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In this episode of the Learn True Health podcast, we delve into the complex world of genetics and health, focusing on the vital connection between gene enzymes like MTHFR and overall wellness. Our expert guest unpacks the role of supportive genes and explains why some people experience heightened anxiety, sleeplessness, and racing thoughts after taking high doses of B vitamins.
We also explore the powerful impact of diet on both brain and gut health, revealing how certain foods and synthetic supplements could be exacerbating underlying genetic issues. Plus, we discuss the importance of listening to your body's signals and how genetic testing can provide actionable insights to improve your health. This is a must-listen for anyone looking to optimize their well-being through a deeper understanding of their genetic makeup.
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Ashley James (0:00:41.012)
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 519.
I am so excited for today's guest. We get to dive into such an interesting topic today with Dr. Dr. Laurie Marti. Welcome to the show,
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:01:00.283)
Thank you.
Ashley James (0:01:02.689)
So we have a mutual friend, and that's how I discovered you, an amazing woman near and dear to my heart. Jessica does mental health counseling, but she looks at the body as a whole, very holistic mental health counseling, helping her clients to overcome addiction around anything you're addicted to. A lot of substance abuse, though. People who want to overcome substance abuse and alcohol come to her, but what I love is that she looks at the body as a whole and helps her clients as a whole, and that's, I'm sure, why she finds this topic so fascinating and why she told me that I really needed to interview you. Because, although you come from a traditional medical doctor, allopathic background, you discovered that holistic medicine, functional holistic medicine, there's this whole world, amazing world of science-based ways of doing things that isn't just waiting for someone to get sick and giving them a drug, and I love that.
I love it when MDs they see the light and they're like, wait a second. This system is incomplete without seeing this whole other side of things. I definitely want to dive into all the fun stuff we're going to talk about today, but first I want to know can you tell us, was there an aha moment as a medical doctor when you went, wait a second, have I been lied to? Was I lied to my entire time in university? Why is this whole other piece missing? Did you have an aha moment?
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:02:41.395)
I think I've had a few of them. There's never just one. So I graduated in a family practice and started doing that for my first few years of my career. I was actually home with my first child and on maternity leave.
I don't even know if I'd been practicing for three years at that time. I just said, I almost don't want to go back, but I have all this student loan debt, so I know I have to go back, but I'm not really happy in what I'm doing. One of the things that really bothered me was just within the medical practice that I had three partners and I was obviously the new young partner.
I always got the most difficult patients because that's where they end up going, is to the new person in the practice. I would order a lot of blood work on them because I'm like, I don't know how to help you if I don't know what's really going on with you. I would actually get chastised by my partners by ordering so many tests. How am I supposed to figure out what's going on with them?
Well, fast forward to me on maternity leave, and there was a company that was looking for a practitioner that wanted to specialize in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and it was this moment where I was like, wow, that's an interest I've had since my residency, because my residency senior project was on a fibromyalgia patient.
During that time off, I interviewed with them and during that process, they introduced me to working with more holistic therapy because they had found that treating patients with fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain condition, really was amenable to a more holistic approach. I had never been introduced to any of that. it just opened up this whole new world to me. Long story short, I ended up quitting my practice in family medicine and working for that for a couple of years, and then, just wanted to go out on my own and start my own practice and it really expounded from there because I didn't want to be restricted to just working with those types of patients. I had known about naturopathic doctors but I didn't really understand what they did and so it was just by being able to incorporate all of that into the allopathic realm and having this all encompassing view of every patient was just an amazing experience. so I opened up my own practice, it was 2007, and I have not looked back. I've just learned more and more as I've gone along.
Ashley James (0:06:07.085)
Oh, 16 years. So you've been diving into the holistic space. How does an MD learn all the holistic stuff? Obviously you do your own reading, but do you go through functional medicine? Do you take those courses or do you pick the brains of naturopaths? How do you get this training? For those who are listening who are medical doctors I just want to know more. I want to dive deeper. I've interviewed so many MDs who've become holistic but the medical doctor training is designed to make you see people through the lens of medicine of reductionism. So you're looking to reduce people into their parts, that's part of MD medicine. Being a diagnostician, MDs are amazing. The problem is then the tools they're given are like, here's all these drugs. So it's just an incomplete view of the body. So many MDs that have come on my show said that they thought their education was complete because of the way their education has been presented to them and how much money and time they had to invest in their education, that what they had been taught was the most important aspects. Everything else was kind of just secondary. That functional stuff over there is not as important or poo-pooed. If you graduated from Harvard, I had interviewed a woman graduated from Harvard Medical. She said they made us believe that we were taught the most important things. So we are trained to poo-poo everything else. Then, MD drug based medicine had no answers for her when she fell ill and she had to turn to holistic medicine, which then gave her life back. It was like being pulled out of the matrix. She had this massive wake up and she's like, oh my gosh, there's this whole other aspect. So in realizing as an MD being pulled out of the MD matrix and realizing there's this whole other world you want to plug into, unless you went back to college and got a naturopathic degree. How do you navigate in the world to piece together all the information you need so that you can really help clients on a holistic level? So how do you do that?
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:08:43.375)
That's a great question. There's a whole industry built around that now, one of them is called A4M. It's basically a regenerative medical group, which they have members, because it's a membership organization. But they actually put on seminars where you pay a fee and you just go and you do classes from experts in different areas of different fields and you can learn as much as you want. I did that at the beginning because I had obviously so much to learn. but I tended to focus on hormonal therapy.
You can tailor your practice to what interests you. I think I always had an interest in hormonal medicine, and then obviously these chronic conditions where they were very underserved in the allopathic community. I really felt like there was something lacking for patients that had been diagnosed with these conditions that were considered when nothing else was found to be wrong with them, it had to be in their head, it had to be psychological, and that probably bothered me the most.
Yes, I just spent a lot of hours doing formal training. You can get advanced degrees in that, but it really isn't necessary because it's really just about the knowledge. It's not like you absolutely have to have those certificates on your wall. You just have to have an interest in it and you have to put the time in to learn it because that's the most important aspect is understanding that there's different roads in any field and how you get there is you can make that your own and so you just need the background information.
But yes, it's good to know that there's this growing interest in MDs learning this other side of medicine. I was surrounded by plenty of other MDs who were in my similar space. So it's a lot different than it was back in 2007. This is definitely a growing area. I think the more that we have pandemics and things like that, you're just going to see this grow more and more.
For example, long COVID, it's almost chronic fatigue syndrome that I've been dealing with for years. But when you have these things come to the forefront in allopathic medicine, it's nice having that background because you realize that it's the same underlying processes are there. so you can take that knowledge that you've learned, even though it's something new that you might be exposed to, all that baseline information is there.
Ashley James (0:11:57.856)
What's really interesting is part of this movement was ignited by Dr. Oz. I think that's so funny, like looking back, cause I can think back to like Oprah and how she would bring things to the table to discuss like menopause. Before she had that first episode talking about menopause as she was going through it herself, you didn't talk about it. It was a hidden backdoor conversation with your doctor. It was almost shameful to bring up and she brought it into the light and brought Dr. Oz on. Then he had his own show. As they explored, just tip of the iceberg conversations about things that were outside of the allopathic realm, little holistic nuggets here and there.
Their patients would go to their doctors saying, oh, I want you to run this test, I want you to look for this. The doctors didn't have any training in that. In America you can choose your doctors, you can shop for your doctor. In socialized medicine, it's a little harder, but here you can go shop for your doctor and so you can fire your doctor. If they don't have the extra training, you can fire them and go get a new one. So all of a sudden there was this need for medical doctors to go get additional training. Go get some functional medicine training. Start to understand what's going on because it's now in the mainstream. It was now being talked about. So I just loved watching that movement take off. We still have a long way to go. I'd like to see functional medicine be taught in medical school, but then that would be helping the patient get so healthy where they would need drugs and that would cut the profits of big pharma.
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:13:48.363)
Yes, there is definitely a strong push with the pharmaceutical industry and training. So yes, I don't think that's something that's going to be introduced anytime soon.
Ashley James (0:14:02.170)
Which is a telltale sign that we need to think critically when we choose the companies we buy food from, the companies we buy medicine from, the companies we buy supplements from, and the doctors we choose to see.
We need to not just blindly trust authority. We can't walk around in fear either. We need to take a step back and make sure that we're choosing the people who have the best training and also the companies who have our best interests at heart and not just profits. So I love that allopathic drug-based emergency medicine is available for us to save our lives should we need it, God forbid. It's like taking your car to a plumber. If you take a chronic disease to an MD who only has training in drug-based medicine because they don’t have the training to see how we can help the body heal itself.
So that's my soap box. I say it every day, but you live it every day as an allopathically trained MD who now specializes in functional medicine, which is so exciting.
So let's talk more about the work you do. You started out, like you talked about fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and , there's like Lyme disease and that whole rigmarole of where you say we've been underserved. So true.
Then of course, the hormones, but it comes down to if we chunk down and we look at cellular health and we look at brain health, there's stuff going on. We look at liver health, there's genetics and epigenetics.
When you look at all of these different syndromes and the diagnoses and you look at the body and how the body's functioning, what's going on that's disrupting the function of the body so it presents these symptoms?
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:15:57.854)
Well, that's a big question because there are so many things that can cause dysfunction in the body and it's not always really clear from the initial assessment of an individual. But that's where my biggest mantra is, each person is an individual and what makes us unique is our DNA.
So at the very core of us, we have a genetic makeup that gives us strengths and weaknesses. then from that, we have our life experiences and our exposures, whether that be toxic exposures. I think most of us would agree that probably in the last few decades, we've been exposed to more toxins than ever before in the things that we eat and the things that we breathe.
Thank goodness more and more people are starting to read labels and starting to think critically about the things they put in their body. But our DNA puts us at that part of us that we don't know what our weaknesses and strengths are. So that's really where it begins.
Then based upon your exposures in life, stresses, the things that just happen because of life, as we get older we become less resilient. So I think as you go through your decades of life there are different things that become apparent as problematic. Whether that be hormonal things or pain or fatigue, these things can happen at any age. But then obviously as we get older, then there's these different facets of just our life with our hormone changes and things like that make us more vulnerable to the deficits that we may have that we don't even know about.
Health is a journey. We don't really think about our health until it's not working. Then, we try to ask someone to help us figure it out. I think that sets a person into looking if they are satisfied with the answers that they have or do they feel like they have more questions. That's when people will seek out a more thorough investigation. I think that more and more people are becoming aware that there's other practitioners out there that can help figure out what's going to give them their healthiest experience. I think it's just an all encompassing world, when you think about what happens in our life in terms of what we consider good health and bad health and disease and pathology.
I think people have to get to a point where they feel like they need to ask for help. I think that that's really the start is when do you start asking help or asking those questions?
Ashley James (0:19:31.531)
Yes. That's such a good point, because, what popped into my mind is my mom who she was like the epitome of health to me. She worked out seven days a week. She took her supplements. She was meticulous with her diet. She'd cheat once in a while. Like she'd eat red jujubes and she knew red dye wasn't good for her, but it wasn't like she overdid it anyway. She'd have like three red jujubes and that was her little guilty pleasure. She had some alcohol, like one or two servings, a few times a week kind of thing. So she had a little guilty pleasure, but she felt like she made up for it by how strict she was with her diet. Like she followed the diet plan that her naturopath gave her just meticulously and had the discipline to exercise but she ignored these little symptoms that came up. She ignored this whole little digestive feeling here, a little tired there, a little kind of funny feeling near her liver, she chalked it up to the fact that she had moved to Naples, Florida. They'd gone through the stress of moving. She was acclimating to a new climate, eating different food, meeting, making new friends, doing different activities. She just kind of pushed it off to the side until she was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. A few months later she died. She ignored the symptoms because she was healthier than most. So those symptoms weren't maybe if she was not healthy, maybe she was eating junk food every day and just really didn't take care of herself. She would have noticed sooner but she ignored those symptoms. So, at what point are you a hypochondriac? At what point are you making a smart move by getting checked out because you feel the symptoms? So for her, it wasn't a big deal until all of a sudden it was.
My dad, on the other hand, largely ignored major red flags for heart disease and died suddenly of heart failure. So, that’s blatant. I'm going to ignore major, major red flags. But then sometimes the body is speaking in whispers. So at what point do you go what? This isn't optimal health. I should probably look into how I could optimize this. So is it that I'm a little tired in the morning? Is it a little bit of brain fog? Is it like I notice I can't do as well in the gym?
I had a friend, we were part of a coaching program. He was an amazing coach. He‘s been a chronic smoker his whole life. Then he quit and did Iron Man's and his coach noticed that his times on his running were getting worse. That’s the only symptom he had of lung cancer. He ended up overcoming lung cancer. Lived for many, many years. Died very, very elderly. I don't remember if he was in his eighties. He lived a full life. That was his only symptom. So luckily he caught it early enough.
When do we listen and go, I want to optimize that. On the other hand, we've been told our whole life, oh, you have that because you're a woman, you have that because your mom had that, you had that because you're in your 40s or 50s or 60s, you have that because you're black or you're white or what. We're just told these ridiculous things, these lies by our doctor that, oh, you're fat because your family was fat, or you have diabetes because your family has diabetes, or you have glaucoma just because that's what happens when you're 70. Like they're blatant lies.
This is why, again, I kind of get on my soapbox with MDs that tell their patients, you're just going to have to be sick because this is how it is. It's not true at all. Your genetics don't dictate your future. They help educate us on where it might go but it has to accompany your lifestyle.
So we look at the patient who has been told there’s a certain way their whole life, or maybe they just believe it because their mom or their grandma said, this is just how it is. Even the mainstream media, everyone, all women have period cramps, like these lies. If you were in absolute perfect health, you would notice no difference. You would just all of a sudden be like, oh, I got my period today. There would be no PMS. PMS is a sign that things are out of balance and we should be listening. So I'd love for you to share, what symptoms do you want people to listen to and take seriously and know that they can optimize those at any age?
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:24:23.603)
Well, I think that is absolutely critical. Unfortunately, the exposures that we have in our medical community is that you don't really ask those questions. So when you're a teenager, you may go in for a sports physical. You're not really encouraged to expound on anything. It's a form you check off. What child is going to admit anything's wrong. That's where we have to change the paradigm, even if it's only not going to the doctor, even if it's among the population, our health is something that should be a topic of conversation.
I think it's never too early to say, you know maybe I should do a comprehensive stool test to figure out how my digestion is because who doesn't have a bloated belly every now and then, or react in some funky way to something they ate, and I'm not talking about food poisoning, I'm just talking about, gosh, that did not agree with me, and it's something I've eaten before. Just having that awareness that if something happens that is not a completely random event, but it keeps happening. That's when you have to do something about it.
For example, normally most of my patients are adults, but I will end up seeing their teenagers or their children only because maybe they've kind of had some random things happen and maybe it's not right. Most of the time we blow off young people's symptoms because they're young and they should be healthy. Come to find out a lot of things that teenagers suffer with acne, just food sensitivities, those things are not normal. However, we've begun to normalize that. The problem is that when you start normalizing those kinds of symptoms or signs, things that you see and experience, that's when you have to start saying, this is not normal. Maybe there is something I should look deeper into.
So it doesn't have to be I'm passing out or I have some real severe symptoms or something like that. It can be just what we consider normal everyday teenager issues or things in our life that we just think are normal for our age. If you just have something that is just happening over and over, maybe don't just consider it normal. Maybe it is something underneath.
I've done testing on over a thousand patients and I can tell you that nobody's normal. Nobody has completely normal tests. I've checked my own tests and they're not normal. So, it's all in how you just take that next step and say, I'm not going to accept this is the way that I exist. If I can improve upon anything, maybe it gives me a longer life or maybe I'll have more energy or so it's just about not normalizing everything and having those conversations with your friends and family and your connections.
Ashley James (0:28:15.421)
One of my naturopathic mentors told me about his favorite movie of all time, King of Hearts, 1966, in which during the war, this whole town is emptied out and the psychiatric patients in this asylum escape and they flee down into the town and they take over the town. All the people are, for a lack of a better term, crazy. They're having a lot of fun. They takeover the bakery, the restaurant, the inn and everything.
Then a soldier comes in and can you imagine you walk in and everyone feels as if they're normal because they're all there, but they're acting as if they've taken on these roles. He walks into this world thinking that they're all townspeople. He described the reason why this is favorite movie, because he goes, this is what it's like to be a patient in the MD medical system.
Everyone's in agreement. They're all crazy and they're all in agreement with each other. So you have to get like we were the outsider coming into this world and we've been told this is just how it is like acting and children are normal. It's not, it is not. First of all, we got to look at blood sugar. We've got to look at the gut biome. We got this list of things we got to look at, like food sensitivities but go even beyond why is there a food sensitivity? What's going on? Is there a leaky gut? Like go deeper. So we have taken a population, got them incredibly sick and then said, because so many people have sickness, it's normal. The very first step in healing is to shift our mindset and pull ourselves out of the matrix of the brainwashed way we've been taught to think.
We have absolutely been taught to think this way. I hate acting like a conspiracy person with my tin foil hat, but I'm making tinfoil hats for everyone. So passing them out right now. When you look at the history of the modern medical system, it was completely 100% orchestrated and influenced those who sold pharmaceuticals at the time over 100 years ago. It has since been not a days gone by that the pharmaceutical industry has not had control over the education of medical doctors and the number one sponsor of all media are the pharmaceutical industry which is petroleum-based. That's a whole fun rabbit hole to go down of true history not a perceived conspiracy, but a real conspiracy. A real conspiracy is when someone or a group of people get together to conspire to do illicit things or to do things that aren't ethical or aren't right. This is absolutely not right because they control the media that you've been bringing into your brain since you were born. Also your parents. But your grandparents or great grandparents. They were before this and they might have had a garden with herbs. They had animals. They did a regular deworming of the animals and then they took the same herbs as well. This is something that's been lost, but it was 100 years ago plus we had a lot of things that we knew to do. Now we also did a lot of really weird stuff, like eat things with lead in it. Paint our body with arsenic or whatever, we had weird things we had. So at least we've gotten rid of the not so healthy things. But if we go back, we see that our ancestors incorporated nature into their medicine.
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:32:11.885)
Well, there was less of a dependence on a system. Again, there's probably multiple theories on what's behind it, but the idea is that we become more inclined to be part of this dependency of people taking care of us. Like we don't take care of ourselves anymore.
But I think that's starting to change. See, I really do feel there are more and more people asking questions, which is where it starts. It starts by being inquisitive because I think we have been told to obey and don't ask questions and just do what you're told but I think people are starting to say, we can follow the rules, but maybe we ask questions along the way. I think it goes beyond even health in that realm but it's about people just using these really big brains that we have and not accepting status quo's because as we become a society that's sicker, we dig ourselves into deeper holes.
I think people are finally starting to wake up and say, maybe there is an alternative way, maybe that we start being more self-sustaining, that we don't ask for help, or depend on organizations to help us. Use those resources when you need them, but also realize that we have a responsibility to ourselves and our families to make sure that we're in the best health possible. In doing that, it does require some work. It requires you to do some research to think outside the box because you're not going to get that if you just go to your doctor's office, you're not going to get that. So it's about people having a different mindset and saying, I'm just going to start asking different people different questions and maybe I start learning some new things and some ways that I can help myself and meet the right practitioners that are going to help me in this journey of empowering myself. That process is really powerful. It really teaches you not only how to take care of yourself better, but how to take care of others better and just a community spirit in that, because I think our health is about community too. We need to heal ourselves, but in the process of just eating better and sourcing out better foods and things like that, we are making those connections that can all help us be healthier.
Ashley James (0:35:22.225)
It does matter the environment because I've had clients before where they're the only one eating healthy and everyone else is going to Sonic's or going to Starbucks and Sonic's and Jack in the Box and McDonald's and they're all kind of laughing at her wanting to go to bed early and get up early to go for her walks or make her smoothies and all the changes she's making versus the clients have had where the whole family is doing it with her or 100% on board or their husband's like, yes, make me a smoothie too.
It’s so much easier when the people around you are on the journey with you, or at least supportive of your journey and not questioning you or putting you down. I can't tell you how many clients have had with that choose to cut out dairy. Then someone in the family is like, you need dairy and you're going to hurt yourself if you don't. They get really indignant and angry at them because they think that they're going to die if they don't eat dairy. Then they literally, on the same day, go through the drive through and eat fried food. That's okay, but how dare you not drink the mammalian excretions of another animal?
We need to respect and honor our friends and family when they're trying to make health choices. But what I explained to my clients is that when people get upset, especially those who are close to you, when they get upset about your changing, it's just holding a mirror up to themselves and they don't want to change.
People with addiction also get very angry because they don't want to give up their sugar and alcohol or whatever they're addicted to. So, if you choose to give those things up, if they don't want to make changes, they get angry at you for making changes because they don't want to feel threatened.
It's really interesting to make a health change and declare it to your friends and family and then just watch and see who's supportive and then who isn't and I get that it's their stuff, but we have to kind of set ourselves up and make sure we have our healthy boundaries in place because it's really interesting who comes out of the woodwork to sabotage us. It's their stuff, but still we need to protect ourselves.
Earlier, you talked about how nutrient deficiency and toxic exposures are largely on the rise, that's something we've seen in the last 40 years create chronic illness. Then there's this whole aspect of genetics, which you love to get into. I'm really, really interested to talk about MTHFR, which is just one of the many genetic things that we could talk about, but I'd love for you to explain, from your standpoint as a physician working with a patient or client, what is the difference between someone's genetics and someone's epigenetics when it comes to helping them support their body's ability to heal itself and create optimal health.
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:38:30.620)
The very first thing I do with any person that first comes to see me is I get an assessment of their environment because you can find out all you want about their genetics. But if their environment is in a negative space you will find that their genetics aren't even if they have strong points they are not necessarily going to work for their benefit. So that concept of epigenetics is that you have certain genes and gene mutations that we're born with, but these exposures, and either good or bad, will affect the expression of those genes.
So that's what's really amazing about this whole idea is that people have for so long said, well I have this genetic problem or that's this genetic predisposition. So I guess I'm going to die of this or, or it's my parents had this and now I'm getting it. So, there's nothing I can really do to change it. Well, we've realized that's not the case, that there are factors that can improve upon these weak areas in our genetics and we can make them function better. In that process, people learn that they aren't subject to the outcomes that gene or that group of genes might cause for them disease-wise, if they pay attention and they take care of their nutrition in a way that optimizes those. So the way that a lot of these genes work is even if you have a mutation in an enzyme, you can take nutritional cofactors that can improve upon the function of that enzyme. if you do that, then you reduce the risk of the potential outcomes of that mutation.
So you had mentioned MTHFR, that's actually the gene that got me interested in genetics because I had read this research paper about fibromyalgia and how this chronic pain condition was affected by this gene, which I know I had heard about in medical school, but it was nothing that was a big topic of discussion. So it was something that I was familiar with, but didn't really know anything about and that definitely led me down the rabbit hole of just understanding that particular gene but then of course, there's a whole host of others that can affect it. so, just in this process of learning how we can understand what our genetic makeup is, but we can improve upon it based upon different factors that we can support. I think there's just a huge educational piece in this because people are learning this stuff or hearing about it for the first time. It's pretty science-oriented, you can really get into the weeds in it. Part of my job is to bring it down to a level that I think people can utilize that information and apply it in their own lives, take that information and do something positive with it.
Then,what I do is I support that with blood work and looking to see, to show people that they're making a difference. The choices that they're making both with their lifestyle and with their choices in what they eat and the supplements that they take, they can see in black and white how these things are changing within their body from their blood work and that really encourages people.
Ashley James (0:42:40.355)
Can you give us some examples?
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:42:42.361)
Are you talking about a specific blood test?
Ashley James (0:42:45.697)
When you've worked with a specific client, obviously don't mention their name, you saw these genetic things and you saw how their gene expressions were expressing epigenetically, and then you supported them with the right cofactors and then they themselves felt results and you could also see those results on labs and also in their demeanor.
Dr. Laurie Marti (0:43:13.535)
Yes, so I wouldn't even say a specific one, but I would say, in general, I will see patients that don't sleep very well, or maybe they have mood issues, depression or anxiety. I will identify that they have certain gene mutations like MTHFR.
One of the things that we do is you want to promote the use of certain vitamins that are specific for supporting those enzymes. What people start seeing is that, wow, I'm sleeping better. Then there are biomarkers, there's blood markers that you can check that actually start out abnormal when they haven't taken those supplements. Then they'll see over the course of three to six to nine months that those numbers are coming down. They're also seeing that maybe not as anxious, they're getting more energy, just their mood seems more stable. A lot of people do these genetic tests now. We talked to several people who have done them, and they'll find out they have a gene mutation, and there's plenty of information on the internet out there about them. Oh, take these B vitamins because they're going to help you. What happens is, they don't know the dosing or, they haven't really been instructed on how to take those things. So they end up being very anxious and this was the worst thing I ever did was take these B vitamins and I was supposed to take them because I have this gene mutation.
Well, obviously, these gene enzymes do not exist in a bubble, theere's other genes that affect, for example, MTHFR. So it's important to understand the supportive genes in that particular realm because some people, if they start taking B vitamins in a very high quantity, and I mean, some of the dosages out there are quite high, and all of a sudden they aren't just really, really anxious. That's usually the biggest thing. They're not getting any sleep and their mind is racing. It's just because they don't know that there's other genes that are malfunctioning, that you've revved up a system that hasn't been very active, and now you've over activated it. So there is a process with this where you don't want to just go at this without guidance. It's very, very important to understand how these genes influence each other and that you have to really personalize it. That's what I do is I work with people to personalize their supplements, their treatments so that they don't make those mistakes of feeling their mental health has really taken a nosedive because they started taking vitamins. So this is the educational piece that I was talking about because, like I said, there's lots of testing that people can do without a doctor ordering it for them. But it's important to know the ramifications of taking certain treatments and supplements when you have these gene mutations.
Ashley James (0:46:58.058)
I have MTHFR. I know there's different ones that I don't remember the name of the one I have but it's interesting because I have had liver problems that I have figured out certain things exacerbate my liver and certain things really, really help. When I take high levels of B vitamins, and this happens to my husband too, we both get very irritable and argumentative. So we typically dole out our supplements and take them together. This was years ago, we were hitting the upper limits of B vitamin dosages and the days that we did we’re at each other, we’ll playfully bicker in a very loving way, but we were just really irritable. I was, I don't like how I feel. I feel uncomfortable and irritable. When I take very, very high doses of B vitamins, which I don't anymore. Back then they weren't methylated. That makes a big difference for me also.
You can't just go to Trader Joe's and buy B vitamins or whatever. You can't just buy whatever's off the shelf. It's not going to be the highest quality, the most bio available. It's not going to be in the right ratios and it's definitely not going to be methylated. So there's just so many things.
I remember way back in the day, 15 years ago, going to Trader Joe's and buying all my supplements because I believed in vitamins. I thought, oh, this is good for me. It did not have a negative effect. So people will often try to save money. They'll hunt around like, oh, these vitamins over here at Walmart are cheaper. I'm like, well, you're actually wasting money and not only are you wasting money, there's like a net negative because now they're actually hurting you. Whereas I really do believe in quality supplements and diet and looking at everything as a whole. But when we go to take our supplements, we really have to make sure. I think even less is more.
Start at a slow, low dose and slowly work your way up and find where you feel best because I did that and I was, wow, my dose was like a hundred pound dose, instead of, doing like the full body weight dose and some people, they just excel, or even a child's dose, I know a woman who does like doses almost the amount that an infant would be given and she can't do anymore and she's like, I feel amazing when I just do this much. This is what her body needs. Just this little extra booster of the cofactors.
This is why when it comes to buying your supplements, I highly recommend going to takeyoursupplements.com getting a free consultation with one of our true health coaches because the supplements that we use in our protocols are all methylated and they’re grouped together in complexes in the way that all the ratios are in balance and they’re all designed to support your liver, support your detox pathways, and support optimal health and nutrition for every single cell and because they’re dosed by body weight you can begin slow and slowly increase and increase until you find the perfect dose for you and the coach that you are assigned to will show you how to do that will show you how to take the supplements that are best for you and that support your body’s ability to heal itself and support your liver to detoxify and your methylation pathways. It is a huge game changer. It’s life-changing. So go to takeyoursupplements.com. Sign up for the free consultation and give it a try. They will also show you how to get free shipping. They will show you how to fit it within your budget if you have a budget. For example, if you are in such a tight space with your money that you’ve less than $50, there is a plant derived, trace mineral supplement, it’s a liquid, it’s about $25 then there’s tax and shipping on that and it is life-changing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people just on that one trace mineral supplement. They see a huge shift in their health because we are so depleted in minerals. Of course if you can afford more they have an amazing complex that is all vitamins and trace minerals, and extract nutrients from plants and antioxidants, and it’s all methylated, all the minerals are plant derived so plants have already digested the minerals so the body can absorb them. I haven’t found supplements like in any other company. I’ve been working with them for over 12 years, with my clients and with my family and myself getting great results. They also have a money back guarantee so there’s nothing to lose. There’s everything to gain. Go to takeyoursupplements.com.
I want the listeners to have a strong grasp on this concept of epigenetics, because with genetics, we all know you're born with your eye color. That's it. We can't change your eye color. You have freckles, she doesn’t have freckles. This is what we're born with. That's genetics that's baked into the cake.
And then there's this epigenetics, which is like super fascinating and this world where things can be turned on and off. For example, exposures to toxins can negatively impact our epigenetic expressions to turn on cancer. We don't want that. Plastics, there's so many environmental things that can turn on the genetic expressions for several generations.
The mouse studies found five generations after BPA exposure took five generations to correct itself and the mice that were exposed to it even though they ate the same food, became obese. These are called obesogens. That's so frustrating because so many people are walking around like, I'm doing the best I can. I'm eating super well. Why am I struggling? Well, do you eat out of plastic? Let's start with looking at the parabens and the best phenol A and all that, all those obesogens, the cumulative exposure. So clean up, clean up the toxicity in your life, in your kitchen, in your cupboards, even drinking out of Starbucks cups, the little plastic thing on top, just because it says BPA free doesn't mean the chemicals are not in it. It just means one type of chemical. There's still like nine others that could be in there? It leeches into our food, especially when the food or beverage is hot. So you have these negative epigenetic expressions we can turn on. Then you have these wonderful, healthy gene expressions we can turn on by the right nutrition and bringing down toxicity. Can you educate us about that for those who this is such a new concept for?
Dr. Laurie Marti (54:38.754)
I think we're starting to really understand how our offspring is an adaptive process. We can see that just if you look at human height and different things like that, there's different aspects that things will change over generations depending on your exposure. So it's not that we haven't seen that in action. People could point to different things within cultures where things just get passed down. So there's this idea that we have this really amazing adaptive response in our bodies. For example, there might be a time when we won't be able to eat gluten anymore.
So this was really not anything up to probably 30 years ago. I mean, I grew up eating gluten. It wasn't a problem, but my own kids have problems with gluten. You look at these different things, whether it be the chemicals in the environment, herbicides, pesticides, and you look and it's like,
I don't think I gave them a bad gene, but just that whole idea that they may pass on to their own offspring the inability to eat gluten. It's not anything that I would have given them. So there is this idea that things in our environment can change our genes good or bad, so that our offspring then take on that gene expression. So that's kind of the idea of what some people call biohacking or where you say, okay, I've identified these genes and if I support them in an optimal way, maybe my offspring and generations to follow, it will not be as much of a problem. But the other aspect to this is that we have seen certain genes will adapt because of certain environmental factors. We've seen that in sickle cell disease the people that have sickle cell are more resilient to malaria. For example, so we know that those type of things can also be passed on based on those environmental exposures but the idea that we now, because the genome has been mapped, and that we can identify these different genes, if we intervene on a certain level, well, we may change the dynamics of health to come. So what we do now, the choices that we make now, the different advances that we can make in our health now, and like you said, getting rid of fragrances and things that so many of the chemicals that actually, like you said turn off some of these genes. If we can eliminate some of those things in our lives that actually promote those deleterious effects on our genes, then maybe in the future, we have a much healthier population.
Ashley James (0:57:50.695)
So are you saying that continuous exposures to certain things over generations, the body adapts as a theory? Did the bodies adapt based on their malaria exposure by developing sickle cell? Is that a theory?
Amazing. In the last 100 years, and this is even before genetically modified food, in the last 100 years, they changed wheat and modified it the way they did the agriculture. The way they harvested it and pollinated and cross-pollinated. They grew wheat that contained more and more and more gluten. So food in the last just three to four generations has a tremendous, measurably huge amount more gluten. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something crazy. It was some crazy number that it has increased.
We've always eaten ancient grains. We've always had some very small amount of gluten in our diet, but now it's this very strong exposure, just like we've always had arsenic. Arsenic's been in our food, but in very, very trace amounts. If you concentrate it, it will kill you. if you concentrate it, but not to the point where it kills you, it will poison you and it will be heavy metal poisoning. You can live with it your whole life, live a shorter life, be chronically sick, and it is not be great. So at some point, gluten, it tipped the scales, and it's a net negative. So small, tiny amounts for thousands of years was fine. Then they concentrated the amount of gluten that the plant makes.
Now, it's interesting, in certain European countries, they eat the bread just fine. They come to the States, they eat the bread, they get incredibly sick. That's because the amount of gluten changes, some people can concentrate gluten, like vegetarians or vegans and in China, they'll take gluten and make a meat-like substance out of it. So some people eat just like concentrated gluten and they're fine. Whereas other people, like your children, like my whole family, we don't respond well to it. So are you saying that over time, because of the exposure, our epigenetics will adapt so that we can't eat it anymore?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:00:30.722)
Yes, I believe that's the case. Right now we see it really prominent in young people. I'm 51, so I kind of miss that because I think some of the major herbicides and things like that, the genetically modified stuff really, I think I missed some of that in my youth. My kids generation, they're being exposed to it on every level of different foods, even well-made foods, not just processed foods. I think what's happening is, yes, we were going to end up having their offspring might not be able to eat any form of gluten. I think that that's something that is starting to happen, but which is a real tragedy because wheat has been around for millennia and it's actually full of really healthy B vitamins. It's a real tragedy that we're getting to a point where we're allergic to wheat because of the gluten content. But what's really interesting is you can find forms of wheat that are non-hybridized like the ancient forms of wheat. But people who are gluten sensitive can't even have those. Which yes, so we've gotten to the point where even if they eat the stuff that's been around for millennia, they can't eat it anymore because their gut has no ability to process it. even if you take digestive enzymes, it still doesn't fix it because the inflammatory process has already set in.
Ashley James (1:02:24.953)
Oh man, I interviewed a guy, Dr. John Doulliard, and he wrote a book called Eat Wheat. when I saw that, I was, oh no, I'm doing an interview with a guy who's selling everyone to eat wheat. I was, okay, let me dig a little deeper. I'm not going to like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It turned out it was brilliant. It was a brilliant title. This was back in Episode 505, this whole book actually is not just go eat wheat and that's the healthy thing for you. He's saying to use food almost like a diagnostic tool. There's ways to measure your health and then go eat wheat, see how you feel. Like cut wheat out for 30 days or 60 days and then eat some, for example but using food to measure your health. If you eat wheat for that day after cutting it out for a while and you feel horrible, you don't sleep well or you're inflamed or your joints are achy, it doesn't have to be digestive, it could be brain fog, then we need to look deeper because there's more stuff going on. But I just thought that it was really interesting that we could use certain foods as a way of measuring our own health and lack thereof and where we can strengthen our health. So, their genetics don't change like eye color, hair color, that kind of thing that you're born with. But then there's this entire beautiful world of epigenetics, which we can influence. So that gives you a bit of power. We can influence. So, back when I was a kid, they were talking about genetics as a standpoint. Nope. Well, but heart disease might be genetic. So, you might be passed down and that's it. Your grandpa had it. You're going to have it. Your dad had it. You're going to have it. That kind of thing.
First of all, lifestyle is absolutely a hundred percent if you have a really, really healthy lifestyle, it doesn't matter what your genetics are because you can intervene. But it's good to know where the weak links are in our body and our health. Then there's epigenetics that’s something we can influence and turn on or turn off in our lifetime. That's the empowering thing. That's where we come to you and we go, okay, what can we do? So when someone comes to you and says, I don't want to feel sick anymore, do you do epigenetic testing? How does that work?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:05:01.901)
So usually what I'll do is I lay it out for people what options that they have for testing. Some people just are not comfortable doing genetic tests, and I understand that. I mean, to each their own. I usually tell them that having some information about genetics is a key aspect to what I do, because I use it like a roadmap to figure out what other testing might be most useful for that person. So I really try to assess right away what their comfort level is. Then some people just want to do everything and that's great. They like data, because data is a huge part of what I do, it's like collecting data.
There's a lot of people who understand that and they want to take advantage of that. Other people are just a little bit scared of, not necessarily what they might find, but just that maybe they shouldn't be looking in those areas and I don't know how to explain it, but everybody has their comfort level. So what I try to do is really look at their family history and from the things that their grandparents, their parents, aunts and uncles may have dealt with, that gives me a clue because there are obviously some hereditary aspects to general health. Then once I have that, then I can point them in the direction of where they may want to go. I think when people were first doing these tests, a lot of people were using the commercially available ones, the more hereditary family ancestry and things like that. Everybody has their own take on doing genetic testing. Personally, I like ones that are actionable. So it's not just enough to find out that you don't have a rare condition because most people don't have those rare conditions.
Mostly genetics to me is something that needs to be actionable. How can I use this information to better myself and better my future? Is there something that I can clean up in my life that I should clean up because of my genetics? For example, just myself, I have really high cholesterol and I figured out that I have genetics that I don't process saturated fats well.
Well, I was eating a lot of dairy and cheese. So those were all things that I had to change because if I didn't, I would end up with probably type two diabetes, which is what my grandmother had and both of my grandmothers. It was something that I did not want to become my grandparents. So I was, hey, I have this information. I'm going to do something about it. So I just started working on differences in my diet. So that's where I will utilize, and I recommend genetic testing where you can understand the nutritional aspect of your genetics because I think that's the single most, the simplest way to really make a difference right away, as well as your long-term outcomes. So those are what I tend to recommend. Like I said, some people want to do it, some people don't, and if they don't, I say okay. So what we'll do is we will just do blood testing. I can do comprehensive stool testing. I love looking at the gut. I think outside of genetics. This is really interesting because even mainstream medicine is really picking up on this. I will never forget my allopathic side. I get email blasts and things like this from the big medical societies and things like that. I want to know what they're promoting and one thing that I heard about and I think it was just this week, it was a trivia question. Where is most serotonin made?
Ashley James (1:09:30.646)
I know the answer.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:09:32.782)
Yes, I bet you do. I already knew it was in the gut, but that was the answer. 90% of it is made in our gut, serotonin, and 10% is made in the brain. Yet how do we address people that have mental health? Well, we try to manipulate their neurochemistry. Shouldn't we be manipulating our gut chemistry? That's mainstream medicine is finally picking up that our gut is an area that's really, really important. So really, I would probably say I try to get 100% of my patients to collect a stool sample. I know people probably raise their eyebrows and good thing I do telemedicine because sometimes I don't see that. But it is definitely like some people are kind of go, well, that seems weird. But oh my goodness, I have learned so much through just understanding people's general health through the function of their gut. That's just something that people are really receptive to it. Once they see that, they're like, oh my gosh, I'm like that.
Obviously I'm reacting to gluten. I have a gluten antibody response. Those are things you wouldn't believe how powerful that is to get people to stop eating gluten at least temporarily at least until you can clean up the leaky gut. The fact that we have biomarkers to check for leaky gut, these were things we didn't even know we could test for. In fact, the problem is the allopathic medical community doesn't even know some of these tests exist.
Ashley James (1:11:19.121)
They don't even believe in a leaky gut. They're still going around poo-pooing it.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:11:25.193)
So the thing is, and this is just a process, the more that I think patients become aware of these things and are doing these things. Their regular doctors are going to be exposed to this, whether they like it or not, because the patients are going to say, hey, I did this test, and so I think even the patients enlighten the doctors a lot.
Even with me, I listen to my patients so much and I let them guide quite a bit of what they do. I obviously give them information, but it's a two-way street. I think that allopathic medicine has been very paternalistic, it's a one-sided thing, and you chastise the patient if they haven't been doing what they needed to be doing for the last year or when you're not happy with their blood work. That's not the right approach. The right approach is to make it a two-way street and say, hey, here's the education, here's what's going on with you, consider this like a baseline. The choices you make are going to influence. I keep patients accountable by redoing some of these tests. So that they can see, because I can only guide them. I can't be with them every day to coach them and say, you got to do this or don't do that. Give them the tools and then they're going to make much better choices about things if they just understand the education or if they have that educational piece and they understand the consequences of not doing those things or the benefits of doing the things that they should be doing.
Ashley James (1:13:08.979)
Well, they're motivated because they paid you and they went through the process of paying for these labs. Also they came to you for a reason. They're not feeling well and they want to get better. So many people are walking around not even believing they can get better. That's why I love doing my podcast because my listeners are getting on a visceral level, oh, my body can heal itself. My body was designed to constantly see homeostasis. I'm going to help it get there. Imagine we're climbing. I say there's no Mount Everest of health. I have this joke because I have overcome so many things in my past. So many illnesses in my past, and yet I'm still on a health journey and I'm never going to be done. I'm never going to reach the top and put my flag on the top of Mount Everest of health and say, I'm done. There is no getting done, but there's these peaks and valleys. There's these plateaus. When I say plateau, I mean, in a good way, You're standing there, yay, I got to this part of the mountain and you can look out and observe your new level of health and then look back down the mountain, wow I used to be down there I'm here now and then you go up the mountain a bit and all of a sudden now you dip down a bit. This is not where I want to be. I got to keep going up
So for me doing a self check, checking in with myself and listening to the symptoms of my body, listening to my body say, these are my energy levels. This is my brain function. This is my sleep. Just checking in and I keep track of my monthly cycles and anything that would accompany that, keep track of bowel movements and just anything out of the ordinary, anything, just listening to my body, just tuning in, listening. Again, not from the fear standpoint. But from the thank your body, this is the language that you speak. Now I've been trained to listen to those symptoms and help just like you have and help them guide us and for someone who has not no training in what these symptoms might mean, you want to go to someone who's been trained, but just listen to them. The best thing to do is do a mood food journal. When I say journal, I don't mean like you're writing paragraphs about what you did that day, just very quick, write down, like score your sleep, score your energy level, score your mental health. I'm feeling great today, or I'm feeling super motivated or I'm feeling miserable, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling down on myself, I have tender breasts, or I'm constipated, or I have a headache because I didn't drink enough water yesterday. Jot these little bullet points, and write down things you put in your mouth. You don't have to measure it, but just be like, today I ate strawberries and yogurt, and I had waffles, or whatever. Today I went to McDonald's and ate junk food. You write it down.
Look at it and go, wow, every day, oh, I have a headache because everyday I drink wine the night before. You can look at the obvious ones but there's some not so obvious where I figured out that I couldn't eat eggs anymore. Eggs cause heart palpitations for me. It was the weirdest thing. I ended up doing a Viome test, in which I had the CEO of Viome and one of their top scientists in a separate interview talking about how they test. They also collect stool samples. It's a home kit. So it's easy. You're not scaring my audience. My listeners are like, they'll be fine. They'll go do the stool sample, it'll be fine. It's actually not that hard to do. It's pretty simple. They make it super easy. They do over 100,000 gene expressions of your microbiome. So they're not testing your genetics. They're testing the genetics of the bacteria that live in your gut. I cannot believe what I learned. I am blown away by how cool just that test alone. I can imagine like the stool tests that you do and the looking deeper into your genetic expressions based on what you eat or what you don't eat and how that's going to shift your body and shift your genetic expressions and looking for what kind of co-factors we can support and like making sure that you don't have leaky brain. There's all kinds of cool stuff that we can look at. I love that we can take someone and help them to find what kind of diet they need. When you work with people, and you're doing the stool testing, what's the most important thing you make sure you look at? I know everyone's different. For me, I want to make sure you're drinking enough water because so many people walk around chronically dehydrated and yet everyone knows they should drink enough water, but no one drinks enough water unless you carry a water bottle and I don't mean a plastic one with you all the time, you are not fully hydrated and or make sure they get enough sleep. There are these foundations of health that the majority of people don't take seriously, but are critical to our health. Are there some major foundational things you make sure to check with everyone?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:18:25.811)
Well, I mentioned the stool test, and I think within that, leaky gut has got to be one of my favorites. If I find it, if it's abnormal, there's a whole lot that's going to be corrected if you can correct that. Because what we understand about inflammation, once inflammation is in the gut, if it's self-contained, you may have just gut symptoms.
Once that inflammation starts leaving the confines of the intestinal system, that's when you start seeing all these other things that we wouldn't even necessarily associate with our gut. So you might see skin problems, you might see like we call it brain fog, just not thinking clearly because once these inflammatory compounds start entering, crossing the blood brain barrier and start entering into our brain we start having a lot of mental cognitive issues.
Then mood issues and of course that affects sleep. Then if you start affecting sleep you start affecting cortisol and our adrenal health. So there's a cascade of things that can happen if you have a leaky gut. You could also look at like MTHFR being a foundational thing too, but there's something very dynamic about the way that our gut has this barrier function, and when that barrier function breaks down, our bodies really become out of sync, whether it be hormonally or we think that almost all chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmunity is all built upon this idea that these inflammatory compounds are leaching into the rest of our body. That's why I ask all my patients to do a stool test, a functional stool test, and like I said, one more, I can test the leaky gut function because if that's present, then that needs to be healed.
Typically, there's a protocol, with some food eliminations and different healing factors and things like that, that can help, but it's then you start assessing, okay, what are you eating that is contributing to this? What are you doing that we can modify? What can we do to start this healing process and then stop this outflow? If you can stop that process from leaching out into the rest of the body, that's going to make a huge difference on so many other areas, like I said, that may not even feel like it's a gut problem.
I've actually found skin conditions are some of my favorites to deal with because when you're talking about things that fluctuate mood and things like that, they're all happening internally. When you have something external and you start seeing it get better and that you can actually see, oh, I ate the wrong things. I started eating gluten again. There goes my acne. When things are on the outside, you pay attention to them a lot more. So again, people can be self-accountable, especially when they see those things. But yes, that leaky gut concept, I've been doing this a long time, seeing patients and working with chronic illnesses. I think the prominence of gut health and this permeability issue that we call leaky gut, that is becoming one of my go to prominent factors. If that can be fixed, a lot of other things can be fixed.
Ashley James (1:22:27.890)
So that's one of your foundation things. So water, sleep, those are for me. I could give you supplements up the wazoo. That’s one thing if you choose to go to bed at 9.30 at night and you have poor sleep, but if you choose to go to bed at one in the morning, then you've got to choose to go to bed on time. So these are foundation things. So many people just disregard it because it's like, ah, whatever, I want to stay up and Netflix and chill or whatever. I don't like drinking water. Whatever their excuse is, there's no amount of drugs or supplements or natural remedies that are going to get you to optimal health because the body doesn't function on poor sleep and dehydration.
So once we cover those foundation things, and there's a few others, definitely a few other foundation things. It’s like, I don't care if your car is a million dollars. A million dollar car or a $30,000 car, there's no gas in it, it's not going. Same with your body. So there's foundational stuff.
Then that next level is foundational, like functional testing. We got to check everyone for this because it's so prevalent. I know that they say almost 50% of the population just depending on ancestry has MTHFR to some degree. That's something that everyone really should know about themselves. We're in this day and age, we can get the testing. It makes such a huge difference. Can you explain what MTHFR is? What is this process of methylation and why should we know if we have, if our body has trouble with methylating and what that all means?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:24:19.719)
Yes, so now you even mentioned it, you've heard it's about half the population. I've even heard it might be even up to 80 percent, but again that might be epigenetics. Our genetics may actually be getting worse over time where more and more people are having mutations in this gene. But what it really is MTHFR, a gene as an enzyme is a protein and it utilizes certain nutritional cofactors to basically do this methylation function in our body, and has many different categories of what it's involved in. So it's involved in DNA repair. We can actually repair our DNA. When it doesn't repair, that's when things break down and people get cancers. So we have this ability through methylation to actually repair our DNA so that we keep things like cancer away.
So mutations and methylation would facilitate a problem in trying to do that repair. It's also important in detoxification. So through our liver, our kidneys, elsewhere in our body, and that's because one of the end products of methylation is called glutathione. Glutathione is one of our most important antioxidants in the body. If you don't have enough of that, you're going to have problems getting rid of toxins in your body. Like you said, there's a whole host of environmental toxins that we're exposed to, whether it's in the foods or the air or even like molds, for example, these are things that we utilize methylation to eliminate. We have great resilience in our bodies up to a point. The more that there's a problem with this methylation, the more that this is going to be impaired. It also is important in turning on and off other genes. So we have a checks and balances system in our body using methylation so that we don't let things go unchecked. So we have different pathways that we have to be able to control. Methylation is one of the ways we do that, it is just that whole checks and balances. It also is involved in neurotransmitter synthesis. So making things like dopamine and norepinephrine and epinephrine and serotonin. We use methylation and these compounds to make these very important neurotransmitters that run most of our cognitive processes, but also functions in controlling our blood pressure, for example. So that is all part of methylation as well. It's also an important part of our immune system. It might be from making different immune types of cells, but also with that antioxidant glutathione, that's a big part of our immunity and being able to eliminate different pathogens and things. So really, that's why it is considered a foundational part because it just involves so many of these different aspects. I didn't even mention hormones. It's not that it's involved in hormone synthesis, but it can affect it, for example, your liver's not working really well because maybe it's got a lot of toxins and you're not eliminating. Well, you also break down your estrogens there. So what we find is that if your methylation process is impaired in your liver, you will find that you'll become estrogen dominant, which is not just a problem with women. Men also have problems with estrogen dominance, especially now with plastics because they are estrogen mimickers. You get this buildup within the liver of these estrogenic compounds and you're not eliminating them properly. then that leads to a whole host of other types of problems.
Some women, it might be PMS, it might be different types of cancers, breast cancer, ovarian cancer. We know it can put strains on other hormone systems. So for example, the adrenals and the thyroid. So there's this massive interplay that happens because of what's happening at the core process that we call methylation.
Ashley James (1:29:13.384)
Methylation. Can you explain it? So I understand that there's an amino acid that we eat, methionine. Our body makes some assisting from that as well. Then our body grabs those molecules and adds that to the serotonin then it becomes melatonin. So the body is converting serotonin to melatonin. Melatonin isn’t just for sleep it actually only but 10% is used for sleep the rest is used as a cellular detoxifier while we sleep. So it’s really important not to disrupt melatonin production where sleep hygiene comes in, but also go to the gut and make sure we’re not disrupting serotonin production. So again, come back to the gut. We've got to go back to the foundations of our health, if you're not sleeping, well, could it be in the gut? Could it be in our methylation? It could just be the fact that you're staying up too late, staring at screens and drinking coffee late at night. It could be an absolute 100% lifestyle, but we could geek out on your labs and see what's going on.
So could you explain, so we understand this idea of methylation, like it grabs this molecule and attaches it, and that's methylation. Then people with MTHFR have a problem with that, so everything kind of gets backed up in the system. I want everyone to understand this more and why it's such an important thing, or one of the many things that we could have tested just so we know more about ourselves, and then we could take information from you to help us understand how we could eat and not eat and the nutrition we should take in and maybe limit to best support our ability to methylate and detoxify.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:31:13.035)
So one of the most important things that I try to teach patients, and this is if they know their MTHFR status, okay, because it depends on whether they want to know that gene or not, but once you know that you have an abnormality in that gene, it's important the type of B vitamins that you get.
So methylation is a process, it's methyl donations. So you have a methyl group that is a carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms, okay? Certain compounds become what we call methyl donors. So they donate this methyl group to another compound and it turns into something else. This process of putting on the methyl group, taking off the methyl group. That's methylation at its very bringing down that science to that level. One of the most important methyl donors, we think of, well, methylfolate. So we think of this, the folic acid in the body is a B vitamin, and that is very important for the process of this methionine, homocysteine, I think of it like a cycle in order to have a balance in this cycle you have to have the presence of methylated folate. What happens is if you have a mutation in MTHFR you can't methylate folic acid. Now if you have a diet full of green leafy vegetables you are getting natural folate. Okay you've already that natural folate is already in that methylated useful version. But say for example you eat a slice of bread and that bread is fortified with B vitamins. Now fortified grains, they put folic acid in it. Synthetic folic acid is not methylated. So if you're eating foods that are fortified and they have fortified a lot of different things now it's not just wheat, okay?
So if you eat folic acid, it is so strong that it is more strongly bound to our receptors because when we eat these things, then we absorb it and then our, it goes to find a cell and that method, that folic acid needs to enter the cell. Well, folic acid can block the receptor, because it's stronger than the natural folate. So even if you eat a lot of green leafy vegetables, it'll be blocked out if you had, so if you had a sandwich, for example, and it had folic acid in it, and even if you had lettuce on it, or some green leafy lettuce, and you had natural folate, you're going to be blocked. You're not going to absorb the natural folate. So that's why one of the paramount things that I tell people to do is get rid of folic acid and that's in a lot of supplements too. So that's why it's really important to know what supplements you're taking in because you may actually be harming yourself by blocking out by basically that folic acid, which is so strong, that synthetic version, so strong that it's going to block the absorption of the natural folate. Then you get these problems with DNA repair because you're not getting the folate. The diet and supplements are really critical once you understand what MTHFR does and why you have to be careful about putting certain compounds into your body that are going to negate the effects of other good things that you're doing.
Ashley James (1:35:10.601)
What about cobalamin versus methylcobalamin? So B12, getting a methylated version of B12 versus, I don't know, what's the difference between cobalamin? Does cobalamin exist in nature? Is that, again, just like folic acid, a synthetic thing?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:35:28.543)
Yes, cobalamin, it refers to the basic core compound chemical, and there's different forms of cobalamin. So the most common form that you would see when you pick up a B12 supplement is cyanocobalamin, which as the name, it's cyanide. It's a cyanide molecule. The small amounts probably don't help people unless you can't detoxify very well. Now, that form of cobalamin is not in its methylated version. So the idea is if you get methylated vitamins, you bypass the methylation process so that you don't then depend on these faulty genes. You're automatically already getting the form of those vitamins that your body can't do.
If you didn't have an MTHFR mutation and you took cyanocobalamin, you would be able to get methyl groups donated to that. You would be able to utilize that B12. Obviously there's an argument about the other components of that cyanocobalamin that are not good, but you could do it. There are other forms of cobalamin. There's one called hydroxylated cobalamin and there's an adenosyl cobalamin and they all have slightly different functions like the adenosylcobalamin is often used for like mitochondrial support, which is the energy producers of our cells so you can really tailor the different types of b12, but the methylated cobalamin is going to be your powerhouse B12 option because again that's already got the methyl group on it. So it's already going to be able to do its function in the body.
So that's the real core important part about the MTHFR is being able to methylate these compounds, folic acid, B12, but if you have a dysfunctional gene, you really need to take that in those already methylated versions.
Ashley James (1:37:42.394)
In my mind, I'm seeing like IKEA furniture coming into the body every day. If you're taking the cheaper supplements or the ones that aren't methylated or the synthetic ones, your body has to then do a process that has to build something. So it's like the IKEA furniture comes in and you have to, now you have to build the table. Here's the building blocks. So your body has to take a donated methyl group added to it to build it. Now it has the table. Whereas when we don't have MTHFR, it's as if we've been giving IKEA furniture, but we don't, we're missing a piece.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:38:26.218)
Yes, I mean that's a very good analogy because it's basically making it easier for your body to utilize those nutrients without having to go through all these steps in order to be able to utilize those nutrients. But that also it's a two-edged sword because if you have a lot of toxins build up in your system and all of a sudden you start taking these methylated B vitamins you’re going to start mobilizing those toxins that's why there's a start low, go slow type of thing, because people don't know how toxic they are. We're all carrying around a certain burden of toxins, some more than others, but once you start mobilizing those toxins, it can make you feel sicker. So in the early phases of this, it's really important to use lower dosages and to be gentle with it because not everybody has the best outlet of their detoxification process. That's why the gut is such an important part of this because that's a big area of waste elimination. So in order for you to eliminate toxins, you need to have a healthy gut where you have that ability to eliminate. So that's why sometimes people they want to focus on MTFHR but if you don't have a healthy gut system, you're going to mobilize these toxins and you're going to feel very, very sick if you do not have a way to eliminate, especially like people who are constipated. Oh my goodness. Those folks have a really, really rough time taking the methylated B vitamins because they're mobilizing these toxins. They become like toxic overloaded and it begins to make them feel very, very sick. So depending of course, upon each individual and how sick they are to begin with, especially if someone comes in and they're pretty sick to begin with, those are people you have to be very gentle.
Ashley James (1:40:35.545)
Yes. Exactly. Start slow. Also the testing upfront really helps because then you know how their body is going to process stuff or not process stuff. So you talked a bit about these artificial things, if we took supplements that were like lower quality and that's something that can block methylation or that it just kind of gums up the works because our body cannot methylate these things.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:41:03.567)
It will definitely block the absorption of the necessary active vitamins. You won't be able to take up these compounds. It would literally block those cellular receptors.
Ashley James (1:41:18.843)
So, this is incredible because taking folic acid, which is what all mothers are told while they're pregnant to take to prevent neuro tube defects. We all think there are two defects like where the spinal cord is sticking out of the back, god forbid, the spine is not made properly in utero, and now part of the spine is bulging. That's major. Then there's minor ones like cleft lip. Then we can go even further now because so many people having MTHFR and so many prenatals have the artificial synthetic folic acid, which what you just shared, for people with MTHFR blocks the ability to absorb and uptake and utilize folate, which we know it causes if you don't, if you have a folate deficiency, your baby is not being built properly. What we see is now a huge uprise in tongue ties and lip ties that is believed to be part of the folic acid blocking folate, we’re like, oh, no big deal, let's just go clip their tongue tie, clip their lip but that's something on the outside, but what happened on the inside? There could be other things going on the inside, just like you talked about. Skin conditions are so fun to help people heal. But if you've got rashes on the outside and scaly skin and itchy and flamed and you've got this stuff on the outside, we have skin on the inside of our body. Think about all the other parts of our body on the inside where there's the same kind of tissue. If you are on fire on the outside, imagine what's going on the inside.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:43:15.076)
Oh yes, if you see it externalized, there's a war going on inside, for sure.
Ashley James (1:43:21.812)
So we have this really huge juggernaut of a problem where the supplements that women are being given to prevent problems actually can contribute to causing them because a large majority of our population has MTHFR issues and then we've got on top of these synthetic supplements. Now some of my listeners I'm sure are saying, well, I'm just not going to take supplements then I can avoid this problem. Is that the answer?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:43:52.126)
Do not take supplements? No, because again, it depends on your diet, a big part of that, especially if you're eating fortified grains, you're going to be getting that folic acid, like you're taking supplements and you didn't even know it. That's part of the inherent problem. Fortification wasn't, we didn't always have that. That's also kind of newer and relatively. So it's important for people to realize that, yes, if you do have these deficits, depending on what your diet is. I would say most people probably don't get a healthy amount of greens in their diet. There's complications with that too. Some people get kidney stones. They can't have high oxalate foods, for example, so they do have to limit some of their green leafy vegetables.
Sometimes supplements just become a necessity because you've eliminated so many things out of your diet. For example, if we were talking about wheat. How taking wheat out of people's diet actually eliminated a lot of the B vitamins that were in it. So you have to supplement those B vitamins or if you're vegetarian, it's very hard to get adequate amounts of vitamin B12. So, the diet is very critical in determining how many supplements you need, but that's where the blood work helps. One of the biomarkers you had mentioned earlier with the methylation process is homocysteine. Homocysteine as well as glutathione, even methionine, all these things can be measured. But homocysteine ends up being a great biomarker in the blood for determining your methylation status.
Essentially with folks that have higher home assisting levels, they're going to need more supplements in the form of these methylated B vitamins. The amount of supplements that you need really needs to be tailored. That's where the testing can help determine what those needs are. So the answer is not giving up all your supplements, but the answer is doing smart supplementation. We've gotten to a point where there's no excuse for not having smart supplementation because we have so many tests that can help guide that.
Ashley James (1:46:28.365)
Also it's not just about your genetics, it can be about the genetics of your gut talking about the high oxalates, it's really interesting that you can help support your gut health and build up a healthy microbiome. There are certain microbiome bacteria that actually help our body process the greens in such a way that we don't develop kidney stones.
I'm so proud of myself because I can eat 12 pounds of spinach a day and I will never ever get kidney stones because I am one of those people that have absolutely no problem with processing it but it's not my genetics it's my gut microbiome. So the cool thing is the more you work on your gut health the more little rewards you. If you've ever played video games. It's like getting these little achievements comes up and pops up. For me, when you build your gut health, it's like you're achieving, because you populate, you grow a robust microbiome. So let's say now you only have a thousand different types of bacteria in your gut, but as you build a healthy microbiome and focus on your gut health, you could build it to 10,000, or you could have a variety that's really robust, and then you get all these little achievements, because the new healthy bacteria come in, they’ll help you digest your food, and make compounds for you. So just imagine all these little achievements popping up like, oh, you got the gut bacteria that makes it so that you're skinny.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:48:06.211)
Well, that's the beauty of the testing. It's amazing the research that they've done to make the tests so that we can identify these areas. So one of my favorite tests is called the GI Map Test. That's the functional GI evaluation stool test. They measure what they call commensal bacteria. Commensals are your keystone, your foundational bacteria. The science has gotten so good in this area where we can actually identify if you don't have enough of certain bacteria, the commensal bacteria, it will set you up for things like leaky gut. So we are really getting to the point where you can take supplements of certain targeted probiotics. It's so funny because people go and they'll buy any probiotic, acidophilus, I heard that's a good one? Well, some people have plenty of lactobacillus, which is in the acidophilus, lactobacillus family. They don't need that. But what they are lacking are some of these other lesser known commensals, which some of them provide the mucin layer which is really critical as a barrier for preventing leaky gut. There's other ones that produce short-chain fatty acids. It takes the carbohydrates, the vegetables and fruits that we eat, and these bacteria convert these compounds into making these other compounds called short-chain fatty acids, which are real key for keeping our colonicides basically are intestinal cells like tight and not leaky and creating this healthy barrier with a healthy immune system and so we've gotten to the point where we can actually target these very specific areas and it makes a profound difference in all the things down the way and the fact that we have access to that now. I think it lends itself to a whole new future of what we consider health and preventative medicine and restoring function that we've lost or that we've damaged through. So even though we can't necessarily control the toxins or, I mean, we can control to some degree, but some things we just can't. If we can make ourselves more resilient through optimization of our microbiome and taking tailored appropriate supplements, we become much less vulnerable to these things that we cannot control.
Ashley James (1:51:16.069)
I love it. We could talk all day. We could keep going and chat all day because I'm so fascinated to learn more and more and more about it. MTHFR is just the beginning. There's so many other epigenetic factors to dive into, but because it's so popular, like you said, it could be 80 percent of the population. It's definitely over 50 percent. It's so common and it’s becoming more common. We need to look at, which is so interesting how we've changed our food because when I was a kid, the cereal aisle looked a lot different than it does now. Let's just put it that way. Like we have in one generation changed our food so much. We're eating most of our food from factories. I had a doctor talking about how over 80% of a child's diet is processed food. over 80%. There's some children who don't eat any actual food. It's 100% from go-gurt and chicken nuggets and craft dinner or whatever. Children are being fed so much of this which is processed and fortified with substandard, the lowest quality, synthetic B vitamins. Then, we see MTHFR on the rise and we're wondering, gee, could it be because we have messed with nature? We've messed with our diet so severely, we made it so manmade, so artificial? In one generation, it's just pretty bizarre. Now our bodies are adapting and revolting in a sense. But this affects every area of our life. This affects the brain health, affects our gut health, affects, like you've even said, our skin. It can affect hormones, everything. We see children who are eating this way, and then they have developmental issues, and they're put on like Ritalin or something, and they're diagnosed. I have seen children who appear as if they are on a spectrum, let's say ADHD or Autism, they're on some spectrum, and then they're given very clean, healthy food, the right supplements through holistic medicine. A few months later, they are no longer displaying any of those symptoms. So my question is, was that diagnosis correct? Are they actually someone who has ADHD or is autistic? Or is it that humans will express different symptoms when their body is pushed into this toxic way?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:54:03.067)
Well, I think that was a perfect example. Because I actually talked to a lot of parents of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD. I'm like, they should probably have some genetic testing done. Because my guess is they might have an MTHFR gene mutation and they're eating processed foods, and they're eating folic acid, and that's probably creating imbalance within the neurotransmitter synthesis system.
So they're getting the erratic, just like you were talking about, irritability when you took too many B vitamins. Well, the same process can happen in kids whether it be dyes, yellow dyes or whatever, these things all promote this aberrant, imbalanced methylation process and so they end up diagnosed with these mental conditions that are actually brought on by the fact that they are being bombarded with these chemicals including what they would think of as synthetic vitamins that are okay to take but they're not in some people they're very sensitive and yes that's why I still can't believe we still put food dyes in things. There are genetics that you can analyze that actually where some people, I actually have that. I have a sensitivity to yellow food dye and ADHD diagnoses are much higher in people with yellow food dye sensitivities. So when you're eating things like a Cheeto, it's no wonder that you are not getting any real nutrition out of that, but you're bombarding yourself with food dyes as well as synthetic folic acid.
Ashley James (1:56:05.799)
Yes, and excitotoxins, it's not healthy for the brain. It's absolutely not healthy for the brain. But we feed children junk, and then put them on a drug. It's so sad. The whole mainstream says this is okay. There's known carcinogens that are acceptable on our shelves, in food, in our grocery stores, in America.
So really, we need to stop trusting. My first step is to stop trusting because as children, we watch Kellogg's, for example. Oh, Tony the Tiger or whatever. We saw Fruit Loops, we saw this cute little cartoon. We have McDonald's, oh, Ronald McDonald. Oh, look at him, I love him so much. I'm a kid. Being brought up with all these commercials. They were smart. They knew what they were doing because they had programmed children to build such a deep inherent trust of their General Mills of whatever company Nestle was.
Then you're 20 years old, walking through the aisles of your grocery store, buying your own food. you look up and you're anchored into these good emotions for Tony the tiger and General Mills and all these companies that do not have your best interests at heart. They are beholden to the shareholders and the profits and they need to buy the cheapest ingredients. Absolutely possible.
Then they need to figure out how to make it be so addictive that you'll keep eating it. It's not for our best interest, but we have been programmed to trust and love these companies. So any time you buy something from a box, it comes from a factory. We need to question what's in it. Understand reading labels. Understand what's in it. So fascinating that what's put in our food is blocking our ability to detoxify and also blocking nutrients from coming in and making us further nutrient deficient.
We could talk for hours. It's been so great having you on the show I want to make sure listeners know that they can go to your website. You do telemedicine consultations so you work with people all around the world? How does that work with you?
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:58:30.902)
There are regulations within the license. I'm only licensed in the states of California and Washington. So, I have to restrict my appointments. I use Zoom or FaceTime for video when people would like video with the audio. I wish I could expand to other states. It was nice during the covid pandemic because they kind of opened up, loosened a lot of the restrictions and telemedicine really grew during that time. But unfortunately that's ended. So patients have to be physically within the state. If you were to travel to Washington State or California, I could have an appointment. So it's a really weird thing.
Ashley James (1:59:28.378)
Can someone hire you in a different capacity? Instead of a patient doctor relationship could they hire you to consult them and to just answer your questions, but not as a doctor? Not as their doctor, I should say.
Dr. Laurie Marti (1:59:41.984)
Yes. I haven't really explored that. That has been something I've been looking into because obviously once you establish a doctor-patient relationship, then you really are under the confines of the licensure status. But yes, I'm exploring different things like that. Also many states actually, if you have a practitioner, even a chiropractor or anybody that is willing or able, because a lot of states are allowing even alternative practitioners to order testing and things like that, not just naturopaths, but other providers as well. So if you have a provider in a state that is not Washington or California, I can work with them, guide them, so that's an option for a lot of people in other states. If they just have a practitioner that's willing to work with me. So I wouldn't be able to order the testing per se, but I could help with the interpretation of it.
Ashley James (2:00:49.860)
Got it. So if they're working with a chiropractor or osteopath or naturopath or any kind of doctor that ordered the labs, could they bring the labs to you and you could talk to them about it or would you have to go between as their practitioner?
Dr. Laurie Marti (2:01:04.618)
I think the practitioner might have to be present on some level, whether they were at the office or something with them. But yes, I think that's the restriction because the states all have their own laws around those things. There has to be them present. But like I said, I'm trying to explore other things.
The licensing process is very, very daunting. To get licensed in all 50 states is just impossible. It would be very expensive too. A lot of the states are allowing a limited license so that you could practice telemedicine in that state without having to get a full license. So those are things that I'm also exploring because I've had to turn away a number of people that would love to just get this testing done. They just don't have anybody that can interpret it for them. So, I am doing that process. But like I said, in the meantime, people can take a trip to California or Washington and as long as they're physically in the States, then I can do the appointment.
Ashley James (2:02:24.502)
Got it. Regardless where someone is, they should reach out to you anyway, just in case, because by the time they've heard this, maybe you have discovered a different avenue of how you can best support people. I just wonder if there's a way, maybe look into this, if there's a way that you can not as their doctor, but it's just as a consultant to answer general questions around something or help someone like point them in the right direction, help them at least decide what labs that they should go do with their chiropractor or whatever, but someone who's like, they're stuck. They're like, I'm stuck. I've done, I've gone this far. I kind of had a loss and maybe like, you could be hired as a consultant to do like little detective work with them. I wonder if that's a possibility because I've seen so many doctors that do, and maybe they're just breaking the rules or I don't know.
Dr. Laurie Marti (2:03:15.513)
Well, and I think that there is probably a lot of that. It's very hard to really police a lot of that, but exactly, no way. Like I said, I am exploring other things because I just feel there's a real deficit. There's a hunger for this knowledge. People really are interested in knowing about it and like what direction to go. I want to be able to provide that in whatever way makes sense for everybody involved. So, I am exploring that.
Ashley James (2:04:00.303)
Cool, well then listeners should check your website out. I'm going to have the link in the show notes, it's with today's podcast at learntruehealth.com so they can go to it and here's the link. It is your name md dot com, so, it’s lauriemartimd.com. Just want to make sure that in case someone's listening and they're driving or something, just go to learntruehealth.com where the show notes are and check out all the information there.
Dr. Lori, it's been so great having you on the show and having this conversation. I think it's really important first of all, our mindset and then knowing that there's a path, knowing there's a way that people who have fibromyalgia no longer have to have it. For some people they've been told you're just going to have it your whole life. You can get to the point where you're no longer in chronic pain. Like Lyme, I know people who've completely, 100% reversed all symptoms of Lyme and no longer have those co-infections and they're feeling amazing. They went from like being bedridden to like just running marathons. We can overcome. The body can overcome. The cool thing is that there's stuff that Dr. Laurie does able to help us with. We figure it out, get to the root cause, look at our epigenetics, uncover what's going on, make sure we're giving ourselves the nutrition, that there's a game plan. We got to make sure we're taking ourselves to the doctor and always always believe your body wants to heal itself and can heal itself. We just have to learn what to give our body to help our body heal itself and that's why functional medicine doctors are so important because they're here to help us figure that out and I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for everything you do and is there anything you want to say to wrap up today's interview? I know you've said so much but is there anything that we left unsaid or you want to make sure that you say before we wrap up today's interview?
Dr. Laurie Marti (2:05:59.783)
Well, I did want to reiterate, I don't want to discourage people that aren't in California or Washington. I do have a contact. Contact me on my website. Send me an email. If you're not in Washington or California, just send me an email, explain your situation. I will look into what options that might be possible. I'll look into it. So just don't be discouraged if you're not from one of those states because I'm really working on trying to expand to help as many people as I feasibly can, because we're under a lot of assault in our world and we need to be more resilient. I think just understanding having some education in this space is so empowering to every individual. If you're interested in exploring those things, I will do my best to try to help.
Ashley James (2:07:11.119)
Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I feel like it's so empowering and enlightening for those to know that there are these avenues. There's these pathways. It's worth diving in and exploring because it can be for so many people life changing.
Dr. Laurie Marti (2:07:28.055)
Yes, I agree. Thank you again for having me.
Ashley James (2:07:32.467)
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Website – https://www.lauriemartimd.com/
The North American Academy of Neural Therapy
naant.org
Dr. Jeff's website:
jeffharrisnd.com
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https://learntruehealth.com/neural-therapy-and-the-five-levels-of-healing-with-dr-jeff-harris/
What if your chronic pain could be alleviated by targeting an old scar you never thought twice about? Join us as we welcome Dr. Jeff Harris, a leading expert in neural therapy and renowned naturopathic physician, who shares groundbreaking insights on this cutting-edge treatment.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This is going to be an amazing one. Dr. Jeff Harris, naturopathic physician and one of the world's leading experts in neuraltherapy, is here with us today. You can go to naant.org, that's North American Academy of Neural Therapy and check out the conference that's coming up April 4th through 7th. Every practitioner needs to know about this, as you're about to hear in this interview, and I just wanted to make a quick shout out also that my book I published it last month In case you didn't know, you got to grab your copy. The reviews are just so beautiful.
I spent a lot of time very intentionally designing this book, using everything I learned from my over 500 interviews with holistic experts, as well as my over 12 years of experience working with clients to help them achieve their health goals and their goals around joy, fulfillment and leading an overall better, happier life, more satisfied life. I made it very simple to use. It's a workbook, so you use it 10 to 15 minutes in the morning, 10 to 15 minutes at night for 12 weeks and you will build foundations of health, no matter where your health is right now, whether you're just starting on your health journey, you're frustrated, you want to take your health to the next level, or whether you're like me, you're a health nut and you're always looking to improve. There's always room for improvement. No matter how old you are, there's always room to become even healthier, right, and no matter how young you are, there's always room, no matter how busy you are. If you say you don't have enough time. That is exactly why you need my book, Addicted to Wellness. It will help you get the wins, collect the W's every day. You'll stack win upon win upon win in very quick ways.
That'll motivate you and a lot of us kind of get stuck sometimes or we say, fall off the bandwagon. Oh, I hear this so often from clients. I used to drink more water, I used to exercise, especially when I'm hearing, the feedback I'm getting, it’s the pandemic. We're all kind of like coming out of our caves right from the last four years, and so many people have told me that they they felt like they were on track with their health prior to 2020 and we had so many disruptions that a lot of good health habits disappeared and some unhealthy habits, new habits got created or exacerbated.
So with my book, Addicted to Wellness, I will guide you and teach you and you will learn. But not cerebral, it's not so like head knowledge, it's where rubber hits the road kind of knowledge, the experiential kind of knowledge, where you'll start tapping into yourself and it raises more self-awareness, and so you'll feel more and more motivated and excited because you're going to go, oh wow, I did this little change, this one little health habit today, this one little thing, and I got more energy, I got more mental clarity, I had better sleep, I had more stamina, I had more joy, I felt better in my body, I had less pain or no pain. I can teach you these little habits that you implement and you track. And it's so simple. You could do it anytime. If the busiest person in the world can do this book, so you can do it.
So if you want to take your health to the next level, you raise your hand. Who wants to take their health to the next level? If you want to take health to the next level, get my book. It's fun, it's simple and it is the foundations of health that everyone is missing.
