MUSHROOM TINCTURE

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GREEN 85 JUICE FORMULA

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TOXIN DETOX

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ULTRA ENZYMES

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485: Medicinal Mushrooms That Heal Brain & Immune Function, Tim James

https://www.learntruehealth.com/medicinal-mushrooms-that-heal-brain-immune-function-tim-james

For thousands of years, people have been consuming mushrooms as food and natural remedies. In this episode, Tim James talks about the science behind medicinal mushrooms and how he has used that knowledge to create a tincture designed to bring you closer to your ideal state of well-being. He also takes you through the facts about each mushroom and provides an overview of some of the products that he specially and intentionally formulated.

Highlights:

• Ayurveda and Siddha medicine
• Green 85
• MultiShroom
• Naturally-occurring citric acid
• Xanthan gum
• Chaga
• Lion’s mane
• Cordyceps
• Reishi, shiitake, and maitake mushrooms

Intro:

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 485.

[00:00:15] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show with us, Tim James of no relation, but honestly, I feel like we were twins separated at birth and tragically separated at birth. We both are incredibly passionate about holistic health and healing and so many other topics that are affecting all of our lives. Honestly, it’s like, Tim, if I was a guy, I’d be you. I really feel like if you were a lady, you’d be me. It’s just so funny how we both have fantastic health podcasts and we’re both incredibly passionate about spreading this information. We both have the same last name, which is really funny. I feel like we should start a podcast together, which might be a little confusing. The Tim and Ashley James Show of No Relation. It’s so great having you back on the show. I loved our interview, episode 442 where you shared how you overcome some major health obstacles and went on to have helped now thousands and thousands of people to recover their health. Even very difficult to heal issues, things where doctors have said that you’ll always have this problem, you always need to be on these drugs, or you’ll definitely never recover from this because XYZ, it’s genetic, or this is just how it is, or this is just because you’re aging. And yet, when people listen to you and do what you say, they heal in ways that no doctor would ever expect.

So, I’m so excited to have you back on the show. Welcome!

[00:01:49] Tim James: Ashley, it's absolutely my pleasure. I'm happy to be back on. I just want to be really clear about one thing, is like I don't heal anybody. That's very important. So, it's like I healed myself. That’s the only person that I’ve healed. What I try to just show people is, like, my journey, what I did, and changing their environment and reducing stress and cleaning up the body and getting the chemicals and toxins out and flooding the body with nature, which we are nature, and allowing the body’s immune system and its natural responses to just take over. And I’m kind of really good at getting people, I guess, motivated or inspired now to put their health as a priority because it’s just a lot of people are struggling out there with their health today.

[00:02:35] Ashley James: And Tim, that is such a clear distinction because we are our own healer. Our bodies know how to heal. We just really need to get out of our way. We need to stop putting stuff in our body that’s hurtful, give our body the nutrients it really needs, make some lifestyle changes that are really simple but really powerful, and boom, the body starts healing itself.

So, that’s a really clear distinction. No one does healing to you. And we have to put the power back into the listener’s hands because it’s their body that’s going to do the healing. We’re here to guide them and give them new information. Perfect. It’s really, really well-said.

Tim, since having you on the show, you have formulated some amazing products. You have a drink. We talked about it in episode 442. And listeners, if they want to go get it, they can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/green85 and check it out. It’s delicious. In fact, I have a glass of it right now. I’m drinking it currently. It’s so good; it’s so delicious. And it also gives me a buzzing energy in the morning. I feel like the oxygen is just penetrating into my cells at a better rate when I drink it. I could really feel it. So, I’m drinking your juice right now.

You have this amazing healing story which we talked about, so definitely want to go back and listen to episode 442. But since then, you’ve made some amazing discoveries. And I’m really surprised about other companies because you’re a one-man show. Right? You’re not this giant company which I really like because you’re all about the quality of the product. You design your products for you first and you take your products daily for you first, and then you’re helping others at the same time.

But you figured something out that these big companies are just really looking to make a profit and they kind of get the lowest quality stuff and throw things on the shelf that in some cases, they’ll say, for example, there’s a certain amount of vitamin C in this and then when tested, it shows there’s absolutely no vitamin C in this. Right? Because it’s buyer beware. We don’t know what’s out there on the supplement shelves. We don’t really know if there’s gingko biloba in those gingko biloba capsules or vitamin C in those vitamin C capsules. Because they can say whatever they want and then just put filler in because it’s not a regulated industry. Whereas I know, working with you, everything that you do is incredibly high quality.

So, you figured something out and I’m really excited to talk about it today because when you first told me about it, and my husband and I tried it, it’s so cliché to say life-changing, but I want you to talk about it.

[00:05:30] Tim James: Well, some of the stuff actually is because we’re just so detached from nature. But let me backpedal just for a little bit.

Number one, just the size of our company. It started with me. I have a full-time assistant. I have a full-time web and designer type person. I’ve got coaches that work underneath me now. We have Dr. Scott Treadway who is our formulator, and he is the bedrock foundation for the formulations. And I just want to be clear on this because this was a gentleman who was groomed to go to medical school. His whole family expected him to go, so he did. He went to Cornell University and as a young man in his 20s, he walked away and said this is not medicine. For somebody to do that at that age, it’s just mindboggling to have that awareness. Then, he went into naturopathic school, and he said this isn’t even good enough, and he walked out of that too.

Now, I’m not here to bash naturopaths because I have a lot of them that I work with all over the United States with clients that I partner with because I look at myself like a general contractor of health. I just kind of help people organize their team. Especially if they're dealing with stage IV of this or that or they got fibromyalgia, they got something, seriously bad arthritis or whatever gout, and they're trying to fix themselves up. You got to get a good team around. You got to get really good at putting teams together for people in their local areas, right?

So, Dr. Treadway gets on a plane and he flies to India. And this is really cool. He actually meets one of like the foremost healers in India. A big name, everything, the guy had herbal shops all over, so the family was pretty wealthy. He was asked to speak at the scientific universities and stuff all the time on the immune system and health. You have to understand that the Ayurvedic traditions over in India of medicine and in the northern area, so it’s all Ayurvedic, but the northern hemisphere it’s Ayurveda and then the southern hemisphere it’s called Siddhar healers. So, there’s two different factions of them, but they’re doing similar stuff. All of Ayurvedic traditional medicine is steeped in system science, biological system science.

So, they have literally taken an engineering systems approach to health and wellness. What does that mean? For a layperson like me, if somebody had said that 12 years ago, I’d be like, “What? What are you talking about?” You know, I’d be like watching peanuts and the teacher’s like “wah, wah, wah,” doing that deal.

So, what this means is, is like what do engineers do in other capacities? Well, engineers build planes. And they kind of have to be perfect on that, right? Otherwise, the wing falls off and we crash and people die. Engineers build bridges and they have to be perfect. They do trusses for buildings. They have to have stronger snow capacity in areas where there’s more snow; otherwise, in the middle of the winter, your house could crush you and kill your kids. So, engineers literally can’t make mistakes. And yet, sometimes through society, they are.

There’s actually a really interesting story, Ashley. There’s a guy named Allan McDonald. Now, I don’t know if you remember the Space Shuttle Challenger. Remember that? When it launched and blew up and killed those people. They were rushed. Because what happened was they launched on a very cold day in the winter. Allan McDonald, I think he was one of the head engineers of the program in the launch. He said, “We cannot launch. We have not tested this one little O-ring in those cold conditions. We do not know how it’s going to perform. So until we do, I cannot sign off on this.” Another guy, another engineer wouldn’t sign off on it either. But the rest of the engineers signed off on it probably because they just want a paycheck and they were under pressure. Right? And they went ahead and launched, and guess what, that O-ring failed and those people died. And millions of dollars. But forget it. People died.

So, my point is, from an engineering standpoint, this is the one profession where you can’t hide from your efforts. You see what I’m saying? There’s no gray area. There’s no like, well, maybe next time. From an engineering standpoint, they can’t make mistakes, like electrical engineers. Like think about, oh, well, yeah, just put the wire over there, and then the house burns down. You just can’t do that. People get sued, people die. Okay, I’ve made a big point about engineers. Right?

So, when you look at a system, a basic system which is called an open system, has five components. Now, if any engineers are listening out there, they're going to know exactly what I’m talking about. This is basics. That has five parts to that system. It’s got input, it’s got an output, in the middle it’s got transport, conversion, and storage. Very interesting, right? So if you look at a light bulb. What’s the input? You flip the switch, the electricity goes in. It’s transporting. Then you’ve got the bulb that houses the filament, that’s the storage component. Then the conversion is the electric goes through the filament, creates heat and then creates light. And the output is light. Right? So there’s a basic system right there. It’s either called an opener AKA dumb system. It just works. Okay?

Now, when you go to Ayurvedic medicine, and traditional herbal healers and what they're doing over there, they have something called karma and karma-phal. Well, that’s what karma is. People think karma is what you do is what you get back. Actually, that’s not what it means. Karma is input. Karma-phal is output. In the middle, vita, pitta, kapha; transport, conversion, storage.

Now, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, he left MIT after four degrees of MIT. His grandmother was a Siddhar healer back in the village. She used to work six days a week, 16 hours in the field and then one day a week, there’d be 20-30 people at her door and she would help them heal through mixing up herbs, certain massage, touch, working through things, giving them certain yoga positions to go home and practice so these people could heal themselves.

So, he grew up and he saw his grandmother as a young child healing people. He went back to India with four degrees from MIT as an engineer, and he kind of made the Rosetta stone and made this whole connection. What I’m sharing with you right now is what I learned from him and his work. When he had a Fulbright scholarship and he went over to MIT, people were like “What are you doing? You could be billing at $2500 to $3500 an hour. And you’re over here trying to fodder around with herbs and stuff.” Well, he was interested in that. He’s one of the top immune system experts in the world.

So, what you have to understand is that for the folks listening, is that Ayurvedic medicine is not like they're trying to figure it out. It’s engineering principles. The medicine is steeped in engineering principles over 10,000 years. They know what’s going to work.

My formulator talks to one of the most gurus of all gurus in India and he walks up to me and he’s like, “Will you train me?” And the guy said yes. So, his training began. Long story short, Dr. Scott Treadway became a master herbalist in Indian herbology, trained in the ways of engineering system science and medicine over there in Ayurvedic technologies basically.

So, then he came back and he went on to become a master herbalist not just in Indian herbology but also in Chinese herbology and Western herbology. The only one he hasn’t mastered was the aboriginal herbology in Australia just because the aboriginals over there are kind of keeping their medicines tight to their chest because they don’t want big pharma to go over and start raping their lands for this stuff and synthesizing it and doing all this stuff. And there’s other indigenous places around the world—South America, North America with Native Americans here. There’s medicines and stuff they’ve been using for thousands and thousands and thousands of years that works.

Just to give people an example. Because sometimes people are questioning like oh, that’s woo-woo medicine man stuff. It’s like, no dude, they’ve been doing this stuff for tens of thousands of years, it works. So, I’ll give you a good example. And people can look this up. I like to give examples so people can cross-check me.

Paul McCartney. You heard of that dude? I think he was with a band called The Beatles. They had a couple of songs or something. Well, he was dating this supermodel named Heather Mills. So, he’s dating a supermodel and she gets in a horrible accident. I think it was some type of car accident or a motorcycle went by really fast or something and cut her leg off. She lost her leg. She went in the hospital, I believe, over in Europe and got an infection in her stump. It got worse and so they gave her antibiotics. But they weren’t working. So they had to cut off more of her stump after they just fixed it. It got infected again and so they were trying more antibiotics and different types and higher amounts. It didn’t work. They had to cut more of her leg off. Then it got infected again. Then her friends said, “Hey look, Heather, you need to do something different or you’re going to die. This is very bad. These antibiotics things are not working.” And she said “You need to go to The Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida and see what they have for you” because she had a great experience there.

Just happens to be that’s where I started my health journey when my friend Charles got diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Like you said in that past episode, pretty much went into the whole journey and everything. It’s quite remarkable. I just saw Charles this weekend by the way and got to hang out with him. We’re friends and he’s playing guitar and he’s got his cancer handled. He healed himself. He made his health a priority. He healed himself.

So, it’s really interesting that Heather went to the same institute that I went to, that I think is cool. Originally started by Ann Wigmore who healed herself with stage IV colon cancer. A gal from Lithuania. So that’s a whole another story we can get into today which is amazing.

And she goes over there and guess what they did? They said, “Oh, you have an infection, a topical infection. Here, let’s show you how to take care of that. We're going to take 100 percent raw organic garlic clove and you’re going to press that. You’re going to put that in a dish. One-thirds that, two-thirds organic olive oil.” So, one part fresh pressed organic garlic and two parts cold-pressed organic olive oil and then mix it together. Then you have to let it stand for about 30 minutes. Why? Because garlic is very caustic on the pH scale. It’s about a 3.3, so it’s highly acid.

Now I’ve actually seen a video, a zoom-in type of video of where you can see bacteria on a table, then you have the garlic oil stuff. Just the fumes when you zoom in the fumes, it’s almost like a nuclear bomb is wiping out all the bacteria. It’s 100 percent kill zone. It kills the bad bacteria. But here’s the cool thing. It doesn’t kill the good bacteria on your skin that’s going to stitch you up and heal you, which is very important.

Hydrogen peroxide is a great way to go as a disinfectant because it’s going to go in there and it’s going to kill the bad bacteria, but it’s also knocking out the good as well a little bit. And that’s why you don’t want to use stuff like hand sanitizers. In those cases, not 100 percent kill zone. They kill 99.8 or 99.7 or 99.9, so that .01 or .02 or .03 stays behind, becomes stronger and more resilient, starts breeding, get stronger stronger and stronger, and you’re actually killing your immune system when you put Purell and that kind of crap on your body, like literally.

Anyway, back to the garlic story. They taught her, like literally, imagine she just got her leg whacked off. She’s about ready to die. She had her leg whacked off once in an accident, two more times at the hospital, and now she’s at Hippocrates. They showed her how to make this mixture and then let it sit for 30 minutes and then apply it to her stump and put some gauze on it and change the gauze and bandage three times a day. Guess what happened? In two weeks, she was running around the Institute on her prosthetic. Go look it up. Heather Mills.

And you know what happened since then? When I was a kid, I got ingrown toenails. Have you ever had those?

[00:18:29] Ashley James: I’ve had like an infected toenail. It was like ingrown and infected, and it was really bad. I was in Florida walking around barefoot. I couldn’t figure out whether it was something I did just walking around barefoot or because it was ingrown, but it was so bad. It was my big toe and it got so infected, the entire toenail fell off, and it was incredibly painful. Then I just tea tree oil every day and a bunch of other essential oils. I wish I had known about the garlic. But I just used a bunch of essential oils to get over it. The healing didn’t happen as fast as I would have hoped, but I bet that garlic would have…

[00:19:10] Tim James: Check this out. This is so cool. So, I had an ingrown toenail when I was 16 and it prevented me from playing a baseball game. And I was totally into baseball. So what ends up happening is when you have an ingrown toenail, typically, what they have to do is they got to numb the toe first thing because what they're going to have to do is they’re going to have to cut. If they do it properly, they're going to take scissors and they're going to go a third of the nail and they're going to angle it in towards the corner, just a slight angle so as it grows out, it doesn’t catch again. So they literally take scissors and cut your nail down to the nailbed, tear it off and then take silver nitrate on a stick and then burn the cuticle down there with silver nitrate on a stick, then they bandage you up. Well, that sounds horrible. Imagine how painful that would be. So that’s why you have to have an anesthetic, right?

To administer the anesthetic, they have to take that little needle and they have to stick it into the nerve bundles on the tip of your big toe. This is what was used in wartime. They would take bamboo splinters over in Vietnam or whatever, and they would shove them down the toe because it’s one of those painful things in the planet. So, they would give me something to bite on, and then they would jam that antiseptic in which is a toxin, basically. But they got to numb the toe. Then they cut it off, and then they send you home, and you’re on Vicodin, and they're destroying your liver. Your toe is like thump, thump, thump, and it’s painful for a day or two, and it slowly gets better, and voila, then you’re finally better and thank God.

I had been through that process three times in my life. It’s one of the most painful things I’ve been through. My son, he’s about 16 too, I think, he got an infected toenail, and I was like “Aha! We’re going to do garlic and olive oil.” You know what it’s like, you can’t even touch it, right? It’s so hot and it’s just so painful. I was like, yeah, your toenail is ingrown. So we bandaged it two to three times a day, changed the bandage, and within two days, the infection was completely gone, no pain, and we’re able to get in there and get under the nail and start packing cotton underneath it and allow it to grow out. That’s what we do. And he never had to have that nails jammed out of his toe. He never had to have the anesthesia which is a toxin in his body that his body had to chelate out. And he never had to take any pain meds. He did it himself at home.

And my question is, is that with Heather Mills and my son, how expensive was that?

[00:21:30] Ashley James: Like, 30 cents. 

[00:21:32] Tim James: Yeah. And if you have that stuff at your house, which you probably should if you’re kind of eating healthy and you’re into it, you didn’t have to go anywhere. You just handle it right there. Now, maybe you had to make a trip to the store. But you didn’t have to go to a doctor’s office, waste their time on something you can handle yourself literally, right? And it’d be a much better process for you and you don’t have to wait in the waiting room and do all that stuff and put on masks and all the crazy stuff. They make you put Purell on your body as you go into these places and lower your immune system, first thing they do.

So anyway, my point is, is that these herbal technologies work and they’ve been working for thousands and thousands of years. This is why our products work so well, is because they’re steeped in engineering system science. That’s number one.

Number two, we already know how they're going to work on the human body. Number two, it’s the quality of ingredients. Dr. Treadway has been sourcing ingredients for well over 40 years. He said it took him over 20 years to get all the right sources in place. Imagine his main job is like sourcing ingredients for 20 years. So, I’m piggybacking off of that as well. Right? The source and the quality of the materials that are going into the products. Right?

So, those are two main things. Now, the third thing is how it’s processed. The third thing is very important because if you process stuff like with too much heat or too fast, it could create heat, it’s going to oxidize it even more. Any time you’re processing anything, you’re going to lose nutrient value at some level. It’s just going to happen. Right? So, we want minimal processing.

One thing we didn’t talk about, I don’t think in the last episode, because you brought up Green 85 which is our first product and it’s our number one seller, is that our products actually have life force in them. They have energy, they have enzyme activity. What does that mean? So, have you heard of Kirlian photography?

[00:23:22] Ashley James: We talked about it on episode 442.

[00:23:25] Tim James: Sweet. Okay, quick recap. Kirlian photography measures the energy that emits from any living thing or even rocks and stuff. You could see how much it puts off. You can take a picture with it or you can shoot a video with it.

When I was looking for a lab to make my stuff, that was one of my criteria. They had to know about the energetics, not just the quality of the nutrients and stuff. I wanted it when it was finally packaged and done that I could open a capsule up and take a photo and it’s glowing, or take the greens and put them on a table and played it or something, videotaped it or take a picture with Kirlian photography, and I’ve got all this energy emitting out of it. Over 30 labs and none of them even knew what I was talking about. Like I said before, they tilt their head sideways like there’s a dog here and a weird noise.

But when I talked to Dr. Treadway, I said, “You know about Kirlian photography?” He’s like, “Oh yes, we have two of those cameras here at the lab.” That’s when I knew I had my dude. Then he’s become like one of my best friends, like a surrogate father, a mentor. He’s one of the top supplement consultants in the industry. But the cool thing is when he told me, he’s like, my company is one of the few companies that allows him to make it the way it’s supposed to be made and then they don’t change the ingredients or modify parts of it or put in some type of excipient binder, filler, or flow agent that is not good for you for speed of manufacturing. So we’re one of the very few places on the planet that do all that. That’s why everything works so well and I build everything for me. All this stuff, all these products, I’m building for myself. I want the absolute best because I was on a slippery slope, and I do not ever want to go back to the health I had that created a lot of contrast for me, and I want to move forward in life and I want to wake up and feel so good and have so much energy and not buy into oh, you know, you’re 49 years old and you’re getting older. Screw that. I want to keep learning how to have my cellular age be younger and younger and younger every year, and I’m learning these things and this is what I’m up to.

So, that’s the whole backstory on the products, the quality and the ingredients, and the history. It’s literally steeped in system science over 10,000 years and we just don’t compromise because I put this stuff in myself.

[00:25:49] Ashley James: Yeah. That’s exactly what I meant by one-man show. I didn’t mean there’s only you sitting in a room alone. I’m sorry.

[00:25:56] Tim James: A mad scientist. No, I have the vision and I have assembled a team of the right people. And Dr. Treadway is a very instrumental part in this. But like I said, how many people that want to start a supplement company are going to go around to 30 labs plus. And most people don’t even really know what they're looking for. Because there’s good people out there. I’ve helped over a dozen other companies get their supplements right. Just because I met them and I got to know them, like, wow, he or she really has a good heart. I’m like, are you open if I could share something with you about your products because I see you have seven products here, but there’s five of them that I wouldn’t put in my body. Do you want to know why? They're like, “Yes, please tell me.” And I would share with them and they're like, “Oh my God, I had no idea.” Right?

