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Myths and Facts About Coronavirus
https://www.learntruehealth.com/myths-facts-covid-19-stephen-cabral
Highlights:
- Myths and facts about the Covid-19
- Foundation vitamins and supplements to take
- What type of meals to eat
- Benefits of monolaurin
- Importance of a healthy gut biome
- Power of sauna therapy and heat therapy
As Covid-19 affects most countries around the world with increasing infections, countless myths and theories have come out about Covid-19. Dr. Stephen Cabral is back on the show with us and he debunks some myths about the Covid-19 coronavirus. He talks about the facts surrounding the Covid-19, and he also gives us some tips on what foods to eat and what supplements to take to have a higher chance of fighting off Covid-19.
Intro:
Hello true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This one is amazing. I’ve been so excited to get this out there for you. Dr. Stephen Cabral answers all of the listeners’ questions on the Covid-19 virus and what we can do to support our body’s ability to stay as healthy as possible. I think you’re going to love today’s interview.
Now, I want to let you know that Dr. Stephen Cabral gives the listeners a discount on his website. He did this when he came back on the show the first time. You can listen to my two previous interviews with Dr. Stephen Cabral by going to episode 271 and 301. You can find them on your favorite podcast directory, or you can go to learntruehealth.com.
Dr. Stephen Cabral’s website is equilibriumnutrition.com/lth. If you put the /lth that gives you a special website, and then you use the coupon code LTH10 for a 10% off for the listeners. Go to equilibriumnutrition.com/lth, and use the coupon code LTH10. That information will also be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.
Dr. Stephen Cabral also talks about the power of sauna therapy and heat therapy. I did share how much I love my Sunlighten Sauna. If you are interested in getting a sauna they even have personalized one person saunas that you can pack up, and put away, and fits into your closet when you’re not using it. It’s called the Solo System. You can go to sunlighten.com and check out their amazing saunas. I’ve had one for over two years now. Our whole family loves it. It’s low EMF, non-toxic. It’s actually ultra-low EMF and non-toxic. It’s the only sauna that gives you the entire spectrum near, mid, and far infrared.
I’ve also interviewed the founder of Sunlighten. Actually, I’ve done a few interviews on the Sunlighten Sauna there science and all the research that went into making those saunas. It took me a while to figure out exactly which sauna I wanted to buy because there are so many great ones out there, but when you dig deeper you find that a lot of them are toxic, or they’re high in EMFs. My favorite is the Sunlighten Sauna for the fact that it is ultra-low EMF, non-toxic. Non-toxic wood, there are no glues. They put a lot into making sure that it’s a very safe product. Also, it has the full spectrum, so you’re getting the benefit of the near, mid, and far infrared spectrum.
I’ve done interviews specifically about why each part of that spectrum is so important. The fact that we have receptors on our cells for that light—sunlight or light—is actually a nutrient that the body is missing. If you can’t get outside and get in the sunlight for an hour a day, you’re deplete in this nutrient, which is just amazing. It blows my mind. I did a whole interview with Dr. Khan on that subject.
If you’re interested in getting a sauna, check out Sunlighten. They do give a great discount to the listeners. They give free shipping, and shipping for saunas is usually around $500. Then on top of that, they also give us $100 in a variety of the accessories that would go with your sauna. They usually also give the listeners something really cool. Go ahead and call Sunlighten, get more info from them. Let them know that you’re a listener of Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James, and they will hook you up. Awesome.
Make sure that you remember equilibriumnutrition.com/lth, and the coupon code LTH10, or just go to the show notes of this episode for all that information. Enjoy today’s interview, and please, share it with absolutely everyone. I normally say share my episodes with those you love or those you care about. This is one of those episodes where you want to share with literally every single person you know, your mailman, just email it to everyone. Get it out there.
We have to get as many people as we know—hundreds and hundreds of people. If you have 200 Facebook friends, all of them need to know this. We’ve got to keep sharing this information because Dr. Cabral answers all the questions and gives us the answers that we really need. We need all of our neighbors, and our loved ones, and our co-workers, and our church friends, and everyone to know this information. I’m really excited to get this information out there because we’re going to save a lot of lives and help a lot of people to stay healthy. Excellent. Have a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s episode.
[0:05:03] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 421.
I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. Stephen Cabral. You were in episode 271, 301, and now episode 421. There’s something going on with the ones. It’s such a pleasure to have you back on the show.
[0:05:32] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It’s great to be back. Thank you for having me on, I appreciate it.
[0:05:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’ve been reaching out to the holistic health community, the Naturopathic doctors that I work with, or that I interview asking if there’s some expert information that you can bring to the table for the listeners around Covid-19 and the coronavirus. What we should do for preparedness, for prevention, to boost the immune systems, to support the terrain of the body? What we should do if we get it, and how to avoid it? Should we be panicking? Is the closure of the world necessary? Are we jumping the gun or should we really all stay at home?
Just getting the advice from the doctors who have pored through all the studies and the information. They really do know how to help us make the safest decisions for ourselves and our families without letting fear run our lives. I’m really excited to have you on the show to clear up a lot of misconceptions. Because you come from a science background, you’re deeply involved in the results in the science, but you have a holistic approach—which is much different. You have different tools in your tool belt than MDs do because you have a strong foundation in holistic medicine and supporting the body’s ability to heal itself.
I’m really looking forward to diving into today’s topic. Thank you so much for coming on the show and helping clear up some myths around Covid-19.
[0:07:10] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It is great to be on. What I want to do today is really come at this from an integrative approach. My philosophy has always been that there is simply no alternative than alternative medicine—as what conventional medicine calls it—for chronic-based disease. That means if anybody’s suffering from high cholesterol, high blood pressure, autoimmune, migraines, none of that can be successfully dealt with through pharmaceuticals or conventional medicine. It simply masks the symptoms. However, when there is an acute-based disease sometimes we do need conventional medicine, and it’s actually life-saving.
What I want to do today is to show you—just like you said—the best ways to boost your immune system, the best ways to absolutely stay healthy. That is by balancing the body. Then if you were—specifically a parent or grandparent—to get this particular Covid-19 virus, what you may look towards in terms of conventional medicine in order to help those people as well. I’m really looking forward to being on and going through all the actual facts. Not a lot of what’s being spread by the fair machine, which is the media right now.
[0:08:19] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, today is March 24th just before noon, Pacific Time. Very up-to-date information. I’m going to be publishing this sometime on the weekend, so just in a few days from now. Those who are listening, this is still very new information, very relevant especially because you’re taking an integrative approach. Let’s start by you maybe just explaining what the virus does, how it spreads, and myth-busting any misconceptions that are going around right now about it.
[0:08:57] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Absolutely, and it is very similar. That’s why we know a bit about it because it’s very similar to severe upper respiratory syndrome—a specific issue that’s affecting a lung tissue. It does seem to have an affinity for lung tissue—meaning this particular virus—but it does enter through the eyes, the nose, or the mouth. That’s why although a lot has been made of hand-washing—that’s absolutely true—but really, what we need to do is it’s not going to enter through our hands or our skin unless there is a cut. Really, the only way it’s entering our body is from our hands touching our eyes, nose, or mouth. That’s why this is one of those times to teach our kids and to teach others, keep your hands away from your face for sure.
Also, there is the other factor, which is it’s airborne. The same meaning it can be transmitted in the same way as the flu. This has a lot of similarities to the influenza virus and the flu as well—one and the same. The difference is that this virus seems to live a little bit longer outside of the body—on many surfaces—up to 72 hours. The new research does show—on metals and things like copper—it’s only a couple hours that it survives. On other surfaces maybe 24 hours, but we know up to 72 hours as well.
People can feel pretty good though because it does not seem to be able to be passed on through food, or supplements, or medications, or anything like that. So it can definitely put our minds to ease in that way. A bigger part of this as well, we’re doing a lot of research, a lot of research has come out over the last couple weeks, and I’d love to be able to share that in a moment too of what is working. We are also seeing that the virus—at least initially—is being effectively stopped slowed I should say.
Stores are actually beginning to open in places like China. Their numbers are not rapidly increasing where we did see a rapid increase in the beginning. Other places like South Korea have made tremendous strides by implementing social isolation or social distancing, increasing the amount of testing that they have for people, and also having enough ventilators for those people most in need.
In terms of what we’re seeing right now, we’re actually seeing some positivity. That’s allowing us to stay—well right now we’re at 407,000 cases worldwide so this a pandemic based issue. We are slowing the spread as of right now, which is good as we develop a lot of these life-saving tools that we will need.
[0:11:41] Ashley James: Can we become immune to it by having it? Can we become immune like, “I had chickenpox and now I’m immune to it?” I’ve heard—it may be just a myth or some misinformation spread around—that this particular virus cannot be something that we can become immune to. So each year it could come around just like the flu and we could reget it.
[0:12:07] Dr. Stephen Cabral: This is a great question. It actually has to do with this strain. I’d like to explain that because 80% of people who get Covid-19 show no symptoms—for the most part very, very minor. We know that children and even teenagers under the age of 19, it seems, are almost non-affected. Keep in mind, they are still getting the virus, they’re just not showing symptoms. Well, there’s a hypothesis. There’s hypothesis they have greater amounts of melatonin, which now we’re showing that melatonin is actually helping tremendously. They have typically not as high cortisol based production, so they don’t have as much amino suppression. They have a more balanced which is called Th1, Th2 based immune system.
Just keep in mind that anybody with a good healthy balanced immune system, they get the flu, or they get Covid-19, and they have maybe a day or two of feeling a little rundown, but that’s the most symptoms they have. Then other people, when they get the flu, they might have it for 24 hours. They might start to feel a little bit, again, more fatigue, more joint pain, a queasy stomach. Then there are others that then get the full-blown symptoms of the flu, which is the joint pain and the fever.
Then with Covid-19 the bigger difference is the lungs are getting inflamed. We are getting an inability to actually produce—as an expectorant—the mucus out of the lungs. People aren’t actually dying from the virus per se just like they don’t die necessarily from the flu. They die from the complications, which is pneumonia. That’s why the average age of death mimics the flu with Covid-19, not a lot of people talking about this. The average age is well into the 70s. Right now it’s 77.4 years old to 81 depending on the source. That’s because until about the age of 65, we’re seeing a very low mortality rate, but it spikes dramatically over the age of 70-75.
That is why when it comes to social distancing it’s unfortunate, but we can’t have kids and young people around our parents and grandparents because they’re most susceptible, and they show no symptoms at all. Can you get this virus again? Most likely and potentially, but it would have to be the same meaning you could build up antibodies to it for sure—because that’s what our body does—but the virus for the flu each year changes as well in terms of strain. There’s actually 200-300 different strains of virus. I know it’s complicated, but hopefully, that makes a little bit of sense.
[0:14:35] Ashley James: I’m just seeing this world like I don’t know if this is my fear-based mind going like, “Are we just going to—every flu season—need to completely shut down the world for three months every year because this is going to mutate and keep coming back and keep coming back and keep coming back? Or are we going to all eventually have enough herd immunity because enough of us have had it—even though we’re asymptomatic—and have mounted an immune response to where it’s not going to be a pandemic every year?”
[0:15:04] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It’s a great question, and I don’t quite know the answer because I don’t know if the reaction right now is appropriate. We’re taking all the proper precautions, which I think is appropriate because maybe this does get to the point where—I mean we have Harvard epidemiologists saying, “Well, this could affect 40% to 70% of the population across the globe.” That’s 3 billion people. I don’t know anything that’s ever affected 3 billion people in this way. The flu, in the United States, affects 30 million, some people say 50 million people a year. I believe this Covid-19 virus has actually affected 10 times the amount of people.
We have 407,000 cases. It’s probably more like 4 million people. The reason is just people are not showing signs. I mean you can see all these people out there saying, “Oh, I was tested and I had it.” Well, yes you did and you had a healthy balanced immune system. So your body—unknown to you—fought it off. That’s what our bodies are meant to do if they’re healthy and balanced. Now, many other people don’t have healthy immune systems because they smoke, they drink too much alcohol, they don’t get enough sleep, they’re on medications that suppress their immune system. Yeah, we are at a lot more risk, and it’s one of the reasons why Italy did not fare as well.
One, they didn’t take it fast enough. Two, many people smoked in Italy, and they have a higher aged population, and they live in very close quarters. Meaning the way that it’s spread is about 1 to 1.5 people. Every person with the flu has the ability—doesn’t necessarily happen. Average infection is they infect a 1 1/2 other people. With this, it seems to be about a 1 to 3 so you can see that it does affect twice as many people as the flu. Let’s say it did that, would we reach then 100 million people? Maybe, but I just don’t know. Again, we have to take the proper precautions, but if we didn’t do it for the flu, should we be doing it for Covid-19? I just wonder.
The reason is that we’re not really social distancing. If you allow people to go to the grocery food store, and you allow them to go to doctors. You only allow 10 people at a time. I’ve gone to places, ok I get it, but I’m standing in line with 100 other people outside the store. People can be asymptomatic for 14 days. I don’t necessarily know that all of this working. It is working from, okay, maybe we can slow it in order to increase hospital beds and ventilators. I get that and I believe in it, but really, what we need to do is be careful and really watch out for our most at-risk populations.
I don’t have the answer, but certainly, we can’t do this every year because just the restaurant industry alone, 7 million jobs lost in the United States. These are people’s lives. These are people’s literal lives as well. I feel for people on all sides of the fence.
[0:18:06] Ashley James: You’re saying that potentially, one of the more conservative ways we could have gone about it is to isolate all the older population from the rest of us to protect them from being exposed?
[0:18:23] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’m trying to think of it from every side of the equation. That’s just because I have family members and friends. They’ve lost jobs. Now their family’s lives are at stake. Meaning, literally, their livelihood, paying their rent. I don’t know what the right answer is because I don’t want this to spread, but now that I know that most people—because I see the curve—are going to be okay even if they get the virus. Now I want to protect those people that are most at risk. As a doctor that’s what I want to do, but I also want to help the entire economy and the world because this will end. Then what happens when it ends? I’m just trying to think of it from many perspectives.
