Learn True Health with Ashley James

As Covid-19 affects most countries around the world with increasing infections, countless myths and theories have come out about Covid-19. Dr. Stephen Cabral is back on the show with us and he debunks some myths about the Covid-19 coronavirus. He talks about the facts surrounding the Covid-19, and he also gives us some tips on what foods to eat and what supplements to take to have a higher chance of fighting off Covid-19.

Intro:

Hello true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This one is amazing. I’ve been so excited to get this out there for you. Dr. Stephen Cabral answers all of the listeners’ questions on the Covid-19 virus and what we can do to support our body’s ability to stay as healthy as possible. I think you’re going to love today’s interview.

Now, I want to let you know that Dr. Stephen Cabral gives the listeners a discount on his website. He did this when he came back on the show the first time. You can listen to my two previous interviews with Dr. Stephen Cabral by going to episode 271 and 301. You can find them on your favorite podcast directory, or you can go to learntruehealth.com.

Dr. Stephen Cabral’s website is equilibriumnutrition.com/lth. If you put the /lth that gives you a special website, and then you use the coupon code LTH10 for a 10% off for the listeners. Go to equilibriumnutrition.com/lth, and use the coupon code LTH10. That information will also be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.

Dr. Stephen Cabral also talks about the power of sauna therapy and heat therapy. I did share how much I love my Sunlighten Sauna. If you are interested in getting a sauna they even have personalized one person saunas that you can pack up, and put away, and fits into your closet when you’re not using it. It’s called the Solo System. You can go to sunlighten.com and check out their amazing saunas. I’ve had one for over two years now. Our whole family loves it. It’s low EMF, non-toxic. It’s actually ultra-low EMF and non-toxic. It’s the only sauna that gives you the entire spectrum near, mid, and far infrared.

I’ve also interviewed the founder of Sunlighten. Actually, I’ve done a few interviews on the Sunlighten Sauna there science and all the research that went into making those saunas. It took me a while to figure out exactly which sauna I wanted to buy because there are so many great ones out there, but when you dig deeper you find that a lot of them are toxic, or they’re high in EMFs. My favorite is the Sunlighten Sauna for the fact that it is ultra-low EMF, non-toxic. Non-toxic wood, there are no glues. They put a lot into making sure that it’s a very safe product. Also, it has the full spectrum, so you’re getting the benefit of the near, mid, and far infrared spectrum.

I’ve done interviews specifically about why each part of that spectrum is so important. The fact that we have receptors on our cells for that light—sunlight or light—is actually a nutrient that the body is missing. If you can’t get outside and get in the sunlight for an hour a day, you’re deplete in this nutrient, which is just amazing. It blows my mind. I did a whole interview with Dr. Khan on that subject.

If you’re interested in getting a sauna, check out Sunlighten. They do give a great discount to the listeners. They give free shipping, and shipping for saunas is usually around $500. Then on top of that, they also give us $100 in a variety of the accessories that would go with your sauna. They usually also give the listeners something really cool. Go ahead and call Sunlighten, get more info from them. Let them know that you’re a listener of Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James, and they will hook you up. Awesome.

Make sure that you remember equilibriumnutrition.com/lth, and the coupon code LTH10, or just go to the show notes of this episode for all that information. Enjoy today’s interview, and please, share it with absolutely everyone. I normally say share my episodes with those you love or those you care about. This is one of those episodes where you want to share with literally every single person you know, your mailman, just email it to everyone. Get it out there.

We have to get as many people as we know—hundreds and hundreds of people. If you have 200 Facebook friends, all of them need to know this. We’ve got to keep sharing this information because Dr. Cabral answers all the questions and gives us the answers that we really need. We need all of our neighbors, and our loved ones, and our co-workers, and our church friends, and everyone to know this information. I’m really excited to get this information out there because we’re going to save a lot of lives and help a lot of people to stay healthy. Excellent. Have a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s episode.

[0:05:03] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 421.

I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. Stephen Cabral. You were in episode 271, 301, and now episode 421. There’s something going on with the ones. It’s such a pleasure to have you back on the show.

[0:05:32] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It’s great to be back. Thank you for having me on, I appreciate it.

[0:05:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’ve been reaching out to the holistic health community, the Naturopathic doctors that I work with, or that I interview asking if there’s some expert information that you can bring to the table for the listeners around Covid-19 and the coronavirus. What we should do for preparedness, for prevention, to boost the immune systems, to support the terrain of the body? What we should do if we get it, and how to avoid it? Should we be panicking? Is the closure of the world necessary? Are we jumping the gun or should we really all stay at home?

Just getting the advice from the doctors who have pored through all the studies and the information. They really do know how to help us make the safest decisions for ourselves and our families without letting fear run our lives. I’m really excited to have you on the show to clear up a lot of misconceptions. Because you come from a science background, you’re deeply involved in the results in the science, but you have a holistic approach—which is much different. You have different tools in your tool belt than MDs do because you have a strong foundation in holistic medicine and supporting the body’s ability to heal itself.

I’m really looking forward to diving into today’s topic. Thank you so much for coming on the show and helping clear up some myths around Covid-19.

[0:07:10] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It is great to be on. What I want to do today is really come at this from an integrative approach. My philosophy has always been that there is simply no alternative than alternative medicine—as what conventional medicine calls it—for chronic-based disease. That means if anybody’s suffering from high cholesterol, high blood pressure, autoimmune, migraines, none of that can be successfully dealt with through pharmaceuticals or conventional medicine. It simply masks the symptoms. However, when there is an acute-based disease sometimes we do need conventional medicine, and it’s actually life-saving.

What I want to do today is to show you—just like you said—the best ways to boost your immune system, the best ways to absolutely stay healthy. That is by balancing the body. Then if you were—specifically a parent or grandparent—to get this particular Covid-19 virus, what you may look towards in terms of conventional medicine in order to help those people as well. I’m really looking forward to being on and going through all the actual facts. Not a lot of what’s being spread by the fair machine, which is the media right now.

[0:08:19] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, today is March 24th just before noon, Pacific Time. Very up-to-date information. I’m going to be publishing this sometime on the weekend, so just in a few days from now. Those who are listening, this is still very new information, very relevant especially because you’re taking an integrative approach. Let’s start by you maybe just explaining what the virus does, how it spreads, and myth-busting any misconceptions that are going around right now about it.

[0:08:57] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Absolutely, and it is very similar. That’s why we know a bit about it because it’s very similar to severe upper respiratory syndrome—a specific issue that’s affecting a lung tissue. It does seem to have an affinity for lung tissue—meaning this particular virus—but it does enter through the eyes, the nose, or the mouth. That’s why although a lot has been made of hand-washing—that’s absolutely true—but really, what we need to do is it’s not going to enter through our hands or our skin unless there is a cut. Really, the only way it’s entering our body is from our hands touching our eyes, nose, or mouth. That’s why this is one of those times to teach our kids and to teach others, keep your hands away from your face for sure.

Also, there is the other factor, which is it’s airborne. The same meaning it can be transmitted in the same way as the flu. This has a lot of similarities to the influenza virus and the flu as well—one and the same. The difference is that this virus seems to live a little bit longer outside of the body—on many surfaces—up to 72 hours. The new research does show—on metals and things like copper—it’s only a couple hours that it survives. On other surfaces maybe 24 hours, but we know up to 72 hours as well.

People can feel pretty good though because it does not seem to be able to be passed on through food, or supplements, or medications, or anything like that. So it can definitely put our minds to ease in that way. A bigger part of this as well, we’re doing a lot of research, a lot of research has come out over the last couple weeks, and I’d love to be able to share that in a moment too of what is working. We are also seeing that the virus—at least initially—is being effectively stopped slowed I should say.

Stores are actually beginning to open in places like China. Their numbers are not rapidly increasing where we did see a rapid increase in the beginning. Other places like South Korea have made tremendous strides by implementing social isolation or social distancing, increasing the amount of testing that they have for people, and also having enough ventilators for those people most in need.

In terms of what we’re seeing right now, we’re actually seeing some positivity. That’s allowing us to stay—well right now we’re at 407,000 cases worldwide so this a pandemic based issue. We are slowing the spread as of right now, which is good as we develop a lot of these life-saving tools that we will need.

[0:11:41] Ashley James: Can we become immune to it by having it? Can we become immune like, “I had chickenpox and now I’m immune to it?” I’ve heard—it may be just a myth or some misinformation spread around—that this particular virus cannot be something that we can become immune to. So each year it could come around just like the flu and we could reget it.

[0:12:07] Dr. Stephen Cabral: This is a great question. It actually has to do with this strain. I’d like to explain that because 80% of people who get Covid-19 show no symptoms—for the most part very, very minor. We know that children and even teenagers under the age of 19, it seems, are almost non-affected. Keep in mind, they are still getting the virus, they’re just not showing symptoms. Well, there’s a hypothesis. There’s hypothesis they have greater amounts of melatonin, which now we’re showing that melatonin is actually helping tremendously. They have typically not as high cortisol based production, so they don’t have as much amino suppression. They have a more balanced which is called Th1, Th2 based immune system.

Just keep in mind that anybody with a good healthy balanced immune system, they get the flu, or they get Covid-19, and they have maybe a day or two of feeling a little rundown, but that’s the most symptoms they have. Then other people, when they get the flu, they might have it for 24 hours. They might start to feel a little bit, again, more fatigue, more joint pain, a queasy stomach. Then there are others that then get the full-blown symptoms of the flu, which is the joint pain and the fever.

Then with Covid-19 the bigger difference is the lungs are getting inflamed. We are getting an inability to actually produce—as an expectorant—the mucus out of the lungs. People aren’t actually dying from the virus per se just like they don’t die necessarily from the flu. They die from the complications, which is pneumonia. That’s why the average age of death mimics the flu with Covid-19, not a lot of people talking about this. The average age is well into the 70s. Right now it’s 77.4 years old to 81 depending on the source. That’s because until about the age of 65, we’re seeing a very low mortality rate, but it spikes dramatically over the age of 70-75.

That is why when it comes to social distancing it’s unfortunate, but we can’t have kids and young people around our parents and grandparents because they’re most susceptible, and they show no symptoms at all. Can you get this virus again? Most likely and potentially, but it would have to be the same meaning you could build up antibodies to it for sure—because that’s what our body does—but the virus for the flu each year changes as well in terms of strain. There’s actually 200-300 different strains of virus. I know it’s complicated, but hopefully, that makes a little bit of sense.

[0:14:35] Ashley James: I’m just seeing this world like I don’t know if this is my fear-based mind going like, “Are we just going to—every flu season—need to completely shut down the world for three months every year because this is going to mutate and keep coming back and keep coming back and keep coming back? Or are we going to all eventually have enough herd immunity because enough of us have had it—even though we’re asymptomatic—and have mounted an immune response to where it’s not going to be a pandemic every year?”

[0:15:04] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It’s a great question, and I don’t quite know the answer because I don’t know if the reaction right now is appropriate. We’re taking all the proper precautions, which I think is appropriate because maybe this does get to the point where—I mean we have Harvard epidemiologists saying, “Well, this could affect 40% to 70% of the population across the globe.” That’s 3 billion people. I don’t know anything that’s ever affected 3 billion people in this way. The flu, in the United States, affects 30 million, some people say 50 million people a year. I believe this Covid-19 virus has actually affected 10 times the amount of people.

We have 407,000 cases. It’s probably more like 4 million people. The reason is just people are not showing signs. I mean you can see all these people out there saying, “Oh, I was tested and I had it.” Well, yes you did and you had a healthy balanced immune system. So your body—unknown to you—fought it off. That’s what our bodies are meant to do if they’re healthy and balanced. Now, many other people don’t have healthy immune systems because they smoke, they drink too much alcohol, they don’t get enough sleep, they’re on medications that suppress their immune system. Yeah, we are at a lot more risk, and it’s one of the reasons why Italy did not fare as well.

One, they didn’t take it fast enough. Two, many people smoked in Italy, and they have a higher aged population, and they live in very close quarters. Meaning the way that it’s spread is about 1 to 1.5 people. Every person with the flu has the ability—doesn’t necessarily happen. Average infection is they infect a 1 1/2 other people. With this, it seems to be about a 1 to 3 so you can see that it does affect twice as many people as the flu. Let’s say it did that, would we reach then 100 million people? Maybe, but I just don’t know. Again, we have to take the proper precautions, but if we didn’t do it for the flu, should we be doing it for Covid-19? I just wonder.

The reason is that we’re not really social distancing. If you allow people to go to the grocery food store, and you allow them to go to doctors. You only allow 10 people at a time. I’ve gone to places, ok I get it, but I’m standing in line with 100 other people outside the store. People can be asymptomatic for 14 days. I don’t necessarily know that all of this working. It is working from, okay, maybe we can slow it in order to increase hospital beds and ventilators. I get that and I believe in it, but really, what we need to do is be careful and really watch out for our most at-risk populations.

I don’t have the answer, but certainly, we can’t do this every year because just the restaurant industry alone, 7 million jobs lost in the United States. These are people’s lives. These are people’s literal lives as well. I feel for people on all sides of the fence.

[0:18:06] Ashley James: You’re saying that potentially, one of the more conservative ways we could have gone about it is to isolate all the older population from the rest of us to protect them from being exposed?

[0:18:23] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’m trying to think of it from every side of the equation. That’s just because I have family members and friends. They’ve lost jobs. Now their family’s lives are at stake. Meaning, literally, their livelihood, paying their rent. I don’t know what the right answer is because I don’t want this to spread, but now that I know that most people—because I see the curve—are going to be okay even if they get the virus. Now I want to protect those people that are most at risk. As a doctor that’s what I want to do, but I also want to help the entire economy and the world because this will end. Then what happens when it ends? I’m just trying to think of it from many perspectives.

[0:19:04] Ashley James: What kind of precedent will we put in place now for future outbreaks? Will we go, “Okay. This works.” So now we shut down the world every time. The problem is if we overreact people lose jobs and become homeless. That’s also not helping the population, but of course, we don’t want to under-react and people die. We need the Goldilocks of responses and hopefully, enough grounded, science-based people come together in governments. Hopefully, we can pray that they make rational decisions, especially for future outbreaks.

You said a person with a healthy balanced immune system, they don’t have a problem. When they get infected they’re often asymptomatic. So really, the best thing we can do right now is focus on having a healthy balanced immune system since those who are exposed to it—who have a healthy balanced immune system—either are completely asymptomatic or have much milder symptoms because the body moves through fighting it quicker. Then you talked earlier about how children have higher melatonin and lower cortisol, which cortisol is the stress hormone. You mentioned that cortisol suppresses the immune system.

Fear increases cortisol—fear and worry. If you’re worried about not being able to pay rent and worried about having lost your job—7 million people just in the restaurant industry, those are 7 million people with high cortisol right now. Cortisol is lowering their immune system making them more susceptible to the virus. We need to lower our stress and lower our fear to help bring down our cortisol, to support ourselves in fighting this. It’s kind of this catch-22.

[0:21:02] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You’re exactly correct. I do something to my practice called the DESTRESS protocol. It’s diet, exercise, stress reduction, toxic removal, rest, emotional balance, supplement protocols, and success mindset. If you look at the STRESS part of it—the rest which is sleep, the emotional balance, and that success mindset—that’s four out of the eight. We’re really looking at a mind, body, mental, emotional-based equation. Because not a lot of people believe that, but when you look at it from a science perspective when your mind perceives stress, the hypothalamus in the brain tells the pituitary gland to tell the adrenals to produce stress hormones. When that happens your immune system or your body shifts into that fight-or-flight—the sympathetic nervous system.

At that time, mucus production actually starts to slow. It goes down. Mucus production contains what’s called our secretory IgA white blood cells. That’s our first-line defense in our nose, our mouth, and all throughout the mucous layer of the body. That’s exactly what the elderly lack. One of the reasons why the elderly are more susceptible is thinner mucous membranes natural killer cells, and less balanced immune system, more prone to inflammation, and less reserves—like less vitamins, less minerals, they’re more catabolic, they have less protein.

When we look at that we could see stress actually mimics your chances of having a worse reaction to a virus—any virus, or any disease, or any bacteria. This is the time actually—and it’s obviously easier said than done—to calm our bodies as much as possible. Whether it’s going and doing some meditation, or yoga, or a lighter at-home workout because we don’t want to do a super hard workout right now, which would again stress our body and lower immune system. Binaural beats is a great one, tapping like flow tank, Epsom salt baths, whatever works for you, essential oils to calm stress, I can’t recommend it enough.

[0:23:07] Ashley James: Excellent. I say make a list of the things that you know that calm you and get out of the fight-or-flight response and keep posting notes around the house, especially those of us in states where we’re quarantined in our homes so that you’re reminded. Laugh every day. Make sure you watch some funny YouTube videos of comedians and laugh every day. I love the essential oils. You can do home yoga. Cuddle, get the oxytocin up.

Oxytocin goes up, cortisol goes down. Our 30-second hugs and cuddles with your pets and your other humans in your house, and give each other back rubs or shoulder rubs. Do things that increase joy, and oxytocin, increase the love hormone and that will decrease the stress hormone. That is going to help boost our immune system because high cortisol, you said, is an immune suppressor. That’s the opposite of what we want right now.

The virus spreads airborne. I heard somewhere that when someone sneezes and they have the virus that it could travel 12 feet before it hits the ground. Once it’s hit the ground—so if we’re 12 feet away from someone, so even this idea of 6 feet social distancing doesn’t necessarily work if someone sneezes and it travels 12 feet. If we walk on the ground and the virus is on the ground, then it gets on our shoe, and we come home, and we don’t take off our shoes. We walk around the house, and we track the virus in our house, and then the dog walks on it, and then the dog licks its paw, then the dog licks our face. Can it get to that point where it’s traveled to us in that way or does it die off by then?

[0:24:53] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Most likely, and again I can’t—today I’m not here to provide medical advice and certainly can’t do that over a podcast. I just want us to make sure that we’re treating, diagnosing or giving personal. Hypothetically speaking, that most likely is not a likely scenario. Is it possible? Potentially. Really, what we’re looking at is someone coughs, someone sneezes—they’re not doing it into their elbow like they should—it does become airborne. It does touch your face your, your hands, or your clothing, and then you touch that and you touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. That is how you’ll be exposed.

After it’s been on an object—if it’s fresh, it hasn’t been moved around, rubbed, dropped, anything like that—then yes, you could absolutely get it from touching something else. The likelihood of you picking it up from the ground is very, very low. If it touches your dog—so that’s the thing. That’s the interesting thing about this virus is it’s not spread from animals to humans.

Nobody really knows how it made the jump from bats or other types of animals to humans because this shouldn’t happen. Meaning your dog shouldn’t get human viruses, typically, and you shouldn’t get pet or animal-based viruses. Your dog licking you should be totally fine.

[0:26:19] Ashley James: What other myths are you really excited to bust today or some clarification you want to bring to us too about Covid-19?

[0:26:29] Dr. Stephen Cabral: There are so many myths. It’s unbelievable on social media. I’m literally getting 500-1000 Slack messages, comments, emails. I do look at them. I really do. I can’t respond to every single one. I do my best to, but I mean people are really grasping at anything for what could be the potential cause, what we’re really looking at. I try to just stay grounded in what we know it is, what the facts are, and then I try to say, “Has anything like this ever come about before?”

We know that we have SARS, and we know that we also have another one called MERS—the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome. What I try to do is draw from that. These particular cases and viruses did not make the massive jump to hundreds of millions of people. I feel optimistic in that way.

The other thing is that we don’t know that this a bacteria causing this, or gut-based. I don’t want to get into all of them now because what people will do is start to Google them, and I don’t believe that they’re true. If there’s one that I could myth bust and it’s that elderberry—people are saying is bad for you. Have you heard that? That it causes a cytokine storm?

[0:27:52] Ashley James: Yes. Thank you. Yes, yes.

[0:27:56] Dr. Stephen Cabral: We don’t know that. That’s completely skeptical. We know that it works really well for the flu and that it’s scientifically proven meaning science-based research showing that typically three teaspoons three times a day shortens—or if not halves—the duration of the influenza virus. We know that this—although and not the same—mimics a lot of these ways. People say, “Well, it causes cytokine storm.”

First of all, that’s just a catchy name. It increases certain cytokines, that’s correct, but the cytokines that increases actually help to increase the body’s immune system to destroy certain things. Yes, it can be pro-inflammatory, but when the body creates inflammation, well, it’s inflammation. It helps to repair the body, believe it or not. What elderberry does is it actually coats the virus. Think of the virus as kind of like a spiky ball, and what it does is it coats it in order to not allow it to replicate.

What I’m telling people—for right now at least—they’re saying that because it creates this Th1. Th1 is how the body fights bacteria and viruses acute base tissues, where Th2 is more for chronic long-standing inflammation like allergies, asthma. If we’re going to go down the rabbit hole of saying elderberry’s an issue well, then we have about another two dozen foods and supplements we need to talk about besides elderberry. I don’t see any been talking about those.

So to put people’s minds at ease, it’s probably only people would be at risk at all if they were Th1 dominant meaning that they had rheumatoid arthritis, they had Hashimoto’s. Even for them, I would say elderberry is probably still fine to use. If you were to get Covid-19, then maybe you would stop using it. I’m just playing in a conservative field. I don’t think it’s an issue at all, but just to be conservative people may want to stop that if they do end up with Covid-19.

[0:29:59] Ashley James: But they take it when they don’t have it? Why?

[0:30:03] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If you wanted to boost your immune system right now and you wanted to use that as, “Oh, I was exposed let me use this. I have no symptoms, and to help it.” We can go through the natural vitamins if you want that do work such as zinc. There’s a great correlation right now. They found this in South Korea that a lot of the younger people who ended up experiencing symptoms—one of the very first symptoms was a loss of taste or a loss of smell, which is very interesting because people in natural health fields—myself included—would say, “Well, that’s a really good sign of a zinc deficiency.”

It didn’t mean that these people were necessarily zinc deficient in typical everyday diet, which is just breaking even, but they didn’t have enough zinc reserves. So when their body came under stress from a virus, well, it used up all those zinc reserves. That’s a really good reason to begin supplementing with zinc, zinc picolinate, or other great forms of zinc in order to boost the immune system and boost white blood cells.

We’re recommending the foundation of vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, melatonin right now. Melatonin would be probably more in let’s say the 35-40 plus range where your melatonin production might be a little less, or if you’re experiencing high levels of stress. Remember, cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship. If cortisol is up, melatonin is down. If melatonin is up, cortisol is down. We actually used melatonin right now as a way to reduce and drop cortisol at night, so you can get into a deeper more regenerative sleep. Happy to go into dosages things like that if you’d like, but I figured I would at least mention them.

[0:31:47] Ashley James: What about vitamin A for lung protection?

[0:31:52] Dr. Stephen Cabral: We’ve got three research studies coming out of China for high-dose vitamin C—seems to be quite effective. Zinc looking quite effective. We know these are nice immune boosters anyways. Vitamin D, typically 35 IUs per pound of bodyweight for both children and adults—assuming that you’re not maintaining a tan wherever you are in the world.

Vitamin A is a tricky one. Vitamin A absolutely boosts the immune system, no doubt about it. The problem with vitamin A is in order to get that high dosage you have to take a synthetic form. A synthetic form of vitamin A can absolutely cause liver issues. If you take beta-carotene, I’m all for it. We recommend 5000 IUs of beta-carotene on a daily basis, keep your immune system balanced. We’re all about that. A little bit of the retinol palmitate, fine, but if you’re talking about 50,000 IUs, which a lot of people are right now, of vitamin A and it’s coming from the synthetic form, I can’t recommend that because I know what it does to the liver. The liver can’t process that amount of vitamin A.

If we’re talking four days, five days if you were to get Covid-19, okay. Again, I’m okay with things in the short-term, but we’re using this as green medicine meaning we’re using high-dose vitamin A and high-dose vitamin D, which would be 50,000 IUs rather than like 4000 to 5000 IU’s a day as a natural form of medicine essentially because that’s a very strong dosage that I don’t recommend over time. Same with vitamin D.

[0:33:26] Ashley James: Got it. My Naturopath has people—who have lung illnesses like Covid-19—on 100,000 IUs for three days of vitamin A in addition to these other nutrients, but not long-term. It’s just during because it’s protective of the lungs. Would you agree with that?

[0:33:51] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I would. Short term usage with no previous history of liver-based issues. Someone’s not on medication that could affect their liver such an Accutane for acne, then I’d be okay with that. Same with for the high dose vitamin D, yes. Again, it comes down to people’s comfort levels as well for what they could do, and 50,000, 100,000 per day is something they could do in the short term. Under a doctor’s care, by the way. You should be under a doctor’s care if you’re doing that.

Ginger—especially as a dried herb—quite effective for lungs and as an expectorant as well. Ginger is one I would recommend. Then just a few you know easy ones to that people could do would be a Manuka honey. Believe it or not, Manuka honey and black coffee is a great expectorant. Another one that’s a great expectorant is pineapple juice, fresh-pressed pineapple juice and that would include the core of the pineapple, which contains the most amount of bromelain. Those are highly effective, but again if you are really suffering from symptoms of Covid you should go to the hospital, and you should get medical care.

[0:35:07] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I found that I had pneumonia two years ago or three years ago. I found that taking—a Naturopath told me to do this, and I was doctor’s care—as an expectorant to break it up and get it out, a handful, a big handful of fresh time put in some hot water, steep it for 10 minutes, and drink it. It was so effective for me. It was really amazing. It’s was a good cough suppressant but also helped me move stuff. NAC as well to help move the mucus out. You’ve obviously heard of those.

[0:35:52] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes. Thank you for bringing it up. That’s great. Another one that’s amazing specifically for the lungs is Mullein extract, M-U-L-L-E-I-N. Absolutely amazing for smokers or people with mucus in the lungs or a lung congestion, it helps bring it up and break it up. Then one other one would be licorice root. Licorice root and viruses is very well known for not only destroying the virus, stopping replication, but also licorice supports the adrenals. The adrenals have a direct connection with the lungs. People that are the most susceptible to bronchitis, mucus production in lungs oftentimes have weaker adrenals. What I mean by that is they have less actual stress hormone production and they’re not able to respond as well.

Everything we just mentioned there—that’s why you don’t have to use one specific thing, oftentimes. There are many that work for many different people, but the foundation is always the vitamin C, the vitamin D, the zinc on a daily basis. Two to five grams of vitamin C we’re recommending right now, up to 50 milligrams of zinc on a daily basis, about 5000 IU’s for adults 35 IU’s per pound of bodyweight for children. Of course, if you feel any symptoms you can go double on those as needed.

The other ones we mentioned the Mullein and the different extracts are all great to use. Oregano oil, amazing to use as well, but I’m not having people use them unless they start to feel rundown or they’ve been exposed because it can get to the point where this is probably going to go on for 12 more weeks, and so we don’t need to use these for 12 weeks meaning the extracts. The Mullein extract, elderberry, oregano oil.

[0:37:39] Ashley James: For the next 12 weeks, what can we take or what can we do to create a healthy balanced immune system? You’ve already talked about decreasing stress. What other really effective scientifically-proven things that we can do? What kind of self-care we can do to just make sure that we’re doing everything we can to support our body so that if we had Covid-19 we would have a successful outcome or our body would completely mount a response and we’d be asymptomatic.

[0:38:12] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Absolutely. I’ll give you a quick rundown of what we’re doing in our practice and what I’m just teaching right now for the DESTRESS protocol specific to Covid-19. The first part of that destress is diet. If you haven’t already started an elimination diet, or eliminating inflammatory processed foods, or eliminating sugar, eliminating a lot of alcohol, which is an immunosuppressant, now is the time to do that. Meaning there’s never been a better time, so if you’re looking to kick-start that—especially with the spring coming around in the US—a great time to just go on a lower processed food diet.

We do a spring detox every year. We’re modifying that slightly for people that are rundown so that they don’t have to do a couple days of fasting if their body’s not feeling strong enough. That’s because if you fast for too long, well, you become a little bit more stressed, that’s just natural. That kind of flows into the—and do stop me anywhere if you have questions—exercise part.

[0:39:15] Ashley James: Fasting, short-term fasting, like a three-day water-only fast. Doesn’t that boost the immune system?

[0:39:21] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, what happens is the body comes under greater stress, and it can actually start to suppress certain parts of the immune system while increasing what’s called autophagy. Autophagy, it’s happening all the time but it takes into a greater degree after about 18 hours— we’ve seen in the research. This is what allows your body’s immune cells to start to scavenge proteins and necrotic tissue to break it down, and that includes cancer cells to remove it from the body, so very, very powerful.

However, fasting—and if you drop in blood sugar—actually increases a cortisol response. Whatever your body needs to break down liver glycogen, it does so by increasing cortisol. Because what happens is when you spike cortisol your body says, “Okay, we need a fast fuel source.” Contrary to popular belief that is not ketones or body fat, it’s actually sugar.

Even if you’re in ketosis your body—well, it depends if you have any liver glycogen left or muscle glycogen, which you do because it’s stored, it could break down muscle tissue or liver glycogen for that. That’s why if you’re doing a longer fast we recommend you do be in a little bit more of a rest-based state. Hopefully, that helps.

[0:40:34] Ashley James: Yeah. Chill, Netflix, fast. Cuddle dog.

[0:40:39] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes. I still do recommend. If you don’t have a dog, adopt a dog right now if you’d like. Twelve to sixteen hours a day is a great amount to be fasting. We typically recommend—if you go to bed at 10:00, which a lot of people do. 10:00 PM in the health-based world, stop eating at 6:00. It’s three to four hours before bed. That means all the foods out of your stomach, now your body can concentrate on a deep rejuvenating sleep. Don’t start eating again until about an hour or two after waking, which a lot of times is around 8 AM for people.

That’s a very simple 14-hour fast. You break your fast when you start to come under stress for the first part to your day. People can do longer, they can do shorter based on hypoglycemia, adrenal issues. They’re more of a restful morning. It really depends on the person, but 12-16 hours every day I still absolutely do recommend for fasting.

[0:41:32] Ashley James: If we did 19 hours then we would have gotten one hour of stimulated autophagy. Like you said, it starts to really ramp up at 18 hours. If we ended up doing the one meal a day or a feeding window of four hours, would that decrease our immune system? Would that increase stress, or would that be a really healthy thing for someone who’s already healthy? For someone who’s not, obviously, in a weakened state, like you said, hypoglycemic. Would now be a good time? If we’re slated at home, would now be a good time to play with lowering our feeding window to eight hours or four hours because it’s beneficial?

[0:42:13] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Different people have different philosophies. I do not subscribe to that philosophy. Although I’m on the latest science, and research, and functional medicine Naturopathic medicine, I really studied Ayurvedic medicine quite in-depth. That’s the oldest form of medicine, 5000-6000 years old. I really believe that unless people have a very low-stress day, an eight-hour feeding window can be more stressful on the body. It works more for younger people 25 to maybe 45, but not so much after that when the body trends more towards a catabolic state.

We see in my practice a lot of women with issues, and I know we’re kind of getting off-topic, but I see a lot of women go into hypothyroid quite often when they’re following a keto-based diet or they’re following an eight-hour feeding window. It’s simply because if your body’s in a state of stress, getting the kids ready in the morning, or having to work on a work presentation at work, or fighting traffic, whatever it is your body’s naturally looking for food. Food and specifically carbohydrates are what is actually cutting the cortisol response. Fat and protein don’t do that. I recommend a light easy to digest breakfast. The largest meal somewhere around 11:00 to 1:00, 11:00 in the morning to 1:00 in the afternoon. Then a smaller dinner.

That has always worked well in the society. I believe that you can fit that in a 10-hour to 12-hour window. It allows for both anabolism or the body’s ability to build itself up, and then catabolism the body’s ability to break down and digest whatever it needs. That seems to work best for most people, and then at the same time, we typically recommend a once a week 24-hour fast. We’re working in all things. To me, again, that would make more sense. You might go a day without eating, so from Sunday night to Monday night I fast. That means that I have dinner Sunday night and then the next time I eat is with my dinner Monday night. Then after that, I do breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I fast for 14 hours every day.

Some people in my practice, I only recommend 12. Some people very, very small percentage, they need a little snack before bed only in the short-term because they’re hypoglycemic and they’re dealing with adrenal-based issues. Then there are many people who do well with a 16-hour fast, but we break our fast around 10:00 AM, and we do still three meals a day. The reason is for one meal a day, how do you fit in nine servings of fruits and vegetables, which is what we know is the only proven anti-cancer based diet out there.

We know that keto-based diets can help with tumors and brain tumors specifically. I’m not saying that there’s not a time and place for that, but I just don’t know how you eat nine cups of broccoli at a meal and get all of your protein requirements, which is about 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, so about half your body weight, and then your healthy fats. I mean that’s a lot on the digestive system in terms of stress. At a minimum, two meals a day, but I still like three easier to digest meals, in my opinion.

[0:45:20] Ashley James: I like that you bring up the point about how do you get in the nine servings, the nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day when you’re only eating one meal. A lot of people—and even some listeners who are listening—they eat three meals a day plus three snacks and they’re still not getting in their nine cups of fruits and vegetables. The guidelines around eating for your immune system, you’ve mentioned cutting out sugar, cutting out junk, now is a great time to do an elimination diet. Can you paint a picture of what someone’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Give me an example, like what did you eat for the last 24 hours? What would be good on our plate right now?

[0:46:06] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I actually just outlined this for our community, so we’re combining our two diet plans or our detox diet plan with now the immunity protocol. What we do is pretty straightforward, and I can just give you a sample day. Waking up and doing one scoop of the Alkalizing Vitamin C. It’s very interesting because some of the drugs that are working right they believe they’re actually working. For example one of the anti-malaria drugs, it’s called—let me see if I can even find it here I think it’s called—hydroxychloroquine, I believe it’s called. They believe it’s working by bringing the pH of the tissues up a half to one point, which to me is very interesting because a virus can’t live in an alkaline-based solution. We know the blood maintains about a 7.356 pH, which is very standard because you can’t live above a 7.5 or 7.2.

Our body does a great job of regulating that, but our tissues can actually change the body. That has to do with everything else but your blood. I love reading that because we know how to alkalize our own tissues and that’s through minerals. So good quality sea salt, and calcium, magnesium, potassium, greens. Eat more veggies. If you’re not someone that eats a lot of fruit right now, well, maybe still a cup of blueberries, which is one of those ACE inhibitors that we keep talking about. Dark chocolate, blueberries, prunes, flax, all of those are great.

Anyway, we do the Alkalizing Vitamin C, which is buffered with all the minerals. Then at breakfast, we’re doing a smoothie with our Daily Nutritional Support because you just don’t want the vitamin C, the vitamin D, you want all your B vitamins. You want all your minerals, the detox factors. We do something called a Daily Fruit & Vegetable Blend, which is 22 organic fruits and veggies, mix as a powder, no sugar, and you can just put that in there. Then one or two cups of berries, and then mix in a healthy fat if you want, and it contains 15 grams of a vegan protein. You can make that as carbohydrate heavy or as light as you would like, but easy to digest. Make it into a smoothie bowl, make it into a smoothie.

I don’t recommend chicken sausages and eggs and all that for breakfast. One of the things I don’t right now is a heavier breakfast, and one that someone might be doing on a carnivore diet or maybe even more of like a keto-based diet which is heavier on a fatty-based breakfast. Maybe it’s eggs, and sausage, or something like that. It’s just not something I can recommend, and the reason is it’s harder to digest, it takes a lot more energy from your body that early in the morning, and it’s also much more acidic. I know a lot of people don’t really play into the acid and alkaline, but the truth is that there are foods that are acidic and there are foods that are more alkaline.

The foods that are more acidic, the way that you alkalize those foods back to a normal pH in the body is that you actually use minerals from your body and use reserves. Instead of using those I simply recommend saving those heavier proteins—if you choose to eat them—for something like a lunchtime meal.

[0:49:19] Ashley James: Does eating excess cheese, eggs, meat, does that affect the immune system? Does that lower it? With someone on a whole food plant-based diet see increase in a strong immune system? What’s your take on that based on the science?

[0:49:38] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I would say more to a plant-based diet is going to be more beneficial in terms of the immune system. The reason is that we know that if you increase your fruit & vegetables—especially a rainbow of colors—you’re going to increase your vitamins minerals, but you get the plant-based phytonutrients as well. All of those come from the different colors of each vegetable.

We get the blues and purples from things like blueberries, we get the reds and oranges—which are quite high in vitamin A and vitamin C—from peppers, and from oranges, and strawberries. So you can go down the line. One other thing that we know too that we get from certain vegetables—namely the cruciferous ones such as broccoli, and bok choy, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts—is we get the sulfur-based amino acids. That allows us to actually ramp up our body’s natural detoxification, which allows the liver to better process any die-off in the body at all. Whether it be a virus, or hormones, or plastics, toxin from the environment.

I definitely recommend getting at least two to three cups of your cruciferous vegetables per day, and that would be amazing as well. Now typically, cruciferous vegetables should be cooked. It’s easier to break down the plant cellulose and you still get all of the great benefits from the actual plant-based food themselves.

[0:50:59] Ashley James: Wonderful. You mentioned what they’re speculating, the reason why these anti-malaria drugs are helping. Back a few weeks ago—when it was first coming out of China and South Korea because they were using different malaria drugs in China than in South Korea, but they were seeing similar results.

One speculation was that the anti-malaria drug increases the uptake of zinc into the cell, which would then show, like you said, for those who are just borderline zinc deficient or just about to be zinc deficient, if that drug would force more zinc into the cell, then they would also exhibit symptoms of zinc deficiency. To have zinc be forced into the cell, that zinc then disrupts the virus from hijacking the cell’s RNA production, the virus cannot then reproduce. Have you heard of this theory?

[0:52:04] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’ve seen a few theories, and I don’t know which ones are correct. These are all small studies. For example, hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine are drugs from the US, but the study is actually being done with something called the azithromycin in France. They show that the combination of these two drugs was remarkable in the recovery of people especially in 50% of the time in this small study in France.

Again, it was only 36 people and it is a small percentage. We have the Japanese antiviral drug, Avigan I believe it’s called, and it seems to prevent the virus from replicating, but just like you alluded to, we don’t know why. We just know that it seems to be working. To me, that’s okay. That’s a good start.

Remdesivir is another one that is another antiviral drug. Then we have Interferon Alpha 2B from Cuba and another one seems to be working. The last one—I’m trying to think—specifically for HIV. I believe it’s called Kletra or K-L-E-T-R-A. This also seems to be working with the replication and preventing that RNA-based replication. I’m optimistic about one or multiple of these working, which is why I think in another three to four weeks—even if the spread continues—we will at least be able to help those people most at risk and cut down the mortality rate.

[0:53:42] Ashley James: I wish we could throw as much money to funding natural studies as the pharmacy companies are so excited to throw money at finding a drug-based solution. Because like Dr. Klinghardt says—he’s an MD who’s been on my show who’s been practicing for over forty years. His favorite thing to do is to find whatever drug someone needs and then go find the natural version that the drug company tried to copy. He says nature always works better than synthetic drugs because synthetic drugs are the man-made copy of nature.

In his 40 years of being a doctor having great success he says very rarely he will need an actual drug, although he’s open to it. He’s open to the best tool possible, but his favorite thing to do is to find the natural cure—the cure that lives in nature because it seems to always work better than a drug with obviously less side effects.

There’s a theory going around that we should all drink tonic water because it contains the natural molecules that they used to mimic the malaria drug. Have you heard about this?

[0:55:03] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have not heard about that. Just to comment on what the previous MD you said is, I completely agree. Also, 50% of all pharmaceutical drugs are based on a plant. It’s a derivative, an extract that they can patent. For example, one of the best-known ones is a statin drug being an extract of red yeast rice. We know what kills a virus: zinc, l-lysine, monolaurin, colloidal silver.

For me, I’m a board-certified doctor of Naturopathy. I don’t use any drugs in my practice nor can I like. That’s not what I went to school for, but what I want to share is this, in life-saving based conditions the drug is more powerful. When someone’s life is on the line, for example, a staph infection, or bilateral pneumonia, please don’t take any chances. This coming from someone who only uses vitamins, herbs, and the best science of that.

I just want to share that with people. Don’t try to prove yourself right in a situation where you’re on a ventilator and you refuse medication. That’s all. I’m just saying that. I agree. If you get a regular virus I’m using coconut oil, and I’m using my zinc and monolaurin. One thing we haven’t mentioned is fire cider. Fire cider is an amazing thing to be using once or twice a day now, which is apple cider vinegar, garlic, onion, horseradish, ginger. You can make your own or they sell it.

This is a really great way to not only kill anything in the back of your throat, which is how this Covid virus seems to be entering. There’s so much to talk about. This is one that if we had tonsils the people with tonsils like children typically aren’t showing symptoms because the tonsils get to sample the virus and the body then creates the right antibody for the right antigen, and then we’re able to kill it at a faster rate. I don’t have tonsils. Mine got taken out when I was 10 years old. Can I kill it without adenoids and tonsils? Yes, but my body takes a little bit longer. I used the natural-based solutions, and hopefully, never get the major symptoms.

[0:57:17] Ashley James: Thank you for saying that for all the parents listening. Please, please, please if your doctor says, “All right, time to take out the adenoids tonsils and put in some earplugs.” Please, find a Naturopathic pediatrician because often times it’s a food allergy that’s causing the chronic infections in your children. I had chronic, chronic, chronic ear, nose, and throat infections until I was six years old. My mom took me to a Naturopath, Dr. D’Adamo, the man who created the Eat Right for Your Blood Type Diet in Toronto. He took my blood, looked at my eyes, ears, and nose, and he said, “You are allergic to milk, yeast, wheat, and sugar. Stay away from them.”

Overnight my life changed. My mom cut out those foods. Within 24 hours my chronic sore throat, my chronic infections, my chronic feeling lethargic, and horrible, and headaches, and everything they all went away within 24 hours of being taken off of dairy and sugar. My problem was dairy, and so many children are being given the foods that are causing their chronic infections. Then the MDs go, “Well, it’s time to take out these body parts that you’re having problems with.” Meanwhile, these body parts 10-20 years down the road could save your life. That just drives me crazy that the tonsils are that important. Like you said, they sample the pathogen and help our body mount an immune response much quicker. It’s amazing.

[0:58:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: 100%. Yeah, 100%. The very thing is most children’s tonsils—even if enlarged—go back to a normal size by seven years old. That’s what they don’t give you statistics wise as well. The thing is this, just like you said if, even if you don’t have a doctor in your neighborhood that knows a lot of these specific things, cut out dairy and gluten. The third one is oftentimes eggs. You can run a food sensitivity test right at home. My practice is about 80% a little bit more women. A lot of times husbands just don’t believe it like, they just don’t. It’s just the way that it is. Guys have such a hard time understanding how what we eat and what we do actually affects our health. I’m a guy so I think I could say that.

Just run an at-home food sensitivity test. Run a test and say, “Do I have a food sensitivity to dairy, gluten, eggs? It could be anything.” If not, eliminate cow’s milk, goat’s milk. Sheep’s milk doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue. I’d still eliminate them to be safe and eliminate gluten. I know it’s more challenging, but you don’t do it forever. At least do it for six weeks and then you can start to slowly introduce back in and see if the symptoms come back. If they do, well, then there you go. You have your proof right there.

[1:00:13] Ashley James: Exactly. Don’t slowly add them in. Do 30 days without and then have an entire day with ice cream, and yogurt, and cheese. Do a whole day with dairy, and if you have zero problems after that then there you go. Or gluten, right? No barley, wheat, rye, or oats for 30 days, and then have a whole day with bagels, and bread, and pasta. Most people that do that, by lunchtime they don’t ever want to eat barley, wheat, rye, and oats again. Their body is yelling at them.

You mentioned monolaurin, I got mine right here. I’d love for you to talk about this because it’s actually something that’s never been talked about on the show. My dear friend Naomi—who I started the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership with, believe it or not—is more into holistic health than I am. I think I’m a pretty crunchy granola very, very big fan of natural medicine. She’s even more into it than I am. She gave me this. She gave me this big thing of monolaurin. Because she beat Epstein-Barr virus. I mean this one of the things she uses, but she beat something that is considered something you can’t beat, and she beat it. Tell us about monolaurin. How much to take and how it works?

[1:01:33] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If we’re looking at where it comes from naturally we could say it’s coming from coconut oil, and it’s coming from something specific within coconut oil, which is called lauric acid. Monolaurin is actually far more effective, and I would say a lot more natural that the body can use. Monolaurin, we’re talking about in terms of viruses but it’s actually, in general, it kills anything any negative pathogen that it touches. It kills any different microbes in the body, viruses, bacteria, yeast, fungus, mold.

When you look at someone with Epstein-Barr virus, which I also had as well many years ago, you’re looking at a virus. Epstein-Barr virus is something like a herpes-based virus that replicates inside the body. It can go dormant, it can wake back up, and it does that when you’re most stressed, and you’re most rundown.

What monolaurin does is it helps to kill the specific virus, stop it from replicating. Its effect works right away, once it gets in the bloodstream. It typically gets in the bloodstream within about three hours. However, it takes 72 hours—like most things—to work. That’s because what happens is you are actually seeing the effect as it spreads through the body, and it’s also why there can sometimes be some worsening of symptoms. You can actually have die-off from taking too much monolaurin too fast, just like you can have too much die-off from doing a detox, or from using too much oregano oil. The reason is that we call that a Herxheimer reaction.

We first put it into science when we were using antibiotics—meaning conventional medicine was used in antibiotics and they coined it a Herxheimer reaction after the person who basically coined the term—for killing too much bacteria too quickly. You get brain fog, and you get fatigued, and you might get flu-like symptoms in the joints. If you’re using monolaurin for the first time, I would start slowly. You can go pretty high dose in this meaning you can use 3000 milligrams a day, which is what we’re recommending for l-lysine when someone has herpes, or Epstein-Barr virus, or virus. We do divided doses 1000 milligrams three times a day, it’s easier for people to take.

Typically, in general, vitamin C and all these things 500 to 1000 milligrams is the max. You take that three to six times a day. Same with monolaurin. I’m typically recommending a 500-milligram dosage three times a day. We do something called the Candida bacterial optimizing program. Monolaurin’s in month three, it’s very strong. What we do is we spread that. We actually do that in month three when a lot of the die-off has already taken place, so it’s much gentler.

If you just want to dive into it, then okay. Start with 500 milligrams the first day, 1000 milligrams the second day. Still, feeling okay? 1500 milligrams, which is 3 500 milligram dosages right off the bat. Now again, if you’re doing this prophylactically to not get the virus I don’t think that you need to. You can use it if you have a virus, but to use it when you don’t have a virus, I don’t believe that it’s needed. Just because there’s so much you could do.

[1:05:01] Ashley James: Okay. Someone who maybe is high risk, could they take it for the next 12 weeks or someone who is an older population, or someone who is maybe a worker in the health industry and is potentially being exposed to pathogens all the time, would they take it all the time preventively?

[1:05:23] Dr. Stephen Cabral: There’s a couple of ways to look at this. It can’t replace your foundation, so use a good daily activated multi or the Daily Nutritional Support. Use your omega-3s every day whether from a vegan source or an omega-3 fish oil source that’s tested for impurities, use a daily probiotic. Ideally, use some type of Daily Fruits & Vegetables blend, some type of greens. That covers all of your vitamins, and your minerals, and your anti-inflammatories because we know inflammation is a big part of all this, so that’s your foundation. After that vitamin C, vitamin D, and zinc. No doubt about it, that’s what I’d be using right now.

If your finances still allow for more, now we can look into specific viral-base things that you can use on a daily basis. Monolaurin absolutely could be one of those, but not for long-term use because there is some potential—not proven yet—correlation between higher dose monolaurin and killing off some of the gut bacteria because it is antibacterial as well.

[1:06:29] Ashley James: Right. So we need to be careful. We definitely need our gut bacteria. What relationship does a healthy gut biome have in keeping our immune system healthy?

[1:06:43] Dr. Stephen Cabral: We’ve heard the term 80% of the immune system is in and around your 26 feet of intestine or so, which is the truth, but it goes much beyond that. The reason is that if someone has an imbalanced microbiome, and they have an overgrowth of Candida, yeast, or an overgrowth of bacteria that we call SIBO—small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—what happens is your immune system is always on. It’s always trying to keep the body in balance. If you have SIBO, or yeast, or Candida overgrowth, you most likely have some type of intestinal permeability as well, which means you’re allowing proteins, bacteria, yeast, waste products to move through the intestines where they were never meant to move through the intestines—they were moved to meant to move to the bowels—and they get into the bloodstream.

Now you have elevated levels of IgG—these are just immune white blood cells, IgA responds, IgE responds, IgM responds, so the immune system is always on. If it’s always on, it wears down your body. Over time, your immune system says, “Listen, we can’t do this on a daily basis,” and it starts to slow. That’s why your gut is so important when it comes to your overall immune health. It’s also why many people never recover from their Hashimoto’s, autoimmune, Epstein-Barr virus, migraines until they fix their gut. Because your gut is what regulates a lot of the inflammation that we’re talking about and your overall immune system.

[1:08:18] Ashley James: It’s like fighting a war on all fronts. If we’re constantly fighting a war on all fronts, then our resources dwindle and we can’t do it. You can’t fight a war on all fronts, and our immune system is our army. If we send out our army over there, and over there, and over there, and over there, and are constantly fighting all fronts, then how can we defend home our home territory? We can’t. To look at it it’s just like you want to keep your military, your immune system, keeping your nation, your body where you live to be healthy instead of having to fight on all fronts.

It comes down to something as simple as what you put in your mouth can be building you up or tearing you down. Is it worth the five seconds of it, “Oh, but the pizza tastes good, but the ice cream tastes good, but the beer tastes good?” Is it really worth five seconds of it tastes good for the days, or hours, or weeks of the effect of we’ve put stressors on our body, we’ve torn our body down, we’re not building our body up, we’re not providing the nutrients our body needs. Is it really worth it?

My aunt used to always say, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips,” but it’s more like a moment on the lips and weeks, and weeks of our body being out of balance. So bring it back into balance, and we can actually find delicious ways to make healthy food. That’s why I created the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership. To teach people how they can make delicious food that also nutrifies the body.

Being dairy-free in our household, and also sugar-free, and having a four-year-old—who’s almost five—he asks for ice cream. I’m not going to say, “No, you can’t have ice cream.” We get into the kitchen and we make whole food ice cream, and he loves it. I throw some spinach in there too, some frozen blueberries, some spinach, some coconut milk, and blend it all up either in the Vitamix or I put it in an ice cream maker. It is so delicious. Sometimes I’ll add stevia or I’ll add dates, and he loves it. He loves helping make it. He knows he’s getting nutrients into him. It tastes even better than what you can get in the store because it’s not a chemical crapstorm—if you look at the ingredients in ice cream.

