Episode 288- Organic Acids Test Explained: Gut Bacteria, Yeast & Brain Health with William Shaw, PhD

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[01:24] DEB: What if a simple urine test could reveal hidden clues about gut health, nutritional deficiencies, mitochondrial function, and even factors contributing to neurodevelopment changes. Today, we're speaking with William Shaw, PhD, a pioneering biochemist whose research has helped shape the field of functional laboratory testing. We'll explore autism research, the organic acid test, and why understanding metabolism may be one of the most important keys to personalized health care.

[01:55] DEB (Book promo): What if your body wasn't betraying you? It was trying to get your attention? We've been trained to silence symptoms. Numb them, shrink them, hide them. But symptoms are not enemies. They're messengers. They're the language of your biology saying, "Look deeper." Every woman I've treated who's been told to accept normal labs but still feels unwell, she's living proof that our system doesn't define health. Your body does. Seen at Last is about learning to translate your body's signals into truth and action, not just suppression.

[02:30] DEB: Welcome back to Let's Talk Wellness Now. I'm Dr. Deb and today's conversation explores the fascinating intersection of biochemistry, functional medicine, and personalized health. Our guest is William Shaw, PhD, biochemist, researcher, author, and the founder of the Great Plains Laboratory, now known as Mosaic Diagnostics. For more than three decades, Dr. Shaw has researched metabolic disorders, autism, gut microbiome imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, and environmental toxicology. His work helped popularize the organic acids test known as OAT, a laboratory assessment used by many functional and integrative medicine practitioners worldwide. So, as normal, grab your cup of tea, coffee, or whatever helps you unwind and settle in to another amazing episode. Welcome back to Let's Talk Wellness Now. I have the pleasure of having Dr. William Shaw, PhD with me today. And I'm excited for this conversation. We were just chatting before we went live and we've got some great topics for you. But I want to first start by hearing his story about what got him interested in this type of medicine. So you've been a biochemist for quite a while. Tell us your story.

[03:56] WILLIAM: So the story was I was doing research at the Centers for Disease Control to try to find out about a really abnormal thing, which was: all the thyroid testing in the whole world gave falsely elevated values. And so I was given the mission of finding out why. It was bizarre. At the CDC, I was given the direction to find out this was why all the thyroid testing in the whole world gave falsely elevated values, so that nobody got the correct thyroid value, no matter where they were in the world. They were getting erroneous values. And the strange thing is if you put purified thyroid hormone and you stored it, it would go down with time, but if you put serum and then measure the thyroid, it increased with time. So there was the blood was giving high values whereas purified thyroid hormone declined. So there was something about the serum that was making the values go up. And so I found the cause was fatty acids, fatty acids that were not attached to glycerol or some other things. So in other words, free fatty acids, not fatty acids that were part of triglycerides. They were okay, but fatty acids that were separated, if you added them to serum, it made the values go up. And so I wanted to find out what the mechanism of that was. And it was that the free fatty acids denatured all the proteins in the body. And the protein that measured thyroid hormone was also being denatured. So the way it worked, that made high values occur. So that was a major thing. And of course, this was before the internet. So nobody in the world knew about this, except the people who read my scientific paper, you know? But so everybody, probably for a period, maybe of five years, everyone who did thyroid hormone tests got a falsely elevated value. And this finding put an end to that. And so shortly thereafter, a new neighbor moved in next to me and I went over to the neighbor to introduce myself, and the woman — she and her husband were mid-20s, and she said, "I've been meaning to come over, but my husband is extremely sick. He has juvenile diabetes. And he has extreme kidney failure." And the physician has told him, "If he doesn't get a transplant, he's going to die soon." And so what I thought about was the same phenomenon was going on in her husband. So her husband had juvenile diabetes so he had no insulin and his kidney function is measured by something called creatinine clearance, which is a measure of the filtration ability of the kidneys. So a normal value, a good value is about 120. His value was 0.5. So it was less than 1% of the normal. And he was already on dialysis. He was far down on the transplant list, so it was in effect a death sentence. And I said, I think I know something that might help. And I said you could take high doses of niacin. So niacin has no effect on glucose. So almost every medical practitioner in the world, if you ask them what does insulin do? They'll say it helps to control glucose. Probably less than 1% of them will know it also helps to decrease free fatty acids. But that was my focus of my research, so I knew that. And I said, if you take high doses of niacin, it won't do anything for your husband's glucose, but it'll dramatically decrease his free fatty acids which is probably the thing that's destroying his kidneys. So I told her to give him 500 milligrams three or four times a day. And so this was the first time I'd ever recommended any treatment for any patient. And then I didn't hear anything from her. So I thought either her husband had died or that was the most likely scenario, but I thought maybe she would have come over and told me about it, but she didn't. And so I got extremely agitated wanting to know what happened. And so after about three weeks, I couldn't stand the suspense anymore. And so I slowly started walking up to the front door. And I knew if I saw her crying or something, I would know that he didn't make it. But when she opened the door, she had a big smile on her face. So she said, "I was meaning to come over and tell you, but I've just been so busy, but my husband's completely recovered. So, he recovered so much, his kidney function went completely back to normal, and his kidney doctor told him he didn't, he was taking him off the kidney transplant list because the kidneys were completely functional now." So I felt like a baseball player who has never been in a game before and they put him in the World Series with three men on base and they put him up. He's never swung a bat before and he hits a home run. That was what, so I thought, "Gee, I'm pretty good at knowing how nutritional therapy can be extremely helpful for some people." And I still think that's something that almost no physicians know about, and fatty acids are at high levels are one of the most toxic things there are, that almost nobody pays attention to. And that's one of the things that niacin is very good at doing. It does nothing for, won't affect blood sugar at all, but it has a profound effect on reducing toxic fatty acids.

[10:34] DEB: Wow. So you've spent some decades studying complex chronic conditions. What led you to focus specifically on autism and metabolic abnormalities.

[10:45] WILLIAM: Well. So I guess partly it was that experience I had previously. And what happened was I was working at the Children's Hospital in Kansas City and a colleague of mine had a test for organic acids at the medical school that was across the border just a few miles away. He was a pediatric neurologist and he had a family come to him. It was a mother and two children, and both of the children had severe autism. But they also had other abnormalities as well. They had kidney problems and they also had muscle weakness, extreme muscle weakness that even though they were three or four years old, sometimes they would get out of bed and their legs would just collapse underneath them. And they had been tested at almost every medical center in the United States. Their medical record was about this high. There was... They'd been tested at Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic and nobody could find what was causing it. I was originally focused on the severe muscle weakness and actually I didn't find out until later that they also had the severe autism. And so Dr. [Chavez] at the KU Medical Center had a mass spectrometer, but it was an old model and he knew I had a new, fancy, up-to-date model for the time. And so he said, "...