TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. So actually, this is a first for this podcast. I am back with a repeat guest. So this is a first time, so you should be honored. 

Chris Shade:
Oh yeah. 

Melanie Avalon:
I'm here with Dr. Chris shade. He's the founder of Quicksilver Scientific. And we had a very, very popular episode. We went on to a lot of topics, but we really discussed mercury toxicity, and detoxing, and dealing with all of that was really fascinating. And I will put a link to it in the show notes and Dr. Shade, he did go into his background pretty detailed in that episode, so definitely check it out. Dr. Shade, would you like to briefly tell listeners, for new listeners who haven't listened to that a little bit about yourself and what brought you to Quicksilver Scientific? 

Chris Shade:
Yeah, that's always a long and rambling episode as I start back from birth and move through. But I was born in a sort of reductionist scientific academic family. I went into environmental chemistry. I was kind of disillusioned with that I went out and became an organic farmer and I was really obsessed with natural cycles and ecology of the soil and everything that went into that. But it was a little before my time, I joked that I went out of business as an organic farmer, the year that Whole Foods came into business. And that redirected me into a couple of things, but that got me into academics. I got a Masters and a PhD in the Environmental Chemistry, first of agricultural nutrients. And then I went into the environmental chemistry of metals with particular focus in mercury.

Chris Shade:
And as part of that, I developed a Mercury Speciation Analysis where separating different forms of mercury and we use that to look at blood, hair, and urine to look at the disposition, both the types of mercury in you, their transformations, and how you excrete them. And that was technology for my PhD applied in to clinical testing. And then I got involved in, 'How do you get this stuff out of you?' And at the time, I thought I would just use the chelators that were out there like DMSA, DMPS. I tried those and they got me pretty well sicker, and sicker and sicker. And so I wanted to understand a lot more of how the body's really supposed to deal with toxins, and how it's supposed to get rid of them. And so that led me to understanding how the glutathione system works and how the general detoxification system works and making a supplement systems designed to amplify that and get things out.

Chris Shade:
And to make that really work, I had to make specialized delivery systems. So a delivery system is a way you get something from out of your body to inside and into the blood and like capsules, the delivery system the liquid is but we had to get the specialized things called... It's a family of particles actually called lipid nanoparticles that includes liposomes, which you use. They're like tiny little cells made out of phosphatidylcholine and use them to deliver water soluble nutrients because they can passively diffuse the oral cavity and upper GI right into circulation and then for fat solubles we use nano motions. They're like little oil droplets wrapped in phosphatidylcholine and we use those for things like vitamin D or C, B, D. And we get so good at those delivery systems. And we get so good at handling detoxification using these delivery systems that we started looking into other problems and other aspects of health.

Chris Shade:
And most recently, we're very obsessed with metabolism and clean metabolism and bioenergetics including what will be kind of the core of today's discussion, raising NAD levels.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, so much there. I remember this happened last time. I was like so many things. Friends, this is why we needed a part two.

Chris Shade:
So much to unpack. 

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, because the first episode was going to be about mercury, and then there's just so many potential rabbit holes to go on. Okay, so to start things off, this is like a very basic question, but I would like to get your general idea on it. Detox is discussed so much, from so many sources, how to properly detox, what's the right protocol to go on. I'm often so torn between wanting to be really natural and intuitive, like my body should be able to just detox naturally. 

Melanie Avalon:
On the other side, I'm like, "No, I need to do all the things perfectly to make detox perfect." How should one approach this idea of detox? Are our bodies capable of adequately detoxing or do we really need to use supplements and such to get things going correctly? 

Chris Shade:
Right. And so, as one of my old spiritual teachers said, regarding your, 'is it this is it totally natural or is it totally controlled?' It's both and you should start with a detox protocol, one of the different protocols that we put together because it addresses all the different aspects of detoxification, but as you go through, I always say to people, they should do a formal detox and then they should start incorporating detoxification into their lifestyle. And the formal really shows you the way and it hits every aspect that needs to be hit, and ensures that everything's going to happen.

Chris Shade:
Now, along the way of doing that, you're going to generate a more intuitive understanding of which parts of that are the most important. Is it using bitters and PC to activate the bile flow and you find whenever you take those bitters while you just feel really good, "that's a big thing for me". Other people will be like, "You know what, whenever I take that glutathione, it just lights me up," meaning they're deficient in glutathione, and so you're going to find what it is that you really need to do that you need more help with then say one other person says. If there's five things you got to hit, well hit all five in a formal protocol. But then over time, you'll figure out that three of those are really big for you, and one of them is crucial and you're going to start integrating that into your life that way.

Chris Shade:
In fact, in our sort of application to health, we say restore, maintain, advance, and restore will be systematically removing toxins, microbes through these protocols. Maintain is once you figured out, "You know what? These three things are really important for me all the time," and you integrate them into your life on some intermittent schedule. And then advance is where we're trying to take everything to a higher level and that's really where we're getting to today is things like AMPK activation, and NAD levels. So does that help you with that? 

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, it does. And actually, so speaking to that, because you're talking about how you feel after these things which ties into so many things as far as your intuitive response. For example, you're talking about at the beginning detoxing from mercury with these pharmaceutical agents, DMPS, DMSA. So for listeners who are unfamiliar, I personally struggled with extreme mercury toxicity, very extreme and I did a run, a very long run, a pharmaceutical chelation. And at the time, and the way this ties into the intuition thing and my confusion, is at the time when I would do these detox agents, they made me feel really good.

Melanie Avalon:
While I was detoxing, but I feel like since then, I sort of... I don't want to say wrecked myself, because I feel like I'm always getting stronger and stronger, but trying to heal but it's like you said, with your experience, it definitely did a number on me. And then that's where I have struggled with this idea of how to interpret reaction to things and then for example, you talked about AMPK activators. And after our last discussion, you were so kind you sent me the mercury tri-test which listeners, I am now making that my go to recommendation for testing your mercury levels or your mercury toxicity status. Because I realized, especially from my own research and talking with Dr. Shade, how severely misleading conventional mercury testing might be. 

Melanie Avalon:
So if you want to check your mercury status, definitely get that kit. I'll have links to everything in the show notes. Now, I'm on so many tangents anyways.