There are ways to utilize food and utilize the kitchen to support the body. I love that you brought that into perspective. Thank you. The listeners—in the Learn True Health Facebook group—asked a bunch of questions. I want to make sure we get to them. Of course, you’ve covered a few just by sharing what you’ve shared today.

The first one from Zachary, “Have him address the nonsense of not taking elderberry,” which you just did, “and vitamin D. Apparently there’s nonsense going around that we shouldn’t take vitamin D. On another note, explain how this virus is not changing the microbiology of how viruses attack the cell.” Have you heard anything about that? The virus is not changing the microbiology of how the viruses attack the cell? I guess he’s talking about the elderberry and vitamin D.

[1:11:39] Dr. Stephen Cabral: No, I have not. They’re not necessarily saying that Covid-19 is a complicated virus necessarily to get ahold of and really figure out. What seems to be the issue is its affinity for lung tissue and why. I have not seen any answers to that, that’s why we’ll continue to do weekly updates. I have a daily podcast, my main virus page is stephencabral.com/virus. I would invite people to continue to check up on what the latest is there, but I have not heard that so I’m not able to speak on it.

[1:12:24] Ashley James: Great, Kelly asks, and I feel that you’ve covered this to a certain extent, “Can we build immunity against Covid-19? I have read some reports of people getting reinfected, but a vaccine is constantly being hyped. It doesn’t make sense that both could be true.”

[1:12:40] Dr. Stephen Cabral: In my opinion, if it is the same exact strain, your body—if infected with this virus—will create the proper antibodies to fight off these particular antigens. If that’s the case, you could certainly get it again in your body, but you will most likely be asymptomatic. The virus can enter your body, it enters children’s bodies. People are saying children are immune to it. Children are not immune to Covid-19, they just don’t show any symptoms, for the most part. They still get the virus but their bodies are super healthy for the most part. I shouldn’t say super healthy. They’re super balanced, and they just haven’t lived enough life. They haven’t missed enough sleepless nights, and studied, and been up all night for term papers. They haven’t done all that, and they have all their reserves, for the most part.

If it’s my opinion that if it’s the same exact strain next year, then our bodies will be absolutely fine and immune to it. Again, it will still affect the same people, 65-75 plus that have an imbalanced immune system that can’t mount a normal inflammation and immune-based response. I don’t see why if we are all getting this that we would need that vaccination next year. I don’t understand that part to it.

Here’s the thing with the flu, they’re guessing at what the strain is going to be. There are 100 plus strains of the flu. The US flu vaccination is often found to be about 30% effective, and this is based on the Center for Disease Control—their specific stats. They base it on what’s already happened in other parts of the world for this particular flu season. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong, but they have to guess at the strain. They use about two to three different strains maximum.

[1:14:31] Ashley James: I’ve seen some studies coming out that show that getting the flu vaccination increases susceptibility to Covid-19. Have you heard about this?

[1:14:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have read on that I’m just not speaking on it because, again, it’s one of those things that I don’t know if there’s any validity to it.

[1:14:52] Ashley James: Got it.

[1:14:55] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Could be true.

[1:14:57] Ashley James: We should do a whole episode on vaccines because we put a lot of stock into, and we’ve obviously been marketed to that they’re the most safe and effective way. If you look at it, if we look at history, if we don’t study our history we’re doomed to repeat it, and we’re definitely doomed to be duped time and time and time again because media is wonderful at controlling how we think.

If we look back on when they implemented a marketing campaign around breastfeeding versus formula, they said that formula is so much superior than breast milk, and that we should switch to feeding formula to babies because our scientists made it. Therefore, we’re smarter than God, or we’re smarter than nature, and we should stop doing all breast milk.

Now, of course, we know that that wasn’t true. Although, I am so grateful that formula exists because there are times when mothers can’t breastfeed. In those times, the baby should always get fed no matter what. Breast milk is so much more superior to anything we could ever make in a lab. The immune system is so much more intelligent than anything we could ever make in a lab. We, of course, want to use we use allopathic medicine when it’s a good tool. We want to use natural medicine when it’s a good tool. We want to know when each tool is necessary, and unfortunately, it’s very unlikely we’ll ever be told the truth because money’s involved. If companies like pharmaceutical companies can make a ton of money, they’re going to push their agenda and lobby and everything.

We have to step back at the 30,000-foot view, talk to Naturopaths—like you—and look at the science and the research. I’ve interviewed so many people in vaccines. This idea that flu shot, for example, harms the innate arm of the immune system and leaves us more susceptible the next year to catching the flu and ends up weakening people. It creates a weakening like a hole in our defense system. For some people that could be fatal.

There’s no perfect solution, but it’s interesting that several people have brought up this concept to me or have shown me these studies where they’re seeing—and these are one of the studies was within the Pentagon—that people who get the flu shot are the more susceptible to like upper respiratory infections, and could potentially be more susceptible to the coronavirus should they get it.

There’s another concern—because I’m here in Seattle—that’s where we’re testing in the United States. Currently, they’re testing the first run of the vaccine, and the concern is that it’s actually going to create more of a spread because it’s a live virus. Vaccines, you can have shedding. Is this true? Should we be concerned that if someone gets a vaccine—like a coronavirus vaccine—that they could then potentially infect others?

[1:18:14] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Without a doubt, to me, I don’t believe in experimenting on people. I think that that is very, very dangerous with unproven things. Keep in mind we already have evidence of this. When SARS came about a couple of years ago, they rushed to create a very quick vaccine. They discontinued it because they found that many people who got the vaccine—not all—ended up with something called Guillain-Barré syndrome. This is a damage to the liver. You literally permanently damage the liver, and that was from directly tied to the vaccination.

I don’t believe in experimenting with human life. I also am very worried about companies that are not liable. If I do anything, if anybody else does anything well you’re liable, but these companies that produce these things can come out with them very quickly, and they don’t have to have a lot of necessary science behind them because there’s no liability and that’s what was passed.

I also believe that unless you are part of that special population that’s more immune-compromised, getting the virus creates your own natural immunity. I don’t believe people like—we’re talking about relapses. Relapses maybe, but maybe you never fully recovered from the virus. That’s more likely, meaning that okay, you slowed the replication so your symptoms started to slow, but you didn’t kill the virus. Then you became under greater stress, or you stopped your specific protocol—whatever you were doing—and the virus then started to replicate again. That’s very common. That happens in the herpes virus, and Epstein-Barr virus, and with mononucleosis all the time. There are relapses all the time. It’s still the same one.

Then in terms of getting on a yearly basis, you very well may, but the symptoms would be so much less. Don’t let anybody fool you. People who get the flu vaccine still get the flu. I know many people who got the flu vaccine and still got the flu. Their rebuttal is, “Well, it was not as severe as what it would have been.” How do you know that? I’m just really like, “In what a parallel universe do you live that you know it wouldn’t be as strong?” I don’t get that.

Viruses have always been around. I’m not saying that this not a scary thing and that this is not serious, it is a serious situation. I don’t know that the tools we currently have with conventional medicine hold our answers. That’s all that I’m saying.

[1:20:42] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m right there with you. Mandy says, “Is a global shutdown necessary or is it an overreaction? Is this virus worthy of global economic collapse?”

[1:20:53] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If you were to ask someone who is 77.4-81 years old, you’re asking them is the economy worth the trade-off for their life? That’s a hard question to answer, right? What is more valuable? It’s an impossible choice, and it’s an impossible question to answer. My parents are in their mid-60s so they’re over 65. I’ll want them to stay healthy and safe, but the only way for them to stay healthy and safe is to take this very seriously because they are the most at risk. They can’t see their grandkids right now because their grandkids could be the carriers right now and not even know it.

Those are all challenging things, but at the same time, like you just said, okay so now 100 million people now become homeless. That creates mental health—I don’t know. That’s a really hard question for me to answer. I worry about both sides of the equation. What I’m seeing right now is that this is the same demographic as those who are at risk for the flu. So creating a global shutdown not only is unrealistic, but not possible.

Again, you’re going to be waiting at the supermarket. When you are at that grocery food store you’re exposed to other people. You are now bringing that back to your family. They’re being exposed to other people. A virus, unfortunately, has to run its course. Our job is to slow it as much as we can, but it has to run its course.

[1:22:33] Ashley James: Right, right. This is a very interesting global lesson in, I don’t know, in ethics? We’re really looking at the ecology of a situation because on one hand, people might become homeless—whole families. It’s really disruptive. On the other hand, people are dying. We need to mount the Goldilocks response, but we don’t know what that is yet. I just saw this last night, the latest the CDC has brought out is that we have in the United States begun to lessen the curve. That we’re on the other side of the curve. We don’t know if there’s going to be another spike because people all leave their homes again because they see this information, or now, more states are hunkering down and giving people mandatory house arrest, self-quarantine.

The good news is though that the CDC is seeing that we are lessening the curve already. The measures that we’ve taken already have begun to slow it down, but like you said, the virus needs to run its course. We need enough ventilators, we need to know what medications work, and we also need to support the terrain of the body and teach people. You and I were talking about this right before we hit record that the shelves are empty in grocery stores.

All the Oreos are gone, all the Twinkies are gone, but the fruits and vegetables—you and I stocked up on our—I got a fridge full of fruits and vegetables because I always do. I’ve got a big freezer full of frozen fruits and vegetables as well. I’ve potatoes, and rice, and beans. These are foods that easily keep. We’re always eating fruits, and vegetables, and potatoes, rice, beans. These foods are easy to get because people are stocking up on junk food and alcohol and not on the healthy foods that are going to boost their immune system.

It’s kind of maddening but it’s because they just don’t know. They just don’t know that what the food, every single molecule they put into their mouth could actually be supporting their body to the point where their body could mount a healthy response, and it would increase their survival rate.

Hopefully, those who are listening can share this episode with those they love. The Oreos, alcohol, and pizza, and whatever, all these processed foods, and sugar could potentially give them a worse outcome instead of a better outcome if they were to be exposed to the virus. That they need to take that just as seriously as they are taking the vaccine and the different medications that are being proposed to work.

[1:25:36] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Absolutely, 100%.

[1:25:38] Ashley James: Jessica says, and we did talk about this a little bit, she says, “Exactly how is it spread,” you talked about that, “and how could we prevent it from spreading,” and you talked about that, “just breathing the same air? So if we’re all just in the same grocery store just breathing that air is that enough or do you have to cough or sneeze out the droplets?” So could someone be just breathing out these viruses and they float around for 6 feet or 12 feet? She also wants to know about the hype around the masks. Does any kind of mask work? Could we sew our own? A lot of people are sewing their own masks or sewing masks for healthcare providers. Does that work or does it have to be some special kind of filter?

[1:26:22] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes, and that’s one of the biggest things is that most masks are proven not to work for this virus and many other viruses. That’s because it’s not the proper material used, and it’s not tight enough fitting. I see people on planes and walking around and the whole side of the mask is open. I just don’t understand that. If you’re breathing in, you’re sucking air into your mouth and nose that’s not going to work. An N95 mask is what you’re looking for, and those will be tight-fitting because they know how to make those masks specifically.

Now those are on backorder pretty much everywhere, but you want to make sure you get a good quality if you choose to use one N95 mask. In terms of breathing in the air, the reason they’re saying six feet is that, just like you said, they’re giving it buffer zone, but someone could cough or sneeze and it goes who knows, 15 feet. Twelve is an arbitrary number, but if some people sneeze, yeah, they could go straight across the room. There’s no doubt about it.

[1:27:25] Ashley James: The gold Olympics of sneezers.

[1:27:26] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You should down and into your elbow.

[1:27:28] Ashley James: If we sneeze down into our elbow we’re preventing the spread?

[1:27:31] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It could be a long jump.

[1:27:34] Ashley James: The long jump of sneezes.

[1:27:37] Dr. Stephen Cabral: There will be fluid with it, so it’s going to be spread airborne through that way. A normal breath should not spread the virus, however, that’s why they’re giving the buffer zone of six feet because three feet is typically where a breath might move out to, but not six feet, and that will drop, it will fall. It won’t fall immediately, but whatever comes out of the mouth will eventually fall. That’s the best that I can give right now, but again, if you don’t have a healthy body you shouldn’t be out right now because you just don’t know. That’s just a chance. Then if you do go out, well, you can wear gloves and you can wear an N95 mask.

[1:28:21] Ashley James: A lot of places can receive groceries, and delivery of food, a delivery of groceries. Let’s say someone’s at risk let’s. Say they’re 77 years old or maybe they’re a population is at risk like they’re on immune suppressants because they have some kind of illness, autoimmune, or they’ve had cancer, or they have asthma, and they know they’re at risk, and they want to stay home, so they’re getting home deliveries.

If the person that collected the food and put it in the bag coughed, and now it’s spread on to that, and then get the home delivery, can they just wash the fruits and vegetables, and wash everything and that’ll be enough to not get it? I know this again hypothetical. I’m just wondering how? Do we need to like Lysol the bag as it comes in the house? What preventive measures? If we’re quarantined at home and we’re receiving shipments of food into the home, what are some common-sense things to do?

[1:29:26] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, whoever’s delivering it can just leave it right at your door, so that’s the first. If you are 65-plus, hopefully, you have someone that could potentially shop for you or you can have it shipped to you. So have them leave it outside the house so you don’t need to come into contact with them. If anything can be frozen, freeze it. That’s because it will kill a virus typically within two to three days, so keep in your freezer for two to three days.

It’s the same thing with fish and parasites, you just freeze it, it will kill the parasites if there are parasites in it and so on and so forth. It’s funny but if you get moths in your closet people will freeze their clothes for two to three days and it kills any of a lot of eggs basically from it. Freezing does a really good job at that. Anything that you’re going to put in your fridge you could absolutely use—on the packaging—some hot soap and water or any type of wipe that’s been shown to kill a virus. There are many of those wipes.

You can use a more natural one with essential oils, or you can use more of the Lysol wipes and that would be fine. Whatever you feel comfortable. Pretty much everything is packaged, so that will that protect you for the most part. I wouldn’t be too worried about that.

[1:30:37] Ashley James: Very good. Cool, cool. Those masks that people are making—the homemade masks that are not N95 masks, it would help people who have—maybe they’re asymptomatic and they have it and if they cough or they’ll actually have it and they have a fever and they’re coughing. If they wear the mask then they’re preventing—if they’re not going to cough in their elbow they can wear a mask and it’s actually just going to prevent the particles from entering the air and infecting other people. People who have it could wear a mask to help others, but it wouldn’t help themselves.

[1:31:08] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You’re saying a homemade mask and one N95 mask?

[1:31:13] Ashley James: Homemade mask instead of an N95 or all the masks that are not N95. Basically, the homemade ones, the flimsy ones it’s not going to help prevent it for that person, but if the person has it they could wear the mask to prevent them from spreading it because it’s blocking the particles from spreading?

[1:31:35] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Only the majority but the problem is that the filter on the mask is not small enough to allow the particles to be completely trapped. That’s why the N95 is a smaller filter. It’s almost like when you look at certain air filters for your home, some do a great job up to 95%, some do a great job up to 99%. The N95, the 95 I believe stands for 95% for the filtration rate.

Yes, any mask is better than no mask. There’s no doubt about it. A mask is better than no masks, but that mask will not prevent the stoppage or getting of the actual virus itself in some cases. Now in many, okay, it blocked it, yes, good. But no, I can’t say that that would actually be effective completely.

[1:32:23] Ashley James: Okay, so it could lower the chance slightly but not 100%?

[1:32:29] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I would agree with that, yes.

[1:32:31] Ashley James: Okay. Stephen says, and I love this question, “Can colloidal nano silver help aid in making the body an unsuitable host for the coronavirus?”

[1:32:40] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I wouldn’t say that it’s going to make it unsuitable because we’ve talked many times about the terrain. The terrain is the body’s ability to have a balanced pH, to have a balanced natural killer cells in the body. What colloidal silver will do is it will kill a virus or other things like that inside of the body. It’s not that it makes it unsuitable because I don’t even think that we’re necessarily talking about preventing you from getting the coronavirus. What we’re talking about is for you not having the major symptoms and being able to fight it off, and colloidal silver could be used when you do get it. So I just want to clarify that as well. To our knowledge, there’s nothing that we know that we can prevent it, but we know how to boost the immune system.

[1:33:21] Ashley James: Boost the immune system to the point where you’re asymptomatic or you have very little symptoms. It’s kind of what’s to be expected. It’s spreading around, we’re all going to mount an immune response, and so we just got to get our bodies as healthy as possible. Follow Dr. Cabral’s protocol for getting your body as healthy as possible. I love your protocol. It’s so well-balanced, and it’s so effective.

We just got to get our bodies as healthy as possible, get the terrain as healthy as possible, so when we do get exposed to Covid-19 or any other virus because let’s be honest, there are many, many, many pathogens out there that could be potentially fatal if our body is not healthy enough to fight it. We walk around with our heads in the sand stressing ourselves out to the max, staying up too late, eating junk food, drinking alcohol.

We live like the masses, and our bodies—as a nation, as many nations in general, not specifically us listeners because I think my listeners are more health-conscious—but the masses have not created a terrain of the body to support the body’s ability to fight healthfully and to thrive. The problem with that is we were looking at these big statistics of the population. If the whole population ate nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day every day and didn’t eat junk food, my goodness would these numbers ever be different in terms of survival rate. It’s not a death sentence. These pathogens aren’t death sentences, but if you don’t take care of your body, then yes it is.

I like coming back to the analogy of a car because men, they wouldn’t put the wrong oil or the wrong fuel in their car knowingly. It’s the same thing. It’s like put the right fuel in your body. You wouldn’t put a 50:1 or what’s that mixture? Five to one or what’s the mixture where you put in your car? You wouldn’t put like an oil-gas mix in your car, but you would in your jet ski or some lawnmowers. You just wouldn’t put the wrong fuel in the vehicle. Yet the majority of people out there are putting the wrong fuel in their bodies.

You take a car who hasn’t had an oil change in a very, very, very long time, has had the wrong fluids put in, wrong gas. Take a Ferrari and put in just regular gas, which is going to throw the timing off, put more stress on the engine, and then you’re not giving it an oil change after 20,000 miles, and then you decide to drive you know 100 miles an hour through the mountains, and it breaks, of course, it does.

That’s what we’re doing is we’re not taking care of the body, and then we put it under a stressor. Those who are under high stress—like the children in South Korea are under high stress because socially, they are taught to get very little sleep and study a great deal because there’s only a handful of universities there—the top universities. They are all taught that you should only sleep four hours a day and study the rest of the day so that you can get into the right university.

So socially, from a very young age, children are taught to be incredibly stressed out. Then we’re seeing the young adults having certain symptoms of the Covid-19, whereas others in other countries are not because of the terrain of the body. If you’re under a high amount of stress for a long period of time—we’re not getting enough sleep—that is enough to throw the body out of balance.

It all comes back to getting that 30,000-foot view, taking care of the terrain of the body, so that when you are hit with any pathogen that you will overcome. Of course, we want to run to allopathic medicine when the symptoms become to the point where we need it because that’s where they thrive, that’s where they shine. Drug-based MD medicine is great at emergency medicine. That’s where they’re really good, but they really suck at helping people get the body healthy, and in chronic health conditions, which is what you’ve talked about before.

Amy says, “What’s the best precautionary measures to boost the immune system,” which you’ve already talked about, “It’d be nice to understand ways that don’t cost a lot of money, the basics.” For those who are on a budget, what’s the absolute basic thing that people could start to do today that gives the biggest bang for the buck?

[1:38:13] Dr. Stephen Cabral: If I could only do two I would do something we call the Daily Nutritional Support and vitamin D3 because that’s maybe $50 for the month, and it would give you all of your B vitamins, it would give you some vitamin C on a daily basis, 15 grams of protein because you need those amino acids to help boost the immune system as well, and then you get your vitamin D for overall immunity. There’s already zinc in there, there’s already—like I said your—electrolytes and minerals.

That’s what I would do Daily Nutritional Support, and I would do liquid vitamin D3 so that you could dose it for your kids and you could also dose it for yourself. That’s the least expensive. If I could add one more on to that I would do then the extra vitamin C, and then I would do the extra zinc, and then after that, I would do the extra omega-3s, again, if you’re on a budget.

[1:39:05] Ashley James: Got it, and switch over to healthy foods, and cut out sugar, and processed crap, and alcohol.

[1:39:11] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, that comes first. Food always comes first before supplements. I don’t want anybody to think they can supplement their way out of it. Whole food diet comes first and the supplements are just like they say, they are a safeguard to anything that you may have missed in your healthy diet—which just letting you know from 20 years of practice and doing people’s food on a daily basis—we’re all short a little bit somewhere. The supplements just help to fill in the gaps, and then times like this they boost the immune system when we need it the most.

As you were saying, the problem in the car analogy makes perfect sense. The problem is your car won’t run without the proper fuel right. I guess the good and bad thing is our bodies will run for 15, 20, 40 years before they start to break down with the wrong food. So let’s start eating the right food now so that we are healthy. We’re a healthy 75-year-old. We don’t want the medication.

[1:40:07] Ashley James: It’s really sad that the majority of adult Americans, that over 70% of the population in America is on at least one prescription medication. That is not health. Being on a medication means that you don’t have perfect health, for the most part. Like type 1 diabetes, obviously, there are certain medications that are life-saving. High blood pressure medications, that’s an indication that something’s out of balance nutritionally or out of balance in some way—stress, nutrition, the terrain of the body—and the bodies were mounting a response.

Then the MDs come in and suppress that response instead of looking at the root cause. In so many cases, people are on multiple medications and then they need medications to manage the side effects of those medications. It’s poisoning the body, it’s causing stress on the liver. Medications and this is very common knowledge you can google it, but most medications actually have us burn through our nutrients faster. So there are nutrient deficiencies that arise from taking certain medications diving us deeper into nutrient deficiency and creating more and more stressors on the body, taking us further and further away from a balanced healthy terrain, and taking us further, further away from the body’s ability to mount a healthy and balanced response when the immune system needs to.

That’s why I love Naturopathic medicine, and that’s why I love the work that you do is that for listeners that are on medication, and they’ve been told by their MDs they’ll be on it for the rest of our life like metformin, “Oh, you have to be on it for the rest of your life.” This is such baloney. Those doctors should be held accountable because the information is out there that we can heal our bodies with food and nutrition that we can bring our bodies back into balance, and it’s science-based.

I don’t want to say, everyone just throw their meds out, don’t do that. Go work with Dr. Cabral, work with Naturopathic doctors, work with functional medicine practitioners and doctors, and get your body so healthy it no longer needs medication. That’s the goal. That’s the goal to be so healthy. In our 70s, 80s, 90s be a Centurion, be so healthy that we don’t need medication, and it’s possible. MDs will tell you it’s not possible because that’s their training, because their training has been backed by pharmaceutical companies for the last 100 years, but don’t get me started.

Sherry says, “Awesome comments so far. I’ve also heard that it’s killed off by heat,” The Covid-19 is killed by heat, “and that it starts in the nasal passages. That’s where our body is coolest. There’s been some talk of using heat from a blow dryer,” can you imagine standing there with a blow dryer and breathing it into your nose? That’d be really annoying. “Or getting in a sauna. Is there anything accurate about that about sweating in a sauna every day to help kill the virus or breathing in heat through a hairdryer?”

[1:43:15] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I can’t recommend the heat from a hairdryer for so many different reasons. We could get into EMFs, we could get into just burning off—you’re basically burning out your mucus in your nasal passages. I don’t recommend that, but it is true. That is why I’m very optimistic about this as well, and that’s why I’m okay with the social distancing, and the quarantining for right now because we need to catch up to the point where we can get more ventilators, that we can get more testing to people earlier, that we can do all those things. Then hopefully, in the future, we’re more prepared.

I’m very optimistic either way because most viruses—we don’t know about Covid-19 yet because we just haven’t, but it is a coronavirus. We have experience with coronavirus. Coronavirus has been around a while. This is a different strain of a coronavirus. Now, from the previous knowledge base, we can say viruses don’t do well in this summer heat, which is why the flu is typically a winter-based virus.

I’m very optimistic by June-July this will slow down regardless because the virus will have more difficulty living outside the body. Going back to the sauna, you can replicate summertime now in a sauna—will heat up your core temperature. Heating up your core temperature is akin to a fever, which kills viruses and also speeds up the flow of white blood cells. I absolutely do recommend a sauna.

[1:44:41] Ashley James: I love that. I have a Sunlighten Sauna and I just love it. For those who don’t have enough space in their home, they have one that’s an ultra-low EMF, non-toxic that you can lie in. It’s like a cocoon, and it heats you up. Then you can just wipe it off, pack it away, and put it in the closet when you’re not using it. Even people in apartments can use it. You would say one sauna session a day, heat up your core temperature may be between 30 minutes and 60 minutes—depending on your hydration level—would be good as a preventive, or would be good to do when you have the virus or both?

[1:45:24] Dr. Stephen Cabral: The research on sauna is incredible for using it five times a week at 19 minutes per day. I did a podcast on that.

[1:45:30] Ashley James: Really? That’s great.

[1:45:32] Dr. Stephen Cabral: It’s incredible. Again, going back to medication, there’s no medication that comes close to this, but if there was it would be a trillion-dollar drug. If you use a sauna for 19 minutes a day, now this is a Finnish sauna so an infrared sauna is not going to get as high of heat so you’ll double the time. Anyway, so when you look at that, 19 minutes a day decreased all-cause mortality by just about 42%. It decreased all cardiovascular risk of death, which is the number one killer by over 60%.

Again, if you could decrease all-cause mortality—any cause of death—by over 40%, it’d be a trillion-dollar drug. You can get that with a sauna and using it for 19 minutes, five days a week. It was a huge study. I have a podcast just called 19 minutes. You can just type that in at stephencabral.com/podcast, and I’m telling you right now, you will want to invest in a sauna after seeing the research on saunas. It’s incredible.

[1:46:31] Ashley James: Wow. I love that. That’s new to me. I always love looking at all the research around saunas, but that is so cool. I’m going to go listen to that episode. That sounds great. We should just do that anyway. So for infrared, you could just do 40 minutes where if you stay hydrated throughout the day the 40 minutes five days a week is totally doable, but if you get a headache after, or if you get a headache the next morning you did not hydrate enough, or you need to back off and not do 40 minutes, and then you work your way up to it.

It’s just a matter of keeping well-hydrated, also drinking some coconut water if you feel like your electrolytes are off. If you drink some coconut water and a big glass of water and your headache immediately goes away, then you know that that was maybe an electrolyte or a dehydration. That’s my thing is dialing that in because I like to see how long I can sweat in the sauna, but not more than an hour. I’ll get in there, and I’ll really know I did not hydrate enough or balance it out enough if I wake up the next morning with a headache. I’ve had to dial that in.

[1:47:41] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yes.

[1:47:42] Ashley James: Sorry, did you have any more to say about that?

[1:47:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I was just going to say for people starting out with the sauna, ten minutes, twenty minutes is great. Just see, do you get lightheaded? Does your heart rate start to increase? Just because you might not be used to the heat. We’re both saying the same thing, we don’t want you to start right away at forty minutes or whatever you might need, and it’s also based on temperature.

An infrared sauna you actually get more benefit by staying in longer because it’s not just about the sweating, it’s actually the absorption of the far infrared rays. So 120 degrees, 250 degrees maximum for an infrared sauna, and then a Finnish sauna is about 160-180 degrees. That’s why you can go in for less time because of the higher heat. So the lower the heat a little bit more time, and then the higher the heatless time. Hopefully, that helps.

[1:48:33] Ashley James: Right. I was just in a Finnish sauna and it was 180 degrees, and I was so uncomfortable. We couldn’t even last five minutes in there. I was just so uncomfortable. The air was really hot, the seats were hot. My body was kind of screaming the whole time, whereas when I’m in an infrared, oh, man. It’s easy. The air is cool and easy to breathe like 120 or mine gets to 132. My body is just sweating bullets within 30 minutes, but I am comfortable the entire time. It’s very enjoyable, and it’s not stressful.

I commend those who can sit in the Finnish sauna for 19 minutes because I couldn’t do five, but in my Sunlighten Sauna I can do 30-40 minutes and feel very, very, very comfortable. Those who are afraid of heat or couldn’t handle Finnish saunas—just know that infrared saunas. Of course, you got to get a brand like I love Sunlighten. You got to get a brand that’s low EMF and non-toxic. There are so many cheaper saunas out there that are cheap for a reason, so you have to really, really be careful—buyer beware about that.

Rosemary says, “I heard A1 receptors in the lungs are what the virus adheres to. What enhances these receptors and what decreases the attachment?”

[1:49:53] Dr. Stephen Cabral: That’s a great question. I actually believe this, although that’s not proven yet as well. Its most doctors believe this now so I do agree with it, and if we’re looking at natural foods what decreases the adherence would be—and people usually like this recommendation—dark chocolate, like real dark chocolate, not milk chocolate. I typically say 75% plus, prunes, green vegetable juice, flaxseed, omega-3s, and blueberries have all been shown to be highly beneficial.

[1:50:32] Ashley James: You know what, they ran out of frozen blueberries at my Costco. I was like, “Really? What health thing did I not hear? I’m going to go have to run to Trader Joe’s because I love their ultra-dark chocolate. I got a little trick for you, get the super ultra like—I don’t know—100% percent. This probably says 95% but one of those crazy, crazy, crazy dark chocolates that do not taste good. You get a square of it, and then you put a date on it. If you want to get really decadent, you put a little bit of nut butter on it, and then you eat that, and it’s like a truffle. It tastes amazing.

[1:51:12] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Sounds amazing.

[1:51:13] Ashley James: You could cut the dates in half too, you could just do a little thing, but yes, it’s very delicious and very nutritious. Dark chocolate, prunes, green juice, blueberries, flax, omegas, those are all things that we could start to incorporate right away. Could we eat greens or does it have to be juiced?

[1:51:32] Dr. Stephen Cabral: No, you could absolutely eat your greens and you should. It’s just when you do the green juice you just get more of the nutrients. You just wouldn’t be able to eat five pounds probably of vegetables at that meal.

[1:51:43] Ashley James: I will take you up on that challenge. I get one to two pounds of vegetables a day or more. After about one pound of vegetables at a meal, I am full. Yes, you’re right. We should probably start juicing those greens. You can get it to Costco. My Costco always has a giant bag for $4.95, a giant bag of organic super greens. Grab a bunch of those. What if we grabbed a bunch, and juiced it, and froze the juice? Would it still be effective or does it need to be fresh in order to preserve the enzymes and the nutrients that help us with this?

[1:52:28] Dr. Stephen Cabral: You’ll still receive the majority of the nutrients, but you won’t receive the enzyme. If possible, I love the juice to be pressed and then consumed right away—at least within 30 minutes—but you’re still getting massive benefit either way. I can’t complain if someone’s saving it, and freezing it, and using it later.

[1:52:50] Ashley James: Great, thank you. Leslie asked a question I feel like you’ve answered, “What does the future of this virus look like? Will it ever go away or is this going to be around for another season?” It’s going to be a seasonal thing. You’ve said that this in the works, this is just one of the many viruses that we’re going to be exposed to every year, but we’re going to, hopefully, our bodies will—of course, we got to take care of ourselves—be able to mount an in immune response, and then it will eventually no longer be a problem. Is there anything you’d like to say to Leslie about her question?

[1:53:21] Dr. Stephen Cabral: My answer would be that we do seem to see these viruses come and go every year to two years. Again, there has been less sleep for me over the past couple of weeks just really looking at the research to bring people the truth of what is really happening. We’ve seen the swine flu, we’ve seen SARS, we’ve seen Zika, we’ve seen all of these different things, and they typically have one season to them, and then they move on. So I’m not sure, well I’m not saying we won’t see it again, and I’m not saying that we won’t see another virus next year or the year after that.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome, which is SARS, MERS, swine flu, all of these have come and gone. I’m not as worried about seeing this again next year as they would a different coronavirus, a different strain, because remember, this is a coronavirus. It’s the Covid-19 coronavirus. Maybe there’ll be a different strain next year, and that would be more likely than seeing the same exact one, in my opinion.

[1:54:37] Ashley James: Okay. SARS was way back in the early 2000s, and we haven’t heard of any kind of outbreak of it since, so that makes sense. The media is really good at hyping anything to be afraid of, and we really haven’t heard of any reoccurrence. Just using that as an example, I like your idea, but viruses can mutate, they can always change. Like you said, we’re going to see more viruses in the future.

Hopefully, we’re going to learn as a globe. We’re going to learn as a whole planet is going to learn how to create a healthier like more Goldilocks approach to this. This is going to be very interesting. In the last few months and the next few months we’re going to be studying the numbers for years to come and using and figuring out a global response that is more balanced.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to create a better ecology for everyone. Tracy asks a great question about vitamin C, “Which kind should we take, sodium ascorbate, ascorbic acid, plant-based vitamin C? The information is so confusing out there.” She says she has some sodium ascorbate. What about you hear buffered? Oh, buffered vitamin C, and of course there’s acerola cherry powder.

There are all kinds of different forms: powder, pill. What kind is the best to take or if someone has access to basically Walmart, this is what they have. Should they just take any vitamin C because any vitamin C is better than no vitamin C, or is there some vitamin Cs in the market that should not be taken? What’s the best?

[1:56:29] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I formulate for Equilibrium Nutrition, and I just obviously—I want full disclosure there—I create all of the different formulas for the company. What I’ll say is it’s a functional medicine company, and the reason I mention that is a functional medicine company is like a thorn, a pure encapsulations in Equilibrium Nutrition. They do things differently.

They typically will not use genetically modified corn and other products like that. If you go to a Walmart, or Costco, or BJ’s, any of those places they’re looking at cost, and so they use the lowest quality ingredients to sell it at the lowest quality price. If you’re buying vitamin C from those places, you’re most likely—I don’t know that for sure—but you very well may likely be getting a GMO corn that I’m not an advocate of using.

However, viruses do respond to an ascorbic acid, which is a less expensive form of vitamin C. If you’re using higher dosages I do recommend a buffered form. On a daily basis, I recommend a product called Full Spectrum Vitamin C, and it’s part functional medicine, which is the ascorbic acid non-GMO form. Then it also is part acerola berry, hibiscus, and other natural forms of vitamin C that I love from a food base. So I get the best of both worlds.

Then for higher dosages, you can be very well served with a buffered vitamin C, and it’s buffered with either the sodium—that sodium ascorbate is sodium mixed with essential ascorbic acid, it’s bound to that—or calcium, magnesium, and potassium, which is what we do that are great alkaline-based minerals. Of course, if you want to add a little sodium, you could absolutely add a little pinch of sea salt, and then you have all of your electrolytes right there. Because you don’t want to do a lot of straight ascorbic acid at one time, and the reason is that it could affect your actual stomach lining as well.

[1:58:27] Ashley James: Very interesting. Right, we got to keep conscious of supporting the digestion because if we throw the digestion off then we’re throwing everything off. That’s the center of our health, very cool. I love the formulas that you’ve come out with. We’ve talked about that in our past interviews: episode 271 and 301, which I recommend listeners go back and listen to because Dr. Cabral talks about his overall formula for creating a healthy terrain of the body in detail in those interviews.

Jeff says, “Would be interested to know if,” he believes this virus actually originated from bat soup or some other nonsensical animal theory. “Could it possibly be a manmade virus cultured in a lab in China or some sinister objective? Wonder why China tried to suppress any knowledge of this horrific catastrophe from leaking out to the wider world?” Can we get into the conspiracies? What do you know? Let’s just stick with what the facts that you do know.

[1:59:36] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Conspiracy theories?

[1:59:37] Ashley James: Well, hey. I’ve got the biggest tinfoil hat of everyone out there, I’m sure, but I want to stick to what is known, what’s factual, what you know is factual at this point.

[1:59:50] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’m not saying that the conspiracy theory is not true, I’m not discounting that at all. We just don’t know that to be true. We do know that the virus—or a virus very similar to this one—originated in the same city in China at a lab there. We know that that is at least possible, whether it was purposely or by a mistake released, again, that’s speculation. We don’t know.

Could it come from bat soup, people are saying that but as we know right now it can’t be transferred from a bat or there are a few other animals as well—or nonhumans that carry the virus—and we don’t know how that made the jump. No one has any idea how it made the jump to humans. Whether it was purposely released, non-purposely released—by accidents, someone was exposed in the lab and then walked out of the lab like not on purpose, that’s a possibility—or that it did come from a nonhuman species.

I have absolutely no idea. There are all sorts of theories, and I’ve read some of those theories. They very well may be true. I just don’t know that part to it.

[2:01:01] Ashley James: Right, yeah. Well, we’re hearing a lot out there. So we just need to stick with what we do know and also focusing on the conspiracy theories that there is an agenda, like a depopulation agenda, whatever, there are lots of them out there. Those will create stress. The fact is we will never know the truth. If it was man-made, if it was released on purpose, if it was released by accident, if this absolutely just 100% natural and just happened because the virus has happened. Focusing on the idea that there’s a sinister motive behind it creates stress, which lowers our immune response.

I like being awake and aware, I want everyone to be awake and aware, but at the same time, the more we focus on that there’s some evil out there that wants to kill us, the more we’re just stimulating the sympathetic nervous system response of fight or flight, the more we’re decreasing our immune response. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot. What we need to do is yes, continue to be awake and aware and detach from that.

If you are a person that believes in God connect with God. God is love. This is the time to hunker down and get more spiritual, get more connected to your Creator. Get surrounded—within your home while social distancing—by those you love, and your animals, and do things that decrease your stress because that is known right now to help your body.

If you believe that there’s this evil force out there that wants to depopulate us, well, they’re going to win simply by you fearing them because fear—living in constant fear is going to decrease your immune system and potentially leave you susceptible. It’s a catch-22. We have to focus on what we can control. What is within our control?

What’s within your control is your breath, what you put in your mouth, who you surround yourself with that’s within your control. Knowing and following our wonderful doctor’s advice today on what we can do: supplements, and food, and lifestyle changes will make a huge difference in our outcomes. Also in our mental and emotional health. Thank you for going over this question because it’s sort of the elephant in the room for many of us.

The thing is that whatever the fact is we’ll never know the truth, but whatever it is—because there’s no way to prove or disprove. Really, without a shadow of a doubt that this is one way or the other because it can always be manipulated, but holding on to a constant fear of something will harm you in the now. That is the truth.

We’ve got to detach ourselves from that fear and attach ourselves to love as much as possible and vibrate on that level because that really is great for the immune system. We’ve got a few more questions, I just want to blast through them really quick. Do some blood types have a greater immunity to the virus? I’ve heard this to be true.

[2:04:28] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I’ve read that research as well saying that type A blood type is the most susceptible, and type O seems to be—again, small sample size, small studies. It’s possible, each blood type has their own specific proteins. Possible but I don’t want people to focus on that because every blood type—with a strong healthy immune system—will most likely be totally fine regardless of your blood type.

[2:04:57] Ashley James: Great. Kathy says, “If I do contract the virus, at what point are we not contagious?”

[2:05:06] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Fourteen days with no symptoms is what the medical establishment is saying.

[2:05:11] Ashley James: So if I get it today, let’s say I’m getting a fever, and a headache—cancel, cancel, cancel—and I move through. Three days later I have burning lungs, I have lung problems, and then a few days later I’m in the clear. Maybe I’ve been sick for 5-6 days. I have to wait 14 more days before I’m not contagious?

[2:05:36] Dr. Stephen Cabral: That’s the current recommendation. However, you are contagious before you even had symptoms. That’s the hard even if you do get symptoms, you’re still contagious before that. Is it 14 days from when you first started to feel symptoms or 14 days afterward? I can’t give you medical advice on this podcast for sure, what I can tell you is that you will not—I mean, again, I’m speculating myself—but you’re not going to be contagious 14 days after that. It’s very precautionary, but again, not a bad precaution, not a bad precaution.

[2:06:12] Ashley James: Okay. Daphne says, “I’d love to know more about the effect of painkillers and fever reducers on glutathione levels, and how that affects the immune system and brain health.” I love her question. We should do an entire episode on that alone, but let’s stick with just the Covid-19. If someone starts getting a fever, they’ve been tested, and they have Covid-19, or they’re suspicious of it, and they start pumping the ibuprofen because they want to lower their fever, how is that negatively affecting their overall outcome?

[2:06:45] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Yeah, it does actually. This was one I was saying was speculation in the beginning but possible. Ibuprofen is now being contraindicated in China, in France, and possibly South Korea as well. I’m going with that. I’m agreeing with that because of its possible immunosuppression making you less likely to fight off the Covid virus. That I would not recommend ibuprofen for a fever.

The problem is you’re typically then going to switch over to acetaminophen, which would be more like a Tylenol. When you take Tylenol it does deplete the body of glutathione, and glutathione is the main detoxifier—at least while in phase 2 liver detox. If you had to choose one or the other, you would still probably choose acetaminophen, but keep in mind that a fever—as long as it does not get too high—is the body’s way of killing a virus as well as speeding up the flow of white blood cells to the infection.

[2:07:47] Ashley James: Okay. So if we can, don’t use any fever reducers or painkillers—if we can. I know there’s also natural—I mean homeopathy has been proven really effective, and I just did an interview on this. Because there are homeopaths who are treating many people with Covid-19, and they’re moving through the symptoms much faster because of the homeopathy. There’s homeopathy for fevers, but it doesn’t suppress the fever. It helps the body regulate the fever in a healthy way. That’s good to know that there are those options out there.

For a fever as we’re watching it as an adult, what’s an unsafe fever versus a safe fever? When should we go, “Maybe I should suppress this,” or is there never a time when we should think to suppress this.

[2:08:43] Dr. Stephen Cabral: A lot of people will say never suppress a fever, however, I’m a little bit more conservative in my approach. I have a 5 and 7-year-old daughter. By not suppressing a fever you do run the risk of seizures, and that can affect the brain. I’m not willing to do that. Again, I can’t tell you what to do for you, but what I can tell you with my daughters is we don’t let it get above 102.5 because we don’t want it to go above 103. Once we see it get to that level we’re going to lower the fever, and of course, we try to do that naturally. We do that through Epsom salt baths, you can use some homeopathic-based treatments as well, a lot of hydration.

For an adult, we don’t want it to get above 105. Once we start to see it get to 103.5-104, then as an adult—at least for myself and my wife—that is when we would start to lower that fever. Luckily, as a healthy human, hopefully, it doesn’t get that high, but of course, that’s not a bad thing. If your body shows symptoms of a fever say, “Oh, okay good. My body is fighting whatever it is.” The problem is, your body can’t keep fighting and fighting and it gets to be too far and then you, of course, do have to lower that fever—at least in my opinion.

[2:09:59] Ashley James: Seattle Children’s Hospital—anyone could google this: fever myths Seattle Children’s Hospital. I love them. They do a ton of fantastic work. They actually do a lot of more holistic research, so I’m very happy with the work that they do. They say fever—I believe it’s 108 or 109 as long as the child is responsive, can talk, or making eye contact, and not limp, and lethargic, and drooling, and not making eye contact, but a very high fever in a child can be healthy and safe.

Then just recently, when I did my interview with Cilla Whatcott, who’s a Ph.D. in homeopathy, she says that very interesting—and maybe you can comment on this—that the seizures that happen in children are due to a calcium deficiency. The sudden onset of a fever in a child, there’s not enough of the minerals for the muscles and the nerves to function correctly, and that causes the seizure. So we want to support the child, give them some calcium. Have you heard of that?

[2:11:14] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have not. Magnesium and calcium are used by the muscles to allow them to contract and relax, and the nervous system is made up of fats, and certain minerals as well, and B6. The issue is you always weigh the pros and the cons, and so that’s what I do. Everything we do is from a natural-based perspective, but we’re talking about acute-based circumstances.

How do you know if your child is potentially calcium deficient in the muscles or the nervous system as well? Keep in mind, the brain is also heating up, so this is also affecting the brain. I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen someone with a 105-degree fever. They are absolutely close to hallucinating, and they’re dehydrated. People have different risk tolerances, and I’m not willing to roll the dice. That’s me. Maybe 108-109, I’ve never seen that before, and I couldn’t recommend that.

[2:12:21] Ashley James: Maybe in the hospital, while they’re being hydrated and monitored, who knows, but I like your more conservative approach of after 105, start to take some precautions.

Cindy, she has several questions. You’ve already answered some of them, so we’ll just get to what I really like about her question. She lists pretty much everything you’ve listed: the garlic, vitamin D. She says astragalus, bee propolis, zinc, red algae, oregano, licorice root, vitamin C, probiotics. If we start to show symptoms, should we stop taking Echinacea, spirulina, and elderberry due to the possibility of a cytokine storm, which is what you already said no for the elderberry? Are any of these other supplements—all these supplements you mentioned—good? That we could just take all the time, in general? If we have the Covid-19, are there any that we just 100% should stop taking—beyond what you’ve already said in this interview.

[2:13:27] Dr. Stephen Cabral: What I recommended for the elderberry, I looked at the studies and the studies actually looked at four or five different herbs. They looked at five different specific cytokines in the immune system—certain interleukins—and it found that elderberry raised all five, Echinacea raised two out of the five, and then there was just one raised in the other herbs.

You could look at that as saying, “Okay, these raised the inflammatory response in the body on a Th1 basis, and that caused a cytokine storm.” It did and that’s exactly what it was supposed to do—I keep trying to tell people. I say that in a nice way like, “The herb is doing exactly what the herb’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to stimulate the immune response. However, there is too much at stake right now.”

If you end up with the fever and the coughing, I do believe that because we just don’t know that use the elderberry, use the Echinacea—which are proven immune boosters, and elderberry was proven to kill viruses—use them. Then if the symptoms start to get higher, I would stop. Only because we just don’t know. This is the first time this has come around.

I’m also saying we have so many other things that we can use. Someone mentioned colloidal silver, we have monolaurin, we have l-lysine, we have the fire cider, we have other things that we know plus all of our vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, melatonin that now are proven to be working. I’d say there’s no one herb that we have to use, use it now. If those symptoms really start to get aggravated, at least take the precaution and I would say come off. Hopefully, that helps.

[2:15:18] Ashley James: I love it. For those that have never taken melatonin before, don’t take it during the day. This is a nighttime supplement. I could just see some people falling—well, if you’re under house quarantine, sure, sleep all day. If you take too much melatonin you’ll get lucid dreams and nightmares. Dosing is different for everyone. What would you say people should start with? One milligram, three milligrams?

[2:15:40] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Most people will do fine with anywhere between one and three milligrams per night. That’s a very small dose. It’s a fraction of what your body makes on a daily basis. Two and a half to five milligrams is what a lot of people in our practice are using right now to really lower the cortisol at night and to produce that melatonin, which is a natural anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and hormone regulator.

Then if you were to get the virus and get run down, current more medical-based recommendations are 10-20 milligrams. I’ve certainly never gone that high before except when trying to reacclimate after long-distance travel for time zones, and that could be for short-term use. We’re not talking about long-term use. Again, right now, anywhere between one and five milligrams completely fine thirty minutes before bed. We like liquid melatonin because it’s in and out of your system a little quicker, and you don’t get groggy the next morning.

[2:16:39] Ashley James: Yes, me too. I really enjoy taking melatonin when I need it. This is a good time to take it, lower cortisol, help our bodies get enough sleep. That’s a good thing.

Cindy also asks about—she said she’s heard the immune system’s first reaction when we’re exposed to it is called the prime, and it sets the tone for the immune system response moving forward. She wants to know—obviously if we’re exposed we don’t know we’re exposed, that’s the thing. We don’t know when we’re experiencing the prime or the first. Like you said, when it touches our tonsils and our body goes, “Ah, virus. Okay, quick. Mount a response.” It sets the tone for the immune system moving forward is what she says. Is there any advice around that or we just really should just follow everything you said in this interview today?

[2:17:28] Dr. Stephen Cabral: She’s correct. That’s why typically your immune cells ramp up over 72 hours. So you’re exposed to a bacteria or virus, your body recognizes it—we’ll say it primes—it starts to create the proper immune response—a certain type of white blood cell natural killer cell—and then it begins to destroy that bacteria or virus. Oftentimes, if we don’t have to mount that larger response, well, we never feel any specific symptoms, but it’s working inside of our body. Maybe we just feel a little bit more rundown than usual, or we have a little headache.

We don’t know but that’s taking place. It’s also why antibiotics—oftentimes when taken on day four or five of our cold—only shorten the duration of a cold by about 24 hours. That’s because our body was creating the same immune response. So it’s interesting looking forward for most people like do you really need the antibiotic, that’s a question. Of course, don’t use antibiotics during a virus because antibiotics for antibacterial bacteria and virus is a virus, which is different than bacteria. They’re not going to help with your virus unless, of course, you’re using one of these newer drug combinations, which is the azithromycin and the hydroxychloroquine.

Again, you’re in really bad shape at that point. Again, I’m telling most people, you are most likely—if you are healthy—going to be fine. That’s good news. Let’s take care of our people that are immunocompromised, and that are elderly, and they need us for their sake to stay away for right now, but do their shopping for them, and get them all their supplies, and FaceTime them, and Skype them so that they know that they’re not alone, even though they do have to spend this time away from those people that might be carriers but asymptomatic.

[2:19:19] Ashley James: Very good. Last question, Sarah asks something, I really like this one. “If you are a carrier,” so like you said, 80% of the people that experience that they’re asymptomatic, and they have the virus, the body mounts the response, everything’s good. Especially all the wonderful listeners who take care of the terrain of their body and have a healthy balanced immune system and they mount an immune response, but they have the virus inside them. So they could potentially spread it to other people. At what point does it clear from you or do you always have it? Does it lay dormant in your body forever like a lot of viruses do? A lot of viruses, your body is constantly keeping them at bay. Does it ever leave your body or your body figures out how to—so are you always going to spread it? How does this work?

[2:20:13] Dr. Stephen Cabral: No, that should not be the case. There will be a period of time that your body has the virus active, and while it’s active you are contagious. When it is inactive—whether it’s dormant or whether we just kill it off like we do the flu. So if I got the flu in let’s say December, and I accidentally coughed on you, in July you wouldn’t get the flu.

We’re hoping that this type of virus—once gone, and incubated, and destroyed by our own body, or whatever we have—is no longer contagious. Whereas a particular virus-like a herpes virus—when active—could be passed on to someone else. I don’t believe—but again I don’t know—that the Covid virus will be contagious after the particular 14-day period of it being active in your body and you being contagious.

[2:21:15] Ashley James: But the virus always lives in your body like many viruses? They just live dormant in your body or does it get cleared out?

