Free Guide: Why Diet and B1 Come First in Chronic Illness Recovery

Introduction to the 7-Step Blueprint 0:00

Hi, my name is Dr. Darren Schmidt of the Nutritional Healing Center of Ann Arbor and I'm going to walk you through the first two steps of The Seventh Step Blueprint to Optimal Health. You can do this for free and i'm gonna go over a few more things. I am going be really concise. i am not going waste your time but I have to teach you how to think what to do and how measure when healing from chronic illness. We are going over step one, how start it for Free. Step two, How to start that it's one supplement that I I'm recommending generally and I'll tell you why.

And then how to get and run MVX+. That is the way you measure your progress and it actually points you in the right direction of what to do with your health. Now we've had people contact your office. They've been through a heavy metal detox program and they're not better because heavy-metal detox is step six. And there's other steps before and after that. We've had people who went through a Lyme program with herbs or antibiotics. Lyne is step seven. And if you change, a lot of people change their diet and they never get better because diet is Step 1. There are seven steps.

You have to do all seven Steps to get the best results possible. I've learned this because I had my own health problems in 2016. I have terrible heart pain from mold. And I didn't know it was mold, I was in a moldy office for 13 years. In a mouldy house for 8 years! So on February 3rd, 2016, that was the worst night of my life. Lying in bed at 3 o'clock in the morning, can't sleep, my heart is pounding, blood pressure is high, chest hurts, it goes down the left arm. And I'm scrolling through my phone.

Do I call 911 or should I drive myself to the hospital? Well, I spent the next summer and fall trying to go to holistic doctors. I went to a cardiologist twice. And nobody in modern times could help me. So I actually went to my old books. I have books from 1955 all the way back to 1909. And there was one particular article in one book from the article was written in 1955 talking about the mechanism of chronic disease.

Personal Health Story and Chronic Disease Framework 2:06

Sorry, I learned that it put everything together. And then I started to get better based on treating the mechanism, which we'll get into a little bit. And in October 2016, I found the cause, and that was mold. So then, then could heal myself. I had to move out of the office and remove myself from that situation. Then in 2024, same symptoms appeared, but worse. And that was a gas leak. So you have to think in terms of what's causing it. What's the mechanism? And then how do you feed your organs to feel better?

So I developed this graphic in 2016 based on that information from the 1930s through 1955. This is from The Founders of Healthcare, The founders of medicine. Dr. Robert Lee, the founder of Holistic Nutrition, Dr Henry Harrower, founder in endocrinology, and Dr Otto Warburg, father of physiology. So what they said is you have to address the causes and the mechanisms, which is lactic acidosis, that's what the called it back then, then feed the organs to get rid of symptoms. You have do three things when you address chronic disease.

Now, some people address the cause, and there are other causes. They have to address all the causes, And there's over 20 mechanisms, but the most common one is this lactic acidosis, also now known as mitochondrial dysfunction. And then you want to feed the organs. Now there're supplements for organs, I carry a lot of supplements And that was the basis of my practice for many years, and I never really addressed the cause or the mechanism until later in my career, post 2016. So people will feed their organs, they'll do like a liver supplement or they will do some kind of hydrochloric acid for their stomach, but you're not getting to the causes of the mechanisms.

You have to address all three. Notice this tank tread that goes around, you have address to all 3 because they all rotate together. So this graphic is how you think. This graphic what you do. Step one is the diet. There's a lot of diets I work with and we're gonna go over some of my favorites and they may apply to you. And then the second one, is energy. So we are talking about increasing energy production in the mitochondria. Now the third one preparation for detoxification of parasites and other organisms and heavy metals and chemicals.

so this step three is called drainage. Step four is intestinal and immune cleansing, and there's just a few supplements that work really well with this in my clinical experience. Step five is full body immune-cleansing. I have more supplements than work for the full-body. We're talking about getting parasites or fungus out of the fingers. So we have people, they take these supplements, now their fingers hurt more, and then a few weeks or a couple months later, their arthritis is gone. There can be great health benefits at any one of these steps.