Chris Shade:
One of the things you're getting at is tying together intuitive and organized and so I would say, why you were doing your chelators you're feeling better, but then you crash afterward because that's the myopic aspect of the chelator is they do bind mercury. And so when you're in an acute toxicity stage, they can pull some of that away, but they're not supporting the healing of your detoxification system. And that's the liver and its interaction with or its coupling the bile flow and the GI being able to move things out and also the function of the kidneys.

Chris Shade:
And so while they might bind up some of the mercury, they're not increasing the body's resilience to the mercury that's left and the myopic part is people think, "Oh, there's this mercury here, and it's causing all of my problems." But why was the mercury there? I mean, I would doubt that you were more exposed than a lot of other people. But the combination between your exposure level and your body's ability to resist the attack of the metal both at a cellular level, meaning its cellular antioxidant defenses, and the systemic level, meaning the liver and kidneys ability to filter out the blood levels and keep those down. That was not working very well. And so you are very susceptible to the toxicity of the mercury and the DMSA helped you but that was not coupled to things that would fix the overall detox system so that it couldn't just take that out and then leave you down on the ground, and you're good to fend for yourself after that.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I definitely learned so much from the experience. People often ask me now they're like, "What should I do? How should I address mercury toxicity?" And I'm like, "I've learned a lot, think long and hard before you go the pharmaceutical chelation route," because I don't know that I would do that again. Or at least not to the extent that I did. 

Chris Shade:
I mean, we tell people you start with ours and if you want to overlay some DMSA or DMPS, you can do that and Hal Huggins used to do that with our stuff and Hyman's group does that but you have to start with rehabilitation of the detoxification and antioxidant system with special focus on the glutathione aspects. And then you can put a little quickening agent on top in the form of the chelators.

Melanie Avalon:
I like that a lot. I like it. And so speaking to things like glutathione and NAD and all of these things. So lots of stuff to tackle maybe we could start with just a general overview. And I know it's hard to do general of something that's so intense. Just a general overview of how our body actually creates energy and regarding the mitochondria and because I feel like that's a baseline topic to understand, so you can understand how these other things might be affecting energy generation in the body. 

Chris Shade:
Sure, and there's actually a lot that'll all come together here, including the mercury stuff. And so how do we make energy? So we make energy in the mitochondria by oxidizing carbon substrates and those can be lipids or carbohydrates. They're all taken down to chunks that go into the Krebs cycle or the citric acid cycle, and NAD along the way, is doing the oxidizing. NAD is in two forms. There's the oxidized NAD+ and the reduced NADH.

Chris Shade:
And so at different stages of the Krebs cycle, electrons are coming off of these carbon substrates and on to the NAD along with a hydrogen and so that NAD's turning to NADH and in the process oxidizing or stripping away those carbon substrates, then that NADH is taken into oxidative phosphorylation, also known as the electron transport chain, where it dumps off the electrons and the hydrogen and they run through a series of high energy handoffs along the electron transport chain, the hydrogen now as the form of a proton is pushed outside of the membrane of the mitochondria, or the outside of the inner membrane until it builds up enough to come sling-shotting back through ATP synthase and generate ATP.

Chris Shade:
So energy is coming off of the carbon. Remember that was originally from the sun is coming off of the carbon going through the electron transport chain driving this movement of protons that then turns over ATP generation. And in the process the NAD has become NADH, and then it goes back to NAD and it goes back over to grab more electrons from more carbon substrates. And so that's pretty cool. 

Chris Shade:
Now, if you're low on NAD, or if it's heavily in the reduced form, now, you're not going to be able to oxidize those substrates so well, and instead of burning up energy, you are going to start to store it more as fat thinking that maybe later you can burn it up. So what gets in the way of that? So actually not having enough NAD gets in the way of that, but there's a bigger problem and it's also related to NAD and it's called decoupling of the electron transport chain. So in the electron transport chain, there's all these proteins that are assembled together into this chain. 

Chris Shade:
And when we think of proteins being made of the cell, we think of a gene in the nucleus being transcribed and turned on to RNA, and then it going out to rhizome, and you make that protein. And we think all of our genes are in the nucleus, but the mitochondria has genes of its own. And in fact, 13 of the sub units of the electron transport chain are encoded within the mitochondria. And so the mitochondria has to make exactly the same number of protein units as the nucleus is making so that when they come into the mitochondria and get all zip together, everything is in balance. But what happens over time as we age is that the mitochondrial DNA is not turning over. It's not being replicated fast or not being transcribed fast enough. And it's not making enough of the sub units. They've got to be made in what's called a stoichiometric equivalent, like a one to one equivalent. But then all of a sudden, you're only getting half a unit out from the mitochondria and a whole unit from the nucleus. 

Chris Shade:
And when they assemble the electron transport chain, something's missing. So there's electrons going in, and they're zipping along these handoffs, and all of a sudden, there's something not there to pick it up. It's like a relay race. And the guy's got the baton, and there's no one to catch it. And instead, he just throws the baton into the crowd, hit someone over the head. And that is the electrons then spinning out of the transport chain and becoming instead free radicals. And so at that point, you're failing to make ATP, and instead, you're making more free radical damage. And so you think, "Oh, why don't they communicate together and make the same number of things?" Well, it turns out its NAD's indirect responsibility to keep them communicating. 

Chris Shade:
When the NAD levels are high enough in the nucleus, there is a messenger called TFAM that gets sent out from the nucleus to the mitochondria to ensure that they're on the same page in transcribing units of the electron transport chain. And so that's something that happens with aging is this incomplete oxidation and excess free radical generation. But when you bring the NAD levels up, all of a sudden, that's fixed. And it's fixed through the agency of something called a sirtuin, that is in the nucleus. And surtuins will come up again and again in this is we talking about NAD and AMPK. Because sirtuins are what we know is one of the longevity genes, and they're super important one to longevity.

Chris Shade:
And in fact, that sort of came into the parlance around when Sinclair found resveratrol, because resveratrol is a sirtuin activating compound, and so it was like, "Oh, well resveratrol can make us live longer by sirtuin activation." But sirtuins can't be activated properly unless NAD levels are high enough. And in fact, there's two different things that happen regarding NAD and mitochondrial efficiency, the first one we just talked about, and that's having this storicametric equivalence in the electron transport chain. And then there's a second one. And that's the activation of something called PGC1 alpha and PGC1 alpha, then stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis, which is creating more mitochondria and more mitochondrial density within a cell.