[0:19:04] Ashley James: What kind of precedent will we put in place now for future outbreaks? Will we go, “Okay. This works.” So now we shut down the world every time. The problem is if we overreact people lose jobs and become homeless. That’s also not helping the population, but of course, we don’t want to under-react and people die. We need the Goldilocks of responses and hopefully, enough grounded, science-based people come together in governments. Hopefully, we can pray that they make rational decisions, especially for future outbreaks.
You said a person with a healthy balanced immune system, they don’t have a problem. When they get infected they’re often asymptomatic. So really, the best thing we can do right now is focus on having a healthy balanced immune system since those who are exposed to it—who have a healthy balanced immune system—either are completely asymptomatic or have much milder symptoms because the body moves through fighting it quicker. Then you talked earlier about how children have higher melatonin and lower cortisol, which cortisol is the stress hormone. You mentioned that cortisol suppresses the immune system.
Fear increases cortisol—fear and worry. If you’re worried about not being able to pay rent and worried about having lost your job—7 million people just in the restaurant industry, those are 7 million people with high cortisol right now. Cortisol is lowering their immune system making them more susceptible to the virus. We need to lower our stress and lower our fear to help bring down our cortisol, to support ourselves in fighting this. It’s kind of this catch-22.
[0:21:02] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You’re exactly correct. I do something to my practice called the DESTRESS protocol. It’s diet, exercise, stress reduction, toxic removal, rest, emotional balance, supplement protocols, and success mindset. If you look at the STRESS part of it—the rest which is sleep, the emotional balance, and that success mindset—that’s four out of the eight. We’re really looking at a mind, body, mental, emotional-based equation. Because not a lot of people believe that, but when you look at it from a science perspective when your mind perceives stress, the hypothalamus in the brain tells the pituitary gland to tell the adrenals to produce stress hormones. When that happens your immune system or your body shifts into that fight-or-flight—the sympathetic nervous system.
At that time, mucus production actually starts to slow. It goes down. Mucus production contains what’s called our secretory IgA white blood cells. That’s our first-line defense in our nose, our mouth, and all throughout the mucous layer of the body. That’s exactly what the elderly lack. One of the reasons why the elderly are more susceptible is thinner mucous membranes natural killer cells, and less balanced immune system, more prone to inflammation, and less reserves—like less vitamins, less minerals, they’re more catabolic, they have less protein.
When we look at that we could see stress actually mimics your chances of having a worse reaction to a virus—any virus, or any disease, or any bacteria. This is the time actually—and it’s obviously easier said than done—to calm our bodies as much as possible. Whether it’s going and doing some meditation, or yoga, or a lighter at-home workout because we don’t want to do a super hard workout right now, which would again stress our body and lower immune system. Binaural beats is a great one, tapping like flow tank, Epsom salt baths, whatever works for you, essential oils to calm stress, I can’t recommend it enough.
[0:23:07] Ashley James: Excellent. I say make a list of the things that you know that calm you and get out of the fight-or-flight response and keep posting notes around the house, especially those of us in states where we’re quarantined in our homes so that you’re reminded. Laugh every day. Make sure you watch some funny YouTube videos of comedians and laugh every day. I love the essential oils. You can do home yoga. Cuddle, get the oxytocin up.
Oxytocin goes up, cortisol goes down. Our 30-second hugs and cuddles with your pets and your other humans in your house, and give each other back rubs or shoulder rubs. Do things that increase joy, and oxytocin, increase the love hormone and that will decrease the stress hormone. That is going to help boost our immune system because high cortisol, you said, is an immune suppressor. That’s the opposite of what we want right now.
The virus spreads airborne. I heard somewhere that when someone sneezes and they have the virus that it could travel 12 feet before it hits the ground. Once it’s hit the ground—so if we’re 12 feet away from someone, so even this idea of 6 feet social distancing doesn’t necessarily work if someone sneezes and it travels 12 feet. If we walk on the ground and the virus is on the ground, then it gets on our shoe, and we come home, and we don’t take off our shoes. We walk around the house, and we track the virus in our house, and then the dog walks on it, and then the dog licks its paw, then the dog licks our face. Can it get to that point where it’s traveled to us in that way or does it die off by then?
[0:24:53] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Most likely, and again I can’t—today I’m not here to provide medical advice and certainly can’t do that over a podcast. I just want us to make sure that we’re treating, diagnosing or giving personal. Hypothetically speaking, that most likely is not a likely scenario. Is it possible? Potentially. Really, what we’re looking at is someone coughs, someone sneezes—they’re not doing it into their elbow like they should—it does become airborne. It does touch your face your, your hands, or your clothing, and then you touch that and you touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. That is how you’ll be exposed.
After it’s been on an object—if it’s fresh, it hasn’t been moved around, rubbed, dropped, anything like that—then yes, you could absolutely get it from touching something else. The likelihood of you picking it up from the ground is very, very low. If it touches your dog—so that’s the thing. That’s the interesting thing about this virus is it’s not spread from animals to humans.
Nobody really knows how it made the jump from bats or other types of animals to humans because this shouldn’t happen. Meaning your dog shouldn’t get human viruses, typically, and you shouldn’t get pet or animal-based viruses. Your dog licking you should be totally fine.
[0:26:19] Ashley James: What other myths are you really excited to bust today or some clarification you want to bring to us too about Covid-19?
[0:26:29] Dr. Stephen Cabral: There are so many myths. It’s unbelievable on social media. I’m literally getting 500-1000 Slack messages, comments, emails. I do look at them. I really do. I can’t respond to every single one. I do my best to, but I mean people are really grasping at anything for what could be the potential cause, what we’re really looking at. I try to just stay grounded in what we know it is, what the facts are, and then I try to say, “Has anything like this ever come about before?”
We know that we have SARS, and we know that we also have another one called MERS—the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome. What I try to do is draw from that. These particular cases and viruses did not make the massive jump to hundreds of millions of people. I feel optimistic in that way.
The other thing is that we don’t know that this a bacteria causing this, or gut-based. I don’t want to get into all of them now because what people will do is start to Google them, and I don’t believe that they’re true. If there’s one that I could myth bust and it’s that elderberry—people are saying is bad for you. Have you heard that? That it causes a cytokine storm?
[0:27:52] Ashley James: Yes. Thank you. Yes, yes.
[0:27:56] Dr. Stephen Cabral: We don’t know that. That’s completely skeptical. We know that it works really well for the flu and that it’s scientifically proven meaning science-based research showing that typically three teaspoons three times a day shortens—or if not halves—the duration of the influenza virus. We know that this—although and not the same—mimics a lot of these ways. People say, “Well, it causes cytokine storm.”
First of all, that’s just a catchy name. It increases certain cytokines, that’s correct, but the cytokines that increases actually help to increase the body’s immune system to destroy certain things. Yes, it can be pro-inflammatory, but when the body creates inflammation, well, it’s inflammation. It helps to repair the body, believe it or not. What elderberry does is it actually coats the virus. Think of the virus as kind of like a spiky ball, and what it does is it coats it in order to not allow it to replicate.
What I’m telling people—for right now at least—they’re saying that because it creates this Th1. Th1 is how the body fights bacteria and viruses acute base tissues, where Th2 is more for chronic long-standing inflammation like allergies, asthma. If we’re going to go down the rabbit hole of saying elderberry’s an issue well, then we have about another two dozen foods and supplements we need to talk about besides elderberry. I don’t see any been talking about those.
So to put people’s minds at ease, it’s probably only people would be at risk at all if they were Th1 dominant meaning that they had rheumatoid arthritis, they had Hashimoto’s. Even for them, I would say elderberry is probably still fine to use. If you were to get Covid-19, then maybe you would stop using it. I’m just playing in a conservative field. I don’t think it’s an issue at all, but just to be conservative people may want to stop that if they do end up with Covid-19.
[0:29:59] Ashley James: But they take it when they don’t have it? Why?
[0:30:03] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If you wanted to boost your immune system right now and you wanted to use that as, “Oh, I was exposed let me use this. I have no symptoms, and to help it.” We can go through the natural vitamins if you want that do work such as zinc. There’s a great correlation right now. They found this in South Korea that a lot of the younger people who ended up experiencing symptoms—one of the very first symptoms was a loss of taste or a loss of smell, which is very interesting because people in natural health fields—myself included—would say, “Well, that’s a really good sign of a zinc deficiency.”
It didn’t mean that these people were necessarily zinc deficient in typical everyday diet, which is just breaking even, but they didn’t have enough zinc reserves. So when their body came under stress from a virus, well, it used up all those zinc reserves. That’s a really good reason to begin supplementing with zinc, zinc picolinate, or other great forms of zinc in order to boost the immune system and boost white blood cells.
We’re recommending the foundation of vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, melatonin right now. Melatonin would be probably more in let’s say the 35-40 plus range where your melatonin production might be a little less, or if you’re experiencing high levels of stress. Remember, cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship. If cortisol is up, melatonin is down. If melatonin is up, cortisol is down. We actually used melatonin right now as a way to reduce and drop cortisol at night, so you can get into a deeper more regenerative sleep. Happy to go into dosages things like that if you’d like, but I figured I would at least mention them.
[0:31:47] Ashley James: What about vitamin A for lung protection?
[0:31:52] Dr. Stephen Cabral: We’ve got three research studies coming out of China for high-dose vitamin C—seems to be quite effective. Zinc looking quite effective. We know these are nice immune boosters anyways. Vitamin D, typically 35 IUs per pound of bodyweight for both children and adults—assuming that you’re not maintaining a tan wherever you are in the world.
Vitamin A is a tricky one. Vitamin A absolutely boosts the immune system, no doubt about it. The problem with vitamin A is in order to get that high dosage you have to take a synthetic form. A synthetic form of vitamin A can absolutely cause liver issues. If you take beta-carotene, I’m all for it. We recommend 5000 IUs of beta-carotene on a daily basis, keep your immune system balanced. We’re all about that. A little bit of the retinol palmitate, fine, but if you’re talking about 50,000 IUs, which a lot of people are right now, of vitamin A and it’s coming from the synthetic form, I can’t recommend that because I know what it does to the liver. The liver can’t process that amount of vitamin A.
If we’re talking four days, five days if you were to get Covid-19, okay. Again, I’m okay with things in the short-term, but we’re using this as green medicine meaning we’re using high-dose vitamin A and high-dose vitamin D, which would be 50,000 IUs rather than like 4000 to 5000 IU’s a day as a natural form of medicine essentially because that’s a very strong dosage that I don’t recommend over time. Same with vitamin D.
[0:33:26] Ashley James: Got it. My Naturopath has people—who have lung illnesses like Covid-19—on 100,000 IUs for three days of vitamin A in addition to these other nutrients, but not long-term. It’s just during because it’s protective of the lungs. Would you agree with that?
[0:33:51] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I would. Short term usage with no previous history of liver-based issues. Someone’s not on medication that could affect their liver such an Accutane for acne, then I’d be okay with that. Same with for the high dose vitamin D, yes. Again, it comes down to people’s comfort levels as well for what they could do, and 50,000, 100,000 per day is something they could do in the short term. Under a doctor’s care, by the way. You should be under a doctor’s care if you’re doing that.
Ginger—especially as a dried herb—quite effective for lungs and as an expectorant as well. Ginger is one I would recommend. Then just a few you know easy ones to that people could do would be a Manuka honey. Believe it or not, Manuka honey and black coffee is a great expectorant. Another one that’s a great expectorant is pineapple juice, fresh-pressed pineapple juice and that would include the core of the pineapple, which contains the most amount of bromelain. Those are highly effective, but again if you are really suffering from symptoms of Covid you should go to the hospital, and you should get medical care.
[0:35:07] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I found that I had pneumonia two years ago or three years ago. I found that taking—a Naturopath told me to do this, and I was doctor’s care—as an expectorant to break it up and get it out, a handful, a big handful of fresh time put in some hot water, steep it for 10 minutes, and drink it. It was so effective for me. It was really amazing. It’s was a good cough suppressant but also helped me move stuff. NAC as well to help move the mucus out. You’ve obviously heard of those.
[0:35:52] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes. Thank you for bringing it up. That’s great. Another one that’s amazing specifically for the lungs is Mullein extract, M-U-L-L-E-I-N. Absolutely amazing for smokers or people with mucus in the lungs or a lung congestion, it helps bring it up and break it up. Then one other one would be licorice root. Licorice root and viruses is very well known for not only destroying the virus, stopping replication, but also licorice supports the adrenals. The adrenals have a direct connection with the lungs. People that are the most susceptible to bronchitis, mucus production in lungs oftentimes have weaker adrenals. What I mean by that is they have less actual stress hormone production and they’re not able to respond as well.
Everything we just mentioned there—that’s why you don’t have to use one specific thing, oftentimes. There are many that work for many different people, but the foundation is always the vitamin C, the vitamin D, the zinc on a daily basis. Two to five grams of vitamin C we’re recommending right now, up to 50 milligrams of zinc on a daily basis, about 5000 IU’s for adults 35 IU’s per pound of bodyweight for children. Of course, if you feel any symptoms you can go double on those as needed.
The other ones we mentioned the Mullein and the different extracts are all great to use. Oregano oil, amazing to use as well, but I’m not having people use them unless they start to feel rundown or they’ve been exposed because it can get to the point where this is probably going to go on for 12 more weeks, and so we don’t need to use these for 12 weeks meaning the extracts. The Mullein extract, elderberry, oregano oil.
[0:37:39] Ashley James: For the next 12 weeks, what can we take or what can we do to create a healthy balanced immune system? You’ve already talked about decreasing stress. What other really effective scientifically-proven things that we can do? What kind of self-care we can do to just make sure that we’re doing everything we can to support our body so that if we had Covid-19 we would have a successful outcome or our body would completely mount a response and we’d be asymptomatic.
[0:38:12] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Absolutely. I’ll give you a quick rundown of what we’re doing in our practice and what I’m just teaching right now for the DESTRESS protocol specific to Covid-19. The first part of that destress is diet. If you haven’t already started an elimination diet, or eliminating inflammatory processed foods, or eliminating sugar, eliminating a lot of alcohol, which is an immunosuppressant, now is the time to do that. Meaning there’s never been a better time, so if you’re looking to kick-start that—especially with the spring coming around in the US—a great time to just go on a lower processed food diet.