[2:21:26] Dr. Stephen Cabral: This particular one or like a flu most likely gets cleared out, and what we keep are the particular immune cells that recognize that in the past that then live on. When we do come into contact with it—typically they don’t last forever, but we know they last somewhere between five years, ten years or so—we’re able to fight it off again. I don’t believe that this will live on, but again I don’t know because this is not my expertise.

Does the virus live on here? It shouldn’t, but other viruses like Epstein-Barr virus, or a strain of herpes-based virus they do. They do live on in the body, they just become dormant because our immune system is strong enough to keep them dormant and it’s balanced enough. This is different though. This is not a herpes based virus. This is a—what seems like it may be—seasonal for this season just like last season’s flu strain was last season’s flu strain. Same with SARS, and avian or bird flu. There have been these before, and I believe that it’s just going to die off—that’s my optimism speaking as well—and that’ll be it.

[2:22:43] Ashley James: Excellent. So really very optimistic. We have to take it seriously. If we can we should. Obviously, avoid contact with those who are most susceptible. If we can, do social distancing and isolate yourself in your home. There are so many fun things. When I heard that we, potentially, were going to be told to stay in our homes, I actually got excited because I’m like, “Oh my gosh. All the things I’ve been putting off.”

We’re going to clear out that closet, we’re going to do the Marie Kondo thing. We started doing it, but now we’re going to finish the whole house, and we’ve got spring cleaning to do because it’s springtime now. I’ve got a huge garden in the backyard I’ve got to start working on. I just started thinking about all the things that we kind of put off every weekend because we’re just busy going out, going, going, going, running, running, running around. All the wonderful cooking I’m going to do.

So something I learned from Tony Robbins years ago that really helped me get over a huge negative hump in my life is asking yourself—when it comes to very bad situations, very difficult, and some situations that don’t seem like there’s any hope, this when you ask this question—what’s good about this? If you’re, “Okay, I don’t have money for rent. I have to stay at home, and there’s no work.” Just all these and that’s all you’re focusing on is all the negatives and the threat, threat, threat, and your body’s perceiving these threats. Ask yourself—in a very honest way, not a sarcastic way, but a very honest way—what is good about this?

You keep asking, and you keep trying to answer that question. It’s a thought exercise until your brain can get out of the fight or flight, and your brain actually starts to solve the problem. Maybe you figure out that you can do Uber Eats to make money. There are ways that we can solve every problem. They can’t even make a computer as smart as our brains. Our brains are amazing, but we’ve got to grab hold of the wheel and be the one driving the bus, and ask yourself, “What’s good about this?”

Instead of focusing on because I could have totally gone in the direction of, “This is the worst thing possible. What am I going to do? I’m going to be stuck in a house with a four-year-old. What do you mean we can’t leave the house? We’re going to be under martial law.” All the negatives. I can go down that road and stress my body out, or I can ask myself over, and over, and over again, “What is good about this? What’s good about this?”

I ended up with a really long list of wonderful things that made me excited about this. Of course, I’m not excited about martial law, of course, I’m not excited about the economy going into a tailspin and people losing their jobs, of course, I’m not excited about people being sick, but we can only control what we can control. When we can focus on what we can control, it does decrease stress. That helps our body, and it helps our immune system.

So focus on what we can control, eat healthy, get enough sleep, do things every day that brings you joy, move your body in a way that brings you joy. You can go out in nature walks. You’re not going to get the virus in the middle of the freaking woods. So get out, get out. Get some fresh air, get some sunlight. I don’t know if you’ve heard this but there are even talks that sunlight kills the virus. Have you heard of this?

[2:26:10] Dr. Stephen Cabral: I have not, but I don’t discount that at all. One thing Ayurveda used to do is something called sunbathing, and you would get the natural infrared rays from the sun, you would get the UV rays—which we know kills bacteria on the body and potentially inside—and the sun creates vitamin D, but it also creates what’s called sulphuration. That increases the amount of sulfur in the body, which helps with detoxification.

So remember good food, clean water, fresh air, the sun, not too much beats that. I mean, really. That’s why I’m telling people prep with good food now because this could last another 6-12 weeks, and they are quarantining city by city. Please do prep with real food. We have fresh food for three to four weeks, and then we have our frozen food, and we have our rice and beans, and olive oil that we can make a meal of forever, and then we have our supplements.

If you have that and soap, don’t worry about the toilet paper as much, get soap. Get those other things, and you’ll be okay. You will be. It’s not going to be fun, I’m not saying that. For kids who are cooped up, it’s not great for parents, kids, for the economy, but we will be okay. If at least we can get the basic survival things.

[2:27:24] Ashley James: Yes, excellent. Wonderful. Know that it can be delivered to you. Amazon is still delivering. If we’re under home quarantine, they’re not going to cut us off from food supply. They’re going to cut us off from supply. Even in China, they have a system that they worked out because everyone was mandatory in their homes. They had a system where you would just report online how many people you have in your home, and then they would deliver, or have some way to get to you that amount of food per week. So they developed a system.

We’ve got lots of systems in place to make sure that everyone’s taken care of. You know what, God forbid, if you didn’t have food for a few days you can survive on water. We can fast. My husband just finished a 17-day water-only fast. Totally fine. Very sick people, like you said, should not jump into fasting for long periods of time, but if you’re in generally good health, we can live for a few days. We can skip a few meals, we’re going to be fine. We don’t want to do massive hoarding. We want to support our friends and family.

We can also grow quick greens. There are certain foods. There’s one guy I love in Australia, he just made a video. He’s Mark from Self Sufficient Me. You can look it up on YouTube. He just made a video of things to plant right now that grow quickly. So sprouts, you can sprout food. I went to Cash & Carry and bought, for $25, a giant 50-pound bag of lentils, and you can sprout lentils. I take one cup of lentils and it makes 8 cups of nutrient-rich, vitamin C goes through the roof, 700% vitamin C goes up when you sprout lentils, and also has amazing amino acids. So it’s a great protein source, a great vitamin source, a great live enzyme source, and you do it in your kitchen. You can be anywhere. It doesn’t matter the weather, you can do it in your kitchen.

So sprouting is a great thing to do. You can grow microgreens that grow really fast. You can grow spinach, and lettuce, and kale, some crops that grow faster. Something that comes to shoot quickly like radishes, and peas. So there are things that we can do to be self-sufficient. I love all the advice you gave today. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and for giving us everything that we can do to stay healthy.

We talked a little bit about colloidal silver. I love colloidal silver nasal spray. There are no negative side effects of doing that. Could we use colloidal silver nasal spray as a preventive if we do go out grocery shopping? Because it coats the nasal passages and that would kind of help destroy the virus. Is that something that you’re doing or that you recommend?

[2:30:15] Dr. Stephen Cabral: First and foremost, I want to let people know that I am not worrying about the virus. I am worried about it from the standpoint that I want to help as many other people as possible, but if I get it, I am confident in my body’s ability, in my ability to use proper nutrition, fasting, and nutritional supplements to be able to fight it off. I want people to know that first and foremost because stress and lack of sleep are going to cause me to be immunocompromised and cause far more damage—I believe—than me getting this particular virus. Again, I don’t want to get it. I’m not saying that at all.

The second is that I personally very much recommend colloidal silver nasal spray, but I also like a product by NutriBiotic called Nasal Spray, and it contains citricidal, which is a grapefruit seed extract. What you would do is you would actually spray it into the nasal passages, two squirts in each nostril before you go out, and then two squirts after you go out. You could also gargle with a little bit of fire cider, which of course will burn a little bit when you come back. What that does is it will kill anything that’s still on those surfaces.

[2:31:27] Ashley James: Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much. You’re such a wealth of knowledge. Please, listeners, check out Dr. Cabral’s website, and his podcast. Of course, all the links to everything that Dr. Cabral does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on for a third time. I definitely recommend listeners go back, check out to 271 and 301 as well for great information.

Normally, I end the podcast by asking the guests to share anything that’s been left unsaid. I really don’t feel like anything’s been left unsaid. You’ve been such a wonderful guest today. Thank you so much for everything that you do, and I really appreciate that you’ve helped ground us.

Really important, as important as our food, is decreasing stress and getting out of fear, and then using all the precautions that you’ve mentioned today, so that’s wonderful. You’re welcome back any time on the show, anytime you want to continue to teach, and bring great grounded science-based holistic information to us. We just would love to have you back. Thank you so much.

[2:32:41] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate you.

[2:32:43] Ashley James: Wonderful. That’s a wrap. It went longer than I thought, but I really, really, really think it’s going to be very appreciated by everyone. So thank you for taking the time to do this.

[2:32:57] Dr. Stephen Cabral: My pleasure. Thank you.

[2:32:58] Ashley James: Thank you so much. Well, stay safe. Are you allowed to go home? Are you allowed to fly to Boston or are you stuck, you’re grounded?

[2:33:05] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Well, we were supposed to fly out of LA so all our flights got canceled, and at that point, we just decided we’re just going to stay in our little quarantine area of the world and not go back to Boston, which is one of the hotspots. For now, we’re staying put.

[2:33:21] Ashley James: Are you able to get out in nature in your area?

[2:33:25] Dr. Stephen Cabral: That’s one of the reasons why we’re here. It’s not snowing in Boston so we can actually walk outside, there’s sunshine, there’s the ocean air, so I’m a big believer that if myself and my young daughters were to get sick, I want them to have sunlight, fresh air, be outside, so that’s why we’re doing this. In Boston it’s cold air, it’s bad for the lungs, mucus-producing. It’s also allergy season. Most people are going to think their allergy symptoms are the Covid-19 and it’s not. We didn’t mention that on the podcast but that’s going to be another scare for people come April, come now.

[2:34:00] Ashley James: I’ll include that, I’ll include this right now. Great. Wow. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. This is awesome. Okay, great. I’ve got the links that you sent me, so we’ll include that as well.

[2:34:14] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Perfect. Great speaking with you today. Let me know if you need anything.

[2:34:16] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. Please, thank you. Go enjoy the fresh air and sunshine.

[2:34:23] Dr. Stephen Cabral: Thank you. You as well. Take care.

[2:34:25] Ashley James: Thanks, bye.

[2:34:26] Outro: I hope you enjoyed this interview. You can go to equilibriumnutrition.com/lth. That’s equilibriumnutrition.com/lth, and then use coupon code LTH10 for a special discount for the listeners on everything that Dr. Cabral does, his supplements, and I think he also sells some online classes, and awesome online courses, and digital downloads. Check that out as well. Of course, go to the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com, and check out all the links that Dr. Cabral gave us. Please, share this episode with everyone so we can help as many people as possible to Learn True Health.

Get Connected With Dr. Stephen Cabral:

Official Website

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Check out these other amazing interviews with Dr. Stephen Cabral

Episode 271 – The Rain Barrel Effect

Episode 301 – Energy Draining Toxins

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420 Liposomal CBD and the Latest Science, Research and Discovery From The Medicinal Hemp Supplement Industry and How It Affects our Immune System, Brain Health, Anxiety Reduction, and Pain Elimination with Medterra CBD Founder Jay Hartenbach 0

Mar 27, 2020

MedTerraCBD.com and use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!

Visit LearnTrueHealth.com/cbd to listen to episode 300 with Jay.

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Liposomal CBD

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Highlights:

Effect of CBD on dogs
What chromatography is
Is CBD safe for children?
Liposomal CBD
Is there an antiviral or antibacterial cannabinoid?

We’re now in episode 420 and who better be on the show than Medterra CBD founder, Jay Hartenbach. In this episode, we caught up with Jay on how Medterra is handling the coronavirus situation and how they’re still able to produce and ship products to customers. Jay also talks about what Medterra has been up to, what studies they’ve participated in, and what products are in development.

[0:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 420.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Jay Hartenbach who is the founder of Medterra CBD, my favorite clean CBD company. Jay, we had you all the way back in episode 300. We’re in the 400s now so it’s been a while since we had you on the show. I can’t wait to hear what’s happened since we’ve had you on the show, and also how your company is staying in business to supply us with the needed CBD we need to keep our sanity. Because it’s so great for anxiety. Hemp cannabis is so great for keeping people calm and helping them. It’s very medicinal. You have a very clean form of CBD that doesn’t trigger tests if someone were to go get tested for THC, which we talk about in detail in episode 300. I recommend listeners check that out.

Jay gives us a fantastic discount, gives the listener is 15% off by using coupon code LTH. So we can go to medterracbd.com and use coupon code LTH for the listener discount. Jay, welcome back to the show.

[0:01:38] Jay Hartenbach: Thanks for having me back, Ashley. I’m excited to be here.

[0:01:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. You are in social isolation. Your company has been making some major transitions for ensuring that everyone is safe, that your customers are safe when they receive your products, that your employees are safe. I’d love to go through all this information. Welcome back to the show. First of all, we’ll definitely hear what has been happening in the world of CBD since we had you on the show in episode 300.

Right now, I know that your company has been taking this really seriously—the Covid-19 really seriously. You guys are in Southern California. What is your company doing to create social distancing and to make sure that everything is sanitized so that everyone’s healthy—both your customers and your employees?

[0:02:37] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely, yeah. I think companies have a huge responsibility here. As the founder and the CEO of Medterra, you can impart a lot of change with something that can be viral—literally viral. Even though we may only employ 70 or 80 employees, there’s a huge responsibility because those 70 or 80 employees if sick could go and infect a lot more people and create this cascading effect. We made the decision two weeks ago to shut down the office entirely.

We’ve sent all the employees home just except for the few fulfillment employees that we have that are now going to be leaving tomorrow. They’re going to just be able to go on permanent leave, basically a paid vacation which is it’s good for them. They’ve worked so hard over the last months. They more than deserve it. We’ve been able to send everyone home.

It’s been a huge transition for us as a company because we have been so close for the last three years and working with each other. You’ve got a lot of friendships that have developed. Now everyone being remote, we were really worried about just the productivity but just also the morale. There’s a lot of concern in the environment of what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen with the economy? It’s been really reassuring to see you’ve got employees that are tagging each other on social media and making them do challenges from their house. We’ve stayed really, really connected.

In some ways, I think we’ve actually become even more productive and the communication has been even better because you’re forced to do so. You can’t not communicate because the only way to do it is to actually send them a message or a video chat. We have made that decision. It’s great to see other companies also making the decision to shut down the office and send everyone home.

[0:04:25] Ashley James: So you have a 40,000 square foot office—I think you said—in Southern California. How are you doing fulfillment then if everyone’s going home? So if someone orders your products are they not going to get it for the next two months or how does that work?

[0:04:45] Jay Hartenbach: That’s a great question. The fulfillment staff that has stayed there really for the last two weeks, like you had said, it is a very big space so social distancing is very possible in the Medterra office when there are only six employees doing fulfillment. What we’ve also been able to do—and this just us growing and maturing as a company—is starting to work with other third-party logistics companies spread out throughout the United States.

Our business, fortunately, has grown a lot larger than even when we last spoke. So the need for these different warehouses across the United States is very important. They are very, I should say, prepared to handle these types of situations. Just like what we were doing in the Medterra office where every order that we were sending out we were just wiping down as an extra precaution.

For our customers, these third party logistics warehouses and companies that we work with throughout the US are doing the same. That just allows everything to stay and run smoothly. We work with three different shipping partners: UPS, FedEx, and USPS, so orders are going out on time and they’re being delivered. In some cases, actually being delivered faster because we’re moving some of that shipping to our East Coast warehouses as opposed to having to ship everything from California.

[0:06:00] Ashley James: Awesome. So everything is sanitized. You are paying your employees to stay home during this quarantine, which I love to hear that people are able to keep their jobs. They will, of course, be loyal to your company for doing that. You help them they’re going to help you. I love seeing that. You’re not just hanging them out to dry. What did you mean by challenges from home? Can you give me some examples of how your employees have been challenging each other from home?

[0:06:39] Jay Hartenbach: I think everyone’s seen the push-up challenge or tag a pup. That’s gone viral on Instagram and social media. Now, I’m starting to see employees saying where they used to have, at two o’clock, they’d go get a shot of expresso together to beat the afternoon slow down. They’re now doing it remotely. It’s just fun to fun to see it. We are fortunate enough that we’ve got a very nice gym in the office. Now that everyone is not able to use that, it’s the same thing. You got people tagging each other and making them do home workouts. It’s just funny. There are also the challenges of working from home. I think it’s not a true conference call when people are working from home unless one dog barks or you have one child in the background. That’s been fun just seeing everyone, what they look like at home.

Like I said before, it is just incredible. I think we are so fortunate to have employees that truly believe in what we’re doing as a company. That’s why it’s so easy to take care of them because they just are—whatever adversity we give them, the CBD industry just in general has had a lot of adversity. Obviously, this has thrown another layer of challenges on, and just seeing how the employees are responding is incredible. I sent a message actually out to the team earlier today and I said, “If we had to start from scratch, I have no concerns because this is the team that I would do it with.” I truly mean that. There’s a lot of great CBD companies, but I really think that the Medterra team, in particular, is a special group. I’m just excited to continue to work through them no matter what the challenges present themselves to be.

[0:08:30] Ashley James: Absolutely. In our first interview, episode 300, we talked about the quality of Medterra about how you really work hard to make sure that the hemp that you derived the CBD from is really high-quality and medicinal, doesn’t have pesticides, that you have a filtration system so that you extract the CBD without the THC. There’s a lot that goes into the production. Listeners can go back to episode 300 to hear about that. We also shared a really interesting story about—I think it was a friend’s father or grandfather who had Parkinson’s. When he took the CBD, his shaking reduced or went away when he took it. Any updates on him?

[0:09:22] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah, continues to use the product. Just so that we’re friendly with our friends at the FDA, certainly not endorsing it as a treatment for that. I can say confidently that he has included that in his daily regimen. Going back to that point of having employees really believe in the company, every one of our employees has some type of personal connection to CBD. Whether it’s a family member or a friend that has seen the benefits for themselves—individually seen the benefits. It’s really easy as a CEO of a company to motivate people when you already have that type of product. It’s exciting.

That’s one of the cases. Because of that case actually and a couple others we’ve created this Medterra Assists program where there’s people that—based on either a disability or just being older and on a limited income or any type of service member: so military, police, fire—we give a significant discount sometimes up to 50% depending on the condition so that they can get access to these products. Because even though we try to keep our products as fairly priced as possible, they still are expensive. Those cases make it worth it for us, so we try to help where we can.

[0:10:39] Ashley James: Absolutely. It’s an expensive process to go through to make a CBD isolate that is clean, safe, and healthy. You’re making a high-quality product, and sometimes you have to pay more for quality. You get what you pay for especially in this industry. I love that you’re providing a big discount for those who really need it but can’t afford it. That’s fantastic. It’s like you could almost create a charity program or something on the side.

What has happened in the last—I think it’s been about a year and a half since you’ve been on the show. What’s happened in Medterra CBD in the last year and a half? How have you guys grown? What kind of science, what kind of studies have come out? I’d love to hear what you guys are doing now.

[0:11:44] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely. It’s a year and a half years. I think three or four years or maybe five years. So much has happened. When we talked last, which was like you said a year and a half ago, we were in a 3,000 square foot office. We had 10 employees working with us.

[0:12:03] Ashley James: It’s awesome.

[0:12:03] Jay Hartenbach: Now, like I said, we’re in a 40,000 square foot space. We have just under 80 employees working with us. It’s just been incredible to see that growth. A lot of it is compliments to the team in executing, but it’s also just being a part of such a fast-growing industry. When we talked about we really were focused on isolate, and we were really focused on CBD. That was our mission as a company.

Now, a year and a half later, CBD is still our primary mission, but what we’ve recognized as a company is that there are other ingredients beyond CBD that can be powerful. So our goal is not to deliver the best CBD product but just to deliver the best product in general. So we’re now working on really cool blends that take other natural ingredients to really enhance that efficacy.

We’re just launching this new gummy line right now where gummies can be a great way to deliver CBD because it’s in a friendly format. Customers and consumers like gummies. If that helps them get on a regular regimen, then I’m all in favor of it. Just not selling a CBD gummy that’s got high fructose corn syrup and is loaded with gelatin and isn’t vegan friendly. Ours are pectin-base and all have additional ingredients whether it’s our Keep Calm, or Sleep Tight gummy, or even our Stay Alert gummy. They all have these different ingredients that ultimately give a more efficacious product to the consumer, which is what they’re doing.

One of the realizations we’ve had over the last year and a half too is people aren’t taking CBD for the sake of taking CBD. At least not anymore. I think in 2017 and earlier, it was this cool hip product. People were taking it just to be on that cutting edge. At this point, people are taking CBD because they believe that it works and it can help them. That’s become our mission as a company, just to ultimately deliver the most effective product. Those products all do contain CBD, but how do we get there? It’s different blends as well as some of our new delivery methods like liposomes that we’re working on.

[0:14:09] Ashley James: And have enough CBD in them so it’s not like trace amounts just so you can say. I bought a deodorant and it actually really works. I’m really happy with this deodorant. I always buy 100% natural deodorants, but honest to God it says there’s CBD in my deodorant. I had to laugh so hard because I’m like, “Why do my armpits need CBD really?” It’s probably trace amounts just so they can say like, “This is a CBD deodorant,” and that’s not why I bought it. I mean there’s charcoal and coconut oil and all kinds of other stuff and baking soda and whatever. It works. It’s one of the best deodorant I’ve ever used, but just the fact that it has CBD in it just made me chuckle because it’s one of those things now, it’s gimmicky. You can put a trace amount of CBD in something and then, “Oh, it’s CBD. We could charge $10 more,” but you’re not doing trace amounts in these gummies. You’re trying to get as much CBD as possible into them?

[0:15:06] Jay Hartenbach: That’s correct, yeah. We just take that stuff for granted, but it is worth highlighting because there is just a wide variety of CBD products on the market. Our gummies, as an example, have 25 milligrams of CBD per gummy. Most gummy or CBD gummies on the market usually have 5 to 10 milligrams. So we’re anywhere from 5 to 2 ½ times stronger from a gummy standpoint. That just goes back to our belief in looking at the clinical data where really, at a minimum, if you’re ingesting CBD you’re starting to see effects and that 15 milligrams per serving and kind of going up from there. A 5 or 10 milligram gummy is great. I think that’s a good place to start, but we are very scientifically-driven. So we want to make sure that we’re putting efficacious amounts to the CBD and all of our products.

[0:15:55] Ashley James: Speaking of scientifically-driven, have you guys participated in any studies or any scientific papers? Has there been anything new in the last year and a half in terms of the science?

[0:16:15] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely, yeah. That’s something that we’re actually very proud of. We just finished a study that’s in peer review right now with the Baylor College of Medicine. It was a combined study with Baylor as well as some local that’s in Houston. What we were studying was the effect of CBD both in naked format or the way that it’s taken now as well as a liposomal format, which we can talk about more. We compared the efficacy versus obviously a control. So as a five-arm, double-blind placebo-controlled study.

We were taking senior dogs that had not found any benefit from traditional arthritis medication. Their owners volunteered to participate in that study. We weren’t locking the dogs up. They went home with the owners every night. I was talking to the marketing team. They said, “You need to make sure that when you talk about this that you clarify that this was not an animal study where they’re locked up.”

[0:17:1] Ashley James: People would be knocking on your door so hard. I love that. When you said vets I thought you meant veterans, but you actually meant the doctors like veterinarians. That’s another thing you definitely want to clarify because I’m like, “Oh, the vets. They would really like this.” Coming back from war and having post-traumatic stress and then being given liposomal CBD and seeing how it affects them.

Okay. So this is pain and dogs, which I find funny that we have to do a double-blind placebo study because it’s not like the dog knows whether we’re giving it olive oil extract or CBD. The dog doesn’t know, but this just going to prove even more that it works. How would they measure pain in dogs? They’re not limping, they’re not yelping, they’re able to walk and run? How did they measure the effects of CBD on these dogs, these senior dogs with arthritis?

[0:18:18] Jay Hartenbach: Well, that’s a great point. So the reason the double-blind was required was because we use something called the Helsinki Pain Index, which is an internationally recognized way of scoring animal behavior specifically to dogs. Like you said, it ties to their gait, how quickly they can go from sitting to standing, and then standing to laying down, and just this qualitative score. That double-blind placebo-control is really important because we don’t want the vets that necessarily know which dog is receiving the CBD or not CBD, but also throw the owners as well. If you’ve got an animal or a pet that’s in suffering, it breaks your heart. You’re really looking for any glimmer of hope. Maybe they get up a little bit faster than they usually do and you’re like, “Oh my God it’s working. This it.”

So it was very important for us just to make sure that it was completely double-blinded so that there wasn’t any way of misconstruing the data because it was a qualitative as opposed to a quantitative scoring system. We were looking at, like I said, how they were getting up and how they’re moving. What was really exciting was in the arm of the study where we were giving—these were larger dogs so 80-pound dogs. We were giving them 50 milligrams a day.

What we were doing was also looking at their liver profile to make sure that there weren’t any elevated liver enzymes, as well as looking at their red and white blood cell counts, as well as kidney analysis just to make sure that there was minimal side effects if not any side effects. In that one arm, 80% of the dog saw 50% improvement or more. This is on a 30-day study, which for us—I think anyone that’s familiar with clinical trials or any type of kind of medical research—30 days is lightning fast. So to see that type of result in 30 days, then we did a follow-on study 30 days after they completed a treatment just to see how quickly they would revert back to their previous symptoms. It was really encouraging to see. That study is in peer review. Go ahead.

[0:20:35] Ashley James: I was just going to say, so to clarify, how many dogs were in the study?

[0:20:39] Jay Hartenbach: There were 25 dogs total. We had five dogs in each arm.

[0:20:44] Ashley James: Okay. When you said each arm there was a placebo, so five dogs were not getting anything?

[0:20:52] Jay Hartenbach: Correct. Five dogs were in the control, five dogs were in the 20 milligrams of regular CBD oil, and then the third group was 50 milligrams, and then we did 20 milligrams of our liposomal delivery, and then 50 milligrams of our liposomal delivery. Each there was five, which is not a very large number. This is granted a preliminary study, but it was powered enough where we could see statistically significant results because of—

[0:21:22] Ashley James: Eighty percent of the dogs that received the CBD saw a 50% improvement. Was there a big difference in dose or did they—across the board no matter what the dose was—see an improvement?

[0:21:35] Jay Hartenbach: They did. The one group that received CBD that saw an improvement but not a significant improvement was the 20 milligrams of CBD oil. So non-encapsulated in a liposome. The one comment that we have to make on that is obviously these were larger dogs, so the average weight was 80 pounds. So think of big labs. One was that enough CBD for them to be effective, and two, these were, like I said, severely arthritic dogs that I don’t think we’re necessarily having the run of a mill arthritis or just age-related conditions.

In that 50 milligram arm of just receiving plain CBD oil, so just our Medterra Pet CBD oil 50 milligrams a day, so 25 in the morning and then 25 at night, that’s where that 80% saw 50% improvement or more. That’s something that I’d be happy to share. Like I said, it’s in peer review right now. We are hoping to publish in the next month or so. So we’re excited about that.

[0:22:42] Ashley James: Very cool. That’s great. So you followed up a month later. How are the dogs doing?

[0:22:49] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah. So a month later is a little bittersweet. For the dogs that were receiving just a regular CBD oil, it was this little heartbreaking because the owners are like, “I need to put them back on CBD as quickly as possible.” The dogs were obviously not very happy from seeing this huge reduction in their symptoms, and now all of a sudden reverting back over the course of really 15 to 20 days to start showing the same symptoms that they were having prior to starting the study.

All of the dogs that completed the study though are now receiving free Medterra CBD for life. It was a tough 30-day period after this study, but now they’re all receiving their CBD and they’re all taking it What was really fascinating for us and this what’s leading us to do some additional studies and actually talking about vets in the sense of veterans, the liposomal delivery, which is a way of encapsulating the CBD so that it becomes hydrophilic and non-hydrophobic, but also dramatically increases the bioavailability as well as the length of time that it is biologically active in the blood.

We were seeing 30 days after still some of the symptoms coming back but significantly reduced. That was very encouraging. I was joking with someone. Someone said, “I don’t know if that’s a great product for you guys to be selling. You’re going to put yourselves out of business.” Look, at the end of the day, we truly believe it. If we’re helping people and animals, then ultimately we’re going to have a strong company. If we ultimately can help them take less CBD down the road, then that’s great because that means they’re seeing less symptoms.

[0:24:33] Ashley James: I think it’s fantastic. You make a quality CBD product that ends up making it so that people need to take less and it lasts longer. Sure, they’ll buy less from you, but you’ll get more customers. Your goal has always been to help as many people as possible, and to make a high-quality product that is holistic, that is healthy, and healing. You’re on par with your mission statement. You’re not looking to try to get as much money out of everyone as possible. You’re trying to really help them. If you can make a very effective CBD product, then you actually would rise above the rest.

I love that you’re putting the effort and the money into all the science around it, which is what you talked about also in episode 300. Really interesting. I love that those dogs are on Medterra CBD for the rest of their life. I thought that was really cool. Why does CBD help to reduce pain especially in an instance where maybe it’s bone-on-bone? Obviously, CBD is not reversing arthritis, but it is significantly helping with pain. Is it that CBD blocks pain receptors, decreases inflammation? Do you know scientifically why CBD helps so much with pain?

[0:26:06] Jay Hartenbach: We’ve got a couple—I shouldn’t say guesses I think it’s a little more educated than a guess. That’s part of the ongoing research, but what we’re seeing is a couple of things. This is done with some of the lab work that we’ve partnered with Baylor to do. One, we’re seeing CBD actually bind directly to the neutrophils. So usually, in cases where you’ve got systemic arthritis, you’ve got overactive neutrophils that are part of our immune system that if operating and working properly these neutrophils are helping combat any foreign particles that are entering or foreign bacteria or viruses entering the body.

If you have an overactive neutrophil that’s basically attacking nearby cells that aren’t bad and they’re native to the body, then that’s a huge issue. What we’re seeing is CBD actually binding to these neutrophils and turning that activity down. That is one, going to just help arthritis in general because that can be a cause of arthritis. The second part of it is to just the actual inflammation around the body.

You’ve seen, we do have studies showing that CBD can turn down inflammation through a variety of methods in the body both applied topically and ingested. One of the things I think we talked about in episode 300 was if we look at just the human conditions that people are afflicted with, a vast majority of them have some tie-in to inflammation or that’s a GI issue, a dermatitis issue. If you can address just the root cause of that inflammation, then you’re going to ultimately see that benefit.

The actual mechanism and the pathway forward is really—I think actually under scrutiny right now—a lot of people have thought—this is new to the industry. Okay, you’ve got this endocannabinoids system. That CBD binds to CB1 and CB2 receptors, and that’s how it operates. We’re seeing, yes, that is part of the pathway for CBD to interact with the body, but like I said, you’re seeing CBD also bind with other parts of the body that aren’t tied directly to the endocannabinoid system. It’s almost creating a more holistic effect than what we thought.

The endocannabinoids system, it was really discovered and started being researched in the early 90s. To think that there weren’t going to be any revisions or new understandings on how it would work, I think was a little misguided or maybe too optimistic. We’re starting to find that out, and that’s exciting for us where you have CBD that’s actually binding to serotonin receptors in the brain. It’s not going through a CB1 receptor and then activating some type of cascade that then affects our serotonin levels. It’s actually just binding to the serotonin receptor in the cell.

That’s exciting for us. It’s just hinting at the potential of both CBD, but just all of these cannabinoids that we’re now looking at and starting to evaluate.

[0:29:12] Ashley James: You mention that CBD, they’re seeing now that it binds to neutrophils, that it’s part of the immune system. Are there studies that show that CBD helps us to combat bacteria or viruses?

[0:29:27] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah. That’s a great question as of late. CBD and just like you talked about your deodorant that has CBD in it. What is the actual justified use? CBD can be very helpful in helping our iMMUNne system from a variety of ways, but not necessarily directly. In the sense that we look at CBD and its ability to help people reduce any type of stress or potentially help with anxiety, those are both causes of immune system degradation. If you’re overly stressed, if you’re not sleeping well, then your immune system is going to start performing poorly. CBD has an immediate opportunity to be beneficial to the immune system through those pathways of just helping you be an overall healthy.

Medterra right now, we actually are developing, and we’re going to be launching this shortly—an Immunity Tincture. It has CBD in it because of those properties that I just described, but it also has Echinacea and elderberry in it to directly act on the immune system to boost the immune system. So kind of goes back to that mission of ours where we want to use CBD where CBD is very important to us, but we’re also not ignorant to the other ingredients that we could potentially include to get this more holistic, more ultimately efficacious product.

There is one cannabinoid though. I’ve heard CBG as an example that may have some antibacterial and antiviral effects. There’s a lot more work that needs to be done on that, but that is really interesting to see that there is one cannabinoid specifically that has shown some antibacterial properties, which is exciting.

[0:31:16] Ashley James: Back when I interviewed you in episode 300 your CBD has been filtered so that there’s no other cannabinoids, there’s no other—what’s the word—particles from the cannabis plant or the hemp plant.

[0:31:36] Jay Hartenbach: Yeah, cannabis.

[0:31:37] Ashley James: There’s the terpenes and all that stuff. It’s not in there, it’s only CBD and that’s great for postal workers, and flight attendants, or policemen, and people that have to take drug tests, or construction workers. They have to take drug tests. I remember my husband was a foreman union carpenter for 20 years. There was drug testing. When CBD came on the market he was worried about taking it. He wanted to try the CBD, which doesn’t get you high. Kids can take it safely. Like you said, pets can take it safely. It’s not a drug. It’s not a street drug. It’s not going to get you high. He really wanted to take it, but at the state at the same time, there wasn’t any CBD product that would say this is not going to trigger a drug test. When he was a union foreman union carpenter, if he were to have an accident let’s say like cut himself, if you have any accident on the job, they immediately require you to get a drug test.

I just remember his conflict because he really believed in all the information coming out and really wanted to try it. He had always had anxiety. He was looking for more natural ways of handling it. Then, of course, the anxiety of, “Well, if I take this CBD what if I have to do a drug test? What if it shows up positive?” That would give him anxiety. He was really just stuck in a hard place. Whereas you’ve solved this problem. That a policeman can take your CBD and know that it’s not going to trigger a drug test because it’s been isolated away from all the other elements of the plants that might trigger the test.

When we did speak in episode 300 we talked about all the medicinal benefits that are in the plant itself, because aside from THC and THCA, it’s the acidic form before it’s been heated. It doesn’t get you high, but it has medicinal properties. There are so many other cannabinoids in the cannabis and in the hemp plant that don’t get you high if processed properly, and that are medicinal and so healthy. There are now companies that want to make whole plant medicines. You were looking into that back then in the last year and a half. Have you made any headway or have you decided against it?

[0:34:27] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely, yeah. To all those points that, Ashley, you just made one was a recognition. Even when we started Medterra there was this idea that when we looked at the medical research there was so much justification for having a CBD isolate because all of the medical research—specifically to CBD—was done on the isolate as opposed to a full-spectrum product. We felt confident that it was something that we could sell and feel like we were actually providing benefits.

Even since the beginning of Medterra, we never were wanting to dismiss the other properties of these cannabinoids because while CBD could really do a lot of the heavy lifting, I think it would be crazy to think that other parts of the plant couldn’t be beneficial. We just talked about CBG potentially having some antibacterial or antiviral effects.

To your point, one of the things that we had been exploring was this broad-spectrum component. As a company, Medterra really will never sell a product that has THC in it, but to your point, maybe there’s a way of including other parts of the plant like the terpenes, and the flavonoids, and the other cannabinoids besides THC to get more of a holistic encompassing effect.

We have actually recently launched a broad-spectrum product. It’s something that we’re really proud of because we’ve been working on it for a while. There’s a lot of broad-spectrum products out there and some are really good. So I want to make sure I clarify that. We don’t only have the good one, but a lot of broad-spectrum products use a manufacturing method very similar to ours to produce our isolate.

The way that they get rid of the THC is by just simply adding more and more isolate back into the full spectrum blend. If you add enough isolate into your full spectrum blend that might be let’s say 60% CBD and has 3% THC right when it leaves, obviously, the distillation. You just continually bombard it with more and more isolate, then eventually you’re going to get to the THC level will be to a non-detect amount, which is great. You now may not be free of THC, but you’ve got it at such a low level that people shouldn’t be concerned.

The downside is that you’ve basically also diluted everything else out of that full spectrum blend except for the CBD. Now you’re just selling hemp-flavored isolate, which I think is a disservice to people.

[0:36:53] Ashley James: A lot of companies are doing that. You go to the drugstore or you buy online, that’s what you’re getting.

[0:37:01] Jay Hartenbach: Exactly. That’s unfortunate. Just like when we’re talking about when we last spoke, if there’s any time you have any concern, any reputable CBD company should be able. One, they should have it on their website, but two, if you call them into their customer service line or send them an email, should be able to provide any CoA from any batch that you’ve purchased. You can quickly ascertain, “Okay. Are they doing this hemp-flavored isolate where they’re just diluting everything out?” You’ll know because you’ll see CBD concentration really high and then everything else will be non-detect, which like I said, doesn’t necessarily do you any good. You should just buy CBD isolate. It’s going to be cheaper.

With that being said, there have been some advances in the actual processing. Through this process of using chromatography where we’re able to selectively isolate out a compound. Instead of saying, Look, we’re going to isolate for CBD and leave everything else behind.” What we’re going to do is actually take this entire full-spectrum blend and just pull out the THC. You can do that through a process called chromatography. Even when we talked last time, it largely wasn’t scalable for the CBD industry.

You could produce maybe two or four kilos at a time or even the best labs. If you’re trying to put that on a national level, that’s just not going to scale, but some of the more recent advances have really allowed that to scale. You’ve got a lot of labs that are now operating in a much larger level.

Now that we are confident that it is a true broad-spectrum product, we’ve actually brought it to market. Our target for these broad-spectrum products is to really have anywhere from 10:20, 20:1 CBD:my inert cannabinoid ratio. It is meaningful. It’s still very largely a CBD product, but you have meaningful amounts of CBG, and CBC, and CBN all showing up on the COA. Not only in the bulk format but in the actual finished product format so that consumers are actually getting that benefit.

That’s been great for us because it’s really allowed us to branch out. The broad-spectrum products have quickly become a favorite of a lot of our customers where they love the CBD products, but getting those extra cannabinoids in there certainly isn’t hurting them, and for a lot is helping them. So that’s been exciting for us.

[0:39:25] Ashley James: Yeah, no kidding. What was the process, chromatography? How does that work?

[0:39:32] Jay Hartenbach: Knowing that you’ve got different molecular weights for all the cannabinoids—and part of the issue of isolating them out and this why it hasn’t been largely scalable is because the molecular weights are so similar. The compounds themselves are just very similar. It’s very difficult to isolate. Using a chromatography, you basically create these call it chemical filters or chemical gradients that allow basically the different densities of the compounds to sift through this filter.

What it creates is this almost imagine a flowing tap—for illustrative purposes. You put the material through in the beginning, and then what comes out first will be let’s say CBD. Then as you go to a different molecular weight then it’s CBG. Then a different molecular weight it’ll be CBN. Then the next molecular weight that passes through the filter based on the different densities will be THC.

You just note, “Okay. Based on what’s coming through on your testing you’re kind of pulling samples. Okay, this is the THC part of it. We need to just discard that, and then we can continue to last the rest of the flavonoids and terpenes flow through. They each come out individually and then you recombine them at the end and. It basically reconstitute that full-spectrum blend just without the THC.

[0:40:57] Ashley James: Fascinating. Do they take the THC and go sell it as a concentrate?

[0:41:05] Jay Hartenbach: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve got that question. We’re just talking with one of our distributors and they said, “Just let me know as a friend where they discard it.” No, they destroy it. It’s just a part of the federal regulations.

[0:41:20] Ashley James: Oh, man. They could have made such a great—I don’t know. I just think I live in Washington and they sell stuff here legally. I will just be like, “Hey, that’s like a byproduct that they could turn around and sell to people that want it,” I don’t partake anymore. I’m from Canada. All Canadians in the 90s grew up on pot. I prefer to be sober. I actually prefer. I don’t drink alcohol. I prefer to just have my wits about me. I’m not against anyone that chooses to partake. It’s just I like being in my body.

I’m a Pisces. I’m so ungrounded and so like in the ether as it is. I just like to be grounded as much as possible and have my wits about me. I see that it’s in Washington State, people partake. I think it’s a healthier alternative than drinking alcohol, to be honest.

People don’t smoke a joint and then start a bar fight and kill people. They usually just chill out, whereas alcohol, alcohol tends to cause more accidents and more violence in general. Your product does not contain anything that would make someone high. Can children take it or is there a warning that children aren’t allowed to take it? How does that work?

[0:42:54] Jay Hartenbach: That’s a great question. We do have parents buying it for their children and taking and giving it to their children. We’ve had a couple of parents say that it’s helping their child focus more, be less hyperactive. So children are taking it. It’s just like anything. When you’re talking about children, or pregnant women, or any of that, it’s just making sure that whatever y our primary care physician or anyone that has some medical experience to just make sure that they’re in the loop.

There haven’t been a lot of studies just because CBD is so new. We’ve talked about there is an endocannabinoid system in every mammal. Whether you’re a newborn or you’re 80 years old, CBD has the ability to interact with your body however it may do that. Especially with really young children, as children get into their teens, then you don’t have as much concern. That’s just something that you want to watch very carefully.

You’ve got children that are obviously taking it for the treatment of epilepsy with Epidiolex. They’ve done a lot of safety studies on these children. Looking at their liver and making sure that it wasn’t toxic to their liver in really high doses. That doesn’t seem to be a big safety concern, but at the same time, I think anytime you’re giving something to your children you’ve got to make you’re really educated. If you’ve got any questions, we’re here to help. Certainly, your physician should be able to help guide that conversation.

[0:44:39] Ashley James: Absolutely. That makes so much sense. I know of a few epileptic children who have completely been able to—and these were the ones that weren’t responding to drugs. Using cannabis, using CBD they, were able to reduce. In one instance, one person completely eliminated their seizures. That’s very interesting. I’ve had several doctors on the show talk about this. That our body has the endocannabinoid system. We have receptors for cannabinoids, and our body makes cannabinoids. So essentially our body’s making CBD. Because we’re nutrient deficient, so let’s say Omega 3s, whatever fatty acids our body uses to make these endocannabinoids.

When we are deficient in certain healthy fats our body can’t make enough of it, and then we become deficient in them. Then when we take an external CBD, it is like filling the nutrient deficiency. It’s a nutrient we’re deficient in. Those people that gain great benefits, so they take the CBD and they notice that they’re happier, calmer, significantly less anxiety, they’re able to focus, that they have better sleep, that they’re in less pain.

Those people had nutrient deficiencies and fatty acids to the point where their body wasn’t making. Their own endocannabinoid system was deficient, so now they’re fulfilling it. Some people take CBD and they don’t notice anything. Well, maybe they don’t have anxiety, they don’t have pain, and they don’t have problem sleeping. They were kind of surprised, “I took it. I didn’t notice anything.” Well, maybe they’re not deficient. So they took it, but the CBD didn’t need to fulfill. There was no nutrient deficiency for that person.

It’s not that CBG doesn’t work, it’s that it really works for people who are nutrient deficient, and many people are. Many people don’t have enough of those healthy fatty acids because we’re eating the wrong fats. We’re eating polyunsaturated fatty acids. That’s the majority of our diet, especially in the United States. So we’re getting the wrong fats, which are clogging everything up instead of the right fats that we can use, that our body can use to fulfill the endocannabinoid system.

Your CBD supplement is literally a supplement that’s fulfilling a deficiency, which is what these doctors are saying. I find that to be really fascinating especially when we look and see that some children react really well to it. Of course elderly and everyone in between. This deficiency doesn’t discriminate against age because it’s about whether we’re consuming, digesting, and absorbing enough nutrients.

This is what these doctors are saying about CBD. So we can really see it as a nutrient that is necessary for our body and not something that’s recreational or something just that’s cute and fun and, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It’s an essential nutrient the body actually needs.

[0:48:10] Jay Hartenbach: Totally. I couldn’t agree more. That’s one thing that really has to be communicated, that endocannabinoids system like you said. An endo-cannabinoid, as an example, is anandamide, which is a very similar analog to CBD. So if your body’s not producing that, like you said, because you’re not getting the right fats in your body, they’ve linked omega-3 deficiency with the inability to produce endocannabinoids as an example, then you’re going to need some type of supplement. Going back to the earlier point of if we ultimately sell less CBD because people are healthier, then that’s okay because we’re going to get more customers. I don’t think the world is going to have a shortage of people that are not nutrient deficient or need to be healthier.

If we can help people on their health and wellness journey, get a little bit more healthier then I think that’s awesome. That’s just a huge win for us as a company. We’re going to start understanding that even more as we do more research. Like everything in the body, it’s never black or white. It’s always something connected to another thing. There’s never a one fix-all. You could take a ton of CBD, but if you’re sleeping two hours at night, you’re probably not going to be a very healthy person. You sleep eight hours at night and you eat McDonald’s for lunch every day.

It’s all about balance and making sure that you’re in touch with your body. I love what you said about just being grounded in general. Because when people have more self-awareness of what’s going on in their body, then they can find even more effective treatments because they know exactly what issue they need to address.

[0:49:47] Ashley James: Wonderful. It has been about a year and a half, and you’ve talked about some exciting things. Is there anything in the CBD industry that’s come out that really surprised you? Because you have been so deep in this information. Has anything surprised you recently about CBD? Any new studies that have shocked you?

[0:50:14] Jay Hartenbach: New studies that shocked me, let me think on that. We talked about this. What we understand of the endocannabinoid system is going to be turned on its head, a little bit at least. That’s not for the worst, I think that’s just us understanding it better. The endocannabinoids system is going to continue to be very important, but just know that CBD isn’t limited to just these CB1 and CB2 receptors I think is relatively groundbreaking for scientists because they’ve been so closely looking at CB1 and CB2 receptors.

What’s going to be really groundbreaking, maybe we talk in a year and a half—hopefully, it’s much sooner—it’s these other cannabinoids that are now coming to light. They’re becoming feasible to put into products. Early studies of CBG I thought were pretty groundbreaking and showing that it could be antibacterial. That it’s actually helping. I saw some studies out of the UK that it shows that it’s actually helping with cancer.

That’s really on the forefront. Everyone has this sneaking suspicion that we’re just scratching the surface, and it’s great to see those finally come to light. I think shocking just in the CBD world in general, what we’re seeing is the FDA finally coming on board. We’re kind of shocked by how long it took the FDA. It’s one of those things where I totally respect what the FDA is doing. They need to do it in a systematic way so that they’re not doing it incorrectly or leaving any loopholes, but the longer they take to act the more time unscrupulous companies can exist.

We’re very careful when we’re talking about medical claims and making sure that we have our products manufactured correctly. It’s hard to continue to stay and compete and do well when you have some guy that’s mixing it up in his garage and he’s saying that it’s going to be the end-all-be-all.

Medterra is doing fine, but it’s that has been shocking because ultimately, the FDA can do a lot of good by being very clear on future guidelines of CBD and really forcing the bad actors to either clean up their act or get out of the industry.

[0:52:34] Ashley James: Yeah. We have to be careful about the claims that these companies make. It’s kind of the Wild Wild West, isn’t it? We want good regulations but at the same time, the FDA is a revolving door for pharmaceutical companies. They’re threatened by CBD because it’s cutting into their profits because people are getting off of pain meds or reducing pain meds. That reduces their profits.

I’m always leery. On one hand, we want the FDA to protect us, but on the other hand, we don’t want them to take away our right to access it. That’s why the FDA does not regulate supplements. There are laws. You can’t make health claims.

I can’t say, “Buy my vitamin C. It cures XYZ disease.” You can’t make health claims and make a profit off of something. If I was a doctor, I could say, “Vitamin C cures scurvy,” and that would be legal. But I couldn’t say, “My vitamin C brand cares scurvy. You should buy it.” There are laws around health claims and selling supplements, but as far as if the FDA regulated the supplement industry, they would do so in order to shut down many of the good companies that are out there. This is just getting into we need the Goldilocks. We need the balance. We need to be able to have good regulations, like you said, can get the bad actors to clean up or get out.

I’m always like just cautious because CBD is such a good product at reducing pain. It is cutting into the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. So I don’t want them to start regulating it to the point where it’s going to shut down good companies like you. Your company could lobby. Have you considered hiring some lobbyists to help Medterra and help the whole CBD industry? Is it to the point where we don’t need to lobby?

[0:55:00] Jay Hartenbach: No. There definitely need political action. Medterra, since really our existence, we’ve been a part of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable. This year, we actually just joined the Executive Board of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable. It’s a great advocacy group that works directly with politicians. It’s so interesting what politics being so polarizing. We are, as a group, working closely with Senator McConnell’s office and also working with Senator Schumer’s office. Depending on which side of the aisle you lean towards, one of those names might send chills up your spine.

[0:55:42] Ashley James: You need both sides to be on your side. You just need everyone to be on the side of CBD. It doesn’t matter. You just need all of them. Get as many of them as possible.

[0:55:54] Jay Hartenbach: That’s exactly it. They are. I guess it’s maybe a little biased, but I feel like the politicians in my mind are redeeming themselves. Because there’s this idea in America that some of the politicians can be very self-serving or just really only aligned with the party and not necessarily in with putting American citizens’ interests first. Them both working with each other, it kind of shows that look they are working towards a greater good. The new FDA Commissioner even said—I think it was a couple of weeks ago—said, “I would be a fool to think that I could outlaw CBD.”

We know what the future holds we just don’t know when. The first step that’s going to happen in probably sometime this summer, Congress is looking to pass a bill that will include language mandating that CBD is a dietary supplement. We think that’s going to happen in the summer with obviously an election year as well as obviously this international health crisis that we’re all facing. There’s some TBD on that, but ultimately that will pass. The FDA, like we said, is I think in favor of making CBD a dietary supplement. They just don’t want to create a policy.

One of the issues is this will be the first time that something has existed as a pharmaceutical product that then is now going to be sold as a dietary supplement. The reason this was set was in 2014 GW Pharma, right when it became legal, filed their IND for Epidiolex. So it became a pharmaceutical off the bat before anyone could even sell CBD as a dietary supplement. They’re selling it now.

The FDA does have some concern, not about CBD, but what other pharmaceutical drugs are now going to start being marketed as a dietary supplement, or what pressure are they going to face for other compounds not even related to CBD because of the precedent that they’ve set.

I don’t envy their job. I know people have this love-hate thing with the FDA, but I do believe that they are acting really in the best intention of making CBD as a dietary supplement. I think they’re on board with that. Allowing there to be some clear guidelines to kind of remove those bad actors, and then just freeing up these questions and concerns. You’ve got retailers like we work with, as an example, Albertsons is selling ingestible CBD products. Other retailers like CVS and Walgreens that we work with only carry the topical products because they’re worried about carrying the ingestible products. There’s just this confusion that ultimately is going to get cleared up.