They're not bad people. In some of these cases, other places, the bigger companies, they don’t care. You’re just a number. If you ever want to find out if a supplement is good or not, an easy litmus test. If it’s in a great big grocery box store, it’s probably not. It’s 99 percent chance. But what you can do is you can type in the name of the company, XYZ company, and then type in who purchased and then put the name of the company. Then if something like Nestle or Procter & Gamble shows up, in my opinion, you probably wouldn’t want to buy that.

[00:27:11] Ashley James: There are so many companies I used to buy from that got bought up and you just know it’s not the same. I go on forums and stuff like that and people will say it’s not the same, they changed the formula, that kind of thing. But that’s what I love about the first product, which is what you created, the Green 85, and have gone on to formulate a few others. Amazing stuff. Which we’re going to talk about today, the one that had a profound impact on my mental health and on my husband as well. So, this one product, frankly I don’t want to say skeptical, but I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I’m going to try it. Because you told me, hey, this is good for the immune system. Like, well, my immune system is okay, I don’t really have any major issues there, but I’m going to take it.

I’ll just tell a story. So, last year, many of my listeners know that last year, we lost our daughter during childbirth and she passed away four minutes before delivery. And we don’t know why the autopsy was inconclusive. No one knows why. I was incredibly distraught beyond measure and then days later had COVID. I had it really, really bad. Of course, my immune system shot, my stress is through the roof, my blood pressure was through the roof because I’m grieving and I’m post-partum. And then, my immune system shot, and then the doctors were like, “Well, we think maybe,” because I couldn’t breathe, well I couldn’t breathe for many reasons, one being I was fighting a lung infection, but they were worried it was a blood clot and so I went to the hospital. They tried to get me on these experimental meds which was a real trip to watch the medical feeder happening before me, knowing the right questions to ask and I looked into their studies. I wasn’t going to take it but I was just like, well, they're offering me this experimental drug that they're not sure if my insurance will cover, but they have really high hopes because they think I’m going to die, I’m going to look at it and just see what the studies say. And it showed that I had 1 percent greater chance of dying in the hospital should I take this med that if I were to not take this med. I’m like, there’s your first clue.

So, I went home and interesting the doctor said between day 8 and day 9 is sort of that’s when most people enter the hospital. It’s kind of like the tipping point. He goes, “If you can get over day 9, you’ll be fine, you’ll be back on the mend. So you really came in at the worst time.” And I could have stayed home had I known for sure it wasn’t a blood clot that it entered my lungs from just having given birth. So anyways, they cleared me for the clots. I went home. The next day, I was doing much better. Of course, I’m taking all my homeopathy, all my herbs; I’m taking everything that I possibly can and I’m getting better and better.

Since then, fast forward a few months later, we had to move out of our home of seven years. So, it was like a tremendous amount of stress and grief and then unfortunately, a family member was passing away and my husband left us to go take care of them, so now I’m alone homeschooling our son, managing the household kind of thing alone. And I started getting PTSD attacks daily. And I don’t know what’s going on with me. I don’t know why. I enter the kitchen and I cannot put a meal together. I love cooking but I didn’t understand why can I not complete a task.

So, I sat down with Dr. Glenn Livingston. I just love the man. I’ve had him on the show multiple times. He’s a PhD psychologist and he primarily deals with helping people to heal emotionally with eating and overeating. But I reached out to him, I said I don’t know what’s going on with me, like maybe it’s COVID brain, like long-haul COVID brain; I feel like my brain is Swiss cheese. I explained to him everything that was going on, waking up five or more times in the night. Really getting broken sleep, can’t even complete basic tasks. I walk into the kitchen, I could maybe start to cook but I just couldn’t even have the brainpower to complete things. I used to do three episodes a week of my show. I was doing one a month.

Everything was just incredibly difficult. At the drop of a pen, I would just burst into tears. And I’m a very strong person, like it’s not that I’m like this, I don’t know, I’m not weak emotionally, mentally, or physically. I’m a strong-willed person. And I explained everything to him, and Glenn goes, “Ashley, you have post-traumatic stress. You are experiencing post-traumatic stress.” I was like, oh, this makes sense. And he explained to me what it meant. So, this was back in January, February and March. And I feel so bad for our son. He would, I don’t know, talk too loud and all of a sudden I’d burst into tears. It was just any kind of stimulus and I couldn’t control it at the time.

But I was looking to heal. So, I was reaching out to different experts that I knew that could help me, starting with Glenn Livingston. I started seeing a fantastic therapist that was a friend of mine. He was giving me some great pointers. I was doing all kinds of stuff.

Then comes along Dr. William Davis. He came back on the show. This is in, I can’t remember, it was like February maybe of this year. He talks about the Lactobacillus Reuteri yogurt which he says increases serotonin and helps with depression. I’m like, oh this sounds great, I’m going to try this. So, I made a batch. The day I started eating it, those breakdowns where I could cry at the drop of a hat stopped. I’ve never been on antidepressants but I felt like I was on an antidepressant. I was all of a sudden like wow, it’s not like any part of my life circumstances have changed but I feel like the cloud is lifting. And I feel like now, I can manage things. Now I can go into the kitchen and actually start a task and finish a task. Things started being a bit more manageable.

But I still was waking up about five times a night. Then, we had to move again. So there’s another stressor. So now we have to move again. And then you tell me, you and I get in contact with each other and as we do every few months, and you say, “Hey, you’ve got to try this product I’ve made and I want you to try it before I launch it.” You start telling me all about the immune stuff and I’m like, okay. Immune wasn’t sort of on my list. My list was more mental and emotional health. So you send us a bottle. Your bottle says take one dropper full. I got to tell you, I’m one of those people who’s going to take two droppers full. So, I take two droppers full thinking it’s no big deal. Right? Just two droppers full. 

And I lie down to go to sleep fully expecting to wake up five times that night because I have since our daughter died. And I close my eyes, fall asleep and all of a sudden, it’s light in the room. I open my eyes and I’m really confused why is it light in the room, what’s going on. And I come to and I realize it is the morning, I have slept the entire night first time since she died. Since then, since starting taking this, I have had such sound sleep, and I really feel like you know how the Lactobacillus Reuteri yogurt helped me, it immediately took the edge off, increasing serotonin in the brain.

But this stuff, your MultiShroom, what it did, it healed something in my brain. Some kind of stress levels, it decreased the stress levels in my brain to the point where I slept soundly and then I just noticed I was way more rested jumping out of bed and it was directly related to the ambient stress that my body was holding at from the grief and the stressors from losing another family member and the stressors from the two moves in the last year. Just all that. That ambient stress was disrupting my sleep. And I take all kinds of stuff and I do all kinds of things. I’m very, very crunchy. But this singlehandedly fixed that for me.

So, that was me. My husband who’s never dreamt, like we’ve known each other for 14 years, we’re now in our fifteenth year of marriage. He doesn’t remember his dreams and when he started taking this, maybe he’ll come on the microphone and share.

[00:36:55] Ashley James’ husband: Just not being a dreamer and then taking this and then having really vivid dreams, it’s just been a huge change in how I function.

[00:37:10] Ashley James: He’s never remembered his dreams or dreamt in color or any of that, and since taking it, he will not run out. He’s like, “Get me another bottle of this.” We’re ordering another bottle because he now just has these really long intense dreams that are full of color and then the next day he’s telling them to me. It’s just like this whole new experience in his life. So, I want to know how does this work.

[00:37:39] Tim James:  First off, that’s pretty awesome because that’s telling me, like for me, I always look at things as in order of importance. So, oxygen is number one because without it, we’re dead in 4 to 7 minutes. Air is pretty big deal, and we know the air quality in people’s homes is terrible and the air quality outside is bad, so this is why we teach people to clean their air. You get an air purification system or at least start cracking your windows at night at least when you’re sleeping to get fresher air in the house. So, we take 20,000 breaths a day. Air is important. 

Number two, water. Without water, you’re dead in 11 days. Right? So, water is very important. You got to get your water right, clean it up, restructure it and all that jazz, especially with tap water.

Then number three, which is actually a tie for number two, is sleep. Because without sleep, you die in 11 days. So, water and sleep are equivalent—think about that—in my opinion. Because without it, without water or sleep, either one, you will die in 11 days. So they're kind of a tie for the silver medal. The gold medal is the oxygen deal. But number two is water and sleep. So, everybody listening, sleep is so important. It’s just as important as drinking water. Your body is mostly made up, what, water. Right?

What it’s telling me is he’s dreaming, he’s getting into those deep rapid eye movements. He’s getting into a deeper state where actually his body can rest and restore itself properly. So, this is really huge for boosting immune system, helping people lose weight and their suffering, because there’s a thing called shallow sleep syndrome where people are sleeping, they might even be sleeping eight hours but they're not getting into the deep restorative sleep and their body doesn’t have a chance to really balance its hormones out and do all the things it needs to do.

So, this is a very important thing.

And since you’ve mentioned it on the MultiShroom, we’ve had other people starting to reach out and talk about the sleep aspect too. It wasn’t built for that. It really wasn’t. I built it because it was another pathway for me to build my immune system. I was buying chaga, as an example, in chunks from another company and then I would make tea out of it. There were different powders where I was getting lion’s mane or cordyceps and reishi and shiitake and maitake, and just putting all that stuff together. Then I just decided that I’m going to build a mushroom product so I can just get all of it in one squirt basically and make my life easier and help people with it.

So, we built it for me, to build for another pathway of immunity, but it’s really, really, really good for mood, mind, and mental clarity. We have a lot of people who are taking it that have anxiety and depression and also, like I said, it’s an immune system boost. The sleep thing was just like this added massive side benefit that people are starting to get.

[00:40:34] Ashley James: And listeners can go check it out. And actually, you have a ton of science on your website. If they scroll down, they’ll see. I love it, you titled it “Science” below it. So listeners, you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/mushrooms and it will take you to the page and then just scroll down. We’re going to talk about some of that science today because I really want to get into why this is different then. Because my husband even said at one point when we were running low, he’s like, “Can you just go downstairs and get your dried mushrooms and just like make me a juice or something so I can keep having these benefits?” And I said, “No, it’s actually Tim’s product. It’s different and you can’t just make it in your kitchen.” If we took all these mushrooms, we can’t just make it in our kitchen because of… and I don’t remember the name of it but can you explain how it’s broken down so that we actually absorb it in our mouth?

[00:41:34] Tim James: Yeah, so this is huge. What happened was I literally feel like I found a treasure chest full of gold. Literally. Imagine you’re on an island with your friends and somebody gives you a map and you’re digging around and you literally find it. You find a big old thing and it’s worth billions of dollars or something. But I’m talking about billions of dollars of health equity is what I found.

A few years ago, I was reading a study on turmeric where they were able to increase the anti-inflammatory response in turmeric by 185-fold. Think about that. Not 185 percent, 185-fold it says in 63 people that they had. What they did was is they took the curcuminoid, the curcumin, which is active in turmeric, that’s the anti-inflammatory, curcuminoids. They mechanically made it very tiny. It’s almost like nano particle size, but it’s not been messed around with the lab. This is a mechanically made deal. So they just take their raw materials and basically just visualize that they get ground down to super tiny particles. Okay? What that does then is they become hyperabsorbable. Then you have to suspend them in a liquid, which makes them even more absorbable. So they actually fed these curcuminoids that were make in this manner to these people and they noticed 185-fold more reduction in inflammation.

So, anybody listening out there that’s got knee pain, joint pain, back pain, arthritis pain, all this kind of stuff, turmeric should be in your daily regimen. But for me, I did want that, but I knew cellular inflammation was a big problem. So, when your cells are inflamed, you can’t get nutrients into the cell as well and you can’t get the toxins out. So, I wanted to reduce cellular inflammation so I could have better response in my whole body and then I knew the pain thing, any aches and pains, or recovery from workouts would just improve. Which it did. It reduced my inflammation from workouts by 50 percent. It was quite remarkable.

So, that process, we bought the machine. It was very expensive and we built Turmeric 100. That was our first product where we used for this proprietary cellular absorption system. Well, like I said, we’re a small mom and pop company basically and I’ve got lots of products that I want to launch, but it’s just a matter of having the funds to do it. So, as more and more people learn about this stuff and get on the products and consume them and use them and tell their friends about it, we’ll just keep coming out with new stuff, which we got a whole bunch of cool stuff coming out anyway. Because that is happening.

All right. So, that system now, we used on MultiShroom because we have the machine already. What we did was we took the highest quality Chaga, lion’s mane, cordyceps, reishi, shiitake, and maitake (there’s six of them) and we put those altogether.

Now, I told Dr. Treadway, I said, “Look, dude. I want this to boost my immune system and I also want it to be good for mind, mood and immunity because I know about depression and anxiety out there, because I’m dealing with them as a coach all the time.” And even my clients are telling me, friends, relatives and kids, and everybody’s saying the depression medication stuff, it’s terrible.

So, those are the six that he came up with, once again, based on Ayurvedic system science using his master herbalism background from those three different places around the world. He came up with those six in certain percentages and then what we did was we actually added a complete multimineral to it because it jacks up the efficacy on all this stuff. It works together. Everybody’s deficient in minerals anyway, so it just makes sense and helps build strong cell walls and all this other stuff. So there’s a lot of good folic’s and humic’s in here and pretty much every mineral under the elemental chart, but they're all from plant-based sources. So, not only are you getting a mushroom product, but you’re also getting a complete multimineral. It’s literally 7 products in 1, if you want to really look at it that way because we have 7 different things.

So, what happens is, we take that, we run it through that process where we mechanically make the particles very tiny, we suspend it in a liquid, and we don’t use emulsifiers. What’s an emulsifier? An emulsifier is something that will keep the particles from separating. We don’t do that. Because a lot of the emulsifiers like Xanthan gum, and you probably learned this from, those listeners who are listening, from Dr. William Davis, he talked about Xanthan gum and gellan gum. They actually eat your intestinal lining. And it’s in a lot of most of the products out there. I mean, even the plant-based milks. Almost all of them have those two things. So, you’re getting off of dairy but then you’re putting something in there that’s eating your digestive lining. It’s silly. So, we don’t put that in there.

Unfortunately, you’re going to have to shake this really good every time before you take it, but that’s just the way it is. I’m not going to put that crop in the bottle. So you just have to shake it really, really good because the constituents will settle, so you just shake it up, squirt one in your mouth one time and swish it around. You want to get maximum coverage on the mucus membrane in the skin inside of your mouth and just hold it for 15 to 30 seconds. It will literally disappear through the mucus membrane. If there’s anything left, swallow it. As it’s going down through your throat, it’s still going through the mucus membrane in your throat into your body. Very little is actually going to make it to the digestive tract. It literally goes directly into the bloodstream and because it’s so small, it goes directly into the cell. It’s so small that these constituents can go through the blood-brain barrier. So, this is very, very powerful stuff.

Now, why do we do this? Well, because we know that people are having digestion issues today. Over 90 percent of people have leaky gut syndrome at some level where you got these microscopic tears in the intestinal lining and undigested food particles and microbes are getting in there and they're wreaking havoc on the body all over the place. So, the digestive tract is compromised. Any food that you’re eating today or supplements that you’re taking, you’re probably only going to get about 10 to 30 percent absorption rate. It’s just the way it is. So, 70 to 90 percent of what you’re consuming whether it’d be food, drinks, or supplements, is it’s going to go through and you’re going to poop it out. Which is okay.

So, my whole mission for the last 11 years has been to help people improve digestion, improve that process, and up their game so they're getting more of what they're consuming because it’s smarter, it costs less money, you’ll eat less, and it’s healthier. And we need more nutrients. We’re definitely deficient. That’s been my whole project and that’s one of the reasons that turmeric product came, was to increase that ability. We are bypassing all of those problems by doing this. It doesn’t matter how bad your digestive tract is on absorption levels. It can be down at the 10 percent range. It doesn’t matter. This stuff is going right into your cell through the mucus membrane in the mouth via the blood. So, this is why it’s so powerful, Ashley, is because we’re bypassing the problems that have been created from the amount of stress that we have in modern society, the amount of toxic pollution the body has built up in the cells, the fat and the muscle tissue, and the lack of nutrition that’s weakened us, especially on the microlevel.

So, we’re actually able to literally hand the cell what it needs very quickly. And within five minutes, the entire cardiovascular system, the blood system transports all these nutrients of whatever we put into that, and within five minutes, your entire blood is doused with these things and it’s going everywhere it needs to go, and whatever it doesn’t need because it’s naturally occurring, the body will just get rid of it.

[00:49:22] Ashley James: Can you talk about the size of the molecules before versus after it goes through that process?

[00:49:29] Tim James: I actually don’t know. I don’t know. I just know they're really tiny.

[00:49:33] Ashley James: Tiny. Micro. Well, I notice that when I put it in my mouth, I usually hold it for a minute and I notice that it’s almost gone. Then I swallow what’s ever left. It tastes good. It tastes kind of like chocolate. What I like also is that there’s no alcohol in it. So many herbal tinctures, it burns the mouth and it’s alcohol. Because of the process that you’ve put this through, it doesn’t need to be alcohol-based. I find that interesting.

[00:50:04] Tim James: It’s a good thing but it’s also unfortunate because for years, one of the things we use is we use naturally-occurring citric acid, and that’s a preservative. Now with that said, it’s naturally occurring, which means it’s from like an orange. So when it comes into the body, it’s coming in with all of its bioflavonoids and its cofactors and its buffer. Kind of like coffee, right? If you actually found a shade-grown coffee that wasn’t processed, that took out the L-theanine, as an example, which buffers the coffee, that’s why if people are just drinking black coffee, it’s been the way it’s made today in the modern world, you should be squirting L-theanine in there to buffer it so it’s not like eating away at your cells, basically. And your nerve endings eating that myelin sheath. That’s why people get jittery. It’s because the coffee is eating the myelin sheath and you’re exposing nerves. It’s like pouring acid on your nerve endings. That’s why when people drink coffee, they’re “eh, eh, eh”, but if you had L-theanine in there, it’s a buffer. But see, it’s been stripped out.

So I have to say this because if anybody listens to me talk at some other planet far, far away or I’m just talking about a few years ago or whatever, sometimes I’ll be talking about citric acid and it’s not good. But I’m talking about the citric acid that’s been stripped of all of its stuff. Okay? Because our gut has got all these different bacteria and one of them is called Citrobacter. So, if you’re actually putting citric acids in your body, you’re actually feeding a bad bacteria and it could cause an overgrowth and cause a problem. Ours won’t do that because it’s naturally-occurring.

So I just want to make that distinction because it’s very important because some of these hearers may go “Citric acid is bad!” and they look at the label and it’s like “He’s got citric acid here!” No, it’s naturally-occurring citric acid, but it was the best thing.

And I told Dr. Treadway, I was like, can we find something else that works just as good? He’s like, “No, this is what works the best.” I was like, okay, well, we just have to tell people about it then, because I just don’t want them thinking one thing. You got to explain stuff because people will challenge me on that stuff. Which I don’t blame them because I was Sherlock Holmes too. I want to get to the bottom of this stuff and I’m just tired of being lied to.

[00:52:17] Ashley James: Let’s go through the list. And thank you for clarifying because we just don’t know where the source is from and we’ll hear it’s from black mold, it’s from GMO corn. So, it’s good to know that not all citric acid is made equal and that you’re sourcing the best quality. You and I off air have talked about the different ingredients, the different plants that you source and the level at which you will strive to get the highest quality because you are designing for your health first. Because imagine if we all as the community listening to this, if we had a magic wand and we could formulate our own products for ourselves like go down the list of our own health issues and go, okay, I want to take a drink or I want to take some kind of supplement or tincture that is going to be filled with these herbs or these plants, and I want to supercharge my cells with this, and we could formulate our own stuff and we have all the resources at our fingertips. That’s what you do. You sit there and go, “What do I want for my own body? And, oh, it’s going to be so good I can also provide so other people can purchase it and try it and help their bodies heal.”

So, I love that. And that’s again what I meant by the one-man show is that you have a team but you’re sitting there going, you’re not some big corporation looking to get low-quality stuff and make a big profit. Of course, we want you to be profitable because you’re taking those profits and putting them back into more and more fantastic, incredibly medicinal and healing products. You’re looking to change lives and help people. And I love your ethics. So, I am so happy that we came across each other’s paths is because this is what I want. I want to find more Tim Jameses out there, the people out there who are striving to make incredibly ethical companies and ethical products to really help people.

