https://learntruehealth.com/FDN

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Functional Lab Testing And Holistic Lifestyle Medicine

https://www.learntruehealth.com/functional-lab-testing-and-holistic-lifestyle-medicine

Highlights:

• What is functional diagnostic nutrition?
• Getting information, identifying the key phrase and healing opportunities
• Focus on is underlying causes and conditions
• Catabolic and anabolic stress and how you can do lab testing to find out if you have it
• HIDDEN stressors and dysfunctions in the body
• Running lab tests to discover healing opportunities
• Investigating and looking at these critical markers for balance in your body
• looking for the hidden contributors to metabolic chaos and to the degree that the root causes are discoverable to work on it 

They say “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” but we all know that it’s not just an apple that we have to get in order to have a healthy body. Diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and supplements can play a big role too. Listen to today’s podcast and listen to what Reed Davis has to say about things that you should know about to help you to optimize your health and your way to functional nutrition.

[0:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. I’m very excited for you to hear our interview today with Reed Davis, the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition.  A few months ago, I interviewed one of his graduates who practice as a health coach with this unique ability to do functional lab testing and then help their clients to find those healing opportunities that the labs present. It’s a different philosophy. A different lens that these health coaches look through to see how they can best serve their clients to finally resolve the metabolic chaos that’s been going on. We often treat symptoms and our medical system even someone has a thyroid condition for example and they think that that’s the root cause and so they’re treating the thyroid but thyroid dysfunction covers from something else. What causes the thyroid to have a dysfunction? And there are dozens of root causes. Functional Diagnostic Nutrition looks to solve that. Today we’re going to dive into what is Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and how can it help you to achieve the best health possible. Those who are already health coaches or in the holistic health field you’re going to love learning about Reed’s program. He has a wonderful online certification program where he teaches you how to do these labs. How to interpret them and how to then help the clients to get the results we’re looking for through lifestyle, diet and when needed, supplementation. If you’re not in the holistic health space and you’re not interested in making a career in helping people like becoming a health coach, you will still enjoy today’s interview because he does teach a lot of wonderful things. He’s told me that some people even take his course just to learn these tools for themselves which I thought was very valuable. After interviewing him, I enrolled in his program and I jumped in and I’m already in module two and I’m loving it. I’m absolutely loving it. I’m learning so much. What I really like about his program is it’s all “rubber hits the road.” There’s no fluff. You jump straight in and you begin learning. I’ve been studying with Naturopaths and doctors and reading tons of books and going to health lectures and obviously doing 300 interviews with doctors and in my first few days of being in his course I have learned stuff I have never heard off before. It’s really exciting. If you’re a health coach I hugely recommend checking out his course because as you know I’m a health coach, I’ve been doing this for several years. I’ve always felt that there’s a piece missing. This piece of looking at things objectively through the lens of proper labs. Reed talks about this today in the show. You’re going to really like the kinds of labs that he does. It’s not the kind of labs that you’re ever used to going to your doctor. These are totally different and it allows us to see where the metabolic chaos is. In some cases, actually, let us find the root cause but regardless of whether we find the root cause or not, they will allow us to see what we need to see in order to make the appropriate changes to support the body in coming back into balance. That’s very exciting. Enjoy today’s interview and please, check out the link. Learntruehealth.com/FDN.  As in Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. That’s Learntruehealth.com/FDN. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview.

[04:01] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 376. I’m very excited for today’s guest, we have with us, Reed Davis. He’s the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. An amazing company that helps people to become certified in functional nutrition. I definitely want to dive into that because we have a lot of health coaches that listen and this is a wonderful adjunct to those who are in the holistic health space or for people who want to get into the holistic health space, it’s a wonderful course that they can take. For those who aren’t, who just want to get their own health back and that’s why they’re listening. This episode is also perfect for you because we’re going to be talking about lab testing and the things that you should know about to help you to optimize your health. The things that going to a mainstream medical doctor, practitioner they just wouldn’t know to provide you and so Reed’s going to enlighten us today. Reed, welcome to the show.

[05:09] Reed Davis: Welcome. Thanks so much for having me here Ashley. It’s a real pleasure. Looking forward to trying to help some people.

[05:16] Ashley James:  Before we get started, you were telling me a bit about where you live which is a paradise up in the mountains. You’re living off a grid and you’re using a satellite phone. So far the connection’s been wonderful and every time we hear a little bit of a delay on the line we’ll just remember that you’re living in absolute paradise on a lake in the mountains. Totally off the grid and we so appreciate that you’re taking the time to educate us today.

[05:45] Reed Davis: Thanks again. I’m happy to answer anything I can. Tell you the history. It’s about helping people and trying to walk the talk. I’m here for you and your pleasure.

[05:57] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’d love to start by hearing your story. You are a certified nutritional therapist. You’re a holistic health practitioner. You founded this wonderful company that helps people to learn how they can do these lab tests for themselves and for their clients. Then what to do once they have the lab results, which I think the most important thing about. Right? It’s good to have the lab testing but then what do we do? Okay, so now I see that my liver enzymes are high but what do we do? You have wonderful course that helps people to learn functional nutrition. How did you start? What happened in your life that lead you to want to do this?

[06:41] Reed Davis: Yes. Thanks so much. It’s an amazing course in lab work and natural protocols to fix what you find. But it was a long time coming. Back in the 90s, I was doing environmental law. I came out of a law program at the University of San Diego. Went right to work saving the planet, birds, bees, air, water, trees. What can we do to clean up the planet and it’s very rewarding work. Frankly, I made millions of dollars for the owners but not for myself. As I increase therapist, my income didn’t grow up that much and southern California’s a very expensive place to live. So I was looking around for a way where I could be my own boss, work for myself but also continue the work. I turned my attention from saving the planet to people like what’s this environment if it’s killing off the bird and bees and air and water and trees and things. What’s it doing to people including myself? What’s it doing to me? I’m getting older too right? Back then I was probably in my 40s but I was again working hard and I went to work, changed jobs. I went to work at a clinic. It’s a wellness clinic or a wellness center in Southern California in San Diego area. It’s beautiful. People were lovely. I was really hired to run the business and help expand the business. But the owner who was a chiropractor. She allowed me to go with her kind of as an assistant. She was getting a diploma in nutrition for her chiropractic work. And said, “Hey, you can come along and you can get certified too.” Not a physician but I did that. This was remarkable, Ashley. You’ll love this. She let me work in her patients in between classes. I’d go into a lesson. Let’s say in detoxification come back and I had access to her patients to talk to them about their health and find out what’s going on and see if I can help them with this training that I was getting. I’ve had many other trainings since was you mentioned. Kind of been a certificate collector of sorts. I think everyone listening probably will see this in a way a learn freak. Just never satisfied with what you know. I know there’s a deeper layer. There’s something else I can learn. I was like that too but also, in the clinic, this is remarkable. Again, I had the ability to help clients and I fell in love with that side of it. I turn my attention instead of just running the clinic and helping to grow and things like that but I still had to do that but I fell in love with the clinical side that means working face to face with people. One of the things I noticed right away was that almost everybody walking to the door for their pain or whatever it was, they had multiple complaints and they’ve been to multiple practitioners trying to get some resolution or solutions to their problem. Some of them 10 doctors already. That just blew my mind. Even though I was neophyte that was 20 years ago, I said to myself and to them even ”Look, I’m going to be the last person you need to see. We’re going to figure this out.” I’ve been very good that the legal research and writing and I could understand fairly complex things and try to make it easy for people. That was another part of my job at that time we’ll just call it patient educator. I got to look at very complex things break it down and try to explain it people so that they could go out and do the things that took to get well.

I could just again, very fortunate with the stars lined up or whatever you want to put it. I met doctors who are running alternative lab work. Back then, 20 years ago, there was just standard medicine and alternative also known as quackery. Some of these doctors, I’ve learned from were not very low respected at that time. They were pioneering doing really important work especially with some of the labs that were coming out. The saliva testing, the urine testing, the stool testing. Things I would say above and beyond normal blood chemistry. Some of these people come in and they’re really sick. They just feel lousy all that time. Things about the way they look and the way they feel that they’re not happy with. Their physicians were saying, “Your bloodwork looks normal. Everything looks fine. You’re just getting old.” Or you’ve heard that before, right?

[11:28] Ashley James: Right. We’ll definitely get into this. Like what is normal? because they’re waiting until you’re in a disease state so they can give you a drug. If you’re unhealthy but you’re not yet sick enough not to be put on a drug to manage the disease, then they’re going to tell you that you’re fine. That’s if you go to a mainstream medical doctor.

[11:54] Reed Davis: Right. You’re considered by them to be sub-clinical. You haven’t reached that point where your bloodwork looks so out of whack that they can diagnose you. This is another the beauty of our work. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, Ashley. There is no medical diagnosis or treatment for that specific thing. Just for feeling lousy and you’re overweight and you’re tired or maybe there’s stuff going on with your sinuses, allergies, moodiness, irritability, digestive problem and all these things but you’re not at that point where you need to be referred to a gastroenterologist there’s something in a way standard measure. Back to the story, I’m seeing people in the office now, I started going into the public and recruiting. I bought a bone density testing machine. I started doing that two days a week. Clinic was open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and I work very hard. I do 12-14 hours a day easily or to a lot of weekends. A couple of days a week. I would go out and for 5 years, I’m going to go twice a week to these grocery stores. Some small chain about 30 stores. I would just go from one to the next, test people for their bone density and this is mostly women between I’d say 40 and 60 because that’s who gets checked and they’re getting early checks. I’d get certified in that part to use that machine kind of radiology limited tech certificate and I was doing this testing and then I was helping those women with that problem like they had low bone density and I got into the hormones and the immune systems and digest and detoxification. I learned how to run the labs. Again, I was very fortunate to be working with some physicians who let me run labs under their license as their protégé is you will. Actually as their alter ego because their licensure restricted them from what they could do let’s say for a person. This is still happening today that it- yes, you’re laughing but even just last week I was [Inaudible 13:58] I was at Medfit tour at the Washington athletic club in Seattle. I was speaking to a group up there about a hundred personal trainers and some physicians and one physician said, “I feel like my medical license are handcuffs. I’m just about ready to give up my license because I want to do what’s really right for people.” 20 years ago, it was worse. Doctors were just tied up to these model of diagnose-treat-diagnose-treat. Very small specific thing. It’s almost always it’s writing a prescription. I was actually like an alter ego.

I got to say to these people anything. Forget the diagnosis, what’s really wrong. Again the saliva testing, urine testing, stool testing, looking at hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and autonomic balance. The sympathetic para-sympathetic. I ran thousands of those labs on thousands of people. Mostly women because that seem most interested but then when we got some good results and actually some miracle cases early on. Just unbelievable things happened that told me I was on the right track. Then they would refer, they bring in their husbands, they bring in their kids. If you want I could tell you a quick story about an early case that gave me tremendous faith and hope and belief in what I was doing. A lady comes into the chiropractic office and you know, I would walk the patients back to the treatment room. I was also trained, took a course in Myo-fascia release. I could do a specialized trigger point therapy on their necks and upper shoulders and things before they got their chiropractic adjustment. One day I was taken aback and I could just tell she as not feeling right, she was depressed and I asked what’s wrong.  She said, “Reed, it’s this weight. This 40 pounds and I’m really depressed about it.” “What are you doing?” “Well, I can’t do anything because I’m on this medication for the hives. It was a steroid that makes me fat. So I talked to my doctor yesterday” and she said, “he said, Lady, you have your choice. you’re going to be overweight or you’re going to have the hives. Take your pick.” So yes, you can imagine. She’s just distraught. She said, “And I told him that was really depressing and he offered me to write a prescription for anti-depressants.”

[16:27] Ashley James:  Oh, of course!

[16:29] Reed Davis: Yes. So check this out. Again, this is a long time ago. I didn’t know really exactly I was doing. I was learning but I didn’t know I was doing but I was doing awfully a lot too. I said, “Susan, did anyone ever try to find out why you get the hives?” Her neck just about snapped, her head just about snapped out of her neck. You know she was, “Well, what do you mean”?” I said, “There’s a test you can find out. Are you sensitive to something? Is there something in your environment? There’s all kind of ways to investigate that. That’s what I do. I’m like a health detective.” She goes, ”No. No one’s ever mentioned that.” Anyway, to get to the chase, we get her take home some test kits. Found out that some things she was very sensitive to, got her off of those things. Mostly dietary and within two weeks, she was off her medication and she told her doctor, “I’m never going back on it again”. I found what the problem is and I’m avoiding it. Then 2 weeks after that she was off her medication. She was doing two things that she hadn’t done in a couple of years. One was take a hot shower because even on the meds she got the hives. The other is working out to the point of perspiration because even on the meds she got the hives. It completely changed her life. She became a happy person. She started losing weight. She started feeling like her old self. Now I have to add that there’s some other labs and the hormones and immune and digestion. There a lot of things you could tune up on a person. That just told me then that I was on the right track. So many stories like that where early on I did not know at all but I was figuring out a system of investigation. Where to look for these underlying causes and conditions instead of, “Here’s something for the hives and the depressants because you’ve gained 40 pounds. Here’s something for the depression.” It’s such a contrast as you will know.

[18:36] Ashley James: I love it. That was your early on experience which got you so excited about helping people that you were shocked to find out that when people go to their mainstream doctor, they wait until they’re sick, put them on a drug and then when they have a side effect. They put them on another drug for the side effect and so on and so forth. Instead of trying to figure out how to solve it. If we look back at the history of allopathic medicine, about a 150 years ago and start to look back to the beginning of what is now MD medicine. Right? If we look at the history we see that. This is not conspiracy theory. This is fact. We see that a large, a person, it was Carnegie who owned a pharmaceutical company is that one that invested in making sure that the education, he invested in all the universities that taught medical doctors to only teach basically how to prescribe drugs. To this day, the education of doctors is largely manipulated by the pharmaceutical companies. They don’t want doctors to learn how to get to the root cause of chronic illness. I love allopathic medicine for emergencies, for some surgeries, when it’s necessary especially emergency medicine. For some infections, that’s where they shine but take a chronic illness to an MD their wheelhouse, their toolset is drugs that manage symptoms not most of them not getting to the root cause especially when it comes to more sensitive tests like you said. Things like food sensitivities or understanding genetics, understanding diet and nutrition. They don’t have an education around that. Unfortunately, they have a hubris, not all of them but some of them have a hubris to assume that they know everything about health because they paid so much for their education, right? I have had a few MDs on the show who said to me, “I really thought I know everything.” And they really do. They think they know everything so when you come to them with hives, they don’t question what’s causing the hives. They just assume, “Okay, you have hives. You’re just going to have for the rest of your life, here’s a drug,” Same with my type II diabetes. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility all the problems I had all that. All the MDs told me was that we can manage it with drugs and I would be that way for the rest of my life and I will never have kids. I told you before we hit record because you asked me about my personal story but it was because I veered off and started to look for holistic solutions that I was able to resolve all of them. All of the things that the MDs said were my life sentences basically. I love that early on, you saw that there’s a huge need for functional diagnostic nutrition. What happened next? You were having these aha moments. Moments when you’re working with the clients in the clinic. What lead you to want to start functional diagnostic nutrition?

[21:11] Reed Davis: Yes, sure. You know I want to just follow up a bit on what you said first. The fact that allopathic physicians, they’re the best at what they do. They want to help it. They save lives every single day. If you get off of a plane from West Africa and your temperature is 106 and you’re bleeding out of your eyeballs or something. You don’t call your nutritionist, you go for the best standard care you possibly can find. The hospitals and doctors are full of people who could really help you at that point. Same thing if you have a car accident and your bone is sticking out of your arm bleeding. You don’t call your health coach and have it fixed, it’s so fantastic at that right? Really keep those things in mind. The next thing for me was just the sheer grind. I was just grinding for years? I didn’t stop to think about what kind of a big movement I could start or something like that. I was really enjoying myself. Earning a very good living. Building one of the busiest, we’ll call it a nutrition practice in the country, in the US. Again at San Diego. I was just doing my thing. Working in the office, really helping all the patients that were coming in. Learning how to teach them, how to educate them in plain English on the things that they could do. Which really in the big concept in the chiropractic office and wellness center. We had other doctors. Acupuncturist, we even had an osteopath but it’s not what you do in the office, its what you do at home in between office visits. That’s when I because an expert at. At least a guy with a plan, a guy with a system because it was all based on observation. If you run thousands of labs on thousands of people, you’re going to learn a few things. What I learned is where the alternative practitioners of the day we’re leaving planks.

There are this gaps in person with a health problem. There are gaps. It’s called the cycle of trial and error actually. You go to a physician he says, “All your bloodwork looks normal” or even if he says, “It looks abnormal” the answer’s just a prescription to treat the paper in most. Thyroids a perfect example. “You have a cluster of symptom sounds like thyroid.” so they run a thyroid test. Yep, pat myself in the back. “You have hyperthyroid. Here’s your medication.” It traces the paper definitely, they can adjust the doses to get the numbers on the paper that look like what they want. That doesn’t make the person any better. It’s treating the test results and the symptoms, not the person. The best blessing I had was not being able to write a prescription. Not being a doctor. You know at first I thought, I should be a doctor so I can help these people. No. Grinding it out for years and years in the office, running to labs to figure out what’s really wrong and then how to fix it. What does that person need to go home and do in between doctors’ visits? I came up with that DRESS for health success system. The D-R-E-S-S. We can get it into that what that is, that’s the lifestyle medicine that there’s now band-aid about by lots of pundits. People who might have come and got training in something. Even people that take my course, they’re much better educated once they’re done but grinning it out being on the discovery levels was happy days. Just working hard. You asked, how to finally turn that into FDN. I was out lecturing not only doing my screenings with the bone density machines. I invented other screening just to get people and get them doing some lab work. Get them running some saliva and urine testing which is easy to take home. It’s not expensive and everyone can do it, so anyone can run these labs. Getting information, identifying, this is the key phrase. Healing opportunities like what’s really wrong.

Again if you’re hormone balance, if you’re not breaking down assimilating food very well if your liver is congested, you won’t be detoxifying your body and on and on. If the immune system is overactive or underactive. These are not medical diagnosis they’re just identifying healing opportunities, things that a person can fix. Of course, it isn’t but one of the trainings I took taught us to substitute drugs with supplements. I tried that for a while and that didn’t work. It’s much more than just a naturopathic medicine should be much more than just “Here’s the test, here’s the wrong in the paper, here’s some supplements that can fix it.” versus “Here’s some drugs that’ll fix it.” That’s not what would work for me. Again, the whole entire lifestyle medicine thing. I started figuring out how do I know what is the right diet for everybody. Everyone has to eat. You’re made of food. I used to weigh 8 pounds when I was born now I weigh 198 pounds pretty big guy. Where that extra weight come from?  It came from food. You ate food and it built the body. So that’s really important. Then also, rest or sleep but rest, knowing how to really get good deep non-realm rest is critical to having a healthy body. Then the exercise, I became a personal fitness trainer and all of that learning about the physical body. Then, of course, another letter is – so that’s Diet, Rest, Exercise, D-R-E-S-S, it spells DRESS for health success. Diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and then, of course, the supplements. I put supplements last. They’re what people want to start with but I don’t really believe that. They’re important but it’s really the D, the R and the E and the first S, stress reduction. You’ve heard that word stress before, right? You probably don’t have any but there’s so many different kinds. I learned about stress.

A matter fact I read in 2001, in an article in a naturopathic medicine that that was responsible for 50% of office visits and up to 80% of chronic degenerative disease. Some form of stress. I looked into different types of stress. Mental, emotional, physical trauma and of course, what I specialize in, is the environmental and the biological biochemical stressors, chemical stressors. It’s really a holistic lifestyle program that was developed over years of working with people, finding out what works how do you customize it. Based upon the actual healing opportunities that I discovered with the labs. If you run thousands of labs in thousands of people and you pay attention, I made observations on who got better and who didn’t. It should be no surprise to anyone listening, those people who worked closest to the underlying cause were the ones who got better but it was not so intuitive. This is where it kind of takes the twist where you really have to be observant is people with the exact same set of symptoms can have them for completely different upstream dysfunction. One person with the thyroid disorder where they’re hypothyroid, whereas their thyroids not making enough T4 or is making T4 but was not converting into T3 properly. Those are basics. Why? Instead of just giving them medication, we want to know why. What I’ve discovered in 10 people, you might find 10 different reasons why. That’s the not so intuitive part that helped me developed functional diagnostic nutrition, the entire program. Which is the investigation, which labs were on? Which observations can be capitalized on. We’re going to make some observations about healing opportunities as long as we’re given time, we can capitalize on those. Again, if you have a temperature of a 106 and you’re bleeding out of all references, don’t call me. Go get checked out first. If you have a big, blood’s on your forehead like some tumor growing. That needs a more attendant care,  emergency care. You go get that handled but then what? You come back and we do a program for you. This holistic functional diagnostic nutrition and the Dress For Health success program. That took a lot of years.

[31:27] Ashley James: Very cool. As you developed this, did you see when you applied DRESS, the Dress For Health success to everyone that you got even better results?

[31:42] Reed Davis: Well, yes. Today, 11 years ago I was asked to teach the system. It wasn’t good enough for one guy in California to be using it. How many people could I actually serve? Again, I had one of the busiest practices in the country. I was told that by my vendors. The people that I did business with especially a couple of the laboratories. They said, “Who the hell are you? No one does this much lab work.” If this was on the doctor’s office and there’s five doctors working there, “Who are you again? You’re a nutritionist? You’re doing all these lab work?” Well yes, I did it actually because I didn’t know you can’t do it. [Laughter] Like, “You can’t do that. Who are you? You can’t do that.” and I just would explain how hard I’d like to work and the number of people and the system I was developing. Finally, it’s became time to start chasing it to other practitioners. I started deputizing with just about anyone at first. There’s a lot of they didn’t call them health coaches back then now there’s a lot medical health coaches, I think we’re pioneer in that area because they’re allied practitioner we’re not medical doctors for the most part. We have personal trainers and people who do raki and nutrition and dietitians and nurses and physical therapist and you just name it, chiropractors, acupuncture. Basically not MDs. What they want to focus on is underlying causes and conditions. Ashley, really quickly we’re talking about the history. It’s really important. In 1903, Thomas Edison said a very famous quote from the great inventor who was right about a lot of things but he was wrong about this and I see people using this quote all over the place it says, “The doctor of the future would give no medicine. But will interest his patients instead in care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.” What is wrong? Doctors are still giving medicine. It’s 113 years later? When is the future? If it’s not now, when is it? If physicians are still giving medicine, who then is going to interest the person in the care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease? It’s health coaches and allied practitioners. We’re the ones. We’re the army if you will saying, give the care of disease to physicians. We freely grant them full monopoly. We don’t care about disease, you’re the experts. You studied disease. You studied symptoms that might kill someone. That’s a good thing. They can do stuff that I can’t do. I can’t order a CT scan to see if you have tumors and other great things that they can do. Although some of that is a big waste of money. I had client once who, I mentioned to her she was going to take that supplement. There’s possibility of that you might get a little bit of vasodilator headache. You might get some headaches if you take too much of this stuff. So back off you go back down to the original dosage and things like that. About 3 weeks later, I’m talking to her and she goes, “I’m going in for a brain scan from my headaches.” I go, “what?” she goes, ”I called my doctor and I told him I’ve been having headaches for three weeks, she wants to give me a brain scan.” I said, “Well okay, if three weeks, how long have you been taking that supplement that I suggested to take?” she said, “About 3 weeks.” Doctors look for brain tumors or things and we work in different ways. I think you get the point I’m trying to make. It’s good to get your brain scan I guess. I can’t order that test but it’s good to have a doctor around who’s licensed to do that but we look for things in a different way. What are the healing opportunities, it’s a different set of labs.

[36:11] Ashley James:  It’s a different philosophy. You’re looking at that through a different lens right? Looking for the healing opportunities and doctors are looking for what drugs can I prescribe. That’s their toolset. It’s a different philosophy.

[36:25] Reed Davis: It’s totally different. Again, back to this idea that there’s gaps. People are caught in a cycle of trial and error. There isn’t enough health coaches and allied practitioners around. The purpose and the fact that the populations getting more unhealthy. Drug uses getting more rampant. We have people being advertised to and television. Going to the doctors and saying, “Hey, I want to try these medication for whatever.” The doctor is they’re kind of market followers. “Well like, okay.” They’re trying to meet the demand. They wouldn’t just indiscriminately do it but you get the point I’m trying to make. We see the health of people getting worse. A doctor I was talking to, a good guy, he said to me, ”Reed, you know we’re ranked 38.” He goes, “In terms of health, United States had ranked second from the bottom of 48 civilized countries or whatever. Like that.” We’re ranked second from the bottom. Why is that?

[37:42] Ashley James: But we spent the most as a country, we spend the most on, they call it health care but it’s disease management. Yet we are basically getting the word results. If it was a country, if we looked at each country like a company, like a business. Like Amazon as a business. If Amazon was spending the most amount of money, and getting the second to last worst results like in terms of sales retention whatever. They would fire the CEO immediately and completely restructure their business or they’d go out of business. But because it is a for-profit business, there’s no sense. They don’t want to change it because they’re profiting. They’ll say, you’ll see that statistic like if you’re a type I diabetic or if you’re an insulin-dependent type II diabetic, they’ll say the cost to be a diabetic is $12,500 on average per person per year. They make it sound like it’s a cost to the country. Its cost but in fact, it’s profit. A diabetic is profiting the industry that doesn’t serve us that is not getting results. Why would they want to change? They’re profiting? Right? But we are the people as individual we are the ones getting screwed over because we’re getting the second to least results compared to all the other countries but we could go to a different country, spend less on health but you know that would go costly to fly or drive to a different country depending on where you live. Here we are. We’re stuck. But we have to do something different, right? We don’t want to leave the country we’re in for health care although some people do called medical tourism. So here we are. We have to understand that the system we have gets the second to worst results yet we pay the most for it. We have to understand that we’re stuck with that system but we’re not stuck with needing to go to an MD for absolutely everything. We have to understand like you pointed out, wonderful people to go to for certain things and for healing opportunities go to an allied practitioner like a health coach or naturopathic chiropractor. I don’t know about calling a Naturopath an allied practitioner because they’re legitimate doctors but they see it through a different lens.

Going to someone other than a doctor that’s just going to prescribe drugs. We need to take our health into our own hands. That’s why the listeners listening right now. So they can become educated and they can be highly informed and advocate for their own health. I will say one final thing on this, I say it often but we have new listeners all the time. As I’ve done all these interviews which I’ve done over 370 interviews for the last few years, it dawned on me somewhere along the line that if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. The statistics right now, I believe it’s 1 of 3 people would get a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. One in 3 people are obese. Or you know, overweight in an unhealthy way. One in 3 people have diabetes or pre-diabetic. And then you look at heart disease. My dad died of heart disease. My mom died of cancer so both two topics close to my heart. That we can help the listeners prevent it. Heart diseases is 100% reversible and preventable. I interviewed Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn a cardiologist who’s in his 80s who still practices today helping people reverse heart disease with diet. The point in this is that we could take action but we have to remember that we need to be summoned swimming upstream if we do what everyone else is doing, we’re going to be statistic. We have to be a little bit controversial. Right? Go get some lab tests done that a regular doctor would scoff at maybe. Change your diet, change your lifestyle. Look at that stress. Look at exercise. Look at all the things that the average person doesn’t in order to live along healthy life without disease. I’m so glad you’re going to outline some great actionable steps we can take today, you created the DRESS for success system to help people see that there are pillars of health that they could take into their own hands every day. To build their health and then using the abs, you look for healing opportunities to target what the body is saying it needs to focus on.

[43:23] Reed Davis: Exactly. That was a mouthful and very good. You were a change maker. Someone’s going to help change this system. Let’s just say the two systems can both exist. Again, it’s not like a wave to eliminated allopathic medicine we just can let that team have control over everything and us because they will just make us consume. We’re just going to be consumers of their stuff. The province of Ontario, we’re both from Ontario right? in Canada. I heard statics recently in the last couple of years, by 2020 60% of the entire Ontario government’s budget. 60% of the budget will go to healthcare. By 2025 or somewhere in there, another 10 years, maybe 20 30 even it will be 80% of the entire government’s budget will just go towards healthcare. Now everybody’s going to be on a the medical dole if you will. Just for all the money’s going to go. It’s a system where you’re right, there is greed and a lot of profit motivation for this. The people who are in the receiving end of the check, like government’s writing the check, who’s getting the check? Who’s getting paid? We want to change people’s thinking. I also just want to throw in that what we do is for profit also. I learned to make a living helping people. It’s an honest living though. It’s doing work, it’s very rewarding that does some good in the world. It will be a legacy, it will be passed on. You and I are of the same elk we’re working together to affect those kind of change and you don’t do it by going along with the pack. You do it by doing somewhat controversial. At least, can’t I ask some questions? Like if you go to a physician, he says, “Yes. I found your problem. You’re hypothyroid that why you’re tired and constipated and gaining weight and can’t lose it, your hairs falling out and you feel sad. It’s hypothyroid. Here’s your medication.” If you say that, “Doctor, why is my thyroid underactive?” We don’t know it’s idiopathic.

When you hear that word, idiopathic means, it means they’re not looking for the answer. It really means, “We don’t know but it means we’re not looking because that’s not how they operate. It isn’t by the way just the drug companies, it’s insurance companies play a huge part in it. That goes back to original comments Ashley about physicians feel like they’re wearing handcuffs. They can’t say anything else. They get reprimanded by their board. If they’re selling supplements, their office are doing some of these things, alternative stuff insurance doesn’t pay for it. They can get a letter to cease and desist or we’ll take your license away. How many are brave enough to say, “Go ahead. Take it. I’m going to do some good in the world and you can keep it.” They’re not just brave at this point. There’s got to be another system not to replace it but to operate side by side that can end up being a bigger system. The one that the people choose when the people go to. I’ve been a working-class here all my whole life. I’ve always admired them anyway. I actually do right to Harley Davidson through the mountains of California at least three times a week and try to do some good in the world and enjoy the lives that walk the talk. I can’t say profits are a bad things I’m just saying you can make an honest living helping people if you want to. That’s a big part of my course is showing other people to of this as a profession. Most people would sign up to their own health and their families. They just want to learn, it’s very affordable. I do this post-grad interviews and I always ask every single graduate in my program I personally interview and I have for 11 years. I have done thousands of interviews that’s “Why did you take the FDN course? What did it meant to you?” Way more than half would say, 75% say, “My own personal health challenges have been completely resolved, partially resolved. I’m working on it. I’m on my journey I felt so much better. I can’t wait to share it with others. I’m going to go out there and now I’m going to do this for a living.” Or we’ve had people start their business, augment their business or shift from whatever they were doing for living to doing this for a living. It’s okay to make money, as long as you’re doing some good in the world in my opinion. 

[48:22] Ashley James: It is not evil. I want every single one of my listeners to live a life that they absolutely love and be well taken care of. To have the means to have the amount of money that provides them with the ability to live their dreams. Money is not evil, it’s what you do with it. You have to give your money, I just paid my bills today so I just paid our health insurance and we don’t buy the most expensive but we don’t buy the most cheap. I always buy the one that covers holistic medicine but we’re nowhere reaching our deductible because we obviously use it a bunch but we do go to our Naturopath, to our chiropractor, acupuncture. That kind of thing. It’s $1,500 a month for the three of us for our family. Last year it was a different plan, it was $1,800. I’m like every time I pay it, I just feel resentment. I feel frustrated. I think to myself why don’t I just not have health insurance and then just save some money or put aside then there’s all these diff options and I’m so obviously like I do the podcast and I’m a very hard worker and I get this podcast to help as many people as possible. That’s a huge percentage of our income goes towards medical expenses for a system that is broken. For a system that isn’t getting results. Right? If this system was designed, if every practitioner had your course, every practitioner in the entire world, even every MD knew what you taught and they practice what you taught, our medical bills would be so small it would save us so much money. Every time I pay it I feel resentful because I’m paying a system that doesn’t work. Now I absolutely have id be overjoyed to pay a functional medicine practitioner and I want them to profit because they get results.

It’s about results. It’s evil when you have to give something or a company you have to pay some money to something that gets very poor results and you feel like you’re ripped off. It’s more about feeling ripped off whereas with functional diagnostic nutrition, I know it gets results. Just like seeing a Naturopath I know I’m going to get significantly better results than seeing an MD for certain issues. You want to go the right practitioner from the results you want. I think that’s just really important to understand that there are these allied practitioners out there. I’ve had listeners contact me that said, “I never knew that Naturopaths existed until I listen to your show.” They just didn’t know. Because that’s not part of the mainstream I guess, Hollywood right? And TV and media. The media we consume growing up is all about ER and Grey’s Anatomy and there’s no show following acupuncturists around. I think that’ll be hilarious. I definitely want to get into understanding a bit about the tests. That if you could give us some examples of lab tests that people when they take your course that they learn to order both for themselves and also for their clients and to just give us a contrast compared to like what someone would get when they go to an MD versus when they’re going to a functional diagnostic nutritionist?

[52:09] Reed Davis: Fantastic. The place to start the labs is how do you think about it? It’s really a state of mind or we call it FDN a methodology. Methodology is a method with a way of thinking attached to it. There’s a philosophy or a state of mind that’s required. Since for non-physician, we can’t diagnose and treat conditions. That would be practicing medicine without license. We don’t want to. We want to just get the underlying causes or conditions. They’re not always identifiable the so called root cause. You hear people talking about this. You may never find the root cause. It could be really well hidden or there just isn’t enough test. There’s no test that’s for sure. It’s not that this blood work that they’re running. We might be 50 or hundred years away to a blood test that tells you everything if it ever happens. We’re definitely not in a land of Star Trek where I don’t know if you remember Dr. Macoy had that little thing and he would wave it over the patient’s chest and then “Oh, it’s this or that here’s your shot of whatever” and that was really allopathic even though it was supposed to be way in the future. Those things don’t exist. The root cause may be very hard to determine but you can still have an effect upon it. That’s the thinking that you can have an effect upon the root if you can just get close to it. People are coming again on that second they’ve been told by their physician that there’s nothing wrong with you or you’ve got this or that and here’s your pills. Let’s treat the paper. They’re in a cycle of trial and error. Those people where they do? They go online. They’re going to get a million hits on any condition they put in. You type in diabetes or thyroid or digestion disorder. Whatever it is. You’re going to get a million of things to look at. Or you go in your neighborhood and you find there’s a guy down the street doing even Naturopaths and so they do a diet program, they’d do an exercise program, they do a supplement therapy. They do some other therapy with some gizmo and they’re making a ton of money kind of praying on people’s discomfort. People are stuck in the cycle and they get pretty desperate.

They just want someone that can help them. They’re spending a ton of money, people are making a ton of money but it’s really not filing the needs and the way we know that is people still walking around with all other problems. If something besides what we do and we’re just catching on really work then all these other people would be out of business. That would be part of my objective is to get more people doing what really works. Anyway, so you got this way of thinking that there’s an underlying cause or condition and how close can we get to it. We can’t give them medical diagnosis and we don’t want to. I have one diagnosis and you might have heard this I call it metabolic chaos. There’s just things wrong going the body. Everyone has different weak links in metabolism. There are thousands and thousands of metabolic processes going on in the body 24hrs a day. Most of them under control of the autonomic nervous system. Your sympathetic and parasympathetic balance of course and all these other things going on. There’s this idea that if symptoms incurred somewhere downstream that’s just another problem is showing up. Upstream from that is dysfunctional and misprocesses and above that is just what I call is metabolic chaos. Things are not working the way they designed it to work. The design is perfect you don’t have to teach these cells what their job is certainly. You don’t have to teach any tissue what kind of tissue it is. It knows if it’s a brain tissue or adrenal tissue or muscle tissue whatever. All the cells, tissues, organs and systems, the what their job is it’s just being interfered in some way and not supported in some way. Everyone’s so different that the opportunity for voids in that system for weak links is just really abundant. There are just millions of things that could be going on. Some of them all at once. We have one diagnosis. It’s metabolic chaos. There’s stuff going on. Our way of looking at it. This is just the discoveries that I’ve made.

Ashley, I’m answering your question now. I ran five labs in every person. And it’s because all the people I try to help, we start with a lady who had low bone density and then what helps with bone density, the hormones, we start testing hormones. What I found out just by working with people, sheer numbers. The people who had low bone density when we worked at their hormones, not only could we help them with their boned density but they felt better. They got more energy, their brain fog went away, their sex drive came back, their weight normalized, their immune system improved but still it wasn’t quite whether something else – I learned to check for hormones in every person using saliva testing and we checked the immune system. You can use saliva testing for that. Which I found out that when I ran another test, we call the metabolic assessment profile which is a urine test. We checked digestion to make sure they’re actually breaking down and absorbing food properly and that leads into dysbiosis and things going on in the gut that just aren’t right. Also detoxification. Is the liver clearing the blood that we’re supposed to? Three pints of blood a minute go through the liver. Three pints a minute? That’s a lot of blood flowing through your liver and most of that blood is supplied off of the digestive tract. There is some blood coming in the rest of the body to the liver through an artery but the rest of it comes it sort of drained off the digestive system. You got all these things going on. Again, you can make observations. You can collect saliva, you can collect urine, you can collect stool and you can collect blood of course. And start making observations.

This happened over a long period of time. I ran a ton of labs and I narrowed it down to what would give me the most healing opportunities for the money. People are going to invest, they have to pay me my professional fees and they have to pay for the lab work. It sounds like where am I going to get a lot of people who do that? they’re everywhere because people are sick. They’re sick and tired of being on it, the cycle of trial and error that they’re in and will spend out of their pocket. Last year you said you’re spending over $20,000 a year on what’s so called health care like insurance and it doesn’t even cover the kind of health care that you want. It really covers like emergencies that’s not a bad thing. Maybe you should buy insurance that only covers emergencies for $5,000 a year. That’d be reasonable. The rest of the money you spend it where you want. On care of the human frame or on diet and the causes and prevention of disease. You could spend it a little better and execute everything cover that you want for your 20 grand. That more than some people make by the way. Some families of three or four people. At least in this country. You got this mindset. It’s a methodology, it’s a step by step process. I ran those five labs in everyone. Hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, healing opportunities, energy production, and nervous autonomic balance. Sympathetic and parasympathetic have to be balanced for your body to function, right? We look for these opportunities. Now some person we might find 10 things to work on, another person five someone else, 15. It just depends on the person. Everyone is different. Everyone has this vital voids or weak links in metabolism. Again, we’re not diagnosing or treating some specific disease look here’s what’s wrong with your body. If you fix those things, then downstream what you see in your doctor for hyperthyroidism, irritable bowel or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or brain fog, cloudy thinking all these things. That stuff should go away if we fix everything upstream.

As a matter of fact you can remember it like this the word hidden. I call them the hidden stressors and dysfunctions. Hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and nervous system balance. H-I-D-D-E-N. Easy to remember right? Yes. H-I-D-D-E-N, the hidden stressors, and dysfunctions. You ran some small handful of labs, they’re not that expensive you can get them done and you have a professional. I’ve trained almost 3,000 people. I’ve trained those for you because everyone’s an individual and it matters whose test results are these. That’s another down side to allopathic medicine is everyone’s the same. All of their studies are on what’s called a cohort. No one person that it applies to it. On a group of 50,000 people approved lifespan by 20% with this drug. Of course, 18 of those people died from the drug and another 19 are permanently braindead or something damaged. You get the point? So we don’t work with cohorts. We work with individuals. That’s the other part of the methodology. It’s a method step by step it’s a way of thinking about the human body in each person individually.

We look for this healing opportunities in the HIDDEN stressors and dysfunctions that I just determine overrunning of thousands of labs on thousands of people will get you the best results. Will get you back to sleeping well. Get up feet on the floor running. You got lost of energy to get through. If you eat your breakfast, you know you’re going to have energy to get through to lunch get a lot of stuff done. Same thing between lunch and dinner and then you’re still going to have energy and clear thinking to enjoy your kids and all the stuff that we all want to do. It’s all high-quality life. Also preventative. My theory in anti-aging using that system, you should feel 40 until you’re 80. Anti-aging isn’t, you don’t wait until you’re 65. Look I’m 66 years old, think honest 20 years ago when I was pretty much abusing my body without knowing. I call it a well-used body. I’ve done some bad things to it but I was trying to fit in this methodology and also approach as an anti-aging tool. It will get you over the things that you’re dealing with that you don’t like about the way you look or feel. Without going to physician getting medical diagnosis and treating that specific thing with drugs or worse surgery. So once you do this assessment and it will include a very careful history taking of your complaints or the main ones you want to go away. How often those things bother you, how long has it been going on, what things you tried first, what’s your motivation running your life, you have to be motivated client for us to take you on. We would run those labs and then we would individualize the protocol, design a d-r-e-s-s program. Be very happy to go into the more details on the labs if you want. Like what hormones we’ll look at or what markers or we could go towards the DRESS program. How does that work? What are the specific questions?

[01:04:41] Ashley James: This is good. Let’s start with because I know my listeners are probably on the edges of the seat going, “Yes, tell us more of these labs.” We have a Facebook group. The Learn True Health Facebook group and so many times people are asking about labs by we have to have the right philosophy and mindset when looking at labs. We can’t be reductionist which is like allopathic medicine just looking at one thing like I’m going to look at the liver and that’s very reductionist just to look at one organ only. We need to look at the whole system because every organ affects the other. Every hormone affects, everything affects everything right? We need to look at everything as a whole. When you’re looking at thyroid and you’re looking at cortisol and liver and digestion and energy and sleep and all these. What I’d love to know if you could give some examples of labs or what are the absolute must labs that you always run with people. Of course it’s individualized because one person comes to you and their health history is all about digestion the other comes to you and it’s all about headaches and maybe nervous system stuff. doesn’t seem related but you dive in deeper and absolutely could be related because again, everything affect everything in the body. Please explain more about these labs that people learn to run in the functional diagnostic nutrition course and learn to run on themselves and their clients.

[01:06:16] Reed Davis: Again, back to the early days of doing the bone density testing. One I was finding is that I should look at hormones at every person. I was doing it just specific to the bones but I realized after a while testing enough people, that “Wow. This is critical for all kinds of reason not just how it affects the body.” Just what you just said, it affects everything. We run a saliva test. We take a morning, noon, afternoon, nighttime saliva sample. We look at cortisol and DHEA. Cortisol is your stress hormone. You could look at the pattern of cortisol and DHEA which is a counter regularity to your stress hormone. You have stress hormones which are catabolic and it breaks your body down. You’re under stress and then you have the anabolic beginning with DHEA, that’s the parent of your sex hormones, so that’s your anabolic. You need catabolic and anabolic balance. The bodybuilding up and the body breaking down. There’s a normal amount of each. Does that makes sense? Let’s look at catabolism. We find people that are overly catabolic. They’re cortisol dominant. Their bodies are breaking down. It’s not like you’re going to treat the paper like “Oh, here’s something for the other side.

We’re not just going to prescribe or recommend. There’s supplements that can do that. You can treat the paper even in naturopathic medicine. We start obviously what? Looking for the stressors. Why are you in this catabolic state? Is it just mental-emotional? When I say they were stressed? What do people think? They hate their boss, their kids, god I don’t know. They have mental-emotional stress but there’s also physical trauma and things like pain. Walking around in pain is very stressful. The body responds the same to either thing if your neck hurts its response is catabolism. Cortisol dominance. If you are in a  fight with your spouse all the time it responds the same way. Also the same thing with internal hidden stressors that dysfunctions in your bodies that occur over time or parasites, bacteria, funguses, viruses or food sensitivities, and things. Environment influences, new draperies can cause hell in the household because the outgassing of chemicals and fire and other things. What we do is we look at that to assess the cortisol DHEA ratio as a marker for catabolic anabolic balance. We need to get this in balance or nothing else matters. Why treat one little thing downstream when we can go upstream to a major factor like that. Oh, by the way instead on a pathway of investigating the stressors and some of that again, requires the investigation, the intake, careful history taking and things. A person might have a hobby that’s actually hurting them.

They’re spray painting little figurines in their garage sucking up paint spray, that’s not a good thing. Anyway, you get the point, there’s investigation involved including the lab work. We can look for food sensitivities, parasites, bacteria, fungus, viruses and things that they don’t even know is there and physicians are looking for the most part. We look at a major thing like hormone balance. The catabolic anabolic hormones and also while you’re doing that. As long as you’re collecting saliva, one I look at the sex hormones because estrogen need to be in balance with progesterone in women testosterone needs to be balanced and we can even look at melatonin. That’s not a sex hormone but that’s hormone that’s important we can get that from the night time sample. We can do a morning, noon, and nighttime evening – morning noon, afternoon and night time saliva sample. Get a lot of information and frankly again, standard physicians don’t recommend tests they’re not looking for that. They’re looking for disease. They’re looking for a way, cholesterol or whatever it is that they’re looking for deepening on your complaint. That’s some pretty important test. Saliva test to cover those things. Again this was just one of the first tests I started running because I was looking for a specific thing like bone density but I found out the ramifications of it by running thousands of it and giving those same people things to do. To look at the stressors, let’s run some more labs and narrow it down to these five labs. That’s one. It’s a hypothalamic pituitary adrenal stress indicator type test. We’ll also run by the way saliva’s easy to collect at home and send in at your convenience and it’s not really expensive so it’s a good investment as is this urine testing that we do.

Again easy collecting at home. We look at that digestive marker. Are you breaking down protein? By what you collect in the urine. You can see how well a person’s breaking down protein. If you’re not breaking down protein, I see amino acids. Amino acids turn into neurotransmitters. Think of all the ramifications of having neurotransmitters are out of balance. Your moodiness, your irritability and all the other things that are going on in your body that require good neurotransmitters. The other things that amino acids are good for like they’re the building blocks of all the enzyme and tissues in your body. Things like that. It’s remarkable how important breaking down protein is. That same marker, if you’re not breaking down protein, how well do you think you’re breaking down your carbohydrates and your fats? There’s other ways to look at that but it’s a great test and on the same lab, the same urine sample, again we’re trying to get the most bang form the book. We can look at oxidative stress. What’s another indicator of excessive stress at some form toxins or something in your environment. You could be over-exercising, you could be smoking, you could be exposed to other toxins or you could get internal toxic producing organisms or processes. So we look at oxidative stress. Basically if you cut open an apple, it turns brown, right? That’s oxidative stress. Oxygen, free radicals, and excess of that is a bad sign. It’s great marker as an overall assessment of health. Something again physicians just aren’t looking at because it’s an insidious long term contributor to chronic degenerative disease.

[01:12:59] Ashley James:  I did not know that you could do urine testing to see your oxidative stress. That’s amazing. Just thinking about oxidative stress, one of the Naturopaths that mentored me he described, he’s a pathologist before he became a Naturopath, he says that cholesterol, the bad cholesterol is oxidized cholesterol, it’s oxidized fat. It’s not, it doesn’t cause disease in and of itself. It’s like saying, look over there there’s smoke. It’s the effect of oxidation. If you take someone who eats fries everyday like fried and deep-fried, that contributes hugely to oxidative stress to the body. Eating anything with oil and fried food. So that person would then have that. Have high levels of oxidative stress but also people are low in selenium for example because selenium recycles the body’s own glutathione which is our antioxidant and so I can see where your starting to put the puzzle pieces together because you’re looking at their diet and their lifestyle. If you see that their melatonin is low and that saliva test and that you see that their protein is low in that urine test you’re like, there you go because their melatonin’s low because they’re not getting the amino acids to the body needs to make the melatonin so you’re starting be that detective. Am I on to something there? Is that how it works?

[01:14:29] Reed Davis: Yes. I’m impressed with your knowledge of oxidative stress. It’s another form of stress that creates an imbalance between the free radicals and the body’s ability to counteract them. That’s why we take anti-oxidants and we include anti-oxidants in our diet. We need the vitamin C, D, and E and these things from food hopefully but if not, you can take some if you take excessive oxidative stress you want to increase the anti-oxidants but you also want to go, that started the immediate care idea. Again, we don’t want to just treat the paper or use the paper to sell supplements or supplement program. That’s another unfortunate occurrence but we want to find out why again it could be over-exercise, smoking or something else hidden. We would just use it with the detective mentality. Like here it is, here’s the problem, your oxidative versus anti-oxidative balance is off. You have an imbalance, let’s correct it. That’s a pillar as you mentioned that can be corrected with our lifestyle program.

 The diet and supplements especially the right kind of exercise, getting the right amount of sleep all these things are critical. So far, we’ve looked at saliva testing, all the hormone, anabolic and catabolic balance, the balance between the sex hormone, getting a peek at melatonin which is I could fill in the blanks in there more, that’s a great anti-oxidant by the way. Most of us made in the gut, people aren’t aware of that. They think it’s just from the penile glands at night time, not true. You do this saliva test, you do this urine test, we said we can look at how well you can breaking down protein which is reflective of how you’re breaking down other things. It’s also reflective of the dysbiotic condition we find in people’s guts. Not enough good flora vs the bad flora. That’s where a lot of your protein that comes from. It’s the bacterial breakdown. We’re looking at that for a saliva, form a urine test on the same urine test, let’s look at the oxidative stress. From the same urine test, we’re going to look at liver function. It’s not the enzymes and things that physicians look at to see if you have a disease it’s just that it congest it. If you’re spilling this it violates and sulfates over into the urine, they collected by kidneys and excreted and we can measure them. If you have a congested liver like before the recording started, we talked a little bit about this scenario that you might want to work on. We see people are overweight there’s so much fatty liver around, it’s unbelievable. Liver it does a lot of things. A couple hundred different operations but if you just look at it as a vacuum cleaner bag collecting toxins and unwanted particles off the digestive track and wherever you’ve got to change your vacuum cleaner bag don’t you?

If you ever changed a bag in a vacuum cleaner the old ones that used to have bags you know that it runs a good vacuum cleaner when you changed that bag when it gets too stuff it’s not working, you put a bag in it, you get a brand new vacuum cleaner. The liver can be assessed that way. That what’s included in this urine test. We’ve only run two tests, we haven’t spent much money but we’ve discovered a lot of healing opportunities. The catabolic anabolic imbalances, the sex hormone imbalances, the low melatonin could be real problem point to figure out, gut dysfunction and things, we’ve looked at dysbiosis and protein and other food breakdown. We’ve looked at the oxidative stress, we’ve looked at liver congestion. That’s a lot of bang for the book and we haven’t given any medical diagnosis. I’m not playing doctor. We’re just being detectives trying to help people or ourselves figure out what’s really wrong. Where can I clean myself up in these upstream functions so that downstream I have to just feel better? I have more energy and I lose the weight. I have a better ability to build muscle, sex life, whatever it is to you that is not right about. The thing about the look or feel that you want to change. That’s only two tests. Another really important one I’d run just about everybody, depending on how they come to us and people come with all these metabolic chaos, they’ve got multiple complaints hardly anyone says it’s just my hangnail, if I had a little more energy I’d be better. They’ve got multiple complaints. Some of them walk around these things for years and years and years, they’ve seen 10 people already and everyone kind of picks and chooses. Try my therapy, try my little machine or my whatever they’re doing. Individual therapies and modalities. When that doesn’t work, you’ve got to start looking upstream and that’s what my entire system is abided on. I would look at gut function a little deeper. I like running an intestinal permeability test just to make sure that your villi and microvilli are in good shape. That you don’t have excessive permeability at the gut, things like that because it’s a healing opportunity. You can call it it’s all kinds of problems for a person. Just unbelievable amount of problems. Include eventually autoimmune conditions and serious stuff. That, by the way, is another urine test do it at home. Doesn’t cost a lot and you can get these markers and start doing the things that takes to repair the damage. There’s two of more tests as a matter of fact if you just ran those three you’ve got a hell of an assessment. “Wow, look at all the stuff that I can fix. Finally, someone has figured out what’s really wrong with me. How do I fix it?” Well, there’s a couple more tests critical in that process. Now we’re ready for the DRESS program but the easy way to shortcut like diet, for instance, is to run a food sensitivity test. We can get into the DRESS program now but the story hidden stressor is the parasites, bacteria, fungus. Those are all easily detectable on stool testing. There’s different ones, there’s microscopy, there’s microscope. There’s culturing you can put the stool in Petri dishes and see what kind of pus grows on it for bacteria or even yeast. You can also run DNA testing. There’s ways to look at the stool that are very informative. More healing opportunities like if you have bugs. You’ve got to get rid of them. You can go to doctor for that or people mostly are choosing to self-treat using age-old botanical treatments. More that are less toxic less harmful to the good bacteria and things. How do you like them apples so far? 

[01:21:51] Ashley James: I like it. I like that its sounds really non-invasive. Saliva and urine test and stool test. All things you can do at home and mail in. There are mold and parasites, a huge problem that people aren’t aware of. Most people aren’t aware that they could live in several different states and they can actually take mold with them in their belongings and many houses in different states even out in the desert where you think, “It’s like humid here.” Absolutely, you can have mold in the dessert living in Las Vegas for example or living in the mountains. Mold is huge and it is a big problem for our health. I’ve had several experts on the show talk about it and it can cause so many different symptoms but obviously immune problems like if someone goes, “Man, I just catch every single flu and every single cold that comes around. I just feel like I’m always sick.” Something’s going on that your immune system is so taxed right now. What is going on? Parasites we think just because we have clean water and we wash our hands, we don’t live among filth like we did thousand years ago. That there is someone immune to parasites right because we live indoors where there is no mosquitoes biting us every day so we don’t think that insects, you know parasites are kind of like parasites if you think about it. Could bug us and you go outside and you can’t and you start to become aware that we are just animals.

We are animals that are a little bit more sophisticated but we are not impervious to parasites and all animals can get parasitic infections like we can get a bacterial infection. I’d love for you to just explain a little bit more about mold and parasites because even if someone had some health issues that are like persistent, it’ll be great to rule out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they discover that the root cause was mold? Or the root cause was a chronic parasitic infection? Wouldn’t that be wonderful because it’s so easy to manage versus everything’s’ out of whack, where do I start? Of course do the DRESS. Do the diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction and supplements to fill in the gaps. Obviously a 100 % of the population would benefit from that formula but wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone suffering and it’s an easy fix, right? To dress mold and parasite rather than years of dialing stuff in and still suffering. If you could tell us a bit more about the parasite and mold testing that would be wonderful. 

[01:24:50] Reed Davis: Okay, sure. In context with what I was saying the investigation, looking at these critical markers for balance in your body. Moving on to than what more specifically is part of the stress takes you this metabolic chaos going on in my body and the things that you can do like some of the testing to determine. Stool testing for parasites, bacteria, and fungus is common. I mean we test everyone for that, now you find things but there’s the issue I have with it people think, “Oh, I found your problem.” there’s people who caught on to that there’s parasites for instance or bacteria like H. pylori and these different things and fungi and things. They’re thinking that they found the problem. Take you back on the whole vitalistic theory. You were already sick for the most part before your symptoms occur. Your immune system would have to be pretty compromised before some of these very common bugs, by the way, if you look at some of the literature, they’re not even considered a problem, they’re considered commercial or sort of normal to have some bacteria and parasite.

You can make a mistake easily by saying, “Oh, your problem sounds like parasites.” See some digestive issues and things like that, pain in the gut or whatever. Diarrhea and things, it sounds like a parasite then you check and you pat yourself on the back “Yes, I found your problem, it’s parasite. We’ll get rid of it and you’ll be fine.” No, you have to heal the whole person. You have to heal their entire digestive tract and bring their immune system back to balance and order. It’s not as simplistic as, “Oh I found this parasite now I’m all better.” You might feel better initially but you’re going to get the next bug that come along if you don’t really repair the whole person. Mold is a little different because – by the way you can run a test it’s called H-E-R-M-I. The hermi test for mold in your house. That’s the sort of best test for finding out if you got the kind of mold that will make you sick and there’s no good molds for us has been exposed to especially when it turns into something you can inhale. If it turns that can be inhaled that’s a bad deal for anybody. We recommend certain people with certain conditions. If you want to learn a lot about mold, I would go to survivingmold.com. Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker is probably the world’s leading expert in that area of research. He’s really specialized in water-damaged buildings and the molds and the long term chronic effects and how to remediate the building mostly you just want to get out, get ways from it. Then what happens to the body, unfortunately, what happens to the body can be really kind of diluted and the testing can be more expensive and hard to get for what it does to your immune system and inflammatory processes in your body. It really wakes up some complementary pathways and it can be really hard to detoxify molds. It’s very insistent. It loves to just re-circulate. It’s a very hard to bind to get out of the body. Because they’re mold toxins, it’s not the mold itself they’re just toxins from the mold. There is what’s called the micro toxin test, you can measure for that. but it’s not our first-line test. I don’t just run a micro toxin test to people. We have to clean them up first.

The FDN program looking at the hormone, immune, digestive, detox so on is a grounding program to get yourself cleaned up where you should be better. You should be a whole lot better. I’m talking about just three months of doing our DRESS program. Doing our customized for your test results and your history. If you do that customized DRESS program, the diet, the rest, the exercise, the stress reduction, the supplementation. 90 days you should really turn the corner or made it a few steps up the ladder so to speak. Yes, I feel a lot better. Then we start getting into more insidious things that could be in your environment. We don’t chase the mentality we still just being good health detectives. I’m not a person automatically would just pick a test like a mold test. I have some good screenings for it. There’s a nasal swab you could do for more things that’s pretty cheap. But I wouldn’t just run as a first-line. I just hate this idea, Ashley, it’s never worked for me anyway to put it that way. To try to guess what the problem is based on symptoms, remember we’re trying to get ways from that. Because people, walk-in from regular doctor, regular Naturopath you know I’ve got this traditionally reliable cluster of symptoms that sound like thyroid. Or traditionally reliable that sounds like chronic fatigue you known whatever it might be, “Oh, let’s run a test for that.” unfortunately, they find something that they say I’d the answer to your problem. It’s hyperthyroidism and the doctor would write a prescription, Naturopath would sell supplements, helping to get the test results in range. You might even get the symptoms to a bit but something there is going to come back or new set of symptoms occurs because you haven’t really sorted out the chaos upstream. When the chaos or new set of symptoms appear if you just say, “Now, it sounds like low testosterone, run that test and yes, so now you have a person, yes, it’s your low testosterone. Now you’re on your thyroid medicine and your testosterone, what’s next?” It’s a new cycle of trial and error. Unfortunately, a lot of people do with mold, they focus on that one things. They don’t really address the entire person. Including all the stressors. The mental-emotional, the physical trauma, bodies that are all banged up. That hidden I would call that a major contributor to metabolic chaos. Mold really sucks. That’s my medical diagnosis.

[01:31:57] Ashley James: Very technical.

[01:32:00] Reed Davis: Yes. We’re speaking big terms here.

[01:32:02] Ashley James: I heard that parasite testing could be a bit more complicated because parasites can hide in the body. How do you account for that?

[01:32:12] Reed Davis: Well, they do. It’s not just parasite, it’s bacteria they like to hang out together. If you go back to what I said about it, even if you find a bug if you think you’re just going to take something and kill that bug and return to normal it’s unlikely. There are called biofilms which is where they hang out together there’s what’s called comsensing. The bugs know that the other bugs are there and they start hanging out together. They start not interbreeding but that becomes fertile ground for them to replicate to grow and even to mutate like fungus mutates. You can get so called would be called normal spores and things but once it take hold it can become very invasive. Punch holes in your intestines for instance. It can get really bad. What we do generally again, this depends on the initial intake like it’s really important to take the history. We have our own intake forms of things we use. Make sure that our clients are filling out a good number of forms. It sounds like a lot of work but probably isn’t going to take more than 15 minutes per from each form, each form that we have. People threw out three or four forms. It’s a good investment in helping us to number one, take stock of where you are today. As a practitioner that’s very important. we don’t want them changing their mind about what their problem was 3 months down the road. Like, “Hey, we’ve been working on your migraines and now you said you’re complaining about your toenail are swollen.”  You’ve got to get a good history and make people stop and think where they’re at. You can grade those things too. We do that, that will have us then running labs and get people on the DRESS program and their problem start to fade away. We actually have a point system for those intake forms. Some might have 300 points or 90 days or 180 days, 6 months down the road. They’re down to like not very many points but everyone has some points in there what. So you got that which is both objective and subjective.

You got the lab work which is all objective. Periodly objective, it’s what’s really going on inside your body. Then you have progress being made. Let’s make a point here that no one sat at the top of the hill. I don’t know anyone with perfect health. I know everyone’s on a stairway towards it but I don’t know too many people that – I’ve arrived here I am on the top of the mountain but we’re all – some of us have more stairs to climb than others. We look up to the people who are sort of able to help us and guide us and we look down and we help those what more steps up we help people up. Like I personally, 66 years old. I’ve a very banged up body from sports, motorcycles and just surfing. Just things that I wrecked. Muscular skeletal mostly. Also during my 20s and 30s was exposed in a lot of chemicals in different profession. Different job I was in. I don’t know what exactly what did that to my liver. I’m always watching. I’m always working. Again, I have less stairs to climb than most of my clients and my students come along and same thing. We’re all just on a continuum of improving. I don’t know anyone at the top so just with that mentality, let’s look at what are the healing opportunities and what are the things that I can do and just I can answer more questions about the testing but I want to talk a little bit more about the DRESS program.

[01:36:12] Ashley James: Yes. We’ll definitely get into that. Absolutely. Before we do, I have one last question about labs and that lab companies. I’ve heard stories about how it can vary results can vary from lab to lab. Do you have one company you work with? Or do you have handful companies like Doctors Data for example? Or Great Plains labs? Do you have handful that you’re like, I really find that these labs are the best in terms of results or do you have one specific lab that is just the best? I’d love for you to shed a bit of light on that.

[01:36:49] Reed Davis: The answer is it depends on what you’re testing for. There’s no lab that’s a specialist in every kind of testing or for everything. They are companies all they do is genetic testing. That’s all they do. You can even just run the 23 in me and then do what’s that cheap and then you can run it through various software. There’s one called Prometheus that I like but there’s other. The hard thing about my job is that no stuff coming out all the time. It’s hard to be on top of every new discovery and research and things that are going on and half of them could be junk because there’s no end to the amount of money being spent in this industry. So I do my best to vet out things and there’s a company called Bio Health Laboratories. I’ve been using them for20 years because I think they do the best saliva testing for that HPA access stress profile. I think they’re the best. I mean the quality and the quality assurance. I’ve been working with them for 20 years and I’m actually clinical advisor on their clinical advisor team. Great Plains you mentioned them, they’re a great lab. I use them for the micro toxin testing. They also have a finger stick test for food sensitivities. It’s not the best food sensitivity test but there’s nothing else around it can be shipped anywhere in the world. You prick finger and you put drops of blood on the blotter and you send it in the company. It doesn’t have to be frozen or anything like that. It’s stable for a week in the mail would be okay. You get a rough idea of the foods you’re sensitive to, it helps fine-tune your diet. You mentioned Doctor’s Data. They’re a good lab. By the way, this bio laboratories does an excellent stool test for pathology. Is there other stuff you could run the stool test for? Yes. Bio health doesn’t run those other parts of the test. There’s DSL which is a good test. They do DNA testing on stool. So to answer your questions, it’s various labs depending on what you’re looking for.

[01:39:04] Ashley James: You’d want DNA lab testing on stool because you’re DNA testing not for human DNA? Your DNA testing for parasites? is that correct?

[01:39:11] Reed Davis: The bugs, yes.

[01:39:12] Ashley James: Okay.

[01:39:13] Reed Davis: Yes but the mere presence of their DNA this is why I like some other testing isn’t telling you really have virulent it is. When you run a stool test and you culture, they take the stool and they shake it up real good and they mix it with a couple of things and it becomes a puree and then they are able to put it in these Petri dishes. They could grow eight different dishes with different mediums or EGAR in each dish, put it in an incubator for a few days and see what grows. Depending on the medium, you get growing different pusses. If there’s little bit of pus or a lot of pus that could make it a difference in your individual assessment of that person and what they need to do next. Also microscopy. There’s sometimes just looking through these high-powered microscope just having a really good lab rat. That’s his or her job and she just sits there and looks for bugs or bug parts and that will fit. Sometimes a human being involved it’s very important. There’s various types of stool testing and DNA is branded about as the ultimate best because it’s looking for non-human material and by the way you can look for that same test looks for other markers that could be reflecting how well you’re digesting things, how much pancreatic enzymes you have. There’s a lot to skin the cat. Once you’re trained in the basics and you can start to look in the finer details and individualized the labs you choose for each individual person. Again, it’s never about the test results, really it’s whose test results are these. That’s part of the methodology and mentality. Yes, I’ve compared a lot of labs like oxford biomedical for food sensitivity testing, they run what’s called the mediator release test. Unfortunately, it’s not covered by insurance and most of this isn’t because even though that test has been used for 25 years. It’s still called experimental by insurance companies. Why? Why because they don’t want to pay for it. Remember I told you about the miracle case Susan about depression and she’s got the hives for 2 years and she has been on this anti-inflammatory that made her gain 40pounds. That’s the test I ran and found her problem. Now I ran it on every person. Do I always hit home runs out of the park by running that test? No, because people are going to have food sensitivities and it’s the major factor in their problems like migraines. I’ve seen migraines gone but no other people the food sensitivities aren’t that big of contributor to the metabolic chaos. They’re minor contributor to the metabolic chaos that is producing the symptoms downstream.

For one little boy I’ve got to tell you, this is way back in the day. A lady was in for chiropractic and we’re talking your own health says, “I just wonder if you could help my boy, Billy. He’s 9 or 10 he’s always in trouble at school. They want to put them on drugs for ADD.” They have teachers diagnosing in the classroom. They want to put him on drugs for ADD because instead of paying attention to the teacher, he’s paying attention to the gardeners working outside or something. It’s telling something with this little boy. Anyway, we just did that test on that boy, got him off certain foods. Some of them are obvious. The highly colored and sugared cereals and all that stuff. Guess what, in two weeks, the principal of the school tracked me down and said, “What did you put Billy on?” “Listen, I didn’t put him on anything.” I ran a test got him off crap and now he’s a better-behaved kid. Things like that to you and I Ashely, that’s just common sense but it’s not always common practiced. That’s why I love labs. They just get into the degree that finding is contributing to metabolic chaos is to a degree to choose full in reversing the metabolic chaos and creating order especially in that hormone, immune, digest, and detoxification and so on and those areas.

[01:43:50] Ashley James:  I love it. I’d love to know you mentioned earlier sometimes we’ll never find the root cause but we’ll be able to help the person. For example, my son who was having asthma, he’s so healthy and he eats so healthy and I’m thinking, “What’s going on?” We changed pediatricians. We went form, of course, naturopathic pediatricians. We changed pediatricians and the one we went to, the new one goes her first after being hospitalized twice for asthma. She goes, “Why don’t we do food testing?” That’s her first response like, “We should be testing him for allergies.” I’m like, “Wow. Thank you.” I brought it up with the first pediatrician and she was like, “Well, you know that’s down the road.” I’m like, “What is going on?” she started telling me that it’s normal for kids to be sick and to have asthma and it’s just like weird. It’s what some doctors will say and sure enough he’s allergic to 7 foods, garlic, fish, almost every single kind of fish like it will set him off. Eggs, avocado, things that we would eat every day. Like he would eat avocado, ate it every day, garlics and everything. A handful of other foods. Things that we also would avoid like Wheat, dairy and oats. He was allergic to and if he had any exposure to these food, he’d have asthma and dust mites. Dust mites are easy to manage but these like garlic is really hard. All of his food is made at home, cooked from scratch or I totally have to be diligent with looking at the ingredients but I’m wondering so now he doesn’t have any asthma by the way but if has any exposure, he starts to get a little wheezy and then we go, “Okay. Now we got to be diligent.” But that’s if there’s an early warning system. His body lets us know, he starts coughing he does a little bit of wheezing. We really make sure we vacuum twice a day. That kind of thing. Make sure that his food is 100% clean in case he accidentally ate something contaminated with eggs or with garlic. I’d love to know, what causes people to have these food allergies? Like you said, we may not ever get to that level of root cause but in your testing, do you see something that says like do you see that “Oh, here’s leaky gut, and that’s what causes.” Do you see that there is evidence for something even deeper than food sensitivities that causes them?

[01:46:25] Reed Davis: Yes. Again, there are inborn errors in metabolism. Their weak links in metabolism much of them are acquired but some are inborn and there’s this, you just have to use the word milieu of factors. That why I use the phrase metabolic chaos and the root cause exactly may not be known or discoverable. It’s too far upstream. There’s not a test. The test sometimes is getting off of food and seeing if you feel better. That’s a really good one.

[01:47:04] Ashley James: Yes, because there’s no side effects.

[01:47:07] Reed Davis: Yes and there’s no diagnosis in the food sensitivity. I coached football for 15 years. Youth football. And I can remember this is again, early on which made me so proud and know that I was hitting in the right direction. I didn’t have it all figured out. Same test, I have a kid, the mom always come up the boy “He can’t practice today on Wednesday.” I said, “Well, he’s not going to play Saturday then. You know if he doesn’t practice he won’t know the play. He had to sit out Saturday.” and she’s like, “Oh but he’s got asthma.” I said, “Well, what are you doing about that?” “Oh, he has an inhaler and he takes his inhaler.” “But we don’t allow those on the football field.” and I just “Did you ran him tested for food sensitivities or anything like that? This kid within a very short period of time never had asthma again. I still see that kid around time sometimes. Now he’s a big strapping grown man with no asthma. It was so miraculous she had her other kids tested. Like, “I want to test my whole family.” “Oh, yes. Maybe That’s a good idea.” There’s this ways to be it’s a mentality that I think we’ve covered pretty well here. Always looking for the hidden contributor to metabolic chaos and to the degree that the root causes are discoverable we can work on it. If it’s not discoverable if it’s just too hidden, we can still have an effect upon it, by getting what are the healing opportunities? What healing opportunities can we identify and my systems based on just years and years and years of observations. If you checked the hormones, immune system, digestion, detoxification pathways, energy production, which is I tell you about in a minute when we go to diet. Then of course again, this idea of autonomic balance. These six things that hidden stressors and dysfunctions are answering almost every case that comes in. Again, there are additional work to be done. Sometimes but they’re a little less common. So most people, all the common things that people complain about today that generally considered chronic degenerative diseases or conditions that’s our wheelhouse.

[01:49:39] Ashley James: I love that. And it’s such a big wheelhouse. Oh my gosh, pretty much the whole population can come see you and get results.

[01:49:49] Reed Davis: A guy’s called me up and he wanted to know if he should take the course. He’s a practitioner and he goes “I don’t know if I’ll find enough people to work on? Will it be enough people to work on? “ I said, “Where do you live?” He goes, “New Jersey.” I said. “No, there’s not enough sick people in New Jersey.” What a joke. There’s just you never going to ran out of customers. They’re going to pass by the way we have FDN practitioners spent the least amount in marketing because we get results and we all have referral-based practices. Too much long to talk at least about the D in the DRESS program and anything else you want. But diet is really one of the biggest questions. How many diets are there out there? A Hundred? A thousand? I don’t know. There’s no one of them that is right for every person. I guarantee you that there’s no one diet that’s right for everybody. What in the hell do you do?

By the way, this was something I spent a long time trying to overcome this question because I knew people had to go, you’re made of food how do I get people to eat right? I started off. It just happened to be the diet of the day in 1999 when I started this was Atkins diet. Everybody was on Atkins diet. Well, it’s making other people sick. Why is that? I want to know. This person does the Atkins and oh man, losing weight, feeling more energy and doing great. Another person’s like, “I got sick. I had no energy. I didn’t lose a single pound matter of fact, my skin flared up and I felt worse.” Why is that? Well, it’s because we’re all unique individuals with different, I’ll use this phrase here metabolic types. A metabolic type is simply, meeting your genetic requirements. We’re all from somewhere and if we all could go back, 500 generations which is a long time ago, you probably find your correct metabolic type and diet that goes along with it. If you’re Mediterranean, it makes sense. If you’re people today having the paleo diet which they think means eating more meat. Well, if you’re from the Anglo-Saxon, heritage eastern Europe and this kind of places where 500 generations ago, there was lots of hunting and gathering on and your people lived on deer and rabbits and muskox, mammoth or whatever. That’s just all about all they ate along with some local flora. Seasonal plant material and you ate just that and that was your heritage wasn’t mixed with any other heritage you probably would do pretty good from that. What if you’re from the island of Borneo. That diet would be horrible for you. There isn’t just one diet that is right for everyone but there is a way to discover it. There’s some principles involved in that way to eat that are really, really critical that I earned. I think it’s really important since I have the opportunity to share. There are things you need to know. You have macronutrients, protein, fats and carbohydrates. They’re the fuel that your cells burn for energy so that cell can do his job. The cells don’t have to be taught anything. They know what to do, they have innate intelligence, the same intelligence by the way that keeps the earth in alignment with the sun and the sun in alignment with the rest of the universe and everything like that. There is an innate intelligence that hangs everything together everything happening all at one time and you yourselves know that stuff. They know if their brain cells, muscle cell, adrenal gland cell of whatever. If you can fuel them properly which requires the right mixture of the macronutrients, the protein, fat, and carbohydrates.

You’ve heard of protein types and you’ve heard of Carb types and there are such things that people want to know, they’re called mix types. It had to do with the oxidative rate. The rate at which rate in quality and quantity of energy being produced on a cellular level. Energy is produced on a cellular level and it’s mostly dictated by the fat, carb and protein ratios. You can dial it in almost perfectly. There’d be some variations based on the time of the month. For women, seasonal variations for some people. Otherwise you can really dial in the correct fuel mixture for you because if it was just simple as either way your ancestors did 500 years ago, that was not available and guess what, people 12,000 years ago started roaming the world and we’re all just really interbred. These very few pure of this that or anything except of native tribes and they’ve been studied. A really big thing is protein, carb and fat ratios. Do you kind of fill me on that? 

[01:55:23] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. I’ve looked at that in terms of how to get better results for people and you would change the ratios if someone was an athlete and wanted to get a different performance versus a woman who wants to lose weight that’s less active for example. You can adjust and play with those ratios, the gram of carbohydrates, fats, and protein to make the fuel mixture that your body wants. If you’re a sports car or a little minivan. Your metabolic needs are you were saying and your genitive pre-disposition but also the quality of a carbohydrates matter. Quality of protein, whether the protein is from something highly processed like whey or meat versus a protein broccoli. Just different quality of proteins and all of the nutrients that come with that food. We need to take into account as well. We need to know the highest quality of the fuel right? And the ratios are really important. But I love that you’re talking about getting those ratios in a healthy mixture for the body and not being extremist with this 80% or 90% fat diet sort of 100% meat diets where the ratios are way out of balance. Maybe in a short term someone could get good results. Anyone can lose 10 pounds changing their diets. It kind of shock the body, shock the metabolism but it’s what you see in the long-term, and I like that you’re looking at subjective and objective by looking in at how the person is feeling in their own skin. And the labs. Because over time you’re going to track a diet and see if you’re getting the results you want or not.

[01:57:22] Reed Davis: Well, that’s really well put. Let’s take little bit step further with this energy produced in a cellular level based on the carb, fat, protein ratios. We’re going to assume automatically that you’re eating really good high-quality food. That your beef or whatever your meat is organic. That your fruits and vegetables are organic as you can get. Not that they have so much extra nutrition in those fruits and vegetables but at least you’re not getting the herbicide, pesticide, and rodenticides all the different. You want to keep poisons to a minimum. This is what people start to write down in terms of “how do I know if that’s the right fuel mixture for me?” Number one, you’re going to be satiated. You’re going to feel satisfied. Your meal will feel like the right kind of the meal. You can start with breakfast, you can start with lunch, any day of the week you want. Just try to measure about an hour and a half or even two hours later, if you had a reasonably sized meal. What is your satiation? It is the principle of satiety.

If you’re not fully satisfied, if something’s missing, if you’re craving something then we would want to adjust ratios a little bit. No, I’m not feeling satisfied, it’s missing something. That’s not satiation. Satiation becomes a really important factor. Again, every breakfast and hour and a half, 90 minutes later, check three things. One the satiety, satiation versus cravings and hunger or something. Assuming you had a real meal in that. The next thing is energy. You need really good high-quality strong energy from your food. If it’s fuel for the cells and they’re producing energy to do their job you should feel energized and energetic. You should have enough energy to do the work or play that you plan to do until the next meal comes along. Which in case, by the way, should you feel a little bit hungry before the next meal, your blood sugar could be checked and things like that. Satiation is one, should feel satisfied. An hour and a half, two hours later you should still feel good energy. I’m not talking about the kind that you get from coffee where you feel kind of nervous to even do something but you feel tired underneath. Not that kind of energy really strong solid good energy, the third thing, these are worth writing down if you’re going to try to adjust your carb protein and fat ratios. The next one is sense of well-being. Believe it or not. You should feel good. If you feel really grumpy for not reasons that a sign that your meal may need some tweaking in terms of protein. If you’re grumpy and someone just cut you off at traffic or got fight at work, that’s kind of okay but if everything’s going wrong why do I feel grumpy or irritated or one of these negative emotions. Lack of sense of well-being in anyway, those three things are really critical and that requires you a bit of self-aware and pay attention and maybe make some notes so the next day you can adjust the ratio. There’s a lot more to diet but that’s some really critical factors. Again, assuming your food is high quality you’re not eating crap out of bags or boxes all the time. You want to eat real food. There’s stuff that’s on the outside the grocery store. I mean on the edges. Stay out of the aisles.

[02:00:04] Ashley James: Right. Stay out of the aisles. Go shop around the perimeter of the grocery store absolutely. I love it. Very cool. There’s so much to this but you make it simple and it’s a delight learning from you and I’d love to have you back on the show. Because we just really scratched the surface, I’d love to have you back to dive in. I know my listeners are going to love today’s interview. I know they’ll love to have you back. I want to make sure that people know more about your course. I’m going to take your course. I’m really interested and I know my listeners are right there with me. For those who want to check out the course, they can go to learntruehealth.com/FDN like as in functional diagnostic nutrition. So learntruehealth.com/FDN. Of course, that link is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Tell us a bit about your course. I believe when they go to that link they’ll get a discount to your program. That’s what it says and I’d love for people to know a bit about the program. It’s self-paced. It’s my understanding. Because we’re all busy. It’s online it’s self-paced. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

[02:02:18] Reed Davis: Oh sure. It’s quite a robust course as I mentioned earlier in the program. I’ve interviewed every person that ever took it. It started as a 2-day workshop and that was 11 years ago July so long time ago. I’ve just expanded and expanded what more can I do? What can I do to make it better? And every person gets asked and I’ve had a lot of honest people who told me “What if you did this? What if you did that?” I take all of their advice and I reiterated the course. Now it’s a full-blown course and first of all obviously the labs, all the investigative processes. The hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification. I teached them the anatomy physiology and biochemistry. For those who already know some of those stuff. It’s a great review. For those who doesn’t know anything I speak in very plain language and teach you what you need to know. There’s no fluff or frills or fill in this course. It’s all practical stuff. I’ve been told by people with masters programs and program said this is the most practical thing I’ve ever done ever. Because it’s just nitty-gritty stuff, all the physiology and stuff for around the lab work. You truly understand what you are testing, what are the hormones and other markers and how to interpret them based on an individual where we focused is on the case studies and how this is an individual test results. It’s not to treat the paper. That’d be easy to teach. I can teach you that in 10 minutes.

This is again, a robust course to take so it’s about 6 months or more to get through. I’ve had people do it in less but they must’ve had nothing else to do. It’s all that. Then, of course, it’s going to be case studies and interpretation. Working with individuals and yourself. You’re going to run those labs on yourself. I pay for two of them and as part of the course, I’m paying your way some of that internal investigation on you. You could take it just for your own health if you want to. That alone would be worth the price of admission. I’ll teach you all that and then I teach you all the protocols. The D-R-E-S-S program. We just ran into diet a fraction of what you might want to know. It’s how to get the right diet for each individual and the rest program and I teach a lot about sleep that’s really important and about the exercise. You just said some people are like drag racers others were like Volkswagens. The same there is no one exercise program that works perfect for everybody. You’ve got to know some things.

You might not be a personal trainer actually put them through these things. You actually teach your client or yourself the right way to figure it out. The diet, the rest, the exercise, the stress reductions is one of the biggest modules because there’s so much varieties and the types of stressors were affected by. Some of then I go back to my early days of the environmental work I used to do and what’s in the environment, other parts where food sensitivities other part that showed the things around your house. As a matter of fact, for people who just want to taste of how to deal with that area in their life, go to environmentalworkinggroup.com. It might be .org, environmentalworkinggroup. We get a lot of stuff about the environmental toxins and pollutants for them. So it’s diet, rest, exercise, stress, reduction. How to asses an individual in various stressors and there of course supplements. I don’t own my own line which I think is to my credit because I know I’m leaving a lot of money on the table not having my own line but I just have avoided that but in all about supplements I teach you what you need to know to support the body, to stimulate the immune system, to substitute what’s missing from food. For god’s sake. These antioxidants and essential fatty acids that we talked about the vitamins and minerals. That’s really important stuff. It’s now all the lab work and assessment and how to work with individuals and yourself. It all the DRESS protocol. What fixes everything? How do you fix every cell tissue system in the body at once? That’s the DRESS modules and then, of course, there’s the business modules like how to do this for a living. How to work with people? How to intake? How to make sure you’re working with a client is going to be successful? Guess what? Don’t let them hire you. I teach you actually how to select people who are going to be successful and make a good living doing this, doing the good in the world that all of us want to do.

[02:07:03] Ashley James: I love it. It sounds amazing. I took the IIN course. I really appreciate it because its focus is on the emotional mental health of doing health coaching. Of course, you learn the dietary theories of a hundred different diets but you don’t learn labs you don’t learn supplements you don’t learn nutrition. I’ve been mentored by Naturopaths for the last 8 years. so I’ve learned a great big deal about nutrition and supplements but what I loved about IIN’s course is a lot of it is the emotional mental work. I see that someone who’s graduated from IIN as a health coach would love to take your program because like you said there’s no fluff it’s a hundred percent everything you want to learn to then go out and work with clients. People who have never worked with clients could take your course and do a great job and people who do currently work with clients like IIN graduates. It would complement their continued education so well. I think it’s a wonderful complement. I’m very excited to take your program. Thinking about the cost of your program and thinking about the cost of seeing a functional medicine practitioner, for example, it’s about the same.

To see someone for six months or a year to work on a problem I could pay someone else. I could find local practitioner maybe graduate for your course and I could pay them and do the testing and pay them to look at it and asses me and help me figure out what I want to do. Or I could pay to take your course to learn it myself to do the work on me and be about the same amount of money but I would have that skill set for the rest of myself to continue helping myself for the rest of my life. You know some people are just at a point where maybe they don’t have mental clarity. I remember when I was very sick with chronic adrenal fatigue. I did not have the capacity to take a course. I was just at that point, where I just wanted someone to help me and maybe people they just want to find a practitioner that’s taking your course and go and work with them. For those who want to sort of be taught how to fish instead of just be given a fish, they have that skill set for the rest of their life then taking your courses is absolutely amazing because in the long run it’s going to save them so much money years to come they can apply these lessons then their selves and their family and loved ones. Then have that background potentially doing that as a career and adding that to their repertoire. Wonderful. I love it. Is it audio? Video? Tell us a little bit about the format of experiencing your course?

[02:09:55] Reed Davis: Well, it’s online for the most part but here are quite a number of head to heads, one on ones with mentors. Some of my best students that’s how I’m grown by the way from the original two-day workshop at 19 people, we now have close to 3,000 that we’ve trained. The course reiterated over and over again. The latest in relation is quite remarkable if I do say so myself. So you’re going to watch the lessons, you can download them to your computer though so you don’t have to be online. You could watch them on a bus or on a plane as long as you’re on your computer. There’s turnouts I have a I think a 180 different forms I give you including the legal documents and onboarding things. Ways to complete the assessment, develop the DRESS program and apply it to a person. The coaching method. You mentioned IIN which is a good school and just every other health coaching program or institute whatever it might be out there. There’s tons of now. I remember there was two or three so we’re one of the earliest been around the longest but there’s some good ones out there but I would consider them to be if they were a bachelor’s program, we would be the master’s program. We are the next level but I break it down in such a way and again I said there’s such a thorough for those who did know a few things it will be a great review for others who hadn’t been exposed you’d be good for everybody.

The only prerequisites are that you want to help yourself and others. You’re willing to walk the talk. If you want to help people and you want to walk the talk set an example, it’s an amazing opportunity to learn. If you only work for yourself and your family, it’ll be worth the price of admission. The fact that you could turn around and recoup your investment in a very, very short period of time if you follow my business model, it’s pretty remarkable and last but not the least, it’s a community now. It took on a life of its own years ago. Even the first-class there’s some alumni that still are they’re still doing things. The alumni group which I formed, officially we have an official alumni group we started two and half years ago. There’s hundreds of members. These are people who do this seriously for a living. Like we have convention every year now where we hang out and share. It’s really remarkable. I’ve been told by some of my mastermind people don’t start a tribe and not lead it. I’m here for the rest of my life to lead the charge. In my way just like Ashley is in her way, we all know what the goal is. It’s for health and wellness and happiness of the planet. If you go back to that quote from Thomas Edison, doctors aren’t getting there. They’re not evolving. As a matter of fact, many are getting more interested than just diagnose treat model. We have to present something to go side by side with that. The people really want that really get somewhere they want to go.

[02:13:10] Ashley James: I love it. I’m so excited. My listeners love reaching out to me and telling me how it goes for them especially when they become a health coach. Several have become health coaches as a result of listening to my show and hearing my journey through IIN. I’ve had three people email me saying that they were going to become MDs and they quit med school and they became Naturopaths instead. Because of my shows, they found their true calling. Which is so cool that people are finding their true calling through listening. I’m really looking forward to hearing in the coming weeks and months from my listeners who take your program. Go to learntruehealth.com/FDN and take your program and then have an amazing experience and then they’ll reach out to me and say, “This is how it affect my life. Thank you.” I love that they let me know how it went for them. I’m really looking forward to hearing the stories because your program is results-based and it’s all about results. It’s why you do all the labs. So that you could move the needle. So you can get results. It’s not just so you can prescribe a drug. Right?

[02:14:25] Reed Davis: Exactly. Yes, and the community is amazing it is what made us what we would call today group sourced. If your feedback from people is, “Well, that was great. What if you do this, what if you do that.” You actually have people listening including me. Where else can we take this? There’s new technology come on board all the time too. There’re new labs, new parts, new things that we can play with like the big thing today is wearables. The wrist bands and the rings and different things. There’s always something new that fits right in that I can’t be the eyes and the all-seeing. It takes a group to do something like this. To make it a true movement. I hope we get some great feedback even great ideas. That’s even better.

[02:15:16] Ashley James: I love it. Wonderful. My listeners have always been so impressed by them that they are a people that take action. They’re action-oriented people so I’m looking forward to you hearing the wonderful feedback as am I. definitely listeners go to learntruehealth.com/FDN to look into it. See more information and see if it’s right for you. I’m really excited to take your course as well and you know, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a hundred percent of the population knew this information? Could you imagine a world where everyone knew the labs that they could take to better themselves? If everyone knew like, “Wow. I have this symptom maybe I need to look at this direction” How self-sufficient would we be? It’s a big threat to the companies that don’t want us to be self-sufficient.

[02:16:17] Reed Davis: Yes, I think it’s called empowerment but it comes with self-awareness first and having a space in your own head or being to be at peace. You’ve got to know what that looks like and set goals for yourself. That’s what health coaches supported to do but it has to being with us. Again, the pre-requisites are you want to help others and you be willing to walk the talk. We are pretty self regroup, pretty high level of consciousness among most. We make money but we’re not in it for the money. It’s just so rewarding.

[02:16:58] Ashley James: Wonderful. Excellent. Thank you so much for coming into the show. Please come back. I’d love to dive deeper. There’s so many topics that you have to teach and I’d love to dive deeper. It’s been wonderful having you on the show.

[02:17:09] Reed Davis: Perfect. Thanks, Ashley. Happy to be here. Glad to come back anytime.

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Spiritual Healing In The Real World

https://www.learntruehealth.com/spiritual-healing-real-world

Highlights:

• Properly letting go of the physicalness of a soul.
• Ashley shares her healing session with Eric.
• Possession and exorcisms in the real world.
• Negative thought forms and energies.
• The addiction to oil and meat

In this episode, Eric Thorton talks about how the remains of our departed loved ones affect our overall health, and how to properly dispose their physical memories. He will also discuss negative thought forms, possession, and exorcism. Ashley also describes her amazing healing session with Eric and how she overcomes her “self-talk” that’s fighting her will to be on a healthy track.

Intro

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re in for a big treat. Eric Thornton is coming back on the show today. I’ve interviewed him several times, if you want to listen to the interviews I did with him before, you can go to www.learntruehealth.com and search Eric Thorton in the search bar for the past episodes. He is a spiritual healer. And when I set out to start the podcast Learn True Health I knew that health was not just physical, that it was emotional, mental, spiritual, and energetic. So we have to address all aspects of life. Now, I thought when I first started interviewing Eric, that it might be too out there, like I might turn people off because it was, you know, we’re talking about stuff that’s not in the mainstream. We’re talking about spirituality and energy healing and stuff that some people might… I don’t know, I was afraid that it wouldn’t land well, and boy, did I have nothing to worry about. I have had a flood of listeners tell me that their favorite interviews of all 300 plus interviews has been the ones with Eric Thorton. I’ve had listeners right in our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group to tell me that Eric Thorton’s interviews change their life, completely shifted their entire world, has helped them to understand their life and the problems that they’re facing in a whole new way. So as I kept getting this wonderful feedback from you, I was encouraged to keep having Eric on the show. And I’m really glad that he’s being well received. Because what I’ve learned from him has made a big difference in my life. And today in this interview, you’re going to hear my experience of my first session working with him in which he helped me to resolve a major life issue that I had since I was nine that it was running my life. And so you get to hear about my session.

[2:16] Ashley James: I am very thankful that I have this platform. I built this platform to share this with you, to provide a way for you to have access to healers, like Eric. So in one episode, you’re going to hear from a doctor on how to reverse diabetes. And in another episode, you’ll hear about how to balance hormones and another you might hear about how to lower stress or increase sleep. And then in this one you’re going to hear about how to protect yourself energetically, how to rid yourself of energies that are unwanted, what to do with the remains of loved ones, and why we should do certain things with ashes or with burials to support our overall health; emotionally, mentally and spiritually. So we get into some pretty interesting topics today. And we also get into some physical healing around diet and nutrition. And so it’s all just great stories. Just know that you’re going to get a variety of topics when you listen to the Learn True Health podcast. I urge you to join the Facebook group. If you haven’t already, please come and join the Learn True Health Facebook group just search Learn True Health in Facebook. Because every week we’re doing giveaways, we’re answering health questions, listeners love communicating with each other in the community. And it’s been such a positive experience to hear from all the listeners and sharing their stories and their healing journeys, and asking questions and learning from each other. So come learn from the entire Learn True Health community by joining the Learn True Health Facebook group. As I was editing today’s show to post it, I got a little hungry, and I snapped on my favorite snack. And I want to tell you that if you haven’t tried EnergyBits yet, you’re missing out and you’ve got to get some. I interviewed Catharine Arnston several times, I believe it’s four times I’ve had her on the show now. She’s an expert in algae. And it’s amazing. It’s a crop. So you can’t really call it a supplement. But it’s these little M&M sized tablets that you chew. And actually it does taste quite good. Other brands don’t taste good. But her brand does taste good. And I chewed and as I was chewing on them, I thought I gotta make sure that you guys know, if you haven’t already listened to the interviews with Catharine Arnston or learned about Energy Bits, you definitely need to know about them, you can go to www.energybits.com and use the coupon code LTH to get 20% off. Buy a bag of EnergyBits, they deliver an amazing amount of pure protein that your body readily absorbs. So within minutes of chewing them and swallowing, you get a boost of energy and there’s no caffeine, it’s just you’re getting an energy source, it’s pure. So get some Energy Bits, which are the spirulina or the Recovery Bits, which are the chlorella and Recovery Bits are the ones that will actually detox the body in heavy metals. So listen to the episodes with Catharine Arnston and go to www.learntruehealth.com, type in algae in the search bar, or you can type in EnergyBits in the search bar. And listen to those past interviews if you haven’t already, and try some Energy Bits and some Recovery Bits for yourself. Because they’re amazing. I eat them every day. Listeners in the Facebook group are posting, if you follow in our Facebook group, you’ll see listeners say “I love them and I eat them every day.” And it makes such a big difference. So many people are saying that in the Facebook group, I thought you know, if you haven’t joined the Facebook group yet, you might not have seen that our community is saying how much they just love EnergyBits and the Recovery Bits, and that they do notice a difference. So give them a try. They’re fantastic snack that will totally take away your hunger and increase your energy and also provide you with minerals and vitamins and detox your body. So many good things. And when you go to www.energybits.com, be sure to use the listener coupon code LTH that gives you 20% off and you can use it every time you place an order. That’s LTH coupon code for 20% off at www.energybits.com. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this information with your friends and family. Please come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and be part of our community. I can’t wait to meet you there. Have yourself a fantastic rest your day and enjoy today’s interview.

[7:07] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 375.

We’re back here with Eric Thorton and not much time has passed for the listeners. Because I just recently published our last interview. But for me, a lot of things have happened because I had my session with you.

[7:37] Eric Thorton: It was good.

[7:39 ] Ashley James: And we’re going to talk a bit about that. And we’re going to talk about a few other really interesting topics. So for those who’ve never heard Eric, I definitely encourage you to go back and listen to the other episodes where we were discussing karma and spiritual health and how that all of this cultivating spiritual health cascades into developing physical health and mental health and emotional health. And so we’ve covered that over a period of several interviews. And I’ve gotten great feedback from a lot of listeners saying they love learning from you. I’ve had a few listeners say it’s been a life changing, hearing what you’ve said, really helped make their lives make sense. And so we’re just going to continue to have Eric on as we dive deeper into the spiritual topics. And hopefully everyone can find more clarity and the answers that they’re looking for. Because as we go to heal our body physically, many listeners have physical ailments, we need to look at emotional health, mental health, spiritual health, energetic health, and how every aspect of our life contributes to either physically being ill, or physically being well, and building ourselves back up. And so that’s what we do with Eric, when we come and learn more about the spiritual realm. So welcome back.

[9:03] Eric Thorton: Thank you. The spiritual realm, well I’m happy to do this, because my purpose in life is to teach people about the soul and how it affects us energetically, mentally, physically, etc. And that’s my goal in life. So whatever people can gain from it maybe can offer a little bit of non biased, maybe a little bit of non bias because I’m not against religion, but I don’t promote it. I’m not against the New Age, but I don’t promote it. I’m stuck and I’m caught in a bridge between the two. And it’s very grounding. And we try to make it logic, we try to make it understandable instead of a mystery in the work we do. And that’s why people, it often change their life, because it’s like, “Oh, that’s what that means.” So if you’re a religious person, we can actually help you, if you love that, help you have a better walk with your religion. And if you’re not, we hope you have a better life, a better walk has non religious. So there’s no judgment here in that respect. So everything we do, everything I say to people is to help explain who they are, what they are, why they’re here, how it’s affecting their body, what that’s all for. And we look at everything that happens to the body, to the soul, everything to look as the learning experience. Because the education of the soul is the purpose of life, the soul bears repeating, the soul can’t taste a strawberry, it can’t be male or female. Yeah, those are animal things. And it comes here to experience, it comes to the human – ours type sold us to a human body to experience these things. And to gain that compassion from having to have to go through the processes that we as our animal goes through, over time it gives you a god like compassion and love for all species. It’s like you got an older soul person, they’re going to love animals, they may not own a half a lot of them, they still love them, or someone who’s younger, so they can eat them, you know, and abuse them on the way. Someone that’s in between maybe wants them taken care of better before they eat them. It’s not wrong to eat them. It’s just how we deal with it, that’s wrong. But anyway, the purpose why I’m doing this is just to help people get a different perspective, that maybe make sense for them. And then the healing sessions are to help people heal such as yourself, of things that drive us in a way that we don’t understand, because the medicine men and women are not part of our lives anymore. So like with your healing session, you know, things changed for you. And they of course let you talk about that. But this is common. Things change at this different level and it relieves stress. And just by relieving stress changes how the body deals with life. And if a person is being compelled by something, causing them a tremendous amount of stress, their body can’t cleanse itself. Their body can’t repair itself well, it changes your immune system, it changes your biochemical function. And if you can just relieve the stressor, things start to change all on their own. So as you’ll see my website it says I’m an exorcist. I am. Exorcist means energy removal. It implies all these drama from TV and movies. But there can be a little drama. But most the time it’s not, if you do it with full sight, full hearing and full knowledge. Because then there’s no argument, there’s no guessing. It’s just there you see it, you experience it, you can remove it. So anyway, that’s why I like doing this, is to help get that out. So tell me about your experience.

[13:16] Ashley James: Well, yeah. Before I do, I want clarification for you. You said newer souls will just eat meat and might abuse animals, medium souls start to think what is humane treatment for animals and then old souls, souls that have had more experience in incarnations – they want to become vegetarian or vegan, they want animals treated properly, and they don’t want to kill them for sustenance. But then you said it’s not wrong to eat animals. Can you elaborate on that? I know we talked about this in a different context, but this idea of creating that wrongness or that guilt, right? To have people feel a sense of wrongness or guilt. Can you just explain why and I know you’re a vegetarian yourself, but can you explain why it isn’t negative to eat animals as you were pointing out?

[14:21] Eric Thorton: Well, energetically, it’s not negative to eat the animal, if everything has a proper balance. So if we’re going out, and let’s say a hunter wants to get some meat. If he goes out, and he or she goes out and kills an animal properly, doesn’t use a bow and arrow where they run around for 10 hours or two or three days dying, they shoot them, they’d shoot them properly. The animal is biochemically in better condition for eating because it doesn’t have all that adrenaline and all that other stuff going on. But you’ve honored the animal by taking its life swiftly. And animals are a lower species and all lower species on every planet in the universe are subject to being used by the higher species in many different ways. You know, we unfortunately use elephants for example for many different purposes. I don’t know if people eat them or not. But I would expect if they were desperate enough. So we use them in many ways. And it’s fine if you’re honoring the animal. If you’re abusing the animal in any way shape or form, it changes them biochemically. But it also changes the way you digest them, the way you use them. Now meat itself, as we get older, our bodies can’t tolerate it because it acidifies the body. Not going to go into that whole thing right now. But it does as everybody knows, when your body gets acid, you can grow things that you don’t want to grow, called cancer. And if you keep your pH higher, you will not grow as many cancers. And I’m sure you’ve had people on talking about pH because that’s a very important part of physical health. And so as we age, we can’t tolerate meat well because of that factor takes a long time to digest, and it puts acid in our system. That being said, if you have an abused animal, it tastes different. It digests completely different. My family are a bunch of sensitive. So I mentioned in this episode we had with chicken that we got that was organic from Whole Foods. I bought two chickens. And we were eating meat then. And some of my kids telling me and I don’t have a problem with it. It’s just not okay for me anymore because of my age. But these chickens were organic, free range, everything you can possibly do to be the most natural it can be from a supermarket. And I just cooked it up their favorite way and served it. And literally, the kids were pushing it around the plate. And they always love to eat it before. They were just kind of pushing it around the plate. And then I took a leg and the leg was broken. So I looked at the other leg, the leg was broken. So that my kids were picking up on that abuse. And I had not blessed the animal for giving it life. Its life for our sustenance, I hadn’t taken away in the prayer is supposed to, in your intention with an animal in your intention or prayer, you thank it, by thanking it you’re removing the drama, the drama and the trauma. And so it comes in more neutrally. Most people don’t even think of doing that. And so I thought well, this is a good experiment, because I had another chicken from the same batch. So we literally threw away the chicken, we couldn’t eat it. One bite my stomach’s turned because we’re sensitive to that type of abuse. And so in the garbage it went two weeks later, I took out the other chicken that had been frozen, so it wasn’t as good. As far as you know, when you freeze me it’s not as good as when it’s fresh. And I cooked it up the exact same way. Blessed it remove the trauma and the drama. They ate it like they didn’t even think about it and both legs were still broken. So the circumstance of the death of the animal is huge in the way we process it and digest it. Whether we’re sensitive to it or not, it still is happening. It’s all energy. So if you have all that negativity, you know, you watch the Cowspiracy, why do they even do this to the animals? You know, I’m watching them lock the tail off of an animal before it goes in to get shot. It has to stand there while they lock the tail off and it screams, you’re getting in all of that from the food. And plants, don’t get me wrong plants have life. But they don’t have suffering. That’s a mammal, an animal thing. Plants – they die, yes, but they don’t have suffering. So people say, well I eat plants because well there’s no soul. No, there are souls in plants, but they don’t have the nerves and the suffering. And so when you pick a plant, the soul leaves. It’s like if I cut down a tree, I asked the soul to leave before we cut down the tree and it goes okay, and it goes into seedling or something, the energy of that life force. It doesn’t have a problem. And so when you’re eating a plant, you don’t have the drama and the trauma period. It’s not there. And while you eat the animal it can. And that is a problem for the human body. So it damaged me. So now I don’t eat it. But I’m not a vegan extremist. It’s what a body needs. And ultimately, as we age, we all need to alkaline our bodies, period. And that’s the best way to do it, is to eliminate your meat.

[20:45] Ashley James: Can you see souls like when you said you cut down a tree or you pick the plants, can you see the soul leave or if you’ve watched an animal die, or a human dies, you see souls leave?

[20:57 ] Eric Thorton: Yes, I do. For example, when you talk to trees, you hear people talking to trees, you’re talking to their monad – the sum total of all their knowledge, of all of that species of knowledge. So when it leaves it’s quite dramatic. When that soul leaves I see it, there’s a tint change. And the tree will sit there and start to look unhealthy immediately. And like when you pick a flower, it takes so long for it to wither. Well, trees are the same thing. And it still has the evaporation happening pulling water from the earth, evaporation happening in the leaves. So you get the, I forgot what it’s called.

[21:45] Ashley James: The photosynthesis?

[21:49] Eric Thorton: No. Photosynthesis is the end result. But there’s a pull, the water evaporates from the leaf, it pulls the water from the ground. So that’s still going on. But there’s no life force to create photosynthesis. So it immediately gets a slightly dull look to it, to me, because I see that that life force is gone. The spark is gone. And then within a few weeks, it starts looking [Inaudible 22:12] anybody can see. Yeah, we see the souls of trees and everything else. So it’s like I have fish tanks in my office with the fish tank. And when the fish die, if I’m around, I see the soul from the fish go running around my house, I go up to the fish dead zone and one of the tanks, I have to go fish it out.

[22:37] Ashley James: You’ve seen a soul of one of your fish swimming around your house. And that’s what prompts you to go find the floating fish in one of your tanks?

[22:46] Eric Thorton: If I was home when it died, I would see that before it left. You know a fish soul isn’t to come back and visit like a dog, but a fish it’ll just whirl around the house for a while and off it goes. So if I’m home, I will see it, a little light that I see floating around the house. And it’s like, oh, when I go which tank is it to the guides and this one now sure enough, I go find the dead fish. But if I’m not home, because it’s not a soul that repeats that visit, I don’t know. And then I have to find the dead fish like anybody else. There it is. There it is. There it is floating. You know.

[23:27] Ashley James: I think conceptually always believes in a soul until I held my mother’s hand when she died. And then I got to actually experience her soul move through me and fill the room. And that was like, that was just there’s no there’s no question in my mind. Because I felt it. It was very real.

[23:53] Eric Thorton: It is very real. It’s like they proved there’s the whole song about it and the stuff that there’s actually weight to a soul. They proved it back in the 30s or 20s or something like that. But it’s amazing how science doesn’t want to repeat that experiment.

[24:09] Ashley James: It could be someone while they die.

[24:12] Eric Thorton: Well, it’s easy to do. But now we got better skills than they have in 1920. So they could actually get that it’s 1/200th of an ounce or something like that to change and you think they would get heavier when you die. Because the centrifugal force of the blood being pushed around your body would give a little bit lighter lift with each heartbeat. But they don’t. And it’s so much of a percent of an ounce or whatever it is to get lighter. They get wider. Yeah because it’s measurable. And nobody wants to do the experiment now. Because, well, I don’t know why. I actually don’t. I think it’d be very interesting to prove that there is something that leaves, but science doesn’t believe that. I guess that’s why they don’t do it.

[24:57] Ashley James: Well, they can’t make a drug, so why would they be putting all that money into that kind of research? There’s not there’s not a drug they can patent.

[25:04] Eric Thorton: Yeah, but not a lot of money in that. But science eventually, always proves out spiritual healing and spirituality. It’s like Einstein, he theorized that the earth is in a time wave. I forget the exact words right now. Well, they proved it two years ago. You know, they have such sensitive experiences now that they put this little box that picks up, I read about it, you can read about it online, in the NASA journals, but I forget what it’s all called. But there’s this box that can measure magnetic pole. And they put it up on one of the satellites and it measured magnetic pole around the earth in all these different places. And they showed that we were in a time warp. That’s what Einstein call it. And it proved that we’re in a time warp. And that’s what time does, science proves out these things. You can’t see it, but it’s still there. So science needs to go on, in my opinion. Well, there is a soul there, it keeps us alive. Well, let’s learn to work with that. But no, they go, “Nope, don’t want to go there.” And they have to go eventually. Because that’s what science is.

[26:24] Ashley James: You reminded me of a study that I read recently that blew my mind; the power of prayer, and those who are atheists or not. I mean everyone who listens to the show all come from different backgrounds. So for some people the idea of prayer is very foreign. Our four year old the other day I talked to him about prayer. And he goes, “I don’t know how.” Well, it’s something we learn how to do. But prayer doesn’t have to be religious, it can be spiritual. But they did these experiments where they had a group of people praying for and, again not a religious, one specific religion, but just the idea of closing your eyes and sending an intention and asking for goodness to happen to someone. And they did this for people in a hospital. And they found that those who were prayed for got better faster, and had a higher survival rate than those who weren’t prayed for. And that’s like you said.

[27:26] Eric Thorton: And it is very consistent. It’s absolutely consistent. I mean it’s 100% of the people that would be experimented with, they may not build a measure at all on every person, but something will be changing them. Biblically, if you’re using the Bible, it’s called the gift of petition. And some people have a little more of it than others. But that means when you ask, it will be considered. It’s not the gift of command, but the gift of petition, it’s called. It’s amazing what our intentions do. It slips right into one of the subjects we’re talking about today – ashes.

[28:13] Ashley James: I definitely want to get into that. Do you want to talk about that first, then we’ll talk about my experience working with you?

[28:19] Eric Thorton: Okay. So the intention, when the power of petition works all the way to the point of death, and after death. It’s not just when you’re alive. So you have someone who’s, let’s just talk about death for a moment. It’s kind of the first starting of that. When you die, the soul that can be weighed leaves the body, it’s a freeing that occurs. People, if they’re aware of spiritual growth, they actually celebrate when they leave the body. Because it’s like a huge relief of pressure on the soul. That being said, when you’re dying, people can hold you back. You hear all these stories about people dying in the hospital when everyone goes and gets a cup of coffee? Because their intention, “Oh, poor. Oh, no. We don’t want him to die. No, and we have to be here for them.” You’re holding on to that soul with that intention. And so everybody leaves, gets distracted by the sniff of coffee and then they escape. Well, it doesn’t end there. We have these things, we have to dispose of the body. And throughout history, if you look at all the cultures, the cultures cremate, bury, things like that. They all have developed celebrations of death at some point to let them go. Well, today we have the technology to keep them. We keep the ashes, we want to do the right thing with them, we want this, that and the other. But when you leave the body correctly, the soul doesn’t care anymore, what happens with the ashes. It’s our ego that wants to hang on to them because we love our loved ones, we we adore them, we don’t want to let their memory go. But when you hold on to the ashes, you’re actually preventing – what I have noticed it’s been my experience, is you’re preventing the astral body, which is partly ego from fading, and the etheric body moving on between the into the life between lives. So when I touch somebody’s ashes, someone brings them to me. It’s as if the person that has died is standing right in front of me. And they’re still based on their thought process, if you will, is still based on ego. So they’re still concerned about family and the specifics. And like money, health, on and on and on where if we move forward correctly and the astral body has died, or faded, and the etheric bodies in the life between lives, we call those the ancestors. And they’re here to wish you good will, love, all the experience possible so you can grow spiritually, little care about your body’s pain and suffering anymore. But the astral body still does. And so when someone I’ve noticed, and it’s happened hundreds of times, to me, is it’s not just a one time incident, when I touch the ashes or the container, it’s like there they are as if they’d never died. And they know they’re dead, but they’re still hooked on the ego, because they haven’t been able to be let go of yet. So the act of burying the ashes, scattering the ashes, you are mentally letting go of that contract with your loved ones. And that includes pets. And when you do that, it is the end of that connection to the physicalness of that person. And it enhances the connection to the soul of that person. The etheric body is a much more delightful thing to have around us. Our ancestors are grand, and have the best intention for us. But they can’t get there unless we let go. And so I’ve shared that with a lot of people. And when they have let go of them, they feel better. They feel it’s complete. And that’s why throughout the world, we have all societies who never talk to each other at all do these burial rites, some like this, some bury, some mummify, but they put it in another place and they let go of it. Because that’s a universal knowing of all people feel that. It’s like when your mom died, you felt her soul leaving. Well, if you’re holding on to it, that still can’t leave all the way. So then when you finally do it, let go and it’s like you feel clean. So I don’t agree with saving ashes for any length of time. You know, if you take a month, or two, or three or five, or whatever to do what you want to do with the ashes to fulfill the person last wishes, terrific. And then we’ve got to move on. And then it helps the whole family because they become ancestors position to everybody in the family. And that includes people we don’t even know, part of the extended family that we don’t even know that they get to help. So it helps heal. You might look at it in a small way, it helps heal the planet when we bury people or dispersed them and let go of them correctly. But I highly recommend it to everybody.

[33:43] Ashley James: Well, the reason why we bring this up is that I have my parents’ ashes and the ashes of my second cat who lived to be 20. So we have those. Yeah, Muffins was awesome. And then we talked a little bit about that before I read your article on your website, www.ericthorton.com. And I thought it’d be really interesting to talk about this, because so many people save the ashes, their loved ones ashes as I have. And also now they do things like make jewelry out of them, there’s companies that turn ashes into diamonds, you know, like a diamond looking objects, turn them into jewelry to wear, put the ashes in some kind of glass and you can wear the ashes. And so by holding on, you’re saying there’s something going on with your physical energy that’s being affected, and your loved ones soul can’t go move on completely, because you’re holding them here.

[34:54] Eric Thorton: Right.

[34:55] Ashley James: So what kind of physical ailments had your clients resolve by letting go of ashes?

[35:05] Eric Thorton: It’s stress and freedom. When someone passes properly, we are sad that they’ve passed. But there’s also if they’ve passed properly and moved over, there’s a freedom now that exists that people almost feel guilty about. We don’t have mom’s requirements anymore, or grandpa’s requirements anymore. When you hold on to that, you’re actually holding on to those requirements energetically. And so you can’t develop who you were supposed to be after they have passed. There’s that we become orphans, it’s normal. And then the rules aren’t there anymore. We get to fully develop our own. So that alone changes your life. And it relieves stress, because you don’t have their requirements. Everybody, we all have narcissism. So we set these requirements up for our children to learn how to be adults. And they feel that all the way through adulthood just like I do I hear my inner parental voice and when they die, that changes. When my father died, my father wasn’t a good man. He was a bully, not going to get into all that. But when he died it was a relief. When his father died, who was a very good man, lovely father to me, it was also a relief. different type of relief, but it still occurred. Because again, the requirements that I had to have for those people, related to those people is now gone. But you hang on to those ashes, you’re going to keep mourning those requirements. You’re going to keep thinking about it. You’re going to keep engaging those requirements. And yes, when we let go, we miss a part of them. But it also frees us physically and energetically. I have a kind of an anecdotal about this, it was an animal. I was working with another practitioner, we were doubling up on clients for a couple years. And her name was Laura Smith, I think she’s in Montana now. This lady comes in and she is completely distraught. Her animals have been dying, and her life was just miserable. And we both got into her energy, started doing the energy work. We kept hearing, it’s cold, it’s dark, and I can’t get out. And we’re like going… We both hearing this second hearing. It’s cold, it’s dark, I can’t get out, it’s cold, it’s dark, I can’t get out, and it kept repeating to us. And we’re looking at each other because we’re know we’re reading the same thing. And we’re like, what is cold and dark and can’t get out. And the lady goes, “Oh, I put my dog in the freezer, I want you to bring them back to life.” The soul was stuck in the freezer.

[38:26] Ashley James: I’m gobsmacked right now.

[38:29] Eric Thorton: We were totally like, you know, just totally use your word gobsmacked. It took us a minute to recover. It was like, she put… But that’s the truth. She was hanging on to that. And because she was in a very abusive situation, etc. Many extenuating circumstances so she really clung to our animals for support. And that soul was not going anywhere. And it was this. It’s cold, it’s dark, I can’t get out. You know, it had no idea what a freezer was, because it was an animal. But it was cold and dark and couldn’t get out. So we encouraged her to bury the animal that we assured her we couldn’t bring her back to life because we were trying to appeal to herself and she was having psychotic problems. We said because you had frostbite. It’s like, “Okay, so we need to bury this, and we need to let this animal go.” And when she went through that she felt better.

[39:34] Ashley James: I can see that.

[39:35] Eric Thorton: That was a poignant moment for me in understanding about hanging on, and about ashes hanging on to any of these things. And that’s why all these rituals have been created throughout the planet independently. Because we’ve got to let go to let the soul go.

[39:56] Ashley James: One thing, I can’t remember whether you said it while we were recording, but you said it to me earlier about, because you’ve touched vessels that are holding ashes about many times, and you’ve never met a soul who was like, “I’m totally content and happy here. And I want to stay attached to the plane.” You’re saying, every time you touch a vessel, like an urn that’s holding someone’s ashes, the soul pops right in front of you and they’re agitated about their situation, because they’re being held here.

[40:31] Eric Thorton: Yes. And that includes anything made out of them. I was watching on Antiques Roadshow, Queen Victoria gave special gifts of little boxes with bits of her hair in it while she was alive. Well, they’re floating around you know, it’s a prize to have something like this from Queen Victoria. It’s like, well, I could connect to her instantly, if I touch that hair, or touch the locket that it was in. And it’s because energetically, you have the most familiar object in the last life that person live. You have the molecules of that, which is burnt or pieces of the body. And so it’s a direct connection to that soul. And if you’re hanging on, which is for holding on to the ashes and things like that, that soul is stuck, it can’t move on. That’s been my experience, and it’s been consistent for all the years of my whole life doing this. And I mean I don’t know everything, but it is consistent and it is current information. There was one guy who brought me the ashes of his wife. He had a little vials of them and he did give them to people.

[41:53] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[41:54] Eric Thorton: And I’m like going, “Can you get those back?” Because he put it in my hand and it’s like, she’s right there going, “Well, you need to date people. You need to do this, you need to get you know, you’re not bouncing your bank account, right.” And he had to do this and this and this. And she’s telling me about his day to day routine of his life. And I’m like, “Well, that’s true.” He’s like, explained to me that everything she’s saying is exactly right. And he hasn’t moved on, he haven’t start dating. He had married her when she had cancer, and took care of her until she died, which is nice and honorable. And she lived for quite a while. But there was a full awareness that she was gonna probably pass before him. And she wanted him to have a get married again and have a girlfriend and things like that. And so she knew he wasn’t. So I’m sitting and he’s looking at me like, “Okay.” But he brought the ashes in several times, because he wanted to get more information and before we finally let her go. But it was always one time it was about her dad. I mean, his dad, the information he had about some medical issues that were going on with him. And of course, she was absolutely correct. But which is convenient, except you’re holding the ashes back. And I could have tapped into the ancestor and maybe found out the dad was having a medical problem, or the ancestor could have come forward during the session. And they do that and tell us there’s something going on, they’re not supposed to have this happening. And we can intervene or prolong the life because of the information they’re giving us. But it needs to come from the ancestral place, not from the place of them being stuck on the earthly planes. So the motivation is very different when we have passed over correctly. So anyway, so yeah, we gotta write that.

[43:55] Ashley James: Well, my experience working with you, everyone I’ve told my friends that I’ve been told I start with this was life changing. But that is so cliche to say that, and I even had a friend go, “Isn’t every healing session that you ever get, like, life changing until you get the next one?” Right? And I’m like, okay, it’s so it doesn’t describe what I went through with you. In our very first interview we were talking about, it was probably in our first. It was either a first or second interview after you told your story. And for listeners who haven’t heard it, you gotta go back to the first interview, because your story is amazing. During one of our first two interviews, you talk about and teach about possessions, and you start describing them. And it’s really funny, because you know what, it was our second interview because I was sitting here, our first interview was over Skype. And I was sitting here and you were describing the possessions. And I just laughed that I said, I think I have that. And you know half jokingly, but the more I learned for you, the more I started examining my motivations and behaviors. And I started diving in deeper and questioning myself where things come from. Because I’ve been on a lifelong healing journey around my relationship with food and my body, and my self confidence and working on myself for many years, I feel like I’ve done a lot of personal growth, and I’ve still have stuff I’m working on. And what I really got in the last few months, is that I would set a goal, let’s say, a new health thing I’m doing is not eating after 6pm. You know, sort of like intermittent fasting, I have a good dinner at six, and I don’t have to eat the next day till like 10. And then I go to bed on an empty stomach. Definitely, there’s lots of benefits to it. And I was excited. So I started doing that. And at 6:01 a little voice in my head would start arguing with me and would not shut up until my head hit the pillow, and my head hit the pillow and it would still try to get me to go to the kitchen. And I’m like going to sleep at you know, 10 at night. And that little voice in my head would be trying every which way to get me to break this goal, right? And I’ve had it for as long as I could remember. And so I really thought that that’s just part of me, or in some spiritual circles they call it the devil archetype where it’s like we always test our own resolve? Right? And so there’s this inner conflict that I was dealing with thinking it’s just me, but also I started to get kind of pissed off. Why? You know, I understand the science behind it. I believe in it. I want to do this one thing, right? Like this intermittent fasting. Why would there be another part of me fighting it? What’s going on? What’s the payoff? Right? And the more and more I listened and argued with this voice that would get more and more persistent, I realized, and it took me a while but I realized it wasn’t my voice. And I’m like, okay, who am I arguing with?

[47:17] Eric Thorton: It can be a big problem.

[47:19] Ashley James: Right. And then I hadn’t gotten too far into, but I started to see this voice in other areas of my life. Because I’d have to distinguish this voice from and I’ve actually had experts on the show talk about sort of like, the different aspects of self talk, right? You know, some self talk can be really positive. And then there’s the self talk that is really negative. And where does that come from? And what’s that designed to do? And I had one expert on the show, talk about how this negative self talk comes from wanting us to learn, but it’s kind of like so negative, you know, so if you’re near a hot stove, it’ll it might say something like, “Oh, you’re such an idiot? Why would you burn yourself?” You know it’s like that very, very negative, almost like a bully, right?

[48:08] Eric Thorton: It’s a form of self preservation. Right, but in a very negative way. I mean it could have said it very positively like, “Oh, good job not burning yourself near the stove.” Or whatever, right? But I would notice that the voice or voices, or just these aspects of myself talk, my inner dialogue would be negative, and I would catch myself going, okay, Is this true? Wait a second, this isn’t true. Like, I’d be with a friend and all of a sudden, that voice would say, you know, “She doesn’t really like you, do notice that she just rolled her eyes?” And it would start to corrupt my thinking. Right? So now now I’m doubting myself feeling very negative about myself. And always the inner dialogue would at every which way have me questioning myself. So there’s a lot of inner conflict because I use a lot of tools from NLP, neuro linguistic programming, and hypnotherapy and all the personal growth I’ve done, I’ve taken all the landmark classes and all the personal growth work, I’d have to very consciously catch myself, and redirect, but I would always be fighting these other belief systems that were inside me. And so I’m like, okay, so I was very conscious of the fact that I was having to catch myself and redirect and stay positive and not give in to the thoughts. Because I saw you recently was it two weeks ago?

[49:47] Ashley James: Yeah. Very, very recently. The weekend before I saw you, I had our son, my husband’s the one holding the microphone. So I’m looking at him. So my husband stayed at home and I took our son out, we were going to the park or something. And the voice in my head said, “Let’s go to McDonald’s.” And everyone that listens knows how healthy I eat. Right? And so that little voice was just really audacious to say that, because I haven’t had McDonald’s in eight years or nine years, nine years. And then it started to say, “Well, you know, you can have the fries.” And I’m like, I know I’m not gonna eat those fries. And I started arguing with that voice and I realized this voice is not me. There’s not one part, there’s not one molecule in my body that wants McDonald’s, like ever. I am very congruent about the fact that I do not want to eat that garbage. And this little voice goes, Well, let’s have the chicken McNuggets. They’re so good.” And it starts describing them and giving me images in my mind. And I’m like, no. And so I had to physically drive around to Monroe and around because I was going to go up Highway 9 where there’s McDonalds, I’m like, I am driving around this McDonald’s, I was going to Everett to meet up with a friend and go to a park. And so I had to drive make sure I wasn’t near a McDonald’s because this voice was hell bent on us having McDonald’s and it was really cool how it happened. In the past I might have given in, and I have often given into this voice thinking it’s just a part of me or, “Oh, it must be what my body needs because this is what a craving is.” And no, a craving does not have a voice, it does not have a consciousness. A craving is just a sensation in your body. If there’s an argument in my in my head, if there’s words that come with the craving, that’s not a craving that’s actually like an entity or consciousness, but a craving is just a physical feeling. But my entire life’s always been a craving followed by a thought process trying to talk me into it.

[49:47] Eric Thorton: Yeah. Right. The craving for McDonald’s, you’re not thinking about, you’re driving along. You go by McDonald’s, because you’ve been conditioned by commerciality, your mouth starts to water and you get a craving. You’re not thinking you have to go to McDonalds, this chicken, it’s a good one. Chicken Nuggets look special. It’s not telling you describing the objects and etc. You’re driving along thinking about nothing you drive to McDonald’s, oh, yeah, you know, Golden Arches to all beef base special sauce, etc. And then you get a craving. That’s a different thing.

[52:35] Ashley James: Right. And for me, I’d have maybe a craving for something, and I tried to resist it. But then I’d have this voice talking me into it. Or something little would happen in my life and this voice would start talking to me and I always thought it was just part of myself talk that I had to fight. And so when you describe possessions, and I burst out, it was interview number two, and I burst out and said, I think I have those right. And I think your reply was, well, those are kind of nasty. So hopefully, you know, but what was great was right before our session, I became very clear that there’s something that [Inaudible 53:14] my efforts that I feel like I’m always fighting, like Sisyphus, I feel like I’m always pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll down again. I get so far with my health regimen and then I felt like I couldn’t fight the inner conflict anymore. It would just keep fighting. And so you know, I would take great measures like we don’t bring any junk food into the house. And we’ve been sugar free we eat as vegetarians.

[53:10] Eric Thorton: We put a lock on the inside so we can’t escape to go to McDonald’s?

[53:49] Ashley James: Yeah, we live out in the middle of nowhere. So it’s not like we can go to a 7/11 down the street or anything like that. My body has even gone so far thank goodness to have developed allergies to things like dairy. So it makes it really easy to not eat junk food when I’m allergic to it and I had violent reactions. But still, I’ve taken a lot of measures and yet that voice would always be driving me crazy having to fight it. So it became clear that it wasn’t a part of me. Well, if it isn’t a part of me, what is it? I’m not schizophrenic right? And I don’t have these kind of mental health issues. I know that about myself. So what is it? What’s going on? I arrived at our session, and we sit and talk for about 90 minutes, and I explained.

[54:35] Eric Thorton: It’s all about the dream.

[54:36] Ashley James: Okay, I’ll get there. I explained to Eric this is what I want to work on – this voice, I really feel like I have an inner conflict. And it isn’t me and I really get that it’s not in alignment with my values, my beliefs, my goals, anything. So let’s get rid of it. And Eric’s like, okay, well, let’s have you lay down on a table and see what your guides and angel’s saying, right? And the table, by the way, is very comfortable. Because I spent like five hours on it. But what happened a few weeks before, I had a very vivid dream that Eric was trying to kill me in my dream. And I woke up telling my husband, I’m like, “I don’t know if I can trust him.” I mean, that’s such a vivid dream. And I tried to analyze it over a few days. And I realized that it wasn’t true that you weren’t going to actually try to kill me, but it kind of it stuck in my mind. It’s like there’s this little threat. And then when I was here with you, you told me about how some people, I think because you were you were happy to see that I found your house okay, and I had no problems getting here. And you said a lot of people, if they have possessions, will try to prevent them from actually coming to the house. And I imagine that happens with other healers as well. Sort of like a parasite, when you start doing a parasite cleanse, if you don’t do it correctly, the parasites become agitated, and it makes the person even sicker. And so it’s like an energetic parasite is going to feel threatened. And you’ve had people not been able to find your house, even though it’s very easy to find. The car breaks down, they get injured right before coming. And you had one man, as you described, heard a voice in his head saying…

[56:24] Eric Thorton: Continually saying, “Eric Thorton is going to kill you, Eric Thorton is going to kill you. You can’t go there, and he’s going to kill you.” And it repeated all the way here and the weeks before. So some people get this even before they meet me. They get my name in dreams saying, “Don’t go to Eric Thorton, he’s gonna kill you.” And I just sit there and crack up. Because I’m like going, I don’t want dead bodies hanging around my house. They start to stink after a while, you know. But our job is to bring life. But their job is to bring grist. So you look at all this that’s happened to you, which you’ll finish your story in a few minutes. But it’s also helped you. So I’ll let you finish your story.

[57:10] Ashley James: What happened when the guy who was having this repeating in your head? Is that what you described to me as he got up to your front door and shook your hand and the moment he shook your hand the voice disappeared? And he’s like, “Okay, this is real.” Like, yeah, Eric’s the real deal. But that was his possession. trying to prevent him from coming to see you. And so I wonder how many people have had that experience where they’ve wanted to go see a healer and their possession has prevented them from getting that work?

[57:47] Eric Thorton: Well, it can prevent them. But most healers aren’t exorcist. So sometimes, not every time. But sometimes the healer can actually promote the possession being stuck there longer. Because they’re not able to see that it’s a possession. And they teach the individual how to compensate or teach their body how to compensate. So this thing can work even better in the background. Because now this person has learned to compensate. So the compensation is with the education. So all these years you’ve had this. It taught you to search. It taught you to be inquisitive. Why? Why am I feeling this way? Why is this happening to me? You had no context because the medicine men women aren’t around. But it literally got you to think beyond the box, subconsciously, at first, and then consciously, and then when you connected to someone that could help, It went “No.” But the other people, it didn’t do that, you didn’t have the realization because the practitioner wasn’t a threat to it. So I would say if 60% of the people coming to me have big enough possessions that they hear that voice. It also makes them doubt themselves and anything that can happen. Because it’s compelling them in ways subconsciously and consciously. Yours was compelling you both, some people’s is only subconscious. And it all is to teach us to grow into search. So anyone has done that and we have to find the value with it. You’re here today, because of that possession. You’re inquisitive, you’re doing the blogs, you’ve been involved in health, for how many years? I don’t even know. Because of that possession. What was it? Did it make you feel comfortable? No. Did it make you feel better? No. Did it caused medical problems? Yes. But it also stretched your brain, so that you could bring goodness to the planet, which is the motivation that it had to stop you from doing it, to provide that opposite – pull back, make her sick, make your unable to do this, that or the other, and she’ll have less effect, you’re an old soul, you’ll have less effect on the planet. So that’s its motivation. And for you, it actually backfires for it because it teaches you to search, and you’ve become who you are because of that possession. So it’s not wrong, is it uncomfortable for the body? You bet. But when we actually find someone that can remove it, it’s going to resist, because it’s been there for so long. And it’s worked well. If you hadn’t had the possession ever, you may not have been inquisitive, you may have just become very depressed with the problems that it gave you. I’ve had people in a similar situation, who it hasn’t compelled yet to make them, so they were younger. And they were just depressed and miserable. Because they couldn’t get out from under its oppression, they hadn’t turned it into something positive yet, the threat to it, I mean, the purpose of it is to turn it into positivity, which you’ve done. And now because that is gone, your reach will even be farther, it’ll just simply grow. And that’s consistent with everybody.

[1:01:35] Ashley James: I like how you’ve you’ve talked a bit deeper in the past interviews, you’ve described how these possessions, although are very negative experiences when they can help us grow because they give us a set of circumstances that can find us, that has us look for solutions like I have, right? And so if I hadn’t had any of this turmoil in my life, it wouldn’t have forged me or at least I chose to forge myself. And you say some people just stay miserable, and they don’t go look to better themselves, but some do. And so the hope is that we can use this negative thing to create growth and experience.

[1:02:24] Eric Thorton: To find God in your own way. The very thing that resists God, whatever that is, is the thing that compels us to find it. That’s the purpose of what we call dark energy. It’s not dark, but we call it dark because our bodies don’t like it. And but that is the purpose of that energy, is to project you into searching and growing, or it’s the underlying purpose of it. The Godly purpose of it. Its purpose is to prevent you. So you resist the prevention and you sling forward. It’s like a slingshot, you pull back, pull back, pull back, pull back, you finally let go and that rock slings forward. Well, the possession would be the slingshot, giving you the resistance from launching. But then it actually propels when it is removed properly, remove fully, and the person learns what it is. So when we work with people, we tell people, this is your first time session, there’s going to be more if you want to continue this, because like yourself, this was influencing your physical brain the whole time. So we remove the extra impetus, you might call it, you still have all the constructs in the brain, the neural pathways, so we have to start working on softening those. So giving them more neural plasticity, so that you can change it. By now you’re not being compelled, I should let you finish telling your story, which you should go do that.

[1:04:07] Ashley James: Well, so that’s one thing I did notice right away after our session is that that voice was gone. And I think it was more than one voice. But it was basically the inner conflict that wasn’t me, is no longer here. And it’s been a week since our appointment. The experience for me is like you said, the neural pathways, the habits are still there, but they’re empty. Like, I’m like a craving for food late at night, when I’m not really hungry and it’s more about just wanting to eat out of boredom like that voice would really, you know, “Let’s have this, let’s go, let’s eat that. Come on.” You know, “It doesn’t matter.” “You don’t need to be hungry to eat. It’s fun, let’s go.” Like that constant consciousness pushing me is gone. And the habit is there, but it’s empty. So I can just say, “No, I’m not going to do them. I’m not gonna do this, or I’m going to do this instead.” And then there’s no one arguing with me in my head.

