The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook: How to Prepare and Combine Whole Foods to Prevent and Treat Osteoporosis Naturally: https://amzn.to/2EFVR2r

Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com

Dr. Laura Kelly's website: https://medicinethroughfood.com

Treat Osteoporosis and Osteopenia Naturally

https://www.learntruehealth.com/treat-osteoporosis-and-osteopenia-naturally

Highlights:

• Benefits of eating mushrooms
• Isolates versus complex herb cocktail as medicine
• Importance of self-care
• What contributes to bone loss and fractures
• Nutrition is foundational medicine
• Medicine is part of life

What is self-care? How do you practice self-care? Dr. Laura Kelly shares what self-care is, and it may be different for everybody. She explains that self-care includes everything about us from the food we eat down to our thoughts. We need to listen and know our bodies really well so we can practice self-care daily. She also shares how her patients, including her mom, were able to heal their bone diseases through her protocol.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m so excited for you to learn from Dr. Laura Kelly today. She wrote a book using food, nutrition, and herbs to support the body in growing healthy, strong, flexible bones at any age. You can be a grandma. You can be in your 90s. You could be a 100-year-old marathon runner. You could be a 20-year-old. Whatever age you are, now is the time to start growing a healthy skeletal system. And what’s so cool is she’s even seen some of her patients and some of her readers reverse other diseases as well. Even her mom reversed calcification in the arteries of her heart after following this protocol because by following this protocol, you’re supporting the body’s ability to lay down healthy mineralization and create flexible bones so that they don’t fracture, so that they’re stronger, and that also supports the body in balancing minerals even in the soft tissue as well. So it’s very exciting.

We also get into talking so much about the contrast between natural medicine and drug-based medicine, and just new ways of looking at it, which I think are really exciting especially because I know, I know you’re going to be sharing this episode with someone you care about. For all the new listeners that this is their first episode, welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited to have you here. Dr. Laura Kelly is going to be giving away a copy of her book to a lucky listener, so please come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s free. It’s a wonderful community, very supportive. If you’re into holistic health and you want to be part of a community that’s all into holistic health, you’ve come to the right place. Join the Learn True Health Facebook group. 

Now, as we talk about different minerals, supplements, herbs, and foods, one thing that I have to let you know about is my favorite magnesium soak. Magnesium is the most important mineral for the body. Now there are over 60 minerals. The body needs at least 60 essential minerals to fully function, but there are elements and there are so many nutrients in the soil that the body needs that plants then digest, and that’s when we eat the plants, we get them. Sometimes we need to take them as a supplement, but the most important is magnesium, and magnesium is used so quickly and so readily by the body, we’re chronically deficient in it. And this is why I love this particular magnesium soak. I’ve had the founder of this company on the show several times. Her name is Kristen Bowen. So you can go to my website learntruehealth.com, and type in Kristen Bowen, and listen to the past episodes.

At her worst, she was I believe 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, and in a wheelchair unable to communicate. And that was at her lowest. She was able to, with the help of her family, get her life back, and her health back. She found that the thing that made the biggest difference for her recovery was soaking in magnesium. It’s a special concentration from nature. It’s from the Zechstein Sea. It also has other co-factors in it. And when we soak in it, we absorb an average of 20 grams of magnesium. You can’t get that much if you take oral because oral magnesium reacts very poorly with the digestive system, and it’s just not economical for us to get IV magnesium—going to a doctor and getting IV magnesium. So it’s very economical to be able to soak in magnesium at home. It’s safe for children, it’s safe for pregnancy, it’s safe for everyone. So please check out the links in today’s episode.

Also, for Dr. Kelly’s book, for Dr. Kelly’s website, and for the magnesium soak that I recommend, you can get it from the website livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH for the listener discount. That’s livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Grab the big jug. It says undiluted magnesium soak. You buy that big jug, and then use the coupon code at checkout LTH, as in Learn True Health, LTH for the listener discount. And check out those episodes that I did with Kristen Bowen. It’s quite fascinating.

I’m so excited for you to learn from Dr. Laura Kelly, and she’s promised to come back on the show because she has invented software that helps us to decipher and understand our genetic expressions. How cool is that? So she’s going to come back on the show and continue this wonderful discussion about how we can uncover what our body needs, our unique needs to support our optimal health.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about. All those friends and family that want to have strong healthy bones. I even know some marathon runners that I’ll be sharing this episode with because they suffer from chronic fractures. So this is not just an episode for those who are senior citizens. This is an episode for everyone. Everyone deserves to have strong flexible bones at any age, and if it takes just doing a few tweaks to your lifestyle, to your diet, to your supplement routine to make such a huge health difference, why not. You’re worth it. It’s such a worthwhile investment.

I highly recommend getting Dr. Kelly’s book after listening to this episode. I already bought a few copies for my friends and family. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.

[00:05:59] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 443. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. Laura Kelly on the show. What a fascinating book. You have published The Healthy Bones, how we can, through food, nourish our skeletal system so we can reverse and prevent osteopenia, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis. Fantastic. I’m so excited to have you on the show today. Welcome.

[00:06:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: Thank you, Ashley. It’s good to be here.

[00:06:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. This is such an important topic, especially when we look at demographics and we see that our wonderful baby boomer parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—that generation has moved into that era where their MDs are pushing them to be on drugs like Boniva or Fosamax, right? I don’t even know if those are still available. Drugs like that have caused so much harm to people in the past. I see it. I see people, especially seniors, being pushed to have drug after drug after drug. The body doesn’t have a drug deficiency. The body has a mineral deficiency.

[00:07:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: Right. That’s a good way to put it.

[00:07:28] Ashley James: Right, right.

[00:07:29] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. I mean it’s certainly a deficiency issue, for sure.

[00:07:33] Ashley James: Right. It just makes sense, but unfortunately for the MD, the only tool they have is drugs. They were never taught in medical school about nutrition, and of course, you were. Before we dive into how we can use food to heal our body and prevent and reverse disease, I’d love for you to tell us what happened in your life that made you want to become a doctor of oriental medicine, and made you want to practice medicine the way that you do?

[00:08:06] Dr. Laura Kelly: I always wanted to study medicine from when I was a little kid. It runs in my family. My uncle was head of neurosurgery, at George Washington University for 20 years. My other uncle is a physicist, my brother is a surgeon. So there’s a lot of medicine and a lot of medical thought in my family. And when it came time to get serious about life and start thinking about what I actually wanted to do as an adult, which happened quite late for me, which was around age 35, I started on the medical path. I started going back to school pre-med at UCLA, that sort of thing and intended on going to medical school. And then, as I approached that, it started to become apparent that path was not satisfying what I was looking for.

[00:09:06] Ashley James: What happened? So were you a teenager? Were you in pre-med?

[00:09:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: No, no, no. This was when I was older. This was when I was 35.

[00:09:15] Ashley James: Really? So what happened though? What happened that made you see that drug-based medicine wasn’t fulfilling?

[00:09:24] Dr. Laura Kelly: It wasn’t anything external, and it wasn’t an issue with me. It wasn’t a health issue with me or anything like that. It was really an internal drive. I had always felt close to nature, and that seemed to me to be the source of all things in this regard. That there were patterns here that were easy, natural, and harmonious. And it didn’t make sense to me in the larger picture to step very far away from that if I was talking about healing and working with a body, which came out of nature. So there was a very strong internal instinctual drive towards that, which I’d never heard about alternative medicine very much before. It wasn’t something that happened in my family, but it just was there, that drive, and I sort of re-examined the medical path. I thought there must be another way into medicine.

So I started looking around and I found that Chinese medicine was very rigorous, and there were thousands, literally thousands of years of documentation, and thousands and thousands of years of case reports. There was enough science available in medicine for me to feel satisfied because I have a strong drive for knowledge. This medicine just appealed to me. It fit with the natural paradigm in an incredibly beautiful way. I mean Chinese medicine, again, the current literature that we still use today started 5000 years ago. There’s a book 5000 years ago that we still read.

[00:11:14] Ashley James: Wow.

[00:11:16] Dr. Laura Kelly: That came out of philosophy. It didn’t come out of let’s make a drug. It came out of natural philosophy. Natural philosophy evolved into medicine, and then it became medicine officially 5000 years ago. That kind of progression made a lot of sense to me intellectually.

[00:11:41] Ashley James: What is the philosophy? How is the philosophy of oriental medicine, as a doctor, differ from seeing an MD and their philosophy that governs how they practice medicine?

[00:11:57] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well the philosophy of the Taoist-based, which is sort of a philosophy of oneness with nature, essentially if you can boil it down to something. And the fact that we are part of nature and we are completely not extricable from that process. The things that make the amino acids and the things that makeup and the structures around us, we are made of the same things. We’re all made of the same things. So that harmony is inherent in Chinese medicine, and I think is inherent in all-natural medicines and all traditional natural medicines that are originating out of cultures that are connected to cultural traditions. Which is very different from the current western medical paradigm, which it’s an analysis. That’s an analysis-based, and that comes around from something like having a microscope and trying to see smaller and smaller pieces, and smaller and smaller parts and isolate understanding. That’s very different. It’s just a different way of looking at the world, and it’s a different way of looking at medicine and the body. They’re both, obviously, entirely valid. They’re just different.

[00:13:23] Ashley James: What’s been described to me is that we need to know when to which doctor, not witch doctors. We need to know when to go to the MD. When to go to the emergency room, essentially. When to go to your Naturopath. When to go to your doctor of oriental medicine. When you go to your chiropractor, right? There are several different forms of medicine and they’re all valid. And if we look at the history of modern medicine in the last 115 years or so, what then became the AMA, the AMA, for so many years, has done huge slander campaigns against all other forms of medicine. And they actually coined it as alternative medicine. And that is almost like it’s Orwellian in a sense that if they can label everything else, everything that isn’t drug-based medicine alternative medicine, then what they’ve done is they made it sound less than.

A Naturopath that I’ve worked with said that if you said a German shepherd was the only actual dog, and every other dog was an alternative dog—the German shepherd is the one dog everyone should have, but a greyhound is an alternative dog, a little Weiner dog is an alternative dog, and the Australian shepherd is an alternative dog. That is absolutely silly, right? It’s completely silly. There is no such thing as alternative medicine. That term was used to discredit valid forms of medicine.

As a doctor of oriental medicine, you’re saying that it’s quite science-based for the last 5000 years. Now there is an appeal to novelty. I was recently sharing a study with someone. In the ‘70s, they were able to reverse gestational diabetes. It was an amazing study, but it was done in the ‘70s. This woman then said, “That’s not valid, it was done in the ‘70s.” I’m thinking, did our genes all of a sudden change? Are we no longer the same humans as the ‘70s? Why isn’t a study that was done 50 years ago valid? I think that’s really funny.

Perhaps there are some listeners who think that oriental medicine, yes, it may have been practiced for 5000 years, but at some point, we practiced bloodletting. We realized that’s not a valid form of medicine, but at the time it was science. What could you share with us that proves that oriental medicine is quite valid now? What kinds of recent studies are showing how it can very much help us?

[00:16:30] Dr. Laura Kelly: I mean there are two parts to that answer, and the first part is like you said, our bodies are still the same as they were. Until we have different bodies, then the things that worked 5000 years ago will still work, and the things that work in the ‘70s will still work. What’s happening now, for example, let’s take malaria. So malaria, obviously, one of the problems is that the bugs get used to the drugs. The World Health Organization is in charge of defining what malaria drugs are being used. 

It was not that long ago, maybe it was 10 years ago, that it was realized that there’s a traditional Chinese medical formula for malaria. I think it’s probably 8 or 12—I’m sorry, I don’t remember exactly. But you learn it, and what you learn is that you can take this prophylactically. You can take this before you are exposed, and you can take it as a treatment, and it works. Malaria is not a big deal if you know how to treat it with this. That’s what you learn in school, that’s what the books say, and that’s what everything says. 

So in 2005, maybe, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the date. There was a Chinese medical researcher who brought forward the isolate from one of the main herbs in this formula and said we can cure malaria with this and won the Nobel prize. She won the Nobel prize in medicine for this isolate from a Chinese medical herb that had been used for thousands of years, and the WHO adopted this herb and said, yes, this is absolutely correct. This herb works. So what they did is they created a drug cocktail for malaria with this as the key component because the other drugs that they had been using against malaria were starting to fall off. They weren’t working anymore. So they added this constituent, which is an isolate, and it worked for a number of years. It is, as far as, I know starting to fall off now. The bugs are starting to become accustomed to this isolate as well. So they’re going to have to keep looking and look for more things.

There are two issues with this. One of them is that this was a malaria formula that we all know that is useful, functional, and does what it says it’s going to do, so much so that the WHO said this is a drug. The problem comes when you pull isolates, and this goes back to the concept of different medicines. If you pull an isolate out of a complex formula, if you have 8 herbs or 12 herbs, you’re going to have hundreds and hundreds of active ingredients, and they’re all going to be working against each other and with each other. And that combination, that’s a massive numerical combination of effect, which is not possible to replicate. 

So if you pull out one isolate from the thousands and thousands or millions of reactions that are occurring within your system with all of those herbs, you’re exposing the effect to exactly what happened, which is the bugs—because it’s an isolate—can now overcome this single substance. Where it was when it was part of a much larger combination, it was harder for the body of the bug to overcome. There’s a danger a little bit when you’re moving between medicines that way if you don’t understand the complexity of the synergy of the effect of the medicinal herbs that you’re working with. You use an isolate because that’s the medicine you work in, the medical paradigm is isolationist. That is a little bit off the subject.

[00:20:34] Ashley James: No, that’s brilliant. That’s right on point. Do the Chinese herbs that they’ve used for thousands of years for malaria still work today? Or has malaria adapted?

[00:20:49] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. It still works in combination, as far as I know. The bug hasn’t completely overcome this isolate, but it’s starting to. I think it’s in Cambodia that it started to become non-effective or less effective.

[00:21:06] Ashley James: The isolate was turned into a drug, but I mean the original cocktail of Chinese herbs? The original, not the isolate, but the original cocktail of herbs, are they still used, and are they still valid?

[00:21:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. Until I hear otherwise, they are still valid, and that’s because of the complexity that you encounter when you combine 8 or 10 herbs with, let’s just say, 40 active constituents that are going to all playoff against each other. You’re creating a complex, complex response in the system. So, yeah.

[00:21:45] Ashley James: I interviewed a doctor who’s been an MD for 40 years, although he studied in a part of Germany that very interesting—while he was becoming a surgeon, while all these doctors become surgeons, they’re also taught acupuncture and homeopathy at the same time at the university level. He came to the United States 40 years ago thinking that all doctors knew homeopathy and acupuncture.

[00:22:09] Dr. Laura Kelly: Oh, that’s wonderful.

[00:22:10] Ashley James: And then he was like, what’s going on here? Why are we giving drugs to people? His name is Dr. Klinghardt, and he has an amazing, amazing ability to help children who are on the spectrum no longer be on the spectrum, also people who have Lyme disease, and just these very strange and hard to get over illnesses. He says his favorite thing to do is to find—someone that needs a drug, let’s say, and then—the herbal alternative that works better than the drug. 

So he doesn’t ever use drugs unless he absolutely, absolutely, absolutely needs to. But he says that herbs always work better than the drug that would be prescribed to that symptom because most drugs are an isolate, like you said, of an herb. Like a compound of an herb, but they throw away all the other medicinal benefits from the herb when they just isolate one component. And this is the problem because drugs are for-profit—I know I’m singing to the choir—they end up looking to make a profit and protect patents instead of looking out for the greater good of humanity, in which case we would still be using and promoting the herbal complex that has worked to prevent and cure malaria.

[00:23:45] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. I think that there are quite a lot of people—to defend some of them—who are well-meaning. There was a symposium yesterday, and the discussion was about certain vaccine development. The concept around vaccine development is to find something that can help the world, right? To cure whatever disease is going to be, but the paradigm with which that is in is the paradigm of what’s the disease, and what’s the treatment. And the human body and the environment in which that disease is occurring is left out of that equation.

There’s a whole other side of medicine, which is the side of medicine that I chose to practice, which is primarily concerned with the human body, the environment of that human body, and the environment into which the disease comes. It’s like two different approaches to the same median, which is the human body interacting with the world. The human body interacting with the disease. And they have one angle, which is the disease treatment, and we have one angle, which is the environment of the body itself. Bringing them together is what everybody really needs, right?

When the problem that you’re speaking about before about the AMA trashing all of us is really unfortunate to me. It’s not classy, you know what I mean? It’s just not classy. When you start mixing dogma and medicine, I think you have a recipe for a real problem.

[00:25:32] Ashley James: That’s why I believe that people should know more about each kind of doctor, each kind of medicine. Instead of having a dogma about it, they can go to the right practitioner. You wouldn’t take your car to see a plumber. Don’t take your body to always the same kind of doctor because you’re just going to get their one philosophy of medicine. So just know which one to go to when, and I’ve had several episodes about this. So let’s learn more about you, how you practice medicine, and as a doctor of oriental medicine. Especially because you’re so excited about the science behind it, the philosophy that we are part of nature, and let’s use nature to bolster the environment of our body so our body can really do the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting off disease, right?

Let’s bolster our own amazing God-given ability. If you’re a spiritual person, you believe in God, and you start studying how the immune system works, it is amazing. When I started studying and really getting into it, we are so complex. Our immune system is so brilliant. Our body functions are so beautiful, so harmonious. There are thousands of things all going on together in harmony. There’s nothing like it. There’s absolutely nothing like it. And even if you look some at simpler organisms, they’re still incredibly complex and beautiful, and there’s this balance. Homeostasis is amazing.

If you’re someone that doesn’t believe in God, look into the science and just see how complex, beautiful, and intelligent it is. We have to really appreciate that our body has an innate intelligence to come back into balance, and it’s our job to help it. You as a doctor look to facilitate bringing the body back into balance so the body’s intelligence can do all the work, right?

[00:27:44] Dr. Laura Kelly: That’s beautifully said. Absolutely. That’s exactly what I do because there isn’t any reason to try and throw it off. I mean certainly, there are circumstances, like Dr. Klinghardt, if you’ve gotten to the end, you’ve tried everything, and if the problem is just too entrenched or it’s a genetic problem, then you may not have success. But even then, you can somewhat. The last resort, of course, is to really hit it hard with the heavy hammer of a western pharmaceutical. Up until that point, there’s incredible knowledge within the body that if you give it the right pieces, it knows what to do with them. That’s for sure.

[00:28:31] Ashley James: Your book is about supporting the skeletal system. What led you to want to publish this book?

[00:28:40] Dr. Laura Kelly: My mother. She had a progressive bone loss for about 18 years, and she finally hit the point where her doctor said to her, if you don’t take this reclass shot, then I can’t treat you any further because you will break your hip, and then you might die. My mother called me, and I was in school at that time. She said, “What am I supposed to do?” And I said, “Well, you know what, there are a number of herbs that I know fix fractures. Let me look into this. I’ll get back to you in a couple of months.”

So I took a fracture map of the world, I looked at high and low fracture rates in the elderly over time, pulled apart the diets of the people with the high and low fractures, and figured out what was missing and what needed to happen. I called her back in two months and I said, “Here’s a list of the reasons why I believe this is happening. So pick three of them and start there.” So she did that, and then we did another DEXA scan early. You’re supposed to do them every two years. We did it in 15 months, and for the first time in 18 years, she had no bone loss. So her doctor said, “Well, that’s a complete fluke. You still have to take medicine.” And my mother said, “Well, you know what, let’s just wait just a minute.”

So in the meantime, she had a scan and her cardiologist called me and she said, “What did you do? Because the plaque is clearing out of her carotid arteries.” So I said, “It’s all nutritionally-based. What I’m doing is activating the mechanisms that she already has in her body that weren’t activated to guide the calcium where it needs to go. And I guess, as a byproduct of that, it happens to be clearing the calcified plaque out of her arteries.” So she said, “Well, you need to write a book for doctors. You need to write a book for doctors because you’re sort of sciencey. You bridge the gap.” So I started that, and then I realized that this wasn’t for doctors. That this was medicine that people can do themselves.

Of course, MDs, medically trained doctors, do need to understand these principles and practices because they can help their patients. But it felt more important to me, at the time, and it probably still is more important to me to write it for my mother and for other mothers because there isn’t a reason to fear this diagnosis in 99% of cases or 99.9%, and you can actually take care of it yourself. So it made much more sense to write the book, again, for mothers.

So I called my mother and I said, “Hey, listen.” And by this time, she had had a second DEXA scan, again, not in four years, but still within another year maybe, and she still had no bone loss. So we realized that this wasn’t a fluke. Her doctor said, “Okay, well maybe it’s not a fluke.” So I called my mother and I said, “You know what, let’s write this together because this is for you. Let’s do it.” So we did that. We called a publisher and said, “Do you want to publish this?” And Chelsea Green, a wonderful publisher, said yes. So we sat down and wrote it.

[00:32:14] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I love it. I’m so excited.

[00:32:20] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. It was a wonderful process.

[00:32:21] Ashley James: Okay. So what I want to know is why was she reluctant to get the shots? Most people are super wanting to do whatever their doctor says. I know a lot of people who just go in. They go in because they’re sick and the doctor says, while you’re here, let’s give you a flu shot. Well, they’re sick. Well, their well their immune system is compromised. Oh, it’s time for these other vaccines. Oh, we need to give you the… So anyway, most people go in and get whatever shot, whatever medication, blindly follow without question whatever their doctor says. You said it was a reclass shot? What was it about that had your mother go wait a second, I want to think about this. Why was she not super eager to do exactly what her doctor said without question?

[00:33:20] Dr. Laura Kelly: Because I had started going to alternative medicine school. I think I was in year six at that point out of seven, or maybe I was actually in year seven. I’m sorry, I was in year seven. I had already been speaking to her and taking care of her from this more natural perspective for six years. So over that six-year period, gone from not really knowing or having any interest to buy now at year seven, she was sort of saying okay, well wait a minute, this is actually serious. This is actually real. This is actually right. When that came up, then she could turn to me instead of her doctor.

[00:34:13] Ashley James: You had been in school for oriental medicine for a while, so you had a few years to have her see some results. What kind of results was she getting to open her eyes to natural medicine? Did you help her through any other health problems before this?

[00:34:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: No. She was fairly healthy. She was very healthy really, to begin with. She has a natural instinct as well, which I think had never been allowed to live. Do you know what I mean? I think that was a latent belief or a latent tendency in her to connect with nature and all that sort of thing. But she grew up in the ‘50s, and life was a little different then. She didn’t participate in the ‘60s revolution, so she was outside of any of that mind-expanding situation that occurred. That was latent in her, and I think that when I took the step, it allowed her to let that out a little bit, and let her think about exploring other things other than the things that she’d been told. So I think it was a gradual process, but again, it was inherent in her already.

[00:35:41] Ashley James: I love it. We have to foster that quiet voice inside of us that is the first voice, that little voice that comes in first, and then we usually override it. It’s like the voice that says bring an umbrella when it’s sunny outside. That’s the voice, right? Or bring a sweater when it’s hot outside. That little voice, that first voice. So when a doctor says, You have to take this medicine, and that little voice says, no, I don’t think so. Something feels wrong here. We just need to listen. Just take a step back.

[00:36:18] Dr. Laura Kelly: That’s really wonderful. That’s a wonderful thing to say. But that’s not taught, Ashley. We don’t learn to do that in our culture. We don’t learn to sit with ourselves quietly and listen. It’s something that definitely happens. I mean meditation, these moving meditations, tai chi, and things like this. For example, part of the tradition of medicine that I learned, all of this is part of medicine. All of this is part of caring for the body. You don’t come with an instruction manual. You don’t come with all of the things that you need in order to take care of yourself, but you come with, in that tradition, medical practices. Medical practices that you carry with you throughout your life in order to keep yourself healthy, in order to treat yourself, in order to listen to your body. And you learn how to do that within that culture.

We don’t learn that here. It’s not part of our cultural upbringing. It’s not part of our cultural heritage. Everything should function great, and then when it stops functioning great we go, oh, what am I supposed to do now? Okay, here’s somebody that knows what I’m supposed to do. I’m going to listen to them. Part of the holistic medical road is you learn to care for yourself from the beginning, and you learn to help the people that you live with. You learn to care for the people who are around you, and this is part of the medical structure.

So this is an inherently different way of approaching life. It’s saying part of my life is self-care. That’s a very powerful thing to learn when you’re young, right? I didn’t learn that until I was well into my 30s. But I can imagine what it would have felt like to learn that from when I was very young.

[00:38:24] Ashley James: Yes. Can you imagine if we raised an entire generation to practice self-care?

[00:38:30] Dr. Laura Kelly: I can’t, I cannot, but it would be wonderful.

[00:38:34] Ashley James: Okay, one thing I’m deeply saddened by but I want to shed light on is that the rate of suicide for ages 10 to 26 has gone up so much. I believe it’s the second cause of death in that generation right now. That it is so high. There’s a huge disconnect, and with holistic medicine, we know that emotional, mental, and physical health because MDs mostly focus on the physical. They see a symptom they attack it with a drug, or they manage, they suppress symptoms. They manage things with drugs. There are enlightened MDs out there. I know sometimes I sound like I’m bashing them. I want us to just broaden our perspective and really see the whole forest. Just get a 30,000-foot view.

We have been taught that there’s a physical body and it’s separate. It’s separate from mental, emotional health, and that in our culture, when you have the mental and emotional issues, there’s something wrong with you. We’re either normal or abnormal. That’s a philosophy that says we’re broken. And that is just such an incomplete version of what it is. The experience of what it is to be human.

[00:40:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s inhuman.

[00:40:04] Ashley James: Right. It’s inhuman to think that when someone has mental and emotional unhealth, that we’re broken. When in fact, it is part of being human. That we have an emotional body. We have mental health things to work out, and it’s not you’re normal or abnormal, you’re human, right? 

What we’re seeing is suicide rates going up is a symptom of a problem that our medical system is broken, which we already knew that. But also, our philosophy—as parents, as aunts and uncles, and as cousins—of how we’re raising this generation is incomplete. And what we need to do is come back to what you’re saying. Maybe this is your next book. Just like you looked at cultures that have the lowest rate of osteoporosis and the lowest rate of fractures, and then you looked at what was different in their diet versus the ones with the highest. What about cultures that have the lowest rate of suicide and what they’re doing differently? What philosophy are they doing differently? 

I really feel that self-care taught at an early age also increases self-worth, and if we can practice things like becoming quiet, doing breathing—I mean meditation kind of is a trigger word for some people because it seems too daunting. But simply going into oneself and just turn off the cell phone. Turn off the outside stimulus, and go into oneself—journal, breathe, get out in nature, do some self-reflection, share your thoughts and feelings with someone who’s supportive, and disconnect from negative energy, negative social media, that kind of thing, and practice self-care. There would also be a component of self-love and self-respect. 

We really need to look at what’s going on because if we have a generation that has huge mental and emotional health issues, they’re not practicing self-care, self-love. And these are the things that also, as you say, are done in cultures that have less disease.

[00:42:35] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. I mean it is a philosophical issue back to that. There isn’t a cultural philosophy that I can pinpoint in America that’s effective in that sort of way. I didn’t grow up with one. So it’s hard, at any point, to say okay, now we have to find a philosophy because that’s not how it works. And that’s why everybody gets sort of tripped up with this concept. Can I meditate? Like you said, it’s really daunting because there is no philosophical base for the concept. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re meditating. It doesn’t matter if you call it that. It doesn’t matter if you do it right. None of that matters. What matters is that you are listening to yourself, and you’re saying I am making space for you. I am making time for you. That’s it. That’s all that actually matters about it. Because when you start to recognize that you just want to make space for yourself, whatever that means for you, then you are respecting yourself. Then you’re respecting your body, and you’re respecting your mind. The response that you get from that will be enormous.

To me, it’s about separating it from the concepts because we don’t have a philosophy in which to place the concepts. So let’s just get rid of them and say well, what am I actually doing? What I’m actually doing is respecting and loving myself, and that’s all I have to do. And if you start there, then you will grow your own philosophy out of that seed. That’s how I help people in a mental and philosophical way. It’s really just about do I love myself enough to sit and say, I’m going to give myself some space and time. If you find that you don’t, then you have to do some examination. Find ways into being good with sitting with yourself and giving yourself respect. But this takes us back to the mental-physical conjunction. The lack of separation of these things.

We’ll pull it back down to reality. When you start to examine things like nutrition and brain function, the mechanisms in the brain, every single neurotransmitter turning into another neurotransmitter, every single function of the neurotransmitters, and the neurotransmitters themselves, all require different nutrients. The neurotransmitters need amino acids to be built. The translation of GABA to glutamate needs vitamin B6 and magnesium. If you don’t have these things, your brain isn’t going to work very well, and of course, you’re going to not feel good in a mental space. These are fundamental pieces. These are key important pieces.

And then the other part of that is, for example, with B6, if you’re looking, if you’re speaking with autistic kids or people with ADHD and focus problems, again, vitamin B6 is one of the key factors for transforming glutamate into GABA. And that’s the inhibition of the stimulation. So if you don’t have enough magnesium, which a majority of Americans apparently don’t according to all sources including the US government, but also a lot of issues can come around the B vitamins in terms of the transformation of the B vitamins within your body. Because the form that you eat a vitamin in is not the form your body uses it in. It has to go through transformational steps, and every single one of those transformational steps is regulated by a gene. All genes have the ability to be mutated or have polymorphisms.

So quite a lot of times, what you find is that even though this child is eating B vitamins, the pathway of transformation for some of the B vitamins isn’t working. So the form that he needs the B6 in order to transform the excitatory neurotransmitter into the inhibitory neurotransmitter his body doesn’t make. So he could eat B6 forever, and he still would not be able to efficiently make that transformation. So the glutamate will stay high, the inhibition of the GABA won’t happen, and he’s excited. 

But when you understand this process that the body has to go through these genetic transformations to make these things actually available, and that every single step is an opportunity for it to go wrong. When you start to understand those pathways you can say okay, now I need to give him the pre-transformed version of B6 because his body’s not doing it. And then the neurotransmitters start to function properly in that mechanism.

[00:48:20] Ashley James: Can that be derived from food? Or would that need to be a methylated B vitamin supplement?

[00:48:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: It would need to be a methylated supplement. So these are the pieces that are really key to understanding anything that you want. The entire system is built from nutrients, right? There’s no way around that. All nutrients and everything that comes into your body is information, essentially. How is that body set up to receive that information, and can it use the information? Does it understand the language? Or does it need help understanding that language information? That’s the base in my having looked at this and worked with lots and lots of patients, and thought about all different types of disease and all different types of mental states and things like this.