[00:54:35] Tim James: Yeah, I really appreciate that. Originally, a lot of the stuff was the reason I started formulating with Dr. Treadway, is because I started looking. I was just getting frustrated as a coach. When you become Sherlock Holmes and you start researching every single ingredient which nobody does, I would go down these rabbit holes and I’m like, well, I can’t eat that anymore and then I can’t eat that anymore. It was like almost everything I was eating was jeopardized at some level. Then you’d finally find this product and you’re like, “Oh my God, I can eat this, this is great. Woo-hoo! Check that off the list.” Okay, now I’ve got my protein powder. I don’t do protein powders anymore but back in the day I did. And then all of a sudden, that’s one of the reasons because they put Xanthan gum in a protein powder I was taking and I had to look it up and I’m like “What is Xanthan gum?” I looked it up, it’s like mutated corn syrup fermented in bacteria, used as an emulsifier to stop things from separating. And I’m just like, what?

And then you find out it eats the intestinal lining and I’m like, why would I ever put that in my gut? I had gut issues. I was bleeding rectally for years when I pooped. My vacation was ruined because I had appendicitis and I had it removed and I almost died on a trip to Peru with my wife and dad and ruined the vacation for them. I don’t want any more gut issues. I’m trying to heal my gut. I’ve learned about those little villi hair-like structures. I want to take care of them. They’re my little buddies. I want them to hang out and be in the best environment possible. Why would I consume something daily that’s going to erode them? I’m not going to. Just because it’s in a store, it’s okay?

It’s unfortunate that we even have to be having this conversation. It’s actually quite silly that we’re at a point in a time where we’re supposedly so evolved yet human beings are the sickest we’ve ever been in the history of the planet and then we don’t get it why we’re sick and then we go into a medical system that was designed in crisis care during wartime and take care of people getting their arms blown off or shrapnel or get shot in the shoulder. And the answer is a synthetic people that has 37 side effects. It only works on 10 percent of the people that take it and the other 90 percent have mild to severe all the way up to death. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Like, when are we just going to wake up as adults and say hey, look, this isn’t good. We have children today that are being born with diabetes. We have children today that are being born that are overweight and now even obese.

And now, if this one doesn’t get people, we are having children today that are being born with cancer. They come out of the womb and chemo, they go right into that kind of stuff. Like, what are we doing? Working-class people listening to this episode right now, we need to take the reins back of our health. We need to learn how to become our own doctors. We need to learn how to self-heal because nobody else is going to do it for you. There is no top-down approach that’s going to happen. It has to be us. We have to unite once again and fight for what’s true and real and has actual results. Everything is always nature-based because people forget we’re from nature. Anyway, I get a little passionate about it, but that’s where we're at.

[00:57:56] Ashley James: I’m right there on the soapbox with you. We have to remind ourselves that. Healing is easy in that the body will heal itself. That will happen. The hard part is the mindset. It’s sort of like the hardest part of going to the gym is getting your shoes on. If you can just get that gym clothing on, get your shoes on, get in the car, you’re good. For whatever reason, the mindset that gets you to put your shoes on and just start driving to the gym or if you’re going to go for a run or whatever it is, the hardest part is those first few actions that lead you into that habit. That’s because when it comes to being healthy, we're swimming against the stream. We are the salmon. We’re swimming against the stream. Because if we go with the flow and we eat what everyone else is eating and we live the lifestyle that the majority is doing, then we will be a statistic. And 70 percent of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication; most of them, they don’t need to be on those. Right?

There are some life-saving medications and I appreciate medication when it saves someone’s life. The majority of medications are unneeded and could be replaced with an herb. And I have Dr. Klinghardt on the show who has been medical doctor for over 40 years and he practices holistic medicine. He takes very sick people like Lyme Disease and some unknown diagnosis that these people have been to every single doctor and they finally find Dr. Klinghardt and they fly around the world to come see him here. He’s just in my backyard out in Woodinville, Washington. But people come from around the world to see him and he says his favorite thing to do is to figure out what drug someone needs and then give them the herb that is even better than that drug. He goes very, very seldom he has to prescribe a drug because he’ll get better results time after time after time; he’ll get better results with the herb or the combination of herbs that that drug was modeled after.

So, what are we doing going after petroleum-based synthetic drugs that suppress the body from healing itself and manage symptoms and then create a lot more symptoms? Why are we on this conveyor belt? We’re born into a system that if we don’t think for ourselves, we’ll be on a conveyor belt of disease. And I’m quoting statistics in America, many countries around the world are following closely behind, but 1 in 3 people to 1 in 4 people, depending on whether you’re male or female, will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. One in 3 people is obese, prediabetic or diabetic. The top killers are all like, you know, heart disease, for example, stroke and cardiovascular disease. That’s one of the top things that people die of. My dad should not have died in his early 60s. My mom who to me was always an example of health should not have died at age 55 with cancer. 

These were preventable, and they are preventable but we have to completely go against the grain. We have to choose drive past all those restaurants and all the drive-thrus and go home and make our own food. We have to choose to source where we get our food, choose to go to bed instead of watching Netflix till two in the morning, choose to move our body in a way that brings us joy, choose to take time to balance and bring joy to each aspect of our life. We have to be really proactive. Sometimes it’s exhausting and hard because all we want to do is just eat how everyone else is eating and go with the flow, nut that backslides us into those statistics.

So, if you can have the stubbornness and the mindset that “no, I will not put crap in my body no matter how easy it is to do it,” then you’re on the right path. So it’s the mindset. The mindset comes first. If you put your foot down, you say “I will be Sherlock Holmes in the grocery store. I will read labels. I will be a label reader.” My husband, God bless him, he will beg me when we go into a grocery store, he’ll be like, “Please don’t read labels today,” because it takes us so long. Now I know what brands I like now and I don’t buy processed food nearly as much as I did, but 10 years ago when I was really getting into health stuff, it would take 90 minutes. I would sit there and I would just read. I was just trying to buy a clean hot sauce. I’m looking at all the organic hot sauces. And I am like, “I can’t believe what’s in this. Why would they put this ingredient in this hot sauce?” And it turns out there’s only two hot sauces out of the entire shelf of hot sauces that passed my test of clean ingredients. My husband was like, “We’ve been standing in front of the hot sauces for 45 minutes. Stop reading labels. Let’s just go home.” But this is what it took. It took being a food detective really time and time and time again.

[01:03:22] Tim James: I was going to tell you a little quick one story. When I was at Hippocrates the first time, they take you on a field trip to a local really good mom-and-pop health food store, like a good one. It was an awesome store, it was homey. It was just very small town-ish. This wasn’t West Palm Beach, Florida. We went to a very good health food store. They showed us how 85 percent of everything in that store was not fit for human consumption. And this was a good one. So this is what you’re finding. You go into the bigger box stores, it’s probably 2 percent of the stuff you’d want to eat. It’s just the way it is. So, all those things, guys, remember inputs. Inputs. We talked about that earlier. That’s part of an open or dumb system where the inputs just come in. We want to be intelligent systems. And intelligent systems have a few more components. They have a goal, which Ashley is talking about. The goal is to put your health as a priority, love yourself and demand good things for yourself.

Another thing that an intelligent system has is it can read disturbances, so it knows when it’s off course. And then, it can also, as a controller, to adjust. So if something’s not working, it can make a switch and change. So, we definitely want to be intelligent systems. So, rather than just be in a dumb system and just throwing down our throat whatever is handed to us, we become gatekeepers. Because those inputs are going to go into your system and they're going to dictate your output which is your energy levels, your mental clarity levels, your recovery ability from workouts or whatever, and your sleep, and your overall quality of life, and how you feel on a daily basis, and how you interact with other people. So, those inputs are very important.

[01:05:11] Ashley James: I love it. And we have to be conscious. That’s the thing. I’m kind of posing this question to everyone, like not you specifically, but everyone who’s listening, have you ever gone unconscious with your bank account for example and all of a sudden, maybe 20 years ago, maybe not now but maybe when you were younger, you go unconscious with your finances and all of a sudden, your card declines and you’re like, “what?” And you just weren’t paying attention. You weren’t paying attention at your spending or you weren’t paying attention to your bank account. I know not everyone can relate to that, but I’m sometimes very unconscious about things I should be conscious of. And often it pronounces you. Or, it could be gas. I’ve never, thank goodness, ran out of gas in a vehicle. I’m pretty conscious and luckily, I have a husband who always tops off the tank. But I see people on the side of the road occasionally, and I’m like, “How did that person run out of gas?” There’s all these kinds of alarms and it’s telling you its’ running out of gas. But sometimes, we go unconscious. We go unconscious with the gas tank or we go unconscious with the finances and all of a sudden, we’re surprised. Or maybe you thought there was broccoli or bread or whatever in the drawer of the fridge, you open the fridge and it’s empty. You’re like, “Oh, I forgot to restock that.” 

Plenty of times we get busy and we go unconscious and then we’re surprised. This is one of those things, is we can’t go unconscious around the intelligent inputs we put into our health. Just like we really shouldn’t go unconscious with our finances because we might not be able to pay the rent or the mortgage or buy food. Right? Or we’ll get bounced checks or whatever, or you’ll end up with no gas in your car because you went unconscious with the gas in the car. So, that level of maintaining awareness is really important, until you’ve developed enough health habits. Like I said, I used to read labels all the time but now I’ve got my brands and things I trust, so I don’t have to sit there although I should once in a while recheck because sometimes companies will change the ingredients on you. But now, I have my methods, I have my habits, I have my methods and so it’s become unconscious because I’ve set up a system.

But when we're first creating new health habits, we have to be very conscious of the inputs. So, that’s my thing is I’ve seen so many people where they're like, “Well, I used to be healthy and I don’t know what happened. I just stopped paying attention and all of a sudden now years had gone by and I’ve been eating out every day.” That’s one of my first things, is I’ll have clients fill out on the intake form what percentage of meals is homebased and so many of my clients will write, “Oh yeah, 70 percent of my meals are cooked at home.” Then a week later, because then we actually start tracking it and we start having them cook at home, they’re like, “Yeah, actually it was more like 70 to 80 percent I was eating out, not cooking in.” That’s just because we go unconscious. You drive around, you go through the Starbucks, you get the sandwich and the coffee for, I don’t know, $15 or something crazy like that. We’re draining our bank accounts by eating out, by the way. It’s convenient, we go unconscious but then we’re destroying our body because it’s a dumb input like you said. It’s a dumb input, it’s costing our body and it’s costing our bank account.

So, even though people look at organic food, you know, the groceries you need to buy, “Oh, it’s so expensive. I spent $200 at the grocery store. It’s so expensive.” I’m like, well $200 is like going to the restaurant maybe once or twice for my family. So, that $200 is going to be groceries for over a week for us.

[01:09:07] Tim James: On that, there’s something that’s important that people understand, is that the lower you eat on the food chain, the less expensive the food gets. You can start buying things in bulk. So if you’re also concerned about prepping or things might go really bad someday, which is possible, there might be a power outage or something, you know, if there’s a power outage in four days, all the food is gone. Right? Or if truckers aren’t running in four days, that’s it. So if you’re in the city and you’re going to the store every day to get your food and you have nothing saved up. That’s why I have a trailer full of nut seeds, grains, beans. I would recommend that and an edible food wild foraging book for your local area. That would be a very important book to have if something happened.

When you make these changes, there may be some new utensils you get. Maybe you buy a juicer and a blender and you didn’t do that before. There might be some setup cost and when you buy seeds, you buy them in bulk and it can add up to a lot, but over time it’s pennies. You’re literally eating for pennies. So for people that are thinking “Oh I couldn’t do this” or “Oh I couldn’t change my diet because it’s going to be more expensive.” Well, yeah, if you go down to Whole Foods and you’re getting all this pre-packaged stuff and shopping at those types of places, it’s going to cost more. But if you go to local farmers markets, you grow your own stuff, you stock up your own seeds, nuts, grains and beans, you develop some new pathways and buy in bulk, it’s literally going to eat for pennies. And if you learn how to detox your digestive tract and heal it and get it maximized for absorption stuff, and you do things like we take like the greens—Ashley and I take the greens, we do certain things—literally, you only need about half as much food that’s going through you because your cells are getting the nutrients they need. So your grocery bill gets cut in half right there. 

[01:10:47] Ashley James: Yes! Okay, this. This right here. I’ve been wondering why is it that my fridge is still full. I’m worried about wasting. If it looks like these vegetables are about to go bad, I chop them up and I put them in the freezer. We have a giant freezer. And I totally agree with you on the storable food. I like Azure Standard. I get some bulk seeds and nuts I have from them and then also legumes, beans, and brown rice in bulk. That’s great because I use it in the kitchen also. But like you said, if there’s ever a power outage or something. Here in the Pacific Northwest we’re always worried about the next giant earthquake which will knock out everything for months and I’ve got enough storable food. As long as we can start a fire and cook it, we’re good. Or I can take the legumes and sprout it and making really nutrient dense sprouts.

But what I’ve noticed is because we are eating nutrient dense foods, we’re eating less. There’s more food left over in the fridge than there used to be. So, I thought that was really interesting. I noticed that lately. Though we are eating less.

[01:11:59] Tim James: Yeah. When you eat less, which means your body, the rental car you’ve been given for this life, is you don’t have to pedal down so much. Imagine if you have to process 100 pounds of food in a month versus 50 pounds of food. Which one is going to be a lighter burden on the body? Well, it’s going to take a lot more for the person that has to process 100 pounds of nutrient-deficient foods than the person who is processing 50 pounds of nutrient-dense foods. So, where does that energy that was going to break down those extra 50 pounds of nutrient-deficient foods go? Well, it goes back to you for your activities of daily living. And you think. Your brain starts working better and your immune system. So, you become stronger and you start building back up the walls of the castle so the viruses, the bacteria, the mold, the yeast, the fungus, the parasites, and the cancers, they can’t get over the wall anymore. Right? That’s I think a very important thing just to have an understanding about.

[01:12:59] Ashley James: And one of the things that they discovered with longevity, and when I say longevity, I mean not just living longer because living longer with disease would suck. Longevity actually means people who are in their 90s able to go for walks and garden and still function, like people who are even living into their 100s still walking around and being functional. There are people in Okinawa, for example, who are 95 years old and they look like our 65-year-olds. They act like our 65-year-olds and they're 95. One of their principles, they don’t eat processed food nearly as much as American food, so they're eating more like Japanese yams. These beautiful purple yams are filled with antioxidants. They're growing their own foods, more whole food diet. But they also have this principle of eating to 70 or 80 percent full. Whereas in America, it’s like every meal is like Thanksgiving. You’re not done until you’re stuffed.

I love this, this idea of just eating. And watch children, they’ll do this. Children will eat until they’re no longer hungry. Adults eat their full. I think it’s the hypothalamus, it takes about 20 minutes for the stomach to tell the hypothalamus that we’re full. “We’re full, you can stop now.” But in those 20 minutes where we’ve been eating for more, so we’re overstuffing ourselves. In that practice in Okinawa, they just eat until they’re no longer hungry.

[01:14:39] Tim James: There’s also some emotional stuff too. Because my parents are in their 80’s and they didn’t have food. They had to make cabbage soup and stuff. So, finish your plate was that was they were taught. It’s like if you got stuff on your plate, you better well finish it. They would have liked to have seconds or thirds but a lot of times, they didn’t do it. So there’s a mentality there of scarcity, that drives it as well.

What you said actually reminds me of I picked up a book on Benjamin Franklin when I was a kid. I remember the quote vividly. He said never eat to dullness or drink to elevation. Which coincides exactly with what you said. I don’t know what his health was like. The pictures I saw, he had a big belly so maybe he wasn’t paying attention or they just drew him wrong, I don’t know.

[01:15:27] Ashley James: Well, I do know about Benjamin Franklin, is that he went vegetarian and then at one point he decided something along the lines of fish don’t have feelings, so he could eat them. So, he was pescatarian. But he’s a really interesting guy to research. But yeah, early on he decided to not eat animals anymore. I have come across his story a few times in regards to his health habits at least in his earlier years which might have led to many of his inventions because he had the mental clarity to do so. 

[01:16:03] Tim James: He got his brain working better.

[01:16:04] Ashley James: Right, exactly. I want to get into intelligent inputs in this mushroom tincture. LearnTrueHealth.com/mushrooms—check it out. I want to talk about the specific mushrooms because you said you can talk forever on Chaga. You know what’s funny. I just started seeing a new doctor of acupuncture. I was telling him about this stuff and he kind of leans in. Because after I told him the results that I got and the results that Duffy got, he leans and he goes, “Is it psychedelic?” I’m like, “No, it’s medicinal mushrooms.” And he’s like, “Oh!” I’m like, “Yeah!”

It’s funny. Here is a doctor of acupuncture and that’s where he goes. Because what I described, the results that I got and the results that Duffy got, he thought we were like microdosing psilocybin, like we are microdosing magic mushrooms to get these results. I’m like, no, we’re getting these results with just basic medicinal, not like street drug mushrooms. I thought that was funny.

[01:17:11] Tim James: Well they’re synthesizing a lot of that stuff. Again, they're not doing natural. But the psilocybin, those are in nature and I’ve seen tons of people that are microdosing them solve their depression issues as well. So, it’s not that they're bad. It’s just things get bad raps and they can be misused, overused and abused sometimes, and that’s where we have to be just intelligent adults and find out what actually works and produces results.

[01:17:36] Ashley James: Yes. What I meant was it’s more of a compliment to your product because thought it would have to take a magic mushroom in order to get those results. And I’m like, no, it’s not. It doesn’t have to be a magic mushroom. We’re getting these results with medicinal mushrooms.

[01:17:54] Tim James: Well, maybe you can send him this episode and then he’ll have a deeper understanding of why it’s working so well.

[01:17:56] Ashley James: I will. Absolutely.

[01:18:00] Tim James: The delivery method and the quality of ingredients and all that stuff.

[01:18:04] Ashley James: Let’s talk about the intelligent inputs that are inside this stuff. You said you have some really cool things to share about chaga. 

[01:18:11] Tim James: Yeah. Chaga, it’s funny because chaga mushroom, it’s not actually a mushroom. It’s not strictly a mushroom. It’s rather a unique fungus that’s similar to mushrooms but people call it a mushroom. Usually they find it growing on birch trees. It’s called Inonotus obliquus. Anyway, chaga is a traditional Native American medicine. It’s been used for hundreds of years. Here are just some benefits that people have been using for hundreds of years for chaga:

Supports the cardiovascular health. Well, that’s good. You just said the number one killer, heart disease. 

Supports immune health. That was the reason I built it. I wanted a new pathway of immunity through mushrooms.

Maintains blood sugar for people that already have it within healthy limits.

Enhances liver, stomach, and skin health. I’m all about all that stuff especially the skin and the liver, all of it, stomach.

Counteracts tiredness. So it helps with that. Maybe because you’re sleeping better, I don’t know.

Enables free and easy breathing. So, a lot of respiratory issues especially around seasonal stuff. You got pet allergies and food allergies and you got seasonal allergies.

Encourages a healthy inflammation response and supports purification of the blood.

So, my formulator said that many people have experienced chaga as an essential part of their immune-supporting protocols and they used it daily for that reason. So, here’s some of the deeper dive on these benefits of chaga, this wonderful fungus.

Number one, it’s a major antioxidant booster. We know that there’s oxidative stress to the cells that lead to cell damage in all the components of the cells including the DNA. So, cell death also known as apoptosis, and disruptions in cellular signaling which is the communication between the cells happens. So, oxidative stress is known to be involved in aging, which I don’t want to age like that, and in the development of many age-related ailments and conditions.

So, antioxidants like chaga can help prevent this oxidative stress. Chaga produces an impressive array of metabolites as well. These are capable of acting as potent free radical scavengers. These little metabolites in chaga can protect DNA from being damaged by oxidative stress. One study demonstrated that the cells that are pre-treated with chaga mushroom extracts, this is huge. If you pre-treated the cells with chaga mushroom extracts before being treated with a free radical, it showed 40 percent less DNA damage to those that weren’t pre-treated. That’s pretty huge. So, chaga is also one of the highest ORAC values out there. That’s really important. That’s that oxygen radical absorbance capacity, it’s called ORAC. It’s claimed to be one of the highest out there. Many websites claim it’s one of the highest.

Chaga is a powerhouse of trace minerals like zinc, copper, iron, manganese. These can also stimulate production of these SODs which is short for superoxide dismutase. These SODs and the enzymes that form the first line of antioxidant defense against damage caused by free radicals. This is all chaga. And that’s just talking about the antioxidant boost.

