The Better Question: Are You Measuring Disease—or Measuring Health?

The overall index is called the metabolic vulnerability index, and that is a score 1 to 100. You want your score to be very low. And that's how you can predict your five-year mortality.

If your his score is too high, you just bring it down. Then you've just proven that you're going to live longer, that your healthier. Welcome to the resiliency method, the truth about healing.

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They drew everyone's blood and tracked who lived the longest. Then they asked a different question. What could we have measured to actually predict mortality?

Well, welcome to the Resiliency Method, the Truth About Healing podcast. I'm Dr. Erika, and today I am joined by Dr Darren Schmidt, chiropractor and founder of the Nutritional Healing Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We're talking about the MBX Plus blood test and what it reveals about health, aging, longevity, using key markers linked to long-term outcomes. We're going to break down the six markers behind the MVX+, why it focuses on cellular health instead of symptoms, and why nutrient deficiencies like B1 are often missed.

We are also going touch on a 7-step blueprint for restoring health and how tracking these markers can show real progress over time. If you think labs are only about diagnosing disease, this episode will change that.

The better question we're exploring today is what if the real issue isn't disease, but what your body is missing? Because that's where the really healing starts.

And before we dive in, if you're enjoying the Resiliency Method podcast, be so grateful if would leave a quick five-star rating and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Thank you for your support. Welcome back to the Resiliency Method, the Truth About Healing podcast. I'm here today with Dr. Darren Schmidt. He is a doctor of chiropractic and the founder of the Nutritional Healing Center of Ann Arbor, where they use new and old clinical discoveries to solve complex chronic illness using only diet and supplements.

And I'd say a lot of probably whole food supplements, right, Darren? Right. Yeah. And his seven step blueprint to optimal health and the use of the MVX plus blood test, which we're going to talk about in more depth today has made him a leader in foundational nutrition.

So I'm excited to hear about this test. Darren, I know you're a big supporter and I am in the process. of looking at it too for how we can help people understand where they're at in the process of aging and longevity.

So get us started here and tell us a little bit more about what makes the MVX Plus such a game changer, do you think, in medicine? And where did it come from?

Why do we not know more this test already, would you say? Okay, so MVX Plus stands for Metabolic Vulnerability Index, and it was released in January of 2025. So it's a pretty new test.

Okay. It was developed by LabCorp and some researchers. And it took 10 years of study on over 30,000 people by the NIH. Then the UK Biobank tested this on 270, 000 people.

And what they did was they drew everybody's blood, you know, and this is different groups, maybe six or seven different. They drew blood and they just waited for people to pass away.

And then they looked at their blood after they died and said, what could we have looked to predict their mortality? And right out of a few, three dozen different markers, there were six that predict mortality.

And when I started studying this test in 2024, I realized I fixed all six of these factors. And so I wanted to run it on myself and it wasn't available.

So then I contacted the NIH. I contact NASA because I know a rocket scientist there. Okay. Contacted by five other labs and you have to have a special machine to.

And I just thought that these labs might have one and nobody would run. It. Professional Co-op Services, which is a third party vendor for LabCorp. And somebody there, it's a kind of a nice story, but I'm gonna keep it real simple.

He just turned it on. Professional co-ops services has like 10 employees and Labcorp has, like, 80,000. But somehow, Professional Club Services has some control over what LabCorp does.

I don't know how they do it, but they just turn this lab on and now it's available nationwide at Labcorp. It's very inexpensive. When I sell it I charge $49 for it.

And I have patients run it every two months and it tracks their health. But the bottom line is, to answer your question, measures cellular health as opposed to measuring symptoms or disease or pathology.

It's actually measuring cellular in five different ways. And then you can improve it and you contract it. You can, it can guide you down the right path.

So this is, so I've been in practice now. I started nutrition practice in 98. I studied nutrition in 1993. And I study the history of nutrition back in the 30s.

That was like the golden era of vitamin discoveries and mitochondrial function was being discovered back then. And those guys back then told us what to do to address chronic illness.

And basically, MDX Plus is it. It's what they said to to. I don't know, it's just the greatest blood test for humanity. You mentioned there's six key factors that this test is measuring.

Can you go into each one of those for us? Yeah, so simply put, We have Glyke A. This is not related to sugar. It's inflammation and infection. So Gleke, it's a combination of several markers, so it is called a multi-marker.

