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505: Quantum Healing: Bridging Ancient Wisdom with Modern Science | Dr. John Douillard
Today's podcast discussion centered around quantum healing, ayurvedic herbal medicine, and the benefits of drinking structured water. Dr. John Douillard, an Ayurvedic physician, shared his experiences with structured water and how it positively impacted his energy levels and mental clarity. The conversation also touched on the universality of Ayurveda and how its principles of living in sync with natural cycles apply to people from different regions and cultures. Dr. Douillard emphasized the importance of using whole herbs and their natural microbiomes to support the body's innate healing abilities. The discussion highlighted the synergy between ancient wisdom and modern science in promoting overall well-being and health.
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Ashley James And Dr. John Douillard
Highlights:
- The benefits of drinking structured water and its impact on energy levels
- Living in sync with the natural cycles of nature and how Ayurveda promotes this approach
- Ayurveda is described as a universal study of nature that can be applied to anyone, regardless of race or location
- The significance of using whole herbs rather than extracts, as the synergy of the entire plant with its natural microbiome supports the body's healing processes
- The benefits of ashwagandha, an adaptogenic herb known for its ability to support relaxation and energy levels
- The importance of a diverse gut microbiome and how Ayurveda recognizes the role of beneficial microbes in health.
- Ashley shares her personal experience with a moon milk recipe containing herbs like ashwagandha and how it has improved her sleep and overall well-being.
Intro:
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode #505.
[0:00:13.6] Ashley James: I am so excited for today's guest. We're going to have a really great show, I can tell. We've got Dr. John Douillard here with us, and in our pre-talk, before I hit the record, I was like, “Okay, we're all set. You got your water.” He's like, “Yeah, I got my analemma water,” and I'm like, “What?” We're both drinking structured water right now. This is so cool.
So John, tell me, so you just started drinking about a month ago, and then now you're drinking, all your water is structured. That's what I do. I stir all my water. I've been doing it since just after Thanksgiving. So it's been, what, seven, eight months that I've been drinking the analemma structured water, and I do notice more get-up-and-go, and my plants look crazy. My plants look like I fertilize them with crack, I don't know. It really does make a difference. But you can't just do a little bit. Like you said, you started drinking a little bit, and then you started drinking more and more of your water with structured water, and then you noticed more energy. It's really interesting, isn't it?
[0:01:13.9] Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, it really is interesting. I think when I really said, “Okay, I'm going to make sure I drink this water, and also, it helps make me drink more water because I really want to get the effect of it. So I started stirring it. Actually, my staff have one too. So they're stirring it into the big kind of glass, the all filter thing, that they just stir all the water for the day in that, so they're using it too. When I started drinking a little bit more of it, just like three big glasses, like 16 oz glasses a day, I started feeling more energy, more lighter. I always have good energy, but I feel like the energy was so much clearer. I was clear-headed, and I was less weirdly distracted by the world we live in, social media, this, and that. I was way more focused on my quiet time, my spiritual time, and I'm more motivated. I always have that motivation, but sometimes I can get distracted, and other things pull me up. But with this, I just felt like it changed my vibration and my brain or something. So I'm still a rookie at this, but I am giving it a good go, and I'm excited about it.
[0:02:30.9] Ashley James: That is so cool. I don't know if you know this, but they came out recently with the whole house unit, and my listeners get 10% off coupon code LTH, as always. Our listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/structuredwater to check it out. Plus, also check out all the studies that analemma puts out. They're putting out a study around bathing in the water, and they found that it changed cardiac output for the better. Now, I'm not a cardiologist, but I read through the study, and I'm like, “This sounds great!” I have no idea what it means, but it was very sciency. I'm sure, John, you would understand it if you read the study. I know that you told me that you read studies every day, the latest studies that come out, and I love it when doctors do that; that they are plugged into the latest science. So I'm excited to see the studies as they come out in terms of bathing in structured water because I believe in frequency medicine. And so it just makes so much sense to surround the entire body with structured water and see how that's going to help us. They take already healthy people and do these studies to see how average healthy people would benefit instead of taking sick people. They want to make sure that they're not crossing any lines in seeing this medical device. Although I'm sure one day, we might be able to start to see studies about that. But already healthy people have improvements in skin health and heart health, and it's very interesting. So yeah, I love drinking it. I wonder how many things you and I have in common. This will be fun.
[0:04:13.4] Dr. John Douillard: And I love the fact that when you actually stir it into the water, it's permanent. Like a lot of structured water, they're very temporary. With this one, you create that structured water, and it stays forever, which is kind of really unique other than the quality of their structure. But that's kind of where you need not worry. You can do a whole batch and then have it last, and it's always there for you.
[0:04:39.3] Ashley James: That's what I do. I fill up all my mason jars and sit down, and I'll stir them for 2 minutes each. Or I'll fill up really big containers of water, and I'll just sit there for like 10 minutes and just stir, and I'll be doing something else, like talking with the family or whatever, listening to something, or watching something, and it's meditative. For me, I love it. I feel a sense of productivity, and I'm like, “Okay, my water is stirred for the day.” But I got to be honest. I can't wait for the day that I have the whole house unit. I think I'll miss stirring it, but at the same time, it will be wonderful to bathe in it as well. It's really, really interesting.
I'm really excited to get into what we're going to talk about today because you have such a depth and breadth of knowledge when it comes to taking ancient wisdom and modern science and showing us the way, showing us the light, right? There's so much diet confusion, even herbal confusion, and medication confusion, and we're all bumping around, sick of being sick and sick of feeling like we're kind of lied to by the mainstream medical system that claims that they've got a pill for us. Whatever your problem is, they've got a pill for us. And that's just suppressing the body, trying to force it into suppressing a symptom, forcing it into a way of being a state. But as we know, when there is a disease, it's going to show up somewhere else. So we suppress something. It's whackable. It's going to pop up somewhere else, and now you got five more symptoms from that medication to handle. Whereas if we come in and look for the root cause, support the body's innate God-given ability to heal itself. Instead of trying to play god, let's step back and go, “How can we support the body's ability to heal itself?” Now we will be able to watch the body come into correction.
So you have a wonderful store. We're going to talk about that later, where you provide herbs and herbal blends that will all support us as tools. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/lifespa and use coupon code LTH to be able to access the products that we're going to talk about today as you teach us about using food as our medicine and using herbs as our medicine. I'd love to hear what happened. How did you figure it out? How did you get super excited about Ayurveda and using this ancient wisdom along with modern science to guide people?
[0:07:17.9] Dr. John Douillard: Well, back in 1986, while I was a Chiropractic, I heard the word Ayurveda and I was studying acupuncture at the time. And for some reason, I just loved that word, and I wanted to know what it was, and it's the kind of traditional system of medicine from India that's thousands and thousands of years old, and I was just so intrigued by that. So I ended up having a chance to go to India for a four-week, six-week trip to learn Ayurveda. And I went there and found an Ayurvedic teacher there, and I was invited to stay there and train with this Ayurvedic physician. And so I had to practice in Boulder, Colorado, at that time, and I called my partner up, and I said, “Hey, I don't know when I'm going home, but I'm not coming home for a while.” I literally closed my practice by phone. He could barely hear me, and this was the 1980s. There was no cell phone. It took an hour to get a line to call from the United States to India.
And so, I just closed my practice, and a year and a half later, I came back, and somebody I didn't even know was driving my car, and things in different houses everywhere were scattered. And when I was there, I met Deepak Chopra. He was opening up a center in Massachusetts, and he wanted someone who had been trained in Ayurveda to do it. So at the end of my training, I also, more importantly, met my wife in India, even though she was from California. Along that way, in that year and a half, we got married, and now she's pregnant. We were living in India with my pregnant wife, who couldn't handle the smells in India at all. So she needed to get out of there, and Deepak said, “This is perfect timing. I'm opening up this center once you come back and run the center for me.” So we did, and literally, the day I got there, it was like November day. We walked into his new clinic, and there was a doctor's conference that I was supposed to teach. I literally got off the plane and started teaching. So I started teaching medical doctors Ayurvedic medicine, and I realized really quickly that this was not going to work — a chiropractor teaching medical doctors Ayurveda unless I had some science to back this up. So that sort of launched me into finding not only the ancient wisdom, which I'm so fascinated by but by the science to back it up. And that's what I do to this day. I write articles and do videos on ancient wisdom, modern science. And if I can find some ancient practice that's been time-tested and still in practice today, and I have science to back it up, I feel like that's what we should at least look at. I mean, science alone can prove coffee is good; coffee is bad. It's always good. It's always bad. Whatever it wants to prove, it sort of proves it. So without having some time-tested wisdom behind it, I feel like you don't really know for sure. So that's what I do.
[0:10:15.2] Ashley James: I love it. You know, some old-school doctors will say, “Well, this medication has been on the market for 50 years. So I would rather go with this medication that we have had for centuries, look at it, and see that we know very clearly what the side effects are and what the effects are. And I'd rather give you this medication than the new one that's been on the market for one month, and we really don't know what it does.” And then we have Ayurveda which is thousands of years old. And it's funny to think about medication, “Oh, it's a 50-year-old medication. Wow, that's really old.” Well, how about a system of medicine that's thousands of years old and has been proven time and time again, tried and tested? It makes so much sense. Now, Ayurveda is cultivated in a specific area of the world. Can it be rubber-stamped to any culture, to any people? Because we have very different climates. We have very different access to food. Can someone in Chile, someone in the Yukon, and someone in the Netherlands all feel the benefits of Ayurveda, or do they have to adapt it to their climate, to their seasons, to the herbs that are accessible to them?
[0:11:40.6] Dr. John Douillard: That's the beauty of it, really. That's such a great question. My teacher literally drove it into my head again and again. He used to tell me, and he goes, “Ayurveda is not Indian. Get it into your head. It's universal.” It's a universal study of nature. ‘Ayur' means life, ‘Veda' means truth. So it's the truth or the science of life. So it's about living in sync with the natural cycles of nature. It's going kind of downstream with the rhythms of nature as opposed to feeling exhausted at the end of every day. You feel like you have to work your butt off, and then you kind of have to recover on the weekends or have to have that glass of wine to come home.
Life has become a struggle for a lot of us. But traditionally, if you listen to nature and watch nature, watch the birds, the deer, the animals, they're not struggling. We're struggling. And it's about living our life in that natural way. For example, the beautiful thing is just the food we eat. In the winter, we all know pretty much, let's say, North America, it is cold and dry, and nature has an antidote to that coldness and dryness, and it's the harvest which is nuts and seeds that grow. That's what they eat in the winter to give them a higher fat, higher protein food to insulate them for those winter months. It makes perfect sense. In the spring, when it's rainy and muddy and allergy season, the harvest is completely different. It's a very austere, leafy green harvest with some berries and some bitter roots, like all the dandelions in your yard that the deer are digging up. Those bitter roots will scrub and clean up all that mucus that builds up in your intestinal tract during the very wet, rainy, congested, mucousy spring months. And in the summer, when it's very hot, nature gives us cooling fruits and vegetables. So, that's the study of nature. That's what Ayurveda is based on, and that applies everywhere, anywhere, anytime.