The bottom of the foundation of all this just simply is understanding. All of the nutrients are necessary—minerals, vitamins, everything is necessary. There’s nothing that’s not supposed to be there. It all has to be there. How does this particular person’s body respond and use that information—those nutrients? Let’s optimize that function as much as possible so that they can get the most out of everything that they’re taking because everybody’s taking supplements, and everybody’s trying to figure out what the right diet is. But without knowing this information, there is no optimization possible. Sometimes, it’s not possible to get happier, better brain function if you’re not transforming your B vitamins.

So these are things that just have to be known, and to me, this is fundamental medicine. From my perspective, the real foundational medicine of this body is nutrition because it’s the only way that it functions. As scientists, as doctors, we have to say, okay, this is the fundamental medicine. Let’s dig into it. Let’s pull it apart and figure out everything we need to understand how to make this work for us. And that wasn’t done by western medicine. Luckily now, it’s being done by a lot of people. And there’s a lot of nutritional medicine and research going on, are really coming to understand how these things function and why they’re so important.

Let me step back all the way to the very bottom of our bodies, which is our DNA. Not even speaking about it from the place of what it does, but speaking about the fact that what it is. DNA is made of something, and it’s made of nucleic acids. Nucleic acids, guess where we get them? We eat them, right? We have a pathway within us which is called a de novo synthesis pathway which can recycle what we have, but human breast milk is full of nucleic acid because that baby needs a huge supply of nucleic acids to build DNA because that baby is just pumping out cells rapidly.

Coming back again, the nucleic acids, we get them from what we eat, but we also need to structure them into DNA. Our body does that in the liver, but it does not do that without folate, without the vitamins, and without the nutrients. These are co-factors that our body uses to build our DNA. To take those nucleic acids, put them together, and make the strands. Without the co-factors of B vitamins, for example, it won’t happen. We won’t build DNA.

So when you’re looking at a system, for example, the immune system which is a rapid turnover—you’re going to get a turnover of cells every day, three to six days you’re going to get a full turnover of cells. The digestive tract, six days turnover of cells. These are rapidly turning over systems. Your body is constantly having to replenish cells, building cells all the time in these two systems. So these two systems need a lot of nucleic acids because you’re building a lot of DNA because there’s DNA in every cell.

You can pull nutrition back to this extremely base level and really see that this is really important because your immune system will not function if you don’t have enough nutritional co-factors, If you don’t have enough nucleic acids, which you get from mushrooms, for example.

[00:53:21] Ashley James: Ohh.

[00:53:22] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, nice link, right?

[00:53:26] Ashley James: I love mushrooms so much.

[00:53:28] Dr. Laura Kelly: Mushrooms are amazing, and they’re the only real substantial source of nucleic acids in the plant kingdom.

[00:53:35] Ashley James: Wow, really?

[00:53:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. This is why they have been used traditionally for thousands and thousands of years as a longevity food.

[00:53:42] Ashley James: Any mushroom? Or are there certain kinds of mushrooms that have more co-factors than others?

[00:53:48] Dr. Laura Kelly: They have different factors meaning there are multiple levels of function with mushrooms. So you have the source of nucleic acids within the mushrooms, which are the building blocks for the DNA, but then you also have specific factors within each of the different types of mushrooms that trigger different immune system cell type growth. So some of the immune some of the mushrooms will trigger early phase immune response like natural killer cells and macrophages, and some of the mushrooms will trigger later stage cells—T cells, B cells, and things like this. There are multiple layers to the mushrooms in terms of the immune system and longevity.

[00:54:31] Ashley James: What kind of mushrooms do you eat on a regular basis?

[00:54:34] Dr. Laura Kelly: I eat chaga. I fluctuate depending on whatever is around. But reishi daily staple, chaga tea once a month, lion’s mane sometimes, and sort of geared towards brain health neuroplasticity, things like that.

[00:55:00] Ashley James: So those are supplements you can drink as teas or take as extracts. What about eating? Are there certain types of mushrooms that are better than others?

[00:55:13] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’m not a massive expert on mushrooms, even though I’d like to be. I think that shiitakes are particularly good. They seem to be very complex. That’s what I would suggest.

[00:55:29] Ashley James: I’ve had Dr. Joel Fuhrman on the show, and he says that everyone should eat a half a cup of mushrooms a day for some of the same reasons you’re expressing. In addition, at least a half a cup of onion, and you can mix them together. You can eat it raw or cooked. For this one particular nutrient he was talking about, and there are so many nutrients in the mushrooms. I always thought they were just water. I didn’t think that there was anything nutritionally beneficial in them, but they’re actually completely superfoods. 

Obviously buy all mushrooms should be organic because you don’t want to buy pesticide-filled mushrooms. But he said the white button cap ones, the ones that are usually void of flavor, shiitake is so flavorful. So these are very mild in flavor, and they’re the least expensive ones. He said that it actually has this one nutrient. I forget what nutrient it was, but one nutrient he was talking about that helps the immune system that they were quite high in it. You could save money and buy—it’s usually $4 a pound organic—and get these little white button cap ones.

I love cooking with mushrooms. Aren’t the building blocks as well for vitamin D? It’s like D1 or something is in mushrooms.

[00:57:00] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, that’s right. Maitake mushrooms are the only ones that actually have inherently vitamin D in them. Well, they have a significant amount of vitamin D compared to the rest of the mushrooms, but if you flip them up and put them in the sun gills up until they’re a little bit dry, they absorb vitamin D just like your skin does from the sun and they’ll store that.

[00:57:31] Ashley James: Yes. Then you eat it and then it’s like a vitamin D supplement.

[00:57:35] Dr. Laura Kelly: Exactly. It’s just way cheaper and more delicious.

[00:57:38] Ashley James: Oh, it’s so cool. That’s so neat. So besides mushrooms though, you’re saying that’s really the best source for the raw building blocks for nucleic acid. Would we have to then eat animals at that point if someone, for whatever reason, had adversity to mushrooms? Or is there anything else in the plant kingdom that we could eat?

[00:57:57] Dr. Laura Kelly: As far as I know, that’s the richest source is mushrooms. Other than that, you’re looking at organ meats, basically.

[00:58:08] Ashley James: Got it. Wow. I mean, that’s amazing. Let’s say someone eats the standard American diet but doesn’t eat mushrooms, doesn’t eat organ meats, they might be really low in nucleic acid.

[00:58:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well, this is a question. I mean, we do have a de novo synthesis pathway, which is we can recycle these pieces and make what we need to make, but again, when you’re dealing with a system with a high turnover like the immune system, the reproductive system, or the gastrointestinal system, you may not actually. This hasn’t really been researched, actually, which I find pretty interesting. It’s been researched more in Japan than it has here, by far. But there was one study that looked at if you’re an elite athlete and you’re pushing your body quite hard, one of the things that suffer post-exercise is immunity. So your immune system, the regulation goes down.

So there was research where they decided that they would supplement these elite athletes with nucleic acids post-exercise and see, and it stopped the immune fall-off.

[00:59:27] Ashley James: How did they supplement? With the actual supplement, or they ate mushrooms?

[00:59:31] Dr. Laura Kelly: No, nucleic acids. I don’t know if it was a synthesized nucleic acid. I’m not sure where they got them, but there was a nucleic acid supplement. It provokes an interesting idea, which is if you’re immune-compromised, you can generally say that if you’re suffering from a chronic condition, you can guess that you’re having low natural killer cell function, which is the first phase of the immune response. So it begs the question, what happens with people who are having faltering immune responses if we supplement them with nucleic acids? So they’re actually able to produce more DNA and more cells. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it’s an interesting question from a supplementation standpoint, for sure.

[01:00:22] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, absolutely. So we’re looking at the body with a different philosophy. You mentioned that the body can recycle. So let’s say someone’s not eating foods that are rich in nucleic acid. The body’s recycling old cells as they die and reusing the nucleic acid. What co-factors are needed in order to do this recycling?

[01:00:55] Dr. Laura Kelly: You know what, Ashley, I don’t know because I have really just started digging into this in the past week because I’m writing a book on the immune system and longevity.

[01:01:05] Ashley James: Fantastic. Well, there’s my question for you. When you have completed that book, come back to the show and I want to know the answer.

[01:01:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: Definitely.

[01:01:14] Ashley James: Looking at each function of the body, for example, in recycling the body’s own glutathione, so glutathione is very expensive for the body to make. I believe the liver produces it. It’s our master antioxidant, so it’s obviously incredibly important, but it’s very expensive for the body to make. However, when selenium is present, which is a micronutrient—it’s like a mineral—then the body can recycle it. So that’s one of the co-factors the body needs to recycle glutathione.

If we make sure we supplement with selenium, you don’t need to overdo it. 200 micrograms a day or between 200 and 600, depending on your weight, is great. But that’s supporting the liver in recycling glutathione, which helps us to fight off cancer and other diseases. If we knew the factors needed in recycling other things in the body like nucleic acid, then we can make sure that we have them.

[01:02:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Exactly. That’s my goal is to put together the list. Maybe someone has done this already. If anybody knows, definitely let us know, but I haven’t found any sort of supplementation in terms of exactly what you’re speaking of—providing nucleic acid bases, but also providing some co-factors along with that to really help the body produce the cells that it needs to produce. I think it’s a really interesting project.

[01:02:48] Ashley James: As you research, had you come across the effects of fasting, especially after 30 hours of fasting when the body’s ability to break down pathological tissue skyrockets?

[01:03:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[01:03:06] Ashley James: Is that part of your system, or do you recommend that for people looking to speed up their healing?

[01:03:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. Well, it depends. It depends on how weak you are. It depends on if you’re diabetic. If you’re diabetic, it’s not a good idea. That’s going to be a mess. You need to do that with serious supervision. But in general, yeah. The upregulation of all sorts of longevity factors on top of all of that, there isn’t really another way to kick the body into that sort of behavior, except by fasting. And again, looking back at—I’m sure many of your other guests have taken this road and spoke about this—how we evolved, it’s again like looking back to nature.

You look back to how we evolved and you say, how did this organism function? What does that mean for us in the environment we’re in, where food is completely plentiful? We can get whatever we want even if it doesn’t grow around here. All of these things are all questions to ask because there is a perfect harmony that comes out of evolution. The farther we get from those and the small choices that we make that distance us from that perfect harmony eventually are going to have an effect.

Coming back to look at how we evolved, which is if we went out and we killed this animal or whatever we ate for a while, and then we didn’t eat meat for three months or whatever. Giving the body the natural patterns, looking at those natural patterns, and saying how we evolved is with those patterns. So that’s probably going to be what our body is going to respond to.

[01:04:51] Ashley James: Right, right. In the west, we’re so afraid of even missing a meal let alone fasting, but there’s so much evidence to show that it’s incredibly healthy. And yes, I have done interviews about it, and there’s lots of science now proving that you can do fasting in a very healthy and restorative way.

I want to talk more about your book. Before I do, I want to bring up one more thing. I have a friend. It’s a friend’s mother, and she has had her gallbladder removed. She has basically had every part of your body you can have removed and still survive. This is exactly what she said to me, “I’ve had everything removed that you can without dying.” Gallbladder, she’s had her parathyroid removed, she’s had her appendix removed, so you go down the list.

She’s 60 years old, relatively healthy, and all of a sudden, a few weeks ago, began having huge dizziness, can’t walk, her legs won’t work, and people have to just support her weight. She was so dizzy she was vomiting. It took several hospitals to finally diagnose her with—first they said it was peripheral vertigo, which is not accurate. Then they said, okay, it’s central vertigo. And then a neurologist, after doing a lot of blood work said, she has virtually no copper in her system. So she’s being supplemented with 2mg of copper a day for a year, which I think is incredible.

[01:06:27] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s high.

[01:06:29] Ashley James: Yeah, very high. But given that, the neurologist is not recommending any co-factors—not calcium, not magnesium, nothing. No co-factors at all. This woman has not had parathyroid for years, so her body has not regulated any of the minerals correctly. I’m kind of just taken aback. And she’s never done a bone density scan. I’m thinking, what’s going on…? Because you mentioned about the brain and how there are certain nutrients like if B6 is missing, you can actually—and I’ve heard of people having dementia, being put in nursing homes, and then a Naturopath is called by a family member. They get them on a B supplement and all of a sudden the lights come back on. They didn’t have dementia. They had a B-vitamin deficiency.

If you have a B6 deficiency, the brain is not going to function. But if you’re incredibly deficient in trace elements and minerals like copper, for example, or major ones like magnesium or calcium, the nervous system doesn’t function correctly. I’d love for you to share. For some people who let’s say they don’t have a thyroid or parathyroid. Their body really cannot regulate healthfully on its own, what steps do you recommend? Do you recommend that they definitely read your book and do this diet? What steps do you recommend, especially for this woman, my friend’s mother?

[01:07:56] Dr. Laura Kelly: Again, my book isn’t a diet. I’m not really a proponent of that because everybody has different needs, everybody has different things that they want to do, and the ways that they want to eat. So I’m not prescribing a diet, just to clarify.

[01:08:13] Ashley James: Love it.

[01:08:15] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’m saying here are the mechanisms in terms of how your bones work and your body works around those bones, and here are the things you need in order to activate those mechanisms. I’m not dictating how you need to get them. So if you want to get your calcium from dairy, you can. If you want to get your calcium from leafy greens, you can. It doesn’t matter to me. Within that context, she’s not going to be regulating calcium. She’s not going to be regulating the bone density aspect. Then there’s a mechanism called osteocalcin. This mechanism is really key to regulating all of that and making sure that the calcium is going the right place.

So understanding how to activate those mechanisms nutritionally sound really important to me for this person, and making sure that all of the factors are in place to make sure that those mechanisms are functioning without the oversight is really the situation that she wants to be in. If I were her doctor, I would run for her a nutrition evaluation first, and that’s going to look at basically all nutrients and say where are we with all of those things.

I may also run genetics for those nutritional pathways because it’s really important for her, especially this person with lack of regulation over this issue, to understand where we may be running into trouble. For example, this all started with me because my vitamin D levels were chronically low. I didn’t understand why for so long, and I took the standard dose of vitamin D, and I never erased them. I finally said this is ridiculous. So I ran my genetics, and I have terrible vitamin G receptor genetics. There are four different transformations that are going to make, three of mine are in the toilet.

So I tripled my dose of vitamin D, and I finally got where I needed to be. I would never have done that, and I spent years vitamin D deficient taking vitamin D. Especially for somebody who doesn’t have a lot of leeway, coming to understand if there are any things in the way from her body and saying, okay, let’s understand all of that, and then just make sure she has the proper doses of all of those nutrients, then you don’t need to overdose on any of the other ones. You don’t need to overdose on things because the body itself, like you were saying before, is so efficient that if you give it the right amounts of things, you’re not going to need to over supplement on anything and throw off because you’re going to throw something else off if you over supplement with copper.

[01:11:07] Ashley James: Absolutely.

[01:11:10] Dr. Laura Kelly: So you want to avoid doing that, of course, because you shouldn’t. You don’t need to, but what you do need to do is exactly like you said. You have to provide all of the co-factors that the copper needs to function, which is exactly the same situation that I encountered with my mother when her doctor had initially said, here take these calcium pills—1200 milligrams of calcium a day. Well, if you look at the research, 1200 milligrams of calcium a day doesn’t fix osteoporosis, and it also ups your chances of cardiovascular problems quite significantly.

[01:11:47] Ashley James: Especially because there are no other co-factors. Magnesium is needed to help place calcium correctly, and there are other nutrients as well, right? So if you’re only taking one, and they have to be in a great ratio, then you’re right. It’s not going to be placed correctly in the body. But just overdoing copper—and you’re much more of an expert than I am, but I know for example—throws vitamin C off, and it throws selenium off. Those three things have to be in the right ratios together. Because some people will overdose vitamin C, and that’s good in certain circumstances. But if you overdose vitamin C, it leeches copper from the body.

Copper deficiency leads to aneurysms because it’s needed in the production. It’s a co-factor in elastin, and it’s also needed for making pigment. So people who lose the ability to make pigment or have gray hair have a copper deficiency. Everything has to be done together in balance, but I love that you talk about this genetic component of epigenetics—looking at how the genes are expressing. I have the MTHFR SNP mutation—however, it’s said—and so I have to take a methylated B-vitamins in order to support my liver to do both phases of detox.

I haven’t even gone deeper into the genetics like looking at how my body—the four different genes that help the body make the D-vitamin, that’s incredibly interesting. So you do telemedicine. You see patients locally in LA, but you also work with people around the world. Can you order these tests and can you decipher them, these gene tests?

[01:13:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. I have actually. I’m in the process, and I’m almost finished building a piece of software that does this because it’s so important. If you want to stay healthy for as long as possible, you have to understand this. If you want to fix your type 2 diabetes, you have to do this. If you want to fix your heart disease, 90% of people who have these problems can reverse them. I don’t want to be too bold about it, but it can prevent, reverse, or mitigate the problems here.

[01:14:20] Ashley James: Absolutely. Even type 1 diabetics, they can increase their health so much that they require less insulin. I’ve known several type 1 diabetics who after focusing on health. They were able to cut down their insulin by over 70% because they increased insulin sensitivity, their body became more efficient. So even people who have issues where we’re not saying you’re curing it, but you can make it more efficient.

[01:14:52] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, definitely. All of these things. Again, we know that we need to eat a good diet. We have good instincts, usually, about our own bodies and what we should and should not be eating. Over time we come to know that, but let’s get to it for real. Let’s just look at it and say, okay, your vitamin D function is terrible. You need to triple a dose. Okay, your B-vitamin functions are fantastic. Just sit in the sun for 10 minutes. We can do that. We can do that now.

What I’m building here is a piece of software that’s going to allow me or you, I’m building it for you, I’m building it for everyone. Again, it’s like the book for mothers. I’m building this piece of software for you, for people to be able to say okay, I have these tests, or if I don’t have them, I can order them here. They’re going to go through this engine, and I’m going to actually know exactly what I need to be taking, or exactly what I need to be eating because here’s a shopping list. I can walk into my grocery store and I can say oh, this is actually the food I need.

[01:15:59] Ashley James: And the herbs.

[01:16:01] Dr. Laura Kelly: The herbs, all of it. Because herbs are concentrated nutrients. That’s what herbs are and that’s why they work.

[01:16:09] Ashley James: I love it. Let’s dive into your research in your book. You studied the cultures, the countries that have the highest rates of osteoporosis, osteopenia, and fractures, and you also study the lowest. Let’s talk about the bad first. What are the commonalities that the cultures that have the worst bone density? What are some commonalities that you feel contribute to bone loss and fractures?

[01:16:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: The two areas of the world are the US and Scandinavia. It’s pretty clear, and they’re significantly higher than they should be than everywhere else. It’s pretty clear in Scandinavia that it’s the vitamin D winter. I think that there’s really not much else to say there. It’s just simply the lack of vitamin D. There was a lot of research done around vitamin A, the balance of vitamin A and vitamin D, and how really important that is for bone health. Just not having enough sunlight is a deficiency.

[01:17:24] Ashley James: Right. I’ve heard some plant-based doctors have come on the show and have shared. I haven’t seen the studies so it would be interesting, but they’ve cited that countries—so certain cultures like Africa and Asia—that consume no cow dairy or very limited consumption have the highest bone density. And cultures that consume the most cow dairy have the worst bone density.

[01:17:56] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, that may be true, but I think there’s a difference that needs to be made also between pasteurized and unpasteurized. I mean they’re basically different foods. I think most of us grew up eating pasteurized dairy, and that’s not going to do much for you. Genetics plays a part in this, of course. You have some African tribes. All they eat is meat and blood and their cholesterol is 120. Do you know what I mean? There are genetic components to this environment. They grew up doing this. This is how their body evolved. This was their evolution, and so it works.

[01:18:40] Ashley James: They have great vitamin D levels.

[01:18:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: And they have great vitamin D levels.

[01:18:46] Ashley James: Okay. So vitamin D, you’re saying, is the biggest thing.

[01:18:51] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well it was. It is in Scandinavia. The point actually that I really should make is it’s just deficiency. It’s really a deficiency issue. That’s clear in the US. I remember, when I first started thinking and studying medicine, I was like it’s not possible. How is it possible that we’re deficient in the US? We’re the land of opulence. We can’t be deficient, but it’s very clear that the majority of us are nutritionally deficient, which is bizarre but true.

[01:19:23] Ashley James: Well the food is void of nutrients.

[01:19:27] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. There is that, and the dietary practices aren’t ideal in terms of keeping the system regulated and healthy. But that isn’t something that you know. It’s not something that you learn from your doctor, and your doctor never tells you that that’s something that’s important. It wasn’t something that was thought about for a long time.

[01:19:52] Ashley James: One of my mentors is Dr. Joel Wallach. I’ve had him on the show. He, interesting background, became a Naturopathic physician, but first, he did pathology, was a research scientist, was a veterinarian, and also had a degree in soil agriculture. He studied soil. He actually discovered what was the cause of Keshawn disease in China, and also certain groups of—what are they called in the United States in Pennsylvania?

[01:20:31] Dr. Laura Kelly: Amish.

[01:20:32] Ashley James: Amish, that’s right. The Amish were having high rates of the same sort of disease-like state, and he came in. Because they only eat what they grow, he studied their soil and determined the soil was completely void of certain nutrients like selenium. It was causing miscarriages and causing an alarmingly high rate of muscular dystrophy in this particular area of Pennsylvania because they’re eating the food they grow, and their soil is devoid of selenium. And selenium is needed in utero to prevent certain birth defects like muscular dystrophy, which he discovered.

We usually don’t eat all of our food from the same soil. You look at your grapes, they’re from Chile. You look at your pears and they’re from Thailand. We’re eating food from around the world, especially if we’re not conscious of eating more locally for fresher foods. But just because Brazil nuts, are grown in any soil, that doesn’t mean they’re chock full of selenium because I’ve often brought this up, like oh, we need selenium. And then someone says, oh, I eat six brazil nuts a day. Brazil nuts can grow hydroponically.

Anything can grow in almost minerally void water basically as long as it has NPK and some form of even artificial sunlight. So the fact that you’re eating broccoli, we should absolutely eat plants. But it doesn’t mean there’s enough calcium in that food or enough iron in that spinach. How do you go about combating this? Let’s say someone actually does eat healthily. They’re eating half their plate is full of vegetables, a variety of colors, and they’re all they’re always eating organic. How do you ensure that they’re getting all of their co-factors? Do you do blood testing? Do you look at their symptoms? Do you do the genetics? How do you go about it?

[01:22:31] Dr. Laura Kelly: All of it. This is a long-term prospect because you’re not coming to see me because I will fix your toe if it hurts. I mean, don’t get me wrong—or your knee or whatever. I can do that. But generally speaking, when people are coming to me, they’re coming to me because they’re saying, okay, maybe I have a bone density issue. Or maybe I have another chronic condition, but I’m interested in—I’m getting older maybe and I want to now be healthy for the rest of my life.

What I do is I look at all of that stuff, and I say let’s build the foundation up. So let’s get the information and then we have it. But let’s also say that we know that we’re not running every trace mineral that your body needs for all that cell communication. We’re not running all of that. We know that we need all of it. We know that it’s devoid in the diet, so let’s choose some really base supplements that we’re going to take regularly. And then on top of that, we’ll figure out what your deficiencies are. If you’re missing vitamin C, we’ll supplement with that.

But there is some really base supplementation that we need, just because of where we live, or just because of the world is the way it is. And that is amino acids and trace minerals. We need these things so much. If we eat only muscle meat, which we eat in the west and we don’t eat the connective tissue, we’re missing part of the amino acid profile completely. These are things that I find let’s just do it. Let’s just get these supplements going, and then you have the basis of everything you need. The nucleic acids, you need these things in order to do anything. Let’s blanket supplement these base things—at least for a while—and then figure out what your additional deficiencies are on top of it. That’s how I work. But the trace mineral supplementation, I don’t know if there’s anything more important than that.

[01:24:41] Ashley James: Absolutely.

[01:24:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: Like you’re saying, they’re the co-factors required for all cell communication, the things that are happening inside of the cell, the communication of the DNA, the RNA, and the building of the proteins themselves. All of these things require all of these co-factors. So let’s just put them all in there and say let’s give it all it needs and then work on the problems once it’s got all the fuel.

[01:25:07] Ashley James: Absolutely. Nine years ago—it’s actually coming up on 10 years, I can’t believe that. Next month it’ll be 10 years. I was incredibly sick. I had a lot of health issues and chronic adrenal fatigue was one of them. I got on Dr. Wallach’s protocol. The first thing I did was get on his liquid trace minerals. Within the same day that I took them, my constant gnawing hunger went away. I had out of control blood sugar, and I was type 2 diabetic as well, but the constant gnawing hunger that I was constantly yo-yoing. Every 45 minutes I was hungry. Nothing could satiate it. Within my first shot, I took an ounce of it, within minutes the hunger went away. It was really interesting. Within five days of being on it, I woke up early in the morning full of energy, and it was like a light bulb went on in my body.

That was really what had me go, oh my gosh, I have to tell my friends about this. And then I did, and I have a friend who reversed her lifelong skin problem. I have another friend that immediately stopped five months of kidney stones—stopped them—and he hasn’t had them since. My friend hasn’t had her skin problem since. That’s what led me down this path of wanting to study with Naturopaths, become a health coach, and start the podcast.

So trace minerals are what started it for me. Now, not all trace minerals are created equal. There’s buyer beware out there. I can say that takeyoursupplements.com is where I recommend getting them from. I’m sure you have your own line that you recommend when people work with you as well. I just want to put out there, I don’t recommend going to Amazon, just typing in trace minerals, and getting whatever. There’s so much buyer beware out there, but get it from a reputable source. Either get it from Dr. Kelly or get it from takeyoursupplements.com, I would say. But I think everyone should be on a trace mineral supplement. It makes such a huge difference. I totally agree with you.

[01:27:17] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, definitely. This is another coming back to the theme, which we’ve been in a while is the natural patterns that are there. We have ratios and balances of trace minerals. We don’t have an equal amount of all of them, right? We have different ratios, and it’s the same ratio that’s in the ocean. And it’s the same ratio that’s in shilajit or Himalayan salt. The patterns of mineral balance are replicated throughout the natural world. So finding sources that replicate that natural balance is what you want to find because then you’ll be taking things in the right balance for your natural body.

[01:28:10] Ashley James: So you had mentioned that you came up with a list of all the things that the cultures around the world with the lowest rate of osteoporosis, the highest bone density, and the lowest rate of fracture. That they have in common that helps the body to properly lay down calcium in the right places, not in the wrong places, and you told your mom to pick three. What were the three things that she picked?

[01:28:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: Let me just differentiate for a minute between bone density and fracture because they actually aren’t the same metric. This is relevant because of what I found. The Japanese, on the traditional diet, had very low rates of fracture compared to everybody else. But, if you scan their bones, they’re necessarily not dense, but they’re quite small, can be thin, and could even fall into osteopenia or osteoporosis, but they don’t fracture.

This was a moment of saying, well wait a minute. So there are two separate metrics here and one of them is the density, which is what we read. But the other metric is actually flexibility because if you look at the way the bone is structured, you have the collagen that gets laid down. It doesn’t get laid down in a regular regulated fashion. It’s not regimented like a line a line a line a line a line of collagen. It’s laid down in a completely random fashion, and it creates a matrix, but a really random matrix. And the reason it does this is because you can imagine that if the collagen were laid down in straight lines, the bone would be very strong from one direction and completely not strong from another direction.

So the randomness of the laying down of the collagen strands is completely random so that it can absorb a hit from any angle. This concept of flexibility is something that we don’t look at in the west in terms of diagnosis or understanding bone health. We look at density, and as you know from the drugs, you can densify your bones. But then, you can also suffer what’s called a bisphosphonate fracture, which is the result of taking the bone densifying drugs, and then the bones just randomly fracture standing on the subway, for example. That was the first one that went to the CDC.

I think some woman was standing on the subway, and her femur just shattered. It was because the bone density drugs will support your system in laying down bone, but if it’s already been laying down subpar bone or bad quality bone, all it’s going to do is assist your body in laying down low-quality bone. You may get a denser reading, but the quality of the bone isn’t good, and so you end up with a fracture.

So just looking at bone density is a mistake, and trying to figure out a way to read something like flexibility would be a better approach, in my opinion. Because if I had to choose between a dense bone and a flexible bone, I would take a small flexible bone any day because it’s going to withstand a lot.

[01:31:34] Ashley James: And not fracture

[01:31:35] Dr. Laura Kelly: And not fracture because it’ll be able to take a hit. Considering that concept, I was looking at the Japanese diet and looking at what in their diet is allowing them to not have particularly dense bones but to have flexible bones because that’s why they’re not fracturing. And that turns out to be K2. That’s in the traditional diet and has always been in the traditional diet. Of course, the presence of magnesium is required for activation as well. So it’s the nutrient co-factors. It’s always coming down to those. It’s always going to come down to those.

So it’s making sure that all those nutrient co-factors are there in the right place, at the right time to make sure that the system and the mechanisms work. That was the top choice of my mother. She’s like okay, well this makes a lot of sense to me. So she started supplementing with K2. We looked at the research out of Japan. They’re researching it at very high doses, multiple, multiple, multiple thousands of times what our body would normally use. And there didn’t seem to be any downside.

So we just took a hard-hitting approach for about three months, and I just said, “Okay, mom we’re going to hit your body so that your body knows what we’re doing.” I don’t have any scientific basis for this but I feel like the body wants, like we were talking about before, to be well. It wants its mechanisms to work. It wants to be in homeostasis. I also think that it listens to us, right? Again, it’s the information we’re putting in. What information are we putting in with our minds? What information are we putting in with what we eat?

So I said, “Mom, we’re going to hit it hard so your body knows what we’re doing, and it has no uncertain terms that we are building your bone and we are making sure that the calcium is going in the right place.” So we spent three months of what I would call therapeutic doses of exactly what we talked about—K2, trace minerals, amino acids. These are her choices, and I agree with them completely. We said let’s start there, we started there, then ran her tests, figured out what else she was missing, and filled it in. She’s changed her diet completely. It took about two years for her to really shift her diet into what she actually needed to be eating.

[01:34:02] Ashley James: Which is?

[01:34:04] Dr. Laura Kelly: For her, again, it’s personal. For her, she ended up needing a lot of calcium from plants because she needed a lot of calcium. She wasn’t actually eating the calcium in her regular diet.