You might need three of the seven, or you might all seven. Step six is powerful detoxification, getting rid of metals and chemicals. And then step seven is where you're cleaning out the inside of your cells. Now you may have heard of Lyme disease that's an organism living in the cells. That was discovered in 1980. But since then there's been dozens and dozens of other organisms and toxins that are inside the cell and herbs clean that out. So you don't want to start at step seven. or maybe you do, some people I have started at Step 7, but most people need to do other things first.

So there are people that go to a Lyme specialist, they take antibiotics and herbs and they feel great. They stop the program and then six months or a year later they're worse again because they never did the earlier steps. Other people they change their diet around and think their diets gonna fix everything, But they haven't done Steps 4 and 5 and got parasites. So you get the idea, you want to do all these steps. Now it's designed like a figure eight here, and here's why. So when people change their diet and their energy goes up, they're starting to feel better.

And now they are pooping better in step three, drainage. Their liver is working better, their colon, the lymphatic system, energy comes up. That's how it comes like this. Then they start cleaning parasites out and now it goes down and backwards. because it's not so comfortable when you go to the bathroom and you get worms into the toilet. But that's life. You got to fix this stuff up, deal with it, get through it. Step six is detoxification.

The Seven Steps and How They Work Together 6:30

This is where people start to get their energy back. So we have a few supplements that detoxify and increase energy at the same time. because of the the physics of, the product, humic acid, fulvic acid. I don't want to get into it, but here energy comes up and then cleaning out the cells and you'll be surprised that toxins in the cell they can cause fatigue, they cause joint pain, because short-term memory problems and other like dyslexia type problems like lack of balance. And so you can have symptoms all the way through.

And then step seven, you feel better. So then lifelong optimization is step O. That's where you're doing something every day to maintain your health and keep staying ahead of the toxins that are in our environment and in food. This is what you do. I'm going to teach you steps one and two. You can do it for free, except step two is like buying a supplement. but I'm launching you on the seven steps with step one and two. Now quick note, I made the 7 steps into this infinity sign here. So step 1 is here, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 optimization.

The point is you do this cycle once and you feel better and that's great. You may need to do it again because we live in a very toxic environment and there's parasites in the soil and parasites and the food and you know, you get stresses, now you need mitochondrial support and step step two, etc. So just think in terms of this is one of your jobs in life is to maintain your health. Yeah, your raising a family, work a job, You know you have other life jobs, but maintain you health is on of you jobs for the rest of life.

Here's how you measure, this MVX+, this an amazing blood test. I have patients run it every six to eight weeks and it tracks our progress. I'm going to go through this really quickly. So it measures inflammation and infection. That's glycA right here. And it measure small HL particle count. that's toxicity. and here we have citrate.That's mitochondrial function. In here, we are valine, leucine and isoleucin.that's malnutrition. You put all that together and you're measuring how healthy are your cells.

If your cell are 100% healthy, there's no disease. So this gives you an overall score of 1 to 100. You want your score to be low. If your scores is 25, you're in really good shape. if your is 75, your chances of survival for the next five years is not that good. So I have a lot of people and their score is let's say 55. It doesn't matter if you are 9 years old or 90 years. You want that score down. I mean, if you're 90 years old and your score is 55, you are in pretty good shape. But you can still bring it down to 50 and 45 by doing nutritional things, diet and supplements.

This test is run nationwide through a company called LabCorp. They have 3,000 locations or something, but they released this white paper on this test, and this is on page two of the white I'm going to read it. It's that important that I read word for word. So just bear with me. Clinical applications in whole person medicine. NVX supports whole-person care by enabling, number one, root cause identification. MVX helps uncover hidden drivers of fatigue, inflammation, and metabolic rigidity. Metabolic rigidity means your body can't really go from sugar burning to fat burning.

So you've heard of the ketogenic diet that really promotes fat burning. Exercise, especially endurance exercise, promotes that burning, so if you have metabolic rigidity, then you can't burn fat and you may be stuck or rigid, stuck with just burning sugar. Now this next one says personalized protocols and it mentions IVX and MMX. Those are two aspects within the MVX score. IV-X has more to do with inflammation. MM-x has to with metabolism and digesting. So let's go over number two personalized protocol.