Okay. If Gleyke is too high, then I'm looking for organisms and I am looking at inflammation. Got it. Okay, the next one is called small atrial particle count.

Now, this is not your standard lipids like HDL, LDL total cholesterol. This is a different way of measuring and it's measuring HDLS, small HDls, and is measuring the number of them.

And if that's too low, that means a person is toxic and they need some detoxing. So I have a patient from a year ago. She's now 82. And you want that number to be like 19 and her score was 9. Then we retested like 6 months later and it was 11. Now it's 12. I'm just detoxing her.

It's taken a years and she's getting better. Her palpitations are gone and is going to take another year or so. Hopefully she'll get up to 15 and then 18. Okay, the next one is citrate.

Okay. And that has to do with mitochondrial function. So we all know we've heard about the Krebs cycle. It's also called the nitric acid cycle, so when you measure citrates, if it's too high or too low, it means you need to use some work for the mitochondria.

Using supplements and diet, that's what it takes to fix these things up. Okay, and then the next thing is a combination of three together. And these are called the branch chain amino acids.

Okay. So these aren't called these, are valine, leucine and isoleucin. These are proteins. If they're too high or too low. It means something about diet is something, about malnutrition.

So it could be that they're not eating enough protein, maybe they need too many carbohydrates. Maybe they are not getting enough B1 because that helps with digestion.

And maybe there's some organ dysfunction. The gallbladder could congested, the stomach's not making enough hydrochloric acid, those small tests are leaky.

So that those last three have a lot to do with digestion and utilization of nutrients and absorption. These are the six factors that give us our… And then we get three indices.

So the overall index is called the metabolic vulnerability index. Okay. And that's is a score one to a hundred. You want your score to be very low. That's how you can predict your five-year mortality.

I don't want anybody to get scared. If your scores too high, just bring it down. Then you've just proven that you're going to live longer, that your healthier.

The next index is the IVX, which stands for Inflammation Vulnerability Index. Okay. And that's a combination of the glycate and the smaller-shell particle count.

Then the last one is called the MMX which is Metabolic Malnutrition Index, Which is branched chain amino acids and citrate. So there's nine total readings with this task.

It's very simple, it's easy to read. Yeah. With the MMS, you know, I can see that people are eating junk food. I can see that they cheated during the holidays.

I see if they need a detox or if have a chronic organism hiding out in their body. It's an absolutely great test. Awesome and what an incredible at such a price point too is it makes it accessible for people to look at that information more often which I think is also very interesting and relevant especially as you're trying to play the game of aging well right and longevity.

What are your thoughts you know on the best way to approach that perspective when you are at a point with a patient and you really want Their goal is to make this health span as optimized as it can be.

What do you think are some of the key components and advice that you give people in that scenario? Well, based on what MDX Plus tells us to go after first, we go down that path.

And in my career, I created what I call the seven step blueprint to optimal health. This is a combination of a variety of people's philosophies on how to deal with chronic illness.

I borrowed heavily from Cellcore. So Dr. Todd Wodge created his five step roadmap to health, and I expanded on that. Nice. And I made it seven. I added diet. I added optimization.

We did different things. Optimization is the last step, but so it turns out that my seven-step blueprint totally correlates with the six factors of MVX.

So it's like a match made in heaven. It's all the truths, you know, and the clinical successes I've had in my career. have brought us to the seven steps, which I really laid out in 2018. And then in 2025, when this blood test came out, it's like, oh my gosh, that validates my whole career.

I wasn't delusional. You know, I saw real time improvements in my patients and I just documented it and just kept going down that. And now you have the data to support that and show that to a patient in an actual report.

Yeah. That's awesome. Good. I know that you and i have known each other for a long time and followed some of your information that, you've been looking at.

Lactic acidosis is a big topic. You've talked about B1 deficiency. Tell us a little bit more about where you are at with each of those, how you integrate them in your side of the way that you look at a patient and their life cycle of making health improvements.

Okay. So the lactic acidosis subject that is now, that was from the 1930s when that term came about. And all the doctors back then thought that lytic acidosis was.

You know, if you solve that, you're going to solve chronic illness, but it's a mechanism. It's not a cause. They didn't really understand that. Now we know it as mitochondrial dysfunction.

These are two different things that happen at the same time. So I don't know how much biochemistry you want to get into, but in the MVX plus blood test, the citrate is the measurement of mitochondrial function.