We do a spring detox every year. We’re modifying that slightly for people that are rundown so that they don’t have to do a couple days of fasting if their body’s not feeling strong enough. That’s because if you fast for too long, well, you become a little bit more stressed, that’s just natural. That kind of flows into the—and do stop me anywhere if you have questions—exercise part.
[0:39:15] Ashley James: Fasting, short-term fasting, like a three-day water-only fast. Doesn’t that boost the immune system?
[0:39:21] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, what happens is the body comes under greater stress, and it can actually start to suppress certain parts of the immune system while increasing what’s called autophagy. Autophagy, it’s happening all the time but it takes into a greater degree after about 18 hours— we’ve seen in the research. This is what allows your body’s immune cells to start to scavenge proteins and necrotic tissue to break it down, and that includes cancer cells to remove it from the body, so very, very powerful.
However, fasting—and if you drop in blood sugar—actually increases a cortisol response. Whatever your body needs to break down liver glycogen, it does so by increasing cortisol. Because what happens is when you spike cortisol your body says, “Okay, we need a fast fuel source.” Contrary to popular belief that is not ketones or body fat, it’s actually sugar.
Even if you’re in ketosis your body—well, it depends if you have any liver glycogen left or muscle glycogen, which you do because it’s stored, it could break down muscle tissue or liver glycogen for that. That’s why if you’re doing a longer fast we recommend you do be in a little bit more of a rest-based state. Hopefully, that helps.
[0:40:34] Ashley James: Yeah. Chill, Netflix, fast. Cuddle dog.
[0:40:39] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes. I still do recommend. If you don’t have a dog, adopt a dog right now if you’d like. Twelve to sixteen hours a day is a great amount to be fasting. We typically recommend—if you go to bed at 10:00, which a lot of people do. 10:00 PM in the health-based world, stop eating at 6:00. It’s three to four hours before bed. That means all the foods out of your stomach, now your body can concentrate on a deep rejuvenating sleep. Don’t start eating again until about an hour or two after waking, which a lot of times is around 8 AM for people.
That’s a very simple 14-hour fast. You break your fast when you start to come under stress for the first part to your day. People can do longer, they can do shorter based on hypoglycemia, adrenal issues. They’re more of a restful morning. It really depends on the person, but 12-16 hours every day I still absolutely do recommend for fasting.
[0:41:32] Ashley James: If we did 19 hours then we would have gotten one hour of stimulated autophagy. Like you said, it starts to really ramp up at 18 hours. If we ended up doing the one meal a day or a feeding window of four hours, would that decrease our immune system? Would that increase stress, or would that be a really healthy thing for someone who’s already healthy? For someone who’s not, obviously, in a weakened state, like you said, hypoglycemic. Would now be a good time? If we’re slated at home, would now be a good time to play with lowering our feeding window to eight hours or four hours because it’s beneficial?
[0:42:13] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Different people have different philosophies. I do not subscribe to that philosophy. Although I’m on the latest science, and research, and functional medicine Naturopathic medicine, I really studied Ayurvedic medicine quite in-depth. That’s the oldest form of medicine, 5000-6000 years old. I really believe that unless people have a very low-stress day, an eight-hour feeding window can be more stressful on the body. It works more for younger people 25 to maybe 45, but not so much after that when the body trends more towards a catabolic state.
We see in my practice a lot of women with issues, and I know we’re kind of getting off-topic, but I see a lot of women go into hypothyroid quite often when they’re following a keto-based diet or they’re following an eight-hour feeding window. It’s simply because if your body’s in a state of stress, getting the kids ready in the morning, or having to work on a work presentation at work, or fighting traffic, whatever it is your body’s naturally looking for food. Food and specifically carbohydrates are what is actually cutting the cortisol response. Fat and protein don’t do that. I recommend a light easy to digest breakfast. The largest meal somewhere around 11:00 to 1:00, 11:00 in the morning to 1:00 in the afternoon. Then a smaller dinner.
That has always worked well in the society. I believe that you can fit that in a 10-hour to 12-hour window. It allows for both anabolism or the body’s ability to build itself up, and then catabolism the body’s ability to break down and digest whatever it needs. That seems to work best for most people, and then at the same time, we typically recommend a once a week 24-hour fast. We’re working in all things. To me, again, that would make more sense. You might go a day without eating, so from Sunday night to Monday night I fast. That means that I have dinner Sunday night and then the next time I eat is with my dinner Monday night. Then after that, I do breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I fast for 14 hours every day.
Some people in my practice, I only recommend 12. Some people very, very small percentage, they need a little snack before bed only in the short-term because they’re hypoglycemic and they’re dealing with adrenal-based issues. Then there are many people who do well with a 16-hour fast, but we break our fast around 10:00 AM, and we do still three meals a day. The reason is for one meal a day, how do you fit in nine servings of fruits and vegetables, which is what we know is the only proven anti-cancer based diet out there.
We know that keto-based diets can help with tumors and brain tumors specifically. I’m not saying that there’s not a time and place for that, but I just don’t know how you eat nine cups of broccoli at a meal and get all of your protein requirements, which is about 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, so about half your body weight, and then your healthy fats. I mean that’s a lot on the digestive system in terms of stress. At a minimum, two meals a day, but I still like three easier to digest meals, in my opinion.
[0:45:20] Ashley James: I like that you bring up the point about how do you get in the nine servings, the nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day when you’re only eating one meal. A lot of people—and even some listeners who are listening—they eat three meals a day plus three snacks and they’re still not getting in their nine cups of fruits and vegetables. The guidelines around eating for your immune system, you’ve mentioned cutting out sugar, cutting out junk, now is a great time to do an elimination diet. Can you paint a picture of what someone’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Give me an example, like what did you eat for the last 24 hours? What would be good on our plate right now?
[0:46:06] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I actually just outlined this for our community, so we’re combining our two diet plans or our detox diet plan with now the immunity protocol. What we do is pretty straightforward, and I can just give you a sample day. Waking up and doing one scoop of the Alkalizing Vitamin C. It’s very interesting because some of the drugs that are working right they believe they’re actually working. For example one of the anti-malaria drugs, it’s called—let me see if I can even find it here I think it’s called—hydroxychloroquine, I believe it’s called. They believe it’s working by bringing the pH of the tissues up a half to one point, which to me is very interesting because a virus can’t live in an alkaline-based solution. We know the blood maintains about a 7.356 pH, which is very standard because you can’t live above a 7.5 or 7.2.
Our body does a great job of regulating that, but our tissues can actually change the body. That has to do with everything else but your blood. I love reading that because we know how to alkalize our own tissues and that’s through minerals. So good quality sea salt, and calcium, magnesium, potassium, greens. Eat more veggies. If you’re not someone that eats a lot of fruit right now, well, maybe still a cup of blueberries, which is one of those ACE inhibitors that we keep talking about. Dark chocolate, blueberries, prunes, flax, all of those are great.
Anyway, we do the Alkalizing Vitamin C, which is buffered with all the minerals. Then at breakfast, we’re doing a smoothie with our Daily Nutritional Support because you just don’t want the vitamin C, the vitamin D, you want all your B vitamins. You want all your minerals, the detox factors. We do something called a Daily Fruit & Vegetable Blend, which is 22 organic fruits and veggies, mix as a powder, no sugar, and you can just put that in there. Then one or two cups of berries, and then mix in a healthy fat if you want, and it contains 15 grams of a vegan protein. You can make that as carbohydrate heavy or as light as you would like, but easy to digest. Make it into a smoothie bowl, make it into a smoothie.
I don’t recommend chicken sausages and eggs and all that for breakfast. One of the things I don’t right now is a heavier breakfast, and one that someone might be doing on a carnivore diet or maybe even more of like a keto-based diet which is heavier on a fatty-based breakfast. Maybe it’s eggs, and sausage, or something like that. It’s just not something I can recommend, and the reason is it’s harder to digest, it takes a lot more energy from your body that early in the morning, and it’s also much more acidic. I know a lot of people don’t really play into the acid and alkaline, but the truth is that there are foods that are acidic and there are foods that are more alkaline.
The foods that are more acidic, the way that you alkalize those foods back to a normal pH in the body is that you actually use minerals from your body and use reserves. Instead of using those I simply recommend saving those heavier proteins—if you choose to eat them—for something like a lunchtime meal.
[0:49:19] Ashley James: Does eating excess cheese, eggs, meat, does that affect the immune system? Does that lower it? With someone on a whole food plant-based diet see increase in a strong immune system? What’s your take on that based on the science?
[0:49:38] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I would say more to a plant-based diet is going to be more beneficial in terms of the immune system. The reason is that we know that if you increase your fruit & vegetables—especially a rainbow of colors—you’re going to increase your vitamins minerals, but you get the plant-based phytonutrients as well. All of those come from the different colors of each vegetable.
We get the blues and purples from things like blueberries, we get the reds and oranges—which are quite high in vitamin A and vitamin C—from peppers, and from oranges, and strawberries. So you can go down the line. One other thing that we know too that we get from certain vegetables—namely the cruciferous ones such as broccoli, and bok choy, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts—is we get the sulfur-based amino acids. That allows us to actually ramp up our body’s natural detoxification, which allows the liver to better process any die-off in the body at all. Whether it be a virus, or hormones, or plastics, toxin from the environment.
I definitely recommend getting at least two to three cups of your cruciferous vegetables per day, and that would be amazing as well. Now typically, cruciferous vegetables should be cooked. It’s easier to break down the plant cellulose and you still get all of the great benefits from the actual plant-based food themselves.
[0:50:59] Ashley James: Wonderful. You mentioned what they’re speculating, the reason why these anti-malaria drugs are helping. Back a few weeks ago—when it was first coming out of China and South Korea because they were using different malaria drugs in China than in South Korea, but they were seeing similar results.
One speculation was that the anti-malaria drug increases the uptake of zinc into the cell, which would then show, like you said, for those who are just borderline zinc deficient or just about to be zinc deficient, if that drug would force more zinc into the cell, then they would also exhibit symptoms of zinc deficiency. To have zinc be forced into the cell, that zinc then disrupts the virus from hijacking the cell’s RNA production, the virus cannot then reproduce. Have you heard of this theory?
[0:52:04] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’ve seen a few theories, and I don’t know which ones are correct. These are all small studies. For example, hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine are drugs from the US, but the study is actually being done with something called the azithromycin in France. They show that the combination of these two drugs was remarkable in the recovery of people especially in 50% of the time in this small study in France.
Again, it was only 36 people and it is a small percentage. We have the Japanese antiviral drug, Avigan I believe it’s called, and it seems to prevent the virus from replicating, but just like you alluded to, we don’t know why. We just know that it seems to be working. To me, that’s okay. That’s a good start.
Remdesivir is another one that is another antiviral drug. Then we have Interferon Alpha 2B from Cuba and another one seems to be working. The last one—I’m trying to think—specifically for HIV. I believe it’s called Kletra or K-L-E-T-R-A. This also seems to be working with the replication and preventing that RNA-based replication. I’m optimistic about one or multiple of these working, which is why I think in another three to four weeks—even if the spread continues—we will at least be able to help those people most at risk and cut down the mortality rate.
[0:53:42] Ashley James: I wish we could throw as much money to funding natural studies as the pharmacy companies are so excited to throw money at finding a drug-based solution. Because like Dr. Klinghardt says—he’s an MD who’s been on my show who’s been practicing for over forty years. His favorite thing to do is to find whatever drug someone needs and then go find the natural version that the drug company tried to copy. He says nature always works better than synthetic drugs because synthetic drugs are the man-made copy of nature.
In his 40 years of being a doctor having great success he says very rarely he will need an actual drug, although he’s open to it. He’s open to the best tool possible, but his favorite thing to do is to find the natural cure—the cure that lives in nature because it seems to always work better than a drug with obviously less side effects.
There’s a theory going around that we should all drink tonic water because it contains the natural molecules that they used to mimic the malaria drug. Have you heard about this?
[0:55:03] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have not heard about that. Just to comment on what the previous MD you said is, I completely agree. Also, 50% of all pharmaceutical drugs are based on a plant. It’s a derivative, an extract that they can patent. For example, one of the best-known ones is a statin drug being an extract of red yeast rice. We know what kills a virus: zinc, l-lysine, monolaurin, colloidal silver.
For me, I’m a board-certified doctor of Naturopathy. I don’t use any drugs in my practice nor can I like. That’s not what I went to school for, but what I want to share is this, in life-saving based conditions the drug is more powerful. When someone’s life is on the line, for example, a staph infection, or bilateral pneumonia, please don’t take any chances. This coming from someone who only uses vitamins, herbs, and the best science of that.
I just want to share that with people. Don’t try to prove yourself right in a situation where you’re on a ventilator and you refuse medication. That’s all. I’m just saying that. I agree. If you get a regular virus I’m using coconut oil, and I’m using my zinc and monolaurin. One thing we haven’t mentioned is fire cider. Fire cider is an amazing thing to be using once or twice a day now, which is apple cider vinegar, garlic, onion, horseradish, ginger. You can make your own or they sell it.
This is a really great way to not only kill anything in the back of your throat, which is how this Covid virus seems to be entering. There’s so much to talk about. This is one that if we had tonsils the people with tonsils like children typically aren’t showing symptoms because the tonsils get to sample the virus and the body then creates the right antibody for the right antigen, and then we’re able to kill it at a faster rate. I don’t have tonsils. Mine got taken out when I was 10 years old. Can I kill it without adenoids and tonsils? Yes, but my body takes a little bit longer. I used the natural-based solutions, and hopefully, never get the major symptoms.
[0:57:17] Ashley James: Thank you for saying that for all the parents listening. Please, please, please if your doctor says, “All right, time to take out the adenoids tonsils and put in some earplugs.” Please, find a Naturopathic pediatrician because often times it’s a food allergy that’s causing the chronic infections in your children. I had chronic, chronic, chronic ear, nose, and throat infections until I was six years old. My mom took me to a Naturopath, Dr. D’Adamo, the man who created the Eat Right for Your Blood Type Diet in Toronto. He took my blood, looked at my eyes, ears, and nose, and he said, “You are allergic to milk, yeast, wheat, and sugar. Stay away from them.”
