What types of labs we use in practice with Christa Biegler, RD and Jenna DeKok, MS, RD

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I have my co-pilot Jenna DeKok on with me. Jenna is also a registered dietician who works along side me in my private practice. In this episode, Jenna interviews me on what labs we use and why. I share my experience with labs that I used in the past but traded out or stopped using altogether and why. If you are interested in working with us in 2024, CLICK HERE!

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Not all labs are useful
• What is on our stool/gut test?
• What are fungal symptoms?
• Testing is NOT the only answer, it's important to look at symptoms
• Other labs that don't make sense
• Pros and cons of hormone, genetic, micronutrient and food sensitivity testing
• Hair Tissue Mineral Testing, what is it and why it's so great
• What do you do when your thyroid blood labs are normal?
• Mold or mycotoxin testing
• Pros and cons of blood labs

ABOUT JENNA:
Jenna is a consulting registered dietitian via her business Nutritiously Jenna and associate practitioner at Less Stressed Life Nutrition. She started working with Christa in 2018 doing mentorship hours for her undergraduate degree. Since then, she's touched business operation roles, social media management, program content creation, and is currently working 1:1 with clients. Her passion for women's wellness came from her firsthand struggles with disordered eating that led to a variety of gut, hormone, and energy issues. This is ultimately why she loves to help women truly understand their bodies by diving deeper into the important but often not-so-talked-about areas of women's health!

WHERE TO FIND JENNA:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nutritiouslyjenna/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

ANNOUNCEMENTS:
WORK WITH CHRISTA IN 2024: https://www.christabiegler.com/fss
You deserve to boost your energy, heal your body, & enjoy food again (WITHOUT restrictive diets, endless supplements, or generic programs that don’t actually help). You don’t have to remove more foods. You just have to find the root cause of your symptoms, so you can finally fix them — for good. (Yes, it’s possible!)

RESET IN SEDONA
For more info: https://www.christabiegler.com/resetinsedona
 A restorative wellness retreat for women who crave good food & adventure. Reset in Sedona is 4 days and 3 night of :

• Gorgeous retreat house with a serene nature vibe, creek/trail access and plenty of room to spread out
• Movement: Onsite yoga & red rocks hiking
• Nourishment: Whole foods & soul foods, hydration and savvy supplementation provided + private chef
• Integrative breathwork & bodywork for clarity and purpose
• Adventure: vortex hike and an ATV adventure
  

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Christa Biegler, RD: Stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance have let a lot of us down. We're over medicated and underserved. At The Less Stressed Life, we're a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional Western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our stories.

[00:00:26] Christa Biegler, RD: Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home.

[00:00:44] Christa Biegler, RD: Alright, today on the Less Stressed Life I have. Jenna Co. Who is my co-pilot and other RD in private practice, and today we're flipping the script. She's gonna interview me a little bit or we're gonna riff together on what kinds of labs we use in practice and why this was actually her idea, which is great. anD I love it. And so she's gonna ask the questions, but Jen and I have worked together since we think about 2018 in some capacity. In that time, we've done a lot of different projects together from testing recipes to writing a cookbook together, to countless client handouts. Really anything behind the scenes if you like, some of the stuff that we put out in the world.

[00:01:21] Christa Biegler, RD: Jenna's got her hands in it for sure. Now we see clients together literally equally sharing our one-on-one consults with our clients, which I feel is in really good service to our clients because they're getting a little bit of the best of both of us. Jenna's really amazing at the details and being really thorough with lab evaluations, and I love that.

[00:01:40] Christa Biegler, RD: But really I prefer to do like big picture recap stuff. And what I tell clients is really like this Underlying highlighting and synthesizing approach to all the information we work through. So we just are able to do what we both currently enjoy, which I think is always a work. Always something that's evolving no matter what, which we're both really open to, which is also pretty cool about working together. So she had this idea that it would be cool to other people to know how we choose the labs that we run with clients. and I thought that was really good as well. Something we're also working toward here in our practice and in our business is just being more generous with the clinical pearls we've gained from working with clients for lots of years and just sharing what works and doesn't work.

[00:02:20] Christa Biegler, RD: So consider this kind of a, our first foray into that, and it really supports the mission of this channel and this podcast of helping you heal yourself. So thank you so much for joining me today. Jenna. can't wait to talk about this.

[00:02:33] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: Yeah. I'm very excited to dive into labs too, because I think it's cool to benefit both as a practitioner learning this info and then also . Client or potential client, like yeah, we actually run. What do we do behind the scenes? What labs are we Yeah, looking into or are important? So with that being said though, obviously it takes time to figure out what labs are actually worthwhile to run in practice.

[00:02:56] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: So maybe let's go back to the beginning of how you started and what labs were you 

[00:03:01] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. for sure when I first started in private practice. It's a bit of a long story, but I will just say that I started with food sensitivity testing, and one thing I wanna say about labs in general is that you can spend a lot of money on labs for sure. And I used to joke that you could tell if clients were from California because in certain areas There's areas where people spend many thousands of dollars in labs, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes labs aren't all useful and sometimes they can be a little confusing and it's just a lot to do everything at once. I think that there can be layers, and so it's a matter of what is a first step and what's a second step, and how much longevity can you get out of those labs?

[00:03:45] Christa Biegler, RD: What kind of interventions and things can you do what I really don't wanna do is confuse someone or make them feel really overwhelmed. I wanna be able to take them through a framework that makes sense that they can maybe reproduce, but also I want the labs to be obviously useful for them.