In the meantime what we’re also working on that pharmaceutical front and talking about veterans, we actually are working on developing prescription or pharmaceutical products. We’re not using synthetic compounds. We’re using CBD and we’re encapsulating in our liposomal format, which we have a patent around. So that will be great because then we can actually allow doctors to prescribe and say, if the studies go well, and we’re talking a couple of years now, “You can take this product for X condition.” That also gives it a little bit more legitimacy as well.

[0:59:20] Ashley James: What you’re saying is that you’re liposomal CBD, which is not synthetic, you’re working towards having it be a prescription which would be paid for then by their health insurance. It wouldn’t be a drug, it’s not synthetic. It’s still naturally-derived and yet it would be a prescription, which would be amazing and be very helpful especially for veterans, and servicemen, and women, the elderly who are on a fixed income, or the disabled who are on a fixed income. That it could be paid for by the insurance companies. The insurance companies would be happy because there’s so much evidence that good quality CBD, especially liposomal, helps people reduce their need for pain medications, which would actually save these companies money.

These pain medications come with a host of side effects that then would cause the insurance companies to have to shell out more money. They’d be saving money by going the more natural route by paying for the prescription of liposomal CBD. That’s really exciting. When will we be able to access your liposomal CBD? When will we be able to buy some? Is there a date you have in mind for when it’ll be available to purchase?

[1:00:53] Jay Hartenbach: Yes. We will be launching it. One of the new lines that we’re launching is our Medterra Clinical Line. As a company, we’ve worked very closely with independent pharmacists across the country really since the beginning of Medterra. They’ve been a huge part of our business. We’ve actually developed what we call our Medterra Clinical Line. They are higher concentrations of our existing products as well as some new blends. That will be the first line to receive our liposomal products.

We’re developing a sleep product that has liposomal CBD but also has life is only melatonin, which is also not very bioavailable. We can dramatically reduce the amount of melatonin that we’re putting in it because it is in a liposomal more bioavailable format, which is just better for you. Then we’re also doing a wellness liposomal product that will have turmeric and ginger in liposomal encapsulation, which turmeric as an example, has a very hard time being absorbed by the body.

Those are launching in June—so this summer—in independent pharmacies. Then we’re going to be ultimately releasing those liposomal formats in the third quarter for just the entire company. People can buy that online as well. Really, really excited about it.

[1:02:16] Ashley James: Will you have a list of the independent pharmacies that we can drive to and pick up your liposomal products? Support the local companies or we just want to receive it faster, or do you have a list on your website?

[1:02:34] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely. Yeah. We have a store locator. We’re actually updating the store locator now that we’ve got these different lines and products. You’ll be able to search on the store locator probably I’m going to say two weeks. I usually over-promise on website development.

[1:02:51] Ashley James: All your employees are at home so they should be even more productive.

[1:02:54] Jay Hartenbach: That’s true. That’s true. I will let them know that. In the next month or so you’ll be able to actually filter the store locator and say, “Hey, look. I’m looking for this specific, I live here and I want to buy this Medterra product.” They can validate if that store carries it. We work with—actually at this point—over 15,000 retailers throughout the US. Not all of them carry all of our products. It’s just helpful for consumers to figure out what they want.

We love working with the retailers because online is great. It’s a great business. It’s important to us as a company, but a lot of people when they want their CBD they want it now. So being able to get it and access it at a retailer relatively quickly is important. We’re thrilled with our retail footprint that we’ve developed.

[1:03:48] Ashley James: Nice. You know what, if listeners want to stay at home and get the package shipped to them they’re going to get 15% off by using coupon code LTH. They can’t walk to the pharmacy and say, “Coupon code LTH please.” So they’re going to get 15% off, and they get to stay at home and chill—Netflix and chill—and wait for their CBD to arrive. Coupon code LTH, 15% off on your website Medterracbd.com or they can go to your website and check out the pharmacy near them so that they can go there. I’m so excited about the liposomal CBD. That sounds amazing. Your turmeric will it have black pepper in it to activate the turmeric?

[1:04:33] Jay Hartenbach: That’s the thing. It won’t because it’s in the liposomal format—the black pepper is really helpful in increasing absorption because it slows down the digestion, but because it’s actually being not absorbed through the stomach and it’s actually hydrophilic, you don’t need the black pepper for the turmeric to be very bioavailable in a liposome.

[1:04:54] Ashley James: That’s really cool. It helps people because there are some people that are really sensitive to black pepper. That’s going to be great for them.

[1:05:03] Jay Hartenbach: We’re really excited. I’ve got some prototypes, and it’s my favorite Medterra product, not to rub it in for anyone that can’t get it yet. I think people are going to be really excited about it.

[1:05:14] Ashley James: I’ve got episodes I published four years ago that people still listen to. For someone who may be listening to this in a few months and they’ll be like, “Okay, I’m just going to go to Medterracbd.com and buy my,” what’s it going to be called the turmeric CBD liposomal thing?

[1:05:32] Jay Hartenbach: We’ve got a working name right now, but we’re calling it our Wellness Capsule.

[1:05:38] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Wellness capsule. That is so great for decreasing inflammation, that’s great for autoimmune, that’s great for, obviously, pain. Turmeric is anti-cancer. It mops up those free radicals. You said that there was turmeric in it and obviously liposomal CBD. What was the other thing that’s in it?

[1:06:05] Jay Hartenbach: Ginger.

[1:06:06] Ashley James: Ginger, that’s right. Wonderful. Oh, man. What a powerful combination. I love how herbs create—when you combine certain herbs it creates a synergy like 1 plus 1 equals 10. It creates a synergistic effect. They individually are good but combined they’re amazing. Ginger turmeric is amazing together. Really interesting to see how CBD and those two play off of each other while giving healing effects to the body. You’re not deficient in CBD so you don’t see this huge difference like some people do when they start taking it, because obviously, you take your products. Why do you love the liposomal wellness capsule, the liposomal ginger turmeric CBD? Why do you love that? What do you notice personally in your body?

[1:07:02] Jay Hartenbach: It’s a great question. One, I think it’s great because if you’re taking CBD as a liposome it makes it more bioavailable. You’re just going to get more bang for your buck with this CBD. That’s a preferred format if available, but the ginger and the turmeric, same thing. I used to take turmeric capsules separate of my Medterra products and ginger. So just having that all-in-one is great. Liposomes are a tough thing to manufacture. So when we first started, we’ve been working on this at this point probably for thirteen or fourteen months now.

Liposomes, when you have things that are not very bioavailable, can be tough. Making a liposomal vitamin C is actually pretty straightforward. There’s a lot of it, but you’ve got something that’s incredibly hydrophilic. You put it right in the center of the liposome and you don’t have to kind of wedge it in between the phospholipid biolayer. You’re good to go. When you start mixing with ginger, which we use gingerall, which is the active form of the ginger or turmeric as an example it can start getting a little trickier.

I noticed—and there’s maybe some placebo effect but I think I’ve got it pretty adjusted—that when I take it as a liposome there’s this mood elevation. If you read a little bit about turmeric as an example, it has been associated with just general feelings of well-being and can elevate your mood. One, I’d love it just because it’s ginger and turmeric. Those are very important they’re very good for your body and making it more bioavailable is just only going to enhance those effects. Taking care of also the daily CBD that I’m taking. In addition also getting this more uplift in mood, which everyone can stand to be a little bit happier. That’s why I like taking it.

[1:09:03] Ashley James: Everyone can stand to be a little happier right now. Come on, Jay. Come on, Jay. Launch it sooner. We need it now. Right now, we’re all freaking out isolated at home getting bored and anxious. If we could choose one of your products, what would be the best one to choose right now to help us calm down?

[1:09:33] Jay Hartenbach: The Broad Spectrum Tincture and the best flavor, in my opinion, is the citrus flavor. So we’ve got a broad spectrum both 1000 and 2000 milligram concentrations. The 2000 milligram, obviously, has more CBD but also has more of those minor cannabinoids. We’ve got a lot of people that have said that it’s been very helpful with their stress relief. That’s just giving credit to these other cannabinoids that also are playing their part on the body.

[1:10:08] Ashley James: Okay. So we get the 2000. We got one bottle of the 2000 milligram Broad Spectrum, citrus flavor. We get it in the mail sanitized—you guys are great. Then how much do we take? Is it a few drops? Is it one dropper full? How much would we take throughout the day? Is it one dose a day? Is it throughout the day? How do we go about taking this? Let’s say it’s a person of average weight. Does weight matter like a 400-pound person versus a 90-pound person?

[1:10:40] Jay Hartenbach: It’s one of those things that we were just saying where it really depends on just the state of your body. We’ve seen people that are 250-pound man only needs 25 milligrams of CBD. You’ve got 140-pound woman that may need twice as much. So my recommendation on it is starting with half a serving, so half an ml, half of the dropper. Take it in the morning, and just see how you feel.

The other cannabinoids, they do seem to have some of a neurological effect as well. The one—I should say not to complain but just what people have said is that it does help them feel very relaxed. Depending on what your day looks like maybe feeling too relaxed is not what you need. Starting with half of it and seeing how your body reacts to it. Then maybe taking the other half at night. Just trying that for the first couple of days and then going from there. Some people take it as needed.

[1:11:44] Ashley James: A lot of us are stuck at home with our kids that we love dearly that are driving us up the wall. We really don’t need to start drinking wine at 9:00 in the morning, which a lot of people are sharing pictures of their alcoholic drinks on Facebook. My friend is stuck. He’s a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He and I were best friends in junior high. He lives in a condo in Toronto. He’s isolated at his condo so he started to make—it’s the best, it’s so hilarious—exercise videos with wine bottles. His pictures or videos of clips of him throughout his condo doing squats and bicep curls with wine bottles. Then other people have joined him. There’s just this group of people that are all doing the wine workouts. They’re just lifting wine. They’re not like working out drinking the wine.

Just making fun of the fact that everyone is freaking out. I saw someone posted a in a homeschooling group. “It’s 10:00 AM. Can I pop the bottle of wine now?” People are just freaking out especially if they’ve never homeschooled before. We’ve been homeschooling our son, who’s almost 5. It can get very stressful, so I can imagine if families have multiple children. They’re looking to just calm their nerves. This sounds great. So the Full Spectrum citrus flavor sounds like a great way to calm the nerves. I would say get the 2000 milligrams tincture because you don’t know if you need the more concentrated, the less concentrated. If you get the stronger one then you can always just take less of it. If you get the weaker one, you might run out sooner if you needed a stronger dose. Does that sound like a good recommendation?

[1:13:39] Jay Hartenbach: Totally. You do get a better bang for your buck. Even if you only need half it’ll last you longer, but it’ll also just be a better value for your spend.

[1:13:55] Ashley James: Nice, nice. Okay. Cool. Use coupon code LTH, get 15% off. So Full Spectrum 2000 milligram citrus flavor. Let’s all go buy that so we can calm down a bit. Take half of a dropper in the morning and see how we fare. Do we hold it in our mouth for a few minutes and then swallow, or can we swallow right away? What’s the way to maximize absorption? Should we do it on an empty stomach or with food?

[1:14:26] Jay Hartenbach: I know there’s been a lot of back and forth on that. Is it sublingual? We haven’t seen too many studies that have actually confirmed in an oil format that it’s able to penetrate in the mouth. I always wash it around my mouth for 10-15 seconds, but ultimately swallow it. We do recommend that people take it with some food because if you do have some food in your stomach it just helps it get to the liver and that will speed up. People have seen a lot of results taking on an empty stomach. It’s pretty resilient once consumed.

[1:15:08] Ashley James: Because it’s an oil format, if someone doesn’t have their gallbladder, for example, they should take it with some food and they should take a bile supplement to make sure they’re actually emulsifying it so that they can to digest and absorb it.

[1:15:24] Jay Hartenbach: Great point.

[1:15:26] Ashley James: There are some people who just—because they don’t have a gallbladder—cannot. They don’t have the ability to emulsify fat so they’re not really going to absorb the medicine. Those people would really benefit from the liposomal CBD, wouldn’t they?

[1:15:41] Jay Hartenbach: They would. Yeah. Absolutely. It doesn’t need to be processed in the liver, and it doesn’t need to be in an oil suspension.

[1:15:50] Ashley James: I’m really looking forward to that product coming out. Can’t wait for it. Awesome. Well, thank you, Jay, so much for coming on the show and sharing with us the latest. When I knew that the episode 420 was coming up I said, “Oh, man. Got to have Jay back on the show.” I’m only going to do episode 420 once and it needs to be one about hemp cannabis. It needs to be one of that. Obviously, everyone knows 420 and what that means. I was so happy that you were isolated at home and had nothing better to do than to be on my show. That was great.

[1:16:29] Jay Hartenbach: I just love that you thought of me for 420. I really do appreciate that.

[1:16:33] Ashley James: Yeah. You were the first thing that came to my mind. I’ve had other cannabis and hemp peep experts, but you probably are the funnest. Also just so interesting the fact that you’re so involved in the science, and in the industry, and in the latest coming out of the industry. That you’ve been in the cutting edge of how to create a full spectrum that is also void of THC is amazing. That your company is in the light. That you function in the light. That you show everyone that you are a company for good, and for light, and that you are not one of those shady companies that works in their garage and claims that they cure everything. You’re involved in the political side, the science side, the industry side, the production, side, the farming side.

You have your fingers in everything, but you also are navigating this crazy, crazy world of Covid-19 with your company doing it in the best way possible. Supporting your employees through this time. Everyone’s working from home, and your fulfillment staff is able to take a paid vacation, staycation. You’re able to keep the lights on because you’ve navigated this and figured out how to still fulfill the orders in a sanitized way to protect the customers. Really, I just love your company. I love the work that you do, and I love that you’re functioning in the light and for good. Thank you so much for the mission that you set out. If only a few years ago—when was it 2016—that you formed Medterra CBD?

[1:18:15] Jay Hartenbach: 2017.

[1:18:17] Ashley James: 2017. Oh, yeah. It was 2016 that you first started the conversation. It takes more than a year to get it all up and running. You’ve been functioning, you’ve been doing this for a few years, but you basically now earned your Ph.D. in CBD at this point. So congratulations. You now are a full-fledged Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks, you’ve earned it. It’s been great having you on the show. Thank you so much. I love your products.

My husband and I have really enjoyed your CBD. We’ve tried many others. We really get the quality is there. We really appreciate that. Of course, my listeners have told me that they really enjoy your products as well. I’m happy that you give us a 15% off discount. Thank you. Coupon code LTH. You talked about your conference calls having the dogs in the background. Well, I didn’t realize that my cat was locked in our office. He’s meowing. Your dog barked, my cat meowed. We’re clearly all at home under quarantine.

It’s been so great having you on the show. Thank you so much. Is there anything you’d like to make sure that you say to wrap up today’s interview? Is there anything left unsaid?

[1:19:42] Jay Hartenbach: No. I think we covered it all. Ashley, I really do appreciate the kind words. It means a lot coming from someone like yourself.

[1:19:51] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, Jay, can you just come back on the show every year and a half or so and update us on the latest in the industry? Or if something big comes out, some big science, something major in the industry that you really want to make sure we know about, please come back on the show. I love to keep all of us, all of the listeners—and myself included—up-to-date on all the really cool information about the CBD industry.

Keep coming back. We’d love to have you. Stay safe, stay sane. You were just talking about how you’ve been hiking because there’s a hiking trail right behind your house, but you, of course, stay a safe distance to respect everyone and everyone’s health. You are getting out in nature. If you can, everyone get out in nature as long as you’re safe and everyone else is safe. Get out in the sunlight. Get out in the open air.

Yes, we have a stay-at-home order. That doesn’t mean you can’t go in your backyard and get some sunlight on your face. We should all remember that for our sanity. We need to take deep breaths. We need to do things to calm our nervous system like taking CBD or putting our feet in the grass and our face in the sun and taking some deep breaths. We’re all going to get through this, and we’re all going to do it as a globe, as a whole. The whole earth, we’re all going to get through this together.

The more that we focus on self-care to boost our immune system and support our health overall our mental, emotional, and physical health overall. We will get through this in the healthiest way possible. We need to focus on that. You’ve brought up some great, great, great ways we can do that today. Thank you so much, Jay. Just stay safe and keep in touch.

[1:21:42] Jay Hartenbach: Absolutely. Will do, Ashley. Thank you so much.

[1:21:45] Outro: Are you in to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

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Homeopathy Treatment for Coronavirus

https://www.learntruehealth.com/homeopathy-treatment-for-coronavirus

Highlights:

Importance of awareness and exercising awareness
What terrain is
What susceptibility is
Why some people get sick when around germs while some don’t
Homeoprophylaxis
Genus epidemicus
Trust your intuition and get away from fear

Everybody from around the world is experiencing some form of fear and anxiety over the coronavirus. Dr. Cilla Whatcott is back on the show with us. She talks about different ways on how we can prevent or deal with the coronavirus by using homeopathy, homeoprophylaxis, and the importance of “trusting your intuition and getting away from fear.”

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I have interviewed Dr. Cilla Whatcott several times. Please go to learntruehealth.com and type in Dr. Cilla Whatcott. Check out all the other episodes that I have done with her. You can also go in the show notes of this episode for the links to my interviews with Dr. Cilla Whatcott on using homeopathy, and homeoprophylaxis, and past discussions on real immunity and creating a very healthy immune response towards all illnesses.

Today specifically, we are focusing on Covid-19. We’re focusing on the coronavirus. I’m very excited that she has some wonderful up-to-date information to bring you. Dr. Cilla Whatcott is connected with a network of top homeopathic practitioners around the world who are treating people that currently are experiencing Covid-19. They have the coronavirus, they’re experiencing it, and they’re successfully moving through the symptoms back into health using homeopathy. This episode is primarily about that.

If you’d like to learn how to increase the terrain of your body—it’s all about the terrain supporting your body and being the healthiest possible—please, go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s the Learn True Health membership. You learn how to use food as medicine, how to nutrify your body, and we also teach you some amazing other stuff as well. All about helping the terrain of the body to be as absolutely healthy as possible at all times for all ages and using food in a way that supports everyone. The kids love it. The recipes, we had to adapt them so the kids will like it. So please, go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen.

If you’re stuck at home and you’re wondering what to watch, go there, go watch our videos. We have over seven hours now. Every week we’re adding more great content. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and check it out. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Enjoy this episode and the rest of your day.

[0:02:25] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 419. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. Cilla Whatcott, Ph.D. in Homeopathy. Her specialty is homeoprophylaxis. Cilla has been on the podcast several times. All of our episodes will be linked in the show notes. You can go back and listen and learn about homeoprophylaxis, and homeopathy, and how it can be used. The closest way I can describe it is like a vaccine in that it trains the immune system to mount a response. You’re the expert. We were talking earlier and I found out that you have some amazing information about Covid-19, about the coronavirus, and how we can support our immune system in this very chaotic time. Welcome back to the show.

[0:03:30] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Thank You, Ashley. It’s great to be here. I appreciate you having me.

[0:03:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. I heard that you hosted a webinar and it sold out. It was max capacity. Huge webinar where you were teaching people what we can do to train our immune system to mount a healthy response. I said, “Oh my gosh. You have to come on the show and teach us everything.”

[0:03:54] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Thank you. Yeah, I had a webinar. There were 900 people registered, and it was free. Now it’s available for $1 only, and that’s available on realimmunity.org. Right on the homepage, you can click on that and access that webinar and see the recording.

[0:04:12] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. I’d love for you to teach us today some things so that we can bring down the fear levels. Right now, fear is our enemy. Fear lowers the immune system. When we’re in a state of panic, and fear, and anxiety—even if you don’t think you are—you might realize that maybe you’re having trouble sleeping, maybe you have racing thoughts, or worrying, which is normal in being in a state of chaos that we’re in at the moment. In that state of fear, our body is in the fight-or-flight response, the nervous system’s response for survival. That shunts blood away from the logic centers of the brain. When that happens, we can’t think clearly, but it also weakens our immune response if we are in the state long-term. The best thing we can do is get out of fight-or-flight so we can get full access to the logic centers of our brain, so we can think clearly and make better decisions for our survival. Also, support our body to be in a state of healing and balance so that we are the healthiest we could possibly be.

I know that some information that Cilla is going to share with us today will help us to calm and ease that panic. Information is power and arming ourselves with what we can do with natural medicine to support our body’s ability to be healthy and stay healthy is what’s going to help us to decrease to that panic, and to regain a foothold, feel a sense of control again. Cilla, what do you have to share with us that is so profound? I’m just very, very excited. I can hardly contain it. What do you have to share with us that is so exciting about homeoprophylaxis and homeopathy in response to the coronavirus?

[0:06:15] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: First, I want to start, Ashley, with just drawing an analogy. If we look at our immune system and we understand that each time we catch a mild virus it exercises and educates our immune system. We build specific immunity—antibodies—to that particular virus. We overcome it. That real health is not never getting sick, but it’s the ability to be adaptable and get well to mount that immune response. What happens is we bump up against a virus, we contract it, our immune system goes into gear by creating those natural antibodies: a fever, a sweat, an eruption, and resolution, and then we’ve built immunity.

Fear, let’s look at it in a similar way. If everything is energy and what happened initially in Wuhan created tremendous fear, anxiety, fear for life, fear for well-being, fear for being isolated, losing income, losing family members, tremendous fear. An energy of frequency of fear was generated. That frequency dissipates around the world. We bump up against it. Throughout our day we hear something, we see something, we read something, and we bump up against that frequency of fear because it’s been generated. It’s no different than bumping up against a virus.

When we bump up against it, if we can then recognize that—okay, acknowledge it, observe it, this is what’s happened: I read a report, I feel my heart rate go up, I feel myself go into that fear mode, and then what do I need to do to calm that? Do I need to get a drink of water? Do I need to go to a yoga class? Do I need to—whatever it is—hug my dog? Whatever you can do in the moment—keeping yourself in the moment—brings you back to your base point. It’s identical to this process of bumping up against the virus, raising an immune response, regulating your system, resolving the immune response, and boom you’ve exercised, and gained an education towards that virus. You’ve enlarged yourself so to speak.

Same thing with the fear. We bump up against it in one of many ways. We acknowledge it, we observe it, we do what we need to do to move back from it, and we’re ascending our own frequency. We’re bringing our own frequency up so that we will not be sucked in and pulled down with the fear. Does that make sense?

[0:09:18] Ashley James: Yes. We can do yoga classes at home. Just because some of us are quarantined. We can turn on the TV and there’s YouTube. There are plenty of yoga classes. I like to just grab an essential oil and take a few deep breaths with it. That really brings me back to now, calms me down, gets me out of that fear response.

[0:09:40] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be an hour class. It can be petting your cat, it can be reading a book. The important part of that process is the awareness. Just be aware and observe yourself, “Oh, I heard the news and then I started getting frightened” That awareness alone is enough to start to educate, and ascend your own frequency, and pull yourself back. Then it’s easy to find some little something. For me, I can empty the dishwasher and it brings me back to reality. Do some tasks around the house or look out the back window. It’s simple. It doesn’t have to be long, and involved, or expensive, or arduous. It’s just shifting your attention.

[0:10:28] Ashley James: Wonderful. Yeah. Taking those few deep breaths and then becoming aware that this is my body, this is what I’m feeling, this is my body’s reaction to the news I just got. Because the mind, when we’re seeing the news—I woke up and I checked a text message from a friend and he sent me an article that was really disturbing about the financial predictions by economists about what’s going to happen. It was all doom and gloom. I could feel my body going into the stress response. I could feel my stomach tighten, almost like nausea. I could feel my body just going into almost like a pre-panic attack, but I felt it every step of the way. I’m like, “Okay,” and like you said, become the observer. I am observing my body responding to this crisis because when we’re reading an article, the mind is imagining, “What does this mean to me and my life? What does this mean to my family?” Our mind, in a split second, is imagining us homeless and having lost everything. In that moment, the body—because the body is always listening to the mind—perceives that as a threat that’s currently happening.

The body goes, “There’s an immediate threat to my survival, I need to go into fight or flight mode. I need to go into the sympathetic nervous system response to survive this immediate threat.” All I’m doing is reading an article, but my body is mounting a response like I’m in a war zone right now. I love that you said that do something when you notice the sensations in your body because stress isn’t an emotion, but we see the results of stress like elevated heart, or nausea, or sweating palms, or feeling dizzy, or almost like hyperventilation. Sometimes you feel a sensation in your neck like high blood pressure. Just notice what sensations you have in your body. Tunnel vision’s another one. If you can’t see your periphery you can only see tunnel vision. That’s another one.

You catch yourself and you go, “Okay, my body is giving in to fear and mounting a stress response because it thinks we’re under attack right now. I need to do a few things to tell my body that we’re actually safe in this moment.” That taking a few breaths, like you said, doing some chores, looking out the back window. For me, it’s breathing some essential oils, and taking a few deep breaths, and visualizing.

Whatever we visualize in our mind our body sees, our body responds to. If you visualize yourself safe and your family is safe, your body goes, “Oh, okay. Everything’s safe,” because the body is always listening to what we’re imagining in our mind. That’s why the body cannot tell the difference between what’s perceived or what’s imagined and what’s real.

That’s why our body will freak out when we’re watching a zombie movie even though we’re totally safe. It’s fun to watch those scary movies. Our body is going through all the stress responses as though it’s real, but it’s not. So it’s fun because, “I’m safe but I’m feeling like I’m under attack by zombies. This is kind of fun.” Some people like that, and that’s the exact proof. The body doesn’t know the difference between what’s imagined and what’s real.

Every time we see something on the news we’re imagining negative things happening or the impact of that to our own lives like loved ones dying or us getting sick. Then our body goes, “Oh my gosh. This is actually a problem that we’re facing right now. I need to mount a response.” That’s when we lose access to the logic centers of our brain because we go into the fight-or-flight response.

I love that you say the number one thing we can do right now, the first thing we can do is always catch ourselves. It might be 20 times a day, but catch yourself when you’re stress response, the sympathetic nervous system response, and do what you can. Whether it’s yoga, deep breathing, cuddling your children, hugging your cat, whatever. Do what you can 20 times a day or putting on a funny Youtube video, laughing for a few minutes to get your body out of that stress response, and imagining your family is safe, you’re safe. Imagining in your mind. That also helps us send that signal to your body that we’re safe, and that your body then gets out of the stress response.

[0:15:10] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Ashley, the most important part is the exercise. Just like the more you get a virus and mount an immune response, you’re building the strength of your immune system by exercising. Same thing with this, the more times you notice it and pull away from that fear response the more adept you’ll become at doing it. That’s what raises your frequency. It’s the repetitive action of doing it again and again that raises your own frequency.

[0:15:43] Ashley James: Right. I’ve talked to a man who’s very high up in terms of personal growth and development. Dedicated his entire life to teaching it. He’s dedicated his entire life to working on himself. It was hard to not put those people on a pedestal and think they’re somehow better more evolved than us. He said that he gets angry, that he gets triggered, that he gets in stress response. He says, “You don’t get to this point where you’re not going to do it because it’s part of being human. It’s how quickly you get out of it.” He might get really angry like someone cut him off in traffic or whatever, and then he catches himself and he does the exercise. He gets himself out of stress response. It’s the speed at which we do it.

[0:16:38] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: And the way to increase that speed is by doing it again and again and again. That’s how we increase the speed of it. Here it comes again and then try to adjust. I had an experience just the other day, something threw me way off balance. It took me quite a while to come back to my own center, but I observed the whole time, and then took steps. What am I going to do next time? How will I not get thrown off when this happens next time? It’s all about awareness, that’s all. Exercise that awareness muscle.

[0:17:13] Ashley James: You said, you learned from the last experience. “Okay. This threw me off. What things can I put in place?” I have my essential oils right by my desk. I have them throughout the house because, for me, it’s the quickest way to turn off the stress response. Utilizing several of your senses so inhaling, breathing, feeling, and also smelling that helps to bring you back. For me, that’s a good one. I have my husband and our son. Hugs and cuddles also help and talking it out with my husband. He’s very supportive of getting out of fear and back to what’s good about this.

That’s something I learned from Tony Robbins is to ask yourself what’s good about this? Even in negative situations, what’s good about this? I’m like, “Okay. What’s good about being quarantined?” Because right now we’re coming into a time of mandatory quarantine. After I list it off—what’s good about this—I started looking forward to it like, “Man, we’re going to get the shed cleaned out.” We’ve been meaning to do that for a while. We’re going to do our spring cleaning. It’s just this whole list of things that we’ve been meaning to do working on the garden. We’ve got a big vegetable garden going.

We’re going to make the best of it, but we ask ourselves what’s good about this? That also turns off the stress response because now I’m imagining all these positive things. My body goes, “Oh, we’re not under siege? Okay, great. We can go back into healing mode.

[0:18:53] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: That’s your immunity. Right. Right. Exactly.

[0:18:55] Ashley James: Last time we had you on the show you shared this ongoing story of how you battled cancer and you got it under control. How have you been since? You’ve been challenged. We’ve all been challenged with the fear that’s going on in the world. How has your health been since I last had you on the show?

[0:19:22] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I’m not sure when it was we last talked, was it August? Six months ago? I’m not sure. I’m in remission, stronger, better than I’ve been. I have to say, Ashley, it was the biggest gift I could have gotten, honestly, because it was a wake-up call for me. I put some things in place. I became more aware. Truly, it’s helped me to make changes in my life that were necessary. I view it as a blessing. I’m grateful. I’m really grateful. I had to come to terms with death in certain ways. I had to look at my diet, my exercise, my busyness level, my stress level, my relationships. I had to examine all of that, and what better thing to do than put all those things under a microscope and make changes that are necessary.

I’ve adapted a meditation practice that is very effective, a yoga practice, weight training, exercising more. My diet was pretty good. It didn’t need a lot of adjustment, but I’m always tweaking my diet. That too has been impacted and just my ability to create boundaries because I just couldn’t stop helping people. I never ever said no. It could be 11:00 at night, it could be anytime. I couldn’t say no because my empathy for my clients was huge.

I just reached a point—just before my diagnosis—when I felt like I can’t hold up the sorrow and suffering in this world anymore. That’s how responsible I felt. I let go of that. I reframed my perspective to understand that whatever we come into this world with, whether it’s poverty, or pain, or relationship issues, or whatever it is that’s our “cancer.” I have to honor other people. I can be here and offer what I have, but I can’t fix anybody else. Whether I answer the phone at 11:00 at night or wait until 9:00 the next morning, that’s not what’s important because it’s theirs. I have to honor and respect that it’s theirs to deal with. I can make my boundaries and still be helpful in that relationship with them.

I came to a deeper understanding of that so that I’m a lot healthier in how I execute my own practice. It’s good. Boundaries are a thing—it’s just like the exercise program, it’s just like the virus, it’s just like the fear. I got to rein it in. It starts to loosen up, and I feel it. I feel the warning signs, and then I rein it back in, and then it loosens up, and I rein it back in. It gets easier.

All those changes have been made. I’m in remission. I’m happy. My plan is to return to Mexico. I actually canceled my trip this week. I would have been there now for a tune-up. They do a full-body ultrasound, they do tons of blood work, they have hyperbaric chamber, they have vitamin IVs. All different natural immune-boosting things all in one place in a loving environment. I want to be able to go back there at least once a year and get a checkup, and a tune-up, and be doing that. So that’s the plan.

[0:23:16] Ashley James: The center you worked with is hopefourcancer.com, is that it?

[0:23:22] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct. It’s the number four, Hope Four Cancer.

[0:23:26] Ashley James: Yeah. I’ve heard great things from you, and I’ve heard great things from other people. It’s always good to share those resources. You, for many years, have been an expert in the immune system from a homeopathy standpoint. Then you really doubled down on your education around the immune system when you had to heal your body from cancer. Because cancer is an immune issue, so you’ve really been focusing on the immune system from a very different standpoint than modern medicine. We have to be very careful to say that we’re not saying we’re here to cure anything. The body does its own healing. I’m not here to tell you a cure or Cilla is not going to tell you a cure, but the body is the one that cures. The body is the one that heals itself. We can tell you information to support your body in doing the best job it can.

[0:24:32] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right. It’s all about the terrain. It’s the terrain. It’s not the germ, it’s not the disease, it’s the terrain.

[0:24:40] Ashley James: Can you explain that for people who’ve never heard it before?

[0:24:43] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Germ theory says that we get sick because there’s a germ, and it touches us, and that makes us sick, but that doesn’t account for why some people can be in the room with the germ, and they don’t get sick. Other people are in the same room with the germ, and they do get sick. What we know as homeopaths is there’s such a thing as susceptibility.

Susceptibility is our predisposition to getting that germ to catching, to that germ. Our susceptibility is based on our diet, our sleep, our emotional state, our relationships, our ancestry. Many, many components comprise our susceptibility. The susceptibility is expressed throughout the body at a cellular level. That’s our terrain. It’s the gut biome. It’s the blood. It’s all of our body.

There’s something called dark field microscopy that looks at a drop of blood and can see lots of facts about the terrain. I had this done three times during my process. Literally, there are some people doing it—well, I shouldn’t say some. I’d say anyone doing it can see these holographic images in the blood.

For myself—when I first had it done right after my diagnosis—I had in hand a mammogram and an ultrasound with pictures of the tumor. It was odd-shaped almost like a sword. It was sharp. It was long and odd-shaped. When I did the dark field microscopy, there it was a hologram in my blood. The identical shape, identical. It was bizarre.

Six months later, after doing all the treatments in Mexico, I had it done again. It was gone from my blood. I could still feel it, but it was no longer being represented in my blood.

[0:27:01] Ashley James: When you say you could still feel it you mean the tumor was still present in your breast?

[0:27:05] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct. Correct.

[0:27:06] Ashley James: But the holographic image was no longer in your dark field microscopy?

[0:27:11] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Microscopy. The person doing it for me said, “If you want to have it removed this an ideal time because there’s no fear of spreading. You’re not going to open up and spread it.” Because this is what happens sometimes with surgery when you pierce the area. That was her advice. It had been about nine months at that point since my diagnosis. It was fairly aggressive. It had a 40% proliferation rate, and it hadn’t grown. I’d held it at bay, which was a win. I had about five people close to me that died during that time. Some of them from cancer, some of them from other methods. It wears on your mind. Every time, I just wanted to not feel it there anymore. I wanted it gone. I opted, at that point, to have a mastectomy.

[0:28:13] Ashley James: I think that was the smartest move possible because you did all this natural medicine for nine months and proved that you could stop the growth of it. It didn’t, like you said, proliferate, it didn’t metastasize, but you stopped the growth of it, of something that is a rapid-growing tumor with all the natural medicine. Supporting your body’s ability to keep it at bay. Then you had it removed. Since then, you’re free and clear and you still practice everything that you learned from the cancer to support the terrain of your body. Was it Louis Pasteur who talked about the terrain of the body?

[0:28:58] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: On his deathbed, he said it’s not the germ it’s the terrain. He recanted because he had discovered—he had talked about germs. It was on his deathbed that he said that definitely.

[0:29:10] Ashley James: It’s more about the health of the individual because, like you said, we can all be in the same room with a virus and not everyone gets it. Some people are asymptomatic, some people have it in their body but completely asymptomatic, some people die from it, some people have minor symptoms, and some people have major symptoms. Why is that? It’s not because they’re old. There are young people too that are having the symptoms. What is it? There have been older people who have completely survived. There are older people who have not had any symptoms at all. The question is what is it? Why is it that some people get it some and some people don’t?

One thing that’s very interesting—that’s come out of China and South Korea—is that the malaria drug in conjunction with zinc, because the malaria drug forces zinc into the cell. The cell up takes more zinc. The zinc interrupts the cell from making the RNA for the virus. It interrupts some way that the virus is asking the cell or hijacking the cell to make RNA for it.

I talked to some people about this, some health professionals about this. It’s very interesting because zinc is—someone’s healthy and if they have healthy zinc levels, then zinc is present in their cells. This comes back to the terrain of the body. If someone has their nutrient tank is full of the 90 essential nutrients, the nutrient tank is full of all the minerals all the vitamins that their body needs in the right amounts—including zinc—then what they’re seeing is that if there’s enough zinc in the cell, the cell will not make the RNA for the virus.

Maybe that could explain why some people don’t get the virus. They could be carriers. They could just have it in their body, but they’re not reproducing it. They’re not having symptoms of it because the terrain of their body was healthy. You said it was more than just nutrient levels. It can be stress levels, it could be genetics. There are so many factors.

[0:31:44] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Influencing it. Let’s take it one step farther. Let’s say your nutrient tank is full—as you have described. You come in contact with that particular virus or any virus. Your body sees it, but it does not get ill. It doesn’t contract it and get ill. What’s happened now? Your body has become familiarized with it because it’s bumped up against it.

This is similar to the principle behind homeoprophylaxis. Because with homeoprophylaxis, we’re exposing the body to the frequency of a disease, but it’s a safe frequency. It’s not material. If your terrain isn’t 100%, and your nutrient tank isn’t full, you are not at risk because this is a frequency. It’s not the material disease. Then you become familiarized with it. We’re giving it in that energetic form, in the HP, and then if you meet it in nature—because you’re familiar with it—you have a better chance of mounting an actual immune response or repelling it.

I have to say upfront, no method is 100% effective, nothing. Not a vaccine, not a medical intervention, not homeoprophylaxis, nothing’s 100%. We have to accept that to start, but certainly, something that’s safe and has been shown to be effective by the track record for over 200 years is a great option which is why I promote homeoprophylaxis.

[0:33:26] Ashley James: There are no side effects. It’s safe for all ages, right?

[0:33:32] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’s safe for all genders, all ages, all species. In third-world countries, they can put it into the water supply for livestock. It can be used with other interventions. If you want to use other interventions at the same time that’s fine. There’s no cold chain required so you can distribute it very quickly. It’s inexpensive. You don’t need medically-licensed people because it’s not injections. They’re pellets so you can train people quickly. Nothing could be more ideal for third-world countries. You can quickly distribute it. In Cuba, 2010 swine flu epidemic, they distributed their HP to 9 million people. They never had a swine flu epidemic there. It didn’t touch Cuba.

[0:34:24] Ashley James: I was just telling one of my guests, he is traveling to Africa to do some research with some tribes there. I said, “You know, you should look into homeoprophylaxis since you’re going to go there. You’re probably going to get a bunch of vaccines, but hey you should check out homeoprophylaxis because it’s been proven to be very effective especially in travel in the third-world countries.” I’m not sure if we’re supposed to call it that anymore, but tropical countries where there are different diseases.

[0:35:07] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Tropical diseases.

[0:35:07] Ashley James: Tropical diseases, thank you.

[0:35:09] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Dengue fever, typhoid, common malaria. Those are some of the big ones.

[0:35:12] Ashley James: Right, right. He had never heard of it. I started telling him about what you said about Cuba. He goes, “Did you know I’m Cuban, and I had no idea.” He goes, “Yeah. I’m very interested in this.” I sent him the studies, and he was amazed.

[0:35:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Did you send him the leptospirosis study? The one that was done in Cuba that’s been written up?

[0:35:36] Ashley James: Yes. For those who haven’t heard it, can you explain that here right now?

[0:35:42] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Sure. The leptospirosis study—and this can be found in my free knowledge vault. If you go to familyhomeopathycare.com, click on courses. Within those paid courses there’s a free knowledge vault. You just sign up for the knowledge vault. You can go in, you can download whatever you want. The lepto study is there.

2007-2008 they had multiple hurricanes come through Cuba. They typically vaccinate the entire population against leptospirosis before hurricane season. Because they had multiple hurricanes they could not roll out and distribute these vaccines. They decided to try homeoprophylaxis. They have an institute there called the Finlay Institute and their research and development for vaccines. They distribute vaccines around the world. They have a natural department that was headed up. Within that department, they created this leptospirosis nosode that was for prevention. They distributed it to 2.3 million people in one region that they knew was going to be hit particularly hard that year based on charting prior years.

The first year it came down, but it came down in some other regions. So they thought, “Well, maybe it’s just down everywhere.” The following year they continued to dose the HP. The following year it flatlined to zero, and it went up everywhere else. That was their proof. It was written up. It’s a PubMed study. That’s inside the knowledge vault for people to see.

They have very little problem there now. That’s the last I heard. Dr. Isaac Golden, who’s the world’s leading authority with homeoprophylaxis, spent about 10 years there going back and forth between Australia and Cuba, collecting data, writing it up, and doing these interventions with the doctors at the Finlay Institute. Swine flu was one of them.

During this particular epidemic, we’re going into now, I consulted with Dr. Golden. He felt that the best HP would be a combination of influenza A, influenza B, bacillinum, which is from tuberculosis, and pneumococcal. That would cover the symptom picture. Because in homeopathy, we use the law of similars. We use things that are similar to the symptoms being expressed by the disease. That’s the homeoprophylaxis that I feel confident using. That being said, there are many very renowned homeopaths around the globe who are recommending other things for prophylaxis.

The Indian government is recommending the homeopathic arsenicum weekly. There’s a doctor by the name of Rajan Sankaran in India who’s well-respected. He’s recommending camphora. There are people out there that are recommending different things. There’s no one right thing. The choice has to be the individual’s choice based on their feelings of security. For myself, I respect Dr. Golden, and that’s the advice that I’m going to follow, and that’s the product that I’m actually offering to people because something very close to that was used for the swine flu. It makes sense the way that he’s developed it.

I’ve also heard of just the actual nosode. Nosode being something from the disease products: sputum, saliva. A remedy is made from that as a prophylactic. That may very well be helpful as well. I don’t know. Isaac didn’t comment on that. He said he doesn’t know where that was procured from. He also questioned just a pure nosode because he had seen effective action when there was a combination of similars. That’s why he recommended what he did. That’s what I’m going with.

[0:40:20] Ashley James: For those who are just learning about homeoprophylaxis for the first time—I definitely recommend going back and listening to our other interviews with Dr. Cilla Whatcott—tell us a little bit about the history of homeoprophylaxis in India, and why the Indian government recommends homeopathy and homeoprophylaxis?

[0:40:46] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Indians are forerunners with homeopathy. They’re homeopaths go through four years of medical school. They operated in the hospitals. They’re well-respected. They really utilize homeopathy because it’s such an inexpensive form of medicine, and they can get it out to all the people in the rural areas. It’s easily distributed for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. Their government actually supports the use of homeopathy.

During epidemics, they will put out public signs saying gather such-and-such place to receive your homeoprophylaxis. They have a boat that’s like a pharmacy—a floating homeopathic pharmacy that goes into the backwaters. Places where people can’t get out and get to the cities. They distribute different remedies or homeoprophylaxis.

In my second film called Passage to Real Immunity, I’ve interviewed one of the Indian docs about using homeoprophylaxis in India. It’s done. It’s used. It’s successful. They’ve done a large intervention with Japanese encephalitis that was very successful, dengue fever, chickenpox, chikungunya, lots of tropical diseases. They do use it.

They actually apply resources to experimentation to see what’s the best prophylactic prescription for this particular disease. They came out with their suggestion for arsenicum very early in this process. Early in the epidemic, the anxiety level was huge. This frequency of fear that we talked about. Arsenicum is very, very popular for addressing that. Perhaps—I’m just speculating here—perhaps by addressing that fear it brings it down to a level where the immune system can deal with the virus better. That may be a good intervention in that regard, but all epidemics are dynamic. Viruses are dynamic. They don’t stay exactly the same.

Over time, they’re going to morph, they’re going to shift. What homeopaths have done for generations is something called identifying the genus epidemicus. What that is identifying a number of cases—the more the better—seeing what the common symptoms are amongst those cases, seeing which remedies best address those symptoms, and they may come up with four, six, eight different remedies, and then they consult with other homeopaths around the world.

We’re networked. We all know that these remedies A, B, C, D, E are the ones that are treating the current symptom picture. If we get patients with the epidemic disease, we know we can use one of those remedies. We’re differentiating between one of those remedies. This is what was done with the Spanish flu. So 1918 Spanish flu, the mortality rate for conventional medicine was about 30%. With homeopathy, it was 1% who got it—

[0:44:19] Ashley James: So 30% of people—sorry. I want to just slow that down because this is so important. Back 100 years ago, there were hospitals that were dedicated to homeopathy.

[0:44:35] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct.

[0:44:37] Ashley James: We had—in some ways—access to natural medicine more so over 100 years ago than we do today because there was more freedom. Because the allopathic medical system hadn’t pushed everyone out.

There were hospitals. You could go to a hospital for allopathic medicine and take their pharmaceutical-based drug medicine, or you could go to a homeopathic hospital and get treated by homeopaths. Back in 1918 when the Spanish flu epidemic was happening, people who went to hospitals or saw medical doctors at the time that we’re treating with drug-based medicine, 30% of the people that had the Spanish flu died.

[0:45:29] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct. Approximately 30% mortality.

[0:45:30] Ashley James: Huge. That’s a very scary number. That is much larger. Right now, they’re seeing numbers somewhere around between 2% and 4% depending on the country, but we don’t have accurate numbers with the coronavirus because we are not testing everyone.

[0:45:52] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right which raises some bewilderment at best and suspicion at worse in my mind. Because if something is so deadly or so transmissible, why are we not testing for it? What is that about? The not knowing raises more fear than anything else. I could have it. You could have it, any minute we could have it. Anyway, that’s another topic.

[0:46:22] Ashley James: We have to catch ourselves when we’re in that fear of others. I was just at Costco yesterday stocking up. There are signs everywhere that say six-foot social distancing and staff members were enforcing it. As I was walking around, we all tried to avoid each other. It felt like this air of distrust. You can’t trust your neighbor, you can’t trust people. It was very interesting.

I just started observing it and going, “Oh, this is just part of human behavior.” It’s very interesting. Let’s take that and go, “Okay. I observe myself doing this. That’s not productive. It’s putting me in stress response.” Instead, transmute it into love of my neighbor, “I’m going to stay six feet away from you to show you I love you, and respect you, and care about you. It’s not about not trusting you.” It’s interesting because we do that. There’s this reptilian maybe primal part of our brain that starts to want to distrust others and that was sort of being enforced.

Back in the Spanish flu, 30% of people passed away which is huge and totally worse. Totally, totally worse than the coronavirus. Thank goodness that the coronavirus is not as bad as that. Those who went to the homeopathy hospitals, homeopathic hospitals, what was the percentage? What was the mortality rate?

[0:48:04] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: 1.05% mortality.

[0:48:59] Ashley James: It is like how in the world do we not still have homeopathic hospitals? How in the world do homeopaths not work alongside our medical doctors and hospitals if that is the level of effectiveness? How in the world have we allowed, have we pulled the wool over our eyes and allowed pharmaceutical companies to take over our medical system, not for our benefit. Drugs are good, they save lives. I’m not saying no drugs ever. I’m saying that for their profits—if you look at the history of modern medicine—they pushed out all others. There are times we want to use homeopathy because it’s more effective. We should have a bigger tool belt. We should be allowed to.

[0:48:59] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: The why did it get pushed out—the answer to that is in an interview I did with an ER doc who now does mind-body medicine. I interviewed her for a live presentation. It’s on the Facebook page Real Immunity Movie. Anyone can go there and listen to that interview. It’s fabulous. Dr. Kim really outlines what happened in medicine and why it got pushed out. She does a nice concise job of it so people can listen to that there.

Part of the reason that that death rate was so high was because they were suppressing the fever. Aspirin had just come out and it was the wonder drug because you could give the same aspirin to 1000 people without having to take the case. All you had to do was see they had a fever, give them aspirin, boom their fever comes down.

Homeopaths had to take the case because they had a genus epidemicus. They knew it was one of these five remedies, but they had to talk to the patient, ask some questions, observe the symptoms in order to give the proper remedy. Then those patients were surviving, whereas the ones whose fevers were eliminated, it was forcing the pathology deeper into the system because the system wasn’t allowed to move things up and out with this fever, and they were dying very rapidly.

The reason I talk about this is because of genus epidemicus. It’s a method that’s been used successfully for generations by homeopaths. There are some classical homeopaths who do not support homeoprophylaxis. They say the only method to use is genus epidemicus.

I would say both methods can be good. Genus epidemicus is great, and we use it. I’m actually doing a class on it next week because we’re identifying the genus epidemicus for this particular epidemic, and it will morph as things change. But what about the weakest among us? What about those who get sick and die before they can get any homeopathic treatment?

Homeoprophylaxis can be effective and it works. We know it’s about 90% effective with these tropical diseases so why not use it? It can’t harm anyone, and it’s easy to distribute, easy to use. It seems to me there’s room for both in the world: genus epidemicus as well as homeoprophylaxis.

[0:51:34] Ashley James: Homeoprophylaxis is like a homeopathy vaccine in that it trains the immune system—

[0:51:44] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It exercises.

[0:51:45] Ashley James: Exercises, familiarizes. The immune system makes a more educated approach when it then actually comes in contact with the pathogen versus genus Epidemicus, which is once we already have the illness, then we want to take some homeopathy to help us move through the symptoms faster.

[0:52:10] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct, correct. Exactly.

[0:52:11] Ashley James: Both should be in our tool belt.

[0:52:17] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Genus epidemicus, if you’re really ill, you probably need a professional homeopath to intervene, to differentiate what remedy you need. I wouldn’t recommend people treating themselves but have remedies on hand. If you have to reach out to a homeopath that’s easy enough to do or if you have enough education knowledge in homeopathy you could probably differentiate and choose the right remedy, but it’s not so easy to treat yourself or your family. Even homeopaths, we reach out to colleagues if it’s ourselves or our family.

Having those genus remedies can be really helpful. Right now I know because I have people emailing me daily saying a lot of the homeopathic pharmacies are out of a lot of the remedies. They’re not able to fill orders, many of them right now.

I know for myself with the Influenzinum CV that I’m offering, I can’t keep it in stock. I pick up 100 or 200 vials of it at a time and they sell out within a day. I have doctors’ offices. This is the encouraging thing. I have MD’s offices contacting me for the Influenzinum CV. They’re open-minded, forward-thinking MDS, and their practices lean towards natural methods, but they’re MDs. They’re classically trained in medical school. They recognize the value of it. They’re reaching out for Influenzinum CV.

[0:53:52] Ashley James: Very exciting. When someone gets a vial of this, they can actually make it last years. Because I got the Influenzinum from you—gosh, I want to say two years ago. It’s when I interviewed you about it. It was well over a year ago. It has to be over a year ago because I’ve been through almost two flu seasons now with it. We didn’t get the flu both seasons.

There have been times where we felt like, “Oh, I kind of feel flu-like symptoms,” and then we would take it, and it would pass. We, of course, do lots of other stuff too to keep our immune system up and to support our body in general. When I took the Influenzinum and made a vial, took a few pellets of this whole vial of pellets, and put it in some alcohol. We don’t really drink. A friend left sake in our house so I ended up making it out of sake and a big dropper bottle. Then pounding it 100 times.