[1:05:09] Eric Thorton: You can distract it. Duffy can give you back rub, and you’re not thinking about anymore. Or you drive by McDonalds, and pretty soon you’re paying attention to this headlight ahead of you, instead of thinking about McDonald’s. You drove by spurned all the commercial stuff, you’re done with it, you’re on to the next thing, instead of that consciousness as you put it, because it is. It’s alive. And the compelling and telling you what it needs. Possessions work on the brain. And it controls your body, they control your body through your brain. They can put voices in your head, they can lift your arm, they can make you, you know, you get shocked like if you get shocked by AC, you jump. Well possession can do the same thing, it can pull your legs to throw you across the room. Some of the bigger possessions can actually physically throw someone across the room. But most the time it’s activating your nerves in all parts of your brain. So it’s like drugs, you can hallucinate having drugs. Well, they stimulates the same part of the brain that causes hallucinations. And they can make you think someone’s saying something, someone’s talking to you, someone’s moving your body. Because it’s stimulating the nerves in your brain, you can feel pushed. And it’s actually your body giving you the motion, but it’s stimulating your brain so that you feel pushed. So they work through that brain mostly, like some can physically move you but most of it stimulating your brain to move you. But it’s in every form. It is the same part of the brain that you’re processing, sight, sound, thinking processes, etc. So the possessions can make you feel like it did with you that you’re hearing somebody or something intelligent is telling you, you gotta have it, it’s going to legitimize it, it’s gonna do everything it can to keep you down, keep you suffering, so that you can’t fulfill your role as your soul role. Because it’s a threat to possessions, by you interviewing me, it’s a threat to possessions all over the world. And it didn’t want that. So it’s going to try to stop you. So it can give you dreams, the one guy we described all the way up to the front door. The only reason he came in was because a priest recommended him to come in. So, “Father’s correct. Okay, gotta go see this guy.” So he just stayed with it. And then the voice was gone. And you know, it left neural pathways in his brain for certain behaviors. And he’s been working on that over the years, and they’ve gotten less. But while it was there, it was literally telling him how to do what to act, and it gets people to kill people. You know, you hear about people going insane. Sometimes they’re not insane. Someone’s got a possession. And it’s compelling them telling them, “God said to kill this person.” Well, they’re really feeling it. They’re really getting that information for years at times. And in our brain, how do you brainwash somebody? Repeat it. So possessions have a very powerful tool to use our brains.

[1:08:42] Ashley James: I was lying on the table. And that was actually a lot of fun. You were standing up by my head. And it was like listening to a one sided conversation, but you’re talking like you talk to someone on the phone. And you were talking to my angel, my guide. And it was it was very casual. It was intention. It was like you guys were at work kind of having a safety meeting. And you were just like, “Okay, do you want to work on this first? No, this how you want me to over here? Okay. Alright. Okay, you’re going to come in here and do that.” And it was just neat hearing this one sided conversation as you’re talking to them. And then you’d come over and you’d ask me a question. It’s like, “How do you know that?” You know, like you’d say something and it was so cool. Because I didn’t really give you a lot to run with. And you’d be like, “Okay, when you were this age, this happened.” And you describe the house? I’m like, “Yep. Yes. That happened. Yes. Okay.” And so then you were ready to remove one of three different possessions and you explain their energy and their purpose, you describe the three possessions. And at the very beginning, you did a prayer of protection over me from head to toe and you don’t ever touch me, your hands are sort of above me and you’re about to kind of come in and work around my heart chakra and then you pull your hands back because I could tell they told you something. I could see in your face you’re about to do something then you got interrupted, like someone grabbed your arm, I pulled you back and you’re like, “Okay, okay, do you feel that?” And I could tell that my guides or angels were saying, “Hold on a minute, slow down Eric, she’s got to feel this.”

[1:10:32] Eric Thorton: They wanted you to feel it because you’re an old enough so that you could feel these things. And it offers you legitimacy, if you can feel something that you know is not coming from me.

[1:10:43] Ashley James: Right. But you never said that the entire time, it’s like five hours. You never said that. But I could tell. I could tell right away. And so what it felt like was like a sandworm from dune crawling under my chest, it was circling under my skin. And that’s what it felt like and because you’d brought your hand close to me like maybe a foot away from my chest. And then you pulled your hand back. And that’s when I started to feel it circling under my skin. And that’s what it felt like. The best way I could describe is kind of like a sand dune. And then and then you said, “Okay, do you feel that?” I’m like, “Yes.” My heart was racing at that point. And yes, I do feel that, okay, let’s get rid of this very uncomfortable feeling. And you pulled it or my angels pulled it or whatever it was. It was pulled by the angels and guides. It was pulled out of me and had it hovering over my body. But now it’s out. So it has no more threat. And you’re like, “Okay, take your hand and move your hand through it.” And it was really funny because it was like putting my hand in two liters of water that was floating above me in a bowl. I put my hand in it. And it felt like cold water. And it was a warm day, up to 70 something degrees, the windows were open, there’s no fan moving through. It was a good…

[1:12:14] Eric Thorton: I had you feel the ambient hair too. Because so many people will do this trick. Well, they have the ambient air moving, which I like movement anyway. But when they have me do this, I said okay, feel the movement, basically feel the ambient air. So you feel what’s going on around you. Now put your hand over here then compare.

[1:12:37] Ashley James: Right. And you didn’t tell me what to feel. You were just like, “Okay, put your hand here.” So I put my hand out away from my body, like towards the window. “Okay, now move your hand inwards, what do you feel?” And and I did it repeatedly. And every time I did it, I felt like this ball of water basically over me. And so that was the first one. So then you put it off to the side and you pull it the second one. And you say, “Okay, move your hand around and say what you feel.” And it felt like moving my fingers through really thick fur. I felt just totally different. And then the third one felt like static electricity. And then you describe their personalities. And it’s exactly what I felt with each one. I thought that was really interesting. And then there was some other stuff you pulled out. And you didn’t tell me much about it. But you’re like, “Okay, just move your arm to your side, off to your side.” And as I did, I felt four columns of hot air that  hadn’t been there before. And you said, “They actually like that it kind of tickles them.” And so I move my hands back and forth. And I felt them and then you had them go. And then I put my hand there again, it wasn’t there. But each time you didn’t tell me what to feel, you didn’t implant sort of hypnotic suggestion, and you just said feel what you feel. And there was one point that you had me put my hand somewhere to feel something. And I screamed, I think I did twice because I was so freaked out because it was so clear to me that I was feeling something. I mean, not a scream, I was more surprised, not afraid, I was more like, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I can’t believe it, oh my gosh.” I could really feel the things because I think you  worked on 12 different things with me. I tried to count and it was a lot, it was not just like one or two. I mean there’s a lot of different things.

[1:14:28] Eric Thorton: When the energy system breaks down because of the the main possessions, you get one and it opens the door for others. They aren’t the main one. But they still open the door and bring in different things to control you in different ways to again render you less effective than if they hadn’t been there. For that whole projection thing because your soul knows what it has to do. So it’s gonna struggle towards it. So but yeah, there were a number of things that came out. I call them ramifications of the original possession. So then we had to remove them from your house, the cars every place you’ve been, your son, any possible residue with people you’ve worked with over the years, etc. Because it opens the door for all of these people. It can damage the energy system of anyone that comes in contact with. So that’s why we have to take care of all these little details. Even biblically, it says when you’re an exorcist, you have to do it right. Otherwise, you pull back many hundreds more. So you have to go through it to be able to see here and be a part of with the guides and the angels be the part that’s in our space. That’s why they use people, because they use healers in our space, because this is where we operate the best. They’re in another space, you might call it, so they’re in the other room. So it’s be like them, using the surgeon’s hands to do the operation while you were getting instructions from the other room while the surgeon was giving instructions, because the surgeon’s actually there with the physicalness that you and I have, that there are more effective tool. They can do it without us, but it’s not as effective. And there’s not the lessons involved. So they don’t do it. People ask, “Well, why don’t my guides just remove it?” Well, there’s no lesson involved then. They’ve removed the purpose of all this pain and suffering you’ve had, with you not having those realizations, that this is real, that it’s life changing, and that you can then feel it. It’s not letting you off the hook, you still have responsibility for getting your health better so it is more effective. And every practitioner that helps you is more effective. That’s why our work is so inclusive. When you remove that energy or you remove constructs from people at these levels, everyone else’s work works including Western medicine and Naturopathic medicines, all the practitioners; Reiki works better, acupuncture. If you remove that, no one could help you. All these years, you’ve had all these people trying to help you. And you’ve learned a lot and it’s helped you with your work. That’s the possession that provided that, the platform. But they haven’t been able to get down to the bottom line of that conscious compelling that we get inside of us. That’s not our consciousness. So I love that you use that word consciousness, because that’s what I described to people. These things are alive. These are not thought forms from people, these are alive. And they have a job to do, to provide resistance. So that it compels you forward. And some people, it breaks.

[1:18:06] Ashley James: Yeah, we talked about my cousin who had received the same possessions at the same time when we were nine. And she now has schizophrenia. She developed it much later in life. Normally schizophrenia shows up when hormones kind of kick in during teenagers. And hers showed up in her… she was almost 30. I’m just thinking of it now. And it really kicked in when she was almost 30. But she had received the same possessions at the same time. And it makes total sense now looking at her life and seeing the turmoil that she went through are the same conflict, but because we’re different, obviously different people, and I can see how someone who’s maybe not I don’t know, as stubborn as I am. You know, I’m just saying. But someone who’s not as stubborn as I am, would have given into the voices and been driven insane.

[1:19:09] Eric Thorton: Exactly. Now, the driving insane isn’t wrong, we are all going to have a life like that, or several lives, because there is experience and learning and compassion develops for people who have those problems. So I’ve been through life like that. And so I have a tremendous compassion for people that have mental problems, because I also know what compels them. Now with your cousin, the mental problems were second, they weren’t first. So it was caused by a possession. So then your cousin, if she was so compelled, which he may not be the type that can, we could remove the possession, and then any medications and stuff that she’s taking to control it will work far more effectively, perfectly usually. And then the brain can rest. And they slowly back out of schizophrenia. If the possession I mean, if the schizophrenia comes first, you still have to remove the possession so that the medicine can work better. And then they’ll require much more therapy to get it under control. Where like your cousin, it could probably come under control fairly quickly, over several months. And were someone who had it beginning, it would take much longer, we’d have to do much more healing with them to get their brain to stabilize. We have success with both ways.

[1:20:32] Ashley James: So a friend of ours went through a pretty nasty divorce and the wife’s side of the family… And he loves his wife, by the way. It was really messed up, what took place and he wanted to be with her but she wanted to change him to the point that he wouldn’t have been himself anymore. And there was no resolving it, it was two totally opposing forces. Her whole side of the family is Orthodox Russian Catholic. And there’s about 200 of her family members sending him hate energy, hate thought forms wanting him to suffer because they’re all angry that he was the one that initiated the divorce. He just sent the papers. She’s the one that basically did everything to say we’re done. And he’s just the one that helped complete it. So there’s 200 people every day praying for his demise. And he feels, he told me he’s been dealing with health issues that don’t make any sense. He’s had tachycardia where his heart is racing so bad. He’s basically having a heart attack. He’s been in the hospital for the last few years. And he’s even had cardiologist open his heart up to try to find what’s causing tachycardia, they say you have the healthiest heart have ever seen. We cannot explain it. Now he goes to all kinds of healers, chiropractors and acupuncture and he takes herbs and eats healthy and everything under the sun. And he still has these issues, he’ll just breakout, he’ll have these attacks where his entire body will be inflamed, and he’ll be covered head to toe in inflammation and scales and hives and I’ve told him like, “Okay, we need to eat anti inflammatory diet, and you need to rest.” And he’s tried everything and when it comes down to it, he really feels like the thought form of these people or this energy from these people are harming him. The reason why I’m telling the story is that you’ve talked about sort of possessions and thought forms and that they are different. Is this an example of a thought form where it’s many people sending a negative thought to him, or can you maybe just go into, the reason why I’m illustrating all this is that my husband wants to know, and that was one of his questions, is how can we protect ourselves from these negative energies? And I know it’s a little difficult to protect yourself from a possession but thought form is something else. So can you teach us what are ways that we can protect ourselves from either negative energies, thought forms, that kind of thing?

[1:23:28] Eric Thorton: Well, this was a friend, okay. With him, he’s got these people giving prayers of petition for his ill health and demise. Well, what’s compelling those people? So they’re sending these thought forms. But what’s compelling these people? Those thought forms are like opening a road to these people’s possessions. If people didn’t have the possession, and they were Christian people, they would never think of doing something like that. You’re not supposed to judge if you’re Christian. You’re not supposed to, you’re supposed to be accepting. What’s complaint them not to be? So they have all these thought forms, they open up because they’re throwing it all to this guy, he starts to feel ill from the thought forms, then he’s opened up to all of their possessions. And any ones that might be in his energy field, it just opens him right up. So the best defense is positivity, the best defense is not finding those vibrations. So some people say, well, you know, the best defense to not have voodoo happen is you don’t believe in it. Well, there’s some truth to that, like energy comes together. So if you fall prey to someone’s opinion, you are now vibrating at their level. So their energy can then or energy like whatever they’re having, can come to you. So it’s like if you accept someone’s opinion or not. If you accept their opinion, their beliefs, you are now having their frequency. So anything that affects them can easily similar or the same can affect you. So people ask me all the time, how do you protect yourself by becoming a vibration that’s so foreign to these lower frequencies, you might call them, that they can’t even find you. So my frequency if I’m in a bad mood, or if I’m in a place that you may call it, you know, depression or pity or just a human emotion thing going on hormonal, or whatever, I’ll call and cancel appointments. Because I could get damaged. I’m having that frequency because of my hormones, or my life going on. And I’m not able to separate at that moment. So then if the client comes in with something similar, I am vulnerable. So then I’m doing damage to them too. So it’s completely out of integrity. So the way I stay clear is by not by being what some people would call enlightened, and conscious. So that I’m just simply not that frequency. It’s not science. You know, when we sit here, there’s thoughts out there that you have to surround yourself with purple light or white light, and have this defense system against all this stuff. Well, fine, you know, that works, until someone throws your curveball. And it makes it right by your defense system. Or guess what you thinking about, you know, the possession in you got you thinking about McDonald’s, instead of holding up that white light. Well, the white light goes away, because the intention goes away, because you’re now thinking about McDonald’s, and you’re thinking that waiting can pop right in at that moment. Where if you are in your soul’s personality, and realize life is human life, and it’s okay, and all of its foibles, and everything else, and yes problems are going to come to you, but you don’t. You learn to move through them quickly. You’re not entertaining those frequencies. So you’re not vulnerable. Remember, the purpose of a possession is to get you basically to find God. If you found that, truly, there’s no more reason for the possession. It’s done. It can’t be in your energy field. And so that’s what we use – frequency. The word frequency for that, we call the things that bother us a lower frequency, and the things that help us is a higher frequency. That’s an opinion. They all have similar, not similar, they all have different frequencies, equally different. And there’s not lower or higher ones, there’s just the ones that are drawn to this type of energy, a magnet that is for this versus a magnet that’s for this. So how do you stay clear? Realizing that human life is really good in all of its problems. And realizing that after you’ve gotten there, truly gotten to that enlightened place where you accept the problems of your life, and you don’t dwell on them, you move through them, then you start becoming what we call conscious. You’re conscious, no one really explains what that is, you got to get consciousness, Deepak got to have consciousness. What is that? Consciousness is awareness of who you are on a soul level. You are aware of the soul’s personality. And when you’re in that personality, when you’re operating from those frequencies, versus when you’re operating from your animal personality. Those are based on fear, because we’re we’re all going to die. The soul’s personalities based on beautiful, everything’s fine, it’s all good. And when you are in that, when I’m working, I’m in that, and then I am able to pick up on all those frequencies really well. When I’m having my human drama, you know, people go, “Well, how do you turn it off?” I go, “Well, I’m not in that frequency anymore.” I’m having my human drama with my wife, or my kids or the lawn or whatever it is. And so then I am in my human, this. And when the second I’m clicking into helping people or meditating or the guides are calling on me for something, I’m aware that I can’t reach that from the human body, I have to reach that from the soul. And so here, I get the same problems in the human body, I get the same problems you do. I can get a possession. I’m very aware of it, though. Really quickly. Sometimes it’s a little too quick. The guys go calm down. I go, okay. One time I come into the house, and we went to dinner or something as a family. I come to the house and I was going, “What the heck did say that?” I said something else. And everyone goes, “What?” And I go, “Something’s up.” And I just started to expand to look at my space. And the guides go, “No, bam! And they throw me back into my body.” And they go, “Just let it be.” And I go, “We’re invaded. I gotta work on people. This can’t happen.” They go, “Let it be will take care of it.” And I’m going, “Okay, I guess.” So I’m looking for this change. And it was down in our washroom. And what we call a negative vortex was sitting in my washroom. And it was causing this negative feeling in the house and drawing in all these ghosts and poltergeists into my home. So I came in, and it was like, “What the heck is going on?” I’m seeing all this stuff, and smelling the classic things, cologne, cigarettes, cigars, all this stuff, the second I got in here, and then I’m looking around, and the house is full of all these energies. And you know, something’s broke here. Found it, they said, leave it alone. Because what happened was, there was a process they were showing me that took took a two week period that they had to mitigate. Remember, these possessions are beings, they have a job to do, but they’re alive, and they affect all kinds of things. And without spending two hours explaining all that, it had affected because of a client coming in, in a few weeks, certain things had to happen here to make it, so we could get rid of this major possession that this guy had. He was one of the people that caused problems in my house when we removed the possession. But if we hadn’t gone through the process, my house probably would have burned down.

[1:32:27] Ashley James: What happened when you removed the possession from him?

[1:32:30] Eric Thorton: This was the one where I told the story last time. When the possession came out, the guides were getting rid of it. And it was a very powerful possession. And it was one when the person experienced… I’m trying to remember their experience, but the whole house got frost on the walls. And I told you a little bit about it. That came out and when the frost disappeared, because the whole house temperature dropped like 50 degrees instantly. And then it came upstairs on the way out is stamped on the ceiling of the rec room and caused the screws actually to back out. And my son was watching TV in the rec room at the time. And I just hear him go, because he was downstairs working obviously with clients. And I just hear him go, “Dad.” And we left those screws are still out. We left them there, only to remind them that this is real stuff. But it was one of those possessions that it had to be dealt with over a period of a couple weeks to get it to make it so when that person came in, they could do it because they knew it was going to be a struggle. And they had to make it easy for me. So they did and then they taught my son a lesson too.

[1:33:52] Ashley James: You told me about how one woman who came to see you, the possession had to do with her mother and as it left blew out circuits in your house and did like $1200 in damages?

[1:34:06] Eric Thorton: It blew out, it came out she could feel it released like you’ve kind of felt it released. And it the guides were bringing out and it was pissed. It was middle of winter, so my heater was running. So its frequency made electronics burn out. So when it came out, it just ran by my heater, and the heater was running. And Forster, he could hear it running. And also there was a pop and the heater goes… Looks like I just went damn. The person goes, “Was that my mom?” I said, “Well, no. But it was with your mom.” And she goes, “Thank God. I’ll pay for that.” And I go, “Thank God.” Because it was 1200 bucks for a new circuit board for my heater. So I had to run around and plug in heaters, electric heaters, and then order the parts for that and have it put in. But yeah, they are different frequencies and can cause different problems. Prior to that, which I didn’t get into, this possession was at her house too. And they had problems with their cars,  it’s too hot at their sink. You know, you turn the water and you got boiling water? They kept burning out every week, they have someone come and put a new one in, burn out. Put another one, all under warranty. They were doing this work for free and it was a possession. And they think they went through five Insta Hots before we got rid of the possession completely. So its frequency was just one that blew electronics. I run into all kinds of interesting processes with possessions. With yours, you were able to able to feel it and etc. and all the things that guides wanted you to do, which is perfect. And it shows your gifts. Most people cannot feel that energy. And your guides want to do it that’s why they stopped me. And they go, “No, this is part of her process. She needs to feel this.”

[1:36:11] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:36:12] Eric Thorton: In her body and outside of her body. You know, I can’t ask people that aren’t gifted to do that. That’s why wait for guidance from the guides, because they know if the person can feel it or not. And I don’t want to make them feel bad if they can’t.

[1:36:26] Ashley James: Right.

[1:36:26] Eric Thorton: Because then they also doubt themselves more too. So I wait for guidance.

[1:36:33] Ashley James: At the end of Duffy’s session, we talked about that in the last interview, you gave him a whole list of, I guess his guides gave you to give to him a whole list of foods to stop eating currently, one of them being broccoli. Because his gut dysbiosis needed to be corrected. And you were given clear instructions for Duffy; do this, don’t do that, we got to heal your gut, it was very physical. And then at the end of my session with you, like you say something like your guides told me don’t tell her what to eat. Yeah, my guides would say that don’t tell her what to eat, she knows what to eat, you don’t need to tell her what to eat

[1:37:15] Eric Thorton: Your system removing those, because they’ve specifically worked with that. Your system needs to resettle and recalculate. The guides are big on letting the body find its new setting. Once you remove some influence, the body’s got to find that and everything with your health or anybody else’s that has it at these levels that are affecting your health. Every single one of them, they say back off, let the body settle, because what affects your health before that possession is removed, and after are very different things. So you’re allergic reactions, your cravings, all those things that are happening, including all these other physical ailments that are happening in there, they’re irrelevant, because they were caused by a possession. So the body goes through all this stuff, settles out, four to six weeks, then we start to look at, okay, then we can look at your Flora prior that the Flora is not going to be right, because the possession is going to control that. And you can put all the right stuff in there, eat all the right things, to get that Flora back or not eat some things to get it back. It won’t work. So we have to respect the body’s process. Now, that frustrates people, because we all want it now. You know, I was telling you earlier I have this client who was in their second visit. And she’s a little disappointed. She emails me and she goes, “Well, I feel different. Basically, my life’s different. But I this and this and this and this and this, and this practitioner said this and this and this.” Tearing apart the work we have already done. So my response to her was, let it work, stop listening to other practitioners that you’ve listened to before our sessions, because they didn’t realize this was a problem. And I said just let it be for a while longer, then we’ll take another look. And that’s what another session would be about.

[1:39:27] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:39:27] Eric Thorton: So we have to allow the body, the brain, everything to settle out.

[1:39:34] Ashley James: And you and I had been talking about that story. Because so many people will come to you in their second session and go, “Well, this is better. And this is better. But what about this, and I want this and I want this.” And I think that’s what we often do in life, is look for the next carrot instead of spending some time in the now with gratitude and acknowledging what has healed, what has changed, like spend some time and let the body catch up, let the neurology catch up. And honor your body by going well, this worked, this is different, this is good. Like after having a cold, you don’t start running marathons and pulling all nighters like you need to give your body, even though you don’t have the symptoms anymore of a cold, you need to give your body two to three weeks to come back and to gain its strength back. And so we can be happy that we have discovered a new level of health. And we need to stand in that gratitude. And then work on our sort of list of complaints, right? But what I’m getting from you is that when we come from the list of complaints that’s kind of coming from that drama, that ends up attracting more thought forms and more negative energy. When we’re in drama, we become susceptible to negative energy, into possessions.

[1:40:56] Eric Thorton: Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about of enlightenment. If this lady was in enlightenment, she would be appreciating what had been done, and letting her body revel in that and get all those positive hormones correcting a whole lot of these ailments she’s already wanting fix right now. And it’s like no, backup. It took her 50 years to get where she was at. Yes, she’s seen a lot of practitioners that couldn’t help her prior to it that maybe could now because her possessions were gone. But she spent a lot of money, I get all that. But this is a new day. With each person I work with, they’ve never worked with someone like this. And you’ve got to give it that time. And as you put it, the carrot, throw it away. Learn to be in the moment. Yes, like your health issues, they have the possibility of switching now. You realizing all this was there, and you give yourself the body time and honor this amazing thing we have, these bodies to survive this stuff are phenomenal. These bodies have these chemical reactions, these RDA, the DNA, the RNA. All these things, processes going on that’s phenomenal, that is energetic, that gets disrupted by these other influences. You got the body, give it a few weeks, been 50 years or 30 years or whatever doing the other thing. Give it a few weeks. It’s amazing what will happen. But humans aren’t innately dissatisfied. And when you’re not enlightened, you don’t learn to roll and love the positive. The things to be in gratitude for, the grace that is giving you every day of your life. We bypass it. And I understand it, because I’m the same way. I want my peanut butter and jam sandwich when I would, and not when someone was to give it to me. And so I get it. I try to explain this to people, to give it the time. But of course, people hear what they want to hear, their filters. It’s amazing how I tell people, very similar things, different conversations, of course, but there’s a certain process like discussing this with the client. And they don’t even hear it. Because they’re so involved with their negative dialogue. So that’s one of the things that over time, we change, we provide the platform, real platform for them to really start taking a look at that, and finding that place of enlightenment. So it’s kind of a challenge to me, when people come in with that agenda. I look at it as, I kind of smile when they write to me, I don’t take it as negative, I take it as, “Well, they’re in their learning process.” And it’s like, “Okay, so we got lots to teach them. I wonder if they’ll stick with it? We’ll see.” But it’s also used to bother me. Because it’s like, well, does it reflect on me and my work? You see, that was ego. And the guides go, “Think about that, Eric.” and I go, “Oh, yeah, right.” And the New Age calls it onion skins. Well, it’s not really onion skins, but it’s just how fast our body can do this. And our bodies can’t change overnight, it will kill us. And so they have to honor that. Yeah, they can provide miracles, you know, cancer can disappear. Well, that’s not going to kill you when the cancer disappears. But if they release all the toxins in your body, so they can get out of your body at the same time, that can kill you. So they have to provide the platform for your body to start functioning correctly, and start getting rid of these toxins or things like that, or parasites and such, so that it starts happening, then they can work with it a little faster. Because the body’s already doing it. So it’s not going to go into shock. So I can say over the years, I’ve learned to take it as kind of a giggle, instead of a criticism. Well, they’ll get it, because I’ve watched people get it. And all of a sudden, their life just changes, that little bit of grace offered. And all of a sudden they become quite positive. And they get the twinkle in their eye, you know. And it’s just, it’s lovely to watch that,  that’s why I keep doing this, even though it’s very difficult to see the depravity of the human condition. But it’s why I forget sessions, and then we call the gift of forgiving, because if I remembered all that stuff, I would be haunted by it. And I’d start manifesting it. So I forget sessions, I even forget a lot of your session, and that was just a couple of weeks ago. What’s important for me is to remain in that enlightened place, and to be aware of my soul’s personality and that keeps me protected, and helping people.

[1:46:14] Ashley James: There’s this medical intuitive who’s become quite famous for telling the entire population of the world that everyone would benefit from drinking celery juice, he has single-handedly doubled the price of celery in the last year. You cannot find really nice the organic celery. Really nice. I mean, it’s all bear pickens now because there’s a whole New Age movement of people juicing celery in the morning, and I’ve heard some really interesting results. It helps the body to create better stomach acid and alkalizes the body at the same time. So it’s the building blocks for helping make good strong stomach acid which of course corrects the digestive tract, and also is going to help, any kind of juice really helps the body to become alkaline. But his thing is 100% of the population should drink celery juice in his opinion. So what I’d like to know, have you ever received advice from the guides or angels, that is like a blanket, 100% of the population would benefit from X?

[1:47:32] Eric Thorton: Yes. Often, but it ain’t going to happen. It’s like the guy recommending celery juice. Well, if we all drink tons of celery juice, one, there’d be no celery left. But two, if you have too much celery juice, there’s problems from that too. A certain amount of It’s good. It’s like eating papaya, amazing for your flora in your intestine, phenomenal. But people don’t like papaya, they get sick of celery juice. Celery juice is an energy. You can also bring in that same energy. My doctor knows me, he goes, “Eric, you can either do this, you can take this pill, or you can touch the pill. Or you can hold on to the bottle. Or you can just think about it if you want.” Because he knows that that medicine is a frequency that might help me. And I can actually refine that frequency. That’s how Homeopaths work. That’s how the placebo effects work. Because you think it’s the sugar pill is a certain frequency. You pull it in, you get better. Because the pill would actually, if it was a real pill, it would be a certain frequency. So the celery juice, yeah, it’s providing a certain frequency. It’s like in Japan, they go through this thing where everyone goes walking through the forests, it’s the frequency of the forest, we can do it here too. It makes you feel better, it can make everything work better. It does, so does celery juice. Only, do you need to drink celery juice every day? Wouldn’t hurt you if you didn’t drink too much. And for those whose bodies are not clear, whose bodies are having problems with the digestion, if they get cleared, like you’ve got cleared, that thing was bothering your digestion, celery juice might help for a while. But after a while, your body figured it out and can grow its own thing that was influenced the celery juice influenced. So your body can literally start doing it by itself. So that’s why these fads come and go. Celery juice is something that went through, it went through about 10 years ago. And then I remember when I was a teen, it was all about celery. And they come and go because the next generation hasn’t heard it yet. So the previous generation that heard it needs to be reminded. And so yeah, I’ve heard the celery juice story and it’s true. But do we need it all, all the time? No, we don’t. Would a lot of people benefit from it currently? You bet.

[1:50:19] Ashley James: Is there anything similar to the celery juice that people would largely benefit from?

[1:50:24] Eric Thorton: Yes. We recommend when the guide say too, the whole food plant based diet. That is the best. And it is the only scientifically proven diet with proponents as evidence. All the massive studies done at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, paid for by nonprofits, not for profit; for a Center for Disease Control, World Health Organization. So there’s no commercial influence in the biases of the studies, we all have is cognitive bias. So if Bear is paying for a study on sugar, they’re going to want certain information from that study. So the study isn’t neutral on sugar, they’re only going to look at what they want.

[1:51:12 ] Ashley James: Like, there are companies that make food like Nestle or Kellogg or, you know, these major food companies that pay for studies, health studies on sugar, and diet. And you’ve got to imagine that there’s definitely an influence there. They want to prove that there’s a certain amount of sugar that’s safe.

[1:51:35] Eric Thorton: Right. And the World Health Organization has determined there’s no amount of sugar that is safe. And sugar does give you benefit. It raises your blood sugar really quickly. And so the Nestle’s will go on that, how did it do that? So emphasize that, but we’ll forget that when your blood sugar goes up really fast, it causes terrible growth in your body, causes insulin resistance, etc, etc. and changes your pH so cancer can grow and things like that. They’ll ignore that part of the study, because all their studies are based on the studies from whole food plant base, from that group. And that is ultimately what is best for every human being. Does every human being have to eat that way to live a long life? No. There are 10% in their studies that show that eating a non whole food plant based diet, those 10% of the people will not get heart disease from eating the standard American diet, we call it. But they will still develop all the other problems, bad knees, bad hips, you know, diabetes, high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome issues, and then all the hundred and 80 different diseases, including various cancers that eating this standard American causes. So like sometimes they say, well, this person isn’t going to change. So let’s see if we can say okay, you can eat meat, but just a smaller amount, and up the antioxidants by eating vegetables and fruits. And then see if we can get them to reduce their sugar and things like that. And they will get healthier, and they might live to be 94 and 95 with a good heart. But they’ll have all these other problems too. But it keeps them going. But ultimately, when I ran into that, years ago, the guides went, that is what the human body needs. Period. With that said, People don’t follow it. Oreo cookies, they’re not whole food plant based but they are vegan. And they are vegetarian, and they will kill you. Or they’ll develop their diet with “Well, this person said this is okay. And this one said this is okay.” And they’re back to the commercialism. And they slowly change it back to and they say see my diet failed.

[1:54:08] Ashley James: Right. Oh, I have even done that before. But I’ve seen people do that where we can justify. Like Dr. Mark Hyman who I’ve had on the show, says meat is fine as long as we use like a condiment, and even Joel Fuhrman who himself does not eat meat, but he says if you could at least make less than 10% of your caloric intake be meat. And that really does help and so, Joel Fuhrman chooses not to eat meat, Dr. Mark Hyman, both of them have been on the show before. Mark says, you know, yeah, okay, just sprinkle a little bit of meat on something, like sprinkle it on a vegetarian taco or whatever. And his thing is, just don’t make a whole meal around the meat like most people do. And so if you pick and choose, you’re like, Okay, over here is the Mediterranean diet. So I’m going to eat some fish, then overhears the Atkins Oh, well, so I’m going to avoid some bread, and then over here, and you just kind of pick and choose. And then you’re messing everything up, you need to find something that is grounded in science. And they’re saying that the whole food plant based diet is healthy for 100% of the population. They need to make sure they’re actually doing it.

[1:55:19] Eric Thorton: Right. They sit here, it’s like the lady who called, she was doing this because she had heart problems. And she’s going, you know, I’m talking to her six weeks later, nothing’s happening. She’s doing oil pulling. So she’s putting oil in her mouth for an hour a day, to pull toxins out of our system. Well, it’s going down her throat. And oil is one of the things you can’t eat, nobody should eating oil. The pseudoscience say you get all these benefits from the oil. Well, it’s what’s in the oil that’s giving you the benefit. It’s like your omegas, those are chemicals. They’re not oil, you need the Omegas, but they’re chemicals, they happen to come out of the plants, or some animal has a few omegas in them, in the oil easiest. So then they sell you the oil.

[1:56:07] Ashley James: Well like EFAs or just basically juiced fish, right?

[1:56:13] Eric Thorton: They’re in broccoli.

[1:56:14] Ashley James: Right. Well and that’s how sardines and how salmon get to have so many Omegas in their flesh. They eat algae. So we can skip the middleman and just…

[1:56:26 ] Ashley James: Or they eat fish that had eaten algae. Exactly, or other green. Algae is generally green or brown, and it has the Omegas in it. So we can get all the you know, EFAs, DHAS, CoQ10, all these oils – I mean all these chemicals, without the oil. That’s what’s good for us. But because it’s easier for commercialism to get it in the oil, it takes a whole huge step process to pull it out of the oil. So it’s far cheaper. So feed them the oil, and keep telling them to have the oil because it’s easiest to get it into. But the oil scientifically shows its mother’s the bacteria in your intestine. And then you can’t digest grains, or the meat very well. The oil smothers the probiotics in your intestines that need air in order to live. It coats them so they can’t pull the air in. That’s the reason you can’t have oil. Because how many billion dollar industry is the probiotic industry and the vitamin industry? If you can’t get the nutrition because you don’t have the probiotics to get it, just take another pill, just buy this from us. No, you can’t get it from those things, you have to get it, you got to get the probiotics right by not eating the darn oil. And one of the reasons meat is so bad because even boneless skinless chicken is 30% fat, which is oil. That’s one of the reasons you can’t eat meat, it’s so bad for us. Sprinkled on things, like the way Asians used to eat, for the whole family, they use six ounces of meat. If you do that from birth, you don’t develop the problems as much, you still will develop a little bit, but not nearly as much. They call those the Blue Zones, the areas where people eat more primitive. When you get more affluent, you start wanting the things that are richer. So the diets of people that are poor, are actually better than the diets of the rich people, because the rich people want the creams, the things that put on fat, because our body wants to have a big bank account. And it’s like you put on that oil and you hold the oil in these oil cells. There are several things that go on with this. The fat cells, you can read about this in the book China Study, this is all scientifically shown. The fat cells, our bodies produce the fat cell, but it cannot fill it up. So this hasn’t been on Good Morning America talking about this. When you cut into a person, you’re cutting those fat cells. And it’s rancid oil, and they stink.

[1:59:42] Ashley James: That’s what surgeons say.

[1:59:42] Eric Thorton: Right. That’s what surgeons say, it’s this rancid oil. So your body once it gets it in there, it gets rancid and the body doesn’t wanna let go of it. Because it’s actually rancid, it’s poisonous. That’s why we have such a hard time losing weight and easy time gaining it. So if you eliminate the oil from your diet, it will use the oil slowly in your system so that you will have enough oil. Our bodies cannot fill those fat cells up with something that is human. And so eating all this oil also literally fills up those cells. And if you stop eating it, your cells deflate. And eventually the cell itself will go away. Or you have liposuction and get them removed or whatever. But it is a problem. Now the other thing that happens is we are also the only mammal on the planet that doesn’t produce our own antioxidants. Antioxidants are what kill the major part of your immune system. They kill viruses, bacteria, they keep systemic diseases under control. And when you don’t eat those fruits and veggies, you are susceptible to major diseases and illness.

[2:01:01] Ashley James: You’re talking about vitamin C. Animals produce their own vitamin C, but humans can’t.

[2:01:05] Eric Thorton: Correct. That’s exactly right. And so we have to eat them. And that’s the premise and let me backup a little bit. When you eat the food as a whole product, your body can use the whole thing and use everything, we talked about it a little bit, last time we talked about how an apple, you get 50 milligrams of vitamin C out of an average apple. And if you extract that, you get a 50 milligram raise in your vitamin C level in your blood. But if you eat the whole apple, you get a 1500 milligram raise of vitamin C levels in your blood, because your body uses the whole apple just like photosynthesis does. It’s photosynthesis taking place. And it’s growing all these chemicals inside the apple making the apple. Where your body will utilize all that produce till the right digestive enzymes to put in to get the body to make more vitamin C out of the chemicals in an apple. Just like the photosynthesis did, or similar. Can’t say just like, we don’t have light shining on us like that. And we’re not green, unless we’re really sick. But it does a similar thing. And that’s why it’s called whole food. They don’t want you taking supplements unless there’s a major reason for it. Because it’s away from the whole food. That’s why this diet is the one that is good for every human being. Yes, you can throw in a little if you’re not sick. In other words, if you’re young. So my daughter has chosen to do this on her own, no parental influence. And then we can prove it because our son still eat some meat and she decided to do this. And it changed the way she feels, the speed of which she runs, the way she can build muscle and everything because she’s getting enough antioxidants. Her body’s alkaline now, and so it can function properly. And she can have because she’s young, she doesn’t have any illnesses. So like when she went to Ireland, she tried their sausages. You know, when she’s out, she doesn’t have to panic about oil. She try to order things without oil. But if there’s oil, if that’s all there is, she’ll eat it. But she’s young and doesn’t have heart disease, or deteriorated joints yet, metabolic syndrome yet. So she’s continuous like that. She will probably never get any of these major diseases until she’s 95. That’s terrific. And that’s what Fuhrman’s talking about, if you can do it from early on, didn’t hurt you so much.

[2:03:52] Ashley James: I had Dr. Esselstyn on the show, really great interview. He is great. I’ve had three cardiologists on the show, all have sort of very different different takes on how to heal the hurt, all of them get results, but Dr. Esselstyn gets the most results. Anyone listening who has any problems with a heart health or any friends with heart health or family, definitely share, listen to and share the Dr. Esselstyn interview that I did. And by the way, if you don’t know how to find it, you can go to www.learntruehealth.com and type in cardiologist and use the search bar or type in Dr. Esselstyn, use the search bar to find the episode. He did the world’s longest study. I believe it was over 12 years old or it’s still going on. I think he wrote it up after 12 years. But yeah, he took a bunch of people who had end stage heart disease four clogs in their heart, you know, absolutely end stage. And he got them on this diet, whole foods plant based, no salt, sugar, oil. And by whole food, I mean, you can make really delicious food out of it, it’s just whole ingredient. Here’s a whole broccoli, here’s a whole asparagus, you know, and you’re not cooking with oil or fat, you’re cooking with broth that  doesn’t have salt in it or water. And you can actually saute something as though it had butter or oil in it using a little bit of water. And so he has these cooking techniques. But in his diet, he has been able to reverse clogs in the arteries and completely reverse hardening of the arteries, the narrowing of the arteries, he’s been able to get people off of the heart transplant list and off of medications using this diet. And they follow people for years to prove that, that it sustains the results.

[2:05:52] Eric Thorton: Right. Exactly. I’m one of those patients. I don’t know if he took down the statistics because this was six years ago. Now that was when I talked to him was four years ago. And I’ve talked to him number of times since. I was what he called the walking dead. I was scheduled for literally two days when I talked to him for open heart surgery, I already had a massive heart attack. And the guides corrected it. I had no signs of the heart attack, but I still developed the coronary artery disease. I was vegetarian. I still had coconut oil, little bit, one teaspoon. I had egg whites in the morning for breakfast, when I put the coconut oil in the pan. And I had an occasional piece of cheese like once every two weeks, and maybe a little bit of lunch meat once a week. That was it. As far as anything else. Everything else was healthy vegetarian. Not crap vegetarian, I still developed more coronary artery disease. So on the way to see a whole food plant based cardiologist, we had called, and my wife had called, and he called back right literally in the lobby going to the cardiologist place. And he goes, “I know that guy, he’s good.” And he goes, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well, we switched to whole food plant base, because of pump head because of all the problems of this open heart surgery.” And I was ready for it. And he goes, “Okay, he goes, you’re doing that. Now I want you to add to it.” So he says, “My latest book is going to have this in it. It’s out now, I don’t know the name of it. But it has this part in it too.” He had me ate six cups of green steamed vegetables packed after they were steamed a day on top of my regular vegan diet or whole food plant based diet.

[2:07:47] Ashley James: And did he have you sprinkle balsamic on it?

[2:07:50] Eric Thorton: Yes, yeah. He explains that in our interview. He has people eat every two hours as they made a whole bowl of steamed greens. He has like 12 greens choose from and you rotate them. And every T is basically a full time job, every two hours, you get to eat this big bowl of greens, and then you sprinkle it with balsamic. And I never liked balsamic until he explained why that there’s an acid in balsamic that heals the inner lining of our circulatory system is healed by this acid from the balsamic. And he’s found that, that is even more effective for immediately helping to clear up the arteries. Right. So I did exactly that, and within three days the angina went away. Within three months, 90 days, 90 days, right? I was off of five medications that were serious medication for heart disease. I was completely off off of them. The doctor goes, “Stop.” I’d cut reduce my blood pressure medication, and reduce and cut in half and cut because the blood pressure was getting too low. And finally I go in, I’m taking a quarter of the dose and he goes, “Stop it, you’re killing yourself.” The veins had opened up that fast.

[2:09:12] Ashley James: The doctor wanted to stop the drugs or stop the diet?

[2:09:14] Eric Thorton: The doctors stopped the drugs. They told me stop taking them. You’re getting too healthy. I’m sitting there going, “Yes!” But that’s, you know, for me, that is a big thing for me. So I can stick to the diet or stick to the lifestyle quite easily. Because I think, well if I eat that oil, is it going to give me a heart attack? Now I know it won’t, at this point because my arteries are cleared up. And I’ve now proven had gone through the tests. The arteries are cleared up. But I’m susceptible to it. I have those genes. So and I know it and I know the effect. I’ve experienced the effect. It’s hard for people who haven’t experienced a major illness to define the motivation to do this. I get it. That’s not a problem for me. But if you can do it like even Dr. Esselstyn says Dr. Lyle and Dr. McDougall, if you can do it 70% of the time, you’re 70% better off. If you can do it 80, 80%, 90, 90%. You know Dr. Esselstyn, and it was hilarious. He goes, “My only draw, my only real weakness is every New Year’s Eve I ate peanut butter cups.” I just cracked, I go, “Really it’s peanut butter cups? He goes, “Yes. I just love peanut butter cups.” “Are they Trader Joe’s peanut butter cups? Because those are the ones that I like.” And he goes, “No, they’re Reese’s.” And I go, “Good for Reese’s.” But he even admits it, basically. It’s hard. And his family, his parents died really young from a dairy farm they used to have, you know, and it’s like, “Aw.” You know? And so, you know, he’s terrific.

[2:11:00] Ashley James: Yeah.

[2:11:01] Eric Thorton: And he does return phone calls.

[2:11:03] Ashley James: Yeah, he does. Actually, I’ve heard that from a few people. I met Rip, his son. Rip Esselstyn, who has a whole line of food at Whole Foods.

[2:11:14] Eric Thorton: Engine 2.

[2:11:14] Ashley James: Engine 2, that’s right.  A book, a very interesting book. And I met him at a talk he gave in Redmond at Whole Foods. The first thing you said is and there’s maybe about 50 people, “Who here has talked on the phone with my dad?” And like half of them put up their hand and he goes, “Yeah, you call him, he’ll talk to anyone.” And he still works as a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, teaching people and he’s in his late 90s, or in his 80s.

[2:11:42] Eric Thorton: I think he’s 84 or 86 now.

[2:11:44] Ashley James: He talks about going skiing in the Alps or something. I mean that’s the diet, it keeps you healthy. So I have a listener, and if he’s listening, hello! I have a listener who is a career military man and he was going to be honorably discharged because his cardiac numbers were so bad. I mean, he looks physically fit, like a marine or Green Beret or something. But his cholesterol was so high that they were going to dismiss him and other numbers were so high, unresponsive to medication so high, and he would have lost his career in the military. And he heard my interview with Dr. Esselstyn, he got on the diet one month later, his numbers were normal.

[2:12:30] Eric Thorton: Yes, exactly. That’s what happens. They do the 21 day challenge. In 21 days, if you eat strict, they actually take people and they feed them, house them and everything for 21 days, take their blood before and after 21 days, it has dropped so dramatically. All these numbers, that they just sit there and go, “Oh, my God.” And guess what? They weren’t hungry, and they had great food. So, you know, it’s you do have to learn a new way of cooking. People go, “I can’t do it. I said, “Baloney. You learn these recipes. So you’re just learning more recipes.” You just stop cooking these recipes and you cook these ones. That’s all it is. It’s not hard. The hard part is like even Esselstyn will say or Fuhrman is the addiction to the oil and the meat.

[2:13:23] Ashley James: And if your addiction has a voice behind it, then come see Eric.

[2:13:27] Eric Thorton: Yes, because it is. It affects that. Because again, the predatory energy was to prevent you from continuing with your process. Well, it had me two feet in the grave, fortunately, I was still standing. Because it wanted to stop me from bringing my knowledge to the world. And I almost didn’t make it.

[2:13:57] Ashley James: But now looking back, I mean, you could either and this is the lesson for all of us, we can either give into the drama of what was me, this thing happened to me or is happening to, or has happened to me and my family, which creates an energy that brings in like energy, right? So it brings in thought forms and entities of other energy to kind of compound and exacerbate that drama. Or you can do what you’re doing and say that you’re grateful for the experience that you went through. Because now I mean, if you hadn’t had those heart issues, would you have found this diet? Would you have, you know, been this way that you’ve now helped your family and now you help your clients this way. So it’s a ripple effect. But you’re looking at the ripple effect with gratitude and seeing that. What’s the positive outcome? Tony Robbins, and I love him for this. He says what’s good about this? When things start to have drama, ask what’s good about this? And keep asking yourself, what’s good about this until you find the positive meaning behind that experience.

[2:15:05] Eric Thorton: Well, that was a major thing that happened to me when I had the heart attack. And I’m standing there and I went pale as a piece of paper. Because I have a connection to the guides, because I went totally pale. I mean, literally, all life drained right out of me. And I go, “Am I having a heart attack?” And they go, “Yup.” And I literally go, “Damn.” And then I called my daughter to get me some aspirin and I wasn’t upset about it. I didn’t allow myself to get upset. I knew what happened. I have the privilege. And I know it’s a privilege. I fully acknowledge it. I know, it’s okay, when you don’t have a body. And I know this is a tool. And I’m very grateful for this tool. But it’s not a problem for me not having that tool anymore. And so I’m laying there in the hospital room, and I could go to anxiety and worry and raise my blood pressure and raise my heart rate when I’m down to a 7% ejection rate on the left side of my heart. And that would just simply kill me. So I decided to honor the body and its process and what I knew I was going to be learning. And I was lying there in bed dying. I got congestive heart failure and double pneumonia, called the nurse and to give me some oxygen because I didn’t have enough oxygen anymore. I’m lying there dying, I’m whistling. And my wife goes, “That was arrogant.” I go, “Well, no. It wasn’t.” That wasn’t arrogant at all. That’s who I am. And I really felt that way. I didn’t even think about it. It was just like, “Oh, this is what I’m going through now. I wonder what I’m going to be learning later, this is going to be interesting.” And I thought you know, it’s a better attitude for the body. So I don’t stress it. And like, well, it all works good. And I lived. And then the guides had a chance to correct the heart. And which they did,  fortunately. We have great success with heart disease in the work we do. But anyway, I have learned so much from that is unbelievable to help my clients. I have learned things I would never have learned if I wasn’t forced into it from the heart attack. And they protected me during the whole process. And that’s what we have to turn these negativity immediately into the positivity. Like you were taught in that class with Tony and probably other people too, what’s the benefit. And that keeps you in, keeps you out of the drama, the human drama, and into the moment. You know, I wasn’t thinking about, I thought you know, I really don’t want to die yet. But I told everybody, I’ll be back to haunt you. And you’ll notice me because there’ll be a sense of humor. And they go, “Okay.” You know my daughter goes, “Oh, when you die? It’s gonna be hilarious.” I go, “You betcha.” Because I will make darn sure every painting is tipped, the TV flips out, the doors open and close. I’ll make sure that when you, because one of my favorite things is strawberries and blueberries. I’ll make sure you dump them on the floor. Just to let you know give some to dad. Because it is, it’s a natural thing for us to do. We do it all, we do it with every life. It’s just we’re taught not to. And we’re talking about Esselstyn and how the gift he’s giving the world in realizing that our cardiological system is designed to keep ill.

[2:19:02] Ashley James: Oh, you mean the mainstream medical system?

[2:19:04] Eric Thorton: Correct. It’s designed to keep us patients. And it’s not bad doctors. It’s what the system is teaching. You know, my cardiologist I had before, after the heart attack, before the whole food plant based, he had knowledge. But he had to operate to keep his license within the rules of the American Medical Association as a cardiologist. So he couldn’t tell me certain things. So when I did show up needing bypass surgery, he was the one doing the work. He was my cardiologist. And we come out of surgery. He goes, you need to have bypass surgery. Here’s the doctor to do it. He’s the best in the State. He’s blah, blah, blah. He couldn’t, and he was the best doctor in the state. And so he connected me up really well. My wife said to him, “But couldn’t we change that with diet?” And he said, “Yes, but it would take three years.” It had been three years since the heart attack.

[2:20:06] Ashley James: And he could have told you three years ago, but he didn’t.

[2:20:09] Eric Thorton: He didn’t. He didn’t. Because if he did, I could sue him. Because the American Medical Association had not recommended yet whole food plant based. He knew it. But he couldn’t recommend it. They can now, American Medical Association now recommends whole food plant based for heart disease. So he can say it now, but he couldn’t then. And I never went back to him. Because he was a good man. He really was. I don’t have a problem with him. But he left that little things slip that he should have let slip three years before because he knew me. He knew I was willing to do anything. And I could stick with things. But he didn’t.

[2:21:01] Ashley James: Yeah, I want all my doctors to be renegades just enough to be okay with telling me the truth. Right and they damn the potential consequences. Tell me the truth.

[2:21:13] Eric Thorton: Right. Or at least look for it themselves. So these doctors are now exposed, like the rest of us are to the various ideas of food and nutrition. And yet they’ve only had 20 minutes of nutrition in their becoming doctors, according to Esselstyn is 20 minutes. And it may be a whole class. Okay, great. But it’s like, okay, but this is out there. So why the resistance to study in this? They sit there and they go with the whole food plant based. Well, Dr… What’s the name? Who started The China Study? Dr… I forgot his name right now, he’s a PhD. He’s not an MD. So all the research is flawed. That’s literally what they say. But he brought in, he was a PhD at Stanford, he brought in the doctors to do the studies. He was just the orchestrator. He did a magnificent job. And it’s the only sound science on nutrition on the planet. And it’s evidence based nutrition. And the evidence was gathered by long term scientific studies. And that the guides have gone. That’s what the human bodies need. They were very specific about it, though. We used to live short lives, it didn’t matter. Now, we’re trying to live these long lives for humans. We’re trying to live past 50. In 1900, the average American, the statistics show, lived to be 47 years old. You couldn’t get year round fruits and vegetables then, now you can. And that’s actually doing that. And sanitation is why we live longer, because we’re getting the antioxidants year round now. So don’t mess with Mexico. Sorry, that was an editorial.

[2:23:13] Ashley James: No. I just thought when the tariffs were being threatened, I was like, “You know what, all these people with their avocado obsession, what’s gonna happen?” Like, don’t take away my avocados.

[2:23:26] Eric Thorton: You know, you gotta have the strawberry, but it is, those are antioxidants. And avocados are very good for you. You take them away, you’re eliminating some of what we need for year round food. And that is what increased our longevity. People have recently in the last 15 years, started doing all these other diets. And now, the average lifespan has dropped three years, literally, because of all these other diets.

[2:23:52] Ashley James: Like Atkins and keto.

[2:23:54] Eric Thorton: Right. High meat diets. If you go online, and you look at a vial of blood, someone that’s on the high fat, high protein diet – half the blood, it separates out, half of it is the fat they ate. That is like taking sandpaper to the inside of your arteries. But we don’t care about that. I do. And people that are doing that much, their bodies care about it. They’re just not aware of it until they have an event. Not fully aware of it. Constipation does develop to be a problem on those diets. And they do, they shock your body into losing weight. There’s no question about that for a while. And then it starts, the antioxidants go down, the vitamins and minerals go down. And then you start getting unhealthy. So anyway, it’s a sad process. And I have learned tremendously from the gift of my heart attack and it was a gift. There’s no question about it.

[2:24:59] Ashley James: Today, we got to learn from the gift of your heart attack as well. So thank you, thank you for sitting with us and sharing so much wonderful information and stories. The takeaway being that, if we have loved ones ashes, let them go so that we become healthier and that the soul of our ancestors can move on into a better place for our benefit, for their benefit. All the way around. Good for everyone, that we need to focus on gaining the positive learnings and being grateful in the now so that we can vibrate at that frequency that attracts like. So the more evolved, less coming from ego, coming from a more soul stance or our soul’s purpose, right? So we need to focus on gaining all the positive learnings and not attaching to the drama.

[2:26:01] Eric Thorton: Focus on the grace of every event like these public speakers talk about, you focus on positivity, there’s a real truth to that. You can’t be there all the time. So don’t punish yourself for not being able to do it. But the more you stay in that, the more your frequency is that and you’re going to draw less predatory or lower frequency energy. That’s how you stay safe.

[2:26:28] Ashley James: And then the final message would be, do a 21 day challenge and try the whole food plant based diet, no salt, sugar or oil. I interviewed chef AJ on the show and she’s a delight. Definitely, listeners can go back and search Chef AJ in the search box at www.learntruehealth.com to find that episode. And then Dr. Goldhamer who I remember the number of that one, it’s Episode 230. I remember that because my husband’s joke is when’s the best time to go to the dentist? 230 your tooth 30 you know. My husband’s full of dad jokes. But yeah, so Episode 230 is Dr. Goldhamer and he teaches this but Chef AJ and there’s some great YouTube videos of the two of them Chef AJ and Dr. Goldhamer together, Chef AJ teaches, I think she says over 100 or more videos where she teaches from start to finish how to cook delicious lunches and snacks and breakfasts and dinners using this whole foods plant based diet, no salt, sugar, or oil, and she also adds no alcohol as well. Which is literally a poison. So while you do your 21 day challenge, cut out alcohol as well, because it is considered sugar and a toxin to the liver. But that together in 21 days, creates like a whole new body, a whole new experience.

[2:28:00] Eric Thorton: It’s phenomenal. I’ve met them both personally, because I went to True North and went through the process down there. So that’s where all these doctors congregate, share information, they have labs there, they have rooms, I did 21 day fast with a 14 day refeed. So I spent a lot of time and I got all those lectures and saw Chef AJ and listen to her and all the other things. And they’re fascinating people, and they have the best intentions. They do have the intention, that’s a good intention. If people don’t want to hear it, they’re not going to hear it. So why bother? And that’s the way the guides are too, you know, I told you if they’re not going to do it, let’s see if we can modify it a little bit and get a little bit healthier. But the people aren’t going to listen. That’s it.

[2:28:14] Ashley James: Right.

[2:28:53] Eric Thorton: And Goldhamer is big on that. And Chef AJ went through the 21 day fast, and she has to remain very strict in order to keep weight off. She was like, very, very heavy at one time. And her body cannot tolerate even oils in avocados and nuts and things like that. Otherwise, she’ll balloon up again and she does it right away. And I don’t know why because I’ve never worked on her. So she has to be very strict. So actually, her recipes are actually really good. Only because she can’t cheat. And so they are they’re very good recipes. I have one of her cookbooks. I think I have two. She did one with Ramsey, Chef Ramsay and her and then I have one of hers too. And they’re very good. So I’m a cook too. So I always spice things up and things like that. But I use all these recipe books for their basic recipe. And then I’ll fine tune it. But her recipes are good and sound the way they are. So, but again, I like to mess with things a little.

[2:30:07] Ashley James: Yeah, you got a gorgeous kitchen for that.

[2:30:09] Eric Thorton: Yeah, I do. We have a commercial kitchen that allows us to do that and get those flavors and things like that. So, but it is. She does the demonstrations on hot plates. She doesn’t do it on a big fancy stove. She’s got it right there and she’s got your coils that you plug into the wall, you know, and just regular electric hot plate. So anyone can do it. You can go buy a hot plate if you need to.

[2:30:37] Ashley James: She gives some great advice. She says make all your seasonings in advance like, she buys all her seasoning, let’s say sage and garlic and ground onion and all the different kinds of spices. And she will get them in bulk for example. And then take these containers and make her blends for the next week. Sort of like someone would take their 20 supplement bottles or their 10 prescription bottles and make up a little holder. You know, she does that with her seasoning. So she knows she’s going to make chili on Thursday, she just grabs her bottle of pre made chili seasoning and just throws it in. And I thought that was really smart to kind of make her make her own blends. So there’s no salt in it, there’s no sugar in it, there’s no oil in it, I can’t believe how many spices out there are filled with crap. So she makes her own. And then she doesn’t have to… it takes less time for her to cook because she just grabs one thing and pours, dumps the whole pile of spice right there on the food while she’s cooking it.

[2:31:43] Eric Thorton: She’s a professional cook. So she has that all worked out for a certain flavor. Most people can’t do that. They don’t plan ahead that far. And they can’t think of what they’re doing, until they actually do it. She happens to be able to do that which is really nice where she buys a lot of her spices, give them a plug it’s called Savory Spice. And they do have a lot of blends that have salt or sugar in or something but they also have a lot to do not. And they have some very, very interesting spices. And they recommend you at True North Health to go to Savory Spice, that’s about 10 blocks from that facility. And they have their own blend that Savory Spice makes for True Health. And that you have on your table to just put spice on your food, herbal blend, and it’s a nice one that doesn’t have to be cooked to flavor your food. And they have several of those and Savory Spice is the place that they get all these and they’re organic and they’re you know the whole works and so you go in and you say I want whole food plant based, no sugar, oil or salt like, “Okay, we got this this this this and this.” And there’s some really amazing blends, they have Japanese blends, they got Korean, they got Middle Eastern, and you know they got all kinds from all over the world that have no sugar, oil or salt.

[2:33:04] Ashley James: Oh I have to check them out. They probably sell them online.

[2:33:10] Eric Thorton: I was thinking they were in Santa Rosa where True North Health is. And so it’s like, I lost their phone number so look it up online there’s one at Alderwood Mall.

2:33:22] Ashley James: So they are a chain.

[2:33:23] Eric Thorton: They’re a chain. I’ve been sitting here ordering. It’s like I get the privilege of now walking in. Because you go in it’s like this place smells good. So anyway, I found that out I go, “Okay, why can’t you tell me that sooner, guys?”

[2:33:45] Ashley James: You give talks in Redmond. So local people are listening can check out your website and get on your newsletter at www.ericthorton.com and come to your free lectures. I know the next one’s coming up in a few weeks.

[2:33:58] Eric Thorton: And I think you said you were going to record it, maybe?

[2:34:00] Ashley James: We’re going to do our best.

[2:34:01] Eric Thorton: Okay. So we might be able to put the whole lecture or discussion, I have a more open discussion. So it’s more interesting. I think lectures can get a little boring.

[2:34:14] Ashley James: Well, not you. I can’t imagine you being boring. But we’ll do our best to record it. Thank you so much for sitting with us.

[2:34:21] Eric Thorton: Thank you.

[2:34:21] Ashley James: And teaching, this has been a lot of fun. I love hearing how all the listeners have been reaching out to you and working with you and getting great results, and those who listen are enjoying our interviews.

[2:34:37] Eric Thorton: I’ve gotten quite a few calls, even long distance. Like I told you earlier had a guy today, the call from Saudi Arabia that’s doesn’t wanna get in trouble in Saudi Arabia. So he’s going to either the UK in August, so he wants an appointment in August and he listened to you. That was the latest podcast. So that was Sunday. So I think he listened Monday and he called yesterday. So I get quite a bit of that and it’s really fun to help your clients.

[2:35:04] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s what I’m all about. Let’s help all the listeners to get true health.

[2:35:10] Eric Thorton: Yeah. Happy to help.

[2:35:13] Ashley James: Awesome.

—

Outro:

Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out.

You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in.

Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible.

I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals.

There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.

So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you.

Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them now and check it out.

And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

—

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For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price.

That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com

Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected With Eric Thorton!

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Recommended Reading by Eric Thorton

Educating the Souls, Spiritual Healing and our Eternal Psychology

Recommended Links:

Episode 327 – Spiritual Healing

Episode 335 – Energetic Boundaries

Episode 336 – Energetic Boundaries (Part II)

Episode 359 – Lives Of Discovery

Get my favorite magnesium! Use coupon code LTH at LivingTheGoodLifeNaturally.com

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https://nootropicsexpert.com/performance-lab-energy-review
https://nootropicsexpert.com/performance-lab-whole-food-multi-review
https://nootropicsexpert.com/personal-consultations
https://nootropicsexpert.com/store
https://www.youtube.com/nootropicsexpert

How To Improve Brain Cognition With Nootropics

https://www.learntruehealth.com/improve-brain-cognition-with-nootropics-david-tomen

Highlights:

• Preventing Alzheimer’s and Dementia is not a sure thing but there are certain things that you can do to really increase your chances of it not happening.
• Free radicals and oxidative damage to the brain is by no means the only cause of cognitive problems and functional decline in your brain
• With the help of certain nootropics or supplements, you can increase your chances.
• Whole foods plant-based diets with healthy fats support brain health.
• Taking the right nootropic supplements can optimize your brain health and protect you from cognitive decline well into the future.
• It is never too late to start taking supplements.

Do you find yourself at times challenged at remembering the things you used to know and even used to really master at life? Memory loss? You would be shocked to discover that it is not a normal part of aging. Today’s podcast will help you understand why and how the decline in brain function starts and basically what to do when realizing that you’re not a sharp as you once were.

[00:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. Today, wow you are going to love today’s interview. David Tomen comes back on the show to teach us how to reverse and prevent aging of the brain. Science has shown it actually starts in your 20’s and really starts to take hold in our 40’s. You’ve noticed that you don’t think as clearly as you used to or maybe math which is my thing isn’t coming as naturally or as quickly to you as it used to. You want to hear today’s interview with David Tomen because he teaches us exactly how to help heal the brain and to anti-aging on the brain. Also, how to prevent and reverse big issues like Parkinson’s, Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. I know you’re going to love hearing what he has to say. It’s very technical. There’s a lot of science in it and I know you’re probably going to want to take notes. But here’s the thing, we now transcribe all of our interviews. So you can go ahead and go to learntruehealth.com and read the transcript for this interview. It’s going to take us a little bit of time between posting it to all of the podcast directories and then getting up on our website but once it’s on our website you’ll be able to read this entire interview which is really exciting. Remember to go to learntruehealth.com and check that out because all of the recent episodes have been transcribed for you, which is so great. I know several listeners have told me that they listened to episodes two or three times to take notes. This has been very helpful for them. I want to let you know about two resources because we discussed supplements in this interview specifically magnesium and vitamins. I want to let you know about two of my favorite resources. David mentions in this interview that magnesium is very important for brain health. My favorite source of magnesium is not oral magnesium. It is soaking in magnesium. If you’re a new listener you may have not heard this but if you’ve been around for a while you’ve heard me talk about Kristen Bowen’s magnesium soak which has really been transformative for my life and for my family. Over 2,000 listeners have enjoyed soaking in Kristen’s magnesium and actually come back and told me about it. There’s several threads in our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group where listeners have shared their positive experience with soaking in the magnesium soak. If you’d like to increase the magnesium in your body because most people are deficient. You’d like to do it without having to take an oral supplement that gives you diarrhea. Let’s be honest, most magnesium supplements do that. You can soak in the magnesium and your body will absorb grams of magnesium every time you soak in it. It’s very concentrated, it’s all-natural, it’s from the Zechstein Sea. You can listen to my interview with Kristen Bowen to learn more about that. You can go to learntruehealth.com and type in Kristen Bowen or type in magnesium in the search box and you’ll find those interviews. Go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH. That’s the listener coupon code to get your discount and buy a jug of her magnesium soak. It is really transformative. After we introduced it into the bath for our 4-year-old son, he was 3 at that time. He would always fight us every time it was bedtime. After we started adding it to his bath, he would be more relaxed and calm and want to go to sleep. That’s how we felt too. It just relaxes you, it calms you, and it increases sleep. It also increases energy because your body needs it for hundreds of enzymatic processes in the body. Since most people are deficient in magnesium and so many symptoms of magnesium deficiency that could mimic other diseases if you’re experiencing symptoms of anything, you should really try magnesium and try soaking in it. Kristen recommends you do a 30-day challenge. You’d buy one of the jugs and you soak in it every evening for 30 days. I soak in it while I’m in my sauna. You could soak in it while watching TV or when you’re sitting at your desk. Sometimes I do that. I soak while I’m sitting at my desk recording interviews. Just try it and see how you feel and come to the Facebook group. Learn True Health Facebook group and share your experience with soaking in the magnesium. Of course, everything that I’m talking right now is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast of the learntruehealth.com. So go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH to try the magnesium soak, which I highly recommend. My second resource for you is where I buy all my vitamins and minerals from, especially my minerals is takeyoursupplements.com. Go to takeyoursupplements.com and fill out the form for a free consultation with a health coach that’ll help you buy the right supplements for you. They specialize in minerals. If you’re looking for a really good trace mineral if you’re looking for a really good selenium complex that is where I’d go. I absolutely highly recommend checking out takeyoursupplements.com for those supplements. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview. I know you will and please share this interview with all of your friends and family who want to have a healthy brain.

[05:44] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 374. I’m very excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show with us Nootropics Expert David Tomen. He was here first in episode 362 where he taught us about how to heal the brain and balance dopamine and serotonin. Very fascinating story that you have David, where you were able to completely reverse your ADHD using natural substances and that it drove you to want to learn how to balance the brain, heal the brain and support the brain using herbs and supplements and food and just understanding more about the chemistry and science about the brain. Which is something that is not explored enough and you just think that we would just focus on the brain more since that is where we live. Right? I’m very excited to have you back in the show today. We’re going to cover some really interesting information that everyone can benefit from. Welcome back, David.

[06:57] David Tomen: Hi, Ashley. Thanks for having me back.

[07:00] Ashley James: Now, are you sipping your chai tea? We are talking about tea. I’ve got my green tea here I’m sipping. Do you have your organic chai tea you’re sipping right now?

[07:10] David Tomen:  I’ve got another kind of Tazo tea. I think it’s oolong.

[07:14] Ashley James: Nice. Okay, there’s oolong in mine too. So, cheers.

[07:16] David Tomen:  Excellent. Cheers.

[07:17] Ashley James: And we know that these teas have nice phytonutrients in it for the brain.

[07:23] David Tomen:  I think they do. [Laughter] They’ll keep us calm during the podcast and we’ll be able to think quicker and live longer.

[07:34] Ashley James: Hold on while I chug mine. [Laughter]

[07:38] David Tomen:  There, you just added two minutes to your life. [Laughter]

[07:41] Ashley James: Excellent. David, we were discussing a few days ago what we discussed today and you said, you mentioned, you rattled off some amazing topics all of which I want you to keep coming back on the show to teach but one of them really struck a chord for me and it was the aging brain and how to prevent. How to foresee the signs of it and how to prevent it. How to reverse it. You mentioned things like becoming forgetful or possibly like losing certain skills you used to have and that really struck a chord with me because in my 20s, I was a math whiz. You could throw math at me all day long. I was like a human calculator and now, I can barely add single digits. It’s just I have to like count on my fingers and it’s like, “What happened?” I feel like a part of my brain just shut down and I don’t have access to the same skills that I used to have and I’m approaching 40. I’m not a candidate for dementia hopefully. What’s going on? You have a great explanation so for those who might notice that they’re less sharp than they used to be or they have a bit more brain fog or possibly they’re concerned that they might end up with dementia. You’re here to teach us today how to take care of your brain so that we can reverse its age and become even healthier brain-wise.

[09:09] David Tomen: With a little bit of work you can get your math skills back. The thing is that we all know some people that have lived past 90 years old, right? They’ve enjoyed a really well functional brain until the very end so we know it’s possible to maintain a fully optimized brain right throughout our life. Most of us also know that people that have got Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or Dementia, I’ve got people of my own family. My father-in-law’s’ got Parkinson’s. But neurodegenerative disease affects not just one person either like close family members and your friends impact as well. It’s not just you if your brain feeling is effective it’s everybody in the circle around you. The thing is that the memory loss that you just described is not a normal part of aging. It really isn’t. Recent research in aging and brain function found that as we get older, individual brain molecule cells and cellular circulation and even the physical shape of your brain are affected in some way. Some of these changes are right around your 21^stbirthday. If you’re young biohacker listening to this podcast, this podcast is just as much for you as it is for the aging baby boomer or the senior citizen. We know that the brain responds to the same types of insults that we throw at it with as the rest of your body. It gets attacked by stress, nutritional deficiency, poor diet, toxins, not enough exercise and sleep. These things all affect cognition but the human brain has an amazing ability to repair and maintain itself even up to old age. All we have to do is give it what it needs to survive and thrive. That’s kind of like our start. We can all just go through, when I was researching this, I divided it into segments so that it was easier to comprehend and understand. There’s five different segments and we’ll talk about each one of these in plain English so that anybody can understand what we’re talking about and some tips about how to take care of the particular thing.

[11:35] Ashley James: Sounds great.

[11:36] David Tomen:  Yes. The first thing that we have to deal with our free radicals and brain aging. Now we’ve got extensive research that shows oxidation of DNA proteins and lipids by free radicals are responsible for functional decline in your brain. As estimated, that 10,000-oxidated interaction between DNA and free radicals in each one of your brain cells occurs every day. But as you get older at least one out of every three proteins per cell is dysfunctional because of oxidative damage.

[12:14] Ashley James: Wow.

[12:16] David Tomen:  So free radicals and oxidative damage to the brain is by no means the only cause of cognitive problems but their rule of free radicals and [Inaudible 12:26] dysfunction is a really major issue and it’s fairly simple to take care of it.

[12:36] Ashley James: In terms of the free radical damage that happens to the brain. It’s kind of approaching it in all fronts because free radical damage harms the circulation to the brain and also the circulation away from the brain so bringing fresh nutrients to the brain and removing the waste away from the brain. The free radical damage would cause inflammation to all the vasculature that’s sort of one insult to the brain that’s happening every day but then you’re saying it’s also affecting the protein synthesis in the brain and it’s also affecting the DNA itself.

[13:15] David Tomen:  Yes, right down to the DNA. When you think about it, free radicals and oxidation are a normal part of how our brain works because when you are sending oxygen and nutrients into brain cells, into the mitochondria to use the skill, there’s a burning process that takes place. We’re talking about energy production but whenever there’s energy production there’s also waste because once the fatty acids, for example, are used up they’re oxidized fatty acids and we have a built-in immune system that helps flush the stuff out but it gets out of hand as we get older. Our body cannot cope with the free radical, the normal free radical process that’s going on in our system, we can’t cope with the onslaught and if you don’t do something about it, you just don’t catch up cells get damaged and they die. Let’s talk about a couple of things that you can do to help stop this and reverse it. Yes?

[14:23] Ashley James: Awesome. Let’s do it. Let’s jump in.

[14:25] David Tomen:  All right. Alpha lipoic acid is a naturally-occurring, sulfur-containing fatty acid that is very unique among antioxidants. Because it is both water and fat-soluble. It’s got a unique ability to neutralize free radicals in all cellular environments. This antioxidant can even reduce brain damage after a stroke.

[14:51] Ashley James: Wow. Very cool. Where does it come from? Alpha lipoic acid?

[14:54] David Tomen:  Well, lipoic acid is a naturally occurring fatty acid in your body and what we do know is that lipoic acid helps boost the synthesis of acetylcholine that increases glucose uptake in brain cells. Lipoic acid is actually part of the synthesis of acetylcholine. If you don’t have lipoic acid you cannot synthesize acetylcholine so it’s part of that process. Lipoic acid regenerates other depleted anti-oxidants that are already in your system like vitamins C and E, glutathione and it recycles CoQ10. It reduces inflammation, it gets rid of heavy metals and boosts cellular energy and memory

[15:40] Ashley James: Very cool. I just pulled up Alpha lipoic acid is a vitamin-like chemical called an antioxidant. You can get it from yeast, liver, kidney, spinach, broccoli, and potatoes. They are all very good sources of it. You can have it also use it as a supplement. Even though if you eat lots of broccoli and spinach, I’d still, if you’re looking to heal the brain I would still use it as a supplement.

[16:05] David Tomen: Absolutely. 50 – 600 mg a day depending on what you’re trying to cure.

[16:13] Ashley James: Would you divide that up if someone decided to do the full dose like the full 600 mg a day? Would they divide that up?

[16:22] David Tomen: I would divide that up into three. For example, for diabetic neuropathy, it’s recommended to use 800 mg a day so you divide that into two doses. You’ll need 400 mg in the morning and 400 mg early afternoon.

[16:34] Ashley James: Is it best to take on an empty stomach or with food?

[16:37] David Tomen: This one on an empty stomach but it’s like it doesn’t really matter with lipoic acid because it’s both water and fat-soluble. I did make some notes when I was researching this that eating it with amino decreases its bioavailability. So taking it on an empty stomach is better but it’s not going to kill you if you happen to make a mistake and you eat it right after a meal.

[17:11] Ashley James: The benefits of supplements is you’re not going to have these large reactions if you took a drug the wrong way.

[17:19] David Tomen: Yes. It’s just going to work better if you take it on an empty stomach. The thing about alpha lipoic acid supplements they contain a mixture of RLA and SLA. RLA is the natural kind of lipoic acid that’s found in our system. S lipoic acid is the synthetic kind. The thing is that R lipoic acid is pretty unstable. They combine it 50-50 with synthetic lipoic acid just to maintain it’s stability so that they could put in the capsule so you could take it as a supplement.

[18:03] Ashley James: Do you find that even though half of it is synthetic, people still gain benefit from taking it?

[18:09] David Tomen:  Absolutely. There are a couple of R Lipoic acid versions that have been produced that are patented that would improve the stability of that particular as RSLA is a little bit more expensive but it’s possible to get plain RLA. You’re just going to pay more for it.

[18:26] Ashley James: I know one from Japan that was they claim it to be all-natural and stable.

[18:43] David Tomen:  Yes. That’s the one that they used in Performance Lab Energy’s got that and that’s the one that I use. Anyway, that is lipoic acid. Another one that you can do is CoQ10. This is a natural antioxidant synthesized in every single cell in your body and brain and it helps produce adenosine triphosphate which is your mitochondria source of energy. There’s two types of CoQ10. There’s one ubiquinone. It gets converted to ubiquinol your cells and then once ubiquinol gets converted back to ubiquinone. We find that people that are over 40, there’s some research that shows that if you supplement with ubiquinol you get more benefit. Then some other people say ubiquinone is better for them. They get as much benefit from ubiquinone as they do from ubiquinol. One is more expensive than the other.

[19:41] Ashley James: I know that you have some supplements brands that you specifically recommend. We’ll make sure that we include that in the information on the show notes because after we had you on the first time, several listeners have reached out to me and said, “What brand do I get? David didn’t tell us what brand.” I know you’ve looked into the quality and the –

[20:11] David Tomen:  I look deeply into the quality.

[20:11] Ashley James: Yes and I really want to make sure that we protect the listener that they make sure that they have access to the best quality.

[20:20] David Tomen: Okay. I know that alpha lipoic acid, the R lipoic acid that we’re talking about and Coenzyme Q10 are both available in Performance Lab Energy which is the one that I use.

[20:30] Ashley James:  Okay. Great.

[20:32] David Tomen: Creatine. Creatine is a non-essential amino acid that synthesized in your liver and your brain uses it to recharge adenosine triphosphate that fuels mitochondria. ATP is directly involved in producing packaging and secreting neurotransmitters, which obviously affects intelligence, improves memory, faster thinking, improves mood. Creatine fuels ATP, which boosts cellular metabolism. This is another way that you can energize your cells. Another natural one is Gingko Biloba. Gingko is one of the oldest species of trees on earth. Gingko increases nitric oxide levels, which dilate blood vessels which increases cerebral circulation which improves oxygen and glucose availability to neurons which improve memory recall, cognition, and learning. There was one interesting study with 31 stroke patients that look at the effects of gingko in stroke recovery. The patients were given with 1,500 mg of gingko per day and the researchers found that the stroke patients using gingko had lower oxidative stress, inflammation, and better anti-oxidant levels. Along with the greater decrease in C-reactive proteins and an increase in circulating antioxidants.

[22:05] Ashely James: I love it. This is where it’s buyer beware. There was a group decided to test how much gingko Biloba was on the shelf at Walmart or Target or whatever pharmacy you could just buy capsules of Gingko Biloba and they discovered that many of the over the counter gingko Biloba supplements contain 100% filler and zero gingko Biloba.

[22:37] David Tomen: That happened in New York. That was when New York attorney general sued and went after Target, CBS, Walmart, and Walgreens I think and a couple of other big retailers that are white labeling these supplements and that’s what exactly what happened. I actually spent quite a bit of time and I wrote a couple of posts on this on how to choose the best supplement. We can do a whole podcast on just this but generally what you’re looking for is stay away from department store brands and drugstore brands of supplements because they sell drugs. That’s not their business. Look for a company that that’s all they do is produces and sells supplements. The Vitamin Shoppe is a good example although they were guilty of putting out some crap in years past but have lightly changed the way they’re doing things and they test everything now but other big brands like Now foods, Doctor’s Best, Nature’s Way. These companies all test their stuff before it goes into production, during production then after encapsulation before they ship it and will actually send you a certificate of analysis proving that what’s in that batch of capsules is actually in there on request. They usually indicate this to their website. A company like the Bulk Supplements for example. I believe you can pull download a certificate of analysis right from their website.  A couple of companies do that but most of them you have to ask for it.

[24:31] Ashely James: Got it. I love it.

[24:34] David Tomen: Gingko, 40 mg three times a day.

[24:37] Ashely James: How much Creatine should we take?

[24:40] David Tomen: Creatine is kind of like up in the air grams. Creatine is a funny one because it’s sold as to the athletic world. There’s a bunch of different kinds of Creatine and from my research what I found is just that Creatine modified by a reputable supplement manufacturer works just as well as the other fancy ones. Up to five grams a day.

[25:19] Ashely James: Is that on empty stomach?

[25:22] David Tomen: Creatine probably better on an empty stomach otherwise it’s going to compete with stuff that’s going on because when you eat protein, for example, you’ve got transporters in your gut that help transport it to place in your body like your brain. When you take a supplement that is competing for the same transports one is going to win over the other one. Right? So it may work, it may not. It’s kind of like you’re not sure who’s going to win. Some things better to take on an empty stomach so it’s not competing with anything else.

[26:02] Ashely James: The CoQ10, I find it fascinating that those who are on Statin drugs need to take CoQ10 because statin drugs inhibit the body’s ability to produce CoQ10. We need CoQ10 for the heart to beat. It’s very, very important. Those on statin drugs will feel fatigued and exhausted as one of the side effects because the statin drugs are inhibiting the body’s ability to produce CoQ10 so their bodies just ran out of fuel so they have to supplement. But they’re told to supplement a very small amount. How much CoQ10 is optimal to take daily?

[26:41] David Tomen: 2 – 400 mg.

[26:44] Ashely James: Would you say that would be on empty stomach or with food?

[26:51] David Tomen: I’m not so sure that it makes a difference with CoQ10.

[26:56] Ashely James: There’s one thing about CoQ10 is we can take too much. Back when we lived in Las Vegas, I was supplementing with CoQ10 and a few other things. My husband had to go to work at 4 in the morning. I’d wake up and make him lunch and see him off. Sometimes I’d go back to bed. Sometimes I’d stay up. I woke up, I made him his lunch. I took my supplements, my 400 mg of CoQ10 and then I fell asleep on the couch. Woke up again, forgot I took my supplements, took another 400mg and I might have done it again later in the day forgetting I had taken my supplements but I ended up having a negative reaction. I thought I was going to die. My heart was just beating like crazy. No matter how much I breathe, I couldn’t get oxygen into my lungs. I felt like I was drowning. And I was lying there in the couch going, “That’s it. My husband’s going to come home and he’s going to find his wife dead.” Later upon looking this up and talking to a naturopath, I discovered that you can take if you take too much CoQ10 it can cause an adrenal dump. I was experiencing basically my adrenal is completely dumping and me going through that stress response not knowing what I was stressed about lying on the couch thinking I was going to die. It’s not lethal but it can be very uncomfortable to take too much CoQ10 which you have to really, really overdose but if you stay under the 400 mg a day you’re not going to experience what I experienced.

[28:46] David Tomen: I’ve got even more specific dosage recommendations than that on my CoQ10 dosage notes on the Nootropics Expert. For example, if you’re using it as an anti-oxidant, 60 – 150 mg per day, for muscle control problems 300 – 3,000 mg. For Alzheimer’s disease 400 mg. For heart attack recovery, 30 – 600 mg. Even I’ve got other ones too, male infertility and Peyronie’s disease, 30 – 300 mg. Diabetic nerve pain, 400 mg. Weight loss, 100 mg. The dosage recommendations were pretty specific on what you’re trying to do. If you’re just using it if you’re a reasonably healthy person and you just want to use it as help boost your anti-oxidant defenses 60 – 150 mg.

[29:40] Ashley James: Got it. Awesome. We’ve got the Alpha lipoic acid, the CoQ10, Creatine, Gingko Biloba. What’s next?

[29:51] David Tomen: N-acetyl L-Cysteine. This is naturally occurring amino acid. Well, it’s L-cysteine. There’s just an acetyl group added to it to increase its bioavailability and it works primarily by restoring glutathione.

[30:11] Ashley James: I’ve got some right here. NAC right?

[30:16] David Tomen: Yup. NAC. I think NAC is an amazing supplement because it not only does it helps glutathione I find that when I’m using NAC, when everybody else around me has got the flu or a cold, I don’t get it but it also helps restore dopamine receptors which is really important for me being adult ADD and using Ritalin. Right? 600 mg three times a day.

[30:43] Ashley James:  Oh, man. I’m taking 500 mg twice a day so you’re saying 600 mg three times a day?

[30:51] David Tomen:  500 mg twice a day is good. But you can take another one.

[30:58] Ashley James:  Did you say 600 three times a day?

[31:00] David Tomen: Yes.

[31:01] Ashley James: Okay, three times a day. What introduced me to NAC, my son before we figured out why he was having this constant runny nose, stuffy nose then occasional asthma and he’s so healthy, eats so clean, “What’s going on?” and we finally found our naturopathic pediatrician that he has allergies. To dust mites then he has about seven food allergies just odd foods like garlic which is in everything. It’s really hard to avoid garlic obviously he does a lot of meals at home of garlic, oats, dairy, and fish. Just pretty much all the fish he’s allergic to. If he’s exposed to garlic for example. He’ll have stuffy nose. If it’s garlic and then he goes and plays at a friend’s house and he’s exposed to more dust mites, it’s kind of a one-two punch his histamine goes through the roof and he can get into a bit of asthma or his nose becomes completely clogged and so our naturopath said for him to take NAC every day. That NAC in large doses causes mucus to become more fluid and so if you have a stuffy nose, then by taking it, it’ll drain the nose. At one point I had a head cold and I just took NAC all day long. I couldn’t believe it. It was so wonderful. It just drained the area and also the added benefit that it’s a wonderful support for our anti-oxidant system in the body. I have seen positive results from this supplement.

[32:43] David Tomen: It’s one of my favorite supplements. Anti-inflammatory as a free radical scavenger. It’s just NAC is good stuff. Get some.

[32:56] Ashley James: On your website, do you sell it? Do you have links to your favorite brand?

[33:03] David Tomen: For some, I started to do that. I don’t think that I did it for NAC. I use Doctor’s Best.

[33:15] Ashley James:  Okay, great. I just buy it straight from my naturopath. They branded themselves so I don’t know who makes it but I trust my naturopath but Doctor’s Best is a good brand.

[33:30] David Tomen: You’ll know that if it’s working if you’re getting results from it you know that it’s a good supplement.

[33:34] Ashley James: Yes, we’re getting results so I’m happy with it. If you don’t get any results from NAC then change brands.

[33:41] David Tomen: Exactly. [Laughter]

[33:34] Ashley James: Awesome.

[33:46] David Tomen: The next thing that we should talk about is synapses and brain aging.

[33:51] Ashley James:  Before we do, can you explain for those who don’t know the synapses? Can you give people the basic understating of why the synapses is important?

[34:03] David Tomen: I call it an empty space but it’s not really an empty space between neurons. When neurons fire they send electrical signals across the synaptic cleft to the neuron next door. It’s like the joint between neurons. The communication junction between neurons.

[34:28] Ashley James:  It’s like the cell tower between the two cellphones.

[34:32] David Tomen: Kind of like that, yes. Synapses they wear out. For example, when they did autopsies on Alzheimer’s patients, they found that there was a profound decrease in synapse numbers in brain regions involving learning and memory. Same thing with Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease.  The reduction of number of synapses in your brain could be part of the cause for brain shrinkage as we get older as well. Now you seen these stories of how your brain shrinks as you get older. One of the reasons is you’re losing synapses. Our brain loses 5% of its weight per decade after the age 40, part of that is synapse loss. When you start losing synapses of they’re break and they don’t work, your brain signaling starts breaking down. That’s how our brain works. It’s by signaling between neurons and when it can’t signal anymore, you’re in big trouble. We know that we can increase the number of synapses it’s called synaptogenesis. The growth of new synapses by increasing brain-derived nootropic factor. I wrote a separate post on 13 different nootropics that I identified to boost BDNF or Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. One neuroscientist called it miracle growth for the brain.

[36:15] Ashley James: [Laughter] Sign me up.

[36:19] David Tomen: Right? You can boost BDNF with Ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is been used before thousands of years but recent researches have shown that Ashwagandha helps regenerate axons and dendrites in synapses.

[36:39] Ashley James: Fascinating. I love Ashwagandha because it is so nice and tonifying for the adrenals. I know it from that angle. You know, from the brain angle.

[36:51] David Tomen:  It’s a very, very powerful supplement.

[36:54] Ashley James: Would you recommend it someone just to drink it as a tea all day long? Take it in a capsule form? How much Ashwagandha would be beneficial?

[37:05] David Tomen: 250 – 500 mg a day. Probably the easiest way to make sure that you’re getting the exact doses by taking capsules. But again, there is usually it’s typically Ashwagandha extract and the ayurvedic pharmacopeia of India recommends 3 – 6 g daily of standard ground Ashwagandha powder but we typically buy an extract that’s 45% with anilides. If it’s 45% with anilides, it depends what we want to do. For arthritis, 250 – 500 mg. For antioxidant production, 100 mg. For immunity, 100 – 200 mg. For sexual performance, 250 – 500 mg. It depends on what you want to use it for. If you’re going to take 500 mg you divide the dose up to 250 mg in the morning and then 250 mg in early afternoon.

[38:11] Ashley James: Is this something you take with food or without food?

[38:13] David Tomen:  It doesn’t matter with Ashwagandha.

[38:17] Ashley James: So you can’t take it with your food?

[38:21] David Tomen:  You can take it with your food. It’s better to find an extract from a reputable company because you know what’s on the labels is actually what’s on the capsule and preferably there’s no other ingredient listed on the label either and certified organic is even better.

[38:41] Ashley James: Right. Especially if it’s an extract since it’s like a concentrate you don’t want concentrated pesticides in your supplement.

[38:49] David Tomen: Or heavy metals or herbicides. Ashwagandha is good for restoring synapses. Artichoke extract is a natural PDE4 inhibitor that supports the secondary messenger cyclic adenosine monophosphate or cAMP. cAMP helps stimulate the productions of CREB which stands for cAMP response element-binding protein. That CREB is a protein that’s needed for new neuron and synapse growth. I know that sounds a little complicated.

[39:29] Ashley James: No, like it. It sounds delicious. I love artichoke. Could I just eat artichokes all day or is this really strong concentrate?

[39:38] David Tomen: Artichoke extract is preferable. Artichoke extract because it increases CREB. It also enhances long-term potentiation. Long-term potentiation is what’s behind the encoding of long term memory. Recommended dosage is 400 mg a day, I’m sorry 900 mg a day.

[40:06] Ashley James: Do we divide that up? Or just?

[40:08] David Tomen: Preferably, yes. Most of these supplements, when you get into higher dosages like that it’s preferable to divide them up into two or three. Which is generally easy to do because you can get artichoke extract for example 300 mg taken three times a day.

[40:25] Ashley James: Right. I’ve never heard of artichoke extract. I’ve never considered an artichoke as an herb or medicinal plant. So it’s very cool.

[40:36] David Tomen: It is. The next one is a very, very powerful supplement and that’s Berberine. Berberine increases glucagon-like peptide or GLP-1. This is peptide hormone plays a critical role in controlling diabetes but it’s also involved in cognition, learning, and neuroprotection. Studies have shown that when you enhance GLP-1, it enhances synaptic plasticity. It also reduces the aggregation of amyloid-β protein and Tau. Berberine can help prevent Alzheimer’s. I actually use it for insulin resistance.

[41:27] Ashley James: How much Berberine is good to take and can we take it with food or without food?

[41:33] David Tomen: You can take it with food. How much do I take? I’m trying to remember what’s on the bottle. The recommended dose is between 900 – 1,500 mg a day. I think I might use 500 mg. I’m taking that three times a day. I found that once I started taking it when I got my labs back, they were normal.

[41:57] Ashley James:  Nice. You mentioned diabetes and I think that’s really important to touch on is that there seemed that even if you don’t diabetes, you have just pre-diabetes or your blood sugar is not optimal. Even just having not optimal blood sugars, so your blood sugars high sometimes but not enough to consider diabetes, even that is enough to do damage to the brain. They’re finding that they can do brain scans and see that your brain has significantly aged and lost vasculature significantly because of unregulated high blood sugar. It’s like when a disease is painful, like arthritis, it gets a softer buts to take action and do something about it but when it’s silent like high blood pressure or having unregulated blood sugar, sometimes we’re not aware of the symptoms, right? There’s no pain so we’re not motivated to do something about it. Here the motivator is if we don’t have really good blood sugar then it is destroying our brain and many other parts of our body that we don’t see but high blood sugar causes damage to the circulatory system across the board and inflammation, especially to the brain. They’re seeing that even just pre-diabetes is enough to do a lot of damage to the brain. People with full-blown diabetes especially if they’ve had periods of unregulated high blood sugar that the brain is very negatively affected and ages very quickly in that state. Berberine wonderful recommendation.

[44:05] David Tomen: One of the drugs that are the primary the most popular drug that most doctors prescribe for pre-diabetes is Metformin. Berberine in clinical trials has been found to be as good as Metformin for diabetes.

[44:27] Ashley James: They tried to put me on Metformin. I was type-2 diabetic and I reversed it with naturopathic medicine and that’s one of the reasons why I do this podcast. They tried to put me on metformin and it made me so sick. I’m so thankful that I experienced every single side effect that it has. One of my friends actually went on metformin and it caused her to be in and out of the hospital for a year with acute pancreatitis. She was only able to drink broth for an entire year and it made her so sick. It made me sick but I would not have to live in a hospital but I experienced all the symptoms and decided to get off of it and decided to look for the more natural route. A lot of times people are put on Metformin even preventively like, “You’re pre-diabetic. Let’s get you a Metformin now so we can prevent you from going further.” I love that you’re pointing out that Berberine can be more effective and also much less side effects.

[45:34] David Tomen: Far, far for your side effects. The only side effect that I came across was long-term use of Berberine can affect muscle protein synthesis and cause muscle atrophy. If you’re worried about muscle loss either don’t use Berberine or exercise a little bit.

[45:54] Ashley James: There you go, or use it short term.

[45:58] David Tomen: Use it short term but it is a very, very potent supplement. Moving on, Berberine, Forskolin. Forskolin is the only known nootropic supplement to naturally and directly boost cAMP which is Cyclic Adenosine Monophosphate. 

[46:20] Ashley James: Can you spell that? Forskolin?

[46:22] David Tomen: F-O-R-S-K-O-L-I-N. Forskolin. We already talked about this with artichoke extract. cAMP directly stimulates the production of CREB which is the protein needed for new neuron and synapse growth and CREB enhances long-term potentiation. Either from artichoke extract or forskolin.

[46:57] Ashley James: So they would do one or the other?

[47:00] David Tomen: One or the other. For Forskolin, 125 – 250 mg a day.  Another one that’s very effective for synapses is Vitamin B8, Inositol. Inositol which is naturally not really a vitamin they found out but Inositol acts as a “secondary messenger” that facilitates communication between brain cells. Lower than normal levels of Myo-inositol in middle-aged adults can signal the initial stages of cognitive decline such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. My wife uses inositol actually for lipido. Myo-inositol is pretty amazing supplements for whole bunch of different reasons but it will help you grow on your synapses. It helps boosts serotonin and dopamine in your brain, dopamine. And serotonin receptor sensitivity. It improves the effectiveness of serotonin glutamate and dopamine. Myo-inositol effects MRNA, which regulates cell volume. Phosphatidylinositol signaling pathways control signals inside and outside our brain cells. Inositol plays a role in DNA repair, long-term potentiation. It’s a component of brain cell membranes that regulates cell metabolism and cellular energy consumption.

[48:42] Ashley James: Is this something that’s normally in just a multi B vitamin or should we take it separately?

[48:51] David Tomen: This one you need to take in separately because it’s not in most B supplements and you want to look specifically for Myo-inositol. It’s M-Y-O dash Inositol.

[49:07] Ashley James: Is this something that we can take on an empty stomach or with food?

[49:12] David Tomen: You can take this on either one. Empty stomach or on food. This is a pretty amazing supplement actually. It’s one of those unsung supplements that most people don’t know about. It makes it easier for you to fall asleep but it doesn’t knock you out like sleep meds do. It increases serotonin, dopamine receptors densities so that you can think faster and your memory is better.

[49:42] Ashley James: Sign me up.

[49:44] David Tomen: Yes. Inositol is great for social occasions because anxiety levels decrease. Inositol outperformed Prozac at reducing panic attacks in one clinical study.

[49:59] Ashley James: Wow.

[50:00] David Tomen: Wasn’t that amazing?

[50:01] Ashley James: It is amazing. Now, are there foods that we can increase to get this?

[50:08] David Tomen:  Not that on amounts that we need it. If we need it.

[50:17] Ashley James: We want the concentration if we want to prevent panic attacks for example?

[50:22] David Tomen: Yes.

[50:23] Ashley James: Right.

[50:24] David Tomen: If you want to avoid Prozac but you still need the help, try out Inositol. The nice thing about Inositol is that you can use it with an anti-depressant. A lot of supplements you can’t because you’ll get into big trouble but Myo-Inositol is not a problem. Actually it helps, it seems to improve, it helps make your anti-depressant meds work better.

[50:51] Ashley James: Now I know that you take on clients that you just coach people and a lot of people will come to you because they’re on anti-depressants or they’re are other ends and they want to take in supplements but they don’t know what’s going to negatively effects them. We talked about this a little bit in episode 362 that most doctors have no training around, I meant the doctors would prescribe you with an anti-depressant but they don’t really know about the supplements and the herbs and what would be good and not good to take. This is just not in the real house. Can a listener get an appointment with you if they are on medication and they want to know if these nootropics would be okay? Do you have that level of research under your belt?

[51:49] David Tomen: Yes. I have been that. I have been doing consulting several times a week since I started about a year ago. It’s turning out to be pretty popular. If you’re using to this internationally, we’ll do it over Skype. If you’re in the United States or Canada we can do it over Skype or just over the phone but I do have power sessions or one hour sessions. Typically, the initial consultation is an hour because there’s so much to cover but if somebody’s dealing with depression for example and are on anti-depressants and want to get off or just want to start nootropics but don’t know where to start because it could be dangerous to combine some of this stuff, I’ll walk you through all that.

[52:30] Ashley James: Right because you’ve looked at all the studies so you’re basing it all on the science which I really appreciate.

[52:38] David Tomen: Yes. You can get yourself into loads and loads of trouble using some of these supplements.

[52:43] Ashley James: Right. If you’re on medication. If a listener is is not on any medication, they’re free to take these supplements, you’ve given us the doses at very safe levels?

[52:55] David Tomen: Yes.

[52:57] Ashley James: Excellent. I take it that none of these supplements would contradict the other ones. They will complement.

[53:06] David Tomen: You can take all of those at the same time for these particular thing for synapses then you’re fine. Included in this lesson, we still have more to go here so we’re going to have to move on but I also have to help synapse growth, magnesium, Pterostilbene, Uridine Monophosphate. Those all help restore synapse growth. The next thing I’d like to talk about Ashley is, Alzheimer’s and dementia and brain aging because it’s a growing problem. In the case of Alzheimer’s for example, they’re looking for drugs that inhibit amyloid b protein intel production. Nobody has been able to come up with the secret sauce yet with whatever drug that prevents Alzheimer’s but there are supplements you can take to help prevent it from happening. For example, Huperzine-A. Boosts neuron resistance to beta-amyloid–induced dysfunction that could lead to diseases like Alzheimer’s. Beta-amyloid affects ATP levels in mitochondria. Huperzine-A protects against this damage. Huperzine-A is 200 micrograms per day once every third day. You can’t use the supplements every day. Another great one for preventing B-Amyloid aggregation is Resveratrol because Resveratrol activates AMPK, which reduces levels of Amyloid-beta deposits in the cerebral cortex. It prevents β-amyloid aggregation by scavenging oxygen free radicals, which induces protective enzymes such as heme oxygenase. Which prevents the build-up of deposits causing Alzheimer’s. Resveratrol, depending on what you’re using it for 20 – 250 mg a day. Piracetam. We haven’t talked much about the Piracetams or the Racetams but Piracetam was the very first nootropic ever invented. It was invented back in 1962. I believe it was. It’s used as a prescription drug in many places around the world to treat things like brain aging, brain injuries, dementia and Alzheimer’s. Several studies show that Piracetam enhances ATP production. Mitochondria membranes and neuroid outgrow in neurons. One study the researches shows Piracetam is able to repair mitochondria in those with mild Alzheimer’s and return their cellular function back to normal. Which is a very big deal. Piracetam you have to know how to dose it. They don’t call it a dietary supplement in the United States but you can buy it as a supplement they call it a research compound. It’s not something that you can buy in like Amazon but there’s a few companies that sell it online like Nootropics Depot for example. Dosage is usually 4,000 mg a day divided into three doses but you have to take it with Alpha GPC or CBP choline because it boosts the use of acetylcholine in your brain and if you don’t take it with acetylcholine supplement, you’ll get a headache.

[56:51] Ashley James: Why don’t they just include it?

[56:57] David Tomen: That’s a very good question. [Laughter] I don’t know.

[57:00] Ashley James: They’re selling something that an uninformed person would get a headache every time they took the supplement. You think that they’d want to prevent that.

[57:08] David Tomen: The thing is that the uninformed person doesn’t buy something like Piracetam. Right? Because you have to search this out and find it. It’s actually called nootropil when it’s sold as a drug in some countries but here you just look for Piracetam. It was invented by Dr. Corneliu Giurgea. He was the one who coined the term nootropic in 1973.

[57:41] Ashley James: I’m going to put it out there. I think you should work with a really good company in private label supplement and just take all these wonderful nutrients and make some kind of multi-nootropic and you should sell that because I would buy that.

[58:02] David Tomen: You know it will probably be better to make individual stacks to treat depending on what you’re trying to treat. That’s a whole other conversation. Several people have suggested that I do it. It’s just starting a supplement company, it’s an undertaking.

[58:20] Ashley James: I bet. Yes. We’re all rooting for you.

[58:28] David Tomen: Thank you. St. John’s Wort. Research shows that St. John’s Wort extract decreases oxidative stress. It prevents neurotoxicity. It controls inflammation. And maybe an effective treatment for oxidative stress-related neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. St John’s Wort is easy to get but you have to be very careful with St. John’s Wort because it’s not something you combine with SSRI or you can get yourself into a load of trouble. If you’re not taking any anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs, St. John’s Wort is a fantastic option. 900 – 1,800 mg a day. The research shows that it has effective for anxiety and depression as prescription drugs. But we have the side benefit that it could possibly prevent Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Turmeric. Curcumin, which is the most active compound in turmeric, may help macrophages clear the amyloid plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease. Curcumin is something that we can do an entire podcast on because it does so many different things but just to sum it up, studies show that curcumin binds to amyloid-beta proteins found in Alzheimer’s disease and blocks its self-assembly. Studies show that heavy metals can induce Amyloid-beta aggregation that is concentrated in Alzheimer’s disease. Curcumin, by interaction with heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, prevents the neurotoxicity caused by these metals.

[01:00:25] Ashley James: Really? Oh, that’s cool. Does it cross the blood-brain barrier?

[01:00:31] David Tomen: It does. It just needs a little help. They found that they could boost the bioavailability of curcumin or turmeric by 2,000% by using it with Piperine.

[01:00:45] Ashley James: Right. Adding the black pepper. That’s the only reason why I have black pepper at the house, it’s to boost my curry. [Laughter]

[01:00:58] David Tomen: I actually use Bioperine on it. I’ve got a separate Bioperine supplement that I use for certain supplements to boost their availability. Now, let’s talk about vascular dementia and cerebral circulation. Your chances of developing white matter lesions and strokes and dementia increases as you age. If your family has a history of these types of diseases, your chances are even higher for this happening. White matter lesions are damage to the white matter in your brain and the primary cause seems to be bad blood circulation. Blood vessel damages associated with high blood pressure and small vessel disease would put you at a greater risk for stroke and other problems. Dementia and vascular dementia seems to be related. Both types are associated with a host of brain problems including increased risk of Alzheimer’s, stroke, disorder of the blood-brain barrier and arterial sclerosis. Research shows that problems with cerebral blood follow and white matter lesions in other associated brain cellular changes begin in mid-life. So like around 40. It’s never too early to start using some of this stuff. How do we boost cerebral circulation? We can do that with cat’s claw. Cat’s claw is a South American vine. That’s a very potent anti-inflammatory, it’s antioxidant effects that support DNA repair, immune function and normal cell division. Cat’s Claw has been shown in clinical studies to protect the brain from damage from stroke. Recommended dosage of Cat’s Claw standardized extract is 250 – 350 mg a day. Forskolin, which we already talked about, also helps boost cerebral circulation. Gingko Biloba, which we already talked about, also increases cerebral blood flow because it increases nitric oxide. Oat straw increases blood flow through several different mechanisms of action. It contains the amino acid arginine, which synthesizes to create nitric oxide. Nitric oxide dilates blood vessels allowing blood to flow easier. There are also, they’re hard to pronounce but they’re certain bioactive compounds that are unique to oats that has been shown to enhance nitric oxide production in human smooth muscle cells. It suppresses the inflammatory cytokines that work in combination with increased nitric oxide, which increases blood flow. Recommended dosage for Oat Straw extract is 800 – 1,600 mg a day. Another good one that we haven’t talked about is Pine Bark Extract. Pine Bark Extract as a nootropic is used primarily to increase cerebral blood flow. It does it by increasing nitric oxide in your brain. Resveratrol. Did we talked about resveratrol, yes?

[01:04:28] Ashley James: You had mentioned it briefly.

[01:04:32] David Tomen: Some speculate that resveratrol found in red wine accounts for the French paradox which you know how the French can dine on baguettes and cheese and pate and pastries and they still don’t put on weight and they live longer. They think it’s because part of the reason is that Resveratrol increases cerebral circulation. Recommended dosage is 20 – 250 mg a day. One of my favorite supplements is Vinpocetine, which they’re trying to make illegal in the United States. You can’t buy it on Amazon anymore.

[01:05:15] Ashley James: Okay, explain what’s going on? What’s the controversy around it?

[01:05:19] David Tomen: Because somebody claims that back in 1983, they put a patent on it, so they want to sell it as a drug. It’s actually sold as a drug in several countries around the world. It’s just that it’s available for the last three decades or so as a dietary supplement. You can still get it from Life Extension and Swanson still makes it and a couple of other supplement companies but Amazon refuses to sell it.

[01:05:47] Ashley James: What is it?

[01:05:48] David Tomen: It’s a semi-synthetic derivative of vincamine, an alkaloid derived from the lesser periwinkle plant.

[01:05:58] Ashley James: I remember you talking about this a little bit on our last interview.

[01:06:02] David Tomen: Yes. It inhibits an enzyme called PDE1 it also reduces calcium levels in brain cells. When both of these are elevated smooth muscle in blood vessels contract, narrowing the diameter of blood vessels. Vinpocetine helps turn this around. I can actually feel Vinpocetine when I use it and I miss it when I don’t have it. I feel better. You know what I did yesterday, I went to see the doctor and I have a little problem with my blood pressure. I need to keep it under control and I was afraid going to the doctor that I was going to be like 150 something over 80 something and she tested it, my blood pressure was 138/69, I think.

[01:06:57] Ashley James: Very cool. It’s the second number is more important.

[01:07:00] David Tomen: Yes. You know how I did that?

[01:07:02] Ashley James: With the Vinpocetine?

[01:07:04] David Tomen: Yes. Just before I went to the doctor.

[01:07:08] Ashley James: The first number which was definitely high but that could absolutely be just from the stress of being in the doctor’s office.

[01:07:16] David Tomen: They’ve actually shown that. That your blood pressure increases when you’re at the doctor’s office. Vinpocetine really works. I love it. All you need is 10 mg three times a day. 10 mg before you go to the doctor. Vitamin B3 or Niacin, which most people know about, helps increase nitric oxide and helps blood flow in your entire body and cerebral circulation. Niacin does a whole bunch of other stuff too but right now, we’re just talking about increasing cerebral circulation so niacin does that. Vitamin B₆ is needed to regulate homocysteine. High homocysteine levels are linked to inflammation that can lead to blood vessel damage and possible plaque buildup leading to heart attack or stroke. Vitamin B₁₂ or methylcobalamin is essential for the synthesis of DNA, RNA and neurotransmitters, the maintenance of myelin sheaths and red blood cell formation. You actually need vitamin B₆ and Vitamin B₉ (Folate) and Vitamin B₁₂(methylcobalamin) to keep your homocysteine levels down. That’s my story on preventing Alzheimer’s. It’s not a sure thing but there are certain things that you can do to really increase your chances of it not happening.

[01:08:56] Ashley James: In terms of diet, what is a good diet for supporting brain health?

[01:09:04] David Tomen: I just did a video on that and I just published it this morning. In this video, there are 11 essential nutrients that we normally get from food and you need each one of these nutrients every single day for either two or three meals to maintain decent brain health and they include things like carbohydrates and potassium and sodium and check out that video on YouTube. I just published it. A normal brain-healthy diet is going to be healthy fats. You need carbohydrates but reducing the amount of or you want complex carbohydrates rather than simple carbohydrates.

[01:09:55] Ashley James: So don’t do flour-based foods. Eat the sweet potato. Don’t eat the bread. Don’t eat the pasta, go have some legumes.

[01:10:05] David Tomen: I actually stopped eating things like pasta and bread. I just feel better. A lot of things changed. Of course, fruits and vegetables. 

[01:10:18] Ashley James: Excellent. So whole foods plant-based diet would definitely support brain health.

[01:10:22] David Tomen: And healthy fats. Like grass-fed red meat provides all kinds of vitamins and minerals that your body needs. The other thing that happens with aging is neurotransmitter starts to decline and this is the last we’re going to talk about when it comes to aging. Studies show that the dopamine and serotonin levels decline as we age. Dopamine levels begin to decline by around 10% per decade starting in your early 20’s. That leads to declines in cognitive and motor performance. In other words, you don’t think as fast as you once did and you don’t move as fast either because you got less dopamine. Serotonin and brain-derived neurotrophic factor also decline with age. The enzyme monoamine oxidase increases with age, which degrades serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. The more monoamine oxidase, the more increases, the more you experience the negative effects on memory, mood, and behavior. As a matter of fact Monoamine oxidase inhibitors have long been used to treat behavior disorders including depression. Now we have several natural nootropic options for increasing neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and for reducing or inhibiting Monoamine oxidase. Aniracetam is a fat-soluble ampakine nootropic that is well known in the nootropics community, it’s one of my favorite nootropics. It’s a fantastic anxiolytic.

[01:12:10] Ashley James: What does that mean?

[01:12:11] David Tomen: It means it’s anti-anxiety. It helps reduce anxiety and depression and fear and increase sociability. Clinical studies show that Aniracetam affects dopamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin receptors in your brain. The recommended dosage is 1,500 mg per day. Taken in two 750 mg doses, which is what I do. You’ve got to take it with a healthy fat like coconut oil and you have to take it with a good choline supplement like Alpha GPC or CDP-Choline because it –

[01:12:49] Ashley James: Why don’t they sell it in coconut oil with the choline?

[01:12:53] David Tomen: Because the Racetams are still research compounds. They’re not really sold as dietary supplements so you’re kind of like on your own when you’re using more of these “experimental supplements”.

[01:13:13] Ashley James: What is it made from?

[01:13:16] David Tomen: Aniracetam is a derivative of Piracetam and Piracetam is a derivative of GABA.

[01:13:30] Ashley James: I know that there’s lots of GABA receptors in the brain but I don’t know much about it. Do you know how do they make the supplement? Is it synthetic or is it from –

[01:13:44] David Tomen: Piracetam is a cyclic derivative of GABA and that was first invented by Dr. Giurgea back in 1962 because he was looking for a drug to treat motion sickness. I think it was motion sickness in astronauts. But he found out that it worked better for improving cognitive performance. Since then there has been probably a dozen at least Racetams invented developed off the original Piracetam that are all built around this, it’s a chemical core so if you take a look at the chemical structure of these things and you compare them side by side there’s just one little branch that’s different from the next. It’s a cyclic derivative of GABA. Aniracetam is similar to Piracetam. They have found in there has been tons and tons of studies done. It was invented by Hoffmann-La Roche. I believe in Switzerland in 1978. And it’s sold as a prescription drug it’s called Ampamet, Draganon, Memodrin, Referan, Sarpul in Europe but you can buy it as a research compound here. You can actually buy Aniracetam on Amazon.

[01:15:25] Ashley James: Just make sure you take it with coconut oil and choline.

[01:15:30] David Tomen: Choline, yes because it releases 2 – 300% more acetylcholine in your brain.

[01:15:38] Ashley James: And you don’t want to end up with the headache?

[01:15:40] David Tomen: Correct. You get a Racetam headache. DHEA which is also called the “youth hormone”. DHEA is the most abundant hormone precursor in your body and is the source of your sex hormones. DHEA levels start decline as you age starting at around your 25^th birthday. This is for men and women it’s bigger problem for men than women but it’s still a problem. Higher levels of DHEA are directly related to optimal concentration, working memory, and executive function. And DHEA is a natural MAO inhibitor which improves mood and energy levels

[01:16:26] Ashley James: How much is a good dose to take?

[01:16:27] David Tomen:  25 – 50 mg a day for anyone over 18.

[01:16:33] Ashley James: That’s the DHEA?

[01:16:35] David Tomen:  DHEA, yes. Now there’s controversy around this because this is a steroid hormone. See my full review in Nootropics Expert for DHEA but anybody over 18 can get away with 25 mg a day and stay out of trouble from my research. Mucuna Pruriens or L-DOPA is synthesized in your brain by the amino acid. Anyway, it makes dopamine in your brain. It’s the precursor to dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. It boosts growth hormone levels in your brain to increase the production of neurons and glia cells. L-DOPA also produces neuromelanin, which are similar to the melanin pigment in your skin. So you get a tan easier and in your brain they absorb toxic quinones, and chelate heavy metals like mercury and lead.

[01:17:43] Ashley James: What’s its name again?

[01:17:44] David Tomen: Mucuna Pruriens.

[01:17:47] Ashley James: Can you spell that?

[01:17:48] David Tomen:  Yes. Mucuna is M-U-C-U-N-A new word P-R-U-R-I-E-N-S. Mucuna Pruriens is usually 98% extract. It is 250 – 500 mg a day. Very powerful to increase dopamine.

[01:18:11] Ashley James: It increases dopamine but it also helps you get a tan?

[01:18:16] David Tomen: Yes.

[01:18:18] Ashley James: That is so cool.

[01:18:20] David Tomen:  They use synthetic L-DOPA to treat Parkinson’s disease. Some have found that you can naturally treat Parkinson’s using Mucuna Pruriens and not have that side effects you get from synthetic L-DOPA because synthetic L-DOPA causes problems in your periphery and all of your places other than where it’s supposed to be in your brain. You don’t have that problem with Mucun Pruriens. L-Theanine which we were talking about before we started doing this podcast. L-Theanine is an amino acid found in green tea. L-Theanine increases GABA, serotonin and dopamine levels in your brain. As well as increasing Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor and Nerve Growth Factor and L-Theanine is an antagonist of NMDA receptors, which can inhibit synaptic release of glutamate. Which protects your brain from over-stimulation caused by glutamate, and possible glutamate toxicity. Research has found that if L-Theanine ispresent in the body at the time stroke occurs, brain damage is significantly reduced. A study in China concluded there was a 40% decreased risk of stroke in those who drank green, black or jasmine teas. Isn’t that amazing?

[01:19:50] Ashley James: Oh, my gosh. How much tea you just need to drink it every day or should someone take it as a supplement if they’re concerned they’re going to have a stroke?

[01:20:00] David Tomen: If you’re concerned for stroke, 2 – 4 mg twice a day as a supplement.

[01:20:07] Ashley James: Because it’s an amino acid, you take it on an empty stomach?

[01:20:10] David Tomen: Yes, but I drink it as green tea so I drink it whether I’m eating a meal or not. It’s just I’m drinking green tea all the time. You can get pretty much as much L-Theanine as you need for a reasonable normal healthy person by drinking four or five cups of green tea per day.

[01:20:29] Ashley James: Excellent and there’s no concerns about how much caffeine that is in the green tea of you’re drinking five cups a day?

[01:20:38] David Tomen: It depends on the green tea. Usually the caffeine amount is listed on the label so check the label but it’s by a third of the caffeine that you normally get from coffee.

[01:20:57] Ashley James: Is there more L-Theanine in green tea that is like the new leaf versus the oolong which comes from the branches, right? There’s this idea that drinking the newer buds versus drinking a tea that’s made more from a plant has been around longer has different compounds in it. Does that matter?

[01:21:27] David Tomen: It’s more about how it is steeped.

[01:21:30] Ashley James: How do we steep it?

[01:21:33] David Tomen: I actually wrote about this. Research at the University of New Castle in Australia set out to determine the optimal conditions for water extraction of healthy from green tea and they examined four different extraction methods and they learned that temperature, extraction time and ratio of water to tea and tea particles size had impacts on the extraction yield of L-Theanine from green tea. They concluded that the optimal conditions for extracting L-Theanine from green tea using water were found to be, are you ready for this? Extraction at 80°C for 30 minutes with the water to tea ratio of 20 to 1 milliliters per gram and a tea particle size of .5 to 1 milliliters.

[01:22:27] Ashley James: Okay, you’ve lost me at the water. [Laughter] 20 mg, so that’s 20 to 1 ratio of how much water?

[01:22:39] David Tomen: The water to tea ratio used to be 20 – 1 milliliters to grams.

[01:22:45] Ashley James: So milliliters to grams. Got it.

[01:22:48] David Tomen:  And the tea particle size a half to one millimeter.

[01:22:54] Ashley James: Okay. I’ve been grinding my tea in a spice grinder thinking that more surface area means more flavor I guess.

[01:23:03] David Tomen: That’s not what these guys found.

[01:23:08] Ashley James: Wonderful. So steep it and do keep it at 80°c for 30 minutes or you just bring it to 8°c and leave it for 30 minutes?

[01:23:18] David Tomen:  I’m thinking just bring it to 80°c then leave it for 30 minutes.

[01:23:23] Ashley James: Unless you’re cooking it. Cooking your tea. Like if you go to traditional Chinese medicine practitioner they will give you some stinky herbs to take home and cook on the stove.

[01:23:35] David Tomen: That’s water extraction. If you buy it as a supplement there is a patented version called Suntheanine. It’s L-Theanine extraction from green tea called Suntheanine so look for that.

[01:23:55] Ashley James: Right. Or you could just have fun drinking the green tea.

[01:23:57] David Tomen: Or you could just have fun drinking green tea because there’s so many different teas. You go to Wholefood’s and you look at the shelf of green teas. There’s just row after row after row to experiment. There’s got to be one in there some place that you like. If you’ve never drank tea before you don’t really care for tea there’s got to be one in there that you’ll like.

[01:24:19] Ashley James: So the supplement company that I buy all my supplements from sells a green tea blend and I’m in love with it. It tastes so good. I’ve actually got my husband loving it which is like a miracle because he does not like tea and this morning he goes, “Did you make me cup?” so he loves it. I discovered that he’s been brewing it on his own. I’m the only one who does anything in the kitchen. He’s been brewing it on his own. This is how much he likes it. I’m very happy that I found a great green tea blend. Now you give me the formula for proper L-Theanine extraction.

[01:25:02] David Tomen: My favorite is Tazo organic chai.

[01:25:34] Ashley James: You told me that right before we started and I’m going to have to get some the next time at Wholefoods. Yes, do you do anything to it or you just put it on hot water?

[01:25:16] David Tomen: Just put it on hot water. I got myself and went to Walmart. 20 bucks got this glass kettle so I can boil water in about 2 minutes and I can make it really fast and put a little bit of honey in it. It’s amazing. Anyway moving on here, we’re talking about increasing neurotransmitters. If you don’t want to use Mucuna Pruriens to increase dopamine. You can use N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine or L-Tyrosine because the dopamine pathway goes like this. It’s Phenylalanine to L-Tyrosine to L-DOPA to dopamine to norepinephrine to epinephrine. You can do it. You typically start with L-Tyrosine. L-Tyrosine is a gentler way to boost dopamine that Mucuna Pruriens that is a more direct way. N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine is just L-Tyrosine with an acetyl group added to it, which was supposed to increase the bioavailability because L-Tyrosine is amino acid. Some people find that L-Tyrosine works better for them and some find that N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine works better for them. There was actually one clinical study that showed that N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine is mostly excreted in your urine rather than getting used. I don’t find that’s the case with this body but it could be true for you. You would have to find out. If you want to try L-Tyrosine, it pays to experiment with both of those one at a time and see which one works best for you.

[01:26:57] Ashley James: How would you know if it’s working?

[01:27:00] David Tomen: Your mood changes, you’re thinking faster, and your focus is better. Your concentration is better. Because L-Tyrosine directly affects executive function which is the decision making part of your brain.

[01:27:17] Ashley James: Oh, I’ve got to give some to my son. 4-year-old’s mind.

[01:27:21] David Tomen: That one I’m not so sure because it also boosts libido. Libido, memory, focus, concentration, mood, and improves executive function, all of these things are influenced by L-tyrosine. Recommended nootropic dosage for N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine is 350 – 500 mg twice per day. I actually use 700 mg. 750 mg three times a day for managing adult ADD. It depends on if you use too much and you boost dopamine too much because it turns into norepinephrine and then epinephrine which is your fight or flight hormone. You can get irritable and jittery, that’s when you know you’ve got too much. Now we also talked about monoamine oxidase, which increases as you age. It suppresses dopamine levels in your brain so you’ve got a double whammy over here as you age. Your dopamine levels are increasing and monoamine oxidase is increasing which is further forcing down dopamine and serotonin. What we would want is we want an inhibitor of monoamine oxidase. Oat Straw is that inhibitor. There also a couple of other ones but Oat Straw works really well. So it inhibits monoamine oxidaseB which increases dopamine levels. One of the problems was monoamine oxidaseinhibitors is that if you inhibit both A and B you have the cheese effect. The cheese effect is if you take a monoamine oxidase that inhibits both A and B and you eat cheese, you have a severe reaction. But if you only inhibit B like with Oat Straw you don’t have a problem.

[01:29:23] Ashley James: Or just don’t eat cheese.

[01:29:26] David Tomen: Don’t eat cheese or anything with cheese like pasta has got a little bit of cheese on it. Anything with cheese is going to cause a problem. Oat straw extract suppresses inflammatory cytokines by inhibiting nuclear factor κB activation.These Cytokines are implicated in a number of brain disorders including major depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s Disease. Recommended dosage for Oat Straw extract is 800 – 1,600 mg a day. The final one that you really should be supplementing with this if they’re over 20, is a B complex vitamin because well, the B vitamins are arguably the most important anti-aging nootropic supplements that we’ve got available. Vitamin B₁ is involved in the citric acid cycle that is used to produced adenosine triphosphate energy for your mitochondria. Vitamin B₃ is a precursor to NAD and NADH which provides electrons for ATP synthesis to power your mitochondria. Niacin enhances BDNF which is involved in synaptic plasticity and axon growth for memory and overall brain health. And it stimulates the production of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. Vitamin B₅ or Pantothenic Acid is essential for the synthesis of acetylcholine, epinephrine, and serotonin. And is at the very heart of the citric acid cycle and electron transport chain which converts nutrients from food into energy which is used to make adenosine triphosphate for mitochondria. Vitamin B₆ or Pyridoxine is a required for coenzyme for the synthesis of dopamine, epinephrine, GABA, melatonin, norepinephrine, and serotonin. In fact, more than 140 distinct enzyme activities in your brain and your body depend on the P-5-P version of Vitamin B₆. Vitamin B₉ or folate is involved in gene expression, amino acid synthesis, myelin synthesis, and is required for the synthesis of dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine and serotonin. Vitamin B₁₂ (methylcobalamin) is essential for the synthesis of DNA, RNA and neurotransmitters all of them and the maintenance of myelin sheaths protecting neurons, and red blood cell formation. And vitamin B12 is also needed to regulate homocysteine. High homocysteine levels are linked to inflammation that leads to blood vessel damage and possible plaque buildup leading to heart attack or stroke. That’s why you need a good B complex.

[01:32:37] Ashley James: I totally agree with you. One of the naturopaths that trained me had a patient that the family was in the process of moving that patient into a senior care facility. They had dementia. The naturopath said, “Let’s get them on a B vitamin supplement.” because B12 deficiency can cause dementia. I think they did B12 injections at this point but totally bounced back from the dementia. The dementia was not permanent. It wasn’t chronic. It was a symptom of nutrient deficiency. Another naturopath I studied with, he mapped out 900 different diseases that cross species line all are linked to deficiencies of 90 different nutrients. 60 minerals, 12 amino acids, all the vitamins and the fatty acids that each one just missing. If you miss copper if you have too little copper. One of the diseases that people can develop is or it’s not a disease it a fatal condition if you don’t catch it in time, hernia, chronic hernia. How you know you have copper deficiency? The symptoms of it are premature gray hair because copper is also needed in the production of the pigment. It can also cause pigment lost in the skin. People who are darker skin who start t have white patches like Michael Jackson had. That is a copper deficiency. Very classic signs of it but you can also have premature wrinkles and you can have problems with the vasculature like in your legs like the veins started popping out and having pain in the veins. All of that are early warning sign of copper deficiency. Copper being something you don’t want to have too much of but if you have too little of it’s one of those nutrient the body need to produce the building blocks to keep everything together basically. It’s part of the building blocks to build the strong vasculature and it becomes weaker without it and then we eventually develop aneurysm as a result. It’s just one of those nutrients that he mapped out. He sees that we can prevent all disease. All disease with nutrients and of course, diet because diet can cause tremendous stress on our body if it’s the wrong diet. He likes to point out that if we look at the diseases and the longevity of those in the United States that if its out of the certain line, I think it’s the Mason Dickson line? Is that what it’s called? Basically in the south where fried food is should be one of the amendments according to them, they’d fry water if they could but fried food is so much more prevalent in the diet and people die 10 years earlier that those in the north or in the Pacific North West where we eat less fried food. So they see the oxidative damage by eating fried food. Even once a week is enough to harm the brain, to harm the vasculature, to take 10 years off of our life and to decrease eye sight. It goes on and on. But diet is incredibly important. So avoiding oxidative stress but also making sure the we have these 90 essential nutrients in our food and also in our supplements because it’s very hard to secure minerals now. The 60 minerals very hard to secure. I would say in addition to, you’re saying take a good multi B vitamin and I say that’s absolutely true and I would add that take a really good multi-mineral and trace mineral supplement because even if you eat lots and lots of greens, it’s very hard to secure enough minerals these days because of the farming practices. Even organic farms, it’s just difficult because they don’t re-mineralize the soil which is something they used to do and they don’t do it anymore.

[01:37:20] David Tomen: I think Ashley that there would be a lot less disease if people just took a really high quality multivitamin which typically has higher dosages than with the RDA is. They’re in a form that your body can use and not synthetic. That’s the reason why I use the Performance Lab Multi because it’s all natural, it’s grown from yeast and there’s nothing else in it. Just vitamins and minerals. And a really high quality B complex vitamin. You would see a lot of fewer cases of dementia, alzehimers, Parkinson’s, depression and anxiety and I could just go on and on and on and that is just the brain. The things is that most of the nootropics reviewed on the Nootropics Expert can be considered anti-aging supplements. You know we’ve got tons and tons of research showing that taking the right nootropic supplement can optimize your brains health and protect you from cognitive decline well into the future. Dozens and dozens of nootropic supplements to choose from. You know we’ve got amino acids and herbs, minerals and vitamins and even the Racetam family that we’re taking about. The prime mutations and combinations that enough to perfect your anti-aging nootropics stack can your brain which is kind of counter to what we’re trying to achieve right? So here’s a suggestion, choose one or two from each of the categories that we talked about in this podcast. If I can listen to the podcast again and just pick one or two supplements from each one of these categories. Go to Nootropics Expert and carefully review the full article that I’ve written to make sure that you understand what exactly the nootropic does and how it can interact with any of your prescription meds so that you can understand the possible side effects. Choose the lowest suggested dosage per each one that you choose, and start using it.

[01:39:35] Ashley James: And when would they increase the dose?

[01:39:39] David Tomen:  Possibly never. Possibly, if there’s a recommended dose for just at random, a 500 – 1000 mg, so you start out with 500 mg to see how you react to it. If you feel absolutely nothing or there is no negative reaction that you might want to quick up the dose to 750 mg and see how you feel but never ever go past the maximum recommended dosage.

[01:40:13] Ashley James: Right. Yes, because we do have that feeling in the United Sates, I don’t know if it’s just a value or a personal philosophy but if a little bit is good then a lot is even better and we get into some trouble that way. Right?

[01:40:32] David Tomen: Yes, that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do. You don’t want to do that especially with stuff that’s affecting your brain.

[01:40:39] Ashley James: Just like you could eat too much celery you could kill yourself with water, you could kill yourself with healthy things. We just wanted the safe effective doses. You want people to start feeling the difference. They should feel that their moods improve, even their sleep is better. Maybe their sex drives improved, that they’re thinking clear, that they’re thinking faster. They’re going to see noticeable differences that even maybe people around them notice. It’s going to take a few months but then people will start to notice a difference in them as well after starting on a good regimen. I like that your advice of taking two from each section and just reading on your website the information and get really clear on the protocol that they’re designing or if they get confused they could reach out to you. They could book an appointment and see that you could help them to formulate their protocol.

[01:41:46] David Tomen: And if you don’t like using the internet, at least use the internet to go to Nootropics Expert and buy my book. It’s called Head First. It’s almost 600 pages, it’s a manual for fixing your brain. You can use the book or you can use the website or you can book a consultation with me or you can go to YouTube and watch anyone of the almost a hundred videos I’ve got now on the YouTube channel. There are all kinds of ways to get help for your brain.

[01:42:14] Ashley James: Very cool. Before we wrap up today’s interview, I’d love to hear since you’ve been working with people, you must’ve had some feedback. Can you share some stories of success? Last time we had you, you shared your story, which was incredible I definitely recommend listeners go back and check out episode 362 with David Tomen. Hearing his story because it’s a great one. I’d love to hear, do you have any stories of success that you’d like to share with us today?

[01:42:45] David Tomen: You know there’s almost a hundred thousand people a month going through Nootropics Expert now. Where I get, the comments are coming in more and more often now. Either people will say, “I was able to manage ADHD or ADD or I was able to get off anti-depressant medication or anti-anxiety medication or I was able to get up in front of a group of people and do a presentation without panicking.” There’s just little stories like that that keep on coming out in the comments section.

[01:43:27] Ashley James: These are comments are the bottom. You have blog basically. All your articles are blog posts and at the bottom people can leave their comments. I’ve read them, they’re great. They were asking questions, you reply. So you’re saying that listeners can go there scroll down at the bottom of the article and read the comments.

[01:43:51] David Tomen: Yes and see what other people are saying, people are sharing they’ll leave a comment saying, “This is my stack now based on the stuff that you’ve suggested.” One of the most hardening things that I’m seeing now is people are getting it. People are saying, “This isn’t my stack, this is my – and this is what I’m taking in the morning. This is what I’m taking at noon and this is what I’m taking late in the afternoon. Have you got any suggestions?” Usually I would change this one thing. People are getting it now, which is just the coolest thing.

[01:44:33] Ashley James: I love that you interact with them because then those comments are there for years to come and people can even though you’re answering one person’s question, you’re actually helping thousands of people because they’re all going to go there and read your answer.

[01:44:48] David Tomen: And they’re doing that. Some of these threads are years old.

[01:44:55] Ashley James: Nice. I love it. I love that you’ve built this forum to help people. You put a lot out there. You put a lot of work into it. You give a lot for free and if someone wants the additional help of that personalized help, one on one, they could work with you and they could buy some supplements from you because you figured out some of the brands the you liked. They could also buy your book. Of course, the links to everything you do including your YouTube channel, we’re going to make sure that is in the show notes of today’s podcast. I have to commend my transcriptionist right now because the entire time I’m like, “Oh my gosh. I just have to say to my transcriptionist, as you’re transcribing this right now, I’m sending you hugs and I thank you so much for taking probably a week to transcribe this interview.” But my listeners are going to be really appreciative of the transcription because once it’s published on learntruehealth.com they can go and they can read everything that David said so they can reference. This is a very technical interview and they can reference all the wonderful supplements that David talked about. The doses and everything. Let’s just thank and commend the transcriptionist for doing a great job. Awesome. David, it was such a pleasure having you on the show toady. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview? Anything left unsaid?