You're going to find there's some things in this book. You're like, hey, I already do that, cool, and you'll learn a little bit more about the benefits of the activities you already do. And you're like, hey, that's so great, ok, keep doing that, and you're going to find that there are foundations of health and health habits maybe you didn't even know existed or you thought were too complicated or you didn't know how to implement.
And I make it super simple. I take something profound and meaningful for your health and I make it simple so that you can do it each and every day to build yourself up. And the feedback that my readers are giving me they've already started the health challenges. They're already seeing big wins, huge gains. So I want you to get my book because I want you to achieve those health gains too, and I do it too. This was part of my health journey as well that using the concept of these small, doable but profound weekly challenges, to start to build moment. So you're going to find that you get great moment and it's a wonderful gift as well to give to a friend who's suffering, because the book matches wherever you are, whether you're, like I said, a health nut, or whether you're just starting out, it's going to match where you are and it's going to help take your health to the next level.
You can go to learntruehealth.com and click in the Menu. It says book Addicted to Wellness. Just click there, grab it off Amazon. Come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. I'd love to see you there. I'd love to hear from you. If you have any questions, we're here to help. I know you're going to enjoy today's podcast.
Dr. Jeff Harris is an amazing naturopath. He's been practicing for over 30 years. World's leading expert in neuraltherapy. It's phenomenal. I can't wait for you to hear it. You can go to jeffharrisnd.com ND as in naturopathic doctor. jeffharrisnd.com is his website and to check out more information about the conference, naant.org North American Academy of Neural Therapy conference April 4th through 7th. Check it out and if you're listening to this and you can't make it to the conference or it's past April, don't worry, go check out their website anyway, because they ongoingly have workshops. But this conference is once a year, so you definitely want to jp in. You're going to be surrounded by amazing world healers, just like yourself, and I can't say enough good things about this.
I'm very excited for you to hear today's interview. Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. If you have a practitioner in your life, share this interview. It is very meaningful. If you have someone in your life that has chronic pain or they have a health condition that they just can't overcome. Those like really difficult cases where it's like they've gone from doctor to doctor to doctor and they cannot get on the other side of it. They're going to want to know about this. So share this episode with them, and thank you for sharing this episode with those you care about, because together we are helping people to learn true health.
Ashley James (0:07:29.639)
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 518. I am so excited for today's interview. I know today's interview is going to change lives. That's why I almost have butterflies. I'm so excited! Dr. Jeff Harris, I'm thrilled to have you on the show today. It's going to be amazing.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:07:55.381)
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Ashley James (0:07:57.317)
Before we jp into you, I've got to share a quick story. I haven't talked a lot about this. I've talked a little bit about this in the last two years, but for the last two years, my husband has had chronic pain and I have had every holistic therapy I could get my hands on, he went through and he has had like this nonstop on again, off again, almost daily and sometimes daily neck aches like radiate up into the head and it's trigger points. And we have had him go through, if you can name a therapy, we had him try it. And everything helped a little bit and would shift a little bit, but it would always come back. And there was specific patterns to his chronic pain and the chronic pain was so bad. It was like migraines. He couldn't think. He often jokes, but please get me a guillotine. Like he doesn't want to die, but he doesn't want his head to be attached to his body. That's how much pain he was in.
And we tried everything. I've been reaching out to everyone I knew in the holistic space for answers. And one of my naturopathic friends suggested that I reach out to you. And I can't tell you, you are worth your weight in gold because after almost two years, it'll be two years next month, my husband's chronic pain has stopped.
It's not just for people with chronic pain. It's more than that. So if you're a listener and you're like, wow, I don't have chronic pain, so this doesn't apply to me. No, no, no. This therapy is saving lives, changing lives, just drastically improving the quality of people's lives. So I wanted to give this little testimonial to set the stage that I think that everyone should listen to this episode, that everyone should learn from you. And that everyone should know about this therapy that I feel like is not very well known because so many of the doctors and naturopaths and chiropractors and acupuncturists and rolfing people and everyone that my husband went to, no one suggested this. They didn't even know it existed and they really need to. I'm very excited to have you on the show. Welcome.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:10:01.285)
Thank you. I'm really excited to have people know about this. Neural therapy has been around since the 1940s and it's been amazing. And I've wondered why doctors can't always figure it out. I'm happy to talk more about it.
Ashley James (0:10:21.189)
You're like one of the world's leading experts in this. And I want to know, how did you even find it? Because it's something that not many people know, but once you do learn it, it's like the tool you are so grateful for having in your tool belt. And everyone who's listening who's a practitioner, listen up because there's a conference coming up in April. I'd love for you to come do this conference and learn neural therapy.
And for those who aren't practitioners, share this episode with your holistic practitioners. They're going to want to know that they can learn this and use it in, in, with their clients, with their patients. But how did you discover this?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:10:59.554)
So the way I discovered it was I have a patient that I met down in Oregon. I was working with a doctor, Terska. And when I met her, she says she was from Seattle area and there was a doctor that she was going to see and she wanted me to come along and watch. And when I went, the doctor was Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt and he started to inject the scars. And the first thing that came out of my mouth was that looks pretty easy. And he says, you should come to my workshops and learn how to do it.
And so he had a workshop that was coming up in about two weeks. I went to the workshop, there was like 70 people and I couldn't get in the front row. And so whenever there was a treatment that was happening, I would walk up to the front and watch very closely because I had a patient, he wanted to see me on Monday morning. He had had diarrhea for two weeks and he was losing about, 20 pounds a week and it was skin and bone. And he'd been to the ER. He had been t, multiple other doctors and nothing had changed it. And, I told him that on Monday morning, I would know what to do with him, which I realized later that was kind of silly. It was like, I'm going to stop all that. And when he came in, I did some testing, actually muscle testing. And what I found was there was nothing wrong with his gut which was surprising. He was having gut issues. So what I did is I started to search around and tried to find where the problem was. I looked in his mouth and he had some pink stuff in this one tooth. And I tested that tooth and it related to the pain and diarrhea that he was having in his gut. And I did an injection into his gum and immediately all his gut pain went away.
And I was surprised. And I was like, Oh, good. And he asked me a question. What did you just do to me? And I was a new doc. And I thought that, well, my career was over and I was going to get sued and everything was going to be go wrong. And so I explained in very detail what I just done. And he says, no, he says, not that. Why did all my pain just go away? And this little dark cloud that was raining on me over my head turns into sunshine. And I was like, oh, that's great. That means I need to do the other side of your tooth. And so he opened up his mouth and I treated the other side. And when we treat a tooth that has an infection, it only lasts between four hours and maybe two days.
So I told him to go to the dentist. He needed to get that tooth removed. And he did. And all the gut pain continues to stay gone. He called me again the next Monday, pretty despondent and said that his diary was back and I had him come in and then I put some iodine on a Q -tip and then I put it down in the socket that was there and immediately all of the pain went away again and at that point it never came back.
So that was my first introduction to neural therapy actually in practice.
Ashley James (0:14:53.084)
And how long ago was that?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:14:54.290)
That was 1993.
Ashley James (0:14:57.496)
And since then you have been using this successfully in your practice. What are some of the most common things that people successfully have resolved with you using neural therapy?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:15:10.308)
It seems like just about everything. Well, one of the things that's not for, is cancer or epilepsy. So to know that is an important thing, but I've treated all kinds of pain, all kinds of issues everywhere in the body that nobody else could even touch. And so often when somebody goes to see another doctor, they'll do treatments like your husband. Well, he'd seen it and there's a little bit better and all those things were important, but the final thing hadn't been found. And is it okay for me to say what we found on him?
Ashley James (0:15:57.802)
Oh, yes. He is given his permission that we can discuss his case.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:16:02.608)
Okay. The most important thing on his body when I did my testing was a scar that was on his left side that he got when was nine years old. And when I find that it's like to me, it's Eureka. Because that's the place that if we treat that, then his body has the ability to have to get better.
Ashley James (0:16:33.690)
The chronic pain started right after his dad passed away and he had a dental procedure within the same 24 hours as two years ago. And then the chronic pain started. And it's like someone wouldn't think that's related to a scar that he's had since he's nine. Right. But it was interesting to see that there was a lot of similarities between the scar over his spleen and when he had the chronic pain from about and the fact that the tooth they worked on was also related to the spleen. So everything was kind of pointing to that scar, but you'd have to know what you're looking for.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:17:16.514)
And it's on the surface of the body, right? I mean, to me, since I've done it for all these years, 33 years, essentially, and maybe 30, if I can get 31, get my math right here. The scars are so often missed because we don't usually think that they're a problem.
And scars can cause all kinds of problems in the body. I mean, from the head and neck pain could cause a problem to the spleen tooth that he was having. And then also relating to the headaches, which we found after I did the treatment and that his headaches got worse again, right? Like soon as the Procaine kind of wore off.
Ashley James (0:18:02.404)
Yes, it was very interesting that his headaches went to daily and got worse. But right when you treated the scar with the little needle that you inject the fluid into the scar. I watched as his whole demeter relaxed and he became very happy, very relaxed. It was a huge shift. And then later that day, his headaches proceeded to get worse for a week until we saw you again.
But that informed us that we were on the right path, even though it was negative change, it was actually like it's not nothing, right? We were tapping into something in his body, something in his body was saying, you're on the right track. And we hadn't had that result from any other type of therapy. And so when we came back to you, that's when we were very excited for the next phase so that we could turn off the chronic pain.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:19:03.304)
So what I saw when he had the treatment is it looked like he went back to nine years old when the injury happened. And to me, he looked like that cute little boy again and he got that memory. So the headache came back because there was more that needed to be done. And I remember telling you ahead of time that we didn't know how it was going to affect the headaches, but it was going to help a whole system.
And I knew there was another place that needed to be treated. And because the testing had showed that, but it's not a good idea to do both of those things at the same time. So when he came back, I treated the place in his neck and then that made the rest of the change. I don't know his status now. That was just a couple of days ago. Has he had headaches since then?
Ashley James (0:20:00.104)
Not had any. It’s been zero.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:20:03.685)
No headaches?
Ashley James (0:20:04.561)
No headaches. Zero, like not even a little inkling. It's been absolutely zero.
Too soon to tell. It's only been a few days, but he normally has one every two days or every three days. So he hasn't had any, which has been wonderful. He's been sleeping deeper. Like a third party observer, I can see that he is out of fight or flight, that he is in that rest and digest state. Cause he's wanting to go to bed at night as opposed to being kind of jacked up at night. His body is wanting to go to sleep on time and he's sleeping completely soundly through the night. I have not in the last few nights, he's not gotten up, like his body is in healing mode and it is so cool to see what you do with neural therapy and to see it on someone who I know very intimately, to see how brilliantly it works in supporting the body's ability to heal itself.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:21:19.357)
Yes, it gets the body out of its own way. So the scar was an interference field. And in neural therapy, that's kind of one of the main things we look for. And an interference field can come from a scar. It could come from a trauma that's physical or emotional and can even be psycho-spiritual kind of traumas that have to be dealt with.
And by doing an injection of local anesthetic or Procaine into the area. So we can do injections over an organ, like the liver, the spleen, large intestine, lungs. And then the place that I did in his neck is, is called a ganglion. And we have sympathetic ganglion which go along our spine that are part of our fight or fight network. And what they do is they get stuck. They get stuck in the healing process and by giving an injection of Procaine into the area, it helps to reset it by adding more electrical energy to the area and having it come off of line, which is what the numbness does.
And then when it comes back online, the brain resets it with its connection and it's like, oh, these areas need to be healed. And then it allows the parasympathetic nervous system to do its healing. So the injection that I did is called the Stellate Ganglion Block. And it's gotten quite famous for treating PTSD, headaches, stroke and left arm pain, teeth pain, heart attacks, heart issues. So it actually does a lot. And the balancing one with that is called the Vegas ganglion, which there's a whole school of people that talk about just doing everything with the Vegas. They want you to hum. They want you to rub or gag or do something to be able to stimulate that when we can do an injection into the Vegas ganglion and that helps to reset it with a with Procaine.
Ashley James (0:23:53.964)
Not everyone knows what Procaine is. So they're like, well, why do I want you injecting me with this stuff? So just reassure us what's in this needle.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:23:59.990)
Oh, totally. Procaine is a local aesthetic. It was actually invented in about 1901 or 1903 by a doctor. They were looking for something to use for an eye anesthetic for eye surgeries that wasn't cocaine because cocaine was addictive. And so when they came out with Procaine, they would first use it to drip it into the eye, to numb the eye for the eye surgeries. So it's incredibly safe to just put anywhere in your body. It breaks down fairly easily. So DEAE (Diethylaminoethyl Cellulose) and another product that's slipping my mind at the moment PABA (Para-aminobenzoic acid) and every cell in the body as well as in the plasma can break it down.
It doesn't have a toxicity effect, which is super nice. And the thing I like to tell people is that it makes you younger, stronger, and healthier, even if you just put it in your hip. There was a whole sanatorium that was in Romania for many years, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, and a number of famous people would go there and they would get injections of Procaine. At the time it's called GH3 and they would be there for like six weeks. They'd get twice a week, three times a week. And then they would be refreshed and they'd be able to go back to work. Their schedules are pretty intense.
I've had Procaine injected in me in lots and lots of places over the years. And people will see me that haven't seen me in 10 years and they'll say, you look the same age as when I saw you 10 years ago, you didn't age. And I said, well, Procaine is one of my, my superpowers here. So it does answer the question?
Ashley James (0:26:07.472)
Yes, it's safe. It's it's healthy for the body. And then it's a temporary numbing agent that when you're injecting it by the autonomic nervous system, it creates a reset.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:26:24.220)
Yes. Anywhere you inject it, it creates a reset. So our autonomic nervous system, it innovates all of our skin, every organ, everything in our body. So any place you put it, it actually is treating the autonomic nervous system.
Ashley James (0:26:44.638)
So tell me about this conference in regards to practitioners who are listening who are like, whoa, I want a way to reset people because I'm hearing that we could take someone who has insomnia, someone who has trauma, right? Someone who has a high blood pressure and heart disease, someone who's suffered a stroke. All these things, when you look at it, they're all definitely related to being in fight or flight, to not being able to get that body in the healing mode, right? They're stuck. And I've seen that, like with my husband, no matter how much I attempted to get him to meditate or relax or massages and acupuncture, all the things we attempted, I could still see that he was stuck in that fight or flight. We couldn't fully get his body to relax, even though he was consciously trying to get his body to relax. He couldn't.
And then after the neural therapy, I saw the reset. So for all the different illnesses and chronic illnesses, there definitely is that fight or flight element that you're stuck in fight or flight. This is applicable too. So for all the practitioners listening, tell us about the conference coming up and what will the be learning and what will they be able to treat when they leave the conference?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:28:16.100)
So the conference is downtown Seattle at the Renaissance Hotel. And it's going to be April 4th to 7th. The first day is going to be a pre-conference workshop. And we have two of those happening at the same time.
The first, one of them is a basic training, and in the basic training you're going to learn the theory of neural therapy and then how to apply it in clinical practice. Well, they'll talk about the pharmacology, how to do injections, indications, contraindications. What kind of responses people have, how to manage the patient, and then safety procedures that will happen in the office. And the main part is really the hands-on. So you get to learn how to do these scar injections, and you get to learn how to do what we call segmental injections. And segmental injections can go over the organs. There's like patterns that we'll use with injecting the Procaine at a shallow depth, not into the organ itself.
And then we also, a really common one that we do is goes around the head. And we call that one the crown of thorns and our joke is that it's popular at Easter, which is coming up here soon. And so that's what they'll get to learn in the basic training in the advanced neural therapy, I'm the one that's teaching along with other doctors that have helped me at other workshops. And I'll be taking people through my protocol for the athlete's full body reset. So we're going to go through all the major neural therapy ganglion from top to bottom and reset everybody's body that's in the conference. And so the stellate's going to be one of those. There's other famous ganglions that are part of it which in my world are famous, which is the sphenopalatine ganglion, the vagus ganglion, we’ll do the ciliac plexus, the inferior hypogastric plexus, and the stellate ganglion on each side. If we have time, then I'll also include ganglion impar or possibly the presacral ganglion.
But most people don't know where any of these places are.The only ones who tend to know these end up being anesthesiologists. But they don't use these the same way that we do in neural therapy or understand the theories of how to balance the autonomic nervous system so that people can get well from these treatments. So that's going to be the first part that first day.
At the end of the day, we'll also have one of our long time neural therapy docs who's also an anesthesiologist who's going to talk about neural therapy IVs. I should say, Procaine IVs, ozone, and then other pearls from his practice. Rob Banner is a terrific doctor, has a great education in diet therapies as well. And so I'm sure we'll hear about those.
The next day, which is Friday, which we're calling the main conference, where we're going to hear from Dietrich Klinghardt and the history of neural therapy in America. And from listening to what he was talking about, we may hear about it in more worldwide as well.
Then we're going to have Dr. Perry Peretz is going to talk about neural therapy and taking acupuncture to the next level. So he's an osteopathic doctor that's also an acupuncturist that has included neural therapy into his practice and had terrific results. And so we're really looking forward to hearing from him.
After that, we're going to have a lawyer that's going to speak, but he's one of the best trained people in how to do O-ring testing. And O-ring testing is a formal muscle testing that ends up being very good and very effective. And it helps you to find the indications that for neural therapy and we'll have another type of muscle testing as well for people to be able to learn because not everybody can catch on to the ones that are there.
And then we'll have a guy, Warren Slayton. He's a medical doctor from New Jersey, and he'll talk about enhancing prolotherapy with neural therapy. So he's mixed those two together. More people do know about prolotherapy than neural therapy. But most neural therapists do know on prolotherapy. I’m one.
The next one we'll have is a dentist that's going to speak. Carl Anderson. He has his talk on focus and the foci in dentistry and neural therapy. And he's got some great stories about how treating the teeth has helped the body, just like my first patient that I had talked about earlier.
And then in the afternoon that day, he and I are going to do an intraoral neural therapy hands-on workshop. So he's going to teach how to do an intraoral injection for the sphenopalatine ganglion. And then I'm going to teach the inferior orbital to be able to numb the upper teeth and to treat the maxillary sinuses. I’ll be able to do an intra-oral training on how to do the vagus ganglion. And then I'll also do a submandibular ganglion. So if anybody's ever had like big swollen lower jaw from any dental work and it's hard to get that to go away, that's what the sub-andibular ganglion works with. And it's magic.
And afternoon we'll have an update from a doctor from Austria, from Colombia and from Spain.
And at the end of the day, we actually have what we call breakout session, where we'll have docs that are on our board or other ones that are long-term neura-therapists that will have a table and they'll be treating patients or other doctors there that have specific things that they want or that they want to learn. Because we want to have that opportunity for everybody to have a chance, and that's just Friday.
Saturday, I'm going to talk in the morning about neural therapy and two other therapies that I do along with it. One of them is called PIT, which is perineural injection tube, which is shallow injections of dextrose, which is a sugar that's dilute. So it's D5W into the cutaneous nerves to turn off pain and inflammation. And it's been miraculous in healing. I mean, neural therapy is miraculous. PIT is miraculous and putting a boat together makes it even better. The other thing that I'm going to be talking about along with neural therapy is called medical Qigong. We've all heard of Tai Chi and we've seen people in the park, and moving the energy and having these different postures and positions. And medical Qigong actually comes from the hospitals in China
In the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, China had medical Qigong hospitals all over China. And the guy that I've get to learn from what his name is, is Jerry Allen Johnson. He got to go to those hospitals and learn what they were doing and then he wrote it all down and he wrote five books on it all. I mean, it's pretty, pretty extensive knowledge. And then he's been teaching a doctorate in medical Qigong of which there's 16 classes and I've taken 14 of them so far, and been practicing it, two and a half hours a day or more, because it's just so fun and interesting.
So how I work with that with neural therapy is I'll do a neural therapy treatment and now the person is relaxed. Their parasympathetic nervous system is on and I'll do a medical Qigong treatment, which is I'll have them laid on the table and clean their energy field and their energy system, their physical body, their energy body and their spirit body. And then, set things correct that need to be corrected, say in their energy fields, kind of like a mechanic is the way I think of it. And then recharge the energy system. So the organs need to be recharged. There's energy organelles called dantians that need to be recharged. And then I regulate them so that they can be in balance. And then the final thing is we set three layers of protection.
It's for the physical body, the energy body and the spirit body and it's just been amazing. And sometimes people don't know about that part because they usually have so many questions so that we don't get to that part, and, I'll say, if you have more questions, then I will take the time. So I can't get to this and often they'll say, I'm done. I only have this one question left and because it ends up being so valuable. There's very rarely we have anything that can take these thought forms that we have out of our body. We will have constant thoughts. I'm in pain, I'm suffering, I want this, I need that or whatever it is, or there's something wrong with me is even more common. And it can actually take those out and lessen them. So a person can actually put good affirmations in their place. So, and then we have a neural therapy and psychiatry that's happening on Saturday.
We're also having Dr. Schwartz, he's going to come and teach us autonomic response testing, which we call ART, which he originally learned from Dr. Klinghardt and has advanced it himself. We're have palpation guided injection technique. That's going to be taught by Dr. Richard Nahas and they'll have a workshop in the afternoon by Mark Schwartz on how to actually do the muscle testing and try and take people through it. Because if you have a test for the autonomic nervous system, then you can find the interference fields that are interfering with the autonomic nervous system. And so that's really important.
And then on Sunday morning we'll have Dr. Rutledge or Dane Rutledge he's going to be speaking about how to protect your practice. He's a lawyer. He says, target hardening, how to legally protect your practice. And so he's got an hour of that. And then Dietrich Klinghardt will give us his neural therapy pearls of wisdom. And then we have a doctor from Mexico that's going to speak she's going to be talking about using another technique for diagnosing the autonomic nervous system, which is called heart rate variability, and she'll talk about that. And then at 11:15, we'll have a doctor from Germany that's going to be talking about gynecological issues and also give us an update about neural therapy in Germany. We have some of the best people in the world that are coming to this and speaking at it and it's an opportunity to learn while it's not a full -on workshop that you're going to get, usually a workshop in neural therapy is about three days. So you're not going to get every single piece, but what I do expect is you're going to walk out of there with the ability to do something in your practice that you didn't do before and I'm confident and you're going to be able to help the patients that are your failures.
All of us docs have failures. We haven't been able to get the patients better. And then they move on to somebody else or we're able to just treat them for, it's like, okay, I have to keep repeating this thing every six weeks, every week, whatever, however long it is. And that's as far as we're able to get with them. And neural therapy is one of the things that can actually break through that. And so usually people have seen other doctors before they see me who have done really good work, put them on really good nutritional programs. They have them on good other types of programs. And neural therapy just gets to be the one that shines because it got this scarf and it got the nervous system back online. But the other things that were being done were actually important and valuable.
So that's the conference and I'm really excited about it. I'm going down today to help do the room set up and pick the foods that we're going to have. We have some really cool vendors that are coming from different places. One of them has injectables for a number of different things. I guess some of them, I'm not probably not allowed to say that they relate to some of the injuries people have had from the-
Ashley James (0:42:57.657)
From the wacky vaccines. Those injuries.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:43:00.516)
Those kind of injuries. Yes. And neural therapy has had some good results with those.
Ashley James (0:43:06.400)
Really? Have you been able to successfully get people out of long haul?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:43:16.279)
Yes. So with long haul, I use a combination of the neural therapy and then I also do the medical Qigong. With that illness, it's very very sticky kind like a black tar that gets stuck in the lungs for sure, the throat, but I've seen it all over the body, but it's an energetic thing and so people don't have a way to really get rid of it because they don't have any energetic skills and so with the medical Qigong, we can break that up and pull that out.
I had a woman recently that had had that illness really bad and she had gotten over it, but she was still coughing and she couldn't even lay down. And so I did the neural therapy, which we call the infraspinatus respiratory response and the sternal reflex patterns. And it opens up the lungs. And then I did the medical Qigong and kind of did a cleaning, a real deep cleaning and also cleaned the heart chakra and the throat chakra and shined them all up and refilled her all up. And when she went home, she didn't cough the rest of the day. She slept with a flat in her back without any problems. Texted me in the morning and said, Hey, I'm all the way better. I've had that happen a lot.
Ashley James (0:44:58.772)
Love it. Tell me about who can come to the North American Academy of Neural Therapy conference. So obviously doctors, naturopaths. But can a midwife go? Can I go? Someone who's just like really interested or do you have to be a licensed or do you have to be a doctor to attend the conference?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:45:20.266)
You don't have to be licensed to attend the conference. Well, I don't even know. You don't even have to know how to do injections, honestly, but to be able to go and see what we're doing and how cool this therapy is and how important it is, is really nice. So naturopaths, osteopaths,, acupuncturists to have the ability to do injections in some states. Chiropractors have the ability to do injections in some states. And also we have nurse practitioners. We have some PAs (physicians assistants), dentists of different types as well. All of them have injection skill sets. And they can actually do them. I think after any surgery, they should actually get neural therapy by the nurse that actually takes them out in the recovery room, they should inject on either side of the scar, not into the scar itself. And then come back at six weeks and have their scars treated. It would improve the success of surgeries by probably at least 70% because they come and see me or my colleagues after a surgery that went well, but they're having some issue and all I do is inject the scar, and now that's better.
There's an emergency room doctor that's going to be there. That's what used to do in the emergency room. I have surgeons that use it as part of their surgery that have given me those types of statistics. And we need more. Every doctor should know how to do neural therapy at the level of doing the scars and segmental because it'll improve everything that happens in their practice and everybody will be so happy with them.
Ashley James (0:47:29.531)
And that's something they'll learn at the conference?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:47:32.337)
They can learn it at the conference and also have it done. We'll also have a time where there's going to be a few couple of medical Qigong practitioners that will actually be there in the afternoon on Saturday to be able to get treatments.
Ashley James (0:47:50.619)
I think, I would be as a practitioner most interested in having it done to me. So I had the experience of what the patient or the client is experiencing. So that's the exciting part that not only is it hands-on, that as practitioners attending the conference, they'll be able to do it. That's why it can't be virtual. There's so much hands-on work that you get to do. This isn't just a theory conference. This is a get down and dirty and actually get to do it and then have it done to you by the very experienced practitioners.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:48:25.703)
Very experienced practitioners that are going to be there as well as you get to feel how it is from a new person as well. What I found is when somebody just sees the neural therapy, it usually looks really easy. Like if you watch how my hand does it or I'm doing it after 30 some years,, everybody goes, oh, that looks so easy. But I've done 10,000 of those injections or more. And so what I do when somebody is learning and they're hesitant and they'll allow me to touch their hand or the syringe, then I'll hold their hand and I'll help guide their hand and tell them what they're feeling in the tissues. We call it tissue palpation.
So as they're going through the tissue, they can actually get some feedback and then they have a chance of learning it kinesthetically as well as by watching it and hearing it. And then they have a chance of learning it kinesthetically as well as by watching it and hearing it. And some people are kinesthetic learners and my hand can teach them really well.
Ashley James (0:49:29.588)
So that's the exciting part. I want everyone to reach out to all their practitioners. I know when I get off this interview, I'm contacting every single person that my husband went to, all the practitioners who really were eager to help end his chronic pain, but didn't have this tool set. And I just think that there's so many practitioners out there that want to have this tool set and don't even know it exists.
So listeners, we got to get together, we need to spread this information, let them know about the conferences coming up, because no matter what kind of thing your practitioner practices, they're going to want to know about this and to have this as a tool set. And even people who are just interested in learning more, the fact that you could go to this conference and get treated and learn all this stuff is so cool. These tools are non-invasive, which I love. It's non-invasive.
Let's talk about, are there negative side effects? Like, if someone says they're going for surgery, of course there's risks, right? Or they're going to get on a new drug, there's risks. But this is so different. So what are the things that we look out for or what are the risks? Or is it only like, oh, redness at the site and that's very minimal risks. Can we talk a little bit about that?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:50:48.377)
So there's, there's very minimal risk, which is really nice about it. There's more risks with maybe where you place the needle than with the Procaine itself. The redness or bruising on the surface. And I tell people I don't charge extra for bruising because I used to get calls like, hey, I got a bruise from that. And it saved me a bunch of phone calls, calls to be able to remind them that bruising does happen. And often I tell a person when bruising is going to happen, I can see it on the surface when I'm doing it. Somebody could be allergic to a Procaine. I've only found one of those in 31 years. So that was rare. And I used dextrose instead on them and it had decent results. Also, there's other local anesthetics that are known, a bunch of them, of course.
The one that's most commonly used is called lidocaine. That's other names are xylocaine. And it actually has to go to the liver to be broken down. So there's a toxicity that's fairly low with that. And there's some neural therapy docs, they won't use it at all. I've used it very sparingly. It has a little bit longer numbing effect. It doesn't cause the vasodilation, which is something that I want. And it doesn't have the healing benefit of the anti-aging properties that could be part of it.
If you put a Procaine into blood vessel, so we can use it in IV and it's been safe for the heart, it's been safe for the brain. You can’t get too much, if you injected it directly into an artery that goes into the brain, then the person will have a very short time seizure. And which, when that's happened, they've said it's probably the best neural therapy treatment they ever have, but they wouldn't volunteer to do it again. So, I haven't really had that.
Ashley James (0:53:26.827)
You're palpating so precisely that you're not trying to find the carotid artery?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:53:30.632)
No, you're not trying to, even though in Argentina, they actually were doing injections directly into the carotid artery very slowly. And they stopped that and decided that they were going to be doing that anymore. They'd done it for a number of years in their psychiatric, with their psychiatric patients.
Ashley James (0:53:53.194)
Did they get results with them?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:53:55.558)
They got results with it? Yes.
Ashley James (0:53:57.327)
Like what?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:53:58.052)
They were having people get better. I mean, we do know that Procaine itself is an MAO inhibitor, which is an antidepressant, which is kind of nice to have, but they were treating lots of different things. And I don't remember what all of them were, but we have a psychiatrist that will be coming to tell us his treatments for his psychiatric patients and how it works.
Ashley James (0:54:23.323)
I'm thinking about the people with long-term chronic depression. Anxiety is through the roof. I mean, when we look at the suicide rates, they've gone up in the last four years. I saw somewhere a statistic that the younger, like 24 and younger suicides, the number one cause of death. I'm not sure if that's still accurate, but it is just very depressing and bleak when we think about mental health in the United States and I don't really know any country that's doing mental health right. But when I'm in the United States and I'm originally from Canada, so I can say Canada and the United States is not doing mental health in a healthy way that we can see the outcomes. People are just put on drugs. I think having it going to an MD saying you're depressed and an MD being allowed to put you on antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds without also having you in therapy.
I just think it's ludicrous because it's like, here, let's just mess with your brain. Numb your body's trying to communicate with you. Your emotions are trying to communicate with you, but let's just numb all that. And don't go to therapy. Don't resolve this issue. It's like we're not giving the patient the tools to heal. Let's just throw drugs at them, which is a crutch. You wouldn't put a cast on a bone that's not broken, but yet MDs are allowed to prescribe antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds like they're candy and that really messes with people. It doesn't help them overcome.
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:56:03.493)
So I think of them as a bandaid. So antidepressants are trying to treat a second level problem, which is an emotional and electrical problem with a physical product. And so you give the physical product and it has an effect but it's always a diminishing return. You get three months, six months. And then now the person their neuraltransmitters are now even more depleted because the drug has been enhancing them. And now the person hasn't done any of their emotional work. And so now they have the double whammy that the antidepressant isn't working and they haven't done their emotional work.
So I agree that if you go into antidepressant, you have to go to a counselor, get therapy that's effective because you got three to six months before that wears off and it doesn't work anymore. And now you'll have more depression and you'll still have the same problem.
Ashley James (0:57:11.858)
So in terms of neural therapy, because it's resetting the nervous system, getting them out of that fight or flight are you seeing that people with depression or even on antidepressants or people with anxiety, are they able to recover faster? Can we talk a little bit about that emotional or psychiatric experience?
Dr. Jeff Harris (0:57:37.038)
So to do that, I'll have to talk about the five levels of healing. Okay. So the first level is physical. So you have, let's say massage, pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, a whole host of things, you blood work, lab work, all is there. So that's, that's the first level. And that's where most doctors are trained and where they actually have a level of competency. In my opinion. So the next level up is the nervous system, the electrical part of us, which is where the emotions are. And emotions carry a charge. And so do interference fields.
So neural therapy works on the second level. And whenever you work at a level higher than the level where the problem is, then it always treats all the levels below. So if somebody gets neural therapy and their problems on that same level, then they get better. Okay.
The third level is the mental level. So we can have all kinds of things that mentally. I think of them as the programs that got in prior to the age of reason, which is between five and seven. We learned these from our parents. We learned them from our peers. We learned them from our environment that we're around. And those programs we're designed to have those go in because the people that are around have been successful at being able to have children. So we need to be programmed so that we can raise children.
But not all those programs are actually healthy. So we need to find those programs, and then be able to reprogram a person. And with Procaine, treating the interference fields that are below that, it makes it much easier for the mind to be able to face those mental programs in an honest way so they can actually do the healing work through affirmations, through mantra, through a number of different ways, there's psychotherapy, there could be homeopathy. And then, so that's the third level.
Fourth level is archetypal. So, an archetype is a symbolic representation. So the kind of the first archetypes that we have are male and female. So we can look across and we see it, see a man. And he has a baby, let's say, in a carriage. And he pick up the baby that's crying. And he pats the baby. And he tries to make the baby happy in some way. And we go, oh, a good father. If we see the man or women pick up the baby and it's crying and they shaking it, we go, oh, bad mother, we must take that baby away. They could hurt that baby. And And archetypes are something that we all agree upon. So good and bad father, good and bad mother, good and bad person, that we'll often go to.
The thing that I've liked is that we all share kind of four of the lower archetypes. According to Carolyn Myss and her last name is spelled M-Y-S-S. She still teaches. And she says we all share the child archetype with the saboteur archetype, the victim archetype, and the prostitute archetype. And we think of these as like, oh, that's bad to be a child. I'm a grown person. But we will see people they'll talk like a child. They'll act like a child, even late into life. They didn't quite grow up and most of us go, I don't want to be a child my whole life. Well, the way that you actually work with the archetype is by seeing it and recognize it's there and know that archetypes have two sides.
So the child archetype, when it stays a child, is childish. But when it grows up, it becomes the adult. The same let’s with say the saboteur. So my life keeps getting sabotaged by this, that, and the other thing. Something's always in the way. I can't get where I'm supposed to be. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know what my purpose is. And the saboteur, it's like, oh, you have a saboteur. It's like, oh, I don't want the saboteur. That's terrible. It's like, no, the saboteur itself, when it's healed, it protects you from being sabotaged. The same with the victim, the victim, oh, everybody's doing it to me. This is a problem and it's there to blame. They're blaming. And when we blame somebody else, we don't have the opportunity. We can't heal it because we pushed it outside of ourselves. The healing of the victim is the protection from being victimized. And the same thing happens with a prostitute. We see that, oh, I'm doing this. I'm selling myself cheaply for things and my spirit is far more valuable. And so I need to actually up my game. And then we end up becoming finding that we're all truly valuable every one of us. So that's the fourth level.
The fifth level is spiritual level. And often we talk about that as being self-healing and doing meditation, focusing on the divine. And there's a whole host of like beings that live in that realm.
The fifth one is the divine or light realm and when that shines the light down through the fourth level, through the third level, to the second level, to the first level, then we actually can have physical healing. The scars and interference fields can be blocking that light from coming through. The mental programs can be blocking that light.
So each one of us has the ability to heal all the way to the spiritual level, but not all of us have the wounding to that level. So some people only need to be treated at the second level. And so for me, neural therapy works on all these physical problems, but if I don't get a result, then I know that I have to go up a level and then if I go up a level and I don’t get result then I keep going up a level.
In my own case, I had to go all the way up to the spiritual level to get the healing that I needed. And that was my contract it’s the way I think of it for when I came into this world.
Ashley James (1:05:23.792)
It's funny, as healers, right? You're a naturopathic doctor and I'd see that there's a calling. I hung out with a lot of naturopaths in my lifetime and there's a distinction between a naturopath and a traditional medical doctor. When someone's in allopathic medicine, you don't even have to tell me what your profession is. I can pick up who's the holistic healer and who's the allopathic healer. There's a definite distinction. And it's funny how as healers, we have to have some wounds to heal ourselves in order to develop that empathy with our passion, our calling is to help others. So the fact that you had to go all through these levels to have your own personal experience so that then you could inform people on an empathetic level and help them with their healing process. I mean that makes complete sense.
I've had a similar experience. And for those listening, a lot of people go, well, I can't do what I want to do because I'm not perfect yet, I'm not at my goal weight, so I could never help someone with health, or I don't look like I'm super healthy, or I don't look perfect. People wouldn't perceive me as perfect. And this is where I catch people and I go, if you wait to be perfect, you've missed out on the opportunity to help hundreds of people or thousands of people because as long as you're working on your journey, you're working towards your health, you're going to learn along the way that you'll be able to immediately take those lessons and apply them to others. I think that there's a lot of healing that's going to go on at your conference. I just have a feeling the way it's set up.
The North American Academy of Neural Therapy has been around for a while, right? So you've had these experiences at the conferences, obviously. You're one of the world's leading experts. What do practitioners walk away in terms of their own personal growth? Can you share some experiences?
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:07:48.859)
So to me, that's what's most important is that the doctors and people that are practitioners that are there, whoever it is gets their areas treated that need to get treated because all of us need healing. And, I'm hoping, and like when I teach a three day workshop on the basic training or the advanced, my goal is to get everybody there treated so that they can actually go back and they're more healed practitioner than they were before. And they have some new tools to be able to work with others.
So they get the experience of actually having the injection and also when somebody is like afraid of it, then they get to have the experience of watching me, how I talk to them to help them make a decision about doing an injection or not because I understand that we all have a right to say no then and that's where I start.
I'll tell them, this is my sales pitch for on why I would do this injection and why I'd even suggest it in your case. But you still have that right to actually, to truly say no. I find if somebody doesn't have the right to say no, then their yes is not, is not definite. And I really want them to be on board and understand or be able to say no, if they need to.
The naant.org is the website and like all website, it has flaws. We've worked on it so much. That's crazy to do so usually if do the contact button on the naant.org website, then you'll end it ends up coming to me. I'm the current one that answers the question and I'm the the current president of the North American Academy of Neural Therapy.
Ashley James(1:10:03.061)
I'm impressed with the website. I haven't found any flaws on it.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:10:06.617)
Good. I was just looking and I saw a couple.
Ashley James (1:10:17.001)
I do. I know how it is. I've been clicking through the conference and looking at all the amazing classes and everything. And I was actually really impressed with the website.
So the links to everything today, Dr. Jeff Harris's website and to the conference are going to be the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. But I'll just throw them out here. So it's jeffharrisnd.com is your personal website. And then, of course, I want everyone who's listening to go to this conference. I just think it's going to be phenomenal and that is naant.org.
And then from there, they should be able to just click right there on Find Out More or Register Now for the conference coming up April 4th through 7th. And you can go to the whole conference, if you're flying into Seattle, you might as well do the whole conference you can do the pre stuff, there's different options for which things you want to attend.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:11:15.265)
You can join. You can join if you want to too from the website.
Ashley James (1:11:19.220)
Yes, so tell us about this. So I'd like just to wrap it up. I want you to speak to the providers who are listening and you've mentioned some, but like anyone who's working with clients or patients, anyone who physically sees their clients or patients and wants to help them on an emotional and physical level and help them on these deep levels, especially the patients who haven't or the clients who haven't gotten results who just like they still have the anxiety, they still have the sleep issues or they still have the chronic pain or you've worked with people with PTSD and very quickly seen amazing results, right?
So if any client or patient who you know that taking them out of fight or flight and resetting their nervous system so that it's no longer like stuck in that fight or flight, you want to bring them in to be able to do this therapy with them. So, speak to the practitioner who is interested in learning this, possibly joining the naant.org but especially those who are interested in coming to the conference. Speak to the practitioner who just learned about this therapy for the first time in this interview.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:12:37.611)
So there's a thing that's a hundred percenter kind of question for neural therapy. What happened just prior to this condition that you have to your body, your mind or your spirit? And most of the time people don't always remember. So it usually takes a little bit of prying. Say you've had this illness for five years. What was happening five years ago in your life? What do you remember from that time? What do you remember from six years ago? What was happening in your life? Did you have any surgeries? Did you have any car accidents? Did you have a divorce? Did you have any kind of emotional trauma? Somebody die in your family. And if they've had any of the thing that's happened, that was a big event, then we know that neural therapy is going to help. That's how we knew with your husband, we'll bring it around to that. It was like, oh, nobody's treated this scar. And it was a kind of a life and death situation. The aid cars showed up the older boys that were around. They all abandoned him. His friend that was there did run and get help, but he got abandoned. He had to lay there by himself maybe for a period of time and he's bleeding and hurt and he's hurt.
Ashley James (1:14:11.970)
Yes, my husband fell 30 feet into a river bed and had river bed rocks lodged in between his ribs and nearly lost his spleen. He was nine years old. There's no cell phones and they were in a park. So his friend ran and got help. And then there was a woman who was happened to walk by and she was the one that was with him. But yes, it was my husband says he doesn't remember being afraid. But but it's like, well, of course we were afraid in that moment. And he was in tremendous pain and I think that it's interesting how we bury stuff and when we go through trauma, if we're not ready to process it, we bury it. But the moment you finished injecting the scar, he had his huge reset and could definitely physically see it. And then the next week when you did the therapy to reset his nervous system, the next injections, that's when all the pain stopped and hasn't come back and it’s like I got my old husband back.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:15:16.867)
And if his pain does come back, we know that we could repeat the same treatment and get a longer result.
Ashley James (1:15:24.851)
Right. It is so cool. And it's so worth it. Like I said, it's the only thing I've tried. We've tried probably 20 different therapists. I mean, I should sit down and think about everyone we went to, but we've tried everything.
And even he went to allopathic medicine and that didn't work. It didn't even touch the pain, like everything. And this is what did it. And I imagine so many people out there who are suffering, who we could end their suffering quickly and without side effect, without harm. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I know your schedule is tight. You're preparing for the conference. It's been wonderful having you here and I'd love to have you back to talk more about this in the future.
I urge listeners to share this interview with your practitioners in your life, your dentists, your chiropractors, your doctors, your nurse practitioners, your acupuncturists, everyone who sees their clients or patients in person. Let's get this information out there. Dr. Jeff Harris, it's been such a pleasure.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:16:28.943)
Can I say one more thing? On the topic of doctors who are allopathic and medical doctors and DOs, they're often so wounded and they never get the help that they need. Our society, in my opinion, has let them down. They spend all their time getting grades, having to learn these things, and they get brainwashed that this is the only way to do healing, is my opinion. Their relationships that they have are usually not very good. I think that we should actually give them a practice boyfriend or a practice girlfriend as they're going through school so that they can learn about relationship from somebody who's healthy. And so I'm all about helping heal anybody in the medical profession. So, I'm going to make sure that's got said too.
Ashley James (1:17:30.847)
Thank you. You called me out. I think I've been holding them in a negative light. I should imagine all the medical doctors and hold them in love and just shine light on them and say, I want all of you guys to heal. Heal thyself and come to the NAANT conference where you could begin that healing. I'm excited. The energy is going to be wild. A bunch of healers together, ready to heal themselves and help heal others. What a wild conference.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:18:03.831)
Yes. We call it the neural therapy family. It's a group of healers and we get together and we help each other and flourish and have a really good time.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I was glad to find out that you actually did podcast. I didn't know that until just the other day.
Ashley James (1:18:26.180)
I know. Well, I heard about your conference. We were talking about your conference. I'm like, okay can I help you? And I want to get this word out. And anytime I meet a holistic practitioner, I'm thinking, I should definitely have them on the show. And I was so grateful that you wanted to come on, because my goal is to help change lives. And that's by spreading information. You're the one changing lives then I'm just like, the farmer has a machine that spreads the seeds, right? I'm like that. I'm like, let's just spread it. Let's just get it out there and get all this information out there.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:19:01.407)
And that's not my skill. My skill is just doing what I do, the treatments.
Ashley James (1:19:06.494)
Yes. You keep healing people and I'll keep telling people about how you heal people. So it works out.
Dr. Jeff Harris (1:19:12.601)
Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Ashley James (1:19:15.928)
Wasn't that an amazing interview with Dr Jeff Harris. Give it up for Dr Jeff Harris. I just love this stuff and I'm so excited for you to share this information with your practitioners. Please, let's help spread this information. I want you to know about my absolute favorite non-toxic mattress. I have done interviews in the past.
This is a medical device. It's a medical device you sleep on, because they made this mattress so that it aligns your spine. No matter which side you sleep on, whether it's your front, your back, your side it aligns your spine and there it removes all pressure points. This was designed by an engineer who patented who is a medical device that originally and is still used in hospitals today, but originally was proven to reverse bed sores prevent a reverse bed sore.
So can you imagine sleeping on something so comfortable? It's firm yet soft, because it keeps everything in alignment and it feels like you're floating on a cloud. It's so supportive. People who love firm mattresses love it. People who love soft mattresses love it because it's firm but you feel no pressure points. It's amazing because it collapses exactly where it needs to. It's the coolest thing and I swear by this. I just love this mattress.
Well, they're doing something they've never done before. This mattress has been sold for over 20 years and in fact it lasts for over 20 years. It has the best guarantee, the best warranty, in the entire mattress industry. It's meant to last over 20 years without warping, without any negative damage. Usually, mattresses go every five years and if you're sleeping on a mattress older than five years, it's warped in some way because they don't design them correctly. So this mattress has never been on sale.
They have a sale going on right now and I have to let you know about it, it's 25% off. Go to learntruehealth.com/organix. That's with an X at the end learntruehealth.com/organix and check it out. You can also, when you go to my website, learntruehealth.com, you can click on what Ashley Recommends at the top of the menu and then you'll see it in there in my list of the things that I recommend. Give them a call. I mean you could check it out their website. You can also give them a call. Let them know I sent you because they throw in goodies and stuff, but it's 25% off right now. They usually throw in some really great goodies for my listeners.
I have the owner of the company. I had him on the show a few months ago and he's giving us some great stuff, but right now, huge sale, 25% off, and they do payment plans and stuff. So if you don't like your mattress and you want a new one, or you're thinking about getting a new one and you're like, well, I don't have all the money to buy this amazing sounding mattress, don't worry, they have payment plans. They have a crazy return policy, like I think you could sleep on it for 90 days or 120 days or something. You sleep on it for months and then you could still return it if you wanted to. So very few people do because they love it, but there's no risk. I love things that are no risk and they help you and they're non-toxic. It doesn't off-gas crap and it helps realign your spine and keep it there. My chiropractor was really amazed because she noticed a difference when I went from my old mattress to this mattress that we've now had for several years. We've been sleeping on it for well over five years and it's true, it doesn't warp. It feels just as good as the first day we got it.
So learntruehealth.com/organix Check out their sale right now. I don't know when the sale's ending. You know how sales go. They can have it for a day, they can have it for a week, but they just let me know that I'm allowed to tell you guys about the 25% off, and be sure to mention that you heard it from the Learn True Health podcast, because I want you to get whatever goodies they're throwing our way. They were mentioning pillows or pillowcases or a mattress protector or something cool.
So get that organics mattress 25% off, learntruehealth.com/organix. That organics mattress 25% off, learntruehealth.com/organix. And make sure you go to Dr Jeff's website, jeffharrisnd.com. Check out that conference naant.org. Of course, the links to everything I just talked about today in this episode is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.
To book a free session with me to discuss trying this technology, visit https://www.learntruehealth.com and click Work With Ashley James in the menu!
Check out my new book! https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness
Can light transform your health and wellness? Join me, Ashley James, as I sit down with the ingenious David Schmidt, the mastermind behind LifeWave's phototherapy patches, on this episode of the Learn True Health podcast. David shares his remarkable journey from childhood aspirations to creating groundbreaking non-invasive wearable technology that has revolutionized health care. Discover how these patches, inspired by divine guidance, have helped countless individuals, including my clients, with issues ranging from insomnia and depression to physical pain and anxiety.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James, and I am beyond excited for you to listen to this episode with David Schmidt, the creator of the phototherapy patches that I've been using for over a year with many of my clients having phenomenal results. I'm not going to take up too much of your time right now before we jump into this thrilling episode, but I wanted to give you a few pieces of information that are key. One go to learntruhealth.com and in the menu there click on Work with Ashley James and the very first appointment type is a free chat with me, just says phototherapy discovery session. Go ahead and sign up for that. If you are interested in any way in learning more, having a talk with me about the phototherapy patches, in trying them for yourself, there's a money back guarantee, so there's no risk and there's no negative side effects. It's not a drug. We're getting really amazing results.
So if you have something nagging in your life, something in your health that you're not happy with and it can be emotional issues, it can be physical issues. I've helped people using the flow therapy patches. I've seen with my clients, they overcome things like insomnia, depression, anxiety, exhaustion.
I myself have tremendous energy and I've noticed that sleep is better, energy is better throughout the day, digestion improves. There's so many things that improve so many levels of health. So pick something you're not happy with. Let's have a discovery session where we chat about it, and I'll be very straight up. If I don't think that phototherapy is right for you, we can just talk about what it is, what your health goals are, what you're frustrated in terms of your health emotional or physical or otherwise and what you want to overcome, what you want to get, what you want to improve in terms of your happiness and your health and your life, and if it's on phototherapy, I will point you in the direction of other resources. I love, love, love talking to you guys, so jump in, have a session with me and let's see how I can help you. I have a feeling, though, most of the time, most of the people that I talk to, phototherapy has worked when I suggest it. I have over 160 clients now using phototherapy, successfully using this.
What were the whole interview today? It's about phototherapy, and when you hear phototherapy, when I heard it, I thought is it a bunch of like lights. because you think photo light it's a no, it's not. You're not getting in a giant machine. It's actually a really easy wearable technology. It's so simple that it's kind of wild how powerful it is. It's very simple, it's very powerful and it's affordable, which is exciting, one example, there is one of the phototherapy patches and this is all proven. They've done studies and proved it that it increases glutathione production.
It asks the body to increase glutathione production by 300% in the first 24 hours and for some people it goes even beyond that after 24 hours. In comparison, if you were to take an oral glutathione, you raise your levels by about 10%. It's hard to absorb exogenous glutathione orally. Good oral glutathione is in the range of $50 to $100 per month; you're only raising it by about 10%. If you were to go to get an IV, that's between $100 and $200. And that doesn't last very long. That's only lasting a few hours. Glutathione doesn't last for days. It's a very short half-life in the body and that is very expensive, if you think about it- the oral glutathione, the injections. The phototherapy patch you're between $1 and $2 a day, basically for increasing it by 300%. So it's actually the cheapest way to support the body in terms of raising glutathione levels. And that's just one of several patches that they have that ask the body to perform specific functions more. So we're helping the body come back into balance. We've got great results around pain, around stimulating healthy bone healing. I've had several clients with broken bones that healed incredibly faster and got them out of pain much faster. That's really exciting.
I do have a quick story In our Facebook group, you can't see it, you can't find it on Facebook. I have to send you a unique, private link. So, if you want to, when we have our call together, I will give you that link and the link expires. So I can't even share this link publicly because it's a unique link that invites one person into this group. That's a private, hidden Facebook group of practitioners and their clients and all of the people in this group that are using the phototherapy patches in a specific way. We use them with an understanding that the body has meridians, like traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and so we place them on specific points of the body and we get even better results because there's that synergy of working with the energy system of the body and the nervous system of the body. We're working with it in that way.
In that group. If you type in in the search function, if you type in thyroid, you could spend over half an hour scrolling and reading testimonial after testimonial of people in that group. Mostly women are sharing about their thyroid who had hypothyroid but after using the phototherapy patches to support their body's ability to heal itself, no longer have hypothyroid, so much so, in less than two months of doing the protocol, and these are several, several testimonials, all said the same thing, went back to their doctor, and their doctor did testing, and their doctor took them off of their thyroid meds. They no longer have hypothyroid and it's just two types of patches.
Again, I'm not making medical claims. I'm not saying we cure or treat anything. We're supporting the body's ability to heal itself. And then people say, hey, wow, my health is getting better. We're noticing my health improving in this way. And my doctor did blood tests. My doctor said I don't need this medicine anymore. And that's my goal. My goal is to get people so healthy. Their doctors take them off meds and because they're so healthy, they're not leaning on those crutches anymore. They don't need to, they're so healthy.
Well, this happened with one of my clients. I told her she didn't want to have hypothyroid anymore, she didn't want to be on meds anymore, and I said, ok, well, here's what other people have said they've done to support their thyroid in optimal function. And she texted me just very casually. I was like jumping up and down, screaming. I was so excited. She texted me like within less than two months into doing this protocol, she goes. I went back to my naturopath, like you said, and I got my blood work and she took me off of all my thyroid meds because my thyroid now is performing completely normal. How exciting is that? It's wild, because phototherapy, as you will discover in this interview, it's not molecular medicine, it's just asking the body to come back into balance.
I have many, many other examples of how this has helped, specifically to help people get back into balance, and that is why I'm doing this interview, because my goal when I started this podcast. I started it eight years ago with the intention that I would reach those who are sick of suffering, who cry themselves to sleep because the doctor that they see have given up on them, or have just have one drug after another or have side effect after side effect and they're sick of being sick and they're tired of being tired and they want to help their body heal and come back into optimal health, but they don't know how, and that's why I started this podcast to find the answers for you. I don't believe there's like a magic bullet out there. I don't believe there's a magic pill.
I think that health is multifaceted. I believe we can't out-exercise a bad diet. you can't, you can't. There's no shortcuts and there are tools that we don't even know about, that you don't even know about, that you're about to learn about today. There are tools out there that will supercharge our healing as we work on supporting our body's ability to heal itself. So that's why I'm really excited for you to hear this today. It's kind of crazy. You've got to open up your mind. So I was resistant at first and I talk about this in the interview I did just over a year ago about the phototherapy patches, I was skeptical then I went, wait a second I got to be a bit more open-minded and so I tried it and I had an immediate, immediate result, and I thought this is too cool.
This is too cool, so I'm very excited to introduce you today to the creator, the inventor, of LifeWave, and I hope you enjoy today's interview and please share it with your friends and family. I'd love to hear from you also, after this interview, come join us in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. I'd love to hear what you thought about it, your questions, what you learned from it. I'm all for starting a discussion about this and, if you are super skeptical, I invite you to have conversations about it. I appreciate skepticism because I think we need to, especially in this day and age where we're being told what's safe and effective is now no longer safe and effective, that we shouldn't just blindly trust anyone.
So definitely come in with your skepticism, but also remember to bring your open mind, and I love that this company does have a money-back guarantee. They stand behind their product, because it is kind of out there when you think about it, but when you look into the results they get and the science behind it, it's phenomenal. So enjoy today's interview and remember, go to learntruehealth.com and click in the menu Work with Ashley James. Sign up for a free phototherapy discovery session with me, because I'd love to help you try these and just see what happens.
Ashley James (0:11:15.701)
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 517. I am beyond excited to have David Schmidt on our interview today. I'm a fangirl, so I'm kind of blushing a bit here just having you on the show.
My husband and I are big, big fans of you and of the technology that you've created. I've, pretty much for the last almost year and a half, have talked about you to someone every single day. Our eight-year-old son, actually, he gravitated towards this technology before I was super interested. I was kind of like at first, when we first heard about it, I was like, hmm, this sounds a little like it's so new, it's such a new concept. I know it's not new technology it's been around for over 20 years but it was new to me and new to a lot of people that I introduced it to, and my son, who's like a science geek. He immediately understood it. He understood the technology before I did.
We watched some webinars, watched some of your science webinars, and he was like I want this now. I want to put it on me and every week. At least once a week he'll say can you put this patch on me, can I get this patch? And last night he was asking me for a patch. And it's so cute that an eight-year-old totally gets it.
And he's had several amazing experiences with your phototherapy technology where he had a really bad sore stomach. He was really nauseous. We put some patches on his tummy and it immediately relieved the nausea and he wouldn't let me take him off him. He's like no, this is making me feel better, don't take him off. He's not generally like a sick child, but he has allergies and it leads to asthma. And we're really good about diet, like we're really clean and eating and we were really health focused. Obviously I'm like a big health nut doing this podcast. After he started using the patches a few times a week, after a few months I noticed that he wasn't using his inhaler. He didn't need it, he wasn't having asthma and his allergies were going away and we've seen a significant reduction in his allergies and that coincides right when the time he started using the phototherapy technology. So just really interesting on that end. We've used it in acute situations in our family, like first aid situations where it immediately stops the pain, immediately stops the swelling. My husband, by the way, says thank you. My husband, Duffy, says thank you so much. I was on the phone with him earlier. He goes tell David I say thank you.
His favorite phototherapy patches, alavita. He wears it nightly on his forehead. It gives him such great sleep, such deep sleep, and gives him dreams. And I've talked about this on the show before, he was for 50 years had no dreams. He couldn't remember his dreams. They weren't colorful, he didn't have anything. And then there was one time we took a medicinal mushroom not psychedelic, like a medicinal over-the-counter mushroom tincture and he had colorful dreams. He's like, oh my gosh, it's never happened to me before. But since he's been using the patch on his forehead at night, it gives him such deep sleep and he wakes up remembering these amazingly vivid dreams and he just loves it. What the patches gave to me is I got the energy that I had as a child back. I feel like I'm seven again in terms of my level of endurance and energy throughout the day. So I never thought I'd get that back and I'm so grateful. So thank you, David, for everything that you've created in the last 20 plus years and what you continue to do, and I'm a huge fan and I can't wait for the listeners to dive in and learn more about your technology. So welcome to the show.
David Schmidt (0:15:05.846)
Oh, Ashley, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for that background information. I will warn you that it sounds like you have an inventor on your hands. So because there's some similarities there, I think from my past, from when I was eight years old. So I would encourage you to encourage him to explore that side of inventing or engineering. So that could be very, very interesting for you and your husband.
Ashley James (0:15:37.718)
You have no idea how happy my son, I bet as he's listening right now, he's got a smile from ear to ear, in the future when he's listening, because he identifies as an inventor. And he wants to be a physicist, he's into quantum mechanics, he wants to be a pilot, he just wants to do so many things, but he loves science. And the way his brain works, it just surprises me. So thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it.
David Schmidt (0:16:06.136)
Well, you never know where life is going to take you. When I was about eight or nine years old, I knew I wanted to be an inventor, but I didn't know how that was really going to manifest. And fortunately, I've been very blessed with divine guidance leading a life of prayer. And from my perspective, God has played the top role in my life, guiding me and directing me to lead me to where I am today.
On these journeys of faith, you end up in places that you don't expect to be, but it's incredibly rewarding. And so part of what goes with the path of being an inventor is allowing yourself to be subject to the will of God, to put the will of God first, and then act in a way that's going to benefit the greater good. So if you have those ideals in mind, you'll end up in places in life that you would least expect, and you find that the journey is exciting and unbelievably rewarding, and that's really been my experience.
Ashley James (0:17:27.824)
I love that you started the conversation this way. When you dive into what David's created, you see that you are David, this amazing inventor and scientist. And to have someone who has such a strong science background and has invented this amazing technology say that first and foremost, you make sure that you're in alignment with what you feel God's vision is for your inspiration and for the way you touch people's lives. And if you follow that level of ethics, we make sure that we do no harm. We make sure that we are leaving a positive impact globally. And if everyone align their hearts and their actions with God's will, what an amazing world this would be. So thank you for starting the conversation off like that.
I have a bunch of really cool questions from my clients and from my fellow teammates that are also practitioners that I've introduced to you and to this technology. And I'm going to save that for the second hour. The first hour, I really want to get into understanding what is this thing we're talking about? Because I'm sure a lot of listeners who don't know are like, what's this? Tell me finally, what is this thing?
What I want to do is reference Episode 496. That's when I had Trina Hammack on the show, actually a year ago. I had been using the patches from about November to February personally and having amazing results. And then I had Trina on last February and shared some of my results. And since last February, so it's been a year, outstanding results. I have over 160 clients having like life-changing, remarkable experiences, pain gone, bones healed themselves twice as fast, people's tremors going away, migraines going away, symptoms of a brain tumor going away, just like hot flashes immediately, instantaneously going away, insomnia going away. Anxiety, depression, just on an emotional level we see a shift, on physical levels we see a shift. It's been remarkable, the stories.
I had one woman she had tons of mystery symptoms and all of them, all of them went away. And she was just like reeling, like she couldn't believe it. She'd been from so many different doctors and they all didn't know what was wrong with her. And after she started working with me using this technology, everything went back to what it was supposed to. So we've just had so many remarkable experiences.
So listeners can go back and listen to 496. And then if listeners want to jump in and purchase them, I want you guys to reach out to me because I work as a practitioner with these and I want to make sure that I help you purchase them and use them correctly. So you can go to learntruehealth.com and click Work with Ashley James and book that free session with me so we can talk together.
And then if you want to just jump in and check them out, go to lifewave.com/learntruehealth. That's lifewave.com/learntruehealth. So David, take us back just over 20 years ago where it all began, where creating this phototherapy wearable technology all began.
David Schmidt (0:20:48.596)
Actually, if it's okay with you, let's go back maybe 40 years. So I just turned 60, so this would be when I'm in my 20s. And I've been to college and gone for a degree in computer science and management information systems. I took a year to go out and work and I worked for a company designing medical devices.
And then I went back to school to get a degree in biology. And at that time I became friendly with the chairman of the biology department, wonderful man by the name of Bill Ventura, and he was a pharmacologist, so he and I would butt heads a little bit on things, but it was okay because he was very kind to me, and I had approached him, and said, I have some ideas on a novel method of treating cancer and I need a laboratory. So, is there a way that I could do this with the university? So he said, well, as it turns out, I'm not going to be using my lab for the coming year. So if you want to use it, that's fine, but it's going to be up to you to raise the money and the resources that you're going to need for this research.
So, I went ahead and I got a grant from a company in New Jersey. This was in New York. I went to Pace University in Westchester. And then I got a relationship with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and they were donating animals, these was mice that had two different types of neuroblastomas. They were an immunogenic and non-immunogenic neuroblastoma. One was called a TBJ and the other a C1300. And the difference between the two was that the C1300 would promote a response from the immune system where the TBJ would not. And the method that I was working at that time was to see if we could electromagnetically manipulate selectively the membrane potential of the cancer cells without harming the healthy cells.
And number one, it was electromagnetic energy and devices that I was working with and I was building these up from scratch. But it's important because the life wave technology works of course with light and that's a form of electromagnetism. But this was a very low frequency electromagnetic wave.
In any case, after two years of research, what I found was that it was possible to depolarize selectively the membranes of cancer cells and do that selectively in the sense that you could kill the cancer cells without harming healthy tissue and there were no types of toxic side effects.
This is important because many years later in the 90s, this was about 1986, 1987. So later on in the 90s, when I was doing work for government contractors and this opportunity came up to improve the survivability of the crew of submarines, I wanted to go back to this idea that we could do this with energy, that we could improve people's energy instead of having to use a stimulants like caffeine or amphetamines, that we could do this in some way naturally and communicate with the cells and do it that way. So that background is probably important because if it wasn't for that experience, it wouldn't have led me down the road that I eventually ended up in.
Ashley James (0:25:08.644)
I've listened to so many of your lectures, but what you just shared made so much sense and got me so excited. We're kind of on the edge of our seat because we just heard you depolarize the cell walls of cancer cells. And what kind of potential that has, right, for the future of natural medicine to naturally stimulate our body's own ability to heal itself. So at that point, you were working on developing a natural technology to help increase energy. I know what happened, because I've listened to so much of you, but the listener doesn't. So please continue with your story.
David Schmidt (0:25:49.786)
Sure. So I was developing power generation technology for the US Navy through government contractors, principally General Dynamics Electric Boat and Newport New Shipbuilding, although there were some other big companies that I was going and visiting and speaking to about some of this tech that I had invented. And I had been at a meeting and I was being told that the power generation equipment that I was proposing they couldn't use on a sub in an emergency situation because it would pull all of the oxygen out of the sub. So I said, well, what are you doing for oxygen during an emergency? And they started to tell me about chlorate candles.
Now, chlorate candles have been around for about 150 years. And it literally is a candle that you burn that causes a chemical reaction that releases oxygen into the air. It's about 60% efficient and it's very dangerous and it's also very, very messy. So on a nuclear sub, they have to put these chlorate candles into an oven, as they call it. They burn them at high temperature and then it releases oxygen.
So I happened to make the comment that I couldn't believe on a billion dollar sub they were burning candles for oxygen. And so one of the fellows, the head of emergency systems said to me, well, if you can think of a better way to do it, then go ahead. So I took that as challenge accepted.
And three weeks later, I called him and I said, okay, I've invented a better way to do it. I'd like to come up and make a presentation. And they thought, oh, there is just no way this guy invented something in three weeks. So we're going to embarrass him. So they told me that I had to give them a presentation in front of about two or three people and it turned out to be 30 people.
And we went down to their microanalytical lab. They had a mass spectrometer. And they put my device into the mass spec. And the chlorate candles, as I mentioned, are 60% efficient. And my device was over 99% efficient. And so that got their attention.
So one of the fellows that was at the meeting was running black projects. And he contacted me two weeks later. And he said, I was really impressed what you came up with and how you handled yourself. And I'd like to invite you to be part of a program we have. It's a mini-sub. And the mini-sub is going to attach to a nuclear sub. And it's going to be manned by navy seals and they're going to go on these very long missions that would be 30 hours, 60 hours at a time, and I want you to take a look at the project and see if you can make a contribution to it. So I took a look and the first thing that came to mind was I didn't know how these guys were going to stay awake for 60 hours. And I've always been a supporter of natural health, so the very first thought was, let's see if we can find a way to improve the energy and stamina of the crew without having to use drugs. So that's when LifeWave really started.
Ashley James (0:29:40.006)
I love it. So you took that concept and obviously it worked 20 plus years later. But tell us a bit of what happened. How did it go from the private sector to the public sector?
David Schmidt (0:29:55.482)
Yes, so that's a great question. So I had developed the patches and then 9-11 hit. So it was all during that window. And at that time, of course, what the government was interested in was developing weapons. So it was like a wall went up. The people that you would normally communicate with, you couldn't get in touch with.
And I had a family to support and contracts that we had were put on hold. And so there was really no telling at that time when things were going to change. So I decided that I was going to try to take the technology public. Since I had developed it, I wasn't under any burden to keep it a secret.
And so in July of 2002, I set up LifeWave. And with the idea that I was going to see how can we do clinical studies? How can we set up manufacturing? How are we going to market this technology? And it was really like entering a whole new world for me since I had been used to doing business with nuclear engineers and very bright mechanical engineers.
So it was entering an entirely new world, but if it hadn't been for 9-11, this technology would have stayed secret and it would have stayed with the military.
Ashley James (0:31:30.852)
How interesting is that, the timing to be just that perfect. I mean, obviously we didn't want 9-11 to happen, but it's always nice to hear something good come from something bad. So I'm so happy you didn't just scrap this and move on, that you had the courage and you had the cojones to say that you were going to start a company, because that, I mean, that does take a lot of faith and a lot of faith in yourself and a lot of faith in God and a lot of just a lot of faith in general. Not everyone is cut out to start a company, but look at you, LifeWave is global. It's helping so many people. And it's so neat to see how far it's come in such a short time. I mean, 20 years is like a blink of an eye. I remember 2002. That's a blink of an eye.
What's cool is when we watch sports, we see major athletes wearing your technology. And that was the first patch you created, which tell us just a little bit about that, because I want to talk about the studies, but that very first phototherapy patch that you created has worked so well for athletes. And that was designed, first of all, for the navy seals, but why not for the average person?
David Schmidt (0:32:57.424)
So, yes back in 2002, 2004 in that window. It was very self-evident that there were going to be people that were interested in improving energy and improving fat burning in a natural non-drug non-chemical way. Really the question was how to go to market with these, how to support them with clinical studies and, how to set up the manufacturing so those early days were incredible because the first thing is I just got out on the street and went to visit medical doctors, acupuncturists, chiropractors, personal trainers, athletes, coaches, and just had them start using the product. I gave away many, many free samples so I could find out, okay, how is this really going to work in real life?
And then in around 2003, I had the opportunity to meet Coach Richard Quick. And Richard was a six-time United States Olympic swim coach and he had countless number of awards. I think it was over 12 NCAA championships and highly respected in the sport. And so I had reached him through a medical doctor and he had said, okay, I'd like to give this technology a try as long as you can convince me that it's safe and it's not going to cause any type of harm to my athletes.
So I sent him out the energy patches and he applied them to his Stanford women swim team. And we spoke three weeks later. And what he had said was that he tried the patches on eight of his swimmers. And during those three weeks, six out of the eight swimmers had broke their personal lifetime best in their event.
And one of the swimmers, Tara Kirk, had broken the world record in the 50 meter breaststroke. So Richard was absolutely convinced that this was working and that began a long friendship and we would work together for many, many years. And that also really played a very, very important role in the beginning of LifeWave because it was having those Stanford women swimmers use the patches and get national attention that led to many, many other athletes hearing about LifeWave and using them.
Ashley James (0:35:42.577)
I love it. It's so exciting. When I first started using your phototherapy technology, I had been going to the gym on a regular basis. I was going to Orange Theory at the time because I liked their structured classes. And when it came to doing the rowing, I could only aerobically row, where your heart rate is in that, that orange, like 150 beats a minute kind of thing for five minutes before I was like needed to take a break. And I could not go more than five minutes. Just every time I went to class, I was going three times a week, couldn't row more than five minutes straight before I needed to take a break.
And then, we had this day where it was like a challenge day. And just so happened to be the first day I walk in there wearing two pairs of energy enhancers, and, as well as a few of your other patches that I adore. I did twenty-three minutes straight. I'm not like an athlete, I'm a health nut, but you wouldn't look at me and go, oh yes, she's an athlete. Inside I’m a pitbull, inside I'm an athlete, but in my heart, I do not look like an athlete at all. And to go from five minutes to twenty-three minutes, I was without a doubt, you can't call this placebo.
And I have some fun stories about how I definitely know there's no placebo effect here. But that was like, I could not muster the will to go more than five minutes without the patches and then boom, I had this huge improvement. And I also noticed my recovery is faster during and after workouts. We switched gyms because my husband wanted to come with me. I like weightlifting more. I'm more into like, just exerting myself in that way. And we noticed that when we wear the patches, we can lift more, it's like almost like it's helping with lactic acid. Like we don't hit that fatigue. We can go longer before we get fatigue. And then we noticed that we're less sore, that we recover faster. Just everything. I love that there's that significant shift. And like I said to you before we hit record, I'm pinching myself still. I kind of the first few months of wearing the patches, I'm like, is this real? Is this real? There's a skeptic in the back of my mind. And I tell my listeners, I'm the biggest open-minded skeptic, but there's this little voice in my head going like, you're putting a sticker on yourself and then you are feeling better. Like what's going on?
Now, we're wearing this technology. It's not transdermal, like we're not absorbing something from it, like a vitamin patch or like a nicotine patch. It's not like that. That was my first thought when I first saw this. I’m like, are you telling me I'm like absorbing energy from it? Not in the sense that you're placing a nutrient inside it for us to absorb, but I'd love for you to explain since we've talked about the benefits and about the impact on athletes. How does wearing this phototherapy patch work?
David Schmidt (0:39:02.536)
Yes, before we get into some of the other signs behind this and the clinical studies that we've done, we should talk about method of action because the product, when you get right down to it, basically what it does is it's stimulating the skin with light and this is inducing very favorable biochemical changes within the body.
So to preface this, we would need to understand, why would that have an effect anyway? It's pretty self-evident that when we go out in the sun, our bodies are going to experience biochemical changes in the presence of light. Everybody knows you go out in the sun and you can get a suntan. So that's an example of UV light changing the melanin content in the skin.
And interestingly, melanin, most people don't think about it this way, they just want to look good from a suntan. melanin is an antioxidant. So actually what happens in the skin is the UV light is going to being, very high energy, electromagnetic energy, is going to reduce the vitamin C and glutathione content in the skin. And in response, to protect itself, the human body releases melanin as an antioxidant to shield the skin from further damage. So that's how we actually end up with a suntan. It's a defensive mechanism to protect us. But it's a very elegant way that everyone can relate to that there is an interaction between light and the human body.
One thing many men don't know, and this will explain some teenage and young adult behavior during the summer, is that when men take off their shirts and they go to the beach and they get sunlight on the androgen receptors in their shoulders, it elevates testosterone levels. Yes, and dangerous around young horny teenage men, and men in their 20s because their testosterone levels are already high enough as it is, but that's an effect. In the absence of light, our bodies are going to elevate melatonin. So this is why it's very important for people to sleep in a room in the absence of light, so they can optimize their melatonin levels. And so when we look at how we were created, there is this incredible interface between the physical world and the spiritual world.
And that intersection occurs right at the cell nucleus and right at the very center of the DNA. So when we look at how the DNA is structured, it's held together by hydrogen bonds. So there is on one strand of DNA, you have you have hydrogen atoms and on the other strand you have hydrogen atoms and when the DNA, when these strands come together the hydrogen atoms counter-rotate and this holds the DNA together.
Well what's not very well known is that this is a very special structure because coherent light comes out of the vacuum and enters into the cells, and the light is coherent in the sense that it is just the same as laser light. And so you have these highly coherent pulses of light that initiate thousands of different biochemical reactions in the cell. This is called signal induction and signal transduction, communications inside and outside the cell.
So it's really the spiritual domain that is responsible for initiating the release of light into our cells that guides the chemical reactions within the cell, which ultimately leads to the expression of our health. And this is one of many reasons why spiritual healing is the most powerful healing of all, then emotional healing and then physical healing. So the reason why LifeWave works so well and so quickly is that we're tapping into this very basic mechanism of how the cells communicate within them and in their environment, and we're doing it with light because that's how we were created, to communicate with light.
Ashley James (0:44:06.719)
So, to say that simply, although we cannot see it because we cannot see the full spectrum of light, we can only see a narrow band, right? There's a lot of light we can't see on either side of that spectrum. Our body, our cells are emitting light, our body is emitting light, and your wearable technology refracts that light back to us? Or you're just talking about the method of action first? You're talking about how the body is emitting light, and then we're going to get into how your technology uses that light. But isn't it cool just to sit and contemplate for a moment that if we could see the full spectrum of light, we would just be light beings walking around. It would almost be like seeing angels, just like, we're just like emanating light. Isn't that neat? We wouldn't see race, we wouldn't see where someone's socioeconomic status, we would just be walking around like these beautiful beings of light.
This hit me a few days ago. I was just driving to park at Trader Joe's and I just was struck. I saw a bunch of people walking in their cars, walking in Trader Joe's, like walking their dogs and I felt like God said something to me. I love everyone. Look through my eyes. And I just started crying. Because I'm like if we could just for one moment look at complete strangers, look at people who are Democrats, look at people who are Republicans, look at people who are Russians and Ukrainians, just like anyone, anyone from anywhere, and look at them through the eyes of like this pure love as if you were their parent, as if you love them like they're your own children, and that's the vision God has. And what was rushing through my brain was all this scripture of the gospel. How interesting and how cool is that?
We've been taught for thousands of years to like love each other, especially your enemies, but just see them through that lens of love. And if we could just for a moment, see the light that's emitted from each person. And in Indian faith, they say, Namaste, which I think has been told to me that it means, I see the light that's in you that's also within me. And so just that idea that we are all emitting light, we're all beings of light. We can't see it, but we can measure it with different machines, which I'm sure you've done.