Overnight my life changed. My mom cut out those foods. Within 24 hours my chronic sore throat, my chronic infections, my chronic feeling lethargic, and horrible, and headaches, and everything they all went away within 24 hours of being taken off of dairy and sugar. My problem was dairy, and so many children are being given the foods that are causing their chronic infections. Then the MDs go, “Well, it’s time to take out these body parts that you’re having problems with.” Meanwhile, these body parts 10-20 years down the road could save your life. That just drives me crazy that the tonsils are that important. Like you said, they sample the pathogen and help our body mount an immune response much quicker. It’s amazing.
[0:58:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: 100%. Yeah, 100%. The very thing is most children’s tonsils—even if enlarged—go back to a normal size by seven years old. That’s what they don’t give you statistics wise as well. The thing is this, just like you said if, even if you don’t have a doctor in your neighborhood that knows a lot of these specific things, cut out dairy and gluten. The third one is oftentimes eggs. You can run a food sensitivity test right at home. My practice is about 80% a little bit more women. A lot of times husbands just don’t believe it like, they just don’t. It’s just the way that it is. Guys have such a hard time understanding how what we eat and what we do actually affects our health. I’m a guy so I think I could say that.
Just run an at-home food sensitivity test. Run a test and say, “Do I have a food sensitivity to dairy, gluten, eggs? It could be anything.” If not, eliminate cow’s milk, goat’s milk. Sheep’s milk doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue. I’d still eliminate them to be safe and eliminate gluten. I know it’s more challenging, but you don’t do it forever. At least do it for six weeks and then you can start to slowly introduce back in and see if the symptoms come back. If they do, well, then there you go. You have your proof right there.
[1:00:13] Ashley James: Exactly. Don’t slowly add them in. Do 30 days without and then have an entire day with ice cream, and yogurt, and cheese. Do a whole day with dairy, and if you have zero problems after that then there you go. Or gluten, right? No barley, wheat, rye, or oats for 30 days, and then have a whole day with bagels, and bread, and pasta. Most people that do that, by lunchtime they don’t ever want to eat barley, wheat, rye, and oats again. Their body is yelling at them.
You mentioned monolaurin, I got mine right here. I’d love for you to talk about this because it’s actually something that’s never been talked about on the show. My dear friend Naomi—who I started the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership with, believe it or not—is more into holistic health than I am. I think I’m a pretty crunchy granola very, very big fan of natural medicine. She’s even more into it than I am. She gave me this. She gave me this big thing of monolaurin. Because she beat Epstein-Barr virus. I mean this one of the things she uses, but she beat something that is considered something you can’t beat, and she beat it. Tell us about monolaurin. How much to take and how it works?
[1:01:33] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If we’re looking at where it comes from naturally we could say it’s coming from coconut oil, and it’s coming from something specific within coconut oil, which is called lauric acid. Monolaurin is actually far more effective, and I would say a lot more natural that the body can use. Monolaurin, we’re talking about in terms of viruses but it’s actually, in general, it kills anything any negative pathogen that it touches. It kills any different microbes in the body, viruses, bacteria, yeast, fungus, mold.
When you look at someone with Epstein-Barr virus, which I also had as well many years ago, you’re looking at a virus. Epstein-Barr virus is something like a herpes-based virus that replicates inside the body. It can go dormant, it can wake back up, and it does that when you’re most stressed, and you’re most rundown.
What monolaurin does is it helps to kill the specific virus, stop it from replicating. Its effect works right away, once it gets in the bloodstream. It typically gets in the bloodstream within about three hours. However, it takes 72 hours—like most things—to work. That’s because what happens is you are actually seeing the effect as it spreads through the body, and it’s also why there can sometimes be some worsening of symptoms. You can actually have die-off from taking too much monolaurin too fast, just like you can have too much die-off from doing a detox, or from using too much oregano oil. The reason is that we call that a Herxheimer reaction.
We first put it into science when we were using antibiotics—meaning conventional medicine was used in antibiotics and they coined it a Herxheimer reaction after the person who basically coined the term—for killing too much bacteria too quickly. You get brain fog, and you get fatigued, and you might get flu-like symptoms in the joints. If you’re using monolaurin for the first time, I would start slowly. You can go pretty high dose in this meaning you can use 3000 milligrams a day, which is what we’re recommending for l-lysine when someone has herpes, or Epstein-Barr virus, or virus. We do divided doses 1000 milligrams three times a day, it’s easier for people to take.
Typically, in general, vitamin C and all these things 500 to 1000 milligrams is the max. You take that three to six times a day. Same with monolaurin. I’m typically recommending a 500-milligram dosage three times a day. We do something called the Candida bacterial optimizing program. Monolaurin’s in month three, it’s very strong. What we do is we spread that. We actually do that in month three when a lot of the die-off has already taken place, so it’s much gentler.
If you just want to dive into it, then okay. Start with 500 milligrams the first day, 1000 milligrams the second day. Still, feeling okay? 1500 milligrams, which is 3 500 milligram dosages right off the bat. Now again, if you’re doing this prophylactically to not get the virus I don’t think that you need to. You can use it if you have a virus, but to use it when you don’t have a virus, I don’t believe that it’s needed. Just because there’s so much you could do.
[1:05:01] Ashley James: Okay. Someone who maybe is high risk, could they take it for the next 12 weeks or someone who is an older population, or someone who is maybe a worker in the health industry and is potentially being exposed to pathogens all the time, would they take it all the time preventively?
[1:05:23] Dr. Stephen Cabral: There’s a couple of ways to look at this. It can’t replace your foundation, so use a good daily activated multi or the Daily Nutritional Support. Use your omega-3s every day whether from a vegan source or an omega-3 fish oil source that’s tested for impurities, use a daily probiotic. Ideally, use some type of Daily Fruits & Vegetables blend, some type of greens. That covers all of your vitamins, and your minerals, and your anti-inflammatories because we know inflammation is a big part of all this, so that’s your foundation. After that vitamin C, vitamin D, and zinc. No doubt about it, that’s what I’d be using right now.
If your finances still allow for more, now we can look into specific viral-base things that you can use on a daily basis. Monolaurin absolutely could be one of those, but not for long-term use because there is some potential—not proven yet—correlation between higher dose monolaurin and killing off some of the gut bacteria because it is antibacterial as well.
[1:06:29] Ashley James: Right. So we need to be careful. We definitely need our gut bacteria. What relationship does a healthy gut biome have in keeping our immune system healthy?
[1:06:43] Dr. Stephen Cabral: We’ve heard the term 80% of the immune system is in and around your 26 feet of intestine or so, which is the truth, but it goes much beyond that. The reason is that if someone has an imbalanced microbiome, and they have an overgrowth of Candida, yeast, or an overgrowth of bacteria that we call SIBO—small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—what happens is your immune system is always on. It’s always trying to keep the body in balance. If you have SIBO, or yeast, or Candida overgrowth, you most likely have some type of intestinal permeability as well, which means you’re allowing proteins, bacteria, yeast, waste products to move through the intestines where they were never meant to move through the intestines—they were moved to meant to move to the bowels—and they get into the bloodstream.
Now you have elevated levels of IgG—these are just immune white blood cells, IgA responds, IgE responds, IgM responds, so the immune system is always on. If it’s always on, it wears down your body. Over time, your immune system says, “Listen, we can’t do this on a daily basis,” and it starts to slow. That’s why your gut is so important when it comes to your overall immune health. It’s also why many people never recover from their Hashimoto’s, autoimmune, Epstein-Barr virus, migraines until they fix their gut. Because your gut is what regulates a lot of the inflammation that we’re talking about and your overall immune system.
[1:08:18] Ashley James: It’s like fighting a war on all fronts. If we’re constantly fighting a war on all fronts, then our resources dwindle and we can’t do it. You can’t fight a war on all fronts, and our immune system is our army. If we send out our army over there, and over there, and over there, and over there, and are constantly fighting all fronts, then how can we defend home our home territory? We can’t. To look at it it’s just like you want to keep your military, your immune system, keeping your nation, your body where you live to be healthy instead of having to fight on all fronts.
It comes down to something as simple as what you put in your mouth can be building you up or tearing you down. Is it worth the five seconds of it, “Oh, but the pizza tastes good, but the ice cream tastes good, but the beer tastes good?” Is it really worth five seconds of it tastes good for the days, or hours, or weeks of the effect of we’ve put stressors on our body, we’ve torn our body down, we’re not building our body up, we’re not providing the nutrients our body needs. Is it really worth it?
My aunt used to always say, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips,” but it’s more like a moment on the lips and weeks, and weeks of our body being out of balance. So bring it back into balance, and we can actually find delicious ways to make healthy food. That’s why I created the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership. To teach people how they can make delicious food that also nutrifies the body.
Being dairy-free in our household, and also sugar-free, and having a four-year-old—who’s almost five—he asks for ice cream. I’m not going to say, “No, you can’t have ice cream.” We get into the kitchen and we make whole food ice cream, and he loves it. I throw some spinach in there too, some frozen blueberries, some spinach, some coconut milk, and blend it all up either in the Vitamix or I put it in an ice cream maker. It is so delicious. Sometimes I’ll add stevia or I’ll add dates, and he loves it. He loves helping make it. He knows he’s getting nutrients into him. It tastes even better than what you can get in the store because it’s not a chemical crapstorm—if you look at the ingredients in ice cream.
There are ways to utilize food and utilize the kitchen to support the body. I love that you brought that into perspective. Thank you. The listeners—in the Learn True Health Facebook group—asked a bunch of questions. I want to make sure we get to them. Of course, you’ve covered a few just by sharing what you’ve shared today.
The first one from Zachary, “Have him address the nonsense of not taking elderberry,” which you just did, “and vitamin D. Apparently there’s nonsense going around that we shouldn’t take vitamin D. On another note, explain how this virus is not changing the microbiology of how viruses attack the cell.” Have you heard anything about that? The virus is not changing the microbiology of how the viruses attack the cell? I guess he’s talking about the elderberry and vitamin D.
[1:11:39] Dr. Stephen Cabral: No, I have not. They’re not necessarily saying that Covid-19 is a complicated virus necessarily to get ahold of and really figure out. What seems to be the issue is its affinity for lung tissue and why. I have not seen any answers to that, that’s why we’ll continue to do weekly updates. I have a daily podcast, my main virus page is stephencabral.com/virus. I would invite people to continue to check up on what the latest is there, but I have not heard that so I’m not able to speak on it.
[1:12:24] Ashley James: Great, Kelly asks, and I feel that you’ve covered this to a certain extent, “Can we build immunity against Covid-19? I have read some reports of people getting reinfected, but a vaccine is constantly being hyped. It doesn’t make sense that both could be true.”
[1:12:40] Dr. Stephen Cabral: In my opinion, if it is the same exact strain, your body—if infected with this virus—will create the proper antibodies to fight off these particular antigens. If that’s the case, you could certainly get it again in your body, but you will most likely be asymptomatic. The virus can enter your body, it enters children’s bodies. People are saying children are immune to it. Children are not immune to Covid-19, they just don’t show any symptoms, for the most part. They still get the virus but their bodies are super healthy for the most part. I shouldn’t say super healthy. They’re super balanced, and they just haven’t lived enough life. They haven’t missed enough sleepless nights, and studied, and been up all night for term papers. They haven’t done all that, and they have all their reserves, for the most part.
If it’s my opinion that if it’s the same exact strain next year, then our bodies will be absolutely fine and immune to it. Again, it will still affect the same people, 65-75 plus that have an imbalanced immune system that can’t mount a normal inflammation and immune-based response. I don’t see why if we are all getting this that we would need that vaccination next year. I don’t understand that part to it.
Here’s the thing with the flu, they’re guessing at what the strain is going to be. There are 100 plus strains of the flu. The US flu vaccination is often found to be about 30% effective, and this is based on the Center for Disease Control—their specific stats. They base it on what’s already happened in other parts of the world for this particular flu season. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong, but they have to guess at the strain. They use about two to three different strains maximum.
[1:14:31] Ashley James: I’ve seen some studies coming out that show that getting the flu vaccination increases susceptibility to Covid-19. Have you heard about this?
[1:14:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have read on that I’m just not speaking on it because, again, it’s one of those things that I don’t know if there’s any validity to it.
[1:14:52] Ashley James: Got it.
[1:14:55] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Could be true.
[1:14:57] Ashley James: We should do a whole episode on vaccines because we put a lot of stock into, and we’ve obviously been marketed to that they’re the most safe and effective way. If you look at it, if we look at history, if we don’t study our history we’re doomed to repeat it, and we’re definitely doomed to be duped time and time and time again because media is wonderful at controlling how we think.
If we look back on when they implemented a marketing campaign around breastfeeding versus formula, they said that formula is so much superior than breast milk, and that we should switch to feeding formula to babies because our scientists made it. Therefore, we’re smarter than God, or we’re smarter than nature, and we should stop doing all breast milk.
Now, of course, we know that that wasn’t true. Although, I am so grateful that formula exists because there are times when mothers can’t breastfeed. In those times, the baby should always get fed no matter what. Breast milk is so much more superior to anything we could ever make in a lab. The immune system is so much more intelligent than anything we could ever make in a lab. We, of course, want to use we use allopathic medicine when it’s a good tool. We want to use natural medicine when it’s a good tool. We want to know when each tool is necessary, and unfortunately, it’s very unlikely we’ll ever be told the truth because money’s involved. If companies like pharmaceutical companies can make a ton of money, they’re going to push their agenda and lobby and everything.
We have to step back at the 30,000-foot view, talk to Naturopaths—like you—and look at the science and the research. I’ve interviewed so many people in vaccines. This idea that flu shot, for example, harms the innate arm of the immune system and leaves us more susceptible the next year to catching the flu and ends up weakening people. It creates a weakening like a hole in our defense system. For some people that could be fatal.
There’s no perfect solution, but it’s interesting that several people have brought up this concept to me or have shown me these studies where they’re seeing—and these are one of the studies was within the Pentagon—that people who get the flu shot are the more susceptible to like upper respiratory infections, and could potentially be more susceptible to the coronavirus should they get it.