[01:46:34] David Tomen: Just get started. If you haven’t started doing any of these yet just please get started.

[01:46:41] Ashley James: That’s a really simple like if someone kind of overwhelmed at this point? What’s a good like just get a toe in the door or toe in the water?

[01:46:50] David Tomen: You know, take something. Take something and see if it works. There’s so much information available now on a place like Nootropics Expert. Whatever you’re dealing with, whatever it is. If it’s anxiety or depression or ADD or OCD or traumatic brain injury or PTST or whatever it is. Use the search function over on Nootropics Expert and put it on the search box.

[01:47:16] Ashley James: And if you’re not taking a great multi vitamin like a multi B, start with that. Start there.

[01:47:23] David Tomen: The Performance Lab Multi I think it is the best multi-vitamin I’ve ever used. You can find my full review on Nootropics Expert Performance Lab Wholefood multi for men and women. The B vitamins complex that it recommends is the one by Life Extension.

[01:47:42] Ashley James: That is on your website?

[01:47:45] David Tomen: I don’t think that one is on my website. You’ll find it probably in the comments section in the places but I don’t think I’ve put a link to that one there. The Life Extension has got a really, really good B complex it’s called complete bioactive something like that. The nice thing is that it uses folate instead of folic acid and methylcobalamin instead cyanocobalamin and the B vitamins are the right dosages.

[01:48:15] Ashley James: Very cool. I take a powder that turns to a liquid and I was designed my naturopath but I really enjoyed itbut I’m going to check out you’re too. I know you sell, do you sell supplements? I don’t own the company I just work as an affiliate so get a little bit of money every time somebody clicks the link and buys one of these things. I’ve got a link to the website.

[01:48:45] Ashley James: You’ll give me links so that listeners who want to make sure that you get credit for spending the time to put this out there. They want to make sure you get the credit we’ll make sure the link is in the show notes.

[01:49:00] David Tomen: Okay, thank you.

[01:49:01] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been wonderful.

[01:49:04] David Tomen: Thank you for having me back.

[01:49:06] Ashley James: Yes. I look forward to having you again. I think we’ve got lots of topics to explore and I really enjoy. I like interviews that bring the meat. You know what I mean? It’s funny for someone who doesn’t eat meat, I want a lot of meat in my interview. I want a lot. I want people to walk away going, “Oh my gosh, there’s so much here, there’s so much available. I’m going to get a lot out of this. It’s going to help me change my life.” I want listeners to feel that this is life-changing and you bring the meat. So thank you, for filing this interview with wonderful information and I know it’s going to help people and please listeners, let me know how this helped you. You can go ahead and email me, support@learntruehealth.com. Let me know how this impacted your life or you can join our Facebook group. Learn True Health in Facebook and start a conversation in the Facebook group about this interview and whether you have questions or whether you just want to talk about it with other listeners. Let’s start a conversation in our Facebook group. David, you’re welcome to join our Facebook group as well.

[01:50:13] David Tomen: Thank you.

[01:50:13] Ashley James: Awesome. All right. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to get you back on the show.

[01:50:18] David Tomen: Let’s do it. Thank you, Ashley.

[01:50:20] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Secrets Of The Optimized Brain (E-book)

Head First – The Complete Guide to Healing and Optimizing Your Brain with Nootropic Supplements  (Ebook)

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https://drwillcole.com
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The Inflammation Spectrum

https://www.learntruehealth.com/inflammation-spectrum-will-cole

Highlights:

• Dr. Will Cole’s path to Functional Medicine
• Stress and autoimmune diseases
• The non-food factors that affect our biochemistry
• How can people figure out what’s the best diet for them
• Inflammation from a Functional Medicine perspective
• Dr. Will Cole’s Functional Medicine group
• Dr. Will Cole’s Books: Ketotarian and Inflammation Spectrum

In this episode, Dr. Will Cole will share with us about the effects of stress in our body and how it can potentially develop an autoimmune disease. He will also share with us his list of the non-food factors that affect our body chemistry.

Intro: 

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You're going to love today's interview with Dr. Will Cole who is a Functional Medicine expert. He shares some amazing information.

Before we start today's interview, I want to let you know about a few things; one, come join our Facebook group Learn True Health, just search it on Facebook. Or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/group. And it'll direct you straight to the group. You know, we do lots of giveaways. In fact, one of the guests I just had on is giving away I believe five copies of his book, which is so cool. So please jump into the Facebook group. We're doing giveaways every month. Most of the time it's books from the authors but sometimes they give away their supplements. We had Clint Ober giveaway five grounding mats that was so generous of him. So come join the Facebook group. And also join us for the conversations and the support. There's so many great conversations going on right now. The whole community comes together and helps to support each other around questions like hormone testing, and diet and what kind of cleaners do you use in your home that are non toxic and what kind of shampoos and conditioners are effective, but also non toxic? So we have these great conversations. Please join us Learn True Health in Facebook.

And one thing that Dr. Will Cole talks about today, briefly but very important point is the importance of sleep when it comes to decreasing inflammation. That's something that you probably have heard before if you've listened to the show for any amount of times because it's the truth. If we have poor sleep, our immune system can become affected, our blood sugar can go out of balance. Those who even test their blood sugars will see that poor nights of sleep will lead to higher blood sugar. You will notice that people who have poor sleep will eat more calories during the day and have more cravings and also experience more inflammation. If you know that sleep is an issue for you and you want better quality sleep, please go to www.learntruehealth.com/bed, that's www.learntruehealth.com/bed and check out the two videos there - educational videos on how to select the best non-toxic mattress and the science behind it. This company wowed me. It's the best sleep I've ever had. I really, really enjoy it. And since I've been talking about it the last month, some listeners have actually gotten back to me and they've told me that they too bought the same mattress that I did and they fell in love. That is the best lead that they've ever had. So I'm not alone in this people are getting better sleep because I told them about this mattress. So go to www.learntruehealth.com/bed and watch the two educational videos to inform yourself on how to make sure that you're selecting the best non-toxic bed for you and for your family. You'll be really glad you did. Excellent. Well enjoy today's interview.

.

[3:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host Ashley James. This is Episode 373.

I am so excited for today's guest. We have with us Dr. Will Cole who's a Functional Medicine doctor. He wrote the book Ketotarian which is the green way to do keto. I bought his book back when I was exploring the keto diet, specifically wanting to do it without needing to eat meat or dairy, which I'm very allergic to dairy. And I wanted to explore how could I help my body be healthy. And I loved his book, he was so down to earth and by the time I was finished chapter when I was like I need to have him on the show. It's so good to have you here Dr. Cole.

[4:00] Dr. Will Cole: Thank you so much for having me and these kind words about Ketotarian. It means a lot to me. Thank you.

[4:06] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, you have a book coming out called the Inflammation Spectrum. And you know, it's kind of a buzzword, everyone in the holistic space is talking about inflammation. But not many people know what it is or you know why it's so important to prevent it. And when we have it Why is it so important to reduce it and support the body in being in a low inflamed state basically. So we're going to get into that. You also see that there is a connection between autoimmunity and inflammation which is pervasive, and so many people are talking about, but you have a very unique perspective because you help people heal with diet, whereas so many doctors don't. So I'm excited to get into that. But first I want to hear a bit about you and understand your path. What happened in your life that led you to want to become a doctor and want to focus on Functional Medicine.

[5:07] Dr. Will Cole: Yes. So my journey happened, started a long time ago in a faraway land in rural Pennsylvania, where I'm actually based back now, I live outside of Pittsburgh, and I grew up in the countryside. And my parents were into wellness before it was cool, before it was Instagram, sexy with glossy like photos with nice filters. And they're pretty like, you know, organic meal of their favorite organic restaurant. It was not cool actually at all to eat very healthy in the 80s and 90s especially as a kid. Even today, it's probably even worse. But I mean, there was no internet, there was no health culture in that way in Pittsburgh, which was like a working class city, it wasn't Abbot Kinney or the Lower East Side. It was quite like hamburgers, hotdogs mac and cheese. So I had the weird adaptogenic tonics and the raw grass fed goat crane, and all this stuff that my friends were like, "What the heck is this kid bringing into the school? So that was my foundation as far as going to the health food store and understanding the food industry on an age appropriate level. Like I just kind of knew like this was healthy food, that was not healthy food. My parents had a garden like that, that was normal for me. And my dad owned a gym when I was little. So I remember spending time there as a little kid, and he was in the healthcare like natural health care world. So I spend time at his clinic. And that was really a formative time for me. And then it turned to be blessed, my mom did it. My dad did it. They were interested in health and I owned it for myself as a teenager, and I knew I owned it for myself. At that point, my diet kind of evolved from a crunchy organic healthy sort of approach to more of a conventional vegan diet for about 10 years.

And you mentioned Ketotarian and I talked about it in Ketotarian. But my journey from being a conventional vegan to a Ketotarian which is still mostly plant based, but I brought in some specific food medicines. And then it was this high clean fat, low carb, clean keto way of eating. And that also was simultaneous of my diet evolution, was also me being formally trained in Functional Medicine. So I have already mean conditions on both sides of my family like my extended family. And I myself have the MTHFR gene (SNP) snip, which is basically a gene (SNP) snip. I mean, most of your listeners will know this, all the fellow health nerds out there, but for people that don't know it's the gene that makes the enzyme that converts folic acid into folate which is a methyl donor, or CH3 carbon hydrogen group that recycles homocysteine down to methionine, and does a lot of other cool things. It basically makes for healthy detox pathways and hormones and protects our DNA against cancer and other horrible things. So methylation is really important. And the MTH of our gene is a one major aspect of methylation, which is this big, fancy superhighway that happens a billion times every second in our body. So basically my gene isn't that good at making this enzyme. So there's a high correlation between the MTHFR genes (SNP) snip or gene chain variant that we get from our parents and our family and autoimmune spectrum issues. So meaning different types of autoimmunity. And then that's when I was also formally trained in Functional Medicine. I was at Southern California University of Health Sciences, which is sort of an integrative health, natural healthcare university, where MDs and DCs and LACs and Naturopaths and Nurse Practitioners are all there learning their craft within an alternative healthcare. And there was a guy who had gone to my school who was older than I was, his name was [Inaudible 9:30] and he's still today [Inaudible 6:40] and anyone in this space will tell you he's one of the like, godfathers of functional medicine, brilliant mind. And he really inspired me to seek Functional Medicine as a targeted field, instead of this broader natural health.

Yes, I wanted to get people healthy. But specific with Functional Medicine, which what appeal to me so much was this marrying of the best of alternative health, which is actually getting somebody healthy, with the evidence based nature, which my school is naturally very evidence based anyways. But just putting it from a lab perspective, and running the blood labs, running and the microbiome test, running the genetic tests, running the hormone tests to look at these clinical data, these diagnostic pieces to the puzzle that explain why somebody feels the way that you do. So when I saw autoimmune conditions on my mom's side, and my dad's side, like, "Look, I need to do whatever I can for myself, to take care of myself." But then also I just got married at that time, we were going to have a baby. And I started thinking not just as a functional medicine doctor, not just as a human being, but also as a husband and a dad, and me taking responsibility for my health in a deeper way. So that was really all collided in this beautiful sort of series of events that led me to getting into Functional Medicine formally. And now all these years later, I see patients around the world, I primarily have a virtual clinic, and I get to talk to people about these things, about these lab issues and give them a Functional Medicine perspective on the things that I know, and I've seen transform my own life, transformed my family's life, and in my patients lives.

[11:28] Ashley James: At what point did you know that you had the MTHFR (SNP) snip?

[11:35] Dr. Will Cole: Early 23andMe years. So it's been a while. Yeah, so we brought the raw gene data from 23andMe.

[11:43] Ashley James: Got it. And so that was like way early on, when not many people knew about MTHFR and methylation So you're kind of in there, like a pioneer?

[11:56] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. I didn't think of it like that. But definitely, when we started with Function Medicine, there was people, it was crazy. I mean, this is over a decade ago, but people were saying, "What are you talking about?" Like, this is crazy. "You can't reverse diabetes, diet can impact your blood sugar." "You're crazy." "You're leading people on." But it's like, actually no, if you look at the research, and you look at this amazing evidence that we're at the forefront of there's so much power that we wield specific to methylation. There's older 23andMe test, you can get so much more in the raw gene data that they can't get. Now, there's a lot of like, no calls on these genes, they've cut down a lot. Like when I look at 23andMe. Now, I can't get all the same data, it's not public, at least on the same reports, I don't know how they do that with 23andMe, and why there's so much regulations on these things in there. And we're at the, again, the forefront of gene data and what that means from a privacy standpoint, and what they're going to release and how they can say it and all this stuff. So it is an interesting field. But we are using the best data that we have at this moment. And it's an ever growing and evolving field, to really say what are the action steps, there's a lot of data out there that there's not really any significant action steps. But my job is to kind of cut through the confusion of saying what are the things that are going to wield the most power to really make a positive impact in their quality of life and how they feel. But also how can we get these lives looking better? So yeah, it's it's exciting for me.

[13:31] Ashley James: Got it. How popular would you say the MTHFR (SNP) snip is in our population? Like as you work with people, what kind of a percentage do you see?

[13:41] Dr. Will Cole: While there's data to show that it's about 40% of the population has at least two heterozygous snip or one single gene change (SNP) snip stands for single nucleotide polymorphism, and a gene variant. I mean, we loosely use the word mutation, like the MTHFR mutation and gene mutation. It actually isn't a mutation, it's gene variant, or snip SNP, that we get a copy from my mom, I copy from my dad. And you can have a heterozygous gene snip, or homozygous gene snip, single or double gene snip or gene variant. So I have a double snip at the MTHFR C6770 location, which in studies is the more problematic one, when you have a double mutation at the C6770 versus the A1298. Those are the two main ones that are looked at clinically and being clinically relevant. So I've seen studies where it's about 40%. And I would say statistically, I'm not talking to the average population. Normally, I'm talking to people with some sort of autoimmunity, some sort of inflammatory issues, some sort of hormonal problem, some sort of digestive issue, I would say, our population of patients that we see it's a higher percentage than that. But I realized I'm not talking just the average person on the streets. So I would say 40% is probably a good indicator here. And that's the bigger point here that I think that you brought up and directly is that these gene variants have been around for 10,000 years. I mean, majority, almost all of our genes have remained unchanged largely in 10,000 years. So it's not the gene variant, like MTHFR Gene snips, that's the new kid on the block. Again, these things have been around for a long time. But what is different is the amount of stress we're putting our genes under. So that is what's dramatically changed in a very short period of time when you're looking at the totality of human history. So that's awakening and triggering these genetic predispositions like never before in human history.

Now, when you look at the rise of autoimmune conditions, like you opened up the conversation with 50 million Americans, it's expected to have an autoimmune condition and millions more that are somewhere on this inflammation spectrum, which is why I wanted to write the book, my second book on that topic, because of this sort of far reaching implications of this continuum of inflammatory cascades. And how much it impacts our life as a modern society. So it's quite a compelling topic to be explored and to be talked about, and to take what information we know now to start empowering people's lives because we have to do something different to see something different. And what we're doing as a society, I mean we both know this, and everybody, most of the people listening will know this too. It's unsustainable, how we're doing life largely in the West as far as healthcare is concerned, and our relationship with food and nature and all of that stuff. We have to do something different to see something different. So all that to say is that our genes are not what's changed. Yes, MTHFR and looking at these other gene snips like MTRR and the COMT and VDR, and all this fancy science stuff that I look at for patients to really further personalized recommendations. Yes, it's important, but it's only a slice of the puzzle. Research estimates that it's about a third of this autoimmune puzzle is genetics. So yes, we have to look at genetics, but two thirds is epigenetics. This is the stuff that's triggering these genetic predispositions. So it's the foods we're eating, or the foods we're not eating, it's our stress levels, our exposure to toxins, our lack of sleep, or lack of movement, or too much movement, it's the lack of balance. How can we find balance to be in alignment with our biochemistry, which again, is largely unchanged for 10,000 years? So that's really the heart of my work, it's really, largely an ancestral health perspective, at least informing me on a lot of things. So yeah, that's my thoughts on it.

[17:46] Ashley James: I love it that you brought up epigenetics that was my next question. This idea, which is, it feels just as new as sort of understanding the snips, this genetic variants. This idea that we've actually seen, our genetic expressions turn on and off in one lifetime, based on a set of stressors, or nutrients being present or being missing. There was this really cool test with mice where they exposed these little cute, fuzzy, soft white mice to Bisphenol A, the compound that people get exposed to every time I touch receipts, for example. And that it so messed with their genes that their hair started falling out and their hair became yellow, they became obese. It changed their genes because it got passed down for two generations after the one exposure before it corrected itself. So this is what we're being exposed to. We're touching Bisphenol A every day and getting exposed to these endocrine disruptors and obesogens that can affect our genes or genetic expression. And Dr. Joel Wallach wrote a book about epigenetics a few years ago that blew my mind talking about how we can see genes turn on and off, the expressions turn off based on whether there's nutrient deficiencies or not. So with that being said, is there a way to help stabilize or correct MTHFR variants or is it baked into the cake, and there's absolutely no way to epigenetically change it?

[19:45] Dr. Will Cole: So yeah, we can't change our genes. But by knowing these gene snips, the analogy that I use is the cup analogy. Some people have small cups, and some people have big cups. In the more gene snips, you have the more gene variants to methylation or gene variants to detoxification, or the endocannabinoid system. These are determining how big or how small your cup is, we can't change that. Some people are born with really small cups, meaning that they're going to overflow, their tipping points going to be a lot smaller than someone with a big cup. So some people can smoke three packs a day and don't take care of themselves, eat like crap, and like all the stuff, right? And they live a long life. And they're like, "How the heck can they get away with all this, when I'm trying to like do all this good, healthy wellness stuff, and I'm getting flare ups over salad." or like high FODMAPS or something seemingly healthy, that's these health foods are causing me having digestive or autoimmune flare ups, etc. So this has largely to do with the epigenetic sort of component here as the genetics is the cup, the epigenetics are what we are filling in the cup. And some people, it's sad, I mean you can't change your genetics, but it's overflowing quite easily. You can't change that. But you can change what you put in the cup, you can change the chronic infections and the exposure to toxins and the gut issues and the food reactivity. You can start to unload the stuff in the cup that's causing the flare ups and the overflow.

So that's what my job is to do, is to look at the framework, to look at the methylation gene snips, the detoxification gene snips, the endocannabinoid system gene snips, and then look at what's filling up that cup. Look at the heavy metals, look at the mold, look at the viral issues, look at the gut issues, look at the hormone imbalances, look at the nutrient deficiencies to your point - and that's a major one, looking at vitamin D, looking at selenium, looking at iodine, looking at magnesium, looking at zinc. All of these things are important to consider. Because these are the epigenetic factors, our body is alive because of brilliant biochemistry. And all these factors are confluent. It's a perfect storm of radiant wellness, or a perfect storm of health problems. So, definitely it has to be talked about, but it's not cutting it to say what mainstream medicine largely says which is, food has nothing to do with this. So that's just bonkers. And then the other side is, "Well just eat clean." And it's like okay, most of my patients eat really clean, and they're still struggling. So there has to be a nuance to this to beyond the basics, but still like not acknowledging the fact that epigenetics is a thing. And it's something we need to talk about. And it's not just about food too, we have to look at non-food factors that influence our biochemistry as well.

[22:43] Ashley James: So what non-food factors affect our biochemistry?

[22:48] Dr. Will Cole: I would say stress and I don't mean that in the fluffy, like sound by the sort of way where it's just like meditate more and don't stress. That can stress people out just hearing that. But I would say being mindful of healthy margins in your life. So and bringing back to this concept of balance, inflammation isn't inherently bad, it's a product of our immune system. So we just want balance, it's the Goldilocks principle, you don't want inflammation too high. You don't want inflammations too low, you want to just right at the right time when you need it. And that's the same way with stress, the human race has been here for a long time, because we can handle a certain amount of grit. So I don't mean to absolve yourself of all stress, I don't mean that. That's quite a millennial thing to think about. And we live in for the most part of human history in Western Civilization, and when you compare it to the rest of human history, we live a pretty stress free life in some regards. We're not being you know, there's no massive famines in the West, and things like that. But it's this insidious, chronic stressor that again, is out of alignment. It's a mismatch between our genetics and epigenetics, which haven't changed in 10,000 years genetics, which we get inundated with its amount of stuff. That is this low grade of being chased by a tiger, but there's no tiger. So it's this constant fight or flight sympathetic response all the time, which raises inflammation up.

So to answer your question, I would say, stress, but I mean, cultivating healthy margins in your life. And not because I want to look different for different people. Some people can handle more, some people can handle less back to their biological variability there. But it is, what's your relationship with food? What's your relationship with your body? What's your relationship with social media? What's your relationship with other people - it's all these things that so many people have, unhealthy or healthy relationships with and calibrating them to find a healthy margin. So you have to look at that, you have to look at sleep, it's so profoundly important. So I would lump sleep, almost under the stress category, because sleep isn't a luxury. It's not like I'll sleep when I'm dead, people say that. Sleep is a mandate on your health, it is necessary. So the amount of lack of sleep is really an epidemic in our society. People are staying up too late. They're on electronics too late. It's impacting their circadian rhythm. It's interrupted sleep. The amount of sleep apnea and poor sleep and just electronics impacting circadian rhythm are huge impediments to people healing through the night and restoring in their cells, rejuvenating through the night to get quality restorative sleep. So then that's throwing off there. Again, they're inflammation cascades in their circadian rhythm and their hormones. So that's huge. Looking at stress, looking at technology, looking at sleep - that is a major part of it, that has nothing to do with food. So we have to look at that, we have to look at environmental toxins, we have to look at what is the product that people using, you mentioned BPA, you have to look at what cleaning products, what's the skin products that people are using, what are the laundry detergent things that people are using. Largely it's unregulated, like Wild Wild West, we don't really know what this is going to do to our wellness, but hey, let's buy it. And then in the United States, at least, a lot of the chemicals are actually illegal in other countries, but yet we can get them in the United States.

So we have to educate. And again, this is so important, the dichotomy of this conversation is to inform, but don't obsess and stress out. Because I find that this is an endless vortex of like a pit of controlling everything, which is not good for your health. But yet still being balanced and informed you say, I'm going to do what I can to clean up my life. So I don't want to be a fear monger or make people like freak out and live in a bubble. But you do the best you can and then you don't stress about the rest. So the things that I bring up in the inflammation spectrum, the book, to start educating people to start realizing how these things impact our biochemistry.

[27:19] Ashley James: I love it. It was just reminding me how obsessed I'd become about clean food, clean eating, cleaning products. Making sure everything's chemical free, natural. And then you know, I'm cooking every meal for our family. And I just want a break I just want to go out to a restaurant and relax. And so I pick a restaurant, I'm like, "We're gonna go, we're gonna have a nice night out." As we're driving my husband's like, "Well, what if it's not organic?" Like, "What about the pesticides?" I'm like, "Okay, one night at a restaurant, because I need to destress and have a fun night with my family." But I mean, we picked the healthiest restaurant possible. And it's funny that it's like that one that you could always obsess. You know, "What about this?" What about that?" You know what, the benefit of me having a night off from cooking is going to far outweigh the potential small amount of pesticides that I'm going to be exposed to tonight. So we don't want to make excuses like eat at McDonald's, because that's decreasing my stress. No, we need to still make really healthy choices. But we don't want to scare ourselves into having stress around our choices.

[28:42] Dr. Will Cole: Totally. And I see it's oftentimes to that example, people that eat a little bit off of what they normally would eat. And even I would say going off of it more than they would ever. And they actually feel better because they aren't stressing. So I definitely, like you said it's a balance. And if you are then trading in like you're eating clean, but then you're like serving your body a big slice of stress every day and anxiety about every day. That's junk food for your soul. So it's counteracting all the good things you're doing. And I get it, we're living in an information overload age. That is a double edged sword. It's great. It's connecting us right now, or it's how we're connecting to people around the world right now. But it also is this endless vortex, I think I wrote about it in Ketotarian, this endless vortex of conflicting information. And Dr. Google is a very fickle, fickle man. And we have to be mindful of the fact that we can have paralysis of analysis where people are just basically paralyzed with fear and anxiety because they know too much. And they need to know what they need to know. But then they need to be able to manifest it in a way that's not going to destroy their quality of life. So I think a good part of people having a functional medicine practitioner in their life, is we can sort of break down what's relevant for them and say, "Look, this stuff, you don't really need to know, what's the basics for you, and what's relevant for you." So you can cut through the food confusion and the shame and the stress that can come along with all of this, navigating through this - a lot of great information. But again, there's a lot of good then a lot of overload too. So it's trying to break it down for the individual. So that's it to say that food is important. But our relationship with food is important as well.

[30:43] Ashley James: How can people figure out the best diet for them? Is there one diet fits all? Like, is eating a whole foods, plant based diet best for everyone and everyone thrives on it? Or there's some people who would thrive on like an all meat diet? I know that sounds really extreme. But have you found that everyone thrives on eating ketotarian for example, or eating a whole foods plant based where there's no processed fats? Or it really does depend on genetics and it depends on the person's disease state at the moment? What have you found when it comes to helping people dial in the perfect diet for them?

[31:27] Dr. Will Cole: That's a great question. So I would say this, when I wrote Ketotarian, and that was my own journey. And what I've seen over my years of I've seen patients of how to do keto and lower carb diets, the clean way and mostly plant based or entirely plant based way. But I know if I'm putting my Functional Medicine Hat on, I know even within the paradigm of keto or plant based or Ketotarian and a whole 30, or paleo or carnivore, Mediterranean or whatever, I realized that the types of food choices that you give somebody underneath that umbrella of whatever you want to call at that moment, is going to be different for person to person. So the umbrella changes, meaning what types of foods to focus on, but also what you're focusing on within that diet paradigm. So I've seen every variable under the sun, what works for one person can flare the next person up. When you're talking about intestinal permeability, or leaky gut syndrome or SIBO or histamine intolerance, or food sensitivities, or reactivities, and preferences and stress about food and all these other variables, there's so many variables to consider when you're dealing with somebody that doesn't feel good. And we're using food to improve their quality of life to consider.

So I have patients that are on carnivore protocols, and you would think the author of Ketotarian and why would I have a patient on a carnivore diet, because my allegiance is to the patient feeling better. And for a time, we use things like the carnivore diet, it's the ultimate elimination diet. We're removing basically every variable out there. So we have them on specific macronutrients, which are still predominantly fats with lower protein to still provide that. I don't want excess protein which can impact mTOR which is the pathway that you don't want long term to be activated. And they're not on carnivore for long term. The goal is to start down regulating these food reactivities. These are people with multiple food reactivities, it's not for everybody, but for a time we are using it to down regulate these overreactions to things like histamines or oxalate or salicylates, these compounds in plant foods, because of intestinal permeability, and this rise of inflammation that they're having. And then to start reintroducing foods as we're healing the gut. And then we have patients that would never do well on a carnivore diet at all, whether it's their biochemistry, let's say they have APOE gene snip, the have APOE 44, they have APOE A2 gene variant, these are two gene variants that in high saturated fats, they wouldn't do well at all on the carnivore diet. So we're looking at their gene snips and what's going on in their body. And we're putting them on a ketotarian diet and they're doing fantastic. They like eating more plant centric ways, they feel more fresh, more clean, more lighter eating that way.

So it works with a preference, but also with their genetics and biochemistry. And we're really improving their cholesterol markers, and it looks fantastic. So and then what works for that person in that moment may not be what they're doing forever and ever because their health is dynamic, their biochemistry is dynamic, and variable. So if I hung my hat on one way to do something all day long, I'd be proven wrong all day long seeing patients. So I have to keep an open mind to seeing what's your health history and looking at it comprehensively, looking at their labs, listening to the as a human being and what they're going through. And then using real life as a lab and what works and what doesn't, and tracking food logs and symptoms and correlating that. So that is really the truth. And that is really what birthed the concept of my second book, the Inflammation Spectrum. Because the whole concept is finding out what your body loves, what your body hates, and what your body needs to thrive. And that's what it's all about, because we're using food as a template to calm inflammation. But then we're reintroducing these foods that are more problematic for some people, but may not be problematic for you.

So I want to allow people to be more mindful and conscious of how foods impact how they feel. And I promise you, you have 10,000 readers, you will have 10,000 different variables, because they're all be slightly different, even slightly different, they may not be major different, but then you may see major differences. So it is so beautiful and one way because we're also created so beautifully different. But at the same time, it can be beautifully overwhelming. So hopefully through the book, my goal was to just cut through that food confusion and just lay it out. So people can start bringing these Functional Medicine principles into their life.

[36:14] Ashley James: You talk about different gene variants and how one person with this gene expression or gene snip would do better eating this way versus that way. Or you could look at someone's genetic expressions and know that they are having a difficult time with processing toxins, their cup is small. And so you'd be able to give them advice around diet and detoxification and helping clear up detoxification pathways. But for those who have never had genetic testing, they don't know where to even start. I myself want to get more genetic testing, but I'm worried about my results being sold to drug companies. We hear about this happen all the time. How do you address this with your patients? Are there labs that you recommend that promise to protect our genes and keep them safe, keep the results safe from the companies that want to buy them?

[37:20] Dr. Will Cole: That is definitely a concern for a lot of people. More I would say in the last couple years than it was back in the day look. I sold my gene data to 23andMe back in the day. So the drug companies probably have mine jeans by this point. But I would say in all seriousness, it is a concern, it is something that is a real potential. I think that that is a lot of the financial interests in a lot of these big geno like tech companies that they are looking to design drugs to be better or to market to certain people or to understand demographics and different gene variants and looking at the data. And I don't necessarily think it's all nefarious, I think there can be unintended consequences from it that are not positive. But I don't think it's necessarily all negative because of the one side of it as well, we're looking to better improve whatever... I'm trying to be [Inaudible 38:21] be so conspiracy theory bait, but I would say that the reality is there can be definitely unintended consequences, and it could definitely be a breach of privacy that I think is a problem. I think that at this point, there's no major cause for concern to go through something like 23andMe. I mean you can use the raw gene data on something like Prometheus or StrataGene or Genetic Genie or something like that.

But the other side of it, there are many Functional Medicine labs out there that will look at methylation gene snips that I do trust more than these big companies. So things like; people like doctors data, and there's other ones out there that will look at those gene snips that are privately owned, they are smaller labs, they're in the space of Functional Medicine, they're not in the space of big pharma. Generally what I would do is if someone did have concerns about making their genetic data public to 23andMe or something like it, then the alternative would be to go to one of the smaller labs that we could still get that same data. It normally is a little bit more expensive. But so if the price point is an issue that they would probably be better off going on through 23andMe or something like that. But oftentimes, they would rather spend a little bit more and get like there are more security, which is completely understandable.

And to be honest with you in full candor, in hindsight, I would probably do the more the local private Functional Medicine lab over 23andMe as well. Because I think that there are unintended consequences to things like that. Down the road, not now. Not now. Everything's fine now, but down the road, they have the full legal right for your genetic data. But you know, there's no reason for it to be alarmed now. But if I had to pick between the two, I probably spend a little bit more on the one that's not saying they're going to use your gene data for other purposes.

[40:32] Ashley James: Right. Right. Well, so there's a lot of options, which there weren't back then, there are now which is really exciting. Man, this is such a crazy world. You know, when we look at getting a PhD, for example, you have to be peer reviewed. So it's very difficult to think outside the box and challenge the status quo when you're getting a PhD, because if you challenge the status quo too much, your thesis will be rejected. You have to still be, you know, peer reviewed, right? You have to be accepted by your peers. And that's how science march us slowly forward. Even things that get published, studies that get published need to be, or the journals, you know, publish these case studies. Journals reject amazing case studies all the time, because it goes outside of the norm or the status quo. So we look at the MD allopathic model. And it is designed the way it was even if you look at the history of allopathic medicine, it is about protecting the interests of big pharma, protecting the interests of drug based medicine, and Functional Medicine is coming along. And Functional Medicine isn't rejecting drugs, but it's looking at how we can best serve the person and use the best tool that's needed, oftentimes not a drug. But if there's a drug that's needed, then fine. But that is still very threatening to the standard allopathic medical system, which says that there's no relationship between diet and health, you're looking to help people get healthy. So have you come up against any friction? As you're practicing functional medicine, have you come up against friction from the allopathic mainstream world?

[42:39] Dr. Will Cole: Generally speaking, no. I think what I'm putting out into the world, and what I want to continue to put out in this world is that we should be on the side of the person that's dealing with the health issues and our collective health as a society. So I would say, oftentimes, what to use as a spiritual principle, what you resist persists. So I feel like my whole ethos of what I'm putting out there is, "Let's come together, how can we make people feel great, and I'm not anti medication." Like you said. My job is to find what's your most effective option that causes you the least amount of side effects. And certainly, some people are alive because of medications. And there are life saving advancements in medications and life saving surgical interventions.

My question is, what is our most effective options that causes you the least amount of side effects, if a medication is the only thing that's given, and yet there are more conservative, safer little to no, most of the time, no side effects of getting healthy and using food as medicine. This is not radical stuff. This is not things that should be scary to the status quo. If anything, we would live a more vibrant, productive, healthy, long life. And yes, on one level, it looks like we're you know, if someone's off of medications, that's not good for the pharmaceutical industry. So on one level, I guess it could be threatening to the bottom line, but an industry that's depending on someone being sick, we have to change the paradigm of how we're even relating to that industry. Because it shouldn't be just sick care, it should be let's come together to get healthy. This is why people get into healthcare.

Every doctor takes the Hippocratic oath, well, let's start doing that. And really just first do no harm. Let's think about that. Hippocrates said, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food." And he also said all disease begins in the gut. So really, Functional Medicine isn't new at all. It's actually just Hippocratic healthcare back to the original. But we're using the amazing advancements of science that we know today, as far as diagnostic testing, to find these common underlying facets like microbiome health and genetics and hormone imbalances. It's to be as evidence based we can, but still stick to our Hippocratic oath. That's all Functional Medicine is. So I don't get a lot of blowback or negativity from mainstream medicine. I think because I'm just pointing out let's come together, there's a place for medications, there's certainly a place for surgery, there's a place for Functional Medicine, there's enough people out there that need help. And this should not be us threatening them. And this should not be us being threatened by them.

So I would say that's my position on it and, and ultimately, I think that, with that said, there are still people that are negative. I see it once in a while on Twitter. Twitter's like the armpit of social media. I love Twitter, as far as like getting news, like I love Twitter feeds and things that are trending, I think it's so great. But the amount of dogmatic, like dark bullying, is so disturbing on a deep level, on so many levels, and it's not good. And not to get too political, but I think that's why the President knows that. He puts out a tweet. And it feeds this negativity on social media. And that's just one aspect of it. He didn't start the negativity. It's been there for years. But it is like the social media platform that's amazing, but also, it's this weird dichotomy. It's great data, it's information really easy to read, and it's trending and connects people. But it's also these armies of trolls, that are mean, they're really nasty and mean. And it's not logical, you can't even engage in that with them. So when I see it, I just normally just put it away. But that's few and far between. The overwhelming majority of I mean, look, the Cleveland Clinic has a Functional Medicine health center now. I mean, you can't get more mainstream than the Cleveland Clinic they made amazing advancements in technology and healthcare, they have a Functional Medicine center. So for people that are still behind the times, and saying somehow Functional Medicine is quackery, or talking about it just is nonsense. The reality if the Cleveland Clinic is realizing there's a place for Functional Medicine, why aren't you? How evidence based are you? Are you going against what the Cleveland Clinic is saying? And other hospitals too, not just the Cleveland Clinic, but a lot of mainstream are bringing in integrative and Functional Medicine. And that's exactly what we've been talking about for the past 10 years myself, and many other people in functional medicine have been. So this is nothing new, I think they're just catching on. Because we have to do something different to see something different. And you can't look at the level of chronic disease we see as a society and the amount of money we're spending on it. We spend more on healthcare than the next 10 top spending countries combined. Yet we have the shortest lifespan of all industrialized nations, yet we have the most disease, the rate of maternal death and infant death is abysmal compared to other industrialized nations, yet, we have all this at our fingertips.

Well, we have to start looking at how can we be more effective and cause people lower amount of side effects. So let's just be open. When healthcare or medicine becomes a religion, you're exactly like the religious radicals, but your religion is medicine, your god is medicine. And you're putting your false god before people. And that's a sad place to be in. And that's where a lot of these people that are trolls, they are. Their god is their beliefs and their radicalized to the point of treating people horribly. And that's a sad place to be at. But to me, it has nothing to do with me, and that says more about them than me.

[48:49] Ashley James: Interesting. I just read an article about why there are trolls, why there are people who will lash out and argue and really insult people. Or like if there's someone puts out a video, and then some troll will come along and just say the most nastiest things about the person. Why is that? The average person is so nice. Why is that? And it has to do with megalomania, where the person is, and maybe I'm saying it wrong, but the person is, they believe that they're the only person in the world that they don't have a relationship, that their actions are hurting someone else. Because they believe that they're the only person in the world. And no one else matters, everyone else is just an object to control.

[49:45] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. Fascinating.

[49:47] Ashley James: So those people are attracted to social media because they can hide behind the screen and lash out at others. And it feels good to them. And because other people are objects, not humans with feelings that they're hurting. So I don't think that the average person goes in and hurts people online. I think it just attracts a type of psychosis. So we just have to be aware that you're doing the best thing by walking away. Arguing online is not going to solve it. We're not gonna enlighten anyone because those people believe we're objects. We're not actually human beings with feelings.

[50:27] Dr. Will Cole: Amen.

[50:28] Ashley James: Yeah. So, we just walk away. And we if we want to help people, we have enlightened loving conversations in person. You know, that's the best way to do it. Because then we can enforce our boundaries healthfully. But you're right in social media it can be wonderful. And then when it's not we need to put it away to manage our stress. That is the healthiest. That's the healthiest choice for us. And I love that you called functional medicine Hippocratic medicine, that's a really great way of putting it. I love it. For those who've never been to a Functional Medicine practitioner, can you enlighten us? Like, let's say we walk into your clinic, we're sitting down with you right now, we're having our first meeting. What kind of labs do you run that we would not normally have never seen run because we've always gone to an allopathic MD?

[51:25] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. So, it's really a cool thing because it's like the Institute for Functional Medicine, IFM which is my self has been trained and my team has been trained with, and they're the same governing group of training physicians that are also training the doctors at the Cleveland Clinic's Functional Medicine Center. And most are MDS, most of the doctors like the overwhelming majority are allopathic, the trained medical doctors that didn't go to an integrative medicine school like myself. It's interesting, because whereas my training was five years in natural medicines, and lifestyle and diagnostics, and all the same anatomy, physiology, psychology, all that stuff. But from a natural medicine perspective, versus the conventional allopathic doctors that don't get, I mean, they have next to no training when they leave medical school, from a health and nutrition, there's studies that actually talked about in the inflammation spectrum, my second book that most doctors in this one study actually failed the basic nutrition course, because they aren't trained anything. It's like going to a mechanic for gardening advice. It's like it's just not there. So that's why they typically refer out to RDs and things like that. So even them weighing in on health and nutrition on Twitter is interesting to me, because they don't really have much, if at all training on that. But with that said, there's a growing amount of amazing brilliant, kind hearted, Hippocratic hearted medical doctors, allopathically and conventionally trained doctors that are realizing and they're looking at the same things that we're seeing, and like, we have to do something different to see something different.

I mean, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. We need to do something different in our healthcare, and just human care, from a societal standpoint. So what are they doing? They're going and being trained in Functional Medicine, they're going to IFM, they're going to these conferences to get postdoctoral education like myself. So it's very interesting because they start the IFM training with very basic stuff, because these medical doctors, bless them, they want to learn, but they're not taught that in school. Whereas I think a lot of us that went to integrative medicine schools already like okay, like this is our whole doctorate training. But then as the advanced practice modules go in, they get more into the meat, so to speak, of Functional Medicine, which I love.

So with that said, when someone comes to a Functional Medicine doctor, the way that I run my clinic, at least, it starts with comprehensive consultation. So I really want to dig in as far as like asking questions that haven't been asked before, we have pretty in depth questionnaires that are pointers as to what areas are the most relevant for that person. And I try to be like fully present and open minded and literally looking at every case as a fresh slate of what this person is going through. And it's sometimes hard to encapsulate five years, 10 years, 15 years, 30 years, however long this person's been going through this in an initial meeting. So I want to really hone in on how this is impacting their life. What does this look like? What is the day in the life of this person and put myself in their shoes as much as I can. And I try to do that for every single person. And again, we primarily see patients online, which people think like the more old school people are like, how can you connect with people that aren't in front of you? I'm actually able to get so much in depth with person. And oftentimes people are less guarded, when they're not there. Because going back to social media, I'm using that social media thing to an advantage, I guess in that moment, because people can be a little bit more vulnerable, I think if you're not right there. So that's an interesting thing. But I see patients locally in Pittsburgh, too. But we asked a lot of questions. And we had one older gentleman say to me, "Are you in the KGB? Because we asked so many questions on the questionnaires. I'm not in the KGB. I just want to know like why the outer third of your eyebrows is thinning. That may mean something, it could be a thyroid issue. Or if you're craving salt, maybe a cortisol, adrenal HPA axis issue.

All these nuance stuff that seem irrelevant to the layperson means something to a Functional Medicine practitioner. So we start with a good health history, which is a good pointer and a foundation to what lab is the most relevant. So I don't want to run labs just for the sake of it, which is I guess a relevant argument or criticism of Functional Medicine is that you run too many labs. I think that can happen. I agree with you. I would say let's start with a good solid health history to see what labs are the most relevant. So we can be comprehensive, I do want to run more labs than you're running because guess what, they're not running enough labs in the conventional medicine status for most people. Running just a TSH for thyroid issues isn't cutting it. So the fact that I am running T4 and T3 and free T3 and free T4 and thyroid antibodies and the reverse T3 and the iodine and selenium. Yeah, that's needed. That's not over testing. That's understanding your thyroid hormone physiology and pathways. So that's pretty basic from a Functional Medicine standpoint. But all they need for that thyroid is to give you Synthroid or Levothyroxine or a thyroid replacement hormone drug, they just need the TSH. So they're running the labs they need to give you the medication. That's fine if all they're doing is giving medication. It's completely relevant within the paradigm of conventional medicine. But it is wholly inadequate from a Functional Medicine standpoint, it's incomplete. Because you can't hang your hat on one biomarker and say, "Well, it's above 4.5. Let's give you Synthroid." Or, "Your cholesterol is above 200. Let's give you a statin drug." Well, why is it cholesterol high? Why is it TSH? High? It's not a medication deficiency. So let's actually find out what's driving it. So these are the questions that we're asking.

We're sort of clinical Sherlock Holmes from a Functional Medicine standpoint. So good health history, running the appropriate labs. And so that involves typically a more comprehensive blood tests. And when it's appropriate - microbiome testing, hormonal testing, we talked about the genetic testing, we look at mold issues, if that's showing up higher on the scores. Because mold can trigger these autoimmune issues and fatigue issues and these immune mediated issues. Looking at viral issues like Epstein-Barr Virus, Cytomegalovirus, [Inaudible 57:58] virus, other viruses, multiple pathogens that can be at play and then Lyme disease which is a problem in our society, tick borne problems, coinfections to Lyme like the BCM, bartonella, and all of these co infections are an issue. And then obviously, the gut dysbiosis; things like SIBO and food sensitivities can be a component to it as well. So all of that is sort of the confluence, the perfect storm of things that we want to consider, where we want to be comprehensive, but still be cost effective, and not just running labs for the sake of it. So that's when a good health history falls into place as the foundation. So that's typically the order. And then we are clinically monitoring somebody and coaching them and educating them about their health and leaning into these findings. We're using those labs. We're getting multiple labs perspective, from their vantage point, like, what the heck is going on here? Why do they feel the way that they do? And really educating and informing and equipping the patient with a self education process of like, this is what's going on in your body, and that empowers them. That empowers them to say, "Look, I can do something." These are things you can overcome and heal from and deal with, or support.

So I love that process of really educating a person about their health. Because obviously, I don't say it with glee of like, "Look at all these problems that you have in your life." But honestly, it's this bittersweet moment, because they already know that something's not right with them. And the last thing they want me to say is everything's fine on these labs, even though they don't feel fine. So it's like this moment, "Okay, look, this validates why you feel the way that you do." You actually weren't just exhausted because you were lazy. You actually had reasons why you were exhausted. Oh, you have that horrible digestive problems. And everyone just said, you just have IBS, which is just explaining how you feel irritable bowel syndrome is not a real explanation. Yes, I know my bowels are irritable, but why? Or I have acid reflux, why? Or I have low thyroid, why? We're explaining all the why's. Everyone can say the check engine light is on. But what's underneath the hood, what's misfiring that's causing the problem in the first place? So that's fun for me, because we have to know what we're up against to do something about it. And this is like really good stuff, solid data to then lean into. And what's even cool, that's normally the one on one stuff, where I'm clinically monitoring them and coaching them. And that's my day job, I'm normally standing up my standing desk and consulting people about this stuff with my team. But what's cool is we are working on this different template, or a different form of Functional Medicine care, which I'm really excited to be rolling out over these next coming months. That's a group care, it's an online class where people can get Functional Medicine blood labs, like I just mentioned.

And then we look at it through a Functional Medicine lens, we put it on spreadsheets, and we color code it, and we show what's optimal compared to the functional range, we show what's not optimal, and we give them suggestions based off of their labs. But we're doing it in a group class, that's still HIPAA compliant. So like, no one's seeing each other, and all the questions are private, all that stuff. And I'm just educating them on what their labs mean, because so many people have these labs and get from their doctor, and they don't even know what they mean. So I can really like say, "Hey, let's run more labs, but also run the labs that they typically run." But empower you to explain what this means to give you insight on why you feel the way that you do. But the goals of the group class is to make Functional Medicine accessible, more accessible, more affordable, to help more people. Because I only have so many hours in a day. And so for the most part, I still see patients one on one, but we're holding these group calls classes monthly for an entry point, maybe they don't want all the expanded testing, maybe they don't want to have all these tests and the one on one care, but they know they can optimize their health. And I feel like this group class that's online can be a good entry point for people. It allows us to lower the cost and we can impact more people. And it's going to get them more accessible Functional Medicine care. So I'm really excited about this functional medicine group class we have going on.

[1:02:29] Ashley James: Cool. And I will make sure that the links to everything you do is in the show notes to today's podcast, your website being www.drwillcole.com, we'll make sure that all the links are there for your books and your group class and how they can reach out to you to learn more about that. That sounds fascinating. So everyone gets their labs, and then they sit in the class with you. And you're going through kind of just each lab talking about the optimal ranges and what to do what not to do. And so everyone's looking at their results, it's going okay, he's talking about this and talking about cholesterol, high cholesterol you mentioned and I see that my cholesterol is high on my lab, and then you start talking about what they can do if their cholesterol is high, so no one sees others. And in the group classes, are they able to ask questions of you and can people learn from your answers?

[1:03:18] Dr. Will Cole: They can. Well because we're making it HIPAA compliant, we're not making it public on people's health information. It's like shooting, we don't want to obviously do that. So the questions are going privately to our team and myself, and we're going to be answering them privately. So it's still HIPAA compliant. So we're educating them on the group class about their labs. And then individually in private, we're giving them suggestions based on their labs. So yeah, they still have action steps to leave based on their labs. But it's all just one on one with us and them.

[1:03:52] Ashley James: So I was wondering if you could give them a code name, like, you're A and your B and your C. And then idea one knows each other's code names. So then you can still answer the questions public, not publicly, but you know, in the forum, so that everyone can learn from your answers. Because what if there are five people in the class with high cholesterol or whatever? And then everyone else is learning from that, from that question. So give everyone a code name.

[1:04:20] Dr. Will Cole: That's a good idea. I just have get back to my team, we'll find that. But yeah. It's so funny that I've heard so many questions over the years that I basically know what people are going to say like the handful of questions I know they're going to have. So I tried to cover the FAQs throughout. But I love that, I think that's good, we'll have to look at the compliance factor of that and make it happen. But yeah, it's really cool. I'm excited for people. I'm trying to meet them where they're at. And if someone doesn't need a full Functional Medicine support, or maybe they just want an entry point. And that's another criticism that's made on Functional Medicine is, it's only for the wealthy, and you have to be super rich to cover. And that's definitely not true for our patients, our patients are almost all working class like normal people. But I wanted to make it even more affordable and more accessible. So it has been a passion project of us for this virtual group class for the past year.

[1:05:15] Ashley James: How many people are allowed to attend the group class? And how much is it going to be? Do you know?

[1:05:21] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. So it includes blood labs. So it includes a full Functional Medicine blood array, that's quite a bit of data on that, and includes the group class itself with myself, includes the food recommendations, the natural medicine recommendations, and any additional recommendations based on their case. And it's going to be under 2000. It's going to be about 1900. around that, so to speak. And that includes the blood labs and everything.

[1:05:48] Ashley James: Yeah. That's pretty expensive.

[1:05:50] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. If you look at that, just to give people context to this. If you look at what the insurance gets billed from the labs, for that same labs is going to be about $4,000. So it's a lot more inefficient and expensive.

[1:06:08] Ashley James: And can people go through their insurance to do your class or go to their insurance to bill for labs when working with you?

[1:06:16] Dr. Will Cole: It depends. I think it depends, generally speaking the answer is absolutely yes. And most of our patients on one on one care, they have private health insurance, they are going through their insurance. So I would say yes, largely for one on one care. As we're beta testing the group classes that are online, we wanted all the labs to be standardized to get into the same time. So there wasn't lag time when the group class comes around, and someone doesn't have a couple of lab results. So we wanted it just to be like systematics ,we get the data and we know the turnaround. And sometimes with insurance and labs, especially in different States, you can get a lag time with certain lab results. So we wanted to make it less clunky. But in theory, as we're furthering the group class beta through beta testing, we can make it more efficient on the insurance front too, especially if there's a longer lead time, or the patients getting the lab early enough for us to get the turnaround to write the report and the recommendations before the online class.

[1:07:13] Ashley James: Very cool. You've talked about high cholesterol, and that's such a controversial subject. I'd love for you to shed light on it. My understanding is that the doctors that set the, you know 200 originally it was like 200 and above its high and then they lowered it and then they lowered it. And they kept lowering it. And I've seen interviews with them. And they said that they had to come up with. It was a team of doctors but they had to come up with a number and they just kind of had to pull it out of their butts. And the reason why they wanted because they had to pick a specific number to say everything above this number is high cholesterol, everything above this numbers below or low or normal cholesterol. And they needed to lower it so they could get more of the population on statins because then they could see whether it's working or not. They needed enough people to lower their cholesterol and it was kind of a guessing game and they wanted to see what would happen over time. And that kind of shocks people that you know, we've been told that fat is bad, cholesterol is bad cholesterol is what causes heart disease. And now we're seeing that the cholesterol or now there's a different perspective that cholesterol is actually the band aid the body's using to try to patch up areas of high pressure that are not able to heal itself because the body's deficient in the nutrients and it needs to heal itself. And so there's this controversy around what is high cholesterol? Is it really bad? And isn't there parts of cholesterol that are good parts of the cholesterol that are bad. What should we do about it? Is it all just genetic? Can you shed light on what is high cholesterol? Why is it bad? And how can we increase good cholesterol and decrease "bad cholesterol?"

[1:09:15] Dr. Will Cole: Great. It's a great point to talk about. So total cholesterol which is the sum of HDL and LDL. And LDL is typically what they call bad cholesterol and HDL is what they'll typically call good cholesterol. But looking at total cholesterol, and then seeing that as a barometer for good or bad if it's above 200, it's bad. If it's, it's below it's good. That's incomplete. And then also saying HDL is good and LDL is bad, it's also incomplete. So, in Functional Medicine, the approach would be more in alignment with with a lot of the modern data and science looking at the context of it. Context matters here with cholesterol as it does with so much of life. That it's just when you're looking at one facet of it and then hang your hat on that and saying, "Well, then you should be on a statin, it's above 200." Well, let's understand the nuance of it all.

So about half of people who have heart attacks and strokes actually have normal to low cholesterol, and evidence points to that. So the reality is that it may be a problem or may not be a problem. It's like flipping a coin. So we want to understand what's the quality of it and not just the quantity of it. So to your point, one of the labs we run and we run this on one on one patients as well as group class patients, we run a nuclear magnetic resonance or NMR test to look at the subfractionation of the lipids basically. Let's measure the quality of the particles that carry cholesterol which is protein, the protein carrier, and you can be largely in pattern A, which is the fluffy, buoyant, protective LDL like a cotton ball, its protective, it kind of clean things up. And then the small dense LDL, which is oxidized rusted BB bullet that has the potential to tear through arterial walls. So it's the quality there, are you more in pattern A, the fluffy cotton ball or the pattern B the little BB bullets. So it's the inflammation and the oxidation and it damages the particles that carry cholesterol. That's the problem, not cholesterol inherently. So we can see that on a test.

So for example, you could have a 250, let's say 250 cholesterol that's in pattern A or you could have a 250 cholesterol that's in pattern B. You could have a 150 cholesterol that's in pattern A or pattern B. So someone in theory looking at the context of this would be better off with 250 and pattern A than a 150 in pattern B. So you have to look. The context matters there - is that low in cholesterol, for all intents and purposes is not helpful for a large amount of people, for women, for senior citizens, for children. There's really no solid research to show that's beneficial. The only group of demographics that is shown to be beneficial or middle aged men who have had a heart attack, the benefits of taking statin drugs, but the benefits of that, the mechanism it seems to be it's because statins are a mild anti inflammatory. So that's good because it's inflammation that damage is the particles that carry cholesterol that's the problem. So you would assume someone that had a heart attack he has the inflammation so lowering inflammation would improve outcomes. So it seems to be it's not lowering the cholesterol that's the problem. That's the benefits of statin drugs for people that are middle aged men who have had heart attacks. It's actually the anti inflammatory benefits.

[1:12:39] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, and it's like they could get the same benefits if they just ate some vegetables.

[1:12:44] Dr. Will Cole: Totally. Yeah, I mean just deal with the inflammation.

[1:12:48] Ashley James: Great. And people don't know that statins, they don't know how they work. We just go, "Oh, they just lower cholesterol." But statins bruise the liver, purposefully damaging the liver and making the liver ceased to produce cholesterol is nothing. It doesn't stop the amount of cholesterol that you're eating. If you eat a steak and then take a statin it's like the silliest thing in the world because now you're just bruising your liver, the cholesterol is so important for the body, the liver produces it, we need it. And so just boggles my mind that an MD will put someone on a statin and instead of telling them to just shift their diet.

[1:13:28] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. And to your point it is like, you said it was almost like a band aid. The analogy that I use is blaming the firemen for a fire. The body is producing cholesterol for a reason, and typically is it's damaged, and it's actually trying to put out the fire, but we are then destroying the firemen and then the fire is still raging on because the larger lifestyle changes are made. And again, that's not to say that some people shouldn't be on low doses of statin drugs some time for a period of time while they get healthy. I'm not saying there's never a place for that. But it's so overprescribed to so many people and based on such a simplistic data of just total cholesterol. It is really incomplete when you're looking at the real truth like nuance of what's really going on and what's actually causing this. And to my earlier point, nobody has these problems from a statin deficiency. So let's get to the root cause here for long term sustainable results. So yeah, just to get people like good things to look out for. In Functional Medicine, we want to make sure HDL is good and strong. So low levels of HDL are linked to cardiovascular issues. So we want it above 60, we want to make sure triglycerides are below 100. Because above 100 can be a sign of increased risk cardiovascular issues, insulin resistance, mainly which is the leading driver of heart attack and stroke, we want to make sure that you're in pattern A on the NMR test, we want to make sure sure that your CRP or inflammatory markers are below one, we're going to make sure homocysteine inflammatory markers are under seven. Hang your hat on one total cholesterol number isn't going to cut it, you want to look at all the other nuances of this that explain actually what's going on here. And then liver enzymes and other things like the AST and ALT would be appropriate too for people with fatty liver issues and insulin resistance and then blood sugar and A1c obviously, looking at your glucose, looking at your three month average of your blood sugar with the A1c, we want it under 5.6 in Functional Medicine and glucose under 100. Under 90 would be ideal from fasting glucose. So that's what we're looking at with cholesterol. Just like with the thyroid example, we have to look at the full lipid, insulin resistance, metabolic panel too for people with the set of issues. So you can't just run a TSH from a thyroid standpoint, and you can't just run a total cholesterol for a statin drug. But yet, that's what's largely done. Because they want to give out the statin drugs and the other medications. That's what they're largely trained to do. They're trained to diagnose the disease, and match it with a medication. It's this medicinal matching game that they're trained in medical schools. And that's what they're taught to do. So your standard PCP or GP is giving out the blood pressure meds and the high blood pressure meds and the statin drugs and all this stuff. But they're not really trained look at these other nuances, which is what's driving a lot of these good hearted doctors to go learn Functional Medicine because they're learning to help their patients.

[1:16:32] Ashley James: Mm hmm. Absolutely. So what things can we do in our life to increase the good cholesterol? If it let's say is below 60? What are some? I mean, is it exercise and eat healthy fats? Is it that simple?

[1:16:49] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. I would say exercise definitely would be appropriate - aerobic exercise and getting your body moving, sweating, and healthy fat. So that you've got it right, completely there. You've been doing this podcast, I think over 300 times. I think you've heard you've heard this once or twice. But the healthy fats like olives, olive oil, avocados, avocado oil, healthy omega fats, wild caught fish, nuts, and seeds. These are all things that can help. Eating healthy, saturated fat obviously, grass fed beef can be great. And then to that point, if I could talk a little bit about the saturated fat because I mentioned earlier about the carnivore diet and the APO and the APOA and all these gene alleles, there are some people and I talked about this in Ketotarian and I talked about this in the Inflammation Spectrum, that too much saturated fat which grass fed beef is not just saturated fat, it has good omega fats and other things too. But too much red meat, which is higher saturated fat, coconut oil, and dairy fats like ghee, and milk and cream and things like that. Too much saturated fats for people with these gene alleles it can raise inflammation, and it can raise your cholesterol to places that you don't want it to be. Because their body is just in this state of inflammation. So the firefighters are happening come out by leaps and bounds. So that's not good.

So you can see here that biological variability will then say that they should just be running these tests, I'm not saying everybody needs to go get genetic testing, I think that's a good differentiator here, maybe just run the cholesterol markers run the NMR test, look at what pattern you're in, run your CRP, your inflammation levels, run your glucose, your insulin. All the stuff that I just said, just run those. You don't have to run all the genetic test if you don't want to, just start off with a baseline of these inflammation tests. And then look at how the food impacts your biochemistry. So that my point of getting HDL up, I would say most people do better, like overwhelming majority do better with more monounsaturated and healthy omega fats. But some people should be having more saturated fats, and some people should be having lower saturated fats. So gauging and tracking your labs is something to consider. So the Inflammation Spectrum, my second book, I put all these labs there, so people can track this, of seeing what their body loves, and what their body doesn't love. So they can see their biological variability. We're all different.

[1:19:20] Ashley James: I love it. Adjusting your diet, for example, whether you should be eating wild caught fish and grass fed meat, versus you should be eating more nuts, seeds and, and coconut meat and olives based on labs. Looking at your labs in in seeing where your body is, where your cholesterol is, and what your body is saying it needs and what your body says it doesn't need any more of. That is so cool that we can do that. And that we can tip the scales. I myself was a type two diabetic, reversed it naturally and so to have that experience, and I also had a few other problems, I was told I'd never have kids and I have a four year old that we conceive naturally. So using natural medicine, using just food, herbs, supplements when needed is so profound, because the body wants to correct itself. The body really wants to come back into balance. And now we can see, with the Functional Medicine labs we can see a clear picture of how we're harming the body and how we can help it. What kind of diseases and illnesses have you seen reversed through Functional Medicine that allopathic medicine says cannot be reversed? Like you know, allopathic medicine loves to just give a drug for the rest of their life to manage their disease, whereas you've helped people to reverse it and no longer have it anymore.

[1:21:02] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's important to say like when I say the word reversed, that could be for some people completely, like healed and they go into remission, meaning they don't have any evidence of it. And for some people that are using food and functional medicine to reverse it to the place of managing their symptoms, meaning it's in remission, but they can't go off of what they're doing because it could flare back up. So autoimmunity is a good example of that. Autoimmunity, we have amazing results with autoimmunity in putting these things in dormancy, remission, decreasing the frequency and the intensity of their flares dramatically naturally. But it's not appropriate for me to say we're curing them, because we're not curing them. That genetic predisposition for our immunity is turned on. But they're living a long, healthy, vibrant life through Functional Medicine and what's working for their body. So all our patients with MS and other autoimmune conditions, Terry Wall is a friend of mine I'm sure you're aware of. She uses Functional Medicine to reverse her symptoms and to manage her symptoms. And she lives a long, healthy, vibrant life instead of my patients. But Terry, and my patients wouldn't say we cured ourselves of MS, it's different. Versus type two diabetes is different, type two diabetes is you can reverse it to the point of being non diabetic. They are living, they could even eat foods that maybe they wouldn't have when they're diabetic and their blood sugar isn't spiking because you've increased insulin sensitivity. That's a different mechanism at play there. That's a hormonal resistance pattern caused by insulin receptor sites to be more resistant to insulin. So there's a lot of people that are type two diabetic that can completely reverse their diabetes wholly. And certainly not every type two diabetic, there are people that are severely insulin resistant, that again, they're doing more like what Terry does with autoimmunity, they're reversing to the place of managing it. So people like Jimmy Moore, who's my co-host on Keto Talk, his labs look amazing. But he knows he's just genetically more insulin resistant. So he can't eat all the carbs that maybe I can eat. When I'm doing my cyclical, ketotarian thing, that would flare his blood sugar way up if he kept doing that. So but I know I'm maybe getting a little bit more nuance.

But I think it's important to understand what our clinical objectives are, from a Functional Medicine standpoint. Let me just say this, there's so much you can do. People with autoimmunity, people with insulin resistance, people with hormonal problems, people with digestive issues, people with neurological issues, you're my people, like these are the people I hang out with way too much, probably. But I've been on the ground, proverbially speaking with these people dealing with these things, we wield so much power with our life with the choices we make, with insight into our health. So these are the people that I know, in most cases, there's so much power that you wield, to decrease dramatically the frequency and intensity of things. So I want to be able to say for the average person in six months to two years, depending on how long they've been going through this and all the variables that go into play with that is that we can significantly decrease the frequency and intensity of your flares to the point of someone saying, "Hey, I'm 70% better." Or, "I'm 100% better." Somewhere moving in the right direction, whereas the point of markedly moving the health needle in a positive direction and improving their quality of life. And when you look at the risk factors go down, the quantity of their life as well.

[1:24:44] Ashley James: I love it. Very cool. So basically, we can improve everything. Because we're supporting the body's ability to heal itself.

[1:24:53] Dr. Will Cole: You can improve a dramatic amount of stuff. Absolutely. And there's so much power we wield, so much power we wield. And I see the difficult cases, like I'm the guy that God brings me the people that they've seen every doctor into the sun and they're still struggling. So I'm used to seeing very, very difficult patients. If I'm being optimistic, there's no reason why other people shouldn't have so much hope. Because I realized the average person that doesn't see a Functional Medicine doctor, but that still wants to improve their life. Maybe they're just picking up a book, they have so much more health potential because they're maybe not as bad as some of the patients that we see in Functional Medicine.

[1:25:38] Ashley James: Your book that's coming out addresses inflammation. So many people talk about inflammation. Like I said, it's this buzzword, but can you teach us something we don't know about inflammation? Can you give us your unique perspective on decreasing it, because decreasing it, we're also helping the body correct itself and get back to a place of health?

[1:26:05] Dr. Will Cole: Sure. So I think the big point that I wanted to bring up in the inflammation spectrum is; A, educating people on my concept of the inflammation spectrum. So this concept is in the book that we have a picture that just kind of show what it looks like in my mind and how I see it impact people's life. Is that inflammation exists on a spectrum, on a continuum from one end being low grade brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, maybe digestive issues, muscle joint, tightness, all the way down on the other end of the inflammation spectrum being full blown autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hormonal problems, and then everything in between on that continuum. So it's A, educating people on this far reaching implication of inflammation. Meaning that it's really the commonality, chronic inflammation is between just about every health problem we face as a society. So things from autoimmune disease, all the things we mentioned before, to things like anxiety, depression, brain fog and fatigue are also inflammatory in nature. And this is reflected in the scientific literature that being full blown inflammatory issues, or at least having an inflammatory component. So it's A, educating people like, "Whoa, I didn't realize my anxiety can be inflammatory and my brain fog or fatigue can be inflammatory cytokine activity in the brain." People think of mental health and they separate mental health and physical health, mental health is physical health. So we have to look at the physiological manifestations that's impacting your mental health.

[1:27:37] Ashley James: I love that you point that out, because having been a diabetic, I felt like I was going crazy when my blood sugar was out of control. And I was told by Naturopath that people get misdiagnosed as being bipolar, when they're undiagnosed blood sugar imbalance, that people when they're going through those highs and lows of blood sugar, it doesn't drastically affects, like you said anxiety, depression, you could have bouts of anger. I mean, you're just all over the place. And it's so common that people feel bipolar. No wonder their inflammation is through the roof. Because of uncontrolled high blood sugar and then when the blood sugar comes crashing down, the anger and the hunger and the confusion, the body's in a state of stress, the blood is shunted away from logic centers of the brain because they're in the stress mode, stress response. So mental health and physical health are absolutely related. I love that you pointed that out. And so even just low grade inflammation can affect our emotional mental state.

[1:28:47] Dr. Will Cole: Absolutely. And our energy levels, fatigue is an epidemic in our society. And what's driving it? Again, saying someone has chronic fatigue syndrome is really the same as saying they have IBS or they have fibromyalgia. They're just descriptive terms. But what's actually driving that, why is someone chronically fatigued? So we're looking at the facets of that in the book. And so finding out where somebody is on the inflammation spectrum is the goal of the Inflammation Spectrum book. So we have a quiz that's adapted from all those questions that I asked in my Functional Medicine clinic where that older gentleman said I was in the KGB. I just wanted to really dig deep and make it applicable for the person, the layperson that's reading the book to say like, "What's going on here? Why do I feel the way that you do?" So that's important, because when they know where they're at, they can do something about it, and it educates them and empowers them to do something about it. So I think that's the insight that I bring on the concept. The topic of inflammation in the book is finding out where they're at on these inflammation spectrum. And then obviously, what to do about it, and how to use food and how to use non food things to help improve someone's health. And then we can start to bring things back in and see what our tolerance is. To see how big or how small your cup is - your genetic tolerance to these things. Because my experience is some people with bigger cups, they can heal, they lower things, they lower the amount of stuff in the cup, they lower the epigenetic variables. And they've healed their cup to the point where they can bring things back in. And they don't have any symptoms, they can have more flexibility. And then some people have smaller cups, and they have really little flexibility. But at least they know what flares them up and what doesn't. And that's freedom. And that's really the second point of the book is empowering people to not say this is another fad diet to do, because we don't need another fad diet in our society. But how can you use food to feel great? How can you love your body enough to feed it good things and to know what your body loves and doesn't love? So at that point, it's the transition from a diet to a way of life. It's a diet to just knowing what makes you feel great. So avoiding that food isn't punishment or restrictive or like, "I can't have all this stuff." No, I just love feeling great more than I missed that food.

[1:31:27] Ashley James: Right.

[1:31:28] Dr. Will Cole: I actually like feeling better more than I miss whatever food that is. Because it's that switch that people make to be like, "Whoa, this concept of self care is a form of self respect." And it's that transition to saying that's freedom, that's freedom from food, and then when you go in the junk food aisle it's not like, "Oh my gosh, I haven't getting all these cravings" To, "No actually, I value feeling better, so much more than I missed that junk food." Or whatever that is. So that's also the heart and the ethos of what I want to interweave through that book. Because that that's what makes sustainable wellness. Because when people make that shift, that's ownership, that's heart and there's a grace and lightness in their wellness at that point. And it's not this dogmatic diet that they're just gritting their teeth to get through the 30 days. It's just this freedom that they find in knowing what makes them feel great.

[1:32:28] Ashley James: Brilliant, I love it. So your book just sounds like it's chock full of wonderful, wonderful information. I love that you also cover the labs, which so many people are curious about, and they want to take their health into their own hands and you're empowering them. When is your book coming out?

[1:32:48] Dr. Will Cole: It's on pre order now, but it comes out October 15th. So yeah, depending on people hear this or on replay, whatever, but it's October 15th 2019. It's when it comes out.

[1:33:00] Ashley James: Awesome. So I'll put the link in the show notes so that listeners can go preorder it right now. And that way the second it comes out they'll receive it. That's very cool. When you do this work, it must be so rewarding. Can you share some stories of success? Obviously not disclosing anyone's name. But can you share some stories of success that have really inspired you?

[1:33:31] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah, one that comes to mind. When I think about all the cool things I get to see. Just to give you context to this, we have a virtual clinic and we have a brick and mortar clinic as well where my team is at. So we're primarily no one gets to smell or like nice essential oils diffusing in the air because is everyone's online. But it smells amazing here. But anyways, I'm sitting with my team looking over the schedule every day. So we start our morning off of just in prayer and meditation and then the clinical stuff of saying how can we serve these people and be there for them in a way that's meaningful that the way that they need it on a clinical level, but a personal level too. And then it's looking back as we're going over these names of seeing all these amazing things that they've done, like so and so, "Wow, they've done this in this in this." Okay, on this visit, see how they're doing on this, like it's this amazing journey that they become almost like family members to us over the time that they're with us. But one that comes to mind, happened earlier on in my career. And I think that's why it still sticks in my mind because it was earlier on and seeing someone outside of myself and my family, but like on a patient level, how Functional Medicine could impact their life positively. It was an older lady. She was actually in her 90s, early 90s at the time. And her... I'm not breaking HIPAA because the least she did a blurb for us. But her name is Blanche just because I think it's a beautiful classic name, I think it's appropriate for the story. She married her husband for ages and he wheeled her in a wheelchair. And he said, "I want the love of my life to be here. I don't want to lose her." And she was like this human story and like I was married and I still am. And I just saw myself in him, and my wife in her and this expounded love because it's like decades and decades and decades of growing old together. And I'm just like I saw myself in him on a deep level. And I just saw the desperation in his heart. And she wasn't very lucid, severe brain fog, couldn't walk, she's diabetic, and she's not doing well and her blood sugar's out of control and blah, blah, blah. That's what they said. And meaning that's what they were told by the doctors, that's what she was telling me. That's what he was telling me and she would interject every so often. So we ran labs and the lab sometimes, and all the Functional Medicine doctors out there will tell you sometimes you get labs that are so high or so low, that you will get a lab alert and they typically will call you and the lab will say hey look so and so's number is like really high really low just to let you know. Even though they're sending it to you, I think they have to legally have some sort of conversation or maybe it's just good due diligence on their end. I don't know if it's mandated or not. But we typically will get a phone call if it's that high or that low. Her cholesterol was that low where the lab alerted us and for labs to say cholesterol is low, pretty dang low.

[1:37:02] Ashley James: It was all the cholesterol or good and bad?

[1:37:05] Dr. Will Cole: Everything. It was everything, it was really low. And amongst many other things there was more than just that. I don't want to oversimplify it, it's definitely more complex than just that. But the thing that sticks out in my mind was that cholesterol being low. Well, as you pointed out, and actually a full circle that we're talking about cholesterol again, but because our brain is 60% fat, 25% of all your body's cholesterol resides in your brain, and you need healthy cholesterol for brain function, which is why one of the potential side effects of statin drugs is cognitive decline and memory dysfunction amongst all the other potential problems too. So the this woman literally was starving her brain of the nutrient that it needed for brain function. Her blood sugar was out of control too and there were other things going on. But we implemented Functional Medicine principles, we ran labs where you changed her diet up that was appropriate for her, we brought some natural medicines and this lady was so dramatic. She went from being wheeled in and could barely talk to me to walking in by herself with a cane. And she was the sharpest wittiest woman like you would ever just a normal, lovely lady in her early 90s. Talking about her health and improvements and about food and just like it was night and day. And something that she said is what stuck in my mind all these years later, she said, "I was planning my funeral, when I met you. Now i'm planning vacations with my grandkids." And that to me was like everything because I thought like how many other women and men are like that, that are just taking these medications? They're told that's all they can do. And they trust it because it's coming from a white coat. And even the white coat is thinking they're doing the right thing. But where no one's questioning? Is this the best option that's causing them the least amount of side effects? Is this what's being called, you're just getting older, and they settle for it? This is madness.

So I just got invigorated the next 13 years in my career, so far, of just like seeing Blanches in all different shapes and sizes all around the world, of people who just want to live a better life. And they're seeking and they're searching and they want to do the best they can for their body and the time that they have left. I mean, she was 91. Look how many I don't even know where Blanche is today. But I know the latter years of her life is way better than what it would have been. So to me, that's my that's my story that is kind of an archetype for the last 13 years. We have a lot of Blanche stories, and we've been blessed enough to be a part of someone's health journey, because it's really a sacred responsibility. Like, that is sacred. And all stories like that is sacred, to be a part sort of that fine line between health and disease, that fine line between life and death. To start bringing people more to life is a very humbling opportunity.

[1:40:12] Ashley James: That's beautiful. I love it. I love it. Now I know everyone's different. So it's hard to tell everyone, like I know some people say, "Everyone go gluten free." Right? And I think everyone could benefit from trying it for 30 days or everyone could benefit from just experimenting and trying dairy free for 30 days or try ketotarian for 30 days. Just try and see how your body feels, do elimination diets. But is there homework that you could give everyone that you know would benefit everyone? Is there some homework that you've seen really help people in general that you could give all of us?

[1:40:52] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah, I think that's a good point. You obviously know that we're all different and that's important to caveat here. But I would say this, what I would recommend is a form of an elimination diet, because I think it's an action step that allows you to find that biological variability. And that's what I put in the inflammation spectrum is based on a quiz, which is again adapted from Functional Medicine intake forms. To make it more reader friendly. It's less dense, academic, but it's just easy to understand. You take the quiz, find out where you're at on the inflammation spectrum. And then you can do based on your score, do easier elimination diet or more advanced one. If you're saying to me, what's the first thing that you can do, when you're talking about food and Functional Medicine? To me, that's a good starting point. Because at that point, you can kind of use food to calm inflammation, because you're not just avoiding food, you're focusing a lot of anti inflammatory foods too and then after four weeks for the lowered scored ones, or eight weeks on the higher scored ones, you can bring foods back in one by one. And then to your point, you can reintroduce grains and gluten containing grains. And there are some people that feel fine on them. And there's some people that don't feel fine on them. So it allows us to make less broad sweeping over generalized statements and actually see what's right for you. So that, to me is a good starting point. It's in the Inflammation Spectrum. And it allows you to really finding out what your body loves and doesn't love. So again, you can make that transition from like a diet to like food - grace and food freedom. That to me is a good starting point that anybody can do.

[1:42:38] Ashley James: And I like that you brought up that it's not always, for example, irritable bowel, like some people go, "Well, I didn't eat gluten and then I ate gluten and I didn't get diarrhea, so I don't react to it." But that you're saying listen to whether you're tired more on certain foods or whether you have brain fog or depression, or anxiety. We need to look for more subtle symptoms, that the body is saying this increases inflammation or it doesn't.

[1:43:09] Dr. Will Cole: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's so much more than just digestion. So digestion is definitely probably the common one, right? It's going to increase digestive issues like bloating, constipation, diarrhea, or stomach pain and cramping. But not always, because I mean, our guts are our second brain, so it can be impacting the brain, the brain fog, fatigue, hives, rashes, it could be like you said just more tired and more irritable, blood sugar fluctuations, there's so many variables. So I lay it out in the book, like all the different implications because it's inflammation, it's a lack of inflammation and balance and regulation that's going on. That is impacting people where they have the most problems or specific to them what they're dealing with.

[1:43:53] Ashley James: Awesome, I'm really excited for your book to come out. I encourage listeners to go preorder it now. It's going to be great. The links to everything that Dr. Will Cole does is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast of www.learntruehealth.com. Dr. WIll is there anything left unsaid that you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview?

[1:44:14] Dr. Will Cole: It's a principle that's been in my clinic for a long time. And it's a concept that I talked about in Ketotarian, but I talked about it in more depth in the Inflammation Spectrum is that you can't heal a body you hate, and that we have a problem in wellness now born out of good intentions. But just like we talked about earlier, unintended consequences of all this amazing data has also created this really stressed anxiety ridden vortex of people not knowing what the heck they should be doing. So I really want people to bring it back to the basics and bring it back to the center and eat more intuitively. And finding out what their body loves and doesn't love because shaming your body into wellness is not going to work. Like stressing about all the things on Dr. Google isn't going to work long term. So you have to inform yourself and equip yourself. But then again, just what do you need to know versus what's this just going to end up stressing you out. So hopefully, through our work and what I'm doing here, people can be more conscious of that, and having a healthy relationship with their body, a healthy relationship with food once again. And just bringing a grace and a lightness back into wellness and not all of this dogmatic stuff that is kind of remnants from the sort of dieting consciousness that's really antiquated and really should have no place in wellness in my opinion.

[1:45:49] Ashley James: Love it. Thank you so much Dr. Will Cole for coming on the show. You are welcome back on any time. I'd love to have you come teach us more. This has been wonderful. And of course, looking forward to your book and looking forward to your Functional Medicine group. As you launch it, please let us know more. I'll make sure that I can inform the listeners about it. And yeah, can't wait to connect with you again.

[1:46:18] Dr. Will Cole: Yes, thanks so much.

--

Outro:

Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out.

You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it's something that you'd be interested in.

Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible.

I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I'm such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals.

There's so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.

So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you.

Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you're gonna wanna call them now and check it out.

And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

--

Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price?

For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price.

That's www.takeyoursupplements.com

Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected With Dr. Will Cole!

Website
Facebook
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Books by Dr. Will Cole

Ketotarian

The Inflammation Spectrum

Check out the info about my favorite bed for the best sleep: https://www.learntruehealth.com/bed

Listen to my interviews about Sunlighten Saunas and detoxification: https://www.learntruehealth.com/?s=sunlighten

 Grounding for decreased inflammation and stress:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding

https://aspirenaturalhealth.com

The Clear Path To Health

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-clear-path-to-health-tim-gertsmar

Highlights:

• Recognize the help of health professionals around you not juts MDs
• Pharmaceuticals can only manage the symptoms we have to go to the root cause of the illness
• food is either causing disease or it’s healing our body
• Food and stress are triggers of our health

Considered as a “taboo” when it comes to conversations, one may never know how important gut health is. Listen to today’s interview to learn more about how to take good care of your gut health besides treating it as a simple digestive system which simply has to function.

[00:00] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. Today Dr. Tim Gerstmar shares some excellent advice for those who have gut health issues and autoimmune issues and who wish to no longer have them. He talks about the foundations of health that when disrupted lead to exacerbating those issues, inflaming them and creating acute symptoms and how to get them under control. He works with people that within a year most of them are in remission which is really exciting. He gets such great results. There’s three key things. We talked a little bit about the importance of sleep and stress reduction and some ways to do that. I mentioned that my absolute favorite mattress that a few months ago I got. My husband and I love it. It completely changed how we sleep. We sleep deep. We get such great quality sleep. You can go to learntruehealth.com/bed to learn more about my favorite mattress. There’s a really great special that they’re providing for my listeners. There’s 2 educational videos on that site talking about the science behind the mattresses. They’re non-toxic. They have I believe it’s a 20-year guarantee, a 20-year warranty. What I mostly love about it is that the science behind it allows you to no matter what you’re a side sleeper, whether you sleep on your stomach, whether you sleep on your back, any direction. It relieves pressure and allows your spine to be straight the entire time. It’s the most luxurious deepest restful sleep you’ll ever have. I highly recommend going to learntruehealth.com/bed to check that out. I also mentioned that I absolutely loved using my Sunlighten Sauna both for detoxification and to decrease stress. You can go to learntruehealth.com and search sauna or search Sunlighten to listen to the two episodes I’ve done on sunlighten sauna and why it’s my favorite. I had the co-founder Connie Zack on the show and she shares some great information about their low EMF non-toxic saunas. I have one in my house and I’ve been using them for over a year. Getting some really great results with detoxification. Like I said, it’s also wonderful for stress reduction and that’s really important in today’s interview. My third thing that I absolutely love that I have to mention especially about autoimmune and decreasing inflammation, are grounding mats. I recently had Clint over on the show. I highly recommend listening into that episode. You can join the Learn True Health Facebook group. Check out the pinned post right now which is the movie. The documentary that Clint created so you can learn more about why people are going into remission. Going into remission from autoimmune condition when doing grounding or earthing. They explain the science of it in that video which is in the Learn True Health Facebook group. Excellent. If you want to learn more about the grounding, you can go to learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s learntruehealth.com/grounding. Thank you so much for being a listener.  I know you’re going to love today’s episode. Please share it with those you love who have gut issues and who have autoimmune issues so we can help them to learn true health.

[03:44] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 372. I am so excited for today’s interview. We have with us Dr. Tim Gerstmar who is an expert in autoimmune and gut health. He’s actually a local naturopathic here, just south of me in Redmond, Washington but he can also consult people all around the world through the magic of Skype or the magic of the internet. Tim, I’m really excited to have you here today because I actually know your office manager, Lorelie. She’s the one that introduced us and she became an avid listener. She raves about you. She says that people around the world come to your clinic who are just the most complex cases of gut health and people with autoimmune conditions that - she see miracles performed in the clinic. You must have holy water on your office desk or something that people come in and you help them to dial in their diet, their herbs, their supplements, their lifestyle and that you’re really helping them to gain a foundation of health especially after they have seen so many other specialists and they feel like the medical system has failed them. So really excited to have you here today, welcome to the show.

[05:11] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Thanks, Ashley. I really appreciate it. I’m very grateful to get in front of your audience and share some nuggets of wisdom here. See if we can help people. I really want to thank you. You’ve created something magical. I’ve seen your podcast, your Facebook group. To everyone listening, you’ve done a good thing for yourself by being part of this community and thank you for the kinds words. I also don’t want to take too much credit. One of the things, the good thing and the bad thing about integrative or holistic medicine is compared to conventional medicine is it’s not like the doctor as the mechanic. I’m taking out your muffler and putting in a new one and it solves all your problems. Certainly, a lot of our great results come from people who are really engaged in the process. They’re really willing to dive in there and get into their own diet and lifestyle. Work on their mindset and make some of these changes and do some of these things. I owe so much of my results to the hard work and the willingness to change that the people who come to work with us are willing to do because without that the people who come to us and they’re just like, “Hey, give me the magic herb that will fix my problems.” They invariably walk away disappointed and in fact over the years I’ve been practicing, I’ve been doing this for over 10 years now. We actually have a screening process to turn those people away not because there’s anything wrong with them but we just know that they’re not going to get the results. They’re going to be disappointed and it’s just a waste of their time, their money, their energy. Nothing’s are going to happen unless people are engaged in and that is probably the single biggest reason not to engage with holistic medicine is because some people just start in a place where they’re already willing and able to make those changes. We understand and we’re grateful. We’re going to talk about a different approach to autoimmunity but I also want to be clear, I’m not anti-drug. There is a time and a place for those drugs. They saved people’s lives they continue to be valuable tools. We don’t believe that they address the root causes and the issues that are going on but they’re a helpful tool that can have their place and some people even with the best holistic medicine that we have available find that they still do need some of those medications.  A lot of people are able to get off them. A lot of people are able to reduce their medicine or move from stronger ones to less potent ones but it is important to know one of the very first things that we talked about. For anyone who’s interested to come and see us is understanding what the goals are. A lot of people their goal is to get off medicine. We always say, “Look it is really easy to get off the medicine, just stop taking the medicine.” but of course, that can be a very, very bad thing for the person to do. Their quality of life can be very poor. Their pain or disability or other issues can be quite serious. So our goal first and foremost is that people have a great quality of life. Not only do they feel good but they’re thriving in all the aspects of their life. If we can get a person to that place without the need for prescription medicine and immune suppressant or anti-inflammatory or other medications then awesome. That is our goal. But if we do need those medicines for people to achieve that quality of life, that safety of life and limb now we’re going to make us the medicine. I’m bringing this off right of the bat because there may be a few people who hear that message and are like, “I don’t know if I want to continue in this conversation if this guy is saying that medicines are useful.” and that’s okay but we do believe medicines aren’t bad. They’re tools. A lot of times they’re misused or they’re used to just put a band-aid on top of things instead of really going in and addressing it but they are valuable tools nonetheless.

[09:20] Ashley James: With naturopathic medicine, you learn how to use other tools. Whereas MDs are taught how to use pharmaceutical medicine. They’re not taught how to use herbs or how to use supplements even how to use diet. They’re not taught anything about therapeutic diets or foods or herbs so you have bigger tool belt than MDs. For those who don’t know much about naturopaths, there’s a lot of listeners that would know a lot about naturopaths because I have them on the show all the time but for those who don’t know about naturopaths, I urge listeners to get yourself a naturopathic physician. They are the best. Because of naturopathic medicine I’m no longer a diabetic, no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome, I no longer have chronic adrenal fatigue. The things that plagued me. I was so sick in my 20’s and 30’s. I was so sick. I was bedridden. When I was 19, I was told by an endocrinologist I’d never have kids. I was infertile my entire adult life until naturopathic medicine and we conceived naturally and our son is 4 years old. Whereas MDs that I saw through my 20’s and 30’s said, every time I came to them it’s like, “Okay, here’s another drug, here’s another drug.” They had no tools in their tool belt for help me heal anything in my chronic illness. Could you just let people know what’s the difference between a naturopath and a medical doctor in terms of your education and your ability to help people.

[10:58] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Totally. Absolutely. Listen it’s important to recognize, I’m happy to answer that. This is just quickly on what you said. MDs in the conventional medical system there’s no one better to treat serious illnesses life-threatening disease, injuries, surgeries. Nobody does it better than the conventional system and regular MDs. That is where they absolutely shine. If I get in a car accident, I’m not going to go see a Naturopathic doctor if I’m bleeding. I’m going to get myself to a hospital. I’m going to get the surgery that I need. I’m going to take the medications to protect my life and limb. Exactly what you said in this chronic health issues like PCOS like chronic digestive issues like irritable bowel syndrome or heartburn or autoimmune disease. The best that MDs can do is manage those things for you. Use prescription medications to manage those things. Diabetes, for example, is considered as incurable, progressive, meaning it will just continue to get worse and worse over time disease. Basically any Naturopath work the result will tell you that type II diabetes, we’re not talking about type 1 the autoimmune type of diabetes. But type II diabetes is incredibly manageable. The vast majority of the time it’s completely reversible and can disappear and it does not have to be a chronic progressive disease. Of course, you have to go far beyond just taking medications to try and manage it. You actually have to get into diet and lifestyle and all of these factors. Like you said, MDs just don’t have the training. People express frustration all the time. “Why won’t my MD talk about these things with me? Why won’t they prescribe this type of treatments for me? Why did they look at me like I have two heads when I bring these things up?” There are a lot of reasons but fundamentally most MDs out there are dedicated, diligent, very intelligent, hardworking people. They’re trying to make a difference in people’s lives. They just don’t have the education to understand that these thing are possible or to know what to do about them. Again, use an MD for their expertise and the things they’re good at. My hope with integrative medicine is that instead of each side saying, so again if you break a leg, don’t come and see me I’d be a terrible doctor to help treat those. If you need to have surgery, you do not want me to be wielding the knife and doing the surgery. You probably not going to make it out there. At the same time, what I want is, when someone like you Ashley goes and says, “Hey, I have PCOS. Hey, I have diabetes. Hey, I have these other issues.” In my dream world that MD says, “You know what, this is not my wheelhouse. This is not my expertise. You need to go see someone like a naturopath to get those issues resolved. We’d all worked together and be friends.” In some ways it’s starting to happen a little bit, in other ways it’s a long way off. One of the deep frustrations of basically everyone that comes to see us “Why isn’t this stuff more commonplace. If I’d only known 2, 3, 5, 10” – was just talking to a lady on the phone the other day who’s had chronic digestive issues for 40 years and has tried to seek out help many different places and just hasn’t found it. There’s a very good chance within the next six months we can have these things majorly improved for this person. So why don’t people know about it? To answer your other question quickly. Naturopathic Medicine for many people maybe not the listeners of this show, for many people it’s something they’ve never heard about before. People may think, “Does that mean a herbalist? Does that mean a nutritionist? A homeopath is that what you’re talking about?” and the answer is No, that’s not what we’re talking about. We are talking about the profession of Naturopathic medicine, which is to attend a rigorous medical school education. I went to 4 years of intensive medical school. All of the sciences that MDS have. Anatomy, biochemistry, we were in the labs dissecting the bodies, we were doing rotations, we were doing all of these things. The major most critical difference is after we get that education in basic science, instead of going on to exclusively focus on drugs and surgery, our focus is on lifestyle, nutrition, therapeutic diets, the use of herbal medicines and on and on and on. A whole host of different therapy. We know prescription drugs but we also know and favor the use of non-prescription drugs. That would be the single biggest difference. You get the same level of medical education with a completely different focus for therapies and that’s what is many people are looking for.

[16:25] Ashley James:  I love it. Thank you so much for just laying the groundwork. Moving forward to the interview, everyone knows you’re a naturopathic physician. It’s like the best of both worlds. You can diagnose. You have drugs to treat if you want them but you also have the herb supplements, diet like all the other things out there. Naturopaths love to help people by doing the least amount of harm. And so you’re going to find the tool that does the least amount of harm and helps the person the most.

[16:57] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Well, we always talk about, you can imagine a pyramid. In your mind, you imagine pyramid or a triangle with four different levels on it. The lowest level to the ground, we talk about is diet and lifestyle. That is the foundation of what we’re working with. You go one step up to the second level of the pyramid and that’s things like herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients go in that second level. The third level up is going to be prescription medications and the fourth level up is going to be things like surgeries and other very aggressive type of therapies for people. We always start at the bottom and work our way upwards. Again, it’s not that no one ever needs prescription medicine or no one needs surgeries, that’s definitely not the case but were saying to the MDs like, “Look, you’re starting to the third level up. How about we back up and make sure that those two bottom levels are taken care of first and a good trunk of the time we find out if those base levels are taken care off. We don’t even need to get to the third and fourth levels.” Again, it’s not that one is good ant the other is bad. It’s saying we need a bigger picture of what’s going on. Again, I find that MDs are stuck at the top of the pyramid and I find some natural practitioners are stuck at the bottom of the pyramid and refused to acknowledge that just the bigger picture all around. If our goal is the well-being, the health and the well-being of everyone or at least the people we come in contact with and are able to help. We need to use every tool that’s available. Again, some people need drugs, a lot of people don’t. We want to have all those tools available and thank you for tuning the horn for naturopaths here. We are one of the few professions that really has the training and the understanding to make use of all of it. That is the reason I evaluated many different types of medicine before I chose to become a naturopath and it was that blending together. Getting the best of all worlds. That’s the reason that I chose this profession and I pursued it all these years. Because it gives me the flexibility to deploy a whole range of tools for people.

[19:25] Ashley James: I definitely want to get into how to help people. Later in this interview, we’re going to give some really great actionable advice and help people have a clear path to health. The name of your book, The Clear Path to Health. I want to first learn a bit more about your story. What happened in your life that made you want to become a doctor specifically a naturopathic physician?

[19:50] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Yes. If you ask most the majority of doctors or other health practitioners, you’re going to hear one of two stories. Either their own personal health struggles and their journey led them into healing and medicine. Then they pursued that down a particular path. Or that a loved one their struggles brought someone into medicine and that second one is me. I was on college at that time about to graduate and finish college. My dad went into surgery, it all went perfectly fine. I can remember very vividly, I was at work. I came home late. Full disclosure here, I was popping a microwave meal into the microwave to have some dinner after a long day of school and then work. The phone rang and I picked it up and my mom was just sobbing on the other end of the phone. Long story short, after the surgery, while my dad was in recovery, he’d have a massive stroke. No one had known or paid attention because he was unconscious from the sedatives. It was only when my mom said, “Shouldn’t he be waking up?” And they were like, “Well, maybe but it’s okay.” And then she finally said put her foot down and said, “No. Listen, it’s been hours and hours and hours now. He should be awake. Wake him up.” and suddenly it was, he’s had a severe stroke. They rushed him off. So she called me and said they were taking him to intensive care. He might not live through the night. I scarfed down my microwave meal and that began my health journey. The short version is. I moved home. Along with my mom, his caretaker for a little over a year. Taking him to all his appointments. I’ve been grateful and lucky to be a healthy young man. I never really had too much experience with medicine or the medical system but I was in and out of doctor’s offices and physical therapists and other therapists near constantly so I got to see everything from the inside. All the good stuff that was awesome and all the bad stuff. Like so many other people, I was asking “What else can we do? What else can help him?” You know, the conventional answer was nothing. There are no other options. No, his diet doesn’t make any difference. No herbs or nutrients can possibly help. No other therapies beyond physical therapy speech and occupational therapy could make any difference on him. Like so many other people, I refused to accept that answer. In those days, the internet was not such a big thing. Google and Facebook didn’t exist at that time. It was a little harder to find information. I started going to libraries during the day and bookstores. I started calling practitioners and talking to them, trying to understand what other options. I found out for example in China, if you have stroke while you’re there in the hospital, they will start acupuncture right away and find that the combination again of conventional medicine and a more holistic approach is more effective than one or either alone. After that year and a half or so, I was aimless. I didn’t quite know what I needed to do. Short version is, medicine sounded really interesting to me. I spent so many hours studying and talking to people but I was trying to figure out which one was right for me. I thought at first, I would go the conventional route. Get an MD and maybe like Andrew Weil who was just kind of becoming popular around this time. Maybe I would be a more integrative. I had a fortune of talking to a few good MDs who very quickly stirred me away from that path and said, “You’re setting yourself up for a very unpleasant number of years if that’s what you’re really hope to do. You’re not going to find it within the conventional system.” I explored many other options from chiropractic to acupuncture and just could not find the right fit for me until I heard about this little profession. It was headquartered in the Pacific North West in Washington, in Oregon. Really where it’s home was called naturopathic medicine. I explored it and knew immediately that that was the right choice for me and that’s been my path ever since.

[24:24] Ashley James:  I love it. As you were going to school, were you able to help your dad further? Did you start to see that natural medicine could help him?

[24:37] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: That year plus that I was caretaking him, we engaged in quite a bit of holistic medicine. From acupuncture to something called neurofeedback. To some vitamins and minerals and such and we found that they were all helpful. One of the greatest tragedies of anyone who learns this stuff either as a professional practitioner or just as a layperson listening to a podcast like this and educating themselves, one of the greatest tragedies is that the people closest to us so often don’t listen to us. My mom who since passed on was more than pleased to tell everyone that I was a doctor. Her son the doctor but when it came to listening to me about making changes or trying this, they very rarely happen. Unfortunately, despite all my expertise, I like to believe I was able to help a little bit but that was not the be my calling but instead, help with other people locally here and all over the place, all over the States and all over the world to help them.

[25:53] Ashley James: When did you decide in autoimmune and in healing the gut?

[25:56] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: That’s a great question. The gut had become trendy now. You look on the internet, you listen to shows and you hear a lot about the gut and were having more and more research every day coming out telling us about how the gut and what’s going on in it affects basically every single part of our bodies. One of the beautiful things about naturopathic medicine which is about a hundred years old now, the profession from the very beginning focused on the importance of the gut. It’s always said from the earlier part of our schooling was always, “Look, disease begins in the gut.” That old Hippocrates, that ancient great physician Hippocrates quote, “Disease begins at the gut.” And so we always took that to heart.  When I graduated, no matter else I was doing what other symptoms someone had going on. I was always coming back to the digestion as an important part of healing that. The gut is not a very glamorous thing. It’s not something most of us want to talk about. Our digestive function, what’s happening in in the bathroom. I found as I was working with people that I just grew more and more interested in the gut. I was very grateful that I got into the earlier research on the microbiome or the bacteria that live inside our digestive tract and began to see the influence that it had on health. I was just able to make such an impact on people’s lives that I very quickly transitioned to sort of just being a general naturopath to working on the gut. What I found over the years was that many people came to me with autoimmune issues both digestive and autoimmune issues and as we worked on their digestive issues, we saw a lot of improvement in their autoimmune issues. It wasn’t the primary focus but we saw so much improving. Coupled with more research and the increasing prevalence of autoimmune disease it became a segway for me moving from exclusively working on the gut to working with people with autoimmune disease as well. Thankfully, now there are many practitioners who are queued into the importance of the gut and are helping people. There are still far and away not enough people taking a holistic approach to autoimmune disease and helping people with that.

[28:33] Ashley James:  Since you decide to focus specifically on those two, what kind of results have you seen? Can you share some stories of success or some kind of results that you’ve gotten through the years of helping people to recover from autoimmune and heal their gut?

[28:51] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Yes. Absolutely. It’s a joy to see people go from the bad place that they’re in to go to feeling great and many even thriving. One recent for example, I had a gentleman in something called inflammatory bowel disease. This is one of our specialties because it is at the inner section between the digestive system and autoimmunity. Inflammatory bowel disease is a type of autoimmunity specifically affecting the digestion. This gentleman had a version of it known as ulcerative colitis.  It causes a lot of pain in the gut, diarrhea, and blood. It’s a very scary disease because you can imagine you go to the bathroom, your guts are hurting, you pass some diarrhea which is unpleasant enough to start with but you happen to look down into the toilet bowl and there’s just blood everywhere. It’s a very scary experience for people to go through. So this gentleman had been dealing with ulcerative colitis for a number of years now. He’d been on and off medication with ups and downs going on. Finally, like many people, he said, ”Is there something more that can be done rather than having to keep running back to the doctor and getting a prescription for steroid or prednisone every time something flares up?” He came to see us. We worked with him over the course of about 9 months. Made dietary changes for him. Recommended some different herbs and nutrients. He has done exceptionally well. We’ve been monitoring him now, his ulcerative colitis is in complete remission. It’s absolutely dormant and quiet for him. He’s not taking any medications. Actually in his case been able to wean off many of the supplements, the herbs and nutrient as well. There’s a few that he takes. Does definitely pays attention to his diet. He finds it’s a major factor. We help him identify specific foods that are problematic for him. Others that don’t have any issue whatsoever. It was such joy at his last visit, which was a few weeks back to see, not only was the UC not bothering him. He had no digestive issues whatsoever. He had no other complaints of autoimmunity that were going on. He was actually thriving. He was happy. Speaking to going just beyond the symptoms. Of course, when people come to us they’re hyper-focused, “I’m going to the bathroom 5-10 times a day. It’s diarrhea, there’s blood in it. It’s scary. I don’t feel good.” All these issues are going on. One of the things that we found in his case was that stress was a big factor for him. Stress at home. Stress at work. By his willingness to dive in and start addressing those factors. He’s made some fundamental changes at work. He’s made some changes at home. He’s made some changes in some of the relationships in his life. Again, not only is the UC quiet, but his quality of life, his ability to thrive has skyrocketed. That’s just one example. We’re so incredibly proud of all the work that he’s done and the progress. In contrast, what would have happened if he had just gone down the conventional routes is there would have been an escalation of medications possibly up to the biologic medications, which if insurance covers them that’s good. There’s often major out of pocket cost. Most of the medications run $20,000 or more a year as their base price. These are very expensive medications for people. They either have to give themselves injections or they have to go into the facility and have IVs put in every once in a while to get these medications. There would’ve been no discussion of diet, no discussion of stress, no discussion of these other factors. If everything worked right and we hope it would. His UC would’ve been quiet and not bothering him. We wouldn’t have moved to simply being symptom-free to thriving having a better quality of life than before.

[33:18] Ashley James:  Awesome. I love it. I love that story. Do you get people who have an autoimmune and gut issue all the time? Is that your main focus or do you find that you get people with just the autoimmune or do all autoimmune people have some gut-level issues?

[33:35] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  I shy away from all, every and none. Those big categorical words. Does every person who has autoimmune disease have a gut dysfunction? I don’t believe the answer is yes. Do the vast majority of people with autoimmunity have gut dysfunction? Yes, they do. We found our experience has been that 80-90% of people find that making dietary changes result in from major to at least minor improvement in their autoimmunity. Do there seem to be some people maybe 10% of people out there from our experiences where diet seems to play little to no role in what’s going on for them? Yes. I’m cautious when we say every person but our experience the people that we worked with, almost all of them. They may not recognize they have gut problems. In fact, it’s very common when you come in they say, “I have rheumatoid arthritis” “Okay, let’s talk about your digestion.” “Oh, it’s fine.” “Okay, no worries but let’s talk about it a little bit more what’s going on.” “Oh yes, I have this issue. Oh yes, I guess I have that as well. Oh, doesn’t everybody have that?” It’s just like, “Okay. There is a dysfunction.” Now a gut dysfunction seems to be at the root of many cases of autoimmunity and again, we routinely find that by improving the gut function that we’re able to make a real positive difference in people’s autoimmunity. Again, if everybody remembers the pyramid, at the bottom of it. Diet and lifestyle and we would also put gut function right down there at the base. is just treating the gut going to cure all autoimmune disease and deal with everything? No. It’s not, unfortunately. I wish it was a simple answer that we could say like that. Is it fundamental that many, many people are going to find significant benefit by treating their gut? Yes. Again, what would you say to people, look if diet and lifestyle and treating the gut are not enough to take care of your problems on their own, it’s good to start at a lower level where the side effects, the issues there are very minimal. Again if you clean up your diet and lifestyle and even if it makes absolutely zero impact on your autoimmune disease, it’s going to make a significant impact on the rest of you as a human being. Who has a body who has all the systems functioning? The worst we can say, for example, another case were still going, we have a person come to us with autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto's, hoping to get off their medication. Again, one of the things we tell people, we cannot guarantee that you’re going to get off your medicine. I just want to put this out there. If people have seen other practitioner or other courses or other people saying, “Absolutely, positively, I guarantee you can get off your thyroid medication if you do this thing” either they have some magic that I’m not aware of or my experience says that’s a false spell of goods. There is no guarantee that everyone everywhere will be able to get off medication. We found through some dietary changes that have been ongoing thus far, we have not been able to make a big impact on her thyroid function or the hashimotos. But at a minimum, she lost some weight, her skin is better, her energy has improved. She feels better. Her stress levels are down. That’s what we always tell people is look, by starting with these fundamentals even if it’s not able to make a big impact on the autoimmunity or the other disease or issue that you have going on. It’s able to improve the general quality of your life and your overall well-being and reducing your long term risk for things like heart disease or cancer. The big E’s that cut people’s life short and destroy their quality of life. I personally believe it’s always worthwhile to address this. Most of the time it’s going to improve a persons’ autoimmunity and in those instances where it doesn’t. I have yet to see someone who doesn’t feel that it’s improved their quality of life or their overall health.

[38:27] Ashley James: Got it. There’s this theory that autoimmune issues are caused by leaky gut syndrome which has been exacerbated by or caused by gluten and grains among other things. Can you talk about that? Do you get everyone off of grains or every one off of gluten? How effective have you found that? I’ve heard from other practitioners that they cannot get results with an autoimmune client if they don’t go gluten-free. Is that your experience?

[39:07] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Sure. Gluten is one of the more common problematic foods. Again, I am not an every and all. So generally, if we have our way, we start people on a gluten-free diet. We often will use a paleo diet or an autoimmune paleo diet as a starting place to put people on. I want to say a lot of people with autoimmunity definitely do have problems with gluten. It is a very problematic food for people as is dairy. Probably the two biggest problematic foods that are really unfortunate because so many foods that we all love to eat have gluten and dairy in them but they are very problematic foods for people. Having said that, does every person with autoimmunity must be gluten-free or cannot heal if they eat gluten? That has not been my experience. Again, many people have problems with gluten but not everyone does. I’ve seen people with a variety of autoimmune diseases, again, we usually cut it out in the beginning as we get to work and as we’re trying to identify the problematic foods for people but in a later time, we almost always recommend that people re-introduce gluten and see if it’s a problematic food for them. There are percentage of people they find that gluten is just not an issue. They’re able to eat it and be perfectly fine.

[40:37] Ashley James: I know you’re not always person when it comes to advise. What are the most common things though that you found are really helpful?

[40:50] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Definitely diet. We always recommend unless people come to us already have done a lot of experimentation with diet, already identified a lot of the triggers and issues that are going on but virtually everyone who comes to see us. Again, we kind of consider this low hanging fruit. We go through to an elimination diet. There are a lot of different ways to do it but again, something like a paleo diet or an autoimmune paleo diet is a nice segway into it. A paleo diet remove grains and dairy at its base. There are a few different tweaks to it. An autoimmune paleo diet goes one step further taking out all of the big problematic foods to include things like eggs and nightshade and nuts and some other foods as well. It can be quite a restrictive diet. Certainly, if no one has ever done that before this idea for you that food could possibly impact what’s going on. The number of people that have been told by their gastroenterologist, that’s a conventional gut doctor, or rheumatologist, kind of conventional autoimmune doctor that food has zero impact what’s going on. I’ve wanted to bang my head against the wall so many times for that bad advice for people. Food absolutely for the majority of people plays at least a modest role in their autoimmunity. The majority of people by finding their dietary triggers and removing them can make a significant impact in their autoimmunity and in their health in general. Kind of a low hanging fruit for everyone is I do recommend if you’ve never done it before. Do an elimination diet. In fact, not quite autoimmunity. Just yesterday I spoke with someone and they found they were healing with eczema. Very common immune conditions. Eczema is not autoimmune. In fact, Ashley do you think you would help just briefly to talk about the different between inflammatory or an autoimmune issues. I find there’s a lot of confusion about that.

[43:07] Ashley James:  Absolutely. Go ahead.

[43:08] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Inflammation a lot of people specially the educated people who are listening to a podcast like this have heard the word inflammation before. They know that information is at the root of many different conditions and problems and diseases that are going on. I find that a lot of people who come to see me don’t actually know what inflammation is. Inflammation at its heart just means an active immune system. When the immune system gears up and activates itself a whole bunch of things happen. Chemicals are released and things happen but globally we call that those changes inflammation. Now we come to think of inflammation as a bad thing. Somethings that’s a problem and it absolutely can be. Inflammation can also be a very good thing. If we are able to magically reach in and shut down inflammation in your body, you would not be able to fight off infections. We need inflammation to happen. Again, inflammation active immune system when we’re fighting off a virus or bacteria. It’s one of the reasons that these immune-suppressing drugs whether they’re steroids or whether they’re the more aggressive immune suppressors make people more vulnerable to things like infection and possibly cancer as well. It’s because by shutting down the immune system or reducing it’s effectiveness, it can’t fight off those things in the same way as if it didn’t have those drugs pulling down immune functions. Inflammation in and of itself is not bad. The problem is inflammation and active immune system is supposed to be there to fight off an infection. To help heal an injury or wound. Again, if anybody’s taken steroids or immune suppressants, you can see that cuts and scratches and other wounds just basically can stop healing or take forever to heal because the necessary inflammation that the body needs to generate to cause that healing just isn’t happening. Again, that inflammation continuing on unshackled or too much of it or for too long is where we see all of these problems occurring. Something like eczema which his very common is an inflammatory condition. The immune system is flaring up, it’s causing the skin to react to become red or itchy. In contrast, an autoimmune issue is when the immune system has decided that part of your body is a problem. It is treating your joints for example as if they were a foreign bacteria that invading you. It’s attacking those joints and causing damage and pain and destruction to those joints. Something like eczema is inflammatory but not autoimmune. The body is not attacking or trying to destroy or damage the skin or other tissues but it is immune-inflammatory. Psoriasis, on the other hand, is an autoimmune disease. Now we have the immune system targeting the skin and causing issues for people. I just find a lot of confusion for people so I hope it helps to clarify and give people a little bit better understanding of the difference between inflammation and autoimmunity. If you have autoimmunity, you’re going to have inflammation but if you have an inflammatory issue it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s an autoimmune one.

[46:40] Ashley James: Got it. As someone who has an autoimmune condition, you want to make sure that you’re not doing things that increase inflammation in your life. You want to decrease inflammation. I learned from an old school naturopath, I think he’s in ’80s now. He said that this issue with autoimmune which is it feels new to me. It doesn’t sound like something that we had hundred years ago that was as big of a deal. I don’t know if that’s because diagnosing has become so much more advanced or is it that we are really seeing this like huge leap in auto immune conditions in the last 50 years through just the toxic environment and those standard American diet and the chemicals that we’re exposed to. The body is just way more toxic now than it is ever been so more agitated and inflamed. He says that - he also before he became a naturopath was a pathologist so he has that unique relationship to tissue and on a cellular level and he says that when someone has inflation cell damage at the tissue at the cellular level that the immune system comes along to clean it up. That autoimmune is where there’s inflammation on and damage like let’s say to the thyroid. A healthy thyroid but there’s inflammation in the body and the immune system keeps going keeps trying to clean it up and in doing so, it's digesting the thyroid. The MDs will say, “Okay, the body’s attacking itself we need to suppress the immune system.” He says, “No, the immune system’s trying to clean up the damaged tissue. But the damages from the inflammation so something about the immune system of people with autoimmune is a little either hyperactive or what’s going on that some people can have inflammation and that their body doesn’t continue to clean it up and clean it up like an autoimmune response whereas others do. What is the difference? Can we see through genetics? Can we see through like toxicology reports? What can we see that is the difference between those with autoimmune and those without?

[49:11] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Right. That’s the million-dollar question. If I have that exact answer for you, I would be trumpeting it to the world because all these we’re doing, all doctors were doing the best that we can. There’s a lot that we do know and frankly, there’s still so much that we don’t know and we’re hoping to continue to uncover. Now for most autoimmune disease there seem to be some genetic pre-dispositions, I argue that there are. Like for example why does one person get rheumatoid arthritis where the other gets ulcerative colitis where the other gets multiple sclerosis. I think there are some genetic predispositions. Now there’s no smoking gun that’s been identified oh if you have this gene you are going to get multiple sclerosis. I think the way I look at it is in autoimmune disease the immune system loses its way. Our immune systems have a very difficult job. Their job is to be constantly be patrolling around our body looking for things that don’t belong. Now when everything works properly even if the immune cells that are a little too aggressive or that want to target the body’s tissues get weeded out. They don’t exist. Where we‘re seeing autoimmunity occur is because something has gone wrong there. Cells that can target the body are now doing so and that process gets laid down and gets locked into the body. I think from my perspective again, my focus is to try and keep zoomed out and keep a holistic picture on someone. You name a number of factors. I think both detection of autoimmune disease is greater. There are more treatments we can argue about how much we like the different prescription drugs but there are many more treatments available for people than they were in the past. Hundred years ago someone with rheumatoid arthritis was just sort of doomed. They were stuck in their home or they were stuck in a wheelchair. They were just going to live a shorter more miserable life because there were really no, from a conventional side, there were really no available treatments for them. When steroid first become available, they were hailed as a miracle drug because these people that are crippled with pain, their joints and finger were all deformed from damage suddenly could leap out of their chairs and they could move around and they could be pain-free and they could have energy again. Certainly, part of it is that we’re able to detect these things now. The treatments are available. People come forward and they’re diagnosed and they’re brought out into the light if you will some of them were kind of captive in a way in the past. Yes, absolutely we’re seeing a dramatic uptake in autoimmune disease and other issues. One of my mentors begin practicing in the 1970’s he said to me that in his experience diseases all from the 70’s to the present day. He’s seeing diseases happen 20-30 years earlier in people than they used to. Something used to effect to people in their 60s we’re seeing it now affecting people in their 30’s. If something only affecting adults before we’re seeing it now affecting children and teens as well. Definitely many, many factors from our environment. Things we put out there to the way that people are living their lives now. I think all combined together. Whether on autoimmune disease begins as a healing process like you said, it is true when tissue is damaged or needs to be broken down or gotten rid of, it’s the immune system’s job to be a little janitor or a little garbage person and take out that trash and help that tissue rebuild and be healthy again. Whether it’s a genetic predisposition. The immune cells are little faulty in that regard. They’re a little too aggressive now and they’ll go after things they should be restrained from. Think about like we have guard dog on a leash if that leash is a little bit too long or the guard dog is a little bit too aggressive, it can end up biting things that you don’t want to when you want to protect other things. Whether there’s a genetic predisposition or whether the balance that’s going on with that person’s life. If your listeners can imagine those old scales where they have a pan on one side and a pan on the other, you put weights on one side it goes up or down and the things are balanced out. The level with one the other sides heavier it’ll be down lower than the lower one. We can imagine having a balance like that. One side of the scale you can imagine one of those pans being all the anti-inflammatory factors in a person’s life. A good nutritious diet, getting enough rest, reasonable level of exercise, managing their stress correctly that can be again certain supplements or nutrients, all of those different factors that serve to calm the immune system and reduce inflammation go on one side. All the factors that increase or raise inflammation go on the other side. The fact is that the modern lifestyles tilt heavily towards a pro-inflammatory state. My opinion is whether it’s a damage or other issues that kick things off for people, whether you throw in a dash of genetic predisposition towards it and then you tilt those scales heavily in terms of inflammatory factors, it’s no wonder that so many of us are suffering in health conditions in general and autoimmunity here in specific that we’re talking about.

[55:26] Ashley James: It’s really scary and interesting to see that what we used to suffer in our 60‘s and 70s’ with, we now suffer in our 30’s or 40’s or even earlier. I know Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, the cardiologist I’ve had on the show. He’s in his 80’s and still practicing. He’s the man that wrote the book, How To Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. He said that when they would open people up and they would see this sort of the beginnings of heart disease that they see beginnings of heart disease people like 40 or 50, these are autopsies from people who died in accidents. Like car accidents. They do those autopsies and they’d find sort of the baseline of the population in terms of heart disease that they could see a 50-year-old beginning to have maybe some blockages or some calcification build up. They’re seeing that in teenagers now. As a population as a whole, we are dying sooner of preventable lifestyle-based diseases and we are as an entire population going down the wrong path. You said the lowest hanging fruit is fixing diet. We definitely all need to be responsible for our diet and I want to talk a bit more about that. What about the toxins that people are exposed to? Do you look into chelation or detoxing or sweating in a sauna. Have you find that helping autoimmune patients to detoxify? Has that also benefited their condition?

[57:26] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Yes, because we know there are many different toxic compounds. I define a toxin. My personal definitely is going to be any substance that interferes with the normal functioning of the body symptom. The most basic level is you hold your breath the carbon dioxide, it builds up in your body becomes a toxin and then things your metabolism things start not working correctly so you desperately breathe out to get rid some of that carbon dioxide and get more oxygen into your body. Anything that interferes with that normal functioning there are normal body process that are going to produced toxins and sort of unfortunately we are the inheritors we’ve done a really great job of putting out a lot. The estimates range about a hundred thousand man-made chemicals into the environment that were not there before and are new to the environment. We either dug them of the ground or we synthesized and created them in a laboratory. The sad thing and I wish it weren’t true is that many of these compounds have undergone very minimal testing. It’s usually been around how much you have to give to someone to kill them or to cause them to have cancer. The newest research that has been accumulating shows that lower levels of these toxins of these compounds that won’t kill you can still have a chronic long term impact. We know many of these chemicals are endocrine disruptors. Endocrine’s another word for hormones. We have these compounds that act as hormone disruptors. Whether that’s in causing obesity, diabetes, whether that’s being a carcinogen or chemical that causes cancer. Immune disruptors. So we know many of these chemicals have these issues. Now when it comes to treatment, again, there’s kind of a low hanging fruit and then there’s the more complex stuff. Everything at the simplest level for your listeners reducing as many of these compounds and chemicals in their life as possible. We can break them down into a couple. We have beauty products, I’m sure you’ve probably had experts on before to talk about in particular women’s make-up as a very unregulated field. All the big cosmetic companies, there is no big oversight of them. They voluntarily are supposed to keep an eye on the stuff that they put into their make-up and their beauty products. We know many of them are full of some really nasty products so if people haven’t seen it, the environmental working group has a nice website. A section of it is called skin deep and they talk about a number of different studies and analysis of various cosmetics and beauty products and they make recommendations for some cleaner more organic, less toxic compounds. We always think about beauty products things, people are putting in their skin is being one factor. Household cleaners would be another and then the yard or the office would be another place. We’ve seen many people they move into a new building or a new workplace and their health took a big downturn. Obviously, there could be a variety of factors. One that I just want to bring up because it is so often ignored when we focus on diet, we focus on things like toxins are is mindset as well. That stress factor we find this is such a big deal. We’ve seen people eating good clean diets. Let me back up for just one second Ashley, we talked about the health triad. The three most critical health factors for autoimmunity. It’s not saying that there are other factors that aren’t important or that need to be addressed. The three most critical factors that we see are one, diet. Two, stress and three, sleep. We see it all the time. If one of these factors get a little off, people go out to eat or they go on vacation or they’re on traveling of for some reason their diet gets a little off track. If the other two factors sleep and stress are really under control, they’ll see either just a minor shift in symptoms or they may not notice much of anything. If two of these factors get out of control, we often see a flare and if all three of these factors are out of control, look out this person is set up for some pain unfortunately in a not too distant future. So diet is one critical piece we’ve kind of talked about that to some degree. Sleep is critically important. When people sleep well that is the signal to repair and rebuild their body. We see a lot of improvement from that. Stress is a factor that is just very often overlooked. We were talking earlier about doctors saying if they don’t get gluten out of the diet, we found in addition, that if people don’t or unwilling to look at their stress or unwilling to make changes in their life to help manage and deal with stress then we are unable to get long-lasting significant improvement for people. That if they just changed their diet, that they will see improvement in their autoimmune disease but if they don’t get some of these other factors and stress is probably the elephant in the room if they don’t get that addressed then they’re not going to see really significant results and they’re not going to see really long-lasting results.

[01:03:19] Ashley James:  I really like that you pointed this out. I had a client who was she was transiting into type 1 diabetes. The doctors were calling it type 1.5. I’ve never heard of that but she was basically pre-diabetic and then they could see that her even though she was, this was like adult onset type 1 coming on as an autoimmune response. I was helping her as a health coach with her diet and her supplements and I kept addressing stress. I just intuitively felt this was probably the biggest piece of the puzzle and she kept fighting me on it. At one point she said, “I don’t feel stressed.” I said, ”Thank you. Thank you for pointing this out because stress isn’t an emotion like anger and I think we’re all sort of waiting to feel stressed but it’s not an emotion” Right? Can you tell us what is stress and how do we know we have it?

[01:04:19] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  The short answer, there’s a few pieces to answer here. We don’t ask people anymore if they are stressed. We ask them how they’re managing their stress because almost everyone with the exception of a few retirees or Microsoft millionaires who are independently wealthy and no longer working and can structure their life however they want. With the exception of few people, the vast majority of us are stressed. Now when we ask people or think about stress what they imagine is that inner sensation of pressure. That could be a psychological feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got so much to do today. So many things going on.” It can be that physical sensation of pressure or tightness. The classic shoulders-up-in-your-ears tension in your body that people are feeling but at a fundamental level there are two kinds of stress. There’s the mental-emotional stress, so this is everything from deadlines to children to bosses to traffic. All of those mental-emotional feelings that we have going on. Then their physical stresses as well. Those can range from inflammation is a kind of stress on our body that can go from poor fueling strategies, blood sugar crashes are going to be a source of stress on the body. It’s important to realize that no matter whether it’s a mental stress whether it’s a physical stress the reaction that happens in the body is the same. From a primitive physiological or body-based perspective, stress is gearing us up to deal with a life or death situation. The gazelle on the grasslands, they don’t have too much mental or emotional stress. They’re not thinking about jobs or deadlines, planning for retirement, or dealing so much with the kids or any of those things. Their life is mostly built around the physical stress which is a lion wants to eat me. When that stress responds kicks in we call the fight or flight response is really what stress is. That causes changes within a person’s body. It changes within that animal’s body. Changes within our bodies. Based around that response which is to fight off something that wants to hurt us or run away from something that wants to hurts us. Now human beings we have the blessing and the curse. For most other animals out there, their stresses are mostly physical. For human beings who are fortunate enough like we are to live in the modern world most of us were not dealing with starvation, work or physical harm as real ever-present issues that are going on for us. Most of us modern humans are lucky enough not to deal with those and most of our issues are psychological. Traffic that I had to wave trough, my kids bugging me, my boss is nagging me. All those kinds of issues. It’s important to realize those mental stressors trigger the same physical reactions to occur in a person’s body. Now the other big piece that you said is most of us are dealing with a load of chronic stress but like the story of the frog in the pot of water. If people haven’t heard, I don’t think this story is actually true but you hear it repeated everywhere so it’s good to use as an example. You put a frog in a pot of water if you suddenly pour boiling water on there, it will hurt and the frog will leap out of the pot. The story goes if you just slowly heat up the water the frog gets used to that hot water and doesn’t leap out of the pot. For most of us, we’re in the same situation as the frog in a pot of hot water that’s been turned up and turned up and turned up. That hot water feels normal to us. The chronic stress that we’re under is what we call normalized. We don’t even know it because most of the time it’s there. It’s become background and baseline but still affecting us but we don’t notice it. It's only when there’s big changes in our lives. When we go away on a extended vacation, for example, we’re able to get out from under all that stress and then we suddenly go, “Oh my god. I didn’t even realized how much this was affecting me.” It’s very common. We see it all the time with people. For example with food, there are food that they really need to stay away from. They see flares of those food when they eat those foods. They go away on vacation and they suddenly go, “Oh my god. I was able to eat that food. I thought –“ I accidentally got it for example. “I was so worried that thing were going to flare up” And you know what? They didn’t. Maybe I felt the twinge or maybe I actually felt nothing. It’s very common for people to do a celebratory dance and say, “My gosh, I no longer have problem with gluten. I no longer have a problem with the foods that are an issue for me.” They get back home and they climb back into the pot of hot water that stress level and all of a sudden they go, “Why can I not eat that food? When I was on vacation I was able to eat that food and now I can't do it anymore?” If you remember back to the scale the one side is anti-inflammatory, the other side being pro-inflammatory. If you’re on vacation, your stress level goes way down. There’s other factors you’re’ loading at the anti-inflammatory side of the scale. Now it’s hanging down low. You put a little bit of inflammatory food on the other side it’s not enough to tip the balance into big active inflammation. It’s not a problem. You get back home. You load up the pro-inflammatory side of the scale and so now, you drop that inflammatory food on and it and it shift things over and brings up a flare of symptoms for people. I’m so glad you’ve recognized it. Oftentimes it can feel like talking to brick wall. People either say,” I’m not stressed.” When majority of the time we find when we dig into it, there’s a lot of normalized stress going on for the person. They’re stressed. They just don’t pay attention to it anymore. For some people they just refuse to acknowledge and work on it because on some level, it’s much easier to change your diet that something external to you than to dig into the issues that are stressful. It can be work, it can be family life, they can be priorities, they can be issue patterns that you have, it can go back into all the way into childhood. They can be challenging to deal with it. It feels more internal and it feels more personal. If people are willing fundamentally we’ve seen if they are not willing to address this they’re going to limit their healing and what positive things that can happen for them.

[01:11:38] Ashley James:  I interviewed a naturopath actually local one here as well. She made a funny joke. She goes, “You know every time – “she just had another client come back from Hawaii. She says, “Every time a patient of mine comes back from Hawaii, all their symptoms go away. I think I’m going to start prescribing vacations to Hawaii.” It’s just, it’s amazing how you’re painting this picture. This correlation of my condition gets better when I’m on vacation and then I come home and it gets worst. Hello, this is the soup we live in. The stress soup. We want to do things like see mental health counselors to learn healthy coping strategies and mechanisms for helping us on a daily basis. Deal with the daily stressors like you said even from childhood. I know that I run programs that I learn from my parents who are both entrepreneurs. There are things from my childhood that I need to examine and re-program. What can we immediately do or implement on a daily basis to significantly reduce stress? What do you see works really well in your clinic?

[01:12:56] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  This is one of the more personal approaches because again, there is no one perfect things that one person finds stress relieving can be stress-inducing for another person. Right?

[01:13:13] Ashley James:  Like meditation?

[01:13:14] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Meditation. You totally read my mind there. Meditation works beautifully for some people. Such a magical tool. For other people, it makes them insane with rage. It’s like the worst possible thing that we can do. I’m happy here to give you a few suggestions. It is important for anyone listening to know while we can roughly come to some generics like, “Hey, from our perspective try something like a paleo diet or that autoimmune paleo diet or the whole 30 diet. Those are all specific carbohydrate diets. These are all reasonable starting places to work with diet. When it comes to stress, there are few basics. As always it’s figuring out what works for you. Doing this “stress-relieving thing” leaves you feeling more stressed out. It’s not working, right?

[01:14:13] Ashley James: If they’re not in touch with their body and in touch with their stress levels, how do they now whether if it’s working or not? We know of heart rate variability. It’s difficult to find an affordable and effective heart rate variability monitor so how would they know that they’re actually lowering their stress when they’re doing something new?

[01:14:34] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Again if stress is triggering the fight or flight response then de-stressing should trigger the relax and digest response going on. Certainly, we can conjure back to those times in our lives when we were not stressed. We can watch what little kids look like when they play. Kids, of course, can get stressed out and have their own issues but by enlarge most kids thankfully aren’t dealing with all the chronic stressors that we have. So there’s smiles, there’s enjoyment, there’s play going on. From a big-picture perspective, this takes most adults totally aback when we ask it. What do you do for play? What do you do for just pleasure and enjoyment? For example, a lot of people have come to us understandably have been doing a lot of research on the internet, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching blogs or vlogs and videos. All of these things to try and better understand what’s going on for them. One of the challenges that will put to people is “What was the last book you read for enjoyment?” Not self-help. Not health related but purely for enjoyment. A lot of times they sit there and stare at us, trying to think up the last thing they did that was purely for joy. Purely for pleasure and have a hard time and often we need to put people, I’m all for people being educated it’s great but often times we have to put people on little bit of a fast of information that’s purely help their self-improvement, make it a homework piece to read something fun or something enjoyable. An activity that people can get lost in by its nature, that flow state is a state of not being stressed. Right? So what do you enjoy doing? This time of year in the pacific northwest, is it getting out for a walk with your dog? Not a power walk, not an “I need to walk for 30 minutes and get my heart rate to 85 % of my cardiovascular maximum” but “Can I actually get outside and enjoy the view? Can I just get some time to de-stress and to bring my creativity out?” One of the things that we see that disappears when people are stressed is creativity. Because we’re on fight or flight. There’s no need to be creative when a tiger’s trying to eat you. Creativity by its nature is a more relaxed flow state. We can’t be worried about the next thing trying to be too creative when you’re driving to work and bumper to bumper traffic. It’s not going to happen. But when we’re talking a nice hot shower. We’re relaxing, our mind is pacing out and all of a sudden the ideas come flooding out. We know we’ve switched off from that sympathetic fight or flight response into a more parasympathetic one.

[01:17:40] Ashley James:  I love it. My husband has the best ideas when he’s in the shower. He always comes to the shower and tells me something really cool. He’s really creative. I love my time in the sauna. I got my sunlighten sauna, which I absolutely love. Decrease stress and sweating out the toxins which is so great. I have my grounding mat. I really feel relaxed on it and it’s funny because I have it on my bed and I also have it on my desk and now whenever I’m on it, I don’t want to get off of it. I’m lying there going, “I have so much energy, I’m so awake, I’m so ready to get up out of bed but I’m so happy and relaxed right now.” I know that’s working for me. I have a newer mattress. I got a few months ago which I adore. I’ve talked about it before on the show. It’s completely changed how I sleep. That in and of itself decreases stress because when I don’t get sleep, I worry about not getting sleep and I worry about not getting sleep increases stress. Just like about worrying about diets can increase stress. Worrying about stress is going to increase your stress. Worrying about your sleep so it’s that vicious cycle of “Oh, I didn’t get enough sleep. I’m not going to be able to function today.” That worry exacerbates it. That exacerbation of worry it means the next night you won’t be able to sleep well. We’ve got to have that break state. Before we hit record you were talking about the studies they’ve done around getting out in nature and how effective that is in decreasing stress in general. You obviously mentioned, “Let’s go for a walk with our dog.” What about just being in nature? Why is that so important? Why is that rather than walking down a busy city street. Why is so nature so relaxing?

[01:19:37] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Right. We can dissect it a million and one ways but anyone who’s interested amongst to look at any of the research there out of Japan in particular and some of the Asian societies there is a long-standing ritual that is very poetic sounding it’s called forest bathing. It has nothing to do with taking a bath or slipping into a bathtub in the middle of a forest that sounds like a drug commercial that we see sometimes. Forest bathing merely means to get outside and be surrounded by nature. Whether that’s sitting and spending time in a natural surrounding or walking through a forest or being around a natural scene. There’s a lot of theories. Now we could talk about and I think this is so very cool. We know the plants breathe themselves. Opposite of us they breathe out oxygen and they breathe in carbon dioxide and we actually know that for example, if you go for a walk in a pine forest and we’re blessed to have many pines and evergreens here in the Pacific Northwest but we actually know that in that exhalation those trees there are essential oils. We know that when we breathe in these exhalations of the trees we’re breathing in trace amounts of these essential oils and other compounds and it’s been theorized that they’re one factor that’s having a positive influence on our immune system. On our nervous systems or stress levels as well. I think most of us have the experience partly it’s noise, I don’t know about you but I know for me going out in a natural scene where there’s some stillness and some quiet and you can hear the wind moving through and you’re not hearing cars and airplane sand jackhammers and all sorts of people yelling and screaming and doing all the stuff that people do. I feel personally if I spend time there I can feel my nervous system ratcheting down whereas for me if I’m walking downtown there’s people everywhere. There’s car buzzing here to and all over the place and there’s all of that. There’s lights, there’s sounds, there’s all these things going on it is profoundly non-relaxing experience for me. Evidence bears that out. There was an interesting study done in Europe as well that asked about people living in downtown areas with constant noise and the constant activity and again to our idea of normalized stress Ashley. When they’re asked these to self-report like, do they feel stressed, do they notice the noise anymore, does it bother them? They basically say no. They don’t notice the noise. It does not bother them. But when they measured their body and what was going on with their body they found that their body was indeed still reacting to those stressors from the noise and the activity and everything else that was going on. Even for people who would live there for a very long time. Again, I don’t believe - you’ll find many people out there and I hope I can caution your audience. Human beings love simple answers. The reason that we have autoimmunity, more autoimmunity and they’re suffering from it is gluten. That’s the answer or maybe it’s glyphosate or maybe it’s whatever like X, Y, and Z. It’s a traumatic childhood. You’re seeing people say The Answer, again, I caution people, there is no The Answer. There’s been a lot of changes. We live very, very different lifestyles from those of our ancestors. Our ancestors of a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago or 25 thousand years ago. We live very different lifestyles. Those changes while there are many very positive changes, I personally don’t want to go back 25 thousand years ago and live that lifestyle that our tough as nails ancestors lived back then. Along with the positives, not having to starve and not worry about a tiger eating me, there are a whole host of negatives. I think what we’ve seen in the past 50-year or so we sort of tipped over the line where those negatives have really compounded in so many ways. That’s why we’re seeing more autoimmunity, why we’re seeing more diseases in general and why we’re seeing diseases younger. I’m sure you know that type II diabetes used to be called adult-onset diabetes because it basically only ever happened in adults and they had to take away it’s not called that anymore because we see unfortunately so many kids and teens with type II diabetes these days.