David Schmidt (0:46:29.639)
Yes, and that's really beautiful the way that you've expressed that. I think the other thing that I would say is, especially with everything that's going on in the world, to be talking about loving others in a true sense, even those people we may not necessarily like, it's great for society and it's really great for ourselves.
What studies have shown is that when people live in a state of anger, no surprise that this causes very harmful effects for the adrenal glands for the entire endocrine system, and it leads to acute then chronic elevated levels of oxidative and inflammatory stress.
So in other words, people that choose to live in a state of anger or a state of confrontation, will see their health diminish more rapidly and they will suffer the consequences of aging more rapidly. And this may actually in turn out to be an interesting mechanism that nature has from the perspective of natural selection. In other words, people that choose to live in a state of anger will not be around very long.
Disease will end up catching up with them. Whereas when people live in a state of love, it's the exact opposite. So you're a mom and when you gave birth, you had a massive release of oxytocin and this allows a mother and child to bond with one another. That's one of the things that this does. But if we have a lifestyle of loving others, the data is extraordinary, because what it shows is that whether or not we're 60, 70, 80 years old, the oxytocin will regenerate muscle fibers and the muscle fibers now resemble someone in their 20s or 30s.
So this is showing number one, we should be living in a state of love. And number two, something that I think we'll talk about later, which is our primary area of research, is that there are real biological ways to both stop and reverse human aging. And all we have to do is look at God's creation to see examples and then convert those examples to technology that human beings can implement. But your message from my perspective, spot on.
Ashley James (0:49:30.056)
I had mentioned earlier that I have examples of this is not a placebo effect because my clients and I have put your wearable technology on crying infants that are teething. Within four minutes they're sleeping. They stop crying within a minute and they fall asleep because they're out of pain. And there's thermography. I know several people who've done thermography that showed within minutes of wearing them that you could see significantly lower levels of inflammation in the body, which is just so cool. It's so cool that you could wear something, just put this little patch on and boom, it's utilizing your own healing mechanism.
I have a client, a dear friend of mine who's a client for 12 years. She is bedridden. The doctors thought she would die years ago, but she's a fighter and also believes in holistic medicine and her service dog could not jump up onto the bed anymore because he would help her adjust her pillows because she's been bedridden. And he had like a hip dysplasia, lots of pain. He wouldn't bite you, but he'd growl if you tried to touch his rear end. And we put a patch on his hips and two minutes later you could touch his leg. He stopped growling and because he wore it every day, during the day, within two weeks, he could jump back up on the bed. And that has been several months. He has been fully recovered. All his caretakers, because they have volunteers that walk him, say he's like a new dog.
But this is just two of dozens of stories I have where with animals, I have a client with horses. The horses, like immediately there was a shift in them and they were out of pain. I have another client who had a dog who he spent $7,000 on this puppy. The vet said, it's just failure to thrive. This puppy's going to die. I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do. 7,000 with the vet bill. And we put the patches on him, and less than three days later, he was fully recovered. But we just have so many wonderful stories where we see it. If it works on children and it works on animals, that's a really strong indication that it's not a placebo effect because this animal doesn't know, or this baby doesn't know, all of a sudden have no pain and go to sleep from wearing it. So it's just so cool. And what I love is that your technology helps in the short term with that pain and inflammation, but then it stimulates the body's ability to heal itself in the long term. So we're seeing this reversal of so many issues.
Before we jump into that topic of stopping and reversing human aging, can you tell us what happens when you apply a patch? Now that we know our body emits light, what happens when we wear your technology?
David Schmidt (0:52:29.298)
Yes, fantastic question. So we've kind of taken a long way to get there, but it was a lot of important background information. So you take a patch and you apply it to the skin and the patch is activated by body heat. And that was a very important criteria when I was designing these, because active electronic devices like lamps and cold lasers, they require a power source. They're big and bulky. They're not convenient. And this had to be something much, much simpler.
So the patches use the human body as a power source, and they're activated by body heat. The patches are completely sealed, and they contain only natural materials, stereoisomers of amino acids and sugars are two of the principal ingredients. Once they're activated by body heat, the patches will start to reflect a blend of different wavelengths of light that stimulate the skin. And this induces an effect called photobiomodulation. And that simply means that what we're doing is causing a very favorable change in the biochemistry of the cell.
So, if we used X39 as an example, you apply the patch, it stimulates the skin with light, and then that light will increase the energy production in the cell. That'll be kind of the first step. And if you wanted to get into the details about that, we could. The next thing that happens is you get some very favorable changes in gene expression. And in our blood and urine studies, what we found is that there is an increase in the production of something called GHKCU, which is a copper peptide. It's very, very powerful at helping the cells behave like younger cells. In our urine studies, we see upregulation of different amino acids that are associated with muscle protein synthesis and sleep.
So, in your example, and you're saying you go to the gym and you work out and you notice you recover more quickly, that's exactly what's happening. The metabolism of the cell has improved. So you can build muscle, strengthen stamina much more quickly with this technology and do it naturally and do it without any type of drugs.
Ashley James (0:55:14.219)
And I've experienced that firsthand. So I can tell you, it's pretty amazing. I'm actually wearing my two favorite patches right now, which is Aeon and X39. I know because of the FDA's new regulations around talking about stem cells, we're not really allowed to talk about it, but can you talk about the studies around it? I don't want to ask you to say something you're not allowed to say, but there's so much proven science here.
David Schmidt (0:55:41.555)
Yes, I mean, what I would do is talk about the years of research that we did in stem cells. I mean, that's completely fair game. So what happened with this was we had gone through two different evolutions in the company, two different generations. The first one was the release of the energy patches, and what soon followed about a year later, were the release of Ice Wave and Silent Nights. So I think we would be properly described as a lifestyle company.
Products that can improve energy, relieve pain, improve the quality of sleep, and that was all fine. We did great during our first few years. But very quickly after that, starting in about 2006, I started to develop products that could produce anti-aging effects. And since I've been in my teens, I have been very, very interested in finding ways to slow or reverse human aging. And this led to the development of the glutathione patch, the carnosine patch, and then the Aeon patch.
So that trio, which was released between 2006 and 2011 helped to reshape who we were as a company and the way that our products were used and also it started to create a very, very interesting path for us because I started thinking about, okay, if we can get these very dramatic anti-aging effects from these products, what's next? And where would we want to be in 10 years?
So it was at that point in the late 2000s that I started thinking about stem cells. And back then, it was evident to me that stem cells were going to be the future. Of course, we see it very, very clearly today. But back then, I already wanted to start investing money into stem cell technology and see if we could do it in a way that would be different than the way everybody else was doing it. So during that time, what people of course were doing were looking at umbilical cord stem cells, stem cells that you would harvest from body fat from bone marrow, and this was all about injecting cells into the body. And that is completely fine.
And no question that let's say over the next 10, 20 years, people will be able to go to a hospital, get an injection of stem cells, and it's going to save people's lives. But I wanted to approach this subject in a very, very different way. Instead of injecting stem cells in the body, which potentially have very harmful side effects.
What if we could get the stem cells that are already in our body and get them to behave like younger, healthier cells? So this would have huge advantages. It would be safe. It would be very, very inexpensive. And the hope was that we could create something that would be at least as effective as getting an injection of stem cells.
So that was kind of the idea behind this. And I generated well over 70 patents, 80 patents now over a course of 10 years. And these patents had to do not only with light therapy but with pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. We did this work at the National University of Ireland. This is on the West Coast of Ireland and we worked at the Regenerative Medicine Institute. We were
incredibly blessed to work with Dr. Tim O'Brien, who's one of the leading stem cell scientists in the world. And we got to do a number of studies showing that you could in fact using energy duplicate the results of a stem cell injection. So we did a study where mesenchymal stem cells or MSCs were applied to an injury site. And then we used a device that was creating this proprietary electromagnetic field.
And we found that number one, the energetic treatments were equivalent to a stem cell injection, and you could speed up healing 25, 30% over baseline. So those initial experiments that we did at the university were incredibly rewarding because it did show, in fact, that there was a way that you could have energy medicine devices that could heal and support the healing process of the body, and it be equivalent to stem cell injections.
Ashley James (1:01:10.449)
And that then you took that information into creating now you have two patches. But are we allowed to talk about that? Are we allowed to say that these patches are known to stimulate our own body's own stem cell production?
David Schmidt (1:01:28.098)
Well, unfortunately, at the end of last year, the FDA, they changed their position on this. We're regulated as a general wellness device. And so as a result, we can talk about the athletic benefits of the product, how it improves recovery, strength, stamina, how it supports sleep, how it will improve the flow of energy in the body. We can talk about these kind of things.
But what we've done since then is we've developed nutritional supplements and these nutritional supplements, we have information on our website about this, we'll co-market them with the patches. And with the nutritional supplements, they're designed to support the health and vitality of the stem cells in the body.
Ashley James (1:02:21.563)
See, this makes total sense and I'm so glad that you developed these supplements. I've looked at the ingredients and this isn't something that is going to replace all the supplements that someone takes because someone's like, oh, well, I'm already taking really good supplements so I don't need to take this, no, no, no, the LifeWave supplements that are coming out, you're going to want to try. I've looked into them. A few years ago, I had a doctor come on my show who's a stem cell doctor. That's all he does. He injects stem cells into the knees and hips all day long.
And I said to him, okay, so stem cells, not a lot of people know what stem cells are. They're like these blank slate cells, they're just a nondescript cell. And when it comes into that area, let's say the hip cartilage, it's going to help become healthy new hip cartilage. It will become what is needed in that area. And I said to him, if someone has degenerative arthritis because it's a nutrient deficiency, right? Unless this person's like some ultra marathon runner and has put too much load or too much stress onto their body because we're always under stress and to some degree, right, we're walking around and we're always trying to consume more nutrition to rebuild our body, right? We're breaking down and building up. And so people who have arthritis, what they don't know because your medical doctor's not properly trained in this, they're trained in prescribing drugs, they're not trained in teaching us how to help our body heal itself, that it's a degenerative disease because we were breaking down more than we were building up because we did not have the nutrients to build ourselves up. And so that's why there can be a 90-year-old with no arthritis standing beside a 40-year-old with arthritis, and it really is a nutrient problem.
LifeWave phototherapy patches is something I tell all my clients. This isn't a replacement for nutrition because it doesn't add nutrients. It's not molecular medicine. It's energetic. It's a frequency which has an effect because of photobiomodulation on the physical changes in the body and in the cell. So we do see physical effects, but it's not adding more glutathione to your body. It's asking your body to make produce more glutathione.
So we still need to give the body the raw building blocks. Like it'd be like asking a carpenter to build a house, but sorry, I'm not giving you any bricks, right? So what's this carpenter going to do? Like the body wants to rebuild every day, but if we don't give it the bricks, it's not going to be able to. So the fact that you've created very specific supplements that's going to be easy to take, that wil nutrify the body and give the body those raw building blocks specifically for supporting your stem cells, which then we can help to stop and reverse human aging is super exciting.
And then on top of that, use that frequency technology, that wearable technology to stimulate those outcomes further. So I can't tell you how excited I am to try the supplements. Coming from someone who's a big believer in holistic medicine and supplements, really high quality supplements changed my life, helped save my life, that and of course eating a clean diet. So I know the feeling of being fully nutrified and I know the feeling of being super depleted. And most people are walking around depleted and then self-medicating with alcohol, sugar, caffeine, because they're exhausted because they're so depleted. So I love that you're supporting us in this aspect as well.
David Schmidt (1:05:57.360)
Yes, when I was developing these supplements and I've been studying supplements for over 40 years. You mentioned your son before having allergies. That's actually how I got into nutrition. When I was about 13, I was going to a summer camp and being outside all day, I would inhale pollen and I had these terrible allergies and I had to be on medication, and I thought there has to be a natural way to deal with this instead of having these drugs and feeling tired and sleepy all the time. And that's what started me on my journey.
And then for many, many years I worked with a medical doctor, his name was Steve Halthiwanger, who's a medical doctor and clinical nutritionist. And he and I would have very, very lengthy conversations on using nutrients therapeutically to treat different types of health conditions. So it was quite an education over more than 40 years.
So when I was developing these supplements, I was looking at our line of patch products and thinking, okay, if someone wanted to use any one of our daytime products or our nighttime products, what nutrients would they need to really optimize the results and get the best results?
So the idea behind this is that you could take the daytime formula and regardless of which one of the patches you want it to use or if you wanted to use multiple patches at the same time that this one supplement was going to have all of the essential nutrients that you needed to get the best results out of the product.
So really good example is that many people decide they want to be a vegan or a vegetarian for various reasons and they are not going to get enough beta-alanine or creatine or glycine or cysteine in their diet. These are going to be nutrients which are principally associated with red meat or other meat products. So, this would be an issue because if someone wasn't getting enough cysteine, then they're not going to be able to make enough glutathione and that could compromise their immune system. And then that potentially opens them up to a number of different health disorders. So we would know, for example, that Parkinson's disease is always associated with a deficiency in glutathione.
And of course, we're not making any medical claims here. But the idea behind this is that, regardless of someone's diet, and of course we want people to have as healthy a diet as possible, they could take this supplement and it would give them the nutrients that they would need to get the best results with the patches. And of course, that is going to provide a very efficacious response, and they'll really notice this in their overall health.
Ashley James (1:09:11.805)
Now, these supplements haven't been released yet, but they're coming out soon. Do you have any studies to share about the supplements that you're coming out with?
David Schmidt (1:09:21.508)
Yes, those are things that we have in development. We wanted to let people know at the beginning of the year that this was something that was coming and it was a direction that we were going in. And so we of course, we formulated these, we have samples, we've gotten them into the stage where they're the finished product. And yes, we're putting them through all the tests that we normally would. I mean, basically what we'll do is we have a few researchers where we do our blood tests, our urine tests, and then other measures of, let's say, athletic performance. We'll look at measures of strength, stamina, grip strength, flexibility. So those are the type of tests that we would normally do.
Ashley James (1:10:05.666)
How many studies have there been in the last 20 years that have been published on LifeWave’s technology? Last I heard it was close to 100 studies.
David Schmidt (1:10:17.796)
It’s over 80. I haven't taken a look recently, but it’s uncounted them, but they're way over 80 studies. Not all of them are published but many of them are. And those studies are on all of our products.
And then for each individual product, we use different methodologies. Some products will do the blood and urine testing, such as with X39. Other products we will do infrared testing, especially with IceWave and Aeon. And then we'll use a variety of different bioelectrical tests. So with IceWave, with Energy, we've used heart rate variability tests.
We've used electro-interstitial scanning to look at organ function with Aeon Glutathione Energy patches and Electro-accuscopes to look at knee pain before and after with IceWave. So we've used a very broad array different types of diagnostics to quantify the effects that people see with the patches.
Ashley James (1:11:35.214)
So the skeptic in me and in the listeners is like, well, you own the company, but you're also doing the studies, so how do you tell the truth? I've read the studies and I've seen that. I think I've even heard you talk about it, where the scientists involved in the labs sign a contract that says, I am not being paid to give some faulty information.
Everything that's provided here is real results. And even if the results were negative, these are the results. But I'd love for you to share from that standpoint, because I think it's important that companies do invest. And it's quite a lot of money to invest in studies. And I love that you do it. And I wish that all companies invested in studies about their products, but then also how do we keep it third party or how do we keep it authentic?
Because through the years I've heard, oh, the sugar industry or some kind of Snickers bar or Mars bar or whatever was behind the study that says that it's healthy to eat a spoonful of sugar a day. And you're like, oh, really? It's like funded by. It's healthy to drink chocolate milk, funded by Kellogg's. And you're like, oh, really? There's Nestle, Nesquik or something, of course you're saying that.
So, of course, a company would say, here's all the positive studies. But but you actually have genuine results. But can you talk a bit about that to clarify for those who are a little skeptical about companies that produce their own studies?
David Schmidt (1:13:11.114)
Yes, first, this is a fantastic question. So thank you so much for bringing this up because it's such an important subject. There's an interesting phenomena in this world, and that is in order for a company to go to market with a health product, you have to be able to demonstrate to a Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, that you have proof that your product does what you say.
So you have a product and then, there's two components to this. First, how are you going to be regulated by the FDA, and in our case we're General Wellness, and then how are you going to advertise your product? What are you going to tell people? And are the claims going to be legitimate or are they going to be false and misleading?
So the FTC has a requirement that you have to have, and this has changed over the years, but the current standard is that you have to have double-blind placebo-controlled study for a product that will support the product usage and the safety and the efficacy and the claims. Now, if you do pilot studies like we do, so in other words, we'll do a pilot study to make sure that the protocol that we have for a study works before we go to our double-blinds, the FTC will accept the pilot study as part of the overall evidence.
But they want to see these double-blind placebo-controlled studies. So the immediate dilemma that a company is in is that in order to take your product to market, you legally have to have these studies. So you have to pay a third-party lab to do it. So this is a very standard practice. So for example, let's say that you had Estee Lauder or L'Oreal or any cosmetic company, and they want to come out with a new type of eye cream, well, they have to hire a laboratory to do a study. So they'll, like Estee Lauder, they've used a company called BioScreen in the past. And they'll hire BioScreen, and they'll pay them to do the study. Now, BioScreen will, as an example of a clinical lab, will release a statement.
And they'll say, we are getting paid to do the study, but we do not receive any type of benefit from doing this. We're not shareholders in the company, we aren't distributors. So we have no type of financial interest in the business, therefore we can conduct this study as a third party and present the results.
And this is the standard practice in the industry, and it is very well accepted by the FTC. So no company can rely on, let's say, a university to do a study for them, because it's simply too expensive, and you'd never get things to market. I would also say the drug companies follow similar standards. In other words, they want to take a drug to market either they have to do the research or they have to pay a third-party lab to do it, but somebody is funding those studies.
So these are the standards that companies have to live by and it's up to the companies and the labs to ensure that there is nothing nefarious happening and the results that are being presented are true and accurate.
It's also up to the consumer to decide. So for example, in some studies, you could have a company make a claim about the study which is true, but it's not really representative of the actual results that people will experience which is really against the FTC. So as an example, we were told that the COVID vaccines, the mRNA vaccines were safe and effective. Well, Moderna released this past week that the mRNA vaccines have toxic side effects. So let's say that they did a study and one person out of a hundred didn't have a side effect.
They could say, well, if you use the product, you may not have any side effects. And that'd be a true statement because one out of 100 people didn't, but it wouldn't be representative statistically. So you'll see in our studies, which are located in the back office of our website, that you can see the statistics and it'll say, okay, 86% of the people got this benefit.
Ashley James (1:18:28.290)
Love it. For the comment you just made, if it was just a year ago, YouTube would have taken this interview down. I think we're in the clear now, but for a few years, anytime I interviewed someone about anything to do with the COVID vaccines or COVID in general, YouTube was censoring me, censoring my interviews with highly trained doctors. I had one doctor, Dr. Fleming, I think multiple PhD research scientist, just a top of his field. And YouTube takes it down saying, this is incorrect and you're spreading false information. I'm like, are you kidding me? So yes, it's interesting times we live in. And now we get to look back and see what these pharmaceutical companies are saying now about the products that they said are safe. And actually I did a whole interview with an expert in the pharmaceutical industry on how they skipped the safety trials necessary to prove it was safe and then fudged the numbers. Of course that interview was also banned from YouTube.
David Schmidt (1:19:49.244)
Oh, it's ludicrous. The study for the booster, you might recall, I believe they did it on like eight or 13 mice. So before they released the booster, they didn't even do a study on human beings. They did it on mice. And then they said, okay, this is going to be fine. And it's just complete nonsense. And now today we know that the pharma was less than truthful.
Ashley James (1:20:16.120)
Right. And then to say to parents, to shame them, like, you're killing grandmas by not giving your six year old this untested, but it's safe just take our word for it. And it's just really sad. It's very sad and wrong. And this is why we need to critically think for ourselves and just don't blindly trust anything. Don't blindly trust me. Don't blindly trust anyone. Just look into things deeper for yourself, and put politics aside, put self-judgment aside, put your belief system to the side, question your own belief system, I think is the healthiest thing to do.
And that's why I come into everything a bit skeptical but open-minded enough to take on new information and not let my bias sway my judgment. So that's why it took me a little bit longer to come to trying LifeWave because at first I was too skeptical and then I caught myself and like, wait a second, I'm not even following my own rules here.
The very first day I wore your patches was such a phenomenal experience. It was so powerful and it kind of feels divinely guided because, so I lost my daughter a few years ago and I was having PTSD and I'm normally a very cheerful, happy person, but it took me a while to recognize that I was suffering from PTSD and I'd have these PTSD attacks. And the day my patches arrived in the mail, I was in an attack.
And my husband got on the phone with Trina, who was a practitioner that I interviewed about the patches. And he said, okay, what patches do I put on her? What do we do? And he put patches on me the way she has now taught me to do with my clients. And we have such great success with this protocol. It felt like someone reached into my brain and turned the knob down from 11 to like two.
I felt instantly grounded back in the room. I could tolerate light, I could tolerate noise, I could tolerate my family being around me, whereas before I just wanted to be in a dark room. And my whole nervous system came back into balance very quickly. And I was just so stunned that I had this phenomenally positive emotional experience, but also feeling my physiology come out of a fight or flight response and come back into rest and digest in that moment. And I was like, I could not believe it.
Now, not everyone has this like giant life altering, earth shaking experience, the moment they put a patch on. But I've had other situations where like I have a client who's a type one diabetic and he has peripheral neuropathy, can't feel his feet and within minutes of wearing the same protocol actually that I was wearing, he started screaming like, my feet are hot, I can feel my feet, I can feel temperature in my feet. And he was just so excited. And we've had other experiences where within minutes, people start feeling sensations or feeling a shift. And sometimes it takes a while. Like I have a client, she patched for a whole month, swore she didn't feel anything, but then she went from being suicidal, depressed, not wanting to leave the house, to going out every day and loving life and making new friends. And just that huge shift in her sleep, in her energy, in her mood through that first month of patching, although she said she didn't feel anything wearing them, we started to see results in her life. So I just thought that was really neat.
So there's a lot of studies and we obviously don't have enough time to go over all 80 studies, although you have webinars that unpack many of these studies. Do you have a study that's like your favorite or do you have kind of like your top three that you would like to share?
David Schmidt (1:23:58.269)
Yes, so I think what I'd say is that when we do our studies on a new product, the first study that we do that validates that the product works is always going to be my favorite. And in this particular case, because it meant such an incredible thing to our business, that would be the first blood study that we did on X39.
So it had taken months to work with a laboratory in Southern California and San Diego to develop the protocols for the blood testing. So we originally started with a lab in Northern California and then another lab in Southern California. And we had went back to Dr. Lauren Picart, who was the individual that discovered copper peptide and asked him for the protocols that he was using and the standards for the blood testing. And that was very helpful, but it really didn't provide all the information that we needed. But fortunately, we worked with a very talented PhD in biochemistry. We eventually developed this protocol. We set up a pilot study, and we did in fact find that within the first 24 hours of applying the X39 patch to the body, that there was a statistically significant improvement in both GHK and GHK-CU. We then went on to do several other studies.
We did one that was published in Internal Medicine Research. And In this study, it was a double-blind placebo-controlled study with X39. We used 60 people over the age of 40. And again, we found out that just within the first 24 hours and then within the first week of using X39 that we saw statistically significant improvements in levels of GHK and GHK-CU. So those studies are probably by far my favorite, because it showed that we could use light to elevate this peptide, and this peptide gives us a path to human age reversal. In other words, GHK is going to be a very powerful way to regulate and reset genes in the body.
And if we can use light to elevate this peptide, then there should be a way that we can find that we can reset other genes to a more youthful state and slow down or even reverse human aging. So I've spent the last five, six years working on that now.
Ashley James (1:27:13.555)
I'm in a secret Facebook group with my team, very intimate group of about 56, 57,000 people. And it's so intimate. Actually, it's one of my favorite places to be online. It was created by this amazing woman, Joyce, in my team of practitioners that are working with LifeWave Full Therapy patches with their clients.
And there's thousands of practitioners in this group. There's well over 6,000 practitioners, and their clients, and patients, and friends and family. And in order to get into this group, you have to be a client, basically, or a customer of myself, or one of the other practitioners in this group. So anyone who's listening, if you haven't already purchased LifeWave from someone else, and you would like to get in this group, please contact me. Go to learntruehealth.com, and in the menu, select Work with Ashley James. Sign up for the free conversation about the phototherapy patches.
So in this group, we have many of us sharing our experiences and there's a lot of personal testimonials and before and after photos and there are countless, you can scroll for well over half an hour reading about the age reversal and in photos you can see it many men and women just as an example who had bald spots, who after using the X39 patch for about a year, no longer have bald spots. They've grown back hair, a full head of hair. And I was really impressed to see men with bald spots no longer have bald spots, but even the women who had really thinning hair now have a full head of hair. And then several women have taken pictures of their roots growing back in the normal colour they were born with, like the colour they had in their teenage years because their hairs turned grey or, they have some grey hairs and those grey hairs are going away. And I thought, how cool is that? That the literally age reversing. But we have other great testimonials about people no longer having arthritis pain and just tremendous pictures you can see before and afters of like wounds healing quickly, surgery scars healing super fast, even scars going away.
I have a scar from an auto accident on my forehead that is just disappearing and I've had it since I was like three. So it's interesting to see on the outside because the body does triage work. So the body does all this internal healing first and then it works on hair, skin and nails.
So when people start saying, wow, my nails are growing really thick and strong and my hair is coming in really thick and my skin looks younger and it's tighter, my skin's firmer and the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles is going away, like all this vein stuff. But for me, even though we're talking about vanity here, but when we look younger on the outside and we're also feeling younger, we know that there's stuff happening on the inside because the body does the triage work first on the inside, on the organs that matter.
David Schmidt (1:30:18.181)
That's absolutely correct. And the type of things that we look at in our research would be not for vanity, but they ended up having a number of beneficial effects on appearance. So for example, collagen is of course the most abundant protein in the body, and it forms what's called the cytoskeleton. And most people aren't familiar with this term, but it would simply be the structural protein that holds together the cell. And the fibroblasts are what produce collagen. And the issue is that as we age, and it starts at about age 25, I'm sorry to say, for humanity, is that our bodies start to slow down the production of collagen. So you could say we really start aging at age 25.
And an incredibly important mechanism that should not be overlooked is finding natural ways to turn on the fibroblasts, increase collagen production, and what this will do is volumize, increase the size of the cell. This will increase the electrical charge on the cell membrane, and this ultimately has an effect on gene expression.
So in some of this is going to be maybe a little bit mind blowing or maybe it won't be, but we have new technology that I invented now that's capable of doing this and reversing aging by about two to three years in only ten minutes. And we're able to use light in an entirely new way now to turn on systems in the cell that make this possible.
Ashley James (1:32:12.857)
So when does that technology get released?
David Schmidt (1:32:15.733)
Well, Ashley, it is our 20th anniversary, and I feel a responsibility to our wonderful brand partners that have been there all these years to support the health and growth of the business, to do something extraordinary. So I would say that a little bit later this year, we're going to be releasing this new technology and having a very nice celebration of.
Ashley James (1:32:47.739)
I am super excited. I did hear wind of this a few months ago when you started talking about it. And I am very excited. I just geek out on this. Like we're tapping into it. It's like we're pushing this invisible buttons in the body, like asking the body to express in a way that is healthier, younger, and it's just so cool. It's just super neat.
One of my favourite studies, and maybe if you, I mean, obviously so many of your own studies, but the, could you speak to the study they did when in South Africa with the glutathione patch on 40 autistic children?
David Schmidt (1:33:32.945)
Well, that was not a study that we sponsored. And we don't make claims about treating or curing any type of disease. What I will say is that over the years, we've had people, parents, use the glutathione patch on their kids and report to us that their autistic children are much more calm.
They notice a significant improve in their mood, in their mental clarity, and of course, an improvement, overall improvement in their health. And what I would recommend, I once had an opportunity to meet Jenny McCarthy, she had worked to help her special needs child. And what I'd recommend is that a parent work with a natural health practitioner and build up the child's health from the ground up.
So that means constructing a program of eating foods that are going to be healthy, non-GMO, trying to keep the chemicals out of the body, and then supplementing as needed and then using the technology like the patches. And it is remarkable, really remarkable, how many benefits an autistic child can get from taking a natural approach. They don't have to be the victims of being on pharmaceuticals their entire lives. They can make a meaningful turnaround and of course the sooner that a child starts the better.
Ashley James (1:35:26.081)
Absolutely. Well, I'm excited. I've been seeing the results in my own son and it's super interesting. Like the other day we were working on a science project. Together we were doing a project on Mount St. Helens and he was building, like with a 3D model that he printed, was building a way for it to emit steam. So we had this little circuit board with a vibration plate and and it emits steam out of Mount St. Helens. It looks so cool, yes. And he was getting frustrated, as we do, when things aren't going our way and we're trying to get the electronics to work, and he would start getting frustrated. And so we put two patches on him that are as a protocol that we've seen work for calming the nervous system and increasing focus.
And my husband, he ran to the patches, actually put it on all of us, because, as parents, we need to calm down too, right? And so all three of us put those patches on and we all noticed for the rest of the evening, we all felt calmer and we felt focused and he, our son got his project completed, without letting frustration take hold. And it was super interesting to watch because we both looked at him when he was on the couch working on his project. And it's like his whole demeanor changed within minutes of putting the patches on. He went from being kind of distracted and frustrated to being super focused and happy and calm. And that's how I feel every day using them.
It's so wild. I'm a big Star Trek, sci-fi geek, and you are like, bringing Star Trek into my life, bringing this type of technology into our lives just is so cool. I have all these wonderful questions from my team, but before we jump into them, I wanted to make sure that we completed our conversations around stopping and reversing human aging. Was there anything else you wanted to say on about that?
David Schmidt (1:37:30.105)
Oh, well, I would say, there's probably a couple hours worth of content on that. But I think what I would say, just maybe as a teaser, and then I'd be happy to talk to you about it in full another time is remarkably, the answers to many of these questions come straight from the Bible. And I didn't find this out until studying species that don't age, that there was a numerical code in living organisms, that were not aging, and that this numerical code was also in the Bible.
And that would require quite a lengthy conversation, which I'm not really ready to talk about because I want to release that a little bit later in the year. But what I would say is, not to be a complete tease, when I started looking at the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of life, and then converting the story from English over to the original Hebrew and then converting Hebrew over into numbers. So of course Hebrew and Greek will convert over into numerical counterparts that remarkably in the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life, those numerical sequences convert into numbers, which convert over into numbers which convert over to frequencies and wavelengths of light. And those wavelengths of light are the wavelengths that we use to turn on mitochondrial function that alters gene expression back to a more youthful state. So what this is to say is that in the book of Genesis, in the story of creation, there is a mathematical code there instructing us on how to reverse aging.
Ashley James (1:39:42.006)
Oh, my mind is blown. Oh, that's so cool. I can't wait to hear your discussion further on this when you decide to unpack it completely. But what a great teaser.
David Schmidt (1:39:55.307)
Yes, I'm going to release that information in full. And it's not something that I want to have it stay hidden, but it requires quite a bit of time to go through it and show the mathematical proof. But I am going to do that later this year, because to me, it's one of the most important messages that people can hear is that God is real. God did in fact created the universe, created all things, and left his signature in living organisms. And that information on how to extrapolate that, that diagnostic equipment has not been available only for maybe about the past 20 years or so. And so that meaning the author of the Bible could not possibly know what these frequencies were, yet they were embedded into the Bible because the Bible's the true inspired word of God. So it's critically important that people get this information.
Ashley James (1:41:06.443)
I feel honored to be just a small part of helping spread this information. It's so neat to be part of this. I'm so excited. I'm moved to tears. This is very exciting. Well, just the fact that I've had so many clients thank me and thank you for changing their lives, for helping them in such significant ways improve their health, both mentally, emotionally and physically improve their health and end their suffering. So many of them. And then in our very intimate, small secret group of 56, almost 57,000 people, every day people are saying that their suffering has ended because of what you've created. And then they share their story and they share how they did it with your technology. It's just so exciting. Tell me how much time do you have currently? Can we jump into the questions?
David Schmidt (1:42:07.254)
Yes, sure, let's go ahead.
Ashley James (1:42:09.788)
Okay, cool. Awesome. Joyce asks, if you know Joyce. Ask him about the different electrical potentials in each patch. Which one has the highest electrical potential?
David Schmidt (1:42:20.785)
Well, it doesn't work that way exactly. It's a really interesting question. So the patches are going to stimulate the skin with different wavelengths of light, and then the patch will induce an increase in energy production in the cell. And we did these studies looking at electrical potential back many, many years ago now. I'm going to say, let's say circa 2010, 2012. And at that time, what we found was that interestingly, the SP6 patch produced the highest increase in electrical charge in the cell.
Now, I don't think we would say that today. I'm pretty certain that it would be X39 that would induce the most powerful electrical change in the cell. And I'm only basing that based on the blood and urine work that we've done and how broad the effects of X39 are. But we haven't compared X39 to SP6 in that regard, but my money would be on X39.
Ashley James (1:43:44.997)
Both of them within seconds of applying, I've had myself personally, my family and my clients have incredible results, but very different. There's two very different patches. SP6, I've seen take a cat out of heat within a minute of applying it, completely out of heat. It was so cool. It was one of my clients' cats. And several clients stop hot flashes immediately.
I do have one client though who's upset at you because she was menopausal and did not have a period for a long time and now her cycle is back. And I said, that's a good thing, your body is reversing its age. And she's like, I thought I was done with this and now I'm back to having a period. I'm like, your body thinks it's younger. This is a good thing. And there's proof that the longer we're fertile, the longer we have longevity and health and good bone health and all around. So super interesting that a phototherapy patch could take a woman out of menopause and give her fertility again.
Kristen says, any major contraindications to patching other than organ transplant?
David Schmidt (1:44:53.875)
What I would say is that what we're legally obligated to say is that if anyone has a serious health condition, they need to speak with their practitioner before using the patches. As a practical matter, identifying organ transplants as a problem, that would be quite accurate. Another thing I would be concerned about is people going through chemotherapy. And most oncologists, they do not want their patients taking any type of antioxidants. So glutathione would be something they definitely don't want their patients to be taking. And what they believe is that the glutathione is going to protect the cancer cells from the chemo. I don't think that's really necessarily true. I've certainly met many medical doctors that are using glutathione therapeutically in by IV in treating cancer patients.
Matter of fact, I met a medical doctor once from Mexico using garlic extract, which contains germanium sesquioxide along with glutathione, and he claimed to have about an 85 percent success rate at putting people into remission. But in any case, if someone is going through radiation treatment or chemotherapy, they should speak with their oncologist. What I would say they could think about as a protocol is using the patches post chemotherapy to help detoxify the body and support the health of the immune system. But there's certainly many more elegant ways to do that.
Dr. Frank Schallenberger, who's a medical doctor and probably the world's authority on ozone therapy, has a program for using low dose chemo, the minimum that would be legally required, along with natural therapies like ozone, IV vitamin C, melatonin, and megadosing as cancer therapy.
Ashley James (1:47:13.481)
I so agree with you that if someone's facing cancer, the success rates are higher often focusing on natural medicine or integrative medicine and not the traditional cut burn and poison that we're seeing just does not have great outcomes, especially when they fudge the numbers and their version of survival rate is giving you five years. Whereas we want you to have longevity for the rest of your life. We want you to have health for the rest of your life and a very long life at that.
Lisa asks, can you wear too many patches to the point of where you're wasting them?
David Schmidt (1:47:54.163)
I would say there is a point of diminishing returns, but it depends on which product we're talking about. So I would say the majority of the time, one patch is enough. When we do our studies, the studies are based on use of a single patch and not double patching. The one or two products that would be exceptions, that we know of, would be glutathione and ice wave.
So while we've done studies just using single patches, what I can tell you from patching thousands of people, that there are certain cases, let's say that if a person is in pain, where applying one set of ice wave on the bottom of the feet and then another set of patches on the upper torso, could be the lower back, could be the shoulders, depends on where the pain is, that would be much more effective than just applying a single set of IceWave. So this would be someone that had chronic pain throughout their body. Two sets of IceWave more effective than one set.
I've also had enormous success when working with people when using multiple glutathione patches, but that would be for very specific situations.
Ashley James (1:49:21.245)
Got it. I've used multiple Aeons around the specific parts of the head, we call the brain balancer protocol. And it is what I had a concussion I accidentally got kicked in the head of full force. It was last summer, it was pretty wild. My son does taekwondo and he didn't realize that I was there and he was practicing a kick and well anyways like I took it to the face of full force.
Because my nose was blowing up, I just got hit by a boxer. I put a carnazine on my nose and immediately stopped the throbbing and brought down the inflammation, which was so cool. For me, it's like the first aid patch. Put it over anything with like tendonitis or anything with like inflammation. So I put it on my nose and then the Aeons, which I put on specific points around the head, I slept with that.
And the next day I woke up and my concussion was completely gone. I was back to normal. And it was just the coolest thing. But I've seen this in other people in our very intimate secret Facebook group of 57,000 people. We have several people who have recovered fully from concussion, even post concussion syndrome. They've shared their experiences. Again, not making medical claims, but they've shared their experiences, no longer having the symptoms of concussion after using specific patches.
Now you said you don't need more than one patch and what you were referring to is that one type of patch but if someone were to wear a few types of patches, like you can wear an Aeon and a glutathione and an x39 at the same time and that's fine right?
David Schmidt (1:51:03.800)
Yes, we haven't had any issues with that. So for example, on a regular basis, my typical protocol would be X39 on the back of the neck, X49 below the belly button, and then a set of energy patches.
Ashley James (1:51:24.336)
Nice. Love it. Sherry says to piggyback on Lisa's question, if someone wears several patches at once, can they feel sensations of overstimulation? Like if they decide to wear 20 patches, is there a point where it's not a great experience if you put too many patches on?
David Schmidt (1:51:44.812)
Well, you could have someone that let's you had someone that was a heavy smoker. If you applied even one glutathione patch, they may go through a rapid detox. And then you would just remove the patch, drink plenty of water and it's fine. So a rapid detox might be like a headache or fatigue. Other than that, yes, I would say that could be one of the effects of using too many patches, would be a rapid detox.
Ashley James (1:52:22.884)
Got it. Out of 160 clients, I've only had two situations where they decided to put on quote unquote, “too many patches”. And they kind of just felt out of it. And then I said, okay, well take some off. And they said, okay. And then they're like, oh, I feel better. I feel fine again. So sometimes people like to do, and I'm guilty of this, if a little is good, then more is better. And the good news is there's no damage, it just not like drugs that have a negative effect on you that last a long time. If you don't feel well, like you said, you're having detox symptoms, then just take the patch off, drink some water and you'll feel fine.
Let's see here. Lisa's friend asks, where does he feel the body receives the light energy the best and why?
David Schmidt (1:53:13.693)
So this happens in the cell, and this would not be an opinion, this is based on clinical studies. It starts in the electron transport chain. And interestingly, this happens with a copper-based compound called cytochrome c-oxidase. So cytochrome c-oxidase is a chromophore and it is light sensitive. So what's been shown, is that there are certain wavelengths of light that will turn on production or activation of cytochrome c-oxidase and this is in the final stage of the electron transport chain and electron transport chain biochemically is what is going to help us turn our food over into energy. So if we upregulate cytochrome c-oxidase then what in turn happens is we increase energy production in the mitochondria and then the result of that is a number of things but very importantly we can make more hormones, we can increase proteinsynthesis and improve the tissue conductivity so pain goes down. There's a variety of beneficial effects that occur, but basically it starts with chromophores in the body and the example of that is cytochrome c-oxidase.
Ashley James (1:54:44.346)
Love it. Lisa's friend also asked, and I just love this question, what would you say to a child to explain the patches, just explain how they work or just explain them in general?
David Schmidt (1:54:57.790)
What I would say is that our planet and our bodies depend on light. So we know that we need the sun for life on this planet, and that includes our bodies because we live in harmony with nature. So the patches work with this system. The patches use light the same way that nature does to improve our health. And of course, how it does that is more complicated, but basically the patches are stimulating the body with light and improving the flow of energy and this is completely in harmony with nature
Ashley James (1:55:42.266)
Deb asks, is it beneficial to always have patches on if they are always in different locations or does the body require a rest from them?
David Schmidt (1:55:52.328)
Body should have a rest period. And in phototherapy, this is called attenuation, where if you stimulate the body with the same wavelengths continuously, eventually the body stops responding. This would be similar to when people drink coffee every day and they keep getting a hit of caffeine and they have one cup of coffee and then all of a sudden it doesn't wake them up and now they need two cups, the body is accommodating or attenuating. And same phenomena with drugs and then the same phenomena with light. So what we found in practice is that if people went through a cycle where if they used let's say X39 during the day and then they removed it at night, they come back the next day and they still respond. But we do need to honor the natural way the body works and so that means an on cycle and an off cycle.
Ashley James (1:56:50.816)
Di has a follow-up question, which I thought was great. She said, what are the strategies we should use to avoid attenuation? For example, if we're having daytime protocols and nighttime protocols, she wants to know what's the best way to do that. Because some people want to wear, for example, X-39 during the day, and they want to wear silent nights at night. Is it okay to always have a patch on you, as long as it's in a different location? Or should you have times where there's no patches on you?
David Schmidt (1:57:18.480)
I think what I'd say is what we found in practice is that there are daytime patches and evening patches, basically. There's some exceptions to that. But let's say as a general rule, if someone used X39 during the day and SilentNights at night, there is no issue with doing that daily, and you would not want to apply them to the same spot. And this is really for the practical purpose that you don't want to irritate the skin by stimulating the same point. So X39 behind the neck or below the belly button, SilentNights on the side of the neck or the temple, and it's completely fine.
Ashley James (1:58:02.962)
Barbara asks, does wearing the energy enhancer patches raise cortisol levels?
David Schmidt (1:58:10.038)
Not that we've seen. I'd have to think back to if we've done a study with energy patches elevating cortisol, we've done an Aeon study where we measured that Aeon balanced cortisol. For most people it would be lowering cortisol, but I can't think that we've done that with the energy patches. But the mechanism of action is that energy patches are turning on beta oxidation.
So it's turning on the process by which we convert fat over into energy. So this is not at all like a stimulant. That process doesn't put any type of stress on the cell. But we've never done a study to look at cortisol with energy patches.
Ashley James (1:59:00.114)
I like that you said the word balance, because I've noticed both in myself and also with my clients with adrenal fatigue that we're feeling more balanced now, and whether that's for some people that they needed more cortisol because they were exhausted, or like they had exhausted their cortisol levels and it bring them back into a state of balance, or for others who are having too high cortisol levels, we noticed it bringing them back down because it's helping the nervous system in the body just regulate, just come back into that state of balance. So that's what I've personally felt and noticed with my clients. It would be cool to see future studies on that.
Sarah says, ask him what type of case he puts his patches in. So like, for example, I have patches upstairs in our office so that I have easy access to them upstairs. I have some in our bedroom. I have a case of patches downstairs, all the patches. Every single one in the house, upstairs and downstairs, and in my purse, but in my purse, I put them in a Faraday bag, so I can travel with them and not like accidentally activate them if the purse is close to me. So when you travel with your patches, how do you travel with them?
David Schmidt (2:00:11.348)
Yes, so I always travel with my patches. I think I would panic if I didn't have them with me. And yes, I always take them, I never put them in a checked bag. I always take them with carry-on. And then I have kind of like a separate sleeve in my travel case that they go into.
But they just stay in their sleeves that we ship them in. I haven't found that it's really been necessary to put them in anything lined with nickel or copper or anything like that. And yes, so I don't do really anything extraordinary with them other than just keep them in my travel bag. I never put them in anything where they're going to be up against my body.
Ashley James (2:00:56.224)
Right, right. And that's why because my purse is right up against my body, that's why I put them in a Faraday bag just to be on the safe side. But so far it's worked. It doesn't use up the patches to have them be that close to me when it's in the Faraday bag.
Lisa, who is one of my dear team members and an amazing holistic practitioner, she says, my husband is an overhead power lineman. Would wearing patches act as a conductor or is he safe to use them while working?
Also, I had read somewhere that X-39 can act as a Faraday cage for 4G and 5G. Could wearing them near high voltage power lines help him at all?
David Schmidt (2:01:37.842)
Well, that's interesting. Now, I would have to speculate, but what we've seen is that X39 improves the electrical potential of the cell.
And when we're talking about things like high voltage, EMFs, essentially what those things are going to do is create oxidative stress on the cell. So anything that we can do to improve the electrical integrity of the cell is going to help us resist things like 5G and electrical power lines.
Jerry Tennant has done quite a bit of research into this and he's certainly an authority on the subject. So, but yes, I would say the other side to this is I'd recommend people supplement with copper. Copper of course is what's used to create a Faraday cage and supplementing with copper orally, we know that there's a high concentration of copper in the skin.
So oral supplementation of copper and then of course elevating copper binding peptides certainly you would say has the potential to reduce the impact of things like 5G wireless power lines on the human body. it's all relative to the level of exposure. So I can't say with this specific case but if it were me I would definitely be supplementing with extra copper.
Ashley James (2:03:15.320)
Love it. And I learned a long time ago that copper should be in a 50 to 1 ratio with selenium, selenium being the 50 and the copper being 1, that they really work well together. And I also saw that those two nutrients are part of your upcoming supplements being launched, which I'm really excited about.
Di asks, I've never seen or heard this be said, but she has. She says, why is it sometimes that Alavida patch is the second most powerful.
David Schmidt (2:03:46.856)
Alavida, the design philosophy behind that, it was I was looking for a way to elevate epithalmine. And epithalmine was discovered by Vladimir Kovinson, a Russian scientist, and he has been specializing in extracting peptides, naturally occurring peptides from the human body that have anti-aging effects along with some other things, but principally anti-aging. And epithelmine is found in the pineal gland and he certainly found that it'll do a few things that it probably shouldn't talk about here.
But what we found with the olivita patch, looking in that direction, is that we could reduce oxidative and inflammatory stress. And the idea became, well, if we can protect the collagen matrix in the body from damage, we could improve the health of the skin from the inside out. And that way we could put together a system where you apply nutrients for the health of the skin and then the patch benefits the skin from the inside out. So that's how Alavida came about.
Ashley James (2:05:08.544)
I love it. Again, my husband's favorite patch. And every night when we're going to bed, we turn off the light and he goes, do you want an Alavida? And then in the dark, he reaches over and places it on my forehead. And it's so sweet the way my husband takes care of me. It's this little ritual that we've gotten into in the last year. And he never forgets to reach over and put Alavida on my forehead. It's just, it's so sweet. I know, I love it.
Now, Dai also asks, how can patches be used to support libido? I just want to give a little testimonial that your herbal spray, which is phenomenal, smells amazing, that it delivers medicinal herbs into the body and that you have information about how it does in men raised testosterone. And I want to let you know, thanks to you, my husband, after three days, just three days it took to spray this, you just spray it on your wrists and rub it and then smell it and it's absorbed into the body.
Three days of using the herbal spray, once in the morning, once at night, he was chasing me, literally chasing me around the house. So talk about increased testosterone in men, increased libido. That would be my answer to Dai's question, but if you could step in, what patch would you say supports libido?
David Schmidt (2:06:28.595)
Yes, well the patch, we don't have a patch specifically for libido. And this is getting into some claims that where we could talk about that for herbs, but not necessarily for light therapy or even for essential oils because of the FDA. But certainly, the good news here is that there's a number of herbs that for men that are getting older. They're experiencing lower sex drive lower performance.
There's any number of things that they can do to elevate nitric oxide, elevate testosterone naturally, and not have to resort to drugs. So, Tongkat Ali is certainly one herb that has been studied quite extensively and been shown to elevate luteinizing hormone, which is going to turn on testosterone. And then with nitric oxide, of course, you have amino acids like citrulline, which have been shown to be very, very effective at increasing nitric oxide. That subject of course is very broad and there's a number of very interesting ways for men to improve sexual performance naturally. But maybe leave that for another time.
Ashley James (2:07:54.031)
And you do have an herbal spray that if a listener was interested in trying that on their husband or themselves, I happen to like it. I feel calmer and happier. I'm already a calm, happy person, but I definitely noticed a shift from using the herbal spray, so I thought that was cool. But then what was really cool is my husband literally chasing me around the house. Sometimes I have to hide the spray from him because it's a little much. But how sweet is it that he kind of feels like he's 18 again, and then I feel like I'm 18 being chased by an 18 year old.
The SP6 patch, I've just seen in so many ways help people come back into balance with their hormones. It's been pretty amazing. So that would be my answer to her question. And finally, we have Kellyann, a wonderful nurse and a holistic practitioner up in Canada and she can't wait for all the patches to be available in Canada. I'm sure she's going when when. But in the meantime, she's using the patches that are available in Canada with all her clients and getting amazing results, both on herself and her husband and all her clients. And she says, what lifestyle habits accelerate the benefits of using the phototherapy patches? What's the best way to use the patches for maximum results?
David Schmidt (2:09:13.459)
Yes, well first I'd say from a lifestyle perspective, diet is going to be so critically important. You just can't get around it, maybe 70%, 80% of a person's results are going to be based around what is their nutrition like, are they eating junk, are they eating healthy food, are they supplementing where they need to. That's always going to be critically important. I also just recently did a podcast or webinar rather on the importance of sleep. And sleep deprivation leads to any number of different health disorders.
This always comes back to the foundation. If people are eating healthy, getting proper rest, exercising regularly, drinking enough water, staying away from the things that we know aren't any good, that foundation is going to serve that individual for their entire life. Then, when you have new technology, like the patches, the benefits are going to be so much better, as opposed to when someone is not eating healthy and not exercising.
So I would say to anyone if you want to use the patches that you really want to make sure that your foundation is there. You don't have to be perfect but you want to make sure that your diet is in place, you're supplementing where you need to, you're exercising regularly, you're getting proper rest, you're drinking enough water. If you're doing those things you can expect that your results with the patches are going to be great.
Ashley James (2:10:53.347)
And this is a point I'd like to add to what you're saying, not contradict what you're saying, because I absolutely agree with you. And I've had clients who put the patches on their husbands who just like eat takeout and drink beer and they don't do anything for their health. And so I didn't know what kind of results we would get, but it's like, it's worth it, just give it a try. I still have seen people who don't live necessarily a healthy lifestyle, still get pretty good results from wearing the phototherapy patches, which just goes to show that even if someone isn't fully-nutrified and living a healthy lifestyle, they do get results.
I have had several clients who didn't have the capacity, like emotional capacity, the mental capacity, the energy to cook healthy food, to exercise, to do the healthy things because they were in absolute overwhelm. And so I had them wear the patches for a month and they, through that month, their capacity to do things for themselves grew because they became calmer and they became more grounded and they got more energy and their inflammation came down. So, I use the patches for people who like, they want to be healthier, but they just don't have the capacity to do the things to get healthier. The patches have been such a powerful tool to help my clients get to that level where now they have the energy to cook healthy food and now they have the energy to go to the gym. And I've seen it on so many people. So regardless of where you are, whether you're just today or just starting out today or whether you've been a health nut for a long time, regardless of where you are, it's worth trying the patches. And then, as you progress, you can continue to work on healthier and healthier ways of eating and moving your body in a way that brings you joy and increasing your depth of sleep.
I love that the Silent Nights patch is just proven on so many levels to be phenomenal for people, for sleep. And I'm so grateful for what you do. Kellyanne has this beautiful question that just really sums up our wonderful interview. And she says, what is your global vision for LifeWave's future? What impact are you creating in the world?
David Schmidt (2:13:06.835)
The vision for the company is it's on a number of different levels. The first thing is we want to bring awareness that people have many natural options for improving their health and their quality of life. And that's really critically important because many people today are indoctrinated with the idea that they have to use drugs and that's the only way that they're going to improve their health. And we're seeing now. the backlash from people that are using Ozempic as a way to lose weight, and of course, the side effects from the vaccine. My daughter has a friend and she's in her 20s and this young lady listened to her doctor got Ozempic and it blew out her gallbladder and she had to remove her gallbladder.
And now the quality of her life is severely degraded now for the rest of her life. And when she could have used natural methods, but she let her doctor convince her that Ozempic was safe when it clearly is not. So we want to help to bring awareness that there are natural solutions for improving quality of life, improving health. That, I would say, would be incredibly important.
The other thing that we want to do is provide people with new technology to empower them so that when they face challenges in their life. It could be something as simple as not having enough energy, not getting a good night's sleep, or something more serious. That they have tools at their disposal to support them in their healing journey. And they don't have to panic. And they don't have to feel powerless.
That's an incredibly important part of what we're doing because, unfortunately, the medical community has seemed to thrive in an environment of fear and getting people to respond that way. And that would be the complete opposite of how we want people to live. In our community, we want to bring hope, we want to bring light, we want to bring solutions, and we want to put power into where it should be into the hands of the individual. So those are very, very important goals for our business.
Ashley James (2:16:01.987)
I love it. I'm so thrilled to be part of this and to see LifeWave. I'm in it for life. I got to tell you, after we used the patches, this is over a year ago, we used the patches in a first aid experience and got such a fast result. I just started saying to everyone, I will never be without these. Knock on wood, I will never be without these. They will always be in my medicine cabinet.
I'll take breaks. I'll go to bed and not have a patch on unless my husband throws an Alavida on my forehead. I wear them every week, definitely taking breaks like you said, not wearing them for 24 hours every day. But I will take breaks. But I will always, always have them in my medicine cabinet. And I want them to be in everyone's purse or suitcase or medicine cabinet. When you can reach for something that works so quickly.
I'll give one example, head cold. In the last year and a half, I've had three head colds. It doesn't sound like much, but when you're whole life is talking, you don't want head colds. And especially trying to go to sleep with a head cold, it's your sinuses get stuffed up. I take a pair of IceWaves, put them on my sinuses, and in the height of a head cold, my sinuses will never be stuffy. I'm able to breathe through my nose and I did this on one of my friends who we were at the playground, we homeschooled and our children were playing together and my friend sounded really stuffy and I said, oh, do you have a head cold? She goes, yes, I'm super stuffy. Both my sinuses, I just can't drain them. I said, here, put these on. Because I always carry my patches with me. Put these on your sinuses. And two minutes later, like I'm talking to another friend and she's carrying her baby. And she just yelps. She goes, Oh my gosh. I can breathe through my nose. This works. I looked at her, I'm like, yes, of course it works. And she goes, I didn't expect it. I thought maybe in 20 minutes I might have some relief or something. I didn't expect it to be this fast. I didn't expect it to actually work. And for my son also, anytime he gets a stuffy nose, immediately put on the IceWaves and it just drains it. How cool is that? And if we get a sore throat, we immediately put a glutathione on it, it blows it out of our system.
It's so cool to have that available in the medicine cabinet and not need to reach for drugs. Of course, I don't normally reach for drugs. I normally reach for like essential oils and homeopathy. And this is more powerful tool than any other therapy. And I have those therapies too. I have all those kinds of medicines at my disposal, but this, your technology is my, single-handedly my most powerful tool that I use on a daily basis and with my clients. So thank you David for everything you do and I would be honored if you'd come back on the show at some point because there's just so much more to unpack and explore with you.
David Schmidt (2:19:03.517)
Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate you having me and yes, I'd be happy to do that.
Ashley James (2:19:08.929)
Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been great. I know you said so much, but I just want to make sure is there anything else you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview?
David Schmidt (2:19:19.881)
Oh, I think what I would say, well first thank you very much for having me on. And I think what I'd say is that we're all going to go through situations in life which are going to be challenging and difficult, but there's always hope, pray, turn to God, look for direction, look for the greater good. And there's always people in our community that just want to help. And, there are answers. And I think that's something that's incredibly important.
Ashley James (2:19:49.043)
I love it. Thank you so much, David. It's been such a pleasure. I cannot wait to have you back on the show.
David Schmidt (2:19:53.919)
Thanks Ashley, appreciate it.
Ashley James (2:19:57.322)
Wasn't that an amazing interview with David Schmidt. I am so excited that you got to hear the entire interview and hear all the answers to the questions from the wonderful practitioners that I work with. If you have any more questions, I'd love to help you get the answers to them. I can talk to you myself. You can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. You can sign up for a free chat. Just get on the phone with me. I promise I don't bite.
I know some listeners were like this is so weird. I listen to you all the time and I feel like I know you but you don't know me and I'm like I get it. I did the same thing eight years ago. I was listening almost all the time to this one podcast and then I reached out and had a conversation with him on the phone. I'm like this is really weird, because you're like in my car with me all the time and I feel like we're best friends, but you don't know who I am. So this is like weird. So I really appreciate that. So if you jump on the phone with me, I promise I understand. It's a little odd when you know more about someone and they know nothing about you, but I promise I will make it not awkward to talk to me on the phone.
I do it all the time. I help people all the time, help my clients. I have phone appointments from around the world and so book a free session. Let's talk about your health, let's talk about your goals and see how I can help you. I can point you towards the right resources, whether it be phototherapy or other resources that I have. I'd love to help you. Go to learntruehealth.com in the menu, click on Work with Ashley James and then the very first option at the top is sign up for a Free Phototherapy Discovery Session. If you're too shy to talk on the phone, please feel free to email me, as I would love to help you either way. If you do have experience to talk on the phone, please feel free to email me, as I would love to help you either way. If you do have experience with the phototherapy patches, or when you do, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, share with the other listeners what your experience is like.
One of the testimonials about the phototherapy patches was actually in Episode 500. I have one of my clients had 100% of her symptoms go away after starting to use the patches, and she shared that in Episode 500. But I have dozens and dozens of really amazing testimonials. In fact, I have one I want to share with you right now. I just recently came across this testimonial in our group and it really blew me away, and there are just thousands of really cool testimonials.
This one, though, blew me away because it has to do with liver disease. This woman shares that she has had liver disease for many years, that it runs in her family. She has several family members who have succumbed to this disease. It's NAFLD liver disease. I had never heard of it, and she was in touch with a surgeon who specializes in this liver disease and was recommending that she get a liver transplant, as some of her family members have had to get liver transplants. All her scans and blood work showed that her liver was at its end and the next step was transplant or death. So she was sent home to go buy a plot of land for her burial, to get her will in order, and she started using these phototherapy patches.
She was incredibly skeptical and actually she kind of jokes about how she wanted to use them to prove that they didn't work, and then she used them for a while and what she saw was pain, insomnia got better, several health issues got better. She couldn't believe it, but she wasn't necessarily expecting her liver to make a full recovery or anything like that. And she went back to the doctor who was helping her, got her on the transplant list and was helping to get her to the point where she could hopefully receive a liver transplant. That was their goal. She goes in for another scan that they do every one or two years and blood work, and the doctor couldn't believe it. The doctor thinks the scan's wrong, even though the blood work backs up the scan. He is in complete denial. Her liver is fully functional within a year of since using the phototherapy patches. She's beside herself. But her, her blood work is normal, her scans are normal, her liver is functioning normally now and she's just so happy. She invested the time it took a year to use them and time it took a year to use them and just to see what would happen, which is so incredible.
And, of course, you know doctors who don't believe in natural medicine or believe the body can heal itself. They're not going to even see it, even when we show them proof, they're not going to see it. Again, I'm not saying that we can cure or treat anything. The body does the healing. The body heals itself and if there's anything we can do to support the body's ability to heal itself, we should do it. We shouldn’t also get our own way. So, there are times when we’re putting things in our body that are harming us or we’re having health habits like going to bed late or drinking too much alcohol or coffee or sugar, or stressing, arguing. These little daily activities or lack of activity. They lead to a diseased body, and the body is constantly trying to heal itself, constantly trying to come back into homeostasis. So that whatever we can do in our diet and lifestyle and supplements and alternative medicine, whatever we can do to just support the body to do its job, which is to heal itself, then we should. And that's what I love about this is that our body is constantly wanting to get back into that homeostasis and this is something that pushes it there faster, which is so beautiful, because that's all we want. We want that quality of life, we want a longer, healthier life.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being a listener. This has been wonderful sharing this with you and I can't wait to hear from you. I hope you reach out and book a Free Discovery Session with me by going to learntruehealth.com and clicking the menu and selecting Work with Ashley James, or reaching out to me, emailing me, ashley@learntruehealth.com. I can't wait to hear from you. Also, join my Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, which is different from the patching group. Join us and ask questions, start discussions about this episode or other episodes. We'd love to hear from you. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.
The Launch Of My Book Is Finally Here! Launching in February!
https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness
https://www.learntruehealth.com/brandon-fausts-ultimate-mold-fix-essential-tips-for-a-mold-free-home
Our homes should be safe havens, but hidden within their walls, a silent foe like mold can lurk, posing risks to both human and pet inhabitants. That's why I'm joined by Brandon Faust of moldsolutions.com, who sheds light on the health effects of mold and offers sage advice on prevention and proper remediation techniques. We dissect the complexities of mold in various environments—from conventional homes to RVs—and the importance of vigilance in maintaining a mold-free sanctuary. With Brandon's expertise, we navigate the delicate balance between awareness and alarm, providing you with the tools to safeguard your living space.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited to announce the launch of my book. It's finally here. How exciting is that? It's going to be launching February 1st, so be sure to check that out. If you go to learntruehealth.com in the menu, I will have a link right there to take you straight to buy the book on Amazon.
The title of the book is drumroll Addicted to Wellness, and it's funny because some people go, oh, that's such a perfect name. And other people go, ooh, isn't addiction a bad word? And it's so interesting how people perceive it. And then, as it sits with them, they go actually, I really like it. So the whole premise of the book is no matter where you are in your health journey, whether you're just starting out, or whether you are a health nut like me that still has some ways to go before they feel like they've achieved all their health goals. Or maybe you have achieved all your health goals and you're looking to just maintain the health that you've worked so hard to achieve. There's no easy way to just coast through perfect health right. We're always working on it. It's a nonstop. Everything's moving and life constantly changes and moves and as long as we make sure we maintain those little daily steps, we can maintain and grow our health. And so, Addicted to Wellness, the book that I spent the last few months writing. I locked myself in the office and my family waved goodbye to me, didn't see them for a few months, just locked myself in and I poured out everything I've learned from over 500 interviews and working with clients for over two decades.
I poured it into this book and the concept is no matter where you are in your journey, let's make these little health challenges, make it fun to push ourselves, to stretch ourselves just a little bit. Something, for example, I always say kale because, like I remember when I didn't like kale and now I crave kale, and I know a lot of people roll their eyes like, oh, how could you crave kale your body actually can get to a point where it craves healthy things, where it desires, where you wake up desiring moving your body in a way that brings you joy, like I love weightlifting, and if you said to me, we're going to go walk on a treadmill for an hour, I'm like that sounds gross. But if you said to me, let's go to the gym and pump some weights, I'm like, yes, I'm right there with you, so I crave it and I and if I don't do it I kind of miss it. And the whole premise of the book is to help you get to that point where you want to. You're driven, you're compelled and you're pulled towards these little easy steps that make huge strides in maintaining health and in growing health and in getting us further away from a disease state, and closer to optimal health. And there are things that you can do even in a busy lifestyle.
I'm a working mom. There's so many things that we do or we're juggling many, many roles, right, we're a chef, we're a chauffeur, we're a maid, we're everything to our families and we have very little time for ourselves. And this book is perfect for you. It's perfect if you're a busy person, no matter what age. It's perfect for anyone, men and women. I didn't want to exclude men there. Anyone could pick up this book, plug into it.
And it's a workbook, so it's actually interactive. It pulls you through these beautiful lessons where every week for 12 weeks, you choose between one and four challenges and then you get to journal about it. And the journaling, I promise you is not tedious, it's not arduous, it's actually quick, insightful, it's fun, it's light. I make the whole thing fun. It's not bogged down, it's not super heavy, but I do bring in the beautiful science and results that people see clinically from incorporating these things. But I do it in a way that's light. So there'll be a little bit of reading every week and then there'll be interactive things you do with the book every day. But it is done in a way that even a very busy, like working mom, for example, can do it. Ash long as you make that commitment, I'm going to pick up that book and spend five minutes with it in the morning, five minutes with it at night. You can do it, you can absolutely do it, and it is so much fun. And some people will do all 12 weeks back to back. That's three months. And, by the way, there's a bonus, 13th week. So it's officially a three-month journey. Or you could choose to break it up and do one week a month or two weeks a month. It's up to you, it's up to how your life is, how your schedule is, but by the end of the book you’ve the opportunity to incorporate thirty-three beautiful health habits that build the foundations of the strong body- mentally, emotionally and physically.
So Addicted to Wellness is my book. I'm very excited to have it launch and I just I can't tell you how thrilled I am to provide it for you, my listeners, as a gift to you guys. I wanted to do a launch party, right, we can't all get together, unfortunately, in the same room. We can't all fly to Las Vegas or something and meet, maybe one day. But we're not going to do a physical, in-person launch party. What we're going to do is a virtual launch party.
So for the month of February, the whole launch party month for the first 50 listeners who purchase the book and share, if you're in a Facebook group, take a picture of yourself with the book or holding the book, talk about if you started your journey with it. You can talk about your impressions about it and give me your mailing address and I will send you a gift bag with some goodies. So it's for the first 50 listeners who buy the book and share that you've gotten it, share it on your social media, or you can just share it in our Facebook group. You then email me your address so that I can send you my gift bag to celebrate with you as to be part of the launch party.
If you're not on Facebook, don't worry about that, just send me an email and I would love to send you that gift bag as being one of the first 50 listeners to purchase the book; and, of course, for everyone that purchases the book, if you love it, please leave a five-star rating on Amazon, because that is the gift that you could give back to me. That would help me so much to help build this book, make it a success on Amazon, which will then promote it to others who are looking to seek true health, and that way, you're helping more people actually to find true health through my book.
There's plenty of resources in the book. It's very interactive and there's QR codes that'll link to resources. So, even though it's a physical book, I decided not to go digital because you're writing in it every day, so that you get to hold it. You get to sit down with a pen and write. Several points along the road in the book point to different interviews or different recipes or different resources, and so you can use your QR code, just scan it with your phone or your tablet and it takes you to those resources.
Can you tell I'm excited? I'm so excited. I already have ideas for the next few books I'm going to write. This is my first book, so I learned many, many things. So if you're ever going to publish a book, just write me an email. My email, by the way, is support@learntruehealth.com. Shoot me an email if you have any questions, because I've learned some pointers to make the journey smoother and maybe one day I'll write a book on how to write a book. I'm sure there's a lot of those out there, but I learned some interesting things and I can't wait to implement them in my future books.
If you buy the book and you have a positive experience which I know you will but when you do, when you have a positive experience with the book, I'd love to hear about it. Please write me an email, support@learntruehealth.com. Jump into the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you can find that by searching Facebook for Learn True Health, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group and that'll take you to the group. I'd love to hear about your journey through the book and how it has helped you and the things that you've learned. There's going to be a lot of stuff. I think that people already know, because I had to cover the foundations, but I do in a way that's fun and I do it in a way that even if you've been a health nut for many years, you'll be surprised at what you learn in the book. So I make it fun. I add new information that I think it'll still surprise you. For example, I know it's good to drink water, but I had no idea that when you drink 5% less than your body needs, you have a 25% reduction in energy production. The body can't produce enough cellular energy, enough ATP. So simply by drinking five ounces less a day than your body needs you can. For example, if that's 100 ounces is your daily requirement, then five ounces less or sweating five ounces more than you normally do can lead to a significant drop in energy production. And then people go to the coffee and the energy drinks, which further dehydrates them, leading to these swings, especially those a lot of those drinks have sugar in them and it leads to inflammation and just like these energy swings where you wake up exhausted or you're exhausted and hungry at 3pm and then that affects cortisol and the whole thing kind of tumbles downwards, right.
So the book and the little daily challenges is meant to get you back on course with every area of your life health and happiness and fulfillment in every area of your life not just physical health, also every area of your life. So I'm really looking forward to you checking it out and reading it and please share, as you go through the process, what you were excited about learning. Share with me and also with our whole Facebook community, the Learn to Health Facebook group community, and I'd love to hear your impression and your experience. I'd love the feedback.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing my book with your friends and sharing this podcast with those you care about. This episode in particular, I'm very excited to publish because I think it is a silent epidemic.
Many households across the globe, not just the United States, have hidden mold and mold is a big, nasty voodoo daddy of a problem for many people and they don't even realize it and they'll go so many doctors because you don't see the mold, because it's in between the floorboards or wherever it is. It's hidden in the house. By breathing in the mycotoxins that we can't see, we can't see them. It can cause respiratory problems, skin problems, nervous system problems, immune problems, digestive problems. And in the United States, how many people are going to a medical doctor and being put on drugs, drug after drug after drug, to suppress symptoms and continue to be exposed to the mycotoxins and the mold which continues to cause the problem?
Think about how many people are sick in the United States and don't know why. And that's one of the reasons why I do this podcast is to help people who the medical system has failed them, and we want to help them find the answers. And these wonderful doctors and experts that I have on the show are those kind of people who help us navigate this crazy world and get to the root cause of our problem. And so many people don't realize that the root cause of their problem is mold in their house or their car or their business, their place of work.
So let's dive in and thank you so much for being here and sharing with those you care about, because we've got to help as many people as possible to Learn True Health for my book. Go to learntruehealth.com and look in the menu at the very top of the website and you'll see a link to go buy the book. And please jump into the Facebook group as well, as I would love to hear from you. Enjoy today's episode.
Ashley James (0:12:38.935)
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 516. I am so excited for today's guest. We have with us Brandon Faust, who's the founder of moldsolutions.com. First of all, you got a pretty awesome URL. When did you buy that? Back in the 90s? Like, how did you get moldsolutions.com? That's a really easy website to remember.
Brandon Faust (0:13:09.453)
You had to ask. So my original website was actually moldsolutionsusa.com for that exact reason, because mold solutions was a very expensive URL. I didn't even know if I want to tell you how much I paid for it, but it was definitely.
Ashley James (0:13:26.797)
Oh no. I'm going to guess $25,000.
Brandon Faust (0:13:29.560)
It was $20,000.
Ashley James (0:13:31.409)
Oh! That was my first thought and I was like, no, that sounds too little. Well, it's worth it. It really is, because who's going to remember to type USA? That kind of reminds me of all the URLs from the late 90s, early 2000s, where you had to type in so many extra things.
Brandon Faust (0:13:53.687)
Yes, so that's exactly what happened. So the original name of the company was mold solutions usa because of that exact point. And, at the end of the day, people were remembering moldusa. And that's definitely not the message that I want you to remember. Right. So we had to ante up and, invest in mold solutions. So here you are. That's the back story.
Ashley James (0:14:17.029)
I think you should own moldusa.com and moldsolutions.com If you still own all those and just redirect them to your main website. But it really does make a difference, especially for podcasting. And then my listeners who are like driving or walking their dog or whatever, it's like, they're not writing this down. Like they're just listening. So you've got to make it easy so we can remember, two hours from now when we go to look you up. Especially because you've got some cool stuff on your website. You got a free book. And mold is a big topic. So we have a Facebook group for listeners. We have over 5000 listeners in our Facebook group. We have way more listeners that download, but just the hardcore Learn True Health listeners come to the Facebook group and to discuss health topics and mold is like a regular topic. We should just have a pinned post all about mold because it's such a common topic because most areas in the United States can be prone to mold and especially with the weird weather. We've been having like floods and stuff like that. It's very common. I live in the Pacific Northwest where our houses grow mushrooms for fun. And you're down in Florida and you've probably seen mushrooms grow out of the corner of toilets. I just saw a post that's going viral right now about how if you ever grow mushrooms in your house for fun, like in your kitchen, you could actually end up growing mushrooms like out of the floorboards of your house. And you've got to be really careful about what you bring home because you don't want to inoculate your house with spores.
Brandon Faust (0:16:01.190)
And that is definitely fungus 101. There are spores, and they will spread.
Ashley James (0:16:06.926)
Yes, the fun side to fungus. You could have a substance come and digest your house for you. So we don't want that. And we don't want mold in our house because it really drastically affects our immune system. And it's something that people can kind of put off and say, that's not such a big deal, whatever that weird black stuff by the tub or by the window and no big deal. And, oh, it's just mildew. It's not mold.
And then wonder why two years later they have autoimmune conditions. They have their kids have hives, their kids have rashes, they have asthma. Everything from skin conditions to cancer. You're wearing down your immune system. And we've had guests on the show, holistic health practitioners talk about how a single mold exposure could actually make mold grow inside you and stay inside your body. And then you have to do a mold detox. And so this isn't something like just get rid of the mold in your house and you're fine. It can actually still exist in you years later. I had a practitioner tell me that I had a mold in me and I had a moldy basement. This was 30 years ago. I hadn't lived in that basement for 30 years and yet I still had some mold in my system. God forbid, you broke your arm or you broke your leg, it's obvious you take care of it. But with mold, it's something we can overlook, something we can put our blinders on and just go about our day. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a friend say, oh, I just threw bleach on it. I'm like, you can't do that. That's super bad for you. And I so I want to talk to you about this, Brandon. I want to talk about you have 15 tips to prevent mold in your home. We weren't going to talk about improving your indoor air quality. We're going to talk about the impact mold has on our health and on our pets.
If you don’t care about your health, why would you listen? You definitely care about your health because you're listening to this. Anyone who has a dog or cat will put their pets first. I've never met a dog owner that wouldn’t immediately go and take care of their pets health before they took care of their own health. So it's even worse for your pets to have, because they're living in that environment. Like you leave your house, they don't, right? They leave the house much less than you do. And so they're smaller bodies, but they're way more exposed to the mold mycotoxins. And so we're going to talk about all this. And also a lot of times people have mold in their house. They don't even know it. Super scary. So thank you for coming on the show and thanks for having such a cool URL. So we could, , ooh and ah over it.
Brandon Faust (0:18:48.889)
Oh my goodness, you're a woman after my heart. Everything that you just said was completely resonating with me. I was like, oh my God, I can talk this girl's language. So a hundred percent, everything that you just went over, I'm highly in agreement with and it's true. It's one of these things that goes misunderstood, underestimated, and there's extremely different sort of takes on it. And you have your people that are, it's no big deal. That's nothing to worry about. It's a scam. It's this, it's that.
And then some people that are wanting to go into a home with a spacesuit and are super concerned and highly concerned. And to some degree, there's validity in their concern. So I try to on this subject because it can be so scary, but it can also be one of those things that people completely ignore. Try to take somewhere in the middle, maybe a little bit over, hey, have a healthy respect from old and don't ignore it because it can actually cause some serious health issues, but also providing answers and solutions, which is why we have mold solutions. That's really what it's all about at the end of the day is how to solve this problem that can cause a lot of issues. It's not just an unsightly thing. It's the indoor air quality aspect of it, which is the most important.
Ashley James (0:20:11.197)
Right. So we could have hidden mold. I don't want to say invisible. We can have hidden mold. You don't see it, but it's in the walls and it's affecting your health. So in the ducts, right there, if you have a furnace, there can be hidden mold in a building. One of my doctors, I go see her whole office smells like mildew. And I mean, if it wasn't for the fact that she's just like a world-class, amazing chiropractor, I would not be going to her and I feel bad for her, but this is the office she's in. And I just think to myself, like, if you can smell mildew, you're inhaling mycotoxins. Like you're inhaling some level, your body is having to process some level of stressor.