[01:34:20] Ashley James: Isn’t there also vitamin K in leafy greens?

[01:34:23] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yup, there is. And that can turn into K2 sometimes, it depends. K2 is one of the things I absolutely recommend supplementing with if you have bone density issues.

[01:34:35] Ashley James: What form of K2?

[01:34:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: Ideally, of course, from natto, but it’s a pretty hard thing to put into your diet because it’s pretty stinky and tastes pretty bad.

[01:34:48] Ashley James: Explain what that is for those who don’t know.

[01:34:50] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s a fermented soybean in a particular fashion.

[01:34:53] Ashley James: Yum. Sounds delicious.

[01:34:57] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s sort of like when you—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Asia but if you bury shrimp in the ground for six months and then you pull it up and make a paste out of it, it’s got a similar kind of flavor to that kind of shrimp paste. It’s very rich, let’s say.

[01:35:12] Ashley James: So fermented natto?

[01:35:17] Dr. Laura Kelly: Natto.

[01:35:18] Ashley James: Natto, thank you. Where would one source that, or can you make it yourself?

[01:35:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: You can make it. It’s a process of fermenting beans, and it’s stinky. It’s a hard thing to do. You can do it. You can find it occasionally in some co-ops. I’ve seen it. And you can also buy powder. That’s another way to go is just to buy the powder. It’s not as stinky, and it actually tastes sort of caramel. So it’s kind of good.

[01:35:50] Ashley James: How did your mom source it? How did she eat it?

[01:35:55] Dr. Laura Kelly: She actually started with natto and then was like, “I don’t know if I can do this for too long.” So we went to supplements. We went to the bacterial fermented supplements. They worked. Everything worked well for her.

[01:36:12] Ashley James: I’ve heard natto’s kind of a miracle food. If someone wanted to eat natto, so it’s a paste, how much would they want to take? How would they cook with it? Do they turn it into tea or soup?

[01:36:26] Dr. Laura Kelly: No, maybe it comes in a paste, but the traditional format is like a fermented bean porridge kind of breakfast thing.

[01:36:36] Ashley James: Oh, okay.

[01:36:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: So you just ferment the beans. It creates this really mucousy, mucilaginous-like gel around it.

[01:36:45] Ashley James: That’s what I want for breakfast.

[01:36:47] Dr. Laura Kelly: Very appetizing. But some people get used to it, and then they love it. It’s one of those things where when you break through the barrier you’re like how could I live without it?

[01:36:56] Ashley James: Can you cook it, or does heating it deteriorate the vitamin K?

[01:37:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: I think heating it too high will kill the bacteria.

[01:37:06] Ashley James: Okay. So I could probably look up recipes. I’m thinking make congee with it, but just add it at the end so it’s not too hot.

[01:37:16] Dr. Laura Kelly: Maybe. The Japanese tend to eat it, I believe, in just a very traditional way, this is how we eat it.

[01:37:24] Ashley James: Just like a cold soup?

[01:37:26] Dr. Laura Kelly: Like a breakfast-ish.

[01:37:27] Ashley James: Like a porridge?

[01:37:28] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, that kind of thing.

[01:37:29] Ashley James: Okay.

[01:37:32] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’m sorry. I don’t know about any other recipes. I think it’s so specific a flavor that it’s hard to—

[01:37:38] Ashley James: It’s kind of like just get it down.

[01:37:40] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah.

[01:37:40] Ashley James: It’s so funny. My mom worked with these people from Asia who owned this company for many years. Worked with them, and had a great relationship. We had a cottage. I’m from Canada, and in Canada, especially Ontario, many people have a cottage. It’s like a second home but like out in nature. We kept inviting them to come stay with us for the weekend and they wouldn’t, and my mom said it was because they were afraid of eating the food we ate. The idea of, first of all, not eating rice at every meal was weird. But we were going to serve them eggs and toast and they’re like, no, thanks. We’d rather stay home. At an early age, that opened me up to this idea that there are certain people in the world that find our food repulsive.

[01:38:34] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:38:35] Ashley James: Especially if our body needs nutrition, let’s look for those cultures that eat food to prevent disease, and let’s try to open up our repertoire, our palette to include what they do medicinally, and just see what happens. I think especially, if we could get our kids to eat it, they might be able to grow up eating it. I’m going to see if I can find it at our co-op or have our co-op order it, and I’m going to try it for myself. I have never had it.

[01:39:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: Can you shoot yourself on video doing that so we can all watch?

[01:39:15] Ashley James: I will absolutely do that in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. I will go live, and I will eat natto for the first time. When I was a kid I’d eat anything, like anything. There was nothing I wouldn’t eat and my dad loved that. So he’d take me out to really weird Asian restaurants and feed me the really weird stuff. I’m just never a picky eater. That wasn’t my problem. Anyway, this will be fun. I will love eating natto.

Okay. So vitamin K2 is incredibly important. Getting it from leafy greens, especially since you’re also going to get some co-factors like calcium is very important. What other things are just generally great ideas to incorporate into our diet?

[01:40:08] Dr. Laura Kelly: Generally great ideas, again, it just depends. This is the process of looking at what you have in your body, what you don’t have, and looking at your genetics and saying what’s actually functioning here? It really is the case that in terms of nutrition, everybody’s different. What do you process? I don’t know. What do you not process? I don’t know. Again, the standard dose of a nutrient is not correct either because I need 10,000 units a day of vitamin D, and you may need none because you’re in the sun for 10 minutes.

There are general recommendations, which are all good, like eat most plants. Everybody needs to eat a lot of plants. Keeping things as whole source as possible. The basic things that we all know for the reasons of the complexity that I was speaking about earlier and the dynamics of the formula—the herbal formula for malaria. That same concept applies to food, and the complexity of the natural sources means that we’re going to get the enzymes that we need in order to digest the things that are there. So staying close to whole sources is always a good idea. But, again, finding out what you need is actually not a bad idea.

[01:41:43] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. What about water? Obviously, dehydration affects everything in a negative way, but what about the quality of water like avoiding sodium fluoride, which I’ve heard the body gets confused with this kind of fluoride in the water and it ends up harming the bone system but also the skull system. Also, it does things to the pituitary gland and to the thyroid. So what about chemicals in tap water?

[01:42:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. This is the problem with the world that we have created. It’s dangerous. We’ve created a dangerous world. It’s a problem. Filtering the water is probably not good enough. These are the difficulties of it. I think that there are some small water filter producers who make filters that actually do a good enough job for you to filter the tap water. So investigating those and figuring out what’s actually going to work if you’re going to drink tap water. Finding clean sources, testing your water is something I tell people to do just so you know what you’re dealing with. All of this is so important, and this is coming back to the information that we’re giving the system and saying what’s the information I’m putting in?

With the food production, who knows what information we’re putting in when we’re eating processed food. I don’t know what that information is. The body doesn’t even know what that information is, and what’s in the water? Every single substance that’s in that water is going to say something to your body. What’s it saying? So these things, even though they seem inconsequential, it’s really important to understand and to know what are you putting in.

Looking at your water, looking at your food sources, testing yourself, giving yourself that strong solid foundation because even if you are putting in questionable information, if you’ve got all those trace minerals present, your immune system is going to work well and you’re going to be able to defend yourself against the dangerous water that you’ve just drank. This is the complex web of self-care that we all find ourselves in, given the fact that the system itself doesn’t take care of this stuff for us. That’s why we’re here speaking about it, and that’s why it’s so wonderful that you’re bringing all of this to the forefront.

[01:44:31] Ashley James: Love it. Thank you so much for coming and sharing this information. I totally agree with you. We need to look at the world we’ve created and looked at the chemicals. For example, the pesticides and the chemicals that we’re spraying on our “conventionally grown food.” I think that’s hilarious because to our grandparents, to our great-grandparents, or to our great-great-grandparents, conventionally grown food was organic. We now consider organic. Although there are over 2000 chemicals that have been approved under the certification of organic. So even then it’s questionable. But get organic, get local as much as possible. Work with biodynamic farms as close to farms as you can. Luckily, I live in a state where I can actually go to a farm and actually get my food from the farm.

So if you can do that, if you can figure out how to do that, do it. If you can source some food boxes that are coming directly from farms, that’s great. Organic as much as possible. These chemicals, a lot of them are chelators. So they bind to heavy metals, they bind to even minerals and wash them away from the soil. If we consume them like glyphosate, they will release heavy metals into our kidneys and brain. What we think is safe when we go to eat an apple or go to eat some corn. What we think is safe or even healthy food.

A conventionally grown apple, they’ve had it tested as up to 50 different chemicals. These are man-made chemicals the body doesn’t know what to do with. The liver gets clogged up. These chemicals are endocrine disruptors. They harm the harmony in the body. You’re teaching us how to bring the body back into harmony, back into balance, and support the body’s ability to be strong and heal itself. One of those things is removing what is in our way as much as possible.

[01:46:42] Dr. Laura Kelly: The insults. This is coming back to—you just mentioned the liver. This is just to be clear, your liver gets clogged up because it’s trying to detoxify all of these things. That’s implying that everybody’s liver naturally functions perfectly anyway, which just simply isn’t even the case. I’ve never seen a genetic run where every CYP enzyme, every CYP genetic is perfect. There are polymorphisms all over the place in liver function. So you have CYP pathways in the liver that detoxify all different sorts of substances. There isn’t one pathway for all substances. There are different pathways for different substances, and each of those pathways has different genetics.

Every time you’re dealing with genetics, which is everywhere, you have the opportunity for things to be not perfect, right? You have a polymorphism, which is sort of a mutation but not quite a mutation. In genetics, you call it a polymorphism in the smaller subset like this. So you have the opportunity for polymorphisms, which interfere with liver detoxification pathways, and everybody has those. I’ve never seen one without.

Not only are you taking in the 50 chemicals that are in the water that went in to grow the organic apple. Because even if it’s organic, if they water it with water that’s filled with garbage, how much of the apple is water? Most of it. You’re going to eat that apple and you already have impaired liver detoxification because most of us do anyway. Each liver detoxification pathway itself has separate combinations of nutrient co-factors that are required including amino acids for phase detoxification.

If you’re missing any of those, so you have an insult that you’ve taken into your body, you’re missing some nutrients either because you don’t need it or because of your genetic component, then your liver detoxification is impaired with polymorphisms in your genes for detoxification so it’s impaired. So you’ve got three places already. You’ve just eaten an organic apple, but you have three places where you could potentially run into huge amounts of trouble. It’s crazy. That’s crazy.

That’s the truth of this pattern and this system is that it’s that complicated. And that’s in a healthy person. That’s somebody who’s me or you who’s walking around feeling good, feeling great, and having a wonderful life. That’s me. I don’t have great liver detoxification. I can eat that apple with those 50 insults and be causing myself a problem down the line.

Not to fear monger, certainly not, but just to say that all of this is important. And when you’re thinking about medicine on a fundamental level, medicine for the human body, these are things that are really important to think about, and all of them are important. It’s not like just a little bit of it’s important. All of it is important.

[01:49:50] Ashley James: And if it’s too overwhelming to think about, find a practitioner like Dr. Kelly who does telemedicine. Or find a health coach like myself. Find someone to work with because sometimes we just get to a point where we just need to hand our bodies over to someone. And that’s often where we go to an MD, then we’re given drugs. Drugs are great for certain things, not great for others. It shouldn’t be a tool we use 100% of the time. We’ve already discussed that, right?

One of the Naturopaths that I mentored with who is the dean of Bastyr Naturopathic College, and she’s practiced for over 30 years. She’s delivered over 1000 babies. She’s has a wonderful, wonderful practice working with women. She says sometimes she has a doctor-patient relationship where the patient is handing themselves over to her, and they’re saying, just take my blood, do labs on me, and just tell me what to do. They don’t want to think. It’s too overwhelming. They just want to be told what to do, and they’ll go home and do it.

And then there are other times where she doesn’t have a doctor-patient relationship. She has a teacher-mentor kind of relationship with a client, and she’ll call them her client. They’re someone who wants to come in, and often, like our listeners, they want to be educated. They want to think for themselves. They want to be given options. They want to have a teacher teach them. A doctor can be a teacher because the root word is doceri, which means teacher. So they want a teacher relationship, a mentor, and a coach, not someone just taking their blood and telling them what to do. They want to actually think for themselves.

So some people are just at the point where they’re so overwhelmed and they’re so sick, just please, do my labs and tell me what to do. You can provide that. And then for those who want to learn more, get the book and you can also have that relationship with them. It’s really important that we understand that distinction. That we could ask our doctor—be it Naturopath, osteopath, chiropractor, or a doctor of oriental medicine—to be our teachers, give us options, show us studies, and let us think for ourselves.

If we are at the point in our life where we want to be educated, we want to navigate this world, think deeper, and spend time on this, but if we don’t have the energy to, we can hand our body over. We just have to make sure we hand our body over to the person who’s going to guide us to the outcome of optimal health.

[01:52:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: Right, absolutely. I think that’s the reason why me and all of your other guests write books. It’s like we want people to embrace, and it’s going back to what I was saying in the beginning. There’s a concept of okay, medicine is for when I’m sick. Or there’s a concept that I learned, which is medicine is part of life. Taking care of yourself, self-care is part of life. When you look at it that way and when it becomes part of your life that way, it gets very rich, of course, and you explore a lot of things conceptually. You also really learn to care for yourself this way.

Writing books for people and sharing this information is really just saying, here, step into this beautifully rich world of self-care. Here, let us help you. Let us guide you with this. That’s why I write books because I want people to be able to, even if you are in a crisis point, you’re going to come out of that crisis point. When you come out of that crisis point, you can’t go back to the way you were that got you to the crisis point. So you have to then step into this world of where self-care becomes fun, ritual, or whatever it is that works for you.

So providing information for people in this way. Again, to make medicine is a hard word to use to make medicine part of your life. It sounds a little cold, but I think you understand what I mean. It’s like taking care of yourself on a daily basis with the food, with the air, with the water, with the thoughts, and with the process of thinking. All of these things, on a daily basis, thinking about them as self-care, from a perspective of self-care, enables you to live a healthy and holistic life because your body isn’t under the stresses of the disintegration of the different parts and the different pieces. Okay, wait a minute, I have to do this, here, this, and this, and this. The mechanization that comes in the thinking.

Again, providing this sort of breadth of movement of medicine self-care to the world is something that I really want to do and would like to keep doing. This is a driver for me. I think, again, for many of your guests and many of the doctors working in this space.

[01:55:19] Ashley James: What if we put a new filter on, and every choice became is this medicine for me? Hugging this person—I’m hugging my friend. I’m seeing my friend. I’m going to give him a hug. Is that medicine for me? Or staying up really late watching Netflix, is that really medicine for me? Is that medicinal?

[01:55:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: It can be. It can be.

[01:55:39] Ashley James: There are times when it can be, but I like to use that as an example because I stay up till 2:00 AM in the morning watching Netflix and then having to get up early the next day. You’re starving yourself of time. But having an evening where you’re watching something that makes you laugh is medicine, versus excessively watching television and staying sedentary is not medicine.

[01:56:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah.

[01:56:03] Ashley James: Looking at all the activities in your life, is this medicine? Is it spiritual medicine? Is it energetic medicine? Is it emotional-mental medicine? Is it physical medicine? And is there a better choice? Okay, watching TV for 10 hours. Okay, this isn’t medicinal for me, but what would be? Going for a walk in nature.

[01:56:28] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well wait, wait. I will differ with you a little bit about that. I would say that it’s really, again, about asking yourself and looking inward for the answer to that question. Because it may be that you just graduated from college, you just wrote a book, and whatever the situation is—that was mine. Watching TV for 10 hours straight is exactly what you need. You’re the only one that knows that. You’re the one that knows inside if this is right or if this is wrong. I don’t think that you can say one thing or another is right or wrong. It all has to do with context, but the most important thing is it has to do with how you feel about it? If you feel like you’re watching tv or 10 hours and it’s not right, then it’s not right.

[01:57:18] Ashley James: Well, if you feel like stiff, achy, upset, and irritable, and the media you were watching was something that ends up making you physically angry or tense, it wasn’t medicinal. But if you’re watching something that makes you happy, you’re laughing, and you’re resting, or maybe you take a break and read a book, but you want to just chill on the couch for the day and that’s what you need, and you feel good. I think we have to check-in. Like you said, check in with that voice inside you, and check-in with your body. Every behavior, every choice could be medicinal.

[01:57:56] Dr. Laura Kelly: Exactly.

[01:57:58] Ashley James: And that’s a wonderful thing to focus on. In your book, do you also talk about exercise? There’s a lot of confusion around exercise and healthy bones. Should it be weight-bearing? Should it be cardio? Should it be stretching? Do you talk about what kind of what are the best exercises for healthy flexible bones?

[01:58:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. I don’t go deeply into exercise, but there are a couple of things I can mention. One of them is in the presence of an estrogenic compound—either a phytoestrogen or an endogenous estrogen—the bone has more of a response to exercise. So this would be a situation where if you do supplement with hormones, you’re going to be well placed to exercise. And if you don’t, you may want to consider phytoestrogen as well. If you don’t eat a lot of plants, then that’s going to increase the efficiency or the efficacy of the exercise that you do.

But there is a certain amount of piezoelectric force that has to happen on the bone for it to trigger the brain to build bone. The osteogenic force is a particular force. Weight-bearing exercise, yes. Anything that’s going to put that type of pressure on the bone because what happens in the system is that the bone tells the brain, hey, we have pressure on us. We need to be strong. That’s what happens. When you’re putting pressure on the bone, if you’re jumping, if you’re dancing, running, or anything that’s putting pressure tells the brain we need to be strong. And if you just sit around, it tells the brain we don’t need to be strong.

So it’s really that communication happens, and it’s really that simple. So putting that pressure on is something that you have to do for your whole life, for everybody, regardless of what issues you have. We all need to keep our system moving, and we all need our brains to think that we want to use our bodies because if the brain thinks we’re not using our bodies, it’s going to stop building them. So we all need to move and take care of ourselves in that regard. But specifically for bone, you want a force that’s going to put pressure on the bone.

If you’ve crossed the point into more severe osteoporosis, then you may run into trouble because that kind of pressure and force you actually can’t do because you may fracture. That point you have to pull back, do the supplementation, and do the nutrition base in order to build up some bone strength before you start that kind of forceful exercise.

And then there’s also a company called OsteoStrong, which produces machines that create the amount of force needed to put pressure on the bones without you having to actually create the force yourself. And theoretically, this seems to work. I haven’t seen enough of their science to fully say this is amazing, but theoretically, it’s correct. There is a certain amount of pressure that needs to happen on the bone to trigger osteogenesis, and these machines appear to do that.

[02:01:29] Ashley James: Very cool. That’s exciting. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. All the links that Dr. Kelly does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Medicinethroughfood.com is your website. We’re going to also have the link to your book, which is The Healthy Bones. I have already bought your book for myself and also for my mother-in-law. I’m sure I’ll think of a few other people I need to buy your book for.

You’re giving away your book to a lucky listener. Listeners can go to the Learn True Health Facebook group, and this discussion will continue there. We’ll create a post, and then we’ll pick a lucky listener that will win a copy of your book, which is exciting. I’ve invited Dr. Kelly to come to join the Facebook group so we can continue the discussion there, which is great. We have over 4000 listeners in the group. We have a ton of listeners, so I’m always surprised.

It’s funny because I’ll get emails or Facebook messages from listeners saying, “I’ve been a listener for over a year and I just joined the Facebook group.” I’m like, “What are you waiting for guys? Come on. Join the Facebook group. It’s a great community. It’s free. Come join us. We’re all here to support each other. So come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. And then also, Dr. Kelly, you have a Facebook group for readers of your book as well. Tell us about it.

[02:02:55] Dr. Laura Kelly: That’s right. My mother is the moderator, and she’s very, very good at keeping the group really dynamic and really motivated. It’s an amazing group of people. Everybody is probably like yours. Everybody just supports each other. They share their successes. They share recipes. They share trials, the difficulties that they’re having in there. It’s a really beautiful group of people, and they’re really there to help each other densify their bones and not be sick.

[02:03:25] Ashley James: And have flexible bones.

[02:03:27] Dr. Laura Kelly: And have flexible, exactly.

[02:03:28] Ashley James: Stronger bones. I love it. And then as a side effect, the body just gets healthier. The cardiologist who had such amazing insight to tell you to write a book. The cardiologist noticed that the calcification was leaving your mom. How is your mom’s heart health now having focused on bone health?

[02:03:49] Dr. Laura Kelly: It continues to be fantastic in terms of that sort of thing. There are no problems.

[02:03:58] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. That’s so great.

[02:04:01] Dr. Laura Kelly: I think unchecked, there may have been.

[02:04:05] Ashley James: Yes, we have to make sure that we take the blinders off and really not leave these very important things unchecked in our life. Do you have any stories of success you’d like to share?

[02:04:18] Dr. Laura Kelly: In terms of bones?

[02:04:21] Ashley James: Yeah, and well in terms of your book. In terms of patients or clients, you’ve worked with. In terms of the Facebook group. Just off the top of your head, do you have any stories of success that people have had because of the work you do?

[02:04:33] Dr. Laura Kelly: Sure, sure. You can go on that Facebook page and see people reporting, oh my God. I got my DEXA scan. I can’t believe it. I’ve gone from osteoporosis to osteopenia. It happens quite regularly, actually, which is amazing and wonderful. I’m crying every time it happens. But in terms of my own patient population, I had someone come to me who was 59 and her doctor had said, “Look, you can’t exercise anymore. I know you love tennis. You can’t play it anymore because you’re going to break your bones.” She said, “I’m terrible. This is killing me. I’m so unhappy about this.” And I said, “Okay, well let’s see what we can do.”

She’s very small. She’s very thin boned and so there wasn’t a lot of room. We started working together, and I said, “This is going to be a long process. Don’t expect instant results. Maybe in a year and a half, maybe in two years. Maybe faster, but it’s going to be a while.” And she was very active in her own care. She was a mix between, what you said, a client, and a patient. She wanted to know what to do absolutely right away, but then she also wanted to understand.

So we worked together for almost two years, and we completely reversed her osteoporosis. She went from 3.6 to 2.4. I think it took about a year and eight months, something like that, and then she’s just been improving from there. Her doctor was like, oh, okay. Because this was in a situation where at first, she went to her internist and she said, “Well, I’m working with this person.” He was like, “Yeah, whatever. That’s not going to work.” It was the same thing as always. But the book was out, and she took him the book, and then she got her scores finally. He was like, hmm. That was the answer, hmm. It wasn’t, no. It was, hmm, okay. He now has the book, and he’s actually shared the book with other people.

It’s an educational process. In that regards an educational process. That’s the standard success that I’ve had. I’ve had a lot of patients now who’ve reversed bone density issues. She actually had a really bad accident on a Segway where she smashed her leg into one of these metal posts going at 50 miles an hour. She didn’t break anything. She said there is no way that this would have been like this without the work that we had done. That’s what her doctor said. Her doctor said, “Well the fact that you didn’t break your anything in that accident is a miracle of the work that you put in.”

[02:07:31] Ashley James: I love it. Beautiful. I love it. That’s so great. Now, what about osteoarthritis or bone spurs? Have you had success reversing or improving upon either of those?

[02:07:53] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’ve had success improving upon osteoarthritis. I haven’t actually worked with bone spurs, so I don’t know.

[02:08:01] Ashley James: This will be interesting though. I hope some people with bone spurs come out of the woodwork to do your program. I’ve had great success using Dr. Wallach’s protocol with bone spurs because if you can increase the nutrients you’re talking about, especially magnesium, the body dissolves bone spurs and puts them in the right place. That’s something really interesting. Hopefully, some people will come forward and share their experiences working with your protocol in laying down bone healthfully. Can you share any results you remember in terms of reversing osteoarthritis?

[02:08:42] Dr. Laura Kelly: I wouldn’t say reversing osteoarthritis. I would say improving function and improving the sensation of difficulty or pain. This actually has more to do with using herbs. There’s the foundation of bone health, but when you’re talking about osteoarthritis, you’re talking about wear and tear. You’re talking about joints. You’re talking about joint fluid. You’re talking about cartilage, connective tissue, and all these sorts of things. Other than bone, you have all of these other pieces that you also have to work with. You want to lay the foundation, of course, the nutrient foundation for bone health and for connective tissue health. What I do with that is I also use herbs at this point—external herb poultices.

At about 1200, there were Shaolin monks. The Shaolin monks were famous monks in China. They were martial arts. They developed martial arts, basically. They took it to a new level. So the Shaolin monks were martial artists of the highest caliber, and because they did this martial arts work all of the time, they injured themselves all the time. What they developed was trauma medicine for martial arts injury, which is the same as any sort of trauma medicine. You break your leg, you have bruises.

The formulas that were written at the time were written with titles such as the formula for hitting the back of the neck with a metal shovel. This kind of thing. It’s pretty hilarious. You have these very interesting names on these formulas, but they were very specific to different types of traumatic injuries. What I do is I take that trauma medicine and apply it to things like osteoarthritis. You have the basic bone foundation like the protocols in my book, but you also have to work with the trauma of the system and the body at that point.

One thing that’s amazing about herbs, which is not available in western medicine and I’ve done this with many people, is that when they have surgery, what you’re doing is you’ve damaged your tissue when you have surgery. There has to be a repair process. And western medicine really has nothing to offer that process. They tell you to sit still on the couch and take pain medication, right? But what we can do with herbs—because herbs have such wonderful complex properties—is we can actually start the tissue regeneration process.

What we’re talking about at that point is actually stem cell regeneration. We’re talking about providing the right information triggers to the system to actually start turning on and having a stem cell response. That’s one thing that’s possible through nutrients and herbs in a very targeted fashion. So you can do that externally, and this is where the trauma medicine is, which is you use the herbs and a combination externally on the site of osteoarthritis. What happens is the immune system factors come, whatever non-functioning cells, tissue, or damaged tissue is there gets cleared out. And then some low-level tissue regeneration starts to happen in that area.

What happens from that is sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you’ll have actually enough tissue regeneration to actually eliminate any trace of the problem. There still is osteoarthritis, technically, but you don’t have the same experience any more of it. That’s a really beautiful use of herbs and where they can fill in where western medicine can’t.

[02:12:46] Ashley James: So cool. I love it. Again, go to the right doctor. You would never get this kind of medicine from seeing a chiropractor or an MD. You got to go to the right doctor for the right problem. Have an arsenal. Have a team.

[02:13:08] Dr. Laura Kelly: Absolutely have a team of doctors.

[02:13:10] Ashley James: Okay, great. You have an OB. I’d rather go to an OB than just a regular MD for gynecological exams. We’re used to that as women. If you have a skin problem, you go to a skin doctor. Or you have a foot thing, you go to a foot doctor. Why not also have Dr. Kelly in your corner? Why not have a doctor of oriental medicine, but on top of that, have a health coach, have a naturopath, have a chiropractor, and the list goes on and on. Then you can bring your body to them and they can offer different pieces of the puzzle to bring you back in balance.

What if what you needed was that 5000-year-old herbal formula, right? That was your thing. You’re not going to get that from the other doctors. What if that was your thing, and your body does the best with that versus the other form? Never shall we use the word alternative again. There is an alternative to none. These are all valid forms of medicine. Why not have all of these in our team of doctors.

Thank you Dr. Laura Kelly for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. I would love to have you back on the show. Please come join our Facebook group. Let’s also join Dr. Kelly’s Facebook group as well, and let’s all get her book. And of course, one of you lucky listeners is going to be gifted her book. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. The Healthy Bones. I know it’s on Amazon, and we could also go to your website medicinethroughfood.com. Dr. Kelly, is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[02:14:59] Dr. Laura Kelly: Oh, gosh. It’s probably lots of things.

[02:15:03] Ashley James: Do tell.

[02:15:05] Dr. Laura Kelly: You’ve had amazing people on your program. As you say, have a team. It’s like we’re all doing little pieces of this, and we’re all pulling apart different pieces of this. Everybody has gone into different corners and pulled apart different things. I just want to say to people who would read the book, the book itself is about meeting people where they are. It’s not about going into the biggest detail about every single piece of how to perfect the food, right?

We need to sprout the beans or high pressure cook the beans. These things are there in the book, but there isn’t a huge amount of explanation in detail in all of that that has been done by others because what I have tried to do with this book is to take people, who like my mother, who doesn’t really have that much knowledge about how to take care of yourself and are coming out of the western medical paradigm. In fact, are still in the western medical paradigm where maybe nutrition may be important but I don’t really know.

You can’t step from western medicine all the way into a natural medicine with a snap of the fingers. We’re not built that way as humans. We need information. We need to process it. We need to investigate it. We need to make a decision about it. Most people don’t do it like that.

When I wrote the book, I was writing it to meet people where they are and say here’s a really broad spectrum of information on taking care of yourself. Here’s a way for you to start to understand that you can take care of yourself, and that you don’t have to be afraid of your diagnosis whatever it is. That you can take care of yourself and improve yourself with or without assistance from a practitioner. Hopefully, with a team, but even if it’s just you alone, you have enough ability, and your body has enough innate wisdom so that you can actually care for yourself.

That was the point of the book, and I wanted to make that clear because again, there’s such a wealth of information from all of the people who you’ve spoken with. Again, this is another piece of that puzzle of creating this sort of genre of self-care. I just wanted to contextualize the book for you a little bit like that.

[02:17:47] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you. Excellent. Please come back to the show.

[02:17:51] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’d love to. I’d love to. It’s wonderful to talk to you.

[02:17:54] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. We’ll see each other in each other’s Facebook groups along with all the listeners.

[02:17:59] Dr. Laura Kelly: Okay, great.

[02:18:01] Ashley James: Thank you so much.

[02:18:03] Dr. Laura Kelly: Thank you. Have a great day.

Get Connected with Dr. Laura Kelly!

Dr. Laura Kelly Website

Medicine Through Food Website

Twitter

Healthy Bones Group

Books by Dr. Laura Kelly

The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook

Use coupon code LTH at ChemicalFreeBody.com for your listener discount!

Use listener coupon code LTH at viome.com for the gut and mitochondrial testing and food & supplement recommendations.

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen
Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!

Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends:

takeyoursupplements.com

The Power of Living Foods

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-power-of-living-foods

Highlights:

• Core four secrets
• What cellular dehydration is
• Where chemicals come from
• How to eliminate chemicals from the body

Tim James is a farm boy who used to hunt and eat meat, but he is now on a raw vegan diet.  In this episode, Tim shares what made him go on a raw vegan diet, and what benefits he experienced after switching to a raw vegan diet. He also shares where we can find some of the chemicals that are getting inside our body and how to eliminate them.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I took a little bit of a break. Sorry for not getting an episode out in the last week. My husband and I just celebrated our 12th year anniversary. And so a friend let us come up to her cabin in the middle of the woods five hours away from Seattle in the Okanagan Valley, 45 minutes away from the nearest town or grocery store. We were completely isolated, there was no cell service, and it was beautiful and pristine.

Our son caught bugs the entire time and played in nature. We swam, we walked in the forest, and we just sat in the sun, put our feet on the ground, took long slow deep breaths, and soaked in all the nature. I definitely encourage you to get out in nature as much as you can, as often as you can. Even if you live in the city, find some clean, pesticide-free grass, and just go lie down in it. Feel the earth rotating around this crazy universe. That ability to ground yourself is so healing.

Now this episode, this interview that you’re listening to today is phenomenal. I love this man’s story, and this is going to be a great episode to share with your husband, your brother, or I just think the men that are at the point where they’re sick of being sick—this is going to be a great interview to listen to. The man that you’re about to hear was the American cowboy. Growing up in a ranch country eating nothing but beef, and he had a lot of health problems that men sweep under the rug. He just got sick of being sick, and he was able to—through his journey and his story he’s going to share, it’s a wonderful story—discover how to heal his body. And he teaches how you can do the same. How you can nourish your body in a way that everything comes back into balance.

Now as you’re listening to Tim James share his story, he also shares his website chemicalfreebody.com. And he has invented a few supplements that are whole food supplements. I am very picky when it comes to supplements, but his green powder that you just turn into a drink is so delicious, and really, my body buzzes when I drink it. After this interview, I went and I bought some, and I am loving it. I put it in my smoothie every day. Sometimes I just put it in a glass of water and drink it. What I notice is it almost like could replace a coffee or tea. It gives me energy, but not jitters. It’s safe for children, it has a ton of raw food extracts from different superfoods, and it actually tastes good.

If you’re looking to detox, you’re looking to become more alkaline—and oh also, I tested my alkaline levels and this green juice, this powder that he sells that is extracted from raw organic superfoods—it is so delicious and it also balances pH. I did the test before and after drinking it, and I saw my pH come back into alkalinity, and I thought that was very cool. My husband is doing a fast right now, and he is drinking this stuff every day, because fasting, you definitely stir up toxins. If you’ve been listening for any length of time, you know that I’m really into supporting the body and removing heavy metals, detoxing and supporting all the organs of the body in detoxing, and becoming as healthy as possible.

If you want to give this a try, which I highly recommend you do, and basically it’s great to get for your husband if you’re helping the men in your life who are just coming into wanting to become healthier but maybe they don’t have the time or wherewithal to make a special salad and make a special vegetable smoothie and you just want to give them something really fast, that’s what Tim James created. He’s very particular, very picky about the ingredients that he puts into his stuff so that the quality is there. He formulated them for his own health—for him and for his family—so I like that he’s never going to compromise on the ingredients. It’s chemicalfreebody.com, and then use the coupon code LTH for 5% off. His margins are so slim when it comes to supplements as it is so he gave us a discount, and I thought that was really nice of him. So chemicalfreebody.com, LTH for the coupon code. Be sure to use that, which will give you just a little bit of a discount. That helps to cover shipping.

He recommends doing the Total Energy and Detox bundle. I grabbed just the green drink to start and I love it, and I’m going to definitely dive in and try his other supplements, his bundle next, the Total Energy and Detox bundle. And he also highly recommends doing his protocol while you do any form of fasting, cleansing, or detoxing because it really helps so that you don’t have any flu-like symptoms, detox symptoms, or any downtime when you’re fasting or detoxing.

Enjoy today’s interview. Make sure you go to chemicalfreebody.com, check out his videos, and do the coupon code LTH. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you love. Let’s help all the people we love—the men and the women in our lives to learn true health.

[00:06:24] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 442. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Tim James on. He’s the founder of chemicalfreebody.com. Tim James of no relation. We just coincidentally have the same last name. I’m really excited for the mission that you’re on. In my own quest for health, I found that by cutting out chemicals and pesticides, my health drastically improved, and so I love what you’re doing. Also, when I’m exposed to certain chemicals I notice I really, really feel it. It’s pretty amazing how so many people are walking around with sluggish livers, full of chemicals, and not knowing that there’s a better way. There’s a way that you can just hugely improve your overall health and well-being. The well-being of our children, the well-being at any age by eliminating chemicals and toxins as much as we can from our food, our water, and our air. Tim, welcome to the show.

[00:07:41] Tim James: Ashley, thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here and share.

[00:07:44] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now you have an amazing story, so let’s dive right in. What happened in your life? How young were you when you first started having health problems? And what happened that led you to discover that chemicals were the cause of your problems?

[00:08:03] Tim James: Well, I can take it back a little further just so people understand my background. I grew up in Eastern Oregon on a cattle and hay farm. We had Hereford cattle. Between me and my neighbors, we had horses, chickens, and ducks. It was just all their—goats and everything. I grew up hunting and fishing a lot, so meat was a huge part of my lifestyle. Played baseball at a high level, and at age 37, that’s when the wheels were really falling off for me. I had gained 38 pounds even though I still, in my mind, I thought I was an athlete, even though I had hardly any energy to get up. I’d only do it to walk the dogs. I was a financial advisor at the time getting up early, long days, lots of traveling, and high stress. And then I had skin issues on my elbows like eczema, and it would bleed and crack. I had to start wearing black shirts because the white ones would you know. I’d bleed on people’s couches on Super Bowl parties and stuff like that. It was embarrassing. And it didn’t look good.

I had this big belly, my elbows were bleeding, my knee finally got eczema too—it was cracking and bleeding. And then I had acid indigestion really bad. I was on Tums and Rolaids all the time. The doctor wanted me to go into Prilosec, I didn’t want to do that, and then finally it got really bad. I started bleeding rectally and I didn’t tell anybody about this for almost two years. I never did tell a doctor, nobody. I’m just like, hopefully, that goes away. How stupid is that, right? It was just that guy mentality like ah, it’s fine. It’ll get better. Not even a pause. Not even a pause. Just oh, I hope that goes away. Back to work because it really wasn’t a problem. I wasn’t stopped completely. I just kept going.

I’m raising the kids and I got a mortgage payment, so I’m moving. Finally, it was on vacation. We were in northern Peru right below Tumbes, which is in Ecuador, and I had to get life-flighted to get an emergency surgery in Lima, and that’s when that mask went over my face. That’s when I knew my life was out of control, but I still didn’t know what the hell to do. I didn’t know what I was doing with my health, even though I thought I was healthy. I was eating trying to do five meals a day and eating more protein. Give me a chicken teriyaki bowl and give me extra chicken. And I thought drinking my milk for my bones, the meat for my protein, and all that stuff, but I was a mess.

A friend of mine got diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which is a supposedly rare supposedly incurable blood cancer. He’s like dude, I can’t die. I have to live. Because our sons played together so he’s like I’m going to go to this place in Florida called the Hippocrates Health Institute. Have you heard of those people at all?

[00:10:44] Ashley James: I have not.

[00:10:45] Tim James: Okay. So they’re one of the oldest alternative health institutes in the world. And he says I want you to go with me and support me. I’m going to try to heal naturally. Well, I’m thinking this isn’t going to work. I’m going to support you. I’m like yeah, dude. I’m all in, but in the back of my mind, he’s dead. My grandma died of brain cancer, my aunt died of skin cancer. We just actually lost a guy in my baseball team that we played in the adult men’s world series in Phoenix on the super nice spring training fields. Clay died of cancer. He had stomach cancer, and he went through chemo, surgery, and all that stuff. He died 80 pounds under his weight. We had already been through that. Clay didn’t have any insurance, but he left three little boys behind at ages 6 to 17. It was terrible.

It was a whole bunch of these really strong tough men on this baseball team were all at his funeral just crying their faces off. Do you know what I’ll never forget? He came for his last baseball game. He was too proud to run out to the center-field because he couldn’t run. He’s just like, “I don’t have the energy to run back and forth to my position. I’m sure as hell not going to walk. Can I pitch? Because I can just kind of jog out to the mound.” And I’m thinking pitching’s going to take way more energy dude, whatever. He’s pitching, and around the fourth or fifth inning he comes in on the bench and he’s sitting there on my left and my buddy Jason’s on his left. Me and Jason were looking at Clay and he’s sitting there spitting up blood. Jason’s like, “Man, what the hell are you doing out here?” He’s like, “Look, dude. I love baseball. And if I’m going to go out, I’m going to go out doing what I love.” I was like, “Okay, man.” What do you say to that? Just okay, whatever you want to do.

I watched a guy my age. Now I’m starting to freak out because I’m bleeding rectally, I have all these problems. I’m looking at this guy. He’s healthier than all of us, and he’s dying of cancer. And then my buddy Charles, at age 43, gets it, and I’m freaking out, but I still don’t know what’s going on. Anyway, long story short, we fly to Hippocrates on January 1, 2011.

[00:12:40] Ashley James: This is you and Clay?

[00:12:42] Tim James: No, Clay passed away.

[00:12:43] Ashley James: Okay, so Clay passed away. When he was spitting up blood at the baseball diamond, did you have any light bulbs going off in your head? Like wow, I was bleeding rectally for years.

[00:12:56] Tim James: No, it was fear. I was just in fear mode, but I didn’t know what to do. I just still didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t until Charles said, “Hey, we got to go to this institute.” Now we’re on the plane flight there because he’s got this blood cancer, and he’s like, “Oh, Tim by the way, when we get there there’s no meat, no dairy, no salt, no sugar, and nothing’s cooked.” And I’m like, “What?” I’m literally freaked out. You have to understand, hunting and fishing were my life. Every year, I worked so hard so I could get another extra week off to hunt and fish. All my thousands of dollars of hunting and fishing equipment. Our motto was if it flies, it dies. If it’s brown, it’s down—just to give you an idea. I’m redneck, okay. Eastern Oregon farm boy. It was fun, we had a lot of fun doing that stuff, so I’m freaked out. And if it wasn’t for Charles and him having cancer, there’s no way I would have set foot into that place.

We made fun of vegetarians, and this place was like plant-based vegans. Not even eggs or dairy, which didn’t make sense because I’m like how are you going to have strong bones? Anyway, I’m freaked out but I’m like, “Look, Tim, put your stuff aside. They probably got salads. Charles has got cancer, just focus on him.” I went there with a notepad, and I’m running around trying to disprove this place, talking to all these people, and trying to gather information from my friend because I really want him to heal but I didn’t think it was possible. Well, it was amazing what happened.

They put us on purified water. They put us on these green juices. All sprouted nuts, seeds, grains, beans, broccoli sprouts, sunflower sprouts, pea sprouts, and all this stuff. Sprouts in the juice even. And what you do is you go through what’s called a healing crisis. Now the first takes about three, four, five days for most people. It’s like doing surgery without a knife, and all this stuff starts coming out of you. They teach you. The very first class is on internal awareness, and they teach you from the time you eat something or drink something—from it enters your mouth until it exits—what goes on. And they just break it down, they make it simple. I’m like, oh my God. Where’s this information? That first class, they’re trying to teach you about getting colon hydrotherapy or colonic. Have you ever heard of those?

[00:14:56] Ashley James: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:57] Tim James: And then I’m elbowing Charles going, “Hey man, you got me to come here to help you, but there’s no way I’m doing that deal.” For those of you listening that aren’t aware of that, you just sit on a tube rectally and water basically goes in and out, and they clean you out gently with water. That’s a colonic or colon hydrotherapy session. He said that most people are carrying around about 6-12 pounds of impacted fecal material and mucoid plaques lining the small and large intestine, and you want to get that stuff out. Now the record at the institute—some lady did a colon hydrotherapy session and she had she dropped 29 pounds of impacted fecal material. And I’m like what? I was the first person to sign up on that thing. I’m like I got to clean that stuff out because I got this blood deal going on, right?

They weigh me, I do the deal for an hour, I come back, and I’m 10 pounds lighter. Just like Dr. Scott said, he goes, “Tim, you got 10 pounds of crap in a 5-pound bag, and we got to clean it up.” This is even before nutrition. What you brought up even earlier was about the chemicals and the toxins, well the pathway of elimination of the digestive tract is the first place to get cleaned up because it’s the epicenter. It’s the driving engine of your life. It’s where all the nutrients flow and everything, so they taught us all that. I did that thing, I started feeling better. Day one, my acid indigestion was gone. The blood had stopped that week.

[00:16:14] Ashley James: When you say the blood you mean rectal bleeding, not the blood coming from your knees or your elbows?

[00:16:20] Tim James: No, that was still there. That was still going on. We do this. I had headaches, I had night sweats, I wasn’t feeling good, I was irritable during that first four days, and this is what they call healing crisis or doing surgery without a knife. Your body is basically changing from an acid-based organism because of the environment it was in. Everything I was eating was acid. I didn’t know meat was acid. I didn’t know coffee was acid. I didn’t think about it. I was drinking two big coffees a day. Dairy is acid, ice cream is acid, pasta is acid, and most cooked foods are acid. I was pouring acid into my body. I’d love picking apples and stuff like that and nature and vegetables, I love that stuff, but it was out of ratio, basically.

They put me on all this alkaline diet. What happens is you change the internal terrain of the body, and that’s when the harmful organisms leave. They pack their bags because harmful organisms like viruses, bacteria, mold, yeast, fungus, parasites, and cancer, they love low oxygen, highly acidic environments. And that’s the environment that I had created for them. Those little buggers were growing, proliferating, eating my food, drinking my drinks, urinating, and defecating in me and I had a build-up of them. We washed out and cleaned out my digestive tract. I started flooding my body, my cells, my blood, and my lymphatic system with all this purified water and green juices, and the body started removing all this stuff. Thank God it only lasted four or five days, and then I woke up the next day and I felt like I was 19 again.

I looked at Charles, I said, “Dude, you’re going to live. I’ve interviewed all these people around here. There’s a whole bunch of people that have already healed themselves of cancer. They’re back now, they’re bringing their friend with cancer, and they’re helping people.” I’m like, “Dude, this is the fountain of youth that we found. This is what everybody’s looking for. I feel great. Dude, how do you feel?” He’s like, “I feel awesome.” I said, “Awesome, dude. I’m going to go back. I’m going to do this whole plant-based thing with you except I’m going to keep bacon. I’ll do that.” Because I figured I couldn’t make it work without—

[00:18:16] Ashley James: So you’re going to eat a whole food plant-based diet plus bacon?

[00:18:19] Tim James: With bacon, with bacon. I was going to keep it. It was hard to give up. I read this book called The China Study by Dr. T. Colin Campbell on the plane flight back, and that changed my mind because they dissected the hearts of 300 young soldiers in their early 20s that came back from the Korean War and they found like 76.3% of them had severe onset of heart disease already in the early 20s from the standard American diet. I’m like oh my God, I have heart disease. Not only do my elbows are bleeding, I’m bleeding rectally, but I have heart disease. Nobody eats more meat than me, and it’s the animal fat that’s causing the problem. That healing crisis really woke me up to like how bad it was, and I didn’t have it as bad as some people. Some people had rashes breaking out all over their arms, their faces, over their bodies as the body was pushing and expelling out toxins, chemicals, pollutants, and harmful organisms. We saw parasites crawling out of people’s pores. One lady had a parasite crawling out of her eye.

[00:19:16] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[00:19:17] Tim James: Many people, when you’re doing enemas and wheatgrass implants rectally, which that’s what they do at that place, parasites will come out in your stools, not just the big long ones, but your stool can be covered with white fuzzy stuff. All these little white ones will come out, and then there are also microscopic ones that you can’t see that you have parasites in your blood and stuff. Again, it was a pretty awesome thing to get all that stuff out, and everybody on graduation day says the same thing. I feel 20 years younger. I feel 30 years younger. I’m off my medications. My elbows were hurting for 20, I can move my elbow. I can move my knee. On and on these people were just raving about how they were feeling.

So we went back home, we got serious. We implemented the lifestyle, and in two and a half years my friend Charles heals himself with this so-called incurable cancer, and he’s alive today. He got to see his son graduate high school, graduate college. He picked up the guitar, started a band. He’s living his life. He went from cancer and bankruptcy to thriving business and living his highest excitement. I just went crazy with it, and finally walked away from the financial services industry to tell more people about it.

[00:20:19] Ashley James: I love it. My husband, because he was just like you, used to say, “I eat vegans daily,” because he would eat the cow—cow’s a vegan. But he—for many years—would only eat beef every day or bacon. Bacon and beef and nothing else. And then one day he woke up two or three years ago—it’s been a few years. He woke up and he just said to me, “I’m never eating meat again. He just woke up and he became whole food plant-based overnight. Just something clicked in him. Probably after one of my interviews with Robyn Openshaw, and he heard about the frequency of meat and how it lowers the frequency in the body until we’re practically dead. Something in him just went, that’s it, I’m never eating meat again.

And within days of eating just whole food plant-based, you got to get, I never was able to get vegetables into him, and all of a sudden he’s eating only vegetables. About five days in he turns to me and he says, “If you told me that this food would taste this good I would have given up meat years ago. This tastes better. This tastes amazing.” He’s always impressed with how great vegetables can taste in comparison to meat, but our brain is hijacked by fatty foods. A great book to read is The Pleasure Trap by Dr. Goldhamer and Dr. Lisle. I’ve had Dr. Goldhamer on the show, and he explains it. That’s episode 230, so listeners can go back and check that out. 

Part of our survival mechanism is to seek out foods that are highly pleasurable in that they’re salty, sugary, and fatty because those help us gain weight and survive famines. Well now, we don’t want to gain weight to survive a famine because those foods are highly readily available. Whereas they were very hard to find and it took a lot of energy expenditure in order to secure those foods 200 years ago. But now, you don’t even have to expend any energy. You could just type in Amazon and they can deliver all those highly fatty foods to you.

Looking now, we see that 70% of Americans are obese or pre-diabetic. We’re heading very quickly in the wrong direction. Now you have mentioned The China Study. One thing that Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn talks about in Forks Over Knives—I’ve had him on the show, also a really great interview. But Caldwell Esselstyn talks about how during the Nazi occupation, one of the Norwegian countries—it was between 1939 and 1945, the Germans who were occupying the Norwegian countries. They took over all of the food supply, and they took over all of the meat. Only the Norwegians could eat potatoes, grains, and vegetables and they were not given any meat to eat. 

You’d think that heart attacks would have increased because of the stress levels of being occupied in a Nazi-occupied country, but in fact, they completely plummeted. In that population, they saw that the mortality rates for heart disease just completely fell to almost zero. And then when they were liberated and they got to eat meat again the heart attack rates went up. That to me shocked me because I always thought that stress—and stress obviously is a toxin to the body for many reasons. You’d think that stress would have somehow made the heart attacks worse, but no, just cutting out meat significantly decreased heart attacks. That really, really surprised me. Also, of course, increasing their vegetable intake and their fiber intake would then also play a role in their health.

You going to this center, coming back, what happened the first day? So the plane lands, you get home, you’ve read The China Study. You’ve interviewed a bunch of people who are on a raw whole foods diet. Your rectal bleeding has stopped. You feel like you’re 19 again. What was the first day like at home? How did you wrap your brain around making these changes now that you’re back in your old routine?

[00:25:00] Tim James: I already knew the changes were going to have to take place before I left because on Thursday before I left on Saturday, I was like oh, I don’t have a juicer at home. I don’t have all these things. I went to the store at Hippocrates Health Institute and I said, “What do I need to get this lifestyle at my house?” She’s like, “Do you have a juicer?” I’m like, “No.” I said, “Which one?” “That one.” “Okay, I’ll take it. What else do I need?” “Are you growing sprouts?” I’m like, “No, but I grew up on a farm. We had a garden. I can grow anything. I’ll figure it out.” She’s like, “Well, you need wheatgrass, sunflower, and pea sprouts to start.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take some of those.” I just ordered a bunch of stuff. I ordered like $1100 worth of stuff.

I called my wife up and I was like, “Hey, there’s a package on the way so look out for it because it’s got some stuff in there. She’s like, “How much did you spend?” I was like, “I don’t know what to say. No, I spent like $1100.” And she’s like, “What are you spending $1100 for?” I was like, “Look, I’m changing my life. Charles is going to heal cancer. We’re going to do this. I got to go.” I ordered that stuff. I got my seeds out, I started soaking my seeds. I went to the store, I started buying lots of produce—celery and cucumbers for juicing. To be honest, I didn’t know what the hell to eat for a while. I basically created these things that are now—we’re putting a recipe book together. I actually became a raw living food chef, believe it or not. From redneck cowboy type person farmer—my buddy was a cowboy. I really wasn’t, but I have a cowboy hat—a real one.

I created these little tacos. I would take a lettuce leaf, I would take hummus, and I would just put some cumin and coriander in it to get kind of that Mexican flavor. A little bit of chili powder and then mix that up. I started sprouting lentils, mung beans, and fenugreek—red, green, and French lentils. They only take two and a half days and they’re ready to eat. You can do it on your countertop in a glass jar. It’s easy. I would throw those in the hummus and mix it up, and then plop that on the lettuce, cut some sprouts, throw them on top of that or vegetables or maybe some avocado. Squeeze some lemon or lime on it, put some lots of paprika on it so it looked like meat, and then I’d eat it. I pretty much ate that for almost eight, nine months because I didn’t know what else to do, then I found another restaurant that made these living food wraps in town.

Once a week I’d go over and buy those on my way to the rotary club and eat half and eat the other half for dinner. I mixed it up a little bit. About nine months into it I’m like I need some recipes. But I was committed because I told Charles, “Look, dude, I’m going to do this with you. I will follow this protocol. I even started growing the sprouts for him too. I was growing it for me and him, and he’d come over and pick him up or I’d drop him off at his house because he was really busy. He’s reeling from a bankruptcy type thing with his businesses and trying to keep the lights on, so I did that for him trying to keep his stress down and just deliver these beautiful trays of sprouts to him. 

That’s how we started doing it, and then one of my buddies actually came over and he’s like, “Wow, what are all these plants you got grown over here?” And I said, “Oh they’re sprouts.” He’s like, “What’s that for?” I’m like, “Well, it’s part of this protocol, and sprouts are living foods. They’re like 30-50 times more nutritious than freshly picked vegetables out of your garden if you ate them on the spot.” He’s like, “Wow, that sounds pretty cool. Hey, will you grow that for me?” And I’m like, “No way, man. This takes a lot of work. Just grow it yourself, I’ll show you to do it.” He’s like, “Nah, but if you grow up for me I’ll do it.”

So he talks me into it, the next day he brings a friend over. I give the same spiel, and he wants me to grow for him. Before too long, between him and Eric, they keep sending people over, and I keep randomly getting home from work and I got to give these talks. Then finally, I told my wife it interrupted a date night. We’re getting ready to do something. This lady showed up with cancer, and I’m just like, “Sorry, I have to help her.” So I do the spiel and doing all this stuff, and before too long, we started teaching classes regularly. Living food juicing classes on Tuesday nights. Those filled up quickly. Then it was Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And then I started speaking at schools, grocery stores, and hospitals. 

I’d go to an apartment complex and speak at the little places that they have there where people can meet and gather. I just get the message out. I did this for five years, and I was still a financial advisor. I wasn’t getting paid, I was actually paying people to come over and have dinner with me. I figured out I spent about $1100 a month on food extra to feed people in these classes. Think about it, I was feeding a lot of people. We’d have anywhere from 1-13 people. Probably on average about 6-8 people per class were coming. We’re talking over 4000 people in 5 ½ years coming to my house. 

I got a lot of experience sharing this message with people. I was just so passionate about it because in a little over two years, again, my buddy healed himself with cancer. I have the first-person experience on this, right in front of my face. So he isn’t bs-ing me. It’s right there. I healed myself. Within 60 days all the weight was gone. I could feel my ribs again. The eczema was gone. I had another skin issue on my shoulder that disappeared. And eight months later, the big huge patch of eczema was completely cleaned up on my knee too. I completely healed myself, and I’ve stayed that way.

Now I’ve been able to maintain it for 10 years, and I just keep getting healthier every year, and I’m 47 today. Nobody believes me. I’ll be in conversations, and “Oh, where are your kids?” “Oh yeah, Mike, I have a sophomore at the University of Oregon and a junior at Tualatin High School.” And they’re like, “What? Wait a minute, how old are you?” I’m like those people that worked at the institute now because the people that worked there that were on that lifestyle, they looked 10, 15, 20 years younger than people their age, and it blew me away. 

I made a decision back then because they said that in seven years you can replicate completely new you. If we took every cell out of your body, put it in a catalog, categorized it, and come back in seven years—completely new you, new cells. He goes, “You have a choice.” I thought about them. I’m like, well I can either keep doing what I’m doing and probably have heart disease and cancer, who knows what’s going to happen with me. Or I could change, do what these people are doing, and build a new Tim. And seven years later there was a new Tim. I keep rebuilding new Tim all the time and finding ways to be healthier, younger, fitter, and make it simpler and easier for people so they can cut through all the minutiae online because there are so many people saying all these things that work and stuff like that, but in reality, they do a little bit but they really don’t. It’s confusing.

The problem is, the standard American diet, Ashley, is so bad that if you make any changes you’re going to see some improvement. But I’m looking for optimal performance. What really works. The cool thing is most of these things are really simple, and it really boils down to what you said earlier, which is getting the toxins out. Our main job over here is not—even though I’m considered a nutritionist now, and I don’t have a degree in it, but I’ve had tons of nutritious and dietitians come to my classes. I actually had one crying and she’d been a nutritionist for 30 years. I said, “What’s going on?” She’s like, “Everything that you said tonight resonated with me so well. It just makes common sense. Everything I’ve been telling my clients is mostly wrong. How am I going to face them?” I said, “Well, just tell them the truth and just say you’ve discovered something new and you’re going to do that. You want to help them, right?” “Yeah.” I said, “Well, go help them. Look at me, I was a mess for 37 years. I got some new information, I’m flipping the coin, and I’m going down that path 100%” So she started going down that path.

[00:32:25] Ashley James: It’s so true. We have to sometimes eat a little bit of humble pie, put our ego aside. When we find new information, we just have to open your mind so much your brain could fall out and be ready to receive new information that could help you change your life and let go of the egoic belief system that you were raised with around food. People believe that they have to eat bacon, eggs, or dairy because we’ve been taught since a very young age that those are healthy things. One thing that really surprises me is cereal, for example. I go to health food stores. We have local health foods, local co-ops here in and around Seattle, and I go to Whole Foods.

Whenever I’m in a different city I go to a health food store, but all cereal—it’s very, very hard to find a cereal that doesn’t have sugar in it. Just a whole-grain cereal, it’s very difficult to find. There are a few, but most cereals—and I’m so surprised because when I was a kid, there were more cereals that didn’t have sugar. Rice Krispies didn’t have sugar in it. There were so many cereals that you could find that didn’t have. Of course, there were sugary cereals back in the ‘80s, but I’m just noticing that even in health food stores, the second ingredient, or sometimes the first ingredient is sugar. And that blows my mind. Now, of course, I don’t buy cereal. I’m just using that as an example of how food has changed in the last 30, 40 years.

Since we were children, I think a lot of people are eating like—even on an unconscious level—how they were raised to eat. How their grandparents told them what was healthy or their parents told them what was healthy. We developed belief systems. My mom was afraid of carbohydrates. She would get very angry at me—I was a child. I remember at a restaurant I ordered the fish and the rice with the side of vegetables. I thought that was a healthy choice to make, and my mom started literally yelling at me. Everyone in the restaurant was looking because she was so angry that I ordered rice because, in her mind, rice was very unhealthy for you. Any carbohydrate was very unhealthy for you. 

I had these unconscious beliefs about food and my food choices that led me down a very unhealthy path. And then I had to re-examine why do I think this is good food or bad food? Or why do I believe I can’t live without cheese or I can’t live without eggs or dairy or I can’t live without meat? Why do I believe that? You really need to wipe the slate clean of my own belief system, and look at what is the most healing thing I can do for my body? What’s my body going to resonate with. 

So trying out the whole food plant-based diet I was shocked. I remember my first meal without meat because I had never in my entire life had a meal without meat. I’d had lots of meals with just meat and no vegetables, but I’d never had a non-meat meal because it wasn’t a meal in my mind. You had to have meat in a meal. And I remember my first meal, and at the end of it, I was shocked because I thought I was going to feel weak. I was going to feel tired. I was going to feel still hungry. I really assumed that it was the meat that filled me up and gave me energy, and it was the opposite. The more I went whole food plant-based and incorporated more complex carbohydrates from potatoes, for example, and sprouts—I love sprouting too. But the more I incorporated vegetables—both raw and cooked—I noticed I had more and more energy.

If we examine our own belief system and we are able to try on things that we said to ourselves I’d never do that, if we talked to you at 18, you would have been like no freaking way I’m going to eat that stuff that you’re eating now. We have to be willing to make these changes and then notice what happens in our bodies. Now you mentioned you spent $1100, and to a lot of people, that would be enough of a barrier to not even listen any further. I couldn’t do that. I can’t afford that. I guess this isn’t for me.

And I want to tell people that you don’t have to spend $1100 to get a juicer and get all this stuff going. I know you did Tim, you did and you probably bought like the best of the best. I’ve actually twice bought juicers that were worth hundreds of dollars for $12 at a local thrift store. You can go to your thrift stores, you can go to Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, or even the Buy Nothing—there’s buy nothing local groups on Facebook—and seek out a juicer. It doesn’t have to be the best of the best but just get started. You could probably find someone who has an extra. I own five juicers. You could probably find someone who has an extra juicer that would be willing to lend it to you or sell it to you at a really cheap price. Don’t let money be a barrier to your health.

Same with sprouting. Sprouting is so incredibly affordable. I buy my lentils organic, of course, but in bulk, and then I just actually use a colander. I soak them for 24 hours, and then I put them in a colander, and I put them in a dark warm place. And then twice a day—in the morning and at night—I rinse them off and I shake them up. For me, I like eating them at about day four day five because I like them when they’re grown more and they’re a little less crunchy. But that’s just my personal preference. There are many ways, and I’ve only done lentil sprouts. I’d be really excited to try like the pea sprouts, the mung bean sprouts, and the other sprouts that you mentioned. That sounds delicious. Your whole thing is living foods as much as possible, we can do it on a budget for those who have a budget they need to adhere to.