[00:03:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Most of the time people land in functional medicine because they're not being validated somewhere else, right? They're not finding answers to something somewhere else. So there's a lot of layers to that. You can take the basic like $3 labs that a provider runs and you can find deeper Information there, that's very possible. But one of the things we do is run labs that the doctor doesn't usually have access to. It's a more sensitive test. So to answer your question, you asked me where did things start and I said my practice really started with food sensitivity testing. But as time has gone on for me, life and practice, they have a little bit of a game element to them.

[00:04:37] Christa Biegler, RD: So I now say, my goal is what can we do that gives us the biggest return on investment and makes the most sense to people and validates some the most? So over overall, my values changed when I was first starting to do food sensitivity testing stuff, and this was Like 2016. It was great. It was magical for people.

[00:04:55] Christa Biegler, RD: They felt so much different. And you can find all kinds of information about this online. People will go through a diet change and they feel incredible. I. But what was the long-term plan? The long-term plan was that a lot of people were having food reactions because of what was going on in their gut. And so the food sensitivity testing was great until it wasn't great anymore. And it's so funny they say that God will just put things in front of you as you need them, or he won't give you something you cannot actually handle. And so probably when I was just getting started was like, here's what I could handle.

[00:05:26] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm coming from a food background. This was fun to have all these different lenses on which, 'cause there's a lot of Details around foods and what is heavy and salicylates and what's this? There's a lot of details. But the long game was is that are people really sensitive to these things?

[00:05:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Are they sensitive food chemicals or is there, what's the root cause underneath of that? So big picture here with food sensitivity stuff is there's a lot we could say. We have entire podcast episodes about this, about the types of sensitivities versus allergies. Is it really a long-term thing? No, not usually. Sometimes, but not always. But my values changed and overall I really didn't want people to be restrictive unnecessarily because further messed up, screwed up their adrenals and thyroid stuff, which long-term wasn't really supportive. You may, or the listener may or may not know that my personal story, I made my health worse with an elimination diet. sometimes that messaging to the immune system, there's some things where it can just, you can just increase the overall sensitivity. are times where I occasionally use that testing because it is It can be useful and the case uses for it are certain autoimmune cases and certain in cases of inflammation.

[00:06:39] Christa Biegler, RD: And what I mean by that is maybe you're having inflammatory water weight of probably 10 or more pounds fluctuating every handful of days. Sometimes it's useful to that, in that case. And then it can also be useful in those cases if people come here and ask for that. I have people who might benefit from it, but we don't do it because it's gonna add more stress to their life. And that's actually the opposite of what our goal is. Our goal is not to add more stress and not to create something that feels like unsustainable. And so I really don't use it. As much as I used to and that's okay. That's okay. Talking about other tests I no longer use unless you have anything you wanna cut in and say here.

[00:07:16] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: I just wanted to emphasize well with the food sensitivity testing. I love the analogy always use of when it's beneficial. It's like you . And correct me if I'm saying this wrong, you almost if you had a broken leg, it's you sitting down almost on a chair, like getting that pain, inflammation to slowly sit side while you work on actually addressing, 

[00:07:35] Christa Biegler, RD: yeah. Oh yeah. That's one of my Thanks to In. It's the broken angle analogy, like food is the reason

[00:07:40] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: yes,

[00:07:41] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm gonna further emphasize the analogy that I've used for years to try to make it make sense. It's like I know that you feel better when you change this diet, and that is amazing. That's like when you break your ankle and you sit down. It's immediate inflammation reduction, but you still have to put a cast on it. You still have to heal it. You still need to correct the. Let's call it an imbalance, a fracture. You need to correct the fracture that's there, right? Or the you need to line that back up.

[00:08:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Bring things into balance. I love to just 'cause what we do, there's a lot of steps and details, which is why we do it. One-on-one because. When you don't do it the way we do it. I was just explaining this to a friend the other day who was asking me questions about her child's eczema, and I was explaining to her how anytime I circumvent the way we practice, I'm not really in good service to people because everyone wants something to be simple, but actually there's a lot of ups and downs. So we want to help people through those ups and downs until they're done. So it's kinda like I can just throw a cast on, but if there's no follow up to take it off like. That's there's some pieces here and you're totally right about the food thing there's always more than one way to do everything. And we tend to have people come in. I think in general there's also been a shift I hope in, I hope we're shifting in functional medicine, there's, it's very generic to just automatically do an elimination diet, but I think people can eat a whole foods diet, right? I think they can eat, and that's what we emphasize and practice now is certain we have some details that we emphasize around food, but they're optional. They're around like getting enough, digesting it. A lot of food sensitivity stuff is actually a issue with digestion. Point blank. That's it. It's like there's an issue with digestion

[00:09:17] Christa Biegler, RD: A cascade of issues, and so we have to unravel that whole process that has ensued. 

[00:09:22] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: Yeah. And I think that leads nicely into just asking what we currently use in practice or what you actually transition to when you realize, okay, how. Am I 

[00:09:31] Christa Biegler, RD: okay, perfect. 

[00:09:32] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: back on

[00:09:33] Christa Biegler, RD: okay. Let's do that and then later let's also circle back to some other tests that we don't use anymore. Really it was a one thing at a time,

[00:09:40] Christa Biegler, RD: I think another question, Clinicians sometimes ask me, or people that are getting into private practice or maybe are a little bit newer is, how did you decide what test to use?