And so we can have hidden, but you don't see it. Like I'm in her office is super clean. It's just the whole building. Again, living in the Pacific Northwest is very moist here, but I can smell it. And I guess a lot of people don't notice because they're not as aware as I am. And so it's not visible, but it could be in the walls. Right. And then there's visible mold. My friend has an old car that is ancient and barely functional. Somewhere has a leak and she goes to get in the car after being away for a few days. She's at the airport. She gets in the car and it's like fuzz. It's like an inch of fuzz. The entire car is mold. There's a hole inside has grown an inch of this moldy fuzz, but she has to get home. So she opens the windows and she drove home and she goes halfway home, she has the world's worst headache and she's one of the healthiest people I know. And so with her already, she's a healthy immune system, a healthy liver, like she's healthy at processing stuff. She was sick for days, just feeling completely out of it, like hung over her body had to deal with all those mycotoxins. So there's times when people just suck it up and go, Oh, I'll just be in this mold for a few minutes. Like, Oh, It's okay, I'm just going to go down into the moldy basement. I'm only here for a few minutes. And the fact is that it's affecting you in an acute situation, affecting you for days, but if you have even a small amount of mold that's not visible over time, it's wearing you down. So I want to get into, why mold solutions? What happened in your life that went, I know what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to crawl around people's ducts and fix their mold problem. Did you have something that happened to you that made you passionate about getting rid of mold?
Brandon Faust (0:23:06.321)
I did. That's a great question. Because I was not in this industry initially. I was a headhunter, I was a recruiter, and I also had done a lot of sales type stuff, marketing. But believe it or not, I even did the New York Institute of Photography course. So I was a professional photographer as well making money in that arena, which I still love today. I think it's fantastic as a creative outlet.
But the thing that really hit me hard was I had gotten involved in another company because my good friend of mine asked me to come on board with this mold company and initially I turned him down. I told him, look, I'm not interested in being a mold guy and I felt it was almost like a step down for me. And he approached me on the concept of having equity in this company. And at that point, my wife was pregnant and with the baby on the way, I was like, no, that might be a good way to go with the ownership. Let's build this. I felt like I could do it, but I wasn't 100% sold, although I was like, okay, marketing, you can market a product.
But it wasn't until my son was born and a month into him arriving, he's like a one month old, infant newborn, he starts having almost like an asthma attack three days in a row. And we were so concerned. And my wife after the third day, she's like, I'm taking him to the emergency room.
And I said, well, look, I've just done all this training and certification. It could be environmental. Let's just take a look. Let's see what's going on. , so I started to do a deep dive in my own home and got to the bedroom, which just happened to be the same room where the furnace was located. It was in a closet there, the air handler. And I moved this one shelving system, this dresser drawers, and there was two feet of mold on the back of it and two feet wide. So it was literally four foot, four square feet of mold on the back of this shelving system. And my eyes got big. I couldn't believe it. And it was just like your friend's car. , it was fuzzy on the back. And at that moment in time, I was like, Oh wow. So started checking the moisture. There was a leak behind that wall that on the other side was a shower. And my mom had come to visit because of the baby. And every time she was showering, there was a pinhole leak. So it was basically soaking that floor in that wall. And then it was wicking up the furniture. So that sort of cheap panelling on the back of the dresser drawers was just covered in this growth. It was being sucked into the air handler and distributed all throughout the house. So what we did was fix a leak, cleaned up the contaminated material and did a whole home sanitization using a non-toxic product, which filled the volume of the home with a product that would actually break down spores and mycotoxins. And the result of it was, my wife and kid were back in the home, about three hours after we were done with everything.
And he slept an hour longer and he had no trouble breathing the next day. So that was really for me where the light bulb went off. Because I started thinking about what would have occurred if I would have taken him to the emergency room? And how many tests would have been done on him? What would have that been like for him in terms of like a traumatizing occurrence? Whoever knows what other tests would have taken place and they wouldn't have found the actual cause point, the thing that was making it happen to begin with. So that was sort of the big moment for me.
Ashley James (0:27:12.083)
I would say one thing to that because I love holistic medicine and I've been deep into holistic medicine for many years. It saved my life. It saved my husband's life. I have seen where if we didn't have holistic medicine, I wouldn't be alive. So my husband at the same time, so we've got that. We have Children's Hospital here in Seattle and my son, not as a baby, but as a toddler. Actually, I don't know if you call 18 month old still a baby, but there was about three different separate times where we had to take him because he had respiratory distress.
So the first thing they did, which would surprise you because I was on guard asking the doctors, like, what are you doing to my son? What are you doing? Like I need an informed consent. And that's a first thing you say to the doctors, I need an informed consent. Before you do anything, I need an informed consent, which means they have to turn around and tell you what they're doing and what the negative impacts are. And so they started putting an IV in my son. He was very young. This was like 18 months old young. And she turned to me and she smiled when I said it, because I thought she'd get angry, because some doctors do. They don't like you advocating. And I was so fortunate that she actually appreciated me asking. And she said, okay, great. This is magnesium. We're doing an IV magnesium because magnesium is the first thing we try with respiratory distress because it asks the lungs to open up it and stop spasming. And I'm like, Oh, magnesium. Great. Go ahead. And I thought that was really cool. And then the second he didn't recover. He was so bad. His oxygen was going down. His lips were blue. Like this is dangerous. Right.
So I would say, if a child has respiratory distress, you don't want to wait and you want to get that handled. And they're not going to find the root cause in the first visit to the ER. And that's not the point. The point is to get them stabilized. But don't ever expect an ER doctor is going to be like, I found the root cause to your chronic health problem because it's very unlikely. They're there to like just stabilize you and then you go see your PCP and hopefully you find a holistic doctor that can help pick through every aspect of your life, including your environmental home health, to find what are the stressors and what's going on, and even do genetics and do nutritional testing and do everything, right? But if a child has respiratory distress, my thing is get it handled and then we'll figure out what caused it. But I'm really glad your son recovered so quickly because he didn't have a chronic exposure to it because he was so young. So it wasn't like years and years of exposure. But I'm so grateful you figured this out. It just seems like God set it up, like it's just such divine order to have you just go through this training and then have this problem with your son. And imagine if you hadn't gone through that training, what would have happened to him? What would have happened? How many, like you said, tests and medications? And when we medicate, we're just suppressing, but we're not addressing the root cause. And he might have lived his entire childhood exposed to mold and his body fighting that. And then on top of that, suppressing his body with steroids and medications and then, just what would have happened then to his life?
Brandon Faust (0:30:42.430)
That's exactly right. And that's really, for me, what did it, was just kind of thinking about that and potentially having missed the boat and not knowing that this was something that could cause that big of an issue because I look back and I was on the West Coast for 30 years, so this was a pretty dry, arid climate, but I was helping on a project with these old files, and they were musty and you could smell it and it was like this sort of mildew smell. But at the time, I had no idea. I was in my late 20s and we didn't have masks on, we didn't have gloves on.
And I was waking up every morning with my feet on fire, my lower legs on fire. And my hands would start swelling up when I would start walking. And I was wondering what was going on. And I never determined what the cause was. But now looking back on it, I know exactly what the cause is because I get the same sensation when I go into a home that is full of mold. And even though I have the mask on, I also have a beard, so there is some exposure that does take place. So I have to take the proper binders and things like that to help detox and pull it out of my body on a daily basis. But while I'm driving back, I get the same burning sensation in my legs.
Ashley James (0:32:13.783)
And you take the binders on a daily basis because you're exposed on a regular basis, unlike the listener who hopefully gets the mold, if they have any mold, they get it properly mitigated and then they're not living in an environment exposed to mold on a daily basis. But if you have mold in your body or you're exposed to mold, then taking those binders is essential. Can you give us the list of the binders you take or is it in your free book or can we talk a bit about that?
Brandon Faust (0:32:43.727)
I try to stay away from that to some degree because I'm not a medical professional. I really work on the health of the home.
But there are definitely certain brands or things that I take that do work. Obviously there's an activated charcoal element. When I got sick in 2019 where I was really pretty impacted by mold, I was taking Spanish black radish on a daily basis. I take glutathione is another one that is not a binder, but it definitely helps with mold exposure. So a lot of these things would probably speak to it would be more like hey go to your functional medicine doctor or your integrated medicine doctor your holistic medicine doctor and find out what they are would be recommending or referring.
Ashley James (20:51.331)
Nice. I've got some good interviews about that also. So listeners can type in mold in learntruehealth.com. And I do have some interviews where we talk about that. But I appreciate that you're sharing a bit about that. I don't know if I've ever heard of black Spanish radish. So I'm going to look that up. So here you are. You have your child, you've just mitigated your own home. Was that the first house you ever worked on? Because you had just gone through your training?
Brandon Faust (0:34:15.497)
No, I mean, I had worked on probably 20 or 30 homes up until that point. There's a lot of mold in Florida, let's put it that way. So, it's a very humid climate and there's no shortage of growth. So it was really fortuitous in terms of like this career path. And then what happened with my son was not fortuitous, but it was serendipitous. It was something that like you're talking about the , the divine entering in and letting me know because for me if I'm going to talk about something or promote something. I feel so much better about it if I have belief in it and if I know that it's going to help somebody or make a difference and just six months earlier my wife had approached me on getting a mold test done in our own home. And I said, I don't want to spend the $400 on a mold test. Like, what's the big deal? Why would we need that? So I had this other end of the spectrum sort of viewpoint on it. And now, fast forward seven years and 3,500 homes later, and how many people that I've helped that have been patients of functional medicine clinics or integrated medicine clinics, and the difference that it makes in their life in terms of actually having a mold-free environment, it's tremendous. And everything that you're talking about with your friend and what she went through. I've gone through that personally and I've seen other people that have gone through that as well. So it's not a joke. It's not something to ignore or to brush off as a potential problem.
Ashley James (0:36:05.603)
So with all the homes you've worked on, have you ever seen a negative mold test for a house?
Brandon Faust (0:36:16.976)
Well, this is an interesting question, right? Because the air sampling is not a good yardstick. It's not a good measuring tool at all. Have I seen homes that I would say are safe and healthy? Of course, absolutely. But the most important test of all is the people test.
How is a person doing in that home? Now that's not an end all be all test either because you can have acute reactions or you can have long term exposure problems that you may not even notice are actually coming from some hidden mold in your home. So I think that you have here in Florida there's like a saying especially amongst realtors, well every home is going to have mold. This is Florida.
Don't worry about that, that's just this old Florida smell, right? Oh, that's just the old Florida smell, no worries. And it really, you should be concerned about it, because if it's musty, it's moldy. But there is truth in the fact that almost every home is going to have some mold spores floating around. It's a naturally occurring thing in our environment. If we didn't have mold spores, imagine what the landfills would look like.
I mean they'd be overgrown, over packed. You would just have that decomposure element is crucial to life on planet earth. So mold has a time and a place. But the problem is that when it gets into your home, it's like putting a car in the garage and keeping it on and closing up the garage door and closing the doors. And then what happens?
So if you have an airtight envelope and you have carbon monoxide going strong, it can be really disastrous for the people that are cohabiting that space. And that's the same thing with mold. When you have mold in your home and it's hidden and it's off gassing and it's releasing spores, it can cause a serious issue. So one of the things that you brought up is this concept of mycotoxins. A lot of people, even in the mold world, even professional mold remediators don't know what a mycotoxin is.
So myco is a Greek word for fungus and toxin something poisonous, something that can do damage to your physical well-being. So the fungus poison is what colonized mold releases. So not all molds have as a potent of a mycotoxin. But I think that the more advanced we get in this study and in the subject, we're going to find out that most of them do release a mycotoxin. So in a lot of times, a lot of cases, and I've heard this one as well, Oh, it's not that dangerous mold. It's not black mold. It's you shouldn't, it's nothing to worry about. And I've even had mold inspectors tell clients or homeowners, Oh, that mold on your vents or that mold in your HVAC. It's no big deal. It's common.
Every home in Florida is going to have it. And these are professional mold inspectors. And then you do the research on it, and you find out that particular mold that is in the HVAC unit that tends to basically infiltrate a HVAC system is called cladosporium. And when you start doing a deep dive or deeper study on cladosporium, you find out that it is highly toxic. It does release a mycotoxin. It can cause skin issues. It can cause a host of physical problems, upper respiratory problems.
And when I go to a home and I hear the entire family is sick, the first place I'm going to is the HVAC. And I wouldn't be surprised if your friend who is the doctor or the chiropractor is dealing with that exact situation. It could be behind the walls, but the first place I would actually be looking is in the HVAC system, in the ducts, in the furnace, the air handler, because the amount of infestation that I have found in the entire system alone is, it's amazing because the materials, especially down here in Florida, they use a porous duct board for the box that connects the air handler or the furnace to the ducts. So these long tubes that go through that attic or,go through the home, the central heating and air conditioning, the outlets, So those ducts are connected to a box that is, it's basically a fiberglass board that's about an inch thick. So it's extremely porous. So you can imagine, when you're turning on your air conditioner, the coils are getting cold enough that water droplets are attracting to the actual coils. So that's wetness, that's water. And then you have this wheel that is spinning super fast and blowing that moist air up into this box that's porous. And what do you wind up with? A Petri dish that is supplying the home with air.
Ashley James (0:41:51.216)
I've heard of these HVAC systems or these add-ons that you can add to your system, in the ducts in your house if you have a furnace, that it's like infrared light or some ultraviolet light, something.
Brandon Faust (0:42:05.430)
UV lights, yes.
Ashley James (0:42:06.306)
Yes, UV, thank you. I was like, it's light, they put light in there. And it kills! It kills all the bad stuff.
Brandon Faust (0:42:15.184)
So, again, there's truth in it, for sure, 100%, but it's also what are the limitations of that technology. So, you have whole home purifiers that can plug into the box, which is called a plenum. So you can basically insert one of these purifiers. There's different technology that goes along with it. There's UV aspect of it. There's ionization technology, some of them have ozone, although I don't particularly recommend having a continual ozone exposure, but you can get these different technologies and add-ons, as you call them, put into your furnace or the plenum box.
So in the book that you talked about, it's moldebook.com, and that's a book that I wrote after going through 3500 homes and it basically has 15 action tips in that particular book, it goes over the sort of the setup which I would recommend when it comes to your air handler. And it's actually Chapter Three, Achieve Fresh Air Through Filters: UV Lights and Purifiers. And it goes over what would be a good setup. So I recommend a sort of a multi-facet approach on purifying your air conditioner.
So a UV light on the blower wheel and potentially one on the coils. So they look like lightsabers when they're on, but I highly recommend you not look at them. You can look at a photo of it, but the UV will burn your eyes.
So it goes on, you have it on the blower wheel, and then a UV light on the coils, and then the purifier in the actual box on top. So those things work in conjunction to ensure that your air quality is kept clean. But let's say you have an HVAC that is already infiltrated and infested, it's not going to handle that situation. It's like taking a slingshot to a battleship. It's not going to solve all the problems. It's not a silver bullet.
Ashley James (0:44:25.890)
So it's more for prevention, but if you already have an infestation, you need to take more specific actions to clean out the infestation.
Brandon Faust (0:44:34.372)
That's correct. Because when it comes to mold, the solution is always first and foremost, removal. You want to remove the mold from the contaminated material. And in most cases, you want to remove the contaminated material. So there is a difference between mold removal and mold remediation. So the technical difference is when you're remediating, you are removing the contaminated material itself. And in some cases, you can get away with mold removal where you're actually like vacuuming up the mold from the surface. So let's say it's a non-porous surface like glass or metal. You can get away with cleaning it and removing the mold from that particular item.
Ashley James (0:45:25.984)
So something that mold is growing on top of, but not growing roots into.
Brandon Faust (0:45:29.520)
Correct, that's exactly right. And that's a big difference because if it's porous, the roots can get deep into the material and in a lot of ways, that's very difficult to actually fully handle because the roots are now in the item itself. So that's where in many cases, if you're dealing with colonized growth on like a sofa or an item that is porous, shoes, purses, things along those lines. You don't really want to take chances with it. And I always recommend throwing it out. So similar to that with the HVAC system, the best solution is always going to be actually removing and replacing the contaminated material. The only problem with that is that's a pretty expensive endeavor. So when you're talking about replacing all the ducts and replacing the HVAC system itself, that could be 20 grand.
It's a massive expense and some people are not in a position to do that. So what I would recommend at that point is doing a deep cleaning or a remediation of the actual HVAC system itself, where you're actually like taking the blower wheel out and removing the mold from the blower wheel, cleaning the coils, cleaning the plenum box. And in some cases you can't clean it, especially if it's porous fiberglass duct board. You can't brush that because it's going to make a bigger problem with the fiberglass and disturbing that. So what we do instead, if we're not able to replace it, is we encapsulate it with a fiberlock antimicrobial paint after we've treated the mold itself. So we do a lot to try to actually break down or kill the mold, then we encapsulate it with a antifungal fiberlock paint.
And then if it's flex duct, which looks like that, almost like an accordion. Metal is always the easiest to clean. The flex duct is hard to clean, and the duct board itself is pretty much, you cannot clean it if that's what's running through your ceiling. So you can only encapsulate it. So it's not ideal for sure. But when we do the duct cleaning, end of it, we run a brush through the ducts and then we sanitize the ducts. And then a key element when you're doing any sort of duct cleaning is also doing a whole home sanitization. Because if you've had mold in your ducts and you've now disturbed it and agitated and it's a living, breathing organism. And that's, I think, one of the most crucial things to understand when you're talking about mold is it is a living, breathing organism that does want to survive. So when you attack it or you agitate it, you actually are putting it into defense mode and hyper replication mode. So it's going to shoot off more spores and more mycotoxins to defend its territory, to defend itself, and to also make sure that it as a species does not die off. So it sends off little babies, which are the spores, and you have almost like a mold explosion that takes place.
So you really, if you're going to do the duct cleaning, you should have it for sure where it's under like a negative air. You can also call that like a massive vacuum, where you have a vacuum system outside with a massive ability for suction, pulling that dirty contaminated air, but even that is not absolute. So you might want to have like a HEPA filters, placed around the home, helping to catch those little microscopic particles, and then doing a whole home sanitization where you fill the entire volume of the home with a product that helps to break down and almost like dissolve or disintegrate mold spores and mycotoxins. So we call that a dry fog, and there's certain companies that do it and do it extremely well. So you want to find a company that knows how to do that.
Ashley James (0:49:47.199)
I want to bring something up, but I just want to say, I'm sorry if I mentioned a competitor of yours. I interviewed, just to be polite, I interviewed Green Home Solutions. I don't know if you guys are friends or if you guys are competitors, but I interviewed them and I thought their whole system was really interesting that they have an enzyme that digests the mold.
I hope you guys are friends and I didn't just mention a competitor of yours, but it sounds like you guys do similar things.
Brandon Faust (0:50:22.877)
Honestly, I've heard of Green Home Solutions and I think that one of the things that I admire, I don't look at it as competition, right? Because there's not enough of us that are doing it the right way. And as long as they are getting a great result and they're creating safe and healthy homes, then fantastic, because there's not enough of the remediation industry that has that as the end result and what they're going for because you have medical clinics that are more inclined to treat what insurance is going to cover versus medical clinics that are more inclined to treat and not even treat but locate, find, and remove the cause, they're looking for root cause.
So if you have a clinic that is operating on finding the actual root cause and trying to handle that, then that's your colleague, that's your brother in arms, it's somebody that is trying to accomplish the same goal, which is making people truly healthy.
So it's a colleague, somebody that you can talk to, it's a contemporary, it's somebody that you can bounce ideas off of. And that's really, for me, anybody that's in the industry that is going for addressing the holistic side of health for the home is the type of person that I want to actually associate with and talk with and discuss best practices, because that's really the end goal, is to make homes as safe and healthy as possible.
So if somebody knows how to do it, better than I or I can learn from, then great. And I think that Green Home Solutions is one of the ones that is doing it correctly.
Ashley James (0:52:19.367)
Well, they didn't talk specifically about the HVAC system, but I really appreciate they say that, well, the first thing is finding out what caused the mold. Like, is it the vapor barrier isn't correct? So I'm sure you do this too. You're looking for, well, why did this happen? Like, yes, we have spores in our environment. And yes, mold is natural because vegetation is supposed to be broken down and we do unnatural things to prevent our homes from breaking down because most homes are made of porous material that some of it comes from nature like trees.
I want to talk about this too with you, there's a certain environment that you can create within a home and it doesn't matter if it's the Pacific Northwest or Florida or Nevada desert, we got to create airflow and make sure the humidity is in check and make sure that the whole home has good airflow, right? Because you don't want like something getting trapped in the basement or in the crawlspace underneath or the crawlspace above. And so again, this is not my area of expertise, but my understanding is if you have healthy circulation and you have healthy throughout the whole house and you don't have any moisture building up anywhere, you are more likely to prevent mold.
So I do want to talk about mold prevention with you, but before we do that, because it's still on my mind, can you warn us, like without calling out any specific company, can you warn us on like, what are the red flags when we're hiring a mold mitigation or mold removal company? What are the red flags that just, you want to run the opposite way? So like if they're come out with their bottle of like, bleach in a spray bottle, like, run the other way! What are the things you've heard of that you in this industry that are just really, really bad, bad practices that we should be aware of?
Brandon Faust (0:54:30.261)
Well, I think the first and most important thing is proper containment, because if you're going to be doing any sort of remediation, you need to prevent that area of exposure from cross-contaminating the rest of the building envelope. And although there is the potential of there already being some sort of cross-contamination.
I'll just talk about a job that I recently did. So, a friend of mine, her father, we had done work on her house. She was pregnant at the time and had a baby on the way. So she was pregnant and had a young baby. So her daughter, I think, was a year and a half. But they had been chronically sick. They didn't know what was causing it. And she asked me to come take a look. And sure enough, there was infestation in her HVAC. And we handled it. And it completely handled her breathing issues and the sickness immediately. Her story was phenomenal. And it gave me a lot of pride. I felt good, let's put it that way, of being able to help a friend of mine who was sick.
So she recommended my company to her dad, who was not doing well and had just kind of hired another company to come handle his mold problem. So when I walked into the house, there was a little bit of a musty smell, and then I got to the master bedroom and it was like Mike Tyson punching you in the face.
So it was so strong. And then I looked at what was occurring, and they basically had put fans on the wall where the mold was located. And they didn't build proper containment. So number one, first thing, you don't put fans on mold. Number two, you always build containment to section off that area of the home. So those are red flags.
And the result of that was, he is still not doing well. He had a massive migraine, headache, brain fog, and he's 92 years old, although he's doing incredibly well for 92. This was something that really set him back. So it's important to know that the actions that you're taking could result in somebody getting sick. And that's something that I would absolutely be making sure is in place if you're going to hire a mold remediation company is that they understand the health aspect of mold. They understand what mycotoxins are. They understand what that means to the health end of it.
So when it comes to insurance, you have sometimes preferred vendors that work for the insurance companies, but they don't necessarily work out deals where the preferred vendor may get less money. So unfortunately, that could result in them taking actions that are less detailed. And when that occurs or they're potentially cutting corners, the person that is not a benefactor at all is the homeowner. They're the ones that are getting negatively impacted by a cut corner.
So, what are the things that you look for? Somebody who has great reviews, that understands the health end of mold, that they know what mycotoxins are. They may be difficult to find, but that they also are not testing their own jobs pre and post. I would always get an independent inspector as long as they really knew what they were doing to come and check what are the levels of the home and then be able to cross check, did the remediator accomplish the goal of getting this home as free and clear as possible?
So there's a whole topic of testing that is a whole subject and topic in itself, but you want somebody who is not just going in, finding that there's a big situation and then charging a huge amount of money, because maybe the results get skewed.
So now at the end of the day, if you have somebody who has a moral compass and is doing it for the right reasons, you really shouldn't have to worry about that, but sometimes it does occur. So just to have sort of checks and balances, I would recommend having an independent inspector do the testing and then write a protocol. But also that goes hand in hand with finding an inspector that really knows what they're doing. They know where to look.
They know what to look for. They're using not just air samples, but they're using direct samples. And ideally, if you have a high-end inspector, you have somebody who's doing like VOC testing, they're doing bacterial testing, they're doing mycotoxin testing, they're doing air samples, they're doing direct samples. And they are building an indoor air quality profile on the home. Now, with that said, that can be a pricey endeavor.
So, there are sometimes ways of doing a thorough job, maybe not as thorough, but still a thorough job at a much more economical rate. So for listeners that are like, wow, that sounds intense, they could go with like Immunolytics, which does almost like Petri dishes, and they do Petri dishes, and you put them in different areas of the home, and as long as you follow the instructions, you can get some concept of the levels that are in your home. And that may be your first step.
There's also like mymolddetective.com where you can do some of your own testing and they give you cassettes, , and doing swabs. You can do some of the swabs and send them to a lab. So there's like different screening partnerships that you can do with people as well. Like I offer that system to some of the people that call me up that are at a distance that they want me to consult them on a project and they're not necessarily wanting to pay a huge amount of money for one of the top tier testers. Because a mom on a mission is sometimes your absolute best inspector, because she's going to overturn every possible place that there could be mold, right? And you want to make sure that what you're looking at is actually mold. So I had a friend of mine who's an actual nutritional health coach and she was talking to me about all the mold that she had in her home. And she was close by, so I said, well, let me come and take a look, see what's going on. And it turned out that what she thought was mold was white rims around her plants, but that was actually efforescence. It wasn't actually microbial growth. So it was just a salt material that was coming through the clay that she had her plants in.
So sometimes you may think something is mold and it's actually not. And that's why testing it is so important. So back to this point on the red flags, if they are putting fans on mold or talking about putting fans on mold, that's number one. If they're not talking about locating the source and locating where it's actually coming from, that's number two. If they're talking about just sanitizing or fogging the home and they're not doing the actual locating of the problem in itself and not looking for the actual mold growth itself, that's number three.
Having somebody that is not understanding of the actual health ramifications and doesn't know what a mycotoxin is and doesn't understand the actual topic, like that's probably number four. So and then somebody who's not, somebody who's trying to test and clear their own mole jobs is number five. So I probably could make a whole list, but I think that probably gives you a concept to start with.
Ashley James (1:02:37.591)
That's a good list. Yes, those are the red flags we've got to look for and then run the other way. I have an interview with a woman in Florida, actually. I think, pretty sure it's Florida. It was a few years ago. I mean, if you type mold into my website, learntruehealth.com you'll find this interview and she's a holistic health coach. And they had mold in their bathroom.
And the first company that came in, which was one that now, after hearing this, she would have run the other way and found a better company, found moldsolutions.com to help her. But the company she found, or maybe I think actually I think it was the company that her insurance was going to cover, they had mold in their bathroom. So they put up a vapor barrier around the door of the bathroom while they're doing whatever mitigation. But there's a fan, like exhaust for the bathroom and they had it on, they're thinking it goes to the outside, but they didn't do any crawling around the space. Like if they had gone up into the crawl space and the attic, they would have identified that whoever built this house was high as a kite because the exhaust does not for the baths. Like so when you're taking a shower, the exhaust does not go outside. The exhaust blue into between the walls and was coming out into the living room. And so she was with her kids in the living room while they're doing mold remediation in the bathroom. And they start feeling sick and sicker and sicker and they're getting dizzy. And it's, it's because everything was just blasting into the living room. So they ended up having to live in a motel for a while, while they found a better company.
And that was just massive problems with home insurance and stuff like that to get a different company. And then the new company figured out what was going on and fixed everything. But she had chewed that, her and her family was sick from it. Now, sometimes one family member gets really sick and the other ones don't. And it's hard to say, okay, this is mold in the home. Cause we've got different genetics, we have different loads in terms of stressors, right? So stress load, emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, whatever your stressor is. Maybe you have a histamine problem, maybe you have MTHFR, and you're just you're not as good at detoxing, right? So I've often heard this well like, I get really sick when I'm near mold, but my husband he could roll in it, he can roll in it and be fine. So it's not always the case where the whole family gets sick or presents differently. Like asthma in one person, sleep problems in the other, a third family member could always have a runny nose, dark circles under the eyes. Another one could have immune problems or skin problems. They could present with different symptoms. So we don't always present with the same symptoms, which is really, we have to be aware of the fact that if you have if people in your household have chronic issues, this is not because of your age, your genetics, your ethnicity. Everyone could be having the same external stressor, but it's presenting differently because of how our body works. Everyone's unique.
So that's just something to consider because I think there's so many listeners who can't figure out, why is my scalp itchy or why do my hands swell or why is my son have asthma. And they keep taking supplements and doing microbiome tests or just doing lab tests or going to holistic doctors. They can't quite figure it out. It might be the air quality in your home.
Brandon Faust (1:06:45.982)
100% and the point that you just talked about where there's potentially a genetic predeposition to mold or in actual fact it's the inability to detox at the same speed as others, right? And I believe if memory serves me it's the HLA DR gene where those people that are exposed to it is like 20 to 25% of the population that are going to have more of an issue than others.
Now that doesn't mean that, let's say you have a perfectly well individual who does not have that gene mutation. If they walk into a moldy home, they still could have an acute reaction, but the person that has this particular gene issue may actually have a much more difficult time detoxing and it may stick with them that much longer.
So I've seen that so many families, I can't even tell you, where one person is sick and it almost seems like they're being told it's in your head, you're crazy or whatever, right? And it turns out, no, in actual fact, they really do have an issue in that once you get the mold out of the home, they get better.
Ashley James (1:08:03.188)
Can you run down the list of here's your sign. If you hear a symptom, you think we got to check mold. Can you run down the list of all the symptoms?
Brandon Faust (1:08:17.136)
There's the respiratory issues, there's the allergic reactions, the hives, headaches, fatigue, skin irritation, even like neurological systems, difficulty concentrating, memory loss, dizziness, brain fog, there can be joint pain and inflammation that goes with that. But some of it is even like mental health issues, like anxiety, depression, sudden mood swings.
You can have nausea, vomiting. Some listeners have probably heard of mass cell activation syndrome or chronic inflammation response syndrome. So when you take a mold spore and you're inhaling it, it's a foreign invader into the body. So similar to like when you get bit by a mosquito or stung by a bee, what tends to happen?
You can get a swelling or an inflammation of that particular area. It gets itchy. And it's a similar thing. You're taking in this foreign invader and the body can have that same sort of histamine release. Where you now are experiencing this inflammation or pain or itchiness or what not. But the mycotoxins are different than the mold spores. They're an ultra fine particle.
So, the unfortunate part with the mycotoxins is they tend to be fatty in substance, so there's a natural affinity to the fattiest part of the body, which is the brain. So there is the interruption of communication in terms of the nervous system as well. So some of these things are more long-term. And again, I'm not a health practitioner. I've just interviewed a lot of the professionals in the area in terms of the impact that mold can have on the body. Mosaic Diagnostics, they are doing a mycotoxin panel and an oats panel But their mycotoxin profile it shows what different mycotoxins have been linked to which physical issues So you have like Alzheimer's? Parkinson's dementia and even a carcinogenic aspect of mold toxicity.
If you look at Dr. Jill Carnahan, she was talking about one of the things that they're finding in tumors, cancer is a fungus. So I think that it's one of these subjects that there's so many different potential ramifications. It's hard to pinpoint one, but there's no question that the exposure to mold, mold spores and mycotoxins it’s not good. That's why I tell people there's no mold that's a good mold to have in your home. So, if somebody tells you oh, that's not a mold that's concerning. It's no big deal that's a huge red flag, especially if there's somebody in the Industry is considered to be a professional.
Ashley James (1:11:29.587)
Got it. Yes, it's okay that you're not a doctor. You've been around this so long. You're sharing from your experience and we're here to listen. After 3,500 homes, you've heard, 3,500 stories of how mold has impacted people's lives and how removing it has helped their lives. So you're an expert. You don't have a degree. You're not medically treating anyone, but you're bringing your plethora of knowledge and experience to show like it's without a doubt removing mold from someone's home makes a huge difference to the quality of the life of everyone in that home and even people who visit that home because like even visiting someone's home with mold has an impact on you for a few days like we really need to take this seriously.
I told you about this off air, but I interviewed Andrew Pace, who's like a world leading expert on non-toxic home materials. And we talked about why is it that some homes are prone to mold? And it's because of the quote unquote green practices of making homes more energy efficient. In doing so, they forgot that we need to have constant circulation and get the moisture out. And so these newer homes are actually mold manufacturing, like they're just mold factories because they're more green, especially like up in the North where we need it to be warmer. Like when it's cold in the winter, we need to keep the house warm. So they've sealed it off and there's not enough circulation.
And then he talked about how certain states have had to go in and implement a law that in building, they have to provide this ventilation so it doesn't create mold. But that still doesn't help you if you happen to buy a home that was built during the time when they weren't making homes drafty, right?
If you buy a hundred year old home it’s better than a 20-year old home in some cases, because 100-year old homes are going to be drafty. And that is kind of like natural mold prevention. But it's a little hard to heat. But it's back then we heated with fire, which is it's drying for the house. And then the whole home was kind of drafty. So we might have had mold like less 100 years ago than we do now. It's just funny to think you think everything's getting better. But in some cases, we made it worse.
Brandon Faust (1:14:11.699)
Well, that's absolutely correct in that ventilation is such a crucial element to making sure that your air quality is excellent because when you think about it to your point, you're never going to live your best life. You're never going to have the best quality of life if your air quality is subpar. It's just not possible. It's one of those things, that in order to live your best life, you need to have clean food clean water and clean air. It's just part of your overall health. And if any one of those are contaminated, there's going to be a much higher chance for illness, for disease, for sickness. So, when you get to sort of what is the actual cause of these problems? Why is mold now all of a sudden becoming a big issue where 40 years ago it wasn't? Well, it may have been an issue 40 years ago and people just didn’t know what it was and now more and more people are starting to realize that it is an actual cause, it is a situation, but there also is a point that just like you're talking about these energy efficient homes that are more airtight. It is like putting that car in a garage and sealing it up. And if there isn't that cross flow of fresh air or ventilation, it can be really bad for the people that are living in that particular building envelope.
So there's another factor, which a lot of times, there's a couple factors, but one of them is the lumber or the timber itself that the homes are being built with. So that old timber, the actual makeup of that wood was much tighter, it was much stronger, and it had an antimicrobial factor in itself, where the new lumber is far more cellulose. That young lumber is something that mold tends to feed off of. And then not only that, there's some of these composite materials that have more glue in the material. And that's also going to be more prone to microbial growth because mold loves anything that is organic. Paper, wood, leather, so it will feed off of it. So if you have glue in the material, and it's a composite material that's also wood or paper or like drywall which also has a paper on it, yes mold's going to love that. So and if you look at the building material that many homes used to have, plaster, the acidic nature of plaster it was at a different level on the pH scale and mold actually does not like plaster for that reason alone.
So, there are certain materials that we build with now that are far more prone to mold exposure. And then there's another element that is one of these ones that many people will not think with or not thinking with at all, which is the EMF exposure. So you have the electromagnetic frequency and electromagnetic fields. So that output is something that actually is disturbing to colonize mold so it makes it replicate faster. There was a study that is, go ahead.
Ashley James (1:17:35.883)
Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. This is huge. My mind is exploding. Are you saying that electronics like electromagnetic field, which is basically of wires in your home, you have a cell phone, you have a wireless printer, you have wifi, you have a smart TV, you have a microwave, it's like crack to mold and it increases the strength and the growth of the mold.
Brandon Faust (1:18:06.668)
That's exactly right. Yes.
Ashley James (1:18:10.080)
So I was right. So like if we had a house a hundred years ago, we would have less mold problems than we do now. That is crazy. So you're saying that modern building materials, more recent changes, are like just feed mold. The mold loves to eat it. The more wireless we get, the more mold loves it. Just wants to come and digest our house. This is insane.
Brandon Faust (1:18:40.470)
Well, you're agitating it, right? That's what's occurring. So if there's an interview from a doctor in Europe, Dr. Klinghardt.
Ashley James (1:18:48.696)
I've had him on my show. He's great. I love Dr. Klinghardt. I had him on my show. Sorry.
Brandon Faust (1:18:50.665)
That interview is all about EMF and what that can do. And the actual frequency, like that EMF exposure, there is a connection between EMF and mold and that it grows 600 times faster. So he had one of those, Faraday cages, right, that was protecting one set of books and another set of books that didn't have it.
So that exposure set it off and it grew and was put that much more toxic. So yes, it is an issue. Look, that sounds kind of way out there, but based on my understanding of mold, and if you just think about it, mold is so sensitive that if there's another mold in its territory, it puts out more mycotoxins. So mold is very territorial. So if you look at like a Petri dish that has two different types of mold in the Petri dish, you will see a distinct dividing line between the two molds until the one that is stronger starts to get more and more of its spores into the other territory and then it starts feeding off the other mold. But it actually, the whole point of mycotoxins is to prevent other molds from encroaching on its territory. So it literally is like gang warfare in the Petri dish.
So if you have something that is sitting there and agitating and disturbing the mold, like the EMF waves, you can actually set it off where it's growing that much faster.
Ashley James (1:20:29.889)
That's just wild. Okay. I want to address the subject of home remediation, home mold killing. So people go, oh, there's mold in my bathroom. I'm going to spray it with whatever, like, hydrogen peroxide. I'm going to spray it with bleach. I'm going to go on Amazon and buy something that says it kills mold.
What are your thoughts on this? Because I have never seen it actually work. And from my understanding, does more harm than good. But so many people think that they can just buy something on the shelves and then take care of it themselves.
Brandon Faust (1:21:12.167)
Well, it goes back to this point of mold being a living, breathing organism. It doesn’t matter what product you use. Look, bleach has its own toxic element, which I strongly don't recommend using. It's going to take the color out of it, but it's also going to add more toxins to the home. But even if you're using something that I appreciate and I like a lot as a product, whether it's a concentrated vinegar or hydrogen peroxide or in some cases, let's say you're using thyme oil as an antimicrobial, any of those products are going to create an agitating effect.
So like if you've ever had mold in the shower and you hit it with this product and you go to scrub it away and you come back three weeks later, four weeks later, and now it's in places that it wasn't before, like why is that?
Well, you've just agitated it and now spread the spores and now they've had a chance to germinate and grow and they're starting to colonize and spread their roots. So you've basically helped to transport it. Same type of thing if you have mold on the ceiling of a particular area and you just hit it with a product and go and wipe it down, you've just aerosolized those mold spores. Not to mention, set it off in terms of producing more mycotoxins. So that's why it's so important that when you're doing mold remediation or mold removal, that you are cutting out the contaminated material in a way where you're removing the actual source itself. And the less agitating, the better. So when you have like a general contractor that tends to really think mold is no big deal, it's like a very common theme amongst general contractors. They just go and smash it, tear it out, and rebuild it and call it a day. Well, they didn't.
Maybe they thought they were doing a good thing by tearing it out, and to some degree, that is the right thing to do, but that tear out action is basically like setting off a bomb on a mushroom. What's going to happen? You're going to like, the spore explosion is now going to spread those little babies to other areas of the home. So you want to do it as delicately as possible.
Ashley James (1:23:25.321)
Exactly. What are your main tips for preventing mold in the first place?
Brandon Faust (1:23:31.797)
The most important element of all is that your home is clean and dry and proper ventilation. Those are the most basic sort of advice I could give to prevent mold. It's keep your home as clean and dry as possible. So, now dry as possible, maybe let me rephrase that. You don't want your relative humidity to at 60% relative humidity, mold will start to grow.
So now you also have to keep in mind that, for example, we have a higher RH every day in our bathrooms. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to have mold growth, but you have to dry it out. And I always, always recommend having like a fan go on to help dry the air in the bathroom because I can't tell you how many homes I've been in where there's been mold on the ceiling and they hit it with bleach and scrubbed it and it keeps coming back and they don't know why. Well the reason why is that they don't have proper ventilation, they don't have a fan, the humidity stays high and then the mold starts growing and then they make it worse by scrubbing it down. So having a dehumidifier on hand if your home continues to have like over 60% relative humidity is not a bad idea making sure that your HVAC unit is properly calibrated ensuring that you do not have an overgrowth of mold in your HVAC.
Definitely, when you're dealing with HVAC professionals, a lot of them like in Florida an HVAC guy, it's actually against the law for them to say that they handle mold. They cannot say that they handle mold. So they won't even call it mold. So the only person that can handle mold is somebody who's got a mold license. And ironically, a mold guy cannot go into an HVAC unit, per law. Yes, they are against, it is against the law for them to go into an HVAC unit.
Ashley James (1:25:44.655)
Wait, so hold on, hold on, okay. So you have mold in your HVAC, but HVAC professionals can't treat mold, and mold professionals can't treat HVAC. How is that? Does that even make sense?
Brandon Faust (1:25:57.391)
Welcome to Florida. So this is a huge issue. And the only way I was able to get around it was getting a license for both. Because for me, the air quality is so crucial and that HVAC unit plays such an important role in your air quality that as a mold guy, if I was not properly addressing that, I was not fully solving the problem for my clients.
So in some states that may not be the case, but it is the case here in Florida. So, when I'm seeing mold growth on the ceiling of a bathroom or in the grout, the first place I'm going to is actually the HVAC, believe it or not, because that's where it's actually coming from. That's the source is in that plenum box and it's now spreading and finding places to grow where it's wet. So mold loves water, and that is back to my point that if you want to prevent mold, it is keep your home as clean and dry and properly ventilated as possible.
So one of the places it will find mold that often gets underlooked or overlooked is the behind paintings or behind photographs. And, for the snowbirds that go out of town, they come home and they see a little bit of mold and we start moving paintings or pictures off the wall and it's covered in mold behind those paintings. Why? Because it's dark, it's damp, and there's not a lot of ventilation. There's not a lot of airflow behind them. So thinking with that in terms of having proper airflow, and that's why it's so important that you have your fans on. And if you look at tropical areas, that's one of the things that fans do, is that they circulate the air. We've had homes where they have a vaulted ceiling, and they're 12 feet high or 13 feet high or 15 feet high, and there's a ton of microbial growth at the top of that vaulted ceiling, and they're trying to figure out why.
Well, the reason why is because hot air rises, and your central heating and air, the vents are at like eight feet. So there's this space that there's no airflow. And of course, it's just staying there. So it's that hot, humid air is lingering. And once you get the mold starting to grow, it grows faster and faster, similar to like a pool with algae in it. Like once it starts turning a little bit green, if you don't jump on that fast, right?
It's going to get greener and greener and be much more difficult to handle. So that's why the prevention is so important. That's why this book, The Mold-Free Living, How to Prevent Mold in Humid Climates, that's the book that your listeners can download at moldebook.com. It goes over each of these points. It really was developed to create an action plan to prevent it in the first place because it's so much less expensive to prevent it than having to deal with it once it's overtaken your home. So we've seen these snowbirds that do come back and literally everything, similar to your friend's car. Imagine walking home to that. Walking, you've been gone for four, five months, you come home and that's what you're seeing, is a white-green growth over every item. And I can't tell you how many times I've seen that here.
Ashley James (1:29:48.279)
So I love that you give us a free book. Thank you. I joke about how like our bodies didn't come with a manual. Like God didn't say, welcome to the world. Here's how your body functions and here's how life works. Well, we're here to discover. We're here to learn. Unfortunately, we learn more lessons from our mistakes. But let's learn from other people's mistakes. And that's why I love hearing stories, because let's just learn from other people's mistakes. I'd rather not have to live through everything. It's funny.
My son, I can't wait to see the man he becomes, because he's so intelligent like, he observes things that blow my mind. And he is very communicative and he is a negotiator. I did not sit down and go, here's how you knew. He's a shrewd negotiator. I think there's some kind of DNA memory passed down because he is like a carbon copy of my dad. He's like a salesman, but in the most beautiful way. He's so great. When I see him communicate, I'm really impressed with that. He observes things that I cannot believe what I learned from him, but he's one of those personalities that he has to learn by doing. You could say, don't touch the stove, it's hot. You could say that to him a million times. He's got to burn himself to learn the lesson. And there's just certain people out there that they have to learn by going through the bad experience. I hope that by saying this, I can warn every listener. Let's not wait until you have mold problems and health problems because of the mold. Let's not wait. Let's not be one of those people that has to learn firsthand from your own personal life problems. Let's learn from the 3,500 homes that Brandon has worked on. And those are families. Those are 3,500 families, right, that you've helped.
And those are lessons that we can learn. So let's learn from other people's really negative and sometimes the darkest moments in their lives. Cause it is not just a weekend like, oh, let's get rid of the mold this weekend. Okay. I'll go to Disney world or whatever Disneyland or whatever. And I see Universal Studios. I'm going to go to Universal Studios in Orlando and I'll be back. And then my house will be done. It's usually six months to a year or more of health problems
before figuring it out and then talk insurance, testing, dealing with insurance, finding a good company, then you're on the wait list for the company and then finally they're doing the work and it could be weeks and weeks of work.
One of my guests who I've had on the show twice, Trina Hammack and it's a great interview. The first interview she gave was about how they bought a house in California and they moved in and she proceeded to get so sick because the house had hidden mold that she had to buy a tent and for six months she lived in a tent. Can you imagine having to pay a mortgage but you're like you're homeless? She could not enter the house. She got so sick but all her belongings were now covered in mold spores until she found this. That's how I learned about Green Home Solutions because they came in and they removed all the mold and then they sprayed the enzyme that breaks it down and everything.
Then it took her six months. So for her, it was six months before she could enter her home again, because that's how long it took for her to find the company. But mold problems, when you have it, isn't just like get rid of it in a weekend. And it's health problems that could last for months or years. So let's learn from Brandon and all the past experiences. Let's prevent it. So let's get the free book. So that's moldebook.com. Let's get the free book and learn.
This is the manual. You should print it out, give it to your friends. This is the manual that all our homes should have come with. This is the manual that, real estate agents should give this ebook to their clients. Because it's like, we weren't born with these manuals, but like, let's learn from the past. Let's learn from the experiences of others. And that is the manual that houses should come with.
And builders should have it, contractors, real estate agents should have this, should go by these tips and also teach them to their clients. I think that would really go far to have a real estate agent hand this to people and make them aware. And that would really give them credit. So that's a free book. So thank you for gifting that to us. Now you have a course that you created and it is less than $40, which so worth it. Tell us about your Healthy Home Guide Course and that is found on your website moldsolutions.com
Brandon Faust (1:34:48.988)
Correct, so it's moldsolutions.com/healthyhomeguide. And it gets into the importance of air quality and what are some of the products that you could be using in your home that are also going to be a lot safer and for cleaning and products that are effective but are not having that same chemical makeup that could expose us to various VOCs. But also how to keep the home clean and dry because at the end of the day that's what causes the trouble. So that's the healthy home guide is basically that sort of experience of what products to use to keep the home as clean and healthy as possible.
So yes, there's the free download and then there's the course aspect of it as well. So it's about two and a half hours. You go at your own pace, of course, but I, it's definitely eye opening in regards to really what products to use and how to keep your your indoor air quality in your home as safe as possible.
Ashley James (1:35:50.866)
So those are both for like prevention. If someone suspects mold in their house, would they also benefit from that course?
Brandon Faust (1:35:58.402)
Of course, because at the end of the day, if it's there, you have to handle it and you have to handle it the right way. So I do not consider mold to be a do it yourself project, really. And even with people that are certified and professional, it's still the wild west. It's still something that you have to really vet your people.
And another resource that I like to talk about that is a free resource is a Facebook group called Mold and Toxins Healing Your Home and Body. In this Facebook group, it's got probably 25,000 people in it at this point in time. It's pretty big, but the lady who started it, she is not a professional remediator, but she ended up taking the same class that I took. So there's only about 50 of us nationwide that have done this class. You would have thought it would have been a lot more, but it really, this kind of goes to show that the number of remediators that really are taking this to heart and taking it seriously, it's not that much because I can tell you there's 50 mold remediation companies and, Pinellas County alone where I'm located, but nationwide there's not even 50 that have done the course on remediation for sensitized individuals. So this is a course that was put together by the president of the National Organization for Remediators and Mold Inspectors in partnership with a fellow by the name of Michael Pinto, who's an absolute genius when it comes to proper remediation. So they did this certification for remediation for sensitized individuals.
And the lady, Kendra, who runs the mold and toxins healing your home and body, that group, although not a professional remediator, really knows her stuff and has put together a ton of free resources for somebody to make sure that if they do have mold, how do you properly handle it? How do you vet the company? How do you vet the mold inspector? What are your options?
And I think that it's an infinitely valuable place to go if you're wondering like, okay, how do I prevent mold? And then if I have it, how do I get rid of it? And how do I find the right company, the right inspector, and the right team to really ensure that my home is free and clear as possible from mold and its byproducts?
Ashley James (1:38:47.104)
Nice. So tell us, because obviously listeners are all around the world, but if they happen to be in Florida, what areas do you serve?
Brandon Faust (1:38:55.510)
So we really primarily focus on the greater Tampa Bay area. So of course, Tampa, Clearwater, Sarasota, we'll go as far south as Sarasota, but I've gone all the way down to Miami for a remediation project. Just depending on the scenario, depending on the situation, we have a lot of some of the best clinics, really in my opinion, some of the best clinics in the world for treating mold toxicity here in the, Pinellas County, Tampa Bay area. So a lot of times they have people that fly in and we have flown out to homes to help them with their mold issues.
So, it just kind of really depends on the scenario but you want somebody who really does know their stuff and is going to do a very, very thorough job, especially when it comes to anything like if you're mold sensitive and it's debilitating, you have to have to have the right team working together to get your home up to a point where it is free and clear. Now, that same level might not be necessary for everybody. But at the same time, I would not underestimate the impact that mold can have.
Even if it doesn't seem like you're impacted or your family is impacted, there's still potentially long-term problems that can result from mold exposure. So you also really need to think with that as well.
Ashley James (1:40:30.988)
How do you know you have mold? What would you say are the early, early warning signs? Besides like, wow, what's that black stuff on the wall? Like what are the early warning signs? Like headaches for me are a big thing. I guess the smell of what people call mildew or it's musky. I'm sorry, that's mold. So if you think something smells musky or mildewy, that's mold. But what early warning signs that we don't necessarily realize early warning signs.
Brandon Faust (1:41:04.866)
Well, let's say you're starting to wake up with joint pain and you're not used to that. Even if you are 65 or whatever, if you didn't have these environmental triggers, how long could we live? How good could you feel if you weren't overloaded with toxins? So, I would say you have to really know yourself and know your body and what are the non-optimum sensations that are starting to take place and there's no real explanation as to why that is. Because that's really what's taking place is there is some sort of an allergic reaction, and in some cases it's similar to a poisonous reaction, like if you get bit by a snake, you can definitely tell the pain of getting bitten, but then there's a poison going through your body.
So that's the type of thing that you have to be aware of, is that you could be exposed to a poison. And if there's a rapid degeneration, or there's a rapid decline, that's something that I would absolutely be looking to, an environmental trigger. Or let's say you are in your home, you're feeling one way, you go on vacation and you're in a different place and your body is starting to feel better and it's starting to recover, and then you come back home and now all of a sudden you're not feeling well again.
Well, that's another massive sign. So, of course, there's the visual aspect of it and knowing what to look for in terms of the pattern. A lot of people, when they see the beginning stages of mold, they say it looks like little mold spores, right? They call it, oh, look at those spores. Well, if you're seeing mold you're not looking at spores you're seeing the beginning stages of colonization or germination. A mold spore is seven microns. The human hair is seventy microns.
Ashley James (1:43:09.449)
Yes, you're not seeing spores. But you're inhaling them and they're getting into your bloodstream, they're getting into your brain, like that's mycotoxins. If you're breathing in spores, that's unhealthy.
Brandon Faust (1:43:24.731)
So the mycotoxins are 0.1 micron. So you literally could fit 700 of those on the tip of a human hair. So you're absolutely not going to see them. And that's why I'm such an advocate of, air sampling is a very small slice of the pie when it comes to building an indoor air quality profile, because the current system for testing the air is using a spore trap. So they basically take this little circular device, they put it on a suction pump, and they run it for five minutes, send it to the lab, and the lab tells you whether or not there's elevated levels of mold spores, right, compared to an outside air sample. The problem with that is that they are only collecting spores. They do not collect mycotoxins, and if they do collect them, the microscope doesn't pick up the mycotoxin. It requires something far more sensitive to determine how many mycotoxins are present.
So it is one of those things where it gives you data that can be valuable, especially if it's elevated. If you have like 4,000 aspergillus penicillium in your home, and I really don't care what the outside air sample says. Let's say the outside air sample is 10,000 and you have 4,000 in your home. Somebody might say, well, the 4,000 is not that big a deal because outside is higher. No, if you have that much aspergillus penicillium floating around in your air, it's going to make you sick, it's going to cause reactions, it's not good for you.
So you want to do something to, number one, the source may be outside, but you still need to figure out how to detox your air if it's inside at those levels. But there's other spores where even if there's like one or two, those spores are considered to be of a more toxic variety, but that is a little bit misleading because let's say you do have black mold, which is Stachybotrys, and you have one or two of those spores. That could call for, well we need to locate where it's at and actually properly remediate it. Now the biggest reason why is because that type of mold comes from a water intrusion issue. So there's most likely a leaky pipe. There's most likely some sort of continual water source coming into your home. So you need to find out what the actual water source is for that particular type of mold.
Whereas aspergillus penicillium is what would be referenced as a dry mold, meaning it can form without a continual water source, the water source being the humidity alone.So a wet mold requires a certain moisture content in the material, like 90%, whereas a dry mold can start growing at just 60% relative humidity which is the amount of water droplets that are in the actual air. So a lot easier for it to start growing and contaminating your home.
Ashley James (1:46:26.067)
Yes, and with the fan on in my bathroom, I got it on Amazon years ago and I absolutely love it. I highly recommend everyone get one. It detects humidity in the air and the temperature and I have that in my bathroom and it gets into the 70% and this is with the fan on after a shower. It's in the 70s humidity.
If I didn't turn the fan on, it stays that way all day. Like you turn the fan on before you even turn the shower on and leave it on for a good half an hour or longer after you've had your shower or open the window and leave it open for a while because you want it below 60%, like you said, 60 or lower. You don't want to create the environment in your home for mold. Like, a slow drip under a sink, that could cause black mold where there's a water leak somewhere. But it is more scary to think about those molds that aren't so obvious, right? It's just, you've got an area in your home and it could be a crawl space. It could be the attic that is like moist, warm, and not circulating air. It's just accumulating.
Brandon Faust (1:47:43.803)
Actually, I had a guy, professional golf player, who was sick for over an entire year and was basically not able to function and operate. His game was off and he thought he was just declining at a very rapid rate. So I said, Bob, let me come and check your home and see what's going on. And I got to his master bedroom and started looking around, got a flashlight going, and every surface in his master bedroom was covered with a thin white film. And that's actually Aspergillius at its beginning stages. So he didn't like it cold. He liked it warm. So he didn't turn his AC on and didn't realize that he was basically poisoning himself because of his humidity levels and the amount of microbial growth. He came from the West Coast of Florida and didn't really understand the climate and how much of an impact that it has. So similar to that, like I had another lady that I helped another family, one of the top ranking doctors in all of Florida and I won't say his name, but one of the top ranking doctors in all of Florida and his wife was completely sick, like debilitated sick. Three boys, they had moved to Florida from the West Coast and she was living in an older home and there was something about the home that wasn't sitting right with her, which is probably the HVAC. So, in her nature, she opened up the doors and windows in what she was doing without realizing it was making the problem so much worse because the mold that was there was now getting enough water from the humidity levels outside coming into the home because hot will move to cold, just like wet will move to dry. So depending on your climate, when you open the windows and doors, you might be inviting a bunch of moisture and mold spores into the home.
And then you end up with overgrowth where it's all over everything. So they didn't realize that. So we had to get them out of that house, because they were renting that house at the time, but it actually came from her actions. And not knowing, like it may have started with some of the stuff in the home, but she was exacerbating it by like a hundred times by opening the windows and doors in the summer
It really is so important to understand the climate that you're living in and what will contribute to microbial growth. So when you have the wet mold, yes, that's a water intrusion issue. When you have dry molds, that's a humidity issue. Being able to understand the difference, because if you have a bunch of microbial growth on shoes, purses, clothes, couches, that pretty much tells you it's a humidity-driven mold. Otherwise, why would it be on these different surfaces?
Now, you could also have a little bit of a curve ball where it's because you have let's say you have a pipe that is broken and adding moisture to the environment. So now you have not only a wet mold, but you now have set off a dry mold explosion because of that moisture level remaining high, even though the source may be a broken pipe that's leaking, it's adding to the relative humidity. So that would be kind of the worst case scenario, right? But these are all things that your mold inspector or your mold remediator really should be aware of.
Ashley James (1:51:44.829)
That really blew my mind, the idea that opening the windows can make it worse, just depending on the humidity, because that's my first go-to instinct, like open up the windows, like let the natural air in, hopefully the air quality outside is better than the air quality inside, and let's all air it out. But depending on where you live, that is the worst thing you could do if you have the beginning stages of a mold somewhere in your home.
You got to keep the humidity down. And again, it depends on region and time of year. I remember being in Chicago in the summer once, it was sunny and it was a hundred percent humidity. And I was like, this is insane. It was so muggy. And then again, I was in like August in Orlando and it was beautiful skies and it was a hundred percent humidity, not raining. It's a hundred percent humidity. I'm like, I feel like I'm breathing water. It can get pretty intense.
And then there's areas like Nevada where I used to live and there was carpeting in the bathroom because it's so dry there. Doesn't mean you won't get mold. There's definitely mold everywhere. But you just have to know especially when you're moving from to a new area where you're not you're not used to or you don't know these things. You've got to ask around. You got to learn about how it works in your area. Talk to locals. How do they prevent mold in their homes? What do they do? And I love the idea of just having that simple $20 device that reads the humidity levels so that you can keep watch of it. And maybe you do need to get a dehumidifier. That makes a huge difference. It also raises the electric bill, so you've got to be vigilant to get the fan on whenever you're cooking, whenever you're in the bathroom, anytime there's something that's increasing moisture in your home. Even if you're doing the laundry and it kind of gets moist in the laundry room, turn the fan on, get that out of the house.
Brandon Faust (1:53:46.307)
And let me throw you another little curve ball, right? So putting on the fan is a huge plus point. It's something that you should do, right? It's absolutely a positive. But if you leave it on for too long, it can be detrimental. Why? Because you're actually putting the home under negative air. So if it's properly done, it should be ventilating outside. So if that fan is running too long, and that's where most people don't realize this, that if let's say you're cooking, you put on the vent hood, or you are in the bathroom and you leave it on, you've now created a negative air situation where the air inside is being blown outside, so air needs to be pulled from another location. Well, let's say you have mold behind the walls and you don't know it, then you can bring it into your house. And that's exactly what, that's what happened to me.
When I was in 2019, I had a pain in my chest that would not go away. I had fatigue. I was having a fever at least once a month. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I took an air sample in my master bedroom. It was totally fine. It was clean. I had sanitized my house earlier. The levels looked great. I had popped a baseboard in one of the areas of the master bedroom that I was a little suspicious of. Nothing, no problem.
Okay, still sick. I took a physical mycotoxin test with at the time, which was Great Plains Laboratory. Now that's Mosaic. Did the mycotoxin test, came back at a high level. So high was like five to 50, and I was at 1,240. So at least my body was detoxing. So it was getting rid of it, but I couldn't keep up. So the amount of mold that I was being exposed to, I couldn't keep up with the level of detox needed.
So that's when I was taking the Spanish black radish, like popping them like candy. So I thought, it's from going into other people's moldy homes and it may have played a factor, but then six months later, my AC overflows and I had continuous flooring throughout my house. So I'm removing all the continuous flooring, get to the master bedroom, pop a baseboard on the other side of the room. And I knew exactly what I was looking at. It's a mold called Ketomium. It's a highly toxic mold.
So then I started to look behind the wall and sure enough, two feet up was another mold called Aspergillus penicillium. So these two molds were literally fighting it out in my master bedroom. I thought I was in a safe zone and it was literally a biological warfare zone. And once I got rid of it, did the full remediation process, did the micro cleaning, did the sanitization, did all of that, within three weeks, all of my symptoms went away.
Ashley James (1:56:36.989)
So whenever you had a fan on, like in the bathroom, is the bathroom like off the bedroom? Was it like, so yes, master bathroom. You're doing the good thing you're supposed to do, but it creates negative pressure. And so it's going to pull from the easiest source. The easiest source happened to be through the floorboards and the wall and your, the cracks in the master bedroom. And it was pulling it right into your face.
So maybe we open a window somewhere in the house, open a window, a crack, so when we're turning the fan on, it's pulling clean air, hopefully from outside, rather than from somewhere in the home where there's mold. Bad that you had that experience, good that you figured the root cause. And think about how many people who don't have your knowledge base live years in that suffering. And then they go to doctor after doctor after doctor, put on drug after drug after drug and get sicker and sicker. And this is so common.
Brandon Faust (1:57:47.528)
I went to three doctors myself, right? One of them said I needed EKG. Another doctor said I had lyme disease. Another doctor said I had an autoimmune disease. And hey, maybe there was truth in some of that. Fortunately, my heart was great, but I had a pain in my chest. So that was the first place that they were directing me. But it didn't solve it. And I was literally like six Spanish black radish at every meal popping it, and that was the only thing that would give me any sort of relief at the time, so it was a serious situation and it was like stopping me from being able to work, especially when the fevers were coming and I thought I was sick and the fatigue. So there's a lot of this type of stuff that, you just don't know what's actually causing it.
Ashley James (1:58:39.882)
And this is in the home of someone who is highly knowledgeable about mold, right? Like this happened and you're very diligent and it's kind of scary to think that this happens in the house of someone who is highly, highly diligent, knows what they're doing. And just think about the people that don't know what they're doing, right? Like how much mold is living in the floorboards and living behind the paintings and behind the walls and in the HVAC. It's pretty creepy, but if you're experiencing health problems and doctors can't figure it out or every doctor says it's a different thing. The thing with those doctors though is like every hammer looks like a nail. They're going to hear the symptoms and go, oh, it must be this thing that they're an expert in like lyme disease.
Sure, it’s a swer of weird symptoms so we could kind of say, okay, lyme doctor says it's lyme disease, autoimmune doctor says it's autoimmune disease, heart doctor says it's heart problems, right? And that's the problem with mold exposure is that it mimics a lot of other chronic health issues.
Brandon Faust (1:59:50.002)
And that's why the testing is so crucial, but it's also understanding and knowing how to read the test because let's say a person's in a moldy environment and they take a mycotoxin test, right, which is normally a urine test, and then they don't show up with any sort of mycotoxins. Well, that's actually not a good sign, that's a bad sign, because most likely they're not detoxing. So their body is holding onto it.
So you need to actually know somebody that understands the way it works. Find people that are knowledgeable. And how do you read it? How do you interpret it? So that's also a crucial element is really knowing what to look for.
And also same thing goes with mold inspectors. Like for example, there was one place, I remember it was early on, where I was experimenting myself wanting to get an understanding of these different tools that I had in my tool belt. And I did an air sample in a room that was full of stachybotrys chartum, that's black mold, that's a technical term for black mold, and I put the pump on a ladder and was running it for five minutes, and then I took a swab just to verify a direct sample on the black mold, did that on the roof, came back with like, 100,000 mold spores of stachybotrys on the swab, and the air sample came back completely clean.
Ashley James (2:01:22.046)
That's my fear. Someone's going to pay $400 for air samples and it comes back clean, but they still suffer. We're like, well, we rolled out mold. I don't know. I guess it's an autoimmune condition. So put me on all these autoimmune suppressants and steroids or whatever.
Brandon Faust (2:01:38.452)
That's why it is so important, truly, to know the different testing methodologies and know that there's not one that is absolute. So there's combinations that help to cover all the ground. One of them, which I've actually heard a lot of good things about, is like a mold-sniffing dog, believe it or not, which happens to be the cutest of all the solutions of all. But they come and they go through the points and it's got probably twice as effective or three times as effective as the air sampling. Air sampling's like 70% inaccurate where a mold sniffing dog is like 90% accurate. So, that's where knowing kind of what are the different testing methodologies and modalities that are available.
There's the direct sample which is probably the most effective if you know where to look and where to find it because you're putting the actual swab to the growth and you're getting a clump of it, sending it off to the lab to confirm that it's an issue. The mold sniffing dog is a great way to go. The immunolytics, the Petri dishes, they have a time and a place, but keep in mind every place is probably going to have some mold spores, so you really have to follow the instructions. You have some of the more sensitive testing, like the dust sampling, et cetera, that gives you a good idea of whether or not there's mold in the house or there has been mold in the house and the mycotoxins. Real-time lab does a mycotoxin test, that you can do a urine sample, and also a Swiffer sample on the dust of the home, as long as you're following the instructions. And then there's nothing that really beats an experienced inspector that is health-centric that knows where to look, what to look for. Is going in the attic. If you have crawlspace under your home, going in the crawlspace. Is willing to do like cavity samples where they are testing behind walls. If there's any sort of area of suspect water intrusion. They walk the perimeter of the house. They're looking all around for any sort of water intrusion issues where the water's not flowing outside.
So all of these things have to be taken into consideration when you're trying to determine whether or not mold is an issue because it can be hidden. It can be in places that you wouldn't normally look. But, if you or somebody you love is in a home and they feel poorly in the home that they're living in and they go away for a couple weeks and they start to feel better, I immediately would look into mold as a possible cause.
Ashley James (2:04:22.300)
This has been truly enlightening. I really hope that this interview helps just thousands and thousands of people. Cause if people who listen to the show are wanting to get their health taken to the next level. And a lot of people wait until they have some symptoms before they start, they're motivated to listen to two hour long podcast about holistic health. So I hope this reaches everyone that needs to hear it.
And what you're doing is amazing. This level of education needs to get out there. Like it is ridiculous how this is the hidden epidemic in our homes so that most of our homes are on some level poisoning us. And whether it's off gassing of formaldehyde. I have several interviews about that but my favorite one I think is with Andy Pace, it's episode 453. Where we go into some pretty crazy stories and understanding just how toxic our air quality is. And this is without mold. Now, mold is a big issue in any area, in any climate. It can happen. And it happens even in the homes of the most knowledgeable people we see with Brandon. Now, I'm curious, though, in 2019 when this happened, your health was greatly affected. What about your family? Did it impact their health at all?
Brandon Faust (2:05:49.742)
It was very minimal and I think it goes back to that concept of like, let's say you have a cup, right? And you're emptying it daily. But once you get it to a point where it's overflowing and it's not emptying or the water is going too fast into that cup, that's when you have the mess, right? So I was never getting a chance to detox. So I was going into moldy homes by day. In a moldy home by night, right? Sleeping and being exposed and not realizing how much of a toxic load I was taking on.
Ashley James (2:06:31.084)
Yep. We had an RV, a really nice one. And it's really hard. This is kind of a movement. I don't know if you've noticed the last five years, like it's kind of a desirable thing to live in a van down by the river. It wasn't when we were younger. But now, those are some life goals, like just own a van and live down by the river. A lot of people are living in various types of vehicles by choice, and it's a lifestyle, whether it be a van or a 46-foot RV. Mold is a huge issue as well, because it is a vehicle. I learned very quickly.
That it is not a home on wheels. It is a car. The temperature changes rapidly. Moisture accumulates on the windows and mold grows almost immediately on every single window sill and you have to constantly have dehumidifiers running and fans running. And that mold can grow in the corners and it takes over. So a lot of people are living in RVs and not aware of the things that they need to do. Do you have any advice for those who are living on the road?
Brandon Faust (2:07:51.449)
Ironically, we have an RV as well, right? And it was sitting for probably three or four months. And then I went inside to take it on the road. I had a mold bloom in the RV. So it was pretty intense to kind of walk into that and see it, you have to kind of don your proper personal protection equipment, PPE, face mask, HEPA VAC the whole place, wiped it all down. It had a air scrubber going while we were doing it. And then at the same time, after all of that was done, I did the whole home sanitization process with the fogging, the dry fog, and it was fantastic afterwards, and it didn't come back.
So it's really a matter of like making sure that you are taking the proper approach. And you may be able to do a certain slice of that pie, but for example, the dry fogging is something that requires special equipment and special product, but there's a company out there that is actually pretty economical and they do a sanitization process, it's called pure maintenance, and their fogging system is superior. It's a phenomenal fogging system.
And the thing that it does is it replicates the actual method that spores and mycotoxins travel, which is through the air, and it lingers long enough that it actually destroys airborne mold spores. And mycotoxins, it may be floating around, it helps to dissolve it. So what I would say on that is that if you ever get like a car full of mold or an RV full of mold, or a home full of mold for that matter, especially if it's humidity driven, you can get somebody to come in that's a professional to clean it all up, remove it, but then I would always recommend bringing in a company that really knows how to do the dry fogging and is using a product that is highly effective, like pure maintenance, and get that done.
Sofor example, cars, I had a similar thing. I made a massive mistake. I left my window open in my truck and a sort of freak storm came in and it was like I didn't realize I had left my window down and my truck smelled so bad and it was almost a brand new truck. It was like a year old and it smelled so bad, musty and whatever else and I ended up doing the fogging in my truck and it totally handled it.
So it's also a matter of knowing where to go to find somebody that has the capability to do a dry fog treatment where you're pushing in particles. It's a pressurized system that is pushing these tiny microscopic particles that are 10 microns, 7.5 microns, into the nooks and crannies of the space. Now, would I ever go with doing demolition-free mold remediation? No. But would I always do a whole home sanitization after remediation project with dry fog? Yes.
Ashley James (2:11:26.679)
Very good to know. And this fog, I guess it just depends on the company. I'd want it to be non-toxic and because you're living in the environment, but the one that you use is safe, is non-toxic. I know Green Home Solutions is safe, but is there companies out there that use a chemical in their fog machine that is unhealthy?
Brandon Faust (2:11:46.211)
Of course, so you really need to make sure that they have an angle that is a non-toxic angle. And really what are you looking for? I would always look for reviews, right? I would always look at reputation. I would always look at their information and their knowledge. Because when somebody calls me up and talks to me about it, or talks to some of our staff at Mold Solutions, they know pretty rapidly that we know what we're talking about, right?
So Green Home Solutions, if they have good reviews, then the chances are they really know what they're doing. So what do their reviews look like? What does when talking to them in terms of their success rate and their ability to get a home free and clear, right? Because we always, always end up passing the clearance testing, like always.
So it's a matter of can they do that and not just like an air sample, but a rigorous test from somebody who is using more intense testing methodologies.
Ashley James (2:12:57.217)
Love it. Brandon, is there anything you didn't get to say? I love doing this after like a two hour interview. I'm like, just want to make sure. Is there anything left unsaid? People are usually like, no, I told you everything. And then I told you a bunch of stuff I didn't expect to tell you. But is there anything else you want to say? Is there any stories that you didn't get to share or anything that you really want to make sure that you leave us with?
Brandon Faust (2:13:25.790)
It really is important to understand indoor air quality and how important it is to the lives that we live and the people that you love. Like making sure that they are doing well and that they're succeeding and that they're in the environment where they can actually thrive. That goes along with not just your homes, but where you work, the schools that your kids are going to, colleges, the university dorms.
If you're renting. Renting is rough, especially when the landlords are not taking proper responsibility for the impact of mold. Some of the worst situations I've ever seen have been in apartments or even hotels. Like I went down to Cancun a little over a year ago and as soon as we walked into the room, the musty smell hit me so hard. And I was like, okay, my family and I are not going to be staying in this room. But after being in the room, 10 stories lower, right, which seemed to be better. By the time we were done with that trip, we were all sick.
So, potentially like I don't want to be over the top on this stuff. And the fact that I've kind of become this guy, it's kind of like, I can't believe it. I was a guy that was like, there's no need for a mold test, eight years ago or whatever it was, right? And now I literally have the purification device in my HVAC, the UV light, the two purifiers. I sanitize my home once a year, right? Plus I have a standalone purifier like I have the proactive versus the passive. I have both. I have the passive HEPA filter and the proactive, ionization UV germicide, high-tech air purifier. I have all of it because I know the impact that it can have, not only through firsthand experience, but also from my son, and also all the people that I've helped and dealt with. I know it is not something that should be ignored. It really, there needs to be healthy respect for mold and our air quality. And it's not just mold, it also is bacteria that follow similar principles. So that's where making sure you understand all of that in terms of protecting yourself and your family is really crucial.
Ashley James (2:16:02.968)
And so renting and vacations, big deal to pay attention. But also if you buy a condo or if you buy like a townhome or a duplex where your house is sharing a wall with someone else. Like that's another thing to be aware of, especially in condo buildings where someone else's leak can be your mold disaster, right? Or someone else can have a mold disaster and that's going to affect you too. Then it becomes like the problem with the neighbor who has a tree that's branches like leaning over into your property, right? It's like, well, it's your tree, but I don't want to pay to have the branch removed, but it's your tree. And so it's like, it's your neighbor's mold, but it's making you sick. And this is something we have to be aware of.
I had that happen in Cancun. We walked into the room and it was all inclusive resort, beautiful view. We walked to this room and it was like, just hit me. And I turned right back around. It might have been the same thing. It's like an all-inclusive resort. Might have even been the same one. I didn't even walk in the room. I turned right back around. I said to the bellhop, nope, going back downstairs. I said, give us a room. Might have been the same room. Luckily, it didn't make us sick. The next room we got. But I also had that experience here in Washington. We rented a cabin out by the ocean shores. There was black spots. It was definitely mold. They were like, okay, well, we're going to come in to spray it while we're living there for the weekend. They're like, we're going to come in to spray it with our bleach later. I'm like, the heck you are. Because if you spray it with bleach, it only makes it worse for your health. So that's a big no-no. And they definitely did not get a five-star review. Let me tell you that.
So yes, this is something we have to be aware of. And we have to be diligent because we're protecting our health, because this can impact your health for a long time, especially if you have any underlying health conditions, this can exacerbate them. And it's like the quality of your life. So it matters. It's just like, buy organic as much as possible because it matters, because you matter, because your cells matter, and choose to live in a mold-free environment, or as little mold as possible because you matter and your family matters.
Okay, my last question. Let's say someone has had mold in their home. They get their home remediated or they move, maybe because it was a rental. They brought their belongings with them. Their belongings don't have visible mold on them, but everything they own has the potential to like, basically, they're bringing the spores, right, with them. What do you say to that?
Brandon Faust (2:18:52.932)
Well, there was a home on Clearwater Beach. It's a $2 million home. And this was three, four years ago, so I don't know what it is now, but it was massive and it was beautiful. And it was, believe it or not, the vacation home. And the woman of the house she would go to antique shops and she bought this one cowhide piece of footstool. Right, it was a cowhide footstool.
And she put it in the closet, which was the size of a room for many people. And two and a half months later comes back and there is mold all over the house. And they're trying to figure out what happened. Well, you go into the closet and the closet was ground zero. It was like a full moldy bloom in that particular closet. So the mold spores actually came from the footstool.
And then because of the HVAC being on but not functioning correctly, it was on but it was not pulling water out of the air. So it was flash cooling is what it's called, where it was the HVAC was too large for the home. So it would cool it off too rapidly and not pull enough water out of the air so it remained humid and there was enough water that the spores on the footstool had a perfect environment and completely took off. So the answer is yes, you can cross contaminate another place by bringing in spores and if the climate and the environment is good or right for that particular scenario, yes, you could wind up with cross contaminating in a full mold bloom.
Ashley James (2:20:46.620)
Wow. Now if she’d had that my little $20 device that I have in my bathroom, it's the thermometer that also reads the humidity levels. If she’d had that and she walked and she knew what she's looking for. She walked into her house and she measured the humidity of like that closet and that the bedroom and the living room. Would it have read really high? Like what did it read over 60% even though she had the HVAC on?