There’s another concern—because I’m here in Seattle—that’s where we’re testing in the United States. Currently, they’re testing the first run of the vaccine, and the concern is that it’s actually going to create more of a spread because it’s a live virus. Vaccines, you can have shedding. Is this true? Should we be concerned that if someone gets a vaccine—like a coronavirus vaccine—that they could then potentially infect others?
[1:18:14] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Without a doubt, to me, I don’t believe in experimenting on people. I think that that is very, very dangerous with unproven things. Keep in mind we already have evidence of this. When SARS came about a couple of years ago, they rushed to create a very quick vaccine. They discontinued it because they found that many people who got the vaccine—not all—ended up with something called Guillain-Barré syndrome. This is a damage to the liver. You literally permanently damage the liver, and that was from directly tied to the vaccination.
I don’t believe in experimenting with human life. I also am very worried about companies that are not liable. If I do anything, if anybody else does anything well you’re liable, but these companies that produce these things can come out with them very quickly, and they don’t have to have a lot of necessary science behind them because there’s no liability and that’s what was passed.
I also believe that unless you are part of that special population that’s more immune-compromised, getting the virus creates your own natural immunity. I don’t believe people like—we’re talking about relapses. Relapses maybe, but maybe you never fully recovered from the virus. That’s more likely, meaning that okay, you slowed the replication so your symptoms started to slow, but you didn’t kill the virus. Then you became under greater stress, or you stopped your specific protocol—whatever you were doing—and the virus then started to replicate again. That’s very common. That happens in the herpes virus, and Epstein-Barr virus, and with mononucleosis all the time. There are relapses all the time. It’s still the same one.
Then in terms of getting on a yearly basis, you very well may, but the symptoms would be so much less. Don’t let anybody fool you. People who get the flu vaccine still get the flu. I know many people who got the flu vaccine and still got the flu. Their rebuttal is, “Well, it was not as severe as what it would have been.” How do you know that? I’m just really like, “In what a parallel universe do you live that you know it wouldn’t be as strong?” I don’t get that.
Viruses have always been around. I’m not saying that this not a scary thing and that this is not serious, it is a serious situation. I don’t know that the tools we currently have with conventional medicine hold our answers. That’s all that I’m saying.
[1:20:42] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m right there with you. Mandy says, “Is a global shutdown necessary or is it an overreaction? Is this virus worthy of global economic collapse?”
[1:20:53] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If you were to ask someone who is 77.4-81 years old, you’re asking them is the economy worth the trade-off for their life? That’s a hard question to answer, right? What is more valuable? It’s an impossible choice, and it’s an impossible question to answer. My parents are in their mid-60s so they’re over 65. I’ll want them to stay healthy and safe, but the only way for them to stay healthy and safe is to take this very seriously because they are the most at risk. They can’t see their grandkids right now because their grandkids could be the carriers right now and not even know it.
Those are all challenging things, but at the same time, like you just said, okay so now 100 million people now become homeless. That creates mental health—I don’t know. That’s a really hard question for me to answer. I worry about both sides of the equation. What I’m seeing right now is that this is the same demographic as those who are at risk for the flu. So creating a global shutdown not only is unrealistic, but not possible.
Again, you’re going to be waiting at the supermarket. When you are at that grocery food store you’re exposed to other people. You are now bringing that back to your family. They’re being exposed to other people. A virus, unfortunately, has to run its course. Our job is to slow it as much as we can, but it has to run its course.
[1:22:33] Ashley James: Right, right. This is a very interesting global lesson in, I don’t know, in ethics? We’re really looking at the ecology of a situation because on one hand, people might become homeless—whole families. It’s really disruptive. On the other hand, people are dying. We need to mount the Goldilocks response, but we don’t know what that is yet. I just saw this last night, the latest the CDC has brought out is that we have in the United States begun to lessen the curve. That we’re on the other side of the curve. We don’t know if there’s going to be another spike because people all leave their homes again because they see this information, or now, more states are hunkering down and giving people mandatory house arrest, self-quarantine.
The good news is though that the CDC is seeing that we are lessening the curve already. The measures that we’ve taken already have begun to slow it down, but like you said, the virus needs to run its course. We need enough ventilators, we need to know what medications work, and we also need to support the terrain of the body and teach people. You and I were talking about this right before we hit record that the shelves are empty in grocery stores.
All the Oreos are gone, all the Twinkies are gone, but the fruits and vegetables—you and I stocked up on our—I got a fridge full of fruits and vegetables because I always do. I’ve got a big freezer full of frozen fruits and vegetables as well. I’ve potatoes, and rice, and beans. These are foods that easily keep. We’re always eating fruits, and vegetables, and potatoes, rice, beans. These foods are easy to get because people are stocking up on junk food and alcohol and not on the healthy foods that are going to boost their immune system.
It’s kind of maddening but it’s because they just don’t know. They just don’t know that what the food, every single molecule they put into their mouth could actually be supporting their body to the point where their body could mount a healthy response, and it would increase their survival rate.
Hopefully, those who are listening can share this episode with those they love. The Oreos, alcohol, and pizza, and whatever, all these processed foods, and sugar could potentially give them a worse outcome instead of a better outcome if they were to be exposed to the virus. That they need to take that just as seriously as they are taking the vaccine and the different medications that are being proposed to work.
[1:25:36] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Absolutely, 100%.
[1:25:38] Ashley James: Jessica says, and we did talk about this a little bit, she says, “Exactly how is it spread,” you talked about that, “and how could we prevent it from spreading,” and you talked about that, “just breathing the same air? So if we’re all just in the same grocery store just breathing that air is that enough or do you have to cough or sneeze out the droplets?” So could someone be just breathing out these viruses and they float around for 6 feet or 12 feet? She also wants to know about the hype around the masks. Does any kind of mask work? Could we sew our own? A lot of people are sewing their own masks or sewing masks for healthcare providers. Does that work or does it have to be some special kind of filter?
[1:26:22] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes, and that’s one of the biggest things is that most masks are proven not to work for this virus and many other viruses. That’s because it’s not the proper material used, and it’s not tight enough fitting. I see people on planes and walking around and the whole side of the mask is open. I just don’t understand that. If you’re breathing in, you’re sucking air into your mouth and nose that’s not going to work. An N95 mask is what you’re looking for, and those will be tight-fitting because they know how to make those masks specifically.
Now those are on backorder pretty much everywhere, but you want to make sure you get a good quality if you choose to use one N95 mask. In terms of breathing in the air, the reason they’re saying six feet is that, just like you said, they’re giving it buffer zone, but someone could cough or sneeze and it goes who knows, 15 feet. Twelve is an arbitrary number, but if some people sneeze, yeah, they could go straight across the room. There’s no doubt about it.
[1:27:25] Ashley James: The gold Olympics of sneezers.
[1:27:26] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You should down and into your elbow.
[1:27:28] Ashley James: If we sneeze down into our elbow we’re preventing the spread?
[1:27:31] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It could be a long jump.
[1:27:34] Ashley James: The long jump of sneezes.
[1:27:37] Dr. Stephen Cabral: There will be fluid with it, so it’s going to be spread airborne through that way. A normal breath should not spread the virus, however, that’s why they’re giving the buffer zone of six feet because three feet is typically where a breath might move out to, but not six feet, and that will drop, it will fall. It won’t fall immediately, but whatever comes out of the mouth will eventually fall. That’s the best that I can give right now, but again, if you don’t have a healthy body you shouldn’t be out right now because you just don’t know. That’s just a chance. Then if you do go out, well, you can wear gloves and you can wear an N95 mask.
[1:28:21] Ashley James: A lot of places can receive groceries, and delivery of food, a delivery of groceries. Let’s say someone’s at risk let’s. Say they’re 77 years old or maybe they’re a population is at risk like they’re on immune suppressants because they have some kind of illness, autoimmune, or they’ve had cancer, or they have asthma, and they know they’re at risk, and they want to stay home, so they’re getting home deliveries.
If the person that collected the food and put it in the bag coughed, and now it’s spread on to that, and then get the home delivery, can they just wash the fruits and vegetables, and wash everything and that’ll be enough to not get it? I know this again hypothetical. I’m just wondering how? Do we need to like Lysol the bag as it comes in the house? What preventive measures? If we’re quarantined at home and we’re receiving shipments of food into the home, what are some common-sense things to do?
[1:29:26] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, whoever’s delivering it can just leave it right at your door, so that’s the first. If you are 65-plus, hopefully, you have someone that could potentially shop for you or you can have it shipped to you. So have them leave it outside the house so you don’t need to come into contact with them. If anything can be frozen, freeze it. That’s because it will kill a virus typically within two to three days, so keep in your freezer for two to three days.
It’s the same thing with fish and parasites, you just freeze it, it will kill the parasites if there are parasites in it and so on and so forth. It’s funny but if you get moths in your closet people will freeze their clothes for two to three days and it kills any of a lot of eggs basically from it. Freezing does a really good job at that. Anything that you’re going to put in your fridge you could absolutely use—on the packaging—some hot soap and water or any type of wipe that’s been shown to kill a virus. There are many of those wipes.
You can use a more natural one with essential oils, or you can use more of the Lysol wipes and that would be fine. Whatever you feel comfortable. Pretty much everything is packaged, so that will that protect you for the most part. I wouldn’t be too worried about that.
[1:30:37] Ashley James: Very good. Cool, cool. Those masks that people are making—the homemade masks that are not N95 masks, it would help people who have—maybe they’re asymptomatic and they have it and if they cough or they’ll actually have it and they have a fever and they’re coughing. If they wear the mask then they’re preventing—if they’re not going to cough in their elbow they can wear a mask and it’s actually just going to prevent the particles from entering the air and infecting other people. People who have it could wear a mask to help others, but it wouldn’t help themselves.
[1:31:08] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You’re saying a homemade mask and one N95 mask?
[1:31:13] Ashley James: Homemade mask instead of an N95 or all the masks that are not N95. Basically, the homemade ones, the flimsy ones it’s not going to help prevent it for that person, but if the person has it they could wear the mask to prevent them from spreading it because it’s blocking the particles from spreading?
[1:31:35] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Only the majority but the problem is that the filter on the mask is not small enough to allow the particles to be completely trapped. That’s why the N95 is a smaller filter. It’s almost like when you look at certain air filters for your home, some do a great job up to 95%, some do a great job up to 99%. The N95, the 95 I believe stands for 95% for the filtration rate.
Yes, any mask is better than no mask. There’s no doubt about it. A mask is better than no masks, but that mask will not prevent the stoppage or getting of the actual virus itself in some cases. Now in many, okay, it blocked it, yes, good. But no, I can’t say that that would actually be effective completely.
[1:32:23] Ashley James: Okay, so it could lower the chance slightly but not 100%?
[1:32:29] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I would agree with that, yes.
[1:32:31] Ashley James: Okay. Stephen says, and I love this question, “Can colloidal nano silver help aid in making the body an unsuitable host for the coronavirus?”
[1:32:40] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I wouldn’t say that it’s going to make it unsuitable because we’ve talked many times about the terrain. The terrain is the body’s ability to have a balanced pH, to have a balanced natural killer cells in the body. What colloidal silver will do is it will kill a virus or other things like that inside of the body. It’s not that it makes it unsuitable because I don’t even think that we’re necessarily talking about preventing you from getting the coronavirus. What we’re talking about is for you not having the major symptoms and being able to fight it off, and colloidal silver could be used when you do get it. So I just want to clarify that as well. To our knowledge, there’s nothing that we know that we can prevent it, but we know how to boost the immune system.
[1:33:21] Ashley James: Boost the immune system to the point where you’re asymptomatic or you have very little symptoms. It’s kind of what’s to be expected. It’s spreading around, we’re all going to mount an immune response, and so we just got to get our bodies as healthy as possible. Follow Dr. Cabral’s protocol for getting your body as healthy as possible. I love your protocol. It’s so well-balanced, and it’s so effective.
We just got to get our bodies as healthy as possible, get the terrain as healthy as possible, so when we do get exposed to Covid-19 or any other virus because let’s be honest, there are many, many, many pathogens out there that could be potentially fatal if our body is not healthy enough to fight it. We walk around with our heads in the sand stressing ourselves out to the max, staying up too late, eating junk food, drinking alcohol.
We live like the masses, and our bodies—as a nation, as many nations in general, not specifically us listeners because I think my listeners are more health-conscious—but the masses have not created a terrain of the body to support the body’s ability to fight healthfully and to thrive. The problem with that is we were looking at these big statistics of the population. If the whole population ate nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day every day and didn’t eat junk food, my goodness would these numbers ever be different in terms of survival rate. It’s not a death sentence. These pathogens aren’t death sentences, but if you don’t take care of your body, then yes it is.
I like coming back to the analogy of a car because men, they wouldn’t put the wrong oil or the wrong fuel in their car knowingly. It’s the same thing. It’s like put the right fuel in your body. You wouldn’t put a 50:1 or what’s that mixture? Five to one or what’s the mixture where you put in your car? You wouldn’t put like an oil-gas mix in your car, but you would in your jet ski or some lawnmowers. You just wouldn’t put the wrong fuel in the vehicle. Yet the majority of people out there are putting the wrong fuel in their bodies.
You take a car who hasn’t had an oil change in a very, very, very long time, has had the wrong fluids put in, wrong gas. Take a Ferrari and put in just regular gas, which is going to throw the timing off, put more stress on the engine, and then you’re not giving it an oil change after 20,000 miles, and then you decide to drive you know 100 miles an hour through the mountains, and it breaks, of course, it does.
That’s what we’re doing is we’re not taking care of the body, and then we put it under a stressor. Those who are under high stress—like the children in South Korea are under high stress because socially, they are taught to get very little sleep and study a great deal because there’s only a handful of universities there—the top universities. They are all taught that you should only sleep four hours a day and study the rest of the day so that you can get into the right university.
So socially, from a very young age, children are taught to be incredibly stressed out. Then we’re seeing the young adults having certain symptoms of the Covid-19, whereas others in other countries are not because of the terrain of the body. If you’re under a high amount of stress for a long period of time—we’re not getting enough sleep—that is enough to throw the body out of balance.