[01:25:45] Ashley James: Yes, it’s just so sad. It’s so sad but luckily the listener here is enlightened and doesn’t go eat fast-food, basically do the basic American diet which causes disease. We have to think about this way that food is either causing disease or it’s healing our body. It’s either destructive or restorative. There is no neutral. It’s either building us up or tearing us down. It’s a fuel. People feel in general have disconnected from food and beverages that they look at this one little pill. We could get a pharmaceutical one tiny pill the size of a pea could give us side effects that could potentially kill us. That’s how powerful this tiny thing is the size of a pea. And yet we eat cups and cups ad cups of food and drink everyday not aware of their side effects. They’re molecules as well. That can either harm us or help us. So food, stress. I love that you point out that stress is so vastly important. That those people who lived in the cities that were studied. They became habituated. I think we become habituated to the diet reading as well. A lot of people say, “I’m not allergic to gluten or grains.” But you spent a month cutting them out, oh my gosh. I’m not allergic to them. I don’t have an autoimmune condition that I know of. My husband and I cut out gluten 8 years ago. We cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. What happened to us was miraculous. I lost 25 pounds of water weight and my husband, he lost something like 11 or something but what’s interesting is that our rings started to fly off our fingers. We had them actually made for our wedding. We have them made by a jeweler. We knew our wedding bands were properly fitted when we got married years before and they started flying off our finger so we waited a few months because I was worried that it would, this was temporary, right? This decrease in inflammation was temporary. After six months, we were still having our rings fly off our fingers. We went it to get resized reluctantly because my engagement ring is actually a hundred years old. It’s been passed down to my family. So I really didn’t want it to have it changed in size if not needed. So we went in and I went down two ring sizes and my husband went down one and a half, no sorry. I went down one and a half, my husband went down to two. Now I’m getting them mixed up. Either way, it went down significantly. I think I went down two because I lost more water weight. What’s funny is that we have our pictures taken for our driver’s licenses right before we went gluten free. We have this before and after. We hold it up to people when we meet them and they’re like don’t believe gluten makes a big difference. I’m like “Look we’re not celiac.” This is just pro inflammatory grains. We showed them the pictures and its like I look like the difference between Bert and Ernie. My face is round and puffy. I’m just so surprised when people go “I don’t have any problems with that. It doesn’t cause any damage.” Just try it. Try cutting out gluten for a month, try to cut dairy for a month. Then you go back to it. I had a friend call me up so angry at me because she’s Jewish and she goes, “I can’t eat bagels anymore.” She was so angry because she was habituated to gluten then she went off it for a month. She felt amazing. She got on some supplements and I gave her some health coaching. She got off foods that were pro-inflammatory. A month later her migraines had stopped but she went back to eating a bagel and she felt so sick she goes, “I can’t believe you’ve taken bagels away from me.” She’s in all just she’s very happy to continue to be gluten-free. Almost seven years later, she’s still doing it because we become habituated. We become habituated to stress. Even become habituated to sleep. I can’t tell you how many people have to told me “I only need 4 hours of sleep.” What’s up with that? Do you find that people that come to you, they just have poor sleep in general because that’s sort of one of the biggest factors that helps to set the groundwork for having autoimmune? Do most people tell you they can function on four to six hours of sleep just fine?

[01:29:34] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  It’s a mix. We get people saying things like they do definitely are people who say like “Oh yes, I sleep four to six hours and I feel great.” and you’re like, “Okay. Unfortunately, it’s design for if you will but that part of our brain, that monitors our state like our wakefulness and how we feel is one of the first to go down from lack of sleep. In the same way and this is very difficult. Again, sleep and stress we often find more difficult for more people than dietary changes. Diet is tough. Listen no doubt about it. Some people took it very easily some people don’t. Sleep and stress can be even more difficult and will often challenge people to do a two to four week challenge of getting more sleep. Whether that’s adding an hour or whatever is appropriate for their situation of getting more sleep. When they do it almost uniformly people go, “Oh my god, I have no idea how much better I could feel getting more sleep than I was.” Again, “I thought I was okay because I was used to it but I really wasn’t. I don’t have those crashes. My mood is so much better. My energy is improved, my inflammation is down.” So many of these pieces improve for people with, two things, better quality sleep is important. Like you mentioned, for example, having an old uncomfortable mattress can impair people’s quality of sleep. So you can sleep a lot quantity-wise but quality is bad, you’re not going to be getting the benefit out of it. You can simply for a lot of people, just not getting enough. A lot of people who come to see us reality admit that. “I’m sleeping six and a half hours a night. How’s that going? Well, I’m tired. I know I should sleep more. I don’t. Okay, we’re going to have to talk about that and see what we need to do to make some changes for you.” This reminds me of a point often when we’re taking someone’s history and we’re looking back through it, autoimmunity can feel like it came on overnight for people. One day I was fine. The next day I wasn’t. Sometimes things do happen. Type 1 diabetes, for example, is typically now not in the example you gave up the adult-onset, that is a little bit into type 1 diabetes but your classic type 1 diabetes, what is thought to happen is the child gets sick with a cold or a stomach bug or the immune system reacts to that stomach bug and there’s a cross-reaction that occurs. That the cells of the pancreas that produce insulin so we could control our blood sugar would close enough like that the gut bug that the immune reaction against the gut bug pivots and a start attacking the pancreas. Often that onset can be within a few weeks. The kid was sick and sort of never really recovers well and gets into the symptoms of having type 1 diabetes. But for most the majority of people, most autoimmune diseases they may say to us “Well, it felt like it just came on overnight” when we track their health back to their history often what we see are the roots and the stirrings of that autoimmunity years or decades before hand. Usually culminates what we call the straw that broke the camel’s back. That’s often a hugely stressful event. That can be a divorce, job change, going to school, some big event travel or something else that was just kind of the last straw that tipped people over into a full-blown autoimmune disease. We often see that and they’ll say, “Well, it was this trip that gave me autoimmunity or whatever the case might be and almost never is that actually the case. That was just the final straw that kicked off the autoimmunity in earnest but often will see it going on for years or decades beforehand.

[01:33:50] Ashley James:  Got it. Very interesting. You talked about the paleo or the paleo autoimmune protocol. What about the GAPS diet? Have you had success with that? The GAPS diet being really about helping to restore the gut.

[01:34:07] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Yes. Again, not an all or nothing guide. I’ve seen the GAPS diet worked wonderfully of people it’s a little more of in my experience a little bit more of logistics kind of a complicated diet with different stages in it. I find a lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding how to do the diet. How to follow it. I’ve certainly used it. I was certified by the creator of the diet to work with it. I found it be quiet helpful for people. Again, just because of the logistic I often found that people do a little bit better with paleo diets or autoimmune paleo diets. It’s just a little bit more straightforward. Yes, found that gaps diets worked well. We’ve mentioned one called the specific carbohydrate diet. It’s been around for quite a long time. Had worked nicely for people before. My biggest thing is, not that anyone diet, in particular, is the right one and all the others are wrong. The question for me is several fold. Does the diet take away foods that are problematic for a person? If it does so then they’re good to be seeing improvement in what’s going on. Secondly, we have to say, along with that diet is a gut dysfunction. You know, a very common story. I’m sure some of the listeners have heard it before is that they remove some food from their diet. Say, for example, gluten. “Oh my gosh, everything got so much better when I took gluten out of my diet. But now it’s been a while and kind of seen some symptoms have been creeping back and things are a problem so now I need to eliminate more foods from my diet. Maybe that’s okay for a while. Everything got better again great. Then it came back again now this is a problem. Now that’s a problem.” So we’ve seen people get down to this three or four foods that they feel like they can eat safely. It’s a very bad, hard place to be in. That’s fundamental because diet is one component of healing a person’s gut. But it’s not the only. For some people when they take the food out, their gut is able to heal itself. Everything rebalances and they’re in a good place but for other people taking the food out can merely be a band-aid.  One of the places without actually addressing the underlying causes of the leaky gut and the sensitivity in the first place, one of the areas that I found that a number of more holistically minded practitioners really let their patients down. They run some sort of test to identify sensitivities to food or they put them on an elimination diet and they go, “Great Ashley, gluten is problem for you. Maybe whatever nuts are a problems, eggs are a problem whatever the food is that’s an issue for you. Great, don’t eat those foods. You’re all good. See you later.” It’s like we haven’t actually address the underlying factor. You have to get those inflammatory foods out to get the system to calm down. Some of those removed foods may be permanent. They may be foods you really need to stay away from or you should stay away from them. Many of those foods can be temporary. While the gut is dysfunctional and disorder the immune system is activated and inflamed, a lot of foods can be problematic. We commonly see that in the beginning, you need to take out quite a few different foods but over time as we heal the gut as things get to a better place for many people, many those foods can start to make their appearance back in a person’s diet and not be problematic for them anymore.

[01:37:58] Ashley James:  I love that you brought that up. That we can go down that road of eliminating things from our diet but people can get very restrictive and that’s a level of stress.

[01:38:12] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Absolutely. Yes, it is.

[01:38:14] Ashley James:  Right, so we have to find that balance. We have to address stress. We do have to help the person figure to what diet is, the most healing way to eat for their body at that time and then help them address sleep. When you help the patient to dial in this trifecta, how long do people get results? Is it immediate? Is it within a few months? I know you can’t say like a hundred percent of people everyone always. I know you can’t say that. Let’s just say that the people who are listening right now have autoimmune maybe also have some gut issues, if they work with you, in six months from now, could majority of them be in remission? Is there that much hope?

[01:39:11] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Again, please I know Ashley just did a good job with it, it does depend. Some people get very huge results very quickly. Sometimes, 80% of their symptoms can be improved within a month. That does happen. Is it common? No. Depends on what’s going on and all the rest.  But can it make that big of a difference for people very, very quickly? It can. Often it doesn’t. Generally, here’s the timeline that we generally use for people. When we think autoimmune disease, we typically think a year of treatment. We’re confident that within 12 months we could’ve made substantial and long-lasting changes for those persons. Again, some people move faster, some people move a little bit slower but we’re generally looking at that. Often by 3 months, again ballpark figure, we’ll often see 30-40% improvement in symptoms. People would be feeling noticeably better, digestion working better, pain levels down, skin improved, thinks feeling better. By six months we’ll often see somewhere around 70-80% improvement so massive. Big changes people are feeling very different than they were six months ago. Then that final six months as often what we’re getting at last 10-20% and also critically important is when we’re cementing habits for sustainability and the long-term. We used to aim for six months of working with people knowing that we can make really major changes. In those six months what we found where we really let people down is that we would say, “Okay, great. You’re good to go. You know what to do. You’ve addressed many of those factors. Keep up the good work. Follow up for your check-up and make sure everything’s on track.” We found there are still a significant percentage of people who would backslide, their habits would come loose with life stressors and things happening in their lives. Yes, diet was in really good shape. Then things got busy and the kids went back to school and this happened. Job changes or moved. Whatever happened and the diet kind of came undone and that trifecta we’ve talked about, the sleep, stress, and diet came apart and then people started to backslide and symptoms returned. What we found is by talking that additional six months of really making sure that all those changes are really cemented, the fundamentals have all been addressed, lifestyle changes have become permanent for people. We found that after 12 months the chance of recurrence of backsliding and having things come back drops really dramatically. So our recommendation for most people with autoimmunity is going to be a plan that encompasses 12 months or a full year.

[01:42:21] Ashley James:  I love it. I love that you get such great results and that you help people to sustain at themselves.

[01:42:29] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Right. That’s the goal, right? There is a place and obviously, I’m biased as a medical professional who does this for a living but there’s a place for medical professionals. I know many people out there who have horror stories. Really terrible experiences with doctors or the medical system. I hear them every week people tell me about those stories and I understand why some people just give the whole medical system a middle finger and say that they’re just going to manage their own health. Again, we come back to that pyramid there’s a place for self-management. Your doctor , your health professional, your health coach. All of these they don’t go home with you. They don’t cook unless you can have a professional chef preparing all your meals for you which some people are very fortunate to be in that place but vast majority of us we have to get our own meals. We have to eat our own meals. We don’t have a personal trainer to be there to force us to do the exercise we need to do. We don’t have someone mom or dad telling us to go to bed and make sure these things happens. We have to be responsible for our own lives and for our own health habits. By doing that we can take our health into our own hands and we can make big changes. But there’s absolutely a place for health professionals for people who do this, who’ve gone through the training, who’ve done the work, who do this on a day to day basis. We need both of those. We need a practitioner who will work with the person and we need the person to do their side of things as well. That’s how we get optimal results. Again, it’s not an either-or, it’s an and both type of situation.

[01:44:15] Ashley James:  I love it. You told me that you have some advice for those who have been maybe they like you said, have felt as though the medical system has failed them and they’re quite upset about it so they go to google and they try to get advice from great podcasts like this one, from blogs and from wiki, from all kinds of medical websites to try to help themselves. There are a million websites out there to tell you what to do. Many of them contradict each other when it comes to gut healing and autoimmune and then forms, Facebook groups. We could just go on and on. We are at a wonderful age of information and it’s up to us to dial it in and figure out what’s best for us. Unfortunately, if we are in a state of stress and we have autoimmune, we probably have brain fog because being in the sympathetic nervous response shunts blood away to logic centers of the brain so we’re not thinking straight so now we’re being overwhelmed with too much information and we don’t know what actionable steps to take. Can you tell us how can we figure out what’s best for us and what sources of good information versus maybe non information will best serve us?

[01:45:39] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Unfortunately, there is no super easy answer and just shameless plug here, my book called The Clear Path To Health was in large part me trying to lay that out this extremely common situation. Where someone’s gone to their doctor looking for help. They’ve got one of two different things that happened. They were either diagnosed with an issue, given some sort of treatment for it. If they asked, “Is there anything else that could be done beyond taking this medication or doing this thing?” They were told “No there are no other options.” Type II diabetes again, right, you have to take your drugs it’s a progressive disease it’s just going to get worse over the course of our life. “Is there anything else that could be done? Nope. Nothing else that could be done.” A lot of people wisely go, “Hold on. That doesn’t sound right. There’s got to be something else that I could do to help.” Of course, they go to doctor google to try to look for answers or unfortunately, we hear this very often people are feeling bad. They go to their doctor. They get some tests run and they’re told that, “Everything looks fine. Nothing’s going on” or maybe there’s something going on but it’s unclear what it is. What can we do about it? Nothing. Please get out of here. You’re clogging up the office.” and people are just thrown out left on their own and don’t know what to do. Again, completely understandable they turn to Doctor Google looking for some answers.

The key piece that I think is important to keep in mind is always start with the fundamentals. To make it easy, we’ve honed in on three starting places. Three fundamentals and we’ve talked about them. Diet, sleep and stress. Does that mean that just addressing those three things will take care of everything that’s going on for you and there aren’t other issues or things that need to be taken care of? No. It does not mean that. Like what we talked about before with the pyramid. These three are the foundation. If you aren’t eating well, you’re stressed out of your mind and you’re not sleeping well. You can be taking all the supplements in the world, you could be doing all the practices, all the mediations, all the other you-name-it-you-can-be-doing-it. Will they give you some benefit? Yes. But will they give you the benefit that you’re really looking for? No, they will not. To go back to diabetes, why do MDs say that diabetes is an incurable progressive disease? Type II diabetes again, just to be clear it’s because when you slap medications on it but you don’t address the fundamentals, the medications will help but hey cannot get the root of what’s going on and they won’t fundamentally stop diabetes. Similarly, with autoimmune disease. You can read all about the latest herbs, potions, pills, patches, therapeutics, all these different things. Is there some benefit in many of them? There are. But if you don’t have the fundamentals in play, you’re chasing shiny objects. One of the things we humans are cursed with is shiny objects syndrome. Like Kosar, we like things that are shiny, interesting, sexy and the problem with me banging in the drum about food, sleep and stress is people go, “Yes, yes, yes. I got that. I know that I already sleep fine. I already eat a healthy diet. I’m not stressed out.”

The majority of people that we work with when we analyzed those factors they may or may not done a lot of great work in their diet. Often there’s a lot of various that still need to be addressed and worked with. They almost always have not properly addressed stress. Again, I want to be really clear I don’t believe in shame or blame. This isn’t about telling people they’re wrong or bad or anything else. It’s just these are things that are not taught. They’re not reinforced in our society. We don’t recognize them and some of the cures for things like stress and sleep go against the varied values that we’re taught about. Always working hard and trying to get ahead and trying to do the things in our life sometimes that we need to be doing. These factors are important and if they’re not addressed first then we can get caught up in all the shiny objects and all the new supplements and all the latest greatest testing. It comes back to making sure that your foundation is solid. The base of that pyramid is there before we jump on to other factors. Then again, shameless plug finding a good holistic practitioner who can work with you. Again, I spent years and years researching and working with these materials. It’s fairly straight forward for me to look up something going to the internet and go, “That sounds reasonable” or maybe that sounds like maybe it’ll work for a few people but it isn’t going to be useful for the vast majority of people. Can be difficult for people out there struggling through on their own. So really finding a practitioner to work with who can guide you, can really shortcut and save you a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of years of your life. Finding a good one. Again, in the back of my book, The Clear Path to Health, I lay out the 11 questions that you need to think about and ask a practitioner that you’re considering working with to help you understand if this is someone who might be a good fit for you. Might give you the help that you need or unfortunately might be a waste of your time money and energy and you should keep on looking to find someone different.

[01:51:14] Ashley James:  I love it. Thank you so much and I know you’re doing a giveaway. It’s in our Facebook group. Listeners who would like to potentially win a copy of your book. They can go to the learn true health Facebook group. After I publish the show, we’ll do the giveaway and they can comment to enter into the giveaway. Thank you for that. I love that you have simplified things. It is very complex. There are I believe there’s over 200 different kinds of autoimmune conditions. Is that correct?

[01:51:50] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  I’ve heard varying numbers. The number I’ve most commonly heard thrown around is about a 150 but listen, we’re in a ballpark. There are many, many types of autoimmunity. Some of them are very common. They have common names. We know about them. Some others are much more uncommon or rare or even discovering that some conditions we thought that no autoimmune kind of basis are now being shown that there is autoimmunity involved in them as well. Unfortunately, for us, autoimmune disease is one of the curses of modern life. Thankfully we’re not getting chased by tigers, most of us are not striving to death anymore but we traded that for autoimmunity. Among many other things. The good news is that many of the things that are within our control that we can do can make a really big impact. For a lot of people, they need for immune-suppressing drugs, they may to need them. We’ve seen many people with a whole host of different autoimmune conditions either not need to get on drugs or be able to get off of them. Some people definitely do need them and we recommend that they use them. But again, use the whole pyramid. Don’t just start at level three the drugs ignoring steps 1 and 2. By layering in steps 1 and 2, we often need less drugs if we need them and we minimize or reduce the side effects that can happen with those drugs. There’s a lot that can be done and I hope people are taking this as the hopeful message that I’m intending it to be.

[01:53:33] Ashley James: Absolutely. It was very positive. It was wonderful having you on the show. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything you wanted to make sure that you cover before we wrap up today's interview?

[01:53:46] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Well, I think we’ve gone to a lot of really good stuff. I hope people have taken some notes or if they feel like it’s gone by in a whirlwind I hope they come back and give it a listen too. There’s a lot of good stuff here. Be aware that all of us we have the shiny object syndrome as an issue. It can be fun to research the newest latest greatest stuff but make sure before you waste your time, money and energy chasing over those shiny things that your fundamentals are being taken care of. Know that there are qualified, caring practitioners out there who can help you. We’re not anti-MD but recognize the strengths and the weaknesses of anyone you work with. No one will be able to do everything. So recognize what the health professionals in your life are skilled at and if they can’t meet a need that you have, then it’s time to get someone involved who does have that expertise who can help you make those changes.

[01:54:58] Ashley James:  Dr. Tim Gerstmar, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Dr. Tim’s website is aspirenaturalhealth.com. Of course, the links to everything that he does is going to be on the show notes of today's’ podcast at learntruehealth.com. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing with our listeners. I hope that it fills them with hope and it gives them the clear direction for them to know that they can take step by step. In a matter of months to a year, they can see great changes in their health.

[01:55:34] Dr. Tim Gerstmar:  Yes, profound changes for sure. If this has been helpful for people, please feel welcome, drop us a line on our Facebook page or send us a message. Just saying that you’ve found the podcast helpful. It always warms my heart, makes my day to know that this has made  a difference in people’s lives. If you’re looking for a practitioner if you’re local in the Seattle, the greater Seattle area. Feel welcome to give us a call or drop us a line or if you’re listening from somewhere else know that through the miracles of modern technology, we can do virtual consults with people all over the States and really all over the world. There is hope and please feel welcome to reach out and contact us. You can find all of our information at our website as Ashley said, aspirenaturalhealth.com and I hope you’ll check it out.

[01:56:24] Ashley James: Awesome. Thanks so much.

[01:56:25] Dr. Tim Gerstmar: Thank you.

[01:56:28] Ashley James:  Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected With Dr. Tim Gerstmar!

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Book by Dr. Tim Gerstmar

The Clear Path To Health

Recommended Reading by Dr. Tim Gerstmar

Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

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Become A Health Coach-Learn More About The Institute for Integrative Nutrition's Health Coaching Certification Program by checking out these four resources:

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4) Get three free chapters of Joshua Rosenthal's book:
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Watch my little video on how to become a Certified Health Coach!

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iThrive Series: https://learntruehealth.com/ithrive

Utopia Found: A Blueprint for Spiritual Renaissance and World Peace
BOOK: https://amzn.to/2yp74hu

www.troyreicherter.net

The Search For Truth In Science And Spirituality

https://www.learntruehealth.com/search-for-truth-in-science-spirituality

Highlights:

• Know that it is possible to achieve world peace and it starts with you
• Science, quantum physics and it’s role in the world and people’s lives
• Spiritual and religious freedom while creating a tight-knit community
• Multi-dimension understanding of the universe

Is world peace achievable? If everyone has their own voice and enforcing their opinions on other people then peace will never come. In a world where war is at par, today’s episode can help us further realize why we need to invest in the quality of life, respecting each other’s freedom and most importantly, what we can do to help each other achieve what everyone wants in their life- peace.

[00:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to need to strap on your seatbelt for this one. It is quite a ride. I have a really great interview for you today. First, I want to make sure that you know about this free docu-series. It’s available this week only. It starts today and for the next 9 days. You are definitely going to want to check it out. It’s called iThrive. John has in the beginning of this docu-series, he is well over a hundred pounds overweight. He has type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and he is essentially is getting towards his deathbed. He’s only in his 50’s and he hits a brick wall emotionally and physically realizing that he’s going to be a statistic. He’s probably not going to make it into his 60s. That’s when he deiced to film himself going through his transformation. Now if you suffer from all those things you know how hard it is to turn that around. He decided to put cameras in his face and go to, I believe he consulted 44 holistic health doctors and worked with them and to pull the great information out of them and he followed a program that’s natural and that’s science-based. It’s wonderful are the results that you see. If you go to learntruehealth.com/iThrive. That’s learntruehealth.com/iThrive all one word. You can put your name and email in and then the next video it shows you is him. His before and after. It’s so cool and then, of course, the 9 days, every day they release another episode and you follow his journey and you learn from him. From his struggles and from him as he has his Aha! Moments with this holistic health doctors that showed him how to adjust his diet and lifestyle and how he can get his body back to be a hundred percent healthy and off all medications. That’s right. By the end of the docu-series, he’s no longer diabetic. He no longer had high blood pressure. He no longer has obesity. He no longer has heart disease. It’s all reversible. It’s wonderful to watch. It’s great to learn from. Please go to learntruehealth.com/iThrive. Check it out. That link will also be in the show notes of today’s podcast. Share that link to all your friends. We’ve got to get this information out there so we can help as many people as possible to learn true health. To learn what it feels like to their body to have true health. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview.

[03:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 371. Well, here we are again in the garden with Troy Reicherter. He was in episode 138 and more recently in episode 369. We discussed when you first came in the show two years ago in our backyard so we’ll continue the theme of having you out here. It’s such a beautiful day. You discussed a few projects you’re working on. At that time, it was the Seattle peace project. Where you were getting groups of different churches and different people from around the Seattle area to meditate and pray on peace to see if we could make an impact and the crime rate because there has been experiments done that I’ve shown that getting enough people to meditate and pray on peace that it can lower the crime rate. Another thing that you have been passionate about for the last few years is testing the toxicants in your body while you are doing detox methods like sauna, fasting, eating organic and taking different supplements and seeing how many pesticides and different toxicants you can lower in your body by using these methods. We just finished a follow-up interview episode 369. Now we’re going to talk about a book that you’ve published and this is, did you say 26 years in the making?

[04:42] Troy Reicherter: 26 years, yes. Started about the same time I started fasting it was 1993. I was a 23-year-old living in Taiwan. Oh, no this is after 23 but I got to Taiwan when I was 23. Anyway, the same group that introduced me to fasting. Well, they were psychics. A lot of psychic people. They had centers they were building around Taiwan including up in the mountains of central Taiwan and doing meditation and all kinds of purification methods. Their goal was to bring about world peace through a kind of a new religion exactly but just an understanding of all the different religions in context with one another so that you see it as one giant mosaic. When I was with them, I started to find a lot of answers to question that I had when I get to Taiwan, which led me later to study Chinese medicine. After understanding how these things work how chi and in and yang how they really work and what they really are. It led me to start writing it was almost like automatic writing. Where you just feel like my hand just wants to write. I wasn’t even hardly thinking of what I was writing I just started cranking at everything that I had written. Another thing that happened really soon on was after listening to them talk and talk about things that they saw and people’s auras and different colors and different symbols that were important, I started to I just went back and started re-reading the new testament. So all of these notes that I took, they turn into a paper and then I just felt the need to write another one and another one. I wrote one about science. One about Jesus. It just went from there. Then I needed to connect these papers together. It provided an answer to a question that I’ve been asking since I was a kid. How do we get world peace? How do we look at the world in a way that makes sense so that we don’t have to fight anymore? So that we could have a sustainable way of life, environmentally sustainable, peaceful. Do that so there’s no more wars with people looking at each other from different religions saying, “I don’t understand how you fit into this picture. I can understand my religion but I don’t understand yours and I don’t respect you and we need to have a war about it to see who wins and who loses.” Since having been studied history I knew that religion was one of the main forces pushing wars that seem to be a crucial part of the puzzle is to figure out how what is it the nature of reality at least to the point where we can agree on some common ground. Agree to disagree about certain things and then agree to agree about other things so we can be close to each other but still without surrendering our own beliefs. Then have world peace. I’ve been thinking about these questions for a long time. What will that look like? Then reverse engineer if you just think realistically about what we have to change for saving the environment? What we have to change to end the culture of warfare? What we have to do to be close enough to our neighbors of different faiths and ethnicities that we can end conflict. What does that look like? How do we do that? Where do we begin? I’ve been wrestling with those problems those questions for my whole life. The people that I met in Taiwan didn’t have all the answers but they had a lot of answers and they started me writing what turned into this book 26 years ago. That’s what I’ve talked about. The book is called Utopia found: A Blueprint for Spiritual Renaissance and World Peace. That’s exactly what it is. It’s unlike any book ever written. I think. It’s a little bit like a cartolase, a new earth but it is a blueprint for spiritual renaissance and world peace because it’s a plan. It’s a path of logic and then it reaches a point to where you can’t prove everything. We go beyond logic you might say go into the spiritual realm a little bit and yet we can observe similarities from around the world to come up with the points of agreement that we need to make communities of the future that will work for all the different parameters I just mentioned. Yes, so that’s what it is. I’ve been doing other things in the past 26 years besides just sitting in the room writing this book. I’ve been going to school, acupuncturist, teacher, couple of master’s degrees in Chinese medicine education but that has been, I consider my magnum opus really. Whatever else I do in my life that proving we can detoxify our bodies of cancer-causing chemicals or what not to belittle any of that but in my own mind. I think that this book is like a trunk of the tree and all the other things are branches of that trunk.

[10:20] Ashley James: Take us back to where you were in Taiwan. How long did you lived there? Do you speak Taiwanese?

[10:25] Troy Reicherter: Mandarin Chinese, I speak. My wife is from Taiwan and I didn’t really take the time to learn the dialect because it’s only when you’re there that you’ll use it. Sometimes I’d like to not understand what they’re saying I just want to tune it out. I was in Taiwan for about 5 years all in all. I’ve gone back to visit periodically. It was from 1991 until I left at the end of 1996 and I came back to the States a couple of times in that time period. I stayed in Mainland China for a period learning Chinese medicine. Taiwan is a very unique because they still use the full from Chinese characters and they never underwent the Cultural Revolution that they did in mainland china. You’d find a lot of very interesting cultural relics. It’s more like ancient china than anywhere else in the world. I would say. There’s nothing quite like it. Every street you go down is just temples. Like crazy. Temples of all different religions and mixes between traditional Chinese, folk religion and Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism. You find a lot of people there that are really into spirituality. A lot of psychics too.  A lot of people whom I’ve know had the same experiences in Taiwan. They’ll meet someone who’ll tell them something about the future that comes true. It happens all the time. You may have to go out of your way to look for it but it’s an amazing place. I was lucky enough to meet some really good teachers who I’m still in contact with. Although the group is no longer existing as it used to be. I think at the moment, they want their privacy. That’s where the answer started to come for me. My parents were a product of the ’60s. They started to question organized religion soon after they got married. By the time, I was born in 1968, they didn’t go to church. They didn’t believe. I was raised there’s just no mention of religion in our house. On my own growing up in American culture. I just got noticing what was in TV. Noticing what’s in the wind and the way people started to celebrate certain things like Easter and Christmas. I started to say, “Who’s this guy Jesus? What’s He all about?” My parents never talked about Christ and all. I went back and read the bible myself and actually joined a couple of churches in Sacramento area when I was a teenager. I went through the whole admission process and was baptized. Believed very strongly on it. Then when I became older then I started to question like, “Well, what about the seventh day Adventist? What do they have to say?” They have a pretty good argument. “What about this? What about that?” Eventually, when I was in college I had a lot of questions and I reached the point where I wasn’t so sure about my faith. Then as I got closer to the time I went to Taiwan I started to meet more and more people who are telling me things that I couldn’t accept but I really respected the person. It was mostly about reincarnation and miracles. They would tell me about just over and over that reincarnation is a fact. I couldn’t accept it. I didn't believe it. I thought it was ridiculous and yet it was very ironic because those were the people who I respected the most and yet I doubted what they’re telling me. People were talking professors at Sacramento State University, for example, we're talking about Indian religion, Hinduism, meditation. They talked about miracles that people could perform if they done enough spiritual practice. I started to open my mind to that possibility as well. So then when I went to Taiwan, that was kind of the frame of mind I was in. I was a history student at that point and had all these questions about how does that world really work? Are these things real? Are they not real? Can physics and chemistry explain everything or not? That was a crucial question to me because if they could, then that meant that there’s no afterlife, there’s no spirit. All those things that people in the spiritual realm are telling us. They can’t be true. Which isn’t. I not to say if those things are true the we can’t use science anymore, of course, we can use both. I really had a lot of questions about the fundamental nature of reality and I was trying to answer the question of how are we going to live in the future with this large population dwindling resources, pollution, wars, global warming. All that things that are facing us. What are we going to do? Seriously. Not just what am I going to do? How am I going to get by but we as a species going to do? We better do fast or we’re in big trouble as we can see. That was my guiding motivation the entire time. My girlfriend who’s now my wife at that time she was my girlfriend. I decided I was going to study Chi Gong. Energy control basically. Controlling your chi. She happen to have a person at their work who that’s just one of those things that were my karma matched the karma of the situation, it was like a lock and a key. She from some person she had never met before just got a note saying, “Why don’t you take your boyfriend to this place.” so I went. She said two things I thought were irresistible. One is, “These people are psychic and they know why you came before you come there. They know you’re coming. They’ll expect you and secondly, they won’t charge you any money.” I couldn’t say no to that. Sure enough, they said, “Didn’t I tell you there’s this foreigner who going to come down here.” Anyway, I joined the group and learned a lot from them. All those things from my earlier experience with the new testament, Jesus came to the fore because half of what they’re talking about was Jesus. And they weren’t Christian. They would describe his energy. They would say I can feel it right now. If you get to the stage where I’m at you can just feel it. You call out. You sense out that vibration, you can sense his energy. He’s omnipresent. He’s everywhere. I thought that was really interesting. It caused me to go back and read the new testament over and over and over. I started to take notes. It was funny because the things that I was hearing from my teachers in Taiwan were exactly the same things that Jesus Christ was saying 2,000 years ago in Israel. I started to look at the whole thing in new way. That becomes one of the components of the book. The book is laid out in a specific order. It’s a like a path you have to go follow to get to the end with the answer you might say or the pieces of the puzzle laid out for you to put together. Or you can think about it like a rubik cube. I got into an interesting debate with a science-minded friend of mine because he was saying that I was a critical of science in the first part of my book. He say, “Why did you even start talking about science?” it’s not the biggest problem we have. It’s not like science does do anything accusing a problem it’s in and on itself. I had to rewrite the beginning of the book to explain a little bit better that it’s like solving a rubik cube. I’m not good at rubik cubes but I see that there’s a set operation. A series of event of operations that you have to do. You have to begin with number 1 then go to number 2. So you can’t move certain colors to where you want them to be unless you do that first initial twist. It’s knowing when to do that is part of the key. The book starts out talking about science. There’s five sections of the book and the first part is science and the search for truth in the west. The way most people think is there’s this assumption that science and technology are leading to progress and that progress is going to make things better and solve our problems. In that first section, I go back through the history of the origin of science. Talk about the Greek philosophers briefly and how science started from a search of moral truth. In the beginnings, Socrates was trying to look for the right way for people to live. He likened it to a cobbler making a shoe he said, “If you don’t know what a shoe is, how can you know the right art to make a good shoe.” So we have to know ourselves. We have to know our spirits. And so he said the famous line “Know thy self.” Socrates was talking about things like this and he was coming after a long line of pre-Socratic philosophers who are always looking for the nature of reality. Then along comes Plato. Plato didn’t exactly say that the world as it exists is real. He says that we should study the world through abstractions and we should use things like geometry. We should use the Socratic method of question and answers but then we should also use things like geometry because geometry forces us to rise above the mundane and go to something that can be measured. We’re talking about number and abstractions like lines and points. We’re no longer talking about the real world which may for all we know be an illusion. So it’s very interesting that how that turns to Aristotle coming along and say, “Let’s not worry about the question if it’s an illusion or not. Let’s just assume it’s real and measure it and just be empirical about it.“ I can see this, I can taste this, I can measure this.” and don’t make any assumptions and just stick with the fact. This is the origin of science basically. Following on Thales and his ideas that things can be explained. Aristotle says, “Stop worrying about the world being an illusion. Stop worrying about some higher levels of consciousness that may make this seem like an illusion. Let’s just stick with the facts.” This is what later on in the renaissance and the enlightenment turns into science. It’s getting back to Aristotle’s philosophy. The first section of my book is talking about how this has led to amazing advances that we can all see but it has basically left behind the original quest of how people live.  Science can never really answer all the questions that we have. As Douglas Hoff Stetter said in his book because in order to do that you’d have to have a system that could make reference to itself. When a system becomes so big that it can have self-reference it can no longer be objective. There’s a trap there of logic. That we imagine that we’re going to go figure out everything there is to know through science somehow but it can’t. It is not necessarily leading us to a better world because every time we get a new technological invention like cellphones for example. Well, give me an hour and I could tell you about a lot of things cellphones are doing even just in the classroom that are very, very bad. Not to mention all the environmental effects and everything else. So the assumption that we’re making about science. That science and technology are leading us to a better world in and of themselves is not true. It could but the question is do we have the wisdom to use it properly? Because it’s really a tool. Just like a knife, a knife can be used to do great things like cut up these strips we’re eating here or it can be used to commit mayhem, right? It’s all in the way you use the tool. That comes down to something you can’t really measure we call wisdom. You can have the greatest scientific minds in the world and they can be employed to make weapons of mass destructions, or work for the Nazis or for Stalin or for Kim Jung-un. It doesn’t matter how smart they have or how much technology they have if their wisdom, if they’re building something that shouldn’t be built in the first place then there’s a problem. So that what I point out in the first section we shouldn’t be making this assumption that science and technology are solving our problems by themselves they could if we employ them the right way. That comes down to a question of wisdom and lifestyle. The second section of the book is – feel free to ask a question anytime you want there.

[24:10] Ashley James: Oh no, this is great. I’m enjoying the ride. I like it.

[24:17] Troy Reicherter: The second section is called towards a multi-dimension understanding of the universe. What I realized in my experiences in Taiwan and elsewhere is that there are things going on that can never be explained by chemistry and physics. There are those who believe that and there are those who don’t. The ones who don’t are in the realm of science. They don’t usually talk to the people that don’t believe that and the people who don’t believe that usually don’t talk to people that do believe that. I’m trying to bring the two sides together and make both sides understand what’s really going on and be willing to see the other’s point of view. Scientists would take this an attack may be to their position but it isn’t. It just fine-tuning our understanding of what’s really going on so we could use this tool of science and technology more rationally because right now we’re assuming things that aren’t true. When I had a physiology class before it thought it was really interesting in the opening few pages of a book they said, “There’s two ways of looking at the world. There’s the mechanist view and the animist view. Animist view assumes that there’s things like spirit, energy and intangible things out there that have something to do with the way the world really works. They pointed out really clearly, this book doesn’t believe that. This book about physiology believes that humans are biological machines. There is no spirit, there is none of this just forgot about all the idea, romantic idea. There’s anything else going on expect just anything that can be explained by chemistry and physics any thought you have is just synapses in your brain, chemicals. Something like that, something that can be expressed in some kind of chemical and physical formula. That’s called the mechanist theory. It’s that everything is mechanical. If you really believe that as most scientists do right now it would seem and I just heard someone he wrote a book about consciousness [00:26 Inaudible] just in the last year he was basically saying that as time goes by he thinks more and more that he’s not making any decision. If someone asks him where he wants to go that night, if he thinks of what he wants to do, everything that he’s doing is predetermined by everything else that happened up to that point. There is no free will. That’s kind of where you end up if you believe that. Through my experience, I’ve just been collecting. For the last 30 years, just been collecting anything that disproves that because I just saw more and more evidence as time went along that these things aren’t true. Some for the evidence is like, like the evidence that I know that my teachers in Taiwan were psychic. I can’t really prove that to you. I could tell you some stories and anecdotes and you could go through and say, “Well, that doesn’t really prove anything.” No, it wasn’t in a clinical setting but I know for myself and so I have been looking at those things that were so overwhelmingly persuasive those pieces of evidence that I can include them or else things that were a result of an actual study where there’s really no question about it. That’s the second section of my book. Toward a multidimensional understanding of the universe. I just present all the evidence that falsifies the mechanist theory because this mechanist theory doesn’t say that most phenomenon can be explained by chemistry and physics, they say all phenomenon, everything. All phenomenon the entire observable universe, everything that exists can be explained through chemistry and physics and I’m saying no, can't. They’re wonderful chemistry and physics. I was collecting things from the news, I was collecting things from my own research and I started out being the weakest part of the book but over time it basically becomes the strongest point because I have so many cool things that I go through. I think the first one is about near-death experiences. I won’t go through all of them you can read them on the book but near-death experiences have been researched by a number of researchers and everyone who’s looked into it has found this amazing degree of correspondence between what people say they saw happening when they were clinically dead. According to the mechanist theory, their brains couldn’t be working and yet they saw things, heard things. Even people who have been born blind could describe the colors of things. How could they do that? This is a so pretty impressive section with several researchers who were very skeptical of it and they look into it they came away complete believers because they couldn’t explain that they discovered. There was a big death study done, a dutch study [Inaudible 29:19] in 2001, I believe. The researchers said in the end, “There’s no physical explanation for near-death experiences and scientists may re-think their theories on the nature of human consciousness.” Was their conclusion.  That was 18 years ago and yet I don’t think there has been a lot rethinking on the nature of human consciousness since then. A lot of these conclusions are put out there and they’re not acted upon and the people like me collect them but the scientific community and the world at large needs to face the facts that this research has been done. There’s a reason to believe these things. Also, I found a lot of evidence about reincarnation which I came to believe in because of my own experiences but I found a number of other examples and some of them by researchers who described things that they could not possibly have known about and which were looked into. Including a case of a woman who claimed to have been killed in medieval England. She said she was Jewish and she was killed in this church, in the crypt of the church. The researchers looking into it and said, “Well, Okay. It could have to be this church based in what she said the problem is there was no crypt in the church.” A little later on some workman were doing some renovation they found actually there was a crypt that they didn’t know about underneath the church. I have a score of these kinds of things collected in my book basically proving as well as we can prove that people are able to say things in certain cases that they couldn’t possibly have known about previous lives. That prove to be true when you investigate it. There’s a couple of instances I found Dr. Ian Stevenson looked into about people who began speaking a language they had never learned. There was one where a Swedish woman started speaking German and a woman in India she took on the personality of a Bengali woman and suddenly started to read, write and speak Bengali. Language shed never studied. In the other case, the woman from Sweden she started speaking German and then she basically became the other person. Here is another one, in Hungary, there was a 15-year-old girl who suddenly started speaking Spanish and then she lost the ability to even read or understand Hungarian. There may be other things involved there like I don’t know phony’s word possession I’ll just call it unlearned language ability. Someone almost starts speaking a language that they never learned. Researchers investigators looked into his case they can find no explanation for it. Yes, this happened in 1933 but you know, people weren’t stupid then. They were able to do investigations. Sometimes we think before they had cellphones nobody could think. There’s a number of other things in the book including the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine including pulse diagnosis. Having gone through the curriculum for traditional Chinese medicine I have a number of accounts of people that I met. They’re miracle curers for things. Like in one case, there was a doctor at ACTCM where I went to school in San Francisco. She had a patient who was told he had to remove part of his colon because he had Crohn’s disease and there was no cure but after a year of acupuncture, he was completely well. Cases of people told they would never walk again, walking. People who couldn’t hear, hearing again. There was a famous study from the journal of the American Association where 260 pregnant women had breached presentation where the fetus was in a head-up position not ready to go into the birth canal. They randomly divided the women and one group just got moxibustion which is applying a heated herb. They light it on fire kind of like a big cigar to an accu-point in a little toe which is supposed to in Chinese medicine theory make the fetus go into the proper position. Sounds crazy, right? But in the controlled group, there were only 81 women who had a cephalic presentation at birth but 98 women from the moxibustion group did. The researchers said, “We cannot foreknow physical explanations for these results we can only comment that the mechanism of action is not clearer and more investigation is warranted.”

[33:58] Ashley James: When I was pregnant, 32 weeks I was breached it’s kind of normal still safe but definitely wanted to turn the baby. My midwife has sent me to an OBGYN who I thought for sure she’s going to be allopathic against good natural medicine. I nearly fell off the table she said, “I want you to go see an acupuncturist because your baby is breached.” and she said, “Yes, there’s a study. As OBGYNs would be a fool not to believe in it because they’ve shown most cases than not without any side effects reverse the breach naturally with acupuncture.” So I went and it was like aliens. My baby’s head pushed up and I could see him turning. He turned half the way during the one-hour session on the table with the moxi and the acupuncture points and then he turned the rest of the way in the next 24 hours. 24 hours after getting one acupuncture session my baby was ready basically presenting with his head down ready to be born at 40 weeks. He came out when he was already but it was perfect. It was brilliant. I totally believe in acupuncture.

[35:22] Troy Reicherter: I heard people laughing in the radio saying I’m sitting here holding this burning in my little toe and this was supposed to do something? Because it was in dama, people believed it. I don’t know if they’re still giving that recommendation but it appears to work. How can we explain such a thing? Chinese pulse diagnosis it doesn’t make any logical sense and yet I’ve seen again and again that it works so well that Brian Laforcia at a seminar I attended explained how he wants just by doing pulse diagnosis he was able to tell that a mitral valve of a woman’s heart had a problem. Or that someone else was developing a tumor on a particular lobe of their liver. There was one person who just by pulse diagnosis alone Dr. Leon Hammer was able to say, “You are locked in an attic when you are young.” and the person said, “Yes. How did you know?” He could tell from the pulse. Yet some people would say like author Liane Saytel who wrote a book about traditional Chinese medicine he wrote pulse diagnosis shows even though this is about traditional Chinese medicine he says, “Pulse diagnosis shows a disregard for modern knowledge about the structure and function of the human body.” See that is the mainstream attitude is that it can’t possibly work. This is ridiculous and yet it works. So there’s Chinese medicine which I have many examples then extrasensory perception many studies done, many cases of people knowing things they couldn’t know, predicting things they couldn’t predict. Experiments where Dean Radin calculated if you put all these ESP experiments together for a card prediction they were done between 1882 and 1939. You wind up with the odds against them those results being a billion trillion to one. It’s just fantastic remote viewing exercises and the stories there by Dr. Russel Targ describing how he and a psychic Pat Price were able to discover where the getaway car for Patty Hearst was put. He was describes how they walked into the Brooklyn police department and he just Pat Price said, show me your book of mugshots and flipped through it and said, that’s the guy who kidnapped Patty Hearst, Donald Defreeze. He had nothing to do with the case. So, again and again, we find all these amazing examples of the extrasensory perception isn’t just a myth but then it’s true. knowledge of future events many, many times people have made predictions which I’ve been collecting that we couldn’t explain another way except to say that somehow they could really see the future. Nostradamus I have quite a number of Nostradamus quotes that are actually quite impressive. I could read a little bit of it but you really need to get into the book to get in the heart of it. So many things. Nostradamus wrote in century 1 quatrain 25 he refers to Pasteur. He says the last thing will be discovered – Pasteur also means it comes from the word pasture. So some people have said maybe he was just talking about a field. He says Pasteur will be celebrated as a demi-god. A god-like figure and the last thing will be discovered. Then Pasteur shows the world that microscopic organisms were the cause of disease which seems to have been understood by Egyptians and even by pre-historic people because they were eating things off the trees that had anti-biotics in them. There’s one example. There’s quite a few of them. Nostradamus seems to have predicted the rise of Hitler. He says there will be a second anti-Christ. The first one he says was Napoleon. The second one he says is Hifter which is close to the spelling for Hitler. It’s also another name for the Danube river near which where Hitler was born and raised. He says he’ll be born of poor people and by his tongue will seduce many. He mentions what he translates as a crooked cross of iron in connection with the pontific sending his power to the Danube. Hitler, of course, have the swastika. His actions were condoned by Pope Pious the 12^th. On and on about Nostradamus. I know Nostradamus is very controversial. A lot of people have said that you can’t prove, because you can’t prove everything then there’s no point at looking at those ones that seem to correct. The final one I had was century 1 quatrain 70 Nostradamus wrote that wars in Persia would not cease. Too much trust or faith will betray the monarch and the end commences in France. This seems come to pass when the Americans stalled Shah of Iran who’s overthrown on 1979. Too much faith could refer to the shah having too much faith in the US ability to stop the uprising and the strong fundamentalist religious belief of the revolutionaries. He says that the end commences in France. Well the shah, the end of the shah did commence in France because was in Paris [Inaudible 40:51] until the revolution was over. There’s many things if you read carefully about Nostradamus that he talked about the fleet traveling underwater, he talked about people traveling by air, he describes what sound like missiles, a dart from the sky. He says the world will get smaller. There’ll be peace for a long time, people would travel safely over land sea and air. Then he says wars will start again. Very, very interesting stuff. Telsomatics is where one person can suddenly feel what someone else is feeling. There’s a few cases of that recorded very carefully.

[41:27] Ashley James: I was just talking the other day to a naturopath who I’m actually interviewing tomorrow about that. Last week I’m was talking to him about that. I called my mom up when I was about 19. She was in Florida with my dad that time and I was in Toronto going through massage therapy college. I was like I have this pain and I thought I had thrown out a rib because I had pain radiating from the front of my liver to the back of my liver. My mom goes, I can’t remember which one of us told the other one first but, my mom said I have this pain I just did yoga class and I had this pain so we both thought we threw out the same rib the same day. It turns out she went to the chiropractor to fix the said rib. That chiropractor said I want to do an ultrasound I guess that chiropractor had an ultrasound machine for some reason. That night she flew back to Canada to Ottawa and was in an MRI machine that night. That’s when she found out she had stage 4 liver cancer. The pain she was feeling was her liver end of life liver cancer and I was feeling it. I called her to tell her I felt the same pain. I didn’t injure my back, I was feeling her pain. The same pain she was feeling. To talk about that and it was long distance she was in Florida I was in Toronto. I was going through college. To have that same pain I wouldn’t say fake but mine was energetic there was no psychological explanation for mine. Hers was real. Hers was physical.

[43:08] Troy Reicherter: It’s amazing isn’t it if we start comparing our stories and we could say, “Oh that’s just this, that’s just that.” We start to look at the sheer volume of these things and usually, we keep it all to ourselves but every now and then it gets documented and then we can compare. So just to summarize there’s other things in here like dowsing examples, magnetic field alteration, effects of meditation the unexplained reason of why people have religious faith seem to be more healthy, powers of healing that people have demonstrated over time, distance healing. Well, there’s the whole idea of disempowered spirits or what we call ghosts. I have many many examples of this kind of ting even one of my own. With my grandmother at my parent’s house where myself and others experienced the music box started playing by itself, we’d hear footsteps when there was no one there. It just so happens that one of my teachers from Taiwan the female teacher who I was halluting to earlier she was visiting in the year 2000. It was really strange because my father was going through this period were for a couple of years there he thought he was going to die. His energy level had dropped to zero. He’d been to see all the doctors no could explain it. My grandmother had passed away in the house in 1995. Well, my teacher spent the night there. The next day she at the end of the day she says, “Can I have some wine. Like what do you need the wine for you don’t drink?” She says, “I need to drink something so I can sleep.” I said, “Why?” then she says, “Well, I guess I have to tell you. There’s this woman downstairs.” I said “There’s no woman downstairs.” she says, “No, there is. There’s an old woman walking around with a walker. She got a pink sweatshirt on and she doesn’t have any hair. It’s your grandma’s ghost basically.” She’s in the house she hasn’t left. She can’t bring herself to leave the family. She said that my mother’s spirit was pointing at this thing on the wall, my teacher doesn’t know any English at all. Yes and no. That’s about it but it was a tapestry. My grandmother had woven it and it said to the tapestry “Reach out as far as you can and God will reach down the rest of the way” she says that all night long when the spirit starts to realize that she could see her. She wouldn’t leave her alone. She’s trying to get attention. She kept pointing in the tapestry. My teacher said it sounded like “Samy. Samy.” which I can only guess “Save me. Save me.” Because she didn’t know where she was and what was going on. It was kind of like the sixth sense. My teacher said, “Look, we need to talk to the spirit. Let’s all get together and my grandmother you need to go tell dad when he’s asleep communicate in his dream, go to him tell him you need to leave. We told her she had passed away, it wasn’t that we were ignoring her it was because she was dead. She needs to leave the house because she was sucking all the energy out of the living in the house and it was affecting my dad.” So we did that and then next time I talked to my dad he was fine after like two years having such low energy that he really thought he was at death’s door. He was fine. I’ve talked to other people who had the same exact experience about just the idea of being in a house with a spirit takes all your energy out of you. It all seems to correspond.

[46:30] Ashley James: Going back to what you said about having a connection with the people in your past. A listener of the show who became a client of mine had an experience where and I’m saying hi to her. I won’t mention her name but, hello. She was born and raised in the United States doesn’t know another languages. She was I think this happened in Ireland. She was walking around and a man behind her said something cheeky about I guess her butt or her breast or something and she wiped around and in Gaelic replied to him and everyone else all of the people that are with her, “What did you say?” she was, “What do you mean?” She knew what she’d said and she didn’t know Gaelic. She’s like, “what’s going on,?” she had that every instant like she understood what she said, in Gaelic, she spoke he was whispering to his friend about how good looking she was and she wiped around and kind of told him off and it was all in Gaelic. She’s like “what’s going on?” Then there was another time when she was driving around, she’s never been to Ireland but her grandmother was from there. Who had since passed. They were completely lost no GPS and she knew exactly how to navigate. She knew all the streets, turn left turn right, she knew everything. It turned out the whole area which felt very familiar to her was where her grandmother was born and raised. Little events happen to her like that that made her feel like her grandmother was with her. She was somehow connected to her spirit. But to be able to talk in Gaelic and understand it. It doesn’t happen to her all the time but to have that experience of knowing with no scientific explanation.

[48:27] Troy Reicherter: Yes, it is amazing. If only we could compare note wed find out a lot more. Although you could always say it’s just an anecdote but so many anecdotes put together it has force. There another thing about the effects of consciousness. There’s this thing called the global consciousness project. They’ve been doing for some time now. Where they’ve got this random event generators when something global catastrophe happens they find that they tend to what they consider the negative. It’s like an electronic coin flip but they’re doing thousands of time every second at centers all around the world and they’re recording and you’d expect them to be at a certain bell curve but they’re not. Overtime when something good happens like a whole bunch of people got together and pray, New Year ’s Day, interfaith events. You get things going more to the positive side. The results basically up until to 2015, it started in 1998 and so up until 2015 they calculated these results that they got as being about one a trillion. Less than one in a trillion.

[49:33] Ashley James: So you’re saying that the chances of every time a large group of people gets together and does something very positive that it, for example, affects the crime rate in the area, right? So you’re saying that if there’s just no odds that could possibly explain why obviously there’s something there.

[49:53] Troy Reicherter: Science, the idea’s that everything can be quantified. It’s very hard to do with social sciences like crime rates but they try. They try as best as they can. Like in that Washington DC study in ‘93 that I was trying sort of replicate here in Seattle having people pray for peace. Dr. Dean Radin has done some amazing work in he’s found that just having people basically focus on a laser light inside a closed box. They can change whether the light is a particle or a wave. So when you’re not observing things it’s a wave then when you start to observe it, it’s a particle but this observation in question is doesn’t from a distance. They don’t even have to be even in the same room as the box. People are doing this online in his website where they just focus for a few seconds and then they press the button as they’re focusing and he measures is it a particle more often than it’s a wave. The answer is yes. People are affecting it with their consciousness. He’s found basically he describes this as a sigma effect of between 4 and 8. Which is so great that there is really no possibility of this being due to chance. There’s a lot of experiences like this done like Princeton engineering, anomalies research program and other places where we definitely showed that consciousness has an effect which is not something we can explain with chemistry and physics. Homeopathy was studied and found to be effective in 81 out of 105 trials in Glasgow by Dr. David Riley. Then there’s getting back to epigenetic effects. Jock Benveniste, if I’m pronouncing his name right. This is in the book The Field by the way by McTaggart, very good book. She cites that the scientist in France found that you could take these antibodies and dilute them like a homeopaths would dilute their active substance. Diluted down to the point where there’s basically not a single antibody left in the vial but the water will still produce a response from immune cells. At a certain point, the response after the 9^th dilution, the response gets stronger the more it’s diluted. Then in 1988, they published this with this big editor’s caveat saying that “There is no physical basis for such an activity and although he was discredited by a bunch of quack busters, Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen’s University in Belfast headed a large pan European study which showed that it completely validated his results. Except that was not trumpeted as much as the fact that this is a fake, this is a hoax and then they left it at that. Nature magazine never printed a retraction or the later research. Although it’s been shown that this is really happening. One thing I find really interesting is in 2013 at Emory University in Atlanta, they had a mouse where they conditioned him to dislike the smell of acetaphino smells like orange blossom and artificial cherries by giving him a shock after smelling this odor. The did basically test-tube babies for the 2^nd generation and the third generation. They’ve never even met. The kids never even met their father, grandfather and then they check the mice and they also had that trait. This is not a genetic trait. The question is how did they get passed along? How is it that 2 generations down the road they’re afraid of the smell he was afraid of? No one can explain this. There’s a lot of amazing stuff going on. What scientists generally say when they don’t want to open their mind to this possibility that the mechanist theory doesn’t explain everything. They’ll say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and we’re still waiting for more evidence.” As I say in here if you really take a look at what we know now and have known for a long time abut physics. Quantum mechanics cannot be explained by anybody yet we know it’s true. If you go back to the arguments between Einstein and Niels Bohr basically what they’d covered is consciousness is forming the universe. When you’re not looking at the moon, the moon isn’t really there. That drove Einstein crazy. He says, “I like to think it’s there when I’m not looking at it.” Right? Because if we are in a mechanical universe then everything is just running on its own mechanically. But what we found is our consciousness is making things happen. There was a consciousness exercise from the body of this section I didn’t mention also where fascinating I thought they had random sounds that were generated on a tape or some kind of a recording device. It would make a sound completely random. Either on the right or left headphone of a listener for the next day to listen to. This is thing is generated completely randomly and if a person flipped a coin that morning as to whether they wanted to hear more on the right or left. In the morning after the recording has been made, they did studies and they found that the person sits there and focuses “I want to hear more on the right or the left” based on the random flipping of the coin the day after the recording was made. They’re actually influencing what happened the day before because they can actually either make the sound go more to the right or go to the left. That’s just numbers so they could look very clearly at the statistics and say, “What’s the possibility of this happening?” It is significant. We can’t change things from the past as long as no one’s seen it yet. The whole uncertain difference, right?

[55:40] Ashley James: It’s like when I hold on to my lottery ticket and I didn’t check the numbers that night. I’m like, I held it before I’m like, “Schrödinger's lottery ticket.”

[55:49] Troy Reicherter: Schrödinger's Cat. Yes, exactly. In the case of a cat, I don’t think it’s going to work because a cat is a conscious entity but if it’s a card from a deck and you flipped it over without looking and the next, “I want it to be queen. I want it to be a queen.” You’ll have more of a chance of it being a queen even though it’s already been flipped.

[56:05] Ashley James: The question is do we know somehow know that it is a queen or is the quantum physics it isn’t a queen until you flipped it over and it’s observed?

[56:16] Troy Reicherter: That’s true. Yes. Which came first? Is it the chicken or the egg? Quantum physics, light can travel through two slits and strike a surface to form an interference pattern. So it’s either a particle or it’s a wave. Its usually a wave but when you look at it, it become a particle again. It’s a totally different pattern. That’s called the wave particle duality of light and no one can really explain that. How it can go back and forth from one to the other. When we look at all this, we’re finding that It has huge effects on all kinds of things. Like in biology they’ve discovered that there is a particle called exyton. Its energized by a photon of sunlight and then it seeks the enters reaction center in the leaf. It’s spread out as wave but then when it strikes the nearest center that collects that energy then it becomes a particle at that point. It’ll be like one of us looking for the nearest gas station we become a wave and go on all directions at then same time then when part of that wave finds a gas station you appear at that point. That’s basically what leaves have been doing since the beginning of time and we haven’t known it. Things can’t be in two places at once. 

[57:28] Ashley James: I really like the movie about the book “Do we know?” I’ve talked about it in the podcast before. I highly recommend everyone watch that wan watch it twice. When I first watched it I was bawling my eyes out at the end and I got it and I immediately hit play again. It was back when DVDs. This was like 2004-2005 and I just immediately hit play again. Stay until two in the morning I had to watch it twice. I got it. It hit me. It really did. This how much control we have over shifting our reality. At that time, I was in Canada. I really wanted to go to the States and study NLP. It was going to cost a lot of money and I had no options for making that happen but after watching it, it hit me that I can change it. I know so many people go they put up a brick wall and go, “Oh, I can’t do this because I’m out of money or I can’t do it because I’m not skinny enough. I can’t do this because I don’t have a car. I can’t do this because I don’t have this or I can’t do that because I don’t have kids or I do have kids.” Whatever. Just people making a reason if it’s like that mechanical view of the world. “Well, I need this for this so I guess I can’t do it.” Then they just stop. They stop exploring how to create the life they want. After watching that movie with the book Do We Know. I went “I can change even though there’s no possibility right now.” There’s no logical explanation for me being able to raise this money. And I went into the “I don’t need to know how am I going to do it. I just need to know this is the sole thing I’m focusing on so I going to get this done.” In days, I had the money. It was like $25,000. Within days, I had the money. It’s a matter of shifting consciousness first. That’s where if you want to create if you shift your consciousness first. It was that exactly what you’re talking about that helped me to realize that the reason why I wasn’t creating what I wanted in my life was because I believed that I couldn’t. It was a really big wake up. So yes, I love what you’re saying.

[59:49] Troy Reicherter: Some other thing about quantum mechanics is that a particle go towards another particle and then instantly appear on the other side of it, it’s called quantum tunneling. No one could explain this. When two sub-atomic particles became linked close together, no matter how far apart they are after that, one particle instantaneously affect the other particle. This is called quantum entanglement. Two particles can be on opposite sides of the universe and they will instantaneously faster than light be going the exact same things at the exact same time. They remain twins forever. No one can explain this. And when you think about the fact that the whole universe came from the big bang. This infinitely small thing you realize at some level everything’s is quantum entanglement with everything else because we were all in that little microscopic thing. To freak out at the thought of telsomatics or ESP or clairvoyance or me being able to communicate mind to mind with you, it’s not that far. If you remember of course, again, that consciousness is the things creating all of these. Even as physicists are saying, again, the observer effect light behaving as a wave when it is not observed as a shower of particles when it is observed blow people away. Einstein didn’t like that at all. Max Planck the physicist wrote, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” That was over a hundred years ago. Consciousness is different from everything else in the universe. It’s not just chemical reactions in our brains. It’s unquantifiable, inexplicable thing. It’s the foundation of all reality. Physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote, “The atoms of elementary particle themselves are not real they from a world or potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or fact.” We’re all talking about finding a physical explanation for something that scientist have said doesn't exists. There is no such things as physical stuff basically. What they’re doing is kind of absurd. Einstein didn’t like this idea at first. He fought against it in 1935 he co-wrote a paper criticizing this idea of quantum entanglement saying it’s spooky action at a distance. Later he was forced to admit that it worked. Actually, I guess it was later that it was proven. In 1968, John bell the physicist he found a way to test quantum entanglement and by 1982 it had been absolutely proven that it was true. Einstein did change his way of thinking. By 1954, he said, “I must confess I was unable to find an explanation for the atomist character of nature. One must find a way to avoid the space-time continuum altogether. Although I haven’t the slightest idea of what kind of elementary concept could be used in such a theory.” A month before he died he wrote, “The distinction between the past, present, and the future is only an illusion. However the tenacious the solution maybe.” They’ve done a number of experiments that showed all kinds of crazy things like John Wheeler, he did maybe the most interesting one of all. He did one where he was looking like a giant experiment with the double-slit only he was looking at the light coming around distant galaxies. Light from a quasar it bends around galaxies. It either takes the right path or the left path to get to your telescope so he made two telescopes. One pointing to the right, one pointing to the left depending on how you chose to look at it, it changes back and forth from a particle to a wave. But the light was sent billions of years ago. So how was that possible that light from that star before we even evolved here before the earth was even here as going right or left based on whether or not we’re looking at it today. Yes, that’s what he came up within the end. It’s almost like it’s going back in time but remember there is no time. Time is just something that we’re inventing. It’s like Einstein said, “There is no difference between past, present, and future.” and in 1979, Wheeler had made fun of parapsychology saying, “It’s a pseudo-science we shouldn’t be studying the stuff.” By the 1990’s he said, “We live in what we call the called it a participatory universe”. Reality is created by the observer and he coined the term participatory anthropic principle to describe the way the universe is shaped by our observation of it. That’s completely repudiating the mechanist theory. It’s already basically been debugged. I’m just putting all the pieces together and showing you we need to stop acting as if it’s still there. Of course, I’m not saying we can’t use science and technology definitely we should. We should use it in a wise way. We should be aware that it has basic limitations of explaining the universe. It’s never going to explain everything. We have the power to change the universe by changing our thoughts literally. Not just by believing in yourself and trying harder but literally, you think something and that send ripples instantaneously throughout the whole world to the whole universe. Your good thought or to your bad thought. Your thought for someone’s betterment. That’s basically my section 2 where going the fact that there’s more than chemistry and physics. That leaves us in a funny place because where do we go from there, right? To develop wisdom you need to talk about spirituality. The third section is where I basically I go through and try to show what in the preface to section 3. If you just look at the mechanist view what it’s assuming you know there’s no such thing as free will, no such thing as ESP, metaphysical powers don’t exist, religious teaching is all just imaginary, there’s no purpose in life except just to go on living and to reproduce. There’s no reason to believe that there’ll be blissful or happy ending for any of us or the earth or the universe. The universe is just going to turn cold and dark someday and everything is just going to end in oblivion. That’s the mechanist theory but if you look at what I’m going to call the yoga world view which is yoga in an expanded sense the yoga of all worldwide traditions all combined. Of course, I used the word yoga because the Indian system is the most systematic and the first to put it all into one big ball of wax. The yoga worldview says everything happens for a reason. Things aren’t random. You have free will. You have a consciousness that is special and separate for the material world. The material universe is created by the thoughts of all conscious beings. Ordinary chemical and physical rules can be breached. Magic and miracles are possible. And on and on. It’s not just wishful thinking. This is really based on all those scientific things that we just looked at. I know this is hard for some people to. This is where some people in the scientific realm will have a hard time and they may have some personal experiences with some of these paranormal things so to speak before they can make a jump to accept this. From here on it’s pretty much just talking about spirituality. Section 3 is called Jesus Christ and the worldwide traditions of yoga. Where I’m going to explaining to I’ve learned about trying to put together all of the things that I learned about Christ and that I believed about Christ with all these other religions that are out there. I was in a situation where it was all or nothing. Either you believe in Christ and you go to church and you believe that everyone who doesn’t go to church and believe in Christ is going to fry in hell forever or you just don’t believe at all. You can just be an atheist. How do you reconcile? I couldn’t believe that Christ was just a regular man but on the other hand I couldn’t until I had my Taiwan experience. I couldn’t explain how these stories about Christ and his teachings and his miracles how they fit together with all the other religious teachings of the world. This section goes through and explains how if you adopt or brought a perspective and not just view Jesus within the Judea Christian tradition but look at Him within the context of spiritual traditions worldwide. His teachings and the powers that he seems to exhibit in his miracles. They’re not just unique to him but they common to other masters of yoga. And Christ’s message is fully in keeping with the message the philosophy of yoga. Yoga is a Sanskrit word it means attaching. Yoking yourself to the universe around you. There’s various forms of yoga abut the ultimate aim of each one is to control the fluctuations of the mind reach a state of transcendence and the individual self merges with the absolute infinite reality that we can call God. That’s what this book is about. This section of the book is about is where I go through and basically just take right out of the new English bible or the world English Bible right out of the new testament and some quotes from the old testament and say what Jesus said and then explain what he might have meant if you look at it from a brother perceptive instead of just maybe what you’re told n Sunday school. And how everything fits completely with the other teachers of yoga.

[01:08:58] Ashley James: One thing we haven’t talked about in detail, you’ve told me before we hit record and so I want to go through that is that your purpose was instead of which I think what our focus is right now is looking at what difference. Like what’s different between Christians and Muslims? What’s different between yogists and Christians? What’s different? We’re always so fixated on what’s different because what’s different is the threat. That’s why people feel threatened by other ethnicities, races, and religions because we’re afraid that they are going to take away our freedom. We’re afraid they’re going to this unknown if they have a difference than us then they’re going to impose their difference on us. It’s going to take away our freedom it’s looking at this fear. It’s a fear-based world that we’re living in. where people are afraid of other races and other religions because we’re afraid of what’s different. And what you’re doing in your book is looking at what’s similar. What are the similarities? Where do all religions meet? Where can we all have common ground? Through your book, you want to create a world where we can be close to our neighbors and instead of be afraid of the color of their skin or the religion they practice. We can see the commonality and go, “Wow we have so much in common and celebrate our differences and there is actually nothing to be afraid of because we have so much in common.” I’m hearing that in your book you want people to start to see and open their minds whatever religion they’ve been practicing or studied that they can actually see that isn’t wonderful that there’s commonalities that Christianity has commonalities in other religions? We can look for these commonalities in order to celebrate and grow our own spirituality? 

[01:11:05] Troy Reicherter:  Exactly, yes. I’m trying to be benevolent altruistic but it’s also very practical. We live in a world with other people. We’re not all going to convince them that our way is the right way. We may feel inwardly that we’re right but we have to learn to live with others. We just have to and our kids have to. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Man must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” Almost all I found was just similarities when I delved into it. A lot of people will say Christ didn’t talk about reincarnation for example.

[01:11:39] Ashley James: This is interesting you bring this up. I’ve talked to people one of which has been underneath the Vatican on the private libraries and what has been understood is that reincarnation was taken out of Christianity that it was actually believed but it was taken out because they didn’t want people to think that they had more than one chance at life because if you have more that one chance maybe you won’t be a good person in this one. Whatever. I’m just going to, I didn’t know what but they have this idea they could control people where it’s like listen, It’s like raising a freaking 4-year-old. I’ve got a 4-year-old. “Listen if you don’t do it right, you’re going to hell.” If you look at the they way they created Christianity it’s like, “If you don’t do it right you’re going to hell so you better do it right now. That’s like if you don’t clean your room you’re getting a time out.” It was very authoritarian but there’s multiple sources that are saying that reincarnation was actually a part of early Christianity.

[01:12:44] Troy Reicherter: Well, like in John 16:12 Christ said,” I have yet many things to tell you but you can’t bear them now.” There’s quotes like this from Him and from Mohammed also saying there’s lots more that I have to tell you people but you couldn’t deal with it so I couldn’t tell you we don’t know what ekes they wanted to say. As you say, yes, a lot of early Christians were Arians which means Arianism after Prince Arius of Alexandria, not the Arian race. They considered Jesus to have been just a man who then became Christ through practice. They didn’t believe that He was part of the Trinity. This pre-existing Holy trinity which that came later. The council of Nicea and the council of Constantinople they sat down this creed saying, “This is not right. Reincarnation is not right.” Reincarnation so many people believed in it. Yes, that’s right a lot of these early beliefs got snapped out into one flavor fits all religion. Then it just became the religion of the Byzantine Empire and the roman empire so then they used that to justify “well, in order to predict Christianity we have to have this war” even though Christ said to turn the other cheek, don’t hurt anyone, love your enemy. That’s nice but they went ahead and had their wars anyway and called it Christian. This whole idea of his was just like a guru in a forest in India. It’s not what it became later as a justification of every western empire that’s existed where we say we’re doing this to spread Christianity or to save Christianity or whatnot. Christ’s teachings were really no different from Buddhist teaching any important way that I can see. I have some of that in the footnotes here, in the end, some comparisons between some of the miracles of Christ and others and his references to fasting, of course, the importance of fasting. This is section 3, is pointing out how to view the teachings of Christ in a larger way so that you see it as part of a worldwide tradition to yoga not just limited to the Judea Christian interpretation of Abraham and the one God and the ten commandments all of those rules which basically tells everyone who’s outside of that circle you’re going to hell and you’re going burn there forever. I think it’s much more accurate all the more useful for getting along with other people. So that’s section 3. Section 4 is the biggest section of the book. It’s called the unified section culture.

[01:15:22] Ashley James: Before we go into section 4, you’re starting to tell me before you hit record about being in Taiwan and finding the book in the library.

[01:15:38] Troy Reicherter: Yes, thank you for reminding me. When I was basically researching what became this part of the book and the other part, I was praying constantly. I felt reinvigorated. Like I hadn’t felt since a teenager going to get baptized. Okay, if Christ is omnipresent if my teachers in Taiwan in a basement in Taiwan can feel his spirit why can’t I? So I made this call saying, “Christ, I know you’re out there and I really believe in you now.” After having believed and not believe and believed again. “I want to tell the true story about you, please help me find what I need.” Someone told me about a book which led me to another book. So I was looking for the book The Nag Hammadi library which turned out was in my school library at the National Taiwan Normal University. There was one floor at that time devoted to English books. I was looking for it. I found it in the card catalog. I went upstairs to get the book it was a reference book so it couldn’t be checked out. I went to the spot where it’s supposed to be but it wasn’t there. I didn’t go ask for help yet but I just thought what are the odds that I can find this book on my own. Unless someone has left it lying out. It’s like a needle in a haystack. It’s not the biggest library it the world but still considerable. As I was leaving, just almost felt - I didn’t hear a voice exactly but it’s like someone was tugging me saying “Come look this way. Come look this way” and remembering my prayer that I made. I just followed my instincts and I was walking around thinking I’m looking for something but I don’t know what and I’ll know it when I see it. I made several turns and I was looking at a big line of books, 6 feet high and one book caught my attention. It had nothing to do with the subject that I had been looking for and I don’t remember what it was. The very first book I reached for because it got my attention, I pull down, looked behind it and hidden behind it was the book The Nag Hammadi Library that I had been looking for.

[01:17:47] Ashley James: What is the Nag Hammadi Library?

[01:17:49] Troy Reicherter: It’s a compilation of gnostic texts from Egypt from about the 4^th century. They were discovered right after World War II in clay jars in the town of Nag Hammadi. So they called it that the Nag Hammadi Library. I have the most amazing quotes from it in my book.

[01:18:09] Ashley James: What is it? What are these texts from the 4^th century about?

[01:18:14] Troy Reicherter:  It’s a Christian sect that was basically stamped out. They don’t go into reincarnation so much but I can read you a little bit of it from my excepts. What I did with section 4 was, I basically realized in my studies of comparative religions that there’s certain number of principles and practices that are common to most religions. Not everyone has all of them. I came up with the number 30. 30 principles and 30 practices that I go through, I delineate, and that’s pretty much my systems for inclusion in this section. I go through beginning with indigenous peoples and then Jewish traditions mostly by the age of the tradition in question. There’s a section of each one just going through this 30 principal and practices which they’re basically yoga ideas that we could all agree on. Like, get to the right part here. Like the first principles is, for example, people should focus on love and compassion above all. These qualities are the basis of all yoga practice. They dissolve the imaginary divisions between self and other and motivate one to move forward so they can help all suffering beings. Number two, an omnipotent omnipresent force exists. No names or images can adequately describe this power because this is infinite and exist in dimensions outside time and space. Number three, multiple agents of God exists. These divine agents which could be called gods, buddhas, Bodhisattvas, angels. They can in one sense be viewed as independent entities but in another sense, they remain integral parts of God just as different hand puppets may be filed and animated by the same puppeteer. These agents exist around us and within us speaking with us according to how available we make ourselves them. Number four a spiritual force exists within all things. And so on. There’s the principles and then practices. 30 practices which begin with meditation and prayer. Number two, contact mindfulness to repel evil thoughts. Number three, constant control of one’s temper and emotions. So then in each section as I go through each different tradition I’m just highlighting things that fit from those. It’s way too complicated to put a footnote with each one because sometimes in a single sentence you’ll have connection to maybe four different principles and practices but if you got them all in your mind you can read through and recognize as we go. There’s a lot of things we’re talking about 26 years of research. Involved and studying everything from things that very few people know about. The Incas the way they look at the energy in the body almost like the way they do in India or China or the Nag Hammadi library from the Christian section. What I found also is that in the major religions or the major monotheistic religions there is an esoteric aspect to this one. In Judaism, they’ve got the kabala where they believe very clearly in karma, reincarnation, the whole idea of a bodhisattva, a being who keeps coming back again and again to help people. There are Jews who believe in these things. This is just not the mainstream Jewish version. There are Christians who believe in these things. In the Islamic tradition, there is Sufis who believes in these things which we would normally consider to be sort eastern religions. There is a hidden inner part to these larger religions that really are almost exactly identical what they’re saying one with another when breathing practices, meditation, the terminology that they use, the stories that they tell. It’s a very rich section. I enjoyed writing it although it took forever because of all the great stories that I’ve came up with. This section on Christianity is actually the largest because that is the religion that I the found most on that very few people know about. Like the sane gospels that might have been, you’re referring to about the hidden library underneath the Vatican. Couple other things like that. Get to it first then I could tell you the name again. Things about India and China more people know about eastern religions but the monotheistic western religions they generally keep those things more hidden. I would like to quote to you from the Nag Hammadi library a little bit since you’re asking.

[01:2319] Ashley James: I want to know what they had to say about Christ.

[01:23:23] Troy Reicherter: Yes, they were Christian but they call themselves children of the light basically. Each one is a different text. Here’s one called the prayer of the apostle Paul. Paul calls out for help saying that the ultimate truth is his mind and his repose. The disciple asked for the perfect thing that is beyond his grasp. There’s a text called the treaties on the resurrection. Where it says, “The resurrection is no illusion and is more fitting to say that the world is an illusion.” There’s a text called the tripartite tractate where they say “God is the form of the formless, the body of the body less, the word of the wordless and the wisdom of those made wise.” My battery just died here. If I could plug it in your house, I could quote for more of it. The Nag Hammadi Library has Christ also saying things that aren’t in the new testament that are quite interesting. The whole idea of it is that people should be constantly mindful and praying and saying prayer themselves at all times and that there’s an effect from every thought that you have. Just like what you see in the Islamic section with roomie and his teacher saying that every single thought you have affects everyone in the whole world. The principles and practices were used as the guiding principle for writing this section. It goes all the way from indigenous people up to I added an elven section for Bhai because it figured it a large enough to merit that. I hope that by reading it gives people the principles and practices aren’t just academic. Just to say isn’t that interesting that they have these similarities but it gives us a common ground that we could in the future. Make intentional communities where we by intention and design focus on spiritual living, focus on sustainable living, environmentally sustainable. Plan our communities so we’ll have much more interaction with our neighbors so that were close to them and have friendships with them and yet not go down that religious path of either making a new religion or having religious warship. On the actual living space so that it doesn’t become, its spiritual community but not a religious community in a sense that everyone has to agree on this is the right way. That’s been one of the main tricks in the world up to now as I see it because we have this fights over religion and yet we want to be friends with people of all different religions so we don’t. How can we live closely with them and still have common ground and yet have your own freedom? The fifth section of the book is called creating a spiritual renaissance. That is where we take all of the stuff that we learned up to now about the nature of reality. The fact that our consciousness determines our reality. The fact the science and technology are great but we need is wisdom to make a livable, sustainable, peaceful world. The fact that no one religion has all the answer but they’re all part of this larger whole, the yoga of worldwide traditions. If you look the boundaries, we draw on the map. The political boundaries are just invented by us and so are the boundaries between the religions. They really are all the same as the Sufi say. So looking at that way and using this principles and practices to guide us is something that we can just agree if employed the right way can be beneficial. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to use each one. For example Muslims and Jewish people they’re not going to use statues in their practice it's just against in their religion but one of the principles or practices is that statues can be used so that they can just agree that, “Okay, statues can be used. So my Hindu neighbor, my Buddhist neighbor, my Christian neighbor they might use the statues that they pray to. I’m not going to do that but neither am I going to insist that they stop doing it.” These are things that are reserved for each person just like we all have the right to freedom of expression but it doesn’t mean we have to go out and use it every day. Almost like a bill of rights that things people can agree on. From there, looking at the teachings of the sages that produce these traditions the first place. You look at the way they told people to live in groups. It almost always the same. Large groups are self-sufficient. Where the focus is on spirituality where they share common meals most of the time. Whether they have little or few possessions. At least to say they’re not materialistic, try to be as welcoming as they can. Each one has its own rules on what and what it cannot do. We design a whole new type of economics which I would call cooperative economics. Coops aren’t new and neither is cooperative economics but the way I’m talking about it is a new thing.

[01:29:00] Ashley James: I’m friends with someone that lives in a farming coop and actually a few people in Manitoba. It’s a whole community everyone has their own house or large building with several apartments. They all run a farm together and when you call everyone just has one phone number and there’s an operator with an extension and you tell what house, what family member you’re trying to reach and they have business hours because they run this whole farm and this whole coop. Yes, they live together as a community and it works really well because they save money together. The whole community gets together and will buy solvents in bulk or buy grains in bulk or something so they can get together and save money that way. They can all take turns cooking. It’s neat. It’s a level of community that we really have lost but we had it a long time ago.

[01:30:12] Troy Reicherter: Yes. Definitely. I miss it. I was in Taiwan and I grew up kind of like that. It was like one big family. Based on the success and the failures of the group that I was in, I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Mine was a spiritual group and it had certain spiritual leaders and the group I’m talking about would be something three would be a spiritual leader per se but everyone would have to sign on to I think the way to build it as I say in my book is to start with associations. People could create associations with certain by-laws and the 30 principles and 30 practices would have to be something that would be agreed upon by everyone and then one of the goals of the association would be to build up coops. That you get a group of people together saying, “Okay, we actually want to live together in this way, on this piece of land. We’ll do what it takes to get the capital, to get that and to make it happen.” It would be an intentional community where I think looking at the lessons of the past, it should be as sustainable as possible, try to grow your own food, everyone should have a hand in growing food being close to nature and trying to eat more together more often. That’s one of the lessons that they found in kibbutz in Israel that’s like, when people aren’t eating together then they just start to stay at their house all the time but if people are eating together then it’s like a big family. That closeness is something we’ve completely lost. Most people have completely lost in the modern world. Where we barely know our neighbors and we don’t have much in common with them. When we do know them sometimes it’s scary. If you’re in a community like this but it can be multi-racial and of course, many different religious groups they’re all together. There has to be other rules which I’ve included in the book based on my experiences and thinking about it a lot. Like you couldn’t have a religious institution that coop property they would have to be on the periphery. If you have communities based on, a coop unit of I think 300 is a nice number. Larger than that you get to have so many people there that you don’t remember all their names. Then next door, you can have another one, another one with up to that number. Then for those people in that regions coops who are Hindu, they’ll set up some Hindu temples nearby but not on the coop. Of course, in the future the way I see it things are going to go ways that I can’t predict of cause. Just like Martin Luther King, he nailed his 95-thesis challenging the Catholic Church to a debate. He had no idea he was starting the revolution reformation. He wound up other people took charge and they just ran in different directions. Things will happen and of course, not everyone’s going to make coops the way I foresee. There could easily be Christian coop over here and a Muslim coop over there and an atheist coop over there. I think that for the future, if we want to really peaceful sustainable world then we need to live in some kind of close-knit communities where we can make decisions about the products that we buy, the things that we do to the earth rather than have it be all spread out so that you and I make decisions based on preference, convenience.

[01:33:36] Ashley James: Amazon rating.

[01:33:37] Troy Reicherter: Amazon rating. Once in a while, we try to do what’s best for the planet but most of the time we’re like, “Well, everyone has a cellphone I need to get this.” If we could be in large groups and say, “What kind of paper should I buy?” In the book, I make the example for toilet paper. Probably the best for the planet will be something complete recycled something brown, something rough, something that can go easily into a compost toilet and go back to the land. And yet we don’t see those on sale. What you see is nice fluffy bleach right with lost of chemical in it not good for the environment. Yet there’s no demand for the right thing because it’s not pretty. It’s going to be harder to make. Who wants something not wrapped in plastic because wrapping it in plastic seems so clean? Making those decisions about what to buy, how to affect our environment and our world. They need to be made in a way that is wise and that hold each other accountable. We can’t say this is the right thing to do but we're doing to the wrong thing anyway because no one else is doing the right thing and it doesn’t really matter and I’m only one person. We make all these excuses. Letting demand just guide things the way it is right now isn’t really working out. We need to have more thoughts and responsibility and accountability if were going to do what they say we need to do by cutting our carbon emission so quickly, so dramatically. There’s no real action taken around the world to do this. When we come out to the end of the tunnel and I’m very optimistic that we will do all of those one way or another. When we come out to the other end of the tunnel, we will be living in communities that are sustainable and that are peaceful otherwise we won’t be here. I’m assuming we will be here so I’m saying we will. So by reverse engineering what we have to do to get to that point that’s how I came up with all of these. I think in the future people will take them for granted they’ll say what took him so long to realize these things and to start living that way.

[01:35:43] Ashley James: Your book sounds fascinating. You’re talking about living in communities and that reminds me of a town in Italy where they couldn’t believe the heart disease was almost non-existent and compared to the rest of Italy, compared to the rest of the world. They were just one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the world in this one region of Italy. This American scientist went over to study them. And to figure out what is it their diet or they’re eating differently? Is it the olive oil that they get in this region? What is it that’s going on that has these people so healthy? Almost no heart disease. Almost just like a disease, rates are really low. He went over there and he watched them marked down what they ate. Him and his whole team went over amber and like, “Okay well, they’re eating the same meatballs. Probably the same recipes been passed down from grandma to grandma. The same meatballs, the same pasta, they’re drinking the same wine, everything was the same as the rest of Italy. What genetically different about these people and it took them a while to figure out that in this whole town was pretty poor as an area. They weren’t ever rich. Most of them worked in the factories but after a hard long day working in the factory they on the walk home they stopped off four different friend’s houses and sit around and drink wine together. He noticed that it was a totally different social pattern that they have. Everyone knew each other and they had a multi-generational families who’d have three generations in every household because they were poor so they had to. The kids were always around aunts, uncles, grandparents. There was a large support structure. Children always had loving people surrounding them and anytime you’ve had a stressful day you can rely on the friends you grew up with. You can go to their house and have some wine on the porch and then walk to your aunt’s house or walk to your mom’s house whatever. He figured out it had nothing to do with their diet nothing to do with their gene expression. Non-genetic but maybe gene expression is triggered by low stress. Even though they were very poor to our standards they had very little stress because they had the support of the community. If someone’s house burnt down the entire village would get together and rebuild. If someone fell in hard times, they would immediately have a support system. They had low stress but also a support system they always knew was there for them. As time went on, the world has become our transient and the people in the town moved away and jobs changed and within one generation, the disease rate rose to be the same as the rest of Italy. He figured out that it was, in fact, the community was the reason why they had such low disease rates.

[01:39:06] Troy Reicherter: Yes, it sounds like the Roseto Effect. It was a town in, I think Pennsylvania. Similar thing with research in it seems to be the lack of stress. There a book that came out recently I can’t remember the title right now. My computer’s battery died. We’re in a garden here but I think it was called lost connections. It was on democracy now. That was the author’s what he was finding was people were mostly unhappy about their lost connections with each other lost connections with nature and just the whole idea of always having to work over someone richer than you and being in a society where you’re not valued. Billionaires are valued and common people are just not. It constant stress and belittling feeling and isolation and when you put all those connections back together in a more sane kind of socioeconomic system, where you have those friendly loving relationships with all your neighbors and friends and family and you see them all the time. Your levels of stress drop way down, you don’t have to worry what’s going to me if this happens and that happens and you don’t always feel like I need to go out and do something and compete with somebody else. You know you just have time, they’ve proven just time and nature makes people feel better. It does all kinds of good things to your body. I think it’s crucial that people get back to farming themselves. We’re so used to just going and getting the food we need. Less than 1 % of the population think is farming right now in America. I really admire the fact that you’re planting some stuff back here. I have some beds in my house that I’ve been meaning to plant for a long time but I keep getting caught with these experiments of mine. It’s really important to teach people not just “Oh yes, this is what a tomato looks like but this is where it comes from and this is how to prepare it and to grow it.” If you’re every other food. Education should be a big part of the coop system. Valuing education above all. Above all the things that we’re doing and every kind of education. Moral education. Spiritual education. Yes, to self-sufficiency, environmental education. Teaching people how to appreciate all the ancestors who came before them and to live in peace with others and to pass it forward. Pay it forward. As we set an example if the elderly were totally focused on teaching the younger generation instead of going cruises to Alaska and you know then that will show them, “Oh this is what I’m supposed to do when I’m old. I’m supposed to take the stuff that I’ve learned and teach them to the younger generation instead of just flying around but that what our culture teaches people right now that’s the to do and if you go to a school and say can I help out they’ll just look at you funny and like you don’t really fit in here what are you talking about. We have to restructure so many things and I think a lot of those answers were common sense answers if we're able to sit down in a round table discussion with our neighbor and say, “Well, doesn’t it make sense to do things this way? Yes, it does. Why aren’t we doing this way? I don’t know” then well suddenly make that shift. There’s so many things we’re trapped in our current socioeconomic system that’s driving us into this massive defense spending so every country can be armed to the teeth against other countries. If we keep down this path, you see what going to happen. Not for a minute besides just the global warming aspect of it. China. What if China decided they want to have all the nuclear submarines that we have? Just so they can have parity with us. What if then India decided and then Pakistan decided they want all those. Look at all the close calls we had just with the United States and a few other countries having nuclear-equipped submarines. Then the long-range bombers. We can’t keep doing this every country can’t have all those stuff. We really need to tone our spending on military way, way, way, way, back and invest in things that really matter.

[01:43:06] Ashley James: Invest in the quality of life.

[01:43:08] Troy Reicherter: Quality of life, education commonsensical things like that. Infrastructure and above all I often think of it like that movie Apollo 13. Where those guys were stuck in space and they weren’t sure if they make it back or not so they made a little replica of the unit down on earth they said, “Here’s all you guys have to work with. Make it work just keep figuring out until we figure out how we’re going to make that space ship get back here.” Well, we're in a spaceship, spaceship earth. We’ve go to figure out how to make it with what we’ve got. They’re telling us within another decade or so if we don’t do something we may have passed the point of no return in terms of carbon emission. That’s just one thing. Look at the pollution we were just talking about earlier. Just think about in what is the last 40 years, sperm count has dropped to 50%, keep going at that rate who’s going to be able to have kids anymore? There’s a lot of things that were just getting worse exponentially and we need to stop it right away. As that teenager, Greta Thunberg said in Sweden the girl who’s refusing to go to school one day a week because there’s not being done about global warming she says, “You have to treat a crisis as a crisis and right now, we’re just not treating this as a crisis.” My book is many things. It’s philosophy, it’s an explanation of what we know about the way the universe really works. It’s an explanation of how all the religions relate to one another and they’re really all one big thing that can live the adherence which can live together in peace and should. It’s a blueprint for getting to work, make associations and one day cooperatives that people can live on to make that world peace start to come about. If that becomes a dominant model, it's spiritual based self-sufficient coops around the world instead of everyone kind of “every man for himself. I’m going to get a  job. I’m going to get that paycheck. Get a big house and environment be dammed while I’m driving my gas cars around and everything else totally unsustainable system. It’s not going to be pretty and so we have to think about not just today and tomorrow but our kids and our grandkids and our great-grandkids what are they going to inherit from us if we don’t start to thinking seriously about these bigger issues because the bigger issues are there right on our face now. The future is now. We can’t say, “Oh, we’ll do it in the 22^nd century.” Can you imagine what kind of bad dystopian science fiction movie you’ve seen that look likes the world is going to look like? Like Elysium or one of those other ones where the whole world is basically just a giant or Wall-E, where the world is just garbage. That’s kind of where we’re headed unless we do something seriously to change. That’s what this book is. It’s a serious attempt to make a blueprint. So it’s called utopia found and it’s coming out just about 500 years after the original book. Utopia. Yes, almost exactly. It is as it says a blueprint for spiritual renaissance and world peace. So I hope you’ll give it a try. It’s on Kindle. The introductory price as we speak is $5.00. May change later. Oh, that book you can print that one up. It's $16.00 currently for a print version. I just ordered two so I can have one of my own but if you prefer the printed version it cost a little more to make them one at a time and that’s $16.00.

[01:46:56] Ashley James: That’s on Amazon?

[01:44:57] Troy Reicherter: Amazon kindle, yes. Amazon yes, kindles like that electronic version and the print version is also there.

[01:47:06] Ashley James: Yes, on Amazon. We’ll make sure the link to Utopia now? Found? I knew it. Utopia Found. I want to say it’s now.

[01:47:16] Troy Reicherter: Remember Eckhart Tolle’s the power of now. A new earth. It’s little like those but I’m not so focused on what each individual person needs to do like in their own spiritual practice exactly. I’m talking about the generalities of the big picture of how things put together. How each religion recommends you do the same things. How we can have a path connect the dots. A path moving forward to actually building communities is that they have to look like if we are going to survive.

[01:47:48] Ashley James: To allow each individual to have their own spiritual practice and not step on anyone’s toes and allow everyone the spiritual freedom, religious freedom. While creating a tight-knit community.

[01:48:02] Troy Reicherter: Yes. I think there will definitely people who will say, “Well, I’m Christian. I only wanted to be around another Christian.” that’s fine but not if we divide the world up into and if everyone did that and you just have Muslims over here and Christian over there then were almost down into like mini civil wars where people would be able to see eye to eye with each other. I think the best thing is that the majority of people or the center if you will, the center has to be able to see all points of view and be as inclusive as possible to other people. That was also in mind when I designed this.

[01:48:41] Ashley James: Awesome. It’s been so wonderful having you on the garden today. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:48:48] Troy Reicherter:  Well, again the book is called Utopia Found. I’ve spent 26 years writing it not that it was all I was doing this time. 26 years of research and thinking and experience. Some of my own experiences and at the end of it, there’s a lot of very positive prophecies. I’ve got over 2 dozen prophesies that I’ve collected for every inhabited continent about the future and they’re all very bright. They all say that there is this new age coming. It would appear some of them are very specific saying like right now in the 21^st century this will happen. They all do say that we’re going to pass through a very difficult period but they all say that we’re going to come out of it in a great state where there will be world peace. I’m talking about from the bible to Nostradamus to Islamic to native American. I have many, many prophesies that I’ve collected. I draw my strength from that when times are tough. I do believe that they could see the future and they’re all saying essentially the same thing that all people from all races will be living together in peace as if they’re members of one big family and even one Chinese prophesy says, past and future will be joined as one and there won’t be cities anymore. As if everyone had gone back to the land self-sufficiently. People of all colors will be living together. I have a lot of hope that that will happen but we have to have a bit of sea of change in our thoughts. Thoughts lead the way and then our actions can follow. We can actually build this better future. So please check it out. It’s called Utopia Found. I’m Troy Reicherter. You can see my author page at Troy Reicherter. It’s R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T-E-R.net with links to the books and same information and links to my other projects.

[01:50:46] Ashley James: I’ll make sure all those links will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at the learntruehealth.com. Troy it’s been a pleasure having you here today. Thank you so much.

[01:50:53] Troy Reicherter:  It’s been fantastic Ashley, thank you so much.

[01:50:57] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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 https://artoflovingcenter.com

The Art Of Loving

https://www.learntruehealth.com/art-of-loving

Highlights:

• Get to know Michelle and Shane Eldston – The Art of Loving Center
• The foundation of a good relationship is friendship
• “Repair attempts”
• Have an “affair” with your spouse
• The difference between love and desire
• Workshops and the Power Weekend sessions
• The emotional bank account
• The Six Hours A Week Homework

A good relationship starts with a good friendship. In this episode, Michelle and Shane Elsdon shares with us the secret of having a vibrant relationship. Get to know their workshop schedules and discover The Six Hours A Week Homework to rekindle your relationships.

[0:02] Intro  

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. Now it is for couples and couples who are married. However, they have some great information here even for people who are no longer in a relationship, in between relationships, or someone who hasn’t yet entered one. It’s just amazing advice. And for those who are in marriages, you will love exploring and integrating the advice that they give today, because it will intensify the love, the connection, the communication, the joy, the intimacy, the romance in your relationship. So you’re just gonna love today’s interview.

I want to let you know, I just got an email today from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. The IIN is the company that I graduated from, I took their online health coach training program to become a health coach. Now you can do this even as a busy mom or working full time. It’s online, they pace it so that busy people can do it in their spare time. Right now, until August 4, you can sign up risk free, zero down. Meaning for 30 days, the first 30 days you enroll, you don’t put any money down. And you can drop out if you decide to, feel like this isn’t for me, you can drop out no problem. So basically the first 30 days of being in their program and just trying it out for you is 100% risk free. So if you’ve been listening to the show, and you keep hearing me tell you how amazing their program is, now’s your chance to get a taste of it totally for free for the first 30 days. And not only that, but they’re taking in instant $1500 off the tuition. That is a huge chunk of the tuition they’re taking off. And that’s both for their paid in full, and for their payment plan option. I went with the payment plan and it was affordable, it was like the same as a credit card payment. So it was very affordable. I love that. When I enrolled, they said to me that because  after the first six months, you start working with clients, and you graduate six months later. So you actually start working with clients halfway through the program. And they told me that the the really successful health coaches have their program totally paid off by the time they’ve graduated. So it’s really that easy to build your coaching practice when you apply yourself. Now with this special, they also give a bonus, you get a course that is almost $1,000 it’s one of their advanced courses totally for free. It’s the How to Successfully Write and Publish a Book. And it’s a self paced book writing program. The second bonus is you get to be on to live group coaching calls led by an integrative health coach. It’s an excellent opportunity for you to experience firsthand what coaching is like and how the transformation process can help you to set your goals and to achieve them. And the third bonus is you get $100 gift card to the Thrive Market which is so awesome. So if you have any interest at all in learning the tools that the Institute for Integrative Nutrition teaches you to be able to be an amazing health coach to take your health to the next level, and to help those around you. Then Google IIN – the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, just Google IIN and it comes right up. Give them a call. They’re really amazing. I love how just kind their staff is, all of them are health coaches. So you’re going to be able to ask them what it was like for them. And let them know that I sent you, Ashley James from the Learn True Health podcast so that you get this special. I’m really excited for you guys and everyone that listens that gets this deal.

Any male listeners that become health coaches, I love mentoring. So if you’d like to also be mentored by me as you’re becoming a successful health coach, please reach out to me. You can write me ashley@learntruehealth.com. I would love to support you and your success, while you’re going through your program and after to help you help others. This is what Learn True Health podcast is all about. It’s helping as many people as possible to gain the health that they deserve.

Now this episode is not about physical health. This episode is about the mental emotional health that is so important when you’re married. If your marriage is not doing so well, the stress of that can drain your magnesium. As Kristen Bowen pointed out to me yesterday when I was talking to her about my interview. Kristen Bowen the magnesium soap lady that I love so much. When we are stressed out from being in a marriage that is unhappy, it can affect our health, our emotional health, our physical health, everything. And so you’re going to love today’s interview because it’s going to teach you wonderful lessons to creating a life full of love and joy. And you keep listening to the Learn True Health podcast and you’ll have a life full of health as well.

So go ahead and call IIN the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and just check it out, completely risk free zero down the first 30 days and dive into their program and see if it’s right for you. It really was life changing for me, so I know you’ll love it. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

—

[6:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 370.

I am so excited to be back in the gardens today. I mean, this whole week has been doing interviews in my backyard, in the garden. And a friend of mine who’s a Mental Health Counselor messaged me, must have been a few months ago. Time really flies. And she said, “You have to interview this couple. This couple is amazing. They help people have fantastic relationships, and they get such great results, you really have to interview them.” And so I’m here with Michelle and with Shane Elsdon, and their website is www.artoflovingcenter.com. It’s so good to have you guys here.

[7:05] Michelle and Shane Elsdon: Thank you. It’s so great to be here.

[7:07] Ashley James: I’m holding the mic. So we’re going to do our best to share it three ways. Who would like to start with sharing your story?

[7:17] Shane Elsdon: I’ll be glad to. So Michelle and I were married. And we live down in Southern Oregon. And I was doing therapy down there in Ashland. We have seven children.

[7:32] Ashley James: Seven?

[7:33] Shane Elsdon: Seven children. Yes.

[7:35] Ashley James: You look amazing, by the way.

[7:37] Shane Elsdon: Our last child went off to college. And when that happened, Michelle said, “Hey, let’s go live in a big city.” And so we started looking around, and we found Seattle. And we decided to come up here and take a look at it. And through our adventure, we found Bellevue and decided to make that our home. So when we came up here, we opened up the Art of Loving Center. And we decided at that time that we were going to try a different little niche. And we were going to approach couples counseling as a couple. So you know, most of the time we hear a lot of people when they’re coming, they’re trying to decide, “Do we want a male counselor?” “Do we want a female counselor?” You know, “Who do we want to have in the room?” And, “How do we want to do this?” And that in itself can lead to argument. So we decided that we would give it a shot to see how it worked with both of us in the room. So we started working together in Bellevue, in the room with our clients. And our clients really enjoyed it. They really liked having that dynamics of both of us in there. Sometimes we’ll do some role playing with them and show them how not to do things or how to do things. And then it kind of kicked off. And we had other therapists started calling us saying, “Is it true, you two are both in the room?” And yes, we are both in the room together. And so more clients, more couples started getting sent to us. At the beginning two years ago, when we first got up here, we were working with both individuals and couples. And we’ve just gotten so in depth with the couples that we primarily just do couples counseling, now we will see individuals over relationship issues. But it’s primarily just for relationship issues. And it’s usually because they either have just gotten out of a relationship, or they’re in the process of trying to figure out some of their issues about keeping into a relationship. So yeah, so that’s how we got started up here together. And the two of us started doing this, and it’s really taken off and we enjoy it.

[9:53] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Well, my friend who has a great marriage herself, said it wasn’t necessarily that she felt like she needed to fix something in her marriage. But that we could all benefit from tools of communication, we could all benefit from making it even better. There’s always room to make a relationship even better, even more compassionate, even more respect and understanding and appreciation for the other person and you know, setting boundaries in a healthier way. So there’s always room for these tools. And so she went to your, she did, she did some kind of workshop with you, where she was blown away, loved it and said it was wonderful. And she herself who has a great marriage has even grown further. So this isn’t just for people who have a rocky marriage, but look at the divorce rates, I mean, isn’t it like 50% of marriages are going to end in divorce? So you know, you’ve guys have an unlimited supply of clientele at your doorstep?

[10:58] Shane Elsdon: Well, I often joke… the joke comes from the fact that people who come into counseling typically are bringing a problem that’s been with them for about seven years. So I always joke and say, if I was king for a day, I would make it every couple has to come to counseling about every three and a half years, whether they’re in a great place or not just to do a little maintenance. You know, we do that kind of maintenance with our health, we go in for checkups with doctors, we take our cars in for general maintenance and checkups. I think it’s a good idea to take your marriage in. And that’s the nice thing about the workshops that we do is for those who, you know, “We don’t need counseling.” Or, “We’re afraid of counseling, and we don’t want to go in there.” The workshops are what we call psycho education. So they’re not counseling, but they’re teaching you the tools. They’re giving you some some new prospects to look into your life and see where you can gain some value and increase some connectivity with your partner that leads to better understanding.

[12:03] Ashley James: And you have a workshop coming up August 3rd and 4th. It’s called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. That sounds really powerful. How did you guys create this workshop? Was it like a light bulb moment? Or was it a long time in the making?

[12:22] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we we both are Gottman trained. And so we studied the Gottman methodology. And so The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is written by John Gottman. And it’s a book and then these workshops are based off of the book. So when the couples come to us to the workshop, they get a workbook and the book. And we kind of go through and just talk about starting at the basis really like we even have premarital couples that come to these workshops, you know, so that they can really get off on a good start. And when you think about it, it’s like you learn so many things in school and, and in your life, but you don’t really learn how to be in a relationship. And so we were really giving you just some basic tools on communication, but also like how to keep and build your friendship. And that’s one thing that a lot of people overlook. It’s like, they just think that, you know, we meet and we’re connected, and we’re friends, and then it kind of starts to wane a bit sometimes. And so staying cognizant of the fact that you need to be friends and work on your relationship by building it, by going on dates, and just having fun with each other like you did when you first met.

[13:48] Ashley James: Yeah. My husband and I will be celebrating our 11 years marriage next month.

[13:53] Michelle Elsdon: Oh, congratulations.

[13:54 ] Ashley James: Thank you. And he’s my best friend, we always say that, like we’re best friends. Like above all else. We’ve had that friendship grow deeper and deeper and deeper. And I see other couples that they don’t do anything together. They basically come home, maybe they eat together one meal a day, sleep in the same bed. But they have different hobbies. They spend most of the work day away from each other, maybe they spend some weekends together, but they’re not best friends. When couples work with you, do they become best friends, or best friends again? Are you looking to create that deeper relationship? Or you just want them to like at least like each other? Like, what’s the goal?

[14:36] Shane Elsdon: Well, science has shown us that the foundation of a good relationship is friendship. You know, one of the things when couples come into counseling, they come in with a problem, and they want to deal with the problems, just solve the problem. And I give an analogy that you know, you and I this is our first time of meeting. If we were to cut each other off in the safeway parking lot, we don’t know each other. You know, we could be flipping with each other, we could be rude to each other. And it’s just whatever at that time, because we don’t know each other. And we have no foundation or friendship between us and you know if we’ll ever see each other again type of thing. But if you and I were childhood friends that have grown up together, if we were roommates in college, if we barbecue every Wednesday together and we had this friendship, when we cut each other off in the parking lot, we may tease each other a little bit about our driving or something to be funny with each other because we have that friendship to do that with. But we would also be more empathetic of each other and more cautious about how we offend each other.

And it’s the same thing in a relationship. When you come into counseling, if you come in and you have lost that friendship and you’re not having that connection with your partner, it’s going to be hard to be empathetic with them, to be passionate with them. And to hear all of that aspect and trying to work through the problem. So oftentimes, when we get into this, we first learned how they’re doing in their relationship; is there a lot of positivity in the relationship or a lot of negative sentiment that’s going on in the relationship? Are they actually interacting and having a friendly relationship? If not, we start with the basis of building that friendship up, we try to get them interacting, being friends, connecting together. And it’s amazing when they start acting as friends. And when they start to build that friendship, then we can enter into the conflict and we can talk about the conflict. And it’s much easier to deal with conflict when you’re dealing with a friend than it is to deal with conflict when you’re dealing with someone that you’re no longer connected with.

[16:48] Ashley James: How can you start to build a friendship in a relationship when trust has been lost? When maybe for the last few years, there’s been fights, there’s been cattiness, there’s boundary pushing, and it feels more like a hostile environment? Maybe it’s a bit passive, but it feels more like a war zone or like dealing with like two different politicians fighting in the home rather than a friendship? How does trust and friendship start to become fostered when there’s that fear that the other person is going to revert back to hurting them verbally?

[17:35] Shane Elsdon: Well, first off, it’s a slow process. And oftentimes couples come in and they want to fix things today. And it’s not going to happen today, it’s going to take a little bit of time. So at first, what we do is we try to get the people to open up and start sharing. We also teach the people to look at themselves instead of their partner. So typically when couples walk in the room, the first thing is it’s, “I don’t have the problem, Michelle’s the one with the problem, you need to fix her.” And of course, Michelle’s over there pointing back at me saying, “I don’t have the problem, Shane’s got the problem.” And that’s how we look at this. And so the very first thing that I tried to explain to the clients is, we’re not here to fix your partner for you, we’re here to help you fix yourself, for you to become a better husband, a better man, a better brother, a better son, a better father, just a better man in the relationship. And for her to fix herself in becoming a better wife, a better mother, a better daughter, girl, just a better woman in a relationship. When the two of them start focusing on what’s going on and then they start to identify what their needs are in the relationship. And that’s one of the key things that we believe is a primary factor of getting us past and getting it started into being able to listen to each other. When we can just find a couple of little needs, and we can start making those needs happen for partners.

[19:01] Ashley James: Can you give some examples of needs that people express to their partner, when they’re starting to open up?

[19:07] Shane Elsdon: Well, a lot of times, they’re going to have just simple needs, like I need a hug, or I just need some alone time, I just need like an hour of quiet time to just gained my thoughts, I need connection. That’s a big one, I need the feeling of connection. And for this feeling of connection, it means that we have to put everything else aside and focus on our partner. So when we focus on our partner we focus on creating this connection with our partner through whatever it is. And oftentimes, you know, I tease our clients and tell them that we have a coupon for him to go get a tattoo and that tattoo we want him to get us across their forehead, and it says, “What do you need from me right now?” And if our partner asked, you know, the need is, “I just I need to connection.” The follow up question that I would ask is, so what does that look like to you? What does that connection look like to you? And that connection could just be you know, “I just want us to spend a little time together.” “I wants to take a walk.” “I want us to hold hands” “I need you to just listen to me.” I just need to vent, not to judge me not to tell me I’m wrong, but just to be an active empathetic listener to me and hear what I have to say.” So, you know, we start out with the basics like this, and trying to work with couples to help them to understand what’s going on and what their needs are in the moment. Okay, we spend a lot of times looking at what we call the ‘big picture,’ or this futuristic picture of something that is a narrative that we’re writing in our head. But it’s not really what our needs are, if we can identify what the needs are that we have right now with what’s going on, and our partners can help us to meet those needs, then we start to feel connected with each other, then we start to feel trust to start to build up again. And trust is one of those things that it takes. It takes a while. It takes not only just the words, but it takes the actions. And it takes that feeling of connection and that feeling that your partner is listening to you, they’re empathetic with you, they’re connecting with you. They’re not fixing you or shaming you, or guilting you, but they’re hearing you and meeting your needs.

[21:27] Ashley James: There’s so many different methods out there for family counseling, for couples counseling. Why did you resonate with the Gottman method the most?

[21:39] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we really like the fact that it’s science based. And so there’s 45 years of research in the methodology of the Gottman work and you know, they studied couples over 10 years and did 3000 couples in this what they called the ‘Love lab.’ And so they had these couples come in and they monitored them. It was basically like a bed and breakfast type situation and they would come in and they would hook them up to EKGs, and do blood work. And then they also had like these scientists behind like a two way mirror that we’re taking notes of their responses to each other, and how they were acting together. And they could leave, of course, and come back because it was a weekend that they did this. But I think from that research, it really built those seven principles of what was working for the couples. And so they kind of had what they called the masters and the disasters after this whole workshop or work that they did. And so the masters were the ones that they kind of pull these seven principles from. And so we really resonated with those. You know, Shane and I in our marriage, we’re doing a lot of those things. And so it really made sense to us that when we read about it, it was something that…

[23:12] Shane Elsdon: Something watching us.

[23:13] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah.

[23:15] Shane Elsdon: Some of the stuff we read was like, “Hey, this is what we said that these guys have been following us.” But you know, that’s the whole thing. Like Michelle was saying, that’s what the masters came from. So they didn’t have these seven things that they taught the masters to do. What it was, is in watching these couples, they found out that these were the seven things that they were doing. They didn’t know that these were the right things to do. They found out that these were the things that they were doing.

[23:41] Ashley James: That sounds a lot like neuro linguistic programming, where Richard Bandler and John Grinder looked at different therapies and tried to find what really works. Like Virginia Satir’s method and Milton Erickson, and they were looking for what really, really works and then they would model it. So what you’re saying is that Gottman and the Love Lab, was looking at amazing couples that had great marriages, and then they found the seven commonalities. And if they could model that and teach it to the disaster couples and disaster couples could transform their marriages. Is that what you’re saying?

[24:20] Shane Elsdon: And the idea is that, you know, just like we go through, and we show the six signs of divorce, that is written in the Gottman’s book, and a lot of times when we’re doing that couples will read through and they’ll think, “Oh, my God. We’re doing all six of these things.” Or, “We’re doing five of these things.” And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean that you’re doomed, and you’re going to be divorced and it’s there’s no hope for you. You’re doing the first step and coming to counseling or coming to a workshop and identifying that, wow, these are the things that we’re doing. These are the things that are creating these problems in a relationship. And so now we can look at, so what are the ways we needed to change in order to have a better relationship? How can we open up to each other in this new way? And again, if you’re 50 years old, and this is the first time of doing this, you’ve been living with this habit for 50 years. You’ve been doing these, this way. If you’ve been married for 20 years, you’ve been living for 20 years doing these habits. So to come into a workshop or to counseling and to think that you’re going to have a session, here’s the tool, now go do it, and don’t make a mistake, that’s not going to happen. Okay, you’re going to make mistakes, but the idea is you have the tools. Now we just need to practice the tools, keep using the tools over and over and refine them as we move down our relationship. Learning new ways to do things.

[25:52] Ashley James: I like that your method has each couple take 100% responsibility for themselves. And in looking at themselves and bettering themselves and also putting that tattoo on their head, you know, ‘what do you need right now?’ And if each couple can take 100% responsibility, then it feels really good. Because I think that’s concern over time it’s like, “I’m doing more than my spouse.” Or you know, “I’m putting more in and they’re not.”Or, “I’m loving them more, and they’re not.” Or, “My needs are being met and his or hers are.” And so going in and going, “Okay, wipe the slate, we’re both going to take 100% responsibility.” I really like that. That also helps to build that trust, I think if both can can say, “I’m willing to commit.” When you were talking about friendship, I was almost crying because I’m my husband and I have this thing that we developed early in our relationship where if one of us was upset, the other one would try to make the other one laugh. I mean, in a way that honors them, right? And in a way that helps to make light of the situation. And then once the person is not about any more than we can talk it through and work it out. And it’s just like that was part of our friendship.

[27:09] Shane Elsdon: Right.

[27:09] Ashley James: Right. Because you can do that with a really good friend. Like you said, the friend you went to college with and barbecue every Wednesday with, you know, you can do little jabs at each other and joke with each other. And if something heated happens, you guys can you know what I mean?

[27:23] Shane Elsdon: Repair attempts. So humor is a great repair attempt. Repair attempts are when; one, you can see your partners in a place. So you use a repair attempt to help them or when you and your partner get off track. Say you’re having a discussion or an argument about a particular subject, and you start to get off track. When you get off track with that the key to the masters is, is that they use repair attempts to get things back on the track, to bring it back to what the actual discussion was about. And the idea is to try to keep the problem about the problem and not about making it personal with each other. So that’s one of the things that we will oftentimes do with couples is we will ask them to remove the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ from their vocabulary when they’re discussing about problems. When you’re discussing an issue of what needs to be done, or what your feelings are, take those words out. First off, it slows you way down, you have to slow way down and think about how you’re saying this, and you can keep the focus on that. But one of the things I did want to go back to was, when it comes to friendship, we believe that friendship is the basis of a good relationship. But one of the things that we also really believe in our couples and this is going to sound, I’m going to make all the listeners out there kind of jump in shock for a second here. But one of the things that we like our couples to do is we like our couples to have an affair when they’re married.

[29:08] Ashley James: An affair?

[29:09] Shane Elsdon: An Affair. Yeah.

[29:11] Ashley James: Like a sexual affair with someone else?

[29:13] Shane Elsdon: No, we wanted you to have it with your partner. This is the thing that we feel is lacking. We fall into love with our partner, we get married and we become best friends and we count on love. Love is that safety. love is that feeling that we come together, you can come home, you know that your spouse is going to be there, you can count on them, you rely on that being there, you become complacent with it. Because it’s accountable. It’s just there. What happens though, is we have a tendency with this friendship – is we have a tendency to lose desire. Desire is the opposite of love. It is not stable, it is not safe, it’s just the opposite. It’s unstable. It’s passion. It’s adventurous. It’s spontaneous. That is what we need to keep alive in our marriages. And that’s the part that fall short. So we ask our couples to date each other. But when we have them go out on a date, we want them to take one date a week. And during that time we say when you go out with your spouse, I’ll say husband and wife here, when you take your wife out on the date, we want you to take her out as your girlfriend, not as your wife.

[30:40] Ashley James: So like, take the rings off?

[30:43] Shane Elsdon: You know what, it’s funny.

[30:44] Michelle Elsdon: If you wanna play that way.

[30:45] Shane Elsdon: If you want to play that way, you can. But when we when you go out, we don’t want you to talk about your kids, the bills, the house, you know all the things that are caught up in your marriage. Instead go out like you did when you first met. Go out talk about where you’re going to be in the next three years, talk about if you go anywhere in the world, where would you want to go and why? Be adventurous, go make out, go have a picnic. Do those things like you used to do when you first were together. Rekindle the desire in the relationship. And we all do have this kind of multiple personality and the way that we handle our relationships. I mean, you’re not the same person sitting here with the mic in this job as you are when you’re in the room with your you know, child or when you’re at home, being a wife and a mom. There’s a difference of how we do that, we put on our work clothes, we go to the office and we become the work person and we handle that. Well, it’s the same thing in a relationship, we get this complacency where we go back in and we become the husband or the wife. And that’s what we do. And we become, like I said consistent with that. And that’s great because there’s safety in that, that what makes us feel safe.

[32:01] Ashley James: But it’s not sexy.

[32:02] Shane Elsdon: It’s not sexy. And it keeps us feel safe. It keeps us in this spot to where we start forgetting about things and we lose certain parts of it. Again, we do have that safety love of each other. You know, we’ve been married for 20 years, we love each other, we have that. But we start to lose some of that passion and desire. So if we keep it alive, I personally think you should do one day to week where you are boyfriend and girlfriend for that date. And no, I’m not saying you have to take off your ring. If that works for you then go for it. But I’m saying that you act in that way. We’re going out, you court each other. You know, you send your husband a little note about your date that you’re going to have tomorrow night, you send him a flirt full little text and tell him that kind of stuff that you want to do. You know, and spend maybe a weekend a month where you take off. Michelle and I will go out and we actually will in a playful way we will go out to the car and when we start our weekend away date and we’ll act like we’ll do this little like striptease where we take off of our husband and wife clothes and we throw those in the garage and we put on our boyfriend and girlfriend clothes and we get in the car, we go away for the weekend. And we are boyfriend and girlfriend. We don’t talk about the kids. We don’t talk about the bills or the house or the office or any of that stuff. We just go and we have fun. We do the things like we did when we were younger, we explore each other in a new way. And we keep that part vital and new. And that’s what I believe husband and wives really need to do. And it’s amazing to me to watch couples when they come in and we give them the spice and just like your eyes got really big. When I said have an affair, you’re like what, wait a second.

[33:45] Ashley James: This is not that kind of podcast.

[33:49] Shane Elsdon: “I got an idiot in here, what is he talking about?” You know, but the idea is to have that affair with your spouse, have that moment where you let go of that and you keep that passion and desire going. And that’s what we want to do and we want to see. And when we see our couples, when they start holding that, when they start having that kind of fun and they start bringing things back together, we start to find that couples really start to interact better. And it’s amazing. You know, when we talk to our couples about having sex with each other, and we open up and talk about sexuality with our couples – when they start having those kinds of interactions with each other. And I’m not saying that sex is the answer to everything. It’s not. But it sure does help bring couples together.

[34:35] Ashley James: Why? Why is that? I mean sex isn’t sex isn’t love. And that’s something that women, I think all women around the world keep telling their husbands. Because I think men are very physical, and they associate love and sex but I could just be too serious, be me.

[34:51] Shane Elsdon: I joke and say women are like ovens. Men are like microwaves. Women need to be, like an oven they need to be preheated. Men are like microwaves, you just have to press the button. Okay. And the problem, I believe with sex and in general with the couples is, you know, typically when a couple goes into the bedroom for sex, they go into the room and the male is already excited and he’s there if he has an erection. He’s already at about a six on a one to 10 he’s at a six when he walks in the room and he easily gets to the 10 and that’s over. When the woman gets into the room, she comes into the room about a two. So she needs to be warmed up. She needs to be brought up. The idea behind this is to start… I don’t know if you’ve ever heard Esther Perel. She often talks about this – foreplay. We’ll ask couples when does foreplay start in your relationship? And oftentimes, they say when we walk in the bedroom, or when we get into bed, and it’s those couple of activities that we do right before sex and as she stated, and I agree completely. Foreplay starts right after your last orgasm. That’s when foreplay starts. It’s sending each other the texts the ‘I love you’ the ‘thinking of you,’ ‘you look really sexy this morning when drool was running down your cheek onto the pillow.’ You know, it’s ‘you look good in the shower.’ It’s walking into a meeting and sending a text, ‘Hey, I missed you.’ It’s coming up behind your spouse and giving him a kiss and asking if you can help him cook dinner, do the dishes. It’s being flirt full, that’s the foreplay that gets things going, that’s what brings us up into that mood to go.

And that’s what’s lacking a lot of times, which I believe is why a lot of women feel the way that you were starting to explain. So the idea is, and again, I want to go back, I’m not saying that sex is the cure for everything. But I am saying that when you look at couples that come in, that are having sex, and who have a good healthy sex life, they come in with a good working format with each other to work with each other in a way that they can interact and get through a lot of their issues and problems.

[37:15] Ashley James: What about when one of the people in the relationship or both has had trauma – sexual trauma in their past? And that impedes them from having that deep connection with their spouse?

[37:31] Michelle Elsdon: Well. I think, first of all, we’ve run across some people who haven’t really shared that information with their spouse, and so then it’s very confusing to the spouse on what’s happening or why they’re avoiding sex. And so I think the first step is trying for that person to make sure that they’ve been able to work through it and get counseling and kind of understand why they feel the way they do and to kind of get better within themselves first. And I think that that’s been amiss on some people’s part where they’ve just tried to push it down and kind of stuff it way inside. And so they think that it doesn’t bother them, but really it does.

[38:16] Ashley James: And their spouse can then take it personally like they feel inadequate, but it’s really the other person has insecurities because they’ve gone through trauma. But that’s why, like you’re saying they need to share with their spouse.

[38:33] Michelle Elsdon: And some people think that it doesn’t bother them. Like it was a long time ago, it was in the past, it doesn’t bother me. But it is kind of spewing out in little pieces and in avoidance and not wanting to have sex. And they don’t realize that that’s really what’s happening. So that’s kind of the first step. And then the next step would be working with each other. I mean, you don’t have to have intercourse to be connected and have sex. So maybe you start out with some sensate or just cuddling, so that it’s not so dramatic for somebody who’s had that experience that they’re having a hard time with.

[39:16] Ashley James: What was the first thing you said?

[39:17] Michelle Elsdon: Sensate. So it’s like where you kind of touch each other’s arm and kind of rub in like circles. You know, it’s kind of like a massage technique in a way except instead of it. You know, typically when you think of massage, it’s like on the back. It’s more like maybe on the arm, you know, you’re just kind of lightly touching.

[39:38] Shane Elsdon: It can be over all parts. In the office, we will have clients that we will sometimes just give them, like I said, we’ll do a little role play where we’ll give them an example of where we just do it on the arm, you know, it’s just we learned to touch each other. So, again, when we talk about sex, of course, everybody wants to go to the you know, penile-vaginal intercourse, and that’s the sex. Sex isn’t just that. Sex for a lot of people can be a lot of different things. So first, it’s to identify what is sex to a couple. So we have couples and for instance, like the [inaudible 40:15] have the saucer cards. And if you look, there’s one, two, and three pepper and if you look at the one pepper is often for some people, sex to them and getting back into sex can be maybe, you know, sitting under a blanket holding hands while they watch Netflix together. And that’s their night of sex. And for somebody else, maybe it’s going to an adult shop and buying a toy and being playful with each other. Sex is to whatever it is, it’s you as a couple. So it doesn’t have its confinement of this is what it is to be sexual. And the idea is to identify what sex is between the two of you and then to start working from there.

The idea of just learning how to touch each other and talk about each other and to learn that. And this is something that we find with couples, and you were asking about, like somebody who’s had sexual assault or something in their past. We will do a sexual assessment with them and we will find out a lot of sexual history. And it’s amazing when couples start to open up about it and it really will change even the partner. The partner who used to feel that, “Oh, you just don’t love me.” You know, “I’m trying to do this, and you just don’t want to be with me.” And then when they start to understand what’s going on, they can have a whole new look at how to approach things, how to identify different ways of dealing with stuff. And that’s where you start to learn about your partner. It’s amazing to me at how much partners don’t know about each other. We have clients that have been married for many, many, many years. I’m talking many years, and still cannot ask each other for sex. They just don’t understand how to do so. They aren’t able to talk to each other about it. And interestingly, there was some studies done, we did actually a study few years ago. Public displays of affection. There you go, PDA. Sorry, I couldn’t think of the name. All of a sudden I went blank. During that we were looking at some other studies. And we found out that there were some studies out that showed relationship happiness. And relationship happiness was they looked at couples that had great communication, but horrible sex. And then there were couples that had great sex, but horrible communication. And interestingly, the study showed that the couples that had great sex and horrible communication actually scored higher on relationship satisfaction than the couples who had great communication, horrible sex. But interestingly, there was another group, the group that scored the highest of all was the couples that had great sexual communication. Those couples scored the highest on relationship satisfaction and think about it, if you can talk to your partner about your sexual needs, probably going to have a lot less hard time telling them you forgot to mail the Visa bill, you know?

So to be able to talk about those things, and we all have an erotic self, we all have an erotic person in us that drives us. And it drives us through our every day who we are. Again, I use the word erotic and we think in the bedroom in that, but who are you erotically in other aspects of your life? Maybe somebody you know, when they give speeches, they become empowered, they feel at their fullest. And that’s an erotic state that you’re putting yourself in. When you get into that erotic state, who do you become? And learn to share with your partner and how the two of you can then manifest that into your relationship, of having this good relationship together, where you’re sharing with each other.

[44:10] Ashley James: I want to know how long have you guys been dating each other?

[44:14] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we’ve been dating each other since the day we met, really.

[44:19] Ashley James: You never stopped? You never had a low time in your marriage or did you know about the Gottman method before you got married? I mean, has your marriage always been great?

[44:29] Shane Elsdon: Well, our marriage we feel has been great. We didn’t know of the Gottman method before but as I said, remember the couples that went through and became that were labeled the masters, they didn’t know what the Gottman method, either. They were practicing these techniques. And that was why I think it was kind of interesting when we were reading it. It was kind of like, “Hey, they’re following us.” It’s because they were reading things that we were saying like, “Hey, we do this.” “This is what we believe.” “This is what we’ve been telling people. “You need to be like this.” “You need to be doing this kind of stuff.” And that’s what the tools were. And that’s actually what they found in that Love Lab.

[45:08] Ashley James: So the two of you were the lucky couple that were naturally doing so many things right. So many things that make a marriage work. My husband and I have always felt like we were a team. We’ve been entrepreneurs together. So we run a business together like you guys, right? And we’ve been best friends and been married and it feels like marriage is more than just one level. Right? It’s many levels of intimacy and connection. Share with me before you guys knew about the Gottman method, you were just having a great marriage, did you look around and see that you were so different from other couples? It doesn’t sound like you had to work on it. Can you just share a bit about the quality of your marriage before you sort of consciously thinking about the things that you’re doing right to make a good marriage?

[46:10] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. I think for the two of us, we really take the time to listen to each other and we always have. And I think just having that presence of mind to listen to the other person and try to understand their point of view and to do some of those repairs like Shane was talking about. He’s really great with humor, which makes me laugh. Sometimes even in an argument, he’ll just pipe out like, “Give me a kiss.” And I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “Give me a kiss.” And it’s like, okay. Yeah, and it just changes my whole perspective. So humor and some of those things, I think just kind of came naturally for the two of us. And I think that that’s a lot of it. Just taking the time to listen, to have fun together, to not take life so seriously. And also, one thing that we teach in the workshops is keeping a positive perspective about your partner. And I think that that’s where people can kind of get in a problem – is when you start down a negative path. And so you start thinking of all the bad things that you don’t like about your spouse, or your partner, instead of thinking of all of the positive things of why you got together with them in the first place. And so when you get into that negative perspective, where that’s all you can think about is, you know, he never picks up his socks, or she never helps me with this, and then you build up this ugly resentment. And so remembering to stay positive with each other and think of all of those reasons why when you first met, like, why you fell in love with each other and to keep that fresh. It’s really important.

[48:04] Ashley James: It’s really easy to accumulate over the course of a marriage, sort of a tab of all the wrongdoings, all the things that they don’t do, kind of like having a bad roommate. Right? Because that’s what it is to a lot of people in a bad marriage. It’s kind of like having a roommate that doesn’t pick up after themselves in a way.

[48:30] Shane Elsdon: That’s one of the things that we do. Remember, I told you there’s those six signs where you’re heading towards divorce. One of the last signs is what we call ‘rewriting history.’ And that’s where you start going back in your relationship, and you start looking at details. And then remembering them in a negative perspective, you start remembering the negative parts. If you think about everything that you do, there’s a positive and a negative outlook that could be seen in all of them – even going out having a good time, someone can sit there and start to look at, “Oh, but it was so expensive.” And oh, you know… and you can find the things to look negative. And that’s when we get a negative perspective with our relationship. Like what Michelle was saying, when we get into that spot, and we start rewriting history, we start looking back at things where instead of seeing it as the fun we saw it, we see it as the bad parts of how it was. And when that happens, that’s the part where we have to change. We have to start using some tools to regain that positive change, and start having positive thought processes about our partner. About our partner and about our relationship. And I think, you asked questions like how are you guys in your relationship stuff? Part of it is we’ve always just kind of kept our relationship a priority. And it’s not something we work at, but it also just kind of sometimes we just have fun. We just try to have fun, even with the kids and as much chaos can go on, we just had fun with doing it. And that’s a big part of it, having fun, being spontaneous. Being spontaneous with each other, keeping things alive.

And again, remember, when I went back and talked about the affair, I talked about the difference between love and desire. And that’s where desire also comes in, is when you’re having that fun, you’re making each other a priority. And you’re you’re seeing each other from that other light. We’re always going to have the fall back to. We’re always going to be able to go home, and, “Oh, gosh. We got to get the dishes done.” “We got to get the kids in bed.” “We’ve got to get that.” But then we can look at the fun parts of it, where we can have the little funs along the way. And that’s the part where I think it’s really important. And that’s the part that falls out in couples, or quite honestly, we have a lot of couples that it’s not that it fell out. It’s that no one ever told them to do that. And so they got into the relationship, they start having a relationship, and they’re doing the work of a relationship. But they forgot about the whole idea about having fun with the relationship. And we get caught up because so many things divide us. We get married, we are together, we are right there together. And of course, we’re on the radio, so you can’t see the visualization of my hands coming apart. But we get married, we have a kid. And that separates us a little bit, it gives us a cushion in between, it gives us something to focus on. And we get a career and then we get a mortgage. And then we get car payments, and we get everything else. And by the time you know, 20 years goes by, we’re standing out here at arm’s length apart from each other, and we’ve had this cushion that we’ve patted each other on. But then all of a sudden we retire, the kids go off to college, or they go into their own relationships, and we’re both standing there basically like strangers. And it’s amazing to me how many empty nesters we have come in. Because now they don’t have that cushion, that focus that they always kept themselves on. Now, they’re just looking at each other. And they’re strangers. That’s why we believe you have that affair. You keep your girlfriend or your boyfriend – you’re husband and wife, but you keep that part alive as well. So that when the kids are gone, when the careers are over, you’re standing there with someone you know. Your girlfriend and boyfriend, you’re standing there together. And that means also that the husband and wife, the other personality in you also is familiar with each other. Because those different personalities are still in the same you. And so you have a better understanding of each other when those emptiness times come together.