[00:09:50] Christa Biegler, RD: What you're asking. It's I started somewhere and it worked for

[00:09:53] Christa Biegler, RD: It didn't work, and then I added something new and then. That worked great. And so essentially you just add something as you need it. I feel like you can't replace experience and that's okay. You can shortcut it with mentorship, but I think experience is your best educator, whether you're a clinician or a client.

[00:10:09] Christa Biegler, RD: It's the same thing. tell our clients all the time, when you experience

[00:10:12] Christa Biegler, RD: success, you're gonna get it better. At the end, I can explain it until I'm blue in the face, but as soon as it all clicks together for you, it's just gonna make sense and I can just tell when it happens. So after food sensitivity testing, I did bring in stool testing or gut testing. We still use that most of the time I. And maybe I'll take this opportunity to talk about some of the things I did. So I use stool testing or gut testing. It's a poop sample. It's imperfect, a hundred percent imperfect. It's a snapshot in time. So one thing that we must do is A good job with interpretation. So I always tell people we must look at symptoms and test results equally, if not symptoms, even more importantly than test results. some practitioners will tell you that no longer use stool testing. Remember that people come to us or a practice like ours because they're not getting answers with their regular provider. Okay, so I wanna give them answers. And the stool test I'm using looks at a lot of different markers. It looks at digestive function, how the enzymes are being produced. It looks at immune function in the gut. It looks at gluten sensitivity and just basic inflammatory markers in the gut. It looks at. Normal bacteria. It looks at weeds in the gut or dysbiotic bacteria. It can screen for some fungus. And I'll just mention that fungus doesn't always shut out in the stool, so it's imperfect. This is where we, every single person, we check their fungal symptoms and we still address fungus and. If their fungal symptoms are talking loudly, even if it's not on their stool test, right?

[00:11:43] Christa Biegler, RD: We don't just say, oh, it's not on your stool test. You don't have an imbalance. We check the other symptoms. I think that's a really good point. Where it's duh. Fungal symptoms would include white coated tongue itchy ears, especially itchy scalp history of yeast infections or vaginal infections, athletes, foot toil, fungus.

[00:12:02] Christa Biegler, RD: Those are all like Duh. Of course those are fungal symptoms. It could be

[00:12:06] Christa Biegler, RD: All of those are symptoms. And so if you have fungus in your sinuses, do you think it's always gonna show up in your poop? Not necessarily right. So it doesn't always shut out in the gi. whAt else is on that test?

[00:12:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Single cell protozoas parasites multicellular protozoas worms, which are you almost never see in testing. And on that note, another test we use that we didn't even talk about before we jumped in here is occasionally I'll urine do a second

[00:12:29] Christa Biegler, RD: stool test if someone needs like a hundred percent needs validation.

[00:12:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Let me give you a couple examples of people. We recently had, we've had people in very recently that were working with other practitioners. And when you hear the story, this is where the story of tell me about the onset of the symptoms that we're experiencing that we need to correct. Sometimes that story leads us to think, how could you not have a parasite This started on this experience like you're camping in the mountains and that's an easy place to get stream water and pick up certain protozoans, to be honest. Or you were in this other country and it started literally when you got home. Not that you need to be in another country to pick up something like that, but maybe this person hadn't been validated. And unfortunately, parasites don't show up on testing very beautifully. But there is some other specialty testing that we will occasionally run side by side because if it's gonna be there, usually it's gonna show up there. Okay? So we sometimes do that about stool testing. I am even sometimes hesitant to talk about the type we use. 'cause something new that's happened is that, and this isn't right or wrong, it's just that people think the test is the answer only. And so if I mention the test, people can say, oh, I had that test done. But then they still have these problems. And so what has happens then is

[00:13:44] Christa Biegler, RD: I have to literally go through someone else's work and see what was missed or why something wouldn't have worked, because I don't ever wanna have someone do something that's not useful for them.

[00:13:52] Christa Biegler, RD: And sometimes we have people, they've done a recent test and it's something I can use and we don't. Do that test for them. We just used the results they had recently that their practitioner did not interpret very effectively, or They didn't interpret well or do a very good protocol.

[00:14:07] Christa Biegler, RD: That, unfortunately happens a lot. Not that we're trying to put out into the world, come to us. It's like it takes me a long time to go through all that stuff, but it's okay. It's not a problem. It's unfortunately just kinda the landscape we're in right now. People talk about the tests that they use.

[00:14:20] Christa Biegler, RD: People go order the tests that people say they like. They expect the test to do all the heavy lifting. it's not actually the point. That's actually not how it works. the symptoms and the expertise, unfortunately do the heavy lifting in my opinion. And this just happened the other day for a client for us too.

[00:14:37] Christa Biegler, RD: We had this pediatric client and the way the onset was of the case, I was like, it's totally gonna be this is what I think it's gonna be the case. The stool test came back with an inflammatory profile, which is something I Made up based on experience . No one told me this is what this is, but it happened.

[00:14:56] Christa Biegler, RD: So this pediatric client, very symptomatic, GI wise, very symptomatic, right? But it's been going on for long enough where inflammation is set in at this point. And this happens for adults that have been going like where stuff has been going on a long time. the VII in the gi. When you're just getting like a snapshot poop sample, like literally a picture, you're not gonna get like deep stuff buried in the vii.

[00:15:17] Christa Biegler, RD: It's like the cracks under the stove, right? Unfortunately the poo, like when you take a picture of the kitchen, you are not getting a picture of the dirt under the stove. There are some ways you can fix that, but it's not easy, quick, and cheap. If I was going to try to correct this, I would use proteolytic enzymes, which, or there's a few variet.