[00:38:34] Tim James: Yeah, can I talk about that?

[00:38:35] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I want you to.

[00:38:37] Tim James: You can save money and save your life at the same time eating this way, so it doesn’t have to be expensive. Yeah, I bought a $600 juicer. I got after it, and I did it. I made the juice twice a day, and it can become expensive. I was teaching people what I learned. I went to this place, juicing twice a day, doing this, eating that, and it worked, so I brought it home, and I recreated it. Most people can’t do it in their busy schedules. First off, you can’t go cold turkey because you’re going to go through that healing crisis, and you can’t. You’re trying to raise kids, soccer practice, school, taking care of aging parents, and all the things we got going on today. People are busy, they don’t have time for a healing crisis. That’s why you have to go away to an institute like that.

People would come to my classes, I would teach them the whole thing. We had a lot of people get juicers, but the problem was only 1 out of 10 would stick with it. Within 30-60, 90 days, most of them would have the juicers underneath the cupboard and they weren’t using anymore. I was like, “Why? You saw what happened to me. You knew me.” I know thousands of people in Portland because I was in business for years, and I’m like, “You know Charles. He healed himself with cancer. Why aren’t you doing this?” “Tim, it takes too much time. It’s too much money. My husband won’t help me with it. My wife won’t help me with it. They’re not on board. I’m getting made fun,” or whatever, blah, blah, blah. It’s too much work, and I’m like man.

I’m like, what could I do to help these people? I went out and interviewed 100 people that came to a class, bought the juicer, got excited, and then stopped. They wanted something simple, and they wanted a plan. It just has to be easy. I went back to the drawing board, and right now I’d like to share my core four secrets that we teach everyone. This is the foundation for transforming your health, losing weight. getting the energy, boosting your immune system, and whatever you need to do. Is that okay if I share those?

[00:40:19] Ashley James: Absolutely.

[00:40:20] Tim James: Okay. So core’s four secrets. Core secret number one is drinking half your body weight in liquid ounces of purified water daily. And if you live in the city, then the water needs to be purified and restructured so you can actually absorb it because the high-pressure pipes in city water make the molecules stick together, and they will not go through the intestinal lining very well and you just pee it out. That’s very important. That’s it right there. And just on a side note, you can at least go to the grocery store in gallon glass jars and get single purified water for 25 to 44 cents a gallon. There’s no reason you can’t at least get some 90% purified water in your life. Okay?

Less than 5% of people are doing this. If you’re 200 pounds, that’s 100 ounces of water a day. If you’re 100 pounds, that’s 50 ounces of water a day just to maintain health. Now if you’re drinking caffeine-free teas or drinking a green juice with no sugar in it, we’re not talking apple juice, orange juice, that kind of stuff—that doesn’t count. Coffee doesn’t. Just flax seed water. Green juices with vegetable juices and purified water itself, hibiscus tea—all these counts towards your water intake. That one right there, less than 5% of the population is doing this, and we are literally sitting in a situation called cellular dehydration. This is like a national catastrophe right now that nobody knows about or even talking about.

And if 95% of us are dehydrated, when your body needs water, do you know where the first place it goes to get it? It’s the colon. It’s the colon. This is why people have—this is what we learned—6-12 pounds of impacted fecal material in that colon because your colon has been dried up over the years because you don’t drink enough water. And if your cells need water, your brain needs water, or your bones—your bones are 22% water. Whatever your body needs for a process or an organ system needs water and it doesn’t have what it needs, it goes to the colon. So the colon then can’t evacuate waste properly. It doesn’t work properly. Do you see the problem? It’s just day in and day out, it adds up and it builds up, then you get backed up, and then you get messed up. That’s what ends up happening.

So simply by changing your water intake, you can allow your colon to start working, waste to start removing better, your lymphatic system works on movement, water, and oxygen, you can start getting the garbage out through the lymphatic system better, you’ll have more intelligence, your IQ will go up if you drink more water—literally. The difference between not having enough water in your body could be the difference between finding your keys, searching around for your keys, or hunting for your keys for 10-15 minutes in the house trying to find them. That’s the difference the water plays. 

I had one lady, she implemented this at my class, eight months later I was teaching a class at a yoga studio and I saw her. I was like that lady looks familiar but I couldn’t recognize her for some reason, and then I said, “Hey, you look familiar.” She’s like, “Well, yeah. I attended one of your classes eight months ago.” And I was like, “Oh, wow. I don’t know, I thought I noticed you but you look different for some reason.” She’s like, “I hope you noticed, I’ve lost 50 pounds.” I was like, “Whoa, wow. That’s awesome.” Now everybody’s tuning in, listening, and taking notes. I was like, “What did you do to lose the 50 pounds?” She goes, “You gave me so much information that night, Tim. I just stuck with one thing—water. That’s what I heard, so I did that. So every morning now I drink water. I do half of my body weight. I dropped 50 pounds.” I’m like, “Well, that’s great. What are you doing back this time?” She goes, “I’m here to find out what’s next.” I’m like, “Okay, here it is.”

Here’s core secret number two, chew your food until liquefied. This is so important. We have two ducts in our upper mouth and four in our lower mouth that secrete the enzymes, amylase, and lipase. These break down our starches and our fats. And if you don’t chew your food really well, they’re not going to get digested, and instead of digestion and a simulation of nutrients, which is what we want, you’re going to get fermentation and gut rot. You’re going to destroy those intestinal villi, those little hair-like structures lining the intestinal tract, and you’re going to end up with a leaky gut like me. 90% of people have leaky gut at some level, which is these little tears and holes in your intestinal tract where undigested food particles and microbes get into the bloodstream. And they start wreaking havoc, causing inflammation, causing headaches, weight gain, cancer, and all these other problems. Hashimoto’s, arthritis, everything.

Chewing your food is of the utmost importance. It’s the first domino in digestion, and if you don’t chew your food well, the first domino doesn’t fall and you’re going to end up with a lifetime of gut rot, gas, bloating, and problems. This one’s big, and less than 4% of the population, that I benchmarked, is chewing their food well. And for those of you suffering from depression, by chewing your food really well and hitting those meridian points on your teeth—this is right from Dr. Gabriel Cousens, Medical Doctor, MD—you can increase your serotonin up to 500%, which is your happy juice just by chewing and stimulating those meridian points in your teeth. So it’s a huge deal.

Core secret number three is avoiding liquids with meals. People are like what? This is a tough one especially when you go to a restaurant—if you can nowadays—and they’re trying to get some water, would you like some wine, you want some tea, you want a beer, or you want some coffee. They’re always trying to upsell you that stuff. Even when I tell them half the time I don’t want water they still bring it to me. Now that you’ve worked really hard to chew your food well and get it really small so it’s easy to digest and you’ve pre-loaded it with all those enzymes if you drink purified restructured healthy water, apple juice, wine, or beer you’re going to dilute those digestive enzymes and you’re going to go from a simulation of nutrients and digestion right back to fermentation and gut rot. You’re going to go right back to where you were—problems, your gut will be jacked up. Less than 2% of the population is avoiding their liquids with meals.

We give a rule of thumb. For beginners, stop 30 minutes before you eat and wait an hour after you eat to start drinking liquids again. For those of you with stage four disease, wanting to win an Olympic gold medal, or just be your fit top best stop drinking liquids an hour before and wait two hours after you eat and then start drinking a lot of liquids again. That’s core secret number three.

And the last one is core secret number four. This one is doing some breath exercises before you eat, just for a minute. Maybe a minute or two. And it’s as simple as this—taking a big breath in through the nose, pause at the top, and then release out to the mouth. And while you’re going through this process you can think about how grateful you are to have that breath, to have your life, to have this food in front of you that’s going to nourish your body. What ends up happening, Ashley, is most people—I mean, would you agree that we live in a stressed-out environment, a world?

[00:46:49] Ashley James: Right.

[00:46:51] Tim James: So even if you don’t think you’re stressed, you are. Your body doesn’t know the difference. If you are in stress mode, which most of us are, and we’re talking lots of stress—work stress, family stress, financial stress, COVID stress, and EMF stress. There are lots of stresses on us, right? Your body will—as a defense mechanism—go into fight-or-flight mode. The blood actually leaves the organ systems because digestion is not important now. You got to fight something to live or you got to run to live. So all the blood and all the energy goes out to your extremities. Cortisol gets jacked up, adrenals, and all these things.

So by simply doing this breathwork for a minute to two, you bring the blood from the extremities back into the organ system so you can actually digest your food properly. Less than 1% of the population is doing that. Now these core four secrets, besides getting some glass jars and packing the water from the purifying place, how much does that cost anybody? Nothing. It’s free, right? There they are. I have so many people when they order our products they hear me on a podcast or whatever radio show, they’re like, “Tim, I’m already feeling better before I even got your products.” Because they started implementing these things. They’re just common sense.

I’ve used this for 10 years. I’ve shared it with thousands of people. It works for everybody, every single person. I tell people until you’ve done it yourself, how do you know? You have to have a first-person experience. Don’t believe what I say. You got to go home and try it. Because people are like, well I don’t want to change my food. I’m going to exercise. I’m going to go get something. No, you don’t even have your foundation in place first. This is the foundation. This is the sub-basement to build upon, and then after that, then we really get deep with our products, to the detoxing, to the nutrition, to the bacteria, and all the other stuff.

[00:48:37] Ashley James: Awesome. So cool. I love it. I love that you point out that anyone can start this, and you can start it slow. You can start one habit at a time. I think chewing the food more is something that is going to take a bit of conscious effort, especially if you’re used to drinking a lot of water. I’ve seen a lot of people do this where they just take maybe two bites and then drink some water to help get it down. The food hasn’t really been chewed.

[00:49:15] Tim James: I have a solution for this if I could share.

[00:49:17] Ashley James: Yeah.

[00:49:17] Tim James: I do private coaching, one-on-one. In the beginning, I didn’t charge anything because I didn’t value myself. Now I have people pay me thousands of dollars a month to coach them if they wanted to work with me. I have other coaches, it’s not that expensive, but the first thing I do on our initial call, we do this onboarding calls. I have them pull out their phone, and I have them program these things into their life with recurring appointments. Now think about it, if I say plot, plot, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is, many people listening today know what I’m talking about. We’re talking about Alka-Seltzer. Why is that?

It’s because television programming actually calls it that. They’re telling you, hey, we’re going to program you. That’s what they call a television program. My dad was like, “What program are we going to watch tonight?” We’re getting programmed with commercials—the habitual repetitive motion. You say something long enough, and often enough, people believe it is true or they’ll remember it because what you’re doing is just simple. It’s programming the subconscious mind. 

What I have my clients do is they wake up in the morning and it says drink water. They pick the time and they had a recurring appointment. And it’s like [buzzing] and it says drink water. Then maybe 30 minutes later it’ll say green juice, Gut Detox, Toxin Detox. Those are our products, and we have them programmed as a reminder. Then at lunchtime, it says chew food. You can put chew food, avoid liquids, breath, probiotics, and enzymes, and we have that as a recurring appointment. In the afternoon—green juice, and then at dinner—chew food, avoid liquids, breath, enzymes, and recurring.

So I have them set up that structure. And then every day, their phone [buzzing], they look down, they see it, they see it, they see it, they see it, they see it. They’re smart. They’re now programming it. They’re using their phone to program themselves, and in three to four months you’re going to have a hard time forgetting those four things. And everybody improves. That’s the easiest, cheapest way I’ve found to do it because everybody carries their phone around.

[00:51:12] Ashley James: Very cool. What kind of juicer? Could it just be any juicer, or do you like the masticating juicer over the centrifugal juicer? Is it better just to get any juicer and just start doing it, or do you have a preference?

[00:51:28] Tim James: Well it really depends on what you want to do. If you’re just going to do celery juice, then you could get a cheaper centrifugal one. It’s really fast, but the ones that are the most nutritious—I’m putting sprouts and wheatgrass through mine. I can do wheatgrass juice. I can turn right around and make a nice sprout juice. I do cucumber, celery, sunflower, pea sprouts, and I’ll put some ginger in there, turmeric, or some lemons and limes. Maybe some vegetables from time to time like leafy greens or whatever.

What you want is a slow auger juicer that’s going to turn under 72, 75 RPMs, very slow so it’s not going to create all that oxidation like a wind tunnel that’s going to oxidize and devalue the nutrients quickly. That’s very important. It’s just a really slow auger juicer. The one we recommend now is an Omega. Omega’s got a bunch of them. You can pick them, but I can’t remember the exact model number now because I used to be super into the juicers. I still use my old Omega 8006. It just works, but there are newer ones that actually work a little bit better and they don’t get gummed up as much. They’re awesome, but you can get one of those for $350 bucks and you’re dialed. Or like you say, go to OfferUp. People are selling stuff like crazy now. Or they started juicing, they got all excited about it, and they gave up on it. Hey, take my juicer for $1000 and you can get a $300, $400 juicer for $100.

[00:52:55] Ashley James: Yeah, right. I’ve got them for even cheaper, but yeah. I have an Omega that I got back in 2008 for $30 or something.

[00:53:04] Tim James: That’s a deal.

[00:53:05] Ashley James: I know, I know. There are people who just want to get it out of the house or whatever. There are so many juicers out there. You want one you can find one at your budget, but the Omega’s fantastic. I love Omega. I’ve had such great success with it.

[00:53:23] Tim James: Yeah, they’re really good. I literally healed myself with juicing. I juiced twice a day for five years because I was like I’m healing Charles, I’m committed. I gave my word that I would do this with him, so that’s another thing is to get a buddy and stuff. The first product that we actually developed—this could be a good segue—is our Green 85 Juice formula. It’s basically as close to a fresh-pressed juice as you can get. This is where I met people where they’re at. It’s simple, it’s easy. They just take a scoop, mix in water, shake it up, and they drink. It takes literally under a minute and they’re done. And they’re flooding their body with all this nutrition. If you still want to juice, do it. I totally do it. I made a fresh juice this morning and I put a scoop of Green 85 in it. Because I want more rights. That’s what I do, but we have stuff like that available to people.

For those of you that don’t want to buy a juicer, I recommend that you do at some point, but you can get this in yourself once or twice a day easily. There’s no juicing, there’s no cleanup, there’s no mess. The grocery bills are way cheaper. When people are drinking these greens twice a day, your grocery bill drops about $100 a month. If you’re drinking it once a day it drops about $50 because as the cells get hydrated from all this new water you’re going to be drinking, hopefully, and you drink these greens and get the nutrients in there, the cells are going to send signals saying, hey, I’m not hungry. You just can’t eat as much. It’s impossible. Your body just whips right back up into shape, and your grocery bill drops. It’s pretty cool. You can do this on a budget. You just have to be strategic about it.

[00:54:51] Ashley James: Very cool. Why is it called Green 85? Is it 85?

[00:54:56] Tim James: Yeah. We called it Green 85 Juice formula, not because I’m a marketer or anything, it’s just because it replaces the 85% of the nutrition that’s farmed out of the soil. Most people aren’t aware of this that even if you’re eating organic vegetables or organic meat, the soil is 85% deficient on average, so it’s just not there. If it’s not in the soil, it’s not going to be in the plant or in the animal that ate the plant. Literally, almost all of us are actually walking around on 15% fuel or 15% octane. What I teach people to do is how to get up to 100% octane. We figured it out with our products now to make it easy for people so they can do it.

Our whole program, it’s a clinic in a box. Literally completely from the inside out—gut health, blood health. It takes less than five minutes a day, so it meets people where they’re at with their time constraints. That’s why we called it Green 85 is because it replaces the 85% that’s been farmed out of our soils today.

[00:55:55] Ashley James: How do you guarantee that your stuff has all of the minerals and the vitamins in it that we need? If the nutrients aren’t in the soil, how do you get it in your sprout formula?

[00:56:06] Tim James: It’s all about sourcing. Sourcing the individual ingredients from farms and farmers that understand how to keep their soil healthy. Either they are doing permaculture, maybe they re-mineralize with rock dust, or even better, they’re re-mineralizing with ionic ocean minerals. They get a concentrate out of the ocean. There’s a company called oceansolution.com. I’ll just give them a plug because this stuff’s awesome. You can get a gallon, and you should. You should get a gallon of this stuff. It’s like $55 or something. And you can put a little quarter of a teaspoon or a half a teaspoon in with your sprouts when you soak them and deliver tremendous amounts more minerals because the plants will soak that stuff up. You can do your lawn with it. You can do your garden. We did my brother’s garden. We sprayed one spray with ionic ocean minerals and the size of his garden doubled. And they were like what is going on. I’m like yeah, your soil’s deficient, right?

And the other thing that you can tell is how you feel. When you start drinking this stuff on a daily basis, it’s going to radically change your physiology from the inside out. I’ve personally made three runs at it. I wanted to do 40 days and 40 nights on just Green 85. The first time I tried it I made it 11 days, then I made it 26 days, and then last year I finally made it 40 days. And all I had was Green 85, 3-5 times a day. I had hibiscus tea, which is just water and hibiscus leaves, and I did some Irish sea moss in the morning and night. I actually did do a chai tea latte, but no sugar. That’s what I lived on for 40 days was Green 85.

[00:57:50] Ashley James: So you were doing a fast?

[00:57:52] Tim James: Yeah. And the time before when I did it 26 days, it was only Green 85 and I never felt better. I don’t want to blow people out of the water here too and think you have to do that stuff. Because I remember when I was at the institute and this guy was on a 10-day fast, I’m like 10 days you didn’t eat? How is that even possible? See I wasn’t even ready for that. It takes time to build up the mental strength, understanding, and how the body works. And then you have to be willing to go through a little pain to feel amazing because usually, the first two, three days of a fast it’s like you’re not feeling so good. You’re freaking getting cravings, and then all of a sudden you’re just not hungry at all and it just goes away. Your body kicks into ketosis and starts burning up all the fat and the dead cells in your body. It just starts cleaning you up.

We were nomadic people for almost the entirety of the time we walked this planet. So we’d walk for two or three days, and then we’d eat some food. Then we’d walk for two or three days, we wouldn’t eat, and then we would allow our digestive tract a time to rest and clean itself up, and our blood to clean itself up. We’re just literally eating ourselves to death. Like you said with the cereals and stuff, I mean, I don’t want to get started on that, but it’s terrible. They’re putting genetically modified wheat, as an example, so it’s grown in a lab, raised in soils that are deficient, sprayed with chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, fungicides, larvicides, and herbicides.

They grind it up in its dormant state, which if I gave you some hard red winter wheat and had your spring wheat and had you chew it you’d crack a tooth. You can’t digest that. It would come out just how it looks when it went in your mouth, but they ground it in that dormant state into a powder. They add sugar, water, and yeast. They cook it at high temperatures, devalue it more, and then they spray synthetic vitamins on it. They call it enriched vitamins, and then they give it to kids. This is supposed to be healthy food. And then it’s even worse. Now they’re putting super sugars like high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup that are 50% by weight glyphosate. This is not me saying it, this is right out of MIT. It’s bad. 50% by weight high fructose corn syrup is glyphosate, it’s Roundup—so ketchup and stuff.

This stuff started freaking me out, but that’s not good enough. They want more addiction so they hired these engineers types, they pay them big salaries, and they created these opiate derivatives that they put in cereals, and it’s not even on the box, to further addict us and our children to eat cereals. So the cereal thing really ticks me off. The only one that I would purchase is Ezekiel Brand Natural. That’s actually sprouted grains, that’s it. They have sprouted grains ground up and you just put it in some seed milk and then off you go. Flaxseed milk or something like that so you’ve got proper food combining, and then then you’ve got cereal you could actually eat and it’s not going to destroy your health.

[01:00:31] Ashley James: Right. Some of us have allergies to gluten or can’t eat barley, wheat, rye, or oats so cereal is not even on the table. But you know what, I’ve gotten used to eating big beautiful salads for breakfast. Actually, what I do is I take my sprouts. I told you day five is my favorite. I take a big bowl of my lentil sprouts, I drizzle balsamic vinegar on it, then I take a little bit of either coconut aminos or soy aminos—the Bragg’s aminos—and then I just mix it up. And I eat a big bowl of lentil sprouts for breakfast. I was surprised because then it was all of a sudden 2:00 PM and I’m like wow, I’m just starting to get hungry. A big bowl of lentil sprouts gave me energy throughout the whole morning, and well into the afternoon. It was really cool. Sometimes, on days like that, I just have that for breakfast and then I just make a really big beautiful dinner, and that’s it.

We can get away from this idea of having to eat what we ate as children, right? Or what we are marketed to our entire lives. I love that you brought up that. We have to remember to not become relaxed and give into—because sometimes people say, oh, just in moderation. I don’t want to get too strict. I’m going to be in moderation, and once in a while, we’re going to eat the standard American diet. We’ll just buy this Cheerios or whatever once in a while, but we have to remember that the glyphosate—the Roundup—is so concentrated. When they make high fructose corn syrup, it’s so concentrated.

I’ve had two really great interviews with Dr. Stephanie Cena, who’s the PhD, top research scientist from MIT who is an activist trying desperately to let us know. And she doesn’t get paid to do any of it. She’s trying to let us know that glyphosate is such a harmful chemical. It binds to heavy metals and releases them into our brain and into our kidneys causing major problems with developmental issues for children, but also can cause kidney disease and actually damage to the brain.

[01:02:56] Tim James: It’s in over 70% of the rainwater today, just to give people an idea of how much it’s out there. It’s bad. That Stephanie gal, she’s smart. I’ve seen some of her work. She was also talking about the laminate floors directly linked to autism in children—another contributing cause. Some really good work that she’s done. She’s done some really cool stuff.

[01:03:18] Ashley James: Yes. In cleaning up our diet, water, and food, we also have to consider the environmental factors that are in our home because the air quality in our home can have 10 times more pollution than outside, than being in a busy street in downtown whatever town you’re in. And yet, we think that it’s fresh air inside, but it’s not because everything is off-gassing. We have to remember to open the windows.

[01:03:51] Tim James: Maybe we are related because you sound like me. I feel like I’m listening to myself. The paint’s off-gassing, the glues are off-guessing, and we’re bringing this stuff in. It’s really cool to be chatting with you today.

[01:04:04] Ashley James: You might have heard of the Sternagles, have you heard of them?

[01:04:07] Tim James: Mm-mm.

[01:04:07] Ashley James: I’ll connect you guys. The Sternagles are a family. I’ve had them on the show. Their son, at a year old, and actually his pediatrician was our pediatrician. They now live in Utah, but we found out that we actually lived really close to each other. At one year old, their son was diagnosed with cancer, and so the last five years he’s been fighting cancer and it came back. They got it to go away and then it came back again. So they really have been fighting it for five years, maybe six years now. He now has a clean bill of health—spoiler alert—but they tell a great story of how they’ve had to fight cancer twice.

The first time they used natural medicine and in conjunction with some allopathic medicine. And the second time it came back, they got the oncologist’s blessing—because they’re very persuasive—to just allow them to do 100% natural medicine and watch, wait, and see. And they’re able to 100% help their child to not have any cancer any tumors. He had tumors in his nervous system and in the spine—very painful. In their journey, like you, they’ve really gotten clear that the toxins in their house and in their environment needed to be thrown away. They moved to Utah, took the rest of their life savings, bought some land in a beautiful area, and they built from scratch a completely non-toxic home

He teaches people. He shares all this information, teaches people how to do it, but his whole thing is what kind of light bulbs are you going to use? What kind of carpeting? What kind of paint? What kind of caulking? What kind of tile? Just every single square inch of their house is the lowest toxic, and it’s just amazing the things we take for granted that we don’t realize are affecting and are contributing to potential cancer, contributing to potential disease, or slowing the development of our children.

Like you said, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, seeing there’s even a link from laminate floors and the off-gassing to potentially creating autism-like symptoms in children.

You mentioned the Irish moss. Why did you take it? And how do you take it?

[01:06:40] Tim James: I take it because it’s got like 92 minerals in it. It’s chocked full of minerals. It can be used as a thickener. You can make a pudding with it, you can make a key lime pie with it, or you can just eat it plain or you could squeeze some lime or lemon juice, a little bit of salt, and then consume it in the beginning. It’s just a wonderful thing. It’s great for the gastrointestinal tract, for your skin, your brain health, and your gut health—everything. What I do is I try to get the purple stuff, it’s harder to find, especially now with everybody home, everybody’s buying all this stuff up. It’s either white or purple. I try to get the wildcrafted purple stuff, and it can be more expensive like $35 to $45 a pound.

But then I take a half a pound of it, I soak it in water for 10-12 hours, then I rinse it off, and I pick out any little sea stuff or rocks that are leftover. It’s pre-washed, but there’s still stuff left, and then I put it in a blender with a little bit of water and blend it to a kind of a paste. Add more water, and I just keep doing that until I got about a half a gallon. From that half a pound I’ll turn into about a half a gallon of this gel, and then I put in the fridge and it gels up. Every morning and night I take a big huge scoop of it. That stuff’s awesome. It really is.

[01:07:53] Ashley James: Does it taste good?

[01:07:54] Tim James: I wouldn’t say that at the beginning because especially when it comes out of the blender it’s kind of warm. It really needs to chill. I mean I can eat it warm now but I’m still like ugh. It’s still what it is. It’s like a sea vegetable. It’s not like dulse flakes. Dulse I think is really good. We put that in our green 85 formula because it’s got a lot of iodine in it, and that’s one of the big reasons so many people have thyroid issues today is because there’s a lack of iodine. It’s one of the four halogens. You’ve got iodine, bromide, chloride, and fluoride. What I was taught was that the thyroid thinks that those other ones like chlorine, fluorine, and bromide are iodine, especially if it’s not getting enough of it. So it grabs it. It’s like oh, iodine, but it’s not. And then it doesn’t communicate properly. It doesn’t talk and give clear direction.

Especially for women listening with breast cancer, we’ve been taught to give them tons and tons of iodine. We like it through a root system of a plant so that it’s converted from rock form to a carbon-based form. It works better, and this sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, and sweep that out and then get the thyroid chock full of a normal plant-based vitamin or iodine that’s been through the root symptom of a plant. That really helps out with breast cancer. There’s a lot of studies on that kind of stuff too.

[01:09:12] Ashley James: I love  01:09:12] iodine, which has been derived from sea vegetables. I like yours better because I love a whole food source of nutrients because then you’re always going to get it in the right ratios. So you’re getting iodine in the right ratios with other trace elements, and I love that you brought up that something that people are getting in their body every day—the bromine, the fluoride, or the chlorine. They’re getting it in their tap water, they’re getting it when they go in their hot tub, or when they go swimming in a swimming pool. We’re absorbing these chemicals that confuse.

[01:09:47] Tim James: From their toothpaste or their bread.

[01:09:51] Ashley James: Oh, right. Processed foods would have bromide in it. Processed foods are made with tap water so they’re going to have that. You know what’s really interesting, it made me so sad, but frozen vegetables, which I thought was a good alternative if you can’t get to the grocery store often. Frozen vegetables are processed by being washed in highly chlorinated water.

[01:10:17] Tim James: Yeah, genius.

[01:10:19] Ashley James: Because they’re supposed to make them disinfected or whatever. It’s great because it’s fresh, right? They’re picking it from the farm and immediately flash-freezing it, but before they immediately fast freeze it, they wash it several times with highly chlorinated water. Then that chlorine is getting into your system or those chemicals are getting into your system from your tap water, from swimming, from your bread, from taking showers. I live on a well so I feel really blessed, and I haven’t used fluoridated toothpaste in 12 years because I woke up back then discovered why fluoride is so bad. Not in its naturally occurring state in the ground because we can eat fluoride when it comes out of the ground.

It’s one of those trace elements the body needs, but not in the chemical form sodium fluoride. It confuses the thyroid, and the thyroid is absorbing these instead of the iodine. And then the thyroid can’t make the hormones, so then we go to an MD and the MD gives us what? Gives us a prescription when the thyroid isn’t working because we’re giving the body chemicals.

[01:11:25] Tim James: Yeah, so you get more chemicals. This is really important because this really helped me. All the listeners have to do is type in the umbilical cord and the word chemical. Just type that in—umbilical cord and chemical. You can go back to 2005 and you can see the studies showing that they actually take the umbilical cord blood from these brand new babies and young mothers, and they tested for like 400 chemicals. They found 71% of what they were looking for. For about 250 toxic chemicals, 180 cause cancer in humans, 212 cause developmental and brain disorders, and on down the list it goes. The scientists and doctors refer to this as a body burden. How come this is not being blasted on mainstream media?

You’ll see it in 2005, 2010, 2013, 2012, the different studies that come out. Environmental working group, different places, and nobody’s talking about that. That’s when I realized, I’m like, oh my God. If the youngest of young—the young babies and the young mothers, the healthiest of everybody—is already being born into this world with a body burden, we’re all polluted. Everybody’s polluted. I realized that. I’ve been on a mission, that’s what we call our company chemical-free body because you can look at the studies. And if that doesn’t hit you upside the head like a frying pan and you realize that you’re polluted, even though you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not the case because we’re all breathing the same air, drinking the water, eating these foods, and we’re exposed to all these personal care products that you don’t think.

Like you were saying, everything’s off-gassing. You got people spraying chemtrails, automobile exhausts, rubber compounds coming off of tires. Where does that go? Well, the tires started out with a lot of treads and then you got to get new tires every year or two, why? Where’d the rubber go? It goes into the environment microscopic. You breathe it in, it attaches to your mucous membrane in the back of your throat, and down into your gut, it goes. That’s where the problems are. That’s why we have really focused on teaching people how to become a mechanic for their own self, be doctoring themselves. You’re a mechanic. If the car is not running right you got to check body light or check engine light.

Here’s the example, car’s not running right check engine light comes on. Do you just keep driving that car? No, nobody does that because they know if they keep driving it and they don’t take it into the mechanic, the repair bill could get huge. Or the car could explode, or break down and they’re stranded at the side of the road they can’t get where they want to go anymore. When check engine lights come on people take them in and get them fixed. It makes sense. It’s common sense, but as our own bodies—the most important vehicle that you’re ever going to own, it’s the only one you got—has a check body light like you’ve gained weight, you have low energy, you have headaches, you have heart disease —

[01:14:02] Ashley James: You’re bleeding rectally.