Now let’s talk about chaga as far as digestion. Chaga has been used traditionally to encourage gastrointestinal health and digestive comfort. Modern research is confirming this, that the gastroprotective properties that it has helps to regulate the gut microflora and the gut bacteria. Extracts of chaga have helped to protect the integrity of the stomach wall when given to rats. In another study, mice were fed chaga extracts, and the results showed that by regulating the release of cytokines, with everybody that’s been through this whole COVID thing might have heard about the cytokine storm which is an inflammation response, chaga supported the health of the colonic mucosa. So, we’re talking about the mucus membrane in the colon. It supported that. So, the antioxidant activity of these polysaccharides in chaga was also found to support pancreatic health and regulate gut microbiome and the composition. Also, it’s been used for centuries to alleviate gastrointestinal discomfort. And again, modern science is confirming the potential of chaga to promote gut health. Alright, there’s number two—gut health.

What about immunomodulation? So, many of you, since you follow Ashley, there’s probably a lot of scientific folks on here, you might have read or heard the term ‘adaptogen’. It’s a biological response modifier or BRM in reference to certain herbs and functional mushrooms. As the name implies, these BRMs are substances that can modulate the immune system’s response by either turning it up or down.

An adaptogen is a type of biologic response modifier that must meet three criteria. It must be, number one, nonspecific. It’s got to be general and it must be able to assist the body in handling a wide variety or range of stressors. It must be able to help maintain the body’s homeostasis or body balance. Number three, very important, it must not harm the normal functions of the body. Essentially, adaptogens help your body adapt to stress and restore the balance within your body. With chaga’s rich polysaccharide content, it’s considered a highly effective adaptogen. Chaga is basically an immune system adaptogen. Remember that’s one of the reasons I built a product was I wanted a new pathway for building my immunity. While the immune system is designed to protect the body against foreign invaders, it can also overact to harmless substances. This is happening more and more today as the chemical burden that people have, the lack of nutrients, bodies are just going wonky and people are having these crazy responses that can affect your sinuses, your lungs, your eyes, all kinds of stuff. Even though allergies aren’t always harmless, some individuals may experience almost like an anaphylactic shock. It could be a severe, sometimes life-threatening allergic reaction. So, as an adaptogen, chaga can help balance an overactive immune system.

The last thing as far as immunomodulation goes, there’s a substance in chaga called—I can’t even pronounce it—inotodiol. Anyway, it’s a triterpenoid, active that’s unique in chaga. It’s very unique. So it acts as a mast cell stabilizer and can support eye and nasal comfort. Chaga can promote the secretion of certain cytokines to modulate immune responses and in an animal study, it also showed that chaga mushroom extracts prevented chemically induced immune system overactions.

My company is called Chemical Free Body. Everybody that’s listening has chemicals in their blood, fat and muscle tissue. Chaga mushroom extracts, when I read this I was so excited, can prevent chemically induced immune system overreactions. This is happening to everybody listening. Your immune system is overacting to all the chemicals that you’re being exposed to. The air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the clothing you’re wearing, all this stuff, personal care products that aren’t clean. So it’s demonstrated its potential as a useful adaptogenic functional food basically. And studies have shown that the active compounds in chaga may help selectively and actively against many types of malignant cells as well. So, that’s an immunomodulator.

Now, another thing is blood sugar balancing. So, insulin is the hormone responsible for moving glucose in the bloodstream and into your muscle and your fat cells where it’s stored for energy production. Healthy blood sugar levels are linked to good heart, blood vessel, nerve, kidney, skin, and brain health. So, chaga is very good for blood glucose levels. There’s been multiple animal studies that suggest that chaga may be able to support balanced blood sugar levels. In one study, they found mice fed the chaga extract for three weeks, they were better able to maintain healthy blood glucose levels as well as total cholesterol, triglycerides and low-density lipid proteins (the cholesterol LDLs, bad cholesterol levels). Most notably, the research team found that feeding chaga supported healthy pancreatic tissue in the mice. So, the pancreas is the organ that secretes insulin.

A follow-up study confirmed that these effects on blood sugar and cholesterol. Mice treated with either 30 or 60 mg per kg body weight of chaga extract for 21 days had similar results as in the first study. So, part of chaga’s effects on blood sugar may be attributed to the inhibition of the enzyme that breaks down the starch by its polysaccharides. Blocking this enzyme helps slow down glucose absorption in the digestive organs, and research performed in vitro showed that the polysaccharides in chaga inhibit this enzyme. So, pretty cool stuff on blood sugar levels especially for those diabetic folks out there.

Now, how about our athletes out there? Or just people are getting tired. Muscle fatigue. Okay, these polysaccharides in chaga also surprising scientists with their benefits. So, as an adaptogen, it has the capacity to bring balance to your entire body including your energy levels and your muscle endurance. So, a study showed that chaga may help increase exercise endurance and these subjects were given the chaga extract for 14 days. Some of them got none, some of them got 100, some got 200, some got 300 mg per kg of their body weight. They were able to swim for longer periods of time than those given just none, which is distilled water. Scientists noted that these subjects given chaga also had significantly more glycogen, the predominant storage form of glucose for energy production in their liver and muscles.

So, this is why when I teach people if you want to build muscle and you want to triple your muscle growth, we use resistance bands for a physical reason, but we only do one set and we do at least 15 reps, but we go to failure, but you have to get at least 15 in. When you start doing the second set of reps or the third or the fourth, you’re actually just burning out all this glycogen. That’s why your muscles are getting so damn sore. So, glycogen storage directly affects exercise endurance and the results of the study suggested might increase the time before glycogen is depleted. So, these chaga polysaccharides also greatly reduce blood lactate levels in subjects. You know, when you build up that acid in your body. Muscles produce high levels of lactate during high-intensity exercise, which contributes to fatigue and thereby if you can remove the lactate very quickly, it’s beneficial to prevent that daily fatigue.

Chaga is just amazing and it shows great potential as a supplement for athletic endurance. A lot of these recent studies demonstrate its capacity to increase the storage of glycogen in muscles and decrease blood lactate levels leading to less muscle fatigue. So, there’s that one.

As far as immunity goes, we talked about a lot of that, but the immune-supporting activity is believed to be due to the diverse bioactive compounds found in chaga like betulin, hispidulin, hispidin, lupeol and these mycosterols. And betulinic acid which is unique to chaga, very unique. And chaga’s other bio compounds are being investigated by a scientific community as potential agents to protect the body against various foreign invaders.

For me, at this point, you can go down rabbit holes, Ashley, all you want but it’s like, if I take it and I feel freaking amazing and it’s working for me, and I know indigenous people have been using it for centuries, it’s like thousands of years. You know what I mean? It’s like, why wouldn’t I do this as long as it’s working for me, right?

It’s also good for skin repair and protection. Beta-glucans and the betulinic acid in chaga may help slow down signs of aging in your skin. Guys out there that want to have beautiful skin, I do the ladies do. You might have like a huge mortgage payment and credit card debt, but by God, you’re going to have a boatload of skincare on your table. It’s going to happen. I know, I’ve seen it. I know that skin repair is important to you.

Chaga infusions have been used to comfort irritated skin, reduce redness and dryness. In a case study of 50 people, they found after taking chaga for 9 to 12 weeks, individuals actually experienced improved skin health as demonstrated by increased skin comfort, smoothness and moisturization.

Melanin also plays an important role in skin health. Now, melanin like that found in chaga is thought to protect human skin against DNA damage by absorbing UV radiation. So, one in vitro study found that melanin increased the sun’s protector factor (SPF) of gel sunscreens, as an example. Another study found that melanin functions as a free radical scavenger, which can also help keep your skin looking younger for longer. Sounds good to me. Right?

Then the last thing is brain function enhancement. All this oxidative stress is a major contributor to mild memory problems associated with aging. Dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s, all this stuff. A team of researchers investigated if chaga had any protective effects in these subjects, again, with the chemically-induced cognitive decline. So, think about what I just said there. Chemically-induced cognitive decline. We know chemicals are basically messing up our brains. And the older we are, the more time we’ve had to bioaccumulate these toxins.

So, these researchers found that in chaga, the subjects given chaga for 7 days had significantly improved learning and memory compared to those that did not receive the fungus. It’s just that simple.

Okay, that’s just one mushroom that’s not a mushroom, the fungus, and there’s five more. Right? There’s five more. I mean, I don’t know if we need to go into that detail on like lion’s mane or is there any that you wanted me to talk about?

[01:32:36] Ashley James: Yeah. Before we get to that, I looked up the ORAC and it’s incredibly high, it’s pretty ridiculous.

[01:32:44] Tim James: I think it was like 52,000, wasn’t it?

[01:32:46] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s what it says. But it depends on what they're measuring it against like is it 1 gram, 100 grams. Usually, they measure in 100 grams, so 52,000 per 100 grams, which is incredibly, incredibly high.

Dr. Joel Wallach who’s one of my mentors, when he treats someone who has a neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson’s, ALS, that kind of thing, or MS, he treats them all the same because he sees it’s neurodegeneration. And he says it is oxidative stress on the nervous system. He wants to fill them up with the good nutrients so the body can heal the nervous system, stop putting fuel on the fire in the diet and maybe bad supplements like you said. There are certain components even in supplements that can away at the myelin sheath. What he says is so important, is eating or getting in you 100,000 ORAC a day. So, anyone who has a neurodegenerative disease or any kind of oxidative stress disease, he puts them on 100,000 ORAC a day. Just the fact that chaga is that high is incredibly impressive.

Also, I just happen to find this. Chaga has 50 times more SOD (superoxide dismutase) than any other medicinal mushroom. I’ve had guests come on and talk about SOD and how it’s like the key to life that if we don’t have it, we’re not functioning. We need it. There are so many benefits to making sure that we have increased SOD in our body. So, yeah, the list just goes on and on.

[01:34:30] Tim James: Well, think about what you just said. It was like, again, 50 times more superoxide dismutase. Not 50 percent; it’s 50 times.

[01:34:42] Ashley James: Fifty times.

[01:34:43] Tim James: This is like why I get so excited about sprouts. Sprouts are 10 to 30 times more nutrient dense than a fresh picked vegetable out of your garden. The best ones. Like mustard greens or kale greens. I mean, 10 to 30 times more nutritious. So, when you get multiples like this, this is huge stuff. It’s just smart because you can take very little amount especially in the delivery system that we have for this and get super massive results, and whenever the body doesn’t need it, it just gets rid of it.

[01:35:13] Ashley James: What’s your favorite thing about lion’s mane? Because like you said, we don’t need to go into each one at that level. I mean, chaga deserves. Chaga is amazing. It’s so medicinal, it deserves everything and all the time we’ve put into it. But we can talk about just the high-level ones.

[01:35:30] Tim James: Well, lion’s mane is like another Hercules. I mean, all of these are. So, it’s really known as the mind mushroom. And it’s been used, again, thousands of years to support healthy brain functioning and neuro regeneration of nerve tissues.

You just mentioned earlier about people with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Parkinson’s and that kind of stuff. It’s really good for memory support. It has the ability to help reduce brain fog and improve memory through two essential compounds known as hericenones and erinacines. Those compounds directly act in your hippocampus and as a result, they can regenerate the neural links and build new neurons.

Lion’s mane mushrooms also have the ability to decrease inflammation, which is associated with conditions that are known to cause brain fog, so it’s also an anti-inflammatory. What I like about lion’s mane is it’s really good for the brain; it supports stress relief, which I know everybody is stressed out like crazy; repairs nerve damage. It reduces anxiety and depression symptoms, which is huge. And I know so many people have depression today. It’s a lot. I looked it up, it was like 30 million people or something like that. It’s a lot. Or 60 million. And these are the ones that are just saying “Yeah, I’m depressed.” How many people are walking around just not telling anybody?

[01:37:04] Ashley James: Or not even knowing that this is what depression is. Because I didn’t know I was having PTSD attacks. People could just be like low-grade depression and they think this is just what life is. Have you ever had that where you have a client and you get them to eat healthy and all of a sudden like 1 week into it, they're like, “Wait a second. This is how I’m supposed to feel all the time? I feel amazing. I can’t believe I thought health was before I changed my ways in this last week. I thought I was healthy but now this whole new level I didn’t even know existed.” It’s like you don’t know you’re supposed to have three arms and it’s missing. You don’t even know it’s missing. Right? You just get to that new level. So people are walking around depressed not even knowing they have depression, not even knowing there’s this whole way that they could be, this whole elevated way that mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically they could be in this better health, and they don’t even know that exists.

[01:38:01] Tim James: I keep surprising myself every year. I finally realize I keep thinking I have reached a new level and I couldn’t get any better. But every year, through all my research and the people that I’m associated with now and the new people coming into my life, I usually find one or two really badass things that I add into my life that takes my health up another level or two or three.

So, I guess one thing I would say about lion’s mane that might be important especially if we have any menopausal women that are listening, is that there was a study done that showed that lion’s mane mushrooms can aid with depression and anxiety caused by all of that. So, that could be something too. The women that were given the mushroom were less irritated and anxious in that study and they had less difficulty concentrating than those in the placebo group. So that’s just something about lion’s mane.

[01:38:58] Ashley James: What did you notice when you started taking your mushroom tincture? I had a tremendous experience and sometimes people take mushrooms and they don’t notice this immediate result right away, but it’s something like after 7 weeks or 9 weeks of taking it, they’re like “Oh yeah, my skin is amazing,” or, “Oh yeah, I do mentally feel better.” Sometimes it takes a while for the mushrooms to heal the brain and that kind of thing. But what changes did you notice? You’re the cleanest-eating person I know. You’re the gold standard. You were already incredibly healthy. You didn’t have this massive inflammation to overcome or anything. But what changes did you notice in yourself?

[01:39:41] Tim James: Well, out of the gate my mind clarity improved—way more clear. And to say the same thing. This is one of the things we get from a lot of people. They say they feel a wave of calmness over them. And that’s what I felt. I’m like, I could relate to that. Even though I’m working more and more and more on my spiritual practice all the time, being able to meditate and breath work and stay in the eye of the storm no matter what’s going on around me and looking at everything in life as something that’s serving me and giving me contrast, and you know what, just a different way I’m looking at life now. I feel less stressed. It’s just like it’s not there and even though nothing’s really changed, in fact, I’ve got more stuff going on right now, I haven’t told you, but I’m writing a book.

[01:40:27] Ashley James: Yay!

[01:40:31] Tim James: People are, you know, “You should write a book! You should write a book! You should write a book!” and I’m like, “Nah, I don’t want to write a book. What am I going to talk about?” Then, now it’s like, oh, I know what I want to tell people. I want to share this with people. And I want to put it in a freaking book. So, it’s there for folks. So, I’m about halfway through writing it. And you think with stuff like that, e-books and all this stuff, and the growth in our company, it’d be more stress, but I actually feel less stressed.

[01:40:57] Ashley James: Nice. You’re on your path.

[01:40:58] Tim James: Yeah. And I just feel good because I know I’m building my immunity with another source from nature which is mushrooms, and I’m doing it in a very specific way. And I’m doing it in a very intelligent way. I’m delivering it through the mouth directly into the cell. And I like that, and it’s simple. I just shake it, squirt it, swish it, wait, done. It’s just so easy to do it. So for my busy lifestyle, it fits in very well.

[01:41:23] Ashley James: Love it. What are the highlights of the cordyceps mushroom that you want to make sure we know about?

[01:41:30] Tim James: Okay, cordyceps. Well, it’s been used in Asian medicine for centuries. So, once again, Chinese herbology and stuff like that have been using it for a long time. It’s really good for energy and performance. So, people that want to have more energy or athletes that want to improve themselves. Cordyceps contain cordyceptin which is an active compound known for its ability to improve oxygen absorption—which is what, it’s our number one nutrient, remember that 20,000 breaths a day—and to support the production of ATP, which provides energy within the cells. So, cordyceps support increased energy levels and they improve athletic performance. One study on cordyceps indicated that there is close to a 50 percent increase in cellular energy levels after supplementing with cordyceptin which is contained in cordyceps. In fact, in the 1993 Olympics, many Chinese runners shattered world records after supplementing with cordyceps. 

So, there you go. It’s also good for heart health, has anti-malignancy properties, so if anybody is dealing with that cancer-type thing, I’d be taking some cordyceps, no question, as one more layer or one more card in my deck of health that I’d be stacking up. It supports immune system and supports a healthy liver and kidneys as well. So, lots of good stuff about cordyceps.

[01:42:59] Ashley James: Now you have reishi mushroom which is one of my favorite medicinal mushrooms. I remember back in my 20s I would drink the reishi mushroom coffee that was kind of really popular back then. My friend turned me onto it. They also had like a reishi mushroom dark hot chocolate kind of healthy drink.

[01:43:18] Tim James: Nice.

[01:43:19] Ashley James: Oh yeah! Really, that was my favorite out of all of them. But I noticed that I would feel this buzz and I don’t know, maybe it was from chocolate, who knows, but I became very interested in learning more and more about reishi and discovering that they’ve been using it for a very long time in Asia.

[01:43:40] Tim James: Long time, yeah.

[01:43:41] Ashley James: Very long time. And it’s supposed to be really good for the immune system. But beyond the immune system, what else is reishi good for?

[01:43:50] Tim James: So the reishi mushroom, also known as Ganoderma lucidum, this is a very popular and famous mushroom. They’re putting reishi in everything nowadays. People are buying it because of the marketing behind it. So, that’s good. It’s bringing some awareness there. So, again, it’s a traditional Asian mushroom. It’s been an elixir for long life. It has lots of health benefits. One of them is it reduces stress.

So, for me, that’s one of the big three, which is reducing stress and giving tools for that. Breath work. Meditation. Getting outside. Getting your feet naked. Touching the ground. Grounding. Earthing. Sleeping on earthing and grounding mats. Going to the beach. Getting in the forest. These are things to reduce and calm the nervous system so that you’re going to live a healthier life and your body is going to communicate better and you’re going to stop blowing out your adrenal glands and producing all this cortisol that’s killing you. Stress reduction, so huge. Reishi, very powerful for that. 

Number two. It supports immune function, which again, that’s what you want. You want to build your body’s defenses and build up those walls so in those pathogens that are always out there, keeping them in balance, the viruses, the bacteria, mold, yeast, fungus, mutagens, all this stuff, and you just keep them down. So you’re having your immune system up, it protects you from that kind of stuff. Again, it has anti-malignancy properties just like some of the other mushrooms. It’s got inflammation reduction.

And maybe this is it, I don’t know, but it helps support sleep and reduces insomnia. So reishi can provide a calming effect which supports your healthy sleep patterns. So maybe it’s the reishi in there.

[01:45:33] Ashley James: Maybe.

[01:45:35] Tim James: Maybe. I don’t know. Or combination. But it could be the delivery system that’s delivering such high amounts to your cells that you’re finally getting enough to help you.

[01:45:44] Ashley James: Right. Well, that’s what I feel is that because I’m absorbing it into my lymph system through my mouth, it’s getting right into my body, bypassing the digestive process, so I’m getting like the supercharged powerhouse of this mushroom elixir straight into me. And we’ve talked about this before that let’s say your bottle was 1 mg of vitamin C. We can all understand vitamin C. But if you took a pill that was 1 mg vitamin C, you would only be getting 30 percent of that actually into your body because it has to go through the process of digestion and absorption. Whereas if it’s in this tincture, because it’s broken down into such a small particle, absorbs through the tissue in your mouth into your body, you’re getting all of it or close to all of it. And so, for me that’s why when I started out taking them, I’m like I’m just going to do two droppers full because I’m thinking myself I need more for it to work, but really, you’re getting all of it. Right? So I just love that and it really does that have calming effect on my brain and my nervous system to the point where, like I said, I slept through the night, and the level of stress that I had diminished went down, that ambient stress.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman who I have had on the show and I love his work, I’ve been really inspired by his books and his work. He talks about eating a nutritarian diet, specifically designed to look for foods that are medicinal and science-based in a way that will prevent cancer, for example, prevent all disease. I mean, let’s prevent cancer, right? My mom died of cancer. Let’s prevent it. He says every day, I think he says about a cup of mushrooms, a cup of onions, start every stir-fry and I do water saute basically with no oil, and it tastes delicious. Any kind of mushroom. He’s like even just the cheaper, obviously organic. Because I had a naturopathic friend of mine go, “I just went to a mushroom farm and you don’t want to know what they use on the non-organic mushrooms. You just don’t even want to go there.” So with organic mushrooms, he said even the cheapest organic mushrooms which are the little white ones, the button ones, he goes those ones actually have more medicinal property than those cremini mushrooms, the more expensive-looking ones at the store. Chop it up, saute it with onion, the two combined will stop if there’s ever a tumor that’s just kind of taking root in your body, tiny, tiny, tiny tumor taking root. Because we have cancer every day in our body and our body is clearing out or our immune system is clearing it out. But if we have a bit of it taking root, it needs new vasculature and it will send a signal to your body to start sending it new blood vessels. There’s all kinds of reasons why you want to eat it with a bit of onion too, but mushrooms tell the body to not make new vasculature. And so, it won’t send these little highways of nutrients to the tumor, so the tumors can’t start growing at a rapid rate because they can’t get the vasculature, they can’t trick the body into giving them new blood vessels because there’s some component in mushrooms that stop that process.