A patient with elevated IV X inflammation may benefit from anti-inflammatory nutraceuticals, gut-healing protocols, or immune modulation. It's amazing that this medical laboratory is talking about these holistic functional medicine-type strategies. A high MMX score may call for mitochondrial support, amino acid repletion, taking amino acids or eating more meat, and detoxification strategies! It is thrilling that we have this available. Gate number three, monitoring progress. MVX can be used longitudinally to assess the impact of lifestyle, nutritional, or therapeutic interventions.

Longitudinally means you take it on day one, you start a program, your changing your diet, changing supplements, and then two months later and four months and six months, later you're redoing it and you are assessing how well your body is responding to the therapies. Okay, last one, risk stratification.

Using MVX+ to Measure Progress 11:30

In patients with complex chronic illness or subclinical dysfunction, meaning you don't know you have dysfunction. You don' even have symptoms. MVX helps prioritize care and allocate resources effectively. So in this test, you can have high Glycae, which is inflammation and or infection. Then you know you've got to go find some, maybe it's candida, it may be parasites, or maybe a chronic virus. Go find it and fix it. Or let's say you have a very low small particle count. That means toxicity. So now you can run a lab test to find toxins.

and then address that. Or it could be the amino acids showing you that you're malnourished. And you could malnutrition of vitamin B1 or amino acid. You could hyperglycemic or diabetic. or something like that and MVX exposes this to us. It gives us that 30,000 foot view of your health. Once you find out you have to take this highway and not this other highway, then you're taking the bigger lab tests and you are starting a program based on what MVx directs you down which path. Conclusion, LabCorp's MV X Plus offers a systems biology approach It's systems biology, it's not risk factors, pathology, conventional lab testing.

It is your biology. You're testing the systems of your body. That's an amazing statement. So it offers a systems biology approach to mortality risk assessment aligning with the core principles of whole person care. These tools empower clinicians to detect hidden vulnerabilities and tailor interventions that address the root cause of disease. Okay, let's get into the seven-step blueprint to optimal health, now that you know how to think, what to do, and how measure. And I give you the links on how get MVX Plus at the end.

So step one, diet. We work with a variety of diets. If I were to be the king of the United States, and then declare one diet for everybody, it's the high satiety diet. So let me talk to you about what that means. The high-satiety is a high protein diet with lower carbs and lower fat. Protein, carbs, and fat are the three main macronutrients. Now right now in our country, we eat a low protein diet, high carb, and high fat. That's why the obesity and overweight percentages are so high. So in order to reverse it, you just reverse the diet.

High protein is very satisfying. Why is it satisfying? It's because your body needs protein more than it needs carbohydrates and fat, so when you eat just only protein, then you'll lose weight. And there's exceptions to that rule. You can have hormonal problems, you can gut microbiome problems. you could have medications that you're taking that prevent weight loss, such as psychiatric or maybe even cholesterol-lowering drugs. So just keep that in mind. But the point is, the high C-tiety diet is the best diet to start to lose weigh.

Now the next diet, is antifungal diet. And then we have the antiviral diet. So now these diets eliminate certain foods from your body, and obviously the anti-fungal diet eliminates foods that feed fungus. The antaviral diets eliminates food that feeds viruses. Now the diets don't kill off fungus or viruses, They just don't feed the organisms. So then we're relying on supplements to wipe out the candida, the fungus, there's tons of herbs that wipe our virus. Don't worry about that. And then let's talk about the keto diet.

The keto is really good for psychiatric problems, even severe schizophrenia, bipolar, major depression. The keto diet is also really good for weight loss. Now I did keto in 2019 with very fatty meat and I put on weight. So the point is when you do keto, you still need to keep your calories down. The Keto Diet is high fat, it's moderate protein, and it is lower carb. and then you end up in the state of ketosis. Now you can achieve ketoses just by fasting too, but there are people who do the keto diet and it completely controls their diabetes.

And so it's worth looking into, maybe that's what your body needs. The Whole 30 Diet is a low ultra-processed food diet.