It all comes back to getting that 30,000-foot view, taking care of the terrain of the body, so that when you are hit with any pathogen that you will overcome. Of course, we want to run to allopathic medicine when the symptoms become to the point where we need it because that’s where they thrive, that’s where they shine. Drug-based MD medicine is great at emergency medicine. That’s where they’re really good, but they really suck at helping people get the body healthy, and in chronic health conditions, which is what you’ve talked about before.
Amy says, “What’s the best precautionary measures to boost the immune system,” which you’ve already talked about, “It’d be nice to understand ways that don’t cost a lot of money, the basics.” For those who are on a budget, what’s the absolute basic thing that people could start to do today that gives the biggest bang for the buck?
[1:38:13] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If I could only do two I would do something we call the Daily Nutritional Support and vitamin D3 because that’s maybe $50 for the month, and it would give you all of your B vitamins, it would give you some vitamin C on a daily basis, 15 grams of protein because you need those amino acids to help boost the immune system as well, and then you get your vitamin D for overall immunity. There’s already zinc in there, there’s already—like I said your—electrolytes and minerals.
That’s what I would do Daily Nutritional Support, and I would do liquid vitamin D3 so that you could dose it for your kids and you could also dose it for yourself. That’s the least expensive. If I could add one more on to that I would do then the extra vitamin C, and then I would do the extra zinc, and then after that, I would do the extra omega-3s, again, if you’re on a budget.
[1:39:05] Ashley James: Got it, and switch over to healthy foods, and cut out sugar, and processed crap, and alcohol.
[1:39:11] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, that comes first. Food always comes first before supplements. I don’t want anybody to think they can supplement their way out of it. Whole food diet comes first and the supplements are just like they say, they are a safeguard to anything that you may have missed in your healthy diet—which just letting you know from 20 years of practice and doing people’s food on a daily basis—we’re all short a little bit somewhere. The supplements just help to fill in the gaps, and then times like this they boost the immune system when we need it the most.
As you were saying, the problem in the car analogy makes perfect sense. The problem is your car won’t run without the proper fuel right. I guess the good and bad thing is our bodies will run for 15, 20, 40 years before they start to break down with the wrong food. So let’s start eating the right food now so that we are healthy. We’re a healthy 75-year-old. We don’t want the medication.
[1:40:07] Ashley James: It’s really sad that the majority of adult Americans, that over 70% of the population in America is on at least one prescription medication. That is not health. Being on a medication means that you don’t have perfect health, for the most part. Like type 1 diabetes, obviously, there are certain medications that are life-saving. High blood pressure medications, that’s an indication that something’s out of balance nutritionally or out of balance in some way—stress, nutrition, the terrain of the body—and the bodies were mounting a response.
Then the MDs come in and suppress that response instead of looking at the root cause. In so many cases, people are on multiple medications and then they need medications to manage the side effects of those medications. It’s poisoning the body, it’s causing stress on the liver. Medications and this is very common knowledge you can google it, but most medications actually have us burn through our nutrients faster. So there are nutrient deficiencies that arise from taking certain medications diving us deeper into nutrient deficiency and creating more and more stressors on the body, taking us further and further away from a balanced healthy terrain, and taking us further, further away from the body’s ability to mount a healthy and balanced response when the immune system needs to.
That’s why I love Naturopathic medicine, and that’s why I love the work that you do is that for listeners that are on medication, and they’ve been told by their MDs they’ll be on it for the rest of our life like metformin, “Oh, you have to be on it for the rest of your life.” This is such baloney. Those doctors should be held accountable because the information is out there that we can heal our bodies with food and nutrition that we can bring our bodies back into balance, and it’s science-based.
I don’t want to say, everyone just throw their meds out, don’t do that. Go work with Dr. Cabral, work with Naturopathic doctors, work with functional medicine practitioners and doctors, and get your body so healthy it no longer needs medication. That’s the goal. That’s the goal to be so healthy. In our 70s, 80s, 90s be a Centurion, be so healthy that we don’t need medication, and it’s possible. MDs will tell you it’s not possible because that’s their training, because their training has been backed by pharmaceutical companies for the last 100 years, but don’t get me started.
Sherry says, “Awesome comments so far. I’ve also heard that it’s killed off by heat,” The Covid-19 is killed by heat, “and that it starts in the nasal passages. That’s where our body is coolest. There’s been some talk of using heat from a blow dryer,” can you imagine standing there with a blow dryer and breathing it into your nose? That’d be really annoying. “Or getting in a sauna. Is there anything accurate about that about sweating in a sauna every day to help kill the virus or breathing in heat through a hairdryer?”
[1:43:15] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I can’t recommend the heat from a hairdryer for so many different reasons. We could get into EMFs, we could get into just burning off—you’re basically burning out your mucus in your nasal passages. I don’t recommend that, but it is true. That is why I’m very optimistic about this as well, and that’s why I’m okay with the social distancing, and the quarantining for right now because we need to catch up to the point where we can get more ventilators, that we can get more testing to people earlier, that we can do all those things. Then hopefully, in the future, we’re more prepared.
I’m very optimistic either way because most viruses—we don’t know about Covid-19 yet because we just haven’t, but it is a coronavirus. We have experience with coronavirus. Coronavirus has been around a while. This is a different strain of a coronavirus. Now, from the previous knowledge base, we can say viruses don’t do well in this summer heat, which is why the flu is typically a winter-based virus.
I’m very optimistic by June-July this will slow down regardless because the virus will have more difficulty living outside the body. Going back to the sauna, you can replicate summertime now in a sauna—will heat up your core temperature. Heating up your core temperature is akin to a fever, which kills viruses and also speeds up the flow of white blood cells. I absolutely do recommend a sauna.
[1:44:41] Ashley James: I love that. I have a Sunlighten Sauna and I just love it. For those who don’t have enough space in their home, they have one that’s an ultra-low EMF, non-toxic that you can lie in. It’s like a cocoon, and it heats you up. Then you can just wipe it off, pack it away, and put it in the closet when you’re not using it. Even people in apartments can use it. You would say one sauna session a day, heat up your core temperature may be between 30 minutes and 60 minutes—depending on your hydration level—would be good as a preventive, or would be good to do when you have the virus or both?
[1:45:24] Dr. Stephen Cabral: The research on sauna is incredible for using it five times a week at 19 minutes per day. I did a podcast on that.
[1:45:30] Ashley James: Really? That’s great.
[1:45:32] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It’s incredible. Again, going back to medication, there’s no medication that comes close to this, but if there was it would be a trillion-dollar drug. If you use a sauna for 19 minutes a day, now this is a Finnish sauna so an infrared sauna is not going to get as high of heat so you’ll double the time. Anyway, so when you look at that, 19 minutes a day decreased all-cause mortality by just about 42%. It decreased all cardiovascular risk of death, which is the number one killer by over 60%.
Again, if you could decrease all-cause mortality—any cause of death—by over 40%, it’d be a trillion-dollar drug. You can get that with a sauna and using it for 19 minutes, five days a week. It was a huge study. I have a podcast just called 19 minutes. You can just type that in at stephencabral.com/podcast, and I’m telling you right now, you will want to invest in a sauna after seeing the research on saunas. It’s incredible.
[1:46:31] Ashley James: Wow. I love that. That’s new to me. I always love looking at all the research around saunas, but that is so cool. I’m going to go listen to that episode. That sounds great. We should just do that anyway. So for infrared, you could just do 40 minutes where if you stay hydrated throughout the day the 40 minutes five days a week is totally doable, but if you get a headache after, or if you get a headache the next morning you did not hydrate enough, or you need to back off and not do 40 minutes, and then you work your way up to it.
It’s just a matter of keeping well-hydrated, also drinking some coconut water if you feel like your electrolytes are off. If you drink some coconut water and a big glass of water and your headache immediately goes away, then you know that that was maybe an electrolyte or a dehydration. That’s my thing is dialing that in because I like to see how long I can sweat in the sauna, but not more than an hour. I’ll get in there, and I’ll really know I did not hydrate enough or balance it out enough if I wake up the next morning with a headache. I’ve had to dial that in.
[1:47:41] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes.
[1:47:42] Ashley James: Sorry, did you have any more to say about that?
[1:47:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I was just going to say for people starting out with the sauna, ten minutes, twenty minutes is great. Just see, do you get lightheaded? Does your heart rate start to increase? Just because you might not be used to the heat. We’re both saying the same thing, we don’t want you to start right away at forty minutes or whatever you might need, and it’s also based on temperature.
An infrared sauna you actually get more benefit by staying in longer because it’s not just about the sweating, it’s actually the absorption of the far infrared rays. So 120 degrees, 250 degrees maximum for an infrared sauna, and then a Finnish sauna is about 160-180 degrees. That’s why you can go in for less time because of the higher heat. So the lower the heat a little bit more time, and then the higher the heatless time. Hopefully, that helps.
[1:48:33] Ashley James: Right. I was just in a Finnish sauna and it was 180 degrees, and I was so uncomfortable. We couldn’t even last five minutes in there. I was just so uncomfortable. The air was really hot, the seats were hot. My body was kind of screaming the whole time, whereas when I’m in an infrared, oh, man. It’s easy. The air is cool and easy to breathe like 120 or mine gets to 132. My body is just sweating bullets within 30 minutes, but I am comfortable the entire time. It’s very enjoyable, and it’s not stressful.
I commend those who can sit in the Finnish sauna for 19 minutes because I couldn’t do five, but in my Sunlighten Sauna I can do 30-40 minutes and feel very, very, very comfortable. Those who are afraid of heat or couldn’t handle Finnish saunas—just know that infrared saunas. Of course, you got to get a brand like I love Sunlighten. You got to get a brand that’s low EMF and non-toxic. There are so many cheaper saunas out there that are cheap for a reason, so you have to really, really be careful—buyer beware about that.
Rosemary says, “I heard A1 receptors in the lungs are what the virus adheres to. What enhances these receptors and what decreases the attachment?”
[1:49:53] Dr. Stephen Cabral: That’s a great question. I actually believe this, although that’s not proven yet as well. Its most doctors believe this now so I do agree with it, and if we’re looking at natural foods what decreases the adherence would be—and people usually like this recommendation—dark chocolate, like real dark chocolate, not milk chocolate. I typically say 75% plus, prunes, green vegetable juice, flaxseed, omega-3s, and blueberries have all been shown to be highly beneficial.
[1:50:32] Ashley James: You know what, they ran out of frozen blueberries at my Costco. I was like, “Really? What health thing did I not hear? I’m going to go have to run to Trader Joe’s because I love their ultra-dark chocolate. I got a little trick for you, get the super ultra like—I don’t know—100% percent. This probably says 95% but one of those crazy, crazy, crazy dark chocolates that do not taste good. You get a square of it, and then you put a date on it. If you want to get really decadent, you put a little bit of nut butter on it, and then you eat that, and it’s like a truffle. It tastes amazing.
[1:51:12] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Sounds amazing.
[1:51:13] Ashley James: You could cut the dates in half too, you could just do a little thing, but yes, it’s very delicious and very nutritious. Dark chocolate, prunes, green juice, blueberries, flax, omegas, those are all things that we could start to incorporate right away. Could we eat greens or does it have to be juiced?
[1:51:32] Dr. Stephen Cabral: No, you could absolutely eat your greens and you should. It’s just when you do the green juice you just get more of the nutrients. You just wouldn’t be able to eat five pounds probably of vegetables at that meal.
[1:51:43] Ashley James: I will take you up on that challenge. I get one to two pounds of vegetables a day or more. After about one pound of vegetables at a meal, I am full. Yes, you’re right. We should probably start juicing those greens. You can get it to Costco. My Costco always has a giant bag for $4.95, a giant bag of organic super greens. Grab a bunch of those. What if we grabbed a bunch, and juiced it, and froze the juice? Would it still be effective or does it need to be fresh in order to preserve the enzymes and the nutrients that help us with this?
[1:52:28] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You’ll still receive the majority of the nutrients, but you won’t receive the enzyme. If possible, I love the juice to be pressed and then consumed right away—at least within 30 minutes—but you’re still getting massive benefit either way. I can’t complain if someone’s saving it, and freezing it, and using it later.
[1:52:50] Ashley James: Great, thank you. Leslie asked a question I feel like you’ve answered, “What does the future of this virus look like? Will it ever go away or is this going to be around for another season?” It’s going to be a seasonal thing. You’ve said that this in the works, this is just one of the many viruses that we’re going to be exposed to every year, but we’re going to, hopefully, our bodies will—of course, we got to take care of ourselves—be able to mount an in immune response, and then it will eventually no longer be a problem. Is there anything you’d like to say to Leslie about her question?
[1:53:21] Dr. Stephen Cabral: My answer would be that we do seem to see these viruses come and go every year to two years. Again, there has been less sleep for me over the past couple of weeks just really looking at the research to bring people the truth of what is really happening. We’ve seen the swine flu, we’ve seen SARS, we’ve seen Zika, we’ve seen all of these different things, and they typically have one season to them, and then they move on. So I’m not sure, well I’m not saying we won’t see it again, and I’m not saying that we won’t see another virus next year or the year after that.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome, which is SARS, MERS, swine flu, all of these have come and gone. I’m not as worried about seeing this again next year as they would a different coronavirus, a different strain, because remember, this is a coronavirus. It’s the Covid-19 coronavirus. Maybe there’ll be a different strain next year, and that would be more likely than seeing the same exact one, in my opinion.
[1:54:37] Ashley James: Okay. SARS was way back in the early 2000s, and we haven’t heard of any kind of outbreak of it since, so that makes sense. The media is really good at hyping anything to be afraid of, and we really haven’t heard of any reoccurrence. Just using that as an example, I like your idea, but viruses can mutate, they can always change. Like you said, we’re going to see more viruses in the future.
Hopefully, we’re going to learn as a globe. We’re going to learn as a whole planet is going to learn how to create a healthier like more Goldilocks approach to this. This is going to be very interesting. In the last few months and the next few months we’re going to be studying the numbers for years to come and using and figuring out a global response that is more balanced.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to create a better ecology for everyone. Tracy asks a great question about vitamin C, “Which kind should we take, sodium ascorbate, ascorbic acid, plant-based vitamin C? The information is so confusing out there.” She says she has some sodium ascorbate. What about you hear buffered? Oh, buffered vitamin C, and of course there’s acerola cherry powder.