[01:14:04] Tim James: Yeah, yeah you’re bleeding rectally, you have cancer, all these things. You have eczema on your elbows, you’re on medications, your body is just flashing the lights like hey, hey, stop, stop, take me in, take me in. Tune me up. This is where self-care comes into place, and you have to start loving yourself and realizing the only person that’s going to take care of your body is you. Not me, Ashley, some doctor, your aunt, your uncle, your grandma, your brother, your sister, your husband, or your wife. It has to be you. Look at animals. They take care of themselves. The cat wakes up, it stretches, does its yoga poses, and it licks its fur—it takes care of itself.

We don’t do that. We don’t expect everybody else to do it. We take really good care of the outside. We wake up, we shower, we brush our hair. We got our face—put our makeup on, we got our earrings, and everything’s looking good. The coat’s looking good, the skirt’s looking right, but what do we do to the inside of ourselves? You can’t see it so it’s not paid attention to. What we do is we teach people to take care of the inside. If the car’s not running right you flush the transmission fluid, you flush the engine, new spark plugs, new fuel filter, new air filter, and new water filter. Then you put in the good fuel and then you maintenance that sucker, and that’s what we’re teaching people to do with their bodies.

You clean out the digestive tract. We have a product called Gut Detox, it’s a thousand ancient-year-old formula from India. It works beautifully for that. You want to purify the blood, we have a product called Toxin Detox. It was originally two formulas for the military that will purify the blood of heavy metals, radiation, and toxic chemicals like glyphosate as an example. And then where are you going to get the fuel? Well, you need to flood the body with those green nutrition twice a day.

We have a product for that, and then you got to recolonize that bacteria—probiotic spores. We do the spore base rather than regular probiotics because they die in the stomach acid, and for those of you eating yogurt and thinking that’s a health food, it’s a dessert. Probiotics are bacteria, okay. When you heat them, which by law you have to do that to all that yogurt, it’s pasteurized. It’s 190 degrees, they’re dead. So yes, you’re getting probiotics, but you’re getting the corpse of a probiotic. It’s dead. There’s no benefit. You’re just having breakfast, or you’re having dessert for breakfast with yogurt, that kind of stuff.

All these things come into play, and it’s really about internal health. When you clean out the gut. you clean the blood, and you start flooding the body with nutrition, flood the body with these bacteria and eating fermented foods like sauerkrauts, kimchis, and these types of things, and more bacteria, getting outside, getting your hands on the dirt, more bacteria. Petting dogs and let the dog kiss you, more bacteria, the healthier you’re going to be. That’s how it works.

[01:16:39] Ashley James: I love it. There are plant-based fermented yogurts you can find that are raw.

[01:16:48] Tim James: CocoYo is one.

[01:16:49] Ashley James: Yeah, CocoYo. So what I do, I learned this from my friend Naomi. Naomi and I created a whole food plant-based course, videos. We basically just made videos in her kitchen because she’s amazing at whole food plant-based. I was doing it before her then she started because she had a heart disease diagnosis, and then she started spreading it. Her whole family started doing it, her parents started doing it, and then they all saw these great benefits. She’s really creative in the kitchen at getting people with very picky appetites to like the food. So she figured out, she soaks raw cashews, and then takes cashews, puts in the Vitamix, blends it, and then mixes in a few spoonfuls of the CocoYo and a very little water and then ferments it for about 24 to 48 hours on the counter. It makes the most delicious, and it works best when we use CocoYo because of the live culture. We can really tell the difference, but it makes the most delicious like cream cheese, sour cream, and you don’t need a ton of it because it’s—

[01:18:03] Tim James: Strong.

[01:18:04] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s strong. It’s very. It’s strong. It’s very dense nutritionally, very calorically dense, but her kids will fight over it. She had to take it and put it in individual little containers with their name on it because they would literally fight over it, which is really cool. She’s made other great delicious recipes where the kids will fight over it, and not leave any for the dad when he gets home from work. And that always surprises her because she made a vegetable dish the other day with mushrooms, and her kids hate mushrooms, but the way she made it was so delicious they ate it all up and they didn’t leave any for the dad. So she had to make a second dinner.

It’s just so cool when she never would have thought that her kids would get excited over a whole food plant-based diet. There are just ways of making it really delicious. When I used to cook years ago, I would start with, okay, well, we’re going to have a roast for dinner. We’re going to have the salmon for dinner. We’re going to have the pork chops, or we’re going to have the chicken. You would start with what’s the meat, and then what complements the meat. Well, I guess I’ll make some couscous, or I guess I’ll make some broccoli. You bring in the side dishes, right?

Now, my focus is on what can I eat to heal my gut? What can I eat to maintain my energy and my vitality? What can I eat to get nutrients in my body? And that becomes the compass or the foundation of that meal, and then what can I eat that’s raw today? What can I eat that has all those delicious raw enzymes that my body needs? And then I build the meal upon that. If you bring your focus to what you want to heal in your body, and what you want to support your whole family, what can I eat to support my immune system? What can I eat to help my liver detoxify? And then you build the meals upon the premise of healing the body.

So your kitchen becomes your pharmacy instead of what can I eat that’s just delicious? Because these foods are delicious. They can absolutely be delicious, but we have to make our focus be what can I do to support the 37.2 trillion cells in my body, so in seven years, I’m a totally new person but I’m actually going to be younger cellularly. I’m going to be younger in seven years. What can I do to make me younger? Now, as women, we spend thousands of dollars in our lifetime on face creams to make our skin appear as young as possible, but we’ve got to actually work on the nutrition on the inside. And when we do that, then our skin will develop younger-looking cells.

So instead of focusing on what I can schlop on my face, we should be focusing on what nutrients we give our body that will make healthy cells, and then we actually look younger and younger? It’s so true.

[01:20:51] Tim James: Yeah. It’s usually coming more from our women clients, but in six months on our protocols, people look five years younger. You’ll know once you start getting about three to four unsolicited comments like maybe your hairdresser will be like wow, your skin’s looking good. Or your roots are coming in thicker, what are you doing? Somebody will just say, wow, you look younger. And in the beginning, it feels weird because I started getting this from people. Especially from a guy, redneck, supposed to eat meat, drink whiskey, and shoot guns or something. Now it’s like, hey, Tim. You have really beautiful skin. I mean that made me feel my skin crawl in the beginning when people started telling me this stuff because I didn’t even know how to take it because nobody ever talked to me like that before. Now, I’m like, my skin is beautiful. Thank you so much. I love it. I love getting the comments. And I like freaking people out. I can’t wait till I turn 50. I can’t wait till I turn 60 because I like people going what?

I want to be that guy that’s like 110, sprinting down the beach, playing tag football with my great, great, grandkids, and they think I’m like their old dad or a healthy grandparent, you know what I mean? Because I know that’s possible now because I’ve met people that are doing this.

Dr. Gabriel Cousens, he lives a living food diet. You should have him on, he’s awesome. He goes deep into diabetes and stuff, wasn’t trying to do that, but he’s got books written on it. The dude’s like 80 something, he can do like 30 pull-ups. He did a rain dance for the Indians. He was telling all the Indians you got to stop eating the buffalo, you got to start eating plants, and they thought he was crazy. Nobody had done this rain dance in a decade, 4 decades, or 10 decades. It’s been a long time because it’s two days no sleep doing this dance. Well, he did it. He did it in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and then afterward, all the chiefs were like well maybe we should start eating plants because somebody’s been able to do that dance for 40 years or whatever it was.

The results speak for themselves. People see other people. If you want people around you to change, you have to make those changes for yourself. There’s no question about it. That’s how you do it.

[01:23:07] Ashley James: Awesome. I love it. In the last few years since you’ve been working with people and helping them to adopt a more whole food plant-based, even more raw foods lifestyle to support their overall health, what diseases have you seen people reverse? What medications have you seen people get off of because they became so healthy?

[01:23:27] Tim James: Everything. I’ve seen everything.

[01:23:30] Ashley James: Can you give us some stories or some examples?

[01:23:33] Tim James: Yeah. One of the first ones was this guy that had multiple sclerosis. His name was Bob, and this guy had come to me. Actually, I met this other guy in the grocery store at Whole Foods. He had a whole bunch of stuff. And I’m like, “Wow you must be juicing.” He’s like, “Well, actually, I got horses, and we feed all these carrots to the horses.” I was like, “I just started juicing so I thought you were because when I first started juicing, I was doing carrots and that kind of stuff.” He’s like, “No, it’s for horses.”

Anyway, he came over, went to one of my dinner classes. He was an attorney, really nice, just a gentleman. The guy was a sweetheart, and we became friends. Then he was part of this men’s bible group. This guy Bob had MS. He’s like, “God, Tim, will this help Bob?” And I’m like, “Yeah, actually what I heard was that people with MS, they actually really need this. Besides the lifestyle and the juicing, they need a blue-green algae.” It comes from Klamath Lake down in Oregon here. It really bolsters and strengthens the fatty tissue of the brain. What I was told is that MS is a virus that’s attacking the fatty tissue of the brain, so we want to bolster and strengthen that up. It’s one of the protocols they use at the Hippocrates Health Institute for people with MS.

Well, this guy couldn’t even walk. He had a caregiver, and I don’t know how long it was—a few months or whatever he was on the protocols. All of a sudden, he was driving up to his house, and the guy was walking across the street and getting his newspaper. He pulled up. He’s like, “Bob. Look at you.” And he’s like, “What?” He’s like, “You’re getting the newspaper, man. You’re walking.” He’s like, “Well, yeah. I guess I am.” And then a few months later, all of a sudden, I get this knock on the door and it’s Bob and his caregiver. He’s walking. I never met the guy before. It was just somebody through osmosis.

He’s like, “I just want to come by and say thank you because the stuff that you’ve been sharing with my buddy has helped me. I’ve been able to get out of the house. I can walk now. I’m getting around to do things. I feel a lot better.” And believe me, he wasn’t fully on the whole program at all, but the changes he made had made a significant impact on him. It wasn’t just the blue-green algae, the [inaudible 01:25:29], it was the brain on version. That’s very important for those of you that are writing that down who might have somebody with MS. But it’s like a super-duper omega is what it is. You’re looking for those omegas. It’s the sub-basement of where all omega comes from.

We recommend people do that for a two to three year period, and then after that, you can do it periodically. Human beings aren’t supposed to eat algae all the time, but for healing, it can be a good thing.

[01:25:52] Ashley James: Absolutely. I totally agree with you. I’ve had several interviews with Catharine Arnston, who’s the creator of energybits.com. She gives us a great discount. Listeners can use the LTH coupon at energybits.com. But she shares her story, and she sources blue-green algae. It’s chlorella and also spirulina. She has it tested, has the water that it’s grown in tested—it’s all purified.

[01:26:21] Tim James: Yeah, it’s important.

[01:26:22] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s very important. There are zero heavy metals. There are other companies out there. You can buy it cheaper, but the problem with buying it cheaper is it’s full of lead, heavy metals, and pollution. There are only a handful of companies out there that will test it. She actually has it tested twice. She has tested where it’s grown and also has the final product tested for purity to make sure there are no heavy metals and there’s no pollution in it. I’m really impressed with the quality of hers, and hers actually don’t taste fishy like other companies do. Hers tastes like it’s fresh.

[01:26:57] Tim James: Clean.

[01:26:58] Ashley James: Yeah, it tastes clean. My son loves them. He’s five but he’s been eating them his whole life. He calls them green crackers, and he loves that it turns his tongue different colors depending on which one he’s eating. He loves that game. So if you want to get kids into it, it’s like look at my tongue, you can make your tongue green. You can make your tongue like this bluish color, and then they freak out and they want to do it too. That’s a great way to get kids to eat it, but it also helps to chelate the heavy metals from the body. That’s part of the protocol that a doctor here, I’ve had him on the show, Dr. Klinghart. He’s just outside of Seattle, and he has a clinic where he basically reverses autism.

He gets kids that are non-verbal, rocking themselves, hitting their head, or banging them themselves against a wall. He gets them from the point where they’re completely shut in their own nervous system and unable to communicate or connect with people, to where they’re able to go to college. Where they’re totally no longer on a spectrum. I think it’s because they don’t actually have autism. I think most of the children that are diagnosed with autism, it’s autism-like symptoms, and that it’s the chemical toxicity.

What he does, Dr. Klinghart has a whole protocol where he cleans the child’s body out of all of the heavy metals and nutrifies the body—like you’ve been talking about. And has them remove the chemicals in their life—like you’re talking about. They just come back online. He has them do green juicing—just like you’re talking about. He has them do chlorella, spirulina, and do saunas—depending on their age.

[01:28:44] Tim James: Is he having them do chlorine dioxide?

[01:28:46] Ashley James: I don’t know, but I will find out. He has a whole protocol. A lot of it is food-based as well. He puts herbs in their green smoothies that also are natural chelators. It’s easy to put just these herbs. You can grow yourself in your own garden into your into your green smoothies every day. But that’s when I first learned that he specifically uses it with children very effectively. That he gives them the algae, and he will only recommend one of the few brands out there that are so clean like Catharine Arnston’s brands.

But we’ve had had her on the show a few times because she went into all the studies and talks about the nutritional profile of chlorella and spirulina, and it’s fascinating. You can get your vitamin K. 

[01:29:42] Tim James: It’s amazing. It’s amazing. Our top four ingredients—spirulina and chlorella are in there. We test them like crazy. It’s very important that people understand the ingredients. You can’t even believe labels anymore today. You have to know the people behind it, that’s the only way. The only reason I have the supplement brand now is because of frustration.

As a health coach, I would do all this research. I’m like okay, I got to clean their gut—this product. Okay, we need to purify their blood—this one. We need a green juice—this one. And then we need digestive enzymes—that one. We need probiotics—that one. And then six months later, I’m looking, I’m like what? Xanthan gum? That wasn’t in there before. And I’m comparing the bottles and I call them up, I go, “What’s this?” It’s mutated corn syrup fermented in bacteria. I’m like, “What? I’m not putting that in my body.” And then I started reading the labels and I started looking up every little ingredient—dicalcium phosphate, the wrong type of silica that would cause hardening the arteries, gallstones, and kidney stones.

After research, research, research, I’d finally get something. I tell everybody about it. My coaching clients are using it, and then they’d switch the ingredients. I mean after this happened three or four times, Ashley, I finally said this is enough. I found Dr. Scott Treadway, who’s one of the top formulators in the world, and he actually studied in India under two lineages of thousands of years of apprenticeship at herbology. Then he studied Chinese herbology, and then Western herbology. So he’s got this trifecta of knowledge. He did practice clinical work with patients, seeing his own patients for 10 years besides when he was getting trained in India, and then now he’s one of the top supplement formulators in the world.

When we met, I was looking for somebody. I went through 30 labs until I met him. And I’m like, “Do you know what Kirlian photography is?” And he’s like, “Oh, yes. We have two of those machines.” I’m like, “Really?” For those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s a machine that can actually measure the energy or the frequency from whatever you’re pointing it at like a night scope. What’s cool is we can process—anytime you process anything you’re devaluing the nutrients. What we do in ours on our wheatgrass juice extract, spirulina, oat grass juice, wheat sprout, broccoli sprout, meringue leaf, or anything that’s in our products, they’re air dried or sun driesun-dried10 degrees to keep those enzymes or that life force active. It’s actually a charge. Not only are you getting the vitamins, the minerals, and the trace minerals, but you’re literally getting a frequency charge from the product itself. It’s literally charging the cells instant contact.

And we’ve had those people that are intuitives or Reikis people that are really into energy healing. They’ll come to booths that we have at events and they’ll take one sip of our greens and they’ll go, “What is this stuff?” They just flip out. And then, “I’ll take six cans.” And then the people working there are like, “What’s going on?” They see that they’re in tune and they know. So that’s what we tell people on our greens. Don’t blend it because 90 seconds in a blender you’re going to kill 85% to 92% of the nutrition of whatever you put in there. Make your smoothie if you’re going to do that, add the greens in later, stir it in, spoon it, and then shake it up, and drink it that way to not kill that life force. That’s very important. And then please read your labels.

On my products, you’ll see in red on all of them no magnesium stearate, no silicon dioxide, no dicalcium phosphate, and I can’t tell you how many people have called in and are like, “Dude that stuff’s in all my stuff.” So if you’re buying supplements, you have about a 95% chance that you’re consuming a toxic chemical even though it’s purported to be health food. Keep in mind, 85% of the supplements on the market today are synthetic versions sold by pharmaceutical companies. So 85% of the entire supplement market is big pharma.

[01:33:25] Ashley James: Right. I’ve been working with Dr. Joel Wallach for the last nine years, and he had the same problem. He is a Naturopathic physician, but back 20-30 years ago, he was working with patients. He had clinics actually from Washington all the way down to California. We’d drive down I-5, go to a different clinic, meet with people, and work up and down the western seaboard. He was getting great results because of all of his research that went into understanding that we’re minerally deficient, and so he was using another company. And all of a sudden people stopped getting results. He looked into it. He analyzed the supplements and found out the company that he was working with decided to dilute their product to make a bigger profit, and he was so upset.

He obviously stopped telling his patients to use those, but he just didn’t know what to do because he couldn’t find the quality that he wanted to get the trace minerals and all the 90 essential nutrients for his patients. And then his family begged him to start their own company. He said, “I want to be helping people. I don’t want to be building a company or running a supplement company.” So his family begged him. “Okay, logistically, we’ll run the company. You keep working with people.” That’s over 22 years they’ve been doing that, but that’s the same story is companies will keep changing their supplements.

And also, with Kristen Bowen who has the magnesium soak that I love, she was getting amazing results with it and then the company overnight—her, and she actually had 200 people. She just kept telling people about it, telling people about it, and over 200 people that she became friends with were all using this magnesium soak. It’s concentrated or undiluted magnesium from the Zechstein Sea, and she reversed major health issues with it. And then out of nowhere, someone says, “It’s not working anymore.” And then she grabs an old bottle and a new bottle, takes it to a lab, and sure enough, the company started diluting it hugely to increase their profits.

[01:35:33] Tim James: This happens all the time. People that are listening, it’s not easy to step into the supplement business. I could see because I only did small batches for my coaching students. Now that things are expanding and the supplement thing is growing, it’s very difficult to compete because my raw material costs are through the roof. I build this stuff for my body and my coaching clients. I build this stuff for me. I want it to freaking be the best, the top of the pyramid. That’s what I want, and every time we build it, I go to the formulator. I’m like, “Look, I want to be the best.” Well, if I was to sell my greens at regular retail value, it’d be like $117 to $127 a jar. Most people can’t afford that.

I can’t really compete on the marketing because I don’t have this huge marketing budget because I’m not making an extra $60 a can or $50 a can on people on top of what I sell it for. It’s just numbers at that point. If I ever sell my company, probably don’t buy the products anymore. But we’re not going to do that. I’m going to put it in the bylaws. We’re family-owned, and it’ll be probably employee-owned. We’ll probably turn it over to the employees and they’ll be bylaws soon. The formulas have to stay the way they are, they will never change, and that kind of stuff so that after I’m dead and gone, it’ll still perpetuate. Because I have a lot of people, they have to have my stuff. Once they get on it, they’re progressing, they do not want to get off of it, so they get on auto-ship and they stay consistent with them.

[01:37:00] Ashley James: It has been such a pleasure having you on the show, Tim. I know you’ve got to go. Thank you so much. Do you have any final words that you’d like to say to our listeners to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:37:09] Tim James: Yeah, I do. I always like to end these talks with a challenge, and I would like you to challenge yourself to start putting yourself first—100% loving self. You have got to be first. I see this with men, and I see it with so many women, especially young mothers, mothers in general. They do everything for everybody. I mean taking care of the kids, washing the clothes, making the food, cleaning the house, trying to have a romantic life with the husband, and taking care of people. They put themselves last, they put their health last, and then eventually, a wheel falls off. Then they find themselves in the hospital with a nervous breakdown, they’re on anxiety medications, depression medications. They’re not happy and they’re not feeling good.

Well, the reality is you have to put yourself first if you truly love your children. You have to because they’re watching you, and monkey see, monkey do. Literally, do you want your children to follow your footsteps and be worn out, worn down, sick, tired, overweight, and all these problems that people have today? No. My people ask me, “What’s more important, you or your kids?” I’m like, “I’m more important.” And people think that I’m a jerk by saying that. I say, “Let me finish. If somebody shoots our way, I’m going to jump in front of my kids and take the bullet. Obviously, I love them unconditionally, but I put myself first because I want my children to put themselves first. And I’m going to lead by example.”

And I can tell you in my own life, it works. You lead by example, and what you’re doing by leading by example is giving other people permission, not that they will do it, but you give them permission and inspiration to do it for themselves. That’s all you can do. You can’t get people to do anything. I mean, you’ve probably experienced this. It’s hard. It’s like pushing a rope or trying to herd cats. Look at your husband. When he finally made the decision is when he changed, not when you wanted him to, when he wanted to. And the best way to do it, change yourself, that’s how you change your world.

[01:39:15] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure having you on. You should definitely come back. I’d love to have you on and continue sharing and teaching. I love your mission and the work that you’re doing to help people to live happier, more vital lives. It’s wonderful. Thanks, Tim.

[01:39:35] Tim James: Thank you so much. Yeah, I’d love to come back. We could go deep on whatever you want. Also, on my website, my podcast is there too where people can find me on the Health Hero Show. That’s my podcast, and I go deep on some stuff like proper food combining and things like that.

[01:39:53] Ashley James: Absolutely. And the links to everything that Tim James does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you so much, Tim.

I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Tim James. Wasn’t his story amazing? I love it. I feel like all men should hear it, I mean women too, not excluding anyone, but men need to hear his journey. Because I think a lot of us, we can stop and go what symptoms have I been sweeping under the rug? What symptoms have I been writing off?

I have friends who take Advil every day because they have aches and pains. They just keep going, and like Tim said, if you’re sick, you have all these symptoms but it doesn’t stop you, it doesn’t stop you from doing your daily tasks, then it’s really easy to keep ignoring or keep self-medicating. That down the road is going to lead to bigger problems.

My mom died when she was 55. I was 21 years old, my mom died when she was 55, and she was the epitome of health. She was the healthiest person we knew. She exercised seven days a week. She ate incredibly clean. She took supplements, and she didn’t manage her stress levels. She ignored certain symptoms, and she died of cancer. My dad died of heart disease. These are diseases that when you listen to enough episodes, you gather that there are many diseases we’re dying of that are lifestyle diseases, that are caused by our choices.

I can’t get in a time machine and bring my parents back, but I can show you this information. Maybe we can share this information with your family members, with your friends, with your loved ones. Maybe we can save some of the loved ones in our life. Maybe you can help someone in your life to stop ignoring some of the health symptoms they have and do some simple changes to their diet or their lifestyle to help their body correct itself. We can extend the quality of our life. We can put years on our life by changing our diet, by changing certain health habits.

This is what we explore in this podcast, so keep listening. If you’re a new listener, subscribe. Please give us a five-star rating review. That helps our show get to more people. And then please, go back and listen to past episodes. The most current episodes are on iTunes, but we’re also on Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and Google Podcast is an app now. We’re on all those, and you can also go to learntruehealth.com. All the episodes are on learntruehealth.com. The most recent episodes, the most recent 100 or so, have been transcribed. You can even just read the transcripts. And you can use the search function on the website to find episodes about specific illnesses or correcting certain things, certain topics.

Please check out Tim James’ website chemicalfreebody.com and use the coupon code LTH. I invite you to try his green drink. I absolutely love it, and I’m very picky. It is organic. He sources the highest quality ingredients, and it is gluten-free. I had to make sure that myself. So chemicalfreebody.com, coupon code LTH.

Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, it’s free. A great resource, great community there. Go to learntruehealth.com and check out all the resources there. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me on Facebook, or you can reach out to me through email ashley@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about.

If you have any suggestions for future topics, or if you are grasping at straws with your own health, I’m also a certified health coach, and I’ve been working with people for nine years. I’d love to help you as well. You can go to learntruehealth.com, and on the menu, there’s a section for working with me. You can also go to learntruehealth.com/chat and fill out the form for a free consultation to see if we’d be great working together.

Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener, and I can’t wait to meet you either on Facebook, through a phone call, or an email. I’d love for you to reach out. Just know that you’re not alone. We’re all in this together. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

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Recommended Readings by Tim James

Supplements Exposed – Dr. Brian Clement

Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

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IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen
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Viome: At-Home Gut Microbiome and Mitochondrial Testing

https://www.learntruehealth.com/viome-at-home-gut-microbiome-and-mitochondrial-testing

Highlights:

• Bad oral hygiene causes inflammation in the gut and the body
• The byproduct of the gut microbiome is important
• What diet ages people the quickest
• No such thing as a universal healthy diet

Every single person is unique, not only physically, but even internally. Because each person is unique, shouldn’t we have a diet specific to what our body needs? In this episode, Naveen Jain tells us the at-home tests that Viome has created that help in optimizing our health. He talks about the importance of feeding the microbiome what it needs and that every gene in our body is important, so all genes expressed in the body need to be tested to fine-tune what diet our body needs specifically.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today is one of those days that’s going to change your life. I’m so sure of it. This episode is mind-blowing. Cutting-edge, state-of-the-art at-home tests—you don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to go to the doctor’s office. You don’t have to go to a lab somewhere to have blood drawn. An at-home test that can take a few drops of your blood easily with a finger prick, can take stool, and even saliva and do a huge immense amount of genome work on the microbiome and of the mitochondria of your body, which are also bacteria, and understand exactly what you need to eat to bring everything back into balance and to make your gut bacteria work for you instead of against you. We can heal a leaky gut. We can heal all kinds of autoimmune issues that are triggered by and at its root caused by dysbiosis. This is very exciting.

If you listen to episode 440, the one right before this, I had a gastroenterologist who has been working for 14 years helping people heal the gut with food. This episode complements that one because now we’re taking something to a whole new level where now you get to determine exactly what foods specifically for you right now, specifically for the very complex and individual microbiome matrix that is so specific to you. No two people in the world have the same makeup of gut bacteria, and so of course, not one exact diet fits all. Why is it that some people can eat bananas and some people can’t? It’s because of our gut, and it all starts there.

We could even heal food allergies by following this method. So I’m so excited for you to listen to today’s episode. I want to let you know that I always ask founders and owners of companies to offer discounts to the listener. So Naveen has offered a discount for listeners. If you choose to do his at-home test, you’re going to use the coupon code LTH when you go to his website Viome and you use the coupon code LTH. I want to let you know that his website has a discount right now. He does have things on sale, but he does have things at a discounted rate, and you’ll get an even further discount by using the coupon code LTH. But there will come a time when those discounts on the website go away, you’ll still get a discount by using coupon code LTH. Go to viome.com, use coupon code LTH, and get a further discount.

Enjoy today’s interview. It’s a doozy for sure, and I can’t wait to have him back on the show. My husband and I have ordered the kit, and we are going to be doing it. So the next time I have him on the show I will be sharing our experience with it, and I’m very, very excited. I’ve already told some friends about this and every single one of them said how can I get my hands on this kit. This sounds amazing. I have a feeling that everyone’s going to enjoy today’s interview and make you think about your bacteria in your body in a new way.

Thank you so much for sharing this episode. Thank you so much for supporting the Learn True Health podcast. Come join our Facebook group if you get a kit from Viome and use the coupon code LTH there. If you end up going to viome.com and doing the kit, please come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and share your results as I will share mine as well. I’d love to hear from you guys and hear what you think. Excellent. Let’s figure out what we can do to feed our mitochondria and feed our microbiome to achieve absolute, amazing health together. It’s so exciting. Enjoy today’s interview.

[00:04:09] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 441. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Naveen Jain on the show. Viome is your website, is your business—viome.com. I’m very excited about this. You are offering a discount to listeners. The LTH coupon code they can use. You give testing that allows us to get precise food and supplement recommendations based on our gut microbiome and mitochondrial health, and this is fascinating. So many of my listeners have asked me what food allergy tests they should get. And every week, my listeners are asking about different probiotics and how they can heal the gut. Many of my guests have said that if you want to heal any disease, you have to start by healing the gut microbiome. It is that important.

And of course, now we know more and more that if you don’t have mitochondrial health you have a disease. Your company is helping people to get right to the root and solve this health crisis we have of chronic disease. I’m excited today because you said you wanted to talk about how we can, as a society, move in the direction so that chronic disease becomes optional. Welcome to the show.

[00:05:43] Naveen Jain: Thanks, Ashley. It is just amazing that we are living in this world of COVID, and it is hard to even mention that as a humanity, we really have done a great job of infectious disease. These pandemics, like COVID, happen once every 100 years. But at the end of the day, the world has this epidemic of chronic diseases. Think about it, we know or every one of us knows at least a dozen people who are suffering from obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, or autoimmune disease. You can give names like heart diseases, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, but these are just the symptoms. These are just symptoms of chronic inflammation.

So one of the things that I realized is that chronic diseases are really caused by chronic inflammation. In terms of chronic inflammation, the root cause of almost all of the chronic inflammation, especially the systemic chronic inflammation, tends to be the gut microbiome. We somehow feel that we have discovered some new signs and new biology about human beings, and we are so much smarter. But if you go back 2500 years ago and Hippocrates say the same thing, “All diseases begin in the gut. Let food be thy medicine. Let thy medicine be the food.” It’s not that we have become any wiser or any smarter, except that now we have a scientific way of actually looking inside the body and finding out what is going on.

So if I were to describe Viome in a simple way, we digitize the human body. We look at every single gene that’s expressed in the human body. We look at the human gene expression, mitochondrial gene expression, the gut microbial gene expression, and the oral microbial gene expression. As you mentioned, these things all work together. Unfortunately, it’s not like these things are just siloed. What happens in your gut doesn’t stay in the gut. It changes our body. What happens in our mouth when we chew our food changes what happens in the gut that changes what happens in the body.

All these things are interconnected. As we go along here, we’re going to talk a lot more about this latest research and the latest science of what we’re learning.

[00:08:10] Ashley James: I’m going to just come out and say the big elephant in the room. Let’s just clear the elephant in the room right now. A lot of my listeners are really interested in doing the different gene tests, but they’re afraid of—myself included. My naturopathic physician was suggesting I do one of these gene tests, but I don’t want to give my genetic code over to a company that’s going to sell it to a pharmaceutical company. Does Viome promise to not sell our RNA or DNA sequences or the information of our body to other corporations? Do you keep our information protected and safe?

[00:08:54] Naveen Jain: First of all, the short answer is yes. I’m going to give you a slightly longer answer as well.

[00:08:58] Ashley James: I’d love a longer answer.