[0:13:39.9] Ashley James: I love it. And when it comes to the herbs, there are herbs that can only be found in the regions of Asia in India. Are these herbs applicable to every race? Do we see that people of Caucasian descent have a different reaction than people of Asian descent or universally to everyone, no matter our genetics, responds well to the same herbs?
[0:14:09.7] Dr. John Douillard: The cool thing about Ayurveda is it gives you ways to classify the herbs according to their taste and their quality, which can apply to anyone from any race, anywhere. But what's really important about it is that you have herbs. You know, in old age, they say you eat stuff that's local, and I understand that that's really important. And we use a lot of Western herbs and classify them ayurvedically, which makes good sense. But there is a study, Ashley, that was done about ten years ago in Utah and in New Mexico. And they went into a museum that had Indians that were a thousand years old, and they took their poop, and they measured it. They were able to figure out a way to measure what kind of bugs they had in their poop. And they found that there were these massive numbers of bugs with lots of diversity. They compared that ancient thousand-year-old poop to modern poop, and there was such a lack of diversity in our guts that they called it an extinction of that — the lack of microbial diversity in the last 30 years. The food that we eat has reduced in diversity, different kinds of food by 50%. So, in other words, by eating the same industrial food again and again and again, we were losing that diversity. So going to Europe and traveling to Asia is a way to get more microbial diversity.
I've actually done studies on that with my patients to back that up. So that's a really important piece of the puzzle. So in the [inaudible 0:15:40.3], I would say, “Yeah, I want to eat local stuff and eat the food which makes sense. They want to get the right bugs for the right season, for the right place in your gut at the right time. The problem is we spray pesticides on so many things that we're eating food, and the soil just doesn't have those bugs. So when we get herbs, we get them from Indian organic farms. They are certified organic. We have to get them tested by the FDA to find out exactly what bugs are in there. And as long as the bugs are good, and they're usually loaded with good probiotics, and you actually ingest those foods, you're actually inoculating your gut with the right bugs for the particular condition you're trying to treat. But also, I always like to prescribe herbs based on the season they were harvested. There is an herb called ashwagandha. Everybody's probably heard of that herb. Now, it's harvested in the fall for the winter. It's a warm, heavy, sweet root that builds resilience, endurance. It's an anti-aging agent. It's just an amazing herb, an adaptogen for stress and things like that.
When you take the whole herb with the bugs on it, you have a synergy. There are what are called bacterial endophytes, which are bugs that are on the plants naturally, and those bugs on those plants support the intelligence and the potency and the benefit of that plant. It's like if I took all the bugs out of you, you would be a completely different person. If I take all the bugs out of our food when we sterilize them with pesticides, that's not going well for us — all these kinds of sterilized foods, processed foods. And the same thing happens when you take an herb versus an extract. If you take an herb and you take the whole plant, and then you create an extract, you've created a sterile compound. It's completely sterile. So when you take what we do in America — because I want to make that herb more potent — I want to take that herb and concentrate it by a hundred times and make it bigger and better. So it's the American way.
But the study showed when you take curcumin, for example, out of turmeric, which is one of the three hundred constituents out of the whole turmeric root, and you make it into an extract, you made it into a drug, and it is going to be a drug. It has been shown to help people reverse colon cancer and breast cancer, and prostate cancer. It is a really powerful drug. But whenever you make a concentrate like that, you're going to have consequences, side effects, just like the TV commercials for the drug companies. So when you take the whole plant with the herb in the natural climate microbiome that's on that plant, you have a food that works in synergy with your body. It supports the body to do the job for itself, for it to do the job for the body. And that's what I really love about Ayurveda. That's what I have, and it is obvious in our stores. It's whole herbs, and we test them for identity. We test them for bugs. We test them for heavy metals. We test them for everything twice. We test them twice when I get the herb and after we make our formula, and then we know that these are just really polyherbs. So I take these herbs personally and give them to my patients for years and years because they're inoculating their gut with the bugs that we desperately need. We need a diverse microbiome, and we just don't have that anymore. That's the difference between Ayurveda which is like, “Hey, let's use the whole plant. Let's use nature the way it came and not try to mess with it.” Who are we to think we can make it better? Let's use what nature provided for us and watch it work for us and with us, as opposed to overruling us.
[0:19:20.1] Ashley James: I make moon milk, like a turbo moon milk, that my husband and I drink every night, and it has over ten herbs in it, including ashwagandha, which I just love, and a ton of turmeric. I've been thinking to myself lately; maybe I want to try making this with fresh turmeric, like with the turmeric root. I've been using powdered turmeric. And, of course, that's more concentrated. It's been dehydrated and ground up as a powder.
[0:19:50.6] Dr. John Douillard: No, no. Not really. If you get the fresh ground turmeric, that's completely fine. It's when you take just one constituent out of it and concentrate that one thing that it becomes an extract and is going to be sterile. But when you have just ground-up turmeric powder, that's perfect. That's great. There is a pretty amazing study that shows that if you mix that sixteen parts turmeric with one part black pepper — this was at the St. John's Hospital in Bangalore in the year 2000 — it increases the absorption of the turmeric by 2000%. So all you gotta do is add sixteen to one, a little bit of black pepper to your turmeric, put that in your mix there in your moon milk, and you are going to make that turmeric so much more active.
[0:20:36.4] Ashley James: Love it. Yeah, definitely. That is one of the spices, that is, the black pepper, and I've learned not to put too much. There was one time I made it, and I put way too much. I'm like, I do have that American; if something is good, more is better. And I often overdo it, and there can be too much black pepper, so I have dialed in for that. I'm actually going to be posting this soon on the website as a blog. I want to share my recipe because I've been playing with it for a while, and I've got it dialed in. I'm really happy about it, and it tastes so good. It's such a beautiful ritual at the end of the night. I like to try to eat dinner earlier and then go to bed hungry, like going to bed on an empty stomach. And so I like to have that moon tea right around maybe 8 p.m. when the body goes, “I wish I could have a second dinner,” and I'm like, “No, no, no. I'm going to drink this.” It's delicious, and it's calming. It's a beautiful ritual to just smell it and sip on it and feel the nervous system calm down and get ready for bed. When I introduced it to my life — I already got good sleep — but I noticed it's even better sleep, deeper dreams. Like I have these wild dreams. And every time I do something that I know helps me for my sleep and deepens it, I'll get even wilder dreams and even more colorful dreams, and I'll wake up remembering all my dreams. I just know that whatever I just did, that was good. I can keep doing that because it's deepening the sleep and the restoration. But I noticed that I am even calmer. Not that I'm prone to anxiety, but I just noticed that I'm calmer and happier and don't yell as much. The nervous system feels like it is much more stable just introducing, like you said, ashwagandha and the other herbs into my little ritualistic evening drink.
You were saying bugs, and I know I have to clarify because lately, there's been a big push for us to eat insects. When you were saying bugs, you did mean healthy gut bacteria, a diverse microbiome of the gut bacteria, and not crickets and roaches and other things that there have been people saying, “Oh, let's eat mealworms instead of beef or something.” I just wanted to clarify for the listeners that are going, “I don't want to eat crickets.”
[0:23:11.7] Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. It's all about these microbes. In fact, in the Ayurvedic textbooks 2500 or 3500 years old, they talked about invisible bacteria. They called them krimi, and I talked about how they could cause problems and they could be actually beneficial. They talked about this, and they couldn't even see them. I don't even understand how they knew this. And they also said that the ones that actually caused problems, you don't want to kill them. You want to change the host, and change the environment, as opposed to killing them. It's something we're just beginning to understand now. When you kill bugs with antibiotics, you're killing so many good ones, and that's part of the reason why we have such a lack of diversity which we now know as an extinction event. That's what I love about ancient wisdom and modern science. It's like they knew that this microbiome existed thousands and thousands of years ago. And they also had some really amazing insight into how to manage all these microbes that can do good or bad.
I love your drink. I want to see your recipe. And you should know that in Ayurveda, it's always said that you need energy to go to sleep at night. And I can say I'm too exhausted. I'm too tired. I'm wired and tired; I can't get to sleep. The reality is you need energy to go to sleep at night, and ashwagandha is one of those adaptogens that's literally named after putting folks to sleep. The botanical name is Withania somnifera, which means put you to sleep. That herb gives you the energy so you can sedate yourself into sleep, but it also allows you to run a marathon or take your SATs in the morning. That's the sign of a really good adaptogen. It's something you can take at night before you go to bed and also in the morning for energy because you don't want to stimulate your body to make the energy you don't have where you're going to debt over time. You have to pay it back at some point. That's the beauty of it. You have to understand, like, okay, you know, a little bit of caffeine here, and it is fine, but let's not get dependent on things that are going to, possibly down the road, deplete you.
[0:25:24.8] Ashley James: So it builds you up. I saw a study about how we need more ATP. We actually have healthy people who have healthy sleep and healthy energy levels. They have a surge of ATP, which is cellular energy made by the mitochondria right before sleep, and I thought that was wild. Of course, more ATP doesn't make you jacked up like you just drank a Monster Energy drink; you're not all jittery. It's just more access to cellular energy. When I thought about it, it made complete sense. What do we do when we sleep? Our body detoxifies. So the cells require more cellular energy to go through the process of detoxifying, which means we should also have more antioxidants readily available.
What is melatonin? We're now seeing that melatonin is a powerful antioxidant. In some cases, it's even more powerful than glutathione, and we need healthy levels while we're sleeping to help the cells detoxify. So that makes complete sense. We need to give the body what it needs to go deep, deep, deep, detoxify, and restore itself at night, and then come up and have lots of energy during the day. So the more energy we have during the day, the deeper we can go at night, but if you're kind of just crawling through the day, you're going to be tired at night because we need that beautiful rhythm up and down. And we need nutrients.
[0:26:46.8] Dr. John Douillard: I love the fact that you know about that study. Very few people know about that study. And that is exactly right. Before you go to bed, just like you said, there's a surge of ATP. ATP is adenosine triphosphate. Right before you go to bed, when the body uses that energy to get you to go to sleep, the adenosine breaks off, and you're left with triphosphates that get wasted, get excreted as waste, and you are left with adenosine. Caffeine is a blocker of your adenosine receptor. So when you drink caffeine, the adenosine is trying to sedate you. It's a sedative. So if you have a bunch of ATP before you go to bed, the adenosine breaks off from the phosphates, and you have this adenosine that actually sedates you into deep sleep. But you also get that surge of energy that you were talking about, just like when you drink coffee. The adenosine receptors are blocked. So it will literally not let you get rest if you need it. So it does, in a way, overrule your intelligence. Not that it's bad, but it needs to be done intelligently. But that is such a great understanding of them. And everybody wants to sedate someone, and most of the time, people are so exhausted that they can't have the energy they need to put them to sleep. So they take a sedative to make an already sedated person more sedated and more exhausted, as opposed to deeply rejuvenating them, giving them the ability to make that ATP so they can have that energy they need to go to sleep. But that's the science behind it. The adenosine breaks off, and that's what puts us in and gets us to drop into that deep sleep.