Chris Shade:
And so when is one or the other of these processes going to happen when you're in a fed state, so this is going to come down to fed and fasted we'll be talking about keto and fasting. And in the keto state and the fasted state, you have something called AMPK activation and AMPK activation starts PGC1 alphas activation to make mitochondrial biogenesis but then it is finished by NAD activating a sirtuin to deacetylate the PGC1-A and enable mitochondrial biogenesis. So assuming there's enough NAD during fasted or keto states, you stimulate more mitochondria to be made. But during the fed state, say you have carbohydrates on board, then the NAD is essential for ensuring the equivalency between the nuclear mitochondrial production of the electron transport chain.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, okay. So I want you to unpack... Okay, so for listeners, I'm going to ask some basic questions and try to-

Chris Shade:
We'll go back over all that. 

Melanie Avalon:
I'm going to try to paint like a very basic picture again, let me know if this is correct. 

Chris Shade:
Yep. 

Melanie Avalon:
So in the mitochondria and this creation of free radicals and oxidative stress and the disregulation with the electron transport chain, is that basically occurring because there is excess fuel that's not either excess fuel or there's fuel not being used properly?

Chris Shade:
Well, it's not being used properly, it's not because you need less fuel, it's because you need more NAD. And let's call it a reckless electron transport chain is leading to damage instead of energy and it gets reckless when the NAD levels are too low to support the communication between the nucleus and the mitochondria.

Melanie Avalon:
Have you seen that really famous I Love Lucy Scene with the Chocolates on the Conveyor Belt?

Chris Shade:
I have. Now, I can't remember all the specifics of it. 

Melanie Avalon:
It's a concept as well. The conveyor belts like constantly moving, there's the chocolates on the conveyor belt and then basically Lucy's... she's doing stuff with the chocolate on the conveyor belt but she gets to this point where she can't keep up with the chocolates anymore because she's the one kind of making sure it's all going correctly. 

Chris Shade:
Yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
But she kind of be like the NAD situation because once she stops managing and making sure everything is going correctly but this movement of chocolates kind of like the movement of energy with the mitochondria.

Chris Shade:
Right. It just gets totally out of hand. 

Melanie Avalon:
Is NAD making sure that energy is being used properly without creating these free radicals and oxidative stress, or is it combating the oxidative stress once that occurs? 

Chris Shade:
Well, it's doing all of those actually and NAD1 is ensuring that you're able to oxidize the carbon substrates and when it goes down, yes, then in that way, there'll be too much carbon substrate, you'll get too much reduced NAD and you're not able to activate the sirtuin to keep the communication control going. So I said no to your first suggestion that too much fuel can do this.

Chris Shade:
But it is true that too much fuel can add to that especially carbohydrate fuel. But then it's also that when the NAD is providing energy to the nucleus to be able to do the controlling. 

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, gotcha. The reason I was thinking that about too much fuel is I was thinking, "Well, if I mean, you can't have free radicals, if there's nothing to create a free radical." It almost requires fuel for all of this to happen. 

Chris Shade:
Yeah, and so too much carbs can do that by... The NAD, remember, it's in the NAD+ in the NADH roles both of them at once. And if you have to oxidize because you have to oxidize the carbs more than the lipids, and so you're generating more NADH there. Once your NADH levels are going up, and you can't get them all through the electron transport chain, and they accumulate, they can't activate the surtuins anymore because only NAD+ that does that. Now, on the free radical control side, NAD also partitions into something called NADP. So NAD you want primarily oxidized as NAD not NADH, and it's driving oxidative metabolism.

Chris Shade:
NADP, you want primarily reduced as NADPH and it's driving reductive metabolism. It's the thing that's reproducing glutathione when it gets oxidized, ascorbate when it gets oxidized, or thyroidotoxin when it gets oxidized. So without a high level of the NADPH, you can't keep up with the free radical generation and the NADPH is in direct relationship to how much NAD there is.

Melanie Avalon:
That is fascinating. And now I think I finally understand why because they always say that carbohydrate or glucose based diets create more oxidative stress than potentially ketogenic diets. That would make sense what you said about the oxidative potential of carbs versus fats. I have a huge question based on something that you said. You were talking about the genes actually within the mitochondria. So is that what causes the potential changes in mitochondria as to how efficiently they are processing fats versus carbs? We know people talk about becoming metabolically flexible and then how your mitochondria have to adjust to different fuel substrates if you make a dietary change, is it the genes within the mitochondria determining that? 

Chris Shade:
Oh, that's a great question, Melanie. Having a lot of AMPK activation is what's stimulating the gene sets for fat metabolism to be expressed more, and that includes gene sets for ketone transport. Now, where are all those gene sets located? Are they all the nucleus? Are they in the mitochondria? And is that one of the problems? And I do not know the answer to that.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. That's so fascinating. 

Chris Shade:
But now we're going to go look.

Melanie Avalon:
To the to-do lists, but it gets a broader question that maybe we can answer or sort of answer. Is it those genes, though, that is determining that ability of the mitochondria to "primarily" run on a new substrate and then efficiently run on that substrate? Is that tied to the genetic changes in the cell? Or is it tied to literally the functioning of the cell independent of genes? 

Chris Shade:
No, no, it'll be dependent on... they'll be genes for expressing, say, out of post triglyceride lipase, which is breaking up adipose and mobilizing it, so you can turn it into ketones. They'll be genes for the transporters for the ketones. All these are inducible. I think it's just you haven't been using them so they're not readily activated. It's almost like they're closed up deep in the book, and you have to open them up. And once you've been using them a lot, you keep them kind of in the short... it's like you keep them on your desktop, instead of buried way deep and hard drive somewhere. So once you're using genes more often they become more readily inducible. And you may have them always sort of active to some degree.

Chris Shade:
I think that's really what that's coming down to is that that fat adaptation. That was the thing with Keto before 6 people seem to fat adapt, then within almost no time at all. I mean, it makes people they keep telling in a few hours, and very soon they seem to be very metabolically flexible. And so there are activators, nuclear transcription factors are sort of master activators for genes, and they go right into the gene you need and just pull it right out and activate it right away. And so the sort of super activator are the things that you need to get going to get metabolically flexible quickly, and turned out that nutraceuticals delivered in these nanoparticles could induce those really fast, faster than just diet and exercise does.