[00:09:00] Naveen Jain: So the longer answer is, remember, your DNA or your genes never change. That means you’re born with your DNA, you’re born with the genes, your genes never change. Anytime someone who is telling you they can give you some recommendations based on your genes is simply fooling you, here is why. Now imagine, if I made the recommendations to you based on your genes and a year later you gained 200 pounds, has your genes changed? No. Your recommendation better change because you’re not going in the right direction. Now let’s assume you also developed depression, now you have autoimmune diseases, now you have diabetes, you have every chronic disease known, and now your genes still haven’t changed. So how can you possibly tell me that somehow the solution lies in the genes?

What really the diseases develop when your gene expression that means your expression of genes is constantly changing, your genes don’t change. So if you’re not looking at gene expression you will never be able to know what is causing a disease, and that’s literally how cancers are formed or everything. It is the microbial gene expression signaling the human genes expressions and they’re literally working in coordination that causes almost every single chronic disease. If you’re not born with a disease you’re not going to get a disease unless you actually trigger it, and these triggers happen with the choices that we make every day.

The interesting thing about gene expression is genes are like your thoughts. You can have good thoughts or you can have bad thoughts, and as long as you don’t express any bad thoughts there is no crime that happens. In the same way—you can have good genes or bad genes. If your bad genes are not being expressed, then you are in good shape. It is really about the expression of genes. You may or may not know, Viome is the only company in the world that actually measures the gene expression because no one has figured out how to sequence RNA because they all look at DNA, which is genes rather than RNA, which is really where the gene expression comes from. As we go along we’ll tell you a lot more about that. I just want to make one more point.

Assume hypothetically that I looked at your gut and I got the gene expression of it. God forbid, let’s assume somehow somewhere our data got stolen. Let’s just assume because anybody who tells you that they have a complete foolish safeguard. We are HIPAA compliant, we have every single security put in place. But let’s assume, God forbid, it does get stolen, then what now? The question you have to ask yourself is since your gene expression is always changing, someone can beat the out of you and you still have a different gene expression so they won’t be able to match it back to you. That means since it’s a dynamic environment we know what is happening right now. And six months later or a year later, it’s going to be completely different. That’s why it is less critical to worry about gene expression than about genes. I hope that makes sense.

[00:12:07] Ashley James: You said some very interesting things in there. Your microbiome gene expression triggers your body’s gene expression. We know the microbiome is incredibly important, but the microbiome is reaching out and sending signals to our body, and our body’s gene expression will change based on our microbiome’s health.

[00:12:29] Naveen Jain: Of course. Think about that, right? I mean 70% of our immune system is along our gut lining. How does our immune system get trained? So it’s literally the signals that microbial—what I would call micro poop, which the technical term is metabolites. The microbiome metabolites. That means the molecules that are produced by the microbiome based on the food they eat they produce certain molecules, and I call them micro poop because they’re literally the poop of these microbiomes. Sometimes these poops are really, really good. They produce short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate.

So the butyrate is a microbiome metabolite or microbiome tool. That literally triggers our immune system to calm down, so it’s anti-inflammatory. There are things like that microbiome produce a molecule called LPS, lipopolysaccharide, that literally creates then tells the immune system to start creating more pro-inflammatory compounds because it says, hey look, the bad stuff is here. Start creating the pro-inflammatory stuff so we can kill that stuff right. It’s constantly interacting with the immune system. Just know that our immune system does not have eyes and ears. Our epithelial cells don’t have eyes and ears. It is simply acting on the biochemicals or the chemicals that are being produced by the microbiome. And based on what is being produced, our body changes. For example, most people probably know that 90% of our serotonin is produced in the gut, not in our brain. And serotonin is, as most people know, is the molecule that actually makes you feel good. Serotonin makes you feel good, right?

The interesting thing is 90% of it is produced in the gut, and it’s produced by the human epithelial cells. But how do the human cells actually know when to produce it? That is triggered by the gut microbiome. So the microbiome triggers the chemical that actually causes the epithelial cells to produce serotonin. They literally are always interacting with each other and you will find that that’s why without microbiomes, your genes are necessary for you to be born, but you couldn’t live if you didn’t have the microbiome in your body.

In fact, the majority of if you look at all the genes that are expressed in our body, 99% of them are expressed by the microbes, which are foreign to our human body. If you look at the human genes, Ashley, less than 22,000 genes that are expressed in the human genes are protein coding genes. When you start to look at the microbes, 39 trillion microbes in our gut, and a trillion in our mouth and all over our body. They are expressing somewhere between 2 million to 20 million genes. And that means at any point of time, we have probably less than 1% of the genes that are expressed in the body are our own, and the rest are all coming from somewhere else. We are literally a container for all these organisms. That’s really—we are beautiful containers for these organisms.

I might even argue that these organisms may have actually created us for their own benefit, right? If you are interested I’ll give you my creation story of how I think humans may have been created.

[00:15:55] Ashley James: We definitely have to hear that, especially when you look at it that way. When you look at it from a standpoint like we’re the planter box that the garden lives in. When you realize that that’s six pounds of gut biome sitting in our digestive system is trillions of cells and does 99% of the gene expression of our entire body. And it does things like convert our thyroid. 25% of our T3 is converted there. Our serotonin is made there. Our short-chain fatty acids are made there. So much of our nutrients are digested there. We know that when someone has an unhealthy or a sick microbiome that their entire body becomes sick. There’s a direct relationship.

Yes, it’s not us in that we didn’t grow. It’s not like the cells of my eye that I grew or the cells of my finger that I grew, but it is ours to take care of or to neglect. Just like having a pet, we have to take care of the microbiome. We can’t just eat whatever we want. If we eat whatever we want we’re going to get the common diseases. I often say in the show if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. If you don’t want to be a statistic like the number one killer is heart disease. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. One in three people has pre-diabetes or diabetes and are obese. All these diseases are on the rise, even though we spend, as a nation—I’m talking about the United States, but most industrialized nations are similar to us in that we spend the most out of every nation “health care” and yet we come in dead last in things like infant mortality and other chronic illnesses.

Your mission is to help build a society where chronic illness is an option. Where someone could choose to not be chronically sick. I love that you also mentioned if you’re not born with a disease, if you didn’t develop a disease in utero, and you weren’t born with a disease, then any disease that comes after birth is optional. Very interesting. I want to talk about those points. Let’s start though by going back to what you said about your creation story because it’s interesting. I’ve had an expert on the mitochondria on the show and he said—and this just blew my mind—that the mitochondria of our cells are a different DNA than the rest of our body. So at one point, we merged with mitochondria and made an agreement that they would be part of us.

We really do have foreign living organisms in a beautiful relationship with us. So tell us about your creation story.

[00:19:02] Naveen Jain: I think as you started that, think about it. Microorganisms have been on planet earth for three and a half billion years. The humans are, give or take, a couple of hundred thousand years old. How do you think the human came to be? And this is my tongue-in-cheek story and then I’m going to tell you the scientific basis of all how it actually happens. But this tongue-in-cheek story, once you hear it you can never unhear it. Now imagine this world. Close your eyes and imagine this world. All these microorganisms are living in Africa and then one day they all got together and said we are sick and tired of living in a small space. We want to take over the world, and they all looked at each other. One of the microbes says I have an idea. What is your idea?

What if we can create something bipedal and trillions of us could live right inside it? Now, all we have to do is keep this person. We can make it crave any food we want and they’re going to run all over the world, find the food for us. All we have to do is keep this thing healthy. Now we can make it crave anything we want and it’s going to go everywhere, it’s going to poop, everywhere, it’s going to spread us around, and we’re going to just take over the world. They actually created humans and they named it humans. Right after they created humans, they started to wonder, oh my God. What have we just done? As you can possibly imagine, we are so worried about artificial intelligence and we keep wondering what if someday the AI becomes smarter than us, what will happen to us humans?

So microbes had exactly the same thought. They all reassemble and say, master, master, what have we done? We created this monster called humans. What if someday it became smarter than us? What will happen to all of us? Master says not to worry for a second. We took care of all those problems. Master, what have you done? Master says, well the first thing we did is right inside their cell we put one of our brothers right inside their cell, and can you believe that they call that mitochondria. It provides all the energy for their cell and we keep in direct communication with us all the time. We are bacterial brothers, we talk to them all the time. At any point in time the humans don’t take good care of us, we tell our mitochondrial brother to shut the energy down and they’re all dead.

Master, that is brilliant. However, you’re forgetting something. What son? They are starting to develop this thing called the brain, what are we going to do about that? Master says, that’s the first thing we thought about what do you think we did? We put a direct connection to their brain and can you believe they call that a vagus nerve? They thought they’re going to name it after Las Vegas thinking what happens in the gut is going to stay in the gut. They’re so wrong. What happens in the gut goes everywhere. Now, through that vagus nerve, we control their mood, we control their behavior, we control their thinking, and we control their craving. And guess what, if they want to feel good they better take good care of us because we’re not going to let them produce most of the serotonin. 90% of that we’re going to produce it ourselves.

So ladies and gentlemen, we are the ones that actually are the puppets, and our puppet masters are these trillions of organisms that are constantly pulling the strings and telling us what to eat, what to do, how to think, and what happens to us. It’s a tongue-in-cheek story, Ashley, but I can tell you some of the research that came out. Just two weeks ago there was a research that showed that our social behavior, whether we are extrovert or introvert, actually is driven by our microbiome.

[00:22:55] Ashley James: Wow.

[00:22:56] Naveen Jain: Our mood is driven by our microbiome. Our cravings for the food are driven by microbiome so much so they did an experiment on different types of sweeteners, and it turns out that the microbiome releases the signal directly to the brain that releases the dopamine that is specifically designed for the sugar molecule. They want to test the theory is it just a sweetness versus actual preference for the sugar. So they did the artificial sweetener, and the microbiome hated that. They wanted their sugar. So they thought maybe it is because of the amount of calories the sugar has. So they actually created this molecule that had identical to sugar except that it cannot be digested. That means it won’t produce any calories. Guess what, they still have the same preference for the sugar molecule. That means they literally want their sugar, and that’s what happens. When we eat sweet stuff we crave sweet stuff, right?

But now interestingly, these organisms that make you crave for that stuff if somehow you can use two weeks of willpower not to eat sugar, guess what happens. You actually don’t even feel like eating anymore because we kill the organisms that are making you crave that stuff. And that’s literally what happens. You and I look at some people and say oh my God, how can you just eat this salad and some people say I love it. I enjoy it. For our microbes it’s like, I don’t want that stuff right. I want my bread. I want my pasta. I want my pizza.

Another very interesting thing we noticed, Ashley, was our blood sugar, diabetes, or glycemic response is completely dependent on what is happening in our gut. We actually did a large study that showed that we are able to predict the glucose response for a specific food based on what is going on inside your gut. That means two people can eat the same slice of bread and one person will get six times the glycemic response and the other person get none. Intuitively, we know some people who can eat bread all day and never get fat, and some people like me can smell bread and get fat, right? We all know that happens. That thing is all are driven by our gut.

The other interesting thing that we talked about—cancer and heart disease, I’m going to tell you something very interesting we found. In the last 30 days, there were two research papers published—one in cell and one in nature. And they looked at about 20 different types of cancer. What they realized was every single cancer tumor had microbiome inside the tumor, and that microbiome was very specific to each cancer, not only providing the energy to the cancer cells, but also protecting it from the immune system.

Remember, the microbes can tune the immune system down, so they were releasing the anti-inflammatory signal to let the cancer actually continue to grow so the immune system doesn’t kill it. Isn’t that amazing that now we are able to simply look at—there is a company that’s looking at it, just looking at the microbiome in the cell and the blood plasma and predict that not only you have cancer but what type of cancer just by simply looking at microbiome.

In fact, we applied for FDA now that by looking at the microbiome in our saliva we can predict stage 1 or stage 0, the pre-cancerous cells in your mouth oral cancer with 94% accuracy just by looking at the saliva microbiome. And it is really amazing how oral microbiome is communicating directly with the gut microbiome, is in constant communication. So essentially, are in fact our body. The other thing that’s really very fascinating to me is almost all of the metabolic diseases and you look at some of the neural diseases like depression, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, many of them are obviously directly tied now to the gut microbiome. In fact, they were able to do a fecal transplant and were able to actually transfer the depressed person’s poop into a person that was not depressed, and actually the same phenotype goes across.

There was another very interesting research that recently came out. There was a person who had Alzheimer’s, and it turns out the person ended up getting a C. Diff infection. And for the C. Diff infection, they gave you tons of antibiotics, and then they do the fecal transplant. This person, after they got a C. Diff infection, they got a fecal transplant and six months later, this person’s memory came back. So Alzheimer was reversed simply with changing the microbiome.

Think for a second. Now what we are learning is just like when our gut microbiome is behaving improperly or what I would say dysbiosis, we get this leaky gut. And these microbes are constantly now going past the epithelial barrier into our blood, and our immune system is constantly inflamed trying to deal with that. The same thing happens when we have leaky gum. Remember, when you have blood, the gums which are inflamed. And now when you brush you’re bleeding because that inflammation now the microbiome from the mouth is now starting to go into the blood causing the same systemic low-grade chronic inflammation.

What they found was, at least in a couple of papers, oral microbiome could be a predictor for Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and autism just like the gut. What’s really happening is that when you get the inflammation in your gum, in one of the studies they showed was not only the pathogens move from the mouth to the gut, even the immune cells—the Th17 cells—they actually fluorescence those cells. They saw them move from the mouth all the way to the gut. That means our immune system cells are moving as well when we have inflammation in the mouth. When we don’t have good oral hygiene, not only you are actually causing inflammation in the body, you’re also causing the inflammation in the gut, which also furthers the inflammation in the body.

[00:29:16] Ashley James: There are two things, one is to screen. So you can use the microbiome to screen for cancer, you can use the microbiome if there’s dysbiosis in the mouth, for example, which could be a precursor, like you said, to dementia and other problems. We can screen the microbiome and see what kind of diseases could have been created in the body because of this. So screening or early detection, especially with cancer, is key, but it’s not prevention. Prevention is the best key, it’s the root cause because if we could do a course correction or prevent it from becoming a dysbiosis in the first place, that would be the best thing.

So here we have people. Most of our listeners are really excited about getting even healthier. Some have major health issues, and some are fairly healthy but they want to get to the next level. Let’s just assume that all of us, on some level, may not have the perfect microbiome. We all have some form of dysbiosis or Homer Simpson gut. I once heard someone refer to the standard American microbiome as the Homer Simpson of microbiomes because there are so few. It’s like a dumbed-down microbiome, and that makes us crave really bad food for us. We could grow a new microbiome that would make us crave healthy foods instead of bad foods, that would give us our serotonin so we’re happier, that would prevent diseases, that would heal up the gut so we didn’t have leaky gut, and it just cascades into better and better health.

Does your testing help us do both screening things but also then teach us what we can do to regrow a healthier microbiome?

[00:31:18] Naveen Jain: The first thing is, I will tell you, we’re not a diagnostic test. We don’t tell you have cancer or you have this particular disease because that will be an FDA-approved diagnostic test. What we do instead is to look at what is going on inside your body. We will look at that blood, stool, and saliva, and based on that we can tell you what your cellular health looks like. That means cellular health consists of many things. In terms of what your oxidative stress looks like, how do your cells behave under stress, what is your cellular senescence looks like, how is your immune system activation, what is causing the immune system to be active.

We will give you things like your gut health, your cellular health, your mitochondrial health, your immune system health, your stress response health, and your biological age because in some sense, what is your true inside age rather than what your chronological age is. And under each one of those scores, we give you the sub-scores that if your gut health is this, what is causing you gut health to be this poor? Is it because your LPS is too high? Is it because your butyrate is too low? Or is it your sulfide production is too high? Ammonia production is too high. After looking at all of that we say here are the foods that you should avoid, and for each thing, we tell you why for you specifically.

For example, the first time when we launched the thing I did a test. I honestly thought, Ashley, I was eating the healthiest one could. I’m a vegan, to begin with. I’m eating spinach, broccoli, cabbage, and brussels sprout. I wasn’t thinking I am going to be the person they’re going to put a picture of me and say this is what the healthy person looks like. It turns out, my gut was so bad it told me not to eat broccoli and says your sulfide production in your gut is very high and the broccoli contains a very high amount of sulfate. You should lay off the broccoli because the sulfide is causing a lot of inflammation in your gut.

My second thing was not to eat spinach because it sees your oxalate pathway for your gut microbiome, which is very poor that means you eat spinach that is very high in oxalic acid, it is not going to be digested properly. All the protein that lentils and legumes I was eating says it’s producing a lot of protein fermentation and producing ammonia that was causing issues because I was eating so much of this. That means they were not being digested, instead were going to the colon where they were being fermented and microbes were releasing ammonia. It told me to take a digestive enzyme along with my food to be able to digest that protein so it does not get fermented in the gut. 

Literally, for every food it says here’s what’s going on, here are the food you should avoid, and why. Here are my superfoods and for each one it tells you why. And then it says here are the supplements that you need to keep your body currently correct. Because a lot of the things that your body is not currently producing that your body needs, so in the short term you should take these supplements until we can get your microbes to start producing that. Take butyrate so you can at least heal your gut lining while we get the short-chain fatty acids to get going.

Literally, that is what the test does. What is interesting is come now three years later, having followed this, my biological age now, I am in my 40s even though my chronological age is at 61. I’m in my 40s as a biological age just because I’m able to heal my gut and get my immune system health, mitochondrial health, and my cellular health to be this good.

[00:35:19] Ashley James: You’re in your 60s?

[00:35:20] Naveen Jain: Yeah, 61.

[00:35:22] Ashley James: You really do look like your early 40s.

[00:35:26] Naveen Jain: Yeah, so there you have it. My biological age is still I’m 40.

[00:35:29] Ashley James: I mean some of us would just do your test because we’re vain and we want to look 20 years younger.

[00:35:36] Naveen Jain: Ashley, I’m going to tell you something very interesting here. Now we looked at biological age and something really fascinating data that now that we’ve analyzed over a quarter-million people now. It’s a lot of people we have analyzed, and here is the thing that really surprised us. The number one offender of your biological age, that means what makes you really, really old is—now I’m going to say it and I’m going to probably get a lot of hate mail for that—the keto diet. The ketogenic diet makes people really thin and lose weight in the short term, but technically it completely their body.

[00:36:17] Ashley James: I can believe it. I had several keto doctors on and it sounded really interesting. My husband and I ended up doing the ketogenic diet with a naturopathic physician where we came in weekly. We did it for three months and we were very strict on it. I’ve done it about three times in my life, but this was a very strong stint of being in constant ketosis for three months with this naturopath. At the end of it, I had developed such bad liver problems that my liver was distended. You could see my liver was sticking out of my gut. It was very inflamed and painful. I went for an ultrasound and they said it wasn’t cirrhosis, it wasn’t fatty liver, it was just inflamed liver. My liver was so bad. All of my liver enzymes were through the roof. Basically, my liver was very damaged.

But what was worse was my husband developed incredibly high blood pressure like worrying about an aneurysm kind of blood pressure. Very scary high blood pressure in those three months. We went for further testing and he found out that he had such bad kidney damage from the ketogenic diet that it took him over a year of eating a whole food plant-based diet and supplementing to heal his kidneys. He had been put on several medications in the interim. We’re working with a really great naturopath here. It’s a naturopathic physician who’s a cardiologist. He specializes in heart and getting people so healthy they no longer need high blood pressure medication.

Working with him, it took my husband over a year to heal his kidneys and get his blood pressure back down from that event and get off of all the medications. It wasn’t worth it. What I do love—

[00:38:08] Naveen Jain: My point is you and I are both going to probably get canceled.

[00:38:13] Ashley James: I’m sorry.

[00:38:14] Naveen Jain: We are both going to be canceled. In a cancel culture, people are going to just think we are the two nut people trying to bad mouth keto diet because there are so many fans of the keto diet.

[00:38:24] Ashley James: You know what, my experience with my listeners is they’re very open to learning about and hearing it. I hope they’re not going to just cancel out what we said because they love the keto diet, and I get it. I get it. I was a raving fan of the ketogenic diet. I looked in all the research, followed the doctors, and I really, really loved it until my husband and I had those experiences. Then I turned around went wait a second, I was really ignoring all of the signs that it was deteriorating my health and it’s a very acidic diet. It’s very bad for the gut. It’s a way to manipulate the survival mechanism in the body, but is that really health? Is that really going to be long-term health?

I have a few friends that are really heavily into keto, and they have been for a few years. I’m afraid for them in the long term. So you’re seeing though that when they analyze cellular age that it is the one diet that ages people the quickest?

[00:39:32] Naveen Jain: Yeah. Remember, the aging is fundamentally the aggregation of all the damage that we are doing to our body, right? To some extent, the keto diet was one of those biggest offenders followed by the paleo diet, by the way. It’s really all these fad diets that we fall into maybe the short term may work for some people, not for others, but they really damage our bodies. To me, it is all about the right balance. You have to eat a balanced food. You can’t say carbs are bad. Carbs are not bad. Carbs are needed for your body. The point really is there is no such thing as a universal healthy diet.

A diet that’s good for one person may not be good for another person. Or even the foods that are good for you today may not be good for you six months from now because remember, when you change your food habits your gut microbial ecosystem completely changes, and then you have to readjust. It’s a constant tuning of your body. Just like you have to tune your car once a year, you got to tune your body every couple of times a year to keep this body into a perfectly working machine. If you want a great working machine you got to keep it tuned. And that’s what the gut microbes do is adjusting your diet so you can keep tuning your gut microbiome to stay in homeostasis. Another thing, Ashley, I found the concept of this good microbiome and bad microbiome. I think that is being just one of those misnomers just like good genes and bad genes.

These microbes actually all work together as one big ecosystem. Think of your gut microbes as a rainforest. That means every step you take in the rainforest can be completely different from each other, yet everything can be lush and green. That means no two people have the same gut microbiome. Both can be extremely healthy. In a sense, it is not about what organisms are there in each person’s gut. That is the second part that when you talk about health, and this has been a big, big misnomer in the field of microbiome. That’s the reason why science has never advanced. Our focus has always been in genes—microbiome genes, and the human genes—the DNA. What that meant was the focus on microbiome was to tell me who is there. I want to know the names of every organism that is there. Somehow thinking that will allow us to find out why people are sick.

The biggest breakthrough for us at Viome was we say that can’t possibly be the problem because I’m being naïve. I thought the microorganisms are probably like human beings. That means there are two people who could have completely different microorganisms producing exactly the same thing that may be causing a disease. Or the same organisms could be producing completely different things in two people’s gut based on the environment and the ecosystem it finds itself in, right? Because remember, you and I both know—like human beings—depending on which company we are in, our behavior changes, what we do completely changes. Me at work—an entrepreneur, me at home—a dishwasher. What changed? Not me. The environment, right?

And it’s very interesting that you look at Akkermansia, which generally most people consider to be good bacteria. Akkermansia can be very good when it is actually taking the fiber and producing butyrate or short-chain fatty acid for us. And Akkermansia can be extremely pathogenic and is known to cause many of the diseases including cancer when it actually turns into virulent and pathogenic. It is not about the organism itself, it is the environment. When you find an organism under attack—so let’s assume there are a lot of other pathogens or something that actually the organisms find to be inhospitable. The organisms start to release inflammatory compounds and antibiotics to kill other organisms so it can protect itself. Now the same organism that was producing short-term fatty acid is now producing toxins trying to kill everything else, in turn harming the body that it’s inside.

The point I’m trying to make is this fundamental change that we did at Viome was we focused on what these organisms are producing. That means what biochemicals are being produced rather than who they are because our body can’t see the bacteroidetes. My body cannot see the fusobacteria. My body cannot see Akkermansia muciniphila. It only can see the chemical signals that are being produced, and it doesn’t care why. It only cares about what is being produced. Our job now is to look at this ecosystem and say what biochemicals are being produced? How do we change the input? Like a computer, if food is the information, when you give it a new set of information, now the process comes up with a totally different output. So when input changes, your output changes. 

But in this case, it is a self-modifying operating system in a sense that when you change your food, the organisms that can thrive on that food start to grow, and other organisms that can’t digest those foods start to wane. And now your ecosystem changes, that means now you have to start changing your diet again so that you can start to create a balance. Otherwise, when you keep eating the same food, the certain organisms that are really, really good at metabolizing that food they become in so much quantity then they start to behave poorly and they start to form the biofilm and they start to misbehave. It’s literally about getting the right balance between all of these different organisms to actually produce more and more nutrients for us.

[00:45:52] Ashley James: I love it.

[00:45:53] Naveen Jain: Makes sense?

[00:45:54] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. So the trillions of cells in our gut doesn’t matter what they are. There’s a variety. It’s like a rainforest. It’s more about what they’re producing. Don’t think of it like it’s a bad microbiome or good microbiome, it’s what’s being produced. What if someone has candida, for example? What if someone, in the past, we’ve called that a bad microbiome. The candida—the concern though is the byproducts it’s producing are toxic for the body, right?

[00:46:24] Naveen Jain: The interesting thing is, again, every organism—for example, one of the worst offenders is C. Diff, right? I mean everybody knows about C. Diff. Obviously, once you get a C. Diff infection then literally there’s not much you can do. You take as much antibiotics as you can and your only survival for people I’ve seen is FMT after that—fecal transplant. It’s very interesting almost every one of us has C. Diff. It is when it becomes out of control that means other organisms, which are good organisms, don’t keep it in balance, then it goes out of proportion. Remember, we need some of these—what I would say—pathogenic people to constantly keep our immune system primed.

Immune system is very interesting. When it is very, very low activity that means not prime and suddenly you get an infection, your immune system is really not ready for it. The immune system can’t be too inflamed—it’s really bad, or it’d be too low where it’s actually not ready for attack. The best way to do that is to have your immune system ready, but not be at high, high inflammation. That means at high activation where it’s dealing with so much inflammation. And that means a little bit of these pathogenic activities actually keep your immune system primed for you to be actually capable of dealing with when there is a pathogen out there.

In fact, when you look at our immune system health, when you have low immune system activation it is bad, and when you have high immune system activation is bad. And if you want to protect yourself from flu, cold, or for example COVID, the best thing you really need to do is to be right in the middle when it is in the best adult prime hood to go take on the enemy.

[00:48:11] Ashley James: Fascinating. Here we have a vast microbiome, and we want to support the body in having a diverse microbiome. Because what you’ve described as being optimal for the immune system. With your test, it’s testing for the byproducts of the microbiome. Then we can see what’s out of balance because it’s not so much, like you said, about what bacteria you have, which ones. The body doesn’t see that, but the body is affected by their poop and is affected by their byproducts. And some of their byproducts can be incredibly healing for the body, so we want to continue to feed those and give them the nutrients for them to thrive like the short-chain fatty acids are—

[00:49:08] Naveen Jain: Are good.

[00:49:10] Ashley James: Sorry.

[00:49:10] Naveen Jain: They’re very good. The SCFAs they’re very good, but they need fiber.

[00:49:15] Ashley James: Right, and they need fiber. You want to be eating the potatoes, for example, instead of the white bread. You want to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables, but the problem is then we have these other microbiome that might be over-producing something that is harmful. So your test will say okay, this substance is too high in your gut so you want to limit these foods. Does your test also tell us what we should eat more of or continue to eat to support and grow a more diverse and healthy microbiome?

[00:49:51] Naveen Jain: Yeah. We give you a superfoods. Here are your top 20 or 25 foods you should eat as much as you can. Here are your foods of another 500 foods that you should enjoy as much as you can, here are the foods you should minimize, and here are the foods you should avoid. You lift all those four categories. And the one thing we are doing next, Ashley, which we have not announced yet but I’m going to tell you since you asked. We always found that getting these supplements, which are an augmentation to the food, how do we only give people what they need rather than giving as much as you can get?

What we found is any time you give your body something it doesn’t need, it actually has to work hard to get rid of it and that means it only causes damage to your body. We thought what if you can actually create supplements made to order for each individual, one capsule at a time. That means if I looked at your body and say here are the 60 things you need, here are the herbs you need, the food extracts, minerals, vitamins, enzymes, amino acids, prebiotics, and probiotics. If you only need 22 milligrams of lycopene, there is no way to find it. What if we create these things for each individual made to order?

We’re going to be launching that next month. We’re launching that in August, basically making make to order after we do the test and say you need 22 milligrams of lycopene, 11 milligrams of elderberry, 2 milligrams of chicory root, and we need these 60 ingredients. We’ll literally take those exactly in that dosage for you and put them in these eight capsules in a sachet, make them for you only that time. And then when we do the retest, you can see all your health markers, what they were after you took all the changes, what they changed to, and then we reformulate again as we do the new results. Literally, constantly reformulating and giving you a new recommendation as your body is changing and adapting.

Imagine every four months, you get a completely new set of food recommendations, a new set of supplements that you need, and they’re all sent to you every single month and made just for you.

[00:52:18] Ashley James: Fascinating. So you recommend that someone would take this test every four months because they want to continue to adjust their diet? Obviously, diet is key, but then they can also have supplements made to order for their specific gut health and their body health.

[00:52:35] Naveen Jain: We also take all your superfoods that you need and we actually extract their stuff and put them in these supplements. For example, we know you may need fisetin that is in strawberries. But the problem is, first of all, you have to eat five pounds of strawberries to get enough fisetin. And the second problem is it also contains a lot of histamine producing products in the strawberry. In fact, we will see strawberry is avoid for you but the strawberry extract actually could be in the supplement. People say wait a second, how can the strawberry extract may be in my supplement when you’re asking me to avoid strawberry? And the answer is we literally just took out the fisetin from the strawberry, we gave them as a supplement, and we took out all the other histamine producing stuff that is going to cause you problems.

It is quite possible the food maybe avoid, but the underlying ingredients can actually be in the supplement that you need. That makes sense to you?

[00:53:35] Ashley James: Absolutely. When you went back and you took the test and it told you should take a digestive enzyme because you’ve been fermenting your food instead of digesting it. You should avoid these foods but eat more of these foods. Even though you eat a whole food plant-based diet, you eat a very, very healthy wholesome diet, you made these slight changes, which don’t seem bad. Cut out this vegetable, include this vegetable, and take an enzyme. That’s almost no effort at all to do. What health changes did you see in your body take place after doing that?

[00:54:10] Naveen Jain: Another interesting thing that you’ll find fascinating. My wife had completely different. Everything that was my superfood was her avoid, and my avoid for her superfood. And it became a challenge. We’ve all been told to eat together in the same dinner. It became a challenge for us to start following those diets. We ended up really making two things—one that was good for her, and one that was good for me. We started adjusting smoothies because for even right now, coconut water is her avoid and coconut water is my superfood. Guess what we do. We make the smoothie and I put the coconut water after.

