Info

Learn True Health with Ashley James

On Learn True Health, Ashley James interviews today's most successful natural healers. Learn True Health was created for YOU, the health enthusiast. If you are passionate about organic living or struggling with health issues and are looking to gain your health naturally, our holistic podcast is what you have been looking for! Ashley James interviews Naturopathic Doctors and expert holistic health care practitioners to bring you key holistic health information, results based advice and new natural steps you can take to achieve true health, starting NOW! If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, if you are fed up with prescription drug side effects, if you want to live in optimal health but you don't know where to start, this podcast is for you! If you are looking for ACTIONABLE advice from holistic doctors to get you on your path to healing, you will enjoy the wisdom each episode brings. Each practitioner will leave you with a challenge, something that you can do now, and each day, to measurably improve your health, energy, and vitality. Learn about new healing diet strategies, how to boost your immune system, balance your hormones, increase your energy, what supplements to take and why and how to experience your health and stamina in a new way. Ashley James from Learn True Health interviews doctors like Dr. Joel Wallach, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Oz, Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Molly Niedermeyer on Naturopathic Medicine, Homeopathy, Supplements, Meditation, Holistic Health and Alternative Health Strategies for Gaining Optimal Health.
RSS Feed Subscribe in Apple Podcasts
Learn True Health with Ashley James
2024
March
February


2023
December
November
September
August
July
June
March
February
January


2022
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2021
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
March
February
January


2020
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2019
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2018
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2017
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2016
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March


All Episodes
Archives
Now displaying: 2022
Dec 16, 2022

If you've ever thought about becoming a Health Coach or Functional Holistic Practitioner, now is the time! Right now, you can save up to 35% with only $49 down!

CHECK OUT THE FREE SAMPLE CLASS: https://www.learntruehealth.com/coach

I love IIN; the Institute for Integrative Nutrition is where I took my Health Coach Training and where you can transform your life and become an Integrative Health Coach!

The whole program is online and designed for busy people, so anyone can do it!

 

Free 7-Day Holistic Doctor Course by Ashley James:

FreeDoctorCourse.com

 

Join the Learn True Health FB group:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/group

 

Ozone Machine:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/ozone

 

Listen to episode 484 for more info on why and how to use ozonated water made in your home for energy and mitochondrial function:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/at-home-ozone-therapy-for-immune-mitochondrial-health-eileen-durfee

 

 

High-Quality NAD Brain Supplement:

Use coupon code LTH at

https://www.learntruehealth.com/nad

 

Listen to episode 460 about the benefits of high-quality NAD on cellular function, energy production, and mitochondrial health:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/nicotinamide-adenine-dinucliotide-supplement-nadovim-nad-the-missing-link-to-energy-brain-function-and-longevity

 

 

Sunlighten Sauna - the sauna Ashley uses, loves, and recommends:

Be sure to ask for the listener special!

https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna

 

Listen to episode 245 to learn from the founder of Sunlighten Sauna as to why this sauna is the best tool for your health journey:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlighten-saunas

 

 

The world's most effective Magnesium Soak:

Use coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com

 

Listen to episode 294 to hear Kristen Bowen share her story of recovery and discovering the world's most absorbable form of magnesium:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/magnesium-foot-soak

 

 

Ashley's Favorite Spirulina and Chlorella:

Use coupon code LTH at EnergyBits.com

 

Listen to episode 487 and hear the latest science behind healing algie

https://www.learntruehealth.com/mitochondrial-self-healing-superfoods-high-potency-chlorella-spirulina

 

Dr. Biamonte's website: www.health-truth.com 

Join the Learn True Health Facebook group: learntruehealth.com/group

 

494: Why Rx Drugs Are Destroying Emotional and Mental Health

We've been conditioned to believe that emotional and mental issues are the result of chemical imbalances, but that's a myth. An overwhelming number of people are taking prescription medications for emotional health problems, and the numbers are growing at an alarming rate. That's because, in many cases, pharmaceutical drugs fail to address the root cause of emotional issues. The drugs we take to treat the symptoms of a condition could be causing more problems than they are treating. Join Dr. Michael Biamonte and Ashley James as they dig into why this is the case and how you can cure your emotional and mental health problems today!

Ashley James And Dr. Michael Biamonte

Highlights:

  • The relationship between gut health and emotional and mental health
  • The chemical imbalance myth
  • Neurotransmitter testing
  • Hormonal imbalance
  • Heavy metal toxicity
  • The madness of marketing
  • Panic attacks and anxiety

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today, we have back on the show Dr. Michael Biamonte. He was in episode 486 and 488 where he taught us all about candida and how you can get candida back into balance. A lot of people say get rid of candida, kill candida, but what we learned from Dr. Michael Biamonte is many people have candida overgrowth and we need candida but we probably need 90 percent less candida than what we have and when it runs rampant in the body, it affects our brain, it affects every organ, it affects every system. It just kind of takes over and everything dominoes in the body. So, you could have bad sleep, you could have cravings, you could have weight gain, you could have hormone dysregulation. You could have brain fog. The list goes on and on and on. Of course, there’s digestive issue that happen like diarrhea and bloating and in some cases, constipation, and we see it affecting our ability to focus. So, those who have ADHD symptoms. Right? Our ability to learn, our ability to concentrate. Motivation, our motivation in life. Our feeling of drive, our feeling of sense of purpose, sense of fulfillment from life. This can get actually very existential. When we see the body as a whole, this is a holistic podcast – welcome, if you're new to Learn True Health podcast – this conversation is that the body is not broken into parts. Modern medicine, when you go to a regular doctor at any given clinic, a medical doctor, their education has trained them to see the body broken into parts. So, you go to the liver specialist over here, the heart specialist over here, the endocrinologist over here, the brain doctor over there, and it’s great that we have specialties. You know, if you have a broken arm or need to be put back together after an accident, God forbid, I’m so thankful that we have this type of medicine. However, what we do see, if you get a 30,000-foot view, is that modern pharmaceutical-based medicine is horrible, has an absolutely horrible track record for helping us to heal from chronic illness, for helping us to get the body back into optimal health.

How often do you see people actually get off of drugs, get off of pharmaceuticals and get so healthy they don’t need them and get even healthier before they went to the doctor? In most cases, they get put on more and more and more medications the older they get. Not less and less. This is the unfortunate truth, is that it is a for-profit industry and it’s a big juggernaut. But when you come to holistic medicine, you come to the side of holistic medicine, now of course there are good and bad… I don’t want to say bad doctors. There are far more competent doctors and far less competent doctors just like there are more competent mechanics. We are fallible, we are humans. Right? Don’t put anyone on a pedestal ever. We have to understand in holistic medicine, let’s assume we are seeing and referred to very competent and experienced holistic doctors, what we’re seeing is, the philosophy that guides them is completely different from Hollywood portrays as medicine. They look at you as a whole. So, when we talk about mental and emotional health, we have to also see that physical health plays a role in that. Because something like candida in those past episodes, 486 and 488, with Dr. Michael Biamonte, we talk about how candida overgrowth and in other episodes where we’ve had experts on small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and fungal overgrowth, parasites, all kinds of stuff that affects the gut, we’ve had many. I have at least 20 episodes that you can go back to and check out when you go to Learntruehealth.com, scroll down from the homepage and you’ll see Choose Your Own Adventure and you can find the digestive stuff and parasites, and all wonderful fun things to dive into. That all these very physical, tangible things, have an effect on the intangible like our emotional being and our mental health, our sense of who we are and how we are right now in the moment can actually be affected by what’s going on in our gut. 

So, we look at the body as a whole and we look at your whole life as a whole. We look at everything impacting you. I think it’s so gratifying to have a practitioner look at you and wanting to see all of you and saying “hey, I know you’ve expressed to me that you’re feeling a lot of stress, you’re feeling a lot of sorrow, or you’re feeling grief, or you feel anxiety,” and not discrediting those emotions and also not discrediting that there’s other aspects of your life like the role you play, the roles you play in your life and everything in your environment, and all of that, looking at your life as a whole and including your physical health. Let’s get some lab work done but let’s also talk about your spiritual health, your spiritual life, your mental and emotional health. Let’s talk about your environment, let’s talk about your relationships. So, looking at everything as a whole. 

That’s what Dr. Biamonte is here to discuss today, this wonderful viewpoint—looking at mental and emotional health from the holistic standpoint. Some of what he has to share today is going to rock your world, it was absolutely fascinating. I think I said the word “fascinating” 20 times in the interview because of how fascinating it was. I feel like I’m Spock, “That’s fascinating.” He shares some crazy statistics. I want you to really let them sink in. He kind of pulls us out of the matrix today in this interview. He shares with us stuff that we just let slide like the effects that certain drugs have on the human psyche and have on suicide rates, and yet, we just let these pharmaceutical companies slide, we just let it all side like the status quo is fine, everything is fine; meanwhile, everything is burning down. And I so hope that what he shares with you today helps you, gives you another piece of that puzzle that helps to direct your life so that you can learn true health, create true health in your life.

My husband has actually started working with Dr. Biamonte on a personal level doing the candida protocol. We’ve done some labs with him. First of all, let me tell you. I am as impressed with him in my interviews as I am working with him as a doctor, because my husband lets me in on their telemedicine calls. He’s a very caring, fantastic doctor, right to the point. Functional medicine, I should say. He really does deal with functional medicine. I’ve enjoyed the labs he’s had my husband do and the analysis of those labs, really interesting. And now, my husband is starting the diet and the supplement protocol, so I’ll keep you guys posted on how that goes, but so far, working with him has really been great. Definitely give him a call if you’re called to, if you find he’s interesting because so far, I’m really impressed and, well, the proof is in the pudding so we’ll see how my husband does after a few months on the protocol. I’ll let you guys know.

There’s a few resources I want to make sure that you are aware of. Especially if you're new to the podcast or newer to the podcast, I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but I have this great resource I built out with some of my favorite holistic naturopathic doctors. You can go to Freedoctorcourse.com. That's Freedoctorcourse.com and I filmed a 7-day beautiful free course, less than 10 minutes a day kind of thing but it gets right to the point, the foundations of health. These are fantastic naturopaths and they have some great advice. This is actual steps that everyone will benefit from no matter what health issues you have – mental, emotional, physical, spiritual. It deals with the foundation of things that we should absolutely be doing to build our health no matter what. So, definitely check that out. Freedoctorcourse.com. Every day I email you one of the videos we made along with some great homework and tools for you. These are things that I often remind myself, “Oh yeah, I need to go back and do these things.” These are the basics but if you're missing one, it’s like missing a tire on your car. Your car’s not going to go anywhere. So, you have to have these foundations to have fantastic health.

The next thing I really want to make sure you know about. Because so many of my listeners end up becoming holistic health coaches, either for their own personal growth and their own health goals, or they’re just drawn to it and they want either add this to their career, have it as a hobby side career, or they want to completely transition into doing full-time holistic health coaching. Check out Learntruehealth.com/coach. That's Learntruehealth.com/coach. You get a sample class from Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That's where I went. It’s an online program designed for very busy people. So, if you're like, for example, full-time job and a mom or a dad and you’ve just got a lot on your plate, you can still graduate from the program. It takes a year. You do about 20 minutes a day. Sometimes if I was really busy, I would just accumulate all of my lessons for that week and do them all on a Sunday. Oftentimes I’d listen to them where I was cooking, doing laundry, driving. So, if you listen to a podcast, you could absolutely a year from now, be a holistic health coach. If you want to become more of a full-time student, it’s about 40 minutes to an hour a day. They have a six-month accelerated program. So you could check either one of those out, but I love that they designed it knowing that usually, it’s not someone’s career, you jump out of high school and go, “I’m going to be a health coach,” boom. You know, 17, 18, 19 years old taking the course when you have all the time in the world. Usually, it’s not your first career and it’s something that you already have an existing career, you're super busy and you have to somehow fit it into your life. What I love about the IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s health coach training program, is your life gets transformed while you're doing it. You learn from amazing… it’s like if you love my podcast, it’s like my podcast TED Talks, like each week is digesting 3 or 4 amazing TED Talks on health and then they give you homework that you get to apply to your own life. So, each week you're adding almost like the foundations of health but you're adding more and more to your life.

Holistic health coaching is looking at your life holistically. It’s not just dietary theory. Yes, you do learn a hundred dietary theories in that course but that’s not even important. As a health coach, you're really helping people to get to their health goals by listening to them and drawing out of them the answers that they’re most of the time already in them. Then you help them crowd out their plate when it comes to eating, helping them bring joy into their life in every area of their life, so helping to identify what areas are missing joy. If you in your life are missing joy in certain areas of your life, you should definitely check out the sample class and consider “could I bring joy to every area of my life through this program?” Because that’s what I loved about the program, is it really helped to unfold and bring forth joy in each area of your life. It has you look at under a lens in a different way each area of your life. So you end up at the end of the program feeling much more fulfilled, satisfied, and joyous in your life as a whole in your body, but also in your world, in your relationships.

They say almost half, I think it’s like 47 percent of people that do the program just do it for their own personal growth, so I thought that was really cool. Right now, IIN’s having an amazing sale. I don’t know when it’s going to end, it’s going to end soon so you should go to Learntruehealth.com/coach and just check it out and see. Right now, they're offering a big discount and they are offering to sign up for I think it was $49 or something just to get started just as the down payment. Sometimes, a few times a year, they do these sales so it’s great to check out. But if you're checking this out and that sale is over, what I want you to know is that when I took the program, I asked them if they would give a discount to all my listeners because I talk about it so much and I’ve actually interviewed many of their teachers. So, they do give a great discount. Make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James and say, “Hey, Ashley James said I’d get a discount. Make sure you give it to me.” So, yeah, check that out. Let me know if you have any questions. You can always ask me questions in the Facebook group, in the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to see you there and answer questions. Every day I’m in that group answering questions. Not just me but there's other holistic health professionals in the group.

Every day when someone asks a question, there's a bunch I was jumping in to help and give our feedback. Feel free to join the Learn True Health Facebook group. You can go to Learntruehealth.com/group to join the Facebook group. Make sure you check out the free sample class from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition for their health coaching program. You go to Learntruehealth.com/coach. If you want the free class that created with some of my favorite naturopaths, you can go to Freedoctorcourse.com and you’ll be given the 7-day class. It’s absolutely free. Something that I created out of love for you guys because it’s so needed. This is the foundations of health. Everyone listening should do those things that you learn in the 7-day course and everyone sees a benefit from doing it. So, I want all of you guys to have that benefit. I love you. I know you and I personally don’t know each other or maybe we do because I’ve actually met several of my listeners. But if you are struggling and you need help, please join the Facebook group because I don’t want to struggle.

What I want you to know, especially if you're a new listener you might not know this, I suffered for many years. I cried myself to sleep. I’d burst into tears often at how much I suffered. I had major chronic illnesses throughout my 20’s and it was very difficult. I know what that feels like. I don’t want you to suffer. If you're suffering, I don’t want you to suffer anymore. I have seen people recover from so many conditions they were told where “unrecoverable.” I believe in your body’s ability to heal itself. I believe that you can improve your situation no matter what. It has to start with you believing and so I want to let you know I believe in you and I believe in your body’s ability to heal and take these resources, take the free sample class from IIN and see if you get something out of it. Definitely take my free course and come join the Facebook group, ask for help. Pore through the answers. You can use the search function in the group. You can also use the search function on my website Learntruehealth.com to find many resources. There are so many resources out there in the holistic world. You have to dig for them. But we’re here to help. The Learn True Health Facebook group is here to help you because we’re a whole community. We’re actually a community of over 5000 listeners and we’re here to help each other. 

So, suffering is needless and suffering is optional. This is what actually a few of my guests have come on the show and said. Suffering is optional, let’s make it optional. Let’s make it optional by discovering the tools, sharing the tools. As I constantly am uncovering these amazing holistic tools, I bring them to you because I know that they're going to help.

Now, what I’m planning for episode 500, and it’s been on my heart for a while now, is I’d like to do a testimonial episode. I received so many testimonials of people who have shared that through this podcast learning from the guests and from me. Their lives have been transformed, their health has been changed. In some cases, they actually saved a relative’s life, which is huge. There's one woman who saved her mom’s life. Her mom would not have lived if it wasn’t for this podcast. How big is that? So, if you have a testimonial listening to this podcast, please send it to me. You can send it to me. Support@learntruehealth.com. Come into the Facebook group and share it. I’d love to see it there, and other listeners would love to see it there too. You can message it to me on Facebook. I’d also love to include it. I don’t have to include your name if you're uncomfortable with that. I’ve been collecting testimonials so I can create that episode.

I think it’s so important. I know when I was suffering, hearing testimonials really helped. When I lost my daughter last year, I think the biggest thing that helped besides my connection with God was hearing testimonials of women who had lost their children and they're living, they're living their life, they’re happy, they were able to heal from it because at the time, I couldn’t see a way out. I couldn’t see that I could heal from it. So testimonials have, even though you might discredit your testimonial like “oh, who am I, my story is not so big,” but if you were suffering and now you're no longer suffering, sometimes that right there, that little story you have, is actually huge to someone else. It’s lifechanging to someone else. So, when I heard, my midwife was sharing with me some other women that she had worked with who like “oh yeah, this mom’s third child diet and now she has three more and she’s so happy.” Just those kind of stories, those type of testimonials might not seem like a lot but for those who need to hear them, it really helps. So please, if you have any kind of transformation, any kind of story of healing, please reach out to me because your story, even though you might not think it’s important, it could be lifechanging for someone else. And that's what I’m about. That’s what this podcast is about – it’s about helping as many people as possible to learn true health.

So, thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about and thank you so much for sharing your testimonials with me so I can create that episode, episode 500. Whatever holidays you celebrate this month, you know, can be stressful a lot for many people. I recognize that you might not be listening to this episode in December although I’m releasing it in December. I want to wish you peaceful, gentle healing and loving holidays. Since I do celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas for those who celebrate Christmas and for those who celebrate anything else. I wish everyone to have gentle, peaceful, loving season to let the stress go and replace it with love and peace in your heart and in your life and in your environment around you. Because we don’t need stress. That is not healthy for any of us. So, I love you all and enjoy today’s episode. 

[00:19:23] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 494.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Dr. Michael Biamonte. What I love about today’s interview is we’re going to do some major myth busting. This is like pull you out of the matrix. We’re going to take you out and show you that you’ve been raised in a system that teaches you that you need drugs to suppress, to change, to manage your brain chemistry, your biochemistry. And when it comes to mental health and emotional health, the word “health”, they shouldn’t even be allowed to use the word “health” because it is so far from health. When it comes to emotional and mental health and prescription drugs, and I’m so excited to have you on the show to talk about this topic today. Dr. Biamonte was in episode 486 and 488. In those two episodes, we really did a deep dive into candida and gut health. Now there's a large correlation between gut health and brain health, and I definitely want to touch on that since that is one of your expertise. But you did mention in episode 488 that one of your favorite things to do is to take your patients or your clients and to help them get so healthy that they're off all their meds especially when it comes to mental and emotional medications. So, looking forward to doing a deep dive there. Welcome back on the show.

[00:21:03] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.

[00:21:05] Ashley James: Excellent. Now, listeners can go to your website which is health-truth.com and of course, the links everything that Dr. Michael Biamonte does is going be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com. I’d love to know because your expertise has largely been around gut health or getting candida back in balance in the body instead of having an overgrowth of it for so many years. At what point while you were practicing and working with people and helping them, at what point did you go “Wait a second. I can help people get emotionally and mentally healthy” to the point where they're no longer on all these meds?

[00:21:47] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Probably in the late ‘80s when I started to see a correlation between several things. First was constipation. I had so many patients tell me “Gee. Since my constipation is handled and I’m no longer constipated, I feel so much happier. My mood is better. I feel lighter as a person. Not physically. They were speaking about more of their own being. They just felt lighter and happier.” So I started researching this and it also was part of my research into candida. I found the correlation between neurotransmitters and the digestive tract. I didn’t know that the body shuttled neurotransmitters and hormones in and out of the bloodstream to the digestive system and back and forth. Sort of like the body will the digestive tract as a holding tank for neurotransmitters and hormones and then pull them back into the bloodstream when needed.

When I understood the mechanism, it made sense as to why these people were now telling me that since they're not constipated, they feel so much happier and quite a few of them went off their antidepressants as a result of that. Some of my colleagues said “Well, that’s probably because their thyroid function improved.” But I actually did find the reference. Unfortunately, I forgot which book it was, but I think it might have been a book by Dr. Whitaker where he went over the fact that the body does pull these neurotransmitters and hormones back and forth in the digestive tract and out of the digestive tract, and you can’t do that if you have dysbiosis. So, you have to have a normal functioning digestive system in order to be able to do that. The other correlation I started to see was in people who had very high copper levels, and that goes back to Dr. Pfeiffer’s work at the Brain Biocenter in Princeton, NJ where he had cited that schizophrenics were very high in copper. He basically laid out that if he detoxed a schizophrenic from copper, his schizophrenia would go away and a lot of his mental health issues would go away that a lot of this was copper toxicity. 

I started hearing more and more from these people who were copper toxic about their mood swings, about how they try to sleep at night and they had racing thoughts and they just couldn’t shut it off and couldn’t go to sleep. It matched a lot of the, well, not a lot but some of the data that I was seeing in psychiatric books, of course they had no idea it was being caused by copper toxicity. But sure enough, when these people were detoxed from the copper, these symptoms would go away. 

So, I guess that was probably the initial thing that set me off on this. But once I armed with that knowledge, I knew there was a lot more. I knew I was just basically scratching the surface. I knew there was a lot more and that’s what led me to dive into it much deeper. I read a book in 2015 which really helped put this together for me. It’s called Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial by Dr. Peter Getzsche. He presented data suggesting that psychiatric drugs kill about half a million Americans and Europeans over the age of 65 per year. He also pointed out that in terms of long-term outcomes, people in less developed countries have far fewer problems with mental health and problems with drugs. Obviously, the answer is because they don’t have the availability. As you and I were saying once, on one of the podcasts, people nowadays, their availability to just go to a psychiatrist or even their medical doctor and say “I’m depressed, give me a pill,” they can do this very easily.

We were discussing also that our grandparents growing up had tough times. You’d come to this country and back in those days, times were tough. They had to struggle and bring themselves up by their bootstraps. They couldn’t just go to a doctor and say “I’m new to this country, I’m having trouble getting a job. Give me a pill.” 

[00:26:07] Ashley James: I have family members, I have friends who they're struggling and their doctor very quickly got them on multiple meds, depression, anxiety, and sleep meds and just thinking back to my grandmother who had to bury several of her siblings while escaping the war in a train with no heating, Just like the horror stories, right? And she was never on any psychiatric meds. She lived a full long life, a beautiful life. Kids, grandkids. Our grandparents and great grandparents had, in some cases, much harder times than we’re going through, not to belittle the struggles that we go through. But they didn’t have access to these drugs and these drugs, in many cases, are band-aids. I’d rather have someone, if a drug could stop someone from committing suicide, I’d rather have them be on that drug. But what we’re seeing is actually the opposite. We’re seeing that in a lot of cases, going to the drug ends up being that band-aid that then doesn’t let them go through and do the emotional and mental healing.

[00:27:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And the growth. Their own personal growth at the same time. 

[00:27:20] Ashley James: Right. And then, we’re still seeing the suicide rates go up and in our youth right now, I believe suicide is the first or second. Either the first or the second leading cause of death in ages I think it was like 12 to 25. It’s very scary and sad how rampant this problem is becoming. I can’t help but think that, obviously, there's gut issues. We have an over toxic world. There's 80,000 new man-made chemicals in the last 40 years. The environment, the milieu, the day-to-day existence is toxic compared to what it was one generation, two generations ago. 

So, we are facing a different world. Our biology is facing a different world than our grandparents. But at the same time, we have to look back and go, how is it that for many generations, we could live through the tough times and grow and learn and support each other and create an ecosystem of support and growth? Then now, we are more isolated than ever. We are more depressed than ever. We have incredibly high suicide rates. The first thing we’re given when we go to a doctor is a drug that has a bunch of side effects.

[00:28:38] Dr. Michael Biamonte: That's the swing that we’ve had in the last 50 years where instead of self-reliance, we have entitlement—and entitlement also offers people these drugs, unfortunately.

[00:28:50] Ashley James: So, the purpose of having you on today isn’t to make people who are on these drugs feel guilty. That's the exact opposite.

[00:28:55] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No of course.

[00:28:57] Ashley James: You help patients all the time to get so healthy that they’re no longer on these medications and that they also feel freedom and they feel amazing again emotionally and mentally. I want to clarify something you talked about before we move on to how you go about doing this. When you said around the world 65 and older, I think you said, what was it, like 2 million people die of psychiatric drugs.

[00:29:23] Dr. Michael Biamonte: What I was referring is that in the developed world, and the developed part of the world as opposed to the underdeveloped, you have so many more people dying from psychiatric drugs than you do in the underdeveloped parts in the world. It’s primarily because the drugs are unavailable in underdeveloped parts of the world. The book I was talking about before was Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial by Peter Gøtzsche. He talks about psychiatric drugs kill approximately half a million Americans over the age of 65 every year. That's horrifying!

[00:29:55] Ashley James: Wow. What is killing them exactly? 

[00:30:01] Dr. Michael Biamonte: What’s killing them is a combination of things. But it’s in part the side effects of the drugs. The drugs cause various side effects in the cardiovascular system and completely damage the gut health. So, then you have whatever problems you then want to postulate from gut health coming from that. You also have mass suicides that have occurred in these people. The FDA trials for Prozac, they covered up. And I know they covered it up because I have the actual reports from Eli Lilly. They covered up so many suicides that occurred in people on the Prozac trials. Why that occurs, you still hear it nowadays on TV. You turn on the TV and the big joke is the pharmaceutical commercial goes on and it lists a hundred million side effects that you could have. They have children playing in the park on the background, you know.

But it’s understanding how the drugs works, gives you a better understanding of why people die from them and why there are suicides. The typical antidepressant, your SSRI, which is an uptake inhibitor of serotonin, it doesn’t work by boosting your serotonin. It boosts by restricting it. Prozac actually stops your brain’s reabsorption of serotonin in order to make the serotonin receptor sites in your brain more acute and more excitable. So, it’s creating a deficiency to try to make something create like a sparring effect. The idea behind the drugs is that if you block the brain’s ability to reabsorb serotonin, then the brain has to do a much better job with the amount of serotonin it has. That works in some people. But in other people, it doesn’t work. It causes a crashing serotonin deficiency which is why of the side effects you’ll hear them talk about when they discuss Prozac or SSRI side effects is suicide or extreme massive depression.

[00:32:08] Ashley James: If you're stopping, blocking the cells from uptaking the… I mean, could see maybe if they did that temporarily like give you Prozac for a week and then take you off of it to try to resensitize the cells, but to keep you on it, how would keeping you always on it resensitize the cells to uptaking serotonin?

[00:32:29] Dr. Michael Biamonte: It doesn’t. Which is why these drugs ultimately are a failure. It’s in part a lot of politicians and bureaucrats that work in the industry have allowed this go on. There's the chemical imbalance myth. I call it a myth. But you hear these for years. You’ve been hearing the doctors quote that this chemical imbalance exists. Well, I can tell you about the chemical imbalance from the viewpoint of really scientific viewpoint of someone who tests. But in big pharma and psychiatrists, they for decades have claimed that the mentally ill have this chemical imbalance but yet, there has never been one single test or one single study that’s ever confirmed anything that they’ve said. In the British Psychology Society, there's a report in there, very interesting. It goes on to say that the chemical imbalance of neurotransmitters such as serotonin has remained unproven.

Now, I can tell you, however, from the viewpoint of someone who actually tests people that when I test people who come to me who are on these drugs or who have these issues, we will occasionally find a person who does have the serotonin deficiency. So, I can say, I am at liberty and I can say with authority that I can find a chemical imbalance in some of these people. But I’m testing them and the difference between myself and other practitioners, particularly psychiatrists, is they never test anyone. They don’t even know that these tests exist. But I can occasionally test someone and find their serotonin is low or their cortisol is too high or I can find some type of neurotransmitter imbalance and thank God for the work of the late Dr. Gottfried Kellermann from Neuroscience Labs who formulated an entire line of nutritional supplements that are all based on some of the patterns that you find in these neurotransmitter urine tests that are available by Functional Labs. His nutritional formulas are aimed at normalizing these imbalances. If your dopamine is too high, your dopamine is too low or whatever, your serotonin, he developed formulas which you can use on people that actually would balance it. He’s not doing something that’s hokey pokey where he has supplements and they’re starving the brain of these nutrients. He’s actually giving the person the precursors of these nutrients. He discovered that there are many herbs that work to excite those neurotransmitter receptor sites. So, he can accomplish with his formulas a natural way of going about what these drugs are doing in a destructive way.

[00:35:28] Ashley James: Fascinating, what you just said. You said psychiatrists don’t test.

[00:35:33] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No. I dare anyone to email or call in on this show who’s had a psychiatrist, not a functional medical doctor. I have never heard of, and if you go through all the psychiatrist data, if you go through the DSM-V, you look at all these books, you're not going to find any mention of any testing that's recommending or any protocol for testing. It doesn’t exist. They don’t do it.

[00:36:01] Ashley James: So they go based on your symptoms like “oh yeah, I can clearly see this person’s depressed,” or, “I’m diagnosing this person with bipolar based on what they’re sharing with me and their behavior,” and then they just put them on drugs and they don’t test them to see could there be a different imbalance.

There's one of my naturopathic mentors often find some people who are misdiagnosed with bipolar who have out-of-control blood sugar swings.

[00:36:26] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Or hormonal imbalances. That's another huge one in women. In women, PMS. They're constantly putting women on all these psychiatric drugs for PMS. Where the woman would be better off taking zinc and vitamin B6. She would get more relief from her PMS doing that than taking these drugs. 

[00:36:45] Ashley James: Fascinating. Yeah, since the last two years, I upped my zinc and I have noticed that I don’t have any symptoms. I always get surprised when my period comes because I have zero symptoms.

[00:36:59] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, zinc and B6 are cofactors to progesterone. They help mobilize progesterone. Normally, when you think of PMS, you think of high estrogen to progesterone ratio or estrogen dominance. And B6 and zinc help smooth that out. They help bolster progesterone.

[00:37:16] Ashley James: Wow. That's just fascinating. So, when comes to you and they have depression, what’s your first few questions for them?

[00:37:30] Dr. Michael Biamonte: My first few questions is why. Why do you have depression? What’s the situation? Who’s involved in this situation? A lot of times, they’ll rattle off names immediately. “Well, I’m depressed because my business partner is doing this.” “I’m depressed because my spouse is doing this or my child does this or my neighbor does this…” A lot of times they’ll just ring it right off. In that situation, I encourage them to handle the real-life situation they have and not take a pill and go hide in the closet.

When a person can’t come up with what it is, then we will do different testing if that's their main problem. A lot of times you get patients with candida come in and they talk about depression very often. So, if that’s the case, we’re going to treat the candida and see if the depression goes away in that line. But let’s say the person just comes in, he’s depressed, he doesn’t know why, he doesn’t really have any other outstanding physiological symptoms. Well, sure, then we’ll go ahead and we’ll do a neurotransmitter test. We’ll check out his blood sugar, check out his hormones, and 9 out of 10 times we’re going to find there’s a physiological reason which flies in the face of the gene finding theory that for years, psychiatrists have been saying that genetic factors have a substantial role in mental illness and even says in the DSM-V but yet, in actuality, there's no evidence that this is true. As a matter of fact, what was his name, David Kupfer several decades ago said we’re still waiting to discover biological and genetic markers for mental illness. They still haven’t found this. That was in a taskforce that I think he was the chair of.

So, they throw these things out, these things become catchphrases. Chemical imbalance. Genetic defects that lead to mental… they throw these things that they become catchwords but when you actually pull the string and look into them, there is no evidence behind them that they exist. 

[00:39:42] Ashley James: Tell us a bit more about the neurotransmitter testing that you do when someone has depression and you're suspecting that there might be an imbalance.

[00:39:53] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, we do a urine test that they're available through several labs. I believe Great Plains, Doctor’s Data, and Genova Labs easily offer them. Those are the bigger labs. They offer, it’s a urine collection. The urine collection goes to the lab, the lab looks for the neurotransmitters. There’s a certain amount of interpretation skill needed because sometimes, high levels of neurotransmitters in urine can indicate a loss of the neurotransmitter. So, let’s say you find a high amount of serotonin. The high amount of serotonin may not mean they have a lot. It might mean they’re losing it. But there's usually a pattern involved in that. Like very often, you’ll see the person has high cortisol which blocks serotonin, so you can see they have high cortisol and then high serotonin. Well, in that case, you know that the high cortisol is blocking the serotonin and causing a loss of it. So, that's what I mean by there's a certain amount of interpretation skill. But for the most part, when you do that test, it lays out all the neurotransmitters and show you the ratios between the ones that are very important that work together. It lets you see what’s high and what’s low. So, then you have an idea if there’s any actual evidence and reality that the person has an imbalance with the neurotransmitters. More often than not, when we find these imbalances and we put them on the right nutritional support, they feel better. 

[00:41:17] Ashley James: Interesting that high cortisol blocks serotonin. I’m just trying to think of why that would be because your body needs to be in fight or flight mode and not in like super happy mode.

[00:41:27] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, it’s a matter of the receptor sites. Cortisol jams up the serotonin receptor sites. 

[00:41:33] Ashley James: They fight for the receptor sites.

[00:41:35] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, cortisol blocks the receptor sites so the serotonin then can’t go and attach itself to the receptor site that easily. So, it’s not being utilized so it then builds up and then it’s excreted in your urine. 

[00:41:48] Ashley James: So, someone who let’s say have high cortisol because they’ve been chronically stressed out and it doesn’t have to be emotional or mental stress, it can also be physical stress like the body’s fighting let’s say a chronic candida infection. Their body is in a state of stress, they have higher than normal cortisol levels. Maybe they're also not sleeping well at night, maybe they're using alcohol to manage their “stress”, so they're doing things that increase cortisol and then they go to a doctor and they say “I’m really depressed and I have sleep problems” and the doctor puts them on an SSRI. Their body is making enough serotonin but maybe even trying to make more serotonin, but the cortisol is blocking it and then they take a drug because the doctor did no testing at all to figure out the root cause. Then they're taking an SSRI that’s then blocking the serotonin further, pushing them further into being out of balance. 

[00:42:46] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, this is true. I’d give you one from the backdoor. There was a patient I had for years. She finally moved away, she moved to California but for years, I was treating this woman. Every September, her hormone tests would start to go out of balance. I asked her millions of questions as to what’s going on and she never came up with the answer until finally, I asked her, well, what’s different about this time of year than any other time of year. Then she suddenly blurted out the L’eggs Mini Marathon. So I said, “alright, tell me more.” She says, “Well, every year I run the L’eggs Mini Marathon in New York City, so I start training for it in August and the race is in October.” That was exactly coincidental with when her cortisol and other hormones started to go out of balance. So, from the training she was doing, the running she was doing, which you could say an excess of what the average person would do, that was raising her cortisol. So you see, it could be something that innocent. 

[00:44:01] Ashley James: You need to do the deep dive. This is why it’s so dangerous at times to go to a traditional medical doctor or go to a head doctor and say, “I got depression” without doing the deep dive. These band-aids are causing more damage than good.

[00:44:23] Dr. Michael Biamonte: A colleague of mine wrote an article called Why Your Insurance is Making You Sick. Backtracking on the whole thing, he was pointing out that people will go to their doctors their insurance will cover. A lot of these doctors don’t know what they’re doing, so by engaging in the doctor that's going to be covered by their insurance, they're actually getting sicker because they're not going to the doctor who would find out what was really going on. 

[00:44:48] Ashley James: Ha! That is so sad. So, we talked a bit about depression. What other mental health situations have you been able to help resolve to the point where they’ve been able to get off all their meds?

[00:45:02] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, we can go down the list of the names—bipolar, schizophrenia. They're all basically, as someone like you who’s read the DSM, basically these are all made-up situations for the purpose of being able to find a drug to sell. If someone really wants to get into this, there's a video you can watch called Marketing Madness. If you go to the website CCHR.org, you’ll find this video. It’s maybe 3 or 4 hours long and it rips apart the entire scam of psychiatric medications and the whole scam of psychiatry, it breaks it all down to the point where you appreciate the title, it’s Marketing Madness. They’re marketing insanity and the solution they have for you are these drugs. As the old saying goes, the two worst things you can ever do is number one, kill the patient, and number two, cure them. Because if you cure them, then he’s off your list to sell the drugs to. 

But to answer your question, you know, I don’t like to get into the terminology. The terminology is only good for recognition. Everyone can agree upon a recognition of a set of symptoms perhaps. But one of the major things that I’ve practiced as a clinical ecologist, because I consider a lot of what to do to be clinical ecology, we work with a lot of children with autism. There is a definite set pattern in what happens with autism. It’s very simple. In fact, it’s too simple. It’s so simple that people can’t believe it. But the components of autism start out with a child who’s born, who’s genetically compromised as far as his ability to detoxify. Then you put that child in an environment that’s toxic or you give him silver amalgam fillings in his mouth. Or you vaccinate him with thimerosal. So, you then make this child whose detoxification is compromised toxic. He can’t detoxify. It affects him neurologically.

A lot of these things like thimerosal and the vaccinations, and then if the child is repeatedly put on antibiotics, he develops candida. Now, from candida he develops leaky gut. So, now he’s autoimmune, he’s got candida. Now, the parents are wondering, “Gee, he reacts strange to foods, this child. He’s got this autism, he has this neurological… but he reacts crazy to different foods.” And it’s not all the time. So, now you mix candida in there, which candida is the big wild card, you never know what’s going to happen next. And it’s that the formula for it is that simple. The child develops candida, develops leaky gut, he becomes chemically sensitive. He becomes allergic. And here you have your standard profile of the autistic child. And it can be reversed, and it has been reversed.

I worked for many years with Jenny McCarthy. Jenny McCarthy was a patient of mine for years. As a matter of fact, Jenny McCarthy wrote the liner chronicles on my book The Candida Chronicles. She wrote the back page. We find as we found with many children, you find that they’re either mercury toxic or copper toxic. Because thimerosal, it’s an alloy, it’s a combination of copper, mercury, and zinc. Now, zine is more of a nutritional element, so the body has a better chance of using up the zinc that might be in the metal. But it’s not true of mercury. Mercury has really no biological functions at all. It’s strictly a toxin. Copper can have biological functions. It’s an essential element. But when it rises to high, it becomes just as toxic as any other heavy metal. 

You start with that. It’s right there. You have loads of trouble. But that explains why. See, years ago, this is the thing that only thinking people can arrive at if they sat down and mudded over this a bit. A hundred years ago, the environment, as you were stating earlier in the show, was much cleaner. You didn’t have the environmental challenges that we have nowadays. So, maybe 150 years ago, something like that, children who were born with these problems detoxifying weren’t challenged by their environment. They weren’t vaccinated. They didn’t have amalgam fillings in their mouth. So, their poor detoxification abilities were not being challenged. That's why these new diseases developed. That's a little microcosm of why it happens. That's why we have illnesses now we didn’t have 100 years ago. The environment is more toxic. And instead of coming up with new drugs to cover up the symptoms of these things, what the people should be doing is they should be taking companies like Monsanto to test for developing all these harmful chemicals that really haven’t been tested and their safety has never really been assured or guaranteed, and they throw them on the market and they're all over the place. Anyone who’s done any weed killing with Monsanto products is going to know that by now.

Soldiers, people coming back from Vietnam, I can’t tell you how many vets I’ve had who were exposed to Monsanto’s Agent Orange, who came back with all types of problems with their lungs and their heart. We had to develop an Agent Orange detoxification program for these people so we could detox them from this chemical. When they start to detox from it, it’s amazing the changes they go through. It’s really amazing.

But eventually, they start to feel better and their chemistry is improved. That's the thing. Anybody can feel better. You can shoot up heroin and feel better. The real bottom line is, do you get healthier? Is there scientific evidence in your bloodwork that your chemistries are improving? That's what we look for. That's what should be done. What I’m talking about should be the industry standard. And it’s not.

[00:51:21] Ashley James: There's another thing that Monsanto did, and my friend is involved in a lawsuit. It has completely destroyed her life. It’s left her in a wheelchair and left her daughter incredibly sick as well. This is just a small town outside of Seattle. There was an alternative school called Sky Valley, and there was an old building maybe built in the ‘60s or ’50s or ‘40s, something like that. But it was an older building. Children were dropping dead, children were getting cancer, teachers were getting cancer. One of the teachers entire jawbone just died suddenly. Crazy horrific things happening. In this town 40 minutes away from Seattle, what they come to find is that Monsanto made these chemicals, construction chemicals for the ballast, for the cocking, it’s through the entire building and it’s very hard to clean up. They said that they cleaned it up but the school board did a coverup. Then, they said, “Okay, it’s safe to come back into that school.” It wasn’t safe. Now, there's a huge lawsuit going on, massive lawsuit, and I think the teachers, they have several different lawsuits. The teachers have one lawsuit, the parents have another. And the teachers won. But they settled that at court or something.

Anyways, it’s all messy. It’s been going on for years. But what I discovered, and I’ll find the article and link it in the show notes. The Associated Press did an amazing… it takes like an hour to read this article. It’s so well-researched. They did this amazing expose where they traveled around the United States and discovered that these dangerous older school buildings, very dangerous for the health of the children because it is killing the children, mostly still exists in impoverished areas now. Monroe isn’t impoverished, it just is an outlier, but most of these buildings that are full of these toxic chemicals that are causing horrific neurological damaging cancer to these children, but the children were susceptible because they're smaller I guess, but also the teachers, most of it is in impoverished areas, most of it is areas where there’s larger groups of people of color, and they know that the buildings are toxic but they don’t have the budget to do anything about it. Because they all feel very powerless in this situation, no one is stepping up to fight back. 

So hopefully, with these lawsuits, it’ll be enough to sort of get everything rolling. But here’s the thing. We walk around trusting the building we’re walking into is safe because we live in the United States or we live in Canada or we live in England. You live in a country where you expect that the building you work in, the house you live in, the car you drive, the food you eat, the air you breathe, the water you drink, we expect blindly trusting that this would be safe for us just like the medications we take. We have so much trust. Sometimes I guess we’re very naïve in that. Without living in constant fear because that wouldn’t be healthy either, we need to do our own due diligence. I have a whole episode on toxic construction materials and how to have a nontoxic building versus toxic buildings. It’s all very fascinating. Same with food and how to have healthier food, how to have healthy water. 

But when it comes to when you already have the toxicity in your body and you have these symptoms, you don’t even know. You don’t know that you have high copper. And that could be why you're feeling depressed or feeling off or feeling lethargic or having the brain fog. Then we go to the wrong doctor. They don’t do the test, they just rattle off some symptoms, they put us on whatever drug the drug rep told them is good for those symptoms. And we still have the toxicity. We still have the underlying problem. We get worse and worse and we end up feeling guilty and shame that we’re broken, and a lot of times, not all the time but many times these people feel like they're a burden on their friends and family and the world would be better off without them.

[00:55:54] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And unfortunately, I can never leave a conversation on this subject without mentioning this because it’s something that really, I took very seriously. When President Obama was running for office, his New York campaign summit was right next door to me. We helped them out in the beginning, we offered them, you know, they needed a table, they needed a chair, they needed this and that, we very easily gave it to them. The people there asked me about what we did. I asked them, what is the senator’s viewpoint about Monsanto and about GMO foods. I was told quite overtly that he was intending on outlawing GMO foods and getting rid of Monsanto and blah, blah, blah. This was great. Then several years later, while he was president, he signed the Monsanto Protection Act. The Monsanto Protection Act, if you look it up, limits the liability that Monsanto has. So, when you're talking about these people suing Monsanto, there's only a limited amount that they could get because this act kicks in and it reduces the liability Monsanto has. Monsanto has no liability at all. You can’t sue them and say that any of the GMO foods that they make made you sick. You can’t do that. In terms of all these chemicals, there's limited liability. 

So, when we start looking at who we’re going to vote in office, we also have to really take a look at this. Who’s going to protect people like Monsanto? Who’s going to protect the person on the street that you're talking about? 

[00:57:37] Ashley James: My church has become very politically active, which is unlike a church, right? Lately, churches have been silent. Something my church has brought up is, you know, the churches that were silent in Germany, the Nazis actually went after the churches first. Not everyone knows the history of this. How is it that such a horrific thing could overtake a country? They went after the churches first. They threatened them and kept them silent. You keep your worship inside the church, you don’t do anything outside the church. You don’t do anything active. You just do your little thing inside the church and stay silent. So many churches have stayed silent.

[00:58:20] Dr. Michael Biamonte: There's a formula, do you know that? You can find this. The Nazis, they actually had a formula of what you did to take over a country or to demean the people. That is one of the first things you do, is you go after religion, you silence the churches. The next thing is you take their guns away from them. Then you make them toxic. That was quite common from when the Nazis attacked the country. Prior to their attack, they would dump fluoride in their drinking water. 

[00:58:50] Ashley James: Wow. Which is a neurotoxin, right, in high doses. And it causes people to be docile. I don’t know all the symptoms but I also know that it disrupts thyroid function.

[00:59:05] Dr. Michael Biamonte: You then start starving them of protein because starving them from protein makes them less aggressive. You take protein away from people, they lose muscle tone, their testosterone drops, they become less aggressive, less motivated. So, they had it all down, the Nazis. They had their whole formulation down. And unfortunately, you're seeing a lot of that getting repeated nowadays in trying to control people.

[00:59:32] Ashley James: With our church, our pastor said, “I don’t care what side. Republican or Democrat, I don’t care. I’m voting for the individual person that I believe is going to do the most good that’s going to help the most people, that's going to, for example, outlaw GMOs or not help these big organizations like Monsanto.” Unfortunately, we have to go based on trust because like you said, you were told one thing and then he did another. And protecting these major organizations that are causing and have a history of causing a huge amount of toxic damage to the world, it’s sick and wrong and very sad and I’m not for either side. I’m pragmatic. I want to see a better world.

[01:00:25] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I agree. I’m a libertarian. I’m registered as a libertarian. 

[01:00:31] Ashley James: The idea that what we deserve is we deserve health. It’s a right. I want that for everyone. I want a cleaner, healthier, safer world for everyone. I know you talked about not wanting to necessarily go based on labels because that is the box they like to put people in just to give them drugs. But when it comes to suicidal thoughts and ideation and wanting to help someone to avoid suicide, have you ever had clients who you felt might be suicidal and are there any common things that are associated with that or imbalance is associated with that that you can help them with? 

[01:01:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah. One of the first things you’ll find is that they're on an SSRI. So getting them off the SSRI and getting them on 5HTP or any of the precursors to serotonin is very important because you want to make sure they're not suicidal due to extreme dips in their serotonin. Usually, you want to get them out of their environment because unfortunately, people with these conditions are prey for other people around them to crap on essentially. So, getting them out of their environment is just as valid a therapy as anything else. So you get them good nutritional support, you get them out of their environment, get them into some other area where they're dealing with people who are not constantly invalidating them or causing them trouble, you’ll see a tremendous improvement in them and it’ll be safe.

[01:02:07] Ashley James: Dr. Hammer, he did Meta-Medicine. Dr. Hammer saw the centrifugal rings on the brain scans when not using the contrast dye and determine that the edema on the brain was specific areas were associated with specific… he did over 30,000 cases, were always related to specific parts of body. So, breast cancer, that sort of thing. He determined that a trauma would have had to happened in the last four years that would have triggered it. His biggest intervention was to take them out of their environment. So many times he’d see, if he took someone and moved them to a different country, just take them away from the friends or the family or the job or whatever it was that was stressing them out or triggered them that they were able to heal much quicker and in some cases, go into full remission. It’s so interesting.

[01:02:58] Dr. Michael Biamonte: The present time and environment of the patient acts as a constant restimulation to their illness from the time the illness was probably conceived going forward. So, it’s a valid form of therapy to change their environment but to hopefully to a better one. You wouldn’t want to take sick person and put them on the titanic. That wouldn’t be the right idea to change the environment. But that’s the concept. You get them away from the re-stimulators that are occurring in their environment. You get their nutrition improved to the point where they’re at least not going to be eating toxic food or not going to be in a toxic environment and then if lucky enough, if there's a practitioner like myself there, you can test the person and find out that if there are any extreme toxicities, there are tests that are offered by Great Plains Labs. Great Plains Labs offers a test which will check you for mold toxins, will check you for environmental toxins, will check how well you can detoxify. You can also look at neurotransmitter panels and do all these things and you can get a lab done for a person. The person would be in remarkably better shape in just a few months.

[01:04:13] Ashley James: I feel like we have to touch on this subject although it is such a sensitive one. A friend of mine lost her child who was a teenager to suicide less than two years ago. This child who was born a female decided they were not a female and did a transition to appearing as and functioning as a male. We see that the suicide rates for those who feel that they weren’t born the right gender, again, I want to be very sort of sensitive to this subject because the suicide rates are incredibly high and the statistics are that even those who transition, even those who get operations, the suicide rates remain high. Have you had any experience working with those and is there anything that we can do to help them?

[01:05:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I have actually more experience than you would think. It’s remarkable that in some of these people that make the transition, some of them are totally fine for their entire lives, they have no problems. Others do have these issues and you would have to then say, well, then obviously this is not the answer. If this was the answer, they wouldn’t still have these compulsions to harm themselves. 

But then on the other hand, I’ve seen that there are some people physically who don’t handle the transition well physically from a biological standpoint and metabolic standpoint. Their bodies just don’t do well at all. They will reject the hormones that they're taking. They can seem to never can find the right balance or dosage of any of the medications. But yet, there are others I’ve seen that did fantastic. So, I think we’re down to this is what the psychiatrists don’t want to hear. But what you're down to is rolling up your sleeves, sitting down with the person and digging in and finding out what’s really going on as opposed to having them come in your office for 10 minutes, hearing their problems and giving them, as you said before, the pill that the drug sells and says it’s the right one for them.

[01:06:32] Ashley James: It takes doing the deep dive because we’re complex. We’re complex. I heard once that the functions with inside a single cell are more complex than the city of Manhattan. So, if you think about if you’ve ever been to New York City and you see just the honking and the noise and the deliveries and the taxis and just everything going on, that is a simpler system than a single cell. We have 37.2 trillion cells in our body, we’re an incredibly complex ecosystem that is affected by energy. The energy of objects nearby, we’re affected by water, we’re affected by the air we breathe. It’s so sensitive. You climb up to Mt. Everest, your muscles will begin to seize, right? We need a perfect homeostasis. When something throws us off, it’s enough to throw everything off-kilter and yet, we think that we can go into an office, spend 10 minutes with someone, take a drug and it’s going to just solve the problem. This is the marketing we’ve been told. It’s ridiculous. We should be and practitioners should be willing to do that deep dive with someone and not be afraid to do the deep dive with them. 

[01:07:46] Dr. Michael Biamonte: To really appreciate what you're saying, I again would have to mention to the listeners to go on the internet and go to CCHR.org and look up I think it’s a 3 or 4-hour video called Marketing Madness. Once you start watching this, you cannot stop. The data they give you is absolutely mind-boggling and they uncover and reveal the entire scam which is the whole psychiatric profession and the psycho pharmaceutical industry. It’s just incredible.

I guess it’s no coincidence the LA Times back in the ‘80s published one of these inserts that you could pull out. It was all about psychiatry. The interesting thing I learned from there just off the bat that I found very curious is that as a whole and a group, psychiatrists have the lowest SAT scores. Psychiatrists have the highest rate of suicides out of any profession. Psychiatrists also have the highest rate of being convicted for felonies out of any profession. 

[01:08:58] Ashley James: Wow.

[01:08:59] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Interesting. 

[01:09:04] Ashley James: And we bring our lives to these people. I don’t think that their entire profession is evil. But we just have to remember that they’re fallible, that we shouldn’t put them on a pedestal like we’ve been taught to do, like the marketing has taught us to worship these drugs and worship these people. Now again, if there's a drug that would stop someone from being suicidal, I’d want them on it, right?

[01:09:34] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, until you figure out as you said earlier.

[01:09:36] Ashley James: Right. If someone has to check them, and I’ve had friends who went, they have five kids, they are like, “I am going to kill myself today and I don’t want to do that,” and they’ve checked themselves into the hospital, they spent two weeks in the hospital, be put on some lithium or something, put on some kind of medication, and then they're like, “Now, I got to get my life in order.” A few of my friends have done it but one friend in particular ended up finding, she found a few support groups, she changed her entire lifestyle, she had to change her diet, she had to do a deep dive into her life. She still has five kids and she has a sixth one on the way and she moved across the country. She’s done a ton of changes. But she changed her diet, she’s seeing a therapist. She’s going to two different support groups. She’s removed a lot of addictive behaviors out of her life. She had to do the work. But sometimes it starts with going “I’m about to break and I really don’t want to leave my children, but it’s like I don’t see an end to this and I’m going to check myself in.” Then you have to do the deep work beyond that. Sometimes it does take that immediate intervention. 

Unfortunately, some people wait till it gets that bad. But hopefully, listening to you, we’re not going to wait to get that bad that we can make diet and lifestyle changes and even contact you. So you work with clients around the world, you do telemedicine. Health-truth.com.

[01:11:08] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Let me add this. Don’t be complacent about your environment. I’ve had quite a few patients over the years who under my treatment were improving but they then moved. They told me that moving made a bigger difference in their health than actually what I was doing with them. When it was examined, when I looked at that, it’s interesting but there are certain things you’ll find. If someone lives in New Mexico in Nevada, that area, where nuclear testing takes place, traditionally, when we do tissue mineral analysis on people, and the test comes back showing high levels of uranium. Now this is not that they're radioactive, this is inert uranium. The first thing I ask is well, do they live in New Mexico, Nevada, that whole area? Ninety percent of the time, they do. There's a high amount of uranium that's inert, it’s not radioactive, but there's a higher amount of uranium in those areas that people will absorb. Uranium, even though it’s inert and not radioactive still has physiological effects. It affects adversely your digestive system, it affects you neurologically. There's a whole list of uranium toxicity symptoms. 

Also, another patient I’ve had for quite a long time, she had some strange elements showing and had beryllium, which is something you don’t see that often. She had high levels of beryllium and chromium and different elements showing. We never could figure out what it was and one day, she happened to realize that about every six months she would notice that the cars in her neighborhood and the windows of houses in the neighborhood had this white film on them. So, she collected the film and she had it analyzed and she found that this film was high in beryllium and chromium and all these elements that we find in her. So, she then started to investigate and she was very active in her community, she was active politically and the school board and everything. She researched where this was coming and sure enough, there was some industrial complex about six miles from where she lived that was dumping this stuff in the air.

[01:13:39] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[01:13:43] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I have dozens of other similar stories. But the moral of all these stories is don’t become too complacent about where you live if you're ill. Investigate if you're ill. If your area has any history of chronic toxicity, if there's anything in the water, if there's anything that’s in the water, eventually it’s going to make its way to the land. If you're doing gardening or you're doing any kind of work like this where you're getting in the dirt, you're going to start absorbing this stuff. It doesn’t have to be in the air although the air is the easiest carrier. But check out your environment to see what’s going on there. Because your environment might be making you sick and you don’t know what your doctor doesn’t know.

[01:14:28] Ashley James: I’m reminded of this. You might have heard this. Let me know if you have. But there were these guys that went to I believe it was Papua New Guinea and they were doing trading. They gave them a bunch of corn and grains that these people had never eaten before. This population didn’t have a history of mental illness but after they gave them, I mean, besides what you get from being a cannibal for those certain areas, but in terms of like bipolar or schizophrenia, they noticed that they were having mental health issues after being exposed to like rice and corn. Same with Hawaii that the ancient Polynesians who had never had grains, they didn’t eat grains, that wasn’t in their diet, they ate tubers and fish and lots of fruit. They were given grains and mental health which had never been recorded in their history was then found. They took these findings and they did an experiment in England with a psychiatric ward primarily that had schizophrenics, they removed grains from their diet and saw that many of the went into remission and had either less or sometimes no schizophrenic episodes just from removing grains from their diet.

[01:15:53] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, these are very, well, at least to me, pretty well-known stories. That especially you’ll read in the books of the doctors who are very anti-gluten or anti-grain. It’s very true. Very true. 

[01:16:06] Ashley James: Do you think that their major component is that it’s not feeding the candida that is having an impact on the brain becomes of the connection, the leaky gut, like you had mentioned before that there was these neurotransmitters in the gut, but also, that there’s a nerve that goes straight from the brain into the gut?

[01:16:29] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, that would be presuming that these people had candida which we don’t necessarily know that they did. So, we would have to look at really… the most obvious thing is these people right off the bat, when they’re eating grains, they’re probably blood type O’s. So initially, you're introducing a fluid which probably hasn’t been in their genetic line because these foods are not native to those areas. Once you do that, you don’t really know what’s going to happen because it’s like putting someone on another planet. You don’t know how they’re going to react to the food. You don’t know if the food allergy is going to cause like extreme irritation or break down their intestinal lining, which is leaky gut is then going to… leaky gut is known to cause many psychiatric-like symptoms in people. So, we could stop just there. But when you go further and you look at allergies that you can get from grains, they’ve been well known to affect the brain.

Pfeiffer, again going back to Karl Pfeiffer from the Brain Biocenter, he did quite a lot of work on that, quite a few of the people who I would tend to call the earlier pioneers in nutrition, did a lot of work showing that grains would affect people in this manner. So, like I said, you're introducing something to a line genetically which it’s not native to. These people never had it before. You don’t know how they're going to be affected by it. 

[01:18:04] Ashley James: Right. Is there anything you’d like to say to those who have or are struggling right now with emotional issues, maybe they're on medication or they’ve been considering medication, is there anything you’d like to say to them directly?

[01:18:24] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes. As you’ve been hearing through this broadcast, going on these medications is haphazardous and dangerous. That's not your first choice. Regardless of how society looks at these things, how they're accepted, when you really get into the scientific aspect of it, it’s not condoned. You really want to take a look at the things we’ve talked about here today. This is where you want to go first before you start taking medicines which the fact the insurance company pays for them and the fact that they're advertised on TV doesn’t mean they're safe, it doesn’t mean they're good. We can start advertising heroine on TV and have your insurance company pay for it. That doesn’t mean it’s good for you either.

So, I would say to them, please look into the things we talked about today. Make that your priority because a pill doesn’t fix your life. If you have a problem in your life, handle your life, don’t take a pill and go hide in the closet. 

[01:19:32] Ashley James: There's one thing we didn’t touch on and I want to make sure we touch on it, and that's those with panic attacks and anxiety. Oftentimes they feel like they're dying. I’ve worked with several clients who they have to go lie down and their heart is pounding, their palms are sweating, they feel like they're dying and they're terrified that they're dying and so they end up popping a pill. Can you speak to those who have anxiety and are choosing to be on anxiety meds because they feel like otherwise they die?

[01:20:00] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, the first thing you always do is go to your doctor and you want to see if there's a tumor, benign or otherwise on your pituitary gland or on your adrenal glands. You want to have your adrenal hormones tested. Not a blood test in the morning where it’s one take. You want to do several blood work over the period of 24 hours or you want to do a 24-hour urine test which is going to measure your adrenal hormones to see if there's any surge in the hormones. You want to look to see how your magnesium levels are. Most importantly, you want to look for toxic metals. Because metals like cadmium, lead, arsenic, nickel, and iron, when any of these are in excess, they stimulate areas of the brain particularly the amygdala of the brain which when you overstimulate that area, you end up having the panic attack-like symptoms. 

You want to look for physical causes. Just simple being medicated is not handling your problem. As you would assume, if there's an underlying problem there and you're not addressing it, well that underlying problem you're not addressing today, in 20 years from now, can multiply exponentially to give you all types of other problems. 

[01:21:18] Ashley James: It’s reassuring to know that there's a path that with working with someone who does functional medicine like yourself, that you work like an engineer and you go through and do a deep dive and help that person become balanced again in their body. Now, they still have to do the work in their life. There's emotional and mental work to do, and you're going to make sure that you help them with the balancing of their body so that they no longer have this. We have to really listen to the symptoms of the body as the language of the body, the body is speaking to us if we have depression. We have problems sleeping, if we have outburst of anger or panic attacks. We need to take these symptoms seriously and go, okay, we’ve got to go through and is there something in my life externally, is there something in my self-talk internally, is there something in my biochemistry that's going on or physiologically what’s going in. We got to do a deep dive. It takes the right practitioner. Like I love saying, you don’t take your car to an electrician. You don’t take your car to a plumber. You want to take your body to the right practitioner for the certain condition.

So, I love medical doctors for emergency medicine. If I have a broken arm or if I have certain types of infections, if I need emergency surgery, that's when I want allopathic medicine. But when I have a chronic situation, I want to go see someone who does a deep dive into functional medicine. That's why I love the work that you do and I think you're an amazing practitioner and I’m so excited that I’ve been able to share you with my listeners because I know you help so many people. So, thank you so much for coming on the show, Dr. Biamonte. Of course, listeners can go to your website, health-truth.com. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:23:09] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, I think that's it. But I do agree with you. If I break my arm, I’m not going to run in the house and start eating yogurt and think something is going to happen miraculously. You want to go to somebody who’s going to be able to address the problem correctly. There's so much on TV, people are so brainwashed by these companies, so, it makes it more difficult. But I completely agree with you. Your summation is people, they have to hold that to their hearts and their minds.

[01:23:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well, thank you again for coming on the show and talking about this very much needed conversation. I really appreciate the work you do and please come back anytime to continue to teach us. I love learning from you.

[01:23:56] Dr. Michael Biamonte: You're more than welcome and I certainly intend on doing so.

[01:23:59] Ashley James: Wasn’t that a fantastic interview with Dr. Michael Biamonte? I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and I hope it really helps you to gain clarity and direction on mental and emotional health. There are so many resources out there and I’ve seen so many people heal anxiety, depression, and bringing themselves back into balance. Even bipolar, I’ve seen people to bring back into balance where they feel even-kill again. 

Use the search function on my website. I do have a lot of other episodes about these especially anxiety. Please go to Learntruehealth.com and just use the search function, type in anxiety, see all the episodes that come up. Lot of episodes, lot of great information, lot of great resources and tools. This is just the beginning. It’s just pulling you down the rabbit hole through the matrix, out of the matrix, down the rabbit hole. Then, I want to just arm you with all the resources and all the tools that’ll help. Make sure that you go to freedoctorcourse.com, get my Free Doctor course from holistic doctors who look to give you the foundations of health and then make sure you go to Learntruehealth.com/coach and get the free sample class from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition as well. I’m just showering you with gifts today. Make sure you get those. Of course, join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group because so many resources, so many people are there to support you. It’d be great to have you be part of the community and join us there. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Have a wonderful rest of your holiday season! I have a few other amazing episodes to post before we get to 500, so you still have some time, but if you have any testimonial to share at all, big or small, please send it to me. You can give me an audio, you can give me a video or you could just type it out. You can send it to support@learntruehealth.com or you can also message me on Facebook or put it in the Facebook group, would love to see you there.

Get Connected with Dr. Michael Biamonte!

 

Website

Facebook

Linkedin

YouTube

Pinterest

Book by Dr. Michael Biamonte

The Candida Chronicles

Dec 9, 2022

Ozone Machine:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/ozone

 

Listen to episode 484 for more info on why and how to use ozonated water made in your home for energy and mitochondrial function:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/at-home-ozone-therapy-for-immune-mitochondrial-health-eileen-durfee

 

 

High-Quality NAD Brain Supplement:

Use coupon code LTH at

https://www.learntruehealth.com/nad

 

Listen to episode 460 about the benefits of high-quality NAD on cellular function, energy production, and mitochondrial health:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/nicotinamide-adenine-dinucliotide-supplement-nadovim-nad-the-missing-link-to-energy-brain-function-and-longevity

 

 

Sunlighten Sauna - the sauna Ashley uses, loves, and recommends:

Be sure to ask for the listener special!

https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna

 

Listen to episode 245 to learn from the founder of Sunlighten Sauna as to why this sauna is the best tool for your health journey:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlighten-saunas

 

 

The world's most effective Magnesium Soak:

Use coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com

 

Listen to episode 294 to hear Kristen Bowen share her story of recovery and discovering the world's most absorbable form of magnesium:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/magnesium-foot-soak

 

 

Ashley's Favorite Spirulina and Chlorella:

Use coupon code LTH at EnergyBits.com

 

Listen to episode 487 and hear the latest science behind healing algie

https://www.learntruehealth.com/mitochondrial-self-healing-superfoods-high-potency-chlorella-spirulina

 

 

Dr. Oz's book, After Covid: Optimize Your Health in a Changing World

https://amzn.to/3BbfglU

 

www.ozgarcia.com

"Our clinic is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We provide detailed lab work, IV therapy, peptide therapy, and nutritional protocols, including supplements."

 

493: How To Recover From Long Covid, Dr. Oz Garcia

When you experience long-haul COVID, it's important to be proactive in recovery, and it's also helpful to know how to plan for this kind of huge transition. In this episode, Dr. Oz Garcia talks exactly about that, which involves reducing toxins in your life, boosting nutrient density (as well as nutrient diversity), improving sleep quality, enhancing focus and concentration, and getting into the best shape of your life.

Ashley James and Dr. Oz Garcia

Highlights:

  • The novelty of the COVID virus
  • How Dr. Oz Garcia became his own patient zero
  • Supplements Dr. Garcia recommends
  • Oura Ring
  • Tracking heart rate variability
  • How long-haul COVID damages mitochondria and healing from it
  • NormaTec compression boots

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Boy, are you in for such a treat. We have an amazing guest on the show today, Dr. Oz Garcia, who used to be a marathon runner, incredibly healthy his entire life. He’s a holistic doctor, works in New York State, and he has a great clinic. I believe it’s in New York City where he does functional medicine and believes in nutraceuticals and really healthy eating. And he got hit with COVID, he almost died. And he tells a story of recovery of experiencing first-hand the worst of long-haul COVID, the long-haul symptoms that have lasted him months, that left him crawling on the floor only months before he was running marathons. This is something now we’re discovering so many people have to a certain extent. I myself have been healing from long-haul COVID. And we’re seeing it is a different animal, it’s a different creature that we’re facing similar to Epstein-Barr virus or mono. The body has been affected on multiple levels. Some have seen even the brain shrink. There’s been studies showing that the brain shrinkage is almost like brain damage and recovering from that, healing from that. Healing is possible. We need to recognize that the body has an innate God-given ability to heal itself. It’s this amazing, beautiful machine.

We are so intricate that cellular biologists say when they look at the cell, they still don’t fully understand the cell, but when you look at just one cell, now you are comprised of over 37.2 trillion cells in your body and yet, one single cell is more complex than everything going on in New York City. It is so complex. It is so beautiful, the dance that happens in your body. And we can heal ourselves. Now, modern medicine really has us duped. It says we have to wait to get sick, go to the doctor, get put on some drugs to force the body to do something and then there's all these spill-over side effects. And they don’t really focus on healing and completely restoring the body from any kind of chronic illness. That's not their wheelhouse and that's frankly not where their money is made. That's why you are listening to this podcast because we’re holistic, meaning we look to the whole body and the whole life of that person knowing that your mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health all affect each other, knowing that what you ate affects you. Even what you ate yesterday is affecting you now, of course it does. What you eat, how you sleep, even when you eat, how much you eat, whether it was organic or not, all of that plays into the cell’s health, how much joy you experience, how much support, connection and love you have in your life, whether you feel like you have a purpose in your life. All these things matter.

So, wonderful episode today because Dr. Oz Garcia goes into his journey where he was left for the first time in his life needing to rebuild his health. And he’s 70, I think he’s 71 now but, you know, at 70-71, he looks amazing by the way because he’s taken such great care of himself all his life, but here he is rebuilding his life, just learning how to walk again, let alone run a marathon again. So he shares what he did throughout his journey in the last year to recover his health and, of course, then go on to help his patients do the same. He does mention some things that I want to make sure you know about. We talk about ozone. I have a fantastic episode. These are resources for you if you have long-haul, if you're looking to heal, especially mitochondrial issues. We see that a lot of people after COVID experience. It’s almost like their mitochondria has been damaged. And this also can happen when people take antibiotics and take other drugs. Those other drugs that disrupt the mitochondria. Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. It is the part of your body throughout all your body that makes cellular energy ATP. The majority of our mitochondria, although it’s in all our cells is in the nervous system, in the brain. We really need mitochondria to function to have these other cells function. It is what makes the energy for our body. So whatever damages mitochondria damages the body and leaves us exhausted. So, we want to do everything we can to support the body in having healthy mitochondrial function and the entire Krebs cycle, everything that has to do with making energy for the body is really important. We need to get the good stuff in, get the bad stuff out and get out of the way. Let the body do what it needs to do, support the body in doing it, what it needs to do.

So, there's a fantastic ozone machine that you can get at home. Quite affordable. I thought ozone machines were thousands of dollars and they’ve really come down in price and it’s a little machine, smaller than a shoebox and it will make ozonated water and it’s safe to make in the home. Other machines are not safe. You had to leave the room because it’s not safe to inhale ozone. But this one degases it so it only goes into the water. And I have a whole episode on that. It’s episode 484. The links to everything I’m talking about now is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com or in the notes, wherever you're listening from. If you're listening from iTunes or Spotify, you're going to just go into the notes there in this episode and you’ll see it. So, check that one out. Of course, everything that I share, for the most part, I get a coupon code from these people, Learn True Health, the LTH coupon code. So always type in LTH and just see if they give us a discount because for the most part, I do get a discount for you guys. 

So, the ozone machine, you can just go straight if you want to check it out. It’s Learntruehealth.com/ozone. That's Learntruehealth.com/ozone. That's the ozonated water that you can make in your home. You can use it as a very safe disinfectant and you can also drink it and it only disrupts or kills the bad bacteria that is talked about in episode 484, but also, ozone hyperoxygenates the body and the cells in the body and it also has been known to help the mitochondria function better. And I had a personal experience with ozone that rocked my world. It took away the muscle weakness that I was experiencing post COVID and I thought that was really amazing.

The next one is NAD. You can go to Learntruehealth.com/NAD, just the letter N, A and D. Learntruehealth.com/NAD. Listen to episode 460. We talk about NAD and how it helps energy production, cellular function, and especially mitochondrial health. It’s a really interesting interview. Today, that's one of the things that Dr. Oz Garcia talks about, ozone and NAD for his health journey. So go to Learntruehealth.com/NAD and use coupon code LTH as well.

Sunlighten Sauna, we do talk about sauna therapy using heat and light therapy. Amazing. I love Sunglighten Sauna. It is part of my detox routine. It has been part of my detox routine for 4 years now. It has really helped me recover from heavy metal toxicity and also, it’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system, for the immune system. The benefits go on and on. There are so many studies about sauna therapy. What I like about Sunlighten Sauna, it’s actually low heat. You can get started sweating at about 130 degrees, so it’s very easy to breathe in there. You're not really feeling overly hot. It just feels nice and warm like a day at the beach and yet you're doing your best detoxing at that temperature and it also helps with the immune system hugely. We talk a bit about that in this interview that you're about to hear. You can go back and listen to episode 245 to hear the founder of Sunlighten Sauna and some of the benefits as to why Sunlighten is better than the other sauna companies out there because I did do my research when I was choosing my saunsa, and I am so glad that I chose Sunlighten over the other ones because it’s full spectrum, it’s ultra low EMF and nontoxic. 

And of course, if you decide you want to buy a Sunlighten Sauna, you can go to Learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna and there's a list of the benefits and the machines and all that. But if you end up calling them, make sure you mention that you heard it from my podcast because listeners get a huge discount. This month and the month of December, there’s an even bigger sale going on right now. I believe it’s up to $700 off plus free shipping, and they usually throw in a few other goodies. So, just say that I sent you and that you better get a good deal because I said, you know, and of course, you can always message me and let me know, or come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and let me know because I’ve had nothing but good experiences from them and I personally am friends with one of the managers there, so if you ever need any help with that, you just let me know. I’ll make sure you get the hookup.

Then, of course, my favorite magnesium soak. Go to episode 294 to hear Kristen Bowen’s story where she was having 30 seizures a day, unable to talk in a wheelchair. Her life had totally disintegrated after a surgery where they put some stuff in her that they said she wouldn’t be allergic to, and of course, now we know so much more but it caused her to become so unhealthy, she was on death store, eventually got surgeons to finally agree to take this stuff out of her, but there she was, she was left still very weak, very sick and she stumbled upon this particular type of magnesium from the Zechstein sea that allowed her… it was the biggest tool she used to recover her health and so she dedicated her life to making this I don’t want to say little anymore because her company has grown so much since I started talking about it. But it’s a family-run company and it’s very high quality. She has incredibly high standards like I do when it comes to what you put in your body. So you can go to Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, use coupon code LTH, get the magnesium soak. And my favorite thing to do is soak my feet in magnesium while in the sauna. Bada bing bada boom, you got 2 for 1. It’s great. We have several more episodes on the magnesium soak. The first one is 294 so you can go back and listen to that one. Make sure you use coupon code LTH anytime that you're at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com because she does give the listeners a great discount.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. My mission is to help as many people as possible to no longer suffer. The needless suffering needs to stop. Man, I can tell you that long-haul COVID is no joke. It is suffering and it’s psychologically suffering as well because so many doctors, they don’t know what to do. They throw their hands up, they say maybe it’s all in your head. You don’t really feel like you're being taken seriously and a lot of them just don’t have the tools. They don’t have the tools because they don’t have the training and some of them have the hubris because, I don’t know, there's ego or they feel threatened because they don’t know the answer. They end up making us feel like it’s our fault. It’s so frustrating. But really, there's a whole world of holistic medicine and it’s completely separate from the mainstream medical system. And the mainstream medical system doesn’t want to acknowledge that there's all these amazing things that we can be doing outside of drugs and surgery. If you're suffering or you have a friend who’s suffering, please get them to listen to these episodes, tell them that there's hope. Tell them the body can heal itself. The body is amazing at healing itself. I was sick with so many different conditions. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, I no longer have it. And I was told by so many doctors that you can’t get rid of it, you have it for the rest of your life. I had type 2 diabetes. I was told that that’s just it. You just have to be on these drugs for the rest of your life. I said no, I took the natural medicine route, I no longer have type 2 diabetes. That was actually the easiest thing to reverse out of all the issues I ever had. And I had it for years. I had out of control blood sugar for years. I had infertility. I was told I’d never have kids. And we have an amazing son. So, you can’t put these doctors on a pedestal and accept their truth as your truth. You need to fight for what you want in your life and if you want really good health, stop believing the limitations that other people put on you. Their belief system is their own and I believe you have an amazing ability to heal yourself, your body wants to heal itself.

As one of my mentors once told me, your body has this blueprint of perfect health and healing. It’s somewhere deep inside you in the higher self, in your soul. But it is in there. You have inside you this blueprint of perfect health and healing. If you’re spiritual, then God has that instilled in you and your body wants to come back to that. Homeostasis is the body always trying to get back to that perfect point of balance. What throws the body off balance can be stress. It can be emotional, physical, mental stress – physical stress being drugs, alcohol, the over 80,000 manmade chemicals in our air, food, water, soil. Right? There are so many factors now that are putting stressors on the body and so, with one thing at a time, with one episode at a time, with one meal at a time, with one day at a time, you can make these beautiful little changes to supporting your body’s ability to heal itself. That's what I want you to focus on. Don’t focus on what the doctor told you that you're going to be sick the rest of your life. Or you have this because your parents had it or you had this because you're old or you have this because you're a man or a woman, or whatever. Whatever excuse they said. You have this issue because… That’s their belief system. You don’t need to buy into their belief system. If you want perfect health and healing, then that's what we’re going to focus on. Because your body can heal. Just like you got a paper cut, you get a little cut, you don’t even think about it. The body just does the healing for you, right?

Now, if you have a lack of nutrients in your body, it takes longer to do wound healing. I have some clients who got their nutrition totally under control, got rid of all their nutrient deficiencies. Their body was super nutrified and then they went in for some kind of surgery and the doctors couldn’t believe how fast they healed. They were amazed. They had to take stitches out weeks before. I had a friend heal a bone faster than was expected. I’ve had clients that the incisions heal incredibly fast. I even had a friend who’s a fellow coach who was working with a client who had a stage IV bed sore and the doctors were like this person is going to die from this, there’s nothing we can do. The bed sores were all the way from the skin into the bone. We changed his diet. Diet. That’s all we could do because they were in a hospital but we changed his diet. And I said okay, here’s the foods I know that are super healing, here’s the foods that I know are super nutrifying, and here’s a list of the foods that are definitely going to hinder his wound healing. Guess what? He was able to get out of that hospital completely having healed that stage IV bed sore. 

And the doctors, within days of changing his diet, the doctors were like, “Hey, something’s working.” We’re like, yeah, we stopped feeding him the hospital food and started bringing in our own. There are foods that help the body heal. Everything you put into your body matters. Right? And that's why I love the magnesium soak because it absorbs straight into your body, bypasses the digestive system, straight into your lymph system. I love the NAD supplements. I really feel a difference when I take it. Especially the ozone therapy is amazing.

ENERGYbits is one I haven’t mentioned here but you can go to ENERGYbits.com and use coupon code LTH. Like yesterday for breakfast, I just had chlorella and spirulina. ENERGYbits to me tastes delicious. Other companies’ chlorella and spirulina, I don’t like. The ENERGYbits are so clean and so pure. It’s pure amino acids. The body just immediately absorbs the nutrients and the vitamins from the ENERGYbits and I feel so good. All I did was eat 30 of these little pellets of chlorella and 30 little pellets of spirulina. That’s all I had for breakfast yesterday and I was full until about 1 PM. How cool is that? I fully nutrified my body with it. So, it’s a food. It’s little capsules you chew, not capsules, it’s like little pressed tablets that you chew. We call them green crackers in our home because our son loves them. But they're actually not a supplement; they're a crop. They're a crop the sun dehydrated and for ease of use pressed into these little things that you can chew. So, I love the ENERGYbits. Of course, you can go back. You can use the search function on my website Learntruehealth.com, search ENERGYbits and find the interview, several of them with Catherine Arnston where we go through the science and the studies. It’s the most studied food in the world. There's over 100,000 studies between chlorella and spirulina. It’s the safest food in the world to eat. It’s the most studied food in the world. And it’s actually the most nutritious food in the world.

My most recent episode with Catherine Arnston, episode 487, is fantastic to listen to. She goes through, even though like I said I’ve had her on the show several times, that one is fantastic. We go through the latest science of chlorella and spirulina and how it actually acts as an antimicrobial in the body and it helps to establish a better microbiome. It is so cool, the science. If you geek out like me on the science of holistic medicine, you're going to love that episode.

So without further ado, I’ll let you get to this episode with Dr. Garcia. I know you're going to love it. I just really felt like I had to do you a service by making sure that you knew that there's all these resources. When you come to listen to this episode, I want to arm you with all these other things that you can do and now you have a bunch of things to listen to after you listen to this one. I’ve given you a list of other ones to go through. Of course, like I said, it’s in the notes of this episode. So, go through all those episodes when you’ve done this one and know that your body will heal itself. Sometimes it’s as simple as little bit of changes in lifestyle, going to bed at a different time, making sure and walking in sunlight in the morning, especially drinking enough water, drinking lemon water in the morning. These changes seem almost because they're so simple, they seem like “Oh that's too simple. My symptoms are so great. These are such small changes. How can they possibly help?” I think that some people go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drink lemon water in the morning, whatever. That just doesn’t sound like it could help me.” First of all, huge benefits from hydrating the body, and then the lemon water, once it gets inside your cells, it actually acts as an antioxidant. Even though it’s acidic in your stomach, it’s actually alkaline once it’s absorbed up inside your body. So, yes, simple cheap things that you can do, like drinking a lot of lemon water in the morning, going for walks first thing in the morning, making sure you get to bed at 10:00 PM, that actually makes a huge difference. Making this shift in your diet. I have so many episodes on the wonderful healing benefits of eating organic and removing gluten grains, removing oil from your diet and increasing antioxidants with all kinds of wonderful, colorful vegetables and berries, mushrooms, onions. You can listen to my episode with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, like a nutritarian diet. Doing these changes, within 24 hours, there’s a shift in your body. Even just one meal. Eating a nutritarian meal actually is seen. You can see it in bloodwork. It begins to affect you right away. Don’t discredit diet changes, little tiny changes. Don’t discredit them. They are the key to your better health. I’m so excited for you on this healing journey because no matter where you are, if you're suffering like I did, please know that you don’t have to suffer. It is optional. And we’re going to help you to get to a point where you’re no longer suffering. I believe in your body’s ability to heal itself. 

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day, and enjoy today’s episode. 

[00:21:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 493.

I am so excited for today’s interview. We have an amazing guest, Dr. Oz Garcia, on the show today who specializes in helping people to heal and overcome from long-haul syndrome. We’re seeing the masses having huge issues recovering even months later after having COVID. And you’ve written an amazing book called After COVID. It’s on Amazon. Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Garcia does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com

As the pandemic began in 2020, when did you start to see people suffering from long-haul syndrome? Much like mono where even a year later, people are just exhausted, mentally exhausted. They’ve got brain fog; it’s affecting people mentally and emotionally. Some people even have digestive problems months and months later. When did you start to see it as a problem?

[00:22:11] Dr. Oz Garcia: Great question, Ashley. I would say the summer of 2020 already, even though that was the beginning, in many ways of the pandemic, that March is when it really took off. But people were already being deeply affected. They have been exposed to the virus. Months later, I started to read about people that have gotten it right at the beginning and by August-September, I was reading about people that were somewhat incapacitated. In other words, they got sick. They had gone through all that was available to actually get through the illness itself yet there was the post-illness hangover, so to say, and information was already coming out at that point and I thought to myself, this is really peculiar. Kind of like what you said about mono and Epstein-Barr where you took a bad hit but it would debilitate you for indefinite periods of time and for the effects of COVID, nobody knew what this was, why were people still experiencing symptoms three months, four months, six months later. And now we know that people are experiencing it one year, two years, going into three years for some people.

[00:23:42] Ashley James: This is very scary because a lot of doctors are ignoring it. A lot of doctors don’t know what to do. They are sending people, just go to a counselor, maybe this is just a mental or emotional issue. But they don’t have this toolset and the drug companies haven’t developed a drug yet, so they're just like, “Well, just wait and be sick until we figure out a drug we can give you.” 

But really, none of those things are the answer. Is this similar to other viruses that cause a syndrome? Is this similar? Or are you seeing it that it’s even worse? Is it different?

[00:24:19] Dr. Oz Garcia: The nature of this virus is its novelty in terms of what’s happening that is completely radically different than anything that’s come before it. So, when people get exposed to it, they could get a kind of like COVID which is in something that I would say is all that good. We don’t know if you get exposed to COVID one, two, or three times with a new variant that there may not be long-term repercussions even though the hit may be initially somewhat light. Now, we know that because of the novelty of this particular virus, in fact, it mutates—in fact, it mutates so rapidly. The fact that there are many points along the protein spikes on the virus itself that can cause depending on the person, depending on their current state of health, depending on preexisting conditions, genetics, whether you're going to go down or not and whether you're going to go down really bad, and whether you're going to have a good recovery or not, and you're going to find yourself with post COVID or long-haul syndrome.

So, doctors are not all that well-equipped to actually deal with this problem because we’ve never seen it before. So, if you do go to a doctor, they’re going to look at you as they did with me when I was first diagnosed with long-haul as a mystery, what do I do about my lungs that were ravaged by COVID pneumonia. What do I do about these joint aches that were back breaking? What do I do about the severe exhaustion and apathy that had me sleeping up to 18 hours a day? What do I do about my moods? The fact that there was this no sense of happiness whatsoever, just morose, blue, anxious. And then the terrible problems with insomnia.

So, I had the full package. Everything that anybody could have had post COVID, I had. I went from weighing about 140 pounds to about 100, maybe 99, 98 pounds by the time I got home from the hospital. So, I was a walking wreckage. Like that, there are people in the millions that got this virus. It’s kind of like termites in a house. They come in, they do the damage that they do. You get the exterminator, they put the canvas over your house, they come in and they spread the house and fumigate it, kill all the termites, take the tent down, but you wouldn’t dare go into the house afterwards. God only knows what condition the floor is in, the staircase. So, kind of like that. COVID does tremendous biological infrastructural damage for many people. Certainly those that are long-haulers and symptomology that's unexpected.

So, you can’t reduce it to a pill, a solution. There are too many moving parts when you’re talking about long-haul COVID or post-COVID syndrome. Some people can’t recover their smell for a while or their taste for a while or they’ve got chronic headaches. It may be just something like that. It can be just deep disturbances with your sleep. So, you can have mild long-term symptomology which is also nerve-wracking or the full package in the way that I had it where when I was speaking to some doctors that are dear friends of mine, some of the most brilliant cardiologists, pulmonologists and so on that couldn’t come up with any way to explain what was going on and any way to explain what would be the best path out or best paths out. 

So, doctors themselves are baffled. There are doctors themselves that have wound up with long COVID, and they're suffering and they understand that this isn’t a mental problem. That there are severe problems with your body that they can’t put a finger on. There are programs at different institutions at Cornell Weill, at Mount Sinai, programs for long-haulers I think at NYU also. I find that the counsel and advice that’s being given by the faculty of doctors in these different institutions leaves a lot to be desired.

[00:29:01] Ashley James: What did you do? So you were patient zero for yourself. Or patient one. You were like ground zero. You're treating yourself first and having to figure out what is going on. Then also, you were seeing amazing experts and they were all scratching their heads too. So you had to really build your protocol from the ground up.

[00:29:20] Dr. Oz Garcia: Let’s backtrack a little bit. I’ve been in my field for about 40 years. I’ve been a long-distance runner. I’ve been a marathoner. I’ve been an ultramarathoner. And I’ve been accustomed to having great control over my body. Certainly when it came to my breathing capacity, the fact that I could in the weeks before I got COVID get up, do 150 push-ups, work out in the ways that I was accustomed to working out and generally feel really well to getting home several weeks after being hospitalized with COVID where I tried to do one push-up and fell and banged my head and just made things worse. Being accustomed to having been a runner and having full lung capacity to where now I was attached to an oxygen compressor 24 hours a day for about two months, this was mentally debilitating and when I would talk to the doctors that had treated me in the hospital, you could almost feel them shrugging their shoulders over the phone. They didn’t know what to say. Bit by bit, they disconnected from being in communication with me.

So yeah, I had to be my own patient zero, so to say. The fact that I knew so much about caring for my body in terms of nutrition, in terms of mindfulness practices, the supplements that I used, the way that I would work out, the fitness protocols, the use of contrast between extreme heat and extreme cold, whether it was sauna and cold plunges. All of these plus a multitude of other practices, protocols, and products that I never thought about, I had to think about. Now, I knew that if I wanted to get my breathing back into control, that I had to rely on myself. And what was out there that was available to actually rehabilitate lungs that have been ravaged by viral pneumonia, by COVID pneumonia, whereas the doctors couldn’t tell me what to do really. 

I kind of literally, in my bed, laid out a spreadsheet. Okay, so my mood sucked. What do I do about that? My anxiety is through the roof. I don’t have energy. I need to crawl to the bathroom. My breathing is suffering tremendously. My lungs have sustained a certain amount of damage. My appearance, at 98 pounds, I looked like I had survived coming out of Somalia. I could count the bones on my chest. My face is completely sunken in. So, what could I do to rebuild my muscle mass? What could I do to gain my weight back? So, this became an inquiry in terms of all my prior knowledge and could I bring it to bear so that I could save my life.

[00:32:28] Ashley James: How long did it take you before you started to start feeling better again?

[00:32:33] Dr. Oz Garcia: I would say it was a good 8 months. Good 8 months. So, the first several months was falling into routines that I would follow every day religiously and repeat them every single day over and over and over. Then, what I would do is add another routine. It’s kind of like becoming a juggler. You start out by juggling two balls and then at a certain point, you find that you can keep on pulling up in the air and add a third one. Then all of a sudden, I was juggling three balls. Then bit by bit, as I had my confidence increased, I could add a fourth and a fifth and so on.

So, it was a lengthy process and it’s still going on. I’m still rebuilding my body almost few years later. But I’m far and away from where I was when I couldn’t stand up hardly. Like I said, I had to crawl to just about any part of my apartment. My breathing was terribly labored. By following the counsel I’d say of thinkers that were better than I am, certainly in how to do things incrementally like James Clear, and James’ book, Atomic Habits. So by listening to Atomic Habits, again, while I was in the hospital, audiobooks, and then kind of listening to it again when I was home, I knew that I could do a little tiny bit every day. If I could do 0.25% percent better than I did the day before and keep building up so that it was a percentage increase in a week, then 0.50%, then could I do 1% better today than I did yesterday? With my breathing exercises, my ability to do some kind of strengthening exercises, crafting my eating so that it was to make me gain back muscle mass, and then by category, all the different things that I knew I needed to do, within a matter of several months, I was off the breathing device that I had at home. Then beyond that, I saw that my appearance is improving. That encouraged me tremendously.

I lost a lot of my hair as you saw before. I now have a full head of hair. But it was coming out in patches. Same thing. You all of a sudden go from thinking of yourself in a certain way in the world, you take great pride in terms of your upkeep, your appearance, and here I was I looked completely unrecognizable to myself.

There were other problems also that arise in the hospital. I developed clots in my body. Now, this is an effect of the virus itself. So there were medications that I was put on to actually break the clots up. They did save my life. Once I got out of the hospital, I found alternative protocols, alternative treatments to actually break clots up because the medications themselves that I was taking were producing terrible side effects.

So, bit by bit, I found the appropriate parallel protocol for just about everything that I was suffering from and how could I continue to expand on that. Okay, so if I use certain kinds of nutrients to improve on my sleep, then could I eliminate what they gave me in the hospital? Could I eliminate my insomnia? By category, same thing there, I worked up a complete protocol for supplementation. That is, the vitamins, the minerals, the amino acids, the essential fatty acids, the peptides, the nootropics, the herbal products. All the products that I felt besides the basics, things like vitamin D and probiotics, but much more I would say precise use of certain nutrients that could build my brain back, that could build my energy back, that could put me into very deep sleep for hours at a time, that could help me recover my energy from the damage that was done to my muscles, the mitochondria, the engines within the cells of my body. Bit by bit, I started to feel that I was going to actually get my life back. But it was bit by bit. It was a James Clear inspired process to getting my life back.

[00:37:26] Ashley James: At what point did you start to share this with patients or clients or people you’re working with? At what point did you start to then help others?

[00:37:35] Dr. Oz Garcia: I would say it took me months. Probably I got sick at the end of the January of 2021 and by October-November 2021, I was back to journaling, writing essays, posting on media, and it occurred to me that I wanted to write a book about my experience and put in that book what it was that I did to save my ass, so to say. The book itself winds up being in two parts. It’s a history of the events that many people go through when they wind up with severe COVID, my own personal experience. Then the second part, Ashley, is pretty much a workbook like these are the things that I did for sleep, these are the things that I did to improve my appetite. These are things that I did to get my muscle mass back up. These are things that I did to improve my brain, my memory (short-term and long-term). And these are things and these are the products that I used to improve my focus, my recall. These are the things that I used to get my motivation back on track.

So I had to earn it all back. I’d say a lot of it was the discipline prior to COVID. I had to draw on that and use certain thinkers that, again, I would listen to, to get the inspiration, to motivate myself when there was no motivation at all. There was nothing in my body that I would say felt like you got to get up, you got to do breathing exercises. None of that. I had to literally use my brain power to move me through just about every exercise, every practice, every protocol to get back to where I thought I should be. And that, like I said before, was incremental over a matter of many, many months. But I’d say by October-November, I was healthy enough, fit enough that I could start writing out everything about my misadventure and how to get your life back at least from my perspective from long-haul COVID. 

[00:40:04] Ashley James: I definitely want to get into things that you felt were really impactful. But I’d like to know, have you ever had chronic illness in your past or is this the first time you’ve really suffered?

[00:40:18] Dr. Oz Garcia: I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never ever experienced anything of this magnitude at all. Nothing that I could recall. Nothing that prevented me from being able to get out of my bed. Literally, Ashley, I couldn’t lift my arms at a certain point. The fact that there was no muscle there to lift it, it should tell you something in that regard. So no, I was completely unprepared for this.

[00:40:52] Ashley James: Now you're in your 70’s and we got to see each other, I got to see you on video and you look incredibly handsome and you don’t look anywhere, I mean, if someone said you're in your 50’s, I’d be like, “Okay,” Like you are very handsome. When I say handsome, I mean very healthy. You look very healthy. So, I know that the work that you’ve done, like you said, you’ve built all these habits, all these routines to getting yourself back and you still are getting yourself back. But I just think about the amount of empathy now you have for those who are in chronically ill states and especially those who are also going through long-haul like you have so much empathy now having been incredibly healthy before, having not really ever experienced chronic illness and you were a marathon runner, your peak performance, top health, and then it was all taken away from you, just very quickly taken away from you and now you're building your body back from being emaciated. So your compassion and your drive, even though you didn’t have any because I know when you have long-haul syndrome, you don’t have motivation. There's no motivation. Like you had to really pull up some motivation that wasn’t even there from like you said mental willpower. I like that you turned back to Atomic Habits. What a great audiobook. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to that with my husband. We really got a lot out of it. I couldn’t believe when I saw an Audible that it was a 5-star and it had so many ratings. I’m like, what has 5 stars? And now, that has 5 stars. That's a great one to tell everyone to listen to.

The fact that you suffered so greatly and you have come so far and you can turn around and then help those who are also suffering. That’s why I know that your book is going to be so helpful for so many people, the book After COVID. I’m so happy that you're here today sharing so that we can help those no longer suffer.

[00:43:00] Dr. Oz Garcia: It’s true. Also, being in the hospital, being told that I may never be able to work out again, run again, may as well forget, I was literally told that many of the things that I had in my life, I think I had my iPhone me, I was just constantly doing Google searches on what was known at that time. But I came very close to dying in the hospital. As my weight kept dropping rapidly, as I would go in and out of conscience often during the day, the fact that there was no real understanding about the value of sleep, so you would be woken up several times a night. I know this is well-intended to take your blood pressure, make sure that your oxygen saturation was what it should be, draw your blood, but I went through three weeks where I essentially would sleep totally maybe 2, 3, 4 hours maximum per night. You got to know at that point, Ashley, there were no hospital rooms available. They are all taken. So we were being wielded into a converted storage room. So, no windows, temperature control didn’t exist. The rooms would either get too hot, too cold, extremely humid. And that would add to the terror that you were going through emotionally, right? Again, we’re talking about a pandemic. Nobody was prepared. Nobody understood how bad this was and how bad it was about to get still. And how to make sure that you could be as comfortable as possible. The medical system was horrifically overwhelmed. While I was in there, I would say that there was a revolution within my value system. So, all the things that I thought were meaningful before, bit by bit as I went through my recovery, started to lose meaning. How important was it to accumulate great wealth, how important was it to accumulate notoriety, being well known, how important was it to have substantial material goods, how important was it to fly off to exotic destinations and think that this was what was important in life.

So, that whole system kind of collapsed and it was, I’d say, one of the gifts out of all of this and I got to be careful because I wish I could have come to these points of view, the ones that I hold now, in terms of yes, having greater empathy, greater compassion, intense gratitude, humility, the value systems that when you stack them all together allow you to have a sense of integrity and a sense of self that wasn’t there before. And I thought that it was there before. I thought that was I pursuing authenticity and sincerity, but at the same time, you wind up in a hedonic treadmill where if you live in New York City, or any big city in America, you’re driven to achieve and achieve to the point where your value systems do get bent out of shape and corrupted. And you can’t see it when you're in it. It’s kind of like a fish in the water. You're just operating that way. What’s everybody in New York up to? Looking good, scoring big, making sure that you're recognized for being somewhat special. All the things that you can’t really say in totality add up to being a happy human being. Whatever they add up to, the whole notion of what it means to be happy wasn’t on my mind. It was kind of like okay, this is what you do and this is what your work is producing for you.

I think these days, my concern is certainly for people around me, and the kind of value system that does allow me to be a lot more forgiving for how I was and where things go wrong these days. Just forgiving overall. And we know through neuroscience that to the extent that you practice gratitude, you can get a gratitude journal, you can get a gratitude app. You can get a 5-minute journal app, download it, and do five minutes of gratitude every morning, five minutes of gratitude before you go to bed every night. And we know that after a month to three, it has a profound effect on your thinking. How it is that you view the world, how you view yourself and how you view people around you. So, all of those things took on greater meaning for me and continue to grow, expand, push out as more time has elapsed, Ashley, since I became sick and I started to look at the world this way.

[00:48:40] Ashley James: So, you're sharing with us things that you got out of it. It’s like taking a very horrible and tragic experience and you're starting to find the growth there.

[00:48:52] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct. But like I pointed out before, did I have to go that far down to come this far in terms of how I now live my life and the way that we’re shaping our practice, our office, and my interactions with most people. So, maybe in my case that’s what it took and thank God I survived. There were plenty of people that I knew that didn’t survive, that didn’t make it. I shared a room with one gentleman who passed away the second week that I was in the hospital and another room with another gentleman that passed away.

So, I remember, I do recall many people kind of telling me, “Well, what lessons did you learn out of this?” Frankly, I don’t think I learned anything. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. It’s not an experience that people need to go through. Now, I think because of my character, I kind of got enough out of this experience that I knew that since I lived and I made it through, that I didn’t want to embody the values that I had before. They somehow seemed meaningless to me. Like the texture of rice paper, like looking good, does that really matter? Or does like you mentioned before, being empathetic and compassionate, does that matter? And should I put my attention there?

In totality, you find that you're accumulating greater amounts of peace of mind whereas I don’t think I had all that much before. I was just driven.

[00:50:43] Ashley James: Wow, it really did completely reset your whole life and you've built yourself back up and then you turned around and you want to help others. I love the work that you're doing because we can end the suffering of so many. There's people out there who went through what you went through. 

[00:51:05] Dr. Oz Garcia: Very true. Well, to give you a quick example, let’s talk about breathing for a minute. So, with my COVID, I had a severe pneumonia. When I was in the hospital and I was CAT scanned, they told me that I had about half of my lungs filled with, to quote the doctor, millions of micro clots. And I had one substantial clot headed for my heart. So, I couldn’t breathe. They wanted to put me on a mechanical ventilator, I refused. Statistically, many of us already know that if you go on a mechanical ventilator, your chances, at least back then, were 2 out of 10 that you’d come back. The other 8 just wouldn’t survive the experience of a mechanical ventilator. They put this tube down your throat into your lungs, you're sedated, you could be sedated for a day, a week, a month, and the mechanical ventilator breathes for you. Now, I knew based on the stats that I just told you and what I reckon, that this would be highly destructive. I took my chances. So consequentially, I was put on what’s called a high-flow cannula. That's kind of like a little breathing device that's attached to this machine that would push 65 liters of oxygen into my nose per minute at 100% oxygen. I went with that and thank God that I survived to be here and tell you the story.

Now, when I got home, I couldn’t breathe without still using auxiliary oxygen, and bit by bit, I started to investigate different devices to help me breathe better. Now, one of the things that they give you in the hospital, they gave me what’s called a spirometer and it’s kind of like a little plastic device that you blow into and then you suck the air in, you suck and you breathe in and you make a little ball go up. To the extent that you breathe better, you can make the little ball go up further and further. And I thought to myself, is this going to really save my life when I get home. You can get it on Amazon for $8. With the severe pneumonia that I had, how do I get back to breathing the way that it did before?

A dear friend of mine who’s a very well-known athlete turned me onto a particular breathing device that you get with an app and started using it. It was like sitting still in a chair using the breathing device, this actually gave me a workout. I could only start at the beginning by doing 1 minute at the beginner level which would knock me out. I’d have to go lie down in my bed. I could hardly make the needle move on the breathing device. My ability to hold oxygen, breathe out and breathe in, you got a measure of all those three metrics, was horrific. Over months doing it every day, sometimes twice a day and working it was the way that I got to breathe again in the way that I do now so that I can go walk, I can go walk for 2 to 3 hours several times a week and bit by bit will consider if I want to run. There were reasons why I’m not running yet. But I can work out the way that I worked out before and go to the gym, do my upper body workouts. And this is what’s missing in the conversation with many specialists that are trying to teach long haulers how to recover their breathing capacity. If you can’t recover your breathing capacity, fully oxygenate yourself, it’s going to be difficult to actually get many other aspects of your health post COVID working as well as you want to.

I was listening to NPR radio a few days ago. On NPR, they were interviewing a gentleman who’s had long COVID now for almost two years and he was talking about how he uses the spirometer still every day and I thought to myself, “oh my God.” Two years later into his suffering still having great difficulty getting up, can only work a couple of hours per week, and doesn’t know that there may be other ways of strengthening his lung capacity, expanding his lungs, getting more oxygen throughout his body and to his brain. So there isn’t a single morning that I don’t do about 40 minutes worth of breathing exercises. That's part of the morning routine. And I can run up the four flights of stairs in my building. Whereas when I first got home, it could take me about half an hour to get up the first 2 flights. 

[00:56:33] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Do you not have an elevator?

[00:56:35] Dr. Oz Garcia: Well, I live in a beautiful townhouse. That was very difficult. 

[00:56:40] Ashley James: Got it. So half an hour to crawl up two flights of stairs in your townhome whereas now you can run up and down the stairs. 

[00:56:48] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[00:56:49] Ashley James: Nice. 

[00:56:51] Dr. Oz Garcia: Also too, as I rehabilitated my breathing, so did my energy start to come back. Instead of having to be in bed at 3:00, I could enjoy normal life. 6:00, 8:00. I remember the first time that I made it till 9:00 PM and I was in sheer ecstasy. It was like yes, you know, everything that you’ve done, you didn’t need to get in bed and crawl and do a 2 to 3-hour nap. You're getting better.

[00:57:18] Ashley James: I love it. I want those who are suffering to see the light at the end of the tunnel and I think your story is sharing that and showing that there’s definitely light at the end of the tunnel for them.

[00:57:32] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[00:57:32] Ashley James: So, breathing exercise is important. Of course, you outlined this in greater detail in your book. Are there supplements or like IV protocols or like ozone IV? What else is there that helped you with your lungs beyond daily breathing exercises?

[00:57:48] Dr. Oz Garcia: We have a clinic and we do have an IV clinic. So, there were two bags of IVs that I would do per week. At the beginning of the week, I would have my clinician come over and I would do a bag with a multitude of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, amino acids. These would have a tremendous impact on how I felt. The second IV was using a very unique and novel form of vitamin B3 called NAD+. NAD is a nutrient that has a massive impact on life extension. So, it will do a great deal of repair within our own DNA sequences so that you produce less mutations as you get older. Now, NAD, we know gets depleted as a consequence of COVID. Certainly, severe COVID. Those particular IVs with extremely high amounts of vitamin C, glutathione, N-acetylcysteine, acetylcarnitine, licorice, all of these were compounded for me, B complex, minerals, amino acids. That was critical to getting me back to normal. Then the second IV which was the NAD one.

So, those are still very important. I do maybe twice a month now instead of twice a week. They’re not something that most people can find unless they go out and search for a good functional MD so that they have access to the intravenous treatment protocols that I believe had a measurable impact to my recovery. Now, separate from that, there were all the supplements that I would use. There were supplements that helped you sleep better. Gaba, magnesium threonate, L-Serine. There’s a plant called Zembrin which is now part of a product that you can get that actually calms your mind and you sleep better. The different forms of plants that I like, herbal products, holy basil. That has a remarkable effect too. So, I would stack these – Ashwaganda, gaba, vitamin B6, 5HTP. Kind of like a little hand grenade in my hand of all these nutrients that would allow me to go into a really good deep sleep. These are laid out in the workbook part of After COVID. They work very well for me and I continue to use them and I sleep a good 8 to 9 hours most days, I make a point of that.

Sleep winds up being a superpower for recovery. If you're not sleeping well and you're trying to get better, just about everything else is going to kind of break down. Your diet, your exercise, getting out and getting sun every day, trying to meditate. Your anxiety won’t alleviate unless you're getting adequate sleep on a regular basis.

I use a tool called an Oura Ring. Now the Oura Ring just like certain kinds of Fitbits, but I would say with much better accuracy, measures a great deal of your activity during the daytime if you want to, certainly when you go to sleep at night. So, by using the Oura Ring and looking at my app in the morning, I could tell how much sleep I got, my body temperature during the night, how many times I woke up, how long was I in deep sleep which allows your immune system to recover, your brain to detox, how long was in REM sleep (that’s where you're doing a lot of dreaming and a lot of memory consolidation is occurring), how much light sleep. And so, I could see my improvement over many months and now, I get almost a perfect score every night.

There's also a measure called heart rate variability (HRV) which you want to make sure is in the high levels. Your HRV can be measured while you're sleeping. HRV levels tend to drop when you're really ill, when you're stressed out. I would say a good HRV is about 40+. My HRV when I got out of the hospital was about 8, 9, 10. I knew that I was in jeopardy at that time.

[01:02:46] Ashley James: Wow. I love the idea of doing the tracking with, like you said, the Fitbit or Apple Watch or Oura Ring and being able to attract heart rate variability is so key. I’ve actually had a few episodes where clinicians have shared about it. We’ve had naturopaths share about it and nutritionists share about it, that they see it’s how we can measure the body’s base stress levels or like you can measure base metabolic rate. You can measure what your body is doing, just the burning calories, and we can understand the metabolism. But now we can look at it and see like how many RPMs are we revving. Are we like always revving at 1200 RPMs or are we revving at 9000 RPMs, is our body revving at high stress. Because I once had a client, she’d do all of my homework except she wouldn’t do any of the homework I gave her to lower stress or to manage stress. I brought it up after a few weeks of noticing. She’d do everything else. She would eat healthy, she’d track what she ate, but she refused to do any of the things that brought more happiness and less stress into her life.

So I approached it with her and she goes, “Well, I don’t feel stress. I don’t need to do this because I don’t feel stress.” I’m like, “Oh, stress isn’t an emotion.” But especially, coming from the perspective of a woman, I just see a lot of moms do this where they ignore stress levels because it’s not an emotion, so it’s not right in our forefront. But we’ll push ourselves and push ourselves. I even had a nutritionist on the show who she pushed herself to the point where she fainted. Her body was so stressed out physically and emotionally that her body said “I’m done.” The circuit breaker blew and she just fainted. That's when she had to go “Okay,” and doctors were like “Yeah, your blood pressure is through the roof, your heart rate is through the roof like everything is through the roof.” She had to dial it back. She ended up quitting her career and going and starting a whole new career and because she had to, like you did, reevaluate her values and realize that she was digging herself an early grave with her stress. Stress is not an emotion. We cannot feel when we’re not stressed. If you actually feel yourself stressed out, you are revving at the top. You’re at like 12,000 RPMs revving at the top. Maybe your heart is beating out of your chest.