If that's off, then we have lactic acidosis slash mitochondria dysfunction. And regarding B1, B1 is needed for digestion improvement. So that'll correlate with the three branch chain amino acids.

B 1 is also responsible for five different biochemical reactions in the mitochondria. That's responsible citrate. Four of the six factors of MVX plus are directly related to B one status.

The one deficiency is endemic across our country. Doctors miss it because The blood test doesn't work very well. You can have a normal level of B1 in your blood, but you're deficient in B 1 in you nervous system, like in the brain.

Doctors will test B12. But they don't test B1. So it's not really even tested. And when they do, it is not even that worthwhile. I just had people take B-1 and I figured out B 1 because in May of 2024, I ended up in the ER with crushing chest pain.

As I was having strokes, my left arm was numb, left leg was numbed, couldn't breathe, high blood pressure. Turns out it was a gas leak. And I didn't, in my house, I did know I had a gas leak until December of 2024. So May to December.

And luckily I'm in this profession and I stumbled upon high dose B1 and they started taking it within one hour of my first dose. I was breathing easier.

Nice. Yep. And then within a week I was 90% better, even though I still had the gas leak. So I started researching that like, what is this? What's happening?

And I've put hundreds of people on it since then, and it has been the single greatest nutrient I have ever worked with in my whole career. Nice. The fat soluble version of B1 that I like is called Benfotiamine.

There's three others, but the other one that is like it's called TTFD. Those have been phenomenal. Got it. And you mentioned mitochondrial dysfunction.

Certainly, I'm in full agreement of that. I think it also begs the question of, what is it do we think that is actually causing mitochondria dysfunction?

Because I know both you and I kind of come from the philosophical agreement that body is smart. It knows how to heal, it knows to find homeostasis and balance.

But what do you see as one of the main factors or some of factors that are the biggest impacts to mitochondrial dysfunction in the body? So what happens is that the the is toxic.

of stuff, which I'll get into, and then also deficient of nutrients. So the mitochondria needs 22 nutrients and I think B1 is the most important one, but sulfur, iron, manganese, carbon, of course, hydrogen, oxygen, But these nutrients are from, you know, bitter foods and meat and like root vegetables and stuff.

These are not nutrients that you find in junk food. So our diets are terrible with junk foods. Okay. Now, what are the toxins? Okay, besides junk Well, hold on, stay there for a second because I think that's an important point that you brought up.

So certainly dietary changes. The first thing to look at is obviously, see, are you eating too much junk food? Are you being too highly processed food, but I want to stay here for just a sec.

And I this is a distinguished point we need to really go through for people because you're talking about supplementation. But supplementation, there's a difference, right?

We know there is a different in uptake when it comes to synthetic sources of supplements versus whole foods. So stay there for just a second, Darren. Expand on how you've seen that play out in your practice over the years.

Well, okay. When, okay, what I've seen is that patients who, first of all, step one of the seven steps is diet. And then step two is mitochondrial function.

So these are early in the care program of a patient. It is so obvious when somebody has a really good diet, their ability to heal is better and they're just going to be doing better overall.

Yeah. Right. And then the other aspect of this is that some people have a really good diet for decades, but yet they have toxins in their body. For example, they fly on planes all the time and they breathe in jet fuel.

That's an example. And then they're really sick, so then we have to detox them, right? Other people have just had a bad diet, but they, they are not filled with toxins.

They're not full with parasites or mold. So you fix your diet up and then in three months they were like doing really, really well. That's what, that's, what matters.

Right now I know that the average adult's diet is 52% junk food. The average kid's is over 70% of junk foods. So we have RFK Jr. now trying to clean up the food supply.

And there's things that are happening. I'm very happy with the changes so far. There's a lot more work to be done. Yeah. We're all on board with that.

Even though there are some social media MDs who hate RFJr. and everything that he does. Every single person deep down inside is very happy that our food supply would be cleaned up.

Right. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Are you tied to treatments, protocols, and gurus who promise results but don't deliver? You're not alone.

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I also think that it's important to make the distinguishing factor of some of those things like you're talking about, you know, sulfur. Well, certainly you get some sulfur from, food, obviously, but you also oftentimes need to supplement with particularly the most bioavailable supplementation is through whole food supplements too.

And sometimes when we say whole-food, people tend to think about what's on their plate. But, you know, as well as I do that oftentimes the source of meat, for example, or from the animal, the nutrition from animal is usually coming in the form of muscle.