What I’m trying to say is she is healthy, she works out every day. She tells me, “Why do I need to do anything? I am just so healthy already.” When she did that test and followed the diet—the husbands are always or your spouse is probably the dumbest person you ever know because they think what do they know? They’re not a doctor. How can their company be telling me do this. He’s not a doctor, what does he know? I said, “Look, why don’t you do the test and follow it for three months and you’ll find out for yourself.”

She does the test and she says, “You know it’s amazing. I used to always feel tired in the afternoon. I just needed a 15 minutes nap, and I just thought it is something that is needed. Now, I just don’t feel tired all day. I just never take a nap.” It’s like wow. She tells me quietly, “You know all my baby fat is gone.” I didn’t know how to respond to it. All I could say was, “What baby fat? I never saw it.”

[00:55:52] Ashley James: Good husband.

[00:55:58] Naveen Jain: The point I’m trying to make is for me, I don’t need more energy, but God, after I change my diet I feel so good. I jump out of the bed at 4:00 AM in the morning jumping with joy, wanting to do things, and I can work 17, 18 hour days and I work 7 days a week and never feel tired.

[00:56:18] Ashley James: I love it. Both of you—even though you were healthy to begin with—saw total improvements in your health in a few months just by making sure your diet was going to be optimal for what your gut biome produces. It’s so cool to think about how we can just cut out one food, include another, and all of a sudden our microbiome is producing better chemicals for our body. And then our whole body responds on every level. Energy, weight loss, mental clarity, and even hormone function.

[00:57:01] Naveen Jain: Everything.

[00:57:02] Ashley James: You have two tests. At viome.com you offer the Gut Intelligence service. I’m really surprised by your prices, to be honest, because I paid over $200—it was close to $300—to have my food allergy testing done. And I thought your services would be like $1000. The Gut Intelligence service is cheaper than what it cost for me to get my food allergy testing done. I’m thinking that if I followed your system in terms of the food recommendations, I’d have far better outcomes than following the IgG food intolerance test. You’ve got this Gut Intelligence service, and then you have another one, which is the Health Intelligence service that includes the Gut Intelligence service. Can you tell us about each one and why we should choose one or the other, or should we all just choose the Health Intelligence service because it includes so much more?

[00:58:11] Naveen Jain: Yeah. Obviously, one thing is the price. Look, if you can’t afford the Health Intelligence service, then you use the Gut Intelligence service. And again, the Health Intelligence service looks at your body, which is human gene expression, mitochondrial gene expression. That means we’re now looking at your cellular health, we’re looking at your immune system health, we’re looking at your mitochondrial health, we’re looking at your stress response, and we’re looking at your biological age. All that stuff also goes into our recommendations. If you’re not doing that test, then you still get very, very good recommendations, but only based on what’s happening in your gut microbiome.

Gut Intelligence test only looks at the gut microbiome. Health Intelligence looks at the gut microbiome and all the stuff that’s happening in the human body from the blood test. It is essentially an at-home test. When you order, it comes in—by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the test or not—a beautiful kit. It’s literally like a Louis Vuitton silver metallic box. But the interesting thing is because we didn’t want people to feel it’s some type of a product that looks like a medical product because we want to make it very easy for people to use.

The way it is done is so easy at home. Even for blood, you don’t have to go somewhere to draw the blood. It is literally you finger prick it, four drops of blood. There is a small pipette, you put the pipette next to it, it draws a full drop of blood, you put in the test tube, prepaid envelope, a touch of stool—prepaid envelope, and you’re done. Literally done. Ten days, two weeks later, in the app, it tells you everything that we saw, so all the insights into your body. And it tells you here are your superfoods, here are your foods to avoid. For everyone it tells you why, so here are your superfoods and why, here are your foods to avoid and why, here are your foods to enjoy, here are your foods to minimize. 

And the supplements that you can made to order for yourself, or you can just go buy them from Amazon. But in that case, you’re getting a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t need and paying 10 times more for the stuff that you don’t need. That means you could be spending $500, $600 a month getting these supplements, and most of the stuff you don’t need versus we just only put the stuff that you need and give it to you on a monthly price, which is substantially cheaper than what you would buy.

[01:00:36] Ashley James: Absolutely.

[01:00:38] Naveen Jain: Another interesting part that you mentioned was the food sensitivity test. I just want to say it because I think most people don’t realize. The food sensitivity is actually about IgG, which is the immune system antibodies for this food. Why would a food ever create a goal into the blood for your immune system to create antibodies? Think for a second.

[01:01:02] Ashley James: Because you have a leaky gut. You got a leaky gut and the food is getting in there. You eat some carrot, a tiny piece of carrot gets in. For me it’s bananas. I’m just so depressed about this. I loved bananas, and now my body just wretches and has such a negative reaction to bananas out of nowhere, but it’s leaky gut. So I ate some banana, I had a leaky gut, the little particles of banana got into the bloodstream, my immune system attacked it because it’s a foreign body—it’s not supposed to be in the immune system. Anything injected into the bloodstream that the body didn’t create as a foreign body that the immune system is going to mount a response against, and it’s not supposed to be there. If I were to eat a banana, my immune system would mount a huge response and my gut totally hates it.

[01:01:56] Naveen Jain: But here’s a very interesting thing. There are two points to make. One was if you have a leaky gut, you’re going to get the antibodies for almost every food that you eat a lot of because a little bit of it’s always going to end up in the blood. Literally, the IgG tells you that you have a leaky gut because if you are allergic to all these foods, all that means is you have a leaky gut. Not that you really are sensitive to those foods, it is what they show. If you fix the leaky gut because these antibodies go away in six months or nine months, then you would be able to eat the food. More often than not, most of the IgGs goes away.

In a sense, if you can now fix the leaky gut and you can tighten the epithelial barrier, then many of those IgG just disappear. So my point I’m trying to make is that the food sensitivity test is the wrong, wrong word. You’re not sensitive to those foods, you simply have a leaky gut. The point is, food should never be in the blood to begin with and there should not be an antibody. You’re not sensitive to those foods. You made them sensitive by eating the foods when you had a leaky gut. That’s all happened.

[01:03:09] Ashley James: Following the advice after doing your test would allow us to seal up the gut and heal it so we no longer have a leaky gut?

[01:03:19] Naveen Jain: That is correct. One of the scores that we give you is actually the intestinal barrier health. That means how tightly your intestinal barrier is actually regulated. You want to keep it nice and tight, and we give you all the foods and supplements to make sure that the only reason it gets permeable or leaky is because of the inflammation. As you can see, inflammation stretches the thing and that causes it to get the junctions to get loose. The best thing you can do is to reduce the stuff that causes inflammation, increase the stuff that is anti-inflammatory, and get more foods that are going to give the nutrients that your body needs. Remember, there is no such thing that more of the good thing is better. That is another thing that most people actually make mistakes on.

For example, somehow you probably heard that you take NAD, and NAD is really good for longevity. It increases your mitochondrial biogenesis, it’s going to make you younger, and you’re going to live longer. And it turns out, there was the research that came out, I think, two months ago that shows that actually the NAD precursor, NMN, and NMNH, when you have high inflammation or high cellular senescence, it causes the cytokine storm and causes the inflammation to get even worse. The point is when you have higher mitochondrial biogenesis, you are actually now creating more free radicals. And if your free radicals were already being over-stressed because they were not getting cleaned up, now you even have high amount of free radicals that are going to cause more inflammation in your body, and higher cellular stress.

[01:05:10] Ashley James: So it just cascades? It’s like a domino effect. People are often just eating whatever they want. You go to a restaurant, you go to a friend’s house, or your spouse cooks, you cook. You cook something that your kids like to eat. We just throw anything into our mouth, just whatever. Just order Thai food. Let’s just eat that. There’s a ton of ingredients in there that might be triggering to your microbiome. Okay, now we’re going to order pizza tonight. Okay, now we’re going to go to McDonald’s drive-thru, or we’re going to go to Starbucks. It’s interesting, though, I got to tell you. My husband switched from Starbucks to a different kind of coffee at one point in his life and he noticed a huge health change. He looked into it and he saw that there’s stuff in Starbucks. There are ingredients they put in their coffee and that will disrupt your health. And if someone were to just switch to a cleaner organic coffee, many people have noticed emotional health changes, as well as physical changes.

Let’s say you wanted to have a pizza, there’s a difference between something you make at home, from scratch, with your own ingredients and you know exactly what’s on it versus the delivery pizza. If we make pizza, we have a cauliflower crust. I make my own sauce on it. We don’t have any cheese, we put some vegetables on it, and we can make something really healthy. But when we do, which a lot of people are doing right now, ordering out at restaurants, we’re throwing just random stuff out of our microbiome to handle. Actually, one of my clients recently said my poop is fine. My poop is fine. I’m good, my poop is fine. I thought that was just the weirdest response. I don’t need to change my diet, my poop is fine. I get enough fiber. I’m fine, I poop. It’s okay. And I just thought that’s so interesting that someone thinks they have a healthy gut just because they poop.

[01:07:08] Naveen Jain: A couple of interesting points you brought up, Ashley. Same thing on supplements. Oh, I heard my friend tell me that the elderberry is really, really good for me not to catch COVID. And I should be taking vitamin C, vitamin D, and I should take this. They have no idea what that thing is doing to your body. You just hear it, you read about it in some magazine you say, oh, I need the green coffee extract because it will help me lose weight. Really? My point is all these things, you get every single magazine—here are the 10 supplements you should buy, here are the 10 ingredients that are a superfood, and you’re always looking for what is it that you need. You keep popping more and more and in the morning you take 20 pills just to make sure you got everything that everybody has mentioned to you and end up harming yourself rather than actually helping yourself.

That is really the trick is to know what exactly your body needs and how much, rather than just thinking somebody recommended so I’m going to take it. I think it’s not just the food but also, as you mentioned, how you prepare it and where you buy it. Let’s assume tomatoes are good for you. If not, you can now buy some tomatoes which obviously have all kinds of pesticides in them. You may still want to get good organic tomatoes. How you cook the food, the tomatoes are more beneficial when they are cooked rather than when they are raw. We eat pizza just like you do. We sometimes make a whole wheat at home pizza, no cheese on it, and we put so many different colors of vegetables on it. We make our own tomato sauce, and then we actually now cook the tomato sauce with basils and stuff and herbs and oregano. We literally make our own pizza that I think is pretty healthy.

It’s not the pizza is bad, it is the ingredients on the pizza and everything else you put on top of that and the crust itself that may be the one that’s causing problems.

[01:09:07] Ashley James: Exactly. Now I’d love to know a little bit more about your company and Viome. Tell us about the history of your of Viome as a company. Because I know that you have a mission and that you see a future where biome is helping the world to make chronic disease an option. They get this testing and then they go okay, I can choose this path and go down this road of disease, or I can choose this path and go down this road of health. We’re not forcing it upon anyone, but it is giving people information and giving them the ability to make better-educated choices about everything they put into their mouth because they’ll know. They’ll have the science to know what is the optimal thing that they could eat and put in their mouth or drink at every moment of the day to maximize their longevity and their health.

Viome I know has this mission. You’re seeing where you’re going in the future. First, tell me about your past. How did Viome get started? How long have you guys been doing this? What kind of doctors and scientists are behind it?

[01:10:29] Naveen Jain: The technology for Viome came from Los Alamos National Lab, which had designed this for the biodefense work. And this is the only technology that’s available to be able to actually measure the gene expression. Preserve your RNA, measure your gene expression, and find out what molecules from the gene expression are being produced. And then we use the AI to be able to see if this is what’s happening in the body. Here are the bioactive compounds in this food. How your gut, which is really a chemical factory, is going to turn a food chemical into what will be the output. It’s a complex chemical factory, but once you know what are the bioactive compound in a food, then you can see what they’re going to translate them into, what is the poop of the chemical factory that’s going to come out, and is that going to be good for you or bad for you?

We started this company four years ago. And anytime I start a company, Ashley, I ask myself three questions. One is why this, why now, and why me? The first question is, God forbid, I am actually successful in doing what I’m about to be doing, is it going to be able to help a billion people live a better life. And if the answer to that is no, then I’m thinking why would I dedicate 10 years of my life to doing something that does not move the needle. And the reason for that is whether you do something small or you do something big, it takes every ounce of energy and it takes every effort to do something. Why not do something that is meaningful and that’s going to literally improve the lives of as many people as you can?

And the second part of that thing is are you truly obsessed about solving this problem? I didn’t use the word passion because a lot of people talk about I’m passionate about this. Me, in my world, passion is for losers. Passion is for hobbies. Passion is I am passionate about meteorites. That’s a passion. That’s not an obsession. Obsession is I go to sleep thinking about how do I solve the problem of chronic diseases? I jump out of the bed at 4:00 AM thinking about how do I go solve this problem? And part of this obsession comes from having lost my own dad to pancreatic cancer and watching him go through the system that could have easily, not only prevented cancer, could have also cured cancer, but they would not go beyond what is the current practice.

I showed them all the research how pancreatic cancer is caused by the gut microbiome going through the bile depth into the pancreas. Showed in the research how the researcher, in fact, injected the antibiotics directly into the pancreas, killed the microbiome, and the immune system killed cancer. Showed them research. I said all I want you to do is just put antibiotics in his pancreas and I would take the responsibility. My dad will sign the thing, I’m going to sign the thing, and you are not responsible. They say we will not do it because that’s not what’s allowed. No, I could not do anything. Nothing I could do and watch him die.

And I told my dad, I said, “Dad, look. I can’t save your life but I’m going to dedicate my life to making sure no one else has to suffer. No one has to suffer from cancer. No one has to suffer from diabetes, obesity, heart disease, or watch someone lose memory from Alzheimer’s or have Parkinson’s. I just don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”  So that’s my obsession.

Part of it is you have to believe that what has changed in the last five years that allows you to do this now than 10 years ago. The reason is if something could have been done 20 years ago and if nobody’s doing it, you have to assume you’re not the smartest guy in the world. Somebody would have solved this problem. So there has to be what has changed? To digitize the human body, the cost of sequencing has to come down. When we started, the cost of sequencing would have been several thousand dollars. We said look, it is an exponential curve. I know in the next couple of years it is going to come down. We were able to use robotics and break it down, and we said let’s go do that.

The second part of it was: are computers going to be powerful enough to be able to analyze these petabytes of data that’s going to come out of, which is the cost of competing going to kill us? And the answer was you can fire up a thousand cores on Amazon Web Service and you’ll survive, and the cost of processing is coming down to zero. AI has to be powerful enough to analyze this massive data because every single person—you’re now looking at you know tens of thousands of these gene expressions and you have to analyze for every single thing. That’s massive AI. Is it powerful enough? The answer was yes, it is happening now.

The last part is the most, I would say, interesting part for me, entrepreneurial perspective, called why me? Why me is what is it that I believe that other people are not thinking about? What question that I am asking that is different from what everyone else is asking? And that’s why they are solving the wrong problem, they are working on a different problem, or they are not going to be solving the problem—their question is completely wrong. And let me give you a couple of examples of that, what I mean by asking the right question.

My other company is Moon Express. We are trying to make humanity a multi-planetary society. Can we settle down on the moon? And then essentially take that humanity into Mars, Pluto, and beyond. And the reason for that is all eight billion of us are living on a single spacecraft. And God forbid, if we get hit by a large asteroid, humanity is going to get completely wiped out. It’s not the planet won’t survive. The planet will do just fine. Remember 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the planet? All the dinosaurs completely got wiped out, and dinosaurs were much larger than us. The planet actually did just fine. The planet did so fine that it created humans.

Now we may get wiped out and it may create superhumans for all we know. But the point is if you can hear any dinosaur rolling in their grave what would they be saying? If they had one good entrepreneurial dinosaur they’ll be roaming on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. So I thought, what if we can do that? Now, what do you think the first question people ask when we say hey, we can live on the moon. They say how are you going to grow the food on the Moon? And my thinking was wait a second, that’s the wrong question.

Instead of asking how to grow the food on the Moon, what if we ask a different question. Why do we eat food? Because if you ask the question of how to grow the food, the only solution is to grow the food. But if you ask a slightly different question, which is why do we eat food? Now there are many solutions. You eat food for energy, and you eat for nutrition. What if you can get energy from radiation? What if you get energy from photosynthesis? What kind of nutrition do you need? Hydrogen, oxygen. What if you can get that from water? But the point is, just by changing the question, now you have a plethora of possibilities rather than just growing the food.

The same thing happened in the space of Viome. Look, all the research is clearly showing the gut microbiome is key to chronic diseases. There are tens of companies doing microbiome as service. Why is the problem not getting solved? And it turns out that everyone was asking the same question. I want to know what organisms are in our gut. And I say what if the question is different, which is what they are producing? And if we can solve that problem, then we will be able to solve the chronic diseases. And that’s the reason I started Viome.

By the way, we hired the head of IBM Watson who worked on the AI, and he runs our AI. We hired the best genetic expression people out of human longevity, Craig Venter’s team. Craig Venter, as you know, is the guy who sequenced the human genome. And then the guy who developed the technology for Los Alamos, Dr. Momo Vuyisich. We actually hired him to go develop this technology for us. So we got the best and the brightest from around the world to solve the problem that we wanted to solve.

Another interesting point, Ashley, is if you set out to solve a problem like how to make chronic diseases optional, you get the best and the brightest because they want this to be their legacy. Smartest people want to work on the toughest problems, right? And that’s why it’s easier to solve an audacious problem than to solve a smaller problem. So that’s really the history.

In four years, as we have come along, we have helped hundreds of thousands of people. If you just literally look at the emails I get every month about the number of people telling me that you saved my life, you saved my wife. I thought I was going to die and now I can walk. It’s just an unbelievable amount of comfort you get that your hard work is not being wasted. You’re doing something that actually improves people’s lives. Really, my goal is to provide actionable information to people that they can act on rather than simply do things and give you information that is not actionable.

My DNA test, I’m six times more likely to get Alzheimer’s, enjoy. What am I going to do with that?

[01:20:13] Ashley James: That’s true. You go get those DNA tests and they just say here’s what you could have. Angelina Jolie has her breasts removed because she has the BRCA gene. Well, the BRCA gene doesn’t mean you’re going to have breast cancer. And in fact, when the BRCA gene expresses in a healthy way it prevents breast cancer. She was worried about the BRCA gene expressing in an unhealthy way that would create breast cancer, and then what, she continues eating McDonald’s, continues eating whatever she wants and disrupts a bad microbiome. Cancer can show up anywhere. It doesn’t have to show up in the breast. She could get a different kind of cancer. What is she going to do, remove everything? Cut out all her organs?

This just infuriates me that women are being told, and I’ve had clients where the women were told to have full hysterectomies and their ovaries removed because their sister had ovarian cancer, or their sister had some form of cancer that was triggered by hormones. Because it’s in their family and their genes, all the women in their family should have their ovaries removed. This is ridiculous. This isn’t preventive medicine. To remove organs to prevent cancers is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous.

[01:21:42] Naveen Jain: And more than, these genes would not have actually evolved through the selection if they were always bad for you. Think about that. They would have been wiped out from the human population if they were bad for you, right? The same thing by the way for Alzheimer’s is called APOE6. APOE6, it turns out in the Amazonian forest they have 8 or 10 copies of them and they never developed Alzheimer’s. In fact, it turns out it is supposed to protect you against all types of bacterial infection because they have so much mosquito-borne diseases it protects them from all those diseases that’s why they have these many copies of things. Elephants have eight times more the same APOE6 gene and elephants never get Alzheimer’s, right?

[01:22:27] Ashley James: And an elephant never forgets.

[01:22:30] Naveen Jain: And never forgets. There you have it. My point is, these GWAS studies are so bogus. In fact, it turns out, when you look at these GWAS, which is Genomic-Wide Association Study, they did 20 studies on depression. They basically will take 200 people who are depressed and say oh, look at what we found in common. The 20 separate research were published all differently. One guy decided that he’s going to do a matter research of look at all these 20 research and see what is in common. And he concluded there is not a single gene that is actually in common between these 20 research that causes depression. It is nothing but measuring the noise because any time you can find a pattern in the noise when you have these millions of these genes, you’re going to find something out there that’s common between these 200 people and you publish a paper. It doesn’t mean that it’s actually causing the disease.

[01:23:26] Ashley James: Like they all ate apples.

[01:23:28] Naveen Jain: Yeah.

[01:23:29] Ashley James: Right. It must be apples because they all ate an apple on a Tuesday. It’s not about the gene is what you’re saying. It’s about the genus expression, and that’s epigenetics. Because we epigenetically can turn gene expression on and off depending on the nutrients that are available. So people can express in a way that develops a disease. And you give the body new nutrients, different nutrients, and the body then expresses in a healthy way that suppresses that disease. So it all comes back to the food. But you take it one step deeper and go back to the microbiome, so it all comes back to what we’re feeding the microbiome because the microbiome is feeding us these chemicals. And we have to optimize the chemicals the microbiome is feeding us in order to optimize our own health. I’m very excited.

[01:24:29] Naveen Jain: Agreed. That’s literally what it does. And I really hope that your audience gets to go try this because I’ll tell you that it will change their life. It will fundamentally. Small changes will have a massive impact on their own, and they can feel it. Not only will it improve their health from the inside out. They will be able to feel it. They will feel younger, they will look better, they’ll have more energy, the mental fog, and all the stuff. And hopefully, prevent all these chronic diseases from happening. Every single person who joins also essentially helps everyone else before them and after them so that we can together understand what is causing these diseases and prevent it from future generations. Even if we don’t do it for ourselves, let’s do it for our children and grandchildren.

[01:25:21] Ashley James: Absolutely. As we’ve been sitting here I’m thinking, well, I’m definitely going to do the Health Intelligence service, which you give listeners a discount. So please listeners, you can go to viome.com and use the coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. Use the coupon code LTH for your discount. I’m going to get the Health Intelligence service, but I’m also going to get it for my husband because like you said and I just know this, he and I react differently to different foods. I’ll feed him at dinner and all of a sudden his gut looks like he’s nine months pregnant. Because he’s fermenting. Whereas I eat that dinner and my gut’s great. I’m like oh, that felt wonderful. But for him, it made him bloated. And then there’s another meal I’ll make and I get bloated and he doesn’t. We definitely have two different microbiomes going on that we need to help. But what about my son?

My son’s five years old and we have a lot of listeners with children. Can children do this as well?

[01:26:20] Naveen Jain: Yes. Yes, they can but the parents have to consent to it.

[01:26:26] Ashley James: Of course. Well, yeah because we’d be the one pricking the finger for the blood and collecting the stool sample. That’s right. So walk us through. Is it saliva, stool sample, and a little prick of blood that we can all do it in the comfort of our own home?

[01:26:42] Naveen Jain: Yeah. Currently, the Health Intelligence only has blood and stool. We are launching the next product, which is going to be the whole body intelligence that will also include saliva. But that’s currently not available. So only products available are Gut Intelligence and Health Intelligence.

[01:26:58] Ashley James: Got it. So very soon you’ll have the one that has all three. We’ve talked a lot about Gut Intelligence. I’m interested about the microbiome. Your Health Intelligence service, what kind of information does it give us to help us to optimize mitochondrial health? I’m really interested in supporting mitochondrial health. You talked about how the gut talks to our mitochondria. Is it that by correcting the gut and supporting the gut health and supporting the microbiome we’re supporting mitochondria? Or are there further steps to take to support mitochondria?

[01:27:36] Naveen Jain: Well, first of all, as you pointed out earlier, Ashley, mitochondria is an organelle inside our own cell. It has its own genes. It replicates itself just like any other bacteria. So inside ourselves, these bacterial cells are constantly replicating. It has its own 12 genes. We look at its own gene expression to see how much energy it is producing? How much is it replicating, which is called mitochondrial biogenesis? When the cells divide you need the mitochondria, you need all the energy. So if you don’t have enough mitochondrial biogenesis happening, you’re going to start feeling tired. You don’t have enough energy. Cells are going to die.

So we look at all of the mitochondrial biogenesis. Then remember, if you go back to high school biology, the mitochondria is the one that completes the Krebs cycle, that ATP cycle. You take glucose and it actually gets converted into ATP. If anything inside that, to complete that cycle there are a whole bunch of coenzymes that they need. So for example, if you are missing some coenzyme like CoQ10, then you may actually not be able to produce energy. And then we will actually give you the foods that are high in CoQ10 or the supplement that contains CoQ10.

It’s literally by looking at your mitochondrial gene expression, we are able to recommend the foods that are good for you, recommend the food that you should avoid, and also include them in the right set of supplements. If there are certain things that you’re not producing but you need, we give them to you as an augmentation or supplement with that.

And we do the same thing with, by the way, cellular side. So by looking at your blood, we’re looking at your cellular senescence. These are the cells that neither died but they’re still alive producing toxins. And the cellular senescence causes aging. So we have to also worry about making sure how do we go out and making sure these cells don’t become these zombie cells. So we look at your cellular stress. We look at, as I said, stress response. We look at your immune system’s health. Because if your immune system is highly inflamed, not only at that point.

Essentially your body is going to constantly be in inflamed mode causing a whole bunch of diseases and getting your organs to start failing. But also, you’re not prepared to be able to deal with the infection. Whether it is cold, flu, or COVID. To be able to get your immune system right in the place, that’s the reason I recommend people do the Health Intelligence Test because they get the most comprehensive insight into their body, and the recommendations are now based on more information rather than just the gut information.

[01:30:16] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you. I’m really excited about your pricing. Just thinking about the last time I got blood work at my annual visit with my naturopath. Even after having insurance, insurance pays for only so much because you’ve got deductibles. I actually paid more. I paid more out of pocket than having your test. So it cost me more to get all these other tests, whereas they didn’t actually tell me. The blood tests I get that I pay a ton for, even with insurance at the doctor’s office, don’t tell me what to do. I mean, the doctor is supposed to tell you what to do, but most doctors don’t. Most doctors go okay, well I guess we got to get you on statins now. You’re going to get on metformin soon. Because MDs will use blood tests to determine if you need to get on drugs. That’s not health. We’ve got two different philosophies of thinking.

The mainstream philosophy of medicine is wait till you get sick and then get on a drug, which will probably make you sicker but whatever. We’ll suppress symptoms in the body. You’ll do that until you die and maybe get on more drugs as you age. And then there’s the other way to think, which is I want to get so healthy I don’t need to be on medication. I want to get so healthy that I optimize myself and I look 40 when I’m 60. I want a blood test that I pay hundreds of dollars for at the doctor’s office to actually tell me what to do. Okay, here’s the information. Here’s where you are. Now here’s what you should do to get better. That’s been my frustration.

Even though yes, I get to sit down with the Naturopath and they look over. Here’s your A1C hemoglobin. Okay, you’re getting better. Here are your triglycerides. Oh, they’re a little up. The Naturopath would be like—because I eat brown rice they’re like—eat less brown rice. What do you mean eat less brown rice? Is that really what’s causing high triglycerides? And we go through all these different things on the blood test, and at the end of the day, I was left confused because it was sort of muddled. Keep taking your supplements, maybe a little less brown rice, and see you in a year when you pay another $500 for all your work up. That just drives me up the wall when I’m not given a really clear intelligent scientific path to take.

Here enters your third option. The third option is your testing. Now you’re not saying don’t go to a doctor, don’t go to a Naturopath. You can absolutely continue that route but taking the Health Intelligence service that you offer in the comfort of your own home. And now you’re given very, very specific instructions on what you can put in your mouth to optimize your health, and then you do it in another four months or so and then you see that you’re getting better. You see that you’re progressing.

If someone were to do that for a year they’re going to get much better results that if they just waited to get sick, go to the MD, and get on drugs. Or saw a holistic practitioner who just took a bunch of blood and then said well, we’ll keep monitoring this but maybe eat a little bit less rice. They have no idea because they didn’t test for what your microbiome needs and what your mitochondria needs.

So I’m very excited for what you’re doing. I’m really, really excited to take the test myself, my husband, and my son. I know that some listeners are going to absolutely want to take the Health Intelligence service test and join me in trying this and seeing how they can optimize their entire body, every cell in their body, to be fully nutrified because they’re eating to feed the gut. To make the gut biome make exactly what we need.

This is just so cool. I love it. It’s finally the right time, like you said. It’s the right time because now the costs can be driven down so low because of AI and because the way machines can be used, robots can be used in labs. Now gene sequencing isn’t thousands of dollars. When I started the podcast four years ago it was thousands of dollars to take tests similar to this, and now it is a few hundred dollars, so this is very exciting. 

I definitely want to have you back on the show after I take the test and after my husband and I do this. We can follow up, and I’m sure we can talk more about it because like you said, your company is releasing this next test shortly. There’ll be more information to talk about, but I’d love you to come back and have you continue to share what Viome is doing in the future as you unfold more and more exciting services in your effort to make chronic disease optional. This is very exciting. I definitely want to have you back on the show. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:35:25] Naveen Jain: I would say, first of all, Ashley, thank you very much for hosting me. And all I can say is keep dreaming and dream so big that people think you’re crazy.  And never ever be afraid of what you want to do because imagination is the only thing that stops us from achieving what we want. Let’s just keep moving humanity forward. Let’s just keep doing the things individually what we can to contribute back to humanity. I look forward to coming back and talking more.

[01:35:53] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much. Listeners can go to viome.com and use the coupon code LTH. Join me in doing the Health Intelligence test, and let’s feed our gut what the body needs. It’s so exciting. Thank you so much.

I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Naveen Jain from viome.com. You can go to viome.com and use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health, coupon code LTH for your listener discount. And please, join the Learn True Health Facebook group and come tell us about your experience. And I’d also love for you to join the Facebook group and share what you thought about this episode, other episodes, come ask questions. It’s a free community of wonderful holistic-minded people who want to achieve true health. I look forward to hearing everyone’s results using the Viome experience. The Viome feedback from their tests and their app, and I can’t wait to do it myself. I’ll let you guys know how it goes in a few weeks after I get my results back and start eating specifically for my mitochondria and my microbiome. And I can’t wait to hear back from you guys and hear how it’s helping you as well.

Excellent. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. And I hope wherever you are, you get to go out in nature, put your feet in the grass, have sunlight on your face, take a few deep breaths, and think of things that you are grateful for. Help ground yourself, come into yourself and feel love and gratitude for all the trillions of cells in your body and all the wonderful energy that’s flowing through you. God bless.

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