There are all kinds of different forms: powder, pill. What kind is the best to take or if someone has access to basically Walmart, this is what they have. Should they just take any vitamin C because any vitamin C is better than no vitamin C, or is there some vitamin Cs in the market that should not be taken? What’s the best?
[1:56:29] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I formulate for Equilibrium Nutrition, and I just obviously—I want full disclosure there—I create all of the different formulas for the company. What I’ll say is it’s a functional medicine company, and the reason I mention that is a functional medicine company is like a thorn, a pure encapsulations in Equilibrium Nutrition. They do things differently.
They typically will not use genetically modified corn and other products like that. If you go to a Walmart, or Costco, or BJ’s, any of those places they’re looking at cost, and so they use the lowest quality ingredients to sell it at the lowest quality price. If you’re buying vitamin C from those places, you’re most likely—I don’t know that for sure—but you very well may likely be getting a GMO corn that I’m not an advocate of using.
However, viruses do respond to an ascorbic acid, which is a less expensive form of vitamin C. If you’re using higher dosages I do recommend a buffered form. On a daily basis, I recommend a product called Full Spectrum Vitamin C, and it’s part functional medicine, which is the ascorbic acid non-GMO form. Then it also is part acerola berry, hibiscus, and other natural forms of vitamin C that I love from a food base. So I get the best of both worlds.
Then for higher dosages, you can be very well served with a buffered vitamin C, and it’s buffered with either the sodium—that sodium ascorbate is sodium mixed with essential ascorbic acid, it’s bound to that—or calcium, magnesium, and potassium, which is what we do that are great alkaline-based minerals. Of course, if you want to add a little sodium, you could absolutely add a little pinch of sea salt, and then you have all of your electrolytes right there. Because you don’t want to do a lot of straight ascorbic acid at one time, and the reason is that it could affect your actual stomach lining as well.
[1:58:27] Ashley James: Very interesting. Right, we got to keep conscious of supporting the digestion because if we throw the digestion off then we’re throwing everything off. That’s the center of our health, very cool. I love the formulas that you’ve come out with. We’ve talked about that in our past interviews: episode 271 and 301, which I recommend listeners go back and listen to because Dr. Cabral talks about his overall formula for creating a healthy terrain of the body in detail in those interviews.
Jeff says, “Would be interested to know if,” he believes this virus actually originated from bat soup or some other nonsensical animal theory. “Could it possibly be a manmade virus cultured in a lab in China or some sinister objective? Wonder why China tried to suppress any knowledge of this horrific catastrophe from leaking out to the wider world?” Can we get into the conspiracies? What do you know? Let’s just stick with what the facts that you do know.
[1:59:36] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Conspiracy theories?
[1:59:37] Ashley James: Well, hey. I’ve got the biggest tinfoil hat of everyone out there, I’m sure, but I want to stick to what is known, what’s factual, what you know is factual at this point.
[1:59:50] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’m not saying that the conspiracy theory is not true, I’m not discounting that at all. We just don’t know that to be true. We do know that the virus—or a virus very similar to this one—originated in the same city in China at a lab there. We know that that is at least possible, whether it was purposely or by a mistake released, again, that’s speculation. We don’t know.
Could it come from bat soup, people are saying that but as we know right now it can’t be transferred from a bat or there are a few other animals as well—or nonhumans that carry the virus—and we don’t know how that made the jump. No one has any idea how it made the jump to humans. Whether it was purposely released, non-purposely released—by accidents, someone was exposed in the lab and then walked out of the lab like not on purpose, that’s a possibility—or that it did come from a nonhuman species.
I have absolutely no idea. There are all sorts of theories, and I’ve read some of those theories. They very well may be true. I just don’t know that part to it.
[2:01:01] Ashley James: Right, yeah. Well, we’re hearing a lot out there. So we just need to stick with what we do know and also focusing on the conspiracy theories that there is an agenda, like a depopulation agenda, whatever, there are lots of them out there. Those will create stress. The fact is we will never know the truth. If it was man-made, if it was released on purpose, if it was released by accident, if this absolutely just 100% natural and just happened because the virus has happened. Focusing on the idea that there’s a sinister motive behind it creates stress, which lowers our immune response.
I like being awake and aware, I want everyone to be awake and aware, but at the same time, the more we focus on that there’s some evil out there that wants to kill us, the more we’re just stimulating the sympathetic nervous system response of fight or flight, the more we’re decreasing our immune response. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot. What we need to do is yes, continue to be awake and aware and detach from that.
If you are a person that believes in God connect with God. God is love. This is the time to hunker down and get more spiritual, get more connected to your Creator. Get surrounded—within your home while social distancing—by those you love, and your animals, and do things that decrease your stress because that is known right now to help your body.
If you believe that there’s this evil force out there that wants to depopulate us, well, they’re going to win simply by you fearing them because fear—living in constant fear is going to decrease your immune system and potentially leave you susceptible. It’s a catch-22. We have to focus on what we can control. What is within our control?
What’s within your control is your breath, what you put in your mouth, who you surround yourself with that’s within your control. Knowing and following our wonderful doctor’s advice today on what we can do: supplements, and food, and lifestyle changes will make a huge difference in our outcomes. Also in our mental and emotional health. Thank you for going over this question because it’s sort of the elephant in the room for many of us.
The thing is that whatever the fact is we’ll never know the truth, but whatever it is—because there’s no way to prove or disprove. Really, without a shadow of a doubt that this is one way or the other because it can always be manipulated, but holding on to a constant fear of something will harm you in the now. That is the truth.
We’ve got to detach ourselves from that fear and attach ourselves to love as much as possible and vibrate on that level because that really is great for the immune system. We’ve got a few more questions, I just want to blast through them really quick. Do some blood types have a greater immunity to the virus? I’ve heard this to be true.
[2:04:28] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’ve read that research as well saying that type A blood type is the most susceptible, and type O seems to be—again, small sample size, small studies. It’s possible, each blood type has their own specific proteins. Possible but I don’t want people to focus on that because every blood type—with a strong healthy immune system—will most likely be totally fine regardless of your blood type.
[2:04:57] Ashley James: Great. Kathy says, “If I do contract the virus, at what point are we not contagious?”
[2:05:06] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Fourteen days with no symptoms is what the medical establishment is saying.
[2:05:11] Ashley James: So if I get it today, let’s say I’m getting a fever, and a headache—cancel, cancel, cancel—and I move through. Three days later I have burning lungs, I have lung problems, and then a few days later I’m in the clear. Maybe I’ve been sick for 5-6 days. I have to wait 14 more days before I’m not contagious?
[2:05:36] Dr. Stephen Cabral: That’s the current recommendation. However, you are contagious before you even had symptoms. That’s the hard even if you do get symptoms, you’re still contagious before that. Is it 14 days from when you first started to feel symptoms or 14 days afterward? I can’t give you medical advice on this podcast for sure, what I can tell you is that you will not—I mean, again, I’m speculating myself—but you’re not going to be contagious 14 days after that. It’s very precautionary, but again, not a bad precaution, not a bad precaution.
[2:06:12] Ashley James: Okay. Daphne says, “I’d love to know more about the effect of painkillers and fever reducers on glutathione levels, and how that affects the immune system and brain health.” I love her question. We should do an entire episode on that alone, but let’s stick with just the Covid-19. If someone starts getting a fever, they’ve been tested, and they have Covid-19, or they’re suspicious of it, and they start pumping the ibuprofen because they want to lower their fever, how is that negatively affecting their overall outcome?
[2:06:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yeah, it does actually. This was one I was saying was speculation in the beginning but possible. Ibuprofen is now being contraindicated in China, in France, and possibly South Korea as well. I’m going with that. I’m agreeing with that because of its possible immunosuppression making you less likely to fight off the Covid virus. That I would not recommend ibuprofen for a fever.
The problem is you’re typically then going to switch over to acetaminophen, which would be more like a Tylenol. When you take Tylenol it does deplete the body of glutathione, and glutathione is the main detoxifier—at least while in phase 2 liver detox. If you had to choose one or the other, you would still probably choose acetaminophen, but keep in mind that a fever—as long as it does not get too high—is the body’s way of killing a virus as well as speeding up the flow of white blood cells to the infection.
[2:07:47] Ashley James: Okay. So if we can, don’t use any fever reducers or painkillers—if we can. I know there’s also natural—I mean homeopathy has been proven really effective, and I just did an interview on this. Because there are homeopaths who are treating many people with Covid-19, and they’re moving through the symptoms much faster because of the homeopathy. There’s homeopathy for fevers, but it doesn’t suppress the fever. It helps the body regulate the fever in a healthy way. That’s good to know that there are those options out there.
For a fever as we’re watching it as an adult, what’s an unsafe fever versus a safe fever? When should we go, “Maybe I should suppress this,” or is there never a time when we should think to suppress this.
[2:08:43] Dr. Stephen Cabral: A lot of people will say never suppress a fever, however, I’m a little bit more conservative in my approach. I have a 5 and 7-year-old daughter. By not suppressing a fever you do run the risk of seizures, and that can affect the brain. I’m not willing to do that. Again, I can’t tell you what to do for you, but what I can tell you with my daughters is we don’t let it get above 102.5 because we don’t want it to go above 103. Once we see it get to that level we’re going to lower the fever, and of course, we try to do that naturally. We do that through Epsom salt baths, you can use some homeopathic-based treatments as well, a lot of hydration.
For an adult, we don’t want it to get above 105. Once we start to see it get to 103.5-104, then as an adult—at least for myself and my wife—that is when we would start to lower that fever. Luckily, as a healthy human, hopefully, it doesn’t get that high, but of course, that’s not a bad thing. If your body shows symptoms of a fever say, “Oh, okay good. My body is fighting whatever it is.” The problem is, your body can’t keep fighting and fighting and it gets to be too far and then you, of course, do have to lower that fever—at least in my opinion.
[2:09:59] Ashley James: Seattle Children’s Hospital—anyone could google this: fever myths Seattle Children’s Hospital. I love them. They do a ton of fantastic work. They actually do a lot of more holistic research, so I’m very happy with the work that they do. They say fever—I believe it’s 108 or 109 as long as the child is responsive, can talk, or making eye contact, and not limp, and lethargic, and drooling, and not making eye contact, but a very high fever in a child can be healthy and safe.
Then just recently, when I did my interview with Cilla Whatcott, who’s a Ph.D. in homeopathy, she says that very interesting—and maybe you can comment on this—that the seizures that happen in children are due to a calcium deficiency. The sudden onset of a fever in a child, there’s not enough of the minerals for the muscles and the nerves to function correctly, and that causes the seizure. So we want to support the child, give them some calcium. Have you heard of that?
[2:11:14] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have not. Magnesium and calcium are used by the muscles to allow them to contract and relax, and the nervous system is made up of fats, and certain minerals as well, and B6. The issue is you always weigh the pros and the cons, and so that’s what I do. Everything we do is from a natural-based perspective, but we’re talking about acute-based circumstances.
How do you know if your child is potentially calcium deficient in the muscles or the nervous system as well? Keep in mind, the brain is also heating up, so this is also affecting the brain. I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen someone with a 105-degree fever. They are absolutely close to hallucinating, and they’re dehydrated. People have different risk tolerances, and I’m not willing to roll the dice. That’s me. Maybe 108-109, I’ve never seen that before, and I couldn’t recommend that.
[2:12:21] Ashley James: Maybe in the hospital, while they’re being hydrated and monitored, who knows, but I like your more conservative approach of after 105, start to take some precautions.
Cindy, she has several questions. You’ve already answered some of them, so we’ll just get to what I really like about her question. She lists pretty much everything you’ve listed: the garlic, vitamin D. She says astragalus, bee propolis, zinc, red algae, oregano, licorice root, vitamin C, probiotics. If we start to show symptoms, should we stop taking Echinacea, spirulina, and elderberry due to the possibility of a cytokine storm, which is what you already said no for the elderberry? Are any of these other supplements—all these supplements you mentioned—good? That we could just take all the time, in general? If we have the Covid-19, are there any that we just 100% should stop taking—beyond what you’ve already said in this interview.
[2:13:27] Dr. Stephen Cabral: What I recommended for the elderberry, I looked at the studies and the studies actually looked at four or five different herbs. They looked at five different specific cytokines in the immune system—certain interleukins—and it found that elderberry raised all five, Echinacea raised two out of the five, and then there was just one raised in the other herbs.
You could look at that as saying, “Okay, these raised the inflammatory response in the body on a Th1 basis, and that caused a cytokine storm.” It did and that’s exactly what it was supposed to do—I keep trying to tell people. I say that in a nice way like, “The herb is doing exactly what the herb’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to stimulate the immune response. However, there is too much at stake right now.”
If you end up with the fever and the coughing, I do believe that because we just don’t know that use the elderberry, use the Echinacea—which are proven immune boosters, and elderberry was proven to kill viruses—use them. Then if the symptoms start to get higher, I would stop. Only because we just don’t know. This is the first time this has come around.
I’m also saying we have so many other things that we can use. Someone mentioned colloidal silver, we have monolaurin, we have l-lysine, we have the fire cider, we have other things that we know plus all of our vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, melatonin that now are proven to be working. I’d say there’s no one herb that we have to use, use it now. If those symptoms really start to get aggravated, at least take the precaution and I would say come off. Hopefully, that helps.
[2:15:18] Ashley James: I love it. For those that have never taken melatonin before, don’t take it during the day. This is a nighttime supplement. I could just see some people falling—well, if you’re under house quarantine, sure, sleep all day. If you take too much melatonin you’ll get lucid dreams and nightmares. Dosing is different for everyone. What would you say people should start with? One milligram, three milligrams?
[2:15:40] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Most people will do fine with anywhere between one and three milligrams per night. That’s a very small dose. It’s a fraction of what your body makes on a daily basis. Two and a half to five milligrams is what a lot of people in our practice are using right now to really lower the cortisol at night and to produce that melatonin, which is a natural anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and hormone regulator.
Then if you were to get the virus and get run down, current more medical-based recommendations are 10-20 milligrams. I’ve certainly never gone that high before except when trying to reacclimate after long-distance travel for time zones, and that could be for short-term use. We’re not talking about long-term use. Again, right now, anywhere between one and five milligrams completely fine thirty minutes before bed. We like liquid melatonin because it’s in and out of your system a little quicker, and you don’t get groggy the next morning.