But that’s why it’s sort of like they say blood pressure is the silent killer. Having high blood pressure, you don’t feel it. And if you feel it, you're really in danger. 

[01:05:06] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[01:05:07] Ashley James: Heart rate variability allows us to see where is our baseline stress level because if we can lower it, if we can do things like get to bed on time, not eat sugar, and alcohol increases the stress levels in the body, and you can track it. You can track your heart rate variability. 

[01:05:22] Dr. Oz Garcia: Oh yeah, you’ll see on the occasions where I’ve had even a couple of glasses of wine, after having a good run for several weeks with elevated HRV, I can see my HRV plummet just from a few glasses of wine at nighttime and waking up and going, “Damn it.” You kick yourself and you realize that yes, in terms of long-haul COVID, it may not be so smart. But even if you don’t have it, overall, it does seem to affect how long you may live, chips away at your DNA’s desire to stick around longer.

[01:06:02] Ashley James: And that's so important. Everything we’re doing now will affect us in our later years. I’ve watched several family members who didn’t take care of themselves really suffer in the last 10 year of their life. I really don’t want to spend the last 10 years of my life suffering and being a burden on my family. It’s just not fun for anyone. We’re dragging everyone down. First of all, a lot of people are ignorant. I should say they're naïve. Where people are naïve, they’re buying into the marketing, the food marketing. They go through the drive-thru’s and they don’t take care of themselves. They don’t take care of themselves emotionally, they don’t take care of themselves physically and they're just going with the flow. And they’ll end up like a statistic. Like the heart disease and cancer, the leading causes of death. It’s so unfortunate that the people die much younger in America than they do in other countries.

If you want to be a statistic, first of all, go Google the statistics, go look at them and then keep doing what everyone else is doing. But my listeners don’t do that. My listeners are here learning from you because they want to be 90 years old, hiking at 90, and they don’t want to be a burden on their loved ones. And they want to enjoy the last few decades of their life want to be filled with joy.

[01:07:14] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[01:07:15] Ashley James: The choices we make now, like you said, drinking alcohol, let’s say, and not getting to sleep on time every night, staying up late every night, that eats away at our DNA. The eats away at our body. 

Dr. Alan Christianson was on the show a few months ago and he quoted this massive study where they found the single most important factor in all-cause mortality was stress levels. Smoking was the second. So, it’s like quitting smoking is less important than making sure you go to sleep on time and manage your stress. So, the idea of getting serious and, you know what, I’ll make sure my husband doesn’t hear this because I’ll tell you what I got him. I got him a Fitbit for Christmas. We were looking at the Apple Watch and all that stuff. But there was all these fees attached to it. So, I got him the best Fitbit and I’m so excited for him to start tracking because now, he’s becoming more aware and he wants to take even better care of himself. We talked about how you can track sleep and stuff like that. So, I’m getting him a Fitbit and he notices how great he feels when he starts doing all the things I tell him to do.  

[01:08:26] Dr. Oz Garcia: Wonderful. It turns out to be a game. I mean, you start playing a game with yourself where the feedback itself, the numbers that you get kind of entice you to want to get a better score the next day. Like, how do I get my 90 again? How do I get my HRV over 45? So, it’s almost a game that I play with myself. It’s the first thing that I do in the morning. Open up my Oura app and look at my scores, and it’s like “Yes!” There's the Garmin, there’s Whoop, there’s Fitbit, there's Oura. So anything that turns you on that will allow you to measure what’s going on with your body and most importantly with your sleep, that becomes a critical aspect certainly for most people. Long-haulers I think need that kind of information so that they can autocorrect. But just about anybody that wants to get better control of their bodies, they need to quantify certain kinds of data. I would say central to all the spokes, is your sleep. Many times, when I’ve got clients that come in and they want to know, “Well, how am I going to eat? When are you going to put me on an eating program?” it’s like, well, how’s your sleep? Horrible. Really. Okay, so I’ll start by cleaning up their sleeping practices and then, we’re going to talk about something else. How’s your level of fitness? Do you meditate? Are you a mindful human being? Let’s get all the basics in order then let’s talk about food so that you get maximum value out of what you eat and it’s not such a struggle. It’s just not a struggle.

What you're finding is, it’s all something to contemplate over because you're well-rested, you’re in better moods. You can think about what’s going to empower you and give you energy at the beginning of the day. Should I have a smoothie? What kind of smoothie? Do I put fruits in it or not? Should I throw in some MCT oil, half an avocado? Okay, do I have lunch? Do I skip lunch? Do I have a high-protein lunch? Or is today vegetarian day? Should I skip dinner? Should I do intermittent fasting? What’s the latest that I should eat? 

So, it isn’t about being an overthinker; it’s about being a mindful, thoughtful individual about what you're doing with your body. What you’re putting in it, what you're doing to it, how you're resting it, what information you're exposing it to. It used to be that I would get up and years ago, first thing I’d do, I’d get out of bed and put on Morning Joe in the background. I can’t believe that that would be how I would start my morning. I would be stretching, do an exercise. And the TV would be on in the background listening to politics. I’d prepare my tea and just as unaware of how this was warping my thinking. And now, when I get up, I don’t even have a TV set anymore. I had two TV sets in my old apartment. Since COVID, I just don’t watch TV. If I want to watch a movie, I’ve got my iPad and I’ll go on to that, if I want to watch a documentary. 

So, it’s a very different experience to not have a TV set on. And I’ll put on Alexa and ask it to play some great jazz in the morning. So I’m good to bed and enter my morning with music. Which is one of the more remarkable ways for any of us to enter our mornings. Not blasting a TV set or listening to news first thing out of bed and wondering why the rest of your day, you’re on edge.

[01:12:33] Ashley James: I love that. Setting up an atmosphere. I heard there’s a whole thing around sleep hygiene like creating an environment to go to sleep to but I never thought of creating a hygiene of an environment to wake up to, to set the tone of the day to, to help the body and the stress hormones to ease into the day in a more motivated way than have my feet hit the floor and it’s like go, go, go, race, race, race and all the stimulation. You're rising, you’ve created an environment for healing going to bed at night but also waking up in the morning and considering that your mental and emotional state affect your physical stress levels, it’s important to nurture ourselves mentally and emotionally because that takes care of our body as well. 

[01:13:25] Dr. Oz Garcia: Very much. Morning rituals I think are critical for everyone. For me, to know that I had a routine that I could follow at my worst that I had no idea that anything I was doing was going to work. So whether it was through my breathing, having my weird concoctions in the morning, making sure that I got body work 3-4 times a week, I had no idea of this was going to give me my life back. Because I was reading the news just like everybody else. This is what happens with long-haul COVID. My blood tests indicated that there were blowouts within my immune system that if I was to believe what I read on Google didn’t bode well for me. 

So, I kind of stopped even doing that. I just started to do everything that I believed would get me back and that also started to nurture my mindset. So, it became a very flexible mindset and allowed me to look at things that were way out of what people would consider healing practices or could possibly have an effect on long-haul COVID. Then, reel it all the way back in and go, okay, so these are the protocols that I find make a difference for me. This is what got my fill-in-the-blank back to acceptable levels. And a lot of that occurred within the first 3-4 hours of waking up. So, I get up relatively early and I like to go to bed early, read before I go to bed for a while, maybe watch a little bit of a movie or documentary and then, all lights out by between 9 and 10 PM. 

Then, it’s up early between 5 and 6 AM. I’ve got plenty of time before work to do my morning routines, my morning rituals, and that includes doing meditative practices. I may do 10 minutes of meditation, 20 minutes. And I love to use the Sam Harris app which is called Waking Up. That's a world of information. Different teachers that are presenting multiple portholes into how to meditate, different kinds of meditative practices. There's a lot of theory that you can listen to. Recently, I listened to an interview with Laurie Santos who is a professor at psychology at Yale. Now, her course is called Well-being and Happiness. It’s the number one attended course in Yale. One in 4 studies in Yale attend it. So, I listened to the interview on Sam Harris and I thought this is unlike I’ve ever heard before on the subject matter of happiness. Went on to Coursera, signed up for a course and completed it and have a very different understanding of what it is that produces happiness. Like I thought I knew what it was before. But there are nuances, there are subtleties. That, by the way, I would say, Ashley, added much to my evolving perspective, what I knew wasn’t producing happiness. All right, so what does produce it? And this is like kind of the other side of it. So, these are the things that you should be looking at that will produce happiness. This is what happiness may or may not be. You may have had preconceptions about the subject matter, we’re going to kind of blow them up here. So, I’ve incorporated much of that simply because I’m listening to a meditation app every morning for 10 minutes. 

[01:17:16] Ashley James: And that definitely reflects your value shift. Our values, it’s our unconscious motivators. A lot of people don’t know. Like we know what a value means and we don’t understand how it affects our behavior. So at an unconscious level, it dictates our behavior. If you want to know what you value, so I have a master practitioner and trainer of neurolinguistic programming and there's a very simple thing you can do. Get a pad of paper and a pen and either you can do it yourself or you can ask someone else to do it. Sometimes it’s nicer if someone else is writing down what you say because you can just kind of go unconscious and say whatever. And you pick something. For example, my career. So you write down “my career”, these are the values that you're going to list about your career and you say what’s important to me about. But for this podcast, let’s say health. My body’s health. So what’s important to you about health? And you can even do what’s important to me about my life. Right? Then you just start writing down. So you say, what’s important to me about my health? That I have energy, I feel great in the morning, that I feel strong, that I’m able to run up a flight of stairs. You do sometimes say things in the negative that I’m not tired, that I’m not winded. So whatever you say, write it down. It doesn’t matter whether you say it in the positive or negative, you write it down. Then, you get about between 5 and 8 things out, and your mind goes blank. That’s the unconscious mind bringing it to the conscious, so you wait 15 seconds, 30 seconds, ask yourself again, what’s important to me about my health? Then new stuff will come to mind. You do this, you kind of rinse and repeat 3 or 4 times, you get a list. You can get a list of up to 40 things. It doesn’t have to be that long, you can just do 20 things. Then, you look at the list and then you number them. What is the most important thing about my life or my health? What’s the most important thing? Then you go down the list and you number them, and then you look at, oh very interesting, it will give you insight what is an away from, so what is a negative, like I don’t want to feel fat or I don’t want to look too skinny. When you say “I don’t” and it’s away from and you say a negative, you really want to highlight that or put like a little red line or under it, and then everything that’s stated in the positive, that's good. 

The values that have a negative associated to it have a negative belief system. That actually will drag us down and it will negatively impact our behaviors and our behaviors are what get our results in life, right? If your behavior is sitting on the couch and doing nothing, that’s getting your result. Doing nothing is a behavior also. Choosing not to do anything is a behavior. When people are negatively motivated, they’re the ones who join the gym in January but don’t go by February. Right? They’re the ones who you’ll get short-term gains but then you’ll give up. You want to examine and look at how many negative belief systems you carry that are attached to your negative values. This is a great self-exploration or you can find an NLP practitioner to work with to kind of go through and explore this, but even just like writing down and looking at your values and listing your values and looking at your values and going, this is all the results I get, all my behavior both conscious and unconscious in my life, the things I’m doing right now and the results I’m getting right now, this is what is motivating me to do or not do those things. Then looking at what is actually important. Because if you're not pursuing the things that are important to you, you might have a negative belief system holding you back.

Someone might be listening to you going, “Oh, but I couldn’t afford to do IV. I’m not even going to try. I’m not even going to start. I don’t have money so I can’t do it.” They cut themselves off from any further action because there's a negative belief around money or around time. What you're saying is you don’t need to be a millionaire with free time to get your health back. These are the things you did and even someone who like is on a pension or on disability, there are so many things they can do. There are so many free apps they can do. Maybe they can find a used on eBay, find an old used Oura ring or something. There's ways. But if you believe you can’t, you will stop seeing possibilities. 

[01:21:44] Dr. Oz Garcia: No question about it. 

[01:21:45] Ashley James: I want people who are suffering to see like if they have the brain fog and they're like “I don’t know if I can even do this,” but you could do breathing for one minute, you could start for one minute a day, or you could start to write down one thing you're grateful for and then the next day write two things you're grateful for. Like gratitude journaling, even if it’s just three things a morning, writing three things down, start somewhere because doing something is going in the right direction. As opposed to saying “Well, I can’t because I don’t have the time or I don’t have money.” Then boom, they’ve just cut themselves off from this world of possibilities whereas you built your health up so much so you went from crawling up to two flights of stairs in half an hour to being able to run up and down flights of stairs. And that's what I want for everyone who’s suffering. It does take that mindset.

[01:22:36] Dr. Oz Garcia: It does. 

[01:22:40] Ashley James: So knowing what motivates you and shifting your values but also understanding that you might have a belief system that is preventing you from even taking action and saying you know what, I’m not going to let this old negative belief that I created dictate my life anymore because what I want now is to be like Dr. Oz Garcia. I want to be healthy, I want to be building my body again, I want to overcome. And so it does take that. I too lang had long-haul COVID but my experience was really unique in that April of 2021, I was giving birth and my daughter died right at the end of labor. Her head was halfway out and she passed away and we don’t know why. We have no idea why. Of course, with the grief, my blood pressure was through the roof, paramedics were there for an hour and everything. It was incredibly traumatic losing her and right after that. I think I had a visitor, one of my friends came to visit within a few days and she didn’t know him and his son had COVID. You don’t know. Who knows? I just had that feeling like I couldn’t breathe almost like an asthma attack. Couldn’t breathe. My oxygen was low, I felt like I was passing out. I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t walk. At this time during COVID, I didn’t know how much of this is my tremendous amount of grief that I’m going through, how much of it is recovering from birth because my body is still recovering from birth and then how much of it is grief, how much of it was birth, how much is COVID, and then afterwards, again, I didn’t notice how much of my recovery because at that time also we found that we had to move. So, we’re packing. So now, I’m recovering from pregnancy, like having grief and trauma and now, post COVID, and not really knowing which is which. It’s all just a package of weirdness. And what a stress. What a stress from not knowing where we’re going to live.

One of my really close family members went into hospice care and we’re taking care of them. So it was just one thing after another. But what I realized is my brain was Swiss cheese. Doing interviews was really difficult. I was still very dedicated to the podcast but I went from… at the start of the podcast, I could do three episodes a week, three interviews a week and I could barely do one a month at the time. I just felt like my brain was Swiss cheese. I would be reaching for nouns or reaching for names and I couldn’t access it. I always thought maybe this is the trauma brain but this could be COVID brain. I also had a huge amount of muscle weakness. I could barely walk up the stairs. It wasn’t really winded like my lungs. I just could barely carry anything, could barely lift my arms. My legs were incredibly weak. I had to hold on to railings and go one step at a time, one leg at a time going up each stair. That was in April.

Then in December of last year, I decided to go for IV ozone, doing an ozone 10-pass.

[01:25:55] Dr. Oz Garcia: Remarkable, 10-pass is terrific. I did many of them as part of my recovery. It’s good for you.

[01:26:02] Ashley James: It was like night and day and I sat there with this wonderful naturopath and she did the 10-pass with me. It took about three hours. We talked the whole time, it was great. Then, so I pick up orders from Azure Standard. It’s like buying in bulk and I had these 25-pound bags of lentils and brown rice and whatever that I had bought. Her clinic is also a pick-up location for Azure. My order had arrived and I’m like, okay, just give me a sec. And I ran down, there's this long cement staircase all the way down to my car, and I ran down it and I opened up the trunk of the car and got it ready, and then I ran back up taking like not doing one step at a time, like jumping up each step, grabbed two bags, so carrying 50 pounds now, ran back down the stairs and I had maybe 4 or 5 bags. Normally, my husband would be the one carrying the bags. I was crying by the end of it, like tears of joy. I’m like, my muscle weakness was gone. I was like, this ozone 10-pass is amazing and so I thought, man, I didn’t realize that my muscle weakness was from the damages of mitochondrial damage from long-haul.

[01:27:21] Dr. Oz Garcia: Tremendous. Long-haul does create mitochondrial damage. Mitochondria, for those that don’t know, are the engines within all our cells. Each cell that we have, each neuron that we have has hundreds, if not thousands, of these little engines and their job is primarily to produce energy by burning off sugar, fat, and protein to the extent that that may be a fuel like ketones, for instance. So, when you get COVID and any number of other illnesses for some people, I would say Lyme disease, chronic Lyme’s, I would say long-haul in many ways is very similar to having chronic Lyme. The ability of your mitochondria to perform is corrupted. They don’t burn off fuel like they're supposed to. They're not burning fat like they're supposed to. They're not burning sugar like they're supposed to. Energy is not being produced adequately. So, there is severe fatigue. For some people, it’s similar to having fibromyalgia. Just this exhaustion where you can’t lift your shoulders, your back, your legs hurt. And you were extremely fortunate. I’d say that some people have genetic capacity kind of like what you’re describing to rise above the damage that you sustain, the damage that you're living through and recover. I would say you’re describing the capacity to be antifragile. Which is very different than what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Who knows if that’s true or not? But certainly, as you go through very demanding events and you look back and you reflect on how you made it through, it does point towards your ability to, well, be anti-fragile. You just don’t come apart that easily. And that’s what I’m hearing through everything that you're telling me. 

Certainly, having that you know you’re anti-fragile in retrospect. You did it, you did this that all this went wrong and this particular event and the pregnancy and on top of it, COVID. Who knows what else? And when you look back, yes, there's trauma that builds up and sometimes you can even overcome that. It doesn’t leave you in a chronic state of PTSD where you’re incapacitated. You can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. You’re just like, “life’s too hard.” There are plenty of people with events in the way that they occurred to you that they just kind of toss in the towel. There's no further capacity, there's no resilience left. It’s kind of like, that's it.

[01:30:33] Ashley James: In your discoveries, have you uncovered what helps people who are sort of in that level of despair to be able to rise above and start to feel like there's hope?

[01:30:46] Dr. Oz Garcia: This all goes the way almost to the beginning of our conversation, Ashley. Doing one little thing every day instead of filling up a whole list of to-do’s, this is everything I need to accomplish today, and doing that day in and day out and day in and day out and finding that you hardly make a dent. But if you can pick maybe 1 or 2 things when you’re in the pits of despair and whatever it may be so that you're moving towards pulling yourself out of this tailspin where you're not clear about why did I get hurt in this manner, why am I suffering so much, whatever—whatever you're asking why over, that you can project that and go, “this is what I can do today, I think I can do this.” As time goes by, you can reflect on the totality of many of the things that you live through, accomplish, and just like you, you're well aware that “oh, I can actually get motivated, I can actually get things done.”

[01:32:02] Ashley James: Beyond doing like ozone IV which is amazing, what other things have you found help people to heal their mitochondria from long-haul?

[01:32:14] Dr. Oz Garcia: I meditate a lot. Not only do I do Sam Harris’ Waking Up but I also use a device called Muse. There’s one called Muse S. It looks like a headband. It’s a neurofeedback device in many ways besides being a meditative device. But it trains you to quiet the voice in your head. It trains it be calmer. I’m on my third Muse device now in I don’t know how many years, and that I like because it helps you work through much of what’s destabilizing you. By doing 10 minutes of that or an hour of that, I don’t know, 3-4 times a week works really well. 

I use a device called Plato and it’s a biohacking/neurohacking device that you place on your device, it has certain electrodes on it. Actually, you can set it on your app to calm you down, help you sleep better, increase focus, prepare for a workout, run better and so on. It does it by, I want to be careful, stimulating parts of your brain but optimizing how certain parts of your brain work in the areas of your concern. So like that, I’ve got, I don’t know, two dozen different devices that I work through during a day or a week or a month, each one designed to actually improve different areas of my health and well-being. 

I’ve got the NormaTec compression boots. Now, for many people that have suffered from severe blood pressure problems, heart problems, POTS as a result of long-hauling, the problems that they suffer with blood pressure shooting up and shooting down, you can stabilize by using the NormaTec compression boots. Not only that, but you can do a 10-minute session with NormaTec, I don’t know, 3-4 days a week. I keep it right next to my chair in my office and I’ll be talking to you and I can have them on. And it improves circulation both in and out of your heart. Tremendous improvement in circulation. 

We now know for instance that even doing hot baths on a regular basis 3-4 times a week improves circulation tremendously to the extent that you can do it 4-5 times a week, it reduces your risk of a heart attack by 28 to 38 percent, if I’m not mistaken. It’s almost a 30 to 40 percent win by just soaking in a hot bath. I add Epsom salts and stand there for 5-10 minutes then get out. Relax, breathe a little bit. And you wake up feeling better the next day but you also did something really good for your body.

So, in totality, there are tools, like I said, practices, the extreme hot bath, saunas which we know for many people, infrared saunas, 15 minutes or regular stone sauna. A cool sauna. You don’t have to go in at 180 to 200 degrees. But you can go in for 150 degrees and go in for 15 minutes and build up your time over the course of many weeks and months. But saunas seem to have a profound effect also on life extension, mood, anxiety, depression, heart health. So, there are what are called heat stress proteins that are activated in your favor whenever you expose yourself to extreme heat. The same thing could be said for extreme cold. When you do an ice bath, when you do a session of cryotherapy, that that stimulates, again, activates cold stress proteins and it stresses your body just enough, what’s called hormesis, the kind of stress that actually repairs your body. If you're dealing with a lot of stress in your life, you want to look at every instrument that I’m talking about in terms of what can you do—what can you do Monday, what can you do Tuesday, what can you do Wednesday, what can you do Thursday. And in totality, when you look back over a month, you realize that you’ve done so many good things for yourself that are contributing to the stability of your body.

You had mentioned earlier living longer and living longer better. What I would say about living longer better is you want to live better with a minimum amount of infirmities. You dodge a heart attack, heart disease, adult-onset diabetes, dementia, hopefully crippling diseases of the joints or arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and so on. And really, because of all the things that we’re talking about, many of the things that I appropriated from life extension I use to actually heal me from long-haul COVID. And like you did when you did the 10-pass, these are things that will reduce your risk of dying young from the wrong things.

So I think infirmity control is critical in terms of all that you and I are talking about. Is what I am eating today going to reduce my risk of infirmities down the road? Is the fact that I only did 10 minutes of exercise today going to reduce my risk of having infirmities down the road? The answer is yes. Yes. And so on and so forth. Is the fact that I’m being very cautious with eating processed foods something that will reduce my risk of gaining too much weight, being obese and building up plaque in my heart? And on and on and on.

Curiosity is a very powerful practice and tool for people that don’t have motivation. If you're not motivated, then can you rely on your curiosity? And if not, you just kind of fade away. You miss out on this gift which is existence. The brief time that we have here, can you make it worth it?

[01:38:47] Ashley James: I love that you pointed that out because if you don’t have motivation because long-haul does suck the motivation out of you, but having innate curiosity and that's I guess probably why I’m good at podcasting. I’m so dang curious, I spent many years suffering. In my 20’s I suffered hugely from chronic illness and I overcame them. Even though MDs told me I never could. I was told by an endocrinologist after a battery of tests I’d never conceive. And we have a beautiful son that's 7 ½ and he’s largely the motivation on those days when I was so sick. Taking care of him, homeschooling him, like I have an amazing husband. If I can’t live for myself, I’m living for my loved ones. I also know because I’ve been through so much, I know that life does get better. I suffered great depression after my mom died when I was 22 years old and I remember the first time I laughed after three months or the first time I smiled after three months. First three months, no smile, no laugh. I remember the first smile. I remember the first laugh. And I remember the first feeling like the doom was fading. So, I know that there is that light at the end of the tunnel and it is so brilliant and amazing and life can be so rewarding. It might take months or years after trauma. It is worth it. Those that love you just cherish you so much and want you to not only not suffer; they want you to thrive and they want you to be around and stick around. 

So, if you don’t have motivation because you’re exhausted, having curiosity and I’m sure those who are listening do because they're listening, to having that curiosity, holding on to it and going let’s go down this rabbit holes and let me just choose 1, 2, 3 things a day that I can do that I could just start to do something towards that goal of just feeling better. Dodging infirmities is a great way to put it. But also, the same activities that dodge infirmities way down the road are things that are going to make you start feeling good today. They’re not separate. It's not like you’ll feel bad today but you’ll be better tomorrow. It’s like going for a walk in the sunlight, that's good for later on. That's good for now too. Same with eating your broccoli, it’s good for now, it’s good for later too. You're treating yourself. You're treating yourself to things that are going to build you up in the short-term but also sustain you in the long-term. So, I love that you pointed that out.

[01:41:18] Dr. Oz Garcia: So long as you're ambulatory, you're six feet above ground and you can just keep moving, you can certainly make things happen. You got to be careful with the way that our thinking is set up. There’s so much work being done now on the conversations what we have with ourselves. The voice in our head and how it all thwarts our ability to carry through and what we know is in our best interest. It’s referred to as the neuro default network. It’s a very lazy kind of mechanism that’s built off different parts of the brain that all together produce the illusion that there's a self inside our heads. The real me is this little me inside my head talking. It just talks innately, incessantly, involuntarily, wakes up and it’s got a million things to say about everything. Most of it is just dead wrong. When you can see that for what it is, that's a long process of mindfulness and meditation so that you can see thoughts kind of just passing your mind like clouds and you act on what you said before, on your list, the list of your goals. “Okay, so I’m going to act on this one thing today” rather than listening to what I had to say to myself because it’s just not all that original. I think that that was critical for me in getting better.

So, as I started to find my strength back, I knew that much of what I was saying to myself in my head, you're never going to get better, this is going to be a struggle, look at how many people have died afterwards or remain cripple. I just kind of disregarded that stream of thought and would go do what I had to do. Don’t get out of bed this morning, stay in bed. Then, get up, go get my breathing device, make my tea, sit there, look at something that I wanted to read and spend an hour or two outside of my bed. Okay, good. Am I going to get a massage today? You don’t want any company, you don’t want people to come over and go. That means that you need to call the person to come over and get body work — going against much of what we often say to ourselves which produces nothing but apathy. 

[01:44:03] Ashley James: Thank you so much for all the amazing things you shared today. I could just talk to you for hours and hours. I love that you’ve brought up the sauna because that's actually another. I have a Sunlighten sauna. I’m actually right beside it. 

[01:44:16] Dr. Oz Garcia: Wonderful!

[01:44:17] Ashley James: I’m knocking on it. it’s in our office. People think they don’t have enough room for a sauna. But it’s the size of a closet but it’s square.

[01:44:28] Dr. Oz Garcia: You can stick it in a closet. 

[01:44:30] Ashley James: Yeah, you could. It’s right beside me. This is our Sunlighten and it’s in our office. We just turned one of the bedrooms into an office. We live in a 1200-square foot townhome and we gave our son the master because that way, he has enough room for his homeschooling stuff and all his play stuff. Then, we took a small bedroom for the office. I converted half the office into a studio with all the sound equipment. I got this sauna here. Oh my gosh, I love the Sunlighten. What I do is I soak in transdermal magnesium using the Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and they give us a coupon code for listeners, coupon code LTH, and I get a big bowl of water and soak in it in the sauna. I just make sure not to spill it. Oh, I feel so good, I feel so, so good afterwards and it’s not too hot. 

[01:45:26] Dr. Oz Garcia: It’s cool, yeah. It’s a cool sauna. 

[01:45:28] Ashley James: It’s a cool sauna. But I’m sweating and my core temperature is raised so that heat shock proteins work in my favor, I feel so good and my husband does it also and our son, he asks for it. He loves it. He jumps in and of course, we don’t give him a full session, we give him a smaller kid version. But he’ll sit in there and he’ll get a little sweat up. And then, we always run into the shower and got to encourage my family to end with cold, get the blood pumping further. Because that also, it gets the feel-good chemicals going. If you're depressed and you wake up in the morning and you're depressed, after you’ve done gratitude, write down three things you're grateful for. But try getting in a hot shower. Even if you can’t stand, I got a seat to sit in the shower because when I was sick, I want to use hydrotherapy. So you can get a medical seat, you can sit in the shower, sure, if you don’t have a bathtub. But sit in the shower or stand and do nice and hot, and then do 90 seconds to 2 minutes of as cool or as cold as you can stand, have it be on the back of your neck and do some nice deep breathing because your body is going to force yourself to start breathing deep and you try to just get it as cold as possible, but start cool and then turn it down, and that gets some amazing endorphins going. 

[01:46:55] Dr. Oz Garcia: Terrific. It does. 

[01:46:57] Ashley James: Yeah. So you can use hydrotherapy in your home. There are so many things you can do for free. Like you said, sweating in a hot, hot bath and then you could take for hot, hot baths, some people get headaches. But if you take a towel and you get like cold water on it. You can wrap it around your neck and that helps to prevent the headaches, so you can get a really, really hot bath and then can get a cold wet cloth around your neck which all the blood going to your brain is cooler there. 

[01:47:24] Dr. Oz Garcia: Terrific. 

[01:47:26] Ashley James: I love the Sunlighten sauna and they actually give a great discount to my listeners as well because when I interviewed the founder Connie Zack, after trying to find the best sauna that I felt was like the most nontoxic and low EMF and all that. But it’s been monumental for me for recovering from heavy metal issues and detox issues. So, that's been really helpful. But yeah, my recovery has been great using that as well. So, I love that you brough that up. There's all these devices. I love the biohacking you do. How can listeners keep learning from you? What’s the best way? Now, of course, you have a website and that is easy to remember because it’s your name OzGarcia.com and of course, all the links are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com. Where should people go to learn from you? Is there social media or a YouTube or a podcast? Where should we learn?

[01:48:27] Dr. Oz Garcia: Absolutely. Well, of course, the website and we’re constantly putting up blogs and information. I would say our fan page on Facebook which is Oz Garcia, and we’re constantly posting articles that I think are relevant in just about every area of health that needs to be addressed. If you want to live a long life, if you're into the subject matter that you and I are recovering besides long-hauling, what can you do so that you reduce your risk of infirmities as get older. So, we cover everything from diet to fitness to different ways of eating to the aspects of neuroscience that fascinate me, and the tools that I use.

On Instagram, it’s Oz Wellness. There, I tend to address much more my philosophical bent, my thinking in terms of what makes for a good life. I would suggest for sure getting After COVID which is on Amazon and the full title of course is Optimize Your Health in a Changing World. I put a lot of really good information in there that is a good beginning for supplementation, diet, all the things that we’ve been talking about today. I think beyond that, they're always free to contact me through our website. 

[01:49:49] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview? Anything that maybe I didn’t touch on or didn’t ask that you really wanted to make sure you conveyed today?

[01:50:03] Dr. Oz Garcia: You and I covered a lot of territory. And I want to emphasize something that I had mentioned we talked about albeit briefly which is happiness, that to the extent that you look at happiness also as a study, something that you can unpack and put together, so that your life has meaning, is meaningful, and you find that there's purpose to it, that's the message that I want to leave everybody because that's where I wound up, that's where I am these days. How do I have meaning, purpose, happiness, contentment, peace of mind? Those are very important features of being a human being.

[01:50:46] Ashley James: Just to reiterate. Where did you go to watch that course? Can you just let us know? Because I’m sure there are some listeners who are like “I got to go do that course right now.” 

[01:50:56] Dr. Oz Garcia: You can do the Wellbeing and Happiness course with Laurie Santos on Coursera. If you want accreditation, it’s $49; otherwise, you can do the course for free which is amazing.

[01:51:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. I love that. So here, there’s always some people who are like, “Oh, money is really tight.” And I totally get it. Money is tight for everyone right now. But to give someone the gift of happiness, a course about happiness for free, oh wonderful. I was thinking to myself, as you were talking, I’m just like, I’m giving this course. I don’t care how much it costs. I’m giving this course to my mother-in-law for Christmas. And now that I know it’s free, I’m going to give her that course, she’s going to love it. And that's a free gift, so how good is that?

[01:51:44] Dr. Oz Garcia: There are dozens of courses on Coursera of extreme high quality that are available for no cost at all. And I’m looking at which two or three other courses I’m going to be doing soon. So, can’t recommend it enough.

[01:51:59] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Please come back on the show any time you have more to share. I’d love for you to come back and teach anytime you feel inspired to come back and teach more, we’d love to have you.

[01:52:09] Dr. Oz Garcia: Let’s do it. I’d love it, Ashley.

[01:52:12] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much.

[01:52:14] Dr. Oz Garcia: Thank you. This was terrific. And it flew. 

[01:52:18] Ashley James: Wasn’t that an amazing episode with Dr. Oz Garcia? I am blown away. I just love him. He’s fantastic. He’s agreed to come back on the show and he’s going to share the next time he comes back on the show about the science of anti-aging and getting your cellular age to be younger and younger. You know, it seems to be a theme in my life right now because I have two things that we’re going to be talking about very soon, I’m really excited. Just a little sneak peek, no spoilers. But there's two things that have popped into my life and I really believe in divine intervention and divine timing that this podcast has taught me that. I’ve talked about it on the show before where I give this link for guests to put themselves on my calendar and I will go out and I will reach out to all kinds of really cool holistic doctors on different topics. Like I’m not going to one day I don’t just go through and go okay, heart health, people. Like I’d just go, oh, this guy wrote this book, this person, I want to get this person. Oh, I’ve heard about this person. And I’d give them all this link and then they put themselves on my calendar. And almost every time I do that, all the heart health people book themselves back-to-back. All the diabetes people book themselves back-to-back.

It happens so often that I just laugh. I go, of course, of course you guys did. Then, when I publish, I don’t always publish in the same order, sometimes I publish, I go, okay, I really feel like it’s time for this episode to come out, and I just get a feeling in my gut like okay, it’s time for this episode to come out. Then, I’ll get a listener messaging me saying, “how did you know this was the answer to my prayer? Yesterday or today, I’ve been just lost and I’ve been asking for an answer. Then, I look at my phone and I get a notification for this episode and this is the answer to what I’ve been looking for.” That happens so often. I believe in divine intervention. It is so remarkable. What started to pop up in the last month or month and a half in my life are a few things that are blowing my mind, the science behind these things. And these things are unrelated but what they have in common is they all reverse cellular age, and there's this one thing that this company actually sent it to me so I could try it myself. My husband and I are hooked. It is so cool and they did a study and they found that by using it for three months, your cells are 8 years younger after only 3 months. That just blows my mind and it takes only a few minutes a day to use this thing. We’ve been loving it. 

There's this other company who’s been around for almost 20 years. They have so many studies. It’s really, really exciting. They are able to reverse cellular age. They're able to remarkably increase stem cells in your body to the point where you can test in your blood and it’s like you’re a newborn baby. You have so many stem cells. It increases stem cells hugely. It increases peptides in the body that end up doing all these things like for us vain people, fine lines and wrinkles go away but people are noticing more flexibility. They're actually seeing that there's more muscle growth and more fat burning. They're able to bring down the stress hormones and the stress response in the body noticeably. They see it in heart rate, heart rate variability. So, the list goes on and on. It’s something that you can use at home, again, easy to use at home. I think it’s really affordable compared to like these giant machines that these holistic clinics have. So, I’m very excited because what keeps dropping in my lap is all these antiaging and reversing cellular age, decreasing oxidative stress in the body. Oh yeah, and another thing, there's been Parkinson’s patients who are shaking and then they use it and they stop shaking right away. 

So, it has this effect, calming effect on the nervous system and it stimulates the body’s ability to heal itself. How cool is that? So, I’m very excited. We’re going to be talking about that in upcoming episodes, so watch for that. But I have a feeling, I just keep getting this intuition that at least part of 2023, if not all of 2023, my podcast largely are going to be about reversing cellular age, reversing degenerative disease and supporting the body to create new healthy cells in its place. So, very excited about that. I think you should be too because it’s not that I want to live be a thousand old, yes actually I do, I think that’d be really amazing. I want to live the healthiest, youngest life possible until I’m ready to leave this world. Right? If you’ve ever been around someone who didn’t take care of their body and they were on their deathbed, it is anguish for those people. It’s sometimes years of suffering. What I want for you is to live fully, live so healthy, so happy where when you're 70, you're going “I feel better than I did when I was 20. That's what I want for you.” I want you to be outrunning the 20-year-olds when you're 70 and when you're 80 and 90, feeling absolutely on top of your game and amazing. That's what I want for all of us. So, I’m going to find those experts and I already have two lined up like I told you about. I’m going to keep finding them and like Dr. Oz Garcia, he’s going to come back on the show and share his tips and tricks because he is gorgeous. This man is so handsome, he does not look like he’s in his 70’s. He looks like he’s in his 50’s and of course, it’s because he’s living proof. He’s living what he preaches. So, get ready to feel amazing no matter what age you are by continuing to listen to the Learn True Health podcast and as always, please share this with those you care about because we got to spread this message and help all of our friends and family and co-workers to feel amazing at every age. 

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Whatever holiday you celebrate, I celebrate Christmas, so Merry Christmas. Whatever holiday you celebrate in the coming months, I hope you have an amazing time and just remember, stress is the worst thing you can do for your body, so let it go. Take some deep breaths and put yourself in a position where you're feeling love and letting go of all that stress because stress is not helping you or anyone you're around. So, just focus on that. Focus on love and let go of the stress. I’m aiming for a completely stress-free holiday season this year and I think it’s going to be very healthy for me. I hope you do as well.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Oz Garcia

 

Website

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

 

Books by Dr. Oz Garcia

 

After Covid: Optimize Your Health in a Changing World

Oz Garcia's The Healthy High-Tech Body

Redesigning 50: The No-Plastic Surgery Guide to 21st-Century Age Defiance

The Balance

Look and Feel Fabulous Forever

Nov 23, 2022

It's November, and that means my FAVORITE holistic health products go on sale for the biggest savings of the year! And this year, I have some HUGE discounts to share with you! How does 40% off with free shipping sound?!

Listen to episodes 294, 341, and 391 for the story behind this very special magnesium soak and how it is the world's best at being absorbed through the skin and alleviating issues common with magnesium deficiency, such as pain, muscle tension, cramps, headaches, migraines, fatigue, sleep issues, and restless legs.

The magnesium collection is on sale today till November 30th with up to 30% off WHILE SUPPLIES LAST. In years past, they have completely sold out of inventory, so if you want to take advantage of this deal, I encourage you to do it soon. 

This discount gets even better because Kristen has given my listeners an additional 10% off at checkout when you use the coupon code LTH.  

So you can stock up on your magnesium soak, cream, muscle cream, and magnesium spray for 40% off, plus free shipping on orders over $99. 

Here is the link to what Kristen Bowen calls her "Calm Black Friday Sale" because instead of panicking during the holidays, we can relax and calm our nervous system with highly absorbable magnesium.

BE SURE TO USE COUPON CODE LTH AT CHECKOUT FOR YOUR ADDITIONAL 10% OFF. 

https://livingthegoodlifenaturally.com/collections/currentsale

Get the Summit:
LearnTrueHealth.com/masteringdiabetes
Get the book:
Masteringdiabetes.org/book

492: Healing Insulin Resistance and Diabetes

Do you suffer from blood sugar imbalance? Do you really want to finally get your blood sugar levels under control once and for all? Do you want to avoid insulin injections or stay off of medications? In this episode, Cyrus Khambatta, PhD talks about lowering your blood sugar naturally, mastering this condition without the use of drugs, and how to increase insulin sensitivity and reduce insulin resistance.

Ashley James And Dr. Cyrus Khambatta

Highlights:

  • Eating a raw diet
  • The ratio of carbohydrate to insulin use
  • Cutting out oil and animal products
  • Fatty acids
  • Diets that make you sick
  • Insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today, you have such an amazing treat to have a PhD, Cyrus Khambatta on the show today, sharing his side of the story about how him and his partner Robby Barbaro created Mastering Diabetes. Both of them have type 1 diabetes, and both of them hugely, hugely increased their insulin sensitivity so much that they require so little insulin to inject into themselves daily that every type 1 diabetic needs to know about this because it’s going to save them thousands of dollars and it’s going to save them years on their life, disease-free years even on their life. Every type 1 diabetic needs this information. But every type 2 diabetic needs it because this is exactly how you can reverse type 2 diabetes and increase your insulin sensitivity so much that you no longer have hyper- or hypoglycemia. I am so excited for you to have this information because even prediabetics or those who have metabolic syndrome, women who have polycystic ovarian syndrome will benefit from this information because it’s all about the insulin resistance. And today, PhD Cyrus Khambatta shares exactly the science behind it and why we develop insulin resistance and how we can reverse it, and it is all with diet and lifestyle, which is really exciting because that puts the power back in your hands. That’s exactly what my show is intended to do. This is what I set out to do in all these interviews, is get you the information so that you can learn how to create true health.

Now, another tool that I want you to know about is my favorite magnesium soak. Magnesium is the most required mineral in the body. The body needs it for 1800 enzymatic processes. The second most needed mineral is zinc at only 800 enzymatic processes. So, you can imagine as the list goes down and down, magnesium is huge for our health and healing. When we have magnesium deficiency, there's over 200 different illnesses and symptoms associated with magnesium deficiency. Most people are walking around deficient in magnesium and suffering from the side effects of magnesium deficiency without even knowing it, and then they medicate themselves. Doctors will give you a drug for, for example, restless legs syndrome is a magnesium deficiency and yet, the pharmaceutical companies have created a drug for it, which is it’s madness and it is unethical, frankly.

So, I have interviews with Kristen Bowen, the founder of this company that has the most absorbable form of transdermal magnesium. She has a program where you do it for 30 days and you get to full cell saturation. She explains in our interviews how you can do that and how you can even test. There's a special test you have to order. It’s about $40 or $50 when you order it online. But you could do a special magnesium RBC blood test. If you wanted to test your cell saturation of magnesium before and after you do her transdermal magnesium soak, she has an amazing story. I highly recommend that you check it out. You can go back and listen to episode 294 for her story in the Learn True Health podcast episode 294. She also came back on episode 341 to answer listener questions about magnesium, and then at 391 we talked about other very interesting things to know about magnesium, including getting rid of parasites. So, that episode is also very interesting, this particular magnesium soak. And I’ve taken magnesium orally for many years, and I was still magnesium deficient, and that's the thing. Most people who take it orally like by drinking it or taking capsules, they're still magnesium-deficient because it’s very hard to absorb most magnesium supplements. Most magnesium supplements go right through people and yet, when you do the magnesium soak, you absorb it straight through your skin into your lymph system and then that from there, goes into your bloodstream and it circulates and it bathes every cell in the body with this magnesium. It’s very bioavailable and you can see it in the blood tests. And that's what we talk about in episode 294. So, I definitely recommend checking it out.

What is so exciting is that right now, going on for the month of November, while supplies last, she has in past years run out of it because the sale is so good, she gives the best sale, it is 30% off plus she still honors the Learn True Health coupon code, so the LTH coupon code. She still honors it. So, in fact, it’s 40% off. And if your order is over $99, so if it’s a $100 order which you can buy all your magnesium soak for the whole year, for the whole next year, she gives free shipping. So, you basically are getting 40% off with free shipping when you use the coupon code LTH at checkout. You have to remember to use it at checkout because she can’t go back and change it. She says she’s very sorry. They have such a huge amount of orders that come in during the cyber sales. This year, she’s making a cyber sale all the month of November, so check it out, go to Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I know it’s a mouthful, it’s such a cute name though and it’s very memorable. Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. And make sure that you use the coupon code LTH at checkout for the additional 10% off that she’s giving us in addition to the 30% off. All the magnesium stuff is on sale on her website.

Then she’s got a few other things on her website that I really like. Everything she sells is 100% natural, it’s paraben-free, cruelty-free, and fair-trade. She’s really big into that, very big into high-quality ingredients. But I go there for the magnesium. It has been a gamechanger for me. I share about it in past episodes, so you can go back and listen to those—294341, and 381. Our son who’s always fought sleep, when we put it in his bath when he was a toddler, he would turn to me and say, “Okay, I’m ready for bed now.” And I was like “Whoa, this is amazing! This stuff really works.” So if you have problems falling asleep, if your kids have problems falling asleep or if you have energy problems, if you have restless legs or if you have migraines, we’ve had listeners actually, over 200 listeners in our Facebook group have shared testimonials through the years of how fantastic this magnesium soak has changed their lives. And we’ve had listeners talk about how their migraines went away and their headaches went away. The tension headaches will go away. And even chronic pain. What’s really interesting is your pain receptors cannot close when there’s a lack of magnesium. So, a deficiency of magnesium can cause chronic pain to continue to persist. In the presence of magnesium, they’re able to close. So, a lot of people have found that this actually is very beneficial if they're struggling with pain as well. So, it’s a great gift to give to those you love. I love the magnesium cream. I love using it if I feel like I’m crampy or if my feet are crampy at the end of the day or my legs, I love using the magnesium cream and it’s very quick, within minutes I’m feeling all my muscles just melt and relax. So, there's that, but then there's the soak and you can go listen to episode 294 to learn how to use the soak. Remember the coupon code is LTH as in Learn True HealthLTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Make sure that you go and get some now before supplies run out because it’s such a huge sale and I know that you’re going to love to grab a few of those magnesium creams. It’s only $15. In addition to that, take off 10% for the Learn True Health discount. Those are fantastic stocking stuffers, great for holiday gifts. I know I definitely am going to stock up to give those away as gifts to my friends and family for sure.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about. Please share it with everyone you know who has blood sugar dysregulation and wants to get on the other side of that because this is exactly how you do it and the science is there and I’m so excited to have Cyrus share with you today how he has helped thousands of people, thousands and thousands of people to reverse their type 2 diabetes and thousands of type 1 diabetics to increase their insulin sensitivity so much that they're able to lower their insulin needs hugely. Which is so beneficial for many reasons. That's what we talk about in today’s episode. You can also go back and listen to the episodes I did with Robby Barbaro in episode 233 and 489. Those are good episodes to listen to, to hear his side of the story for mastering diabetes and how he was able to eat—I think he went from eating 30 net grams of carbohydrates on 30 units of insulin, which is a horrible ratio of insulin units to carbs, to being able to maintain the same amount of insulin, but then eat 700 grams of carbohydrates and his blood sugar actually got better. So, Robby’s story is very similar to Cyrus’, but you can go back and listen to his episode 233 and 489

Have yourself a fantastic day and just happy holidays! Happy Thanksgiving, a Merry Christmas! Whatever holiday you celebrate—the Hannukah, Kwanzaa, whatever you're celebrating, you're just celebrating and being with your friends and family, my love goes out to you. Really, I’m just hugging you, I’m just sending my hugs to you. This can be a wonderful time of year. It can be a very painful time of year, having lost my parents. It’s bittersweet. So, I can really understand and relate to you. What I love about the magnesium sale is Kristen Bowen calls it her Calm Black Friday sale because magnesium calms, it actually is very therapeutic for our nervous system, for our stress levels. So if you find yourself a little stressed out in the holidays which I do too, and it’s understandable, get some magnesium soak and treat yourself. Treat yourself to that and be gentle and be loving with yourself. I’m giving you big hugs. Give yourself some big hugs. Be gentle with yourself and see what you can do for the next two months to nurture yourself and jump into 2023 with great goals for your health and take everything that Cyrus says to heart because he has a fantastic program for reversing disease and for increasing health to such a monumental level that you will feel like a million bucks has been handed to you every day, every morning you wake up. Enjoy today’s episode!

[00:12:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 492.

I am so excited for today’s guest. I have been trying to get Cyrus on the show for years, and just both of our schedules have never come together until now, so I just feel like it’s kismet, you know, it’s meant to be. Today, finally, PhD Cyrus Khambatta is on the show. We’re going to talk about the deep science of why this very specific way of eating completely reverses type 2 diabetes, re-sensitizes insulin and even helps those who have type 1 diabetes to become so much more insulin-sensitive that their ratio of insulin units to carbohydrates becomes very good. Just very, very, very good. So, we see people restore even things like eyesight and neuropathy, improvements in immunity—all of this—heart disease, cancer, blood pressure, all these things get better and better. Inflammation goes way down. What’s great though, is that people feel like a million bucks eating this way. Now, there's a lot of science behind it and it’s a very specific way of eating that it does take a little bit getting used to, but once you're doing it, you never want to stop because you feel so dang good. 

Cyrus, I am really excited to dig deep into the science today to understand how this one way of eating is it’s kind of like the fountain of youth and then it helps reverse so many diseases and helps people live optimal lives. I’m just chomping at the bit, can’t wait to dive in. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

[00:13:49] Cyrus Khambatta: Awesome. Thank you, thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. I apologize, I wasn’t intending to play hard to get here, but I’m glad we’re talking now.

[00:13:59] Ashley James: I just think your schedule, my schedule, and they just kept not working together, but it’s actually perfect because I had the opportunity to have your partner on the show, Robby on the show several times talking about Mastering Diabetes, this beautiful book you guys have written and also, this whole program you guys have come up with. You guys just launched a summit which was amazing, and listeners should go to Learntruehealth.com/mastering diabetes to check out the summit there. Then to get your book which is now in paperback—congratulations by the way—paperback and in hardcover. And I know this has been a labor of love. And again, what I love is that you have so much science in it, and to prove this is how it works, but you also have so many testimonials. You have thousands and thousands of stories of success backing what you guys do, and that is Masteringdiabetes.org/book. Of course, the links to everything that Cyrus does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com.

Very quickly, let’s just touch on so you have a PhD. Let’s touch on because you’re like the science end of the Mastering Diabetes book, so I’d love to hear a bit about how did you meet Robby and tell us a bit about your background, how you guys came together to create this for so many people to be able to reverse their diabetes. 

[00:15:18] Cyrus Khambatta: Great question. So, I basically was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the year 2002 when I was a senior. I was studying mechanical engineering at Stanford University and I was just trying to graduate and move on with my life and all of a sudden, I got this strange diagnosis and I just felt very sort of like low energy and I was kind of confused and my vision was getting weird and I was dehydrated all the time. So, I finally ended up going to the health center. They sent me to the emergency room and there, I got diagnosed with not 1, not 2 but 3 autoimmune conditions. So, the first one is Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism. Then, the second one was alopecia universalis which is basically just total hair loss. Then the third one was type 1 diabetes. So, I got diagnosed with all three of these practically overnight and I became a chronic disease patient all of a sudden. It was a pretty tough time and it’s a lot of information to take in at any one given moment in time. So, for the first year, my life with type 1 diabetes, I was just kind of listening what the doctors were telling me which was to eat a low-carbohydrate diet and use that as my primary weapon of choice, if you will, to try and minimize my use of insulin and try and keep my blood glucose very controlled.

So, I did that for about a year and I just found out that my health was just getting worse and worse and worse. The promise that they had given me was that my glucose would become more controllable and that my insulin use would go down or my insulin use wouldn’t go up. And it turns out that neither one of those was true because my blood glucose was very hard to control, extremely hard to control. And in addition to that, my insulin use started out at about 25 units per day, and then before I knew it, it was at 28 and then 32 and then 36 and then 39 and then 41 and then 47 and then 52 and 55. There were days where I was injecting somewhere between 50 and 60 units per day and I was like, the math doesn’t make sense and I was literally not eating the thing that’s supposed to cause my blood glucose to go up which is carbohydrate because that’s what I’ve been told. But yet, my glucose is going high, and my insulin use is climbing. So, like, what am I doing wrong? I just don’t understand. I mean, I’m an active guy. I was exercising 3, 4, 5 times a week, I was riding my bike, I was trying to do everything. I was playing soccer, I was lifting weights. But it didn’t seem to matter. 

So, to answer your question, where did Robby come around? What happened was that I switched over to eating a plant-based diet in the year 2003, and I did under the supervision of, in my opinion, a genius, a guy who saved my life. His name is Dr. Doug Graham. And he went on to write a book called The 80/10/10 Diet. He basically teaches people how to eat a raw food diet. So, under his tutelage, I said, you know what, I’ll do this raw food thing, I got no problem with that. I just want to feel better. Within the first week of eating the way that he described, my glucose fell like a rock. My insulin use fell very quickly.

[00:18:30] Ashley James: Now, sorry to interrupt, raw diets are primarily carbohydrates. 

[00:18:35] Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, so that’s the kicker. That’s the kicker. So, what you’re saying is absolutely true, which is okay, so, the medical institution said, hey Cyrus, carbs are bad for you. Carbs will make your blood glucose go up. Carbs will make you use more insulin, so eat less carbs. I was like, okay, sounds like a plan. So, while I was doing that, because I was eating less carbohydrate energy, what I was eating more of is protein and fat that came from things like red meat, white meat, fish, chicken, turkey burgers, peanut butter, dairy products, olive oil. And I was trying to limit my intake of things like pastas and potatoes and fruits because, again, that’s where the carbohydrates are found, and I was told that carbohydrates are bad for me. So, I was trying to eat a bunch of these sort of like fat-rich foods and protein-rich foods. And again, while doing that, it was supposed to keep my glucose down and keep my insulin use from going up, but neither one of those happened. So, when I met Doug and he switched me over to eating a raw food diet, I started eating large plates of fruit and large plates of fruits and vegetables together. I was nervous that my glucose would go up because those plates and those bowls are very large with, no exaggeration, between 8 and 12 servings of fruit in one shot, in one meal. The math behind it and sort of what the doctors had led me to believe was that like glucose would go extremely high and instead of seeing like a 200 blood glucose value after eating a meal, that by eating a bowl of fruit, my glucose would go up to a 400 or maybe even a 500. So, that was the fear that I had. But then, once I started to eat the way that Doug had described, I recognized that my blood glucose did the exact opposite thing. 

The expectation was that my glucose would go through the roof, but in reality, instead of hitting a routine 180 or 200 or 220 after a meal, which is what happened on a low-carbohydrate diet. After a meal when eating a fruit-based meal, my blood glucose was like 120 or maybe 130. And then, I would continue this process over and over and over again, and my blood glucose just didn’t seem to go anywhere, didn’t seem to go high at all. What was interesting was that not only was my blood glucose not going high after a meal but in between meals and in the middle of the night, my blood glucose was going down. And so as a result of that now, I had to limit the amount of insulin I was injecting myself and back off because the amount of insulin that I was injecting was now too powerful. So, instead of injecting 42 units, 45 units of insulin per day, all of a sudden it went from 45 down to 35, and then from 35 to 31 to 27, and I ended up at like 24 units of insulin per day after 1 week.

So, Ashley, here’s the kicker. These numbers are ridiculous, okay? Before, I was eating approximately 100 grams of carbohydrate, and I was using approximately 42 units of insulin. So, 100 divided by 42, we’ll call 2 ½. Okay. My ratio of carbohydrate to insulin use was 2 ½, meaning that every time I ate approximately 2 ½ grams of carbohydrate, I would have to inject 1 unit of insulin. When I started to eat a raw food diet, when I started to eat a plant-based diet, my intake of carbohydrate went from 100 grams to 700 grams per day. No exaggeration. And my use of insulin went from 42 units per day down to 25 units per day. So, if you calculate the new ratio of 700 grams of carbohydrate divided by 25 units of insulin, now, instead of operating at a 2.5 to 1 ratio, I was now operating at a 28:1 ratio.

[00:22:54] Ashley James: Which proves your insulin sensitivity.

[00:22:57] Cyrus Khambatta: Bingo. So, my insulin sensitivity had gone up significantly. So, previously, I would have to inject 1 unit of insulin per approximately 2.5 grams of carbohydrate that went into my mouth. Now, eating a plant-based diet, I would have to inject 1 unit of insulin per approximately 28 grams of carbohydrate, and this is almost a 10-fold increase in my insulin sensitivity. That's bonkers.

[00:23:22] Ashley James: It is bonkers. I want to say two things real quick before some people start turning this off. Because they’re like, I’m sure someone is thinking, “I can’t be a raw vegan. I can’t be a fruitarian. That's whacko.” Right? So first of all, what you guys are teaching is not exclusively fruitarian. You can eat cooked food. But Cyrus is telling his story, and which is really important because if we listen for the physiology, the science of how our body works, and this is where I get so angry. Okay, I step on my soapbox, people. We have people dying because they cannot afford their insulin. Type 1 diabetics, the insulin cost in the United States have gone up so much that people are going homeless, going broke trying to afford their insulin and they're deciding whether they need to pay their rent or survive another month because they can’t afford their insulin. I mean, this is so infuriating and yet, they're not told by any of their doctors that there is a way to increase their insulin sensitivity so that they need less units, so that they could afford their rent again. Then they could afford their car payment or the gas. They don’t have to go broke and homeless because they’re deciding whether they're going to live another month because they can’t afford their insulin. And I am so livid with this system where your plan, what you teach in your book Mastering Diabetes, is known, it’s a known thing and yet doctors are not teaching this. And maybe these doctors don’t know it. Some do but it’s not yelled from the rooftops. And if you get into the conspiracy of needing to keep people sick so that they can make money, they would rather sell you a higher amount of insulin than sell you a lower amount of insulin.

So, they're going to promote a diet that “manages” your diabetes and keeps you diabetic, keeps your insulin sensitivity very bad, keeps you insulin resistant. Right? So, they can sell you more drugs. Then the American Diabetes Association ever promoting a diet that would within three months completely reverse diabetes for type 2 diabetics and increase insulin sensitivity so much that type 1 diabetics could lower their insulin intake, saving them money and frankly increasing the quality and increasing the longevity of their life.

[00:25:50] Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah, no questions, Ashley. Absolutely right. I mean, you can ask a hundred doctors how much nutrition did you learn in medical school and all one hundred of them are going to tell you that they learned somewhere between 0 and 20 hours within their entire medical school education. Having gone through a PhD program to learn nutrition inside and out, I can tell you that in 20 hours, you can’t even scratch the surface. I mean, you can’t even get to the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg in nutrition because it’s a very complex subject, and there’s a lot of things to take into account, a lot of things to learn. So, we can’t look at doctors as being authorities on nutrition. It’s not their fault. Doctors are phenomenal human beings and they're very altruistic and they really want to help people, but they just don’t have the tools. And so, we have to look beyond the medical institution if we really want to find a way to use as medicine and that’s where a program like Mastering Diabetes comes into play. 

[00:26:59] Ashley James: Okay, so there you were in your first week trying out Dr. Doug Graham’s protocol. You’re eating as much fruit as you want. Your insulin needs have gone way down. Your blood sugar is balanced. You’re feeling like a million bucks. Then, what? Because at this point, you haven’t even thought of becoming a PhD in nutrition, right? You were on a totally different track.   

[00:27:29] Cyrus Khambatta: That’s exactly right. So, let’s go backward. Basically, I made the transition to eating a plant-based diet in the year 2003. Just for full clarity, going back to what you were saying, my story is about becoming a raw food vegan. That’s just because that’s what was presented to me at the time. But if you fast forward to now, we’re in 2022, which is 19 years beyond, the methodology that I teach people living with all forms of diabetes and the research that I’ve done over the past almost two decades, is that if you want to be a raw foodist, go for it. If you don’t want to be a raw foodist, go for it. Right? If you want to just eat a diet that contains a significant amount of plant material, that is good enough. So, like you were saying, I just don’t want people to get intimidated like “Oh, there’s that raw food guy talking about raw foods” because like I don’t even eat a raw food diet right now anymore. I just happened to start upon that diet back in the day.

So, we go backwards in time, 2003, I felt like a million bucks. I continued to live this way, I continued to adopt this lifestyle and my life got better and better. So, my insulin use stayed down, my blood glucose was very normalized. I became extremely active once again because I grew up as kind of one of these like my mom refers to me as a health cat. I’m one of those guys that just wakes up in the morning and I have so much energy, I don’t know what to do with it. So, from a young age, I would play soccer then baseball then basketball then running then swimming and then hiking and whatnot. In my young 20’s when I did go through this transition and I started to eat a plant-based diet, all of a sudden, I got that excessive amount of energy back and I was like, “Oh, I feel like a 5-year-old kid again. This feels awesome. I love it.” So, I continued to live a very high-energy lifestyle, which was directly a result of eating a plant-based diet. So, 2007 rolls around and I was like, you know what, I want to learn this stuff. I want to not just understand, have a personal story, but I want to actually learn the science.

So, I put myself back to graduate school and I got a PhD in nutritional biochemistry because that’s the super nerd nutrition science that I was looking for. Right? So, I go to UC Berkley for 5 years from 2007 to 2012, and I did a PhD in the subject of nutritional biochemistry. And I wrote a thesis on the ins and outs of insulin resistance and basically how you can manipulate insulin resistance, how you can create insulin resistance, how you can reverse insulin resistance, and how you can use diet and exercise to your advantage to really control the amount of glucose and insulin inside of your blood.

It was an eye-opening experience for me because I got to read thousands of scientific papers, I got to conduct scientific experiments, I got to really get so, so deep in the research that my mind was blown. It gave me an explanation for what was happening inside my own body but then it also completely opened up my mind to the idea that there are so many people on this planet that could benefit from eating a plant-based diet. That this story was no longer about Cyrus Khambatta. The story is about the human race. The story is not about this guy who got type 1 diabetes and happened to eat a plant-based diet. The story is about everybody who eats a diet that predisposes them towards insulin resistance and how they can eat in a way to reverse insulin resistance and lower their chronic disease risk, whether that’s diabetes or heart disease or cancer or autoimmune diseases or dementia or Alzheimer’s disease or fatty liver disease or chronic kidney disease, I don’t care. All of those conditions are influenced by your level of insulin resistance. So, if we can make you an insulin-sensitive individual, then your overall chronic disease risk goes to zero. 

[00:31:41] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, I love it. So, in having your thesis accepted, tell me a bit about, you know, it was peer-reviewed, right, or you have professors reading your thesis, like what was their take on it? Did you blow some people’s minds? Were they resistant to your hypothesis, to your findings?

[00:32:04] Cyrus Khambatta: It was actually really interesting because the actual subject material of my thesis was trying to use intermittent fasting in particular as the primary intervention tool to be able to manipulate insulin resistance. So, what we would do is we would actually induce insulin resistance inside of laboratory animals, inside of mice and rats, and then we would rescue that insulin sensitivity by putting them onto a calorie restriction regimen or an intermittent fasting regimen. And so, my thesis didn’t really necessarily have anything to do with eating a plant-based directly. It was more about how do you manipulate the timing of your food intake in order to rescue your insulin sensitivity once again. When I presented all this to my thesis committee and did my qualifying examination and then my defense, it was never a question about like is this right. It’s not controversial in the world of biology, in the scientific world of biology. If you go to social media and you make a statement like a high-fat diet can induce insulin resistance, you’ll get torn to shreds. Because everyone and their mother has their own opinion about what they think is right and what they don’t think is right. “This is my experience and my mom said this and my brother said this and whatnot…” It all becomes this giant conflict-ridden conversation where people are pointing fingers at each other and saying “Oh no, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” right? But if you go into the scientific world and you present these ideas to people who are in the insulin resistance research-based world and you say yeah, we induce insulin resistance in laboratory mice and laboratory animals using a high-fat diet for 8 weeks, it’s silence. Everyone goes “Oh, okay, great, yeah. I know. That’s the way you create insulin resistance. Of course. Like there’s no argument here, that makes perfect sense.” Right?

It was this disconnect that I was seeing over and over and over again because the scientific world is pretty darn clear about what creates insulin resistance. But then if you go to the general public, the general public literally does the exact opposite. So, the scientific world basically says if you try and create insulin resistance inside of either a laboratory mouse or a rat or a human being or even a monkey, our closest primate ancestors, what you’ll find is that the way to do it repeatedly is to feed these animals and feed a human a high fat diet. It’s not a sugar diet. It’s not a high carbohydrate diet. It’s not a high fruit diet. It’s not a high potato diet. It’s not a high pasta diet. It’s a high fat diet that contains primarily saturated fat. If you feed an animal or you feed a human this type of diet for about 8 weeks, what you will find is that blood glucose levels begin to rise and they get elevated or they’re sustained at an elevated rate or an elevated concentration, and that insulin production also begins to increase in order to try and compensate to bring blood glucose back down again. 

So, this is very well-described, it’s very well-known and it’s literally the exact mechanism that we used over and over and like, literally, hundreds of experiments to induce insulin resistance inside of these laboratory animals. But if you go to the outside world and you actually ask people on the street or you ask doctors or you ask influencers on Instagram or YouTube, well, what causes insulin resistance, they’ll tell you the exact opposite. It’s not about saturated fat for the general public. It’s not about eating a high-fat diet. They’ll tell you it’s carbs. Carbs are bad for you. Sugar is bad for you. Carbs are bad for you. Carbohydrates are bad for you. Don’t eat carbs. Carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs. You go to the American Diabetes Association, it’s about carbs. You go to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the JDRF, the primary research-based organization for people with type 1 diabetes, they're telling you that it’s all about carbohydrates. And I literally sit there and I bang my head against the wall sometimes and I’m like, is the rest of the world under some kind of weird hypnosis? What the hell is going on? It’s like mind-boggling because what the general public is saying is so out of touch with what the research actually shows that I feel like I’m trying to educate the world about something that is absolutely true and is very repeatable, but yet, somehow I’m the minority and I’m the weirdo that gets a finger pointed and that I don’t know how to read research or that we’re citing research that’s not peer reviewed or some collection, if that makes any sense. 

[00:37:06] Ashley James: Well, we’ve got this mass group think where we have been brainwashed since very, very young children. You and I both grew up in the ‘80s. I’m only a few years older than you, I think, or we’re right about the same age. 

[00:37:24] Cyrus Khambatta: Yes, exactly.

[00:37:25] Ashley James: But anyways, growing up in the ‘80s, it was such a time of innocence. I was like 3 years old on my tricycle alone on our street. We could go out. I have memories. Because it was a very quiet street and I knew all the kids on our street. I just remember going out and playing alone on the streets, like this is a time of innocence. Our parents entrusted the TV as a babysitter. I mean, my parents were really, really great and they didn’t give me unlimited TV but there were times when they just popped me in front of TV because I was a hyper kid and it was just easier to manage their lives. I would sit there watching these… and also, my parents did not take me to fast food. Being a kid, we had in the ‘80s less fast food than they have now in the States. I live in the States now but I grew up in Canada. But I watched these commercials and it would be Kellogg’s and it would be all these cereals and it was these magical characters that you could trust. I grew up loving this Tony the Tiger and these spooky animals, whatever. Also, my mom didn’t buy any cereal where sugar was an ingredient. She was as health nut and so, I didn’t get to have any of this stuff, although there would be once in a blue moon like maybe 5 times in my childhood I had like sugary cereal. But, I’d go down the aisles in the grocery store and it was a form of trust and I had these good warm feelings in myself.

Now, having studied neurolinguistic programming and having studied how we create reality and understanding how they do propaganda. Edward Bernays – you study Edward Bernays, that's great. Understanding how they create marketing to do propaganda and brainwashing. When you walk down the aisles and look at brands and look at logos. Now, you have a kid, I have a kid, and before he could read, he knew logos. “Ah, Starbucks!” He would yell. I’m like, this kid, it was like a toddler having maybe a 50-word vocabulary but he would say “Home Depot!” like he’d point out because he knew we were at Home Depot because he could see the logo. Wherever we went, he would point at the logo and I’m like, this is brand marketing. When we go down the aisles and we see these sugary foods or when we drive through the drive-thru, you were raised to love a Ronald McDonald. You were raised to trust him and trust the food because you have these good warm feelings inside of when your parents took you or your grandparents or aunt or uncle or whatever or your big brother took you to the drive-thru or took you in to McDonald’s or whatever, insert fast food restaurant. Or, did a microwave dinner and made some kind of Mac ‘N Cheese, whatever garbage processed food, they have marketed and they have associated really good emotions with it. We grew up on a high fat processed food diet, but it has become part of our belief system that it is good because it is through the marketing of making us feel good and trusting these characters, these cartoon characters. Right?

Also, all the memories we have with our families eating this food, we trust it. Then, someone comes along and says this stuff is the cause of your diabetes and we want to say “No, I was told that Atkins reverses diabetes and keto diet is good for me, and these are high fat diets and therefore, you can’t tell me that a high fat diet is the cause of my problems.”

So, first thing we have to do is say if you're sick, and I’ve had five diseases, so my main listeners who had listened for a while know, but I had raging out-of-control blood sugar, type 2 diabetes. For many years I had out-of-control blood sugar before I was even diagnosed with diabetes. I also had polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility. I was told that I’d never have kids. After a battery of tests, I reversed that even though other doctors/endocrinologists said I could never reverse that, thank you very much.

[00:41:21] Cyrus Khambatta: I’ll tell you.

[00:41:22] Ashley James: Exactly. Right? The thing is you have to be stubborn. You have to be able to be willing to say no, like don’t bow down to this authority. We put the medical doctor on a pedestal or our parents or whoever in our life is saying you’ll always have this or the reason why you have this heart disease or this diabetes or whatever it is. The reason why you have this is because your genetics or because whatever they want to say, or because of your age. None of that. None of that is the reason. Do not buy into someone telling you how you're going to be and how your body is going to be. You should rage against it and say “No, I want to get healthier.” The thing is, and I think this is the hardest thing to swallow because it is a blow to our ego, we have to accept that what we’ve done both consciously and unconsciously, all the behaviors that we’ve done have led us to where we are right now. So if we’re on medications and we’re sick and we’re feeling horrible, we got to stop pointing the finger and we got to just say okay, what I’m doing and what I’ve been doing isn’t working. Like the person who’s been on and off keto diet or on and off Atkins and they're still sick. And that was me for so many years. 

[00:42:33] Cyrus Khambatta: What ended up happening? How did you end up…

[00:42:35] Ashley James: Okay, I mean, I’ll go back in my story because I think it’s important for listeners who are struggling with diabetes, but I, in my teenage years, had hypoglycemia and it was pretty brutal but I was like you, as a child, incredibly energetic. I was an athlete. I don’t know if you know who Kurt Browning is, a Canadian. He’s our gold medalist in figure skating for many years. His coach was my figure skating coach growing up. So, I was intense. I love figure skating, I love downhill skiing. I love water skiing, tennis. I did everything. I bike rode or rollerbladed. I mean, I was on the rugby team and the swim team, and I weightlifted in high school. I loved being active. My mom, she had a lot of emotional issues around food and weight and she was constantly struggling to lose 5 pounds. Now looking back, I realize, so she was always skinny and also muscular because she worked out a lot because she had almost that anorexic mindset of anorexic and look in the mirror and see that they're fat when they're not. That my mom had that distorted view that she maybe had 5 pounds—maybe—on her body of excess weight. But she was always like, “Oh, I have to lose the 5 pounds!” That was kind of always the background, this panicky-ness around diet and she started projecting that on me when I was 12 years old and I was going through puberty. So, when I started growing hips and breasts, she put me on diets. She put me on diet after diet and that messed with my mindset and my metabolism because I was constantly being told by her that I was fat when I wasn’t. I was athletic.

But she put me on the Dr. Bernstein diet and that was my first introduction to ketosis. I’d have to go visit Dr. Bernstein in Toronto 3 times a week and they’d weigh me. He’d yell at me and here I am, I’m 15 or 16 at the time, I think it was 16, and he would yell at me and say I didn’t lose enough weight because I’m supposed to lose a pound a week when I’m already an athlete and I don’t have a lot to lose to begin with. Like, I’ve got boobs and hips, what do you want? I’m a growing teenage girl. But back then, I really bought the idea that I was fat. Because my mom was telling me and the doctors were telling me, and I think Dr. Bernstein was just happy to keep collecting a paycheck. And then I rebelled against it and started eating the way I’ve never eaten in my life, which was how all my friends were eating, because I was just like, screw you guys, stop trying to control me because I was going through the teenage-hood, which in a sense is good because here I am and I got to learn from this experience. But I was also going to the dojo 4-5 days a week and I really looked up to the black belts. I started eating exactly how they were eating and they were eating not great. But I thought they must be eating great because they’re black belts. So I started eating processed food and subway sandwiches and stuff. I accelerated my sickness and became an out-of-control type 2 diabetic at that point. Then all the other things cascaded and I had chronic infections for which I needed monthly antibiotics for. 

I mean, that was very painful to be in so much pain that I needed antibiotics monthly. Then, just feeling horrible. It just went downhill. In my 20’s where you're supposed to be having the time of your life in 20’s, it was like being in a prison and I was crying myself to sleep every night. And I was struggling. It was really brutal. So, I know what it is to suffer. I know what it is to be so sick. You're just suffering. I never ever wanted to commit suicide, I never wanted to die. I wanted it to stop. I still loved life and I still had a lot of people I loved and I knew loved me. So, it wasn’t that. But I was so sick that I just felt like I was trapped in a prison. And I would cry to my husband and say “I just feel like I’m just trapped in this prison in a sick body,” because I feel like my spirit is healthy, my soul is healthy but I’m living in a sick body. Then, what happened was we just started watching these health documentaries and we learned to shop the perimeter of the grocery store, eat organic, and we just did one thing at a time and eventually, the first thing to go was the chronic infections. That's after shopping the perimeter of the grocery store. So, cutting out all the processed food and eating organic. Within 1 month, all the chronic infections went away. Surprise, surprise. You know, that was like oh, okay.

Then, it was hit or miss because I was learning from all these different people and not everything worked. Some things worked, some things didn’t. But I stumbled upon some really great mineral supplements and was told to cut out some bad foods and went gluten-free and saw that. I lost 25 pounds of inflammation of water weight in 1 month just cutting out the gluten grains. For me, that was a really big thing. Then I got to the point where I was no longer diabetic. At the time, I was like “Keto is the best, yeah, look at me I don’t have diabetes anymore.” This was about 6 years ago. But the problem was I couldn’t get my insulin resistance under control. It was still horrible insulin resistance and anytime I went off of this very controlled low-carb way of eating, it was just like I’d feel like a wreck. My blood sugar would be out of control and it was such a struggle.

Then, I tried the plant-based thing. I’m like, okay, well I’ve done everything else. That’s the thing you got to say to yourself. If what you're doing is getting this result and you don’t like this result, try a different thing. I tried over the 35 diets my entire life. At first, it was because my mom thought I was fat, right? So I was just going on with her diets. But then I actually created a lot of illness in my body so then it was then for me all these diets were chasing, trying to find the thing that helped. I loved the book, it was very cathartic for me to listen to the book Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis. I really want to get him on the show because he said something in the first chapter, and I was just crying. He says you did not fail these diets; these diets failed you. Because their marketing is BS. And he proves, his entire book is proving to you that the science is not there. That these diets don’t have a leg to stand on. When you actually look at the science, these diets don’t have a leg to stand. This whole, like I said, Atkins, keto, and he goes down the list of every single diet I ever was on. I felt like a failure, I felt like there's something wrong with me. I started thinking maybe I have like some hidden trauma or like I was trying to think what was going on in my mind. Maybe I’m secretly sabotaging myself or what is it. All the while, these diets are smoke. They’re fraud. They're just smoke and mirrors. And it’s all marketing. In the long term they do not heal the body on the cellular level and they do not increase insulin sensitivity.

So, the first few weeks, and I don’t exactly remember and I could probably go back because I actually went down to this plant-based convention down in Seattle and I think we got a babysitter, I think we got the grandparents to watch our son. He was pretty young. We went down there and it was like a day date for us. There was a booth there that was checking blood sugar and I had eaten maybe an hour before and I was eating whole food plant-based so I know I was eating a ton of carbs. And I was terrified of carbs. I spent my entire life being afraid of carbs. My mom, once I ordered fish with a side of vegetables and rice and she stood up in the restaurant and screamed at me. And I was a teenager. She screamed at me because there was rice on my plate and she was so angry at me that I would eat rice. So, I was raised in an environment where you would be screamed at if you ate carbohydrates because that’s how bad they are for you. This is the brainwashing that I went through and so many people are brainwashed by the Atkins diet and the keto and all the influencers out there who look like ripped and look like a million bucks telling you that if you eat rice or if you eat mashed potatoes or something, that it’s bad for you. And so, I had been eating high, high, high carbohydrate but again, it was all plant-based and she took my blood sugar. Like I said, I had eaten about an hour before. I hadn’t exactly looked at the time but I knew it was recent. And it was 87. And I burst into tears, I had never seen my blood sugar under 115. Since I had been testing it, I had never seen it below 115. And it was 87. I’ve never been lower than 115 ever even in fasting. First of all, I don’t wake up feeling like I drank a bottle of tequila and got hit like a back truck the night before. Because that's how I used to feel waking up every night if I ate carbs. Because it was like if I ate a pizza, right? So there's carbs in there but there's like a lot of fat, which is what causes the insulin resistance as you're explaining.

And I’d always feel like I was waking up from a night of binge drinking, which I don’t drink alcohol, but like imagine a hangover. It was a sugar hangover. And yet, those few weeks that I had been eating a whole food plant-based diet with no oil, no added fat, no processed fat, I didn’t wake up that way. In fact, I woke up jumping out of bed, tons of energy and just feeling great and even keel the whole day. So I’m like, wait a second, what’s going on? But seeing those numbers, seeing my glucose, and it was funny because all those people there are the booth were like, “Aw! Are you okay?” I’m like, oh my God, I’m so happy, because I’m crying and they're like, “Oh no, what’s wrong?” Like, “No, I’m so happy.” I had never seen that low number. And that was the big a-ha. I’m like okay, there's something going on here. And I didn’t realize at the time that how could you, because I thought it took years to heal insulin resistance. Years. I didn’t realize it was within days that you can have it restored. Within days. So, for me, it’s been just hugely rewarding and cathartic because I’ve been processing and healing my entire childhood and the trauma around food and the belief system. You really have to look at your belief system around food. Because we are rooted so deeply in, well, this is how I was taught to eat, this is how we eat because we’re celebrating, and this is what we eat because we’re sad. We have to look at food and our belief system because we need to change something. If you're sick and suffering, there needs to be some changes because if you keep doing it, you're going to keep getting what you're getting. I had to make some major changes.

Now, I can cook a Thanksgiving meal that is delicious and plant-based and super amazing. I did a dry run last week and I can make a pumpkin pie. I can make this amazing Shepherd’s pie like a lentil loaf Shepherd’s pie that is out of this world and I fed it to someone who isn’t plant-based and they thought it was delicious. You can make really delicious meals. It does take practice. You can saute with that oil which was mind-blowing to me. But yeah, switching this way very quickly, I noticed that my insulin resistance came back online.

So, I want you to dive into the “why”. Why is it that when you cut out oil and animal fat, so you cut out animal products and you cut out oil and you just eat as many plants as you want, what does that make your insulin sensitivity happen? 

[00:54:50] Cyrus Khambatta: There's a lot of science here that we can talk about. So, going back to what I was saying earlier is that the world operates under this paradigm that the thing that causes diabetes and high blood glucose and high insulin is carbohydrate. It is a true statement that when you consume carbohydrate energy in food, that it elicits and insulin release from the beta cells in your pancreas. So, from a biological perspective, it’s a true statement. 

But what people have to understand in the sort of biology I’m going to describe here is that the amount of insulin inside of your blood at any given moment in time and the amount of glucose inside of your blood at any given moment in time are functions of multiple things. You cannot minimize all of the influences and all of the nutrients in your diet and all of the daily habits that you may or may not have. You can’t minimize all of that into one thing and one thing only and say “Oh, that’s the reason why I have diabetes. That's the reason why my insulin level is high.” Okay? So, in other words, chronic disease is multifactorial. Once we understand this, then we start to recognize that the amount of fat that you eat matters. The amount of carbohydrate that you eat matters. The amount of protein that you eat matters. The amount of fiber that you eat matters. The amount of water that you drink matters. The amount of exercise that you perform matters. The amount of intermittent fasting you perform matters. All of these things matter and they each have a very specific role in regulating your blood glucose and your insulin, and the goal for any individual is to try and identify how can I manipulate my fat intake to my advantage. How can I manipulate my fiber intake to my advantage? How can I manipulate my exercise to my advantage? If you start to have 5, 6, 7, or 8 different things in your lifestyle that are to your advantage, then the chances are you’re going to become a very, very optimally healthy person today and also into the future. 

So, if we are willing to accept the premise that diabetes is more than just carbohydrate, we have to ask ourselves what other components of your diet are affecting your blood glucose and insulin use. So, in order to answer that question, again, we got to go back to the research and try and take a look on what the research world knows. So, what I said earlier was that the research world knows that eating a diet that is high in saturated fat will induce insulin resistance in as little as 8 weeks in laboratory animals and even faster in human beings. The reason that that happens is because when you eat a diet that contains a significant amount of fat which is very common in the low carbohydrate world, it’s very common in the ketogenic world, it’s very common in the paleo world. In fact, they encourage you to eat a lot of fat. A lot of the fat that they encourage you to eat is actually saturated fat that comes from animal products like red meat, white meat, like dairy products, like processed meats and also eggs. When you’re consuming these types of foods, the type of fat that you're putting into your mouth is predominantly saturated but most importantly, it comes locked up in a form called a triglyceride. Triglyceride is basically just a fancy super nerd way of describing way the storage form of that fat in nature. The storage form of fat is called a triglyceride simply because tri means three and glyceride means glycerol. So what happens is that you have three fatty acids that are covalently bound to a glycerol molecule. Okay? Don’t worry, that's not going to be on the test. But the idea here is that you got a glycerol backbone with three fatty acids. You consume triglycerides, that's the predominant source of fat in food and you consume the triglycerides, they travel down your esophagus, they go down into your stomach. Inside of your stomach there’s hydrochloric acid that’s secreted by the walls of your stomach that's there to sort of start to unfold protein and unfold these fatty acids or unfold the triglyceride molecule and unfold carbohydrate as well. 

Finally, the next chamber is called your small intestine. Your small intestine is where the bulk of all the nutrient digestion and absorption takes place. So your small intestine is a chamber in which your multiple tissues secrete digestive enzymes. These tissues that secrete digestive enzymes include your liver, your pancreas and your small intestine. So all three of them have responsibilities to make things called lipases and proteases and carbohydrases and elastases and beyond. There's literally hundreds of different types of -ases and -ase basically refers to an enzyme. An enzyme is required in order to do some biological work to try and cut large molecules into smaller pieces. The triglyceride molecule in particular gets cut multiple times. The three fatty acids that are bound to glycerol basically get released from the glycerol molecule. Glycerol basically goes on to have a whole collection of effects. But the three fatty acids are then absorbed through the walls of your small intestine. They get put into these little spaceships called chylomicron particles. The chylomicron particles then circulate through your lymph system and then eventually into your blood. And these chylomicron particles, there's billions, if not trillions of them. They have one mission. Their one mission is to basically take the fatty acids that came in from your food and distribute them to tissues to put them somewhere. 

These chylomicron particles become very numerous right after you eat a meal because they basically take on a lot of cargo from the food that you just ate and they’re there to try and deliver those fatty acids to tissues. So, what are the tissues that they're going to try and choose to deliver these fatty acids to?

Number one, your adipose tissue which is your fat tissue. This is actually a safe place to put fatty acids because from a mechanical perspective and from an enzymatic perspective, your adipose tissue is literally perfectly designed to absorb food from your blood when it is present. Most people think of your adipose tissue, your fat tissue as basically being this bad tissue. I hate fat because I don’t like the way it looks and it’s in my abdomen, it’s in my butt and it’s in my chest and it’s my armpits and it makes me look overweight. The reason for that is because there's excess fat that is being put into those tissues or put into that tissue. But in a normal metabolic situation where there isn’t an excess amount of fatty acids coming in, those fatty acids are supposed to go into your fat tissue. That's literally their home. So, you put those fatty acids inside of the fat tissue exactly where they're supposed to belong. But if you're eating a high fat diet, there is also a spillover. The spillover means that there are some fatty acids that get directed outside of your fat tissue to other tissues. Well, what are those other tissues? 

Number one, your liver. Number two, your muscle. The spillover of excess fatty acids that come in from a high fat diet end up going inside of your liver and inside of your muscle. That's okay as long as the amount of fat that goes inside of your liver and muscle after a meal is a small amount. Because your liver and muscle are specifically designed to be able to absorb fatty acids from the chylomicron particles when it’s present in small quantities. They absorb those fatty acids and they stick them into this thing called a lipid droplet, and the lipid droplet has a physical location and the present inside of muscle and inside of your liver, so everything is fine. No problems at all. 

The problem is that when you consume a diet that is low in carbohydrate aka high in fat, you end up overconsuming fat which puts a significant amount of fat inside of your adipose tissue and then the spillover inside of your liver or into your liver and into your muscle is greater than what they are designed to be able to absorb at any moment in time. So within a short period of time, if you eat one high-fat meal and then another high-fat meal, and then another high-fat meal, and then another high-fat meal, you end up overwhelming your liver and muscle with too much fatty acid and as a result of that, the lipid droplet inside of both of these tissues ends up becoming larger and larger and larger. 

If you look at the research and try and figure out, well, what happens to a call inside of your liver? What happens to a cell inside of your muscle when it over accumulates fatty acids? What you’ll find is that there’s these very complicated scientific terms that are used to describe it. Number one, they refer to it as intramyocellular lipid deposition. What the heck does that mean? Intramyocellular refers to intra means inside, myo refers to muscle, cellular means in the cellular environment. So, intramyocellular means inside of the muscle tissue. So, intramyocellular lipid accumulation means putting lipid or putting fatty acids inside of the muscle tissue. If you look at it from the liver perspective, it’s called intrahepatic triglyceride. IHTG. Meaning putting fatty acids inside of the liver aka the hepatocyte. So, the research demonstrates that when there is intrahepatic triglyceride accumulation and intramyocellular lipid accumulation, that the first thing that those two tissues do is they go whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Where did all this stuff come from? I didn’t ask for this. This is beyond my biological design. Why is there so much lipid coming inside of me? So, they initiate a self-defense mechanism to try and block more lipid from coming in. And try and block amino acids from protein and glucose from carbohydrate at the same time. 

The simplest thing that these cells can do in order to initiate so it protects themselves against the overaccumulation of more energy which is really what they're trying to block, the simplest thing that they can do is they can basically tell the insulin receptors on the plasma membrane to become less functional. What the cell does is it initiates this program known as insulin resistance or insulin rejection so that it can block insulin from signaling. Because it makes perfect sense. Insulin is a signaling molecule. Insulin’s job is to knock on the door and go “Knock, knock.” There's glucose in the blood, there's amino acids in the blood, would you like to take it up? The cell can respond by either saying “Sure, sounds like a plan. Why don’t you go ahead and put it inside? I’m going to open my doors to glucose and I’m going to open my doors to amino acids, put it inside of me.” 

But if these cells are suffering from a high energy environment and they don’t want any more energy, then it makes sense to try and block insulin because the next time insulin comes and knocks on the door, it goes “Knock, knock. I got glucose and amino acids in the blood. What do you want to do?” these two tissues can respond by saying “No, no, no, I’m closed for business. Thank you very much. I have a whole bunch of lipid inside of me, let me go deal with this lipid stuff first.” So that’s what they do. They initiate a self-defense mechanism aka insulin resistance so that the next time you as an individual go eat something that contains any amount of carbohydrate, literally one banana that contains something like 20 grams of carbohydrate or maybe an orange or maybe a bowl of black beans or maybe a bowl of quinoa, something that doesn’t have that much carbohydrate energy, insulin goes “Knock, knock, there's glucose in the blood. Would you like to take it up?” and both of these tissues respond by saying “No, no, no, I don’t have room for you right now. It’s not time.”

What ends up happening is that this metabolic traffic jam that has been created by an excess deposition of saturated fat ends up decreasing insulin signaling inside of your liver and insulin signaling inside of your muscle. That then results in two problems. Number one, glucose gets trapped. Glucose cannot get inside of your liver and muscle as effectively as it used to before because both of those tissues are saying no, you don’t have a time and you don’t have a place to get in here right now.

Number two, insulin who’s knocking on the door saying “Hey, open up, open up, open up,” insulin literally cannot even dock onto its insulin receptor and as a result of that, insulin accumulates inside of the blood. So now you have both glucose and insulin that are trapped inside of the blood accumulating in high concentrations. What that means is that if you eat yourself into an insulin-resistant state and then you follow that up by eating a banana or a bowl of black beans or anything with carbohydrate, then your blood glucose goes high within an hour or two hours of eating that meal. You look at your blood glucose meter and you go, “Damn it! I told you. I told you I can’t eat carbohydrates because carbohydrates are bad for me. Potatoes are bad for me. Bananas are bad for me.” And I can prove it to you because I just ate 1 banana and now my blood glucose is high. So what that means is that I’m not going to eat any more bananas because carbs are bad. Atkins was right, the paleo diet is right, the ketogenic diet is right. All of these carbohydrates are bad for me. So then, people shy away from eating more carbohydrate energy and they go and they eat more fat-rich foods and more saturated fat, and they make the problem worse. Okay? What they're doing is they're blaming the carbohydrate. They’re blaming the banana and the potato and the black beans and the quinoa and they're saying, “Look, I can’t any more of you because when I do, my glucose goes high.” But what they don’t realize is that those are just the messengers. Those are just the secondary effect of the metabolic traffic jam that began by consuming too much lipid to begin with. 

If you can clear out that traffic jam and get rid of that excess lipid deposition inside of your liver and muscle, then those two tissues aren’t forced to create a self-defense mechanism, then the next time you go eat something that's carbohydrate-rich and insulin comes and knocks on the door and says “Knock, knock, I got glucose and amino acids in the blood. Do you want to take it up?” both of these tissues respond by saying, “Sure! Give it to me. I’ve been looking for this stuff. Put it inside of me. Game on.” Does this make sense at all?

[01:09:46] Ashley James: Absolutely. It makes sense to me. We have a dance between insulin and glucose. We have been told since we were kids by the media that sugar is the problem, so stop eating sugar and by the way, all these plants contain sugar carbohydrates, so these are the problems. I mean, donuts, they contain sugar too. They're the problem but I think there's more fat in a donut than there is even sugar. 

[01:10:12] Cyrus Khambatta: Correct.

[01:10:13] Ashley James: Which is crazy because you think donuts are all sugary. I mean, they're both. They’re both not healthy in many ways. But the point is, is that we’re told sugar is the problem, sugar is the problem. Diabetes is a blood sugar problem. Sugar is the problem, stop eating sugar. Well, what do you have left? Well, you’ve got protein and fat. Then we turn to the keto diet and Atkins diet and all that stuff.

I did Atkins several times. The reason why I kept doing all these different diets, I’d get to the point where I do a diet between 1 and 3 months and I would feel good at first and then I would become sicker and sicker and I become worse on the diet. I have to eventually stop because I was so sick, the diets would make me so sick. So, I remember the last time I did keto diet was actually with a doctor or the naturopathic physician. I came into her office weekly. This was about 6 years ago, closer to 7 years ago now, and they did a DEXA scan to monitor how much fat to muscle to bone tissue there was because they didn’t want us to lose bone mass or muscle mass while we were doing this keto diet. It was a doctor-instructed ketogenic diet where we were eating like it was stricter than Atkins, less than 20 grams of carbs, and lots of animal fat and lots of protein, which you can’t eat too much protein because then the liver is going to convert it to blood sugar by gluconeogenesis. 

So, we were doing exactly what the doctor told us to do. First few days, I feel good maybe because I had cut out some processed food that snuck into my lifestyle, which is why I think a lot of people end up feeling good originally on these diets because they're cutting out the donuts, they're cutting out maybe the highly processed flour grains and all the stuff that comes with it. So they're cutting out some stuff that was proinflammatory. But then I started to feel worse and worse and worse, and eventually, what happened was after three months of being on this program, my liver became so inflamed that you could actually see my liver pushed beyond my ribcage. I couldn’t sleep on my right-hand side. I went for an ultrasound. My blood work showed my liver enzymes were through the roof and I went for an ultrasound. My doctor was like, “I really am curious to do a biopsy.” But I’m like, nope, no, you are not sticking that needle in me. But I did go for an ultrasound and they said this is not fatty liver, there is no fatty liver detected. It’s just angry. Your liver is completely inflamed and angry. They couldn’t figure out anything wrong with it other than it was very inflamed. My husband who luckily we got him tested because while I was like wow, this ketogenic diet really messed my liver up, it really messed me up, and then we got him tested and they’d actually damaged his kidneys and was causing massive kidney damage. We were concerned because it was like almost borderline kidney failure and he is otherwise a very healthy person. But he did a bunch of tests and then luckily, very soon after that, we actually discovered the whole food plant-based diet. Believe it or not, I didn’t really know that this was a thing. I knew what a vegetarian diet was or a vegan diet, but I didn’t understand that there's this whole other realm which the whole food plant-based, no oil, salt, sugar, this very clean way of eating. It was introduced to me through a guest I had on the show. 

So, we adapted it and my husband was 100 percent onboard which was crazy to me because of how much of a big meat eater he was. I kind of went kicking and screaming because what I now understand is food addiction, and 1/3 of the population has addiction brain. You have to face that. If you know that you're like, wait a second, I can’t give up my __, if that's the conversation you're having, you go like “I can’t give up my donuts, I can’t give up my pasta or my meatballs,” whatever it is, if there's a voice in your brain saying “I can’t give up my cheese or whatever,” you have addiction brain. That's something you need to heal and work on because that's holding you back and keeping you sick. Is it really worth it? Is a moment on the lips worth the illness? I did go kicking and screaming and I finally gave up 100 percent of the animal products just as an experiment. Okay, I can do this, I can do this experiment. I actually never had one day, in my entire life I never had one day that I hadn’t eaten an animal product. 

I remember my first day, I was expecting to feel tired because I was told protein gives you energy, which is not physiologically what happens at all. And you can explain that. But we’re told that you need protein for energy. “Protein” meaning you need to eat eggs, you need to eat cheese, you need to drink dairy, you need to eat animal flesh to have muscles and have energy and feel strong. So, the first day of eating this way, I couldn’t believe how like wait a second, I feel good, what’s going on? Because I had been on and off Atkins for over 20 years. Also, I had to face that fear of carbohydrates. But I felt really good. So that keto, coming up against that idea that eating fat is what’s good for you and the carbs are what’s bad for you and then having to go wait a second, we’ve been lied to, it’s actually completely the opposite, and Cyrus can explain why. But what the doctors were impressed by though by using the whole food plant-based diet, my husband healed his kidney and I healed my liver so fast. The naturopaths were very impressed with how quickly our bodies recovered and healed from the damage the ketogenic diet did using the whole food plant-based diet.

[01:16:20] Cyrus Khambatta: That’s amazing. It’s funny how I think the commonality between what you experienced and what I experienced is that the speed at which your liver can improve, the speed at which your insulin sensitivity can improve, the speed at which your overall energy levels can improve is very, very fast. It doesn’t actually have to take weeks or months necessarily. You can start to see the improvements within a very short period of time and then that right there can reverse or begin the process of reversing years and years and years of damage.

[01:16:55] Ashley James: Now, did you get to tell us how you met Robby and how you formed this alliance together where you're teaching people how to do Mastering Diabetes? What I want to say though is that if listeners go back to episode 233 and episode 489, Robby explains exactly how your program works and how to eat this way. He really goes into great detail in episode 489. Those links to those episodes will be in the show notes as well because I definitely want listeners to go back and listen to that. But what I want to understand from you because you have so much with the science, I mean, I want to know all the stories and I’d love to talk to you for hours, and I know you're pressed for time, so what I want us to learn from you is how is it that there are some people out there like the influencers who are eating this incredibly high fat diet and they're ripped and they keep taking pictures of themselves in the gym and they keep showing how they're drinking ketones and drinking MCT oil and they don’t gain weight. We’re told “Oh, you don’t gain weight when you eat fat. Fat that you eat doesn’t become fat. Carbohydrates that you eat become fat.” 

And yet, what I learned from Dr. McDougall, he says, you know, if you eat potatoes and you don’t add like let’s say butter, olive oil, or sour cream, if you don’t add any fat to potatoes and you eat an excessive like let’s say you eat 5000 calories of potatoes and your body only burns 2000 calories, let’s just say, your body is not going to take that excessive 3000 calories and convert it to fat and store it as energy. It actually converts it to heat. When I read that, it blew my mind because I had noticed. Our house is 66 degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t like spending money on heating. But we’re all warm. We’re all just wearing extra layer. But I go around barefoot now and our house is cold. We keep our house cold and I am hot all the time ever since switching to a high-carbohydrate low-fat diet. When I read that, I was like oh my gosh, this makes sense, because I used to be the person that had to wear microwave slippers because my feet were always so cold and ever since eating this way, my body’s just pumping out heat and it’s not gaining weight from eating any kind of excessive amount if I happen to eat more carbohydrates. It doesn’t convert to fat. Can you explain that? Why is it that what we see in the media, we see that eating high fat doesn’t convert to fat because we see these like ripped bodies in the influencers, and yet, what you're telling is is the physiology is when we eat excessive fat, it gets stored in the adipose tissue and when we eat carbohydrates without fat present in the diet, we don’t store it as fat. 

[01:19:46] Cyrus Khambatta: So when you're consuming a diet that's high in fat, what I don’t want people to think of is that “Oh, Cyrus told me that if I’m eating a lot of fat, then all of a sudden I’m going to become fat.” Because that can happen. But in order to determine whether or not you're going to become fat, you have to take a look at your overall energy balance. So your energy balance is basically what is the total number of calories that you're consuming from your food and how does that relate to the total number of calories that you are burning on a daily basis or that you are getting rid of on a daily basis through your basal metabolic rate plus your activity level plus the thermic effect of food, the amount of heat that's being dissipated from the calories that you're consuming. 

We’re going to have to go into a lot of fancy detail in order to really understand what all that means. But the idea here is let’s say that there is some random person who claims that eating a ketogenic diet is an ideal solution for their body. So, they’re a normal weight individual. They might be a 175 pounds. They might look good, they might go to the gym on a daily basis. They might be ripped. You might look at them and be like “Damn, you're clearly doing something right.” So that individual, if they're not gaining any weight on a daily basis and they're completely weight neutral or preventing themselves from gaining weight over the course of time, what that means is that they're in energy balance. So, the amount of energy that they're taking in on a daily basis is roughly equal to the amount of energy that they're expending and that's actually a good thing, so I would say great, I’ll give you a high five, my hat goes off to you.

So, being in energy balance is a good thing because it’s going to prevent against the accumulation of weight over the course of time or the accumulation of mass over the course of time. But just because you are weight neutral does not mean that you are living in an insulin sensitive state. Okay? So, we have to decouple the two of those because you could be living in an energy-neutral position and preventing yourself from gaining weight over the course of time but if you are eating a high fat diet, then that means that likely, you are in an insulin-resistant state. So, you are in an insulin-resistant state, your liver and muscle are over accumulating fat as we talked about earlier and as a result of that, insulin signaling is not working very effectively inside of both of those tissues. Okay? So it becomes this sort of confusing picture because on one hand, you're saying, well, you're not gaining weight, so then what’s the problem, Cyrus? It doesn’t really make any sense. And I could say okay, fine. Just because you're not gaining weight does not necessarily mean that you're in a healthy metabolic situation, okay? You can take two individuals that are both weight stable and one of them could be in a highly insulin sensitive state because they're eating a low-fat diet and the other individual can be a highly insulin-resistant state because they’re eating a low-carbohydrate diet. Both of them could look good from the outside, both of them could be weight stable from the outside, both of them could actually have a low A1C and a low blood glucose and a low blood pressure but yet one of them is highly insulin-resistant and the other one is highly insulin-sensitive. 

What that means is that if you fast forward over the course of time, each of them is going to have a slightly different chronic disease risk into the future. The person that’s living in an insulin resistant state because they're eating a low carbohydrate diet is going to be at an advanced risk or a higher risk for the development of many chronic diseases including heart disease and cancer in particular. The person who is in an insulin sensitive state is going to be at a low risk for the development of chronic diseases including cancer and heart disease. So, we have to add time as a variable because the amount of time that you are consuming food in an insulin-resistant state or the amount of time that you are consuming food in an insulin-sensitive state is a very, very, very important factor into understanding what is your chronic disease risk is going to be like into the future. This is something that I think most people just don’t understand. They’re not willing to understand it, it doesn’t compute in their brain. Which is that if I look good today and if I am normal weight today and if my glucose level is low today and my insulin level is low today and my cholesterol level was low and my blood pressure is low today, does that mean that I’m doing everything right? My answer to you would be well, it may suggest that but it may not also suggest that because the research demonstrates that people who are eating a diet that’s higher in saturated fat and higher actually in animal-based protein over the course of time are at an advanced risk for many chronic diseases. It’s really important that we understand that what you're doing today is important, but what you're doing today and how it’s going to influence your risk for many metabolic diseases into the future is more important and that’s what I really care about in the long term. Does that make sense?

[01:25:11] Ashley James: Absolutely. In your book Mastering Diabetes, is that everything that we need to know, if we read that book and do what it says, is that everything that we need to know for type 2, so no longer have diabetes or type 1’s to be able to get their insulin to carb ratio at a really good rate, and reverse these diseases and prevent these diseases. Is that everything we need to know in that book?

[01:25:35] Cyrus Khambatta: Yeah. So effectively, Mastering Diabetes is a book that we have written that took 3 years to write and has been out for two years now and has really shaped, changed the way that so many people think, that book is not only a prescription for becoming an insulin sensitive individual. What it is truly is a prescription for lowering your overall chronic disease risk. And if you can think of it from that perspective, then what you're going to learn is a way, a system that’s going to lower your blood glucose today and lower your insulin use today and lower your body weight today. But if you again multiply that times time then it’s going to lower your overall chronic disease risk tomorrow and 5 years into the future, and that's a really good thing because I want you to live in an optimal metabolic state today, but I also want that to continue to unfold 5, 10, 15, 20 years into the future. Up to this point, I have not found a way of eating that is more powerful than a plant-based diet at improving your current metabolic state and improving your metabolic state into the future. I simply haven’t found anything that’s more powerful. 

[01:27:01] Ashley James: I love it. There are so many athletes who are doing this and they're winning gold medals. It improves immediately. They're seeing that when they switch this way, that there are improved outcomes. To watch someone who’s an athlete hone their body as a tool and then they see that they're able to run longer, they’re able to do whatever they do longer and they're able to recover faster, we can see that in them. Even though we might not be pro athletes, we do the same thing and then we see that we get similar results. We’re just able to go longer and recover faster and feel better. If you’ve ever been around older relatives and watched them passed away too early and suffer too many years from a disease that was preventable, as I have, you don’t want that for yourself. You don’t want that for your spouse. You don’t want that for your children. And we have to do something different from the masses to not be a statistic. 1 in 3 to 1 in 4 people depending on whether you're male or female will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. 1 in 3 people is obese, is pre-diabetic, or is diabetic. It is a huge juggernaut that we’re facing. If you want to be a statistic, keep going to Krispy Kreme. Keep going to Starbucks. Keep going to the McDonald’s. Just keep eating the way everyone is eating. Just keep doing what everyone is doing to do whatever your doctor says and you will end up as a statistic. But if you want to be an outlier, you have to do something different from everyone else, and that definitely takes that mental switch. I highly encourage listeners go to MasteringDiabetes.org/book, get the book, check it out. Give it as Christmas gifts or Hannukah gifts or holiday gifts, whatever. Give it as birthday gifts. Give this book out. Encourage your friends and family to listen to this episode. If you’d rather consume videos and video interviews as I love, go to Learntruehealth.com/masteringdiabetes and check out their summit, and purchase that, show it to your friends and family. This is something that we can make a difference. We can turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help so many people. If you throw a stone, you're going to hit someone with type 2 diabetes. I can’t believe how many people I know have type 2 diabetes or on metformin or insulin. I had a friend who is in and out of the hospital for a year and the doctors couldn’t figure out why. Actually, I was the one that figured out why. My friend was suffering from chronic acute pancreatitis. She was living in the hospital more than living at home for a year. Could only consume liquids and was so sick, in so much pain and I was like, “just tell me everything you're taking. What’s going on?” I listened to all her meds and I went and looked on the drug website, the actual pharmaceutical manufacturer’s website and I saw that pancreatitis can be caused by metformin. She wasn’t even diabetic. Her doctor had her on metformin as a preventive which just boggles my mind. I said, listen, ask your doctors to get you off of this. She did and the pancreatitis went away. I’m like, geez, that wasted a year of her life of suffering, in needless suffering. How many people are needlessly suffering because they’re blindly listening to their doctor and blindly eating how everyone else eats just because that's how everyone else does. Don’t be a sheep. Don’t be a lemming. If you don’t like how your health is now, get this book and change your life. Just try. Try it for a week.

Within days, you feel a difference. How many days would you say, Cyrus, does it take for even the worst of insulin resistances to kind of come back online and for people to start noticing a difference? Would you say giving it a full week, would they start to see a difference? Giving it a month or three days? How long would it take before they start feeling a difference? 

[01:30:50] Cyrus Khambatta: I like the term that you use which is coming back online. I love that. What it makes you realize is that reversing insulin resistance is a long-term metabolic change that has to happen and it’s going to unfold over the course of many months to many years. Literally, it’s a never-ending process. You can always become more insulin sensitive and you can do it by continuing to eat a plant-based diet and continuing to exercise and continuing to intermittent fast over the course of time. But the question really becomes, well, how quickly can you start to see the effects? How quickly can you go online. And the answer is, in my situation, I saw it within 24 hours. I’ve talked to so many people that have seen the same thing happen within 24-48 hours. So, I would say worst-case scenario, you’ll feel the effects within 7 to 10 days. But chances are, you're going to feel it a lot quicker. 

[01:31:42] Ashley James: So just give it a try. It’s like you're doing a detox or a cleanse. Just do it. Just try it. Going to that restaurant because that friend or family member wants you to eat that way, is that really worth your health? Is that really worth sick and suffering and having limbs? People will have limbs amputated, will lose their eyesight, like will have heart attacks or strokes when they're way too young because of this issue, this very issue. You could just say I’m just going to say no, I’m just going to try for 7 days, just give it a try. Get the book. All the links are in the show notes today. Masteringdiabetes.org/book. Just get the book or watch the videos. Learntruehealth.com/masteringdiabetes. Try it. See how you feel. The jury is out. Just try it for yourself. See how you feel, maybe test your blood sugars now and test them after a week of doing it. Just see how you feel.

I can’t convey how good it feels. The hardest thing is all in your head. The hardest thing is the mental shift. It’s actually easy to cook this way, easy to eat this way. The hardest thing is the mental shift. Once you're sold on it, you just have to enforce healthy boundaries with those around you because people are addicted to food and they're going to want to try to suck you back and just like alcoholics when they get you to drink with them. They're going to try to suck you back into their Krispy Kreme or whatever. And if you say listen, I’m on a health journey right now and I love you and you can eat that way, but I’m going to eat this way, and just try it. 

Cyrus, I’d love to have you back on. Thank you so much for coming on. I’d love to have you back on. I’d love for you to share more. We didn’t even get to talk about stories of success. You’ve helped thousands of people. You and Robby. Robby talks about more in episode 233, but you guys have helped so many people and done one-on-one’s and done group coaching where you’ve guided people through this and had outstanding results. We’ve been told by the media you cannot reverse diabetes that you are stuck with it, that you have to “manage” it because the system is designed to keep you sick, to keep making a profit off of your sickness. You're here listening to this today because you don’t believe that crap and you want to get healthy and you’re sick of being sick. If you're sick of being sick and you want to feel amazing every morning, you want to feel like you're that 5-year-old again jumping out of bed, bouncing with energy and just loving life, try something different. Because what you’ve been doing isn’t working, so try this. 