Melanie Avalon:
So after our last conversation, you're so kindly sent me a bottle of your Keto Before 6, which has a lot of AMPK activating compounds. And it's funny because... so I'm also the co-host of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, And on that podcast, we have a mentality because we have a very large audience who are very new, experienced and people new to intermittent fasting, but we have kind of like a blanket idea when you're first trying intermittent fasting. Just do water and black coffee, don't add other things. We call it the "clean fast."

Melanie Avalon:
So my co-host, Gin, would probably freak out at the idea of taking something else that's not water or coffee while fasting, but I only talk about it on this podcast.

Chris Shade:
Come on, man. It's what you trying to get, not what you're trying to put in. You're trying to get effect. 

Melanie Avalon:
Exactly, exactly. Because if you're taking in these compounds, which are actually stimulating all of these pathways, which fasting is stimulating, I think it's a much more complicated picture, then 'does this break my fast or not?' I think there's a lot going on, but in any case... So I received the bottle of Keto Before 6 and my personal experience was I have a very intuitive response to it where it was the first time that I took it while fasting because I've had ideas of trying a longer fast in the past but it's never seemed possible to me. I remember the first time I took it, I don't know something changed. I was like, "You know what? I could probably fast longer with this." So it was a really, really interesting experience. I've actually been taking it every day and I reordered it twice. So I do really appreciate it.

Melanie Avalon:
So what it has and it has resveratrol, which we discussed for listeners, we mentioned David Sinclair and his work on resveratrol. I actually did interview him on this podcast, so for listeners, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. The Keto for 6 has the resveratrol it has... you said berberine which has amazing effects on blood sugar glucose regulation, has the quercetin, which was really kind of nice because it was like two birds with one stone because I'd been taking quercetin separately. I'd been taking... this has milk thistle in it I believe, separately and I was like, "Hey, now I can just get it all."

Chris Shade:
All in one, it has DIM to.

Melanie Avalon:
Yep, I will put a link to all of this in the show notes. I do have a question though about the delivery systems because you were speaking at the beginning about the liposomal delivery, liposomes for water soluble versus fat soluble and using the nano emulations with that. So when taking the compounds in those various states, is that all... because I know for the supplements, it will often suggest that you hold it in your mouth for like 90 seconds or something and then swallowing it. So the absorption of those, is it primarily occurring in the mouth and the GI tract? Can it be absorbed topically? That's a huge question I have.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, you do like. They have the topical rapamycin. And yes, all these are true. It absorbs in the mouth, it absorbs in the stomach, in the upper GI. You're trying to fast forward the absorption and that's why you hold in the mouth, which incidentally the oral holding is more important for the liposomes or water soluble then the nano emulsion but that's a fine detail. And yes, it can be done topically too. In fact liposomes are first used in cosmetics and they can penetrate across the skin layers. In fact, we have a whole series of serums that we're working on right now.

Melanie Avalon:
So can all of them be done topically? So I've also been taking and we talked about your Keto Before 6 for AMPK activation. Also, a big one you sent me that was loving beyond belief to go back to NAD is you sent me your NAD Gold, which is NMN, a precursor to NAD, which we can discuss. I have been experiencing so many benefits from that. 

Chris Shade:
Well, that stuff's crazy.

Melanie Avalon:
Building up my NAD energy levels.

Chris Shade:
The first thing I was doing for myself was the Keto Before 6 and then I got to doing the NAD. I was so amazed with what Keto Before 6 did for me. And then I added in an NAD and I'm like, "I cannot believe where I'm at now."

Melanie Avalon:
I've just noticed a huge change, and I know it's like subjective but just like a change in my feeling of more resilience and more just energy.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, it's not just energy. You can eat more different foods and not feel weird after them, you drink coffee and you feel awake from it not foggy. There's this whole organization of your energy production at a mitochondrial level and adrenal level and your immune system and your brain. It's just like, "Wow, it all got zipped up." It was all seemed to be going, falling off the ledge to the right or to the left at any moment. And now it's just like straight down the middle. 

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, and for listeners, if you're wondering what supports NAD, what depletes NAD, how do you get to this state of needing to boost up your NAD, we know stress is a huge one for that. And I mean, I can't even imagine with all of my mercury and detox what I probably did to my NAD levels. Something I found really fascinating about NAD is it's so important in the body that Rhonda Patrick was talking about this was that it's so important. In theory, we could get it from food, but we would never be able to create enough. So that's why there's a whole salvage and like a recycling pathway of it, because we just need to be able to use it all the time. 

Melanie Avalon:
But that's why you can take these NAD precursors, the ones people might be familiar with is NR as well as NMN always have to say it slow, it's hard to say, which is the one that NAD Gold, which I should tell listeners a little bit about the difference between an NR and NMN. And how they serve as precursors to NAD so listeners can build back up there in NAD stores.

And actually, right before I do that, let me just go back round out something you were just saying about how NAD levels go down. I want to tie it back into the mercury thing, and then we'll talk about how to build it all up. And so what lowers NAD levels, and all these things primarily work on the enzymes that are making NAD, damage the enzymes that are making NAD. But any inflammatory processes, infections and toxins all work to some degree to lower your NAD levels. But there was this cool study where this guy was using these little worms that are used for basic biochemistry and poisoning them with methyl mercury.

Chris Shade:
And when he did that, he saw that he damaged the mitochondria, the amount of live mitochondria went down and their activity went down. Now then when he measured NAD, of course, the methyl mercury diminished the NAD levels. Now, how is he going to fix this? What he did was bring the NAD there was a lowering of glutathione levels and an increase in oxidative damage. So what he did then is he started exposing, raising up their NAD levels before he poisoned them with the methyl mercury and then there was no damage at all. Because the NAD was keeping the excess, like the supplemental NAD was keeping the glutathione system activated and then the glutathione system could work out all of the excess mercury, could get rid of it all. And this is where that partitioning of NAD into  NADH is important.

Chris Shade:
The NADPH was keeping glutathione in the reduced state as it was trying to accommodate all the oxidative stress and the high levels of NAD were able to generate a lot of ATP for the glutathione synthesis and the glutathione conjugation and the toxin transporters all at work. When I do my NAD talk, I like using this Bible quote from Matthew and this guy wrote a book about the Matthew effect and it's this quote that says, "To those who have shall be given more and shall have abundance. And to those who have not even the last bit they have shall be taken away."