I mean, Michelle and I are now empty nesters, that’s when we moved up here to Bellevue as we became empty nesters. And so now we’re up here and we’re having fun. We’re still doing all kinds of fun stuff, we go out together, we kayak and we do those things together. Now it’s important and it’s okay to have your own individual things. Michelle’s an artist, and she likes to paint and do stuff like that. And I can’t draw stick figures, you know, to save my life. But it’s okay to have things and to do things together… I mean, individually, but it’s really nice when you can do things together. Michelle loves art. She likes to see museums, to be honest with you. If I never set foot in another museum again, it wouldn’t be too soon. They don’t ever put those black velvet Elvis Presley pictures and dogs playing pool up, you know, so what’s the point, right? But, you know, Michelle and I went to Italy a couple years ago, and she has all these pictures of the art. I literally have like 600 pictures of Michelle taking pictures.

[54:08] Ashley James: You’re his art.

[54:11] Shane Elsdon: You know, I enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it. And that, but I also got to enjoy seeing the art through her eyes. And that was what was really interesting. I enjoy riding a Harley, I like to get out and Michelle rides with me on the Harley, she gets to see the world through my eyes on that. And so we get to enjoy those things together. You know, I mean, if I was to pass away tomorrow, I doubt Michelle would drive a Harley. But we do it together because we enjoy it. And it’s not I have to, it’s because we enjoy doing those things and seeing our partner appreciate those things. And that’s the part that I think is important. You don’t have to, “Oh, great. Michelle likes to paint, I gotta go take paint classes, and I gotta learn how to paint.” No, I can still throw paint on the screen and not be able to identify what it is, but I can have fun watching her, and that’s what’s important.

[55:05] Ashley James: A friend of mine in marriage counseling said she felt like the therapist was always siding with her husband. And the two of them were kind of beating her up. And I imagine it’s a very different scenario working with you as a couple – the two of you, because you’ve got the male and the female, the wife and the husband perspective as counselors coming in and helping that couple so it’s more balanced. Do you ever find that, Michelle, you’re taking the wife side and your husband’s taking the husband’s side? Do you ever see that, like you just see totally different perspectives in an argument?

[55:40] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah, we do sometimes. And I can understand what the woman is saying, and Shane can kind of identify more from the man’s perspective where he’s coming from. But interestingly, sometimes it’s the opposite. Where the guy will connect with me more, and the woman will connect with Shane more. And I think sometimes that has to do with our personalities. I’m a bit more of an introvert and shades a bit more of an extrovert. And so in understanding that thought process when couples come in, and there’s situations where maybe the introvert is needing more individual time or quiet time, and the extrovert doesn’t quite understand, like I can understand better, because I’m a little bit more similar to that. So I think that’s another way that Shane and I sort of balance each other out is because we are a little bit different personality as well. And so we can kind of see our couples from that perspective as well.

[56:46] Ashley James: I definitely recommend listeners, if they want amazing counseling, to see you guys. Do you only work in person, or can people do Skype sessions with you?

[56:59] Shane Elsdon: We primarily just work in-person. We will do some Skype sessions with people in the state of Washington, like if they’re from Yakima or Spokane or something like that. We’ve had a few couples that have called us for Skype sessions. But primarily, we do it just in session. We like to keep things local. And we’ve had clients that have driven here from a lot of different places. We have clients that drive up from Olympia. We had one client that called and set an appointment where they were in Idaho, and they had called and came over for the weekend to see us. And the workshops that we do, this workshop that’s coming up, we have people coming from Canada, people coming from Oregon, people come from all over the place. We get some locals as well, but we get a lot of people from a lot of different areas. And we do it usually at a hotel, we’ll have the conference room where we do it and then we get rooms at the hotel where the people coming to the workshop can get a room there and be able to stay for the weekend and make and make a weekend out of it. Make a date weekend out of it and have fun and get away from the kids. So they can come in and learn on Saturday and have an affair with each other that night and then come back into session on as husband and wife on Sunday.

[58:27] Ashley James: I want to talk a bit more about your workshop weekends. And I also want to talk about your Power Weekend. They’re very different. I want to talk about both of those. And then I’ve got a questions about the Gottman steps. So first, how many times a year do you do these workshops?

[58:53] Shane Elsdon: We do them about probably six times a year. Yeah. Every other month? I mean, we kind of are practicing with them up here in the sense that we found that some months, people just don’t go to them, and other months that they do. So I would say we do about six a year. Yeah, that every other month. We have one scheduled in August, at the beginning of August. And I think our next one is October that we have set up. And then I think we also have another one in November afterwards. So kind of a back to back one.

[59:28] Ashley James: And my friend highly, highly recommends it. She loved it. How long have you guys been teaching these workshops together?

[59:36] Michelle Elsdon: We’ve been teaching them for two years now. So we’ve really had fun doing them. And our workshops are a little on the small side. And which we really enjoy because we’re able to focus on the people that attend and give some individual attention. So when we do the breakout, so we have like so much your time. And then we have, sometimes where we show you a tool and Shane and I will show you how not to do it, and then how to do it like a role play situation. And then everybody will do a breakout. And they’ll go with their partner and go into the lobby and stuff. And then we walk around and kind of help people learn how to use the tool, make sure they’re doing it right. And if they have questions or struggles then we can help them out. So it’s nice for us to have a manageable group that we are able to go and see everyone. So that’s really kind of unique, I think with some of the other workshops where they’re a little bit bigger, and it’s harder.

[1:00:43] Ashley James: Could you share some stories of success? Obviously, not talking about names. But can you share some outcomes that have really excited and surprised you from people taking your workshop?

[1:00:58] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. We’ve had some people that come to the workshop, and they’re there just really paying attention. And we never know, for sure what people’s thoughts are, while they’re there. Like some people are tired or, they’ve driven a long way. We’ve gotten emails and responses from people about, they go back home, and they start doing the tools, and they’re so excited, because it really is life changing. And we’ve helped a few couples that have come to the workshop that were it was sort of like their last ditch effort – where they were either going to get divorced, or they were going to keep… Yeah, even hired attorneys. And so I think that to me was really just amazing. That workshop was able to help the couple enough that they were willing to give each other a second chance and stay together. And some of the couples had been married 25, 30 years. I think that’s really cool that they were able to come and learn the tools and really make a commitment to each other to do them and have some happy results.

[1:02:20] Shane Elsdon: Several couples, the workshop was the opening that they needed to enable them to come to counseling. So we’ve had several couples that have went to the workshop, learn the tools, and then called us a month later and said, “Hey, can we come see you guys?” And then they come in and see us for counseling, and to continue on. And that is actually where you’re going to get your best results. Michelle likes to say when you go to the workshop, we put a lot of information out and she says, “You know, it’s like drinking from a firehose because you’re just being overwhelmed with a lot of information.” And the tools that you get, you get a workbook, there’s the exercises we go through with them, we help you. But then when you go home, oftentimes we will forget or will miss some of the more intellectual intent of the workshop, or of the tool that’s being used. It can sometimes cause more arguments or more fights, so then coming back to us. And and then sometimes, you know, these tools that we have, they’re great for getting us through there. But if you have some history that’s underneath and behind it, and sometimes we have to dig into that, and we’ll have to get into that history. But that’s where we change roles, though the role at the workshop is we’re education, and so we’re just doing psycho education, we’re not there as your therapist. When you come into counseling afterwards, then we’ve changed the roles and we become therapist. And that’s where we’ll change the roles in that part and move into that aspect.

[1:04:06] Ashley James: So you have these workshops, and then you do counseling individually, people can come to you on a weekly or monthly basis. But then you have these Power Weekends, and I find them to be so unique. Which one of you wants to talk about the Power Weekends?

[1:04:20] Michelle Elsdon: I can start. So the Power Weekends are really more of an individualized attention on one couple. And so, there might be a couple who lives out of state that wants to come and work with us for an intensive two or three day period. And so we set aside the time to work with couples in that format. And we go over a lot of these tools that we’ve been talking about, and also find out what’s going on, if they have some individualized things that they also want to focus on them, we can do that. And then we also have some couples who are just super busy, like they’re traveling all the time, their schedules don’t connect, and they have a really hard time coming in to counseling.

[1:05:10] Ashley James: On a weekly basis.

[1:05:10] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. On a weekly basis, just because of their work schedules and stuff like that. And so they asked to have just these intensive Power Weekends where they come in and really work on something that they need to work on. And then of course, we share with them, the tools that are maybe specific to their needs. And it’s really individualized to the couple. So with the workshops, it’s a little bit more broad for the people that are there. But for the Power Weekends, it’s really individualized to that couple and we set up like before we even do the weekend, we send out a questionnaire and have them fill it out. And then we have some assessments and then we do some individual phone calling or in-office appointments, depending on if they live locally or not. And then we do the weekend, and then we follow up with some sessions as well.

[1:06:14] Ashley James: Do you notice that you get better results, when couples do the Power Weekend versus just counseling over time, or is it really just depends on the couple?

[1:06:24] Shane Elsdon: It depends on the couple and the Power Weekends are kind of a specialty tool. I don’t necessarily see them as in place of, they’re because of a specific. Like Michelle was saying there either one, there are a couple that wants to come and work with us and they’re from out of state or something. So they come to us, or it’s that high task executive that does a lot of traveling, and they’re really caught part, where their schedules just won’t line up. And so we’re trying to give them, there is much more of an intense focus on what it is that they’re trying to work on. So that’s why we give so many assessments and questionnaires going beforehand to come into it. And you know, it’s not one that is going to be something that if like, say there’s affairs going on, or there’s some addictions or something that’s going on. Those we would probably not take them in for that kind of a Power Weekend, that’s going to take some more counseling besides just what we could do in that Power Weekend. So basically there’s like an interview process to find out that this will work for you. And there’s some people that it just won’t work for you, or I mean, it would be a waste of time, you know, really to come in and do that. And there’s things that have to be focused on before they can get to that point.

[1:08:01] Ashley James: Give me the format of what the Power Weekend looks like for a couple.

[1:08:05] Shane Elsdon: Well, that’s sort of individually. So it depends, again on what they’re coming in for. But on our basic, on our three-day one, it’s going to come in, we’re going to meet them Friday. Usually, the four of us go away somewhere. So we usually go to some type of retreat, we will go over the process of what it was that they are trying to get from there from this weekend. And then we start with them, let’s just say on Friday, we’ll start with them on Friday. And we will take them in the direction that the assessments and their questionnaires have shown us where they want to go. And then we incorporate tools that are needed and the counseling that’s needed for that. But the thing about the Power Weekend is each one of them is individual to the couple. So there’s not really a directive of saying like, well, this is how we do it, it’s because it’s really directed towards the couple and the intensity of what they need.

[1:09:11] Ashley James: So it’s not that they’re being in a counseling session the entire weekend.

[1:09:16] Shane Elsdon: Well, no. I mean, it’s it’s six or seven hours a day. I mean, we’ll take a break, we have lunch, there’s dinner, there’s homework that they do in the evenings. We are there so that we also stay at the same place. So if during the homework, if there’s some roadblocks that come up, then they can get us as well. And we’ll help them through those roadblocks. But it’s all three days. And like I said, there is a time where they’ll go to dinner, they’ll go on a date, they’ll go to dinner, afterwards, they’re going to go home, they’re going to work on some of the homework then we’re back in there in the morning again. And we work on it all day long. Taking a break here and there going to lunch, those kind of things, but we work on it, a good six hours every day.

[1:10:11] Ashley James: You know, and as Gottman deciphered the seven things that really successful couples do. As you’ve been doing these Power Weekends with couples, helping them to transform their relationships, what insights have you seen, or what like aha moments have you had that has strengthened your ability to counsel people and help them build stronger relationships?

[1:10:39] Shane Elsdon: So I think we probably get more insight from our counseling sessions than the power weekend sessions. Just because of the intensity of that we’re in, in a Power Weekend. A Power Weekend is pretty intense. The sessions that we see where we’re getting the C people that are working through stuff on every day, I think some of the biggest insight, is what you were asking, I think some of the biggest insight that comes from it is probably the intensity of what people are not willing to work on the relationship. It’s amazing to me to watch people come into counseling, and yet not want to actually do the work. That even though they’re they’re coming into counseling, they’re putting in the time, or they’re putting in the time of coming to the session, they’re still not putting in the work into what it is that they’re working on. It’s it’s kind of like taking homework, and yet you’re given homework, you go home and you don’t do it.

[1:11:48] Michelle Elsdon: Yeah. We’ve seen couples that have come in that seem like a disaster. Those couples that I’m thinking of, they worked so hard with the homework, and they came in every week and talked about, what they were doing and how it was helping and it was amazing to watch the transformation. Where there’s been other couples that seemed like, “Oh, well, they just have a few little things that they need to work on.” But it didn’t seem to really get better. Because we would be like, “Well, how was the homework?” “Oh, we forgot to do it.” “Oh, we got busy with this, that and the other thing.” And so I think one of the most important things about coming to counseling is to really have that commitment to each other and that you’re putting your relationship first because that’s why you’re coming to counseling is to make it a priority. And if you can’t make it a priority, because you have the kids, things, and your work, and the house. Yeah, basically the excuses, that it’s sort of like wasting your money. Because like Shane said, it’s like going to college or something and never doing the work and then expecting to have a good result. You know?

[1:13:10] Ashley James: And that seems like not doing the homework sounds like a symptom of what they’ve already been doing which is which is not prioritizing their marriage. How do you how do you like slap them around and get them to prioritize their marriage?

[1:13:24] Michelle Elsdon: Well, we’re kind of like the teachers in the way of reminding them how important the homework is. And when they do the homework, maybe they have a week where they did it, and then we really can see a difference, and we talk about that. And wow, we can really see a difference in how you’re interacting with each other. It is amazing to watch them come into the counseling room, and they seem happier, and more connected. And then when there’s those weeks where they haven’t done the homework and some couples do really great. And then they just have a couple of weeks where they fall off. But you can really tell when they walk in the room, we’re like, “Uh-oh.” It looks like we haven’t had a good week, you know. So I think it’s the reward of the couple can see it themselves. When they do it, they’re like, wow, we can really tell a difference.

[1:14:23] Ashley James: It sounds like results based therapy.

[1:14:29] Shane Elsdon: As Michelle said, they can walk into the room, and we can just look and say like, “Yeah, they’ve been doing their homework.” You can just see it. And as she said, two or three weeks will go by and you’ll see him they’ll come in and it’s like, okay, they aren’t doing it right now. And you know, it’s that thought of like wow, it was working so good. We just decided we didn’t want to do it anymore. It’s kind of one of those feelings of like, Okay, what happened here? And again, there is that part of that commitment of where you’re making your priority something that’s going to be there, and relationships take work. I wish I could say they didn’t, but they do. Relationships do take work. You know, it’s like being a parent. It’s easy to become a parent. But it takes work to maintain and be a good parent, you have to be involved. And the same thing with a relationship, you have to be involved. If you want to maintain a relationship, you have to be involved, and you have to put in work to it.

[1:15:35] Ashley James: Well, now what about couples who are no longer together? I have several friends who are divorced, but that they have children, and they’ve chosen to be good parents and be good sort of team members to continue to have a friendship for their kids, because they have that common goal. Have you ever worked with couples that aren’t married anymore, but want to have good communication and be good parents?

[1:16:02] Shane Elsdon: We have had couples that have come in not quite to the extent I feel that the question is going with where they’ve been divorced for a couple of years, and they’re coming in. But we have had couples that have come in because they have decided they were done. They were getting a divorce, but they wanted to find out now how to do good co-parenting together. And so we’ve worked with them about that. We’ve worked with couples who as we said, they already had their Divorce Attorneys, when they came into us, they started working with us on their marriage. And as we have kind of point out to them – if you’re going to do this right, it’s going to take as much or more effort and work to co-parent apart as it will to parent together. Because if you’re truly going to be the parent you need to be for your child, it means that you still need to be respectful to your other partner, you know, we don’t want to be talking bad about our partners in front of our children, we want to be respectful to them. We want to teach our children how their mother or father should be treated so that they can have that same example set for them. And then it also means that when there’s additional parents get added into it, your partner gets remarried, you get remarried, now we have to have this same relationship with four of us instead of just two of us. So quite honestly, it’s just as hard or more work with getting divorced as it is staying together, if we’re really going to be co-parenting and good parents with each other. So there’s a lot of effort and work that goes into it in doing that. And in reality, when we add in the aspect of children into it, part of the thing is, is to understand that we need to teach our children how they need to be in a relationship. We’re giving them a good example of what it looks like. So we need our daughters to know how a man should treat them, and how they should treat the man. And we need our sons to know how they should treat a woman and how women should treat them.

And we do that by giving that as an example, as a husband and a wife. I have said this to many clients, we have never had a couple come in and sit down and say, “You know, my parents were so loving, and they got along so well. And they were always touching each other and kissing and laughing and talking and oh, I don’t even want to say what we heard coming from their room and all this kind of stuff. And I think that’s why I’m so screwed up.” We’ve never heard that. But we have had lots of couples come in that say, “Well, my parents shoot. I mean, I’ll be they had sex once because I’m here. I hardly can remember seeing them in the same room, let alone talking. They never talk, they were always arguing when they did talk and they fought, and I think that’s why I’m so screwed up.” We have seen that a lot. But we don’t ever see it the other way. And so, we try to help parents to understand that that’s the realm we have to be looking at too as we’re parenting – that we’re setting examples and teaching our children how to move into relationships as well.

[1:19:29] Ashley James: Speaking of which, I’d love for you guys to teach some or at least explain some of the steps of what Gottman discovered, what the disasters are doing. So we can identify it if we have that going on. And what are the, what was the other one?

[1:19:51] Michelle Elsdon: Masters.

[1:19:52] Ashley James: Disasters and masters.

[1:19:53] Shane Elsdon: So the seven steps that they were talking about is that what we find with the masters is that they build love maps. They share fondness and admiration, they share positive perspective, they have good conflict resolution, they know how to do conflict, they share dreams. And they also share purpose and meaning in life.

[1:20:26] Ashley James: What’s the love map?

[1:20:27] Shane Elsdon: The love maps are, these are the things that we have with each other. It’s how we know our partner, it’s what we know about our partners. So I like to think about like those Randy McNally maps, you know, think about a roadmap.

[1:20:42] Ashley James: Okay, the old school.

[1:20:47] Shane Elsdon: The old school. You know those paper things that we used to have? And even if you look on the GPS, so those bright red lines that are on the GPS on those maps, those are the big things, those are like I-5, the 405 – those are the big freeways. So those are the common easy things to think about. Those are knowing who your parents are, where you were born, what neighborhood you grew up in, what school you went to Then you have the smaller ones, the black highways, those are like Highway 2 or Highway 20. Those ones, those are a little smaller. Those are now I know maybe who your best friend was in school, what kind of classes you hated or didn’t like in college, what’s your favorite professor, those kind of things can we get down to this even smaller roads. And as we go, each one gets more personal; what your favorite foods are, what your favorite animal is, your favorite tree, favorite kind of flower. And we keep going until we get all the way down. And hopefully a couple has a roadmap that their love maps are so setup that they’ve got those dirt roads and back alleys. And that’s we know our sexual fantasies, we know what makes our partner tick and what turns them on, and those kind of things. And the thing about it is just like on your GPS or maps, they are constantly redoing them, your GPS constantly needs to be updated. And that’s because so does the love maps, things like where you were born, that’s not going to change, but your favorite food, I imagine your favorite food now is probably not the same as it was when you were in high school or the same when you were five.

So those things are changing; the things that you like, the things that you desire. Those are constantly changing oftentimes. We play the role play, we’ll do it like, “Oh your two best friends.” And your best friends can change. It’s like, “Oh, these are your two best friends.” “Well actually, no. They passed away a few years ago.” And as a partner, sometimes we don’t even know that because we’re not paying attention. So the idea is to constantly be touching base with each other, to check in with each other, keep familiar with each other. In relationships, it’s not the big things that have the biggest impact, it’s the small things. Those are what create the emotional bank account. And for some of us, we make a lot of withdraws out of the emotional bank account. I’m referring to myself there, you know, I can screw up real easy and, and really hurt that emotional bank account. So I constantly want to be putting into it. And those emotional bank accounts are the little things, they’re staying in touch with your partner, they’re keeping current on what they’re like, what’s going on in their life, it’s telling them I love you, it’s bringing them the little flower, it’s holding their hand when you’re walking down the street. Those are the things that add to that emotional bank account, that’s what really makes things happen in a relationship. Going to Hawaii, that’s great. It’s a big investmentment, it can have a real high payoff, but it doesn’t last. A week after your back and it’s forgotten. And and it doesn’t have that fulfillment into the relationship, like the little things do.

[1:24:15] Ashley James: What kind of little things do you give examples or suggest to couples who don’t really know where to start?

[1:24:23] Michelle Elsdon: I think it’s just paying attention to your partner and what they like. Maybe you’re going to the grocery store, and you pick up their favorite ice cream and bring it home as a treat. Or you stop by and get the dry cleaning that normally they get, but you do it as a favor. Or you pick up something around the house that you know will make their evening easier, or you draw a bath for your wife and have a glass of wine sitting there because she had a hard day at work. And when she called she told you on the phone or you know, so it’s just being thoughtful and paying attention to what’s going on with your partner. And little simple things like putting a sticky note on the mirror in the morning, if you leave before your partner and you put a little I love you or do a little hard in the steam and the shower. And it’s just sweet, fun little things. They don’t have to cost money. It’s just more about being thoughtful.

[1:25:30] Ashley James: And if both people are doing it to each other, then I can see how that would build the desire and make it more and more fun. Because it’s surprises, like you said, it’s these little things. But how romantic because they’re, they’re surprises. And examples are showing that the other person’s thinking of them. I’m sure you guys have heard of the love languages, this idea that some people need to be given gifts to know that they’re loved. And some people need to be touched to know that they’re loved. And some people need to be told. Have you seen that this is true? Do people know that they’re loved from all of these different things?

[1:26:09] Shane Elsdon: No. Definitely we see couples react with the love languages. And most people don’t know what their love language is and there are the five love languages. And that’s covered in the book that we talked about. And I think one of the important things,it doesn’t get in depth about on the love languages is knowing what your partner’s love languages as well. For instance, my love language is touch. And Michelle’s love language is words of affirmation. Okay. And so if Michelle wants to give me love, one of the things when she reaches out and holds my hand or when we’re in the car, and she caresses my ear, or puts her hand on my leg, or when we’re you know, sitting on the couch watching TV or something that she just puts her hand on me. I feel loved, that may make me feel loved. That really draws me into her. Now, if I want to give Michelle love, what do you think I probably do?

[1:27:08] Ashley James: You probably touch her.

[1:27:09] Shane Elsdon: I go over and I touch her. So I’m this pervert that’s groping her and hugging her and grabbing her. It’s like, “What are you doing? Gosh, why are you always doing this?” And until she understood that, “Oh, that’s his love language. Oh, he’s not being a pervert. He’s actually trying to share his love with me.” And then she can remind me, “Hey, I see what you’re doing. This is great.” But remember, my love language is words of affirmation. And so when Michelle is in a place, and I want to give her love, I need to remember to try to give her that love in her love language so that she can understand it, giving her those words of affirmation, touching her in that way. And it’s when we do that with each other, we’re more receptive. And it’s very interesting to watch it. Because when you do have those, identify your love language, and you do give your partner love with their love language. It’s interesting to watch how they react. It’s like, you go out and buy him some thousand dollar gift and they’re like, “Oh, thank you.” And then you give them this really heartfelt words of affirmation, and they’re in tears. It’s like, “Really?” I could have just told you that and saved 1000 bucks, you know? And for me, gifts is my lowest on the score. When I took the test. That’s my lowest. And quite honestly, when I get gifts, I feel uncomfortable. And it’s like, “Okay, how much thank you do I say?” “Did I say too much. Am I overdoing it? Am I not doing it enough?” I just feel awkward. And I don’t feel the love in it, you know? But like I said, when I’m sitting there and she starts scratching my head, it’s like, okay, what do you need? Well, what’s going on here? You know, it really touches. And so we do think that the love languages work. You were asking what are some of the small things, there is a tool that we use, and we teach all of our couples to do it, we teach them in the workshop, and we teach them in our sessions. And it’s a tool that comes out of the Gottman’s book also. And it’s the six hours of…

[1:29:13] Michelle Elsdon: Six Hour A Week is what we call it.

[1:29:17] Shane Elsdon: Yeah. Six Hour A Week Homework. And basically it’s a group of things to do that you and your partner are each responsible to do. And when you add it all up, it takes about six hours of time throughout the week. So it’s not any lump sum of six hours, it’s 20 seconds here, it’s six seconds here, it’s a 20 minute thing here. Doing those steps throughout the day really helps. And it’s amazing to watch couples, that you give them the assignment and we’ll just challenge and say, “Look, just go and do this for a week.” Just practice this for a week and come back and tell us that something didn’t change. And it’s amazing to see what it does.

[1:30:02] Ashley James: Can you share some of the homework with us?

[1:30:05] Shane Elsdon: So in the morning, we like our couples before you leave, in what we call the partings – before you part ways, so in the morning before you go off to work or your husband goes off to work, there’s three things that we want you to do. We want you to one, give each other a 20 second hug. Okay, 20 second hugs, releasing oxytocin in the brain. This is that bonding agent and this is what kind of draws us together. We want you to give each other a six second kiss. Now think about six seconds, that’s a real kiss. And then we want you to have basically a two minute conversation. But during this conversation we don’t want it to be while you’re brushing your teeth and he’s down making toasts in your hall or down the hall. We want you to actually stop. Take those two minutes time, stand in front of each other look each other in the eye. And it’s a simple conversation. What do you got going on today? Your partner shares for a minute what they got going on. Then they ask you, what about you what do you have going on today? This interaction with each other where the world stopped, you look each other in the eye and you share what’s going on with each other. Then we want you, when you get home after work within about a half hour after getting home. We want you to do another 20 second hug, a six second kiss and a 20 minute conversation where you’re going to de-escalate, you’re going to get rid of all the outside stress in the world. You know the garbage that went on at work, that horrible traffic on the 405, the stuff that you got in the mail, just all that stuff that eats on you or it could be positive you know you got on the 405 and it wasn’t a car you thought it was closed and it was such a great thing and then you won a lottery ticket and you got 500 bucks and you’re just bubbling with all this. If you think about like being a teapot, okay, a teapot, if it doesn’t have a way to vent it’s going to blow up. So that’s what we are. We’re like a teapot we have this this outside stress it keeps building in us and building us and we have to keep spouting it out and spouting out. But if that’s plugged up, it’s going to blow, so this de-escalating conversation just pops the lid off of it and let’s all of that pressure out. So you have this 20 minute de-escalating conversation and with our clients in session, Michelle and I will role play it for them. We’ll show them what not to do, how not to do this conversation and then we show them how to do it. We do this at the workshop as well. And then we want you to spend about five minutes a day sharing with each other affection.

We want you to share with each other sending each other little text, “Hey, thinking of you. I love you.” You know maybe a quick phone call when you’re walking, “Hey, I gotta walk into an office but I just want to let you know I was thinking of you.” As Michelle said, leaving a note on the mirror for your partner, leaving something in the lunch pail or something like that it’s doing that. And it’s not one partner doing it and another partner reacting to it. It’s one partner doing it, the other partner reacting. That partner doing and the first partner reacting – it’s you’re both doing this back and forth. It’s sharing affection with each other. It’s holding hands when you walk out to the car, it’s when you sit on the couch, as we said touch each other , a little pat on the butt as you’re walking down the hallway, the little kiss with each other,  the flirtatious things that we do with each other throughout the day. Spend four or five minutes doing that throughout the day.

Then we want you to take a weekly date, two hours a week, we want you to go out on a date. This is the part that we say this is a little different for us, is that we say we want you to go out as boyfriend and girlfriend. We want you to leave everything else from the marriage behind and go out as boyfriend and girlfriend, have fun. Chase each other around. You don’t have have to spend a lot of money, it can be a picnic at the park, it can be a walk. Stay away from the movies, because we want you to interact. You can go out to a nice dinner, you can spend money or you’re not. And some couples say you know like, “Oh, you don’t understand we have a toddler at home. Babysitters are so expensive, we can afford it.” Fine. Designate time as your date, set up a time, this is our date, the little one goes to bed, you know what, we are turning everything off, we’re having a special box of macaroni and cheese for dinner tonight. We’re going to play games, we’re going to do stuff. But we are designating this time as our date, where we’re going to do it in a special room and make it something different than what we normally do. And so you can do that even at home, you can be playful with each other however you want. And then lastly, we’re what we want you to do is check in with each other with the State of the Union once a week, we want you to check in with each other. And what are you doing right in your relationship? And what do you need to work on? What do you need to improve? Not what you did wrong, just what do you need to improve? And when you add all that up, you’ve spent six hours on your relationship that week, and you’ve done things that are going to really draw you together.

[1:35:27] Ashley James: Thank you. That was very well said. Could you clarify like how to do the State of the Union, the weekly meeting, how to do it and how not to do it? I can really see I mean, in my own head, I can see myself doing the blame game, “I didn’t like it when you did this, and you didn’t pick up your underwear or whatever. But I know that’s not how to do it. It’s not about blaming the other person. But you’re saying it’s about celebrating what worked that week, and also then acknowledging what’s not working, so you can work on it.

[1:35:57] Michelle Elsdon: Correct. So we suggest maybe designate a time each week that you’re going to do it. So you’re both kind of aware of the time. And you know, maybe it’s Sunday morning in bed, you have your cup of coffee, and sit down and kind of start off with like what you think worked. And from your perspective of what worked for you, what you really appreciated about your partner and things that you noticed. And I think that goes a long way by just saying, “Wow. You know, I really appreciated those little notes that you put in my lunch.” Or that, “You sent me extra text this week.” A lot of people don’t communicate all day long. So those extra things are really special. And then as far as what we have to work on, it’s really nice to talk about, from what you saw that you did. So instead of talking about what your partner did or didn’t do, it’s really better to say, “I really messed up this week about this and I’m going to really try harder to do XYZ.” So instead of saying you did this, it’s kind of like what Shane said earlier about not saying ‘you’ or ‘your’ in this particular situation. It’s really better to focus on what you saw, that you could improve on versus what you think your partner should improve on. And I think that’s a little bit better way to go about it. Because then your partner will also probably talk about the things that maybe you are going to bring up but it will be less critical that way.

[1:37:33] Ashley James: So I see what you’re saying. And what if someone has a boundary that their partners crossing?  How do they address it without the blame game? So I’m going to use the example of one partners leaving clothes all over the floor, because that’s an easy one. But the other partner really, it’s just their pet peeve, they really don’t like it, they want him to put in the hamper or do the laundry. Is that when they would bring that up in the State of the Union? Or should they bring it up just at the moment that they see it? Like I’m just, “I’d like to change this thing that you’re doing.” Or how can we change it? So how would they address that?

[1:38:13] Shane Elsdon: Well, the focus of what your question is, is you’re saying I need you to change what you’re doing. And what we like to try to do is focus on fulfilling what your needs are. So to identify what your needs are, and then coming up with a plan. So the idea of, we’ll use the laundry on the floor – I would come to Michelle and I would express to her that I have a need. And this is what my need is. And when we get into these kind of conversations, this doesn’t have to be during the State of the Union, this can be throughout the week, if this is something that’s becoming an issue or a problem where as you pointed out, you said you’re starting to feel discouraged. And as we bring it up and we like to use a three step plan in how we bring this up to our partners. So it’s, ‘I feel about what and I need.’ And the ‘about what’ is the problem. And we want to make sure that we keep it up. So the ‘about what’ in this case is the laundry on the floor. That’s the problem. Now what we have a tendency of doing is wanting to make it personal. So what I mean by this is, “Okay, so the problem is the laundry on the floor, you always put your laundry on it.” Now I’ve made it personal. It’s no longer about the laundry, it’s about you. Or, “I’m always the one that has to clean up the laundry.”

[1:39:40] Ashley James:  And then there’s that resentment, and possibly seven years of built up resentment.

[1:39:46] Shane Elsdon: And so I made it personal about me, I always have to clean up the laundry. Okay. So the idea is – the problem is the laundry. That’s the problem. So if we can keep the personal part out of it and focus on the problem, how do we come up? So I have a need. So I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling overworked. I’m feeling discouraged. I’m feeling unheard about the laundry and the socks on the floor and you know, the clothes laying out. And I need for us to come up with a plan, I need for us to come up with a schedule of doing the laundry, or I need for us to get us to get a bigger hamper, so that it’ll hold all of our laundry or whatever the needs are to fulfill that. I’m sorry. Whatever the tools are to fulfill that need. And then we express that with our partner. So you notice in that example that I just gave at the end there, I never made it personal. I didn’t make this about you or about me. The idea is about the problem. How do we focus on getting rid of the problem and dealing with that? And those are your needs. What is your needs? And if you if the two of you are going to sit down together and hear each other’s needs and understand each other’s needs, then we can come up with; one, how to fulfill each other’s needs or two, how to come to compromise about those needs. And how we can come to what would be a working situation for us. And that’s ideally what we’re going to come up with.

[1:41:22] Ashley James: So it’s I feel about what I need. It sounds like it reminds me of nonviolent communication. Is that where you got it from?

[1:41:34] Shane Elsdon: This is a Gottman tool. It’s another tool that Gottman’s have if using conflict management.

[1:41:42] Ashley James: Got it. Conflict Management, of course. I think that’s a tool we all need in our relationship. That’s great. What’s your favorite out of all the seven? Do you guys call them steps or tools? Principles. Thank you. Out of the seven principles, which one is your favorite?

[1:42:03] Michelle Elsdon: I guess my favorite one is really probably the love maps and the friendship part of it. Because I think that’s the part that is so easily forgotten. Especially in not really the newer relationships, or maybe the premarital couples, you know, they may not quite get it yet – what we’re talking about, but for everyone else, I feel like that, that really resonates the most with everyone because it kind of gets lost in the shuffle of life. And marriage becomes a business instead of a relationship. And so getting back to the friendship and the relationship part of it is that’s really the foundation of the whole principles that we talked about. And so to me, that’s why it’s my favorite, because it’s really the one that I think is overlooked the most.

[1:42:57] Ashley James: And what about you? What’s your favorite principle?

[1:43:01] Shane Elsdon: You know, I like the fondness and admiration and I like the positive perspective. And I think primarily because I’m a positive person. And I like to focus on fondness and admiration, on the things that I like about my partner, on the things that I like about us doing, the fun. Keeping that positive perspective. When I catch myself in a bad place, I find that I am slipping into that negative perspective. And so I have to remind myself to be positive. And I have to remind myself of why I love my kids, or why I love Michelle, or why I like this relationship. Or why I like myself? Why is it that I do what I do? So I will remind myself of that positive part. And so in the seven principles, I think fondness and admiration and positive perspective is probably my favorite.

[1:44:11] Ashley James: I love it. I’m so interested in learning more and diving in. This has been such a great introduction into this. Can you paint the picture of sort of a couple that’s in trouble? The couple that’s in disaster, so those who are listening can go, “Uh-oh, I see a few of those symptoms in my marriage, it’s time to time to turn it around.” Can you paint that picture of the common things that they saw in the disaster couples?

[1:44:37] Shane Elsdon: Well, you know, first off in communication, it’s couples who they call it the four horsemen. It’s using criticism, using defensiveness, using contempt using stonewalling. When you’re using those conversation patterns, those are going to be detrimental to communication. The first initial just watching how couples start conversations, using harsh startups instead of softened startups. That’s something we see immediately what happens when couples come together. If we see that when they start talking and they start using harsh startups, that’s going to be something where the conversation’s gonna go bad. You can just see it’s going to go bad in those ways. Like I said, the criticism, contempt stonewalling, defensiveness, those are all big predictors in bad relationship problems. Failed repair attempts are a big one where you talked about your husband and it has a humor, but when he starts to use that, and they’re not being accepted, those repair attempts aren’t being accepted. That’s another sign that we’re going down that path where there’s those six signs of divorce, and that’s the next step in there. It’s the rewriting of history, it’s where we start seeing that negative perspective, start talking about things that are negative, start remembering the history of things that were bad, you know, just our whole thought processes is in that negative prospect. And then the last and final stage is just when we start living parallel lives. You know, it’s like we aren’t interacting, but we’re just kind of living together. And we’re running that parallel lives together.

And, you know, those are the signs where when you see the couples or the listeners right now, when they’re looking, and they say, “Yeah, we use these, you know, these are the things that we’re doing and stuff.” It doesn’t mean that it’s over. But it means that you need to get help, it means that you need to come in and change some things. You need to learn your conversation patterns, you need to start interacting and communicating. I would want to get into looking at how all of that is and then how connected are you? How is the erotic you and you as a relationship? Are you and your spouse, are you guys being intimate with each other? And whatever level that intimacy is with each other. Are you being intimate with each other? Intimacy is an enormous one. To me it is, like I said, it’s not the fix all, but it is huge in a relationship. And when the intimacy isn’t there, it needs to be brought up. And even sometimes people say, “Well, what if I just don’t feel like it?” Well, you know what, put on your Nike’s and just do it.

[1:47:47] Ashley James: But intimacy, like you said, that doesn’t mean penetrating sex, it can be touch, it can be you know, it can be soft words, it can be hugging, it can be cuddling, it can be holding hands. It’s putting the wall down, putting the defenses down, opening up, being vulnerable, being connected, and wanting to be energetically connected to the person.

[1:48:17] Shane Elsdon: Yeah. It is that connection at whatever level each couple. And we have couples that come in that have been married for 20 years, and they report to us, and when we’ll talk to them, and we’ll ask them how their sex life is, we’ll ask them the quantity and the quality and all of that. And we’ll hear things like, “Oh, no. We haven’t been intimate in 12 years, 14 years.” And you know, they’re not having sex, they’re not being intimate with each other. And they’re not even living as good roommates anymore. They’re now just kind of living as bad roommates. And that intimacy is something that keeps that roommate part of us away, keeps us together. It’s amazing to me, when you look at, like the normal bar study, where they look at couples who are reporting being satisfied and having great marriages and great sex lives, and that the things that they’re doing. They’re telling each other that they love each other, they’re being intimate with each other, they’re buying each other little erotic gifts for each other, they’re taking each other on erotic vacations with each other, they’re spending time turning towards each other instead of away from each other. They’re spending quality time constantly trying to connect together, that’s what’s going on with the couples that are having those relationships. And when we see couples that come in, that are having great sex lives, we see coming are intimately together and having great sex lives.

It’s funny when those couples come in, it seems more often than not that they are having situational issues that they need to get past. That’s what they need help with, it’s situational issues. We have this particular thing that’s going on, and we just need help getting past it. That’s what they’re coming in for is a situational. The couples that have no relationship, they’re not having intimacy, they’re not being sexual with each other, they’re not being close. When those couples come in, and are looking at, it could be there’s some situational things, but then we find there’s all these foundational parts of it that aren’t there in the relationship. And they’re basically just living as roommates. When they come in, and they have the conversation, we hear them talking to each other in ways that are just non-relationship ways. They’re just two strangers or two friends talking.

[1:50:57] Ashley James: I can see why your website is artoflovingcenter.com. I can see why now. I get it. It really is about fostering that love, that connection, and you’re taking away the blame. I think a person in a relationship that wants to fix it is worried that a part of counseling is going to be a blame game, or they’re going to feel very vulnerable, they’re going to feel like their ego gets bruised. And that they’ll get defensive. A lot of people feel defensive when you know, “Hey, let’s do some counseling. Let’s go to marriage counseling.” Then the other one gets all defensive. Like there’s nothing wrong with me, you need to get fixed. There’s nothing wrong with me. But you guys are gentle and loving. And it’s just tools you want to give the couple, it’s not about blame. It’s not about bruising the other person’s ego. It’s not about dragging them through the mud of the history of the relationship and everything they did wrong. It’s about what they can start doing right – right now. And it’s very practical. I like how practical it is. It’s so cool. It’s been wonderful sitting with you guys today. Is there anything left unsaid? Anything that you want to share with the listeners to wrap up today’s interview?

[1:52:19] Michelle Elsdon: No. I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered most of the things that we do in our work together. And I would just say, if you’re concerned about your relationship, and you’re afraid to go to counseling, then maybe try a workshop. It’s less threatening, and it’s kind of just a class. And a lot of times we hear that there’s one partner that really wants to get some help, and the other person really does it. And so I think that the workshops can be less threatening for that person that’s really not wanting to do it. And they come away with a lot of tools, and then maybe that helps propel them into the counseling that they need. Or maybe it just helps them on their own to kind of have a springboard to go forward.

[1:53:09] Ashley James: I love that your workshop is the Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work, and that it is psycho education. It’s not a replacement for therapy. It’s not counseling, but it is teaching the couple all the tools that they can apply every day, you’re giving them the homework.

[1:53:25] Shane Elsdon: Correct. Correct. And you know, one thing that I think it’s important, if in a couple, one partner says, “I think we need counseling.” And the other partner says, “No, I don’t think so.” – You need counseling. If a person is coming to you, and they’re expressing that they feel that they need counseling, they’re expressing to you that even though you may not be identifying a problem, that they’re feeling that there’s a section that there’s a problem. We get couples that come in all the time where they say, “Well, I brought this up before. I brought this up before. And now I’m at the point where I’m ready to quit.” So if your partner expresses to you that they need, they want help, take it serious. You may not see the issue, but they’ll see the issue. And you need to go in and talk to find out what these issues that they’re feeling are.

[1:54:22] Ashley James: Beautiful and that it’s not threatening, especially if they’re going to work with you guys. Because it’s all about fostering love and and for the men listening it could be great sex, right? Great love and intimacy. www.artoflovingcenter.com. I definitely urge listeners to check out your workshops. The next one coming up is August 3rd and 4th. So it’s just around the corner, but you do them every few months. So they can contact you on the website and see.

[1:54:51] Shane Elsdon: They can sign up directly on the website. They can call us to set it up or there is a signup page right on the website. There’s a few seats left in the August one and then yeah, we do them periodically.

[1:55:04] Ashley James: Wonderful. Thank you so much. You guys are welcome back on the show. Anytime you want to come teach.

[1:55:10] Michelle Elsdon: Thank you, Ashley. It’s been really wonderful meeting you and we love your show. So thank you.

[1:55:16] Shane Elsdon: And thank you very much for having us on and we do love your show. Thank you.

—

Outro:

Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Ntrition.

I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I defnitely recommend you check them out.

You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in.

Be sur to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible.

I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals.

There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.

So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you.

Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them now and check it out.

And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

—

Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price?

For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplemnts are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price.

That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com

Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected With Shane And Michelle Elsdon!

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Recommended Reading by Shane And Michelle Elsdon

The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work by John Gottman

Become A Health Coach-Learn More About The Institute for Integrative Nutrition's Health Coaching Certification Program by checking out these four resources:

1) Integrative Nutrition's Curriculum Guide:
http://geti.in/2cmUMxb

2) The IIN Curriculum Syllabus:
http://geti.in/2miXTej

3) Module One of the IIN curriculum:
http://geti.in/2cmWPl8

4) Get three free chapters of Joshua Rosenthal's book:
https://bit.ly/2wgkLOU

Watch my little video on how to become a Certified Health Coach!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDDnofnSldI

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Ashley James
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Troy's detox experement results: https://hhresearch.org/current-experiment

Learn more about Sunlighten Saunas by listening to this interview with their founder, Connie Zack: https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlighten-saunas

How To Eliminate Cancer-Causing Chemicals

https://www.learntruehealth.com/cancer-causing-chemicals

Highlights:

• Toxicants that bioaccumulate
• The body is not able to recognize the chemicals in our environment
• Activated charcoal and detoxification
• Gene expression
• Troy Reicherter’s experiments
• Fasting
• Re-feeding after the fast

Ever afraid to try fasting? In this episode you will learn about the benefits of fasting in detoxifying the body. Know what toxicants are and the damage they can do internally. Troy Reicherter will also share with us his fasting journey and reintroducing food after a long term fast.

Intro:

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have a really interesting guest coming back on the show. In the last two years, he spent over $20,000 in lab tests to determine whether he was detoxing chemicals, like he calls them toxicants; artificial pesticides, you know, chemicals, environmental pollutants, basically, which are very hard to get out of the body – PCBs. These fat soluble toxins that accumulate in the body and that are now known to cause cancer once it reaches a certain threshold in the body. So in the last two years, he has done numerous things and experimented on himself. He’s done supplements, he did 109 sauna sessions, and several long water only fasts. Then he took his blood tests every six months to determine what works, what doesn’t work. And today, he’s here to share his results, his ongoing results, as he’s been on the show before, and he will come back every few years because he’s going to continue doing these experiments, and he has people who want to participate with him. So it’ll just keep growing into case studies. It’s amazing that no one around the world is doing this research. Because if you think about it, research dollars come from wanting to invent a medicine, right?

Universities so far has been willing to experiment on how to detoxify the body naturally of these horrible chemicals that get accumulated in our body and cause disease and wreak havoc on our health. And so he’s basically the first person that he knows of, that is doing these types of experiments. So it’s really cool to learn from him today. One thing he mentions, because again, he did 109 sauna sessions, and tested his blood levels to see if it was working among all the other things he was doing. I want to let you know that my favorite sauna, and I’ve been using it with great results for the last year and a half. It has been the Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love it, I really noticed the difference.. And if you’ve been a longtime listener, you’ll know my story. I was having this toxic overload happen every time I went to lose weight. So as we you know, we store these toxins, these toxicants in our adipose tissue, and my liver was not able to handle it to manage it. And so anytime I went to lose weight, I would get very sick, my liver would become inflamed, I went and got liver tests and ultrasounds and blood tests and determined that it was a very, very angry liver, and my body would just become so sick that I would be almost bedridden from this toxic overload. So I got a sauna after being recommended by several Naturopaths that the best way to remove toxins from the body is to bypass the liver and the kidneys is through our skin. Our skin can sweat out even these fat soluble toxins. And so I’ve been using the Sunlighten Sauna successfully. I’ve been having amazing results. The first thing I noticed my skin became very soft. Because it has the anti aging properties.

The Sunlighten Sauna, which is the three in one sauna has near mid and far infrared and these rays will stimulate collagen production. So it’s great for beautiful skin. But I noticed that I slept better, I had more mental clarity, I had more energy, I was so much more relaxed, and my body started to shed weight without having the toxic overload that I had before. So I’m very excited to tell you that I believe in the Sunlighten Sauna, it’s ultra low EMF, it is non toxic. It’s very easy to assemble. My husband did it single handedly. And so you can get the wooden one or you can get the one that is a solo system, which you’re able to put in your closet when you’re not using it. I recommend that you call Sunlighten and talk to them, see which unit is best for you. And make sure you get the Learn True Health listener discount, you get free shipping, that’s about $500 off because these units are quite heavy. So you get free shipping. And right now they’re giving us an additional… It’s hard to explain but it is very relaxing. It’s it’s a machine that they put in the sauna and it uses light and sound to turn on the healing response in the nervous system. And they’re finding it works really well with people with anxiety, high stress, and even post traumatic stress. So that is something that is wonderful that they’re gifting us as well. So give Sunlighten a call. Mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James for those wonderful discounts. And if you have a Sunlighten Sauna and you’re having great results we want to share with me please feel free to email me ashley@learntruehealth.com, I’d love to hear your experiences. I’ve had dozens of listeners contact me and tell me that they’re having such wonderful results with it. And also because you can even sweat on lower temperatures. It’s great for kids, my back when he was three and now he’s four, he sits with me in the sauna till he’s ready to get out. I don’t keep him in there for a whole half an hour, but he will sweat in the sauna, which is so great to help the children to detox as well. Excellent. Will enjoy today’s show. As I know you will have yourself a fantastic day.

[6:10] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 369. Well, here we are in my backyard garden, sitting here with Troy Reicherter and we’ve had you on the show before you came over to my house for Episode 138. So listeners can go and check that out. And since then many things have happened. And I’m excited to uncover them here today. Welcome back to the show.

[6:45] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for having me. It was two years ago, wonderful to be back.

[6:49] Ashley James: It’s amazing how time flies. It’s pretty crazy. But that was just two years ago. So, what interests me the most when I met you at the Unity Church, you were doing an experiment, you like doing experiments. Do you consider yourself a scientist?

[7:08] Troy Reicherter: Well, I have a master’s degree in traditional Chinese medicine. Technically, that’s a Master of Science degree. But no, I’m not really a career scientist or anything. I’m kind of a citizen scientist, if you want to put it anyway.

[7:23] Ashley James: I like that citizen scientist. So you were experimenting on a few things, you were looking to form enough people to come together in the Seattle area to pray and meditate on peace over the summer, two years ago to see if we could impact the amount of crime or the crime rate in the area. And you’ve also been experimenting for the last few years on fasting, water only fasting and testing your different levels of pollution, chemicals and pesticides that are really hard to get rid off, to see if you could use fasting and a clean diet and some supplements even talk about today to help to eliminate the body of heavy metals and pollution. And so now it’s been two years later, you have some remarkable information to share with us.

[8:20] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Well, this experiment started back in 2015. When I had read a lot of articles about the things in the body, including heavy metals. I had to pick and choose what I could test for, I would have loved to have tested for heavy metals for flame retardants. But I finally had to narrow it down to two main things. So what I was testing for was pesticides. I think they measured 13 different kinds and then PCBs, of which there are I believe 207 different varieties. So it’s not exactly water only fasting, it’s a modified fasting, and I can describe the things that I did. And I started out just believing that there must be a way because mainstream medical science right now is telling people that there’s no known way, or no safe way to get these chemicals that do bio accumulate out of your blood. Now some chemicals don’t bio accumulate. And so like the phthalates, plastic softeners for example, within a few days they leave your system or the stuff that you get from those plastic water bottles or from receipts, you know.

[9:45] Ashley James: Bisphenol A?

[9:46] Troy Reicherter: Bisphenol A, yes. That leaves your body within a few days, depending on how it’s taken in, maybe a week. So some things do leave the body like arsenic, but then other things do bio accumulate like heavy metals, and DDT, PCBs. So those are the things I’m testing for, and decided to do this fast to see if I could get it out of the body. So that was my whole thesis is that there must be a way to do this. And actually, I am the first person to prove that this can be done. So this is pretty remarkable. Everybody said I was crazy to do it. Everybody said this, how is this going to work? These these things are so lipophilic. And that means that they bind with the fats in your body, and they’re just not going to be released. Because of my experience with fasting that goes back to 1993. I was just very convinced that when you’re fasting, so much of the fat is lost, and it’s throwing toxicants out into the body. And by the way, the word toxin is used by most people to describe these things. But that’s not actually correct. A toxin is actually a toxic substance, that’s made by a living organism. So like a spider’s venom, that’s a toxin. So I’m going to try to use the right word toxicant, which is either either an element like a heavy metal that’s toxic, or else a man made chemical. So these toxicants get thrown out into the blood and I was thinking they must be leaving the body at pretty large rate during a fast. So I was just sure that if we did this and measured, because these tests are very expensive. I’ve spent over $20,000 so far on the eight tests that I’ve done on my blood, and I could use some help pay for the rest. With the donations I have. I’ve set up a website and a nonprofit called Holistic Health Research. But these tests haven’t been done before, and the assumption was fasting wouldn’t work. So that’s what I was trying to prove. So in 2015, I began the whole thing with three-week fast. And you met me in 2017, I guess it was after my second fast. Yeah. So to go back to I guess, to just kind of recap what I knew then, when I saw you last time I had the results of the first four blood tests in. And they’re interesting, but they’re a little bit confusing. I discovered later a little bit misleading. Because what happens is more complicated than I realized. So my initial blood measurements for the PCBs was 71,000 parts per trillion.

They give some of these numbers in parts per billion, and I’m adjusting by adding, you know, adding three zeros. So 71,000 parts per trillion, was actually much lower than what most people seem to get. The other results that I’ve seen, for people’s blood is usually much higher than that. There was a test in a family in Oakland back in 2005. And the littlest boy in the family, he had 355,000 parts per trillion, a little girl, I think she was like eight; 207,000 parts per trillion. And then dad had like 200,000 parts per trillion, mom was the lowest she was actually a little lower than me, 67,000 parts per trillion. Can you guess why the mother might have had the lowest rating?

[13:24] Ashley James: I’m gonna guess because she breastfed. And so she gave the toxins to her kids.

[13:28] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. Yeah, that’s the theory anyway. We don’t know what she had before that. But that’s the only known way right now that scientists or doctors will tell you to get rid of these things from your body is to have kids and to breastfeed. Which, of course, is horrible, right? I mean, who would want to do that? You’d rather keep it all yourself, or even intensify your own levels than to give it to your poor child. And what’s doubly worse is the kids are more vulnerable to these chemicals as they’re developing. So it may be that they’re 10 times more vulnerable, we don’t really have a way to gauge that yet, you’d have to do all kinds of experiments. That would be totally unethical. But the funny thing is, we’re doing these experiments on ourselves right now. And there is no known way besides that to get rid of this stuff. So, so these were my beginning levels, which were pretty low compared to other people, 71,000 parts per trillion for the PCBs. And then for DDT, it breaks down into a bunch of smaller groups of chemicals. And the largest group by far is called 44DDE. So it’s basically DDT with a slight change in its molecular structure. And my numbers there were not quite as high, it was 56,000 to start out with. Again, which is about like one quarter, or one fifth of what the average person seems to have. And I can only guess that’s because I’ve tried to eat vegetarian for a long time. Tried to eat organic for a long time. And I’ve done a lot of fasting in the past. So that’s my best guess as to why my numbers are lower than other people’s. Because these these toxicants – they definitely are higher in meat, especially seafood, and dairy products, for sure.

[15:13] Ashley James: Right. And the understanding is that when animals consume, so let’s think of a cow, a lot of people eat beef. We now raise corn to feed the cows. It actually really disagrees with with the cow’s stomach. Some people have even said cows are allergic to corn. And so then they have to be put on a lot of antibiotics because they constantly get infections. So they’re eating all this corn that we’ve raised. This is not organic, just talking about standard, you know, fast food, hamburger kind of meat. We raised this cow on the corn that is latent with pesticides and heavy metals. It’s all concentrated in their fat and their meat – significantly concentrated through a few years of eating pesticide latent corn. And then we slaughter that animal and turn it into a hamburger and you go through the drive-thru. And you’re eating that patty and the fat in that patty is concentrated pesticides. And so no wonder when we eat meat that we’re eating concentrated toxicants. We’re eating concentrated toxicants. We’re eating the flesh of animals, because we’ve been feeding them toxicant latent food for years.

[16:41] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, that’s right. I mean when you when you delve into the subject, you’ll really feel that we should take just a fraction of the money that we spend on the military or sports and do some real research into these things to find out how bad is it? What are the levels and all the foods that we eat and the animals and ourselves? What are the effects of these things on us? What can we do to avoid it? If every time you went to the store, there were numbers of PCBs and heavy metals printed on the food you bought. You think twice before you got that seafood. Because like the one of the articles that inspired me was the 2006 October National Geographic article about the levels of toxicity inside of a Bay Area reporter. And he just went out and had, was it swordfish, I think that he caught off the Golden Gate and his levels of some heavy metals doubled just from one meal. You know, so this is very dangerous stuff. But we don’t think about it. It’s not talked about much.

[17:49] Ashley James: You’re sharing with the numbers with us. I know they’re on your website too. What’s your website again?

[17:55] Troy Reicherter:  Well, there’s my author page is www.troyreicherter.net, and also there’s Holistic Health Research, it’s www.hhresearch.org.

[18:16] Ashley James: I’m going to make sure the links to everything you do are in the show notes of today’s podcast. But before we continue, I want to ask, in the last two years, I know you’re going to share with us your results of lowering these levels. Do you do feel a difference? Do you feel healthier? Can you noticeably say that since lowering your levels of these chemicals that there’s been a shift in your health or your life?

[18:46] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you notice it most the first couple months after the fast, you just feel like Superman basically. I just turned 51. And I remember last year when I turned 50 and I did that fast. It was grueling. I did a 40-day fast last summer, but I could have gone for another 10 days. And then when it was over and I got back into the routine of eating again, slowly. Like I say, I mean your human growth hormone levels they’re just through the roof. For a man, they may be 22,000% higher than normal. So I really felt like I was 20 years old. Really.

[19:24] Ashley James: You look early 40s. You don’t look like you’re in your 50s. I’m sorry. You said that the human growth hormone in men after doing a fast is how much higher?

[19:36] Troy Reicherter: I’ve read that it can be up to 2000 times higher. For women I think the number was about 1300 percent higher, depends on the person I suppose. But that’s linked directly to testosterone and tissue repair, energy, vitality, all those things that make you youthful and feel good.

[19:58] Ashley James: In Episode 230. Interviewed Dr. Alan Goldhamer. The whole episodes about fasting. But he talks about on on day five of a water only fast, you have a huge spike in human growth hormone. And that is linked to preserving your muscle tissue. Because people are always afraid they’re going waste away, their muscles going to waste away. But the spike in human growth hormone preserves our muscles. So you can do extended fast and not have that loss of muscle mass.

[20:36] Troy Reicherter: Interesting. Yeah, I need to learn more about that as well. And I need to talk to him. So what I discovered, I’ll just quickly tell you what I learned up to the point where I was basically blind for two years where I didn’t have any results coming in because this laboratory that I send my blood samples to, like I say they they do them in large batches and it costs a fortune. So I had to wait a while. I did my first blood drawing in May of 2015, and had those numbers that I just gave you the 56,100 parts per trillion for the DDE and 71,000 for PCBs. Now when I got my results back, first I did two tests. And the second blood drawing was January of 2016. So seven months later, I had only a 12% drop for the DDE and I had actually a little increase in the PCBs. 71,000 is it? I can barely read it there, 900 I believe. By the way, all my results, I use a snipping tool and I took all of them and I put them on my website. So you can see what I see. You don’t have to go through something that I’ve typed up and perhaps you know, made some kind of typographical error on. I mean they are the original results, they send me Excel sheets, then I requested a printed version, and they got kind of irate about it because they don’t usually do that. And then they basically just printed me the same thing that they sent me. So there is no difference. There’s no difference between the report that I got on paper and the report that I got electronically. So what you’re seeing is really all there is. And so I was disappointed way back in 2016, that it hadn’t been a bigger drop. But I’ve learned a lot more in the meantime, which I’ll explain. So all I saw then was it a moderate drop of 12.48% for the for the DDE, an increase.

[22:35] Ashley James: Let me just clarify 12% drop from doing two fasts?

[22:40] Troy Reicherter: This was from just the the 21-day fast.

[22:42] Ashley James: So you do one 21 -day fast and you drop which chemical at 12%?

[22:47] Troy Reicherter: DDE dropped 12% after seven months. These these are blood lipid measurements, by the way. We measure the lipids in the blood, because if you measure the total blood volume, that is very dependent on how much water is in your system, so it throws the whole thing off. So blood lipids are pretty constant. There is a whole other aspect of this, which is the fact that your fatty tissues – we’re not testing. That would require something else, you’d have to do liposuction or something and decide where you’re going to do it, which part of the body. And then you know, it brings up a whole lot of questions as to how that would be accurate. I’d have to check with the company if they could do this. But if you wanted to know a person’s total body toxic load, you’d have to consider the blood lipids as well as adipose tissue. So that’s a really good question as to what’s still in there. However, this was what I did get, I got the 12% drop after seven months and a slight increase in PCBs, because I assumed you know, the fat cells are throwing out their toxicants into the bloodstream, and it was still elevated. Now remember, my experience at that time wasn’t just fasting. I was doing saunas. I did over 100 saunas, I believe 109 saunas, it’s all in my book in great detail. And there’s a case study online. But I was taking supplements, like 30 different supplements, they’re all in my case, study online, Sam E and everything I could think of to try to make more of the enzymes that would get those chemicals out of my body. So I was doing all kinds of stuff. And it’s all documented there. I was meditating on it, I was walking in a circle, because in Chinese medicine, they say that there’s a way to get rid of, expel bad things from your body by doing that I and I recorded all of that stuff. So, that was an unknown how much that did along with fasting itself. I was drinking pretty much pure water during the fast and taking those supplements, along with the vitamin.

It’s all documented carefully. So I had hoped way back then that I was going to have this great drop and I’d be done with experiment. And then I suspected, I thought oh, I’ll get, I didn’t know what I get. But I was hoping for this huge drop. And then I could get some funding and do more experiments with simpler model so that we could really prove this intervention had this effect. So I realized I was going to have to go for at least another year. So I did not do a fast in the summer of 2016. I just kind of wanted to see whether or not the level would continue to drop on its own. I was thinking perhaps there would still be a spike in the toxicant levels in the blood. So I did a blood drawing and July 6 of 2016. And I didn’t get the results back till the next year. But that one was almost exactly the same level. So it was 49,100 parts per trillion for the DDE for January. And it was only 48,600 parts per trillion for that same chemical in July of that year of 2016. So almost no change at all. And then for the PCBs, there was a bigger shift. The PCBs had peaked after the fast at 71,900. And then they dropped down to 64,400. So from the baseline measurement, it was a 9.3% drop. But of course I didn’t have those results till the following year. Now in the summer of 2017 right before I met you last time I had done a 30 day fast. So yeah, let me see.So 30 day fast. But I had only had the results from prior to that fast. So in January of 2017, the toxicant levels for the DD dropped a bit. So they had leveled out and then they dropped a bit. But see, I had done one additional intervention. It was the one I wouldn’t tell you about last time because I wanted to see the results first. Do you remember what it was?

[27:21] Ashley James: Are you talking about the supplement?

[27:23] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, it was activated charcoal. So what happened was, I was troubling over my results, because I was disappointed that I didn’t have a greater drop. So in 2016, I went to the University of Washington, and I emailed all the professors of toxicology, and one person got back to me, a dean named Professor Eaton. So he met with me and he was saying, “Well, the reason why fasting doesn’t seem to work for this is because of the enterohepatic pathway.” And I only had basic physiology. So I didn’t really know what that was. So it turns out what’s happening is, inside your body, we talked already about how there’s some chemicals that can be removed from your body naturally. But then there’s others that bioaccumulate. Well, even the ones that bioaccumulate, like PCBs and DDE and PBDEs, all those things, your body is not blind to them. There are enzymes in your body that can detect these things. So what’s happening is, your body has enzymes, cytochrome P450 family, and specifically there’s one called P450 43A. It’s abbreviated to CYP3A4. And this enzyme, you can see if you type that number, and you can see a picture of it on the internet it looks this, it’s just a giant mess of proteins, just a big ball of proteins. It reminds me of the Borg spaceship in Star Trek the Next Generation. And so that thing, it’s the enzyme is like a biological machine, it goes around and it acts on the body, it speeds up or changes cellular processes in the body without being changed itself. And so it can recognize these chemicals that don’t belong. I don’t know how. But it can do that. When it finds one that doesn’t belong, it bonds it to hydrogen. And then it just kind of moves on and finds another one bonds into a hydrogen.

So as these hydrogenated molecules are passing through the liver next time, the liver has special cells, they can sense them. And they use that hydrogen as like an anchor point. And they can grab onto it and bond them in with water or whatever is in the bile. So they put them into the bile, and it goes out the bile duct into the duodenum and into the small intestine. So the body has this amazing tool that almost none of us know about or think about to catch these molecules and get rid of them. Problem is, we didn’t evolve with these chemicals present. We evolved millions of years ago in Africa mostly, right? So everything that we encountered back then we had a pretty good way to get rid of, you know, the toxins of animals and plants and whatnot, that weren’t in such great amount that they killed us right away, right? But we’ve never seen these chemicals before. So even though our body can recognize them, in terms of these enzymes, the small intestine has no way of knowing what they are, it doesn’t have any detection system. So once they get into the small intestine, where all your food is passing through. The gates are open, it just comes right back into the body.

[30:37] Ashley James: So to recap what you’ve just said. Because it’s there’s a lot there, I think we really want to make sure that that it’s understood. It’s a lot for me too. So going back to the Borgh shaped enzyme, there’s this enzyme, and where does it come from? How does the body created it? Do you know?

[31:02] Troy Reicherter: Good question. I should look that up again. It may be partly the liver and then other places in the body, other special tissues that make it. But the main thing is that it’s there. It’s like a superhero that’s constantly on the lookout for these bad guys, and it catches them and it throws them out the door. But the problem is the doors a revolving door.

[31:23] Ashley James: Yeah, so I want to talk about that. So our body, like you’re saying, 100 or 200 years ago, we did not have any of these chemicals in our environment. But this is very, very new. Having PCBs, and all these all these things that we’re facing now, I think there’s something like 30,000 new chemicals every year being created and put into our environment, and our body just doesn’t recognize them. But this enzyme, when it senses something that’s not supposed to be there, so a toxin or toxicant, it will attach a hydrogen to it so that the liver can identify – it’s like tagging something and because all the blood is passing through the liver, and the liver goes, “Hey, you over there with that hydrogen, come over here, I gotta put you in the bile. You’re not supposed to be here.” And so it just knows. So it tags to this little really cool Borg like thing in our body is tagging all that stuff that we don’t want in our body with the hydrogen and the liver goes, “Okay, come on over here. We’re putting you in the bile.” And then because bile is meant to help emulsify fat so that we can digest it, but it’s also filled with toxins to get out of our body, including hormones as well. This is one thing for women, is that all the estrogen once the body is done with it, puts it in the bile to be eliminated. And so it breaks it down and puts it into like a form and puts it into the bile. So now it’s getting, like you said, excrete it into the duodenum to the rest of the small intestines and going to go into the big colon. And hopefully we’re going to have a bowel movement. And the problem is that bile is also a very precious substance. So the body will reabsorb as much of it as it can in order to reuse it. And thus, all the toxins that it was eliminating, are going to be reabsorbed because the body cannot tell the difference between the toxicants because we didn’t evolve with them, like you said. And so we need a way to bind in the colon, or in the intestines to bind. And I know, people who eat a very high fiber diet versus no fiber, so the standard American diet are even more toxic, because the fiber helps to bind I’ve heard especially if someone has constipation, that then the toxins will get absorbed quicker and for women will reabsorb the estrogens that have become unhealthy. They’re unhealthy levels of estrogen, that will reabsorb them. So we have to make sure that we’re not reabsorbing these chemicals. So you’ve you’ve started experimenting with activated charcoal in an effort to bind to the toxicants. And you got this idea from this professor.

[34:11] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, he didn’t mention that part of it. But he told me about the enteropathic pathway, which is like the circular thing going from the enzymes to the liver to the small intestine and right back into your blood. So then I immediately thought, “Okay, this seems like the logical weak link in the chain that maybe I can fix.” So I started thinking of what I could do to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. I’ll call it EPI enterohepatic pathway interrupter. So I did a little research. And there’s a number of things out there, there’s some clays you could take that some people are saying will get rid of toxicants. Well, no one was talking about the enterohepatic pathway, though. It was known for quite some time that taking activated charcoal, which is an interesting product, it can come from different kinds of woods, coconut shells is one way, bamboo, all hardwoods, but it’s made in a very high temperature oven. And sometimes they use high pressure, high temperature steam. And it produces these tiny little granules that have incredible amounts of surface area. And so it’s not absorbing them, it’s ‘adsorbing’,  it’s adsorbing these little chemicals as it passes through. It’s been used in emergency rooms for people who have overdosed on drugs or alcohol, it will get a lot of things right out of your in your alimentary canal quickly. But again, no one that I saw on the internet was using activated charcoal for the purpose I was talking about. It’s kind of fashionable now to bake cakes or pies, or even put activated charcoal into drinks, you know, putting in all these food and drinks with the intent of getting rid of some of the toxicants that are in that food, it may do that too. But I think by far the largest amount you’re going to be finding is what’s coming out in the bile, my own suspicion, but tests will have to be done to really prove this. So after doing research, I started with the activated charcoal in 2016 in August.

So from that point on, that was my main other intervention. And I didn’t get my results back from my January 2017 blood drawing. And I got those results back by the time I saw you. So, there was a drop in the DDE, it was about it was a little over 7% from the previous. So if you recall, the DDE had dropped 12% and then it had leveled off for two periods. And then it dropped about 7% down, it’s minus 20.68% from baseline – 44,500 after starting at 56,100. So it looked like a very clear step, as if it had if it had plateaued, leveled out and then dropped again. And for PCBs, it was an added drop, it went from 64,400 parts per trillion down to 59,700 parts per trillion. So it went from 9.3% drop from baseline to a 15.92% drop from baseline. So I couldn’t really tell as much with the PCBs since they had dropped for two periods in a row. But with the DDE, it appeared that it was the added intervention of the activated charcoal that was doing the trick. But there’s more on that later when I get to my next results. So then I was blind as to the results for two years, because I had to wait until I had four batches of my blood collected to send in for testing.

So in the meantime, I did a 30-day fast in the summer of 2017, right before I met you. I started about the last week of school I think. I’m a teacher, so I try to time it around my summer break. And then I did a 40-day fast last year. That was really interesting. And you can see the YouTube videos from that. If you go to YouTube, it’s Holistic Health Research YouTube channel. I’ve got videos showing most of the days of the last fast. And right up till day 40 I was out and about doing things, shopping, able to function. And as I said, I really could have gone for another 10 days. I was getting pretty gaunt. It looks a little scary. But I felt like I could keep going. Yeah, you reach a point where you know what you’re doing. And it’s just mind over matter. As long as you’ve got fat to burn, you can keep going. There’s lots of prohibitions about fasting, I should say don’t go off half cocked, you always want to talk to your doctor first, you definitely want to be over 21 before you do any fast, read up on the subject, start small start with a two or three-day fast. I started with a two-day fast you can read about all this in my book. I think my book is a great place to start because I go through all of my experiences, as well as talking about the history of fasting, physiological research into fasting, scientific discoveries about the health benefits of fasting, I have references to all the other books that I’ve ever heard about fasting. So you can read those yourself to all the considerations you have to make before trying to fast, all my own experiences with problems that I had. It’s all in there. And at the moment it’s on Kindle for just $5.

[39:38] Ashley James: It’s nice.

[39:39] Troy Reicherter: Good introductory low price. So what I did for this period, since my thesis then was I was thinking that all those other interventions I’d done – the sauna, the supplements. I had no reason to believe that they worked at all. You know, so I thought I’ll simplify  the experiment from this point on and just restrict it to the fast which I just took some electrolytes and vitamins. I didn’t do all those other supplements to try to increase the enzyme levels, MSM and all those other things that you can take. They’re all listed on my case study, I think I had 30. But I didn’t do that this time around for the 30 and 40-day fast. I tried to keep it very simple, didn’t even do any saunas for a year and a half. And so I did blood drawings in June of 2017, December 2017, June 2018, December 2018, the first Saturday of those months. And I was hoping or I was expecting I guess, my hypothesis was based on all that I knew that I was going to see a big drop after the fast each time and then a smaller drop over the period when I just took the activated charcoal based on what I saw before because there was no big spike after a fast. There was a tiny little spike with the PCBs, if you recall, just like 1.27% the first time after the three week fast. And there was a drop of 12% with the DDE. So I was not expecting any spike after the fast. I thought it’ll be a big drop after the fast, little drop, big drop, little drop. I was hoping that all together it might wind up with a 90% drop.

[41:21] Ashley James: And during the fast you’re consuming the activated charcoal.

[41:25] Troy Reicherter: That’s right. Yeah, during the fast itself, I was taking activated charcoal. Another important point which I mentioned in my book, you have to do colonics if you’re going to do a fast of I would say over a week. I wouldn’t go more than a week without doing colonics and they’re easy. I use a Colima board and just follow the instructions. I would do it every other day. I used to try getting away with every fourth day. If you’re taking activated charcoal, that’s a really bad idea. Because the stuff, it accumulates down there and your large intestine very good at drawing things out. So basically, just imagine trying to pass charcoal briquettes kind of what you’re doing. And so you don’t want to do that, just every other day, I think is a good idea for for that. So yeah, I did. Because I was reasoning that the enzymes would be at an elevated state. When you stop eating and you start fasting, what happens, one of the many things that happens is your body stops producing digestive enzymes. And so all those little proteins that go to make enzymes, they get rearranged into different legos down there, and your body starts pumping out way more of those CYP3A4 to go and search and destroy and tag things for elimination and your liver is working overtime. It’s getting lots of energy to do this, you know, to filter through the blood more and get that stuff out through the bile. So there’s no food at all, your body’s kind of shut down that whole aspect of itself. And it’s just repairing things, all the cells are throwing out the toxicants for removal. So I thought that would be the perfect time – that time and then immediately after the fast. I was almost tempted to take an extra dose of the activated charcoal, but I just kept it the same every day for simplicity’s sake, because someone could always say, “Well, it wasn’t the fast that did it, it was the fact that you took more of the activated charcoal maybe.”

So anyway, I didn’t know until this year in April, what effect any of this had. So what’s really funny is everything I expected was backwards. But it was actually better than I expected. So the big shock was the time period in early 2017 between January and June of 2017, I didn’t do any fasting. I took activated charcoal. But you see, I didn’t take that much of it because I was waiting for my results. I sent in the blood sample in January and I didn’t get the results back until March. So I took a break from everything, because I was really sick of taking all the supplements. And I didn’t know if they were working. And I just thought I’ll just wait and see what my results are. So I really didn’t take activated charcoal. I think I only took it March, April and May. So it’s only about three months of it. The exact dates are in the book, and in the case study. But I had no reason to believe there would be any drop at all, or just I thought maybe 3%, maybe 5%? No, it was a huge drop 59.71% drop over baseline. So it went from 44,500 down to 22,600. And so that was for the DDE. And then for the PCB, it’s the same thing, it went from 59,700 parts per trillion down to 30,500 parts per trillion, it was a 15.92% drop from baseline down to a 57.04% drop from baseline. So it was humongous. So the only way I can account for this after thinking about a lot is gene expression. So we know from test on by Valter Longo at USC and elsewhere that the gene expression accounts for almost everything in your body.

[45:24] Ashley James: You’re talking about epigenetics, the ability for genes to turn on and off, right?

[45:28] Troy Reicherter: Well, I don’t know epigenetic, I think that’s a slightly different definition, something beyond genetics. It’s something we don’t understand about genetics, that’s for sure. And as a history teacher, I like the analogy or just a story about how they’ve recently discovered that the base pattern of DNA that makes your hand, or my hand or a dog’s paw, or a fish’s fin is the same. It’s the same base pattern. And what’s really affecting this is the gene expression. There’s big huge parts of the genome that we don’t understand at all. We used to think it was like garbage DNA. Somehow something in there is sending a signal to these patterns to say switch on and off here, switch this on, switch this off. So it’s like, just imagine the same piece of music, winding up being all the music that we hear, but it’s the same on the sheet. And it all depends on how the conductor chooses to play it. That’s almost what’s really happening with our DNA.

[46:25] Ashley James: Right. We have all the same notes. And you could have Mozart or AC DC, and it’s just all the same notes.

[46:31] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you could say it that way. Or like this, if I have the same recipe, and then just depending on which chef makes it, you know, it turns out to be all the different foods in the world. That’s kind of what’s happening. So we’re just at our infancy and understanding how gene expression works. But gene expression changes when you do most anything like if you stand in your head for a while your gene expression is going to change if you go hiking, get up and higher altitude flying an airplane, your gene expression changes. There were a couple of twins recently, there were one was in space and one was on the earth. And it was in the news that even a year after the one twin came back down, I’m not sure exactly how they can tell. But when they take your DNA out, they can analyze it, they can tell which genes are being expressed differently. And they said he is the same. And yet he’s not the same because it’s identical DNA, and yet it’s being expressed differently.

So the only way I can explain that big drop is it’s not the activated charcoal alone doing that. Because I was taking activated charcoal during that time period, not for a very long time only maybe three months, like I said. So for less than the previous period in which there was a smaller drop. So I think what happens is, when you do an extended fast like I did – the 21-day fast or a longer one, you’re making the cell gates open to dump the toxicants into the bloodstream. And they’re not really going back to their default setting of collecting it back for at least two years it looks like, somewhere in that last six months. And I’m not even sure if that was going to be the bottom. I mean, if I hadn’t done anything else, maybe it would have kept on falling. I don’t know. So this is a huge question. And I think I’m the first person to discover this. Because no one else has done these kind of blood tests along with fast, right? So this is amazing to think that the body has this ability to do this. So many questions here about what did the activated charcoal do? What did the saunas do? What did the fasting do? What did these things in conjunction do? Okay, so the next big surprise, almost as big as the first one was the second one, you can see all this on my website, www.troyreicherter.net or www.hhresearch.org, all the graphs are there. So for the December 17 test, this is about six months after I did the 30 day fast.

[48:45] Ashley James: And just to clarify. So the next results that you’re going to give us, what did you do in those six months?

[48:55] Troy Reicherter: Right. So I tried to keep it simple. I tried to eat mostly vegan, although sometimes I fall off the wagon. But definitely vegetarian. And I just did the fast. I didn’t do any saunas. I didn’t do any of those supplements and none of those other fancy interventions that I did the first time, I didn’t meditate on it, I didn’t walk in a circle, and all those all those many, many things that I tried. I did acupressure. You can see all the list of the things that I tried, everything but the kitchen sink approach. I didn’t do that. So it was just the fast and then regular eating without any trouble all the way through.

[49:38] Ashley James: So it was six months?

[49:41] Troy Reicherter: I tried to do it. Yeah, exactly every six months. So it was like the first Saturday of June and December for two years.

[49:47] Ashley James: So for six months, there was no fasting it was just eating as clean as you could and some activated charcoal. But what you’re what you’re looking for is how does the body respond over time even six months after a fast?

[50:00] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I had started the fast right after the previous blood test. So the previous one was the first Saturday of June. And it was later that month that I did that fast for 30 days. So the fast ended in July sometime. And then I had all those months. So here’s the funny part, based on my first fast back in 2015, I had no reason to believe there was going to be an elevation in the toxicants because I didn’t see it before. Well, this time I did see it. So it jumped up. So it went from 22,600 for the DDE parts per trillion, it jumped up to 34,200 parts per trillion for DDE. And for the PCBs – almost exactly the same thing. It jumped from 30,500 up to 51,900. So now, there was a spike. So the question is, was there a spike because I did a longer fast? Or probably more likely there had been a spike the first time back in 2015. But I didn’t see it because I did all those saunas, all the supplements and who knows what else? So to tease out what exactly is doing what will require a lot more experimentation. I mean, I did, I think it was 109 saunas. So when you think about it at the time, I was wondering, is this doing anything? I was hoping it was, but I think it was now, because I was just taking it for granted all the time. “Oh, there was no spike after the past.” I think there was a huge spike. But I reduced that all the way down through those other methods. And maybe the supplements had, maybe they had a huge effect. I can’t say for sure. But we won’t know unless we keep doing more experiments. It’s going to take a lot of people to experiment, and a lot of different places under a lot of different conditions and reproduce those experience before we really understand what’s doing what. But the way I looked at it was it’s a crash course, I had to figure out how to make those numbers go down as fast as they could and try everything I could. I mean, in this country, there’s over 4000 people every day that are being told they have cancer. And there’s over 500,000 people a year that are dying of cancer. And I can only imagine what it’s like. And if it were me, I would do everything I could, I would try everything I could to get rid of it. Or if I had a reason to believe I was at high risk, I would do everything I could to lower that risk. So I wouldn’t just try one intervention and wait 10 years and see what happened. And we can’t afford to just try one intervention at a time. I mean, sure, if you work in a big university, go ahead and do it that way. But since no one at big universities and institutions was doing this research in the first place, this is why I took it upon myself to do this. And they’re telling us that there’s no way to get these chemicals out of our body. So it is messy, it is complicated. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But the big, amazing thing is that I got these numbers to drop massively. And I’ve learned enough now to see that if you did these interventions within the first year and a half to two years, did them all up front, then within two years you’re going to see that adjustment, and then you’ll find out how much you got rid of.

And I am doing another experiment right now with a friend. I wish I had 10 friends and I could afford to have 10 blood tests. But a friend of mine, he’s just he’s doing nothing different all year, except he’s taking activated charcoal. So six months out or a year out and God willing, we will do the follow up and see what his numbers look like. So of course, it’s only one person, and what we need our clinical trials to do, you know, for men, for women, for older for younger, all different kinds of people. And then we’ll get some real, real hard data that we can use because different people could react totally differently to these things depending on their their genetic makeup and whatnot in their environment. But I’m trying to find that out as well about the activated charcoal and what effect that has all by itself. But that was my second big shock. First of all, there was this huge drop when I didn’t really do much of anything except the activated charcoal when I wasn’t expecting. So as I said, everything was backwards, I thought there’d be a little drop, there was a huge drop, then I thought, oh, there won’t be a spike, there was a big spike, which leads me to believe there probably had been earlier. But the sauna’s probably were very effective, and maybe the supplements and maybe something else. I mean for all I know, maybe the acupressure acupuncture that I did, might have added another 10% on top of it. All these things need to be researched.

So I think that’s the takeaway, I hope I can change culture to get people to start doing these things, and start researching these things and pushing other people to research these things. Because right now all the people with the big funding, they’re just, I don’t know what they’re doing. But they’re doing maybe drug tests, they’re doing anti cancer tests of this type, of that type. But this is your body’s main way to detoxify itself, heal itself and keep you from getting sick. And it’s being almost completely neglected, except for a few people out there that did you hear about every now and then. So okay, not to digress. But as I said everything after that was kind of backwards from what I expected. There was a there was there was a spike after the fast, then then the numbers dropped down to their lowest level but it wasn’t much lower than the June 2017, because it was still on the way back down. And obviously, you’re gonna have to wait a year and a half to two years after your last big fast to see that gene expression come to an end. Or you’re going to get your lowest reading, so it’s kind of frustrating, but you don’t see it right away. And now if we were doing like I said, the test right on the fat tissue itself, you will probably see a bigger drop right now before it readjusts and then you’d know, but that’s a whole nother kettle of fish. I didn’t start with that. I can’t jump into that now, because we don’t have a baseline measurement. I haven’t even talked to the lab to see if that’s possible, but I suppose it probably is. So then the numbers dropped down for the DDE. It spiked in December 2017 at 34,200 then it dropped all the way down to its lowest measurement of 22,000. And then the PCBs dropped down from a spiked high of 51,900 dropped down to 29,200. So this is the lowest measurement right there, was the measurement from one year ago before I started my 40-day fast. So remember I have these numbers in hand.

[56:35] Ashley James: Okay, got it. Let’s back up because I got a little confused there. So I want to make sure the listeners understand. So let’s, let’s tell it like a story. Because they can go look at the numbers, let’s tell it like a story. So the biggest drop that you had was after, I’m looking at the graph here that’s on your website. He’s showing me his laptop. We’re out in the garden sitting under a beautiful 10 by 10 tent that I once used with my husband to sell our handcrafted bat hoses at a farmers market 10 years ago. And it’s since been our our shelter, it’s our outdoor living room. So we’re in the outdoor living room, I buy the garden, and he’s showing me his laptop and I see this graph. And the graph is also on your website, which we’ll have the links to it in the show notes at www.learntruehealth.com. And here we have, I’m seeing the graph and it comes down and then the biggest drop is after – what did you do here to have the biggest drop?

[57:37] Troy Reicherter: Nothing. That was a surprise. I didn’t even take as much activated charcoal as I did the previous time, maybe only three months. And it was when I expected to have the least drop. I had the biggest drop. I think again, it was the gene expression coming to an end. That’s the only explanation I can think prior to this.

[57:52] Ashley James: But all the things you did prior, how many fasts were leading up to this?

[57:58] Troy Reicherter: Well, from beginning in 2015 till prior to the 30-day fast in 2017. I only did the one 21-day fast.

[58:06] Ashley James: So you did a one 21-day fast, a 109 saunas, took supplements, you meditated, locked in a circle, and colonics?

[58:16] Troy Reicherter: It was on the first six-month period.

[58:17] Ashley James: Okay, so you did a ton of stuff. And then you kept taking your blood every six months. So from here when you did all those things, how much time went by to the biggest drop?

[58:29] Troy Reicherter: About two years.

[58:30] Ashley James: Two years. Okay. So two years after the huge amount of detoxing, you spent a whole summer detoxing.

[58:36] Troy Reicherter: Activated charcoal began in August of 2016. And I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since except, as I said, I took a little break in 2017 because I was burned out. And I didn’t know what my test results were. I didn’t know if I was doing anything.

[58:51] Ashley James: You added the activated charcoal and you didn’t do much else and then you saw the sudden drop. But you really believe that that’s from the gene depression?

[59:00] Troy Reicherter:  It could be part of the activated charcoal definitely. But I took more activated charcoal in the previous period where there was a tiny little drop. So there’s something else going on. I think gene expression is…

[59:11] Ashley James: It makes sense. Because like you said, Yeah, you took activated charcoal, and you even stopped all those other things, and you weren’t doing much. And then you got the biggest drop, but you had done a bunch before. Saunas could change our genetic expression, and the fast can change our genetic expression. And so you’re looking at accumulation of all these things could have done it. So you’ve got this big drop and then six months later, it goes up a little bit. I mean, it’s not up like it was at the beginning, but it goes up a little bit. And then it comes back down. What happened here to have it come back down? What did you do in this six-month period?

[59:53] Troy Reicherter: Just the usual. There was no other special intervention. I think after the spike it just naturally starts to come back down.

[1:00:04] Ashley James: Why did it spike?

[1:00:05] Troy Reicherter: Because when you fast again, remember the fat cells are shrinking. And so they’re basically going into emergency starvation mode. So they’re throwing out everything that they don’t absolutely need. Your body is just conserving everything it can keep and it’s throwing away everything I can throw away, gobbling things up, catabolizing things, breaking them down and you know, your body has more enzymes to work on them, but they’re overwhelmed by the amount of toxicants being tossed out by the fat.

[1:00:34] Ashley James: So this spike right here in December 2017 was after a fast?

[1:00:39] Troy Reicherter: Yeah.

[1:00:39] Ashley James: And so you’re saying that it’s actually a good thing that you have a spike there, because your body was in the process of releasing the toxins?

[1:00:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. It would be wonderful if we could do this for every one of those chemicals out there. And also if we could do a separate test at each point in time from the fat cells themselves. So because you probably see the opposite. You know, if it goes up here, well, it’s probably because it just got dumped out from somewhere else where it’s mostly stored.

[1:01:07] Ashley James: Yeah. And so now in June of 2018, you have a drop again, what is this? Did you do a fast here?

[1:01:16] Troy Reicherter: The fast? There’s a tab at the top, indicating where the fast were.

[1:01:20] Ashley James: Oh, okay.

[1:01:21] Troy Reicherter: So this is between fasts, it appears that by a year later, that was June 2018, prior to the fast of 2018, it had gone back down slightly below the level from a year before.

[1:01:33] Ashley James: Now what I’m seeing here, I just realized, because you pointed out where the fasts are – I’m seeing that after every fast or at least after these fast, it looks like there’s a little bit of a spike, but it’s always lower. So it’s like constant, like little steps, but it’s constantly getting lower, which is cool.

[1:01:55] Troy Reicherter: That was my last big takeaway. So for the DDE, it went from 22,600 in June of 2017. Then after the after a 30-day fast, it spiked up to 34,200 in December, then it dropped back down all the way down to 22,000 and then after a 40-day fast. So this is a fast of an extra third in length, an extra 10 days, it spiked much less, it only spiked up from 22,000 up to 25,600. So you see, you would expect, if I had lots and lots and lots of fat reserves, or toxic reserves in my fat, like bottomless, you would expect a longer fast to make a higher spike. But the reverse was true, it was a lower spike. So that’s showing that I really am cleaning out the bottom of the barrel. And there’s going to be this huge, huge drop is going to follow almost certainly. I don’t know exactly how long since I did two fast within two years, or within one year, and I did a longer length of fasting. It may be the gene expression will take longer to go back to its default settings. I hope not. Because I’d really like to get the data out there. But I’m continuing to take blood measurements or blood samples, which I will send in when I get enough together for the lab to do it. And so I took blood in June of this year, I’ll take it in December, and then again next summer. I think looking at all these numbers, if a 21 – day fast caused about a 60% drop, then an additional 70 days of fasting, along with another two years of activated charcoal, I think we’re going to see probably greater than a 90% drop for both these chemicals. But we won’t know until we have the numbers. I mean these are not just speculation, these numbers are real from lab – an independent lab. They have no way of knowing what I’m doing. All they do is just do a mass spectrometer test, which is why it costs so much. You know, they’re testing individual molecules as they pass through and weighing them to tell you which one is what size and everything. And they couldn’t care less what I’m up to or what my results are, they’re just giving me the absolute fact on this. So I’m speculating that we’re going to have a greater than 90% drop in the end. It would have been nice if a 21-day fast all by itself had done that. But it obviously didn’t work out that easily.

A 21-day fast plus all the other interventions did over two years make a 60% drop, which is pretty astonishing by itself. The two year delay was a big surprise. I in the beginning, was thinking I should try to test as soon after the fast as possible thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to contaminate myself by eating stuff.” I was completely wrong in that. And the activated charcoal has probably changed everything even with no other interventions, seeing a gradual decrease over time, if the theory is correct. Which we’re not sure of now, we can’t really be sure of anything. So like the January 2017 drop from 13.37% from baseline down to 20.68% from baseline, which I assumed had been due activated charcoal. I can’t make that assumption anymore, because it could very well have also been due to the change in gene expression. We don’t know. These things have to be done separately and repeated over and over by different people and then we’ll know more. So I do believe the activated charcoal is working. But I can’t say for sure from the data that I have proven that it is working. We can’t say for sure that my blood lipid levels have dropped a lot as far as my total body toxicity, that would require more testing.

[1:06:05] Ashley James: And you’ve got your friend who’s now just taking activated charcoal. So we’re going to figure out whether just activated charcoal alone is going to help. Now how much is he taking? I talked to poison control a few weeks ago about… and that’s a funny story for another time, but I talked to poison control and they said you’d have to take like a cup of it a day to actually absorb, it’s not like just take two capsules. It’s a significant amount of activated charcoal someone needs to take to absorb toxins. How much do you recommend people take? How did you figure out how much to take?

[1:06:45] Troy Reicherter: Well, first of all, poison control is dealing with someone who’s just massively adjusted something that’s about to kill them, right? So they’re giving them massive amounts to try to save them, that’s an emergency situation. What we’re talking about is over prolonged periods of time taking activated charcoal probably as directed, and trying to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. So you can read my book about what we know about activated charcoal, you can do your own research, there are some downsides to it, it will interfere with certain drugs like birth control pills, things like that. Maybe headache medicine.

[1:07:23] Ashley James: Because it absorbs those toxins.

[1:07:25] Troy Reicherter: Right. It will absorb the toxicants that you don’t want, but it will also decrease the nutrients in your food, because some of those will get taken out, they won’t make it to your intestine.

[1:07:37] Ashley James: So you take it in between meals?

[1:07:39] Troy Reicherter: Personally I started out taking it kind of staggered throughout the day. And then after that I just simplified it and I take it with meals, or maybe right after a meal. The amounts I was taking in the types is kind of complicated to go into, you can read my book about my experiences. I tried to make my own capsules, I would not recommend doing that. The stuff is more powdery than you can believe. It gets in everything and you’re gonna have a hard time not breathing it in, just buy it already made, it’s way better. So I use different kinds. It’s all in my book. And one of the kinds I was using got discontinued. So I couldn’t take that even if I wanted to. Right now, the kind of that I believe my friend is taking, I think this is what we agreed on, is activated coconut charcoal. They’re 1200 milligrams per capsule. And it says to take two to three hours before a meal. And anyway, so I think he’s taking the recommended dosage. I’m pretty sure I took more than the recommended dosage myself because I was the guinea pig and I wasn’t too worried about it. I just wanted to get those levels down. It’s all in the book how much I took. But definitely there’s every reason to believe that it’s getting things out of your body. The question is, is there any harm in it? There’s some speculation that there may be some acrylamide in it. But from what I can tell the acrylamides are formed from incompletely carbonated substances like burnt toast, you know, meat burned on the grill, but you didn’t burn it completely. So those are cancer causing, very carcinogenic. So I think it’s probably not that way because these are baked at a very, very high temperature. And so I think it’s completely carbonized. That’s the whole point of it. Don’t try to substitute anything else for activated charcoal, it’s got to be real activated charcoal. It’s completely different from the kind of charcoal that we cook with. That’s a whole different.

[1:09:47] Ashley James: Don’t try to make your own activated charcoal with burnt toast.

[1:09:51] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. So I’ve had a few friends who I I asked about if they wanted to be my guinea pig and volunteer to do this. And they said no, not enough is known about activated charcoal. But I suspect that just eating falafel or hamburgers or french fries is probably way more dangerous for you than activated charcoal.

[1:10:09] Ashley James: I think it’s hilarious when people get freaky about supplements like a vitamin C. They just go, “Well, there’s not enough research.” And yet they don’t think twice about taking a pharmaceutical. No, no question about taking pharmaceutical. Just think of all the drugs that have been taken off the market for killing people, were all drugs that were first approved to be on the market and approved to be safe. So we have to like, really remember that. Yes, it is up to us to advocate for our health and to look into the research. Don’t go blindly taking drugs and don’t go blindly taking supplements. Do your Googling and look into it for yourself, you can look at NIH, you can see that there’s so many studies, I’m sure there’s so many studies about activated charcoal. There’s so many studies about many things that we can look into before we jump into it. But to just blindly go, “Well, there’s enough studies about this. So I’m just not going to do it.” But I’m sure that your same friends will go to the drugstore and take an Advil without questioning it.

[1:11:12] Troy Reicherter: Right. Yeah. And like I put in my book, those warnings with the drug commercials that we see on TV, they’re frightening. And yet they just say it as if, “Oh, it’s no problem. Maybe you know, you’ll die you bleed to death. Yeah, you might be suicidal and on and on.” And oh, but talk about fasting and people freak out. They just make it sound as if “Oh, it’s the end of the world you want me to die, I’m going to die.” You could die if you fasted long enough or in the wrong way, you could also die if you just walk across the street without looking, you know.

[1:11:45] Ashley James: Let’s talk a bit about fasting for those who’ve never done it. I’ve only done it for almost three years, like a 2.9-day fast. I haven’t gotten to three yet, and I want to do more. But one of my Naturopaths scared me, she goes, “My boyfriend in college, I had to take him to the hospital after five days because his electrolytes were off and I’d basically pick him up and carry him to the hospital.” So she was so afraid, she tried to talk me out of it or she basically said you need to find a different doctor to monitor you for your fast because I won’t do it. And that kind of put the fear of God into me, and I know fasting is healthy, but it’s also, we got to take precautions. So let’s talk to the people who’ve never done fasting. Give us some advice.

[1:12:35] Troy Reicherter: Well, I can’t give medical advice, per se.

[1:12:37] Ashley James: So maybe based on your experience.

[1:12:40] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I just want to be careful how I phrase it. So well I I’m a historian and history teacher. And so I have known for a long time about all the fasting that has gone on throughout world history. And in my book there’s one section about a brief history of fasting where I give an overview of this. So I’ve known people have done enormously long fasts, I mean 40 days is like the gold standard. You know, the Pythagoreans used to do it. They say Moses did it. You know, Jesus did it. The Buddha did it. It’s on my website. And so I have always wanted to try a 40-day fast. Fear is a huge, huge part of it and not knowing what’s going to happen and the strangeness of it all. Plus the fact that, well, your body produces a chemical called ghrelin and ghrelin makes you hungry. And we’ve all had the experience of maybe going all day without eating. And at the end of the day, you’re irritable, you’re frustrated, you got a headache, you just feel like you’re going to die. And it’s like give me some food right now before I kill somebody.

[1:13:41] Ashley James: It’s called ‘hangry.’

[1:13:43] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, right. So we’ve all been there. And then people imagine, “Oh, my God, when you fast, it must be like that only worse.” Well, it’s not exactly. It depends on how much you had to eat the day before. There was one time when I I’ve had a huge meal. Probably shouldn’t have. But I had a huge meal before I believe it was the 2015 fast. I didn’t feel anything the whole next day, I wasn’t at least bit hungry. It wasn’t till the second day, that I started to even feel like hey, I’m hungry. But generally speaking, the first day after you don’t eat anything, you don’t feel very good. It’s like the experience we’ve all had of having to help someone move and there was nothing convenient, and you just don’t eat until really late. But it’s that next day after that usually is the worst day. Usually that’s when, I just refer to it as hitting the wall. This last time even though I did a 30-day fast two years ago, last year I did the 40-day fast and I still felt that way. Maybe it’s not going to be as bad as the first time you do it. The first time will be the worst time probably. But I honestly felt like someone had just hit me right in the head with a sledgehammer, just right between the eyes. And I don’t recall if I took anything for it. But I mostly just laid on the couch all day and just moan and groan because I felt horrible. But the day after that, it passes – ghrelin, your body basically says, “All right, you’re obviously not getting any food. So stop making this stuff.” It’s just like, you know, you get a bad injury and after a while it goes numb, because your body’s to stop sending that pain signal. So you stop feeling hungry in the ordinary sense. There’s still a certain sense that, “Hey, I should eat something.” But it’s not that urgent need that you’re used to. And I’m not going to say the rest of the fast is fun or easy. But it’s not nearly what you think it is. You feel euphoric sometimes, you feel light, it has to be built up too though.

Like I said, begin with two days, or three days. I mean, if you’re going to go ahead and do two, why not do that extra third day, which feels a lot better than the second day. And that’s the day when your body’s really, I think getting the most work done to repair and rebuild and rejuvenate anyway. But I will just stick with that. What I did in Taiwan, I was reading a lot about fasting and I knew people that required me to fast before I went and did their meditation. So I tried to fast all by myself. And it was like abortive two-day fast and I thought I was going to die. Literally, I thought this is it. My parents are going to read about in the paper, where they’re going to get that call, “Your son died over here in this apartment in Taiwan.” What a bad way to go, right? Just you all alone. Scared to death, your hearts palpitating you’re thinking, you’ve never had that feeling of hitting the wall before and you’ve never gone for more than a day without eating. So fear is making all these hormones come out into your bloodstream and freak you out. But after that, I did another attempt and I made a three day fast. And I just did a whole bunch of three-day fast. I don’t remember how many, five or 10. I mean I did a lot of three-day fast before I dared to go for four and five days. And then you start to have some experience built up. You know what to expect. I think your body learns too. I can’t really explain how, but you feel like your body is just not panicked. Not just your mind, but your body kind of like, “Okay, I see what’s going on here.” And I think there’s a deep learning in the cells that takes place where you don’t feel that bad. You’re okay with it. Plus, you know, also the experience and the sense of not being freaked out. You start to really feel like you can do anything. You’re walking around after 10 days of not eating, 15 days.

Last year, when I did my long fast, I went to a Vietnamese temple, I actually put that on my YouTube channel. And afterwards, I was talking to the monks and nuns and the person who had invited me to the temple told an elderly monk passing by that I hadn’t eaten for however many days – it was 27 days, he just laughed and shook his head. He said I don’t believe it. And I said, “Look at how thin I am.” So people even in traditional like that where fasting is a big part of what they do, they still don’t believe it. It’s like you can’t go that long. You can if you have the fat reserves that it takes. And you know, if you’ve checked with your doctor, of course, you’re not pregnant or expecting to be pregnant, you’re not breastfeeding, you’ve checked with all the contraindications that there could possibly be with your with your physician, definitely do that. And then take it slow. As I said, as long as you have fat to burn and you’re a healthy adult, you can keep going lot longer than you’d think. It’s a great feeling. It’s a good feeling to feel like, well, you almost feel like you’re in heaven or something. It’s like, whatever happens in the world around me doesn’t matter. Because I’m okay, I’m up on this other plane floating around doing things just the realm of pure energy. It’s a pretty cool experience, but it is grueling. I’m not saying it’s easy. I mean, 40 days, every day, it was like, “Oh my God, I’m only on day 25. I’m only on day 26.” Time seems to fly ordinarily. Like my summer is flying by this year. I can’t believe we’re almost halfway through the summer. But when you’re fasting, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s like it takes a long, long, long time to get to eating again. And you have to try really hard not to think about eating. It’s not easy. You know getting up, sometimes it’s hard, you have to really just get up slowly so you don’t get lightheaded. You’re not going to get much sleep or at least I don’t, a lot of insomnia, weakness, you have to really plan what you do, you can’t plan to be doing heavy labor, or running a marathon. Walking is pretty strenuous, you can do that. But I wouldn’t ride a bike up a hill at that time. If you can do that, more power to you. But I wouldn’t recommend planning on it. Just doing the fast by itself is grueling enough, it’s hard to take a lot of willpower. But once you’ve done it, I mean, I’ve never run a marathon. And I’ve never given birth, you know, I’ve never done those 24-hour training things they do in the army. I’ve heard people talk about it. I’ve never climbed Mount Everest. And fasting is kind of like that, I think. When you’re done with it, you feel like nothing. If I can do that I can do anything, nothing can faze me. And then of course, you know the great feeling that you get knowing that you’re detoxing. And a lot of health professionals like to say there’s no proof that any detox works, well check my numbers, check my website, because I can prove that it does work. Exactly which components of my plan work to what degree it still remains to be seen. But definitely, it is working. And I think fasting is the main component – supplements along with it, activated charcoal I believe are making a big difference as well. If I was doing this without fasting, I don’t think you’d see these drops at all. I have no reason to believe that. It’s a great feeling. When you’re doing it, there’s there’s moments of feeling great, there’s moments of feeling lousy. And when it’s all done, yeah, you feel much, much, much better in practically every way. And read my book about all the research into fasting. I mean, it’s one of the only ways known to grow new stem cells, to rejuvenate stem cells. Definitely, it’s been found to grow new brain cells in rats. So there’s a dispute now over the growing of brain cells, how much is really happening when you do other things, but I think fasting definitely appears to be doing that as well. HGH levels go up, all kinds of brain chemicals that stimulate your brain increases, it appears to be helping with increasing longevity and a decrease in pathology in every way across the board. Yeah.

[1:21:54] Ashley James: Yeah, Dr. Goldhamer has a fasting clinic and so he studied well over 30,000 people. And he’s been publishing but he doesn’t study what you’re studying, which is to see the decrease of these toxicants. But he’s studying like, whether cancer goes away and heart disease goes away, and diabetes goes away. And he’s published and he talks about this in Episode 230. He published this one woman came in with cancer and 30 days later didn’t have cancer anymore. But they’ve accumulated so much information about the benefits of water only fasting. And he says that on day three, something really amazing happens in the body, and you mentioned this, the body starts digesting its own pathological tissue. So the body starts digesting cancer and cysts, you know, ovarian cysts go away and scar tissue and just the not needed tissue in the body. And even on a cellular level, they’re seeing that the cells kind of clean up. So it’s like a house cleaning for the body. And then on day five is when they see the spiking human growth hormone and they see the spike in stem cells. So even in adults, which, you know after you’re about 24 years old, there’s very little stem cells in your body. But after a five-day fast, the body has a huge spike in stem cells. So by day three it starts cleaning up the junk and then by day five, it starts to regenerate new healthy tissue. I mean, that’s how you’d clean your house, right? First you take out the junk then you sort everything and clean it. So it’s like Marie Kondo for yourselves. We’re just cleaning everything and reorganizing everything and you’re seeing great results. And I love your first big result, which is, you did everything. And now you’re like, “Okay, what worked?” Right? And you published it in your book. Of course, they can go to your website to get the link to buy your book, of course, we’re gonna have the link to it as well, in the show notes. What’s the name of your book?

[1:24:09] Troy Reicherter: Detox Fast.

[1:24:10] Ashley James: Got it. So simple, easy to remember. You had mentioned the family that was back in 2005. Back in 2005, you mentioned a family that took all of their levels of, was it PCB?

[1:24:27] Troy Reicherter: They mentioned the PCB levels and also the PVDE levels, maybe some other things. It was an Oakland Tribune article.

[1:24:34] Ashley James: And I remember seeing that on Facebook. It’s kind of a video that circulated around or a story that circulated around. They didn’t do a fast though they just went organic, right? Do you remember the results from just going organic?

[1:24:49] Troy Reicherter: Well, I think they had been eating organic, basically, you know, shopping at Whole Foods just as a custom. And they didn’t do a before and after, they just did the one measurement just kind of to see. I think the reporter was Douglas Fisher, and they just got some grant money to just see what’s in people’s blood around here in the Bay Area, an average family.

[1:25:11] Ashley James: There’s a different story, I’ll see if I can find it. But there’s a different story of a family. It was like in the Midwest, and they went from eating the standard American diet too and they did a blood test. And then I guess a month later, a few months later, they are just eating organic, they saw a decrease, not levels, like you’re seeing with everything you’re doing. But they saw a decrease. And it’s substantial, I mean, we need to as a baseline, eat organic, it just makes sense that it’s so easy to choose the cheaper option, the conventional grapes versus the organic grapes, because you can’t see the chemicals, the toxicants you can’t see them, but they’re there. So we have to choose organic because if you choose the cheaper food, they call it conventionally grown, which is silly. Conventionally grown should be organic, because that’s what it already always has been. But if we choose the cheaper option, we’re paying in our health, we’re still paying. My husband said yesterday, there’s no free lunch, you can’t get a free lunch in life. You’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul. So we’ve got to choose organic. That’s the number one thing that we need to do every day.

[1:26:21] Troy Reicherter: Try to be vegetarian.

[1:26:22] Ashley James: And try to reduce or eliminate meat as much as possible. Because again, what’s contained in the meat is all the toxins that the animal ate, right? My husband who went vegan just overnight, he was the biggest meat lover to all of a sudden, completely vegan overnight, which surprised me. I came kicking and screaming into eating whole foods plant based, but he but he did it overnight. And he said you know pigs don’t sweat like you know, like a dog pants, right? But we sweat, at least we’re sweating out toxins, but pigs don’t. Pigs – they’ll store toxins much more in their meat. So just considering it for those who eat meat. If you’re going to eat meat, hopefully you can eat less of it or choose more vegetables, choose organic vegetables or choose organic, free range meat. But just know that in the food, there are these chemicals, right? And then how we can get rid of them is by reading your book and experimenting ourselves. Doing small fasts working up to maybe bigger fast, sauna, taking activated charcoal. I really like chlorella. Have you experimented with chlorella?

[1:27:38] Troy Reicherter: It was one of the things I took that first. Yeah, the first year yeah, it would be great if we could do tests on all the different chemicals that are in us because there are so many that we know are there. There were some other results that I got back that were interesting. There were seven pesticides that had blood lipid concentrations high enough that they gave me a before and an after number. And they are a little bit uncertain because they’re in such small amounts. When the lab gives you back the results, they put a little marker J next to it saying that it is basically an amount less than the lowest calibration equivalent. So this is the best they could do though with a mass spectrometer there was six of the seven that were measured all went down.

[1:28:22] Ashley James: And what are these?

[1:28:22] Troy Reicherter: So one was called nonachlor trans. So this was 8,910 parts per trillion in my initial measurement. And then in the June 2018 measurement, it was 4,250 parts per trillion. So that one decreased by 52%.

[1:28:40] Ashley James: What is it?

[1:28:41] Troy Reicherter: Oh, these are pesticides.

[1:28:42] Ashley James: Okay.

[1:28:43] Troy Reicherter: Six of seven different pesticides.I think they tested for 13. Some of them were in such small amounts that they just kind of said can’t even detect it, or don’t even know what to say.

[1:28:52] Ashley James: Is that before? Because you you pretty much always eat organic.

[1:28:58] Troy Reicherter: It’s complicated because when they do these tests, they have to have a – what do they call it? A lab blank. So you have to pay for it too, the same amount is for your blood. Suppose I had two samples there, there’ll be your blood before or your blood after. And then there’s a third thing that they have to test, which is a substance where they put in a known amount, so that they can use that to calibrate the machine, and you have to pay for that the same as for your blood. So that’s part of why the tests are so expensive. And it’s better to do bundles of four instead of bundles of two. You know, then you’re paying for five measurements and four of what you want, instead of paying for three, only to have what you want. So sometimes the lab blank amount determines the detectability amount. So it’s complicated. And these were the ones, going through the numbers that I thought were impressive. There was the nonachlor trans, which went down 52.54%, hexachlorobenzene – you might have heard of, this one started at 7,840 parts per trillion, and then its lowest was June 2018 – 3,250. So that’s a 58.54% decrease. Then there’s chlordane oxy, started at 3,380 parts per trillion and it went down to 1,460 parts per trillion in December of 2018 measurement. That’s a decrease of about 56.8%. The halogen went up a little bit, it started out at 2,920 and it was 3,000 in the end. Maybe because the spike last longer, maybe it has something to do with the way the enzyme receptors act on it. And then HCH beta started at 1,840. It went down to 573, so a 68.85% drop. Chlordane alpha cis started at 1,540 and it dropped down to 833 for a 45% drop. And then mirex started at 1,230 parts per trillion went down to 517 parts per trillion, 57.96% drop. So these are some of those pesticides whose residues are not only on the food, but just scattered throughout the whole world now in the dust and we breathe everything. They don’t break down, they don’t go away.

[1:31:28] Ashley James: So you eat primarily organic, but we’re still exposed to them. You’re saying it’s like through water and air and contamination of soil sometimes. And what about glyphosate? Did you test for that?

[1:31:41] Troy Reicherter: No, unfortunately. I do have quite a bit on that in my book. But glyphosate, it appears that its water soluble. So what everyone is saying, although I’d like to see more proof of this is that it does not bioaccumulate, but that it passes through your body quickly. Recently, there was a study done, you can find online down in Southern California, where they tested people in the 90s. And then again recently, and they were testing the urine. So it had gone up dramatically, dramatically over the last 20 years, because there’s so much more of it in the environment, apparently. But it seems to be that it’s more like the phthalates, it’s the plastic softener is that pass through your body in a short period of time. I did find some evidence online that that might not be entirely true. And glyphosate is just one of the ingredients in roundup, although that’s the main one. So there may be other things going on there, probably it’s a much more complicated story. It’s been implicated in non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for sure. So it’s probably causing cancer, even though they’re still spraying it everywhere. I would love to see more testing on all kinds of things like that. And then like lawns, whenever you see a beautiful lawn with no weeds in it, almost certainly they’re putting down products that have 24D inside of it, which is one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange, you know, and if I said I’m going to come and spray Agent Orange on your lawn, you’d freak out. But if I say I’m going to use Scott’s organics and such as Scott, such and such product, and I have some of the product names listed in my book, then you’d say, “Oh, yeah, sure everyone’s doing that.” Why not? I want my lawn to look nice. I don’t want to go pull weeds, I’ll just put this down. And then all the things with leaves naturally just die. Well, they’re growing themselves to death because of this chemical, which is no good for people. And it’s been found in streams all over the place. It’s been proven that people who apply it, you know, it gets on the kids, because they play in the grass.

[1:31:55] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. And the pets.

[1:33:45] Troy Reicherter: Pets.

[1:33:45] Ashley James: We have a big spike in cancer for dogs. I think it was like one in two dogs get cancer. I heard some crazy number. But just think about it, your dog basically lives in your house almost all the time and then when it gets out, it’s running through pesticides.

[1:34:01] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, exactly. So there’s so much stuff out there that we don’t think about, it would be great to test for all of it. And I don’t know what levels we would see. I don’t know if anyone knows that. Like, I was testing these because they’re famous. And we know they’re in the body in large amounts. But it could be the 24D is in my blood lipids to a higher degree than then PCBs. I don’t know. It’s all around us. But it’s been noticed in Canada. I think almost 200 municipalities have outlawed it. Whereas here, they’re just spraying it and not thinking anything about it. And those are just a couple of examples.

[1:34:38] Ashley James: Yeah, I had Dr. Stephanie Seneff on my show a few times. She’s a PhD, MIT top research scientist. And her background is not in the body and understanding the body. But she understands how to look at research. She is just like seeing the matrix, right. And she can see all the data and be able to understand it. And so her and a bunch of other researchers have been looking at glyphosate and its correlation with other diseases, Well, it’s interesting, and she talks about this in our interviews that glyphosate binds to heavy metals, and will release the heavy metals. So let’s say mercury or aluminum, right, it’ll bind into aluminum, and then it’ll release the aluminum when there’s a pH change. So let’s say we eat the glyphosate because we’re eating the hamburger, right, and the cow ate glyphosate, because it was on his corn that he was fed. And so now we’re eating concentrated amounts of glyphosate, which is bound to heavy metals. It gets into our digestive tract, and now we’re ready to urinate it out. When blood changes to a different fluid -so cerebral spinal fluid, or when blood changes to urine, it changes pH. So they’re finding that glyphosate releases heavy metals in the brain, and heavy metals in the kidneys. And in Sri Lanka, they banned glyphosate in the rice paddies when enough of the farmers got kidney disease from it. And that’s because there’s accumulation of the heavy metals and the kidneys as the body was trying to expel the glyphosate. So it might be water soluble, but what it’s leaving behind are the heavy metals, it’s depositing them in the kidneys and the brain. So there’s a little tidbit of information about glyphosate and one of the many reasons why we should eat organic and also advocate for our neighbors, and our schools, golf courses near you, but all the properties near you to not use these chemicals.

You know, I wish we could create a movement where weeds are beautiful, you know. I mean, they’re beautiful flowers. They’re nice and yellow. You’re looking across my lawn, you probably see about a million tiny little Buttercup flowers, and you know they’re beautiful. Why can’t we just love weeds and not poison our body by poisoning our planet. You know, if we think about our planet, and our body are one, everything we’re doing to our planet we’re doing to our body. You know it’s amazing that we have the separation of church and state in our head, we have this amazing like idea that we are somehow completely separated from what we’re doing to our environment. It’s just crazy. It’s, we are poisoning ourselves by poisoning our environment. So I love the research you’re doing. I love your passion about it. I love that you are an educator and an explorer, and that you want to help just give this information to as many people as possible. So hopefully we can start to create a movement around it. I urge listeners to donate because you take all those donations, and you pay for these labs yourself on a teacher salary. So there’s a Donate button on your website. Right? Can you talk a bit about that?

[1:38:03] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, yeah, the money would all go, there’s no administrative costs. It’s just kind of a side project, there’s no staff or anything like that. So it’s not like giving to the Red Cross, or you don’t know how much of your money is actually going to get to where you want it to go. It all goes in, that’s all I would pay for is just for more research, you know, I’ve got my blood tests that I want to do. My friend, just one person also doing the activated charcoal only intervention. And I’m interested to do clinical trials with all different aspects of this, and set them up with advice from professors that they could help, make sure that I don’t make any mistakes. And not just for toxicity, but also all aspects of fasting and holistic health, including, I think heart disease is a huge killer. And I would be willing to bet you anything, based on everything that I know that if a person does extended fast, and they do a before and after coronary calcium scan, which is a lot cheaper than these blood tests I’m doing. I think they’re only $200 each. I’d like to get a group of people to volunteer to do some… someone who’s got like a number of 50. Mine was zero, by the way. I was going to do myself, but I was already zero. So I think the fasting has a lot to do with that. And of course eating vegetarian and everything.

[1:39:31] Ashley James: My husband just did one, you know, he’s been vegan for a year and a half. And his was 02. And we’re like, oh, this is great. It’s pretty awesome what you can transform with this natural living, right?

[1:39:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. So I would love to do those kinds of experiments and then get in the news more and get more exposure and have more people start to donate. So please, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, don’t just trust that the big institutions are going to do this kind of research, because they don’t seem to be that interested in it. So it a little bit goes a long way. I mean, I was able to come up with two different chemical panels on my blood for eight different points in time for just $20,000. So if people were to give a few hundred thousand dollars, we could do quite a bit more than that.

[1:40:25] Ashley James: Yeah, and start getting volunteers to work with you and do a bigger study.

[1:40:30] Troy Reicherter: Definitely, yeah. Not just one person, because there’s going to be some  kind of a spectrum out there of responses, you’re going to get to any intervention. So, you know, the more times you reproduce the experiment with different people, the better then you can really tell – how men do it, how women, how women react to these interventions, how older or younger people have different body types, and you name it. And then we can start to fine tune it and experiment with other things that may be going on in the body.

[1:40:57] Ashley James: So at the beginning, I asked you how you felt, like what the difference is? You said you felt like a superhero, like Superman after doing these fasts. But how do you feel like today, right now sitting here versus two years ago? You know, what’s your date? I mean, you were already healthy, right? So it’s not like a huge night and day, but you have significantly removed these toxicants from your body in the last two years. Do you notice a difference in the day to day quality of life for you?

[1:41:33] Troy Reicherter   

I wish I could say yes, but I don’t know that. It’s that simple. I think what I would say is, I mean, I had been fasting for a long time, and I had been exercising and had been healthy. As you age, you start to notice aches and pains and maybe slowing down of energy. But I think that that’s happening at a much slower rate than it would be happening otherwise. And I think it’s not so much that, it’s just that I’m almost disappointed this summer that I don’t get to fast again.

[1:42:05] Ashley James: You could always just stop eating if you wanted to fast.

[1:42:08] Troy Reicherter: But that would throw off my experiment. Because you see I’m waiting. I’m going to wait a good two years from last year’s fast because I want to see those numbers drop. If I was to do it now, that would interfere with the gene expression and make a new spike. And you’d have to wait for all that to level out. So I can’t really do it.

[1:42:25] Ashley James: You’re making a sacrifice for us.

[1:42:27] Troy Reicherter: Well, not fasting is not exactly a sacrifice. But it’s just that I used to dread it. I mean, when I had to do that 21-day fast, I dreaded it and the 30 day fast. I really dreaded that. But then it got to be last year, and I was almost looking forward to that 40-day fast. And now I kind of feel like, “Hey, where’s my big long month of not eating?” I’m used to this now. And so it’s the first year and you know, for three years that I haven’t done a month or more of not eating. I have some Muslim friends. And when I hang out with them they do their Ramadan and you know I was doing my fast at the same time they were doing some of their Ramadan. And they were like, “So you’re eating at night, right?” I said no. Like, “Are you serious?” So they got quite a bit of respect for that. But of course, I was drinking all day, I’m drinking lots of water. But it’s like that. Even though it’s a it’s an ordeal, they look forward to it for the cleansing that they get from it and the spiritual satisfaction and I kind of miss it. I mean, I don’t know, it’s almost masochistic maybe. But but it’s pleasure and pain. It’s sometimes awful, but sometimes euphoric. And the whole process, you know, it’s just become a part of my life. And I think after this experiment is over, I might do a month a year of just no eating. I don’t know, because it feels so good. It feels so right.

[1:43:56] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:43:57] Troy Reicherter: It’s not that everything changes for me and I was healthy before. It’s not like everything for me changed from night to day. But it could be that way for someone else who was pre diabetic and has all kinds of other issues going on. Definitely, it could make that kind of change for them. For me, it’s just been more of keeping things better than the average person, I guess. Yeah.

[1:44:23] Ashley James: And you’re preventing cancer, and other diseases from accumulated toxins.

[1:44:29] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, I like to think so. You know, scientists always say how do you know, where’s the evidence? So until we have a lot of people to do these tests, you get a number. Here’s that number 20 years later, but you know, 20 years later, how old will all of us be 20 years older, right? So we can’t always wait for all of that empirical data from all of these peer reviewed clinical trials to come out. Otherwise, it might be 100 years before scientists can agree, “Oh, this is a good thing for you.” In the meantime, we’re long gone, and our grandkids are alive, you know, or our great grandkids. So we have to make decisions based on the best evidence we have available right now. And a lot of times that flies in the face with what mainstream medical reputable people are saying, because they have to be careful of their reputation, and they don’t want to get sued. So they say what everyone else says, what seems to be safe, and they’re going to tell you fasting is dangerous. Don’t do that. How much training do they have in fasting? Zero, right. They’ve never done it. They’ve never seen anyone do it. They’ve never heard about it in med school. Of course, they’re going to say not to do it. But so that’s another caveat to the whole thing is pick a good doctor. I picked a doctor who’s into this kind of stuff. If you pick someone who’s not very open minded to it, you’re going to get told don’t do that. And, well, I’m not going to tell you to fast without talking to a doctor. But it’s up to you to choose a doctor. Just like choosing your own religion and choosing which church to go to, right? Choose a good doctor to go to. Well, I mean, if doctor says not to do it for a good reason, then yeah, if there’s something about your health, that definitely precludes fasting, then don’t do it. But if they’re just against it in general principle, then I’d say maybe you should shop around some more.

[1:46:13] Ashley James: You know, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the fasting doctor. He has this story he tells about his mom. He got her to eat wholefoods, plant based no salt, sugar or oil years ago, and she tried to convince her friends to do it. And they all said she’s crazy and they kept eating the standard American diet. And now she’s, I think, gosh, she’s in her 90s for sure. And just doesn’t look like it. She looks like she’s in her 70s, she has energy like she’s in her 70s, she’s just running around, and super healthy. And she goes, you know, the worst part about this is, is that I can’t tell them, I told you so because they’re all dead.

[1:46:54] Troy Reicherter: That’s funny. That’s kind of how it is. Yeah, it’s like, if you wait till the end to tell someone that, then they’re not going to be there. So you have to be the one that does the right thing. Even though you get flack for it the whole time, you get told you’re crazy. And that’s another thing about fasting is if you choose to fast in a house where everyone else is dead set against it. And you go through that period of fear where you hit the wall, you’re going to be 10 times more scared. So if you choose to try to do this, after doing the research and checking with your doctor, it’s good to be surrounded by people that are supportive of what you’re doing.

[1:47:31] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah.

[1:47:31] Troy Reicherter: Otherwise, it’s going to be very negative. Very scary. You’re probably going to get freaked out you’re never gonna try it again.

[1:47:36] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s why I like the True North Medical Center, which is Dr. Goldhamer’s place, because I think staying there’s like the cost of staying at a hotel. I think it’s something like $180 a night and includes all the lab tests, all the doctor’s visits, and they monitor you during your fast and then they help you refeed. That’s another thing before we wrap up the interview, how do you refeed safely?

[1:48:03] Troy Reicherter: Very stupidly, as you’ll see from my book. Yeah, I made some mistakes over the years. And and actually the worst mistake was last year after my 40-day fast. Yeah, it’s easy to sit back and say I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, this is the right way to do it. Even with all my experience, things come up and my son’s birthday comes up and we were taking a trip to Taiwan and so I was I was kind of in a hurry. And so it wasn’t that I ate too much, although I did. What really hurt me was too much salt, you have to be very careful about dry things, anything the least a bit spicy because your stomach lining is very thin. And as I learned to my pain and suffering, and a story about near death experience almost. Well, that wasn’t maybe that bad, but it it’s in my book. I ate, I forget how many days after I’d broken the fast but there was some chips that I bought. And I was stuck in traffic and I was really hungry and I had one and then next thing you know you’ve eaten half the bag. And later that day I had some Mexican food, some some salty foods. Well, when you finish it fast, basically, your body is holding on to any salt that it can. It’s just clinging onto it. And so when you stop eating your body stops producing insulin. But then you start eating again, it over produces because it hasn’t done it in a while. And that makes your body hold on to salt, like you wouldn’t believe. And the salt makes your body retain water. And so my feet started to swell up. And then my leg started to swell up. And if that had gone all the way up to my heart, well, yeah, I would have had to run to the emergency room. And the problem is you don’t notice it until too late. So it’s like hours and hours and hours after you’ve consumed the thing you start notice how it’s funny, my feet are a little bit swollen. And then and I had to get on a plane to go to Taiwan. So which is you know, you’re going to be immobile in a seat where people tend to get edema anyway. So it was a really bad, perfect storm. So be very, very, very careful about all of that. And that would be the gold standard, is to stay at a place like that where someone else will prepare your meals for you. Because I’m telling you, you think you have self control. And I have self control to do a 40-day fast. But it’s when you’re told you can eat but only this much.

[1:50:32] Ashley James: Yeah, the True North Medical Center, I have the printout. And they say like for every seven days you fasted you get one day of juicing. And then after that for every seven days you fasted, it was like one or two days of juicing and then one or two days of just soups. And then you do just raw vegetables. And then so it’s like this gradual process and it’s only certain kinds of vegetables. If you did a 40-days fast, you could spend like the next week, just just gently, slowly refeeding into it and they deliver the food to your room. So that you don’t have to go to  the cafeteria and then get tempted by the food. But that’s really important. The refeeding part is to be gentle and slow and have that level of self-control. And I love that you pointed out about salt. One thing that Dr. Goldhamer says is that you could quit salt after a fast because you have retrained your tongue, basically to taste salt. So now all of a sudden you eat some celery and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, the celery is so salty.” Or you just eat a salad with nothing on it, no dressing and you’re like bursting with flavors, because you’ve retrained your your tongue and your brain to sense the flavors in food that you never sensed before. So after a fast it’s like you get this reset, and all sudden food tastes amazing. You don’t add any seasoning to it. So he encourages people after a fast not have any salt in the house and don’t add salt to your food. Because you’ll be able to taste foods, I mean, no one can hear you’re nodding, but you’re nodding and smiling. Did you notice that after a fast the food tastes so much better?

[1:52:21] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, definitely. Your tongue is much more sensitive. If you just have a piece of bread, you can taste the sugar and the salt in the bread, you don’t have to put anything on it. I wish that I was as scientific as they are about breaking the fast. I I’ve had my own method, which is in the book, which is not advice to others, but just explanation of what I did and why and how it worked out for me and what I think for the future. I usually break it fast with a smoothie but a warm one, never cold. You know, that’s the Chinese medical thing, and then lots of soup, vegetable soup, I’d go very light on the seasonings. And then as far as the length for myself, I think my gut feeling was after this last time that I would basically take the length of time that I fasted in the future, cut it in half and add one day to it. So for a 40-day fast, I would take 21 days to get back to eating a normal meal. And then I divide that up into three parts where, you know, three different stages, stage one, stage two, stage three of equal length. Each one would be about a week long, if I was to do another 40-day fast, that would I think be very safe. And I don’t know if it would be as perfect. I’m sure a century from now, they’ll be so scientific about all of these things. They’ll know exactly what to do. And all kinds of new products will be available, but for myself doing it at home and not having someone else prepare things for me. That’s what I came up with for myself that I think will work well. And as I say, not not perfect by any means. Not something that won’t be changed in the future. But I wrote it down in the book, so I just had such a strong gut feeling that this is the way I will do it in the future. Even though I haven’t done it yet. I thought it would be important to mention to people that that’s what I’m telling myself for now. I should have done.

[1:54:18] Ashley James: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[1:54:23] Troy Reicherter: Well, just to mention, you can read the case study online at www.hhresearch.org. But to really understand what it was all about in terms of the history of fasting, the physiology of fasting, scientific discoveries, about the health benefits of fasting, all the considerations you have to make before fasting, and then all of my experiences from my very first fast 1993 up till now including all the lessons I’ve learned the hard way, all the modifications I made in my fast, and then just what it’s like day to day, because I have a log for each one of the fasts, even going back to the fast in 2007 that I did – what it’s like every day, you know, from beginning to end, how much weight you lose, what you feel like, it’s a lot more than you can put into a simple case study. And then at the end of my book, there’s also a history of toxicity. It’s a brief history, but it’s everything that the average person needs to know. And there’s quite a few practical tips about avoiding toxins and toxicants in your daily life. So I think it’s a good place to start, that was kind of my whole intent is to take a person from zero to 100. In terms of their understanding of this, you know, you may know nothing about chemicals and how big they are, how they interact with your body and other chemicals, where they are. And by the time you’re done with my book, you’ll be at the cutting edge, you’ll be ready to read any other book, and you’ll be able to have a conversation with anybody about pretty much anything on this topic. And you’ll know things that very few people know about fasting.

[1:55:53] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting with us here in the garden, in the backyard to discuss fasting. I’m very fascinated with it. And I love that you’re doing these labs to determine how fasting and all the other things you’re doing to detox is helping. And this hypothesis about gene expression is wonderful. So it’s great. And we’re going to continue to follow up with you and hopefully, listeners will donate to help pay for the labs. And if anyone’s super interested in working with you, they can contact you. I’ll have all the information in the show notes of today’s podcast where they can reach out to Troy and then get your book also so for only $5 so that they can be well informed about detoxing toxins and fasting. So wonderful having you here. Thanks for following up with us. I look forward to hearing more interesting information in the future as everything unfolds.

[1:56:57] Troy Reicherter: Oh, thank you so much, Ashley. You know, I did think of one last thing I should have mentioned is that while we’ve seen a 60% drop in the blood toxicant levels for these chemicals that we measured, and we might see a 90% drop later, that doesn’t necessarily equate to the percentage drop you’re going to have in your chances of getting cancer, because it would appear from talking to the professors at UDub, that the way it works with these chemicals is not like other ways like asbestos and other types of things that induce cancer. What seems to be happening is there’s a certain threshold that gets crossed. And if you’re if you’re across that threshold, then there’s a chain reaction starts in the body, which basically creates antigens that make a chain reaction that cause – it’s as if you got stung by a bee and some people just pull up the bee and they’re fine, other people are allergic to it, and then they’ll have an allergic reaction and they’ll be unable to breathe, right? So it’s basically your body’s overreaction to detecting the presence of these chemicals in the first place. So when they cross that threshold, that your body detects them, not the enzymes I’m talking about, but different enzymes, then that causes cancer. So it may be that even a slight decrease. If you cross that threshold and get below it, then it may be that your chances of getting cancer, because of these chemicals has gone from 100% to zero percent, just like that. It’s like a light switch. It’s either off or it’s on. So you get below that level and stay there. And as far as cancer goes, it would appear that you’re not going to get it. So again, this is like the only way right now that is known to do something that that we’ve been told up till now can’t be done to reduce the level of these chemicals that are giving people cancer. So if you are interested in this, and you want to give it a try, or just find out more about how you can reduce the levels of these toxicants in anyone in your family, especially, especially the unborn, the babies that are on the way, you know how you could maybe get rid of some of this if you’re a woman of that age, before you have your own child, that could be all the difference to save them from some kind of problem later on.

[1:59:18] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:59:18] Troy Reicherter: So that’s the bottom line that I think is so important. So thank you so much for having me. It’s been wonderful.

—

Outro:

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SomaTraining

https://www.learntruehealth.com/somatraining

Highlights:

• What is ELDOA and knowing the basics of it
• Resolving symptoms using ELDOA
• How all elements in our body are all inter-connected that one symptom doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the root cause
• The complexity of the human body and tensegrity
• Stretches and specific techniques using ELDOA

Improve your mobility and unlock the symptoms that you’re feeling using Kinesiology by Jacob Schoen on today’s podcast. Know about positions to target specific functional units in your body by learning about ELDOA. 

[00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 368. How did you get on the podcast? Did he reached out to you or did you reached out to whom?