Cyrus, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s such a pleasure having you here. Really, please, come back on the show, share more stories of success, share more of the science. I know you're always diving in and learning more and sharing more, and I’d love to have you back. 

[01:34:17] Cyrus Khambatta: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation to be here and I do hope that your listeners have learned a lot in this process. Truth be told, I’m happy we can come on here and we can talk over and over again and do more episodes in the future because the message is very important and what I’m trying to do is provide as much clarity as possible so that people can really transform their lives using the power of a plant-based diet. Thank you so much for all that you do. I know you’ve been podcasting for a very long time and you’ve changed the lives of thousands of people. We’re on the same team. And I’m here for you and I’m hoping to do whatever I can to continue to relay this message and have you on my team as we do so into the future.

[01:34:59] Ashley James: Love it. Thank you so much.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Cyrus Khambatta!

 

Website – Mastering Diabetes.Org

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Podcast – https://www.masteringdiabetes.org/podcast/

Book by Dr. Cyrus Khambatta

Mastering Diabetes

Nov 13, 2022

Get the three gifts (book, 30min coaching session & $10 off)
Go Here: learntruehealth.com/gifts
Checkout Pat's Humic Fulvic probiotic that increases cellular oxygen and mitochondrial function: https://www.learntruehealth.com/blackgold

491: UFC World Champion’s Secret To Maximize Endurance and Improve Body Performance, Pat Miletich

https://www.learntruehealth.com/ufc-world-champions-secret-to-maximize-endurance-and-improve-body-performance-pat-miletich

There are countless supplements you can take for endurance and performance. There are even more supplements you can take for recovery. But on today’s podcast episode with UFC World Champion Pat Miletich, we discuss one supplement that can do all these things at once: the fulvic humics. We also talk about the science behind it, fulvic humic trace mineral absorption and uptake, maximizing endurance, recovery, and energy production, plus so much more!

 

Highlights:

  • Where fulvic humic acids are derived from
  • Terra preta soil
  • Super Soldier Black Gold Oxygen Booster 
  • How many capsules to take
  • Studies done on how fulvic humics help with mitochondrial function
  • Why you should care about farming practices
  • How metals are converted to organic
  • Effects of atrazine

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. We have on the show today a UFC World Champion and highly successful MMA trainer. He has won many awards. He’s in the UFC Hall of Fame, and he’s gone on to train other athletes in the mixed martial arts realm to go on and become amazingly successful and well-accomplished UFC fighters as well. Pat Miletich is here on the show today. I’m excited for you to hear this because he struggled for many years his entire childhood with health issues, with lung issues, with mold. And he overcame them. He figured out how to dial in his body. I love learning from elite athletes who’ve had to overcome something. And I’m not expecting all of us. Like, I don’t want to become an elite athlete, but I want to be the healthiest I can be, right? So, we can learn from those who are absolute excellence, who have figured out how to master something and create absolute excellence. His body is a finely tuned machine. So, he’s figured out, and he’s gone on to help many other athletes do the same and reproduce the same results. He’s here today to share some of the things that has really made a difference, including this very specific fulvic humic probiotic trace mineral supplement. It’s all natural from the earth. It’s unique in many ways. That's why it’s so exciting because it does things that hugely increase oxygen in the cells and help mitochondrial function, and we’re seeing some really, really great results.

In the interview, I mention a link where you can go purchase this. You can go to Learntruehealth.com/blackgold. But before you do, I want to make sure that you get the discount because I love saving money and I want to save you money too. When you go to Learntruehealth.com/gifts, you have right there on the homepage there, Learntruehealth.com/gifts, put in your name and email address and you’re going to be given a $10 discount as well as a 30-minute free health coach strategy session and also a fantastic e-book on the foundations of holistic health. So, great gifts to get. But definitely want to make sure that you get that extra $10 off, and of course, always use coupon code LTH on any of the websites. Because every time I have a guest on, I ask them, “Hey, if you have the ability to on your website, if they're selling something, can they include a discount for the listener?” And often, I end up getting a great discount for you guys. So, LTH is the discount code for most of the time when I have guests on. Always try that code, of course. But make sure you go to Learntruehealth.com/gifts and put in your name and email address to get that $10 gift card, and then go to Learntruehealth.com/blackgold after listening to this episode if you want to try the fulvic humic acid supplement that has a natural probiotic from the earth. It’s really fascinating.

Well, just listen to the episode. You’ll see what I’m talking about. Enjoy today’s episode. Those links are going to be in the show notes of this podcast. So, just go down the description in the show notes wherever you're listening from. And you should be able to see those links there. You could, of course, always jump into the Learn True Health Facebook group. We have over 5000 listeners in that group, and it’s very active, wonderfully supportive holistic community of listeners. A lot of our guests also are there answering questions along with me. You know what I love? I love learning from other listeners, and we’re all just sharing together. So, it’s a wonderfully supportive community. If you do decide to try this humic fulvic probiotic supplement, definitely jump in the Learn True Health Facebook group and start a chat about it. Let’s talk about your results. I’d love to hear from other listeners as you guys add this to your healing journey. If you have any questions for Pat, you can always jump in the Facebook group also because I have his ear and I can always ask him for you guys. And that goes for any of our guests. If you ever have a question for them after an episode, you can jump in the Learn True Health Facebook group and ask. I can always reach out to them if you have anything, and an episode was like “Hey, what about this?” or “Now, I’m struggling with this. What do you think they would say about that?” I can always reach out to a guest. I can have them back on the show to answer your questions or I can just ask for you and then answer in the Learn True Health Facebook group. The Learn True Health Facebook group is about supporting each other in our healing journey. It’s dynamic, it’s always changing and wonderful questions are coming up and so many people are helping, and we can just pull from all the information. If you have any questions after listening to an episode, for sure jump in the Facebook group and ask. Let’s keep supporting each other and learning from each other. Excellent. And thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about, especially athletes that you know. I think they would appreciate learning from elite athletes on how to hone in their health. But also, share this with anyone who has energy issues, who’s tired or fatigued all the time and really wants to get on the other side of that and no longer struggle with energy because anything that has to do with mitochondrial health and healing is going to be something you're going to want to share with them. Learntruehealth.com/gifts first and make sure you put in your email address and name to get that $10 discount code and then go to Learntruehealth.com/blackgold to try the fulvic humic probiotic supplement that Pat is going to talk about today in addition to all the other stuff we talk about. Enjoy today’s show, and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day!

[00:06:01] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 491.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show Pat Miletich who I’m just going to let you tell your story because I’m in awe of what you have created out of everything that you’ve been doing, there’s a fulvic humic supplement that increases oxygen in the body and has had a tremendous effect on so many people’s lives. I am really excited just to jump in and hear the story of how you figured this out. So Pat, welcome to the show, and just jump in and tell your story so that we can catch up and understand what you were doing in your life that made you want to find this and figure it out. Then, we’re going to jump into what it does for the body.

[00:06:55] Pat Miletich: Thank you, Ashley. I appreciate you having me, number one, and I guess the best way for me to explain it is, so I was a very sick kid all the way into my 20's. Even though I was a pretty good athlete, I just couldn’t get to the very pinnacle of sports because I had such severely damaged respiratory system. And my mother’s basement had leaks in the foundation and every time, there would be three inches of water down there, and that's where my bedroom was. So, I lived in black mold for basically my entire life. Again, most people know me as former UFC Champ and UFC Hall of Famer and things like that. But it wasn’t until I was about ready to turn professional in kickboxing and I was giving it my best. I was training as hard as I could. You know, my wrestling matches in high school and college were me always never standing on the gas pedal because I was always worried about running out of gas. And running out of gas in a wrestling match can be kind of painful when you start getting thrown around because you can’t breathe.

So, a good friend of mine got me on some organic antioxidants, some capsules back in the day many, many years ago. I have a lot of really good antioxidants. I would spar a lot with really high-level professional boxers to work on my boxing skills. In 10 days, I went from sparring 3 to 4 rounds to about 10 rounds and feeling like I hadn’t even worked out. I felt like I went from breathing through a straw that was filled with mucus to breathing through a perfectly clear giant PVC tube. It took the inflammation out of my respiratory system, and now, all of a sudden, I’ve got endurance for days. And I went from struggling in my runs to running 16.5-minute 5K’s, got to where I was dunking a basketball, I’m only 5’10”, bench-pressing 375 pounds, and eventually, winning a UFC world title and held that for about 3.5 years. Then, I was lucky enough because of the organics that I was introduced to to train. We put 95 kids in televised careers and 12 world champions. Then, all of a sudden, I’m getting called by law enforcement and military units and I’m training them all the way up to special forces in different branches of the military. And then, a broadcasting career. 

None of this stuff would have ever happened is my main point. God knows what I’d be knowing right now had I not discovered organics. Right? So, it changed my life and it woke me up and a light bulb went off in my head. I got a lot of my athletes on these organics as well. And everybody always wondered why our team had such good endurance. Well, number one, we could train very hard because we grew up in the wrestling world, which is a pretty tough sport, to begin with. But also, our bodies were at a cellular level having so much more oxygen that we weren’t running out of oxygen in our muscles, and therefore, our muscles weren’t burning sugar for energy, so we weren’t building up lactic acid. So, we could just go and go and go. It has, yeah, really been a cool life journey for me because of organics.

[00:10:13] Ashley James: That is absolutely fascinating. So, you said it was a bunch of antioxidants at the beginning that you took. What led you to figure out the supplement that you’ve created now?

[00:10:28] Pat Miletich: You know, I got a call several years ago from a guy that I had known for about 20 years and he was always into the supplement world and very well-versed in organics. He called me up and he started talking to me about fulvic humic acid. As he was explaining the benefits of it for humans, he got to the point where he said up to 45 percent more oxygen at a cellular level. And I said, “Hold on, stop, say that again.” He said 45 percent more oxygen at a cellular level. I said if that’s true, people are going to break world records in endurance sports and combat sports. I’ve never heard of any number near that amount. I said, send it to me immediately and I want to get on it immediately. So, I got myself and my daughters on it right away. 

About 10 days into it, at the dinner table, my oldest daughter who was on the rowing team, one of the top rowing clubs in the world actually in Moline, Illinois right across the river from us, said that she was keeping up with the number two girl in the world on her team going upriver in the Mississippi River and asked my middle daughter if her swim practices were getting any easier. Of course, she was swimming for a guy that was a former Navy SEAL, so you can imagine what those practices are like. My middle daughter said, “We did 100-100 yesterday on the clock, and I was the only girl to finish practice.” So, I said, “Okay, I think yes, this is definitely working, so I’m going to go run 22 miles tomorrow,” because it was Memorial Day. For the 22 veterans on average that die per day, I figured I was going to go run 22 miles. And I hadn’t run in about a year really at all. I’ve been lifting weights but not really running because I had done a lot of ultrarunning distant stuff, and it just took so much time to go out and do a training run of 20, 30, 40 miles that I decided I was going to spend time in the weight room. 

So, I went out, and I ran 11 miles out and 11 miles back in my 50’s and thought I’m going to be really sore tomorrow. I woke up the next day and I wasn’t really sore at all and I ran a 5-mile recovery run, and I said, “Okay, yup, this is exactly what he said it is.” So, from there, I’ve shared it with a lot of people and we’ve had a lot of amazing athletic stories. Guys who are in their 50’s who are my buddies that are ultrarunners who’ve been running marathons and ultramarathons for decades in their 50’s, dropped their per-mile times by over a minute, and at the same time, their heart rates dropped by 30 beats a minute. So, you just don’t do that in your 50’s unless you’re putting something very potent and very effective in your body.

[00:13:23] Ashley James: This makes so much sense because my husband, he started taking it and then he went on a hike. We’ve been kind of sedentary, let’s just say. The last few years have been stressful. A few months ago, he spent five months sitting for five months straight doing 24-hour hospice care for his dad. So, he was very sedentary. We haven’t been as active. We have probably been the least active in the last few years that we have in our lives. He got up, this is a few days after getting on your supplement, he’s like, “I’m going for a walk.” He just went and he hiked up a really steep hill, and he went, and he went, and he went. And I thought maybe he goes a few blocks, but he went miles, he went absolute miles. I mean, you know, if you have been really sedentary just sitting for years, and then you get up and you just start hiking, and he walks pretty fast, he’s 6’6” so he’s got long legs, and he went and just went. He was, “Yeah, I made it to Starbucks.” I mean, Starbucks is miles away. Then, he walked back. And he wasn’t sore the next day. It didn’t even faze him. I didn’t connect the dots until just now. But that was a few days after like maybe a week or so after he started taking your supplement. But since he started taking it, he’s been more energetic, more motivated, more active than he’s been in a long time. 

[00:15:05] Pat Miletich: That's amazing.

[00:15:09] Ashley James: I’m an extrovert and I go, go, go, and I manage so many different things, so I’m just always kind of on the move. But we’ve been both organizing more, cleaning more, just being more active around the house instead of being lazy bums. The first thing I noticed, so I joined the choir and we’re practicing for Christmas and that particular Thursday, we have a choir practice on Thursday evenings. My mornings start pretty early, so it was a long day. Usually, on those long days because I’m working, I’m doing homeschooling, I’m managing a large homeschooling group, I’m shopping, I’m cooking, I’m cleaning, I’m doing the laundry, so it’s like go, go, go, and then, at 6:30 after I’ve made dinner, after we’ve driven our son around to all of his Taekwondo class and all the other classes he does, and then, I get to the church and I’m in the choir, and normally, right around dinnertime, I am done. I’m wiped. I just want to sit down and I just want to put me to bed; I’m done. It’s been a long day. Just let me be, right? 

But there I was getting ready to go to church, and I am, like, my body is telling me it’s 11:00 AM. Now it’s 6:30 at night, but my body is like, do you know how you feel at 11:00 AM? That's pretty much high peak energy, right? Your body has processed breakfast, you got lots of energy, you haven’t spent all your energy that day. Ever since I started taking it, my body feels it’s not like jittery like coffee. It’s not like energy that coffee tricks you into having energy. That's not it. It’s not like sugar tricks you into feeling like you're hyper or energetic before a crash. It’s not that. It doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s giving me energy. It just feels like it’s like my body is at 11:00 AM all day long until I’m ready to go to bed. That's what I noticed. I just don’t hit that exhaustion. I don’t hit that like “Oh, I need a break. I need to sit down. I need something to get me through the day.” I don’t hit that since I started taking it and it’s not like a bunch of capsules. It was like 2 or 3 of these tiny capsules. So, I’m kind of like, what’s going on? I always think it’s a placebo effect. But I didn’t know it would do this. In a placebo effect, you have to have some belief it’s going to do something. I didn’t know what it was going to do. But I just noticed like, wow, it’s 6:30 at night and I can keep going. And I just feel myself steady, even-keel energy all day long until I’m ready to go to bed. Then, I’m just like, okay, then I go to bed.

[00:17:58] Pat Miletich: Beautiful.

[00:17:59] Ashley James: Yeah, that's what I felt. I thought, man, this is very interesting. I haven’t tried pushing myself like, okay, I’m going to go to the gym. Because when I do go to the gym, I get like very alpha and I push myself pretty hard. I love weightlifting, I love grabbing those ropes and throwing them around until the burn hits and my muscles stop working. So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when I get back in the gym. But right now, I’m just being kind of trying to put out fires in my life. I’m running around, and I just notice that I can do that with ease instead of with exhaustion. So, I thought that was really cool.

[00:18:30] Pat Miletich: Beautiful. And I can explain where this comes from, why it’s so effective, how it works, all that sort of stuff. So fulvic humic acids are derived from different places. Some are derived from leonardite, which is a soft coal, which is fossilized. I don’t want to put that in my body. They have to use harsh chemical processes to remove the humic fulvic from the coal and then they would add pre- and probiotics in it for agriculture to call it organic, so to speak. Same thing from dead seafloor beds. They’ll mine it from places like that. 

But the ones that I’m going to put in my body come from living, breathing peat bogs in North America. The gentleman that discovered this searched for about 6 years testing bogs all over North America to find the most nutrient-rich ones. Once he found that area where there were the most nutrient-rich, he knew to go down roughly about 45 to 50 feet to the sediment layer where all those nutrients are concentrated from 1500 different types of plants that have basically decomposed for 60,000 years. So, they’re able to auger that up. They put metal tubes down into the bog and then they auger that up and then they have a process that uses zero chemicals, puts it under extreme pressure and separates the powder from the pulp. The pulp goes back in the bog to continue what’s called the humification process and breaking down. So, it’s actually as sustainable as you're going to get. 

When you add that powder in water, some people put it in their coffee in the morning. I used to drink coffee like crazy. But I drink one cup of coffee a day now because yes, this product gives you so much energy. In testing, fulvic humics are known to be organic forms of the metals will be burned by the mitochondria which is the furnace of the cell to create energy within the cell, and that's where you get the real energy that a human being or an animal is supposed to feel when they're healthy and putting proper levels of organics in their body. So, that's where the energy comes from.

Also, fulvic humics are known in test to bond with hydrogen within the cell to create more oxygen in the cell which is very beneficial. Then, the last thing they do before they leave is they have the ability to bond with heavy metals and toxins and then your cell recognizes those organic substances that are water-soluble and will then release the heavy metals and toxins attached to the organics to chelate those toxins and heavy metals out of your cells. So, when you have better cellular function throughout your entire body, you're just going to feel better. That's really one of the things that it’s done.

Fulvic humics are also known to be able to help balance hormonal levels—testosterone and estrogen. The organic iodine that is in fulvic humics is known to benefit thyroid function as well as even they say it protects you from radiation, which with 5G and all the other stuff that we’re dealing with these days, probably not a bad thing. So, there’s a lot of benefits to this and, ultimately, what you want is to remove as much inflammation out of your body as possible and with the heavy metals and toxins in our cells, a lot of the inflammation comes from those toxins being trapped within us and that, of course, ends up manifesting in some form of disease many times.  

[00:22:10] Ashley James: Listeners, to get it, can go to Learntruehealth.com/blackgold. But on the website, it says one of the things it does is build your gut biome, which is the single most important thing we need. I mean, obviously we need our heart to be like there’s certain things we need immediately. But for sustained health, for optimal health, the first thing we have to do is make sure we have a healthy guy because the gut makes our neurotransmitters, it houses them too, it digests and basically makes the nutrients for us. I’ve done a few interviews on this where we discovered that there’s over 100,000 genetic expressions of your microbiome, and they can see that what your particular gut bacteria are doing is digesting food and changing its chemical composition and then you uptake that, and that becomes this nutrient. So, we have a delicate relationship and an essential relationship with these 6 pounds of bacteria in our gut, and it’s constantly under threat because if you don’t eat organic, life is safe for example and all the other chemicals on conventionally grown food destroy the gut, lots of different over-the-counter medications and prescription medications destroy the microbiome of the gut. So, we’re constantly under threat and we need to support our microbiome. We need to repopulate it and support it. So, any time I see a product that works really well, helping us maintain good gut health. It’s essential. It’s essential for our emotional and mental health as well because there is a direct link between gut health and emotional and mental health.

[00:24:02] Pat Miletich: Sure.

[00:24:04] Ashley James: And there’s a direct link to our immune function. Just every cell in our body requires this delicate balance to be protected. So, can you explain how your supplement helps build the gut biome?

[00:24:21] Pat Miletich: Well, basically, what’s being tested right now and there’s been several studies done on mitochondrial function and cellular function and heavy metal toxicity removal. But the really cool thing that a lot of people are testing right now at universities here in Iowa as well as at the university in British Columbia, is they're very interested in the specific types, families of microbes, and the numbers because when this comes up out of the ground, again, this is not fossilized, this is living. So, there’s 60,000-year-old pristine microbes that come up with it. And when it is flash-frozen, those microbes are frozen in time. But when you put them back in water, they come to life like sea monkeys again. And that’s the best way that I can describe it for people.

So, that’s what they’re very interested in because that’s what’s going on inside your body. It’s also when they talk about the terra preta soil, have you heard Gram Hancock on Joe Rogan talk about the terra preta soil from Brazil at all?

[00:25:27] Ashley James: No.

[00:25:29] Pat Miletich: So, very interesting. Gram Hancock is a guy that’s been on my podcast several times. Super, super intelligent guy. One area of his study is history, talking about the massive ancient civilization cities that they're finding within the Amazon jungle that pre-date back to 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. These cities, these civilizations had a really unique composting method that created a super-rich and microbial-rich soil called the terra preta soil or the Amazon black earth. You can take a handful of that and put it down on barren soil, and his words exactly, and bring that barren soil back to life through the microbial activity and the nutrients in that soil. So, this is a 60,000-year-old version of that but even more concentrated because this has been, again, 1500 types of plants that have decomposed for 60,000 years. It’s the most nutrient-rich substance that I’ve ever found, and I think the gentleman that discovered this actually should get a Nobel Prize for it.

[00:26:46] Ashley James:  That’s fascinating. And they're doing studies on it right now. It would be interesting to see if it repopulates and stays in the gut because a lot of probiotics only work as long as you take them and they don’t stay in the gut months after you have stopped taking them. Whereas eating fermented foods, they tend to see that that has a greater effect. But again, this is not a probiotic. This is, in a sense, that it’s been constructed in the lab or cultured in a lab, I should say. This has been taken from the earth. So, it’s different. It’s different than taking a probiotic. 

[00:27:30] Pat Miletich: I, over the past 35 years, have found that to be honest with you, whatever our Creator has created is always better than what is created in laboratories from what I’ve found. I mean, of course, nutraceuticals, taking organics, revving them up, doing the things that they do with them, are very beneficial. But I’ve not seen a laboratory produce anything that has these effects on people’s endurance and overall well-being, to be honest with you.

[00:28:00] Ashley James: That is fascinating. So you’ve given us some examples of athletes who have benefited from it. Do you have stories of average everyday people or even people who are sick have some transformations where we’ve seen people be able to really recover from an illness because of this?

[00:28:21] Pat Miletich: Well, I don’t make any medical claims but I can tell you that there’s been some very dramatic health turnarounds, 180’s with people who were in dire straits with their health and it certainly helped them a lot. For me, again, with my respiratory system, I’ve tried over the past four years several different fulvic humics just to see how they compare. Generally, about 10 days into using other fulvic humics, my respiratory system starts to deteriorate again. And so, then I get back on my own product and my respiratory system seems to come back. So, yeah, I can’t make any specific stories. I won’t do that just for obvious reasons. But I can tell you that I’ve had a lot of very good friends with a myriad of pretty serious health issues seem to make some pretty good recoveries.

[00:29:22] Ashley James: I love it. And now, I saw that one of the things that you have added to it is acerola cherry powder which is a fantastic way to get vitamin C-wise, that you include that in with the fulvic humics inside the capsules.

[00:29:40] Pat Miletich: Yeah, the fulvic humic is an amazing transporter of nutrients into the cell. So, it’s going to transport that organic vitamin C much better into the cell so it’s going to make that even more effective for immune function. The organic vitamin C is also an incredible antioxidant, so they both work well together. For me, I’m thanking way ahead of taking every possible antioxidant that I can find along with fulvic humic and throw them in one capsule and just turn people into literally just machines. 

[00:30:17] Ashley James: I love it. Now, you call it Super Soldier Black Gold Oxygen Booster. Can you explain why you’ve decided to call your supplement that?

[00:30:32] Pat Miletich: I’m a guy who has followed a lot of the folks. I hosted a podcast for about 7 years that we dealt with a lot of the stuff that was going on in the world kind of behind the scenes. Listening to guys or folks who are talking about digital implants in people’s brains and a lot of the things that they’re talking about building digital super soldiers, China is talking about building military digital super soldiers and things like that. I thought, you know, in all the athletic endeavors that I’ve ever been involved in and I believe and I know because I’ve seen them, I’ve had to rustle them, I’ve had to fight them, I’ve run with them, that the X-men actually do exist on this planet. There’s people in their 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s who can run 100 miles at high altitude at level 100 without stopping, within 24 hours they get it done. And I can’t explain to people who have not experienced altitude how brutally hard that is just to hike up one mountain is brutally hard for healthy people. I work at a gym where people regularly carry around over 1,000 pounds on their shoulders at a strongman gym. I’ve had people grab me that are so unbelievably powerful that it’s almost beyond, you know, and I was a guy who was in my prime very strong. And these people, there was no comparison in strength. I mean, they threw me around like a ragdoll. Olympic-level wrestlers and people like that. So, they do exist and they were all these people that were raised and ate whole foods, real foods from the earth, not boxed and not processed foods, so to speak, right?

So, my goal, you know, when I hear Dennis Bushnell from NASA saying we’re going to build digital super soldiers, I said, well, I’m going to build organic super soldiers. Let’s see who’s better. And I know who’s better.

[00:32:29] Ashley James: I love it. Building organic super soldiers. I love it. We all want to be. When I first heard that name, I’m like, man, I just think so many people won’t relate to this thinking of super soldier, right? There’s the, you know, mom who’s at home doing homeschooling. I’m not sure that that would be relatable. But then, when you explain in that way, like I want to be an organic super soldier, I want to feel especially the experience I’ve had now with your product where I’m just like yeah, I’m go, go, go and my body just doesn’t go into fatigue, and it’s so cool. Our church is pretty extreme, our services are two-hours long, and we do choir. We get there at 8:00 AM, we don’t leave until 1:00. And we’re standing and singing for at least 3 hours because we do two services. I did that yesterday. I got my family ready, fed my family breakfast. We got to church, was there until 1, got home, made lunch, served lunch to the family, cleaned, did all the stuff around the house and made dinner, and then had a friend over. It was like at 9:00 at night and I’m like, I don’t want my friend to leave, I want to just keep hanging out. But, you know, it’s Sunday night, right? And I’m just like, I can’t believe how just consistent my energy is and I could get so much done, and that is like I’m organic super soldier mom level.

[00:34:01] Pat Miletich: There you go. No, that’s it. I mean, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about changing people’s lives and if we can’t get people to just eat even remotely sensibly to educate them on what’s making them sick, what’s causing inflammation in their diet, and then put proper organic nutrients into their body from the supplementation, we can literally change somebody’s life so dramatically with their health that then they sit back and go “wow, what do I want to do with my life now? Now that I can actually do things I want to do?” I’ve had people just break down in tears numerous times because their health had changed so dramatically by just simply changing their diet a little bit and putting proper organic nutrients into their body supplementation and it’s all I care about right now, is just helping people understand that they don’t have to be sick, that you can change your life.

For the past several days, for the past week, I’ve been helping DownRange Excursions which is a local group that helps local veterans here in the quad cities, Iowa, Illinois. They take them on excursions, canoe trips, kayak trips, fishing trips, hunting trips, things like that to get them back into the wilderness and help them cope a little bit with what they’re going through. They also have a supplement line. So, I like helping them and explain the benefits. As we’re in these grocery stores, I’m telling probably 9 out of 10 people are either obese, they’re sadly disfigured, their musculoskeletal system, you can tell that they're not with it mentally. It breaks my heart to watch this happen to Americans because I’ve watched it for so many years because I’ve been involved in high-level sports and nutrients and understanding this stuff, that I understand why it’s happening because they're not getting the nutrients from their food anymore, because our soil has been so beat up by chemicals and things like that. 

So, as I was sitting there yesterday and as I was talking to the owner of the company DownRange Supplements, I said to him, it’s sad—it’s sad to watch this. He said yes, and that's why we’re here. We’re here to explain that people can change their lives. Just the message I try to get out to people for those people that are hurting right now that maybe have obesity issues that are in pain, suffering from a myriad of health issues, that you can change it if you put the right things in your body and just give it a chance. That’s the main thing. 

[00:36:44] Ashley James: We’ve been discussing inflammation and you brought up food, so I think this is a wonderful transition. I’d love for you to share your expertise. I mean, you see trained world champions, trained amazing fighters, trained soldiers, so many people, and helped hundreds and hundreds of people in this becoming elite athletes, becoming the best versions of themselves athletically. Right? And you can’t do that and then go to McDonald’s. You can’t do that. Medical doctors, it just drives me nuts when they say this: “Your diet has nothing to do with your health.” I have heard that so many times from doctors. “Well, you can’t fix this with diet. You can’t fix this with food. You need a drug.” It’s ridiculous that it’s a huge myth that you can just eat whatever you want because “diabetes is genetics, so just eat whatever you want and take the insulin or take the metformin.” There's this whole mentality around maintaining sickness. With that, I want to shift people’s mindsets. I want to help them understand what you’ve been doing for so long, is helping people to become the absolute best versions of themselves.

[00:38:12] Pat Miletich: Yeah.

[00:38:13] Ashley James: So, I’d love for you to share the insight with the masses. Tell us what the masses don’t know that the elite athletes do know about what they can do on a daily basis to create optimal health. 

[00:38:26] Pat Miletich: Well, I can tell you this. If it needs a commercial and it’s in a box, you generally don’t want to eat it, right? There are simple things when you're going through the organic section or the produce section where you can look for the numbers. There's a hashtag with a four- or five-digit code on there that you want to stay away from the 3’s and 4’s, when they start with 3’s and 4’s. You want to go to the 8’s and 9’s that are truly organic, so that’s something that is super important. But years ago, you know, at one time I had between 40 and 50 world-rank fighters training in my facility at the same time. So, it was a roomful of very high-level professional fighters. And fighters from all over the world would travel to train with my team for their upcoming fights. It was my job to coach these guys, but it was not my job to babysit them, so I would tell them “This is where you stay. Rent an apartment across the street. And then this is where the grocery store is, and this is where you can get this and take care of this. And you're on your own.”

So, all the fighters from Asia, from South America, from Europe, they would go to the grocery store and every single time, and this is over two decades ago, said “Now, we understand why Americans are obese and disease-ridden. Your grocery stores are grotesque. There's nothing but poison in your grocery stores.” They couldn’t believe what they saw. That's another lightbulb that went off for me and because I was doing things like on Sundays I would boil three chickens and then take the meat off and put it in big Tupperware, steam a bunch of broccoli, cook a bunch of brown rice, hard-boil 48 eggs and peel them all and have them ready for the week, things like that, and eat super clean while I was getting ready for my own fights. But yeah, and that was the problem is, is I started seeing Americans getting bigger and bigger. There was a gentleman named Dr. Ed Thomas that periodically that periodically I would be blessed by his presence and his education. He was saying 25 years ago that it was a national security crisis that was taking place with obesity in America and we’re seeing that manifest now where people who are obese and diabetic and have comorbidities are very, very vulnerable to what’s been going on in the last few years. So, it’s got to be a terrifying experience for them and to those folks, again, you can change your health, you can change your immune system, build your immune system and that's super, super important in modern times for certain. 

That's really something that’s very important as well as kids were brought to me when I was teaching, you know, I taught children for years anywhere from 3 years old all the way up. All of a sudden, boys started to be brought to me to take lessons because the parents wanted them to be able to work on their concentration and their focus. And they had this new thing called autism. It was growing and back then it was 1 in 5000 kids I guess roughly, and now, I believe we’re up to 1 in 36 children, specifically boys, that have autistic symptoms or characteristics. So, it’s obviously our environment, the chemicals and a lot of the other stuff that's going on, the toxic chemicals and heavy metals that are in our environment are getting into these children and everybody else into our cells and are causing us to short-circuit, so to speak. That's really what it comes down to, is just you’ve got to really pay attention to labels, what you put in your body, what chemicals you do not want to put in your body and as well as deodorants, shampoos, things like that that have aluminum and other substances in them that you don’t want to put on your skin because your skin is going to absorb that into your system and cause hormonal disruptions and a lot of other issues. 

[00:42:37] Ashley James: Yeah, we’ve got to really advocate for ourselves and take care of ourselves and be very cognizant of what we’re putting in our body, around our body. You talked about mold. So many people live in homes with mold. Mold is so bad for the immune system. It causes neurological problems. We just have to be very clear and understand what’s in our environment and where our food is coming from. And we have to question everything. We have to be the person that questions everything that reads labels. I become a food detective; it drives my husband nuts. There are certain brains I know I can trust so I don’t read the labels. But I have still been shocked because I’ll find a brand, I’ll read the labels, I’ll vet them. I’ll go, “Okay.” I don’t buy a lot of processed foods but there's a few things, you know, like maybe packages of brown rice noodles for our son or something. Right? And I’ll read the labels. Or some hot sauce. Sometimes I’ll make my own hot sauce, sometimes I buy it from the store and I’ll read the label and everything looks good. And then, I’ll be buying that for a few years and then I’ll just it’s sort of a habit to look at labels and I’ll read the ingredients, and they’ve changed it. They’ve changed the ingredients. Now there’s, all of a sudden, sugar added or some weird “natural” flavoring which is a cover for MSG and all kinds of stuff. We have to be diligent and question everything. That’s why I love finding these.

There's just a handful of amazing supplement companies out there that have incredibly high ethics, that are actually doing good in the world, that are making a difference for people. It’s like 1 percent or maybe even less than 1 percent of the supplement companies out there. Then there's a ton of really bad supplement companies that are giving the good ones a bad name. It’s so unfortunate. I spent thousands of dollars in many, many years when I was sick, taking like go to Trader Joe’s and just buying all the vitamins there. They just go right through me and I never felt a difference ever. Ever, ever, ever. I’d go to Whole Foods or wherever supplement store. I didn’t get a difference. Then I was introduced to a really high-quality brand that was made by a naturopath and not sold in the stores. And I felt amazing. Amazing. Totally a game-changer for me.

There's only been a handful of game-changer supplements. Yours is one of them for me.

[00:45:13] Pat Miletich: Beautiful.

[00:45:15] Ashley James: For me, that's why you can’t out-supplement a bad diet. I couldn’t take your supplement every day and then just eat McDonald’s and expect amazing health. Right? The diet absolutely is key, but even more so than diet, we have to make sure that's clean in terms of organic. Make sure that it’s clean. We have to eat right. We need to move our body in a way that brings us joy. We have to go to bed on time, drink enough water, destress ourselves, make sure that we’re feeling fulfilled in life. These are key to health. These are fundamental key things to health.

Then there's these little things that come along that are complete gamechangers that take you to the next level, right? I want everyone to do all the fundamentals and then they get something like your supplement that oxygenates their cells, boosts their gut biome, helps their immune system. I want to get into understanding a bit more, if you could explain further. Can you explain further how this helps the immune system function better, how it fortifies the immune system and how does it work to oxygenate the cells even better than just a regular body does it on its own?

[00:46:28] Pat Miletich: Sure, yeah. So, the fulvic humic combination, the humic is a bigger molecule, a bigger chain, and it protects the outside of the cell. The fulvic is what goes into the cell and will bond with hydrogen to create more oxygen within the cell. I mean, we’re water, we’re oxygen and what I like to say good bugs and bad bugs, technically. But we’re the same as dirt. If you take human cells only in clay, that's the starting point, right? And then we add water, oxygen, decomposing organic matter and microbes, and that makes rich dirt that can grow food and it also makes a human being. So, that's super important for people to understand. So, the more you can raise your oxygen, stay hydrated with good quality water, and control the bad bugs, so to speak, to a certain extent, is super important. There have been a lot of tests done on the ability of humic and fulvic acids to have a greater affinity for viruses than viruses have affinity for the cell itself. So, it’s something that's very powerful. They’ve been proven to be very good natural antivirals. And people can look those tests up on a myriad of different fulvic humic acids. So, that's something that does exist. But that's super important for folks to understand that as well.

I’ve had a lot of good conversations, interesting, colorful conversations, to say the least, when you talk about doctors. I’ve had good conversations with doctors, I’ve had very interesting conversations with agronomists, horticulturalists, and I was laughed at the other or probably a week and a half ago or whatever by a chemist. I was at a digital currency meeting and a lady that owns a CBD company was asking me about humic fulvic. And I was talking about organic forms of metal. The guy started just laughing in my face from across the table. Then, his friends started laughing at me and pointed at his friend and goes, “He’s a chemist.” I was thinking to myself, I can tell. So, anyway, I said, “Do I have to explain how organic metals are formed?” And they said, “Give it a shot.”

And so, I said when metals are chelated up out of the ground by a plant and bonded with a carbon molecule, they become very stable and useful for the mitochondria to burn as fuel to generate energy again. And he looked at me and all he could say to me was, “Well, I’ll agree that things can be bonded with carbon molecules.” And I was thinking to myself, how much did that chemistry degree cost him. I mean, I got punched in the head for a living and had figured this stuff out. But people have been educated only one way and it’s about synthetics. And he had the gall to ask me, he said, “Wait a minute, can this substance by synthesized?” And I said, why would you want to do that? That’s the problem that’s getting everybody sick, is synthetics. I go stop it, just stop. So, that was an interesting conversation.

[00:49:51] Ashley James: How different is this from store-bought, let’s say, humic shale and fulvic acid? I have a lot of friends who said, “Oh, well, you know, I’ve been taking…” and then they’ll just name off some stuff they bought at some supplement store. “And I’m taking a humic shale and a fulvic acid.” The reason why I ask them is because my friends know I’m like a health nut and they’ll tell me what they take and I’ll start talking about their symptoms. Then I’ll say, “So is it working for you? Are you feeling a difference?” “Oh, maybe. Maybe I’m getting a little better sleep.” But they have 20 other symptoms. They’re still riddled with health issues. They’re still exhausted. And I’m like, “Well, first of all, let’s look at the supplement company. You did buy it from a store, right?” And in my experience, most supplements bought at a store are not the highest quality ones out there. Some of them are middle of the road, some of them are okay, you can get away with it. But I’ve never met a friend who said “I’ve totally noticed the difference. My life is completely changed,” when they talk about using an over-the-counter humic shale and fulvic acid supplement. I’m just thinking there’s probably a few listeners out there saying “Oh yeah, one of my supplements I’m taking says it has humic shale and fulvic acid.” So, how different could yours possibly be?

[00:51:15] Pat Miletich: Well again, we go back to organic or inorganic sources—dead sea floor bed or coal that has to use harsh chemical processes to remove the humic fulvic from it in the first place, is something that I don’t want to put in my body and I’m certainly not going to put it in my kid’s bodies. So, it’s got to come from an organic source. Peat bogs–living breathing peat bogs has got to be the first source. Now, a lot of peat bog derived humic fulvics, they will take and they will heat pasteurize and kill the microbes that are in it, which are again, pristine microbes from thousands of years ago, and then they take pre and probiotics that have been cultured in a lab and add them back into it. And I don’t understand why you would want to do that. 

Now, some people say, “Well, we want to be able to control what type of microbes are in it and things like that.” I always say it’s obvious that God created some really powerful stuff. Every time man seems to mess with what God created, they screw it up really bad. Genetically modified grains, for instance. Synthetic fertilizers and glyphosate and everything else that was patented as an antibiotic originally. You spray it on plants because they’re sick and they can’t fend off bugs because they don’t give off the natural enzymes. So, again, most vitamin mineral supplements, for instance, come from rock that’s inorganic. You're an inorganic organism. You're not going to absorb it. It’s not an organic substance so it’s not meant to be in your body. And that’s just the way it is. So, you're always going to benefit and feel the organics, at least high-level organics, especially for sick people or people that are looking for huge gains and endurance, they're going to feel it a lot more when they put powerful concentrated organics in their body.

[00:53:16] Ashley James: I’m a huge believer in trace minerals and your supplement has over 70 trace minerals in it. There’s 60 minerals that are essential to the body. There’s many trace minerals that are necessary and the body absolutely needs them and yet we’re deficient in them because of the farming practices of over the last 100 years. I had Dr. Wallach on my show twice. His degree is in veterinary medicine, pathology, soil agriculture and he’s a naturopathic physician. He also spent many years, decades being a research scientist. So with all that, and what he concluded, with all that, because he actually discovered what is not in the mainstream, which drives me nuts. We know how to prevent neural tube defects in utero because we know to take folate, not fulvic acid, that's synthetic. We’re talking about that’s synthetic versus like an organic. Folic acid actually blocks folate from uptake and we still then can develop neural tube defects. So, we’ve got to make sure that if you are taking a supplement during pregnancy and also even before pregnancy when you're waiting to get pregnant, we should be making sure that it’s folate. We have to make sure it’s folate in its organic form. Also, eating lots of leafy greens that are organic will help us get there as well. 

But he discovered that selenium deficiency in utero is the cause of muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis and that Down syndrome is a zinc deficiency at the moment of conception. There's many other birth defects that can happen because of not optimal conditions while the baby is being built. We can build humans without all the key nutrients. We’re just going to build sort of broken humans, right? And most of us are walking around like, you know, our parents drank alcohol while they were pregnant and smoked cigarettes and weren’t taking supplements and were eating not-so-great nutrients. We see poor health as a result and so we have to overcome it. What’s amazing is the body is just an absolute miracle and I’ve seen people on their deathbeds be able to recover and live absolutely healthy lives when they're able to make some powerful changes in their diet, in their supplementation to fill in those gaps. It’s like supplements, really high-quality ones are the mortar and the food is the bricks. Right? 

We can overcome so much. But Dr. Wallach discovered that the key thing for health, beyond anything else, are minerals. He says you can accidentally get vitamins by eating fruits and vegetables. You can accidentally get them. But it’s really hard to accidentally get all minerals that we need. The farming practices, again, his background is in soil agriculture so he saw this. He tested soil samples and found that the Amish for example who had incredibly high birth defect rights, he tested their soil. Because they were primarily only eating the food they grew and he discovered that their soil was completely void of certain key minerals like selenium and so they kept having these birth defects. He helped them re-mineralize their soil and get on the trace minerals, and boom, they were able to stop those birth defects immediately. So, I’ve seen it over and over again. And I’m a huge believer in making sure we take trace minerals as a supplement because you don’t know if the farm you’re buying your organic produce from has been re-mineralizing their soil and most farmland has been farmed for almost 100 years or more without re-mineralizing. We used to over 100 years ago up until electricity took over. We did wood burning. We had ash. We had so much ash and that's minerals and we’d throw it onto the garden. We always were eating food from re-mineralized gardens.

If you look at cookbooks from 200 years ago, it will say in the recipes to add pot ash as a thickening agent. We were adding minerals back into our food as part of a regular practice. 

[00:57:53] Pat Miletich: Very cool. 

[00:57:54] Ashley James: So yeah, I’m a big believer in minerals. It’s one of the things that helped me to regain my health after being sick for so many years. So, your supplement has these minerals but you're saying that because they’re an organic form, it’s like it was predigested by the plant. So the plant up-took, plants digest minerals and it digests it to the point where we can absorb it.

[00:58:20] Pat Miletich: Yes.

[00:58:22] Ashley James: So 50 million years ago or however long this peat bog has been in there, the plants digested the minerals and they stayed in this chelated form, this very microscopic form that is easy to uptake from the body. But we’ve been sold. So, I grew up, as you did too, grow up watching commercials on milk, it does the body good. We grew up being told that we have to drink milk to get our calcium. I kind of grew up thinking cows made calcium like a lot of people think.

[00:58:55] Pat Miletich: And eat wheat bread.

[00:58:56] Ashley James: Right. Fortified. Eat fortified. And it’s synthetic. By the way, people who like me have MTHFR, who can’t process non-methylated B vitamins, eating fortified bread and fortified foods and flowers is really bad for us. It clogs up our liver and makes it so we can’t detox heavy metals. It’s crazy how if you go out there and eat the standard American diet, and I say this often on my show, if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. Seventy percent of the adult population is on at least one prescription medication. Many of them are on pain meds. People who are chronically in pain, their bodies are in pain because they’re nutrient deficient and they’re just screaming in inflammation. We have got 1/3 of the population’s obese or prediabetic or diabetic. The leading causes of death—heart disease, diabetes, cancer—these are not fun diseases to die off. This is like the last 20 years of your life just goes downhill worse and worse and worse. It is suffering, it is hospital visits. It is not nice. I would rather sacrifice the fun that food brings me now, like I would rather not go eat fun food. Like I’d rather say no to that whatever chocolate cake, whatever. I’d rather say no to that and be climbing mountains in my 90’s than live how everyone else is living.

So, I need to be the black sheep or I need to be the salmon. I need to go completely against the grain. I need to be okay to doing it differently from everyone else and saying no to the things that people say yes to. But I have to really make sure I secure my minerals. So, looking where we get our minerals from, because people have been brainwashed to think “Well, I get all my minerals from dairy products or from fortified wheat or fortified grains.” I had Dr. Neal Bernard on my show twice and he talks about studies that show that countries who do more cow dairy have the highest rates of broken hips, broken lips, have the highest rates of osteopenia/osteoporosis. Those countries that almost don’t do any dairy at all have the lowest rates of basically all the bone diseases. So, very interesting that we’ve been brainwashed through marketing to eat fortified cereal that’s laced with sugar, drink the excretions from another mammal past infancy, which is actually drinking an immune system from a different animal, which kind of just drives me nuts. When you look through Neal Barnard’s research and you read his books or listen to those two episodes, it’s a real eye-opener. So, we’ve been conned through food marketing to create ill health. And I wonder if there’s some real evil people in a backroom somewhere like you’ve got big food, big agri sitting back there menacingly with Monsanto and the pharmaceutical industry and they're like “Ha-ha-ha! So we’re going to tell people that they have high cholesterol and we need to make them eat no fat but they have to eat lots of sugar instead because low-fat foods are filled with sugar. Then we’re going to get them on this drug.” The way we see how much we’ve been manipulated, I just wonder if they're all kind of in cahoots together and maybe that's my little conspiracy brain going. But basically, what we’ve been taught is the exact opposite of the truth. 

[01:02:45] Pat Miletich: Sure.

[01:02:46] Ashley James: So people are walking around completely mineral deficient, believing that they're getting their minerals because they're getting their 8 ounces of milk a day or whatever they’ve been told by the marketing. They're actually not getting anywhere near what they need. So, these minerals that are in your particular supplement, the 70+ trace minerals, they’ve already been digested by these plants. The body uptakes them very quickly. I wonder how much though are we supposed to take because they’re very small capsules and I was surprised, I was just taking two twice a day and I got really great results. So I’m like, man, how is it that it is so tiny and yet I’m getting such a good result? What if I took more? Could you go through a detox if you take too much? Maybe can we just talk about that. Like are there any adverse effects at first or does the body go through a detox if we take too much? Can you kind of lay out what the appropriate amount to take is?

[01:03:46] Pat Miletich: For starters, again, the chelation process and it will clean off your intestinal walls. At the smaller does that you're taking, it’s going to do it a lot slower. There are people who have, say, an athlete who’s pushing the envelope every single day, the things that I used to do as an athlete where we would kickbox on Wednesday nights. It was sparring at the gym for all the professional fighters. And we would spar 10 to 15 rounds—and that's a lot, that's very taxing. But then we’d throw in our running shoes and go run a hill over and over and over for extra endurance. Now you got to get up the next morning and you’ve got to come back and you’ve got to train again, so you have to be able to recover and you have to put the nutrients back in the body, the hydration, proper sleep, you know, all those sorts of things.

So, people that are really pushing the envelope in terms of endurance and strength training and a lot of the other stuff that people like to do that look crazy to other people, they’re going to definitely take more to replenish their body. But 2 to 4 capsules a day is plenty for the average person, generally. I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people on social media who are saying. I had a guy and it’s funny because I’ve had several guys that I know say the same thing, they go, “Hey, does this do something for your testosterone?” I go, “Oh, you’re chasing your wife around the house?” They go, “Yeah.” And so, I’ve gotten a lot of that. A lot of digestive issues, the symptoms are waning and a lot of other stuff with inflammation. So, it just varies, I think, depending on activity, to be honest with you.

[01:05:35] Ashley James: Would starting with 2 twice a day be a good place to start?

[01:05:41] Pat Miletich: A lot of people can take just 2 in the morning to start with if they want. That's fine. But like I said, I mean, I’m a guy who’s going to use a lot more because I’m trying to push my body. Today, I tried to do a bunch of crazy stuff. I like to do workouts where I’ll do 10 burpee jump pull-ups and then go run half a mile and do that 10 times, things like that that are breaking my body down pretty good. I’m in my 50’s, so I want to be able to come back tomorrow and get on the treadmill and hike a bunch of miles at 10 incline to work my rear chain and then the next day I’ll do something like beat on the heavy bag and then get on the treadmill and do some sprints, just different things like that to try and keep myself at least in pretty, pretty good shape in my 50’s. Not quite as intense as I used to be but I’m going to still push myself. The older we get and a lot of times the more inflammation we get as we get older because the cells build up those heavy metals and toxins, the more we’re going to feel when we put really good organics in our body and start cleaning it out.

[01:06:50] Ashley James: Yes. Can you tell me more about the studies? You said some studies have been done and some studies are in the process. Is there anything more you can tell us about studies around this?

[01:07:02] Pat Miletich: Yeah. So the mitochondrial studies that was done on it, it definitely improves mitochondrial function and output. So, that's something that’s obviously very good. Because a lot of people come 1:00 in the afternoon are starting to drift off and fall asleep. A lot of times that can be thyroid related, it can be mitochondrial function that's deficient as well and a lot of other things that are going on. So, a lot of people that get on this, as you have said, have no desire to take a nap. They were somebody who was prone to falling asleep at 1:00 and they just have energy all day long, so that's something that proves that it’s obviously doing something with mitochondrial function and other things. But the heavy metal toxicity showing people the levels of the heavy metals have dropped considerably in their bodies even from their hair follicles, so that's something that's really big. There’s a lady who owns a farm on an island in Canada near Vancouver and she got on the product, and she had blood work done of her metal toxicity before and after, and it was very, very dramatic decrease in the heavy metals in her system and likewise there's been a lot of people who have gotten the same results.

[01:08:23] Ashley James: That's really interesting. That was actually my next question. If you could share blood work. Have you guys done blood work with a section of people? Or what are the results that people see are changed after 3 or 6 months on this supplement when they compare blood work? 

[01:08:39] Pat Miletich: Well, some people who have been very sick with really high white blood cell and red blood cell deficiencies and a lot of those types of things, and the 14 chemicals that they test for generally in regular blood work, will be really out of whack and after being on the product for a while, their white blood cell counts and their red blood cell counts go back into the normal range many times and the different chemicals within the body go back into the normal range quite a bit as well. So, that's something that’s empirical, it’s data that’s super important for people to understand that there have been a lot of people who have, yes, gotten blood work. One of the farmers that I’ve been working with, I’ve done some speeches at some Ag gatherings like I said, and talking to farmers because they’ve been exposed to so many harsh chemicals, many times their health is pretty bad. I remember my grandma and grandpa on both sides of the family having Parkinson’s disease from using chemicals on the farm and things like that, so we got to get that stuff out of them.

When I talk to them about their own health and talk to them about fulvic humics because fulvic humics—and they’re called humic fulvics in agriculture—are used quite a bit by a lot of farmers to help with yields, to help with soil health and plant health as well. And so, when I talk to them about their health and I get them on the human form of this product, this Super Soldier, and their health greatly improves, then they tend to perk up and listen to me. Because I ask them about their humic fulvic that's derived from coal and I say, “Would you put that in your body?” And they say, “Absolutely not.” And I said so now we’re starting to talk about the difference in the quality and where it’s derived from is super important. That's when they start to listen to me a little bit.

I’ve got one friend who’s probably one of the most knowledgeable farmers in the country in terms of mixing and conventional and organic products to do biological farming. His pants are literally falling off in right now. He’s lost so much weight and his health has improved greatly. His wife’s health has improved greatly. That's been something that it’s my pathway, my vehicle to getting through to farmers and helping them understand how we can change not only their health but the quality of their crops.

[01:11:05] Ashley James: I met you through Tim James and I’ve had him on my show and I’ve been on his show, and that's his passion too. I’m sure you guys have talked about that. That’s his passion to help farmers to, first of all, just educate them so that they’ll stop using these horrible chemicals that are killing their families and killing the land and destroying the earth. Maybe they’ll get a higher yield for a while by doing GMO and glyphosate or whatever the horrible chemicals. We’re sacrificing the long-term for the short gain. When we have barren lands that are unusable, what’s the point? What we thought in the old days, we thought that the soil was dead, that it’s inert, that it’s not organic. And now, we’ve discovered that farming and the soil is as complex is as our own microbiome in our body, you know, that it’s kind of like so above so below, right? As on earth as in heaven. As in the soil as it is in our body. As in nature, as it is in our body. We can see the similarities between the microbiome of soil and the microbiome of our gut and that we need to maintain a health soil to maintain a healthy body. And by them putting these chemicals on that glyphosate being a chelator but it’s also an antibiotic. So, it’s destroying the microbiome of our gut and of the soil, just killing the soil dead. Then on top of that, it chelates heavy metals to the brain and the kidneys, depositing them into the brain and kidneys. And I have two interviews on that with Stephanie Seneff, PhD, top research scientist at MIT who explains that what we’re seeing is an epidemic of heavy metals being deposited into the brain and the kidneys because glyphosate is rampant and now it’s in our waters. It’s not only in our soil; it’s in our waters.

[01:13:16] Pat Miletich: Our land, everything.

[01:13:18] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s everywhere. It’s just so high, the cancer rates are just going up and up and up. If we look in the farming areas, if we look, for example, in the United States but we could look at any country, the areas where they spray, I was woken up. When I was first pregnant 8 years ago, my midwife who’s also a naturopathic physician who used to be the dean of Bastyr, incredibly knowledgeable woman, been practicing for over 30 years, delivered over a thousand babies, she said to me, you know, it’s good that you don’t live on the other side of the mountains in eastern Washington because during the times, if you're pregnant, I think it was spring or something, if you're pregnant, if you're in the first trimester or whatever, there’s a certain very vulnerable time of a pregnancy. If it coincides with the farming schedule, you will likely lose your baby. Just by living in an area because they do the spring, you inhale the fumes from miles down the road, you inhale what is being sprayed and you will lose your baby. This happens across the world.

So, we really, really need to wake up that our farmers are our line of first defense. We need to support them in changing their ways because it’s going to trickle downstream and then we’re all messed up. These chemicals, it is possible short-term gain but long-term detriment and long-term in our lifetime. So, I love what you're doing. I love that you're supporting the farmers and helping them, I want to say, wake them up but, you know, they're just doing the best they can. They’re scraping by. They can barely make a profit.

[01:15:06] Pat Miletich: Yeah. They’re getting beat up right now. It’s pretty bad. That's the scary thing. So I was talking to a very good friend of mine who’s an advisor. He’s a professor of biology at one of the universities here in the State of Iowa. I asked him, I said, you know, this is a question that I’ve been pondering quite a bit lately for a lot of years, actually, a couple of decades because in the State of Iowa and I know around the Midwest, when they're going to build a development or an office park or whatever, they bring in earth scrapers and they scrape off all the top soil and they put it in massive piles, and then they’ll go back out and I think they're required to put 4 inches back down. So, they’re scraping off all the living soil and then there's clay and then they put a few inches of black earth back down which is not going to hold the water. The water is going to run off into the streams, in the rivers and away from the area, and so, there's not proper, and I said, “You tell me if I’m correct in my assumption that now we do not have proper evaporation rates and therefore, we’re seeing droughts around the country in a big way right now.” And he said, “Yes. You're correct.” And also, by putting synthetics on farm fields and on golf courses and our own yards and everything else, we’re all part of the problem, is that we are creating dead soil that does not hold water and it’s running off and we are creating… the Mississippi River is at the lowest, I think, it’s ever been. There's rivers around the world that are starting to run dry right now because of this, and so, we’ve got to stop it. We really have to stop it and we’ve got to change our ways because it seems like humans are so easily, whether miseducated or I guess programmed so to speak, for the better lack of term, to literally extinct ourselves. I mean, that's what’s happening. People have got to wake up and understand that we’re doing this to ourselves. This is where we talk about the free will, for those that believe in a Creator. He gave us free will. And everything, every calamity, every genocide, every war has always been free will but it always seems to be an atmosphere that has been created by folks that run this planet and somehow humans end up not seeing through it and turning on each other and even turning on ourselves. That's all I ask, is that people take a step back and realize that yes, you’ve got to be the change that you want in the world. You’ve got to change your own health. Then, people start asking you, what are you doing? And then you can teach them. That's really important where you talk about the old saying “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.” It really is that simple. 

[01:17:52] Ashley James: Yes. And we need to start questioning everything and stop and go, what I’m doing now is not working. If I am not happy with my health, it’s not working. Not to throw it all out. Maybe some of it is half working. But we need to be able to question our own belief system. We need to stop and go the farming practices are not working. The evaporation rates around the world are causing droughts around the world. This is not working. We need to stop. We need to go back to a farming practice that is sustainable, that is healthy for humans and for the planet and because what’s healthy for the planet is healthy for humans. Let’s go back to how we used to do it a hundred years ago, right, where we cared about top soil, where we didn’t dig deep into the earth and remove the layers that have the wonderful microbiome in there.

So, I love the work that you're doing and understanding more about healthy agriculture that allows us to understand more about how we can create a healthy body. So, there is that direct correlation. I want to know though I’ve heard this a lot. That people are afraid to take trace minerals because of heavy metals. I’ve even heard naturopaths say, “Oh, I don’t give trace minerals to my patients because I’m worried that those trace minerals are going to be full of heavy metals and that this is actually toxic, and fulvic acid is actually toxic.” Now, of course we’ve talked about this, the stuff that comes from coal, yes, I could understand that. But can you please explain how your supplement does not contain these heavy metals that are dangerous to the body?

[01:19:33] Pat Miletich: I mean, anybody that has done even a little bit of investigation and again, this is where people are miseducated. So chemists, doctors, agronomists, having a high-level chemist tell me there's no such thing as organic forms of metal and laughing at me, and they stopped laughing as soon as I educated him on how metals are converted to organic to be bonded with carbon. So, there are drastic differences. Heavy metals are very bad for you. When you have heavy metals such as aluminum and lead trapped in your cells, they're very toxic. They will cause you health problems. Period. End of story. 

But when those same exact metals have been chelated out of the ground by a plant and bonded with a carbon molecule, they now can be used again as fuel by your mitochondria. So, there's a huge difference. And trust me, after 35 years of research, I would not put this stuff in my children’s bodies. And people have to understand I just got done giving a speech, I don’t know, a month ago to the school board here in Bettendorf, Iowa. We’ve been having a lot of problems here Bettendorf, Iowa with the education system, the behavioral issues, a lot of other things. And we’ve got 5 of 7 school board members and a superintendent who are, it’s impossible to explain the insanity that I’ve witnessed when I go and I listen to these people talk. So, I went and I said, “I’m not going to get into the division that’s been falsely created by designed. I’m not going to get into politics. I’m absolutely done with politics. But I’m going to tell you flat out that our children are being systemically poisoned by the food, the water.” I talked about the 22 chemicals in our local water, one of them being atrazine that not only converts the testosterone and estrogen levels of frogs in the wild from runoff and of lab rats, not only destroys their hormonal levels of testosterone and estrogen, but male frogs and male rats actually grow female genitalia. This stuff is so powerful. And I said this is what’s happening to our children. Our boys are being destroyed, our girls are being destroyed. Their hormonal levels are out of whack. They have no clue how they're supposed to feel. Then they're told by you guys that it’s perfectly okay to feel the way you feel, dress the way you want to dress. And it's wrong. Because eventually, these kids are going to end up under the knife of some Dr. Frankenstein. This goes against all laws of nature. Even if you don’t believe in a Creator, it goes against all laws of nature and it’s horrible. It is the mutilation of and destruction of an entire generation of children. And it’s got to stop. And I told them flat out my children have never had a serious illness. When a lot of other kids are getting strep throat, flus, pneumonias, bronchitis, everything else, my kids have never experienced that because I make sure to put powerful organics in their bodies and they are constantly cleaned out and they are healthy as they can be.

So, that's what I want to try and get through to people, is that we have to save our kids and we’ve got to save our planet for those kids because are we going to leave them a toxic synthetic world that’s going to just destroy them? No! We can’t do that. 

[01:22:58] Ashley James: You talked about atrazine. I just recently shared a video with a scientist and his team of scientists about atrazine. One area of California has the highest levels of atrazine than across America. They were testing the water supply, the runoff in the streams near the farms. Incredibly high levels of atrazine. They were collecting the frogs and studying them. The head scientist was showing that look, this frog is a genetic male and he has both genitalia. They were showing that there were two frogs that were both genetically male and they were able to mate and reproduce. He was explaining it. Very fascinating. He goes this is terrifying for the health effects of humans because it is an endocrine disruptor. I think if we take the politics out, and I support children and families, I want them to be the healthiest they can be, and if there's something that’s hidden in their water supply, that they’re drinking, they're trusting their tap water, and I don’t even know if atrazine has been removed when you pour it through a Brita filter or whatever filter you're using that you think removes chemicals. Maybe it’s not being removed. Because there's certain filters that can’t remove everything. Even the Berkey can’t remove nitrites. So there's certain compounds that are so small, they can get through a lot of filters unless of course it’s like reverse osmosis. There's a few ones that can remove everything but they're also removing the trace minerals. So, the thing is, people are going around, trusting their water supply. They're getting atrazine in their body. It’s an endocrine disruptor. Whether that then as a child that’s growing up, all of a sudden now they're not having the appropriate amounts of hormones, which is disrupting them and making them feel very weird. I’d feel very weird if my hormones are being disrupted or like when women get put on birth control, it makes you feel different. It absolutely makes you feel different.

But not only that. And I agree with what you're saying that we need to be very cautious for our children. And it’s in our food, the atrazine is in our food. It’s now hidden in our water because it’s runoff, all these chemicals. But it’s an endocrine disruptor while you are maturing but also past maturity, that is going to cause cancer. That is going to cause other diseases. We see this. We see this that anything that’s an endocrine disruptor affects. We might see on the outside it’s affecting hugely the reproductive system and the testosterone and all the estrogens. But then, it trickles down and it affects because all of our hormonal systems are in this crazy balance, so you're throwing this out of balance. Then we see down the road, increase in childhood cancers. Increase in ADD or ADHD now because it’s disrupting how we function, how our brain functions, how we learn. And you're affecting the child’s future. Everything. You're affecting fertility. So, we need to come back and take control. We need to come back and go, okay, I need clean water, I need clean food, I need clean water and clean food into my families at all times. I need to make sure that we’re getting good clean food that's healthy and I need to make sure I’m filling in those gaps like mortar. You know, bricks are food, the mortar is the supplements. And making sure I’m getting all the minerals I need to optimize our health.

I appreciate that you’ve brought up atrazine because that’s something I haven’t covered on the show specifically. We’ve covered other chemicals but that specifically is so important. We’re seeing girls getting their period younger and younger. We’re seeing 8-year-olds growing breasts. It used to be like maybe grade 8 or 9 that this would happen. Now, it’s in middle school, right? Something’s changed.

[01:27:12] Pat Miletich: You know, it’s funny but it’s not funny. But, you know, somebody as crazy as Alex Jones talked about it, but he framed it completely wrong because he’s such a theatrical lunatic that he would scream “They’re turning the frogs gay!” And he was correct in what was happening to the frogs and the lab rats that they were being destroyed with their hormone levels, but he wasn’t explaining it scientifically what was happening to them and what’s happening to our children that are children are being destroyed. And this is something that, yeah, we’ve got to wake people up and we’ve got to help them educate themselves. And that's what’s frustrating about an education system that is basically almost an accomplice to the crimes that are being committed against our children because they’re not educated in the family, they're not educating the children about what’s happening to them, to their bodies, to their minds and everything else that’s going on and instead are just saying it’s okay, it’s perfectly—it’s perfectly normal that you're being poisoned. So, that's where we’ve really got to change things.

Again, that's the whole thing is I don’t care one way or another what people do with their lives, but we’ve got to have them healthy physically and mentally for them to make the decisions of what they want to do with their lives. If they're sick mentally and physically and are so confused that they don’t know how to feel, they're not making educated decisions for their own lives at all. 

[01:28:46] Ashley James: Well, it’s like this. What if atrazine caused diabetes and obesity? Let’s just say that it caused that. And the school board said, you know, it’s perfectly normal to be incredibly sick and have diabetes. It’s perfectly normal and we’re just going to support this and we’re going to feed you lots of sugar, we’re going to fill you up with chemical processed crap. We’re not going to feed you any healthy food, we’re going to cut out recess. We’re going to decrease PE. Just do everything to support your unhealthy habit and lifestyle, right? And to make sure that you continue to have it. I mean, that is not in any way in the child’s best interest. What’s in the child’s best interest is we’re going to give you a healthy diet, we’re going to support you in reversing type 2 diabetes and increasing insulin sensitivity. We’re going to give you more recess time. We’re going to let you run around and be a kid and be as healthy as possible. We’re going to make sure your food is clean, your water is clean, your air is clean. We’re going to put you in buildings that don’t have mold that don’t have toxic off-gassing. We’re going to just do the best we can and give you a healthy environment. Whatever. The child decides to grow up to be fantastic because they’ve been given a healthy body and a clean and healthy environment—that’s what I want for them. That’s what I want. But they don’t have that right now. And the whole system is designed to keep people sick, so that’s why we have to take matters into our own hands. We have to get the right supplements. We have to get the clean food. We have to be the advocates for ourselves. We cannot leave our health up to any system especially a government system. There is my soapbox and it’s probably why I do homeschooling because I have a strong distrust of these large systems that I don’t feel are out for my child’s best interest.

Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing what you’ve shared. I’m again in awe of your product and of course, listeners can go to Learntruehealth.com/blackgold. Check it out. Try it for yourself. See how you like it. Do what my husband did. Take it for a few days, take it for a week and then go on a massive hike and see what happens. Or just do like me and be like a crazy mom with their head cut off and run around and do a million things like all moms do. Run around all day. And just notice that you don’t have to live off of energy drinks to Starbucks, like I don’t. I just feel amazing. I don’t do coffee all the time. And if I do, it’s one. It’s one little coffee. But I don’t do it all the time. I just feel great. And of course, I’m doing the foundation stuff and I just think it’s so important that we look to everywhere. We don’t just do one thing. We look to all the things. There are so many listeners who want to take their health to the next level and maybe it’s this one where it’s these really powerful probiotics from the earth and trace minerals from the earth to bring their health to the next level. I love that it fortifies the immune system and it helps oxygenate all the cells even more so. It helps the body remove heavy metals. You’ve checked every box on my list. So, the fact that it helps the mitochondria, I’m thinking about people with MS and people with mitochondrial disease and how this could help them. It’s very exciting. People with diabetes, with cardiovascular issues because it helps the vascular system. I think there’s so many people who are sick that could benefit from this in addition to doing all the other good things that are important for our health.

Yeah, Learntruehealth.com/blackgold. Is there anything you’d like to say to the listener who’s struggling with health and just learning about all these changes they could make to get on the other side and just overcome what they’re facing? Is there anything you’d like to say to them?

[01:32:40] Pat Miletich: I can just tell you that I can relate to severe health issues because I suffered as a kid for my entire childhood, again, into my early 20’s. To experience a life-changing event, putting organics in my body and being able to accomplish the things that I have, it was ultimately about changing other people’s lives, not just mine. What I was capable of then to help everybody from little kids to learn how to defend themselves and learn discipline all the way up to adults that just wanted to stay in shape and learn self-defense to professional athletes to military law enforcement. You can change your life. You really can and just take that step. It’s not scary. It’s an amazing adventure when you can wake up one day and go, “Wow, I really can now dream of things that I want to do with my life.” And that's what we want to give you. 

[01:33:33] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much, Pat, for coming on the show. Please come back when you’ve got the rest of those studies done. I want to hear it. I want to hear all the science that you guys discover as these studies continue. 

[01:33:46] Pat Miletich: Okay. You got it. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. 

[01:33:50] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you.

 

Get Connected with Pat Miletich!

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Nov 2, 2022

To get Kristen's transdermal magnesium soak, 
use coupon code LTH at
livingthegoodlifenaturally.com

490: How To Recover From Stress Through Magnesium Soak, Kristen Bowen

https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-recover-from-stress-through-magnesium-soak-kristen-bowen

 

Stress is something that is constantly around us and sometimes unavoidable. You need to stay on top of stress levels so they don't get out of control. Learning how to relax is important, but so is getting your body the nutrients it needs to heal itself. In this episode, Kristen talks about magnesium soaks, how to get a better night’s sleep, and managing the stress in our daily lives.

 

Highlights:

  • Ways to lower stress levels
  • Magnesium soaks
  • Insulin resistance
  • Knowing your “why”
  • Taking care of your circadian rhythm
  • Achieving cell saturation

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today, we have back on the show Kristen Bowen. She is so amazing. She was in episodes 294341, and 381. Although if you haven’t listened to those episodes, you will still enjoy today’s episode. I do recommend though that you eventually go back and listen to episode 294 because she shares her story, and it will bring you to tears in a good way. Let me just give you a little bit of a spoiler. She was about 90-something pounds in a wheelchair, having 30 seizures a day. Now, she’s fully recovered from that. She shares her story as to what caused it and how she got over it, and it will shock you. It is just amazing and sad how many people are suffering out there needlessly. It is people who, like Kristen, who advocate and her family who advocated for her health. I know that’s what you’re doing right now by listening to the show, you're advocating for your health. So, make sure you go back and listen to episode 294. You can always find if you're ever looking for a topic or an episode, you can go to Learntruehealth.com and search it in the search bar. Just type in, for example, magnesium or Kristen Bowen, and other wonderful episodes will come up.

In today’s episode, we do cover magnesium and the way that we can absorb the best forms of magnesium. We also go into recovering from the stress of the last two years and learning from the stressors of the last few years, learning from it, learning from our own stress and learning how to heal, overcome and grow, so that we can be better the next time we’re hit with a stressful situation in life, which I think is so important to learn from each other and learn from our past as well. 

Make sure you go to Kristen Bowen’s website, Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. That's Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and be sure to use the coupon code that she gives you. She gives a wonderful discount to our listeners. The coupon code is LTH as in Learn True Health. So that’s coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I love her magnesium soak. If you’ve listened to any of my previous episodes, I even talk about it in other interviews whenever we bring up magnesium because it’s made such a difference in my life. And there’s over 200 listener testimonials in the Learn True Health Facebook group. Go there and type in “magnesium soak” and you’ll see so many people talking about how wonderful this magnesium soak is. Listeners have shared that it has help them get rid of their migraines, their sleep problems, muscle cramps, their restless legs syndrome, energy. They got more energy out of it. I definitely notice that my muscles felt relaxed. It helped me with my detox. I’m doing heavy metal detox for the last 4 years. It’s helped me with that. It’s helped me with my liver functioning better.

Magnesium is needed for over 1800 enzymatic processes in the body. It’s the most needed mineral. The second most needed mineral is zinc at 800 enzymatic processes. So, when we think minerals, we always think calcium is the most needed but it’s not even in the top two. Magnesium is the most important. And we’re often walking around completely deficient in magnesium, and that's why a lot of people have these things like restless leg, digestion, adrenal burnout. And the list goes on and on. It’s pretty wild. So yes, listen to episodes 294341, and 381, the past episodes with Kristen. And today’s episode, you're just going to love where we just continue this wonderful conversation of how we can use magnesium to help heal the body. So, enjoy today’s interview, and thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about.

[00:04:02] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 490.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Kristen Bowen who, if you guys have been long-time listeners, well, remember my absolute favorite magnesium soak product. And the whole company, Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, of course, you can use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health for so many of their amazing products. Kristen, I love your company. You’ve been on the show with episode 294 where you shared and honestly, I dare you guys listen to episode 294 without crying tears of joy and inspiration because Kristen shares her story where she was crippled in a wheelchair and just so close to death, and she was able to regain her health and now she is an advocate to help those who are sick and suffering that no longer need to be sick and suffering. We can gain our health back and we can create optimal health. Kristen’s here to help. She’s like a sister from another mother, I don’t know. I don’t know.

[00:05:17] Kristen Bowen: It’s official, Ashley. We’re sisters. 

[00:05:20] Ashley James: We are, we are. So there’s episode 294, and then there’s 341 and 381. And we talk about all kinds of great things.

[00:05:28] Kristen Bowen: That’s what I love about your podcast, Ashley, is who knows where we’re going to go. 

[00:05:33] Ashley James: Who knows where we’re going to go? We definitely talked about parasites. You know it’s a real good interview when we talk about all the things we can get out of the body, detox and parasites. And I love this that you noticed in your coaching because you do this wonderful group coaching that women who held on to shame and guilt, no matter what lifestyle changes or supplements or diet changes they made, their bloodwork still showed that they weren’t getting the healing that they should be doing based on other lifestyle changes. When they were able to heal and move through shame and guilt and let go of it, that’s when their body then caught up.

So, you’ve observed some amazing things in the many years that you’ve been working with people. 

[00:06:22] Kristen Bowen: Oh, it’s been 20 now, Ashley. Just over 20 years I’ve had the privilege of connecting with the women I’ve connected with.

[00:06:32] Ashley James: And men, you can listen too. My husband loves the magnesium soak. So, men are here too. But, you know, as women, we definitely see relationship between our stress, between our magnesium levels, and between our hormone balance, and I think that’s really interesting. And we’re going to get into that today because Kristen and I, we’ve both been through it as I think everyone has who’s listening. The last two years, there was high, high levels of stress, higher levels than normal. And, now, what we’re seeing after two years of just this background noise of higher stress in people’s lives.

[00:07:12] Kristen Bowen: And disconnect.  

[00:07:14] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s now showing up in bloodwork. And we’re now seeing not just stress hormones and blood work, but we’re seeing other things. So, Kristen was telling me about that before we hit record. And I thought, how interesting. Right now, what we need to do is a mass healing. So, everyone who’s listening is here to gain better health, to learn true health, and acknowledge and heal from the last few years, let it go, and now, we need to heal from it on an emotional level but also on a physical level, and make sure that we’re checking in with our physical body and our emotional mental body, and then making the lifestyle changes, the diet changes that we need to make to bring that healing in so that we can go back to health and then from before the last two years, and even then, even get more health from that. Because I want to be able to use the last two years, even though we’ve kind of sort of stepped back in our health, some people, like I know I have, with the stress that I’ve been under in the recent past, and now I’m back into healing mode. Right? We’re going to be able to take the last two years, learn from it, and then grow even more.

[00:08:34] Kristen Bowen: I love that. 

[00:08:35] Ashley James: Yeah. And there’s something that was taught at our church recently where we talked about how Jesus, there’s times where He would go into the wilderness, he went to the wilderness, and then He goes up on the mountain. Right? And sometimes, we’re in the thick of it. We’re in the wilderness, and that’s when we’re stressed and we’re suffering. Then there’s times we go up on the mountain and that’s when we’re rejoicing, and we’re loving life, and we got a whole new perspective. And so, I’m inviting everyone to walk out of the wilderness, up into the mountain, and learn from the last two years. But right now, today, we’re going to learn from Kristen what we can do to check in with ourselves and to get back up on that mountain of health.

[00:09:23] Kristen Bowen: You know, Ashley, I loved so many things that you said. I love the fact that you talked about and spoke of the different dimensions of healing because I think everyone listening right now could share their hard time. You can share your hard time, I can share my hard time. Your listeners can share their hard times. One of the things that happens as a trauma response, is we stay in one dimension to heal. And it is a trauma response. We need to recognize it as a trauma response so that we’re not stuck in singular dimensional healing because that’s where we get frustrated, that’s where I hear women say, “I’ve tried everything, nothing works”. And we are multifaceted dimensional beings, and we need to heal on all of those dimensions.

Before we get started, can I just tell you, I had never even thought of going on a podcast like that. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. You were the very first podcast that I went on. And Ashley, you’re my favorite. It’s okay to say that, it’s the truth, because right now, I do not have to filter “Oh my gosh, say that in a soundbite. Get done in 30 minutes, they want this podcast over in 30 minutes.” Oh, I can’t even go there because just helping them understand so that they understand that concept, that’d take me 15 minutes and then that podcaster is going to be frustrated. And it’s just so nice, Ashley, to come on to your podcast knowing that it’s not a set place of where we’re going to go in our conversation that you will help me to flesh out anything and everything. So, I am just sending you this big massive, warm, enveloping hug of gratitude for the gift that you have in taking and leading your guests who come on to your podcast. I’m pretty confident that your listeners are sending that right along with me, so thank you. 

[00:11:45] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well, thank you. For listeners who didn’t listen to our previous episodes with Kristen Bowen, in episode 294 I explained how we met. My friend found out that Kristen was flying all the way into Seattle to host…

[00:12:02] Kristen Bowen: Downtown Seattle. 

[00:12:03] Ashley James: Downtown Seattle, in the summer. No one goes to downtown Seattle. You don’t do that.  

[00:12:09] Kristen Bowen: I didn’t know. I didn’t know. 

[00:12:12] Ashley James: It was a free health lecture on magnesium and it was like a Facebook advertisement, my friend told me about it, and I said, “Okay, well let’s carpool down there.” And it was ridiculous because you just don’t go into Seattle in the evening in the summertime. There’s construction, there’s crosstown traffic. It’s ridiculous.

[00:12:33] Kristen Bowen: I think at one point my team and I were two minutes from walking. The Google Maps told us two minutes walking to the thing and we were in our van that I had rented to get everything there. It was over an hour to drive there. It was so bad.

[00:12:53] Ashley James: Right. It’s like New York City. Just get out and walk. So, it’s pretty crazy, the traffic here. So, I just thought it was hilarious. Anyone who knows Seattle, you do conferences outside like you do it in the suburbs. People would rather join up north than drive into it. But there we were in this gorgeous conference room overlooking the sounds, like overlooking the ferries. It was beautiful. The sun was setting. It looked like you spent a million dollars in this place. And like maybe 7 people showed up, I felt so bad for you. But you paid so much attention and gave an amazing health demonstration/health lecture. You let us all soak in your magnesium. And then you answered everyone’s questions and you acted like the room was filled with a thousand people.

[00:13:41] Kristen Bowen: To me, those 7 people who came were as important as 1000 people, Ashley.

[00:13:49] Ashley James: But I’ve hosted these things before. That’s what I used to do. I used to work for a training company, and I used to travel around and host these. I know how much that costs, so I was sitting in the backroom going —

[00:13:59] Kristen Bowen: Yeah, I was upside down. 

[00:14:00] Ashley James: I was like, she has lost a lot of money on this. I’m just sitting in the backroom. Because that’s what I used to do in my previous life, was lead those kind of trainings and book them and budget them and advertise and all that stuff. So, in the back of the room, when I thought it was just so funny because I was thinking to myself, you know, Kristen doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to expose her to like 100,000 people, and this is going to be so great. Sure enough, at the end of it, I say, “hey, you got to get on my show.” And I felt drunk by the end because I was soaking her magnesium. Now, I’ve done a magnesium intravenous before and it felt like that. I’m like, this stuff is legit. Because I’ve soaked in other magnesium products, didn’t feel a difference. I’ve soaked in Epsom salt, that feels relaxing, but nothing felt like actually getting it in my veins.

[00:14:55] Kristen Bowen: You got to get the real deal, baby. 

[00:14:56] Ashley James: Like the real stuff. So, Kristen’s magnesium soak, to me, felt like I was getting an IV of magnesium and it felt amazing. I’m like, this stuff is awesome. Then I started to have a detox reaction in a good way, and I started to taste heavy metals, then she told me what I needed to do. So, I’ve used it in conjunction with all the other things that I do for my heavy metal detox. I soak in the magnesium while in my sauna, and that’s something I learned from you as well. And it’s a great one-two punch. But I noticed almost immediately feeling better, but what was really cool is our son who fights sleep like you wouldn’t believe, I put it in his bath without telling him, and he was a toddler at the time, and he turned to me and said halfway through the bath, he goes, “Let’s just go straight to bed. You can skip books. I’m too tired. Let’s just go straight to bed.”

And I’m like, what? First of all, who is this kid? So really, this stuff was working and then I had you on the show and then we got over 200 testimonials in our Facebook group of people saying how much the magnesium soak made a difference. And your magnesium cream is fantastic. When I was pregnant, I had like those achy kind of muscles in my legs, almost like restless leg syndrome and I immediately rubbed it with your magnesium, really concentrated magnesium cream. And then, just immediately the muscles would let go.

[00:16:27] Kristen Bowen: I think it’s so interesting to remember that especially when we’re pregnant, we’re now taking the magnesium our body has and ensuring that with the baby. And if you don’t upgrade your magnesium levels during the pregnancy, one or both of you is going to become deficient. So, it’s the critical time to be soaking during that pregnancy. Studies have shown that as the baby comes down the birth canal, that the head bends more easily when magnesium levels are high to get in the proper position for birth. So, magnesium is important always, very important during pregnancy.

[00:17:11] Ashley James: Well, I felt it. Your products have saved me so many times. Another thing I wanted to say was that you have, in the past I bought a coconut powder on your website as an electrolyte. I recommend anyone who likes to build their medicine cabinet filled natural stuff that they can just run to. Having that coconut powder in my medicine cabinet has really helped because there's…

[00:17:39] Kristen Bowen: Ashley, I have bad news.

[00:17:41] Ashley James: No! I’ll just take this out then.

[00:17:47] Kristen Bowen: Well, let me share with you though and then you can decide. So, in 2020, businesses had a decision to make. That decision was, do I change suppliers and sell any kind of junk? Or, do I get real with my customers and say we can’t source the quality that we usually have? And Living the Good Life Naturally, with me being the CEO of that company made the decision that because we lost our supply chain, we were not willing to compromise on quality of that product. What the company sent us was not acceptable. Everything goes through third-party testing before it goes into our warehouse. And so, I made the decision with team Good Life absolutely supporting me that this was not a product we were willing to sell to people. And so, because of that, we are temporarily out of stock of that. We are looking for another supplier but we will not put that back into stock until we find that supply chain that meets our rigorous standard. 

[00:19:03] Ashley James: You know what, I’m not deleting that. I’m not deleting it. I want listeners to hear what you just said. Now there's only two companies. Yours and one other company I know of that's willing to lose money to ensure quality products and it’s rare. It’s such a rare thing for a founder of a company to cut their own profits for the safety and efficacy and for their customer. Right? You’re making ethical decisions that prove to me and this is again why I really love your products. So, when it gets back to stock, I love the coconut powder. It’s a fantastic electrolyte. And you don’t know when you need an electrolyte. There's only been about three times that I’ve needed it. My husband likes to do fast once a year. He does like a 30-day fast. And all of a sudden I’m like, oh, his electrolytes are off and I made him some, and it restored him right away. Then there was two more times during the summer when my son or I, I think we were like at the fair or something all day long and we both became almost like beyond dehydrated. You know what I mean when you're in the sun too long and you start getting headache-y. Man, that stuff immediately brought us back.

So, as far as electrolytes go, that is my favorite electrolyte drink. So, when you get it back in stock, you’re going to have to let me know because that coconut powder. And it hardly tastes like anything. It’s not very strong but it’s all those different trace elements and minerals the body needs to just restore it. So, it’s not just magnesium that Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com has, and I love that you really look at quality. In terms of your skin care lines, it’s stuff that I would make if I was in a kitchen filled with ingredients and I needed to make like a facemask or I needed to make a cream for my face. It’s just all real ingredients that are very pure. So, I really appreciate you.

[00:21:13] Kristen Bowen: Thank you. We’ve lost so many products because of supply chain issues. But here’s the thing. And I think that your listeners might enjoy understanding the concept of when you know your values, decisions are easier. So, in the company, we work every year on our values and fine tuning our values. I am a company, I have to make profit, payroll and keep the lights on—money does not drive my decisions. That is not one of my core values. And so, once you’ve fleshed out your values, decisions are so much easier. That plays for your health also. Knowing your personal values will help you to make those decisions when it comes to your health with more ease.

So in January is what I do every year, is I reassess values and ask myself those questions. “Am I making decisions based on my own personal core values?”

[00:22:30] Ashley James: Absolutely. When I check in with myself, when it comes to my values, I will make better health decisions. I’ll say “No, I don’t want to eat out” even though eating out is fun. It’s easy, it’s convenient, I don’t have to wash dishes after, like I’m tired. All these reasons that sound really good. So, that would lead me to a behavior of eating out a lot. But when I check in with myself and I go “I value my health above all else,” I know the ingredients they put in that food. Don’t put your head in the sand. When you eat out, you're getting the lowest quality foods because restaurants need to make a profit and you're getting a ton of pesticides and those oils and those free radicals, lots of sugar, just highly processed food versus eating at home. Or, I’ll be at the grocery store and something looks good, I will always read the label. I will read that whole label, all those crazy ingredients, and then I’ll decide, is this fuel for my cells? Are my cells going to rejoice at these ingredients? Or are my cells going to shrink, shrivel up, and die from these ingredients? And that's because I value my health. Right?

So your decisions, your behavior and then your results in life are directly impacted by making sure that your values are motivating and driving your decisions. It is always good to check in because sometimes we sort of fall off the bandwagon. I know talking about stress in the last year, losing our daughter, moving twice and then losing a major family member in our little family unit, so we’ve had two deaths and two moves in a year. And I did have some PTSD that was acting up. I’ve never had it in my life until then, but that's why I didn’t know what it was at first. But I was very dysfunctional in my life. Couldn’t even walk into a kitchen and complete cooking a meal. And I love cooking and I’ve been cooking since I was a kid.

So, I was like wow, why can’t I focus, why can’t I cook. I went from publishing 2 to 3 episodes a week to 1 a month. That, for me, was like what is going on? Why am I not functioning correctly? And I was eating out a lot. Because that's the only way I could get food in me because I couldn’t even cook a meal. So that, for me, like at my peak stress and then I had to step back and go, okay, I need to do some triage, do some deep breaths and I need to do baby steps. And that's some coaching I got from this amazing psychologist, Dr. Glen Livingston who’s been on the show multiple times. I just love him. He said, you know, “You need to choose some baby steps. What can you do?” Because of course, I was feeling so much guilt and shame for I am this big health advocate, I love being healthy, but I’m eating out and not taking care of myself because that's all I could manage. 

So, he invited me to figure out what I could do versus what I thought I should do. Right? I had to really scale back. Okay, what can I do? And maybe it’s a 5-minute walk. Maybe it’s just 2 minutes of deep breathing. Maybe it’s just steaming some vegetables. What can I do? And those little baby steps got me back on track. But I love that you said to check in with your values because we can use that in our business to help steer an ethical business. We can use it in our health to help us steer in the direction towards better and better health.

[00:26:11] Kristen Bowen: Ashley, I want to take a minute and just recognize that we mourn to the level that we love and just sit with you. That's a lot that you went through. And just honor all the work that you put in, the support that you had, the trauma, the heartache, the love, the refining that happened for you and your family during that time. We love you, Ashley.

[00:26:49] Ashley James: Thank you. Why I’m sharing and why I’ve always been vulnerable in my show even before all this, is that I know the listener, whoever is listening also has been through it or is going through it. Right? This is a bridge. We are so connected. I want people to feel like they’re being heard and they're being understood, and it’s like, wow, I’m going through to giving them permission to self-nurture, to heal. 

[00:27:24] Kristen Bowen: You know what could be happening right now, Ashley? Could I talk about it for a little bit? Kind of our first little sideways jaunt. So, you experienced like that is so many major traumas stacked on top of each other. Patterns can walk us toward health or walk us away from health. We all carry healthy patterns, and we all carry broken patterns. I’ve watched over the last 20 years as I’ve helped women achieve self-saturation through soaking in magnesium from Living the Good Life Naturally, I have watched women not even be able to see their broken patterns. As they start to bring those broken patterns into the light and heal them, that’s when the flow kicks in and health becomes easier to create. One broken pattern that could have been happening with some of your listeners that I know comes up for me a lot is the pattern of what I call “compare and contrast”.

Now, when I’m buying beautiful shoes, I’m a shoe girl and I love shoes, when I am buying shoes, I am comparing them to other shoes. And I am contrasting them to determine is this a shoe that I’m willing to bring into my closet? Because I’m also someone who operates from the belief that I don’t want too many pairs of shoes. So, it slows me down; I have to be very conscious about my purchasing decision with my clothing and my shoes. And so, I’m comparing and contrasting, and that's an appropriate way to use the pattern of compare and contrast. But if I was listening to you say that and I was in a stressed-out state, but I took that pattern of compare and contrast, I could be increasing my guilt and shame right now by saying, “Oh, my stress isn’t as bad as Ashley’s stress.” So, therefore, what I’m going through, I’m minimizing that like oh, it’s no big deal. Because here’s the thing. Trauma is trauma. Making that change in my business from teaching classes in person to now I spend my day teaching classes online, I can put my body into a trauma mode by sitting too long, Ashley. And it can go back into a dysregulated nervous system because I forgot to stand up every hour and move and make sure that that psoas muscle is not stuck in fight or flight. 

So, there are definitely degrees of trauma when my husband experience double amputation. That's a different level of trauma than me sitting at my desk. But trauma is trauma, and walks us away from healing and focusing on not comparing my trauma to your trauma, but recognizing we all need to be regulating our nervous systems because if we’re not achieving cell saturation with magnesium from Living the Good Life Naturally, is not going to happen as easily. I like that ease and flow. It’s one of the reasons I love coming on your podcast. There’s an ease in the flow to have a conversation, and I want that same ease and flow in creating health. If I’m comparing my trauma to your trauma, I’m just increasing my own personal trauma. Hard is hard no matter what it is ease.

Now, some of it has more complexity, some of it has more layers. But when we’re in a dysregulated nervous system state, it doesn’t matter the food we’re eating. It doesn’t matter the supplements we’re taking. It doesn’t matter how often we’re soaking in magnesium. We’re not in healing mode. And so, making sure that we’re adding layers to our day throughout the day to help keep our bodies regulated, our nervous system regulated is one of those dimensions that you spoke of earlier that if you are not focusing on that right now, you are slowing down your own healing. 

[00:32:25] Ashley James: Yes, stress is stress. I did a recent interview where a doctor talked about how your nervous system and your body and your hormones, they can’t differentiate the difference between stress from your boss yelling at you, stress from eating a fried food, drinking alcohol. Stress is stress. Or breathing in smoke from a nearby forest fire or mold exposure. And the body responds to stress in the same way. Just like drinking alcohol and eating a Mars bar is all the same to your liver really. It converts to sugar and your body still has to deal with it. So, a lot of times when people give up alcohol, alcoholics give up alcohol, they will run to sugar. Go to an AA meeting and you’ll always see sugar at an AA meeting. They’re actually still doing addictive behavior. Luckily, they're sober. They're not sober from sugar but they're sober from being drunk. So, it is an improvement, but they're still feeding the addiction brain and that's still a high state of stress. 

[00:33:37] Kristen Bowen: Can I share one of my favorite tools that pretty much I think all of your listeners would have access to? It has helped regulate my nervous system. And I actually do it while I soak in magnesium. Have we got a minute that we can go there, Ashley?

[00:33:53] Ashley James: We have all the minutes you need.

[00:33:55] Kristen Bowen: Okay, I love that. So, now, please remember I’m not a doctor. I’m not prescribing, I’m not diagnosing. I am not a psychologist. So, please make sure that you are using a strong filter to make sure that this is an appropriate activity for you. For me, it was like a great big deep glass of water on every dimension of my health. But I don’t know what each individual experience will be like, so please remember that. 

Go to YouTube. Put in the search your favorite song that you just, you know, that song. In fact, do you have one, Ashley? Do you have a song that you just love? One of my mine is Hallelujah. I love that song. Do you have a song that you love, Ashley, that you can think off the top of your head?

[00:34:53] Ashley James: I am thinking of a song, but I forgot the name.

[00:34:56] Kristen Bowen: Okay, that's fine. So, one of mine is Hallelujah and I love listening to different renditions of that song. So, if you go to YouTube, and this works better if you have headphones on. You go to YouTube with your headphones on, put in the name of your favorite song, and then put 8D. Now, my experience was incredible, deep relaxation, which when you're soaking in magnesium, if you're in fight or flight, it’s going to take longer for your body, your lymph specifically, to pump up that magnesium through your body because you're in fight or flight. And so, by putting that music on in 8D, it just helps relax me. Now, my husband –

[00:35:54] Ashley James: Did you say N? Could you just explain? Is it like N as in Nancy, the number 8 and D as in dog?

[00:36:02] Kristen Bowen: No. Just the song that you like, so Hallelujah, and then 8, and then D as in dog. So the numeral 8 and then D as in dog. It’s the same song but a different format and different waves for your brain. Now, some people, it will be irritating. So please, filter this to your own experience. If it’s irritating to you, be done. It’s not a good fit. For many people, it is just soothing at the cellular level. My husband is a Styx fan. I cannot tell you how many times that man has driven through the night to go to a Styx concert. He loves Styx. So, I said to him, for those that don’t know, he’s a double amputee recently in the last couple of years. He was born without the proper veins in his body and so, certain parts of his body don’t get enough oxygen and blood, and so, the body part dies. He has a higher level of pain than most people have and experience. So, I’m always looking for things to help facilitate and help him manage his pain. And magnesium is one of those. So, he was in soaking in magnesium, he does it in the tub because he doesn’t have feet, so the tub is the best option for him. I said to him, just put these headphones on and listen to this music. It was a Styx in 8D. He now has headphones on all of the time. And now, in our marriage, I’m like “okay, take the headphones off, talk with me, connect with me, come on, come back to me,” because it’s helped him so much relax. When you find those tools that help you relax, it increases the ability that your body has to hold on to magnesium, to stay at cell saturation, which activates your stored vitamin D to convert to active vitamin D, which is the first gateway we need built for optimal health. So, that simple task of music in the 8D form can be an incredible tool to help you achieve cell saturation faster.

[00:38:40] Ashley James: It makes sense that we absorb less or takes longer to absorb when in fight or flight, understanding that the sympathetic nervous system response of the autonomic nervous system, it shuns blood away from certain areas and puts blood more into the muscle so that we’re running. It gets us ready to fight or to run. It increases insulin so that it drives sugar into the cells and obviously, there's an increase in stress hormones as well. It shuns blood away from the logic centers of the brain so it’s harder to think clearly and make rational decisions, and it’s harder to decide that it’s a good idea to sit down and soak in magnesium. When we’re in a state of stress, we’re like, “Okay, we got to go, go, go,” and then we’re kind of tired and exhausted. Some people go, “Well, I don’t feel like…” This is my husband. “I don’t feel like a magnesium soak right now.” I’m like, “That's because you’re in stress response. I’m just going to put a bowl under you and you're going to put your feet in it, and then by the end of it, you’ll be happy you did.” And he’s always happy he did.

Another thing in addition to listening to the music, and I can’t wait to try that, is doing a specific type of deep breathing that was taught by Forrest Knutson on the show. This is a type of breathing that increases heart rate variability which heart rate variability is, if listeners didn’t hear that episode, heart rate variability is the variation between heart beats, the heart rate on an inhale versus an exhale. If there's no difference in your heart rate when you're inhaling versus exhaling, you are in a high state of stress. Health insurance companies are now experimenting with using this metric to determine life expectancy and whether they're going to give you a life policy or not because those who have good heart rate variability will die sooner basically is what they're proposing based on what they’ve been seeing. So, you want to get your body out of state of stress.

Recently, Dr. Alan Christianson came on the show, talked about a massive study where they followed a huge amount of people for their entire lives. They found that the number one cause of early death was stress. Number one cause. And it didn’t matter what kind of stress. It could be like staying up till midnight every night. It could be smoking, it could be drinking alcohol. But it could just be bad habits like not walking, not breathing, allowing yourself to stay in stress and staying up late at night, choosing to eat the standard American diet. But just stress levels, they saw that if you stay in stress, it all costs mortality, die younger than people who chose to be not in stress or figured out how to not be in stress.

So, I know it sounds like I’m just saying, “Oh, just get out of stress,” right? Just do it. But, it’s little tricks like you said. Closing your eyes, listening to this music. Another thing is this breathing. The breathing is you take as deep of a breath as you can, make sure that you expand your lungs, you expand your ribs, you feel your ribs expand, you feel your tummy expand, you feel your clavicle and your sternum rise, or you're feeling your whole being expand. Then when you think you’ve got to the top of the breath, you can even add a few more ounces of air. But you take about 5 seconds to do this big deep breath and then you take 7 seconds and there's no pause in between. So, 5 seconds in, inhale, inhale, inhale, inhale; and immediately, 7 seconds out, so you're counting, you can do it even longer, but as long as the exhale is longer than the inhale and then there's no pause at the bottom, you’ll then immediately inhale again.

So, if you're doing a longer inhale than 5 seconds, you can make it 7 but then you need to make your exhale 10 seconds. So, you do this and you do that after a few minutes, you’ve increased your heart rate variability and that you’ve taken yourself out of the stress response. So, that's a very powerful breathing technique.

To pair it with sitting in a magnesium soak would be really good because the diaphragm is one of the major components of pumping the lymphatic system, which is all the fluid outside your cells, to get them back up into the circulatory system, into the veins, and back into the arteries. And that's where the body removes all the junk and that's where it brings all the nutrients. That's where all the good stuff happens. So, the magnesium soak comes into our skin, through our skin, into the lymphatic system, and by pumping the lymphatic system, we’re washing the cells with nutrients and taking out the garbage and reoxygenating. It’s so good for us. So, doing that deep breathing along with the magnesium, along with listening to the music, if we can do this every day, we’ve now cut down significantly our stress levels. To figure out how to do something throughout the day to lower stress is so important.

What other patterns do you have that could really help us?

[00:44:18] Kristen Bowen: One thing that I tell my clients, so we had ended up on a trip to Hawaii with a couple of our kids. It was amazing. I said to my husband, if I could do this every month, my stress levels would just be spectacular. He looked at me and he’s like, “Yeah, we’re not doing this every month.” So, I realize in that moment, oh, I need tools that I can do when I have 10 seconds, tools that I can do when I have 5 minutes, tools that I can do when I have an hour, tools that I can look forward to that are a vacation that if it’s a destressing vacation, if you're married up and so my vacations with my husband are incredibly destressing, they're not stressful, and so we need tools that we can apply every day because if I only have the tool of oh, when I have that opportunity to go to Hawaii, my stress levels will drop. That doesn’t happen all the time. So, we need to make sure that we have tools that we can use in a moment and when we have more time so that we have this varied array of tools.

While you were talking, Ashley, I just again found it so interesting that it’s those small moments that get us to where we want to be. The space in between our heartbeat is what determines our health. We can change that through the way that we breathe. It’s the smallest of things that make the most profound difference in the long-term quality of our life. I think that's a good pattern for all of us to remember. We can sometimes be looking for that next new cutting-edge thing to learn, the big tool that we have to save up and buy, but in reality, it’s changing our breath pattern. And that increases the quality and the space between our heartbeat which now we know and science has shown how absolutely vital that is for our vitality. 

You said something else, Ashley, that I would love to dive a little bit deeper. Because I don’t think the connection is talked about enough on the connection to inflammation. We know that inflammation drives disease. We know that inflammation increases pain. And so, with my filter on, with my husband, I’m always looking at things that I can do to help with inflammation. Because if you are someone like my husband who manages pain, that inflammation aggravates it.

You talked about the insulin and going into the cell. We have a problem in our country in that insulin is not going into the cell. The cell is not getting the insulin that it needs because of a cell that hasn’t been made from proper healthy materials. So, the cell knows it needs insulin and it calls out for more, so the pancreas creates more insulin and sends it over to the cell, but the cell is blind to the insulin and so then, we have all this free-floating insulin that’s incredibly inflammatory because it’s not in the right place. So, making sure that your body is seeing, you're at the cellular level that you're seeing the insulin, that the insulin can enter the cell, is so important. If someone ever says to me “I’ve tried everything,” that is what I hear in my language in my head is, “I might be insulin-resistant and not understand it and not have the tools to put into place to walk away from that” because that free-floating insulin is incredibly inflammatory.

[00:48:53] Ashley James: So, I used to have type 2 diabetes and I reversed it naturally. I’ve gone on studying with naturopaths, I’ve gone on to do a lot of coaching around blood sugar balance. When the body becomes insulin-resistant, which like you said, the cells, they're unhealthy cells, there's a few reasons for this, which is quite interesting. One of them being that there are 16 trace minerals required for insulin to open the door to allow glucose in. So, glucose will rise and rise and rise in the blood which is very pro-inflammatory, and the pancreas has to produce more and more and more insulin until it busts the cell open to allow glucose in. It’s opposite of type 1 diabetes being too little insulin. Type 2 diabetes, the pancreas often is fantastic at producing insulin, it’s producing enough insulin for 5 people, but the cells are sick and the cells are not responding to the insulin, so the glucose is rising and rising and rising on the outside of the cell, but the cells are starving on the inside. I remember experiencing this first hand. I was hungry all the time. I had to eat all the time. Every 45 minutes, I had to eat. It wasn’t until I took in trace minerals and I changed my diet and I started walking and within days I felt just this huge shift. But minerals were the first things that stopped the hunger, the constant gnawing hunger, was taking in trace minerals and then the hunger went away first time in years.

That’s the first thing that helps the insulin work with the cells. But when we have high stress, the body is trying to force more glucose into the cells so that we have more cellular energy to be able to run from the bare. So, people are often hyper- and hypoglycemic. They’re just a rollercoaster. So, under stress, they’re a rollercoaster of blood sugar. And then that often with the lifestyles that’s happening today and with stress, people have insulin resistance and don’t even know it.

[00:51:17] Kristen Bowen: Well, and there’s such a simple way that they can look at their bloodwork. And if they're willing to look at the relationships in their bloodwork, not all, but a lot of people are very familiar with a cholesterol panel. If you look at your triglycerides and you look at your HDL, the relationship of those two numbers can give you some data into your body into how insulin resistant you are.  

[00:51:54] Ashley James: Can you explain? I’m really excited to learn this. 

[00:51:57] Kristen Bowen:  Absolutely. So, grab a phone, grab your bloodwork, your cholesterol. You want your triglycerides and your HDL. You take your triglycerides and you put that into the calculator first, your triglyceride number. And then hit ‘divide’ and then enter your HDL number and then hit ‘equals’. That number will give you a feedback. It’s a feedback tool for you to know how deep into how insulin resistant you have become. Because some people on being insulin resistant are like what you experience that you just never felt full. Some people with insulin resistance wake up in the morning and they don’t want any food and so they go all day long without having any hunger pains and they don’t recognize that’s a sign of insulin resistance. Some people with insulin resistance are putting weight on as a spare tire around their belly and they don’t realize that’s a sign of insulin resistance.

And so, it used to be, and it depends on who you listen to and different studies, that you want that number minimum at 1.5. I see women creating optimal health when that number is closer to 1. If it’s in the 2’s, we're in trouble. If it’s in the 3’s, 4’s or 5’s, that’s a fire that has got to be taken care of so that it can be turned around and that communication between the cell and glucose and insulin can be balanced back out to where it needs to be.

[00:53:51] Ashley James: So, what lifestyle changes do you have your clients do in order to see those numbers change? 

[00:53:58] Kristen Bowen: Three things to start with that it doesn’t matter what a person is working on. There are three things that build the first gate of a strong vitamin D panel and the cells working. They soak in magnesium, they achieve cell saturation, they walk in the early morning sunshine. If you get on Google right now and you search for red light machines, you can spend thousands of dollars. I think we’ve forgotten the common sense. The original red light machine is the sun. And that first 2 hours that the sun comes up, the spectrum of colors specifically reduce inflammation in our body and help the insulin and the glucose to do what they’re supposed to do and interact in an appropriate relationship with the cell. So that red light therapy from waking up in the morning, within 2 hours if you can be there as the sun comes up, that’s the most powerful spectrum. And it helps to set that circadian rhythm and it also helps determine how much melatonin your body will produce to go to sleep that night. So, when we start to set that circadian rhythm in our cell, it’s like a wave. I’m able, I live in Morro Bay and so I walk the ocean every day for my walk. There’s that big crash of the wave that comes in and then it gets pulled out. And our cell has that same thing. That circadian rhythm needs to be a great big crash of the wave coming in and then going out. The way that we set that circadian rhythm is when we have strong magnesium levels, we’re walking, we’re in that sunshine and watching the sun come up and watching the sun go down.  

[00:56:03] Ashley James: Love it. I had Dr. Carolyn Dean on the show talking about magnesium. That was a really long interview. So good. And she’s a naturopath and an MD. She’s dedicated her life to magnesium. She says that magnesium is used in over 1800 enzymatic processes in the body. The next mineral or element is zinc at, I think, she said 700. So, calcium wasn’t even in the top 2. In terms of the body needing it for enzymatic functions, magnesium is absolutely the most important nutrient. Now, all the trace minerals and elements are important for the body. If you’re missing one, it’s like building a building and being like, okay, well, but you don’t have any cement. You have everything else but you don’t have cement really. Like, so you need everything. The body needs everything. And unfortunately, so many people are deficient and what they need in the body will take unhealthy substitutes to build because it’s like let’s just duct tape this together and keep going and maybe one day we’ll get the nutrients we need. 

That’s when cholesterol builds up. A lot of cardiologists have come forward and said that cholesterol is actually the body trying to patch up an area because it didn’t have enough building blocks for elastin and collagen. Like vitamin C, for example, is a needed nutrient for elastin. And if it doesn’t have enough of these nutrients, it’ll make patches, kind of like if you had a bike that the tire was ballooning but you didn’t have any tape, you would use glue or whatever. You’re going to use whatever you can to tape it up. And that’s what the body does. The body will take unhealthy heavy metals or halogens and replace and put them in our bones and put them in areas instead of the healthy ones.

So, that’s why every bite of food, I always have to remind myself like pleasure from food, it’s kind of the silliest thing, and we’ve just been so brainwashed and so marketed to. To put a donut in your mouth, for example, what are we building ourselves out of? A lot of sugar, flour, inflammatory foods, oil. Fifty different processed manmade chemicals. Like, what are we trying to build cells out of?

[00:58:36] Kristen Bowen: Oh Ashley, I have a donut story. Can I tell you my donut story? 

[00:58:41] Ashley James: Sure.

[00:58:42] Kristen Bowen: My husband used to work on campaigns. He’d be the manager of a campaign and he’d have a vision. He only did the campaigns that, for example, a school district that he worked on to recall the school district because the kids didn’t have pens and paper but the school district officials were taking private jets and flying their girlfriends to Las Vegas. And so, he wanted to help them recall those people who had been elected to office that were misusing funds. Do you know what his strongest strategy was? 

[00:59:28] Ashley James: Don’t tell me donut. 

[00:59:29] Kristen Bowen: It was. He would come up with different strategies and he’d evaluate, okay, what was the most effective. And here’s what he would do. He would take the opposing team because you’d have two political teams that were working against each other. In his situation, it was usually school boards that had forgotten who they were serving. And so, he would go in and do the recall and when it got down to the wire, he would take his campaign money and buy donuts and send to the other campaign the last week. They would be like, “Oh, who sent all these donuts?” When all those volunteers and all the workers are supposed to be out walking precincts to get their version of the story out, they were exhausted, tired, and couldn’t think because they had eaten his free donuts.