Chris Shade:
So there's this knife edge sort of below the certain level, you don't have enough NAD to handle the onslaught, and everything just goes to hell on you. Whereas above a certain level, you're able to generate more ATP and make more NAD and you're able to recycle more NAD, and you're able to make the glutathione that keeps you protected from the environmental stress. And there was even some data showing in there that when the NAD levels were high enough, the methyl mercury exposure was actually a hormetic tonic to the worm and strengthened various processes. Whereas when the NAD levels were lower, the methyl mercury then was a toxin and killed the worm.

Melanie Avalon:
That is so fascinating and I think it can explain or help us understand so much why people can get and things like chronic illness situations because it's like... I was talking actually when I had David Sinclair on about this same thing like this or two ends because we were talking about how when you have this damage the surtuins get... they go and kind of like fix things, but sometimes they get actually lost and don't actually come back to where they're supposed to be. And it's like, the more damage you experience, the more just crashes and burns it so makes sense why people may feel like they're... It's like you can be okay and be dealing with things. But then once that tipping point happens, like you talked about, like the knife, it's like getting to this point where when you don't have the resources to recover, then clearly everything's just keep getting up.

Chris Shade:
It is. it's the tipping point. And it's why a lot of the biochemical literature like the animal based toxicology, literature is wrong. They take this completely healthy young mouse and they have to give it like tons of mercury before it gets super, super sick. And then you got some human that's been living and stringing itself along in this screwed up environment, and you give it a little bit and it goes over the edge. 

Melanie Avalon:
So true. I've been doing a lot of research on skincare, for example, and all the potential things that we are exposed to in like skincare, cosmetics, makeup. Ladies are often putting that on their skin every single day. And it's like, all the testing for these individual compounds. It's like what happens when we apply this individual compound at one time, on one cell and see what happens in this small amount. It doesn't take into account the fact that you're exposed to multiple compounds, you're exposed to that compound from multiple places. There's the cocktail effect, there's a synergistic effect. It just doesn't work that way. 

Chris Shade:
No, it doesn't. And so that's why this is such a sensitive thing, is such an important thing to get right. And so then that takes us to the, "well how do we get it there." Now, if you're hip to a little bit of vitamin chemistry, you know that NAD is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And that nicotinamide signifies it as a vitamin B3 form. In fact, it's the super activated fully composed and brought together elevated version of vitamin B3, and so what are the lower levels of vitamin B3? You've got niacin, nicotinic acid, and then you have a slightly higher level called Nicotinamide. 

Chris Shade:
Now, how do we make NAD? We can make NAD from those two vitamins which you can get from food. And if you're not getting any of those vitamins, you can do this longer pathway called the de novo pathway, where you're taking it from tryptophan and amino acids. So taking it from niacin is called the price handler pathway. And eventually say we take some niacin, we turn it into NAD and we use the NAD to activate a sirtuin or to repair a gene or CD 38 which fixes tight junctions, then it forms Nicotinamide. And so the broken or the sort of after you've donated energy of NAD, your NMN, Nicotinamide. Then you have the salvage pathway to turn it back into NAD. 

Chris Shade:
So why can't we just take lots of vitamin B3? Well, all those stressors, those environmental stressors could just be age, inflammation, toxins, any different stressor, they work on the enzymes that are taking Nicotinamide or niacin, up to NAD. Now, on its way up to NAD, it has to go to NMN. And it can also go to NR, Nicotinamide Riboside which until now was the most popular NAD precursor. NR becomes NMN and then it becomes NAD. The enzymes that take NR to NMN or NMN to NAD do not get so affected by environmental stressors. So those are the easiest to drive right into NAD. That happens pretty much without a hitch. So those are the ones that you want and you've got an NR and NMN, so why would use one over the other?

Chris Shade:
Now, you used to use NR over NMN because the guys who sold you NR told you that NMN was too big to get into the cell and there was no transporter to get it in there. Now, when you go into the research world like Sinclair's world, they had not found the transporter that moves NMN around, cell the cell,  into the cell into the GI from or into the blood from the GI. They didn't know what was doing it, but they strongly suspected it was being done and a lot of these guys were doing animal studies with NMN and getting fantastic results in reversing aging and animals. That was very consistent with the NAD levels being raised.

Chris Shade:
And so Sinclair always believed there was one but the guys that make NR kept saying, "No, no, no, no can't be used." But then last February 2019 Japanese researcher, Emi, found the transporter and it was heralded it was in science. And there was article from Sinclair saying, "At long last, the elusive transporter's been found, and it's in the GI tract, it's in the cells, it's everywhere." And indeed, NMN is a great way to raise NAD. And so that's what we used was NMN and we mixed it with some tri methyl glycine, which I'm sure we'll get into talking about methylation, why we need to balance methylation with NAD levels, but we put those two together and we put them into a nano liposome to increase their absorption because this stuff is expensive.

Chris Shade:
And even though you have a transporter for it, which means you can absorb it, it doesn't mean that you won't saturate the transporter and not be able to absorb it anymore. And indeed that's the case and using the liposome gets our first data set was 4.25 fold increase in bioavailability. So a 425% increase in bioavailability off of just taking an NMN powder. So like Sinclair, he takes a gram of NMN a day, I take 100 to 200 milligrams a day with an occasional forray into four and five or 600. But generally, one to 200 milligrams in this liposome and I get all the benefits that I need.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that so much. And really quick question, can we measure NAD levels in the body?

Chris Shade:
Sure. Yes, but very difficult thing to do. And so NAD, we have equipment that can do it, but we're moving from one lab to another. And when we get this over here, we're going to be doing a lot of NAD measurements. And in fact, Joe Mercola is also setting up to do the NAD budget. We've been working together on this project to get the... you want to measure NMN, NR, NAD and he's got a guy's got a similar machine and he's working it all out. We learned the original techniques from Nady Brady over in Australia. And so we hope to do a lot more measurement. But it's not something that it's like, "Oh yeah, I got to go down to lab core and get my NAD level measured."

Melanie Avalon:
It's pretty exciting. Exciting. One more quick follow up question. So given the idea or now that we know that there is the transporter for NMN, which maybe this is just me, but I feel like wouldn't it be obvious that there has to be a transporter since in NMN was serving as a precursor in the body to NAD or can things service-

Chris Shade:
No. The way that we're drawing the diagrams was that when you're moving it cell to cell, it moves as NR, and then inside the cell, it moves to NMN, and then to NAD and so they didn't stay in the mechanism how you could move it around your body. 