Brandon Faust (2:21:09.404)
Yes, definitely, for sure. And that's what you're looking at.
Ashley James (2:21:12.340)
So this is something we can watch for. Like if you're buying homes, you could travel with your, what is it called, the device that reads humidity?
Brandon Faust (2:21:19.616)
A hygrometer. They call it a hygrometer is the correct word for it. But there's smart devices as well that hook up to your phone to tell you what is going on in your house. If there's any sort of toxins, pathogens and things along those lines, they will pick up certain levels of elevated counts it's like a particle counter. So they'll pick up things that are microscopic, but they also will pick up your temperature and your humidity levels as well. You're trying to do everything possible to ensure that your climate, your environment, your home is not conducive to mold growth. And that requires data.
Ashley James (2:22:07.592)
Yes. Right. Exactly. So if you're like looking at places to rent or buy, it would be good to walk into the environment and see what is the humidity of each room. Because if everything's working right, like the furnace is on or the AC is on or whatever. And it's 60 plus percent humidity in areas of that house, run in the other direction. That's not the house for you or that's not the apartment for you.
Brandon Faust (2:22:38.965)
Because it could be hidden and the growth could be there. I had one lady who had migraines for years. She couldn't figure out what was going on. And this was just like accidental, it was by luck. So she asked me, please take off your shoes when you come into my home. No problem. So I'm walking around the room, I'm walking around the house, checking everything out. I get to the master bedroom, my shoes are off, she's got carpet and I just felt a little bit of dampness on the bottom of my feet. And I looked under her bed and she had slats, wood slats, on the bottom of her bed that were covered in white fuzz, all under her bed. And what was happening is the slab which is that concrete tends to be somewhat porous, so there's capillary action that can take place. And it pulls moisture up through the concrete. And now it's damp enough that the wood close to the concrete is moist enough that it's this raw wood, and she had a massive colony of aspergillus under her bed. And that was what was causing the issue.
Ashley James (2:23:58.371)
The migraines. If she had not been like me, like Asian, Canadian. I don't know what other cultures, but like we take our shoes off. You take your shoes off. You do not go into someone's home with your shoes on. And oh, man, I've had that before. You walk through carpet and all of a sudden you feel a wet spot. You're like, what? And you wouldn't have felt that if you had shoes on. So, yes, that's detective work right there.
Thank you so much, Brandon. I feel like this has been so helpful for so many people discovering the hidden dangers that every house is susceptible. Everyone. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you multiple times. It could happen to anyone. And we all need to be aware of it. And it happens in cars, too, like surprisingly. One of my past vehicles was a Ford F-150. I love that truck. The insurance company AllStates was great to us. It was totaled by mold. They paid it off. They cut a check and said this vehicle is totaled because of mold. So a rat had chewed through some of the wiring. This is the silliest thing that Ford has ever done. They made it out of edible soy, which is, I guess, toxin-free, and that's good, but animals love eating Ford trucks because there's components in Ford trucks made of soy. And it's edible, edible car.
And so, it chewed through the vapor barrier, the seal between the engine block and the cabin which start letting the moisture in and then couple that with having a toddler who like leaves food little crumbs everywhere. Just made the entire cab like three inches of fuzz. I have pictures somewhere. It was wild. It was wild. I was like, I'm not even opening that door I'm not even going in there. The entire steering wheel was covered in fuzz. The dash was covered in fuzz
It was bad. Nothing. You could not recover anything from that car, but I've seen it before I've seen it several times with several vehicles. That it can get really bad. You got to get little like dehumidifier sort of packets that suck up the moisture. But yes, so we have to be we have to be diligent.
Thank you Brandon! This has been amazing and your website of course moldsolutions.com or ten years ago you could go to moldsolutionsusa.com
I love that. And then check out the healthy home guide, which is less than 40 bucks, totally worth it to do that course. Check out the free ebook moldebook.com. I think everyone should have that printed out and in every home in the world should have it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is great. If you ever have anything else you want to share, any new breakthroughs in the world of mold come back on. We'd love to hear you. We'd love to have you back.
Brandon Faust (2:27:18.513)
Absolutely. I really appreciate the interview and very comprehensive. It's fantastic. It's what people need to hear about it because it's an issue.
Ashley James (2:27:28.795)
Yes. And thanks for doing the work you do. You're definitely saving people's lives and increasing the quality of life. So keep at it. Awesome.
Brandon Faust (2:27:34.737)
All right, thank you.
Ashley James (2:27:36.343)
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Brandon Faust, moldsolutions.com. It's pretty amazing and kind of scary to think about. But also I would rather definitely know this information for the future, like when purchasing a home or choosing an apartment to rent. You've got to know this information and definitely share it with those you care about, because there's loved ones in your life who are going to buy a house one day or rent a condo apartment one day and this could really save them.
I have several friends who've had major chronic health issues. They've had to work very hard to overcome because of mold in their environment, and even a short term exposure of a few weeks, or like being on vacation, can last months. And that is just quality of your life. That is priceless, right. You can't get that back. So this information is absolutely gold.
Remember, my book is coming out I'm so excited February 1st and you can go to learntruehealth.com and in the menu there on learntruehealth.com you'll see a link to go buy the book and when you buy it, make sure you take a picture of you holding it, or you could take a selfie with it and post it to the Facebook group or post it to social media. Send that to me. You can send that to me at support@learntruehealth.com and I would love to send you a gift bag as being part of my launch party, the first 50 listeners who joined the launch party and share with me and share on social media that they got the book. I'd love to send you my big gift bag to celebrate with you. I'm very excited and then, ongoingly, as you go through the book, I definitely want you to jump into the Facebook group because we're going to share going through the different challenges and the things we learned. It's going to be a lot of fun to participate together and see all of the listeners participating in the book.
It is meant to help you wherever you are in your health journey, take it to the next level and create daily habits that make you crave wellness and habits that last a lifetime, that build you up and strengthen you no matter how busy you are in life. So I can't wait for you to check out my book Addicted to Wellness. Go to learntruehealth.com February 1st to purchase it. Go to the menu. Select it right there and it'll take you to Amazon. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener and for sharing this podcast and my book with your friends and family. Have a fantastic rest of your day.
Check out the EMF Protection Grounding Bags here at https://www.learntruehealth.com/emfrocks
And be sure to get your listener discount by using coupon code LTH
Unlock the secrets of electromagnetic fields and their impact on our health as Ashley James, your devoted guide, navigate the terrain of modern technology with Justin Frandson, a seasoned athletic performance coach. This episode peels back the curtain on the unseen effects of gadgets we trust for well-being, revealing how they may inadvertently disrupt our body's functions. We don't just stop at problems; Justin brings forth a groundbreaking solution, offering a natural escape from the silent storm of oxidative stress through grounding bags that encapsulate the Earth's healing frequency.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have with us an amazing guest. He's been an athletic coach to both professional and non-professional athletes for over 25 years and early on, as he was helping athletes to become the healthiest and best versions of themselves, he noticed that EMF exposure affected them, and a lot of athletes will wear these smartwatches and devices to monitor their heart rate and monitor their vitals and everything that they can see to squeeze out more efficiency in themselves as the athletic machine that they're creating themselves to be, in themselves as the athletic machine that they're creating themselves to be. And he noticed that all this EMF exposure to cell phones and electric vehicles and all the devices they were wearing was harming them, was actually suppressing their body's functions. We talk about some of these suppressions like that our mitochondria, the part of our cell that makes cellular energy, is affected by exposure to EMF. So my guest today discovered a natural solution that really rocks. I got to tell you I've had a lot of fun with the puns on this one. This is a technology that's 100% natural. I call it a technology because we're using it and applying it in a certain way. That would be considered a technology, in that we're using something from nature, applying it to help solve a problem, and this problem is exposure to EMF and also helping us to ground.
I have several episodes with experts and doctors talking about the excess electrons that build up in our body when we don't spend time touching the earth. A lot of us do not touch the earth. Can you remember the last time you had your feet or your hands right on soil? We don't. We wear insulated shoes and drive around in insulated cars and live in insulated homes, and we very rarely touch the earth. So we build up these excess electrons in our body that are doing oxidative stress and free radical damage to us, increasing inflammation throughout the body. And using this all-natural solution today that we're discussing, you'll be able to protect yourself and your family from electromagnetic radiation and help them to release these excess electrons safely, healthfully.
I love that it's 100% natural and it's super easy. You don't need electricity, you don't need to plug it into something and it protects you. It protects you from the EMF from cell phones, from computers, from Wi-Fi, and, at the same time, is helping us do earthing or grounding. If you want to check it out and get it for yourself. You can go to learntruehealth.com/emfrocks. That's learntruehealth.com/emfrocks. I got us a discount so you can use coupon code LTH. I love it when my guests do that for us.
A few episodes ago, I had announced that I was writing a book and I am still writing the book. It's taking a bit longer than expected, unfortunately. I was hoping it would be published for Christmas, but my ultimate goal was that it would be published before January so that everyone could use it for their New Year's resolutions. This has been such an exciting journey. I've loved, loved writing this book because it's all the advice that I help my clients with, all the foundations of health, done in a really fun way that helps you to build health habits for the rest of your life. So keep an eye out, keep an ear out, listening for updates on that. It's going to be available very soon. I'm really, really looking forward to sharing it with you guys. Awesome, make sure you join the Learn True Health Facebook Group for updates. You can also go to learntruehealth.com and join the email list. I send out just a few emails a month. I promise not to spam you. I'll definitely be sending an email about my book, so be sure to check that out as well. Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this podcast with those you care about. If you have an athlete in your life, if you have someone in your life who is worried about EMF exposure, or someone who's in pain or has problems sleeping, this helps with so many of these issues. I'm really looking forward to hearing from you guys how you experience this product and how it helps you in your life. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today's interview.
Ashley James (0:04:42.430)
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 515. I am so excited for today's guest. We have a really interesting interview ahead of us. I just have a feeling we're going to have a lot of fun today.
Justin Frandson, who is an athleticism performance coach and author and a waterman. He's introduced me to something that I did not think it was going to go this way, so just absolutely did not. When I first was introduced to Justin a few weeks ago by a mutual friend, a colleague that I highly respect, I was incredibly skeptical. I have to admit, when I read the email and looked into you, and I think it actually took me a week to reply because I sat with it and it's so out there, right. But then you know, I'm the biggest open-minded skeptic. So the skeptic took over and this just sounds crazy. And then the open-mindedness started melting in, but what if it's true? What if it is true? Okay, fine, it doesn't hurt to have a conversation. So I told you in the email, I'm a big open-minded skeptic. And I got to tell you like the little alarm bells are going off in my head, like this sounds whack, job, right. But you said there's a lot of science and studies behind it. And also I really trust the person that introduced us and they wouldn't have introduced me to something that was a scam, right, or something that was crazy. But coming into this whole conversation, I'm like how am I going to introduce this to my listeners? Like, hey, I want you to go buy this bag of rocks. And this isn't woo-woo, this isn't like crystal licking, this is not. I mean, and I love my new age brothers and sisters, but this isn't that. This is not I'm not asking you to you know be new age. This is grounded in a ton of science and studies. So, anyway, you sent me this bag of rocks. It's, it is actually. There's a purpose behind it. It's to help with EMF.
And we opened the box and we grabbed the bag and I felt like the closest thing I could describe is I felt like I was in the middle of a thunderstorm, like the electricity in the air changed and I got lightheaded, but not in a bad way, like I wouldn't have fallen over anything. I just noticed like, wow, I'm feeling something. I'm feeling something incredible. Like if you had hooked me up to a device and turned on like a tens unit, but over my whole body, I would have believed you. But all I was doing was holding this bag of rocks. I'm like, this is wild, I'm feeling this.
And I sat down, I drank some water and that that almost like just before lightheaded feeling went away. But it left the air charged and I felt more energized. And what I noticed almost immediately is I felt highly motivated and I actually ran back upstairs, got in the office and started working and I was just like, oh, I'm so motivated, I feel so good and I thought that's really interesting because I didn't do much with the bag other than like hold it for a minute and like talk about it with my husband, and I'll get to what I did wrong next. But I want to tell you the rest of the story. But I haven't even let you say hi. So, by the way, welcome to the show, Justin.
Justin Frandson (0:08:26.550)
Oh Ashley, thanks for having me on. Keep going, I love the intro.
Ashley James (0:08:31.332)
Okay. Okay. So we take the bag and we've been feeling the effects of it. The whole time I'm going, I've got to tell my listeners, but how am I going to tell them? You got to try this bag of rocks. So we we put it by. We had it in our office all day, where we have all our electronics, right. We have multiple computers, 3d printer, the sauna and, the Wi-Fi, everything. We actually try to hardwire everything, but we do have Wi-Fi for some things and it just felt like it changed the energy of the office, which is really neat.
Then we slept with it, not like hugging or anything. We put it beside our bed and we can't put it under our bed because we're on this antique oak thing that has drawers, and so we just put it up past the headboard, really close to our heads, but near us, and my husband, who has been recently snoring more than usual and waking me up, and then I tell him to roll over, and what I thought was so interesting is he went into a deep sleep and he didn't snore all night long and I woke up the next day going wait a second, I wasn't woken up all night with snoring, like that's cool. And my husband woke up, went whoa, I slept so deep last night, like that's neat. And I was talking about how well we've got to go lend this bag to so-and-so who has insomnia, and he's like I don't want to be without the bag. I want to sleep with it again tomorrow night and again tonight. So we've slept with it for a few nights. Every night has been deeper. My husband's snoring no longer wakes me up. I thought that was really interesting.
If only for like the snoring, I would have bought this bag of rocks. If you told me I put a bag of rocks by your husband and he stopped snoring, I would have been, okay, I'm sold, but how neat is that deeper sleep. And I've got the bag right here and I'm holding it and I just get this like charge, like this feeling like it's something shifted. And so I want to dive into the amazing results, the clinicals or studies or whatever you've got. You told me you've got studies. You told me you got science. I want to hear it, but I did do something wrong, so here's my confession.
When I was really excited opening my package, there was a smaller bag. It's like this little tiny bag that fits in your pocket, I guess, maybe just to carry around for EMF protection. And I didn't read any of the instructions. I just thought you're supposed to hold the rocks in your hands. So I opened the bag and then I proceeded to open the second bag that was the EMF bag or the Faraday bag, and then I opened the plastic bag inside and I held the rocks, and that might have been why I felt a little dizzy at first. And then my husband's reading over the instructions and it's like he said it says to not open the bag. I'm like oh.
So my husband's like he really wants you to explain why not open the bag, and that's something you can tell us at some point. But I hope everyone is wondering. What I'm wondering is like what's up with this bag of rocks? How did you even get involved in this? Because again, I was very skeptical, like this guy makes a living selling people rocks right, and I mean, it's rocks you can't even look at cause they're in a bag, but they have an amazing impact on your health. So, yes, please tell us more about this bag of rocks.
Justin Frandson (0:12:09.628)
Well, Ashley, you're so spot on and as skeptical as you were, I was the same way when I found out about how the rocks are deployed, the way they're deployed and how they work that way. And I was just going, Hey, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. But then all of a sudden I started using them, bring them into our home. The biggest thing that we saw at our home.
My wife was going through early menopause and she had night sweats and would wake up every night for three months and her menstrual cycle stopped for three months straight. And then once we loaded the house up with some grounding bags, everything normalized in her cycle return. And that's when I knew we had something really, really special, like more so than, oh, me just saying, oh, I slept great, which is huge in its own right.
Ashley James (0:12:59.786)
That's so cool. So grounding bags is probably easier to better portray it. Then just like go buy this magic box bag of rocks. It's a special kind of rock. It's not just any kind of rock when I opened that bag, which I shouldn't have, but when I opened the bag and looked at them, I'm like, I've never seen this mineral before. I don't recognize it. It's very interesting. So, tell us more about what it is. How does it work?
Justin Frandson (0:13:29.274)
So the same skepticism Ashley that you had I actually had to. And when I found out about these was from a doctor working with his patients and treating EMF electromagnetic field sensitivities, from non-native EMFs with these crystals, and I was working with another product that had crystals and copper in it, and I developed a reputation in Newport Beach, not only with working with athletes, but also going into homes and seeing the health of someone's home, and that was just huge because you got to check the environment and see how toxic it is and that because it directly affects our health. And so he had these crystals.
We ended up bringing them into our home. My wife at the time was going through some early menopause and so her menstrual cycle stopped and she had night sweats and wasn't sleeping for literally three months straight and the cycle stopped for three months, and so we brought the crystals into our world and into our home and everything normalized. Her cycle returned after three months, and that's when I knew we had something really, really special.
And so I asked the doc. I said, hey, can I bring these to market? Are you going to bring it to market? He says, go for it. He was about to retire and he didn't want to get shut down anyways because this is a hot topic. And so we ended up bringing the crystals to market and they are really special. It's just not just any rock that you can go grab outside and bring into your home.
Most of those have the human resonance. They have the healing pulse of the earth in it because it's earth's resonance outside. But ours have moisture properties with the magnetic, and the combination between the two of those, Ashley, is unbelievable for EMF protection. And you have to keep them sealed because they'll end up drying out over a period of time. And that's why no one's ever seen them or used them for EMF protection. It's because when they would mine them they would turn to dust over a period of time. So they do have a resonance. We call it the Schumann Resonance. It's that healing pulse of the earth, the magnetic properties with the moisture, is what makes them so exponentially powerful for electromagnetic radiation protection.
Ashley James (0:16:13.331)
Got it. So that's the reason why you shouldn't open the bag. Cause it's the moisture that's escaping. So I'm going to reseal them and then it'll all be good. I'm kind of glad I opened it cause I got to see what they looked like. And I'm like, I've never seen these, these are a type of rock I've never seen before. So that was pretty interesting cause it wasn't like you're just going out in the garden and ha ha, I'm going to sell them a bag of rocks. No, it feels like I'm hooked up to a machine, like some kind of frequency device when I'm holding these and you have a whole system of how to use them or you tap them. Can you explain what happens when we tap the bag?
Justin Frandson (0:16:56.585)
Definitely. So we're taking the Earth's resonance, which is a natural field. It's a natural electromagnetic field. And we're bringing it into our environment to create a coherence between us and all the non-native wave forms in our environment. So there's definitely protocols that we recommend we go through. And the way we use them is you put one on your bed, you'll sleep up to three to 60% deeper. And so let me lean into the studies here because those are big numbers. I mean, 3% accumulated over a period of time is huge.
Dr. Rodney White, his deep sleep was really disrupted. He was at 45 minutes consistently for forever. Like he's never been able to find an EMF protection product that can get it above that and he brought the grounding bags into his bed and you put it on or under your bed, just as long as it's touching the bed, you're good to go. He did a sleep test for three months straight. He couldn't believe it. He just kept testing it and the grounding bags allowed him to go from 45 minutes to a hundred minutes for three months straight. And when it dropped 5%, he would take it at the grounding bag outside every month and then recharge it for about 10 to 20 minutes by putting it out on the lawn outside. And that was it. That's all he needed to do is a passive test and his deep sleep improved about 60% consistently. And that's a third party independent doctor test. Dr. Barre Lando, he has Alfa Vedic, A-L-F-A-V-E-D-I-C. If you don't know him, I'm going to introduce you because you guys will love connecting. And he is absolutely brilliant. Actually, he's one of the most brilliant guys on the planet, huge voice in the health space. And he has these dual impedance antennas.
And so he measures your chi and as Bruce Lipton will say, your health lies in your chi and the chemistry in your body is secondary. So he measures the chi and any distortion and it can tell him exactly what's going on with you. What's wrong with your health. He’s the grounding bags. He tested, they clinically passively treated up to 91% of the markers that were off from EMF, which is huge, the lowest was 67% and she was the youngest in the field. And then her thymus was decharged. So the tapping protocol that I had you do where you take the bag and you put it, you know, over your chest, upper chest and tap on it. If we would have done that with her, I have a feeling the results would have been even higher on the way for him, but because it was a passive test, he didn't do that. It wasn't me doing it. It was all him.
So the grounding bags have just some incredible merit from a doctor's testing just outside of what the market's really shown to do and how well they work.
Ashley James (0:20:25.770)
So a few years ago, I interviewed Clint Ober, who I'm sure you know who Clint Ober is since you're in the earthing or grounding space, Episode 366. He has a really interesting story. He was hanging out in Sedona and he was watching these tourists get off the bus and he just had this aha moment because he looked at every single person wears rubber sold shoes, so they're insulated. And we're all driving around in insulated cars because the wheels are rubber..
And then we go into a house and largely where our lives are insulated and almost never do we ever touch the earth. And so he went back to his hotel room. He got a device that you can get at Home Depot to measure your voltage or your Watts or like, I don't know, I don't know anything about electric electricity, but basically measure your electrical potential versus the earth potential. And what he saw was that his body, which should be at earth potential, wasn't. And he thought, oh, this is interesting. I can't remember if he put it out the window or put it into the ground of the electrical outlet beside him, but he like taped it to his body.
And then the next day he slept with it. The next day he could have just went out and, slept on a rock. But I mean, he already paid for this hotel room, so why not?
And the next day he tested himself and he saw he was at earth potential and he felt good. And he thought, I wonder if there's something here. And he went up and down the coast, all the universities trying to get the professors to do studies on this. And they'll kind of laughed at him. And then he finally found some professors cause he funded it. He just was super interested in this concept of what would happen to the human physiology if we all took the time to get to earth potential to release the excess electrons that are built up in the body.
Could this be man made, based on our lifestyle, man made free radicals that are bombarding our DNA, causing further inflammation in addition to the crap diet that Americans and now the rest of the world eat largely unless you're a health nut like you and I and our listeners?
And he finally found some professors that would do it and he invested in, I think it was 26 studies and they found like there was people with MS who went from being in pain in wheelchairs to like being out of pain and walking, because of how much this lowered their inflammation. And he just got super excited, but he invented these mats and everything. And the mats are kind of cumbersome. I got to tell you, you can't take them everywhere with you. You're only using it like in your in your bed or you're only using it in your office. And I liked the one in my office, but I found that the one in the bed, although my husband would sleep good, I felt like I was being hooked up to electricity. Like I just felt kind of a bit more jittery. And so I found that using the grounding mats were more of a daytime thing for me, not a nighttime thing. I didn't get the same feeling from your bag of rocks. From your grounding bag, I did not have that same jittery feeling when the mat was hooked up to the ground of the electrical outlet.
And I just wonder if it's because it's more natural, right? So, but I did interview Clint Ober. So it's a good interview for people who want to learn more about earthing and grounding in general. Cause you can also put your feet outside. But I was talking to a client the other day. I'm like, just go walk in the grass and she's like, but it's cold outside. I'm like, listen, just do it. And she goes, yes, I felt really good, but like, you have to do that every day. You got to go barefoot every day as much as possible. That might be nice if you're in Southern California, but like I'm from the North and we're not barefoot six months of the year.
And we're hardly as humans ever touching getting back to earth potential. And the question is, how long do you have to earth? Like do earthing, do you have to do it for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, how many times a day do you have to do it to maintain those results, right? And then I also have an interview, Episode 402 with Dr. Steven Sinatra on the heart health benefits of earthing or grounding. So I like the bag of rocks. What I like about it, this specific EMF rocks are, you can take them everywhere. It's super, super easy. You don't have to plug it into an outlet. I like that. Tell us a bit about how did it change the air in the room? Because it changes the entire atmosphere. Like it mellows everything out. I don't even have to be touching the bag but I have it in the office and I have been more productive in the last few days with this bag in the office than I have in months. It just shifts things. Is it because just by being in this room with me, it's protecting me from the EMF? Like, can you just explain this more?
Justin Frandson (0:25:53.671)
Definitely. Well, first off, Ashley, you have a gift, obviously, and the gift of awareness and the gift of feeling energy. And not everyone can feel the energy like you do and that shift in your environment. So some people call it a sensitivity, which it could be as well because we had to do some clearing with you on the tapping of it.
And, I too have that sensitivity, but it's more of a gift and awareness. And I'm so glad you brought up Clint Ober's name and his book Earthing, cause I give him so much gratitude for bringing this concept to the masses. I mean, he was the guy that really put it on the map and said, Hey, everybody, you got to get grounded by nature and get outside because that's how you heal and get rid of inflammation. And here are all these studies that go along with it. And I'm with you. I agree. I love his information. And just as I love Dr. Mercola's information on EMF and he wrote a book called EMF and the information spot on, but their products just aren't unfortunately, and when you're plugging something into the grid or to the electrical grid,
Remember, electricity doesn't travel in through the wires. It actually travels around the outside of them. So even though it's on a grounding plug, which is the bottom one, it's still getting all the electricity from the source. So you're literally charged to the level of the outlet, even though it's going to the ground outside. It's just too much. Electricity and technology is awesome for healing.
And we have to understand that when you use PEMF or sound beds, I use bioharmonic technology as Dr. Steven Schwartz, like one of my favorite products. So I'm on a sound bed. It's like you're inside of a speaker and the frequencies coming out of there are just so medicinal. I go into theta brainwave state just instantly. The list goes on and on. There's so much electricity out there.
When you use that, it's great for your body to jumpstart it and to kick it into healing mode. But when you're attempting to do that for EMF protection 24-7, it's a futile effort. You can't use electricity or plug something into it or manufacture a resonance to create a coherence. People are attempting to do it and they're marketing it as that it can, butI lean it back and ask the question, hey Ashley, do you like eating genetically modified food?
Ashley James (0:28:51.480)
No thanks.
Justin Frandson (0:28:52.216)
No way, none of us do. So why would we want a modified resonance in our environment? That's the net of it. So you asked how the crystals work. Well, there's this thing called the Schumann Resonance. It's the healing pulse of the earth and it's about 7.3 Hertz or waves per second. That's what the frequency is.
That's what we're putting in, that's what the earth has and where we've just captured a really special part of the earth with our coiloidal crystals that have moisture magnetic properties that can carry that frequency and help with EMF protection. When you bring that bag of crystals into your home, what it does is it creates a coherence between you and your environment. And we live in these homes, we call them homes, but they're actually electrical boxes, literally since 1889. We've put electricity in our homes. And before that, the flu, they called the flu the flu because it would fly in and fly out with solar flares. And not until electricity was put into the home was the flu here to stay. I mean, that's a huge, huge point. So even low-level EMF is affecting our bodies and everything, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular, every major health challenge has gone up on the bar graph, like crazy. And obviously diabetes kind of took the cake, but I feel it's more of electromagnetic sensitivity and it jumped up so high because all the manufactured fake foods. But these resonances, they affect our body in such a huge way. And so that's part of the whole concept of understanding that when you can go outside into nature, you're going to be able to create a coherence. When you can bring the resonance of nature into your home, it's innately and naturally the most quantum natural way you could do it, create that coherence within your environment of your home or bedroom or office.
Ashley James (0:31:09.840)
What you just said reminded me of when I interviewed Arthur Firstenberg, who is the author of The Invisible Rainbow. That is a really good book and I highly recommend everyone read it. It’s thick, man. It's probably three and a half, four inches thick. It's a big book from what I remember. But the first chapter captured me so much. I had requested he be on the show. I hadn't even finished the first chapter yet. I'm like, this is amazing. And he outlines, he studied the history of electricity and I was blown away because what's really interesting is we've been using electricity for a lot longer than a hundred years especially in medicine. And so he talks about the history of how we've used frequency and electricity for a long time. There's good aspects around it, but he shows you just after that leap in technology, there was a major epidemic or pandemic.
So he came on the show Episode 445. And he talks about when we first went to 1G, like when we went from analog, it was in the 90’s. I think it was with ‘95 or ‘98. I can't remember the exact time, but it was the first time they turned on the switch in Manhattan and there was like a mini pandemic only in Manhattan. Nowhere else in the world. And all these health problems happened overnight the second they turn on that switch. And so you could clearly see it's like we're guinea pigs, right? And who's to say this is healthy, right? The FCC, right? Oh yes, so cell phones are healthy. And now we see that if you hold the cell phone to your head for three minutes, you're cooking your brain.
I never hold a cell phone to my head. You know, it's so damaging and we're going to see it a few years. I just know it. We're going to see. They'll finally we have studies coming out showing the damaging effects of having Bluetooth devices on our body or by our head, having cell phones on our person at all times, they already have this information, but it's not like super mainstream yet kind of like back when they did bloodletting with leeches, that was real popular. And they used lead and mercury in medicine and that was super popular. And then they used x-rays like willy nilly, like you could go into a shoe store and get your foot x-rayed every time you tried on a shoe to see if the shoe fit your foot.
Until they realize oh, that's damaging too. Oh, lead in gasoline, super healthy for you, right? Lead in everything until they finally realize that it's unhealthy. So we have a lot of devices. The thing is we have to remember that just because you bought it in the store doesn't mean it's safe. There's no vetting process. We are constantly being exposed to things that are just killing us. And companies get to make these products. They get to make products that hurt us.
They think they're going to get away with it. They don't look into the safety studies. There's companies largely are not ethical. It's up to the consumer to do their own due diligence. So that device you have in your pocket every day that you're scrolling on could be doing a lot of damage. And one of my guests, I can't remember which one, it might've been Dr. Steven Sinatra said that was really interesting. When you hold a cell phone, the mitochondria go to sleep. Wherever the cell phone is nearby. So if you're holding in your hand the cells of your hand, the mitochondria, they just go nighty night they go to sleep. And if you're holding it by your head, you now you're getting the 5000 mitochondria per cell to take a nap of for your brain. Your brain cells are not getting the necessary food they need. It's just wild that we're being bombarded by this electromagnetic radiation, all these different frequencies, we have no idea what they're all doing to us. And especially when we mix them all together, like how many Wi-Fi signals and cell phone towers are all coming at us, right? And I used to live out in the country where you couldn't get cell reception and man, did I sleep good. Or anytime there's a notice when there's a power outage, as long as you're not worried about the power outage, right?
You sleep so good or go camping, right? You sleep so good when all the wifi shut off and all the cell towers are shut off or you're away from them. You're somewhere in the middle of nowhere. You sleep so good. So, you know, how many people are taking meds to mask the symptoms that EMF exposure is causing? So anyways, I want to talk more about the solution than the problem, but I think it's really poignant that we point out that there's a lot we don't know. Because it's invisible, we think it's safe.
Justin Frandson (0:36:22.958)
Yes, exactly. And let me share why you don't sleep with EMF.
Sound good?
Ashley James (0:36:29.164)
Yes, let's do it.
Justin Frandson (0:36:30.500)
Let's talk about this EMF stuff, Ashley, in a wave per second, because that's how we measure it. When you go to buy a meter, a EMF meter, electromagnetic field or frequency meter, the specific meters are designed to measure the speed of a wave length. So if you get a milligas meter, it's going to meter 50 to 60 Hertz or waves per second.
If you get a Stetzer electric meter, S-T-E-T-Z-E-R, electric.com, it's about 140 bucks, you plug it in the wall. That'll meter any static in the line, any dirty electricity in the 4,000 do about a hundred thousand waves per second spectrum. When you get an acoustometer, a one-directional wireless meter, it doesn't have to be one-directional. I like those, but they're measuring 50 million to billions of waves per second. And just to clarify, 5G is 60 to 90 gigahertz or billion waves per second.
When we're sleeping, Ashley, our brainwaves state, we're in a delta or theta brainwave state. Our brainwaves states are one or below 1 to 8 hertz or waves per second. 1 or below 1 to 8. When our athletes are in the flow state with athleticism, they can't miss. Everyone calls it, they're in the zone. They're in an alpha brainway state about 8 to 12 Hertz or waves per second. Remember the Schumann Resonance of the earth, the healing pulse of the earth, 7.83 Hertz or waves per second. We rev one with the universe.
Now the difference is this other stuff, it's way faster, but not only that, they're one directional wave forms or they don't work. So they end up being polarizing on our body. And that is the essence of the difference between us and non-native EMFs. They're not made the same as we are. And the most simple explanation, Ashley, is when you drop a pebble into a pond, does the wave splash of the pebble going into the water go in a circular direction equally in every direction, or does it go in a straight line to the right or left?
Ashley James (0:39:06.345)
Oh, yes. Yes, that nice, beautiful circular ripple.
Justin Frandson (0:39:10.611)
Why is that? Okay, that is because it's an unpolarized wave. It's the foundational framework of our entire living collective intelligence matrix of a universe and how we're one with the universe. We're also built on unpolarized waves. They distribute equally in every direction. It's not a one-directional waveform. They're called scalar waves. That's a framework for every waveform resonance on earth.
My energy field. they say, hey, stay six feet. Our biofield goes out about 6 to 8 feet from everybody all around us. It's not straight out of my right ear. You have to stay six feet away from my right ear, but it's not a one directional waveform. I'm not standing in the Schumann Resonance and getting grounded in one spot of the beach or the park and then step over the right and I'm not getting grounded in the other spot. It's not a one spot. It's a resonance that's unpolarized, that's everywhere, distributes equally in every direction. And so let me just stop there and then I'll go into the waves and particles and our atmosphere next.
Ashley James (0:40:25.190)
Okay, cool. Yes, the Schumann Resonance, super interesting. Episode 445, Arthur Firstenberg, he touched on that. And what's interesting, and I've heard this before, that when astronauts started going outside of Earth, they would start getting sick because they were not part of the Schumann Resonance anymore. We can't hear it because it's always there, right? It's ubiquitous with our life, we're all bathed in it. But when you leave the earth, you're no longer bathed in it. And we start getting sick, which makes sense. So we're separating ourselves from this Schumann Resonance when we insulate our lives, never touch the earth, and then surround ourselves with totally different frequencies that are drowning it out.
And no wonder, like in the book Invisible Rainbow, he outlines so many of these diseases that have risen. We can say physiologically like I see the clogged artery over here. I had an expert on my show who's a research cardiologist, he's the one that discovered the beginning of heart disease started 30 years before.
And it all starts with the inflammation. Well, what's causing the inflammation, right? Go even further. And with the studies that Clint Ober funded, we can see that by getting back to earth potential, we've removed the excess electrons that are causing the damage. So that's just on that level we're not even talking about. Now take it one step further and protect ourselves from these waves, right? The waves of these unnatural, non-native EMF waves that were constantly being bathed in from cell towers and all the electronics we're surrounded by. So back to the bag of rocks. The skeptic in me is going, alright, come on, tell us how the bag of rocks helps us because it's a bag of rocks. But seriously, I feel amazing when it's around. So, just by being in the room, how is it helping prevent EMF exposure?
Justin Frandson (0:42:52.766)
Because you're bringing nature's resonance into your home to create a coherence between you and your environment. And obviously there's some EMF in your environment that is a little strong for your biofield to take. And so you see it chemistry wise. And the person who said that your mitochondria gets disrupted right out of the gates is exactly right. Dr. Martin Paul of Washington State University talks about the voltage gated calcium channels breaking down. Let's break down those four words.
Those are voltage gated. That's a gateway for your mitochondria to get energy for your body. It's so simple. So right out of the gate, it disrupts our cellular health, our mitochondria function, where we get energy and it's an oxidative stress. It destructures water. It calcifies your pineal gland. So you're not going to get in those lucid dreams and be able to go into those more awareness states.
That's what we do every day is to help everyone learn and through experiences and getting out into nature to raise their level of consciousness. All that stuff is disrupted through EMF. And then it goes into more of the cognitive stuff. So you get into the lack of memory, focus, anxiety, more behavioral challenges, fatigue, stress, headaches, ringing in the ears.
Those are all level one EMS sensitivity. So we see it in such a broad spectrum. There's level two and three, which I'll get into in a little bit, but this stuff is a stressor. We don't typically see air, right? Unless you're in LA and it's all polluted. You don't see air. So you don't see these wave forms, but let's talk about our air.
Our air is ether or plasma waves and particles travel through it. That's how you're in Washington. I am in Southern California. We're able to communicate and have this awesome conversation that everyone's going to be able to hear across the world. So it's through wave forms and the wave forms traveling through this air, which is, particles and waves and when there's a shift in that, our bodies adapt. And as Arthur Firstenberg says in The Invisible Rainbow, before 1889, when there were a lot of people that got sick, it was from solar flares or cosmic shifts in our electromagnetic blanket of an atmosphere. And then once electricity hit our home, the flu was here to stay and then we had shifts where people adapted to bigger electrifications of non-native waveforms. So 1918, Spanish flu, they also introduced radio waves right at that same timeframe. So that's why a lot of people all around the world, even back then when they couldn't travel, they would get the same symptoms. Their bodies were naturally adapting to that frequency, that challenge, that new environment. And I have a flow chart from Dr. Darren Weissman. He developed the system called the Lifeline Technique, and he uses infinite love and gratitude to clear the body. And in his flow chart, one of the healing modalities is you go into waves and particles, or particles and waves, and it directly affects your REM patterns is the next thing.
So we know like even doctors that had no bearing on EMF, it's in their modality, their healing charts. And if it's cosmic or manmade, our bodies are still adapting at the level we're capable of when there's these big shifts. Then you had radio waves, then you had satellites, and then you had radar, World War II, and then what did we have last several years? And keep having, 5G. And they keep adding and adding and turning it up. And so when a lot of people get sick, it's too much of it. Like you fly in an airplane, there's so much EMF. I have clients that their glucose levels spike 200 points and they get a bloody nose instantly from flying an airplane. So we know that this invisible environment affects us. And we know that nature is designed to create a coherence when we can bring her resonance into our environment. Then the question is how much of it, how much of the earth's resonance do we need in our environment and what we've seen in the test show and we sell our grounding bags through doctor clinics all around the country. So that's where they're sold exclusively through. And there's protocols to dealing with it. So five grounding bags together will clear a 2000 square feet space. One is about 70 feet, and then you want it touching the source. So you want it on your bed or desk or car seat. If someone has solar, we want seven grounding bags together to clear 2000 square feet, because solar, they haven't figured out how to ground it. They just haven't, and it caused lots of static in the line. So every home that I've metered over the last decade that has solar has really high levels of dirty electricity. Then you go into the electric car thing, which is, ugh, it's insane. It's the most ridiculous product that's ever been made. Sitting on a massive battery is not good for your health. Pharma can't even make that up. It never will be and that's what they're deploying for families. And that causes 18% lower testosterone as guys and girls driving electric cars. So we got to look at our environment.
Ashley James (0:49:20.573)
Wow. I know people who feel sick when they get into electric vehicles. I have a friend who felt like his skin was on fire, like fire ants were biting him when he got into a Tesla. And we all have different ranges of our tolerance level, kind of like alcohol, right? You have that friend who could drink you under the table. Then, there's people like me, I don't drink alcohol for this reason, but half a beer. And I'm dancing on the table with the lamp shade on my head. So, I actually was a bartender when I was 19. A fun story. I loved having jobs as a kid. And so as early as I could back up in Canada, where I'm from, you can legally be a bartender at 19. I wasn't like doing it like under the table or anything but every summer I had summer jobs. Absolutely loved it.
I worked in so many industries, I learned so much, it was so much fun for me. And so as a bartender, I looked around and I'm like, I don't really tolerate alcohol that well, but then like having to babysit drunk people, not for me, definitely didn't want to drink alcohol, but watching people's alcohol tolerance is a really interesting observation to then correlate that to other tolerances like pain. Everyone has heard of different pain level tolerances and an EMF tolerance. And so you can have someone who could drive a Tesla and they're like, I don't feel anything. I feel great. I love my Tesla and I don't care that my testosterone is plummeted. And other people they get in one and they start feeling really sick.
I did an interview a few years ago with Kellyann Andrews. She has an amazing ionic foot spa that removes heavy metals from your body, significant amounts of it. She was at the library and a woman is walking with a cane. And all of a sudden her legs just stop working. She falls to the ground like a marionette who had her strings cut. And Kellyanne is a nurse. So she runs over and she's helping this woman.
And the woman says, I don't know what happened. I'm really sensitive to EMF exposure. And, that's why I walk with a cane and usually my muscles stop working when I'm near EMF, but I'm not near any, and Kellyanne looked and walked around the desk that she had walked by and there was all the computer banks hidden right behind this desk or wall or something that this woman had walked by. And so Kellyanne brought her back to her house and gave her these treatments with the ionic foot spa called the platinum energy system.
And the woman left her cane at Kellyanne's house and Kellyanne had to chase after her running to her car saying, you forgot your cane, you forgot your cane. And the woman's like, oh my gosh, you're right. Wow, I feel a lot stronger. And so she proceeded to do more of these treatments and got all the heavy metals out of her and then she stopped being as sensitive.
Well, when I had Dr. Klinghardt on the show, he talks about how we are more sensitive to EMFs when we have heavy metal toxicity. And who doesn't these days, if you've ever had a vaccine, you've had a heav metal of some kind put in you. But if you've eaten tuna or if you've eaten any kind of a large fish, if you drank from cans and I don't know, I grew up around lead paint. I have been dealing for years, very slowly, healthfully, gradually getting rid of my heavy metal toxicity. And every time I see a naturopath about it, they always look at my labs and look at me and go, did you grow up in a factory? Were you mining coal? Why do you have these? I'm like, I don't know. I think everyone has different levels of detox. So even if you didn't grow up near a factory, you're breathing in, it's in our air, it's in our food. Heavy metals are just part of life of this modern toxic life. And some people detox better than others. But if you have an accumulation of heavy metals, then they vibrate at the same frequency as the microwaves and the wifi, and they're vibrating in your brain and they're vibrating in your cells, and it's causing havoc. And so people who walk near the EMF, it's like it triggers all this metal inside their body that's now vibrating, and then they have these big symptoms, right? Whereas someone who's really clean and their body have safe levels of heavy metals or they have no heavy metals.
They seem to have a higher tolerance for how much EMF they can handle before they start to notice it. But EMF is unhealthy regardless of if you feel it or not. And that's something really important to remember because it's invisible. And if you don't feel it, you're less likely to do anything about it. Like, that's why high blood pressure is this silent killer. Because if you have high blood pressure, you don't really feel it until it's too late or until it's too high. That's being constantly bombarded by something that's doing this slow microscopic damage to us. And for some people like me, I am more sensitive and I can feel when there's shifts in the room. Like I'm holding my bag of rocks right now, feel amazing. And I don't think I've ever been in an electric vehicle before nor do I want to.
Justin Frandson (0:54:53.956)
Lucky you. Well, when, when I was interviewed by Tom Cowan several years ago, I forget what number it was, like conversation with Tom Cowan number 14. He talked about this kind of hitting his radar and his list. One of his clients or patients at that time was a electrician and he was also a surfer and the guy ended up breaking his arm and couldn't get in the water and surf anymore
but he had a metal plate put in his arm. And so he was out of the water, sidelined, but then he had a huge metal rod put in his body, and he started getting all these EMF sensitivity symptoms.
And so Tom correlated the two, and he's like, you got to get grounded. You're like, you got to get back in the ocean. That's why you're getting all these symptoms. He was so toxic. And when you have more metal, whether it's from tattoos or metal plates or hips or shoulders, or vaccines or fillings or amalgams or what have you, you're going to definitely be more EMF sensitive.
So you got to go through those detox protocols to flush and get the metals out. And you got to get grounded as much as you can as well. And then a subtle simple protocol that we use for radiation flushing is apple cider vinegar, bentonite clay and protease, which is a proteolytic enzyme. It's a digestive enzyme. And so the three of those together, just recommended amounts every day will help flush all that EMF internally out.
And then you go through the tapping program with our bags where you tap on the bag and then you cover your eyes with the other hand and then teeth and then upper chest thymus and then intestine area, one at a time for about 20 seconds each. You'll feel your energy shift just as you did, Ashley, where you're flushing your biofield, you're clearing toxicity out of your energy field. It doesn't only get stuck internally with the heavy metal, but it also gets stuck in your energy field.
I mean, Eileen McKusick talks a lot about tuning forks and clearing your biofield through tuning forks sound therapy. She can clear generations out of stuck emotional challenges and such in there. And so, and the other part that I don't want to mention is she talks about the body in the best way. It acts like a body battery where we get a negative charge from the earth's resonance. We get a positive charge from the sunlight, the unpolarized light of the sun, distributes equally in every direction.
We breathe in minerals. That's why Zach Bush says, hey, get in all these different microbiomes. They're great for you. Hopefully we get it from our food, right? The nutrients and the minerals. And then we drink the water for all that as well, plus the conductivity of it all.
That's how our body battery works. If we're missing any one of those components, then those are gateways or opportunities. If our eyes get decharged, or our teeth get decharged or our thymus loses its polarity, we become a gateway for disease in the body.
Ashley James (0:58:24.734)
I, a year ago learned how to correct polarity and I've been doing it with my clients. I've done it with just about 150 clients in the last year. And one of my clients didn't even tell me half the things that she was suffering from. She calls me up. She leaves me a voice message. I still have it actually put it in Episode 500. We have a testimonial episode because she gave me permission to share it. And it was so cool. Cause I taught her how to correct her polarity.
And a few days later, she leaves me this message. And I remember when I first listened to it, I had it playing in the car. My husband's driving home with it with our son. And I have it playing and I'm just smiling ear to ear because it was the wildest thing.
She goes, Ashley, I have to thank you because for the last six years I suffered from, and then she lists the weirdest symptoms and some of them you've mentioned because they're similar to EMF poisoning symptoms, right? Like she felt completely ungrounded. She felt dizzy. Anytime she went near trees or nature, it was weird. She actually had to unground herself. She felt safer when she was in a second story versus near the ground.
She grew a phobia, not a phobia to water, but like water made her feel sick. Things that were healthy seemingly made her feel sick because her polarity was completely reversed. So things that were good were like bad. And she had gone to doctor after doctor and healer after healer for years. And it was feeling so out of whack. She just had to lie down. She'd feel dizzy and weak.
Weird, weird symptoms. I taught her how to correct her polarity. Her polarity got corrected and she goes, it's all gone. All of it's gone. All of the symptoms I suffered from are gone. And that's how powerful it is to correct your polarity.
It's really interesting. Again, you can't see it. So it's like, it's invisible. So a lot of times we are very skeptical around these things, but we understand like, if you took a bunch of metal shavings, right. And put it around a magnet, you can actually see the polarity of the magnet, which is so freaking cool. It's called a torus where the shape comes out of one pole and goes around to the other pole, but it's three dimensional.
But the shavings, obviously, because the gravity isn't going to float. So you're just seeing it two-dimensionally on the table, right? You're not seeing the whole field, but that's our bodies too. We have like a North Pole and a South Pole and we have this, it's called a torus, the shape of the electromagnetic field that's coming out of our body.
Something like way back in the day, I went with a friend. I was like about 19 years old and I went with a friend to this. I don't know how to describe it because there was a psychic fair, but it was a classroom where he was teaching life skills that had to do with more on the esoteric side, but like, here's the science behind it.
And he says, okay, I'm going to show you that you have this electromagnetic field that you actually have. We call it in the new age, we call it an aura. But like in science, you're like, you have an electromagnetic field that we can actually measure. And because we have this energy field that comes out of our body.
And so he took, he took dowsing rods, which again, sound very woo woo, but I'll get to that in a sec. And he was about 25 feet away from this woman. He said, turn your back to me, just stand here on the stage. And he held these metal rods and he walked towards her. And then all of a sudden they move on their own. He's just very delicately holding them, balancing them in his hands. He's not doing anything with his hands and they just move.
And then he talks to her and he shares with her how to pull in and shrink her aura or her electromagnetic field. And he does it again. He shows that it's smaller than he says, now I want you to expand your consciousness, expand your awareness, make it really big. And they showed that she could do it like 50 feet if she wanted to. And then we all got to play with it. And you really, it's so cool because these dowsing rods actually do move on their own when you hit someone's field.
Now I wasn't thinking this was like magic voodoo new age stuff because I had worked with a plumber, we had a septic tank and it was the winter and he couldn't find the septic tank or the entrance to it and so he got his dowsing rods. He said, this is a plumbing tool here in Canada, up in the North, where we have to like find your septic tank in the snow. You grab dowsing rods because anytime there's moving water or a body of water or pipes in your house or electrical, you can find it by holding these two rods and walking across the electromagnetic field and the electromagnetic field will move them for you.
And so I got super excited. I took two hangers, bent them in the shape of dowsing rods. And I walked around my house finding all the pipes and all the wires. Cause it's so neat to have something move in your hands. I can't see it. You can't see the electromagnetic field, but you're surrounded, your entire house. Just like you said, your entire house is surrounded. Your entire house is surrounded with this constant bombardment of electromagnetic fields, whether it's a healthy one, like a water moving through pipe, that seems kind of benign.
But then there's all these wires and the electricity is moving on the outside. That's the electromagnetic field. So, it's so interesting that we have this energy field that is affected by everything around us, but our energy field is not just a few inches from our body. It's feet. It's feet from our body.
And it's part of us because we are electrical, right? God forbid, if you had to go to the hospital, they'd hook you up to electrodes and they'd measure the electricity in your body, whether it be your heart or your brain, to see how it's going, right? To see what's up, to diagnose things. So we don't have electricity running through us. We are not alive.
Do you have any more like science you want to share about the EMF rocks? Do you have any more science or studies or research? Because like the ancient wisdom bringing and then going, Hey, here's modern science to prove that this ancient wisdom, like the Schumann Resonance and we should be at earth potential, actually there's something to it, we can now measure it. There's something to it. I mean, we know we can feel it. But now let's prove it with science. So do you have any more that you can share with us?
Justin Frandson (1:05:07.872)
Yes, definitely. I mean, the first two right out of the gates that I shared are huge tests that I lean in on because everyone will feel the benefits in their sleep. I mean, that's where you'll see it the most. So 3% to 60% deeper sleep, barely and correct and passively up to 91%. I do pH tests and your pH will normalize. So I've done pH tests which is crazy. You go stand in front of a Tesla battery for solar on someone's home. That's right next to the smart meter. And for every minute that you're in front of that, you have to have 10 minutes away from it to clear it out. So it takes a little time to do the test, but the pH paper after you tap on the bags and stand from it, you have a better pH than when you started.
So, we've done med bed tests where you put it on a med bed and it actually grounds it out. We're talking about us carrying more voltage. We're not supposed to carry extra non-native electromagnetic voltage in our system, but most of us walk around with extra six volts or so.
So that's why it's so important to get grounded. So the grounding bags will help normalize that as well. We'll see it on EEG tests,that coherence that we're having, you'll have more normalized. The doctors do their own third-party tests. So I get a lot of results from doctors and just from their own testing to say, hey, one grounding bag kicks out about 70 feet, the five together is better.
Dr. Charlie Fagan-Holtz, who's one of the fastest growing doctors out there, huge following online course. He is amazing. He just upped our time to recharge the bags by putting them on the ground. He said 10 to 20 minutes, once a month before we never even recommending recharging the grounding bags. Cause when the crystals are in solid form, they're ground. And so there's bags, I still have in my house where we haven't re-grounded them. They're still working, they're still effective as long as they're in solid form. Once they lose their form, they lose their function, for EMF protection. But I've leaned in to a lot of the doctors because we sell them all through these doctor clinics, MDs to Chiros to Naturopaths, there's a ray of different doctors, acupuncturists and all, that do their own testing with it. And probably one of the coolest things I just went into the doctor this past week for a chest cold and I was in a toxic environment. I was at a trade show and then an event in Las Vegas for a week straights with secondhand smoke and not grounding, bad lighting, and I got up a respiratory thing. And so I go in to clear it.
And she's like, Oh, you're EMF sensitive. And I said, well, let me show you. The clinic sells my grounding bags. And so I said, go grab a grounding bag. So I went through the tapping protocol and it totally flushed the EMF out of the biofield. I wasn't sensitive to EMF anymore. And she was a new doctor to this clinic, so she didn't know all the protocols with it. She just thought you just passively place it on there. But the other cool thing is it's one of the only products on the market that's an active healing product where you can tap on it and actively flush and 10X your energy. How has you felt so much more productive when you tapped on it and wanted to go do stuff? That's what it did is it upped your energy field. It got the mitochondria to function. It created a coherence with our environment.
And probably one of the biggest messages that I think is the standout message for us in our talk today is having a coherence with our environment because our environment could kill us instantly or it could allow us to thrive. And we have to understand that we're one with our environment as nature.
And when we can get out into it and create that coherence, we're going to recharge our body battery and be able to heal. And it's really tough to heal when you're decharged. So it's one of the first missed steps of getting people to heal is to get outside in nature and reground. And then when we can't get outside, and if you're in the colder temperatures, touch a tree. If you can't go barefoot, hug it if that's your thing. Get into bodies of water. I do cold water therapy all the time in the ocean, no wetsuit, I'm in there for extended periods of time, no matter what the temp is. And so I'm putting the work, you guys, you got to put in the work and then bring that resonance into your home. And that's going to be huge for you. Bring that resonance into your home through the grounding bags.
Ashley James (1:10:27.871)
Now your website, listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/emfrocks as in, woohoo, it rocks! Also, they're also a bag of rocks. learntruehealth.com/emfrocks and coupon code LTH. There's a lot of really interesting stuff on your website. You have the tapping protocol on your website. You also have these Faraday bags. Can you tell us a bit about why someone should have a Faraday bag? What are they used it for? I mean, beyond the obvious, like put your cell phone in it, but like, what do you use these Faraday bags for?
Justin Frandson (1:11:01.435)
Yes. So this has been a crazy journey. I mean, literally just over a decade, I've learned that EMFs and how they rev differently than us and how we're one with our nature and because I had some sensitivity, I could feel it. If I had a really watch on my hand, I could feel the pain underneath it. I've had a lot of learning experiences over the years with EMF and what keeps turning into then it's like, okay, how does it affect our body? How does it affect our sleep? How does it affect your hormones? And so it's leaned in on the next topic, which is our privacy and our security, and these cell phones are designed to aggregate all your information at record speeds and send it to artificial intelligence and to learn so they can do surveillance marketing to sell you more products.
Every app on your phone actually has about one to 15 trackers on it. It tracks your gate, how fast you drive it, knows all your pass codes and your bank accounts and literally everything about you. These phones are tracking at record speeds and learning from you. And so the Faraday bags are awesome because you can put your phone in it and ours are really inexpensive bags are $12 to $15 bags. The blackout ones are over several hundred dollar bags.
And so ours, when we first made them a handful of years ago they would pretty much black out everything. Well, the telecoms up the signal strength of these devices. And so you're really carrying a high powered router in your hand. That's way over 2.45 gigahertz or waves per second in your hand. And so when I first made them, we test the phone and the phone wouldn't ring inside of them. Now they do. So frequencies go in and out of our Faraday bag. But when you put a positive polarizing charge of a cell phone in a Faraday bag, it squashes it to safe levels.
And when you put good into it, it amplifies it of a negative charge and amplifies, so it's a crazy deal. But anyway, for purposes of putting a cell phone in the Faraday bag, it not only squashes it to what bioinitiative.org would consider safe levels, but what muscle testing considers safe levels. So I do lots of applied kinesiology. I've been muscle testing for over 30 some years.
Now, you can test when you're proficient at testing the body's reflexes and energy through applied kinesiology, you can test and showcase how our grounding bags work. But when you put a phone in the bag and seal it, even if the phone's ringing inside the bag, you muscle test strong. Just holding the phone outside the bag, you muscle test weak. So, we know that it's really beneficial for the body just to have it in the inside the Faraday bag and your phone will still ring most likely in it now with them turning up the signal strength. But what it does is it slows down that data harvesting, that aggregation of information. So the life of your battery lasts longer.
Ashley James (1:14:41.654)
Wow. Crazy. Alright, well I'm going to test that.
Justin Frandson (1:14:49.460)
It's so fun. Yes, it's a fun task and those things are super slick. They're really effective, but we got to slow down this aggregation of information from AI that we're giving away our fingerprints, our palm prints, our retinas, our voice, our face. These are called biometrics. They're our single most unique identifiers and we're giving them away at record speed. So this whole concept is turned into security and privacy. Which I know you're a homeschooling mom, like these are huge, huge parts of our body sovereignty and our freedom that we're giving away at record speed. So the more we can slow down their aggregation of our information, the better off we will be.
Ashley James (1:15:36.336)
Yes, there's that idea of the track tracing and database as all, but I've got a lot of friends who are like, I don't care about doing anything wrong. So what? So they know why I went to Starbucks. So what? My biggest concern is that while it needs to send out these signals every nanosecond in order to track trace and database you, and these signals are harming you. So if the phone didn't do all this tracking, it wouldn't have to constantly send out information.
We also have like smart meters, which I talked about Robin Openshaw on my show. We had a whole long discussion about how dangerous smart meters are and how unhealthy they are.
And he's got like, I don't know, two PhDs in electric stuff. He's like electrical engineer, super genius. But he's hired to go around the world. People hire him to go test, just like you test people's homes. And there'll be people who are sick, and they don't know why they're sick. And they have him come in, and he finds out that it's because it's dirty electricity in their home, or the whole neighborhood is messed up because the electricity coming into the entire neighborhood because there's one transformer that's whacked and the electricity could still come in, but it's dirty electricity. It's at such a frequency that it's, it's causing people to literally be sick. And so he comes in and tries to clean everything up. And he says, you know, smart meters, big bad, super big bad. And we're being strong armed into agreeing to have them.
They are sending out constant pulses through the whole house. Like you have, it's similar to if you had agreed to have a cell tower attached to your house. It's sending out pulses through the entire house at your body all the time. We're being bombarded and maybe you don't have one, but maybe your neighbor does, it's just, we're being constantly bombarded. So we have to step up our game to protect ourselves.
I was sick for many years. If you've listened to my show for a few episodes, you've probably heard me talk about it, but I was sick for many years and that's what really had me doubled down on making sure that nothing toxic came into my house.
If you're, if you're not sick, you just go to the store and you buy whatever laundry detergent that has all kinds of carcinogens, cancer causing chemicals and you just buy the Colgate or the Crest toothpaste because that's what's there. That's what you grew up on or all the commercials you saw and it says, Oh, dentists approved this.
And we just, we just buy whatever's ever on the shelf, like some kind of Arm and Hammer deodorant or whatever. And meanwhile, they're filled with heavy metals. They're filled with carcinogens. We kept coming back to this point of manufacturers make stuff that is going to harm you. They don't do safety testing on their products because there's no approval process for that. And the EPA, 90% of new chemicals and products brought to the market, the EPA rubber stamps anyway.
I have a whole really interesting interview about that. If anyone wants to listen, I don't remember the name number of it right now, but it's a guy named Andrew. I'll remember it. He's a world's leading expert on green homes and getting non-toxic building materials. He's super interesting.
It was BMW or Mercedes, I can't remember which one came to him to figure out a solution to make non-toxic adhesives for their vehicles so that they could import their vehicles. Their vehicle that was made in the US so they could import it into Germany because Germany has higher standards than America. A lot of European countries have higher standards and they won't allow these toxic off-gassing glues and adhesives into their country, but they were using them on the American vehicles because there's no standards.
So, there's a lot of damage being done to us every day because we're breathing. If you can smell something, it's in your bloodstream. If you smell a fragrance, your liver is processing it in 15 minutes. And we're constantly being bombarded. So I was really sick for a long time. I did a lot to clean up my diet, to clean up my life. I got the majority of my health back fairly quickly using natural medicine. And I've been at it working ever since to just be tomorrow I'll be a healthier version I am today every day, every day, little baby steps, every choice I make, what I put in my body, the products I use on my body. I'm going to be a healthier version I am today.
And, and just like using this bag of rocks, I’m like, how flipping cool. Like if it's 3% every day, I can't wait to see what my life is like in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. And then you sent me, and thank you, you sent me your brand new toothpaste that you just created. It's very interesting. I use healthy toothpaste. I know the look on his face, no one can see him, but he's laughing. And you have beautiful pearly whites, by the way. Listen, if you're a health nut like me,
If you're addicted to wellness like we are, you're going to freak out for his toothpaste. Because what I noticed is it exfoliated my gums, not in a way that made left them raw. I was just like, I felt around my mouth. I'm like, wow, I feel like I just went to the dentist. Like my whole mouth feels really clean. And it, yes, it like exfoliated everything. Like it totally polished my teeth. It's soft enough that it wouldn't hurt it. But it takes off the plaque.
I know you say it's three ingredients, but like one of the ingredients is water, and you can't really count that as an ingredient since I'm putting water on my toothbrush anyway. So it's really two ingredients. And you've got this kind of clay, I want you to tell us a bit about it. And then you've got this very, very light peppermint, and it's actually really pleasant because there's no sweeteners, there's no, and it doesn't.
It's spearmint, but it's just, it's just so, so, so light. It's not overwhelming because all the toothpaste I use, which are all natural anyway, it's like they dump half a bottle of essential oils in it. It's like, here, you're like a little bit of peppermint. Try half a bottle. And usually it's too overpowering for me when I'm brushing my teeth with all these other natural toothpastes and yours is just subtle. There's no bad flavor. It's just, it's a neutral flavor. You got a little bit tiny, tiny
hint of spearmint, so that's wonderful. And then my whole mouth felt sparkling clean. So yes, tell us a bit about why you designed this toothpaste and why is it only three ingredients, but one of them is water, so it's really two ingredients.
Justin Frandson (1:23:05.621)
Oh, thanks. Oh, it's so fun. Well, we hand-mined crystal. So we have access to mines and one of the mines is pink Montmorillonite and we have one of the purest forms anywhere in the world. It's over 85% pure pink Montmorillonite. So just to let people know, bentonite clay is 8 to 30% pure Montmorillonite and we're over 85% pure Montmorillonite. So bentonite clay is kind of like just dirt and it's not great for you. I recommend it for, it's a great chelator, it's really easily accessible, but Montmorillonite is exponentially better. And so it's so mineral dense, that's why people add fluoride and all this other crap to the toothpaste is because there's no minerals in it, so they want to remineralize the teeth. You naturally get the minerals, the essential minerals, calcium and silica and all these natural minerals that you need for your body. And that's why guaranteed you feel like you went to the dentist and your teeth are cleaner than ever, but it's naturally done that way. So we just use Montmorillonite hand-mined crystals and a 300 mesh form. That's toothpaste mesh that's safe and, and smooth on your teeth. And then we add organic spearmint and we have a citrus blend as well. And then just water, so distilled water, clean water, and that charges them and they're amazing.
Ashley James (1:24:41.371)
It was Episode 59 with Sal La Duca. I looked it up. So Sal La Duca, that's a good one. That might've been my first episode diving into EMF. And he had some wild stories. And then Andy Pace Episode 453 on non-toxic homes and achieving a non-toxic home and work environment. If you're ever going to renovate your house or build a house, you've got to listen to that episode. You can contact him. One of my friends that I actually had on the show. And then we became friends. I introduced him to Andy.
And he got him, because his son had cancer and he's now completely cancer free. And his cancer had come back. The first time they did it like half natural medicine, half whatever the oncologist wanted to do. And then it came back and they went to the oncologist and said, if you don't mind just watching and waiting, we want to try it 100% natural. And they were able to get rid of this very aggressive form of childhood cancer in their son the second time 100% naturally. And they realized that they had to spend the rest of his childhood preventing it from returning. And so they went to Andy and said, help us build an EMF safe, non-toxic home, like ground up. And so he helped them choose every single building material. There's only a handful of companies in the world that build, that make paints and glues adhesives with nothing that off gases and he's got access to them. So, so that's Episode 453.
And recently I just published this episode, Episode 514 about Nano Silver. And I want to say if you are looking to add one thing or maybe trade out the water. I would consider playing with nano silver. Maybe trading out the water and adding nano silver liquid. You can listen to my Episode 514, they have something like 50,000 dental procedures done with this nano silver and there's almost no infections. They have major, major dental procedures where they're like removing teeth and or doing implants and the next day there's zero infection, zero pain, zero inflammation because of the power of the nano silver. But I'm really excited about the mineral that's in or the crystal that's in this the toothpaste that you created. Can you say the name really slowly so I can say it? What is it called?
Justin Frandson (1:27:12.184)
It's pink Montmorillonite. And yes, I've actually considered having colloidal silver in it as well. And, the cool thing is, our Montmorillonite is so pure. It doesn't do well with anything else and it doesn't need anything else. So we're just going to probably stay with this for a bit, see how it goes. Maybe in the future we'll add that in there, but right now we don't really have a need for it because it's just so effective.
Ashley James (1:27:45.564)
It doesn't need it. Yes, it is. It feels really good and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It felt like my gums were exfoliated in a good way. It felt so clean. It felt cleaner than my super healthy toothpaste that I've been using for years. So good job creating this. How did you figure out to create this? Cause if I was mining crystal, I wouldn't be like, aha, I'm making a toothpaste. Like that. How did you get there from there?
Justin Frandson (1:28:16.486)
Well, Montmorillonite's really powerful for a lot of different things. They use it in koi fish, cattle feed. You can drink the cloud water. You can drink water with white in it. It's just so nutrient dense for the body. It's such an amazing healer. You could put it over wounds or spider bites, but the pink's really great for teeth. And so just learning about the crystals and having the history with the owners with these mines we've learned a lot about how the benefits of it and how clear it is. And there's so many, products that throughout the years that we've rolled out the toothpaste one, lean oil, the MCT oils one that helps. Buffer the insulin spiking with glucose from EMF.
I want to go back to your smart meter talk. Josh Del Sol did a documentary movie called Take Back Your Power. So I want everyone to make sure they watch that one. That one's huge on smart meters. There's sporadic pulses, like 7 to 15 second pulses, multiple bandwidths are receiving and sending every several seconds. So it's just really challenging on our body, but he
first saw everything that's going on and that was about at least 12, 15 years ago when he produced that movie, just unbelievable documentary movie.
Ashley James (1:29:51.031)
Yes, that's the thing. It's like, you feel like smart meters are new, but they've been pushing it for a while. I remember hearing about it 15 years ago and the whistleblowers came out then. And all the utility companies just push forward because it's going to save them money. So as long as it saves that money, it's either, but businesses are in business to save money and make money.
And at the expense of our health. So we just have to remember that all businesses are out. It's like their secondary gain is to destroy the earth and the planet and humanity as long as they make a buck at the end of the day, right? And I know there are ethical companies because it's the person behind the company, right? So that's why I love interviewing these small businesses. Hopefully it won't be small forever, right? Like one day there might be a bag of rocks in every home. Cause it's so cool. And it's also like really neat to have friends over and be like, here, hold my bag of rocks. See how you feel, tap it a few times. What a fun gift, what a fun thing to have. How many? So I've got this big bag and tell us about how we should go about using it. So I've got this big bag. We've so far been sleeping with it and then during the day we carry it into the office with us and just feel good having it near us or we're touching it. How would someone
take the small bag and put it in their pocket and just walk around all day or their purse or their car? Tell us how to maximize the usage of the EMF rocks.
Justin Frandson (1:31:33.949)
Yes, so definitely on emfrocks.com we have the full size grounding bag, which is about one pound bag of crystal. Then we have a mini grounding bag. That's about two to three ounces that you put in your purse, your pocket, or a kid's backpack for on the go protection. So I carry it in my pocket. I put my phone on the outside of it. So that's the best way to carry it. It's great for a purse. You can do the mobile Faraday bag with your phone in it. So if a woman's carrying a purse and they have it over their shoulder and their phone would essentially be resting about at their liver area. They could do one or both. They could have their phone inside of a mobile Faraday bag and that would be more of a shield protection. But then to create a coherence, they would have to do it through actually going on and to having a mini grounding bag with them as well.
Ashley James (1:32:35.431)
Okay, so it's good to have a mini grounding bag to carry around with you. What about in the car? Should we have one in the car? So what if they have an electric car?
Justin Frandson (1:32:48.037)
Yes. Seven grounding bags behind the drivers. Seven. It's just like clearing a 2000 square foot house. Yes, so I could literally write a dissertation on driving an electrical car and how bad it is for us and the environment and how much of a storytelling that they've hoodwinked us on. Hey, let's invent a vehicle that we want to reduce the usage of electricity. Let's say it's better for the environment, but you have to use more of that electrical grid to use the vehicle. Just right out of the gates, there's just zero merit behind it. And then we're using coal, cadmium, mining, precious minerals, using way more of the coal to manufacture them.
It doesn't get more efficient when you drive it. You get 18% lower testosterone. I mean, this whole concept behind an electric car is crazy. And the amount of wattages that it uses to charge the thing is extensive. So, I mean, I could go down and talk about this whole topic for literally hours. It's that bad of a deal.
Ashley James (1:34:01.317)
It’s like 12 years of pollution to make one car battery for an electric vehicle. The amount of mining that they have to do, it's just the pillaging the earth. And it's in these countries where there's child labor and the horrible pollution caused by everything they do to get the materials to make these cars. It's such a scam.
I mean, I love the concept of like, oh, imagine a world where just clean energy, right. And I want that, I want clean energy. I'd love it if we lived a hundred percent off of, I don't know, bio-thermal or something like that didn't have any negative effects on us whatsoever on our health. And this isn't a political issue. I don't care if you're on the left or the right or the middle or up or down. I don't care what political spectrum, whether you're a flat earther or globe person or whatever, this is not about that there's global warming because I'm like, let's just not even go there because it's politicized on purpose to keep us all fighting amongst ourselves. We can agree on one thing, 100% of everyone listening could sit here and agree on one thing, pollution is not healthy for us.
Now, how do we go about diminishing toxic pollution in our air and our water and our soil? That's another thing. But manufacturing something that causes more pollution in order to make less pollution? It's not there yet.
Justin Frandson (1:35:37.677)
And you're left with all these batteries. I mean, what happens to the batteries? They just a flashlight battery, a power drill battery, they don't last for very many years. What about the solar batteries and panels and electric car batteries? They just filling up our landfills with acid with dead batteries. So you have all the waste on top of the toxicity from the mining.
But the worst part is it's so bad for our health, the sitting on that battery. You have all the new cars, it's seven computers in every car at least. So you have a lot of electricity. And then now you have all this dirty electricity from that massive battery covering across the entire floorboard. And then you have all the self-driving capabilities.
So all the wireless, you have all three electricity, magnetic resonance, dirty electricity and wireless, all of those three at the highest level. And you're literally cooking yourself and families. And to your point about your friends not being able to sit in a car. I can't sit in an electric car. My body aches. There's too much resonance in there. But I can feel that. And these are the things that most people, unless you're sensitive, feel, our bodies, the sounds that they make, I mean, this is crazy. So when that thing's making noise, when it's going forward or reversing or charging, these are the noises that our bodies hear. And these sounds that our bodies hear, plants hear, pets and animals hear. Most humans can't hear that bandwidth. But when I go, I live in Laguna Beach, when I go into our cove, into the ocean and go underwater, frequencies, they travel so well underwater. You can hear them. So I can hear when there's a dolphin in our cove. I can hear when the whales are swimming by our cove. And when there's an electric foil board, Ashley, it's like noise pollution. It's like someone put it on a static radio station and turn the volume up when I go underwater. It's so crazy.
And from Arthur Firstenberg's work, he's saying they want to have entire internet of things in the ocean to protect us from tsunamis or whatever. That would kill the entire marine life. So we got to really understand the ramifications of electrifying our atmosphere and our environment at the levels that we're doing. We're seeing a lot of people got really sick from it. And keep getting sick from every notch above it. And I feel it's directly correlated from all the work that all these incredible doctors that we've talked that have shared about the environment and us and how we're one with it. I go into a smoke-filled casino and I don't smoke. Like my body's going to say, hey, you're going to adapt to that. So that's essentially how our body works. When you get in these polluted environments, we adapt, but now there's only so much of this we can take. We're already connected.
They don't need 5G in third world country. They don't even have electricity in remote areas in the oceans, mountains, deserts, forests, pristine areas, third world countries. They don't even have electricity. Why do they need full surveillance and 5G and all that? They don't. They're marketing to sell us stuff to track trace. I feel as well, and to make us sicker quicker. So these aren't always enhancing. There's so much benefit we can get from certain products of it. But I really want everyone to learn what the stressors are, develop proximity protocols to them, and then get grounded by nature and use technology, not let technology use us and get out of this meta universe, like everyone wants to have a smart device on the wrist and say, oh, I did so many steps or oh, I slept good or oh, it's time to eat or whatever or I got this great workout in. Listen to your body, connect to God and listen to your body and how it feels. You'll know so much more. I don't wear a watch. I know what time it is pretty much to the about 15 minutes. Like all day, every day, even when I wake up in the morning by looking outside. Like I know exactly what time it is. So listen to your body, get connected, and your vitality, your health, your performance, all of it will exponentially increase.
Ashley James (1:40:43.320)
I want to go back to the cause, you really quickly went over some major things. I want to go back to the pH changes. To hold a bag of rocks or tap a bag of rocks, something that many of us, I'm sure are kind of laughing at. I know the skeptic in me is like you're a good salesman. You figure out how to make me hold a bag of rocks. To hold a bag of rocks and have your pH change is phenomenal. pH is the measurement of the loose hydrogen molecules floating around, bombarding. So to have lower pH is a way of measuring like the lowered oxidative stress, right? We want to be slightly alkaline. We don't want to be slightly acidic because there's a big difference between the two. Cancer thrives and loves an environment in our body that's leaning towards the acidic side. The homeostasis is slightly on the alkaline side. And if you can do something without putting anything into your body to change your pH. I know with the Platinum Energy System Ionic Foot Spa, we do a pH of our saliva before and after, and all you're doing is drinking water, you're not eating anything, but it takes 30 minutes of that machine and it’ll make your pH go into healthy ranges from slightly acidic to slightly alkaline. That's like a 30 minute foot spa where it's removing heavy metals and lactic acid and other things from the body. And what I love about the bag of EMF rocks is it's not plugged into anything. It's not technology. It's literally what God made us. God made us this earth, here, have a bag of earth and I can feel it. I mean, I'm holding it and I can feel it. So tell us just a little bit more. Can you talk a bit more about the pH change?
Justin Frandson (1:42:55.310)
Yes, definitely. So let me talk about the tapping first. The tapping is huge because when you grab a homeopathic tincture, what do you typically do is they say, Hey, tap on it, activate it to activate the molecules inside of it. That's what you're doing with the grounding bags. When you grab it, you'll tap on it. You're going to start to wake up the properties in there. You could kind of squeeze it, tap on it.
And that'll excite the molecules in there to say, hey, naturally do what you're supposed to do and create a coherence. And when you create that coherence, what's going to change in your body are all the different marker changes at the cellular level. So when inflammation goes down, if your radicals go down, that acidity level will start to change because you get out of the sympathetic nervous system state. When you're in fight or flight, your acidities can be like acidic, like crazy. So when you get back into the parasympathetic, the rest digest, heal, that area where you can start to sleep and get in those restorative sleep, your body's more in a homeostasis. So the body's going to show that in the chemistry of it. It's directly correlated from the energy field of your body. You can't have chemistry without energy. So it's all from the environment. And so when you can get grounded by nature outside or tap on the bags, create that resonance inside, your body is going to adapt and then you're going to see less and less of the symptoms. You won't be as nervous. You won't be as anxious. You won't be as stressed. Like literally, it's such a great calming.
You made the comment that you want to just hug the bag the whole time. And that just really says that your body's wanting to ground a lot more. And that's the benefit of the product. It'll help ground. Now, some other more severe symptoms, like a non-trauma concussion symptom would be like level two EMF toxicity. So they would have nausea, vomiting and rashes on the skin, seizures of grind their teeth down to nothing. I've seen that with clients where their head of the bed has been on the other side of two smart meters. They live in a front and back end unit in CDM. One kid has seizures, the other one in the same room grind their teeth to nothing. It was unbelievable. And the mom's like, we're organic, we're holistic. How does this happen? I'm like, well, this kid is sleeping on the other side of two smart meters. So that's radiation. So anyhow, we got a look at that environment and how it affects our body.