[00:15:36] Christa Biegler, RD: There's actually a few things you could do here. You could potentially change diet and maybe get this to look better also, but that may not be accessible. And to be honest, people are usually overwhelmed when they come in the door, so we just have them usually do the poop sample and then we just use clinical experience to correct.

[00:15:52] Christa Biegler, RD: To correct. And so what happened with this test was it came back with this inflammatory picture, which to me is just low. Good bacteria, which makes all the other bad stuff look also really low. It's falsely low, like it's usually a lie. 'cause if you're very symptomatic there's usually something going on. So we tend to

[00:16:10] Christa Biegler, RD: treat by symptoms instead. Okay. So I'm talking about this GI test we use. We sometimes add on an extra parasite I have tried other GI tests as well. And that's okay. I'm always like on the lookout, is there something better? Because the one I use isn't Perfect. But I just don't feel that there can be a perfect GI test when it's a snapshot. It's just not perfect. Maybe a three-day stool test maybe would be better. Maybe that's something. And we sometimes turn our test into a three-day test. Not too often, but every once in a while I make that recommendation to people. , but there's other, I won't name all these companies, but there's another comp because people, like the companies change.

[00:16:46] Christa Biegler, RD: But there's a company out there I will not name it, but they make a clinical GI test and I think it can be a very good GI test. But when you get the client results. Next to all the bacteria, it says this is validated. And let me just throw out an idea here that's like this bacteria is indicated in colon cancer.

[00:17:02] Christa Biegler, RD: And I'm like, this is not helpful for a client to see this because this does not mean they have colon cancer. And it's actually just horrifying. And if we do things that induce stress to people's lives, we're not serving them ever. The end, like the more you increase stress for someone. If whether it's intended or not, it's actually never helping so that's why I don't use that one. 'cause I think it's silly that they do that. Not that I don't think there's any clinical utility there, but I don't think it supersedes the one that we're using. So unless I find something that's gonna be better than what we're using, I'm not

[00:17:34] Christa Biegler, RD: I've also trialed some other consumer based tests.

[00:17:37] Christa Biegler, RD: One of 'em starts with AV. it's been around a long time and I think that test has changed a lot as well.

[00:17:43] Christa Biegler, RD: And then I've also used some that use shotgun genomics. And there's all kinds of methodology here, whatever. And I just didn't find them clinically useful if they don't have all these markers that I. I see in a lot of certain types of cases, if I'm looking for particular markers to show me different things, and if these tests don't have them and I've had a lot of success with addressing certain markers of elevation in the past, then

[00:18:05] Christa Biegler, RD: Know what's it doing for me? Nothing right? So another test.

[00:18:09] Christa Biegler, RD: One last thing on GI testing. Small intentional bacteria overgrowth testing. I used to use this. I don't think it's worth the money to do it anymore. So if something costs someone money and it's not

[00:18:19] Christa Biegler, RD: really serving them, then I just don't do it anymore. So small intestinal bacteria overgrowth has to do with just a really two bacteria that are being measured methane and hydro sulfide and methane bacteria. Sorry, I was pondering in my head, which two bacteria are we looking at? But in the small intestine,

[00:18:34] Christa Biegler, RD: I think that this just doesn't make sense because if you have a lot of bloating or symptoms within two hours after eating, that's supposed to be the small intestinal transit time. And so if you have symptoms zero to two hours after eating, then it's like dove.

[00:18:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Course there's SIBO automatically. But if there's sibo, so there's all these. So why this gets talked about is because conventionally SIBO is now being recognized more commonly, and you can go do a SIBO test at your regular provider. And so because this is recognized, it's being treated, it's talked about, et cetera. And so what happens a lot of times with SIBO is they go in, they do a, what's most common is a breath test. There are some other things. So a breath test, it's annoying because you have to do a special diet for a day. , let me explain this, and then you decide if you feel like this is more stressful. you like basically rice and chicken for a day. And then you eat and then you drink this stuff and then you like breathe into a tube. I think it's every 15 or 20 minutes for two hours. This sounds like a pain in the butt, right? They'll even just do the test to really validate that there's one or two bacteria out of range in this small intestine.

[00:19:35] Christa Biegler, RD: What happens then, if this is positive, is that people are frequently put on antibiotics but we're not addressing the gi above the small intestine. Like stomach acid and maybe range pylori, things like that. So there's a lot to say about that and unpack there. And then the lower intestine, which has all kinds of bacteria in it.

[00:19:53] Christa Biegler, RD: So to me, it just seems shortsighted. The test is a pain in the butt. anD it doesn't change what I'm doing, so I don't care. I just dropped it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's not like gonna make a difference or not gonna change how much someone feels or doesn't change what I'm doing. Then I'm gonna drop it. And so sometimes to go back to, our pediatric patient the other day where we had a conversation 'cause we round on everybody. It's here's what the results came back with. Okay, no problem. That's not what the symptoms say. So we're gonna make sure we address the symptoms. 'cause all anyone really caress about is that their symptoms go away. No one really cares that the, they want their test result to validate them, but only if it also makes their symptoms go away. So this is part of where we just, to me, I think developing trust and rapport with our clients. Also just not being idiots, I don't know how else to say it.

[00:20:42] Christa Biegler, RD: That's kinda my preference. Let's not treat the test only, let's treat the person. And that makes sense when I give it context. That makes sense when I give it context. So let me summarize. Testing for validation, the client, right? 'cause we want them to feel good. Validation feels good in the nervous system, the test that helps us change the protocol. Let me give you another example I've had, 'cause sometimes I've got, a good rapport with someone, right? I can remember this case, I had this little kiddo and I'd already had the parents for clients. So we have good rapport, everything is great. And then we're checking in.

