Chris Morrell says, "Chris, in the absence of any other notable abnormalities in a metabolic
panel with a high BUN, blood urea nitrogen, that's slightly out of range," I'm going to
stop you here.
I'm going to say you're eating about a gram of protein per kilogram body weight or somewhere
around there.
Now, I'll read on the rest of your question and see if I'm right.
"Would this usually indicate low stomach acid?"
That's a fascinating idea that is very puzzling to me.
I doubt it, but I'll keep reading on.
"I worked with a functional practitioner for anxiety and lifelong seasonal and food allergies
a couple years ago who did a similar panel, same high BUN.
Her main approach was treating low stomach acid with HCl and including supplements for
B1, B2, B6, B12.
The general idea was my body is starving itself because of my inability to retain nutrients
with low HCl.
More context.
I'm considering a Heidelberg stomach acid test here in LA for about $375 to foolproof
this.
Perhaps a result of being both vegetarian and vegan for much of my 20s could have contributed
to a decline in stomach acid.
I'm thin but also moderately muscular, 6 feet, 150 pounds.
It's always been very difficult to gain weight."
I get the Heidelberg test.
That's the only accurate way to assess stomach acid.
If you want to do something else, it would be better to use the kitchen techniques, like
take half a teaspoon of baking soda and see how long you take to burp, or take HCl with
your meal and keep adding capsules and see how many capsules you can take without reflux.
That's probably both more accurate than using BUN.
Chris clarifies he probably eats 90 to 100 grams of protein a day.
First of all, in my experience, everyone who is physically active and eats a decent amount
of protein has a BUN that's toward the top of the range or slightly above it.
So, there's that.
Remember, the BUN range is the mean.
I'm pretty sure this is true.
It's the mean plus/minus two standard deviations, and so if you're an athlete and you're eating
a lot of protein, even if you're not eating a tremendous amount of protein, but you're
very active.
What do you do when you're very active?
You burn through more protein.
What do you do when you burn through protein?
You make urea.
I find it almost certainly the case that a slightly high BUN would never be a useful
marker of low stomach acid and would never be a good marker of poor protein digestion.
If you want to know if you have poor protein digestion, measure the protein in your stool.
Get a GI stool test that looks at what you're not absorbing.
That's how you test that.
The reason that this sounds nuts to me is maybe you are allowing the protein to ferment
in your gut and generate urea from the microbes that you're absorbing, like maybe.
But where does most of the urea come from that's in your blood?
It comes from the urea cycle, which is how you get rid of ammonia.
How do you get ammonia in your body that goes into the urea cycle?
You digest protein into amino acids, you absorb the amino acids, and then you break them down
so that you can either burn them for energy or turn them into glucose or turn them into
certain neurotransmitters or whatever, and then you lose ammonia that you put into the
urea cycle.
Why wouldn't the urea be a marker of having good digestion?
I'm not even sure that we could say it could be an equally useful test of good digestion
and bad digestion of protein.
I don't know if it's as good a marker of bad digestion of protein as it is of good digestion
of protein.
But even if it were just as good a marker of bad digestion of protein as it is of good
digestion of protein, something that's an equally good marker of two opposites is not
a good marker of anything.
I hope that helps to answer your question, Chris.