Ashley James (1:45:48.211)
Yes, that's huge. And again, invisible. You can't see it. You can't see the EMF exposure and therefore you you just don't know how much you're being exposed to or how much it's affecting your day to day life until you do something like earthing and grounding and you go, holy crap, I can't believe it. Like, I can't believe my husband did not snore for the last few nights because we had a bag of rocks by his head. Like, I'm never not sleeping with this bag of rocks.
Justin Frandson (1:46:19.087)
Well, I can't claim that it helps with snoring. That's from what you guys, I'll take it, but that's news to us, and that's great. I think definitely getting into the more lucid dreams will really is what we see and hear a lot of and how when you're in such a deeper state, maybe the breathing's just easier, I guess. I don't know if that's happening.
Ashley James (1:46:51.163)
Yes. I don't know. He definitely said he was in much deeper sleep. And I thought that was really cool. Now he's the kind of guy that he's always out of bed before I am. He just bounces out of bed. He needs less hours of sleep seemingly than I do. But since we've had this bag, he slept deeper. He slept longer.
And I think he's getting more of the rest his body actually needs. That's really neat. And even the other day, I said, that's okay. I'll get up and start making breakfast. You stay in bed. And I don't think ever happened in 15 years of marriage. So, it's definitely calming his nervous system. Yes. That's right. You said, this helps to get us out of that fight or flight mode. Well, it's totally doing that with my husband and I've just noticed I'm more motivated, happy, like clear-headed more get up and go like pep in my step so that's that's how reducing the EMF and grounding myself with the this bag of rocks has done to me so I guess it affects you differently depending on how the EMF stress is affecting you, right? And how being ungrounded or having excess electrons, having that excess voltage in the body, how is it affecting you when you remove it, get back to your natural state?
How do you feel at your natural state? And right now I feel motivated, happy. My husband's more relaxed and sleeping better and not snoring because he goes into deep sleep. So it's so cool. Learntruehealth.com/emfrocks. Of course, the link to everything that we talked about today is going to be in the show. So today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. Justin, is there anything you didn't get to say or anything you'd like to say to wrap up today's show?
Justin Frandson (1:48:43.215)
I'm just so grateful for you having me on Ashley. Thank you so much for your awareness and your voice to help so many. It's awesome. I want everyone to lean in on their healing journey to look to nature, to get grounded by nature. It's free. Go outside, touch a tree, get barefoot, jump into a body of water, get into nature, breathe that resonance, get in the sunlight. It's healthy for you. It's good for you. And when you're turn your electricity off at night, get a timer on the Wi-Fi router, if you have Wi-Fi. Hardwire is best, but if you have it, get it on it. Get an electrician to get a switch on your electrical panel to turn the electricity off in your bedroom at night when you're sleeping. So the resonance of your bedroom is as close to nature as possible.
That's what we want. That's what we want to bring into our home and our life. And when we can do that, everything's going to be so much better in your world.
Ashley James (1:49:51.963)
Love it, love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And if you have any more studies or results or science or anything more in the future you want to come back on and share, we'd love to have you back.
Justin Frandson (1:50:03.839)
Thank you, Ashley.
Ashley James (1:50:05.145)
I hope you enjoyed today's episode with Justin.
It was amazing, the things we talked about and all those other episodes that I referenced. They'll also be linked in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com, so you'll be able to jump into those show notes once this episode is on learntruehealthcom and you'll be able to listen to them as well. Remember to check out learntruehealth.com/emfrocks. That's learntruehealth.com/emfrocks, not because EMF rocks, but we want to get rid of the EMF with the rocks. And you can use coupon code LTH to get the listener discount. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.
Check out the nano silver we discussed: https://www.learntruehealth.com/silver - I got you a discount! Use coupon code LTH at checkout.
Get Keith's book for free: https://silveruseinstitute.com.
https://www.learntruehealth.com/nano-silver-natures-answer-to-microbial-threats/
Unlock the secrets of nano silver with Dr. Keith Moller and Ashley James, as they explore the groundbreaking impact of this tiny powerhouse on health and medicine. Prepare to have your misconceptions about silver shattered, as we reveal its true potential in everything from enhancing antibiotics to transforming dental surgeries into pain-free experiences.
Highlights:
Intro:
Hello True Health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited for you to hear this episode. This episode is going to save people's lives. This is how important it is. So I'm going to be really quick. Two websites that you got to know about. One is to get Dr Keith's book for free. Now you can buy a hard copy of his book if you wanted to, but he gave his book to the world. It is silveruseinstitute.com. And then you can use the coupon code LTH at learntruehealth.com/silver. That's learntruehealth.com/silver If you'd like to purchase the Nano Silver that he talks about today. It's phenomenal. I am so excited. So, without further ado, enjoy today's episode.
Ashley James (00.45.502)
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 514.
I am so excited for today's guest. I've actually been waiting a really long time to interview Dr. Keith Moller, who was referred to me by Tim James. Tim James, I've had on the show before I've been on his show. It's been wonderful. There's not like someone out there judging and deciding who's the top and who's the second leading expert and who's the third leading expert. But Keith, I think you're up there probably right up there at the very top, a leading expert in not only understanding silver when it comes to medicine, but Nano Silver technology and utilizing it for health, for wound healing, for the immune system. You've been involved in over 400 studies and just specifically around this topic of using silver.
I am so excited to dive into this. I've been using silver, not Nano Silver, but I've been using like colloidal silver, for example, for myself for over 25 years and absolutely love it. And then when I heard that it was kind of trash in comparison to Nano Silver, and it's like a totally different thing in comparison to this far superior medicinally product that we can get and use for our immune health. I was intrigued.
But there's a lot of controversy. There's a lot of misconceptions. A lot of people, you know, saw the blue man on some kind of talk show 15, 20 years ago and decided that, silver was bad for us, that it's a heavy metal, that we shouldn't use it in medicine, or shouldn't use it to help to support our immune function. And of course, MDs like to poo poo anything that isn't a pharmaceutical drug. And so there's just been a lot of misinformation, but considering how many studies, and this is just widely studied, there's so much great information around this. I'm very excited to have you today so you can share with us the benefits of Nano Silver and how safe it is and how effective it is. So welcome to the show.
Dr. Keith Moeller (03:08.264)
Ashley, it's a pleasure to be with you. And yes, we can go over all those things. I have worked for decades with some of the top scientists in the world, MDs, DOs, naturopaths, all groups of people, dentists, really all over the world.
And what I find is that if you have doctors and groups that like to study, silver is very highly regarded. If you have the old time boys that, I learned it this way, it's gotta be this way and I can't add anything to that, yes, you're going to get nowhere. But if you really want to know about silver and the different types of silver, right? I think when you said, well, colloidal silver is actually junk. Let's do it a little better.
Let's say that silver is like a piano, right? And with colloidal silver, regular ionic colloidal silver, what you're doing is you're playing with about half the keys. So can it make music? Does it function? Will it kill bacteria? The answer is yes. But it's a lot like a guy who walked up to me and he quoted a phrase that I've seen written a bunch of places and from most of the people who don't know anything about silver, he came up to me and he said, hey, do you know that silver will kill 650 disease organisms? And I looked at him and I said, you don't know the question.
And he looked at me a little frustrated and he said, what do you mean? It's not a question, it's a statement. I said, no, you have to know the question. And he said, okay, what is the question? And he was looking at me, a little like I was trying to be arrogant. I wasn't, I was just trying to teach him something. And I said, well, it isn't that silver will kill 650 disease organisms. That's not the question. The question is at what level, over what time period, with what type of silver can you kill that organism? I said, once you know all of those things, you become really useful. Up to that point, you're just taking a crap shot at it, right? Oh, I have this, I'm going to try this and hopefully it works. That's not the way we do business.
When you're talking about the scientific world and you're working with big institutions, you have to have the background data. If you're going to be successful at something, let's say you're doing a wound care product, which we have, right? We just got approval of the gel in Canada and we'll go over more of that later. But if you are going to make a claim on that, that it's antimicrobial, which that Canadian approval says, it's an antimicrobial and use it for cots, burns and wounds. If it's going to be an antimicrobial and you're going to make a direct claim, for example, on killing MRSA, Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus, you have to know at what level that product will inhibit the growth and what level it will actually kill it.
If you know that, you can design a product that will be successful. And if you don't know it, you may not design the product to be successful. So if you have all that background data, then you're highly useful. Then you can accomplish some amazing things. And silver is incredible.
I just read an article that was in PubMed. It was called The History of Silver. I actually wrote it yesterday, and I read it again this morning for the fun of it. Other people read books and magazines and that sort of stuff. I like tests, so I read and study. It just gives me a great feeling, and it allows me to get up every morning knowing that I can do good, right?
And so in this, it said that silver had been used for six millennia to prevent infections. That's a history of medicine. It was written in like, what, 2008 at some PubMed. But the fact is, six millennia, we're talking about thousands of years over time, and originally way back before antibiotics and all of that, right?
Silver over the centuries has been used in medicine, as a medicine, eating utensils, plates, cups, food containers, jewelry, money, coins, clothes, building materials, wound care, and as a disinfectant. And now after the centuries, and now we're in the modern day and we are so much better than those past people, right? We have so much more knowledge. We have the internet.
We have access to all this stuff. Now that we have access to all that stuff, silver right now today is being used in medicine, in eating utensils, in plates, cups, food containers, jewelry, money, clothes. In fact, clothes have gone nuts. They're embedding it in all sorts of clothes for nurses and military people so it can eliminate infections. And in building materials. They make carpets out of electricity or out of silver. They put threads in there because in these big computer rooms, it pulls all the static out. Silver is the number one conductor of electrical and thermal energy. And that gives it huge things. But the funny part for me is everything they used it for in the past, now that our civilization is so uppity, we've come so far.
We're still using it for all the exact same things. Why? Because it works. And now we can add to it all electronics and solar panels. Every day, every person that's hearing this uses mass amounts of silver. It's in every connection of your car. It's in the amalgams that they put in the wires that hook the wires together to circuits.
It's an amalgam of silver and other stuff. They use silver because it is such a great conductor of electrical energy. And they think that that's why it has some incredible abilities in the body as well. But all the solar panels, right? Electric cars, the most expensive batteries are all made out of silver. They use lots of it. So almost everything you do every day in the modern world, you're using silver. And it's an industrial metal and they use mass amounts of it. So it's really interesting that people just don't know all the things they do with it. But over time, it's still the same. I mean, you're talking about Aristotle, 350 BC. It's reported and it was in Nature magazine, but it reported that 350 BC, Aristotle was telling Alexander the Great, if you want to keep your men safe, you got to use silver to help keep your water pure. And then at 400 BC, you have Hippocrates, right? I think I love Bill and Ted and their great adventure, they called them Hippocrates.
Right? Made me laugh. But Hippocrates, and I'm not even sure I'm pronouncing it correctly, but the fact is that 400 BC, he describes in writing the antimicrobial effects of silver. He didn't use the term antimicrobial, but he talked about the fact that it would work as an antimicrobial. So the point is, we've known for a long time. And for the last 20, 30 years, we all got away from silver, right? We're still using it everywhere, but medicinally with the advent of antibiotics, people stopped using it as much, right? Before then, actually one of my favorite ones was that in a PubMed history of silver from 2008.
In the conclusion, it says silver is the most important antimicrobial agent before the introduction of antibiotics. So over the millennia, silver has been the most important thing to help humanity control infections, disease, germs, those types of things. Right. And there are literally thousands of products right now.
Hundreds, at least hundreds that are FDA approved silver products for use all over in and around the body. Devices, right? So we're after a bunch of new approvals right now that are FDA approvals on a new product. And it'll be really fun. So hopefully within about six months, we can have another one and go through all of those new uses.
But those are some of the most important things that we can get a handle on in medicine in the US. But the funny part for me is that now antibiotics are starting to fail, right? They are having problems. And so what are people actually going back to? Silver.
Ashley James (14:08.969)
Herbs and yes, looking for natural remedies.
Dr. Keith Moeller (14:13.045)
Yes, so they use a lot of herbs. Do herbs work? Sure. Where do you think the medicine came from? Almost every single medicine was an herbal ingredient before. And then the scientific boys figured out how to synthesize that and make it so it just had that one effect. Usually, they added in a whole lot of bad effects with that. Right?
But they took away the natural part of that and they just use it. So they lost the natural portion of that, but every single one of those that I'm aware of is all from the base of a natural product. But even if you're talking about antibiotics as they exist, right? In nature, they talked about a guy named Collins and Collins was using silver with Antibiotics, right? As an adjuvant to antibiotics, as an immune support with the antibiotic treatment. And what he found was that silver could in fact make antibiotics, and the quote is, ten to a thousand times more effective. So now you have silver helping antibiotics to become more effective.
We actually had a partner do a study on using Nano Silver with nineteen different antibiotics, seven different pathogens. Those are bugs like E. coli and I think there was a yeast like Candida and Staph Aureus and some nasty bugs. Three of them were multi-drug resistant strength.
And what they did was add the silver to the antibiotics to see how it worked. And in fact, out of 96 tests, in 94 of those tests, the silver made the antibiotics more effective against the pathogen. It has the ability to help eliminate the problem of the antibiotic actually becoming less effective.
Ashley James (16:34.231)
What about if they just did silver? What if they didn't do the antibiotics and they just did the silver?
Dr. Keith Moeller (16:38.837)
Well, that's a different thing. Can you just use the silver? Yes, you can. And, will it work? There's thousands of studies that shows that it does. I have been involved in a whole bunch of those. I've been involved in ones with Texas Tech School of Med. And they're peer reviewed published studies if somebody wants to see them, we can send the copies. But we did one in direct comparison to Betadine. So we used a Nano Silver gel and did a direct comparison to Betadine. And in that study, we found that Betadine, which is used all over in hospitals even today as a disinfectant on the skin before they do an operation, right, to help keep you from getting that infection.
They disinfect the area before they cut into you. And in this case, we showed the Betadine was actually not very effective, that there were a whole bunch of bugs that were resistant to it. And it took a long time to kill.
In that study, which is peer-viewed and published and available in PubMed, it showed that the silver could eliminate all those bugs, do it within minutes. And then we did a study where we used the silver with the Betadine. So synergistically together, and it worked incredibly well. So could you use it without it? Yes. Do you think you could change the hospitals and all those guys over from using the Betadine?
Probably not. But the reason why we did that study is we said, look, we can possibly bring out a Betadine 2 and then add the silver to it so it becomes more effective. So you have two problems there. One is the effectivity and two is the perception of the people that are working in the medical industry. So how do you make them both happy? You combine those two and that's why we did the study apart from each other and also together. Cause we have a greater chance of actually getting that into the hospitals as a cleanser for the skin, if we add them both together, because then we say, look, this is an improved Betadine that's more effective. And then they'll all go, oh yes, okay, we're good with that. And they'll put it right in. So it's all about knowing how to get something done, right? And trying to help people. I mean, the fun part, Ashley, is what if you got up in the morning and you actually believed that you could change the medicinal history of the world?
Ashley James (19:48.490)
Oh, dream come true.
Dr. Keith Moeller (19:51.026)
Okay? I actually believe that my team and I can help change the medicinal history of the world. And we are. Every day we work towards that. And we've been able to do a whole bunch of stuff that is stunning. And we'll get more and more of that out as we go. But we actually believe we can change the medicinal history of the world.
And we know we're actually doing it. We have helped hundreds of thousands of people over the last two decades, and it's getting more fun. There it is, growing like a weed. And as we get more and more data, it just becomes that much stronger. So we're after a whole bunch of approvals, and those approvals will allow us to do more and more.
And what we see is we think that we're the intersection between the natural products industry and also major med. We believe we can satisfy both. We believe we can make products that meet spec with the natural market that don't have the whole list of nasty side effects, right? Those things on TV, man, they just kill me.
I'm watching this thing on TV and they'll say, hey, use this for your psoriasis, right? And I'm thinking, oh, that's pretty good. They helped that woman get rid of her psoriasis. And then comes on the thing. Okay, may cause you to be blind, impotent, give you diarrhea, and death. I'm thinking, what the heck? I think I'll hang out with the psoriasis, right?
Ashley James (21:48.670)
Right? They call it side effects, but it's not side effects, it's effects. We have to think about that. They like to use language to limit the intensity of it. That's very manipulative. So when you say, oh, may cause these side effects over here that probably wouldn't happen to you, but no, they're actually effects of the drugs. And some people have it worse than others, but you really need to take that into consideration.
And then drug interactions also cause a whole list of other effects on the body, because these artificial man-made chemical compounds are designed to suppress, to alter, to manipulate the body. Whereas nature, like bringing in silver, it's a complimentary to our body. It's almost like evolution versus creation, right?
If you believe in evolution, we evolved with this. We evolved over thousands of years with silver, right? Versus man-made drugs that like, definitely did not evolve with this. It's only very recently did they introduce this into our genetics, into our body. And so it's very foreign, right? And from the creation side, God created us to have silver, right? So both sides, we can show that nature
has the answers we need. So I'm on that camp. I'd rather go with the science behind Nano Silver and supporting the body, but these drugs out there, and they're constantly creating new drugs, and you really gotta be discerning and cautious when it comes to anything new on the market, because remember every single drug that was taken off the market for killing too many people
was first approved, right? So we have to just have that memory.
My mom died from a drug that was approved and then taken off the market while she was in the hospital dying from that drug. So we have to remember.
Dr. Keith Moeller (23:53.128)
Yes, that's crazy. I do have an interesting thing for you. I think you'll like this story. But one day we had a bunch of meetings with some of the top quantum physicists on the planet. And they were having a big meeting in Boston and my father and I were invited. So we're at this meeting and we go through and we'll have some comments about that on another day, but it was a fun meeting.
But at breakfast that morning, my father looked at I believe was the top physicist in the world at that time. His name was Hans-Peter Juer, chairman of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. And my father looked at him and said, Hans. And he said, yes, he said, can I ask you a question?
And he said, sure, go ahead. My dad looked at him and said, do you, as a scientist, believe in God? And Hans looked at him and said, let me explain something to you. And my dad said, OK. He said, all things in the natural world degenerate to their lowest form.
it's the way of science and the world. He said all things degenerate. So he said, if we take steel, for example, we take iron oxide ore and we pressure treat it with heat, we can make it into fine steel. And he said, we've made that into fine steel, right? And then he said, it spends the rest of its existence trying to get back to be an iron oxide rust.
He said it degenerates to its lowest form, but he said, if you look at the Earth and the billions, not millions, billions of systems that all have to work in perfect sync to make this Earth function so we can exist here, he said something or someone is in charge and keeps the Earth functioning at its highest level.
So he said, you call that anything you want. I don't care if you call it God, I don't care. But he said something or someone is in charge and keeps your functioning at its highest level. All these systems stay in concert with each other. And he said, it's not a few. He said, there are billions of intricate systems that make it function. And I sat there and I thought, that is an incredibly brilliant assumption from a scientist, right? So, yes, I believe that we have divine help and I believe that if we search and work, and my dad had an interesting sign on his desk and I loved it and I take it to heart, I still think about it. And I believe I actually have that after he died, I got that sign. But what it says is all things come to he who wait as long as he works like hell while he wait. And I think that's true. That's why every day I get up, I study more, I get into new tests. I have stuff going right now with scientists all over the planet. And it's way fun. I'm working with the dental group. And in the last 16 years, using a silver nano liquid, a 32 PPM liquid and a 32 PPM gel, we have completed more than 50,000 test procedures on people in the dental industry using silver in almost every one of the protocols. So the 50,000 are all protocols that use the silver.
So there are hundreds of dentists right now using these protocols that were developed by this group. And it's stunning because they're getting heal rates of half the normal time. You can pull wisdom teeth, use these protocols that they're doing in these clinical trials, and you have no squirrel cheeks, no pain, no inflammation by the next day. So yes, no dry socket, none.
No secondary infection.
Ashley James (27:47.376)
What about healing from early stage cavities instead of needing to drill or anything like that? Have they had any success with reversing cavities?
Dr. Keith Moeller (28:56.382)
Okay, so the answer is I don't know. I never make up anything, so if I don't know, I'll just say I don't know, I've never tested that. But I did do a paper with a whole bunch of really bright people. I found that if I surround myself with really bright people, great things happen. And so there were a whole group of scientists and myself.
I'm probably the least of those, but I'm lucky to be smart enough to be in those groups. But we did a peer-view published study with Texas Tech School of Med on biofilms in the mouth. And we were able to create a product that could eliminate biofilms. So literally, you brush your teeth at night, you spit it out, but you don't wash it out, you leave it in. Next day, you wake up in the morning, you give her a big kiss and you say, baby, welcome to this world because there's no biofilms, no growth in your mouth. And now they've hooked those biofilms in the mouth to Alzheimer's and to endocarditis and all sorts of other problems. So if we can eliminate that, which we believe we can't and we're in the middle of doing, as we get more and more of that information, we'll be able to save or help save all of those lives.
And it's not like, we're saying, hey, we've done 20 of these, right? So far, we're talking about more than 50,000 dental procedures over a period of probably 18 years. So when we talk about that, do we know what we're talking about? Yes, I'm feeling pretty confident that we're pretty good at that.
Ashley James (30:43.796)
I have a holistic dentist I go to and he was really excited to teach me about the biofilm of the mouth and not like the regular dentists don't do that. I think everyone needs to just fire their dentist and go find a holistic dentist that uses Nano Silver. My dentist uses homeopathy, he banned fluoride in his clinic, like just really cool stuff.
But the first thing he does when you get into his chair is he scrapes your tooth, puts it on a slide, and puts it on a microscope, and it beams onto a monitor that you can see right in front of you. And you can see all the bacteria that are crawling around in your mouth, and there's spirochetes and weird things like little squirrely things, and they're all swimming around.
And then he proceeds to point to each one and explain, okay, this is a healthy bacteria and then, but all these other ones are causing heart disease, dementia and eating away at your skull. It actually causes not only gum disease and gums to recede, the recession of the gums is because they get into the bone and they break down the bone and now you're losing bone as well. It's almost like causing osteoporosis over time.
And if you have dental implants, it's eating away around the bone of the dental implant and it's just disgusting. It's horrible. And that is the biggest motivator.
Dr. Keith Moeller (32:15.490)
So now, if you put that implant in there and use the silver and eliminate the bacteria around that implant, you can now do it so, and let me give you a fun one that I did, right? So we got a call, this dentist and I, from Medical Innovations, PBS. And they said, we heard you are doing this.
And this dentist said, yes, we do that every day all day long. Thousands of those. And they said, well, we would like to film it. We want to see this. And so they brought in a producer. And the guy was a karate expert and had broken all of his teeth. This guy had one of the nastiest I'd ever seen. But they went into a place called LVI, Las Vegas Institute. And the guy in charge of all the operatories for that was a guy named Leo Milan. Incredible implant dentist, right? But he had a ton of experience using our silver in these implants. And he was teamed up with the King Poo Ba of using silver in the dental industry. That's a guy named Andrew Willoughby. And he's out of Canada.
And so Andrew and I and Leo were on this. So they took this producer and they did thirteen implants in one day. Thirteen in one day. And they used all the silver products in that. Day two, no pain, no discomfort, no squirrel cheeks, no inflammation.
So, we actually have been utilizing a Nano Silver serum, and we'll talk about that on a later day, in the bone grafts instead of using saline. And we're getting heal rates of about 20% of the normal time. They're getting bone reformation, and these are clinical trials that are ongoing. And if somebody wants to see them and they ask for them, we can show them a copy, but in this case, we had bone formation reformed and most of the skin, about 80, probably 84 to 90% of the skin, regrown in this clinical trial, regrown actually in five days compared with the average of 30 days. So peer-reviewed type information that's being created and published. We actually published a whole bunch of that data in the one of the top wound care. It's called the Bible of Wound Care. It's out of Springer and they came to us and they said, we want to write a section on using silver in wound care. And they said, we've been over it all this time and we want you guys to do it and there was about six or seven of us, doctors out of India, doctors out of the US, and me and also one of my sons who's also a naturopathic doc. And so we wrote this whole section and we added in there all the dental information. So it is published in the Wound Care Bible. So we actually wrote, I think, 42 pages on the use of silver in wound care, how it's used and we gave all the case studies, right?
One of those was a horse and they were going to kill this horse because a cougar or something had got it and ripped off a chunk of skin. And the piece was triangular in shape, but it was like a foot by a foot. So it's a huge chunk and all you can see is the meat of this horse's derriere. And they said, look, it's winter, we can't bandage it. It's infected, we're going to have to kill it. And I said, no, what I want you to do is just gel it once a day, every day with the Nano Silver gel. And they said, okay, we really like the horse. It's a family pet, we'll try it. And within three weeks, we had a layer of new epithelialization, a skin layer over the top of that. And then over a period of about four months, that entire piece of flesh re-grew, including the hair with no scarring. We're able to regenerate all of that tissue using just a Nano Silver gel.
And Canada just approved it for wound care, cuts, burns, wounds, right? But they also approved it for skin infections and skin affections. Skin affections is really interesting because that includes stuff like acne and eczema. Those are skin affections. And so in that, we got a direct approval from Canada on that 32 PPM gel to make direct claims, antimicrobial claims, right? Kills these bugs. And we're after those currently in the US, but it's not approved in the US.
So, right now on that gel product, we say it helps promote natural healing. And does it do that? Yes, it does it in a huge way. It cools, it soothes, it helps remove the irritation, it kills the odor-causing bacteria. So if you have a kid in sports, and I was always involved in sports, basically I love anything that's outside, right? As long as you can do it outside, usually you can count me in. But these kids, they come in and all of a sudden, they pull their shoes off, your eyes roll back in your head, right?
And you think that has got to be the most horrible smell I've ever smelled in my entire life. It smells like you've been wearing dead cats. And they're not, they've been dead for weeks, right? And you think, oh my gosh. So then you just take, you put some of this gel on there, wait a few minutes, and you can let him back in the house.
There's literally no problem. And so helps eliminate odor-causing bacteria. Yes, it's true.
Ashley James (39:38.811)
Could you put it on your underarms and use it as a deodorant?
Dr. Keith Moeller (39:47.153)
Yes, you can. The only problem with that is that it will wash out after a while because of all the sweating. So in surgical hand scrub studies that I did back when at my old company, before we formed the new one, we had done surgical hand scrub studies on a gel and found that we could help keep the skin fully antimicrobial for about four hours. So it works really well. You would just have to apply it a few times a day. It wouldn't stop the sweating. It would just help eliminate the odor, right?
Ashley James (40:30.685)
I love your stories and I could listen to you for hours and I definitely want to have you back on the show because I know there's so much we could talk about. But right now I'm going to dive into some questions. I've been using colloidal silver since probably late teens. I used to go to the health food store. I've always been crunchy. I've always been like a health nut.
And I loved going to the health food store. It just smells like herbs and musky. And you can't find those places anymore, like they're few and far between now that big box stores around, but I loved going in there and they had a huge book. It was like the Bible of Nutrition, massive book, and you could flip through it to find remedies because they were like the staff were a little bit cautious about telling you what to take but the owner was great and I remember going in there with the science infection I'm like listen, I don't want to be on another course of antibiotics like what should I do and she led me to the colloidal silver nasal spray and the Olbas essential oil blend told me about dropping the Olbas into hot water and breathing it in and that's going to really clear everything out and that's the essential oils are wonderful for that. And then you're going to take after you blow all the stuff out of your nose. You're going to take the colloidal silver nasal spray, and you're going to spray it up your nostril as much as you can while you're breathing in, and then do it to the other nostril and do it as many times a day as you can. And I blew out that sinus infection, and ever since then, it's been my go-to.
I always have this colloidal silver nasal spray in the house. Not that I don't get many infections now that I eat so clean, but back then, I can't imagine how many times I was able to avoid antibiotics because at the first sign of a head cold, I ran to the colloidal silver nasal spray. So I've always loved it, but when you early on in this interview, you brought up the question, right? And the question is also, what's the quality of your silver? Because you brought up that there's different types of silver, and I want to get into that. And you brought up like dosage and timing.
So, what quality of silver do you have? How many sprays would you do? How many times a day would you do it? And we don't know those answers. It is shot in the dark. Am I going to spray it once a day in my nose? Am I going to spray it ten times a day? What what is it going to take to kill that microbe and it depends on what the microbe is right and how prolific if I go at stage of the infection is so there's so many variables-
Dr. Keith Moeller (43:11.394)
Okay, so let's talk just a second about different types of silver. There's dozens of different types, but we're going to talk about the three main ones, right? So you have a colloidal silver, what's called colloidal silver, and about 94% silver hydrosols, structured silver. These are ones that are actually ionic forms of silver.
One of them calls himself a silver hydrosol, right? Hydro means water, sol means particle. It means literally nothing, but it sounds cool. So if you look at ionic forms of colloidal silver, they do have the ability to eliminate bacteria, okay? The only problem with regular colloidal silver is that there are two major studies out. I can send you both of them if you'd like.
But both of them showed that regular colloidal silver, one, has no ability to eliminate a virus or neutralize a virus, depending if you want to argue whether it's alive or not. It has no ability to eliminate a yeast, and it will start to kill probiotic bacteria at about 2.5 PPM.
So at 2.5, if you're drinking it and it's diluted and it's still at a level of 2.5 in your gut, yes, it can kill probiotic bacteria. Now that's not mine. That study was done by the USNIH and that study was done by like 20 doctors and other guys, but it was the USNIH that did that study. And they tested a number of colloidal silver.
And so that's not me. I don't go with the little argument thing. I'm the guy that says, look, don't give me the BS. Just show me the data. And if you can show me the data, then we'll talk. If you can't show me the data, then don't spew out BS, right? Know what you're talking about or don't waste the time. So in this case, this study says that it has colloidal silver in the form of bionic colloidal silver, which is 90% of what's on the market. Those would include the silver hydrosols, the structured silver. Those ones, like I said, they're playing on a piano and do they work? Yes. Can they help? Absolutely. Do they work at the highest level? No, they do not. They do not have all the keys. You're limited to about half the piano.
One of the big interesting ones that just came out, and there's a reason why people want to read this new study, but there's a big study that came out, I believe, last December. And that study came out of University of Florida, University of Tennessee, and the University a big one in Canada. And what they found was that colloidal silver or ionic form of silver had no ability to reduce an inflammation, which I always thought that all silver would reduce inflammation. But in this study from six different institutions, eight different PhDs, it showed that Nano Silver actually could eliminate virus and had a very pronounced anti-inflammatory effect where ionic or regular colloidal silver did not. Also, it went into some other areas that we won't go into but let's just say that the paper is produced to show that people in hospitals could actually use Nano Silver to eliminate a major problem that existed in the last few years and still exist, least to a certain extent, still making people's lives miserable. We won't talk about the name of that.
Ashley James (47:43.294)
I think, start to the scene, picking up what you're putting down. Yes. Got it.
Dr. Keith Moeller (47:47.231)
But if you want a copy of it, it's all independent information. It's from eight different PhDs and doctors, six different institutions in both the US and Canada. And it was just a great paper. I read it and I thought, this is like Christmas. I would give these guys a big old kiss if they were here. Not that they would be enthused about that, but it was like Christmas for me because the information they provided was stunning. But one of the big things they said in there, and you could read it, was that Nano Silver could help, and we're saying help, could help eliminate fungal sinus infections.
Now a yeast is just a single cell fungus, right? And one of the nastiest of all the ones that have now dropped into the US is a bug called Candida Auris, A-U-R-I-S. It's probably the most deadly fungus that's hit the world in a long time, but it's spreading. In fact, I think one of the big internet
television groups have a show on it right now, a fungus that wipes out mankind. But this fungus is called Candida Auris, and it's a yeast, right? Which is a single cell fungus. And what they found was that all three major antifungal drugs can't touch it, and don't even inhibit its growth. And yet, Nano Silver, and I have direct data on this, Nano Silver can eliminate it and do it in minutes. I mean, minutes. So I think that what we do is we call it a first line of protection, right? And colloidal silver, does it work? If that's all I had, would I use it? For sure. But again, you're playing with half the keys. So when you go to Nano Silver and there's mass amounts of information and I'm talking, I have one study that is out of Romania. And that study is actually a summary of 430 major studies on Nano Silver that are all peer reviewed and published. And it covers five major areas. And one of them is a hot topic with the FDA. So we won't touch that one. But the other ones were wound care, antimicrobial action, antiviral action. And the other one, well, there's one on there that we won't talk about at the moment. We'll talk about it maybe off air, but the other one was biotissue engineering. That silver has been used in all these things for biotissue engineering. Engineering new things that you could add in. Imagine a skin graft that would heal twice as fast and not be problematic, have less scarring, all of that stuff. Can we do that? Yes, we can. The information and abilities are already here. And I'm actually after that approval right now with the FDA for diabetic culture, septic culture, skin tears, venous taste assaults, or surgical wounds, grafted sites, and device insertion sites.
So we're after those approvals right now and hopefully in the next six months, they'll give us that and we'll be able to add a whole bunch of new keys to that piano and we'll have a much more fun conversation about the data we're producing on those. But at the moment, we're talking about ionic colloidal silver. So it has a few of the keys. Is it bad? No. Is it great? No. Nano Silver is way ahead and there's a lot of different types of Nano Silver. The one that we like actually is a super hybrid of a Nano Silver and it has a coating on the outside. The coating is an AG404. It's a multi-valent silver oxide coating and what that does is it means that it has abilities that no other silver particle has. So regular silver works, the colloidal silver, the history, the 101, right? Now we're talking about base, how does silver function? So silver, if it oxidizes, loses an electron, it wants it back. So by missing one electron gives it a plus one charge.
And so if it comes up against a bacteria yeast, something like that, depending on what type of form it is, but let's say bacteria, comes up against a bacteria, it can steal one electron out of that cell wall. And then it's happy, it's done. So normal silver, like the colloidal silvers that you're used to, are a single shot. They're one and done. They steal each silver ion, steals one electron, and then it's happy in its state. It doesn't, there's no more use to it. So you have to have lots of it to make it function.
One of the studies we did for the FDA was actually a direct comparison between a 32 PPM gel and a 10,000 PPM ionic product that's used in all the burn care units across the US. And we did the direct comparison on that gel for the FDA. We did that against MRSA, the Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus. So it was David and Goliath, but we had to have a direct comparison with a drug that was already approved to get the approvals we're after. And so it was 32 PPM gel versus 10,000 PPM cream.
And the 10,000 PPM took more than five hours to kill the MRSA bacteria in that study for the FDA. The silver gel, 32 PPM gel, had eliminated all of it at the first time check, which was 30 minutes. And we know with further testing, it's about 10 to 15 minutes. But it was 10 times faster than a product that had 300 times actually, I guess to be, if somebody wants to argue with me, 312 times more of the active ingredient. 300 times more and yet this 32 PPM, David just slaughtered Goliath, right? Much more effective. And why is that Nano Silver more effective? Because it has multiple modes of action. Instead of being able to steal one electron, and being done, each one of these little nanoparticles, and they're five to seven nanometers in size, each one of these particles can first steal eight electrons, each one of these. And there's thousands of these molecules of the AG404 around the silver particle. So it can, each one of those thousands can steal eight then it pulls it into the core and it can do it again and again and again. So it's like a self-loading machine gun where everybody else has a single shot. Second thing we found, and it was actually found by a professor named Rustam Roy, right? And Hans-Peter Dürer, that's where I met him. And they were having a conversation. We were talking about work we had done on bubonic plague. It's a bacteria called White Pestis. And people got it from fleas back in the dark ages and it killed millions of people, right? Black plague. And it's a bacteria called White Pestis. And we had done some work on that bug and found that we could eliminate like 2 billion of them. And we could do that in like two minutes. And so I'm sitting there with some of the top scientists in the world and they're discussing it. And their ability to do math in their head was just stunning to me. So I'm sitting there, I'm a pretty young kid, and I'm with these guys. And I'm listening to this conversation. And one of them was saying, look, you have this size of particles, so it means you have this many particles. And it's impossible for those to come in contact with this many bacteria in this amount of time. It can't work. And I just should have shut up, right? I just should have shut up and listened. But I said, but it did. And Rustem Roy leans over, puts his arm around me like a kindly grandpa. And he looks at me and says, Keith, we know it did. You did the test in triplicate. We know it worked. What we're trying to do is figure out how it works and why it worked. We know that it worked, but it's impossible to do what it's doing with what we know. So there's gotta be another mode of action. And then they came back and he said, okay, we're going to put it on a Raman spectrum and a whole bunch of stuff. Long story short, and translating all the science into English, what they found is that this particle actually is embedded with the resonant frequency. The frequency is the same as ultraviolet light.
890 to 910 terahertz. So it can eliminate pathogens in water that it doesn't even touch. And interesting enough, it doesn't hurt human tissue. So there's no negative action on human tissue or cell. None. No cytotoxicity at all. And we have test work showing up to 40 PPM. It won't kill probiotics.
And so in this, Rustem Roy looks at it and he says, we got to figure out what it is. And then a couple of years later, they published a big paper on it and said, okay, we found that this particle works, but we think it's bio-effectivity is because of the fact that it has both this resonant frequency that it emits, and also it has this code on the outside, a superoxide.
So it's not an ionic, it's a superoxide. And the superoxide makes it so it functions like a catalytic converter in your car, right? Your catalytic converter in your car eliminates problem gasses. And you don't have to go in there and refill it. It doesn't wear out, it's automatic. Because that metal, in this case platinum, is in there, when the gasses go through it, the platinum eliminates the toxic part of that. Well, silver does the same thing, but in this case, by luck or by let's call it a gift. By gift, this particle that we created way back when my father and a bunch of other guys, they created this particle.
I believe it was a gift. And we're still figuring out now all the things that we can do with this. So this is a Nano Silver, has more abilities, has a full piano key. And we still are adding new keys to that piano all the time as we work on it. And as we talked about, through this time period and several different companies.
I've been involved in more than 400 major studies and test series, all on this technology directly. So do we know more about silver than just about anybody else? Yes, we do. Is it because we're smarter? No. It's just that we've done more work, so we have more answers. Another one that you'll find interesting is people always argue, and I think it's really funny, they argue about whether silver should be in glass or plastic, right? And you have the old boys all saying, oh no, it has to be in glass. Well, if you actually know anything about glass, that's a bad choice. Because the silver particle we talked about has a positive charge.
If you look up glass, you find that glass has a negative charge. So what happens, and it's not a strong one, it takes time for it to do it, but glass will actually pull silver, or can pull silver out of suspension, where a food grade PET, a high grade plastic, won't. So I had a fun time way back when in my old company, where I first started.
I was working on it and I thought, okay, I have this product that I put on my floor 16 years ago. Liquid, right? Sitting on the floor in a PET food grade plastic bottle, been sitting on my floor by the window, hot and cold for 16 years. I pulled it out, had it tested for microbial abilities on yeast and bacteria, E. coli and Candida and it eliminated them at the same level as it did the first time I'd tested them. Almost exactly the same. There was literally no significant difference. And it had been sitting on the floor in a food grade plastic bottle for 16 years.
So it's highly stable, much more stable. I had a guy I was talking to, he said, I have a great silver. And I said, that's fantastic. He said, but, he said, I have to use it quickly. And I said, why is that? He said, because it falls out of suspension in like three weeks. And I said, I have news for you. You do not have a good silver. It's not a good product. It's highly unstable.
And that brings up the third type of silver. So you have the Nano Silver, we talked about that. You have the ionic silver and silver hydrosols. And then you have these silvers that have tons of silver in them, right? You find one and some guy will say, well, mine's better because it has 5,000 PPM in it, or it has 500 or 250, right? They'll say it's much better because it has more and more is always better, right?
Well, we answered that question with the test we did for the FDA, right, that we already talked about. More is not better. Effectivity is dependent on the type of silver. So what happens with these products is that they're ionic forms of silver. And ionic forms of silver are inherently not stable. They fall out of solution. And so what happens is somewhere way back when somebody said, look, I wonder what would happen if we bound that to a protein. So they bind it to a protein. It's kind of like your mom who used to make jam, right? She'd put in Knox gelatin, which is a protein, into the juice and make jam out of it. And it'd make it stable and keep it suspended. And it wouldn't go bad. This is the same thing. So they bind the protein to the silver ion and then it mucks up the silver's ability to function, but it makes it stable. And so you have to have a ton of silver in there to make it useful. And again, you're talking about antibacterial, not anti-yeast, not antiviral. You're talking about antibacterial effects, but you have to have a lot of it because you've mucked up its ability to function because you added the protein to it, and now it's bound up in that particle. The interesting part is we found with this nanoparticle with the AG404 coating, we found that it was semi-bound to the water molecule. And so we could boil it, we could freeze it, and it would remain suspended. That's why we can make tons of products that nobody else can make. Because if their products get boiled or frozen, they fall apart. Ours does not. It stays suspended. So we have the ability to make gels and other products that literally nobody else can make. And we can do that because this particle is so incredibly stable. I mean, somebody came up to me and said, why would I have silver in my house, right? Why do I want to buy it? I said, well, let me ask you a question.
I said, there's nobody more important to me than my family and friends, right? We all just went through a major problem. I said, what do you have in your house right now that you can use as a first line of defense? I said, last time it happened, and I think it's going to happen again, I think it's going to be worse. But I said, last time it happened, we know that the hospitals were overrun. It was hard to get in. We know that a lot of medications were no longer available because the plants in China had shut down or they weren't shipping them or they weren't allowing them to be shipped in because the containers were contaminated with the virus. So I said, what do you have in your house right now as a first line defense? I said, if you have to go to the doctor, you go, right? But what if you can't get in there? I said, I can't bear looking at my family and not having at least something that I can try to help all the different situations with.
Ashley James (01:07:31.751)
That's natural. It doesn't have side effects. It's shelf stable.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:07:36.288)
Exactly. And he looked at me and he said, Oh, I see your point. I said, yes, the liquid lasts a long time. I said, the gel, you're good for three and a half, four years. I said, so you'll use them up, you rotate them. There's thousands of you. So I use that gel every time I go shopping. I just put some on my hands as a first line of defense.
Put my hands in my face. I have people that gel their whole kid before they send them to school. We were involved with ingested and injected studies up to 5,000 milligrams per kilogram showing that the gel had no negative effect. It's not cytotoxic, won't hurt probiotics, but it has the ability to do some really great things. It makes your skin intensely soft, it's cooling.
If you get something like your skin starts to itch and you put it on there, it just soothes that in a flash, a few minutes. So as a first line defense, those two products I think are probably the two biggest that I have all over in my house. And I have to constantly refill them because people are always coming by and pilfering them out of my house.
They found that shopping at my house was a lot cheaper than shopping elsewhere. And so I have to restock it. But the fact is, it gives me and my family a first line of defense, right? And some people say, well, I didn't know how to use it. I said, okay, so for my doctoral thesis, and I freely admit, I had out from probably 2000 doctors, MDs, DOs, naturopaths.
And we came up with about 100 protocols for exactly how to use silver. It's a general use book. Doesn't talk about any specific silver. Doesn't talk about any product name or anything like that. And so I wrote it for my doctoral thesis. And then after I got my doctorate, I converted it, made it into a book. I sold thousands of copies. And then I thought, I don't need to make money on this. What I want is people to have access to the data. So if somebody wants to use it for something, let's say you have an eye infection or an ear infection and they have a certain product, whatever that product is, how would I use that, right? What do I need to do to know something about how to do that? So in the first part of this book, I put in all the information or a whole lot of information on the different types of silver, what they are, how they are, how they function. And then the last two thirds of the book is who's who list A to Z of about a hundred problems that a family can have, including emergency water purification and hard data as to how much you would use over what time period to accomplish what it is you're trying to do.
And then I thought, okay, so how do I make this available to people for free? So I put it on a site, the silveruseinstitute.com and there's no names on it, no product names, no nothing. It's just a book to help people understand what and how they should do to help give their families a first line of defense. Gives you about a hundred different ways to utilize the products or silver products in general. So it's there, it's free, silveruseinstitute.com. And you know, Ashley, if anybody has questions, I'm happy to answer them. The FDA came up with the rule and they actually wrote it and I memorized it. If you go to fda.gov/media/82660/download.
It says that if somebody has an off-label question for a product, you can answer it, but you have to do it on an individual basis. You can't do it in a big group, right? So if somebody asks us, you and I, on an individual basis, for an answer to a question they have about silver, they can just ask us. There's about a 99.9% chance my team and I can answer that question. And we're happy to do it. If I don't know, I won't make up gibberish. I'll just say, I don't know. And if I do know, I will not only answer it, but I'll put the report on there so that you know where the data came from.
Ashley James (01:12:38.959)
So I have a Facebook group for my listeners, a Learn to Health Facebook group, and I could ask them, what are your questions? Like after listening to this episode, it was there, do you have a question that wasn't discussed? What's your question? I could collect all their questions anonymously, and the next time I interview you, we'll be able to voice their questions and discuss them.
Does that sound like something we could do?
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:13:09.507)
For sure. And as long as they're not asking me cure questions, which I can answer in private, we can answer those. There's one other study before we finished. There's one more that we have to talk about because it's very apropos right now. And we didn't do the study. It wasn't done by us. It was done in three different countries. And it is so cool. But what these guys did was they got 231 frontline doctors in the middle of COVID and they did a study. So 231 doctors. The control group was 117 of those doctors and the treatment group or the group that was doing the testing was 114. Now, these are doctors that are in the hospital treating people with COVID every single day, right?
And we can talk about this one because it's not an FDA claim, it's not a treatment claim. What they did was they rinsed out their sinuses, nasal rinse, with the Nano Silver, just like you were talking about doing earlier, right? You washed out your sinuses, you squirted it in there, you washed out your sinuses. So they were using the Nano Silver, they washed out their sinuses, and they gargled with it. Doesn't say they swallowed it, just says they gargled with it.
Now, the amazing part is that out of the 117 who did not use the Nano Silver, right? Did not. 33 of them got COVID, 28%. Okay? Of the ones who didn't use it as a treatment, but just use Nano Silver as a nasal rinse and a gargle, two got COVID, 1.8%. So was it perfect?
It was not. I haven't found anything that was perfect. Was it incredibly good? Yes, 1.8% compared to 28%, right? If somebody wants a copy, I'll give it to you. You can post it on your site, cause it's not a claim. It's an independent study on Nano Silver, and it was done in three different countries. So multi-centered, great, human clinical trial all with frontline doctors. So as a nasal rinse, I think there is nothing better at this time than the Nano Silver liquid to just rinse out your sinuses, not an FDA claim. Just rinse it out and help keep yourself on the open up.
Ashley James (01:15:54.265)
So, obviously they were doing it preventively. They didn't wait to get sick. How many times a day did they do it?
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:15:59.541)
Okay, so I believe it was twice. I'm trying to remember, but I believe it was twice a day.
Ashley James (01:16:06.077)
Yes, that makes sense. So like before you leave the house, it takes you 30 seconds, spray it up your nose and slosh with it and then go about your day, come back home from work or school or wherever you've been out in the world, do it again.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:16:20.883)
And do it before you go to bed. Yes, do it before you go to bed so that nothing has a chance to grow overnight. Just rinse it out, wash it out, right? And can you do that with all your kids? Yes, will it hurt them? It will not.
Ashley James (01:16:35.419)
Oh, it doesn't sting?
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:16:37.095)
It has no stinging, unless you're infected, it has no sort of stinging, nope. So let me give you another little piece of info. So a guy comes up to me and he says, look, he says, I will use silver outside my body, but I won't use it internally because it's a heavy metal. Do we have a little more time?
Ashley James (01:17:01.171)
We have as much time as you have. I'd be here for four hours if you want to be. I'm on the edge of my seat. My jaw's on the floor. I know my listeners are loving this. Let's dive in. As long as you have, as long time as you have, I'm here.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:17:17.307)
Okay, well, I don't want to go forever, but I can go for hours and hours and hours, but we'll keep it down to a couple, right? Okay, so this doctor comes up to me and he's an MD and he says, I won't use it internally. And I said, why not? And he said, because silver is a heavy metal. I said, silver is not a heavy metal. He said, silver is a heavy metal. I said, not a heavy metal. He said, no, silver is a heavy metal. I said, look, we can keep arguing all day long, or we can go to a referee. He said, who do you suggest? I said, not who, but what? He said, okay, what do you suggest as a referee? I said, the Merck Manual, M-E-R-C-K. And I said, the Merck Manual is kind of like the Bible of Science and Technology. He said, I know the book, I'm aware of it, everybody in medicine knows the Merck Manual. I said, okay, would you accept that?
And he said, I would. I said, great, you just lost. He said, what do you mean? I said, if you go to the 17th edition, you go to page 1880, I said, second paragraph, table 226-1, it will give you a list of all the heavy metals that cause nephrotoxicity or heavy metal poisoning. And I said, silver's not one of them. I said, interesting enough, copper is. Interesting enough, iron is. Salt is a heavy metal and can build up and damage your kidneys.
Nephrotoxicity means that it's toxic to your kidneys, right? Over a time period, it can build up and damage your kidneys. That's what heavy metals. Everybody knows mercury is one and lead is one. Most people don't know that Pepto Bismol is one, right? It's a heavy metal. Can build up in your system.
So he said, I'm not winning this. I said, no, you already lost. I said, if you want to go to the 18th edition of the Merck Manual, the newest one, it's page 2022, again, second paragraph. I said, it'll give you a full list. I said, many doctors think that silver is because of silver nitrate. Silver nitrate started being used in the late 1800s to cure stuff like typhoid and anthrax and stuff like that.
They found that silver nitrate was one of the few things on the planet that could eliminate those pathogens. But silver nitrate is in fact included as a heavy metal. It's not because of the silver, it's actually because of the salt, the nitrate. So silver is not a heavy metal. There's no nephrotoxicity. It doesn't damage your kidneys. And the only problem people have with silver
is actually, if you consume huge amounts of it over a very long period of time, and it's ionic form, you can get what's called Argeria. Argeria is the blue man effect, right? The blue man effect is where you drink so much silver that your body can't get rid of it fast enough. And so to get rid of it, it's non-toxic.
To get rid of it, your body walls it off in your skin cells. And then when you get in the sun, you tarnish like your grandma's old silver teapot. And you're turned blue. And you're blue forever. It's a permanent thing. Is it easy to get? No, you really have to work at it. It takes a lot. So I wrote the paper and it'll be published shortly.
But I wrote with a whole bunch of other doctors a paper on Nigeria. And the data, if you look at, one of the questions is people ask, how much can I safely take every day, right? How much can I drink? Every day for my entire life. The EPA put out a document and I memorized all this stuff, right? It's turning, I lose names in a flash, but I can remember info page and paragraph and I don't know, it's a gift. We'll just be happy that I have that portion of it, right? But the EPA put out a document called the RED Document, Registration Eligibility Document for Silver. On the second page, on the fourth paragraph, it states that the EPA, and this is by, actually by Interveneous Action, it's about four or five times this level, if you're talking about ingestion.
But in this intervaneous action, it says that you can safely consume 0.005 milligrams per kilogram of body weight a day, every day for your whole life. So if we translate that into English, what it means is that the average sized adult could safely consume about an ounce a day of a 10 PPM silver product of any type and have that being deemed completely safe for every day of their entire life. So about an ounce a day is what they have. Now remember this is not a toxic level, this is the amount that they deem completely safe, right? So an ounce a day every day for your entire life you're good to go. You can never get Argeria. Now let's push it a little farther.
There's a peer-review publication from Rustam Roy, a man of Penn State, number one material science lab in the world. And in that paper, he explains that you cannot get Argeria from Nano Silver.
Nano Silver, no matter how much you drink, cannot build up in the system because it's not metabolized. It's not a chemical form. Ionic or regular colloidal silver is actually a chemical form and can build up in the body over time.
So the thing about it is that Nano Silver, he said is not metabolized, can't build up. And so we wanted to test that theory. So in my old company way back when, we went to the University of Utah, we hired five or six different drug divisions from the University of Utah to do a human ingestion study on a 10 PPM and a 32 PPM Nano Silver liquid, right?
Every day, an ounce a day, every day. And 56 humans. And what they found was that there was no negative action at all in the body from the ingestion of that silver, none. They tested the metabolic, the hematologic or the blood, the urinalysis, they checked the urine, the sputum, the spit, they did MRIs on their chest, they did MRIs on the abdomen, and what they found was that Nano Silver could not build up. What they said is if you drink it, it hits its height in your blood in two hours, washes out completely in 24 with no residual. It goes in, does its job, washes out, and it doesn't stay. So it's impossible for it to build up.
Ashley James (01:25:08.954)
What about if you nebulized?
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:25:11.160)
Yes, so nebulized, there's a whole bunch of studies. But now you're talking about something that's pretty fun. So I've worked with a group of veterinarians for probably the last 15 or 20 years. We'll say at least 10, 15, right?
And one of the studies that we've been doing over that time period is that race horses, when they run, they get an exercise induced infection in their lungs and it causes their nose to bleed a little. And so what we have been doing for the last decade, and it's going bigger and bigger and bigger all the time for the reason that I'll tell you in a minute.
But what happened in that was that we started nebulizing the horses, right? About 100 a day. And what we found was that they could run faster. It's not because it's a stimulant, but because we're cleaning up the infection in their lungs. So this is a direct mammal study, large mammal study, and we've been doing it for more than a decade for sure.
But the fun part is I generally think that betting gambling, is for people who are bad at math. But in this case, 70% of the horses that are nebulized with this Nano Silver particle finish in the money.
70% and it's being used by some of the top trainers that two of the big ones in California every day, about a hundred race horses. And this year we started with the barrel racing groups, right? Cause they were worried about the health of their animals and all the exercise and they were worried about the exercise induced infection. And so in that they started nebulizing them and they found that it could cut almost a second off their time.
Okay, now that a second doesn't seem like very much, but when you consider that in national barrel racing, between number one and number fifth place was less than a second. So the difference between winning and taking fifth place, less than a second.
So, nebulizing it. Has there been any negative action over the decade of using it in mammals? None, none at all. So in the study that I quoted you earlier out of two major institutions and the one in Canada, they were using Nano Silver in humans for utilization on that virus, which will remain nameless at the moment, and they were nebulizing it.
Interesting enough, they included sinus infections in that. So if somebody wants that data and how it worked, because I can tell you that exists, I think they get upset if I tell you what the date is on that at the moment, but I'm not going to, but it's available should you want to read it. Okay, so the answer is nebulizing it, is it safe? Yes. Does it have any negative effect? It does not. In that human ingestion study, they actually tested the lungs of the people. Because there's a certain amount of silver that you drink, consume, that's actually exhaled through your lungs. That's one of the modes of it being eliminated from your bodies by exhalation. Well, the horrible part was for these poor people, but they're being paid, right?
I think that study at the time and that company cost us about 350,000 bucks to show not what silver does, but what it doesn't do, right? But in this case, they stuck a swab clear down in these guys' lungs to check for cytokine storm action. And that means negative action, inflammatory action in the lungs. In fact, they found none.
And in a study that we did with USNIH and it's published peer-reviewed and it's on bird flu, one of the most deadly virus I've ever seen. And we did that study with them as an ingestion study. They had tested it and found that it actually had an anti-inflammatory effect on the lungs. So not only did it not cause inflammation, but it helped eliminate inflammation in the lungs, which also is probably a reason why it works so well for horses. Now, can that help a runner? haven't done runners yet, but we have done horses. And if you're asking me, have I nebulized it? Yes, only for about probably 10, 15 years.
So does it work? I believe it works very well. Is it safe? Yes.
Ashley James (01:30:58.262)
I purchased the Nano Silver. I was sold back when you and I spoke over the phone, to switch from my store bought Colloidal Silver that is just like you said, half the piano. It only kills bacteria and it also wipes out my microbiome if I drink too much and which, I want to protect my microbiome.
That's why I don't run to antibiotics. I'm also like allergic to almost every antibiotic out there, thank God, because I'm not trying to put anyone down, but I think it's the easy way out to just run and get an antibiotic. And we don't realize that actually every time we take antibiotics, we're increasing our chances of cancer. Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about that a lot in his books and shows the data in his book. So you can go check out Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work to learn more about that. It's not just, oh, I need to take a probiotic and then I'm fine. It actually takes up to two years of, with intention, working to rebuild your complex microbiome of thousands of different healthy bacteria if you've had even one course of antibiotics. So I used to be chronically on antibiotics. This was a good 15, 16 years ago.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:32:22.111)
Which explains why you've had sinus problems, so.
Ashley James (01:32:25.117)
Right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I was just wiping out my microbiome and then getting sick again and then wiping out my microbiome and it was on and on and on. And so now, when I’ve finally learned, that whole idea that knowledge is power, like knowledge guides you to make better choices. And that's why the Learn to Health Podcast is here. Cause I want to help give the information to those who are sick of being sick and this is going to help guide your choices. You're going to make better choices because you have more information. Like our parents did the best they could with the information they have and now we're going to go and seek this new information and we're going to make even better choices because we have the information we have now. So I switched to the Nano Silver and I recently had a bronchial infection which
I don't get sick as often since I started eating healthy and really working on my health, the building it up for the last 12 years. So I was really surprised that all of a sudden I didn't know where I get this bronchial infection. I had just bad bronchitis and I went to my herbs at first, I went to my normal stuff and then I ordered the Nano Silver and I nebulized it and it really, really helped. Homeopathy also really helped me within 30 minute turnaround with the proper homeopathic remedy after working with my homeopathic doctor.
I found the Nano Silver quickly brought down the inflammation and brought down the congestion and brought down like everything got noticeably better. And I was really excited, but in the back of my mind, I remember reading somewhere a doctor saying, don't nebulize colloidal silver, it'll build up in your lungs. And again, Nano Silver is not colloidal silver, two different things. Nano Silver doesn't build up in the tissue and is safe to nebulize versus colloidal silver.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:34:27.735)
Even with colloidal silver, I have never seen any documentation anywhere that said it would be deleterious or build up in your lungs. The only thing that I've ever seen negative action that could possibly come from colloidal silver, right? The only one is that you could get Argeria. It's too low in PPM to be toxic. It's not going to be toxic to your system. The only problem is that it does kill probiotics, right, which screws up your microbiome, but it is not going to damage your system. It's not going to hurt your lungs. I've seen no proof of that at all. And like I say, I read everything I can get my hands on. There's no toxicity associated with that at the levels which it's been used.
Ashley James (01:35:26.396)
If I drink Nano Silver every day at a healthy amount, could I wipe out or like I should say reduce because we still want candida in our system. We just want it usually 90% less than we have. Let's say I had some candida overgrowth. Would drinking it every day help my body reduce the candida to healthy levels? Would it help?
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:35:51.336)
Okay, so let's answer this in a different way. All right, so you have a parking lot and you want to put a whole bunch of good cars in there, right? And we're talking about your microbiome. You have all of this bacteria and it's helpful bacteria, probiotic bacteria, you need it. Without it, you die. It protects your throat, it protects your skin, it protects your gut, and it functions to help you be able to metabolize foods and so forth.
In your body, I've heard it estimated that you have about 12.5 billion probiotic bacteria. In fact, one scientist told me, and I haven't been able to check this, but he told me that every time you go to the bathroom, your fecal material is as much, 50% of that can be dead bacteria that are probiotics. So they divide about every 20 minutes. So they multiply. But let's say that you're having a gut issue, you have irritable bowel, you have something like that, right? You're taking probiotics and you're saying, look, these aren't working. They're not working because the parking lot is full. You can't park anything in there.
So what you have to do is empty the parking lot of all the old junkers, and then you can park your Tesla in there, right? Or your Mercedes, or whatever it is. You don't want it full of these junkers that are taking up room and causing problems. So you have to clean that out. So if your question is, do I believe that silver can help remove that? The answer is yes, I absolutely believe that silver can help with the microbiome to help make it much more healthy.
Now we did studies and we published some studies, my partners out of India actually published the studies showing that this Nano Silver did not hurt the probiotics. So the potential there is to be able to empty the parking lot and at the same time rebuild it.
You have the kefirs, you have yogurts, you have probiotic pills, there's tons of them. There's some good ones out from microbiome labs. There's a lot of different types that you can get a balanced portfolio of probiotics for your gut, right? But you have to be able to have room for them to be in there.
So if you're asking me, do I believe that the silver can help empty the parking lot of the problematic ones so that the good ones can grow? Absolutely. I've seen people who started using it as a supplement and we're specifically talking about as a supplement to augment the immune system, which helps all of these problems, but as a supplement for the immune system.
I've seen them be able to mitigate stuff like irritable bowel in two or three weeks because they're able to get the probiotics to be built back up again. Now your body can do that. It just takes a while. And if you've talked about antibiotics and I believe I don't use antibiotics. Most of the time they're actually prescribing antibiotics for something that's either fungal or viral, which they have no effect on whatsoever. So I think very limited use. If you're really sick and you're going to die, should you use it? My opinion is yes. But you don't use them as a first line. You don't go to them. They're not the thing you go to, right? There, I see it as more of a life-saving thing. You use the other things as your first line of defense. And then you almost never, or even hopefully never, have to use them at all.
So I think the point is that, yes, you can damage your microbiome in a huge way by using a lot of these drugs. They're highly toxic to these bacteria. If they're designed to kill bacteria, they don't have the ability to decide what bacteria are good and what bacteria are bad. I have a bunch of people that says, okay, so why doesn't this type of Nano Silver kill probiotic bacteria?
And the answer is, well, we have a number of studies that show that it doesn't. We're still arguing amongst ourselves as to why. Some think that it's because pathogens, most of them, have one or two cell layers on the outside. They're very unprotected. Where probiotic bacteria actually have like three different cell wall layers. And so they're actually more hardy, but it doesn't mean you can't kill it.
So one theory is that the silver is actually not making it in there. And the other is that it just doesn't pull it in. So most cells will not pull silver in. When you ingest silver, most of it will not be pulled into your cells. It gets pulled in into fat and other things if it's regular colloidal silver. And silver in nanoform is not, it stays separate, it's not metabolized. So it goes in, does its job, washes out most of it, probably better than 90% of it comes out through your fecal tract. So it's going through that system where all those probiotics are. And can it help eliminate those? I'm sure it can.
Ashley James (01:42:01.690)
You mentioned Nano Silver affects the biofilm in the dental, over 50,000 dental procedures that you guys have studied or done as a collection of dentists. What about the biofilm in the gut where the Candida has created a biofilm? It's like its own fort, it's like Fort Collins, but like in the gut, like it created a whole fort and that's the biofilm and that's where the bad stuff lives.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:42:31.129)
Okay, so let's talk about what a biofilm is. So some pathogens, a whole bunch of different ones, have found that if they cover themselves with a slimy layer, stuff can't get to them to kill them. They're really good at mutating, right? And there's a ton of bugs that have developed this ability to get biofilms. And most stuff won't touch a biofilm.
I've never seen any data that showed that a colloidal silver could eliminate a biofilm. Never. There are no drugs that I'm aware of that can penetrate a biofilm and kill the underlying bacteria or pathogen. So what they have is they have this cover on the outside. Now we did three different studies. One was a dental one. One was a pathogen one on MRSA and VRI and
another really bad bug that is really problematic for burns, it's called Pseudomonas. And these are all biofilm forming pathogens, right?
With Texas Tech School of Med, we tested all of those on the biofilms and found that the nanoparticles could, in fact, penetrate and kill the underlying pathogens. So we have three different peer-reviewed published studies. Published just means that what you have is, and peer-reviewed means that you did a study, and then you wanted to tell everybody that your study was great. So what you do is you take that study, give it to a whole bunch of other doctors, and you say, okay, look this over and see if you see any problems. And if they don't, then they sign on, and they say, okay, you did a great job, this data is useful. And that's called a
peer review.
So you're having a bunch of peers, scientific peers, check the study to make sure it's useful and that its calculations are done correct and all of that. So these are peer reviewed and then published in major magazines studies. And so in all three of those with Texas Tech, we showed we could eliminate biofilms with this Nano Silver technology. And so in the dental thing, it's pretty easy. And we'll get to that with the new toothpaste we're working on, right? But what you do, if you brush your teeth at night and you spit it out, but you don't wash it out, you leave it in, right? Next morning you wake up, you have no growth, none. It's still clean. There are no biofilms. So that tells you, without the big scientific paper and all that, that it works because that's never happened. I would bet that every day of your whole life, you woke up and you had bad breath and you had morning breath and you had gunk on your teeth, biofilms. Well, this has the ability to eliminate that. And we showed that in this big peer review publication with Texas Tech. And I think you'll have access to that shortly. But it's just a really cool tech. And if you want to know if our tech works and if you want to know if it works on biofilms, yes, in one night, you'll know, right? You'd lean over, you give them a big kiss and you say, baby, welcome to this world. And their eyes don't roll back in their head. They don't faint because of the bad breath because there isn't any. It breaks the biofilms. So does it work? Yes. How does it work? We believe that it works because of resonant frequency.
This vibration that it puts out actually travels through the biofilm and kills the underlying bacteria or pathogen. Can we prove that? Have we decided that that's it? No, I haven't seen any proof of that. The proof is that it does it, does it every time, and we have three different publications on that. So the question is not whether it can do it, the question is how it does it. And we believe that it's a resonant frequency which can penetrate through the biofilms and kill the pathogen that the nanoparticle actually never touches.
Ashley James (01:47:00.299)
Are there any cancer studies?
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:47:02.975)
You are now on a very hot topic. And let me just say that there is a whole section on data that's available. And it's in that peer review that I talked about out of Romania that I can give you and you can post it. So I believe in the next four or five years, we are going to make a very dramatic impact on the cancer industry.
It might take us as long as 10. We've been producing data, which we won't talk about, for the last five years with a whole bunch of partners. And I think we're going to publish that. I talked to them about being ready to publish. We have data on 15 different types. And we will publish that data but somebody said to me, so how will you use it? I said, no, no. I said, not the right question. He said, what's the right question? I said, look, there's two major things. Can you affect a cell that's gone AWOL? That's the first question. Can you affect it? Can you kill a cancer cell? That's the first question. The second question is how to utilize that to do it. How to get it to that cell. We're on the first one. And do we know the data is available? Absolutely. Do you want to read some? Sure. There's a ton of published data on it. And it's available in that one study that I told you about earlier. It's the one I skipped because it's a hot topic. And it will give you a whole section on probably dozens of different studies which has used Nano Silver and its impact on cancer. Okay, so we're not making any claims there. We're just saying there's data available. If you want it, you can read it, not difficult. The part that we're working on right now with all these scientists from around the world and that I've been working with for five, six years, we're working on, can you? And remember how I told you the questions? How much, how often, how long? That's what we're working on, how much it takes. And we found that it takes different amounts for different types.
Ashley James (01:49:50.181)
Yes, that makes sense.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:49:51.457)
And so what we're trying to figure out is, okay, do we have enough if we use this and this amount over this time period? And so can we is what we're working on now. How to, I figured there's, hundreds of thousands of really intelligent people out there. If we give them the data, there's thousands of people who will figure out how to do it. And that'll just be, I think.
You do some things because you can make money and you do some things just because you want to be a help. And I think we do well by doing good, right? And the more good you can do, the better off you are. And so our goal is to do well by doing good. And we believe we do a mass amount of good and we know that we do and we have documentation. It makes me feel good when I get up. So it's not anything compared to where we're headed, but I am really excited. In 2005, my father and I got a call from US Congress. And they said, we hear that you've been producing data on malaria in humanitarian efforts in Africa.
And we said, that's true. They said, will you come and give us that data? And we said, no. We said, you're asking us to make claims we can't make in the US. We can make it in other countries. Cause at that time we actually had approvals to be able to do it in some portions of Africa. And they said, look, we make those rules. We'll give you a pass. We want the data. And so, my father stood, I was next to him, in front of the US Congress and gave him all this data. And they wanted data on HIV, on TB, number one cause of death by infection in the world, TB, and malaria, second leading cause of death by infection. And we gave them all the data. We told them how long, how much, exactly how much they needed, how long it would take to mitigate it.
And then they made all that data public. We still can't use it in the US because it makes claims we can't make. But Congress released all that data. If you want to read it, yes. I have the address in the congressional record where they made all that data public. But somebody said, “Hey, can you prove that it actually does anything?' I said, well, other than the fact that we have published peer-reviewed human studies, on HIV that are public data. We have data on H5N1 bird flu we did with the US NIH. We have mass amounts of data on malaria and numerous other things. We have data on probably 10 different virus, bird flu, swine flu, H1N1, H3N2, H4, there's another one in there. There's data on monkeypox, there's data on big peer-reviewed published paper on RSV that they're pushing right now. Huge problem in kids and adults, RSV. Can Nano Silver affect it? There's a whole big published paper on saying exactly who, where, what. If they want it, can I send it to? For sure, they just have to request it. So I think the fun part is that the old silver BS stuff is gone, I hate the gibberish, right? Either show me the data or don't give me information. And I think that there's so much data being produced all over the world and so many uses that are incredible that if you look at mankind's history, right? We're having problems, so we're going back to it. If you want to read something fun, now this is really pretty fun. I was looking at all the problems and what I thought was going to happen in 2010. And I wrote that on page 23 of that book. So if you read that book, Silver: Nature’s Natural Healer from the Silver Use Institute. Read page 23. One of my employees came up the other day and said, did you realize you wrote this in 2010? And he started calling me Madam Cleo. And I started to laugh and I read it and I thought, yes, wow. There was some insight that I didn't expect to be given the world, but I did in the book of what I thought was going to happen and how it would happen. It's crazy, but you should read that just for the fun of it.
Ashley James (01:55:22.912)
Oh, I will. I want to make sure listeners know where to get the Nano Silver that we know. I mean, it's a wild west out there, right? So anyone could slap a label on a bottle, put some liquid in it, and say, come buy my Nano Silver and it's an unregulated industry, we don't have the FDA needing to test everything good for us.
I don't want the supplement industry to ever be regulated in that way because they would wipe out everything and only let pharmaceutical companies make stuff. It would just definitely remove choice, but it's still the wild, wild west. We have to go with companies that do third-party lab testing that prove what's in the bottle is in the bottle, that back up their product. They have a track record. They have history. They have data and studies behind what they do. That's why, I'm going with the one that you guys work with.
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:56:28.276)
In this day and age, we have the internet, right? People can have information in a flash. And if somebody's blown BS, the easiest thing is, show me that. You said this, show it to me. If they can't show it to you, then we call that defined as scientific gibberish, right? It sounds scientific, but it's actually useless.
And there's a lot of them. I heard one the other day that said, I said, well, your product actually is ionic. And they said, no, it has nano clusters in it. I said, I'm looking at your data. I see nothing in here that shows anything about nano cluster. And they said, no, there's nano clusters in it. And that's because we've been putting out so much data on Nano Silver. They were just morphing into becoming nano from a very small ionic, right?
And so the answer is, you can always say, show me the data. There's abilities to get information like never before. The blessing of being able to do research in seconds is stunning to me. I had a question the other day and I just looked it up and I had like a hundred reports and I thought that is the coolest thing ever.
When I was a kid and that was a long time ago, because I'm old now, I'm 63, right? I actually had to look all that stuff up in the library and books. And once it's written in books, it's old, right? So you're not dealing with the latest, greatest.
Ashley James (01:58:09.558)
Right. I remember going to the University of Toronto Reference Library to get information. I'm 43, but I still, I'm at that wonderful age where I remember what it was like before the internet and you had to go down into the bowels of University of Toronto Reference Library and the dusty and that smell. I love the smell of books and libraries.
Oh my gosh, and now it's so simple. I don't have to get on three buses and go all the way downtown and go in the bowels of a library. I can just type it in and scan documents with my eyes and capture the information and then listen to interviews with experts and immediately have access to books. I just love it.
So I want to let listeners know how to get the silver that is proven. The Nano Silver, learntruehealth.com/silver, use coupon code LTH. I'm so glad I can always get a great discount for the listener. I definitely want to have you back because we're going to have lots more questions, but my final question, what about those people that say they make their own silver at home?
Dr. Keith Moeller (01:59:24.770)
Okay, so home brews, that's also a section in the book. Most of the cases of Argeria that I've ever seen are the home brews. And do they work? Yes, they probably work to a certain extent. There are clumps of ionic silver, mostly it's large clumps, and it's pretty gnarly. It's kind of like saying, the difference between what we do and that is kind of like saying, okay.
I know that aphrod comes from white willow bark, so I'm just going to chew a chunk of bark. You know, will that work? Probably, if you get enough of it. Is it the best way to do it? Probably not. In this case, the home brew, if you're using it for outside your body, I think you're good. You have a couple problems. One, and we've tested a lot of them but most of those are an ionic form of silver and that ionic form is in big clumps, it's stuck together and it can build up in your system pretty bad. And the second one is almost every case of Argeria I've ever seen was almost always home brew.
But don't get me wrong, these guys most of them are the opinion that if a little is good, a lot is great. And some of them are drinking like a gallon a day, right? And the other problem with home brew is, it goes back to that question, how much over what time period to help eliminate the problem. In this case, you don't know what the part per million is. You have no idea. You're just taking a guess out of it. And you have no idea what kind you're actually creating and what it looks like or what it does.
There's no test data because every single time you make it, it's different. And usually when we make a silver product, we use a four and a five nines pure silver to embed it into the water. And our process is crazy long. It takes us on like even at 10 PPM takes us about 30 hours to embed the silver into the water. And we use a four and a five, nine silver. So you understand what I'm talking about.
If you have sterling silver, right? Sterling silver is about 70% silver and 30% other stuff, right? Can be whatever, brass, copper. But when you sell silver as a coin, it's a 3.9 silver. That's the standard. And what 3.9 means is it's 99.9% pure silver, right? And the silver that we use is actually a lab grade silver, which is a 99.99 or 999% pure.
So we get the purest form of silver we can do. It costs us a lot more money, but then we know that we're coming up with the product we want that's the right level at the right timeframe to be able to do what we're trying to do. If it's a wound care product that's in Canada, back there at the University of Toronto, I can tell you every single pathogen and how long it would take for this silver gel at this level to eliminate that pathogen. So I know we'll have success because if you know what the pathogen is, I can tell you exactly how long it takes to eliminate it.
So, and the other big thing with the Nano Silver is we can actually tell you that it can eliminate it. Whereas with an ionic or a homebrew, you don't know what you're getting. You might be getting a lot, you might be getting enough, you might not be getting enough.
How do you know, right? You're taking what we call a crap shot at it. And you know, if that's all I had, would I use it? Yes, I would. Is it the best? No, you're back. So where a colloidal silver has about half the piano keys to play, a home brew has about 10% of the keys, right?
So do they work? Yes, but the music you can make with it is very, very limited. Colloidal Silver, you can make a lot more music. The Nano Silver with the AG-404 coating. Oh yes, you have a whole orchestra.
Ashley James (02:04:16.520)
I just love that Nano Silver doesn't build up in the tissues, that it doesn't disrupt the microbiome and like you said, you keep adding keys because you keep seeing other uses for it. And I am so excited for the day that we can see it being used in oncology. Really, really excited. I was just imagining the mechanism of action, like taking Nano Silver.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:04:41.602)
Okay, so you know that silver's been used in oncology for decades. So the gels, and we can talk about those gels because they're wound care gels, like the one that I'm talking about, this product in Canada can be used on the radiation burn site. So where you're in treatment, can you use it? Yes, you can. You use it on that treatment site and it will eliminate the pain, the inflammation, the redness.