[00:21:17] Christa Biegler, RD: We're checking on the symptoms of this child. I think it was eczema, of course it was probably, I don't know all the other symptoms. And I said, okay, we can do something prophylactic, meaning. I can guess and we can do some interventions and if it doesn't work, then we can always test. So we guessed.

[00:21:33] Christa Biegler, RD: We did some interventions, it wasn't enough. What happened was it was free, right? We didn't have to pay for a test, but time elapsed, which no one wants to have time and pain, so time elapsed, we decided that wasn't effective, so we're gonna test and figure out what's going on in there.

[00:21:47] Christa Biegler, RD: We get the test back and there's some really se serious stuff in there that takes some really specific. Treatment or intervention or protocol. Okay. It take very specific intervention or protocol because certain things only respond to certain things. And so that's the beauty of if the test is necessary to make sure I edit that protocol to be effective, then I'm just gonna keep using it, right?

[00:22:12] Christa Biegler, RD: Shows me something that I really need to know to be an effective clinician, then I will use it. Because usually people come to us 'cause they wanna see things on paper. Maybe they're sick of just like having their arm pushed on and told them they have something. 

[00:22:27] Christa Biegler, RD: These are all experiences that I've had these are my client experiences also. So validation, change the protocol, and then also how can we minimize our testing for best? ROI? So why would I add sigo testing if it doesn't do anything? And then also what doesn't add more confusion like to the whole pot?

[00:22:45] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I'm gonna give an example. We use hormone testing. We specifically, we occasionally use serum hormone testing, but we also use dried urine testing for comprehensive hormones, or the Dutch test. It's just my personal belief for the clients we typically work with that. I don't think it's a first step for them because, and this is just, again, you could do it before and after, that would be fine, but again, I'm looking for like lowest testing input for maximum ROI.

[00:23:15] Christa Biegler, RD: It's just my game in my head. And hormones are impacted by gut health, toxic burden, blood sugar, stress, and micronutrients. And we're influencing all of those things when we work with clients. Every single one of 'em. And the Dutch test has a lot of amazing information. But if we do that alongside of a GI test it actually would feel really pretty overwhelming and confusing. I know, 'cause I've done this everything we do here is based out of experience and I just don't think that worked very well for, I don't think that was in best. We really have a couple lenses, right? Was that in good service to someone? Actually it wasn't. It sounded like it was right?

[00:23:49] Christa Biegler, RD: It's sounds

[00:23:49] Christa Biegler, RD: Run all these tests. But it's

[00:23:50] Christa Biegler, RD: A lot and you can't do everything at once. Even when people get a Dutch test bag, I'm really actually pretty careful when I have people do them because it's not like you can just poop in a box and send it off. That's actually easy when people do a dried urine test for comprehensive of hormones.

[00:24:03] Christa Biegler, RD: There's a few varieties here, but they're not having a period normally the road to even testing is maybe two months. Probably it's very likely 'cause you have to see if you're ovulating, even if you're not having a menstrual cycle and you can ovulate outta one side or the other. So you can test, you can check for ovulation for up to two months before you do the test and, or you need to work around your period.

[00:24:23] Christa Biegler, RD: So it's just not very quick turnaround. It's like a nice idea but not very quick turnaround time. And the test is really essential if you, I think if you need to know estrogen metabolism, but if you just need to know if your progesterone is low, then probably just go get a serum level. That's fine in my opinion.

[00:24:38] Christa Biegler, RD: Would you agree?

[00:24:39] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: And I just agree with the whole idea, like with the Dutch. Yes, I love it in theory, like everyone test their hormones, who doesn't, but in terms of the actual practical information you gain from it, more than likely we can already just based on your symptoms. So just would love save you money, obviously, that time 

[00:24:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, it's it all sounds nice, but just in the, how do we actually

[00:25:02] Christa Biegler, RD: get Get the results and get you what you want. Let me start by asking you why you wanna do the test in the first place. That's always my first step before I even do one of those, because if I understand that you have X, Y, Z symptom. Okay, that's a symptom of this Is really great if you wanna see where, if you have estrogen metabolism issues and or, and I just like to make sure I say this all the time 'cause I think it's really essential if you have a history, family history of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, those are all symptoms of excess estrogen or estrogen metabolism or their cancers of estrogen metabolism issues commonly, very commonly. And the Dutch chest was Up until recently, I think the only estrogen metabolism test, I think there may be some other things entering the market that we have not had a chance to fully test and check. And those are consumer based tests. I had a, we just had a client do one and I can't even remember the name of it and it doesn't matter.

[00:25:51] Christa Biegler, RD: But we're always gonna be on the lookout. We're always like test things out and see if it's gonna be useful. Thinking of overwhelm, and again, death testing can be great, but there's A lot of potential information to gain from it. so it's just a matter of is it the right next step, which would really help you?

[00:26:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Or is it gonna send you off on 10 other rabbit holes and actually make you feel like you're more scattered? And that's a common problem, right? I

[00:26:14] Christa Biegler, RD: don't want you to feel more scattered when you're done here, to be honest.