[01:00:26] Ashley James: No! 

[01:00:27] Kristen Bowen: Yup. He scrambled their brains with donuts and it was so effective, he used it every time. They couldn’t figure out like, “Who got these donuts?” “Oh, I don’t know. Here’s all these donuts showing up, though.” And it scrambled. Now, you can talk about whether that’s ethical, you know. But in the end, the bigger picture was, that school district, those people who had been elected to serve children were recalled because he scrambled the other side getting their word out that was actually a lie and broken, and they just wanted to hang onto the money that they had to be able to fly and go and misuse that money. It was used for a higher good because he wanted that money back developing the hearts and minds of children, but that’s how he scrambled the other side, was donuts. And it works, incredibly effective. And then, you take that and you look at our children. And what are we feeding them? We’re setting them up to fail, Ashley, because of the way that we’re feeding them.

[01:01:43] Ashley James: Mm-hmm. Oh, it is so sad. It is absolutely so sad. Go down a cereal aisle and I dare you to find a cereal that doesn’t have any sugar in it and also barley, wheat, rye or oats, because those are highly inflammatory and harmful. I have other interviews about that. 

But back when I was a kid, my mom was super strict when it came to eating clean. I had amazing health. After the age of 6, my mom found a naturopath. It was actually Dr. D’Adamo, the man that created Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type diet. He was my naturopath as a kid and I went from being sick all the time to overnight no longer being sick because he’s like, you’re O blood type, you can’t do dairy anymore, you can’t do sugar, you can’t do flour. I was 6 years old and boom, I remember waking up and all of a sudden, I had energy for the first time in my life. And I’m like woah, this is great. And I could go all day long just bike ride, bike ride. And I couldn’t do that before on the cereal and the cow’s milk and all the junk that I was being fed before. So, all of a sudden now, I was eating super clean and taking supplements and my whole life… it was almost like Paleo kind of. It was like just grilled chicken breast or eggs and lots of steamed vegetables and lentils. That’s what I grew up on. Then, of course, in my teenage years I rebelled, and that’s why I gave myself all those health issues because in my teenage years, completely the opposite and ate the standard American diet.

So, I’ve watched myself go from ill health to really amazing health to ill health, and then I’ve been building my health back up and giving myself amazing health. It’s simple as what meal you choose. So many doctors have done bloodwork and shown that even one meal makes a difference. Because some people go, “Oh, I’ll start that diet next week,” or, “I’ll start eating healthy next week and I’m just going to do this. I’m just going to eat these donuts now and then I’ll start…” But that one meal, just one good meal of steamed vegetables and brown rice and lentils, for example, instead of the burger and the fries, that shows up in your bloodwork right away. Right away. Every single thing you put in your mouth is feeding your cells. Because your body is constantly making new cells. You have over 37 trillion cells. It’s like 37.2 trillion cells. 

And so, millions of cells are dying every day. Millions of cells are being born or being created. Do you want those next 10 million cells to be fed fries and be built out of fries and a milkshake or a donut? Or do you want them to be built out of really nutritious food?

So, we actually will feel good after we start making these choices. So much of it, there’s so many components, right? When we’re under stress, we’re not thinking clearly. We can’t organize. Cooking, it’s like we have to have a break state. We have to get in there somewhere and just make a good choice. Just buy some apples. Something. We got to somehow get a wedge and then go “I need to insert a healthy habit here because I’ve been on a rollercoaster of bad choices because I’m under stress.”  

[01:05:03] Kristen Bowen: Okay, we’ve got to talk about this. Okay. So, I’ve experienced hard times. When my husband, during that amputation, and the one leg was taken and then six wees later, the second leg was taken. Ashley, I was not eating how I normally eat. It was all I could do to figure out how to get the ramp on the house, how to sell the car to get the new car that I’d be able to get him in to remodel the inside of the house, to show up at the hospital and learn the techniques of how I was going to help him get out of bed while I held the fear of I’m losing this man, I’m losing him.

Ashley, I was not out in my garden picking vegetables, steaming them. What I experienced was increased stress because I knew better, but I wasn’t living up to it. So, it kicked in even more stress because of what I know. So, sometimes, my concern is, am I helping to create more stress when people listen, who maybe aren’t in that place right now that they are making the greatest choices?

So, I want to stop right now and I want to share a couple of things that I do and I want to ask you what are some really simple things that you do when life is happening in a way that we’re doing our very best to just hang on. So, for me, stewing apples. When the apples are stewed and that skin goes shiny on an apple, so I just cut it up, shallow pan of water. A cooked apple is actually more nutritious than just eating an apple. It releases the pectin. And when that skin turns shiny, that means your body has access to that pectin. Incredibly healthy, incredibly easy. Apples can sit on your counter for a long time without going bad. Super simple way to stop, take a moment, and increase. And if you don’t have time to cook it, when you’re taking that apple and eating it, chew it really, really well. Chew it so very well and that will increase your health.

So, Ashley, share with me something because I do not want to do a podcast that gives someone more ammunition to throw more guilt on themselves when they're having their own hard time. Because one thing I’ve found that people do is they’ll project on me that during that hard time, I was eating perfectly. And Ashley, I did not. It was all I could do to get the modifications in our home. The insurance kicked him out of the hospital. I had to fight the insurance. Plus, I just wanted to be with him in the hospital. There were times I was eating out of the vending machine just because my caloric intake had dropped so low and there was nothing around me and it was midnight. I didn’t even have enough to take the next step to do what I needed to do. And so, I want to make sure, number one, that people are not projecting that during my personal hard time that I was eating impeccably—because I was not.

You talked about how adaptive our bodies are. When we build, when we take that pattern of building trust and trusting our bodies, and when we build healthy habits like hydration, chewing our foods well, our bodies can adapt. My body had the ability to create health for me even though I wasn’t doing things perfectly. But if our belief is that we have to do everything perfectly to deserve the health, then we never create health. Because our beliefs drive what our body can do. Our body is listening to our internal dialogue, and we are so powerful that it will create what we’re thinking. And if we think, “Oh I can’t have optimal health because I didn’t do everything that I’ve learned perfectly today,” that’s actually a trauma response. You’re in fight or flight. And part of creating health is rebuilding that trust bank with our body. My health got better when I was taking care of him even though I was not doing things perfectly. And I ate things from that vending machine that right now, I would no more make that choice. But at the time, Ashley, truly it was the best choice for me. It was the only choice that I had.

So, that pattern of rebuilding trust with our body and knowing “No, I’m not doing it perfectly. I’m doing the best that I can with the tools that I have in this moment.”

[01:10:31] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, there’s good, better, best. Right? My mother-in-law taught our son the little poem. Maybe you guys should learn this because it’s such a good reminder. Good, better, best. Never let it rest until you’re good is better and your better best.

She taught him that when he was just a toddler. It was so cute too hear his little toddler voice say it. I always have frozen vegetables like an assortment, like the giant bags. I like Costco. Our Costco has got a lot of organic choices. Frozen vegetables, I wouldn’t want to live off of them for the rest of my life. It’s a better choice than fried food and takeout. Okay? So, I always have frozen vegetables that I can grab. Or I actually have a few bags that I’ve made my own where I’ve cut up my own vegetables. Because if you’re like me and you buy a bunch of vegetables and all of a sudden, four days go by and you realize your vegetables are going bad and you haven’t cooked them all. You can chop them all up, put them in a big freezer bag, put them in the freezer, and then throw them in a stew or soup for later, so you don’t have to let them go bad. 

But at a moment’s notice, I can make rice in the instant pot. So, I woke up this morning and the first thing I did is I threw brown rice in the instant pot and I took 4 cups of brown rice, I washed it, rinsed it, poured out the water, and then I put 5 cups of water because it’s 1.25 cup of water per cup of brown rice for the instant pot. If it’s white rice, it’s 1 to 1 ratio of water to rice. And then I set the instant pot on high pressure, seal the lid, high pressure for 30 minutes. And I just hit start. Now, when I finish this podcast, I’m going to go downstairs, I’m going to steam some vegetables. I already have some lentils in the fridge, I’m going to add them to the vegetables. And I have like a tahini. I’m dairy-free so it’s not taziki, but like a tahini sauce that’s really easy to make. Garlic, lemon, water, a bit of liquid amino’s, and tahini, which is sesame paste. I just blend that. That’s really delicious to put over steamed vegetables. And I can do fresh because I have some time this afternoon to be able to prep that. But if I didn’t have time, I can grab the frozen, put it on the stove and have vegetables in a minute.

So, that’s my quick just like throw-a-meal together. 

[01:13:24] Kristen Bowen: Oh, I love that. It’s so important that we have those, that we’ve got things like oh, what can I do in a really quick moment. And I want people remembering the chant “good, better, best”. Because getting healthy is not about eating perfectly; it’s about good, better, best. And I have to throw in, I think every home needs the book Favorite Poems Old and New because it’s got that poem in it. 

[01:13:52] Ashley James: Oh, really? Oh, that’s cool.

[01:13:54] Kristen Bowen: Favorite Poems Old and New is an incredible collection of poetry that is just… I always had my kids memorize poetry, and it’s just got some of our family favorites in it. 

[01:14:07] Ashley James: That's fun. So, when I was under high stress earlier this year, that meal that I just described which is very simple, they’re going to take me less than 15 minutes to make that, that was too complicated for my brain to handle under high stress. I did actually manage to make apple butter. I don’t add sugar to apple butter. I just condense apples on the stove or on the instant pot. It’s like applesauce.

I had just done an interview actually where we talked about how every day we should eat homemade applesauce because it is the number one thing to heal the gut. It heals the gut. He actually explained the science behind it which I geeked out on. But he said just if you can do one thing for your gut health, eat homemade applesauce every day, put it in the instant pot if you can’t by a stove and cook it. That's what I did. I just took the core out, threw it in the instant pot with a little bit of water and just put it on for a few minutes and then let the instant pot do the work. What I would do, if I had to eat out, is here’s a really quick great thing. Any Thai restaurant will have in the back—I’ve never seen a Thai restaurant not do this, so far it’s been every Thai restaurant that I’ve been to—in the back there's side dishes and you can order steamed vegetables and steamed rice.

[01:15:37] Kristen Bowen: And kimchi.

[01:15:39] Ashley James: Yeah. If you're at a Korean restaurant, you could ask for kimchi with steamed vegetables. But there are so many restaurants. I even went to an Italian restaurant and I said I just wanted some really beautiful grilled vegetables. I asked for no oil. So, you can ask for even at a restaurant you could say or takeout, “I just want a bunch of steamed vegetables and some brown rice.” Or even if you're on the road. A lot of people forget that there’s some really healthy choices you can make at a takeout. Wendy’s has a baked potato. You could just order a few baked potatoes. And don’t eat the skins. Skins of baked potatoes, when it’s dry heat, when they bake it, it causes a free radical that’s very damaging to the body. But if you steam it, that free radical doesn’t get created. So, you can eat the skins of baked potatoes when it’s steamed, but when it’s baked, you shouldn’t. Don’t add anything to it. Just eat it. That starch is incredibly good. It gives the body energy for over 7 hours. It’s a slow drip, so it won’t cause you to go into hypoglycemia.

So, there's these little choices that I’d make here and there and I just ask myself is there a better choice. Is there a better choice in this moment? Not looking to be perfect because you're right, I had to catch myself and go, “Wait a second. I’m really creating a lot of guilt.” I’m putting on a mom guilt, I’m creating a lot of wife guilt, I’m creating a lot, you know, health coach guilt. I’m just creating a lot of guilt not making these amazingly amazing excellent choices because I was just having to keep it altogether. Right? Keep my family together and keep everything functioning. So, I had to go, okay, what’s the best choice I can make in this moment? Then I had to find peace in that. 

[01:17:29] Kristen Bowen: And that’s the part that you can only claim for yourself and you can say that you’ve done it. But then you need to check in with your body and feel that your body is not in fight or flight. Because if you don’t do that part that you just talked about, taking action on it, Ashley, you’re still in fight or flight. And we have the most educated sick people walking this planet than we’ve ever had. We’ve got the education. There’s so much that we can learn. But we’ve got to take it and put it into action. And the gap of our education and our action is creating a fight or flight, or freeze or fawn state. And that's what we’ve got to close down as a society. 

[01:18:19] Ashley James: And I would say what I found really helpful was always having snacks in my purse and in the car that were incredibly healthy. So, the apples, you could just have a bag of apples in your purse. I’d always have apples, I’d have healthy snacks for my son always. Always, always, always I have a big pile of healthy snacks for him. This is not processed food. I’m thinking like nuts and clean trail mix. Organic. Always buy organic apples. Always buy organic nuts. They did tests on conventionally grown apples and found that there's at least 50 pesticides, 50 different chemicals that they could detect on conventional apples that’s really hard for the body over time. So, I’d rather choose an organic over non-organic when that choice is available.

Then, algae. Spirulina and chlorella. I love ENERGYbits.com. I’ve had the founder of that company on the show several times and just having a handful of chlorella or spirulina with some nuts, just throwing that in my mouth, that is actually sometimes a meal replacement. It’s an incredible amount of protein and available nutrients. So, just being able to do that on-the-go, really helpful. Those healthy proteins from nuts and from chlorella and spirulina, protein helps the body with stress. My chiropractor who is just such an avid, every time I talk to him, he’s like, “Make sure you're eating protein. Just a little bit of nuts or little bit of lentils or something,” because protein, he sees it that it helps to regulate the stress response. So, those little habits.

But the big thing was for me, and not everyone, it’s about 1/3 of the population deals with addiction, and for me, I’ve got addiction brain. And checking in with myself because in times of stress, I want to self-soothe. I want to go for something. Not now but in the past, I’ve gone for those crazy, sugary drinks at Starbucks, for example. I’m not into alcohol. I was a bartender, so that's not my thing, but going for something that is like potato chips, chocolate bar, something that is going to increase the dopamine response that’s going to get my brain jacked up to help self-soothe when I’m under stress. So, a big bowl of noodles, a big bowl of some Asian noodles, that's like my alcohol, basically. To the liver, it’s the same thing. It’s quick sugar to the body. 

And so, in those times of high stress, I needed to step back and go “Is this choice me self-soothing? Is there a better choice I could make to regulate my emotional state and my stress?” Because when we self-soothe with sugar and with food and with an addiction, we actually are checking ourselves into a rollercoaster ride for the next 24 hours. Because I eat that bowl of noodles, I end up having bad sleep. The next day, my stress is even higher. Same with alcohol, same with that sugary coffee drink or same with that choco bar or that ice cream. Whatever we’re choosing to self-soothe, that putting in our mouth to self-soothe or that donut, whatever we’re choosing. And people will be like, “Oh, I’m celebrating. Let’s go out for pizza and wings” or whatever. Like, “Oh, I’m celebrating.” Or, “Oh, I had such a stressful day. Let’s go out and get this.” Right? Whatever it is that we’re putting in our mouth or the activity that we’re doing that we know is an addictive activity, that is going to make our stress levels even worse.

I have a family member who always turns to wine. I keep talking to them about it in a gentle way and I say, “I know you're under high stress, I know you're on antidepressants. I know you're on anxiety meds.” This person keeps talking to me about not wanting to be on them anymore and I say unfortunately, alcohol, you go… and she’s admitted to this. Alcohol in the moment makes you feel good. That's why she goes to it. But the next day, she’s wrecked. She’s not even drinking a ton. It’s like two glasses maybe. But it causes our body to go through even more stress for 24 hours after. So, that's the thing for me when I’m dealing with stress and when I’m healing from it, is checking in with myself and going, is this the best choice I can make right now? And, is this choice a self-soothing choice? Or, is this actually a nourishing choice?

[01:23:22] Kristen Bowen: Ashley, you and I are very similar in that addictive brain. And two foods, well, one’s not a food, two things that I have cut from my diet entirely because I didn’t understand how deeply triggering they were for me in craving other foods that didn’t support my health, and one is natural flavors. It excites my brain and it gets it looking for things that cannot be found in nature. So, I do everything I can to avoid those natural flavors and it decreased my cravings. The other is Stevia. Now, for some people, Stevia is great. For me, it just triggers me wanting more and more sweet things and looking everywhere to get that sweet thing. Now, I do use other sweeteners but Stevia, for me, is a trigger. So, I think it’s so important as each of us are on our individual journey that we recognize that part of this journey that we’re on in supporting our bodies is learning what your triggers are. And those two, for me, staying away from them as much as possible has been a gamechanger in my ability to not be driven by cravings. 

[01:24:50] Ashley James: At the moment it doesn’t even feel like you're craving, right? Because let’s say having to drive to and from the hospital, taking care of a family member, taking care of a sick kid, it’s like go, go, go. You're just trying to get some food in you. Then, you're standing in front of, maybe you're looking at the menu at the restaurant or at the hospital, or you're looking at that vending machine. The moment you just need to put the best choice in you as possible, right, because it’s maybe that apple in your purse and that's a great choice.

[01:25:21] Kristen Bowen: I have a hospital go pack now. And it literally is packed in my car foods that do not perish so that I never have to be in front of a vending machine feeling that desperately hungry with that being my only options. I just call them my go-bags and I’ve got them in all my cars. So, I never have to be in that position again. But I made that position worse because of the stress that I experienced over the options and what was going in my mouth. That’s where I needed help from your son chanting “good, better, best”. Just make the best choice that you can, Kristen, and move on. Instead of buying into perfectionism, which we know is driven by shame and guilt. And so, wrapping that together has been such an important realization for me and not buying into perfectionism, which means for me, I’m not letting shame and guilt drive my decisions. 

[01:26:32] Ashley James: Yeah. Exactly. And so in front of that vending machine, you’d never put yourself in front of the vending machine under regular circumstances.

[01:26:42] Kristen Bowen: No, never.

[01:26:43] Ashley James: With a menu in front of a restaurant or in front of a hospital restaurant. In normal circumstances, there’s times, or maybe you're at a potluck or at a banquet or something. You need to make the best choice in that moment and there's things you wouldn’t normally eat. I had to check in with myself and go, I want to make the best choice that I have given the limited options, and I also want to make sure I’m choosing something that isn’t going to feed into my addiction brain, or isn’t being chosen by my addiction brain. Because there are times when it’s like oh, ooh, we’re at this place and they have these choices. My addiction brain goes “Ooh, good. We get to indulge.” And I have to rein myself back in because that is a rollercoaster. I don’t want to go down. I think the movie’s called Leaving Last Vegas. I just see that spiral down through alcoholism. I just remember that. That image comes to my mind that there's this little addiction brain in me that just wants to get completely trashed, but it's on sugar or it’s on Asian noodles or something. Or it’s on some kind of pleasurable food or donuts, right? Or pumpkin spiced lattes. Whatever it is, it’s a spiral that then causes my entire body to have inflammation, have bad sleep, have bad energy, and then I have a short fuse.

My interview with Joan Ifland was really good. She’s a PhD in processed food addiction. She talks about how when we are using a substance, it can be sugar, it can be flour, it can be eating fries, it’s the weirdest thing but when we’re using to up the brain chemicals, then we have a shorter fuse and we’re quick to anger. I’m just sort of summarizing it but when she described it, I could see in both my parents, their struggles with food addiction, their struggles. And I wouldn’t say they’re alcoholics but they would come home and my mom would have 1 or 2 shots of vodka and they’d split a bottle of wine. They were never drunk but you could tell it was going towards a substance to regulate your stress, to regulate your emotional state. I liken it to as a baby needs a binky or a blanket or a toy to soothe them if they don’t have the mom’s boob, right? We’ve all seen it, right? The baby wanted its blanket or the toddler wants its blanket or its binky. And we never really grew out of that. Not everyone but a lot of people. They say, statistically, 1/3 of the population has this propensity, their brain has this propensity to do this. And we have to catch ourselves and ask ourselves is there that little addiction brain in me looking for its binky? And catch ourselves and go, okay, if I eat a food that triggers that or feeds into that addiction brain, I’m going to put myself in that rollercoaster for the next 24 hours. I don’t want to be put on that rollercoaster because I’m already under stress and so I want to make the best choices for me to maintain my health levels.

JJ Virgin was on the show, this was a few years ago and she had to live in the hospital where they didn’t think their son would make it. A car hit him at 50 miles an hour. Every bone in his body was broken. They had to fly him to a special hospital and I think they had to fly him to a second hospital. It was ridiculous. He had a feeding tube. She was sneaking supplements down his feeding tube. But she shared in that interview how she maintained her sanity by choosing the best foods possible in the menu at the hospital and she would take breaks to go walk up and down flights of stairs because she knew that sitting the whole day by her son and then eating the junk food at the hospital, that she could not be in peak performance emotionally and mentally to be there for her son.

I’ve actually had feedback from a listener who said that that interview, there were three different interviews but that interview and then two others helped her save her mother’s life when her mother was dying in the hospital. They were able to save her mother’s life. And she said that strategy of get up, walk some stairs, drink some water, make sure you're hydrated, make sure you're eating the absolute best food. If you're only eating fruit, that's better than the fries, right? A handful of nuts and some fruit is so much better. But making those good little tiny baby step choices to keep you on the top of your game so that then you can handle and ride the stress as best as possible and do things like the deep breathing, the walking. I love that idea of getting up in the morning with the sunlight, with the red light of the sun, and save yourself thousands of dollars with a red-light machine.

[01:31:57] Kristen Bowen: It’s the OG of red light. You know, the pattern, I’m always looking for patterns, Ashley. That pattern of learning how to take care of yourself in any situation is so important. The other thing that I was thinking that you really highlighted pattern-wise, was the pattern of making decisions in a way that support our health. Okay, I’ve decided this good but now I’m going to be stressed because I didn’t soak the nut to get rid of the problems in the nut. You made that decision strongly and you did the best that you could in that moment.

Also, another pattern that I thought of that you highlighted was knowing your why. I am very driven by my why and my choices. One of my why’s is I want the physical strength to be there for my husband. His body does not have the benefit of oxygen and blood like my body does. It’s a higher maintenance body. I love having that ability to massage him down and use some different melt massage techniques at night for 60 to 90 minutes every night. If I’m not caring for my body and putting myself first in some experiences in the morning especially, then I don’t have it to give to him. So, knowing your why, not just “Oh, I want to be healthy. I want more energy,” but specifically, what will you do with that energy, how will you utilize. When you get to the why of the why, that’s what starts to motivate and change the behaviors of what you're doing during the day. If “Oh yeah, I want to be healthy, I want more energy,” why? Why? Because I love climbing trees with grandchildren. I love being able to take 90 minutes at the end of an incredibly full busy day and still have the capacity to take my body and put every ounce of my being into massaging him and helping him manage his pain.

So, knowing your why and being connected to it helps to drive just like your value. Knowing your why and your values and being deeply connected to them, number one, helps you maintain your magnesium levels because we know that’s the first foundational piece of creating health, because that magnesium activates stored and active vitamin D, and then it helps you to become deeply connected to your why and your values. 

[01:34:57] Ashley James: I love it. When I do coaching, most of the time it’s with women. Most of the time, we talk about their life, their day like tell me about your day. So, you wake up and what you eat. Like, tell me about your routine. Most women go to bed way later than they should. 

[01:35:21] Kristen Bowen: Which crashes their circadian rhythm, which creates disharmony in their hormones. But then we’re all going “Oh, I want better hormone balance, I want better hormone balance. I’m willing to spend thousands of dollars over here,” when in actuality, get your butt to bed on time. Really. Said with love. My grandma vibe just came out. It’s official. But really, we’re saying “Oh, I want this, I want this.” Are you taking care of your circadian rhythm? It's the foundation of your health. It will determine your heart rate variability. You get up with the sun and you go to sleep with the son. And that sunlight from being outside with that sun sets that circadian rhythm. It’s not found in going and buying a supplement. It’s found in your basic daily habits.

[01:36:20] Ashley James: Yeah. So, the biggest thing, with these women, and the biggest reason, and I think that a lot of listeners can relate, they get their kids to sleep or their spouse is doing whatever, their house is finally quiet and it’s their alone time, and it’s like, well, after 10:00 or after 11:00 is my time. So, they’ll stay up until midnight or to 1:00. I had a friend that stayed up until 4:00 AM the other day reading a good book. And I’m like, I’m all about reading good books, but get your butt to bed. Or Netflix or whatever. And I’ve done it too. The problem is, is that if you are aware past 10:30, and it doesn’t matter what time zone you're in, it’s kind of cool and weird how the body works, but 10:30, if you're still awake at 10:30, you get a second wind. You ever notice that you're tired at 9:00. At 9:00 PM you could be like, yeah, I could go to bed now. And then you're “But I have to do the dishes and I have to do this, and I got to put the kids to bed, and I have to send that email,” or whatever. “I want to watch that TV show.” Then at 10:30 or 11:00, you're like, “Oh, I’m awake now. Now I’m going to clean the toilet or I’m going to clean the kitchen or I’m going to…” whatever, go watch more TV or I’m going to work out. 

The problem is, like we were tribal people for many generations and the person that had to stay up and guard the tribe while everyone else slept, they got the second wind. They’re sitting around the campfire watching for the lion or whatever. So our biology will kick into stress mode to survive. If you stay up past 10:30, you’ll get a second wind of cortisol, which tells the melatonin to go away. Because they’re opposite. So melatonin tells the body to fall asleep, it doesn’t make the body fall asleep, but tells it it’s time to fall asleep. It’s an antioxidant. You want your melatonin up there. 

[01:38:16] Kristen Bowen: You create melatonin in the morning. It’s determined that two hours in the morning of sunlight determines the quality and the quantity of your melatonin that your body can kick in that night. So truly, your sleep starts with how you spend your morning.

[01:38:37] Ashley James: I love it. So, the best thing that my clients have done, the ones that do, oh my gosh, it’s lifechanging. I say, okay, here’s the deal. I had this one client who she ran her own business, she said, “Listen, I do all my emails at night after I get the kids to bed.” I said, what if, just what if, I said, how long does it take you to write these emails, like come on. She goes, “Well, I’m so tired, it takes me longer to write them.” I said, exactly. You're not putting your best brain power in your business because you're doing it at 11:00 at night. So, I said, eat dinner with the kids at 6:00 or the bedtime routine starts at 7:00, get them all into bed at 8:00, fall asleep by 9:00, you and the kids. Then, you wake up, because kids will sleep for like 11 hours, they should. If your kids aren’t sleeping for 11 hours, then they're not going to bed early enough. You’ll wake up at 5:00, you’ll wake up at 4:00 or 5:00. If you go to bed at 9:00, you’ll wake up at 4:00 or 5:00, you’ll feel amazing, really refreshed. You go downstairs, make yourself breakfast, drink a big glass of lemon water and sit there on your computer. And she goes, it was amazing. She was, “I had a good three hours of me time and I was at 100 percent energy and mental clarity.” That was more productive better me time than the at night. But the thing is, if you are one of the people that’s the 1/3 of the population that has the addiction brain like I do, that addiction brain will try to take over and convince you it’s fun to stay up late. “Oh let’s just watch another show. Oh, come on.” That addiction brain is looking for more and more dopamine and will try to keep you awake, so you have to talk to yourself and go, okay, it’s now 9:30, I’m getting into bed with a good book, not the cellphone. Or, I’m going to listen to a podcast but don’t look at the cellphone. Get into bed at 9:30 and try to be asleep between 10:00 or 10:30. Then have an earlier morning. All the stuff you like doing late at night, do early in the morning, and you go for that walk in the morning to set the tone for the next evening. But that is a way to significantly lower stress in the body. 

What this last year of the last two years has taught me, is my sleep is one of the most important things to me, and that's where I put myself first is to make sure I’m getting to bed. My husband sometimes, the thing is he can lie down and he’s immediately asleep, snoring right away. So, I got to get in bed before he falls asleep. Otherwise, he’s snoring every side of me. But yeah, that's it. Just putting yourself first, putting your health first and knowing that it’s going to set you up for an amazing day the next day. Sometimes, if you have adrenal fatigue, sometimes that takes time. I have a friend who says, you know, I did that, but I’m still tired the next day. I’m like, yeah, well, it’s going to take those baby steps. We got to get your magnesium up, soak in the magnesium to full cell saturation. We need to shift your diet so that your cortisol, insulin and your glucose are all in this harmony together, and decrease the stressors. But the sleep is so important earlier in the evening, falling asleep, and then just do all the fun stuff you want to do at night, do it in the morning. 

[01:42:10] Kristen Bowen: So, I love staying up late. I know that I feel better when I’m in bed early. So, the compromise, like there's optimal and then there's life. So, for me, over the years as I’ve tracked and I’ve always watched my heartrate variability and I track my temperature and all sorts of things, I’ve found that once every 10 to 12 days, I can handle a late night without my data dropping or changing too drastically. So, that way, it doesn’t kick me into all or nothing thinking. Because when I’m there, that’s being driven by that perfectionism and shame.

So, it’s okay with the fact that I stay up late every once in a while. I just know I don’t do it often and then that way, I’m not driven and triggered back into fight or flight. Because if you're being driven by that guilt and shame, you are in fight or flight. So, by giving myself permission to do it imperfectly, it helps to keep me out of that fight or flight which helps decrease the rate that my body is burning up that magnesium because I want my cell saturation at 6.3 or above.

[01:43:36] Ashley James: Right, right. And we talked about blood tests or getting blood tests. On my website down in the sidebar, if you're on a cellphone it’s all the way at the bottom, there’s a link to a lab that you can buy your own labs. If you’re in the United States, you can buy your own labs and I believe you can buy the magnesium RBC lab which is about $40 to $50. 

[01:44:08] Kristen Bowen: Almost always a coupon out for it.

[01:44:12] Ashley James: Yeah, you can look for that. But it’s not incredibly expensive. And that's kind of a hard test to get a doctor to do, which is annoying, but you can just buy it yourself and then go to LabCorp, go to Quest with that receipt from that company and then you can get it. Same with the cholesterol labs. It’s good to look at labs because it checks us in with stuff that we don’t feel in our body. But also, not a good thing to stress about. So, labs don’t really help if you don’t know what it means. Right? So, a lot of times we’re going to the wrong kind of doctor because MDs are not trained in nutrition, they're trained in drugs. The best thing to do is go to a functional medicine practitioner or go to a health coach that’s trained in it or go to a naturopathic physician that’s trained in looking at labs through the lens of how can I help you achieve optimal health. I love all doctors, I believe they want to help people. Their education, MDs have a lens that they look through that informs them. What they do is they look to see what drugs they can put you on, they are not taught how to help you achieve optimal health. Unless they went after medical school and took extracurricular activities and became like a functional medicine practitioner, MDs are not taught how to help us achieve true health. They're taught how to help us save our lives. I love them for emergency medicine, absolutely. But we have to know when to take our body to the right practitioner.

And going to an MD for chronic illness to get better and to get so healthy you no longer need medication oftentimes doesn’t work because they're not trained to do that. They're not trained to get you so healthy you don’t need medication. Just like you wouldn’t take your car to a plumber, you got to find the right practitioner. Then labs are a really great tool but also, we have to check in because I tend to feel the guilt and the shame comes up when my labs aren’t perfect-perfect. But I also rejoice when my labs are great. So, I also have to check in and go okay, this is not who I am, my labs aren’t who I am. Just like a diagnosis is not who you are, diabetes is not who you are. It is a manmade construct of a set of parameters that they have detected and you can change those parameters so you no longer are labeled diabetic. Right? So, you are not your diagnosis, you are not your labs. These are all feedback to help you on your journey. We have to really check in and make sure that we’re not putting ourselves down when we’re looking at this information in front of us.

[01:47:12] Kristen Bowen: So, I love to look at labs as neutral data. When I get on the scale, it’s neutral data. Now, I didn’t always look at it that way. So, please know that was a huge journey for me on healing that relationship. It’s neutral data. We’re asking for feedback and what I was doing was throwing a fit about the feedback. So, instead of throwing the fit and putting it into fight or flight, I’m looking at it as neutral data. For some, that comes easily and for some, we’ve got to build a relationship of healing, take that healing journey back to the point where it’s neutral data.

I think there's a lot of confusion, I’d like to touch on just really quickly about the magnesium testing for cell saturation. Number one, they don’t even throw out the number anymore of 6.3 because years ago, nobody was hitting it and so they dropped the standard. I’m not dropping my standard of cell saturation because the rest of the country is not eating how they should. So, I still hold myself to that old standard of 6.3 or above.

Number two, I’ve had a lot of people email in lately about oh my gosh, my test came in at 2.1 but they said that was fine. They’re looking at blood serum. So, you want to make sure it’s not serum but red blood cell. Then the next one is, there was new magnesium testing. Ashley, I was so excited because I thought oh my goodness, easier to do, less inexpensive, but it’s not ready yet. So, there's a lot of people jumping on about testing your magnesium through your urine. So, I bought a bunch of them to just test and evaluate because I thought oh my gosh, I cannot wait to share this with my clients and it is so inaccurate. I would take one strip and it would tell me I was low. I would test it 10 minutes later, it would tell me I was high. And it was actually an investor out of San Diego that really blew this company up. I think eventually, the science will be there that we can accurately test magnesium levels through our urine, but at this point, it’s just not sound and solid enough. So, the gold standard is, the magnesium red blood cell test. 

[01:49:53] Ashley James: Yeah. That's really good to know. Going into the 30-day challenge, we talk about this in episode 294341, and 381, so listeners, definitely want to go back and check out those previous interviews with Kristen. You do a 30-day challenge. And you don’t have to do a blood test. I was too excited. I’m like impatient. So, I just jumped in and did a 30-day challenge and I felt it in my body so I knew it was making a difference. I saw it in our sleep and I saw it in my energy, and I saw it in my detox. I just feel fantastic. Some people, when they do your magnesium soak, which is really easy. You get a bowl that’s not plastic. So anything that’s not plastic. It could be a bowl from the kitchen big enough for your feet or a pan like a roasting pan. We went to a kitchen supply store actually and got like a chafing dish that’s metal. I have a big glass bowl and sometimes we just use that. Whatever’s kicking around that’s big enough for your feet, you're just putting enough water to cover your feet. You don’t have to go all the way up to your ankles or calves. Then you're putting a quarter cup which is 2 ounces of the magnesium soak in the water and you sit there, it can be any temperature of water although I personally like hot water, but in the summer I’ve done it with cold water and I got the same results. It’s really good to move your limb beforehand, so walking up and down the stairs, doing some jumping jacks or bouncing on the rebounder or going for a walk. But if you can’t, then just doing some deep breathing while you're in the soak. I like to tell people to do it for an hour, but half an hour, I think you said you uptake about 70 percent of the magnesium you're going to absorb in 20 minutes.

[01:51:34] Kristen Bowen: In 20 minutes, the average absorption of the elemental magnesium was 80 percent. In 45 minutes, the average absorption of the elemental magnesium was 98 percent. Realizing that's going to vary a little bit from person to person, depending on inflammation levels. So if your inflammation is high, then that's going to change a little bit. But on average. 

[01:52:04] Ashley James: I just like telling people to do it for an hour, you know. If you can do it for 45 minutes, do it for 45 minutes. If you can do it for half an hour, do it for half an hour. Definitely do it longer than 20 minutes. But if all you have is 20 minutes, you're up-taking a lot. I throw it in my son’s bath and his baths are 20 minutes long. He’s a kid. So he just wants to go do something else. But he absorbs it and he gets better sleep. So, I see it.

We had a family member who was in hospice and doing magnesium soaks, decreased his pain significantly. He went from moaning, moving was very difficult for him, he was in so much pain. We do a magnesium soak and then he’d just be walking. Sometimes, he wouldn’t even use his walker. And we’re looking at him like, are you kidding me? You were in pain all day and after a magnesium soak he’s walking around like nothing, no pain at all. It was really cool. We couldn’t really get him to talk about it like hey, how’d you like it? He’d be like, eh, it’s okay. But then we’d walk around and he wouldn’t moan. I thought that was really interesting because times he would sit, he would moan and then sit and then stand. He’d be like “ugh…” the whole time, he’d be moaning. It was so sad, we just wanted to take his pain away and he was refusing pain meds. He was in hospice care and he’s like, “I don’t want to become addicted to them.” I’m like, I can appreciate your principle; however, let’s get your quality of life up at this point.

[01:53:31] Kristen Bowen: That's a tough one though. That was a real challenge for my husband especially because he comes from a family that there’s been end-of-life was because of addiction. So, that can be a real challenge for people in how do I balance this pain and not become addicted to that. So, that can be a whole journey for somebody.

[01:53:56] Ashley James: We saw with the magnesium that it made a huge difference in his quality of life. He wasn’t doing anything else for his health. When I work with the magnesium soak and with clients, they're doing a lot of changes at once. But to see how drastically, how much it helps someone who is not eating healthy, who is not making any changes to their lifestyle and the only thing they did was magnesium soak, it significantly lowered his pain. I thought was really cool. 

[01:54:24] Kristen Bowen: You know, Ashley, when you were talking about that, it connected me to something you said earlier that I want people to understand. You commented calcium’s down the list of things that we need. When we become magnesium deficient, we become calcium dominant. So, take someone who experiences chronic pain, it puts them in fight or flight which drains the very magnesium that they need and then they become calcium dominant. Then, what happens, those pain receptor sites stay open because of calcium dominance. So, magnesium becomes so, I mean, it’s important, it’s foundational. Someone who’s in pain is going to need more soak time in magnesium because we’ve got to walk away from the calcium dominance so the body can shut down the pain receptor sites that get stuck and open with the feedback loop being always having pain.

[01:55:35] Ashley James: Exactly. It’s incredible for pain. Asthma, for example, my son, this was a few years ago. We took him to Children’s, he was in respiratory distress. It was like 10 out of 11 respiratory distress. All these doctors are rushing around this emergency room and they’re hooking him up to an IV. They’re about to put something in his body and I said, “Stop, I need informed consent,” because I had no idea what they're putting in his body. And I wanted them to save his life but at the same time, I also need to know what’s going on. The doctor looked at me and she took her mask off, this was more than 2 years ago, she took her stuff off so we could make eye contact and make an emotional contact and she smiled. And I’m like, woah. Because I was expecting her to get angry and she was, “Oh, okay.” Then she started explaining what was going on. You have to say to doctors “I need informed consent.” They have to perform this where they need to tell you the benefits of the procedure, the downside to the procedure, and the alternatives to this procedure. She said, “We are giving your son magnesium intravenously because magnesium is so important for the body.” In some cases, when children or adults even are in respiratory distress, the muscles in the alveoli and the lungs are spasming and the way to release them is through magnesium. Muscles in your body, when they don’t have enough of that magnesium because magnesium relaxes muscles and calcium contracts muscles. So when you have that neck tension, when you have the cramps or your eyes twitching or you have restless legs, that's magnesium deficiency. That's an imbalance of magnesium to calcium. And I was so happy to hear the first thing that they were administering at Children’s Hospital to our son, was a bag of IV magnesium. How cool was that? It wasn’t a bunch of drugs they were trying to pump him with. I was so grateful. I was like, okay, go ahead! Give him magnesium, that's great.

[01:57:48] Kristen Bowen: Many hospitals when you go in with symptoms of a heart attack, that's what they’ll do for you because they know the magnesium will relax the heart muscle. Yeah. 

[01:58:00] Ashley James: It’s so important.

[01:58:01] Kristen Bowen: It is.

[01:58:03] Ashley James: I was just reading an article about magnesium deficiency in adults who are prone to A-fib, to going into atrial fibrillation where the upper part of the heart is beating rapidly and out of sync with the ventricle, with the lower part of the heart. So, that's dangerous because it can cause clots in the body and cause strokes. They’re analyzing why do some people go in and out of A-fib or why are some people jumping into A-fib whereas others don’t. One of the causes, they saw, one of the similarities was that people who had chronic low levels of magnesium were more likely to enter A-fib than people who had a history of A-fib and got their magnesium levels up were less likely to reenter A-fib. So, I thought that was interesting. 

[01:59:04] Kristen Bowen: It’s that foundational mineral. It’s not the only mineral. It’s the mineral that we start with to put the pieces and the gates back together to create a strong foundation. Ashley, I could get it for so cheap out of Utah, I won’t because of the arsenic levels. Right now, Utah has got some problems happening because there are water issues and they're in a drought. The arsenic is just being exposed like crazy. Well, of course I could get that really, really inexpensively, but I’m not soaking in magnesium to increase my arsenic levels. I could get it from Russia for pennies, but that's very high in heavy metals. I could have lab-manufactured magnesium. That's not why I carry magnesium. I carry magnesium to help clients achieve cell saturation. Currently, undiluted sea brine from the cleanest source in the Zechstein Sea is the best magnesium available to help you achieve cell saturation.

[02:00:20] Ashley James: Yeah, well, I noticed the difference. Like I said, I could feel it. When I soak in it, to me it’s like getting an IV of magnesium. I can feel it. It’s really cool.

One thing that you mentioned before we hit record, we were kind of catching up.

[02:00:37] Kristen Bowen: It was nice to catch up, wasn’t it?

[02:00:39] Ashley James: It is. And it’s been a while. But you talked about how, well, when I first interviewed you, I was your first podcast, so I was so excited. Episode 294. You have mentioned since then, you’ve been on the show a few times and you’ve mentioned being on other shows, but since then, you’ve grown your company. Have you moved twice or three times? You’ve gone bigger and bigger. Tell us about how the company has grown since you’ve last come on the show.

[02:01:13] Kristen Bowen: So, we had decided because we’re a family-owned company, and we had decided okay, we are jumping in at a deeper level. We want to share on a bigger stage more magnesium. So, we had decided to do the traveling magnesium parties of which I met you. And it ended up being so much more expensive than what we thought it would be. And it was one of those this is either going to work or the company is going to fold. And you made that comment, I think there were 7, was that 7 including my team or was that 7 people?

[02:02:05] Ashley James:  I think it was like 7 people in the whole room.

[02:02:08] Kristen Bowen: So that was 7 people including my team and just in advertising I had spent $1000. Just in advertising. Let alone driving out with the magnesium, the payroll hours, the gas to get there, all of that kind of stuff. So, my husband, because before, it was the day before I turned to my husband and I said Seattle is a bust, we cannot go here. And he looked at me and he said “Two things I’m going to remind you of. You’ve never cared about the numbers. Why start now? And someone will show up to that that will help you get the word out to more people and they will connect with your heart.”

[02:03:00] Ashley James: Give your husband a hug for me. 

[02:03:02] Kristen Bowen: And I was stressed the day before because I’m like, I’ve got more of my team here than people showing up. As I saw the people who were there, I think there were 3 actual new people that weren’t my team, I just thought, okay, I’m being driven by my values. These three people are important, their lives are important. The people that they’re connected to are important. And I threw away my stress and worry about how much money I had spent and determined to make it a value to those people who had driven into Seattle at night in the summer and had done all of the things that they needed to do to get there. Little did I know that Ashley James was sitting there with the potential to connect me to other like-minded people who are passionate about creating health. And I do podcasts all the time now and you're still my favorite podcaster because of your ability to not like “We’ve got to be done in 30 minutes” but to just really flesh out and have true communication instead of staged question-and-answer. I love the true communication versus the staged question-and-answer. And all of your listeners, Ashley, we so appreciate what you do and our heart broke as we watched what you went through and you have inspired us to remember and remind ourselves that we can take the ashes and we can create something beautiful and make a difference in the lives of other people. So, we’re so grateful that you’re back and on your road of recovery, and we appreciate the authenticity of sharing it with us because in those moments of our own darkness, even though they're different than what your hard times were, we remember that we are not alone and we can take that next step and take that next step, whether we’re standing in front of a vending machine, getting a Nature Valley granola bar or we’re grabbing apples and nuts. We’re taking that next step together without judgment and with love connecting as humans to each other and supporting each other in the process.

[02:05:41] Ashley James: Absolutely. You know, life is incredibly messy and incredibly beautiful, and there are moments where you feel like the pain will never end. I promise you if you hold on, it will end in the biggest thing, is getting out of your head and sometimes the biggest thing is being in service to others. When you need help the most, I know that sounds crazy because you're like “I need help. Why am I helping others?” Sometimes, being in service to others is the best way to get out of your head, to get out of your depression, to get out of your funk. Yes, asking for help is important to asking, and it’s not about pride. It’s about loving yourself enough to go “Please, this is a moment in my life where I’m requesting some backup. I need some backup here.” And it’s not a weakness; it’s a strength. It’s a strength to be able to say I need some help holding it together. And it’s okay to cry and find your friend that will cry with you and you will put it back together. You know, I turned to God and we felt His grace with us.

[02:07:00] Kristen Bowen: So glad.

[02:07:02] Ashley James: We felt. And I grew up in the church but my husband did not and he turned to me something like 2 or 3 days after she died, our daughter, and he said “I feel God giving me a hug.” It was something like both of us, we felt His grace and His presence. We felt His protection, we felt His love. And it was so beautiful and so intense and so real to us, both of us.

[02:07:33] Kristen Bowen: It is tangible, I can hear it in your voice.

[02:07:34] Ashley James: It was. It was tangible. For my husband…

[02:07:39] Kristen Bowen: A new experience for him probably.

[02:07:41] Ashley James: It’s a new experience. I mean, I brought him to church a few times but him, this was a new experience. And I do not believe that God causes bad things. You know some people go “oh well, God has a plan.” God does not cause suffering or bad stuff. The more you study and the more you build a relationship, God loves you the most out of everyone, wants the best for you. In your life, some perfect life is messy and in those moments of mine, we can find connection. Another thing that came out of it was my community of friends and family and my community of homeschool moms came together and supported us in a way. Even the listeners of the podcast supported us in a way that my husband said “I’ve never felt so loved before.” He’s an introvert, he doesn’t have like a lot of friends. He just likes to hang out with me. It was a nonstop flow of people coming in. Because I said, you know, my door is open, right, but he said “I’ve never felt so supported. I’ve never felt so loved.” 

And I was told that some friends and even when we were arranging the burial, a woman who works at the cemetery, and several people told me this that other people when they experience a loss of a child, they sort of just get silent and they don’t ask for help and they don’t get public about it, and they don’t tell friends and family and they don’t reach out. They just suffer in silence. And whether it’s a miscarriage, a stillbirth or a child dying early in infancy, there are so many parents that feel guilt or shame or they don’t know how to reach out. And they just get silent and suffer in silence. I did the opposite. I suffered openly. And I opened my heart aloud for love and healing and connection, and I communicated. I think that's how I healed and survived. 

But what I was amazed at is so many women came out of the woodwork and said, “When I lost my child, I never told anyone. When I had a miscarriage, I didn’t tell people. When I had a stillbirth, I didn’t tell people. And I suffered for years in silence and seeing you do it publicly has been healing for me because now I want to talk about the child I lost. Now I want to get it off my heart and I want to share it.” 

[02:10:27] Kristen Bowen: And feel comfort.

[02:10:29] Ashley James: The thing is, whatever, listen, all of us, if you live long enough, you're going to suffer. There’s going to be a loss. I mean, I want everyone to live to be 120, right? We want to live long and beautiful glorious lives. And all of us are going to be, at some point, in a hospital supporting a loved one. Right? In an emergency. In a situation where we’re taking care of a sick family member or a sick friend. Or where our needs are going to go on the backburner for a day or a week or a month because we’re taking care of someone we love. The strategies we talked about today are so important to think about and learn because if you live a long enough, full enough life, you will have those moments. No matter how healthy you are, you could be a marathon runner that’s like whole-food plant-based and eating your own food from the garden, you could be just like the healthiest person in the world. And when you're up against it and you're up against the wall and you're in a hospital taking care of a loved one or your entire routine is thrown off or you're sleep-deprived, you're nutrient-deprived, it’s those times of stress. Or maybe you're just under the gun at work. Whatever your stress is, it throws off our routine and that's where the patterns, the little habits, the little choices, the little baby steps that we talked about today can make your experience be a healthier one, be a better one, be one where you can manage it with grace. That's what I want for everyone. Life is messy, life is not perfect, and you can learn the good, better, best of the choices to help yourself so that you can help the ones you love during those crucial times.

But I love that we talked about that's like there's no perfect, right? When I started the podcast, I wasn’t the perfect weight, I wasn’t the perfect health. I’m incredibly passionate. My number one value is health. I study health. I eat healthy. I make the best choices I can. 

My husband is the one that pushed me to start the podcast. I wanted to do the podcast but there was that voice in my head that said I don’t look like an Instagram model yet or I don’t look like these people on Instagram. You know what I mean? Like these raw vegans who have their own garden in the backyard and they all look perfect and they all eat acai berry bowls or whatever it’s called. Okay, that smoothie bowl looks disgusting, I’m sorry. But like the people that eat smoothie bowls every day, right? That level, it seems superficial. I mean, I don’t know. Those people, I’m not putting them down because those people probably have beautiful authentic life, but that compare and contrast that we look at these people, the health gurus. You look at them and you go like, “Oh.” Like there's that little voice in your head that goes “I’m not like that. I’m not good enough. I can’t do that. I wish I could do that.”

[02:13:39] Kristen Bowen: That's a way we keep ourselves safe. It’s a way that our subconscious is keeping us safe because ultimately, we know like okay, that's not going to happen and so I’m just going to watch them and follow them, and it’s a very convenient excuse to stay exactly where you're at. One of the things that I’ve recently done, Ashley, that I finally stepped out of that perfectionism is I’ve always wanted to become certified in Pilates. It stopped me because I don’t have a flat Pilates tummy. It doesn’t look like the Instagram Pilates tummy. And Ashley, it has been one of the most enjoyable journeys and I just realize I’m not waiting to do that until I look like that. I’m creating it now. And it has been life-changing for me. So, hairs up for imperfect action.

[02:14:41] Ashley James: Yes, thank you. So, that's what I was saying. It’s like when I started the podcast, I had to let go. I just say, you know what, “No. I’m on a journey. I’ve come a long way.” Like when I started the podcast, I had already healed. Polycystic ovarian syndrome, type 2 diabetes, infertility, chronic adrenal fatigue and chronic infections. That's five things that I had healed in my body. And I’m still working. I’m still working on my health. There's no promise land where it’s like okay, I achieved it, I’m up Mt. Everest of health and now I’m the guru. It’s like no, that's not it. Life is messy, life’s not perfect. Make good, better, or best choices.

And I started the podcast going, people are suffering, I can’t wait any longer. There's an urgency. These people to know this information and we’re going to get healthy together. We’re all going to learn to make good, better, and best decisions, make better decisions every day and we’re going to get there together. We’re going to shed those layers of symptoms and ill health together. I love that you didn’t wait to have a flat stomach before you started studying Pilates. I love that. I think that we should grab on to the things that we love to do or things we want to do and just go and run with it. 

[02:16:00] Kristen Bowen: Healthy women create. 

[02:16:02] Ashley James: We will grow as we learn, as we do, as we experience. So, good. Awesome. It’s so exciting to have you on the show and I know there's a lot more I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the growth of your business. We got a little sidetracked into health talk, of course.

[02:16:18] Kristen Bowen: Imagine that. You and I, Ashley, getting sidetracked. But thank you so much for having me on today. Hopefully, I can come back again and we can talk some more. 

[02:16:29] Ashley James: Yeah, businesses are recovering from the last two years from supply chain issues and quality issues. You have kept your quality high. And as the world heals from the last two years and the supply chain heals…

[02:16:44] Kristen Bowen: We dropped 13 products and we lost.

[02:16:48] Ashley James: I know you want to get those products back. When everything comes back to the high standards that you hold, come back on the show and we can talk about the products you're able to offer again. But I’m so happy that obviously, your flagship which is the magnesium soak is still at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and listeners can use coupon code LTH to get the discount and do the 30-day challenge, the soak every day. If you can do it for 20 minutes, do it for 20 minutes. If you can do it for an hour, do it for an hour. I like doing it at night because it helps me sleep but for some people, it gives them more energy. So, I say the first soak or two, do it like in the middle of the day, if you can, like maybe on your lunch break because then you will figure out whether your body gets more energy from magnesium or whether you fall asleep from magnesium. And yeah, listen to the previous episodes of Kristen because they're just packed full of amazing information—294341, and 381. Kristen, wonderful having you on the show again, as always. Can’t wait to have you back and thank you so much for being on this journey with us. Thank you for not waiting to be perfect before you took action because you would have never started. Just like me, I would have never started the podcast if I waited to be perfect before I took action. Just remember, baby steps, good, better and best. Make your choice. You’re always improving upon yourself and shed that guilt and shame. There's no place in that for your life. Your life is filled with joy and love.

[02:18:18] Kristen Bowen: Love it. Thank you, Ashley.

[02:18:21] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Kristen Bowen. She’s absolutely amazing and I highly recommend you go back and listen to the other episodes that’s she’s been in and you can go to Learntruehealth.com and type in “Kristen Bowen” in the search bar there to find the other episodes where she shares about how to get rid of parasites and more about magnesium. Just incredible information about magnesium. And of course, her health journey which she has an amazing story, so it’s really worth listening to. Please go to her website Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. Use coupon code LTH to get the listener discount. Please share this episode with those you care about who you know this would help. We’re all recovering from the last few years in some way or another and let’s support each other in our health journey. Have yourself a wonderful rest of your day.

 

Get Connected with Kristen Bowen:

 

Official Website

Facebook

Facebook – Living the Good Life Naturally

Instagram – Kristen Bowen

Instagram – Living the Good Life Naturally

 

Recommended Reading by Kristen Bowen

 

Healing Is Voltage by Jerry L. Tennant

Oct 29, 2022

If you have blood sugar issues, fatty liver, kidney issues, weight issues, heart health issues or immune issues you MUST check out this FREE summit! Please sign up (free) and share this link with your friends!
https://www.learntruehealth.com/masteringdiabetes

 

489: Mastering Diabetes: How To Reverse Insulin Resistance and Restore Insulin Sensitivity with Robby Barbaro

https://www.learntruehealth.com/mastering-diabetes-how-to-reverse-insulin-resistance-and-restore-insulin-sensitivity-with-robby-barbaro

The quest to restore insulin sensitivity is a long, arduous one. In this episode, Robby Barbaro talks about the right approach, combined with progressive health habits and lifestyle changes, to help anybody achieve their ideal weight, master diabetes, and reverse their metabolic issues once and for all. He also talks about his upcoming summit, the most comprehensive one you can ever attend, all in one place with no travel and at no cost.

 

Highlights:

  • Endotoxins
  • Recommended foods in Robby’s program
  • Green light, yellow light, red light food categories, etc.
  • Insulin sensitivity and resistance
  • Robby’s summit

Intro:

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 489.

Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Robby Barbaro who was in episode 233. You should definitely go back and listen to that. That was all the way back in 2018. Since then, you’ve published an amazing book. I’ve actually given your book as gifts before. Mastering Diabetes is a phenomenal book. You guys have coached thousands of people to reversing type 2 diabetes completely blowing it out of the water, completely reversing it. These people are getting off meds, losing weight, getting balanced blood sugar, living amazing lives, and even type 1 diabetics like yourself have cut insulin. Crazy amounts, 50 percent, 70 percent. They have had the best health success in their lives from the program that you and Cyrus have created and have been doing for many years. And I’m so excited to have you back on the show because you are about to launch a summit which I want all my listeners to attend because honestly, statistically, you as a listener probably have blood sugar issues or someone in your household or one of your friends does. Because statistically, I think, what is it, 1/3 of the population has diabetes or prediabetes.

[00:01:25] Robby Barbaro: That's absolutely right. It’s unbelievable. I’m just so excited to be here, Ashley. We have so much to talk about. And you’re exactly right. This our big event every year, happens once a year. It’s the Blood Sugar Revolution Summit. It’s absolutely free and people should absolutely register so they can get involved. We do free webinars in the evenings of this event, so we can answer questions live and some people call in, they do a phone call. It’s an incredible even. We have over 22 incredible experts talking on a wide range of topics. So, we’re just really stoked on it and people are going to definitely benefit. If you want to learn how to reverse insulin resistance, if you want to learn how to get rid of excess weight, if you want to learn about how you can prevent and reverse conditions like kidney disease, we have heart disease experts, we have fatty liver disease, we have gut health experts, we have cancer experts. It’s an amazing event with incredible speakers. Our goal is to help people really take full control of their health and understand the truth because it’s a very confusing landscape right now when it comes to nutrition, but it doesn’t have to be confusing. 

[00:02:39] Ashley James: I love that you brought up that you’re addressing kidney disease, fatty liver, heart disease, cancer. These are issues that are it’s kind of like an octopus like here we have diabetes but then you see all these arms of diabetes and we see that. It’s like what came first, right, chicken or the egg? When you go to a medical doctor, they’re trained. Now, I love all doctors. The unfortunate part is their education. They’re taught to see the body through the lens of reductionism and to see the body reduced to different parts, and then they're taught to prescribe pills to alter the body. They don’t teach us how to have optimal health and they don’t cure. These are standard medical doctors, right? And they’re doing the best they can with the tools they have but you wouldn’t take your car to a plumber.

[00:03:30] Robby Barbaro: That's right.

[00:03:31] Ashley James: Right? So, when we go to a medical doctor with chronic disease, their tools are drugs that manage symptoms but these drugs have other side effects and you go down a road of early death and disease.

[00:03:44] Robby Barbaro: That's exactly right.

[00:03:45] Ashley James: When we maintain having diabetes, because if you go to a medical doctor, I know like I’m preaching to the choir here, right, I’m talking to you, but this has been my experience also. I had, for many years, uncontrolled type 2 diabetes and every medical doctor “you’re going to be on metformin for the rest of your life, you’re going to be on insulin for the rest of your life. Like you're going to be on this drug and we’re just going to keep adding drug after drug.” And you're going to “manage” your diabetes. You're not going to “master” it, you're going to “manage” it, meaning you get to keep diabetes and these drugs.

But here’s the thing. Medical doctors have probably told the listeners, several listeners just like me that you’ll always have it, which is complete nonsense. It’s like saying there's dirt on your face. You're always going to have that dirt on your face. It’s like, you just wash it off. Just wash it off. So yes, with amazing change in lifestyle and diet and nutrition, we can heal the body to the point where it no longer has diabetes.

But now you’ve got all these arms of the octopus because with diabetes comes inflammation and with inflammation comes heart disease, cancer, fatty liver, kidney issues, eyesight issues, neuropathy. You’re losing your limbs. And I have a friend whose boyfriend has erectile dysfunction and he’s in his early 40s and he now can’t get it up because of his blood sugar issues. There’s certain jobs that he’s been fired from and he can’t be hired because he falls asleep. Like he wanted to be a bus driver. Can’t be a bus driver because he falls asleep. That's all out of control blood sugar. But he’s not willing to change his diet. So those who are listening today are willing, they're excited and willing. They want to know what are the answers because they’ve been told so many wrong things. So, I want you to demystify. Let’s talk about how are we going to demystify and this juggernaut because we’ve been lied to by the pharmaceutical industry, by the medical industry, the giant medical complex which makes so much money. Maybe you have some statistics here because I have some old statistics, but maybe you have new statistics of keeping someone diabetic. The medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the hospitals and the doctors. I saw an old statistic where they make $120,000 off of these patients.

[00:06:00] Robby Barbaro: The statistic I have is that the average is $16,752 per year, costs that are incurred by diabetes patients. So, that's like medical expenditures. That number you got might refer to other things.

[00:06:19] Ashley James: Might be when it’s the end stage like when they're in heart failure and diabetes, stuff like that. Either way, it’s costing. It’s costing you.

[00:06:27] Robby Barbaro: It’s absolutely costly.

[00:06:28] Ashley James: But if it’s costing you, it’s profit for them. They're profiting to keep people sick instead of reversing it, and you have a program that you’ve been doing for many years that reverses these issues.

[00:06:40] Robby Barbaro: Absolutely. Just to add to that cost, basically 1 out of every 4 dollars in the US healthcare cost, is spent on caring for people with diabetes. That amounts to $237 billion each year on direct medical cost for diabetes. So, it’s expensive, it’s costing.

[00:07:04] Ashley James: It costs us but it’s a $237 billion profit to keep people having diabetes and to keep everyone in the old way of thinking that you have to eat lots of fat and lots of meat and you can’t eat any vegetables or fruit because those are carbs, carbs are bad, and you definitely need to take all these meds. To keep them in the old way of thinking keeps them sick, so it keeps them profitable. $237 dollars of profit for the medical industry which is costing us.

[00:07:38] Robby Barbaro: Exactly. There's definitely some misaligned incentives for sure in our healthcare system. Like you said, something that's really disappointing and you know this to your own experience, is going to a doctor, being made aware that your A1C is high or your fasting blood glucose is high and that you are living with either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, and then being told okay, the first line of defense is metformin. “Here’s some metformin.” And maybe the doctor will say, “Hey, you should also adjust your diet and move your body.” But it’s not very clear guidance, there's not a lot of support there. There's not any really mentality of, “actually, let’s address the cause. Let’s see what we can do to actually take care of this now and make sure it doesn’t progress. This doesn’t have to be a chronic disease.”

It’s such a missed opportunity because diabetes, in particular, can be a great wakeup call. Especially pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes because if you catch it early enough, it is quite easy to reverse and turn it around. If you don’t catch it early enough and you let the disease progress, you can get to a point where your beta cells are burned out. So the beta cells inside your pancreas are responsible for producing insulin. When you're in an insulin resistant state, those beta cells have to work overtime and they have to work extra hard to produce more and more insulin to compensate for your insulin resistance and eventually, they can get exhausted and they just die out. So the population is diminished and all of a sudden you get to a point where you're not living with an autoimmune version of diabetes, you still have type 2 but you can become insulin-dependent simply because your beta cell supply has been reduced too much.

Now, there are people who come into our program where that has happened. Their beta cell supply, the produce of insulin has been diminished, but because our program helps them become so insulin sensitive, even with a smaller amount of insulin being produced, they can maintain a healthy A1c in the nondiabetic range. They can maintain a healthy fasting blood glucose all while eating the foods they’ve been told that they should not be eating just like you were insinuating before.

Another point I want to touch on here is you were talking about something like the octopus and the tentacles here, and how when you're living with any form of diabetes, your chronic disease risk for a range of conditions is increased. The number one cause of death for people living with all forms of diabetes is heart disease. So, that is the most important tentacle, okay? And it is something that you can address. You can absolutely in many cases reverse heart disease. You can also halt it and make sure it does not progress. So, this is an important part of our program. And again, we have a few interviews in our summit. Dr. Brian Asbill, he’s a cardiologist and he’s interviewed in our summit and talks about this in detail to go in depth on cardiovascular issues, tests you can get and all that important information.

But what you highlighted is very important to understand. When you are living with diabetes, there are many other concerns. And so, our approach is a blessing in a sense that it addresses all of them simultaneously and that’s what’s really fun about this. When you follow a low-fat plant-based whole food diet and you start addressing the root cause which is insulin resistance, you can absolutely turn your health around. Does that make sense?

[00:11:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. I had the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, on my show in episode 437 and he talks about how having diabetes was the wakeup call for him. He was losing his eyesight, not feeling really good, went to the doctor and came home with a bag of prescriptions and a pamphlet that said living with diabetes. And he rejected that. He thought, “I don’t want to live with it. I don’t want to have it anymore.” And so, he was called to. He just felt inspired to type into Google instead of like how to manage diabetes, he felt inspired to type in like how to beat it. And it led him to your information, it led him to eating a whole food plant-based diet, a very specific way of eating where you’re not eating processed oils and you're not eating processed sugar or processed flours, and you're eating real food. He had a huge bag of prescriptions. It was pretty gnarly. He was able to get rid of all of them and be taken off all of them and reverse all of his health issues. So, he is just a big advocate for this way of living because we can reverse the heart disease, the kidney disease, the liver disease, the diabetes, and prevent things like cancer. But also, people go from feeling incredibly crappy to feeling amazing.

Dr. Richard Fleming came on my show in episode 463 and he’s a research cardiologist, PhD, and he discovered way back over 30 years ago, discovered the root cause or the beginnings of heart disease before it was detectable in any machines. He invented a way of scanning in the body and he could then tell you if you kept doing the same thing, if you kept eating the same way, kept living the same way, he could predict where heart disease would show up. What he saw was that inflammation was the first thing that he would see in the body, the very first thing he would see was inflammation and that was the precursor to heart disease and as we know, that when we are in a diabetic state, the body is just full of inflammation. Is there anything you can say to that? Because I know that your program is incredibly anti-inflammatory. But just getting people’s blood sugar under control is also anti-inflammatory.

[00:13:56] Robby Barbaro: Absolutely. So, there's no question. I mean, having high blood glucose is a problem there. But really, it comes down to the foods that people were eating that led them to have a high blood glucose reading in the first place. It’s the foods that people are eating that cause them to be living in a state of insulin resistance. Okay? So foods like meat, cheese, and processed foods, they elevate your levels of inflammation in your body. But at the same time, what’s important to understand is when you eat those foods, you’re eating foods that cause inflammation, but also, you're missing out on the opportunity to consume those same calories with foods that actually naturally are anti-inflammatory. Okay? Those are foods that are high in fiber, antioxidants and other phytochemicals. These foods lower inflammation in your body. Okay? They do not have this saturated fat, the endotoxins. Okay? So, these are foods, the endotoxins that basically are toxins released from bacteria commonly found in animal food. So, these are the types of toxins that you avoid when you're not eating animal-based products and high fat products and foods high in saturated fat.

So, it’s kind of like a double whammy. It’s like, okay, we’re taking away the things that cause a problem, but then we’re replacing those calories with foods that actually address the problem. They’re anti-inflammatory. And that's really important to understand here. I mean, I would love to go a little deeper into the exact foods that we have people eating on the Mastering Diabetes program. Is that okay with you, Ashley?

[00:15:44] Ashley James: Yeah, I definitely want to touch that. First, I just want to talk about the endotoxins for a minute. Other guests recently have been talking about this and how harmful endotoxins are. But no one said, hey, you know, if you're really struggling and you know endotoxins are a problem for you, especially people with leaky brain, leaky gut, people who had Lyme disease or overcoming mold sensitivities, there's just certain people who are way more sensitive to endotoxins. You're saying that we get it from eating animal flesh. 

[00:16:17] Robby Barbaro: That's exactly right. So, basically, it’s present inside a bacterial cell and it’s released when that cell disintegrates. Okay? So, you have more of these cells when you're consuming animal products. It’s really that simple. And it’s a big deal. Actually, what’s fascinating is Dr. Joel Fuhrman in his summit, I think he’s on the first or second day, he almost talks about this for like the entire podcast interview. These toxins that are created inside your body when you're eating foods that are not designed for your body. Does that make sense?

[00:16:56] Ashley James: I love Joel Fuhrman. I’ve had him on the show. I also learned a lot from him when I went through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s coach training program and he was my favorite teacher.

[00:17:06] Robby Barbaro: I love that.

[00:17:08] Ashley James: He is so amazing. Just the things that he teaches. I love how he takes like the science of food to a whole new level and makes me so motivated to eat my broccoli and eat my mushrooms and eat my berries, all the good stuff. Oh my gosh. Yeah, okay, let’s talk about the food. One thing we didn’t touch on because I told listeners just go back and listen to episode 233 where you tell your story. But for those who don’t know your story, because I really want people to get what’s possible. Can you just give us the highlight reel? 

[00:17:42] Robby Barbaro: Absolutely. So, I’ve been living with type 1 diabetes since 2000, so that’s now over 22 years. It was in December of 2006 when I decided to switch to a low-fat plant-based whole food diet. So prior to that, I had tried many different dietary approaches. And my goal, my personal mission in life still to this day, is I would love to find a solution to how to reverse type 1 diabetes. I would love for my beta cells to produce insulin once again. That sent me on this mission to do anything and everything I possibly could to optimize my health from the inside out. That's why I learned so much and that's why I tried so many different diets. 

Just for those who don’t know, type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes, they're different. They’re different and they're the same in some ways. The reason they're different is type 1 is an autoimmune condition. We don’t know the cause, we don’t know why beta cells are damaged. But if you're living with type 1 diabetes, you don’t produce sufficient quantities of insulin. Your beta cells have been damaged and you have to inject insulin in order to eat food and survive. If you're living with type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes, in the initial phase, you're actually producing excess insulin. So, your body is in overdrive. It’s a lifestyle condition and it is caused by diet, exercise, genes are a very small component here. It’s really your lifestyle that causes type 2 diabetes. So, both of them, both type 1 and type 2, insulin resistance can be present. It’s insulin resistant that is the driver of the chronic disease risk that's associated with, again, both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

So, I’m living with type 1. I, again, tried many different approaches and really, the last 2 things I tried. So, the one before this approach we’re going to talk about in more detail, was a ketogenic plant-based diet. They didn’t really call it keto diet back then. But I basically ate nuts, seeds, avocado, I had lots of oil, I had tons of greens. But I kept my total carbohydrate intake to less than 30 net carbohydrate. Okay? So, 70 because there was plenty of fiber in the greens. So about 70 total per day, about 30 net. So, at this time, I did it. I did it very diligently and I did see how because I reduced my carbohydrate intake, my insulin went down. The insulin I needed to inject as a type 1 went down. But what didn’t improve was my carbohydrate to insulin ratio. So, how many grams, how much insulin I needed per gram of carbohydrate that I consumed, that got worse. I became more insulin-resistant. I ate myself into a state of insulin resistance. At that time, if I had berries or if I had a banana, my blood glucose would skyrocket. I could not metabolize those foods. Now, after doing lots of research and looking into this topic and having a whole new experience, I can see why that is so problematic. I can also see and understand why people with diabetes are so confused, why this condition is so confusing to the general public. It’s one of the few conditions that you can self-monitor, and that is part of what makes if confusing. You can test your blood glucose as often as you want and that confuses people.

Back to my story here. So, I did that ketogenic diet and I lose energy, I’m losing weight. I’m a freshman at the University of Florida. I’m not feeling well, and I’m like, I got to find something else, I got to keep searching. And I heard a podcast. It’s so funny to say that while doing a podcast.

[00:21:40] Ashley James: Right.

[00:21:41] Robby Barbaro: But I heard a podcast with this guy, Doug Graham. He was explaining how he had an approach where you could eat lots of fruits, mainly fruit and lots of greens and lots of vegetables. And that could actually, you know, help people reverse chronic disease, improve your health, and improve blood glucose controls. Like, wow, this is amazing, I’m going to try this. So, I bought the book. This is in September of 2006 when I heard this podcast. And he was talking about a book that he was going to have coming out. It didn’t come out until December. So between September and December, I was a little bit confused. I was buying some of his older books to try and figure this out and started to follow a fruit-based diet. But it was December when I started coaching with Doug. And I would email him every single day and he emailed me back every single day. For 90 days straight. I really learned his program. And I started eating unlimited quantities of whole fruit and lots of greens. My life just transformed. All of a sudden, I was super energetic. All of a sudden, my skin started to radiate. It was unbelievable what happened to my skin. And I had really struggled with skin problems growing up. It was so bad I took Accutane. It was one of the most serious drugs you can possibly take for acne. I tried all the treatments you could do at the dermatologist. The pills, the laser treatments, the microdermabrasion, the creams. Everything. Accutane was the last resort.

But I get on this fruit-based diet and all of a sudden, my skin is radiating. It was amazing. And my blood glucose control was mind-blowing. So I started eating over 700 grams. So, we go from a total of 70 to 700. And my insulin use stays at a physiologically normal amount. Right now to this day, I’ll inject like roughly 27 to 30-ish units of insulin per day. That's basal plus bolus. And I’m eating, again, well, over 700 grams of carbohydrate. So, my insulin sensitivity changed by 900 percent when you look at it on just a glucose basis. So with modern nutrition software, you can remove fiber and you can remove fructose. Okay? Because fructose does not require insulin to be metabolized and neither does fiber. So, if you compare just the amount of glucose I was consuming on the low carbohydrate diet, the ketogenic plant-based low-carb diet, compared to now my low-fat plant-based whole food diet, it’s a 900 percent change in the glucose tolerance. So, it’s basically 1 to 1 for me. For every gram of glucose I consumed, I needed 1 unit of insulin. And now, for every 10 grams of glucose, I consume/I need 1 unit of insulin. So, 900 percent change. 

I love talking about that because on this podcast, we can go deep because we have plenty of time, I love that. Most people don’t understand. Most people, 99 percent of people listening don’t even know how to do that calculation. But you can do it in a nutrition logging software called Cronometer. When you look at the carbohydrates, it’s broken down inside the software and you basically take the sucrose and divide that by 2, then you add the glucose and then you add, what’s the other number… I’m blanking on the other number. But there's three things you end up adding together and you can do that.

But the bottom line is, I eat far more carbohydrate than anybody thinks that somebody with diabetes should be eating. And I use a physiologically normal amount of insulin. And that’s the goal for a person living with type 1. So, my pancreas doesn’t produce any insulin anymore. So, what I have to do is I have to inject what it normally would have produced on its own. That’s the goal. And so, oftentimes, people in the low-carb world, they get confused for type 1. They’re like, “Oh, I want to take as little insulin as possible. Therefore, I’m just not going to eat carbohydrates.” That’s not a good idea. Yeah, you can get lower and lower and lower, you probably could get below 27. You could get below 20 if you’re very disciplined. But your insulin sensitivity is terrible. You can’t eat a banana. You can’t eat blueberries. So, you’re trading 1 problem from a longer list of other problems that are associated with living with insulin resistance. So, people are confused about that.

But even when you look at published research on type 1, we wrote about this in our book, on average, the low-carb community in this particular paper was following the Dr. Bernstein diet. They would consume 30 grams of carbohydrate per day and inject 30 units of insulin per day. So again, just think about that math. Again, compare to other type 1’s, they're using 30 units of insulin which is more insulin than I am using, they’re eating 30 grams of carbohydrate and I’m having over 700. So, the magnitude of change here is very important. And again, as we talked about earlier, insulin sensitivity matters. It absolutely matters. It matters for everybody listening to the show. If you have low energy, if you’re looking to lose excess weight, if you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, if cognitive decline is something you’re struggling with, neuropathy, retinopathy, cancer, like all these conditions are connected to insulin resistance. And that’s why this topic is so important. That’s why I’m so passionate about it. And that’s what led us to create Mastering Diabetes, is Cyrus had a similar personal experience.

We, as people living with type 1, have this unique advantage of understanding what decisions impact our insulin sensitivity on a moment by moment basis. The reason we have this advantage is because we know how much insulin we need to inject. So there’s three key metrics you’re going to have to know in order to understand insulin sensitivity. You have to know what’s your blood glucose. You can test yourself. You can get a CGM, anybody can do that. You have to count the carbohydrates you’re consuming. You have to know how much glucose is coming into your body. Number three is, you have to know the insulin levels. And that’s the number that a majority of people listening to the show don’t have but us type 1’s we do have. And so, I can see okay, what happens if I have like a whole avocado for dinner? What happens if I snack on too many brazil nuts? How much insulin do I need to inject over the next 24 to 48 hours because of that decision? Or let’s say if I’m not being as active or maybe I’m being more active, what happens to the amount of insulin I need for the grams of carbohydrate I’m consuming? We see that instantly like we are required to monitor that and manage it; otherwise, we wouldn’t survive. 

So, when I had that insight, okay, wow, like I know exactly what to do to make insulin work more efficiently, I can then translate that into okay, wow, we have over 100 million people in the US alone who are living with prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, and all they need to do is optimize the function of insulin inside their own body. They're trying to optimize the insulin that their pancreas is producing and their disease can go away in the vast majority of cases. So, that’s what we do at Mastering Diabetes. We help people with all forms of diabetes reverse insulin resistance. That is the cornerstone, we’re all doing that together. And the results are extraordinary. It’s amazing that we talked before our book came out and we were very excited to see that it became a New York Times bestselling book and the people continue to recommend it and it’s still a bestseller on Amazon. And we also have our own audiobook which is super fun. But to see this message being shared and the reviews on Amazon are incredible, we have well over 3000 reviews, and people are finally getting the truth. Thank you to podcasts like yours, truly beginning to understand why carbohydrate-rich foods are actually the best foods to eat, if you want to reverse insulin resistance. It’s just got to be the right carbohydrate-rich foods with the right combination of other foods, and we can get into that if you’d like me to.

[00:30:11] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely want to get into that. Listeners got to go to LearnTrueHealth.com/masteringdiabetes to sign up for your summit which is coming out on November 2, which is perfect timing, right after the Halloween candy orgy. I mean, it’s just this crazy amount of candy. I can’t believe how much candy. I don’t do this with my son. We go out and have fun and we enjoy all the festivities, but I’ve never made it about the sugar with him. I know it’s difficult for a kid but also, like I explained it to a few moms, you’re not going to go down to downtown Seattle, which is horrible by the way now in the last 2 years. It looks like a Third World country. It’s just graffiti everywhere. I feel so bad for the people who are like in the homeless camps and it is just overrun with drugs and crime. So, it’s very scary downtown Seattle. I would not go to downtown Seattle and score some drugs, some street drugs for my kid. Right? Like you wouldn’t do that. And yet, we’re giving children sugar which has almost the same effect on the brain. There’s brain scans you can go on YouTube and find where they do brain scans. Street drugs and brain scans of people on sugar, the same areas of the brain light up. You got dopamine. You’re triggering addiction brain and we’re training our children to be in addiction brain.

And I had a great interview with Joan Ifland, PhD. She earned her PhD in processed food addiction and she’s the reason why it’s in the DSM IV, which is now the DSM V. But she’s the reason why it’s now we understand it’s a problem to the point where people have a condition called processed food addiction. It is real. And about 1/3 of the population has addiction brain. Whether you choose to feed into it or not, people are susceptible, a certain percent of our population are susceptible to like someone can just go and eat some Halloween candy and it’d be fine, and in the next day they go to work or they go to school and they’re fine, but then there are those with addiction brain. You eat some candy and it triggers the dopamine high and crash and now that kid is looking for their next dopamine fix. And they don’t even understand it because it’s very unconscious, but now they’re going to binge on Netflix or screens or they’re going to go find more candy, or maybe they’ll do more daring things, more exciting, daring things. Whatever they do to get the dopamine. So much of processed food out there is the same. It’s meant to do dopamine spikes. It’s not just dopamine. There’s other chemicals in the brain that it spikes, but we like to go towards pleasure and away from pain.

What are we doing with kids during Halloween? We’re letting them have an almost unlimited access to a drug that affects the brain just like if we went to downtown Seattle and scored some drugs. We are training our children’s brains to do this. And like I have this love-hate relationship with Halloween because in my childhood it was so much fun. I loved the idea of making my costume, I spent a whole month working on my costume. For me, it was like I get to do theater. It’s just like it was so much fun. And yet, what’s happening now is as an adult, I look back and go, wow, this is just training us to be alcoholics, training us to be drug addicts. Training us to be sugar-holics when we’re adults. So, I do this fine dance with our sun where it’s like okay, we find some organic like just fruit candy kind of thing and I give him one or something. But we make it be about the fun. And I talk to him, I dialogue with him about how does your body feel when you eat these good foods versus if you ate this junk food, how do you feel. And he doesn’t like how he feels when he eats the garbage food. And so, you know, I wanted to be his choice. Right? I want him to grow up when he goes to his friend’s house, he goes, “No, I don’t want to feel crappy.” I’ve watched him do it which I’m really proud of him. I watched him go, “No, I really don’t want to feel sick. Like, give me the banana, I don’t want to feel sick.” I don’t want to feel gross in my body. 

And it’s that consciousness, but we have to also recognize in ourselves like here we’re coming out of Halloween and you’ve got your summit on November 2, and I really want all my listeners to sign up for it because everyone’s going to learn something whether it’s fatty liver, healing fatty liver, healing heart disease, cancer and preventing cancer, and how to heal the body from inflammation. Everyone could benefit from this insulin resistance. But if you don’t personally have any blood sugar issues, you know someone who does, and so you could be sharing LearnTrueHealth.com/masteringdiabetes with your friends. We can get everyone that we know and love, at least give them this information. Let them make the choice. If they're ready, if they're ready to no longer suffer, then they’ll make those steps, which is really, really exciting. 

So, we’re coming at a perfect time. It’s between Valentine’s Day and the Christmas holidays and all the really high sugar kind of holidays. I think Halloween is the highest sugar holiday. So you’re really catching people at a good time and I hope that my listeners will be more conscious of making the best choices they can during this candy season and making the better choices, knowing that the foods they eat can heal their body, which is really exciting. So yeah, let’s get into the foods that your program helps us reverse disease and heal disease.

[00:36:23] Robby Barbaro: Okay, this is my favorite topic. So, I’m going to go through a resource that we created. It’s free, it’s online, you can check it out. You just type in “High Carb Foods: Mastering Diabetes”. It’s going to take you to this article where we have a list and a photo of all our green light foods. So we’ve taken food, we’ve put it into green light, yellow light, and red light categories. Okay, so it’s very simple. And I’m going to list some of the key foods in each category that you can easily access that are affordable and some that are also particularly in season right now.

So, the green light category, it starts out with fruits. Fruits, as a general class of food, are high in water content, they’re high in fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytochemicals. Fruit is a great food for people living with diabetes because it’s a whole food. It’s the package that is special and important here, all right?

[00:37:27] Ashley James: What package the fruit comes in? Like frozen, dehydrated, fresh, blended? Is there any way that they shouldn’t be consuming fruit or can they consume it like can they consume frozen and blended? Can they make a smoothie? Does it all have to be unadulterated? 

[00:37:46] Robby Barbaro: That’s a great question. I love that you’re asking this. These nuances, they really do matter. So, when you are living with insulin resistance, you have any chronic disease that you want to reverse, like you’re trying to truly, truly heal a chronic disease, there are nuances that we recommend you pay attention to, particularly in the beginning. Okay, you’re in a very insulin-resistant state and you’re on a path to get out of that state. So, in that case, it is ideal to eat whole fruit unadulterated, right? Like, just the whole fruit and chew it. And it’s important to eat that fruit with greens or non-starchy vegetables, especially in the beginning, okay? All our recipes provide that, we make it really fun and easy to do. But the whole food, chewing it.

Now, the next best form of fruit, as far as package, would be if you took whole fruit and you blended it. Okay, you put it in the blender. Now, the reason it’s not ideal especially for people who are struggling with blood sugar challenges and they see spikes in their blood glucose and they have a high A1C, is that what you’ve done when you blended the fruit, is you have broken up the fibers. What you’ve done is you have increased the surface area and because you’ve done that, it can get absorbed into your cells faster. And an analogy I’d like to share to help understand this increased surface area, is to imagine you have a gigantic block of ice sitting in your front lawn. Okay? It’s the summer, it’s in Florida, it’s hot, it’s 90 degrees outside, and there’s this block of ice literally the size of your car. Okay? And it’s sitting in your front yard. And as the day goes along, that ice is going to melt and it’s going to disperse into the grass, okay? It’s going to be absorbed into the soil. And it’s going to take all day. okay? It’s going to take a while. If you took that big block of ice and you broke it up into individual shards like you took a weed wacker or saw and you started just breaking it up into tiny little pieces, little shards all over the place, that will get absorbed into the soil rapidly. Okay? You’ve broken it up. You’ve altered the structure of the fibers. That’s what’s happening when you take the fruit and you put it in the blender and you blend it up. It’s going to get absorbed faster. Okay? So, number one is whole. Number two is put it in a blender.

Number three would be dehydrating. Okay? The less dehydrated, the better. Let’s say you put something in a dehydrator and you want it to be a little gooey. Instead of making a banana into a really, really dense strip, you kind of made it just a little bit of gooey, only took maybe half the water content out. That’s going to be better because you still maintain some of the water content. But the more and more dry it becomes, the more calorie dense it becomes, the easier it is to overeat. The reason it’s easier to overeat dried fruit is because you remove the water content. And what makes you feel satisfied, what holds you from meal to meal, is bulk. And bulk is water plus fiber. So this is the whole concept of calorie. Density which we talk about in detail in our book and it’s a lot of research done by Barbara Rolls from Penn State University, and she has established clearly through decades of research that it’s water plus fiber and it’s bulk that makes you feel satisfied. So, when you’re removing the water, you can easily overeat. 

Then I would say regular dehydrating, once you get into like freeze dried fruit, it really becomes like candy and stuff like that, like it sticks to your teeth. It’s not ideal. I would not recommend that at all. I’d probably go and put that closer to like a red light category to really try to minimize or completely avoid. You really want to focus on whole fruits. Does that make sense, Ashley?

[00:42:01] Ashley James: Mm-hmm. 

[00:42:03] Robby Barbaro: Okay, good. All right. So, I want to mention a few fruits here. Plantains. When you go and when you look at this article, you will see that we have organized all of these categories. So, the fruit category is organized by calorie density, meaning that the foods that are the most rich in their caloric content are going to be at the top of the list. And the reason this is important is because when people adopt a plant-based diet, they are shocked at the volume of food they have to eat in order to stay satisfied and actually get the right number of calories. In the beginning, it’s part of the reason why people lose weight so quickly and easily in the beginning, is because their stomach is starting to adjust to even get in enough volume to meet their normal caloric requirement. So you kind of get into a calorie deficit just because it’s difficult to eat the right volume of food. Now, the problem is if you maintain that calorie deficit too long especially beyond the point of where you’re looking to lose weight or if you’re losing weight potentially too fast, you’re just not satisfied, then the diet becomes unsustainable and you start to crave other foods and all of a sudden you go and you eat a cheeseburger, which is way more calorie dense, and you feel better. It’s mainly because you got calories. You are missing calories.

So, in the green light category, basically of all the foods in the green light category, you need to actually focus on the most calorie dense green light foods in order to stay satisfied. So for example, something like watermelon is very calorie dilute. It’d be very, very difficult to just eat watermelon all day and be satisfied. You could try to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but you would be hungry like “I want more food” but you’d feel full. So your stomach would just be a little bit bloated because you had so much water, so much fiber with not that many calories.

So, the reason we have these calorie-dense fruits listed at the top, is to make this diet satisfying. And plantains are one of the best foods in the fruit category because they have 554 calories per pound. That’s the calorie density. The goal, when following this low-fat plant-based whole food diet for optimal weight and optimal energy and overall health, is to basically eat as much as you want that is under 750 calories per pound. And just for context, the most calorie dense food on the planet is oil. That is 4000 calories per pound. Okay? There is no water, there is no fiber, there is no carbohydrate, there is no protein, it’s just pure fat. Okay? So, that is the most calories. Then when you get into foods like animal products and processed food, that’s going to go much higher. So, let me give you an example here. Something like chips. Okay, let’s say you had some processed chips. That’s about 1200 calories per pound. Okay? Let’s say even sugar, 1700 calories per pound. You go to bread, 1200 calories per pound. Ice cream, 1000 calories per pound. Beef, 1000. Okay? Eggs are at about closer to 800.

So, what we got to understand here is that those foods, as you increase that calorie density and you decrease the nutrition value, it’s technically a junk food. Okay? So, oil is the ultimate junk food because it’s very high in calories, it’s the most calorie-dense food in the planet with very little nutrition.

So back to the green light foods here, plantains are in the appropriate calorie density. Now, you wouldn’t want to eat just foods let’s say like lettuce or something, or watercress like 40-50 calories per pound. Again, that wouldn’t be enough. You’d have to eat so many pounds of those foods, you wouldn’t be satisfied. So, there’s a sweet spot. There’s a sweet spot of somewhere between like 400 and 600 calories per pound is where you want the majority of your calorie-providing foods to come from and then you supplement the rest with nutrient-dense non-starchy vegetables and greens.

Another food that’s worth talking about is persimmons. Ashley, do you like persimmons?

[00:46:50] Ashley James: Oh, yeah.

[00:46:51] Robby Barbaro: It’s an amazing fruit. A lot of people don’t know about persimmons. They’re commonly found in two forms. Fuyu persimmons are round, Hachiya persimmons are cone-shaped. And this is a fall fruit. You can get it almost any grocery store. If your local store doesn’t have it, definitely find it at local Asian markets or Mexican markets. And with the Hachiya, you have to wait till it gets really soft like a balloon. And if you eat it before then, you’ll get a bunch of like a chalky sensation in your mouth and you won’t enjoy the persimmon anymore. The Fuyu, you can eat like an apple. That you can eat crunchy or you can wait till like it’s soft. That’s 477 calories per pound.

Then, bananas, 404 calories per pound. Jackfruit – have you ever had a jackfruit, Ashley? 

[00:47:35] Ashley James: Yes.

[00:47:37] Robby Barbaro: I love jackfruit.

[00:47:38] Ashley James: It takes a bit to process. A really, really big one. My son loves it. To me, it tastes like Juicy Fruit bubblegum which I imagine…  

[00:47:49] Robby Barbaro: Do you know what Juicy Fruit bubblegum literally mimicked the entire flavor? That’s why it’s called Juicy Fruit.

[00:47:56] Ashley James: Right. When the first time I ever had jackfruit, I’m like, wow, this tastes like my favorite bubblegum as a kid! Then I was like, oh no, no, the bubblegum tastes like jackfruit. 

[00:48:06] Robby Barbaro: That’s hilarious. I love that, I love that. That’s a way to look at it.

Okay, figs, a great fruit. Okay? Oranges, cherries, mangoes, longans, kiwi, pears, all the different varieties of pears, all the varieties of apples, pineapple, raspberries, tangerines. There are so many fruits. The variety that you can have on this program is surprising to many people and it’s an opportunity to expand your palate. So, there’s a lot of fruits. Okay?

Now, the next category is starchy vegetables. There’s less variety here as far as different produce items, but there’s a lot of variety within the fact that there’s over like 500 different types of potatoes. I mean, there’s so many types of potatoes and you can commonly get at least like 6 or 7 different ones at a grocery store. But potatoes are in this category. For example, the calorie density of a russet potato is 440. That’s the perfect place. You can eat these when hungry till satisfied. It’s very, very difficult to overeat because of the water content and the fiber. And similar to the question you asked about the package of the fruits, the ideal way to consume a potato would be steaming. That’s going to maintain the largest amount of water content and going to produce the lowest amount of advanced glycation end products which occur in the cooking process.

Then you’d go to something like you can do broiling, you can do baking, then you can do air-frying, but all these processes are doing more and more removal of water content and you want to focus on the whole food. So, we also have yams in this category. Taro is a great starch. Corn. There’s white potatoes, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, parsnips is a starchy vegetable that a lot of people love. The flavor is actually much better when you bake parsnips. And then squash, acorn squash, hubbard squash. That’s what’s in season right now. We have pumpkin here, spaghetti squash, butternut squash. There’s a lot of different squash varieties that you can try, and these are really, really beautiful foods. You can try and reverse insulin resistance.

The next green light category are beans, peas, and lentils. So many varieties of beans, so many varieties of lentils. Get the red ones, the green ones. Green peas are a wonderful food. So, we have on this article which you can access for free, it’s on the website. Chickpeas, pig beans, pinto beans, small white beans, black beans, adzuki beans, kidney beans, pigeon beans, great northern beans. These are things you can easily get in a can if you want to, and if you’re going to get it from a can, get the option that has no salt added, which is plenty of those available. And if it does have salt added, you can just try and rinse it off with water to reduce the sodium. But that’s going to be important for, again, addressing insulin resistance and also addressing high blood pressure which comes along with insulin resistance and diabetes in a majority of cases. So, lower your sodium intake, get the right package products. And I just want to say, a lot of people are scared of packaged foods. All of a sudden there’s this culture that we put like all packaged food into a class of being terrible. That’s not really true.

In 2022, there is an amazing amount of foods that do come in a package but like a plastic bag or a can, but they’re absolutely nutritious and delicious and convenient. So, don’t buy bypass some of the conveniences of the 2022 world where you can get these foods some of them pre-made. The next category here is intact whole grains. So for example, you can get intact whole grains that have already been precooked and you can heat them up. And if you need to save time, heat them up in the microwave, it’s great. So intact whole grains, those include spelt, barley, brown rice, quinoa, millet, rye, sorghum, wheat, wild rice, teff, amaranth, buckwheat, bulgur. There are so many intact whole grains and again, published research shows how beneficial these foods are for reversing insulin resistance and also for longevity. 

All right. So, Ashley, we just went over the first 4 categories. Fruits, starchy vegetables, then we had beans, peas, lentils, then we had intact whole grains. Those foods are listed first because like I said earlier, you have to focus on foods that provide you energy, provide you with calories. Too many people transition to a plant-based diet, they go, “I’m just going to eat a bunch of salads. I’m going to have tomatoes and carrots and onions and greens, and just eat all these salads.” It’s not enough. The bulk will make you feel satisfied for maybe the first 30 minutes or an hour, but then an hour and a half come by, two hours come by, and you're like, you’re starving like “Well, I need some food.” And it’s because you didn’t get enough calories. You didn’t eat foods from the appropriate category of calorie density.

So, the next part of the green light category, these are foods you add to the calorie-providing foods. These are foods that are very dense in their micronutrients which again, Dr. Fuhrman loves to talk about. And he talks about it in our summit. These foods are also even higher in their fiber content and they help stabilize your blood glucose. So things like shallots, artichokes, brussels sprouts, onions, beets, egg plants, broccoli, mushrooms, bell peppers, fennel, rutabaga, kohlrabi, chayote, cauliflower, okra, turnips, radicchio, asparagus, tomatoes, zucchini, celery, summer squash, cucumber, bok choy. These are amazing non-starchy vegetables that you can add to your life. When you get amazing recipes, learn how to prepare these foods, they can become very satisfying.

Then same thing with leafy greens, their nutrient density. Leafy greens are so important. We actually had an entire interview with Dr. Rick Dina in this year’s summit where he goes and does a nutritional analysis of what happens when you add in some more greens and in some cases, you replace some starchy vegetables with more fruit, what happens to your nutrient intake. It’s absolutely fascinating, you don’t want to miss that.

So, in this category we have foods like parsley, leeks, colored greens, kale, green onions, spinach, arugula, mustard greens, beet greens, Swiss chard, purslane, endive, romaine lettuce, red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, iceberg lettuce, butterhead lettuce. The nopales. Have you ever had nopales, Ashley?

[00:55:10] Ashley James: I’ve never heard of it.

[00:55:12] Robby Barbaro: Nopales is fun. It’s kind of a Mexican food and it’s quite crunchy and has sort of like a little bit of a slimy texture, but it’s actually quite good. So if you’re listening, you guys got to Google that. Nopales recipes. You’ll have some fun with it. So, that's the greens.

Then we have herbs and spices in the green light category. These are foods you can essentially eat when hungry till satisfied. You really don’t have to worry about the quantity. The key is, again, we talked about this in the first podcast, Ashley, so I’m not like repeating too much of that old stuff. But the key is that you're having these foods in a low-fat environment. So if you eat a bunch of fruit and a bunch of fat, don’t expect to reverse your insulin resistance. You’re increasing your carbohydrate intake while simultaneously decreasing your fat intake. That includes even some of the foods that people are calling good fats these days, the healthy fats. That's why we have the yellow light category.

The yellow light category lists foods that are healthy, they’re nutritious, they’re nutrient-dense, but you have to be cognizant of how much you're consuming. So this includes avocadoes, nuts and seeds, soy products, olives, and some particular fruits which one of them would be durian. Durian is a high-fat fruit. Those are all whole foods, absolutely delicious, absolutely nutritious, can be a great part of your program, but you can’t sit down and watch a movie and just start snacking on cashews and almonds and Brazil nuts. You’re going to eat way too many, you're going to exceed your fat intake very quickly, and it’s going to cause insulin resistance even though these are plant-based fats. You can still have too much. So to be very clear, to make sure everyone understands our program, to maximize your insulin sensitivity, we want you to keep your total fat intake under 30 grams per day. And just by eating whole plant foods and having a normal day of eating greens and beans and fruits and non-starchy vegetables, all whole foods contain fat. As a matter of fact, all whole foods contain essential fatty acids. When you eat a large enough volume of them, you meet your requirements. You can have chia seeds and flax seeds as an insurance policy, but it’s just a typical day of eating. You’ll get 15, 16, 17 grams of total fat without consuming any high fat foods. 

The moment you start adding in, you know, a handful of nuts, half an avocado, all of a sudden, you're going to go past 30 very quickly. I highly recommend that people listening use a nutrition logging software to actually become aware of how much fat they’re consuming per day. It’s really important.

So, we have those high-fat plant-based foods in the yellow light category. We also have processed carbohydrate-rich foods that are still healthy but they're a little bit more processed. This is like pastas. You could have brown rice pasta, you could have chickpea pasta. You can also have something like Ezekiel bread, okay? Whatever these foods were originally made out of, it’s better to have the whole form. So brown rice is better than brown rice pasta. Okay? If Ezekiel bread was made out of some sprouted bread, whatever that original grain was, just eat the whole grain. That's the better option. It’s less refined, the calorie density is lower in most cases. To be clear, in the pasta case, the calorie density is actually quite similar. So brown rice pasta ends up having similar calorie density because of the water that's absorbed in the cooking pastas. But it’s still a little more refined and it’s better to have brown rice. 

So, we clarified that. We also have put fermented foods in the yellow light category only because of the sodium content. So, plenty of research showing the benefits of fermented foods. But the sodium content is a concern for people who are looking to reverse insulin resistance. So again, the distinction is, you don’t just eat an unlimited amount of fermented foods. You be cognizant of how much you’re consuming, keep it at an appropriate amount in your overall diet, and you’ll be just fine. Whereas the green light foods, you just don’t need to think about it. You just eat as much as you want. They’re self-limiting with their fiber and water content. 

Now, the red light foods, these are foods we suggest you completely avoid and minimize them. We put animal products in here, so that's going to be things like chicken, beef, dairy, even things like shellfish, salmon, particularly because of the fat content, the advanced glycation end products that are higher animal products, and a lot of the pro-inflammatory compound. So, animal products are out. 

We already talked a little bit about oil. But I really do want to go a little bit deeper on the oil topic because people really get crazy. They get up in arms about not having oil. It’s just upsetting to them. What I want to clarify for anybody who’s in that category and have just been concerned like, “Oh, but it’s just so good. I’ve read so much research. This is so good for me.” Here’s the deal. It’s better to consume the whole foot. There is no research that's showing that having olive oil is better than having olives. What I was looking at was a study where they documented the 100 richest dietary sources of polyphenols. This is a fascinating paper. Within the list of 100, black olives is in the list and so is olive oil. Okay? So, what I want people to understand is this paper documented the dramatic difference in nutrition content of whole black olives versus olive oil. When you consume the same weight of olives, the study did 100 grams of olives and 100 grams of olive oil, the polyphenol content is 9x greater in the whole black olives, the antioxidant content is 2x greater and it’s 75 percent less calories. So, it’s more nutrition, less calories. For a society that is generally overweight and needs to lose weight, it’s just better to have the whole food. It’s going to be the same thing across the board where you're talking about avocado oil, sesame oil, or any other of your favorite oils. It’s just better to have the whole food. You don’t need to have this processed food where so much is removed. So in this particular study, we see how in the olive oil, not only was the fiber removed and the protein removed and the carbohydrate removed, but a great portion of the nutrition was removed in the processing. It’s just unnecessary.

So, we’re big advocates of whole foods. Again, it’s not like we’re anti-fat like oh, just don’t have any fat. No, it’s have the appropriate fats in the whole food format and keep your fat intake, again, under 30 grams per day, or another way to look at it, is no more than 15 percent of your total calories coming from fat. That is how you optimize your insulin sensitivity. And this is where there's actually a lot of confusion in the research world because you’ll see a lot of papers where people are comparing a low carb diet to a low fat diet, but the low-fat diet wasn’t actually a low fat diet. It was usually 30 percent of calories from fat. High 20’s. Not under 15. That's a big mistake that’s happening in research. 

A few other red light foods that are obvious but I want to state them anyways, processed food in general. So, obviously we’re not telling people to have Twinkies or M&M’s or Snickers bars. That's not going to be helpful. But it’s also important to clarify that even some of the modern new plant-based foods you're finding in grocery stores, plant-based burgers, these foods are made in a laboratory. They're processed, they're high in fat, we’re not recommending you consume those. You can make amazing burgers from beans and other ingredients and you can really enjoy your life that way. You don’t need these processed foods. It’s not going to help you reverse insulin resistance. That's our really simple traffic light system, Ashley.

[01:04:00] Ashley James: I love it. So much to talk about. With the keto, I think so many people have been told or like so many people say “Well, I saw a study,” or, “I heard, or, “My doctors says that eating keto or Atkins increases insulin sensitivity. When I cut out most of my carbs and I eat really high fat, that increased my insulin sensitivity.” Can you speak to that?

[01:04:31] Robby Barbaro: Absolutely. I love this topic. I understand why it’s confusing and you’re exactly right, Ashley. You're seeing that all over the media, right? You're even seeing papers of people publishing saying olive oil. It’s in the research like the actual researchers are concluding that olive oil increases insulin sensitivity.

A big mistake that’s happening is number one, how insulin sensitivity is measured in the research papers. There are a few common ways. The gold standard in testing insulin sensitivity is euglycemic clamp test. This is a test. It’s very expensive. It’s done in a laboratory. It takes many, many hours. There's a solution being injected and insulin being injected simultaneously and a lot of things being tested. It’s not practical to be doing often. But it is the gold standard. Then after that would be the oral glucose tolerance test. And that's where you go to a laboratory, you consume 75 grams of glucose, and your insulin levels and your glucose levels are measured in your blood over the course of 3 hours every 30 minutes. You can see a graph of okay, well, how much insulin is required and what was your blood glucose levels as your body is metabolizing this glucose solution.

These two are both valid forms of testing insulin sensitivity because they contain a glucose challenge. The mistake that's being made is that there is a new form of insulin sensitivity being reported or basically being measured. It’s called the HOMA-IR. HOMA-IR is a surrogate basically allowing researchers to measure insulin sensitivity in a much less expensive, less invasive way. This test only requires a fasting blood glucose number and a fasting insulin level. So you can easily get that done. Those are very easy blood tests. Okay? What’s missing here is there’s no glucose challenge. So, of course, when you stop eating carbohydrate-rich foods, you in that case don’t need to produce as much insulin. You can have a depressed insulin requirement because you're not even eating carbohydrates. Okay? In the same case, you can have your blood glucose levels come down. But you're not testing insulin sensitivity. You're not assessing how well can your body metabolize glucose. So, this is a big mistake that’s happening in the research and people are getting erroneous conclusions because there is no glucose challenge. Does that make sense? 

[01:07:33] Ashley James: I just realize that some listeners might not even understand what insulin does. Could you just very quickly explain here’s the cell, here’s glucose, here’s insulin. What’s the dance?

[01:07:45] Robby Barbaro: For sure. Okay, so insulin is a hormone that does many different functions in your body. But the primary function is that it ushers glucose out of your bloodstream and into your cells. The way it does that is think of insulin as a key. So, insulin is the key that opens the door so glucose can then go out of your bloodstream into your muscle and liver cells. What happens is when you consume a diet that is too high in fat, particularly trans fat and saturated fat, you end up storing excess fat inside your cells. It’s called intramyocellular lipid. This excess fat interferes with insulin signaling. Insulin resistance is a defense mechanism. Your body is trying to prevent your cells from intaking excess energy. So, if there's too much fat inside the cell, your body is saying, “okay, I don’t want that glucose. The glucose that's sitting in the bloodstream, I don’t want it. I have too much. I’m overloaded when it comes to fuel in here. I don’t need anymore. So, I’m not going to allow you to open the doors. Stay in the bloodstream.”

Again, it’s a protective mechanism. So, what’s happening in that case is you're going to develop a state of hyperinsulinemia. Your body is going to try and produce more and more insulin in order to shove the glucose into the cell. So now, you have high insulin levels, and high glucose levels. That is the classic state of insulin resistance, of metabolic dysfunction, and is at the root of a longer list of chronic conditions which we’ve discussed throughout this show.

[01:09:37] Ashley James: And the longer the blood sugar remains high in the bloodstream because the cells are rejecting it, the cells are like “I’m full” goes somewhere else, the sugar is staying high, the glucose is staying high in the bloodstream, the longer that happens, the more inflammation and damage it causes.

[01:09:54] Robby Barbaro: That is correct.

[01:09:56] Ashley James: What’s also been described to me by someone else is that the more insulin like when you have excess insulin, insulin is almost like banging down the door of the receptors of the cell and damaging the cell wall because it’s just like more and more and more and try to force it in, and it’s kind of like shoving the key in the lock so hard that it damages the keyhole. But there’s damage being done on a cellular level throughout the body and we’re overconsuming fat and so the cells are like, “I’ve got too much to handle right now, we filled the cells with fat, and then we filled the cells with sugar,” because let’s face it, the standard American diet is a high processed fat, high processed sugar diet. Then, we’re starving. Then, we feel like we’re starving. That's how I felt.

When I had type 2 diabetes, I was hungry every 45 minutes, I would just cry. This was back when we lived in Vegas, we loved going on drives. This was pre kids, just my husband and I, and we decided one day to go for this fun drive out into the dessert and we did this loop around one of the mountains and came back around, it’s beautiful out there especially when it was a little stormy and you see these beautiful thunderstorms off in the distance, and we talk and talk. So, we went for a drive, and I ate before we left and we’re out in the middle of the dessert, there's nowhere to eat, and I’m like, the hunger starts hitting me harder and harder and harder. I started feeling crazier and crazier. I just cried. I just was bawling. We were newlyweds and I’m bawling to my husband. I’m just like, I feel like a prisoner trapped in my body, I’m hungry all the time. I’m panicking. My body is actually physically panicking because there's nowhere to get food. I said the first restaurant you see, we’re stopping at and I don’t care what it is. 

This happened multiple times where we’d be out running errands or we’d be late to go meet someone or pick something up. My body would just get into this panic mode of needing to eat. And I wasn’t crashing. I’m not type 1 diabetic. I’m not going to go into a coma. I would survive. But it was this constant gnawing hunger that would get worse and worse and worse like 45 minutes after a meal. It would come on suddenly and I said, “Just pull over. I don’t care what it is. Arby’s, McDonald’s, whatever the first food. I just needed to put food in me. And that was back then when I was eating the standard American diet and listening to the MDs and all they had was drugs and they had no answers for me. I finally got sick of being sick and that's when I started to dive into the holistic health and shop the perimeter of the grocery store is what I was told, eat organic. I could not believe how one condition after another dropped off when I changed my diet. I found a naturopath who mentored me. I was able to reverse. I had chronic adrenal fatigue that was so bad I couldn’t process human language in the morning. I couldn’t even understand people talking. Like my chronic adrenal fatigue was really bad.

I had infertility. I was told I’d never have kids. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and then I had chronic infections I was on monthly antibiotics for. The infections went away when I started eating organic and I shopped the perimeter of the grocery store. I still at the time was eating cheese and meat, but I cut out all the stuff in all the aisles, basically. I was just going around the outside of the grocery store. Anything that was in the produce section was safe in my mind. That was back in 2008. That was my first big thing where I was like, wow, if in 1 month of changing just this little thing, if I can no longer be on constant antibiotics, then what else can I do? Right? I was able to just go bang, bang, bang down that list and reverse all those issues.