[00:19] Jacob Schoen: No. That’s a funny story. I was sitting in the living room and my mom came in and she showed me this post that Ben Greenfield had made on Facebook. She showed me this picture of Ben Greenfield hanging upside down on an inversion table. She had known that I was a fan of Ben’s since I don’t know, probably since I was 17 when I first got into triathlon because he had his book beyond training and he was on triathlon at that time. I watched all his videos online. Anyway, she showed me this picture of him hanging upside down talking about the benefits of traction whether be pulled up float to the head or different types of decompression for the spine or making you feel good just in general or anything like that. This is when I was really, really excited about the Eldoa and I still am but I was just new into it so I was really passionate about it. I decided to message him in Facebook. That’s really what I did. I messaged him and I was like, “Hey Ben, my name’s Jacob Shayne and I have these exercises that I’ve learned. They’re pretty uncommon and you’re a pretty uncommon person. I think you might really dig them. They’re pretty holistic. They’re pretty badass like I think you might really like this things. I’d be totally willing to show them to you if you’re willing to have me teach them to you.” He responded and the next day, I booked my plane ticket to go up to Washington like 2 or 3 weeks later. That’s where he lives in Washington state. I showed up at his house 3 weeks later and taught him exercise for 8 hours for the course of 3 days. Just really got immersed in how he lives up there and what he does, him and his whole family, if he’s listening to this “Man, you’re a beast. Good job for you and your kids and your wife you are an amazing group.” I was to go up there to spend time and just kind of live in the greenfield household and really dedicate myself to training him everyday as intensely and precisely as I could and all the exercises that I’ve learned up to that point just try to give the best impression that I could.

[02:19] Ashley James: That is so awesome and during the time that you were training him over the 3 days, was he recruiting you and that’s how you got in the show? After those 3 days then you sat down and did a podcast interview?

[02:35] Jacob Schoen: Right. The second one. After those 3 days, he was like, “Hey man, I really enjoyed what you did. I think the best way I could give your exposure, the best way we can let people know about this is through the podcast.” He was like, “Let’s set up a time to get on skype and make that happen” that’s exactly what we did. I think maybe 6 weeks later, we are on Skype and we got into it. It’s interesting because there’s just like this person I had seen his books, he’s not famous like Brad Pitt famous but in the world of training and more alternative types of ways of thinking in health sphere he’s kind of the man. To be in his show and to be able to talk to him and really to be able to train him like that was pretty awesome for me. That was a definitely an experience I would never forget anytime soon. It’s still kind of unreal people ask me just like you did, “how did you get up on the show” it’s just like, “Well, I just messaged him.” It’s like a lesson of some way to if you just put yourself out there and say, “Hey, what’s the worst thing that could happen” he says, “No, or the best thing that could happen you know you get on his podcast and a whole bunch of other doors of opportunity open for you. There’s a good lesson to learn from that for sure.

[03:51] Ashley James: That is so cool. We have with us, Jacob Schoen. I was really excited to interview him especially because he was on the Ben Greenfield podcast. Of course, most people know he’s a really cool health podcast. People have told me I’m like the female version of him. I thought that was pretty neat. He was homeschooled. I’m homeschooling. I’m going to homeschool our 4-year-old. In fact, were going to do road schooling. We plan on getting an RV and traveling across Canada and the States and homeschooling there. I’m trying to figure out the logistics of how to keep ding the podcast and while doing road schooling. It’s going to be fun and hey, my idea is I want to travel and go to my guests and even like interview them or video them in person so I’ll have to come down to New Orleans and see you, Jacob.

[04:40] Jacob Schoen: Yes, come down to New Orleans. It’s a good place to be.

[04:43] Ashley James: I’m really excited for you to teach my listeners today some awesome information about how to relieve pain and eliminate pain both the chronic and acute injuries and how to prevent them. You specialize in that. You have a degree in Kinesiology. You’ve got all these amazing training. I’ve heard of it before but I don’t really know a lot about it. I know my listeners will definitely want to know more about what you do. Soma training and all the other things you do. Before we get into your credentials, id love to hear your story. What happened in your life that made you want to dive into Kinesiology and eventually want to help people become better versions of themselves?

[05:34] Jacob Schoen: Yes, sure. I think that starts from day one honestly of my life. Now’s the perfect time to give a big thanks to the main person involved without her, she’s my mom. She’s been my best friend for my whole life and she’s really the person that inspires me to do what I do. Without her, even coming down to just giving me my first client. Without her, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing. So thank you, momma, I love you.

[06:02] Ashley James: I’ve never had guest do a shout out to their mom. I think that’s pretty awesome.

[06:06] Jacob Schoen: You’ve got to give a shout out to mom. She’s so important. I started like any kid. I grew up playing sports. Played any sport you could imagine. Baseball, football, soccer, basketball all those. I just loved being outside, I love playing sports. Also, I am unbelievably competitive. Competitive to the point where not just I would cry if I lost but I would cry for days and think about it. I was super, super competitive and then that brought me into sports into high school where I wasn’t the most naturally gifted athlete but I was really set on trying to work hard to try to find different ways to be better. Whether it was how to make my legs stronger so I could kick the soccer ball harder or jump higher or whether it was how much weight can I do for this to make me swim faster whatever it is. Being really competitive and being really curious and being really interested in trying to learn to find details about things to try to make up for any deficit I might have naturally was really my – on how to learn different things. When I was in high school I had an injury to my knee and later come to find out that injury to my knee actually probably gave me the injury that I have in my hip right now that I was still dealing with to this day. That injury in my hip is what really inspired me to start trying to figure out different ways to get the injury and the pain to go away because it would just bother me all the time. I was really competitive cyclist and triathlete in my late teen, early 20 years and anybody who know athletes who knows sports they know that when they get focused on something they just go for it. Like if you’re a cyclist or  a runner or a  swimmer you could look at the black line all day and just focus on that thing. I was really driven to try figure out what the heck was going on with my freaking hip. I couldn’t figure it out so when I got into college I know that I wanted to deal with something of the physical body. I was interested in performance. I was so interest on how to make the human body bigger, faster, stronger. Just kind of classic like most athletes are. I went into Kinesiology and the from Kinesiology, my senior year of college I got an internship at a holistic training facility in Baton Rouge which is where LSU is. During that semester, I was introduced to all different types of exercise techniques that I’ve never even heard of or thought of. Never even knew existed, because my initial interest was in the sports performance aspect, how to make a muscle bigger, faster, stronger. I’ve never really thought about the body in a holistic type of way. I always just really focus and super-concentrated on a particular level. I’ve never really branched out and try to think about like “what influence does the ankle have on the hip, what influence does the knee have on the shoulder. What influence does all the different parts of the body have on the bigger picture.” Once I got into this internship and started to have my eyes literally not just open but peeled back and just held up into all this new amazing information. I was so inspired to start to learn about this stuff and I was like, “Man, maybe some of the things can help me with the hip problem that I have.” My final couple months there, I got introduced to Eldoa techniques which are a group of exercises designed to create space joints. Whether hip, back, your neck whatever it is. They try to create space to give more room for the nerve so you could rotate and move and really just feel good. These exercises I introduced them and I was like, “Man, not only do they feel really good but they’re also really challenging and there’s academic aspect to learning about them.” I was just hooked from that. As soon as the semester was over and I graduated. I signed up with a couple of guys from the facility to take the first Eldoa one which was in Dallas that next April. Ever since then, I have been on the road to just really learning as much as possible but over time, it’s changed from just learning as much as possible just to be the best practitioner to learning as much as possible because I realized the more things that I learn, the more opportunity that I have for the people that come into my studio for me to help them. If I learn a technique, if I learn something more about the body that opens my eyes a little bit more to a problem that someone else’s is having then that makes me a better practitioner and give me the opportunity to help them. It’s really been all the way back from day one to trying to be good athlete to now, to try to use that same drive to get the people that come into my office out of pain or just to having a more functional life.

[10:58] Ashley James: It’s interesting. If you had never had that hip injury, do you think that you would’ve ended up in the same place?

[11:04] Jacob Schoen: It’s so funny you say that because I’ve been it’s a constant battle in life I think to try to garner perspective and to try to really appreciate the things that are challenging for you and how they put you in the place that you are. For example, like my dad died when I was young, if it wasn’t for him passing when I was young then I probably wouldn’t have that relationship I had with my mom. If I wouldn’t have that relationship with my mom, I wouldn’t have the respect for the work that she does. She’s also a trainer. I probably wouldn’t have been inspired as much by her to do what I do now. Just from that level also like the competitive nature of being a little boy trying to find his way. Everything that comes from that and then – it’s funny because I got the knee injury when I joined the wrestling team in high school. I joined the wrestling team in high school because my friends that were on the wrestling team kept beating me up. I was like, “I can’t keep getting beat up like that. This isn’t that much fun. I want to be able to handle this back.” I did it totally from a place, now I see there’s a place of lack of maturity but in reality, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had the knee injury. The knee injury wouldn’t have caused the hip problem, the hip problem set me on the path towards really trying learn about all this stuff. It’s a tough thing to do to have that perspective that the thing that causes you the most pain is probably the best gift but in reality, that’s really what it is. As much as my hip problem annoys me, I have to at the same time be thankful that I have it because without it, for sure I would not have the drive to really try to figure any of this stuff out. I guess I can thank my bum hip for that.

[13:00] Ashley James: You turned your pain into a gift.

[13:04] Jacob Schoen: Yes. Hopefully, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. I guess. [laughter] People who have problem that they’ve been dealing with for a long time, a lot of times there’s a lot of layers of it. It’s complex, not just from the orthopedic level where now my hip problem has caused different things to happen in my lumbar spine and that creates little problems in my neck. I still have the knee problem, yes. All that stuff is connected but everting comes in layers like that. It’s definitely an interesting process for sure both mentally, physically and emotionally too.

[13:46] Ashley James: Now, you’re a Eldoa trainer. Can you explain what does Eldoa mean?

[13:54] Jacob Schoen: Yes, Eldoa. I like try to make it as simple as possible. I don’t if it’s Einstein that said it, “it takes a real master to or anyone can make something simple complex but it takes a real master to make something complex simple” something along those lines. Really, what Eldoa is it’s a group of exercises designed to create space at a joint. If you think about our body in a way that it’s organized, we can get into that a little bit more later too but it’s really organized in what’s called Tensegrity. Tensegrity is like those kids toys you see where there’s a bunch of rubber bands holding a bunch of sticks together. Those sticks are our bones those rubber bands are our connected tissue in our muscles. If you think about your body, if overtime you get dehydrated or too much stress or injury, those rubber bands start to get smaller, smaller and more and more fragile. The goal for the Eldoa is to re-establish the quality of those rubber bands and also to establish again better movement between the sticks it creates space at the joint. On a deeper level, it gets as complex as you want to make it. It means in French, it’s a French acronym. In English, it’s Longitudinal Osteo-articular De-coaptation Stretches. Which is not only a mouthful but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

[15:21] Ashley James: Okay, but I want to hear the French version.

[15:24] Jacob Schoen: Oh the French version? All right, here we go. Gosh, you know I don’t speak French right? [Laughter] it’s like Entirement Longitudinaux Decoaptation Osteo-Articulaire avec something, something.

[15:36] Ashley James: That was awesome.

[15:39] Jacob Schoen: You made me do it and I did it. there you go, I hope you’re happy. Yes, it’s a big, big word that is you really just boil it down, you have two structures, two bones and you want a little more space between them. What that space means is that space means freedom. That freedom gives you an ability to move, it means less stress on the artery and the vein that is associated on that’s space. It means better quality, better hydration, more ability to get nutrition to that area. Just in general, it means a higher quality existence for that particular structure that you’re working on.

[16:17] Ashley James: That’s really interesting because the first thing I think of when giving a joint more space is instability. The more space you give a joint the more and stable it becomes. Can you bust the myth or explain why giving the joint more space using Eldoa would not create and instability in the joint?

[16:36] Jacob Schoen: Yes, absolutely. If you were to for example lay down on someone’s table and they just yank your leg right, let’s say the goal was to create space between your leg bone and your hip bone. So your femur and your ilium, let’s say that was the goal. Let’s say they accomplished that goal where they now have 2cm instead of 1. There is going to be more instability at that joint now, because why? For one because it was done passively. The ligaments that support the joint, the muscle that support the joint, they didn’t learn anything. They didn’t have time to adapt, they didn’t have time to actively take part in it and also the nervous system which is what coordinate your reception and the awareness of your body no longer now has any feedback from that joint that it knows exists. Does that makes sense? When things are done actively, whether it be a kid learning how to write or ride a bicycle or someone learning how to do an exercise to decompress a joint in their back, when it’s done actively, the nervous system takes part, the brain takes part and then locally the muscles and the ligament and all the connected tissue around that joint, they all take part in that process. You become strong in that new place. As opposed as to just being put there by something someone else because you got there yourself. You learn how to be there and the structures that got you there or are there to support you, know what you’re doing. They know what your intent was, their ability to adapt to that new place is so much stronger, does that makes sense?

[18:00] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. If someone hangs upside down using an inversion table is that considered passive?

[18:18] Jacob Schoen: It is because the active component of that is just gravity. The active component in that is not intrinsic to their connective tissue or to their body. It’s an outside force acting on them and then them allowing that to happen. That is passive, yes, maybe they’re holding on to the pull-up bar. But at a more specific level or a more precise way of looking at it. It is passive. If you do an Eldoa exercise, trust me it is active. I’ve had athletes where for example, I’ve worked with a weight lifter who was, I believe he was 22 at that time. He’s like 160 pounds, he could clean and jerk 375. This kid was an absolute stud weight lifter. I had him do teen on teen Eldoa which is to be fair, one of the more difficult ones. He said, he was more likely to throw in the white flag, it’s a throwing the towel during the Eldoa exercise than he is in even some of his hardest squat workout because what it does is it not only in some way put you in a slide battle against gravity but also in a battle against all the tightness that you have intrinsically in yourself. If you’re really, really tight in your hips, if you’re really, really tight in your shoulders or in your neck and then I tried to coach you into a good position then you had to work against that tightness. The battle against yourself is the hardest battle. It’s super active when you do it but because it’s active your body remembers it. It ingrains it in your nervous system and the result last longer because you had to learn how to do it as opposed to someone just in some way giving you the answer.

[19:59] Ashley James: I’m trying to imagine it. Obviously, with the podcast, we can’t see you doing it. I’m trying to imagine it. Is it like stretching? Is it like doing a squat? I’m trying to imagine going against the tension of the body to open up the joints.

[20:22] Jacob Schoen: I’ll bring it to one of the most introductory postures. It’s really the ones that you learn when you first start doing the Eldoa. It’s the Eldoa for t67. I’ll try to describe it to you in a way hopefully make sense in the context of what we’re talking about but you sit as tall as you can possibly sit. Most people work at a desk nowadays or if you they don’t, they spend a lot of time on their phone or on the computer and they start to develop that rounded posture that everyone’s familiar with the my-head’s-forward-I’m-looking-at-my-cellphone kind of posture. That posture now you have to try to sit tall. Now you can’t sit rounded which is more comfortable for you. You try to sit tall now. Now you’re pushing the crown of your head to the ceiling and you’re pushing your sit bones into the floor. Your initial tuberosities down into the floor. What that is, it’s what called axial extension. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re taking the resting tension in the spine and increasing it to start establish the deepest level a little bit of tension so you could create some space out of a particular joint. Then with your legs crossed, you start to push your knees down a little bit. The way I think about that is it kind of anchors the lowest level and then you take your hand above you keep them above like you’re praying and you try to touch the ceiling. You don’t just hold your hands at a high point you’re actively constantly trying to touch the ceiling with your head and your hands as you keep your sit bones and your knees pushing down. If you really just take a step back and look at that, is the upper half is doing a tug-of-war to the ceiling, the lower half is doing a tug of war to the floor somewhere in the middle they meet and they meet at T67 and at that joint they create a little battle. They create a little tug of war. The top that’s above wants to go up, the art that’s below wants to go down and so in the middle you create a little bit of space.

[22:12] Ashley James: You said, cross your legs?

[22:16] Jacob Schoen: Yes. You cross your legs. For T67, you cross your legs.

[22:20] Ashley James: Does it matter what legs is crossed? Like leftover right or right over left. Does it matter?

[22:25] Jacob Schoen: No, it doesn’t because you close the kinetic chain at the two initial tuberosities. Whenever you start to cross the legs you don’t have any concern anymore for the balance of the pelvic floor and now you’re really just concerned about the extension above your head. That’s just particular for that posture. For the other ones though you have more concern for the different fascia connection down to the feet to the hips whether depending on which level you’re trying to target.

[22:54] Ashley James: That felt awesome. How long should I hold it for?

[22:57] Jacob Schoen: 60 seconds. Yes, I try to explain it a little bit like it’s a really, really fast jog. It’s not a sprint because you can only sprint for so long. If you’re just, “I’m pushing super hard. I’m holding my breath. I’m trying to make myself as tall as possible.” A lot of people when they first try it they go, “That was tough. Oh man, it’s only been 15 seconds.” The reality is to get the different type of muscle fibers that you are working with to totally relax, to shut off the Sherrington’s reflex. To get the fascia that you’re working with to actually start to respond because of it’s elastic nature. To actually start to respond you need to hold it under tension for a little bit longer. The base-level we say is just 60 seconds. There are adaptations to that depending which Eldoa you’re doing and also the state of the client that you’re working with. If they have a super, super toned nervous system, they’re under a lot of stress, under a lot pain, maybe you changed that a little bit but the base level is that you work for 60 seconds and that also gives you time to start to make modifications too. Let’s say you don’t have super good awareness of your head in space, if you only go up there for 10 seconds well, then you don’t really have time to correct the posture of your head or to really learn that it was in a bad way so you can move it back. That 6o seconds is both physiologically functional but also awareness functional. It lets you try to modify and perfect the exercise while you work at it.

[24:27] Ashley James: I like it. In your pre-interview form, you mentioned that you love to teach people how to have awareness of their body so they when they go to work out they can prevent injuries. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve injured and my husband too, I’m going to throw him under the bus, how many times did both of us have injured ourselves. I remember this one time we went back in the gym. It’s sort of like after we’re taking a hiatus, “Okay, we’re back it’s going to be awesome” the first machine we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to use machines because they’re safe. We’re not going to injure ourselves.” I think we we’re recovering from something. I remember my husband had fractured his ankle. We were working with the trainer and he was like, “Just push harder. It’s fine.” So we were like, “No, we got an x-ray. No, it’s actually fractured. Thanks for telling him to push through it.” When we got back to the gym, the first machine he got on, I guess he overdid it. He re-injured his ankle. I’m like, “How did you injured your ankle on a machine? That’s a stationary object. You’re moving your body in it.” I injured myself so many times at the gym and so the idea of having more awareness and just taking it slow. Making sure our bodies in the right space, in the right alignment. Yes, you’re in the right space. What can you teach us here to help us have better body awareness so we can prevent injuries?

[26:08] Jacob Schoen: Wow, that’s a good question. To be fair, it’s kind of tough to teach someone awareness without being there with them. I’ve worked with enough people now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not the most experienced practitioner. I’m only 26 but I’ve worked with enough people now to really appreciate that fact that not many people have awareness of their body. That’s why a quick sidebar, I think people should absolutely get their children involved in gymnastics or dance to really start to develop that awareness from a young age because gymnasts and dancers even if they’re not the most brutally strong or brutally fast athletes, they have a really good base of understanding their body in space that they can then transfer to any exercise or any sport that they want to. There’s stories of football players that their parents make them take gymnastic and you have these 6’5, 300-pound guys able to do backflips. It’s just unbelievable stuff. That’s a quick sidebar for that. To develop awareness I would say, one you have to have a reference. You have to have something you trust to be for example straight, so you can compare whether or not you’re straight. Your husband or wife to take a photo of you like, you pick a string, an example that people first tell me the how-to assess posture is that they use is that they have a string hanging from the ceiling, then they line it up directly in between the people’s feet and then they take a picture of them and they show them how maybe their nose is not directly in line with the string-like they would think if they were even or the other way you can do it is you can stand next to a wall maybe you have too much curve in your lumbar spine, you don’t know that. Maybe your hips really fall forward put your shoulders and head to the wall you’ll see how much space is between your lower back and the wall maybe you thought its going to be a little bit but it turn out to be a lot. You have that trancendal reference to know because you trust that the wall is built vertical, right? Hopefully at least if your carpenter was good. You have to have to have something that you trust to be your standard so that you can have that thing to compare against, right? From there, you have to start to develop movement practices. You have to start to really try to do movement with an intention. That intention can be anything as simple as when I wake up in the morning, I do a gentle routine where I just start my body a little bit. I roll my feet back and forth, left to right. I roll from front to back. I try to do a little figure 8 with my feet, little figure 8 with my knees. I really try to don’t it just to accomplish it, it try to do it at least when I was first doing it to see how it felt. Is it easier to do it on my right? Is it easier to do it on my left? When I move my pelvis, is it easier to stick my butt out? Or is it easier when to tuck my tail? Do I have a little pain when that happens? If move my spine, if I try to move it left or right can I actually move that? Another thing that your people can do at home which is an interesting thing to try do. I’ll try to explain it. Take your arm out to the side, so that your palm is facing the ground. Alright? You there with me? Okay, perfect. Now turn your hand all the way down so that your palm is facing backward. Okay, do you see that? Now I what I want you to do is keep your palm facing backward but turn your bicep to the ceiling. Were you able to do it?

[29:38] Ashley James: Okay. [laughter]

[29:43] Jacob Schoen: I like the way you’re doing that.

[29:44] Ashley James: My elbows bent a little bit. Was my elbows supposed to be bent a little bit?

[29:48] Jacob Schoen: We’ll start from the beginning again. Take your arm out to the side with your palm facing the floor. Turn your palm towards the back wall. If you look at your elbow now your bicep is facing more towards the floor. Right?

[30:00] Ashley James: My bicep is yes, floor and also kind of in front of me. 45-degree angle. Yes.

[30:12] Jacob Schoen: Exactly, okay. Now what I want you to do is keep your bicep facing that exact same place and turn your hand back flat. Now without moving your hand turn your bicep back to the ceiling.

[30:29] Ashley James: Oh yeah. Okay.

[30:31] Jacob Schoen: Do you see how your elbow and your hand can move separately?

[30:34] Ashley James: Yes.

[30:35] Jacob Schoen: Now what I want you to do the level is to keep your hand flat the whole time and now turn your bicep to the floor. Did you do it?

[30:46] Ashley James: Yes.

[30:49] Jacob Schoen: Okay, perfect. That is your body’s awareness of I know the difference between my hand and my wrist, my elbow, and my shoulder. A lot of people especially if they have an injury they go, okay they can turn it down then can turn it back but then when they try to differentiate the movement at their elbow from the movement at their hand. They can’t do it. It’s not because you and I are from a different planet that we can do it, it’s just because our brain knows how to move our elbow instead of move the whole thing. That is body awareness. There is different practices for that, for everything. It could just be inverting or reverting the ankle. Rolling the knees around, moving the lumbar spine, moving things left to right. A good thing that I’ve tried to teach people when they first come in especially if they have a lot of back pain is what’s called the Good Morning exercise. Essentially, all you do is to sit on your bum, you bend your knees to whatever they’re comfortable most people a little less than 90 degrees or sorry, little more than 90 degrees. Nice and relaxed kind of like a butterfly would be open. All you do is hold on to your knees, you lift yourself up really tall, feel your sit bones on the floor. Feel those hard bones like that would be if you felt those on a hard chair it would be uncomfortable. All you do is to tilt just your pelvis back and then roll your pelvis forward. That just to teach you, “Okay, I know where my pelvis is.” A lot of people when they do that they start to move their pelvis and then their head starts to move forward or their chest moves a lot. I have to educate them that your pelvis is here and not up there. Start to move just the pelvis and then you can increase it so you can say, “Okay, I’m moving my pelvis and more of my lumbar spine. Okay, now I know better where my lumbar spine is in my body.” Then you got from your lumbar spine to the thoracic and then you can go all the way up and down but that’s an education exercise that teaches them how to differentiate different parts of their body. When you’re doing exercise at the gym, really try to pay attention to what you’re doing. Be mindful of what you’re doing and if you’re really interested in learning more body awareness, you go out and you seek out a professional that’s going to be able to teach you whether it be yoga or I prefer, recommend doing the Eldoa because of how precise it is. You really learn a lot about your body and how to manage all the pieces at one time.

[33:05] Ashley James:  I learned about a Z health. Have you heard of that? It was developed by a chiropractor. He explains that when we have injury, the body’s compensating to protect it but when the injury’s healed it’s like we still have the neurological map of holding this pattern. Like that you just said, when someone has had an injury in the past, they might not be able to right away move their arms separate from their wrist and move their shoulder separate for\\rom their elbow then it might just all move in one because if they have elbow injury then their brain is still holding that injury memory. That in Z health he has people do small circular movements with each joint to reset the map. Have you heard of that system? Is this similar to it?

[34:08] Jacob Schoen: I haven’t heard of it. No. To be honest, I’m really a fan of anything that gets people more moving and in the context of moving gets them moving more mindfully. Anything that gets them to get to start to do that where they just pay attention to what it is that they’re doing is something I’m all on board for. I haven’t heard of that specifically.

[34:31] Ashley James: Intuitively, it sounds like you intuitively were doing what he also intuitively figured out. Which is sit there and roll each joint and just pay attention and go, “Wow this is how this joint feels. This is right wrist versus left wrist. Left knee versus right knee and you’re warming them up in the morning, you’re getting the synovial fluid going, but you’re also getting that body awareness and going, “Okay, let’s just come back into the body” which would also be very relaxing. It would turn off the sympathetic nervous system response. It would help the body like you said better circulation. Better circulation happens when we were in that rest and digest state. How many minutes a day would you say do that in the morning?

[35:15] Jacob Schoen: In the morning? Maybe just three. Nice and easy nice and quick. I’ll do that and usually hop in the shower and get my day started. It’s nice because unfortunately, we live in the world were most people are a little sleep deprived so they set up their alarm from the exact last minute that they would absolutely need to wake up to make it to work on time. They don’t really allow themselves that time in the morning for their body to really warm up to the day to day life. I try to give myself that a little bit of time, just allow myself just 3 minutes to move and not only open my eyes and wake up and but also get my body ready to go get the day is something I think really important. It’s also most people’s first instinct when they wake up especially if they’re busy and they have a lot of responsibilities, “Okay, let me check my email. What did I miss? Let me do this” its just nice to take that first couple of minutes to just say, “Hey body, good morning. How are you doing? How my knee? How’s my shoulder? How’s my head?” just kind of take that time for yourself. I admit I’m not always the best with it. There are some morning where I’m like, “Man, I’m just going to the shower I’m tired of doing this.” Most mornings I will try to make that time.

[36:28] Ashley James: You could do it in the shower.

[36:30] Jacob Schoen: I could do it in the shower but I don’t know if that’s slippery soapy environment is my best environment for body awareness. It’s definitely high stakes that’s always kind of fun but I don’t know if it’s the best place to do that. I think this reminds me of why I’m so pumped about – there are certain things that I feel like come to you, just like pop in your brain. You know, I can’t really take responsibility for thinking up. Here is this time when I thought of the tagline for my business or the slogan for my business whatever it is it’s called Move More Aware. I want people to move. I want people to move more. I want people to move more awareness. That awareness can be whether mentally, emotional, how you moving throughout the day, what kind of baggage you bringing with you, what kind of energy are you giving off to the people you’re interacting with. Also physically, how are you moving? It’s not just that you’re moving but what like what’s the quality of your movement? Most people especially in the western culture it’s more about go, go, go. I did 20,000 steps. I burned 6,000 calories at CrossFit class. I’m not trying to talk bad about CrossFit anything. I did 4,000 burpees today. Okay, good but how well did you them? What is that really giving you in the long term? What kind image and what kind of information are you sending to your brain about the quality of your movement and not just the quantity of it.

[38:08] Ashley James: I like that you’re pointing out the quality of the movement is more important than just the quantity of the movement because in the quantity of the movement is where we can injure our self but the quality of the movement is where we can heal our self.

[38:24] Jacob Schoen: Absolutely. That’s where all the power lies. I think it’s general life thing too. It’s really about the quality of your life and not necessarily the quantity. It’s so interesting to me I think a lot of times about people who are doing the longevity stuff. I also wonder say, “Okay good you’re doing all these stuff but what’s the quality of the life you’re living right now? How good is it?” If it’s good, I would like – one of the things I came up with is like, I want to live a little and live a lot. Do you know what I mean? A lot of times when you’re out having a good time and people say, “C’ mon, live a little.” its like, “Okay, I’ll live a little. I’ll do some things but also I want to balance that with living a lot. I want to live long time.” Trying to balance those two things. There needs to be, yes sure there needs to be some quantity on your life. I think it really comes down to most people would probably agree that it’s really about the quality of the relationships that you have, the food that you eat, the movement that you do, the sleep that you get. All of those things are really what create a balanced and beautiful life. It’s really about the quality. I think movement is no different than that. Especially in our culture, it’s about we were pretty short-sided in a lot of ways where we just say, “Okay, I want my muscles to get bigger. I want to be more ripped and lean,” it’s like, “Okay, I understand that. I also want to do that and wanted to do that when I was 16 but at the same time, how well do you move, how much pain do you have? How good is the quality of your movement and where is that going to bring you in 2, 3, 5 years?  If all of those answers are answered and you’re happy with those answers then you can just plug and go along.

[40:11] Ashley James: Right. I love it. looking deeper into what your motivation is for wanting to shape your body in a certain way is important because you point out there are those consequences that come down the road. We want to make sure we’re creating a quality of life and longevity in our life. Also having a great life right now while we’re doing it. It’s both. What is Soma training? That’s another thing that you do. Soma training and Soma therapy.

[40:43] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, sure. Those programs are programs that were developed by Dr. Guy VOYER who is also the gentleman who developed the Eldoa exercises. Everybody has that person, that teacher that they really resonate with and what they find to really provide message that they think is powerful and philosophically they agree with and also academically, you’re otherwise they really find to be true for them, he’s been that teacher for me. I want to thank him for that, thank you Dr. VOYER, you’re amazing. Those two programs are his programs for both trainings so soma training and soma therapy. What those programs are, I’ll talk about the training aspect. What those programs are they really try to teach you how to work with every single part of the body so that no matter who walks into your facility, you can at least in some way help and understand what they have going on because the level of the training you’ve gotten is so in-depth. One of the things that’s interesting about it and i respect so much about it is that it does break the body down into its smallest pieces. When you take a class you’re going to take a class for 3 days just on segmental strengthening of muscles in your legs. There’s a whole bunch of muscles in your legs and people might go “Okay, why do I need to strengthen this specific fiber of this quadricep?” Well, that’s really specific but if you take a bigger step back and you understand the global picture it makes a lot of sense to go after the link in the chain that you know to be the weakest link in the chain. Only with specific tools can I think you really be holistic in the way you approach things. Each ligament of the knee has an exercise for appropriate section. Each segment of the spine has an exercise for the Eldoa. Each muscle has segmental strengthening exercise. Then there is exercises to bring the picture all back together. The Some training what it really does is it divides the body into all of its functional pieces. Teaches you how to work with each individual one and then gives you the context on how to bring it all together in the bigger picture. For me as a trainer, it absolutely changed and really made my practice because I feel confident that anybody who comes into my studio I’ll at least be able to get them on the road towards their goal. Whether it be bigger, faster, stronger, whether it be no pain, longevity or whatever it is. I feel really confident the these exercises, because of their specificity and because of their precision can really move people towards whatever goal it is that they have.

[43:24] Ashley James: That’s soma training?

[43:25] Jacob Schoen:  That’s soma training exactly.

[43:27] Ashley James: It taught you how to work with all body style, body shapes, body challenges and the goals that people have.

[43:38] Jacob Schoen: Yes. It’s an exercise program, exercise curriculum that really teaches you how to respect the individualistic nature of each person. One thing and this is a good time to talk about what people call functional exercise. That’s a really big term that is used super frequently. The thing I would say first off start by saying is that it seems to me that most functional exercise looks the same. It has a similar style look to. Whether it be a certain type of kettlebell thing or certain type of TRX movement or if you’re not familiar with TRX, it’s just that suspension straps but I’m sure you know what those are. It’s just a specific looking type of movement. The one thing I would say about that is that “Okay, what’s functional for me is someone does manual therapy over a table and teach people how to train all day versus functional exercise for someone who’s sitting at a desk versus functional exercise for someone who does hair or is a car mechanic. These totally different functional exercise. The other thing is it’s like, “Okay, what’s your goal. If your goal is to build muscle then yes, a bicep curl is functional exercise for that particular goal.” I think a lot of times in the exercise field, we need to take a step back and we say a lot of people really get dogmatic and say anything that isn’t functional training is bad, or whatever it is. “Okay, functional for you and for me are two different things, otherwise what’s your goal for that?” The Soma training programs that really teaches you how to respect, what is functional in for that person. Also how to apply that to every single person because everybody is totally beautiful and unique and different right? You know, you’re obviously different than I am. Not only different but maybe you have a different way of thinking, a different type of emotional system, a different brain, and a different orthopedic history. The way that I teach you an exercise or how you execute an exercise might be different from how I execute the exercise based off our anatomy based off a whole number of factors and what the program really does is it allows you to take all of those factors into consideration and give the person the best exercise as opposed to just saying, everyone needs to be able to do deadlift or everyone needs to be able to do a kettlebell swing, everyone needs to be able to do whatever because the truth is that, not everybody needs to do the same thing because not everybody is the same.

[46:12] Ashley James: Right. I just imagine the challenges that someone was sitting in the desk all day versus if they’re doing hair or if they’re a machine. Their bodies in a different position all day. It wouldn’t benefit them to just do the same exercise, the same machines at the gym. You are looking to support them and understanding what their body does every day. You can support them in being balanced. That makes sense.

[46:42] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely. If you have a chiropractor for example. Chiropractor is probably doing manual work and adjusting most of the day. Maybe he’s leaning forward over a top of somebody for 4 hours a day. That a totally different stress in his body than someone who like a hair dresser who’s arms are up by their head all day working on people’s hair or different than somebody who’s a car mechanic who’s laying on his back all day underneath a car. It’s three totally different classes of people just in those examples. To say that their training all needs to look and be the same is super reductionist and the goal is to be précised so you can help the person as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. To put everyone in the same box and say everyone needs to do a certain type of training is really narrow. When you have the tools to work with the body then you can apply those tools to anybody. Soma training is just somo which means body, so it’s body training. We know things about the anatomy, we know things about body mechanics we could just apply those if you understand it well to the people would walk into you and say, “Okay, Joe walks in. He has problems with his knee. Should he be doing this or should he strengthen his specific muscle around his knee? How do you strengthen that specific muscle? Well, you do it like this but you have to modify it to the fact that Joe has pain around this point. Everyone’s different. Not everyone is the textbook. If you only have the textbook to work with then you’re going to be really limited as a practitioner to how you can apply that to different people when they come see you.

[48:19] Ashley James: If someone come to you and they have pain and they want to work out. They want to strengthen their body but they have pain so maybe the mechanic or that hairdresser has a frozen shoulder or the person works at the desk all day has carpal tunnel, the chiropractor has lower back pain.

[48:41] Jacob Schoen:  Which is very common by the way, which I get because you’re leaning over people all day you know.

[48:46] Ashley James: Exactly. My chiropractor has pain in his hands from how he adjusts and he’s developed some kind of arthritis. He’s been doing it for over 30 years. He figured out amazing ways at still being a chiropractor and no wearing down his hands. If someone comes to you, they want to work out but they’re really afraid because they have pain and pain has stopped them from working out in the past, do you start by doing Eldoa with them or what do you do first to help get them out of pain so then they can train? Or do you train at the same time? How does that work?

[49:30] Jacob Schoen: It’s really a concurrent process. Most of the time it’s going to happen at the same time. That’s the beautiful thing that I really love about this exercise is that you can get someone who is afraid of exercise or hesitant about exercise because they’ve been hurt in the past. Every time they do something, it hurts more or they just don’t want to be in pain anymore but the beautiful thing about this exercises is that a lot of times you use the exercises to help or start to work on the pain. It’s like a snowball effect, you do more exercise you feel a lilt bit better. You do more exercise you feel better and better before you know it, you’re using the exercise as maintenance thing because you’re no longer in pain and then you can start back on the road of classic fitness training if that’s your goal. Most of the people that I work with, they come and see me because they either had a friend that work with me and they had results or they just tried everything else and they still are not really where they want to be. Most people it is concurrent process of a little bit of manual therapy and then a lot of exercise. I try to do as much exercise as I can in the context of that person because it really gives them the power. If I have someone that comes and sees me and I only see then to do manual therapy then yes, I’m healing them and I believe I’m helping them but it’s, not that its too much power on my hands but it’s not enough power on their hands. I really want to work the peoples that I work with their mentality that start to, here’s a plug, shift. That’s how I came up with the business. I was started talking to myself and I came up with that name. It’s really been great because it’s stuck and is made a lot of sense for me as far as the paradigm goes. Yes, its really start to shift because if they say, “Yes I learned these exercises from Jake. but I’ve been doing them I’m getting result by doing them.” I’ve only seen him once or twice. It’s not that I saw him that got me the result but it’s doing the exercise that got me the result. “Okay I can do this, I can do the change to myself that I want to see.’ To be a part of that s process is the amazing thing for me because you teach people realize they have power. You do it through exercise. Really, my main goal is to start people to exercise by themselves. That’s not an original idea to me, Dr. VOYER one of his best quotes is “You are your own best therapist” whether it that be mental, emotional or a physical thing, it’s really the power is in you. And so yes I have the tools to teach you how to do that but really it’s up to you to get the result for yourself. Most people that are successful with me are the ones who really take the responsibility to do the exercise by themselves. To follow the home program and to execute that by themselves and that how they get the result. Yes, its some manual therapy but I really try to use mostly exercise to get people back moving and start the ball down the road. I had a lady who come and see me she was so afraid to do anything even walk. We were doing some really, really gentle exercise like the good morning thing I was telling you about. She had pain during that. I know that her nervous systems is really guarded. I know mentally, emotionally, physically she’s really protective of what she was doing on. So I was like, “All right before you do any exercise all I want you to do is just go outside and do a nice easy 10-minute walk. Go get some fresh air. Maybe some sunshine,” in New Orleans it’s super hot you have to deal with that but “go outside and get a 10-minute walk” and she was afraid. She as like, “Well, walking hurts my back.” I was like, “Is there anything that doesn’t hurt your back?” she’s like “Well, if I lay down in this specific away.” and I was like, “We have to work together because if you’re going to get where you want to go which picking up your grandkids and going out to dance with your husband. We need to start somewhere.“ I got her to start to do 10 minutes  walks a day she’s like, “It’s a little painful but I do feel better after.” Now she’s walking 30 minutes a day during her exercises and everything is a lot better. It’s just that process. Really getting people to try to take power back into their own hands. Maybe they experience a little pain at the beginning but they feel accomplished after. There’s a whole bunch of factors that go into it to getting someone from a place where they are afraid to do exercise to back to a place where they’re going out and dancing with their husband.

[54:02] Ashley James: What helped her to get out of pain? Was it that not moving was continuing to have the pain or what was it that had her be free of it?

[54:13] Jacob Schoen: To be honest with you, I really don’t think it was anything that I did. I think it’s a little esoteric to say this but I think a lot of people’s pain whether it be at least initially or a lot of times chronic pain, is a mentally emotional adaption from any kind of stress or trauma that they maybe they store in their body. For me, I think hers was a mental-emotional thing mostly. I didn’t say that to her because she came to me for orthopedic reasons. I try to keep it as in that context as I could but I knew that if we got her in some way out of her own way that she would really start to see how powerful she was and how really the pain couldn’t hold her back. If you know what I mean. Getting her to move. Got her to see, “Oh, okay I can do this.” Yes, it’s a little bothersome at first but then she said, “Okay, I can do this. If I can do 10 minutes, maybe I can do 15. If I can do 15 then maybe I can do 20 and you know what, I’m doing 20. I’m feeling better. Okay, all right. I’m doing 20, I’m doing 25, I’ll do 30.” I think in reality she let her guard down a little bit and she started to get out of her own way to heal. A lot of people hold on to these problems that they have and they won’t let them go for any number of reasons. As a trainer, you do have to wear several hats. A lot of people come I and they tell you about their day or they tell you about their problem that they’re having with their kids. I love that because I love working with people. I don’t want to just work with a robot that’s covered with muscle. I want to work with human. A lot of people they have these problems that they don’t really let go. When they come to see me, part of my thing is working with the mental, emotional system. Start to get them out of their own way so that they can progress in the orthopedic system. A lot of times it solves itself over time.

[56:16] Ashley James: I love it. People who are in pain don’t want to be told that it’s all in your head. Because it’s real. The pain is real. There’s proof now that the body the mind can create physical pain that feels real. I believe it was John E. Sarno that wrote the book, Healing Back Pain and he discusses how he could see that when we had mental, emotional issues going on, especially that we were stuffing away and procrastinating to face that the mind would create an ischemia in a muscle would actually tighten the muscle so much that it would cause a tremendous amount of pain because there was lack of blood flow in the are kind of like trigger point. Where the blood flow is cut off in that muscles and just like trigger points would cause radiating pain too so it could mimic pinched nerve. It could mimic a lot of different symptoms. He saw it commonly that it was lower back pain that would be created when someone was having emotional issues that they were facing that the unconscious minds really wants us to resolve things. When we’re in the state of anxiety or panic and we’re faced with choices and they’re really hard so we procrastinate them that the unconscious mind will tense a muscle or tense muscle fibers and create ischemia and create that level of pain that is real. We can move and we can put hot packs on it that’ll give relief temporality but it’ll keep coming back until we look at it and face the emotional stuff. It’s real and physical pain but like you said, she freed herself up and she had to move past that fear of moving and to get that freedom in you helped her face that.

[58:26] Jacob Schoen:  Yes. I try to do my part in helping her see that and I think giving her a little bit of accountability with me as someone who’s going to check in on her and see if she’s walking and see if she’s doing these things was helpful for her but really it was up to her to make the decision to impart trust me and the other part trust herself. The other thing that I find so interesting is that a lot of people like you said they don’t want to be told that their pain it’s all on her head. The problem with that is that just because it’s in your head doesn’t mean it’s not real. If I were to be extraordinary blunt with this lady and see, “Mam, I see that you have back pain but it’s all on your head.” She would’ve been totally turned off and she would’ve been like, “Okay, I’m leaving.” I would’ve understood because it’s pretty insensitive. The reality is that even if I do say it’s all in your head doesn’t make it not real. It just makes it not in the place that you thought it was which is it doesn’t mean its any less valuable or any less tangible or any less real. It just means that its somewhere else. That’s all that really important to take away from that. If you look at the hierarchy of your body, Paul Chek of the C.H.E.K institute did an amazing job with his graphic. He has this totem pole. At the very, very top of the totem pole is the spirit or the mind. The mind if you look all the way down of the totem pole you have the visceral system, have the breathing, you have the nutrition, you have all the stuff down the totem pole but really who’s in charge the big boss is the mind. If you think “Okay, I have back pain.” Yes, sure you have back pain and I agree with that but maybe the back pain is caused by something up higher down the line. It doesn’t have to be another physical thing down the line. It could be an emotional, mental thing down the line that you need to work on to solve the back pain that you’re having. The way I try to work with people is I give them exercises that I think will someway get the water out of the boat and will give them exercises to fix the hole. If you just fix the leak but you don’t take the water out of the boat then you can still have some residual pain. But if you just take the water out of the boat then you’re going to be taking the water out of the boat your whole life. That is a process that you have to work with somebody on is one getting the symptoms that have to go away then two getting the cause of the symptoms in the first place to be resolved. That could be, the human body is complex and the human organism is amazingly complexed. That’s why it’s a beautiful field to be in to work with people because it’s not just plugging numbers and doing spreadsheets. You’re working with dynamic diverse history of a human that walks into your office every day and so you have to treat them with that same respect if you just say, “Yes, back pain I need to go straight to your back and cut off of your disc and do this.” Then yes, you’re going to miss the picture. That makes me think about a gentleman that came and saw me last week, 2 weeks ago. He flew down from Colorado. He sent me all these videos of his neurosurgeon showing that in between L4 and L5 he had narrowing in the space for the spinal cord and how it was exactly 103 ml whereas his other space where 110. It’s like I get it there’s narrowing there but there’s also people that have severe narrowing who don’t have any pain. It’s not necessarily all the time that that ting is causing the pain. It could be multitude of factors that’s causing the pain and the weak link that you have because of your history or because of the structure is what’s pain. Someone who has that same narrowing maybe has no pain and has no pain for the rest of her life because they have better hydration or because they’re not at stressed because they didn’t play the same amount of sports that you did growing up. I really try to treat people as holistically as possible because that’s who’s walking into your office.

[01:02:36] Ashley James: What happened with the gentleman? You practice in New Orleans so people local to you can come visit you. I have a friend that lives in Houston and she said it’s like a 5 ½ hour drive or something like that. You could get people from Texas just driving to see you.

[01:02:53] Jacob Schoen: Yes, come on down Texas.

[01:02:55] Ashley James: Yes. Florida, Louisiana, Georgia. All that whole area could be coming and just drive to you but you had someone fly in from Colorado showing you the neuron surgeon stuff. He had pain for how long?

[01:03:10] Jacob Schoen: He had pain at this point for four months. He is a type a of a person, go-getter of a person that you’re ever going to meet. He’s an absolute stud. I’ll give him that. If I look and move like him when I’m in my early 60’s then I will be doing a good job. With that same context, he had never stretched. He had never taken time to stretch. He was severely dehydrated. You could just feel in his tissue when I had my hands on him. It’s like instead of feeling like soft and hydrated and well-nourished it was dry like leather. Of course, you’re going to have more pre-disposition to tearing certain things, you have less leeway when you have that quality of tissue. Part of the things I just started to get him to drink more water, starting to stretch. If you’re 6 foot tall but your connected system tissue think that you’re 5’8. It’s going to be pretty difficult for you to move well and then something is going to have to pay. So over time, he had just developed this posture. He developed an amount of stress in his body. He developed the quality of tissue that his body finally said “Hey man, we’ve got to do something about this.” Gave him exercises for the posture of his head, gave him exercises for his breathing, gave him exercises to get the water out of the boat in his lumbar spine, gave him exercise for the nerve prolifically. Now he just texted me the other day saying that his pain was an 8 out of 10 and now it’s 4 out of 10. He’s making progress by himself. He came down and we spent a lot of time together, got to know him. It was awesome. It’s awesome for me to work with people like that because whenever they come and see you, they’re really motivated and they really try to work on it and you get to really be in the zone when you work with people like that. I saw him for 3 hours a day for 2 days. Those 3 hours they go by in an absolute flash. Which is awesome because it’s almost like you get transported into another realm and you come back and it “Wow, it’s 5 o’clock already.” When you work with somebody like that it really awesome because you can see a change in their brain when they start to realize, “Oh, these things that I’ve been doing to myself or that I haven’t been paying attention to these might be the things that can help me.” Before this, he was scheduled to have surgery the end of July and as far as I understand he’s no longer going to have that.

[01:05:37] Ashley James: I’m so happy to hear that. I love it when people choose to try alternative methods before just jumping into an elected surgery. One of my mentors, he’s an old school naturopath. He’s yelled at someone who had something removed, some organ removed from their body and then they need help. I think it was thyroid. The doctors removed my thyroid and then they were asking for your help. He’s like “I can’t help you when your thyroids in the garbage. I can’t help you get your thyroid back. It’s been cut out of you.” he was more yelling like sheer frustration because he’s also a pathologist before he became a naturopath and he saw that like you can reverse so many diseases that surgeons just go, “Okay, let’s just cut it out of you, it’s time.”

[01:06:29] Jacob Schoen: Totally. That’s the thing that we have to work against as people who are offering alternative means to these things. It’s because fortunately or unfortunately most people’s disposition is that when they have problem they go to specialist. One of my favorite quotes is that “A specialist knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.” That’s the thing that I really think about. If you go see a neurosurgeon, a neurosurgeon is great at what they do which is neurosurgery. They’re not going to be experts in all these other field that most likely are going to be the cause of your problem. Don’t get me wrong, some people need surgery, that’s a certain thing that you can’t fix with Eldoa. It’s just not going to happen. At the same time, you have to think, what is surgery? You already have a trauma to your body, well guess what, you have to create more trauma to go in there to fix the trauma. Are you doing anything before to repair the tissue for that type of surgery and what’s the quality of the stuff that you’re doing after to make sure that you don’t have another problem because it’s not so uncommon for someone to have a back surgery and then 6 months later be like, “Oh man, that didn’t really work. I need another back surgery” or for someone who have fusion in her neck and be like, “Oh geez, I still have the same neck pain that I had and now I have to go get another fusion to now fix the problem because something was mechanically stuck in my neck and then now everything above and below has to compensate for that. It’s not so uncommon for that. Then as a quick change, the other change is when you go see a specialist, they specialize and they spend a lot of time specializing in that thing but whenever you have your blinders on to focus on one thing, you do miss the things that are around you. A lot of times, for example, people will have problem with their cervical spine, guess what’s right below your cervical spine, your rib cage and your thoracic spine and then your shoulder and then what’s above that is your head. The connections are unbelievable. People who are really interested your pericardium, you have a series and your fibers are pericardium which is the fascia of your heart has connection forward to your sternum below to your diaphragm and above to your cervical spine. If you have bad posture for your neck, guess what, then there’s differentiating tension in the pericardium. Maybe your heart doesn’t work so well as it needs to. Okay, your heart doesn’t work as well as it needs to. Well, now there’s differentiating tension on your sternum, which is where your rib is attached and on your diaphragm. When your diaphragm goes all the way down and attaches to your lumbar spine and into your pelvis. Guess what, there’s no distinction between those connection, if I pull on one end of the chain, the other end of the chain is going to move. Where you have the problem is just dependent on the person.

[01:09:18] Ashley James: Have you helped someone get lower blood pressure, better heart health from using Eldoa and the soma therapy?

[01:09:29] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely because one, if you start to drink water most people are severely dehydrated. I think that’s what I’m meant to say. First off, you introduce more water so now you have less resistance in the tube and the water flows [Audio Gap 01:09:48-51] blood is viscous so it moves more easily. The other thing is that now you have better water in the tissue so the tissue is more malleable. When the heart has to push, doesn’t have to push against as much peripheral resistance so now the blood pressure can be lower. The other thing is you start to work on the posture. The posture in quotes of the vein and of the circulatory system is off the better alignment. Now it doesn’t have to work as hard to move blood to the periphery so now the blood pressure go slower. The other thing is whenever the posture of the head is in the better way, there’s less tension on the heart, the heart is organized in relation to gravity in a more perfect way. The way that it was intended to be. Whenever you work on all of those factors, the blood pressure a lot of times goes down. The other thing is when you work with these exercises not only do you affect mechanically the bone but on the front of the spine is the sympathetic chain ganglia so the autonomic nervous system sits directly on the spine and it doesn’t just sit there because it’s glued there. It sits there because the fascia holds it there. The fascia integrately holds it to the bone. If you affect the bone, you affect the fascia, you affect the sympathetic nervous system, blood pressure going down baby, everything’s looking good. All of this factors go together to really holistically start to help the person.

[01:11:16] Ashley James: I love that. A few years ago it was 2010 my husband singlehandedly carried all of our furniture into a 26 foot Penske. We moved from Las Vegas to Seattle. We didn’t hired anyone to do it. It was all him. I was busy packing boxes or something, a few days later and he’s a carpenter for 20 years so he’s used to carrying heavy loads. He’s pretty big guy, 6 foot 7.

[01:11:44] Jacob Schoen: That is a pretty big guy.

[01:11:46] Ashley James: Right? We were under a lot of stress. Big move. Lots of new changes and he woke up one morning and his lips were blue and he’s like my heart’s doing something funky. I freaked out what’s going on? It took me a bit that I’m driving him to the hospital. That’s when we found out that he had AFib. Every chamber of his heart was just spasming. That’s why his lips were blue, he’s having problem breathing. They had to reset his heart which was again really scary. The cardiologist said, “This is holiday heart.” Probably because you’re under a lot of stress. We were at that time, we just bought an espresso machine. We thought, we’re living in Seattle, we need to do the coffee thing.

[01:12:37] Jacob Schoen:  Get the coffee culture going. I love it.

[01:12:38] Ashley James: Yes. Exactly. We got the coffee culture going a little bit too much. So he was overdoing it with that espresso and that time we were still drinking alcohol, not that we were alcoholics but we don’t partake in poison anymore. Back then we were not into health as we are definitely now. The cardiologist was just like “between the stress of the move and your new lifestyle and excessive caffeine and alcohol, it’s right around Christmas” so she was like, “this is the most AFib I’ve seen it’s right around Christmas and new year’s. This was just totality normal.” Totally normal okay, great. She’s like, “well, you know, we should do stress test just in case and you’re fine.” It happened again a year later. He as carrying a 6-year-old child on his shoulders who was jumping because she’s excited so she was jumping, as we’re going for a walk. We’re walking with a friend and her daughter and the next day he woke up with AFib again. Not as bad as the first time but it is definitely scary. At this point, we were seeing a naturopath and the naturopath said something really interesting, the naturopath said when there’s compression on the thoracic spine I think it’s T67 but I could be wrong. That there’s a nerve that comes out your be able to correct me one of the nerves that innervates the heart comes from the thoracic spine and so when its’ compressed it can send a full signal to the heart and the heart is completely healthy but the compression on the spine is what’s triggering the AFib. That made sense now that we were thinking to ourselves, “Okay, this is the second time that’s happened” and so the naturopath said I want you to rest. Get an inversion table and do hydrotherapy. Hot cold showers and just rest and see your chiropractor. It went away on its own. It was scary 3 days and his heart was beating irregularly and it just reset and everything was good. We’re like, “Okay, that’s a little scary but now we know. A few years later we’re doing CrossFit and he’s learning how to do deadlifts and the next day not only wakes up but he faints. He wakes up and he faints, he hits the floor and he has AFib. We’re like, “Whoa” That was again that was his first time lifting heavy objects since the last AFib occurrence. He’s only had 3 but 3 acute AFib attacks it makes you a candidate for pacemaker. If we had never worked with a naturopath and we had just seeing a cardiologist he would’ve gone in for a pacemaker which they have to burn the nerves to the heart and then put in a machine –

[01:15:48] Jacob Schoen:  Which is terrifying by the way.

[01:15:49] Ashley James: It’s terrifying , yes. Put in the machine that beats your heart which sends a signal for you instead of your body. Meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with the nerve at his heart. It’s the compression on his spine. We did the exact same thing the third time. We had actually gone to a naturopath and they did an EEG and determined yes, it is AFib. “Okay, great. See your chiropractor. Hang upside down, do hot and cold hydrotherapy and just lay down a lot.” It reset again. Thank goodness. That was the last time because since then, he’s been doing exercises and supplements and seeing the chiropractor on a regular basis all to keep his thoracic spine super healthy and decompressed. Sometimes when he gets a little off or he gets a little tight, he’ll just start to feel it and his heart starts to just do a little bit of a skip and he’s like, “Oh.” I’m like, “You’ve got to get back to the chiropractor. What are you doing? Or do the exercise your chiropractor gave you.” Listen to the whisper. Listen to the symptoms as they’re coming in gently. Don’t ignore them and just push through.

[01:17:02] Jacob Schoen: Exactly. Don’t let the little hearts turn into big hearts later.

[01:17:03] Ashley James: Right. But if we were to see a traditional MD it would’ve gone surgery. They’re amazing doctors. They specialize like you said they’re doing more than 8 years of higher education. They’re so intelligent and they’re passionate about their field and yet they’re not taught that the compression the spine can cause AFib. It just maddens me.

[01:17:31] Jacob Schoen: Yes. There’s only so much time in a day to learn so much stuff. I am definitely not an MD and there’s things about pathophysiology and immunology and things like that that they would absolutely blow me out of the freaking water with. That’s definitely not my area of expertise and if someone has a disease like that I for sure would send them to an MD. When it comes to a lot of other things unfortunately, they’re not really given the tools to be effective with the complexity of the human body that is walking into their office. They have a subset of tools, they have the parameters that they have which is only a certain amount of time with each person because they’re super overloaded with patients. They only have so much time to make a guess and to give a certain type of treatment for that and unfortunately, most of the treatments the we have especially in the western culture is just cut and burn or whatever they do to people’s bodies.

[01:18:36] Ashley James: Cut, burn and poison.

[01:18:37] Jacob Schoen:  Yes. Cut, burn and poison. I’ve had people who come in and it’s funny because they call certain surgeries minimally invasive. If you ever watched video of minimally invasive surgery, I have seen various things in my life that are more invasive than minimally invasive surgeries. They have to go inside of the body especially for the lumbar spine, they have to go inside your body, cutaway bone, slip away disc, burn the disc, sew you back up. I don’t know about you but that’s pretty invasive. All qualification for what it means to actually have remedies for this things are so skewed to this unbelievable procedures. If you want to freak yourself out, go watch a hip replacement surgery. It is absolutely freaking brutal. People say, “You know my hip hurts maybe in a couple of years I have some arthritis and I’ll probably have to get hip replacement” I was like, “Are you kidding me right now? Have you seen a freaking surgery like that? Wouldn’t you just rather do some stretching and exercise?” but unfortunately, this is kind of where I get into my soapbox. Unfortunately, we live in a culture right now where people would much rather give away their responsibility to someone else than have to take the responsibility themselves. They say, “Oh my doctor said this, this, this” it’s just like listen to your body. Give yourself the opportunity to heal yourself. Then if that doesn’t work and you know you’ve tried all the other options then you can get surgery. But for your first instinct to be to get surgery or to get your fourth surgery or whatever it is, it blows my mind but that’s a philosophical thing that is different between where I am now and where I was. I definitely was on the other side of the coin a couple of years ago before I got introduced to these things and where most of the population is because “Oh, you have a problem with your knee? Go see the orthopedic.” What does the orthopedic say, “Oh, we took an MRI. You have a problem with your meniscus. What we can do about that is that we could cut out a piece of meniscus.” It’s like, “Maybe you can do something else?” it’s just crazy what we turn to and what we think is or we think is very valuable therapy but you know. That’s a philosophical thing that is different amongst practitioners. Not good or bad just different.

[01:20:54] Ashley James: Just to add that story, recently I mean, it’s been the last 4 years I thought I had a hernia. I gave birth and so they say it’s common for women after giving birth near belly button I’m like, “Wow. Something is pretty funky feeling in my belly button. I better get this checked out.” I got to the doctor, naturopath of course. He feels around and he goes “You know what that really feels like a hernia. I’m going to suggest that you go get a surgical consult.” I looked at him like dead in the eye. “Surgery is the last option. I will try 100 alternative therapies. I will travel to Tibet and rub I don’t know, Tibetan berries on my tummy before surgery is an option. It’s just my last option.” Luckily, I heard this old school naturopath again mentored me he says, “Anytime that there’s a hernia, go to a Bowen therapist. It’s a Bowen technique. It’ll a massage therapist likely who would administer it.” I found a woman who’s been a massage therapist since the ‘80s and been doing Bowen therapy for 15 years and she’s 45 minutes north of me. I went in and visited her. Very interesting. She spent most of the time doing ranger motion tests to determine where my fascia was. She goes, “First of all, I’m not a doctor. I can’t tell you. I can’t diagnose” like cover her butt. Yes, exactly. There’s a disclaimer but hint and wink-wink, she’s like, “This is not a hernia. This is diastasis recti.” So many people will go in and get a surgery when it’s not needed because the abdomen has separated and she did some very minimal technique. I kind of was like “Are you kidding me?” She just touched me a few times in different places to adjust the fascia and then I started feeling like a new person. It was really cool. She recommended some exercises. I went to see her like 4 times. Again, if I was on the just the MD route even if my naturopath told me I should get a surgical console. If I had just given away my personal power. I would’ve been under the knife the next week and have all of the consequences that come with that versus seeking out other types of therapy. The problem is, people don’t know there’s other therapies. I love that you bringing up that. Now people know that there’s Eldoa which is spelled E-L-D-O-A. There’s this soma training, the soma therapy. You do other stuff too but there’s this techniques that are very effective. Even if they don’t get 100% results, they’re going to get some results. Even if they get no results which is rare I understand. At least they could rule out trying something before they get permanent surgery. Right? I love that it gives people those options. Do you have any stories to share? More stories to share of people who come to you with issues and have had really great success?

[01:24:32] Jacob Schoen: I mean, I just have so many I didn’t even know where to start. I’m just kidding. I just had a gentleman leave a review for me on google because I just trying to get into the – what I’m really bad at, to be honest with you is business, what I’m good at is training and work with people, what I’m bad at is business. I had him leave a review and he had back pain for 15 years and he’s been working with me for 3 years now. He’s’ now a great friend. He hasn’t had any single spell of back pain for over 3 years now. He’s an older gentleman. I’d like to think I helped him changed his life a little bit whether it be just his quality of movement or even just drinking more water, taking more time for himself things like that. It’s funny because when I first got started, to be honest with you, I look back at who I was and the trainer that I was. I have to laugh because you look back at where you were and “Man, I didn’t know a single thing. I didn’t know what I was doing at all.” I know in 10 years from now I’m going to look back at myself now, “Yes, I thought I know so much. I don’t know anything.” I had this lady come see me and she had a lot of people used the terminology but she had thrown out her back. She was all slumped over. Her back was totally wrecked. She couldn’t really do much of anything without feeling a lot of pain. I was a little inexperienced so I tried to get her to do just a little gentle warm-up. Even the warm-up just absolutely lit her on fire. I just laid her down on the floor, had her do some breathing exercises. Taught her Eldoa for L5-S1, which is the pillar of all the Eldoa exercises. Your last lumbar vertebrae, your first sacral vertebrae, it’s really an important area because of how important the pelvis is and the amount of stress that that area takes. I taught her how to do that any gently. She hasn’t had pain since then. She’s text me she like my biggest fan just because she was dancer. She was super active, super healthy lady and now she gets to go back and do all her stuff and she does all her exercises. The amount of people and that I’ve been able to help is pretty awesome to look back on that. In reality, like I said before, it’s really those people helping themselves I gave then the exercise but the people that have the most success with me are the ones that commit themselves to doing the hallmark that I gave them. If you see me for once a week, you see me for an hour or an hour and a half a week and then there’s all hundred something hours left in the week for you to manage what we do and for you to improve on yourself. If you do those exercise if you commit to that, really that’s when you start to get the result because you need consistency to those things. Your body has learned through thousands of bad reps and thousands of days in pain or whatever it is to adapt to a certain posture so to unlearn that takes a little bit of time and that time takes consistency. That consistency takes dedicated effort on your part to do the exercises. I mean, I’m trying to think if there’s really a groundbreaking one that I’m just super stoked on. Honestly, anybody that I’ve helped that had pain I’m pretty pumped to be able to help them out. Let’s see. It was funny because I was working on this lady the other day. I was treating this lady and she had a carpal tunnel in her left hand for 4 years. She was a painter so she really enjoyed painting and she just couldn’t do it as enthusiastically as she wanted because it hurts her hands whenever she would do it. She went to a surgeon the surgeon recommend carpal tunnel surgery. I had worked with her on her neck before of course, –

[01:28:14] Ashley James: With a surgeon that would be like, “I think you should go get a gentle massage.”

[01:28:20] Jacob Schoen: Right. Exactly. She came to me and her hand was almost contracted with Dupuytren’s. Are you familiar with that? Yes, it was almost contracted with Dupuytren’s. She sat them down on the table. I did a bunch of work for the fascia of her hand. I pumped. Pumping is just a terminology thing for getting the joints to move better, more nutrition, all those kind of stuff. Did all that for her shoulder, her elbow then her wrist then work on the fascia of her hand. I moved to the other side because she had small problem with her right hand. She laid her left hand down on the table, I didn’t say anything because I want her to notice but her hand had opened almost completely on the table without her trying to force it because all of the connected tissue of her upper limb had just relaxed. I waited 2 or 3 minutes and she looked over she goes, ”Oh my god, look at my hand.” I was like, “Yup. Check it out, pretty cool.” Just things like that. You have people get on your table. You work on their sacral joint or work on their knee and all of a sudden their back feels better. It’s just like yes, I’d say magic because I’m trying to be funny. The reality is if you respect the connectedness and the holistic nature of the body, you could really achieve some amazing things. Just things like that. Pretty cool.

[01:29:34] Ashley James: What caused her fascia to be tight in the first place do you think?

[01:29:38] Jacob Schoen: For her, I think it was just repetitive nature of holding on to a brush for 5 hours a day for 10-15 years.

[01:29:47] Ashley James: Not taking a break.

[01:29:50] Jacob Schoen: Yes, not taking a break. She was passionate about she loves painting. She loves, loves painting. Just that and then also, I’m pretty sure before she retired, she was not a secretary but she was someone who worked on the computer a lot. Lot of stuff with the hand being in that kind of closed claw position. Kind of gradually chronically shortened everything in that hand when that happens the posture just adapts to it. The posture of the hand affects the wrist. The wrist affects the shoulder, the neck and all that down the line. I think it’s just a chronic thing for her. Some people its hydration, some people it’s stress, some people it’s any number of factors. The superficial fascia of your body covers your whole body except for your face. If I were wearing a bodysuit, just kind of weird to think about. If I was wearing a bodysuit and just scrunched up the fabric by my hand, it would get tighter by my toes, tighten about my knees and my back and my neck, it wouldn’t be as obvious as it is by my hand but for sure it still gets tighter. The body’s connected in that way. For her, I think it was chronic, for other people it can be any number of things. That any number of things is why this job is so cool is because it’s not a cut and paste thing. For anybody that comes in as a new puzzle to try to solve. That always keeps it interesting.

[01:31:20] Ashley James: I love that you keep bringing up that hydration was so important. I was a massage therapist in Canada ages ago and it’s really interesting how tissue does feels different depending on whether someone’s hydrated or chronically dehydrated. Even cellulite and you could correct me if I’m wrong, cellulite is the puckering of the fascia when it’s dehydrated. People always think, “Oh, cellulite is just fat or something” but it’s the fascia adhering because it’s dehydrated and getting all sticky. Is that correct? Is that a good way of explaining it.

[01:32:01] Jacob Schoen:  I believe that. To be perfectly honest, I’m not super sure about cellulite but it makes sense to me because a lot of people – the fat that you have at least above the orthopedic system is located inside of that superficial layer of fascia. If that fascia contracts it makes sense that it’ll create some dimpling effect for the cellulite. Absolutely.

[01:32:21] Ashley James: There’s aesthetic reason why we should hydrate. What do you recommend? Let’s say everyone who is listening is dehydrated on some level. They’re drinking coffee or black tea instead of water. They’re not drinking the 4 gallons of water a day or whatever.

[01:32:41] Jacob Schoen: That’s quite a bit a lot of water. [Laughter]

[01:32:42] Ashley James: I’m from Canada. I keep on forgetting quarts. Quarts, not gallons.

[01:32:46] Jacob Schoen: We use liters.

[01:32:47] Ashley James: You guys use liters. Okay, two liters is a minimum, right?

[01:32:51] Jacob Schoen: Yes, we need to switch to the metric system without a doubt. I hate dealing with ounces and gallons. It doesn’t make any sense. Let’s be honest.

[01:32:59] Ashley James: You drink at least 2 liters of water a day but okay, if everyone is somewhat dehydrated how much water should people drink and how can we help dehydrated tissue to become hydrated again? Are there any exercises or movements that or just moving the body is that going to be adequate enough to rehydrate?

[01:33:21] Jacob Schoen: Yes. That really takes time. The way I think about it is like filling an Olympic size swimming pool. It’s going to take some time. Your body is 70% water certain structures are more or less depending on which one you’re talking about. If you want to think about it, yes, I dumped 4 liters of water into my body today. Okay, that’s good. But how much of that water is needed to work through the kidneys so it can cleanse and detoxify? How much of that water is for biochemical processes and how much of that after is actually going to make its way into my orthopedic system so I can start to rehydrate the structures that we’re talking about. I don’t know what the numbers is. It might be only be a 100ml of that 4L that you drink. If you’re missing 15 kilos of water in your body then it’s going to take a little while for you to get rehydrated. A lot of people say “Oh I need to drink water. Yes, but I’ve been drinking water for last week and I don’t feel any different or I’m just peeing a lot.” I was like, ”Hey, sorry to break it to you but it takes a little while to do that kind of thing” I would say it also depends of what kind of climate you live into. If you live in a super dry climate, it’s different than you live in a humidity, if you live in an altitude that’s different. If you live in New Orleans where I live where it’s just hot as a mother every day, then it’s a little bit different. I like to say that if, I’m going back to ounces look at me talking about how much the metric system is good, I’m going back to ounces. Your bodyweight in ounces of water a day is a good place to start. You also have the thing about the quality of the water. Hopefully, it’s not tap water. I’m crossing my finger for you. It’s not tap water. Nice quality mineral water that has different effect than just distilled reverse osmosis water like with the minerals and things like that. Whether you drink it with food or without food, that’s getting into fine details of it. A lot of people that they think they drink a lot of water and then you really ask them and they go, “Oh, I drink water.” I was like, “How much do you drink?” “Oh, I don’t know couple of glasses. Yes, I drink 4 glasses or 8 ounces a day.” “That’s only 32 ounces mam, you need to drink like a hundred. What are you doing?” People are in some ways surprised that they have these orthopedic issues but that the same time they’re dehydrated. That is the base to base level of nutrition for your body. If you don’t have water you can’t do anything else. Yes, you can’t do anything else. If you want height in the disc for your lumbar spine so that the nerve isn’t so compressed, guess what, the disc is 85% water. You need water in the disc to make a change. You need water in the muscle. You need water in the fascia so that things could actually move. A lot of people – my teacher loves to say this, I think it is such a great idea. There’s the age on your passport then there’s the actual age of your body. We all know somebody who’s in their 80’s but looks vibrant, feels young and moves really well. Then we also know somebody in their 30’s that is like, “Oh my back, every day, oh my knees.” There’s a difference between the age in your passport and the age on your body. Water is the answer. Drink more water. As far as movement that’s going to solicit the water, just moving is good place to start. As far as particular movement, you just move the water around your body. I don’t really have answer for that, unfortunately.

[01:36:45] Ashley James: Just drink and move and your body’s will take care of itself.

[01:36:58] Jacob Schoen:  Think about your body as any other body of water. If you look at a pond that doesn’t have any freshwater moving in and out of it guess what, it get stagnant, it gets stale, it starts to stink, it starts to rot. Guess what? You’re not moving and you’re not getting new water to your body. No wonder that you have this pain or that pain or that ache that just will not go away. You need to manage those things on a more consistent basis for you to really make any change. That takes time too. The gentleman who came saw me from Colorado. He’s been living in Colorado. He’s super active. He’s a super active guy works out on the heat all the time. He’s only been drinking about a liter to a liter and a half of water a day. He’s about 180-170 pounds. That is 50% of what he needs to be drinking and he’s been drinking that for 25 years. There’s no adaptability. There’s no leeway in his tissue because there’s no water in his body.

[01:37:58] Ashley James: I love it and it’s going to take time. Like you said, in 2 weeks working with you, his pain went from 8 out ten to 4 out of ten. I imagine in the coming weeks, he’s going to see even better results but it does take time. He flew down to see you and he flew back and he’s continuing to do the exercises you taught him and getting result. I love it. I love that.

[01:38:23] Jacob Schoen: That’s the hope at least is that it he keeps- unfortunately, it’s easier for us to have a short term memory loss where we go, “Oh, I forgot how much pain I was in. My pain is gone. My body feels good. I don’t have to do my exercise anymore.” Then they try to go right back into the gym, pick up right where they left off deadlifting, how many pounds and they go, “Oh crap, my back hurts again.” it’s like, “Well, sorry brother but you’re not quite back to the place where I need you to be before you can really start loading your body again.”  

[01:38:55] Ashley James: Right. I had that happen with my clients where I get them off of the foods that are causing inflammation, get the mono great holistic diet that’s anti-inflammatory and get them on some supplements to aid in rebuilding their body if they have certain nutrient deficiencies. They started feeling amazing and they called me up and they’re like, “Why am I in so much pain?” I’ve had it more than once. It’s so funny. Just one that’s come into mind, this grandma and she’s like, “Why am I in so much pain,” I’m like, “Okay. Well, what’s happening?” she’s doing everything, right? Everything I laid out for her she was getting really great results and all of a sudden she’s just totally flared up and I’m like, “Okay, tell me what you did this week.” “Well, I gardened and then hiked with my grandkids and then I played with them for 4 hours in the yard.” I’m like, “Were you doing any of that before we work together?” like, “No, I was sitting watching wheel of fortune all day because I couldn’t.” so when they start getting really good results take the pain away, all of a sudden they’re living like half their age and they’re go, go, go, and then some pain comes back because they’re pushing their body way beyond what they were used to. We have to always remember that, when the pain is gone we need to ease into it. Like you said, move more aware. Have that awareness and have that patience to baby your body a little bit, as we build up endurance. While we’re creating, we’re building upon a foundation you helped set for them.

[01:40:27] Jacob Schoen:  Totally. You’ve got to take your time unless you’re an elite athlete and there’s a competition you’re getting ready for. Maybe you’re a weekend warrior and there’s really something you want to do. Yes, maybe you can push it a little bit but you have to take that into context that that’s a risk that you’re willing to take. But for most people, take your time, you got nothing to rush here.

[01:40:52] Ashley James: I have a few more questions before we wrap it out because you did say you were going to touch on explaining more about the tensegrity but before we do that we kept talking about water is. We live in a well and the water has been amazing the last few years but something happened also in our well. Water stared tasting funky and were like “Oh my gosh” we started buying bottled water while we waited for the lab results to come back to tell us whether our well water was safe or not. It’s something that I keep forgetting as you should, if you live in a well you should have it tested every year. It’s important you don’t want to die from E-coli. I finally made a purchase of a gravity-fed, this doesn’t require electricity so it’s great for emergencies. A gravity-fed water filtration system that’s really affordable. I’ve been wanting to buy it for about 12 years. I just didn’t have it. I didn’t need to buy it. It also has a way of filtering fluoride for those in the city. We are drinking even more water now because of it even though we’re well water for whatever reason just started it went back to normal. It was like this weird flu I don’t know what happened. Well, water still tastes great and we put this on this water filter that’s on our counter. It’s amazing. It filters out all viruses, it goes all the way down to viruses but like you could basically put sewer water, you could put water from a puddle or a pond, creek and it filters out everything. It doesn’t filter out minerals. It makes the water taste amazing. It’s now my new favorite water filter. I think everyone should own it. I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes.

[01:42:47] Jacob Schoen: What’s it called?

[01:42:49] Ashley James: I forget the size. There’s different sizes, it’s a Berkey.

[01:42:55] Jacob Schoen:  Berkey, yes. I was going to say, Berkey. It’s awesome.

[01:42:57] Ashley James: I did it. I read a bunch of people’s comments about which size to get and I was like, “Oh we should just get the travel size.” I read a bunch of notes you should actually get one size larger than what you think you need because you will want to cook with that water. The whole family wants to drink it but then you’re going to also find that you want to cook with it. Once we start doing that, we realize that we still fill it up everyday. We got the 3^rd largest size. I’ll put it in the show notes. This is my absolute new favorite kitchen gadget is the Berkey. Like I said, you can get the filters to filter out the fluoride because a lot of people go, “I don’t like the taste of water.” It’s like you know what, this stuff makes water taste amazing especially if they live in the city, right? Even bottled water. I had a problem with buying bottled water. I’ve had a guest on the show, doctor on the show teaching this. They’re finding now that if you drink bottled water, basically any water from plastic any water that’s been stored in a plastic they’re finding micro-plastic has been leeched into your water. What’s your kidney and liver going to do with microplastic?

[01:44:1] Jacob Schoen: Throw their hands up in the air and complain. I guess

[01:44:19] Ashley James: Right. Exactly. It’s an endocrine distractor, it’s an obesogenic. It’s not healthy in anyway. So many people resort to drinking water from plastic bottles that is why I love the idea of getting the Berkey for everyone because it makes your water taste great. It’ll take out the chlorine and the fluoride and all that stuff from tap water. It makes it taste great so you drink more. It doesn’t require any electricity so if there’s a problem you could still filter water if there’s an emergency.

[01:44:52] Jacob Schoen: I’m actually probably going to buy one for my studio honestly. I definitely should.

[01:44:58] Ashley James: The trick I found is you want to get one that is big enough to feed everyone for the day but only for the day. You want to fill it up at the end of each day maximum at the end of two days but you don’t want to go longer that because if the filter gets dry and air gets in it, it becomes very slow. You want to get one that’s big enough to give enough water so it doesn’t run out during the day but the small enough to still need to put to fill up the top chamber once every one or 2 days. That’s my tip for knowing what size Berkey to get. I highly recommend it. I think everyone should own a Berkey. I’ve seen a lot of people in RV have travel Berkey because they literally go to a pond or a creek and put it in. It’s pretty cool. Yes, okay. That was my plug for – I’ll make sure the link to my favorite size and put the Berkeys in the show notes of the podcast at learntruehealth.com. Of course and the link to Jacob Schoen’s website as well is going to be in the show notes of the podcast which is shiftsportwellness.com. We’re going to talk about how people could work with you but first, tensegrity is that like a mixture of tension and integrity?

[01:46:25] Jacob Schoen: That is exactly what it is. Good for you. That’s awesome. Yes, it was actually originally a term developed for more architectural structures. Buckminster fuller back in like I want to say maybe 1970’s, 1960’s, don’t quote me on that. There’s a lot of big structures across the world that are using tensegrity principles to be built. If you think about a building that is – they’re going to try to build a building I think Dubai or Qatar that’s almost a kilometer high. You can’t build that building by stacking one brick on top of another. It just wouldn’t work. You have to build integrity into the building intrinsically by creating tension across the pieces. You think about the golden gate bridge, you think about I think it’s the Olympics dome in Montreal, there’s another building in France. Classically as you can think about it. It is islands, this is a strict way of saying it. Islands of solid pieces so an island in a sea of tension. What that means is if you look at your orthopedic system, there no place where you should say that “this is supported by that” right? Because it’s not a brick on top of a brick. When I stand up, my head is not attached to a hook in the ceiling or by a rod in my back unless I’ve had surgery. When you look at a skeleton in the classroom, it has to be supported by rod or else it would just fall to the floor. How does it maintain its structure? It maintains its structure by taking this piece and pulling it tight and then attaching it to that piece and then attaching it over there, back and forth back and forth and before you know it, it’s like a spiders web in your whole body that pulls you together and keeps you together but allows you to move and be dynamic at the same time. That tensegrity system is really how we look at the body. If we want to understand how different pathologies or different problems can really be connected because if you look at it from a Newtonian kind of way it’s just this brick is on top of this brick on top of this brick then it wouldn’t make any sense that the brick at the bottom is affecting directly the brick at the very top. If you look at it in the way that this one is connected to that one to that one then it makes a lot of sense how you can have a problem at your ankle which affects your knee which affects your hip which affects your lower back which affects then your neck. All of these pieces together come together to make the tensegrity model. When you have your body it is being held together by the tension and the tension, its base of support or its foundation is this decompressive element, your bones essentially. Through that, you create the beautiful and amazing organisms that you are as a human. Which is how we are able to walk upright and how we are able to do all the things that we can do. If you just took a brunch of bricks held them on a stack and then drop them on the floor they would all fall apart. For me if I stand up and jump when I land, my heart doesn’t hit my pelvis there’s a reason for that. It’s because it supported by all the ligaments that we’ve talked about earlier. There’s a reason why my sacrum doesn’t fall to the ground it’s because it’s supported by the sacral ligaments, the disc in the lumbar spine, all of that stuff and the muscle and all that. Really that goes back to the fascia which is what gives our body the ability to have a tensegrity structure. If you don’t have a tissue that connects all of the pieces, then you don’t have tensegrity structure. You just have brick on top of brick and we know that we don’t have that because a skeleton can’t hang by himself. To respect that we have to use exercise and therapies that respect that organization which is why I think that these programs are so amazing is because they do respect that. Yes, they break it down to pieces but they talk about and teach you how to assess why the ankle might affect a problem with the head or why someone who’s had a concussion needs to have work done on their coccyx. Things like that is just why it’s so freaking cool. To be honest with you. That’s why it’s so complex and so difficult. That’s why a lot of people they can spend their time spinning their wheels, it like “You know, I had a back problem. I went to the surgeon I got my back operated on and I still have back pain.” It’s like, hmm that is interesting maybe it’s because your knee or maybe it’s emotional system or any of the other things. The tensegrity is a biomechanical philosophy but it’s also a global way of thinking because it’s a more complex way of thinking which means that you respect the complexity of a human not just a robot with muscle on them walking into your office.

[01:51:27] Ashley James: Yes. I love it. I’ve got these amazing experience where my chiropractor gives me an exercise for my upper back and my lower back all of a sudden stops hurting. He adjusts my neck and my hip stops hurting or he adjust my assai joint and my thoracic spine stops hurting. I’m like, “What did you do?” It’s cool because like you said, it’s about respecting that integrity of the where the tension needs to be in that balance. I like that your type of training with people, your exercise and also the therapy you do is looking at how you can support that body and having that optimal balance. That makes complete sense.

[01:52:13] Jacob Schoen:  Absolutely. It’s back to the specialization quote. If you only specialize in one thing when someone comes to you for that thing then that’s what you’re going to do. But if you at least have the foresight to say that, “Okay, the thing that they’re coming to me for might not actually be their problem. It might just might be where their symptoms are” then you can really open up the doors for them to actually get the result that they’re looking for which is pain or a better performance or whatever is. Now I’m at the point where I’m just like I’m not even having convinced myself anymore because being classically educated in western culture where most things are reduction is down to this specific thing or the problem is where the symptoms are. I had to work really hard to think in this way and I think in a more complex way and to take myself out of the more linear way of thinking. Now that I’m on the dark side if you will, it’s just so obvious to me. Of course, it’s all connected. Like how simple do you think a human being early is although we can’t be simple sometimes. How complex do you think somethings really be it can be with? It can be tremendously complex. Of course, the muscles of your eyes that help you orient yourself with where you’re looking can affect your lower back. Of course, the concussion that you had when you were 7 because the dura mater envelopes the brain then goes down and attached to the coccyx. Of course that can explain some of the pelvic problems that you’re having but until you take a step back and really see it that way then you don’t really have an opportunity to fully help someone to their potential because you’re limited in the philosophy that you have towards or least you used to approach them.

[01:54:00] Ashley James: Right. There’s a big difference between the hubris and the humility. You have so much humility that you’re willing to say “I don know but I’m not going to impose my belief system in my client. I’m going to be open-minded and be the detective to help find the root cause and help my client come back into balance and be open to learning new things as I go.” Versus other practitioner will have that hubris to believe that they know better. Right? That’s where we really hit a brick wall when it comes to our own healing. When we give up that power especially to practitioners that have that hubris.

[01:54:52] Jacob Schoen: Totally. To be perfectly honest with you, that was not how I started. I’m a person when I was in high school I couldn’t translate Latin to save my life so I would memorize hundreds and hundreds of words of Latin for a particular translation so that when I got the test I could just write from memory. I am a go, go, go type like, “All right. You want to beat me in this contest? Well, good luck.” kind of person. For me to admit that I don’t know something definitely took some time. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s almost freeing to say that I don’t know somethings because then the pressure of having to know isn’t there and also the opportunity to grow from not knowing and having the opportunity to explore and to challenge myself by thinking in different way is now open. It just makes me think of the quote that my teacher always says which is like, “With the body, always possible.” that is just I think so beautiful and powerful. Yes, I’d like to think of ourselves pretty highly. As humans, we kind of dominated the planet and all the stuff that we do to the world but like as an organism, as a creature we are pretty spectacular. The emotional capacity that we have, the physical capacity that we have and all of those to be in the world that we are. We are amazing, amazing creature. I think we have to adopt different kind of thinking to respect that organization. For me as far as an exercise goes that’s what I’m passionate about this makes the most sense.

[01:56:30] Ashley James: I love it you have mentioned that you worked with a woman recently where you did a fundamental exercise to release L5-S1. Is that something you can teach us through the podcast?

[01:56:46] Jacob Schoen: Verbally? No. Before I kind of to but it isn’t something – It’s difficult to do when you’re with someone because of the amount of awareness that it takes. For example, you have to simultaneously coordinate specific movements with your hands, your neck, your eyes, your lower back, your feet, your knees, your hips. I mean your whole body has to be coordinated because what you’re trying to do is I use an analogy like the golf swing. If I want to hit a golf ball at the hole, well then I can’t hit it anywhere else, I have to hit it at the hole. To hit it in the hole, I have to have my hand, my elbows, my shoulder, my hips. Everything needs to be going well. I need to judge the wind all those stuff. All those pieces needed to come together and if they come together, I can hit it the hole. If they don’t come together, maybe I hit it off into the bunker or whatever it is. To be able to actually specifically target L5-S1, the connected tissue around L5-S1 and that joint by itself, it takes a coordinated effort of your whole body. To do that, especially if you are not super aware of your limbs or you’re maybe not the most coordinated person is different to do in person and over audio like this without being visually seeing someone. I’d say impossible.

[01:58:04] Ashley James: Got it. We want to hit it in the hole. That’s why people should come see you. You are willing to talk to people on Skype but you mostly work with people in person and clients have flown to see you. What does it look like to work with you? How people work with you and could people let’s say a listener in Australia work with you through skype?

[01:58:33] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely. It just depends on what they’re really looking to accomplish. If you have someone who is in Australia for example who wants to learn the basics of Eldoa, wants for someone to introduce it to them to see if they like it to see how they feel I do skype sessions like that all the time. People connect me just because they want to work with me. They like that approach that I have and they want to learn some of the exercises. If you have a really specific thing that you haven’t been able to resolve in months or years or weeks or whatever it is and you have the means to come down and see me, I set up blocks of time for people to come down get the training and work on the exercise and they go home with the full exercise program based on the problems that they have and then how much time they have. You don’t want to give someone an hour of exercise if they say they only have 10 minutes because they’re a busy mom or executive or whatever it is. Then I’ve also had people who had organized little courses where they bring me to their facility for their athletes or for their practitioner and I give them an Eldoa rundown. I teach them some of the basics of the Eldoa. I call it a workshop. I do a workshop for them where the goal is to introduce them to the exercises, to teach them some of the basics that they can start to do for themselves and to start to integrate that in their daily practice or movement practice and things like that. If you’re within driving distance of me come on down and see me. I have my studio here in New Orleans and I take clients everyday except for the weekends. I take off on the weekend for a little me time. Come down and see me and then the process is relatively the same. Have the assessment try to figure out what I see in your body based off your symptoms and all those things to give me as much information I can have about you, your lifestyle, nutrition, stress all that type of stuff. To start to develop a program and a plan of attack if you will, to get you to where you want to be and then either put you back in the car and send you back to where your home and you work on that for a couple of weeks and then you come back depending on your means. Or if you’re an out of town person, maybe we spend instead of just 1 or 2 hours together, we spend 2 or 3 days together. Do a whole bunch of work. Give you a big program like the gentleman who came from Colorado and then you go off. You work on that. You report back to me. You get feedback and then we work from there. It’s really a process for those types of things.

[02:00:58] Ashley James: I love it. And your clinic in New Orleans is called shift sport wellness?

[02:01:04] Jacob Schoen: It was. I did call it shift sport wellness but then I changed to shift training and health because people didn’t know what support and wellness meant so I changed it to training and health which made it hopefully more obvious for people.

[02:01:18] Ashley James: Got it. Okay, awesome. But if they go to shiftsportwellness.comthey can find out more information in your clinic and how they can work with you and how they contact you?

[02:01:31] Jacob Schoen: Yes. I am on there. That’s is going to be the best place. I’m on google. If you search shift training health on google, you’d find me and there should be link to message me on there. Then my email is also on my website. Anything that people want to send me with questions, I try to help with over email as best as I can but the reality is that if I really respect the complexity of the person, if someone tells me that they have back pain for 10 years what can they do. My answer to be honest with you is I don’t know because I don’t know who I’m working with yet. I try to be as helpful as I can but also respect the idea that each person is an individual and I can’t give cookie-cutter answer for people really looking to help themselves.

[02:02:18] Ashley James: I love that. It comes back that you have the humility to respect everyone as an individual. Of course, if someone has back pain for 10 years they should come see you in person so you can do an assessment. Like you said, you do an extensive assessment to figure out if you can see the Kinesiology of the problem. Then, of course, like you said, you asses their nutrition and find out if they’re dehydrated or not and their lifestyle. You can determine what’s going on and you take it from there. I have really enjoyed spending the last 2 hours with you. The time has just flown. It’s easy, so awesome. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview? Anything left unsaid or any last words you want to share with our listeners?

[02:03:08] Jacob Schoen: If I hadn’t already said it then I’ll make it explicitly clear. I think when it comes to these types of problems that we’re talking about. I think you really have two options. Those two options are one, you can offload the responsibility and the work and the problem to someone else or you can take the responsibility yourself. Just because you go and see someone doesn’t mean that you’re offloading that responsibility but if you can find a way to use exercise, I mean I see a counselor every week just to because it’s nice to talk to somebody. Like if you can start to work with people that help you help yourself that’s really going to be where the power is. If you continue to do things that in some way start to wheel away at that power that you have. I think in the long term you will find that you won’t be as successful. My really advice to people would be start to bring the power back to yourself and to try to make the change for yourself because in my experience, you can do it.

[02:04:18] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Jacob Schoen, for coming on the show today. The links to everything that Jacob does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. His website again is shiftsportwellness.com. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show and sharing why we should all learn Eldoa. I think we should all learn it. This is amazing because we want to keep like you said, the integrity and the tension in the right space, in the right alignment as the demands of our body changes throughout our life that we make sure that we are coming back into balance. It just makes sense to work with you. People take their car to the mechanic more than they consider taking their body to the mechanic, right? You’re like the mechanic I want to take my body to. That’s pretty awesome. Jacob, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you today.

[02:05:12] Jacob Schoen:  Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

[02:05:16] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

[02:08:24] Ashley James: Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Recommended Readings by Jacob Schoen

Gray’s Anatomy 1901 by Henry Gray

How To Eat, Move, and Be Healthy by Paul Chek

Listen to my interviews about Sunlighten Saunas and detoxification: https://www.learntruehealth.com/?s=sunlighten

Get Palmer's free Optimal Food Guide to help people dial in the best foods for them; you can download it at PalmerKippola.com/gift

How To Beat AutoImmune

https://www.learntruehealth.com/beat-autoimmune

Highlights:

• What is MS and some most common auto-immune diseases
• One of the key factors that helps to reverse her autoimmune disease was decreasing and managing stress.
• Reasons why we need to on a daily basis have a routine that decreases our stress levels
• For autoimmune, removing the gluten is paramount but my lifestyle
• Find out how FIGHTS can affect your health (Food, Infections, Gut health, Hormone balance, Toxins, and Stress) 

Feeling stressed lately? Find out how to build a foundation of health by addressing (FIGHTS) Food, Infections, Gut Health, Hormone Balance, Toxins and Stress in today’s podcast.

[00:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. This woman Palmer Kippola had MS. Multiple sclerosis for 26 years and she figured out how to no longer have MS. Have it completely reverse and heal her MS. In this today’s interview she shares her story. One of the key factors that helped her to reverse her autoimmune disease was decreasing and managing stress. We talked a bit about the physiological reasons why we need to, on a daily basis, have a routine that decreases our stress levels. Decreases the cortisol that puts us in the parasympathetic neuro-system response of rest and digest. It’s very important and we don’t do it enough especially if we have an autoimmune condition. I want to share with you something we really recommend. If you’re a type of person who’s battling a chronic illness and you want to heal, you’re going to love this suggestion. I’ve talked to in the past episodes about how much I loved Sunlighten Saunas I have one myself. It’s really aided me in my healing journey. I know that dozens of listeners have also purchased the sunlight and sauna and shared with me their personal story of how it’s been a great tool for them. This summer, Sunlighten Saunas giving my listeners a free chromotherapy device installed into their sauna and it aids with relaxation. Being in a sauna, number one is very relaxing. It does turn on the healing response, it turns off the stress response in the body. It incredibly healing and it decreases that stress from them. In addition, to just being in a sauna and all the benefits that they provide, this is a low heat sauna, they do have options for high heat but for those who are in chronic stress or having chronic autoimmune condition, you might not be comfortable of going in a sauna because you think it’s just going to be very hot. I start sweating in my sunlighten in about 119 degrees and the air is very comfortable. It’s almost like slightly above room temp. I feel really good. All my muscles totally relaxed and my body is expelling toxins through my sweat. I stay in there about between half and hours and 40 minutes. It’s very relaxing. When you have the chromotherapy in there, it adds both light and sound to decrease the stress. They are able to prove that it sends your bring into these relaxing waves. It takes you down out of that stress response and they’re showing that it is really helpful for those post-traumatic stress and with high chronic anxiety and those in chronic stress states which often people with autoimmune are. I highly recommend checking out sunlighten you can just give them a call. Google Sunlighten Saunas. Give them a call. Tell them I sent you Ashley James from the Learn True Health podcast. You get free shipping and you get this free chromotherapy added to your sauna. That’s worth several hundred dollars there. They do have a type of sauna that is called the solo system and it is portable. You can lay in it. Its ultra-low EMF and nontoxic. When you’re done you wipe it down and you put it in your closet. They do have that option for those who don’t want to have a big wooden sauna in their house or condo which I have and I love it. It only takes up a corner of the bedroom. It’s wonderful. I definitely recommend Sunlighten Sauna. It has been a great tool for me in my healing journey so many listeners have shared with me that they’re having wonderful results with it. As you listen to today’s episode and you start to understand why stress is a very important thing to learn how to manage on a daily basis, know that Sunlighten Sauna has a wonderful solution for you and as a learn true health listener, you definitely have a great discount by going with them. If you’re interested in learning more about sunlight and why I chose their company over dozens of other sauna companies out there, please go to learntruehealth.com and type in sauna or type in sunlighten in the search box, listen to my interviews. I did two interviews on the sunlighten sauna with the founder and one of the employees there who I absolutely adore. Both of them have wonderful stories and explain why sunlighten for me is the better option. I took about 2 years in researching all these different companies and contacting all these diff companies and talking to naturopaths and talking to other doctors until I finally decided that Sunlighten is my Sauna company. I’m really glad I did it. I’ve had only amazing experiences with their saunas and with their company and their customer service. I highly recommend them as a healing tool that help you both detoxify, sweat out those toxins and bring down the stress. Decrease that stress. Also, being in the Sunlighten Sauna help decrease inflammation as well. All wonderful healing tools that we need to help us on our healing journey. My goal for you is if you have autoimmune disease that you learn today how to beat it by listening to today’s interview and following all the wonderful advice that Palmer gives today. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Please continue sharing these episodes with all your friends and family so we can help everyone that we love to learn true health. Enjoy today’s interview.

[06:18] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 367. Today we are in for a big treat. We have with us, Palmer Kippola who is a functional medicine certified health coach. What has impressed me is much is that she overcame her 26-year battle with multiple sclerosis. She went on to design a formula to help everyone with autoimmune condition to no longer have it. She explains, she teaches us today. She’s going to explain why we can permanently and forever reverse autoimmune disease. If you go to a typical, traditional MD, they’re going to say that you need to be on drugs and manage it. That maybe they’ll even say that your autoimmune disease can go into remission but anytime it could sneak up on you and come back and flare up so they want to get you on drugs for the rest of your life. Not Palmer’s experience. Her experience is that you can epigenetically shift your body so that you can longer express, no longer have autoimmune and you’re 100% forever in remission. I’m so excited for my listeners to learn from you today, Palmer. Welcome to the show.

[07:41] Palmer Kippola: It’s an absolute honor to be with you, Ashley. Thank you so much for having me.

[07:45] Ashley James: Absolutely.  Well, this is going to be really exciting. Right off the bat, I want to say congratulations, your book is number one Amazon bestseller in 8 categories. You launched it a few months ago and it is just selling like hotcakes. Congratulations.

[08:03] Palmer Kippola: Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.

[08:04] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, your book is called Beat Autoimmune: The six keys to reverse your condition and reclaim your health and it has a foreword with Mark Hyman. I’ve had him on the show, I absolutely love him. What does it feel to have an Amazon best-selling book?

[08:22] Palmer Kippola: It’s a little surreal. I have to tell you. It just had exceeded my expectation but what it says to me, is that people are seeking real solutions and that is so exciting to me. People actually know it’s possible or believes that it’s possible to completely heal. They are looking for these answers.

[08:44] Ashley James: It’s number 1 in 8 categories including immunology, alternative med, lupus, MS, chronic pain. You cover a lot of really great content in your book and of course, you’re here today to teach us some of that content. Before we get into that though, I really want to hear your story. Can you take us back? What happened in your life that led up to you having MS for 26 years and ultimately discovering how to no longer have an autoimmune condition?

[09:15] Palmer Kippola:  Yes. This a story that starts when I’m 19 years old so I need to take you back just a few years. I was a happy, healthy, well-adjusted 19-year-old young woman. I was home for the summer after my freshman year of college. I’m just working a summer job, doing my thing. One morning I woke you and the soles of my feet were just tingling. That feeling that you get when you’ve sat on a limb for too long and when the blood flows back it’s all tingling. I thought, “You just shake your legs and the blood’s going to flow back. Only this particular morning, the blood didn’t flow back even when I was jumping up and down. I thought, “Get up, this is just going to go away.” Off I go to work but the tingling just crept up my legs like a vine. By the time the tingling reached my knees, I knew something was really wrong. So I called my parents and they called the family doctor who said, “Get her over to the neurologist at UCLA.” I don’t know how we managed it but we got it that the afternoon, by the time we sat in the neurologists’ office, the tingling was all the way up to my tummy. The neurologist had me do this very cursory exam, heel-toe across the room. She tested my reflexes, the knees, touch your fingers to your nose with your eyes closed. I think it was a 5 or 6 minutes visit and she then pronounced, “I am 99% certain that you have MS. Multiple sclerosis. And if I’m right, there’s nothing you can do, except go home and wait it out.” We had never heard of MS. This was before the internet. There was no Dr. Terry Walls. We just left her office with very little information. Very little hope and went home and by the time we got home that evening, the tingling was all the way up into the collarbone. By the time we got into bed, my mom crawled in with me and she was holding me and crying and I was crying because by that time I couldn’t feel her holding me Ashley, my whole entire body had gone completely numb and would stay numb from the neck down for a full 6 weeks.

[11:30] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that must’ve been so scary.

[11:35] Palmer Kippola: It was absolutely terrifying. We just didn’t know what to expect. We couldn’t just go and check out doctor google. Really, I was relegated to the couch for those 6 weeks. We didn’t know how long it’s going to last. I’m just so grateful that I was at home at that time with my parents and they were tremendous supporters. My mom was quick to empathize, hug me and start planning what we could for we don’t know what. My life permitted being in a wheelchair and going to school locally. My dad was also very quick to motivate me and my can-do spirit. He would often say, “Honey, you can beat this thing.” Just I understand him he was a former fighter pilot so he had a very strong can-do spirit and he always fired mine up. I had the empathy, I had the motivation and a lot of time to just contemplate and be on the couch. I will say that during those 6 weeks, I am so grateful that friends came by and they weren’t too scared off by this mysterious disease. One friend came, a family friend who is into things metaphysical, in retrospect I can see that this was a gift, but at that time I was very offended. She asked me “Palmer, why do you think you got the MS?” “What? You think I caused this? What do you mean why do I think I got this?” I was offended. I didn’t have much to do or very far to go. I was like a dog with a bone with that question and I just lay on the couch thinking about this. “Why do I think I got – Did I bring this on?” I will share with you what I came up with this, my intimal hypothesis for why but I need to take you a little bit farther back in time because I had been adopted as a baby I was 3days old, my parents’ very loving parents. My dad who I mentioned who was also a fighter pilot had very strong opinions about things and very definitive views on how things should be. He didn’t liked that my mom was overweight and she really struggled with that. He would yell quite a bit. My earliest memory about age 3 or age 4 is, my dad is yelling at my mom who had shut her bedroom door, she probably crying behind her door. I am standing up to my dad with my little dukes up saying, “You yell at my mom and call her names, I’ll suck your lights out.” Whatever words to that affect. In lying on the couch there at age 19 completely numb, it occurred to me in a flash of insight that the reason for MS was chronic stress. I had become a child warrior. The hyper-vigilant, always scanning the environment for safety or danger and catching knives under the air vigilance, right? That is what occurred to me and I didn’t know anything about the immune system. I had no basis for any kind of knowledge about this but I envisioned my immune system as having become hyper-vigilant too that if there wasn’t a real battle going on, like a virus or some sort of bacterial threat that it could create friendly fire. It would turn against my own body. Much of this still rings true for me today that chronic stress is the root of the MS even though I know there’s a lot more to this story.

[15:25] Ashley James: I love it that you have that as you’re lying on the couch, you have this insight into that how the stress was affecting your immune system and how your immune system was responding. While you’re lying on the couch, did you start to do things to try to calm down or calm down your immune system? What did you do with that information once you had it?

[15:49] Palmer Kippola: Yes. I did. The first thing we did, another family friend brought a book, Norman Cousin’s Anatomy of an Illness and in it, Dr. Cousin’s recounts his own experience healing from some mysterious autoimmune condition with high doses of laughter and vitamin C. I didn’t know anything about nutrition but the laughter made perfect sense so every night my family and I made it our mission to watch funny things on TV. That was definitely a good distraction at the very least it gave me an oasis of calm from the fear. That was one thing and I did start doing visualizations. If you think about Pacman, it was that rudimentary when I was envisioning my immune system like shooting laser beams at these little critters that were in my body that shouldn’t be there. Guided imagery and laughter were two of the first things that I used but it took a couple of years for me to really put this into practice if you will. I am very fortunate that at the end of 6 weeks the numbness were treated enough for me to go back to college. I went back for my sophomore year. I intuited since chronic stress was at the root of the MS then I needed to learn how to relax. That drove me for the next 26 years. That I needed to put relaxation practices in place to calm that hypervigilance. The first thing I started doing is yoga. I noticed that when I did the practice, did the deep breathing and actually did the poses, I noticed a reduction in symptoms. Conversely, when I was really stressed like there were exams at school, conflict at home or later in the workforce, when I might have been overwhelmed with work-related stuff, I noticed flare-ups of the MS. That was really, really easy for me to see the cause and effect of stress equals symptoms, relaxations equals no symptoms. No, not at all but a reduction in symptoms, I should say. The next thing I started doing in the early 90’s is to meditate. I noticed once again if I did it, things would calm down and if I didn’t, I would experience more symptoms. But still the MS still persisted, it didn’t go away just because I started to relax more it was always there to some varying degree.

[18:30] Ashley James: How many flare-ups would you have? Would it be just little symptoms like if you were under stress you’d wake up with tinging numbness or pain? Would you have major flare-ups where you would be in a wheelchair?

[18:45] Palmer Kippola: Fortunately, I’ve never made into to a wheelchair. I don’t know how to say that. I never ended up in a wheelchair, I did have an experience once probably the most dreadful was aside from that 6 weeks of total body numbness was a flare-up of optic neuritis. This is a striking before and after. I was working for AT&T network systems in New Jersey. A stressful marketing job, I went on vacation to a really relaxing Caribbean island fantastic time and I came back, and the moment I set foot in the corporate building under those florescent lights, I was struck blind in one eye and had this searing pain that would last about two weeks. That would take two visits to an emergency room for the pain and them not figuring out what it was and finally a trip down to John Hopkins in Baltimore where there’s an MS specialty to be diagnosed with optic neuritis which is, in fact, a hallmark symptom of MS. For the most part, your question about feeling symptoms, there was tightness like rubber bands around my torso, there was numbness and tingling. There was no rhyme and reason to where the symptom would show up and there was also this general profound fatigue that I felt.

[20:13] Ashley James: The catch22, when you have these symptoms, it causes more stress. It’s just feedback loop because you don’t know if it’s going to get worse, you don’t know when it’s going to get better. You’re feeling it in your body so it’s real. You’re constantly worrying about which is creating more stress, which is creating more symptoms, the symptoms creating more stress and worry which is creating more symptoms and on and on, how do you take a breath and do a break state?

[20:47] Palmer Kippola: That is a great question. It think it’s so important to understand that the stress itself, create such a downward spiral to a vicious cycle of stress and symptom, stress and more stress and insomnia and you can’t sleep and you’re stressed about that. I think inherent in that question too, I think you mentioned taking a deep breath. Anything that you can do to cut that cycle and you’ve practiced, I understand that you do NLP, one thing that I have found super helpful is just to do the deep breathing. Taking maybe a total of 6 rounds of 5 breaths in really slowly deep belly breathing is some way to just get back centered in the body and not to let your mind spiral out of control because there’s no sense creating more stress. There’s what is and then there’s the story that you start telling about what is. Just to stay present with what is and breathe into it and get centered and back in the body. Whatever you can do to center yourself has been in my experience the most helpful.

[21:59] Ashley James: You say that it reminds me of landmark out. Did you do any landmark or did you do that somewhere else?

[21:05] Palmer Kippola: I don’t know if I learned it from landmark but you’ve caught me. Yes, I’ve done landmark through their advanced program. I guess, SELP which was very helpful. I can’t remember what it stands for but maybe you do.

[22:18] Ashley James: Self-Expression and leadership program.

[22:21] Palmer Kippola: There you go.

[22:22] Ashley James: Yes, I did landmark when I was a teenager. Then after my mom died, I ended up taking a lot of their advanced courses and then they hired me and I was on staff in Toronto at the Toronto center. I love Landmark but they got a little miffy when I told them I wanted to study NLP because they just wanted everyone to do Landmark and not look at where landmark got their original stuff from. They copied NLP and so I went basically to the source. Coming back to what you said about story. This is really important. I was just talking a friend of the wall and was very stressed out about something. She was exacerbating her symptoms so much so that she was unable to walk. She was really exacerbating her stress. It’s hard to tell someone, “You’re causing this.” She has health issues but stress exacerbates the health issues and the only time she has flare-ups is when she’s’ stressed. It’s hard to say, “By the way, you have control over this” because people feel like, ”Are you telling me that I’m doing this on myself and it’s all on my head?” it’s not. It’s not saying that at all. It’s very real and that emotional, mental and physical stress both from internal emotional and mental and external stressors, like what we eat and our environment are – if you are in an area where there’s high pollution in the air and you have asthma that’s an external stress on your body but if you are not sleeping at night then you’re worrying a lot. That’s exactly same as breathing in pollution for someone who has asthma. It’s just a different kind of stress but it’s going to do the same thing to the body. It takes the body out of the healing mode and into the fight or flight mode. If we are in fight or flight we’re not healing. Whether we’re healing or we’re fighting to survive in the moment. Like you said, taking those deep breaths is going to give us that break state where we can bring our body back into healing mode and calm it down. When we’re worried about something we’re throwing fuel in the fire and I love that you brought up the idea of the story because that’s exactly what I had to tell my friend which really helped her. She was having symptoms in her body. She has some emotional stressors going on with her life with her family. Her symptoms came up and then she started worrying about the symptoms “Oh my gosh, does this mean I’m going to have to go to the ER? What’s going to happen to me? Am I going to be able to walk? Do I need to go get my walker? I don’t have anyone to take care of me.” So she starts making a story about the feeling. All she had was a sensation in her body but her mind wanted to predict the future so she could be prepared but the mind goes to worst-case scenario, the doomsday. Her mind started thinking about all the worst things that could possibly happen be she’s feeling the sensation in her body. Then that exacerbated her worry and her stress which then created more symptoms and that was the feedback loop. She started feeling more symptom then she started worrying about them thinking, “This means that I’m going to be this, that I’m going to be that. “ I had to say lest focus on what’s so right now because all the this-means that the brain does, all the story that the brain creates is not necessarily true. It’s just trying to predict the future based on the past but were not living our past right now. We need to do a break state. Catch yourself when you’re in story. Story meaning when you’re trying to predict this negative future based on what you’re currently feeling in your body. You felt the searing pain in your head and you couldn’t see at one eye your brain probably went, “Oh my god, I’m going to blind for the rest of my life.” That’s the story that you probably created because I would. I would, possibly in that moment. And then that feeds into creating more and more stress. Like you said, we have to come back to what’s so. What’s so in the moment is I’m having these feelings and that’s it. That’s the only things that so. What can I do right now to help me to trigger the healing mode and to de-escalate the stress mode. I love that you do the deep breathings which immediately helps. Then to manage stress in a daily basis, you’re doing yoga and meditation. Obviously, you’ve discovered more things to help because this was just helping to manage it but it didn’t helped it to completely go away. So after you discovered that the optical nerve,

[27:29] Palmer Kippola: Optic neuritis.

[27:30] Ashley James: Yes, the optic neuritis was a common symptom of MS then what happened?

[27:37] Palmer Kippola: I just kept on this path of stress reduction because I thought that that was going to be my path to freedom. In fact, it was big part of it but in addition to that, I did a bunch of other experiments over the 26 years. I intuited that food had to do something with the MS. I didn’t know what and at that time there was very little information available and I came across the swank diet book that purported that a low-fat vegetarian diet was in fact the best for MS. That was the next experiment I did. For me, it didn’t work. I didn’t notice a reduction in symptoms and in fact, when I added more healthy whole grains into my diet I noticed that I started having more tummy trouble and no reduction in MS symptoms. Every time I ate, I would notice some gurgling not like IBS symptoms that were debilitating but this kind of gurgling sensation that you can just feel something going on that doesn’t feel great but I thought it was normal. I thought everybody felt this way after eating. I didn’t think anything of it. I just kept eating the whole grains at every meal. I grew up eating great big bowls of cereal, I had my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole wheat bread, and for dinner there’s was either pasta or sometimes pizza or beer. Every time I ate, I felt that grumbling. That was my first experience with food and I must say that all different types of vegetarian is for me, didn’t seem to make anything better. In fact, I discovered that I had more tummy issues as a result of adding more grains to my diet.

[29:33] Ashley James: Right. Not many people get that there’s a connection between gut health and other systems of the body. Did you feel that disrupting your gut health with grains played a role in affecting your inflammation, affecting the MS, the autoimmune, did you take that correlation?

[29:58] Palmer Kippola: I didn’t make any correlation whatsoever. Again, I thought this was normal and it just seemed like a failed experiment to me at that time. It wasn’t until 2010 when I actually discovered my lynchpin trigger which I will talk more about. I just wanted to add one more failed experiment to this equation before telling you what my eureka experiment was. The third experiment I tried was medication, which for me was not beneficial. I, in fact, developed more people know of them as side effect, they’re not very side effects they’re very direct effects that medication causes but I think the drug companies want us to believe that these are just little tiny side effects. I actually developed heart attack symptoms about 15 minutes after injecting myself one night with this medication purported to help the MS. That was a terrifying experience. They just assured me that this was a normal known side effect of the mediation. I developed a wound that wouldn’t heal for 6 months. I developed lipoatrophy, which is a disappearance of fat where you inject yourself in all the fatty places, they don’t talk about a that. If the medication worked, you overlooked those. It’s a question of balance. Is it doing more good than harm? For me, it ended up more harm than good. I was already managing well with the stress reduction. I was modeling along with the diets trying to figure it out on my own again, not having the internet, it wasn’t until 2010 that I decided to finally I need to go see a nutritionist. I found a functional medicine nutritionist who lived pretty close to me. She ran a bunch of tests and it turned out that I have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. In other words, I didn’t have celiac disease but I was very sensitive to gluten. One of the proteins in grains notably wheat. This functional medicine nutritionist educated me on what gluten is doing to my body. How that was what was causing this gut symptoms. Remember I shared that I was eating gluten at every meal for as long as I could chew food. I had no idea what was doing to my body. She educated me on how it was inflaming the lining my gut creating leaky gut and she led to through gut healing protocol that included a 30-day elimination diet so that’s what I did in October of 2010. I remember the date because this was really notable for me. Within a week of removing gluten, I stopped having tummy trouble after eating. Within one month of removing the gluten, I stopped having any and all symptoms ever again. Like end of story. I really quick to footnote Ashley that your experience might be different. Everybody has a different reaction. I’m not suggesting that reversing MS is as simple as removing gluten and you’re done because our root causes are different and we’ll go into the FIGHTS categories that I’ve came up with to look at all the things that need to be looked at. Gluten happens to be the number one biggest baddy when it comes to food and autoimmune conditions. I just wanted to get that said and I would also like to add that I was so excited about this fact that by January of 2011, I thought I’ve got to go tell my neurologist because over 26 years I’ve seen 6 neurologists, this 26-year period where I’ve lived in different places, 6 neurologists who all had done MRIs and office visits and everything who have said, yes this is MS. This one that I was seeing in Palo Alto, I told him this is what I did. I removed the gluten and I don’t have MS anymore. I can’t feel it. Prior to that, I felt like I was plugged into an electric socket 24/7. I could feel this humming in the background all the time. I knew it was always there. When I went into his office really excited he gave me one of this pat me in the head condescending remarks and said, “Palmer, gluten sensitivity is a fad, your MS must’ve been benign after all.” There’s no acknowledgment of anything that was done. Fast forward now to last year when I went back to the same neurologist. To close the story, 8 years later, I thought it would be a good time to go back and get a follow-up MRI with him just to check-in. He wondered what I was doing back and I said, “I was actually really curious what his thinking was on MS and autoimmune conditions and the first thing he said to me was, “Palmer, we now know that gluten sensitivity is real. I bet more than a third of my MS patients are sensitive to gluten.” There was a recognition and acknowledgment that about 10 years later, he had come to another understanding maybe he had read the science for himself. He had me do the follow-up MRI and I came by sat side by side with him and we looked to the results the before and after. He showed me that pattern of MS and how there was a dozen finger pattern that was very much consistent with MS patients lesions in their brain look like and how my brain showed that the lesions had disappeared or were fading. He just looked at me and said, “This could’ve been a better story.” Ashley, I tried to partner with him saying, “You know, I’m a functional certified health coach.” and he said, “I can’t give you my patient list but maybe I can send people to you. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great just to have 2 or 3 clients that we work on together like a one plus one equals three kind of thing?” I pursued that a couple of times and I never heard back from him again.

[36:34] Ashley James: That is so frustrating. Why are they so threatened with getting people off of medication and a hundred percent healed especially when it comes to partnering with holistic health practitioners. Why? Why can’t they drop the ego? Also the ego, this just drives me crazy. MDs and this is part of their training, I know as individuals, I know there’s probably MDs listening right now because they write to me. I’m not bashing individual MDs, I’m saying that their training, it’s like when you get a soldier to go into the military, they put them through hell week or whatever, or hell month whatever their training is in order to mold them, in order to shape them, if you look at how they develop the training their MDs, it is to mold them into a certain kind of thinking. They do 24-hour shifts, this kind of things where it really does shift how you act and how you think. Their entire education, they spent eight or 9 years being molded to believe that they have been taught everything. That new information is really hard to come by because they’ve been taught everything. Their immediate reaction when they hear something like, “Oh, I cut out food and my diagnosis is going away or has gone away” is to scoff at it. It’s to put it down without looking for information to prove or disapprove. They just tell the patient that’s incorrect. That’s their ego. That’s their huberous. Instead as a scientist, they would say, “Interesting hypothesis. I do not know.” Most MDs can’t say “I do not know. Let’s go look into this together. I’m going to put my bias. My personal human ego and bias aside and lets go look into this together and see if there’s other studies, see if there’s validity to your claims.“ No. Most MD’s do not do that. If you find a doctor that says, “I don’t know the answer but let’s find them together” that is a potential keeper. It just frustrates me. Especially, women, I have heard story upon story of women who have not been listened to by their doctor. It’s like they’re brushed off “That’s just hysteria. That’s just your hormones. That’s normal. Whatever your symptoms are that’s just normal,” and they’re not listened to. There’s so many cases of people coming to their doctor and they feel like something’s wrong. It turns out, years later, they develop cancer and it’s like they knew something was wrong but because the doctor just writes it off and sends them home. They’re basing things on their ego and not as a scientist. Let’s see if we can prove or disapprove this hypothesis. It’s frustrating to me because people go to their doctor because we put them on a pedestal and we expect answers and then if they don’t know the answer that’s treating to their ego so then they just makeup one instead of actually looking into the science. That puts the patient down and disempowers them. We want to empower people to advocate for themselves and thank god, there’s the internet so we can – and thank god there’s podcast like this and interviews like this so we can go and empower ourselves and seek information. We have to remember when we bring this information to our doctor, they’re not putting their ego aside. We have to get whatever they say if they’re not willing to go and look into the research then don’t give up, go to the next doctor and the next doctor and find one that’ll partner with you. Be okay with you advocating for yourself. I love seeing naturopaths. Many naturopaths I’ve seen are excited when I bring research from the internet saying, “What about his, what about that? can we look at this can we look at that and they’re excited to not know all the answers and to learn with me because they’re better at reading the science than I am. So if I can bring them something to look at and to research and look at all the studies then great, they’re going to do that for me I’m just going to point them in the direction that I want them to go to help me because I’m advocating for myself getting my doctor to look into what I want. I love that you noticed and you listened to your body those 26 years and you kept experimenting. Obviously, you never gave up because that’s your quality of life. You advocated for yourself. Just because your doctor said, “This is who we eat. This isn’t real.” you did not go, “Oh, I’ll just go start eating cheerios again because my doctor says that this is who we eat.” You know, you still listen to yourself. People I know who their doctors have talked them out of a healthier lifestyle because the doctor just didn’t believe in it. That is so sad that sometimes people put the opinions that their doctors give them as higher than their own ability to listen to their body.

[42:26] Palmer Kippola: So beautifully said, Ashley. I want to thank you for saying all that. I am with you. This is not us coming down on doctors but it feels like when there’s not a curiosity that’s demonstrated even in the face of evidence that’s everywhere and will get into this now with epigenetics and now there’s actually an autoimmune equation, we have the knowledge but not being curious, it’s a little bit baffling but it really speaks to the need that we all have to become the CEOs or the captain of our own ships, speak of our own health. We really must do that and I know that that’s daunting because that seems that the doctors supposed to be the one who educates who know all of this. Sadly, my understanding is that in medical practice often follows about 17 years behind science and that’s just because the medical schools can’t keep up with what’s coming. The textbooks are out of date, they are really, really busy people and of course, insurances involved, that further limits what they can actually talk with patients about and get paid for. The bottom line is we need this root-cause revolution. We have the information today to show us that it’s not just about putting this autoimmune conditions into remission and I love how you said we’d be getting like its lurking there in the background waiting to pounce forward. It’s not that way with cancer either. We’ve read Kelly Turner’s radical remission for the stories of people who’ve overcome cancer. There are things that people put into practice that actually matter greatly in terms of changing your health outcomes. I just wanted to say thank you for really advocating on behalf of each of us becoming the CEO of our own health and well-being. Feeling the confidence to step up and say, “You know that just doesn’t seem right to me” because food apathy said food is medicine 25 hundred years ago and we know this to be true just because the doctor didn’t have nutrition training doesn’t mean that it’s not true. Anyway, I do want to say that western medicine is fantastic for acute illnesses. For broken bones, for surgeries and these acute conditions but this gray area mysterious diseases that don’t have a clear beginning and end are really not – that’s not the purview of medical doctors, they didn’t get trained in this stuff. So many systems are interconnected. For the most part, doctors get trained in their xylode approach. Works like I said for those acute illnesses and that’s when you want to see a doctor if I want a heart attack I want to got to the hospital but if I have MS, maybe not the best place. They don’t have the right toolkit.

[45:47] Ashley James: They’re not looking to heal the root cause. They’re looking to manage symptoms, they’re really good at managing symptoms. It’s up to us to heal the root cause because it keeps coming back to, it’s our lifestyle that is the cause of this. Lifestyle being the nutrition, the food we eat and don’t eat the amount of stress we have, how we move our body, all of that. Our environment, all of that triggers the genes to express in a certain way. Let’s jump back to your story so we can discover what you did then. After you leave your doctor 8-10 years ago, you left your doctor’s office and you knew that cutting out grains, was it all grains or just gluten grains?

[46:43] Palmer Kippola: Well, I eventually cut all grains. I started just with gluten but I found that for me I have naturally high blood sugar. For me to manage the blood sugar, just not having grains at all or starchy carbs was a better way to go. I’ll just say for autoimmune, removing the gluten is paramount but my lifestyle, it’s better for me to avoid all grains.

[47:11] Ashley James: Got it. After you left the doctor’s office and he have purported going gluten-free, you knew in your gut you’re on to something, then what? Where’d you go from there?

[47:24] Palmer Kippola: I just have this cognitive dissonance. The feeling that you have when you know something in your bones and yet I have been old for 26 years by this 6 neurologists there’s nothing I could do. It just didn’t compute. Right? How in the world was it possible that a woman like me, I was in sales and marketing for high tech companies, I was not in the health industry, but I decided I needed to learn for myself. What had actually happened. I dove into the research, you probably know PubMed. It is probably the largest database of biomedical research, I think owned by the NIH it’s just endless. I started doing research upon research and looking for studies on the cause of autoimmune conditions and I found just an incredible amount of evidence that talked about things like low vitamin D is associated with autoimmune conditions. Low DHEA which is another hormone associated with autoimmune, high mercury associated with all – I’m thinking oh my goodness, there are so many things that we can control. These environmental factors seem to be associated with developing autoimmune conditions, it wasn’t just MS. I thought MS was going to be some different animal or some different beast but it turns out that any of the 150 or more autoimmune conditions all have similar root causes. I just started putting the puzzle pieces together. I started writing down these categories and it turned out it spelled the word. Fights. Which stands for Food, Infections, Gut health, Hormone balance, Toxins, and Stress. I just was super excited that now, we had information that wanted to share with the world. I knew that people needed to know about this. It wasn’t okay with me that a doctor didn’t know more about this and I felt like, I really wanted to help people so I finally decided that I needed to share this with the world in a form of a book and not just keep this for myself because honestly, I felt like it should have been front-page news and it wasn’t.

[49:47] Ashley James: Each time you came across a study like the high mercury, did you look into what you can do to detox mercury as you go through each one, “Oh vitamin D. I should get my vitamin D checked, oh vitamin C.” each time you came across one did you address it in your health?

[50:07] Palmer Kippola: Yes. Well, first thing I did is I wrote it down and I had what I called my root cause reversal checklist. I just wrote everything down. I saw that poor sleep, for example, only getting 6 hours a night was enough to turn on inflammatory genes and getting restored of sleep, on the other hand, turned on the nourishing genes and dim down those inflammatory ones. I learned that dairy can be very inflammatory for people with autoimmune conditions. So I did. It was self-experimentation first but writing them all down on this sheet of paper so that I could see the full array of different root causes and there were many of them which I ended up putting in categories so, yes.

[50:53] Ashley James: I am fascinated. 6 hours or less of sleep epigenetically turns on the expression of inflammatory genes?

[51:02] Palmer Kippola: Yes.

[51:05] Ashley James: Think about all the people. Does that include disrupted sleep?

[51:09] Palmer Kippola: The study says even a few hours of lost sleep can lead to turning on inflammatory genes

[51:15] Ashley James: That’s huge

[51:16] Palmer Kippola: Yes, it is huge. I’d like to if this is an okay place to talk about it, introduce the topic of the toxin bucket. I know you’ve talked with your audience about this before but I think this is really an appropriate place to include it because we each carry inside us this metaphor of a toxin bucket into which all of these lifestyle factors go. Those things that I was researching the mercury, “I had a mouthful of mercury fillings, I had an addiction to sugar growing up. I not only had my cheerios, I put tablespoon upon tablespoon of sugar and added my non-fat milk to it. So I ladling in dairy, I’ve got the gluten, I’ve got the chronic stress from childhood, I’ve got a mouthful of mercury filings.” All of those things, individually your body deals with. We have a certain amount of resilience as a child or teenager as an example. Theoretically, our bucket can hold a certain amount of toxins and the bottom of the bucket should have holes metaphorically where those toxins get excreted. Through our skin, our colon, through our kidneys, etc. we want to make sure that the detox organs are functioning perfectly. Things are flowing but it turns out, that in my case, I was adding more things to my toxin bucket than I was excreting. It just gets to the point where once things starts spilling over, the whole system just goes tilt. This is when the leaky gut develops, this is when we start to experience symptoms because leaky gut is the gateway to autoimmune conditions. I finally figured out in doing all these research that all of those elements that I was studying, the poor sleep, minimal exercise or minimal movement, eating a sad diet, even infections like Candida and chronic Lyme disease, all of those elements are adding to the toxin bucket and it’s our job if we want to stay healthy or get well. To examine those things that we’re putting into the bucket or might be to our knowledge and to do something about it. We can start by emptying the toxin bucket and I think that’s a lifetime’s work because we want to practice daily detoxification and not just do a few quick cleanses a few times a year. That was what I decided. I had my toxin bucket head overflowed and that is how the MS developed and so to heal from the MS and any other autoimmune condition, we need to examine what our own buckets are filled with and see if we can remove those element so that we can get back to balance.

[54:12] Ashley James: To go to your acronym, food, infections, gut health. What were the other?

[54:21] Palmer Kippola: Hormone balance, toxins, and stress. Those were the big categories.

[54:27] Ashley James: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. You started discovering as you went through your research that certain nutrient deficiencies were associated with autoimmune and then toxins, the toxic overload like mercury was associated with autoimmune. Where do infections come into play?

[54:49] Palmer Kippola: Infections are a very insidious contributor to autoimmune conditions. They are there often lurking in the background. Like Epstein-Barr for example is a herpes virus. It may be you had childhood mono and it’s not until you’re hit with a major stressor maybe later in life. Maybe a loved one dies or maybe you lose a job or something happens that knocks you off balance. That hidden or latent infection gets reactivated and that can become a major contributor. It’s usually some combination of factors and with infections, it’s both a cause and hitchhiker I’ll call it because sometimes it’s the chronic Lyme disease that is the root cause of an autoimmune condition or Epstein-Barr. Sometimes when your immune system has taken a hit and it’s dealing with an autoimmune condition, your defenses are down and it’s more likely that people with autoimmune conditions will pick up an infection because people with autoimmune conditions typically are hypometabolic meaning their metabolism are low and slow. There’s usually low thyroid involved and when we’re at a hypometabolic state, we are our environment our milieu is more attracted to infections, that’s another conundrum with infections and autoimmune conditions. They seem to go hand in hand.

[56:31] Ashley James: I’m thinking, Lyme disease often has co-infections and the people I’ve interviewed on the show about Lyme all say, these experts help people reverse Lyme disease, they themselves have had them and helped people reverse it and they say that it’s the environment of the body that became optimal because like an entire family could be exposed to ticks that have Lyme but only one person in the family develops chronic Lyme disease and everyone else just gets over it. It’s not like a hundred percent of the time people develop Lyme. It’s at the environment of the body was perfect meaning their toxin bucket was full and their immune system was somehow compromised and the body became this perfect host for the chronic Lyme disease and all this co-infections. So all the experts on the show keep saying, it’s the environment of the body that invites these infections to live in us. When I say infections, it can be parasites, it can be bacteria or viruses. All of them. Right?

[57:47] Palmer Kippola: Right. Absolutely.

[57:48] Ashley James: You’re looking to help the body become an environment that’s inhospitable to these infections.

[57:59] Palmer Kippola: Well said. Absolutely. It’s all about the terrain. What I have found is that we actually need a two-prong strategy to address these infections. It’s not just about kill, kill, kill. The Lyme co-infections as an example, it’s not just a killing strategy. Like with chemotherapy for example, if you have cancer and you get chemo, it might kill the cancer cells but if you don’t do anything to address the root cause of why you got cancer in the first place, the cancer often returns with a vengeance. It’s a similar kind of story here. The two-prong strategy that I talk about is first, we’ve got to unburden our immune systems. When you’re dealing with any kind of autoimmune condition, MS is not a brain problem. Hashimoto’s, thyroid is not a thyroid disease. Rheumatoid arthritis is not a problem with your joints. It actually may manifest that way but these are all immune system problems. When you help unburden your immune system, you’re actually helping resolve the autoimmune condition and you’re doing the best you can do and help clear infections. We want to remove all sources of inflammation. That would include those inflammatory foods that we talked about, the gluten the dairy the sugar and for some people they have challenges with things like eggs, soy, corn, some with nuts and so forth. You need to discover for you what your sources of inflammatory foods are because that’s the best place to start when we remove the sources of inflammation when it comes to infections. They love sugar. Infections like candida as an example thrive on sugars so when you take away their preferred fuel, their sugar you’re creating an environment that’s inhospitable to those infections. That’s why that’s a very, very good way to start it’s addressing the sources of inflammation that you’re putting into your system and then the second piece which is very much synergistic with the first is to raise your metabolism and the way we can do this is to help ourselves. I have found three things that work really well, one is to go low carb because carbohydrates convert to sugar in our body, high glycemic ones. We want to do what we can to minimize the high glycemic foods, and starches and processed foods and I also find that intermittent fasting is an excellent strategy to remove those sources of even digesting is metabolically really high energy for the body. When we can give ourselves a break or digestion a break, we can actually focus our energies on healing as an example. Finally, cold showers. At least the last 30 seconds or a minute of a shower can be another great way to raise your metabolism. These are all strategies to help you become an inhospitable place for infections.

[01:01:24] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. I love this approach because you’re looking at correcting the train of the body and looking at it from all the different angles. How long have you been teaching the FIGHTS method to help people no longer have autoimmune condition?

[01:01:44] Palmer: Kippola I have been coaching people for the last couple of years. I got my certification to be functional medicine certified health coach. It’s interesting Ashley because the first book that I set out to write was a book of healing stories. I wanted to not just share my own story of healing from MS, I wanted to make it an exponential good news story to share other people’s stories and I have an agent and she tried to shop that around, it’s disappointing to me that I learned that, and the quotes where “healing stories don’t sell.” I couldn’t believe it. I know. I find healing stories very powerful and I share it on my website. But in fact, the publishers weren’t interested in that, instead of having 12 doctor’s perspectives on healing, they wanted my perspective. That’s when I thought I actually need to package this up in a way that is digestible, pun intended so that people can really get their arms around what they need do to. That’s when I really started coming out with more information on FIGHTS as a protocol and not just throwing things against the wall to see what would stick. I actually now have a framework for healing.

[01:03:09] Ashley James: So you have been working for the last few years and getting results, can you share what kind of results? Can you share some of those stories of success?

