Reed Davis

Health Assessment and Improvement with Functional Nutrition

Aired On: April 24, 2026

Show Notes

Reed Davis has developed a wellness paradigm where he defines key laboratory tests to measure health status.  He then has a program to move the person towards optimal wellness.  He has a training program through which the students can become health coaches.    The laboratory tests he uses include:

  • Stress and hormone profile
    • This saliva test  assesses  cortisol levels and provides information on immune system
  • Metabolic wellness profile
    • This is a dried urine test which addresses digestion, detoxification (via liver) and oxidative stress.  This looks at cell and tissue damage that builds up  with metabolic dysfunction
  • Gut  intestinal permeability which includes diamine oxide the enzyme that breaks down histamine (dried blood spot)
  • GI map stool test
  • Mediator Release test for food sensitivity
  • Metabolic typing questionnaire

BIO

Reed Davis, Double-Board Certified Holistic Health Practitioner (HHP) and Doctor of Nutritional Therapy (DNT), is a globally recognized expert in functional lab testing and holistic lifestyle medicine.

As the visionary founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® (FDN), Reed pioneered the FDN Certification Course, which has empowered over 5,000 practitioners across 50 countries to take charge of their clients’ health.

Reed noticed that most patients had already seen multiple doctors and therapists and still had many of their original complaints. Reed decided then he would be the last practitioner anyone needed to see and became an expert in functional lab assessments. FDN is the result of more research and experience than most practitioners get in a lifetime.

While working with top leaders in alternative medicine, he ran thousands of labs on thousands of people and learned to identify “healing opportunities.” Using all-natural, drug-free protocols, Reed made observations about who got better and who didn’t, codifying which “general principles of health building” would outperform “specific treatments” being provided by standard and even alternative medicine. And through this work, he then developed the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Certification

Reed Davis is one of the authors of four books including “The Needs Gap”: A Simple Guide to Manage Autoimmune Disease and Chronic Pain. This book fills the gap between standard medicine approaches and alternative strategies for resolving chronic conditions as well as some great recipes.

His website is www.functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com

Reed Davis

Functional Diagnostic Nutrition

  • Allopathic medicine focuses on decreasing symptoms
  • To look at underlying contributions such as viruses, infections, toxins, heavy metals
  • having normal lab values means we fall in the range of 95 % of a very sick population
  • Some clinicians have looked at patterns within laboratory values such as functionaldx in the UK and Dr. Robert Thompson with his mineral hair analysis
  • Reed decided that he wanted to be the last clinician that patients saw
  • The majority of his patients have multiple problems including excess weight, fatigue, hypothyroidism, irritable bowel

His approach

  • We can live ourselves out of most of the problems we lived ourselves into
  • Functional Diagnostic Nutrition is a natural investagtive system that gives people control over their own health and life
  • He seeks causal factors and healing opportunities
  • He looks for major dysfunctions and gives recommendations on reversing the condition
  • He looks at nervous system, hormones, digestion, energy production, detoxification
  • He looks at the nervous system first
  • His acronym H-I-D-D-E-N
    • Hormone
    • Immune
    • Detoxification
    • Digestion
    • Energy production
    • Can add oxidative stress
  • He looks at chronic degenerating (“spiralling”) which he always calls stress related
  • He has examined patterns in thousands of labs
  • He has taught over 5000 practitioners
    • Health coaching is one of the fastest growing professions

Labs he looks at

  • Stress and Hormone panel
    • Show what happened to person because of his unique stressors and his body’s ability to handle these stressors
    • Saliva (shows real time bioavailable levels
    • Show unique situation on
      • Shows overall adaptive reserve
      • Show circadian rhythm
      • Catabolic vs anabolic function
        • Eg cortisol/DHEA indicates catabolic /anabolic balance
          • Catabolic means breaking down. Anabolic means building up
        • N.b. Dale Bredesen included this as one form of Alzheimer’s Disease/ cognitive decline
      • Shows sex hormones and melatonin –
      • Can see insulin levels
      • Shows secretory IgA a measure of the immune system
        • If this is high, an acute infection is likely
        • High cortisol levels can decrease this marker and weaken the immune system
  • Urine testing
    • Looks at digestive and gut markers, oxidative stress 8OHdg
      • 8OHdg is a good marker for oxidative stress inside the cell
      • This will impari mitochondrial function
    • Urinary bile acids direct measurement of liver function and detoxification
    • Is a mucosal barrier assessment
  • Finger sticks
    • Lipo polysaccharides (LPS) measures oxidative stress of the cellular membrane
    • Zonulin
    • Histamine
    • DAO (an enzyme that breaks down histamine
    • Is a mucosal barrier assessment
  • Stool test for the microbiome looking for viruses, bacteria, fungi
    • These pathogens occur when the immunity is poor, the gut hs dysbiosis or possibly a leaky gut
      • These lead to an overgrowth, biofilms
  • Blood draw for food sensitivities for 176 different foods
    •  Mediator release test – is cell mediated and tests for foods even that were not eaten
    • The number of sensitivities increases with an impaired gut
      • These are causing inflammation
      • Will not heal unless these food sensitivities are addressed

Patterns: following stress

  • Body responds to chemical stress: Cortisol increase
    • People develop symptoms, feel miserable increasing catabolic/ anabolic imbalance
    • Stress increases blood sugar and can lead toinsulin resistance
  • Sex hormones “go out of balance next
  • Then the immunity weakens
  • Digestion imbalances
    • High indican indicates they ran out breaking down protein showing there is not sufficient bacteria to break it down leading to dysbiosis.
      • Doctors ran this test fifty years ago
      • At this point it is an imbalance, not a disease yet,
  • The last step is the nervous system becomes sympathetic dominant
  • Low thyroid can occur because the body wants to hibernate to conserve resources

Acronym for life health interventions

  • D-R-E-S-S
    • Diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplementation
    • Supplementation is essential because our food and soil are not good enough any longer

Thyroid Issues

  • From his point of view, thyroid is secondary unless there is a strong autoimmune condition
    • Autoimmune causes elevated TPO and thyroglobulin
  • When  addressing the elements of his protocol, the thyroid might balance
  • The signals from the hypothalamus pituitary to the thyroid gland might be improved
  • If thyroid issues caused by other signals going to the thyroid and what happens after making T4
  • For converting T4 to T3, need healthy liver,
    • Need selenium, tyrosine, iodine
    • 25 % of the conversion to T3 occurs in the gut