[0:28:19.9] Ashley James: So we got to step back and go, okay, how do I support my mitochondrial health? What kind of nutrients does my body need? What do I get to do to make sure I protect my mitochondria because mitochondria are related to gut bugs? It's really, really, really interesting. But anything that harms bacteria in the body can also harm mitochondria. So we want to support it, and I just want to kind of hold the mitochondria like it's a baby, a newborn baby, and just protect it and give it what it needs and know what it doesn't need. So what do you recommend? Of course, everything is in balance, right? We don't look reductionistically and say, “Let's just look at the mitochondria.” But what are the things that are really bad for the mitochondria, and what are the things that are really good for the mitochondria?
[0:29:13.0] Dr. John Douillard: Well, the best thing for mitochondria is what actually makes mitochondria energy, which is infrared light, which is basically the light in the morning. As long as the shadow that the sun makes in the morning is longer than you are tall, you're getting pretty much unopposed red and infrared light, not any UV radiation that could actually potentially do some damage in excess. And that infrared light actually penetrates your skin inches, even through your skull, and activates an enzyme called cytochrome c oxidase which is an enzyme that actually activates the mitochondrial energy in your body. So they said we didn't do photosynthesis in Biology class, but now we know that infrared light actually does activate energy from the sun.
And here is the crazy thing — you mentioned melatonin. Well, I'm a big fan of melatonin. But only 10% of the melatonin in your body is actually made to help you go to sleep. 90% of the melatonin is made by the infrared light from the sun. So whenever your body makes energy, just like any energy plan, there's going to be a lot of waste products, and those are called reactive oxygen species, and the inability to make that energy or get rid of that trash is what causes accelerated aging and mitochondrial damage. So the body had to figure out a way to use an antioxidant to make an antioxidant inside the cell to take out all that trash. Otherwise, it would accelerate the aging process. The antioxidant that the body chooses to make from the infrared light of the sun through the same cytochrome c oxidase enzyme is melatonin. So the body makes 90% of the melatonin. It stays inside your cell. It doesn't have anything to do with you going to sleep at night. But it is inside your cell to shovel out all the free radical damage that comes as a result of energy production.
So the sun is going to give you massive amounts of energy in the morning, particularly infrared light in the morning. The more of that morning sun you get, the more mitochondrial energy ATP you're going to get throughout the day and the more melatonin you'll produce at night. So that's one way that you can really help yourself. You should clean out in the summertime, and you can get outside and get that morning light. It's so critically important. You know, 90% of the time, the average American is indoors. And all the new lights, the LED lights, don't have any infrared light. You know the old incandescents would burn you if you touched them. And that's infrared light. It is hot, heating. So a lot of us are now having an infrared light deficiency which is really an important piece of the puzzle because it's so powerful to protect us from DNA damage and mitochondrial damage and accelerate aging, things that don't have to happen if we actually recognize that the sun is a really important thing.
In fact, we also have this paranoia about UV radiation. But did you know that in 1901, UVA radiation, the stuff that the sunscreens block primarily, won the Nobel Prize for healing skin disease and autoimmune conditions, and all types of conditions? That literally won the Nobel Prize. That's why those old-time pictures of hospitals where they wheel people out on the balconies and they'll be out there in their hospital bed in the sun, remember those pictures? That's because of UV radiation, the thing that we were so afraid of. So we got to be aware of that. The sun is not our enemy now, obviously. And the infrared light in the morning will prepare you for UV radiation in the afternoon. And again, as the sun sets, the infrared light at sunset is going to heal any potential damage that might have been caused by excess UV radiation during the day.
So, the sun really had a plan, and we were supposed to be in it a lot of the time. But we just take our little dip in and out of it, and we become really super sensitive to UV radiation. And I think it's something we have to realize that we really would have to be outside and in nature, under the trees in the forest. You get all that radiation bouncing off the leaves, and it's a really safe way to get all the health benefits of nature therapy and all that. And that's primarily because you're getting literally blasted with infrared light. It's really fun to go on Google or whatever and then search for infrared light in a city, and the photography of infrared light in the city looks exactly like a city normally would — it would look like bricks. But if you take an infrared picture of a forest, it's an explosion of white light, like you went to heaven, and you're just like, “Oh my gosh, it's just an amazing difference.” What is happening in the forest is all the infrared light is just blasting around underneath the leaves and bouncing off of you and everywhere. 70% of all solar rays are infrared, so we really need to have them. And if we lock ourselves in the house all day, we're not going to get them. So that's a big piece of the mitochondrial puzzle, big-time.
[0:34:40.8] Ashley James: I just looked it up. I just looked up ‘city,' and I looked up ‘forest,' and you're right. It looks really different. And the forest is so beautiful. I'm in Seattle, just north of Seattle, and just this morning, I was surprised that it wasn't sunny. Usually, in the summertime, it's sunny. But no, we have a really thick overcast right now. So on days when it's thick and overcast or on times when it's winter, I am so thankful I have my Sunlighten Saunas. It's near-mid and far-infrared. Is that a good second to the actual sun, and should I be getting it into it first thing in the morning instead of in the evening because the infrared helps the body more in the morning?
[0:35:24.4] Dr. John Douillard: I think it is a good thing to do first thing in the morning. Although, because we have such a deficiency, I think doing it anytime will actually help us. But doing it first thing in the morning sort of helps to align our biological clocks. Normally, most traditional cultures are up to the sunrise. They watch the sunrise. They got this blast that says, “Hey, the sun just came up. The infrared just clobbered me on every level, and this is literally my nighttime biological clock turned off and my daytime biological clock turned on. So it's like synchronizing our watches to be, “This is the time when I shifted gears,” and it's kind of a night way to help us make that happen. But, as I said, I'm doing an infrared sauna. I'm a big fan of those definitely if it's in a near-infrared and red near-infrared light combination. That's the combination you're looking for. Far infrared is a little more heating, a little more therapeutic, but you have to limit how much of that you get.
[0:36:19.6] Ashley James: Oh yes. And I, of course, have overdone that as well. I figured it out.
I'm about 20 to 30 minutes maximum. You know, too much water and too little water can kill us. And so it's like the sun. Too little sun, too much sun also can be harmful. There's a sweet spot, the Goldilocks effect; none of us are getting it. Most of us aren't getting enough water and minerals, let alone enough sun, and enough earthing, getting our bare feet out on the ground, and making sure obviously the grass you put in your bare feet is not pesticide laden. And that's a problem, though. So you got to make sure it's a yard or a lawn or forest that you trust. But touching the earth is so important. I have had several interviews on earthing or grounding, releasing the excess electrons back into the earth, and getting to earth's potential. And that's something that is backed by science as well, but we're so insulated.
Think about our lives. Think about how artificial our lives are. We are so disconnected from nature. We are so disconnected from where our food is coming from, and so many hands have touched it by the time we get it. It's been so adulterated by the time we get it. Even the frozen organic — sometimes you get frozen organic vegetables because that's better than nothing at all. So if you're super busy, but you want to eat vegetables and you want to eat healthily, I'd rather you have some frozen organic than go for completely processed crap. But even that has been washed in high concentrations of chlorine, and we just don't even know. We're so disconnected from our food sources, from nature, from the earth, from the sun, from the sky, from clean air and clean water. We're so artificial. We're so insulated that we end up collecting these excess electrons in our bodies because we're always away from the earth. We're wearing rubber shoes. We're driving a car with rubber tires. And if we finally just took off our shoes and walked in the grass barefoot in the sunlight in the morning as a routine while sipping some wonderful herbal tea to hydrate ourselves and get the good nutrients in us, that would be an amazing, multi-purpose ritual to bring in each morning instead of dragging ourselves out of bed and running to the coffee machine to trick our body into thinking it's not tired. Like you said, how it blocks the adenosine.
I love that you're bringing these ideas to us. You have really interesting thoughts about diet. Can we talk a bit about your book Eat Wheat?
[0:39:14.1] Dr. John Douillard: Yes, of course.
[0:39:17.7] Ashley James: I'm gluten-free, by the way. So when I saw that you wrote a book called Eat Wheat, I was like, “Okay, this is going to be interesting. It's fine.” I don't believe in diet dogma. So I'm not going to sit here and go, “Everyone has to eat the way I eat.” But I took it at face value; I was like, “Okay. He's just going to tell us we need a lot of wheat. Here we go.” But actually, I loved it when you and I talked a bit about this. I got so excited because it's such a wonderful concept. So yes, please tell us about your book, Eat Wheat.
[0:39:44.7] Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, it's not really about wheat. We have talked about pesticides. Pesticides on our foods literally have been studied to kill the bugs in our mouth that make the digestive enzymes that help us digest things like wheat, dairy and nuts, seeds, lectins and phytic acids, and ketogenic and oxalates. All these things that we're being told don't eat, don't eat, and we're literally bubble wrapping our diet. And then, we talked about an exchange in microbial diversity. Well, this is how we get it. It's by eating a variety of foods. Those foods we've been eating for millions and millions of years. I'm not saying we should eat processed wheat. I'm not saying we should eat a food if we feel bad eating it, obviously. But if you eat a food and you feel bad eating it, then we should not say, “Hey, I'm going to stop eating that food.” You put gas in your car and this car stalls. You don't think it was the gas. You'd think, “Something is wrong with my car.” So that's what we should be thinking about — what can we do to strengthen our ability to digest our food the way we were designed. And so, the reason why I wrote Eat Wheat was because the whole gluten-free industry was sort of based around the fact that folks weren't feeling good eating wheat. A lot of it was the processed version of it, but a lot of it wasn't. A lot of it is the fact that folks just aren't digesting the way we should. And then they eat the hard-to-digest food, and then they pay a price for it. So they, obviously, logically think it's the food, so I should stop eating that food.
Studies have shown now that when folks are gluten-free — and I'm not trying to promote eating wheat. I'm trying to promote strengthening digestion to fix the upstream cause. Weed is a canary in the coal mine. If you eat that wheat and you can't digest it, then you need to ask yourself the question. Why am I not digesting that well, and how can I reboot that digestion? How can I troubleshoot every aspect of my digestion and figure out where my digestive system is broken down? Well, the wheat here is processed, and it's sprayed with glyphosate. It is. But everything is sprayed with glyphosate because it's in the rainwater now. So you have to be able to digest well to detoxify well. If you don't have good digestive strength, you're not going to detoxify, and ETA 2019 and 20 reported 70 million tons of toxic chemicals dumped in our atmosphere every year, which filters down into the water we drink and the air we breathe. So if you eat organic food, you're still getting those chemicals on your food that don't really wash off. So if you don't digest your wheat, your dairy, and your nuts and seeds well, sure don't eat them. But don't stop there because that means your ability to break down the toxins in the environment, which can cause real problems for you, are also going into your intestinal tract undigested, and they'll find a way into your tissues, into your brain, and they're going to wreak havoc down the road. So that's why I didn't like the idea that we were being told to bubblewrap our diet and not really fix the upstream cause.