We keep it in the fridge. We just take a few drops of it every week or every two weeks. Like you said, it’s retraining with homeoprophylaxis, with the Influenzinum, you can take it every few weeks throughout flu season to educate your immune system to mount an intelligent response.

[0:55:26] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: You made a tincture. That’s great. That’s really commendable. Yeah, you made a tincture. Those pellets, you could have made 100 bottles of tinctures from those pellets.

[0:55:34] Ashley James: Right. It could last our family forever. It’s why I love. It’s such an inexpensive medicine. It’s not molecular medicine, it’s energetic medicine. A lot of us have been raised in the system of if I can’t see it out I don’t believe it. That molecular medicine is the only kind of medicine.

[0:56:00] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Ashley, let me present this to you. Let’s say you were around in 1800, and I said to you, “I’m going to take a picture of you, and I’m going to look at your bones. I’m going to see all your skeletons.” You would have looked at me like I was from Mars. Now, we x-ray people.

Technology is never done. Very clearly, it’s catching up to homeopathy. These energetic methods are becoming more understood and more explainable. It’s happening. The science is catching up. The science is there. Trust me, we are going to see the day where it’s explained and it’s accepted. It is the future of medicine. I honestly believe that.

[0:56:48] Ashley James: I really believe it too. I’ve done a few interviews recently talking about energy, and the morphic field, and how we can affect it and it affects us. There are so many scientific studies happening now to prove that matter and energy go in and out of phase with each other. There even whirled a photograph—a particle being a wave and a particle at the same time recently. You could probably google it, but they just took an image right at the moment where a particle was becoming a wave.

Something physical, something material was becoming energy and phasing in and out. We have to just really wrap our brain around this idea that we are energy, that our body is frequency, that we vibrate, and that there’s actually more space in us if you think about it. I love thinking about is, on a molecular level, the space between atoms that were actually made up of a lot of space when you think about it. That we’re all vibration and frequency. That’s what homeopathy is. No wonder, it is so effective. When you get the right remedy if you’re helping the body move through symptoms.

A homeoprophylaxis is so effective because, like you said, it’s a non-invasive way of training the immune system to mount over an intelligent response. Have you met anyone who’s been using homeopathy and has been in contact with the virus or have you talked to any colleagues?

[0:58:42] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yeah. One colleague who gave a webinar on the genus epidemicus has called between 60 and 70 cases of positively diagnosed coronavirus from around the world—all different countries. That’s what he’s based the genus epidemicus on. He has had actual proof of the disease itself and the remedies.

Personally, because of the dearth of testing in Minnesota where I am there hasn’t been testing. I have been treating many children mostly that have had suspiciously similar symptoms, but they’re not taking any kind of test. I’ve treated them homeopathically. Some of them have been quite miserable, but they get through it. The parents are freaked out over the symptoms. The high fever and child’s moaning and clearly uncomfortable—very, very uncomfortable—but they make it through.

[0:59:55] Ashley James: There is a woman here in Duvall, Washington who was a first responder for a nursing facility in Kirkland where they became confirmed cases—some of the first responders. I think there was something like 50 or 60 in total that were infected. She was one of them, and because she’s a health professional, documented her experience through the entire thing and wrote down.

She said she’s got the fever. It was about 102 point something. Then after the fever, she had a day where her lungs were on fire. She said her lungs were burning, but she documented and shared all of her symptoms. I hadn’t heard that before that symptom that she said her lungs were on fire and burning for a whole day. She survived and shared her experience in hopes that it would help.

The children that have been having the high fever, and the moaning, and the similar symptoms, did the parents also get it? Are you seeing a lot of?

[1:01:04] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: In some cases, yeah. In some cases it went we went through the family, others not. A lot of my patients are from Hawaii to New York. They’re all over the map. They’re not necessarily only here. Some in California, some in Hawaii, New York, East Coast—a bunch on the East Coast, which is what made me suspicious because it would be the coast that would pick it up first with flights coming in. That’s where I’ve been treating most of these sick kids.

[1:01:36] Ashley James: Like you said, we should work with a homeopath because I might have burning lungs, and someone else might have burning lungs, but because of how we present our symptoms, and because of our constitutional, and all these factors a homeopath might give me a different remedy than someone else as they’re going through the disease. It’s best to work with an experienced homeopath. Are there some remedies that you can share that yes, people should stock up on or have available that have been really helpful to help people move through the fever? Especially what’s deadly is the inability to breathe.

[1:02:24] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right, right. We see a lot of lung involvement. I’m actually going to be doing an in-depth class on this next week, which will be available through my website. A little sneak peek I would just mention a few remedies. The first one is aconite. In stage one of this, we’re seeing a lot of aconite, which is a very sudden onset of high fever. You’re not feeling well, maybe something’s wrong, and boom 102 fever—very sudden. That’s an aconite feature. You can always start with aconite.

We’re also seeing a lot of phosphorus symptoms or phosphoric acid. The difference between phosphorus and phosphoric acid, there are lung symptoms, there can be choking, coughing, desire for cold drinks. The phosphoric acid has a lot more depletion, exhaustion. We see that also in stage 1 and stage 2 of this virus where there’s tremendous depletion. People are just limp, very heavy, very tired.

Then one of the most common remedies is antimonium tartaricum. This is for the inability to cough something up and out. You see in the elderly they’re not strong enough to cough something up, that they can’t expectorate, or very young children sometimes need antimonium tartaricum because they don’t have the musculature to cough and get something up and they start to choke on it. A lot of antimonium tartaricum, phosphorus, phosphoric acid, aconite is there.

There are a few others, which I’ll go into detail next week in the class with what we call materia medica. It’s a list of symptoms that are associated with that particular remedy.

[1:04:17] Ashley James: This is great for people who don’t have access to a homeopathic practitioner or like you said, it’s the middle of the night and we’re just trying to move through the symptoms. What’s the difference between suppressing a symptom and helping the body move through them?

[1:04:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Suppression takes place when you use a pharmaceutical drug to stop the action of something, so stopping the fever with a pharmaceutical drug. Giving any homeopathic remedy is supportive. Given correctly it’s supportive. I suppose you could suppress with a homeopathic remedy if you hammered a system with the wrong remedy time and time again, but in the right hands, homeopathy is supportive.

The other remedy for high fever is belladonna of course. You can put that in water and give it to a child every 15 minutes to bring a high fever down, and you’re not suppressing the fever. You’re facilitating the body to function with the fever, move through the fever.

The other thing that can be helpful for fever, which is a folk medicine prescription is calcium lactate. This is a supplement. In high fever, the muscles try to leach calcium from the bones. You burn up your calcium very quickly. If you supplement with calcium lactate—it comes in powder, it comes in pellets—you can put it in water, you can put it in juice, and have the child sip it. I’ve known families that never use any fever reducer. They use belladonna, they use calcium lactate.

The calcium lactate can also be helpful if children are prone to febrile seizures. Febrile seizures can occur because the muscles are trying to leach calcium from the bones so they’re spasming to leach that calcium. You see it when the fever goes up rapidly very, very quickly. They don’t necessarily pretend a lifelong of seizures. It’s scarier for the parent than the child, but the calcium lactate can preclude that. Keep getting the calcium in the system and have them sip this calcium lactate in juice or water.

[1:06:39] Ashley James: Does the body do this—leach calcium from the bones—to put into the muscles because a fever is acidic and it’s trying to balance the acidity?

[1:06:50] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I can’t really answer that, Ashley. All I know is that there’s a higher demand for calcium. I don’t know about the acid-base balance.

[1:07:00] Ashley James: I wonder if people who are deficient in their minerals because if you don’t eat a really good diet it’s very easy to be deficient in minerals. We’ve been lied to about just drink your cow milk. The reason why cow milk has such minerals is they feed the cows supplements. Well, let’s just skip the middleman, take some supplements ourselves, and also why don’t we just go eat what the animals eat, get some greens in us.

[1:07:29] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right, and leave out the antibiotics that the animals get.

[1:07:32] Ashley James: Yes, yes. Also, milk is the biggest food that affects the immune system because you’re drinking the immune system of another animal. It’s very confusing for our immune system. Many, many reasons to cut out milk to promote a healthy immune system. That’s not my opinion. That’s from Naturopathic medicine.

We’ve been told that that’s where we should get our calcium from. Yet, animals don’t make minerals, plants don’t make minerals. Minerals are in the soil. How we get them, the best way to get them is from our fruits and our vegetables. If someone doesn’t eat enough, especially toddlers or children maybe they’ve been eating a lot of processed food like pasta and crackers. They’re not eating a ton of fruits and vegetables, maybe they’re mineral deficient or they have a digestive issue that we don’t know about because they’re allergic to milk. We don’t know.

Maybe that’s why some children get these seizures and other children don’t. The terrain of the body. If a child is fully nutrified and they’ve got enough minerals, then when under that stress of a fever they’re not having those seizures, but a child who’s minerally deficient— the muscles don’t have enough calcium—then they’re having those seizures as a result while the parathyroid is trying to get the calcium out of the bones to feed the muscles.

It’s again coming back to that idea of the terrain of the body, which is very interesting. Why we should spend all our time throughout the year filling our nutrient tanks, and decreasing our stress, and practicing self-love, and supporting our body’s ability to be fully stocked up, fully nutrified, and fully healed. That way, when we come across illness, it has its best chance of survival and of thriving. Very interesting about the seizures and the calcium supplement.

[1:09:48] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: You can find that information, again, in the free knowledge vault under natural methods. That’s in the knowledge vault for anyone who wants to download that.

[1:10:00] Ashley James: In the Spanish flu, when they were suppressing the fever, why was that killing people? Why was it killing people to suppress the symptoms?

[1:10:14] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Homeopathically we know that when you suppress that function of the body—the fever serves a tremendous function to reboot everything, to burn up bacteria, to burn off the illness basically. Take that away and it’s going to go rampant. The first place that’s going to go is into the lungs. This is what we see all the time. It goes to the lungs, and then the people would be coughing up blood in the Spanish flu situation, and dying very quickly.

It was understandable because the “modern medicine” was aspirin. You could treat so many people with aspirin. It was the modern way, so that’s what they were doing. In the class I have coming up I have some of the testimonials of some of the doctors that were treating homeopathically or the nurses that were in hospitals and seeing the difference between those taking homeopathy and those taking allopathy or conventional medicine. It’s very interesting to look back in history and see what happened.

[1:11:25] Ashley James: I bet. Absolutely. We need to learn from the past especially now. Especially now.

[1:11:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I know that members of our Homeopathic Association have gone to the State Medical Association and offered to assist and showing the data from these past epidemics and saying, “We’re prepared to assist,” but they’re more or less ignored.

[1:11:49] Ashley James: Of course. This is the system that’s been set up, and also people have been trained for the last 100 years by pharmaceuticals. If you look at Edward Bernays and how we’ve been manipulated. Just study Edward Bernays and how we as a society have been manipulated over the last 100 years to view pharmaceutical-based medicine as the only cure, or the only tool, and everything else is quackery. They discredit everything else multi-generationally. They’ve made it so that we don’t trust great-grandmother’s remedies basically.

What we have to come back to, we just have to keep coming back to the results. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let’s look at the results. The results are that homeoprophylaxis has—in many countries—gotten great results, and it is cheap, it’s effective, there’s no side effects, everyone can take it. So why not? Why not practice homeoprophylaxis? Even if it just lowers our stress levels a bit, that’ll be helpful too.

[1:13:09] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Right, right, right. Exactly, exactly. Look back again, Ashley, at frequency. The frequency of conventional medicine is such that it can’t see or hear a different frequency. It can’t understand homeopathy. It can’t let it into its field because it’s at such a lower vibration, a denser vibration. I’ll have to say that for emergency medicine, conventional medicine is great. If you have an arm hanging off or you’ve been hit by a car that’s what you want, but it doesn’t treat chronic disease. It doesn’t really prevent disease in quite the same way as a good terrain can prevent disease. It’s a different frequency. Will it ever be able to see natural medicine or homeopathy? I don’t know. The frequencies are pretty far apart as I know from the whole cancer journey.

Every time I walked into an allopathic office it would take me days to get my center back again because the frequency would be so dense and so doom and gloom. You do this or it’s not going to work. You can feel it, feel a different frequency. I’ll have to look up Edward Bernays. Is it like mayonnaise? Is that how it’s spelled, Bernays?

[1:14:37] Ashley James: Well, if you just type into Google, Google will spell it right for you. Edward Bernays is sort of the father of media manipulation. He wrote some really good books. One of them is called Propaganda. He just shares his formulas. He is one of the people who is celebrated as creating how they manipulate us using media back in—I don’t remember the exact time frame whether it was the 40s of the 50s, but right around then smoking, only men smoked. In the movies, only the villain smoked. The cigarette companies wanted to sell cigarettes to women because that’s half the population. They want to sell twice as much as what they’re selling now.

They use this manipulation in the media all of a sudden they made they used Hollywood so film, and television, and radio, and print ads to make smoking be something that women have freedom do. That it’s a symbol of freedom, it’s a symbol of womanhood. They were able to very quickly turn the narrative 180 to go from only the villain smokes to now sexy women smoke, and your doctor smokes. Look at how their sales went through the roof because they were able to change the perception of cigarettes. It took them many years to change the perception of cigarettes to be like cancer sticks. We’re fighting still against their marketing in some aspects and the remnants of their marketing.

That’s just one example, but they’ve used in modern medicine they’ve used the same tactics to turn people against holistic medicine. They’ve manipulated, that’s very well-documented that the hospitals wanted to make more money. Birth pretty much happened at home. Home births—for how long have we been alive here on the planet? Hundreds of thousands of millions of years, who knows how ever long we’ve been here. It was home births. The hospitals wanted it to be in the hospital so they could make more money.

They started to put out advertising and articles about how if you have a midwife from a different country—so they used this xenophobia—that they will bring their third-world country diseases into your home. As they deliver your baby they’ll infect your baby. They made people afraid of midwives and said, “Your baby will die, and you will die if you have a midwife. Come to our clean pristine hospital we’re modern. You’ll be a modern woman.” Look at how they marketed that breastmilk was inferior to the science of formula.

[1:18:13] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Most recently they said that nursing your baby was contradictory to vaccines. Vaccines couldn’t work as well if you nursed your baby.

[1:18:22] Ashley James: Right, right. The thing is that we have to use our critical thinking. If you want to learn critical thinking there’s a website called Trivium Education. I think it’s triviumeducation.com. It might be .org. Google Trivium Education. It’s a free website that has been around for a very long time. I’ve been following them for over ten years. They teach for free. They teach critical thinking. It’s a system of thinking from Plato’s era. It’s a 3500-year-old system of critical thinking that was taught to people, but it was actually systematically taken out of the education system when they introduced the project and education system about 150 years ago—somewhere around there.

They took it out of the education system. It’s still taught in certain private schools like Jesuit private schools, but it is a system that was taught rigorously. It’s critical thinking. You can watch their videos, and listen to their audios, and you learn this system you learn all the linguistic fallacies. If you learn the system you will become a human BS detector. You’ll actually be able to hear the lies that the media is spewing. It’s all about gathering the facts, and not letting the spin and the Edward Bernays style manipulation take over.

Very Orwellian if you’ve ever—just read the first chapter of 1984. Watch the movie to get how the media spins things and controls to manipulate because all major media outlets are owned by the corporations that want to control the population. It’s not conspiracy this fact. It’s the first paragraph in Edward Bernays book says that he believes that the population needs to be controlled by a few powerful men that own these media outlets. That major corporations owned the media outlets so that they can control the interests. They can control the population.

I guess I’m showing my tinfoil hat at this point, but it’s about coming back to what we can control. Because I can’t control, the media does. I can’t control what the few powerful men out there are doing to the puppet masters. What I can control is my breath, I can control taking homeopathy, I can control eating organic food, I can control supporting my family in love, and joy, and bringing myself to a higher vibration, and I can control educating myself, and informing myself. So that when I take in the information, I look at it through the lens of critical thinking, through the lens of being able to decipher the fallacies. I recommend people study critical thinking, especially if we’re all going to be locked up in our homes for the next few weeks. Study critical thinking. It’s called the Trivium Education, triviumeducation.com or .org.

[1:21:49] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’s .com. I just went there.

[1:21:50] Ashley James: It’s .com. Okay, good. I always think it should be .org because it’s a free thing, but it’s triviumeducation.com. Just study the trivium and learn the system of critical thinking so that you can decipher. Don’t just let the media dictate your nervous system. This will also help our nervous system to learn critical thinking because you’ll be able to see through the lies and stream through all the information to pull out the truth, and to weigh it, and to analyze it. If the medical system used the trivium and analyzed homeopathy, they would adopt homeopathy as one of their tools because they would see the results. They’d see that there is a place for homeopathy alongside allopathic medicine because people get fantastic results. It’s all about the results, and that it increases survival rate. That’s wonderful.

We have two tools in homeopathy. Like you said, we have homeoprophylaxis, which is something we can do to exercise the immune system. There’s homeoprophylaxis for all kinds of diseases, which is really exciting, but right now, everyone’s focused on the coronavirus. They can go to your website. Is it realimmunity.org that they would go to your website and go under shop for the homeoprophylaxis?

[1:23:20] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yes, or they can look for just general programs for their family, for their children as well. For the homeoprophylaxis for viruses, for Influenzinum CV that’s under shop.

[1:23:33] Ashley James: Okay. I know that you sell out. So you have to go to the website every day because it sells out very quickly. Then you go, and you restock, and then it sells out again. One of my friends locally was able to get one. He says the tracking shows it’s on the way. He’s going to share it with all of us locally here, which is exciting. Just keep going to realimmunity.org, and checking out every day, and seeing. I know Cilla is doing her best to keep it in stock. We can use that for years to come because it exercises the immune system against several viruses, is that correct?

[1:24:18] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Correct, correct. You can use it year after year.

[1:24:24] Ashley James: Terrific. Your training, which is going to teach us more about when we have symptoms then we could take these homeopathic remedies to help our bodies, for our body to move through it faster—instead of suppress it move through it faster. How do we find that training?

[1:24:46] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’ll go out in a Mailchimp, it’ll be on Facebook, it’ll be on Instagram. The goal is to have it offered next Friday, the 27^th. I’m working towards finishing it up to have it offered by next week.

[1:25:03] Ashley James: Okay, great. If we got on your email list we’ll see it. If we follow you on Facebook we’ll see it. Is it going to be a live webinar?

[1:25:12] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yes, live webinar with Q&A.

[1:25:16] Ashley James: Oh, great. I was going to say, “Do you have Q&A?” Okay, perfect. That’ll be great, so we should all sign up for that. That’ll be fun. For those who can’t attend live you’ll have the video for sale or available afterward?

[1:25:31] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Possibly. I might just be updating it and offering it again live. We’ll see.

[1:25:40] Ashley James: Okay. We’ll stay tuned. Cilla, I love how dedicated you are to education, educating us, and supporting us to support ourselves and being healthy. You’ve been on the show numerous times, and we’ve gotten to know each other over the years. I love how much integrity you have and how heart-centered you are in the work that you do. I only promote things I believe in, and I really, really believe in the work that you do. I feel like I’m the mama bear sometimes. I protect my listeners. I protect in that I don’t want to send them down the wrong path like I don’t want to be sent down the wrong path.

I protect my listeners by not taking on advertisers. I get offers every day for all kinds of things. I comb through them, and I have not taken any advertising dollars. I don’t believe in commercials because I don’t know if I could trust those companies. The only companies that I will promote are ones that I believe in that I know make a difference, and then I’ve gotten fantastic feedback afterward for my listeners saying that it really helped them. Then I’ll continue to promote those companies.

You are someone who I will—time and time again—refer people to because the work that you do is exceptional, your heart-centered, you are full of integrity, and you get great results. You have three documentary movies that listeners can check out. I definitely recommend them. You have homeoprophylaxis, a kit for the entire family that covers everything like polio, and measles, and mumps, and rubella, and all that stuff. That covers a ton of them. People can get the whole homeoprophylaxis kit from you. The whole family can go through that program. You’ve got lots of free information. Again, tell us how to get to your free library, your free vault of information.

[1:27:54] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: The free knowledge fault is on familyhomeopathycare.com. I have a free giveaway for your listeners as well, Ashley. The first of the three films, I’ve divided it into three half-hour episodes, and I’m giving away the first episode. That’s going to be on Instagram, Facebook. People will be able to find it on the Real Immunity Facebook page or Instagram page. I don’t know if my assistant’s gotten it up there yet, but as soon as she gets it up there it’ll just be a link, password, and people can access that first episode of the film.

[1:28:32] Ashley James: Great. I recommend just buying the digital access to all of your films because the three films together paint this great story. It’s so worth watching. Didn’t you have Dr. Debra Gambrell as one of your?

[1:28:50] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Yes.

[1:28:51] Ashley James: I interviewed her and we talked about this in a past episode. She’s an anesthesiologist who started getting into holistic medicine after her son was diagnosed with autism. He was on the spectrum to the point where he couldn’t be in a—if he was going to go to school it was going to be a very specialized school for people on the spectrum. She did natural medicine with him. Now she says in a “normal school.” He’s in classes with children who are not on the spectrum, and he is functioning with them. That’s very exciting. One of the things she shares in our interview is about the importance of fevers. She talks about that in your movie as well.

Parents, we’ve been trained to suppress a fever. We’ve been trained to give baby aspirin or ibuprofen to our children the moment they have a fever. We’ve been trained to be afraid of fevers. We’ve done a huge disservice to our children as a result because fevers are healthy. She talks about this that fevers are healthy. Seattle Children’s Hospital, which I adore. I adore the work they do. They have an article, you can google Seattle Children’s Hospital fever myths.

They say that even a fever of 108 or 109 for a child can be a healthy fever. I’m not saying it’s always a healthy fever, but it can be a healthy fever. When your child is 102, think about this, your child could be at a 108 and a Children’s Hospital in Seattle thinks it could still be a healthy fever. Dr. Debra Gambrell discusses in detail what to look for in children to see whether it’s a healthy fever or an unhealthy fever in my interview. Also, she talks about it with you in your movies.

The point is that if we suppress symptoms we could actually be doing tremendous harm and a disservice to the child. Of course, always talk to your child’s doctor, always talk to your pediatrician. Go read that article that Children’s Hospital put out about fevers. Listen to my interview with Dr. Debra Gambrel about it, and also watch Dr. Cilla Whatcott’s three movies that she made where she interviews amazing doctors of holistic medicine to bring you this information about how to support the immune system. Your movies are real—what was it? I get them mixed up.

[1:31:36] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: It’s the Real Immunity series: Quest for Real Immunity, Passage to Real Immunity, and Choosing Real Immunity. Those are the three. They’re all available on realimmunity.org.

[1:31:47] Ashley James: The third one’s the best one but you have to watch the first two. You have to watch all three. You have to watch all three, so realimmunity.org. Go there, get the movies, get the digital access to them. I have a feeling we’re going to have a lot of free time on our hands for a lot of us who are social distancing or quarantined at home. We’ve got a lot of resources we’re giving you today to go check out.

It’s been so great having you on the show. I could just talk to you for hours about my love of homeopathy. I have some stories about homeopathy I share in past interviews so I won’t share them now, but I have had great success with homeopathy in my personal health but also in my child’s health when he was a baby when he was weeks old with horrible colic. I was trying everything. I was giving him the special little drink you give babies—that colic calm or whatever they call it—where it has fennel in it.

[1:32:54] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Fennel tea.

[1:32:54] Ashley James: Yeah, fennel tea. I was giving him fennel tea with a little bit of ginger. I was rubbing his belly with very diluted dill essential oil. I was trying everything natural to help with the colic. He had horrible, horrible gas pain. He was just looking up at me with these desperate eyes like, “Please, help. I’m dying.” His guts were being torn up from the inside. Horrible, horrible because, unfortunately, he had to be on formula and we were also getting breast milk donated. The formula was from a cow because everything else he was allergic to. We tried everything. We tried a lactose-free one that he was still allergic to it. While we were trying to access breastmilk he had to be supplemented on this. The colic was just unbearable.

In the middle of the night, I’m exhausted, he’s exhausted, he’s screaming, I’m crying, and I’ve tried a bunch of different things. This isn’t placebo. Then I put a little pellet of the homeopathy in him, and the calmness comes over his face. It melts in his mouth—this little pellet—and he calms and he looks at me. It’s just relief. He didn’t pass gas. It happened every time because, for the first year of his life, he had horrible gas pain and colic until we dialed what food allergies he had, and was able to adjust his diet for him, and of course when he got off breastmilk and formula.

Homeopathy was what helped him move through it. This is what I tell people for people who are skeptical, “How does homeopathy work for a dog? How does it work for an infant?” Because you can explain like if I’m an adult and I take it and I believe in it and then I get a result you could say it’s placebo, but how does the placebo effect work when homeopathy helps animals and it helps infants. Other things I was giving my child wasn’t working. So it couldn’t be placebo because he can’t sit there and think he’s a one-month-old baby. He can’t go, “Oh, my mom put something in my mouth therefore I’m going to have a placebo effect. I believe this will help.”

Homeopathy has been shown—time and time again—to work whether you believe in it or not. That’s the exciting thing. If you want to hear more of my stories that I’ve shared in my personal life. Cilla has shared many wonderful stories and also lots of great information. Go to learntruehealth.com, search Dr. Cilla Whatcott in the search bar at learntruehealth.com. You’ll find all the episodes where Cilla has been on the show. You can also look in the show notes of this podcast to find all the episodes. Listen to all of them so you’ll hear more great information about homeopathy and homeoprophylaxis.

Thank you so much for coming today and talking specifically about the coronavirus, and how we can use homeopathy and homeoprophylaxis for the Covid-19. Is there anything that you want to make sure that you say today to the listener? Anything left unsaid before we finish today’s interview?

[1:36:24] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: First, I want to thank you, Ashley, because it’s always a pleasure to come on your show. I just so appreciate everything you’ve said. Your recognition that I try to work with integrity from my heart means the world to me because that’s the most important thing to me. Thank you sincerely for having me. I think that the most important thing is to trust your intuition and get away from fear. That’s the keynote of my films, really. Coming at it from every direction to try to get parents to trust their intuition. You have this, and you can get through this. Just quiet yourself, go inside, learn, read, understand, know what you need to do for yourself, and trust that. That’s my best advice. Nobody can tell you what’s right for you. It has to be your choice.

[1:37:22] Ashley James: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Dr. Cilla Whatcott for coming back on the show. You are always welcome. Keep coming back, and keep teaching us. We’d love to have you. Before we wrap it up, is there a resource for those who would love to hire a homeopath? Either a digital one online or one in person? Some people, they’re learning about homeopathy for the first time. How do they navigate this world and find a good homeopathy?

[1:37:50] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Let me tell you a website, I’m just pulling it up. Center for Homeopathic Certification. They have a list—here it is, hang on. Council for Homeopathic Certification. The actual URL is homeopathicdirectory.com. These people are certified. I would highly recommend people who have the CCH after their names. It’s rigorous training, rigorous testing, and they are certified. Homeopathicdirectory.com. You can click on your state, and you can find who’s certified in your state.

[1:38:26] Ashley James: What does CCH mean?

[1:38:28] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Certified Classical Homeopathy.

[1:38:34] Ashley James: Is there any alphabet behind their name if they’re into homeoprophylaxis?

[1:38:41] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Some do, some don’t, C.HP. Certified in HP, but not everyone because I’ve certified quite a few medical doctors, chiropractors, Naturopaths. They don’t necessarily have that designation. You just have to ask and see if someone has training.

[1:39:07] Ashley James: Do you offer training for people who want to study homeopathy?

[1:39:10] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: I do. I don’t advertise it publicly. People who reach out to me I save their emails, and then when I do a training I limit it to about six people so there’s a lot of personal interaction. It’s a six-hour training and the seventh hour is one-on-one with me to adapt it to your own practice. I provide tons of information, handouts, written information. There’s just lots of stuff. I’m hoping to teach that again sometime this summer. People can contact me. I just give them a free 15-minute consult so we can see if it’s a good fit for them.

[1:39:51] Ashley James: Got it.

[1:39:52] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: But they need to have a practice. They need to have some sort of practice. It’s not available to parents or laypeople. Professionals who are in some sort of practice.

[1:40:03] Ashley James: About 20% of my listeners are holistic health practitioners. Those who have a practice and want to learn homeoprophylaxis—fantastic tool to have in your practice—can contact Dr. Cilla Whatcott and see if it’s right for them in their practice. That’s very cool. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. So realimmunity.org. Lots of great information. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

I want to leave everyone with the homework to practice self-care, self-love—especially now—more diligently. Soak in magnesium, drink lemon water, go for walks—even if just walks around your backyard. Get out in sunlight, ground yourself, take your shoes off and put your feet in the grass in the backyard, get out in nature. Even though we’re self-isolating do your best to get outside in nature and take care of yourself. Lots of love, and cuddles, and hugs to get the oxytocin up.

Oxytocin and cortisol are opposite. So cortisol is the stress hormone, oxytocin is the love hormone. If we can do lots of cuddles—30-second hugs with our spouse and our children—and love on our pets like you said. Our dogs, or cats, or whatever. We can increase oxytocin and that helps to decrease cortisol. You’re either in a cortisol state or you’re an oxytocin state right now. You want to keep yourself in oxytocin state as much as possible and keep yourself out of cortisol as much as possible.

My homework for everyone is to practice as much self-love as possible. Even if you have to write down a list. I have a list on my fridge. Just write down a list of ways that you decrease your stress and ways that you increase your joy. Whether it’s put on music and dance. Just ways you increase your joy and decrease your stress. Put it up around the house—post-it notes—to remind yourself, “Oh, I can do that right no. I can decrease my stress.”

Then after that, take all the resources we told you about Dr. Cilla Whatcott’s website and her free resources vault, and her videos, or movies. Also, if you want to study what I talked about today with triviumeducation.com. Take all these resources and bring that information into you as long as you’re staying out of cortisol, as long as you’re staying out of the stress response. If you catch yourself in stress responsible while studying, get up, walk away from your computer or your phone, and do something that brings you joy and increases your oxytocin. Stay in a state of oxytocin for better health long term.

Cilla, such a pleasure as always. Come back on the show again sometime soon. Keep sharing with us. I love, love learning from you.

[1:43:07] Dr. Cilla Whatcott: Thank you, thank you, Ashley, very much.

[1:43:10] Outro: Are you in to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Mar 21, 2020

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Dr. Terry Wahls and Healing MS

https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-terry-wahls-and-healing-ms

Highlights:

What the Wahls Protocol is
Mitochondria driver of disability for MS and other degenerative diseases
Factors that raises cognitive decline
What carotenoids are
Diet and lifestyle choices made diseases develop.
Everything you eat will become you.
What do you want your health for?

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and needing to use a reclining wheelchair, nobody expected that Dr. Terry Wahls would be able to walk without assistance or even ride a bike for 18.5 miles. But she did. Be inspired by Dr. Terry’s story on how she put her multiple sclerosis in remission and how she helped other people put their degenerative diseases in remission by changing their diet and lifestyle.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited for you to hear today’s interview with Dr. Terry Wahls who is quite the celebrity in the holistic health space. She reversed her MS using food and has gone on to help thousands of people reverse autoimmune conditions and heal their brain, heal their nervous system. She has a very interesting approach to healing the body by using food. The majority of the diet is vegetables.

I want to let you know that if you’re the type of person that does not know how to cook and eat delicious vegetables, please join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Back in October, I started working with my friend Naomi, who’s an amazing stay at home chef. She has created some amazingly delicious and healing recipes. Of course, that’s what my passion is as well, using the kitchen to heal my body and keep my family healthy. We started filming, for four months, we filmed videos and we put them all up in a membership. Every week, we also add new videos. These videos teach you how to cook lots of vegetables, lots of plants to heal your body.

Dr. Wahls also talks about using things like organ meats to heal the body. She goes through that in the interview. Of course, you definitely are going to want to get her new book. She has so much science behind it and also many results clinically, which is really, really exciting. Thousands of people have been able to put their MS in remission and other autoimmune diseases in remission using her way, her diet. She explains that there are different ways to do it. You can take her formula and you can do it in a vegan or vegetarian way. If you have allergies or religious beliefs or you don’t want to eat meat, there’s a way to do it that way. A way to go more whole food plant-based with her protocol. She does mention in the interview it’s difficult but it’s doable. She works with Dr. Joel Kahn, who’s a plant-based vegan cardiologist. They together help people reverse heart disease, MS, and autoimmune conditions together.

In the interview, she says it’s difficult because they don’t have a complete protein. What she meant by that was not that the whole food plant-based diet is void of protein, it’s not, there’s protein in everything. In all plants there’s protein. What she was referring to is that her protocol is very limiting because it’s an autoimmune protocol. There are no potatoes, there are no beans, there are no grains. If someone is going to take her protocol and also be a vegan, they’re going to have to really monitor their diet closely so that they’re making sure they’re getting all the nutrition they require to heal the body.

We can use food as medicine. There’s not one diet that fixes everyone because everyone is on different paths. One person is healing their diabetes, the other one is healing their heart disease, the other one is healing an autoimmune condition, the other one is trying to gain weight, the other one is trying to lose weight, someone’s trying to gain muscle. You can accomplish many of these things by eating whole foods. What does that mean? It means it’s not eating processed foods, eating whole foods. Dr. Terry Wahls today is going to share some amazing stories and amazing success around showing people how to dial in their diet to heal their bodies.

If you want to learn how to cook whole foods and learn from myself and Naomi, we have some amazing recipes that are so delicious that our kids love eating these meals. Kids that normally don’t like vegetables are now eating them and loving them. If you want to figure out how to use your kitchen to heal your body, please join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. You’ll also be supporting the Learn True Health podcast by doing that. We made it affordable for everyone. You could join monthly or annually. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. You are just going to love it.

I’ve got one recipe in the baked section that is a 10-pound lasagna and lasagna is 100% made of plants. You’re getting all your vegetables and the kids love it. They love it. They don’t realize that they’re eating so many vegetables. It is so delicious. There are no grains in it. It’s grain-free and is just very delicious. I call it 10-pound lasagna because it’s 10 pounds of vegetables. It’s just amazing. It’s so delicious. I am excited for you to join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and join our membership. You’ll be supporting yourself and your family. If you’re stuck at home during the quarantine, there are over seven hours of videos and content right now in the membership. You’ll be able to pour through them and learn all these wonderful recipes and ways of healing your body. We even have recipes that incorporate antiviral foods to support the immune system. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Excellent.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about especially those you know in your life who have MS or have any form of autoimmune condition. This diet, this protocol, is proving to be incredibly successful. I’m so excited and grateful to be able to bring this information to you today. Let’s share it with as many people as possible and turn this ripple into a tidal wave to help as many people as possible to learn true health.

[0:06:15] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 418. I am so excited for today’s guest. I feel like you are a celebrity in my world so I am starstruck. Dr. Terry Wahls here. You, to me, is the bringer, the mother of using food as medicine. The founder of bringing forth the knowledge of what we’ve known for centuries but forgotten in the last hundred years. That when we eat our medicine, when I treat our plate as if it’s our prescription, we can heal disease. You have been showing us with your own example and you’ve helped thousands and thousands of people so I am so inspired by you. Many of my listeners, when I told them I was interviewing you, got so excited because we can, with whole foods, we can heal our body and you’re showing us that. Welcome to the show.

[0:07:25] Dr. Terry Wahls: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here.

[0:07:28] Ashley James: Absolutely. For those who don’t know who you are or haven’t seen your TEDx talk, which I’m going to make sure the link to it is in the show notes of the podcast. Everyone should google Dr. Terry Wahls and watch the first video that comes up is the TED talk because it is so inspiring. Even since then, because that was back in 2011, so much has happened. I can’t wait to hear what has happened since. For those who have never heard of you before, can you fill us in? What happened in your life that led you to using food as medicine?

[0:08:01] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m an internal medicine physician at the University of Iowa: very, very conventional, believed in the latest drugs, best technology, and was very skeptical of special diets and supplements and all of that stuff. God works in mysterious ways to teach us. I developed weakness in my left leg in 2000 and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I knew it’s a progressive disease. I want to treat my disease aggressively so I sought out the best people I could find, took the newest drugs, but went relentlessly downhill. Within two years, my Cleveland Clinic physicians had told me about the work of Loren Cordain. I read his books and his papers and decided, after 20 years of being a low-fat vegetarian, to go back to eating meat. I gave up all grains, all legumes, all dairy and was eating meat.

It was a big change. I continued to go downhill, but I stayed with that diet because I didn’t know how long to change my course. The next year I needed a reclining wheelchair. I started taking more potent drugs including Tysabri, that new biologic. Continued to go relentlessly downhill. They tried a variety of other disease-modifying drugs. They never had any impact, but I stayed with them because I was trying to do everything that I possibly could.

I also decided to begin reading the basic science and to do all that I possibly could. On that basis, I decided that mitochondria were likely the drivers of disability in MS and many other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s Alzheimer’s, ALS. I started making a supplement cocktail to support my mitochondria. That helped my fatigue a little bit, but I was still declining. I also have trigeminal neuralgia. I actually had that since medical school since 1980. My face pain was getting steadily more severe, more difficult.

I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine in the summer of 2007. I took their course in neuroprotection. I had a longer list of supplements, which I added. Not a lot changed, but then I had a really big aha moment. What if I redesigned my paleo diet in a very specific way based on what I’d learned from my review of the basic science and what I was taking in supplement form? It was several more months of research and I started this new way of eating in the December 26, 2008. Mind you, at that point, I’m beginning to have problems with brain fog. Of course, I have severe, severe fatigue. I am so weak I cannot sit up in a regular chair. I’m in a zero-gravity chair with my knees higher than my nose, and it’s a struggle to walk 10 feet using two walking sticks.

I start this new way of eating, within three months my trigeminal neuralgia is gone, my brain fog is gone, my fatigue is gone, and I’m able to sit up and eat at the kitchen table again. Then in six months, I’m walking around at the hospital with a walking stick. In nine months, I’m able to get on my bike for the first time in six years. I am able to pedal around the block. My son and my daughter are crying. My wife is crying. I am crying. In a year, I’m able to do an 18.5-mile bike ride with my family. Once again, my kids are crying, my wife’s crying, and I’m crying. This radically changes how I will practice medicine. It will ultimately change the type of research that I do.

[0:12:09] Ashley James: I bet. How did you come across the idea that mitochondria and feeding the mitochondria was the key?

[0:12:17] Dr. Terry Wahls: As I was continuing to go relentlessly downhill despite taking the best drugs from the best people, I was like, “Okay, I can go back to reading the literature.” I started reading the animal models for MS. Then I thought, “Well, I might as well read about the other neurodegenerative diseases with shrinking brains.” I’m reading the animal models of Parkinson’s, about Alzheimer’s. I see that mitochondrial dysfunction is present in all those disease states. Although no one’s yet talking about it in MS, but I decide since I never really had relapses. I had really only one relapse, maybe two in my entire course. Otherwise, it was this slow relentless decline, that mitochondria were probably the big driver for my illness. Then my research was like, “Okay. What nutrients could I take, supplements, vitamins?”

Again, I’m reading the basic science, animal model studies. Slowly, I’m coming up with a supplement cocktail that’s helpful. It’s not stopping anything but I’m slowing my decline. I can tell the days I skipped my supplements I don’t do as well. I’m very excited by that. I’m excited because I’m learning stuff that my medical team is not telling me. I’m feeling very impassioned and I’m willing to spend more time reading the literature. By now, I’ve been assigned to join the Institutional Review Board to review clinical research. I tell my partners that I want to review all of the brain related studies. I’m getting more and more comfortable reading the basic science, reading clinical trials, and I’m getting more comfortable experimenting on myself.

[0:14:15] Ashley James: Very interesting observation that the days that you skip your B vitamins and your supplements that you notice a difference right away.

[0:14:25] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. Well, it takes about 36 hours. Here’s what happened. After six months of my first round of supplements, the conventional doc reared her head and said, “Oh, you’re just wasting your money.” So I quit them all. Then I could go to work the next day, but then after 36 hours, I just felt profoundly even more exhausted. On the third day, my wife came in, “Honey, I think you oughta take these again.” I took them and the next morning I could go to work. I thought, “Wow. That is really, really interesting.” Two weeks later, I did the same thing, I stopped all my supplements. Again, at 36 hours, my fatigue was even much more severe. I waited three days. I started them up again and said, “Okay,” that is when I was so excited like, “Okay. I’m figuring stuff out.”

[0:15:18] Ashley James: Right. That there’s one way that someone could have MS—my understanding and maybe you could shed some light on this—is that it’s an autoimmune condition or at least that’s been… People think it’s autoimmune, but an autoimmune condition wouldn’t get better and worse and better and worse because you took your supplements one day and then didn’t the next. Right? Is that my understanding?

[0:15:45] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. Correct. We’ve known for a long time that MS has both an inflammation component and a degeneration component. Early on, the researchers focused on finding drugs and strategies that would turn off the excess inflammation. Now that we understand the MRI, we’ve been measuring brain volume and spinal cord volume, we realize that as the brain volume shrinks the disability is fixed. If you have inflammation you’ll have weakness that may disappear when that acute relapse goes away and you get back to close to normal. As the volume decreases, the disability is fixed, and the thinking is it’s the mitochondria that aren’t making enough energy that are leading to the brain volume loss and that are leading to the permanent disability. A lot of the drugs that are focused on stopping inflammation are really good at stopping the inflammation, but they don’t have any drugs for mitochondria. It turns out that that’s really a diet and lifestyle thing.

[0:17:07] Ashley James: Right. You can’t feed a body a bunch of drugs and expect it to make enzymes because the body needs nutrients.

[0:17:17] Dr. Terry Wahls: Needs all the parts.

[0:17:18] Ashley James: Right. The building blocks of life.

[0:17:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: My daughter went back to school. She’s taking a chemistry class. I was thinking about going back to grad school with some more science. It’s so fun to watch her get so excited about chemistry. We’re having these lovely conversations about biochemistry, nutrition, and health. It’s just so obvious that if you don’t have the building blocks, you can’t run the chemistry. How can you be healthy if you don’t have the building blocks to run the chemistry of life?

[0:17:57] Ashley James: Right. We’re not going to get it through a fast-food drive-through. The standard American diet does not set us up for success. You noticed a difference on days that you took your supplements versus you didn’t within 36 hours. What happened to have you have that aha moment and go, “Wait a second. Maybe I could get even more if I switched over to food.”

[0:18:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: Isn’t it interesting? I started taking with my supplement cocktail about 2004, maybe early 2005. I’m reading the basic science, slowly adding a few more vitamins and supplements. In the summer of 2007, I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine. They had a really lovely course on neuroprotection. That again was a lot of mitochondria, a lot of biochemistry—I liked it a lot. They had a longer list of supplements, which I added. I should step back. Remember, I switched from vegetarian to paleo eater and that I’m adding supplements. It does not improve me, it’s just slowing my decline. I have to admit, I don’t quite recall what was the aha moment. What if I used my list of supplements to say, “I need to figure out where these are in the food supply and stress those foods.” Because of course food is really complex. It’s much more than the—at that time it was 19 different nutrients that I was working on supplement wise. Now there are 36 nutrients that we monitor to determine the quality of the diet in terms of brain health. When I went to my registered dietician colleagues I said, “What foods would these be? What I need to eat to have a rich supply of these nutrients?” and the response was, “That’s complicated. I need a dietetic intern to look that up. I don’t really know.” Then I went to the university librarian so we tried. They really weren’t that helpful, but fortunately, I went back and I found the Linus Pauling Institute of Micronutrients. I used that as a [inaudible 0:20:19] resource. Originally, I had these long lists of foodstuffs that I was stressing. You can’t teach that to the public very well. Then I had to think much more deeply about how could I create an easily understood teaching message that would help people have diets that stress these key nutrients that I’m so keen on?

That’s how I ended up creating the message that I now teach which was the core part of the Wahls protocol.

[0:20:51] Ashley James: Before that though, before you decided you were going to teach people how to eat this way, you were figuring out for yourself. You were experimenting with food. Then you started to see results. Can you bring us back to that moment?

[0:21:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: What happened there was I’d identified these B vitamins, some sulfur amino acids, carotenoids, a variety of fats. I had that as I needed to have foods that would be rich in these things. Eventually, I get this list of these key foodstuffs that I wanted to be eating, and that was eating liver. I grew up eating liver. I quit eating liver. I was back to, ”I got to eat liver once a week,” and to get oysters and mussels a couple times a week. The other thing that’s fascinating, I identified that carotenoid, all these carotenoids were really vital. So I ate salads but now I was eating a tremendously much larger volume of kale, and parsley, and romaine lettuce, chard, and way more garlic, and then flax oil, and hemp oil and all this. What I discovered was as I ramped all of this up, I discovered that I couldn’t get enough greens. I had just this amazing craving for greens, for cooked kale, for steamed kale, for big kale salads, parsleys.

We since had more research that has come through on the critical role of vitamin K2 in the brain for stimulating the growth of brain stem cells, and the oligodendrocytes that repair the myelin in the brain. I’m recovering enough that I’m submitting papers and abstracts to present at scientific meetings, and so I’m going to these meetings. You can’t eat 9-12 cups of vegetables on the road very easily. I had yet figure out how to do that. I discovered that 36 hours away from home, my energy was beginning to tank.

[0:23:40] Ashley James: Right. Had you switched over? Had you stopped taking supplements and you’d been getting all your nutrition from food?

[0:23:47] Dr. Terry Wahls: No. I was still taking my supplements. I could still take the supplements, but I couldn’t take all the food. When I was away from it, within 36 hours, my energy level was dropping quite remarkably and my mental clarity was dropping quite remarkably. I would eventually learn, so I would pack food with me. I’d pack a kale with me and I’d be eating my kale. I pack cabbage with me, I’d eat cabbage. if I would pack these foods—and cabbage flies really well because it’s very forgiving. It can go several days without being refrigerated, it’s not a big deal. I really enjoy raw cabbage so I could go with a green cabbage, I could go with a purple cabbage, I could go with green or purple kale. Those are very portable foods.

[0:24:43] Ashley James: And delicious.

[0:24:46] Dr. Terry Wahls: And delicious. When I traveled with my vegetables in tow, I didn’t have my vegetable intake drop, and then I was fine.

[0:24:58] Ashley James: Fascinating. You figured out that you needed certain compounds like sulfur, iodine. Can you break that down a bit, the really important? You mentioned carotenoids, what is that?

[0:25:15] Dr. Terry Wahls: Carotenoids, those are the antioxidants that are in plants. The part of the pigment in plants. A lot of them are in the green plants but also in red, orange, blue, purple, black also have a variety of carotenoids in them. You can think of these as the polyphenols, the antioxidants. These are compounds that help protect. Every chemical plant always has some trash in it as you do the chemical processes. Whether it’s a man-made chemical plant or a biologic chemical plant. There is some biochemical trash in our mitochondria and biochemical trash in our cells and the color—the carotenoids in our plants—mop up that trash very nicely.

[0:26:12] Ashley James: They go in and they clean up the mitochondria? They give it a little spring cleaning.

[0:26:16] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yes, exactly. That is exactly correct. They provide support to a lot of enzymes of the mitochondria to improve their efficiency. They also provide support to some of the enzymes in the brain for making neurotransmitters. They provide support to the enzymes involved in the processing and eliminating of toxins.

[0:26:43] Ashley James: So these are things that are really hard to get from supplements. You can get a B complex but if you’re just taking supplements and then eating potatoes and corn and just the standard American diet, you’re not getting the carotenoids.

[0:26:59] Dr. Terry Wahls: And you’re not getting the diversity. You see, we have had about a billion and a half maybe two billion years worth of random mutations that have occurred in DNA that have allowed us to create enzymes that facilitate the chemistry of life. We have this rich array of compounds that support the chemistry of life. Food is vastly more complicated than the 34 different nutrients that the US Department of Agriculture has listed with recommended daily allowance or average intake recommendations for us. We need food, with all of its complexity and diversity, in order for us to run the full chemistry of life.

In fact, when I was in medical school, we were so excited about the genome project because we’re going to analyze the human DNA and sequence it. We thought we’d have about 100,000 genes because of the number of proteins that humans have. It turns out we have only about 25,000 genes. The big question is, “Man, where did those other 75,000 genes go?” Because corn, grass, plants, wheat have more like 100,000 genes. Our professors are sort of offended that plants appeared to be more complicated than humans. That this was like, “How could that be?” Of course, nobody knew anything about the microbiome. We just thought poop was poop.

Now we know that microbiome is teeming with life. As those bacteria and those microbes help eat the food that we consume and help digest the food and make vitamins and other small molecules that would get into our bloodstream, it’s the bacteria that have those other 75,000 genes that have the DNA to make the enzymes to make those compounds that we need for the other processes that we could no longer do, but our bacteria could. When the mutation occurred thousands of generations ago in our ancestral mother, she had reproductive success because the microbes in her gut could still do that chemical step. It was at that moment that the genetic instruction for that chemical step was exported from the human DNA to bacterial DNA.

[0:30:03] Ashley James: Fascinating. Your microbiome changed because you changed your diet. It became more diverse because you ate a more diverse diet of plants because that’s what feeds meat. Meat doesn’t necessarily feed a microbiome well but plants do, right?

[0:30:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: Let me modify that. The meat feeds your microbiome. The supplements you eat feed your microbiome. Junk food you eat feeds your microbiome. Plants feed your microbiome. The things that are new to our microbiome are processed foods, processed food additives, emulsifiers, sugar, white flour, pasta, cereals. All those things are clearly feeding disease-promoting bacteria. Plants, they are probably feeding the same kind of bacteria that were in our ancestral mothers for thousands of generations. Meat, again, thousands of generations. Whole grains and legumes, that’d be about 8,000 years, so a few generations. Not as many as the meats and plants have been eating. The sugar about 300 years. The emulsifier, food additives, that’s probably about 100 years.

[0:31:24] Ashley James: I heard one microbiome expert said that we’ve created the Homer Simpson of microbiome in the modern diet. It’s just kind of dumbed down and very limited in its functionality.

[0:31:44] Dr. Terry Wahls: Very limited. On my study team, I have a bunch of dietitians on my study team and we love talking about diet, food quality, the research. The research—I think it’s really very interesting—there are many diets. Humans can eat a wide variety of things and be healthy. My mitochondria can burn protein. During the winter, my ancestral mothers and fathers either had to live off their own fat or if the hunt was good they got to have meat. Otherwise, you had to wait until the next hunt was good because it’d be summer before there was plant material again. You’d have several months where you can have meat or nothing. Then during the summer, you could have plants. If the hunt was bad you just had plants or nothing. If that was okay, you’d have a combination of plants and meat.