[01:14:00] Robby Barbaro: I’d love to know more about your story, Ashley. So, what was your A1c when you got diagnosed?

[01:14:10] Ashley James: This was 9.5 I think.

[01:14:15] Robby Barbaro: Wow. Okay. Then what’s been your most recent A1c that you remember?

[01:14:21] Ashley James: Oh, 4.7.

[01:14:22] Robby Barbaro: See, that’s what I’m talking about, okay. That's powerful.

[01:14:31] Ashley James: My midwife was like, “You have better blood sugar than I do.” And then I told her to get your book. 

[01:14:37] Robby Barbaro: Yeah, I love that. Okay. I mean, tell the audience, like what did you eat.

[01:14:41] Ashley James: What did I eat when I was sick?

[01:14:43] Robby Barbaro: To reverse insulin resistance.

[01:14:46] Ashley James: So it was a process for me because I was actually one of Dr. Bernstein’s patients. You mentioned the Dr. Bernstein diet. I was one of his patients. I love getting vulnerable and sharing my story and I could totally go on forever, so I want to be cognizant of the time. But I was not sick. When I was in my early teens, I was really healthy. I was very athletic. I didn’t care about food. I just ate whatever was put in front of me. We just ate a lot of vegetables and lean meat and brown rice and that kind of thing. My mom was pretty healthy, so we ate healthy. But I didn’t care about food. Then when I hit puberty, because women gain hips and boobs. My mom had the psychosis around weight and so she started putting me on diets when I was 12. She put me on diet after diet. I wasn’t overweight. She took me to the weight watchers, she took me to Dr. Bernstein. And that started messing with me because now I’m doing keto, I’m 16 years old, an athlete. I was on the rugby team, I was on the swim team. I rollerbladed and cycled. I weightlifted. I was very athletic. I thought I ate healthy but my mom in her mind thought I needed to lose weight. 

For me, I rebelled. I pushed against that, I rebelled. But I did his diet and after his diet, it messed my body up so much because it was this weird keto thing. Oh man, he would yell at me if I didn’t lose more than a pound a week. I remember losing less than a pound in 1 week. I’m 16 years old and I’m an athlete. And he yelled at me and he told me I cheated. I walked out of their crying. Actually, that wasn’t the first time that my mom sent me to a doctor or nutritionist. I’m surprised now looking back, like all these doctors were yes, telling my mom “yeah, she could lose some weight.” I can show you pictures. No one would think I was overweight, so I don’t know what these doctors were thinking. But they all put me on all these diets and my mom would buy all the latest. We went and met Dr. Barry Sears when he wrote his first version of the Zone Diet and met him, shook his hand, did the Zone Diet with my mom. She was so diet obsessed that it really messed with me. Then, I rejected all of it and said no, and then I started just eating like my boyfriend. I had never eaten that way. He was going to Subway and eating Subway sandwiches and baloney and Wonder bread. He was a black belt and I’m like, well, you know, I was into martial arts at the time going to the dojo 5 days a week, and I’m like, well, I’m going to eat just like the black belts because they know what they're doing. That made it worse. That's when really my blood sugar started spiraling out of control because I was eating literally no healthy food, it was all processed. 

[01:17:48] Robby Barbaro: That's an incredible journey you’ve been on.

[01:17:49] Ashley James: Right? Both my parents have passed away. I love my parents and now as a parent myself, I really understand that my mom was coming from a place of fear and love, and how many times as parents our love comes out as fear, and then that fear is anger. What we’re trying to do is we’re so afraid we’re going to screw up our kids and we actually end up screwing up our kids which is just life. My mom, she loved me so much. She put my through that craziness and it has led me to where I am today. Now I’m on my own healing journey, I can help others heal themselves. I don’t regret any of that. But I can look back and go, that was really messed up. Like I can look at my childhood and go, that wasn’t okay but at the time I thought it was normal. Right? Because we always think what we’re going through is normal. But now I can go back and say, you know, those doctors were wrong and they shouldn’t have done that with me. I’m surprised that not one of those doctors took my mom aside and said there's nothing wrong with her, stop putting her on diets, just let her eat healthy food. It’s just crazy how messed up this world is. Man, I wish I had known about the whole food plant-based diet sooner. I kind of kick myself. I think about man, what would my life had been like if I was on this diet back when I was a teenager.

I hate the word “diet”. It’s really just a lifestyle and a way of eating. As Dr. Joel Fuhrman puts it, it’s like a nutritarian diet where you're nutrient dense. You're eating as much nutrients possible. So I’d rather eat olives that have 9x greater the polyphenols than drink olive oil. Plus, olives are really fun to eat. Olive oil is not really fun to drink. So, I’d rather take in the nutrients from something instead of have to pay for the processing to take out the nutrients and eat a processed food. But for me, it’s been a journey. So, I really fought this idea of not eating meat because I had been on Atkins several times and Dr. Bernstein. I’d been so many times on these diets where doctors told me or books told me that meat was the solution and that carbohydrates were the devil. My mom would accost me if I ate any carbohydrates, she’d yell at me. So, I had a lot of emotional trauma around carbohydrates. This idea of eating even a banana was so foreign to me because I thought it was so dangerous.

[01:20:19] Robby Barbaro: I’m so glad you're sharing this experience because this is just another reminder. It’s also very unique that you’ve been an actual patient of Dr. Bernstein who literally is teaching the exact opposite, like literally says no fruit.

[01:20:34] Ashley James: It was really weird like if you could have seen the diet, just the regular way of eating I did before Bernstein, you’ve been like “That’s not bad.” I mean, it was steamed vegetables, rice, lentils. That was all in my diet. I wasn’t the picky kid. You put it in front of me, I ate it. I wasn’t picky. I’d have some kind of cream of wheat or some cream of rice pablum cereal for breakfast kind of thing. Then, just pretty much the same stuff. I did not like the lunches my mom sent because I’d open up my lunch at school and there would be brussels sprouts and they smelled really bad by the time you get to school. But I’d have brussels sprouts in a salad and apple and maybe some almonds, she’d throw in a few almonds. It wasn’t like I was eating unhealthy before. Then, doing these doctor diets were so radical and so unhealthy now that I look back. It’s really crazy. Of course, I lost weight but then my metabolism freaked out and I rejected it.

Then I got into, you know, there's a sense of control and fighting that control and then addiction brain, and I really acknowledge now how much addiction brain there is. So, I was depressed and angry and food was a soothing mechanism like babies want their blanket or they want their binky. My brain wanted the sugar binky or the bread binky. I really did feel like if my brain was suffering, I’m upset or angry or stressed going to that food, like a sandwich for example and all of a sudden, a sense of relief. Yeah, it’s a drug. We, more times than not, will turn to food for that “comfort”. And we’re just filling ourselves with crap and then we’re causing these diseases. Then the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry gets to profit, what was it? $237 billion.

[01:22:49] Robby Barbaro: No one really knows how much profit is in there. But it is a large number. 

[01:22:55] Ashley James: A stupid amount of profit for big pharma and hospitals. None of them want us to be healthy, so of course, the world is upside down and we have to really acknowledge that. If what you're doing is not working and so for many years, what all these doctors and what all these sicko diets that I was on constantly wasn’t working, and then my own way wasn’t working, my own way was like addiction brain, processed food, standard American diet, all that wasn’t working. It’s like okay, well, what’s left? What’s left is this whole food plant-based diet that works and that people get results. So, I fought it and it actually wasn’t until I started doing the podcast. Because when I started doing the podcast, I was full on keto. I was like, keto is the best thing in the world! And if you listened to early episodes, it’s like keto, keto, keto. 

Then I started to get these whole food plant-based doctors on and of course, I’m open minded, I want my listeners to learn. I want to learn because nothing is perfect, right? And I didn’t have diabetes anymore but I didn’t have insulin sensitivity. And so I couldn’t go away from like, for example, if you went and ate a pizza, if you went and just ate the standard American diet for a day, would you be okay? The next day, would you be okay or would you feel like your blood sugar be so off and would everything be so off because you don’t have insulin resistance. You do have insulin resistance or you don’t.

[01:24:37] Robby Barbaro: That's okay. But you're asking me if I went and had like a standard American pizza, I would feel awful.

[01:24:43] Ashley James: You’d feel awful because you're so used to eating a healthy diet. 

[01:24:46] Robby Barbaro: Yeah, of course. It’d be super heavy. I would be eating myself into a state of what’s called situational insulin resistance. I’d become insulin resistant over the next 24-48 hours because of the garbage that I just ate. I mean, could I get back into my normal state of insulin sensitivity? Yeah. If I didn’t continue to eat a bunch of that garbage, then yeah, I’d be back to normal.

[01:25:16] Ashley James: You can situationally. Because of all the fat that fills your cells, does that mean that after 24 hours of not eating crap, can people already see insulin sensitivity coming back online?

[01:25:31] Robby Barbaro: When people come to our in-person retreats, which are about 3 ½ days long, people fly in on a Thursday, we have dinner on Thursday, we kick it off, all day Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, people leave on Monday morning. In that rapid short period of time, every single person who’s come to one of our retreats in person, experiences an improvement in insulin sensitivity rapidly. Within the first day, type 1’s are reducing their insulin, type 2’s are reducing their oral meds, they're reducing their blood pressure medications. We have a doctor who comes in to oversee the whole process. We’ve had many amazing plant-based doctors come and join us. It happens rapidly, no question. And that's because when they're under our care to retreat, we do choose to give people optimal results as fast as possible, which means all three meals are changed immediately, it’s extremely high nutrient density, very low fat, and we’re having people move their body twice a day. So, we speed this up to show people what’s possible and help them give a plan to maintain it when they go home. Which is a little it different than, again, like if you read our book, most people transition one meal at a time over an extended period of time, but when you do everything in an optimal way, results come in very fast.

[01:26:59] Ashley James: Cool. So, going back to your question. So, at the time when I was keto, keto, keto, it was the best thing in the world, at the beginning of starting this podcast six years ago, if I ate outside of keto, but even if it was healthy like potatoes or had the Ezekiel bread like you talked about, but mine would be gluten-free, like sprouted gluten-free bread, I don’t know, I would be a mess. I would have felt like crap because even though when I was eating low carb in keto, I thought it was good. Go out of those boundaries of keto and I felt horrible. I also developed inflamed liver. It wasn’t fatty liver, it was inflamed liver. I had an ultrasound done and blood work done and my liver enzymes were through the roof. You could see my liver. It was pushing out, it was do distended, it was pushing out beyond my rib cage. It was so painful I couldn’t sleep on my right side. It was really painful. That was from the keto diet.

And so, I had to go, “Okay, this isn’t working.” I went down the list of like this isn’t working, I’ve done this over and over again. It’s just like Bernstein. Although Bernstein wasn’t as high fat or anything, but it was still keto. And Atkins and all that. It was just a repackaged Atkins over and over and over again, this whole low-carb high-fat thing that keeps getting sold to us. And it wasn’t working. It was very restrictive and then I would start feeling sicker and sicker and sicker, and then eating outside of it, I would feel even worse. 

So, when I started interviewing doctors who were on a whole food plant-based diet, I was open-minded but I was also resistant because I had my mom’s voice in the back of my head going, you know, rice is bad for you, potatoes are bad for you, what are you doing. She’s this little voice in the back of my head that I had to stop and go, I really need to examine my beliefs around food. Because I had been carrying some beliefs from childhood that aren’t true. And I need to examine my food beliefs.

When I had an expert, I don’t even think he was a doctor, he was an author. Because my last little reasoning why I shouldn’t eat a whole food plant-based diet was there's not enough protein. Because back in my mind, again, meat, meat, meat, meat is the answer. That had been my belief system that I had around food. But my belief system wasn’t serving me anymore because I was not optimal health. And I don’t believe in diet dogma. Here’s the thing. If we have a dogma and then something changes in the body, we need to adapt our diet to help our body. So dogma will stop us from doing that. I had to examine my own diet dogma and this one author that I had on the show said, “Well, you know, you can get 16 grams of protein from a serving of lentils.” And I was sold. I was like, wait, that's like two eggs or whatever, right? I was like, oh, I can trade out my eggs for lentils? And I can trade out my chicken for beans. Then I started kind of going down this list of wow, there's a lot of protein in vegetables and a lot of other nutrients also. But then, hearing like well, where does the ape and the elephant, you know, those strongest land mammals get their protein from? They're eating plants, right? So it was kind of the middleman.

But I started doing that and then shortly after eating, I decided to basically do the program that you recommend and chef AJ and Dr. Goldhamer and Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Fuhrman and all these other plant-based doctors that I’ve had on the show, they all pretty much say the same thing. There's nuances, right, like yours is really geared to reversing diabetes. Dr. Esselstyn has a slightly different spin and that's more for heart disease. But they all complement each other. You would still probably reverse diabetes on any of their programs because they’re all very, very similar. But I like had like you said, the nuances were dialing stuff in for your program which is fantastic. And watching people reverse disease.

I went and tested my blood sugar, which I hadn’t done, because again, I wasn’t diabetic anymore, but I didn’t have insulin resistance. And I always, always, always could not get below 115. Fasting, couldn’t get below 115. Two hours after a meal or four hours after a meal, couldn’t get below 115. It was just no matter what, even on keto, couldn’t get below 115. It was like the weirdest thing. It was like this barrier. And I remember, I don’t know if it was weeks or months into eating this way, but it wasn’t long after. It was still new to me. So, I was kind of on this high of how excited I was because I was feeling better and better and better. My rings were loose on my hand. I was like, wow, I’m doing really well. I tested my blood sugar and it was 87. And I just started crying tears of joy.

[01:32:13] Robby Barbaro: Good for you.

[01:32:15] Ashley James: I had eaten like a snack an hour before and it wasn’t a big snack, but like, this isn’t even fasting. I ate something an hour before. And I felt so even keel. I wasn’t hungry for hours. I know you said like when people first go plant-based, they’re hungry because they only ate 200 calories for a meal because they don’t realize that you kind of have to eat more. And so I was like, oh, I just had seconds. I’m like, okay, I’m just going to have a second serving of brown rice, beans, and my stir fry of vegetables that are done with water instead of oil. I’m just going to have a second serving, and that's fine and now I’m full. But I go hours, hours without crashing. I mean, I don’t crash. I go hours without feeling hungry. I mean, if I have to skip a meal because I’m super busy, I don’t have jitters, I don’t have panic. My body isn’t panicking. I just go, okay, I’m just a little hungry, I’m going to drink water and then I’m going to get something in me when I can. It’s so much freedom. 

Here's the paradox. Because the paradox is like people who don’t eat this way think they won’t have freedom like “Well, I can’t eat. You can’t eat it.” Like, I can’t eat at restaurants, I can’t eat at my mom’s house anymore, whatever, my aunt’s house or whatever relative. I can’t go have wings with the boys… they’re thinking about all the limitations on how they won’t have freedom. But that way of eating caused them health freedom and freedom in their body.

[01:33:42] Robby Barbaro: That's so right.

[01:33:43] Ashley James: So, what I love is I jump out of bed in the morning, I don’t need coffee anymore. If I do partake in coffee, I do a tiny, tiny, tiny amount and it’s kind of just my little fun drug of choice. But I don’t need it. So I don’t do it every day. I used to need coffee. I wake up, I jump out of bed like I didn’t have any stimulants this morning to get on the show with you. I just jump out of bed and I’m like, boom, my mind is awake, I’m awake. That is totally not me when I was on animal products and when I was on processed food. So, I have body freedom, I have energy throughout the day. I have so much body freedom. So yeah, I have traded the freedom of eating crap food for health in my body.

But yeah, so there are limitations. I can’t eat at certain people’s homes. But I’ll bring my own food. Or you know what, my friends are really accommodating. I’ll just tell them like listen, these are our restrictions and also, our son has some allergies so I’ll just say these are the things we eat, these things we can’t eat. Honestly, if a friend isn’t willing to make accommodations for you, like how much are they your friend? I’ve been impressed with like when our daughter died last year, people came out of the woodwork to bring us food and they all brought us whole food plant-based. They came out of the woodwork. My neighbor cooked me so much food. I had a friend that lives 45 minutes away brought just days’ worth of food. Everyone cooked us to our diet. Some of our friends even went and found websites that had whole food plant-based recipes. Our friends just Googled whole food plant-based recipes and accommodated. There was no one that was like, I don’t know, mean about the way we eat. So, it was how they showed love. And people who really care about you, there's always going to be someone who’s upset about your diet because what it does is if they have addiction and I’ve seen this before, if they have addiction and they're addicted to their processed foods, your change threatens that. Just like alcohol, people who choose to stop drinking and they tell their friends who they used to drink socially with, there's always a friend that gets angry about it and gets defensive about it. And that is because you're challenging their addiction. You're not asking them to stop eating meat, you're not asking them to stop drinking alcohol. Your change is a reflection of their addiction and it’ll make them angry. So, don’t take it personally, but you got to do you. You’ve got to stick up for yourself and just love those friends and family, but don’t let their discomfort influence the longevity you're giving yourself. 

[01:36:39] Robby Barbaro: So true. So true. 

[01:36:43] Ashley James: Yeah, so there’s my soapbox. 

[01:36:44] Robby Barbaro: I love that. What an amazing example, what an amazing story you have. And I mean, also the practicality of doing this lifestyle, communicating with people, with friends, with loved ones, like that can be an entire show. We should do a whole show on that topic. 

[01:37:01] Ashley James: Yeah, right? Your coaching, I love your coaching on helping people navigate once they’ve made these changes. Navigating those friends and family. Because that’s something that, you know, I’ve grown a thick skin. But I acknowledge that there's a lot of listeners who haven’t yet. Right? I don’t know what it was. Honestly, I think it was giving birth to our son. He’s 7 ½. So I think right about that time, I was in the hospital for 5 days, in labor for 3 ½ days straight. And it was pretty ridiculous and I was just like, people were walking in and out, and I was half naked, all naked, I don’t remember. I think that's when I just lost that ability to care about or like have what other people think of me, have me want to change the good that I’m doing for myself to make other people feel comfortable. And I was like, you know, somewhere around there, I grew a pair and I’m like, you know what, I love my friends and family, but if my health choices that are healing my body is making someone uncomfortable, they need to work on their baggage. I am not going to make myself unhealthy to make someone comfortable. And this is what we’re doing as a society, is we’re trying to make people comfortable by making ourselves unhealthy. And we really need to cut that out. That is not healthy for anyone. It’s okay to be that black sheep, the salmon that's swimming upstream, that’s saying no to the things they know are unhealthy for them when everyone else is saying yes to them. It’s okay.

[01:38:47] Robby Barbaro: Couldn’t be more. Be proud, proud of what you're doing. You’re reducing the healthcare cost in this country. You're reducing the impact on the environment and you're becoming an example of what’s possible and the having more energy and having less missed work days because you're actually healthy. I mean, that's actually another big cost of our country. When people are unwell, they can’t contribute to the workforce. It’s a problem. So, you have to be proud of yourself.

[01:39:18] Ashley James: I’m just proud that I’m reducing the profits to big pharma.

[01:39:21] Robby Barbaro: There you go. That's another thing to be very proud of. Fantastic.

[01:39:27] Ashley James: So you keep talking about half an avocado and I don’t have a concept for that because you cut open an avocado, you eat the whole thing. If someone were to eat too much nuts or too much avocado and too much for your program, do they not get results? What does this look like?

[01:39:46] Robby Barbaro: It’s a big question. Here’s what happens. If people start eating too much of those foods, it does inhibit weight loss for a lot of people. What it does is it also makes it more challenging to have certain fruits. So, you’ll hear a lot of people that say oh well, look, if you're going to have these nuts and seeds and you have diabetes, you should be careful with the “high glycemic” fruits. This is only a problem when you are in an insulin-resistant state. Basically, then if you're going to have more fat from plant-based sources, then you're going to be limited to things like berries and pears and foods like that in order to keep your blood glucose under control. So, that's the main concern. But again, nuts and seeds are fantastic, they’re great. It’s just that the quantity, you don’t want to sit down and just start snacking on them because it’s just easy to overeat them. It’s just really that simple.

[01:40:46] Ashley James: It’s so easy. I don’t love nuts or seeds, like they're okay, that’s not my thing. My husband, he did go through a phase where he’d eat like a huge bag of cashews in a day. He went vegan before ever considered going whole food plant-based. He was the guy when I met 14 years ago, he would only eat meat and yeah, he never ate vegetables. He would do like nachos. There might be a vegetable in nachos, but pretty much he was the meat and potatoes and the nachos guy. And oh, ice cream and just all the junk food and alcohol and the sugar and all that. When I first met him, I got him off of sugar, alcohol. I mean, he was not an alcoholic but just socially and I was like, no, this is not good. And we made some good changes but he was still just like beef for breakfast, lunch and dinner kind of thing. And even that was too much for me. I was like, always on and off Atkins. He was just go, go, go meat only. Meat and coffee basically. Then one day, he woke up and I think it was about five years ago, he just woke up and he said “I’m never eating the flesh of an animal again.” That was a complete opposite. And he goes, “Yeah.” And he’s the kind of guy who’d never kill a spider for me. He’s 6 foot 6. He’s very tall. No one has ever picked a fight with him just because he looks like he’d take you down, but he’s a total pacifist. He’ll take the spider outside but he won’t kill out. He goes, you know, “killing things just doesn’t feel right to me and it doesn’t sit well in my soul. It’s been really bothering me for a while. And I don’t want to partake in that anymore.”

I had been also telling him about stuff from my podcasts. I think the last thing I told him that might have been the very, very final thing that made him flip over was I had Robyn Openshaw on talking about one of her books which was something called like Vibe or High Vibration Life, and she’s talking about the vibration of food and that there's hertz, like you can measure the hertz of food. So if you go to the grocery store, you can take this machine that measures the hertz or the energy frequency of something. She says broccoli and carrots and apples and bananas, they’ll all be like 60 hertz, 90 hertz. They’ll be high in hertz. Then she goes, you know how much pork is? And I’m like, no. And I just had had like pork sausage just that morning for breakfast. She goes it’s 6 hertz. Well, why does this matter? They measure the hertz of people who are healthy and I can’t remember the exact number but something like 200 hertz if you're healthy. If you’re sick or have cancer, maybe you're like 120. People who are in the hospital dying are at 60, and people who are the day they’re going to die, they’re down to 40.

So, you can measure basically in health. You can measure hertz. And you see that the healthier you are, the higher your hertz; the unhealthy you are, the lower your hertz. Why wouldn’t you be consuming foods that are higher in hertz and not consuming foods that have no energy in them? I know that correlation is not causation, but it just was like an interesting thought like oh, why don’t I eat foods that are high vibration to increase, at least help my body have a high vibration that makes sense because we are all energy, anyway, if you study quantum physics. In chemistry you see that we’re more energy than matter. So, we should eat foods that are higher in energy to feed ourselves in that way.

And yeah, the next day, he woke up and said “I’m never eating meat again.” So I had to figure out how to cook for him. Then, of course, I had all these doctors on the show, we’re constantly talking about whole food plant-based diet. I kicking and screaming started eating that way, just dragging, it was so hard to say goodbye to chicken and eggs. I’ve struggled at times. I’m not perfect, I’ve struggled at times. But cutting out oil was fine. I had done that years ago because Dr. Wallach back 12 years ago told me to not eat oil. He wants people to eat gee or rendered duck fat. I’m like ugh, I can just cook with water, that's fine, I don’t need that.

So I started learning like from Chef AJ and other whole food plant-based chefs and it became really easy for me because I love cooking in the kitchen and making delicious food. it became really easy for me to do that switch. But what I was surprised with was that I didn’t miss meat. My body didn’t crave it. My brain did because of addiction brain. But my body didn’t feel like it needed it and I was surprised because I had never eaten a meal without meat. Then all of a sudden to have meals without it, I’m like, oh wow, I’m full. I didn’t think I’d be full. I thought I had to eat meat to be full. I thought I had to eat meat to have energy. And it was the opposite. I had way more energy without meat. Meat was causing me to feel sluggish. I couldn’t believe that. So, it was a big night and day. There was a lot of old belief systems that had to drop away.

So, I’m really excited about your summit, and thank you for breaking down those foods. If people just started eating that way right now, they’re going to see a difference. But we want to give them tools and we want to arm them with so much good information, which is what your summit is going to do. So, people can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/masteringdiabetes and get access to your summit. Sign up now because it starts on November 2. Tell us about your summit. What are we going to get out of it, what does it look like, how long is it. Are people going to be able to do your summit, and then dive into this and master their diabetes?

[01:46:32] Robby Barbaro: You said the most important word there. Practical. We’re all about practicality at Mastering Diabetes. Each interview, each expert is summing up what they're teaching with practical tips for you to put into action. That is what makes this summit so viable, is because whether you're coming in because you want to lower your blood glucose, or you want to lose weight, or you want to gain more energy. Or you're struggling with kidney disease or fatty liver disease. You have high blood pressure. Like it doesn’t matter what you're coming in with. There is something in here for you and there are action items. It’s an amazing event. So it's 22 speakers. It’s from November 2 to November 9, and the whole thing is free. You just enter your email, you're going to get emails inviting you to listen to the presentations during the day. It’s very, very powerful. We learn a lot. Every year we interview these experts and it’s a real honor and privilege to be able to share this with all of you out there. Again, it’s free. It’s November 2 to 9. We have an incredible lineup of experts. Once you register, you’ll be able to see all those details. But it’s just an incredible event and I really can’t wait for everybody to get involved. 

I can’t also emphasize enough the importance of the webinars. There's live webinars that happen and you get a chance to interact with us and our coaches, ask questions, and we’re here to set you up for success and get you going on the right direction. And really addressing the nuances. There are so many, and you’ve learned this and you’ve applied it in your own life. You’ve had so many amazing experts on the show. You’ve been able to dig into the details. But there are nuances to doing this successfully in your life and that's what the summit is going to help deliver for you. 

[01:48:24] Ashley James: I love it. I am so excited for it, I can’t wait. I’m definitely going to attend. I can’t wait for it and I know that my listeners should definitely check it out. Please, though, everyone share this with your friends and family. You can share this episode with your friends and family, or you can just tell them to go to learntruehealth.com/masteringdiabetes, let’s get all of us signed up to learn. If someone is struggling, let’s help them and maybe they’ll make that leap. Maybe they will give it a try and they will see the results. The results speak for themselves. When people feel so good like when you feel so good eating this way, you just notice you don’t want to go back to feeling like crap and so the old way of being doesn’t serve you anymore and you're like you know what, I can still go hang out with my friends, I just don’t have to eat the food. That's okay. You still get to have all the fun and you get to have all the health. So, learntruehealth.com/masteringdiabetes. I’m very excited.

Thank you so much, Robby, for coming on the show again and sharing all this information. It has been so fantastic that you’ve been doing this and you’ve been eating this way for, what, 16 years now.

[01:49:37] Robby Barbaro: 16 years now, yeah.

[01:49:39] Ashley James: So awesome. Also, the links to your podcast will be in the show notes and all the links to everything that you do will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything you want to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:49:50] Robby Barbaro: I just want to say thank you for everything you do and your consistent contribution to this movement of healthy eating and having people get well and address the root cause of chronic disease and you're so passionate about not giving profits and revenue to these pharmaceutical companies that aren’t acting in our best interest. Thank you for everything you do. It’s amazing, keep doing it, and I appreciate you having me on.

[01:50:13] Ashley James: Thank you. I appreciate you too. This is awesome. You’ve saved thousands and thousands of lives and we’re just going to keep turning this ripple into a tidal wave. I’ll see you at the summit, Learntruehealth.com/masteringdiabetes.

[01:50:24] Robby Barbaro: See you there.

 

Get Connected With Robby Barbaro:

 

Official Website

Facebook

Instagram – Mastering Diabetes

Instagram – Mindful Diabetic

YouTube

 

Recommended Reading by Robby Barbaro

The Forks Over Knives Plan by Alona Pulde M.D.

Oct 10, 2022

Dr. Biamonte's website: www.health-truth.com 
Join the Learn True Health Facebook group: learntruehealth.com/group
Check out our new site! https://www.learntruehealth.com
The Minerals Ashley takes and recommends: TakeYourSupplements.com

 

488: Kill Candida Holistically and Restore True Gut Health, Dr. Michael Biamonte

https://www.learntruehealth.com/kill-candida-holistically-and-restore-true-gut-health-dr-michael-biamonte

Looking for a way to eradicate candida for good? Join me on this episode as I again interview Dr. Michael Biamonte, who has a unique and effective protocol to heal the gut, eliminate toxins in your body, and get rid of candida that is causing immune dysfunction.

 

Highlights:

  • MARCoNS and biofilm
  • What die-off is
  • Effects of candida on bowel movements
  • Dr. Biamonte’s diet recommendation to heal the gut
  • The different phases of Dr. Biamonte’s program
  • Candida and allergies
  • Candida strains
  • Female yeast infections

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers, and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. I am really, really excited for you to hear today’s interview with Dr. Michael Biamonte. It is mind-blowing. This is going to be one of those interviews, you know, once in a while. I definitely have done several interviews that are life-changing, and this is one of them. You know sometimes I’ve got some feel-good health interviews and mental health, emotional health, that kind of stuff, spiritual health. This is the one where rubber hits the road and I know that we’re onto something with his protocol.

I’m really excited to dive in and excited for you guys to hear how you can finally get rid of that elusive candida which it sounds like is a major contributor to many illnesses that people continue to suffer from and it’s just like playing darts in the dark. You keep trying different things, taking different supplements, changing diets, eliminating … I know some people who they can hardly eat anything. They’ve eliminated so many foods and yet, they’re always so sick. And candida is the root cause. It’s just amazing how so many people are walking around suffering from candida infection and here we have today the information that is going to change their life. So, I’m very excited for you to hear today’s interview.

I want you to plug in with the Learn True Health podcast to make sure that you don’t miss out on anymore life-changing interviews. Please, of course, subscribe to wherever you listen like Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Podbean, even the podcast app on your phone whether it’s Android or iPhone.

You can also come to LearnTrueHealth.com. I spent all summer long revamping the website and so it looks fantastic. It’s much more mobile-friendly. Please come to the website LearnTrueHealth.com and pour through great information there. I also transcribe every interview to make sure that you can get the information you need, so that all the content is searchable on the website. You can use the “search” function if you're looking for, let’s say, you're like, “I want to learn more about detox or heavy metals.” You can type in “mercury” or “heavy metals” or “detox” in the search function of every episode where we talk about that and teach about it is going to show up for you. Also, I know that there are some people who like to take notes or like to read instead of listen to the show, and that's why the transcripts are there for you. And they're all at LearnTrueHealth.com.

Now, many of you are not on Facebook, but I encourage you to come join just to get into the Facebook group. For those who are on Facebook and are not in the group already, I invite you to come check it out and be part of our community because you are really missing out if you're not part of the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’ve got over 5,000 listeners in there, and together, we answer each other’s questions, we learn from each other, and we share our successes with each other. It’s a very supportive environment. I have learned so much and I’ve also shared. I answer all the questions I can and I help to bring all my expertise and all my knowledge from all the guests that I’ve interviewed and all the naturopathic physicians that have mentored me for the last 11+ years. I bring all that to the table. I help as much as I can. But, you know, we also have experts in that Facebook group. We have some of our past guests in the Facebook group. They’ll show up and answer questions as well. And we have naturopathic physicians. I’m so pleased that we have such a wonderful community of health nuts just like myself there to show up and to help each other. 

And so, whether you're brand-new to the holistic space and you're looking finally to get your health back or whether you're an avid long-time listener or long-time advocate for holistic health, you're going to love the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s free. Come join it and just experience that either you could be someone who helps or you could be someone that receives the help, or both. And that’s why I think it’s such an enriching environment. So, please subscribe. I have a bunch of really great interviews coming out this month and I’m really excited for you to hear them. And I want to make sure that you continue to get access to my interviews. Make sure you come to LearnTrueHealth.com, my website. Check it out, use the search function, take advantage of all the features that I’ve added to it. And come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. You can find it by going to LearnTrueHealth.com/group.

Now, this episode I know is going to make a huge difference in people’s lives. So, please share it with any of your friends that have eczema, that have chronic health issues that don’t seem to resolve, that have chronic gut issues that don’t seem to resolve. This is definitely the interview that’s going to help them.

I’m really excited though for the next few interviews I have planned out that I’m going to be releasing soon, so definitely stay tuned because this one’s amazing and the next few are equally as amazing. I’m so excited. I hope you guys are having a wonderful, wonderful month. And thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing, thank you so much for listening, thank you so much for coming into the Facebook group and sharing your testimonials of how the Learn True Health podcast has made a difference in your life. There is recently a testimonial that left me absolutely in tears, in a good way. And actually, I think what I’m going to do, because it is such a good testimonial, I think I’m going to read it out loud soon in an episode because I feel that it is worth everyone hearing it. And just spoiler alert: some of the information that she got from my show helped her save her mom’s life. So, how cool is that?

When I set out to do this podcast, it was to help people no longer suffer like I had suffered, and it was to help people. If we could save someone’s mom or save someone’s dad from dying of cancer or heart disease, if we could prevent illness, if we could stop suffering and prevent illness in other people’s lives, then mission accomplished. And I love getting your testimonials because that’s the fuel. That's the fuel that keeps me doing this because I want to help as many people as possible to learn true health. I want to stop the suffering of as many people as possible and help as many people as possible to save their loved ones. 

So, together, by sharing this, you are helping to do that. You're onboard with my mission to help as many people as possible. So, thank you for spreading this information by sharing my podcast with those you care about. Because we are really making a difference. When we get testimonials like that, that is why I do it and that is why. And so, I know that’s why you share it as well. Because if you can share it with a friend and they're able to resolve their chronic illness from the information you shared, that is better than any Christmas gift or any birthday gift or any gift you could ever receive, that is the best gift. To give someone the gift of knowledge that they apply that then allows them to no longer suffer, I mean, touching someone’s life in that way feels so good. So, thank you for helping me to spread this information. And you are part of that. You are part of helping people to get out and end suffering, get out of suffering and start feeling amazing, and living lives that are full. So, thank you.

Awesome. Enjoy today’s episode. I know you're going to love it because with Dr. Biamonte’s protocol, we’re going to help a lot of people. I’m very excited about that.

[00:07:55] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 488.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show for part 2 of the candida chronicles. We’re just diving deep into the gut today and we have listener questions because we just published recently our first part of our interview. And now, we’re going deep and I’m so excited to have you back on the show, Dr. Michael Biamonte. We have fantastic questions from the listeners, but first, I want to pick up where we left off. We were talking about your candida protocol. And for listeners who haven’t heard our first episode, we definitely want to go back to episode 486, so that they can hear the first part where we talked about how Dr. Biamonte came about understanding candida on such a deep, deep level and how to finally resolve it because it is a very elusive beast. And I’m so happy that we’re finally digging into the meat today.

So, let’s just pick up where we left off. You were talking about the treatments that work and that you see really work, and that before you even start treatments, you sort of have a pre-treatment protocol. Can we get into that?

[00:09:22] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Sure. We start typically with phase 0. The program runs phase 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. One of the major discoveries that I made in handling candida was that you needed to do certain things in a certain order and if you violated the order, it wasn’t going to work.

So, the first phase that we have, Phase 0, is like a preparatory phase, in a sense, where it is like a colon cleanse for someone with parasites and candida or let’s just say dysbiosis. What that phase essentially does is it removes any of the major organisms that are hanging out there that if we try to kill them with the latter phases would just create so much die-off that it would make it intolerable for the person.

So, phase 0 works mechanically. The products that we use in phase 0 destroy candida enzymatically by digesting it using diatomaceous earth which slashes into it. And by using herbal and fiber products, which sort of scrub this and get it to release off the lining of your intestine which is a very tricky thing with parasites and candida because they make certain proteins that lock themselves onto the lining of your intestine.

Then there’s the biofilm that's there too. So, phase 0 neutralizes all those things so that the organisms that are easily accessible are being able to mechanically be drawn out which is another thing that two of the phase 0 products, in particular, mechanically draw out candida and harmful organisms that are kind of living in the creases of your intestinal tract.

[00:11:17] Ashley James: We talked about biofilm a little bit in the part 1 of this interview. So, biofilm, because I keep seeing it in those colon cleansing parasite groups where people take a picture of this long weird thing that's not quite a worm but really, it looks like they shed something that molded. It was like a perfect mold of their intestines.

[00:11:42] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, that's not biofilm. That's considered to be hardened feces and hardened mucus, which has stagnated in the intestinal tract. And you don’t find that in everybody. Dr. Jensen’s book on bowel management, I think it was Colon Cleansing Through Bowel Management, or Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management, that book had many, many pictures of people who had been very constipated, who excreted this black rubbery material that was literally like a mold of the intestinal tract, that's not typical. That's in more extreme cases. The average person doesn’t have that. The average person will have biofilm.

Biofilm is produced typically by MARCoN bacteria. MARCoNS or bacteria which are unfortunately drug-resistive and they become antibiotic resistive, and these MARCoNS, they're in the family of MRSA. These types of bacteria, these MARCoNS produce this mucus-like substance that they hide in. Unfortunately, the way bad organisms work is they cluster together. So if you have candida, you can be guaranteed that in the area of your intestinal tract where the candida is living, MARCoNS are going to find their way. They're going to become attracted to that candida as will protozoa and other harmful pathogens that will get sort of stuck together. Then, the MARCoNS produce the biofilm which is like a slime that they get covered in.

This was before until we learned about MARCoNS and biofilm, it made it harder to get rid of these microorganisms. But the advent of technology on biofilm has made it much easier because we know that the average person who is doing any kind of like a cleansing program to try to get rid of candida or parasites, if they have a lot of biofilm, you have to cut through that biofilm for those products to be able to reach those organisms. We now know that's essential. 

But it is typical that people who have biofilm – you touched on this before a little – people who have biofilm typically will excrete mucus. That's one of the ways we know that they have biofilm and the product to get rid of the biofilm is working. They’ll call and they’ll say, “You know, I pooped before and it was really slimy.”

[00:14:13] Ashley James: And that's an indicator.

[00:14:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: That's an indicator. So, that’s for phase 0 of our program.

[00:14:17] Ashley James: I’m hearing how important phase 0 is because I know so many people who will jump into a “cleanse.” They’ll go to the health food store, they’ll buy something with a bunch of herbs in it and then they’ll just start taking it. And they’ll end up feeling horrible because there's a big die-off, but they're not addressing the hood/the neighborhood inside the gut where the candida has set up shop, basically, within this biofilm. And as long as we’re keeping the biofilm in there, then they hide inside us and can avoid these protozoa, these bad bacteria, the candida. They’ll hide together in their little bunker that they’ve created inside our gut.

[00:15:06] Dr. Michael Biamonte: It’s a pretty accurate picture. Phase 0 was originally developed when I was doing some work with Hulda Clark who wrote a lot of popular books. She made me aware of just how common parasites were in a lot of my patients. So, the original phase 0 was a parasite cleanse. Then, we discovered that the phase 0 was also busting our biofilm and doing all these other things that we discovered that the people who did phase 0 before they went on to the other phase is that we had less die-offs, and then we decided to extend phase 0. We gave the person phase 0 for the first month and then after that, the person continued phase 0 along with phase 1 and phase 2, which are the two major killing or elimination phases. The die-off was less in those people than if they did not take the phase 0. But still all relative because if you have somebody with bad leaky gut, people with leaky gut get very bad die-off as well because the nature of the leaky gut allows all those dead toxins from the organisms you're killing just to spill into the bloodstream and overload it and cause mast cell activation. But it still is less. Phase 0 still does cut back the die-off the person is bound to have. That's kind of the bottom line and that's why phase 0 is useful because it does lower the die-off and it does continually act like an ongoing colon cleanse, so that as the person is taking phase 1 and phase 2, the phase 0 allows them to get deeper and deeper and deeper, and make it work better. It’s just very synergistic.

[00:16:47] Ashley James: I love it. Can you just back up for those that don’t know die-off? When we say die-off, what we’re referring to? Could you please explain the mechanism in the body of die-off?

[00:16:57] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Sure. Die-off is technically referred to as Herxheimer reaction because it was Dr. Herxheimer who identified die-off. He had found that when he treated people for Lyme disease and parasites and things like that, they had a bad reaction, like a toxic or an allergic reaction that was generated by the dead organisms. So, if you give somebody some kind of antimicrobial, it goes into their system, it kills the candida, it kills the bacteria, it kills the yeast, whatever. Now you have this dead organism there, dead debris. The dead debris starts to denature. There’s a lysis that occurs which means the cells break down and they split, and it’s decomposing essentially. So, you have decomposing dead microorganisms in your gut that release all kinds of toxins and antigens and harmful toxic proteins and whatnot. They can even release viruses. Candida and certain parasites harbor viruses. They themselves are the carrier of a virus. So, this is why you’ll get some people with herpes, when they do a candida cleanse or a parasite cleanse, their herpes will get worse temporarily, and that's because killing those organisms, you're killing the host. And that's releasing the virus from that host, which is the microorganism.

So, that's what die-off is basically. Die-off is basically an allergic reaction that one has to the dead organisms they're killing on their cleansing program.

[00:18:28] Ashley James: Right. The mycotoxins and just all of it. Dr. Jay Davidson was on our show and he talked about how parasites can almost be like sponges for heavy metals and that when they die off, they end up releasing heavy metals right back into the body.

[00:18:45] Dr. Michael Biamonte: The same thing is true of candida, and that’s a very dangerous concept because it’s caused some people and some practitioners who are very intelligent to be misled into thinking that candida or parasites actually are a protective mechanism of the body to entrap these heavy metals, which is totally false. It’s completely false. The major reason why I can say it’s false that we can easily look at, is the fact that heavy metals, especially mercury, suppress fecal IgE and IgA. The mercury depresses your intestinal immune system. It suppresses your intestinal immune system. That's what allows candida and parasites to even flourish more, is that due to the presence of mercury, your own intestinal immune system is suppressed.

[00:19:35] Ashley James: I mean, this is such a strong point to make that the parasites are mopping up mercury, for example, and then they die off, they're releasing the mercury which is suppressing the immune system which is allowing things like candida to overtake it. Does candida itself also mop up or hold on to these heavy metals? What does candida release when it dies?

[00:19:59] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Candida can release and can accumulate all heavy metals. This is, again, why you’ve got to eliminate candida in a specific order and you have to know that it does this because when you put somebody on a program to kill candida, if you don’t have them on things that are also binders, which my phase 0 program covers, that are going to absorb the mercury or the heavy metals, then you're just throwing those metals back into their system.

[00:20:25] Ashley James: I want to talk more about the products that you figured out work, we’re definitely going to talk about. I’d like to also address food. Because you’ve talked about constipation and I wonder, do people with constipation have greater chances of candida, or do people with diarrhea, do people on either side of the spectrum, when it comes to bowel movements have candida issues? Or does candida end up causing constipation or diarrhea?

[00:20:52] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Actually, both are true. If you're fine and not having any issue and you suddenly get candida, it will constipate you. It can cause diarrhea, but mostly it will constipate you. But on the other hand, if you're prone to constipation for whatever reason or you suddenly get it, the constipation will cause you to develop candida because constipation causes your bowels to become more alkaline. And candida lives in an alkaline environment in your intestinal tract.

[00:21:21] Ashley James: And this is really interesting. That was actually one of the questions our listeners brought up in our Learn True Health Facebook group. The idea that if flourishes in an alkaline environment. Because you know, everyone is running around drinking alkaline water and saying we should alkalize our body. But there's areas of the body where we want it to be acidic for a reason as part of our defense mechanism.

[00:21:42] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Right. We have to separate this out. This is where a little knowledge becomes dangerous. The pH of the intestinal tract, a normal good pH for your intestines is somewhere between 6 and 7.2. When you go higher than 7.2, the acidophilus there dies. The probiotics die and then candida takes over. When you go below 6, you have other parts of your normal flora which die and then it’s very easy to have organisms that would cause diarrhea to take over. So, an alkaline colon tends to be constipated. An acid colon tends to be diarrhea. In the middle is where we want to be because that's where the pH is correct for all your normal flora to live.

And there is also a large majority of the normal flora, is E. coli. Now when I say E. coli right away, they're thinking of hamburger that’s putrefying and it’s going to be poisonous. But the large majority of your normal gram-negative bacteria in your intestinal tract is sort of a friendly E. coli which is non-pathogenic. You can even buy it in supplements in Europe, in Germany and other countries there. You can buy E. coli supplements just like you were buying acidophilus. They don’t allow that here in this country because they would be very concerned about whether or not the E. coli you're getting is the right strain or is it a pathogenic strain, so the FDA just doesn’t allow it.

[00:23:11] Ashley James: But we need the healthy E. coli?

[00:23:12] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, we do. The majority of your bacteria in your intestinal tract actually is the healthy E. coli. It’s not even the healthy gram-positive acidophilus and bifidus. The healthy E. coli outnumbers those.

[00:23:30] Ashley James: When we’re doing phase 0 and someone let’s say is either they have diarrhea or they have constipation and they're doing the protocol to bind and to get rid of the biofilm and all that, what foods are the best foods to support this program?

[00:23:46] Dr. Michael Biamonte: You know what, it’s funny, when it comes to candida, there is no food that helps you get rid of candida. There are only foods that make it worse. 

[00:23:56] Ashley James: So just don’t feed it.

[00:23:57] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Right. That's really the simplest answer. There is no food that really gets rid of candida. When we really cut down to the nitty-gritty of it, there isn’t really any food or any diet that's going to get rid of candida. Even if you go on a really low-carb diet that's high in vegetables and high in al these beneficial foods, you’re still not going to get rid of the candida because the candida has grown roots into your tiny capillaries in your intestinal tract to siphon off glucose to keep itself alive.

[00:24:26] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[00:24:27] Dr. Michael Biamonte: So, you're not going to get rid of it. But an ideal diet for candida would include organic non-GMO grass-fed meat and animal products. It would include a high amount of vegetables. It would be low in carb and low in sugar. It would be also very low in grain and gluten-free. That would be the essential makeup of the diet that would be helpful to somebody with dysbiosis. And on an individual level, it’s important that they avoid foods they know they’re allergic to that they say they have reactions to or maybe show up on an allergy test that they're reacting to. That would be important too.

[00:25:10] Ashley James: I’m going to ask the question just a little bit differently, but you did answer it. So, I’m asking the question again but slightly different. Certain diets claim to heal the gut like the GAPS diet, for example, that has a lot of bone broth. Do you see benefit? When it comes to treating candida and healing the gut, have you seen a benefit to specific diets that aim to heal the gut?

[00:25:37] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Some. Again, it’s kind of more important what you don’t do than what you do. When it comes to healing the gut, raw food, believe it or not, raw salads, raw vegetables are actually harmful. They further irritate a leaky gut. And fermented food also irritates the leaky gut. So, on the leaky gut diets that I give my patients, the first thing we’re concerned about is they're not eating fermented foods. They're not eating a lot of raw foods. And of course, because almost everyone with leaky gut has candida, you also want to make sure the diet is low in carb and low in sugar.

[00:26:13] Ashley James: But the carbohydrates from vegetables is okay, but you're saying maybe like remove fruit?

[00:26:18] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, because fruit is more of a refined sugar. Fructose and fruit juice and things like this, get absorbed into your blood stream and in your body too quickly because you’re separating the fiber from the sugar. Like as an example, when you make a juice. That's a great example. But when you eat fruit, your body eventually separates out the sugars from the fibers and the fructose is pretty volatile. It does aggravate candida regardless of what some people out there say.

We had a patient who went whacko once with this concept that fruit would not be a good sugar to eat or fruit would be bad for candida. But anyway, so the fruit is bad for candida because it is sugar. Lactose is bad for candida. Maltose is bad for candida. Sucrose is bad. Just about anything that's sweet. Twenty years ago, we found that a lot of the alcohol sugars like mannitol and xylitol, these sugars were not really affecting candida patients. And it just happened to be we’ve noticed in the last few years that people who eat these sugars are now reacting where their candida is. And I’ve been scrounging, trying to find data, trying to find evidence from somewhere in some university where someone is able to prove that candida has genetically, let’s say, morph to where it can now feed off alcohol sugars, but I haven’t been able to find anything. I can only say that I hear more complaints from patients when they try to eat these called low-impact carbs. People are reacting to them now where they didn’t 10-15 years ago. But I think a general rule with anything that you taste that’s sweet is going to be bad for a candida program.

[00:28:11] Ashley James: Yeah. We’re using food as medicine, so these foods, like fruit is healthy for people who don’t have candida, right?

[00:28:17] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, it does.

[00:28:18] Ashley James: Get rid of the candida, you can start eating fruit again as long as you don’t redevelop candida. So, it’s not that fruit is bad; it’s that we’re really looking to use food as medicine.

[00:28:29] Dr. Michael Biamonte: This is therapeutic. This is a therapeutic use of foods specifically for an individual case. And so, someone who’s an apple farmer shouldn’t be offended by what I’m saying. This just happens to be the science and this is only, as you're saying, it’s only temporary. It doesn’t mean you can never again eat the fruit, but you have to get your flora back so that you don’t end up feeding these bad sugar-dependent organisms that are out to give you trouble.

[00:28:55] Ashley James: I wonder about the anti-candida diet. We’re starving the candida but at the same time, are we also starving all the good stuff that’s also keeping it at bay. There's that fine balance. 

[00:29:07] Dr. Michael Biamonte: To a degree because sugars do feed friendly bacteria. There are certain sugars that are found in certain foods and just right off the top of my head, artichokes and bananas are very high in sugars, which very often feed friendly bacteria without overfeeding bad organisms, although fructooligosaccharides (FOS) which is a popular product can feed harmful bacteria. So, when you use it, you have to be careful because if you have a bacteria like klebsiella, let’s say, in your system, which is a bacteria that causes a lot of autoimmune illness, if you take FOS, you're going to feed the klebsiella and make it grow. So, you need to be careful with this.

But to a degree, you're correct, there are certain sugars and things which do help feed the friendly guys. It’s kind of a war of attrition, this whole subject matter we’re talking about. We need to put a diet together that's going to starve the candida long enough for the supplements and the other, let’s say, products that we take to kill it. And then, once we get the candida low enough, then we need to reestablish the probiotics by giving the intestinal tract the prebiotics which are the different foods that help feed the probiotics so they could grow back.

[00:30:28] Ashley James: This is a very complicated garden that we are balancing within us. I love that you have these phases because we really need to take that seriously, the idea of phase 0 and phase 1. So, we’ve discussed phase 0 and I want to talk about the other phases. I want to talk about the products that you recommend that you’ve created or have seen really work. So, phase 0 being incredibly important, they do it for a month. Are there times when someone would do it for longer than a month or if they have certain symptoms, they do it for longer or a month would suffice?

[00:31:03] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, phase 0 is continued with phase 1 and phase 2. That’s my first answer.

[00:31:09] Ashley James: Okay, good. So after a month, they add phase 1. So, what does phase 1 look like?

[00:31:13] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Phase 1 is typically 4 to 5 naturopathic or herbal antifungals that I choose based on the testing I do on the person, and they rotate these every 4 days. Most typically, it would be 4 items they take 4 days each, that would mean it would be 16 days for them to go through the cycle once. Normally, we have them go through the cycle twice before we speak to them or retest them to see how much they’ve killed off with phase 1.

The herbals that we chose on phase 1 work systemically. They absorb into your blood in your lymphatic system and kill candida there as well as killing it in the intestinal tract. That phase typically will last 2-3 months. And we know when they're finished because the urine test that we do on them has a certain reaction when they're finished with that phase, and that tells us they're ready to go to phase 2, which is probably the most important of the phases in a way. Because on phase 2, we use fatty acid-based antifungals, which are able to absorb into the intestinal lining and kill the candida at its roots. That is the very candida we’re killing on phase 2, which prevents the probiotics from coming back. And right here, there’s a little microcosm of why all the people out there who are self-treating are constantly failing. They don’t know categorically which antifungals would fit into a phase 0 or phase 1 or phase 2. So, they just have everything thrown together. In Yiddish, the word is ungapatchka. Everything thrown together.

So, they don’t know specifically to select the antifungals for phase 2 that are going to be able to kill that candida that’s blocking their prebiotics from coming back. But you see, even if they knew the products and tried them, it still wouldn’t work because they hadn’t done phase 0 and phase 1 yet.

[00:33:03] Ashley James: Right. How long through trial and error? And this is why they call it practicing medicine. How long did this take you to dial in?

[00:33:15] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Let’s see. I started researching this in 1986-1987. We had a basic framework in about 1992 or 1993. A lot of the research took off when I met Scott Gregory who was the author of a book called the holistic protocol for the immune system. He helped a lot. We shared ideas to put together this because he had a basic structure. He had the concept of phase 1. Phase 1 would be killing the organisms. Phase 2 would be detoxing the body and phase 3 would be putting nutrients that are essential back in in phase 4 would be boosting the immune system. That was the skeleton he had. You can still buy the book. The book is out there. It’s called Holistic Protocol for the Immune System by Dr. Scott Gregory. So, he gave me a basic map and from that, I was able to fill in all the empty spaces and also include the correct testing that would go at each phase because he didn’t have anything on testing. And the testing is very important because you don’t know when to stop the phase. You don’t know when the phase has reached its end phenomena if you don’t have some kind of test to say, “Well, is this now complete? Is the action we’re carrying on complete?” You have to have that; otherwise, it’s not scientific.

[00:34:38] Ashley James: Absolutely. Yeah, we want to be pragmatic about it. I love this idea, the phase 2, the fatty acid-based antifungals, so that then we’re preparing the way for those good bacteria to come in and proliferate and like soldiers not allow for the candida, to not giving the space for the candida to come back. So, how do you know when phase 2 is done?

[00:35:07] Dr. Michael Biamonte: When phase 2 is over, the person no longer has die-off from these antifungals. And on the urine test that we do, the candida levels have reached a certain point. They’ve dropped down to a certain point that we know we can now give the probiotics, and the probiotics will work.

[00:35:27] Ashley James: Is that phase 3? No, you said phase 3 was the …

[00:35:30] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, phase 2, we split. We split into three sections. There’s the first part of phase 2 that everybody would do that has these anti-fungals we’re talking about. Then, there’s potentially the leaky gut section where the person would then heal leaky gut. And then, the probiotic section would be last. This is because people who have leaky gut tend to have bad reactions to probiotics. So, we never give prebiotics to people who have leaky gut. They have to handle their leaky gut first and then we give them the probiotics. Then, when they go on the probiotics, normally they will have bloating and gas for about 3 to 4 weeks and then the bloating and gas goes away. That's actually a sign that the probiotics are replicating and they're killing off or fermenting any remaining harmful organisms.

Also, the urine test that we do on them has a very, very particular reaction that it does when those probiotics have come back. Now, if we reach 2 or 3 months, let’s say, on the probiotics, and the person is still having bloating and gas and the urine test hasn’t reacted in that way that we’re looking, we know we need to go back to phase 2 part A, back to those fatty acid-based antifungals and do more killing.

[00:36:43] Ashley James: Now, what about small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth? Is that a concern through this?

[00:36:51] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, everyone with candida has it. It’s become in the last few months I think like a little bit of a kitschy that they’re talking, but it’s nothing new to me. It’s existed as long as I’ve been researching candida and there's nothing special we do about it. We just follow our typical protocol and that goes away. I think there’s somebody in a lab some place noticed that the small intestine may get candida overgrowth as well as the colon and he decided to try to turn this into some kind of a new thing It’s actually nothing new and I really don’t have very much to say about it other than what else is new. 

[00:37:33] Ashley James: How do you know that your patient has leaky gut? What tests prove that?

[00:37:37] Dr. Michael Biamonte: We do a test that’s done by a lab called Medisol. It’s a breath test. For years, I’ve been searching for tests for leaky gut. The original one we did, which everyone did, was called the lactulose mannitol recovery test where you have the patient drink a small bottle of lactulose and mannitol and then you collect their urine and you see how much they absorb and how much they peed out, and that will tell you if they had leaky gut.

Nowadays, we have the Zonulin test which is very good, which tells us about the integrity of the brush border cells. That's a very good test. They’re including it now in certain stool tests. Of course you can have it done as a blood test. But I have found that sometimes it’s a little bit iffy. The best results I’ve had had been with this breath test. The lab can actually tell us if the person has leaky gut based on the gases that are in the person’s breath. I have found that to be from trial and error with using all these tests, that so far has been the one that's the most reliable. 

[00:38:43] Ashley James: So fascinating.

[00:38:44] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Keep something in mind here. This is a very important point. When we do these tests, we follow up with them. This is where, unfortunately, a lot of practitioners and a lot of patients become very sloppy. We do a test on someone, we find they have leaky gut, they go on the program for leaky gut. When we feel that they’ve improved significantly enough, we retest them so that we have actual proof the leaky gut is gone. And if you don’t do that, your whole program is going to be very sloppy and you’re not going to be really assured of what direction and what’s happening because you don’t really know. You're guessing. You're guessing your leaky gut is gone because this main symptom I had of the pimple on my nose hurting, every time I ate this food went away. Well, that's not scientific. Because you can have other reasons why that's happening. We’ve had people who’ve done the leaky gut test. They were positive. They went on the leaky gut program. They got better to some degree. We repeated the test, the leaky gut was gone and they said it can’t be “because I still have this symptom.” Well, we end up finding that that symptom is caused by something else and not leaky gut.

You got to get away from opinionated, subjective concepts and you have to think more objectively if you're really going to get a result.

[00:40:00] Ashley James: It’s good to know your body and listen to your symptoms, but it’s not good to just decide that those symptoms are caused by this without doing any follow up test and proving it. I love your program because you're checking in with the body and what’s happening in the gut throughout the program so that you can make the most informed decision as to what’s best next.

My mom was on the anti-candida diet for half her life. I bet people get stuck, right? They go to a practitioner, they do a test, they say they have leaky gut, and then they end up eating for years and years and years like the leaky gut program without completing it, without getting to the final phase and getting true health like getting to the other side. They just get stuck in a cycle of just having to eat a certain way or take a bunch of herbs without completing it. So, I really love that you are so pragmatic about this. 

[00:40:59] Dr. Michael Biamonte: You’ve got to be objective and subjective. You have to know when to use both and when they fit in.

[00:41:04] Ashley James: At what point is phase 2 complete? What does phase 3 look like?

[00:41:10] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, phase 2 is complete when we have the flora restored. As I said, the evidence that the flora is restored is usually they’ll go through a period of a few weeks when they're on the correct flora program where they’ll have bloating and gas. The bloating and gas will go away with it. There's that particular reaction in the urine test that we’re looking for that occurs, we know they're cool.

Now, the next thing, the very first thing we do on phase 3 is we do a hair and mineral analysis, and we do a test called the organics test. The reason why we do these two tests is because the organics test will tell us if they’re being exposed to any kind of chemical toxicity. They’ll also tell us how well they detoxify. It also has a GI panel that looks for arabinol and some other organic acids which will further confirm the candida is gone. 

Then we look at the hair analysis for toxic metals. So, if we find any toxicity, if we find toxic metals, toxic chemicals, anything like this in the person, then we either can do some further testing to identify exactly what it is, or if we feel like we have the date and we know what it is, then we put them on a program to detoxify the metals or the chemicals or the molds or whatever it is we happen to find. 

 Once we do that which can last quite a few months, depending on what the person has, it could be 5 to 6 months easy to get rid of the metals. Once we have that done, then we repeat those tests to verify and confirm that the toxicity is gone. Now we look at their balance of nutrients in the body. We look at all their amino acids, we look at their hormones, we look at their vitamins, we look at their minerals, we look at their fatty acids, etc. We look at virtually every nutrient in the person’s body and look to see what we need to do now to rebalance that and get that into a normal level. When that's done, that's the end of phase 3 and then we can look at them from a phase 4 viewpoint. 

The phase 4 is dealing strictly with the immune system. If the person, and this again goes back to what I was saying about the order you do things in, if you're going to try to handle somebody’s immune system while they still have toxic metals, you're going to fail. If you're going to try to handle somebody’s immune system while they still have improper adrenal or thyroid function, you're going to fail. If you're going to try to handle their immune system while they're liver or their insulin levels are still off, you're going to fail. If you're going to try to handle the immune system while the person is deficient in testosterone or DHA or they have high cortisol, you're going to fail. So, all of those things have to be handled on phase 3 first before we touch their immune system.

[00:43:54] Ashley James: This thought came to mind. This would be an amazing program for those who are choosing to battle cancer in a holistic way. This would be perfect from the go-through because all these things you’ve mentioned cause the immune system to be totally drained and totally focused on these things instead of actually beating the cancer.

[00:44:19] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I would agree with you. You do have genetic factors when it comes to cancer. And even candida. There are genetics that make people more prone to candida. There are certain snips that actually make a person much more prone to candida than not. And of course, with cancer, we know that cancer and looking at the genes that are involved in cancer is an absolutely fascinating study and very, very warranted. What’s even more interesting is when you're studying genetics is when you look at the genes and you get a physiologist who is well-schooled in nutrition and herbology and things, and they're able to look at those genes and they’re able to actually tell you what nutrients or what herbs are good in trying to control that gene from manifesting and doing its damage. To me, that's the future of a lot of medicine is looking at somebody’s genes and then putting them on a program where they actually are taking nutrients that are going to try to control the aberration that the gene may cause.

[00:45:26] Ashley James: The epigenetic expressions being affected by levels of toxicity or lack of nutrients. What you're doing is perfect for that because you're looking at the body holistically but you're going about it in the correct order.

You mentioned how in phase 3 you're looking at the balance of nutrients and hormones and it occurs to me, does having a chronic candida infection affect? Or how does it affect our hormones?

[00:45:58] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Candida is very estrogenic. So if you have candida, you're going to become estrogen dominant. It may not show in your lab work, but it’s going to happen with your estrogen receptor sites. So, you're going to manifest being estrogen dominant. If a man has candida, he is going to have low testosterone. Generally, people who have candida have elevated cortisol.

[00:46:21] Ashley James: So their body is in a higher state of stress which is that fight or flight, so they're less likely to be in that rest and digest healing mode as well.

[00:46:28] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Right. Then the biggest one is thyroid. This is why if you do a search for me on the internet, you're going to find that I have websites that are dedicated to candida but I also have a website that’s called the New York City Thyroid Doctor. Because candida affects your thyroid and if the doctor doesn’t understand the relationship between candida and thyroid and if he doesn’t understand the relationship between toxins and toxic metals and thyroid, and if he doesn’t understand the relationship between trace minerals and thyroid, he’s not going to get the optimal result when he’s trying to correct someone’s thyroid function. Those are three areas we cover on that website that the average practitioner who deals with thyroid has no clue about.

I actually laugh about it when patients will tell me “I went to this thyroid specialist on Park Avenue and he’s one of the greatest in the world,” and blah, blah, blah, I’ll ask him “Well, what did he say about your zinc-copper ratio or your calcium-potassium ratio? Did he inquire as to whether or not you had any mercury affecting your thyroid? Or, did he talk about reverse T3 or T4?” He said, “No, the man didn’t say anything about any of that.” Most medical doctors are very good in understanding the thyroid from the viewpoint of hormone levels in the blood.

Now, for any people out there who took biology and biochemistry, you studied something called the Krebs cycle in school and you studied something else called the electron transport chain. When you're dealing with the thyroid hormone, the thyroid hormone enters the electron transport chain and the hormone undergoes certain changes. One of the major changes you get with thyroid hormone is that it’s converted from T4 to T3, and in order for that conversion to take place, you have to have a balance of other hormones which is a correct balance, and you also have to have certain trace minerals that enable that to occur. Those trace minerals become coenzymes in helping this transformation to occur. Then, when you hit the cell, the sensitivity of your cells to thyroid hormones depend on a ratio of zinc to copper and calcium to potassium.

For the medical doctors out there who are listening to me or thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about, go pick up Guyton’s physiology book. Guyton’s physiology is a book that's the bible of physiology. Pick up Guyton’s physiology and look up where Guyton talks about how calcium and potassium, in some way, he said not fully known at this time, act as either a receptor or a governor against thyroid function. In other words, Guyton was saying that potassium in your cells sensitize as your tissues to the effects of thyroid hormones, while calcium desensitizes. The reason why that exists is because if you went one extreme to the other, you’d either the thyroid hormone overrunning your body and making you hyperthyroid or you would be hypothyroid.

So, there is hypo- and hyperthyroid based on the hormone levels, but then there is also hypo and hyperthyroid based on the cell receptor levels. The only way you can understand that is that you can’t understand that by a blood test because a blood test isn’t telling you the level of the mineral in your cell. It’s telling you what the mineral level in your blood is and the blood is a means of transportation. The cell is a storage site. So, in order to understand how your thyroid hormone is working in your cells, you’ve got to look at a tissue. And the easiest one to look at is hair which is why we use hair analysis. You look at the ratios between calcium and potassium in your hair and zinc and copper, and then you have an understanding of how well your body is responding to thy thyroid hormone and how well you're actually utilizing it. Also, if you see your mercury or your arsenic is high, you know that those metals are downregulating your thyroid hormones.

[00:50:41] Ashley James: And the stuff in tap water as well.

[00:50:43] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, exactly, of course. Exactly. So this is why we have this other website about thyroid is because thyroid and candida are very heavily related. There are some doctors out there who have told me that they don’t believe that Hashimoto’s occurs outside of a candida patient. They believe everyone with Hashimoto’s has candida and leaky gut. Now, I think that's a bit extreme because there are maybe some other conditions, environmental conditions which would also cause it. But they have a good point. It’s more prevalent in candida patients and patients with leaky gut. Hashimoto’s is. 

When you draw back to reveal a little bit, you find that a lot of what functional medical doctors and functional nutritionists like myself, what we’re really doing is a term that was used years ago which kind of died ago, but it’s called clinical ecology. This is what a lot of us are, actually, in reality, doing. It’s clinical ecology. We’re looking at the environment and how the environment and different infections and toxins in the environment affects this person and their health from a clinical standpoint.

[00:51:56] Ashley James: I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. So it sounds like your program could take about 2 years. Does that sound about right?

[00:52:04] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, that's very possible. Of course, people get upset hearing about that because they read advertisements on the internet, let’s say, for different products like Freelac and all these things which claim they get rid of your candida in a couple of weeks. You got to be careful because that's false advertising. They don’t have any proof that they're getting rid of. You take the product and you feel better. That's not proof your candida is gone. That's only proof you feel better. What happens when you stop taking the product? You feel bad again. Well, that's because you needed to continue to take it. That starts to get into the same fallacy and the same kind of racket that you have with psychiatric drugs.

Since I just said that, I will further say that most of the mass shootings, when you go and you analyze the people who have done all these mass shootings, most of them were on psychiatric drugs and now withdrawing from them. If you study the actual data, you find out that when people try to withdraw from psychiatric drugs, their symptoms go wild. Just as a side note.

[00:53:10] Ashley James: It is so painful to see how many people are suffering. And they go to their doctor, they say they’re depressed with anxiety and they're put on meds, and have a worst experience with the meds. My beautiful neighbor was murdered by a man. I mean, just terrifying. She was murdered by a man who had recently been put on drugs and once they put him in the jail with the psychiatric prison and they got him balanced, got him off the drugs or whatever, and he says “I have no idea why I did it.” They put him on these drugs and he started having obsessive thoughts about killing people and he claimed guilty. He’s spending the rest of his life in prison, but he absolutely did not understand why he did it. And he was put on a bunch of new-to-the-market drugs. I’m not saying that’s the cause all the time, but it’s just we see this, like you said, you look at people who do these violent acts and you see a lot of times they're also on drugs. There's got to be a better way.

[00:54:12] Dr. Michael Biamonte: This is something I’d be happy to come back to the show and we can talk about this exclusively because I’ve made it a hobby in the last 30 years to get people off psychiatric medications by handling the real problems that they have in their body, looking for the real physical problems. See, a psychiatrist, when they prescribe these drugs, they really don’t fully understand how the drug is going to work and how it’s going to work in combination. When they talk about a chemical imbalance in the brain, there's absolutely no proof that it exists. No one has ever proven with any tests that a chemical imbalance exists.

[00:54:48] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[00:54:49] Dr. Michael Biamonte: It’s never been proven. If you go out and look for it, you're never going to find it. There's no proof. It’s a word or a phrase that's been thrown around and it’s been marketed. Psychiatry and the whole field of psychiatric drugs is one of the most amazing marketing scams you’ve ever seen in your life. How it works is incredible. There's a video people can find, which is called Marketing Madness. You look for that video. It’s rather lengthy but it’s incredible in how it explains and give you all the actual proof about how this whole thing is just like one big racket. Because I can tell you they have no clue what they're doing. Psychiatrists are probably the most inept out of any group of professionals. They have the lowest SAT scores, they have the highest rate of suicide, they have the highest rate of committing felonies and other crimes. That's not my opinion. That came out of the LA Times in 1988 when they did a special on psychiatry.

But anyway, rather than wasting our time on them, let’s go back to the main point.

[00:55:56] Ashley James: Yes, I’d love to have you back. I know you are pressed for time and we only have a few more minutes. I wanted to make sure that we understand how we can get on your program. I also wanted to field a few of the questions from the listeners. So you talked about these different products, these binders and all these different products. Your program is really individualized. So, someone comes and works with you. You can perform telemedicine or do they have to come see you in person?

[00:56:24] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, we don’t see anyone in person anymore. We do everything via the internet.

[00:56:31] Ashley James: So you can order the labs or tell them to get their doctor to order these labs; therefore, they could be covered. Some of these labs could be covered by their insurance. 

[00:56:39] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, some. But mostly, the lab tests are either self… I guess, you would call it a home test that I’ve developed. So it’s a self-test they do at home on their own urine. Or they can contact one of the labs online and have the kits sent to their house and they can collect a hair sample or urine sample, saliva sample, stool sample, or whatever is needed. The only time that we ever need a doctor is if they need a blood test for anything.

So, the testing, everything is basically done online and right with them at home. Very easy.

[00:57:17] Ashley James: Fantastic. I know you have a few websites. What is the best website for those who want to get on your program? 

[00:57:26] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I’d say it’s either health-truth.com or it would be The New York City Yeast Doctor. 

[00:57:32] Ashley James: Okay, dot com. And we’ll of course have all those links in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com. So we’ve got a lot of questions from the listeners in the Facebook group.

[00:57:43] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Shoot.

[00:57:44] Ashley James: Okay. So, Desiree says, “I’m super excited to hear the protocol.” So, good, you already heard the protocol because we talked about it. “For kicking candida and heavy metal detox.” She has three questions. “Which would work first? Heavy metal or candida? Sounds like you handle candida and then heavy metal.”

[00:58:01] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, you have to. Because if you handle heavy metals first, drawing those metals out, some of them you urinate out, some of them go out in your poop, and when they go out in your poop, they have to go through your intestinal tract, and the candida absorbs them. So you always have to handle candida first before heavy metals. There's a very famous doctor out in the Midwest who’s been preaching for years that you have to handle the mercury first, and I thank him for that because he has sent me so many patients inadvertently who couldn’t handle it. They come to me, they say, “Dr. Biamonte, everything he said made sense. But when I went on the piss treatment, I couldn’t handle it. My candida was going insane.” So that's how I learned not to do it that way. That's how I actually learned that was the wrong way to do it. I listened to what the patients were telling me and I sat back and I looked at it from the viewpoint of the textbooks in terms of how metals affect these organisms, and it made sense.

[00:58:59] Ashley James: I love it. I love that you figured so much of this out and we get to benefit from your years and years of expertise. Her next question: “What can we do for kids that have this? Can they also go through this program?” 

[00:59:09] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Oh yeah, the kids go through the same program. It’s just that it’s a little different for kids. Some of the products used are not as potent, but it’s the same concept. Kids have to go through the program using the same concepts. Not necessarily the same products and the same doses, but it’s the same concept.

[00:59:26] Ashley James: In the last part 1 of this interview series, we did discuss symptoms to look for to know whether you have candida or not, and of course, you could order Dr. Biamonte’s urine test to determine whether you do have a candida issue. Her third question is, “Does candida have a direct correlation to allergies?”

[00:59:43] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, it does. Absolutely. Patients with candida will notice that when their candida is worse, their allergies are worse, and they’ll especially, very interestingly, notice that when they have die-off, their allergies get worse. It’s all basically the same mechanism that's going on. It’s all the same mechanism. But the funny thing is, from birth, you’ll find that kids who are born with a lot of allergies, who are born with eczema, who are born with asthma, these are kids who are born with candida. Candida is the underlying reason why they have these problems.

[01:00:15] Ashley James: And by clearing it up, do allergies go away? The asthma from allergies go away?

[01:00:20] Dr. Michael Biamonte: They go away. Allergies go away. Because an allergy is from a hyperactive immune system. People think allergy, my immune system is weak. No, it’s not. It’s hyperactive, it’s hyper vigil. One of the reasons why it’s that way is because it’s dealing with candida all the time. So when you get the candida out of the computation, the immune system, it’s the balance between the thymus gland and the adrenal glands. Any good nutritionist or acupuncturist or chiropractor is going to know this. How you’re handling allergies ultimately is by balancing or rebalancing the adrenal and thymus. Most doctors don’t think the thymus does anything past the age of 2 or 3 years old. That's not true. The thymus makes a hormone called thymosin which is still active and is still doing things well into your years. So there is thymus involution that occurs. As you get older and your adrenals become more active, your thymus does shrink a bit, but the thymus is still there doing something. It’s not like your tonsils that you just remove or something like this.

[01:01:23] Ashley James: Sandy asks if you have experience with—and I hope I pronounce this right—C. krusei candida. 

[01:01:32] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, there are many different strains of candida. What you need to know about them is some of them have evolved and become drug resistive because these strains have been exposed to repeated pharmaceuticals like nystatin and some other drugs. Ultimately, there is no difference between any of these strains as far as I’m concerned. Any strains of candida, whether it’s tropicalis, krusei, glabrata, whatever the strain is, we kill it all the same. There's only, I will say, of interest, there are some Japanese strains of candida which are very interesting because they’re able to produce huge amounts of alcohol in the person’s body to the point where the person could actually be legally intoxicated. But even that candida can be killed. But it is not worthy that those strains exist. They are interesting.

[01:02:25] Ashley James: I’ve seen a few episodes like House or those kind of MD TV shows where they have a patient that's chronically drugged and it turns out it’s in their gut. They love doing that as a plot because it’s amusing. But all these candidas will die in your program is what you're saying.

[01:02:43] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, I should probably be serving 20 lifetimes in jail for killing candida over and over again.

[01:02:52] Ashley James: Now, there are several listeners so I’ll just group it all together. There are several listeners who are so excited and they're saying they have irritated, patchy eczema lesions all on their body, and they wonder what is the connection between these and one of them said that they started appearing on their body after several courses of antibiotics, and they wonder if there's a correlation between eczema and candida. 

[01:03:18] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Eczema is caused by candida and leaky gut. I had eczema as a child. I didn’t really get rid of my eczema until I finally handled the candida I had, my own imbalance in my flora. Although when I did it on myself, I did it backwards because I hadn’t evolved this technology yet. I did it the hard way. But guaranteed, candida is the cause of eczema.

[01:03:45] Ashley James: Well, that is saying something because right here we’ve talked about 2 conditions that are autoimmune in nature. 

[01:03:53] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Have everyone go online, go on Google, do a search for candida and eczema and take a look at how many documents you end up pulling up.

[01:04:03] Ashley James: There's a listener who talks her tongue that is always coated and she wonders if it’s candida. Even though she scrapes it—she’s wondering is this candida—her tongue is always just covered in something.

[01:04:15] Dr. Michael Biamonte: There's a condition called thrush which typically happens in AIDS and latter stages of cancer where the candida starts to grow in your mouth. The American Indians used to call it furry tongue. Your mouth and your tongue become furry and white-looking. Your tongue is very painful. It’s very hard to swallow, it’s very painful. that's called thrush and that's having live candida growing in your mouth. That's a different condition than I believe what this lady is talking about. Simply having a coated tongue very often comes about due to your sinuses having a constant drip or having allergies. Or if you have candida, your tongue can be coated from the candida in your intestinal tract causing the mucus to form in your mouth. They’re two different things. But those are the two explanations for that. One is the extreme which is thrush and the other, we would just simply mark like let’s say it’s dysbiosis or it actually could be a sinus problem.

There's a great test you can get nowadays. It’s a sinus culture that identifies in your sinuses whether or not you have MARCoNS and biofilm there. I very often see that condition in these people with the tongue type of issue that they have MARCoNS. MARCoNS in their sinus with biofilm and even yeast. And that's what’s causing their tongue to get covered. It’s not the actual infection. It’s the fact that the immune system and the body is creating mucus there to try to protect itself from the irritation of these microbes.

[01:05:50] Ashley James: How would you go about helping the person get rid of those microbes in the sinus? Would these anti-parasitics and anti-fungals that they take on your program help remove that from the sinus. 

[01:06:02] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, they do but we also give them very specific localized treatments using different sinus products that are available now that kill all those bad bugs there.

[01:06:12] Ashley James: Love it. Then my final question is female yeast infections like vaginal yeast infections. How similar is that to a colon candida infection? Would going through this whole protocol also help a woman to balance her body to no longer have chronic vaginal yeast infections?

[01:06:33] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Per the Merck Manual, which is a book that should be in every physician’s library, you do not treat chronic vaginal yeast infections without concurrently treating the yeast infection in the colon. Women who only treat vaginal yeast never get better unless it’s just a flippant one-time yeast infection. Any woman who has chronic vaginal yeast infections has candida overgrowth in her colon and her intestine just like all the other candida patients. She’s never going to get rid of the vaginal yeast infection until she stops worrying about the vaginal area and starts treating her whole body, meaning her colon and her small intestine. It’s never going to happen.

[01:07:15] Ashley James: It was such a blast having you on the show today and having you back. I can’t wait to have you again to talk about getting people off of psychiatric medications. That is just going to be such a great rabbit hole to go down under. I am so excited for that one. I’m thrilled that we brought this information to the listeners because it sounds like a lot of people who suffer chronically for years and years have a candida infection in their gut and it’s this grouping of things. Like Lyme disease is not just one thing. They often find there’s all these co-infections and it’s a co-environment. It sounds like candida is the same thing. It becomes this ecosystem that supports this ongoing chronic infection and you help to break it apart and then support the body in creating that new ecosystem that is inhospitable to candida. I thank you so much for the work that you do and thank you for coming on the show and sharing with us. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:08:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Lyme disease. What happens in many patients with Lyme is they actually become cured by their doctors but they don’t believe it because they still have symptoms they associate with Lyme. Those symptoms are now candida. Interestingly enough, there are two conditions nowadays which are interesting to consider in this light, one is COVID. COVID causes candida. The COVID vaccine causes candida. And treatments for Lyme disease cause candida. So many of these things you're hearing about long COVID, very often long COVID is just simply somebody who’s now developed candida as a result of having COVID. The same thing with people with Lyme disease who are going around saying none of the tests really work, they're saying that because they had Lyme, they were treated for Lyme, they tested for Lyme, it showed the Lyme improved greatly or was gone but they still had symptoms that they think are from Lyme. Those symptoms are now from the antibiotics they took that caused candida because they took the antibiotics to get rid of Lyme. Very simple. 

[01:09:17] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That's hundreds of thousands of people right there who are suffering, suffering and suffering. Thank you so much. I hope we help so many people today with the information that you're providing with us. Can’t wait to have you back on the show. This has been wonderful. Thank you.

[01:09:37] Dr. Michael Biamonte: You're more than welcome.

[01:09:38] Ashley James: Wasn’t that a fantastic interview with Dr. Biamonte? Aren’t you just on fire and want to share this with all your friends? I know I am definitely going to be sharing this. The second I finished this interview, I started texting some of my friends, telling my friends how excited I was for them to hear this because I know just how much this interview is going to make a difference in so many people’s lives. I’d be remiss if I didn’t let you know about a resource that I have found invaluable, and that is Takeyoursupplements.com. When you go to that website, it’s very simple. You put in your information and Jennifer Saltzman who is the head health coach there, I’ve been working with her for over 10 years, we’ve become very good friends. Those supplements are designed by the naturopathic physician that helped me to heal and reverse, to no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome, chronic adrenal fatigue, type 2 diabetes, and infertility. He helped me to resolve all those issues. And Jennifer Saltzman has been trained, as have I, in his protocols. But when you go to Takeyoursupplements.com, you put in your information, and the two of you get to have a phone call together. She will help you based on there’s a set of questions we go through that determine what mineral deficiencies you have or what nutrient deficiencies you have. She’s also an expert in helping people to get especially those who are like have had to eliminate, have a lot of food sensitivities, who had to eliminate a lot of foods, who have symptoms like Lyme disease, digestive issues, bloating, or heartburn. Just frustrating, constant gnawing digestive issues. She’s been fantastic at helping people to strengthen the digestive system and to strengthen the immune system. She’s also fantastic at helping people with chronic pain. Those are her areas of expertise. She’s been trained by these naturopathic physicians that have created these protocols and also designed these supplements, and my favorite being, their mineral supplements are the most bioavailable mineral supplements I have ever found. They’ve made such a huge difference for me.

So if you're like, hey, you know, I’m thinking like I just need to add more trace minerals to my life, or you keep hearing about how important it is to have not only just magnesium but have all 60 minerals or 77 trace minerals and elements in your body, in your life, because our food is really void of minerals. They don’t remineralize the soil in large agriculture. So unless you yourself are growing your own food and you know you’ve remineralized your soil, then you’re not getting all the minerals you need. So, go ahead and just go to Takeyoursupplements.com, put in your information, she’s amazing at working with people, really just very understanding. And she quickly goes through a list of the symptoms you have and then she helps you to determine what supplements you need that are within your budget. They’re dosed by body weight. So it’s a very specific protocol. Then you follow up with her. A lot of practitioners out there will just like drop off into nothing. She will follow up with you and help you along your path. So, I absolutely Jennifer Saltzman at Takeyoursupplements.com and she’s helped so many of the listeners. In fact, if you go to the Learn True Health Facebook group, you will see a lot of testimonials there. You can use the search function in the Facebook group and you’ll see testimonials there of people who have shared how much she has made a difference in their healing process.

So, a lot of times we’re deficient in key nutrients. And we always think about vitamins. But really, minerals are the hardest thing to secure and I just love. They’re liquid trace minerals that are in such a way that the body can readily absorb them even people with chronic absorption issues because they're in such an ionic state that the body can readily uptake them. That was my experience when I started taking those minerals years ago. I immediately felt. I had this gnawing hunger all the time because my blood sugar was out of control and I was exhausted. In one day, the first day of taking the supplements, the trace minerals, I noticed that my gnawing hunger went away. Within five days of taking the supplements, my energy came back. I had really bad chronic fatigue and I had really out of control blood sugar. Within the first 5 days, feeling such a difference, it was amazing. In less than 3 months, my diabetes was completely gone. Of course, I did dietary changes as well. But the thing is, you can’t out supplement a bad diet, so you always have to make literally good positive changes to your diet. But at the same time, you can’t eat your way to enough minerals given conventionally grown food. It’s just not possible. So most people out there are nutrient deficient in certain key minerals. That’s why I love the Takeyoursupplements.com. I love their minerals and I love the work that Jen’s doing.

So, check them out. They also have a 30-day moneyback guarantee which I only ever recommend companies or products that I believe that make a difference for me, that have a difference for other listeners and that also will stand behind their products to make sure that they are legitimate and that they are their priorities and their ethics are there to support you in your health’s success. So, I’m proud of that as well. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this show with those you care about. Come join the Facebook group and share your testimonials. I’d love to hear you and I’d love to see you there.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Michael Biamonte!

 

Website

Facebook

Linkedin

YouTube

Pinterest

 

Book by Dr. Michael Biamonte

 

The Candida Chronicles

Oct 6, 2022

Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount at www.energybits.com 

Energy Bits = Spirulina (for energy and nutrition)
Recovery Bits = Chlorella (for sleep and detox)
Vitality Bits = Spirulina/Chlorella combo

Coupon code LTH at energybits.com www.energybits.com 

Articles:

Protect Your Mitochondria and Longevity with Algae:
https://www.energybits.com/blog/protect-your-mitochondria-and-longevity-with-algae

Algae Outperforms Collagen for a Better You and a Healthier Earth:
https://www.energybits.com/blog/algae-outperforms-collagen-for-a-better-you-and-a-healthier-earth

Gut Healing with Algae:
https://www.energybits.com/blog/get-gutsy-with-algae

Surprise! Your Best Biohack is Algae!
https://www.energybits.com/blog/surprise-your-best-biohack-is-algae

 

Mitochondrial Self-Healing Superfoods: High Potency Chlorella & Spirulina

https://www.learntruehealth.com/mitochondrial-self-healing-superfoods-high-potency-chlorella-spirulina

Imagine feeling stronger, more alert, and more energized than ever. How? By taking in spirulina and chlorella. These miracle health superfoods contain all the nutrients that will protect your mitochondria, the powerhouse of your cells, from damage. In this episode, Catharine Arnston explains how it works in your body and offers tips on how to use this vital food product.

 

Highlights:

  • Macroalgae and microalgae
  • Spirulina
  • Chlorella
  • Ascorbic acid
  • Chlorophyll
  • ENERGYbits
  • RECOVERYbits
  • BEAUTYbits
  • VITALITYbits
  • Superoxide dismutase

Intro:

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 487.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Catharine Arnston who was in episodes 234265266, and 357—all about studying, actually, the most studied food in the world that is used as a medicine. It’s a very medicinal food, a superfood. And today, we’re going to talk about mitochondrial health and healing the mitochondria. I’m really, really excited to dive into this topic. But first, for those who haven’t gone back and listened to those four episodes, Catharine, I’m excited that you're going to give them a quick recap for those who haven’t heard that information because it’s really important information. Listeners can go to EnergyBits.com and use coupon code LTH (as in Learn True Health) at EnergyBits.com for Catharine’s amazing superfood algae.

I’ve tried a bunch of different algae on the market, and there are a lot of companies out there. There's only a handful that I know of that strive to make sure there’s no lead and heavy metals in their algae. But out of all the companies that are sort of the highest quality and do the most testing, the rigorous testing to make sure that they are the cleanest, ENERGYbits is by far my favorite flavor. I’ve tried those other ones that the naturopaths push, and they kind of taste and smell fishy to me and chalky. And I don’t like them. I don’t know what it is about your chlorella and spirulina, but to me, it’s the best tasting. Yeah, I enjoy the flavor. But the real litmus test was getting our son to eat it, and he’s been eating your stuff since he was a toddler. We call it green crackers in our household.

[00:02:03] Catharine Arnston: Yeah, right. I remember that. 

[00:02:05] Ashley James: And it makes your tongue turn green, and we stick our tongues out at each other. And he loves it as a little snack. But I have some great anecdotal stories for detox. I’m having a great experience for the last few years using it in conjunction with my sauna therapy for detox. And then, I have a friend who eats it regularly, and she says her hair started growing and thick—thick, wonderful hair instead of having the hair loss that she was experiencing or the thinning hair. She started growing back thick, thick, thick. And her hair is thick and beautiful and lustrous. She said her skin cleared up and was just healthier. She just notices not only does she feel good while every day eating your spirulina and chlorella, but she sees it. She looks it on the outside. So, that is true health, is when we’re so healthy on the inside, it comes out on the outside.

[00:02:54] Catharine Arnston: Exactly.

[00:02:55] Ashley James: So, I love your ENERGYbitsEnergyBits.com coupon code “LTH“.

So, let’s dive in. Give us the recap for those that haven’t listened to those previous episodes, and then we’re going to jump into mitochondrial health. So, welcome back to the show. It’s been a few years.

[00:03:08] Catharine Arnston: Thank you. Before I do that, I just want to share with your community that I’m so thrilled just to hear about our algae tablets. I do too. But 99.9 percent, so that's virtually everyone else, swallows them. Because the chlorella does I think taste better, but the spirulina is very much an acquired taste. It’s very earthy, and it’s very chewy because of the very high protein and essential fatty acids. So, virtually, everybody else swallows them. And when you swallow them, there is no green flavor. There is no repeat like you would have with fish oil. So it’s an easy, fast, and effortless way to get your nutrients and protect your health and your mitochondria, and we’ll dive into that. But I’m so thrilled that you and your son chew them because I do too. But I’m used to eating them because I’ve been eating them for 12 years, which is how long I’ve been running the company.

[00:04:06] Ashley James: I like chewing them. I like chewing them because I feel like I’m eating a snack.

[00:04:09] Catharine Arnston: Exactly.

[00:04:10] Ashley James: It’s a snack. And then I drink water with it because it’s dehydrated. So obviously, you need to rehydrate it. But I like the flavor. At first, you don’t know what to expect. Right? So, in the first few mouthfuls, you don’t know what to expect. But after a while, you're like, “Oh!” Your body starts to crave it, and you start to really enjoy it. I like to drink water with it. I’ve tried throwing like 30 little tablets in my smoothie. Swallowing it? I don’t know. There's something satisfying about chewing it.

[00:04:39] Catharine Arnston: I agree. But for those who don’t like the flavor, it seems to be most people, swallowing is the easiest thing. But I do want to get into what algae is and I want to segue from something that you just said, which is that it’s food. The first thing people need to understand is that algae is food. It is not a supplement. Our tablets are about the size of a baby aspirin, and they may look like a supplement or a vitamin or a pill, but they are not. We actually call them, or I call them “bits” because they are bits of nutrition.

And first of all, algae was the first life on earth almost 4 billion years ago and there is algae everywhere. Macroalgae is basically seaweed which is high in fiber and high in iodine because it’s come from the sea, with virtually no nutrition. But what we’re talking about is microalgae, which is microscopic in size. Something like a million microalgae cells could fit on the head of a pin. That's how tiny they are. And microalgae is everywhere. Macroalgae is only in the sea; hence, the word “seaweed”. Microalgae is in the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the soil, yes, the oceans, what feeds the whales. It’s probably in your swimming pool, your aquarium.

But the two that we’re going to talk about today, spirulina and chlorella, are not from the ocean. They are harvested as food crops in fresh water. This is really important because we’re constantly getting emails from people asking, “Well, is your algae tested for microplastics?” Well, there are no microplastics because that would be something from the ocean. Spirulina and chlorella, whether it’s ours or whether you buy it from Target or Whole Foods, it’s all grown in fresh water. It’s called hydroponic. We’re well known for our high quality, as you mentioned, and part of that comes from the fact that our water is triple-filtered spring mountain water.

We don’t use high heat to dry it. It’s actually not dehydrated. It’s just dried. And this will become very important when we talk about the mitochondria health issue. Because there are some very important enzymes. I’ll give you a little spoiler. One’s called (it’s a mouthful) superoxide dismutase, which stops the free radical damage of your mitochondria DNA. And that is essential for health and longevity. Anyways, it’s an enzyme. So, if you use high heat like everybody else, it kills that enzyme, so you don’t get the benefits of that particular enzyme as you would with our algae. Then, of course, we don’t use any binders when we press them into these little tablets. And we do third-party lab tests here in the United States.

So, we grew ours in Taiwan, which is world-renowned for having the highest quality algae. But the number one thing is, A, algae is a food crop. You’ll be surprised to know that algae as a food crop in Asia is as big of an industry as the cattle industry is here in the United States. It is enormous. It is a multibillion-dollar agricultural crop.

Now, people outside of Asia don’t know about algae. Why? Because it’s just not grown here. In Japan, you can’t ride your bicycle, you can’t go in your car without going by an algae farm. It is everywhere. Here, we drive by cornfields or wheatfields, neither of which are good healthy crops to be consuming. But in Asia, it’s algae. Now, if I do my job right and I help the world outside of Asia learn more about the healing benefits of algae and you’ll find that there are some that cannot be duplicated by anything else in the world. If I do my job right, we will be growing algae here in America. I have identified Florida as a subtropical environment where we can grow it similar to Taiwan. That won’t be for another 5 or 10 years, but that is the long-term plan. So, number one, a food crop.

Number two, as you mentioned, it is a superfood. I actually call it a super-duper food because it has nutrients, as I mentioned, that are not found in any other food in the world. And some of them are these antioxidants, which we’re going to talk about, that are found in the highest quantity in algae that are essential for your mitochondria health because they are the only four that can get into that mitochondria and remembering which we’ll talk about in a minute.

Algae, by the way, is also the most studied food in the world, as you mentioned. There are 60,000 studies on spirulina, and about 40,000 on chlorella. And in a minute, I’ll just go over briefly the differences between the two algae and what they do differently in your body. This is amazing. So, these studies are from America, from universities, from PhD’s in India, Taiwan. Every single country in the world has contributed research to the study of algae and have determined through all these peer-review studies that it does things like stops cancer, stops Alzheimer’s, improves your gut biome, reduces inflammation, protects your mitochondria, is great for pregnant moms, nursing moms, children, energy, focus. You’d almost think it’s unbelievable if it wasn’t so science-based.

When I started the company, quite honestly, it’s because my sister had breast cancer, and her oncologist in Canada recommended that she change her diet to an alkaline diet because she said it would help with her healing. They didn’t tell her what an alkaline diet was and why it was good for her, so my sister called me, and I did some research. I had no nutrition background at the time, but I discovered that an alkaline diet was a plant-based diet, which led me to algae, and then I discovered that it was endorsed by NASA as the most nutrient-dense food in the world, endorsed by the United Nations as the answer to world hunger because it has three times the amount of protein than steak. A hundred thousand studies document it as a multibillion-dollar industry in Asia. And the only thing wrong with algae is nobody outside of Asia knew about it.

So, I decided that I would dedicate my life 12 years ago to helping anyone and particularly in North America, but anyone who’s listening, to understand what algae is, why it is so critical for you and your family and the earth at this juncture in our world, and how to enjoy the benefits of it. It is the most effortless, concentrated, simple, safe, pure food in the world and a gift to us from Mother Nature, and to ignore it any longer is something you will do at the risk of your health. It’s really that simple. So, it is my honor to be representing Mother Nature here. It’s her concoction. I’m just the voice of algae. I can’t claim that I made this stuff up.

And the tablets, by the way, that we sell, as I mentioned, most of you will swallow them, but you can certainly eat them or add them to a smoothie or the chlorella tastes great—we’ll talk about that in a second—when you add it to your salads as a garnish or as in trail mix. But they’re made like this in these tablet forms in Asia. The company that grows it for us, they’ve been making this for 50 years. So, I remind people when I get on these podcasts that algae isn’t new. It’s just new to you. And just as you didn’t know about chia or quinoa or matcha or CBD or probably collagen powder until maybe 5 or 10 years ago, I’m here to help you understand what algae is and why it is better than any of those things and will basically help you regain and reclaim your health and longevity and your children’s as well. But it’s not new. It was used by the Egyptians 2000 years ago. They used to wrap themselves up in it for health and skin benefits. So, that’s a little bit of a summary, a little quick history of where algae came from and why you don’t know about it.

So, let me segue into now the two algae we’re going to talk about, spirulina and chlorella. Before I do that, I want to mention that spirulina is a blue-green algae. It is one of thousands of blue-green algae that exist. And chlorella is a green algae, one of thousands of green algae that exist. There also is red algae. Red algae is what makes, by the way, salmon pink and flamingos pink because they eat these particular algae. But I mention this because many of you may go to the internet at some point and Google blue-green algae and be horrified when you see some notice about blue-green algae closing your favorite beach. It’s not spirulina. Blue-green algae is a strain of algae and there are thousands and thousands of strains of it. Spirulina is one of them, and it is the one that is harvested, as I mentioned, in fresh water as a food crop. It is not the one that’s closing your beach. And by the way, I want to mention that poor algae get a bum rap because algae will show up only when there are toxins because algae kills bacteria. Now, the reason it showed up to close your beach is because somebody or something has poured toxins into your water. Now, they could have been run off from an agricultural situation or chemicals from a plant or just more people peeing in the water. Who knows? But you didn’t see the toxins. But you do see the algae. But algae is the clean-up crew. It’s there to protect you. It kills bacteria on your beach and in your body.

When you take algae, as we’ll talk about in a minute, internally as we do here with these tablets, it’s killing the bacteria internally just like algae would kill bacteria on your beach. And the good thing is usually, many of it, especially chlorella, it does it while you're sleeping. While you’re getting your beauty rest, you got the cleanup crew in there getting rid of toxins, and helping regenerate healthy cells, so it’s really an effortless way to improve your health and everything else.

So, that being said, spirulina, blue-green algae. First life on earth. Spirulina, drumroll, is actually a bacteria. It’s called cyanobacteria. Chlorella does belong to the plant kingdom. Now, you may say yourself, “What’s so important about it being a bacteria?” Well, when we get to the mitochondria conversation, you’ll find out it’s very important. But in terms of what it does for you now, because there is no cellulose wall because it’s a bacteria, spirulina gets absorbed into your bloodstream virtually instantly, certainly instantly if you chew it because it gets absorbed sublingually through your mouth into your bloodstream. And because spirulina is known as an energizing algae, that’s why we call ours ENERGYbits, and it has the highest concentration of protein in the world. Now, all the protein in both the algae, spirulina and chlorella, are in amino acid form. This is important because this allows your body to get access to the aminos, again instantly, because there is no cellulose wall to break down, no protein to break down, and attached to the aminos are all the B vitamins. B vitamins are what convert protein and glucose into energy. That's why when you take spirulina, your mind and your body and your mitochondria—and we’ll explain that in a minute—are energized.

Now, it’s not like lightning bolts from the sky because that kind of energy is a rush and then you have a crash. It’s based on a stimulant, a sugar or caffeine. The energy you get from spirulina is from the nutrition. You might not even notice it. It’s very quiet energy. You just suddenly realize hey, you're not tired, you're not hungry, you can focus, you can get through your day. You can have a great workout. 

And by the way, you’ll need a minimum probably of 10 tablets. I mean, you could start with 5, but you won’t really experience much. Ten tablets is kind our suggested entry-level amount to take. Most people do take the spirulina tablets in the morning or the afternoon or before a workout. Basically, any time you’re hungry, tired, fatigued, want energy or focus, if you're going on a long trip, or running an exam, we have brain surgeons, students, soccer moms using them. They're great for kids. It’s the safest, purest food you’ll ever put in your body or your children’s body. It’s great for pets. Pets love them. For children, we recommend either 1 or ½ tablet per their age. So if they're 2, give them 1 tablet a day, half of one or 1. If they're 4, give them maybe 2 or up to 4. But there is no upper limit. We have NHL players who put 75 spirulina in their smoothie before a game because they want all that access to that energy while they're doing rapid spurts on the ice. So, you can’t have too much salad and you can’t have too much spirulina.

By the way, I’m the one that discovered spirulina’s nutrient profile, particularly the amino acid profile. It’s virtually identical to mother’s breast milk. Same aminos and same proportions. And we know that mother’s breast milk is the perfect food. Well, algae and spirulina in particular is the next perfect food. Since spirulina and chlorella were given to us by mother nature, I consider it—and she’s a mother—it’s her version of mother’s breast milk. It’s quite remarkable how the nutrients are so similar. So, that's why spirulina is very energizing. The B vitamins, the access to the aminos. By the way, it’s a complete protein. It has 18 of the 20 aminos, all nine that your body can’t make, which is different from collagen powder which is not a complete protein that's missing tryptophan. 

Spirulina also is very high in iron, which is what carries oxygen in your blood, so that's energizing. It’s known as a vasodilator that opens up your blood vessels so that more blood can flow to your brain. It’s loaded with essential fatty acids like omega-3 and GLA, which reduce inflammation and also support brain function. It has boron that helps brain function. So, again, very energizing at the mental and physical levels. And when we get to the mitochondria discussion, I’ll elaborate more on the benefits of spirulina and why it is energizing at the cellular level.

In fact, when you take spirulina, some people take it before bed because it balances your blood sugar and the energy, again, is at a cellular level. What you do once you take it is up to you. You could have 10 tablets before bed, and it would still help you sleep because the energy is at the cellular level. If you take 10 tablets before you go on a workout, you’ll have a better workout because now you're using that cellular energy to propel your workout. So, it’s sort of like if someone gives you $10, it’s up to you how you spend that $10, right? Somebody might put it in the bank, somebody might go have a great lunch, somebody might buy themselves a nice little bauble or something. So, think of spirulina as being given the gift of energy, and it’s up to you and your lifestyle how you use that energy. You could sit and still be enjoying the benefits of it and still be energized at the cellular level. So, it’s pretty cool stuff.

By the way, there are actually two spirulina products on our website EnergyBits.com. The second one is called BEAUTYbits. The reason why there are two is because as I’ve mentioned earlier, I started the company because my sister had breast cancer. By the way, she’s completely cancer-free, 12 years cancer-free. We celebrate every year. I saw her a couple of months ago. So, women’s cells has always been a big priority for me. And I noticed when I first started the company that women were not purchasing ENERGYbits spirulina, and my girlfriends literally said, “Well, you got to make it pink and give it a cute name.” Because spirulina has more collagen than collagen powder, up to 400 percent by the way, and so it builds your skin and your hair, and it has the highest antioxidants in the world which stopped free radicals so it prevents wrinkles, I thought, “Well, the heck, let’s make a pretty version and call it BEAUTYbits.”

So, there are two spirulina on our website. They are absolutely identical. I’m not trying to fool anybody. I just want women to feel comfortable. Because it’s very happy packaging. I design everything. But I can’t help you or your skin or your health if I can’t get the algae into you. Just holding it outside of your body isn’t going to help you. So, that’s why there are two. Whatever strikes your fancy to make you feel comfortable because some people, if they think about algae at all, they think of it as pond scum or something that's closing their favorite beach. But they don’t think of it as something that is a remarkable nutritional beauty ingestible. So, all the things we do here at ENERGYbits is to take away the weirdness of algae, help you feel comfortable with it, help you learn the science, and understand there is no woo-woo. It’s just something that you’re not familiar with and we’re trying to make it more familiar for you and more comfortable because it really does amazing things, and it’s all science-based.

[00:22:54] Ashley James: And also, your company ensures the quality and the safety. Because it really is buy or beware out there. You can go on Amazon and buy some spirulina but it’s made in … I don’t mean to bash China. Unfortunately, there has been a history of toxic things coming out of China like melamine plastics in baby formula, as an example. Right? And the man that did that was put to death in China. China doesn’t condone this behavior. You know, it’s buy or beware out there, and it could be a different country that is producing something. It could just be some kind of green plastic powder claiming it’s spirulina. Right? As consumers, we need to do our due diligence and choose a company that does the third-party testing, doesn’t do skip batch testing. They test every batch. They will provide the test results to the public. They’re showing their integrity. And your company shows its integrity and that's why I trust that when I eat the spirulina and chlorella from your company, I know that it’s lead-free. I know that it’s heavy metal free. I know that it’s not filled with a bunch of fillers like these other companies, and it really is buy or beware.

So, yeah, I’ve heard a few people go, “Well, I can go to, like you said, I can go to Target. I can go to Ride Aid and pick up some.” But, I actually do know some, they're not college kids anymore, they graduated, but back about 10 years ago or so, I knew some college students that decided to do a study on their own of the different things in vitamin C that was on the shelf. And so, they went to every Rite Aid, Walgreens, Walmart, Target, and some supplement stores, generic supplement stores, and they buy all the vitamin C brands they could find and then they test it to see how much vitamin C was actually in it. Right?

[00:25:15] Catharine Arnston: I know the results.

[00:25:16] Ashley James: So, there’s some chewable vitamin C’s. They didn’t have gummies back then. They had some chewable vitamin C’s, they had some tablets, and then they had some capsules. Sometimes it’s powder, sometimes it’s like a hard-pressed tablet. So let’s say a tablet says it has a thousand milligrams, so 1 gram of vitamin C, ascorbic acid or whatever form they were saying the vitamin C was in. Most of the time it’s ascorbic acid derived from corn.

And so what they did was they picked apart each one in their lab at the college. They discovered that there was not one brand, not one brand that they could find that was over-the-counter that sold what they claimed had in it. So, if they said it was 1000 milligrams a capsule, maybe it was only 200. Right? There were some that were 100 percent filler, 0 vitamin C could be found. And most of them had some vitamin C but never was it accurate to the label. And this is a good thing and a bad thing. I know that sounds weird when I say it, but here’s the thing. It’s a good thing that the industry is not regulated. Here’s why: If the FDA actually took over, we would be in deep yogurt. 

[00:26:38] Catharine Arnston: You’d never have anything. 

[00:26:39] Ashley James: You would never have supplements again. And the FDA’s constantly under pressure from big pharma to shut down supplements. Now, there are certain health concerns when someone like takes too much of an herb and they have a negative effect and then all of a sudden now that herb is banned. Those are unfortunate. We don’t want the supplement industry being regulated because then big pharma will control the entire industry and then we won’t have access to things that are actually healthy for us. I know that kind of sounds like I got a tinfoil hat on and the thing is, I have so much more information on this topic and so I have been informed. And how it’s been laid out is that what we need to do instead is we need to do our own due diligence. We still want it to be the wild, wild west, but we need to find companies that will put the money and the time into ensuring the highest quality and stand behind the quality and not be these fly-by-night companies that get big and then get sold to Nestle.

I am so disappointed that companies like Pure Encapsulations were sold to Nestle, like I can’t trust them anymore. And I’ve seen this with like Garden of Life and other supplement companies where they used to have good products, they got sold to a big company and now the quality is gone in the toilet. So, please don’t ever get bought by a big company.

[00:28:10] Catharine Arnston: I’ll tell you. The little company, it’s a grind. I mean, I’ve been at this 12 years, 12-hour days 7 days a week for 12 years. And it’s a grind. Eventually, you run out of energy because you think “why don’t people understand this, what am I doing wrong?” The trouble is, these big companies, they have all the distribution channels. They can get to the product to places where us little companies just can’t go. So, I feel the empathy of other fellow entrepreneurs who have done their best to make sure they have a high-quality product. But at one point, you just run out of steam because it’s not easy. I’ll tell you this has been a labor of love for me. I mean, I just thought if I could stop one more person from getting cancer, I will die happy. But I’m 12 years in, I probably got another 12 years to go. And I do love still what I’m doing, but it’s not easy. It’s really, really hard to bring a high-quality product consistently to the world. I’ve seen pictures of other algae companies, capsules and they got ground up wrong because like you said, filler.

If there were ever a requirement of me to sort of get involved with a larger company, you can set standards of regulations. These things will not happen when you acquire the company. Or, you will file a lawsuit. And there are situations where that has happened and the quality has been maintained. But you have to do this because you love it. And I do love it. But it is not easy.

You were talking about vitamin C and just on that note, everyone thinks ascorbic acid is vitamin C. And I point out ascorbic acid is just one component. There's 200 components to vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is just one of 200, and yet, all the supplement companies make their vitamin C out of ascorbic acid and this is why they are so poorly absorbed because your body is looking for the other 199 pieces in order for it to absorb it. I tell people it’s like going to work with just your shoes on. You can’t just take ascorbic acid and think that you're getting vitamin C because it doesn’t exist in nature like that. When you eat vitamin C from an orange or from broccoli, there’s more vitamin C, by the way, in broccoli than there is in oranges, it has all those other components. This is one of the many reasons why algae is so far better for you than supplements because supplements are made from extracts, and extracts do not exist in nature. And so, when your body is trying to figure out what to do with it, it kind of gives up at some point, and you only absorb about 10 percent of it.