And studies have shown that when folks compare people who eat wheat to people who don't eat wheat, gluten-free versus non-gluten-free folks. And these are not Celiac patients. They found that the folks who ate wheat had significantly six times less mercury in their blood than the people who were gluten-free. There are significantly more good bugs and less bad bugs than the gluten-free folks, and they had significantly more killer T-cells than the folks that were eating wheat. Now, what that means is that these harder-to-digest foods have a hormetic effect. That thing that says, “If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger,” like the cold bath plunges and all that. It doesn't kill you, but it makes you stronger. The harder-to-digest foods that we've been eating for millions of years, the nightshades, and all these foods that we are being told to avoid, the phytic acids, the lectins, and things. They're naturally occurring. And if you take them out of your diet, you're going to surely lose your digestive strength. They did a study — I thought it was a really amazing study — with kids with asthma. They found that the Amish kids who have cows as pets — so they run barefoot in the barns and stuff — have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. And they did another study with their genetic cousins, the Hutterites, who come from the same valley in Switzerland, but they became modern farmers, and their kids have the highest rates of asthma on the planet. It doesn't make any sense. Like it is not a genetic thing. It's just something's going on with these kids. Well, they measured the Amish kids, and they found out it was the dust in the barn that they were breathing that would cause allergies for some kids, but it was actually creating a hormetic effect or hormesis effect that causes an immune reaction against them getting asthma.
So we have to not bubblewrap our bodies. We have to challenge it. That's what wine is. Wine is a xenohormetic which means xenohormesis, made with plants that struggled in their life growing in really dry, harsh environments; deliver delivers the benefits — the antioxidant, longevity, and resiliency benefits to humans as hormesis. And that is what our foods also did — the lectins, which are on every bean, in every nut, and pretty much every vegetable. This is why eating a vegetarian diet is a little bit harder for folks, actually. Eating grains is hard for folks, right? And if you don't have really good digestive strength and you become a vegetarian, and you never fix the digestive problems, that's why a lot of vegetarians don't do well in the long run. A lot of them sort of crash and burn like the guy Leo. He started having real severe issues, and they go back, and they started eating meat, and they felt good again because wheat doesn't have any nutrients in it.
Now I'm not suggesting people eat meat, but I am suggesting that we fix the digestive system and make sure that we don't leave that stone unturned. And that's why I wrote Eat Wheat. It's more of a troubleshooting guide for your digestive system to find out what part of your digestion is broken. So you're not in harm's way down the road. Eat beef if you want, but boy, be careful if you start seeing yourself taking one food out of your diet, the next food out of your diet. While I was in practice, I graduated in 1984 and started seeing patients. I was a natural chiropractic practitioner with a lot of nutritional support, and my patients would come with digestive problems. We take them off of wheat, and they get better. We put them on probiotics, and they get better. But shortly thereafter, the problem would come back, and I realized taking them off of wheat, dairy, or whatever, wasn't actually solving the underlying problem. There was an underlying weak link in their digestive system. And I started digging into the underlying causes of what's causing wheat. So they tell us, don't eat this, don't eat that. That's because that's not the cause of the problem. Humans have been eating a variety of foods for millions and millions of years. Now, pesticides, that's the cause, and we have to get rid of processed foods and pesticide-rich foods. There's no question about that. But you can get really good wheat. You can get really good grains, and that is a signpost of whether your digestive system is really strong.
So that's why I really wrote the book because I saw so many people being duped. And we now know that when people are not able to eat wheat, they are letting other undigested or harder-to-digest proteins and harder-to-digest fats which are in our environment that you literally cannot avoid. The studies show that they will go undigested or incompletely digested through your stomach and your small intestine. And because they are incompletely digested, the pesticides, the environmental pollutants, and the harder-to-digest proteins are going to irritate the lining of your gut. And an irritation of the lining of the gut is going to cause inflammation in your gut and compromise and end up getting up taken into your body's lymphatic system causing lymphatic congestion, which is linked to extra weight around your belly, tiredness, fatigue, stiffness, achiness, brain fog, skin rashes, breast tenderness when you menstruate.
These are all drain-clogging events that come from undigested proteins and fats that should have been broken down upstream in your digestion and end up in your lymph, which is the trash can, and also carry in your immune system. And when that system gets stuck in traffic, you're going to pay the price, and that price is a symptom of an underlying digestive issue and your gut immunity, which is 70% of your immune response, is in your intestinal tract and is actually linked to your respiratory immunity.
And I wonder, and I've seen some emerging studies coming out about this, but when you have a broken down digestive system where you can't eat XY and Z and you sort of bubblewrap your diet and not fix the real problem, then we have a pandemic that requires your skin of your respiratory tract and the skin of your intestinal tract to be as strong and resilient as it possibly can. If we don't have that, we are going to be a vulnerable host for any opportunistic bacteria or viruses that come our way. There's going to be another crazy virus that's going to come, and we need to be strong as a host and not depend on a vaccine or a killer powder or whatever because there's a lot of controversy there. But if you're getting your digestive system strong and your body strong, that's the source of our immune strength, and that sort of is what I'm all about when it comes to wheat. It's not about saying, hey, wheat is really good; you should eat it. Even though it's processed, it's got a bunch of glyphosate on it. I get that, and I know people and they go to Europe, and they feel better. I get that. The thing that we're doing is we're not looking at the elephant in the room, which is the digestive weak link.
[0:49:54.0] Ashley James: You know I'm smiling ear-to-ear. You're saying exactly what I feel inside. It's like thank you. Thank you for saying that. It's like what everyone's thinking in the holistic space. It's not about waiting for Papa's government and Mama's pharmaceutical company to come to take care of us. On Facebook, a lot of people will have this ring around their avatar that says, “I have an immune system.” I know that was a little bit of a show of where we stood, and a lot of people took it as a political stance. It's not. It's saying, “Listen, I'm not going to buy into the propaganda. I'm sorry. You're not brainwashed.” Like, so many people are brainwashed, but they were fear-mongering so heavily. And I know many of my listeners did get the experimental gene therapy injected into them because their parents did it. Their doctor may have said their whole life that this is so good. You should definitely do it. Their job said they had to do it. Everyone around them, their neighbors, said they had to do it. And I have watched in such sadness as so many people's lives were destroyed by that. And, of course, we don't talk about that, or you're a conspiracy theorist if you talk about that. But really, be careful what you put in your body. And like I said about the drug that's 50 years old, “Okay, well, we can trust that a bit more because we've seen it work on people for 50 years, and we know what it does and what it doesn't do. Something that just came to market, and they're suppressing the effects of it. Why were their parents giving their six-year-old children this is beyond me. But that's how intense the fear-mongering was. And I am so sad and sorry for the teenagers, the amount of teenagers, and all the people that died suddenly and unexpectedly, and all the young people now that have heart disease that didn't before, and of course, getting the virus itself wasn't fun either.
Like you said, we have to look at why it was that some people that were healthy walked around, like — like my husband — when he had it, he was at the height of his infection. He had like 100-degree fever, and he was mowing the lawn for 4 hours. We lived on 5 acres, and he had a push mower. We had the driving one, but there's something about walking and mowing the lawn for 5 hours every two weeks. It was fun for him and was a great exercise. And I watched him from bed as I was sick, and he can eat wheat once in a while, and it doesn't affect him like when I eat it. And I've had heavy metal toxicity so bad. I would wake up tasting heavy metals, and my liver was inflamed. That's why I've done the Sunlighten Sauna to help get rid of my heavy metals and the PES and take the chlorella and all the herbs. And I've detoxed from heavy metals for the last four to five years, and I feel like a whole new person. And I've been working on my gut health for the last few years. But at the height of my infection, I was in bed, feeling miserable. I watched my husband mow the lawn for 4 hours, and my husband has amazing digestion. It makes sense. So we have to go; what's the root cause? Let's go all the way back to the center of our body, our digestion. It just makes so much sense.
If we don't have a strong digestive fire, we're not getting in nutrients; the body has all these leaky guts. The things that aren't supposed to be entering our lymph are entering our lymph. And a lot of people talk about the byproducts of the bad bacteria entering the body like a toxin in itself, sort of the poop of the bad bacteria, getting into our lymph and into our brain, and making us just feel miserable all day long. And there's no pharmaceutical that's going to be your knight in shining armor. If you have poor digestion, everything's broken down. I had a doctor on the show. He simplified it, and I love this analogy. There are 37.2 trillion cells in the body, and they're all very, very different under a microscope. But there's one basic truth. If you can bring the groceries in and take the garbage out and do it successfully and repeatedly, then you're going to have health. And I take his analogy one step further, and I say inflammation is like what we look at on TV, and we see that there's a flood somewhere, and people are sitting on the roof. And there are helicopters trying to save them, and there's dirty, muddy water up to the eavestrough of the house. You guys in America called it the gutters of the house. But you can just see the one or two-story houses are just completely underwater, and all the families are on the roofs waving at the helicopters to come to save them. When we see that, imagine that every cell in the body that has inflammation is like that. The groceries can't come in, the garbage can't come out, and it's not functioning. And that sludge, the lymphatic sludginess, and we have to go upstream and go, “Where is this coming from?” Go all the way back to digestion, like you said. And we have to honor that 6 lb of hopefully healthy bacteria in our guts. I alluded to a chihuahua or a little panda, some kind of animal that's small, maybe a kitten that's about 6 pounds that you like. When you used to imagine, you want to hold it and take care of it. This is the gut bacteria in your gut and is helping you digest your food. It stimulates the nutrients. It is our pharmacy inside us because it can transform our food into other compounds and chemicals that our body needs.
And so it all comes back to that. Like you said, it's so important — the bacteria that are on our food instead of sterile food, the healthy bacteria on our food. That's something I learned from The Institute for Integrative Nutrition when I took their health coach training program. There was this video where they showed a strawberry, and they said, “This strawberry grown in organic soil has this kind of bacteria on it. And when you eat this raw strawberry, if you've left it on the ground, the bacteria would have digested it. We've seen those videos where they'll speed up the camera, and you'll watch a fruit dissolve into a fuzz and then get back to the earth, like becoming earth again. And when we eat it, the bacteria that are on the strawberry helps us digest and assimilate the nutrients of the strawberry. And it blew my mind like it was fireworks going off of my head. I was like, “Oh my gosh, you just expanded my universe.” Because I was raised, like everyone, to think that the sterility of food was what we needed. You have to have the milk go through the pasteurization process. You have to have pasteurized food. Sterile food is best. When you bring your food home, you wash it, soak it in the tap water that has all the chlorine, and kill all the bugs. Meanwhile, if the body is sterile, we die.