Whereas, oftentimes the things that are most important for us in our nutritional value and overcoming that deficiency is going to be in some of the thing we don't want to put on our plate.

Fair enough? Yeah, for sure. Yeah it's good. So let me expand a little bit on the seven steps then. We covered step one, which is diet. Step two, mitochondrial function.

And then step three is preparing the body for detoxification. Making sure that the liver, kidneys, colon are working well. Those are primarily herbs. And step four is cleaning out the gut.

Step five is, cleaning the organism from head to toe. step six is detoxification of metals and chemicals. and step seven is the inside of the cells. And then step zero, or step O, so we did seven steps, and then O is optimization.

Nice. And that's where the glandulars come in really well because now we're feeding specific organs, nutrients that they really need. Again, step O can be done at any point in the seven steps.

The whole food supplements. I'm talking about supplements, right? So whole foods supplements can done anywhere on the seventh step. At the basis of the 7 steps, the middle is cleansing organisms and toxins.

Yeah. Then nourishing on both ends. Nice. Nice, great. That's great, yeah. And so, back to the conversation we're having about mitochondrial dysfunction and talking about some of these things, how does that 7-SIP overlay addressing mitochondria efficiencies in bodies?

Okay, good, yes. So, 40% of Americans live or work in a moldy building. So mold depletes B1 and mold and mycotoxins can get inside the mitochondria and just be toxic.

So there's mitochondrial dysfunction from mold. Parasites can deplete B-1, parasites can live in the cells, so like Babesia, for example. And then candida can even be inside the mitochondria, right?

So in chemicals, metals, they're in the, so toxicity in a mitochondrial causes dysfunction there. And the lack of nutrients in mitochondrion causes disfunction there, Yeah.

How does that play out too? Do you think Darren, in terms of the next generation, how would you say that somebody that procreates with somebody else that has these kinds of dysfunctions, what does it look like for the offspring do you thing?

Yeah, another good question. So now I want to bring up genetics. We can have genetic in capabilities for transportation, storage, and metabolism of B1.

And then we have the same in-capabilities related to detoxification or using other nutrients. Then we just live on a very toxic planet. It's so sad. In Hawaii, in some hospital, they've been testing the placentas of newborns Looking for plastic and like in 2019, it was in 60% of the placentas and now it's 100% Of the percent has had plastic.

We know that people have plastic in their lungs. It's in there. Placking in the arteries. That's an Alzheimer's brains. And there's actually now saliva testing for this.

There's only one lab in the world that does saliva-testing for plastic particles, and they're actually based out of Michigan. And then there is a solution for that too, there a supplement that gets rid of that.

Yeah, and we're seeing, too, clinically, that a lot of these toxins that you're talking about, especially heavy metals, plastics, are stored deeply in the nervous system, because plastics came in, obviously, probably mostly through oral consumption, but some of the heavy metal came through injections.

And so we're seeing that they're stored a little differently a bit more deeply into the body especially when the exposure comes at such an early stage of life being stored in the fat particularly the brain nervous system neural tissue and so you almost have got this like.

you know, encased toxicity level to where, you're saying you got to start with the surface, the blood, right? And tissue detox. And certainly we've got great products and tools to see those levels of toxins, but the conversation and the oxidation doesn't go down until you actually get to the point of where you facilitated a process where the body can open up the encapsulated toxins.

And that is something that we've seen in terms of lab testing to oxidative stress. The use of even, you know, antioxidant therapy is almost silly to an extent until we get to that level with the body, because there's this continuing factor of being leached into the bloodstream that you can, it's hard to get over until you really address it at that You know, even how, because we should probably talk to, you talked about mitochondria, but just oxidation, cell oxidation and being able to measure that is an output to another factor of looking at toxicity levels.

What have you seen clinically and how does the MPX cover that aspect too? So MVX plus does not measure oxidation, but it does measure toxicity and infections and inflammation.

So it's, you know, related for sure. Yeah. But I think I see there's a recent lecture named Dr. Thomas Levy, L-E-V-Y. He's absolutely amazing cardiologist.

But he talks about oxidation or accidents as the cause of disease, as he only cause a disease. And the truth is, yeah. So then what? Then you just take vitamin C as an antioxidant.