In Canada right now, we can make direct claims on mitigation of even like sunburn. Nobody has a product that makes a direct claim on mitigation of sunburn. I'm hoping by next spring, we can do that in the US and I think we'll be able to. With a little luck, we produced all the data. It's already been filed. We're just waiting our time and seeing if they come up with any problems, which we don't think they will.
But hopefully, right, we have that done. But with that approval, yes, we could use it on catheters. That's a device insertion site. Eliminate the bacteria on catheters while they're in, and that would eliminate UTIs in older people and elderly care. It would be a very big deal.
And that's one of the uses that we've already tested. We know works. And we're up for that approval. The use, potentially even on condoms as an antimicrobial, that's a device insertion site. So there's a whole lot of that stuff that we're currently working on that has the potential of really changing the medicinal history of the world and eliminating mass amounts of problems.
The number one bug in the US is still MRSA. That's one that raises the most havoc in a hospital. Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus. And the gel, the gel data that we turned into the FDA, shows that it's about 15 minutes. Not a problem.
Ashley James (02:06:57.878)
Kills it, wipes it out in 15 minutes. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. I'm so excited to have you back on the show. We're going to keep this discussion going. Listeners, please go to the Learn True Health Facebook group and join the discussion. I'm going to create a thread so we can start collecting your questions for Keith. And also, if you don't have Facebook, I understand that. Just email me, ashley@learntruehealth.com.
Go to learntruehealth.com/silver, use coupon code LTH, get the Nano Silver for yourself, if anything, just store it and hold on to it for a day and a time when you may need it, right? It's because it's shelf stable, which is so exciting.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:07:42.833)
Yes, it'd be way better if you learned how to use it before that problem gets there.
Ashley James (02:07:49.169)
Right. Yes. We can get your free book, the silveruseinstitute.com and go to page 23 for fun reading. And I'm going to make sure that the links to everything we talked about today with Dr. Keith Moeller on my website and in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. This has been wonderful. And normally when I wrap things up, I ask, is there anything you didn't get to say? And I kind of think we'd start talking for another hour if I did that, but I want to have you back on the show.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:08:19.851)
Oh yes, make a note, next time we'll get into tests and studies I did with William Boma Army Med and the Special Operations Medical Association. After I worked with them for a while, eliminating problem bugs that they had in the Middle East, they actually made me an official member of the Special Operations Medical Association. So I've been adopted.
They liked me enough, they adopted me into that group, which is some of the coolest people on the planet. These are the guys who are in charge of keeping all of their people alive and well, and who end up running back onto the battlefield, right? To save people who've been shot. And they're running into fire to help people who've been hit. And I mean, these guys, they're nuts, and they're like the coolest people on the plane but I did a lot of work with them. We can talk about that on another day.
Ashley James (02:09:19.533)
Yes. And I've got a note also to talk about Nano Silver, in terms of mixing it with bone graphs. You said at a later date, we'll talk more about this, the data.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:09:30.351)
Yes, I'll tell you the case studies, the pictures, you can see them. And that work is actually in Canada, now it's traveling across the whole US. I think we just signed up a group of 1,000 dentists to do these clinical trials.
Ashley James (02:09:49.563)
Awesome. I'm going to make sure my dentist listens to this. So hi, Dr. Beer. I'm going to tell him he's got to listen to it. So now I've got a shout out for him. I'm going to get him to listen. I also have a story and I'll share it next time as well. My husband's grandfather, who was a professor at Cal Tech at the same time as Einstein, we have a picture of him with Einstein, super neat that my mother-in-law as a child got to meet Einstein. He came over to the house in Alta Dina and had dinner or something like that. But he was a German professor who came over here and had invented, for personal use, he shared it with friends and family, but he invented a powder and these two different kinds, one for internal use, one for external use, and it contained silver and he used it to him and his whole family.
So my mother-in-law grew up doing this, not getting on antibiotics because anytime they had any problems they used this type of silver. I'll get more information and share more, but it was really interesting. They called it the black powder, go get the black powder. And they'd rub it on a cut or they'd gargle with it. And then boom.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:11.08.203)
Okay, so you know my favorite Einstein quote, and I think it is so perfect. He was so intelligent. But he has a quote that says, if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research. That's my favorite Einstein quote. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.
Ashley James (02:11:32.539)
That's really good. And we have to remember that science and research is about discovery. And also about admitting, finding out we were wrong or finding out new information. And it's this whole idea the last few years, the science is settled. The science isn't settled. Science literally is not settled. That's not the definition of science. It is constantly learning new things, finding out we were wrong or finding out some deeper information, getting the complete picture on something. Right.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:12:01.167)
Absolutely.
Ashley James (02:12:02.601)
There's no science that's settled. That's like, that's crazy. Right.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:12:04.937)
It's a moving object, and hopefully you get much better at it. Hopefully you're continuing to learn, but there's always more. There's so much more.
Ashley James (02:12:16.673)
Right. And I'm so excited to explore that with you the next time you come on the show. Thank you so much, Dr. Keith Moeller. It's been such a pleasure having you here. And I know listeners are going to go to learntruehealth.com/silver, use coupon code LTH and grab your bottle. And tonight I'm using it as a rinse and I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning, jump on my husband and breathe on him or we're going to do that little experiment.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:12:42.215)
We'll get you an experimental version of the toothpaste and you can try that. That's the big thing. So we're bringing out three different types and we'll work with that group on those, but one will be a cinnamon, one's a mint, and then a bubblegum berry for the kids. But that's the test and that's how you know it works.
You're getting that kiss first thing in the morning, and it opens up all sorts of new opportunities, right? Ha ha!
Ashley James (02:13:12.965)
I'm sorry, I don't even have a dog, but I hate dog breath like on dogs. And I wonder, cause like the end of the pet industry, could you just add the Nano Silver to their water?
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:13:23.166)
You could, but you can't do the toothpaste because the toothpaste has xylitol in it and xylitol does bad things for dogs, but humans, it has the ability to eliminate a bunch of the pathogens that are gram negatives in the mouth. The other thing we put in, and we'll talk about it later, is we added a coral calcium, and that is expensive as all get out, but it's harder than the plaque, softer than the enamel.
So the theory is you can scrape the plaque off the teeth and not hurt the enamel and then the xylitol and the coral calcium rebuild the teeth. They remineralize the teeth.
Ashley James (02:14:05.433)
Nice. And then of course the Nano Silver is in there decreasing inflammation and wiping out the–
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:14:13.370)
Working with the Xylotoph. Yes, it worked incredible. Yep.
Ashley James (02:14:16.377)
Yes, working with it. Yes. Getting rid of the biofilm, wiping out the bad bacteria while not harming the good bacteria. So, oh, exciting. Thank you, Dr. Keith Moeller. It's such a pleasure having you on the show and I can't wait to have you back.
Dr. Keith Moeller (02:14:27.184)
Have a great one. Thanks for your time.
Ashley James (2:14:29.018)
I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Dr Keith Moeller. We're definitely going to have him back on the show. He dropped a few really cool topics that I can't wait to follow up on.
As we discussed in the interview, if you have questions especially after listening to this, I'm sure I'm sure everyone does and you want Keith to answer your questions specifically. Jump into the Learn True Health Facebook group. I'm going to create a post there for all your questions for him and then, when I have him back on the show, I will go down the list of all your questions. I'll make sure it's anonymous and I'll start asking the questions and say these are from the listeners and let's start picking his brain, because, man, it's so sexy when a scientist or a doctor or an expert, has photographic memory and he might not remember your name, but he could tell you what's on paragraph three of page 10 of the 47th study published in 2012 on Nano Silver. How cool is that? And so let's collectively pick his brain.
After our interview, he got to tell me some stuff off air, that he's not allowed to publish yet, he's not allowed to openly discuss because he's going after FDA approvals. But hold on to your seats. It is as exciting as you can imagine in the realms of I'm just going to name some hints major disease that is in the top five of killers and something that, no, you wouldn't want to wish on your worst enemy. Hopefully you don't have any enemies, but you know the saying and major results in that area. Very cool. So they're doing some huge studies around that and it's going to turn the world in a good way, up on its head. It's going to completely shift how medicine is practiced and he's figuring out how to get it into the hospital system, get it into being widely accepted and used in products that the hospital uses, get it to be accepted. I mean, the studies are the sciences there. You'd have to be a complete pardon me, but like moron of a doctor to keep your eyes closed right, to not see what's in front of you.
But it's not up to the individual doctors to change the broken medical system right. It's going to be up to all of us to force the hand of the broken medical system because, even though it's broken on our end, it's actually not broken on their end, on the end of those who profit from it. They're keeping it this way on purpose at every level, because it profits them.
And for those in socialized medicine like Canada and the UK, think about it this way it's about saving money. Saving money comes before saving the patients, and making money comes before saving the patient in in systems like the United States. So every single medical system is broken. I've had several experts on recently talking about that and what we can do is vote with our dollar, educate our individual doctors and make those choices by getting the doctors that best support us and that will look at the new research to be with us and to be on our team.
You'll definitely want to share this episode with your doctors. I know chiropractors are already on board, like the second you share it there's a very little resistance that they have. Medical doctors have a bit more resistance because of their indoctrination. And a really good medical doctor when they realize they become self aware and they realize the indoctrination that they went through was designed to profit big pharma, and again, I am folding my tinfoil hat as we speak, I'm handing them out to all of you.
I know I sound like a cuckoo bird, however, when you just look at how the system is run, it's unfortunate that this is what we're in, but I'm going to scream it from the rooftops. We can build a better system. We just we have to first know, know your enemy, know what you're up against, and then choose the the aspects of the system that best supports you, which, in this case, are doctors that are willing to listen and look at the research. So Nano Silver amazing, amazing benefits. I love that there's so many studies and there's so many applications and I see a day where it's being used on every level in medicine.
Can you imagine how much of medicine would shift if all infectious disease, both chronic when I say chronic, like HIV, aids, those kind of things like chronic infection right, if we could have a world where all chronic and acute infections were not a problem, naturally and that the treatment did not harm us in the process. That's what Dr Keith's working on and that's what the studies show that we have. We have an amazing tool and it's just the beginning. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this episode with those you care about.
Jump into the Learn to Health Facebook group to join the conversation and give me your questions for Dr Keith let's pick his brain next time he's on the show. Be sure to check out learntruehealth.com/silver and use the coupon code LTH. I just love that I can get a discount for you guys and go to silveruseinstitute.com to download Keith's book, and if you have any questions for me, I'd love to hear it as well. Can't wait to see you in the Learn True Health Facebook group, but if you're not on Facebook, please definitely just email me, ashley@learntruehealth.com. I'd love to hear from you. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for listening and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.
Silver Nature's Natural Healer (Get Dr. Keith's free e-book!)
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Intro:
Hello True Health Seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited. If you listen to today's interview with Dr. David Clarke, it's possibly one of the most important interviews I have ever done in the last seven years and will ever do.
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Okay, second to last Organix Bed. I've been sleeping on this for several years, and I will never sleep on another mattress again, if I can help it. When we go on vacations, we actually like, really don't look forward to any beds and except our own, and we love coming back for our vacations because of how amazing this mattress is. This mattress is healing for the back. I've done several interviews about this. I've raved about it before.
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If you do decide to go for the Organix mattress right now and that deal is ending soon so if you are up for a new mattress, we're supposed to replace it every five years. If you can believe that it's kind of crazy. Organix mattress lasts for over 25 years. You will be buying this mattress and it's possibly sleep on it the rest of your life. It's that amazing and it doesn't break down like regular mattresses. It's paying for two mattresses but then you're getting six mattresses out of it. It is so like heaven sleeping on this thing.
Lastly, the InSuit for Integrative Nutrition, which is where I went to become a health coach. They're offering the biggest sale I've ever seen them do. They recently merged with Dr Chopra. All of his courses are also offered there. If you're like I'm not interested in being a health coach, well, they have other courses.
You got to go check it out. Please go to learntruehealth.com/healthcoachtraining. That's learntruehealth.com/healthcoachtraining. Be sure to use the coupon code AshleyJames20. I couldn't get them to do LTH, just their system needed more letters or whatever. AshleyJames20. In total, you're getting 45% off their health coach training program right now and the sale ends on the 25th. That is huge. I've never seen them do that significant of a discount. It is an amazing program. I highly recommend checking it out. If you're curious and you just want to see more and get a sample class, go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That gets you a sample class. It's 45% off for the health coach training program with coupon code AshleyJames20. When you go to learntruehealth.com/healthcoachtraining, it's 35% off, I believe for their other trainings. They've got a ton of them. Go check it out. It's really cool.
There's a few other health-related Black Friday sales that I'm seeing coming up that I'm going to possibly be talking about next week, just to let you guys know but these are the major ones. Thank you so much for sticking around and listening to them.
Today's interview is mind-blowing and I'm so excited to bring it to you. Please come join the Facebook group, the LearnTrue Health Facebook group, so we can have a discussion about this afterwards. I just really think it's important that we get together as a community to talk about this, to share our thoughts on it and to learn from other people's thoughts and experiences. Come join the community. Let's chat about this. You can always reach out to me. You can email me, ashley@learntruehealthcom. I'd love to hear from you if you have any questions or comments, but, really, the Facebook group is where we all get together as a community. The listeners get to learn from each other and share and feel a part of something. It's kind of a lonely world out there. When I'm just talking into a mic and you're just sitting there listening. It kind of feels lonely. But I'm reaching through the mic, I'm giving you a hug and I'm saying we're here, we're all in this together and I support you and we support each other. Come join the Facebook group so we can do that with each other.
Also, go to my website, learntruehealth.com, and sign up for my newsletter, if you haven't already. It's not really a newsletter. I just like maybe send one or two emails out a month on average, just sharing the latest news in this arena when it comes to helping you achieve true health. With that being said, I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving in America. To all my American friends a wonderful Thanksgiving, and, around the world, I wish all of you true health. Enjoy today's interview.
Ashley James (09:58.011)
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 513.
I am so excited for today's guest. We have Dr. David Clarke on the show endchronicpainorg. This is such a fascinating topic to get into. The mind, is something we're just beginning to understand, we're just beginning to explore. I kind of imagine us like we're in the 1500s and we're discovering the Americas and we're discovering all these new areas around the world. That's where we are when it comes to understanding the mind. We know so little and we're always amazed by how much we can learn. And when I saw the study that you're here to talk about today, where they have such a powerful breakthrough when it came to long haul covid, I just had to have you on the show. Now, you are the president of and let's see if I can even say this correctly Psychophysiological Disorders Association. Is that correct?
Dr. David Clarke (11:05.409)
Almost, yes. We dropped that little AL at the end because it's got way too many syllables as it is, so we call it the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association, and the easiest way to think about it is that it's a blend of psychology and physiology.
Ashley James (11:22.683)
Which makes perfect sense because when we go to the doctor, the doctor says, oh, it must be in your head, go to the shrink. And we feel really hurt by that because it's like, no, my pain is real, my suffering is real, and you're telling me I'm just making it up. And that's not necessarily what they're saying. They're saying that the mind and the body are intimately connected and that the mind does impact the physical body and vice versa. And it's so interesting that you get to explore this area. It's so unchartered, right? It's worth learning new and new things every day about the mind-body connection, how powerful it is. I have been fascinated by this subject my entire life. I remember a teenager reading books on the mind-body connection. And here we have your studies showing how you can turn off chronic pain, like endchronicpain.org. And now with your new study on how we can help those who are suffering from long covid. I'm so excited to have you come and teach us today.
Dr. David Clarke (12:34.152)
Thank you, I'm delighted to be here. And you know, patients should be angry when they hear that something is supposedly all in their head because that's the last thing it is. We've found real anatomic changes in the brain in people that have these conditions. That's why we have physiology in our name because those are the processes of the body. And there are anatomic differences that have come about because of stress.
And the stress is largely unrecognized. When you would think that a stress that was severe enough to produce physical illness in somebody's body, pain or otherwise, that the stress would be obvious, but actually it's not. And the stresses can come from the remote past, from adversity in childhood, they can be going on in the present day, but just simply not recognized for how powerful they are. But all of this turns out to be good news because if we can identify what those stresses are, and we know how to do that in 2023, we can almost always treat them successfully. And when we do that, as was shown in this study, people's physical symptoms, even severe, long-lasting, multiple symptoms can respond dramatically. And the long covid study was a group of people who had been suffering for an average of nine months. They had 23 adults under the age of 60 that were studied. And this was done at Harvard, but it's just one more example of what psychophysiologic work can accomplish. So these patients had been very ill with their long covid, and they were treated with exactly the approach I was just outlining, uncovering the sources of stress, which can include emotions, it can include things that are triggering for you in the present day, it can include long-term impacts from the past, such as personality traits that are stressful, and they help people identify these, work through them, and in a matter of weeks, there was dramatic improvement, 80% improvement in shortness of breath, 77% improvement in how pain was interfering with their activity, 74% in pain anxiety, 67% improvement in brain fog. Other body symptoms improved 60% and on down the line with physical limitations, average pain through the day, gastrointestinal symptoms, and even fatigue was 44% better. And the other dramatic finding that was a standout to me is that a majority of the patients had experienced that exercise made their symptoms worse. But after eight weeks of treatment, only 4% was that still the case.
Ashley James (15:35.715)
Oh my gosh, that is so cool. Because long haul covid, there's all these different symptoms and we think this virus destroyed my body and I'm left ravaged. And there's over 8 million people suffering from it. We know it's a real thing. And they're just wondering, do I ever get my body back? Is this something like mono where we have to wait a whole year? Do I ever get my body back? And that was so stressful. I mean, the last few years have been stressful for everyone. But people who have suffered from covid and survived, it was such a traumatic event for so many people, myself included, and then to then have day-to-day suffering compounds the stress. So, it's this catch-22 because the past was stressful. Now the present is even more stressful because they're stressing about their current symptoms. And then you're saying that finding the causes of stress and helping to relieve them and solve them was the key to helping their body get on the other side of long haul covid.
Dr. David Clarke (16:44.593)
Yes, absolutely. It's a perfectly natural assumption that if you are feeling something in your body, if you've got pain or illness, that there must be a disease or injury going on that is causing it. And that if only you can find the right doctor or the right diagnostic test or the right treatment, that you're going to be able to do something about that disease or injury. And people go from doctor to doctor, they get specialty evaluations, they go see alternative health clinicians, they try different diets, they try medications, they try supplements, sometimes depending on the symptom, they will try various manufactured devices, all with this intense focus on there must be something structurally wrong with the body. But it turns out that you can have just as severe symptoms, just as long lasting, even multiple symptoms that are generated by the brain. The classic example that's kind of an analogy for all this is what's called phantom limb pain, where a person has had an amputation, but they feel pain in the location of the missing limb. Now, obviously, the limb isn't doing that because it's not there anymore. The only place this can be coming from is in the brain.
And it turns out that the brain can do this literally from head to toe in people who've never come close to having an amputation. And the reason why the brain is doing that is again because of this stress. So that means the whole focus of diagnosis has to shift, that we need to move our attention from what's going on in our bodies to what is going on in our brains. And from there,
to what's happening in our lives or happened in the past. And when we do that, that's when the solutions begin to appear.
One of my patients, I'll just give you an example of how dramatically this can turn around. She was hospitalized at a major university medical center on the West Coast 60 times in 15 years. And no diagnosis. She had her attacks were nausea, vomiting, and extreme dizziness, just to describe her symptoms. And she saw gastroenterologists like myself. She saw a neurologist. She saw ear, nose, and throat specialists. And when they all were unsuccessful, and she saw a dozen of them, they had her see a psychiatrist in the third year of her illness. And he evaluated her according to the normal approach that mental health professionals are taught, looking for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, personality disorders, and she didn't have any of those things. And so he sent her back to the medical doctors and said, she's fine mentally, which is true from the vast majority of my patients. They're very strong people actually. But she happened to have one of her attacks when she was in Portland, Oregon, which is where I'm based.
When I went to see her, she said something I'd never heard from any other patient, which was, thank you for coming, doctor, but you're wasting your time. You'd be better off seeing your other patients. She was in such despair. But you can imagine, 15 years, major university hospital, no answers. But even though this was early in my career, I knew what to look for, which was to find a stress, either in the present day or the past. And it turned out she had significant amounts of both that were directly linked to her attacks of these dizziness and vomiting episodes. And just by showing her that connection, she was well on the spot, just bringing the stress into her conscious awareness when she could see it, think about it, do something about it. She went home from the hospital the next day. She called me a year later. She'd gone the entire year without a single attack.
Ashley James (20:57.941)
Oh my gosh, this doesn't make sense when we think about the brain, its job is supposed to help us survive, right? The brain's job is supposed to get us through life and, anything that's not conscious, right? All the autonomic functions, everything about the brain is to keep the heart beating, to keep the blood flowing, to keep us hunting or gathering and for another day, mating, right? It's supposed to keep going. And yet now we're seeing when we have a certain amount of stress, it could be emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, we've got some kind of stressor or unresolved stress from the past that we're bringing into the now, that the body is just manifesting things physically. It's breaking down and manifesting things physically. And that doesn't make sense because isn't the brain's job intended to protect us and keep us in, keep us living.
Dr. David Clarke (22:00.071)
Yes, and you're talking about the fight or flight nervous system and that absolutely the sympathetic nervous system absolutely is designed to keep us alive in a stressful situation. But the reaction to that is when the stress goes away, your fight or flight nervous system can settle down and then the rest and digest nervous system can take over. So it's natural to have a back and forth between the two.
But if you are feeling like you are constantly under threat, then your sympathetic nervous system is turned on all the time and it begins to have its impact on the body. And you're constantly under threat when there is a stress going on in your life that you're not recognizing. It's impacting you, but you don't know how to make it go away because you don't know where it's coming from. And until you recognize it and bring it into your conscious awareness and get some help in reducing it, it's going to be impacting your sympathetic nervous system. Everybody's had a psychophysiologic stress at one time or another, or psychophysiologic symptom at one time or another. A classic example is blushing with embarrassment. That's a mind-to-body reaction. Same with feeling a knot in your abdomen when you're in a tense situation. That's a mind to body reaction. There are countless expressions in our language that wouldn't exist without there being a brain to body or mind to body connection. And that's something like a spine tingling excitement or heart pounding thrills, for example. There's scores of those. But the good news is that if you know what to look for, we can uncover what's going on, bring it out into the open where we can see it, think about it and do something about it. And then people get better like that patient who was hospitalized so many times. I wish I could say I get people better that quickly in every case. I certainly don't. There are many patients who need up to several years of psychotherapy to achieve the same outcome. But even those patients once they've identified the stress, they can see that they're on a pathway toward recovery. They can see that they've found the source of the problem, that it wasn't in their body, and that they can use their cognitive skills to overcome it.
Ashley James (24:40.342)
So before you became a doctor, you received a degree in psychology. Is that where you started to see this, that it was so important to look at the stressors in someone's life? Did you have an aha moment or is it something you pieced together over time?
Dr. David Clarke (24:55.946)
No, there was definitely an aha moment. My degree in psychology was just a bachelor's degree and it didn't really include a lot of information about individuals who were struggling with these issues. It was more just general background. Honestly, I never expected to use it again. I was on a pathway toward becoming a garden variety gastrointestinal specialist. We put camera tubes inside people and do all kinds of interesting things in their GI tract. That's what I was headed for. And I was having a good career up to that point. My formal training years were going very well. I got an award for excellence in medical school. I was at a top training program at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. I was passing my board examinations with excellent scores. So I was completely unprepared to run into a patient that I didn't know the first thing about diagnosing or treating because this isn't taught in medical school, even to this day. This huge issue that affects 40% of people who come to see the doctor in outpatient care is just simply not taught. So when I met this patient, she was a 37-year-old woman who had been referred from another university because she was having an average of one bowel movement per month. And…yes, that's what I said. I mean, I'd never heard of such a severe disruption. And she had already had almost every diagnostic test. The reason that she was sent to us is that we did very specialized testing of the muscle contractions and the nerve impulses in the large intestine. And my department chair and I were completely convinced that test was going to be abnormal because what other explanation was possible or so we thought. And this woman was taking four different laxatives at double the usual doses and it wasn't doing a thing. So we knew this test was going to be abnormal. But we were very surprised and perplexed when that test was perfectly normal also. And we just threw up our hands and it was left to me to do the exit interview with this woman and just basically tell her she was going to have to live with it.
I didn't want to just walk in and tell her she was going to have to live with it and walk out. So I asked her about stress, knowing it was going to be a waste of time because everybody else had asked her about stress and she didn't have any. She was happily married, she had two nice kids, she enjoyed her job. And then I asked her about, well, were you under any stress earlier? Thinking, well, maybe something happened two years ago when her illness first started.
And she interpreted the question to mean way earlier. And she said, well, my father molested me. And when I heard that, I didn't know what to say because I had no training in asking people about childhood abuse. I had no experience with it. I was worried that if I asked her too many questions about it, it might make her very emotional and cause her a lot of pain to have to discuss that. But I didn't know what else to do. And so I fell back on my early training, which was take a history, find out the details, get the exact story of what happened. So that's what I did. And she seemed to be perfectly calm about it. I mean, she was describing what happened to her in the same tone of voice you'd use to read a grocery list.
And it turned out that her father had sexually abused her hundreds of times, up to the age of 12. And then he stopped. And for the next 25 years, nobody touched her against her will. So I'm sitting there thinking, this can't possibly be relevant. I mean, she's been away from this horrible, horrible event for 25 years how can it possibly be connected to this very severe physical illness that she has? I didn't think that was possible, but I knew of a psychiatrist at UCLA that was certified in internal medicine as well that had an interest in patients like this. So I thought at least I've got something I can do for this patient. At least we can maybe help her live with this condition a little better.
So I arranged for the patient to see the psychiatrist, Harriet Kaplan, and forgot all about her for the next several months, until I ran into Dr. Kaplan in an elevator. And just to make conversation, I said, whatever happened to that patient that I referred to you? And she said, oh, I haven't seen her in a few weeks. She's fine now. And that just upended my world.
Because the idea that you could alleviate a really serious physical condition just by talking to somebody for, in her case, an hour a week for 10 weeks is what it worked out to be. That was impossible as far as I was concerned. I was in the eighth year of my formal training and nobody had ever mentioned that such a thing was possible- just completely shocked me. But I decided, if I want to be a complete doctor, I should know a little more about this because if I've seen one patient with this condition, I might see a few more over the course of my career. So I prevailed on Dr. Kaplan to teach me her framework for how she thought about this kind of illness and how she approached it, what kinds of questions she asked, and over the next year and a half of my training before I went into private practice in Oregon, learned the basics, never thinking I would use it very much. And now we're 7,000 plus patients later.
Ashley James (31:21.962)
Did you follow up with that patient to hear her side of the story or like how do we know that she is having healthy bowel movements now?
Dr. David Clarke (31:33.769)
Well, that's a good question, but she was welcome to return either to me or to Dr. Kaplan at any time and never needed it. She was, according to Dr. Kaplan, she was even able to stop taking all of the laxatives. It basically went all the way back to normal. It was like my patient with the attacks of severe dizziness and vomiting, who in her case, didn't even need 10 weeks. I mean, just in the course of, one 50-minute conversation, that was the end of her condition.
Ashley James (32.12:990)
God bless you. Just the intuition you had to listen, even though it was uncomfortable, and to get curious and ask questions and to want to explore this. There's so many doctors out there that would have shied away from that. And you leaned in towards it and look what it's achieved. Look how many people you've helped and how many people you're helping. I'm just so ecstatic for the work that you're doing.
Dr. David Clarke (32:41.931)
Thank you. Well, it turned out to be among the most rewarding in my practice, to be able to alleviate someone's serious physical condition just by talking to them. Sometimes your best medical instrument is your brain and what it knows. And we don't necessarily always need the high technology that was, frankly, heavily used in two-thirds of my practice.
But the other one third, being able to see people recognize what was happening, being able to make the connections to stresses that were often not obvious at all. We had to do some real searching to find what the connections were that were making people ill. But it was just tremendous to be able to do that. And I've seen this with other doctors too.
We have a course on our website, the endchronicpain.org that you mentioned earlier that some doctors in a medium-sized city that I worked with, took the course, just three of them and their psychologist they collaborated with. Took the course at first, and it just transformed their practice. They suddenly the 40% of patients who had been a tremendous source of frustration for them.
They couldn't help them, they didn't know what to do. The patients were truly physically ill in a variety of ways, but the doctors, after looking for biological explanations and not finding any, didn't know what to do next. So after they took the course, then they knew what to look for, just as I'd learned from Dr. Kaplan. And all of a sudden, these patients started getting better. And one of the doctors took me aside at a conference and said, these ideas, have put the joy back into my work. That was wonderful to hear. And then three years later, it had spread. They had such enthusiasm for this that it spread from the original three doctors to now, as of a year ago, 72 doctors are using these ideas.
Ashley James (34.55.521)
Well, I want to keep spreading that. Everyone who's listening, share this with your doctor. This is something they could also be trained in. I think every doctor should be trained in this. What did you say the percentage was of people who come into the doctor's office? What percentage was psychophysiologic?
Dr. David Clarke (35:18.093)
A review article that looked at that question in 32 different studies from two dozen countries around the world and the average was about 40% that had real body symptoms but no organ disease or structural injury to explain it. So it's about 20% of the adult population or 50 million people in the United States alone.
Ashley James (35:45.756)
Well, the pharmaceutical companies do not want that to get out because they would get a significant pay cut if like 20% of adults were able to resolve their issues by getting to the root cause of their stress and managing it.
Dr. David Clarke (36:04.832)
Yes, it's definitely going to change medical practice once these ideas become common knowledge. Even better news is now that we have gold standard science that backs up the anecdotes that I'm sharing with you. We have randomized controlled trials. In addition to the long covid study, there are studies of pain patients from Harvard, from Detroit, from the Boulder back pain study is a great one. And there was one of older male veterans, usually a very difficult group to treat successfully for chronic pain. And they got dramatic results in Los Angeles. And these are controlled trials. This is very solid gold standard science that is showing that if you know how to talk to patients, what issues to bring up and how to discuss them, that you can make a huge difference. The Boulder back pain study, they had three groups of 50 patients each, and the 50 that got the pain relief psychology, which is the sort of umbrella term for this kind of work, they just got eight sessions, two sessions a week for four weeks, and their pain scores dropped dramatically. After an average of 10 years these people had been suffering with low back pain, their pain scores dropped from over four down to one on average in four weeks. It was just astounding. Nothing like this from talk therapy alone had ever been seen in a randomized controlled trial. But it's just exactly what I saw in my office every day.
Ashley James (37:54.738)
And that is so exciting. A lot of the listeners, are familiar with the concept of fight or flight, the sympathetic nervous system response, and then rest and digest, the parasympathetic. But we're not all aware of what are the physiological changes that take place when we get stuck in the sympathetic nervous system response. So like we shunt blood away from the core, away from our organs, our digestion kind of like goes on hiatus, shunt blood away from the logic centers of the brain, but could you kind of walk us through, like, let's say we're stuck for one day, one week, one month, what begins to break down in the body? There's even epigenetic changes that can take place when we are stuck in that stress response for too long.
Dr. David Clarke (38:48.544)
Yes, the differences over time can be, let's say, significant and profound. All the details haven't been completely worked out, but it definitely has long-term impacts. There's increased rates of a variety of conditions.
One of the places you can get the hard and fast data is from the ACEs study. And I should say ACEs studies because there are now scores of them where the stress was inflicted on people as children. ACEs stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. And these were categorized into 10 different groups in the original paper from 1998. And the more of the 10 that you had the more likely you were to suffer long-term consequences. So some of the long-term consequences are psychological and behavioral. For example, depression, suicide, intravenous drug abuse, alcoholism, obesity. But there are also organ disease impacts as well. There's higher incidences of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease. And the working theory at this point is that stress in children turns on the inflammatory system in the body, has effects on the immune system, and that chronic inflammation is what leads to the damage in what we call the end organs, the heart, the circulatory system, the fat tissue, and produces these long-term effects on the body. My particular focus is not so much the organ diseases as it is the processing of signals that are coming from the body and being interpreted as painful by the brain. Again, coming back to that idea of the phantom limb syndrome that the brain is interpreting signals from the body as being painful. And that if we can help people understand the stresses that have changed the circuits in the brain, we can change them back. The Boulder Back Pain Study included, as part of the work that they did, scans of the brain. And what they found was that the pain relief psychotherapy actually changed the brain back to a healthy pattern. It rearranged those circuits so that was why the pain was relieved.
Ashley James (41:43.710)
Many years ago, I read the book Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno, who is just fascinating. I'm sure he would have loved the work you're doing. Back pain that was not explained by scans. There was nothing on the scan to say that it could be causing his back pain. And what he saw was that the brain was creating ischemia. For example, the quadriceps lumborum, which is like the low back muscles would be grabbing. And so ischemia, for those who don't know, it's like cutting off blood flow. So you can imagine if like maybe you sit on the toilet too long, you get pins and needles, it's really painful, right? If you continue to sit there, and then when you get up that pins and needles, it can be like very, very painful. But what he saw was that there was definitely something going on where the brain was grabbing ahold of and squeezing and making almost like a spasm in muscles like the quadriceps lumborum. And to the touch, when you examine it would feel cold. Like it would seem like almost white and cold, like there was less blood flow in the area. And this definitely sounds like stress to me, but specifically when they were shoulding themselves, like I should like my job, I should like this, and even though they hated it. So if they really hated something, it was very stressful in their life, but they were kind of suppressing their feelings around it, and when they suppressed their emotions around it, wouldn't listen, that's when it would present as this ischemia in the muscles. And if they could just listen and ask their body, like what is this, I'm listening, what emotion is present, what emotion is present.
And as they began to feel it, the pain would subside and the muscle would release. And I ended up using that technique with my clients and a lot of them had a really great success, which was just mind blowing. But again, the brain is in the body are affecting each other and this is exactly what you do in your work. And I love that there's so much science now behind it that we can get
other doctors on board, because man, if we could help that, like between 20 and 40% of those people that you talked about that are, you know, coming to the doctor, going to the clinic and they have pain or discomfort or disease or they have symptoms and there's no physiological explanation, then instead of just putting, here's some pills, go home, I have nothing for you, instead of giving up on them we can actually go deeper and find the root cause.
Dr. David Clarke (44:39.772)
Yes, it's very exciting. I should mention that on that same website, the endchronicpain.org, there is a 12 item self-assessment quiz for people that are listening and wondering if perhaps they might have this condition themselves. It's arranged so that the more questions to which you answer yes, the more likely it is that a psychophysiologic disorder or PPD for short is responsible for your symptoms. So that's something easy that people can do. But you're absolutely right in the approach that you took. Many of my patients have, probably a majority of them have experienced adverse childhood experiences and we can't go back and change those, but we can change the long-term impacts. We can make a difference for the effects that those ACEs have had on people in the present day. One of those effects has to do with the emotions. Many of my patients have had anger, fear, shame, grief, or guilt that they're not fully aware of because they've repressed it. But if we can help people connect with those emotions, put them into words, then they can alleviate them. The more of those emotions that are put into words, either written or spoken, the less they need to express themselves via the body. And that's an approach that's helped a lot of people. One of the techniques that I use to help people connect with these unrecognized emotions is to have them imagine themselves as a butterfly on the wall of their childhood home. And to imagine also that a child they care about, whether it's their own child or someone else's, is in that home and is having to cope with whatever adversity there is in that home, while the patient, as a butterfly on the wall, is only allowed to watch and to see what's happening. And this is a very difficult exercise, as you can imagine, but it helps people recognize much more accurately the reality of what they went through because so many people, when they look back, they have a strong tendency to minimize how bad it was. And until they see the reality of it, until they're able to feel the emotions that would be appropriate for someone who is going through this adversity, then those emotions are going to be locked away with the only outlet being into their bodies.
Ashley James (47:32.108)
Wow. I just totally went there. I had my son in my childhood home and I'm already seeing some stuff. I haven't seen before. That's a very interesting exercise.
Dr. David Clarke (47:43.045)
It’s been very, very useful for my patients, that one. And it's not easy and I see the facial expressions of my patients often change dramatically when I ask them to do this, but it is so useful in cutting through the layers of repression.
Ashley James (48:06.343)
Repression, like you said, we minimize it, or justify it. But if we put someone we care about as like a child in that situation that we were in, and then watch, and then we have empathy for that child, it's like, oh, that empathy is actually for me when I was going through it. Right.
Dr. David Clarke (48:27.585)
That's exactly right.
Ashley James (48:29.884)
Right. Do you have any other exercises that you like to share?
Dr. David Clarke (48:34.165)
Yes, for reaching the emotions, there's one that's kind of completely different, that you cast your mind back to a difficult person or event or situation from the past and just think about that for a moment and then start writing down words and phrases that come to mind about that person, event or situation, just as fast as you can, trying not to worry about spelling or grammar or syntax or whether it makes any sense, just to scribble down every word or phrase that comes to mind about this past event. And keep writing for five or ten minutes, however long it takes, until you feel like you've got every conceivable idea out of your head. And the reason for writing them down so fast is to bypass your cognitive brain. We don't want you thinking about this. We wanna reach into your subconscious and just pull out whatever is boiling and bubbling away in there and get it onto the page. And then once you're done with that, take a look at it, think about it, and start writing complete sentences about what it all means. Try to figure out why those particular words and phrases wound up on the page and start writing complete sentences about the meaning of what you scribbled down. And that is another way to tap into emotions that you might not have been aware of before.
Ashley James (50:16.378)
There are so many different kinds of therapy out there, right? Some types of therapies might be better suited for certain personalities, but as far as your experience with helping people, for example, with chronic pain or PPD, psycho-physiologic issues, do you have like a top three or top five types of therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, or, can you say like, oh, these ones have the best results in helping people get to the other side of it and then they resolve their symptoms.
Dr. David Clarke (51:03.323)
Yes, that's a really important question because the new form of treatment that's been developed by a number of us around the country and overseas, what I call pain relief psychotherapy, basically covers three very closely related types of treatment.
The first is pain reprocessing therapy, which is relatively new, but also straightforward. Straightforward for patients to apply to themselves and for psychotherapists to learn. And then the next one is emotional awareness and expression therapy, which is what I use in combination with the pain reprocessing therapy, but it's emotional awareness and expression is the one that I rely on the most heavily, particularly since the patients that I see tend to be the most complex and severely afflicted and they need kind of a higher level of delving into those repressed emotions and then the third closely related type is intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy or ISTDP, which is strongly associated with Clinicians based in Halifax, Nova Scotia and it's not as widely available in the United States.
But all three of those share a lot of characteristics. There are chapters about them in our textbook, Psychophysiologic Disorders, that I edited with three other people. And that book is written without jargon. So people who like to read about science even if they're not a healthcare professional, can perfectly easily read that and learn about these forms of treatment.
And it turns out that because we are shifting people's attention toward, from their bodies to stress, because we are delving into repressed emotions, and there are two other whole categories we haven't talked about yet, but because we are focusing on those things, the results are far better than they are with other forms of psychotherapy, because you're right, there are hundreds of different kinds of psychotherapy.
The dominant one is cognitive behavioral therapy, but it has been scientifically compared with these new forms of treatment and it falls far short, unfortunately. The Los Angeles Veterans Hospital Pain Study, for example, with cognitive behavioral therapy was given to those veterans, only 5% reached the goal for pain relief that they had set before doing the study.
With emotional awareness and expression therapy, it was 42% achieved the goal. So a vast difference, an eightfold difference, just because of a different kind of talking that the patients were getting, that it was delving into emotions and getting people to focus on sources of stress. This is really new. This is not widely available, but there are books about it, as I mentioned, my first book is called They Can't Find Anything Wrong. The Psychophysiologic Disorders textbook is written by 16 different people that had found their way to these same principles. And there's an app now called Curable that I highly recommend. It's taken all of the best ideas in this field and put them into a user interface that you can have on your smartphone or computer.
Ashley James (54:53.346)
Oh, very cool. Well, I'm going to make sure the links to everything that you just discussed is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. Curable app. That's really neat. So someone's listening to this somewhere in the world, not in Canada, like not on the East coast of Canada, so they wouldn't necessarily have access to the ISTDP. Is that what you say? Yep. And how would they get access to all this? Do you have a list of practitioners that can work with them remotely?
Dr. David Clarke (55:29.456)
Yes, we do. On the endchronicpain.org website, we have a practitioner directory and there are practitioners there from around the world who have found their way to these concepts and have taken the available training in it. And there are lots of resources now for professionals who want to learn how to do this. We have the online webinar course on the website. There are other practitioners who provide training in this. The Dr. Abbass who does the ISTDP is regularly traveling around the world giving trainings to professionals. I do presentations on this topic for professionals all the time. A couple of weeks ago, I did 13 hours of presentations in four cities in seven days. So we are definitely trying to get the word out.
And there's going to be a new course in January. I'm very excited about this one. I finished filming for it in late September and the video production company is furiously working away on editing all the footage and we're planning to release it in January. It's going to be a really advanced course about challenging cases, but again, going to be done completely without jargon so that anybody can comprehend it.
Ashley James (56:55.605)
So this course, anyone can take it, but any kind of doctor or practitioner should definitely take it.
Dr. David Clarke (57:05.872)
Yes, I think not only medical professionals, but mental health professionals, because the medical professionals don't learn the psychology of this condition, and the mental health professionals are not taught the particular kinds of issues that can make people physically ill as opposed to having mental health challenges. That's why the psychiatrist at the West Coast University failed to diagnose my patient with the extreme dizziness and vomiting because he didn't know the kinds of issues to look for in somebody who was physically ill. So that's what we teach in the courses. And that's why it's a giant blind spot in the healthcare system that 50 million Americans fall into, because they don't have a biomedical cause for the doctors to find. They don't have a classical mental health condition for the mental health professionals to find and deal with. They kind of fall right in the middle and neither group of professionals really feels like they have the expertise to deal with it. But that absolutely can change and we've seen it change in numerous locations around the world.
Ashley James (58:24.879)
But it's important to grasp that this happens to relatively healthy people. Someone who's listening might go, I don't think I have any trauma. I feel normal. I feel emotionally normal, day to day. But someone could be bumping along in life and then there might be a trigger they're not aware of and then they start having these symptoms and they could be relatively healthy people. And like you said, your patients are strong. They're resilient people. And it just happens, it just starts. It can just start, like for the long haul people, there was like a very known trigger, but when you go deeper, there might've also been adverse childhood experiences. There might also have been stress that they were suppressing emotions that they were suppressing and it compounds.
Dr. David Clarke (59:28.120)
Yes, this is a condition that can happen to anybody. Most of my patients were not aware of the level of stress that they were coping with, mostly because they'd been coping with stress their whole lives. And so it just didn't seem like it was out of the ordinary. I've had countless, countless patients who have told me that their childhood wasn't really that bad. And then when we get into the discussion about it, we begin to see that, well, yes, there were some things that were pretty bad. And then when I do the exercise of having them imagine themselves watching their own kid try to cope with the same stuff, and they get this horrified expression on their faces because they've never truly appreciated before just how tough it really was. I think of my patients like champion weightlifters who are suddenly being asked to carry a weight that's 50 million Americans fall into, because they don't have a biomedical cause for the doctors to find.
They don't have a classical mental health condition for the mental health professionals to find and deal with. They kind of fall right in the middle and neither group of professionals really feels like they have the expertise to deal with it. But that absolutely can change and we've seen it change in numerous locations around the world.
Ashley James (58:24.879)
But it's important to grasp that this happens to relatively healthy people. Someone who's listening might go, I don't think I have any trauma. I feel normal. I feel emotionally normal, day to day. But someone could be bumping along in life and then there might be a trigger they're not aware of and then they start having these symptoms and they could be relatively healthy people. And like you said, your patients are strong. They're resilient people. And it just happens, it just starts. It can just start, like for the long haul people, there was like a very known trigger, but when you go deeper, there might've also been adverse childhood experiences. There might also have been stress that they were suppressing emotions that they were suppressing and it compounds.
Dr. David Clarke (59:28.120)
Yes, this is a condition that can happen to anybody. Most of my patients were not aware of the level of stress that they were coping with, mostly because they'd been coping with stress their whole lives. And so it just didn't seem like it was out of the ordinary. I've had countless, countless patients who have told me that their childhood wasn't really that bad. And then when we get into the discussion about it, we begin to see that, well, yes, there were some things that were pretty bad. And then when I do the exercise of having them imagine themselves watching their own kid try to cope with the same stuff, and they get this horrified expression on their faces because they've never truly appreciated before just how tough it really was. I think of my patients like champion weightlifters who are suddenly being asked to carry a weight that's 50 pounds more than the world record for their weight class, that would break down the strongest person. Their bodies would break down, they would feel like failures, they would not know why they couldn't carry the load anymore. It comes as a big surprise that there's stress involved.
People have trouble imagining that stress alone could make you physically ill like this. So yes, it comes as a big surprise to people. And the level of illness that you can get from this, that's one of the myths is that it's going to be mild. Absolutely not. I've had many patients in the hospital with this. One of my patients I was asked to see after she'd been in the hospital 70 days, she was getting morphine around the clock, in doses you would normally give to somebody with widespread cancer. You would never convince her in a million years that her pain was due to stress, but it was, we uncovered the stress. She was out of the hospital in a week, and she was off of all the opioids in 30 days.
Ashley James (1:01:44.794)
Amazing. I have friends in my life, I'm thinking of two of them specifically who have had surgeries because of chronic pain, multiple surgeries, and the pain persists beyond. And I've, you know, I'm going to be sharing this episode with them. And I can imagine those who are listening are thinking of their friends and family who have chronic pain. And it's not just chronic pain. Like you said, that there could be the woman who had the vomiting or had another woman who had the constipation. It can be these odd illnesses that don't have an explanation. And but sometimes they get a doctor who says, I know what to do. Let's cut this body part out. That's the problem. And then the problem continues to persist and now they have less body parts.
Dr. David Clarke (1:02:35.068)
Yes, that's unfortunately true. And there are lots of non-pain symptoms, dizziness, trouble swallowing, visual disturbances, seizures that are not due to epilepsy, chronic coughing, difficulty breathing, all kinds of gastrointestinal symptoms, as we mentioned, problems with the pelvis, with the menstrual cycle, with the genitals, with bladder spasms, numbness and tingling, certain kinds of rashes can happen from this. The only common denominator tends to be that people with this condition have more than one symptom at a time, more than one location in the body, or the symptoms can move from place to place. They don't have to, some people just have the one symptom, but the more symptoms you have and the more different locations they are, the more likely it is that PPD is responsible.
Ashley James (1:03:33.542)
Do you have any way to measure stress? Like for example, heart rate variability, is there any way that you could hook someone up to a machine? I know there's blood tests that measure cortisol, but is there any way that you would say you could measure their chronic stress and go, oh right, now we can put this device on you and we can see your stress lowering?
Dr. David Clarke (1:03:57.216)
Yes, I really wish there was. I wish there was a blood test for this condition. If we had a blood test for this, then you can bet that every health care professional would learn how to diagnose and treat this condition, because we could get a blood test for it. And we could see, oh, your PPD level is high. We need to find your stresses, and we're going to make you better because of that. But unfortunately, we don't have that. And I don't expect to see that anytime soon. But when you think about it, because we don't have a blood test, it means that we should spend even more time training healthcare professionals how to figure out what's going on, because it's not so simple without the blood test. But people who have had stress for a long period of time, they get accustomed to it. And when you ask them, do you feel stressed or depressed or anxious, frequently they say no, because they've been living with this for years.
One of my patients, my personal record patient, had PPD symptoms for 79 years. And even that patient, once we uncovered the stress and helped her with it, she got about 60 or 70% better, even after all those years.
Ashley James (1:05:17.027)
Amazing, but, yes, you become habituated to your stress. You become habituated to your environment. So, yes, of course.
Now this pain, the typical chronic pain that persists, does it come and go? Is there any commonalities? Is it always there? Does it come and go? Does it act almost like a migraine that comes on and there's telltale signs that's coming, or all of the above?
Dr. David Clarke (1:05:45.867)
Yes, all of the above. Everybody's different. And migraines definitely are part of this, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, all of those are part of this spectrum. But everybody's different. But we definitely, if the patient's symptoms are moving around, if they're highly variable, from with respect to any kind of triggers, then we get suspicious that PPD is responsible. It's really hard to have an organ disease or structural damage cause symptoms that migrate from place to place, or that are highly variable in terms of what triggers them. But I should go back to the point you made earlier about having surgery for this. It comes up most frequently in low back pain because a majority of people over 40 and a large number of people younger than 40 have abnormalities in their spine on an MRI. And this is in people with no symptoms whatsoever, it's just part of the normal aging process. But if you have PPD related back pain and you go to the doctor and they image your spine one way or another, and they find these age-related abnormalities, it is very tempting to say, okay, you've got pain, you've got this abnormality there, let's go in and do surgery and fix this and that's probably going to alleviate your pain. But it turns out that the success rate of surgery for pain is about 30%. If you have evidence of nerve damage, then it's better. But most patients don't have any evidence that they have a damaged nerve. And if they get surgery for back pain, the success rates are terrible. And there was a study from the 90s where they took a whole bunch of patients, I think it was 87 patients who had lumbar spine surgery, low back surgery, and looked at the success rate of the surgery. And they compared it with their ACE score, the adverse childhood experience burden that these individuals had suffered. And it turned out that if you had no ACEs, your success rate from the surgery was pretty good. It was about 95%. But if you were in the top range of people with a lot of ACEs, the success rate for the surgery fell to 15%.
Ashley James (1:08:23.029)
I've never opt into a surgery that had only a 15% success rate, but I guess if you're in chronic pain, you might roll the dice, you know, if it meant, if that was the only answer, right. And now, now you have the answer and we need to get this information out there. Please, everyone listening.
Share endchronicpain.org with your doctors, with your practitioners, with your friends and family. Share this episode with those you care about and everyone. If we can get this out, we could be part of the movement to completely change the way medicine is practiced and the way people are helped. We got to get this information out there. I am so, so thankful for what you do. And I said earlier, God bless you. And I mean it. God bless you for the work that you're doing.
Dr. David Clarke (1:09:20.637)
Thank you.
Ashley James (1:09:21.704)
Absolutely. Now you had said that there's two other categories we haven't even touched on. Can we, can we touch on those?
Dr. David Clarke (1:09:28.571)
You bet. This is a long-term impact of ACEs. And the first category that we did talk about was repressed emotions. That turns out to be the most challenging to diagnose in most cases. But the other two are stressful personality traits that grow directly out of the child's attempts to cope with their adversity. And the third one is triggers that are going on in the present day that are in some way linked to the traumas or stressors of the past. And the personality traits that can be stressful include the most fundamental and important is low self-esteem. This is the common denominator, and my patients who've survived ACEs is that they are made to feel like second-rate human beings, or in some cases, made to feel like worthless pieces of crap. Other personality traits that are kind of linked to that include being excessively self-critical, much more critical of yourself than you would be of others, for example. Having limited self-care skills, people who are devoted to the care of everybody else in their world, but have difficulty putting themselves on the list of those they take care of. So if you ask them, what do they do for fun? They have trouble coming up with very much.
People who are perfectionists, people who are living on high alert all the time, people who suffer from anxiety or depression, people who are focused on pleasing others, who tend to choose narcissistic partners to be in relationships with, or partners who have significant issues or problems that need to be solved. That's, a direct outgrowth from growing up in a home where there were problems in that home and the child trying to survive, trying to make the best of that situation, ends up focusing on trying to solve those problems. So it's not a big surprise when they end up choosing relationship partners for themselves that need a lot of support and they end up in relationships that are not mutually supportive, not balanced, but where the giving from them is not balanced by getting back from the partner. Other ones, self-sacrificing to an excessive degree, difficulty setting boundaries, not being very assertive for your needs, fear of abandonment, need for external validation. And in more extreme cases, you get into coping mechanisms to try to deal with the emotional pain of all this.
And those can include eating disorders, can include self-mutilation behavior, can include all kinds of addictions, not just to substances, but to behaviors like work, sex, food, gambling, exercise, even shopping I've seen in one or two cases. So all of these, as you can imagine, are highly stressful.
And people struggle to make changes. A lot of psychotherapists just accept them as largely a given and don't even try to intervene. But when people see where these came from, that one of the questions I'll ask people is, who taught you these false assumptions about yourself that you need to be the caregiver for everybody, for example, or that you are a second-rate human being. Who taught you this and how did they teach you? And when people can understand where that came from, it truly facilitates making changes.
Ashley James (01:13:36.226)
Oh, man, that is such a good question. Wow. You describe so many people I know and some of me, I was feeling called out there for a sec. I was like, wow. I've done a lot of personal growth work through the years and I can see where I have overcome actually a lot of that. And my parents did the best they could, but I definitely had to go back and work on stuff and heal stuff and I mean, I'm seeing so much of this, exactly what you described, in so many people.
Dr. David Clarke (01:14:13.071)
Yes, those are the most difficult. I was just working with a patient last week. Her parents clearly meant well, meant the best, but they created an environment of extreme pressure without realizing what it was doing to their child.
Ashley James (01:14:37.175)
Yes. It's not always obvious, right? Emotional abuse or mental abuse. That's the hardest because it doesn't leave a bruise, a broken bone. You know, we can say, Oh, I didn't have abuse as a child. My childhood was fine because there wasn't an alcoholic throwing bottles at my head, like it's not always like Hollywood style, right? And like you said, we do a lot of times we'll repress, we'll justify, well kind of almost blank out. I've talked to people who they sort of don't remember most of their childhood, like big chunks of it, until you start really talking about it and then they start remembering.
Dr. David Clarke (01:15:21.962)
Yes, it can be very difficult to recognize. And so many of my patients have told me, no, my childhood was okay, and then we start talking about it and they start remembering.
We just have this conversation. One of my patients, we talked for well into my lunch hour because I wasn't finding the stress. And he finally just stopped and said, the only time I ever got praise from my parents was when I did something better than my brothers and sisters could do it. And he had three siblings and they were all very accomplished kids, academically, extracurriculars, athletically. It was not easy to do something better than those siblings could do it. So he ended up rarely, if ever, being made to feel good about himself. And it had a lot of those consequences that I mentioned. He was in a very bad relationship. He was addicted to his work. And he was having all kinds of physical symptoms.
Ashley James (01:16:30.773)
If we were friends with that kid growing up, we wouldn't think, oh, my friend's really abused. Like that's a really bad household. We wouldn't imagine that's abuse, but internally, what's going on? The stress levels over time and that self judgment and like you said, the poor self esteem. So, so I think it's worth it for anyone, especially if they're having health issues, right? And you said this even affects immune. So if someone is having immune problems, always sick, always catching every cold, it's worth diving in and doing the work. I mean, what's the work? It's not going to hurt, right? There's no negative side effect of self-personal growth, other than you might have to shake up a few relationships, learn how to enforce healthy boundaries. But transformation, at the end, only good comes from it.
Dr. David Clarke (01:17:29.395)
Yes, all these issues are worth assessing and treating for their own sake. And I have patients who say, well, I'm not sure that these issues are contributing to my pain or other symptoms. And I'll just say, well, let's work on them anyway. They deserve attention for their own sake. And we'll see if your physical symptoms improve in response to that. And a very large number of patients will experience physical improvement as well.
Ashley James (01:18:04.282)
Is this something that you're going to be able to have colleges, universities start to teach? Is this something that we can get into the curriculum?
Dr. David Clarke (01:18:14.488)
We are working on it. I taught a class at the University of Rochester last year and I've just been invited to teach it again. I taught for 10 years at Arizona State. I taught at Cummings Graduate Institute in Arizona. I've taught a class on this since the late 1990s at Pacific University here in Oregon. So I'm teaching in the medical school now, short module on this topic. So it's growing. I mean, when I think back to 15 years ago, in terms of widespread acceptance in the healthcare community, especially the educational community, we were really nowhere. But today, 2023, it seems to be growing exponentially, to be honest.
Ashley James (01:19:06.164)
Good. Well, we need to get it to where it's in the meme, to where it's common.
Dr. David Clarke (01:19:12.807)
Now you are helping with that Ashley, I appreciate it.
Ashley James (1:19:15.743)
Absolutely. And I hope my listeners will as well. I mean, I am on fire about this.
Dr. David Clarke (01:19:20.419)
I should finish before I forget about that third long-term impact of the ACEs, which are the triggers. Just say a few words about that. These triggers are people, situations, or events in the present day that are in some way linked to the past. And the most common example is someone who was an ACE perpetrator, someone who created the adversity for my patient as a child who is still in the patient's life today. And because of some of the other personality traits that I mentioned, it can be very difficult to set boundaries with such a person, to assert yourself with such a person, and to limit your interactions with that individual to the point where they're not making you physically ill. But it starts with just realizing that this person is still creating issues for you and is triggering for you. It turns out that patient who was having the attacks of dizziness and vomiting, who was hospitalized so many times, it was her emotionally and verbally abusive mother that was responsible for the attacks. All of the attacks, it turned out, were linked to interactions with that mother who had been verbally and emotionally abusive, starting at the age of three with that patient and continuing for the next 47 years. The patient is now 50 years old, mom is in her 70s, and mom is still doing it. But the patient, having experienced mom doing this since she was three, it just felt normal to her. She was completely blind to the idea that it was triggering her episodes, even though there were giant screaming clues that were saying exactly that, which is what made it so straightforward to diagnose her, let's put it that way.
Ashley James (01:21:24.955)
Well, that's the habituation. When I remember that moment somewhere in my early teenage years, when I realized that my household that I grew up in isn't a carbon copy around the world. I thought everyone did what my parents did and lived like we lived. And then started to go over at friend's house to see. Wow, other parents act really differently, have different rules, have different boundaries or no boundaries and different communication styles. Some are abusive, some aren't, some are very more loving than my parents are outwardly loving, some are less. And just realizing that the person you have in your whole life, if it's an abuser, we go, this is normal. This is who they are. This is normal.
Dr. David Clarke (01:22:18.799)
Yes, none of us has a parallel life to compare ourselves with.
Ashley James (01:22:21.355)
Right, exactly, and I love that exercise with the butterfly where you're putting someone else in your shoes, because then you go, wait a second, if you have a child, you can do this. If not, you can think of someone you really care about as a child, but putting them in that situation that you were in, oh man, I just wanna go save that child as soon as possible.
Dr. David Clarke (01:22:46.013)
Yes, one of my favorite stories about that is I get some interesting consultations because my name is out there and one of them was a Hollywood type actress and I found myself in a very pleasant bar having a conversation with this impossibly good looking person who was telling me she had suffered physical symptoms in many locations in her body for 20 years.
We got around to talking about her childhood and it turned out that her parents were verbally and emotionally abusive of each other but not her and she was the peacemaker and she was the only child so it kind of fell on her to try to keep the peace. When she's eight years old the parents get divorced but unfortunately, they kept living in the same house They slept in separate bedrooms, but they lived in the same house.
So for her, nothing changed. But she was telling me this story and every other sentence was, this didn't bother me, it wasn't that bad, there was no abuse, they didn't drink too much, I could deal with it, I'm over it now, I'm out of that household for a long time. And she just was not accepting that this situation was sufficient to account for her 20 years of illness. Until I told her to do the butterfly on the wall experiment with her beloved niece, whom she spent a lot of time with, who was six years old at the time, and just said, imagine your niece is in this household, and you're there watching your niece try to cope with your parents for, let's say, just a week, how is that going to be for you? And she just stopped talking and stared at me for probably two minutes, but it seemed like longer than that because she was a very verbal person, as you can imagine, and just stared at me. And I just let her stare. You know, I was going to let her process this thought experiment. And then finally she said, ‘At the end of that week, I would shoot myself.' And that was the first time that she realized just how bad it had really been.
Ashley James (01:25:10.501)
We love our parents. And if it's not that outwardly like, all the alcoholics throwing bottles at your head or whatever, like if it isn't this very stereotypical, that's definitely abuse, right? But if it's something like she said, well, they weren't yelling at me, I know they loved me and they meant well, as children, and then when we grow up, we love our parents and we in some ways want to protect them because we don't want to necessarily say, oh, they were abusers, that they're the cause of my pain. Like that would almost feel like betrayal, saying something that negative to someone you care about. And the thing is, what we have to get is they're human. They did the best they could with the resources they had. Of course they didn't mean to hurt you. Unfortunately there's some very sick people out there, not the majority, but there are some who actually did mean to hurt people. However, if you love your parents and you know they loved you, we want to say they did the best they could. They loved you the way they could. And unfortunately, the way it turned out, it was a stress on the body. And there's stuff to process. There's ways that our mind protected ourselves. We justified, we coped, we suppressed, but we have to process it, and we can do therapy and still love our parents and honor and respect them while also admitting that the experiences we had were traumatic and that they hurt us.
Dr. David Clarke (01:26:53.943)
Yes, and that leads directly into a key idea that I think a lot of therapists don't emphasize nearly as much as they should, which is that when you finally recognize the reality of what you went through, you have to also give yourself credit for having gone through that. I like to use the analogy of being born on the far side of Mount Everest or born in the middle of a dangerous jungle, that through no fault of your own, you found yourself in this very difficult place. And again, even when the parents are doing this from a place of love or doing the best that they can, from the child's perspective, it can be, far side of the Himalayas or middle of the Amazon. And I want my patients to give themselves credit for having endured that. It takes truly heroic levels of perseverance to pull yourself through these situations when you're a child. And you need to respect that. You need to recognize that you're truly meeting the dictionary definition of heroic when you've come through an environment like this. A hero in our society is somebody who's overcome a difficult mental or physical challenge for a good cause. And my ace surviving patients have done exactly that. And it is a truly critical foundation for their future recovery that they be able to think of themselves in these terms, that they respect what that kid did to get through that situation. And once they can do that, once they can engineer that 180 degree flip in their self-image, all kinds of other things change. It makes it vastly easier, for example, to make changes in those stressful personality traits that I was mentioning earlier. My patient who was the actress, she was in a dysfunctional relationship with a boyfriend at that time, one of those unbalanced, giving way more than you're getting back kind of relationships. She dumped that guy the next day. She began building her self-esteem. And a year and a half later, she met the love of her life.
Ashley James (01:29:20.439)
Oh, that's awesome.
Coming back to this idea that it's not all in your head, there's physical experiences, the body has been changed physically, but the stressors are something we need to process. So it's the heart and the mind and that we can see and now measure results. So we can see and measure, like for example, with the long haul, that they had shortness of breath. It's hard to measure brain fog and fatigue, but you can measure shortness of breath. You can measure, there's certain things that you could measure before the study began to see that they were physiologically impaired by the long haul and other people like that woman you talked about that sparked much of this, the woman who pooped once a month, which I can't even imagine. And it was very clear, you could definitely measure that. It is a physical thing that's happening. And by healing the heart and the mind and going through the process of that.
So it's not taking a drug, it's not taking another antidepressant, it's not another, just one drug after another, one surgery after another. Those are bringing the wrong tools to the table, right? Like they say, a carpenter, every problem is going to be handled with a hammer, right? Like so when you come to a doctor, he's going to use the tools he has.
Dr. David Clarke (01:31:12.199)
That's right, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Ashley James (01:31:16.075)
Right, but this 40% of the people, and you said it was somewhere around 20% of adults, at the time, it's not a nail. Don't bring your hammer anywhere near me, it's not a nail. So the long haul covid sufferers who went through the study and went through the therapy, how much therapy did they receive?
Dr. David Clarke (01:31:45.287)
Well, most of their improvement took place after just four weeks. So these are people who had been ill for an average of 40 weeks. And after four weeks of treatment, they achieved the majority of the results that I mentioned earlier. But yes, you're right. It's not that often that we are able to document real biological changes in the body as a result of this. It's more a subjective, internal to the brain, a kind of perception that's going on. But one of my patients had a completely paralyzed stomach. There's a special test called the gastric emptying test or the stomach emptying test where we have them swallow a very slightly radioactive material and we just watch it with a specialized camera and see if the stomach empties it. And we know how fast the stomach is supposed to empty it. And when we did this test on this gentleman, it didn't move at all. It just sat there for two hours and they said, well, we don't need to watch this anymore. We know it's abnormal. So they stopped the test. But I had never seen or heard of somebody with a psychophysiologic complete paralysis of their stomach.
His symptom was vomiting naturally. I mean, if nothing was emptying in the forward direction, it would eventually empty in the backward direction. And I know that it was psychophysiologic because we uncovered the stress in his case, successfully treated it, and his eating and digestion went back to normal.
Ashley James (01:33:31.111)
Oh, that's so exciting. But just that we have cases where you can demonstrate through imaging, you can measure and show here's an impairment. We go through four weeks of very specific therapy that's proven to be the most effective so far, right, until something better comes out. But so far, this is the best we've found. And we're always striving for excellence, right? That's the thing, especially in the case of mental health, and I'm just so disappointed that people still practice archaic mental health techniques that have been proven to be insufficient.
I know that not everything's for everyone, right? Sometimes you got to pull out different tools for different personalities, but you found something that is incredibly effective and in a short period of time.
Dr. David Clarke (01:34:31.329)
Yes, it's really dramatic. I mean, I'm a bit of a statistics nut and there's a statistic that really captures the power of this new pain relief psychology and it's called effect size. And basically what it means is when you apply a treatment to a group, how big an effect did you have? And normally with things like cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness-based stress reduction, you get an effect size that gives you a number of 0.2 to 0.5. Those are just the numbers that are associated with this and those are considered small to moderate effects. Rarely do you see anything better than moderate. A large effect would get you a number of 0.8.
The effect size in the Boulder back pain study for Pain Relief Psychology was 1.5. I don't know, if it was a football game, the score would be 150 to 30, something like that. The lead researcher for this was very skeptical. I met with him. Some other people in my organization met with him. And we said, we truly believe, based on our clinical experience, that you are going to get excellent results from this. And he's a psychologist, he knows about pain. He'd been researching pain for several years. And he said, I don't really believe that this is going to happen, but I'm willing to do the study and we'll see what kind of results you get. And he was just blown away.
Ashley James (01:36:26.273)
That's so exciting. So we've talked about people who have this and the things they can do, especially going to your website, endchronicpain.org and check that out, do the quiz, they can find a practitioner, they could take your courses, they could read your books. What about prevention?
So everyone, it would be good for everyone across the world. We already discussed this to do personal growth work, to dive into our childhood, just learn and forgive and process. It's a joke, life is crazy, can't get it alive. None of us are going to survive this, right? We've all been through something. It's good to process.
So let's just assume everyone is going to take this really seriously and go do some really great therapy and get super healthy mentally, emotionally. What can we do starting today and for the rest of our life to prevent chronic stress? What are the top things? Like you love statistics, so what are the things that are the most impactful? Is it meditation, exercise, breathing, deep breathing? Is it hugging everyone you love for 90 seconds every day? What are the things that are the most important? What are the things that you do to make sure that you stay on top of managing your stress so that it doesn't become this big problem?
Dr. David Clarke (01:38:07.267)
Yes, that's a great question. You can go on the internet and find all kinds of highly valid techniques for reducing your personal stress level. And I have no issue with any of those. I do them myself. I go for walks with my wife along the river that we have here in Portland.
I played soccer as an adult on up to three teams at a time for over 20 years. That was a great one. I ride a bicycle. I do photography. I play chess with my grandchildren. My wife is a fabulous cook. Her meals alone are wonderful for just general stress reduction. All of those things are great and I absolutely recommend them.
But if you have what could be called deep stress, if you have issues that are the result of long-term impacts of adverse childhood experiences and those have not been recognized, then you are essentially swimming against the tide in trying to reduce your own stress level. There is this tide of long-term impacts that is going to limit your success with all of the stress techniques that I just mentioned. So it's worth the exercise of looking back and taking a serious review of how you might've been impacted as a kid, doing some of the exercises that we've discussed earlier today, and figuring out what some of those long-term impacts might've been.
The two biggest, the self-esteem, having a realistic sense of your own value in the world, contrary to what you might have been taught as a kid, is very important. And that in turn facilitates the second important part that gets the tide working with you instead of against you, and that is to set aside regular time for self-care. Regular time, every week, ideally several hours if possible, for activity with no purpose but your own joy. What we're looking for is the moral equivalent of finger paints for a four-year-old. The four-year-old doesn't care who sees the finger paintings, that doesn't care about the quality of the work, doesn't care about how many pictures per hour they produce. They just know they're having fun and everybody needs that.
One of my patients was a champion athlete as a girl, but she did her sport before school, after school, on weekends, starting at the age of four. And she never really got to be a kid. I mean, there was no time to just self-indulgently play, which every child needs. And by missing out on that, she never really learned self-care skills. So now she's in the emergency room at seven in the morning, where I'm looking over her records, where she'd been the entire night getting tested for sudden abdominal pain. Everything was normal. So I'm talking to her about her lifestyle, and she's working full-time. Her husband's working full-time. She's got two kids. She coaches the kids in her sport. She's on the athletic club board of directors. She's driving kids to out-of-state competitions.
She's coaching other people's kids. And I asked her, what do you do for fun? And she had to really think about it. She said, well, you know, maybe every other month I go out to the movies with my husband. That was it. So her treatment was to carve out a regular block of time and her family was 100% behind this idea where she would just do trial and error to learn how to play.
And at first, she's just looking at me, what am I going to do? Because she, age 32, she had no idea how to go out and have fun because she never had in her entire life. But what she ended up doing was going for walks in a park. And that wasn't enough, but while she was walking, she was thinking. And one day she hit on the idea of taking piano lessons, which came as a surprise because she'd never done anything musical before, but she absolutely loved it and her physical symptoms just melted away once she started doing that.
Ashley James (01:43:02.309)
Wow. I love it. I love it so much. Oh, Dr. Clark, you are a godsend to this world in this day and age. So I don't know if you know about me, but I was sick for many years. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, type two diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue. So bad. I couldn't process human language in the morning. It was really odd. My husband would talk to me first thing in the morning and it would be like being on Charlie Brown and hearing the parents, he would just be like, whoom, and I would just put my hand up, I can't even understand what you're saying, just hand me four cups of coffee. It was bad, I suffered for many years, and also had chronic infections, and it was wicked. And that's where I found natural medicine and resolved these issues. Also been big into, like I said before, personal growth and working on myself, right? Working through all this stuff. I've been through the wringer when it came to doctors. One doctor after the other told me, I'll never have kids after a battery of tests when I was 19, the endocrinologist said, I'll never have kids. I wait with this beautiful eight-and-a-half year old boy who is our whole world and he impresses me.
I look into his eyes and I recognize that God exists because of how amazing this child is and how life is so beautiful. Life is filled with so many beautiful things. And being a mom is so amazing. And I'm so grateful that I was able to overcome. If I had believed that doctor, if I had just believed her and had not taken the steps, I would have never had my child in my life. And just the impact that the words doctors have when they say you can never do this or you'll never be able to do that is sickening. I was told I'd always have diabetes. I was told I'd always have these problems and I overcame them and I don't have them anymore. And that's why I started the podcast is I suffered, I cried daily, I was suffering in my body. I felt like a prisoner trapped in a sick body every day. And I created this podcast because I wanna reach out to all those people who are crying, they're suffering. And they don't need to. And this podcast is for them. It's a lifeline. I'm throwing the lifeline, the giant flotation device, I'm throwing it and hopefully reaching them. And we can help them. And you have the answer to millions and millions of people suffering. If all the doctors I had been to were trained in your work, I wouldn't have had to suffer as long as I did. Let's just put it that way. And so you're going to help so many people.
So everyone listening is going to share this with those they care about. And frankly, share this with those you don't care about. Jesus talks about how we need to treat the least of us is how we actually treat Him. So just like, share this with your enemy. Let's mend some bridges. Let's share this with everyone.
Dr. David Clarke (01:46:14.971)
They might become a nicer person too.
Ashley James (01:46:18.377)
If someone has shared this with you, they're going to be like, well, wait a second, do they like me or am I their enemy? Share this with everyone. We've got to get this out there. The impact of what you're doing is so important. And I'm so honored to have you here today. I want to make sure that we've covered everything you wanted to cover. I know you've already shared a lot, but is there any homework? Is there anything to wrap up? Is there anything that you didn't get to say?
Dr. David Clarke (01:46:48.671)
You did a great job with asking questions, and I think we covered a huge amount of material. I can point out that these ideas that we're sharing aren't especially new, but they are largely unknown to the healthcare professionals of this world, and that's why my colleagues and I created the nonprofit, and why I do teaching all over North America and Europe and speak on wonderful podcasts like yours.
There was a Harvard professor named Francis Peabody who gave a speech in 1925 and it became one of the most famous speeches in American medicine. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1927. It's easy to find on the internet. It's a 6,000 word speech. He covers a lot of the same ideas that you and I have covered today. This was 100 years ago almost. This was before the discovery of penicillin is how old that speech is. And all those ideas that we've discussed today are in his speech. So this is kind of timeless wisdom that we're trying to bring back amid the tsunami of technology that has overtaken medicine today. We need the technology. I used it in my practice for 30 years. I've benefited from it myself. I'm all in favor of technology, but we absolutely don't need to lose the humanistic side of medicine in response to the technology.
Ashley James (01:48:39.311)
Right, exactly. This should be foundation. This should be something dealt with first, not last. Unfortunately. I'm sure you've heard it, that people come to you after they've already been through a battery of tests and trials and, wouldn't it be wonderful if this was the first thing we tried and not the last thing we tried.
Dr. David Clarke (01:49:00.723)
Oh, absolutely. It makes doctors happy when they learn how to do this. It saves a ton of money. It saves complications from diagnostic tests. It alleviates vast amounts of human suffering.
Now, one of my patients had been ill for 55 years. Volume three of his paper chart was three inches thick, and he was cured in less than 30 days, just by bringing these issues to the surface.
Ashley James (01:49:32.475)
Oh my goodness. I would love nothing more than to watch like a documentary of following people's lives. Did you have that in the works? I know you've been a producer of three films. Do you have the intention of covering this in a documentary?
Dr. David Clarke (01:49:49.411)
It is covered in three different documentaries. I participated as a producer and helped as a consultant with the editing. The first was All the Rage, and the second was This Might Hurt, and the third was Pain Brain, and links to these are on our website, and you can easily track them down through the titles on the internet. They're all different. But they're all excellent and provide information about different aspects of this. So yes, those are great. You pay a few bucks to watch them, but the filmmakers did outstanding work.
Ashley James (01:50:33.938)
Very cool. Well, holidays are coming up. I think one of your books would be make an excellent stocking stuffer. I think listeners should go and check them out. I keep saying share this episode, but also get the books, watch the movies, check out endchronicpain.org. I'm very excited, even though this is like you said, timeless wisdom. It wasn't really until recently that you have been able to put together the three types of therapies in that order that were the most effective, right? So it took many of you to come together and create the system that is working and be able to measure the system that is working, which I'm so grateful for, cause it's one thing to be, cerebral about it and it's another thing to put, where rubber meets the road, right? Where we actually have to go do it. So we can be cerebral and go, just knowing that this is the cause of your chronic pain isn't going to solve anything until you get into action and do it and do the therapies and do the work. But what's showing across the board is in a very short period of time, sometimes as little as one month, you can have tremendous results, which is really exciting.
Dr. David Clarke (01:51:58.432)
Yes it’s. People get the insight into it, and even if they don't experience complete relief right away, they can usually see that they are on a pathway toward recovering, and that's tremendously reassuring for people.
Ashley James (01:52:12.568)
Oh yes, especially if they've been through the wringer for many years. One therapy I definitely want you to check out, cause there's so many out there is a Timeline Therapy. It was created by Tad James and I studied underneath him of no relation. We just happened to have the same last name but Timeline Therapy is a wonderful tool and I'd love for you to look into it and see if it's something that, you'd like to add.