We need the gut bugs. We need that. So I love that you're talking about this and that we got to wake up and go; it's not about removing the food. It's not just about removing the food you're reacting to because, eventually, you'll have nothing to eat. And I have friends who are now eating the carnivore diet because they are left with nothing. They cannot eat anything except meat, and they're suffering.
[0:58:07.8] Dr. John Douillard: A hundred percent right. That's it exactly because the meat doesn't have anti-nutrients. So it is easier to digest for folks, and that's why we keep going down the road of like, “Oh, I don't feel good with this diet. I'll try this next diet.” They keep going down this next diet and trying to fix my problem by changing my diet, going from one extreme diet to another. And you know, I've been in practice for almost 40 years now. I see the casualties of these extreme diets. When I help people get their digestive strength back, they can start having a variety of foods like your husband. A digestive system that is not only digesting wheat if you want it. But they have an immune response that is 100% dependent on our digestive strength and ability to detoxify, which in this toxic world we live in, if your digestion is not strong, your ability to detoxify is going to be compromised, and that can create a real problem.
I was teaching a seminar years ago at Tupelo, the Elvis Center, back on the East Coast. One of my patients did a show, and one of my students came up, and she said, I found this McDonald's hamburger underneath the seat of my car, and that was there for ten years. That's a true story. And it looked exactly like a McDonald's hamburger. It hadn't been done with the strawberry that you just mentioned. It was completely recognizable. Everybody was just shocked it didn't degrade. It just looked like the hamburger. It was amazing. So yeah, we really do have to understand the digestive system. And the very first system that's evaluated, which I think is so cool, is the lymphatic system. It's called Rasa. And the study of Rasa is called Rasayana, and the study of Rasayana is the study of longevity. And there is a whole branch of Ayurveda about living a long, healthy life. And so, understanding the lymphatic system is such an important part because it's not only trying to take the trash out. It carries your immune system and also delivers properly broken-down fat as baseline energy to every cell of your body. So if you don't have good lymphatic flow, then you're going to start to feel compromised immunity, more vulnerable to allergies or hypersensitivity reactions. All of the undigested proteins and fats are going to end up in the fat cells around your belly and hips. They are going to go into your brain lymphatic system, called the glymphatic system, which dumps 3 lb of plaque out of your head every year while you sleep at night, causing brain fog and cognitive decline, information, infection, and even autoimmune system concerns, according to the science.
I did a debate with Dr. David Perlmutter when my Eat Wheat book came out. He wrote the book called Grain Brain.
[1:01:15.9] Ashley James: Yup, I had him on the show.
[1:01:18.0] Dr. John Douillard: And you can watch the debate. My mother said, I definitely want a debate, so I'm pretty sure I did.
[1:01:23.0] Ashley James: I can't wait to see it.
[1:01:25.5] Dr. John Douillard: But, you know, what was really interesting was there was so much science on the other side of the ion. He actually did finally admit in our second debate that wheat isn't really that bad. And the diet that he eats today isn't the same diet that he ate when he wrote that book, by the way. And that's what I also love about Ayurveda. It doesn't change. You don't say, “Oh gosh, you know what? We made a mistake; you shouldn't eat this or that.” They've been using the same diet forever and ever. We should eat what comes out of the ground in the season because we have no other choice but to do that. And when you do that, you change the bugs in your gut from one season to the next. Studies are now showing good science from Stanford to show that the bugs in your gut are supposed to change from one season to the next to the next. So we shouldn't knock our gut with the food, with the bugs, with the microbes from the foods in that season. And studies are now showing those bugs on those foods, those microbes, actually support the function of those foods. So if you want to have foods to help you decongest from allergies in the spring, you eat the foods that are in season because they have the right bug for the right season. Same thing with dissipating heat in the summer. They seem to be boosting immunity in the winter. The science is in on that, but we haven't had anybody write a book.
My second book is called The 3-Season Diet, about eating according to the three major harvests in nature. I do know that there are four seasons, so people question me on that. But there are three harvests. There's a spring harvest, a summer harvest, and a fall harvest for winter eating. Generally, nature takes a rest like we should. Everybody takes a rest. And those diets change dramatically from a very high-carb diet during the end of the summer, and that high-carb diet is really important in nature. If you're going into winter and you haven't eaten a lot of fruits to convert into fat and reserve fuel, all the grains that will harvest that excess fuel convert into fat and reserve fuel. You need that when the winter months are coming. That's part of nature. And the spring is a very austere harvest where you go into ketogenesis because you're not eating anything. There's no food. Think about the spring. Look out your window in the spring and see what you can eat. If you're living off the land, you would naturally go into a ketogenic diet naturally occurring. You burn your own fat, and that's how you would be in ketogenesis because there's no pasta. There's no pizza harvested in the spring whatsoever.
This winter time is a naturally occurring high-protein, high-fat time of the year because you're not growing anything. You're probably going to have to do more hunting. And that's what our traditional ancestors did. They all had to have a little bit of meat. They didn't need a lot of meat. But they had a little bit of meat, and it was mostly seasonal. Why would you kill your chickens in the summertime when you can eat the food out of your garden fast enough? You know what I mean? So nature really did have a beautiful plan that we've gotten ourselves far, far away from. And now we're beginning to see that all of these diets are actually okay. But whenever you go into an extreme diet, the next best-selling diet is usually giving you permission to eat the foods that the other diet says you shouldn't eat because you're craving them. And if you go on any extreme diet for a little while, you're going to feel better, but the test is will that diet provide you a lasting benefit where you really feel good for the long haul. And now, I would recommend folks take a look at eating foods that are in season. We put together a free — nobody read my The 3-Season Diet. They thought I really didn't know that there were four seasons, so they didn't read it. I don't know what they thought, but it didn't do as well as I thought. But the point is that I've put all the recipes into a free eating guide that people can get for free. Every month we put out a recipe guide, a grocery list for every month of the year, and superfoods for every month of the year, so you can get, “Okay, here's what's happening in July. Here's what's happening in August.” And you can just get a list and eat more of those foods in that season. That's the key that, hopefully, folks will take away from this. It's, hey, you know what? It's the summertime. I'm gonna give myself personally way more vegetables. It's winter time. I'm going to give myself personally way more fiber, way more fat, way more protein. In the spring, I will intermittently fast way more aggressively. I'm going to force my body into a little bit of calorie restriction because that's the hormesis time. That's the time of the year that provides strength and resiliency, and immunity because we are giving the body a sort of a nature break from eating lots of heavy food that we did in the season prior, which is the winter. So you have a beautiful understanding when you look at nature and tell yourself, hey, I want to try and mimic that somewhat.
[1:06:25.2] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. So here's the idea. Let's take your book, and you're going to do a relaunch, like a second edition or whatever. But instead, call it The 3-Harvest Diet, and then you can do some kind of subtitle about The Ancient Wisdom and Science of Eating with the Seasons. Just do it. To do that, people are going to buy it and read it, okay?
[1:06:52.0] Dr. John Douillard: I'd love that, but I hated that. But the people at Random House were like, “Oh, we're going to call it The 3-Season Diet.” I'm like, I don't even get that. They just overruled me completely.
[1:07:04.9] Ashley James: Really? Well, go back to them and tell them my idea and say, “I know what I'm talking about,” and just say, “The Ashley James said it, of the Learn True Health Podcast. She knows what she's talking about. Put your foot down.”
[1:07:19.5] Dr. John Douillard: Which is true.
[1:07:21.4] Ashley James: So most of the population that's listening is living three to four seasons. Well, I joke about the third season because I'm in Seattle. We don't really have three seasons or four seasons here. We just have rain, cold, and mud, and then a beautiful spring, and then an amazing summer, and that's it. And so fall, and winter is just like cold, mudded rain. So I joke that we have three seasons. Actually, mud is the season here. But what about people in the subtropics and equatorial regions of the world where they have access to fresh fruit all year round?
[1:08:02.7] Dr. John Douillard: They do. But there is still harvest there. There are still seasons there, and they can still eat foods that are locally grown, that are naturally occurring, and are still sort of natural cycles there. And also, the people there are different from those in the northern hemisphere. We go from a 72-degree house to a 72-degree car to a 72-degree office. So we never really experience the changes as much, like if you live in the tropics or in Florida. It can be 50 to 60 degrees in the wintertime, and it can be 80 to 90 degrees in the summer. That's an almost 30-degree difference. So they're actually experiencing that every single day, almost every moment of the day, and they sort of do the air conditioning thing now but not as much as we. We are so much more insulated, and that's where you really lose that natural rhythm of nature of helping to strengthen that hormesis effect of dealing with cold and being stronger for it.
[1:09:01.2] Ashley James: You keep talking about building on the fat for the winter like, “John, okay, I've got a few winters on me.” I'm sure there are some listeners who are like, “As much as I want to eat with the seasons and heal my body, can I skip building the fat for the winter? And could I just go straight to burning fat for next summer?” So what do you recommend? Of course, go all the way back to healthy digestion and lymph, right? Because you talked about how that buildup creates unwanted belly fat. But for those who want a good healthy digestion and also want a really strong healthy metabolism and equally strong detoxification to handle the toxins as they burn the fat. But what do you do for people who are really ready to get down to their ideal body weight? How do you help them to build that fire in them?
[1:10:01.1] Dr. John Douillard: Well, in so many ways, obviously, there was a time when we really needed that extra fat, and this is not that time. Most of us need to help lose a few pounds and get ourselves back to energy balance where we're putting in, reusing, and not storing excess, right? So there are lots of ways. Every spring and fall is a really great time to do a calorie-restricted type cleanse. We have Ayurvedic cleansers that folks can do. We have a four-day cleanse, which is really super easy. We have a 14-day which is more of an overhaul digestive reset that folks can do. So there are ways that they could do that. In our 14-day cleanse, people usually lost about 17 pounds on average, or short home cleansers, which is an ebook. Anybody can download it for free. Woman's World magazine called me up one day and said, “Can we do a cleanse?” And I said, “Sure, you can take my short home cleanse right on my website, and you can get it for free.” They did it. I didn't hear from them for almost nine months. They called me up and said, “I want to do a fact-checking test interview with you.” I go, “For what?” And she said, “Well, we did your cleanse, and we had 40 people do it. It was mind-boggling. People lost 11 pounds on average in just four days; It was an amazing reset.