There are some exceptions because there are a handful of really high-quality supplement companies that are making their supplements from food. But it’s a very rare situation and that's why I’m so proud that algae is food and why I really take great lengths to help people understand that it is food and it’s unprocessed food. Again, we do not use high heat to dry our algae like everybody else does because as soon as you use high heat, not only do you kill the enzymes, you change the chemical structure of the nutrients. So, they aren’t as powerful, and they’re a little more difficult to absorb. So, there's lots of less expensive algae tablets on the internet or on Amazon. And lots of times, we have people saying, “Oh, I’m going to go try another brand.” They always come back because they say, “Well, I didn’t get the energy that I had from yours or it just didn’t seem to make a difference.” We have mothers whose kids are ADHD and have been reading statistics that in like within the next 10 years, 1 out of 2 children are going to be on the spectrum. I mean, it’s just insane what’s going on in our world these days. And algae literally is the answer for almost everything, and we’ll get into some of those details in a minute.

But yeah, we do go to great lengths. And these lab tests are not cheap. They're like $15,000 to $20,000, and they will only test what we tell them to do. So, I’ve got a long shopping list of things. Every time we do test, we do more tests. They’re very long and lengthy, complicated lab tests. We get labs from our suppliers in Taiwan, but we do a full set here in the United States. I think we’re the only company that I’m aware of that does that because we sell through doctor’s offices, chiropractors, functional medicine. And they need to know for sure that the algae has in it what we say it has, as you said. And we are only allowed to put a nutritional chart on our products that labeling requirements of the FDA. They don’t allow us to put all the nutrients. I mean, how crazy is that?

So, we have the nutritional chart that's found on all our packaging, but then we have a QR code that you can scan that gives you everything because we’re not allowed to put everything on. To me, that’s insane. Right? And we often get people saying, why does your nutrition chart on your website or the QR code not match the nutrition chart? This is why. Because we are just not allowed to put everything on there according to the FDA regulations. The FDA labeling is so stringent that if you have a line between the different nutrients that’s like 1/16 of a millimeter thicker than what they tell you it should be, they will not allow you to sell. I mean, it’s crazy. The regulations are so strict on labeling. So, anyways, I just want to throw that out there. 

[00:34:20] Ashley James: It’s just silly. It’s like on the one hand I can see how they want to help, but on the other hand, I see they're definitely not helping. I think my listeners are sort of really well-educated or at least they’re more into the health space than the standard American populace, the people who are asleep and just going with the flow. Right? And I say this on the show often that we need to be like a salmon swimming upstream. We need to go against. We need to be the black sheep. We need to go against the flow of the world if we want to not be a statistic.

[00:35:03] Catharine Arnston: Exactly.

[00:35:04] Ashley James: So, look at the statistics out there. 1 in 3 people are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. That's insane. That is so sad. My mom died of cancer, and I’ve made it my life’s mission as with this podcast to help save other people’s moms so that if we can help some people not lose their family members to cancer, and my dad died of heart disease, and those are the two big ones, the two big killers. But he died six years later, and he really died of a broken heart of losing the love of his life. She died at 55, and she was the healthiest woman I knew and then just very, very quickly died of cancer. That's a whole episode in and of itself to get into. I can see now what the lifestyle that leads to that. This is why I teach. This is why I get guests like you, and we teach how we can prevent this.

[00:36:02] Catharine Arnston: It’s absolutely preventable. Absolutely.

[00:36:04] Ashley James: It is. But if you go with the flow and you eat the way everyone else eats, and you think the way everyone else thinks, and you just do what everyone else does, then you will be a statistic. 1 in 3 people have type 2 diabetes or are pre-diabetic. Seventy percent of the adult population in the United States is on at least one prescription medication, so that’s pain meds, high blood pressure meds, and antidepressants. The list goes on and on. This is a result of the body being out of balance, right? When we look at the body from a holistic standpoint, which is a different lens than the mainstream. So, for the listener who was brought up, like we all were, under the lens of the mainstream, you wait to get sick, and then you go to the doctor, the doctor gives you something that manages your symptoms, and you shop down the aisles of the grocery store, buying the junky cereal that has dye and has sugar as the first or second ingredient, and you just go with the flow, you get your annual flu shot, you take antibiotics the second you have a sore throat or whatever, just like whatever people are doing out there. They eat mostly food that is processed that are factory-made, that was made in a factory, or go out to restaurants, eat fried food, don’t really ever see just whole foods, meaning this is a vegetable, look there’s a vegetable with nothing on it, not altered in any way. That is the standard American lifestyle that has encapsulated most of the world. 

As a result, we can see even in, for example, they have studies, just incredible studies where they see the descendants of because we think how much of this is genetic, right? Well, when we look at heart disease, anything below the Mason-Dixon line is there's just super high rates of diabetes and heart disease and arteriosclerosis, especially in African-American males. They die much younger than their white male counterparts, and we’re like, “What’s going on? Is this genetic?” Well, we look at the cultural diet in that area, and then we look at their cousins not genetically any different in Africa eating a different diet. Completely different outcomes. The heart disease is not there. So, it’s the diet is what I’m saying, not the genes.

Then we look at Japan in Okinawa and how they had very, very, very low rates of disease, incredibly long lifespans. It’s very typical to live to 90 or 100 or even a little bit past 100, disease-free, still gardening out in the garden. Now, the McDonald’s and American lifestyle and processed food has become more glamorous in that area. In one generation, cardiologists saw a shift. And now, Japan is catching up with America in terms of cancer and heart diseases. Catching up. It’s not there yet 100 percent, but it is definitely not where it was 50 to 100 years ago.

If we do not want to live the last 30 years of our life suffering in disease—and if you’ve watched your grandparents or your parents go through it or great aunts and uncles, if you’ve watched anyone suffer in the later years of their life, it should be the biggest motivator for you to pick up that fork and eat that salad instead of a drive through the drive-thru.

[00:39:43] Catharine Arnston: I was just going to say if you don’t like salad, algae is your answer. Men and children, in particular, are well known for not wanting to eat vegetables. I’m here to tell you. You don’t need to eat another vegetable in your life as long as you take at least 10 algae tablets a day and just swallow them and you're done. But we can get to that later on. 

[00:40:04] Ashley James: Well, I believe in the power of eating a variety of whole foods, I love that. But if you can’t get them in, I know my son is super picky, I figured out sneaky ways. And he’ll eat some vegetable. He only wants to eat raw vegetables, which it could be a challenge sometimes, but he only wants raw. There's only a certain kind he wants. So anyways, I think he eats more vegetables than any other kid I know, but I’m still not satisfied because I want him to be more flexible. But you know, he’s 7 and this is what kids do. But I love that he will any day of the week pick up your chlorella or spirulina and chew them up and swallow. It’s so reassuring to me that a neurotic mom such as myself who is so deeply concerned with the health of my child and wants to make sure that he has the best nutrition possible that at the end of the day, I could give him some spirulina and even some chlorella and that he is getting that nutrition.

But back to my point is that we need to be the salmon. We have to. I know it’s a little exhausting to go against the grain, but we need to be the ones to figure out how to do home-cooked meals. And I’m right there with you, figuring it out and doing it. Home-cooked meals, eating healthy food, walking every day even just to reduce stress, go get in nature, go walk through a park, walking every day, doing deep breathing, bringing down your stress levels, getting nutrition, getting the super-duper food like spirulina in you. And all these daily activities will make it so that you are divergent from the mainstream, the status quo, from the 1/3 of the population being incredibly, incredibly sick. You will diverge from those statistics, and you will be the outlier with true health. And that’s what I want for you. So yeah, it does take time and energy every day, but you have to make choices different from the masses.

And sometimes, it looks like grabbing your bag of ENERGYbits and throwing it in your purse or your gym bag or the car. That's a great place, as long as the car is not too hot. But that's a great place to always have it because you know how you're hungry or hangry in the car, instead of the drive-thru, grab 15 ENERGYbits and chew them. For me, I chew them and drink some water while you do it, or just swallow them if you don’t want to chew them. And within minutes, your body is digesting and absorbing that nutrition, and you really don’t feel hungry anymore. I love how it stops the hunger and it gets me to the point where now I can wait until after I cooked dinner. But instead of reaching for something unhealthy or even spending money, I don’t want to spend money out. I want to go home; I got groceries at home. I know that I’m giving my body nutrition. And so, it is a really great snack.

[00:43:02] Catharine Arnston: It’s really your lifeline. It’s a nutritional lifeline. I call it also your nutrition insurance. People know about health insurance. Well, this is your nutrition insurance. Because if you take these every day and if I do my job right, everybody in the world will be taking them every day, then your body is nourished in a way that will allow you to not just survive but to thrive. The sad thing is, most people know more about their cellphones than they do about their bodies. And once you understand what your body needs and the way that it operates, and we’ll get to that once we get to the mitochondria discussion, now you start to understand what it needs. It’s easier for you to give it what it needs because now you know the rules of the road. If you don’t know how to read a map and you’re driving to a distant location, you're kind of out of luck. You have to teach yourself how to read a map. And then, it’s easy. You just follow the road.

So, once you have a roadmap of how your body works, the algae makes that journey effortless because it gives you what you need, gets you where you want to go. You may take the spirulina because you want it for energy, but you’re going to find out that your digestion improves or maybe you’ll take it because you want improved mitochondria health. Maybe you’re taking the chlorella because you want to pull out toxins but you’ll find that you’re sleeping better at night. So, it will take you wherever you go, want to go, and then there’ll be some bonus trips along there as well.

[00:44:43] Ashley James: Love it. I had heard of it, but I hadn’t really gone and tried algae until I want to say about 4 years ago, maybe 5 years ago. I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt. He’s local to me, which is crazy, because people fly from around the world to see this man. He’s been a holistic MD for over 45 years, I believe now. And he has designed a system that detoxifies the body so well that he takes children who are non-verbal and, I think, misdiagnosed on the spectrum.

This is my hypothesis. I hypothesize that most autism is misdiagnosed heavy metals in the brain. That hypothesis is based on my observations of several holistic doctors that are able to take these children who have been diagnosed extensively. And they're non-verbal, they're agitated, they're not making eye contact, they’re beating their head against a wall, or they're beating their hands against their head, they're rocking. They look like their brain is on fire, and they're trying to soothe themselves. And they also have digestive issues. There's a lot going on.

And Dr. Klinghardt takes them and does a very gentle but rigorous heavy metal detox, and he can get these children to the point where they’re happy, calm, making eye contact, talking, going to school, and he says he has had children now, one of them has graduated, become a composer, several have become PhD’s. They’re essentially no longer considered on the spectrum. And the biggest thing is heavy metal detox and he explains that the heavy metals are in the brain, for whatever reason their bodies didn’t detoxify like others do, and this is how it shows up.

[00:46:48] Catharine Arnston: I think a lot of it is heavy metals—and when we get to the mitochondria—but it’s also mitochondria dysfunction. Because the highest concentration of mitochondria is in the brain. There are 2 million mitochondria per cell in your brain. It’s the highest concentration of mitochondria in your entire body. But I don’t want to jump the gun. We’ll get to that in a few minutes.

[00:47:12] Ashley James: So exciting. He uses chlorella as part of his package, as part of his detox with these children and with adults because adults will come to him. Unfortunately, he attracts people who this is their last-ditch effort, like they have tried every single doctor, every single method in their country. Because people fly from around the world to see him and they’re so sick of suffering, they’ve probably been suffering for 7 or more years, and then they come to see him. And yes, it’s expensive because he does a lot with them, and at the end of the day, people get better and mostly, he’s doing detox with them. So, he’s doing sauna, he’s doing the Platinum Energy System foot detox. Yeah, he’s doing all that. And he’s using the chlorella as part of the pulling out of the heavy metals.

So, I remember listening because I was having heavy metal issues. I learned from him in my interview with him. I did my research. I got a Platinum Energy System foot detox machine, I got a sauna, and I was eating your chlorella. Well, I’d throw 30 in my mouth, chew them and drink water, and then go jump in the sauna. When I take it, like it mops up the heavy metals and I don’t have, I don’t know, some people are really sensitive like I am to detoxing and they get like that kind of flu sensation from detoxing. And chlorella mops it up, so I don’t have that, which is really exciting.

So, I know the next thing we’re going to talk about is chlorella.

[00:48:46] Catharine Arnston: Yes, chlorella. So that's a great segue.

[00:48:49] Ashley James: That was my introduction and then I found you. I can’t remember if I found you or you found me, but I tried the company that Dr. Klinghardt likes and they’re a high-quality company, and honestly, I couldn’t even get through a whole bag. I felt bad because I bought, you know, their bags are maybe like $140. And I couldn’t even get through a whole bag because it just smells like dead fish. And I’m like, this is so gross. And then I tried yours because actually, I think I remember you sent me a sample pack and I’m like, “This is amazing!” I think you’re experimenting with like macadamia nuts because it was like a trail mix. And I’m like, “This is delicious! This doesn’t smell weird and fishy. This tastes good to me.” I like healthy-tasting things, but yours is totally different from the other high-quality company that I had tried from Dr. Klinghardt, and I said, man, I don’t know what it is with the Klinghardt one, but yours is way better, and I was getting great results.

So, then I started like singing ENERGYbits from the rooftop and giving them out to all my friends. I couldn’t believe our little toddler at the time was loving them and now he’s 7, and we’ll eat them and even though he’s very picky. So yeah, it’s exciting.

[00:50:02] Catharine Arnston: I remember that was when he was about 2. So, we’ve been connecting for almost 5 years. Wow! It’s really great.

[00:50:06] Ashley James: Yeah, I know. Time just flies, right? It’s just crazy. I’ll be serving ENERGYbits at his wedding.

[00:50:13] Catharine Arnston: Oh, there you go. Yeah, we have to sort of airdrop them from the sky. Instead of confetti, we’ll have RECOVERYbits

[00:50:23] Ashley James: Love it.

[00:50:24] Catharine Arnston: Well, that's a nice testimonial. And we will talk now about chlorella. And the great thing about chlorella is that it does taste pretty good especially, as you’ve mentioned, if you have it with pistachio nuts or macadamia nuts are the best. What we call our chlorella, it’s really a wellness algae. Spirulina is an energizing, nourishing algae. Chlorella, we call ours RECOVERYbits because it helps you recover your health. So, when you mix it with macadamia nuts, honestly, you close your eyes, you think you're eating potato chips. It's that delicious. And I still do plan to do a trail mix with chlorella and macadamia nuts and also, we’re working a lot now with pistachios and there's a brand that has a salt & vinegar flavor, and it is, again, ultra-delicious. Not only are these very good nuts for you, they're very soft, so they’re good for your teeth. They're very low in lectin, so they're really good for your gut biome. Dr. Gundry points out that a lot of nuts like almonds are very high in lectins and oxalates, and they can be very damaging to your stomach lining, and these two nuts are very low in both lectins and oxalates. So, I’m very happy that they're the two that we’ve settled on for our trail mix when we finally get that out there.

[00:51:41] Ashley James: Nice.

[00:51:42] Catharine Arnston: So, chlorella showed up on the earth a billion years after spirulina, and as I mentioned, it is a green algae. It does belong to the plant kingdom and so it has fiber in it and a fibrous and cellulose wall. Now, remember I said spirulina’s claim to fame had the highest protein in the world? Chlorella’s claim to fame is it has the highest chlorophyll in the world. Now, chlorophyll is very, very cleansing and healing. If you go online, if this was a visual, I would have shown you a picture, but you can go online to see this, and we’ll send you a bunch of articles that you can link to in the notes.

But the chemical composition of chlorophyll is virtually identical to the chemical composition of your hemoglobin, your red blood cells. Now, this is important because chlorophyll builds your blood. It’s that simple. And so when you have healthy blood, you're going to have healthy organs. You're going to have a healthier body, a healthier brain. So, it’s very, very cleansing.

Up until World War II and even as recent as World War II, they would give the injured liquid chlorophyll because it would help them heal from injuries if they’d run out of blood transfusions for this very reason. And it’s been used for centuries this way. It’s only since the pharmaceutical industry has got their hands around us that people have forgotten about the cleansing, blood-building capabilities of chlorophyll, and there is nothing with more chlorophyll than chlorella algae. It has 500 times more chlorophyll than arugula and 25 times more chlorophyll than liquid chlorophyll. Nothing in the world has more chlorophyll than chlorella algae. You could fill a room with arugula and you wouldn’t even come close to the same amount of chlorophyll as in 30 tablets of chlorella, so that's pretty cool.

Now, the other amazing thing about chlorophyll, of course, as you know, chlorophyll is what makes plants green, is that chlorophyll is a fat-based pigment. The blue that's in the spirulina, which is called phycocyanine, it is a water-based pigment. Now, this explains to me why the blue pigment in spirulina stops the growth of blood vessels to tumors. It’s called antiangiogenesis which in its own right is very important to know about. But the chlorophyll, because it’s fat-based, what it does is it heals your cell walls. Now, we will get eventually to mitochondria, but all of your health issues start at the cellular level. Everything. Whether you're healthy or unhealthy. And it’s not just the mitochondria inside the cell, it’s the cell wall itself. Now, we’ve all been told we need things like omega-3 and D3 and vitamin A because those are fats. Your cell walls are fat-based. They're called lipids. And you need to keep them nourished and moist because that’s how nutrients can get in and toxins can get out. And if they are not healthy with healthy fats, we’re not talking about the rancid, awful, poisonous, toxic, damaging omega-6’s like canola oil, please, if you do nothing else, stop eating canola oil. It should have crossbones on it. That and sugar are the two things that are making ill, diabetic, heart disease, we can go on. That's another podcast in its own way.

Anyways, so chlorophyll is just as healing to your cell wall as omega-3 because it’s a fat-based pigment. And I don’t take fish oil and I would encourage everybody not to because it goes rancid even before you buy it. And by the way, where do you think the fish get the omega-3 from? Because, of course, the fish oil has omega-3 in it, they get it from algae. I remind people to save themselves, save the oceans, save their health, save their cell walls, and get the healthy fats from algae, especially spirulina, it has the higher omega-3 in it. But the chlorophyll is fat-based. So, even if you don’t take fish oil or even if you don’t take D3, you're still getting the benefits of growing and building your cell walls from the chlorophyll.

So, not only is chlorella the highest chlorophyll and we now know it builds your blood and it builds your cell walls, chlorophyll is also very cleansing. And chlorella has a hard cell wall. Now, that hard cell wall not only has fiber, remember spirulina has no fiber because it’s a bacteria, chlorella has the fiber so it feeds the bacteria in your gut biome. And that hard cell wall attaches to toxins, as you talked about earlier with Dr. Klinghardt. It attaches to all heavy metals—lead, mercury, radiation, aluminum, toxins from mold. It also attaches to alcohol, lactic acid, and it will chelate them out of your body. This is very, very, very powerful. I read a statistic a couple of years ago that said the average American has 800 toxins in their bodies. 800. That's crazy! Our immune systems were not built to sustain that kind of toxic load. And even if you lived in bubble, and even if you had no exposure to any toxins, which of course we know it’s impossible, you need to know the good news is our bodies are constantly regenerating on a daily basis every single second. Cells die and cells grow.

Now, we have 30 trillion cells in our body. And literally every day, cells die, new cells grow. But where do you think those old cells go? Well, if you don’t get rid of them by pulling them out with something like chlorella, they sit there and they clog up your lymphatic system and they attract bacteria. And they cause disease. And I remind people, you know, if you didn’t take your garbage out from your house for a couple of days, it would get pretty smelly in there, right? Well, your body is the same way. If you do not get rid of the dead cells, they're called senescent cells, they're zombie cells, they're clogging up your body. This is why you do things like fasting to trigger autophagy, to get rid of all these dead cells that are either mutated or just dead and not gone, you need to pull them out. And chlorella is the best way to do it. 

In fact, I personally feel it’s far better than activated charcoal, which a lot of people use, but activated charcoal pulls out all minerals. The good ones and the bad ones. Chlorella only pulls out toxins and it has 40 vitamins and minerals as does spirulina. So, it introduces all the electrolytes—magnesium, potassium, manganese, and salt so that you don’t lose your minerals. It just pulls out the toxins. That's the big difference between activated charcoal and using chlorella algae.

So, with chlorella, because your body goes through a detox and repair cycle when you are sleeping. We generally recommend people take chlorella before bed. Now, you can take it any time of day. I eat them all day long. I have them for breakfast, lunch, snacks. I eat them with pistachio nuts, macadamia nuts. But I definitely have them before bed. But you could have them any time of day, but if you were only going to take them one time a day, I would recommend before bed because now, when you're getting your beauty rest and you’re getting your deep repair, you have chlorella which will A, facilitate sleep because both algae have the highest concentration of melatonin in the world, so it helps you sleep and know melatonin does not make you sleepy during the day, it’s only triggered by night. We’ll talk about melatonin more in a minute when we talk about mitochondria. It has the highest tryptophan in the world which is a precursor of melatonin. It has your daily requirement of vitamin K2, which pulls out excess calcium from soft tissue. This would have been very valuable for your father. Arteriosclerosis which is the hardening of arteries. I remind people, “You know what’s hardening?” It’s calcium. We’re all taking D3 and we’re taking calcium, but it’s going to our soft tissue. It is not going to our bones because most of us are deficit in vitamin K2, which moves excess calcium from our soft tissue like our blood vessels and our heart, and our skin, and our brain, and moves it into your bones. And chlorella has your daily requirement of K2, so it automatically does that. Kidney stones, you know what they are? It’s a calcification gathering with your gas.

So, all of these things, the high chlorophyll which stimulates peristalsis, highest RNA and DNA in the world, all of these things contribute to a great repair while you are getting your beauty rest. Chlorella, because your body goes through this detox and repair and because chlorella has all the nutrients that facilitate the repair, we definitely recommend taking it before bed. And so, you can just leave it at your bedside and have it as your snack before you go off to your Lalaland and you wake up refreshed. If you had a cocktail or a glass of wine, same thing happens.

Now, in terms of quantity, just like we said with spirulina, 10 tablets of spirulina will give you a slight improvement in your energy and your focus and satisfy your hunger. If you wanted it as a meal replacement, you’d probably want 20 or 30 tablets. Same with chlorella. You could take 10 tablets and you’d enjoy all the wellness benefits from the chlorophyll and all the other nutrients. But for detox, you need closer to 20 or 30 tablets. And you’ll find they're so tiny and as you would start to enjoy eating them, it’s not a hardship. In fact, you’ll probably start looking forward to having your chlorella even if you put maybe a little bit of sea salt on it if you don’t want nuts. It can be your bedtime snack, much better for you than cookies and milk.

And if you don’t want to take that many all of the time, you can do maybe 10 tablets for a week and then 20 or 30 for a couple of weeks and then get back to 10 at night or do 20 or 30 for a month and then do 10 tablets for a month, so you can cycle in and out just like people cycle in and out of doing keto. So, the chlorella, we call it RECOVERYbits because it’s very much a recovery algae that has so many benefits that there's nothing like it. And remember, it’s food. It's not a pill. It’s not a vitamin. It’s not a supplement.

Now, when you take chlorella on a daily basis and we would certainly recommend you do, if you don’t like vegetables or you don’t have time to eat vegetables, or you're traveling, or you want a fast recovery from sports, this is your answer. You just swallow 10 or 20 or whatever many you have or chew them, and you're done. No carrying groceries, the heavy vegetables from the grocery store, stuffing them into your fridge, cleaning them, cooking them, arguing with your kids or your husbands, and then throwing half of them out. None of that. It just goes away. And we sell the tablets in bags of a thousand tablets. And I use the quote from NASA that “1 gram of algae has the same nutrition as 1000 grams of fruits and vegetables.” And I did the math. I realized one bag of our algae tablets, it doesn’t matter which one it is, has the same nutrition as 551 pounds of vegetables. 

[01:03:55] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[01:03:57] Catharine Arnston: And at $3 a pound, that's like $1500. Normally the bag is $125. With your discount code LTH, it brings it down to $100. If you took 10 a day, the bag would last you about three months. That’s efficient nutrition. Right? It not only saves you money, it saves you time and it saves you arguing and now you’ve got something when you're traveling or going to the gym or going to school, or you're a soccer mom and you're stuck in traffic and you don’t want to eat any of those crappy carbs, here you go. You’ve just nailed. I call it the ultimate fast food.

[01:04:33] Ashley James: Well, I certainly enjoy the idea that it is such a, like you said, super duper superfood. I wouldn’t say don’t eat any vegetables or fruit, but like you said, if someone can’t, and actually there's a listener who has a … I don’t know if they call it a nursing home or a skilled nursing home where they host elderly people in their own home. They’ve got like 10 rooms and they take care of them, and they feed them the ENERGYbits. And how amazing is that? Because they want their clients to be healthy and for some, there's certain people who you can’t feed enough fruits and vegetables, too, right? So, it can be children, seniors, when we’re super busy, when we’re traveling. I know there's days where I’m traveling and I’m hungry and I’m like, okay, I’m just going to skip a meal and I’m going to fast, or I can take my ENERGYbits. I’d rather do that than go through a drive-thru for multiple reasons.

[01:05:41] Catharine Arnston: Exactly. And I’m with you. Because I love vegetables, but I know a lot of people especially as they get older, they don’t have the enzymes for digesting fiber and so they avoid fiber, which means they avoid nutrition. And white mushy stuff just doesn’t have any nutrition in it. So, for those people, or we work with a lot of bariatric surgeons and their patients have such small stomachs. They cannot physically put a lot of food in their stomach. So, they love the algae tablets because they're so tiny and yet they’re so tiny but mighty is what they say, they give them all the nutrition that they need. Or children who are just, let’s face it, kids love pasta, but again, not a lot of nutrition in pasta. We don’t want parents to have to worry. And if you turn the tablets into a bit of a game like you did with your son, they think it’s fun. Their tongues turn green. And now you've turned you eating healthy into something pleasurable. So, whatever it takes to get. And for older people who don’t eat very well, even if they took two tablets, there's probably more nutrition than they're having all week. So, we just want to help people get the nourishment that they need.

[01:06:58] Ashley James: Now, you’ve mentioned earlier that I know it’s going to spirulina, but you mentioned earlier how you’ve discovered that has the same like a really similar nutrient profile to mother’s breast milk. Have you ever thought about formulating a baby formula?

[01:07:13] Catharine Arnston: Oh, I mean, there's no end to the things that we can do, but we’re still such a tiny company. We’re so understaffed and we’re so underfunded. We’re self-funded. The number of things that we could do is limitless. But I have to help people first understand what algae is because those are all very what’s called vertical markets and there's hypersensitivity with mothers and with children and formulas. And the food companies have a stranglehold on that. I couldn’t even attempt to get to that community until we’d established algae as the nutritional…

[01:07:56] Ashley James: Safe. It’s safe, it’s nutritious. I mean, there are so many benefits. And we have four other episodes that listeners can go to. We actually talk about, well, what are the downsides. Are there downsides? And we talked about debunking the algae myths and you bring up a lot of science in episode 357. That was a fantastic interview. I highly recommend listeners who have been listening so far and going okay, well, like they're waiting for another shoe to drop. They're like, what’s the downside to eating this. There's got to be a hook. There's got to be a side effect. Right? We’re used to do that. We’re used to the side effects mindset because everyone’s used to drugs. This is a food. You don’t go, “What’s the downside to eating an apple?” I mean, I don’t know. Maybe you're full. I don’t know. And the thing is, a conventionally grown apple has upwards of 50 different manmade chemicals on it and in it. So, that is why we choose organic and that's why your spirulina and chlorella are essentially organic. They're very clean. There's no pesticides and those chemicals in it.

But we do talk about addressing those concerns in episode 357, so I recommend listeners go back and check that out. I definitely want to make sure that we do get into …

[01:09:13] Catharine Arnston: Cover mitochondria, yeah.

[01:09:15] Ashley James: The mitochondria. One thing I’d like to say is before we move forward, with the amount of chlorophyll, chlorophyll is like a deodorant for the insides. Right? Your poop does not smell when you do chlorella. So, if your husband has particularly horrible bowel movements or farts, give him the RECOVERYbits. It’s like a deodorant for the inside. It’s helping him detox and it’s also saving your marriage and saving your nose. That's one thing.

[01:09:50] Catharine Arnston: And same with people who are they're eating just meat. What’s it called?

[01:09:55] Ashley James: Oh, the carnivore diet?

[01:09:56] Catharine Arnston: Carnivores. Because I ran into some at this keto conference I was at last week and their breath was just it knocks you over. This will get rid of breath issues. That's the same with dogs and cats. You might not notice it with your cats, but with dogs. So, anybody who’s eating meat, the bad breath is from bacteria in your mouth. This kills bacteria. Remember I said algae blooms show up wherever there’s bacteria? Same within your mouth. Same within your colon. That's why they’ve used chlorella for decades for IBS, for Crohn’s disease, any kind of gut, abdominal issues at all, and laughingly, when I was at this conference, I held up a bag of my ENERGYbits on my head and I put my chlorella bag down by my gut. And I said the blue one, ENERGYbits, is for AM, and the chlorella which is the green bag is for PM, but if you need another visual, think of the ENERGYbits which is spirulina with all the nourishment for your brain and the chlorella which cleans out your gut and stops any kind of bacteria and deodorizes your lower part of your body. So, your brain and your gut. If you need simple things to remember what they do and when to take them, that hopefully helps.

[01:11:13] Ashley James: I do. I love it, yes. You mentioned that it’s better than activated charcoal. Would you consider taking the RECOVERYbits when someone has food poisoning? Would it help in that way as well? 

[01:11:29] Catharine Arnston: That's a good question. I don’t know about food poisoning. I guess it’s bacteria that’s caused the food poisoning like salmonella.

[01:11:40] Ashley James: But it’s like the toxins left behind from the bacteria is what I understand. I’m just wondering because people will typically take activated charcoal during food poisoning to help mop it up, and I’m wondering if, well, I guess you could take activated charcoal and chlorella just to see if it would help more.

[01:12:00] Catharine Arnston: But it’d be certainly cleansing. I’ve never had that question come up before, that's very interesting. I can only think that would help. 

[01:12:08] Ashley James: There you go. Okay, so we’ve laid down a good groundwork, although listeners can still go back and listen to the previous episodes because we really, really dove even deeper. But we’ve laid it out. Everyone now is excited and probably going to ENERGYbits.com using coupon code “LTH” and already buying their bags of RECOVERYbits and ENERGYbits. And then one thing I wanted you to mention is if someone wants to try chlorella and spirulina, they can get the 50-50 bag. And what’s that bag called?

[01:12:37] Catharine Arnston: That’s called VITALITYbits.

[01:12:38] Ashley James: That's right. VITALITYbits.

[01:12:40] Catharine Arnston: It’s a blend of the two of them.

[01:12:41] Ashley James: You want half chlorella and half spirulina, get the VITALITYbits. Okay, so let’s dive into this. The superoxide dismutase (SOD), I am so excited about. I’ve had guests come on the show talking about how it is like the fountain of youth. We need more of it. And I’m so excited that your crop, your super-duper food is going to help us get more superoxide dismutase for our mitochondria. Okay, so let’s dive into this.

[01:13:12] Catharine Arnston: All right, well, let me first explain what mitochondria are, why they're so critical for your life full-stop and why algae contains all the nutrients that will protect your mitochondria from damage. [j1] And when the mitochondria are protected, then you have more life. And one of those antioxidants is superoxide dismutase. It’s also known as SOD, so I’ll use the terms interchangeably because it’s easier to say SOD than superoxide dismutase.

So, here’s the deal. Think of your body as a building. Okay? Like a skyscraper. And inside the building are offices. Think of those offices like your cells. And in the offices are lights. Think of the lights as your mitochondria. Now, you can’t do any work in your office without lights. And your building doesn’t function without offices and people in the offices. Your body is the same way. The mitochondria are the fuel, the thing that keeps the lights on in your cells. And the problem is, those mitochondria are getting damaged. The mitochondria, they're little organelles. If you look at any drawings, they're sort of like peanut-shaped things that are inside the cells and they generate energy for everything in your body. Everything from breathing. And the currency of energy is called ATP. We have electricity that is the energy for our homes or our phones, and we have gasoline for the energy for our cars and although soon to be electricity. ATP is what energizes your body. It’s what helps your blood to flow, your lymphatic system to function, your heart to beat, your brain to think. It fuels everything.

So, your mitochondria play a pretty important role just like in the building. Without any lights, you can’t really do anything. The trouble is, your mitochondria are located exactly where … actually, your mitochondria have their own DNA, I’ll say that first. We know that we have about 25,000 DNA and those DNA last a lifetime. The mitochondria have their own DNA. And interestingly, they all come from the female, which is quite different from your regular DNA. Half comes from the male, half comes from the female. All of your mitochondria DNA come from the female. I just have a sort of interesting note to put in there.

Now, there's only 37 of them. But these mitochondria DNA control all of your DNA. They control all of the communication on your cell wall. They control everything that goes on in your body. So, the analogy I like to help people so you can understand how powerful these mitochondria DNA are. They're like the air controller at an airport. An air controller controls absolutely everything that’s coming in and go on out. And if they are ill or not on their job, planes crash. When your mitochondria DNA are ill and they get damaged, your health crashes. It is that simple. Now, the good news is, we can change that trajectory because as you age, you have fewer mitochondria, you have more mitochondria being damaged and mutated and these mutated mitochondria send the wrong signals. It’s like an air controller telling a plane to land on a runway when someone’s taken off. So, when the mitochondria are damaged, they're sending wrong signals and so things, your tissues start to literally rust, that's what free radicals do and your health deteriorates.

Now, the reason why the mitochondria get so damaged and mutated is because the mitochondria DNA, they're located exactly where the ATP is produced. Now, the ATP is good. The problem is, when ATP is produced, a byproduct is something called free radicals. Free radicals are molecules that are missing an electron, and so what they do is they steal electrons from other tissues, from other molecules. It basically is the equivalent of rust. If you’ve ever seen boats on a dock or an old car left on a yard, you see how there’s rusty holes that appear and they get bigger and bigger because of oxidation. That's what’s causing the holes, is oxidation.

Free radicals cause oxidation, damage, and rusting of your cells. Not a good thing. So, because the mitochondria DNA are located exactly where the ATP is and exactly where the free radicals are, they are constantly getting damaged and dying. The average lifespan of your mitochondria DNA is 10 to 20 days, whereas your regular DNA lasts a lifetime. When you're born and when you are about 30, your body creates antioxidants that can get into the mitochondria to stop this free radical damage. But the problem is, there’s only four of them that can get into the mitochondria inner membrane. They are glutathione, melatonin, superoxide dismutase, and also chlorophyll. I know your body doesn’t make chlorophyll, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

So, those are the only four antioxidants that can stop from the free radical damage. And you go, “Well, wait a second. Blueberries have antioxidants. Oranges have antioxidants. What’s wrong with them?” Here is the problem. Those antioxidants are fine for all the other cells in your body to stop free radical damage. But the problem is, your mitochondria, unlike any other cell in your entire body, have two cell membranes. Every other cell has one. Remember we talked about it earlier and it’s a fat-based membrane and nutrients go in and go out. Well, there's one of those around the mitochondria for sure. But there is a second inner membrane that is impenetrable by virtually anything. Certainly none of the traditional antioxidants, and I’ll explain that in a minute why.

In your regular membranes including the outside one of the mitochondria, these nutrients that get in and out, and proteins, and antioxidants, they go through something called a porin. Now, porins are like little channels that open up and allow things to flow in and out. But that inner membrane of the mitochondria does not have any porins. The only four that can get through that inner membrane and they're not through porins, are these four antioxidants – glutathione, melatonin, superoxide dismutase, and chlorophyll.

Now, you mentioned superoxide dismutase, so let me start with it. It is heralded as the answer to longevity. And here’s why. The most damaging free radical that is produced in your body and it’s all at the mitochondria level, is something called superoxide. And I was curious I read all this literature. Hundreds of NIH articles talking about the super damage of superoxide. And then we’re like, why? Why is it so damaging? And here’s why. Most free radicals have just one electron that is by itself and so it steals one electron from another molecule, which damages that molecule which then becomes a free radical, which damages the next molecule. And that's how the cascading effect of damaged tissue occurs. 

But superoxide has three of these unpaired electrons. So, it steals three times as many electrons from the next molecule, which causes three times as much damage to the next molecule. So that's why it’s known as the most damaging free radical, because it requires three electrons to stabilize. So, superoxide dismutase, what it does is it encounters this superoxide and turns it into water. Harmless water. Imagine a fireman with a hose. Just hosing down all that superoxide dismutase and protecting your mitochondria. The reason why this is so powerful is because again, when you're talking about the free radicals being produced as a result of ATP, if anyone’s ever sat by a bonfire or a fireplace and you got too close to it and sparks would fly, you know that those sparks could burn you. And that's what’s happening at the mitochondria level with all this ATP. It’s generating a fire but the results are free radicals, which are like the sparks. And what’s getting burned is the mitochondria DNA. And so, you’ve got to find a way to protect those mitochondria DNA because when they're damaged, then again, they die or they send the wrong signals.

Now, the other two antioxidants that can get into the mitochondria, as I mentioned, is melatonin and glutathione. And algae has the highest concentration of superoxide dismutase in the world, the highest concentration of glutathione in the world, and the highest concentration of chlorophyll in the world. All four are the four that can get into that inner membrane to stop this free radical damage.

Now there's two ways to stop the free radical damage. One is to reduce the number of free radicals being produced. And the second way is to neutralize them like superoxide dismutase. The first way is easy for anybody to do because carbs and sugar generate the most free radicals in your mitochondria. So, removing processed carbs, anything white, rice, bread, sugar, and replacing it either with a keto diet or at least a low-carb diet, that's number one, because you're going to have fewer free radicals being produced that will then produce less damage. Now, the best way, the thing that produces virtually no free radicals is fasting, either intermittent fasting or long-term water fasting and algae. Algae creates virtually no free radicals because there are no carbs. The remarkable thing about algae is scientific discoveries that if you take chlorophyll and expose your body to red light, either red light therapy or the sunlight, the chlorophyll regenerates the CoQ10 molecule, which is part of the cycle of producing ATP and it creates energy without free radicals. So, now you're taking algae that's full of the four antioxidants that neutralize the free radicals and it’s giving your body, your brain, your organs nourishment, and it's generating ATP without free radicals. So, that's number one. Reduce the number of free radicals that are damaging to the mitochondria DNA, and the second one, which is getting these four antioxidants that can neutralize them like superoxide dismutase.

Now, the catch is superoxide dismutase, as I mentioned, is an enzyme. And virtually all the other algae companies that are lower priced, higher volume, they use high heat to dry their algae. Why? Because they have to get to market quickly, to sell quickly, to make money quickly. Now, when I started the company, as I mentioned, it was just to help my sister. And so, twelve years ago I learned that high heat kills enzymes. To be honest, I knew nothing about superoxide dismutase 12 years ago, but I knew if you got over 118 degrees Fahrenheit, it killed enzymes. And I knew enzymes were important for digestion. So I said, well, we can’t use high heat. We can’t use high heat when we dry it. So, we never have.

So, that's why when you use our algae, the superoxide dismutase which has been heralded as the answer. And by the way, there's 50,000 studies that have been done on the healing properties of superoxide dismutase. It has been proven to stop cancer, proven to stop heart disease, proven to stop brain disease. And 50,000 is a big number just like there's 100,000 on algae. So now you’ve got something that's been proven to stop these diseases and reinstate health at the cellular level. And yet, everybody else is killing it except us. There is one other source that you could use, I want to point out, and it would be frozen spirulina. Chlorella, by the way, does have superoxide dismutase in it as well, but spirulina has the highest. It has four times as much as chlorella.

Now, frozen algae because, again, has not been exposed to high heat would have all the superoxide dismutase still alive and well. Same with such a thing as frozen chlorella. I’ve never found anybody that sells it. The problem with frozen spirulina is that it has a very short lifespan, it’s messy, you can’t travel with it, and it’s even more expensive. But it is an option for those of you who do want to search that out.

So, superoxide dismutase is unbelievable for preserving your mitochondria[j2] . Now, as I mentioned earlier, the highest concentration of mitochondria are in the parts of your body where there are the highest energy needs. Number one, your brain. They have found there are two million of these mitochondria per cell in your brain. That's why they're realizing autism, ADHA, dementia, Alzheimer’s, any brain issue. Any brain issue.

Brain fog is a mitochondria dysfunction, a mitochondria disease. We have people writing in who have had dementia. They’re in their 70s. Within two days, they started being able to focus again. One gentleman said he couldn’t even figure out how to turn his microwave on. And within two days of using the spirulina, he was being able to focus again. The power of these antioxidants cannot be understated. It is crucial that you get these into your body because after the age of 30, your body, which normally makes superoxide dismutase, glutathione, and melatonin drops, and it drops, and it drops. By the time you are 60 and certainly in your older years, it is producing virtually none. This is why when you're 20, in your teens, in your 20s, you have energy. You might get a cold, you bounce back in two days, but once you get into your 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, you’re not sleeping, you're not recovering, you're getting chronic illness, you're getting cancer diagnoses, heart disease diagnoses, your brain fog is increasing. It’s because your mitochondria, which used to be protected when you were younger by these antioxidants, the three that your body makes plus chlorophyll, it is not producing them anymore. And I’m not telling you anything that's not scientifically proven. This is the reality. So, as your mitochondria get damaged and as you have fewer of these antioxidants to protect you, your inflammation level goes up and up, and your mitochondria and your health goes down and down and down.

We can change that trajectory simply with algae. It’s un-freaking-believable. I have the lab tests that prove that algae has the highest superoxide dismutase in the world. There’s a teeny, teeny, teeny amount in cabbage. It has 28,000 times more superoxide dismutase than cabbage. It has more melatonin. It has 1400 times more glutathione than avocado or beef. I can’t remember the number but some crazy number, more melatonin and melatonin, they're realizing there's way more than help you with your sleep and manage your circadian rhythm. It’s an antioxidant that, by the way, is produced in all of your mitochondria and used by all your mitochondria. These are essential antioxidants that preserve your mitochondria DNA which therefore preserve your health.

But I want to walk you through where the other concentrations of mitochondria are. First, as I mentioned, is your brain. The second highest, you’ll never believe this one, is women’s eggs. There are 600,000 mitochondria per cell in a woman’s eggs, in every single egg. For infertility, is a mitochondria dysfunction. You get this back into your body, it will be so much easier for you to have a baby, carry the baby, nourish the baby because it takes a lot. And why is there so many mitochondria in women’s eggs? Because it takes a lot of energy to create another human being.

The third highest is your heart. Once again, they’re realizing heart disease is a mitochondria disease. It’s anywhere between 5,000 to 7,000 mitochondria per cell in your heart. After that, it’s the rest of your organs and your muscles, which have an average of 5,000 mitochondria per cell. So any athletes who are listening, you want muscle for performance, but you need mitochondria for a long-lasting performance because that’s where your energy is coming from, from the mitochondria in your muscles.

Now, just as a comparison, a fat cell or a skin cell has an average of only 100 mitochondria per cell, because there's not a high need for energy there. But the things that go first when we are aging is our brain and our heart and, of course, our immune system as well.

So, the fact the algae, both the spirulina and the chlorella have the four antioxidants that can get into that inner membrane to stop the free radical damage that is like sparks flying off a fire and damaging the DNA, which is what causes the cascading effect of decreased energy, brain focus, cancer, immune health issues, algae does provide that ability to protect the DNA and at the same time, generate ATP without free radicals.

Now I’m going to tell you why there are two membranes in the mitochondria and why algae is such a remarkable thing and basically saves your mitochondria. So, remember at the very beginning I mentioned that algae was the first life on earth almost 4 billion years ago. And this is all documented in science, by the way, so we’ll send you all the links so you can check it out yourself. So, the first cell was cyanobacteria. And it was an anaerobic cell because before algae, there was no oxygen on earth. There was just gas and water. No one knows why this little tiny anaerobic cell, cyanobacteria, started growing, and of course, spirulina is a cyanobacteria, so it’s effectively spirulina was the first life on earth 4 billion years ago. And after a billion years of it growing, of these little cells growing, and they generated ATP and released oxygen in the process, which always happens, now there's a lot of oxygen on earth. But now this little anaerobic cell is struggling because it did better when there wasn’t any oxygen on earth, and at the same time, larger cells that were aerobic started growing. But they weren’t generating ATP as well.

So, I can imagine the conversation that went on between the two of them because this is exactly what happened. The big cell says to the little cell, “Hey, little guy. I see you’re struggling there with all that oxygen, and we love oxygen. But we’re not doing so well generating ATP. So, how about you come and join us? And we’ll protect you from the oxygen and you can generate ATP for us.” And basically, that's what happened. The big cell engulfed the little cell but did not digest the little cell. That little cell, that little cyanobacteria became mitochondria. Your mitochondria evolved from spirulina, well, from cyanobacteria, which spirulina is a cyanobacteria. Crazy, right?

That is why there are two membranes on your mitochondria. The original membrane is when it was out by itself 4 billion years ago as an anaerobic cell. Then when it got engulfed by the big cell, the big cell put a second membrane around it as occurs in all of the cells in your body that have these porins and allow things to go in and out. But the original membrane was retained. And that is why algae has everything that can get into mitochondria inner membrane where nothing else can get in there because it’s the same thing. There are different processes that allow the absorption to get through the cells. Nothing else can get in there. Your mitochondria and spirulina are family.

[01:36:11] Ashley James: It is so cool. I did a whole interview on mitochondria back in episode 297 with Dr. Warren Cargal. And I feel like I should connect the two of you because he published a book on mitochondria. He’s all about mitochondria. He said exactly what you said, which is really cool. It’s cool to hear it from multiple sources, right? And it’d be cool to hook you guys up. I’m going to do that. I’m going to hook you guys up.

[01:36:38] Catharine Arnston: What’s his name again?

[01:36:39] Ashley James: It’s Dr. Warren Cargal. Anyways, that's episode 297. I’ll make sure I’ll hook you guys up. I’ve had another, Dr. Jack Kruse has been on the show talking about mitochondrial health. He’s a cardiologist that … pretty sure. I’m going by memory. No, maybe he’s not a cardiologist. I think he’s a cardiologist. You know, when you do 500 interviews …

[01:37:04] Catharine Arnston: Oh, I know. I know. God bless you if you're even remembering.

[01:37:09] Ashley James: Yeah.

[01:37:10] Catharine Arnston: I’m the same way. I meet so many people. But when I discovered that mitochondria evolved from cyanobacteria.

[01:37:17] Ashley James: It’s just fascinating.

[01:37:19] Catharine Arnston: It’s called endosymbiosis, which is the scientific terminology that's used. And I tell people it makes me sort of chuckle because it reminds me of, let’s say you had a friend who got kicked off out of their apartment, and they come to you, and they go, “Hey, can I come and stay with you for a few days?” And you go, “Okay, fine.” Then they come and stay with you, and they do your laundry, they pick up your groceries, they pick up your dry cleaning, and you go, “Hey, this is working pretty good for me.” So you tell your friend, “Hey, stay forever.” So it’s sort of what happened with the little single-cell cyanobacteria that kind of took up shop with the bigger bacteria, and instead of digesting it, the big bacteria said, “Hey, you're doing such a great job generating ATP for us. Why don’t you just stay forever?” It flipped me out when I realized that we came from algae.

This endosymbiotic theory was discovered, by the way, in the ‘60s by a female professor who was at MIT at the time. And she was ridiculed by her peers for almost 10 years until they realized she was right. So, any article that you read at the NIH library, the National Institute of Health library on mitochondria, they all reference this thing. That's why I was so comfortable telling you about this because it starts to make complete sense. The mitochondria is where everything in your health starts and ends. Everything. You cannot get any further down the food chain, so to speak, in your health than mitochondria. And algae, you can’t get any further down the food chain. It is the original life on earth. It is the original ancestral, paleo, historic food. And here we are looking at all these people getting sick and taking all these medications and dramatic surgery.

The answer to all this for prevention and for maintenance and for excelling in health and vitality for you, the earth, and your children, has been sitting in front of us for billions of years, but it’s not sexy. It’s not cool. No one’s explained it to you.

[01:39:40] Ashley James: I think it’s sexy. I think, like mushrooms and algae, I think it’s incredibly sexy. So, I have deep faith, and I believe in God, and so many who study the Bible go, “Well, okay, but you're saying something that happened a billion years ago, but the Bible doesn’t say that. The Bible’s only …” you know. Some people take it literally and say 5,000 years. And what’s interesting, as you transcribe the Bible, and we’ve sort of changed definitions of words as you transcribe it from one language to another, but in the Old Testament, where “day” actually is transcribed into a literal day 24-hour around the sun, which, I mean, I think God can do anything; however, it was originally said and remember also Bible stories were spoken before they were written for a long time. It was the original language. And I’m open to being wrong about this, but this is after talking to like rabbis and ministers and priests and stuff like that, and having these wonderful theological discussions. When it comes to theology, I don’t take the stance where I’m infallible and I’m right. I’m open to being completely wrong because I’m listening for God to show me. Show me what you want me to see. And so, I think we should all have this open mind, like show me, God, what is the truth, show me what you want me to see and what you want me to understand about my healing and about life and how I can help others and how I can be in service to you.

What they said is that the word “day” actually means event. On the first event, God made this. On the second event, you know. It was not a literal 24 hours, which is really fascinating, because we’ve taken it as 24 hours. Because I believe God made the universe, and the more you study science, it’s actually really fascinating. Go look under a microscope, under a really, really intense microscope. Go look at a single-cell organism. And when you see how complex a single-cell organism is, it will move you to tears. It is so beautiful. There's more happening. If you study biology, there's more happening in a single cell than in New York City. There's more happening than in a city with millions of people and all their lives. It is so beautiful, and scientists have never discovered something created out of nothing. Anyways, this is just me. I’m not pushing my beliefs on anyone. But try it on. Try on this concept that there's a beautiful higher power that loves you and created this whole universe. And this has been my philosophy since I was a kid that God is the world’s biggest scientist, that He’s the world’s coolest scientist. Right? And I say He, it’s God, it’s everything. Everything, this beautiful universal energy that there's something behind life. There's something after life. There's something behind everything that's a universal life force. There's more energy in us than there's matter. So, you get into studying quantum physics. Just study any of these scientists, and you just start to see God show up in these beautiful ways. At least He does for me.

[01:42:55] Catharine Arnston: I completely agree. I totally agree.

[01:42:57] Ashley James: And He gives us what we need. So, it just makes so much sense that here He’s given us the mitochondria, this beautiful relationship between this interesting bacteria-like object that then is now in our cells, making energy for us. And that makes so much sense because now that we’re just starting to crack open or just starting to go down the rabbit hole. We’re just starting to crack open that pandora’s box. I know pandora maybe isn’t the best reference, but this beautiful deep, deep, deep rabbit hole of understanding how good bacteria plays a role in our health. Right? And there's about six pounds of good bacteria in your gut that digest your food, that make neurochemicals for you, that your gut bacteria is making about 70 percent of your serotonin for your brain, and we’re just scratching the surface. So, it just makes so much sense that here we have chlorella and spirulina, these crops that God has given us that is here in nature, nature has given us that is healing and healthy for our body. Just like when you go into nature and you find a plant that's poisonous, you will always find the cure nearby. That there is a balance, in a balanced ecosystem.

And I wouldn’t say like go into like a state park, might not be a balanced ecosystem or your city park. But in a balanced ecosystem, herbalists, when they go out, and they wildcraft and forage, they will point out. They will say here’s the poison, and here’s the remedy. They're nearby. There's a balance in nature. And here we have this balance and especially now when the world is more and more and more toxic, we need to go back and find what are the cures that are showing up. Like you said, it shows up in a beach when the beach is toxic to help mop it up. We need to bring this into our body and mop up all the damage we’re doing from living in a toxic world. I absolutely love it.

Now, you said it kills bacteria. But what does it do to the good bacteria?

[01:44:58] Catharine Arnston: Oh, it helps it multiply because it’s a prebiotic, so it supports the healthy bacteria and kills the bad bacteria. It’s an adaptogen, so it can identify which team it wants to play with. 

Speaking of teams, it’s also keto, vegan, paleo, carnivore, no lectins, algae is not technically a plant. It’s certainly not an animal. It will work with every lifestyle group. It has zero sugar, zero caffeine. One calorie per tablet, 40 vitamins and minerals, highest protein in the world, highest glutathione, melatonin and superoxide dismutase in the world. And just to go back to you referencing God, two things, they now think that in the passage where Jesus is feeding the masses manna from heaven, they now think it was algae because he was scraping stuff from the rocks and now algae grows on rocks. And if it’s exposed to light, the chlorophyll is pulled out. But all the protein and the polysaccharides remain, so you’ll see it on rocks like this white crystal stuff. That’s algae. But it’s still nourishing. You can live on algae forever. It’s that nourishing. So, that's one of those sorts of things I want to mention.

Because algae is so healing and because it is really truly a gift to us from God from nature, from the universe, whatever you want to call it, anybody who is on a spiritual quest or wants to at least find themselves and get out of the crazy world that we live in, you have to be quiet. You have to step back, listen to your own soul, listen to your own voice because your soul and your spirit whisper. It never shouts. You know who shouts? People and companies that are trying to get your attention to sell you stuff. So, I tell people whoever is advertising the most on TV, run the other way. Because they’re loud and they're pushy. Your soul and your spirit are never loud or pushy. It will just whisper to you. And algae has been sitting around waiting for us to take notice of it.

By the way, the agents have figured it out like 60 years ago. And there was no legitimate reason for me to get involved with algae. I have an MBA, I was doing international economic development, then my sister got sick, and that I just helped her, and then I wanted to help more people. And I kept going. I had no science background at all. I’m completely self-taught. I call myself a citizen scientist, which I was going to mention this at the very beginning. Everybody who’s listening, you need to consider yourself a citizen scientist. It is your job to find out how your body works and find out what you need to give it so that you do not have to be a statistic. You can turn around that trajectory that you are on if you do not do something like this, an algae intervention, because your body is not giving you the antioxidants you need to protect yourself from free radical damage and the world that you live in is too toxic, it’s dumping on your body and your immune system things that you just cannot continue to get access to and expect to live a healthy life. It’s just impossible.

So, I have no science background. I’ve tried to do as much heavy lifting for you as possible. I’ve probably read 3,000 NIH articles at this point. I’ve been on over 200 podcasts. I speak nationwide. I’ve written about 500 papers. I’m in the process of getting a book. I’m going to do a TED Talk. I will do as much as I can to help you understand the science of algae and the science of your body. We write a blog on our website. You could just come to our website. Don’t even buy anything. Just educate yourself. But be careful on the internet in general because nobody understands algae like I do, and so there's a lot of stuff that’s out there that's actually incorrect. And I’m here to help you learn from my 12 years, I’ve given you a bit of a brain dump, and you can listen to this multiple times, and we’ll send you a lot of articles that you can link to. But I can promise you, if you start taking both the spirulina and the chlorella, you, your children, your pets, your family, your health will improve, and so will the world, because it’s also the most eco-friendly, sustainable crop in the world. The earth is begging you to wake up and help it because it needs help, and it doesn’t need a voice.

[01:49:43] Ashley James: I love it. And especially as you dive in, first of all, you have a PhD in algae.

[01:49:49] Catharine Arnston: Algae. I do.

[01:49:51] Ashley James: Well, you’ve been studying it for 12 years as a scholar. Harvard would give you an honorary PhD at this point. Listeners can go to episode 357 to learn about debunking algae myths, especially for those listeners who consider themselves citizen scientists and want to dive into the research. Episode 357 is great for that. Episode 266, we talk about vitamin K2 and the importance of that in relation to algae. Then episodes 234 and 265. We did an even deeper dive than what we did today about these crops and understanding how these crops are made. So, if you want to go back and sort of have the behind-the-scenes tour of how these crops are turned into these wonderful little tablets and all that. You can go back to those episodes, and we’ll link these previous four interviews in today’s episode along with all the articles that Catharine’s going to give us to start diving in and digesting ourselves. And I love it. You can go to ENERGYbits.com and just start poring through the information there, and of course, use coupon code LTH any time to get the listener discount.

Okay, so listeners at this point are sold. They want their mitochondria to be healed. They want all the benefits you just mentioned. I’m especially thinking about heart health and brain health. I’m so, so, so excited about helping listeners to protect their mitochondria, to heal their mitochondria. Which one would be the best bag to buy if they're just starting out and they're like, “There’s four different bags. I don’t know which one to buy.” Which one should they buy?

[01:51:36] Catharine Arnston: Well, because VITALITYbits is a blend of both the spirulina and the chlorella, that might be the way to go. It’s interesting, spirulina has the highest superoxide dismutase and the highest glutathione and then the chlorella has the highest chlorophyll and the highest melatonin. As I said, they do different things. But both of them have the highest of all four antioxidants. But if you take the VITALITYbits, it gives you a nice mix of the two of them. So, that would be my suggestion if you can only buy one bag. And if you are able to buy two, then I would get the ENERGYbits. Well, someone joked and they said you have a boy spirulina and a girl spirulina. Remember, ENERGYbits and BEAUTYbits are identical. So, that would be what you would take in the morning. I personally love the BEAUTYbits, so that's what I have on my countertop because I’m a girl.

 And it’s a very attractive packaging. I design everything, it’s my homage to Mother Nature. The ENERGYbits is blue because spirulina came from the ocean and so it’s in a blue ocean color package. The BEAUTYbits is a gorgeous pink rose in it which Mother Nature knows beauty is healing, and so there's no shame in wanting to improve your own beauty. I mean, Mother Nature does it every day with the gorgeous flowers that she provides for us. The chlorella has a green leaf on it, and of course, chlorella does belong to the plant kingdom, so it’s a green package. And the VITALITYbits is in a bold red, sort of a fuchsia red color because it’s a blend of the two colors, the green and the blue, and it’s almost a purpley color.

I used to have friends say “I want two blue bags and a couple of green bags.” Some people buy it by the color. But the spirulina is generally the best in the morning, the afternoon when you're hungry and tired, and the chlorella which is the healing RECOVERYbits definitely before bed, but anytime that you want. And most people, as I said, do swallow the spirulina, the blue, and the pink one, and they do enjoy eating the chlorella with either macadamia nuts or sea salt or pistachio nuts. The VITALITYbits is a blend, so it’s kind of up to you in your flavor, but there's no shame in swallowing them. You can swallow them, chew them, add them to smoothies, or grind them up first. They don’t dissolve because they're very concentrated.

And just so you know, each tablet has the same nutrition as an entire plate of vegetables. One tablet. So, again, if you have parents, grandparents, who aren’t eating well, just get even a couple of these and if you take one or both of the algae, you could eliminate a multivitamin, especially spirulina, a multivitamin, eliminate your fish oil, eliminate CoQ10, biotin. You can clean up the clutter on your countertop with something that is nourishing and food, and chlorella because of the high chlorophyll, you don’t need to if you don’t like them or can’t get to them, you don’t need to be preparing vegetables as frequently because it gives you all the nourishment that you would find in greens. It’s a one-stop shop.

[01:55:00] Ashley James: I’m an overachiever. I just want more. So, I’m going to eat my vegetables and I’m going to take this because I want to do both. But I can appreciate that people have gaps. There's some people that have gaps in their nutrition, and this is fantastic for feeling it, and for me, I’m like, I want that optimal true health. I want the best of the best, so I’m adding this in addition to my vegetables. But at times when I can’t get a good meal, this is a fantastic quick food on the go that also happens to be the most concentrated amount of food nutrition I can get, which is super, super, super exciting.

[01:55:41] Catharine Arnston: One last thing I want to mention. Because cancer and heart disease and all these other illnesses, Alzheimer’s is so prevalent, when I mentioned 10 tablets a day, that's kind of for adults who are healthy. If anyone listening or you have any family members and we all do who are experiencing cancer or heart disease, Alzheimer’s, please double the amounts, I promise, triple the amount. There is no upper limit.

[01:56:07] Ashley James: It’s a crop, it’s food.

[01:56:08] Catharine Arnston: It’s a crop; it’s a vegetable. Your poop might be a little green, drink a little extra water because there's high protein and that your body needs water to process protein. Please, please, please get them on this stuff. I promise you, it will make a difference. Cancer cannot exist in an alkaline environment. Algae is the most alkaline food in the world. That's how I got started. My sister’s oncologist told her to eat an alkaline diet when she was preparing for chemo. And I will send you a link to a PowerPoint that will give you lots of other references. It’s hundreds and hundreds of science references in my presentation that we’ll send you. Trust me when I tell you this is the most natural, effortless, non-invasive way to nourish and heal your cell and your mitochondria and your health. I’m so grateful for the opportunity, Ashley, to help people understand this.

[01:57:03] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well, I don’t want to use the word “desperation,” but I hear your passion and I hear almost like the tone of your voice, first of all, you have even more information than the last time I interviewed you. But I hear an essence in your voice and, you know what, the word “desperation” is completely wrong. That's not it. It’s urgency.

[01:57:25] Catharine Arnston: Yeah, urgency.

[01:57:29] Ashley James: There is a level of urgency that this deserves because people’s lives are at stake. For me having suddenly lost my mom at 55 and my dad at 62, young ages. It’s so sad that some people are just like drop-dead in their 40s of a heart attack out of nowhere, like young. I have a mom friend of mine who died of cancer. I have another mom friend who’s fighting cancer. These diseases that were maybe diseases of 80-year-olds are now diseases of 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds.

[01:58:10] Catharine Arnston: It’s unacceptable.

[01:58:11] Ashley James: It is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that teenage athletes drop dead of all of a sudden, a heart attack. It’s unacceptable, right? So, we need to take matters into our own hands. There is a level of urgency and you have an urgency that we need to get the algae to be accepted en masse and widely. You converted us. We’re believers. We’re excited. I know my listeners who haven’t tried your algae are doing a jump and try it. Please come into the Learn True Health Facebook group and let’s talk about it, listeners, those who have tried the algae, tried the ENERGYbits. Please come into the Learn True Health Facebook group and tell the listeners what your experience has been. Those who haven’t tried it, come ask, tell me about it. Let’s start a conversation about it. I want to hear your testimonials and your stories around it. And then those who are new to it, as you try it, please come to the Facebook group and share.

One thing I wanted to say is, and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, those who are very sensitive like I am to detox and to toxins, I’m one of those people and the second I start detoxing, I feel it hugely. And I found that when I eat 30 of the tablets of the RECOVERYbits, which is the chlorella, that is the magic number for me to not feel detox effects when I’m going through a heavy metal detox. That for me is the magic number. Dr. Klinghardt said that's about the amount like a good handful, is what you want to take when you're doing heavy metal detox. If you take less and you're doing a heavy metal detox, you kind of are dusting in a room with no windows open and no air filter on. You're just kicking up the toxins inside the stores because toxins will store up. When I say toxins, I mean, man-made toxins and heavy metals. I mean like by-products of cellular waste, natural by-products of cellular waste. That's normal. I mean, the 80,000 manmade chemicals over the last 40,000 years that we’re now exposed to that our body has to figure out how to process, plus heavy metals that are in our air, food, medications, and soil, and water.

It gets stored in adipose tissue. Even if you're skinny, you still have some fat. It gets stored in that. And then when we do any kind of detoxing or weight loss, it gets thrown back into the 

blood system for your body to have to figure out how to get rid of and if you're like me and my liver’s not really great with detoxing, then it’s just going to re-damage everything and get back into the fat cells until I do more weight loss or I do more detoxing, then it comes back out. It damages everything and then it goes back in instead of getting out of my body. So, eating 30 of the RECOVERYbits is what mops it up and allows it to leave my body without feeling any ill effects of detox. So, that was my thing. And Dr. Klinghardt said, and he confirmed this that if you eat less than 30 and you're doing detox, you’re going to still feel sick if you're like me. So, eat 30. Don’t be shy. Just a handful. Every day, if you’re going to do detox like doing sauna or other detoxing things.

Because I’ve heard from a handful of people, not a lot of people, I’ve seen people eat 5 and have had no problem, but people who are also sensitive like me, if they're doing a detox and they eat less, they’ll then feel sick and they go, “Oh, this algae made me sick.” And I’m like, no, it’s not the algae that made you sick. You didn’t take enough of it to mop up. Then, they trust me enough to try again, and they're like, “You're right. I tried 30 and I don’t feel anything at all. But if I eat 10, I feel sick. But if I ate 30, don’t feel sick.” And like, see, there you go. It mops it up at 30, but you don’t get enough of the mopping up effect if you eat 10. So, that's been my experience.

[02:02:02] Catharine Arnston: And I agree. That's why you’ll get the wellness benefits from 5 or 10, but just so you know, and I’m not boasting about this, I probably eat 100-150 chlorella a day and have every day for 12 years. I mean, I love this stuff. It’s a main food for me. Probably eggs and algae are the two things. As ironic, when I first started the company, I didn’t have any money and the only things I could afford were eggs and algae. And here I am, I am finally not desperate again like I was 12 years ago. But my favorite foods are eggs and algae. And I’m not suggesting you need to eat 100, but I just share that with you to show you that there is no upper limit. So, if you can eat take the 30, that is the magic number. In fact, we sell them in boxes on our website in pouches with 30 tablets in it. So, for those of you who can, it makes it so easy because all you do is you start your day with a pouch of spirulina with the 30 tablets and you end your day with a little pouch of chlorella with the 30 tablets. You don’t even have to think about it. We also sell them in canisters that come with a bag inside. You open the bag, you put it in the canister and then you just leave it on your countertop, and then you just shake out the tablets through the little opening in the canister. It’s adorable. It’s beautiful, it’s effortless and then when you run out of tablets, you just buy another bag and you fill a bag up with a canister because we found people were sticking their hand in the bags and they're getting green powder on their hands and it was messy. So, we’ve done our best to make it as effortless for you. The little pouches that we call them travel single-servings are just the best. Just buy a bunch of boxes of those.

If you want to learn more too, we’re very active on social media. ENERGYbits is the main handle on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. And BEAUTYbits has their own Instagram handle if you want to see the girly stuff. It’s just that, BEAUTYbits. They're like kids, right? They have complete different personalities.

[02:04:02] Ashley James: So funny. I’m not one of those, a pink, you know. I’m kind of like, why, why is everything pink? Like, I’m not a pink girl, but I appreciate you do that for the girls, for the women who like it. I personally don’t. I don’t know. I liked climbing trees when I was a kid. And I believe that as a female, we have such a beautiful spectrum of what being a woman is. Being a woman is anything that we say we are. We are strong. We are so amazingly strong. And I have this wonderful naturopathic physician who’s been practicing for close to 40 years now. She’s delivered over a thousand babies and she used to be the dean of the naturopathic college Bastyr University just outside of Seattle. Her name’s Dr. Molly Niedermeyer. She says that women, they're so strong. Like blood tests show that they should be dead, you know what I mean? It’s like your energy levels through the floor or your cortisol or through or through the roof. But man, and I’m not putting you guys down but just as a comparison, we drag our bodies through the mud. We have a willpower and a determination to be the most amazing mothers, the most amazing wives, the most amazing businesswomen and students. And whatever we put our minds to, our physiology will keep us going. Just our mindset, our willpower. But we will drag our bodies through the mud and a lot of times put ourselves last because we are taking care of everyone we love and then finally, our body breaks. Then, we finally have to take care of ourselves. And I really don’t want, because I hit that breaking point 15 years ago, and I was incredibly sick. Now, I’ve spent the last 15 years recovering my health from that and going, okay, I put my oxygen mask on first in order to take care of those I love. So, we have to flip that mindset and go, for example, I buy ENERGYbits to take care of myself so I can take care of my loved ones. Feed them to your kids and feed them to you. Feed them to your husband, feed them to the whole family.

I know that there are some listeners right now going, “I can’t wait to give this to my kids,” but it’s like, “Oh, money is tight, I’m going to buy this for my kids but not for me.” Or, “I’m going to buy for my husband but not for me.” I know you’re thinking that. I’m in your brain. And here’s the thing. If you get sick, who’s taking care of the ones you love? You’ve got to take care of yourself. Please, please, please. Putting yourself first isn’t selfish. Putting yourself equal to your kids and husband in terms of the importance of health is necessary to take care of those you love. So, please try it, do yourself that service and try it.

[02:07:06] Catharine Arnston: My final sort of comment is I saw a great quote on the internet and it said self-love is giving the world the best of you, not what’s left of you. And that really resonated with me and I hope it resonates with you.

[02:07:21] Ashley James: I love it.

[02:07:22] Catharine Arnston: I need to run but …

[02:07:24] Ashley James: Oh, thank you so much, Catharine, for coming on the show. This has been wonderful.

[02:07:27] Catharine Arnston: Thank you for having me, Ashely. This is so great and I’m so grateful to share again with your community. And like I said, this is a labor of love for me and I’ve got to get people using this so they can regain their health naturally. It’s possible. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. But you’ve got to do it.

[02:07:47] Ashley James: Love it.

[02:07:48] Catharine Arnston: Citizen scientists, reunite.

[02:07:50] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. Well, come back on the show when you discover more information. Just keep going down that rabbit hole. Listeners, go to LearnTrueHealth.com to get all the show notes, get all the links to everything that Catharine Arnston is going to link to us, all those articles, so you can dive down into the science. And please go to ENERGYbits.com, try the chlorella and the spirulina, and use the coupon code LTH to get the listener discount that Catharine so generously gives us. Thank you so much. I’m just so excited to hear the feedback from the listeners as they go down this rabbit hole with us and they notice that their health becomes even better and better from it. So, thank you so much.

[02:08:30] Catharine Arnston: Thank you. Thank you so much. All the best to everybody.

 

Get Connected With Catharine Arnston!

 

Official Website

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

LinkedIn

 

Recommended Book by Catharine Arnston

 

Vitamin K2 And The Calcium Paradox by Kate Rheaume – Bleue

Recommended Links:

 

Learn True Health – Episode 357

Learn True Health – Episode 265

Learn True Health – Episode 218

Learn True Health – Episode 227

 

Downloadable Information About Chlorella And Spirulina:

why is our spirulina and chlorella the safest and best

mothers milk and spirulina-have the same nutritional profile chart and explanation 3 pages

chlorophyll content in sprirulina and chlorella compared to other vegetables- one page (2)

Vitamin K2 is found in RECOVERYbits chlorella helps prevent heart disease, Alzheimers and osteoporosis

Sep 29, 2022

Dr. Biamonte's website: www.health-truth.com 
Join the Learn True Health Facebook group: learntruehealth.com/group
Check out our new site! https://www.learntruehealth.com

486: Learn From The Expert, Dr. Michael Biamonte on Candida Elimination and Recovery

https://www.learntruehealth.com/learn-from-the-expert-dr-michael-biamonte-on-candida-elimination-and-recovery

Do you ever wonder if you're suffering from candida? Maybe you hear about it in media and don't even know what it is. Or maybe you’re struggling with candida, but that doesn’t mean you have to give in and let it take over. Candida is a fungal infection that could affect your digestive, urinary, and reproductive systems. It can be tricky if you don’t know what it is and how to treat it. Check it out on this podcast as Dr. Michael Biamonte and I discuss candida, its effects on your body, and how to eliminate it.

 

Highlights:

  • What you see in bloodwork when you have candida
  • Causes of candida overgrowth
  • Candida as a possible etiology of autism
  • Vitamins that aggravate candida
  • Toxic elements that suppress your intestinal immunity
  • Biofilm

Intro:

Hello, true health seekers, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I'm so excited for you to hear today’s interview. If you’ve been struggling with candida, if you think maybe you have candida, or if you know you have some kind of gut dysbiosis, then this is the interview for you. This is only going to be part 1 because, unfortunately, my guest was short on time, but he’s coming back in a few days and we’re going to finish this interview. Listening to part 1 though is going to lay the foundation. I learned so many new things about candida and this has been a very important topic to me. So, the fact that I learned so many new things, I know you’re going to learn so many new things. Your eyes are going to be wide open, you’re going to be on the edge of your seat, then you’re going to, just like me, can’t wait for part 2. I’m so excited to have him back. In a few days, we’re going to finish this interview, so that’ll be part 2, so just watch for that. But in the meantime, strap yourselves in, enjoy today’s interview. And if you have any questions for him, this is actually really exciting. We’ve got a great opportunity.

You can listen to part 1 today right now and then come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and type in any questions you have for him and I’ll be sure to include those in my interview that’s happening in a few days. So, join the Learn True Health Facebook group. Come on down. Come on down to the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’re all friends there. The water’s nice. Come on in, jump in, and ask your gut healing questions, especially about combatting and completely eliminating and resolving candida. I’m so excited to be diving deep into this topic because so many people are suffering from candida that don’t have to be. And it’s so fascinating that we get to pick the brain of the world’s leading expert on resolving and healing candida infections. So, enjoy today’s interview. Please share it with all your friends and family and loved ones and coworkers. Just everyone who you know might be interested in gaining better gut health. Have yourselves a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll see you in the Learn True Health Facebook group.

[00:02:10] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 486.

I am so excited for today’s guest. This is a very interesting topic, and in almost 500 episodes, I cannot believe that we have not covered this topic yet. Dr. Biamonte is an expert in several areas, but one which we’re going to talk about today is candida. I am really interested in learning about diving into this subject, and I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

[00:02:49] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Thank you. I’m very happy to be with you. I’ve heard some of your work, and I’m very pleased that you’ve chosen me to speak to today.

[00:02:58] Ashley James: Absolutely. So, the reason why candida, to me, is so fascinating is I was six years old, this was back in the ‘80s, my mom ran her own business, so she was gone 10 to 12 hours a day easily 5 days a week and she had a cold one day, and she went to the MD, and the MD put her on antibiotics probably for something that was like a virus, who knows. But she was on antibiotics and then the cold wouldn’t go away and looking at it now from the holistic lens, she was running herself ragged. Of course, her body was worn down and her body was trying to tell her to rest. But she wouldn’t take one day off work. So, six months later, she was on non-stop antibiotics for six months to handle basically a little cold that wouldn’t go away, which we know now of course is crazy, but back then, I guess they were playing it real loosey-goosey with the antibiotics and, as a result, it totally wiped out all her good bacteria and she developed a horrible candida inside her gut and outside. And I just remember her going and finding a naturopathic doctor, and he got her on the anti-candida diet, this is 1986. And subsequently, I was also very sick, but not with candida. I didn’t know; we didn’t know I had a dairy allergy. She took me to the same doctor, and he said stop doing dairy, stop doing sugar, stop eating processed food, and basically told us to eat the anti-candida diet that was close to what we would consider paleo today.

But they had all these weird rules like you're not allowed to eat leftovers and it has to be fresh. And you can’t have anything with vinegar in it and no condiments. The list went on and on. Well, sure enough, she got better and so did I. The rest of my childhood was eating super clean, no sugar was allowed in the house, no flour was allowed in the house. It was a totally different life after that until I rebelled in my teenage years. I went back to eating junk food because I was as a teenager and I had to rebel with something. And I watched my health from bad to good to bad to good every time I chose to eat what I was told by this naturopath was good versus what everyone else around me was eating.

But I watched my mom diligently stick with that anti-candida diet for years and the candida never returned. And it stuck in my brain how amazing is that, that she went to a medical doctor which gave her candida, and the medical doctors could not help her solve the problem, but a naturopath who told her about how healing food can be if you choose the right foods. Eventually, she’s able to overcome it. 

So, when I saw your work and how much advanced are we now in the last 36 years, so much more has been discovered and understood. That's why I’m really excited for you to teach us today about candida now in 2022 as opposed to 1986. So much has happened. And you’ve been a practitioner for over 30 years, so you’ve really seen the science in how we can really understand how to heal the body using food and, in some cases, nutraceuticals, and to support the body’s ability to heal itself and to stave off candida. So, that's why I’m excited about the work that you do and I’m really, really excited for my listeners to hear how they can heal their body and prevent candida and remove it from their body should they have it.

[00:06:44] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I started practicing in 1984. 

[00:06:47] Ashley James: Oh! There you go.

[00:06:49] Dr. Michael Biamonte: In those days, things were very limited. People asked me what college I went to and I said I went to the College of Hard Knocks because I learned a lot of things the hard way. We didn’t have tests back then.

So, when I first encountered candida, I had been out of naturopathic school for a few years, and I was working with some aerospace engineers at Grumman on Long Island because that's where I was from. I was from Long Island. And I ran into those aerospace engineers who were working at Grumman. They were working on a computer model of the human body that NASA approached them to design. They wanted this computer software so that they could use it to analyze or interpret the astronaut’s bloodwork when they were in the space station for long periods of time because they were concerned about negative calcium balance and nitrogen balance. When you're in space and you're weightless for that amount of time, you can start having muscle loss, and you can start having bone loss.

Fortunately, one of the people who was the head of the project that I was working with and I became very close with was the same man who designed the life support systems on the lunar module, Dr. Robert Santoro, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago. I worked with him on constructing this model for about 3 or 4 years. And unfortunately, Grumman cancelled when NASA cancelled the project on us because it was getting a bit expensive, and they weren’t anticipating that they were going to get back the amount of investment that they were putting in. That was partially our fault because we had an expense budget, and we were flying doctors into Long Island from all over the world, all famous nutritionists who were all adding to the model. Everyone had their own data and research that was sort of privy to them.

So, we asked them at this point because we almost had the model complete. Now what this model could do, this was computer software that was designed in they called it table-driven. Table-driven software allows you to take up datum and insert it a different spot, so that you don’t have to rewrite the whole program. So, we were almost finished with this and we asked them, “Well, what are we going to do this? I mean, this project is almost done but you're not going to complete it.” They said, “We don’t care what you do, you can keep it.”

So, we took the model and we started to offer it to physicians, and what a physician would do, they drew some blood on their patients, have an SMA-24 or 26 which is pretty standard bloodwork done. Then we’d ask them to do a tissue mineral analysis on their patients which was typically hair or nails, but it’s commercially hair nowadays. And then whatever other test they wanted to do. If it was a chiropractor, they could tell us what particular subluxations their patient usually had, so we gave them a diagram of the spine and they would circle like L1, T4, C2, or whatever typically came up and then we would input this data in the computer, and the computer would actually run a simulated version of their body and it would look for errors. Then from the product module we had that was loaded with different supplements like from standard process or Metagenics or Nutri-West, all these different companies, the computer would then select supplements that it would recommend to fix whatever was wrong, and it would then recommend the diet based on their blood type and other things. And we had a lot of doctors using it back in those days. A lot of people were getting really good results. But there was this certain population of people and I estimated it was about 30 to 35 percent of the people who would run through the model that got crazy results like they would take the vitamins and get worse. Or they would take the supplements and have crazy reactions.

So, I volunteered to figure out what was going on with that group of people. And it took a while. I studied all their folders. When my wife tells the story, she always talks about walking into the room and seeing this big stack of folders on the desk that were higher than I was. And here I am going through this and what I eventually found out was that all these people had some kind of disturbance in their digestive system. I found that their intestinal tract was fighting something. There was some type of immune response going on there. And they were also having a lot of allergies to the supplements they were taking.

Eventually, I found out that what it was, was candida. Now, I didn’t know really much about candida. I thought it was some fad from California for all I know. And I remember the pop song Candida, that was really all I knew. So, I hit the textbooks and I studied and I understood what it was. And I told the people, “You have candida. Go to your medical doctor. Tell them you have this. Let him clear it up and then come back and we’ll put you back on the program, and it should work.” That's how stupid I was. The people came back and they said the doctor says he doesn’t know what candida is, or he doesn’t know how to treat it, or some doctors were saying, “We don’t know anything about it at all.” So, I told them, what you have to do then is find a doctor who knows about this. And then so I looked it up, and I found Dr. Atkins at the time and Ronald Hoffman and Dr. Teplitsky and these different alternative functional doctors in New York City. And I said, “Well, go to those guys. They know about this.”

So, they went and then they came back to me, and they said, “Well, yeah, they said you were right. I did have candida, and they put me on a treatment and I got better for a while, then I kept relapsing.” So then I said, “Jeez, I got to figure this out.”

So, I spent the next 30 years studying candida and unraveling all its tricks. Then eventually, I wrote my book The Candida Chronicles, which we took the name from our newsletter that we had for many years, which was giving out information on all my discoveries about candida. And it was very interesting because, sure enough, when we cleared these people up of candida and put them back on the programs, they did fine. That experience was empirical to a degree. I mean, there was a lot that I’ve learned from the textbooks, but I essentially reverse-engineered the whole thing in order to figure it out.

So, I would listen to the patients and I would listen to what they said worked and didn’t work, and then I would go and look in the textbooks to figure out why that was. And that's essentially how I developed my candida treatment. I didn’t do it based on dogmatic laws that I thought had to be followed or data that was old or whatnot or insisting on certain things had to be a certain way. It was more by listening to people figuring out why something would work and wouldn’t work and then understanding through the existing knowledge that we had.

One of the first datums I came across was in The Merck Manual, which is a book that most doctors have in their offices. And The Merck Manual regarding candidiasis said that candida is caused by the indiscriminate use of broad-spectrum antibiotics and that if you continue to treat candida only vaginally, you will not get a result, the patient will not recover. You would need to treat it concurrently also in the intestinal tract. When I read that, it all made sense. That’s when I understood what it was I was seeing in their lab work. Because in the lab work of these people, there was a pattern in their white blood cells that was indicating an intestinal infection.

So, that's where a lot of it started for me. Then I just began to continue to deconstruct and reconstruct it and reverse engineer it until I got the program correct, and then at that point, I wrote the book several years ago. Once I felt I had enough of the secrets and the tricks that it plays, where someone could read the book and then have a workable solution, that's when I decided I was actually going to write the book. So, that's from when I first started studying candida in 1987 to like let’s say 2016. So, there you go, that's a little bit of time. But that's how confusing candida can be.

[00:15:29] Ashley James: I’m fascinated you said that when you looked at their bloodwork you could tell that the white blood cells, there was like a storm going on inside the intestines. You could see that based on blood work? Can you talk a bit about that?

[00:15:41] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Oh yes, it’s very simple. When your neutrophils are low, approaching below normal and your lymphocytes are high approaching above normal, that pattern of low neutrophils and high lymphocytes is the pattern for an intestinal infection.

[00:15:58] Ashley James: Whoa! Do all doctors know that?

[00:16:02] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, they don’t. 

[00:16:05] Ashley James: This drives me crazy. And so, how did you know that? 

[00:16:09] Dr. Michael Biamonte: There were some additives you can put on that. Also, very commonly elevated monocytes in eosinophils at the same time.

[00:16:19] Ashley James: So, did you learn that through this trial and error, like listening to the patient then going back and looking into textbooks? Is that how you discovered this?

[00:16:26] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, that actual pattern I learned from Dr. Ken Brockman who was a barnstorming chiropractor back in the ‘80s, who was working on interpreting bloodwork using a combination of kinesiology in the bloodwork. So, what he would do is Brockman would take a guy, he would use kinesiology to figure out what was wrong and then he would look in the bloodwork to spot it in the bloodwork, and then he would duplicate this in enough people where he knew that that pattern in the bloodwork meant whatever it was.

[00:17:00] Ashley James: That is fascinating. From an outsider’s perspective, someone who’s raised in the mainstream medical system to believe that you wait to get sick and then go to an MD and get put on a drug, like that mentality, that lens that they see health through which is actually disease management, not health, you look at kinesiology and you think this is total witchcraft. It’s quackery, it’s snake oil. But then, if you go and have a session and do kinesiology several times with many different practitioners and then you can see it. Whatever they find in the kinesiology, they can then back up by looking in other places like you said lab work, and they can find it. It is absolutely fascinating. But from a quantum perspective, we are more energy than we are matter. Right? So, of course, there’s a way to communicate with the body other than physical, other than what we see is what we get. I love that. That is so fascinating.

[00:18:05] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And this is where you’re going to find the validity in Vega testing or the Rife machine, and so many of these other tests have existed that have advanced over the years that are based on frequencies in the body. I’ve used them all including kinesiology. They all have validity and they all work and they all helped me to understand what I understand today. The problem is, they’re not exacting. In the field of engineering which I heavily rely on because when I was growing up as a little baby doctor, all the people that I was surrounded by were all engineers. When I worked at Grumman Aerospace on that project, I worked with a group of doctors who were all systems analysis engineers, and they all had degrees in physiology.

So, I learned to view the body as an engineer, which is the way all health practitioners should be studying. And this is where holistic medicine tries to come in. But because they don’t follow engineering doctrines, let’s say, they can fall short. But this is where it comes from. The body as a system, a large collection of systems and subsystems, which all work back and forth. And where we got the name actually “biocybernetics”, biocybernetics refers to the study of self-regulating mechanisms, biological self-regulating mechanisms. This is also where the word “homeostasis” would come from. This is the body’s ability to try to maintain a balance. But when the body gets off balance, it then seeks to hold on to a balance which may not be correct because that’s what it knows. Many times, what chiropractors and doctors are doing is they're trying to reeducate the system, sort of like rebooting your computer to come back to a normal maintenance level, a normal balance. This is where candida comes in because candida, like many other infections or illnesses, continues to throw that balance off. The body continues to try to compensate for the presence of this organism. This is what makes it so interesting.

[00:20:21] Ashley James: So, when you say the body keeps adjusting, what kind of symptoms?

[00:20:27] Dr. Michael Biamonte: First off, the first thing to establish is that candida is normal in the body. Candida is a fungus or a yeast. It’s a chameleon-like organism. It’s sometimes called dimorphic. Dimorphic means to live in two different states. So, candida can be in your body as a yeast which women experience vaginally or it can be in your intestinal tract as a fungus which is part of your normal flora. It’s part of the normal aggregate of all the microbes in your intestinal, your biome which has become a popular term nowadays.

The problem is, is if you take antibiotics or if you take different medications, it kills the friendly bacteria which balance the candida out in the food chain. There is a food chain in your intestinal tract when it comes to microbes, and the food chain basically is that the friendly gram-negative E. coli bacteria act as a neutral area and the gram-positive bacteria which is the Lactobacillus bifidus and Lactobacillus acidophilus species are the more aggressive bacteria that actually use candida as a food and stimulate your immune system, help your body manufacture vitamins, help you absorb nutrients, etc. When you take something, an antibiotic for instance, or a steroid drug, or chemotherapy, or even antacid pills like Tums, they can kill your friendly bacteria and that allows candida then to go unchecked. The candida no longer has a governor there to balance it. So, it grows and it becomes dominant where it’s not supposed to become dominant, that grows out of control. And once candida grows to a population more than it should be or as a dominant part of your flora, now it’s excreting alcohols into your body because it’s a yeast.

So, what does yeast do? When you give yeast sugar, it ferments and produces alcohol. So, now you have alcohol levels in your body rising where they shouldn’t be. You have mycotoxins which are toxins that are formed by yeast and fungus going into your nervous system. You have all types of other … I think total there's over 50 different toxins we can identify that can releases into your body and they affect you neurologically which is why you find so many children with autism have candida. And children with autism, the prerequisites for a child to be autistic, as far as I’m concerned, are number one, he’s got to be born with a set of genes that make him a really bad detoxifier and then he happens to get an overload of toxins from the old vaccines that have thimerosal or from the mercury in his fillings, and that affects him neurologically.

But back to the person here, the person now has this candida overgrown in his body and it’s releasing all these toxins. The toxins are causing multiple problems. They're causing him to have brain fog, he loses his memory, he gets rashes, he gets asthma, he gets digestive problems, he’s bloating, he’s burping, he’s farting, he’s doing all these things. And the guy is saying, “Where did all this come from?” Because it’s the symptoms you wouldn’t necessarily associate having lower gas with brain fog, you see. So, the symptoms that candida can produce are of such a spectrum that it can be very confusing and you would never think that this was all coming from the same place. Then, when you have the fact that diet changes, so if the guy eats sugar or too many carbs that feeds the candida, and now you have more toxins forming, he goes into a toxic environment where his body absorbs mercury or copper or a lead or something, well then that further makes the candida worse, you see. He goes up to a hot humid environment, well think about fungus and molds and hot humid environments, well, that’s going to make it worse. See, so all these things are going on around him and he can’t quite put his finger on what’s happening but he knows that all of these different changes—changes in his diet, changes when he takes medicines or vitamins, because vitamins aggravate candida. It’s one of the things a lot of people don’t know.

B-Complex vitamins taken in the presence of sugar or carbohydrate would drive candida crazy. Because what do B-Complex do? B-Complex break down carbs into simpler forms of sugar for your body to absorb. Well, guess who’s standing right there waiting to absorb those sugars? It’s the candida.

Vitamin CoQ10 is going to aggravate candida. Vitamin D and iron can spread candida. In fact, some of the pharmaceuticals, the common ones like ketoconazole and nystatin, how they actually work is by blocking the candida’s ability to absorb iron and vitamin D so you can kill the candida.

So, you have all these things going on and this is what makes it such a mystery. This is why this mystery of candida probably could have only been solved by someone like myself who was looking at it from the viewpoint of an engineer.

[00:25:43] Ashley James: And you're not looking to wipe candida out because again, that's more of the medical doctor; the MD system is let’s throw a nuclear bomb at the body and wipe something out. But that is also just leaving the body susceptible to whatever is going to kind of grow in its place. And we need candida, like you said, it’s food for those good bacteria.

[00:26:05] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Right. You need a certain amount of it and you couldn’t knock it out totally even if you tried. I’ve never found that to be even possible because it’s so intrinsic to the gut, that you got to have some, so it’s not even possible to do that. But yeah, that would be a more allopathic viewpoint. But it doesn’t work if you're trying to do that.

So, here you have the person now, they have all these symptoms going on and there all these different causation points and they're utterly confused as to what it’s all about, what’s happening. Now if they go on the internet, I don’t know if that's good or bad, they're going to learn something about it, but then there's the old adage that a little knowledge can be dangerous when it’s incomplete. And you're going to get people who start self-treating. I’ve heard of a few people but I’ve never actually met anybody who actually self-treated and got rid of their candida. The best I’ve been able to ascertain that people have done is by staying forever on a very strict diet—a diet so strict that most people wouldn’t want to do it, they’ve managed to maintain their symptoms. See, because candida is literally a plant and as a plant, it grows roots, and these roots permeate your tiny blood vessels and your intestinal tract to draw glucose, to draw sugar out so that candida can stay alive.

So, if you go on a very strict diet, an anti-candida diet, you can starve the candida down to the point where like a wilted plant, it has not so much activity, but those roots are still there. So once you go off the diet, within a few weeks the candida grows right back and blooms to its former glory and it’s going to spew out all kinds of toxins once again, and you're right back in the same boat.

[00:28:04] Ashley James: So, in order to bring it back into balance, you must bring what eats candida back into balance.

[00:28:10] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, that is the goal. I preach this to my patients. The whole goal of my treatment plan is to reduce the candida enough to where we can get the friendly bacteria to take over again. And that sounds easy, but it’s not as simple as just giving the person a probiotic. On the step of my program where we reintroduce probiotics, in order to get to that step, the person has to have reduced their amount of candida, their total amount, by at least like 90 percent. And we have ways of measuring that with the urine test that we do.

[00:28:44] Ashley James: Really?

[00:28:45] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah. They’ve got to have it down by at least 90 percent, and they need to take a series of prebiotics. Now, a probiotic is the actual good bacteria like the acidophilus or the bifidus. The prebiotic, theoretically, could be any substance that aids the probiotic in returning or in multiplying or attaching itself back to the lining of the intestine. And while candida does not do permanent damage to people, there is something that candida does to the intestinal tract. And we never figured out exactly what that is, but it does do something that makes it harder for the bacteria to come back. I speculated that something to alter the collagen in the intestinal lining, it makes it a little harder for the friendly bacteria to reattach or reinoculate, as we would say.

[00:29:36] Ashley James: Wow!

[00:29:37] Dr. Michael Biamonte: But nonetheless, that’s the whole game. The whole game is get your candida low enough to where the probiotics will come back. And very rarely does anybody accomplish that because you have to handle the candida like peeling an onion that's layers. The step that we do right before we put the person on the probiotics is we give them antifungals which are fatty acid-based because those fatty acid-based antifungals are the only thing that can kill the candida deep enough in its roots to then allow the space for the probiotics to come back where the candida won’t repel. Because the average person with candida who takes probiotics, the probiotics will lower the pH of their intestines, which is a good thing. The candida loves the pH of your intestinal tract to be like over 7.4. Your body wants it to be between 6 to 7.2. When you take the probiotics, the probiotics acidify your intestinal tract. That's where we get the word “acidophilus” from. Acidophilus. Because the acidophilus releases acids, hydrogen peroxides and different things which lower the pH. So, when your pH lowers in your intestinal tract, a lot of the candida symptoms stop. But once you stop taking the acidophilus or the probiotic, the pH comes right back up again and then you have the same story.

But that is the goal. The goal is to take the probiotics and the prebiotics and get that re-established. Then, once that’s reestablished, then you can go and look at other aspects of what’s going on like does the candida produce different vitamin deficiencies or candida as a causative agent might be involved with mercury toxicity. Once you’ve reestablished your prebiotics, then you're free and clear to go and handle all those other issues.

But if you try to do it the other way around … like there is a doctor I won’t mention his name. He’s very famous, and he’s in the Midwest. His whole gig that he preaches to people is you’ve got to get rid of the mercury; otherwise, the candida is going to come back, you’ll never get rid of it. So, he takes everybody and he puts one on mercury detox. And over the years, I’ve gotten so many patients from this doctor who have come to me because they couldn’t handle his program that it’s embarrassing. And it doesn’t work because when you start to pull mercury out of somebody who has candida, that mercury comes through your intestinal tract. Your liver dumps it into your intestinal tract as a way to try to get rid of it and wants to put it in your stool. But guess who’s sitting right there with its arms open? The candida’s right there saying “give me the mercury.”

Somebody even came up with this wild theory that your body produced candida as a protective mechanism to help against mercury toxicity. Well, that's total nonsense. Candida absorbs mercury and it uses it as kind of like a nutrient, but mercury depresses fecal IgE and IgA, so no wonder if you have mercury, you get candida, so it dampens your intestinal immune response. It’s not there helping; it’s not what it’s doing. Mercury and copper and other toxic elements, when they're in your intestinal tract will actually lower and suppress your intestinal immunity, and that allows the candida to grow.

[00:32:59] Ashley James: So, if someone has like I have this problem I have been working on detoxing heavy metals and I’m one of those people you mentioned that just is not great at detoxing. I’ve got MTHFR, my liver came in last in the race. And I’m doing everything I can naturally to support my body’s ability to detox heavy metals and it really helps. All the natural stuff I do really helps. But what you're saying is that when our body, our liver removes these heavy metals, puts it in the bile to be placed into the intestine, so we poop it out. We’re not pooping it out because if there's candida overgrowth, which so many people have, it’s really, really common, which is just crazy. Those drugs you mentioned—steroids, antacids, even chemotherapy and antibiotics, everyone’s taking at least an antacid or an antibiotic or a steroid. It’s very, very, very rare that someone’s not had any of those drugs.

So, there's so many people walking around with candida imbalance, and then if they're like me and they are overly toxic with heavy metals, if they start doing some kind of heavy metal detox, then the liver is pumping it into the intestines to be released, and then the candida is right there sucking it up and basically keeping it in your body even though it’s not inside your body, it’s inside your intestines, which is then, like you said, lowering the immune system to support the body in fighting off infection. The candida is almost protecting its own environment by sucking up the heavy metals. It’s like they're wearing a coat of armor protecting themselves against our immune system.

[00:34:48] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And this is what you’ll occasionally hear of doctors who will tell their patients that when you go on this candida elimination program, don’t be surprised if you start re-experiencing symptoms of toxic metals or a toxic metal detox because when the candida dies, it releases the metal. This is why in my Phase 0 program, my Phase 0 program is very specifically designed to be able to absorb toxic metals that come from the candida when we first start to eliminate this. 

[00:35:16] Ashley James: I definitely wanted to get into the discussion, but before we do that, I wanted to go back because you had mentioned something. It sounded like biofilm. When you hypothesized that candida creates its own collagen to protect itself, to create its own little environment that not only protects itself but uses up the space so that the other healthy bacteria can kind of get in there and start eating up the candida. Is that biofilm?

[00:35:45] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, it is. That is what biofilm does. Biofilm is produced by a particular type of bacteria. It’s not all bacteria but it’s certain bacteria, and these bacteria release this mucus, slimy substance to cover themselves, to cover parasites, to cover candida in order to protect them and to protect itself. Even before we knew about biofilm, we knew that these phenomena existed of cluster bacteria. If you were in a little ship and you could drive through your intestinal tract and look around with cameras and lights whatnot, you would see that candida doesn’t grow in a uniform manner. Candida grows in a splotchy, uneven format. And this is why people will have candida, and you’ll find in those clusters of candida, you will also find harmful bacteria and parasites. They’re all synergistic and symbiotic, so they all tend to cluster together. We knew that before we knew that also biofilm was being produced in those areas.

[00:36:49] Ashley James: Is part of your program to strip away biofilm in the intestine?

[00:36:55] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, it has to be. Our Phase 0 program addresses that, the biofilm.

[00:37:00] Ashley James: Very cool. Yeah, that is such a big deal. I have so many questions for you, and I definitely want to have you back on my show. I know that you are really crunched on time right now, and we have just begun to open up this pandora’s box of candida. I’m going to make sure the links to all your websites and your book is in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. We’re definitely going to have you back because I’ve got like 10 more questions and then I want to dive into how we can start to fight this. But just letting people know that this exists, they're going to start listening to the symptoms of their body and going, “Wait a second. I really need to read The Candida Chronicles and I really need to look into this further.”

So, you do have at-home tests. Could you please let the listeners know? You have three websites, and you have at-home tests. Please let the listeners know what are the websites and what steps should they take to follow you and start learning from you.

[00:37:53] Dr. Michael Biamonte: The main website is Health-truth.com. The two other websites are The New York City Candida Doctor. It might be The New York City Yeast Doctor. I think they might have changed the domain. But it’s either The New York City Yeast Doctor or Candida Doctor, and The New York City Thyroid Doctor. Why we have the thyroid website is because candida hits your thyroid and your adrenals the hardest, and the one thing you’d be guaranteed is after you handle a candida patient and you got the acute phase of candida, you're going to need to do something to restore thyroid and adrenal function.

Many people treat themselves for candida forever because they still think they have it even though they have it suppressed or in remission. What they’re experiencing now is adrenal and thyroid exhaustion, and they confuse it with still having candida, so that’s why we have to separate those things out.

[00:38:45] Ashley James: Fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We’re definitely going to have you back because we’ve got to dive in. We’ve just sort of opened up pandora’s box and we’re going to dive in with the next episode. And I know you’re crunched on time, so I really appreciate that you took the time today to talk to us and we’ll have you back on soon to continue this discussion. 

[00:39:04] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Okay, great.

[00:39:05] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Biamonte. Wasn’t that amazing? And this is just the beginning. We just have scratched the surface. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, ask your questions about candida. I know some questions have bubbled up for you after hearing just this first part. And oh man, I have my list of questions. I am so excited to dig into him next time. I’ve got him on the schedule for early October. So jump in to the Learn True Health Facebook group and let me know what questions you have for him. Let’s tap into the community and to the hive mind, and let’s come up with some really great ones for him. In my next interview with him we’ll just be digging in deep, figuring out all the why’s and the how’s and getting the plan of action that we can take so that we can take each step to resolving candida. But please, ask away. I’m sure you guys have got some great questions as do I. Let’s all join heads and think of what we can say to him. If you don’t have Facebook and you're not able to come on the Learn True Health Facebook group, you can always email me ashley@learntruehealth.com, although you're missing out because the Learn True Health Facebook group is pretty awesome. 

Have yourselves a fantastic rest of your day. And stay tuned. Make sure that you subscribe. Wherever you listen, if you listen on iTunes, or Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Podbean, wherever you're listening from or even just LearnTrueHealth.com, you could be listening on my website, whatever app you're using, make sure you subscribe and make sure that you’ve got your notifications. So when I do list part 2, that it will be up there for you. And please, give us a 5-star rating and review. If you love my show, if it’s made a difference for you, I absolutely love it when I hear back from listeners and I see your reviews. It means so much to me. It warms my heart, it motivates me to keep going when I know that I’m helping you guys. So, you can help me in return by leaving a 5-start rating and review. I’d love to see that. And also, if you haven’t already, come check out the LearnTrueHealth.com website. We spent all summer long revamping it and it looks totally different. It’s super cool. There's a Choose Your Own Self-Healing journey on the home page. Just scroll down and you’ll see that. And you’ll find all kinds of really cool content there. So, go to LearnTrueHealth.com, check out our new website. Let me know what you think about. And hopefully, I’ll see you in the Learn True Health Facebook group soon. If you don’t know how to find that, you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/group, and it’ll take you there. Awesome. Have yourselves a great day and I’ll see you in part two of this interview soon.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Michael Biamonte!

 

Website

Facebook

Linkedin

YouTube

Pinterest

 

Book by Dr. Michael Biamonte

 

The Candida Chronicles

Aug 29, 2022

MUSHROOM TINCTURE

learntruehealth.com/mushroom

GREEN 85 JUICE FORMULA

learntruehealth.com/green85

TOXIN DETOX

learntruehealth.com/toxindetox

ULTRA ENZYMES

learntruehealth.com/ultraenzymes

 

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

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

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

 

Highlights:

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

Intro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, this is a very important thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

[01:34:42] Ashley James: Fifty times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[01:40:27] Ashley James: Yay!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[01:43:18] Tim James: Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[01:45:33] Ashley James: Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[01:57:21] Tim James: Oh good, good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[02:03:59] Tim James: Totally. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[02:14:47] Tim James: That’s cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Connected with Tim James!

 

Website

Podcast

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

 

Recommended Readings by Tim James

 

Supplements Exposed – Dr. Brian Clement

Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

 

 

Aug 18, 2022

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

For the coffee enema:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/enema

At Home Ozone Therapy for Immune & Mitochondrial Health, Eileen Durfee

https://www.learntruehealth.com/at-home-ozone-therapy-for-immune-mitochondrial-health-eileen-durfee

Highlights:

  • Silver amalgam fillings and mercury
  • Toxicity
  • What ozone is
  • Types of ozone generators
  • Ozonated water and its many applications
  • Glutathione
  • Coffee enemas

If you’re looking to detox your body, try incorporating ozonated water into your daily intake. In this episode, Eileen Durfee discusses a host of benefits and uses for ozonated water. Get your energy back, feel healthy, and discover how it can help you on many different levels. Plus, Eileen’s got a treat for you, guys! Listen to this podcast, learn something new, and get an exclusive discount code for her ozone generator and other products.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today, we have a mind-blowing episode. A former nuclear powerplant engineer needed to become a health inventor in order to save her life and heal her body, and in doing so, has created some amazing inventions, which we talk about today on the show, and has gone on to save many people’s lives and improve the quality of life for everyone. After I did this interview, I came to the realization that every single household should have this device — that is that important. It’s like everyone should have a water filter, everyone should have an air filter. Those are important things. Everyone should have access to a furnace if they're living in an area that gets a cold climate, sort of like essentials, a hot water tank in your house. These things we take for granted. We think that it’s standard to come in a house, and I think her invention should be standard in everyone’s home that it would prevent so much illness and increase health dramatically. Just one thing. There’s over 10 things that this device does for you.

But the one thing is that it kills infections in the teeth, so it stops cavities before they become cavities. And if you use it every day just like a mouthwash, so you just rinse with it and you could spit it out or swallow, it prevents cavities. In fact, dentists use this, a holistic dentist uses this to even treat cavities instead of having to do a lot of drilling and filling with God-knows-what. Some dentists are actually still using metal amalgams which are so detrimental to our health. If you’ve been a long-time listener, you’ve heard of a lot of our holistic doctors talk about the importance of preventing, not using amalgams, metal amalgams, or mercury amalgams. Just who in the right mind thought it was safe to put mercury in the body that would live in your body for the rest of your life. Like, who said “Oh, well, I know mercury is dangerous, but let’s shove it in someone’s mouth”? Like, who does that? This is just such a crazy toxic world we live in, and common sense is not common. That’s why you’re listening to this show.

We have to be the outliers. One in three people in the United States have pre-diabetes or diabetic or have heart disease. It is so common. And 1 in 3 to 1 in 4, depending on whether you’re male or female, will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. If you’re in a room with three or four people, one of you is going to have cancer. One of you already has heart disease. One of you has pre-diabetes or is diabetic. And one of you is obese.

And I love you all, and I don’t want you to suffer and suffer. You should not have to suffer this way. But we have bowed down to the altar of modern medicine, which is Orwellian. I’m going to put my tin foil hat on. So everyone, get your origami tin foil hat for a moment.

George Orwell back in, you know, wrote the book in 1984, right? He talks about how everything is the opposite, right? If you call it healthcare, people will think it’s good. But really, look at our system, look at the state of health our country is in. Is this healthcare? Is this really healthcare or is this disease management where we’re waiting to get sick and then get on a drug that gives us more symptoms and puts more stressors on the body?

Now, I believe that allopathic drug-based medicine has its places. Amazing in emergency care. But if you’re listening to this show, you probably have one or more chronic conditions, and you don’t feel good and you want to feel better and you want to get healthier. So, we need to go outside the box of “modern medicine”, right? We need to go to holistic medicine, which is science-based. But what it does, instead of saying “what drug can I give you,” it says “what can I give your body so your body can heal itself.” 

So, today’s interview is about exactly this. What can we give our body to help our body heal itself? And sometimes, we need to lean on the latest in science and technology in the holistic space to be able to prevent infections like tooth cavities. Can you imagine if you had a machine for your whole family, all you had to do is slosh water in your mouth once or twice a day? And this kind of supercharged mouthwash was only discriminatory to the bad bacteria. And it had no ill health effects. It’s not a chemical, there are ill health effects. And your entire family, as long as you used it, would never have cavities. Do you know how much money you’d save? I have a friend who has three boys and all three of them, she’s constantly taking them to the dentist. It is costing her just crazy amounts of money to treat her sons’ constant tooth decay.

Some people, no matter how they eat, they have this. And my holistic dentist says it has more to do with the microbiome of the mouth. So, if we can balance the microbiome of the mouth, we can support not only our digestion, and as you listened to in a recent previous episode, we can support the cardiovascular system because the good bacteria in the mouth digest our food and creates nitric oxide, which is needed for heart health. So, if we take just regular Listerine or regular mouthwash, we're actually killing and wiping away all the good bacteria along with the bad. And that ends up increasing heart disease, which this doctor I’d interviewed before on nitric oxide, talked about those studies.