[2:16:39] Ashley James: Yes, me too. I really enjoy taking melatonin when I need it. This is a good time to take it, lower cortisol, help our bodies get enough sleep. That’s a good thing.
Cindy also asks about—she said she’s heard the immune system’s first reaction when we’re exposed to it is called the prime, and it sets the tone for the immune system response moving forward. She wants to know—obviously if we’re exposed we don’t know we’re exposed, that’s the thing. We don’t know when we’re experiencing the prime or the first. Like you said, when it touches our tonsils and our body goes, “Ah, virus. Okay, quick. Mount a response.” It sets the tone for the immune system moving forward is what she says. Is there any advice around that or we just really should just follow everything you said in this interview today?
[2:17:28] Dr. Stephen Cabral: She’s correct. That’s why typically your immune cells ramp up over 72 hours. So you’re exposed to a bacteria or virus, your body recognizes it—we’ll say it primes—it starts to create the proper immune response—a certain type of white blood cell natural killer cell—and then it begins to destroy that bacteria or virus. Oftentimes, if we don’t have to mount that larger response, well, we never feel any specific symptoms, but it’s working inside of our body. Maybe we just feel a little bit more rundown than usual, or we have a little headache.
We don’t know but that’s taking place. It’s also why antibiotics—oftentimes when taken on day four or five of our cold—only shorten the duration of a cold by about 24 hours. That’s because our body was creating the same immune response. So it’s interesting looking forward for most people like do you really need the antibiotic, that’s a question. Of course, don’t use antibiotics during a virus because antibiotics for antibacterial bacteria and virus is a virus, which is different than bacteria. They’re not going to help with your virus unless, of course, you’re using one of these newer drug combinations, which is the azithromycin and the hydroxychloroquine.
Again, you’re in really bad shape at that point. Again, I’m telling most people, you are most likely—if you are healthy—going to be fine. That’s good news. Let’s take care of our people that are immunocompromised, and that are elderly, and they need us for their sake to stay away for right now, but do their shopping for them, and get them all their supplies, and FaceTime them, and Skype them so that they know that they’re not alone, even though they do have to spend this time away from those people that might be carriers but asymptomatic.
[2:19:19] Ashley James: Very good. Last question, Sarah asks something, I really like this one. “If you are a carrier,” so like you said, 80% of the people that experience that they’re asymptomatic, and they have the virus, the body mounts the response, everything’s good. Especially all the wonderful listeners who take care of the terrain of their body and have a healthy balanced immune system and they mount an immune response, but they have the virus inside them. So they could potentially spread it to other people. At what point does it clear from you or do you always have it? Does it lay dormant in your body forever like a lot of viruses do? A lot of viruses, your body is constantly keeping them at bay. Does it ever leave your body or your body figures out how to—so are you always going to spread it? How does this work?
[2:20:13] Dr. Stephen Cabral: No, that should not be the case. There will be a period of time that your body has the virus active, and while it’s active you are contagious. When it is inactive—whether it’s dormant or whether we just kill it off like we do the flu. So if I got the flu in let’s say December, and I accidentally coughed on you, in July you wouldn’t get the flu.
We’re hoping that this type of virus—once gone, and incubated, and destroyed by our own body, or whatever we have—is no longer contagious. Whereas a particular virus-like a herpes virus—when active—could be passed on to someone else. I don’t believe—but again I don’t know—that the Covid virus will be contagious after the particular 14-day period of it being active in your body and you being contagious.
[2:21:15] Ashley James: But the virus always lives in your body like many viruses? They just live dormant in your body or does it get cleared out?
[2:21:26] Dr. Stephen Cabral: This particular one or like a flu most likely gets cleared out, and what we keep are the particular immune cells that recognize that in the past that then live on. When we do come into contact with it—typically they don’t last forever, but we know they last somewhere between five years, ten years or so—we’re able to fight it off again. I don’t believe that this will live on, but again I don’t know because this is not my expertise.
Does the virus live on here? It shouldn’t, but other viruses like Epstein-Barr virus, or a strain of herpes-based virus they do. They do live on in the body, they just become dormant because our immune system is strong enough to keep them dormant and it’s balanced enough. This is different though. This is not a herpes based virus. This is a—what seems like it may be—seasonal for this season just like last season’s flu strain was last season’s flu strain. Same with SARS, and avian or bird flu. There have been these before, and I believe that it’s just going to die off—that’s my optimism speaking as well—and that’ll be it.
[2:22:43] Ashley James: Excellent. So really very optimistic. We have to take it seriously. If we can we should. Obviously, avoid contact with those who are most susceptible. If we can, do social distancing and isolate yourself in your home. There are so many fun things. When I heard that we, potentially, were going to be told to stay in our homes, I actually got excited because I’m like, “Oh my gosh. All the things I’ve been putting off.”
We’re going to clear out that closet, we’re going to do the Marie Kondo thing. We started doing it, but now we’re going to finish the whole house, and we’ve got spring cleaning to do because it’s springtime now. I’ve got a huge garden in the backyard I’ve got to start working on. I just started thinking about all the things that we kind of put off every weekend because we’re just busy going out, going, going, going, running, running, running around. All the wonderful cooking I’m going to do.
So something I learned from Tony Robbins years ago that really helped me get over a huge negative hump in my life is asking yourself—when it comes to very bad situations, very difficult, and some situations that don’t seem like there’s any hope, this when you ask this question—what’s good about this? If you’re, “Okay, I don’t have money for rent. I have to stay at home, and there’s no work.” Just all these and that’s all you’re focusing on is all the negatives and the threat, threat, threat, and your body’s perceiving these threats. Ask yourself—in a very honest way, not a sarcastic way, but a very honest way—what is good about this?
You keep asking, and you keep trying to answer that question. It’s a thought exercise until your brain can get out of the fight or flight, and your brain actually starts to solve the problem. Maybe you figure out that you can do Uber Eats to make money. There are ways that we can solve every problem. They can’t even make a computer as smart as our brains. Our brains are amazing, but we’ve got to grab hold of the wheel and be the one driving the bus, and ask yourself, “What’s good about this?”
Instead of focusing on because I could have totally gone in the direction of, “This is the worst thing possible. What am I going to do? I’m going to be stuck in a house with a four-year-old. What do you mean we can’t leave the house? We’re going to be under martial law.” All the negatives. I can go down that road and stress my body out, or I can ask myself over, and over, and over again, “What is good about this? What’s good about this?”
I ended up with a really long list of wonderful things that made me excited about this. Of course, I’m not excited about martial law, of course, I’m not excited about the economy going into a tailspin and people losing their jobs, of course, I’m not excited about people being sick, but we can only control what we can control. When we can focus on what we can control, it does decrease stress. That helps our body, and it helps our immune system.
So focus on what we can control, eat healthy, get enough sleep, do things every day that brings you joy, move your body in a way that brings you joy. You can go out in nature walks. You’re not going to get the virus in the middle of the freaking woods. So get out, get out. Get some fresh air, get some sunlight. I don’t know if you’ve heard this but there are even talks that sunlight kills the virus. Have you heard of this?
[2:26:10] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have not, but I don’t discount that at all. One thing Ayurveda used to do is something called sunbathing, and you would get the natural infrared rays from the sun, you would get the UV rays—which we know kills bacteria on the body and potentially inside—and the sun creates vitamin D, but it also creates what’s called sulphuration. That increases the amount of sulfur in the body, which helps with detoxification.
So remember good food, clean water, fresh air, the sun, not too much beats that. I mean, really. That’s why I’m telling people prep with good food now because this could last another 6-12 weeks, and they are quarantining city by city. Please do prep with real food. We have fresh food for three to four weeks, and then we have our frozen food, and we have our rice and beans, and olive oil that we can make a meal of forever, and then we have our supplements.
If you have that and soap, don’t worry about the toilet paper as much, get soap. Get those other things, and you’ll be okay. You will be. It’s not going to be fun, I’m not saying that. For kids who are cooped up, it’s not great for parents, kids, for the economy, but we will be okay. If at least we can get the basic survival things.
[2:27:24] Ashley James: Yes, excellent. Wonderful. Know that it can be delivered to you. Amazon is still delivering. If we’re under home quarantine, they’re not going to cut us off from food supply. They’re going to cut us off from supply. Even in China, they have a system that they worked out because everyone was mandatory in their homes. They had a system where you would just report online how many people you have in your home, and then they would deliver, or have some way to get to you that amount of food per week. So they developed a system.
We’ve got lots of systems in place to make sure that everyone’s taken care of. You know what, God forbid, if you didn’t have food for a few days you can survive on water. We can fast. My husband just finished a 17-day water-only fast. Totally fine. Very sick people, like you said, should not jump into fasting for long periods of time, but if you’re in generally good health, we can live for a few days. We can skip a few meals, we’re going to be fine. We don’t want to do massive hoarding. We want to support our friends and family.
We can also grow quick greens. There are certain foods. There’s one guy I love in Australia, he just made a video. He’s Mark from Self Sufficient Me. You can look it up on YouTube. He just made a video of things to plant right now that grow quickly. So sprouts, you can sprout food. I went to Cash & Carry and bought, for $25, a giant 50-pound bag of lentils, and you can sprout lentils. I take one cup of lentils and it makes 8 cups of nutrient-rich, vitamin C goes through the roof, 700% vitamin C goes up when you sprout lentils, and also has amazing amino acids. So it’s a great protein source, a great vitamin source, a great live enzyme source, and you do it in your kitchen. You can be anywhere. It doesn’t matter the weather, you can do it in your kitchen.
So sprouting is a great thing to do. You can grow microgreens that grow really fast. You can grow spinach, and lettuce, and kale, some crops that grow faster. Something that comes to shoot quickly like radishes, and peas. So there are things that we can do to be self-sufficient. I love all the advice you gave today. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and for giving us everything that we can do to stay healthy.
We talked a little bit about colloidal silver. I love colloidal silver nasal spray. There are no negative side effects of doing that. Could we use colloidal silver nasal spray as a preventive if we do go out grocery shopping? Because it coats the nasal passages and that would kind of help destroy the virus. Is that something that you’re doing or that you recommend?
[2:30:15] Dr. Stephen Cabral: First and foremost, I want to let people know that I am not worrying about the virus. I am worried about it from the standpoint that I want to help as many other people as possible, but if I get it, I am confident in my body’s ability, in my ability to use proper nutrition, fasting, and nutritional supplements to be able to fight it off. I want people to know that first and foremost because stress and lack of sleep are going to cause me to be immunocompromised and cause far more damage—I believe—than me getting this particular virus. Again, I don’t want to get it. I’m not saying that at all.
The second is that I personally very much recommend colloidal silver nasal spray, but I also like a product by NutriBiotic called Nasal Spray, and it contains citricidal, which is a grapefruit seed extract. What you would do is you would actually spray it into the nasal passages, two squirts in each nostril before you go out, and then two squirts after you go out. You could also gargle with a little bit of fire cider, which of course will burn a little bit when you come back. What that does is it will kill anything that’s still on those surfaces.
[2:31:27] Ashley James: Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much. You’re such a wealth of knowledge. Please, listeners, check out Dr. Cabral’s website, and his podcast. Of course, all the links to everything that Dr. Cabral does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on for a third time. I definitely recommend listeners go back, check out to 271 and 301 as well for great information.
Normally, I end the podcast by asking the guests to share anything that’s been left unsaid. I really don’t feel like anything’s been left unsaid. You’ve been such a wonderful guest today. Thank you so much for everything that you do, and I really appreciate that you’ve helped ground us.
Really important, as important as our food, is decreasing stress and getting out of fear, and then using all the precautions that you’ve mentioned today, so that’s wonderful. You’re welcome back any time on the show, anytime you want to continue to teach, and bring great grounded science-based holistic information to us. We just would love to have you back. Thank you so much.
[2:32:41] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate you.
[2:32:43] Ashley James: Wonderful. That’s a wrap. It went longer than I thought, but I really, really, really think it’s going to be very appreciated by everyone. So thank you for taking the time to do this.
[2:32:57] Dr. Stephen Cabral: My pleasure. Thank you.
[2:32:58] Ashley James: Thank you so much. Well, stay safe. Are you allowed to go home? Are you allowed to fly to Boston or are you stuck, you’re grounded?
[2:33:05] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, we were supposed to fly out of LA so all our flights got canceled, and at that point, we just decided we’re just going to stay in our little quarantine area of the world and not go back to Boston, which is one of the hotspots. For now, we’re staying put.
[2:33:21] Ashley James: Are you able to get out in nature in your area?
[2:33:25] Dr. Stephen Cabral: That’s one of the reasons why we’re here. It’s not snowing in Boston so we can actually walk outside, there’s sunshine, there’s the ocean air, so I’m a big believer that if myself and my young daughters were to get sick, I want them to have sunlight, fresh air, be outside, so that’s why we’re doing this. In Boston it’s cold air, it’s bad for the lungs, mucus-producing. It’s also allergy season. Most people are going to think their allergy symptoms are the Covid-19 and it’s not. We didn’t mention that on the podcast but that’s going to be another scare for people come April, come now.
[2:34:00] Ashley James: I’ll include that, I’ll include this right now. Great. Wow. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. This is awesome. Okay, great. I’ve got the links that you sent me, so we’ll include that as well.
[2:34:14] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Perfect. Great speaking with you today. Let me know if you need anything.
[2:34:16] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. Please, thank you. Go enjoy the fresh air and sunshine.
[2:34:23] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Thank you. You as well. Take care.
[2:34:25] Ashley James: Thanks, bye.
[2:34:26] Outro: I hope you enjoyed this interview. You can go to equilibriumnutrition.com/lth. That’s equilibriumnutrition.com/lth, and then use coupon code LTH10 for a special discount for the listeners on everything that Dr. Cabral does, his supplements, and I think he also sells some online classes, and awesome online courses, and digital downloads. Check that out as well. Of course, go to the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com, and check out all the links that Dr. Cabral gave us. Please, share this episode with everyone so we can help as many people as possible to Learn True Health.