So there are simple ways to just kind of reset your ability to burn fat which is a really important thing. I did a study with my own patients. Once, we had about 25 folks to study, and we had them eat breakfast, lunch, supper, and no snacks. And they were like, “Wow, no, snacks.” That was hard for them, and they complained for the first two weeks, and they started feeling better at the end of the two months of study. We measured their anxiety, depression, and cognitive decline. We measured their sleep. We measured their anxiety, their exhaustion, their exhaustion after work, and their weight loss, and all of those. Sleep also was significantly better. They lost 1.2 lb every week during the entire study.
One of my patients, one of those people in the study, would come in, and then every week, we'd meet, and she'd go, “I love this. I'm feeling so good. I'm not snacking and feeling great. And a lot of them said, “Well, you know, I'm feeling so great with just breakfast and lunch. I don't even want supper.” So many of the folks felt like they could just skip supper and go down to two meals a day, which they did, and they lost even significantly more weight. But the lady who kept saying, “I feel so good. I'll never stop eating this way,” she said, “But I haven't lost a pound.” I'm like, “This is a study. It would be great to have you lose a few pounds. It would be great for our numbers here.” And every day, every week, she came in, and she hadn't lost a pound, but she felt great. Six months later or something, she walked into my office as a patient, and I said, “How are you doing?” And she says, “Great! I lost 25 lbs.” I said, “How? When?” She goes, “I don't know. I told you I never stopped doing that, eating breakfast and lunch and no supper, or a lighter supper, or a soup-like supper. And I just somehow slowly lost the weight.” And she was a really type A go, go, go, go person yoga teacher and mom. There's just so much going on her plate. And I said, “I just think it takes time for your body to feel safe enough to burn the fat.” We store fat when we're under stress. That's where understanding that the harder you push, the more devices you have. This is crazy. I'm going to store the fats under the mattress for a rainy day. And that's what is so important for us to meditate, do yoga, or breathing practices, some type of prayer, some type of downtime where we're not just going, going, going. It is a really important piece of the puzzle.
A lot of the things that impact our physiology are our crazy mindset. That makes us do the same dumb things again and again and again and again. I already talked about this years ago. I called it mental armor or unwanted emotions. And are, according to research, the molecules of emotion; we know that those are actually stored in our fat. And they actually are little energy, kind of pre-recorded stress responses that make us do the same dumb stuff again. But when you burn fat, you free and release those, you have access to those old underlying emotional patterns of behavior, like during a cleanse when you force that metabolic, if you do self-inquiry, which we give people a self-inquiry guide. In that process, they can begin to go, “Wow, I see the reason why I go home for the holidays; I start acting like a four-year-old again.” And then the key is to begin to take action to free ourselves from those old patterns by not responding to their stress but by looking through the window of compassion and understanding. And instead of reacting to them, respond from what's really inside your heart, which is that you love and care for them. But there will always be like them who trigger us. And then we end up trying to engage in behavior to make them change, to be something that we think they should be. If they were the way I think they should be, I would be happier; they would be happier, and there would be a happier place. So it never really works, so that's part of it as well. Ayurveda understood that this crazy mind of ours gets our senses in big trouble. So we have to pull every string, the upper digestive string. How do you reboot digestive strength? How do you detoxify the lymphatic system? How do you shed all unwanted emotions? How do you force the body into fat metabolism so you can get into energy balance? All these things apply, and they can be done gracefully throughout the year. And it becomes kind of a beautiful way of life where you really feel like you're going downstream with the current, and you don't feel like life is a big struggle any longer, and that's the key.
[1:15:42.6] Ashley James: Ayurveda was never just about physical health. Like it wasn't just, here's the food and the herbs, and when you eat it, and when you take it. Ayurveda was true holistic medicine in that, looking at the body and life, and your being as a whole, your life as a whole. In the Learn True Health podcast, I always say that you're not just your physical body. We are emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and energetic. And even every aspect of your life is your health — the health of your marriage, the health of your relationships, the health of your career, while you're driving, while you're walking, while you're brushing your teeth, what's going through your mind, your self-talk. Every single aspect of your life can be kind of looked at and examined. Is this in harmony? Do you have joy here? Do you have a blockage? Is it toxic for you? Are you stuck? Are you growing?
We do not practice reductionistic medicine like MDs do. We don't reduce us and break us down into our parts. And so what I hear from you is that Ayurveda is that true holistic medicine and that you're looking at everything, every aspect including your emotions, but also your mental strategies and maybe the unwanted strategies that were developed in childhood that aren't serving you, looking at that as well and seeing how it is now affecting everything. How does that affect digestion? How is that affecting detox? How was that affecting your weight loss? It's all interconnected. Nothing in the body happens in a vacuum. We have to remember that.
[1:17:32.0] Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, I know, that's a hundred percent true. In Ayurveda, it's that you feel the pain or distress in your heart and that stress is then carried to your brain, and it's actually etched into the white matter of your brain, which is where the waxy myelin is like etching the stress and recording it in a certain part of your brain. Well, they now have discovered that part of the brain that cleans that out, and it's called the glymphatic system, where it dumps 3 lbs of black trash out of your head every year while you sleep. I did Ayurvedic panchakarma detox retreats for 26 years. So people come into our clinic, and they would do a detox retreat, and I would guide them through this for many, many, many years before I started writing and teaching more. And one of my patients — there's a technique called Nasya where you actually sniffed medicated oil into your sinuses, and you clean out the brain lymphatic system. It is what happens. It's a pretty elaborate procedure, and I have a video on my website about how you can do it at home. But it was the thing that would actually help people crack that emotionally. You know, sometimes patients can't get over that emotional hurdle to get themselves to feel at peace and turn off the alarm bells so the body can actually heal. So she did these treatments, and I gave her her self-inquiry guide, and she was writing it in her journal after she did this because the brain is kind of sniffing medicated oil up into the sinuses. But it was after a really big head massage and eucalyptus steam to visually dilate the head and the vessels in the head as much as possible, and then you sniff this sort of medicated oil to trigger a brain lymphatic sinus dump.
And after she did it, she said she was sitting there and writing in her journal, and she said, “I had this epiphany where I was abused when I was 14 years old and should have completely blocked it out of my mind.” She was probably 35 years old at that time. “It was so amazing for me to see this event. But what was really, really weird was I wasn't affected by the event. I was completely taken by my childhood. Before the event, I was just a happy-go-lucky kid. Then this even happened, and then I became this type A hyper-vigilant corporate executives perfectionist. I even have a color-coded closet. Everything was perfect in my life to keep me safe. And I looked at my life before, and I looked at my life after. After that event, I said, this wasn't worth 25 years of my life.” And she said, “I just dropped it.” And she let it go. She came to me with a goiter in her neck, the size of a grapefruit or a cantaloupe. You couldn't miss it. Within the week of the Ayurveda detox, I swear to you that goiter was gone. You could not see it. Her numbers were measured, and it came down by 200 points. She had hyperthyroidism. Within six months, her hyperthyroidism was completely normalized. Two, four, or five years later, or something like that, I was in Denver at a Christmas party, and she came running up to me — I hadn't seen her in a long time — with two little kids in tow, and she said, “I just need to introduce you to these kids that I would never have had if this didn't happen.” So, the idea that the emotions are just in your head, in Ayurveda, they don't compartmentalize. Those emotions are physically based in our body, and we can detoxify them out of ourselves so we can have access to them mentally and emotionally, make transformational changes, and free ourselves from underlying emotional patterns that aren't serving us any longer. And that's what Ayurveda means.
Ayurveda means truth. It means the truth of your life. We know 95% of the things that we think and say, and do as adults come from impressions from the first six years of life. So most of us walk around, pretty unconscious, thinking of doing stuff based on old impressions that saved us and helped us survive and navigate our childhood. But becoming conscious is what Ayurveda was all about, like freeing ourselves from those old protective patterns and letting something real, more powerful, more beautiful out, letting the delicate petals of your flower really open and letting that vulnerability out, letting that love out and even your power out. What got me was guiding people through this process and watching them transform. Oh my gosh. You ask about their digestion, you ask about their back pain, you ask about their heartburn, “Oh, that's great.” But when you see someone light up because they're free from those old emotional traumas, the underpinnings of their digestive health, and you really see it's all tied together. It's not just one or the other. It can be. If you fix heartburn, they feel better; that's great. But a lot of times, it's all one thing. It just kind of morphed into different expressions.
[1:22:27.8] Ashley James: Yes, the root problem has a bunch of branches. So the symptoms are showing up in different ways, and you take a stressor, and then the bodies are sympathetic, and then they're not digesting, probably, and then they're not sleeping. And because they're not sleeping, they're taking coffee, and maybe they're super stressed, so they start drinking, and then they start yelling at their kids. It just got snowballed, like you said, unconsciously. At that point, it feels like their health has so many symptoms. It feels like a kitten has been playing with yarn. How do I get this back to an organized ball? Where do I begin? It's just a tangled yarn, and so many people grab supplements. And I love supplements when they are high quality, and they're meant for you. But we just kind of grab it desperately, hoping for a solution, or grab onto a diet because the marketing around diets is wonderful.
The doctor that wrote Proteinaholic said, and here goes chapter one, and I started crying. It was just so beautiful. He goes, “These diets, you did not fail these diets. These diets failed you.” And then he proceeds like the whole book is demystifying these diets based on science. He has a really interesting story. He had humor that's, “Oh, I'm a doctor that cuts your stomach out, and I'm going to help you lose weight by cutting your stomach out and telling you to eat a ‘low-fat', highly-processed, 1200 calorie-a-day diet.” But then, in his thirties, he began to become sick and fat, eating the diet that he puts his patients on. So he had to eat humble pie and go back to the drawing board. He did not start going, “I want to become vegan.” That was the last thing he wanted to do. But after looking at everything, he's like, “Oh my gosh. Everything I've been saying is wrong, and everything I've been saying is like cutting up people's stomachs. It was just a temporary solution. This wasn't the long-term solution. But, like, “Oh, you have a sore throat. Let's cut out your tonsils,” It's just like, “Oh, but the problem is the gallbladder. Let's cut out the gallbladder. Let's just remove body parts. That's the solution.” That's when clients coming to me — I'm a health coach — and they have all these symptoms, I'm like, “Okay, so how many body parts have they removed from you?” Because so many times, someone starts talking about their digestion, I'm like, “And when did they remove your gallbladder?” And they're like, “How did you know?” I'm like, “Well, this is a dime a dozen.” How many people have had their gallbladders removed or other body parts removed? Because, you know, it offended the MD.
I love MD drug-based medicine for when it can save someone's life, but they suck at chronic disease. They cause more chronic diseases. They do not help fix it. They will help you manage the disease, keep the disease, and make other diseases happen. They're great for emergency medicine. That's where they shine. I love them there. But they're the worst. We're taking our cars to plumbers is what we're doing. And we have to stop believing the propaganda that drug-based MD medicine, allopathic medicine, is where we should go when we have multiple symptoms and chronic illnesses. We need to go to doctors like you who look at ancient wisdom and the latest science to get to the root cause and support the body to come back into balance. It just makes so much sense.