So, here we have a guest today who’s going to teach us what we can do in our home to increase our liver function, our detox, increase glutathione, increase superoxide dismutase, and it naturally kills and goes after infected tissue and sick tissue, but it does not damage the healthy tissue and the healthy bacteria.

One of those machines I think is actually quite affordable. There’s two machines; there’s like an at-home one of them and there’s like a professional one that large industries are using. The professional one is totally affordable, which I was really excited. I was surprised. When I went on their website, I was expecting it to be thousands of dollars. I’m like, “This is only a few hundred dollars. What?” So, I was really excited to see that. This is something we can all use to prevent so much illness but also support our body’s ability to heal itself.

So, strap yourselves in, and enjoy today’s show. Please share this with a friend of yours who is struggling with dental issues or detox issues because this episode is really going to help them. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Together, we’re going to help our friends and family and those we care about to learn true health and create true health. Awesome. Have yourself a fantastic day, and enjoy today’s interview! 

Oh, and one last thing before I forget. She’s giving us a discount – a coupon code. I asked her, “Could you please give my listeners a discount?” So, the coupon code is LTH which is I’m just so grateful that she’s giving us a discount. And you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone. That’s LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone and use coupon code “LTH”. The other thing we talked about, she’s an engineer so she’s invented some amazing stuff to help her save her life, which we’ll talk about in the interview. But the other link is LearnTrueHealth.com/enema where you can do coffee enemas and ozone enemas and other kinds of enemas, and we get into that a bit. 

And we’ve talked about it. Dr. Patrick Vickers. You can listen to my previous episode with him. He has a cancer clinic where people go to do the Gerson therapy method and they reverse their cancer. And coffee enemas are essential as part of the protocol because it supports the liver’s detox and also it makes the liver produce a lot of glutathione which is our master antioxidant. 

So, for those who are excited after hearing Dr. Patrick Vickers’ interview and wanting to know more about coffee enemas, she invented a no-mess, there’s zero mess, easy, easy, easy enema system that makes it super easy to do it without all the mess and the weird stuff. So, check that out. You can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/enema. That’s LearnTrueHealth.com/enema. And the links, of course, are going to be in the show notes on today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com and any podcast directory, wherever you’re listening from, go to the show notes in there, and you’ll see those links. LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone and LearnTrueHealth.com/enema, and make sure you use the coupon code “LTH” when you’re going to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone.

Have yourself a fantastic day and enjoy today’s interview!

[00:09:39] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 484.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on with us the master of health recovery, anti-aging, get our bodies to a point where we’re feeling amazing and looking 10 years younger. I’m chomping at the bit. I can’t wait to get in and dive in. We’ve got about 10 topics I want to cover, but we're going to do one at a time. 

Eileen Durfee, it’s so wonderful having you on the show. You’re covering things that I’ve been wanting to cover for years and today, we’re going to talk about ozone. But I want to have you back on the show to dive into very simple ways that we can detox like you have simplified coffee enemas to maximize the benefits without all the mess. And you’ve got a way to increase oxygen and immunity, to help with increasing nutrition and detoxification through our skincare. The list goes on and on. I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome!

[00:10:54] Eileen Durfee: Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s a pleasure.

[00:10:56] Ashley James: And you were saying before we have recorded, you said, “You should have seen a picture of me 10 years ago.” And I got to see you, we were on video together, and I got to see. You’re gorgeous, of course. But in the last 10 years, you have actually shed 10 years instead of looked 10 years older. You look 10 years younger. You could do like the 10-year challenge on social media and people would get it wrong. Unless if they knew you, they’d get it right. But people who didn’t know you would be like, “Wait a second. These are like 20-year-old, not 10-year-old challenge,” because you’ve actually lost 10 years when you’re 10 years older.

So, let’s just dive right into your story. What was going on with your health in your life that had you dig deep and discover how to restore the body and how to nurture the body to where it is getting healthier and healthier and looking younger and younger as you age?

[00:11:53] Eileen Durfee: Well, unfortunately, I’ve been sick my whole life. I’m 60 years old, and it started when the doctor ripped me out of my mom with forceps. Then as I started walking, my hips were twisted. The doctors x-rayed me and said, “She doesn’t have any abnormalities,” but I had to wear special shoes because one knee banged into the other knee. I was in pain all the time. I grew 9 inches in three months in the summer of the eighth grade. Then, I was run over by a car in a parking lot. It was like daggers being stabbed in my chest every time I took a breath. I couldn’t raise my arms, just very painful.

Then, when I was 19 years old, I got a silver amalgam filling in my mouth. And that was the downfall. I mean, became allergic to everything, was having hives all over my body, had psoriasis. My hair started falling out. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t remember anything. So, I started going down this rabbit hole. I mean, they had me on antihistamines which made me tired. 

Then, I started having problems with candida and cystitis, and they had me on antibiotics constantly. Then, I became allergic to every antibiotic and I didn’t find out until the mid-'80s from a doctor in Kansas that was going to do some allergy testing. He said, “Oh! You have leaky gut and candida. So, I went on nystatin and ketoconazole, drugs of course that keep that somewhat in check but do damage as well.

And I just couldn’t accept the fact that my body had to have all this medication. So, I started reading and learning and trying a variety of things where I was my own guinea pig. I did the Bernard Jensen, you know, Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management, where it’s colonics. I ate paleo before paleo existed. I did the avoidance where I wouldn’t eat the same thing within 72 hours or I’d become allergic to it. I would do the pulse test so I could tell if I became allergic to something because I had to carry an EpiPen, my lungs would close up. I had to crawl around because my feet were so swollen from hives. And it was very miserable – very miserable to say the least. 

And so, I started all kinds of things. I even got into electronic equipment, Rife machines, the multiple wave oscillator that was developed by a French man named Lakhovsky. He was friends with Nikola Tesla who helped him develop that. And, you know, the Hulda Clark zappers and just everything, the Bob Beck pulsers and zappers, and pulsed electromagnetic frequency machines. I must have had $50,000 invested in all these machines. And I was much better. But it took about an hour and a half a day to do my zapping, I called it.

One day, I was reading about hair analysis. So, it was just one more thing that I was going to try and that was the turning point in changing my life. But I had been through so much pain and suffering that it did, it caused me to dig deep. Not all hair analyses are created equal by the way, but the one that I chose, they don’t wash the hair at the lavatory because if you do, it takes away those water-soluble minerals, so the readings are not accurate.

But I went on a diet. I was pretty about 80 percent on the recommended diet and then the supplements. Now, lo and behold, I found out that some of the supplements that I was chasing my symptoms and medicating for the constipation, for not sleeping and all that, were further suppressing my adrenal gland and my thyroid gland and actually causing the joint pain that had been increasing.

So, it’s really kind of like Russian roulette when you start a supplement regimen because the wellness revolution does not look at the table of elements charts and how like, for instance, zinc lowers sodium and raises potassium, magnesium lowers sodium. The body is just like a plant. The farmers, for instance, to pick out what kind of fertilizer, they do a soil test and they don’t put nitrogen on the soil to raise nitrogen in the plant. With COVID, everybody’s going, oh yeah, zinc, let’s take zinc. Well, nitrogen releases calcium bioavailability in the tissues. Likewise, when we take any vitamin or mineral, it has this give and take where you move one, they all move. So, if somebody already has, for instance, too low of sodium in comparison to potassium and you’re taking excessive amounts of zinc, then they can actually become very susceptible to chronic infections.

So, that was amazing. I started feeling my anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and all these things were improving. I found myself not having to go sit in that multiple wave oscillator for 30 minutes to be pain-free. I could go days and even weeks without it. So, I was just amazed. Then they said, “Oh, get a retest,” and I thought, I’m feeling good, I’m not going to get a retest. Then after five months of taking those same supplements, almost all my symptoms came back and I’m going, what the heck? So, I did a retest, and the only change was instead of taking two tablets of this one supplement three times a day, we only want you to take one three times a day. You wouldn’t think that would be much of a change, right?

Well, all the symptoms within three days went away and gone, and then I was horrified. It’s like these cupboards full of vitamins that I was using. What did I do to myself? But the interesting thing, how all my inventions and all these things that I’ve created since then was because when your body has the right minerals and the cells at the cell level, these ratios, these homeostatic balances, that certain things can flow and happen, it will freely give up junk that it’s been using to survive. Like, the body will use aluminum for magnesium or cadmium for zinc, but those are very toxic. So, this process removed the reason why I had to be a jalopy, why I had to use a junkyard part like duct tape and baling wire to get from point A to point B. 

My body freely gave all that up and if anybody goes on a cleanse, everybody gets warned about, oh man, you can have Herxheimer reaction, you’re going to feel terrible, you know, you just got to tough through it. Well, that would happen. Your body would think it won the lottery and it would get rid of all these toxins. And so, there’s detoxification protocols that you can do to speed up that, get that, because it leaves the organs and tissues then it travels in the bloodstream. When it’s in the bloodstream, if you have insomnia, you might have worse insomnia. Then people give up. But that’s not what I did because I knew that I had to get it out, I had to get the preferred minerals in my cells for me to be like a new car with new car parts.

So, I upped the things I was doing to help my body escort poisons out like jumping out of a trampoline, dry skin brushing, drinking ozonated water which we’re going to talk about today, and doing near infrared sauna therapy. Just all these things to help the body. 

It’s just been kind of a journey because I was a former nuclear powerplant engineer, auditor, and trainer who then went into real estate development, and I designed and built houses and ran construction crews, managed non-profit organizations. When I started regaining my health and just had this passion and desire to share what worked for me, I started my business in 2010.

[00:21:39] Ashley James: I love it. When you were working in the nuclear power plant, were you exposed to anything? Do you feel like your health deteriorated in that environment?

[00:21:52] Eileen Durfee: I believe it deteriorated in that environment a lot of times because you worked 6-7 days a week, 12 hours a day, so the massive amount of stress. But also back then, when they were welding and when they were doing all these kinds of stuff, they didn’t give us fresh air or oxygen hoods or protect the workers like they do now. They really weren’t up on that. So, there was lot of exposure during those times to all sorts of chemicals and fumes. That was right about the time when I got the silver amalgam filling and it was just all downhill from there. Long working hours, stressing out the adrenal glands, then you’re going to be more susceptible to accumulating toxins.

See, if your endocrine system converts your food into energy pretty efficiently, then the body is going to be less likely to use the junk that it’s exposed to. So yes, that was the downfall.

[00:23:09] Ashley James: You had mentioned that the body when it’s missing nutrients, so the body needs the 90+ essential nutrients, the body needs to build the 37.2 trillion cells in your body, and if you’re not getting enough of one nutrient, like you said, it’ll use duct tape, it’ll use something that is not a great alternative. But it’s better than not being able to produce any cells anyway, right? We don’t see people just dropping dead of a vitamin C deficiency. The body kind of chugs along and it starts to develop symptoms. 

So, maybe your gums bleed every time you brush your teeth when you spit out and after you brush your teeth, it’s pink. You have a vitamin C deficiency and you could have other deficiencies along with that because people don’t normally have just one. It’s a pack. They travel in packs. Nutrients are like wolves. You don’t find them alone; they travel in packs. Because there are co-factors and we don’t eat single nutrients. When we eat a meal, it either has like very little nutrients because it’s junk food or highly processed food. But if you’re eating, let’s say, a beautiful salad that you grew yourself, that’s got all those wonderful enzymes, it’s got wonderful vitamins. If you have mineral-rich soil, it has wonderful minerals in it that have been digested by the plant so they are colloidal and your body is able to assimilate it assuming that you don’t have digestive issues and absorption issues.

But when we are deficient in certain nutrients, the body’s going to look to try to put the body together. You mentioned a few. Ones that I’ve heard so often are the halogens. Like, there’s fluoride in our water and our body will use that in place of like chlorine or chloride in water I think it is. We’ll use it in place of the healthier ones. Is there any other sort of replacement ones that you can talk about or touch on just how deficient we are and how out of balance we are when we just go around eating a bunch of processed food? In our past, we did a lot of processed food eating before we realized that we really needed to focus on foods that contained nutrients.

[00:25:31] Eileen Durfee: Even organic food grown today, I read a study comparing minerals. Yeah, I didn’t have the pesticides or herbicides on it. It wasn’t genetically modified. But it really didn’t have the nutrient values of food grown in like the 1920s. I mean, the USDA even says that our foods supplied today have 40 percent less nutrients in it. So when your body doesn’t have the nutrients it needs being a mineral or vitamins or what have you, it has to do something, and that’s called an adaptation. Because it’s like the key to the front door isn’t there so it has to go around to the backyard, climb up a ladder and break in a window. Why are we all fatigued? Because we have so many darn adaptations going on. The body has a lot of pathways to accomplish the same thing. It’s like a backup of a backup of a backup.

And every cell in the body has an enzyme-binding site. Enzymes don’t do anything new, but you can’t bat your eyelashes without enzymes. I mean, I do take digestive enzymes with my food, but if we had the right minerals and our body could get it to the cell-enzyme binding site, the cell would make enzymes for us, and then we’d be more energetic. It’s like the sparkplugs of life. 

So, a common toxicity that I see, that I’d really like people educated on is mercury. Now, that’s the worst one, in my opinion, because mercury will substitute for selenium and our thyroid gland has more selenium than any organ in the body. Our thyroid can become dysfunctional because we have mercury, and it doesn’t let the cell function. Like cadmium, it almost is like drinking caffeine. It will cause the cell to work, but yeah, it makes it brittle and causes all these other diseases, but at least the cell is functioning, where mercury permanently disables, it distorts the enzyme-binding site or it goes alongside the cell and makes it impossible for the right mineral to get in the enzyme-binding site, so it’s just like a cell that’s there that can’t function. Mercury is so toxic and you would not believe how many people have high mercury in their hair, and they don’t have silver amalgam fillings. But they eat high amounts of fish. So, fish, you have to be really careful about sourcing the types of fish or getting ones that are certified not to have all that mercury because it is just so toxic.

Now, I will eat, like, brisling is a species of sardines. Instead of just getting a can of sardines that any small fish can fit into, they’re half the size, the brisling species, and then they’ve got a lot of bioavailable calcium, good omega-3’s, and they taste good. But they don’t eat other fish and they don’t live very long, so they're not toxic. And likewise, I’ll always eat wild-caught fish, and I will do sockeye salmon. But other than that, if I’m eating halibut, bass, especially tuna, the mercury is so poisonous and it just gets in our body and does havoc. So, that’s one of the most problematic toxicities that I see in people.

[00:29:36] Ashley James: Tony Robbins, many people know him. He was at one point homeless, and now he’s a billionaire. He is a motivational speaker. A wonderful guy. I’ve listened to his work for many, many, many years. Recently in the last few years, he almost died. He was kind of pushing himself. He was on stage though, because he’ll be on stage for 8-12 hours doing these really intense weekend workshops with people where there’s like 2000 people in a giant stadium. He was feeling sicker and sicker and sicker until he was collapsing. They tested him and they figured out that his mercury was in the deadly, deadly range. 

Luckily, someone connected with him with a PhD. I’ve had him on the show. Chris Shade, PhD, who developed a type of mercury test that tested mercury and it’s three different forms in the body. Then they were able to get him on chelation and detox. They had to get it done very quickly. Chelation is not something for everyone because of how it often strips other minerals, it strips the body. But he was at the point where he needed immediate detox and emunctory support there.

So, he has just become this huge advocate support for really being careful. Now, he’s a billionaire, he’s a biohacker. He eats impeccably clean. He does not eat out. He has a personal chef. He eats incredibly clean. And he thought it was safe to eat, I think it was swordfish three times a day. I think it was swordfish. It was one of those big fish. And he doesn’t have amalgams. He didn’t work in a mine. He hasn’t been exposed to mercury other than he ate fish a few times a week. 

Now, people can just go out for sushi a few times a week or just go eat fish because they like fish or eat the Mediterranean diet a few times with fish a few times a week because they hear that’s healthy. They can develop incredibly scary toxic heavy metals and mercury in their body. And you might end up in the ER with all these crazy symptoms, that doesn’t necessarily mean the doctors will know what to look for because they’re not always thinking, “Oh, this must be a heavy metal problem, it must be mercury.” So, they’ll see that the thyroid is not working but they're not necessarily going to know that it’s mercury. That’s why we have to go to holistic doctors who are going to look at everything and understand the early warning signs. So, I love that you pointed this out.

Now, we’re talking today about ozone, but I know that ozone helps us in this way and supports us within this realm. Ozone really changed my life. I had really, really bad long-haul COVID symptoms. I had muscle weakness. I had to take one stair at a time, like I would put my foot up and then pull the other leg up to that step and then put one foot up, and I was grabbing the railing, pulling my body up. I didn’t really understand that this muscle weakness was from long-haul COVID because at the same time, I had lost my daughter last year during childbirth and then got COVID really, really bad all at once. So, the recovery, here I was six months later still recovering, but I noticed the brain fog was so bad I couldn’t remember nouns. It was like pass the thing on the thing was how I would talk because my brain wasn’t functioning. And I thought, okay, this must be grief and then I realized, you know what, this is more than that. So, I went to a naturopath here that does ozone IV and we did one session. It was a three-hour session of ozone. They would take my blood, put some ozone in it and then put it back in me and they did that ten times, so it’s called a 10-Pass.

When I walked up, because there’s a bunch of concrete steps going up into the clinic, it was the same thing, I had to walk one foot at a time. One foot and then bring that other foot up to the same step, so one step at a time going up into the clinic. Also in the place where I picked up Azure Standard, which is like this organic bulk food place, they ship direct to an area, and then you can pick it up instead of having to pay for shipping. So, I had two 25-pound bags of I can’t remember what it was, it was like lentils and brown rice or something. And when I was finished with my session, I was like, oh yeah, here let me pick up my order. I grabbed both bags and ran down the stairs, put it in my car, ran back up the stairs, and I nearly started crying. I’m like, my strength is back! My strength is back! My muscle weakness is gone. It’s like I got my body back. For about three days after, it’s like all the stress was gone and my body, I was in healing mode for three days straight. I was laughing with my son for the first time in six months. We were just having fun. We’re having like tickle fights. I was resting and sleeping deep. It was like my body finally let go of the stress and was in healing mode for three days straight. 

It was amazing. Then, the doctor told me that ozone, one of the things it does is it helps heal the mitochondria, and so she was going on and on about all the wonderful things which I want you to get into today. Because not everyone can go find a naturopath that does ozone IV 10-Pass, but there are ways that we can use it in our homes and get the benefits of it.

So, for me, I was so excited when I found out that you’re this expert on how to incorporate ozone at home safely and gain the benefits. Because for me, it helped me overcome something that I didn’t even know that that was as big of a problem as it was until I overcame it. I was like, wow, that’s such a huge difference. And I only needed one session. So, it didn’t come back; that muscle weakness didn’t come back. That brain fog didn’t come back. It was done, it was gone.

Another thing is my friend had cervical cancer, and she went down to Mexico and had 7 or 10 sessions every day of ozone IV and in a week, in a cervical cancer had gone away and she raved about it. She said that the doctor down there says that it explodes all the microbes in the body, allowing the immune system to finally do its work because it doesn’t have to constantly fight off all the sort of dormant and the microbes that are hanging around, waiting to take hold. So, it takes all that stuff out of the body, allows the immune system to focus on what it needs to focus on.

So, I’ve always been super curious about ozone and how it helps us on all these different levels. It’s not just one thing. It’s not just mitochondria. It’s not just microbes. It helps us in many ways. So, I’d love to go through and start learning all these different benefits.

[00:37:11] Eileen Durfee: Sure. It was one of the first things that I started on the natural side of taking care of my health. I learned about drinking ozonated water back in the 1990s. And I had an ozone generator which is different than the ones used for ozonating blood or another treatment that they do with people is they’ll have bags of ozone gas that they put up direct down in the vagina, in the orifices of the body.

Now, the type of ozone generator for those treatments must be fed with oxygen tanks, so that they’re ultra, ultra, ultrapure. But for water ozonators, a good affordable option is a Corona Discharge machine that uses ambient air as the source. Because we have about 15 to 20 percent oxygen in the air then nitrogen and with this Corona Discharge, it converts that into a strong ozone gas. Some people might not even know what ozone is, but it’s just three singlets, O1 + O1 + O1 of oxygen.

Now, in nature, things that are in pairs, positive and negative, are strong and stable. But like with three O1 molecules, the two are great but that third one is like a third wheel, it’s going to break off real soon. And that is one of the two miracles of ozone gas, is the O1 breaks off and it’s got a high oxidation potential where Ashley referred to her doctor about killing the microbes or the pathogens. 

The awesome thing about ozone oxidation, it’s not like an antibiotic where you create superbugs and they become resistant to it. It actually in the cell surface of the pathogen, it blows a hole and it oxidizes it, it destroys it, it breaks it down and it kills it. There is no mutating to survive oxidation. So, the miracle of ozone is its oxidation potential. 

One molecule of ozone, we’ll talk in the form of dissolved ozone because the ozonators that we're going to talk about dissolve ozone gas into water, so it’s like a liquid that we can use. We can drink, we can clean with it. But one molecule of dissolved ozone in water is like up to 10,000 molecules of bleach. So, immediately, your mind should be thinking “I can’t drink bleach. How can I drink ozonated water if it’s even more powerful?”

The answer is this: ozone is smart. In your body, healthy cells have an enzyme coating around them. So, ozone is selective. When you drink ozonated water or if you went to the doctor and they use the ozone in your blood or gave you ozone insufflation, that’s the gas like in the rectum or whatever, it does not destroy healthy cells. It will only attack the weak cells, the infected cells that don’t have that enzyme coating on them. Because every day, your body is making millions and millions of cells and recycling them. So, ozone whether you’re drinking it or getting your blood done or whatever modality of using ozone, it’s helping your body recycle those cells to build healthy cells. It’s anti-inflammatory. There’s all kinds of benefits of it.

But one of the other benefits that’s not really commonly thought about is the oxygen levels in the body. So, there’s water allocation mechanisms in the body, there’s oxygen mechanisms to allocate oxygen in the body. Because our body to survive has this minimum of what we need to keep ourselves healthy and, unfortunately, with most of us being indoors where the climate is controlled, with heating, ventilation and air conditioning system that’s stripping oxygen, negative ions out of the air, so when we're indoors working, we're breathing less levels of oxygen. But also, if you’re not active, you know, they talk about the sitting disease, people are sitting and working too many hours that’s why our fitness reminders are telling us to get up and move so many steps every hour. So, with sedentary lives, we can have lower levels of oxygen. 

The body actually allocates oxygen. It’s smart. It says okay, I’m going to protect the bone marrow over joint cartilage. I’m going to protect the brain over different other kinds of cells. So, cells actually when they don’t have enough oxygen lose the enzyme coating. And what that does is it makes the cell susceptible to infection by a pathogen.

So, not only is the oxidation of ozone so fantastic that it’s going to help your body recycle those cells so they don’t go rouge into cancer or something like that, the byproduct after that O1 breaks off is, guess what, pure O2. Drinking ozonated water boosts your body’s oxygen levels, so then it can protect more cells to make sure they have the enzyme coating around them, so that your immune system is stronger.

Another aspect. I guess there’s three things of ozonated water that are just absolutely phenomenal. It will be something if it only did one of them. We got two. Now, here’s the third bonus. The EPA, when there’s contaminated ground water, they drill wells and they have giant ozone generators and they inject ozonated water into the aquifer to break down heavy metals and pollutants.

Now, think about it. How much of your body is water?

[00:45:21] Ashley James: It’s 70 percent.

[00:45:23] Eileen Durfee: That’s huge. So, here’s another benefit. By drinking ozonated water, you can help decontaminate the liquid toxins in your body. It’s just so amazing. I don’t know of anything that’s this powerful at all.

[00:45:48] Ashley James: Can you dig in a little bit as to how ozone decontaminates?

[00:45:55] Eileen Durfee: It’s through the oxidation again. If the cell doesn’t have the enzyme coating, it will break it down. But when it’s exposed to petrochemicals and hydrocarbons and just all these different chemicals, because everything is just about the number of electrons spinning around the nucleus. Right? That’s all matter is. So, ozone gets in there and disrupts that structure and breaks it apart so it’s no longer what it was and it’s less harmful.

[00:46:35] Ashley James: Got it. For those who don’t know, ozone is three oxygen molecules where it’s normally air that we breathe is two oxygen molecules. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Ozone is less stable, right?

[00:46:53] Eileen Durfee: Yes.

[00:46:54] Ashley James: It’s less stable and so that third oxygen is kind of like shaking around, going, “Ah! I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something.” It’s unstable, it’s active. And this was my understanding, so please, please correct me or explain deeper. We have loose hydrogens jumping around in our body, which are free radicals, so they're piercing through, they're kind of like bullets in the body — piercing through the nucleus of the cells, damaging DNA. 

Just imagine if you’re shooting up these tiny, tiny, tiny bullets that are jumping through the body and just piercing holes into cells. And along comes this ozone, there’s this third oxygen molecule which is unstable and looking to create stability because there’s this magnetic pull. It will part from the two. So, the three oxygen, one will leave, and then now the two is now two oxygens, right? So then that’s what we breathe, that’s oxygen. And that one oxygen molecule will mop up two hydrogens, making water and, therefore, stabilizing. It’s like an antioxidant in and of itself. It’s mopping up those free radicals.

Then now, you’ve got oxygen in your body and more water in your body. And those are two things that are wonderful for your cells. 

So, is that an accurate description?

[00:48:28] Eileen Durfee: Yes. There’s additional studies on NIH.gov under PubMed articles that confirm the benefits of ozonated water. It increases glutathione, peroxidase, superoxide dismutase, catalase, prostacyclin, red blood cell glycolysis rate, and of course, we talked about the oxygen metabolism and it inactivates bacteria, virus, fungi, yeast, and protozoa. It’s like everyone should be using ozonated water, and I know that it’s not very popular because of people talking about our ozone layer, but, also, because breathing ozone is very dangerous. So, it’s hard to use this in your home and that’s why I created an easy-to-use degasser to make it safe.

[00:49:37] Ashley James: So, let’s back up. I want to touch on all those things you just said because it is really important that something that is incredibly healthy for you can also be dangerous used in the wrong way. Right? Like water can kill you if you drown in it. Water can kill you if you drink too much of it. But also, not having enough water will kill you. Right? So, water is incredibly good for you, you bathe in it. It’s absolutely essential for human life but used wrong, it is dangerous.

Ozone – incredibly healthy. One of the tools every single one of us should be using on a daily basis to create health and healing, and if used wrong can hurt us, just like water. So, I want to go on that, but I’d like to back up because I’d like to unpack that list that you talked about from the NIH studies starting with glutathione. A lot of my listeners know glutathione is the master antioxidant that the liver makes. It is so vitally important and I’ve used it before in the past as a supplement. I had taken it before just to see what it would be like, just to go hey, this is interesting because I’m into detox. I’ve had a real hard time with heavy metals in my past and I’ve been healing that through all these different modalities. And I can tell you that when I took glutathione, really, really high-quality glutathione, I felt like a different person. I’m like, wow! I can’t imagine like so. And then that’s when I went I really need to focus on my liver health and focusing on giving my body what it needs to up my glutathione because I should be feeling this way all the time. We should be feeling like on top of the world all the time.

So, let’s dive into how is it that ozone helps glutathione and why is glutathione absolutely so crucial to make sure that we have enough of it?

[00:51:31] Eileen Durfee: Well, after the oxidation and the oxygen boost, I don’t know how to explain why ozonated water increases glutathione production. I don’t know the biochemical, I’d have to ask my son who’s a biologist and a chemist to explain that. But I do know that it’s documented clearly in multiple studies that people can Google on the PubMed and read benefits of ozonated water.

I do know another hack to increase the body’s production of glutathione 600 percent, which we’ll have to talk about another time is coffee enemas.

[00:52:21] Ashley James: Yes, definitely. We had Dr. Patrick Vickers on a few episodes ago and he has a cancer clinic where he helps people with the Gerson method. Gerson plus, I would say, because he has added on some things since Dr. Gerson’s time that amplify the results he gets, where he helps people’s bodies. He supports the structure and function of their bodies to get rid of their own cancer and just feel absolutely amazing. They do six coffee enemas a day and it’s necessary because of the huge amount of detox you need to support the body. When you are killing trillions of cancer cells, when you’re killing all those cancer cells off, your billions and millions —

[00:53:07] Eileen Durfee: The toxins will kill you, not the cancer.

[00:53:09] Ashley James: Exactly. That’s what Dr. Gerson saw back in the ‘50s. He saw that people, if they didn’t do the coffee enemas, they would die of the toxins that would build up from killing cancer too quickly. So, we have to support the emunctory systems to release the heavy burden on the body, and of course, now, our bodies are more burdened than ever. We have 80,000 man-made chemicals in our air, our soil, our water, and our food. These are forever chemicals, they're endocrine disruptors, they’re obesogens; they are harming us for generations. They actually epigenetically change our gene expressions.

We are totally messed up as a race. We are completely messed up from the last 40 years of all the damage that’s been done to our environment and to our food. And so, we need to take matters into our own hands. We need to be very diligent with our food, but we also need to be incredibly diligent and double down on our detox protocols.

That’s why I love coffee enemas. But also, I love ozone. And I’ve only scratched the surface in my research but I do know that it helps with the Krebs cycle. I think that has something to do both with the energy in helping the mitochondria heal. I think there’s something about the glutathione. These things, again, we should talk to your son because I studied biology, but I’m like 101 level biology, and we need to get into like PhD level biology to really dig in.

What were those other points you talked about?

[00:54:46] Eileen Durfee: The superoxide dismutase. Back when I was allergic to everything, I had these Sod pills, superoxide dismutase, because it would cut the reactions, those enzymes. It’s just amazing. Catalase, prostacyclin, red blood cell glycolysis rate. It’s just everything that our immune system needs to function and to survive, that’s what ozonated water can do for us.

And one thing that I don’t know, probably dates me, but I think it was back in the 1980s, there was this Alpine ozone machine. Everybody was using these ozone generators to clean the air and finally, the FTC made them quit selling them because a lot of people, including myself, I’d be breathing large amounts of ozone gas and not knowing that I was actually harming myself. At the time, I had a lot of gut problems where I had bloating and indigestion, which is a direct result of inhaling ozone gas in too high of a level.

I still run across people who say, “Oh, I love the smell of it. It makes me breathe deeper.” I was talking with my son about, well, what’s going on? Why is it bad to breath over .1 part per million ozone in the air? After a while, we had another discussion. He says, “Well, mom, it’s competing with the oxygen receptor sites in the lungs.” So number one, that deep breathing that people are doing is a homeostatic survival response mechanism, so it’s not that their breathing is improving; it’s like trying to overcome that life-threatening circumstance of lower oxygen levels.

[00:56:58] Ashley James: Kind of like carbon dioxide. You’re starting to breathe heavier because you’re trying to get the oxygen in, so it’s competing with the oxygen. That is interesting. I love the smell of ozone. When there’s a thunderstorm, you could smell it in the air. Like there’s certain times when there’s a naturally occurring ozone and you could just smell a little bit of it. But that is really interesting.

Yeah, I was told once that ozone, when you breathe it in, it is like an oxidant for the lungs. Even though it’s an antioxidant for the body, when it gets in the bloodstream or when it gets inside the body, but inside the lungs it’s going to attack the lungs in a negative way, so best not to inhale it.

Our dentist, we have an amazing holistic dentist and he treats cavities and things like that with ozone. The first thing they do, they take a scraping of our mouth and then put it up on a big screen under a little microscope so we can see all the spirochetes and the bacteria, and he can point out what kind of bacteria and whether they cause heart disease and that kind of thing. So, he points out all the different kinds of bacteria and then encourages us to brush twice a day and floss twice a day to get rid of the biofilm that these guys basically build the condo buildings in between your teeth that we got to get out with the dental floss. Then he has us rinse with ozone water because it destroys the bad bacteria before he starts doing any work on the mouth. Like let’s say he scraped the gums as he’s cleaning, he doesn’t want that bad bacteria to get into your body, so he has us rinse with ozone water often and then he uses ozone to treat small cavities and if there’s ever any kind of dental surgery they need to do, they're using ozone before, during and after to increase healing time and significantly decrease infection rates.

My husband had a root canal and when they opened up the root canal to do the work they needed to do, they're like, this doesn’t smell at all. They're like if you go to any other dentist that doesn’t use ozone, it will smell like garbage, it will smell like decaying death. Because all they do is use antibiotics. They don’t use ozone to clean it out first. And our dentist was like, it doesn’t smell like anything. That’s because they use ozone to clean it out. So, it should be used by every dentist. It should be used in so many industries. So, I’m a really big fan.

Superoxide dismutase. I had a guest on recently who said that it’s like one of the keys to life. It’s one of the keys to everything. And he just geeked out on how important superoxide dismutase is to our existence, to our healing, to our health that for him it was one of the major factors. So, just the fact that this is just one of the many things that ozone does for the body is really exciting.

Let’s go back down that list. Was there anything else that you could dive deeper into that helps with?

[01:00:07] Eileen Durfee: As part of the immune system. I’m more of like creating the better widget to get the job done that we’re going to use and making it safe and making sure that it’s nontoxic. And just knowing that it did that was good enough for me, so I did not dive deeper into that. I mean, I explained about the oxygen metabolism and how it prioritizes to protect certain cells and with the enzyme coating, so that’s pretty much part of what it does there. Of course, any of the bacteria, virus, fungi, yeast, and protozoa, it is actually blowing a hole in the cell structure to kill it so it can’t mutate against it.

The one thing about ozonated water is like literally for the city of Los Angeles, they ozonate the sewage water and it’ll end up being as clear as drinking water. So, every pathogen has a concentration and a duration that’s required to kill it. Like E. coli for instance, we’re talking about let’s have good food supply. Well, let’s clean our food before we eat it because everything is grown in dirt so we’re not getting E. coli, listeria, salmonella from our chicken and those kinds of things that can cause food poisoning because the ozonated water, like at .1 part per million, can kill E. coli in 15 seconds.

[01:01:44] Ashley James: What?

[01:01:45] Eileen Durfee: My ozone generator produces 1.5 part per million. I mean, literally, practically on contact, washing your vegetables in ozonated water will kill it. You can take a black light. You know how they say don’t rinse chicken, you’re going to get salmonella everywhere. I always rinse my chicken in ozonated water. You take a black light and it’s crawling with salmonella before, and then it’s gone kind of like your dentist putting it up on the screen, showing you. So, you can make your food safe.

I did want to touch on why it damages the lungs. I do know about that. See, the lung tissue is full of lipids. So, the oxidation of lipids is very sensitive to ozone. It doesn’t take very much of it all and it’s oxidizing that tissue. It’s kind of like getting a sunburn. So what inhaling ozone gas does immediate to the lungs is it causes permanent lung damage. It’s like a sunburn on your lungs.

[01:02:59] Ashley James: Oh, wow!

[01:03:01] Eileen Durfee: Then, when it goes through your body, it causes the gastric bloating, upset, those kinds of things where these people that brag about they love the smell of ozone, it makes them breathe deeper, I go, “Oh, do you have problems with indigestion and bloating?” Oh, yeah. And I go, well, stop breathing ozone gas and see if that goes away.

I had this one person get back to me and say, “Oh, my gosh! That’s gone. You mean I caused my own problem?” I’m going, yeah. That’s why the EPA says not to breathe it.

[01:03:40] Ashley James: When you talked about the enzyme coating on the cells, the healthy cells which protect it from the oxidative stress of ozone, so ozone only attacks things that are infected or pathogens, so viruses, bacteria, fungus, mold, all that stuff, so it’s going to attack, it’s going to go after those, it’s going to go after infected cells and weak cells. What about cancer cells? Do cancer cells lack the enzyme coating?

[01:04:10] Eileen Durfee: Yes, they do.

[01:04:14] Ashley James: So by drinking ozonated water every day, would we be feeding ourselves with that additional support system that attacks the cells that don’t have enzyme coating? 

[01:04:25] Eileen Durfee: Yes. Before they can go rogue, it’s going to help your body recycle them because you get these Frankencells that start growing really fast instead of being recycled. Because every day, every single one of us have cells that are like pre-cancer cells, but our immune system recycles them. So, this is just giving us a leg up. It’s helping us do the job. Besides your doctor had told you that it’s killing the microbes, the level, the load of microbes so then your immune system is free to do the job of keeping your body from having cancer or recovering from cancer.

[01:05:21] Ashley James: I love it.

[01:05:22] Eileen Durfee: So, ozonated water is great. You definitely need to use a degasser so you’re not breathing it. And I made a simple gizmo that can hook up to any typestyle of ozone generator to get the job done. I got the utility patent for it and yeah, it’s just amazing to be able to make some ozone water and not have to leave. Because I used to just turn out the exhaust fan and leave and then come back after it was safe. But then it’s like I’ll forget that I ozonated water because I get doing something else. And ozone in water, that’s the other thing. You can’t go to the store and buy a bottle of ozonated water. Because depending on temperature, pH, and total dissolved solids in the water, that reaction where that third singlet breaks off could be anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, and then it’s done. It’s done.

[01:06:38] Ashley James: Bottled water companies that are saying you’re buying ozonated water. So, a friend of mine, she just moved her clinic, and she was ordering like a new Culligan service that was going to like Crystal Springs or something that was going to deliver her a bottle or two, these giant bottles each week so that her and her clients could drink the water. She goes, “Should I get the kind that is pH and ozonated?” I’m like, sure, why not? I mean, I’m all about the pH water as long as you’re not eating, like you don’t want to drink alkaline water while you’re eating because you don’t want to alkalize your stomach acid. Alkaline water is great in between meals. And I said, you know, I don’t know. I was honest. I don’t know much about ozonated water but I think ozone’s really cool. And I thought in the back of my mind, I wonder how stable that is. Because they do it in their factory and then it gets shipped to her, what, a week later, two weeks later, a month later.

[01:07:39] Eileen Durfee: All bottled water companies have ozonation and it is simply to keep the microbes so it passes their bacterial test. It’s just for sanitation during. There is no way. There is one company who has a patented pressurized type container that can keep the ozone active from breaking down. It’s a special technology. But just your bottled water and Culligan, I mean, I’m a fan of Mountain Valley Spring Water that I get delivered in 5-gallon glass bottles because it’s got the natural minerals in it, and it’s got the sacred geometry, the surface tension in the water so that it’s more hydrating to my cells versus purified water that’s been ozonated and maybe some minerals added back in there, but it’s not alive like spring water just going through those rocks and creating the structure and the sound from all of that is like life in water. Water is so important for the body.

[01:09:01] Ashley James: I had a doctor on the show who swears by that same water and he has it delivered it to him. He says it’s the only water he drinks. He said something about the depth and the structure of the water was so superior to everything else that it hydrated the body better. He had the scientific explanation for it but I was like, water is water, right? It’s like, wrong.

[01:09:24] Eileen Durfee: No.

[01:09:25] Ashley James: I mean, I believe obviously in filtered water but the water that comes out of your tap is actually structured differently than water that comes out of deep springs or artesian wells.

[01:09:35] Eileen Durfee: Yeah. And the energy, you know, it is dead. You look at it under a microscope and it’s like dead water. In reverse osmosis and distilled water, just rip minerals from the body, it’s worse. So, a lot of people are drinking the wrong kind of water. But yeah, water is so important. Oxygen is so important, and that’s why utilizing an ozone generator in your home can just really help with the body hydrating and getting the oxygen. Because oxygen is going to help your body hydrate, too. 

[01:10:16] Ashley James: I’m a big fan of glutathione, the killing of any kind of cell that’s not healthy for the body like cancer and infected cells, the killing of microbes. Does it disrupt parasites at all?

[01:10:32] Eileen Durfee: Yes, it does. Parasites is kind of like there’s not really a silver bullet. I’m a fan of telling people to do their coffee enemas because how it changes the pH and all that, bile that gets produced makes it harder for them to live, and obviously, having oxygen-rich because the hypoxic areas of the body are where these things are going to thrive. So, if you can reduce the amount of low oxygen areas in the body, then you’re obviously to reduce the amount of parasites. Really, digestive enzymes, having enough stomach acid to kill some of these things, but making your food safe. I’m a big fan of breathing clean air so you don’t have to detoxify what you just inhaled.

Likewise, prepping your food, so you’re not ingesting parasite larvae to complete its life cycle in your body. Let’s minimize the amount that we got to have to try to go on a cleanse to get rid of. In Europe, in a lot of the other different places, people will go on antiparasitic cleanses and things like that. In America, it’s like, who does it? Maybe some of the people in the biohacking community, but I imagine the general population are just full of parasites.

[01:12:09] Ashley James: Yes. I’ve had several doctors, the holistic health professionals that say that easily at 1/3 of the world’s population, including Americans have parasites, easily 1 of 3 people. So, it’s definitely something. And we used to do – we used to do annual parasite cleanses a hundred years ago. That was the thing up until about 100 years ago. We’re really blind to the health practices that we have been doing for the last 10,000 years — the health practices that we’ve developed in the west. I’d say in the east, there’s certain practices they’ve been doing for over 5000 years because they work. Right? Like annual parasite cleanses.

And we’re completely blind because in one generation they were able to switch people through great marketing. They were able to switch us from doing our own herbal medicine and homeopathy which there was homeopathic hospitals in 1918. There were herbal hospitals/herbal medicine. These were places that you could go and get natural proven, safe and effective treatments. Then along came pharmaceutical-based patented medicine that is derived from the petroleum industry and the byproducts of petroleum, and they saw a market and they went in for great amounts of marketing and developed this style of medicine. And through the brainwashing of marketing and PR, they were able to make us forget that we ever did these things on a regular basis to help ourselves.

If we could all go back and talk to our great-great grandparents, oh my gosh, the amount. I wish we could all go back in a time machine and learn from our great-great and great-great-great grandparents. And those young men and women could teach us how to grow healthy food, how to eat healthy, the herbs and the plants we could go into the forest and pick and heal our bodies with, but those were the things that they did and they had to do.

Now, we wait to get sick and then get put on a drug that manages symptoms and doesn’t help our body heal from the root cause, like heal from the ground up. Right? So, that’s why all the listeners are super excited to learn how they can heal their body because we have to take matters into our own hands.

So let’s say we have some water, we have an ozone machine, we have your device that makes it so that we can make our own ozonated water in a safe way, so we're not inhaling it. We could put it, what, in a spray bottle and spray down our counters. You say it lasts about up to 30 minutes, so we have to make some and then put in like a glass bottle and then spray down all our counters. How does it work to use it as a cleaner?

[01:15:20] Eileen Durfee: Yeah, you can put it in a spray bottle and spray it down or you can just take a clean rag, have that wet and then just wipe things down. So, there’s several ways of doing it. I’ve got a large model that farmers use that screw a hose in, screw a hose out, and put like a mister on the end of it and they’ll mist plants because it kills powdery mildew and this and that. Or they’ll spray down grow rooms because it kills everything better than bleach does. I’ve got people using it to bathe their pets in. One 4-H farmer sprays down his pig pens every day when he slops the hogs and no flies in the pig pen, if you can believe it, because it killed the larvae. And now, he doesn’t have to put miticide on any of the animal’s eyes.

[01:16:30] Ashley James: Wow! So you’re talking about farmers spraying down plants because it’s killing the bad stuff. But my question is, what about good bacteria? So, we have good bacteria in our mouth, in our gut. The whole lining of our intestines has good bacteria that aids in different functions. The good bacteria in our mouth helps us to make nitric oxide. And I had a whole episode on nitric oxide and people who use mouthwash which indiscriminately kills all the bacteria, the good and the bad. They have higher rates, significantly higher rates of heart disease because they have lower nitric oxide. So, we want to do everything we can to support the body’s ability to make nitric oxide and, in some cases, even supplement with it.

Then, of course, there’s bacteria all throughout the lining, the entire intestines from mouth to anus, and it helps us to digest and assimilate our nutrition and it’s even like a pharmacy. I’ve had several episodes where we talk about that six pounds of bacteria in your gut is like a pharmacy that actually makes these compounds, these healthy chemicals take our food, makes stuff for us, and then we uptake those chemicals like a healthy pharmaceutical and our body uses it. So, we have this wonderful relationship with this six pounds of health bacteria in our gut. Does ozone disrupt healthy bacteria?

[01:17:58] Eileen Durfee: I was on a doctor symposium about two months ago and one of the researchers there that uses ozone did a study, and ozone did not kill the good bacteria. Now, that’s been up for debate for a long time and so, I’m waiting to be able to get my hands on this study once he publishes it. Now, personally, I rinse my mouth with ozonated water. I brush my teeth in ozonated water every day. I haven’t had a cavity since I was 19 years old and I don’t have any gum disease and my gums are healthy. I’ve been doing the ozonated water thing since about 1996. I wash my face in ozonated water. And I drink one glass of ozonated water on an empty stomach in the morning. Not with vitamins because that can break down the goodness of the vitamins and stuff like that.

I know that CancerTutor.com, they recommend cancer patients drinking up to two liters of ozonated water a day, it’s not a standalone cancer protocol. It’s just something that helps raise the body oxygen levels. I mean, I take a good bacteria capsule morning and night just because of how important the gut bacteria and stuff are. But there’s going to be more and more studies coming out about how selective ozone is, how it doesn’t damage the cell with an enzyme coating and how it doesn’t hurt the beneficial bacteria. So, these are going to be exciting things. 

[01:20:01] Ashley James: Just thinking about like for example, children who have a sore throat or children who have ear infections gargling with it, like how you would say okay, you take colloidal silver or gargle with salt water to help kill the bacteria, kill the infection. You could gargle with it. Could you take a few drops and put it in an ear if there’s an outer ear infection? Can you put it on, if there’s a rash or if there’s an infection in the skin or like cystic acne, does it help in those kinds of applications?

[01:20:37] Eileen Durfee: Yeah, I actually had a customer, her legs were so bad and infected that they were almost ready to amputate them. And she was using my first instant on-demand ozone generator and she would run ozone water on her legs and then in little strips and she’d saturate it with ozonated water and then she would wrap them on her legs. The before and after was incredible because all of the lesions and the deep infections in her legs were healed. She had smooth skin.

So, you’re going to want to do something with besides just washing it if you’ve got something really going on with your skin, you could create same bandages and keep the moisture of the ozonated water while it’s active on the problem area. Now, there’s a lot of people who sell like ozonated olive oil in a paste that you can put on your skin for things like that.

My ozone generator is not set up for that because that actually literally takes over a week of constant ozonation to turn an oil into a paste. But those are very healthy for skin issues. I mean, we have our own skincare line with tallows and stuff, they’re very, very, very healing. That’s kind of like on a different nutrient nourishing level. But yes, ozone on the skin, I think that’s why my skin looks so good is I’ve washed my face in ozonated water for many years.

[01:22:34] Ashley James: So every day, we could just wake up in the morning, hit the button, make ourselves some ozone water, drink it, use it, slosh it around our mouth, use it when we brush our teeth, wash our face and clean down our counters, water our houseplants to get rid of the bugs. You could feed it or bathe the dog in it, feed it to the animals, put it on our garden outside. The list goes on. I’m starting to think about all the different applications.

[01:23:08] Eileen Durfee: Yeah, well, I had one rancher that had chickens. He hooked up the bigger unit on a timer to dispense ozonated water in the troughs of the birds. So, the first thing that happened is he never had to clean algae out of the troughs anymore. The second thing that happened is the birds started drinking more water. And they were healthier because normally, from hatching chickens to growth in adults, you just have some birds that die. Ever since he put in the ozonators, he didn’t have any birds die. It kills bird flu on contact.

[01:23:57] Ashley James: Oh my gosh!

[01:23:59] Eileen Durfee: So, literally, they had a washing machine with the one that has the venturi injection where they would clean the rags and stuff, because that stuff is very contagious, so any of the work overalls or anything like that to have it cleaned there to keep things in check. And they started spraying the fly pens because a lot of the chickens too will get lice and different things on their legs and things like that. So with this constant spraying kind of like the pig farmer, any of the eggs, it would cause not as many of them to hatch. So, the populations of just all the stuff that you’d have to deal with reduced.

Then as far as watering ozone plant roots, the one big machine that I’ve got has a dial on it so you can go maximum for foliar feeding. Because foliar feeding, they did a study on onions and cucumbers. It got rid of powdery mildew, mold, but the side effect was the same crop area produced 40 percent more. So, the plants love it when they uptake it through their leaves and so then you’re not having to put stuff to deal with the mold and the mildew and things like that. But then the plants are healthier, they grow more, but for the roots, you really have to dial down the ozone so that the soil microbes stay good and balanced, but yet then it’s up-taking the oxygen.

So, there’s just so many ways and industries where ozonated water can be used, and now, you could do it at home.

[01:26:17] Ashley James: Just the bird flu. My family’s plant-based but I have a lot of friends who rely on chicken and eggs as part of their diet. Several of my friends are freaking out because the bird flu is wiping entire farms across the states, just wiping them out. And there’s a deep concern. I mean, we’ve already seen like a bit of a food crisis in that the prices have gone up, inflation, and that the supply change has been disrupted for the last two years. There’s many farms that have stopped growing crops for various reasons. We’re seeing issues. And then, now, we’re seeing the bird flu. Just crazy.

I don’t know if you know about this but in the last few years, they had to cull more pigs than the entire population of China. It was some wild number of pigs. They had to cull because of the swine flu that it’s like Ebola for pigs. They had to cull so much that it disrupted their food supply and they stopped exporting many of their key foods in the last few years. There’s all these disruptions, right? We’ve got the crops in Ukraine and in Russia disrupted from the war. So, we have all these disruptions and then to add on, in addition to that, in the United States entire chicken farms and egg farms completely destroyed and decimated from the bird flu/the avian flu. And so, if we were to get this ozonated water in all of the farms, it’s leading to a better quality of life.

[01:28:11] Eileen Durfee: This machine that I have has a handle on it with folding legs. You screw a hose in from your faucet and you want the hose to be no longer than 10 feet long. Then, you screw a hose on the outset of it and if you have that more than 10 feet long, you need an inline pumper. You can get that 3/8 inch. It’s like a coiled hose with the sprayer you see on it. Then you’ll have enough pressure to spray and mist and I tell you what, the chicken farmers that I have, one of them just breathing, that’s one that I was talking about, and there’s other ones that are doing the 4H and the home thing.

But it’s normally like these big industrial type ozone machines, they’re making and spraying in the vineyards and all that, most small farms, they don’t have $25,000 to $30,000 for that. And this little machine, it’s a little over $2,000 and you could have this machine and take it and use it wherever you need it. And it produces up to 6 parts per million. It’s a bad boy man. It is powerful.

They did a study where they scrubbed cow feces on the walls. There’s like 50 different pathogens that can grow out of cow feces. They took different concentrations of ozone and sprayed it on there and figured out what it would take to kill it, and you need 4 parts per million. So, my big Tri-Oxy Complete Machine, it makes 6 parts per million. It is just like an annihilator man.

So, that’s meant for using outdoors or in larger areas where you don’t have to worry about breathing too much ozone gas. The growers that are using it in greenhouses, what they do, is like the painters who paint houses, they have that airless paint sprayer, they just fill up a 5-gallon bucket of ozonated water, and they hook it up to their airless paint sprayer, and they’re spraying the plants with ozonated water that way so it coats them completely. So, there’s ways around not having to be in fear about that stuff and protect yourself.

[01:31:05] Ashley James: And all the chemicals. That just eliminated so many chemicals from our air, from our water, from our food, and from our soil. What if every farmer used your machine? We’d be able to eliminate so many chemicals. It’s just amazing.

[01:31:23] Eileen Durfee: I read a study on strawberries, where not only did they not spoil it as much, but their nutrient concentration of ozonated strawberry plants, the produce, the berries actually was higher. It’s just like, is this a miracle or what?

[01:31:46] Ashley James: Well, it makes sense, right? So the plant loves it; the plant uptakes it more and it disrupts the bad microbiome, allowing the healthy tissue to grow. Then because the plant is so happy absorbing all that, it’s absorbing more nutrients as a result. So, that just makes so much sense.

Now, ozone kills mold. So, someone could use it in their bathrooms when they clean, on their windowsills. Like when they see mold in their home, they could be using this as a nontoxic way to combat mold.

[01:32:20] Eileen Durfee: Yes. But also, the ionic refresher, I have a plug-in gizmo that kills 99 percent of pathogens in the air. And every time you flush the toilet, you’re sending E. coli everywhere in the air. And keeping those in your bathroom really reduces molds, spores, and everything else in the air.

But yeah, you go at it from because you don’t want mold spores in the air, but you got to clean mold off of surfaces too. One in two homes have a moisture problem according to the government. And I used to build 12 houses a year and ran construction crews, so I’m very informed about moisture problems in buildings and things that people need to create a safe home.

[01:33:13] Ashley James: And your machine helps us do that. I’m really, really excited because the problem is, is we are using so many chemicals in our environment just to clean. People that don’t know, right? They're using like baking soda or vinegar or something, like spraying down the house with vinegar and then the house attracts flies and smells like something fermented. But that’s what we deal with. We’re realizing everything under our kitchen sink is dangerous for us.

An early interview I did a few years ago was with a woman who puts a device in your home and it’s like an air filter that captures particles. Then, she takes the machine and plugs it into a computer and based on the particle – so this is just air that’s in your home, like you’re walking around breathing in your home. You don’t smell stuff unless you have like Febreze plug-in thing. You’re not smelling anything, right? So she has this machine, you put it in your living room and basically breathe your air just like you breathe your air, and when you breathe, there’s fine particles of chemicals in your air that’s floating around. Your air is not pure unless you have these amazing HEPA air filters all around.

So, you’re breathing in chemicals in the air. And we don’t smell it, we don’t see it, we don’t taste it. We don’t realize that what it does is when it gets into our nasal cavity and then we swallow it and it goes down into our stomach and we absorb it, then it gets into our body, our liver has to process it, it gets into our adipose tissue and hangs out basically until we get overly toxic and then maybe we lose a little bit of weight and something happens. And now it’s released again into the body and the liver has to do something with it again. It just kind of keeps cycling through the body over and over and building up and building up and building up.

But it’s so small and we don’t see it or taste it that we don’t realize it’s there. So, this little machine breathes in our air just like we do. And then, she analyzes it and she can tell you, get this, this has just freaked me out, she goes, “I can tell you which Mr. Clean you are using based on the chemical readout.” The Mr. Clean that is in your cupboard, in your kitchen or down the hallway in your bathroom because every plastic bottle in your house, and if you have an attached garage, every can or jar or bottle of chemicals. So think about if you have an attached garage, all the stuff for automotive, all the paint stuff. Just everything you’ve got in there. All of your stuff you got under every single sink in your house is off gassing all the time. Your liver is processing every chemical that’s in a bottle in your house all the time.

Because these are not like her medically sealed bottles, they’re plastic. And so, it actually leaks through slowly. But it’s this constant slow drip of toxicity and as we’ve heard from many people, many experts that our indoor air population is ten times worse than outdoor air population. You live in New York City? Go outside and breathe the exhaust out there. It’s probably better than what’s trapped in your house because of everything that’s off gassing.

So, if we can get rid of all the junk, all the chemicals and the junk that’s under your sink, and replace it with something that actually works better as a cleaning agent that actually works better as a disinfectant agent that’s safe to wash our produce with, to wash our counters with, to wash our floors with and everything, and wash our face with, and is incredibly effective, that decreases the toxicity in your life while at the same time increasing your health. So, I just think it’s a much-needed device on all those ends.

For those who are excited to dive in and look into it, they can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone. Tell us about the different devices. Once they go there and they’re seeing your systems — you’ve talked about farms versus the home — is it sort of one size fits all or are there different ones that you would explain that people could get based on their needs?

[01:37:47] Eileen Durfee: I have two ozone generators. One that’s called the Tri-Oxy FRESH. It’s a countertop model. I have a nice video on that. And that uses diffusion where we give you the silicon tube with the different diffusers, balls, cylinders that you submerge in water and you can turn on the machine. It’s got a touch panel and a remote control, timer, and all that kind of stuff.

Then, we have the bigger one that has folding legs, it’s all stainless steel with the handle. It’s kind of like the monster that you screw a hose in and screw a hose out that’s got the adjustable from 0 part per million to 6 parts per million. See, the smaller one is 800 mg/hr. So, it’s just under 1 versus this other one producing 6 parts per million.

Basically, you can use the big one with the hose. I have people hooking it up to their washing machines. I have people hooking it up for the farming needs, for watering systems. Then the one for the countertop model, that also comes in a kit. You save money when you buy the kit. There’s this ozone water sterilizer, food, and enema prep kit. It doesn’t have your enema kit in it but it’s got the degasser and the Tri-Oxy FRESH generator. So, you save money buying that together. And you can buy them individually. If somebody already has their ozone generator, they can get the degassing kit.

And that’s it. So, there’s really just the two systems. The big one uses venturi injection. The difference between diffusion, which we didn’t get into, that’s what you use in the water bottle plants. They use diffusion where they’ll have bubbles going up these towers to ozonate the water. So, the smaller the bubble, the quicker it dissolves into water because it’s got more surface area. It’s like versus sand in a container versus rocks in a container. There’s more surface area in sand than the bigger rocks. 

With the FRESH, you’re given multiple different diffusers that have a variety of hole sizes, so you can dissolve ozone gas really fast, which is nice because the ozone generators that I used to buy when I’d use it every day would wear out in a year. I’d have to buy a new machine and when I designed mine, it’s like, man, I don’t want that to happen. So, I have the 8000-hour ozone generator so it’s going to last years and years and years, but still, if I can ozonate water, dissolve the ozone gas in the water faster, that’s better. Because diffusion, only 15 percent of the gas that the machine makes dissolves in the water; 85 percent of it goes to the air. And it’s the absolute reverse for the diffusion, the big guy, 85 percent dissolves and only 15 percent goes in the air.

So, with that degasser, you’re going to get some diffusers that instead of having to run it with the container of water for 30 minutes, you can ozonate that container for 5 minutes. It’s going to extend the life of your ozone generator besides protect your lungs.

[01:37:47] Ashley James: Fascinating. With the countertop one that does 1 part per million in an hour, is that enough to use therapeutically?

[01:42:11] Eileen Durfee: Well, if you ozonate cold water for instance, I have had a meter and measured, it’d all make up to 1.5 parts per million. And that is like the oxygen-fed ozone generators produce less ozone concentration than the corona discharge. So, this is way sufficient for anything that you would want to do with your drinking water doing an enema with ozonated water.

Another comment I wanted to make is that corona discharge still has .003 percent nitrous oxide, and that’s why you cannot use it for ozonating your blood or doing the insufflation with the gas. So, don’t think you’re saving money by buying this unit and not having to have the prescription for the ozone tanks. You can only use this for ozonating the water that you would drink or maybe follow up with an enema or cleaning your food or sterilizing your counters. That’s what this machine was created for – to be easy to use, with the degasser of course.

The degasser is just a 32-ounce glass jar with a handle that has a filter cap that you screw on and the filter media that you put in there one time, which I have a video on how to do it, it will last you 10 years. You only have to put it in there once, screw it on, and then it just basically is copper manganese pallets that when ozone gas interacts with it, it causes that O1 molecule to immediately break off. So then, the only thing left that comes out in the air is nonflammable concentrations of oxygen. So, it’s totally safe. I had one of those ambient meter tests, and sure enough, it degasses 100 percent, so it’s very effective.

[01:44:35] Ashley James: Very cool. I had a man who he healed his own cancer and has gone on to help others do the same and he swears by doing daily enemas with ozonated water or the other way, which is basically getting a bag of ozone gas and holding it up your rectum like a reverse fart. You just have to hold it up there and then it gets into your lymph system and into your venous blood flow system the same way with the coffee enemas, so it gets in you. But it’s not straight IV. Right? That’s something different and a different machine. He swears by that.

He also said we really should look at other countries to see what they're doing and which countries have better rates of success. Because when we compare America, for example, has one of the highest death rates for infant mortality of the industrialized the world, has the worst outcomes for chronic disease. We spend the most money. We’re the number one. The only thing we’re number one in health is we’re the number one spenders of money for a healthcare system that doesn’t work. It’s a healthcare system that’s broken, that has some of the worst outcomes in the world for, when I say industrialized nations, other countries that have access to the same pharmaceutical medicine.

So, the problem is, why are we continually going back to the system that is broken that is continually keeping us sick? It’s because again, it’s like the wolves of our eyes. We don’t know that there’s a better way out there. In the UK, in the EU, in the European Union, it is allowable to give a cancer patient ozone. It’s allowable to do hyperbaric chambers to do treatments where they bring the body up to 109 degrees while protecting the vasculature to the brain. They bring the body up into a state of fever, like getting in a sauna but even higher. With the heat shock protein, it helps kill most cancers. Same with ozone that it’s used and it’s allowed. In the United States, oncologists are not allowed to use those medicines. They are only allowed to do surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and now, there’s been a few immune drugs that still fall under the category of chemotherapy as far as I’m concerned. But they're not allowed to go, oh hey, let’s do a hyperbaric chamber, let’s raise your oxygen levels, let’s do some ozone. They're not allowed to do that. 

Why do we have to go down to Tijuana, Mexico to cancer clinics? There’s cancer clinics lining the border with American doctors who have to go across the border to give you medicines that you can get in hospitals in Europe. Why do we have to feel like we're criminals going across the border to Tijuana, Mexico to do something illegal in the States. Why is finding a better solution illegal in our country. We have to start questioning the status quo because the status quo is killing us. Right? So, that’s why I love your machines. This is something we should all have access to, and people in other countries do.

So, I absolutely am so excited for the solutions that you bring. Of course, listeners, go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone, you’re going to see that. Then, you had said to me before we hit record that you wanted to make sure our listeners got a discount, so please give us some more information on that and anything else in terms of buying this that people should know about.

[01:48:41] Eileen Durfee: I would definitely buy the ozone water sterilizer prep kit because that’s $399.99 versus paying $249 for one and $219 for the other. But I’m going to give Ashley a special coupon code that she’s going to have on her ozone page that you can use for the next 30 days to buy anything on the ozone page and get your discount.

[01:49:13] Ashley James: Thank you for giving us a discount. I really appreciate it when guests do that for us.

So, in terms of the enema kit, you said that there’s all these different kits. Just break it down for us to make it real simple. What should we get when we want to treat our bodies to get better health, to get optimal health. We also want to make sure we’re washing our food, cleaning our counters, that kind of thing, but we also want to do the stuff that helps our body detox and get all the benefits that we talked about throughout the whole episode.

[01:49:46] Eileen Durfee: Yes. We have a standup no-mess coffee enema kit. I call it “the enema fix.” I always gave my clients the two-week coffee enema challenge. If I could just get a person to do it daily for two weeks, I’d never have to ask them again to do it, but the common complaints are… and some of them weren’t excuses. People had back pain or they have problems with their knees, and it was too difficult for them to lay down. Then the people that could, when they would get up, when they had to eliminate, then fecal water matter would go everywhere and make a mess, and so people weren’t too fond of doing the coffee enemas just because it was such a mess, even though it made them feel fantastic.

So, I had a client that was bound and determined to do the coffee enemas. This is back when I had a bag that you could turn inside out to clean because the bags, you couldn’t clean them, so I got one that I could turn inside out. He wouldn’t lay down, but he stood up and he painstakingly rolled the bag so it pumped the fluid up inside him, so he was doing the coffee enemas standing up.

That gave me an idea to get like a pump. And I had a little pump bottle, I would have to fill it up multiple times and the hose was kind of short, and so, I created an adaptor to fit on a glass jar, and by the way, not all glass even though it’s food-safe is toxin-free. So, my glass jar that I had made for both the enema fix and the degasser is SGS certified, and I put all my product testing on the website, too, so there’s transparency there. But I created a jar with a handle that’s 32 ounces, so you can pour. I use my spring water. Then I brew up some coffee and just pour a little bit of that in there. That way, I’m taking room temperature water with hot fresh brewed coffee, pour it in. That way, there’s no waiting. It’s just perfect tepid temperature. Then there’s an adaptor with a pump. So, you can prime out the liquid and you can stand in your shower, and you can fill up with half of it or whatever is comfortable, then you can just massage up your ascending colon across your transfers. Then, when you need to eliminate, you just sit on the toilet. 

So, it just took all the medicine. I was one of those people that I spent $300 and I had a Climaboard. As a matter of fact, I bought three because I was going to make a better one because I didn’t like all of them. But that’s a lot of money for people to have to invest in and after I created the pump, I don’t even use my Climaboard anymore. I put it up. Because this, it’s just cleaning the bottle, not scrubbing the laying surface and all that kind of stuff.

But go to the enema page and there’s the standup no-mess kit. It removes every excuse and you can just enjoy yourself, meditate, you could work on your fascia while you’re in the shower. You can do a lot of different things. I always try to stack my hacks because how else are we going to fit all these wonderful into our daily life?

[01:53:43] Ashley James: Yes, right. I love that idea that we could be using like a fascia brush or we could use a lymph brush and be moving our lymph flow while we’re doing it. We could do some stretches. Well, as long as you’re holding that Kegel, you could do some light stretches. You could be singing in the shower. The acoustics are fantastic. So, there’s all kinds of fun you could do. How long do you do a coffee enema for? Five to 15 minutes? Or is there like a sweet spot?

[01:54:13] Eileen Durfee: The sweet spot in those studies when Hitler’s army was cut off from supplies and they were operating on soldiers without anesthetics and the pain relief was so unbelievable, that’s for a university study, and they found that all of the caffeine and palmitic acid was gone from the rectal solution in 12 minutes. So, I always tell people, I mean nobody’s going to be able to hold it for 12 minutes the first time. You just don’t have those rectal muscles to balance. So, that’s part of that two-week challenge. By the end of two weeks, I bet you can. But I just tell people don’t sweat it. If you can hold it a minute, great. Or three or whatever it is. That’s the purpose of that nice 32-ounce glass jar because you could do half. And then, when you’re done eliminating, you can fill up again. You know, whatever total hold time, our goal is to get to 12 minutes.

[01:55:17] Ashley James: Yes. I like that you said you could do half. Because you don’t have to use all 32 ounces at once. Really, you just need a little bit of liquid in the rectum. This isn’t the American “if some is good, more is better.” I always have to remind myself. We’re not filling the entire colon with coffee. This is a little like one cup, half a cup, one cup to start. Just a little bit, right?

I notice that I would do is first of all, I would do an enema just with warm water just to clean out and then I would do half of the coffee and sometimes I would be able to last one minute, two minutes, and then sit on the toilet. Then that next go, I could go for 15 minutes. As long as I did my little cleanout beforehand and kind of psych my body up with the first installment of coffee, which this coffee is not like Starbucks. It’s very different. And we’ve talked about it with Dr. Patrick Vickers but I’d love to have you back on the show t go into more detail because it is so important as a regular health regimen, as something you could do daily, or weekly to support your body and your liver in detoxification and getting rid of parasites. There are so many benefits to this.

For people who are facing major illness, they want to do it more often. For someone who just wants to maintain health or just a little bit of a leg up, it’s a wonderful solution. I always feel amazing after I do it. And it does become a little addictive simply because of how good you feel afterwards and how good you feel for the rest of the day. You can really feel the difference it makes.

I’m going to make sure that the links to everything are in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone. I’ll also do just to make it easy, I’ll make a link, so LearnTrueHealth.com/enema. That’ll go straight to the coffee enema solution that you’ve made it tremendously easy because man, I can’t tell you. I’ve spent a lot of money on different enema kits and they all are frustrating, and so I’m really excited to try yours because you figured out how to take the mess out of the whole process and make it easy. If you can make something quick and easy, just as easy as brewing a cup of tea or coffee, then we’re going to do it. But if there’s like 20 steps like these other coffee enema kits out there, then the harder it is, the less likely we are to do it. So, you’ve taken the work out of it, made it so that we can easily integrate it into our daily habits for health. And I really appreciate that.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you being here today and I can’t wait to have you back on the show. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:58:31] Eileen Durfee: Just that trying something new is going to get you different results. With the ozonated water, don’t do it at night because it’s going to give you a bunch of energy. People don’t realize how lacking of oxygen they are and when their body has it, you’re just all energized. So, you maybe find yourself drinking too much coffee in the morning. That’s why doing ozonated water in the morning is so fantastic because it just gives you that natural energy that your body is looking for.

[01:59:14] Ashley James: Love it. So there’s that and then there’s also the coffee enemas. Then, you can take the coffee enema kit and use ozonated water, right? 

[01:59:25] Eileen Durfee: Yes!

[01:59:26] Ashley James: So we can also gain the benefits of that.

[01:59:27] Eileen Durfee: Yes! And don’t mix. Don’t mix. Okay, this is the other thing. Remember, ozone oxidizes and breaks everything down. It changes their structure. So we want caffeine and palmitic acid to remain intact. We don’t want the ozone using up its power by breaking down the goodness out of the coffee. So, you have to do them separate.

[01:59:56] Ashley James: Got it, got it. Could you be brewing or simmering the water like that’s kind of getting ready, and you go and you grab the ozone water, and you run into the bathroom and do an ozonated water enema, and then you sit on the toilet, clear out, and then go grab the coffee and then do it?

[02:00:21] Eileen Durfee: Yes, you can.

[02:00:22] Ashley James: So it could be part of the whole routine. How long should we hold the water in the rectum, the ozonated water? Again, this is, what, like a cup of water. It’s again not like a colonic where you’re filling your entire colon. We just need a little bit, so a few ounces of water. How much water is good and how long is good given that the machine, like you said, can make 1 to 1 ½ parts per million? 

[02:00:55] Eileen Durfee: So your body temperature, the higher the temperature, the quicker it oxidizes. So, as you put the ozonated water in your rectum, you’re going to find that it’s oxidizing quite quickly. So, five minutes should give you a lot of benefits.

[02:01:20] Ashley James: Got it. Do we need to use cold water, or can we heat the water?

[02:01:26] Eileen Durfee: Well, it’s up to you. I have a meter that measures ozone, and I actually have an ozone generator set up on my shower.

[02:01:43] Ashley James: Nice.

[02:01:45] Eileen Durfee: So, cold water, I had it at 1 part per million. The hot water, like a hot shower, is .3 part per million. So, you’ll be able to achieve higher concentrations of ozone in the water when it’s cooler. But I would just recommend the tepid because that’ll be somewhere in between. It’s not a hot shower. It’s not ice cold. So, it’s going to be somewhere in between. Like room temperature water, you could get it to 1 part per million very easily.

[02:02:21] Ashley James: And that should be fine. I mean, people who are new to enemas though, maybe start with internal body temperature. I think for those who are not used to enemas, then they put cold water in the rectum, it can cause cramping and kind of shocks them a little bit. So, it’s just like drinking a really, really cold ice water when you’re hot and you weren’t expecting it to be cold and you’re like “ooh!” and the body reacts. So, you want to ease into it. Everything should be easing into it slowly. 

Great. I love that whole idea, that process that we could use the ozonated water for an enema for a few minutes while the coffee water is preparing and then go get the coffee water and do that enema. And the whole process is going to take about half an hour because again, you’re not holding it for a very long time. But this, although half an hour out of someone’s day when they're very busy seems like a lot, something you can do in the morning, wake up a little earlier, go to bed a little earlier, wake up a little earlier. Then, the entire rest of the day, all your cells are singing. Everything is working better that it’s just so exciting to think about your liver is functioning better, it’s making the glutathione, all the antioxidants are going through the body, all the pathogens are exploding and your body is able to recycle those damaged cells. Just all the benefits go on and on.

So, thank you so much for coming on the show. Please come back and continue sharing about the things that we can do to incorporate into our life that we’re not taught, that we should be taught. This should be something that’s in everyone’s home. In Vegas you buy a house and there’s water softener just already there and there’s reverse osmosis just already under the sink. That’s kind of standard for certain parts of America. There should be an ozone machine inside people’s home. This should be something that we have access to because of all the numerous benefits. But it’s up to us – it’s up to us to do it.

So go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone, check it out. I can’t wait to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for all this information today.

[02:04:30] Eileen Durfee: Thank you for having me, Ashley.

[02:04:32] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. I am so excited to get myself one of these ozone machines. I’ve been thinking about everything I’m going to use it for. Our family doesn’t have a lot of cavities. We’re better than most. But just the thought that we could prevent cavities for the next 10-20 years or more, that we could have better oral health, just that alone is really exciting. And to be able to use ozonated water to treat scrapes and little skin infections and maybe my son in 10 years will start developing acne as he goes through puberty, who knows, and just be able to wash our face with that. Of course, everything is about balancing the microbiome. And so the idea that we can support ourselves in this way, support our liver and support our bodies in detoxification, use ozone to mop up those free radicals, those extra hydrogen.

Here’s something you might not know. A former guest recently explained this. You know pH, right? Everyone knows alkaline versus acidic. I’m sure you’ve heard, if you’re listening to a holistic health podcast, you’ve heard, “Oh, we want to eat alkaline. We want to make sure that our body is in a state of alkalinity. The alkaline diet and drink alkaline water.” Of course, don’t drink it while you’re eating. You actually want your stomach to be acidic. There are times when certain parts of your body need to be acidic like your stomach when you’re digesting. The first 75 percent of time that you’re digesting is acidic and then right before the stomach dumps its contents into the small intestines, it neutralizes. So, about an hour or two, maybe two hours after you’ve eaten, you can start drinking alkaline water. If that’s your thing, cool.

But here’s the thing: pH is actually the measurement. So the H is hydrogen. It’s the measurement of loose hydrogen bombarding the body, like I had said, like bullets bombarding the body. So, if we have more acidity, we actually have more loose hydrogen bombarding the body, like bullets piercing through our cells, damaging DNA, which you might know that damaged DNA can turn into or it’s hypothesized that damaged DNA turns into cancer. But also, the more damage we have to cells, we have premature aging, that’s not good. The more damage we have to cells, the more our body has to use up its resources to heal and repair and restore rather than fight off illness and rather than create optimal health, so our body is always just sort of maintaining like rebuilding after a war instead of getting to that next level of health.

So, if we can mop up those free radicals and prevent those free radicals, then our body goes into a state of balance and then it can use all of its resources, enzymes and energy towards becoming even healthier. I’m just so excited for all of us to know this, to use it, to experience it. Please come to the Facebook group. If you’re going to get one of these machines or if you have already gotten one, come to the Facebook group and please, please, please share your experience.

Now, she’s only giving the coupon code for the next 30 days, so I hope you’ve listened to this episode in the first 30 days. After 30 days I’m going to ask her if she could extend that, so I’m hoping she does. So, still try it out, go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone, try the coupon code “LTH”. I’m going to go back to her and see if I can get her to permanently extend or something, give us something because I really like giving you guys specials from my guests that I have on and extending that to you guys.

So, if you’re going to use the machine, come to the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook Group. You can go to it by searching LearnTrueHealth.com/group. Come to the Facebook group and share with us your experience. I want to know, I want to hear, what you’re using it for, what’s your health benefit. Let’s talk about this machine.

I have had guests on the show that talk about using this style of machine for their personal cancer protocols and immune boosting protocols. So it’s interesting to hear about the other applications which we talked about throughout the podcast. And I’d love to hear why you’re going to use it and what you’re using it for. So please, come to the Facebook group and share. Or if you have any questions, let’s start conversation and I can see if I can get her to come into the Facebook group and answer those for you. So, come to the Facebook group, let’s start the discussion about today’s episode and I’d love to see you there.

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. It’s through sharing that we’re going to get the word out and help as many of our friends as possible to end their suffering.

You know, about 10 or so, actually it’s been longer than that, 11 years ago when I started to get my health back, which is really exciting. So, let’s say about 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago, I was crying myself to sleep almost every night. I was tortured by a sick body and I wanted out, but I didn’t know how. It wasn’t until I found this naturopath I started to discover this information and it was one step that led to another. And you don’t know in your life the people you care about, because I didn’t tell anyone how miserable I was. I didn’t. Buy you could have looked at me and you could have seen that I was not doing well. I did not look healthy. I did not feel healthy.

Look at your friends and family and those you care about. If there’s something that just might look off, like maybe they're not happy, maybe they're living in a body they're not happy with, maybe they're feeling symptoms and they're not telling you, share my podcast with them because you don’t know that might be the one friend who’s crying themselves to sleep in their pillow so sick of the suffering, living inside the prison of a sick body. And they don’t even know this information exists. So, please, be that hero in their life. Be that angel in their life and share with them an episode that may give them the hope that may open the crack in that door that shows them a whole world of healing. 

I had chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections in which I was on monthly antibiotics for. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told I was infertile after a battery of tests by an endocrinologist that I’d never have kids. I was so sick that every morning I couldn’t get out of bed until about 11. I couldn’t process human language in the morning. The brain fog was so severe. I was constantly hungry; I had to eat every 45 minutes. It drove me nuts. I was so sick. It was agony being in my body. And how many people did I bump into or come across that knew about holistic medicine that knew about these answers but were too shy to tell me? I finally, finally, finally found it. And you can have someone in your life that might be suffering and may have been told just like me by their doctors that they’ll always have this illness. 

Here’s the thing. My doctors told me you just have to take these drugs, you’ll always have type 2 diabetes, you’ll always have chronic adrenal fatigue, you’ll always have these chronic infections, you’ll always have polycystic ovarian syndrome. When I discovered naturopathic medicine and true holistic naturopathic medicine, and I went down that rabbit hole of changing my diet, changing my lifestyle, taking really, really high-quality supplements from TakeYourSupplements.com, when I did that, that’s when within three months I no longer had diabetes, my chronic adrenal fatigue started to go away within 5 days. I woke up on day 5 feeling like a million bucks. And I had been sick for years.

My chronic infections went away the moment that I shopped the perimeter of the grocery store, meaning don’t go in the aisles and buy processed food. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store and choose organic. I was just doing an experiment. My chronic infections went away. That’s how important going organic and not eating processed food is to the immune system. And I thought, holy crow, what else can I heal just by making one change?

So that’s what my whole podcast is about. This one change at a time that you can make, that you can say hey, what your doctor has told you is a lie. Because all those doctors that said to me I’d be on these meds my whole life, I’d always have these problems, you know, my bloodwork has shown for the last two years that I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s actually been longer than two years, but I’m just remembering back to the last few doctor’s appointments. All my blood work shows I no longer have it. My A1c is 4.7. For those who understand diabetes, that’s amazing blood sugar. I have outstanding blood sugar. Type 2 diabetes is reversible within three months. It’s just crazy that doctors are going on and saying you have to be on metformin and insulin the rest of your life when it is lifestyle and diet, and in some cases, it’s a mineral deficiency as well. So, we address that. TakeYourSupplements.com has an amazing blood sugar protocol for increasing insulin sensitivity.

So my point being, that we can heal. And you, our listeners, so I’m already preaching to the choir, but you might have someone in your life who’s suffering and they don’t have to suffer anymore and you have the answers, but maybe you’re afraid to share it, please know there are people in your life just like me who are crying themselves to sleep suffering deeply. And it takes a little bit of courage on your part to say, “Hey, do you want to listen to this podcast I’m really, really enjoying? They might have some answers for you.”

So, I’m just putting it out there because my goal is to end the suffering of millions of people that no longer need to suffer. Eventually, I’m going to get on the radar of big pharma. I am praying to stay under the radar here. But I want to make a difference in millions of people’s lives. And you’re part of that. You’re part of that. I have talked to listeners who are like “I tell everyone!” I had a listener who printed out laminated cards like business cards with Learn True Health podcast and how to listen to it and every single person she came into. I was like, I love her. This is it. Because she understands that people no longer need to suffer. We are able to heal. We are able to heal the body. The body is able to heal itself. We just have to give it what it needs and get out of its way.

That’s what my goal is with each episode, is to extract that information for you and condense it so that you can walk away after each episode going “Okay! I got an action in plan. I’ve got some steps I can take.” So, please share it, come to the Facebook group if you haven’t already. We have very active conversations about health and healing, it’s wonderful. So many people are helping each other and I try to answer every single one. I’m pretty sure I do. It’s every single post we have between 1 and 8 questions a day that come in. I’m in there and we’re all in there answering each other’s questions and helping each other. And I’m discovering resources too. We’re all helping each other in the Learn True Health Facebook group.

So, come join it, share with your friends. Thank you so much for being a listener. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

 

Get Connected with Eileen Durfee!

Website

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

YouTube

TikTok

Aug 8, 2022

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

Learntruehealth.com/coach

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

 

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

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

 

Highlights:

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

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

Intro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:14:48] Ashley James: Oh, my gosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:21:33] Ashley James: Cancer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:38:55] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[01:10:58] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Wow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Get Connected with Dr. Mark Sherwood!

 

Website

Facebook

Instagram

YouTube

Twitter

 

Books by Dr. Mark Sherwood

 

The Quest For Wellness

Fork Your Diet

Surviving the Garden of Eatin’

Jul 26, 2022

Check out more articles, science, benefits and studes on heat and full-spectrum light therapy using Sunlighten Saunas and light devises:

LearnTrueHealth.com/sunlightensauna

Dr. Wendie's gift to you: www.fivejourneys.com/promo

 

Detox, Self-Healing from Mold & Stress with Dr. Wendie Trubow

https://www.learntruehealth.com/detox-self-healing-from-mold-stress-with-dr-wendie-trubow

 

Highlights:

  • The importance of detoxing
  • The impact of stress on body functions
  • Mycotoxins
  • Genetics is not a death sentence
  • Microbiome health and leaky gut trifectas
  • Why toxicity testing is important in improving our health

Stress has tremendous effects on our bodies. It can affect our ability to detox, digest food, ovulate, have sex, uptake nutrients, and even control our food cravings! In this episode, Dr. Wendie Trubow shares how we can recover from stress and other health issues just by changing our diet and lifestyle!

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today’s episode is really awesome. We have Dr. Wendie Trubow with us today, who, through her own healing journey, discovered a unique way of focusing on supporting the body’s ability to detox, heal the thyroid, balance hormones, especially for women going perimenopause or menopause and just how they get on the other side of feeling poopie and to the point where you’re feeling awesome. Another big thing we talked about is that these toxins can lead to abdominal fat and can lead to depression, and can lead to fatigue. And so many of us are running around getting our coffee fix in the morning, getting our sugar fix in the afternoon, so it’s a self-medicating fatigue, not realizing that fatigue is a symptom of toxicity overload and that by doing daily simple things with our lifestyle and our diet and our nutrition, little fun life hacks that we can maximize our body’s ability to heal itself, maximize the body’s ability to detox and balance hormones and feel amazing.

Wendie, after our interview, said, oh no, I forgot to tell everyone about this freebie that I’m giving away. So I want you to know to go to her website fivejourneys.com/promo, and I’ll make sure that the link for that is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. If you are listening on a podcast directory, just click details or show notes and it’ll all show up there. I’ll make sure that’s there.

Another thing we talked about is one of my absolute favorite tools that I’ve used to help my healing journey because I realized that a lot of my health issues were from toxins, specifically heavy metals, and that’s something we talked about in the interview, so you going to love learning about that. But the thing we both, Wendie and I both used is a Sunlighten Sauna. Now, I’ve been raving about Sunlighten Saunas for about four, five years now, and the reason why is I kept having these really weird episodes where I taste heavy metals in my mouth. My liver will become distended. I’d feel very toxic and very sick. And finally, one of my doctors, one of my naturopaths, just turned to me and said, you know you should really use a sauna because you sweat out these toxins, and it bypasses the liver and the kidneys, so I thought, this is amazing! So when I started to dive into studying the Sunlighten Sauna specifically, because I was looking at all the saunas and I kept hearing Sunlighten. But why the Sunlighten Sauna over every other sauna system out there is it has this incredible patent to technology that allows the full spectrum infrared to be absorbed by your body efficiently. There’s actually receptors on your cells. We talked about this in my interview with Dr. Kahn, who’s a cardiologist, and he uses Sunlighten Saunas with his patients. And he says that on each cell on the body, there’s receptors for light which just like, boggles my mind, right? Because you can’t, like, pour me a cup of sunlight, right?  Or like pour me a cup of infrared, right? You can’t drink it, right? You can’t take it. And so we always think that something physical like things you eat, things you drink, is a physical, tangible thing that you can hold that something that the trillions of cells in your body would absorb and utilize. But then, there’s this medium that our body absorbs and utilizes that is a light spectrum, and that isn’t that just wild. Well if you think about light is energy, and our body is made up of energy, so that makes total sense. Well, in looking at the studies, and there’s so many studies, and then Sunlighten also has worked with doctors and researchers to come up with some studies of their own. But the Journal of Athletic Enhancement published a study of ten national-power level athletes, and they found that the infrared improved the neuromuscular performance during intense training and that balanced and increased the testosterone to cortisol ratio, and they found that these athletes recovered faster, built more muscle, and could train harder, every day using the infrared system. There’s another study published by a top researcher in infrared technology, Dr. Michael Hamblin, and he says that after looking at muscle mass and muscle gain, they did find that with the Sunlighten System that there’s increased muscle gain after training and decreased inflammation and oxidative stress, which is exciting! Because the other day, so normally I’ve just been using my Sunlighten for heavy and metal detox has all these other benefits I kept hearing about but but mainly I was like I feel really good when I get out of my sauna, and for hours later I feel really good like I got a massage good. I’ve been using it to detox heavy metals gently out of the body, so it’s good me time, I feel amazing, I know it decreases stress, I know there’s all these health benefits, but that’s pretty much been my focus. Well, the other day, I did two workouts back to back at the gym, it was like Tuesday and Wednesday, and I did a lot of leg work, and my legs were really sore. It’s kind of hard to walk up the stairs, and I remembered, oh yeah, I’ve heard these studies about using a Sunlighten system to recover faster from athletics. So I jumped in my system that night, and I set it to the relaxation program because I was about to go to bed, I didn’t want to like because sometimes when I do the certain programs, I’m like more awake. So it’s good to do it in the morning for some programs but this one I just want a gentle sweat, I just hit the relaxation, and it was very gentle, it’s easy to breathe, it’s not very hot, it’s warm, you feel nice and warm like you’re in a cocoon. And I enjoyed it, it was very gentle it had the full spectrum, so it’s near, mid and far-infrared, and afterward I felt great, and as I was walking around, I took a shower, and I went to bed, I notice oh I don’t have pain in my muscles anymore, that’s good! But the next day I woke up, and I should have, normally, I would have had more soreness cause you know 2 days after an exercise, I worked out really hard that Tuesday so by Thursday I should have really felt because Tuesday and Wednesday I was doing a lot of work so by Thursday and Friday I should have really had more muscle soreness, I had zero muscle soreness after being in a sauna, and I thought, oh my gosh now I’m definitely going to use the system after every workout. I’ve seen these studies but I never had that personal experience until now. So I thought that was really cool.

It also helps with weight loss, and I always heard that like, oh, it’s good, because you know you’re sweating and you’re burning calories, but I’ve read the study, fascinating! That it increases a type of protein that stimulates the breakdown of fats, of these lipids with inside the fat cells- the adipose tissue. It stimulates the breakdown of that, so can be transported to the liver, and then the body can convert that fat and get rid of it. So I thought that was really needed because it’s actually stimulating the chemistry of the body to go to the process of burning fat.

And then with the anti-aging, it stimulates collagen production. A lot of women love, I mean, you know, and men that want to look great too. It stimulates the collagen production, so women noticed they have less fine lines and wrinkles. My big, big rave about the Sunlighten System is that it decreases stress significantly, so it helps with mental and emotional health as well, especially, in the last year I’ve been going through a ton of stuff emotionally, and using it has greatly helped me to just calm myself down. Have you ever been so stressed out, and the thing is stress is not an emotion, so you just walking around but you know your stress because someone does something and you just snap at them, it’s like you’re incredibly irritable and you have a short fuse, that is a symptom of being in a high state of stress. That’s why I noticed that after using the Sunlighten Sauna every day once a day I notice that, whew, it just brought it down, so my fuse is longer, I’m more patient, I don't snap at people, I’m very slow to anger, we’re supposed to quick to anger, so those are signs that you’ve decreased stress in the body and as Dr. Wendie points out today in our interview, the body cannot tell the difference between a mental stress, emotional stress, physical stress, all the kinds of stressors in the body it’s just a super stress. So whether you’re having physical stress or whether you’re having really hard time emotionally or mentally sometimes even spiritual stress. The body takes it to heart, and it’s all the same to the body. The body’s going to go through a state of stress no matter what. So doing things to decrease stress like walking, prayer, meditation, Sunlighten Saunaawesome, they all help the body to decrease them.

But what I really like about the Sunlighten compared to other saunas because I’ve been in the sauna at my gym, which is way too hot, it feels like I’m trying to breathe in Vegas in July, it’s just way too hot. It’s hard to breathe. What I like about the Sunlighten is you can sweat at low temperatures. When I said low temperatures, I mean low temperatures for a sauna. When I breathe in a Sunlighten, I’m always surprised, I don’t sense any hot air going into my lungs, right? It’s not hot. It’s a very comfortable temperature, and you could ask my husband, I do not like feeling hot. I immediately turn the AC on when I get in the car. I’m just one of those people. I don’t like feeling hot, but there’s something about the Sunlighten that’s different. So if you’re one of those people who is like, Why, I don’t like feeling hot! You might actually really enjoy the Sunlighten because it’s very gentle, it’s just warm, and then all of a sudden you’re sweating because the infrared technology – the near, mid, and far infrared technology, is getting into the cells and warming you up from the inside. Your core temperature goes up one degree for an hour after your session. So it’s doing all this fantastic work inside you even after you leave the sauna, and they see that for 24 hours, it has this protective response for the whole body and for the cardiovascular system. This is such a cool information and Dr. Wendie agrees with me that it’s so great to use this type of therapy to detox the body from stress and from toxins in a natural way. When I interviewed Connie Zack the founder of Sunlighten, I ask for her to give my listeners a really good discount and she did and she’s honored that for years. I think it’s been five years now so she gives free shipping and she throws in some extra gifts. Call the company and ask them and find out what really great deal that they’re providing for listeners because they always make sure that they take care of you guys, and if you want to go to the link learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna that’s learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna. If you have any questions for me, I’d love to answer them, come join the Facebook group The Learn True Health Facebook group, where like fifty people away from reaching five thousand people, it doesn’t sound like a lot of people, we’ve a lot more listeners, I guess not everyone is on Facebook we’ve a lot more listeners than that but what’s cool about our Facebook group is people are so active and helpful. It’s a fun community where people are really supporting each other. So if you want to join our Facebook group, it’s not toxic, we do not attract that kind of person, it’s very supportive, very loving, very understanding, healing community that everyone’s sharing their information and asking questions, learning from each other and I’m very active on that group. So if you have questions about the Sunlighten System or anything that Dr. Wendie shares today or anything about my experience with detox and transformation, please come, join the Facebook group, you can do that by going to learntruehealth.com/group, or you can just search Learn True Health on Facebook.

And if you’ve been a long-time listener, you may have noticed that this last week we launched our new and improved website. It was a big endeavor. I wanted to make the website even more accessible for you. So we completely revamped it and updated it. The search function is working a lot better than before. So please take your questions to the search function on the website. Type in the topics you’re interested in, find your episodes, we’re almost at five hundred episodes. It’s so exciting that your answers are there for you, and we’re here to help. So join the Learn True Health Facebook group, and I look forward to seeing you there. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about. By sharing, we’re spreading this information. My goal is to help as many people as possible to learn true health. I’d love to turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help millions of people to transform their lives, and you’re a part of that; we’re all part of this ripple effect to help as many people as possible. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day, and enjoy today’s interview.

[00:14:01] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 482.

I am so excited for today’s guest! We have with us today, Dr. Wendie Trubow who specializes in detox but I have a feeling that this detox is going to be a totally different conversation than what we’re used to. You know, we’ve talked about detox, dozens of times, from many different angles, and this angle, and I love this because Dr. Trubow started off specializing in women’s health, right? And we’re going to hear your story but what I do know is that your personal experience led you to dive in to holistic medicine and discover that detox was the most important thing we really, really need to focus on, and supporting those systems of our body so that we can get on the other side of ill health. So, I’m really excited to jump in to this. Welcome to the show!

[00:15:05] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Thank you and feel free to call me Wendie during the show you don’t have to call me doctor.

[00:15:10] Ashley James: Well, it’s a hardened title, but I’m happy to call you Wendie. I know that as a medical doctor you went through excruciating years of higher education and indoctrination into the pharmaceutical industry. And somehow you managed to unbrainwash yourself to the point where you realized that there’s this whole world of healing out here beyond drugs, so, congratulations you’re one of the few amazing medical doctors that made it out  the other side.

[00:15:38] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Thank you. I think there should be a bumper sticker, like, I survived med school and residency. I think that should be a bumper sticker because I lived through it but I did not thrive through it. I can’t say that I thought I survived. That’s all I get.

[00:15:54] Ashley James: Well, it’s really not an environment for thriving, is it? It’s really is excruciating what they do and it definitely a lot of doctors end up jaded, right, through residency, they have kind of going to becoming a doctor like with beautiful dreams of helping people and then through residency they are just completely torn apart. But something happened in your life, and I really want to dive into this, because I think your story will resonate with all of us. Something happened in your life that had you need to go beyond your medical school training to find out how to heal. So I’d love to dive right in and learn more about what happened to you.

[00:16:41] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I’d love sharing the story because what it really underscores, so first I’ll say is Ashley is it my health story has two peaks. The first one, well, let me back up and stop. I want to underscore, it’s really hard to recognize when you are going off the cliff, unless you have a particular world view that only accepts optimal health, okay? So I didn’t have that world view when I went off the cliff for the first time. And so it literally took me years to recognize that all was not right in Wendie Land, until, I got to a point where I thought to myself, oh my god, I have to get up today. I have to get up every day, but I’m so tired. And I got up because I was the primary breadwinner. That’s why I got up the bed, otherwise, uh-uh I would have stayed in bed. Sex drive, forget about it. I had head-to-toe issues. I was losing my hair. My brain wasn’t working. I had anxiety, no, I’m high-strung. I’m not anxious. I’m just happened to be like go, go, go high energy. I had a thyroid dysfunction where it was totally normal. I had heart palpitations, asthma, bloating gas, diarrhea, constipation, sometimes all in the same day, right? I’d be having diarrhea then be constipated then of diarrhea later, like, go figure. I had really heavy periods, I had difficulty conceiving – I made up for that one. And I had wasting in nutritional deficiencies, so I was really a mess, and that happened when I was 35. I was a year and a half out of residency. And I did go off the cliff in residency but again, world view, I didn’t have the view that I was supposed to feel amazing so I can’t just tolerate and feeling all these things.

And the other thing of it all, highlight, Ashley, is it doesn’t happen overnight for most of us. It’s not like Monday I feel amazing. Tuesday I feel terrible. What happened? I’m going to look into this? Now, it was this, slow, slow, deterioration of my health, okay? So I’m 35. I’m barely getting out of my bed and my husband says to me, why don’t you go and see my mentor who was one of the old time functional medicine doctors in Massachusetts? He was mentoring my husband. And our insurance was changing and he took our insurance that we were leaving so we kind of rushed it and got me in for an appointment and he did what I considered at that time a ridiculous work up. He has his proof before functional medicine in my world and he worked it. Fruit sensitivities, minerals, nutrients, and one thing that he did that he didn’t even talked me about was he tested me for Celiac, and it was positive. And on the car right up, I’m six weeks post-partum, I’m like about to lose my mind, I said to my husband, call him. I need to know what’s wrong. I can’t wait any longer. Now, I’ve read it six weeks mind you but it can’t wait another minute. And I said to him, you going to call him. So my husband calls him and says, alright, I’m sorry, but Wendie is freaking out here. Is there anything major that we should know about before we walk into the office? And he’s like, yeah, she’s Celiac disease. And I said, oh my dad has celiac disease! And he says, well it’s genetic. You probably should have been tested. I was like, oops. So at 35 I got diagnosed with Celiac disease and went gluten-free. I want to pause there because sometimes that’s a lot to unpack, and we haven’t even really gotten to peak two. That’s just peak one.

[00:20:23] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important to look at our family history not from the standpoint of, oh, because my dad had heart disease that means I’m going to have heart disease, or  because my grandma had diabetes, I’m going to have diabetes. But it’s really important to look at it as, genetics don’t necessarily cause, it’s only the trigger that pulls the gun, right? It’s the nutrient deficiencies, the foods you’re exposed to, you’re typically eat about the same way, with typically have the same nutrient deficiencies as your family and so if your family has these issues, it’s really, really good to eat a diet that is corrective, to do lifestyle that is corrective, and preventive of those issues and what I’ve heard over and over again is, not only Celiac but gluten intolerance. So the intolerance, it’s not necessarily Celiac but it’s just the intolerance to it, is often, more than not often seen, if the mother has it all the kids have it. Same with dairy, dairy intolerance, something like 51 or 52% of the population of the earth should not, in any way, she’d perform be drinking the breastmilk from any animal, right? So any kind of milk from any animal, and yet we do. And so, if there’s one person, like, I see these moms, who are like, well little Johnny is allergic to milk so we don’t give him milk but the rest of the family does, and I’m like, that doesn’t make sense because if he has dairy intolerance or if you know you had dairy intolerance as a kid it’s more likely that all your children have it and sometimes their symptoms are masked because they’re also eating a bunch of sugar, they’re also, you know, there’s a bunch of other allergens and it takes time you’re going to remove  these food sensitivities, right? Remove those grains and the dairy and the eggs those are the most common ones, right? Remove them for quite a while. I believe that a certain immunoglobulin responses, hyper responses have a 60-day, half-life, some of them, some of them are 30 days, some of them are 60 days. So, it’s like it takes a while to really calm the body down. And it’s not that big of a deal like I know some parents freak out, I wouldn’t know what to feed them if I can’t feed them sugar, right? If I can’t feed them a bunch of cereal and dairy every day, so you’ll figure that out. I don’t know, try fruit. But this is so common that we overlook that our major, major health issues could be something, that’s like, oh yeah my mom is allergic to that, or my mom had to avoid that, or my dad had to avoid that maybe I should, right? And this is what drives me off the wall is that, you’re a doctor, right? But how many doctors did you see? And you yourself are a doctor so you saw yourself? It’s kind of hard to treat yourself, right?

[00:23:25] Dr. Wendie Trubow: You can’t treat yourself. No, you can’t treat yourself. That’s very hard.

[00:23:29] Ashley James: What drives me off the wall is that in all your medial training there wasn’t a class that was like, okay we’re going to talk about food sensitivities and allergies and how we can help our patients to dial in their diet for the most optimal healing, right? That class doesn’t exist.

[00:23:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow: No. And we’d like 2 hours of nutrition training that was it.

[00:23:49] Ashley James: Drives me crazy.

[00:23:51] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, so it’s not.

[00:23:52] Ashley James: Okay, so you’re in the car. You’ve been given this and also the light bulb goes on. Did you have a glimmer of hope? Did you have a feeling, like, hey maybe this is the answer?

[00:24:00] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I don’t think of things like that. It’s so funny, you know, I’m 51 and a half and I look at those years like a blur because I was in the midst of so many really all-encompassing projects, so the biggest project was reproducing, so I was either pregnant or nursing for 11 years.

[00:24:26] Ashley James: HmmWow.

[00:24:28] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I know. So, and I have four kids. So you all can do the Math.

[00:24:32] Ashley James: Congratulations!

[00:24:28] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Thank you! So, that’s why I say I made up for them, infertility stuff or fertility challenges we should say. So that was kind of in my face, right? I’m trying to grow and feed and raise a lot of little people. So that was really encompassing. Then, the next part to that is I was a new attending doctor so I had to prove myself. Then the next layer to that is my husband, about, let me think about this. What is the timeline? About four years into my career as an attending, my husband decided he wanted to open a functional medicine centre, and so we opened this huge place that grew to be one of the largest functional medicine providers in the country.

[00:25:16] Ashley James: Cool!

[00:24:28] Dr. Wendie Trubow: And we’re on that rollercoaster for seven years and that closed in 2015 and that I feel like when I woke up, you know, because my kids, all of them were weaned. So I was no longer the human food slot machine?

[00:25:33] Ashley James: Creator?

[00:24:35] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I was no longer the human vending machine, like, oh I’ll have a snack now! And it’s free! It’s open 24/7!

[00:25:43] Ashley James: She doesn’t need to sleep!

[00:25:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow: No. I remember craving unbroken sleep in those days. So I didn’t look at it, honestly Ashley, on those early days I was just trying to survive. I was on the rollercoaster of life. I had zero brain space. I could gauge how overwhelmed I was by how long it took me to book an appointment for something, and I remember saying to my hairdresser, if you don’t make me book an appointment before I leave, you will literally won’t see me for nine months, because I’m just too overwhelmed to even think of calling you. So that was sort of the barometer for my life, and one thing hits the max right? You don’t feel well so it’s hard to then take care of yourself, and if you don’t take care of yourself then you’re not going to feel well, so you circle the drain, and that was me, circling the drain. So getting rid of gluten is very impactful because I noticed tremendous improvement head-to-toe immediately. But I’ll always say to patients, it’s like that shark’s mouth. Sharks have seven rows of teeth and when one tooth falls out the next tooth moves forward to takes its place, and that’s when it’s like you’re untangling your health. So, you have layer number one, cool, gluten. Guess what? Layer number two, was candida. And layer number three was dysbiosis. So I’m kind of work through those, and worked on my gut, for tsk, let’s think about this, thirteen years! And I was doing pretty good! I had gotten to a place where I was still extremely, and I still am extremely reactive to gluten. But I felt pretty good. Okay? So fast forward from age 35 to 48 when peak two happens, and peak two, we go on a trip of a lifetime. Now, just so you know, I have four kids, and we travel with both of our mothers. So it’s not just a romantic getaway, it’s like a soccer team that will show up! There was all of us! So we go in this amazing vacation in 2019 to Paris and we spend the week right around Notre dame and, whenever I go on vacation, I work really hard to stay on the eating plan that works for me so I generally don’t gain weight on vacation. So, I came home, same weight, fine, but a month after I came home, I gained 9 pounds. And half the hair on my head started falling out in droves, like, crazy amounts.

[00:28:14] Ashley James: Wow!

[00:28:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow: And I had a rash on my face that would not quit. And what do women care about – hair, skin, weight. Those weren’t ok for a doctor, right? You could’ve a blood pressure of 200 over 100, but you’re like, yeah, it’s been that high before but I just gained 6 pounds! Doc, I need an appointment tomorrow, right? So I freaked, and of course what’s the number one thing when you gain weight? Thyroid. So here’s where you can treat yourself but you can’t treat yourself. So I start to do my test, and by the way, I’m 48 at that point, so I’m perimenopausal. Damn, hormones! So I check my hormones, they’re perfect! I checked my thyroid, its perfect! And now, I’m like, hmm, maybe I’ll do a stool test! Maybe cause you got to run through your body right? So, I start to do a stool test, it looks for me really darn good! So I’m totally stymied. And I spent a month or so sort of flailing around like what am I doing? What’s wrong in here? Maybe it’s just perimenopause, right? Chalk it up! And I’m listening to the radio one day and I hear this report about how when Notre dame burned down it released five hundred pounds of lead dust into the air and the closer you were to Notre dame the more lead exposure you got the further away the less you got, make sense right?

[00:29:35] Ashley James: No.

[00:28:36] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes! And I looked at my husband and I was like, we spend a week there right after it burned! I got a lead exposure! And that threw me off the cliff! And he was like, maybe? I’m like, don’t maybe me! That’s what happened! So I did the testing. Doctors are bad patients. That’s all I have to say. Bad doctor! I had previously done a lead and mercury, heavy metals testing on myself and it was mildly positive. So we, in our practice, treat when the levels are over 8. And I tested at 9 for lead a million of years before and I was like, it’s kind of a pain in the butt program I’m not going to treat for a just slightly positive level knowing what I didn’t know then is that often the first numbers you get when you’re someone that doesn’t detox well, the first numbers you get are often just the tip of the iceberg, and I didn’t realize that then so I blew it off, okay. So my number was 9 years ago and then I do this test after going to Notre dame and my level was 25% higher. That got my attention because I will treat at 12. So I said to my husband, oh my god, I’ve lead! Oh, and mercury by the way. Why go for just half of the bad ones, I’ll go for everything! I didn’t have cadmium, I didn’t have arsenic, and I didn’t have thallium those are really the ones we look at, all five of those. And then I started to think about what other toxins are there. So I did mycotoxins, which are the mold toxins that when you get exposed to mold it puts out toxins in your body those are called mycotoxins. So I did the testing for that. And I had four strains of mycotoxins. Tsk. And now I’m really thick. And I start treatment, I got so much better, like my hair loss slowed, my rash quieted down, I got, here’s the really cool part, I used to be the canary in a coal mine for gluten, so, I never went out to eat because I got so sick, anywhere. And so I don’t know why it has tested out, and instead of having a 3-month recovery to gluten I started to notice that my recovery was instead of 3 months, 6 weeks! And then it was 2 weeks, and then it was 10 days and then it was 5 and then it was 2 and then it was 24 hours and then it was like 12 hours which sounds pretty awful when you think about like brain fog and diarrhea but on the other hand when you compare it to, I used to do it for 3 months, it was such a different world.

[00:32:23] Ashley James: Yep.

[00:32:24] Dr. Wendie Trubow: So I did these treatments from mycotoxins and heavy metals and it’s hard honestly, like, my whole life was organized around detox. Get up, do something, do something an hour later, I did something throughout the day for months and when I was re-tested, I was like, oh my, because the levels of lead were so much higher and mercury was so much higher, and that’s really when we started to dive into, right, if you’re not detoxing it’s just a tip of the iceberg that your body’s able to start to sort of squeeze out, luckily, squeeze out, and then the last part of this was when I re-tested my mycotoxins after a year sort of occur to me like, oh, they also have environmental toxins testing and testing for pesticides so why don’t I do that at the same time, in for a penny, in for a pound, let’s just do it all. So my re-test when I did that I did the other and I was like, oh my, it’s never good news here, and I’ve got all bunch of those things to deal with. So I’ve been systematically addressing and removing things and so what I’ll say is, it’s a long process, A, B, it’s a rewarding process, C, I’d lost more weight than I gained, right? So I gained 9 pounds and I lost 15 pounds when my weight finally shifted, but it took two and a half years into the process before my weight shifted and I think that’s really important for the listeners because whenever someone comes and says, I can’t lose weight and my thyroids are normal. I’m like, great, you’ve most likely got toxins but it’s going to be a couple of years before your body quiets down, it’s not immediate.