[01:03:19] Palmer Kippola: Absolutely. Here’s an example, one of my clients is a – she’s probably 50 years old now. She has a couple of kids. She’s a single mom. She works and have had IBS symptoms so bad that she couldn’t leave the house. She used to be an athlete. She used to run and participate in races. When she developed these IBS symptoms, she was terrified as you can imagine to leave the house to go for a run and not knowing whether there’s going to be toilet. She also had a long commute to work and that made it nearly debilitating for her. She also had celiac disease and she had Hashimoto’s, thyroiditis. I have given a talk at the end of 2016 for an organization called Silicon Valley health institute. SVHI. They recorded a 30-minute video of me sharing my MS healing journey and what I’ve learned to help others. This woman saw my video and she was across the country so it was great that we have the internet now to share this healing stories. She reached out and she became a client. At that time, she was also losing her hair and had real hormonal imbalance and dysfunction with very, very heavy menstrual cycles. That was what we started with. We talked about my methodology and she was just eager and ready to do what she could to change her lifestyle. We came to find that she was eating a lot of these foods that were actually interfering with her immune system including gluten, corn, tomatoes, dairy, all of which she was reacting to but that she craved. As difficult as it is to consider doing an elimination diet and giving up your favorite foods, I told her that “Look, it’s only 30 days. For me, it’s the most empowering experiment that I ever did. We’ll go through this together.” Sure enough, she did. She removed all of those foods including eggs and coffee and so forth. At the end of the 30 days, she felt fantastic. Then she tried to add some of those foods back in, she just found immediately that when she added back in the tomatoes, she loved her chips and salsa, that is just an absolute inflammation bomb, she had a very bad outcome with that but this was so empowering for her to actually see that what she was eating almost on a daily basis was causing so many of these problems. Over time, we’re able to balance her hormones, get her blood sugar balanced. Get her feeling great. She dropped, I’m going to say nearly 25 pounds of inflammatory water weight and weight that she wanted to lose, by the end of working with her after a couple of months, she was feeling good enough to start doing 5ks again. I forgot to mention one of her symptoms at the outset was she was falling asleep at work. This is not a good situation. You don’t want to be I don’t know if it’s official narcolepsy or I’m not even sure. I know narcolepsy is an autoimmune condition but her fatigue was so great that she was falling asleep. After this her energy returned, her hair stopped falling out. She was able to get back to more regular cycles and honestly Ashley, it was astounding that it was mostly removing the bad things that were harming her and just adding a few supplements like getting her vitamin D levels up, getting her magnesium balance and up. Avoiding those favorite foods and she was really, really amazed with how she felt.

[01:07:36] Ashley James: No longer has IBS?

[01:07:38] Palmer Kippola: No longer has IBS. Doesn’t associate herself with having Hashimoto’s or celiac. She’s really clear on what she can eat or not. She’s just decided some of these foods are going to stay out. She knows if she chooses, which is empowering because now we have choices, right? Now we know cause and effect and we know if we want to add something back in and she knows what will happen if she does and that’s that.

[01:08:05] Ashley James: Just to clarify, she was diagnosed with IBS, hashimoto’s and colitis?

[01:08:12] Palmer Kippola: Celiac.

[01:08:13] Ashley James: Celiac, okay. Got it. That is so cool. I love it. How long from start to finish did it take for her?

[01:08:23] Palmer Kippola: I want to say two months of being diligent with her diet and working with me and adding back in the nutrients to really deal with some of the deficiencies like vitamin D and magnesium and vitamin B12. She was able to get back to life and in fact, she’s running 5kms now with her daughter. It’s super empowering. What happens is it is not just about her, this is the ripple effect of healing when somebody is able to overcome these health challenges they become a role model for their family and friends. So it becomes a ripple effect in the family and then in the community and you can just see the ripples in the pond going out. That’s super exciting.

[01:09:15] Ashley James: Super exciting. I love it. You mentioned magnesium. I want to let you know that I’ve been on my health journey healing, I had multiple problems, you listen to this show so you know but for listeners who’ve never heard. I had many health problems. I was very very sick. I had spent the last 10 years finding my own health solutions and something I really believe in, supplements. Magnesium is the most important mineral. Everyone thinks calcium is but magnesium actually is more important. They’re all important but magnesium, the body needs it so much and it’s so hard to get enough magnesium especially if someone has a gut issue. If you’ve been eating gluten grains and it has caused inflammation in your gut it’s very hard for your gut to absorb enough of the minerals, right? We have this catch 22 where our gut can’t absorb enough and then there’s not enough minerals in our soil anymore because of the farming practices of over a hundred years especially the pesticides that have been used in the soil. Even if we buy organic it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that we’re getting enough minerals. So we have to take supplements. Magnesium’s very hard to take orally either as a liquid or as a capsule and get to full self-saturation because if we do take a lot of it orally, magnesium just causes the smooth muscles, the bowel to go “wee” and then we’re running to the toilet which is the nicest way I could possibly say it causes diarrhea. Great for people with chronic constipation but if you have chronic constipation you need to look to that too. In my discovery of figuring out how to get full self-saturation because I have lots of magnesium supplements that I’ve enjoyed them all but again, couldn’t get the full self-saturation. There’s a 50-dollar blood test you can get when you go to walkinlab.com called magnesium RBC. It’s between 40 and 60 dollars because they always have it on sale. In the United States, you buy that test online and then you go to, they’ll tell you where your nearest lab is. They’ll draw your blood and they’ll send you the results. You don’t even have to see a doctor to check your magnesium levels. It wasn’t until through a friend of mine I discovered this magnesium soak that within one month of doing it every day gets – 76% of people reach full self-saturation. We absorb about 20g of magnesium every soak. I know. It blew me away. I did it and I’ve had a miner’s push before which is where they the naturopath will inject you with magnesium straight into your vein. You feel really drunk and kind of happy for a few minutes because it’s very relaxing. I felt that same feeling after my first soak. I went, “Oh my gosh, this is real” we can’t absorb magnesium readily from Epsom salt. It’s just not the right molecular size to absorb into the skin. This woman who I’ve had her on my show. She was like 70 something pounds in a wheelchair with 30 seizures a day and magnesium was one of the biggest things that helped her to recover her health. She ended up getting the magnesium from the Zechstein Sea and then shipping it here and then selling it in jugs. You basically soak a quarter of a cup in a basin of water, you put your feet in it and you soak for an hour and you absorb about 20g every time. Like I said, 76% of people get to full self-saturation within one month of doing it. It’s been really cool because you mentioned magnesium while you know and everyone else listening that they can use that. If you’re having problems absorbing through your gut then absorb through your skin and we can bypass that. It’s so cool, right? The website is, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com I know it’s a really long website to type in, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and then the coupon code she gave all the listeners which gives them 10% off is LTH as in learn true health. If you want Palmer, I can connect you guys. You guys can chat because I think that you would love to, as I know all holistic health practitioner would love to connect directly with her, chat and learn more about her magnesium and her healing story. You mentioned that and I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to tell you.” My intuition said that you would really like to know more about that. Since that, it’s one of the clogs. Right? It’s so great that you cut out the grains and had such an amazing response. You were, however, for 26 years doing healthy things. It wasn’t like you walked out of a McDonald’s and with a coffee in one hand and having cigarette in the other. It’s not like you had this really unhealthy lifestyle and you just cut out grains and all of a sudden you didn’t have MS. You spent 26 years building a foundation of decreasing stress and eating healthy and looking for answers and that was the last, for you, that was the last hole in the bucket that made it just exponentially healed. Makes your body exponentially healed. For others it might be correcting sleep, dealing with infections, healing the gut, it might be hormone imbalance, toxins stress or it may be all of them. That’s why I like that you’re addressing all of them because you’re building a foundation of health by addressing all the FIGHTS together. I wanted to make sure that we touched on the fact that food being the F in FIGHTS that you have a free gift for the listeners because everyone goes, “Well, what should I eat?” I know that there are some people out there who no longer have MS because they’re vegan. It’s not necessarily that eating low carb high fat would work for everyone because for some people it’s like just eating a ton of vegetables and cutting out the meat was what their genes needed we don’t know. Doing the elimination diet and figuring out for themselves what they should eat for their better health is key. You’ve come up with a free gift that teaches people what they should eat by listening to their body. We’re going to have the link to that in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com the link is Palmerkippola.com/gift. We’ll make sure the link is there in the show notes because I just want to make sure that listeners who are at this point going, “Well, what should I eat?” Great, go get the free gift and it’s a guide to teach you how to listen to your body so that you can dial in what is best for you. Like I said, I know people who are vegan who reversed their MS and you sounds like you do a bit more like of a Paleo diet. Is that correct?

[01:16:57] Palmer Kippola: That’s right. I don’t purport to know what diet is best for everybody that’s why this optimal food guide would be – I think of really good resource for people to find out what’s best for them. In my case, I’ve sort of landed on what I’ll call a paleo template diet where I eliminate grains, dairy and sugar and the meats that I do eat or the fish that I do eat or the poultry that I do eat is either going to be 100% grass-fed that means grass-fed and grass-finished. The chicken and turkey are happy free-range and important note about this, we’re not just what we eat. We’re whatever we eat ate. Super important to pay attention to what do those cows eat? When we digest and ingest that food, that profile of the meat of a cow that’s been fed corn, which by the way cows are allergic to corn, you really want to make sure that you’re ingesting something at is biologically a match for you. If you are going to eat meat do opt for 100% grass-fed. I have heard it think it was Dr. Pozorno say that meat is one of the most important foods, Dr. Lee Cowden said this because meats can concentrate pesticides and herbicides three times more and maybe even greater than that than any other source. If you’re eating vegetables that are conventionally grown yes, you’ll get the pesticide and herbicide. Meat becomes more important to find the wild, the free-range, the healthy pastured version of what you eat. We do try to find poultry from farmer’s markets where the chickens are eating bugs and grubs. Organic chicken just means that those chickens are eating organic corns and organic soy. If you have a problem with grains or soy, you might still have issue and not know what the problem is. Until you’ve removed the chicken. That was very surprising to me. I just want to mention that to listeners that you have to really put your detective hat on. Just be really curious about that’s going.

[01:19:24] Ashley James: That’s very interesting. My son was colic and we figured out that there was a handful of food like broccoli, onion, garlic. I’m dairy-free anyway. I’m allergic to dairy. My husband’s allergic so we just assumed our son was and sure enough, he definitely was when we tried formula. When I was breastfeeding, he would have horrible reactions to the foods that I ate. It’s just like what the chicken eats, if you’re allergic to what the chicken eats, don’t eat the chicken. I had to cut out the foods. I wasn’t allergic to those foods but my baby was allergic to those foods. I had to cut out those foods when I was breastfeeding because it was giving him really horrible pain and gas. I just makes sense that we need to be diligent. Be a food detective. I like how Dr. Mark Hyman talks about, “If you’re going to eat meat, make it be a condiment.” It okay if that’s 12$ a pound, you’re not eating a pound of it. You’re making it a condiment. We don’t need the giant steak, we don’t need the meat to be the centerpiece of the meal. It’s more of a condiment for the nutrient.” I myself don’t eat meat right now. My husband went vegan a year and a half ago. I’m experimenting myself. I went from pescatarian to vegan. I’m just experimenting. I’m going to see. I’m getting my bloodwork this week from my naturopath. We’ll see how it’s going for me. It’s about experimenting and be willing to try different things see how it feels and if you have cravings. I love that you brought up it, someone allergic, your client is allergic to these foods but craving them. Craving sometimes can mean that we are nutrient deficient and the body is seeing those nutrients but it can also mean that it has that dopamine addiction to it as well. Those hyper-palatable foods of salt, sugar, and oil are a bit addictive. The brain lights up just like cocaine and heroine that we need to recognize that the body’s become addicted to these hyper-palatable foods. Do those deep breaths. Those moments of food addiction where my body is going towards the cravings and it’s like, “Wait a second, is that what my body really needs? Does my brain really want dopamine?” and I have to do those deep breaths. I like that you help your client address that the cravings especially when you’re doing food eliminations those craving come back with a vengeance. We have to catch ourselves and realize that, “Yes, my body might be nutrient deficient that why it has craving but it also might be dopamine deficient so let’s go watch some YouTube videos that make us laugh and get dopamine somewhere else.”

[01:22:21] Palmer Kippola: That’s is great. I can add to that just a moment. You mentioned addiction and craving the opposite of that is aversion. Things that we don’t like and don’t want. I have found that people sometimes who have an aversion to meat, they don’t care for the taste it just turns them off or sometimes deficient in zinc. That is something just to pay attention to, you can do a zinc challenge and taste it. Just do a little bit of zinc after eating so you don’t get nauseous. That’s sometimes clears up that aversion to meat so just wanted to add that.

[01:22:59] Ashley James: That’s fascinating and zinc is so important for our immune health. Very cool. Awesome. All right so we talked about the food and we talked about infections. Let’s talk a bit about gut health. How do you help people restore their gut health? Do you recommend they eat a bunch of fermented foods and avoid grains? Or is it more about listening to the body and seeing what helping, what not helping?

[01:23:26] Palmer Kippola: Yes, such a good question. I just want to step back a tiny bit because the gut is so central in the development and healing of autoimmune conditions that we can’t talk about autoimmune healing without talking about the gut. It turns out that in the early 2000s, Alessio Fasano and his team at Harvard found the final element in the autoimmune equation that is the leaky gut or scientifically known as intestinal hyperpermeability. When we’re eating these sad foods or taking medications in some cases or even having stress, those factors can all cause our guts to become leaky. That had been proven to bet the pathway or gateway to developing autoimmune conditions. The exciting part about having an autoimmune equation is we can flip it to heal it. Meaning, if we remove the things that are causing the inflammation and the leakiness and we heal and seal the lining of our gut, we can as Dr. Fisano says, arrest and reverse the autoimmune condition. This is no longer conjecture and myth or wishful thinking that we can reverse these conditions. We now understand that there is science behind this leaky gut. That scientist for year purports that this is not being real. Well, it is very real and we know many things that lead to it. We also know what we can do to restore it. When it comes to repairing our gut the first and foremost we musts top putting things in that are harmful. Those would be the inflammatory elements that we’ve talked bout. There might be suspect foods that are toxic to some and are helpful to other. I have one problem with eggs or nuts as an example but for somebody else, their kryptonite might be eggs. That elimination diet can help you define and refine your foods at least for maybe 6 months those are what you’ll enjoy, you need to get rid of some for short term while you’re healing your gut because if you continue to eat things that are causing your gut to be permeable, so if I wanted to bring the MS back, I might start eating gluten again, sit down to sandwiches, pasta and so forth. We now know that there are many medications that create permeable intestines. There are actually Ashley, I think there is a study that says that there are 90 medications are known to induce Lupus by creating a permeable gut. It’s really known information. This is not hidden information, this is out there. So whatever you can do to minimize unnecessary medications, to eliminate those sad foods and get rid of toxins in your environment. I only recently understood that stress creates a leaky gut like getting ready to do public speaking, for example, creates intestinal permeability. Some things are not all stress is bad and some of it is growth-oriented but we are stuck in that always-on, stress response, that is when our gut stay open and permeable. The first step in any kind of gut healing program is to make sure that we’re minimizing the things that are causing harm.

[01:27:04] Ashley James: Right, yes. Just like inflammation is a good thing when it’s acute but not when its chronic and always turned on. I know that Advil or Ensets I’ve been told increase gut permeability and also harm the liver but they do increase gut permeability causing leaky gut. I had a neighbor once, this is just a few years ago, 21-year-old woman who is going through chemo not for cancer. The doctor decided to give her chemo for lupus. That just blew me away because I even knew back then that cutting out gluten and cleaning up diet played such a huge role in autoimmune. I’ve been gluten-free for 8 years with my husband and just to see that she was suffering so horribly going through chemo for what – just that MD could’ve looked into the research and seen what you saw but instead he chose to give her chemo. Chemo’s the one medication that doctors actually get kickback from something like 2500 dollars every dose. They get a kickback. It infuriates me this young woman’s potentially her entire youth has been destroyed because she’s suffering greatly from chemo which was obviously not helping the lupus. We have to be diligent. We have to advocate for ourselves. You always have to get 2^nd or 3^rd opinion, don’t put the doctor to the pedestal. Obviously, always seek a doctor of I never recommend someone especially if you have symptoms that you avoid medical attention. It’s just get more opinions and do your own research and be willing to keep seeking answers especially when it comes to a surgery or treatment like we should really, really make sure that it is the best option for us. Food, infection, gut health, hormone balance. Now, you are a functional medicine practitioner, health coach that you can get people to do blood tests. Tell us did you do labs and blood tests? How does that work? How do you help people to balance their hormones?

[01:29:47] Palmer Kippola: I partner with functional medicine practitioners that’s how I can get the lab work done. One reason why hormones is last in the book in terms of a core chapter, the book is not in the same order that FIGHTS is spelled. We start with food then we go to gut health which we’ve just talked about but hormones is last strategically because often times when you deal with the other root causes, your hormones can fall back into balance. That really is the goal to do whatever we can from a lifestyle perspective first. Some of the biggest hormone imbalances that we see with autoimmune conditions are high insulin, high cortisol. Insulin again that’s going to be when you’re eating high carbohydrate foods. We also see the diabetes increase through the environmental toxins. There are the two things you can control and if you remove the toxins from your environment, you go lower carb, you can lower the insulin potentially. High cortisol being one if you address stress we can bring cortisol into a balance. Low thyroid is very common. It is probably one of the most common hormonal imbalances we see and that is something that can also get regulated when we do everything else for ourselves including removing the sugar and addressing stress. High estrogen, estrogen dominance. This is something that’s both common in both in men and women.  It doesn’t just mean that your estrogen is high. It’s relative to progesterone. Progesterone is the calming hormone. We want those hormones to be in balance. The two other final imbalances we often see are low vitamin D and low DHEA. In the book, because hormones is such a complicated category each chapter is a little book onto itself. I give people tips and strategies for how to address things naturally. If you need additional help, how to find a practitioner who deals in bio-identical hormones which are not the hormone replacement therapy, which are the synthetic hormones but rather, if you’re going into the route of hormone therapy, you want to make sure that they’re bio-identical in nature. From my experience, I dealt with all six of those hormonal imbalances. So I offer a story from my own perspective on how high levels of sugar and high levels of stress created a hormonal mess for me for many, many years.

[01:32:39] Ashley James: How much did your hormones come back into a balance by just shifting food and gut health?

[01:32:40] Palmer Kippola: I wish I could tell you like a wimble that wobbles but it doesn’t fall down when you take your hands off. It just goes right back to balance. That wasn’t the case for me. Part of my personal story is that my hormones were so imbalanced when I was 15 years old. I had excruciating cramps and actually had to miss school on occasion because they were so bad. I had a gynecologist who put me on a birth control pill very, very, early and told me to stay on the pill until I decided to have children. This is the same gynecologist who ran my blood test for a while. Why would I doubt her? She’s the expert, right? For years and years, I just did what she told me to do and she ran my blood tests and told me that my total cholesterol of 104 was excellent. This is opening a can of worms.

[01:33:44] Ashley James: For those who don’t know, that’s way to low. For those that don’t know. There’s healthy cholesterol and we need it, we want it to be high. The body needs a certain amount. The cholesterol is so important that the liver makes it. How cholesterol medication works, it bruises the liver to the point where the liver ceases to function correctly and liver can’t make cholesterol. What drives me crazy is that doctors will put people on cholesterol medication but don’t tell them to stop, like stop eating fried food, stop eating the fats that are damaged. They have oxidative damage on them which increases unhealthy cholesterol. They’ll give you a medication that damages your liver so your liver stops producing good cholesterol and then they won’t tell you to stop eating bad cholesterol. It just drives me up the wall. There’s a balance. We need to have healthy fats. It’s so important that the liver makes it. The myelin sheath on your nerves are made from fat and MS is when the myelin sheath is destroyed and then the nerves are inflamed. Hello, of course. You are set up for having MS if you didn’t have enough healthy fats from the body. They are the raw building blocks for the body to produce myelin sheet.

[01:35:04] Palmer Kippola: That’s right. That’s beautifully said. I’ll throw in a little factoid here that just completely floored me. The countries with the lowest cholesterol, in other words like my gynecologist that 104 was excellent, die the fastest. Highest all-cause mortality and the countries with highest cholesterol lives the longest. That’s research that is available for anybody that wants to find that. Cholesterol it turns out is essential for our health and it’s the foundational building blocks of our hormones, our cell membrane, and our brain health. Our brain is 60% fat. We need healthy cholesterol. It’s all about the balance of different types of cholesterol that is, what I’ll say about this is I was a hormonal mess that I didn’t just regulate back to balance by getting everything else in line and I opted for bio-identical hormones and now my hormone are finally in balance. You know I never felt better. It can be done and if I was suffering in all six of those hormonal imbalances. I’m doing great now than I know that you can heal.

[01:36:18] Ashley James: Beautiful. I definitely want my listeners who have autoimmune to get your book, make sure the links to your book is on the show notes of today’s podcast of learntruehealth.com. Tell us a bit about who should read your book, is it only people with autoimmune or is it people that want to just generally be healthy? Tell us a bit about your book and who it serves.

[01:36:44] Palmer Kippola: I wrote the book with the intention to – it’s the book that I would’ve wanted at 19 when I didn’t know what to do to my younger self. I wanted a step by step but for anyone, the first audience would be people who are suffering, who are actively seeking healing and don’t really know what to do next. That would include people that are finding it difficult to afford a natural medicine or naturopathic practitioner. I really urge people if you can to work with somebody because they will help you shortcut your time to healing. It was so worthy investment in yourself if you can do that. My book is actually quite popular now with integrative and functional medicine ad naturopathic physicians who also wanted to help their clients so they’re actually buying it for their offices which I was thrilled to see that happening. That would be the first level, is people who are actively seeking to heal. I have clients who I’ve worked with who are seeking to prevent an autoimmune condition because it runs in their family, everybody has a thyroid problem. Their father had MS and they don’t want to go down path. They just want to know what they can do to prevent something. If you put those two categories together that’s basically everybody because I don’t know what the actual stats are Ashley, maybe you know better than I do. At least one in five people is dealing with an autoimmune condition that may be diagnosed. Many, many more people had mysterious symptoms from joint pain and brain fog to profound fatigue to insomnia to infertility to numbness and tingling and migraines and all of those mysterious symptoms are messages from your body that something is out of balance. Anybody that’s dealing with mysterious symptoms, who has an official diagnosis or want to prevent one, this is who is book is for.

[01:38:51] Ashley James: I love it. So many people have mystery symptoms and they’re seeking information that’s why they’re listening today. I hope they get your book and they apply all the lessons to helping them figure out the foods that are most important for them and reducing the inflammation and the infections, helping their gut health, reducing toxins and stress, of course balancing their hormones. That’ll help a hundred percent of the population everyone could benefit especially those who are beating autoimmune. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. I wonder, do you have any stories of success or have you heard from people who have also reversed their MS using your protocol?

[01:39:37] Palmer Kippola: Absolutely, yes. In fact, most of the people who follow me who are MS warriors themselves who are actively seeking to heal from or have beat MS. I will end with this story one of my favorites is a client who was diagnosed with MS actually the information the letter came to her in the mail from Kaiser Permanente saying the results of her MRI are in and it seemed that they were consistent with MS. She experienced the loss of vision in one eye, numbness on one side of her body, almost stroke-like symptoms and she was in her mid-30s, had two young kids and a husband, waking up one morning unable to function and to see properly. Just was absolutely terrified. When to the neurologist and got her results as I’ve said by mail. Somebody who knows us both connected us and I was able to talk with her before her second appointment because the neurologist was insisting that she go on injectable medication immediately and he wanted to do a spinal tap which I’ve never have done but I can’t imagine was pleasant. I got in the phone with her and was able to transmit the certainty that I have based on all my research, my personal experience working with other clients that if she was willing to work with me, give it a couple of months, try the elimination diet, work with me about reducing her stress, would she be willing to let the neurologist know, “Look, I know where you are and I will schedule my follow up appointment with you after I’ve tried these lifestyle interventions. If they don’t work, I know where you are.” and she said yes, she was willing to wait. So I worked with her, coached her for probably 6 weeks or so where we talk every week. We still talk maybe not as often maybe once every 6 weeks. She found out what her trigger food were, removed them and her big issues he felt were chronic stress also growing up in childhood. She had a really difficult situation both parents either had alcoholism or drug addiction and were not able to care of her so she grew up with her grandmother. She has a lot of stress that was manifesting with her current life with her kids. A lot of it she felt was driven by her past. Once she was able to feel better after removing those foods, after about 6 weeks she stopped having any and all MS symptom. Nothing was noticeable anymore after she removed the foods and healed her gut. Then she was able to have the energy to deal with those profound stressors from childhood and she started a forgiveness practice. She started doing gratitude journaling every night. Now her family, her kids no longer ask her for sweet things. She has actually become a role model for health and other people look up to her for information. This is another one of those ripple effect stories. Her husband revered symptoms of type II diabetes. Her children are off sugar. She is an icon for healing with food. That’s not an isolated incident this is most people when you take the bad stuff out, it’s been one of the most profound surprises that I’ve experienced. It can be way more simple than you know if you’re just willing to put your detective hat on. Give it a try, get some testing done. Yes, there might be an infection to clear up. Yes, there might be mercury poisoning that you need to deal with but the end result is this freedom and it’s just been a super good news story.

[01:43:49] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much, Palmer for coming in the show today and sharing this awesome information. It definitely fill people with hope to know that yes, they can completely reverse their autoimmune condition. They can improve their health. For those who have mystery symptoms, following the keys in your book will help them restore their body. I think everyone’s going to get some great information for your book. I highly recommend people buy it and try it out for themselves. If they have any questions, they can go to your website, Palmerkippola.com. Especially go to palmerkippola.com/gift and get the free guide. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything that you would like to share to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:44:39] Palmer Kippola: I would like to invite people to get still within yourself and allow your own intuition to come forth and to maybe ask yourself the question that that family friend asked me many, many years ago, “Why do think you got this blank?” Whatever it is. If you’re dealing with something that you got a diagnosis or if you’ve got mysterious symptoms. Why do you think that is? Allow time for the answer to bubble up. Really acknowledge that because chances are pretty good, you already know what’s out of balance in your life. Maybe it’s you really wanted to do something different in your life and you didn’t take that path or maybe you’re in a situation where you’re not happy at work or your relationship is not working. I believe that these autoimmune conditions are really an invitation to us to wake up to who we truly are. We may not see the gift at the moment when we’re going through the middle of these awful symptoms but I just want to invite people to dig deeper and really know that you can get to the root of what’s going on.

[01:46:02] Ashley James: Beautiful. Excellent. Thank you so much Palmer Kippola for coming on the show today. It’s been a pleasure to have you share this information that I know will help to transform people’s lives. I feel honored that you are here to share this information and I am so thrilled for the potential of how many people you’ve just helped. So thank you so much.

[01:46:28] Palmer Kippola: Thank you, Ashley. It’s been an honor and a delight.

[01:46:31] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

[01:49:39] Ashley James: Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Recommended Reading by Palmer Kippola

The Last Best Cure by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

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https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding

Grounding And Earthing

https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding-and-earthing

Highlights:

• What is grounding / earthing?
• Grounding and inflammation.
• You are creating free radical damage when you’re ungrounded.
• The human body is electrical in nature.
• How to prevent electromagnetic interference in the body.

Have you experienced feeling fatigued even if you just woke up? In this episode we will talk about the connection of our bodies to the earth and the amazing benefits of grounding / earthing. Clint Ober will share his products that help the body to stay grounded and reduce the risks of immune related conditions.

Intro:

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast today, I think will be the most important and interesting interview you have ever heard.

This information to me is absolutely crucial essential for everyone to know. So I’m very, very excited that you’re here to listen to today’s interview, Clint Ober is doing a giveaway. We talk about it near the end of the episode, but I want to make sure you know about it. Since sometimes people take a few days to listen to a whole interview, especially when it’s as long as this one. So you want to join the Facebook group Learn True Health, just search Learn True Health in Facebook or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/group, and it’ll take you to the Facebook group.

We’re doing a giveaway and Clint Ober is going to be giving away several of his products for free as a big giveaway. It’s so exciting. He’s giving away so much – their grounding mats. And the one that I’m using right now, my feet are on right now are pretty much either at cost or they’re putting all the money back into helping people. So he’s mission driven. He’s heart driven, I really really enjoyed interviewing him. I also watched his documentary which something we talked about, we talked about a lot in the interview, and they’ve given me permission to play the documentary for you right now. It can’t be a public documentary, because it is being played at film festivals around the world. And it just won a bunch of awards in Hollywood at a film festival. So in order to be in compliance with the film festivals, it has to be password protected. Well, they gave me the link and the password. And I’m going to be sharing that in the Facebook group as well. You’re going to want to watch this documentary, it is fascinating. We sat down and we were glued to it. In fact, I’ve been wanting to go back and watch it again. That’s how interesting it is.

Now as you listen to today’s show, if you decide that you want to try one of his grounding mats, I absolutely recommend you do it has made a big difference. I’ve tried other stuff from other companies, but he has so much science behind it. I really love it. So you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. And there you can find the mats. One thing is if you want to try it and have your whole family try it then there’s a little kit that you can get –  the patch kit. And later on in the interview, I asked him to explain each product and the reason why he created these products was out of a need because he wanted to do studies. So he’s done 26 peer reviewed studies. And he had to create a product in order to do this grounding.

When I first got into this, I really thought that it sounded like a lot of woo woo, it sounded really hippy dippy, like, you know, “Oh, what are we going to go dance barefoot in the grass?” And that little skeptical part of me was like, “Are you kidding me, there can’t be any science to this. This just sounds like a bunch of placebo.” Well, the documentary goes through the science and explains how the immune system works and how these electrons that are built up in our body because we are not grounded anymore. With the shoes we wear, the carpets we walk on. Throughout the day, we are not grounded. And so we’re collecting electrons that you can actually hook yourself up to a meter. And you can prove that we’re being like little batteries. There’s this positive charge that’s occurring. And through the process of earthing which is connecting directly to the ground or grounding, which is using a device in your home. Sometimes it’s easier to do grounding, especially if it’s like February in Montana, and a lot of people want to go walk in the grass right now it’s summertime. So we all want to go out and walk in the grass barefoot, but there are parts of the country that we don’t want to do that in because of heavy spraying of pesticides. So in that case, the devices are amazing for helping you.

I love that it calms me, it makes me happier. And our son who’s using it on his bed is sleeping in now. We’ve done really well with sleep between the magnesium and changing our mattresses, and all the little health habits that we do. But since we added the grounding mat, he is sleeping in more. So I thought that was really neat. And I also noticed that we’re getting even deeper sleep, I didn’t think that was even possible. And that’s because when you do grounding or earthing, it significantly lowers inflammation in the body. And he talks about that both in the movie, in the documentary that you’re gonna have access to by going to the Facebook group, and also in this interview that you’re about to enjoy.

So I’m so thrilled that you’re here to learn from this information from Clint Ober. He is quite a character quite fascinating and such a wonderful soul. It was a true blessing to interview him today. And I know you’ll really enjoy what he has to share. I just want to make sure you know, to join the Facebook group and participate in the giveaway because you could win one of the awesome mats and I’d love for you to do that. I’d love for you to win it. That’d be great. He’s giving me I think like five of them. And also definitely come to the Facebook group so you can have access to the documentary and watch it. It is amazing. And if you have any questions, please come to the Facebook group, Learn True Health in Facebook and ask them. Our community is super supportive. So many people not just me, I’ll definitely be there to answer your questions. But the whole community comes together to help each other. So it’s a really wonderful place to be. Wonderful. Well enjoy today’s interview.

Welcome to the Learn true health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 366.

6:10 Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guests. Out of all the interviews I’ve done and it’s been over 365 interviews. I feel like this one today is going to be the most important interview that you listen to. We have with us Clint Ober. I’ve watched the documentary with him recently the Earthing Movie. And it has completely blown my mind. I feel like you know that little nuclear explosion that went off in my head. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most important thing my listeners need to know.” Clint, I’m honored to have you here on the show today.

6:51 Clint Ober: Well, Ashley, I’m honored to be able to visit with you and present what I know about earthing and what we’ve learned over the last 20 years and hopefully help some people.

7:03 Ashley James: Absolutely. Now I first heard about this, I want to say about maybe a year and a half ago, I was interviewing I believe was a naturopath. I’ve heard about a dozen naturopath and holistic experts on my show, telling me that grounding or earthing is vital  – is absolutely essential to someone’s healing and it kept coming up. But the first time I heard it, I was asking one of my guests to share some homework for the listeners, what would be one thing they could do to really change their life, like what one thing that 100% of the population can do to change your life. And she said, the first thing I do with my clients is I get them a grounding mat on their bed. Absolutely essential that every one of her patients have one. And I thought, wow, if she says that it’s that important, then I need to look into this a little bit. And so I told my husband and he got really curious. And that’s he actually found you through searching through YouTube videos. And he came to me he goes, “You have to have this guy, Clint on your show. He’s amazing. This stuff is amazing.” And yeah, and so we started to do things like walk barefoot outside, when we could and hug, I was hugging trees. You know, just to feel –  do I feel different? Do I notice a difference when the electrons are leaving my body? And then my husband got into trying to build our own mats because he saw some videos online. And I don’t recommend making your own mats, it was kind of messy and, and it just didn’t work out very well. But your mats are amazing. In fact, I have my feet on the grounding mat right now for the office. And when I have my feet on it, I actually don’t want to leave the office, I start feeling so good. Have you heard that before, people say they don’t want to get off the mat?

9:03 Clint Ober: Yes. You don’t want to get out of bed.

9:06 Ashley James: Right. Well, what’s really interesting is that we put the grounding mat that we bought one from you and put it on our bed. And and we noticed a difference, we’re like. “I wonder if our son knows the difference?” He’s four and so we didn’t tell him but we put him on one. And he started sleeping in. And that’s like a miracle for us because he’s been our alarm clock for the last four years. And he was sleeping in, we’d wake up and he’s still sleeping. And that would never ever happen in the past. And it’s the only change we made – was putting them on the grounding mat. I thought that was really interesting.

9:46 Clint Ober: It is. Absolutely love it.

9:49 Ashley James: Yeah, so I want to get into your story. I know definitely we picked some people’s interest. What is this? What is this grounding or earthing? It sounds so woo, whoo. You know, “Oh, go hug a tree, go walk barefoot in the grass.” Well, when we started telling my mother in law about this, she thought it was fascinating because her nanny growing up was her grandmother from Germany. And every morning she would go out as the sun rose, and they would walk barefoot in the grass, in Pasadena, California. Every morning her whole childhood, her grandmother made her do that. And and so when we started talking to her about earthing or grounding, she said, “That’s what I did my whole childhood, my grandmother made us do it.” And I thought that was really interesting that we, as humans knew to do it. And we’ve lost that way in the last few generations. So I want to get into your story. And then we’re going to dive into the science of why earthing or grounding can remove inflammation, pain, depression, it has even helped women lose weight, and balance the systems of the body. It’s it’s very fascinating. But first, let’s get into your story, Clint, what happened in your life that led you to discover earthing or grounding?

11:18 Clint Ober: Well, I never really know where to start. But probably the best place is to – I spent 30 years in the communications industry, primarily cable television, broadcast television, satellite distribution and things like that. And in that industry, we have to ground everything to the earth, in order to maintain electrical stability throughout the system to prevent noise, electrical glitches. It’s like if you see a TV set that has lines in it then flicks and you know any kind of electromagnetic interference. So we have to ground the system to maintain it at earth potential. So that eliminates all the static charges. And if there’s any atmospheric electrical events, a lot of times people think of lightning, but there’s lots of other rises and ground potential and all of that thing. So But anyhow, the main thing is, everything had to be grounded to the earth in order for safety and for electrical stability. And I learned that when I was quite young, prior to that, I grew up in Montana. And we were barefoot all the time, most of it. And a lot of my friends were Native American. And so we were a very earthy group of people. I mean, we were more nature oriented, it’s like, in nature, everything is connected. It’s it’s all systemic, and we’re a part of it, and so on. After I had a health event, before I had a root canal, as a result, an abscess in my liver, and I had to go in for surgery, and they had to remove a lot of my liver. And at the time, they didn’t know how much they could remove and habit grow back. And I was young enough to get a new liver at that time, I was like 49. I’m 75 now. The problem was, I didn’t have time, because of the condition I was in. And so I did recover from that. It was kind of, I think, a little bit of that was touched on in the movie.

After I went through that traumatic experience. I woke up one morning, and I looked out doors and the world was just very different to me, I couldn’t go back to work yet. But anyhow, I looked out the window and everything was vibrant, it was electrical, it was like there was energy, the pine needles, the sky, everything was vibrant. For some reason, I looked around the room that I was in, my bedroom. And I was looking at all of the art that I had there, plus I had lots of other things. And I just had this epiphany that, you know, I almost died and I spent my whole life just acquiring all these assets and almost died. And so my kids would get part of it, most of it would be auctioned off or thrown away. And I realized that, you know, my life, that I didn’t really own these things. They owned my soul because I owned them. So I had to take care of them. I had to provide, and the environment, the home, all that stuff. And and in the end, I almost died and so what’s the point in all of this? So anyhow, as I came through that I, I just had this feeling came over me that I didn’t own any of this stuff. So I gave everything I had away except for what I could put in a couple of suitcases and an RV. And I didn’t go back to work and the company that I owned, I turned it over to my employees and let them have it. And it was a fairly large company. But I didn’t want to make my life about working anymore.

The main thing that went through my mind was, I knew that I almost died, because I went through all the processes. And when I recovered, I was different. I knew that this time, if I’m going to die again, I want to be able to be happy. I want to be able to look back on my life, not for anybody else, or for any rewards or anything but just look back on life and say, I was worth being here. I was a contributor, I did something good. And so I disengaged from everything in my life. And I spent about four years driving around the United States in an RV spending most of the time with my kids, grandkids and in national parks. And I spent a lot of time alone. So I ended up down in Key Largo, Florida. One night I felt like was nature talking to me, I was looking over the bay. And here’s some manatees hosing them down a bit and playing them for fun. But anyhow, I was standing there and watching the sunset over the bay, over the gulf, I just had this feeling that I had to go do something. So I went into the RV and I wrote on a piece of paper, become an opposite charge. And I didn’t have any idea what that meant.

An opposite charged me would be no gotten. Stir up the troops charge everybody up, get them excited, get them moving. And then the second thing I wrote down is status quo was the enemy. And again, I didn’t really understand that other than, you know, change. So I didn’t think too much about that. And I just kind of put that away. I just had this feeling and I had to get back West. So I unplugged, loaded everything up, stop to see a couple of my daughters on the way and I ended up back in California. And I started driving around, I was looking for a place that I could just settle. And I didn’t feel comfortable. So I went to Tucson, that wasn’t right. So that night I was driving in the afternoon, I was driving up to Flagstaff because that’s more like Motanna where I come from. And on the way I stopped in Sedona, Arizona, and I pulled into an RV park late at night, couldn’t see what was going on. Just pulled into a space and park. Woke up in the morning and I looked outdoors and I said, “Well, I’m not leaving here.” This is like living in a national park. And because of all the beauty and the energy and the feeling and it just felt good.

So I spent about two years there. And in that process I started doing, when I was a young kid, I did a lot of stage lighting and things like that, for fun. So I started doing some lighting and for all the galleries in Sedona and Scottsdale. I would just go in and help them light up their shows. And in many cases you would have to redo their circuits or move the lighting around. So that kept me busy. But one day I was working on my computer and it kept crashing. This is back in 98, 97. And I knew that it was from static electricity. So I went in fix the outlet. So it was grounded. Then I put a piece of conductive tape across my desk and connected it to the ground. And so whenever I would touch the computer, I would touch that first. So I wouldn’t have a static charge on my computer.

After I resolved that I was just finishing up a job, and so I went out doors, and I sat down on a bench and an RV full of tourists pulled up. I was at an art gallery area where I was fixing some stuff. And I just sat there and I looked at them and they were getting off the bus. Everybody was wearing these white tennis shoes, athletic shoes. I don’t know whether they’re Nike or Reebok or whatever. I think they were Nike. But anyhow, I just intuitively asked the question. I wonder if humans no longer being naturally grounded, it could be affecting us. I mean, affecting how we feel our affecting us. I didn’t know. So that night I went home and I got a meter and I grounded it to the earth. I walk indoors and put a patch on, just started going around the house and I noticed all of the elevated EMF charges on my body, and then I started to measure the static electricity, which is more DC and the huge static electricity that builds up and that every time you take a step, you’re creating a static, if you’re wearing shoes, rubber soled shoes, and you’re walking on a carpet or a vinyl or some kind of flooring. Then every time you pick up your feet, there’s contact separate. I mean there’s separation of electrons, so you’re creating charge on the body. If you do a lot of it, then you’ll get the little shock when you go touch a doorknob, but forever in a home you are you have static electricity build upon your body. And in many cases, you have high levels of these electric charges, electric field charges on the body. That night, I said, “Okay, it’s getting late, I needed to go to bed.” So I laid some metal duct tape that I bought earlier in the day. And I laid it across my bed, connected an alligator clip to it through a round wire out the window, connected into a ground rod through a second wire out the window and connected the electric meter to a little separate ground rod. And then I measured them together and I knew that the tape was grounded because the meters went to near zero. So then I laid down. I measured the body voltage and all that stuff on my body. And then I laid down on the tape. And as long as I laid flat on it, and I saw the body voltage dropped to zero. But the most important thing that happened that night was that I laid down on the bed normally for me to go to sleep, I had to take Advil, because I had a lot of pain I was a cowboy, I’m a skier, I played tennis, I’ve done everything and back at that time I was in my early 50s. I’m pretty tough shape. But I had to go to sleep, I had a lot of pains and a lot of issues, so I take Advil to go to sleep.

That night, I was laying on the tape, I had the voltage meter lying on my stomach and I was measuring the voltages. I just kind of laid it on my chest. And the next thing I knew it was morning, and the voltmeter was laying down beside me. And I stayed flat all night long. I was excellently grounded for the first time in my life. And I woke up and I said, “Wow, there’s something to this, I need to learn more about this.” So I started to look around a little bit on the internet, which is really difficult back in 98 to 99, there just wasn’t a lot of data. So I went down to the university in Arizona and I went to their medical libraries looking for anything I could find on grounding. The only literature on grounding had to do with, if you know if you’re going to perform surgery, and then the patients need to be grounded. And in many cases, the surgeons have to be grounded in order to prevent static sparks. Because if they cut the skin and there’s a static spark, it can trigger a heart event. So that made some sense. But anyhow, I couldn’t find anything about grounding for help – Grounding for to reduce static electricity, to protect chips, to protect computers, to protect software, to protect against gasoline events, fireworks, all of those things. Grounding is a huge industry.

It’s a multi billion dollar industry in the commercial area and it’s 100 years old. I mean, ever since dynamite and gasoline, people have to wear grounded shoes. They have to be grounded and everything has to be protected from that sparks. And then I went back to Sedona and I started grounding a few of my friends, a couple buddies that I hung out with a little bit. One of them had severe arthritis in his hand, and I didn’t think anything about it. But I told him, “You gotta let me do this. And you got to experience and make sure I’m not crazy.” So I went to their homes, and I grounded them like they I grounded myself. And both of them said they had real results. First of all, it was a joke, it couldn’t possibly be whatever. But the third day, the fellow who had arthritis, he says, “Do you think this could have any effect on arthritis?” I said, “I wouldn’t have a clue.” And he said, “Well, my arthritis is coming down.” And so that piqued my interest. So I kept playing with it and playing with it. And then I recognize that, yes, this affects me, it affects my friends. So there’s something here, but there’s no information on it. And it wasn’t till after we wrote the book, all of these people from around the world – from Germany and all of the Native American populations throughout North and South America. And all of these I mean, grounding, or barefoot was a known thing. But the science behind it did not exist. So the thing that happened, I want to make sure I’m on track here. But the thing that happened, as time went on, I came out to California and I went to UCLA. And I asked them and they said, you know, they pretty much told me that you know you’re you’re crazy. So anyhow, I took that, and I went and found me some researchers that were in the meeting there, and they helped me do a study. And then we saw that, yes, there’s some dramatic effects going on here. Anecdotally, we could see it, then there needed to be some quantifiable studies, then we did the cortisol study and all the others ones. And I can kind of come back to that. But the real event that happened was in the late 50s, they invented plastics. And then by 1960, we had the plastic materials that we could create carpets with, we could create soles of shoes with. And so the whole world, this was a real benefit. Because now the poorest people around everybody, no matter who you are, you could afford shoes now. Because the leather soled shoes that we had before. Before 1960, this is an important thing. Before 1960, 90% of all visitors to a practitioner were for infectious disease, acute injury and childbirth, 10% for stress and whatever, today over 90% of all visits to a practitioner for a stress related health disorder. Meaning, it’s about something’s affecting the immune system sufficient that you can maintain health. And now we know that that’s inflammation. Before 1960 when I was a kid, we had leather shoes that we had to wear to school, or go to church, and for weddings, or real special events. Other than that we were barefoot. And if we were going to church on Sunday, and it was raining, we carried our shoes in our hands, walk barefoot and when we got in the church would put the shoes on, we couldn’t walk in the water or the rain with leather soled shoes, because that would ruin them. And they were expensive back then. That’s the world I come from, now it may be different in the bigger cities and other populations of the world and in Europe. But everything was leather sold, which is a semiconductor. So even wearing a leather soled shoe, you’re somewhat grounded. But when we invented the plastic soled shoe, then that’s like putting a jacket around an electrical wire – it insulates. It insulates us from the earth.

Now, that takes us to what is ground? Ground is the earth itself has an electrical surface charge, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, but you can feel it. On the average, the earth, it will vary between midnight and 12 noon, at 12 noon, the electrical potential of the Earth is higher because the sun’s hitting the earth directly. And it excites electrons on the surface. At night, everything calms down. It’s quieter. But it has a 24 circadian profile that absent flows and so on. But you know, when human beings stand barefoot on the earth, the earth has a negative surface charge. And the word negative – a lot of people would know this word because in a battery, it has a negative side, it has a positive side. On a little battery one hand is positive, the other hand is negative. How batteries work is you store electrons on one side. And then if you connect to wire to the other side, than the electrons will travel from the negative side to the positive side. That’s how batteries work, but the earth is a huge battery being charged by the sun. But it’s has a negative surface charge of about 20 to 50 millivolts on the average. So there’s a lot of free electrons stored on the surface of the earth that can move and reduce charge. Now go back to the cable industry, TV industry for a minute. The reason we connected everything to the earth, was so that a conductive cables, and everything electrical could be held at earth potential – meaning as soon as we connect them to the earth, the cable system, then it goes negative 20 to 50 millivolts, the surface wires. So if there’s any charge or static, they’re automatically absorbed by electrons coming from the earth, up on the wire and neutralizing charge.

28:54 Ashley James: So when the cable wires which we’ve seen they’re up by the telephone wires, in these poles, are they collecting a charge because they’re having the sun beat down on them, because they’re in the positively charged environment of above ground? Like what’s charging them?

29:20 Clint Ober: It’s mostly wind.

29:22 Ashley James: Oh, interesting. So the wind is carrying the positive charge?

29:26 Clint Ober: It’s the friction of the wind hitting the cable, and then you have the atmospheric charges. If a cloud passes over, then it’s going to have a pull on the electrons on the earth and kind of well up. Temperature, wind, dust, all of the pollution, all of these things, but it really comes back to wind. Wind is the primary thing because the wind is constantly blowing and there’s a lot of friction being created between the wind. And the air and the atmosphere is positively charged.

30:14  Ashley James: So the reason why I asked that question is to compare our bodies to those cables. If those cables, which are just standing like they’re staying in one spot, can collect a positive charge, then what happens to us we’re moving around, we’re out in the wind, we’re at our desks in front of electronics, and we’re not grounded, we’re insulated. Our entire life has become insulated, as you pointed out starting in the 50s. Because we are wearing our Nike rubber soled shoes or whatever, a Reebok rubber soled shoes, and all of our shoes now have that rubber. And we barely ever touched the ground with our bare feet or our bare hands, very few people do. In fact, I had a guest say, “You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that we had to wash our hands with the faucet, we would probably all die because we accidentally ground ourselves at least once a day by touching the faucet.”

31:13  Clint Ober: Yes. And that’s very true. For instance, most of the diagnosed autoimmune disorders, which we know are related to this are female. Men have a lesser amount, but men live in different environments. They golf, they work on cars, they are outdoors, they do the lawn, they do various things, they accidentally, incidentally get grounded.

31:41 Ashley James: Oh, I see.

31:42 Clint Ober: Women get up in the morning, they’re on a carpet, go take a shower, they do get a little ground there in many cases, then they put on, a lot of times you have clothes that has poly in it and put on shoes, then you walk on carpet or indoor insulated type of flooring. And then in many cases, they’re handling vacuums, and hair dryers and all of these things. And then when they go to work, they get in, they walk to the car in insulated shoes, drive the car to work, get out of the car, go sit in an office that they are totally ungrounded in static or whatever, sitting in front of computers over the electric fields in the static electricity, and their bodies are just totally electrified.

32:30 Ashley James: You mentioned DC charge, that static electricity builds up inside us, all the electrons have built up inside us. These free electrons, which are free radicals, it’s causing free radical damage, right? That they’re built up inside us, like a DC battery, on the Earthing Movie, it was mentioned that someone could have up to 20 volts stored inside them because they don’t ground.

33:03 Clint Ober: Voltage is a measurement between two points, the electrical potential between two points. Like the Earth would be zero and your electric lights would be 120 volts. So what they’re talking about in many cases, let me explain something first. The body when it’s grounded to the earth, it’s identical to a cable, or a TV tower or your refrigerator or your computer, if it hasn’t grounded. For instance, your refrigerator is grounded, the metal housing on the refrigerator is grounded. So it’s identical to earth potential, I mean, it has the same amount of electrons per square inch, as the earth itself does. And the reason that you ground that to earth so if there’s no electrical event, you know, broken wire or anything ever happens, that refrigerator is grounded, so the human being will not get shot. So the electrons from the earth, switch up the wire and the breaker gets blown. That’s the safety side of it. But what happens to a body, how does a body get voltage? If a human being is standing in their living room or laying on their bed, and they are grounded, then their body is an antenna for electric fields, and electric fields radiate from all electrical devices. These are lamps, some computers, if they’re not grounded computers, TV sets. But electrical wires – anytime you see a lamp or an electrical wire anywhere, it is radiating an electric field. The only way you can remove an electric field or prevent an electric field is to unplug the lamp. But if you are in the proximity, or close to it, the closer you are to the electrical cord, then that electric field is being radiated from that wire. It creates a charge on your body. And you can take an AC voltmeter, you can connect it to the earth on one side. And then you can put an electrode patch or anything on the body with the other side of the voltage meter and it will measure the AC charge that is on your body. And you can walk close to a lamp, it will increase. You can walk further away, it will decrease. You can stand barefoot on the grass or on a grounded device, and it will go to zero because the pad is at earth potential. When your body stands on the earth or the mat, then the electrons from the earth come up the wire, the negative free electrons on the earth, they come up the wire, they bring pad to earth potential, then anything that touches that pad, if it’s a human body then the human body is going to equalize with the earth. You will maintain the same negative charge as the earth. And what that means is there’s an abundance of free electrons on the body that are able to move and reduce charge. Does that make sense?

36:24 Ashley James: Uh-huh.

36:29 Clint Ober: Okay, so over a period of 60 years, we started wearing rubber soled shoes. And there’s an exponential curve that is still climbing. It was about 2010, 2011 when we had about 90% of the shoes sold in America were plastic soles. Back in 1960 10% were plastic soled shoes. So we’ve had this complete reversal of leather soled shoes versus synthetic soled shoes. But if you look in the book, The Earthing book, there are charts that show the growth of,for instance, rubber soled shoes over a 58 year period. And here’s the growth of autism, lupus, MS, diabetes, and so on, and so on, and so on. So, now in the early days, when we started investigating all of this, we did not understand what the mechanism was. How could grounding the body reduce pain? That’s the only thing we knew at that time. And this was back in, I think in 2001. I was at a conference in California, trying to talk to people that might know something. And we ran across Dr. Stephen Sinatra who was a cardiologist and I started talking to him. Because cardiologists deal with electrical, they know the body’s electrical first chemical second. But no one else did at that time. And more importantly, Stephen said, “Clint, if you are affecting people’s pain, then you need to be looking at inflammation. Because pain is a byproduct of inflammation.” You have to have inflammation first before you can have pain. So that’s, I went home scratching my head, because inflammation to me was, I was playing tennis, and I slipped and twisted my ankle, and it was who would swell up, it got red and heat. So that was inflammation. That was what I knew. But along the way, we began to learn. And we kept doing studies, and we began to learn that when we ground the body, it would reduce the pain. And then we went on and did some tests on hormones, especially cortisol. We wanted to know if it calms the body when you ground. So we needed to understand that. So we did a study on cortisol, we would measure cortisol every four hours for 24 hours, and ground them for a few weeks, and then do it again. And it’s just dramatic – the change, the shift, because before their circadian cortisol profiles were all over the place. And then after grounding for a few weeks, they all synchronized. And these people lived in different parts of southern California. So we knew it was connected to earth rhythms and so on. So we learned about cortisol, and I’d like to come back to that later. Then I started investigating inflammation and then I learned one day that neutrophils, macrophages and many of these white blood cells, what they do is – how the immune system functions, is if you have a damaged cell, or pathogen in your body, then it sends over one of these white blood cells, which have many different many purposes, but they encapsulate the damaged cell or the pathogen, and they release reactive oxygen species. As soon as I saw the word reactive, then I knew that this is an electrical process.

40:46 Ashley James: That’s so fascinating.

40:50 Clint Ober: So it was an accident.

40:51 Ashley James: So just to illustrate for the listeners, a white blood cell, it needs to attack a pathogen, or maybe the white blood cells need to digest a, like a cancer cell or a cell that’s damaged. And it comes along the white blood cell encapsulates the cell, and then it releases reactive protein, which what it’s actually doing is releasing free radicals, it’s releasing lose electrons, that magnetically tear apart that cell, so then the white blood cell can continue to digest it, is that correct?

41:28 Clint Ober: Right. That’s how the immune system destroys pathogens, and damaged cells – by stealing electrons from their structure and killing them.

41:36 Ashley James: Uhm-hmm. And if we have too much of that, so the inflammation comes in, when we have too much of that going on and we have too much of a buildup of these electrons in our body because we don’t ground, then they start to attack. The electrons start to attack the healthy tissue creating more inflammation.

41:55 Clint Ober: Yup. What we have to do is go backwards now. In 1960, before then we were all semi grounded, or we spent a lot of time grounded. People who didn’t spend any time – you know, there’s a few of those. But these autoimmune diseases, inflammation related health disorders started to climb in around 1960, late 50s, and the 60s. So when the body is grounded, it has ground, earth potential – ground potential. What it has is a reservoir of free electrons, the body is negatively charged. So those free electrons are not just on the surface of body, they’re in the body, they’re everywhere. They don’t have free range. I mean the body gates – everything in and out and all that kind of stuff. But basically, when we did our grounding studies, it was like 2008 or 2010 when I met with Stephen Sinatra back in Essex, Connecticut, and there were about a dozen doctors got together. And we’re all trying to figure this out. So what we did is they drew blood from everybody and looked at the blood under a microscope, then grounded everybody for 30 to 40 minutes and looked at their blood again. And what we saw was a complete separation, automatic, perfect profile of the blood after they were grounded. But before there was real low formation, like static electricity, and peanuts, you know, the blood was all stuck together. When it’s stuck together like that, can’t get in and out of the capillary, so soon as you ground and the blood can get in and out of the capillaries, then everybody’s face started to pink up and so on. As soon as you ground the body, then the red blood cells, we found out through further experiment, that the negative surface charge on red blood cells increases by a factor of almost three. So now the red blood cells being more negative, they can’t stick together, and they repel each other. That’s how nature maintains normal blood viscosity, the thickness of blood. But more importantly, is as the blood circulates throughout the body, and the negative surface – so if you have negative increase negative surface charge on red blood cells, you have increased negative surface charge on every cell in the body. So now when the white blood cells come over and release reactive oxygen, and destroy a cell, if there’s any remaining radicals – free radicals, then the blood can give up an electron here, there or adjacent cells, there’s plenty of ground free electrons on the cells in that area that can absorb and reduce and prevent, the blood can give up an electron to a free radical which prevents damaging the blood or damaging the cell.

So by grounding the body, in the past, the immune system was dependent on us maintaining a negative charge. A quick side note is if you look at the animals who live in the wild, the elk, deer, coyotes, all the animals that live out there, cancer doesn’t exist out there. They don’t have plaque on their arteries, they don’t have plaque on their teeth, they don’t need to go to the emergency room, when they get hurt, they can just go find a piece of ground bury themselves in they heal up. But the animals who live indoors with their owners, they all manifest autoimmune diseases, just like their owners. And they have a death rate of approximately 50% from cancer – indoor, domesticated animals. Now a lot of people could say, well, it’s the food, it’s this, it’s that and so on. But the simple corollary is, the animals in the wild are naturally grounded 24/7. They can’t have inflammation in their bodies.

46:14 Ashley James: And what fascinated me was  the understanding of how the immune system works, like you said, how the white blood cells work to attack and digest pathogens or damaged cells. To destroy them, they use the free radical charge.

46:15 Clint Ober: Yes.

46:16: Ashley James: And if we have too much of a buildup of that charge, then it attacks the healthy cells, and then we get inflammation because now the body is having to clean up the damage from these free radicals running through our body. And my listeners have heard about free radicals. We talked about how when you consume rancid oil or if you eat anything that’s fried food, it’s proven. I had Dr. Joel Fuhrman on my show, and his latest book, which is called Fast Food Genocide, he talks about the studies where they proven that if you consume fried food on a regular basis, like once a week is a regular basis, that you have cut 10 years or more off your life. So that’s free radical damage from eating fried, like fries once a week. Let’s say you go out and have some fish and chips once a week, meant you’re now going to die in your 60s instead of in your 70s or 80s from that one choice. That’s how bad free radical damage is from fried foods. And we think about free radicals as in, we can get them from our food and we need to consume antioxidants, which is all the fruits and vegetables to neutralize those free radicals. But no one thinks that we need to ground ourselves to release the free radicals because the free radicals are just these lose electrons, right?

48:07 Clint Ober: Let me try to straighten this out a little bit. If the body is grounded, then it is negatively charged, and you can’t have inflammation in the body when it is grounded. Pathogens I mean, free radicals, every time you take a breath, you’re breathing in all kinds of particulates. And they create problems in the lungs and the immune system has to clean all that up. If you have asthma, you know it for sure. But even when you’re healthy, when you’re breathing bad air, you’re breathing in radicals. And so the water – it’s definitely food and all these issues that are going on in our environment. But what grounding is all about, is when you ground to the earth and your body is negatively charged, then our working hypothesis is and that’s what we’ve kind of proved, is if you get grounded and stay grounded 24 hours a day, and you saw the movie. And you saw a lady with MS. I told her, “I can help you. But you got to do this, you got to ground 24 hours a day and stay grounded until you get well.” And you saw her story I believe so. Anyhow, if you get grounded and stay grounded 24/7 here’s what happens to the immune system. If you’re ungrounded the immune system, you have the build up of these radicals, whatever source they’re coming from; food, all of it, and from metabolism, just the body itself creates a lot of radicals.

So when you’re grounded, the immune system provides free electrons everywhere in your body all over the place. Okay, radicals that are produced, or reduced – radicals from a white blood cell, it produces reactive oxygen in order to reduce and tear apart that pathogen. Where inflammation comes from primarily, is if there’s any remaining radicals, they don’t build up. They will only last for 10, 20 nanoseconds, at the very most. They’re going to reach and grab and steal an electron from something in the vicinity. And the only real thing in the vicinity is another cell, another normal cell in the body. So they reach over and attach to and grab an electron from a healthy cell and damage it. And so that neutralizes those radicals. But in the meantime, now we’ve damaged another cell. So metaphorically, a message goes out to the immune system, “Hey, something has got me. It’s still here.” And so it sends another neutrophils and neutrophils, if that cell can’t be repaired, depending on the damage, then it destroys that cell. So then if there’s any reactive oxygen left from it 10, 20 nanoseconds later, it’s going to steal it from another cell. And so that’s like burning along. That’s oxidation. So the immune system is oxidizing healthy tissue. You’re not storing free radicals, what you’re doing is you’re building up free radical damage. So now the immune system rather than do what it would normally do, like take care of the pathogens from breathing, or water or, or food or some of these other things, and you can overwhelm the immune system with any of them. But let’s just say in a normal situation. So now the immune system can’t fight things that it would normally do during the day, it has to go and spend all this energy and resources, trying to manage the free radical damage and to stop the burn. But it’s creating more burn as it’s trying to fix it. And so it’s stressing the immune system sufficient that the body can’t maintain health.

52:32 Ashley James: And then doctors say under a microscope, “Why is it the immune system is attacking supposedly healthy tissue? This must be an autoimmune disease.” When pathologist look, pathologists are like, “Well, there was nothing wrong with the thyroid, why is the body constantly attacking the thyroid?” for example. And what you’re saying is that it is this chain reaction that we we’re not grounded. It’s a chain reaction, that’s happening at the size of an electron, the size of an oxygen molecule. And so of course, a pathologist with a regular microscope can’t see that that supposedly healthy tissue was damaged. Because of the immune system could not do what it’s supposed to do, because they’re that we’re not grounded. So we need to ground ourselves constantly as much as possible need to. It’s not just go out once a day and walk barefoot for five minutes, it’s all day long. We need to ground ourselves so that we are at earth’s potential which is releasing all that positive charge so the white blood cells can do their job, because otherwise the white blood cells end up damaging the body in the process of trying to do their jobs.

53:57 Clint Ober: Yes, collateral damage.

54:00 Ashley James: So autoimmune disease is collateral damage of not grounding ourselves throughout the day?

54:06 Clint Ober: All autoimmune diseases are related to a dysfunction immune system because the immune system is oxidizing healthy tissue.

54:13 Ashley James: Have you seen people cure their own autoimmune disease by grounding themselves throughout the day?

54:20 Clint Ober: Thousands.

54:22 Ashley James: This is why I said at the beginning that this interview is going to be the most important interview that everyone’s listened to. I’ve done so many interviews and such great information, but my goal has been to help people get to the root cause.

54:39 Clint Ober: Right.

54:40 Ashley James: And this is the root cause.

54:41 Clint Ober: It’s ground meaning it’s its base, it’s at the very foundation of health. You have to have this throughout all the time. The human body was grounded like the animals are in the wild now. And autoimmune disease was not the problem, infectious disease, acute injury, childbirth, war and famine and so on. But environmental inflammation related health disorders, autoimmune diseases are 100% I believe, related to loss of ground. The body has lost its electrical ground, it lost its ability to neutralize positive charges. In this case, reactive oxygen species. Now you can drink a glass of water, it’s going to help and if it’s more negatively charged is going to help. But you can’t drink water all day long. Every day all day long. There’s not enough free electrons and a glass of water. Blueberries, certain types of berries are much more beneficial than others, but you would have to have a blueberry drip.

55:54 Ashley James: My husband would agree with you. He eats two pounds of blueberries a day. It’s his favorite food.

56:00 Clint Ober: Exactly. It’s really, really simple and that’s what’s complicated about this, because the body is electrical first – everything in the body functions electrically, then chemically. You have to take an electron from here to there in order to create energy, life. That’s how we know when a person is dead, because they have no more electrical potential. I mean they’ve lost their electrical capacity. So how do I Where do I go from here?

56:40 Ashley James: Well you just bring up a really good point. If we go to a cardiologist they’re going to read the electrical, they hook us up to the EKG or these other machines that will read the electrical signals from our body, we have to remember that every part of our nervous system has electrical potential, has an electrical charge that in between each synaptic gap in the nervous system. We keep thinking we’re a bunch of chemicals but beneath that, it’s actually electrical information that is happening in the body as well. We’re bio electrical beings. And when I think about it, think about a machine where the electronics are not grounded like a computer that it’s getting static, your TV gets staticky, it crashes, the hard drive burns out, it doesn’t work correctly. And that’s just a machine, which is an electrical being. It’s a machine that’s not grounded, it can’t function. And now we look at us, a significantly more complex being because we’re bio electrical beings and when we’re not grounded, the circuitry is blowing out.

58:00 Clint Ober: Right. But you also have to recognize that every cell in the body functions electrically. You have an electrical surface charge on the cell and an internal electrical circuit charge, and how it takes information or nutrients in and takes other things out is through repolarization. So anytime there’s a difference of a few bolts on a on a cell, then they’ll depolarized, repolarize – so everything is electrical first. The body is the most electrical thing in the environment. There’s nothing on earth that’s more electrical than a human body.

58:41 Ashley James: I want to talk about some of the studies that you have participated in, because where we left off on your journey was that you had gone to universities and they kind of threw you out, laughed you out at the university. And since then you have conducted 24 peer reviewed studies that are monumental. In the earthing movie they talked about one study where they hooked preemie babies up to basically becoming grounded. They grounded these preemie babies in the NICU in their little oxygen tents. And and they had outstanding results. Can you share the results from that study?

59:24 Clint Ober: Yeah. Basically, babies in these ICU units – they’re ungrounded and their little bodies and nervous systems are all electrically charged. And there’s a lot of EMF around, but there’s a lot of static electricity because they’re in plastic things, and there’s people coming in touching them. So anyhow, I think there were 24 preemies and these were babies that were prematurely born by some number. These studies are all available on www.earthinginstitute.net for detail. But just to give you a general concept, what they did is they put a simple electrode patch on the babies, and grounded them to the earth via the electrical ground, and the babies, they’re totally stressed. Their heart rate variability is really significantly challenged. And you know, they’re they’re just in this wired state, and it causes all of the cholics and a lot of the problems that these babies experience. So what they did, when they grounded them, then they measured everything, of course. And what they found was that there was a, you know, like a 60 70% increase in normalization of vagal tone. And vagal tone is the calmness of your balance of the parasympathetic versus sympathetic normalizing and normalizing heart rate variability, then the babies would calm down, circulation would normalize, and all of these things. and it was universal across the board. And so that was the first study. And that was done, I think, at the Hershey Children’s Clinic in Hershey, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania. So that was a really, really good study, because here we find that grounding normalizes and vagal tone. What that means is, you have a parasympathetic nervous system, you have a sympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system responds to anything in the environment – noise, wind, cold, somebody breaks something, just whatever, or stress, you know, whatever is going on. So the sympathetic is on one side of the body pushing, and it’s like a fight or flight mechanism. If you see there’s a bear in the woods, so cortisol spikes.

In the beginning, that’s not a problem. But as time goes, on the parasympathetic, it’s releasing hormones to modulate the response of the sympathetic so that you will stand still for a split second to determine if you really need to run or if you’re really need to fight, and that calms down the response. But eventually, if you live in a chronically elevated sympathetic state, that means you got noise, everything chaos going around you in your life all the time, then what happens is, the parasympathetic has limited resources. So it’s going to run out of hormones, and whatever, and then all of a sudden, the sympathetic will start over driving. And that’s when you get this, what’s going on with these babies, I mean, this challenge, I mean their bodies are just screaming. And it’s the same with adults, I mean, people who are wired, and take a look at our kids, especially in classrooms, they’re wired, they’re just jumping in their skin. So by normalizing vagal tone, what you’re doing is, to me, you’re giving the body itself a reference. It’s connected to the earth, it’s got a reference. So the inflammation that is created by the sympathetic over responding, the negative surface charge of the earth, the negative electrons come into the body, then they’re reducing the positive charges in the body, and that calms down the system, and then the parasympathetic can recover or begin to recover. And for people who have chronic fatigue, adrenal burnout, all of these issues, this is what it’s about.

So here we have a, you know, a class A study showing that just simple grounding puts out the fire of inflammation, calms the nervous system, and stabilizes the heart rate variability. That’s powerful. And now we just have to convince people that babies and adults and children are all the same. Their nervous systems are all the same. So if a child in school gets up in the morning, puts his tennis shoes on, and then he spends his whole day insulated from the earth, that’s why we have a lot of this high anxiety, and irritability and chaos.

1:04:53 Ashley James: I’m just seeing it with our four year old son. We don’t feed him sugar, we don’t overstimulate him with TV or anything like that. And yet, and he hasn’t had any trauma in his childhood. He’s just average healthy, happy, but he, he hasn’t been grounded a lot, you know, we always put his shoes on, and maybe once in a while he’ll play barefoot. In fact, when we’re outside, he usually throws his shoes off. It’s just his instinct to do so, which is great. He knows he knows to ground himself. But just putting him on the grounding mat to sleep on, and it couldn’t have been placebo. He didn’t know he was on it. He was asleep by the time we put him on it. And he started to sleep in, you know, two hours more than he normally does. So we get him to bed by seven, he usually wakes up at 6:30 or seven, and he’s been sleeping until nine. So his nervous system just went, ah (sigh), and relaxed, because he was grounded from using your grounding that while he was sleeping.

1:06:08 Clint Ober: Right. That’s that’s what it’s all about. These kids need lots of sleep.

1:06:12 Ashley James: Yeah, they do. They do. Absolutely. So tell us about those people that you said that were in different parts of California that all had cortisol issues, that were all under stress. And that you said within a matter of weeks that they begin to connect to the earth’s rhythm.

1:06:32 Clint Ober: Yes, what we found and again, it was really interesting. No, this isn’t brand new, people in the communications industry knew this. Back in the early days of before telephone when we had Western Union, those kind of ground wires. So they had to know different times of the day, they could only send messages because the sun affected the signals. If there was no sun, then you’re not going to get a telegraph message, and so on. And so on, we knew that the electrical potential of the earth, from the communication industry plays a big role in everything, traveling on the surface of the earth. So what we did is we took a handful of people, I think there were eight or nine people in the study. This was done by an anesthesiologist, and what we did is he measured their cortisol every four hours, for 24 hours; 8pm, midnight, 4am 8am, noon, and 4pm. Now in the book, these charts exist there, and they’re also on the institute under the cortisol study. But anyhow, if you look at it, the first chart looks like spaghetti. I kind of knew these people not personally, but by age, the younger people were high stress and they had elevated cortisol. And the older ladies had low cortisol exhausted adrenals. But to look at them as a group, they did have a peak coming in around 4am and peaking at 8am, and then dropped off. But as soon as we grounded them, they all synchronized and they’re all identical on a tight little band, and they all kind of went to normal. And when I say normal, what that means is at 4am, first of all, if you’re not sleeping at night, if you’re there’s only one reason I believe that people can’t sleep, they have elevated cortisol. Because cortisol is a fight or flight hormone it’s not, it’s not going to let you sleep, because you’re worried about a child, bill, work problem I whatever life issue that’s causing you stress, and causing you to think about or worry, or whatever. And that’s causing the body to secrete cortisol. And it’s really hard for the body to go to sleep as long as the cortisol is elevated. Sleep is autonomic, but you cannot sleep if there’s a bear in the woods. So anyhow, what we saw first of all, was the cortisol normalized between 8am and 4am, where before it was kind of spaghetti. And then at 4am, we saw the cortisol rise from, I can’t use the word milligrams here. But anyhow, to give you an example. They, they rose from let’s just five milligrams, all the way up to 50 milligrams, or about 40 milligrams at 8am. So you have this at 4am, then the body starts producing lots of cortisol. And that cortisol is to create the energy that you’re going to need to get out of bed. A lot of people will have heart attacks, because of low cortisol in the morning, morning heart attacks. So anyhow, the main thing that we saw was one, the cortisol circadian profiles, the daily profiles synchronized amongst this group of primarily women. But more importantly, in the original study, three of them, they were outliers, and we couldn’t figure out why because their cortisol would peak, I mean start climbing at one in the morning, and so they couldn’t sleep. What we found was these were stewardesses. These were three stewardesses that were based in New York, but they spent half their time in San Diego. So they were on the nonstop flight San Diego. But the majority of their time they lived in New York. So when they come to San Diego, and their circadian cortisol rhythms are off three hours. So that’s what you call jet lag. So what we learned is one, jet lag is real. But more importantly, what we learned was if you go stand on the earth for 15 minutes, after you fly from East Coast to West Coast, or vice versa, you stand on the earth for 15 minutes, it resets, or your ground – it resets your circadian cortisol rhythms.

1:12:00 Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is so amazing. When I was 16, I flew with my parents from Toronto to Honolulu, Hawaii. And the first thing I did, you can imagine that was a long day of flying, but it was like the middle of the night for me. And the first thing I did at the airport was kick off my shoes and stand in the grass. I just had to, it was like a calling. And I didn’t have any jet lag that entire trip.

1:12:28 Clint Ober: Your body knows what to do you listen. We’d get out of our own way.

1:12:33 Ashley James: Yes. That is so cool. Well, my husband, when he first got into this, he had built our own mat and it was a really big pain in the butt. And so I can I can tell people that yeah, you could go out and buy all the materials and try to make your own but I don’t recommend it. It was a big pain in the butt and the thing fell apart. And it was kind of expensive for how not professional it was, but that your mats, I am in love with. They’re very low profile, you don’t even notice like you’re sleeping on them right now, my feet are on the one in the office one. But when we’re lying on the one on our mattress, it’s not bulky. I I really feel it, it’s just, you know, people might say it’s a placebo, but there is a difference. So my husband, the plug is on his side. And because it’s plugged into the ground, and you have a device that comes with the kit that you test the electrical outlet to make sure that it’s safe. And that it’s it is in fact a safe ground. I want to talk about that next. But I can tell when it’s not plugged in and when it is plugged in. So he’ll do like it’s just been a little bit of an experiment, but he had it plugged in. And then he had it unplugged. And then he had it plugged in again, over the course of a few days. And I noticed a difference. So I didn’t know when he had it plugged in and when he didn’t, but I could lie on the bed and I could feel whether or not we the grounding mat was plugged into the ground or not.

I do have some questions about this. So we did try, put a wire out the window into the ground. And not everyone can do that, because a lot of people live in condos. And you know, that’s kind of a pain in the butt, because you have to figure out how to get around your screen on your window. I like your system much better. It’s cleaner, it’s low profile, you just plug it right into the ground. I appreciate that. But I do have a question about electromagnetic fields. So if an outlet is there beside your bed, isn’t giving off an electromagnetic field. And when you’re plugging into the ground, would that also bring the electromagnetic field of the outlet onto the grounding mat?

1:15:12 Clint Ober: Well, the EMF industry, that’s their big story from an electrical point of view. And the reason we ground everything in the communications industry, and ground all of our equipment and put up shielding to prevent all this stuff. But basically what happens is, when you are grounded to the earth, the earth is infinitely large, bodies infinitely small, relatively speaking. But when you’re at earth potential, you have the resources of the entire earth to hold your body at earth potential. If you are grounded, then you are antenna for electric field charges.

1:16:02 Ashley: Because the atmosphere is positively charged?

1:16:06 Clint Ober: No. We’re talking about electric field, static electricity is different. When you’re grounded, it dissipates static electricity. I mean, that’s the industry. I mean, that’s a huge industry. Now electric fields, EMFs. You have an electric field and a magnetic field, magnetic fields you or nobody else can do anything about whatsoever. Because they go through bricks, they go through everything, you can’t shield them, you can with new metal, but nobody could afford it. So magnetic fields are not the problem, we have done enough work that we know that the active agent with EMFs is electric, the electric field. And the electric field is kind of like the bear on the wood. I mean, the bear is radiating an electric field. You have an electric field, the bear has been electric field. This is a fact. And when you sense his field, then it’s going to fire your sympathetic nervous system and your cortisol is going to spike. And you’re going to run or you’re going to fight. So here’s my take on all of it, I have a huge background in all of this. And it’s really hard to teach everybody electromagnetism or the basics of electromagnetism. But the reason everything is grounded is to prevent electromagnetic interference. That’s the real term here. So what we’re trying to do is prevent electromagnetic interference in the body. And how does an electric field create interference in the body? First of all, you have to know where they come from. Everybody is worried about what they can see, they can see a lamp, they can see an electrical outlet, they can see a cord. But what they can’t see is when your house was built, before the wallboard went up, all of the studs and everything were put in place, then an electrician came in with a drill. And he drilled all the holes going across the timbers at waist high to an electrician. If he’s short, it’s a little lower if he is tall, they’re a little higher. And then he ran all the wires through those holes up and down to the outlets to the switches to the ceiling, whatever, and around the whole house. So then, if you see a house before they put the wall board up, you’ll know and recognize that it’s a cage wire. There’s electrical wires running everywhere. But that isn’t so much the problem, it is a problem. But that isn’t so much of the problem. The problem is, now they put the wallboard up, and the carpets down, and they bring in the mattress and the box spring. And they bring in the nightstands and the lamps and whatever else. So you would think that the lamps probably is the biggest problem. But in fact – I hate to tell people these things, because if I don’t like to tell people something they can’t do anything about. And that’s what the state of California Health Sciences told me, they said do not go out and bother these people and tell them that they have a problem unless you got a solution. And the solution has to be no cost or low cost. And that’s another little story here for me to tell. That’s why these products are low cost and, and why I preach barefoot, it’s no cost. But anyhow, I’ll go ahead and I brought it up, so I have to finish it. But anyhow, so you put your mattress up against the wall, then you put your pillow up at the end of your mattress, then you go to bed and and everything’s beautiful and whatever. But there you are more affected by the electric fields radiating from the romacks in the wiring, at the head of your bed, because your head is within six inches of those electric fields. So the body at that point is an antenna. A lot of people say, “Oh, well, all you gotta do is ground the springs of the mattress.” Or, “You ground this, you do that.” That’s crazy, the body is an electrical, it’s every bit as much of an antenna as the springs in your mattress, or the lamp in the corner, or anything else. So the only thing you can do is turn off the electrical in your bedroom at night. There’s no other option. And I hate to tell people that because it’s expensive, most people can afford it most people can comply with things like that. So the only other option you have is to ground yourself and get rid of the antenna effect. Now, here’s how electric fields affect people, they do not cause cancer, they do not do all of these things that a lot of these fear people are always talking about. What they do is the hair on your skin, on your arm in your head. It’s really an electrical antenna. It can sense. It’s like a bear in the woods. In the old days when there wasn’t all this noise in our environment. If you were out in the woods, you could feel a bear, you couldn’t see him, you couldn’t smell and you couldn’t hear him. But you could feel him, you knew he was there. And so what you did is you look for safety or your cortisol came up and you are prepared to run or fight.

Now then as soon as the problem went away, cortisol went back down, life was back to normal, everything was happy and good and you’re grounded. So any inflammation that was created from that charge of cortisol is automatically dissipated, get the immune system in ground. So now today, we have the mailbox is a bear in the woods, the phone’s a bear in the woods, a swimming child is a bear in the woods, the boss is a bear in the woods, the traffic is a bear in the woods. So our sympathetic nervous system, which is sensing all of these environmental things. And now we have this electric field that’s radiating from these electrical appliances and devices and so on. And the hair on your arm can sense that. And it’s holding your body in a chronically elevated sympathetic state, as is everything else in life. Wind can do the same thing, chronic noise, there’s many things that can do the same thing. So if you’re sleeping ungrounded and your body is an antenna, or you are in an environment where you’re exposed to a lot of electric fields, and you are wearing rubber soled shoes, then when you’re in a chronically elevated state, what you’re doing is your body’s pumping cortisol, your sympathetic or your parasympathetic which is operating on hormones, it becomes exhausted. So it can no longer function and maintain that normal state. So anxiety, irritability, and depression, come next, then comes diabetes and lupus, MS, et cetera cancer, heart disease, et cetera. Because our bodies are taxed, but electric fields themselves are not the problem.

1:24:06 Ashley James: It’s not being grounded, that’s the problem.

1:24:08 Clint Ober: It’s not being grounded, because the human body throughout most of time, most of existence on this planet was grounded. The immune system had that resource to function and be the mop to clean up the excess free radicals or to prevent free radical damage to healthy cells. So that’s my take on it. Now a lot of people say, Well, I gotta fix my electric fields. Well, I mean, that’s maybe four or five or six on the list. It’s probably your food, it’s your toxic work environment, it’s your toxic relationship, it’s all these other things – not enough time sitting in the park, not enough time walking, not enough time waking up and becoming a little more conscious about our environment and nature and who we are, and how we relate to it, and that we’re a part of it. And we have separated ourselves from it. But anyhow, one thing that’s beautiful about it, is you put it back and you ground it and put it back in nature and you see some nice healthy food, do a little exercise, the body returns to normal, take the stress off the immune system, stop inflammation, take the stress off the immune system. The body only knows to do one thing – return to normal. And you have to remember, health is the body’s most natural state.

If anybody’s got anybody’s got a health problem, then they’re doing something or they’re in an environment that their immune system is challenged and it can’t maintain health. And it manifests differently. You know, it’s like the fellows at  Rutger and those folks at Boston Massachusetts, when they came out with that article in 2004, cover of Time Magazine, and it showed the body on fire and it said inflammation. And what they’re really saying is you don’t have cancer, you don’t have lupus, you don’t have ALS, you don’t have any of these diseases, what you have is chronic low grade inflammation. And as time goes on, the body becomes compromised. And then the body’s going to try to save itself. But in the process, it has to give up something. Maybe I’m going a little bit too far here. But anyhow, disease manifests differently in different people based on their genetics, and based on their environment. And that means what you’re breathing, eating and, and doing and hearing and whatever. But if you if your immune system is functioning perfectly like it in nature, like in the wild animals, then you couldn’t have lupus, MS, you couldn’t have these things. It’s not possible.

1:27:04 Ashley James: I had a listener recently and shared that she went out to do some grounding. I think she lives near LA or in California. And she was really upset to have been poisoned basically by whatever they sprayed. Because I think she’s at either a condo or an apartment complex. And so she doesn’t have control over the grounds. But they sprayed some kind of chemical maybe to kill the insects. And she was walking barefoot and end up getting this big rash. And she was really upset because she thought that  her body’s absorbed some toxin. And I was just last night chatting with a chiropractic friend of mine, a chiropractic doctor in Las Vegas. And I used to live in Las Vegas and many houses or condos, those grounds are sprayed with all kinds of chemicals. And so I was telling her, “Go do some grounding.” And she goes, “I don’t know, where could I go, every park is sprayed.” Some people, like I can go in my backyard, I live in Washington State and I can go, there’s lots of places I feel comfortable and safe going because I know there’s no pesticides, but there are so many places, especially in the cities where we just don’t know what’s on that grass. And so we’re not really sure that it is safe. Or in the winter time when there’s snow, I’m also from Canada, originally, and so there’s like six months of the year where we would not go barefoot outside. So I really like the low cost solution you created, which is the grounding mats for when we’re at our desks, for when we’re sleeping, that allows us to ground you eight hours a night at our on our bed and all throughout the day at our desks. And then if we can go outside in nature, which is obviously preferable if we can access a healthy patch of grass or ground that we know has not been sprayed, then that’s good as well. But it’s not something that we do once a week for five minutes and think that that’s enough. Like I’m really getting that it’s something we need to ground ourselves as much as possible. Dr. Joseph Mercola was on that documentary saying that 95% of the time he is grounded. And that just blew my mind that we really need to make an effort to ground ourselves all the time.

1:29:35 Clint Ober: Well, that’s the issue. And I have to tell you a real short story here. When we were doing our research studies, I had to make ground planes, meaning pads and whatever to either put people on so we could measure them, things they could sleep on, and or electrode patches and things that we could use to do our measurements. And many of our subjects, they all begged and pleaded to keep the little devices that we had created. And then all of a sudden there is this, “Can I get one from my uncle?” “Can I get one for whatever people who had problems?” In the early days of all of this, I never had any intention whatsoever of going out and creating products. I had to have products in order to do the studies, or not products, but devices. And we manufactured those and we know begged and borrowed and figured out some things and how to do all of this. And so anyhow, but this business grew up, it was an accidental business. And as an absurd business, you have to try to reconnect because I mean, 60 years ago, we couldn’t get off the earth. And today, we can’t get back to the earth. Except for having a wire, or something of that nature. So and then this one, I remember the, like I said earlier about California Health Services and National Institute of Health Sciences, they all say the same thing. “Don’t go out there and scare the people and don’t go out and create trauma unless you have a solution that you can offer them.” And that’s where I started, I said I will not talk to anybody, I will not do anything unless you go outdoors and go barefoot for a half hour or an hour and just experience this. And then if it helps you, if it has benefit for you, then do it another half hour and then do it more time and do it every day. And then if it’s really important to you, then there are these devices that are beginning to surface and that we’ve been able to pull together that now work and now have some long life and longevity to them.

Going outdoors, first of all, anybody who could go, if you can go to the beach, if you can go and find a sandbox or build your own sandbox or do whatever, to spend some time grounded to the earth, it’s just really, it’s it’s bigger than just reducing inflammation, it’s the connection. When you are connected to the earth, when you are in contact with electrical contact with the earth, then you’re connected to every living thing that’s in contact on the earth, throughout the entire planet. You are electrically connected, because electrical operates speed of light. So it’s important, when possible to find your place in nature, if you can find that. But on the other hand, if you’re going to be exposed to all of this craziness in our living environments, whether it’s static electricity, or whatever, then you need something, some mechanism to ground yourself in the home. So what we tried to do, and which we sold probably a million products that we never advertised, this was all word of mouth, and it went around the world. And now we’re trying to figure it out, because there’s so many people trying to get into the business and all this nonsense out there. But it does have to be safe. And that’s number one in anything electrical and it has to be safe. So all of the products that we put out there are involved with, they have a built-in electrical resistance. So they are not a purely conductive, they’re called a deceptive or a soft ground. That means electrons can move back and forth, slowly enough that there’s no possibility of an electrical shock or a spark, or anything of that nature, anything uncomfortable. So that’s number one. And then number two, it has to be functional, you have to be able to put it on the bed. And it has to be something that people can tolerate. And it has to have a life expectancy. For years we had the cotton sheets, they put silver yarns in them. In many cases, especially men, because they perspire and there’s a lot of sulfur in their perspiration. It’ll oxidize a silver in just a few days. Or women could sleep on them for months or years. And so we had to fix that problem. And that’s why we ended up with the black carbon mats, because carbon is safe, clean, it will last, literally it could last forever, somebody would take care of it. So now what we have is a no cost, low cost, and that’s what I deliver. It’s free, it’s free. Doing it yourself is okay if you’re if you have an electrical background and know something about electrical. But do not just run out and start grounding wires and tying wires around people’s toes. You have to have you have to be conscious of safety.

1:34:55 Ashley James: Absolutely. So this little white box with these three lights, red and two yellows, and it has a little instructions like what the lights mean. You plug that into your outlet and it tells you whether your outlet is a clean, healthy ground or whether it’s undergrounded or whether it’s a dangerous outlet. So tell us a bit about that. Because that’s something that other people who try to copy what you’ve done, you’re the founder, you’re the original. You’re the first. Right?

1:35:34 Clint Ober: Right. 20 years ago, for biological grounding. Yes.

1:35:40 Ashley James: Absolutely, biological grounding. I remember making computers with my husband and we knew to attach ourselves to something grounded while we were working with the electronics and my husband has been building computers since 94. And I feel very blessed to have his skills, the computer I’m currently using he built for me a few years ago and it’s still holding up. So in terms of people who make electronics, they know to ground themselves or like you said doctors and patients in the OR have to ground themselves. But those are for different reasons. The reason we’re talking about is so that we can release those electrons and beat become grounded, like we’re meant to, we’re returning to what we were less than 100 years ago. It’s just hard to wrap my brain around it, less than 100 years ago. We were grounded almost all of the time. For the most part, right? Almost all of us were grounded all the time, and just to see the rise and all these chronic diseases take place at the same time as us becoming less and less grounded. It’s just no wonder between becoming ungrounded, and stressors, like you said have now multiplied, and the chemical stressors, and environmental stressors, and the stress of poor food and lack of exercise and bills and all that. So the stressors have increased. And then the biggest stress of all, which is the stress of being ungrounded. Coupled with all that, no wonder we’re seeing these diseases come out of nowhere that we didn’t have 100 years ago. So that’s fascinating.

So you have this little device that when people buy your grounding mats, this little device, they plug into the wall first to test it. Can you talk a bit about that?

1:37:40 Clint Ober: Yes, I will. I want to follow up on one thing you were discussing. A good way to think about grounding is amino therapy. Ground therapy is your grounding the immune system, restoring the immune system function, bu it’s restoring the immune system. That’s what it’s all about. But anyhow, enough of that.

The electrical outlet tester, that is a universal device for outlets, like used in America and Canada and various other countries. So you plug it in, and what it’s doing is it’s testing the heart and the neutral and the functionality of the ground. So if everything is proper and working properly, then you only get to the two little yellow lights come on, saying it’s there’s a ground, there’s a working ground. So then you can plug in your device, put that away and put it in a drawer. And the only time you ever use that again is if you move on, you need to check your outlets and make sure they’re grounded. So then you plug in your device, and it’s connected to the ground, it’s not connected to the electrical system, it’s connected to the ground which ends up going to ground rod in the earth. So it’s like the water coming out of the pipe coming into the house. This is electrons coming up the wire into the house. And then whatever you connect to it, it will hold that device, if it’s conductive and at earth potential. So it’s like going out in the backyard and taking a few square feet of earth and bringing it in the house.

1:39:24 Ashley James: Uh huh. Yeah, absolutely. I feel a difference. Like I said, My feet are on it right now and I don’t want to get off of it. I noticed a decrease in stress, I just feel more relaxed, and calm and happy, happier. You know, and I know that you had people saying that even their depression was going away which makes sense. I mean, if you take the stressor out, then the body’s like you said, the most natural state for the body is health and the body’s constantly trying to get back to homeostasis, concentrating back to health. And if we remove that stressor, then we’re going to notice that shift. So, that’s really exciting. I know you’ve got several different products, you’ve got the one for the bed, you’ve got the grounding mat that I’m using my feet on for when you’re at a computer, what other products do you have?

1:40:21 Clint Ober: What we have, first of all on that meter, if you see the red light comes on, that means that you either don’t have a ground or is not wired properly, you need to call an electrician. Or you may not have a ground, if your home was built before, you know 1960 or so in that timeframe, most homes weren’t grounded, they did not have an electrical ground in their electrical system. And a lot of times with all the Do It Yourself remodeling, they go to Home Depot or whatever and buy new outlets, and they have the ground port, but there is no ground wire in the wall. So it’s not connected to anything. So when you stick the electric tester in there, then it’ll show that there’s no ground. So then you have to either get a ground rod like we were talking about, then throw it out the window or whatever, put it in the earth where there’s grass, or flowers or something. Or just have them come and install, figure out how to run an electrical ground for you.

The products – we’ve experimented with a lot of things, but what we’ve ended up with, one of them is called a patch kit. It’s the ground therapy patch kit. The reason I came up with it is it has a couple of wires in it. And it has 90 electrode patches in it. It has a book videos and everything and a nice little kind of like a first aid kit. And the reason for that product is so that most people can’t get their mind around grounding until they experience it. So with the patches, they can buy the patches, if they have, they can put it on the bottom of their feet, they can put it on the palm of their hand. And if they have inflammation in their body, put it wherever, you need to actually put it over an area of inflammation. But anyhow, so people can experience grounding, like you’ve experienced your bed. So a lot of people don’t want to do anything until they experience every piece. It’s really absurd and unbelievable that this is true.

In many cases, they cannot go outdoors because there is no place for them to go that’s convenient. A lot of like you say in apartments and condos and city areas, everything is sprayed, you know bug killer fertilizers, pets, the whole thing, it’s just not going to happen. So what we did is we came up with this kit so that everybody could have something available that you can go experience yourself, or go patch grandma, see if it helps her, patch mom, patch anybody and everybody, you know. Because here’s what we’ve learned over the years, the average person who buys a product and grounding products in between 35 and 55. Yes, and it’s 99% female, men all go out and tinker which is fine. So anyhow, she buys a product. And the first thing she does, she uses it for two or three days telling, “Oh my goodness, this works.” She calls her mom, her sister or her girlfriend, or her child who needs it worse than she does and gives what she bought to them. Then she buys another one for herself. And then she gives that one to somebody else that needs it worse than she does, but she needs it worse than anybody. But she wants to. She’s a caregiver. And she’s not happy unless she is helping somebody heal with their health or something. It’s just middle aged woman. And it’s just in her blood. So now she’s found that resource that is relatively inexpensive, that she can share and many times she will go put it on the bed for them because they won’t do it themselves. The doctor doesn’t tell him that I’m going to do it. The patch product is kind of a product that you can use for acute injury, acute issues, after surgery, all kinds of things. But it’s really designed to let people experience grounding, so they can learn about it and find out if it’s a value to them. And then we have the movie and the resources, books and all that kind of stuff we put in with it so they can do whichever. So then as soon as we figured out in the early days what people need the most, what can we do to help people the most and that was ground the bed, because put it on the bed one time, plug in and forget about it. Every night to come home go to bed and get up, there’s no compliance and they’re going to get great benefit. And there are various sizes of that.

Number three product was a mat that’s 14 inches wide and 40 inches long. You can put it on the floor, put your feet on it. When you’re at the computer you can put it on your desk, put your keyboard and mouse on it. You can’t have carpal tunnel if you have that mat under your keyboard and mouse because the palm of your hand will touch the mat. A lot of people buy it because it’s a little less expensive, but we call it the poor man’s bed because if you can’t afford it, what’s the least expensive thing you can do to sleep grounded because that’s when most of the healing occurs in the body. And so it’s the most important time to be grounded. So we focused on that. The little mat, it can be used in a chair, it can be used, on the floor, it’s called the universal – it can be used for anything. And again it has to work and it has to be functional and all of that, so it took us years to get the right product, get their carbon, the right everything to make this work. And so it’s not toxic.

Then the fourth family of products is what we call it throw. One day we were playing around, people want a grounded mattresses. It didn’t make sense at the time because of the silver going bad, but they had made up a yard of material 36 inches wide and 72 or whatever inches long. And so I was standing there and it was cold so I just wrapped it around myself and my shoulders that day. And somebody said that would make a good throw. So we ended up making that product by accident. And it’s a conductive wrap like a throw on a couch. The new ones are like 45 inches by 72 inches. And so you can lay on the couch and put it on top of you or even put it on the bottom and lay on it. And people in recliner chairs, a lot of people use it as a cover. It’s just a comfort thing. It’s a very popular thing in the winter, especially up in the Canadian and most areas. So that’s the only real products that we have. We do have grounded meditation chairs that are coming online, we have grounded recliner chairs, where the entire chair has grounded carbon leatherette material on it. These are zero gravity recliners, and we have in the works other things that will come online as time goes on. It takes six months to a year to bring anything new online. So what we’re trying to do is put the most effective, least affordable, most affordable, most effective product we can out there, and that’s what these products are.

I don’t know how we can educate people too far on them, but basically the sleep mats, take your sheet off, put them on top of the mattress, plug them in, and then you put your sheet back over the top of it and just lay down  and go to sleep.

1:48:48 Ashley James: If you had a mattress protector, they’re usually some kind of plastic. Is it okay to put the grounding mat underneath it or that then defeats the purpose?

1:48:58 Clint Ober: That defeats the purpose.

1:49:01 Ashley James:  Got it.

1:49:02 Clint Ober: We do have one coming up maybe four or five months that won’t have the whole [inaudible 1:49:07] So it can serve as a mattress protector and a waterproof mattress protector.

1:49:14 Ashley James: Ah, there you go. Excellent. Well, we figured we probably should not put it underneath the mattress protector. Now most sheets, though, are not synthetic. So most sheets, does the material the sheets matter? Do you need to make sure their cotton or bamboo or there’s something that’s not synthetic?

1:49:45 Clint Ober: Well, the only thing that’s not synthetic would be a fiber, like cotton, or hemp or something of that nature. Anything like bamboo, I don’t think that’s a fiber. That’s a polymer. So that’s a synthetic. But that family, anything that’s a polymer base. You would be better off with cotton, normal thin cotton. But if you use anything, when you lay on it, you’re going to perspire. And as you perspire, it hydrates the sheet. It’s like when you drive a car and you reach back and touch your back of your shirt in a few minutes, you’ll feel the moisture. So when you lay on a mat, the perspiration is creating a moisture. It’s hydrating, your pajamas and your sheet and you will eventually be grounded. I mean within a few seconds.

1:50:41 Ashley James: Got it. It’ll conduct because of the moisture. Right?

1:50:46 Clint Ober: Yes. People whose health is very compromised – that means you have lupus, MS, or something more compromising. They will sleep directly on it, on the black mat. And the reason they do that is because it works. But once they recover from the situation they’re in and their life and everything stabilizes, then they can go back to sleeping on the sheets. We don’t tell them to do this. This is what they do.

1:51:23 Ashley James: I love when people’s intuition kicks in.

1:51:27 Clint Ober: Yeah. What I do tell a lot of people to do, is if you have a chronically inflamed knee, or elbow or joint or you have chronic inflammation, something debilitating that’s interfering with your sleep – to put a patch on the bottom of the foot, and sleep and put a sock, you need to make the wire and everything stay on, but sleep grounded, I mean put a patch. Because it will put the fire out and then the body can heal. And what we’re trying to do is support the immune system, reduce the inflammation so the immune system can clean up the damage, rebuild the knee or the ankle or whatever is going on.

1:52:14 Ashley James: So just to recap, you’ve discovered that the cortisol returns to healthy levels, when we ground on a regular basis, cortisol – so stress hormones are returning to a regular basis. The body is coming out of the stress response, the autonomic nervous system is balancing. So if we’re not in fight or flight, the sympathetic nervous system response then we switch over into the parasympathetic rest and digest response. So it’s helping the body come back to rest and digest. When we ground, it helps the immune system function properly so the immune system can clean up the unhealthy cells and not accidentally harm the healthy cells in the process. I believe in the movie, The Earthing Movie, they said it was around two hours of grounding or earthing, that the blood becomes viscous and healthfully thinned, meaning it wasn’t all stuck together, that they could see that the blood was acting like really healthy, viscous, thinned blood – not clotted together, and it could then better transfer oxygen to all the cells and pull the toxins away better. They also talked about that the buildup of electrons affects the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the body in producing ATP. We didn’t touch on that, can we just touch on that for a second?

1:53:48 Clint Ober: It’s really simple, you need an abundance of electrons to create ATP.

1:53:56 Ashley James: So in order to create cellular energy, we need to have that balance though.

1:54:03 Clint Ober: I don’t remember exactly how all of this works. But anyhow, when you digest food, basically you have molecules, and these molecules are somewhat balanced, let’s say, like sugar. So when they go into the ion channels, then what happens is how the body creates energy is it separates electrons and protons, and they’re electrofiles, so they are forever wanting to get back together. Boom. These all feeds into the ATP. I wish Dr. Sinatra or a couple of these others were able to explain the details of it. But yeah, your ATP increases significantly when you are grounded. And that’s what gives you more energy, you get up in the morning. When you get out of bed in the morning, you’re ready to get up, rather than dragging yourself out of bed.

1:55:05 Ashley James: I love it, I love it. So it helps people have more energy, have less stress, balance their stress hormones, put them back into the healing mode, balances the immune system, the immune system is now acting healthfully. Gosh, so many of my listeners have autoimmune conditions, I am almost in tears, thinking about how much this can help and how much this will help all the people who are listening, I’m really, really excited. Clint, it has been so amazing having you on the show today. I’m going to record a little blurb at the beginning, so everyone knows this. But for those who want to try the patches, or the bed pad or the pad that I’m using right now, which is the pad that you can put your feet on or put your wrists on, they can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. And that takes them to your site with all of the different options that you’ve discussed. Of course, and the free one is go put your foot your feet on the ground, take your shoes and socks off. But not everyone can. So if you can’t, then get the grounding mat or get the little patches and just experience it for yourself and do it as much as possible. And do it 95% of time like Dr. Joseph Mermcola and see the difference?

1:56:29 Clint Ober: Yes. It’s really important. I can tell you I started out in my early studies and research working with ladies who had MS and lupus. And what I saw was the dramatic impact the grounding had on them is what gets me up every morning. It’s the first thing I’m thinking about when I go to sleep at night, whether it’s 10 o’clock or midnight or whatever. The last thing I’m thinking about is what can I do to get this done so they can get to the people, so that people can take charge of their lives and restore their health.

1:57:03 Ashley James: You are going to be revered. You know, it’s only a matter of time. Because of the way this information travels. Like you said, you sold so many of these mats without ever advertising it because it was word of mouth. I’ve already told dozens of my friends since using your mats and since watching the Earthing Movie. I can’t stop telling people about it. So I know my listeners who are very active and love helping their friends and family to gain their health back. It’s going to be like a ripple effect, right? Turn that ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible. Now we do have a lot of international listeners. What about those in the to 220 volts? So it’s a different looking outlet? D How would they go about using your products?

1:57:58 Clint Ober: It’s identical. They have adapters.

1:58:01 Ashley James: Ok, so the adapter will work?

1:58:03 Clint Ober: Yeah, they have adapters for each of those countries. And they can get outlet checkers in any hardware store. And generally their systems depends on the country, India is terrible, but other countries are great. But yes, all of those can be accommodated. One way or another. But we do have like the UK, Australia, China, various adapters that are universal throughout the world.

1:58:40 Ashley James: When you say India’s terrible, do you mean that they often don’t have a ground?

1:58:44 Clint Ober: Yes. They have too much electrical. And I mean, it’s electrical exploded over there, many years ago, but they didn’t have the resources to come back and fix it up. So if you go to India and look up, you’re going to see a maze of wires overhead. So in India, we do have a lot of grounding in India, but they have to use ground rods, or they have to live in one of the newer, something built after 1980.

1:59:20 Ashley James: God, but they could figure out how to ground their house? It just may take working with an electrician or getting creative. And we know they are incredibly intelligent and creative and resourceful people and they will figure it out.

1:59:30 Clint Ober: There’s a whole new industry waiting out there for people to come and fix these homes, these older homes and make them, so people can ground. And especially young people or older people who don’t have time, people just don’t have the knowledge, they need to have a ground. I remember in the old days, we started installing cable TV. While it was an industry, it took 40 years and took an army of people to get a cable installation into every home and build the programming and build everything that went with it and so on to make it work. And then came the computer industry, we had to redo it and do it better. And all of these things. So it’s the same thing. The telephone industry had to go drill holes, cable industry had to go drill holes. This is another industry, 40% of the homes in the world don’t get ground.

2:00:29 Ashley James: Yeah, I can definitely see a need for that for sure. When you were in Florida, looking at the mentees, and just on your journey of enjoying life after you had that sort of near death experience. And you received those two messages be an officer in charge and status quos, the enemy. I will point, did the light bulb go off when you knew what that meant?

2:00:58 Clint Ober: I didn’t know what that meant until many years later, and when we started to write the book and about 2010. Then I realized that becoming an opposite charge was becoming negatively charged rather than positively charged. And the whole world had the problem, that we were all ungrounded and we needed to fix that. And status quo is very simple. People don’t change, people don’t want change, people will fight change. And so I think I got the message loud and clear. But there’s a bigger, more powerful driving force behind this than me. And so I just keep working away and this is an opportunity for the world, I mean everything gets out of balance, our medical institutions are out of balance. We’re treating symptoms rather than preventing problems. And that’s what this is more about is prevention. But it’s also, I don’t like to necessarily use the word spiritual. But nature is spiritual. I mean, we are a part of it, we’re connected to it. And when you connect with nature, it affects your psyche. It affects your heart and it affects who you are. You’re a nicer person, when you’re grounded. You’re more conscious of other people and you know, you aren’t some money or you aren’t materially oriented. You there’s a natural beauty and there’s a natural elegance and a natural scheme to nature of which we are partners. Just you can’t put it in words.

2:02:37  Ashley James: Absolutely. You know I think I am a bit nicer now that I’ve grounded. I started thinking about some grumpy people in my life, I need to go get them on a grounding mat.

2:02:50 Clint Ober: Well it gets rid of the stress. And the most important thing is getting our kids grounded teaching them grounding. And slowly getting into the schools because it’s gotta stop, We can’t electrify our kids. I mean, all of our kids are sick today, or their health is compromised. I’ll say it that way. They don’t have perfectly natural health.

2:03:14 Ashley James: And I love that in the movie, The Earthing Movie that they covered a classroom, a special ed classroom that had grounding mats. And they noticed that even children who were autistic nonverbal wouldn’t sit still for more than two or three minutes, that would sit still for seven minutes if they were on a grounding mat. And that they could get kids to focus that their constant fidgeting and twitching and looking out the window and fidgeting with things that it all went away. And it makes sense because when they covered those who have MS. In the movie, they said that their restlessness went away, the crawling of their skin that feeling like their legs were restless, and their skin was crawling. And that just wired feeling went away.

2:04:01 Clint Ober: Yup.

2:04:02 Ashley James: And it makes so much sense.

2:04:03 Clint Ober: You know, autism is an inflammation related health disorder. It starts out as an inflammation related health disorder. And you gotta put the fire out. I put the fire out these kids calm down. And if they’re damaged, not too much damage is done, they can slowly recover. We’ve seen it too many times. The immune system is a self healing mechanism. It only knows the one thing, try to restore if its got the resources and remove the stress.

2:04:34 Ashley James: That’s wonderful. So this movie, you’ve done two movies, and this latest one is now being shown at different festivals. What are your thoughts on that? Is it kind of like surreal to sit back and go, “I’m in a movie that is being shown at these big film festivals.” Isn’t that awesome?

2:04:56 Clint Ober: Yeah, it’s weird.

2:04:58 Ashley James: You’re like a movie star.

2:05:00 Clint Ober: No. What’s interesting is we were at a film festival in Hollywood. Two weeks ago, I think. And we won the Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary in Hollywood. So that’s a huge thing. And what it meant to me was this can get to the world now.

2:05:28 Ashley James: Yeah. That’s awesome. So cool. So what’s going to happen with the Earthling Movie? Is it is it going around the world to all the different festivals? Will it ever end up like on Netflix or something? What are your plans with it?

2:05:39 Clint Ober: My plans are, Netflix and all those people who manage films, they’ve all come to us. And we have said that what we would like to do is, first of all, finish up the festival just so we get the media and we get the feedback from the consumers. And then we would like to make it free to the world through whatever mechanisms we possibly can to facilitate educating as many people as possible. It’s not about money, we haven’t made any money, we sold a million plus we have not made any money yet. It all goes back in. And this is really a mission. It’s more of a movement. And it’s bigger than me, much, much bigger than me. And I’m 75 now, and some youngsters are going to have to come along here and you know, help out. I mean, we are working with people in China, Malaysia, India, Europe. Everybody’s starting to wake up more so there than here. It’s easier for them to tune into nature, I think, than American for some reason.

2:06:59 Ashley James: Yeah. You have you have a gauntlet to go down, that’s for sure. Like you said, once people experience it, they’re forever change, they can’t go back,

2:07:13 Clint Ober: Yes, they can’t go back. And then they have to share it. So what we are trying to do is provide them tools that help share it. You’re eventually going to have grounded flooring, grounded beds, grounded everything. Because if ground is what maintains the immune system in its natural state, then we have to incorporate grounding into our living environments. Now that’s going to create an army of what they call it value added. So when they make sure is they’ll value add grounding to it, they’ll value add grounding to the carpets, to do the flooring, to whatever. So it’ll create a new industry, like TV, or telephone, or radio or TV or sewer, or railroads or anything else. It’s a new industry, we have to go back and fix, find balance and fix what we did over the last 60 years. Plastics are good, plastics are good. And they can be used, we just need to make them so that they have ground material in them. So that when you use them, you’re still grounded.

2:08:23 Ashley James: Last night, as we walked to bed, I said to my husband, I wonder if we could ground the floor. If there’s a material we could use, I’ve seen these corks, you know, but like a natural material, if there’s a way to ground it. And his response was that sounds like it would be too expensive. And he started thinking about all the problems. My husband was a carpenter. So he starts thinking about right now, how that could be possible. And my vision was to see every floor grounded and just and then we need to teach people to walk barefoot in their homes and leave their shoes at the door. And that was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s that’s the solution. You ground everything in the house.” And now that’s what you’re saying is that this is you have that same vision that everything in the house needs to be grounded.

2:09:12 Clint Ober: Over the next 40 years it’s a new industry that will employ a lot of people. And you know, it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s like the medical industry didn’t happen overnight, the way it is. It took 60 years to get there, it’s going to take 60 years for the transition to occur. But there will be grounded flooring, it’s like a lot of the plastic based flooring materials that they have. They put a layer of conductive film on that. And so it wouldn’t even be noticeable. You put in saltillo tile or use water based cedars on concrete, you know, concrete floors and polish them and make them pretty. There’s lots of things that will surface.

2:09:58 Ashley James: Very cool. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show, Clint. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview anything left unsaid, you want to make sure that you share with our listeners?

2:10:12 Clint Ober: Well, I could probably talk for hours.

2:10:15 Ashley James: I’d love that. I love learning from you.

2:10:18 Clint Ober: Yeah. The main thing is, if you have pain in your body, if you have anxiety, irritability, depression, chronic fatigue, if you have an autoimmune disease, you must pay attention to this and at least go outdoors, take your shoes off and spend enough time out there that you can know if this will serve you. And then if you can’t do that, then you must go to ground therapy and at least investigate what they have. And find something that you can afford. And try it if they don’t, I’m sure they’ll give you your money back. But we know that doesn’t happen. Because once they get grounded, then then they they have to keep using it there. The big issue then is how do I get grandma? How do I get I’ll get my sister how to get my girlfriend grounded? That’s more of the issue. But again, this isn’t about pushing product to make a profit. For me, it’s about educating people. But these tools like ground therapy, they’re important tools. And we did try to follow the advice of the NIH and California Health Services to provide low cost methods to solve the problem.

2:11:42 Ashley James: Awesome. Well, listeners can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding to check out those packages. And I was informed by your excellent staff that several are being given away to the listeners. So we’re going to have a giveaway and I’m going to make sure that I make a blurb and put it at the beginning of this interview. But that there’s going to be a giveaway in our Facebook group Learn True Health Facebook group. And so the listeners who aren’t there yet can go to Facebook and search Learn True Health and join the group. Or they can go to www.learntruehealth.com/group and that redirects them to the group. And from there, we’re going to have a giveaway for listeners to be able to win some of your awesome grounding mats and materials. My listeners love to share their experiences with trying new things. And so they’re going to get vocal and share how it made a difference in their lives. And then we can all have this discussion in the Facebook group about how we’re feeling and how this is changing our life. How earthing and grounding is having a positive impact on our lives.

So thank you so much Clint, for everything that you do. I am such a fan of yours. And I am a cheerleader for the work that you’re doing. You’re welcome back on the show anytime you need a platform, you want to have a platform to share new information. And I’d love to interview anyone, any of those doctors that you see fit. I’ll definitely have them on the show because I know that there’s so many doctors that are seeing a difference in the lives of their patients, and that they’re totally on board with your mission to help the world get grounded again.

2:13:21 Clint Ober: We’ll have a few of those. So I’ll point them in your direction for sure.

2:13:27 Ashley James: That sounds great. Thank you so much, Clint. It’s been such a pleasure having you here today.

2:13:29 Clint Ober: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.

—

Outro:

Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out.

You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in.

Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible.

I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals.

There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.

So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you.

Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them now and check it out.

And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

—

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For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price.

That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com

Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected With Clint Ober!

Earthing

 The Earthing Institute

Grounded Beauty

Ground Therapy

Earthing Movie

Facebook – Clint Ober

Book by Clint Ober

Earthing

Recommended Readings by Clint Ober

Return To Nature by Adolf Just

The Plant Paradox by Steven Gundry

Health Coach Success Summit:
https://www.learntruehealth.com/success

More info about becoming certified in Functional Diagnostic Nutrition: https://www.learntruehealth.com/fdn and (use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!)

Free Gift - 21 Day Program to figure out why you feel fat, sick, or tired all the time and to learn how to fix it in 21 days or less! URL is- wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth

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What is The Root Cause Of My Disease?

https://www.learntruehealth.com/what-is-the-root-cause-of-my-disease

Highlights:

• The body expresses itself if it’s out of balance.
• Symptoms mean there’s something dysfunctional inside the body.
• Looking at the body’s whole picture to remove the root cause of physiological symptoms.
• Health issues does not happen overnight.
• Parasites and yeast overgrowth, how it affects the body.
• How the moon phases affect the body internally.
• Environment is 80% of the disease process.
• Autoimmune disease and gluten connection.
• The importance of quality sleep.
• Stress and its relationship to disease.
• Things you can do to de-stress.

Intro:

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health Podcast.

I have a little announcement for everyone who is a health coach, an aspiring health coach or who works in the healthcare industry.

In my interview today, I interviewed a health coach that specializes in functional diagnostic nutrition. She took a course with FDN to learn how to read labs and how to choose which labs should be run specifically around understanding the metabolic process. My guest describes it as metabolic chaos and being able to dive in and assess and figure out the right tests and the right labs to run so that they can understand the root cause.

The example she brings up is that many people with Hashimoto’s thyroid actually the root cause is in their gut health and liver health. That is the first thing that set off this chain of events that trigger the Hashimoto’s. As long as they still have that liver and gut dysfunction they’ll never be able to fully heal their Hashimoto’s and so, many people are going around chasing symptoms. Even naturally chasing symptoms, because they haven’t been able  to get to the root cause. That’s exactly what Functional Diagnostic Nutrition provides.

So if you’re a holistic health expert or health coach and you’d love to learn how to read labs and how everything interrelates, if you’d love to learn how to provide that for your clients that kind of skill set that would take you to the next level, then definitely go to www.learntruehealth.com/fdn as in functional diagnostic nutrition and get more information from that website. You can click through and they’ll give you all kinds of information and I know by using that link and the coupon code LTH, they’re giving $750 off this week. Normally, if you use that code, they have told me that they’ll give my listeners $500 off but this week only it’s $750 off. This course is online and at your own pace which I really enjoy. I’m gonna be enrolling and taking this course because I’m very interested especially after this interview. I’m very interested in learning about how to order these labs and how to interpret these labs and not only do they teach you how to interpret them, they also teach you what to do once you have the information.

In fact, coach Jen even told me that some people take this course simply for their own knowledge which I can see myself doing. Learning how to apply these for my health, my family’s health, but also helping all my clients as a health coach. So go to www.learntruehealth.com/fdn to learn about how you can learn about functional medicine and become a functional diagnostic nutrition certified that adds to your ability to be an excellent health coach. Speaking of being an excellent health coach, there is a free summit for health coaches that is coming up in 14 days. I want you to enroll so you get your spot reserved, it is called The Ultimate Health Coaching Success Summit. They interviewed 36 speakers that are experts in health coaching and marketing and they teach you how to grow your thriving health coaching business and the things that you can do to make sure you empower your clients and grow your business. If you are a health coach or if you’re interested in becoming a health coach, you definitely want to attend this free summit. They also give you the opportunity to buy it and own all of the interviews as well but if you sign up, you can watch it for free. Go to www.learntruehealth.com/success to sign up for the Ultimate Health Coaching Success Summit that’s coming up in 14 days. If you do decide to purchase it, you get to watch it right now. That’s something really cool, you could sign up but if you can’t wait and you want to start watching it now and watch at your own pace then you can decide to purchase the Summit. So www.learntruehealth.com/success gets you access to the summit and www.learntruehealth.com/fdn gives you access to more information about the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition course.

Excellent, well thank you so much for being a listener and if you’re in the states, Happy 4th of July. This is a time where we definitely celebrate with our loved ones and I hope that you are having a wonderful week celebrating with those that you love most. Enjoy today’s interview.

0:05:08.1 Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 365.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us a Functional Diagnostic and Transformational Coach, I love that title it’s quite a mouthful. Welcome to the show Jenn Malecha it is such an honor to have you here today.

0:05:35.9 Jenn Malecha: Thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here to provide some information and insights for your listeners.

0:05:43.1 Ashley James: Absolutely, we were just chatting before we hit record and you were telling me how you were just listening to one of my more recent episodes about mold and how mold has really played a role in your health journey and that you and your family have experienced mold several times and also, you now can help your clients as well with mold. It’s one of those major things that we don’t realize, it is a major contributing factor to triggering disease and autoimmune conditions and kind of maybe being that straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of people. It’s fun that we’re gonna dive into your story because I think you have a really interesting story that we can all learn from. Then you’re gonna teach us some great things about helping us heal when we have been faced with stress, maybe not the best diet that we didn’t realize was the best diet for us, or hormones were unbalanced, maybe we have autoimmune condition. How do we just finally take control again and get conscious and figure out what are those necessary steps in getting us back to health and I know that you are here to share some great tips for us today. I’d love to start by hearing your story.

0:07:00.4 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, I would love to share it too because all of us I think have a health story in some way and obstacles and challenges that we’ve faced and ultimately, our health is what supports us really living our best life. When you think about anything that you do in this lifetime whether it’s your career, family, or if you love to travel like I do, if you don’t have your ideal health and weight then you’re not really getting to, you know, optimize those experiences or get the most out of them in a lot of ways. That was kind of a beginning part of my health journey. I had always been kind of an active kid growing up and I would say I’m fairly healthy in comparison to most. My parents had a garden and we would get about making sure that we had balanced meals for dinner and that we ate our dinner before we had desserts and things like that and so, I actually went to college to pursue an education in Fitness Nutrition and Health and soaked all of that knowledge up and in my early twenties when I was in college is probably when I first started having some health occurrences and I began to come into light and this was very much pre-mold. So I’m definitely gonna talk about the mold’s piece but the molds piece in my journey is the second obstacle that I have faced. I think just explaining to the audience a little bit about the journey prior to that is gonna help bring light to the mold situation a bit too. When I was in my early twenties I, all of a sudden just started to develop seasonal allergies that were worsening year over year over year and these were the things I never had as a kid to the point where I was having recurring ear infections and the seasonal allergies were so debilitating that they would take me down for days or sometimes weeks at a time. I remember one of the last ear infections that I had I was really laid up on the couch for multiple days just struggling for it to finally go away. At that time I was questioning, why was this happening to me because I never had allergies. I was somebody who really prided myself on always being healthy and not ever getting sick. Along with that, I also started to experience what some people might call Chronic Fatigue where I was a personal trainer at the time so I graduated college with my degree in Personal Training where I was kind of figuring out the future of my career path and I just remember going to Starbucks in the afternoon and getting a double Americano and still struggling to keep my eyes open and to stay awake as I was training my afternoon and my evening class and that’s just not normal.

I was tired all of the time. I would go home and literally sit on the couch for 5 minutes and fall asleep instantly. I was having different joint aches and pains that were recurring and I thought that just because I was a runner, that those might be normal but then it became kind of debilitating too. Finally, at the age of 26, I was diagnosed with skin cancer which is kind of like light bulb (aha!) moment for me because when I really started to ponder why I was diagnosed with skin cancer, the pieces of the puzzle just really didn’t fit together. First of all, it was extremely scary to be diagnosed with skin cancer, I think out of all the diagnoses one can receive, anything related to cancer is one of the scariest ones to have because you just don’t know am I going to survive this? Is it treatable? Is it gonna come back? There’s so many questions when it comes to cancer and when I was looking at my specific case, you know, the dermatologist and the doctors start asking you if there’s any family history of cancer and all the questions that looking for clues about why you would be diagnosed with cancer. In my family there was no family history of any cancer related to skin cancer specifically. There was other cancer that ran in my family but nothing related to skin cancer. I was not your, you know, what we will qualify like a chronic tanner, somebody who’s out baking themselves on the beach all the time or using the tanning salon on a recurrent basis. I was, you know, the healthiest people that I knew, I was like “healthiest people” because that version of healthy is not the version of healthy that I practice today and I’ll explain that a little bit, also, but at the time I was eating lean proteins like boneless skinless chicken breast and having a vegetable with every meal and eating yogurt and berries as a snack and exercising regularly, like that’s most people’s definition of healthy right? It wasn’t until I got into the work that I’m doing now as a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner that I really started to be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out why I had been diagnosed with skin cancer or how that manifested in my body. When I enrolled in that training program The Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, one of the things that they have us do is run some lab tests like its a requirement, you have to run a couple of lab tests on yourself as part of the training and one of the lab tests that I ran was about Health 101, it’s a metabolic profile that looks at urinary bio acids which is basically getting you some insights as to how the liver is functioning, like is it sluggish or congested? If it’s not moving bio acids through, that can be an indication that there’s toxic build up. It’s probably happening in the body, it’s just not detoxing as well as it could be. My urinary bio acids where high, my liver was clogged, and then it also looks at lipid peroxide which is a measurement of oxidative stress, and oxidative stress gives you some insights as to how the body is aging, like is the aging really fast which can be some indication for cellular damage or DNA damage its going on and my oxidative stress was also very high. Also measured something called urinary indican which takes a look at how you’re digesting protein and can give you insights about malabsorption, bacterial overgrowth such as H pylori or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and my indican was off as well. After running a simple test, I found that I did have H pylori overgrowth happening in my gut which attributed to some of the migraine headaches that I was having and the recurring back pain I think its vertebrae T7 its where its associated with. I also ran a Salivary Adrenal Hormone Panel and I had a level of adrenal dysfunction that was going on. Essentially on the inside I was a metabolic disaster even though on the outside I was doing all of these allegedly healthy things, right? Especially when I saw that my liver was clogged and the oxidative stress markers where high, I was like, “Oh, this is exactly what’s cultivating this environment for cancer to basically grow in my body”. I immediately implemented a plan that changed my lifestyle like my diet, my rest, the exercise doing more stress reduction type of stuff, eliminating toxins out of my environment, taking supplements to support my body in ways that it needs to be supported and I’m happy to say that the skin cancer never returned and here I am this year 10 years skin cancer free as a result of making some of those lifestyle changes which is huge.

0:14:41.6 Ashley James: That is definitely huge, now did you just have it surgically removed or how did you proceed with your oncologist to eliminate the skin cancer and monitor it?

0:14:52.2 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, so, they went in to the sites. I had a couple of different sites, like the one on my leg and a couple on my back, they cut out a certain diameter around the skin cancer to make sure they get all of the cells and then they stitch it up so I’ve got some beautiful scars on my leg and my back and they monitor that over time. I had to go for skin check-ups every couple of months to make sure that there weren’t any new spots that are coming back. Thankfully, the biopsies on the places that they have kind of cut out came back and none of them were related. So that indicated that the skin cancer itself wasn’t actually spreading it’s just that I had multiple different spots that were happening. So I still go back every year for a skin cancer check just because I am always gonna be a high risk person from having it previously and I’ve never had anything new pop up since those first instances.

0:15:46.3 Ashley James: Can you share what kind of cancer it was?

0:15:48.5 Jenn Malecha: Oh, you’re gonna make me think about this. I wanna say that it’s been so long, I don’t really keep track anymore because it’s something that I just don’t think about aside from it being a fact a huge part of my story. I believe it was basal cell melanoma but I have to go back and check my records I don’t actually know that off the top of my head.

0:16:07.2 Ashley James: Right, you don’t sit around going “I had basal cell melanoma type 2.5 and whatever”. They come up with all these numbers. You figured out that the environment of your body expressed itself with skin cancer because the environment of the body was at a point where it couldn’t handle its oxidative load and so it expressed itself not only with cancer but like you said, you had fatigue, you’re getting chronic infections, and allergies. So all these symptoms, your body is expressing itself saying “I’m out of balance, something is incorrect, something is not optimal” and then you started to dive into those tests. If all of us were to go get those tests would we all find that we are out of balance in some way or have you actually seen people who get these tests and they’re all within normal ranges? I mean, is it pretty common to be out of normal ranges when we get these metabolic tests?

0:17:13.7 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that most of the time I see that people are out of range but that’s because people are coming to me with some type of health complaint that they want to resolve. They already have some insights that their body is signalling to them that something’s not right, they don’t feel right on their own skin, they don’t feel at home in their body, they’ve been diagnosed with something and so the majority of the testing that I see is gonna indicate some things out of balance. If we were running testing on people who said that they felt great on a normal basis, we probably wouldn’t see much and sometimes the reason for that is because everybody has their own threshold of vitality in a sense. It can be an example of how we can correlate this or an example of this is if somebody can get stung by a bee and it’s the end of the world, that’s excruciating pain for them versus another person getting stung by a bee and they don’t feel it at all. So their pain threshold is different, or like women who give birth and some of them are able to give birth naturally and they are like, “Oh, it’s like an easy experience” versus other women who are like, “Give me the epidural as soon as possible” because they can’t handle the pain. Everybody has this bio individuality where our threshold, our adaptability is different. There are some people out there where they can recover or adapt from environmental factors and chronic stresses maybe better than some other people and what’s also interesting that I’ll add about your question here too is that, any time that we’re doing a test it’s only a snapshot in time and the body’s metabolic state is constantly changing like you’re thyroid hormone can be different every single minute of the day. When I work with clients and we do testing and do the training that I’ve received, one of the things that we really emphasize is that we don’t treat the test results, we treat the person and that’s because I definitely have had test results come back what I would say clean, like there’s not really anything on them but the person feels terrible and so I’m not going to dismiss the way that the person is feeling just because the test result comes back saying there’s nothing to be found here like it could have just been that snapshot in time when we caught it at a good moment and there was nothing to show but if we would have tested it five minutes later it could look totally different. The reverse of that is that I definitely have had people that I worked with and say, “I feel really good”, and their test results shows some dysfunction but if they’re telling me that they feel good, there’s no point in chasing the test result and having them go through all the stuff if they feel good because again maybe we just caught it in a bad moment on the test results.

0:19:59.9 Ashley James: Absolutely, I was just at my naturopath yesterday and the nurse, the second I walked in takes my pressure and it is amazing. Throughout the day, my blood pressure is absolutely amazing. I just know myself, the second I walk into the naturopath where I had our 4 year old son and he was extra hyper yesterday for some reason so he was just bouncing off the walls and I have my husband with me and he was just a little bit cranky that our son was just bouncing off the walls and so we’re all in one room together with the nurse who’s taking my blood pressure the second I walked in. I’m like, “My blood pressure’s going to be high” like I just know that and it was like 148/97. I was just, “Wait a second, take it again give me a few minutes” because I have a really good blood pressure so the nurse was like, “Ok, I’ll get the doctor to take it”, I’m like, “Good”. She used one of those machines and I was like, “What are you doing? Get your sphygmomanometer and take it yourself, don’t put this machine on me” and sure enough after I had my appointment with my naturopath and then I’m like, “Oh, by the way can you take my blood pressure?”. She was like, “Sure”, whips it out I was 117/78 or something like that, I’m like, “See, my blood pressure is always good, you just gotta give me a minute, let me sit down and recover from the chaos” but that’s just it is, we would take a snapshot of one time we take blood pressure, one time we take a lab, it can be different from 5 minutes from now. Like you said, we don’t want to treat the lab results as though it’s like the 0:21:51.3?? but we need to see the person as a whole. So, you’re looking at how the liver is functioning, understanding that it can go up this lab result isn’t what it is all the time but it can go up and down, thyroid does go up and down, cortisol does go up and down. I’m sure there are some tests that you do like 24 hour urine collection where it’s like an average of 24 hours or taking samples of saliva throughout the day for the whole day cortisol snapshot, gives you a better understanding of what’s going on but you’re really looking at the symptoms. Can you maybe dive in to a bit about listening to the body, listening to the symptoms and how it paints a picture for you so when someone comes to you and gives you a set of symptoms, you go “Aha! It might be this, or it might be that”, can you talk a bit about those kind of symptoms that you commonly see and what they mean.

0:22:48.6 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, so let’s just first define the fact that symptoms are the last thing to show up in a dysfunctional state. When we’re experiencing symptoms, there’s already been some type of dysfunction that’s been going on underneath the hood of your car and your body basically for a period of time and we kind of touch on this earlier when were talking about my skin cancer story is that my body had been giving me signs, the allergies, the fatigue that I was experiencing, the stuff like not being able to manage my weight very well even though I was doing all the right things. These were all symptoms that something was happening and the skin cancer was like my body raising a huge red flag going, “Hey! Like you need to pay attention to the situation that’s happening here because this is not good, you know?” I do remember finding that first, it was like a mole on my leg and really feeling like intuitively it was a foreign thing on my body. I have moles on my body and freckles and things like that and this one I was like, “This feels like it’s not supposed to be here”, it’s like an alien whose landed on my leg and I needed to go get this thing checked out and I think that so often, most of us are ignoring some of the signs because we consider them normal just because they’re common. Symptoms can be very common but that doesn’t mean they’re normal. We need to start looking at like one of the symptoms that we’re experiencing and what does our body trying to tell us as a result of that. There’s a lot of symptoms that we will ignore that we just don’t even know that are symptoms for example like one of the questions that I ask clients on my intake forms is, are you sensitive to bright lights, and most people would not even think about it as a symptom because it’s so normal just to put on sunglasses immediately as you walk out your front door right? We look at symptoms, the tricky thing about symptoms is that they are cross-related to multiple different systems of the body so we can take something like fatigue for example. Fatigue could be related to adrenal dysfunction, it could be related to poor blood sugar regulation, it could be because you’re getting inadequate sleep at night time, it could be because your T3 hormone is low, it could be because you’re liver’s not functioning very well, maybe you’re nutrient deficient because you’re gut is dysfunctional, and so the reality is when it comes to symptoms, we may never know what the root cause is but we can always have a positive effect on it and when one system of the body goes down, all the other systems of the body are going to be soon to follow essentially. Going back to your question Ashley, you asked me, basically, how do you look at a cluster of symptoms to determine what somebody might have, well, my job is not to diagnose people with their condition, my job is to look for healing opportunities in the body because regardless of whatever the condition is, if we go back to the general principles of health and we coach up function or improve function in the body no matter what their symptoms or conditions are, they’re going to start to resolve themselves you know. I find in my own personal journey and with a lot of the clients that I worked with, a diagnosis isn’t really helpful in a lot of cases like I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s as a result of the mold that we eventually found in our home in a later point in time in my story and having that diagnosis didn’t necessarily changed the course for me on what I was going to do to get my body back, like it still involved modifying my diet, my rest, my exercise, stress reaction, some strategic supplements that were supporting my thyroid and some other functions that were going on like it helped. It’s like it helps with 20% but the other 80% is really just dialing in on those general principles of health that we kind of all know to be true but I don’t think that most of us are really paying attention to or prioritizing sometimes in ways that we need to really feel our best.

0:27:06.2 Ashley James: So you have a set of rules for helping people to dial in optimal health, you know, the foundations, the building of the strong foundation of health regardless of what their diagnosis or symptoms are, they follow this set of rules. I’m pretty sure I could guess some of them like to drink enough healthy water everyday, move your body in a way that brings you joy, and get enough of those wonderful nutrients from fruits and vegetables everyday. There are certain things everyone knows to do, whether they’re doing them or not is another thing but that they really do make a difference. I definitely want to dive in to what you teach to build the foundations of health but first, I would like to go back. Are there symptoms that you could tell us that when someone presents with this symptom, this is the test I look for, this is how I help them, do you have sort of a list of symptoms that when someone experiences, it puts a light bulb in your head to go “Ok, we should look over here”.