[00:26:16] Christa Biegler, RD: of course not. another, I just wanna throw in one more comment. We used to do genetic testing. And Jenna did the reports on it. They used to make my eyes,

[00:26:27] Christa Biegler, RD: it made me, it used to make me wanna pull my eyes outta my head. 'cause they're like, it's like computer coding That's what it reminded me of. and I think that it can be helpful. I remember doing my own genetic test results and I remember feeling very validated because 

[00:26:42] Christa Biegler, RD: it was after a big eczema flare of whatever year, 20 15, 20 16, whatever that was. And I had mostly corrected that, but I did genetic testing and it essentially said, yeah, your liver sucks, like genetically. And that was really validating at the time. And now, even though it's nice to know that I can if I just would look at my family history of course that it does. Look at all this stuff. Like my parents and my aunts and uncles all have if you have a bunch of cancer in your family, maybe your drainage and detox sucks. Know I am not genetically blessed. End of story. And so does the genetic test actually do a ton? A lot of times it can be a little bit brain numbing, I feel. And I would usually try to make sure there was like a top three to five takeaways, but by the time we were at the end of working together,

[00:27:26] Christa Biegler, RD: 'cause we would usually do it very last thing if we were gonna add it on. It didn't really change anything to be honest. It was like I already knew these things about,

[00:27:34] Christa Biegler, RD: 'cause if you're listening to your symptoms and how your body behaves around things, you can learn so damn much already.

[00:27:40] Christa Biegler, RD: And so for us personally,

[00:27:41] Christa Biegler, RD: We, I wanted to pull my eyes out doing genetic testing review and I didn't really feel like it was like, I just don't even run, we don't even offer it. And people don't ask about it very much anymore either. There are some Genetic markers we can get when we do like a Dutch test and that could be useful. But there's always a lot more under the hood on every single test, in my opinion.

[00:28:00] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. So stool testing. Alright, what else? So all that to say, we often use stool testing most of the time. Every once in a while we don't. 

[00:28:09] Christa Biegler, RD: So carry on with your questions, 

[00:28:11] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: So then I guess, so we're looking at the stool. What else has you been, or have you found beneficial to look into or what other are actually really insightful in terms of what's going on with the client, why they might actually be having, or just sluggish energy? This can even give us insight into digestive status well, thyroid 

[00:28:29] Christa Biegler, RD: Yes. I know you're gonna, I know what you're leading into is to talk about hair tissue mineral analysis,

[00:28:34] Christa Biegler, RD: That's exactly what I'm gonna talk about. And before I do, I'm gonna just take a quick detour to mention that we dump, we sometimes do

[00:28:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Mycotoxin or mold testing in clients, but it's for validation. And sometimes if people already know they had an exposure in a pressed house, then I don't think it's worth their money. 'cause the validation on the stool test

[00:28:53] Christa Biegler, RD: It costs money. So it's not like super cheap to validate. So validation is good if you are not all on the same page and you're like, if a husband and wife aren't all on the same page, or people need to see the validation to know what they are doing. Sometimes the symptoms are just so crazy that it's like, of course this is the problem and they had a know and exposure. So it's just not even worth spending the money to test in the body. It's not like a good use of the resources, but sometimes it is. So I usually do mycotoxin or mold testing. if we need validation and to see the severity. And there, we've done it at all junctures. And so you just always have to change how you read the results based on junctures. I've had people do the mole testing after they've done protocols, and the results are gonna look a little bit different. So I have lots of feelings about that.

[00:29:34] Christa Biegler, RD: We have two or three podcasts about that, so I'll just mention, yes, we pull things in if we feel like we need them or they're gonna be of service to a client if they're gonna help them and change what we do. But if we can figure something out from symptoms and history, I. and the client and I trust each other, right?

[00:29:49] Christa Biegler, RD: Or we all trust each other and have good rapport and we can save 'em 500 bucks. Then we do that. So back to your point, which is what kind of testing can we do That tells us a lot. So let me lead into this. There was there, I forgot about this test. I used to do a lot of comprehensive micronutrient testing and it was awesome and insurance partially covered it, so it was a no brainer.

[00:30:10] Christa Biegler, RD: It was like $180 after insurance covered it. and then the test was good. The lab administration was bad. I love behind the scenes stuff, by the way, like just love knowing like what's going on at that company where everything is like falling apart,

[00:30:24] Christa Biegler, RD: so we used to do a lot of comprehensive of micronutrient testing and it gave people good results. And I remember I had this client who was a physician's assistant, and I remember she just I just remember her singing so many praises. She was like, I just loved this test. I just rem explicitly remember her loving it because she got more results from that than doing some of the other things. If you fix people's nutrient deficiencies, I very firmly believe that there's just a zillion symptoms that people are out like literally medicating for, that are just nutrient deficiencies.

[00:30:50] Christa Biegler, RD: I feel this like deeply nutrient deficiencies. Come are not always a root cause. They're usually the second step in what we do. That could be a whole podcast on its own. To that end we usually bring in nutrient repletion second, typically, unless people we can tell they're just like, have no resources and we start right away. if you have no resources, nothing works. meaning if there's no workers, nutrient workers there. Okay. So we started using hair tissue mineral analysis, testing a few years ago. After I went on retreat with some colleagues, 'cause we sit around and talk about stuff like this and talk about, what we're all doing in practice.

[00:31:27] Christa Biegler, RD: And I grew up with these colleagues, meaning I grew up in practice with them. And so that was a beautiful thing. But a few years ago we started using it not so long ago, like in the last year, I was thrown away crap. I should have thrown away 10 years ago. And I realized I was first exposed to it in like at least 2009 or 10. I just thought it was really hokey at the time. So hair, tissue, mineral analysis, testing. The main reason I use this is because there was a subset of clients that would go into relapse around gut issues and symptoms, and it's related to the stuff in the mineral analysis. Basically, if they've had stress and they've dumped out all their minerals they're gonna have sluggish thyroid, which is gonna slow down their motility.