Step 1: Diet Strategies 16:00

Now originally it had no seed oils and of course there's no additives, there are no preservatives. You're basically eating meat and vegetables and fruit that are organic and your body has low inflammation. So I know people who eat seed oil and they have joint pain from that or they start coughing or some weird symptom. So that's why the Whole30 diet might be valuable for you. What they all have in common is that there's no junk food. Now 52% of the American diet is junk-food for adults. Over 70% percent of diet for children is a junk.

This is disaster. So when you eliminate junk, what are you left with? You're left grains, whole grains. meat, vegetables, and fruit. And basically that's it. You've cut out all these other chemicals and all those other types of food that are in the center of the grocery store. So the current food pyramid, as per RFK Jr., is just eat real food. Place it upside down and then you have a little bit of whole grains at the bottom. And then you have the rest of the food pyramid is real food. There's no junk food in there.

No white bread, no white pasta, there's not refined grains, and no refined sugar. As a matter of fact, in the documents associated with this upside down food pyramide, it even says zero sugar! This is the first time since, you know, ever, that our federal government is saying zero sugar. So at the end of this video, I'll have resources for these diets, and then you can grab them, educate yourself, pick the one that works best for you, try it out. Maybe you have to switch to another one. Let's talk about step two, energy.

Now, again, give me this information for free, but here you're buying a vitamin B1, B as in boy. You may have heard like in school that B one is water soluble. Yes, the original B 1 made in 1934 is waterproof. But in the 1960s, fat soluble versions were manufactured in Japan. And we didn't know about this in this country until like the 90s or something, because all that original research was in Japanese. So Benfotiamine is one version of B1, and this is what it fixes. Hear me out. This is an amazing supplement.

It's the best supplement for mitochondrial energy creation. so it's divided into certain categories within your body. Cardiovascular, peripheral neuropathy, brain problems, digestive problems and then end of life syndromes. So let's go over this quickly. You can have peripheral neuropathy like numbness and tingling in your legs or arms. And then benfotiamine is fantastic for that. It can take six months at a high dose. A high-dose would be 750 milligrams, maybe a thousand milligrams. Now cardiovascular problems get better with high dose B1, benfotiamine.

So I've had people where the swelling in the ankles shrunk down, blood pressure comes down. Breathing gets easier. B 1 is amazing for cardiovascular problem. Even B-1 deficiency can even cause plaque in arteries. Now I mentioned digestive. Valine, leucine and isoleucin go up. Those are measured in MVX. And when they're very high, you end up with diabetes, hyperglycemia.

Step 2: Energy Support with Vitamin B1 19:30

So I've had patients with straight up type 2 diabetes and benfotiamine was the best supplement to bring down their glucose and their A1C. Other digestive problems include bloating, acid reflux, heartburn, inability to digest certain foods such as protein or fats or carbohydrates. Why is that? Because the digestive system is controlled locally, like the stomach works on its own. The pancreas, the gobbler, they work on their own, but they're also controlled from a distance, meaning from the back of the head there's these nerves that come down the side of neck called the vagus nerves.

They go to all the organs in the torso. They control digestion. So when these nerves aren't working very well, then you can have digestive trouble. How do you fix these? Vitamin B1. Speaking of nerves, the brain needs vitamin B1. Now, Benfotiamine is okay for this, but there's another version of B-1 called TTF-D. So short-term memory problems, even Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, they've been studied with B 1, and T-TFD is the best way to get B one into the Now let's talk about end of life syndromes.

This is the last thing. So I had a patient recently, she's 92 years old. She lost 20 pounds in three months and she wasn't trying. she got down to 125. That is an end-of-life syndrome. It's called cachexia. it's where your body can't digest food very well, you don't have an appetite anymore, and you just start wasting away. I put her on B1. i talked to her three month later. Her weight loss stopped. her appetite came up. Another end of life syndrome includes apnea when you're not breathing at night.

B1 has fixed that. It's like your body has lost its energy. Your nerves here, C3, 4, 5 of the neck, they control your diaphragm and your lungs. And if you don't have energy there, your lung just quit moving. I had this. in 2024 when I had a gas leak. B1 saved my life. In May of 2024, I went to the ER. I have terrible chest pain, crushing chest, eight out of 10, and they couldn't find anything at the hospital. They kicked me out. I came home with no answers. I asked them for blood pressure drugs.