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, that makes sense. 

Chris Shade:
So they're like, "Well, you move it as NR, then you turn it to NMN, and then you turn it to NAD."

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, got you. Given the fact that we now know there is the transporter, do you prefer NMN over NR? I mean, I know you chose it. 

Chris Shade:
The main thing is ChromaDex that owns the license on using nicotinamide riboside, license that to us, they have it tied up and Thorne has the license into the practitioners market. Now, they used to control the supply of NR but then the Chinese started making it and supplying it to other people. So I could get it from the Chinese and hope I'm not breaking some use patent that ChromaDex has. And they own it. I mean, it was done at Harvard. And so then it was sold to ChromaDex. And they sell now to True Niagen and they sell some stuff through Thorne too. So NMN is what I could, there was no intellectual property around it.

Chris Shade:
So I was able to get that. We're doing deeper studies to see which one is actually more efficacious. I'm sure you know that if NR turns out to win in some way... now see the thing is NR now you can't get it a liposome and so it would have to be five, six fold better absorbed than NMN to get past the advantage we have from using the liposome, plus then there's this really cool advantage in that the body actually traffics different elements of the NAD system in liposomes. And so the cells are actually tuned to,... they're called extracellular vesicles. And the cells are actually tuned to recognize vesicles with NMN or NR in them.

Chris Shade:
And so theoretically, they have a higher uptake into the cell. Now, we don't know for sure how all that works, but the body is already trafficking stuff in these little liposomes that are made in the cell.

Melanie Avalon:
I have a super random very personal question. I'm just wondering about using sunflower... How do you say, lecithin?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, lecithin is the crude stuff that comes out of the oil pressing and then we refine out of that Phosphatidyl Choline. 

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so with the supplements, and this is literally just coming from my insane craziness when I'm researching polyunsaturated fats like Omega 6, Omega 3, is that even at all a thing in sunflower lecithin? Like you said even PUFA? Or is it?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, it is. It is. It's the same oil as sunflower oil, the fatty acids are the same. And so, the one thing I take so many lipososmes. I'm like, "I need a little bit more Omega 3. And so, I'll take a little Omega 3 and recently we got phospholipids from krill, which are all Omega 3, and we are going to do a little blending of Omega 6 and Omega 3 phospholipids in making the particles.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, that would be really exciting because that would be like three birds with one stone, or four birds.

Chris Shade:
It's a flock of geese with one stone.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I know, all the birds. And then just so I don't forget it. I know I already asked about the topical absorption but with the NMN the NAD gold that you make, so could I be using that topically?

Chris Shade:
Yeah it really works I've done that for sure. You can slather your whole body with is a little expensive but you do it around your eyes and it like really tightens things up. The best stuff we have for skin the C lipolic and the NAD gold or the best to glutathione is really good too especially if you do like a dermapen. In fact, with any of them you could do like a dermapen or something like that. You know micro needling and do even better but I just do them topically. The liposomes you put them on you want to leave them like 15, 20 minutes and then you can just blot them with a hot wet washcloth and that'll take the sticky residue off.

Chris Shade:
Now the serums that we're making are designed not to have any residue at all and of course we have one with NMN in it. We have C, we have lipolic acid, we have AMPK activators and all kinds of cool stuff coming in the topicals range so make sure to hassle me about getting samples of that.

Melanie Avalon:
I will. But with the topical absorption of one of the ones that's intended to be oral absorption, would that just be a local effect or can I still get the systemic benefits? 

Chris Shade:
Little bit it'll go systemic. Yeah, we don't know exactly how much and the smaller they are the more we'll go systemic but we definitely have seen that. I was working with the delivery systems with hormones and we're able to see the topical stuff go in pretty quick.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, because I know people use progesterone creams and things like that people can regulate a lot their hormone system.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're getting systemic from that. Yeah, you're getting both. 

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. I have to do some experimenting here. I need like an unlimited supply of NMN just like everywhere. Okay, so another question because you've talked about... actually one more NAD/NMN question before we leave that topic. You do formulated with TMG. And I know that partly relates to concerns about methylation, would you like to talk a little bit about,   is there a risk of burning through your methyls with supplementation?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, there's a risk. And it's not a problem at all though, because you just kind of balance it. And so go back to, reverse in your head, five, six years to an MTHFR was all the thing. And everyone was into having methylfolate, phenolic acid and they would say, "Oh, but if you over methylate, then you can just block that with niacin." And there was also this fear that niacin was going to suck all your methyl groups out and you're going to die from under methylation, because methylation was everything and that's all there was.

Chris Shade:
Well, why was this relationship between niacin and methyl groups? It's because if you recall just a couple of minutes ago, we were talking about when you use NAD to activate a sirtuin, there's this high energy bond from the nucleotide going to the sirtuin to turn over the sirtuin, and you're left with NAM . Nicotinamide. All right?

Chris Shade:
Nicotinamide sticks to the sirtuin is actually a negative regulator of it, it's an inhibitor of the sirtuin. So as long as the NAM the nicotinamide is stuck there to serve to the sirtuin, it's blocking the sirtuin's activity. There are two ways to take it off of there. One is through the salvage pathway, where you regenerate NAD from the Nicotinamide. The other is through methylation of the Nicotinamide and then excretion of it. So you're going to pee out the excess.

Chris Shade:
So as we're stressed or as we're older, we're not as good at turning the NMN back into NAD. So instead, we want to methylate it, move it out of the system. This is also why high doses of NMN do drive NAD production can have some other consequences because you're making NAD but you're inhibiting the sirtuins at the same time. So the most activating way to go is to bring in NMN and then methylate away the NAM.

Chris Shade:
And so people are just sort of average to good methylaters don't really have this problem, they got enough methyl groups around, and we put in one to one ratio of NMN to TMG and that pretty much holds over your average methylater. But then if you're not so good at methylater, you're going to need some extra methyl juice to turn the wheels of methylation and that could be more TMG and that was what I first started using is TMG is the safest, safest methylation driver. It's like the least safe one or I don't know safe, but the easiest one to mess up would be at the top of the pyramid, that would be methylfolate.