[00:32:08] Christa Biegler, RD: And it's, I always call it the bird bath syndrome, where it's got stagnant. It's like the motility that digestion, the water in the bird bath is stagnant and then crap, gross and stagnant water. And so they have relapse from it. And maybe I really cared about this 'cause it was also me. So I always say that most of my clients are just like, it's like I can't really tell if I'm reading their history or my history sometimes, which is okay.

[00:32:32] Christa Biegler, RD: It's been a very good, your experience is your best educator, right? So I. Innately understand what people are going through. 'cause I've been through it. And I was my favorite clinical picture that we see on the mineral analysis, which is your adrenals are a little fried, but you're still performing at a high level.

[00:32:49] Christa Biegler, RD: Like you're still a high performing person and then your adrenals are, or your thyroid sluggish, but it doesn't show up in blood work. So you have thyroid symptoms, but it doesn't show up in blood work. What does that look like? It means under prolonged stress, I would lose a little bit of hair. My extremities would be a little bit of cold. But I wouldn't, I didn't have thyroid labs that were off. I had dry feet predisposition to dry skin predisposition to fungal stuff or some of mine. And all of that can be related to a sluggish thyroid situation. So what do you do when your thyroid blood labs are normal, which is a common problem. It's didn't really feel great, but I did my blood labs and things weren't normal. So this is the answer to that problem. Going into the tissue level and looking at how your body, 'cause your serum comp, your body compensates. So if these particular nutrients that we see in the tissue are low, if they're low in the serum, like you're probably gonna present to the er 'cause you're gonna faint.

[00:33:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Your body's just so good at pulling and trying to keep things in balance in the serum, but in the tissue is where you have the losses. So it's really all the downstream effects. So it's like long term you're feeling like not awesome to the point where it's like you're just used to it. So we use mineral analysis because if you are depleted in minerals, which minerals are depleted under stress, it just depends on which ones, how fast, et cetera. Then digestion will be affected, hormones will be affected, detoxification will be affected, energy will be affected. Pretty much everything. 'cause they're nutrient workers, they're workers. So workers are needed all over the body. So when we start to put back those nutrients in the right order. And so this, what's fun about this is that it's good or bad. I think it's good and bad is that I think that this testing is hard to interpret.

[00:34:23] Christa Biegler, RD: And I will say that before we added it to practice, I actually tried to learn about it from other sources. And I thought it was Not good. The education I had gotten was just crappy. It was like, oh, people are gonna feel really bad when you do this and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, that doesn't sound like a good fit for me 'cause I don't wanna make people feel bad. I'm not attracted to this at all actually. Nevermind. I actually don't wanna know anything about this. But the way we do it now is really food-based. It's really sustainable. And here's the crux. Here's like the bottom line. It's really synergistic. And when you're doing the other micronutrient testing I used to do the one that was used to be covered by insurance, it definitely no longer is when you would do that, people would feel better, but it wasn't in a synergistic way. And something that would like I would fall over is when people would say, they would say, oh, I'm still on all the stuff you put me on eight months ago. And I was like, oh my gosh, why and so when you go on certain things for a long time, they create other, every nutrient has an antagonistic and synergistic relationship.

[00:35:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Most of them do. Most of them do. And so if you're on certain things for so long, they can create other depletions. For example. What is most horrifying when people come in the door, if they've been on it forever? Vitamin D forever. Iron forever, These have all kinds of implications. So if there's a lot of cool levels, there's a lot of stuff for us to dig into on minerals and the way we practice. We can pull back those layers, each appointment and get a little deeper each time. The first appointment when you go through the minerals, it's let me get the base like the most important things done first, and as you start these things, you're gonna start to feel better typically, and then we can get a little deeper and start to feel better and we can get a little deeper and feel better. I feel pretty happy about the situation. I'm not sure how you feel. I can't remember all the, as you and I were talking before offline, it was like, it's been a blur since you've worked here. You've seen everything behind the scenes forever. Why do we do HTMA? Because I want sustainable, synergistic results.

[00:36:16] Christa Biegler, RD: I want people to feel good forever, right? I don't want them relapsing. That's horrifying to me as an achiever. I do not like people relapsing. So this allows them to understand to one, be validated, right in those symptoms. And this is also where like I've really started to shy away from even a lot of blood labs.

[00:36:32] Christa Biegler, RD: We do run blood labs for our clients. They're optional. We let them choose their blood labs. We educate about a handful that aren't really common ones that their provider would usually draw. So we're trying not to be like redundant we tell, we educate them on what you could get from these values because. We're humans. And so we're trained to think oh yeah, blood labs, that's normal, right? And so

[00:36:54] Christa Biegler, RD: Them to choose if they wanna run blood labs, we run blood labs, we use them if they're gonna be useful, right? But we, in transparency, we created this, we spent a lot of time creating a spreadsheet with all these normal blood values and all these things, and I just feel like it's, you don't fit in a box all the time around blood.

[00:37:12] Christa Biegler, RD: So I have mixed feelings about

[00:37:13] Christa Biegler, RD: Like they can be useful, 

[00:37:15] Christa Biegler, RD: but the more we run like thyroid, blood labs, like the more kind of disgruntled, like I'm just like less and less interested in the

[00:37:23] Christa Biegler, RD: Labs as compared to the minerals. And that's just, where

[00:37:27] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: And I think with the blood work, everyone's oh, just tell me like am I high or low? But it's more, or what we're looking for kind of behind the scenes again are possibly patterns going on that actually indicate. I'm just gonna use cholesterol, for example. Yeah, your cholesterol may be high, but that's actually giving us information regarding a whole different area of your health you 

[00:37:50] Christa Biegler, RD: How's your liver working? 