0:28:15.8 Jenn Malecha: Actually, I don’t because that would be chasing the symptoms versus really understanding what the healing opportunities are within all systems of the body. When a client comes to me, no matter what the condition is or the issues they’re having whether it’s fatigue, or known autoimmune condition my goal in order to truly understand what is going on with the person on a physiological and a functional level, I love to run a group of lab tests to look at the hormones, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy, and nervous system. Let’s get the big picture of what’s going on here because, no matter what is the condition or the symptom that they’re having, again, going back to the concept that every single system in the body is interconnected, that’s a network of systems. If one system is going down, they may be presenting symptoms in one area but that area could be completely disconnected or really far away from whatever the root cause is and a really great example of this is Dr. Tom O’Bryan is somebody that I follow and one of my mentors, and in his book, the Autoimmune Fix, he’s talking about a 4 year old child that had a recurring growth on their eye and they couldn’t figure out what was going on with this. They finally cut gluten out of this child’s diet and the growth never came back and then they tested him to be celiac so that can just be an example of how like the root cause can be removed from where the symptom is actually showing up like you would suspect the recurring growth a tumor in your eye is related to celiac disease. How is the eye related to the gut you know, it’s what a lot of people would be considering. Thyroid is another really great example of this too, if you have poor thyroid function or a sluggish thyroid, well we have to ask a question of why is that happening in the first place? If you go through the physiological process of thyroid where you have your TSH that is released from the pituitary gland to stimulate the thyroid to produce T4 and T4 has to be converted into T3 and then the majority of that conversion happens in the liver and then the intestinal tract, if you have low T3 we need to be looking at what’s going on in the liver and the intestinal tract also like, why are you not converting T4 to T3 properly or is it you’re actually not making enough T4 from the thyroid and if that’s the case then ask him the question again why is that happening, like, are you not getting the right amount of nutrients or support, is the HPA access not working well? So you can start to see how in order to really understand the whole picture we want to look at all these different systems of the body at the same time to see how they’re all interconnected and where the multiple dysfunctions might be lying and that is where you understand how you really get to heal the body. We can correct cortisol dysfunction if we can boost liver function, if we can get the gut running better and cleaner, then the thyroid issue is going to resolve itself. We don’t want to just go after thyroid, is that making sense?

0:31:40.3 Ashley James: Absolutely! If I have a friend with Hashimoto’s and her nature path finally after years discovered that she had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and now she’s being treated for that and what you’re saying is that what’s going on in your gut absolutely affects your thyroid and your other hormones.

0:31:59.9 Jenn Malecha: Exactly, and that’s why I have so many people that come to me and say, “I have been working and taking thyroid medication or done some things to support my thyroid but I’m still not feeling better”, it’s because they’re kind of missing some of these other pieces of the puzzle and so I never really chase the symptoms. I’m like, let’s actually look at the whole picture and see what’s going on and where are those areas of opportunity where we can boost function in the overall body which is going to have that same domino effect to help bring the other systems of the body back up and running again.

0:32:30.4 Ashley James: Cool. I want to reword my question because what you were explaining is actually what I want, I want more of that. So, when someone comes to you and they have been experiencing the symptoms for a while and they have a diagnosis like, autoimmune or hashimoto’s or autoimmune of the thyroid or some kind of autoimmune condition or some kind of maybe their hormones are out of balance in some way, regardless of whether they have a diagnosis or not but they come to you and they say, “This is what’s going on with me or this is what my doctor told me I have.” and obviously they’re suffering. Can you give us some examples of ok so someone comes to you with this diagnosis or these set of symptoms and you go, “Aha! We need to look over here.” and it’s just like thinking, “What do you mean the gut has to do with skin health” or “What do you mean the gut has to do with or the liver and the gut has to do with thyroid”, can you just explain a bit about why looking at the body holistically is so important when people come with each of these different conditions and where you want to look to see what’s going on like these different conditions that you end up looking at the health of the liver, or health of the kidneys, or health of the gut in order to help them to resolve something that doesn’t seem like it’s related to the gut, or the liver, and the kidneys.

0:33:55.6 Jenn Malecha: Yeah. First, I’ll say to that is that whatever you’re currently experiencing right now in terms of the health issue did not happen overnight and that is the first thing that I explain to people. We get in a consultation, that’s basically where we start is I just set the preface of the conversation with whatever you’re experiencing currently right now did not happen overnight. It’s an accumulation of things that have happened over a period of your lifetime that have probably just worn down your body and started to degrade some of these systems, like dysfunction started to set in and then we have symptoms that arise ultimately. And so, I will have people go through their health history, I have them go all the way to the point of birth Ashley because, if somebody was a C-section baby or they were not breast fed for example, those could actually be factors that are affecting their current health for them right now in their 30s, 40s, 50s, or however old they are because right from the beginning of their entrance into this lifetime, they were not exposed to the right types of bacteria to help build a healthy microbiome and a healthy immune system and so we usually find clues right there and then throughout their childhood, they’re often becomes more inclusive, like recurring illness, or infections thats happened, or things and then all of a sudden their menstrual cycles were off from the beginning and they have forgotten that all of these things that happened over their timeline or they just haven’t really paid attention to them realizing that they were contributing factors to what’s going on with them today. So, that’s part of my answer to your question because looking at the whole person means looking at that whole life experience to understand what are all the different types of stress that they have encountered in their lifetime and I ask people to redefine what the word stress means to them because we often think that stress is just the mental emotional stress that we encounter when we get in a disagreement with a loved one, or when we have an angry boss, or we get stuck in traffic or something but, stress is anything that places a burden on your body that results in inflammation and leads to dysfunction. It could be to foods that you’re eating that aren’t right for you, poor quality food that your getting, over or under exercising, toxins in your environment, and other types of triggers. Someone comes to me with let’s say they do have a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s. My goal is to understand how they got to that point in the first place because I want to get us some insights on how do we go about reversing it. Again, going through that clear health history from the point of their birth all the way leading up to where they currently are, being able to pick out clues of things like, maybe they had hormone imbalances that set in in adolescence when they started their menstrual cycle and they have indicators for what would be like estrogen dominance which can lead to triggering Hashimoto’s and thyroid imbalances or if they’ve been drinking and bathing in toxic water, the chemicals and water that can bind the thyroid hormone and start to create dysfunction that’s happening in the body and that would also give me some insights that their liver has been overloaded based on their environmental exposures. Talking about their digestion, what do their bowel movements look like, do they have bloating or gas, are they responding to food; could give us insights about what’s going on with gut health. And how do they sleep? You know, there are some key clues that you can get around sleep like if somebody is wired and tired at night time and has trouble falling asleep that usually highly correlates with having a parasite bacteria or yeast overgrowth that’s going on in the gut, if there’s somebody who wakes up recurrently in the middle of the night, usually that window of like maybe 1  to 3 AM that’s an indication of their blood sugar dropping so you have poor blood sugar regulation which probably means that they’re not eating the right diet, like macronutrient breakdown for them to regulate blood sugar or that they have some cortisol dysfunction that set in that’s dysregulating blood sugar as well, or they’re insulin resistive and kind of like putting all the clues of the puzzle together and whatever all the clues of the puzzle are, they always kind of relate back to these foundational tests that I run with every single person to start. Again, so we can look at the hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy, and nervous system all in one swoop and see this big picture of like let’s look through all the systems and then based on that information, I will put together a protocol for them that includes strategic recommendations for diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplementation, and toxin removal, and there’s a reasonable expectation that within 90 days, they should see some really significant improvements in their health. If they’re not seeing the improvements that I would expect them to see or making progress in a way that I would expect them to, that’s where we go back to the drawing board. Let’s dive a little bit deeper, you’re doing all of the right things, you should be seeing x, y, and z results but you’re not getting that, so now let’s consider something like mold in your home or an underlying autoimmune condition that we don’t know that you have or lines or something else that might be deeper that didn’t necessarily show up on one of those foundational lab tests. Regardless of some of those deeper issues that are happening, you still need those foundational lab tests to be supporting those systems of the body because let’s say it is molds, toxicity for example, you still have to support the hormones, liver function, the digestive system, energy, nervous system, immune system in order to be able to recover from mold exposure, right?

0:39:55.1 Ashley James: I love it. I love that you are looking at the body as a whole and that you have these insights. I know about waking up in the middle of the night was blood sugar but, being jittery tired but wired, I did not know the connection to parasites. I’ve had a few really cool interviews about parasites and it always blows my mind how common parasites are. No one wants to talk about it, by the way. My mom, when I was about 11, or 12, it was late 80s early 90s. My mom brought home a book called, ‘Guess What Came to Dinner?’ and I still remember it, my mom put us on a parasite protocol because we got some parasite testing and we had picked up one parasite from Mexico and 2 parasites from owning pets, a cat and dog parasite. Who knows how long we’d had them for. I think it was like one dog parasite one cat parasite. I had a dog when I was like an infant, so the whole family basically had these parasites. I remember doing the whole parasite cleanse. I was just a kid and I was so into it, I thought it was like, “Are you kidding me? We all have worms inside us?”. I grew up, my mom was really into health stuff and doesn’t every family do parasite cleanses and drink fresh smoothies and juices and protein shakes and doesn’t everyone do supplements. I grew up and that was my environment and so I just thought this was totally normal and now coming into the real world going, “This is so not normal!” like, parents don’t talk about parasites with their kids and go on parasite cleanses. Of course, for the majority of people this is news to them, thinking that we need to deworm ourselves. One of my previous guests Dr. Jade Davidson explains and he has a whole protocol of getting rid of parasites, especially for people with lyme disease and his protocol works really well with people with lyme and he says that, back a 100 years ago our great grandparents knew to deworm, that every year we would give these herbs and clays and all that stuff to all of our farm animals and we do it to ourselves too, that it was just a known thing. Since modern medicine has come in, in the last 3 generations we’ve really given up our health and health education over to the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors and the hospitals and we have stopped practicing these daily health habits. It’s been lost, you know? We all moved away from the farm to the city, and with a matter of generations we forgot about midwifery and we forgot about how to take care of ourselves using nature. Now we’re coming back, now we’re turning around going, “Wait a second”. So listening to the body, what other symptoms do you look for to confirm for you that someone might have parasites or yeast overgrowth or candida, what other common symptoms happen?

0:43:28.3 Jenn Malecha: Yes, another thing that’s interesting is that they can correlate with the moon cycles. So, we’re in a new moon right now, today’s the first day of a new moon and so usually the symptoms you’re having would be lower in a new moon stage versus during as we get closer to the full moon if you’re having digestive issues or skin issues or anxiety or sleep issues, you would see those symptoms start to worsen as you get closer to a full moon because the full moon, creates its gravitational pull on the earth and we know this from tide cycles of the ocean during a full moon, the tide tends to be higher, the tide will shift on the earth and that same gravitational pull kind of happens in our body and creates this awakening response in the kidneys, and within parasites and bacteria and yeast. That would be something to look for as I start tracking and seeing if your symptoms are worsening as you get closer to the full moon and as you start to see some relief as the full moon starts to go away we get into a new moon phase. There’s also, skin issues can be a result of parasites and bacteria and yeast overgrowth or they can be connected because whenever you’re experiencing skin issues like rashes or acne like anything that’s coming out of your skin is like an indication that your body is trying to detox, and parasites and bacteria and yeast overgrowth create their own byproduct or waste product internally and they can create a really toxic environment for us. Definitely, variations within your bowel movements, if you vary from being more constipated to having diarrhea, if there’s a potent smell that comes along with that, sometimes you can actually see what we call biofilm in the toilet, it seems like there’s a filmy substance that’s in the toilet because parasites and bacteria and yeast, they produce biofilm, it’s like a protective layer that they produce so they don’t get eliminated. Another thing is teeth grinding, a lot of people don’t know that teeth grinding and tinnitus actually can be indications of parasitic or yeast or bacteria overgrowth as well. These are really common things I see a lot that can be linked to those kind critters that are going on in our gut.

0:45:55.3 Ashley James: Now, one thing is becoming more and more popular is autoimmune disease and one argument is, “Well, we’re better at diagnosing.” People have always had autoimmune disease, we’re just now good at diagnosing it so that’s one argument. Kind of like, autism are those in the spectrum it was like 1 in 10,000 children back when we were kids and now it’s like between 1 in 40 and 1 in 60 depending on boys or girls and so some people say, “Well, we’re just better at diagnosing and better at seeing it.”, is one argument right? We can’t really disprove that but we can definitely gather some evidence to prove or disprove it but ultimately, we know it’s a hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that in the last 30 years, many changes have happened in our environment and even in our food chain that have lead to people developing autoimmune, so autoimmune is primarily a man-caused illness that if we were all living peacefully in the jungle eating fresh fruits and vegetables and we had no chemicals, we didn’t have any pollution, that no one would have autoimmune condition or that it would be incredibly rare. So, this one idea that in the last 30 years it has exacerbated greatly because we are exposed to so many toxins and the body just can’t handle it right? It’s showing up as the weak point in that person’s genetics. What is your is your belief in huge increase that we’re seeing in autoimmune? What do you think contributes to triggering it in people?

0:47:46.7 Jenn Malecha:  I wanna think that the environment is 80% of any disease where currently known, autommunity, cardiovascular disease, like whatever is going on, environmental plays a bigger role that I think most people are willing to or want to even acknowledge. And we know this because there are still places around the world we call them blue zones where the diseases are virtually non-existence and people were living well into their nineties and their hundreds disease-free and a colleague of mine Jason Proll just did a whole documentary about this called the Human Longevity project and they went out and they researched and met with these people that lived in this blue zone to figure out what are the things they are doing like what makes it different for them and environment is the biggest part and you know just how they live their lives and the fact that they do live in these areas is where toxins and modern society is barely present in their environment, I think that’s a huge factor. When we look at something like autoimmune conditions, there are rules that says that 3 things have to be in place, this one that you have to have a genetic predisposition to it but, we are not a result of our genes. Our environment is what turns our genes on or off essentially. So, you have to have this genetic predisposition to it. Second is that you have to have basically a degree of leaky gut going on. And leaky gut really means that you have a dysfunctional intestinal tract where toxins are crossing the gut barrier getting into the bloodstream that aren’t supposed to which then is triggering the inflammation in the body and the immune system and autoimmunity really shows itself when the immune system has become so overwhelmed with so much inflammation that it no longer is able to differentiate who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and it starts attacking healthy tissue as well. The third piece of autoimmunity then are these triggers for inflammation and there are some specific triggers that then can be related to certain autoimmune condition. With Hashimoto’s for example, we’ve found that epstein barr or also known as mono like UBV is a trigger for Hashimoto’s as well as certain parasites and bacteria like H pylori bacteria, blastocystis hominis as a parasite, those have been strongly correlated with Hashimoto’s cases. On the stool sample tests that I run with all my clients, there’s actually a section for autoimmune trigger types of bacteria and parasites, we got other things like klebsiella for example, which is a common one that we can find amongst a lot of people. Gluten is a trigger for some autoimmune conditions obviously celiac but also crosses over to Hashimoto’s as well and then there are certain toxins in our environment. If we look at this factor of like what you are saying, I love that you’re bringing these 2 hypothesis to light because, yes, we are better at diagnosing I have been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and when I was looking at family history, both of my grandmothers were being treated for thyroid disorder but they hadn’t necessarily been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. Now, knowing that I’ve been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, they’re long passed but I could probably make a really good assumption saying they probably had Hashimoto’s too just probably didn’t know how to diagnose it then. There’s studies and surveys that have been done with the traditional medical world with doctors coming out of school to ask them, how comfortable do they feel with diagnosing autoimmune conditions, and the reality is it that they don’t really feel comfortable about it and so do you think it’s been underdiagnosed for a long period of time but that means that we actually could have higher populations of people in the previous generations that had autoimmune conditions and we would have to ask why would they have these autoimmune conditions and then we’ll start to look at environment again. So, they kind of really interplay with each other, I think, and the environment is a huge factor and that’s what we have to be more conscious of because I know it for myself, reversing my Hashimoto’s, the way that I was able to do that was by changing my environment and changing my lifestyle. Just because you’ve been diagnosed with something doesn’t mean that your doomed to live that way or have that forever. I will always have to be aware of this risk factor that I have but I don’t have to live a life suffering with Hashimoto’s because we do have that ability to change our environment and our lifestyle and reverse the effects of it essentially.

0:52:40.1 Ashley James: I’m glad you brought that up because some people especially some doctors will tell their patients that you have an autoimmune condition, you’re going to have it for the rest of your life. If I had stuck with MDs they would have kept me on metformin and kept me in diabetes. Luckily, especially if any MDs is listening to the show which are about 20% of my listeners are holistic health professionals, so I have had MDs write me and say, “Hey, I’m not one of the bad guys”, I’m not trying to bash them but it’s just if we take all of them, there’s a majority that will give their patient metformin or give their patient insulin if it’s called for and tell them ok, “Follow the American Diabetes Association diet” and we’re going to manage your diabetes. I’m talking about type 2 obviously type 1 is a totally different concept but type 2 being that the body can still produce its own insulin and the blood sugar is out of control it’s not in healthy ranges and the body is able to produce insulin, so type 2 diabetes. So going to see “traditional pharmaceutical allopathic based medicine”, you go to see that MD, they put you on drugs to “manage” as in we’re not curing you, we’re not going to reverse it, you will always have diabetes, we’re just going to try to manage it. So a lot of people that have an autoimmune condition get the same treatment, get the same spiel that we’re going to put you on these drugs, we’ll test you every few years but there’s no talk of let’s reverse it, let’s cure it, let’s no longer have it, no you have it and you will always have it. Maybe you’re body will spontaneously go into remission but you will always have it. That’s one philosophy right, and then we’ll have to pull ourselves out of that box, pull ourselves out of that man-made philosophy, man-made confinement, and pull ourselves out to this new way of thinking where the body has the miraculous ability to heal itself if we give it what it needs and if we stop giving it what it doesn’t need.

0:55:05.3 Jenn Malecha: Exactly.

0:55:07.4 Ashley James: And that diagnosis is man-made. It’s a set of symptoms and the body can correct itself. So, we are not so broken that we’ll always be broken. That’s what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe but the body has a miraculous ability to heal itself. Let’s not own the diagnosis as though it’s a death sentence or a life sentence or how we are defined or confined, instead, we come out of it. Just take yourself out and go, “Ok, my body has a set of symptoms, something’s going on let’s heal the body and it’s reversible”, now if I went and decided to eat junk food everyday, if I went and eat a standard american diet I could recreate diabetes in my body, that’s just how my genetics expressed when I fill it full of junk right? And so, I know that about myself and someone like you, you could recreate autoimmune condition or the skin condition, you could recreate that, you could give your body a set of circumstances, like McDonald’s and Starbucks everyday and figure out how to recreate that disease. It’s kind of empowering, once we realize that the choices we’ve been making 50 times a day, everything we put in our mouths and how we choose to manage our stress, or not manage our stress, and whether we’re moving our body in the way that it brings us joy or not, but every single choice that we’re making everyday has built up and led us to the disease state we’re in and that we can shift that, like you said 80% is the environment we can shift it and help the body gain health. Coming all the way back to birth, can you elaborate why even knowing you’re a C-section or whether you’ve been birth vaginally and whether you were breastfed or not, why that can play a factor in someone’s health now 30 or 50 years later?

0:57:11.7 Jenn Malecha: So when we are a natural birth we go through the vaginal canal and at that point, you are exposed to all of the bacteria within the vaginal canal and that bacteria is what helps to stimulate your own micro biome growth and helps to stimulate the strength of your immune system. So, if you’re a C-section baby or if you have C-section children, you’re missing out on this once in a lifetime opportunity. We’re not going back up and down on that vaginal canal ever in our lifetime right? There is a practice out there, obviously C-section has to happen sometimes because of medical concerns or if the mom or the baby’s life is at risk and things like that, and there are some doctors out there who are practitioners of something that you should request if you ever get yourself in a position of having a C-section baby is that they can still sweep the vaginal canal and smear? some of that bacteria over the baby’s face and the mouth and eyes so they get some of that exposure and that can be very helpful. When it comes to breastfeeding, there’s colostrum. The mother produces colostrum, there’s also bacteria that’s coming from the mother’s body that’s again helping to boost the immune system and helping to build the microbiome and so, if we don’t get exposed to that from a young age then we’re basically missing some of the building blocks that are really critical to the future of our health. And aside from that, when breastfeeding doesn’t take place then what are we supplementing with? We’re supplementing with formula which tends to be really high in sugar and that is then disrupting or causing inflammation within the intestinal tract and also tends to be milk-based. So milk that’s produced by cows or somewhere else and that is not our natural form of food for humans. It’s not exactly replicable, formulas not a great replacement necessarily but it’s the only thing that we really know about or know what to do if right now, right? There are places out there where women donate their breast milk, and you can go get that. You know I’ve had friends of my own, I don’t have any children but I’ve had friends of my own where they were in a situation where they weren’t able to breastfeed. It just wasn’t working, you know, for various reasons and they were a little bit reluctant to go utilise some of these places where you can purchase breast milk because it is a hit to your ego and your pride a little bit, I understand that. I hope for some of the listeners out there that are listening to this, know that if you’re the one who set your child up for the best success with their health, that should be something that you might want to consider as a replacement instead of going straight to formula. We can get down the rabbit hole of the push on formula in the food industry, but ultimately we need to be like you said, every choice that you make or every action you take is an opportunity to make a choice for your health or your child’s health if you’re raising a child, every time you sit down to eat, you would have a choice to make. You can eat something that either support your body and builds it up or breaks it down. When we go out to exercise, or when we look at our sleep, or the other choices that we’re making in life, every single action is an opportunity to make a choice on how you’re going to support your body, to either build up health or break it down essentially.

1:00:48.0 Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. Our son, when he was born just over 4 years ago I could not produce enough breast milk and I did everything, I drank the teas, and the tinctures, the cookies, and all those little things that the midwives and doulas and my naturopath all recommended and I did everything I could and I still wasn’t producing enough. The first rule is baby gets fed and that’s when I was introduced to Human Milk for Human Babies which is a project where women, wherever you are look for Human Milk for Human Babies’ Facebook group in your area and if you have milk to donate go to Human Milk for Human Babies and find the local Facebook group and so there’s women who are donating. So I connected with women who say I eat organic, I’m not on any medications, I eat organic, I do not drink alcohol, I don’t drink coffee, my baby is this old, and I have this many ounces to donate. We went around for the first 6 months of our son’s life and supplemented the majority of his milk. I’d give as much as I could and then we drove around and we would drive sometimes an hour away, even this one woman who was a client of one of our naturopaths who had flown to the east coast and she has a huge surplus, she shipped it frozen, she shipped it overnight to us. Now that was like a month’s supply, like a huge cooler, a month’s supply of breast milk. It can be done, it absolutely can be done and it was a great adventure and actually made some friends that are still friends to this day. It can be a great support network to connect into and if I do have another child and I have a surplus, I would be so excited to donate it but it’s very interesting that we can see the correlation between whether someone was breastfed, whether they were birth vaginally and their health to this day, and so we know that if someone wasn’t, that we need to do extra support for the microbiome of their gut and that does play a role in their health. The last 2 weeks I love doing experiments on myself. I’m always shifting my diet. I’m always playing around with what does my body needs? I figured that you would just be playing with your diet and I think the listener would benefit from this kind of mentality where it’s like be fluid and be willing to experiment, be willing to do these little elimination diets with yourself. You know what, I’m going to do an experiment for the next 2 weeks, I’m not going to have any dairy, or I’m not going to have any grains just to experience what does your body feel like away from those foods. And so, I decided to cut out, I’ve been gluten-free for 8 years so I don’t eat barley wheat oats but I decided to go flour free and I’ve been sugar free for the most part but you know like occasionally would have something with some kind of natural sweetener but I decided to go 100% sugar free, I’m already dairy free, and flour free, and focus my foods on whole food plant-based. So it’s like a very anti-inflammatory diet. I wake up with so much more energy now and I don’t feel like I cut out that much, I just decided my plate is full of vegetables and whole grains, so like either brown rice or sweet potato and just tons of vegetables and some legumes and that’s it, that’s like my breakfast, lunch, dinner for the last 2 weeks and I’m really impressed by how good I feel. So there’s been a few times where I was out or I was at a friends house and I could have eaten sort of off my plan that I’ve created for myself and I sat there and I thought, “You know, I could have that.” like whatever the food was, that was delicious. I could have that gluten-free vegan cupcake at the birthday party last weekend, but I didn’t because I thought, you know what, I feel so good right now and I just know that I won’t feel as good after I eat that very pro-inflammatory food. And so we have to ask ourselves, do I want the 5 minutes of joy that eating this McDonalds, I always use McDonalds as an example but, I’m going to get a letter from them one day, and just whatever that food is you know that is pro-inflammatory to you, is 5 minutes of joy really worth a 3 days of inflammation and maybe just feeling off and feeling kind of sluggish, is it really worth it? And ultimately, it wasn’t for me. I am just feeling even better and even better everyday noticing that the inflammation that was caused by flour products and those grains that its dropping of my body and I’m feeling better and better. It’s a cool little mind trick. Once we’re eating really clean it’s like, it’s not worth it to go back and eat the foods that are harming us because 5 minutes of pleasure and that 5 minutes of dopamine spike is not really worth 3 days of pain.

1:06:21.9 Jenn Malecha: Right, right. Yeah, I love this concept. I mean, this is something that I talk with my clients all the time about is play this game with yourself, create presents by every time you’re faced with food choices, like ask yourself is it worth it, because most people are just moving through life on autopilot, we were talking a little bit earlier about, have you ever had that experience of driving home from work and all of a sudden you are in your driveway and you don’t really remember how you got there because you are on autopilot. It’s like a routine of what you do every single day and most times that’s how we’re moving through life as well, we’re not paying attention to how this food or how does this experience or how does this action really make me feel, and then questioning like is this worth it and I know that was a shift to that I made in the beginning also, when I started to move towards a gluten, dairy, sugar, soy free type of lifestyle which is starting to make that connection that when I eat this I feel this way, and is that how I want to be feeling. After I’ve been gluten-free for some time we went to Thailand in 2017 and we’re in Chiang Mai and I remember there was a local dish there sounded so amazing and I decided to try it knowing that it had gluten in it, I shared it with my friends and I didn’t feel great afterwards. I had brain fog, my stomach was a little bit upset, and my joints were a little tender and so I remember just consciously going through this process of is this the way that I want to experience the rest of my trip, because this is like day 2 when we arrived there. I want to have energy, I want to remember and be clear minded, like all the beautiful sights that are to be seen here, I flew 36 hours from California to Thailand, I don’t want to mess this up you know. And I think that that’s just how we want to start living our life more on a day to day basis is really just creating that presence and recognizing like tuning in to our body and seeing how it responds to the things that we’re doing. And also this point that you brought up too, is that things can shift. One of the reasons that I kind of play around with my diet from time to time is because our body is always shifting. When I was in the midst of healing Hashimoto’s I had tried to start and get into a little bit of intermittent fasting and more of a Keto style diet and I instantly realized that my body was not responding well to that and I healed the Hashimoto’s and now I primarily eat more of like a keto style diet and it totally works for me because I’ve resolved the underlying hormone imbalances that were going on or another great example of that is eating seasonally, you know, you’re in southern california in the US, you know it’s summertime and so the hotter weather like I’m finding my body craving blueberries or we walked by a peach tree the other day and I was like salivating looking at these peaches. And I was like, you know what, this is my body, we’re meant to eat seasonally, we’re not meant to be forced into this structured diet 100% of the time, I don’t believe that. If we look at our ancestors and even indiginous tribes that are around our modern day society now, they eat seasonally based upon what is available. They have great food orientation in their diet and that’s something that we should be considering too as well and you might find that some foods are problematic for you right now, you cut it out for a little bit and then you may be able to reintroduce them and have no problem with them you know. And it’s all about the overall load on your body and sometimes we just need to stop adding fuel to the inflammatory fire and allow our body to heal and then we’re able to tolerate things much better afterwards.

1:10:21.5 Ashley James: I’d love to dive in to what you teach your clients. Overall, what’s the foundations of health that no matter what condition they have really benefits, so benefits a 100% of the population to make sure that their doing.

1:10:40.1 Jenn Malecha: So the first thing is figuring out what foods your body needs to eat to function at its potential and I’m not biased towards any type of diet. I really believe that you are unique and therefore your diet should be too. There is a difference between eating healthy and eating right for your body. Eating right for your body will incorporate healthy foods but not every healthy food is right for your body. You just gave a great example of yourself, that you’re gluten free and all these things but maybe like, even the gluten free flours were “healthy”, they were not doing you a good service at this point in time in your life. A banana, banana will obviously be considered as a healthy food but if you have blood sugar regulation issues or insulin resistant going on, that’s not a healthy food for you right now. And so, and what they try to walk people through in exploratory process like we use food sensitivity testing, looking at their digestive system, as well as metabolic typing to kind of find those pieces of the puzzle to figure out what kind of foods are right for your body then they go through this journaling experience to really dial that and see how their body is reacting to certain foods so that they create a connection with their body, an intuitive connection so that, they will know how this knowledge moving forward about what foods are right for their body and that’s something like you’ll always have, that’s priceless. And then, really that might have huge emphasis is on sleep, because I say all the time like your diet and exercise efforts are worth nothing if you aren’t sleeping well and aside from sleeping well, good quality sleep during the right periods of time of the day. I’m sure you’ve talked about circadian rhythms and cortisol rhythms here on your show before and our body has this natural rhythm to it that is in alignment with the sun and the moon cycles. And so, there are certain times, really critical times that we should be sleeping and generally speaking, that’s from about 10PM to at least 2AM and then in extended 8 hours would be 10PM to 6AM or so. Once the sun sets and temperature decreases and light decreases, our bodies are already starting to shift into this creative like we’re supposed to preparing for sleep and based on this time clock that we’re on certain critical functions are supposed to just happen in certain times. A couple of hours after the sun sets your body will start releasing human growth hormone and the liver’s supposed to its big huge detoxification process around like, 2AM in the middle of the night. If you’re not sleeping during those times those functions will not be happening or they won’t be happening to the extent that they should be and your missing out on these natural healing opportunities that happen all the time and no matter how much you sleep in the next day, your body will never make up for those lost times. So that’s why a lot of people can like, they go to bed at midnight or 1 and yes, they sleep until 8 or 9 or 10 o’clock the next day but they still feel groggy, it’s because they missed out on that critical sleep time from 10 to 2 and they missed out on those critical functions that their body is supposed to be doing at that time of night. A really good visual for this is people can Google the Chinese medicine like body clock or time clock, and in Chinese medicine, they have it all mapped out. There are certain hours at certain times a day, like your body is supposed to be doing these things. So if you’re not sleeping during those hours, you’re missing out on those incredibly important functions.

1:14:30.6 Ashley James: And how important is timing around eating because if someone’s still digesting their food at 2 in the morning because they have a late night snack, or they ate right before bed, how much does that disrupt the big liver healing that happens at 2 in the morning?

1:14:48.4 Jenn Malecha: It can be different for every person. Especially if somebody’s got some more severe blood sugar imbalances that are going on, some of those people actually really benefit from eating a high protein or fat containing snack right before bed within a 30 minute window before bed because it helps to balance their blood sugar in the middle of the night versus other people won’t do as well with that. So I think that’s just on an individual basis to really figure those things out and what might work for you to resolve that issue like when I have somebody eats a high fat or a high protein snack before bed to balance their blood sugar in the middle of the night. Once we get it balanced, they eventually don’t need that anymore and usually that comes from resolving what their eating throughout the rest of the day. Making sure they have balanced meals throughout the rest of the day but I do believe that and I found this to be successful in most people, we do need to give our bodies a break from digesting which is kind of where the whole philosophy around intermittent fasting comes into play or like just having an eating window of like 11AM to maybe 7PM so that you can give your body a break. There’s a lot of healing benefit that occurs like cell autophagy and things that can happen when we’re not digesting all of the time. That’s for some of the lab testing that really helps like I can see on a DUTCH test if their cortisol or other things are super dysfunctional then fasting isn’t right for somebody in order to balance things out at this point in time once we get them in a better place and they can implement some intermittent fasting or specific eating windows that are right for them.

1:16:33.8 Ashley James: Absolutely, that’s where the individuality comes into play. If someone doesn’t have a blood sugar imbalance and they might benefit from intermittent fasting or experimenting, I love experimenting, it’s like “try it.” I turned to my husband a few weeks ago and I said, “Let’s try finishing dinner by 6PM and then just seeing how long we last until we break the fast. It might be 2PM the next day, who knows? Let’s just see how we feel.” and I noticed that for me, I have way more energy in the morning when I make sure that the last food that gets put in my mouth is at 6PM and that’s just maybe drinking some water, some herbal tea, obviously caffeine free, you know herbal tea in the evening and then, going to sleep at a reasonable hour between 9 and 10. The next morning I have way more energy and I feel so much better than if I had eaten at 8PM because sometimes, you know, I just get into the routine of feeding our kid and then doing the bedtime routine with him, getting him to sleep and then I get to cook dinner for myself. Just that little change of eating with my son versus eat after he’s gone to bed has hugely given me way more energy, I mean, the more energy that I could ever get from 4 espresso shots. I’m just so impressed by how much energy that one tweak. So, be willing to tweak and try things but try it long enough, try it for enough days to go, “Yeah, this really does make a difference”, and then also the next experiment which I’m working on is what’s optimal for my body right now to break the fast, is it first thing in the morning, is it later in the afternoon, because it’s really different for everyone. Because sometimes for some people, if we wait too long and we break the fast at 2PM then, they end up being so hungry by 7 or 8 PM and they don’t have the willpower to say, “Ok, I’m sticking to this.”, and so then they end up pushing their feeding window to be too late and they go to bed with a full stomach. So, we have to play around with it. I love the idea of let’s experiment on ourselves and track our progress and see how we feel.

1:19:01.6 Jenn Malecha: I was going to add to that too. Recognizing we have different energy needs on different days. If you have a 12-hour work day, you know, that may not be an ideal day to go on an extended fast. Being a little bit flexible, I think also in recognizing what are the demands being placed on your body and making sure that you’re supporting whatever those demands are at the same time.

1:19:23.6 Ashley James: Stress is something that you’ve talked about that I think especially as women, I mean, I’m a woman so I don’t know what it’s like to be in a man’s body. Based on the observations of my husband I am sure that men also equally do not deal with stress. But, I could speak as a woman, I know that we culturally do not deal with stress that we really would rather put ourselves through the ringer, put ourselves last, drag ourselves through the mud. I had a client once, I gave her the best diet plan based on her needs and the supplements and the lifestyle changes and we worked on everything and she seems to be getting some results but she hit a wall, and I kept coming back to her stress and she said, “I don’t feel stressed”, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that. Stress is not an emotion that you feel.”, when you actually feel stress as an emotion, you are at your breaking point. When it’s an actual sensation that you’re feeling like feeling your blood pressure, in your neck, in your head, you are way at the breaking point. So you don’t feel stressed, you’re just doing things that cause stress on the body by not managing it. She had a mother who was sick, she had a young child at home, and she was a very busy manager. So she has constant demands on her at work, with her mother who was ill, and her young child and there was not one break. I gave her all these things that she could do throughout the day to manage her stress that because it didn’t seem important. It wasn’t like, and I get it because it doesn’t seem not important, like why is laughing and hugging and social time and relaxing, that stuff doesn’t seem important, what seems important is working at your job 12 hours a day and then taking care of your kids and then taking care of husband and then just putting ourselves last. But all of that, the lifestyle of not managing stress exacerbates disease and causes the body not be able to heal. Could you talk a bit about your observation with stress and its relationship to disease?

1:21:43.7 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, I talked about in the beginning too just the concept of let’s redefine stress. Stress is anything that places a burden on the body that results in inflammation and dysfunction. We’re talking here about mental emotional stress, but there is also a ton of other things that can stress the body for example, travelling across different time zones if you’re a traveller. That places a stress on the body and disrupts your natural circadian rhythm that we’re talking about earlier or toxins in your environment or mold like we’re talking about earlier, those all place a stress like a burden on the body that then results in inflammation and that dysfunction. The mental emotional side of stress is so fascinating because I love this example of the woman that you were just speaking of is I find this too with clients. The mindset that we’ve developed in our modern day society and I remember watching the presidential elections that we had here in the US, when was it 2016 with Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump running against each other and then there was a point where Hilary Clinton got really sick and she just kept and she just kept plowing through and what am I thinking in my mind is, “This is just a terrible example for women.”, a powerful woman I think would take a sit back and say I need to take a break and recuperate and take care of myself because what good are we with a person if she would have had won the presidency like what good are we with somebody who’s going to be chronically ill because they’re not really willing to prioritize themselves and take a break from the amount of stress that they’re experiencing. I often have clients because I tend to work with really Type A personalities who have climb their corporate career ladders from a young age and they sacrifice their health as a result of doing so, like they have this defense mechanism built in on those, I would call it as like, they just put their head down and keep plowing through and they never really stop to acknowledge how stress is affecting their body and then they come to us with all of these health issues and again like you said, are doing all the diet things, all the other things but the health issues aren’t fully resolving themselves and finding if we can correlate, let’s start journaling this and writing this down and we can notice, “oh you had a super long day at work” and then we’re working on a huge project and all of a sudden you’re exploited with some symptoms or you’re travelling and then you’re exploited with some symptoms and we can start to connect connect the dots. And it’s not even lack of wanting, it’s kind of like an ingrained ignorance because they just don’t know any better because of the mindset that we’ve developed in our society to even be able to acknowledge the fact that what they’re doing in their lives is contributing to their health like the fact that they’re not acknowledging stress or that again, going back to this concept of just because it’s common doesn’t mean that it’s a normal scenario. I’ve had conversations with clients before where they’re doing all the things like we need to start looking at the fact that like you know, it’s your job, have you considered getting a new job because it’s what’s killing you and that’s where I infuse them of that transformational work and the coaching that I do with clients because it’s not uncommon for a lot of my clients to either end up changing career paths or moving out of their city or their homes because we start to recognize that those are some of the biggest burdens of stress that is depleting their body and making them feel unwell.

1:25:34.9 Ashley James: Can you elaborate on certain conditions that you’ve seen that stress has caused or exacerbated.

1:25:42.2 Jenn Malecha: I keep going back to Hashimoto’s because it’s so close to home but that is certainly one of them. When we look at the energetic aspects of autoimmunity, it manifests a lot of times and correlates with feeling attacked our personal lives in some kind of way. Especially for women and we see that women are like, I can’t remember exactly what the statistics are but, so much more likely to develop an autoimmune condition over men and to be diagnosed with the thyroid imbalance as well. A lot of these comes from like, if we look at the energetic aspects like the thyroid is related to our throat chakra, and the throat chakra is all about communication, like the communication center so when we’re not standing up for ourselves and setting boundaries and speaking our truth and owning our self- worth, we are stopping all of this energy and creating a road block. It can then manifest itself into a disease state essentially or we’re kind of evolving out of this time like a more masculine air into a more feminine presence now, spiritually speaking in the world and so many women have tried to keep up in a man’s world where they don’t call out sick, they don’t stay at home with their kids to take care of them, they shove their emotions to the side, I mean I remember working in the corporate world and having one of my regional bosses came in and he said, “You’re too emotional for a manager”, talk about like you know stunting my health progression right there or like giving me a nice good kick in the gut or should I say my thyroid and just making me feel really bad about being emotional as a woman and I think now in the world that I work in now like my attunement with my emotions is part of what helps me create success and also is what helps me be such a good advocate and intuitive leader for some of the people that I work with. So in any point in time whenever you’re not fully expressing yourself, you’re creating a blockage of energy that’s happening in the body and so when we’re shoving emotions to the side, not acknowledging stress, it’s gonna fester and it’s gonna manifest itself in some kind of health condition for sure.

1:28:14.2 Ashley James: It’s so individual, it’s so specific to each person’s circumstances, can you give some generic – for everyone kind of advice on how to figure out what is causing stress for them and what kind of steps they can take to de-stress?

1:28:37.9 Jenn Malecha: Yeah. I mean there’s a couple of scientific tools that you could use to evaluate. Like heart rate is one of them, when we are stressed out, our body releases cortisol which acts almost like an adrenaline rush and so your heart rate variability is one way to be able to measure stress or just your heart rate in general. You gave a great example earlier talking about your blood pressure also, right, so what you were having a psychological response like a stress of your kid running around, and your husband being there and all these things happening and you knew when you bought into that quiet room with that naturopath that if she took your blood pressure again it would look better so the physiological responses – anxiety, I think would be another one as well to look at like that’s something that lets you know – communication of stress and just feeling wound up when were round around the axle or when we are shooting all over ourselves, I should have done this, I should have done that or I should be doing this, you know we’re being self critical that can be another indication of just being really stressed out or trying to control a situation and that oversensitive control is stressful in itself. The list can go on, there is an emotional aspect that even so people recognizing they are stressed out and then they tend to eat as a result of that, often we have clients kind of assess that when they see that they feel they need a snack or that they’re hungry all the time. We are working on improving their diet, and they’re doing a lot of the right things but they still have a sense of being hungry all the time or they need a snack then I asked them to stop and shift “I want you to stop in the moment when you feel that way, check in with yourself and ask yourself, what is really going on” and check in and see if there is an urge of boredom or reaction to stress in some kind of way or scarcity or a fear, what is the emotion that is coming up and then implement an activity that shift whatever that is that’s happening. So we will define some things that they can do, like go outside or do some deep breathing techniques or something like that. Those usually resolve the problem once they shift that mindset and get out of that stressed state. In terms of things that you can do, deep breathing hands-down is the single most effective and easiest thing that anybody can do to take themselves out of a stressed state into a rest or digest and healing state. So one of the things that I want to drop for your people here Ashley is like, your body can only heal in a relaxed state. If you think about how many times a day you are actually in a relaxed state, it’s very infrequent. When we adopt the deep rhythmic breathing patterns of a relaxed person, it automatically flips the switch in our brain, it takes us out of sympathetic fight or flight mode and puts us into parasympathetic mode. I’ll usually have people do a deep breathing technique or inhale for 5 seconds then hold it for 5 seconds and then exhale for 7 and they just do that 5 to 10 times. It doesn’t require learning how to meditate or any devices or other tools, it’s something that’s accessible to you all of the time. I have clients do this right before they sit down to eat so they can get in the parasympathetic mode because you can actually only really digest your food when we’re in parasympathetic mode so that’s called the rest and digest state basically versus the fight or flight state. I’ve had clients use this breathing technique when they’re feeling anxious about getting onto a plane, when they’re in a meeting and they feel themselves getting worked up, nobody can tell that you’re sitting there doing deep breathing you can be sitting in a room with 20 people on the spotlight, in a board meeting and be doing deep breathing and nobody knows the difference. Otherwise, there’s some really great tools out there people want somewhere like biofeedback stuff, something like Heartmath is a great tool you can use, one of my clients was just telling me she’s been using something called A Muse that helps you with your meditation state and it can identify when you get your brain starts to wander so it kind of pulls you back in. Meditation is another way that we get into that relaxed state as well. So there’s a ton of tools out there, different fitbits and Apple iWatches, all of these technology tools that we have are starting to incorporate more of these stuff in there as well like a mindfulness tool that helps you just take a moment to breathe and relax and calm down a little bit.

1:33:47.9 Ashley James: Got it, I like the free one, just breathe. Taking that time to do that slow deep breathing is great. Thank you so much, there’s so many nuggets of gold in what you’ve shared today. What kind of homework would you like to give our listeners? What kind of changes would you like to help them make in their life? Can you give them an assignment so they can go and do it and make some really positive changes.

1:33:47.9 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, well, since we’re talking about deep breathing and I just said it, I think that the deep breathing before you eat is huge because you could be eating the healthiest food in the world but if you’re not digesting it very well, you’re not getting much out of it you know and often times in our fast paced life, we’re constantly eating on-the-go or eating with distraction and so simple doing this 5 5 7 breath like I said 5 to 10 times before every meal you’ll probably notice some shifts and the amount of energy that you get out of your food, your ability to digest your food a little bit better and also just feeling satiated and full for longer are usually some of the really few things that people get from that. The other thing we talked about that was so important today was sleep, so for everybody out there, like we said the critical sleep time is be asleep by 10PM or as close to it as possible, most nights out of the week and most nights would probably be like 5 nights out of a week if you could do it every night of the week, awesome but you know I’m a realist there’s going to be Friday night dinners to go to or parties or whatever so there might be those times when you’re up a little bit later but on the majority of your time, get to bed at a reasonable hour and your body will 100% thank you for it, definitely. I think these will be the 2 biggest things that I recommend as homework for people and if I was to add a 3rd it would really be to just be more present every single time you sit down to eat and checking in with yourself like we were talking about earlier, and remember every time you sit down to eat, you have a choice. You can eat something that builds you up or breaks you down and just being present in that moment and making a conscious decision about how it is you want to feel after that meal, or for the rest of the day, or into tomorrow and when we connect with those choices, it makes it so much easier just to naturally choose foods that are right for us versus the ones that aren’t as beneficial for us.

1:36:38.6 Ashley James: And you said sit down to eat, that’s actually part of the homework.

1:36:43.8 Jenn Malecha: That’s part of the homework.

1:36:47.0 Ashley James: I know women who will stand to eat by the kitchen sink, shovel the food in their mouth in between doing the laundry and getting the kids to bed or whatever or drive and eat. It is sit down and take that 5, 10, 15 minutes to eat slowly and to be conscious of that everything we put in our body is feeding our body. You know it’s funny to me that someone will take a prescription medication, the size of a pea, let’s say they take 1 pill a day to manage their blood pressure or manage their blood sugar or manage their thyroid but it is a pill the size of one pea that they take everyday and that tiny little pill the size of a pea has a huge impact on the body. I’m not saying in negative, I’m just saying it has an impact. It can shift your blood pressure, or it can shift your blood sugar, or it can shift your hormones, so this tiny little thing that you put in your mouth once a day or maybe twice a day really impacts your body and we know that. Like if someone takes an Advil for pain, like they know they take this tiny little thing and it has a huge impact on their body, it’s going to shift how they feel and yet we’ve disconnected that everything else we put in our food has an impact on how we feel, there’s a disconnect. So like people are eating the standard American diet right and not getting that huge plate of food can, way bigger than any of those pills they take, has even more impact on the body than that 1 little pill does. Everything that we put in our mouth throughout the day is like a medication. If we think about that, is it a medication that, it has side effects right, so fried foods for example has absolutely studies of proof and will take 10 years off of our life. If we eat fried food everyday, it will take 10 years off your life and cause heart disease and increase the chances of cancer. It’s been proven and studied enough that these foods that are readily available to us have side effects. If we would look at everything that we put in our mouth, like either this is a healing food, or this is a harmful food just like medications. We’re really careful about the medications we choose to be on or not choose to be on based on their effects or side effects. If we take that approach with our food, that everything we put into our mouth is healing or harmful. And another thing that I’ve had a struggle with, I’ve been doing a lot of emotional healing for years around food and that food is something for pleasure like ice cream or chocolate bars or whatever and it’s like catching myself going, “Wait a second, am I missing so much joy in my life that I need to get a dopamine high from the food?”, and I really have to catch myself and go, “Okay, when I wanted that twinky or when I want that ice cream”, even a celebratory ice cream with my kid, it’s like ok and even if it’s vegan and all that stuff. It’s still looking to food for dopamine, I’m putting it in my mouth and it’s what are the effects over the next few days on my health versus how can I increase joy and dopamine and excitement and love, how can I increase that amount of happiness in my life and not have it come from foods. We do live in the real world, we do go to birthday parties there’s always birthday cake, I get that. That’s one thing that people can choose to participate in or not participate but, I did find myself everyday seeking food for pleasure and everyday opening that fridge going, “What am I gonna eat, what am I gonna make for dinner?”, based on wanting more pleasure, and I had to catch myself going, “Ok, I am making food choices that are motivated by this lack of happiness in my life.” and I’m trying to fulfill happiness from food and that ultimately is destroying my health. And you know what? Healthy food, like my salads taste absolutely amazing. I’m sure I’m getting dopamine from my salads now. I can make them taste really good but I know I’m also getting a little bit of a high knowing that everything I’m feeding my body is moving me towards better health. And so for me there is that emotional component, that psychological component, that mindset that comes into play when choosing food and you’ve outlined some really great fun steps that sitting down, being conscious, taking those deep breaths, and you’re asking yourself, “Is this food that is healing for my body or maybe I’m missing something else in life and try to compensate?”. I love your advice around that. I know that you have a free gift for our listeners, I definitely want to make sure. The link to everything that Jenn does is going to be shown on today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Your free gift is a 21-day program, I’d love for you to just explain a bit about what it is and the link to it is www.wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth. So what is this wonderful 21-day free program that you’re giving us?

1:42:15.8 Jenn Malecha: So the 21-day free program actually goes through in more detail a lot of the stuff that we talked about today and it’s kind of getting to the roots of why you might be feeling fat, sick, or tired all the time, essentially, and uncovering some of those hidden healing opportunities. Week 1 is actually all about exploring what food is right for your body so they can function at potential, I actually take you through some of the journaling aspects that I mentioned earlier today to really narrow in on how is your body responding to certain foods and then based upon that feedback, you can then go and make adjustments to really figure out the perfect meals for you and the foods that work with your body best. And then week 2 we move in to talking more in-depth about sleep, giving you some more tools to improve the quality of your sleep, shifting your sleep cycles so that you’re just ultimately getting more restful sleep, in general which will support all of the metabolic processes that your body goes through. And then week 3 is where you get to explore some parasites, bacteria, yeast overgrowth opportunities that might be happening so going through some self screenings where you can check and do some home test to pre-screen yourself to see if these are potential issues for you, and then I’m definitely available to answer your questions for you as you go through that process and I love to hear the feedback that people have from it too on what their finding and exploring. And obviously, I’m open to helping people in more depth if they need some more guidance beyond that but, those are probably the 3 big key areas that I focus on with people and when we make those shifts on those areas they’ll start feeling better instantly in just a matter of couple of days or a couple of weeks. There’s just overall improvement in their health and it’s bringing awareness to some things that maybe they didn’t know previously so they can support themselves better moving forward.

1:44:18.6 Ashley James: Awesome, thank you so much for that free gift. The website again is www.wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth and I know that my listeners will love gaining more insight from you. It’s been so great having you on the show today. Is there anything you’d like to say that was left unsaid or anything you like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

1:44:38.5 Jenn Malecha: You know I just want to empower people and leave them with that, I always like to say that I think that you’re kind of in this line of work too, Ashley, we’re in the business of making the impossible possible. We’re here to help people that feel stuck and aren’t getting answers or solutions, so no matter what you’re situation is, just know that there’s probably a solution out there for you and it’s just a matter of finding the right person to work with and sometimes you just have to keep digging and really, the possibilities are endless. I also love to tell people, you only know what you know until you know something different. And I know that even when I’ve done lab testing on myself, like I’m in a really good place right now but every time I get lab test back sometimes, I’m like, “Oh, like I can improve in that area”, like I just got my cortisol and dopamine values back and they’re sitting a little bit low and I was like, “I consider myself a pretty energetic and happy person but what is there like a possibility for like, I can feel even better than this,” you know. So, the possibilities are really endless, and I think that just coming from a place of empowerment, like we’re talking about earlier today that you’re not doomed to the results of a diagnosis or a situation that you’re in, there’s likely a solution that’s out there for you, and to just keep searching and having hope you know.

1:46:07.7 Ashley James: Wonderful, absolutely, yes. There is hope, the body has the miraculous ability to heal itself. We got to give it what it needs, stop putting in what it doesn’t need and that there is absolutely hope. I have even seen a woman who is in wheelchair from MS, was told that she’d never walk again and a month later was walking and pain-free because she shifted her nutrition, her diet, and her lifestyle. Just cause the doctor said you’re going to have something for the rest of your life doesn’t necessarily mean, even if you do, you could optimize, we could always optimize our health and well-being. But it does take time and it takes effort and it takes being a detective and that’s what I love doing what you do. I love what you do because you’re that detective that helps people to go deep and find the root cause and support the body holistically. So wonderful, excellent, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing, and of course giving us your free 21-day program as well. It’s been such a pleasure to dive in to this topic with you today.

1:47:15.1 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, thanks for having me and it’s been wonderful to chat with you.

Outro:

Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?

You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out.

You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in.

Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible.

I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need ore health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals.

There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.

So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you.

Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them now and check it out.

And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.

Get Connected With Jenn Malecha!

Website

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Free Gift – 21 Day Program to figure out why you feel fat, sick or tired all the time and to learn how to fix it in 21 days or less!

Recommended Readings by Jenn  Malecha

Beyond The Pill by Dr. Jolene Brighten

The Thyroid Connection and Autoimmune Solution by Dr. Amy Myers

The Wahl’s Protocol by Dr. Terry Wahls

The Autoimmune Fix by Dr. Tom O’Bryan

Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms and Why Isn’t My Brain Working by Dr. Datis Kharraian

https://www.greenhomesolutions.com
For questions reach out to David Bloom via email:
davidb@greenhomesolutions.com

For the Free Jar of Magnesium Muscle Cream use coupon code LTH, Add the Magnesium Jug to your cart, and the free muscle cream will be added automatically as well as the 10% discount. https://livingthegoodlifenaturally.com/product/magnesium-jug

To join IIN and enroll in their Health Coach Training Program, 25% off with zero down, call (844) 315-8547 (U.S.) or +1 (212) 730-5433 (International).

In support of the show please join Ashley's fun kid's book party! https://kidsbook.party

How To Prevent And Treat Mold Naturally

https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-prevent-and-treat-mold-naturally

Highlights

• VOCs and particulates are the most common household air pollutants
• Dangers of burning candles
• Best air filter combination
• Molds accumulating indoor
• Indoor moisture problem can be serious
• Radon – a harmful, naturally occurring gas
• Environmental mold
• Prevent mld growth inside the home
• The importance of proper ventilation
• House treatment after a flood

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James.

This is Episode 364.

We have a very interesting guest for today’s show, David Bloom. I’m so excited to finally have you on the show. I’ve been a really big fan of Green Home Solutions which has created a revolutionary technique for removing mold that is both non-toxic and permanent. It’s something that no other company has. I have personally experienced the benefits of what you’ve created. I had black mold in our bathroom and it was making sick. I didn’t even know it was making me sick. It basically shot my immune system and I was catching everything, and then I finally used your services and it removed the mold, and I stopped catching the germs. I thought this is amazing. I spent probably a year just catching every single cold and flu and just feeling like my immune system had hit rock bottom and it was because of the mold in our house that I was being exposed to everytime I went to our bathroom which is right off our bedroom. So I was basically breathing in these mold spores all the time.

Other companies will use harsh chemicals. They won’t actually get rid of 100% of the mold, and I’m really looking forward to you teaching us today more about how to create indoor air quality; what to look for and the science behind this technology that you’ve developed. So welcome to the show.

0:01:56.0 David Bloom: Thank you very much for having me, Ashley. It’s a privilege to be with you. You’ve done some great work. I’ve listened to several of your podcasts. Just to give you an idea of how this all got started. About late 90’s to early 2000, I had just completed finishing my basement turning it into a living space. We had had a sewage backup or a blockage and the plumber came out with the septic system. He was running a snake from the tank back towards the house to clear the blockage. What I forgot was above the ceiling in that newly finished basement space was a standpipe for water [inaudible 0:02:36.1]. So everytime the plumber is pushing the snake there is ethylic coming over that pipe into the basement which had just been completed into a living space.

So I started to freak out and called my local DP and they said get rid of everything, get somebody in there. Called environmental protection with the same issue. But I remember meeting a gentleman at the Atlanta airport who had created a particular product that was rather unique. Back at that time, I live in Connecticut northeast, and most homes or a lot of the homes up here are heated using heating oil. And the oil tanks had historically always been buried in the ground. They found that around that time that most of these tanks started leaking. And if you had a tank in the ground you couldn’t sell your house. You would have to remove it first, and if you removed it and they found any evidence of leakage that was considered hazardous waste – that had to be hold away.

So he had come up with a combination of microbes that would be injected into the ground prior to the tanks being dug up a few days ahead of time. And these microbes would actually digest the oil in the ground and then when you dig the tank up there’s no hazardous waste left. It was brilliant. So I got his card and I said, “Stephen, will this stuff work with what I’m doing?” He said, “I have no idea, but why don’t you try it.” So we did. We dried the space out ourselves, we used his product as a spray, we used it on the carpet, we used it as a wipe down. We used it for everything. Now, it wasn’t a big mess. It came in a quarter, maybe a 6 by 6 area, but it was a carpeted space. They told us we’d have to get rid of all that and everything. Bottomline was we spent a couple of days playing around with the stuff. I had somebody come in and test my house and there was no evidence of mold and there was no evidence of bacteria.

That actually stayed that way. The only thing we got rid of – there was a wood bookcase that had a particleboard core. So that swelled up a little bit. I got rid of that. Everything else stayed there until about two years ago when we finally re-did the space. I test my house regularly, usually about every six months. Never have had an issue. So, Steve and I got together and we formed the company and we started looking at other alternatives. So we worked on this particular product for mold remediation specifically because at that time they’re a good industry to get into and we expanded it off of that with other cleaning products. We have odor neutralization technologies we developed, we do biogas desulfurization for anaerobic digesters which is to clean the gas up so it can be burned in a generator from plants or using a fuel cell.

So what happened was I went back to school at roughly 50 years old for microbiology because I had to know what I was talking about and everything took off from there. I come from a family of scientists. I actually took a wrong turn when I went to college and thought that law looked pretty good. My uncle is a very well-known research chemist in the Boston area. I used to work for him during the summer. As a matter of fact, I had a better chemistry set in my house when I was a teenager than my highschool had. It just thrilled me to death to get back and become a scientist. My daughter is finishing up her PhD in neuroscience. I mean we’re a science type of family. We love what we do because we’re helping people. We’re not breaking things down. We’re just helping people get healthy the best way we can.

It took us a couple of years to get the formula perfected and it needed to get through an EPA registration which is not an easy process. You have to prove your efficacy, you have to prove the safety. it really comes down to having a registered product means that the EPA has looked at our data which is generated from third-party laboratories and it matched what we say it does. So, it does what we say it does. It’s the safest we say it is. That’s a big deal. In the mold remediation industry there’s a lot of cowboys out there. We call them “spray and pray.” They go in to somebody’s house with God knows what? I mean they’re gonna tell you, “Oh it’s all natural. It’s safe. Everything’s fine.” But if it’s not EPA registered, there’s no way of verifying that and you just really don’t know what you’re getting. Unfortunately it’s giving the industry a pretty bad rep.

With Green Home, I got involved with them 2015. They have an exclusive – mostly the products that I make now. We have a couple of things we do for the industry but most of the products we make. I had been responsible for training their remediators. They all have to get accredited by the American Council for Accredited Certification whose own programs are created by the council of engineering and scientific specialty branch which is the only one like it. There’s a lot of people that have [inaudible 0:08:03.0] after their name in the mold industry, but usually it’s a paid up plaque. You pay them a fee, you answer some questions and you get a certification. ACAC does not offer any kind of training. All they do is they do proctored exams. So it’s really a great way to do it and it puts us ahead of a lot of the other people that are out there and much more reputable.

We’re actually getting into a lot more things than just mold. In fact, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the two most common indoor pollutants are VOCs and particulates. People don’t realize it. There is an article recently in one of the journals where they analyze the air in a home after they had cooked the roast in their oven. It was a gas oven, I think that would probably make a little bit of a difference. The air quality was equal to New Delhi India which is about the 6th most polluted air in the world – off from that roast.

0:09:05.9 Ashley James: Yeah. I believe that. I had a doctor on who wrote the book Dirty Genes and his whole thing is teaching people how to help their body through epigenetics. Because when we’re exposed to different chemicals, it can actually trigger genes to turn on and off – basically genes to be suppressed or expressed themselves. And when we are cooking with gas, when we’re breathing and we don’t have the hood on to suck all the byproduct or the waste of burning gas away from us, it can change our genetics. Because there are chemicals like formaldehyde in the gas that comes to our stove and so people often will turn the oven on and not think to turn the hood on and their whole house is being filled with formaldehyde.

0:10:01.5 David Bloom: Yes. The electric stove still have the issue from the particulates from the cooking process itself, but obviously not from the gas. And while we’re talking about gas, one of the other major pollutants are the pilot lights that are in gas fireplaces. A lot of people still have pilot lights instead of electronic ignition. Those are very inefficient – they way they burn. They let something that’s not used very often. When it’s on it gets complete combustion. You don’t get the same particulate matter, but when it’s not operating and just the pilot light is on – then you’re putting particulates in. And along those same things, the next one that everybody should be avoiding is burning candles. Candles are atrocious for putting particulates into the air, especially paraffin candles. Soy-based candles are better, and if you had to burn a candle and you could keep your wick short under about half an inch – that’s even better.

We did a test where we hooked up a sort of like a radon fan in a filtration system. We burn a single candle for 20 minutes, the filter was as black as black could be from that one candle. Nobody realizes it and then you go into somebody’s home and they can’t understand why they don’t feel well and they got 25 candles burning everywhere – not a good idea.

0:11:28.4 Ashley James: Wow. We have one air filter that we keep running in our bedroom. I turn it on a few hours before we go into the bedroom to sleep. I turn it on high and when I walk in there, it is like I’m walking into a fresh forest. The air smells amazing. Not that our house smells bad, but it’s just there’s something totally different about the quality of the air. It smells clean and fresh and it feels different when I walk into our bedroom after having turn the air filter on high and we have it running all night long with us. I just notice a difference. I thought that was really interesting that the rest of our house is so different from this one room that has an air filter in it.

0:12:18.6 David Bloom: I’m guessing you have charcoal filter in that filter also. Activated charcoal is unbelievably good at absorbing some VOCs and gasses. So typically the best combination that I would ever recommend is a HEPA filter with an activated charcoal pre-filter and that will take care of a lot of the pollutants that we would normally see. A HEPA filter is down to .3 microns so you’re getting most anything that could get down deeper, you’re not getting really tiny stuff, but you’re getting a good portion of it.

0:12:51.3 Ashley James: Is Green Home Solutions planning on designing and providing air filters that are effective?

0:13:03.4 David Bloom: Actually we’re in the middle of looking at that now. There’s a lot of them out in the market. There’s a big discrepancy between what the lab results on a lot of these filters are versus what you actually get in real life. In fact, Wire Cutter which is a division of the New York Times published an article just recently where they did real life experiences with a bunch of different air filters and made some strong recommendations. There’s some really good ones. So we’re not necessarily to re-invent, we’re looking to see if we can find the one that does what we want. If we had to, we will. But I think we’re gonna find a manufactured product that we can recommend based on the design and how it works.

0:13:43.8 Ashley James: Very cool.

0:13:46.1 David Bloom: But I would recommend that article for your listeners.

0:13:48.5 Ashley James: Great. I will make sure that we link it. Is there a particular brand that you have in your home right now that you like?

0:13:56.4 David Bloom: No. [Laughter]

0:13:59.1 Ashley James: The jury is still out?

0:14:01.0 David Bloom: I actually have a commercial unit that I was still learning remediation business for a number of years before I decided I didn’t wanna do the work anymore and just make the stuff that other people use and train people how to do it. So I’ve got air scrubbers that will move anywhere between 500 and 2000 cubic feet of air per minute.

0:14:19.7 Ashley James: I bet your house smells amazing.

0:14:22.0 David Bloom: Well, we’ve got dogs and cats. So, got to take that into consideration. But I’ll run those periodically for a couple of hours especially if we’re not home during the day, I’ll let it run. I have activated carbon pre-filters on those also. So that’s what I do use.

Getting back to the VOCs, what a lot of people don’t realize, I mean formaldehyde is bigger. Formaldehyde can come from building materials, particle boards, new carpet smells – typically formaldehyde. But most of the VOCs that we find when we test homes are actually from personal care and cleaning products. So the typical house if you open a cabinet under the sink is just a zestful of VOC producing chemicals and people don’t realize that that could be affecting your health in the home.

Personal care products – I had a client that I was visiting and she was undergoing chemotherapy. She thought she had mold in the house and it tested negative for that. So we looked for bacteria, we didn’t find anything. So we did the VOC test and there was some sort of a funny smell and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it when I was in there. So when the test results came back, she had two major sources – one was under her sink and the other was she had a perfume that she would put on when people are coming over. It was a very light scent, it had a perfumey type of smell but I didn’t really detect it on her, but that was putting a tremendous amount of VOCs into the air. And so here she is sitting getting chemotherapy but she is making herself ill. So once we got her to change, things got better of course.

The other thing that people don’t realize is when they store – if you have an attached garage and you store chemicals, pesticides, gasoline. All of those things can generate gasses that then can get sucked in to the house. Most homes are under a slight negative pressure. Ideally we’d have them under positive pressure, but most are under negative pressure and that comes back to what’s called the [inaudible 0:16:42.0]. Assuming you’re in the basement or crawlspace, air will flow from that cooler space below all the way up through the attic. One of the things just on a side note is if I walked into somebody’s attic and I see that they’ve got mold there, the first thing I would look for is a wet base in their crawl space because that’s typically where it comes from. Second would be lack of ventilation.

0:17:07.0 Ashley James: So an attic can have mold because there’s like a leak in some other part of the house but that the moisture is travelling upwards into the attic.

0:17:17.0 David Bloom: That’s correct. So if moisture generates below is always gonna go up and you reach middle pressure, somewhere towards the top of the house and then you get a little bit of negative pressure in the attic. So it is all going in that one flow. It’s a very common known issue. Nowadays they typically try to air seal attics from the rest of the house so that you don’t get anything going up and then if you can condition your house to take care of that moisture, you’re fine. But here in New England we typically all have basements here, but if you don’t have a dehumidifier in your basement, you’re gonna have a mold issue. Because in the summer time it gets very hot and humid and you get a tremendous amount of moisture because that cooler space down below, you get hot air infiltrating into the house reaches that cools space and you get moisture. Ventilated crawl spaces are a big issue. Same thing, you have hot humid air coming in, it gets the cooler surface of the dirt or the floor in the crawl space and it condenses and you end up with a moisture problem.

In fact some people would fans in there because they think if they move more air through their crawl space it makes sense, but the reality is you’re really just bringing in more moisture and allowing it to condense. So I’d like to say, seal the crawl spaces.

0:18:45.1 Ashley James: Oh okay. I was gonna say what the solution? So the solution is to seal them.

0:18:48.1 David Bloom: Yeah. That’s the best thing you can do. Seal it. If you don’t have combustion appliances in the crawl space then we would actually recommend sealing the entire thing. You should probably put a dehumidifier in there, but you’d seal between the crawl space and the living space and obviously you’re gonna seal between the outside and the crawl space itself in the ground. If you do have combustion appliances, you have to be careful because those typically require either a draft for the gas to get up the chimney plus the air for combustion. So there you have to have some alternative ways to doing it.

Modern day furnaces, condensing furnaces, gas units have their own air supply. For other types of units – oil; here they do something where they bring in we call a fan in a can, but it’s a little fan that turns on when your furnace turns on. So it has enough air for combustion. But sealing them up is one of the best things they could do. It improves the whole indoor air quality of the house.

0:19:50.4 Ashley James: So Green Home Solutions franchises. So you teach, you’re one of the main educators at Green Home Solutions and you teach these franchisees how to do these things and I know they go through extensive education with you. Do you teach them how to detect these kinds of problems? Sort of beyond mold, but looking at what should be – like where the VOCs and particulates are coming from, what should be sealed off, is this something that if one of our listeners called Green Home Solutions and have one of their local people come out to their house they could inspect this and see if they could find these problems?

0:20:35.4 David Bloom: Yes. We spend several days just teaching building sciences. So we teach them about proper construction techniques to manage moisture so that when they go to look at a property and if it doesn’t look like they way it’s supposed to look, you know you’ve got a potential issue there. As far as testing for these, we’re just really getting into it. I’ve been doing it for a while. I’ve got several franchisees that are preferably qualified and we’re slowly getting everybody.

So originally we go in and test for mold. If that came back negative, then we’re sort of out of luck because we’re not helping anybody. We just tell them they don’t have mold issue, they have some other issue. And actually mold is really isn’t the problem. Mold is a symptom of a problem. Moisture is the issue. So mold is just a symptom of a moisture problem. That’s why we spend so much time at the building sciences is because they have to be able to identify where the source of moisture is coming from. And we do that, we use thermal imaging, moisture meters, we have[ inaudible  0:21:40.9] so they can look inside walls. We have a number of tools available to help us do these inspections, but there’s really no substitute for your eyes and your nose actually – of just looking around.

We can test for molds, we’ll test for bacteria, we can test for VOCs, formaldehyde – we test for separately because it doesn’t always show up on a standard VOC test. If there were spray foam insulation, we’ll do a different type of aldehyde test. Spray foam – if it isn’t put in perfectly, it can off-gas and the half-life is like 50 years. It never goes away.

0:22:16.7 Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I know so many people who thought they were really smart to use spray foam for insulation. They do it themselves.

0:22:24.3 David Bloom: I used to recommend it. I don’t any longer. Although in some situations it’s okay, and if they’re doing it themselves and they’re using a single-part system, that’s okay too. But when it’s done professionally, there’s two separate components to it that get mixed together, and if everything is not perfect it doesn’t cure properly and then it has the potential to off-gas for an extended period of time. But in some areas you have to do it, we talked to some people up in Boston that had bought a new condo and they’re renovating it and they only had about nine inches of sealing space, but Boston requires an R60 I think it was for insulation in the roof. The only way you can get that level is with spray foam. So if it’s done properly – somebody described it to me as this, somebody smarter than I. He said it’s like playing Russian Roulette with a revolver that’s got 50 chambers. 49 out of 50 times it’s gonna be fine, but when it’s not, it’s catastrophic.

I did several spray foam insulation remediation projects or managed them a few years back and I couldn’t do it anymore.It was just awful. The first one, we literally cut the roof off the people’s house. Cut it off where the rafters meet the ceiling bush. Take it with a crane, we built them a new roof.

Second one I did, they tore the house down because there’s no way to fix it. If it’s a mild issue, you can bring in more fresh air. I did one where we put in something that brought in an extra 7,000 cubic feet of fresh air, conditioned it and it kept the house in a positive pressure so it held the gas in the wall. That’s why positive pressure is always good. When you end up at negative pressure you can suck pollutants in places you didn’t even know you had.

0:24:23.3 Ashley James: I need to unpack that. My mind is about to explode. So many people have homes that have this spray foam. Maybe they moved in to a house and someone else had done the spray foam and they’re sitting here going, “Oh my gosh I have spray foam in my attic. I have no idea whether my house is positive or negative.” Or whether the draft is coming down from the attic and I don’t know whether it’s off-gassing. Can we talk a bit about what are the symptoms, what’s the harm in having the spray foam off-gas for 50 years to our whole family in our house?

0:24:58.7 David Bloom: If it’s off-gassing, that’s a big if. Like I said 49 out of 50 times it’s probably just fine. If it’s off-gassing, there’s usually a little bit of an odor that you detect, but not everybody is sensitive to it. That first house I mentioned where we took the roof off, the two other people that live there had no symptoms at all and one of them is actually one of their children couldn’t stay there. He just would get headaches, migraines, he’d feel awful and as soon as he left the house he felt better. So obviously there’s some sort of a correlation there.

Now, if somebody wanted to check and see if it’s cured properly, you could actually cut a little sample out. Put it in a mason jar and set it out in the sun for a little bit, then open it up and take up and take a big whiff. If it has sort of a sweet fishy smell, that would be an aldehyde – one of the gasses that’s pretty common that’s not right. Formaldehyde is an aldehyde. There are other aldehydes – glutaraldehyde, formaldehyde, but they’re aldehydes. Often you have acetic acid which is like a vinegary kind of smell. This is not a scientific test by any way, but it is simple that somebody could do. To do it properly you would have to have sorbent tubes in a pump it runs for about 24 hours and that then gets analyzed specifically for gasses that could be present in spray foam.

There’s not a lot of places that do that. In fact, I’m only aware of one laboratory that does that kind of analysis specifically for spray foam. There’s a lot of really good labs that can test for various VOCs, but they have a very nice panel of all the potential gasses that could come out of spray foam insulation.

0:26:59.9 Ashley James: We didn’t define VOCs. So for those who don’t know what VOCs are, can you just define it and explain why they’re harmful?

0:27:10.4 David Bloom: VOCs are Volatile Organic Compounds. They’re essentially gasses that are given off by various organics through their life cycle so to speak. Now, a lot of them will off-gas fairly quickly and dissipate quite quick. We had new carpet put in as I mentioned when I redid my basement living space not long ago and that stunk. It was awful and I have a way of getting rid of it, but I wanted to see how long it would take to actually dissipate on its own using. We weren’t using the space, so I figured it would fine. And it took almost four weeks before it completely off-gassed. So it’s just such an off-gassing from a chemical compound. It usually gets more intense when it’s heated. So that actually is one of the methods of trying to get rid of VOCs in the house. You could turn your heat up as high as it’ll go. Let it run that way for eight or nine hours and then ventilate the heck out of it. So the idea is to get as much of that gas you can into the air and then get it out of the house.

0:28:21.8 Ashley James: And don’t stay in the house while it’s happening. [Laughter]

0:28:26.0 David Bloom: No, because you’re gonna put more of it into the air. The other thing that people forget about is just open your windows. I mean this is gonna sound silly but I tell people this all the time. Dilution can be the solution for pollution. Just diluting that air, so the concentration now is lower makes a big difference. And as houses get build tighter and tighter and tighter for energy efficiency, if there’s not enough fresh air make-up, you’re carbon dioxide levels go way up because as humans are exhaling a lot of carbon dioxide. The moisture levels go up because we as humans have a lot of moisture and it’s got nowhere to go which is also why we see more instances of mold growth nowadays than we did in the older homes.

0:29:16.9 Ashley James: Right.

0:29:18.3 David Bloom: My first house I bought was built in 1865 I think. It leaked like a sieve but I never had a mold issue because it could breathe. It had the ability to dry if it got wet. It could dry to the exterior. It could dry to the interior. Now, when we build these things so tight, there’s no ability for them to breath. So there are units that are either energy recovery ventilators or heat recovery ventilators – ERVs or HRVs. Those are pretty standard issue today in modern homes. What they do is they take and equal amount of outdoor air and exit an equal amount of indoor air. So you always have some fresh air coming in. The problem I see is they don’t seem to be enough in a lot of cases. The house is really tight but just not enough of it, and it needs to be increases. There are ways to doing that, but as I mentioned open your windows and take a deep breath.

Now, granted you’re exposed to a lot more mold outside than you are inside normally, but getting that air diluted especially for any of these other things we’re talking about particular to VOCs – let’s dilute it and make it not such a big deal. Getting back to the things that we test for, we can also test for settled allergen. We’ll take a dust sample and have it analyzed for pet dander, dog and cat dander, dust mite matter, rodent excrement – there’s a lot of things they can look for and they can actually look for actual particles too. I had an instance where an old woman wasn’t feeling well in her home and she said that she’s had an abnormal amount of dust lately. We had the dust analyzed and it was silica. So I took a drive around, in about a mile away from her home, there was a place that they were demolishing a building and they were generating a lot of silica dust and that was carrying into her home and that’s what was causing the issue.

So it really becomes sort of an investigation. It’s a lot of fun actually. The other thing too is radon – is the second leading cause of lung cancer after cigarettes in this country. People would test for radon when they buy their home and never think of it again. it really should be tested every three or four years. It’s a simple test, non-invasive. And your water should be tested on a regular basis, especially if you’re on a well system.

0:31:59.3 Ashley James: Oh absolutely. I want to talk about the radon for second. What in the home could generate radon?

0:32:05.9 David Bloom: Radon is a naturally occurring gas from the ground. It comes from rocks similar to uranium actually. It’s naturally occurring. It’s much stronger in certain parts of the country. The northeast has pretty high radon because we have a lot of rock and that tends to be where it is coming from.

0:32:29.0 Ashley James: Because of the bedrock, the Precambrian Shield, I think it’s what’s called.

0:32:34.1 David Bloom: Yeah. Other parts of the country, it’s not nearly as big of a deal, but certain parts on the East Coast is pretty good. Getting down south, we don’t see it as much because the sand is more sandier and it’s not anywhere near as much rock. But the EPA has a map on their website that shows where the highest instances of radon are. I would certainly recommend to your listeners that they take a look at that and if they’re in one of the red areas, get it checked if you hadn’t done it in a couple of years. It’s odorless, colorless gas. you’ll never know if you have it.

0:33:09.5 Ashley James: But it can cause lung cancer.

0:33:12.4 David Bloom: It can cause lung cancer.

0:33:13.4 Ashley James: Very interesting. Yeah because we’re always thinking that these things in our home might be from like you said, carpet or a mattress off-gassing, or mold – but we don’t think that something totally natural coming from the ground would be harmful. So remember to test radon. It can shift, so when you first buy your home radon might not be present, but five years in the future it could start happening. Like shifts in the earth and then it just starts off-gassing?

0:33:48.3 David Bloom: A construction project can do it. Our well water has always been perfect. I was in a fairly rural area. They were building a new house maybe a quarter mile from me on my street and all of a sudden I started getting iron in my water and it came from the construction that they were doing and when they had a blast because again, we have so much bedrock – they had a blast to actually get their well dug drilled, it disturbed the aquifer and all of a sudden it started with a relatively high iron content. We had to put a fairly sophisticated filter system to take care of that.

0:34:36.2 Ashley James: I just had the exact same thing happened. We’re on a well and we’ve been living here for five years, the water has been perfect. We were joking about bottling it in glass bottles and selling it to Europe or something. I mean it’s just like the best water. We have friends come from all around to bottle out water and take it home with them and all of a sudden our water become murky, it taste like heavy metal, it taste very metallic and it had an odor to it. Out of nowhere, just one day it’s fine next day it’s not and we got a water filter, but we’re waiting back from the lab right now. They said it will take like 10 days because they’re testing all these things. It feels like it’s taking a million years to get these results back because I wanna know with our water. Is it even safe to bathe in it. We were like bathing in a friend’s house. But yeah, that made me realize that I hadn’t actually had our well water tested since our son was born because we had it tested to see if the nitrates were high – that’s one thing because we had to substitute with some formula and I didn’t wanna make the formula with water that’s high in nitrates because it can cause blue baby syndrome. For adults too, it makes our red blood cell not be able to carry oxygen, and so people can feel really lethargic and sort of just down if their drinking well water that’s high in nitrates, and most filters cannot filter out nitrates. I discovered this, that most filters in the market – you have to get a specific filter that filters nitrates.

So really being careful if we have a well and making sure that we test our water every year is really important. Time just flew by and I’m like, “Oh my gosh. What are we doing to drink this water that we don’t test every year.” So yeah, being really careful testing for radon every few years. if you have a well, most people don’t, but if you do – get that water tested.

You mentioned that one of the things that your franchisees do with Green home solutions is test the home for bacteria. Why test the home for bacteria? Is bacteria growing inside the home?

0:37:08.7 David Bloom: bacteria is growing everywhere. There’s a book by a guy named Rob Dunn called “Never Home Alone” and it’s about the microbial bio [inaudible 0:37:17.2] all the time. It’s creepy, but it exists. We need them. Most of the bacteria is healthy and it’s fine, but we just don’t need bacteria. So when I was back there before I got involved with Green Home, we found a number of instances where we would test for mold and it would come back negative. So we would test for airborne bacteria levels and if those were elevated, we would take care of it in the same way because the product works equally as well in bacteria as it does in mold. Bacteria is actually much easier to get rid off. Bacteria just have a single cell wall whereas mold spores can have two or three membranes you have to get through before you can get to the nucleus, and I’ll get into that in a minute.

So airborne bacteria levels which a lot people take slobs on the surface. It’s [inaudible 0:38:08.3] bacteria when it should in most cases. But elevated airborne bacteria levels sometimes could be an issue. It’s not as common, we don’t do airborne bacteria very often but it is a test that’s available.

Now, for surface – one of the things we do we’re using something that’s out of the food service industry which is called and ATP test. This is used to determine cleanliness. ATP is a particular enzyme that is present in all organic matter, and this is an instant test. We do it with a meter and a slob. I can take samples in numerous locations around the house ad if the levels are elevated, I don’t necessarily know that it’s bacteria, but it does indicate a general level of uncleanliness I guess, which could easily be bacteria. It could be peanut butter for all I know, but there’s something. So it’s just an overall level of cleanliness, but if you have a clean home you typically don’t have much of these other issues with bacteria that you don’t want in particular.

0:39:23.4 Ashley James: So when you met Steve at the Atlanta airport, I think that’s such divine intervention to have the two of you meet with your love of science and that problem that you had in your home. Did you look back at your life and see how, it’s sort of like all the stars were aligned. You had to have that bad thing happened to you in your home in order to be intrigued. So when you met Steve you had this problem to solve and then that led you to want to solve this problem for other people.

0:39:54.6 David Bloom: Yes. That was life-changing for me. I switched careers. I was a small business owner for a number of years. I completely switched careers in the middle of my life and I just fell in love with the fact that I was able to help people. I like the fact that Green Home being a relatively new company, a lot of people that I work with are half my age which is terrific. I love it. And I love sort of getting the next generation involved in the same kind of work. I’ve never been happier. I can’t imagine why I would ever want to retire. I love what I’m doing.

0:40:41.8 Ashley James: Yes. That’s exactly it. You know you’re doing what you should do when you don’t wanna retire. Like when I interviewed Dr. Esselstyn, he’s in his 80s. I think he’s 87, and he still is an active cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and he still takes phone calls. If you call him up, he’ll answer the phone. He talks to people all day long for free. He’s amazing. but he’s the kind of person that he’s gonna be like 110 years old and he’s still gonna be a cardiologist helping people. So, when you find your life’s calling, you find your purpose in life, you do it for free – you know when you absolutely love what you do, especially when it comes to helping people.

David, I know you’re passionate about what you do, but you’re also really helping people. You’re helping the business owners, those who choose to be a franchisee of Green Home Solutions – you’re helping them to help other people and then ultimately you’re helping all these homeowners through what you’re doing as the Chief Science Officer at Green Home Solutions.

When you met Steve and he talked about this enzyme that he created to breakdown the oil, how did you figure out that it could also be effective at basically destroying and demolishing mold? Can you take us back to that moment, that conversation you were first having with Steve, was it a light bulb moment? How did you come to that conclusion?

0:42:19.2 David Bloom: It’s actually by chance because I’d met him and learned a little bit about what he was doing with the oil stuff. So I had enzymes in my brain to start with, and when you look at what enzymes do, enzymes can either break things apart or they can build things up. We have about 3,000 different kind of enzymes in our bodies. We would not be alive without them, because what they do is the speed up the reactions that are required to keep us alive, and the reactions wouldn’t occur fast enough without them. They are in our RNA and DNA and various enzymes in there. They’re in almost everything. So when he was talking about using the enzymes to essentially digest the oil molecules I said, “Why couldn’t we do this…” And then of course when I tried it, we had no idea whether it would do anything or not. It did actually worked pretty good. Not as good as what we have now, but it did work pretty good.

The concept of breaking something down by using itself so to speak, so the enzymes that are present in our mold product are actually from molds. They are harvested from other molds. So molds have a very very strong protective mechanism and they have these things we call acceptors that open and close. They are like channels that allow material to get in. That’s how they get their food, energy, and moisture. When they come in contact with something that’s foreign, they typically sort of like close up and don’t allow anything to enter. When we attack the mold spore with our product, it’s like a homecoming and they welcome it with open arms. So it actually gets in and destroy the mold spores from the inside out.

0:44:10.8 Ashley James: That’s so cool.

0:44:12.9 David Bloom: And then the enzymes themselves are specific types to breakdown various parts of the mold spores. So there would be one type that would go after the membranes, one type that goes after the fatty lipid layer between the membranes. The nucleus is typically a protein, so we use a protease which breaks the bond. Proteins are just strings of amino acids held together by a peptide bond. By breaking the protease, it breaks that bond and actually digest it. So all that’s left is amino acids, and typically when most people have a reaction to molds, your typical reaction – I’m not talking about people that have very serious diseases, but just your typical sort of sinus type reactions. That’s a reaction to the proteins. So by breaking down the protein’s amino acids – there’s no protein, there’s no allergy. So mold is essentially a histamine, that’s why if you get a cold or a stuffy head, you’re gonna take an antihistamine to try to get rid of that. So molds has the same symptoms as histamine, that’s the trigger. So by breaking down the components so that you don’t have an allergen left makes all the difference in the world.

0:45:23.6 Ashley James: Does inhaling mold or mold spores increase histamine in the body?

0:45:30.5 David Bloom: I don’t know, to be honest. I’m not a medical professional. That would be a question sure I could find out. It’s just nobody asked me that question before. [Laughter]

0:45:45.3 Ashley James: If in itself is a histamine, is it as we’re inhaling it, is it the same as our own histamines? I know our bodies react to it. It is like breathing in pollen and their histamine levels go up. Or someone eating a food they’re allergic to and their histamine levels go up or even under stress our histamine levels go up.

0:46:08.2 David Bloom: I would assume it’s the same kind of trigger.

0:46:10.7 Ashley James: This is so fascinating. One thing that was explained to me – I had a health coach on the show and she’s the one that introduced me to you guys, and it was life changing for her to have find your company. She bought a home with her family in California and for six months she could not live in their new home. She had to live at a tent in the backyard because she was sick everytime she went into their new home, because it had mold. And they finally found your company and so they went in and they sprayed everything. And she said it was like a miracle, she was able to live in their home after that. She’s had a lot of her clients use the Green Home Solutions services very successfully. When I interviewed her she told me about it, because at the time I was telling her about my immune system was shot and I didn’t know why because I eat super healthy, I have a really healthy lifestyle, like what’s going on. And something that you wrote to me that basically health requires three things; it requires that we take into account – lifestyle, genetics, and our environment. She pointed out that my environment probably had mold in it and told me about you guys.

How she explained how it works – she basically said a lot of companies will say they’re mold remediators and they go ahead and just use something like bleach which just kills the molds but does not get rid of the mold spores. So even though it’s “dead” is actually now more toxic because now it releases these mold spores and it can still harm your body. Is that an accurate description? Like if I went to Home Depot and bought some kind of natural mold remediator or bleach which is so common. I’ve heard landlords use bleach all the time. The different between those chemicals and the enzymes that you use, can you explain the difference?

0:48:22.5 David Bloom: Sure. It’s actually pretty simple. Most of those products – a lot of them are oxidizers, and oxidizers can work a couple of different ways. An oxidizer can literally shake a molecule to break it apart and then essentially the guts leak out, it’s dead, but you still have the residual. Others are DNA disruptors – they actually don’t kill the spore, they just make it so it can’t reproduce. So you still have the spore left, it’s still intact and could still trigger an allergic reaction which is the most common response.

Bleach is a really good example of this. If you have mold on a wall in our home, the roots of the molds are into the paper. What you see on the surface is topical. So bleach let’s say it reacts with that mold. It’s what we call a stoichiometric reaction, it’s a one on one reaction and all the energy in that chemical is consumed instantly. It’s used up instantly. So even if it kills the mold on the surface, the byproduct of that reaction is water, and water is now gonna feed the roots that are still in the wall. So that’s why, often when people use bleach – it looks like they got rid of it for a short period of time, but it comes back because they actually fed the roots.

Enzymes on the other hand are catalyst. So a catalyst enables a reaction to occur but it’s not consumed in the reaction, so it will continue working as long as there’s something for it to work on. The best analogy I can give you is men’s facial hair. If I were to shave, that’s sort of like using a bleach. if I would have laser hair removal, that’s using our product.

0:50:10.0 Ashley James: Because you’re getting the root.

0:50:13.9 David Bloom:  We’re getting the root. That’s what makes the difference.

0:50:15.0 Ashley James: It’s so fascinating.

0:50:17.1 David Bloom: It’s not an exact salience, but there is some evidence that molds, when it’s killed or reactions occur – some molds can give off toxins, they’re known as mycotoxins which can be harmful. The problem is that not all molds produce mycotoxins and even the ones that do, don’t do it all the time and there’s no real easy way to measure for them. A lot of people will test for mycotoxins in their urine, but I would challenge that everyone of us has evidence of mycotoxins in our urine because it’s on our foods. If you are to open your refrigerator door and close it because you had somebody take an air sample for mold, you would dramatically skew those results even though you have no visible mold in your refrigerator. Trust me, there’s mold on your food. So that’s where it comes from.

So, it makes it a little bit difficult. Going back to your air filtration – activated carbon is pretty good at working with mycotoxins. So that’s why I talk about activated carbon a lot. You can even buy these bags now that you just sit out and they absorb some odors and things like that. That kind of stuff could be helpful for someone.

The other thing that we found when we started working with doctors, and that’s where that whole three-part thing was. It was to try to convince a doctor that, “Look, if you’re looking at genetics lifestyle and environment, if we can take your environment on the picture, even if it’s not the problem, at least we eliminated one leg. Now, it makes it easier for you to do your diagnosis.” Several of the doctors we worked with did discover a correlation between a treatment for lyme disease and moldy homes. So what they’re trying to use the normal treatments they would do for lyme weren’t working on a number of their patients. When we got them to look at the environment then we cleaned up the environment, all of a sudden they started responding to their treatment.

0:52:37.7 Ashley James: Yes. So What kind of things were common? Did you find that everyone that had lyme also had mold in their home? Or was there some kind of commonality?

0:52:47.6 David Bloom: The commonality for us was the particular practice that started us on this path because they had a lot of lyme patients, and they were trying to figure out what could it be, why are these people not reacting. The commonality was the fact that had mold in their homes.

0:53:03.4 Ashley James: Ok. That’s what I meant. So, you had all these lyme patients given to you by this practice and you went into their homes and all of them had mold in their homes?

0:53:11.7 David Bloom: All the ones that weren’t reacting to the treatment. Yes.

0:53:16.3 Ashley James: That’s what I meant.

0:53:17.9 David Bloom: Yeah.

0:53:18.5 Ashley James: So all the lyme patients who weren’t reacting to the treatment, all of them had mold in their homes.

0:53:23.5 David Bloom: That’s correct.

0:53:24.2 Ashley James: And when the mold was removed all of them started responding to the treatment?

0:53:29.7 David Bloom: I can’t say that every single one is good because I didn’t know.

0:53:36.1 Ashley James: You didn’t stick around to follow up with the doctor.

0:53:38.6 David Bloom: Yeah. I didn’t stick around to follow up long enough, but this particular practice in Virginia have us referred to patients. And that has actually spread, so we’ve made some really strong inroads. And that what’s made us get into all those additional testing things because we’re gonna look at the environment home, we decided that mold is one piece of the puzzle, but look at all of these other potentials. The downside is lab fees can add up quickly. So when we go in to look at a home, we wanna know what we’re looking for. I don’t wanna just go in and test. I want to get a hypothesis and device a testing strategy that will either prove or disprove that hypothesis. So often, we’ll do a couple of basic test first to rule out the most obvious and then. it gets a little bit more detailed if that’s not the answer.

And I have to admit, there are some times when we’ve been stumped. I have one of Green Home franchisees not far from me has a particular client that we just can’t figure it out. I’ve done a fair amount of testing and all kinds of different things. His doctors don’t have any clue. Occasionally there is some syndrome and for the life of me I can’t remember where your brain gets wired a little bit differently. It’s not a hypochondriac because the symptoms are real, but they’re caused by the brain not necessarily by an external force. There is an actual name for it. I just can’t recall what it was.

There’s other people out there that do mold remediation in a number of different ways. The old way was just what we call “Bash and Trash.” You go in, you just physically remove everything. Now, we do follow IICRC S520 standards – that’s the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration certification. They came up with a guideline on basic standards. So they have five specific principles that we follow as part of what we do. So to say that we don’t remove building materials would be a missed number, we do. We just try to preserve as much as possible because of our method. We’re typically able to preserve more which makes it a more economical project instead of just going in and just ripping everything out and putting it all back together.

So there’s a lot of that going on there. We had a client that I got a wonderful letter from just recently where she was in the Atlanta area and they found mold in her home and her doctor told her she had to leave the house and get rid of all her possessions and she did. She moved into an apartment. She had Green Home test the apartment, it had mold. So then, they said, “Well, we gotta get out of here.” So they looked at four or five different other places and they all had mold. It’s in the south, it’s humid, it’s hot, there’s mold. So, when I talked to her I said, “Look, why don’t you let us see if we can get you back into your home. There’s a number of things that we can do and if it doesn’t work, don’t pay.”

0:57:11.7 Ashley James: That’s nice.

0:57:11.9 David Bloom: Let’s give it a shot. So we did. We went it. We treated it for mold. We have a device that uses a very low level of hydrogen peroxide but yet gets a 99.999% kill. Which is a lot of reduction on bacteria. And we did that in a couple of areas that were problematic just sort of her insurance and I believe you are aware that we also have this probiotic treatment. We put that back in there. They moved back into the house and she said it was like the place is brand new. So the letter I got said that I saved her marriage, I saved her life, I saved her kids happiness, I saved their dog. It’s just crazy but we got her back into her own house because all the properties are gonna have an issue, let’s just fix the one we’ve got. But I fear that happening time and time again. I was meeting with a doctor in Peabody Massachusetts who had a client that had just built a $5 million dream home on a lake and the same thing, whoever her prior doctor was told her, “You’re house is killing you. You gotta leave.” She got out of the house, went somewhere else and she didn’t get any better. So it wasn’t necessarily the home and that’s what we try to avoid.

There is a lot of testing that’s being done now called ERMI – Environmental Relative Moldiness Index. ERMI was developed in early 2000 to be used as a research tool to see if there was any correlation between water-damaged properties in the Detroit area and childhood asthma. So they came up with. It’s actually PCR testing which is measuring DNA. So it had a very specific design. We took a 6 by 3 area in the main living room and we vacuum that with a special attachment for exactly five minutes. We repeated the same thing in the main bedroom. And then it gets analyzed for mold DNA and what they did is they had a list of 36 molds; 26 that were potential water damage indicators and 10 that were typical environmental molds. They subtract the environmental molds from the water damage molds and it come up with a score.

What the score shows is sort of a history of that building, that’s why they did it on carpeting. Carpet is designed to hide dirt. So it traps stuff deep down, and that’s how they look clean. So it’s getting that stuff, but you don’t know if it’s something, and as I mentioned mold is a symptom, moisture is the issue. We don’t know if there was a moisture problem in that property 25 years ago or yesterday. So what happens is nowadays there’s a lot of people recommending that particular type of testing and it does serve its purpose. Don’t get me wrong, not that I don’t like it. But they’re making decisions on whether they should remediate or not based on it and they’re not following the test, but most of these are getting advise and take a swiffer cloth and just go pick up some settled dust that are on there. But that’s not how the test was designed, it was never meant to be done that way. So they’re not sampling properly and then they come back with a high score and they’ll spend thousands and thousands of dollars chasing something that doesn’t exist because there is no moisture issue – it’s really at that point housekeeping. Getting rid of all that dust.

1:00:40.9 Ashley James: So just to elaborate on what you said earlier on, mold is a problem. Mold is dangerous for our health, we should not live in a home with mold. But it’s not the root cause, and you don’t chase symptoms. So if you go to an MD with a headache they might chase symptoms and prescribe something instead of asking deeper questions. Where you go to a naturopath, they’re gonna go, “Ok. What’s going on? Let’s find out what the root cause is because a headache is a symptom.” So you’re saying mold in a house is a symptom of a problem. Moisture and looking at whether you need to make the house pressurized, whether you need to ventilate properly, or whether you need to seal off certain areas, but when you solve the root cause and of course take care of the mold. You solve the root cause, the mold doesn’t come back.

1:01:35.0 David Bloom: Correct.

1:01:37.3 Ashley James: So if other companies test incorrectly, they could be testing for a mold problem that no longer exist and then paying thousands of dollars to treat something that’s not there.

1:01:50.3 David Bloom: Correct.

1:01:51.7 Ashley James: Got it.

1:01:51.8 David Bloom: So the Inspector General of EPA came out with a position statement a couple of years ago and said exactly that, that this was designed solely as a research tool. It was never intended to be used to determine whether a property needed remediation nor should it be used to determine if remediation was done properly.

One of the more interesting things thought, if you look at the numbers – so if I had an individual that was mold sensitive, I would think the overall mold exposure is gonna be very important. We wanna limit that as much as we can. Let’s say you had a very small amount of the water damage indicator molds, but you had a ton of environmental molds, you’re overall exposure would be quite high, but your ERMI score is gonna be very low and vice versa if it’s true. So if you really cleaned the place well so that there’s absolute, almost none of the environmental molds but there’s a couple of fragments of the other ones, you can have high ERMI score because there’s nothing to subtract from it.

So, when we see people using ERMI to confirm remediation, typically they’ve got to wait 30 to 45 days to let that house settle down and equalize and then ERMI is where it comes down. But instead they’ll spend, again they sometimes get into that trap of spending thousands and thousands of dollars. It kills me when I see that happen.

One of more interesting things thought, if you look at the numbers – so if I had an individual that was mold sensitive, I would think the overall mold exposure is gonna be very important. We wanna limit that as much as we can. Let’s say you had a very small amount of the water damage indicator molds, but you had a ton of environmental molds, you’re overall exposure would be quite high, but your ERMI score is gonna be very low and vice versa if it’s true. So if you really cleaned the place well so that there’s absolute, almost none of the environmental molds but there’s a couple of fragments of the other ones, you can have high ERMI score because there’s nothing to subtract from it.

So, when we see people using ERMI to confirm remediation, typically they’ve got to wait 30 to 45 days to let that house settle down and equalize and then ERMI is where it comes down. But instead they’ll spend, again they sometimes get into that trap of spending thousands and thousands of dollars. It kills me when I see that happen.

1:03:25.5 Ashley James: Thank you for warning us about that. I know that Green Home Solutions is in a lot of places, but it’s not everywhere. So if someone’s in an area where Green Home Solutions just isn’t there and they have to use a different company, it’s really good to know to make sure you don’t use the company that uses the ERMI score to test your mold.

1:03:46.8 David Bloom: Again, don’t get me wrong. ERMI does have a place and it could be a very useful tool especially if you’re looking for historical idea of what’s going on in the property. It just shouldn’t be the only thing used to determine if you need remediation. You could get a false positive. Fortunately a lot of the medical community has gotten involved. I mean the idea of having a standardized test is brilliant because the other types of testing for mold, either air sampling or surface sampling – it’s not an exact science. Typically we look to compare suspect areas to non-suspect areas. So if you tell me that you feel okay in the bedroom but you don’t feel good in the living room, I’m gonna sample both and see what the difference is.

If it’s not that situation, typically we look and see what the outdoors is, because once you open your windows or your door, you’re gonna start to equalize whatever you have outside. We’re never gonna make the house completely mold-free. What we’re looking for is just to make sure that there’s nothing actively growing in the home.

1:04:49.1 Ashley James: I was about to ask, you mentioned environmental molds versus the sort of the black mold growing in my bathroom. So. environmental molds, maybe someone walks into the house after going for a walk and they don’t take their shoes off and they’re tracking something to the house or our groceries come into the house or a dog walks into the house and the dog tracks in something. So environmental molds are just things that would come from outside from nature?

1:05:19.9 David Bloom: Yes. If you’re sensitive to molds, any kind of mold could bother you potentially, but these are molds that we would commonly see in our everyday life and you don’t even have to bring it in with you, just open the door and you feel that little breeze? Yup, that’s all coming inside. So we can’t escape it, but we try to keep the house as clean as it can and make sure that it’s not actively growing.

1:05:51.4 Ashley James: So environmental mold comes from the outside, it’s not growing, it’s not taking hold of the wood or the drywall and like replicating itself.

1:06:05.0 David Bloom: Well, it could if you had a food source which is complex polysaccharides  – is what they love which is like paper cellulose and a moisture source. So yeah, it could grow.

Often you’ll see windows that get condensation, you will see a little bit of black mold all the way around them? That’s actually cladosporium – is the king of leaves and grass. It’s a very common outdoor mold and it’s probably the most common mold there is. That you can just wipe off. It’s coming because your windows have condensation on. You see in southern areas particularly because a lot of times they have metal window frames, you have hot humid weather outdoors so they keep the inside really cold, and that temperature difference will cause condensation. Just like if you take a bottle of water outside in the summer and it starts to sweat, that’s the same reaction. And then you’re getting your typical environmental mold growing on it.

A lot of molds are black by the way. When people talk about the black mold, they’re usually talking about a species of stachybotrys chartarum which happens to be a particularly nasty mold to a lot of people. Which brings me to another thing, I just want to mention why mold testing can be valuable. If I got called into a home and there’s some mold growing because the washing machine hose broke two weeks ago. And I look at that with blinders on and got rid of it. I may be doing that client a disservice. If we take samples for examples, and I see that there’s chaetomium  or stachybotrys – those are what we call tertiary molds. So you have three classes of molds essentially; primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary molds will show first after a water event and sometimes it’s fast as 24 to 48 hours. Penicillium is a good example of a primary mold. Secondary molds typically take three or four weeks of that moisture exposure before they grow. And then your tertiary molds can take months. So if I’d look at this damage that occurred two weeks ago but I picked up stachybotrys or I find some stachybotrys, I know that something else is going in that property, it’s been going on for a long time. And I would be doing them a disservice if we don’t try to track down what that long term even was. Often, it’s just chronic high humidity. That’s a big cause of a lot of issues. People just don’t seen to dehumidify. And again, in the southern half, often the air conditioning system weren’t sized properly, so they’ll cool a place down before it gets the chance to fry itself out and that’s the recipe for mold growth.

So there’s a lot of things that can contribute to that, but chronic humidity is a big one which is why you see mold in the bathroom. Again, one of the things that’s out of sequence, but we were talking about mold in an attic. In this area, I’m not sure if it’s the same all over the country, a lot of people have pull-down stairways to get up into their attic, and they’re typically located in the hallway, and that hallway is typically pretty close to a bathroom. So, if somebody get out of the shower and let’s assume you have an exhaust fan, not everybody’s fat. Assuming there’s an exhaust fan in the bathroom, they shut it off and leave the door open as soon as they leave. All that moisture is gonna get sucked right up through where that stairway is because they’re not sealed. It’s on top of the attic side that keeps a tight air seal, but sometimes they’re called blankets. There’s a number of different ways of doing that, but the normal thing for a shower is when you take a shower, the door should be closed, the fan should be on, the fan should stay on for about 10 minutes with the door closed after you vacate it. That’s what it takes to get rid of that moisture, but when you open it and release it, now you’re dumping moisture into the house.

1:10:14.1 Ashley James: And it’ll go where the air in the house is pushing. Like you said, into the crawl space, up in the attic, down in the crawl space. It’s gonna push somewhere in that airway.

1:10:28.3 David Bloom: It’s typically gonna go up.

1:10:30.4 Ashley James: It’s gonna go up and push. The hot air rises, cold air falls and so the moisture is gonna go with the hot air up into the attic and create the mold and we’re not looking. So we don’t really know. We’re just experiencing the spores which can really harm our immune system, seriously.

1:10:56.1 David Bloom: One of the other things that is typically is often we’ll see bathroom vents vented into the attic space itself which should always go up to the roof. Or we see multiple vents connected to each other and then they go up. So what happens is when one vent is running and the other isn’t, you’re actually pulling air from one bathroom to the other bathroom as opposed to get rid of it.

1:11:20.8 Ashley James: I interviewed a woman in the last few months who’s a health coach who is in Florida and had to have their home mold remediated and it was a major deal. Apparently it’s only in the bathroom, so they have to seal off the whole house and they said, “Okay. We’ll work on it in the bathroom, but it’s totally sealed off while we’re spraying. You guys just hang out in the living room.” So she’s in her living room with her young kids and it definitely affected her health living in a home with mold, and as she’s sitting there and they’re doing all this work on the bathroom she’s starts smelling the chemicals. So she’s like, “What’s going on?” And she comes in and said, “Hey. I thought you guys sealed this off? Is it okay for us inhaling this? And we’re now inhaling the mold because they are doing construction to remove it.” It turns out how the house was built – the venting for the bathroom went into the living room. It’s the most ridiculous thing. So now they’re sitting there and the first company she hired was just a complete joke – ended up causing them to be exposed to more mold and the chemicals which were not safe. So they breathe them in and they started to feel sick. So they ended up having to get another company to come in and they had to do construction and make proper venting for the bathroom and it was just this whole ordeal, but the first company was so irresponsible with their health.

It’s just amazing that a house would be built in Florida where the bathroom would vent into the living room – it’s just beyond me. Just like we have to advocate for our own health, we really need to advocate for ourselves and look into how our home is built whether we’re renting or we own it. We need to know, what’s the ventilation system like, have we had our ducts cleaned properly, do we have mold, let’s test for radon, let’s look at the insulation – make sure it cured properly, let’s test the VOCs and make sure we’re not being exposed to particulates and off-gassing that’s harming us. We need to take our home environment into our own hands. I love that you’ve mentioned that when a family cooks a turkey in the oven, that the pollution inside the home is like being in New Delhi, like breathing in the air of New Delhi. And we are sitting here thinking that, “I live in such a wonderful neighborhood where the air quality is so clean.” Or like, “Here I am living in Washington state where it rains so often and that we always feel like the air is really clean here.” But not inside the house, because these newer homes are designed to be energy efficient, so the more energy efficient the home is, the more it becomes like a balloon where the air is trapped inside and it traps all of these VOCs, particulates, mold. It traps everything inside and so our home air can become toxic over time.

I had a woman on the show who said she had this machine, it’s like a little box, and she leaves it in a home for 24 hours. I’m sure you probably heard of them, and then it captures all the VOCs and then she tests it. And she said that she could tell you what brand of cleaners you have in your home. There’s this one Mr. Clean Wipes – because of the specific carcinogenic chemicals that she would see on this list that was captured from the air quality in the home, because she said everything under your sink off-gasses including all your cosmetics. And we think that we’re safe because they’re in a metal container, if it’s a spray – like Lysol or something. “Well, it’s in a metal container. What do you mean?” Or if it’s in a plastic container, we’re safe it’s in a plastic container. But all these things off-gas even through their containers and pollute over time the air we breathe. So we have to look at every single thing and create a home environment that supports our immune system, our overall health.

Just like you said with the lyme patients, they were responding to the treatments after the mold was remediated. They weren’t responding to their treatments because they all had mold. I mean, that is right there a big wake up call for people who are listening to the show going, “I’ve tried everything. I don’t know why I’m still sick.” Just like me with catching every cold when I know I eat really healthy. It was because my home environment was destroying my immune system.

1:16:22.2 David Bloom: I’ll tell you an amazing story. I got called into a job where somebody went in and did some mold testing and it came back negative. They guy didn’t believe him. So I went down to take a look at the property. The house was pretty clean. It did have a little bit of an odor to it. The wife has been horribly sick. She swore that they had tons of mold. I went down to the basement and there’s a 6 by 3 shelving rack and it is 5 or 6 shelves. Everyone of the shelves was stocked with Lysol floral scent something. And I said, “What is all these for?” He said, “My wife sprays it everyday, everywhere because she thinks she’s got mold.” But what she was doing was contaminating the environment because there’s a lot of chemicals in propellants – number one, depending on what they’re using. it could be bad for you. Who knows what other additives are there. I mean the active ingredients they have to list, but you don’t know what else is in there. She was using so much of it, that’s what was making her sick, and after she stopped using it, within a week or two she felt fine.

1:17:29.4 Ashley James: Oh my gosh. She thought she had a mold problem and she was causing her health problems with the Lysol.

1:17:38.1 David Bloom: Yup. Too much of a good thing just doesn’t work.

1:17:42.4 Ashley James: We need to be really careful with those chemical cleaners and also really careful with those things that “Kills 99.99% of germs.” It’s like we do actually need, like you said there are beneficial bacteria in our environment and we don’t want to live in a sterile environment. We need to have the good bacteria, the good microbiome. I know everyone in the last 18 years has been talking about the microbiome of the gut. You know, “Eat yogurt because it’s good for your gut.” Or. “Eat fermented food because it’s good for your gut.” And now in the last few years, everyone’s raving about that there’s a microbiome on our skin and on every surface of our body and in so many more areas of our body than we knew and it’s beneficial bacteria. And so, we’re home which I find fascinating also has beneficial bacteria.

Tell us a bit about this device that you guys created to spray, to spread beneficial beneficial bacteria into the home. Why did you guys create it and what are the positive results of it?

1:18:48.1 David Bloom: Actually we can’t take credit for creating it. Environmental probiotics have been around for a while. There is several companies in Europe that have been on to this technology for quite some time. The device is designed to spray every 30 minutes for 20 seconds. Essentially it’s fermented bacillus and what that does is it’s very unfriendly to the bacteria we don’t want and much more friendly to the bacteria that you do want. So the way that it works essentially is, a lot of bacteria is transferred on skin cells. We all shed thousands and thousands of skin cells everyday. If you ever used a facial scrub, part of that uses a keratinase which is a particular enzyme that’s formed when bacillus is fermented. And keratinase is present in our nails, our skin, animal clubs, horns, and things like that. But the keratinase sort of softens up that piece so that it’s not conducive for bad bacteria to attach to, and it’s also slightly acidic which makes it much more unfriendly to bad bacteria while encouraging the growth of good bacteria. So it’s sort of like probiotic and people take probiotics as a supplement. If you’re taking antibiotics, they typically tell you to take a probiotic so that you can keep that balance going as the antibiotics are not selective of what they’re getting rid of.

So the idea is just a sort of filling the environment with bacteria that’s not harmful. Bacillus is the same bacteria that if you are a kid playing in the dirt, that’s what you would get that on you, which is one of the other interesting things I have too. If little kids nowadays will spend more time outside and eat a little dirt once in a while, they’d be a lot healthier as when they’re grow up. But they’re just not exposed to it, well certainly like I was or people my generation anyway, and so this is a sort of supplementing that. So it’s not an air purifier – it doesn’t filter anything out. The idea is just to get a healthier biome. Results on that have been pretty good. I have one on my bedroom. I don’t really notice much of a difference, but I also have a 70 pound dog that sleeps between my wife. Wonderful birth control by the way. [Laughter] And we don’t seem to have had any issues. So I’m guessing it’s helping, but a lot of the people that we put it in especially the ones that have had serious mold swear by. The pricing on the units has come down, it’s not as expensive than it used to be. But it’s an interesting concept. Because it doesn’t get rid of any particulates, it’s not a replacement for a good air filter.

1:22:02.6 Ashley James: Yeah, it’s just designed to support the microbiome of the home and discourage bad bacteria, encourage good bacteria. Can you share any of the anecdotal testimonials from using that?

1:22:19.7 David Bloom: Yeah. But one thing I did fail to mention, the one thing that it does do and this is pure review literature on this. There are two particular enzymes on dust mite matter that are very strong allergen triggers. And the bacillus neutralizes those two enzymes. So dust mite matter is a huge allergen trigger. It’s a little bit different bow because mattresses aren’t quite made the same. But years ago, your mattress could gain half of its weight again after 10 years and that was all because of bugs so to speak, from dust mites. So that’s a very very strong environmental trigger and it does definitely negates that along with helping crowd out that bacteria and provide a healthier biome.

We had one woman here in Connecticut. She had very severe mold illnesses. We went through the whole situation and we treated her house, we put in the better air units and she was feeling pretty good. Then she would leave and go visit, I don’t know if it was her son or daughter, and say that she just didn’t feel well. So the second time she took the machine with her – it’s only the size of a half loaf of bread. She took the machine with her and she was fine. So is it in her head or did it really make that much of a difference? I can’t answer that, but it seems to work very well for her.

The people who have them like them because they have to replace the cartridge every three months. So we certainly would know if they stopped replacing cartridges. They love them. There are some units actually go into an HVAC system and treat the whole house as opposed to the unit but they’re considerably more expensive.

1:24:14.7 Ashley James: My son is allergic to dust mites and it causes him to have asthma. And we again, eat super clean. he doesn’t eat processed foods, no sugar. Like we eat so clean so when he was getting asthma, I’m like what’s going on? He doesn’t have nutrient deficiencies, he eats super healthy, he gets outside, you know everything. His health is perfect and then all of a sudden he was just getting this asthma. And we finally did all these allergy tests and we figured out he was allergic or sensitive to about five different foods that would increase his histamine, but that dust mites was through the roof. Like he was really really allergic to dust mites. So of course, we’re vacuuming like crazy and we have the special dust mite covers on the mattresses and we’re washing all everything really often. I even saw this really cool study where they’re able to kill most of the dust mites, it was something like 96.7% something like that with washing and soaking linens, blankets, and pillows with eucalyptus oil. And we’re just going like gang-busters, washing everything with eucalyptus oil like crazy. And so he doesn’t have his asthma right now, but if he goes to a friend’s house and he plays in their playroom on the floor for half an hour, he comes home and has an asthma attack. So we really noticed that when he is at other people’s homes and they might not vacuum as diligently as we do, he’ll have asthma attacks from being around dust mites for even half an hour.

So we’re looking for anything we can do to mitigate dust mights. And what you’re saying is that this device that you have that releases the bacteria healthy microbiome into the bedroom, that it somehow neutralizes dust mites?

1:26:26.4 David Bloom: It neutralizes the two allergenic triggers that dust mites have. The reaction that you have to dust mites is as an allergen and that allergen is caused by I think  it’s an F1 or F2 enzyme – it totally neutralizes that so that you shouldn’t have that allergen. You could also use that in a spray, a personal spray and spray some of it on his clothes before he goes to play somewhere and see if it makes a difference for him.  I don’t know if it would or not honestly, but it might.

1:27:02.1 Ashley James: Or bring the small box, because you said it is very reasonable, I could travel with it to a friend’s home and plug it in their playroom. Does it act that fast or does it take time?

1:27:17.3 David Bloom: No. It takes a little bit of time to build up. When we install these, typically what we’ll do is we’ll actually spray just like we would for mold. We’ll spray all the surfaces with sort of a boost to give it a head start and then it starts working from day one, but otherwise, it can take a week or two before it builds up enough where you would notice a difference.

1:27:40.4 Ashley James: Interesting. And what about the enzyme that Steve brought to you that breaks down mold, and of course he was using it to break down the oil in the soil. Do these enzymes also destroy dust mites or kill them? Do you have any experience with that?

1:28:06.5 David Bloom: No. Again, we’d have to be very careful because when you start to make claims, your product has to be registered for that purpose. So these enzymes are different than the ones that are digesting oil. The concept is the same, but the enzymes are much different. But even if it did, I couldn’t say it does because the registration is not one of the intended uses when we registered the product. So we’ve never actually done that same rigorous amount of testing on bugs as we did with bacteria and molds.

We did come up with something for bed bugs that we developed, would have been what’s called the 25 B Exempt Pesticide. 25 Bs were very limited and what you could use for the ingredients is very select list. But if you stay within that list, it doesn’t require a federal registration. Although it typically does in the States, because that’s what we are trying to do – to get something really really safe that would help bed bugs. it worked terrific, but the problem is it didn’t have any walk-over kill. So in other words, if I sprayed at bed bugs, it would kill them. If I sprayed a surface and a bed bug walked over it, the kill rates are very low. So we just couldn’t decide and just forget it about it at that time because it was too difficult.

1:29:36.3 Ashley James: Got it.

1:29:36.7 David Bloom: But that’s the difference. I mean most soaps will work. Because if you spray something in a soap, you’re gonna suffocate it essentially. Or in cases like with ants for example, the way that ant’s circulatory system works – there’s no actual vein system, but it sort of breaks the bond and literally their guts leak out. But a soap could do that because it’s a surfactant. It’s more slippery than water and so by decreasing the surface tension, it can kill bugs. So that’s why people use it on plants for small bugs all the time and they’re pretty harmless.

1:30:18.6 Ashley James: Right. And that’s a natural way to go about it.

1:30:25.1 David Bloom: So that won’t work with dust mites, it would have to be a direct contact. That’s the difference.

1:30:34.2 Ashley James: I just love it. Now what about cat or dog urine. The smell – I’ve heard of people using sprays that have enzymes that break it down. Does Green Home Solutions have a solution that helps to breakdown the smell of cat urine?

1:30:54.6 David Bloom: Yes. Cat urine and tobacco are the two worst odors to try to get rid off. Green Homes’ order technique and it incorporates a product that I made, that is an actual  odor neutralizer. So most of the things you have, air fresheners and things like that mess with the receptors in your nose. So it’s not that the odor necessarily went away, it’s just you can’t smell it anymore. Either that or it substitutes a different fragrance for the fragrance that exited. A lot of times the use of molecule called cyclodextrin which is sort of like a seashell shape and it typically have a lot of solvents in the product and you gotta break it up into small pieces and it gets trapped in that molecule and that molecule would be coated with a masking odor. So again, the odor is still there, you just can’t tell because it’s being masked and it tricks your nose.

Neutralization, we actually change the physical characteristics of the odor molecule so it no longer has an odor. Most [inaudible 1:31:58.9] have a charge to it and the product has the opposite charge, it becomes neutral. Once it’s neutral it has no odor. So it works really well. Dog urine is not a problem, dogs are fine. Cat urine though. Cat urine is made up of several different things. Initially when the urine is fresh it’s a bacterial odor. So at that point, anything that’s antibacterial would actually get rid of the odor because you’d kill the bacteria, you’ll get rid of the odor, but it has to be relatively fresh. But when you come into a home that had cats for a long time and it’s old, eventually the urine will form uric acid crystals and uric acid crystals are not water soluble. It takes about 15,000 grams of water to breakdown one gram of uric acid. So that’s where the enzymes come in, but when you do add that water, it actually releases more of the odor. So everytime you try to clean up with something that’s water-based it seems like it’s getting stronger. So enzymes will breakdown that particular odor. But you gotta be able to get to the source and that sometimes is tough because it soaks into things quite deeply.

So we have a procedure that takes a number of steps. It’s a little bit time consuming but it’s been proven to work. We do use a little bit of hydrogen peroxide and depending on the situation, I mean if there’s a carpet, the carpet is gonna have to go. Unless you want to keep cleaning the same spot over and over again which would be somewhat labor intensive and too expensive. It really has to go. Because then you can get to see if it got into the sub floor and a lot of times on a real estate job that we do a lot of work with realtors from the house they’re changing hands and the owner will say, “Well my cat only messes this one room.” And then you’ll pull out a black light and you see this orange and greenish blotches everywhere – that’s where all the cat pee is. And if they’re male cats, they spray – you’re talking about going up about two feet on the drywall. Source revealing is the best think you can do. We can neutralize it once we get the source of it. If it’s on concrete in a basement for example, often we can get rid of it but then we have to seal it. Because you’re not gonna necessarily get down far enough into that concrete. Concretes are very porous to be able to pull everything out, but there is a process for it.

Tobacco, it’s the same thing. If you are in a room and somebody smoked in the room, we could spray that room to go away instantly. But if somebody has been smoking for 20 years, there is what we call third hand smoke which is everything that builds up on the walls  There are 4,000 different chemical compounds in tobacco smoke. The problem with neutralization technology is the chemistry is different depending on what you’re trying to neutralize. So we came up with a formula that works on most everything. There’s no way I’m gonna cover 4,000 different chemicals, but if the smoke is new, it’s fine.

There is a study in [inaudible 1:35:14.0]? they had people smoke in a room for four hours. They measured the gas level. They went back and 10 hours later and measured the gas, then they went back 10 hours after that which is 24 hours later and measured the gas levels. The gas levels were high at the 24 hour period. So that was because everything that got onto the walls was giving back. So in a tobacco remediation, those walls, ceilings, floors, all have to be physically cleaned first. You got to get rid of that source. Again, if I just sprayed it I would neutralize what’s on the surface but eventually whatever is buried in the paper is gonna emanate back up. So you’ve got to clean that all off first and then you treat it and it will work fine. We’ve been very successful. But it’s not as simple as we’d like. But it’s really only those two odors that cause that issue.

1:36:04.2 Ashley James: It’s amazing to think about like if someone buys a home from a smoker, they’re being exposed to 4,000 chemicals that’s off-gassing out of the walls.

1:36:14.4 David Bloom: Yes. They may not all be there but they are going to be exposed to a significant amount.  I’ve gone into homes were the person moved out and the walls were yellow and when all the pictures are gone, you could see that the walls are really white and the difference is dramatic. I mean it looks like there’s a ghost in there because that’s how heavy it got built up.

1:36:41.1 Ashley James: Amazing. I like talking about these different things your company does. I mean obviously removing cat urine is not gonna be sort of life changing to someone who has health issues. But it is the reality of being a homeowner and also being a pet owner and your company can save people a lot of headaches.

1:37:02.4 David Bloom: Yeah.

1:37:03.8 Ashley James: And save money – I like that your company tries to do it the smartest way instead of like, “Ok we have to tear out everything.” You’re gonna do it the smartest way and try to save the homeowner money.

1:37:19.8 David Bloom: 90% of the work that we on those two in particular – cat urine and tobacco, are done because of a real estate transaction. Somebody wants to sell their house, they have an open house, people walk in the door, turn around and walk out if the house smells like smoke – that kind of thing. Most of the time the people that have the cats don’t necessarily realize that there’s an odor and maybe there is. I mean I’ve got cats, I don’t think my house smells. Typically if you’re trying to sell your house, you’re looking to buy a house that has that type of an issue, that’s when we can really make a difference.

1:37:59.7 Ashley James: So a lot of real estate agents use your services?

1:38:04.4 David Bloom: Correct. For a number of reasons, number one – we’re pretty quick. We’re really good at what we do. But because we can preserve most of the building materials or certainly more than conventional remediation, the turnaround is much quicker. So often we can be done in a house in a day, but it really depends on the extent of it. In the northeast, I’d say a good 75% of their real estate work is just attics because they all have problems. The probably 15% is basements and 10% is somewhere else in the house. Our whole goal is to help them preserve their deal, not waste a sale. And they are excellent referral source of course.

1:38:53.3 Ashley James: Speaking of preserving, I know that your company also works with a lot of victims of floods. We’ve had some really crazy floods the last two years. I’m just remembering hurricane Harvey, I had friends in it and their house was so damaged. And so I’m just thinking about the floods we’ve had and are currently having now in the  United States, tell me about how Green Home Solutions helps people who have just had a flood to basically preserve their home.

1:39:36.1 David Bloom: Floods are different and the reason they’re different is the water – when you get rising water like that, you don’t know where it came from, you don’t know what it traveled through. So it’s considered category 3 water. Anytime you have category 3 water, anything that touches has to be physically removed, unless it can be cleaned. So drywall has to go. Normally we can clean drywall and preserve it, but in case of a flood you can’t. Because you can’t be 100% sure that there’s not something in the middle of that drywall that could kill you and you just can’t take that risk. So any kind of rising water, flood waters, sideways rain is considered category 3 water – so if you get a tornado type of thing or you get the wind whipping the rain around sideways, again, you don’t know what that water could have gone through before it reached you.

Normally, our work is done with either category 1 or 2 which is category 1 is potable water and category 2 is, I wanna say gray water, but it’s water that isn’t perfect, you wouldn’t wanna drink it, but if you did, you’re not gonna die. Category 3, you could die. So that has to be treated considerably different. Not all of our franchisees do water dry outs. A number of them do, especially the ones on the West Coast and we do have a group in Houston that got started in Harvey. They preserve as much as they can, but you’re gonna lose a lot because you just can’t. It’s not worth the risk in those kind of situations.

1:41:19.2 Ashley James: And so, can you walk us through. Let’s say someone has just gone through a flood, can you walk us through, like what are the steps that Green Home Solution takes to ensure that, that home is gonna be safe to live in.

1:41:34.0 David Bloom: First thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna get rid of the water – that’s gonna get pumped out. You’re gonna dry everything as fast as you can, because you can dry it quick enough using commercial dehumidifiers, a lot of air movers – you can at least limit any kind of mold growth. And then often if there’s a lot of debris left behind, you have muddy things – there’s a piece of equipment that’s almost like a carpet steam cleaner that it’s made to clean this type of work – to clean all those surfaces off and getting down to where there’s no contaminated materials. Normally you’re gonna have to test it, make sure there’s no bacteria, make sure there’s no mold growth.

1:42:21.8 Ashley James: Is that where you use the ATP device?

1:42:25.5 David Bloom: No. It would that as a screen, but if it came back positive, you would definitely check and make sure it’s bacteria. You’d wanna know what was going on in there.

Like I said, not a lot of our franchisees get involved in the heavy flood stuff. There are some decent water restoration companies. It takes a lot of equipment. The capital investment to be in that end of the business is substantial and you also have to be on-call 24 hours a day. Not everybody who gets involved in the business wants to be a 24 hour a day business, they like their 9 to 5.

1:43:14.3 Ashley James: Sure. That makes sense.

1:43:17.4 David Bloom: So we don’t do a lot of that, except most of the guys in California and the ones in Texas do water restoration.

1:43:25.3 Ashley James: Got it. So let’s say someone has done the water restoration side, could they have Green Home Solutions come in and just test to make sure that there’s no mold?

1:43:41.4 David Bloom: Yeah. We actually work with some of the water restoration companies where they’ll go in. They’ll do the demo, whatever needs to be taken out. They’ll get the place dry and we go in and we’ll typically treat it even if it’s just preventative to make sure that there’s not gonna be any bacterial growth or mold growth, but it’s after it’s been dried out. So we let them do the heavy lifting and then we go in and take care of the house like we normally do.

1:44:08.8 Ashley James: So the enzymes that you have that you use to kill mold, it can also be used preventively?

1:44:15.9 David Bloom: Yeah. It can. It’s sort of an insurance policy. So it’s really prophylactic to try and prevent growth by making sure there’s nothing there that can grow. So if the house sits for a couple of days or something and it’s humid, we’re hoping to run and prevent that growth from occurring. Ideally we would do it again when all the walls that are up in the house is in back condition. We do a lot of work with Habitat for Humanity, we’re one of their major sponsors. And in their situation, a lot of times they build a home, it doesn’t get occupied for maybe three or four weeks and it sits there and they have the potential for mold growth. So for them, we go in and test. If it’s not obvious, we can’t say anything, then we’ll test. We’re gonna clean the house, if they feel comfortable turning a house over to their [inaudible 1:45:14.8] So it would be something similar to that.

1:45:20.3 Ashley James: Ok. I was curious whether the enzymes that you spray to kill the mold, if you spray an area, let’s say a bathroom, it doesn’t have mold but you sprayed it. Do the enzymes stick around and then if mold were to enter the area kill it later on? Like does it have a half-life or shelf life that it kills what enters the area for a certain period of time?

1:45:51.3 David Bloom: You know I get asked that question quite often and to be honest, I don’t know. Because we’ve never been able to get a scenario where we could actually test that. That being said, if you go and treat an area, obviously it’s gonna kill anything that’s there, so you’re not gonna have any mold. And if you did that in some sort of a reoccuring timeframe, then you’re never gonna allow it to grow. By the time you can see it, you’ve got a lot of it. So when you have a square inch of moldy wall board for example, that could be anywhere between 10,000 and a million spores. So you can’t see it until it’s already got its little fragments that are gonna start to grow into things. So spraying periodically would be helpful to keep it away. Now, can I tell you how long in between? No, I really don’t know.

We got a school that we did in West Virginia that was sitting in a flood plain. So they would get water under the building quite frequently and there is a lot of mold growth under the building. We treated the school, we actually broke through the foundation to treat in there one time. And then the idea was that we would come back, they would have the school tested every three months, I think it was. And we had figured that we’d probably have to come back about every six months and re-treat it. They ended up closing the school. I mean they kept it for that school year and then close it. So we actually never did go back, but it did keep it away for nine months or so.

1:47:38.1 Ashley James: And I like that your whole philosophy as a company is to get to the root anyway. Your philosophy isn’t let’s just spray all the time and keep coming back and spraying, let’s try to prevent it. In the school’s case, you couldn’t prevent the recurrence of flooding.

1:47:57.0 David Bloom: Correct.

1:47:58.4 Ashley James: But in most residential areas, your company looks for the root cause and make sure – whether it’s putting a dehumidifier in and making sure the bathroom is ventilating correctly or the other steps you take. You’re making sure that the home doesn’t have sort of that perfect environment to create mold and then you spray to kill it. But you’re not necessarily spraying – coming back and spraying preventively because there would be no need if you got rid of the moisture problem.

1:48:27.2 David Bloom: Right. If we can get the homeowner to address the moisture issue or at least we’ll do it. Somebody’s got to address it. If we can do that and we get rid of the mold that they have now, they should never need us again. Because without the moisture, you shouldn’t have a mold issue. Now, at some places there are areas that you can’t just avoid it, but there’s a lot of things that can be done. When I look at a property, when I approach a client’s property, I’ll look at the outside of the building first and I’m saying, “Ok. If I’m a raindrop, where am I going?” Are there gutters that are gonna take the water away from the foundation? Or is it dumping it straight down along the foundation? Is the grading such so that water is gonna drain towards the house or drain away from the house?

Because when you think about it, it’s really pretty simple. There’s only four places that water can from from. It’s either gonna come down from the top, it’s gonna come up from the bottom, it’s gonna be a pipe leak or some sort of a leak, or it’s gonna be high humidity. So when you break into those simple things and look at what you’re dealing with, it’s not that complicated. Sometimes you have buildings that have a convolution of factors. One in particular was in the clubhouse for an over 55 housing community and the exercise room – the pictures in the room started falling off the walls because they’re are so wet. This was in Maryland, and what happened here was a whole bunch of different things. So for example Maryland for some reason, they love their mulch and they mount everything up really high. In fact a couple of trees were dying because they were drowning, they were just holding so much moisture. So because they love their mulch, they had splash blocks which is a gutter comes down, goes into a splash bx and lead their water away from the building – turned around backwards because they didn’t want it to wash the mulch away. So the water is just going back towards the building. They had sprinkler heads that had a 360 degrees spray pattern, six inches away from the building which had a brick facade and brick is very porous. The rest of the building was vinyl sided and there was no vapor barrier.

In Maryland that’s not uncommon because half the year the vapor barrier would be in the wrong side anyway, pretty much even heating included. But the inside of that exercise room which was kept cold had vinyl wallpaper which is a vapor barrier. So now, vapor pressure is driving moisture in the humid summers into that room, and it’s going from hot to cold, and it hits that cold paper, condenses in the vinyl wallpaper but it can’t get out because it can’t get through the vinyl. Vinyls are impervious, so it just collected in the wall. And it was all of those things together that caused that problem we had.

That’s why you can’t just look at the obvious and a good visual inspection is the best thing you could do. Your eyes and your nose are far better than any testing. Testing can confirm, but your eyes and your nose are really what you need. That’s why we have to train our people so well.