We can survive on just plants for a while, but we all have to have protein. Otherwise, we can’t live without protein. We can survive for a long time on just fat, our own fat. That’s how we survived, war, winter, famine. We can survive for a while on meat alone. I don’t know that we have any societies that have—over their lifetime—been a meat only eater.

We do know the standard American diet is wrecking our health. We could have the Mediterranean diet and have better health. We can have the Paleo diet and have better health. You can have a ketogenic diet and have better health. You’d have the standard American diet as a population our health declines. We have this exploding rates of obesity, autoimmunity, and mental health issues, and cancers. If I take you off that diet and I could put you on a Mediterranean diet, a paleo diet, a ketogenic diet your health will improve. With a little bit of structure, I can put you on a vegetarian or vegan diet and your health will improve. I have a bias that I think our diet, of all the diets out there, have been most thoughtfully structured. We’re the only one who really have done any prospective studies in detailed nutritional analyses to say, “We know that this diet provides everything that your brain needs.”

[0:34:21] Ashley James: While you were traveling and you were experimenting with food, eating tons, tons of plants. Of course, you were eating you said liver. I believe you said once a week, you’re eating grass-fed meat.

[0:34:32] Dr. Terry Wahls: Once a week, yes.

[0:34:34] Ashley James: So you’re eating organ meat once a week. You’re eating grass-fed meat, free-range—

[0:34:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, I want to correct you there. Liver once a week. Heart probably once a week. Oysters and mussels once or twice a week. I was eating a lot of organs. I was paying deep, deep attention to the diversity of my meats and diversity of my plants.

[0:35:01] Ashley James: Now, you ate, I believe you said, nine cups of vegetables a day.

[0:35:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: I told the public to eat nine. I was probably eating more like 12.

[0:35:13] Ashley James: See, yeah. Nine seems small because when you’ve been describing how much a variety of vegetables, but you ate a huge amount of beautiful variety of plants. It’s not like you’re eating a carnivore diet. You’re listing off all these meats and stuff. It’s really a small amount of animal products in comparison to the rest of your diet, which was a variety of beautiful vegetables and berries. You did that experiment accidentally where you cut back on your 12 cups of vegetables while you were traveling and you notice within 36 hours you had fatigue and brain fog. Did you ever experiment with cutting out the animal products for a few days and noticing if you also experience the same effect?

[0:36:11] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. I could do no meat for two days. Beyond that, it does not work.

[0:36:21] Ashley James: So you had the same experience of lowered—so there are some key nutrients that you figured out in the organ meats.

[0:36:31] Dr. Terry Wahls: The organ meats are really superfoods. I had some debates with the carnivore folks. Then with them, I like liver, I think it’s really good for you, but I only want people to have about 6 to 8 ounces of liver a week. I want them to otherwise have other organs: heart, kidney, oysters, mussels, whole sardines. If you have more than eight ounces of liver, then you’re going to be at risk for chronic vitamin A toxicity. If you don’t have enough retinol, then you’re at risk for retinol insufficiency, which also increases the risk for infection, autoimmunity, and cancer. There’s a balance, liver once a week. My mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother also eat liver once a week. By God they were correct.

[0:37:30] Ashley James: Right. If we look at even the health of our great-grandparents versus the health that we have today. We really do need to go back. If we just go back a few hundred years we would eat such a better diet than what we’re eating now. I really do love what you’ve dialed in. The question is, where’s the science. You’ve experimented on yourself, but since then, where is the science? I’d love to know, have you been able to do clinical studies?

[0:38:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yes. Absolutely.

[0:38:08] Ashley James: Have you been able to prove that this formula is effective for other people as well?

[0:38:16] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah. My area of research was a diagnostic error looking at what we called secondary data analysis. When I had my recovery, the chair of medicine saw my recoveries. They’re at the U again, call me in, I told them what I had done, and he’s a rheumatology doctor. He says, “Terry, this is so important. I want you to get a case report written up.” I said, “On myself said?” He said, “Yes. Work with your treating team. That’s your assignment for the year.” I salute and I said, “Okay.” I get that done, and he calls me back and says, “Now, I want you to do a safety and feasibility study.” I said, “Well, I don’t really have training in that.” “I will get you mentors. That’s your assignment.” Again, I salute and we get the protocol written up. That takes me a while to get it written up and through the IRB, now I have to raise about $100,000. When you have less than 2% of protocols get funding, but if we have any Canadian listeners, we have to thank the Canadians because it was a Canadian small nonprofit that gave us that funding. A little electrotherapy device MP that gave us that funding, and we were able to do that small early pilot study. We were able to show that yes other people could implement my diet and lifestyle program, that it was safe, that the biggest risk was if you’re overweight you lost weight and got back to a healthy body weight.

[0:39:59] Ashley James: If people were at normal weight or underweight would they lose weight as well?

[0:40:03] Dr. Terry Wahls: They would get back to the weight that they were at as a young adult. It’s about 19-22 years old without being hungry. Nobody became underweight. We were able to work with people to keep them within that target BMI. They lost their weight actually quite rapidly. I had to file safety reports every three months because of that. Fortunately for me, people got to their young adult weight and stayed there and did very very well.

Then we were able to show that quality of life went up quite remarkably. You got a short form 36, a 5-point change is clinically meaningful. We had a 16-point change so that would be clinically very very meaningful. The p-value was less than 0.0005, so that’s hugely impactful. The fatigue severity dropped quite largely. That scale was close from seven total fatigue in every aspect of your life to one no fatigue in any aspect of your life. We had a reduction of the volume, I think it was 2.38. Again, clinically huge and statistically very, very meaningful. Again, less than 0.0005.

[0:41:30] Ashley James: What’s a low p-value mean?

[0:41:33] Dr. Terry Wahls: It means that it’s a statistical way of saying it’s significant. If it’s less than 0.05 then that means there’s a 95% probability that that is statistically meaningful, it wasn’t a random possibility. The fact that I’m less than 0.0005 would mean there’d be less than 0.005 percent chance of random finding of that. In the science world, that is hugely, hugely significantly.

[0:42:10] Ashley James: I bet. You’re using diet and nutrition, you were using it to heal your specific condition, but do you think your diet could heal all conditions? Do you think that this is the perfect diet for everyone or just for specific diseases?

[0:42:29] Dr. Terry Wahls: This changed how I practice medicine in my primary care clinic, in the traumatic brain injury clinic. They’re taking care of people with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic brain injury. My Veteran Affairs hospital was so impressed that they pulled me out of those clinics and put me in my own clinic. We call it the Therapy Lifestyle Clinic. There, I went and asked people who had the pain clinic and the primary care clinics and said, “Give me your people who are most refractory to treatment who you can’t really help, but they need to know I’m only using diet and lifestyle. You’re going to do the drugs. I’m not doing any drugs for these patients.”

We got a few folks had tremendous success. Started getting more and more referrals. We just had such, such success that the VA national office came out to see me. We wrote a grant, expanded the clinic. Then, three years ago, I decided to leave the VA because by then, I’m now traveling in the world lecturing, teaching other physicians, other researchers how to do what it is that I do.

[0:43:58] Ashley James: Brilliant. You mentioned that if the population just stopped eating the standard American diet any of your listed [Hough 0:44:07] even vegan, vegetarian, paleo, keto, Mediterranean all of those would be better choices than the standard American diet. Can someone heal? Could someone choose a whole food plant-based diet eating 12 cups of a variety of vegetables a day and heal their mitochondria, or did you find that you absolutely need to eat organ meat in order to heal the mitochondria?

[0:44:33] Dr. Terry Wahls: In my book, the Wahls protocol, I do have levels. For the vegetarian, vegans I provide a structure for them and supplement recommendations so that they could address their mitochondria. Most folks who are vegetarian are vegans—unless they’re taking supplements—are going to end up with chronic disease and a neurologic problem.

[0:45:00] Ashley James: Why is that? What supplements?

[0:45:02] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, that’s because they don’t get a complete protein. If they aren’t taking B vitamins they’ll ultimately become short on B12, they may become short on iodine, they may become short on minerals. You can be a vegetarian vegan but you have to be very thoughtful, you have to structure your diet carefully, and you need some B vitamins, and you need some supplements.

[0:45:29] Ashley James: Most people need supplements if they’ve been eating the standard American diet because they’re highly deficient.

[0:45:36] Dr. Terry Wahls: Their recovery will be faster. In my VA, we had very limited supplements that we could use. This was really a diet and lifestyle program. My folks were living on food stamps. They’re often disabled, unable to work. They’re shopping in rural small-town Iowa. It’s certainly not Whole Foods, and we had remarkable success. I teach them how to cook. I wasn’t doing any fancy functional medicine testing, I was doing just basic primary care labs.

We had worked out how to grow their internal motivation. We’ve created what I now call the Wahls behavior change model, and that’s part of what I teach clinicians. Because the reasons our patients get better—whether you’re a conventional doc or you’re a functional medicine doc—the reason they get better or not is most often really contingent on can they follow your recommendations to improve their diet quality and their health behaviors? We’re asking people to give up today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s benefits.

[0:46:45] Ashley James: It could be something as quick as days, days of eating vegetables. How soon did you notice a shift in your symptoms? Because you were very sick.

[0:46:56] Dr. Terry Wahls: In a month.

[0:46:57] Ashley James: In one month. So it took 30 days and then you started noticing it or was it gradual over that month?

[0:47:03] Dr. Terry Wahls: Gradual over that month, in my clinics with the VA, we’d see people monthly for that first six months. It was very typical when they’d come back. Then that first month, they could tell that things were beginning to improve often for the first time in years, many times decades. That their pain was lessening, their brain fog was lessening, their energy was improving, that the world was less irritating to them, and it was easier to get along with family, with co-workers, with colleagues, with their spouse, with their kids. It was because the inflammation in their brain and their spinal cord is going down. Their weight is coming down quite remarkably. They’re not striving. They’re not hungry. They’re eating to satiety.

Of course, many of these folks had either never been taught how to cook or had forgotten how to cook. We have to have cooking classes and food demonstrations to show them how to do this affordably. How to do it affordable in terms of money and in terms of time. It has to be manageable for both.

[0:48:28] Ashley James: Were all the participants in this study all have MS, or do they have a variety of neurological symptoms?

[0:48:35] Dr. Terry Wahls: In my clinical trials we’ve only studied multiple sclerosis. In my clinics, so I told you about my primary care clinic and my traumatic brain injury clinic, in my lifestyle clinic, we’d see folks with anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar. Then we’d see rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, fibromyalgia, myasthenia gravis, MS, Parkinson’s, cognitive decline, chronic pain following back surgery, chronic pain following a war injury or a traumatic amputation, chronic headaches following a severe traumatic brain injury. Then of course, the usual diabetes, obesity, heart disease, heart failure. We had some Neuropathies following chemotherapy, so a wide variety of conditions. The most common symptoms were pain, decreasing energy, or fatigue problems, irritability, brain fog. People will often report that those symptoms were reducing within four to six weeks. Then It’d continue to improve over the next six months.

[0:49:58] Ashley James: Did their MS go away?

[0:50:00] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m very clear. In my case, I still have lesions in my spinal cord, a couple of lesions in my head, but these were lesions that had been there for years. My neurologist when I went back to see him he was so excited to get another MRI. He was disappointed that the MRI hadn’t changed. He said, “But you know, Terry, I expect it was foolish to think that they would because those were old lesions. Of course, they’re going to stay. If you have new lesions that are less than two years old, there’s plenty of reason to be very hopeful that those lesions will go away. If they’re old lesions, older than two years, they may well stay.”

I’m very clear with all of my patients whether you have an autoimmune problem, or a degenerative problem, or diabetes, obesity. If we change your diet and lifestyle to health-promoting diet and lifestyle choices, and your blood pressure improves, your blood sugar improves, your mood improves, you are doing great, you’re off meds, and so you think now you’re cured. You can go back to your old ways. All of your diseases will come screaming back, and you’ll need all your drugs again. It’s the diet and lifestyle choices that made those diseases develop.

[0:51:24] Ashley James: Well, it’s kind of like drinking a poison. If I were to give arsenic to someone and they get sick. Then they take an antidote and they’re like, “Oh, I’m better again.” They keep taking the arsenic.

[0:51:37] Dr. Terry Wahls: I can go back to eating an arsenic.

[0:51:38] Ashley James: Right. The diet is the arsenic, the diet causes these diseases. It’s not that we’re broken. I feel that’s the mentality, and I love that you have a behavioral change model because part of that is the mentality that I’m broken and I need drugs, for example. I’m not against drugs. They’re not the only thing out there. It’s certainly not the cure if the diet is the poison.

[0:52:04] Dr. Terry Wahls: What we teach is we’re creating health by helping you learn health behaviors, health-promoting behaviors. What I can’t predict for anyone is how much health recovery is possible. Typically, I am quite delighted that vastly more health recovery is possible than the person had dared to hope for because they were so ill that they had been afraid. They just couldn’t know what might be possible.

As we embrace those health behaviors, and I get them to understand how to shop and make menus and eat and cook and prepare all that. We teach them how to find joy and meaning in their life as it is. How to manage their stress levels and self-care. To go outside and move and be at the sunlight again. What they discover is the blood pressure begins to improve. The blood sugars begin to improve. Their mood improves. They were having joyful relationships with their family.

The guys come in smiling and say, “You know what doc, you didn’t tell me that my love life would come back.” So they’re smiling and the ladies are in because they’re so pleased that they’re getting their old bodies back. They’re losing weight getting back to a younger, healthier self.

[0:53:34] Ashley James: Beautiful. I interviewed Dr. Joel Khan and he said to me he was very excited for the research that you’re doing now. I think it was specifically around a whole food plant-based diet. Can you shed some light on that?

[0:53:51] Dr. Terry Wahls: What Joel is he is more of a low-fat person, and he is very much into plants. He comes out from a cardiology perspective. Where Joel and I agree is that it’s certainly possible to have a vegetarian diet. He and I recognize that you got to follow your B12 very closely, you want to follow your mineral status, you want to follow your protein status. If you do a low-fat diet, you still have to maintain your Omega-3 fatty acid, Omega-6 fatty acid ratios. It’s the ratio that’s also very important in addition to having sufficient fats in your brains are fat.

The research that I do uses the Wahls Paleo diet or the Wahls elimination diet. In my clinical practice, we do take care of people who are vegetarian and vegans. We have a diet that Joel Khan would be thrilled that we are using. That’s my clinical practice for people who are vegetarian or vegan for their religious beliefs or who may have a particular reason to follow a lower cholesterol diet because of their underlying heart disease. In my MS clinical research, we do either the Wahls paleo or the Wahls elimination diet.

[0:55:18] Ashley James: Explain how we can get healthy fats from our diet to support our brain? People are worried about Alzheimer’s and dementia. That’s on the rise. Of course, not only MS, but that there’s other neurological problems that look like they’re on the rise.

[0:55:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: Absolutely. It’s very scary the rates of cognitive decline, early dementias—early dementias in the 40s that are being found. Of course, there are many factors with that. Part of that is a diet that drives your insulin up very high. If you have a diet that’s high in carbs, that can drive your insulin high. When the insulin is high, your brain can’t clear out some of the toxic trash, the beta-amyloid as well. So you’re at higher risk for cognitive decline. If you have more toxins, heavy metals mercury, arsenic, you’re at higher rates for cognitive decline. If you have unrecognized gluten sensitivity, you’re at a much higher rate of cognitive decline. If you aren’t physically active, you have a higher rate of cognitive decline. If you smoked or exposed to air pollution, you have higher rates of cognitive decline. If you are lonely, you have higher rates of cognitive decline. So there are many, many, many factors here.

When we see people, we talk about the many things that are under our control that can markedly reduce your risk of cognitive decline. When I first started doing my research in 2010, I was the only person doing a food-based dietary intervention. I was the only person doing a multi-modal diet stress reduction exercise intervention. The feeling was that if you didn’t do one like you at a time if you had a good effect we wouldn’t know the mechanism. Fortunately, my chair of medicine said, “The question is, can people do what you did? If they do, what happens?” We saw that yes they could do it, we didn’t hurt them, and we had dramatically favorable results. We’re doing more of these complicated diet stress reduction exercise studies. The NIH is now doing more of these diet and lifestyle studies to look at other autoimmune conditions and other issues of cognitive decline.

[0:58:10] Ashley James: I know you said you’re just doing basic labs, but did you see that in the labs, that they’re autoimmune—whatever markers you use for autoimmune—that they were going down as well as healing mitochondria?

[0:58:25] Dr. Terry Wahls: As you address the diet and lifestyle factors, you can do autoimmunity panels. There are much more sophisticated autoantibodies that look at brain structures, look at thyroid, look at bone that you could see someone comes in with many autoantibodies. If we teach them how to address diet and lifestyle and adapt these health behaviors, we can see these autoantibody profiles come down. In the VA, thyroid disease is very, very common. Having people implement the Wahls protocol, and we followed their thyroid antibodies, we could see the antibodies coming down nicely. That’s a lovely marker that people can use to monitor that they’re having a great biologic success at changing the trajectory of their illness. If they can go back to being autoantibody negative, they have reversed the damage. Whereas if you continue to have autoantibodies, we know that you’re damaging yourself and you are developing a more progressive organ damage.

[0:59:53] Ashley James: Right. Whether it’s the thyroid or the mitochondria or wherever the autoimmune is presenting. That’s such a clear picture that helps motivate the patient to keep going because it’s going in the right direction.

[1:00:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: Even more important than blood work, I talk about your biosensor. Again, this is something I’ve learned both from my own personal experience and from working with veterans is to help educate them to identify their subtle symptoms. For me, because of my trigeminal neuralgia, if I have changes in sensation on my face that will come up. I know that if I don’t address that my face pain, electrical face pain due to trigeminal neuralgia would turn on, and I will have horrific levels of pain in very short order. That’s my biosensor. So I talk to my patients, “Okay. We want you to figure out what are your subtle symptoms that are sort of your warning that there’s more incipient trouble ahead for you? If you can identify these subtle symptoms that are your biosensor, you can use that to help monitor your environment. If your biosensor is turning on, then you can sit back and think, “Okay, is there something in my diet that I have a food sensitivity to? Was I exposed to more toxins? Is there a bigger situational stressor that’s going on? Am I not outside enough? Has my vitamin D level fallen? Am I having a viral infection?””

I help people tune in to their subtle symptoms for their biosensor. Then help them develop that internal checklist of what are all the environmental exposures I could run through in my mind to see, could this be what’s making my biosensor turn on today?

[1:01:58] Ashley James: Oh, I love it.

[1:01:58] Dr. Terry Wahls: And then, what could I do about it?

[1:02:00] Ashley James: Right. I love that because they’re tuning into their own body. I interviewed Palmer Kippola who had MS for many years. I believe it was over 10 years that as she was adjusting her diet and figuring out what worked for her, she made a checklist and she realized that she could predict if she would have within a month if she would have a relapse based on sleep, stress, nutrition, if she sort of partied too hard, or whatever it was, or had too much stress. She saw that if she didn’t get her supplements or her nutrition or these really important factors, if she just stopped practicing self-care as much, she could predict. She could go, “Okay. This month I’m going to have one. I’m going to have a relapse.” Sure enough, it was predictable, but if she stayed on top of all of the things that you teach then she wouldn’t.

[1:02:59] Dr. Terry Wahls: All the self-care.

[1:03:00] Ashley James: Yeah, all the self-care. Everything that you teach and the diet she would have zero relapses. It was just evident to her that something is as simple as managing stress, moving your body in a way that brings you joy, hydrating nutrition, nutrition, nutrition, diet being the number one thing, and sleep. Even a lack of sleep and stress, those two combined would be enough for her to have a relapse. She just saw that taking care of yourself on all these levels is so important.

[1:03:35] Dr. Terry Wahls: Think about what’s happening in the world right now. This pandemic of the coronavirus that has people afraid, have governments trying to figure out how to contain the spread of the infection. There’s a lot of fear. People don’t know what to do. If you have this fear, this isolation, and terrible diets that make people at much greater risk to have the viral infection and a greater risk to have a more serious infection. Think of the people over the age of 60, an autoimmune disease or on chronic medication. If we could help them understand that the concepts that I teach, the self-cares, the quality of your diet, the meditation, being outside with some sunlight and fresh air. These things are addressing those factors that put you at greater risk.

[1:04:42] Ashley James: Yes. It’s protective on all fronts. I love it. You mentioned in the evolution of man that there were times where, in the winter, those who lived in the North didn’t have access to plants. We either had to fast, or we could eat a game if we caught it.

[1:05:03] Dr. Terry Wahls: Right. If the hunt was good.

[1:05:06] Ashley James: Yeah. Whatever we could gain access to, but throughout our history, there have been times where we had to fast. Where there was famine we had to fast and our body figured out how to burn fat for fuel so that we could fast. I believe it was back in 2012 that the discovery of autophagy that occurs during fasting. Autophagy being the body’s own ability to digest pathological tissue and scar tissue. Then there’s a huge spike in human growth hormone and in stem cells. Have you looked into or experimented on yourself with using fasting to heal your lesions?

[1:05:44] Dr. Terry Wahls: Probably about 18 months now. My typical eating pattern is one meal a day. So I’ll have a two-hour window where I’m eating food. Then, one week a month, I will have a calorie-restricted diet so that I’ll have about 500 calories a day during that week. By the end of the week, I am pretty hungry. After that then I have a higher protein diet. That’s when my stem cells have all woken up. They’re like making the new younger Terry. I really appreciate that. My family and my kids are like, “Your hair is grayer—yes, mom—but you keep looking younger and younger and younger.” That fasting and that intermittent calorie restriction does increase the number of stem cells that your bone marrow makes and releases into the bloodstream in the periphery. It does improve your ability to repair your blood vessels, your heart, your brain, your pancreas. It makes for actually younger fat because your fat turns out to be a hormone organ.

Intermittent fasting, calorie restriction great for you. If you do intermittent water fasting you for sure need to have your personal medical team supervise that.

[1:07:19] Ashley James: Absolutely. I love that you address that you’re eating very good nutrition after fasting or after a time period of calorie restriction because those stem cells need nutrition to make healthy new cells.

[1:07:36] Dr. Terry Wahls: To make the new you.

[1:07:37] Ashley James: Right. I’ve seen some people come off of a fast and then eat ice cream. I’m like, “You’re just building cells made of ice cream. That’s not conducive to building a healthy body.” We have to remember, everything we put in our mouth is building our cells.

[1:07:53] Dr. Terry Wahls: Becomes you. Everything you eat will become you.

[1:07:57] Ashley James: Do you want to be a doughnut?

[1:08:01] Dr. Terry Wahls: We want to be eating foods that our great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather would recognize as food.

[1:08:09] Ashley James: Yes, I love it. As part of your protocol, is there a percentage of food that’s raw so that we get the enzymes? A percentage of food that’s cooked?

[1:08:20] Dr. Terry Wahls: Again, I personalize this based on the circumstances. The simplest way to think about this is who are feeding our microbiome and us. I have you monitor your bowel movements. Are you passing rocks, logs, snakes, pudding, or tea? If you’re passing rocks and dry logs, then your microbiome needs more fiber and more fermented food. So more raw vegetables, more salads, more resistance starch such as inulin. If you’re pooping snakes, that’s fine. If the snakes are getting into your pants that is not socially fine so you’re going to have to back off on the fermented food and the raw things. If you’re pooping pudding and tea, again, that’s not good. You have to back off.

So some people can only have soups and stews because they have inflammatory bowel disease and they’re having pudding and tea. Some people can’t manage the snakes because they have a neurologic disease. They have difficulty controlling their sphincter and they have too many accidents. I don’t want anybody to have rocks and dry logs. I would much rather that they have enough fiber so that they can easily pass their bowel movements.

There’s this stool chart that’s like one to seven. It’s way too confusing to keep track the numbers, but all my patients know when I’m talking rocks, dry logs, logs, snakes, pudding, and tea. They know exactly what I’m talking about.

[1:10:07] Ashley James: So ideally, it’s logs but not dry logs?

[1:10:10] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. It’s really soft easily passed bowel movements that you have a couple times a day, you’re not having fecal accidents.

[1:10:20] Ashley James: Can you tell us more about the Wahls behavioral change model? Maybe teach us a little bit because I know the listeners been piqued. Their interest is piqued and they want to make changes in their life. Maybe you could teach us a little bit.

[1:10:34] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah. Our brains, through evolution and all of the random mutations that occurred in our DNA, if something was pleasurable and we did more of it and it was good for the species, that mutation was passed on. So in general, we’re wired to crave pleasure and comfort. We’re also wired to be much more interested in what’s happening right now than what might happen in the future. So if I tell you to make this change to give up today’s pleasure, that ice cream, to prevent trouble from being demented in 20 years that’s very difficult. That goes against all of the biologic priming of your ancestors over thousands of generations. That’s incredibly difficult.

Then if I put the ice cream on the counter in a bowl, I put some chocolate sauce on it, it’s extremely difficult for you. You can just taste it, it’s right there in your mouth, it’d be so yummy. But there are some circumstances where you and I would be willing to go into a burning building to save something or someone that we cared so deeply about. That we won’t care about that bowl of ice cream. My question is, is there anything in your life that you care so much about that if you knew that prison or that thing was asleep in that house we see some smoke coming out of the window, without thinking you’d be in there getting that item or that person out. If there is nothing then I’m going to have to help them. I have more join in their life right now because they’re too depressed. If there is something that they care that much about, then there’s a possibility that we can help them give up on the ice cream. Because if I can link the decision that I’m going to give up on the ice cream because I care so much about my grandson that I would take out of that burning house because I want to be there to see my grandson go to school. I want to see my grandson get married. I want to dance with my daughter at her wedding.

If I can help them understand the possibility of why eating vegetables, meditating, and walking will help you achieve that, and let’s figure out what’s the next small actionable step. We’ve got 15 steps along the way to help people go from their current diet and lifestyle to the more therapeutic diet and lifestyle. That’s part of that whole process that we use. When people understand, when I explain to them that of course, it’s very hard to give up today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s benefit. That’s biologic. We’ve had millions of generations where that biology has been reinforced. That is an incredible ask for you to give up today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s theoretic benefit, but we will all do it for things that deeply matter to us such as our children, our grandchildren, or your fellow soldiers in an army unit under fire, or a purpose that you so deeply care about, or perhaps your grand your grandfather’s pocket knife that he gave you, and he’s dead, and by God, you’re not going to lose that.

People are items of tremendous emotional value. You’re willing to risk pain and suffering and potential harm to go safe. We, in fact, are going to give up today’s pleasure, but we have to put it in context for someone to be willing to do that. Then help them make the small actionable next step to be successful.

[1:15:06] Ashley James: I love that you have 15 small steps because it seems almost impossible to go from eating no vegetables at all or people eat potatoes, because they think that’s a vegetable in the form of fries, to go from that nine cups.

[1:15:21] Dr. Terry Wahls: There’s a lot of steps that we go through to help people be successful. You have to grow the insights to understand how it’s possible. You have to connect the motivation. You have to help people find joy in their life as it is right now.

[1:15:42] Ashley James: The listener was following you as you were describing that. In their mind, mentally threw out the ice cream to save their favorite person or object from a burning building. What next steps could they take today?

[1:16:00] Dr. Terry Wahls: Again, it will depend on the person and their circumstances. What are their diagnoses? What am I helping them address? The first step that I really want people to think deeply about is what do you want your health for? Spend some time journaling about that: what I want my health for? That is the beginning of the process because whenever you’re changing your behavior, you can sort of think about the last time you changed a health behavior, broke a bad habit, made a new habit. The reason you were successful was that you decided it was worth it to you to put in that effort. We never make those kinds of changes just because I came over and said, “You got to start walking an hour every day.” When we make a new habit or extinguish an old bad habit it’s because I made the internal decision that my desire for change is great enough that I’m willing to put in the effort.

The very first step for any change is this really deep reflection on what do I want my health for? Because I have to grow your desire to put in the work.

[1:17:43] Ashley James: Yes. Well, look at you. You were in a wheelchair, in a zero-gravity chair and months later, you were walking without assistance.

[1:17:54] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m walking without assistance, and within a year, 18.5 miles on a bike ride.

[1:17:59] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Those who are sick and suffering right now and immobile, know that within a year you could be mobile, you could be out of pain, you can end the suffering.

[1:18:16] Dr. Terry Wahls: I spend a fair amount of time helping people understand that their life has meaning and they could have joy now in their circumstances as they are right now even if they’re in a wheelchair, even if they’re having pain, even if they have tremendous sorrow because they’ve lost someone who is deeply, deeply important to them.

[1:18:47] Ashley James: It’s needing to shift the mindset first. That’s where it really allows them to-

[1:18:57] Dr. Terry Wahls: All change begins. All change begins. First, with understanding why I want to make that change.

[1:19:07] Ashley James: You had to overcome a lot of—maybe you’re just a black sheep because you had to have a mindset to be so different than your training as an MD. You’re not trained as an MD to look at food and nutrition. Like you said, you started out by going to the Cleveland Clinic and doing the chemotherapy and doing all the drugs and doing everything. You were a really good patient.

[1:19:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: I absolutely believe in all those drugs. I still take gabapentin, a small dose. The gabapentin, if I don’t take any, my face pain will come back. I take small doses. I’m pain-free. There’s absolutely a role for medication for some conditions. Some people may need disease-modifying drugs. I also want to tell your listeners that I did all of this to slow my decline. I had no hope of recovery. I had accepted that there’d be—with progressive MS—no return of functions once lost. I couldn’t sit up, my pain was getting more and more severe, my brain fog was more troublesome. I knew I would probably soon be forced to stop working, but I felt like I have to do everything that I possibly can. I have young kids. My kids are in high school and junior high. I was still doing my tiny simple work out. I’m still doing everything that I can: reading the basic science, experimenting on myself because I wanted them to see that life’s not fair, but so what? You don’t give up, you just keep doing the best that you can.

[1:21:06] Ashley James: So that was your mindset, that you were a fighter but you were also doing it for those you love, your children.

[1:21:12] Dr. Terry Wahls: I was modeling for my kids that life’s not fair but you do the best that you can anyway. I was modeling for them how I wanted them to face their greatest challenge in life. That was my why.

[1:21:30] Ashley James: I’m moved to tears. I’m just thinking about here you were just wanting to slow down the progression so that you could be there longer for your children, but also that you could demonstrate being a fighter. Out of all of this, you have helped so many people, so many people.

[1:21:51] Dr. Terry Wahls: When I was walking around—as you have a progressive illness, progressive neurologic illness, you finally get to a point where you take each day as it unfolds because I knew I had an incurable progressive illness. My pain is gone, my fatigue is gone. I’m walking the neighborhood with walking sticks and without walking sticks. I’m still taking each day one day at a time because I don’t know what any of this really means. It was the day that I got on my bike, that I was able to bike around the block, that I understood that who knew what might be possible. That the current understanding of MS was incomplete. As I said, my wife’s crying, my kids are crying, I’m crying. Actually, I’m crying now too because that was such a momentous moment. That’s when I began to have hope again. It’s like, “Oh my God. How much recovery is possible?”

[1:22:59] Ashley James: Yes. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself and you unlocked that. Then you started to see it, but it’s the mentality, it’s the mindset. We need to adopt the mindset that it is possible to heal. That a diagnosis is not a life sentence no matter what the doctors say because so many doctors tell their patients what they have been told, which is, “This is progressive. You’re never going to get better.” The fact is no one knows for sure, only God. No one knows for sure what is a life sentence and what isn’t, but the body has an ability to heal itself. We need to hold on to hope and believe that we can heal and then take the actions and fight for ourselves and fight for those we love. You did that and look, you’re creating a ripple that is going around the world and is saving millions of lives. They now get to ride bikes with their children because of you.

[1:24:04] Dr. Terry Wahls: They have meaning to their life. That they have joy and purpose. Some people get on their bikes again, some do not, but some find that they still have a very meaningful and joyful life. That their purpose is modeling for their kids that you keep doing the best you can.

[1:24:27] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your story. We didn’t break down your diet specifically but those resources are available. I’d love for you to point us in that direction. Of course, listeners can buy your book. If a listener wants to adapt their diet to heal themselves using food as nutrition, what’s the best place that they can start?

[1:24:53] Dr. Terry Wahls: Go to my website terrywahls.com/diet. We have a one-page handout that’s a great resource. We have many, many resources on the website to get you going. I certainly want you to pick up the book. Even if you’ve gotten the first book, the new book has so much more research on epigenetics, the microbiome on neuro rehab. We have more details on oxalates, histamines, FODMAPs. I’ve added the Wahls elimination diet. We have a lot more information on ketosis, how we monitor it, and the many different ways of using fasting strategies to get into ketosis. It’s 30% new material. We have lots of bonuses that I talk about in the book that we’ll have for you. If you go to terrywahls.com/bonus, you’ll learn more about how to get those bonuses that you’d be able to get by ordering the book.

[1:26:01] Ashley James: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It has been such a pleasure. You are welcome back. Anytime you want a platform to teach we would love to have you back. To wrap up today’s interview, is there anything left unsaid or anything you want to say to the listener, make sure that you leave the listener with?

[1:26:22] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’d like you to swap out the sugar for berries and to try having some more greens.

[1:26:30] Ashley James: Nine cups. I love it. Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to have you here today.

[1:26:39] Dr. Terry Wahls: Thank you.

[1:26:41] Outro: If you love this interview and you love the Learn True Health Podcast, please join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. You’re supporting the podcast and you’re also supporting yourself and your family and you’re continuing your education to learn how to achieve true health. This isn’t a diet. The membership isn’t a specific diet. It’s just teaching you how to eat more nutritious food, how to incorporate whole foods that are unprocessed into your diet in a way that your children will love, in a way that your whole family will love, in a way that is quick, and will save you money. We teach you how to save you time in the kitchen, money in the kitchen, and how to grow your health by using your kitchen.

So please, join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. We make the videos fun and we share wonderful, wonderful recipes. I’m so excited for you to join. The members, the listeners who have joined already have shared some amazing testimonials. One listener, within five days of beginning to incorporate what she learned from the membership her chronic headaches went away and her fatigue went away. How cool is that? So join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. I can’t wait to see you there.

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417 Corona Virus, What Naturopathic Doctors Are Saying About The COVID-19 Outbreak, Vitamins, Herbs, Self-Quarantine, Social Distancing, Immune System Support 0

Mar 16, 2020

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Coronavirus and Natural Medicine

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Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 417. Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. In the light of the coronavirus, I’ve been in contact with several Naturopathic doctors and medical doctors who have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on right now around the world and have been watching the studies that have been coming out of China and other places. Interesting studies. Korea and China have found some things that are working better than just waiting it out. They’ve been publishing these. The doctors that I’ve been talking to have been putting their finger on the pulse and really making sure that they are prepared, and they’re letting all their patients know what they think they should do. I wanted to pass that information along to you.

Some people feel we’re overreacting with the quarantine, the self-quarantine. I live in the state of Washington and we are self-quarantined. Some people feel were under-reacting. Whatever your position is, we are all affected. Borders are shutting down, restaurants and bars are shutting down. We’re being asked to stay in our homes for the next few weeks. All the schools in Washington and several other states have shut down. Whatever your belief system is around the virus, whether you think it’s a conspiracy, whether you believe the mainstream narrative. Let’s err on the side of caution. Let’s not give in to panic because that lowers the immune system. Don’t allow fear to run your life because that lowers the immune system. Any virus can be potentially fatal depending on your health status.

We all have a family member or friend who is at risk, who’s vulnerable. Whether it’s a grandparent or a friend’s grandparent or a child with asthma, immunocompromised child. Maybe you’re in total health but others around you, others that you could have contact with may not be. The best thing to do is to err on the side of caution. If you can, if your family is capable of doing it, if this doesn’t affect the income of your family to self-quarantine, if you need to leave the house, obviously you’re taking measures like washing your hands and face. Also, take your shoes off and leave them outside of your home. Take your clothing off the moment you get home and throw it in the wash and take a shower right away. There’s certain things we can do to lower our exposure, but the fact is that this virus does live on surfaces up to I’ve heard nine days, I’ve heard 12 days. It can incubate in someone for up to 2 weeks. So you may have it right now and not know it for two weeks.

Again, giving in to fear will decrease our immune health. So what can we do? We can all take precautions. There are antiviral herbs. I’m going to give you a list of some herbs that you can add in your cooking, you can add in tea, you can take encapsulated form, you can take in tincture form or an essential oil form. You’re going to want to do your own research as to how much of these herbs to take. It’s best not to overdo anything. I’m also going to give you a list of some vitamins, some supplements that the Naturopathic doctors are telling their patients to take. There have been some studies that show that they help to give a positive outcome with the coronavirus.

Vitamin A

The first is vitamin A. If anyone is experiencing upper respiratory problems you can take high-dose vitamin A. This is according to a Naturopathic doctor that’s very experienced that I was talking to recently. He says for 3 days you can take 100,000 international units of vitamin A and that’s not beta-carotene. You want to get high-dose vitamin A that is not beta-carotene. Then after that, you can take 25,000 international units a day. This is just for preventive measures during the flu season or during an outbreak.

Vitamin C

Vitamin C. In China, they’re doing high-dose vitamin C intravenously. They’re showing that that has been creating positive outcomes with the coronavirus. For just a regular dose every day, take between 2,000 and 6,000 milligrams a day. You want to spread it out throughout the day so that you don’t get diarrhea because high dose vitamin C does cause diarrhea. It’s best to get powder. That way you can dose it slowly throughout the day. If you can get between 2,000 and 6,000 milligrams of vitamin C in you every day during flu season that would be fantastic.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D. If you have your levels tested every year and you know you’re low like let’s say your reading is below 40 for example, 40 or 30. Then you can easily take between 5,000 and 10,000 international units of vitamin D a day. These are all adult doses. You’d have to speak to your pediatrician about doses for children. My son, our pediatrician has him on 1,000 international units of vitamin D a day during the flu season.

Zinc

Zinc. They have seen, there’s been a study on the Covid-19 coronavirus where they found that zinc and a malaria drug combined, they did this in China and they did it in Korea, but they used a different drug. That you’re using the drug in order to increase zinc’s intake. It increases the uptake of zinc into the cell. They’re finding that zinc stops the cell from producing RNA for the virus. That’s very promising. I’ve talked to several health professionals about this. We want to take zinc every day. This would be just a great general practice during the flu season anyway. The Mayo Clinic says that between 8 milligrams and 11 milligrams is a good recommended daily dose, but that seems kind of low. The National Institutes of Health consider that 40 milligrams a day for adults is the upper limit dose. They recommend not going above 40 milligrams a day and that they say four milligrams a day for infants under the age of six months. That’s the National Institute of Health.

Again, any supplementation for your children, I’d talk to a Naturopathic pediatrician, but there you have it with zinc, basically 40 milligrams or less a day. Taking any supplements in high doses can cause diarrhea or other symptoms. You want to start gradually, slowly, and increase to your bowel tolerance basically it says. It’s how they put it for vitamin C but also for zinc. High levels of zinc too can cause diarrhea as well as headaches and nausea.

Again, we don’t want to overdo anything. We don’t want to harm our body by freaking out and taking high doses of something that ends up causing other symptoms. The point is we just want to support the immune system. What’s been proven to be supportive is vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc. There are herbs that have several studies, many studies that support the body in fighting off viruses in general. There aren’t a lot of studies around Covid-19 specifically and herbs, but what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of herbs out there that support the body. For example, basil.

Basil

There was a four-week study in 24 healthy adults were supplementing with 300 milligrams of holy basil extract significantly increased levels of helper T-cells and natural killer cells. They’re both immune cells that help protect and defend your body from viral infections. Things like holy basil, that’s something that you could eat every day in your food. You could put it in salads and soups or you could get an extract or an encapsulated form.

Lemon Balm

Lemon balm is a fantastic antiviral. It’s great to make a tea out of it. A lot of these herbs, not all of them but a lot of them, you can mix together, buy in bulk. For example, mix together and just drink all day long as an herbal tea. So lemon balm, oregano, sage, fennel, garlic. Garlic is something I wouldn’t necessarily make a tea out of, but you can eat it raw and you can eat it cooked. Peppermint, rosemary. Rosemary has an extract that has been proven to be quite antiviral. Oleanolic acid in rosemary has been displayed to be quite antiviral in several studies against several different kinds of viruses.

Echinacea

Echinacea both is antiviral and boosts the immune system. That’s something again you can get in tea form. Herbal tea, if you take all these antiviral herbs and you mix it together and make a nice tea out of it, that’s very gentle for the body to take it all day long, drink it all day long. If you take capsules or if you take an extract that’s more concentrated and then you have to be careful with the dose. Whereas, it’s easier to dilute. Just take a tablespoon of each dry herb and make a big thing of tea like 60 ounces of tea and then you just sip it all day long. That’s more gentle and it’s less likely that you would accidentally overdose. Tea is the most gentle form of taking herbs. Then the next would be encapsulated. Then the more concentrated extracts or essential oils the more careful you have to be with overdosing.

Elderberry

Elderberry, I’m sure you’ve heard of elderberry extract. There have been several studies on elderberry that’s very exciting. It’s known to suppress viral replication and it stimulates the immune system. Even in a recent study, it showed that elderberry helped to inhibit viruses from entering our cells. That’s something that you can actually get your own elderberries and make your own elderberry syrup. Or you could just buy a bunch of elderberry syrup or you can buy a bunch of elderberries. Kids often love it because it is delicious. That’s definitely something to have stocked up on.

Licorice

Licorice has been known, it’s been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. You have to be careful with licorice if you have high blood pressure. Licorice also is fantastic for depression and anxiety and for people who have lethargy. It has shown to be antiviral against several viruses including severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronaviruses.

Astragalus

Astragalus is another herb in traditional Chinese medicine that has shown to significantly enhance the immune system against viruses.

Ginger

Ginger, and you know, I heard that there were stores that had completely sold out of ginger. I’m not surprised because you can make teas, you can cook with it, and you can make cough syrup with it. It has fantastic compounds that are antiviral, but that also help us throughout the flu season to mitigate several symptoms of the cold or flu.

Dandelion

Dandelion is wonderful to add to your herbal tea blends. It has many medicinal properties including a potent antiviral effect. Several studies showed that dandelion extract reduced or inhibited the replication of some viruses, but it also is wonderful for the liver and for our blood.

There are many different kinds of herbs that we can use. You can go on Google, find the herbs that you like and make a tea. You could buy them on Amazon or there are many co-ops online that will ship herbal blends to you. I say buy it in bulk. Pick a few that sound really delicious together like lemon balm, basil, sage, rosemary, echinacea. Get these loose-leaf basically and then mix them together and every day make a big tea. You don’t even have to heat it. You can put it in a big thing of water overnight and then just drink it the next day. It makes a beautiful tea. You can drink cold or you can drink hot. That way, you’re getting very gentle antiviral herbs into you and into your family and you’re hydrating.

Learn True Health Podcast Episodes

Some episodes for you to listen to. Episode 315 of the Learn True Health podcast I share everything I’ve learned from Naturopaths for what to do when you have a cold or flu to boost the immune system and also to mitigate symptoms. You really want to listen to that episode. I talk about colloidal silver. I talk about specific essential oil blends for respiratory support. Use of the neti pot, use of hydrotherapy to boost the immune system and boost lymphatic flow. You’ll want to listen to episode 315.

Episode 15

So to get to episode 15, you can’t listen to it on iTunes because only the most recent 300 episodes are available. Because this is episode 417, there are 117 episodes that have been pushed off of iTunes. You have to go to learntruehealth.com, my website, or other podcast directories like Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Google Podcasts. There are lots of other podcast directories that you can find episode 15 on or you just go to learntruehealth.com and find episode 15.

Dr. Jenna Jorgensen. She’s a Naturopathic physician and she shares exactly what she has in her medicinal holistic first aid kit and what you should have in your medicine cabinet. All the natural remedies from homeopathy, essential oils, and some really interesting things that you should have in your home for helping you with cold and flu and other just general stuff that happens. If you want to have a Naturopathic kit, basically, a first aid kit, then listen to episode 15 with Dr. Jenna Jorgensen.

Colloidal Silver

Colloidal silver is something that has been proven to be antiviral. You have to make sure that it’s a high-quality colloidal silver. I was just talking to my Naturopath about this last week. She and I both like the brand that Sovereign Silver. You can take it orally, you can gargle with it, and you can use it topically. Some Naturopaths talk about nebulizing it, so inhaling the fine particles. Consult your Naturopathic physician or consult your doctor about that, about nebulizing. The lungs really aren’t meant to have stuff in them. If you’re going to nebulize colloidal silver be very careful because there’s been evidence to suggest that it will accumulate, the colloidal silver would accumulate in the lungs. However, if you are fighting a viral infection, many Naturopaths talk about nebulizing colloidal silver and also nebulizing glutathione to support the lungs.

There are things that you can do to support the lungs using natural medicine, but again, talk to a Naturopathic physician about these specifically. I really want to err on the side of caution here. Don’t just nebulize things randomly as a preventative because you could end up doing damage. We really want to be very careful.

There was several people that died recently in the Middle East because they read something on social media that some kind of rubbing alcohol if they drank it would be a cure for coronavirus. Of course, that killed them. I know you guys, my listeners, are so smart. You guys are smart. You guys wouldn’t buy into a fake meme. I want us to also not overreact. I want us to not under-react, but I definitely don’t want to overreact and an overdose on a natural substance. It’s best to do this all in balance. Before you take anything, just do a little bit of digging and talk to a Naturopathic physician to create your perfect formula of natural immune supportive supplements that you could be taking.

Supplements are generally very, very safe. It is when we go into high doses for long periods of time that we can do damage. So stay within those parameters and just err on the side of caution. Start slow and work your way up like vitamin C. Start with 1000 milligrams and then slowly ramp it up to bowel tolerance. Those are things that are totally proven to be safe.

The best thing we can do is to decrease our stress levels is to err on the side of caution to stay at home as much as possible. You know what’s really interesting? I bet we see a huge decrease in all infections. If you think about it, if we all stay at home as much as possible, we’re probably going to see a huge decrease in all affections across the board. A huge decrease in the spread of all infections. If you can’t stay at home, practice more self-care to decrease stress levels. I’m seeing so many people are so afraid right now. The best thing you can do for your immune system is to stay informed, stay calm. Maybe when you’re drinking your antiviral tea every day, you can imagine that it is supportive of your body every time you sip it, you could imagine that you’re supporting yourself, and your body is strong and healthy and then everyone you love is going to be healthy and safe.

We can just support each other by letting everyone know that we can take vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, and elderberry and other herbs to support our body in the best way we can. Everything that I’ve shared today, I want to make it really clear, I’m not sharing a cure. I’m not saying that any of this will even prevent coronavirus, but what the studies are showing and what the doctors have told me is that these herbs and these supplements support the body. So they might help to mitigate symptoms. In China, several studies are showing that with the use of vitamin C and zinc and other nutrients that they’re finding that those people have better outcomes with their infection. That they have a higher success rate of thriving and living when they used vitamin C when they used other nutrients and herbs versus nothing at all.

Of course, we want to do the best we can to support our body’s ability to heal itself and stay healthy. Please, support yourself by not giving in to the overwhelm. By doing what you can daily to lower your stress levels. Get out in nature. Get out in sunlight. There are studies that show that sunlight is antiviral and getting out in fresh air, grounding yourself. Go stand out in your backyard with your feet in the ground or go lie down in the grass if you can. Go for nature walks. Read some books. Unplug from social media and do things that will decrease your stress. Now is a great time to pull out those board games and play with your family. Please, make an antiviral tea. Take these supplements to support your body’s ability to stay as healthy as it can.

Join our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. We have many health professionals in that Facebook group, and we’re all sharing great information, staying up to date with what we can do to support our immune system and support each other. Please, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. Although I just said stay off of social media, but it’s a really positive place to be, the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’re trying to keep it a very happy and positive place, but also supporting all of our health questions with great information. If you’re looking for a good resource, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’m going to have some great doctors on the show coming up soon to support us around this as well. Please, just keep focusing on decreasing your stress and self-care. I love you all. We’re all going to get through this together. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

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416 Super Human, The Mind's Physiological Effect On The Body And How We Can Harness It To Heal and Create Our Reality, Telekinesis, Extrasensory Perception, Pre-Cognition Experiences, Consciousness & Energy Medicine, Caroline Cory 0

Mar 10, 2020

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Superhuman

https://www.learntruehealth.com/superhuman

Highlights:

Why the Superhuman film was created
How to encourage DNA repair
What vibrational methodology is
The merging process
Release blocks before setting specific intent
Importance of getting to the root cause

In this episode, Caroline Cory shares how people not trained with telekinesis can change pH in water; and how blindfold perception were able to do those. She also talks about the importance of releasing blocks before setting specific intent.

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. If you love the Learn True Health podcast, as I know you do, come join our membership go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s a learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. We have some wonderful lessons on boosting the immune system and foods that you can use that are in your kitchen right now to fight off viruses. Come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen and learn how to use food as medicine to heal your body and keep you healthy. Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen.

[0:00:42] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 416. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show Caroline Cory, who’s an award-winning filmmaker. Oh man, I love your most recent movie Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible. You produced some wonderful documentaries. I really am excited for my listeners to check out your documentaries because they’re so relevant to helping people heal their bodies. We get to a point where we’re trying everything, we’re trying all kinds of physical medicine or maybe we have emotional work to go through or maybe we’re really stuck in our life. The one thing we’re not tapping into, which is our most powerful tool, is our mind and our consciousness and our mind’s ability to shape and change our reality. I know that sounds like a bunch of new-age stuff, but your movie goes through the science of it. You have so many wonderful science experiments with PhDs who do this for a living. By the end of the movie, you walk away a believer that the mind has the ability to change our reality and our mind shapes our reality. It can be a very beautiful thing to cultivate that. Caroline, welcome to the show.

[0:02:19] Caroline Cory: Hey, Ashley. Thanks for having me. It’s great to connect with you. You said it, it’s exactly what you said. We don’t talk about this that much. Actually, I take that back. Everybody’s been telling us and we’ve been hearing over and over that the mind affects our body, our health, our stress level. Even in the mainstream medical field, we know now that meditation is helpful for reducing stress and imbalances and things like that. What I wanted to do with this film is to take it to the next level. It’s not just theory anymore, it’s like show me how. How it’s possible that the mind is actually having a physiological effect on my body? That’s exactly why I made this film because it’s no longer new age stuff, just theory. This is the proof, this is the demonstration, these are the devices, this is the science and this is very real, very measurable.

[0:03:30] Ashley James: I like that you said the mind is having a physiological effect on the body.