I'm really blown away by this idea that as we burn fat, we're processing stored emotions. I always knew that as we burn fat, we're processing toxins and heavy metals, like the things that were storing the fat. But the idea that then we would be unlocking old patterns, old negative beliefs, and old unresolved emotions makes sense if you're changing your diet. You're changing old, old behaviors, so there's some stuff that comes to the surface there. But then, just the process of burning fat is going to bring up stuff to resolve. It's really such an interesting way of putting it. You talked about these different detoxes, and I'm really, really interested if our listeners have identified with what you talked about and say, yeah, I think my digestion needs some support. I feel like my lymph or my glymph could really use some support, and I'd like to burn those 11 or 17 lbs. You said I'd like to get my metabolism fire going, and I'd really like to address this. If they could pick one cleanse or one protocol on your website, what would it be?
[1:27:11.9] Dr. John Douillard: I think that the first one is as simple as this 4-day short home cleanse, which is a free book that you can get and takes you step-by-step through the entire process. It gives you some herbs. There's one herb we call Gentle Digest. It's just a combination of five spices — ginger, cumin, coriander, fennel, and cardamom. You can make your own mix with that and spice your food, cook with it. And the studies show that it will actually increase the strength of your stomach acid, increase the amount of bile that you produce from your liver and your gallbladder and increase your duodenal pancreatic enzymes. And if you have that upper digestive coordinated, you won't let undigested proteins and tabasco, undigested into your intestinal tract, irritate the lining, and find a way through into the lymphatic system where they cause all kinds of havoc. And like you said, on why doctors are taking parts out, started here. It started by bubble wrapping our diets. So instead of fixing that problem I just mentioned, we just say, “I'm not going to eat this. I'm not going to eat that. I'm going to go on a low-fat diet. I'm going to go on a high-fat diet. I'm going to do all these extreme diets trying to dance around, without realizing it, dancing around the underlying problem. And that’s the beauty of Ayurveda, their thousands of years of experience being experts in rebooting and strengthening digestion.
You probably know Dr. Bernard Jensen from years ago. He was a great doctor about gut health. He created the first cleaning boards for the colonics. He created iridology and had a health clinic out in Escondido, California. I was a big fan, a real longevity nut. I got to meet Jack LaLanne. I was a fan of Paul Bragg. I was a fan of Bernard Jensen way back in the day. And I finally got to lecture with Dr. Bernard Jensen, and he was my mentor. He has written over fifty books. He’s just a really brilliant guy. But he is old now, probably in his late 80s. And his belly was really super distended. His assistant told me that he had to take 17 digestive enzymes with every single meal, and I was like, “God, that can't be right.”
And then, when I went to India and I studied Ayurveda, they were so kind and gentle to the intestinal tract. They would never clobber with really aggressive agents that could irritate the lining. It was all about creating a really nutritive environment for the good bacteria to proliferate, and they weren't about killing the bad, ripping the guts to shreds with antibiotics, or heavy, aggressive cleanses or coffee enemas. All of those can work medicinally, but in the long run, you want something that's going to be sustainable. And so it was really an eye-opener for me about how we do it in the West. It is so aggressive — more is better, push harder — versus in India, where they had thousands of years to figure this out, and they knew that they got the environment. Like you said, it's Goldilocks — it can't be too dry in there, constipated. It can't be too wet in there, mucousy. It has got to be just right for the good bugs to proliferate and for the lining to stay intact. And if that lining breaks down, you know we're in trouble. And that's what happened to us. That filter in our intestinal tract doesn't really get replaced. It can just break down over time. So that's what Ayurveda is really about. It is understanding how to reboot that upper digestion and heal the lining. There was a study that came out just a couple of weeks ago that showed that when you actually heal the gut, that actually was the key to longevity and when they've healed the gut, it actually had a cascade effect of healing every other organ in the body. We all know gut health is really important. But to have science to show that gut health is the kingpin, the organ responsible for our longevity, that's new science. And that's what Ayurveda said thousands of years ago — the seat of your stress in your nervous system is in your gut. It takes a beating, so it keeps on ticking, but we really have to care for it with kid gloves and create an environment that’s so conducive. That's why the cleanses we do are gentle. It's not like an endurance event. You eat. You're not starving because if you're starving, the body stores fat. And just like we said, when you're under stress, you store fat. Well, when you're not under stress, you release the fat. But when you store the stress as fat, what is that? That's emotional stress that got stored in your fat, and when you actually force the body to release the fat by creating parasympathetic dominance, it’s taking away the emergency of the body from naturally burning fat and releases those emotional toxins and patterns of behavior that were there because of a stressful situation recorded because of the stressful event that scared the heck out of it. When you were ten, you went into a cave, and a bear chased you out. You are never going to forget that. It’s a species survival thing, and we hold on to those memories. But a lot of them don't need to be remembered. We can let them go.
[1:32:08.5] Ashley James: I love it. And earlier, you talked about how the study with people eating wheat versus not eating wheat. The people that didn't eat wheat, which we don't expect to be healthier because they're gluten-free. They had higher levels of mercury, and the first place my mind goes is, “Oh, gluten-free products are higher in mercury.” But that's not the point that you were saying. What you're saying is that people who have stronger digestion also have stronger lymph, have stronger detox. The toxins are able to move through and get out. And that they're able to eat some poison. They're able to actually eat like you need a little bit of poison to strengthen the body, in a sense, and test the body. But when you have all those aspects in alignment, then if you eat something with mercury, your body is going to get rid of it, which is people who are removing food after food after food, eliminating the gluten, eliminating the dairy, and the eggs. And they just kind of start going down this list of all the things they can eat, or, now, I can't eat nightshades, and now I can't eat legumes, and now I'm sensitive to apples, and can't eat bananas. They just keep removing food after food. They will feel temporarily okay, but the root cause is not being addressed. So their lymph is still backed up. Their digestion is still compromised. Their immune system is compromised. The integrity of their detox pathways and all the ways that we eliminate them is weakened. And so then, when heavy metals get in us through our food, and if someone has amalgams or gets injected, they just stay in the body. So it's really interesting. We can't just assume, “Oh, this person ate this, and this person ate this, and here's the outcome. Oh, it means that food is bad and that food is good. Okay, done. I'm going to stop thinking and just take it at face value.” There's so much more to this, and we have to go deeper.
That's why I love this conversation today. You're probably now one of my favorite guests. You're right up there, and I got to have you back on the show because this is just scratching the surface of what you know and teach. I'm so happy to bring your information to the listeners because we are all desperately seeking, if not for ourselves, our friends and family. We're all looking for the answers to help us. Now, I know there's not one one-size-fits-all, but like you said, with Ayurveda, it's looking at the body as a whole and helping the body come back into balance and supporting the nature that we've observed for thousands of years on how the body is able to the function. And for those who are religious or spiritual, it just only makes sense to eat the way God intended. It just only makes sense to eat what God has provided. And I can’t think of a religion where fasting isn't part of it. And so, people who aren't tuned into religion or to any spiritual practice, they eat three meals a day and some snacks, and they think fasting is ludicrous.
One of my friend's partner just goes, “I think fasting is unhealthy,” and she fasts. And she goes, “What makes you say?” And he goes, “I don't know. I just think it's unhealthy. I don't have any basis. I just think it's unhealthy.” His blood sugar is above 400 all the time. We keep showing him this information and we feel really bad for him because his health is deteriorating and he's so young. But he's got this belief, “If fasting is good for me, my MD would have told me.” It’s what he said. Unfortunately, there's a percentage of the population who believes everything their MD tells them is right, and if their MD didn't tell them, then it's not worth knowing. And MDs are not trained in this. Again, taking your car to a plumber; plumbers are great for leaks in your house. They may not know how to fix your car, but we have to think critically. And I love that you're showing us how to think critically around our health and how to dig deeper. So listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/lifespa and use coupon code LTH and definitely get the four-day free cleanse there on the website. Out of all your products — we didn't really talk a lot about your products — is there something that you want to let us know about on your site because you've designed so many amazing herbal products? Is there something that stands out that you'd like to let us know about?
[1:36:58.2] Dr. John Douillard: There are probably two, and one of them is the one we talked about today. There is that formula we call Gentle Digest, which is ginger, cumin, fennel, coriander, and cardamom. Take a couple of those before each meal to reboot your upper digestion. And then there's an herb called manjistha, which is the Ayurvedic lymphatic herb. It's phenomenally important for helping that extra weight around your belly and making sure whatever you eat, if there's some undigested food, doesn't end up creating lymphatic congestion, which can cause so many health concerns. Many of the things that most people are experiencing are lymph-based, and we don't really look at or think about the lymph. There's nothing really in Western medicine about the lymph. There's no medical pharmaceutical-grade drug for the lymph. But in Ayurveda, there are a lot of herbs for the lymph. It’s the first thing we treat. So those are the two I would say to start with for folks, and they are very safe. There are the Whole Herbs, all the natural conditions, all the bugs, all the natural microbes that are there. They've been used as food for thousands of years. It is like taking a thousand times potent extract that can actually do good but also have some consequences. That's the beauty of it. It's really kind and gentle and very safe.
[1:38:12.8] Ashley James: How do we take it? Both of them.
[1:38:16.0] Dr. John Douillard: The Gentle Digest is a capsule, one or two capsules before the meal, and the Manjistha is also a capsule, and you take probably just one of those after the meal, and you’ll be set.
[1:38:26.4] Ashley James: Nice, it’s very cool. I really want to have you back on the show. I’ve got a list of things. I want to talk about parasites. I want to talk about breathing. Oh my gosh, there are so many things we can geek out. There’s a lot of really cool stuff. So please, please come back on the show. And then go back to your publishers. I want your book to be relaunched with my title that I came up with. You don't even have to give me credit. Just do it. I want people to read it. I'm so excited. Thank you so much for coming on the show and introducing these concepts to my listeners, who, in turn, are going to share them with their friends and family. My goal has always been to help end suffering. I suffered for so many years. I know you've listened to a few episodes. I don't know if you know my story. In my twenties, I was so sick. I suffered so much. I’m not suicidal. I never wanted to die, but I’d cry. I felt like I was trapped. I was trapped in my body, and I had chronic adrenal fatigue and type 2 diabetes, and it was out of control. I was on constant antibiotics. I couldn't even process human language in the morning. It was really bad. I was just exhausted and sick all the time. And I was hungry all the time. It wasn't me. My spirit inside did not match my body. I had to turn away from MDs because they didn't have anything for me. They said I would always have PCOS. I'd always be infertile, I always had to be on drugs, and I’d always have diabetes. They just told me, “I'm sorry, you're stuck. This is your plot in life, your genetics.” And just the lie after lie, and the hubris, and the poison they gave me. It was disgusting, and they acted like they had the answers and there were no other answers. And so many people are suffering.