Chris Shade:
But TMG is like at the bottom of the pyramid, it's same thing as Betaine that's in your Betaine hydrochloride pills, you can take a couple grams of that. And it really helps bring down homocysteine, but without destabilizing things like your folate levels. And so that's what we use. But now, I've been using a lot. Like for myself, I do a two to one, NMN or NAD gold to B12. Now when I'm talking to the one, I'm not talking a milligram equivalent, I use the NAD gold I do four pumps to that. And then I do two pumps of our liposomal methyl B12 and that keeps it balanced. 

Chris Shade:
And I do that for most people. And they do good with that unless they're real strong methylaters, then they don't need any. Now we're also developing one called methyl charge, that'll have more TMG, it'll have B12 and it will have B2. Now, the significance of B2 is that B2 drives the methyl transferases, they found that a lot of the people that they thought were fully deficient, were actually B2 deficient.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, wow. I'm learning so much, especially I personally got the whole MTHFR. You know "diagnosis", although I've heard that like a large, large percent of people have some sort of mutation regarding MTHFR like 70% or something, I could be wrong in that number. But I remember when I first figured out about that, I started supplementing with methylfolate methylated vitamins or B vitamins. I don't know, it just always felt like frustrating. I felt like I would too easily tip into the... I don't know, methylation just seems really hard to like address yourself.

Chris Shade:
I think it's because you're trying to keep your folate levels high and there's a lot of neurological processes that are tied to that and you're under methylated, you're tired, and depressed, you're over methylated you're manic and angry, and people would just go back and forth. And they take 10 milligrams and methylfolate and be like, "Wow, I feel great." And then the next day they'd be trying to kill people. You don't have those problems when you're filling it in from the base when you're giving a good methyl base. By having a lot of TMG you're having good transferase activity by having a lot of B2 and you're not monkeying so hard with the methylfolate directly.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that because I started doing the methylated choline and the methylated B vitamins. And I think there's like a reason I didn't keep doing it even though my homocysteine went down. It felt like too much I get maybe I was overdoing it. So I love this whole... This is a great new perspective to have with all of that. Another question. You mentioned the methylation potential from betaine HCl is that like my digestive HCLs that I take with my meals?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah, that's betaine. You could take grams of that and it doesn't destabilize you, it  just gives you a solid base.

Melanie Avalon:
Is there a potential of taking too much because I take a lot of that with meals. So now I'm just wondering.

Chris Shade:
I mean there's always a potential but it's not like methylfolate where you can easily go over.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. And then we keep mentioning glutathione and things like that. I have two really big questions I definitely want to get your opinion on. So ties in a little bit the idea because we talked at the beginning about free radicals, oxidative stress, things like antioxidants. What are your thoughts on antioxidants from food addressing oxidative stress and free radicals versus endogenous antioxidants produced by the body? Do you think that taking an exogenous antioxidants fruits and vegetables is that having a significant effect on free radicals and oxidative stress or?

Chris Shade:
For the water soluble portion of your world the inside of the cell, the outside of the cell. The endogenous antioxidants glutathione, superoxide dismutase, thyrodoxine, and glutaredoxins. And those do a great job there, bringing in ascorbate helps and you can transfer reducing factors between ascorbate and all those and that's all very good. Now, where you're reliant on food based antioxidants is inside the membranes. And so there's a lot of lipid peroxide stress that can hit the oily domain of the cell membranes. And there you need carotenoids, and tocopherols and tocotrienols, the water solubles vitamin A derivatives and vitamin E derivatives, and that's going to come from your food.

Chris Shade:
In fact, I'm making a membrane formula that's got the different omega phospholipids along with astaxanthin and tocotrienol as your membrane based antioxidants. So again, you're pretty good on your own for the waters but the fat solubles they have to come from the foods.

Melanie Avalon:
Obvious what's really fascinating about that is I think a lot of people when they first think antioxidants food they think fruit and based on what you just said the antioxidants are going to be found vitamin E, fat soluble antioxidants that's like fats.

Chris Shade:
But like carotenoids and stuff, they're going to come from green leafy vegetables, colored vegetables that can be come from colored fruits, but people think fruit because of vitamin C, the old orange juice is going to replenish your vitamin C thing. 

Melanie Avalon:
Is that the main connection the vitamin C?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, that's why people think about fruit. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
So what are your thoughts on the whole carnivore movement and people saying you know that that's actually the best way to support antioxidant status with endogenous glutathione production and endogenous antioxidants.

Chris Shade:
Well, in that whole carnival world for that all the work you need to eat as the carnivore doctor says nose to tail, you got to eat all the organ meats, probably got to eat the brain too, a little plant will take you a long way. They go a little too far with that. I mean, I like a lot of the concepts in there and plant stuff can be irritating. And yeah, there's phyto lectins and stuff. But for me, typically those are things that are stimulating glutathione production. And so I am definitely still omnivorous.

Chris Shade:
Now, if you are in some sort of auto immune challenge and GI challenge, then I would use the carnivore diet as an interventional diet to tone down all the immune hyperactivity.

Melanie Avalon:
This is perfect. This is going into my next big question that I had. But as far as tampering down the immune activity, is there an aspect of memory to that? So what I mean by that is because people will often find themselves I feel like a very dis balanced immune system as far as the TH1 versus TH2 dominance and how you're reacting to foods and how you're reacting to life and just everything A, can anybody correct this? And first of all, what is this imbalance? And can it be addressed? And is there some sort of memory to this whole immune system where maybe you're always going to be just having to live some sort of diet where you're not sparking the immune system? Or is it possible to reset?

Chris Shade:
It's short term memory and the memory will go away. If you bring things down and calm things down and stop hyper activating it, it'll be good in three to 12 months in general. And there may be some longer memory of that and you're easier to trigger back into things, but you just got to let it all settle down and titrate down. My own experience with reactivity to things is that once I got... first the AMPK activation but then especially when I got that NAD on board, my immune system just zipped right up and stopped doing so many weird things.

Melanie Avalon:
I have heard you talk on previous podcasts. Can you talk briefly about for listeners who are not familiar the difference between TH1 versus TH2 and what that means because I know people often hear being TH1 dominant or TH2 dominant. So what is the difference there?

Chris Shade:
We use, in my world, this sort of simplistic definition of it, and it doesn't totally hold up when you get deep into immunology. But the generalization does hold up and it holds up clinically. And TH1 is more antimicrobial attacking. It's things like interferon production that are antiviral. It's your immune vigilance, your ability to kill the invader. TH2 is more related to as such. It's more related to your innate immune system.