[0:03:36] Caroline Cory: Yeah, measurable.

[0:03:39] Ashley James: It’s measurable. You can see it. My experience of this, back in 2005, I became a master practitioner trainer of neuro-linguistic programming timeline therapy and hypnosis. I often attended the American Board of Hypnotherapy conventions that they would have. Actually, the last one must have just happened, but it was every President’s Day. They did it for like 20 years. They would have, as the opening evening, it was like Friday evening, they would have all of us in a big ballroom. There’d be two or three or a hundred or thousand or however many people there are. It was a big ballroom, lots of people. The first event would be this man who is a Ph.D. professor. He taught at one of those big universities in California. He would come on stage. He was very factual and he talked about telekinesis. Of course, we’re all like, “Okay, this is a little out there. We’re at hypnotherapy convention.” His day job is teaching physics. He believes in reality and in measuring reality, he’s a physicist. He would take this giant iron bar that was maybe two inches thick, a very big iron bar used in making the railroads. He would have us all come up and touch it and pound on it and feel that it was absolutely solid. It was solid. It was not a magic act at all. It was solid.

He would hold it in both hands. He would pause and he would meditate with it. Then he turned it to a pretzel. We’d gasp like, “What just happened?” Then he’d say, “Okay. Now, feel it. Touch it.” Again, we’d come up and it would be completely solid. Then he’d spend the next few minutes explaining what happened. That our mind has the ability to speed up the matter, to speed up all the electrons and all the matter inside that iron bar to the point where he could mold it. Then he’d teach us how to do it. We’d all be holding lots of cutlery. He’d hand out silver cutlery so we’re all holding—I remember holding a knife and my friend, who’s also from Canada, was holding a fork. She and I had known each other for several years. I’ve known her not to have some superhuman powers. She was just regular like me. She’s holding the fork and she’s practicing what he said to do, which is with your mind imagine that the spoon is bending or that the fork is bending. Imagine that you’re speeding up the electrons.

I was having a hard time because I really wanted it, my knife, I really wanted my knife to move. I really, really, really wanted it. I just desperately wanted it too much and I wasn’t actually just doing it. Kind of like if you have your arm resting and you just say, “I really want to move my arm.” But you don’t actually just do it. Wanting it doesn’t happen. Wanting doesn’t make it happen but doing it does. I was not as successful as I was doing it. I looked over at my friend who was holding the fork. She’s holding the base of the fork. She’s holding it up in front of her looking at the four tongs of the fork. I’d believe you if someone told me that they like dropped acid in my water before the event because I watched, as she was just gently staring at it, and I watched as every single tongue moved away from each other and then curled up. They all curled together. I looked around the room and some people were successful, some people weren’t. I watched as people, with their minds, bent spoons, twisted knives around.

Some people would hold the knife and they’d sort of warm-up the molecules with their mind and the knife would be malleable. They could turn it to a pretzel and then it would harden again. Whereas some people could just look at the object and move it. He would come every year to the American Board of Hypnotherapy Convention. It was the highlight of the weekend, obviously. Seeing that with my own eyes left me, obviously, questioning my reality, but also left me in awe of the untapped potential of the human mind.

[0:08:27] Caroline Cory: Exactly. Absolutely. That’s it. People don’t realize that this is real. They can do this. That’s what I was trying to do with the film to make it very kind of an everyday thing. That’s why we didn’t just show people who are super trained. I had, in fact, guests who had never done anything like this. They would come. We would teach them in a couple of hours the basis of telekinesis and they would be able to move stuff like it’s no big deal. That is exactly what I want people to take away from this. It’s just an untapped potential, an untapped power. We just have to do it like you said. Stop talking about it. Let’s just do it. What was the name of this physicist?

[0:09:26] Ashley James: I knew you’re going to ask me that. I forget his name off top of my head, but if I remember I’ll tell you. I think he has since retired. It’s been a few years since I’ve been back to the conventions.

[0:09:41] Caroline Cory: There’s a lot of people as you saw in the film as well. There are quite a few scientists that we were able to bring together in the film. Of course, doing four different subjects. That’s exactly what I want people to take away from this. It’s not just a theory when they see other people on camera. Don’t forget, it’s even harder when we’re filming because you have this stress. You want to succeed. Even though it’s edited eventually, but then it’s one take. We don’t cut when we are doing the experiment, during the experiment. You can literally see the object move. It’s even more stressful like I said because you have cameras all around us. You have staff looking. The crew looking at it. “Is this going to work? Is this going to work?” It’s that much more tension and stress on you. Even under those conditions, when it works, it’s pretty amazing. That’s what I’m hoping people will realize to just try it. In fact, we’re doing a seminar. We’re doing workshops teaching everything that’s in the film. The telekinesis, the change in the pH in the water, the blindfold perception everything that’s in there we’re teaching in workshops. Because of the reaction of the people who are watching, like the crew, for example, some of them were kind of familiar with the topic. Most of them weren’t. When they would see this, their reaction would be like, “Wow. Wait a minute. I want to do this. Can I try this How come this person could do it the first time?

In fact, I keep getting just from the trailer that’s been out there now a few months so people are sending us texts and emails like, “Hey, are you teaching this? Where can I learn this? My kid wants to learn this.” It’s really more pop culture than we think. If it’s packaged and presented in the right way as opposed to this kind of strange new age thing that only a few people can do. You know what I mean? It’s just like, “Hey. It’s just a real thing. Have fun with it. You are your own superhero.” That’s what it’s about.

[0:12:27] Ashley James: I love it. Talking about the real applications of you go through in your movie and you show how we can use our mind to change pH really quickly. Within minutes, you can actually. There’s a great scientific experiment in a lab where you change the pH of water with your mind. Be able to move things with your mind. What I love is that your friend, who had an eye condition that left her almost blind, it was very hard for her to see. Within two weeks of using these techniques, she was able to read again. Not because she healed her eye but because she was able to perceive letters with her mind. That they’re using these techniques to teach blind people how to even see and read. You have these video, the part of the movie is following these children who become blindfolded and are able to read books blindfolded and able to run outside and play soccer blindfolded. It’s something that even adults can be trained to do to be able to perceive reality.

What you proposed was that you and the PhDs that you’re working with propose that, our order is wrong. We think our eyes perceive things, the messages get sent to our brain, and then we perceive reality. What it’s being proposed is that we are actually perceiving reality before our eyes perceive it. That our eyes kind of are the secondary system to go, “Okay, yes. I thought that was there and it actually is there.” Our brain has the ability to both intake and perceive information from the outside world, but also to influence it.

[0:14:35] Caroline Cory: Yeah. It’s consciousness if you will because your consciousness is non-local so it’s tapping into a unified field. It’s tapping into an information field whether you know it or not, whether you feel it or not, you understand or not. You are bigger than your body so your consciousness is constantly retrieving that information first. Then the brain, the physical brain, translates that information into a visual data. Then you see or you hear what your consciousness had already tapped into. It is the other way around. Whereas we are not just taught, but we’re literally programmed to think that what you see is what is real, what you see or what you hear is what is. Everything else doesn’t exist. That’s a big problem because, first of all, the order is wrong, like you just said. Also, if you keep convincing yourself that it’s only what you see and what you hear that exists and nothing else counts, it’s almost like you’re discounting what your consciousness is doing spontaneously, which is tapping spontaneously in this unified information field all the time and retrieving this information all the time.

This is a paradigm shift. This is a completely different perspective on reality. We show this in the film. It’s not just a few kids somewhere in the UK because they’re doing the specific training. They’re all over. We went to Utah, we went to Germany, Russia, Romania. There’s a lot of groups that we didn’t even include in the film. Mexico, India. We just want to—it’s obvious if the film gets very, very long so we just went to enough places, shown enough people of all ages, different backgrounds. By the way, the methodology is actually different.

Some folks use a vibrational methodology, meaning they’re tapping into the information field through vibration, reading the information as a vibration, and then translating it into a visual data. This is one group. The other groups do something completely different. They use visualization and, of course, intent. Especially with the kids, it’s so easy to teach the kids basically. Really allowing your consciousness to be in the universe, accept that you are everywhere in the universe, that there’s light everywhere, and then to bring that through the physical brain, the physical body, and translate that into the visual data. Then you start to see. It sounds crazy but it works. It’s in the film. There are people from all over doing it.

[0:17:56] Ashley James: I want to back up and get to know you a little bit, get to know why did you create this film? What happened in your life? Because this is a huge project. This is a huge project that took years and a lot of energy, a lot of time and money to create this beautiful documentary. What happened in your life that motivated you to put forth the effort to build this and create this documentary?

[0:18:30] Caroline Cory: Actually, since I was very, very young, even at the age of five, I could perceive subtle energy, not just aura, but I could see basically the energy field around people. People’s consciousness. I could just look at them and know everything about them. Of course, I was five years old so I thought it was like, “Oh, everybody can do this.” I didn’t think I was anything special or it wasn’t anything special. I just kind of went along with that. I don’t know if you want to call it ability because I think everybody can do this. What happened is that because it was so spontaneous, I also had an experience where I could kind of hear telepathically, kind of communicate telepathically. What started to happen was not so much like, “Oh, wow. This is happening to me.” It was more like how is this happening? What is the mechanism that allowed me to do this when nobody else, for example, could see the subtle energy or could understand certain things before they happened and things like that?

I kept kind of wanting to know the mechanics of this. As I grew up, of course, I went into the field of psychology. In college, I studied psychology. By the time I got to graduate school, it was like, “This is not even close. We’re missing a whole field of understanding.” I continue to explore and research and really bring my own knowledge from my own experiences. For example, I would look at someone and I knew the root cause of their whatever illness or struggle. They had been trying different kinds of healing methods and doing psychotherapy for 20 years. They were still exactly at the same place. Then when I would tell them, “Oh, yeah. Well, you have this because in the past life you had this and that or because before you were born you’re supposed to come in with a twin brother but this happened. Things like that. It was like I was able to pinpoint the root cause and exactly at that time their problem would go away.

This was validation for me. It was like, “Okay, I’m not crazy. This is real. I am tapping into an information field that is accurate. I just have to train myself to make sure that I’m not projecting, that I’m not mixing with my own interpretation and things like that.” This was my personal training that allowed me to develop a whole methodology. How do you stay out of the objective observation? How do you then shift the energy field?

It took me 20 years to develop a methodology in energy medicine for healing and also for consciousness expansion. I started teaching other people to read the energy field in this way and to go directly to the root cause and the method. It’s not just one way, it’s many different ways. It’s color, its sound, its geometry, it’s zero point. There are all kinds of techniques altogether.

I did that for a long time. Even though, for example, I was working with people who had a cyst. We would do one session and the cyst is suddenly gone. You could see it on an ultrasound. One minute it’s here the other minute it’s gone. People with cancer. Even though I had so much validation and even my students, people who were studying it, had so much validation this stuff works, it’s very strange. It’s almost like I still had to go to the next level. It’s like I had to not just go from the experience of, “Hey, you had this condition and now you don’t” or “you were stuck in your life and now you’re not.” Going from the experiential to the actual scientific demonstration. It’s almost like people still need this additional validation to prove to themselves that they have this healing power. It wasn’t a fluke.

That’s the reason why the subject itself was very easy to me because everything I said, it took me my whole lifetime to explore the mechanics of consciousness on matter, in the physical world, in other dimensional fields, what-have-you. It was more like I need to at this point go beyond the experiential and bring the data. The scientific validation, demonstrations. That is the reason why I had to make this film. I wanted to also invite people who had never done anything like this before to take part in the experiments, in the demonstrations to show that anybody can do this. I wanted to bring some credible scientists, not just a few people who are just in, again, in the new age field.

[0:24:35] Ashley James: Woowoo?

[0:24:36] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Yeah. I think I managed to do that. That’s the reason why I ended up making this film investing so much of my time, energy, and money. I think it was worth it. I think it’s worth it.

[0:24:51] Ashley James: I think it was worth it too. This isn’t your first movie. You’ve made other movies.

[0:24:58] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Again, because I had so many experiences with otherworldly beings. When I was five, that one experience that I had, I realized that I wasn’t just looking at people’s energy field, but I could see beings, I could see angels, I could see spirits. It was obviously nothing scary. It’s not like in the movies where you see dead people, it’s so scary. It was nothing like that. It was beautiful, angelic, light beings. I could feel them, I could talk to them. I would see the type of energy they had and what they were doing here on earth and things like that.

That also stayed with me my whole life. I kept kind of, not just thinking or feeling that somebody was there, I would literally see them. Because of that, I also felt that I needed to demonstrate, that we’re surrounded by so many types of beings and what those worlds were about. That was my last film called Among Us, but I think it’s more specialized tactile. It attracts more people who are really into the subject whereas this current film is more helpful. It’s more like you can apply what you learn in the film to your daily life. Especially the experiment we did with pH.

There was a physicist—William Tiller actually did a famous experiment with pH. He was able to demonstrate that a group of, I think it was his students at the time, they would focus on a water sample and they were just intended to increase the pH or change the pH and it would happen. They did that scientifically. They did that study. I think he published that study. I believe it was in the 80s. Anyway, so this showed at the time that your consciousness, your mind can literally change the chemistry of water. I wanted to replicate this.

I worked a lot with water and DNA with another scientist, Glenn Rein. The reason why I had to include this in the film and why this is so important is because if you are able to change the chemistry of water that’s sitting in front of you, it means that you can change the chemistry of your body. That’s the point. That’s the point of this whole film. It’s not about moving the piece of metal. It’s not about the piece of metal. It’s not about the water. It’s about you having those abilities. Especially water because we hear so much about higher pH and water and people are selling these 9 plus pH water bottles and things like that. Obviously, an alkaline environment is not conducive to illness. I mean the virus cannot survive. We know that an alkaline environment is better for your health, not too much alkaline, but, again, a balance.

I wanted to demonstrate that on the film. It took a few minutes, but the other one with the DNA, I did that many times the DNA test where I was able to change the electricity in the DNA. That literally happens in seconds. I can zap that thing.

[0:29:16] Ashley James: For those who haven’t seen it, explain the experiment so we get the full picture.

[0:29:23] Caroline Cory: What happens, first of all, when we set up these experiments, of course, we’re editing a film, and so we can’t show the hours and hours and hours of preparation that goes into each experiment. Basically, what we do, let’s say we want to test the conductivity and change the electricity in a DNA sample. We have to measure this electrical conductivity in that same sample over a long period of time, get specific measurements. This is kind of like we get a baseline meaning over several days, over several hours this is the measurement of the electrical conductivity in this sample. Then at a specific point, I come in, or whoever comes in, and with the intent starts to interfere, intervene with that sample and trying to change. In our case, we wanted to increase the electrical conductivity in the water. Then let’s say at 3:00 PM the experiment starts from 3:00 PM-3:15 PM and then we do it again from 4:00 PM-4:15 PM, 5:00 PM-5:15 PM.

We have this measurement over a long period of time. We notice that exactly between 3:00 PM-3:15 PM, 4:00 PM-4:15 PM is exactly when the electrical conductivity changed dramatically. All the other times it would go back to the original baseline. This means this time correlation tells us that at those specific times, the intent of the observer or the person that’s doing the experiment has an effect, has a measurable effect. Scientifically, that’s how it works. Of course, we have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. In the film, we talk about the baseline, measuring the baseline. Then we show on camera how it changes.

I’ve done this experiment with DNA before. What I notice is that DNA responds very, very quickly like literally in seconds. Whereas the pH it takes a few minutes, which is still pretty good. What happens is that when you change the electrical conductivity—in this film, I think it showed about 100% jump. Other films I did it again and other places I did and it would jump to 400%. This is very significant because the electrical conductivity in the DNA was shown to increase its ability to self-repair. They had done a study, this is California Tech Institute I believe, they had done a study to measure or to see a correlation at least between the electrical conductivity in a DNA sample with its relationship to self-correct. If you have any sort of imbalance, any sort of something not working and you increase the electricity in the DNA sample, you basically restore its original kind of pattern if you will. That is huge. Imagine that you can do that in 10seconds. I did it in 10 seconds in the film.

This means that your mind, your consciousness can self-repair help your DNA to self-repair. If that is not significant I’m not sure what is.

[0:33:26] Ashley James: That is wonderfully significant. How would one go about encouraging the DNA to repair? Would we send love to our DNA? How would one do that?

[0:33:45] Caroline Cory: That’s what I was saying. We are now teaching workshops. I’m also writing a book. It’s more of a manual exactly for that. First of all, to understand like anything else it’s you, it’s your consciousness so you have to prepare just like in anything. You have to know what type of state your consciousness has to be in, what type of meditation needs to happen that is more useful because everybody meditates differently. People say, “Oh, I just meditate. I do mindfulness. I do this or I do that.” Well, yeah. To me, every type of meditation does something different.

You have to do the meditation that works for what you are trying to do in this experiment. In this experiment you want your mind to be very very fast, very very accurate, very very precise. You want it to be very quiet. That’s the reason why it’s a specific meditation. Actually, I have one that’s online. It’s free of charge if people want to take a look at that. It may look or sound like a simple meditation but actually, it has, if you want, the pattern to get you to that point of specificity and aligning your mind channels very specifically. That’s the preparation.

Then you also have to understand, which was very very interesting actually, working with all of these devices. It is not the same when you are trying to affect water. It’s not the same as trying to affect a piece of an electronic device or an electrical device. It’s completely different or to move a piece of paper or to try to influence a metal like you were saying earlier. It’s a different feeling. It’s almost like you notice that the biological substance, like DNA or water, responds to your, I don’t want to say command but you know what I mean, to you intent let’s say in a very different way than does the spoon that you’re trying to bend. You have to kind of know all of these things so that you know how to approach whatever it is you’re trying to influence.

If you’re working on your body, of course sending love and all of that is great. You want to be more specific. You also want to be aware of what’s coming up for you and release that. For example, that’s part of the preparation. As soon as you sit down and you try to do something like that I can see the people’s mind chatter kicks in like, “Wait. Can I do this? Is this going to work? I don’t know. Maybe other people can do it. Am I gifted?” All this mind chatter are blocks. You can’t start the experiment if you have all these blocks. Part of the preparation is to release these blocks, to know when you are really energetically ready. Then begin the influencing of whatever it is that you want. If it’s the DNA then you focus on the DNA. Then you basically set your intent for something specific. For example, it was very specific. I want the electrical conductivity to increase. You can say, “I want to get my cancer.” That’s still too general.

I find that it’s more efficient if you have more specific intents. If you have more details as to—for example, what is contributing to your current imbalance? It’s that much better than you target that imbalance. It’s the thyroid or it’s the chemistry and this part of my body and so on and so forth. Does that make sense?

[0:38:22] Ashley James: Absolutely, I remember in one of my trainings back in 2005, there was an MD, a doctor, who was studying along with us. We came to this exercise using a pendulum. The pendulum was just a biofeedback. We would swing it and it would go from—one it would start swinging let’s say northeast, northeast and then it would go up like a sunrise and start then going towards north-south, north-south. It’s just kind of like arced. We would say to it, as it was arcing upwards, we would say as this goes, as this moves up progressively. It’s swinging going from one direction to arcing to swinging going to a different direction, my metabolism is increasing. This doctor just totally didn’t believe it at all. It’s not a placebo because he thought this was just ridiculous. He actually said it, “The mind cannot affect the body. I’ve spent eight years in medical school. The mind cannot affect the body. It’s not possible.” I don’t know why he was taking these trainings, but he said the mind can’t affect the body. Probably just to be a better doctor, have more tools in his tool belt. He said, “The mind can’t affect the body. This is ridiculous.”

He actually was the demo. Our teacher brought him up in front of the class to teach this. The fact that he totally didn’t believe in it and thought it was a sham was great. Because what happened was as he’s doing it, so he just says to his mind, unconscious mind, “Raise my metabolism and show me that you’re raising my metabolism by the movement of the pendulum.” We’re using as a biofeedback so the micro muscle movement, we’re not moving it with our mind. This is not telekinesis. It’s simply, the unconscious mind can control micro muscle movements in the fingers. He’s just holding it there but his unconscious mind is moving it. We’re watching. As it’s moving up, he wasn’t surprised that the pendulum was moving, he had moved a pendulum before. His unconscious mind has moved a pendulum before. It wasn’t a big deal.

We noticed that his neck started to get really red. The redness move up his face. By the time the redness had crept up to his eyes, beads of sweat began to form on his brow. He yelled out, “This is impossible. What is going on? I’m so hot.” He throws the pendulum. He’s ripping off his coat, his blazer and unloosening his tie. He’s sort of angry. He says, “This is impossible. The mind cannot affect the body.” He’s fighting with it because he saw with his own eyes and experienced in his own body that his intention, his mind’s intention to increase his metabolism and the command he gave it, he gave it a conscious intention to his unconscious mind. His unconscious mind communicated back that he was doing it, that it was doing it. Just with the intention of his mind within seconds, it wasn’t even a minute, it was like maybe 30 seconds, he raises metabolism to the point where he was sweating and had a huge flush of blood flow and heats. He was very hot, his whole body was hot.

That kind of blew us away too because he didn’t believe in it so it’s not a placebo effect. He had to really re-examine his eight years in medical school because the mind absolutely affects the body. What does that mean? We’re walking around listening to other people’s suggestions, the media suggestions about our health. How much does that play a role in how we create our reality and how we create ill health?

[0:43:06] Caroline Cory: Absolutely. Look at the commercials. Every two seconds there’s a commercial on a drug because we’re all going to get sick by the time we’re 50. Women are going to develop that and men are going to be that. It’s like we’re definitely programmed to become ill. This is fascinating this story you just told about this. I have to say, the fact that he was even in that class, a part of him, I think his unconscious mind, totally believed in it. It’s his conscious mind, it’s his logical mind that doesn’t even want to go there because of his medical training. It’s like he’s not going to reexamine what he spent eight years or ten years or whatever that is. He’s not going to question that, but unconsciously, that’s what brought him to the class. Of course, that’s what demonstrated the effect.

Also, you bring up the point that we don’t even have to believe. I mean, it’s better if we believe because it’s more efficient and faster, but even if we don’t believe there’s still something happening. Even if we don’t believe consciously, I want to say. It still works.

[0:44:29] Ashley James: Belief is not required for your consciousness to affect your body because it always is affecting your body. You prove that in your movie with all the different scientific experiments you did. That our consciousness is constantly talking to our DNA, talking to every molecule in our body. Even across the country, across the world. You did an experiment where you were able to move an object in a vacuum across the United States, which goes to show that we have this. We’re connected to this morphic field, this energy field that is this earth. There are so many experiments. You want to highlight another one that so people can understand that they have the ability, they have tools to unlock inside them that can help them to achieve their health goals?

[0:45:31] Caroline Cory: Yeah. The pH and the DNA is extremely useful for an everyday life thing because every day you are dealing with chemistry: food, even your mood, the hormones that get released in your brain, your emotions. Your chemistry is changing all day long. I feel like this one experiment should empower people to remember that during the day like, “Wait, I feel off. So I just ate something and it just doesn’t feel right.” Instead of ignoring it or saying, “Oh, it’ll go away,” or “it’s just indigestion.” or whatever that is. To start to gravitate to have a reaction, a spontaneous reaction to say, “Wait, I can change the chemistry in my digestive system right now.” I feel that one is very useful on a day-to-day basis.

The other experiments, for example, the one that we did with the long distance, the remote viewing and of course the telekinesis and the blindfold. For example, the remote viewing, that one I feel also is very empowering for people to just remember that all these crazy synchronicities that happen in their life is not even on a day-to-day basis is not synchronicity. It’s like your brain and your consciousness is tapped into a universal consciousness, a collective consciousness. Everybody’s tapped into the same field so why is it so crazy to think that, “Oh, I just thought of Ashley and then the phone rings and it’s her. Wow.” This is not like weird stuff.

Actually, there’s science. Scientists have also demonstrated and proven entanglement meaning that two particles at a distance can actually exchange properties. They don’t even have to connect with each other. The property of one particle can be transferred to another and affect the other and vice versa. Not just in a small way but even on a cosmic way like a star in the sky can do that with another star. This was demonstrated scientifically.

If you just allow yourself to imagine that or just believe that this is real, this is the mechanics of who we are. Stop calling it like, “Hey, it’s a fluke. It’s synchronicity. It’s luck,” but use this mechanism for your benefit. For example, I’m about to take a trip somewhere or for example, my son is on a trip and I haven’t heard from him in ten days. I’m worried, what’s going on? For example, I can use this understanding, the mechanics of our consciousness to know that we are entangled. If I train myself, there’s a method that I call the merging process, you can pick up that information accurately every single time.

That’s why I showed the remote-viewing experiment in the film. It was used by governments around the world to spy on other governments. If this was a woowoo thing, they’re not going to spend 20 years and millions of dollars investigating. It was accurate to a point especially the Russians and the Chinese too. They were able to read documents and see what’s inside the drawer remotely or know exactly where the rockets were. That is very precise. If at that level of government level, if that doesn’t bring validation and also with this scientific explanation and demonstration of how entanglement works, we can start to use it in our daily life and manifest so many things, feel so much better of how we are interacting with the rest of the universe and use that to our benefit and manifest our daily reality differently.

[0:50:35] Ashley James: In the Bible, in the Old Testament, Genesis 1:27 it says that God made us in His image. I’ve always been curious about that ever since I was a child. It really dawns on me that what if this is what he meant, made in His image. Not that God has ten fingers and ten toes and walks around with a big beard. He’s about 6’2” with blue eyes. Not in his image physically like we’re taking it literally, but in His image in that he gave us the ability to be connected. We’re connected in this morphic field. You talk about in your movie, trees they can measure it and prove it, but trees have an energy field that talks to each other, communicates to each other when a storm is coming when there’s a threat nearby. Even there’s a mycelial network that all living things that are connected there, all plants connect through the mycelial network and communicate that way. More so that they’re able to communicate long distances through this morphic field. This resonance that were a part of that animals can sense it and communicate and we also too are part of it. That we can both perceive it and also affect it with our consciousness. What if that’s what God meant by in His image? That he gave us this tool to shape our reality.

[0:52:25] Caroline Cory: Exactly. I totally agree. When we talk about that, to me it has to do with being omniscient, omnipresent, omnipresence. Of course, we’re not talking on a Creator level, but it’s kind of like a smaller version of that potential. Omniscience is the ability to tap into all of the knowledge in the universe. Does it even make sense that animals communicate that way, trees communicate that way but not humans? It doesn’t even make sense that certain things have been proven, have been demonstrated on an animal level and then it goes kind of strange when we talk about it in terms of human beings. It’s the same mechanics. If anything, it’s even more sophisticated.

I feel like tapping into the knowledge of the universe spontaneously without going through a third party. Directly being tapped into the source of all of the information, all of healing, clarity, guidance; it’s all there. I feel that’s exactly it that we are connected. I think that is the definition of as above so below and being in His image. It doesn’t even make sense for it to be otherwise. Sometimes if you look around and there’s millions and millions of breeds of animals of flowers and trees and insects. Look up in the sky. The stars, billions of stars and galaxies and universe and multiverses.

Whoever created this or however that whole thing was created, does it even make sense that there would be one species called the human being that would not be able, that would be completely isolated on this one planet and not be able to communicate with anything? Not communicate even with themselves. You know what I mean? It doesn’t even make sense that whatever divine intelligence, whatever mechanics is behind all of this, it doesn’t make sense to not think that it is all connected. You’re a part of this larger mold. If you’re a part of it, then you are it. It’s like your hand. Your hand is part of your whole body. Whatever your hand feels, you feel. Whatever your hand is doing you know what it’s doing and vice versa. You know if you’re going through something, your hand is going to feel it. It’s like that. We’re an extension. We’re part of this larger consciousness, universal consciousness of all that is.

[0:55:50] Ashley James: A very famous experiment was done in DC several years ago where they try to affect the crime rates in DC. At the beginning, the Chief of Police was not on board, he was not supportive. By the end of the summer, they had had such a drastic decrease in the crime rates in DC that the Chief of Police became an absolute supporter. How they dropped the rates of crime so significantly in DC was they meditated on peace. They got thousands of people together and they meditated. They focused their consciousness on peace. People focusing their consciousness on peace with the intention of peace we’re able to drop the crime rates.

How is it that some hardened thug with a gun who’s down on their luck and wants to rob a convenience store who doesn’t give to any things about some monks down the street meditating. The people that do the violence right, all the violent crimes, those guys don’t care that there’s someone meditating for them to be peaceful. They really don’t. Yet somehow, the consciousness of a few thousand people were able to calm, to ground, to make these criminals choose a different path, a peaceful path.

[0:57:27] Caroline Cory: Yeah, exactly. This was done several times actually with the Dean Radin’s the random generator, the random number generator that measures collective consciousness. It works in the same way as you would have a hurricane category 5 that would completely destroy an entire neighborhood and there’s this one house that’s not the most stable house or solid house and yet it’s standing. It goes to show that you can still create your reality within the larger reality. The problem becomes when we think that we are here to change the world and so we want everybody to change in order for things to work. We want people to believe what we believe and have better systems and be fair and be honest and things like that. That doesn’t work. If we understand the principle of consciousness, I feel like consciousness is the behind-the-scenes power that we have.

You don’t really change the pattern or the behavior of a person, you affect their consciousness, which then, in turn, affects their behavior.

[0:59:10] Ashley James: Oh, sure.

[0:59:11] Caroline Cory: That’s the reason why a lot of clashes happen when we want somebody else to be convinced of our truth because we’re going head to head a neurological human mind trying to convince them that our truth is the better truth as opposed to simply tapping into the larger consciousness and pouring into the larger consciousness what we believe in. It doesn’t mean that you are being sneaky about it, it’s just that you are pouring your truth. If many people are pouring the same truth then eventually, it affects whoever is open to that truth because they’re still free will.

On some higher level, this thug in DC that was just about to rob the 7-Eleven that his conscious mind would say, “Hey, I’m going to rob this 7-Eleven and that’s that,” but on a higher honor, he’s tapped into the same consciousness field that everybody else is. On a higher level, his higher consciousness, kind of changed. Something happened in that field and told him, “Maybe not today. Let’s take a break.” He was on some level open to it. He didn’t understand it himself on a conscious mind, but on this higher consciousness level, everyone is tapped into this. Everyone can receive that inspiration, that shift if they’re open to it.

[1:00:58] Ashley James: A practical application would be instead of yelling at the kids again because they didn’t clean their room, to focus and intent with love for them to feel motivated to clean their room or something. Try that every day. Instead of just coming at them, just come at them from love and just focus an intent that you’re going to affect their consciousness. Do this experiment every day and see what happens. See that your intention, your focus, your consciousness could affect their consciousness. Now, in terms of healing our body you said the more specific the better.

[1:01:39] Caroline Cory: You don’t want to put in their consciousness, “I want you to clean your room and go do your homework.” You want, first of all, when you are working at that level because this is part of the method that we work with. You are, again, it’s a method that I call the merging, so you’re merging with their higher consciousness. Before you pour the love into it, you can already feel why they are not wanting to clean their room. You know what I mean? Do they not want to clean the room just to show you? Is it like a defiance thing or do they not want to clean their room because actually, they’re not feeling well physically? Do they not want to clean their room because they just had a fight at school and they were bullied? You know what I mean?

There are different reasons why. Every kid is different. Every kid has a different situation. Again, before you put in the positive you want to take out whatever is the root cause of the problem. If you do this enough, you tap into this root cause and then let’s say if it’s something physical, before telling them to go clean their room, maybe you can be guided to give them the chemical whatever food or drink or whatever they need. If it’s a tea, if it’s a hot milk, or whatever. Something that will soothe or bring that chemical balance back into their body so they feel good. Then you say, “Okay.” Then they will naturally feel okay and then they will clean their room. You know what I mean?

If it’s something that—let’s say you feel that something happened in school. They were bullied, they feel ashamed or something like that. Then you want to sit down and say, “Tell me what happened in school?” You know what I mean? Then it’s almost like first, you have to feel the block. Once that is resolved, it’s very easy to pour the love. Then you just watch them change. It’s very magical, but it works.

The problem with kids is we don’t really hear them. Even though sometimes we hear this, some parents are really good. Some parents are, “Okay, tell me what’s wrong. What’s bothering you or whatever.” But what happens is that even though the kid says, “Well, this kid in school said this or did that,” or whatever. Usually what I noticed with what parents would say, “But it’s okay. Just don’t think about it. Just next time don’t talk to him. Go play with your other friends,” or whatever. It’s almost like the parent is bringing the solution to make the kid feel better or they’re completely ignoring it. That’s another case, of course. Even when they are trying to help, you’re bringing a solution to the problem, but that is not really helping the kid resolve the emotional block that just happened from that experience if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean?

It’s more like, why is this kid attracting the bullying in the first place? Why is my kid allowing these circumstances the other kids don’t get that, for example? I want to go behind the scenes again and feel the root cause that created this problem in the first place and help that, resolve the situation, and help him resolve it at that level. It’s a completely different approach because the kid then feels heard. Because if you propose a very loving solution, they’ll feel the support, they’ll feel like, “Hey, my mother has my back.” Yeah, that’s great, but it still does not resolve the conflict. Does that make sense?

[1:05:54] Ashley James: Absolutely. I like that you’re starting by getting in their shoes, connecting with them, and then going deeper. Sometimes, we kind of just override their feelings. Not just kids but anyone we’re interacting or wanting to influence. That they should be doing it this way, they should be cleaning the dishes this way, or they should be doing it this way. They should do it my way. Why aren’t they looking for a job? Why aren’t they doing this, why aren’t they doing that? They should be doing it this way. They should be doing it my way. We’re cutting ourselves off from this flow of energy by imposing our own will on people.

[1:06:37] Caroline Cory: Yeah, exactly. Or why doesn’t he call me when he’s gone for so long? All the behavior of others.

[1:06:45] Ashley James: Instead, if we close our eyes, take a deep breath, connect with their energy, and just get in their shoes. What are they feeling? What are they going through? Have that level of empathy to connect with them. See if you could understand their world and what they’re going through on an unconscious level and a level of just connecting to their consciousness. From there, help them to get to the root cause. Help them to see it in a way that’ll help them get out of that rut or to shift their life. So that we’re not just imposing our will on them, but that we’re actually helping them to make those. I think it’s really beautiful. How can we do that for ourselves when we get stuck?

[1:07:36] Caroline Cory: I see that also a lot in relationships. For example, usually with women, they get very frustrated because he’s somewhere and he’s not calling or he goes to the store and he buys everything except the one thing that you really want. You know what I mean? Those little annoying things. You want him to pay attention to what you just said. I see this very, very often. It’s very frustrating because to you it’s very logical like, “What’s the big deal, just call me when you get there,” or something like that. “Hey, it’s on your list. What’s the big deal?”

I noticed that when you tap into their higher consciousness exactly at that moment you notice in general, it’s really not that he’s trying to blow you off or you’re not important, sometimes it is, but most of the time it’s not even that. Sometimes they’re just very ADD. They cannot focus. Sometimes it’s just that. Sometimes they feel that what you asked for is not so important, that you’re going to be okay. They’re assuming that certain things are not important even though you tell them it’s important.

These little things end up piling up and at the end, you end up with fights and confusion and frustration in relationships. The way you can use this is, again, when this is happening, or even before, you can focus and merge with the higher consciousness, not the human aspect of the person. The higher consciousness of your partner or whatever, in that location and just ask the question, “Can you please remember to buy me what’s on the list?” You will feel his authentic reaction like, “Oh, wait. I forgot,” or “Oh, it’s not important.” You can change it. You can change it at that level. It takes a little practice, but it works like miracles.

If you do this with your partner, with your kids now you are becoming, I feel like I want to say evolved, you’re working on multi-dimensional levels of reality. Your human mind is being conscious, is doing all the conscious stuff: cooking, cleaning, driving, going to work, whatever. Your higher consciousness is tapped into all of this potential and it’s guiding you, it’s bringing. You’re not just on one level, you’re on both levels let’s say or multi-level. You are operating in this reality, in this very expanded evolved way.

[1:11:02] Ashley James: How can we take that same principle and apply it to our own healing?

[1:11:07] Caroline Cory: Again, it’s the same thing, it’s the same principle. To me, the biggest problem is the root cause. Why? For example, it’s not myself but let’s say it’s just an example. You start to have certain symptoms or certain imbalances in your body. In the same way, of course, we know at this point it’s not just the symptoms. You want to go back to the root cause of the root cause. We know maybe because your mother had this or it’s genetic or because you ate too much whatever the wrong foods or you smoked or this or that. This is one level of root cause. To me, the bigger root cause or the deeper root cause is why am I creating this in the first place exactly at this time? When you tap into that, all kinds of stories start to happen.

You can train yourself to go deeper and deeper and deeper. Actually, that’s what I teach other healers to do. Once you released one of these root cause, to try to even go deeper and deeper to that place where you first decided that it was okay to create this condition. That is the point where it needs to be reversed. It’s just training. It’s just practice. It’s just training. You just have to keep going deeper and deeper. It’s a whole training of course that we teach.

[1:12:51] Ashley James: That was my next question. I want to know about your training because you know what, my four-year-old wants to learn all this.

[1:13:00] Caroline Cory: Which part?

[1:13:02] Ashley James: Be able to be blindfolded and see the world. It’s just amazing that these kids are reading books blindfolded. You could hold up any color they can tell you what color it is. They can even navigate the world blindfolded. I like that you even did in one clip, you had a little sensor inside the blindfold to prove that there was no light coming in. It’s not a trick.

[1:13:35] Caroline Cory: Oh, it’s not a trick. Also, when you start watching that part of the film, in the beginning, you’re like, “Yeah. Okay. Whatever,” but then you see more and more and more people doing it and just doing all kinds of amazing stuff, not just reading. By the way, these kids, because somebody said, “Well, what if they just memorized the book?” Okay. Well, when I was there, for example, I would write something on a piece of paper that they had never seen before. They have no idea what I’m going to write and then they’d be able to read it. How does that work?

This is very much real and kids are easier to teach. Because they don’t think so much. Imagine that there’s light inside. I want you to put light inside your mask, inside your body. I want you to go out in the universe and bring as much light as you can and put it inside the mask and imagine that you were—I want you to pierce through the mask and read. They’d be like, “Yeah.” If I told an adult that they’d be like, “What? Wait, what? Universe? What does that mean? How can I bring the light? How does this work?” It’s definitely better for kids to do that.

We started putting some classes together. People can go to the Superhuman Film website for those types of classes. Because we’re getting more and more requests for kids so we’re going to do one specifically for kids. Also, we’re going to start doing them online. It’s not the same thing online because just for technical reasons as well because you want the kid to touch things and feel. It seems to be working. I’m doing that with a couple of kids. We’re going to be posting more and more specifically for kids. That is the best age. I think between four and eight is perfect. Of course, everybody can do this. Stay tuned for those details. The other ones that are currently available are on the website superhumanfilm.com.

[1:16:00] Ashley James: Got it. The classes haven’t started yet or have you already started teaching them?

[1:16:05] Caroline Cory: The ones that are based on it, because we’re releasing the film literally now. The film is being released now. It’s kind of like you watch the film you say, “Hey, I want to learn this.” You go on the website and then you take all the classes. We have about five or six workshops already planned this year. We’re going to keep adding more and more.

These classes are specific for mind over matter meaning the blindfold perception, telekinesis, changing the water pH. These are the specific mind over matter workshops, but the other classes that I was talking about how to merge and feel the consciousness of the person, these are on my energy medicine consciousness website. I think I have like 600 classes and sessions on how to use these techniques for healers. People who are interested, there’s a whole healers program with all of these methods all on the website already. That is carolinecory.com.

[1:17:20] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. I think that these are fantastic things, fantastic tools for us to learn. It would be really great if this was taught in school. To come back to like how real this is that the US government, for many years, invested a lot of money in psychic soldiers and in remote viewing. So did Russia, so did China. They haven’t stopped because it works. I’ve met a few psychic soldiers.

I went to the Awake and Aware Conference back in 2008 and talked to a few, met a few. The ones that are speaking up and sharing their experiences, it’s very interesting that you can remote view a location and know where a bomb is or read a manual or read classified files. The military would not be investing time and energy into it if it didn’t exist. The fact that if they can train a soldier to do it then you can get trained to do it too. It’s part of us. It’s part of who we are. For whatever reason, we’ve been suppressed. We’ve been told not to cultivate these gifts. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that throughout the history of the last thousand years, they’ve wanted us to suppress and not be connected to our gifts?

[1:19:13] Caroline Cory: Well, there are a couple of answers to this question. On one level, it has a lot to do with our programming that you have to believe what a scientist tells you because they’re educated and they are. That’s not to say they’re not, but here’s the problem. What people don’t realize is this is what I call subjective science, which is a contradiction in terms actually because science is supposed to be objective. This is still science. The problem is it is subjective in the sense that, for example, today I’m going to be able to move this piece of paper, make it rotate 360 degrees very easily. Tomorrow, if I sit exactly in the same condition, at the same time, at the same hour everything exactly the same, there’s nothing interfering with it, I’m going to be able to maybe move it 10 degrees. Then the next day, I’m going to be able to move it 20 degrees and then 40 degrees, and then on the fourth day, I’m going to make it move 360 degrees.

A scientist from the outside would say, “Wait, this doesn’t work.” Because the way we define science is you’re supposed to have repeatable results. You’re supposed to every single day you move an object it’s supposed to behave in the same way because they’re a physical law you. Newton’s physical laws that apply to the physical world. If you did it once in one way and then the next thing you did something different, that doesn’t count, therefore telekinesis doesn’t exist. It’s crazy. Wait a minute, wait a minute. I moved the object 360 degrees. Of course, we’re talking baseline, everything else in a vacuum, the conditions are scientific. The fact that every day the result was slightly different or very different, this should not make any difference because, under the actual physical laws, I shouldn’t be able to move anything. This should be impossible.

Some scientists will look at the result and say, “Wait, this just moved ten degrees. That’s nothing.” You know what I mean? That’s the problem. They dismiss it right off the bat because it doesn’t comply with the way scientific experiments are conducted. The reason being, that’s why I call it subjective science because this manifestation, what’s happening is that it has to do with my subjective consciousness, which is affected by so many things. One day, I have less energy, another day, my mother just called and I spend an hour on the phone and I’m exhausted, or my kid is sick. You know what I mean? I am a living consciousness that it’s continuously changing. I am in constant movement and form of energy that is constantly moving. It’s that energy that is trying to affect a physical object. That is the reason why the results are now going to be exactly the same. Again, but the fact that I have done it even once, it means I broke the physical laws of the universe. You see what I mean?

I think that’s one of the problems. They dismiss it because it needs to fit. They are trying to explain non-physical phenomena with physical laws in other words. That doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It’s like you have the wrong ingredients, you have the wrong parameters for measuring this thing. That’s the main problem. I have another. I don’t even know if you want to go there. I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years ago. I feel that there has been a lot of manipulation with the human species. Even on a genetic level, I feel that there’s been a lot of interference and a lot of genetic manipulation that kind of made the human gradually, generation after generation, thousands of years later, become very limited. I mean more limited than it should be. Something on a genetic level, it was programmed so that you keep going in circles so that you don’t expand out. You stay inside your little bubble. That programming is very, very, very ancient.

I don’t know if you want to go talk about those kinds of things because we’re talking about other types of species and doing stuff like that. I don’t know if this is part of this.

[1:24:39] Ashley James: I know I’m into it. I’m interested in everything. Leave no stone unturned. If you think about it, I think we’ve been programmed to have fear. If someone had awakened their gifts 500 years ago they’d be burned at the stake or the Spanish Inquisition. If you look at the last 1000 years or 2000 years even, there’s a concerted effort by the ruling people using religion and government to control us. To not want us to be awake and be empowered. There’s a fear. Don’t be a tall poppy. Don’t stand out. There’s a fear of standing out because we’ll be culled from the herd. We’ll be somehow put back in our place. We have to acknowledge that there’s a fear inside of us that if we were to tap into our own gifts that we’re afraid we’ll be rejected by those we love and care about. That it’s part of our survival to fit in. We have to get that it’s safe, it’s safe to tap into our gifts, and that we all have them. That there’s no Spanish Inquisition coming after us if we become fully empowered in our gifts.

I really would love every single listener to be able to tap into their and use their consciousness to support their body’s ability to heal itself, to unblock what is blocked, to adjust the pH, increase the connectivity of their DNA, to increase the absorption rate of nutrients, increase the uptake of nutrients into the cells, to open up their capillaries, and increase the oxygenation to the cell. Just all these little things that we could focus on, what if that if every day we chose one thing? We chose to spend five minutes just meditating on and focusing on the intention of increasing oxygenation to the cell or increasing the permeability for nutrients to come in and for waste to come out or supporting more blood flow to the liver to get toxins out or whatever. Pick one thing and just focus on it for a week and see what happens.

[1:27:18] Caroline Cory: Right. I love that.

[1:27:20] Ashley James: We can focus on supporting our body and healing tissue and increasing, like you said, increasing thyroid, but you got to get to the root. Because what if the thyroid is not the problem?

[1:27:30] Caroline Cory: I was just going to say. I was just going to say. I can’t stress that enough. Part of this work though is to first tune into why that is happening in the first place. Because if you’re focusing on increasing, let’s say increasing your metabolism or something. It’s almost like you are adding more information to the cells. You’re telling your cells, “Okay, now I want you to behave this way. My intent is that I want you to increase your electrical conductivity or I want you to increase your vibrational whatever.” You’re kind of adding more information when you have not taken out the information that made it behave this way in the first place.

That’s why when we talk about affirmation it’s kind of the same thing. You can’t be saying, “Oh, I’m healthy. I’m beautiful. I’m successful.” I’m not saying it doesn’t help. It helps, but it’s not efficient enough if you are saying that. You’re still saying, “I’m successful. I’m healthy.” and your unconscious mind and your cells still have the old information of, “I’m not good enough. I’m a failure. I’m abandoned by my father.” and so on and so forth. That is part of the revolving door. You have to do both at the same time.

[1:28:58] Ashley James: That’s been my problem with affirmations because you can say, “Oh, I’m successful. I’m rich. I’m beautiful.” over and over again and yet, let’s say, you’ve got no money in the bank account. You really have an unconscious belief that you’re not beautiful and you’re unemployed or you’re not successful. You’re consciously repeating something but your unconscious mind is going, “That’s not true. That’s not true. That’s not true.” It’s not actually changing anything. When done wrong, affirmations are kind of a waste of time and also will actually harm. It’s almost like they’ll harm us though because they have our unconscious mind reinforce our belief system. “No, I am broke. What are you talking about?” Just reinforces that, whereas when we get to the root cause we go, “Okay. What do I need to shift? What do I need to change? What is my belief system?” Then focusing the consciousness on like you said, it can’t be so general, it needs to be specific.

Let’s say, okay specifically, “I just did a job interview and I’m going to put my consciousness towards that person hiring me or that person thinking I’m going to be really good for the job.” So we get really specific and we focus our intent, our intention on shifting our reality to go a certain way. I’d love to do experiments with lab tests like lowering cholesterol. Get a bunch of people together. Maybe if you’re interested in doing any experiments or doing a sequel to your movie. Get a bunch of people together and get a bunch of diabetics together and teach this to them. Type 2 diabetics and teach this to them. “Okay, using your consciousness we’re going to monitor your blood sugar, your blood glucose. Let’s see if you could actually manipulate your blood glucose with your consciousness.”

I just remembered. There is a—I don’t remember what book it’s in but there was a reference to a publication where this woman had multiple personalities. I forget what they call it now. There’s a new term for it. She would go in and out of different personalities, completely split personalities that didn’t know the other personalities. One of her personalities was diabetic and the other ones weren’t. When she went into the personality with diabetes, her blood sugar would change. They would monitor her. The other personalities didn’t have it. She would not have blood sugar problems when she was in those other personalities. The doctors were baffled to be able to see that personality, that the mind could actually affect that.

I’m not saying people should just stop taking their insulin or eat doughnuts and then just imagine that they’re not having high blood sugar. It’s not what I’m saying. I think diet and lifestyle, physical things are very important. What if part of keeping us sick is continually holding on to the belief that we’re sick?

[1:32:18] Caroline Cory: Absolutely. Absolutely. Exactly. That’s exactly it. In fact, we are opening a lab and we’re definitely going to be doing more along those lines. Again, like you just explained with that example, there was a root cause for this person. The root cause was that she had multiple personalities. It’s not just genetic, it’s not just a diet. But then, you go deeper into this and go, “Wait. Why did I attract or create this multiple personality condition in the first place?” So you keep going, again like I said, the root cause of the root cause. Then when you get there, this is when the diabetic condition is going to shift. Until then, it’s still there because it’s being built on all of these patterns that have been there for years and years and years. That’s the methodology that I teach.

[1:33:25] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Caroline, this has been wonderful. I love exploring this topic. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[1:33:38] Caroline Cory: I think if people watch the film they would feel that it’s okay and it’s time to be empowered. To just go out and do it and be themselves. I feel that is the purpose of this film. It’s not just a select group of gifted people. Everyone can do this and they will see it in the film. There’s a lot of scientific validation and we need to just move on from expecting everyone to agree or do this or do that. It is what it is. That’s what I’m hoping that people will get out of this. In terms of the healing methodologies and stuff, I have actually a lot of free stuff on my website, on my Youtube channel. For those who are more interested in really learning the methodology, they can look at the courses that are on the website carolinecory.com as well.

[1:34:50] Ashley James: Excellent. Very cool. So your website’s carolinecory.com and also, to see the movie superhumanfilm.com. Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible, which is coming out really soon. What’s the date for the launch?

[1:35:07] Caroline Cory: Actually, now. We’re just finalizing the details of the actual official release. It should be any time now in March. The best thing is people go to the website Superhuman Film and they can just sign up, just put their email. They’ll go get an update. As soon as it’s out, they’ll get an update.

[1:35:30] Ashley James: Excellent. For those who are really interested in the paranormal, they could check out your other videos. You did something with William Shatner. Is that correct?

[1:35:44] Caroline Cory: Yeah. I am a guest on a couple of shows on History Channel. There’s one show is Ancient Aliens. I’m kind of becoming almost a regular in this season, anyway. I’ve done maybe four-five seasons of that show. The Unexplained is a new show with William Shatner. I think it’s season one still. We just filmed one of the episodes, actually, just last week.

[1:36:19] Ashley James: Well, I can’t wait to see it. Have you met William in person?

[1:36:23] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Actually, I met him in another event. These shows, he does the hosting. We’re not necessarily filming on the day, on same space, because we were at a conference. The A&E Network, they had an event for all their shows. We were both in that, invited. I just met him there.

[1:36:51] Ashley James: I’m a big Trekkie so I just have to know, what’s he like in person?

[1:36:55] Caroline Cory: He’s adorable. So nice, so nice, so so sweet, and so nice. Yeah. He’s adorable.