So when I found natural medicine, actually, I re-found it because I went to a naturopath as a child, and then I rebelled. So I had to refind it and use food, herbs and supplements, vitamins and minerals. But that was when I was in my twenties. Now in my thirties, I’m getting my body back, and we have a beautiful son. And I don't think we're done having a family yet, but we lost our daughter two years ago, and I gained 40 lbs. I didn't feel like I ate myself into those 40 lbs, which is really interesting because I ate so clean during pregnancy that within weeks, like two or three weeks after the birth, I was back down to my pre-birth weight. So it wasn't like I gained weight during the pregnancy. I was really good about my nutrition. And it was after losing her that I put on 40 lbs, and these are 40 grief pounds. I had PTSD, and just when you said that, it's really interesting because I pretty much lost it now, but it was a struggle. And I kept coming up against, and like now, seeing when you talked about losing weight, it can bring out the emotions that were there.
And that's so true that I felt like I was really going through some stuff while losing it. But it was a different weight loss than what I've experienced in the past because it was so charged with emotion, let's just say. So now this really makes sense, and we can be gentle with ourselves and forgive ourselves. I can only say what I feel like as a woman. I don't know what it is to be a man. But for women, I feel that we hold a lot of guilt and shame for not looking like magazine models. Maybe we looked amazing in our teenage years, in our twenties, and then it kind of all falls apart after a few kids. Although I do have a friend who's had five daughters, and she still looks like she's 19. But for most of us, there's something that happens, and maybe it’s trauma like you said. There's a lot going on in digestion, pesticides, and drugs that kill our good bacteria. But there's a lot of guilt and shame. And much of the weight that we are carrying is emotional. So thank you for bringing that up, and I wanted to share that with the listeners so that I can give them the grace that they can hold mercy in their hearts for themselves and let go. Hold that grace and love themselves enough to let go of the guilt and the shame so they can take the steps towards health and healing and heal emotionally while they heal physically.
I want our listeners to go to your website, learntruehealth.com/lifespa. It gets you there with the coupon code LTH. Go check out those cool products, get the books, and tune in for the next time we have John on the show because I can't wait to have you back. This is going to be a lot of fun.
[1:43:30.6] Dr. John Douillard: Well, I'm honored, and I would love to come back. All the things you just mentioned, I feel like there's just so much to talk about there, and it can help so many women. I'll tell you, in one of John Hopkins’ studies, 40% to 60% of women during and after their pregnancy have what's called a hiatal hernia, where the stomach pushes out from the baby so hard and herniates through the diaphragm and causes digestive problems, breathing problems, lymphatic problems, and cognitive problems for decades. And I wanted to write a book called I've Never Been Quite the Same Since My Pregnancies, and my publisher thought it was a bad idea. I think I’ll get a new publisher. But the idea is like, that doesn't have to happen. Those things are reversible, and I treat so many women, decades after that, with proper breathing exercises, reboot their digestion, and all those problems go away. And along with that is the emotional peace where you can shed some of those old, unwanted emotions. And those patterns of behavior that just haunt us, and they don't have to. Yeah, I can't wait to dive into that with you next time.
[1:44:37.5] Ashley James: Cool. Alright. Sounds good. It’s a date. Looking forward to it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to talk to you again.
[1:44:44.2] Dr. John Douillard: Great. Thank you.
[1:44:45.1] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Dr. John Douillard. We're definitely going to have him back on the show. He has a whole talk on how to reactivate the diaphragm so that we breathe correctly. And I thought it was really interesting that they did a study and found that 93% of athletes, or gym goers, people that run on the treadmill are not using their diaphragm correctly, that something's blocking them from full activation of their diaphragm. I guess I'm not one of those people because I feel like I breathe really well. But my husband and I were on the treadmill this week at the gym. And he turned to me and said, “I don't feel like I'm breathing correctly.” That was really interesting because I'm watching him as he is
running, and then he stops the treadmill, and he's kind of winded because he just sprinted, and he's looking at me and goes, “It doesn’t feel like I'm breathing correctly now.” We see the chiropractor, and we see naturopaths, acupuncturists, and all kinds of really cool holistic practitioners. But he just had that realization that he didn't feel like his diaphragm was fully engaged. And then right after that, I interviewed Dr. Douillard, and he and I got to talking about it, and that's why we’re definitely going to have him back on the show to teach us this because it's a real thing.
I recently had a client who I've been working with using phototherapy patches. I discussed in a recent episode having amazing results, and she noticed that her diaphragm came back online. She said that when she would fall asleep, her oxygen levels would drop into the 70s, and she is on monitors. She's on medical monitors throughout the night. And so she knew this and that after using the phototherapy patches, she felt like it awoke something in her diaphragm. It re-engaged it, and she started breathing better. And when she sleeps now, her oxygen level stays in the 90s, and I thought this was fascinating that we can reactivate. First of all, I never thought that the diaphragm — unless we had some kind of major brain trauma or some kind of major neurological troubles and kind of major structural trauma — I didn't realize how common it was for people to not be engaging their diaphragm correctly and the auxiliary secondary muscles that help to control the rib cage and the sternum. This whole upper body thoracic structure could be off. Just like someone could be walking, like their gait, they could be walking. And some people are walking, and everything's fine. But then you look at someone, and you're like, “Hey, your foot kind of bends inwards.” Or the way you're walking looks like the rest of your body is kind of off because of the way your gait is. Well, just imagine breathing; I always thought we all breathe pretty well. And according to Dr. John, we're not. Most of us aren't doing it correctly. And we can, with some exercises, reactivate and bring online the full use of our diaphragm. How cool is that? Especially for my husband, who is getting really great numbers in the gym, running more and more, and sprinting more and more. And he wants to maximize his experience on the treadmill. So I thought that was really cool. I'm excited to have him back.
I don't know if you remember the very beginning of this episode; it was a long time ago, almost two hours ago. At the beginning of this episode, we opened the episode talking about structured water, which surprised me because he's like, “Yeah, I got my analemma water right here.” And I had my analemma water. So we had a good conversation about it. If you don't have your structured water device yet, what are you waiting for? Go out and get it. It is not that expensive compared to all the other machines out there. It's under $300. I think there's one that's like $170, plus we have a coupon code. So you use this little device, and you stir your water with it. We have an interview I've done about it. We have an interview coming up. I'm interviewing one of the scientists that do the studies, and he's got some really cool things to share. I’m going to be interviewing him next month. That's exciting, so tune in for that. You can go to learntruehealth.com/structuredwater and be sure to use coupon code LTH for the listener discount. Get your savings when you buy your analemma structured water device. Check it out. And if you like your entire house and all the water in every tap and faucet coming into your home already structured, then you can also check that out there as well, because they have the device that you hook up to your plumbing and then you can bathe or shower in structured water, which they're releasing the studies. And there are already some studies you can check out by going to learntruehealth.com/structuredwater. The preliminary studies are fascinating. I thought it would have to do more with skin health, but they're seeing that it actually has to do with heart health. They're seeing vast improvements in heart health, and how cool is that because that affects every cell in the body. They also say that if you want to improve brain health, improve heart health because the major aspects of brain health have to do with making sure that we’re getting the flow of nutrients and oxygen to the brain and removing the junk. It's all about bringing the groceries in the cell, and just like a house, bring the groceries in, take the garbage out. As long as we do that effectively, then every cell can be healthy.
Now, if you'd like to get some of Dr. Douillard’s wonderful Ayurvedic herbs, supplements, and also his free guides — he talked about his four-day free cleanse that he gives — you can go to learntruehealth.com/lifespa. Make sure you use coupon code LTH. They're giving us a 10% off on orders over $50, which is pretty easy to do. You buy two bottles of something, and you're over $50, and then you get 10% off. How cool is that? And that’s a repeating coupon code, so you can use that every time you go to learntruehealth.com/lifespa coupon code LTH and join our Facebook group. I'd love for you to come in. Tell me what you thought about this episode and what you learned. I thought this was amazing. I got off the interview with my husband. I said that this might be in the top 20. I mean, we’ve done over 500. So to make the top 20 is pretty big. But the amount of wisdom that Dr. Douillard just landed on us and it was so cool. I just love that you can walk into your kitchen and take cumin, ginger, turmeric, and black pepper. These kinds of herbs are just sitting there in our kitchen, and we can use them to support digestion.
I had just been recently reading some studies because I’m in the process of writing a blog that I'm going to be publishing about my moon milk that I've been drinking for quite a while. He had mentioned some of the spices. I'm like, “Oh yeah, those are all the herbs that are in my moon milk.” I've been doing research on ginger, fennel, coriander, cardamom, and cumin. Those were the five he talks about that are in his supplements. I've seen that in their studies, it’s like, “In the six-week study, someone took a teaspoon of this herb every day, which you can easily do.” And I’m like, yeah, sure, you can put it in tea or make moon milk like me. You can also just throw it in your soup. If you want to, you could put it in your smoothie. That would be an interesting smoothie right there. You can put it in your juice. You can blend a bunch of juices together and make a virgin caesar. But there are all kinds of ways you can get these herbs into you. And in the six-week study, they found that taking these herbs significantly decreased bloating, decreased gas, and increased the ability to perform digestion. The list goes on and on. I was using them. I have about 15 herbs I make in my moon milk, and most of these herbs are probably already in your kitchen, which is so great. And there's just a handful that I go to the store for, like the adaptogens I love to add, like ashwagandha. These herbs not only aid in digestion, but they also help to balance out hormones. They help to get rid of parasites. They help to boost the immune system, decrease inflammation, aid in sleep, and just on and on and on. Everywhere I look, it almost seems like it just helps every single system of the body, and it's so easy, and it's almost free. Just walk into your kitchen. You already own most of these spices, so start using them on a daily basis to gain the benefits.
I just love Dr. Douillard’s methods of bringing in that ancient wisdom and now also using modern science to understand what they've been teaching for 5,000 years and using in these ancient ways. But now we can look at it through the modern lens and go, “Yep, yep. These studies prove what they’ve been saying for 5,000 years. And now, we understand the processes as to why these things work so great. So yeah, definitely get his free cleanse. Go to learntruehealth.com/lifespa, and if you do decide to buy any of his herbs, which I've checked out and I really like, that's coupon code LTH. Come join the Facebook group, Learn True Health on Facebook. Would love to see you there. Tune in next week. We're going to have a two-part interview, more about herbs, actually. We’re diving in and learning more about herbs, and it's pretty exciting. I love what we learn in the next two episodes. So tune in for that.
Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. If you're a new listener and someone shared this with you, guess what? They care about you. It was like sending you a big virtual hug by giving you this episode, just so you know. So definitely share this with those you care about and tell them, “Hey, I like you, and I thought of you. This is my little virtual hug sending you this episode.” And then tell your friends to come join the Facebook group community, the Learn True Health community, because we love supporting each other in our health success. We're helping as many people as possible to learn true health, and you're part of that. So thank you.
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