I did have a client with chronic back pain. I was able to do a Timeline Therapy session with them, took one session over eight hours over one day. We did an intense session. And I'm a master practitioner and trainer of NLP and Timeline Therapy. And we were able to resolve her chronic pain in that one day. I mean, that's just one person, but for her, it was her whole world. But Timeline Therapy incredibly amazing as a technique for resolving trauma. And it would be great for you to check it out and see if it's something you'd wanted to add to your repertoire, if it helps, if it advances your cause.
Dr. David Clarke (01:53:23.644)
Yes, I'm happy to take a look at it. I hadn't been familiar, but especially if the timeline goes back to day one, I can imagine a lot of ideas that would overlap with the work that I do.
Ashley James (01:53:35.580)
Yes, so actually, so with Timeline Therapy, you're in a light state of trance, so you're conscious of the unconscious mind and you're conscious the whole time because it's a light state of trance. And then we go back to the root cause, the very beginning, and kind of do the fly on the wall thing so they're not completely immersed in the emotion and they're able to then get a non-mirror image reverse of the event because we go above and beyond it, but it's a little hard to explain without a visual, but the way in which they're visualizing the beginning of the trauma and then they gain positive learnings from the experience, very quickly they're able to then go into the event and the emotion is gone, it's resolved, and they've gained positive learnings and they're seeing things from different perspectives. So it's very cool.
But like I wouldn't say it's the only thing to do. I would just say I'd love to add it to your tool belt because I think everything you're doing is wonderful and in addition to what you're doing, I think it'd be really cool for you to have Timeline Therapy. I think it's just timelinetherapy.com or the Tad James company that teaches it and there's many practitioners out there now. I studied it with Tad back in 2005 and 2006.
Dr. David Clarke (01:54:56.086)
Very cool, I'll check it out.
Ashley James (01:54:58.562)
Dr. David Clark it has been a pleasure having you on the show. I'd love to have you back or any of your colleagues. Anytime there's new advancements, you guys want to come back and share more as things develop. You are always welcome back. And I will definitely be just like screaming from the rooftops for everyone to go to endchronicpain.org.
Dr. David Clarke (01:55:20.774)
Yes, thank you. The research that I described today has opened the floodgates for money from National Institute of Health and other places to do even more research. So I'm sure those will be published in the next couple of years and is just going to help accelerate this snowball rolling downhill for more and more people to become aware of this.
Ashley James (01:55:44.450)
Beautiful. That's so exciting. Awesome. Well, it was been a pleasure having you on the show and please come back anytime.
Dr. David Clarke (01:55:51.660)
Thank you.
Website – Psychophysiologic Disorders Association
Use coupon code LTH at energybits.com to get your supercharged spirulina and clean chlorella!
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https://www.learntruehealth.com/grow-a-younger-brain-phycocyanin-sod-spirulina-algae-secrets
In this interview with Catherine Arnston, founder of EnergyBits, the focus is on the transformative health benefits of algae. Catherine discusses the potential of algae in improving brain function, preventing cancer, and enhancing cardiovascular health. Emphasizing the importance of choosing clean sources of algae, she explains why EnergyBits prioritizes product quality. Practical advice is provided on incorporating algae into daily meals, with a particular emphasis on the distinctions between chlorella and spirulina. The conversation also delves into the production process and nutritional profiles of these microalgae, highlighting their rich content of essential nutrients. Catherine expresses her aspiration to pursue further research in algae nutrition, concluding with a discussion on the critical role of algae in gut health and their potential to revolutionize overall well-being.
Highlights:
Intro:
Ashley James (00:00.737)
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 511.
I am so excited for today's guest and I know you will be too when you hear that we have Catharine Arnston back on the show. So excited to have you back. Welcome.
Catharine Arnston (00:24.804)
I think this is my third, or is this my fourth?
Ashley James (00:27.340)
No, this is more than your third. Let me give you the list. You might be up there for one of my guests that's been the most frequent. Actually, frequent flyer. That's it. We've given you the Learn True Health frequent flyer. You've entered the Frequent Flyer Club.
We had you in Episode 234 talking about algae, just going deep into discussing algae and chlorella and spirulina. Episode 265, we talked about the superfood components of algae. Episode 266 was all about vitamin K2, of course, from algae, which is a great, great source. Episode 357, debunked algae myths.
I really like that one because, everyone's an expert these days and just because they have doctor in front of their name and then they write some article that was just a real misconstrued idea from one study and then all of a sudden everyone's it's bad science and everyone's running around like it's the truth and we have to really keep our heads about us and look a little deeper and so I really liked that episode.
And then you were on Episode 487, mitochondrial self-healing superfoods, which we dove deep into chlorella and spirulina, understanding how they can help us not only detoxify, not only nutrify, but also help the mitochondria be healthier. And of course, when you get into understanding the body's ability to heal itself, you learn that- every disease has one thing in common besides inflammation. Go a bit deeper than that. On a cellular level, every disease becomes a mitochondrial disease. And if your mitochondria isn't working, you're dead.
Catharine Arnston (02:11.923)
Yes, exactly. And by the way, 90 percent of that inflammation is in the mitochondria. So their mitochondria and inflammation are inseparable. If you understand mitochondria, you will understand how to maintain, protect and regain your health. It's that simple.
Ashley James (02:28.947)
And you love digging into research and then, bringing it back to us and giving it to us in a way that we can, we can take your thousands of hours of diving in through the years. And then you condense it and give us, the bullet points we need to know so that we can walk out into our life with this information to best help ourselves be healthy, as healthy as possible. This is episode 511. Can you believe it? I know, is that cool?
Catharine Arnston (03:03.016)
Oh my god, thank you, I'm so honored.
Ashley James (03:06.222)
I think I'm handing you your frequent flyer pin right now. And today we're gonna get into something you've been researching for a long time and seeing all the studies. And of course you see the results in those who regularly eat chlorella and spirulina. Now of course in past episodes there's really very few companies where you're gonna get clean, very, very clean chlorella and spirulina from.
My favorite being your company, energybits.com. Listeners can use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health when they go to energybits.com and buy Catharine Arnston's amazing chlorella and spirulina. You can chew it, you can just swallow it, or you can take a handful and throw it in your smoothie. There's all kinds of ways you can incorporate it. What I really appreciate about your chlorella and spirulina is you go above and beyond to make sure that they're very, very clean.
So many companies out there have to have the warning on the back of the label proposition. I always forget the number. Proposition, what?
Catharine Arnston (04:04.467)
I think it's 65 or 64.
Ashley James (04:05.873)
Yes, proposition something. California says that this contain something that can cause cancer and all these things. And that's because there's heavy metals in a lot of those other algae companies because of their poor practices and you have outstanding practices.
So of course that means it does cost more because you go above and beyond in testing and in the farming practice to this crop to make sure that it is pure. So we talked a lot about that in our past episode. So we're not gonna get into that too much in this episode because I really wanna spend a lot of time diving into what you're here to talk about today which is maximizing brain health, preventing cancer, and then of course, by doing those things, you're actually also supporting amazing cardiovascular health.
But I really wanna make sure listeners know to go to energybits.com, use coupon code LTH to get the listener discount. Thank you for that, by the way. Thank you for giving us the discount. I can't tell you how many times my family has sat around in the evening to watch something on TV. We like learning stuff. Well, my husband does not wanna watch fake TV. He really likes documentaries.
So we've found documentaries as a family we can watch with our eight year old and we'll sit around and we will pass the bag of EnergyBits around and we'll eat it instead of popcorn.
Catharine Arnston (05:25.882)
You're making me so happy.
Ashley James (05:28.418)
It is amazingly delicious. Of course, it is a fantastic to add to your trail mix or make your own trail mix, but I'll sit there and pop them like candy and they have that wonderful crunch and that wonderful saltiness. And it's not overly salty, but it is for me better than popcorn.
Catharine Arnston (05:45.624)
Yeah, and I actually put sea salt on my chlorella and sometimes add pistachio nuts and OMG, it is my favorite food. I have them for lunch, snacks, dinner. When you add the sea salt, it's particularly the chlorella. Although spirulina tastes a little bit better, but definitely the chlorella. It's a game changer and then you're eating it, so you know you're eating food. And when we dig into the subject matter of today, I'll start by just giving a quick thumbnail overview of the different two algae, because they are quite different. They do different things in different parts of your body, and you take them at different times of the day for maximum and optimal benefits. And they work, as you said, to protect your brain health, protect you against cancer, and protect you against heart disease. And those are the three biggies in our world today. And the brain health is more than Alzheimer's. It's anxiety, it's depression, and we'll talk about some of the science that's coming out that reinforces why spirulina in particular is amazing for brain health.
Ashley James (06:54.772)
Love it. Now in becoming a health coach, I took a year long program through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
Catharine Arnston (07:04.294)
Me too!
Ashley James (09:05.370)
Oh really? You went to IIN?
Catharine Arnston (07:07.222)
Yeah, but I went there the last second last year they were live classes. So yeah, I graduated in 2009.
Ashley James (07:13.498)
Oh my gosh. I love that. I, oh, I'm not sure if you had Dr. Daniel Amon as one of the teachers. Did you happen to have him? Okay.
Catharine Arnston (07:23.041)
I don't know if I did or not, but we're hoping I have someone who's setting up a meeting with me because we want to work with him.
Ashley James (07:29.977)
I want you to work with him. So I'll let the listeners know in on it. So I went to IIN when it was not live, it's all prerecorded. And it was kind of like every week, kind of like watching these 45 minute long Ted talks. You know how you watch a Ted talk and you wish it was 45 minutes long, cause it was so good? Well, that's what it was like that every single week. And there was audios and there was written stuff. And it's done in a way that even busy career moms or working women or men, time should not be an issue because you can break it down and do it 20 minutes a day kind of thing. And I absolutely love that it could fit into my busy schedule. And Dr. Daniel Amos, that week we were studying all of his work and I was blown away because he figured out after doing thousands and thousands of brain scans and then using more holistic based medicine, he was able to take people who had Swiss cheese brain, basically the scans would show that there was pockets in the brain looking like Swiss cheese that had diminished blood flow or almost like no blood flow over time, those areas were overly toxic because the blood flow can't come in, it can't cleanse the glymph, can't drain out and people's brains were just becoming Swiss cheese and eventually it was like dementia, right? But he could detect dementia 30 years before it ever took place or more. And what he figured out the number one thing to preventing and reversing. He was able to take people with Swiss cheese brain, put them on an amazing nutrition program and exercise, everything to do with helping cardiovascular health, helping the vasculature, helping blood flow. And he was able to reverse the Swiss cheese brain. So five, 10 years later, they actually anti-aged the brain, right? The brain now is younger, healthier. And that's where you live. Like, this is our house. Our body's our house. So this is where we live. And what I love, the big aha moment, is that everything you do to support your brain also supports your heart and vice versa.
So today, and yeah, exactly, right? We often think of the body as broken into these parts
that aren't affecting each other because that's how allopathic medicine works. You go to the liver specialist, you go to the stomach specialist, you go to the eye specialist, and no one talks to each other. And this is the really annoying part of Western medicine is that we're all broken down into parts when the body really should be treated as a whole. And that's where holistic medicine comes in. So we're looking at the body as a whole, but Dr. Daniel Amon was able to see, Oh wow! In focusing on helping brain health, we actually then corrected a bunch of other stuff too. So that's why I'm very excited for you to dive into brain health today. And I really hope you get to work with Daniel Amon because I'm a big fan of his work and I'm excited to hear about that.
Catharine Arnston (10:37.185)
Yes, yes, me too. Yes, and when he sees what spirulina and chlorella do for the brain, I think he'll flip out because my specialty is this area of algae nutrition and correlating all the nutrients that are uniquely found in algae, not available in any other foods, if it comes from a good source. And you're right, it's not just being the clean source, it's the production process, because, as I get into this in a bit deeper, growing Algae isn't like growing tomatoes or broccoli or carrots, it's more like wine, and when you grow and make wine, it's affected by the angle of the sun, but most particularly by the production process. And so, the thing that distinguishes us from pretty much everybody else is the production process. We do it so carefully that we retain all these nutrients that are other companies are killing because they dry their algae with high heat. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So let's talk about that brain. But before we get to that, I'm just going to give you a thumbnail on the two algae in case you haven't heard the other episodes to understand that there are different types of algae and they do different things. So the big broad sweep is that there's something called macroalgae and there is microalgae. We're going to be talking about microalgae today but let me tell you what macroalgae is. It's that big stringy stuff that washes up on shore also known as seaweed because it's found in the sea and it's still good for you because it has lots of fiber and iodine, because the iodine comes from the ocean but there's virtually no nutrition so high fiber high iodine both of which are good for you.
Well, I don't know if you don't have a hypo thyroid condition. Microalgae is the complete opposite. It has either virtually no fiber or no fiber. I'll give you the distinction in a minute, but it has the highest concentration of nutrition in the world. This is because it's called microalgae because it's microscopic in size. You can get a million of these microalgae on the head of a pin.
Now it has so many nutrients so that when you consolidate them into these little tiny tablets it's there's nothing in the world with more nutrition than these tablets. One tablet has the same nutrition as an entire plate of vegetables and microalgae compared to macroalgae is everywhere. Microalgae is in the ocean but it's also in the lakes, the rivers, the streams, your swimming pool, the soil and there's a few strains of macroalgae, the stringy stuff.
But there are tens of thousands of strains of microalgae. And the two that are harvested as food crops. So not from the ocean. Yes, there is microalgae in the ocean, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about spirulina and chlorella, which are the two microalgae that are harvested in fresh water. It's called hydroponic. And lots of vegetables are grown this way.
So number one, you need to understand that algae, microalgae, which we're talking about today, is a food crop. It is not a supplement. Supplements are made from extracts and then they're mashed up with heat in factories. We're talking about a dried type of vegetable grown in fresh water, so not from the ocean, so no toxins. And we do not use high heat to dry our algae and we do not add anything to it. So our algae tablets are whole food, they're raw, vegan, unprocessed, highly concentrated with nutrition, but they do completely different things. Spirulina and chlorella are like night and day, or chalk and cheese. Some of you maybe have family members and you're quite different from them. So is algae. The spirulina, which we'll talk about next, is completely different from chlorella. And the things that they do, it does in your body, are also very different.
So spirulina is known as having the highest protein in the world, it's three times the amount of protein, and very high B vitamins. By the way, it has 18 of the 20 aminos, including the nine that your body can't make, so it's a complete protein. And it gives you energy because of the B vitamins converting the protein, the aminos, because they're all individual aminos, into glucose for your body. And it also is a vasodilator, so it opens up your blood vessels and has lots of iron, which carries oxygen to your blood. So that's why we call it our spirulina, Energybits, because it gives you energy in the moment. But as you'll find as we get into the deeper dive on brain health and also the heart health, it has nutrients in it that protect and stimulate your mitochondria. Now your mitochondria are what generate cellular energy, which is called ATP. So you get energy in the moment when you have spirulina which we call Energybits. We also have another brand called BeautyBits. They're exactly the same, just packaged differently. But you also, because of the nutrients, we'll talk about in a minute, get additional long-term cellular energy. Now cellular energy is necessary, it's called ATP, for everything that you do. It's not just energy that you need to run to the grocery store or go do a workout. This is cellular energy that helps you breathe, that helps you think, it moves your lymphatic system, it helps your heart, it's what drives your heart to beat, your cells to replicate, or your autophagy, which is cellular death to occur. It generates everything, all energy for everything that you do. When you have cellular energy, you are alive. When you don't have cellular energy, that's when problems start surfacing.
That's when you get indigestion. That's when you have brain fog. That's when you start not being able to have a strong immune system. That's when you can't fight off cancer cells. I tell people having cellular energy is like money. You know, when you have more money, you can do more things and you have more choices. Cellular energy is exactly same thing. When you have more ATP, you can do more things and you have more choices. So everything that you do now that you know about this is you should be protecting your mitochondria so they can generate more cellular energy because that cellular energy is what helps you sleep, it helps you fight disease, it helps you recover from any kind of illness, it helps every part of your body, every cell in your body and spirulina as you're going to find out has a couple of nutrients that are particularly powerful and critical to generating cellular energy and protecting your mitochondria.
So you get that long-term energy from spirulina that is very unique and these nutrients aren't found anywhere else. Spirulina also satisfies your hunger, and it has zero carbs. We work with ketogenic physicians, fasting physicians, because it does not interfere with your fast, and yet it gives you all the energy, mental and physical, and satisfies your hunger without interfering with your fast, without decreasing your ketones or increasing your glucose. So it's a perfect food for any time of the day You could snap have some for the morning have some in the afternoon In fact, that's generally when we recommend people to have the spirulina in the morning because you're hungry and tired when you get up or in the afternoon when you get a slump or before a workout because that's when you need the nourishment for your brain and for your body.
By the way, spirulina is called a blue-green algae because it has two pigments in it. Chlorella, which we'll talk about in a minute, only has one. Now one pigment that's in spirulina you'll know about. It's chlorophyll and that's what makes plants green. And there is chlorophyll in spirulina. But the other pigment that you've probably never heard of before, it's the blue pigment and it's called Phycocyanin and I'm going to spell it for you because I encourage you to google this particularly because we're going to talk about how Phycocyanin has been proven to kill cancer cells and Phycocyanin does not exist anywhere else in the universe except in spirulina and it can only be in spirulina that has not been dried with high heat which is us or raw spirulina. So let me spell Phycocyanin for you, it's P-H-Y-C-O-C-Y-A-N-I-N. And when we get to our discussion on cancer, you can Google phycocyanin and cancer treatments and you'll see all the articles that have been in the PubMed or the National Institute of Health for a very long time. But of course, who's gonna tell you about these things, right? Well, that's what we're here for, right, Ashley? We're opening the Pandora's box to tell you things that nobody else will. So spirulina, because it has this blue pigment that has unique properties, some of which increase energy, some of which kill cancer cells, but all of which protect your mitochondria, it's pretty powerful. But chlorella is a green algae. It only has one pigment, that's chlorophyll, and indeed it has the highest amount of chlorophyll in the world. It has 25 times more chlorophyll than even liquid chlorophyll. And it also has 500 times more chlorophyll than something like arugula or a thousand times more chlorophyll than Chinese greens. There is nothing in the world with more chlorophyll than chlorella algae, which is why it's called chlorella, because of the chlorophyll. And what's so important about chlorophyll? Well, it heals your cell walls, it builds your blood, it has the same chemical composition in fact as your hemoglobin. So that's very important. It's also very cleansing. Chlorella also does have fiber. Oh, I forgot to mention spirulina has zero fiber. The reason why this is important is because this is one of the reasons why you get energy from it because there is nothing for your body to break down. There's no cellulose wall. And this is why it gets into your bloodstream so quickly and the nutrients can be directed instantly to your mitochondria or wherever they need to go.
Chlorella has the hardest cell wall in the plant kingdom so it does take about an hour and a half to be fully absorbed but the amazing thing about that hard cell wall is that it attaches to toxins and heavy metals and when we get to brain health we'll talk about this a bit more but it pulls out any kind of heavy metals from all your cells, all your organs.
And for that reason, we generally recommend chlorella before bed or after a workout. Because when you sleep, that's when your body goes through a detox repair cycle. So if you take chlorella before you go to bed, you'll be able to have a more effective detox and remove heavy metals. Although I will put the caveat that you can have either spirulina or chlorella at any time of the day, with each other, separate, with food, without food, with water, it doesn't matter. You can have them as often as you want and as much as you want because again they are food. We generally recommend 10 tablets of each one, spirulina in the morning and 10 chloral at night. But if you have any health condition, you really should be taking 30 of each until you get a clear diagnosis. And I have way more than that and have for the 13 years that I've been using it.
So chlorella is a detoxing algae because of that hard cell wall, a cleansing algae because of the chlorophyll, and also it builds your immune system. Your immune system is primarily in your gut, and the combination of the chlorophyll, the hard cell wall which has fiber which feeds the gut biome and the bacteria down there, and also chlorella has all the nutrients that are necessary for a strong immune system.
So it's very much a wellness algae as opposed to spirulina, which is an energizing and nourishing algae. So we call our chlorella RecoveryBits because it helps you recover your health or recover from your day, recover from toxins. It even pulls out alcohol and lactic acid. So you could take it after drinking any wine or anything or after sports to get rid of lactic acid. So it's very much a cleansing algae as opposed to the nourishing spirulina. And I came up with this kind of fun analogy to help people remember the different types of algae and what they do differently and when to take them. Because I give a lot of lectures at conferences in fancy hotels. And it dawned on me that spirulina, because it's so nourishing to your body and to your brain, is sort of like room service.
It gives you everything you need for the day. And then chlorella, because it's so cleansing and detoxing and gets rid of all the junk in your trunk, it's like housekeeping. Housekeeping comes in and takes all this stuff out that you don't need. So think of spirulina as room service and chlorella as housekeeping. Another simple way to think about it, and we'll get to this in a few minutes, because spirulina is so nourishing to the mitochondria and so healing to the mitochondria and because the highest concentration of mitochondria are found in the cells in your brain you have two million mitochondria per cell in your brain two million think about that the next highest is actually women's eggs after that it's your heart and then your regular cells have maybe anywhere from a hundred to a thousand mitochondria per cell, but the highest concentration of mitochondria are where the greatest energy needs are, and that's your brain. Your brain is a workhorse for energy. So think of spirulina as brain food. You know, it occurred to me, you know, a lot of people eat fatty fish like salmon, and they know it as brain food. Well, part of the benefit of that is because these deep cold water fish have a lot of omega-3 in them. And I tell people, well, where do you think the fish get the omega-3 from? Yes, they get it from algae. So here's spirulina, I forgot to mention, has high essential fatty acids, including omega-3. So think of spirulina as brain food, just like you do with salmon or some of these other cold water fish.
Ashley James (25:56.604)
Cut out the middleman. The salmon, the salmon's the middleman. Just go eat with the salmon, with this, the fish eat the algae, the salmon eat the algae or the salmon eat other fish. But it all came from the algae to begin with.
Catharine Arnston (26:11.146)
Correct, correct. And then think of chlorella as healing your gut because that's where your immune system is. That's where your microbiome is. And chlorella heals the gut and it's been used for IBS and Crohn's disease for decades because of the chlorophyll, the hard cell wall that attaches the toxins, the fiber that feeds the gut biome.
So Spirulina is brain food, chlorella is gut food. And let's not forget that there's a highway between the two of them called the vagus nerve that connects the brain to the gut. And this is where the real magic happens because as you mentioned earlier, as you heal your brain you are going to be healing other parts of your body but most particularly your gut. And on the other hand, as you heal your gut, then you are also going to be healing your brain because of the two-way communication that occurs between the two of them. And think about it, if you know, that whole concept of a gut feeling, it's real. Your gut is your second brain. And on the other hand, if you are eating in a rush or standing up and you're not focused on your meal, very often you get indigestion and that's because your brain is so distracted that your body can't focus on digestion and the reality is it's not just eating nutritious food that's going to benefit you it's not just the nutrition it's the absorption. What are you absorbing? And if your gut lining and your gut biome are not functioning or they're overrun by candida and all the bad bacteria, you're not going to be able to absorb the nutrients very well and that will affect not only your gut but also your brain. And that's the other reason why particularly I like both of the algae because they're very bioavailable. The nutrients are all there ready for absorption. So anyways, that's the two differences. Spirulina nourishing and very energizing both in the moment at the mitochondria level and Chlorella is very cleansing and detoxing. it's very much a recovery algae that you would take any time of day, but definitely at night, whereas Spirulina is more of a daytime algae.
Ashley James (28:37.119)
And that was probably the best breakdown I've ever heard you do. You were great the first episode, but it's like, you have now like three PhDs into algae.
Catharine Arnston (28:56.599)
Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, in fact, it's funny that you mentioned that because I realized, oh my God, I mean, 13 years I've been studying algae nutrition and how it interacts with the body for optimal health. And I thought, maybe I should do a PhD. So I've actually found a university, there's a lot of steps to go through, but I'll get credit for some of my previous degrees. I do have a master's and I would have to write a test, but I think I'm going to get a PhD from them. So please, please. I mean, yes, exactly. Yes. That's what I want. Dr. Arnston.
Ashley James (29:26.070)
I am so excited for you. I mean, yes, yes. What, come back on the show and tell us about that. I love it. I want to go back because you, you laid down so much amazing information. There's one thing you said that I think for people who didn't hear the previous episodes would have written it off as you being just over exaggerating how great it is. So these are like little chewable tablets, they're the size of aspirins. And when our son was about three years old, I introduced him to EnergyBits and he would chew them because they temporarily turn your tongue either blue green or green, depending on which one we're eating, chlorella or spirulina. And we would play a game and we called them green crackers because they're crunchy but they look like little pills, right? But they're chewable tablets essentially, and you don't have to chew them if you don't want, you can just swallow them like pills.
Catherine Arnston (30:27.620)
Yeah, and most people do swallow the spirulina because it's very earthy and very chewy. Yeah.
Ashley James (30:32.087)
I love, I love the flavor. So the first time you put it in your mouth, you're like, ooh, because you didn't know what to expect. But then if you keep eating it, your body starts to go, wow, I really like this. And then like five minutes into eating it, you're like, mm, this is actually really good. And you start tasting all these flavors. So my son who didn't like it at first, but then we played a game where we stuck our tongues out at each other and he got excited. It's like, oh, your tongue is green. I want my tongue to be green.
Well, we both called it green crackers and he'd ask for them. And now, like I said, he's eight and we'll sit there watching TV and we'll pass the bag around and we'll be chewing them and sticking our tongues out still. And it's great, it's a lot of fun. But you said that one of these chewable tablets, right? Which is very small, size of an aspirin, is the equivalent of a plate of vegetables. And that's something that we discussed in the last time you came on the show, Episode 487, because this is actually research from NASA. Can you just elaborate a bit because again, that point seems too good to be true.
Catharine Arnston (31:30.702)
I know, I know. And just on that note, when I started this as this company, I wasn't planning on starting a company. I just wanted to help my sister, younger sister, who had breast cancer and her oncologist told her to change her diet to an alkaline diet because it would help with her healing. And I was doing international business, nothing to do with nutrition, but I just jumped in and helped her and found out and led me to algae, which is the most alkaline food in the world.
And it turns out, it's been endorsed by the United Nations for 49 years as the answer to world hunger because, drum roll, it has the highest protein in the world, has three times the amount of protein at stake, there's tens of thousands of studies that confirm all this. So whatever I'm telling you today, I want everyone to know, everything I say is documented in the National Institute of Health and in medical libraries all around the world, there's almost a hundred thousand of them.
But we also found this great quote from NASA who's been using algae for the astronauts again for almost 50 years. And the quote from NASA, and I can give you the paper with it if you want it, says one gram of algae has the same nutrition as a thousand grams of fruits or vegetables. One to a thousand, that's a big number. So I took that calculation, that's about
30 or 40 grocery carts of vegetables, just to give you a visual. And so I was trying to communicate this to people so they could understand the concentration. And I did the math, and we sell bags of algae tablets, and I did the math based on the weight of our bags, which have a thousand tablets, and found out one bag of our algae tablets has the same nutrition as 551 pounds of vegetables.
That's probably 50 or 60 or maybe 100 grocery carts of vegetables. And our bags are $120 and with your discount, it's about $100, but that's, I would have been $1,600 worth of vegetables. And then I took it a little further that, well, I still need to get it to a level that people could really understand. Cause so it worked out to about three quarters of a pound of vegetables per tablet, which is basically a big plate of vegetables. It's three quarters of red peppers, green peppers, tomatoes, greens.
Ashley James (33:52.181)
It's about two cups. If you think it's just maybe depending on the vegetable. It's about two cups and that's a larger serving than most people will take a vegetable. So that's a big bowl of vegetables.
Catharine Arnston (34:03.378)
Right. Yes. So the CDC says 97% of Americans do not get their daily requirement of fiber and vegetables. And after I graduated from IIN, I taught plant-based nutrition at corporations and hospitals for free, by the way, trying to get people to eat more vegetables because I had seen all the science about the importance of the alkalinity, the phytonutrients, blah blah. And everyone came up to me and they said, you know, look at my mother's been trying to get me to eat more vegetables, but they're heavy to carry home from the grocery store. They go bad quickly. They take a long time to clean. They take a long time to cook. My husband won't eat them. My kids won't eat them. I throw out half of them. So I thought, okay, I have seen the science, I've read for years the science of the importance of vegetables. If I can't get people to eat vegetables, and what mother doesn't struggle with this, I thought I have to find a way to get the nutrition of vegetables into people in a way that is effortless. And I didn't know what I was going to find, but I just re-examined everything I had found for my sister, and that's what led me truly to algae, because it comes in these little tablets. This is how they use it in Asia. They have been growing it in Asia for 60 years. They take it every day. Some of them it's in powder, but the Japanese don't leave their house without chlorella every day. And by the way, I'd like to point out they have the best longevity, lowest cancer rates, lowest obesity rates, and great skin and hair. And I know it's not all the algae, but it certainly contributes to it. And they know about the science of algae, but the trouble is here in North America, nobody knows about the science of algae. They know it's a superfood. Actually some people don't even know that spirulina is an algae. And they put it in their smoothies because it's supposed to be good for them. But they're not really sure why. So I spent 13 years discovering the why. And whoever's listening, you aren't alone in the fact that you don't know anything of what I'm about to tell you today. But that's because no one's explained it to you until I did and it's not grown here. So you don't ride your bicycle to school and go buy an algae farm but they do in Asia. You don't drive to work and go buy an algae farm but they do in Asia. So it's just never been explained and it's not grown here although I do plan to grow it in Florida.
Ashley James (36:38.864)
I would love that. I can't wait for you to grow it here. You know, the other day I was talking to one of my clients and I was getting her list of supplements and things she was taking and she said, oh, I'm taking chlorella and spirulina, but I'm not buying EnergyBits anymore because they're too expensive. I said, okay, hold on, stop. What are you eating? Which brand? I want you to go get the bag. I need you to look on it, see if that proposition such and such is on that bag because the 99% of all the brands out there that sell chlorella and spirulina, the chlorella has lead in it. And the spirulina is like highly heated. It's like flash heated. So it's dead. You're missing out. I like, let's say someone wanted to save $40. So they bought a $60 bag. And she said, oh, wait, the bag that she bought, cause she was saving, $20, $30. She goes, and it tastes horrible. It tastes and smells fishy. I'm like, well, okay.
Energybits is the only company I have found that is pure, that is highly nutritious because at every step of the way from growing it to processing it to shipping it here, every step of the way there's testing and there's things in place to make sure that it is the optimal quality and it preserves the optimal quality of the nutrition. And you can smell it and taste it because the Energybits does not taste like of rotten fish, and so many other companies do. And then I said, you don't ever, ever wanna eat chlorella from any company unless you confirm, because there's only a handful, and EnergyBits being one of them that does not have lead added to it because of the process of cracking the chlorella. And those are the cheaper brands. So if you find it cheaper, it's because they did, they cut corners, which hurt you, or there's no nutrition in it.
Now, with the supplement industry, and some people think this is a supplement, it's a crop, like you said, with food and supplements, it's buyer beware. And it's not a regulated industry like drugs are a regulated industry. We don't really want supplements to be regulated because then a lot of really good companies would go out of business and Big Pharma would be the ones running the show. We don't want that. But at the same time, it is buyer beware.
And these companies that make it cheaper, it's cheaper for a reason because they can put fillers in, because they can do processes that either harm the algae or harm you. And so really you just wasted, you think you save money by buying a $60 bag instead of a $100 bag, you actually just wasted $60 and you possibly harmed yourself in the process. So it is worth spending and like you said, get the discount, use the coupon code LTH. And that bag will last you for a month and that is giving you one tablet as a whole bowl of vegetables worth of the nutrition. And you can make it last longer than a month, like you said, eat 10 a day. I like 30 a day because I'm more focused on using it to detoxify. But for people who are just wanting to stay on top of nutrition, between five and 10 tablets a day, they could just do that. They could hand their kids. Sometimes I just hand my son three to five of the tablets, here, just chew this or swallow. And I know that he just got bowls and bowls of nutrition like comparative to fruits and vegetables. I'm still gonna feed him fruits and vegetables, but there are days I don't get fruits and vegetables into this kid. I'm just gonna hand him three to five chlorella and spirulina and feel good about it.
Catharine Arnston (40:18.589)
Yeah, right, right, and even for adults who don't have children, when you're traveling, you're stuck in traffic in between meetings, you don't have time to eat, you go to any of those convenience stores, it's just carbs, sugar, and carbs, carbs. And so this way I call spirulina chlorella, your not only your nutritional insurance, but your health insurance. And, and let's just, I just want to circle back to that comment about the young lady who didn't want to who'd stop buying ours because of the higher price. So it's like buying a car. If you don't look under the hood, maybe there's a car that's $1,000 cheaper than the other one. And you think, oh wow, I'm getting such a deal. But if you don't lift the hood, maybe there's no engine in there, right? It's just from the outside, because what do you know? They look the same, but you gotta lift the hood to find out the deeper story.
Same with algae. So here's the lift the hood thing, and we'll get into this hopefully in a few minutes. I'm gonna do a deep dive on two nutrients that are found in spirulina that are damaged, that are killed by high heat. And all the other algae companies use high heat to dry their algae because they are cheaper and because they're less expensive algae, so they need to sell more to make money. So to get to market quickly, they use high heat.
But they kill these two important nutrients. And what do these two important nutrients do? Well, one of them is superoxidismutase, which protects you from heart disease. And the other one is the pigment that I already mentioned, the blue one called phycocyanin, that kills cancer cells. Cancer and heart disease represent 75% of all deaths. And by the way, these two nutrients also prevent brain disorders, anxiety, Alzheimer's, any kind of dementia.
So, this lady is saving $20 and not getting the benefits of protecting herself from heart disease, cancer or dementia. I would say everyone here, everyone in the world deserves to be protected from heart disease, cancer and dementia. And when you take 10 tablets a day of spirulina, same thing for chlorella, 10 tablets a day, you know what that works out to? A dollar a day. She is depriving herself of protection from cancer, heart disease, and dementia because of a dollar a day.
Ashley James (42:52.990)
Well, I don't blame her. She didn't know this information and a lot of listeners, but it's like, this is where we have to go, we're investing in our health. Yeah, educate, we're investing in our health and it is worth spending a bit more for the highest quality product on the market. And exactly.
Catharine Arnston (43:10.045)
Yes. But someone has to tell you why you want the higher priced algae. It's just everything we do is just more expensive. I've been on 275 podcasts. I've been on 30 summits. I write all the scientific papers. I do all the research. I do all of the writing. Every single weekend, I'm working on more material to help people understand the science because whether you're buying an expensive handbag or you're buying algae, you want to know what is it that makes it better. And nobody else is telling you. Nobody else is explaining how your body works and why the needs the cellular level are perfectly matched by the nutrients found in raw spirulina or chlorella. Again, it can't be heated or you lose all those benefits. This is the key that unlocks the door to great health. That is, in a nutshell, is what good spirulina and good chlorella, i.e. spirulina chlorella, not heated, not dried with heat. They are the key that unlocks perfect health. That's what I've decided.
But you need to know what, how does that work? Like what exactly is it doing? So I'd like to unpack that for you today.
Ashley James (44:31.733)
Yeah, let's do it. I have had several guests come on and do whole interviews on superoxide dismutase and its benefits and how we need more of it and it is crucial for life and crucial to avoid disease, like an amazing nutrient for the body. And the fact that we get it through eating EnergyBits or go to energybits.com getting your stuff, because we know that your stuff isn't heated. So it's not destroyed because it's raw algae. And then of course the Phycocyanin.
Catharine Arnston (45:13.384)
P-H-Y-C-O-C-Y-A-N-I-N. So, well, let me talk about both of those because we'll do them separately so we can do this two ways. We'll talk about those two nutrients and I'll address the three major chronic diseases, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and cancer, and address how these two nutrients that aren't found anywhere else in the world can protect you and also get you back to health and they're essential for longevity. And then we'll flip.
Ashley James (45:52.519)
Before you do that, and I want you to do that, can you tell us, like, is this something that's found in trace amounts? Is this something that is in high concentration? When you address the individual ones, can you give us an idea of how much of the superoxide dismutase, for example, is found in your algae?
Catharine Arnston (46:14.723)
It has the highest concentration in the entire universe. I don't have the slide in front of me, but there is a little bit of superoxide dismutase in cabbage or broccoli. I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but if spirulina was 100, cabbage or broccoli would be 0.00000000001 percent. There is nothing, and we do lab tests that give us the concentration of super oxygen dismutase. I know I'm stumbling as well. It's also called SOD. It's a little easier to say that way. So there is nothing in the world with more of it. And chlorella has quite a bit of it as well, but half of what spirulina has. So spirulina is the number one algae for the mitochondria. And chlorella is the number one algae for your immune system. So I can dig into that a little bit deeper. So, well, since we're on superoxide dismutase, or SOD, let's address it first of all. So as I mentioned, it's virtually non-existent from any other food in the world. It's certainly not in any amounts that would have any kind of medicinal benefits. I mean, 0.000001 percent is nothing that's going to move my needle. And even if you did find some supplements with it, they get damaged, it gets damaged in the stomach through the digestion. And here's the other benefit of spirulina. It does not have a cellulose wall. So it gets absorbed almost instantly. So it's 99% bioavailable. So all of the nutrients, including the superoxide dismutase get absorbed and directed to the mitochondria so it can be put to use. If you chew it, as I know Ashley, you do, you get it within seconds because it goes sublingually through the mouth membranes. And if you swallow it, oh, it's maybe 10 or 15 minutes before it's completely absorbed into your cells. So there's nothing that's faster than spirulina for that reason.
So, what is superoxide dismutase? One other thing I want to tell you about superoxide dismutase, the good news is your body makes it from the moment you are born, but it stops making it after the age of 30. And you're going to find this the same thing happens. After the age of 30, your body stops making melatonin, it stops making glutathione, because up until recently, we died at age 30. We have been on the earth, mankind, for 2 million years.
And up until about 125 years ago, maybe 50 years ago, we died at 30. So biologically and evolutionarily, if that's a word, our bodies think we're dying at 30. So it shuts down some of these protective measures like superoxide dismutase, which, drum roll, you're going to find out right now, is one of the very few antioxidants that can get into the inner membrane of the mitochondria, it's like an NICE unit in there, to stop free radical damage. Now, because when your mitochondria are damaged by these free radicals, they die, they mutate, and that's when your health starts to go astray. This is when chronic disease hits. This is when brain fog hits. This is when everything just slides in a downward spiral. And it's no surprise to me that most of the diagnoses of heart disease, cancer, occur after the age of 40, because that's when your body has pretty much shut down its ability to create superoxide dismutase, which is one of the few antioxidants, like I said, that can get into that inner membrane and stop free radical damage. You can eat a room full of blueberries and not a drop of antioxidants will get into that inner membrane. Your mitochondria are your only cell in your body that have two membranes. All of your other cells have what's called a lipid membrane, which basically is a fancy word for saying fats. And your mitochondria have that one too. But they have a second membrane, and I'll tell you where that second membrane came from later on, that is impenetrable by drugs. Drugs can't get in there. Almost no antioxidants can get in there. But virtually all the nutrients found in algae like superoxide dismutase, and we'll talk about some of the other ones in a minute, like chlorophyll and glutathione can get into that inner membrane.
So what's so important about that? Well, we talked about earlier about ATP being cellular energy and you need ATP to do anything. Thinking, sleeping, walking, talking, digesting, immune health, absolutely everything. But the downside of production of ATP, the byproduct of ATP, guess what?
It's free radicals. Nobody tells you about that. And the most damaging one is called superoxide. This superoxide is a byproduct. It's a free radical produced, I think it's only in the mitochondria, as a byproduct of this ATP. And I read that superoxide is the most damaging free radical. So I was curious, well, what makes it so damaging?
So I dug around in all the different papers and I found out why. So those of you who aren't familiar with a free radical, it's a molecule that has an unpaired electron. The mother nature likes balance. And so if there's an unpaired electron circulating around the atom, it will go and snatch an electron from the neighboring molecule and so to create harmony. But then that leaves a molecule with one unpaired electron so that it steals one from the next molecule and on and on it goes so it leaves this trail of damaged tissue, damaged cells, wherever it goes. And when you have damaged cells then they don't function properly. So superoxide is so the reason why it's so damaging is it has three unpaired electrons. So it is three times as damaging as any other free radical found. And I believe that it's only generated in the mitochondria. So this thing called superoxide dismutase, the word dismutase means it reduces something. It demutes, it's like a dimmer on a light. So think about it's superoxide dismutase. It dims this superoxide. Basically, what it does is it turns that free radical into harmless water.
Ta-da! Mitochondria is hydrated. It's like having the fireman in there with a fire hose. Just puts out the fire caused by all these free radicals that are a byproduct of ATP. Because the place where the ATP is produced, which is also the place where the free radicals are, are exactly where the mitochondria's DNA are located. They are front row and center.
And if you've ever sat near a bonfire or got too close to a fireplace and sparks would fly and you might get burned, that's what's happening to your mitochondria DNA every single nanosecond. They are exactly where the ATP is produced, which is exactly where the free radicals are produced. And so they are always being burned. That's why you need the superoxide dismutase, which is like having a fireman with a hose to put it out and your body makes it for you but only until the age of 30. Right? And then after the age of 30 it makes less and less so by the time you're 40 you do not have any more firemen in there putting out the fire. And this is why people get chronic disease because their mitochondria are no longer being protected by these free radicals as they were until they were 30 or 40 and there's no food source for it. Nothing. Right? Crazy. So now spirulina comes along, but here's the trick, superoxide dismutase is an enzyme. It's an antioxidant but it's also an enzyme. And if you know anything about nutrition you know that heat kills enzymes. That's why a lot of people eat raw food because they want all the all the enzymes and all the other algae companies use high heat to dry their algae because they're lower priced to get to the market quickly. We don't use high heat. So all of our enzymes, including superoxide dismutase, are alive and well. So they can go in there into your mitochondria and put out that fire caused by the free radicals, which are a byproduct of the ATP. Pretty sweet, right?
Ashley James (55:42.560)
Oh my gosh, totally blows my mind. And I loved how you explained free radicals. I went to a naturopath with my mom when I was a kid and he would write these really cool news articles. And of course there was no email back in the eighties, right? So he would physically print it out and mail it to us, and we would read and it was like almost digesting a bunch of different journals, right? He would take all this information, but from the naturopath standpoint. And you know who it was? My naturopath when I was six years old was Dr. D'Adamo, the man who invented the eat right for your blood type diet. He was amazing. And he totally turned my life around. That's part of my health story that I was sick as a kid. And then when I was six, I went to him and he looked in my eyes, took my blood, looked at my tongue, looked at my ears, you know, did the whole naturopathic rundown. And he told us to stop eating milk, yeast, wheat and sugar. And overnight our kitchen transformed and we ate really clean and we took his supplements and I did not get sick once from the age of six to the age of thirteen when I rebelled and started eating all the junk food because I was a teenager. And I quickly learned that you can turn health on and off and you can turn diseases on and off and here I am.
But what was really interesting is I have a distinct memory and I was probably about seven, maybe eight. I was in my mom's bed and we were reading through the articles that he wrote, the newsletter, and I loved it. When you look at kids, you can tell what they're gonna be interested in their whole life. And I was fascinated by his articles. Can you imagine a seven or eight year old being like, I want to read more about antioxidants, right?
Catharine Arnston (57:37.413)
Wow. Everybody else is reading Nancy Drew or comic books and there you are reading naturopathic newsletters. I love that.
Ashley James (57:42.289)
I know, I know. And I was super fascinated but he described free radicals as a bullet on the microscopic level. A bullet bouncing through your body, piercing different cells and breaking open cells basically, but on an electron level. And it was like bullets ricocheting inside you. And then he talked about how the foods that we can eat can either reduce that damage or can increase anytime you eat fried food, you are essentially swallowing loaded guns, shooting bullets throughout your body, like breaking apart cell walls because the free radical damage from fried foods, right? Same with overcooked red meat has the same effect. There's a bunch of foods out there that we eat as Americans, as Canadians, right, as many, many countries eat these foods that are so high in what causes free radical damage and then thus causes inflammation, right? So, we've got to stop doing that and then start doing the opposite of that, which is eating foods rich in antioxidants and knowing that specifically the antioxidant that targets the mitochondria…
Catharine Arnston (59:05.048)
There's very few that can get in there to do that.
Ashley James (59:06.924)
Yes. And the fact that there's very few companies out there that produce a chlorella, sorry, a spirulina that is not heated.
Catharine Arnston (59:16.742)
Right. So you're shooting blanks if you want to use the bullet analogy again. If you buy algae that is less expensive, I can almost promise you they dried it with high heat which would kill the superoxide dismutase. So it may have been there before they dried it, but it's empty now. And you're shooting blanks. And I love that analogy about the bullet bouncing around and piercing different cells because that is what happens. Another visual that just came to me while you were talking is bumper cars. When I was a kid, we used to go to the circus and there'd be these bumper cars and you just go around and you smack into everybody else and hopefully didn't damage anybody permanently. There were lots of studies done about the fact that antioxidants like vitamin E and vitamin C, they have never had an impact on longevity. And it's because I have realized those are two antioxidants that cannot get into the mitochondria inner membrane. Everything, if you come away from this podcast today, understanding nothing else except the fact that everything that happens to your health is determined by your mitochondria. And the problem is this mitochondria, like I said, they're like the ICE unit. They're in lockdown. Virtually nothing can get in there except a handful of antioxidants. Not even drugs can get in there. So the fact that superoxide dismutase is one of them that can. There's also glutathione, which also algae has the highest concentration of, chlorella, in fact, and chlorophyll. And we could talk about those as well. But, in this case, superoxide dismutase is the number one antioxidant. It's considered even more powerful than glutathione. And there are 25,000 medical studies, proving the benefits of superoxide dismutase to prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's, inflammation, any kind of respiratory illnesses, proven. So, but the problem has been your body stops making it after the age of 30 and there is no other source of it from food. And now you know you can get it from RLG or from frozen spirulina because those are the two that have not been exposed to high heat. So the SOD is active and will protect you for a dollar a day.
Ashley James (01:01:56.925)
Now what about those SOD supplements?
Catharine Arnston (01:01:59.537)
Well, they did some studies and again, they were finding that they were getting damaged during digestion and a very limited amount of those tablets of the SOD was making its way into the mitochondria. Here's the thing, those supplements probably cost 60 or 70 dollars and you probably have to take four or five a day and that's all you're getting. Think of a supplement and I've told this to people before, think of the supplement, it doesn't matter which one it is. It could be fish oil, it could be SOD, as just like a grade three soloist. And when you take algae, you've got the Boston Symphony Orchestra because it has 40 vitamins and minerals, the highest chlorophyll in the world, highest protein in the world, in this case, highest superoxide dismutase in the world. You're cheating yourself when you take these isolated supplements for isolated purposes.
You mentioned earlier, our medical profession has become so disparate. You've got one person for brain health, one person for liver health. And so you're running around going to all these specialists and nobody talks to one another. Supplements are the same way. They are isolated. They don't talk to one another. They actually don't exist like that in nature. So you pee 90% out of what you're taking. And some people take chlorophyll water, for example. I applaud the use of chlorophyll.
Well, chlorella has 25 times more chlorophyll than liquid chlorophyll, and at the same time, you're also getting 60% protein, 40 vitamins and minerals. Chlorophyll water is just chlorophyll. So you always look for the greatest efficiency, and you usually get that from nature. Mother Nature knows best.
Mother Nature has laid out a bounty of ways for us to look after ourselves and most of them are free: sleep, walking outside, simple pleasures, lik,e community, getting fresh air, any movement, sunlight, you have to pay a little bit for your algae, but it's the most concentrated nutrition in the universe
And it was a gift to us from Mother Nature, the first life on Earth, I might add, four billion years ago. So I always encourage people to slow down and take a look, lift the hood, because when you find the truth, it resonates with you. You were saying earlier your body craves the spirulina and the chlorella. So does mine. I've been taking this stuff for 13 years. Every single time I have my first handful in the morning.
It's like an exhale. It's just like, oh, thank God. Honestly, I don't know, I do eat real food, but I don't know how I would survive without these things. It's so instinctual and my body just absolutely loves it and everyone's will too, because it's so high quality, it's so concentrated. It's Mother Nature's invention, but we do the best at preserving the nutrition that she's provided to us by growing it carefully in triple filtered spring mountain water, not using high heat, and then not including any other crappy stuff like binders or whatever. So it's as pure a food as you're ever going to get. The only other thing I could say that would be better is mother's breast milk, but you can't have that after about the age of two. So spirulina and chlorella are your next best shot. So, but pretty amazing about that superoxide dismutase, right?
Sneaking in the back door of the mitochondria to help it survive. And it's like if you had a friend who was in the hospital and they were feeding them crappy food, which they of course still do at hospitals, and then you have some friend who brings you quietly or in a hidden bag, a bag of salad and maybe some grass-fed beef or something.
Ashley James (01:06:10.632)
The homemade chicken soup.
Catharine Arnston (01:06:14.774)
So glutathione and superoxide dismutase, they get in there to deliver what your mitochondria aren't getting from anything else. They're like your best friend.
Ashley James (01:06:25.980)
Well, I just love that, that it's putting out the fire and at the same time, transforming it into water. So it's not only stopping the damage to your cells and the DNA in your ear, mitochondria in your cells, and restoring balance, like removing the chaos, but then it hydrates at the same time. It's like here cell have more water and less chaos. That is so, so cool.
Catharine Arnston (01:06:51.232)
And also, and because water has oxygen in it, and there's a German scientist who won a Nobel Prize back in the 30s, his name is Otto Warburg, and this will be my next segue into cancer. He discovered that cancer can only exist in an acidic environment. And there's a scale of zero to 14 that measures acidity to alkalinity, alkalinity being at the high level. And your cells need to be 7.1, slightly alkaline, your blood needs to be a little more alkaline, but when it's slightly alkaline that's indicative of a lot of oxygen that's in the cell and that the cell is functioning in a healthy way. And algae is the most alkaline food in the world and this particular nutrient as you mentioned superoxide dismutase normally reduces the fire from the free radical production, it encourages the production of water, which brings more oxygen into the cell because that's what oxygen water is made of. Pretty cool.
Ashley James (01:07:54.424)
It is very cool. So in your research, you saw that superoxide dismutase helps the cell become more alkaline, like achieve that alkalinity.
Catharine Arnston (01:08:04.296)
Well, it's actually other nutrients that do that, like the chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is probably the most alkaline lining nutrient, and it's another pigment found in both spirulina and chlorella. Chlorella has a higher amount. But this engagement of the superoxide dismutase by stopping the free radical damage of the superoxide dismutase and turning it into water contributes oxygen to the cell. But you get other contributions from other elements in the algae, whether it's from the magnesium or from the chlorophyll in particular is a very alkalining nutrient.
Ashley James (01:08:45.765)
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around alkalinity and making sure the body's alkaline because there's certain areas of the body, we want at certain times to be high acid. For example, in the last part of digestion with the stomachs about to empty out Into the small intestines it it'll it brings it back to neutral because the small intestines would not be happy with you know hydrochloric acid but there's certain tissues have a range of like, from here to here is the healthiest range. And we have buffer systems in the body to maintain our acid and alkaline balance. And the thing is, is that the body uses our own mineral stores in our bones. So it'll have us release minerals from our bones to buffer the acid in our tissue. So if you're the kind of person who goes and drinks Coke or Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi or whatever, goes to McDonald's, you know, drinks some wine at night, eats a high acid, like the opposite of an alkaline diet, right? Alkaline diet, think of like the raw vegan frolicking through the fields, just picking wild berries and eating raw food in the sunlight, that's an alkaline diet, juicing, anything with a lot of enzymes, anything from plants. You've got a very alkaline diet. And then lots of meat, dairy, sugar, flour, fried food, and also the beverages, high in sugar and Coca-Cola.
One of my backgrounds is massage therapy. This is in Canada where I worked in hospitals and in sports medicine rehab. This is like over 20 years ago, but it's in Canada. Massage therapy is, we work alongside physical therapists. It's a two year college program, not like a 500 hour program that they do here in the States. So it's much more advanced and we would have oil on our sheets. So you can imagine massage therapists end up getting their sheets, have a lot of oil on them. And you know how we wash our sheets to get the oil stains out. Cause you know, any kind of detergent will not get oil out of massage sheets. And then the sheets start smelling rancid from the oil, from the massage oil.
Do you know how we do it? We take a two liter bottle of Coke and we take a bucket and we put all our sheets in the bucket and we pour the two liter bottle of Coke and we let it sit overnight. And then we put it in the washing machine the next day, 100% removes oil. And if you have clothing with oil stains, I have a friend, a good friend of mine, her husband works as a mechanic for helicopters and there was a leak, like some crazy fluids from the helicopter, got on him, and it was like jet fuel and all this other fluid. And he came home soaking and smelling like just awful chemicals that you would not want anywhere near you. And the only way she was able to get it out, because she tried detergents and everything and it stunk up the whole house. And then she did what I told her, use a two liter bottle of Coke, soak it overnight and then put it in the wash. And it 100% cleaned all these oils, like petroleum based chemicals. So people are drinking this stuff. This stuff is a degreaser agent. This stuff is like this crazy, but people drink it. And that was my little side note to say, people on a regular basis, the standard American diet, which is copied throughout the world now, is highly acidic and it's unnaturally highly acidic. So the body in order to cope with it, because the body isn't running around if we were too acidic, you would just drop into a coma, right? But the body has to regulate and so it has buffer systems.
If you have to constantly use your buffer systems, you're putting massive stress on the body. So yeah, go drink your two liters of Coke and eat your pizza this weekend, but just know that your body is now leaching minerals from your bones in order to compensate. What is the saying? You rob Peter to pay Paul. Eventually, it's going to catch up to you. So yes, we have buffer systems. And that if you constantly eat an acid-forming diet, you are leaching your body of nutrients in order to keep up with that lifestyle. Whereas if you eat a diet high in enzymes and nutrients and phyto plant chemicals, high in plants, and you look for these like rich in superoxide dismutase, Chlorella spigulina, you are putting out the fire. And now you are helping the body. Now you don't have to rely on the buffer system so heavily to stay in a perfectly balanced state for those cells, those cells being 7.1 perfectly balanced. So there's my little rant about pH, because a lot of people go, what are you talking about?
Catharine Arnston (01:13.41.491)
Well, it's, there's a misunderstanding. There are organs and there are cells. And different organs like your stomach do need to be acidic. But universally, through your entire body, your body is made of cells. I came up with another analogy. Think of your body like a building. You know, when a brand new office tower is built, it's glorious and everything works. When you're a baby and you're born, everything works.
And then in the building are offices. And so think of those offices, the equivalent would be your organs. They're gathered, they're groups, so they have maybe a city group in one place, maybe TJ Maxx is in another, they've assembled offices to have big corporations. And so in your body, you have groups of clusters of things that are organs that work together to function.
And then in the office, the things that keep, or in the building, the things that keep the office working and the people working are lights. And so in your body, those lights are the equivalent of your cells and your mitochondria. And as the building gets older and if they don't replace the lights, the people start closing their offices and leaving. And eventually the building, it's decrepit, and maybe there aren't any people there anymore.
in your body if you don't keep your cells functioning properly and your mitochondria protected, they're basically your lights. They go out and eventually just like the building that becomes decrepit, you do too. So think of your cells and your mitochondria as the lights that keep the equivalent of your building, your body, working. And part of that is, when you mention about the coke getting rid of all that grease and all the oils from the massage. Well, remember I mentioned at the very beginning that all of your cells have a cell membrane that's made of lipids. That's another word for fats. And so when you're eating these things like coke, just like the coke stripped out the oils in your sheets, it must strip out. Similarly, the oils and the healthy oils in your cell walls.
And when your cell walls are stripped of the healthy fats, they become dry and brittle. We're entering the fall here in New England. Think of a leaf that when it does not have the sunlight and it doesn't have all the nutrients and the chlorophyll, it becomes brittle and dry. That's what's happening to your cells. If you do not have the proper fats and if you eat too much acidic food, it causes your cell walls to become brittle and dysfunctional. And that causes your mitochondria to suffer because they're not getting the nutrients either and all that sort of stuff. So you can see how it's all connected, right?
Ashley James (01:16:45.595)
Absolutely. I love it. Anything we can do to keep us like just optimally healthy. I want to be that 106 year old that's still hiking, it's possible we can do it. I think you will.
Catherine Arnston (01:17:00.519)
I probably will be. But the other thing that you have to remember, because we live in North America, people want things that are effortless and simple. And if you can swallow water, although you and I chew these tablets, you can get the nutrition that you need to prevent these chronic illnesses or restore your health. It's that easy. We're not talking about going out to a cryotherapy center, although you could do that. We're not talking about going out for an IV drip But you could do that too. We're not talking about complicated anything. You're in your home. You just open your bag or your canister or your whatever you put some tablets in your mouth and you swallow them down. Seconds we're talking about seconds. This is like in fact, we're going to an IV drip show in a couple of weeks because People are getting glutathione drips. Well, you know what? Glutathione is an algae. People are getting collagen drips. Guess what? The highest collagen is an algae. They should probably have a superoxidized dismutase, but nonetheless, the highest concentration is an algae. So it gives you everything that you need for nourishment, cellular protection, and it's effortless. You don't have to cook it, clean it, mix it, nothing. Just open your mouth and take it. That's all you have to do. And at a dollar a day, it's the best prevention that you're ever going to get and those of you who currently have a condition, it will help speed your recovery faster than just about anything. But anyway, so that's superoxidized dismutase, how protective it is of the mitochondria, and as long as you are protecting your mitochondria, everything works better. It just does. And I can walk you through some of the science behind that.
And for brain health, the highest concentration of mitochondria are in your brain, as I mentioned earlier. And we did our own clinical trial recently. We were working with a nonprofit group called the Gray Team. They're based in Florida. And their entire purpose is to stop the suicide rate of military veterans, which is at a heartbreaking 35 to 50 percent. 35 to 50% of military veterans are committing suicide. Just let that sink in. I mean, that's just tragic, beyond tragic.
Ashley James (01:19:25.248)
That's beyond tragic. That is incomprehensible how time and time again, and I'm not gonna just say this to the United States because I mean, I love living here. I'm from Canada. My home is the States now, but it's not just America, unfortunately, because I have seen Britain, I've seen Canada, I've seen multiple countries, Australia, Asia, I've seen them just throw away their veterans like trash. And that is unacceptable. Like just for example, for this country to throw away their veterans like trash and then take billions of taxpayer dollars and give it to other countries. Now I believe that we should all help each other, right? I believe in aid, I believe we should all help each other. But why aren't we helping our veterans? Why do we just throw them away like trash? That gets me so angry. And it's not, again, not just America, it is other countries too. These people, they've been through enough, you know what I mean? And they just deserve so much better. And suicide is such a big problem, especially since 2020.
Catharine Arnston (01:20:26.914)
Oh, well, and we know it's also on the rise just in the general population and COVID didn't help. I mean, it really pushed it over the edge. So there's a lot of people suffering, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder. And you and I talked before we started recording, there's a great book that came out. I would encourage everybody to read it. You can get it on Amazon. It's called Brain Energy. And it's by Dr. Christopher Palmer, P-A-L-M-E-R.
He is a physician, a psychiatrist, at the Harvard Medical School. So he's got all the great education behind him, and he's also been a psychiatrist for 25 or 30 years. Anyways, his entire book documents how all brain disorders, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, suicidal thoughts, Alzheimer's, any dementia, all of it is because of damaged mitochondria.
Damaged mitochondria are the cause of all brain issues. And what did I just talk about? How superoxide dismutase protects and heals the mitochondria. You can connect the dots and see that spirulina is the highest superoxide dismutase as long as it's not from a heated spirulina source. So all the science points to this. So I thought, you know what? We want to help other organizations.
And we had been meeting with them. So they said, let's do a small clinical trial with our particular spirulina. So we did. And all we'd had a small group of their military veterans who had been discharged for 15 or 20 years because they'd had these mental issues that had never gone away. And all we did was give them a pouch of our spirulina tablets. So 30 tablets a day. They did nothing else. We did a brain scan before the clinical trial. And we also hooked them up
to some devices that measure their sleep and their CRV and stuff, HRV, heart rate monitor.
Anyways, and then we did a brain scan after 30 days. Only thing we did was give them 30 tablets a day. We asked them not to change anything else, no extra exercise, no change in diet, nothing. And within 30 days, and it probably would have happened within even probably seven, that inflammation we could see from the EEG, the brain showed no activity, it was all inflammation, virtually gone, completely gone. One person had multiple sclerosis, his tremors went away. 30 days, not from a drug, but from food.
Spirulina are raw tablets, 30 tablets a day. Meanwhile, they're still getting 64% protein, 40 vitamins and minerals, and part of the reason it worked was because of the superoxide dismutase. Also, we're going to talk about in a minute, the phycocyanin that's found in spirulina. It's also loaded with essential fatty acids. Your brain is mostly fat. One of the things I didn't mention is one of the things that superoxide dismutase also does is it protects your telomeres. Your telomeres are these things that protect your DNA. And as your cells replicate, the telomeres shorten until they get so short that the DNA gets exposed.
And then, when the DNA is exposed, it interacts with toxins and it becomes damaged. And then when it replicates, it damages as damaged DNA. And this leads to other chronic illnesses. But when you take the superoxide dismutase, it protects the telomeres so they aren't shortening. So you start to get more functionality and this also contributed to the brain health. So, and as I said, it probably could have happened within a week or even two weeks but we did do the EEG's at the beginning and at the end and that was pretty powerful when you think of how something as simple as this whole food unheated just spirulina could do so much more than any drugs could. Amazing, right?
Ashley James (01:24:36.525)
I am beyond thrilled. So this 30-day study, did you do any questionnaire just to get an idea of their mood before and after, or did they report anything like that?
Catharine Arnston (01:24:53.797)
I think we have, there's so much data and I haven't looked at everything because I haven't been able to, we're gonna write a paper about it so we could submit it. I have to submit, I've fallen behind on that because there's a professor who also works with NASA, Dr. Dominique D'Agostino, who I'm a good friend with, he was going to help us write the paper and submit it to the PubMed and all that sort of stuff. So I have to get back on that. It's just one more thing I haven't had chance to follow up.
Ashley James (01:25:22.561)
So it's totally fine. It's totally fine. It hasn't been published yet. These are preliminary findings, but in the preliminary findings, the most exciting thing that you've noticed is that there was definite changes in the brain scans. And what other definite cool things did you notice while just looking preliminarily through the findings?
Catharine Arnston (01:25:39.833)
Yeah, well, there's a marker called HRV, which stands for heart rate variability. And you want a high heart rate variability because it shows that under stress, your body can respond quickly. When you have a low heart rate variability, it cannot. So I just remembered this looking at one data point, this person's heart rate variability, I think went from 40 something to 80 something. It was a 50% increase which is unheard of. People brag about how their heart rate variability increased by 2 or 3%. This was like literally a 50%. They also monitored their sleep. They used something called a wavi, which is sort of like those rings, aura rings. So there's tons of data, but with science and studies, you gotta go comb through the data and you look for trends and then you have to write up the findings. It's just time consuming. And I'm running the company, I'm traveling all over the place and I'm busy with my stuff.
Ashley James (01:26:43.789)
It is totally fine. I'm so happy that you dropped some of this information, but you know what? It's like, don't wait until you're done. If you've got something, share it, right? And then you can come back, and once the paper's been written and all the scientists have poured through the data, and you can come back and share more. There's no harm in that. Heart rate variability is super interesting, and life insurance companies are now playing with the idea of using it in order to determine whether someone should be insured or not, because they have seen that it is possibly a way to determine lifespan. Because low heart rate variability means you're in a state of stress and your body can't bounce into stress and then out of stress mode, that if you have low heart rate variability, you are kind of always in stress mode and it wears on you faster and you die sooner.
Whereas, a high heart rate variability means that when you inhale and when you exhale, your heart rate changes and your heart gets to rest a bit. And so your heartbeats won't be consistent. They'll be higher and then lower and then higher. And that's the variable that's measured between the two. Liistening to my son's heartbeat freaks me out because I'm like, did his heart stop? Because in between, there's such a noticeable difference in his heart rate from his inhales to his exhales. Now he's been seen by doctors. He's been seen by naturopaths. He's totally fine. His heart's healthy. But from the untrained ear, who's used to hearing a consistent heartbeat, when he inhales and when he exhales, his heart rate changes.
And that's heart rate variability. So he has actually very healthy because there is a very clear measurable difference between his inhale and exhale heartbeat. And if you listen to your own heartbeat and you notice there's no difference between your inhales and exhales, then you've got low heart rate variability. And there's some work we gotta do to bring your stress response down. So it's really cool. That's something that largely people have been thinking heart rate variability was more associated with mental, emotional health and getting you out of stress response mentally. Of course, you know, the body can stress the stress, right? So eating McDonald's is as stressful as having an argument with your husband or drinking a glass of wine is a stressor or running up a hill really fast is a stressor. Some stressors are good for you in the long run, right? But it's a stressor nonetheless. And the more cumulative stress we have, wears us down if we don't know how to turn off the stress response, right? So with heart rate variability being so changed by one factor, which is like you said, it takes what 10 seconds – open your bag, throw the chewable tablets in your mouth, either chew them or swallow with water, close the bag, done, go about your day. And for some people, the heart rate variability changed by 50%. That is just my mind is blown. My mind is, I'm so excited for that. And I can't wait for your study to be released.
Catharine Arnston (01:30:02.761)
Well, and to have this book by Dr. Palmer, Brain Energy, the health of the brain is determined by the health of your mitochondria. And we have something that basically blows everything out of the water, all drugs, nothing comes close to the impact that these nutrients, and I'm gonna talk about another one in a minute, in spirulina and also to chlorella for protecting the mitochondria. But if you had to choose one algae, for protecting your mitochondria, it would definitely be spirulina. And if you were looking at building your immune system, it's definitely chlorella. And that's another conversation, the science is there and there's literally no question, but we've changing the perception of health in general and predictability of longevity is like moving the Titanic because we have certain ideas in our head, but the new science keeps coming out. And so, I stay in my lane about algae and I keep connecting the nutrients found in algae with the discoveries found in the longevity research and I'm going, Wow! Superoxide dismutase stops heart disease. Hah! Spirulina, our spirulina has the highest superoxide dismutase. That's amazing! Or as we're going to find out next, research finds that phycocyanin, which is the blue pigment in spirulina, kills cancer cells. And I go, Gosh! That's pretty interesting because our spirulina has the highest phycocyanin in the universe. So the science is there about these nutrients, but the scientists don't know those nutrients exist in algae or at least in our algae. So I'm sitting here, I feel like, the kid with the finger in the dike holding the water, holding a dam from exploding and I'm so eager to get this information to the world because this is why I did this. I mean I just wanted to help my sister heal from cancer and I did, and I thought if I can help one more person I'm going to just keep going and now we're in thousands of people, but it's so important to get this information out because it's scientifically proven and there's no question, but you have to know what to look for. People say, you don't notice a red car until you have one. You're not going to notice the benefits of superoxide dismutase, or next we'll talk about phycocyanin, until now that you've learned about it. Now you are informed. Being educated about these things, because nobody else is telling you, is critical. And so that's my goal, and I love educating people, because, I know Mother Nature has provided for us and we just need to get her bounty out to the world in a way that is understandable. The science is complicated but what it does in your body is so remarkable. So is Mother Nature. I mean she is so smart, the universe, God, whatever you want to call it. We are supposed to be healthy, right? But you have to follow a lifestyle that mimics the one that we were born into. I don't think Coca-Cola and white processed food and sitting all day long was the life that Mother Nature, God, the universe intended us for. We need to move, we need to hug, we need to drink water, we need to sleep, and we need nourishment.
And the best way to get it is from spirulina and chlorella. The best and easiest. Again, it's health insurance, not just nutritional insurance, it's health insurance. So it's pretty powerful. And before I swing over to cancer, I do want to make one more, just do a little mini deep dive into another benefit of the SOD. So as I mentioned, the most mitochondria are in your brain and this almost a similar amount and I have tried for months to find a number for this, but nobody, I can't seem to find a number, but virtually your retina has virtually the same amount of mitochondria as your brain, because your eye is literally another brain because it's taking senses, strings of light and and converting that into an image in the back of your head. If you have eye issues, not just your reading deteriorating, but glaucoma and other serious eye issues, they are almost 100% predictor of heart disease and a heart attack within a year. Crazy, right? And why is that, it's because of the high concentration of mitochondria in your eye. There's 7,000 mitochondria per cell in your heart and there's close to 2 million in your eye. But the eye is more visible, you can tell when you have eye issues whether it's glaucoma. So it breaks my heart because I don't think there's any direct communication between the eye specialists and heart specialists, but I have talked to a lot of heart specialists and they confirm that this situation with the glaucoma is indeed real. And it even hit home with me with a fellow I grew up with all my life. He was like my best friend's brother. We did everything together and about a year ago he was diagnosed with some form of glaucoma, but they didn't know that was a predilection of potential heart issue. And so they didn't really do much about it. He's a big skier. He was out skiing about six months ago, had a heart attack, and died on the spot.
Ashley James (01:36:31.384)
Oh my goodness.
Catharine Arnston (01:36:33.920)
So, anybody who's listening, if you have glaucoma issues going on, get your heart checked because, pardon the pun, but it's more visible. It's damage that's occurring at the mitochondria level. I know I'm going to keep hammering home. All of your health issues are determined by your mitochondria, and some of them are easier to detect, like your eye, than your heart.
Ashley James (01:37:04.776)
I have a little side story to share. I am friends with a man who is on the kind of the same health path we've studied under the same nature paths. Really fascinating guy. I've told this story before on the show so I'll try to keep it brief. I forget the names but it's like Green Beret. He was like one of those, like those Navy Seals. He was like one of those, but I can't remember which one. But it's up there. It's like he used to be one of those. But before he actually was Amish and he left the Amish community. He loves them, but he left the Amish community to become like a Navy SEAL green braid, whatever. And him and I were hanging out and he said, and we study under the same doctor. And he was telling me this story. He goes, okay, so the doctor that we've studied under, I've studied under him for over 12 years. He is amazing naturopathic physician, old school. He's like 83 or something like that.
And he was, I mean, his story is fascinating. I've had him on the show twice, Dr. Joel Wallach. And he says that he's told people for over 20 years to not eat oil or fried food. 100% don't eat oil. He goes, just cook with water. He's not plant-based. He grew up on a farm. He thinks beef's amazing. To each is own. He's doing something right. He's 83, he still works. He works like six days a week and worships the Lord on the seventh day. And he’s a very fascinating man. But he says, never eat fried food. It destroys your health. Don't do it. Don't eat fried food. Don't eat oil. Well, our friend, his name's Marvin, and he decided to eat McDonald's fries every day. And he was doing like a little experiment. He wanted to see if he could notice a difference because he ate clean his whole life, right? He was grew up on this, he grew up on a farm, but he'd never really eaten the standard American diet. And he goes, I've never been sick. My whole life I've never been sick. And he is very passionate about studying health, but he'd never been sick. So he started eating McDonald's and started eating fries, just fries, not anything else, just fries at McDonald's. He drives home and he lives in Utah.
And it's really dark out if you've ever been to Utah, but just outside the city, it's pretty dark at night. And there he is driving home. It's like the moon isn't out and there's no street lights or anything, right? It's been seven days of eating fries every day. Now, it's not been every meal, but every day he's had large fries. On the seventh day, somewhere around there, he's driving home and he realizes, he has completely lost his ability to read signs. He's lost his night vision.
He should have glasses at this point. Everything's fuzzy. He's driving home and he goes, I can't see. Now he was a green brayer, whatever it was. He had like 40, 20 vision. He had some crazy good eyesight. And all of a sudden, seven days of eating fries every day, his night vision was gone. It was shot. And he said, you know what happened? Obviously he stopped eating fries. He went back to his healthy lifestyle. He goes, it took me a year of taking antioxidant supplements and of course eating really healthy. But it took him a year of taking everything he could he knew to nourish the eyes, except for, chlorella and spirulina. But he took everything that he knew to take for eye health for a whole year. It took him a whole year to reverse the damage that seven days of eating fries and just think about all the people that are running around destroying. And so then we go to Dr. Wallach. Well, why did this happen? And Dr. Wallach pulls up an image of anatomy of the eye, specifically the vasculature. And it is the eye's mostly blood vessels. And these blood vessels, which are very small, just like the kidneys, right? Kidneys are another thing that gets damaged by fried foods. That's another reason. Dr. Wallach's been able to take people on dialysis and get them so healthy, they no longer need dialysis. And one of the things is fried food, get rid of oil, get rid of fried food, and then also get rid of any processed meats like have nitrates or nitrites. And because the vasculature is only wide enough to house single blood cells going through. So the vasculature is thinner than hair and it becomes destroyed and inflamed. And so then everything gets backed up. And what happens is that just eating that seven days where the fries was enough to inflame and damage the vasculature of the eye and the retina and the mitochondria and just everything took it like, I could not believe it took him a year to get his eyesight back. So just really we have to listen to our body and listen to the symptoms of our body and don't just go, oh, it's cause I'm getting older. You know, if you notice you can't see it at night very well, we got to take this seriously. Just like you said, the vasculature of the eye, things to go first, right? Men won't see the doctor till they have a penile dysfunction, till they have erectile dysfunction, right? When they can't get it up, that's when they go to their doctor. Well, they should have gone five years ago when they started developing diabetes, but it wasn't until their penis stopped working. Well, their heart has been affected by their declining health and the way they're eating. So we have to listen to the symptoms of the body.
And that person, the man who temporarily lost his penis' function, that can be reversed if we catch it quick enough. But also if he had listened to his body, he would have noticed years before, starting to get tired, going towards more sugar and more caffeine for energy, because he felt tired in the morning, not being able to stay up as late, just like falling asleep while watching TV, getting acid reflux, little things that normally the average person puts band-aids on. Oh, I'm going to take an antacid. I'm going to take a Tylenol or an Advil. I'm just going to drink some alcohol here and I'm going to self-medicate, right? I'm going to take some coffee here, alcohol here. People self-medicate instead of listen to the symptoms. And if we listen to the whispers, then we can catch something, but we have to know. And so I love that you said, if anything's happening with eyesight, especially like glaucoma, we need to get our heart checked right away. We need to take it seriously. And there's a way to reverse it. And we can do that with food, certain foods we gotta stop putting in our mouth and certain foods we gotta put in our mouth more.
Catharine Arnston (01:43:51.713)
Exactly. You've got to give your body what it needs and stop giving it what it doesn't. But you also raise a really very important point, which I want to emphasize. Your body, there's a great expression, an old ancient Asian expression. You never step in the same river twice because a river is flowing. So every second different things are flowing by and your body is the same way.
You have over 30 trillion cells in your body and guess what? 30 trillion cells die every day and 30 trillion new cells are born every day. You change your entire stomach lining, I think it's either 24 hours or 48 hours. Other parts of your body take longer, like your skin if you're young it's a 25 day turnover as you get older it's more like 60 days or 72 days your organs.
But the point is, is that if you have a condition, like this gentleman developed, you know, an eye condition, it's not, it doesn't have to be permanent, but you have to do something about it. And the other thing is that if you slide into this, getting into a condition,, in this case, it was unusual because it did happen so quickly, but usually things like cancer and heart disease. They call it silent inf