[01:49:28] Tim James: I want to share something that’s really important. By taking this formula that we’ve put together, I’m not saying don’t eat mushrooms. I think you should still eat mushrooms for sure, enjoy them and get the benefits just like you normally would through the digestive process. This is just to make sure you’re getting everything you need. But it’s very important you should not consume raw mushrooms. No, do not do that. Raw mushrooms are pretty much indigestible because their cell walls are very tough. They’re composed of chitin. So it’s very important to cook the cell walls of the mushrooms, the heating… this is weird but they’ll actually release the nutrients they contain, all the proteins, the B vitamins, the minerals, the wide range of compounds we just talked about.

Now you mentioned something else that Dr. Joel Fuhrman said to eat, which was onions. Onions on the other hand, you don’t want to cook them.

[01:50:26] Ashley James: Oh, interesting. 

[01:50:27] Tim James: Do not want to cook them. Because this goes back to back in, when was it, oh God, 1991 I believe. Do you remember when there was the big push, when the researchers at Johns Hopkins, the cancer researchers, the top researchers that have been researching cancer for 50 years came out and said that sulforaphane, the main ingredient in broccoli was the biggest discovery ever in the history of cancer. Those researchers named it phytochemo or plant chemo. Because it was just destroying cancer cells in the petri dishes. They’ve never seen anything like it. And because of that blip got out on national news and George Bush, Sr. was president at the time, he said “I don’t like broccoli.” And somebody dumped 600 pounds of broccoli or 200 pounds broccoli on the White House steps. It made national news. And because of that little blip, just goes to show how powerful the media is. It could be used for good, but it’s not in most cases. The broccoli seeds have doubled in price since then and they never went down because of the awareness of broccoli. Right?

Now, they were just using broccoli. They weren’t using broccoli sprouts, which are 30 to 50 times more anti-cancer than the broccoli because the sulforaphane count was higher. But guess what else is very high and even higher than broccoli? Garlic and onions. Garlic and onions have tremendous amounts of sulforaphane in them. So, when you cook an onion, if you cook it, you’re killing the anti-cancer compound. But in mushrooms, you need to cook it. So I just want to be clear on that for people because they might be like eating raw mushrooms and cooking their onions and you don’t want to do that. It should be vice versa.

[01:52:05] Ashley James: Thank you. Now I’m going to have to figure out how to enjoy raw onions. Okay, I could do this.

[01:52:11] Tim James: Well, maybe you just cook it a little bit, and then throw the raw ones in there too. You got the baby steps.

[01:52:16] Ashley James: Right. Yeah, I can chop it up and put it on as a garnish or something. I’m always playing in the kitchen. I’d never stopped eating mushrooms. I eat them every day. Every day mushrooms. Then I started taking your tincture and I had that result. So, I know that mushrooms, for me, I eat it because I know it’s healthy. But mushrooms I cook in the kitchen didn’t have the effects on my brain that your tincture does. So there’s something maybe like you said, maybe it was the reishi that did it for me.

You also have shitake which I actually cook shitake mushrooms daily. Love them. What’s medicinal about shiitake? I just like it because of the flavor.

[01:52:56] Tim James: Again, it’s another medicine that’s been used in Asian cultures for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. It’s got a really impressive nutrient profile. It’s rich in choline, copper, potassium, vitamin D, zinc. They also boast all 8 essential amino acids found in meats. So I know you have a lot of plant-based eaters listening, so that’s cool. It’s got a bunch of just good stuff in it. I mean, shiitake mushrooms are big for supporting immune function. They’re high in antioxidants. They’re anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial. They have antiviral properties that support a healthy immune response. I’m just trying to think. 

For example, there’s a substance called lentinan. It’s an active compound found in shiitakes that protects against a variety of bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections, which is pretty cool. Let’s see what else. There was a four-week trial involving 52 healthy volunteers between the ages of 21 and 41, and they found that by consuming dried shiitakes mushrooms daily, it improved their gut immunity. Specifically, blood samples found that the mushrooms increased the production of two important types of T cells, which is our natural killer cells that go out there and attack stuff. So, we’re talking about massive immune system boosting here. Shiitakes also promote heart health. Shiitake mushrooms have also been found to reduce triglyceride levels by as much as 55 percent, so that’s good for the heart.

Let’s see. Oh how about bone health. So many people today are dealing with osteoporosis, osteopenia, weak bones. Number one thing to help you with that is weight resistance exercise. Number two is get off of dairy. And then number three would be eat things that are going to support healthy bones like arjuna tree bark, products made from that, or shiitake mushrooms. It can support healthy bones. There’s a lot of vitamin D present in mushrooms, so it’s good for bone strengthening. It aids in absorption of calcium and it actually inhibits bones from getting weak. 

Let’s see what else. It also supports healthy gums which is really good. British researchers have reported that the antibacterial compounds in shiitake extract reduce harmful bacteria that causes gingivitis. So it helps you get your oral microbiome back in balance.

[01:55:35] Ashley James: And you’re holding it in your mouth for like a minute, so that’s good.

[01:55:38] Tim James: Oh yeah. There was actually another study that appeared in the Journal of Pharma… I can’t even pronounce it. It’s a review. They found the same compounds inhibit plaque-building bacteria that can lead to cavities as well. So, it’s good for your teeth, good for your gums, and supports weight management. So, this is why a lot of different companies are taking and putting shiitake in their protein shakes or their weight loss things because there’s an active component in there that helps support healthy weight. Studies have found that subjects fed a diet high in shiitake mushrooms had 35 percent less weight gain than those eating a diet low in the fungus.

[01:56:27] Ashley James: Love it. And it’s just super delicious. You know what, your tincture, I just realized because shiitake is a very strong flavor and people either love it or hate it. It has a very strong flavor but your tincture does not taste like mushrooms. To me, it tastes like chocolate. It doesn’t have a bad flavor. It has an enjoyable flavor.

[01:56:46] Tim James: Well, we’ve actually improved it. What you’ve got now is the first run. I’m always trying to improve stuff. Just wait, like just keep enjoying the benefits and stuff, but eventually, you’ll call me and say, “Dude, I got one of the new ones.” Because when the new ones come out eventually, we haven’t even ordered them yet, but when we get to that point, we’ll reorder, it’s going to taste like chocolate. You’re going to be blown away.

[01:57:07] Ashley James: Cool. Well, it already tastes good to me. 

[01:57:11] Tim James: Well, it’s going to the next level, baby. It’s going to be awesome. 

[01:57:15] Ashley James: Nice. I’ve given some drops to our son just to see what he thought of the flavor and he liked it. And he’s picky. 

[01:57:21] Tim James: Oh good, good.

[01:57:22] Ashley James: Picky child likes it. Mikey likes it, everyone’s going to like it. The last one is maitake mushroom. I admit, I know nothing about this mushroom.

[01:57:34] Tim James: It’s just another traditional medicinal shroom that’s been used in foods for thousands of years. Anti-malignancy support, antiviral support, blood pressure balancing, energy support, supports cholesterol regulation, blood sugar balancing, supports healthy immunity. A lot of the same stuff that the other one did. Maitake mushrooms are a perfect combination for health and even taste, so people love eating these. You should get them, they’re delicious. When you dive deep into their health properties, you’re going to find out that they contain lots of potassium, calcium, magnesium, amino acids, fibers, vitamins like B2, D and many more. There’s just a lot of nutrition in a maitake mushroom. And it helps boost immune system.

[01:58:27] Ashley James: And of course, the last ingredient was the fulvic and humic acid, and that’s trace minerals and elements. But because it’s broken down, like all the mushrooms is broken down, it’s highly absorbed into the body.

One of the naturopaths I learned from in the past used to be a formulator and he said trace minerals make everything work better and he said it’s really interesting that pharmaceutical companies do not add small amounts of trace minerals into their drugs because it would actually increase the effectiveness of the drugs. So, it helps the body regulate everything and get everything working. But to add that is just making it so that everything is running better.

[01:59:24] Tim James: We actually experienced this years ago when we came out with our ultra enzyme formula. So that was the one thing that I took away from the Hippocrates Health Institute was taking your enzymes. Right? And I know a lot of people like me, they're super, super geeks on this stuff, and a lot of them have been at it a lot longer than me, you know, 30, 40, 50 years into this process. And they're also enzyme aficionados. They know their enzymes. When they tried out my enzymes, they're like, “Dude, these things are amazing. What the heck? I noticed that your amounts were very high compared to the other one.” So, I spared no expense. Our digestive enzyme formula is packed. 

But what we did was, because of Dr. Treadway, we added something similar to this to the formula which is a mineral complex. And I’ve had these guys reach out to me. They’re like, “Dude, I don’t know what you’re doing to these enzymes, but there’s nothing like them.” And these people, they know what it does in the body and they know how they feel. I got a guy up in Canada that buys them by the case. He just buys them by the case for him and this other dude, and they consume it like crazy.

So anyway, these natural sources of fulvic and humic acids from this mineral pitch, this is like a plant-based natural gum. It’s found in like super ancient mountainous granite formations. So, picture this. For millions and millions and billions of years, plants, the roots, and the bark, and the stems, and the trunk, and the limbs, and the leaves, and the flowers and everything, it dies and it goes into soil and it goes down, but it slips down through the cracks. And as the tectonic plates move and mountains move, you don’t see it, but over millions of years these plant-based materials have worked their way down into the granite, and the granite has been down there, you know, it heats up in the summer and it gets cold in the winter but it keeps moving. That movement is like it’s been stirring it in these cracks of granite. On hot summer days this stuff will ooze out the side of this granite formations, and this stuff could be in there millions of years. So, what we do, oh not me, but what people do is they’ll go scrape that stuff off and then our lab or the source that we get it from will then clean it, which is very important because it needs to be cleaned, because there could also be heavy metals in it. This is very important when people are consuming fulvics and humics that they're getting a clean source. So I don’t want heavy metals. I try to educate everybody about them and get them out because of all the 5G and the stuff going on, because we turn into radiation zappers when we have all that stuff in us, so we want to get that heavy metals out.

So, what you basically have is every element in the elemental chart in this formula. So, you’re getting everything. It’s all there.

[02:02:13] Ashley James: Love it. And before people go, “Oh that sounds like tinfoil hat,” what Tim just said, Dr. Klinghardt, he takes children who are non-verbal, who are displaying symptoms of autism. Let’s say they’ve been told they have autism but let’s pretend they don’t and it was a misdiagnosis because they're beating their heads against the wall, they're non-verbal children. If you didn’t know what autism was and you look at these kids, you’d say they have fire ants crawling in their head, that they look like they're in pain. Dr. Klinghardt will take them and put them on as natural as possible chelation for heavy metals. He’ll get them drinking these green drinks like with herbs to help the body. Maybe he’ll get them on homeopathy to help with the chelation. In really, really, really rough cases, he’ll have to use a pharmaceutical chelator, but most of the time, he does it naturally.

And I talk about that, you can listen to that interview with Dr. Klinghardt, where he goes through his process of how he does heavy metal detox. But he gets these kids who are beating their heads against the wall, non-verbal, they don’t show affection, they don’t show love, they don’t make eye contact, and he gets them where they are communicating and essentially look like different children. They’re hugging their parents, they're saying “I love you”, they’re playing, they’re making eye contact, they're no longer in pain. Because he’s been doing this for over 40 years, he goes “I have children who came to me like this and now they're PhDs. One of them is a famous composer.” He says this was heavy metal toxicity in the brain.

[02:03:59] Tim James: Totally. 

[02:04:01] Ashley James: The first thing he does is he says get your children away from electromagnetic radiation and turn off the WI-FI. He explains that WI-FI resonates at a certain Hertz that vibrates the heavy metals in these children’s brains, basically making their brain feel as if it’s in a microwave cooking. So, the parents have to take their kid and move somewhere where there’s no WI-FI. If you’re going to have a computer and internet, you just have to hardwire it. And it’s just their entire nervous system calms down from that. 

[02:04:36] Tim James: Well, let’s be clear on this. A microwave is 2.4 GHz. If you have a smart meter installed outside your home and your neighbors do too, that’s 2.4 GHz. It’s the same as a microwave. So, you literally are cooking your brain regardless and if there’s heavy metals in there, it’s exponentially worse. So, folics and humics are very important.

[02:05:01] Ashley James: Right. As crazy this sounds, these doctors like Dr. Klinghardt and also like Tim who’s been doing this and uncovering this—Tim, you’ve got a great podcast, you definitely want to make sure we plug it and we’re going to have the link to it in the show notes of the podcast here. But the doctors who are uncovering it are getting results because they get the heavy metals out, they get the kids away from the WI-FI, the smart meters, the EMFs, and they get better.

So, I’m all about the results. I know this sounds crazy. It sounds just nutty. “Oh 5G, that’s something a conspiracy theorist will say.” Well, how about you take these children who are incredibly sick, get them away from these frequencies and watch what happens.

[02:05:44] Tim James: Well, 5G is right below military-grade weaponry as far as the frequency goes. Just go look it up. I had some clients on. I had Dan and Ashley Claxton on my show. It was episode… I think it was in the 80’s or something. He’s a K9 policeman. His wife is ah airdresser. They had a son, raised him up normal and everything. Got the next son, got a new kid. Well they have to say it, but the son got jabbed and then all of a sudden, he lost eye contact and became autistic. After 3 ½ years of hell, as they put it, people can go listen to the episode, they finally decided to take the reins and figure it out because it was creating a tremendous amount of stress on the older child, because this kid will bang his head on the concrete and just go nuts. Up until that point, he wasn’t totally normal and they said there’s nothing you can do about it, you just live with it. And so, 3 ½ years of hell.

Finally, this guy listens to a lot of podcasts. He learned that it could help to get his son off of dairy, so they got him off of dairy products. And that helped a little bit. Then they learned that you want to get him a good probiotic. So, they did that and that helped a little bit. And then they found out that you could put him on a good quality CBD. They did that and that helped a little bit. 

Then he was listening to a podcast and he said that it’s the heavy metals that are in the environment and in the jabs that can cause this. What you just said. Too much heavy metals go in the brain. He was already a client of mine. He was already taking our toxin detox product. So, he started all this research and he found all these different ingredients that help pull heavy metals out of the body. All of them were in our product. So, he was already taking and he’s like, well, he did this on his own, didn’t contact us or nothing, and instead of giving him 3 capsules which is the normal dose for an adult, he gave his son 1. His son, he only spoke two words up to this point. Within 30 days, his son started talking again and six months later, they said they had their son completely back.

What they did was is they stacked and I was like “whoa!” because everything he was writing off is like protocols we’ve learned for autism. Get him off of dairy. Oh, get him off of wheat too. One of them was get off of wheat. Obviously, wheat and dairy is just for everybody, just get off that crap. Get off of wheat, get off of dairy, high quality CBD, good bacteria, start working on the probiotics and that kind of stuff, and then start chelating. The foot spas like with Kellyanne, toxin detox, eating cilantro, all the things that you can do to get heavy metals out of the body and then stop putting them in. And people are getting results. I was just like, “Hey Dan, would you and Ashley like to come on and do this show with me?” I’ve tried many times to have parents that we’ve worked with that have helped with autism, but nobody wants to do it because they’re scared. And he’s like, “Yeah, we’ll do it.” So they came on and they told their story.

So this isn’t like woo-woo stuff. We actually have real-life examples of people recorded on tape that actually they're just working-class people like Ashley and me that have figured out what we’re figuring out and what you’re figuring out, and then they just went and applied it and tried and see if it worked for them, and a lot of them are getting good results. That’s what we’re about. We’re just about like, hey, it might sound really simple, but it’s kind of working. Why does everything have to be so damn complicated? And you don’t have to get into the level of beta-glucans and knowing all this crap if you don’t want to. You can just like, “Okay, that sounds good, I’ll try it out.” And if it works for you, keep doing it and then maybe add something else in and just kind of keep gleaning information off from shows like this and if something resonates with you, the most important thing to do is just go take action and see if it works. Then, you’ll have your own first-person experience. It won’t matter what I say or what some doctor says or what Ashley says. You’re going to know in your heart and your soul, “Hey, this works for me. I’m going to keep doing this.” Or, “Didn’t work for me, I won’t do that and I’ll try something else.” Having a can-do attitude is very important instead of like “Well, I can’t do this and I can’t do that.” It’s like no, we’re going to figure it out, I’m making my health a priority, I’m tired of waking up and not feeling good, whatever, I want better relationships, I want more finance, I want better health. You can have all of that. You just have to put yourself as a priority and start loving yourself, and all that stuff can fall into place for you.

[02:10:20] Ashley James: Yeah, I love that. Be willing to turn over every stone. Be willing to try new things. Be willing to try, give it an honest try.

There is this mom, an amazing video. And she’s something like a PhD or doctor or something, and her daughter was nonverbal. She started with, like you said, “Oh, probiotics, good.” Started with probiotics, did no dairy, no gluten, that kind of thing. She was doing all this stuff. Then, she came across some research and her daughter was still having issues. She went from no eyesight and just no communication at all. To be able to communicate, she’d have these tantrums that would be two hours long like, again, the brain on fire. Then she came across some research about… you know monosodium glutamate, right? MSG is hidden in food. You’ve got to know there’s dozens of different ways they say it. Like they’ll say natural flavoring and that actually means MSG.

Well, what she found out was that the glutamate in some people gets built up kind of like heavy metals in some people gets built up, whereas other people, maybe because of MTHFR or maybe because of how their liver works or isn’t working great. Some people can clear heavy metals based on just the regular everyday stressors of it being in your food and it being in the air and the water. And some people can’t, so it builds up in their body. Well, glutamate is another one of those things where if you eat lots of grains especially gluten grains, you can get high levels of glutamate if you eat lots of processed food. There’s hidden MSG in all these foods.

So, she went on this Sherlock Holmes for food and found all the different sources of glutamate and gave her daughter. Typically, these children are also incredibly picky, so she had to dial that in. But she was able to get glutamate incredibly low in her daughter’s diet. And now, her daughter is just like any other kid, just laughing and communicating and looking in everyone’s eye and just happy and living a normal life not in pain. Not in that agony and that discomfort and the constant inner turmoil that you could see she was going through.

So, the Frankenfoods that are out there disguised as regular food, processed food, it’s hijacking our nervous system. We have to be aware of that. So, we talked about that, just getting back to eating down on the food chain. Like, eat the nuts and seeds, the gluten-free grains, like the grains that are naturally… So, don’t eat barley, wheat rye and in some cases, oats because oats contain gliadin, which is very similar. Make sure you buy organic. Look into eating as much plants as possible, but learn from Tim. Know when to cook them and when to eat them raw. I didn’t know that about raw onions, and I’m excited to add some raw onions to my diet to get those benefits.

[02:13:30] Tim James: Just make sure to definitely eat some too; otherwise, you might have a hard time getting kisses.

[02:13:36] Ashley James: Oh, I don’t have a hard time.

[02:13:39] Tim James: You’re going to have onion breath.

[02:13:40] Ashley James: Yeah. I could eat raw garlic and he’d still come after me. I love that man.

[02:13:45] Tim James: That’s awesome. 

[02:13:48] Ashley James: He’s something else. I’m blessed. I’m blessed in many ways and I want to pass this blessing on to the listeners by sharing this information and continuing to get this information out there. So, we’re going to keep uncovering with every interview, especially with Tim, but with every interview we do, we’re uncovering these steps so we can take away today to gain better health. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing just your wealth of knowledge. We’re definitely going to have you back. I want to kind of uncover each and every product that you’ve made because you’ve made it with some intentionality. There’s so much behind it. There’s so much science behind it. There’s a need that’s filling and I want to be able to go through and learn from you and learn about each product. So, I can’t wait to have you back. But thank you for sharing about the mushroom tincture that’s made such a big difference in my life and in my husband’s life. Like he’s never dreamed in color and remember them. 

[02:14:47] Tim James: That’s cool.

[02:14:48] Ashley James: He’s having this whole world. He’s in his 50’s and he’s now for the first time ever just experiencing what dreams are like. That’s just amazing. I love dreaming. I love waking up and be like, wow! Like Alice in Wonderland for the last 8 hours or whatever. I love dreaming. And he never had that until your tincture. It’s just so cool. Listeners can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/mushrooms and check it out.

Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show. Why don’t you plug your podcast and make sure that listeners check it out?

[02:15:19] Tim James: Sure. Well, I just want to say this has been really a new experience for me because normally when people have me on, they want me to tell my story or go over a specific topic. I usually don’t really get into the products that deep at all because number one, everybody’s trying to sell everybody something and I don’t want to come across as some salesperson. But it was really fun to be able to actually do a deep dive and completely geek out or share everything I’ve been geeking out on. It’s like this is why I built this product and this is what we found out, and these are all these side benefits that are happening for people. And just giving a really deep dive on one product, I never got to do this before. So, I just want to thank you. Maybe it’s more understandable for people just the level of why this stuff works so good and why we have a double your money back guarantee because I already know based on system science that I’ve got a 98 percent chance it’s going to work really well.