That's his solution is IV vitamin c. But you got to get the toxins out. I mean, what causes oxidation? It's toxins, it's mucus from organisms, that's ammonia from organism, is plastic, its chemicals.

Yeah. What you're saying about, I want to bring this up. There was a study done. You know, NHANES, the National Nutrition Survey. So as a subset study, they had the blood tests and urine samples of thousands of people.

They looked for toxicity and they found that like lead, for example, is in like 98% of Americans. There's a few that are just, everybody has it. And then they tested 42 different toxins, metals and chemicals.

And plastic was not one of them because this is a few years ago. Okay. And they found of the 42 there are six that create the most burden on the people.

Right. So then they looked at of what were those six. Uh, there were categories, I don't have it memorized, but I think four of them were chemicals and three, you know, one was definitely metals.

I remember three of the six were fat soluble, so they're going to go straight to your nervous system, straight into your brain and stuff. So of those six then, when you compile them together and you look at what people are burdened with, the people that were most burden, like the worst 40% had all the chronic disease.

So she had the most amount of those six toxins. You had, you had that chronic diseases. The other 60% were actually doing quite well. Okay. So like these six, which are the.

Burden some create the chronic. And what is a chronic disease? It's Alzheimer's, diabetes, right? Heart disease on and on. That's you know, so it's toxic again.

Did they classify cancer as a part of that? Chronic disease. Yeah, well, they did like a wellness index. So yeah, if you had some diagnosed disease, then that would be not wellness.

Yeah. Got it. What kind of feedback have you seen with the use of this test inside of practices? What have been hearing from other clinicians who are using this particular test to measure, it sounds like, get an idea of toxic burden, of stealth pathogen burden but also from a standpoint of longevity?

Well, it makes life easier. Yeah. So you present this to people, they run it. You know exactly what to do next. And you and I both do muscle testing. That's very, very helpful.

But a lot of practitioners don't do biofeedback or muscle-testing and they're relying solely on labs and history. This lab is like, It'll tell you where to go.

It's so cheap. then it'll point you in the right direction. Now go take this other lab, which might be $400 or $700. You're not doing initially all the very expensive labs at the beginning, like $4,000 at beginning.

And I have patients that they can afford the three, $400 lab tests. So we just keep doing MVX Plus and we see the results there in that test. Nice. The ones that want to spend the money, you know, or I think it's super valuable to track results, we'll do the more expensive tests, but at least we're guided.

You know we are so guided by this lab. Yeah. And then I will say that too, we make lab testing in our practice optional for people. We get a lot of people that have spent thousands of dollars on their lab tests.

Unfortunately, I think sometimes too and let's make this distinction for It's sort of like put a lot of credence in terms of the testing itself almost as if they know you know from the test something about what's going on their body they have the resolution or the treatment and really the tests thing is important to make this clear is that testing is really about giving you information about your body it's not the treatments.

And you and I know that specifically because we're able to, with our skill sets, drill down and customize these healing programs for people at a very individualized level.

But we can't rely on just the test itself to give us that sequence, that cadence, order of operations, which is what really people need to overcome the information they're seeing on these tests and to get that health outcome.

Yeah. Anything else, Jaren, that you think is important for us to, in conclusion, wrap up about this? And then we always end each of these episodes with just a better question for the audience to ask themselves about their health, maybe about they're testing.

What would you say comes to mind when I ask you, you know, what is it that is a question that everyone should be asking themselves, about there health?

Yeah, the better question is, what do I need to improve my health? Which is different than our standard healthcare system now where people come to a practitioner with a complaint and that relationship is now, how do we get rid of that complaint?

Squashing it, right? Anti-depressant, antibacterial, anti whatever. The point is improve your health so that these chronic conditions go away. Of course, you know, antibiotics are necessary for acute situations, of course.

Nobody's going to argue that. But in the long term, over the course of a year, two, three years, you have to improve your health and then you live longer, your healthier, Your medical bills go way down.

And so it's a whole new viewpoint. Your vitality way up, right? Your health stands. Yeah, vitalities up. Improve your house so that diseases and symptoms go away.

If I tell you it comes up your longevity comes out. It's two different industries. The acute care medical model with pharmaceuticals. versus the chronic health improvement industry with diet and supplements.

Two different industries, two different types of practitioners. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and your knowledge with us today, Darren.

I appreciate you coming on. We'll look at having you again in the future. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for tuning into The Resiliency Method, the truth about healing podcasts.

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