[1:37:04] Ashley James: That’s awesome.

[1:37:05] Caroline Cory: I think he’s 68 or 70, I’m not sure, but I mean he’s very sharp and just very, very sweet.

[1:37:11] Ashley James: Very cool. You should get him to watch your movie.

[1:37:16] Caroline Cory: I mean there’s enough on his plate but yeah.

[1:37:20] Ashley James: Well, we should all watch your movie. I’m excited for its release. Thank you so much, Caroline, for coming on the show today. It’s been a real pleasure. I’d love to have you back especially when you do more studies and when, in your lab as you say, when you have collected more studies, I’d love for you to come back and share the results. Then for those who are interested in taking your courses on developing their own telekinesis, their own ability to sense the world, perceive the world, like read blindfolded, and also to be able to affect the world with their consciousness, would going to superhumanfilm.com be better or go to carolinecory.com be better?

[1:38:04] Caroline Cory: Just go to superhumanfilm.com and look at the workshops. You just click on workshops, you’ll see what we have now. We’ll keep updating, we’ll keep adding classes and online classes. Like I said, the best thing also for people, just use the sign-up link. Every time we add a class or we’re doing like a private screening somewhere or a public screening, whatever, then they’ll get an update. We don’t really bombard people with information. It’s only when we have an update.

[1:38:38] Ashley James: Excellent. Thank you so much, Caroline. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show.

[1:38:41] Caroline Cory: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was awesome.

[1:38:47] Outro: For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

Get Connected with Caroline Cory!

SuperHuman Movie

Website

CranioSacral Therapy

https://www.learntruehealth.com/craniosacral-therapy

Highlights:

What CranioSacral Therapy is
What dance therapy is
What the enteric nervous system is
Gut and brain relationship
Listening with your hands

In this episode, Nikki Kenward tells us how CranioSacral Therapy helps people with their gut problems as well as help with emotional issues. She shares what dance therapy is. Lastly, she shares how do we listen with our hands.

Intro:

For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com, and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com, takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.

[0:00:34] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley team. This is episode 415. I am so excited for today’s guest. We’re going to have a fantastic show today. Nikki Kenward has such an amazing story and such wonderful heartfelt lessons to teach us today. Nikki, welcome to the show.

[0:01:02] Nikki Kenward: Thank you, Ashley. It’s a real delight to be here and talk to you.

[0:01:07] Ashley James: Absolutely. I really love the work that you do. Nikki has been an Upledger Craniosacral Therapist for over 25 years, and her focus is on mental health and the gut. We’ve covered those topics several times separately. The mental health is over here; the gut is over here. We don’t ever really talk about that there is a direct link between mental health and gut health. Also, so many people feel ashamed to talk about their mental health and also ashamed to talk about their gut health. There’s some kind of stigma in today’s society about having gastrointestinal distress and symptoms and as well having mental and emotional health symptoms.

The fact that you help people to heal their gut and heal their emotional mental state and come back into a place of balance is so beautiful. I’m excited for us to learn from you today, Nikki.

[0:02:09] Nikki Kenward: Great. Yes.

[0:02:12] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now Nikki’s website is nikkikenward.com. Of course, the links to everything that Nikki does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. I want to start by diving into your story because I feel that there’s a really interesting story that led you to become the expert that you are today and the healer that you are today.

[0:02:32] Nikki Kenward: Where would you like me to start?

[0:02:36] Ashley James: Well, what happened in your youth that made you go in this direction?

[0:02:42] Nikki Kenward: I went in the direction of CranioSacral Therapy, actually quite late in life. I was around 39-40 at the time because I’d been a dancer, dance therapist and needed to get another string to my bow and was really fascinated by it and fell in love with that. I soon realized as I got deeper into CranioSacral Therapy and especially the smarter emotional release work that we do with the Upledger work, that the body process work was so important looking at our emotional history that was held in our body. Supporting that experience, the experience people have on the couch when you’ve got your hands on to help them move forward and integrate these experiences.

For myself, I had some incredible support during my craniosacral training especially the advanced classes where I got to deal with all kinds of trauma from my childhood in a way that really transformed my life. It’s all about the emotional history being written in the body.

[0:04:05] Ashley James: When you said you’re a dance therapist, what is that? Is that like a physical therapist or is that an emotional therapist?

[0:04:12] Nikki Kenward: Well, a dance therapist will dance with people so it’s really about the emotions, expression of the emotions but through the body so not really that big a step away from the work I do as a CranioSacral Therapist.

[0:04:28] Ashley James: I’m fascinated. I’ve never heard of dance therapy. If I were to go to a dance therapist it would be like we’d be doing the waltz or the tango while talking about my emotions? How does that work?

[0:04:41] Nikki Kenward: Well, it would be more. They were to help you explore through movements that felt authentic to you how you were feeling in your body. So it’s about helping you connect to that emotional history in your body and express it in whatever way is helpful to you and they would support that.

[0:04:59] Ashley James: I can see how I could be really helpful especially because we have so much body shame.

[0:05:04] Nikki Kenward: Exactly. Yeah, we do.

[0:05:07] Ashley James: Very interesting. You started to use CranioSacral Therapy in conjunction with dance therapy. What happened? Did you have some aha moments? What happened when you’re first integrating CranioSacral Therapy with your clients?

[0:05:25] Nikki Kenward: I think there were some—can you have a gradual aha moment?

[0:05:30] Ashley James: Sure.

[0:05:32] Nikki Kenward: I think I had a gradual aha moment quite early on that it wasn’t so much about what you were doing with your hands or your body, it was more about the space between you and the person on the couch and creating a safe space so that person is able to do and express and experience what they need to on the couch that day. That’s helpful to their process.

[0:05:59] Ashley James: For those who’ve never heard of CranioSacral Therapy, could you explain what it is? Now, I know you are very well-versed in it. You have like a higher understanding of what it does and I think it affects the body on many levels, but for those who’ve never heard of it, just walk us through. What is CranioSacral Therapy? Who is it good for? Why should we go and experience CranioSacral Therapy as a client?

[0:06:24] Nikki Kenward: Sure. CranioSacral Therapy works from the cranium, the head down to the sacrum, the bottom end of the spine between your hips. These bones, of course, contain our central nervous system: the brain, spinal cord, all the fluids in that system. That’s the core system in the body that impacts on every single part of the body, all the fascia all the organs coming from the central nervous system. What CranioSacral Therapy does is listen really carefully to that system with a gentle pair of skillful hands to look for and release any restrictions around the system. It’s hands-on but it’s gentle, it’s listening, it’s without agenda. It can work on a very physical basis so somebody might come with a stiff neck or concussion or migraines after a spinal surgery perhaps. You can really help get things more functional, you can free things up for the migraine headache sufferer, you can work with the jaw.

It doesn’t have to be on anything other than a physical level but it very often seems to go deeper than that. It takes people in into a very deep state of rest in their system, which really allows them to start healing and processing whatever might be helpful to them. Then while you’re working, there is memory of an event or an emotion might come up into their awareness. We don’t analyze it, we’re not psychotherapists, but we support their experience of it through the dialoguing guided imagery. As a result of them going into that piece of their emotional history in that part of the body where we have our hands, we are able to get release of emotion from the tissue. The tissue would then release much more fully than if it hadn’t gone to a deeper level, if that makes sense.

[0:08:35] Ashley James: Absolutely. I studied CranioSacral Therapy in the 90s.

[0:08:42] Nikki Kenward: Did you?

[0:08:43] Ashley James: I did. I went to the Canadian College of Massage and Hydrotherapy. I chose to take courses in it to augment what I was learning and what I was doing. I was really blown away. I love the first book. I can’t remember the name of it, the very first book they have you read and the stories, Dr. Upledger’s stories when he was first doing it. Maybe you could share some of those stories like the man who had had bombs. He was a soldier and he had bombs go off. He had post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and extreme anger and he was in constant pain. Wasn’t there like a child who couldn’t walk?

[0:09:36] Nikki Kenward: Yes. There are many wonderful stories. I think the great joy and beauty of this work is that it’s a very respectful, listening, passive pair of hands in a safe space which really activates the body’s self-healing mechanisms.

[0:09:59] Ashley James: Would you be able to just fill in those stories that I mentioned and tell the stories for listeners who’ve never heard of them so they have an understanding of the depths of CranioSacral Therapy?

[0:10:12] Nikki Kenward: Yes. I was really lucky and I did some studying with Dr. John. I’ve also worked at intensive therapy programs in the Institute in West Palm Beach with military veterans. Of course, they had often horrific post-traumatic stress disorder from the bombs, maybe some injuries that they had sustained. They were given lots of medication and maybe some talking therapy, but often, it was very hard for them to move forward from a place of fear, anxiety, hopelessness, depression and there were many suicides. Dr. John was really an innovator in that he created these intensive programs where there would be a small group of military veterans, and I’ve worked on these, that would be at the Institute for a week all-day every day for a week. They would be in the same room. There would be a lead therapist and two, three, or four assistant therapists for every person on the table.

They would then be able, in that really safe consistent space, to really explore their experiences, release some of that fear, begin to rebalance some of the autonomic nervous system, find hope, lift the depression, recover better from injuries. The results were phenomenal.

[0:11:45] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Right. I just remember crying reading that book because of the amount of healing. The one soldiery he talks about who was able to recover from the anger and the pain. That Dr. Upledger as he was very gently, only putting about four ounces of pressure but very gently felt the joints of the skull release from that pressure. Then the flow of the cerebral spinal fluid could finally flow, which of course affects the brain. Yes, there’s an emotional healing. There’s also a very real physical healing and that he was able to heal on an emotional and physical level. I remember just being so happy reading that book because hearing about that, I think it was a child that couldn’t walk and then the child grew up and then came back to John. It was like, “Hey, remember me?”

[0:12:51] Nikki Kenward: Yes. Absolutely. Of course, the emotional and physical healing are one thing. So the emotions that the emotional process is held in the tissues that are tight. It’s a mind-body experience always. The two things are done simultaneously are one healing process.

[0:13:15] Ashley James: It’s such a light touch that it’s sometimes we discredit it, its validity in our mind. “You’re touching me so lightly, how could that have made any difference?” How do you address that?

[0:13:29] Nikki Kenward: Well, people often say that to me. They say, “Oh, I feel very relaxed but you didn’t do anything,” especially their first session. I say, “No, that’s fine.” They look a bit guilty saying that. I do explain it. I say, “Well, what we’re working with are the nerves, the cerebral spinal fluid flow, and the fascia, the membranes that surround the brain and the spinal cord. All of these tissues only respond and relax with a very gentle touch. So that’s part of their anatomy. So if you were to push really hard on them, they would just either do nothing or they would get more tight and resist.”

Then I suggest to people they might like to mix up some cornflour and water in a bowl when they get home.

[0:14:24] Ashley James: Some what?

[0:14:25] Nikki Kenward: If you mix up corn flour, like a very fine flour and water in a bowl and if you stir it around, if you prod it hard with your finger it feels like wood or concrete.

[0:14:38] Ashley James: Right. I remember that we did this as kids. You take two cups of cornflour and maybe a cup and a half of water and then you mix it together. That’s right. It acts solid if you pound on it, but if you just gently put your finger on it it’s like quicksand.

[0:14:54] Nikki Kenward: It flows. Well, the collagen in the makes fascia behave like that. So that’s why we need a gentle touch. Nerve fibers are 50%-70% fascia. If you’re working with the nervous system with the dura membrane in the skull and in the spine and the fluid flow, you need to be gentle or nothing’s going to happen. I say, “Well, if you go and see a chiropractor they’ll do what they do to line up the bones of your spine and that’s great. You go into your massage therapist, very often they’ll be aiming to lengthen and massage knots out of your muscles so they need often more pressure. But if you come and see me, I’m not working on either of those systems, I’m working with your craniosacral system and that requires that I have a gentle touch in order for it to release.”

[0:15:56] Ashley James: Your intention as you worked with your clients for dance therapy and CranioSacral Therapy was to help them on an emotional level and then also help the more physical level in the nervous system and the spinal fluid. Understanding that there’s obviously a connection between our brain health and our emotional mental health. As you began to work with clients and helping them to release and helping them to heal on both physical and emotional levels, when did you start to see a connection to gut health?

[0:16:34] Nikki Kenward: Well, that was probably about four or five years ago I began to see it because there suddenly was a whole raft of books about gut health beginning to come out at that time. There were lots of people talking about the microbiome, the gut bacteria. There were people talking about the gut-brain access between the gut, the brain and the gut, the brain and the head. I got very interested in all of this and began reading a lot. I was particularly interested because lots of my clients coming to me had what I would call post-traumatic gut. They’d had difficult experiences. They had a lot of emotional history buried in their gut.

I didn’t really know how to properly help them. I was in the same situation as them. I had post-traumatic stress disorder arrived in my life about 15 years ago, but the worst part of it was the gut. That was what I’ve struggled with since then. I always felt for all the therapy I’d had: CST, talking therapy, you name it I’ve probably done it. There was a missing piece, there was something I couldn’t quite get to in my gut. I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. I felt disconnected and disassociated from it.

That was also a big motivation besides my curiosity in the research coming out. As a result of all that, I thought, “Right. I need to make some new kind of training for myself and my colleagues so we can work with the enteric nervous system in the gut,” which of course talks do and is part of our central nervous system, our autonomic nervous system because it’s just as important.

That was the time at which I approached the International Association of Healthcare Educators, for whom I’d been a certified educator for many years already. I rather sheepishly said to them, “How do you fancy writing a class on the gut and the enteric nervous system?” They were interested. So the next stage I had to do a presentation about it at the Beyond the Dura Conference in Palm Beach a few years ago. People responded well so I was invited to write an outline of the class, which I did. That was sent around to the international faculty for comment. I then wrote the whole four-day class and the rest, as they say, is history. I’ve been teaching that internationally for about two years now. It was during that process that I was approached, in fact in the same week, by two publishers to write the book.

[0:19:42] Ashley James: Very cool. What is the enteric nervous system?

[0:19:46] Nikki Kenward: The enteric nervous system is the nervous system that is embedded in the whole of the gut. So, if we think of the gut as a long tube going from the mouth down your esophagus through the stomach wriggling around the small intestine colon and out through the rectum and anal canal, anus. That long tube is our gut, it’s nine meters long. There is a network of our enteric nervous system stretching up to the esophagus and all the way down to the anal canal. It’s complex, it’s like a modern data processing center. It talks to the brain in our head all the time. It also makes its own decisions a lot of the time without referring to the brain in the head. So that’s our enteric nervous system. It’s massive. It has as many neurons in it as our spinal cord.

[0:20:47] Ashley James: Amazing. How do we feel our enteric nervous system? Could you maybe give some examples of when we’re experiencing it?

[0:21:02] Nikki Kenward: Yeah, sure. Well, a couple of things really easily come to mind. If we’re feeling very anxious sometimes it’s difficult to swallow. That would be one thing. When we’re eating it can make it really difficult very anxious. If we’re scared maybe we’re going on stage or we’re meeting a new person or going into a situation where we feel really out of our comfort zone, we’ll get butterflies in our stomach. That’s our enteric nervous system. If we eat something that’s poisonous or doesn’t shoot our particular digestive system our gut will get all those horrible cramps and nausea. All of those things. Sometimes much more subtle than those very obvious things. We talk don’t we about having a gut feeling about something. We meet somebody or somebody says something. We just get that kind of feeling in our gut but not sure about this. Often, it’s very definite it’s a yes or a no and we feel it in the gut. We really need to pay attention to that.

[0:22:18] Ashley James: I just saw an article this morning that said, “Children won’t tell you they have anxiety. They’ll tell you they have a tummy ache.”

[0:22:25] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. Because they feel that anxiety in their gut as I would do and a lot of adults do but they don’t know what it is. All they know is that they’ve got cramps or nausea or tummy ache, some sort.

[0:22:46] Ashley James: Right. Now that we understand what the enteric nervous system is, how could we use this relationship to focus on healing our gut and being more connected with our body so that we can work on healing our emotions? Because I think a lot of times we—let’s say we have anxiety or depression or we have these different things come up. Maybe we have trauma from our past and a lot of times we self-medicate with food, alcohol, with street drugs or even we get a prescription in order to cope.

I think a lot of people walk around coping with symptoms and not healing from them. Then feeling so ashamed that they have this problem because they feel broken. They’ve had a decision somewhere along the way that they’re not whole complete and perfect and they’re broken. They have emotional things that they’re sort of shutting down, pushing to the side, or numbing and it’s manifesting in the physical body like you said around the gut through the enteric nervous system. So there’s the real definite emotional mental connection to our physical health. I love that you’re addressing that we have to heal our emotional state and our gut at the same time because even long-term trauma can cause gut imbalance. Could we talk a little bit about that?

[0:24:27] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. You may well have heard of the adverse childhood experience study. That was done in the States over 17,000 people. It was begun in about 1995, done over a long term. There had been a couple of brilliant books that have come out of it, one is Childhood Disrupted and one is the Deepest Well. Now, what that found, one of its big findings was that early traumatic experience were adverse experience in the early years has a negative impact on the gut bacteria.

[0:25:05] Ashley James: It’s just fascinating.

[0:25:08] Nikki Kenward: So, even at that stage and there are other studies which show us the impact on the developing brain. So if we have early adverse childhood experience that has an impact almost our entire life. It predisposes us to post-traumatic stress disorder. For example, for a man going to war of we have any other kind of trauma which we know there are many different kinds.

[0:25:36] Ashley James: Talk about how when we have trauma that it can negatively affect good health.

[0:25:41] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. Yes. So right from the beginning of our life, our gut health is impacted by our experiences especially how safe we feel, how nurtured we feel. A lot of those emotional experiences become embedded or held in the tissues of the gut. It’s often a place where if we have a trauma we pile those emotions into our gut and we disconnect from it. A lot of people whose mental health is such that they dissociate find it very difficult to be present to make relationships in their life. Everything is stuffed down into the gut tissues and then they’ve like switched off from it. I did that as well. So then it’s really hard to reach that emotional history in the physical tissues. I think it’s interesting also that the actual diagnosis of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was created by psychologists who didn’t really think about the gut as part of PTSD. Yet, all the many people I have worked with, including myself, with PTSD always have a gut problem.

[0:27:07] Ashley James: It makes so much sense. I’m thinking about everyone I know with PTSD and yet it’s right. It’s true. They all do have a gut work that they’ve been working on healing. Is it that that adverse childhood events or trauma from our past disrupts the gut so much that it causes gut problems or is it that gut problems—I mean it is that gut problems cause emotional problems, is that it starts on the emotional level and then manifests in the physical. Is that correct?

[0:27:44] Nikki Kenward: I think that’s right, Ashley. I think it starts with the difficult events. It manifests in the gut, but of course, then it’s going to create a kind of vicious loop. For example, if you’ve got a problem with the gut barrier, if you’ve got a not a very healthy gut bacteria, maybe not diverse enough, maybe not the right ones, if you’ve got a slightly dysfunctional enteric nervous system from all these things that have happened in your life, then you’re going to have low serotonin. That will also increase your anxiety. You’re going to have the possibility of undigested food proteins and bacterium virus getting into your systemic and circulation and going up to your brain, further enhancing your anxiety and depression again and maybe causing information in your central nervous system. There’s a huge correlation now between stuff from the gut going to the brain, creating inflammation and that inflammation being correlated with depression. I think it starts with the experience, but it then loops all the way back. Then things get kind of entrenched in a horrible circle.

[0:29:01] Ashley James: Another thing the gut does, a healthy gut and a healthy gut biome, converts 25% of our T3, our T3 thyroid hormone. So someone with a perfectly healthy thyroid could show up in blood work with low T3 and be put on medication when it actually wasn’t the thyroid itself, it was their gut dysbiosis. We have, like you said, the serotonin. The feel-good happy neurochemicals of the brain are made in the gut. We also have that—there’s a nerve, the vagal nerve?

[0:29:41] Nikki Kenward: Yes, vagus nerve.

[0:29:42] Ashley James: The vagus nerve that travels as a cranial nerve that travels all the way from the brain down into the gut.

[0:29:51] Nikki Kenward: That’s right.

[0:29:52] Ashley James: Is that part of the enteric nervous system or is that affected? How does that a play a role in all this?

[0:30:00] Nikki Kenward: So, the vagus nerve is often called the superhighway between the gut and the brain and back again. It’s also the biggest part of our parasympathetic nervous system, which allows us to rest and digest. It’s connected to the gut. There are more messages that go from our gut to the nervous system up to the brain then go from the brain downwards to the gut. We have to remember that as well as that vagal superhighway, which is really important, people talk a lot about vagal tone. When we got good vagal tone and a good functioning vagus nerve, we can heal ourselves really well. When we haven’t, we can’t. Of course with PTSD, we don’t usually have that.

However, it’s more complex because we have the fact that the enteric nervous system can make its own decisions without talking to the brain in the head via the vagus nerve. You have this massive communication superhighway really important. You also have the autonomous aspect of the enteric nervous system. You also have the gut microbiome that’s talking via the vagus nerve and to the autonomous aspect. You’ve got so much complexity. It makes my brain hurt to be able to touch base. I figured the only way we can possibly work is to have a truly holistic approach to people because it’s too complicated to be able to work out what’s happening with any particular individual. You have to go on a journey with them and explore and see.

[0:31:53] Ashley James: We want to take, like you said, the holistic approach. Because if we went in the allopathic medical system, which is the traditional, I don’t say they were traditional, it is the modern go to a hospital, go to an MD. Most of these, most hospitals practice allopathic medicine, which is reductionistic. Reductionistic meaning it’s going to look at symptoms and systems of the body. I think because it’s compartmentalize, this is probably the reason why it’s taken us so long to acknowledge in medicine that there’s a direct link, an integrated link between mental health and the gut health because allopathic medicine treats people reductionisticaliy and also is segmented.

So you go to one doctor for your gut, you go to a separate doctor in a separate building for mental health. The two don’t normally meet each other or talk to each other or really respect each other. The gastroenterologist is going to want to use drugs and surgery and they might suggest diet if they’ve taken courses outside of extracurriculars they’ve taken some courses. Maybe they’ve understood that there actually is a relationship between food and gut health, but it’s not mandatory to be in a gastroenterologist. Not mandatory to actually study nutrition. That’s their wheelhouse. Then separately is mental health. It’s it’s considered totally separate. That’s one of the problems with modern medicine is that it’s reductionistic. That, “We’re going to only look at your pancreas or we’re going to only look at your stomach. Then we’re going to give you some drugs for your stomach because you have GERD. You have diarrhea? Okay, we’re going do colonoscopy. We’re just going to look at the colon. Then we’re just going to look at this and then we’re going to give you some drugs for this.”

They’re never going to see the big picture. They’re never going to see the root cause that way. They’re simply going to keep treating symptoms. That’s probably why a lot of listeners are listening now because they’ve been given the runaround, they’ve been on drug after drug or therapy after therapy or even holistic therapy after a realistic therapy. They feel like they’re chasing their tail or as I have often felt like playing darts blindfolded. I guess I’m going to try this therapy. Maybe I’ll get it, maybe I won’t. But what’s the root cause? We really have to get that 30,000 view approach. We have to really back out kind of like Google Earth where you back out and you see the whole planet. Look at the whole body and look at your whole life. I like that you’re going all the way back to adverse childhood events because that’s where it starts. It could start all the way at birth being a cesarean section baby. Being born cesarean affects the microbiome. Having been put on antibiotics as a child. So it can compound if we have poor gut health for a long time and maybe some adverse childhood events or some trauma.

Then, like you said, it probably starts with emotional health. Then it just snowballs from there. If we had a weakened gut because many people have been on antibiotics or eat a diet that isn’t supportive of their body unknowingly or been born cesarean. However, we’ve had we have a weakened gut to begin with and then couple that with some with some trauma from our past and we’re just trying to survive day-to-day. We’re just getting up, getting our coffee, and going to work, and just try to keep a roof over our head. We’re kind of treading water. We don’t really feel like we even have the luxury to stop and process a lifetime’s worth of trauma and stuff from our past because we’re afraid it might consume us. So for those who really do want to heal and they really feel like they’re chasing their tail but they’re kind of overwhelmed by it all, by all the therapies and everything, and of course, the overwhelm harms the enteric nervous system. It harms the gut more, right? We need to get ourselves back into a state of calm so we can. What are some steps we can take? So we’ve been chasing our tail, we’re stressed out, we got bills to pay.

[0:36:44] Nikki Kenward: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Just to preface that, which I’ll come to, it’s so interesting because when I started to talk about it, the thing that really was frustrating and drove me into my day-to-day struggle on my own was people would say things like, “If only you take the probiotic I take you’d be fine,” or “if only you’d put lavender oil on your pillow you’d sleep,” or “go and see my hypnotherapist. She’ll sort you out in one session.” There was such a lack of understanding out there and compassion that I was in that very isolated state. I think that what I’ve come to realize, the biggest steps we can take it’s how we live our life, it’s really all about that. How we live our life. So, as far as the gut goes, I used to see my gut really as the enemy. It’s like, “Oh, no. Not again. How am I going to cope with this?” I’ve got diarrhea. I’ve got to go to work. I’m going to have to take some Imodium, whatever it is or I’d be up in the night feeling horrible with anxiety and my palpitations and nausea and all of that.

So I would get very frustrated and cross with my gut, which wasn’t particularly helpful but quite human. I’m sure lots of other people listening are in that state. So my first thing was to take the big step of finding compassion for myself and my gut and begin to befriend it, connect and listen. Even if it’s just sitting with your hands on for a while with the intention of understanding of listening not judging befriending connecting and breeding is also helpful. Then how we live our lives, that’s one thing. So finding time to do things that help you to relax and get into that calm state, whether it’s going for a walk at lunchtime from your job somewhere. Maybe you’ve got a park or somewhere you can go for a walk or just sitting down somewhere peacefully and breathing meditating for a few minutes. Maybe it’s singing, maybe it’s yoga, maybe it’s tai chi, maybe it’s a social dance. Whatever it is, playing tennis. All these things add up together. There’s not one big thing. I think there’s a lot of little things looking at how you live your life with your gut in a compassionate way for yourself.

Part of that breathing and physical activity in those things matters. So your gut bacteria love being taken for a walk. I know I can tell. I have this image of mine all on the little leech and I’m taking a walk like lots of very tiny dogs. They love it. It helps get strong and healthy and grow the good ones.

[0:40:01] Ashley James: I love that analogy. I have a friend, she has two Mastiff dogs if you know them. She doesn’t have children, she has dogs. So Mastiffs are the size of adults, they’re huge. She will spend more on her dogs. They get dental work, they go to the vet, they go to the dog park twice a day, they get home handmade treats, and she’ll spend more time, energy, and money on her dogs than she would on her own health. It’s pretty funny and it’s very common for dog owners to put their animals first. I mean you know as parents we put our kids first. I love this analogy because often we won’t take care of ourselves but we would take our dog for a walk or we’d take our child in the pram for a walk. We won’t take ourselves for a walk. It’s like you know what, you have this gut health it’s a bit between three and six pounds of bacteria. So it’s like a little cat or a Shih Tzu. We imagine we have like an internal pet some animal.

[0:41:25] Nikki Kenward: I like that.

[0:41:41] Ashley James: How we treat it is how it treats us. So if we ignore it and feed it McDonald’s and whatever then it’s a very angry Chihuahua that we don’t like.

[0:41:41] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. If we shout to it and hit it.

[0:41:44] Ashley James: It wakes us up in the middle of the night, it gives us horrible indigestion, it gives us all kinds of nasty feelings start the day; but if we take it for a walk and we feed it good food and water and we spend some time rubbing it, putting our hands on our belly. We’re nurturing that little inner pet, whatever we want it, whatever we identify, whatever animal: little kangaroo. I don’t know. Whatever we wanted to be, little panda. I love it.

[0:42:14] Nikki Kenward: I love that. I’ve come to a whole new expansive idea now, Ashley, thanks to you. I think I like the idea of having an inner panda.

[0:42:25] Ashley James: Because bacteria, it’s kind of hard to emotionally connect with. What’s really interesting about our gut biome, and I’m sure you know this, it’s really interesting and there are studies. I actually have a few of them printed out on my desk somewhere. There are studies now that show that the gut biome creates chemical signals to the brain to feed us more of what it needs. So if we have a disrupted gut biome, we’ve got a really bad gut biome, we’ve got the Chihuahua of gut biomes; then it actually causes us to crave bad foods for us that feed it. So if we’re craving sugar like refined sugar and we’re craving caffeine and refined sugar and all kinds of junk food and fast food, it’s actually not us. It’s our brains being hijacked by the parasites.

[0:43:22] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. Because if we eat lots of sugar we’ll grow many more bacteria that eat that, that’s their diet. So when they’re hungry they send the messages up saying, “Give me sugar now.”

[0:43:35] Ashley James: It just hijacks our brain and then we feel, “Oh, I guess my body needs this,” but it’s not us. We’re being hijacked by the six pounds of angry Chihuahua inside us. What’s really interesting though is I never particularly liked kale until I started to eat a lot of raw kale. Because of course raw organic fresh vegetables and fruit is how you can populate the gut with those bacteria. I learned that when I studied to become a health coach at IIN. I was blown away by this lecture on the microbiome of gardening and how a bacteria that live, they’re alive on your strawberries. Even if you wash the strawberry the bacteria is still there and you eat the strawberry raw, of course, then the bacteria on strawberries that digest strawberries—if you just leave the strawberry and it’s sort of like molds and decomposes anyways, but you eat it before that happens, that same bacteria that digests strawberries populates in your gut and helps you to not only digest the strawberry but helps you to assimilate the vitamins and the nutrients from that strawberry. So the more strawberries you eat the better you get at digesting strawberries. So the more kale I ate the more I began to crave it. Then I really knew that my little panda gut biome was taking control of my brain because I began to have a Pavlovian response to kale. I’d start to salivate, get really excited for, and even crave kale.

So we can retrain our gut to make us want to eat healthy.

[0:45:19] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. We can retrain our little pets. The other interesting thing about the pet is that it’s constantly talking to all the parts of our enteric nervous system. So it’s talking to the enteric neurons all the time and the immune system and the hormones in the gut. So nothing happens on its own. The gut bacteria do not act on their own nor does the enteric nervous system nor does the immune system nor does the endocrine system in the gut. They’re all talking to each other the whole time. Decisions are being made on the basis of those conversations. So everything needs to work.

[0:46:12] Ashley James: How does the enteric nervous system affect our emotional health?

[0:46:16] Nikki Kenward: So the enteric nervous system affects our emotional health because if it’s not functioning well we will have low serotonin, low dopamine. Also, if we have emotional difficulties, trauma, whatever it might be that will impact and create tension strain patterns through the nerve fibers, the different layers of the intestine and colon, which wound and make it very difficult for the enteric nervous system to work properly.

[0:46:50] Ashley James: So as you begin to explore these, last four or five years, you began to really dive into gut health. You’ve been really into for a very long time like you’ve been doing therapy with people for a really long time. So you’ve been into the healing emotional health. You’ve been into CranioSacral for 25 years so helping people in that way. But in the last, like you said, four or five years, your focus has been on gut health. As you began to make these connections, what changes did you see in your own health?

[0:47:24] Nikki Kenward: So I began to understand—well, the first thing that changed was I found some compassion for my gut health. I began to understand better all the many messages it was giving me and where they were coming from in terms of my emotional history. So that awareness and understanding is itself very empowering. I began to realize I needed to look at that stuff and to take some pressure off myself in my life and the way I lived it in order to give it time to heal properly. I’ve also worked with a nutritional therapist to give it the other stuff that it needed to heal. I’m not a nutritionist but I think, as we’ve said in this conversation, that’s a really important part of gut health and of gut healing.

So those nutritional aspects I’ve addressed, looking at how I live my life now, I’m looking at the emotional history and my gut. So the changes are coming fast and furious now for me. Interestingly in my clients, I’ll have a client who’s done everything, tried everything, eaten everything, not eaten everything, has had constipation for decades, had a couple of cranial gut sessions so to speak, and now goes every day. It was an emotional event that she been holding on to was disconnected from in her gut for such a long time.

[0:49:07] Ashley James: So she was chronically constipated and after having an emotional healing event she now goes regularly?

[0:49:14] Nikki Kenward: Yes.

[0:49:14] Ashley James: Wow. What about the opposite? What about people who are inflamed and have diarrhea?

[0:49:22] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely similar. So I’m getting some really encouraging results from people who come with chronic long-term gut problems that they can’t seem to resolve. I work with my hands just as I would with my other cranial work very light and gently on the gut going where the gut needs me through all the different layers of the intestine, the colon palpating with intention into the places where I can feel strain patterns and tension. Just staying there giving it an opportunity to release if it’s appropriate and often the emotional stuff will come up.

[0:50:05] Ashley James: As the emotional stuff comes up, do they talk to you? Do they cry? Do they just breathe? How do they process it?

[0:50:12] Nikki Kenward: So sometimes all of those three or maybe one of those three. It may just be some tears. There may be, “Oh, so this is it. I remember and I was….” And there’d be a story. Sometimes they’ll just breathe deeply there may be a few tears they don’t need to talk that’s absolutely fine. So it can express itself in many different ways, but there’s usually a bit of an aha about where that came from. It softens something that they had wouldn’t have been able to get to in a kind of rational, “I’m trying to work it out way.” It comes from a deeper place because it’s coming from the tissues of the body.

[0:50:55] Ashley James: So you’ve taken Dr. Upledger’s CranioSacral Therapy and applied it, taking it away from the traditional working on basically around the spine and you’re working on the gut but on a very, very light, gentle, slow because you’re not trying to work on muscles like you said like a massage therapist. You’re working on the fascia and the nerves.

[0:51:22] Nikki Kenward: Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m doing. So I’m applying the cranial techniques and the cranial approach, which is obviously meeting someone where they are without an agenda with a light listening touch, creating a safe space between you and the person on the table, non-judgment. I’m doing all of those things. I’m doing it with the tissues of the gut.

[0:51:48] Ashley James: Now, since you created this type of therapy, I mean you expanded upon Dr. Upledger’s work, but you really did pioneer this specific technique. Have you had therapists do your technique on you?

[0:52:06] Nikki Kenward: Definitely, yes. A bit more now because at first there was only me, but yes I have. It’s been wonderful. I’m very fortunate now. I travel and teach it to lots of other therapists. So I get messages from all over the place now saying how helpful it is in clinical practice.

[0:52:33] Ashley James: If someone wanted to get a session, how would they find a CranioSacral therapist who has your certification?

[0:52:41] Nikki Kenward: Well, they would look at the list of therapists on the—let me see—it be the website of the International Association of Healthcare Educators. They would look for somebody who’s done my class amongst the other classes they’ve done, which will be by their name. So my training is called CST and Listening to the Second Brain. So the acronym for my class is CLSB. That would appear. They might have done the basic training. They might have done a brain class and the immune course. You’ll also see CLSB and you know they’ll have done my training.

[0:53:33] Ashley James: Excellent. Can you share any stories of what’s come about as you’ve been traveling and teaching this? Any really brilliant stories as practitioners have learned in the class or have had like aha moments while they’re learning from you?

[0:53:52] Nikki Kenward: Absolutely. So many really. There’s one class I was teaching in—where was I think I must have been in—it was either Boston or Denver. There were a lot of equine therapists there. They had light bulbs going off all the time because apparently, horses have—I’m not a horse person so I didn’t know this, I’m more of a panda person. They’ll have baby horses in their guts. Anyway, so the equine therapists we’re going, “Oh my god, this is going to be amazing for our horses.” So they went away and applied these techniques to their horses. I’ve had messages saying how it’s really helped horses with their irritable bowel or the equine equivalent of that.

[0:54:49] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s really neat. I got to tell you. I’ll tell you a story. I’ve had Eric Thornton on the show several times. He is a spiritual healer, a very practical down-to-earth. I live in a part of a Washington state near Woodinville where there’s a lot of horses. It’s a horse area. English style riding, not cowboys. So it’s actually kind of the uniform of people and Woodinville to walk around in English riding gear minus the helmet basically and the crop. Even if you don’t own a horse you just walk around in boots and the riding pants. It’s quite funny. That’s our area for you, lots of horses.

So he works with humans and with animals. He’s been doing it for a long time. He shared a story in one of our interviews that really blew my mind. A horse had been having miscarriages. This horse also acted as though it was depressed. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. They had the vet come and do everything they could do. The rider was about 12 or 13-year-old girl. So Eric comes up to the horse. They explained what the problem was and he basically talked to the horse. The horse shared with him what was going on. He turned to the girl and said, “Your horse is so depressed, so sad, has so much grief. She has so much grief because she has lost her babies.” No one could ride her. She was just really very unmotivated as a horse. Eric said to her, “Just go into the stall with her and sit with her and feel the grief with her and be present to her. Just imagine what it would feel like having lost your baby.” This young girl is about 13 but she so she hasn’t had that experience, but she could be empathetic show.

So the girl just sat with her horse in her stall and felt the grief with her. The next day the horse was fine. Then she went on to conceive. So it was just very interesting that we can help process emotions with our animals. That animals can hold onto trauma just like we can. I thought that was really interesting. So the fact that you can use CranioSacral Therapy with animals is really cool, but then that you can also help them on an emotional level is really neat as well.

When our son was born we used craniosacral there be with him and it made a really big difference in making it a very gentle experience. I love CranioSacral Therapy. I love that you’re incorporating it for gut health. I think that’s really cool. Do you have any more stories that come to mind that you’d love to share with us?

[0:57:57] Nikki Kenward: Some of the stories involve people’s emotional stories, which I’m not sure I could talk about. Obviously, they’re very personal. For example, people with eating disorders. There was a lady who’d had an eating disorder for many, many, many years. As I’m sure you appreciate it, something that’s really, really difficult to overcome. As I was working on the layers of her small intestine she connected back, just came into her awareness hidden in this really massive tension I was feeling in this particular layer. It was the basement membrane, which is one of the many layers in the small intestine, of experience she’d had when she was tiny and being weaned by her parents, by her mother, which was a really difficult and traumatic experience for her. That had completely colored her attitude to food and from then her ability to eat in a healthy happy way and digest her food. It started right back then. She hadn’t really thought about that and only barely remembered it in the past, but because we were right there in the part of her intestine where the tension was held it came up into her awareness. She realized. We talked about it. Just open questions on my part allowing her to tell her story. As she did that the tissue released and released and released. She felt very relaxed. Then the next time I saw her she said it was like you just flipped a switch. She said, “My body is now able to process my food so much more easily.”

So obviously, she didn’t go immediately into, “Oh, yeah. I can eat anything and I’m fine,” but it made a huge change. It was just that place, that membrane, and that part of her intestine that was holding that trauma from when she was less than a year old.

[1:00:29] Ashley James: So sometimes we don’t even know consciously what we need to work on.

[1:00:35] Nikki Kenward: Exactly. I think very often we don’t in my experience. We try and work it out rationally and usually that doesn’t get us very far. We have to go deeper than that.

[1:00:52] Ashley James: Well, I can see your tool, your technique being a great tool for therapists, for many different kinds of therapists. For holistic health providers, if they can help the person to release and also the person to become conscious of what’s going on, then it could save them years of work to try to find that root cause. So how can someone take your class? You’ve piqued their interests, now they really want to learn this technique for themselves and for others, how can they take your class?

[1:01:33] Nikki Kenward: So at the moment, my class is for Upledger CranioSacral Therapists. So they will know about the class they can take it. So I’ve been asked quite a few times recently to develop training for other therapists, which I haven’t done it yet. The other way in which other therapists could use it as a tool is to read the book because a lot of this is in the book. It’s actually written for therapists or laypeople to give people strategies, to give them the understanding of the anatomy of the layers. So even a layperson could put the hands on their own gut and start to connect in and discover these places. Lots of people have bought my book, have been my clients, but also other therapists doing other kinds of bodywork. So that would be at the moment the best way for people to access some of these ideas and techniques.

[1:02:35] Ashley James: Is there any lesson from the book that you’d like to teach us today?

[1:02:40] Nikki Kenward: Yes. Okay, there’s so many. Let’s choose one that’s a nice simple one to start with. We talked about it being a long tube from the mouth down to the anus. If we think about the long tube as being the outside world really coming inside us, so everything in the long tube is in the outside world until we absorb any of it into our body. Does that make sense? That idea was first mooted by Michael Gershon in the Second Brain many years ago. One thing you can always do is put your hands one on your belly maybe one on your chest thinking about the esophagus or one on your belly one on your stomach. Wherever feels right at that moment. Just allow yourself to connect into your long tube with your intention and maybe visualizing it, your breath. Just ask yourself the question how does my long tube feel? How am I responding to the outside world coming in? Am I very relaxed and embracing the things that come in? Am I more guarded or maybe I have some tension or more fearful? How does it feel? How am I responding to that outside world?

Really, it’s one of the main places we respond to our lives. We can just sit quietly, hands-on say belly, stomach, esophagus, breathe connecting to our long tube and just ask ourselves that question, how does it feel? How is it responding? How am I responding to the outside world? See what happens.

[1:04:39] Ashley James: Just slow deep breaths and close your eyes and just become aware.

[1:04:46] Nikki Kenward: Yeah. Just go inside, become aware, listen with your hands. If the answer to that question is, it feels like there’s tension like it’s guarded then maybe just acknowledge that, send the breath there, listen to that. Sometimes the body loves being listened to. That can be enough for things to start to release. You might feel the tension and become aware of an event or an emotion. It’s really a journey of exploration.

[1:05:29] Ashley James: What does listen with your hands mean?

[1:05:32] Nikki Kenward: So you’re listening to the body to feel if there’s tension there. Does it feel relaxed or tense? Does it feel warm or cold? What can I feel in there? What’s my felt sense of my inner world? We’re just really palpating touching with an intention to notice, to feel what’s going on under the surface.

[1:06:03] Ashley James: Beautiful. How long should we do this for?

[1:06:08] Nikki Kenward: Well, you could just do it for 5 minutes or 10 minutes or as long as you have. Even just doing that, say for five minutes or so, 10 minutes a day, we can gradually become more connected. We can find some compassion. We can befriend that part of us a little bit. What I would say is I’d really encourage you just to sit with it, to not worry if you think, “I don’t if I can feel anything,” because it can take a little bit of time. Just have that intention each time you sit and gradually things would change and you’ll notice things.

[1:06:53] Ashley James: I think this would be good to do right before we eat.

[1:06:55] Nikki Kenward: Yeah, definitely.

[1:06:57] Ashley James: Take the time. Prayer before a meal is a common practice, but we could also take the time to close our eyes and breathe and go within, which would help to put us out of stress response and into rest and digest response.

[1:07:16] Nikki Kenward: That’s a brilliant idea.

[1:07:18] Ashley James: Listen to the gut. I think a lot of times we’ll eat in front of the TV or standing by the sink or we’ll eat in front of the computer. We’re not true truly aware of what’s going on, what the signals of our body. I remember as a child, my mom would talk about that we have an internal thermostat. It’s not the thermostats broken but it’s like the wires are cut. We eat far more than we need but we’re not even digesting it correctly because we’re out of rest and digest mode or the sympathetic nervous system response of fight or flight. Our resources are shunted away from the gut or we have lower stomach acid. Really, we’re not fully digesting. Then we have a lot of gas and bloating because we’re not digesting we’re fermenting. Then we’re not really absorbing. What we are absorbing is kind of fermented and partially digested, it’s leaky gut.

I was just talking to a colon hydrotherapist over the weekend and she said when you have really smelly farts. You just smell horrible, especially those that might be allergic to dairy and not realize it. So you just smell something and it smells putrid like something’s rotting in your gut. She said, “Your colon absorbs most of your water. If the water in your gut smells that way, smells basically this putrid. It’s like a swamp. Your body is actually absorbing putrid swamp water. What do you think you that’s going to all your organs?” The pristine water you drink has been contaminated by the dysbiosis. Maybe you know maybe you’re in stress mode so you’re not really digesting so you’re fermenting. Basically, by the time your water gets the colon, it’s now putrid swamp water. We wonder why we have brain fog and we can’t sleep and our energies zapped. We wonder why we feel so gross. It’s a vicious cycle, but we have to break it somewhere.

[1:09:35] Nikki Kenward: We have to break it.

[1:09:37] Ashley James: Yeah. We have to break the vicious cycle. Before we eat for five minutes at every meal right before we eat, if we could just do some slow deep breathing into our belly, put our hands on our belly in our heart, get connected, check-in. I love the imagery of checking in with the tube from our mouth to our anus just checking it with that tube and relaxing the belly and letting the belly just fall out of the pelvic floor. Just let it all fall out because I think sometimes yeah suck it all in and it’s all hard. Let the belly soften then just connect. Connect with the inner panda.

[1:10:20] Nikki Kenward: It’s a great idea. Connect with our inner panda. That’s such a good idea before we eat. It’s so interesting what you were saying there because our Western idea of the belly as it should be taut, flat, and hard. It shouldn’t look like what it is because we don’t want to think about poo going through a tube. If we look at Eastern tradition, the gut, the lower Dan Tien, the lower navel is the center of emotional and spiritual growth. How did we get to where we are? What you were saying about the prayer and the meditation before eating and allowing it to soften is beautiful. That’s exactly what we can do.

[1:11:12] Ashley James: For the last 100 years or so—I mean if you look at history, there’s been a concerted effort throughout all of history to try to suppress us and control the masses. If you look at the way in which they’ve used all religions throughout the world and the way in which they’ve enforced or created wars. “My religion is better than your religion. We’re going to kill you.” or “You have to convert.” If you look at the history of government, for example, why are all the Christian holidays on top of pagan holidays? It’s very interesting how the history of the last 5000 years. Look at human history and look at how governments and religions have worked at controlling people. None of them have wanted us to be in our own power. We’re very dangerous when we are empowered, when we are in the seat of our own power connected to source, connected to our creator, connected to our heart, connected to our soul, and have health.

When we are at full health and in full power we are a danger to those who want to control us. We need to be read to examine our belief system and examine who instilled these beliefs about our bodies like what the ideal body looks like? Where does that come from? Because really, there’s so many layers to what we have been taught and hat we have unconsciously accepted as truth. What you think is beautiful or what your belief system around beauty about being, like you said, that the heart and flat tummy, that might be part of the mechanism of keeping us distracted so we don’t connect with. Look at it as being unnatural. If we’re so focused on getting a boob job and getting a nose job, if we’re so focused on what we wear, if we’re so focused on this external look of something we are not and we want to be something we’re not. We have this like, “If only I had more money. If only I had more time. If only had more energy.”

They keep us wanting and wanting and wanting then we cannot focus on being in our own power. I think to get back into our own empowerment, we have to take it into our own hands. No one’s going to give it to us. I love that your technique doing it right before each meal three times a day: sit, breathe for five minutes, pray, meditate, connect with yourself again with the intention to come back into your power, to heal yourself. Because the powers that be don’t want us to be empowered and fully healed. We just have to reexamine our belief system around what is beautiful and why do I want that? What is health? Why am I doing what I’m doing? Why am I desiring what I’m desiring? Is it my authentic self or is it been something that’s been imposed upon me? Because society is designed that way to keep us all sheeple. I love that. I love right.

[1:14:53] Nikki Kenward: It’s so true. It’s so true.

[1:14:55] Ashley James: Your technique is helping us come into our own power and listen to ourselves and connect with ourselves again because the mainstream media and the mainstream collectiveness does not want us to know that we can get in touch their intuition. That we can get in touch with our body and our body could speak to us. That we can actually heal. These are radical, radical ideas that you’re throwing out here. I love it. We have to kind of be radical. We have to swim upstream. We have to go be like salmon, totally going against the norm. We don’t want to live like a statistic. The number one killer is heart disease. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis. One in three people have pre-diabetes or obese. The statistics are horrible. If we want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. If we don’t want to be a statistic, we have to be the salmon and be willing to challenge the norm and go upstream. I love what you’re doing because you are helping people get empowered.

[1:15:57] Nikki Kenward: That’s what Dr. John Upledger taught me. He said that our job is to empower people to give them choices. That’s always been my focus because I completely agree with everything you’re saying. The only thing is if we’re a salmon can we have an inner panda? I’m not sure about that. By the way, laughing is very good for our vagal health.

[1:16:30] Ashley James: One of my one of the homework I give my clients is on their lunch breaks—I’ve get a lot of busy clients, “I don’t have time to do this. I don’t have time to get to that.” I get them to, on their lunch break, go on YouTube and look up Comedy Central or whatever and watch 5, 10, or 15-minute comedy act and just laugh. Go for walks. Get out of the office, go for a walk, listen to comedy, laugh, walk, and breathe. We have to actually schedule time throughout the day to help our enteric nervous system and help our autonomic nervous system to go back into healing mode and come out of stress mode.

[1:17:18] Nikki Kenward: Definitely. It’s really important.

[1:17:21] Ashley James: Brilliant. Nicky, is there anything else you’d like to make sure that you teach us today before we wrap up today’s interview?

[1:17:29] Nikki Kenward: I think just the only other thing is to say that anybody there who is listening to this who has felt isolated with these issues, ashamed, secret, unable to talk, I’m talking about my issues. I talk about mental health and bowel movements with my clients all the time. I just encourage you to talk about it. We all need to talk about it. It doesn’t make you any less. It doesn’t make you less functional, less competent. It makes you a human being.

[1:18:03] Ashley James: Talk about it with the right people.

[1:18:06] Nikki Kenward: With the right people, yes.

[1:18:08] Ashley James: The people who are receptive who will hold a loving space for you.

[1:18:13] Nikki Kenward: Yes, absolutely. Because the Japanese if they crack a pot, say it breaks a piece of pottery, they will put it together with some gold-colored glue because they say that pot is more precious than the one that hasn’t been broken.

[1:18:32] Ashley James: Exactly. I’ve looked at every part of my life when I felt broken and I look back and I just see that that forged me into an even more beautiful person. When we’re at our depths when we’re at our lowest know that in five-ten years you’ll look back and be grateful for the tragedy and the sorrow you have now. To keep going and use it as a tool to slingshot you into your healing. Nikki Kenward, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Listeners can go to nikkikenward.com to access your information. Is that the best place to go to buy your book as well?

[1:19:13] Nikki Kenward: I have another link for my book which is nikkikenward.store.

[1:19:20] Ashley James: Okay. Excellent.

[1:19:21] Nikki Kenward: If they’re in America though, they might do better to go on to the International Association of Healthcare Educators website where their products are because it will be cheaper to get it from there in America.

[1:19:38] Ashley James: Okay. We’ll make sure those links are all in the show notes of today’s podcast. Excellent. Nikki, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[1:19:45] Nikki Kenward: You’re welcome. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Ashley.

[1:19:51] Outro: For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price.

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