My podcast is called the Health Hero Show. It’s on all the major platforms. I don’t have as many episodes as Ashley, but we’re about 130 out the door so far at this point in time. Who knows when people are going to be listening to this. But I had a lot of fun with it. I do solo episodes and I also have guests on like Ashley and other cool people that are getting results in their life or maybe they got a really cool product or a system they put together and just trying to share things that I have incorporated in my life for the benefit of me or benefit of others. It’s just a similar mission to what you’ve got going on, Ashley, and I just appreciate you letting me get this information out to more people.

[02:17:06] Ashley James: Absolutely. And I love telling your story. Especially when I come across, like I’ll be talking to one of the husbands of my friends, I’m like, oh, you need to listen to, if there’s one interview you’re ever going to listen to, it’s episode 442 with Tim James. Because you started off as that typical American cowboy kind of just meat and potatoes and then you went on to this journey. And the amount of mom friends that I have, they're like “Oh, I wish my husband would get on board or I wish my husband would choose to eat healthy or I just wish he would, you know, he has his health issues but he says his fine.” I’m like, “Oh just one episode. Just one. Just get the stubborn man to listen to episode 442.” Because even just 30 minutes of listening, 30 minutes in, they’ll be hooked. Listening to Tim’s story, they’ll be hooked. Listeners definitely want to go back and check that out.

Of course, the links to everything that we talked about today is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Tim, thank you so much. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[02:18:11] Tim James: Same stuff I always say, which is put yourself first and lead by example. and be your own doctor and learn how to heal. and wake up and feel good. It’s your birthright. Creation doesn’t make mistakes. So if you’re here, unless you think that you’re going to doubt creation, then you have a purpose; otherwise, you wouldn’t be part of all that is. So, you’re here. Even if you might be a down state or you’re not feeling good with your health or whatever, and maybe you came here to try to glean some stuff to feel better, just understand that you have a purpose and we need you to be fully activated and doing whatever that is. Whatever brings you the most joy and excitement, you should be doing that. And the more that we do that, the more synchronicities that will start happening in your life and in my life and in Ashley’s life as more and more life raise their consciousness and do what brings them the most excitement. So, thanks again for having me and I appreciate it. And I appreciate the listeners for taking time to listen to this show. 

[02:19:12] Ashley James: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tim. I can’t wait to have you back on.

I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Tim James. Isn’t he amazing? If you haven’t already, go back to episode 442 and check out his story. He tells such a good story of his life and his health transformation. And he was one of those guys and you know those guys, maybe you used to be one of those guys, but he was one of those guys who like would not eat a vegetable. He would not even look at a vegetable. They thought salsa on their chips out of a jar was a vegetable. He was one of those guys. And now, he is a raw and living foods, sprouted foods, vegan chef and supplement formulator and health coach and just all the different things that he does to help people to get on the other side of major health issues. I absolutely love his mission. It’s so on par with me and I resonate so much with everything he does. I just think it’s so funny that the two of us, I feel like we're just twins, it’s so great.

So if you love my show, I know you’ll definitely love listening to his show and you should absolutely go check it out. Of course, the links to everything are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. But if you’re driving and you just want to remember the link really quick, go to LearnTrueHealth.com/mushrooms or mushroom. Go to LearnTrueHealth.com/mushroom and it’s going to take you straight to check out the MultiShroom tincture which we talked about in the last 2+ hours. This very medicinal tincture, not psychedelic, although the name “shroom” is in it, so some people think that’s what it is. But not, it’s not psychedelic but it does have fantastic health benefits that are noticeable. So that’s LearnTrueHealth.com/mushroom.

If you want to check out Tim’s drink that I love drinking, and my husband and I, we drink it all the time, it is called Green 85. It has 85 superfoods in there and it’s like fresh squeezed juice practically. My body just buzzes when I drink it. If you want to try that, it’s great as I wouldn’t say a meal replacement, but if you just need to take the edge off, like you’re hungry but you’re super busy and you don’t want to do something bad for you, you want to do something good for you, drink it. I do 2 scoops in a 32-ounce mason jar, I have a special lid. I can link it if you want. I’ll link it in the Facebook group. Actually, I should link it in the Facebook group. I love drinking out of glass instead of plastic or metal. So, we’ve got into the habit a few years ago of drinking out of mason jars. It’s funny once in a while, I’ll bump into someone else that drinks out of mason jars. We’ll be out in public, I’ll be carrying my mason jar and someone else will be carrying their mason jar and we cheers each other, “Hey, mason jar drinkers!”

But yeah, we just put two scoops in a big mason jar and sip on it for an hour or so and it gets us through our day. Today, I didn’t even eat breakfast. I just got super busy. I just drink my green juice and I think it was about 2 PM that I made this huge salad, I’m going to post it on Instagram. It’s super delicious. Actually, I was inspired by Tim talking about raw onions and I’m sitting here going, I really don’t like eating raw onions, but I remember I blended them before and made really good salad dressings. So, I ran downstairs, I cut up half an onion, put it in the Vitamix with about a quarter of a cucumber, some Italian seasoning and then the brine from my homemade live, cultured, fermented pickles, and I put that in there. I don’t know, I just splash in there and then I blended it and I put that over a bunch of greens with some avocado. It was so good.

My husband and I both went back for seconds because I made this big bowl. We each ate a bowl and then he looks to me and he goes, “Do you want some more?” kind of like if there’s any left, can I have the rest of it. It was that good. So then we fought over the leftovers. That was super delicious. Yeah, that was 2 PM. I was like, wow, I was not hungry all day. I just had a big thing of the green juice and I got busy in my day. I drink water, I drink my green juice. So even though I don’t consider it necessarily a meal replacement, it definitely just took the hunger away and gave me lots of energy and I kept moving on with my day until I was able to prepare a healthy meal.

So if that’s what you’re looking for, you should definitely check it out. Of course, we talk more about it in episode 442, which you can find by going to LearnTrueHealth.com and searching Tim James or just like Googling his name, internet searching his name, Tim James in the Learn True Health podcast. Then yeah, if you want to check out the drink, go to LearnTrueHealth.com/green85. Yeah, check it out. He also has a double your money back guarantee which he briefly mentioned and we didn’t really get into it, but you should read his double your money back guarantee. I’ve never seen a company do this. I’ve never seen a company so boldly stand behind their products that they will give you your money back and then double that, double the amount of money. So they give you all the money you paid and then again, they give you it again. Like here, we believe in it so much that we will give you not only the money you spend, but twice the money you spend, which blows my mind.

That also goes to show that he has a very low return rate, which for me, the proof is in the pudding. So people try it and if they love it, they keep drinking it. If a bunch of people didn’t like it and asked double their money back, he had been already out of business. So for me, that’s a no-brainer. I love his ethics. I love the quality of his products and that’s why I love sharing it because I believe in it, I take it myself. And I think it might help you too, so you should give it a try.

LearnTrueHealth.com/mushroom and LearnTrueHealth.com/green85 – check out his two products. Let me know what you think. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health in Facebook or you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/group, come join the group. We’d love to see you there. We’d love to chat. Our fantastic listeners are in there chatting with each other, chatting with me, we’re all just helping each other and getting great advice, great input, great insights. I learn things all the time from you guys and I share my knowledge with you. There’s just a lot of love going around in that group. So, come join it.

Awesome. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. This is a mission to help people to get so healthy that they no longer have to suffer. Suffering should be optional, especially when it comes to health, and we can help each other to learn true health. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day. Go out there and figure out how to get some raw onions into your diet and some delicious mushrooms.

Get Connected with Tim James!

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Recommended Readings by Tim James

Supplements Exposed – Dr. Brian Clement

Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

Check out the inventions that Eileen talks about in this interview: https://www.learntruehealth.com/ozone

For the coffee enema:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/enema

Get your free sample class for IIN's Health Coach Training Program that Ashley loves:

Learntruehealth.com/coach

Get Dr. Mark's free download: www.sherwood.tv

Your Quest To Wellness: How To Self-Heal Through Food, Dr. Mark Sherwood

https://www.learntruehealth.com/483-your-quest-to-wellness-how-to-self-heal-through-food-dr-mark-sherwood

Highlights:

• Diseases and the two major causes of death in the United States
• Allopathic versus naturopathic/holistic medicine
• Sleep dysregulation and emotional trauma
• Inflammation in the body and its effects
• Cortisol
• Metformin
• Foods that cause inflammation and what to cut out in your diet
• Cytokines
• Broccoli is good for you

Nutrition has a tremendous effect on our lives. Some foods harm, and some foods help. In today's episode, Dr. Mark Sherwood speaks about how our emotional health, spiritual health, and lifestyle play a role along with the foods we eat. He also shares tips on healing and getting our health back or taking it to the next level.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. You're going to love today's interview with Dr. Mark Sherwood. He brings some amazing information to help us heal and help get our health to the next level. He said at the end of the interview, “This felt like I was just chatting with my bud and it was such a great conversation.” It's interesting that he said that because a lot of listeners say to me that they feel like they're sitting in the living room with us, chatting with us, and just learning from our guests, asking the questions that they wanted me to ask, so it feels like they're a part of the conversation.

Learning from him in this interview reminded me of my experience with IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. When I went through their year-long health coach training program, I learned from the world's best holistic health experts and functional medicine experts. It was phenomenal. And then, I ended up interviewing many of them on the show. I had Andrea Beaman, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Joel Fuhrman. And I loved them all and I had many more. You can go to my website LearnTrueHealth.com and type in “Institute for Integrative Nutrition” in the search function. You'll find all my episodes where I interviewed many of the graduates, the staff, the founder and the CEO, also health coaches that have come through their program and many of their teachers.

Now, when I was considering doing the course, considering going through the year-long health coach training program with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, I had two problems, two dilemmas in my mind. I didn't have enough time, and I didn't have enough money. What I was really surprised about is that they broke it down so the year-long program, even incredibly busy people can do it because it's about 20 minutes a day. So, sometimes a little bit longer, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but it averages out to be about 20 minutes a day. I did it while I was washing the dishes, cooking, and doing the laundry; I just have it playing. I'd be driving and I'd listen to it. I'd be at the gym listening to it. I would just listen to it whenever I could; I would turn it on just kind of like you're listening to this show, you fit it in maybe while you're driving. If you can listen to a podcast, you can do the program. You can go through their program. So, that eliminated that first dilemma for me.

Then the second dilemma was I didn't have enough money. And it is an incredibly rich program, so of course, it costs money, right? It's not cheap, but also, they deliver so much value that at the end of it, I was like, this was worth every penny. And what I love is they give a discount to my listeners, which is amazing because I talked to the founder and I talked to the CEO, and I talked to some managers there, and I asked them if they could please give a discount to the listeners of my show, and they do. So, if you do want to go forward and check it out, make sure you get the discount from the Learn True Health Podcast with Ashley James. Make sure you get the discount.

But what was great was that I signed up with a payment plan. I was like, okay, that eliminated my last barrier to entry for me, and I was able to jump in and do it because I had a toddler at the time, I was working full-time, go, go, go, go. I was so busy, and yet, I was able to afford it on a payment plan. I was able to do it about 20 minutes a day; I was able to fit it in. And I got so much out of it. Imagine how great the content is on my show and condense that into TED Talks like how great some TED Talks are. Every time I would sit down to learn, it would just be these amazing, amazing health lecturers that were so well thought out and so well-taught that I got so much information out of it. And I was really surprised at how much my life transformed, and then I was able to spill that over and help my friends and family and, of course, go on to help others.

About half the people that take the program don't ever intend to work with clients and be an actual health coach. They just want the tools for themselves and their family and their friends, or they just want those tools because that is for themselves alone, and then maybe it'll be a great addition to whatever they're doing in life. You learn to help people on so many levels. You learn how to communicate with people and really listen to people and help people on so many levels. It's incredibly rewarding.

So if you'd like to check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, you can get a free sample class by going to LearnTrueHealth.com/coach. That's LearnTrueHealth.com/coach. Check it out, and see if it's for you. If it's for you, you can give them a call, or I believe you just go to the IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition's website, and I think they have like an ability to chat with them there. But go ahead and just check it out for free, first of all. Just go get the sample class and see if it's for you, and just dive in and look at it. It was amazing for me.

Now, if you have more time on your hands, let's say about 40 minutes to an hour a day, you'd like to become a health coach sooner, they have a six months program. And recently, in the last year, they spent the year really working at this, and they have completely revamped their whole program. It's so exciting. It's just amazing. So if you geek out on health stuff just like I do and you're also into personal growth and development, this class is for you. And I love that people do it all around the world. You get this big sense of community because you actually participate with people around the world. There's nothing quite like it. I actually remember crying, just bawling my eyes out like good tears, good happy tears the entire first day I was taking the class because I felt like I had finally found my tribe, like I had finally found the people that would understand me. It was such a good feeling to be a part of that and part of that experience. And at one point, you actually get to do coaching calls with a group of people, and you can connect with people locally in your state or province or your territory or your area that are going through the program as well. So, you can make friends, and you feel like, wow, you're not the black sheep anymore, like there's a bunch of other people who are also just totally geeking out on health stuff and personal growth stuff and emotional healing stuff. It's just fascinating. So, check it out.

In this interview today, Dr. Mark Sherwood just reminded me so much of how much I got out of IIN, and so if you just love this interview, you'd probably also love their program. Make sure you go to LearnTrueHealth.com/coach, sign up for the free program and just see if you even like it. Even if you're not interested in signing up, you get a free sample class. Go get it. Maybe you'll get something out of it. Anyways, I know you're going to get something out of this episode, so enjoy today's interview. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Hey, if this interview or if any of my interviews were shared to you by one of my listeners, they really care about you, and that's saying something. Because we have to help each other, right? There's too many people sick out there.

Seventy percent of the adult population is on at least one prescription medication. We're walking around thinking that health is disease management. And that's not the case. Up is down, left is right; everything is backward in this world. Because true health is being symptom-free and off of drugs, true health is feeling amazing, jumping out of bed full of energy. True health is having longevity. And if you do get sick, you recover like that. You recover so fast. That's true health. I want you to have that, and you can have that. I've watched people heal from things that they were told by doctors they could never heal from including myself. And I want you to have that.

So, keep listening, and keep sharing the episodes with those you care about. Let's help our friends and family to learn true health and to experience true health. Enjoy today's episode!

[00:08:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 483.

I am so excited for today's guest! We have Dr. Mark Sherwood on the show. The website to go to is Sherwood.tv. And I just want to point out that he has a great free download. It's an e-book, it's about 27 pages. And it has some fantastic protocols in there and it also will show you what is possible, the healing that is possible for you.

Mark, I'm such a huge fan of the work that you and your wife do because your mission statement is right on par with my mission statement: to eliminate all unnecessary usage of medication, to eradicate all self-imposed choice-driven disease. The thing is, a lot of people are walking around not knowing that their choices have led to their disease. That's what happened to me in my 20's. I developed a lot of diseases, and then I, in my 30's, eradicated them all with my choices. But I was walking around like going with the flow, not being a salmon. I was a good hillstream. I was doing what everyone else was doing, and I developed a bunch of diseases. Then I had to turn around and be a salmon and go totally against the flow, and that's when I eradicated my diseases.

So, a lot of people don't know, and sometimes they might get offended like “I didn't give myself fibromyalgia,” or, “I didn't give myself MS. I didn't give myself autoimmune disease.” We're not saying that people consciously chose to give themselves that, but their choices have led to the state that they're in, and that also allows them to step into their power when they realize that they are now in control. And

Today, Dr. Sherwood is going to teach us that you are in control. All your MDs have been giving you drugs and telling you that you are going to have that disease for the rest of your life, and it's not true. You can heal, and your choices really do make a difference. Welcome to the show! It's so exciting to have you here today.

[00:10:20] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Ashley, thank you. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate what you do, I appreciate your show, and I appreciate the audience that you draw. I know people want to learn. So, I'm excited and it's going to be great.

[00:10:29] Ashley James: Absolutely. Can you start by sharing your story? What happened in your life that led you to become the doctor that you are today?

[00:10:39] Dr. Mark Sherwood: My story's quite unique, actually. During my childhood years, I was not brought up in a healthy environment at all. I didn't know anything about it. As a matter of fact, it was so unhealthy physically and emotionally that I went through a tragedy in my life, the early 2000s, unexplainable, but it was the suicide of my own mother. It was that traumatic. But during the trauma, I was determined to learn a few things on how not to do that in my own life. Even though I didn't learn it, it didn't really come to full fruition until probably the late '80s, when I found myself on the other side of the world in the country of Australia playing professional baseball. I had nothing to do during the day except sit around and wait for the games in the evening, but I decided to start exercising, and before I knew it, I realized there was something to this.

Then shortly thereafter, I joined the police department in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was put in charge of a wellness program. I'm speeding up the story, but you get the idea. And I didn't know what I knew now. I wondered why my colleagues were dying so quickly and I wanted to figure that out.

So, I started to really get into the idea of does stress really have to have this much effect on us and what effect does nutrition have in our lives? And how do those two relate? Do they relate? So, I went on that quest, if you will, Ashley, to determine the answers to those questions. Is our lifestyle creating this increase, this thing I call “sick span”? That led me down the pathway of naturopathic study. I was always a fan of that because it made sense. I thought, okay, if we can take care of ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually, what does that mean? Because I knew enough at the time that conventional medicines and allopathic medicine wasn't working. It was a measurable failure, and it has been for, what, 60 years now. We can look at that simply based upon evidence. We are now growing diseases much, much faster than we're growing people. We have seen disease processes like heart disease, type 2 diabetes and autoimmune conditions, as you were speaking of earlier, that have absolutely skyrocketed. So, when I look at the system, and I looked at the system then, I realized that doesn't work, and I wasn't going to continue to practice insanity. As Einstein said, to continue to go on the same pathway, do the same thing, expect a different result.

So, I went on a mission to find out what I could learn about the human body and its interaction with the environment we live in and other people and nutrition and medicine that's put inside food. I really wanted to understand why. Why? That “why” question was the thing that drove me, and it still does. And so, that kind of began the journey, and now, all these years later, we're still learning, we're asking why. But the most important thing to understand is we're seeing literally thousands of people around the world get well, and I can't be more grateful than that. I'm thankful to God that He gives us the wisdom, the knowledge, and the ability to do that. I'm so happy for people to get well. That's what drives us every day.

[00:14:17] Ashley James: What were your colleagues dying of when you were in the police force, and you started to notice that they were dropping like flies?

[00:14:24] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Well, this is an interesting statistic that's been around for probably five decades that a few people are aware. This is an FBI study: the average male police officer, it's 20 years of service, and this is back in I believe the '70s that was done, the average age of death was 66 years of age. Which is substantially lower than the expected age, right?

[00:14:48] Ashley James: Oh, my gosh.

[00:14:50] Dr. Mark Sherwood: So, in my own city, and this brings me back to the early 2000s, I did a study of the officers that had died, and I did the same analyses that the FBI did, just a smaller group. And I found that the average life expectancy for a 20-year retired male officer was 65. So, I thought to myself, something is wrong with this, but basically, because of shift work, you get a lot of cortisol, you get a lot of blood pressure issues, weight issues, metabolic disorders, blood sugar issues, depression, sleep issues. They were on all these medications, and eventually, they ended up dying of things like cancers or heart disease, so that was predominantly the two causes.

[00:15:36] Ashley James: Which are the two major causes of death in the United States.

[00:15:38] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right. So that led me, as you've picked up there, I looked at the major two causes of death in the US. I found that same thing, and I said, “Okay, well, this must be hitting everybody,” because I used to think that only police officers and the military had PTSD. Right? Then I realized, wait a minute, it's everybody that's had trauma and drama in their lives. All that put together in a big mesh bucket, if you will, was one of the things that I said, “You know what, I can do something about this.” I'm going to believe that if people knew the information, that they know how to do this, they know how to reverse, they're going to do it.

So, with this information quest, I learned as much as I could to communicate then in an effective manner this concept of hope. Now, we've kind of coined the phrase, if you will, my wife Michele and I, who I get to work with every day, we are hope dealers. A hope dealer. We give that away every day, and I pray that the listeners will, during the course of time, gather and grab on to that hope.

[00:16:50] Ashley James: So, MDs are “drug dealers”. [laughs]

[00:16:53] Dr. Mark Sherwood: They are. They really are.

[00:16:54] Ashley James: And Michele and Mark Sherwood are hope dealers.