Chris Shade:
TH2 is more related to allergic reactions and acquired immunity, even though saying that is a little simplistic, but it's more in this allergic reactivity. And when people get TH2 dominant, everything they eat is sending them into a tizzy, yet, they're getting an infection and body's ignoring it and there's viruses all over the place and lime is living in there. So they become intolerant of the things that should nurture them, their food, and their environment, yet they become tolerant of the things that they should kick out the parasites and the evil creatures on the inside. So that's called the TH2 shift. Now that happens very quickly in the face of low glutathione. So how is that low glutathione created? It could be created by a high toxic load, it could be created by an infectious load, it could be created by low NAD. So everything at some point comes back to NAD being one of the weak links and one of the pathologies in there, which is why it's probably the most universal fixer upper for us.

Melanie Avalon:
And with the glutathione for both NAD... Well, not NAD, it would be NMN that you'd be supplementing with NMN as well as glutathione, is there the risk with either of those of down regulating your body's natural production of the prospective compound?

Chris Shade:
There's always this theoretical risk but you really got to jack high levels into there to down regulate your own production. I haven't seen that doing that with the levels at which we supplement. Now, if you're doing testosterone, yes, you do see that and so then you have to completely replace those levels and then when you cycle off of it, you have to stimulate yourself to come back up and make more but with glutathione and NAD I have not seen that to be the case.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, awesome. I need to try glutathione supplementation. 

Chris Shade:
Oh my God, you have to. Have you not... Oh, I can't believe it. 

Melanie Avalon:
So when I was doing chelation with DMPS pushes, I would do glutathione pushes. And that's the only experience that I have with supplementing glutathione and I mean, that was amazing the glutathione aspect.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is a great but they just don't last as a supplement. So it's the day to day use some liposomes and see what that does to the day to day is really where it's at. I mean, IVs are big interventions and their big punctuations on it. But keeping that supplementation riding long term is what really changes things. 

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. Do you take the glutathione daily?

Chris Shade:
No, I used to. I intermittently take it. I take it a couple times here a couple times a week and if I'm traveling, if I've been up drinking with people, I'm going to supplement. If anything is dragging it down I'm going to supplement it up. And in the earlier stages of really bringing myself back, I used to take a lot of it. But once you get up to a high level, then your body's making enough. 

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, that's going to be my next one to try and report back on. So that's exciting. So one last question, which will lead to the last question. So given all of this, the status of NAD, glutathione, the immune system, all of these things potentially getting depleted or out of whack, what are your thoughts on... Is this all something that must be addressed or can be addressed and aided with these supplements? What role do you think mindset comes into play? Because I know that can people often will address immune intolerances or food sensitivities or things like that with like DNRS or a mindset perspective. Do you think that it all relates to all of this?

Chris Shade:
Oh, 100%, 100%. Gratitude, peace, these things change your autonomic nervous system immediately. They put you in a sympathetic state, the sympathetic state, you started` feeding energy into the processes of detoxification regeneration. I've wanted to do this for a while, but I haven't done it. I do a lot of Tai Chi and I wanted to measure people's glutathione levels before and after weekend retreats. Though we could do that meditation retreats, there's a number of different ways that we can do that. 

Chris Shade:
And I have no doubt at all that levels will go up. NAD is probably the same. Maybe we'll see it as NADP. Maybe it's just NAD, but we will see these changes. I know Rudy Tansy and Deepak Chopra have done a lot of work on people before and after retreats, meditation retreats, and they did they actually split a group and just sent them on a vacation and another group to a meditation retreat, and the biochemical changes were stronger in the meditation group than in the vacation group. But the vacation group did better than the working group. And so mindset is a huge, huge, huge part of our health. 

Melanie Avalon:
I love it so much. I recently actually had an episode on tapping.

Chris Shade:
Oh yeah, FT.

Melanie Avalon:
Out of all the therapeutic techniques, I find the most personal benefit from that. And they recently did studies on it, the findings are just shocking on how it affected gene expression at upregulated like 70 genes after one session related to like longevity. I was like, "So much. There's a lot going on here." 

Chris Shade:
That's great. Actually at the end of the Tai Chi sessions, we do a tapping session along the major meridians. I'll send you a little video of it at some point. 

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, yeah, I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. 

Chris Shade:
Yeah. And if you just integrated that with intention, it would be awesome. Now, at the end of your Tai Chi thing, you're just sitting there in bliss and so you're tapping the bliss into your meridians. But if you wanted a specific intention, you could do that.

Melanie Avalon:
That's amazing. So for listeners, I will put links to... well, maybe not to that video, but I can put links to the interview that we had about tapping and all of the things. So, awesome. Well, I think this was absolutely wonderful. And I said that was the question that brought me to the last question, because the last question that I ask every guest on this podcast, which will be the second time I've asked you this, but what is something that you're grateful for? 

Chris Shade:
I am grateful to be able to do what I love to do, and help so many people and have so many supporting loving people around me doing that.

Melanie Avalon:
That is awesome. I love it. It's so fulfilling when the work you're doing is something that you're passionate about and it's helping others. I mean, that ties in everything it ties on purpose, connection, social support, and then when it's about health.

Chris Shade:
I'm pretty lucky that way. I got it tied together. 

Melanie Avalon:
That is so wonderful. So this has been absolutely amazing. So for listeners, if you are interested in any of the things we talked about, I will put detailed show notes in the show notes. Those will be at melanieavalon.com/nad. And also, if you'd like to get any of the Quicksilver Scientific products that we talked about or others, there's a ton of products on the website, which I go on there. It's like, "Oh, I want every thing." You can go to melanieavalon.com/quicksilver. And using that link, you can get 10% off. So, that is super duper awesome. 

Melanie Avalon:
So thank you so much, Dr. Shade. Thank you for being the first second timer on the podcast. And maybe we can even bring you back for number three. I mean, you mentioned at the beginning like metabolism, and I feel like your new stuff going on there. So I'd love to hear in the future about that. There's just so much, there's so much.

Chris Shade:
There is so much. Yeah, I'm happy to do it, love talking about this stuff. 

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you so much. Hopefully, I will talk to you again. 

Chris Shade:
Great. Take care, Melanie. 

Melanie Avalon:
Bye.

Chris Shade:
Bye, bye.