They said, no, you don't qualify. But I'm here for a reason. And I have these terrible symptoms. So luckily, I am in this profession. And within one hour, I was breathing easier. It was amazing. And I knew this was the solution. That was May of 2024. I found the gas leak December 7th. Despite being exposed to gas every day, B1 not only did it save my life, but it made my health better and better. So I shut off the Gas Leak, my Apnea is gone, Peripheral Neuropathy is Gone. B-1 detoxifies and it heals.

It controls five different biochemical reactions within the Mitochondria. I'm saying all this because B 1 has given me And my patients, the greatest benefits in clinical practice, I've put about 400 people on B1, and I see over and over again, people breathe easier, their energy's better, they're sleep is better. Their pain goes away. All these amazing things happen with B-1. Now, i've had people take it and nothing changed. That means that they didn't need it. but they still have symptoms, so they need to go through the rest of the seven steps.

So we did step two, that's the energy, thats B1. They need some more work to be done, steps three, four, five, six, seven. I'm giving you free information right now, step one and two. That's where you can start. And when you're ready for steps three, four, five, six, seven, contact us. We're here for you. So my notes here, let's talk about how to start it. You start with a lower dose, like let say one pill a day, and then you work up to two pills a and three pills. As you take it, you could have worsening of your symptoms and that would last three to five days.

So you go to a certain dose. If you feel worse, just stay at that dose until you'll feel better. And then you increase your dose again, and then, you might feel worst again. Stay at the higher dose! and then you feel better three to five days later. So you just keep increasing the dose. And when you're taking bethyltiamine, get up to like 750 milligrams per day. If you are taking regular B1 water soluble, you know, it can go up like 4,000 milligrams. and if you take TTFD for your brain, then get it up let's say 500, 600 milligrams a day Those are high doses.

How to stop it? Well, the way that you know you're done with B1 is that, check it out, it's really crazy. B one will get rid of certain symptoms, and then six months later, those symptoms return. That's when your body says, okay, we're done with B1. It's the only supplement I've ever worked with in my whole career where it causes the things that it solved in the first place. Now, some people need it every day for the rest of their life because the moment they stop it, they feel worse. But if you're taking it and then you feel worst, that's six months later, then, you are done And then maybe you can do a little bit of water soluble B1 every day for the rest of your life.

A little would be 100 milligrams or 250 milligrams. So the point of this video is to start somewhere and maybe already have, maybe work with your diet and you've taken B one already and your ready for next step, step three, four, five, contact us. And maybe have already started somewhere with somebody else. You've already done a line protocol, you detox parasites, but you never done step 3 or you ever did step 2. So anything beyond step two is done for you,

How to Start, Stop, and Get Help 25:30

meaning you come to our office, we'll walk you through it. We'll make sure you get the results that you want. And that's working with us and here's our website. Then do it yourself is at theholistichealthacademy.com. And at that website, I have a whole course on the 7-step blueprint to optimal health. It's like 130 videos. I go into great detail.I go over all the supplements. You have access to the supplement and all of the different steps of 7 step blueprint. And talk about all diets. Talk about optimization.

Its all there waiting for you. If you don't want to do it yourself, come with us and we'll do for through our office. So if this training has resonated with you, then you're going to love the next steps. This is an adventure, and it's not always better, better better. Sometimes you feel worse. That's just the name of the game. When you are detoxing, for example, I detoxed mold for seven years. when I first started detox it, i could feel the pain in my heart where the mold had really settled. and I had to slow down my detoxing.

And I mean, I've been through it myself, like with the gas leak. Oh my gosh, that thought I was dying. I thought it was dining with a mold. Then later with that gas leaked. So I'd been where you are, maybe. You might be much sicker than I ever was. But the point is I have been trough the chronic illness stuff myself and have seen tens of thousands of patients. In my office, we have 10 other practitioners and we've seen 60,000 patients in the last five years. This is what we're built for, this is we train, we talk about new discoveries like all the time.

I have a meeting with my practitioners once a week. We're going over new stuff and new discoveries. So start somewhere, where do you need to go now? You may have done some things already like I mentioned, and I hope what I've just given you will help you determine your next step.