[00:16:58] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right. And it's funny, my wife, and this is interesting; she came from the conventional system because she's an osteopath as well. So, interestingly enough, she had a drug rep actually call her a “drug whore”. That was the word. We still look back at that in shock and awe and horror, but also, we looked at it like, you know what, that's exactly what that is. And I want everybody to kind of get this. When you go to that conventional doctor, they are looking for what's wrong. “What's wrong?” There's something wrong with that question. When people come in here, they want to know what's wrong. I say, “Wait a minute. Let's turn this around. Let's first look at all the things that are right about you.” So, we don't let them go down that pathway; so, therefore, our diagnostics are not looking for diseases. They are going upstream to look for the root causes of symptoms that are named diseases or disease categories.

[00:18:07] Ashley James: Right. Well, MDs break the body down; allopathic medicine is breaking the body down into its parts and then treating it with a drug. So they're not seeing the body as a whole or finding the root cause. The problem is that philosophically, the lens that they look through is so different from a naturopathic standpoint. Right? The lens that they look through governs their choices — what tests they're going to run and how they're going to interpret those tests. If you took the same tests to an MD that you took to an ND, a naturopathic physician or a functional medicine practitioner, a holistic practitioner, the MD will say, “Oh, your vitamin D is at 35. Okay, we're good with that,” whereas “As long as it's below 30, I'm fine,” that's what the MD says. Or if it was above 60, they go, “Oh, you're toxic. You have to stop taking your vitamin D.” They don't have any training around nutrition. They don't have that training on how to prevent disease and how to reverse disease. Their training lies in pharmacology. They're wonderful diagnosticians; they're fantastic at diagnosing. And treating symptoms or making sure the body shifts into like with drugs, it pushes the body in one direction. Right? But they are not trained in reversing disease and supporting the body's ability to heal itself.

[00:19:45] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That is a very good statement. I agree with all of that. Additionally, we need to understand that all drugs, for the most part, have these are not side effects. These are actual effects. But they will pull out various vitamins and minerals and nutrients, and therefore, when you look at that, you say, okay, well, for example, let's use one drug – the drug metformin. It's always given to people for blood sugar issues to create more insulin sensitivity, in other words. So, somebody's hemoglobin A1c is running at 6 or 7 or whatever or 6.1, slightly over the “normal range,” and so they're going to go on metformin. Well, when you go on metformin, it may help with blood sugar, but it also pulls out vitamin B12 and also folate.

Now, vitamin B12 and folate are critical factors in the methylation cycle. So, if you pull those out of the methylation cycle, again, metformin is looked at as this anti-aging product but let's think about this from a holistic standpoint. If we pull out vitamin B12 and folate from the methylation cycle, we render the methylation cycle ineffective in creating methyl groups. Methyl groups are in charge of, in a nutshell, repairing DNA, maybe helping create neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, and also driving down the transsulfuration cycle, which is going to be creating glutathione. We would be in effect inhibiting glutathione production and neurotransmitter production that could be leading to toxicity issues, oxidative stress issues, or even depression issues.

[00:21:33] Ashley James: Cancer.

[00:21:34] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Cancer. That's right. Something has got to change in the paradigm over the course of time, or we're doomed to be stuck in that system. And that system is not going to create wellness because it's like a male going to a suit store. I'm going to buy a suit, I'm going to go over here, and the first thing we're going to do is try on a pair of pants. Well, then you're going to go over here from the pants department, they go to the jacket department, but the jacket department person is going to say, “I don't care what the pants department said. That's their department.” They're going to get a mismatch, right? And you get the idea it's going to go from the shirt to the tie to the shoes, and you're going to have just a mishmash of stuff that looks terrible.

That's what the body looks like when it goes through that system. It looks terrible. I could go on and on with examples such as that.

[00:22:24] Ashley James: It reminds me of a story I just heard about. I think it's one of my listeners who shared with me that her mom has kidney problems and heart problems. The doctor said, “You have to eat less meat,” and the kidney doctor said, “You have to eat more meat.”

So it's like okay, one diet is going to cause her kidneys to fail, but her heart will be better, and the other diet is going to cause her kidneys to be healthy but her heart, you know, so anyway, it's just back and forth. And so the doctors, she said, “Wait a second, you guys are giving me the opposite diets.”

Now, medical doctors are not trained in nutrition. They get something like 20 hours of nutrition unless they, after graduating medical school, go on to take further courses and actually dive into the studies, which we'd hope that doctors would continue to look at the latest science and studies around diet because it makes sense that everything we put in our mouth is either hurting us or healing us. So, there's the dilemma. Right? There is a lot of confusion around diet.

Now you mentioned heart disease and cancer being the two top killers of police officers after they retire but also, that's what the two major causes of disease are in the United States or the causes of death are. I recently had Dr. Richard Fleming on the show, episode 463. He's a research cardiologist. He's not a holistic doctor at all. He's 100 percent all about the drugs. What I love about his work is he dives into the research. For the last 30 years, he's been looking at the root cause of cardiovascular disease, and he also did studies on cancer and heart disease and found that really the root cause was inflammation. Years, years, years before cancer will appear on a scan, you can see the inflammation that's there beforehand, same with heart disease.

So, really what we're doing is we're looking to decrease, to mitigate all the things in our life that cause the inflammation. My question, because we could definitely talk about foods that harm and foods that help, we could definitely talk about herbs and supplements, but you mentioned the emotional aspect, and my question is, like sleep, the police who are on altered schedules, I'm sure there are lots of listeners who have to do the second or third shift so their sleep is disrupted or maybe they go to bed at 1 in the morning. Does sleep dysregulation and also emotional trauma, do those play a significant role in increasing inflammation in the body?

[00:25:16] Dr. Mark Sherwood: They do. Let me explain to people in a way they'll understand this concept. So, let's look at both of those. When you have trauma or drama or you perceive stress, now stress doesn't have to be real to create this response. You can have this perceived stress. Because you can think about something, it creates the same response as if you're going through it, so we all understand that. So, let's key into the hormone called cortisol, which comes in second after the short-acting adrenalin goes and does its things, and then cortisol is produced. So, cortisol, known as the stress hormone, is produced.

When we have these stressful occurrences, that's originating from the sympathetic nervous system arousal side as opposed to the parasympathetic nervous system arousal side, which is relaxation. So, this yin and yang, if you will, this rest-stress should be balanced, but when we're living perpetually in a cortisol-driven mode which can come through stress and emotional lack of resilience or non-resilience, we combine this with the lack of sleep. Now, lack of sleep, let's think about this whether you're shift work or just not sleeping, we have this opposite effect of melatonin and cortisol. So if you're not sleeping, melatonin should be up but it's not. Cortisol is up. So, cortisol is elevated when we don't sleep as well.

In both cases, cortisol being a glucocorticoid (kind of sounds like glucose), it will elevate glucose because the body can't digest food when you're under stress like that. Our genes have changed 2 percent. That's it, Ashley, in 10,000 years. Two percent. So, when the body is perceiving stress or going through stress and synthesizing cortisol from the adrenals, the body's going to interpret that as if it's being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, trying to eat. So, there are several things that happen in that. We see blood pressure going up, of course, muscle tension going up, perspiration going up, tightness going up, and we see digestion going down. This is a big deal right here because when we see that glucocorticoid coming up, it's going to create some sort of blood sugar because it has to drive the body because you can't get it from food digestion. You don't have time to stop and eat while a saber-toothed tiger is chasing you.

So, what happens is glucocorticoid comes up, blood sugar, the pancreas secretes the insulin to match it, and insulin becomes perpetually elevating, creating, fat-storing all the time. This constant stress creates a lot of fat, belly fat called cortisol belly. Too much fat tissue on the frame is a home for toxins. Too much fat tissue also creates this endocrine disruption creating more inflammation. And the beat goes on.

When you look at this whole metabolic process, this whole obesity crisis that we're having, you can drive at least in part back to this emotional lack of resilience and even lack of sufficient sleep, and of course, that leads us into this idea of comfort food eating which everybody can relate to that, eating the classic standard American diet which perpetuates the same thing. It kind of is a snowball, if you get my drift.

[00:28:46] Ashley James: I remember that snowball so well. I remember I was working towards my black belt, and I was going to the dojo four days a week, sometimes five days a week. Sometimes I'd do it on the weekends also. We do clinics, like all-day Saturday kind of thing. I just remember I was working like crazy. So, I was raised in a household to eat the way a naturopath told us to eat. I was super healthy until I rebelled as a teenager.

But while I was studying and I was 19, I was studying karate, I started eating like all the black belts because I wanted to mimic them, I wanted to model them. We'd all go to Subway. And this was my first time eating wheat and cheese before I had seen a naturopath when I was five years old. Also, I'm eating white bread or I think they did whole bread, whole wheat, but whatever the difference is isn't really that great. It's processed bread, cheese, processed meat, and maybe some lettuce and some tomatoes. I remember, for the first time in my life, having heartburn. But I was just planning on eating exactly like how my Sensei and Shihan and all the black belts and brown belts were eating because I just wanted to model them and be excellent.

And I just started to pack on the pounds. I gained about 50 pounds a year very quickly, and I was exercising like mad, and I thought, what is going on here? My mom passed away of cancer two years later, so I didn't really sit down to think this through like my diet had caused this. I was just in go, go, go mode. But it got worse and worse. I developed chronic adrenal fatigue, type 2 diabetes, and chronic monthly infections for which I was on antibiotics for. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility. I was told after a battery of tests by an endocrinologist that I'd never have children.

I then spent years just eating takeout and whatever, totally forgetting that I had all this wonderful health because in my early years, I ate just like our naturopath told us to. Until 2008 when I watched with my husband, it was one of the first streaming movies on Netflix in 2008, they just started streaming and watched Forks Over Knives and all those health ones. What stuck for me was: shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic. In our first month of doing that, my chronic infections went away. And I still was miserable, I still felt horrible in my body, but at least I was off of antibiotics. So, I just kept searching and searching and searching, and that's when I found naturopaths that became my mentors; and switching my diet, taking the right supplements, changing my mindset, all of that. I eradicated all those diseases and conceived naturally.

For me, that's why I started the show. I started the show because everyone who's suffering doesn't need to be suffering. Seventy percent of the US adult population is on at least one prescription medication. They've been told they have to be on it, but the thing is, most prescriptions, we don't have to be on it. We can get so healthy, that we don't need it. That's why I love the work that you do because you want to show people that they can get so healthy and absolutely it's possible to get so health that they no longer need drugs.

Now, you brought up metformin. And I want to point out that one of my friends who often comes to me for help, she was in and out of the hospital. She lived in a hospital more. This was about two years ago. She spent more time in a hospital than she did out for acute pancreatitis. She lost 80 pounds, she was on a liquid diet, and she was in such bad shape from pancreatitis. I didn't think she was on any meds; I didn't know. Then I said, “Hey, just tell me. What are you taking? Are you taking anything? Let's figure this out. Why do you have pancreatitis?” That's when she told me she was on metformin. I'm like, “Why are you on metformin?” She doesn't have diabetes. What's going on here? And her doctor did that thing, “Oh, it's good for longevity. It'll prevent it later on.” Oh, my gosh.

This is what I say to all my clients: go to the actual drug's website. Go to the website that manufactures that drug and go to the full list of side effects. Not the little WebMD like here's the common ones. Go to the one that shows you the entire list of side effects. Again, they're not side effects; they're effects that you may or may not get. Then, read through them. And sure enough, acute pancreatitis was one of the causes.

But here's what surprised me. Do you know that a side effect of metformin can be hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia? The very reason why they gave it to you, it actually can cause those problems, which blows my mind. And it changes all those pathways in the body, it depletes us of all the nutrition, making us more sick so then we need to be on more drugs. So, I just have a very big distrust.

Now, drugs have their place when they can save my life, and I want people to always use the best tool in the toolbox. I'm not crazy. If there's a tool that's going to save my life, I'm going to use it. The problem is, MDs are only taught to use hammers so everything looks like a nail.

[00:34:56] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right.

[00:34:57] Ashley James: We have to make sure that we hire a whole team of professionals to support us, so that's why I love the work you do. I would hire you, I would hire a chiropractor, and I would hire an acupuncturist. I'd hire a whole team. And then all of them would inform me on what choices I should make for my body instead of just going to an MD. Going to an MD to tell me what to eat is like asking my plumber to the wiring in my house.

[00:35:30] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's awesome. I love that.

[00:35:32] Ashley James: You could keep that one. So, your wife is an osteopath. I'd love to hear a bit about her journey through seeing holistic medicine through the lens that you see it through. When I went to an osteopath for the first time, I think maybe an ovarian cyst was popping or something, I don't know. But I had excruciating pain and I was worried something was wrong with me, like maybe I was having ectopic pregnancy or something. I went to an osteopath, and he stood there, holding his prescription pad, ready to prescribe me a pain med.

Now, I'm from Canada. I live in the States now, but I'm from Canada. In Canada, they don't give out pain meds like candy. I realized they didn't when I was growing up. So, he was like, “Okay, so we're going to give you a pain med.” I'm like, “I'm not here for a pain med. I'm in pain, but pain tells me that there's something wrong. I don't want to just numb it.” I was really surprised. I thought going to an osteopath would have been more holistic. But he was just ready to write me a prescription and make me comfortable.

Your wife is an osteopath. What happened that had her see the holistic medicine versus allopathic medicine in terms of how she can help her patients?

[00:36:51] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Her story is quite unique. She was homeless, believe it or not, at one time, and working as a massage therapist trying to get by. Her story, by the way, is depicted in a just-released movie, believe it or not, called The Prayer List. So, I encourage people to go there. I didn't think about that before we went live, but that's a cool movie. It's called The Prayer List. A wonderful story.

During that time, she had a massage client say, “You got more to your life. Come on. Not that massage is bad,” but she paid for her first year of school. My wife had this healing in her mind in the background and thought, “I'm going to go back and be a doctor and really heal people.” So, she graduates with honors, it turns out she's the valedictorian in her class. Just a wonderful comeback story. She was in martial arts too, by the way. But she got into the system. This was back in the early 2000s. She had been in the system for a couple of years. And she began to show her patients how to cook, how to eat and all that stuff, and then she was chastised by her fellow clinicians and even her bosses about how that's not how we do it here. She still persisted not because she was rebelling at them, but she just knew it was right.

What turns out after being in the system for about three years, she was fired. She was let go because she wasn't contributing adequately to the payer mix. People didn't need to see her as much because she had that kind of a healing mindset going in, and so they fired her. She couldn't find a job anywhere for like six months. It really put her in a tailspin and then, hence, the birth of the Functional Medical Institute. So, she went into that kind of backwards.

And it's been interesting because some of her colleagues that she went to school with come to see us as patients.

[00:38:55] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[00:38:57] Dr. Mark Sherwood: The irony of it all.

[00:39:04] Ashley James: How did you two meet? She had her own path leading to holistic medicine, as did you. How did the two of you come together to work together?

[00:39:14] Dr. Mark Sherwood: When she started, she got into medicine basically because of those reasons I stated. But she had really bad experiences with men, quite frankly, like a lot of women have. She was abused and treated badly. The whole story is in the movie. And basically, swore off men because men hadn't treated her well at all.

With that said, I had come through a very horrific divorce where I became the sole custodian for my two-, four- and six-year-old child, respectively. Basically, I swore off women, and I'm not going back to that anymore. So, about 10 years go by where I'm just kind of like doing my thing and she's doing her thing. Then one day, we met, and it was the very first meeting we met, and I saw something in her. Actually, it was just unique and there was a draw there. There were people around, and I said to her, “Dr. Neil,” that's her maiden name, “Dr. Neil, I appreciate the conversation with you. Definitely enjoyed it,” and I stuck out my hand to shake her hand because chivalry is not dead in my world.

And so, when I shook her hand, and it truly happened, I couldn't let go of her hand. It was the oddest thing in the world. Couldn't let go of her hand, and she couldn't let go of mine. It was this really awkward few moments there, and it was so awkward that other people were looking at us, and we were looking at each other, and we're like, I don't know what's going on but for some reason, my hand is glued to your hand. So, I just heard this voice inside me say, “Mark, would you please have some courage for once in your life, dude? Seriously? Ask her out.”

So, I did. I asked her if she would go to dinner with me and she said yes, and so we exchanged numbers, and we really, since that first dinner, have not been apart since. It was truly love at first sight. Since then, it was like that equally yoked, that common theme, that healer mentality, that healer gift that we all have. It just multiplied, and we just feed off of each other. We encourage one another and she's my best friend. And I call her my queen. We have this interaction. We work together in the clinic, and people love that. I will show public display of affection. I will give her a hug and a kiss right in the middle of the work day multiple times. It is interesting because we can't imagine not working together. It's been kind of cool because people come here, and they come here because we're a couple. Right? It's inspiring to them because today, obviously, there's a lot of horrible relationships that people are in and decisions they made that have affected their lives, much like the few moments ago we were talking about the stress, trauma and drama. Well, many times that comes from a relationship, doesn't it?

We give them a sense of hope in that area, too. And every time I'm speaking, literally whether it'd be in front of 5000 people live or a podcast that's audio-only to millions of people around the world, I'm always going to one, thank God for the opportunity to be here, and number two, honor my wife because she is my backbone. I say she's not my spare rib; she's my prime rib. So, that's kind of how we've met. The long story short.

[00:43:02] Ashley James: I love it. That's beautiful. It makes a difference in the work that you do. You both bring your backgrounds to the medicine that you practice. So, let's dive in now that we have an understanding of the philosophy, the lens in which you see our body, our human body, that our spiritual or emotional health and our lifestyle, like when we go to bed really does play a role in our health along with what we eat. Let's talk about how we can eliminate the usage of unnecessary medication and how we can eradicate all self-imposed choice-driven diseases.

[00:43:50] Dr. Mark Sherwood: As you mentioned earlier, the main issue that we see within heart disease and really all other disease conditions is this thing called inflammation, and it's chronic systemic inflammation.

If people can grasp just one concept I'm going to share right now, it will absolutely set you free. Because the immune system is unique, the immune system is one that's like surveillance. It's like the army, navy, air force, marine, coast guards, and space force all combined, magnified. So, it has internal surveillance and external surveillance. It's always looking for something that might be an intruder. We all understand the inducement of the immune system being from the idea of parasites, bacteria, and certainly, in today's world, virus. We understand that. The immune system will respond. And the immune system when it responds like that, it will send out signals or another word for that is cytokines. And some of the cytokines are inflammatory cytokines. So, that's how we get this idea of inflammation. We also know that when we have an injury or something like that, like a cut or a bruise or a broken bone, we get inflammation.

But the greatest inducer of the immune system that creates the most inflammation is the standard American diet because it's got chemicals, it's got genetic modification and all kinds of pollutants in it that the body looks at as foreign. So, just the very intake of a burger and fries is something that the body looks at as like “holy crap, I haven't seen that before. What is that?” That's sending a shockwave to the system, and it's not food. It's an enemy invader. So therefore, we have this chronic bombardment of this inflammatory-driving system that contributes to all these diseases we see.

In our clinic, when we get people off of that, we bring back just the concept of real food. If God packs it like this, it's probably how you eat it. And we don't give people dietary restrictions. We don't even tell them to count calories. We just say if it's on this list of anti-inflammatory foods that we generally believe, then eat it as much as you want. If it's on this list of inflammatory foods, don't eat it, any of it. And guess what? One hundred percent of the people get better. They're like, “Well, that was easy.” Yeah, it's not that hard. So, that's kind of our philosophy in practice, and that's the very first place we go.

[00:46:24] Ashley James: Can you give us homework to help decrease inflammation? Let's dive into the actionable steps we can take.

[00:46:33] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Let's first of all look at a list, and I hope everybody gets their pen and paper out or your phone and just begin to take this down. What are some known inflammatory foods? Well, some of these are going to be really obvious, and some of them not so obvious, and I'll explain why.

The obvious ones are going to be like processed foods, fried foods, artificial sweeteners, sugars, and MSG. We know those things are going to be inflammatory. We would include sodas in there. But let's look at corn, soy, and grains.

[00:47:11] Ashley James: What about non-GMO organic corn or soy grown in our own backyard? Is that going to also be inflammatory no matter what? Or like a store-bought, not organic, non-GMO? Is there a difference? Or should we avoid soy and corn no matter what?

[00:47:35] Dr. Mark Sherwood: There is a difference. And in your case with a non-GMO soy and a non-GMO organic corn, those will be just fine and beneficial because they're in their natural state. What makes corn, soy, and grain so damaging is really multiple things inclusive of the following: the genetic modification is one of them, specifically in the wheat crop, the grains. They've been genetically modified to avoid the effects of the herbicide Roundup. Roundup is sprayed on the soy, the corn, and the grains. And those are subsidized by the US government. So, you got to think about this from that standpoint. If the government tells you to do something in regard to your health, you probably need to do the opposite.

So, with the genetic modification, we have problem number one that's glaring. When these grains specifically come into our body, even though they're going to be genetically modified at a small percentage, the genes again haven't changed but 2% in 10,000 years, so it's still looking at this newfound genetically-modified seed grain crop different. So, it looks at as a foreigner, so therefore we get that immune system inducement, and that's why so many people have so much problem with grains creating this idea of leaky gut or hyperpermeability of the gut, leading to autoimmunity.