[00:37:51] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: of.

[00:37:51] Jenna DeKok, MS, RD: So it's cool with blood work to see patterns. buT yeah, it's not as direct again, all 

[00:37:57] Christa Biegler, RD: This is why we do the things the way we do it. It's like I don't really care if you just want to get your blood labs and be told it's normal or not normal. Because

[00:38:06] Christa Biegler, RD: That, then go to your provider, they're already doing that for you, and then do some

[00:38:10] Christa Biegler, RD: If that's the kind of

[00:38:11] Christa Biegler, RD: That you want for us. And that, I think you just have to know yourself. Like I'm not fulfilled by that. And so I'm fulfilled by pulling it all together for my client to understand things. And so

[00:38:23] Christa Biegler, RD: Tell when I meet someone, like, if you don't really wanna understand this, you probably should work with someone else. 'cause I want you to understand this stuff for your own benefit. Because once you understand things and not like you're gonna understand everything right away, that's not realistic. But, I want you to understand things so you can fit. Do things on your own. You're not just reliant on someone else, because that's what we're called to, especially after these last few years of healthcare chaos, I'll just say is we're called to optimizing our health on our own and being in charge, like taking responsibility for our health on our own to some extent. Not that should feel heavy or whatever. It's like, how do you make it fun at the same time? I think that's all valuable and it's fun. I love when people say, oh, I wanna have fun doing this.

[00:39:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Or anytime someone says, I think this could be fun, I was like.

[00:39:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Like anytime someone,

[00:39:10] Christa Biegler, RD: I love you Unicorn. Like this is the best. I would love for you to feel that this is fun and it doesn't have to suck it's just a fun process or experience to go through. It's ' cause we're taking people through. A little bit of a few mesh together frameworks, right? The integrative process from Jeff Bland,

[00:39:27] Christa Biegler, RD: who From Marley Robbins. It's like not, it's not carbon copied whatsoever, but it's like we've learned from 

[00:39:32] Christa Biegler, RD: these other processes and we've combined them to something that's synergistic, sustainable, gives good ROI, et cetera.

[00:39:39] Christa Biegler, RD: And that's really the bottom line is like, how do people wanna feel? How are we gonna accomplish that? How are we gonna keep it that way? That's like pretty much how we've That's how you come up with the labs that you run. It's like what I do isn't what everyone else should do, but it works really well for us based on what I want. I have a friend who. sees her clients for years and years, the same ones. And that is awesome. I miss my clients when they're gone often 'cause I love them. I have some really cool clients. And I've gotten better about developing or cultivating longer term relationships. Probably more so even just this last year to 18 months.

[00:40:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Getting much better at that outside of working together, but. That doesn't mean I want them to rely on me for the rest of their lives. I want them to understand, I want them to, at the end of the day, like our core values are empowerment, efficiency, and efficacy, which are not the same. efficiency is like actually we're in excellence.

[00:40:39] Christa Biegler, RD: So anyway we talk about that, right? Every quarter We.

[00:40:42] Christa Biegler, RD: talk about does this, does it feel like this is aligning with our core values? And so that's the beauty of having your own business is. I would like to run this better than the previous provider that I personally saw or whatever. So that's how we've landed on this.

[00:40:57] Christa Biegler, RD: Any other questions related to this? Do you think we got it? I think

[00:41:04] Christa Biegler, RD: we did. I think we did an okay job. Now you know, these are the labs we use in practice. Some of them we use almost all the time. Sometimes we trade 'em out. Sometimes if someone had something done recently and it's not in good service to just, Spend more money on it. 'cause they didn't even get the fir, they didn't even squeeze the results outta the first test. Let's go ahead and do that. And that's where it is beautiful to talk to people individually. I really I love doing that with people, but I also appreciate when people are able to listen to this kind of podcast first and understand what we do.

[00:41:33] Christa Biegler, RD: So it's just a, they know oh, of course that's what I would want. That's always the most fun when someone comes in and they already get how we do things a little bit be, and they want that synergistic, that sustainable approach. They wanna go through that process, understand how it works, and do it effectively.

[00:41:49] Christa Biegler, RD: Jenna, thanks for interviewing me today and thanks for coming up with this topic for us.

[00:41:54] Christa Biegler, RD: And on This note, we're accepting clients right now. I don't remember when this podcast comes out, if it's like in a week or two, but now is our end of year enrollment period, meaning I'm taking calls right now to assess someone's case and then we get them the lab sent so they can do them at home, so that way. When the new year rolls around, we can do that first one-on-one hit the ground running, but still have the Christmas holiday off there. so it's just a matter of, there's a little bit of, takes a little time to get that stuff done before we can actually jump in and hit the ground running. So if that's interesting to you, you can go to krista bigler.com and find what you need there.

[00:42:28] Christa Biegler, RD: Thanks so much, Jenna. I appreciate y'all.

[00:42:30] Christa Biegler, RD: Sharing and reviewing this podcast is the best way to help us succeed with our mission to help integrate the best of East and West and empower you to raise the bar on your health story. Just go to review this podcast. com forward slash less stressed life. That's review this podcast. com forward slash less stressed life.

[00:42:52] Christa Biegler, RD: And you'll be taken directly to a page where you can insert your review and hit post.