We also see when those genetically modified grains are digested, they become exorphins, which turn around and bind to the opioid receptors in our brain, creating a chemical addiction. This is why people have a hard time giving up the bread and the grains because we're talking about real, live, genuine addiction. That's problem number one.

[00:49:30] Ashley James: Same with dairy.

[00:49:32] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right. Dairy.

[00:49:33] Ashley James: There's sugars in dairy that also trigger that same opioid response, the dopamine. Mammal milk is meant for the baby. And the baby, we got to trick the brain into wanting to keep eating, so it grows, so a baby's brain is hooked on its mother's breast milk for a very good reason. God is smart.

[00:50:01] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah. It creates comfort and peace, and that's when a baby can be crying until the baby latches on to that nipple and it's like, “Oh!” That makes them happy. It's not just the milk. It's the chemistry within the process.

That's why it's interesting. They were saying that milk does the body good. No, it doesn't. Don't drink it. Period. You got a double whammy there with milk because the cows in the confined animal feeding operations are fed these corn, soy, and wheat products to get fat fast, the antibiotics and the hormones, so we're selling them by weight, not by health. Therefore, when they put out that milk, I mean, that's fat, so this stuff is carried in the fat, and toxins are stored in the fat, so you have this milieu of just a mess that's subsidized. Again, the government subsidizes dairy. But all that is problem sort of number one.

Problem number two is you got Roundup. I mean, in itself, think about the concept of glyphosate and atrazine, a known carcinogen, known estrogenic compound. Why are people getting so fat so fast? Why are we seeing the feminization of our world in front of us? It's because of these compounds, the chemicals binding to the estrogen receptors creating the same mimicking effect of estrogen. So, we see this troubling trend across our country in the United States specifically, but it's lending itself across the world as well. So, these things are as bad as I just described, as inflammatory as I just described, and even much, much more.

When we talk about this with other people, we're just saying stay away from it. I know what you heard. You can take this argument over here to an allopathic side and the majority of them are going to say, “Oh, that's nonsense.” But it is true. Everything I just said is true, and folks, you can look it up out there, and there's all kinds of studies on that that you can see and the way it works. It's out there. It's not hidden from you. Just search it out and see that it's actually accurate.

[00:52:15] Ashley James: I just read a recent study. Really fascinating. I'm not an advocate for Frankenfoods, for highly processed foods. But this one study took two groups of people, and one group of people, they just said keep eating meat at every meal like just keep eating what you normally eat, get your burgers and your fries and whatever you do. Then the other group, they said keep eating what you eat, keep eating the standard American diet, but you're going to replace five meals a week. And five meals a week is nothing, right? And five meals a week with some non-meat Frankenfood like beyond burger or whatever impossible burger.

Then, they took their stool samples for a month. I don't know, maybe it was six weeks. I think it was six weeks, but it was a short study. So yeah, it was six weeks. They looked at the microbiome and what they found is that eating the Frankenfoods, because there's fiber, even though they're not healthy at all, they have canola oil and all kinds of GMOs and stuff, they're not healthy foods. But what's interesting is that by switching out some meat with something that had fiber, now these people weren't eating the way you and I eat. They weren't eating fresh fruits and vegetables. They weren't getting proper fiber from whole food sources, to begin with. But just adding in something that wasn't meat and instead had fiber in it increased the butyrate that was made, which helps to digest and absorb. It also has other functions in terms of lowering heart disease.

So, I thought that was incredible like just kind of blew my mind. I thought, well, okay, we're not taking blood because I want to see like maybe eating these Frankenmeats is going to increase inflammation because now they're getting more canola oil. But they were told to just keep eating the standard American diet, just replace some meat with something that has fiber in it, the Frankenmeats.

So, I thought that was really interesting. I'm a big advocate of telling everyone to get fiber up to 40-50 grams a day from whole food sources for a variety of reasons. Yeah, the first few weeks maybe you're going to fart more. Your microbiome is going to catch up and get used to it. But oh my gosh, the difference it makes. The difference. It's such a huge, huge difference. Then just to see that that study shows that even just replacing meat with something that has fiber in it for a few meals a week was noticeable in the microbiome within six weeks.

It kind of gets exciting that you can make a health change, something small like a baby step. Some people choose to eat vegetarian dinners, or they choose to eat more plants until 6:00 PM, and then their dinner has meat in it or something. So, I personally have found, because I have done over 30 diets to try to find what works for my body, and I believe, I've come to the conclusion that diet is a moving target because your body's needs change as we age under different circumstances and stress levels. So, you got to listen to your body, right? And also, my body really resonates with the most whole food plant-based possible. The more whole food and plant-based, the less processed food I eat, the more health my body gains. But I don't believe in diet dogma, and I don't tell everyone to eat the same way.

But I do want you to share what you've seen promotes the most health and makes the biggest difference. If everyone followed what you said, like avoid these foods and instead eat these foods for the next six weeks, you're going to see a big shift. So, can you give us sort of what is the biggest bang for our buck in terms of changing? So you've already said cut out, obviously GMO foods, obviously non-organic GMO foods, all the processed foods, the fried foods, the processed meats, the sugar, and the corn and soy. What else has a really big impact in terms of cutting out of the diet?

[00:56:55] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Well, I think you nailed them a moment ago. You bring in more plants with more fiber. It's interestingly enough, the idea of gut health, digestion, and assimilation is very key, and the short-chain fatty acid butyrate that is increased with good fiber intake is going to help heal the leaky gut, and it works to bring about more repair to the tight junctions that get spread apart with the increase of that protein zonulin.

All that said, people can expect, and we tracked that for a long time and we've got thousands of people in our database, this is what we've seen in only 30 days, and we measure what's called body fat percentage. We're trying to get ladies down somewhere in the low 20's more or less percent body fat. Men, I want them below 15, or 15 or somewhere less than that. We see in one month, the percent body fat dropped 2 to 4 percent with ladies. We've seen this consistently. The percent body fat went down 3 to 5 percent in one month with men. We've watched this occur over and over and over again.

Really, it's about our body composition adjustment. We know people have a hard time for 4-5 days if they have heavy addiction to this sugar-grain thing. But once they get past that 4-5 days, their energy level goes up higher, their sleep gets more effective and functional, the clothes fit differently, and the confidence goes through the roof. And that correlates well with the reduction of stress because we now have confidence which is a precursor for resilience, which is required to deal with stress.

[00:58:53] Ashley James: Now, to be clear, you are not promoting a vegan diet. I looked on your website. I saw that one of your smoothies had beef protein powder in it. So, what way of eating are you promoting that gets these great results?

[00:59:14] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah, we are not promoting a vegan diet. As a matter of fact, vegan diets typically lead to deficiencies in omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin B12, many times even iron as well. To that end, we promote more of the quasi-Mediterranean diet, I would say without breads and grains. If you keep that parameter there, a lot of plants, a lot of fruits and vegetables of course. I want to stay away from the white potato more or less, the majority of the time, especially if you have had blood sugar issues and you have metabolic issues. And the white potato is the most polluted vegetable consumed in the United States today. We consume more of that.

Then, you think about nuts and seeds. We want to get nuts and seeds that are not cut or raw, not rolled and roasted in a lot of hot oils. That's not healthy.

With proteins, I want to pick organic grass-fed, wild-caught, and free-range. Those kinds of things like that. Grass-fed is a cool double-term there to think about. But as long as you do that, you're going to have good results. Even further, if you say, “Well, I'm going to have a hard time doing that just off the bat, I'm going to have a hard time flipping that light switch on,” okay, well, do one meal a day that's right. One meal a day under these guidelines and you will feel better, much like you cited in the study that just adds a little bit of fiber to a meat diet. One meal a day can change the microbiome. And we know that mood can change because the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced primarily in the gut, so people feel better, they're more calm, and they're more confident.

You say it like this. Small victories and small successes lead to more successes and more victories. If we just take these steps one at a time and just commit to doing one baby step every day to benefit us physically, emotionally, spiritually, just one thing, it's going to lead to two things. It's going to lead to a lifetime of those things that are perpetual and habitual, and we will have a higher quality of life with the concept of wellness not being just a pipedream but being realized.

[01:01:43] Ashley James: For someone who doesn't want to eat meat, can they eat beans, legumes, and then supplement? Like you said, they might end up with a deficiency. And there are meat eaters that have B12 deficiency, too. So, saying that a vegan diet leads to that, I know plenty of meat eaters that are incredibly deficient in their B12 but also in their intrinsic factor, which leads to B12 and iron deficiency. It all starts with the gut, right? We have to heal the gut. They could supplement with omega 3 to fill in the gap there. I do though say if you're going to eat any bean or lentil to cook it in the Instant Pot because under pressure, it breaks down the lectins. And then you don't fart as much. So, it's easier to cook it in the Instant Pot and just walk away from it. So, there's that.

Do you have any superfoods that are just like if you add this, people are going to get sort of for brownie points, some extra points there? Do you have any super, super, superfoods? Let's say someone is walking around totally feeling inflamed. I've done it. Like once in a blue moon, I'm going to go out, and I think maybe five times in the last 11 years I've been gluten-free, I've had a slice of cake at a party or something and a glass of wine. I drink once a year. I go somewhere, a birthday somewhere, and that happens. Then the next day, I'm walking around feeling a little poopy, a little inflamed. And I own it. I'm like, okay, I'm going to get back on my eating healthy. I'll go to something like quercetin, turmeric, resveratrol, a big green smoothie, something that I know is going to kick that inflammation in the butt. What do you have that kicks inflammation in the butt?

[01:03:45] Dr. Mark Sherwood: I really like the broccoli. If you can take in broccoli. And this is why – because broccoli, and even broccoli sprouts if you can take in broccoli sprouts, that would be number one of those two because a sprout has 100 times more density of nutrients than a full-grown plant. What happens is when that broccoli sprout comes — and this is why I like it because it does so many things — there are two compartments in the broccoli. One has something called glucoraphanin. The other has an enzyme called myrosinase. When you choose this or digest this, these two compartments bust apart, combine together, and we get this wonderful compound called sulforaphane that is yielded inside the body. Sulforaphane upregulates the nerve II pathway genetically, which will increase the antioxidant enzymes and your detox enzymes. You're talking about a triple whammy in the ability to conquer this chronic systemic inflammation caused by the toxicity that is driven by the standard American diet. So, think yielding sulforaphane, and to get that, broccoli sprouts or broccoli.

[01:05:03] Ashley James: I love it. Now, cooked broccoli has the same effect, or does it have to be raw?

[01:05:08] Dr. Mark Sherwood: The more you cook things, the more the degradation occurs with anything. Obviously, if you can find some sprouts. Like raw broccoli can give some people gas.

[01:05:22] Ashley James: Yeah, I just live with it. I know. I love broccoli. I just have to be careful. If I'm going to go and do a meeting with someone, I'm not eating broccoli before that meeting.

[01:05:35] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Oh yeah, you don't want to do that because you're going to have awful gas pains and you let it out, it's probably going to smell bad. That's not cool. But honestly, if you can find a way to grow some broccoli sprouts, those aren't bad at all, and you can put those things on salads. And I haven't seen them cause that gas nearly as much as a full-grown stalk. It's really interesting.

So yes, on the one hand, you want to cook less. But I get it. I'd rather somebody eat/cook broccoli than none/no broccoli.

[01:06:09] Ashley James: I have this health book and I got to find it somewhere. We just moved, so my books are unpacked yet. But it's from, I don't know, the '50s or something. It's this old health book and it's all about juicing for wellness, like way back before its time. It has a whole section on sprouting and how whenever you sprout, either you can sprout lentils, you can sprout beans like mung beans, not all beans, and then seeds. I've been really into sprouting seeds lately. I'll post a picture of last night's dinner. It was brown rice cake, that's my little guilty pleasure. The Ashley in her 20s would not think that that was some little cheap food. But my brown rice cakes with avocado and piles and piles of sprouts on top, it's really delicious. To me, avocado mixed with sprouts is so good. I get like a dopamine high from eating it. It's so delicious.

Sprouting is actually really easy. Go on YouTube, and look it up. Different types of seeds or beans or different types call for sort of different times, but I found it really, really easy. In the Learn True Health Facebook group I'll make sure I'll post how I do it, so listeners that want to try it can do it for themselves. It's so great because even in the winter you can have fresh food. I had a guy on the show recently, Tim James, who said 70 percent of the food he eats, he grows in his house because he sprouts like no one's business. He has a whole wall of sprouts and he mostly eats that. That's how he cured a lot of diseases he had and his friend cured his cancer with it. He's a big proponent of eating live food. But just having sprouts in your house, it's so easy. You don't need sunlight. You just need a dark cupboard. I put it in the oven. You just got to remember it's in the oven and not start the oven.

[01:08:22] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right.

[01:08:23] Ashley James: That was a kitchen fire a year and a half ago. My husband and I now understand to always check the oven before we turn it on.

One thing I wanted to bring up. You talked about MSG, and I think it's really important that we not gloss over that. Because just last night, my friends told me about this video, Dr. Katherine Reid. It was a TEDx Talk, “Unblind Your Mind.” It's a great video. I highly recommend everyone listen to it. She shows clips of her autistic daughter, who is in her own world. In the first video, in her own world and not making eye contact. Then they chose to go gluten-free and do a green smoothie every morning. They saw neurological changes. They also went casein-free, so all dairy. All dairy, all gluten. And do a green smoothie. So now we've upped the fiber, gotten a bit better gut health, and now she's able to make eye contact but she's having two-hour meltdowns where she's stuck in a yes-no loop.

I saw when my kid was younger, he did yes-no loops a little bit and we would give him chamomilla homeopathic and it would take him out of it. But I noticed that. Then, she was stuck in these loops. That's when she figured out. Dr. Reid figured out the problem was MSG and that the glutamate is so excessive in our processed food diet that then she went through and made her child's diet 100 percent processed food free in order to eliminate MSG. There are 40 different words for MSG. When you read the packaging, it can say soy protein, but that actually means MSG. There are all these different words for it, right? We might look at a package and think it's clean, but there's actually monosodium glutamate in it. The problem is glutamate is good for us, but the problem is too much, right? So, she eliminated that.

Then the last video, my jaw was on the floor, is of a healthy, happy child making eye contact, speaking clearly and calmly, and having a wonderful discussion about her kindergarten class. She was kicked out of her special needs class and put into a regular class. Her daughter is no longer on the spectrum. Her daughter was diagnosed on the spectrum, moderate autism, and now she has zero autism. And it was 100 percent done with diet.

[01:10:58] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Wow!

[01:11:00] Ashley James: And it was all about the doctor figuring out that eating wheat, barley and rye, and in my opinion, oats as well because oats contain gliadin which is similar enough to gluten. It's kind of a lie when they say gluten-free oats. I'm like, yes, but it has gliadin in it, so don't eat it. By avoiding those grains, we are reducing glutamate. By taking out processed food, we're reducing glutamate. And that affects the brain. It also affects the gut.

So, that is this sort of huge wake-up. I've never heard of this — this standpoint because I've been dairy and gluten-free for so long. But a lot of people see a benefit because they've reduced the free glutamate.

[01:11:48] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That is so right. You think about glutamate being a neuroexcitatory hormone. So we're talking about affecting brain health. You think about an inflamed brain where you think of excess glutamate. So, think brain inflammation. If you don't feel good in the brain, you're not going to make good decisions.

Again, as we've talked about at the top of our conversation, everything is connected. It's not segregated. It's connected. And because of that, just like you said correctly, we have to think about all these different effects it has all around our body. And they are significant, to say the least.

[01:12:28] Ashley James: Amazing. This has been so much fun having you on the show. I absolutely would love to have you back to dive in deeper. I feel like this has been an introduction to the work you do, and I'd really love to get specific, especially specific on how to lower high blood pressure. A lot of patients are like, “Okay, I get it. I don't want to be on meds, but my blood pressure is 160/110, and I'm taking medication. So yeah, what do I do?”

I'd love to have you on the show again. We can discuss how to lower high blood pressure. Think about the most commonly prescribed drugs that we can heal the body by doing these changes like doing these lifestyle and diet changes, to the point where the body is so healthy, it doesn't need the drugs anymore. I'd really love to have you back on the show and dive into the most common drugs that you get your patients off of because you get them so healthy, that they no longer are a candidate for them.

[01:13:33] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah, I would love to come back. Let's do that and talk about high blood pressure. We can talk about osteoporosis, that kind of stuff as well. That's huge. Certainly, we can talk about autoimmunity and reducing the ability to depend on those immunosuppressants. There's all kinds of things, etc. etc. that we can talk about.

[01:13:51] Ashley James: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, so let's come up with a list of the most common drugs that you get people off of. And let's go down that list and talk about the protocols. Wonderful. All listeners can go to Sherwood.tv of course. It links to Dr. Mark Sherwood and everything that he does and his wonderful wife does, Michele. It's going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at Learntruehealth.com. When you go to Sherwood.tv, go to the free download e-book. Didn't you say it was like 27 pages or something? But it gives you some great protocols to start today. I love that your mission is to continue to spread this information. I also want to let listeners know you do have some great books. We didn't even get to talk about them today. We can definitely dive into that next time. I'd love to know maybe some tips from each of your books Quest for Wellness, Fork Your Diet, Surviving The Garden of Eatin‘. That's cute. I love it. Then, of course, watch the movie, the newly released movie, The Prayer List, which sounds fantastic.

Mark, can you give us some homework to do between now and the next time we have you on the show?

[01:15:02] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah. I want people to make a list of what I'm going to give you right now, and I want you to do these couple of things. It's not going to be much, but again, let's celebrate small victories.

I want people to work on having at least a 15-minute walk every day. That's number one. Okay? Number two, I want people to work on 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night. That's very important. I want people to work on having a salad once a day. Just one salad once a day. That's beautiful. Number four, I would like to challenge people to come up with a two or three-sentence positive affirmation that they speak out loud over their life twice a day. For example, it can be “I am a loving being. I am worthy. I am successful.” There you go. There's three things right there. Say that out loud twice a day, every day.

Do those couple of things that I just named off. Do them between now and the next time we talk and watch your life change. Watch how those small little things lead to bigger changes. No matter where you are in your health journey whether you're just getting going on, whether you've just been into this, look, we all have improvement. So, you can take those things right there and you can improve them based on where you are. But I've given you a little bit of homework that you can do every day. It doesn't take much time. You're talking just a little bit of time and thought. We get 1,440 minutes a day. Why can't we spend a little bit of time on self-development so we can make the world a better place?

[01:16:52] Ashley James: Beautiful. We're starting with ourselves, and then we expand out to our friends, our family, our neighborhood or community, our county, our state or province, our country, and the world. We have to think of all of our choices in that ecological way because if our choice is harming ourselves, it's trickling down, and it's harming our children.

I always pick on McDonald's. They're such an easy target. Going to a fast food restaurant in the moment, it's easy because “I'm tired. I'm hungry. My kids are hungry. I'm just going to go through the drive-thru.” That easy choice, right? We have to choose our hearts. We have to just choose our heart. Maybe our heart is getting that salad and doing it. But once we do it, it's going to fill you with so much energy that then you're going to want to do it again and again. But choosing out your heart, the good choices are trickling down to those you love. And the bad choices are also trickling down to those you love.

We have to remember that, especially as women, because we like to put our kids first and put everyone first and then we're left just hungry and tired and just doing takeout. I've been there. Just trust me, I get it. And ultimately, harming ourselves harms those we love. You don't want to imagine a world where you're not here anymore and your children don't have you or your spouse doesn't have you or your family and friends don't have you because we kept putting ourselves last.

So, I love these little things. A 15-minute walk and 8 hours of sleep. Also, it matters when you go to bed. I just want to point out that if you go to bed at 1:00 in the morning versus 10:00 at night. So at 10:30 at night, we get a cortisol spike and that makes it hard to stay in a deep sleep all night long. It'll actually affect the depth of our sleep and when we wake up. Maybe you notice this with your children. If you let them stay up late, they'll actually wake up early in the morning. You're like, “Why didn't you sleep in?” But same with us. We'll have a lighter, restless sleep. You got to make sure you fall asleep by 10 so that you don't have that second wind, and you don't have that cortisol spike. Then, you have a deeper and most restful sleep. You wake up 7 to 8 hours later feeling way more rested. So yeah, I love that.

Then you want us to eat one salad a day filled with lots of wonderful vegetables and hopefully some broccoli sprouts. And then using that positive affirmation is beautiful.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to have you back. This has been wonderful.

[01:19:33] Dr. Mark Sherwood: I can't wait to come back here. It's an honor to be here with you today. And I look forward to it, I truly do.

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Books by Dr. Mark Sherwood

The Quest For Wellness

Fork Your Diet

Surviving the Garden of Eatin’