[00:34:08] Ashley James: That’s been my experience with my own health. Every doctor I’ve gone through and I go to naturopaths and like holistic doctors. Every doctors, like, I walked in the door, oh, thyroid, you are thyroid, classic thyroid ha-ha-ha and I’m like no actually every test I’ve ever done my thyroid’s fantastic and they kind of look at me like they’re going to be the doctor that fixes my thyroid. Then the blood work comes back and they’re like, oh, okay, you’re right. I showed them all the previous lab tests and my thyroid is fine everything’s fine everything in all my blood tests are fine and when I finally figured out was I have major heavy metals to the point where everything I did like weight loss I’d feel, I could taste heavy metals I’d wake up tasting them in my mouth kind of like an ash tray whatever you imagine that would taste like it was horrible and then my body would exude a smell of burning rubber like when cars are spinning out the burning rubber’s smell like burning garbage that’s what my body would smell like and then my liver would distend to the point where you could see it pushing out from behind the rib cage and it was hard as a rock and one of my doctors wanted to do a biopsy we did the ultrasound and they’re like your liver’s just pissed of there’s nothing wrong we couldn’t find anything wrong here it’s just pissed of,f my gall bladder is fine but my liver was as hard as a rock and pushing out and that’s when it all clicked because I had to do my own sleuthing cause every doctor that I went to was like oh thyroid and I’m like are you kidding me and when it finally clicked my I’m like wow, I’m tasting heavy metals my liver is pissed off and I have MTHFR that’s just one of the many things and I’m sure attribute to..

[00:36:04] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Me too!

[00:34:08] Ashley James: …poor detox, which is what I want to talk about is why there some people can detox, like it’s so funny, there’s this one woman I know whose very similar story to you, if she was in the same room as gluten she’d be in bed for 6 months like she’s just everything she’s so reactive she’s constantly having to work on her health, constantly, constantly, constantly. Her husband, all he eats is pizza all he drinks is beer. He is fine he is the picture of health why is it that some people are easily over burned with toxins unable to like the liver’s unable to process them and seemingly no matter how healthy they feel they eat they’re still it’s just like this uphill battle with detox why are some people like that way and other people could spend their entire lives thru drive in or drive thru and like rarely got a cold, so, what is this? I’ve always heard it’s a microbiome, the microbiome is everything if you have a good microbiome then you are good but there’s so much more than that.

[00:37:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Okay before I answer that question I have to ask you something, can I call you Ash?

[00:37:20] Ashley James: Oh yeah, sure.

[00:37:22] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Okay Ash. So we were privileged enough to interview Alessio Fasano for our podcast and legit when I first read one of his papers I said to my husband this dude’s going to get the Nobel prize and I was like I’ve been a groupie for the last ten years of his. I love him to pieces and he’s  this like beautiful Italian man with the accent and he does great research and It’s all about gluten and so one of the things he said he talks about is yes it is your microbiome and it’s a triad so you have the triad of the microbiome health which really is a term for gut permeability okay that’s what we’re looking at it’s the permeability of the gut and lets come back to that because I want to make sure we talk about the triad and then we will talk about each component. The gut permeability combined with a genetic susceptibility combined with a trigger – that’s your triad. So 40% of the population has the MTHFR gene and like 40% of the people have the gene for Celiac but very few people were actually are diagnosed of Celiac although the numbers much higher than suspect basically there’s more people with Celiac than know they have Celiac they just haven’t been diagnosed but basically when you put that together the thing that seems to set it off is not your genetics its actually your gut permeability so this is where the science gets so cool and so in your gut if your someone who carries a gene for Celiac that’s DQ2 or DQ8 positive it’s on the HLA subtype of antigens. If you have that then you upregulate these receptors called CXCR3 I don’t know why they named it that but that’s the name now when you eat gluten as someone with the gene and now the upregulation of these receptors, you have more receptors that bind to the gluten particles so it’s actually gliadin and the gluten and that upregulates something called zonulins. Zonulins are a substance, now in order to tell you what they do I have to tell you the significance, so zonulins dissolve the tight junction in your gut.

[00:39:48] Ashley James: Yes!

[00:39:50] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Okay. So your gut from your mouth to your anus is essentially one cell wall thick which is crazy to think you think you have this whole big barrier between you and the outside world but no there’s one cell wall that’s each cell is stuck tightly to its neighbour and that lines your entire GI tract now if you have the genes for Celiac and you eat gluten you upregulate the receptors and then zonulin gets pumped out zonulin dissolves the tight junctions and now the outside world is being exposed to your inside world, okay are you with me so far?

[00:40:32] Ashley James: Hmm-hmm

[00:40:34] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Now what’s really interesting is anyone who eats gluten opens up their tight junctions for about 15 minutes anyone genes are not but if you have the genes you open your tight junctions for like 4 hours and so what that means is that when you look at people eating a standard American diet, what’d you eat for breakfast? Huh, bagel, cereal, okay, what’d you eat for lunch? Sandwich what’d you eat for dinner? Pasta with chicken and broccoli, or lasagna or pizza, you basically, if you’re someone who’s genetically at risk you’ve opened your tight junctions for the entire day. So the outside world meaning bacteria, toxins, hormones, whatever, right? Food particles, you can pretty much start naming them all of those things you’re getting into your bloodstream, and your bloodstreams like what in the holy name of you know what is this? This is not me? This is not part of what I want to do. This is not normal. Your body starts to generate an immune response, and then things go haywire. So your body starts to attack everything because it’s like confused basically, okay? So one major part of the triad is genetic susceptibility combined with the gut permeability and then anything that gets through the gut serves as a trigger. Unless you went to Notre dame right after it burned and got a huge lead load and here’s where those three things don’t adequately explain everything, okay. Because the next layer to it I will just describe it like your health is the sandwich, the gluten-free sandwich, between of a bun, a gluten-free bun  and that bun is your environment and your genetics and epigenetics and we can talk about epigenetics in a minute, the meat of that sandwich or if you’re vegetarian the vegetables of that sandwich are your sleep, your thoughts, your gut health, your nutrients status, your ability to move your body, your intimacy with others, how often you poop, all the stuff about you is the meat or vegetables of that sandwich put that all together and all of that is influencing whether you’re going to be someone who can do drive thru for their life eat Dunkin’ Donu.. I’m in Boston, so it’s Dunkies, it’s been Dunkies since I was a kid, so if you could go to Dunkies every day and get a coffee and a donut or if you’re someone who’s just driving by Dunkies is gonna make you sick like me, so it all kind of re-smooshed in and I’ll always say to people it’s hard to taste out the exact thing because think of yourself like a blended soup you can no longer pull out one ingredient because it’s already been blended together.

[00:43:22] Ashley James: Right

[00:40:23] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  That’s your health. Okay.

[00:43:26] Ashley James: Before you move forward I really want to unpack what you said because I think it’s the most impactful, I want every single listener to really, really sit with, including myself to sit with what you just said for a moment and just really unpack it. So when you say from your mouth to your anus which is one long tube right so we’re kind of like a donut if you think about it because we always think that when you put stuff in your mouth and you swallow your quote unquote inside of your body but it’s actually not inside your body it’s a tube, that tube is kind of like the outside world in a sense, right? Because we’re like a pull noodle, we’re a pull noodle, and so when you say that from your mouth to your anus the only protection we have from the outside world I mean besides things like stomach acid hopefully kill things right is this one layer of epithelial tissue, right,  like it’s a type of skin. Can we just get an image in our mind is it like the thickness of a hair or is it…

[00:44:39] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Thinner.

[00:44:42] Ashley James: It’s thinner than that? Is it so thin we can’t visibly see with the human eye?

[00:44:45] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Correct.

[00:44:47] Ashley James: So we have a layer protecting us from all the craziness of the world, that’s thinner than what we can perceive with the human eye, and when we eat barley, wheat, rye, I’m going to say oats because they contain gliadin.

[00:45:05] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  They’re often cross-contaminated too.

[00:45:07] Ashley James: Right. So let’s just like throw out this notion of marketing which is gluten-free oats, just throw it out, because oats do the damage too. So barley, wheat, rye and oats if we eat anything even if we don’t have celiac let’s say you are the luckiest person, you won the genetic lottery and you have perfect, perfect, perfect genes, perfect digestion, it’s still even with perfect genes and perfect digestion causes leaky gut for 15 minutes so that tiny imperceivable with the human eye barrier between your insides like your bloodstream and your lymph system, your immune system and while you’re eating that barrier is dissolves slightly like the junctions are weakened and food particles that are not fully digested are allowed to enter into your body and then your immune system freaks out has to attack it then it causes this cascade of inflammation your lymph system freaking out and that could trigger all kinds of things and that’s for the healthy people.

[00:46:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Hmm. Hmm. Don’t forget, not just food. It’s food and bacteria, and molds, and toxins, and something that you walked by a perfume that you inhaled anything you swallowed, any chemicals on your water, it’s any chemical and toxin, not just food.

[00:46:37] Ashley James: Can we also dare to say parasites?

[00:46:43] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yup! Have at it! Anything that you can ingest you can absorb.

[00:46:48] Ashley James: Alright. So, basically the outside world, the crazy, crazy toxic outside world is getting into our bloodstream and our body has to deal with it and our liver has no idea what’s going on and now has to figure out how to deal with it, and that’s for the healthy people.

[00:47:02] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yup!

[00:47:03] Ashley James: And the unfortunate people, likely if you are listening to our podcast you’re not one of those people who is always healthy never sick, right. Like those people aren’t motivated necessarily to listen.

[00:47:14] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Right.

[00:47:15] Ashley James: It’s all of us who are like working on ourselves right, like, I’m on a health journey, I’ve healed a lot, you’ve healed a lot, when I’m done healing we’re still getting better and better. All my listeners I know still getting better and better. So we can’t be gluten-free once in a while, because that once in a while is still enough to cause this triggering, right,  so we need to be really diligent and even more when in a restaurant we need to be hyper hyper diligent and not consume this because it causes even 15 minutes of that tiny, tiny, tiny layer of protection like removing that, I mean that’s really blows my mind I’ve talked to so many doctors about being gluten-free and why but you explained it in such a way that is so understandable and I think of so many people who are like, oh yes! I’m gluten-free but you know once a week I couldn’t, but that whole week your body is still cascading from inflammation, having to clean up the damage of one meal, like you said, one meal really worth that? Okay I’m getting of my gluten soapbox. So thank you. Is there anything else that you want to say that really have us fully grasp the necessity of a 100% of the population removing barley, wheat, rye, and oats because of how damaging it is to everyone.

[00:48:45] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Honestly Ashley, I think that’s a stronger statement than I would make even as a Celiac. What I would say is, there’s so many layers to this okay, so back like in the 1940’s, 1950’s there were food shortages and gluten, wheat, is not genetically modified okay, but I don’t really understand the difference, okay between hybridization and genetic modification because basically the end result is that they bred it so that it grows faster, it will stand drought, it will stand pests, and it doesn’t fall over in heavy rains or winds. That’s genetic modification in my world but it’s called hybridization.

[00:49:25] Ashley James: But what happens in the lab, right? With there like where going to take the genes of a fish, and we’re going to put it into a tomato, right? That’s GMO, right? Or we’re going to take this wheat and we’re going to make it so it’s resistant to, we’re going to actually create it Bt toxin so that the wheat itself kills bugs. I don’t like some crazy nonsense, now you’re like eating something that has the genes of something else. But breeding something when wheat even a hundred years ago is not even recognizable to the wheat we have today or even in the 40’s the amount of gluten is so much more it’s crazy it’s used to just be like a handful of little seeds at the end of the stalk and now it’s like a hundred seeds right on the end of the stalk it’s completely different and they also increased the amount of gluten in wheat, but yes, you’re right that overtime these crops were bred and now they bred to produce so much more gluten that people are reacting to that but don’t react to like ancient grains

[00:50:33] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right. Right. So that’s one part of it and then the next part of it is that, as Americans we often are eating it much more frequently so we’re not necessarily cooking breakfast and cooking lunch and cooking dinner so faster food has become needed and that faster food is typically gluten so here you have the layer of where it’s more allergenic we’re eating it more, we’re eating more of it, you know, my god, I remember being a kid I found a dress of my mom’s. My mom was born in 1944 and I remember finding like I think it was her wedding dress, it’s kind of a midi, white dress it’s like a size 0. People are eating more we’re actually bigger than we were 50 years ago, we’re physically bigger, so we eat more and then the next layer of that is that you mention stomach acid there’s a really cool association between stomach acid and gluten sensitivity so if you have the gene for gluten sensitivity or celiac that you see more likely to have low stomach acid it’s not clear which is the chicken and which is the egg and which came first but there’s some kind of association okay, so the next layer is our lives are much more chaotic and so we aren’t taking the time to slow down and eat properly, chew our food, so there’s always layers to what we eat, we eat with  stress that suppresses our stomach acid, that makes us more likely to let bacteria and not breakdown our food properly, into the next phase which is the small intestine so there’s all these layers to it, Ashley that just keep propagating but I don’t know that I would say everybody shouldn’t eat gluten period what I would say is the best and healthiest way to eat is a way that has a minimum amount if any of processed food and food from a package and if you start with that that becomes sort of naturally a gluten-free diet but it’s not gluten-free for the purpose of gluten-free it’s gluten-free for the purpose of getting higher quality nutrients that do more for your body and sustain the mitochondria and the telomeres and your DNA and your vitality that’s the reason not just to do gluten-free for the sake of it because of how you’re feeling as a result.

[00:53:04] Ashley James: Got it, got it. The mycotoxins you talked about I’ve been excited to uncover that can we jumped into that?

[00:53:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow: DefinitelyMycotoxins are nasty little bookers.

[00:53:20] Ashley James: Yup! So what are they and where did they come from and how do we avoid them?

[00:53:25] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Well, step into my office. So the most common sources are water damaged buildings and when you say this to someone have you been in a water damaged building? Most people are like I don’t know, not that I know of. That thing that you drill into, okay did you go to school? In a school? And they will, yes, okay schools are typically moldy. Did you go to college and live in a dorm? Yes. Okay, dorms are typically moldy, oh okay. A lot of government buildings are typically moldy. Old homes are typically moldy. Homes that are built in wet climates are typically moldy. Homes that have water damage like I live in Massachusetts and we had the snowmageddon winter in 2015 and a million and one people had ice dams which essentially opened up their roof to the outside world and then they have water in their walls so that kind of stuff is really hard to remediate so if you got water in your walls you got to fix it. So all of these layers, right, that’s the big exposure. I did randomly have a patient who had mold in her car that’s not the most common but she said when I diagnosed her she was like I know my car is moldy and she tested it and it was so that’s another possibility. And then there’s food. There are number of foods that are particularly moldy including all grains and that’s because when you think of how grains are harvested they cut them now I’m not that familiar with honestly harvesting but I know that they get cut, they get threshed, they get stored and that storage process they’re often wet so here’s where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t because if you eat organic grains they’re not sprayed with glyphosate which is a good thing you don’t what glyphosate in your body it’s terrible for you, actually I just had a whole long call with Michael Antoniou, Antoniou who’s a British researcher and has published some really landmark studies on glyphosate because I’m giving a talk on glyphosate and I was like I really want to dig into this with him and he was kind enough to do the data with me and the ultimate upshot is that glyphosate was developed as a, it was actually discovered as a chelating agent and then in 2006 Monsanto patented it as antibiotic and how it works is to inhibit certain enzymes in bacteria and other microorganisms and that inhibition throws off the function and creates lead cell death and its going on around us so if you’re grains sprayed with glyphosate you’re getting glyphosate you don’t want to do that. But if you’re getting organic, the glyphosate helps dry out the crops that’s why it’s helpful. But if you’re getting organic grains that haven’t been sprayed there is chance they’re moldy because they are sitting around waiting to be processed, and if it rained the day before they got processed they are sitting around so and there’s mold spores in the environment. Often for people in Massachusetts I will always find my patients are flaring in April and September, they’re like what’s going on? It’s the mold. It’s the rainy season. In our rainy season people flare in our neighbourhood. So mycotoxins when you got exposed to them again it comes down to genetics if you’re someone who’s sensitive and obviously I’ve got the gene because I’m really reactive to mold and once it gets into your body it just kind of hangs  out and if you’re not a good detoxer it just hangs out. Then if you layer on, you eat a standard American diet and don’t get enough fibre to bind them or don’t do detoxing or stress the body and your body just stores it and hangs on to it because it’s got no other option it’s kind of backed into a corner.

[00:57:12] Ashley James: Can mold live inside our body like in our bloodstream or our lymph system?

[00:57:25] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Hmm. That’s a good question, Ashley. I normally think that the mycotoxins which are the toxins that molds put out as what’s stored in our fat and our organs but what you do bring up, you know, candida is a strain of mold, candida is a yeast and mold they’re related so you can have candida in the bloodstream its less common you can have antibodies to candida which is very common you can have candida in the gut so you can have it in your body but typically it’s the mycotoxins not necessarily the mold itself

[00:57:59] Ashley James: So if someone is having a mycotoxin you know exposure and I don’t want to talk about how you’d figured that out but let’s say they’re having exposure, they realize it’s their office let’s say and they moved offices to a place that is clean now the exposure’s gone! So eventually, the mycotoxins get cleared out or we now concerned that there’s mold living inside them? Because I’ve heard from some people that like if they’ve had a cinema mold exposure that mold is now like continuing to live inside them but this is environmental mold like not internal mold like you’re saying candida that lives inside you it continually produces mycotoxins now we’ve got to do a candida detox replenishing of the gut in the good way and rethink our diet for removing candida and so then that gets rid of the mycotoxins cause you’re not addressing the mycotoxins you’re addressing the cause of them. Is that my understanding?

[00:59:08] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s kind of both. So certainly you wanted to get out of the exposure, no questions, it is sort of schizophrenic to try to heal from mold when you are continuing to be exposed that doesn’t make sense now on the flip side I will say Ashley I always say to people who have silver fillings if you have mercury let’s start getting you detox and take your fillings out in the middle of the detox so that you’re protected from any mercury that gets into your system because we’re already binding it, right,  but mycotoxins it’s more like we want to get you out of the scenario were you’re being exposed to mycotoxins so you stopped the madness because it’s just throwing off your body and jacking up your immune system and it really throws people off you want to get them out of the scenario wherever it is and then start to remove the mycotoxins that they have stored in their body.

[01:00:05] Ashley James: You know we haven’t even plugged your book at this point as a listener I’ll be like okay I’m sold how do I do this? How do I work with Wendie? How do I do this? Oh my gosh! I’m going to make sure that the links to everything is in the shownotes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com including the book, Dirty Girl, Ditch the Toxins Look Great and Feel Freaking Amazing. I definitely want to talk more about your book but I really want to understand the mycotoxins so either it could be in our food and you know I’ve seen this actually with coffee, back then my husband and I were on coffee we switched to mold-free like certified mold-free coffee and noticed the difference I was like what, what, like I really noticed the difference, I was like that is crazy, and so it could be in our food which freaks me out because I have brown rice in bulk you know I buy it in bulk I’m just thinking like is this moldy? How do we know?

[01:01:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s typically the oats, the barley, the wheat, the rye, it’s the grains, rice is a funny one because it sort of lumped in but it’s not so much rice, it lasts, it’s more of the I think of grains, not sure I let you get it that well

[01:01:34] Ashley James: So, okay, well, no, barley, wheat, rye, oats that kind of stuff right?

[01:01:35] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yeah, yeah

[01:01:37] Ashley James: So we should look into foods that are more likely to contain mold and coffee is the big one because of how they processed coffee so if you’re heavy coffee drinker really get mold free coffee I know Bulletproof coffee is one of those brands that are there that prides themselves you don’t have to put like MCT oil and butter or bacon fat or whatever they put in bullet-proof drinks you don’t have to do that you can buy the actual bag that says Bulletproof and give that a try.

[01:02:09] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah. Purity, purity is also, and there was a third one that I just hear about that I’m blanking on but there’s another brand I think if you do a Google search it’s like mold plus free plus beans you should get it.

[01:02:16] Ashley James: Yeah, there you go. So we want to make sure it’s not in our food, make sure it’s not in our home, in our car, we had a beautiful truck we still miss it but man it was full of mold because an animal had chewed through the barrier and gone into the cab because the way they make these trucks now they lined it like a soy lining it’s made from soy so it’s basically edible so you made an edible truck for the animal and because we live in a forest we live in western Washington lots of animals and an animal made its home, its cute little home inside the dashboard and all of a sudden, one day, I look at them and why is there moisture inside the truck? And this is like a newer truck, we opened the door and there was like three inches of fuzz it looks like shag carpeting on every surface especially the areas where the babyseat was because that’s like CSI where you like shine the black light over like that the mold was insane over by the babyseat I’m like what, that’s where he threw up and that’s where he spilled his drink or whatever but the whole thing was mold and our insurance you got to love AllState, our insurance totalled the car and paid us for it, which it sucks I’d rather have a truck than have a paid-off truck but I have paid off not truck, but yeah, that was our experience with it, AllState were like this is unsafe to drive at this point because of all the mold.

[01:03:55] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Well think about it, you know, Katrina, hurricane Katrina in what 2014 all those literally people were submerged up to the top of the first floor which includes cars and so a few of the cars that was in any hurricane, but hurricane Katrina I have pictures of where you can’t imagine see the cars because they are submerged so if that’s your car that has mold you should not be driving that car get rid of it.

[01:04:19] Ashley James: Yes and what if you bought a car, that’s why car facts are so important. 

[01:04:22] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I know.

[01:04:22] Ashley James: Because if you bought a car that’s used you don’t know if that was in Katrina like you don’t know right and I did a few interviews of Green Homes Solutions I don’t know have you been part of them

[01:04:32] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I have.

[01:04:33] Ashley James: Sweet! So I’d interviewed the head scientist and then the CEO slash founder whatever, they are amazing guys but they created an enzyme that digests mold safely so it doesn’t allow for all the toxins to continue to build the spores or whatever to continue to be removed in the environment and then they also test to make sure they’ll comeback to test for years to make sure that it’s safe but Green Homes Solutions that’s my plug for them because I was so impressed with their treatment, we had mold in our bathroom and that I was so impressed with it and I love interviewing them because I got so much information but I can’t believe how many people I’ve talked to friends, friends family and also through the podcast and clients of mine and mold is so common it’s such a common problem and it’s so overlooked so once we removed ourselves from the molds what is the most important thing we should do to help ourselves recover from that exposure.

[01:05:44] Dr. Wendie Trubow: See a functional medicine provider who’s senior I used to be like see a functional medicine provider but it’s really see a senior functional medicine provider who’s comfortable doing toxins testing that’s the criteria right and then tests and then target your treatment to get rid of those strains from you.

[01:06:04] Ashley James: How do we test? Are we testing for mycotoxins or are we testing for mold? What is the testing?

[01:06:09] Dr. Wendie Trubow: You test for mycotoxins. You test your house for mold and you test your body for mycotoxins.

[01:06:15] Ashley James: Got it. And let’s say we removed the mold or removed ourselves from mold, like we got rid of the car, or we moved offices or whatever and we now know where no longer in the mold environment how long do we wait until we test for the mycotoxins because isn’t it gonna clear up of our system?

[01:06:31] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah I think this is really a nuanced question Ashley, so there are people who are not sensitive to mold so it’s so funny as I said that I thought huh I’m not sure if the studies have been done to look at because mold is implicated in to degenerative diseases, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, all of the toxins are pre-strongly implicated in those diseases so I’m thinking about I don’t know the answer too so I’m completely hypothesizing here, okay  this is the part where you’re like it’s not data I’m thinking.

[01:07:07] Ashley James: Right, or it’s the stubborn husband that says I’m fine, I’m fine, I don’t feel anything.

[01:06:31] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right but the thing about it is there are people who are not genetically susceptible to mycotoxins or mold so what I honestly don’t know is what percentage of people with dementia don’t have mycotoxin genes I don’t know that okay I don’t know so I’m just thinking about if you are exposed to mold yes so you want to get out with it but if you are exposed to mold and you feel amazing that’s different when you’re exposed to mold and you feel terrible, right, so the behaviours are different if you’re someone who really is reactive to mold, you don’t do well in moldy environments you have a reaction then I’d say you’re someone who wants to then test and treat, if you get out of the moldy environment and you feel amazing I don’t know that I would go down to spend lots of time and energy and money on functional medicine visits and testing because maybe you don’t need it but the thing that  I’ll say is amazing meaning vital vibrant healthy able to and interested in intimacy able to move your body bring working well not noticing any body system because its functioning optimally your weight is optimal you cardiovascular and metabolic status is perfect if that’s you cool you don’t have to do anything but if that’s not you then I will recommend testing and targeting your treatment.

[01:08:34] Ashley James: You answered my next question which is what the symptoms we should look for and that was awesome! Give us some more, give us some more symptoms of mycotoxin exposure.

[01:08:48] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Sure, so hair loss all things skin mycotoxins cause a lot of skin stuff so rashes, acne, itchiness just sort of being like god my skin just really not right, asthma, all respiratory disorders, weight issues, difficulty losing weight, I personally found that my gut got a lot more regulated when I started to deal with the mycotoxins. The mycotoxins was the most impactful thing that I did to quiet down my celiac canary in a coal mine stuff cause I started that first actually and so gut health…

[01:09:26] Ashley James: I’m sorry to interrupt I’m thinking about what you said, about hair loss, and about skin, and your story where you came home from Notre dame, were you also exposed to mold as well as lead like when the building burned I imagined parts of the building were moldy did that exposed you to mycotoxins

[01:09:44] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I may have. No, the burning building did not expose me to mycotoxins but I mean we stayed; we stayed in the historical French region. Like who knows, right, I have no idea where I got exposed to but it’s very possible but I already knew that I have a mycotoxin issue but it was like the sum total of all the exposures sent me over the edge, right, and the most pressing exposure that I got was a clear lead exposure, but I already you know theres so much we haven’t talked about Ashley I am a child of the 70’s, I had pneumonia when I was 6 months old which means I got antibiotic when I was a 6-month old I had multiple ear infections and strepthroat growing up it was sort of a path I was a poster child for food sensitivities but I didn’t know it and I’ve two genes for celiac and I had what occurred to me was a very stressful events in childhood and then I went to med school I couldn’t simply do a family practice no I had to OB-GYN cause it was hard and I got to stay up at night delivering babies sounds great until something goes wrong right and we forgot about the part where I grew up in the 80’s and microwaves came out and we had those pre-packaged meals in plastic and we took advantage of them and I have a whole bunch of fillings in my mouth, I had, I should I say so when you really start to look at my toxin package I was the whole package man I had everything so because the time when I got to the lead exposure I had mercury some existing lead, mycotoxins, environmental toxins, and now a little bit of lead that I got from being in Notre dame was the straw that broke my back that was it.

[01:11:47] Ashley James: So you were just waiting. Your body was just waiting to have that one additional stressor and for some people it’s not a physical stressor like leads for some people it’s an emotional event.

[01:11:58] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah or perimenopause hormone changes can absolutely be a stressor but you’re right on emotional event is a hugely stressful it’s a life changing something happens a breakup a death a traumatic loss and ending a friendship whatever that is a terrible boss who just keeps chipping away your self-esteem these are all massive stressors and can have a tremendous effect on our body’s ability to detox and I’ll be happy to dive in to that one cause that’s a great conversation.

[01:12:31] Ashley James: Ooh yeah, because I’ve had stories of people where it’s like I don’t know what happened but I had this emotional event and my health was never the same, their memory was like their health was so much better before but you’re saying that they could have been just on a precipice right they could have just been slightly over toxic or just you know had a little bit too much of the lead or just had a little bit of candy that sort of had this everything just sort on that edge and maybe they woke up tired 3x a week instead of everyday, right, and so they’re just on the edge and then they had an event and for someone then it’s pregnancy because that is emotionally stressful that is physically stressful and then there’s the possibly four five years of breastfeeding I know of a mom that went up to seven years of breastfeeding mostly people do two or three years but if you have several kids in a row like you can be eleven years or breastfeeding so that’s the broken up sleep and then we just say oh it’s just because I’m not sleeping it’s just because and we don’t listen to our body and we negate because we go oh it’s just because I didn’t have enough sleep or didn’t eat well or I’m running around chasing the kids or I’m stressed out because of the kids and we don’t take the time to go wait a second I never recovered from that pregnancy I never recovered from that and that could have been when we’re at that breaking point even the emotional stress was enough so yeah let’s talk just about something that is so  intangible as emotional or mental stress could have a physiological effect on setting us over the edge especially when it comes to detox.

[01:14:21] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I love talking about this. So, it’s pretty cool the body does not distinguish between types of stress so the body doesn’t have a bucket for Madame Boss or that darn Massachusetts drivers, that’s not another bucket or the bucket of my spouse’s irking me or my kids are driving me crazy, none are those were separate buckets in the body whatever you say to me I’m going to say to you it’s all going into the stress bucket. So your adrenals are these tiny little organs that sit on top of your kidneys and they are magical they literally determine whether you live or die and under these tiny little things, important things come in small packages so they sit here and they are responsible for a number of behaviors and when you go ten thousand feet, big picture, the primary goal of your adrenals is fight, flight, freeze and maintaining your blood pressure so that’s your life or death pathway and your adrenals are going to do that at any cost and then your nice to have pathway is your hormone balance which becomes particularly important specially if you’re woman when you start to transition into menopause and the ovaries no longer do the job of making the estrogen your adrenals pick it up, okay, but if you have any stress in that bucket your adrenals interpret it in a particular way. So I call it the trinity I apparently like things of three but that’s just how it’s been presented. So there’s your adrenals, when your adrenals experienced that they are being stressed or something stressful is occurring to your body and that could be anything you interpret it at a cellular level like a lion is going to eat you that’s how primitive we are and when a lion is about to eat you it is not important to, digest your food, have sex, ovulate, uptake your nutrients, detox, none of that stuff happens it’s not important because what is happening  your body is experiencing an existential crisis, like I’m going to die we need to focus here and what happens is a really cool cascade so the adrenals signals to the liver, liver, don’t you detox because what we really need to do is focus on getting sugar to the muscles so two things happened at that point your lives takes the sugar that it stores called glycogen out of the liver and makes it into glucose so you have glucose in the bloodstream and simultaneously your body will signal you, I really need some quick sugar, so you’re going to start craving carbs, usually carbs and candy are typically what people like I’m craving and I’m like oh alright you’re stressed so your body is telling you.

[01:17:23] Ashley James: Yes, just think about our society you have a breakup you go for ice cream you have a stressful moment you go for the chocolate bar like how many times is that reinforced that we go for sugar in times of stress.

[01:17:43] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah at least the ice cream has some fat hopefully but yeah so you craved sugar and you take sugar out of your liver now simultaneously what’s happening in your gut and that sugar goes to your muscles in your legs by the way so you can run cause ultimately your body is primed to run from a lion okay we haven’t kept up with the technology our bodies haven’t evolved that the same pace the technology has so then in your gut your adrenal signal the gut you know right now digestion and absorption is not our priority stop so if you just had a big meal that made its way to your intestines it sits there and it rots and then the bacteria that are anaerobic that are there to digest you when you die they are psyched cause they are like, oh a meal and they get going and those are the bacteria that make you bloat and gassy and gross that really disgusting cause those are dysbiotic bacteria okay and the other part of it is when you eat that sugar candida in your system you know it’s common to have candida and I would say even a small is normal but if you have a large amount it starts to run the show and when you eat sugar it gets fed and then it needs to eat more cause it just reproduced so it makes you crave more so now you are on the rat wheel of OGs I’ve just increased my candida in the system along with my stress so all those things are going on simultaneously right and in the adrenals you start to use up the raw materials that you have to make cortisol you start to use them up because you are constantly turning now this is what happens in the short term, in the long term, your body starts to go into long term crisis management because it’s like wait a minute obviously we’re not running and instead of starting to sort of increase your metabolism and burning and put sugar where it belongs you start to actually collect your calories and depose fat and usually that fat is called the angry fat and its full of interleukins and inflammatory mediators that are seating right in your gut. So people are like oh it came all this way right in my mid-section, I’m like yup that’s your stressed gut and so this is what starts to happen long-term issue you hold on to every calorie the metabolism starts to slow and you go down the inflammation pathway because you’ve deposited all of these fat around your intestines, then you will get fatty liver because you’re now in a dysfunctional pattern it’s pretty creepy actually.

[01:20:09] Ashley James:  So you’re saying that the fat around the mid-section so like pear-shaped people or like Bart Simpson got or does it look like you’re pregnant like that shape where it’s just a bunch of fat deposited right there that is more likely than not stress gut deposits of angry fat from long term being in fight or flight mode?

[01:20:51] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes and, It felt like I’m on in broad, yes and, and because when you’ve shut down detox your liver’s no longer doing the job what’s happening is I mean we’re exposed to thousands of chemicals every day humans have created over a hundred forty thousand unique chemicals and we created an additional unique fifteen hundred chemicals every year so as we moved for a day we’re exposed to thousand of chemicals and it’s like death by a thousand cuts because obviously none of them are in  amounts that are going to kill us but they are in amounts that are high enough to torture us and so what’s happening is instead of your liver working on those and by the way alcohol is a toxin and it isn’t a cute toxin. So if you’re get exposed to alcohol you’re going processed that because it will kill you directly so you start to store this toxins in your fat and so if you’re having trouble losing weight and your thyroid is normal where I go is toxins cause it’s been about four years and I’ve been in this stance and it’s like everything kind of comes down to toxins and food and inflammation.

[01:22:13] Ashley James:  Hmm-hmm toxins, food and inflammation. Seriously?

[01:22:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow: In a nutshell that’s your health

[01:22:20] Ashley James:  So when you talked about the trifecta where you’re saying adrenals liver gut?

[01:22:29] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes, yes

[01:22:30] Ashley James:  Got it.

[01:22:31] Dr. Wendie Trubow: On top of the trifecta of leaky gut trigger and genetics slash epigenetics that’s another trifecta. I really like the word trifecta much better than trinity because I feel it was a religious reference and it’s not.

[01:22:48] Ashley James:  That really sounds such a positive thing to be like the trinity that’s killing you, you know like, ha!

[01:22:53] Dr. Wendie Trubow: The trifecta. Actually the perfect storm and the trifecta of- I love that language it’s great I’m going to steal that blindly.

[01:23:00] Ashley James:  You should do that. It’s yours now with bow on it. So, to wrap that up it’s very important to the emotional work and emotional healing and check in with yourself and it’s as important to makes sure you’re regulating your emotional stress and mental stress as it is your physical stress and your environmental stressors they’re all equally important because your body cannot distinguish between your emotional stress and the burger you ate to the drive thru or the plastics you’re exposed to or the lead you’re exposed to like stress, stress, stress but more importantly when our body is under threat, right, when you feel anxiety. Anxiety is the message, it’s like the red warning light on the dashboard saying hey we’re under attack were under attack and we can be totally safe but if we’re imagining something even just sitting there because the body’s always listening to our thoughts even if you are sitting there imagining something we don’t want to have happen is enough to trigger the stress response. So we’d have to be really careful, clear, we have to be very clear unintentional with our thoughts and do the emotional work, the emotional healing I’ve got great interviews on that but that is as important as the other stuff because if we trigger the fight or flight response we go into that cascade like you said and long term our body were fermenting or rotting food in our stomach, we’re feeding bad bacteria, we’re getting more mycotoxins in our body like that’s horrible, that’s all from just being careless with our thoughts and allowing the let’s say the mainstream media go somewhere there’s cable tv and watch it, not in my house, but go somewhere there’s cable tv and just turn to any news channel watch it for five minutes and you’re going to be rotting your food instead of digesting and absorbing your food right and then your body’s going to like what you’ve said in the long term you’d gain weight in the mid-section and that weight is also carrying with it a lot of toxins so we need to reverse that let’s err you know turn around make a U-turn go back and let’s go back to where we’re every day taking time to check-in within ourselves emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically and really be responsible for our state of stress and our state of triggering the autonomic nervous system parasympathetic response of our rest and digest you know it takes going for that walk five minutes three times a day just getting out there and breaking up your day doing deep breathing doing five minutes of meditation doing a few breaths and chewing your food slowly and making sure you sit, you sit before you eat and you’re in a calm state you know so all these little things add up hugely and that’s been my journey as well and I’ve seen this with so many of my clients like just making sure we’re taking ourselves out of the stress response so I loved that you associate that and you showed us, it’s like you see those crime shows where they show you the board and there’s a bunch of like these pins and strings on the board. You’re like the crazy detective that no one’s listening to until they finally realized that your crazy conspiracy board was actually true and you’re like look look you know you’re stressed out because your job is actually causing you to gain weight and also causing your candida which causing your brain fog and they’re all connected. So you got this great way of putting it all together and

[01:26:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes, truly!

[01:26:49] Ashley James:  So you’ve got the great way of putting it all together and allowing us to really see it. So thank you for the pin board. That’s wonderful. So we want to make sure that we’re checking off all these boxes are we go through. You want to talk about this epigenetics and I love this conversation because so many people are told by their well-intention doctors who are not trained in functional medicine or holistic medicine that’s like oh well you have diabetes because its genetic take this pill for the rest of your life, goodbye! You know it’s like what wait a second that’s totally not the case, epigenetics is a beautiful dance where the body can express in certain ways and due to nutrients or due to toxins could express in a different way so I love for you to enlighten us why it’s so important for us to understand our epigenetic tendencies and how we can utilize them to best detox and regain our health back

[01:27:51] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I’m going to use myself as an example because it’s such a clear example honestly so epigenetics is this, think of it like a small supporting cast of genetics that’s support your DNA and depending on what happens in your life, your parents life, your grandparents life, okay so we go back pretty far whatever happens on those three I guess you think of it the other way whatever happens on your grandparents life and your parents life and then your life influence whether your genes are going to turn on or not turn on, are you with me so far? Because this is really epigenetics insane it’s really cool so when I said I will share about myself I essentially come from a line of celiacs because my dad has celiac and I have celiac and my two brothers they’re half-brothers genetically to me my two half-brothers genetically who I consider emotionally my full brothers but really genetically they’re my half-brothers they have celiac and then when you go up the line my grandmother died of dementia which is strongly implicated in celiac and gluten sensitivity and then my uncle I’m pretty sure he’s got celiac but he won’t get tested and then his three kids out of the three two of them are sensitive to gluten and one of them has ADHD which is implicated in gluten sensitivity okay so and  by the way of my four kids two of them are fairly sensitive to gluten we figured out that I have two copies of the celiac gene, a dubious genetic overachiever, I’ve got two copies for celiac, two copies for MTHFR, and two copies for Vitamin D deficiency. So I by default…

[01:29:51] Ashley James:  Oh geez!

[01:29:53] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right? At that point I stopped counting I was like I’m not looking at anything else so by default I passed that along to all my kids and we allowed my older two to have gluten at preschool and by that time they were done with preschool they were both sensitive to gluten so by the time we have this like second generation of kids you know  we call them the bigs and the littles, the bigs were sensitive and the littles we were like no you’re not getting any gluten because we have epigenetically enhanced nasty genes for celiac and now let me talk to you about some things, so my dad was like pretty sick in his 20’s and this is before he had me his dad was very sick his whole life and was an immigrant, my grandmother she was intimate and immigrant but her parents were both immigrants and they lived a pretty successful life but they always lived in fear okay and then on the other side of my family my grandmother was an immigrant my grandfather was an immigrant and so my mom was the first generation born in the country and so those stressors acted to turn on those genes okay and so when you then layer on this is why it becomes a blended soup when you then  layer on yes I eat sloppy Joe’s as a kid I had the microwave food and all the antibiotics that messed with my gut permeability and my microbiome by the time you get to med school when I’m super stressed and eating on the run and eating a lot of gluten my ability to fight this off has really been diminished and deteriorated and so epigenetics is what turns on or off these genes and sometimes they’re carved before you even born so you’re at the affective other peoples choices which kind of stinks but the  good news is you’re only 15% right if I have lived a life of not eating gluten or if I have lived a life of not honestly not abusing myself in terms of putting myself in stressful situations I may not be where I was until I am now in terms of being so sensitive to gluten right knowing now what I did not know then but I didn’t know those things. Can I share a really cool study?

[01:32:15] Ashley James:  Yes!

[01:32:16] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I want to share a really cool study. I heard about it on NPR I was driving from Western Mass to Eastern Mass where I live and I have my kids in the car and for once they were quiet I was like shh we got to listen to this so it’s such a really cool study of this tiny town in Sweden I’m pretty sure it’s Sweden they keep meticulous records on their inhabitants of their town and their records went back to like the 17th or 18th hundreds, it was a couple of hundred years and these 2 epidemiologists went there I don’t know why they did this but they went there and they started just combing through the records of this town and here’s what they found that was so so creepy and yet so such a huge thing for us to be able to make choices about our health that what they found was that if your grandparent when they were going through puberty experienced a feast meaning they had a good crop they had lots of food they ate a lot then their offspring two generations down this is the impact of epigenetics their offspring two generations down were significantly more likely to have diabetes and heart disease and on average died six years earlier than the general population and if you’re grandparent went thru a famine when they hit puberty their offspring two generations down were significantly less likely to experience diabetes and cardiovascular disease and on average lived twenty-five years more than the general population so there this spread of 30 years based on what happened to your grandparent when they went thru puberty.

[01:34:05] Ashley James:  Can you explain why? I’m trying to wrap my brain around it. Is that because they were fasting and that has protective properties? I would’ve imagined a famine would cause stress on the body but why did that actually worked to their favour?

[01:34:24] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I have no idea. Honestly. This is what’s being studied now. So some of the reasons how do I say this it’s easy to feel victimized right because we can’t do anything about it it’s done it happened and the stuff that happened to my grandparents to my dad is seventy-five years to a hundred fifty years old and so we don’t have any control over that but your genetics again are 10 to15% of the total mix and we do have control over the 85 to 90% of it, meaning you have control over your eating, your sleeping, your pooping, your relationships,your intimacy your thoughts , how much you exercise, you have control over all of that and so that work is inspiring because you’re not your genetics. Yes, they put you at risk and it’s helpful to know what you are at risk for but you are not your genetics.

[01:35:29] Ashley James:  That really makes me wonder if the protective properties of fasting went in to play and if so if you chose let’s say you do a 5-day fast every quarter or 3-5 day fast or 3-day fast there’s so many like that, when someone fasts for months and months and months they actually see the benefits of those fast when they continue to do blood work and check up on the person so there’s protective properties that happen when we fast and I’m just wondering if it then now were seeing evidence that it’s actually goes down a few generations, which boggles my mind.

[01:36:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s amazing.

[01:36:19] Ashley James:  Right? So amazing. Cause we also see on the other side of that people who like for example were in the holocaust or you know very very traumatic experiences during the war that they’re able to see higher levels just observed ambient natural stress like higher level of natural stress hormones in the grand children of holocaust survivors and they talked about how people who like have normal stress lives versus incredibly stressful lives that even two generations there it’s seen in their genetic makeup which means it’s even more important if you know your grandparents your parents or your grandparents went thru really really, really, really, really, really hard times it’s even more important for you to take it seriously to check yourself to lower your stress levels or it’s even more important to get Wendie’s book and detox the stress levels and focus on you know ditching those toxins Dirty Girl Ditch the Toxins I’m excited for your book cause the way you teach, you handle this information in such an easy visual way right that’s what I love I want the science I want you to tell us the science but I also want people to understand it and be able to use it you know everyone must have walk away from this interview going okay now I know how to tackle that those 15 pounds on my stomach that I can never get rid of no matter what I do now I know  now I get to look into my stress levels my mycotoxins all the stuff right the go down the checklist.

 

[01:38:04] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yeah, I mean look. I co-wrote it with my husband. I co-wrote it reading the book is like talking to me basically and it’s meant to be a roadmap right because you know if you think about how many toxins we’re exposed to it’s paralyzing and so we’re not going to tell you that you’re going to be toxin-free what I’m going to tell you is it you want to get your body burning of toxins down enough that it’s not messing you up so you can live a vital vibrant healthy life able to be interested in intimacy until you are at least a  hundred, that you get better every decade, that is my philosophy and I will go to the Math, fighting for that one because that is my why, something you said earlier we have to talk about the why you have to know why you are doing this right it’s not because you have an event coming up and you want to look good for it, nope, it’s because you want to be healthy enough to see your great grandchildren and play with them and have them remember you in fifty years, right, or you make a legacy impact that is felt by millions you got to find some why that is massive because if it’s like I want to look better for the wedding I am going in to September after September you’ve no more future that pulls you forward this powerful enough, so you want to pick a big, big scary goal that you can accomplish in your lifetime but it gives you strength when you like oh, I really wish I could eat that, I really feel left out, oh I used to eat that at Thanksgiving, right, there’s a lot of emotion around food so when you are stripped to feel that emotion to get something bigger like yeah I did always used to do that and remember how I felt and here is  what I want to do with this new found health.

[01:40:01] Ashley James:  Uhumm-uhumm… you know it really helps me I’ve cut a lot of foods I used to eat and I imagine how it’s going to make me feel and I go I don’t want to feel that tomorrow and then I could imagine the way it’s doing to the tiny, tiny very less than paper thin lining of my gut and how eating for example fried food is a bunch of free radicals that’s like punching holes like bullets through the nucleus of my cells and causing all kinds of havoc just inflammation and havoc and craziness and then the oil, the fried oil in the food is suffocating the good bacteria in my gut and creating an anaerobic environment for all the bad stuff to takeover, because there’s this war that means there’s this real war going on your gut all the time and it’s the good versus the evil right they should make a movie there’s a war and there’s 6 pounds of bacteria in your gut it’s like there’s a Chihuahua or like I don’t know baby kangaroo living in your gut and there’s a war between like 2 or 3 pounds of bad bacteria and 2 or 3 pounds of good bacteria and they’re going at it and hopefully you have less than 30 pounds of bad bacteria but for all the people who are sick and so every single meal and every single decision could be is it going tip the scales for the bad guys or the good guys right, and then there’s the bad stuff in your gut that’s making the mycotoxins and you eat a little bit of gluten and all those mycotoxins are (slurps) sucked up into your body and affecting your brain. Do mycotoxins crossed the blood brain barrier?

[01:41:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Ooh, I don’t know the answer to that. I know that when you have a patient with dementia and get rid of the mycotoxins it improves brain functions so I have to say yes but I don’t know for sure, speculation.

[01:41:59] Ashley James:  Both my grandfathers died of dementia I mean you can’t’ really figure out their Alzheimer’s until after right so they just called it dementia I was really young and this was in the 80’s when they died and when you said that likely people who passed away of dementia likely there’s a relationship between that and barley, wheat, rye, and oats right so likely right so that’s another thing is if you know of direct relatives that passed away of dementia or have dementia that you, yourself and people related to them could benefit from cutting out those grains right to prevent them. Our genetics is not a death sentence which is  what you said, right, they’re not a death sentence. So if everyone in your family got a heart disease it doesn’t mean you have to as well it means that that’s the thing to circle on the chalkboard for you I need to live a life preventing this and I need to live a life creating heart health, focusing on heart health don’t focus on dying of our disease focus on everything that you can do, you wake up in the morning your feet at the ground you go, good what I’m going to do to create heart health today? I’m going to go for a walk, I’m going to drink my water, I’m going do my meditation or my prayer, I’m going to eat bowls and bowls of greens and beans and a little bit of balsamic vinegar for the nitric oxide you know so you build up this list in your mind of all these wonderful things and if you follow this daily habit of I’m going to create this health for me then that 15% genetic factor isn’t going to do you under right because we have to live a life of this actionable steps. And your book has a bunch of actionable steps can you share I mean you taught us so much but can you give us some homework some tidbits from your book you know tantalize us with the tidbits from your book because we’re all going to run out and buy it and afterwards and starts following it diligently but like set us a separate now what we can do starting today to improve our health

[01:44:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I love this question. I really encourage people to always start with food because you do it 2 to 3x a day at least and it’s the cornerstone of what we do so you have to take stock of what you are and get real so if you’re someone who’s eating a relatively standard American diet meaning something processed for breakfast lunch and dinner then action item #1 is to pick a meal and get rid of the processed food at that meal once you’ve won go on to the next meal, and once you’ve won at both of those both meals go to the third meal. So that the food you are eating generally is devoid of processed food yes you can have special occasions yes you can have a treat and what you want to watch out for is it’s not a slippery slope meaning you have it once in a while but then you start having them every day and then you are like oops, sorry, so it’s important to start with food and that is actionable right? And no matter where you live and I’m cognizant that not everyone has the same financial resources so ideally in a world where you have all choices you would go for no processed and organic and then do your best you can get frozen foods that are organic that are often much cheaper than fresh and those are pretty good so if it’s a choice between something that has pesticides versus something that is frozen that has no pesticides I would go for the frozen especially because it’s fresh frozen so it’s preserved all the nutrients in it and don’t cook it to death because then you’ll get rid of all the nutrients, so lightly cooked it. It’s so funny in our book what we go through is like if this is where you are starting for food do this and if this is what you are starting do this because we recognize you could be on a huge spectrum of places for food. So we start with figure out where you are and then start to level up.  Now I always say to people most of the people, well actually all people that see me our female because I’m a gynecologist so I always see females but my husband’s partner sees men also and I always say to my patients watch your language, language is really critical and so this isn’t a diet, a. it’s is a lifestyle and b. there’s no cheating on your lifestyle there’s just what you do and whether or does or doesn’t work for you because you know they call me we have these calls since like, bless me Dr. T, I have sinned, oh my god, I’m not a confessional booth, you have not sinned you are perfect, incomplete and sometimes you do things that don’t work for you move on but then the question is let’s Monday morning quarterback this did you eat that at that party because you were a. hungry b. forget to prepare c. left out d. acting out what was the source of it, let’s get down to the source of it so next time you can have a win when you go to the party that you at the end of it say oh, I actually ate in a  way that I’d feel good the next day, so we really look a lot of that in our book, are you sleeping, are you moving your body, what is your genetic risk, all of that. All of the stuff we talked about today or things that we talked about in our book, and we’re really drilling to it, is like one per chapter, we got a whole chapter on each of these things.

[01:47:37] Ashley James:  Nice. I love it.

[01:47:40] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  And you may want to cut this out, this is the part where if you want to cut it out I’m totally fine with but my experiences as a perimenopausal woman lead me to say to my husband we need to write a book about how to navigate perimenopause in a way that is empowering and so that book we’re starting tomorrow actually and that would be out in 2023

[01:48:00] Ashley James: Congratulations! I’m not cutting this out. That is a fantastic thing and I can’t wait to have you back.

[01:47:06] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Thank you! 

[01:48:07] Ashley James: Talking about this I’ve a girlfriend of mine and she is a listener so it’s so funny when like my legit friends in real life then became my fans of my show, I heard that episode! Oh my gosh, this is cool, but kind of crazy and so we’ve known each other for years and she started becoming a listener, and I’m not preachy to my  friends, I kind of can’t help myself so if I listen to any their conversation and I’m like oh I did an interview with this doctor and then I’ll catch myself because I’m like I’m sorry guys I know I’m like this I act like this you know like Lisa Simpson about health stuff but it’s kind of my thing I truly do geek out all the time 24/7  this is who I am and so a friend of mine didn’t tell me she had this health issues she’s had 7 kids, 7 kids, she knows at least 2 languages that I know, lived in several countries and just really had this very eclectic life at times incredibly stressful, really beautiful life, they do ministry where they opened their home to people who are recovering drug and alcohol addicts they are sober but they’re going thru their program, and they opened their home with their children opened their home and they bring them in because now this is a clean and sober environment so they for many years have ministered to these people who are like it so hard to recover from like fentanyl addiction like these crazy street drug addiction their kind of like their side gig is they constantly helping these people to get back on their feet and they’re called to do that and they also run a construction business so she’s like one thing or another and she said to me, oh I listen to this episode now I don’t have migraines anymore because I did what this top doctor told me to do, like just a major life thing, and then I did this, she’s done several things from several different guests but what she’d told me which I can’t wait for her to hear this episode so she’s listening. Hello!

[01:50:24] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Shout out! Shout out!

[01:50:26] Ashley James: Shout out! Yeah, she said to me something really interesting because she’s like really really healthy she looks really healthy and she goes, I hit a total wall and I don’t know where she’s in her 40’s I don’t know where her energy drops down to the floor like I don’t know where and I’ve heard people talk about it and but you say things several times in this interview you said things it’s like I’ve heard it but it never landed and you had these tidbits really land in my listening and I’m hoping for all the listeners too I bet it has and so for her I think because she’s at that moment where you said if your adrenals are taxed  which I bet hers are because she’s lived such an amazing life, just beautiful, brilliant life so far her adrenals are taxed and then her ovaries were like well guess what we’re plucking out! Perimenopause. Welcome, welcome to the beginning of menopause and so now she’s like boom hits the wall completely slides all the way down to the floor so I can’t wait for her to read you book also because I bet that’s really going to help her.

[01:51:43] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Late spring 2023! It’s coming.

[01:51:45] Ashley James: Oh awesome! Welcome back on the show, can’t wait to have you back. I’d said earlier that I had that distended liver tasting heavy metals like I was crazy and I had switched over to a very healthy very clean totally no processed diet in an attempt to heal because anytime I was actually doing keto and meat and everything but that was made it all come flaring out, that was made it all, it was keto with a doctor we’re following and every week working with this doctor and it was so bad like three months of keto with this doctor my liver was crazy I was going through all this tests my liver enzymes were through the roof they’re very concerned they want to do  biopsy and I was like, no no no then I did an interview that really turned me around and had me do 100% unprocessed whole food plant based very healing like a lot of raw food also one of my doctors said you really need to sweat because that is one of your emunctory systems that’s where your detox system that allows you to bypass the liver so I looked around and looked around talked to a bunch of doctors and finally settled on Sunlighten Sauna, have you heard of the Sunlighten?

[01:53:04] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I have one. I love it.

[01:53:05] Ashley James: You have one! Yes! So I have the 3-in-1 it says it’s about the size of a small closet I’m actually sitting right beside it right now that’s my Sunlighten and it’s in the office in the corner of the office, and my husband and I can actually fit in it even though it’s for one person we can both fit in it on a bench although, you know what it’s not as fun as it sounds to be sitting with your husband sweating that was fun for the first few times but I’d just like to just spread a little bit and have my space so we go back to back but what I thought that’s really interesting is my  electricity bill didn’t go up well we turn off the heat because it’s the summer time and I just check the electricity bill so we’ve probably using the sauna a lot and it didn’t change so its about as much as having the heat on in which we didn’t have heat on much cause we’re in a very neutral area, Seattle, we hardly ever have the heat on but with the detox I started with the sauna and I noticed that everything slowly got better my liver went down within a few weeks my liver went down I stopped tasting heavy metals I’m sweating almost everyday in the sauna I would sweat everyday but if I didn’t really stay on top of my hydration then I wouldn’t do it that day it’s my reward at the end of the day for being hydrated all day long and that was about four years, four, was it four years ago it’s like time is sort of crazy, 2018 I think and what happened  was for the first time in my life I successfully lost weight and kept it off it was 80 pounds and that was over the course of two years but you’re right the weight didn’t just start coming off right away it was gradual and it was definitely after the first few months like a little bit of first because that was inflammation but using the Sunlighten consistently was one of my best tools for detox and then I was introduced to other stuff as well I’m never going to say that it’s just one thing

[01:55:14] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  No, it’s never just one thing.

[01:55:15] Ashley James: Right. It’s never just one thing that’s why getting your book is so important because what if it’s 10 things or 12 things and maybe we’re doing 3 of them and we need to add the rest that’s why you’re book is so important because it’s going to let us know about all the stuff we’re not doing that we could be doing to take ourselves to the next level so here I am I’ve come so far but I know there’s more for me to do and that’s why I’m excited for your book, I’m so excited for all your books all the books that you’re going to come out for the future but this one thank you for writing it I really appreciate that you came here today to share this and I just know that you’re helping so many people so many women but I think that this message can help men as well just like you wrote it with your husband and your addressing everyone so thank you, thank you for the future generations cause imagine the parents or let’s say people who are listening who aren’t parents yet make this changes and that’s a trickle effect down generations after generations so when you get up in the morning I just want you to think about all the generations that you are touching based because you’re sliding this information so thank you.

[01:56:23] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Oh it’s really a privilege. I think I love how you put that out there. It’s not that just for you it’s for future generations. That’s where the magic lives.

[01:56:34] Ashley James: And even let that be the motivator for not eating that thing at the party because I know some dads are like super endearing dads also but I can only say for my experiences as a woman because that’s what I am, in the moment, I want to eat that whatever that blank that’s going to be tasty really good in the moment but if I were think that this would harm future generations, my unborn generations, like my grandchildren or if you know if I have that idea in my mind, and even if I’m done having kids my health impacts my children my mom died when I was 22 and she was 55 and she was the epitome of health to me until she died, that was devastating to my life and what if I die young and how that impacts my son these are lifestyle choices that we can make their little tiny ones that add up every day and that is the difference between being around for you grandkids or not every listener you are important your life matters and the impact you have on your family on your future generations matter so you’re worth it to say no in the moment there’s temptations for the long term benefit of future generations they get to be with you and I think that is really beautiful and so we should remember that our life choices and every life choice we make does have even a small impact on those we care about.

[01:58:09] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yes, small changes add up to huge impact over the course of the year. It’s really impactful.

[01:58:18] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Please come back when you have your sexy book written.

[01:58:26] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s going to be a fun one. Once we embargo the title I’ll share it with you. The first one is Dirty Girl you can kind of imagine what the second one might mean. You probably can’t imagine the title but it’s certainly not going to be tame and boring.

[01:58:40] Ashley James: Okay good, good, I mean we’re talking about sex and health right so we need to make this fun.

[01:58:48] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  We should. Not just fun but accessible we can do this we’ve got this we’ve got the tools, and no, it’s not normal to experience these things it’s fixable.

[01:58:40] Ashley James: I love that, I love that. Thank you so much Dr. Wendie Trubow this has been such a pleasure having you on the show and oh, I want to make sure that listeners also know that your website now I have fivejourneys.com is that the best for you or is there another website you want them to know about.

[01:59:17] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Well, I’m into world domination so that’s our clinic it’s fivejourneys.com the book is on Amazon that’s the best place you’ll get it for the least price we have my Instagram at wendietrubow.md and we have our own podcast which is five journeys podcast live like you matter.

[01:59:34] Ashley James:  Nice definitely check that podcast. Awesome. Well thank you so much have yourself a fantastic day and I can’t wait for you to comeback on the show.

[01:59:42] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Me too, thank you so much Ashley, this has been great!

[01:59:46] Ashley James:  I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Wendie Trubow. She was amazing, wasn’t she? And you know what, right after I recorded this I realized there’s 2 more studies I didn’t tell you about that I’m really excited about when it comes to utilizing light and heat therapy found in the Sunlighten Sauna System which offers the full spectrum the near mid and far infrared there’s two really incredible things and that’s increasing nitric oxide in the body and also the heat shock protein so the Sunlighten system when you use it on a daily basis it increases cardiovascular health and decreases high blood pressure actually there was a study I just read recently that it increases nitric oxide and if you’ve been an avid listener you know we talked about nitric oxide in the past because it is directly related to preventing cardiovascular events preventing like heart attacks and supporting longevity and the health of the cardiovascular system so we want to have a healthy level of nitric oxide in the body now there’s something called heat shock protein and we talked about this in episode 410 that’s really important cause Marcus Friedmann talks about the natural treatments for cancer that some countries are freely using in hospitals for whatever reason we get into that episode before, for whatever reason are not being used in this country but have been highly, highly studied in other countries so the use of heat therapy stimulates heat shock protein and there are some types of cancers that are unable to survive in the higher heat and so they find out that when you stimulate heat shock protein they’re also seeing that some cancers can’t survive in that and that’s why we have other certain countries they’re using a heat therapy as an adjunct with the other cancer treatments very successfully so episode 410 is really good to listen to about that but that’s what I love about the Sunlighten System is that it helps your body to increase the heat shock protein which heat shock protein and there’s tons of studies on it, it helps the body maintain homeostasis by forming new proteins reactivating misfolded proteins and it works as a chaperon to stabilize unfolded proteins and deformed cells which helps the body to prevent type 2 diabetes, obesity, arteriosclerosis and of course cancer, because we’ve seen some that cancers are DNA’s gone awry in some cases but there are many other diseases that we see where DNA’s gone awry thru oxidative stress so this is helps greatly to reduce oxidative stress there’s whole component of our innate immune system that heat shock proteins stimulates and boosts reduce free radicals and heat shock protein alone also aids in faster muscle recovery and repair and then heart protection as well there’s many studies I read but I just want to highlight a few of the ones I thought we’re really interesting heat shock protein also helps in relieving chronic pain and depression and in the studies they saw that people who were depressed reported that they had increased appetite they had a sensation of a relaxed mood and they had an alleviation from their depression which is amazing and it goes back to the fact that when we reduce stress in the body we could be we were doing something physical we’re sitting in the sauna our body is sweating it actually affecting our emotional state our mental state it’s helping us detox it’s having this anti-aging effect it’s having this really positive effect on the immune system and in our cardiovascular system so it’s always wonderful things happening all at once as far as all the healing tools that I have collected over the years it’s the Sunlighten Sauna System is the one tool that does the most things it’s like the Swiss army knife of holistic tools that I have in my arsenal that I use on a regular basis sometimes I’m going to use an oral health example it was kind of life changing for my oral health when I started using the tongue scraper and I realize that your mouth has never been cleaned until you’ve used the tongue scraper it’s a game changer the stuff that comes off your tongue twice a day is amazing you should definitely get a metal tongue scraper it does one thing it just that one thing and it does that very well and that’s effective and I like it and I have all kinds of health tools and bio hacking health tools to help me just optimize my life that I use all the time but the Sunlighten Sauna does over 20 things to the body and I’m learning more and more every time I look into it I’m learning more and more about what this light and heat therapy does for my health and so as far as investing in your health you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck by using a tool on a daily basis that accomplishes all these different health results at once just like shifting your diet all of a sudden, oh all of these wonderful things are coming online epigenetically your gene starts expressing differently when you changed your diet when you lower stress your genes actually starts expressing differently your different enzymes start happening your body goes into this huge healing mode where it’s able to finally deliver resources to healing and to repair and to restoring and regenerating when you make this one time, you make this one change just one switch all of these things come on line and that’s what I’ve noticed with the Sunlighten System I just want a detox but I’ve got so much more so there’s my 2 cents and then some with inflation I don’t know here’s my 2 dollars on the Sunlighten System. Please if you haven’t already joined our Facebook group I’d love to see you there, I’d love to chat with you, if you have any questions or if you just want to share about your healing journey so many of us are on our healing journeys together and it’s so great to come in to a community and feel like you are not alone so please join the Facebook group say hi to me and thank you for being a listener thank you for sharing this episode to those you care about and I can’t wait for you to hear what’s coming up we’ve got some great interviews in the pipeline that we’re going to be publishing in the next month or so, so watch out for those and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and please do something today to love yourself.

Get Connected with Dr. Wendie Trubow!

 

Website

Facebok

Instagram

YouTube

Twitter

Book by Dr. Wendie Trubow:

 

Dirty Girl: Ditch the Toxins, Look Great, and Feel Freaking Amazing!

Jul 11, 2022

Visit Sunlighten Sunlighten.com to see the different infared technologies and how they can help you lower your stress levels and support optimal health and healing.

Jun 7, 2022

https://brookehazen.com
Book  https://amzn.to/3zqzWX9
"You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide for Men and Women to Heal the Pathways of Sexual Dysfunction and Restore Relational Harmony Together"

 

Pornography-Induced Erectile Dysfunction – Treatment and Intervention

https://www.learntruehealth.com/pornography-induced-erectile-dysfunction-treatment-and-intervention

  • Understanding Erectile Dysfunction (ED)
  • What are the three different kinds of ED
  • What is Chelation Therapy
  • Bad effects of pornography and semen release addiction
  • Dopamine Addiction

 

Erectile Dysfunction, commonly referred to as ED, is when it is hard to get or keep an erection firm enough for sex. ED is often a symptom of another health problem or made worse by emotional problems. In this episode, Brooke Hazen shares his wisdom on the causes of Erectile Dysfunction and how to heal the devastating effects without relying on medication.

 

Intro: 

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 480. I am so excited to have Brooke Hazen on the show. Brooke is an organic farmer, lifelong athlete, physical coach, health and fitness enthusiast, and an author. I’m really excited to talk about our subject today which is a deep dive into ED, and uncovering what’s going on in your health that is obstructing your sexual health. So what I love to look at is the body speaks to us its symptoms. And this is something I was been taught by many of my naturopathic mentors over the years that the body– we were born with a manual. Right? But if we listen really closely to the symptoms of our body, we can begin to hear the messages our body’s trying to tell us. 

In Erectile Dysfunction both in men and women or I should back up sexual dysfunction in men or women, anyone, any adult who notices that they have a difficult time being aroused or painful sex or just all the issues around that or not even wanting it. Any of that is a great indication of hormone imbalance, of pelvic floor dysfunction, of nutrient deficiency, and the list goes on and on. In fact, Erectile Dysfunction just for men, as an example is an early sign of diabetes and heart disease as a result because it’s a cardiovascular issue. One of the actual issues is cardiovascular.

Brooke, what I love is that you’re really going to dive down deep into it and show us the different aspects of this dysfunction and how we can heal our body holistically as a whole to have a healthy sexual life because that means it’s a symptom. Right? It means, if you have a healthy sexual life, it means that your hormones are balanced, your cardiovascular system is healthy. There’s a lot of great things going on. Your pelvic floor is healthy. So we’re going to dive into all those things up, but first, I’m just so curious about your organic farming company. I want to learn more about that as well. Can we talk about that first? 

 

[00:02:40] Brooke Hazen:  Yes. Thank you for having me on. Sure. 

 

[00:02:42] Ashley James:  Yeah, absolutely. So you have this beautiful organic farm in California. And you make, you cultivate medicinal herbs and a special type of olives that are high in healing properties. How can we buy your products? Because I know you’ve got this little organic farm to help people gain access to these medicinal products that aren’t just in the grocery stores. 

 

[00:03:15] Brooke Hazen:  Well, I’m moving largely direct to customer at this point. So my website has all the information for getting engaged with my organic farming, part of myself besides my author first and it’s called goldridgeorganicfarms.com.

 

[00:03:32] Ashley James: goldridgeorganicfarms.com. Great. Well, of course, the links to everything that Brooke does is going to be on the show of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. And of course the link to your book, You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide For Men And Women To Heal The Pathways Of Sexual Dysfunction And Restore Relational Harmony Together. That’s a mouthful. 

 

[00:03:55] Brooke Hazen:  Yes, it is. 

 

[00:03:56] Ashley James:  Absolutely. Well, I’ve been seeing a Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist, healing from my last two pregnancies and just I’m learning so much about how for both men and women. In men, it just goes so much more undiagnosed than women. And that, if there’s an imbalance in the pelvic floor, it can lead to all kinds of pain or sexual dysfunctions and they might not even think to look there. 

So but that’s just one aspect, right? The majority of it is diet and nutrition. Which of course, being an organic farmer and being really interested in medicinal foods, you’re seeing that there’s a difference that when you consume medicinal quality foods versus just going and eating conventionally grown foods. You see a big difference in your health. What led you because you’re such an enthusiast around health and fitness. What led you to become an organic farmer and dive into this world?

 

[00:04:58] Brooke Hazen:  Well, I just love to be connected to nature and I wanted to do something with my hands that I could see the results of my work. And so I was interested in natural resources at first and then over time, I came a bit down to earth and started getting into organic farming.

 

[00:05:18] Ashley James:  And how many years have you been doing it?

 

[00:05:21] Brooke Hazen:  My whole adult life. I studied it in college and ever since I got out in evening college I started apprenticing and afterwards, I eventually started my own farm.

 

[00:05:32] Ashley James:  Love it. Now a little bit off-topic, but I’m really curious with this state of affairs going on. Are you being affected by the global fertilizer shortages?

 

[00:05:45] Brooke Hazen:  No. I believe that’s more synthetic fertilizers and I’m organic and so those are usually natural materials. They aren’t natural materials.

 

[00:05:57] Ashley James:  Fascinating. So we’re going to see sort of a bump in the organic farming world because they aren’t reliant on the fertilizers that now we have a massive shortage of.

 

[00:06:09] Brooke Hazen:  Yeah. Yeah, we should. Hopefully. 

 

[00:06:12] Ashley James:  Cool. Well, keep buying organic. Keep supporting those local farmers that are doing such good for our bodies and for the world. I love it. 

 

[00:06:19] Brooke Hazen: Thank you.

 

[00:06:20] Ashley James: Okay, so tell your story. So what happened to you, when you went to school to become a farmer? You got super excited about organic farming. What led you down this path that had you write this book?

 

[00:06:33] Brooke Hazen:  Well, this beautiful journey started several years ago when I started noticing the symptoms of Erectile Dysfunction. I don’t even like to use that word, Erectile Dysfunction because that’s really a word that’s meant to sort of cast a veil of mysticism and disempowerment over us. When I’m going to end up breaking it down for you, it’s really nothing that could be further from the truth. We have a very simple and easy solutions for all the different types of ED unidentified whether that’s organic, or neurological, or energetic, and I actually had more of an arousal issue that’s neurologically based. 

So that’s Dopamine, mainly. I also had an energetic ED from releasing my semen too often and I was doing this because I was addicted to pornography. It really isn’t an addiction and I’ll tell you why, when we get into this further. So what I did at that time I had no idea what all this was. And I did what everyone else thought which was to reach out to Western Medicine. And they, of course, they prescribed me the only remedy they have which is a very specific pharmaceutical for cardiovascular blood flow. 

And I actually had in millions of men actually, and women, actually have porn-induced Erectile Dysfunction, which is the neurologically-based form of Erectile Dysfunction or really an arousal dysfunction where we become desensitized to sex, to our partner, and to life. And it can escalate to the point where eventually you no longer could get aroused to not only your partner, a real-life partner. Which is what was happening to me– but also your favorite pornography. Eventually, you become fully desensitized to life completely on every level. So, I didn’t know all of this, so I was experiencing debilitating side effects because I was being misdiagnosed and misprescribed. Just like millions of men right now with blood flow-inducing pharmaceutical drugs. When I actually had something that was easily fixable and curable that was neurologically based. 

So we don’t realize how the immense burdens that men are under when they’re addicted to pornography. There’s a few different things happening all at once. There’s this unneeded burden of debilitating side effects from the Erectile Dysfunction drugs I just mentioned, which causes fatigue and all kinds of horrible symptoms. But there’s also, what I found out later was debilitating side effects of being addicted to pornography, which is perpetual dopamine crashes and associated fatigue, and mood imbalance, and distancing in the relationships that takes place. 

Furthermore, we have this undue burden of The Scarlet Letter that Western Medicine places on men which is the word Erectile Dysfunction, and all the associated loss of identity, and confidence, and confusion, and disempowerment that comes with it. So I was going through all these burdens at the time and the reason I wrote this book because I want to help others avoid this and there are millions going through this right now. The fastest-growing segment of ED is Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction and this energetic form of semen release through pornography. 

So, as I was going through this process, I was going through so much. I’ll never forget that I felt like a gerbil on an experimental wheel with all these different types of pharmaceutical EDs and they were debilitating, they were exacting and mechanical and I was dependent on them. It was not in resonance with who I am, my heart, and my soul. But during this time, I was praying to God and I was praying for a natural drug which could not have side effects and works. And I was never going to get that prayer answered because God had so much more in store for me besides a drug that I was dependent on, whether that’s natural or that’s pharmaceutical. As I ran out of options, there was nothing left for me in the pharmaceutical realm. I fell into a deep depression for weeks at a time. And now, it’s when I began to let go of my control and release myself completely into God’s arms and pray for a true healing miracle. 

It was at that time, God actually did hear me and gave me a true healing miracle. And God decided to start the journey that I was to take place of restoring not only the most incredible sexual health beyond what I ever could have imagined, but also my overall physical health, my relational health, and my mental and emotional health. And God also showed me how this is all intertwined. God is the ultimate, holistic healer, the power behind all holistic healing. If we just let God in, we can unleash all the power, unlimited potential of our minds. And the key to doing that, I have found and I’ll never forget why God led me first to Your Brain On Porn website by Gary Wilson, was to show myself and everyone that this key, this foundation, all starts with our neurology. Having healthy neurology meaning balanced dopamine levels, as well as our overall chi sexual energy by simply getting rid of our addictions to pornography and semen release. That is really where we must start and that’s where is the foundation for really launching us into massive transformation on every level. It’s all intertwined and connected. It is all holistic.

 

[00:12:45] Ashley James: I love it. You were led to this website, Your Brain On Porn and how long did it take to reverse this issue and be healed?   

 

[00:13:01] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, that’s a great question. So this process of rewiring, and rebuilding, and regrooving our neuro chemistry, these neurotransmitter hormones of dopamine because this is a dopamine addiction when you’re addicted to pornography, on par with actually the same level as cocaine and morphine addicts. In fact, the dopamine levels have been measured to be just as low as cocaine and morphine addicts. But this process takes anywhere from, it takes at least months but sometimes a year. It could go as long as two years but what I’ve found is this process of rewiring and re-sensitizing ourselves to life, actually can take a couple of years and I’m still seeing increased sensitivity to everything around me. And this includes also sort of refraining from virtual type of imagery, not just pornography, but this whole fantasy of pixels on a screen because it’s really our neurology is getting desensitized to life by this whole fantasy of what’s going on in our brain. 

And our brain cannot actually tell the difference between a fantasy and a real life. So men actually believe they’re on this successful campaign with meeting a wide range of novel needs, which is getting into the mating behaviors that is so prominent in pornography and in relationships today that is really poisonous to long-term sustainable relationships. 

But there’s really three different kinds of ED and I want to demystify them. I want to educate us about it because I believe that there’s so much myths and misconceptions around it that really Western Medicine sort of promotes indirectly because they really have one tool for resolving it and that is this one form of medication. They have no idea what to do with the fastest-growing segment of ED which is neurologically based ED. And they’re never going to give you a holistic approach that’s curative and preventative. You can try as much as you want, they will never give that to you. They only have this one tool and even that one tool does not actually resolve organic ED which is physical source of ED, which was everyone talks about. 

You were talking about Kegels and I get into all that deeply in the book. The second half of my book covers all of organic ED. But first, we have to really focus on the real problem. We have to go to neurologically-based ED and energetic ED first. And those are the first two that I’ve found are the preprominent source of EDs taking place today and where we must go first. 

And we’re actually the only ones capable—we’re so empowered. We’re the only ones capable of actually resolving the first two major types of ED which is neurologically-based and energetic-based by simply refraining from pornography and semen release. Mainstream Western Medicine can’t do that for us. Nobody can do that for us. Except each individual has to do that, that has this addiction. So the three types are PIED, Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction. Which we don’t talk enough about neurology but we need our neurology for getting aroused, knowing to sex in our partner back to life. And the second form is Energetic ED, which is has to do with our semen release, releasing our semen too often and that just causes a depletion in our chi sexual energy. 

Our chi sexual energy cannot be separated from our overall energy because chi is really our life force. It’s God within us. And dopamine is our drive or inspiration, determination, and the will of God for us to become our ideal selves. God has given us this gift of neuro chemistry and energies that we’re simply abusing. And Eastern traditions are totally familiar with this. It’s just in the West we aren’t and we are simply abusing these gifts that had been given by God and the answer is really easy and simple. It’s to give up this addiction to pornography and semen release. That’s the answer.

And then, Organic ED is the third one. That’s the one that we always go to. And we’re sort of brainwashed to go to automatically. We gets so focused on Organic ED and I’m not saying that we shouldn’t. I’m saying at first, we need to focus on the first two because the reason is that you can have even if Western Medicine does prescribe, if they look out and that one little slippery tool that they have for ED does actually land our selves on someone that has Blood Flow Restricted ED. They still maybe watching pornography and releasing semen in pornography and they will not resolve their ED until they first resolved those two. And then, we can look at whether we have a blood flow issue or we have a hormonal issue and all this is Physical Organic ED is definitely resolvable naturally without side effects. 

I go into it in my book with the Chelation IVs for arteriosclerosis. Western Medicine doesn’t even with their ED medication, Viagra, and all that, the blood flow inducing nitric oxide, inducing medications, doesn’t actually cure anything. I just saw it clear. I know, you know this Ashley, but those listening, it doesn’t cure a thing. It actually just bypasses the real underlying source of vision which is what I get into my book in my exploration that God led me on. 

I got the real source of what is causing blood flow ED which is arteriosclerosis. But even deeper than that, it’s not just arteriosclerosis. Arteriosclerosis is a symptom. What actually is causing nitric oxide dysfunction that Western Medicine is jumpstarting with nitric oxide-inducing pharmaceutical ED medication. Well, the answer is what goes in our mouths. It’s what we drink or breathe through the form of heavy metals. It’s what we eat with an animal-based diet which is full of saturated fats, carcinogens, and free radicals, as well as pollutants, and smoking. That’s the source of arteriosclerosis. Arteriosclerosis is really a symptom. It’s a conglomeration of plaque, calcification, and heavy metals. And we have ways to get rid of all this through Chelation IV therapy, Plaque X IV therapy, and we can break up that conglomeration. I did it myself, actually. 

There’s numerous studies which also that I’ll cite later that show that we do not need to have people dying anymore of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks. We do not need to have people suffering with this The Scarlet Letter of Erectile Dysfunction. I have solutions in my book that God has given me to give to everyone that I pulled together all aspects of holistic health related to sexual health. Because sexual health is intertwined with everything else, our neurology, our cardiovascular, our hormonal in our nervous system, as well as our mental health, emotional health, and our relationships. It’s all intertwined and I think Western Medicine wants to make us think you can isolate sexuality, sexual dysfunction to simply the genital pelvic region can take one pill. One little pill that’s going to resolve it. That pill will never replace true healing.

 

[00:21:35] Ashley James: Right. You just summed up my entire podcast.

 

[00:21:42] Brooke Hazen: I knew, you’ve loved that.

 

[00:21:44] Ashley James: Drug-based medicine has its place. If you’re looking for results, if you’re looking for getting to the root cause, if you’re looking for true health, pharmaceutical-based medicine is a very small slice of the pie. Very, very small. But what we’ve been raised to believe is that it’s the whole pie or 95% of the pie and then there is some alternative pie you can go explore. But really first, you should get into a bunch of drugs. So the first thing we have to do is we have to pull ourselves out of the matrix that we’ve been born and raised in. We have been brainwashed since birth to believe that the medical industry is the best, and has all the answers, and the MD with their little prescription pad has all the answers. Right? 

And if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have a clue that they don’t. I’ve had so many doctors on my show who went through the medical system and spent half a million dollars and 8-12 years to become these amazing doctors, only to find that they are just paid for and education on how to sell drugs. And that they weren’t getting results. They were actually helping their patients. And so many of the doctors that interviewed them had health issues of their own and their own style of medicine couldn’t heal them. So then they had to find natural medicine and that’s what healed them. And then they woke up and they went, oh my gosh, I was brainwashed in a system. 

This drug-based system, again, is a very small slice of the pie, but the problem is we’ve been brainwashed to believe, it’s the pie, its the whole pie. Once we wake up and realized, we have to advocate for ourselves. We have to do things like listen to podcasts and read books. Learn from people like Brooke Hazen, who’s showing us that the mainstream medical system will never ever talk to you about your dopamine levels, about porn addiction, about your energetic health, about your pelvic floor health, about ways that you can reverse heart disease, and the diet, and the chelation. All the things that you can do to reverse heart disease, your doctors won’t going to talk to you about that. You have to go out. You have to find the right holistic doctor. You have to find the books. You have to find the information yourself. We have to advocate and we have to be the conductor of our orchestra. Right? It’s the orchestra is the holistic people that we go to. The chiropractor, and the homeopath, and the acupuncturist, and naturopath like our whole orchestra are there to help us and we’re the conductor. We have to take matters into our own hands and be willing to explore different things like be willing to throw out, unplug the TV, unplug it, stop watching the news. Like you said, stop watching the screen and put the cell phone away. Stop watching porn and address the dopamine imbalance. And this is for men and women. I know, statistically, largely more men than women watch porn but this is not just a male issue. I believe that all people, all adults. And the problem now is children have access to it, younger and younger and younger.

In my state of Washington, they’re teaching masturbation to fourth-graders in our public school system. It’s getting kind of weirder and weirder out here. But what we have to get is that addiction. 

I had a great interview with Dr. Joan Ifland and we talked about this addiction brain is not just alcohol, or methamphetamines, or cocaine. It can be porn, right? It can be alcohol. Yes, but it could also be something that’s more socially acceptable. Right? It could be sugar, it could be drinking wine, but it could be porn, it could be whatever you’re addicted to, whatever that causing this dopamine imbalance. And then, the dopamine balance gives you this plethora of effects, of side effects which one is your sexual dysfunction but the other is like you said, you have distance with your partner. Maybe you’re quick to anger, maybe you’re depressed, maybe you’re unmotivated or agitated. It’ll show up in your work performance. It’ll show up even in your willingness to live, willingness to like go out there and live a life, and your enthusiasm or your zest for life, starts just to deplete.

And from, I don’t know, but it’s more of a spiritual sense. It’s almost like demonic energies, demonic vampires are sucking the life out of us when we plug into these little outlets that gives us temporary pleasure but then so drain us. They suck us dry of the vital life force. So we have to be really protective of where we go to get our pleasure. Go get your pleasure from walking with your partner, holding their hand, and looking at a sunset, or go play with your kids, or grandkids, or either your nieces or nephews at the park. Get pleasure from something that’s wholesome and protects you from these outlets that might give you a temporary boost and pleasure but then completely suck you dry of your vital life force. So I see, you’re talking about is part of this grand scheme to keep as rats just so preoccupied, running around preoccupied and we don’t wake up. Let’s advocate for ourselves.

 

[00:27:58] Brooke Hazen: It’s kind of amazing because the elephants in the room are so in front of us but nobody’s talking about it in Western Medicine with blood flow issues related to ED. Nobody’s talking about diet when it comes to arteriosclerosis. Nobody talks about the root cause of it. Heavy metals have been shown to be a very big factor now, but also, what we’re eating. The food what we’re eating is what’s causing it, as well as smoking and environmental pollutants. 

The other elephant in the room nobody talks about with ED is this pornography epidemic. We’re at the end of a two-decade-long massive experiment on the global population with free internet porn. And the results are in and they are harrowing. There’s an entire generation of young men who are unable to perform sexually with a real partner and engage with any connected, intimate relationship. It’s really a dopamine addiction. And I want to tell you why this is. We don’t understand in the West but Eastern traditions are well aware for millennia is the enormous tool in ejaculation really is semen release. That’s why I don’t say it as ejaculation but I say semen release because we can still ejaculate and have full-body orgasms. It’s the semen release that causes this intense dopamine drop where dopamine crashes and prolactin rises. And this intense refractory period and period of replenishment takes place where the body pulls all the most precious resources of growth factor hormones and nutrients from all the parts of our body with the sole purpose of replacing that vital sperm. That’s really is our liquid gold.

So the pornography and semen release is a super stimulus and it because it combines the two. It combines the semen release with that dopamine effect that I just mentioned, which causes massive mood swings, fatigue, and distancing in our relationship. But it’s also the super stimulus of the novelty. The constant novelty that takes place with pornography, where we’re just desensitizing and building these neural pathways in our brain that’s specific to just gets us aroused. And this is what slowly replaces our partners in real life. That’s actually what’s happening. 

So this super stimulus that’s taking place and actually the brain cannot tell the difference between a chemical addiction like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and in neurological addiction which is pornography. And so, what happens is the brain actually is completely overwhelmed with this super stimulus of the imagery, combined with the dopamine crashes and the semen release. And the brain starts canceling out dopamine receptor sites and dopamine levels, and they crash to very low levels. And so, as I mentioned, these are gifts we’ve been given. This affects not just our sexual performance, but our arousal to life really, to everything because our physical selves, our physical health is completely inseparable from sexual health. 

Millennia is the protruding member of a vast orchestra, as you mentioned of neurological, nervous, cardiovascular, or hormonal health. It’s really the canary in the coal mine that will shout out what our level of health or disease is currently within those systems. But again, the key to unlocking and to making it easier for us to make massive transformations physically lies in this neurology, the balanced neurology, and the balanced energy levels. And people freak out around the concept of semen retention but really it’s such a misconception. It’s actually, the opposite of what we think. 

The benefits of semen retention is so enormous. First, you have increased sensitivity and potency, sexually. Then, you also have a prolonged sexual experience where you’re actually able to cum into alignment with your partner. And women are usually just getting warmed up at the moment and the man is finished. So this gets us in alignment where we can have a much more connective relationship. And most importantly, is we avoid the poison and the decency that takes place through this mating behavior of releasing semen with the sole goal of getting to climax. 

We can cope through Karezza, Tao, and Tantra for Millennia. Eastern cultures have been aware of this, that has been supplanting that’s mating behavior with moaning behaviors. And this actually can build long-term relationships through eye gazing, caressing, deep connective sensual play, and respecting, honoring, communication, embracing, and holding, all these behaviors build connection through oxytocin. Mating behaviors are focused really driven by dopamine. We wanted to skip that imbalance. We’d have balanced dopamine levels by disengaging in any form of pornography and we want to get balance energy through semen retention. And we want to have connective relationships through building oxytocin-based behaviors.

 

[00:33:58] Ashley James: Can you give us examples of behaviors that would help us to balance this in our day-to-day lives?

 

[00:34:07] Brooke Hazen: Yeah. Well, mating and bonding behaviors- this is something that Marnia Robinson, who wrote a review for my book because she went into detail about in her book, Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow. My book actually draws together all the different types, the neurology of pornography, the neurology of relationships, and then, also organic ED, and overall physical and mental, emotional health, and spiritual health. I tie it all together, but she talks about in there how through studies have shown that over hundreds of thousands of years, the brain has developed these neural pathways of either bonding or mating-based behaviors. We have both. 

And we’re able to actually talk about biohacking. Biohacking is reclaiming our vitality, vibrancy, and youthful vigor. This is actually a big biohack is supplanting mating behaviors with bonding behaviors. And these bonding behaviors are built over 100,000 years through family, friends, through our immediate culture, through our babies, through our immediate family. These are the kind of behaviors that are extremely connected and build oxytocin. So the mating brain, the mating behavior, which pornography fits perfectly into is actually incredibly poisonous and destructive to long-term relationships because the real sole goal of the mating brain and mating behavior is to spread maximum genetic diversity to a wide range of novel mates. And there’s really no end to this search. There’s no end to this dopamine addiction of this novel search and this dopamine crashes. In fact, as I mentioned, the dopamine crashes, when we have this semen release, the brain’s dopamine levels crash. This process of replenishment and the refractory period lasts for up to two weeks. 

In fact, the largest reverberations can take place at the two-week level. I can tell you as a man that when we’re addicted to pornography and even just in masturbation in general, but usually pornography is involved almost all the time. Men are releasing their semen not just every few days, definitely not every two weeks, but they’re doing it daily usually, and sometimes multiple times per day. Now what that means is we’re getting a perpetual state of chronic fatigue, mood imbalance, and distancing in the relationship. It’s truly poisonous to relationships and that’s where sexual health crosses into relational health.

 

[00:37:15] Ashley James: What is interesting, this concept is that by overstimulating yourself with pornography or over masturbation that the brain is in this mindset of wanting to spread the seed as opposed to grow roots in a relationship. And so they become restless within the relationship, they’re become agitated, they’re not bonded, they’re not connected to emotionally to their partner. And are they looking around? Are they looking to cheat? Is this pornography lead to infidelity?

 

[00:38:07] Brooke Hazen: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. At least, it’s going to inevitably lead a partner towards finding a new novel mate in the relationship. Just like it’s happening with pornography, it’s an escalating addiction where men and women, that actually women are also can get addicted to pornography. It’s just that, women, she has more connective behavior. So only 26% of women end up watching pornography weekly, whereas men are at 80%. I think it’s probably more.

 

[00:38:45] Ashley James: You talked about this two week, it takes up to two weeks after one ejaculation for dopamine to rebalance. Can you keep and dive into that and explain that a bit more?

 

[00:38:57] Brooke Hazen: Yeah. So, science shows that when a semen is released, that this refractory period. This period of replenishment where prolactin rises and dopamine crashes, continues in that sort of ratio for up to two weeks, and it weaves up and down. So maybe, in a few days, it’ll sort of you’ll come out the overwhelming haze of the first few days can tend to be more intense, but this does continue for up to two weeks that has been shown. So what we’re getting is overlapping cycles of dopamine crashes and prolactin rising. 

I mean, forget it, if men are releasing semen multiple times per day, or once a day, or even every few days. They’re in a chronic perpetual state of crashed dopamine levels. And again, dopamine is our driver, inspiration, our determination. That’s how we become our ideal selves. It’s that motivation to be the best we can be. We don’t have that anymore. 

And it’s entertainment about pornography, this is also new to people that don’t understand this in the West. But this is a new experiment that is coming too. But we don’t understand what men are going through. Prolactin is actually going back to the replenishment cycle. Prolactin is actually what causes fatigue. It’s a chemical that causes fatigue. And the dopamine is that important, what’s we need for life. And so, well, I think, as I’m gonna say is that we don’t realize that this truly is an addiction that like if we had a cocaine or morphine addict or an alcoholic, per se, and that was our partner in real life, we would not expect them to be fully capable of having an intimate, beautiful—that’s the relationship that can possibly have to be at their peak of physical conditioning and to have balanced neurology. Would we? We could expect that.

 

[00:41:18] Ashley James: While they’re fighting the addiction or while they’re in the addiction or while they’re using?

 

[00:41:23] Brooke Hazen: While they’re in addiction. While they’re aware of addiction. Even while they’re still in the grips of it. Even if they’re aware that they want to get out of it. 

 

[00:41:29] Ashley James: Right. 

 

[00:41:30] Brooke Hazen: We wouldn’t expect that but with pornography, we’re completely unaware that this is the same as an addiction, the brain cannot tell any difference between an alcohol, cocaine, or morphine addiction, and a porn addiction because these are all dopamine addictions that even we have food addictions that are dopamine-driven also. All these are dopamine and that’s why I get into organic ED which I want to get into.

Diet is so important. I mean, we could end up using Chelation therapy and get rid of our symptom, arteriosclerosis as is a symptom. Which is we can get rid of the free radical damage. We can get rid of calcification, and plaque buildup, and heavy metals. But if we’re continuing to eat an animal-based diet, which is the source of this free radical damage, oxidation through saturated fats, and carcinogens. As we continue to not to deal with the heavy metal buildup in our bodies which is so important and collate that out. Work through the diet. We’re going to continue just to keep creating the same problem. We’ll never resolve the source of organic ED through cardiovascular. There’s really a few different markers that neurologists just look at with organic ED which is the physical ED that’s where we always jump. We’re always like, oh my god, oh my god, physical ED. 

Well, first we got to deal with neurological and energetic but we can also heighten up even if we don’t have organic ED. We can increase our sexual health and prevent further possible organic ED in the future by looking at hormonal. That’s what they look at first and that or they look in addition to blood flow. They don’t really look at blood flow, they just prescribe medications. But hormonal, we can resolve easily with Bio-identical Pellet Therapy, TRT-Testosterone Replacement Therapy. It’s bio-identical and it’s natural. It’s a pellet that mimic as best as we can find the natural cycles of hormones, testosterone within our body. They’ll look at blood flow and that’s where I get to the root source of it. And that’s where, if we don’t look at this holistically, where we’re looking at diet too. We’re going to just continue to have the same problem because there’s this big elephant in the room that is standing right in the middle of our living room that Western Medicine and Western culture is not willing to talk about, which is what we’re eating, this heavy metal exposure we have, environmental pollutants, smoking, pornography, and too much semen release.

 

[00:44:32] Ashley James: So it’s like all lifestyle. I mean, it’s all lifestyle and then we go to the doctor and they want to give us a drug. I love the meme. I keep seeing it on Facebook. I love the meme, you know, I keep trying to follow the science but it keeps leading me to the money. And the pharmaceutical industry which is petroleum-based — and please if you want to go down to a fun rabbit hole, go down the rabbit hole of the history of the modern medical system beginning with petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. I’ve had a few guests on that talk about it. But it is a wild trip to go down the understanding last 150,120 years and what’s led us up to where we are now.

When you go to a doctor and we put them on such a pedestal, and then they give us a drug that it’s not in anyway like giving you an Advil or a Bandaid. It’s not in any way figuring out why you had the headache in the first place. It’s just that not fixing the problem whatsoever. The problem like you said it’s neurological. We have such a dopamine addiction epidemic. If you don’t watching porn, look in your life, where you have a compulsion or an addiction. Do you have to watch cooking segmented TV or sugar or like I have a friend, who, she has to drink alcohol on the weekends. Like she’ll not drink alcohol on Monday through Friday, but on the weekend, she has to drink alcohol. And it’s just like, I’m not saying you’re an alcoholic. Right? Because you and I think, maybe an alcoholic is someone who’s like shaking up if they’re not drinking alcohol. Right?

I talked to her because we’re talking about doing a long-term fast and she’s like, I can’t fast. I have to drink alcohol on the weekends. I have to. I have to drink alcohol on the weekends. So I’m like, you can’t skip a weekend? Because we’re talking about doing it like a seven-day or longer fast. Absolutely not an option. She has to drink alcohol on the weekend. And if you have there’s like, I have to do this and you’re not flexible then there’s an addiction there. If the substance is controlling your life and you can’t leave that substance, like I dated a guy when I was a teenager who couldn’t fly on airplanes because he wasn’t able to smoke on the airplane. Like he wasn’t willing to not have a cigarette for two hours to take a flight somewhere. 

So if a substance is controlling your life, that’s an obvious answer. But there’s less obvious ones and sometimes our dopamine addictions are really in our blind spots. So talking to someone who’s in your life that you really and trust you get vulnerable with to uncover what’s going on but like food is a big one. Right? Food is a really big one. Do you get upset if you don’t have access to the food you want? Like if you don’t get to have dessert or if you don’t get to have there’s some kind of food you want that you don’t have access to it. Do you get angry or irritated? You have to have it. Right? That’s just an example. There’s a food addiction that can be obvious that you know like you’re binge eating. There could be less obvious ones like you always, always have to have a certain thing in your house because you have to eat it every day. So looking at how we can uncover this. 

I had a friend, unfortunately passed away, a really nice guy who was a raging alcoholic. And then he quit cold turkey because his family was losing everything including his family. So he quit cold turkey, and he was amazing after that. Sober for 20 years. But every time I visited him, he had a cigarette in one hand and a candy bar in the other. He absolutely traded one addiction for another. Now he was sober and he was paying the bills and loving on his family. But he always had Halloween candy all year round. It was amazing. How many bags of Halloween candy he buy because he always had giant bags of Halloween candy surrounding him when inside the couch. And a cigarette in one hand, and like just constant candy and sugar in the other. And if he go to a meeting, you’ll see always he have copious amounts of sugar. Yes, I’m so proud of them for gaining sobriety from alcohol but they actually didn’t stop. They did not conquer the addiction. They didn’t bounce their dopamine levels, they’re still using. They’re just traded in one drug for another. 

So when someone stopped porn, the first thing the brain was going to do is trade in one addiction for another and that’s what we want. Make sure we set ourselves up for a success so we don’t do that. We want ourselves up so that we heal—like what you’ve said, heal the nervous system, heal the dopamine levels. Dopamine is not the only chemical going on in our brain like my interview with Joan Iffland, who’s a Ph.D. in addiction. And she talks about bouncing different brain chemicals by love. 

Brooke, you are a shining light on this taboo subject because we really want to take – so men, and again, women are affected by this two indifferent way. Like I believe they’re affected in a similar way, I should say. But men in our society still are taught and not allowed to be vulnerable. They have to be strong and tough and not allowed to have emotions, that they are not allowed to have breakdowns, and there’s a lot of shame and hidden shame. And so for you to shine a light on such a taboo subject where men feel so like they cannot talk about it, right? So you’re bringing healing to a part of humanity. Where humanity has not been allowed to shine light on this and heal. So I love the work that you’re doing.

 

[00:50:36] Brooke Hazen: Thank you. Well, dopamine is a cycle that builds further dopamine addictions. It’s cyclical. So that’s why I said, and God really is telling us that the gateway to allowing God into our lives and for massive transformation on healing level holistically, opening that door to that massive change in our life really starts with balancing the neurology and the energies that we have within us. Those gifts we have, it has to start there. 

 

[00:51:08] Ashley James: You’re going to mention some studies, that you said, you talk about later. Do you have these studies?

 

[00:51:14] Brooke Hazen:  Yeah. I do want to get into that also. I just want to say to about, I mean, my books were full of biohacks. I mean, the mother of all biohacks is what I just said is that nobody that talks about is, balanced neurology and energy. That’s the launching pad for that I’ve experienced. I can tell you firsthand, this is how I went through this incredible transformation. I believe that’s why God led me to this and had me write this book. I promised God to write this book. But I also want to get into the organic further and talk about when I mentioned the plant-based diet, or I mentioned the animal-based diet, and how that’s elephant in the room. We can have a plant-based diet and this is really the pinnacle of all diets is a plant-based diet, but if we’re not careful, we can still have problems with a plant-based diet.

 

[00:52:10] Ashley James: You know, Oreos are vegan. The Oreos are vegan. 

 

[00:52:13] Brooke Hazen: YeahRight. 

 

[00:52:14] Ashley James: You going to watch out this plant-based. If you buy packaged foods and it says plant-based on it like just walk away. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store. Don’t go down the aisles. Like these Frankenfoods, they’re not healthy. They’re full of oil like full of these processed oils, polyunsaturated, fatty, whatever, like all that stuff. You don’t want to eat it. You don’t want to eat the canola oil and all that stuff, right? You want to eat real food.

 

[00:52:40] Brooke Hazen:  Yeah, because if we eat like lots of flours, not all flours, but grain flours. We’re going to end up having a lot of obesity take place which I’ve experienced myself in the past. So I’ll call it a light, plant-based diet meaning it’s full of light, like high-end vegetables and fruits in different forms, how we prepare it, nuts. If we’re going to have grains just have a small amount of quinoa or whole grains but stay away from processed flours, but that’s really important. I also want to talk about, before we get into your question about the Chelation therapy and those studies. I want to mention that something that really amazing which is another biohack is donating blood. 

You never would have guessed this but donating blood decreases the chance of heart attack by 88% which is one donation per year. Now, we should be practicing this on every level but Western Medicine doesn’t clearly not telling us about this, but I’m telling you now, donate blood. It’s like an oil change for your body. It reduces iron stores and oxygens in our body and increases antioxidant capacity. And when going back to when I mentioned earlier about the source of arteriosclerosis, a source of blood flow ED at which we’re also scared of because that’s the only tool that Western Medicine has. They really don’t know what they’re doing. So that’s all they can do is prescribe that one medicine because it’s money driven. But the source is free radical damage. 

So the different ways to get to that is to get rid of the free radicals which is the heavy metals through the IV Chelation Therapy block x which gets rid of–it’s a natural source from soybean, which gets rid of the plaque buildup that gets rid of that, that breaks apart the arteriosclerosis. But we also can add in antioxidants, both IV as well as orally. It’s just that IVs are much more transformative than oral because it bypasses the digestive tract in 100% of these chelations, nutrients and antioxidants are able to go to every cell of our body as opposed to a fraction through oral and actually holistic health sector of our medicine is moving more and more in this direction. We can heal cancers, arteriosclerosis, immune system issues through Myers’ cocktail. I’ve seen an enormous boost in my immune system. And I had NED which NED is anti-aging. It’s another biohack that these are incredible biohacks. 

NED increases the length of our DNA strands which is literally anti-aging and happening in front of our eyes increases energy levels, clarity, mental clarity and also rebuilds receptor sites like dopamine that have been and we can rebuild chemically, neuro chemically from ED, from addiction to pornography, or dopamine crash levels. But the studies for the Chelation therapy are astounding. There was a study in 1991, well, there’s been a TACT one study and a TACT in two study that’s recent but this other study from 1991 involved 22,765 patients, and 87% of them had market improvement and vascular disease which is one course of disodium EDTA. Now, in this podcast, I’ll tell you, I recommend calcium EDTA does the same thing as disodium EDTA but back then they were using disodium EDTA for the study in there. They estimated that in 1991 that 363,000 of the 407,000 bypass surgeries that year could have been avoided saving an estimated 8 billion dollars. Yeah, 8 billion dollars. With a B.

 

[00:56:56] Ashley James: When you say saving, you have to remember, no, no, no, it was making them 8 billion dollars. It was profit.

 

[00:57:04] Brooke Hazen: Exactly. And that’s the politics. This is astounding. So the TACT one study which is the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy. It’s a government-based study showed a 51% reduction in cardiac events and a 43% reduction in mortality in patients with diabetes. And I’ll repeat that again, a 51% reduction of cardiac events and a 43% reduction in mortality in patients with diabetes after receiving one course of disodium EDTA which is I believe it’s around, it can be anywhere from 20 to 30 different IVs but when you combine black x with this, as I mentioned before, this is sort of a trifecta of getting rid of this heavy metal calcification and plaque x which causes arteriosclerosis. Now we should be practicing this in on a massive scale and actually as holistic health people, we need to be demanding this because right now we’re at war with the FDA and the different political bodies and insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries, who are selling statins. And they are trying to hinder and harass this process of obtaining these. So we should demand this. We should absolutely demand that they need to stop killing people because statins are actually been shown to increase deaths from cancer and heart attack because they’re actually lowering our LDL cholesterol artificially, while again, they’re missing the entire picture. LDL is a symptom. LDL cholesterol is produced in increasing amounts. It’s an antioxidant, antiviral, anti-cancer. And it’s our only source to protection other than these Chelation IV therapies from free radical damage. They’re missing the entire picture that the source of arteriosclerosis is free radical damage. Arteriosclerosis is a symptom of what they’re trying to sell us with these statins, these pharmaceuticals, and they’re actually doing the opposite. They’re actually killing people by giving them the statins.

 

[00:59:20] Ashley James: So, I’m going to get on my soapbox for a little sec to do that.

 

[00:59:24] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, go for it.

 

[00:59:25] Ashley James: So statins, and so for those who don’t know, because this is so monumentally important. I was taught this by my naturopathic physician mentors. Statins, so that they believe that cholesterol causes heart disease because they looked at let’s say, your heart and they said, Oh, look, there’s a clog in the heart. There’s cholesterol in that clog, therefore, cholesterol causes heart attacks. That is like saying showing up to a house fire seeing that there’s firemen there and saying, there’s always firemen when I see a fire, so firemen cause fires. 

 

[01:00:01] Brooke Hazen: Exactly.

 

[01:00:03] Ashley James: That is, so cholesterol, the blockage is not the cause, it is a symptom of a problem.

 

[01:00:10] Brooke Hazen: Yes. 

 

[01:00:11] Ashley James: What they decided to do is the pharmaceutical industry just like the pharmaceutical industry decided to “treat or cure ED” by like giving you Viagra or some kind of vaso, something that increases the vasculature when we know it’s actually seldom just a blood flow problem. It’s seldom a blood flow problem, but they’ve got a pill and they’re treating all forms of Erectile Dysfunction with a pill that only forces the body to do one thing. Right? 

So the same with “preventing heart disease.” Right? They give you a statin and what statin do? And this is very enlightening. Cholesterol is so important for your health, that your liver makes it. I could be eating a raw food vegan diet where I’m only eating salads and fruit, occasionally some nuts. There’s many people out there that eat that way. I could be eating that diet and I still have cholesterol in my body. Right? My liver makes it. It’s so important. Your liver makes it. It’s protective of every cell in the body. Every cell, 37 trillion cells in the body have a fat layer that is the cell wall. Your nervous system has insulation just like your house, all the wires in your house have insulation, so there’s not a electrical fire. So to your nervous system has insulation and the insulation is made of cholesterol. So made of healthy fats. 

So your brain has cholesterol. Your sex hormones and stress hormones, both of them very important for your optimal health are derived from these healthy fats, of this type of cholesterol. So your body needs this. I’m not saying go out there and eat a keto diet or like always eating fat. I’m not saying consume high amounts of fat. I’m just saying that is so important.

 

[01:02:11] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, that could be dangerous.

 

[01:02:13] Ashley James: Yes, it’s so important that I can eat a very sort of clean and not eat any cholesterol. Right? No cholesterol at all. Right? I’m not eating any animals. I can eat no animals, just like salads and apples and some seeds and my liver will make all the cholesterol my body needs. Now, statins, what they do is they bruise the liver so much. They damage the liver that the liver ceases to produce the amount of cholesterol it was producing. That’s all statins do.

So the doctor says to you, oh, your our cholesterol is high. I’d like you to have more cholesterol. Here, please take this drug. Now back until I was up until I think it was 2012, then you can go and it’s actually a wiki. It’s like on mainstream websites. You can find the history of the statins but up until 2012, you had to go in for regular blood tests as either every three months or every six months but regular like more regular than once a year. If you’re on statin, you had to go for regular blood tests to test your liver enzymes to make sure that those statins were not over damaging your liver and basically over-compromising your body because the drug is designed to punch your liver to the point where your liver stops functioning enough that’s what statins do. Now, as a side effect of hurting the liver so much, as a side effect, you then develop neuropathy. How many and just raise your hand if you have a family member who has been on statins and now can’t feel their hands or feet and starts falling because I have three family members who won’t listen to me. I mean, this is the problem that because the doctor has the plaque behind that and the half a million-dollar medical degree that says they know better and that these people are now, they’re elderly, so their body doesn’t have enough cholesterol, it’s damage their liver now, it’s damaged their sex hormones. Now, it’s damaged their nervous system, their Myelin sheath is being eaten away because you don’t have enough for this healthy cholesterol. And you get neuropathy, and you also have neuropathy from other things too. But statins are known to long term effect caused neuropathy, so that you can feel your feet and then you can’t, you end up falling. 

So I actually have three family members who were constantly falling and hurting themselves because of the neuropathy because of the long term use of statins. Very frustrating that statins are still being recommended on a regular basis when it is like saying, we have to get rid of firemen. We need to defund the fire department because firemen cause fires. That’s the same logic. I’ve had, I believe five cardiologists on my show, award-winning cardiologists on my show and all of them say, statins should not be on you, got to throw them out. Well, don’t move down the toilet but really take it back to the pharmacy and have them dispose of correctly. Throw them, throw them out. They do not work. 

I had Dr. Esselstyn on my show and he wrote the book, How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease. And he shows that with a very clean whole food plant-based diet, very specific. He has a specific, so he lays it out, a plan, and when you follow it, people’s Erectile Dysfunction goes away but their heart disease goes away within tears, all clogs, all arteries are gone. So you can mop up and clean up the cardiovascular system with a clean, healthy diet. And it’s something to look into and I often have guests on the show that boast the benefits of the whole food plant-based diet and then listeners think that I’m being biased and this is a vegan show. 

Listen, I have also have had guests that talk about the benefits of eating organ meats. Just the fact is look at the proof. If you take someone who has heart disease and you put them on Dr. Esselstyn diet, three months down the road, their angina is gone. They’re not winded anymore. Now, they can walk long distances, whereas they couldn’t before. The blood clots they had in their legs are gone. Like you don’t get that from any other.

 

[01:06:35] Brooke Hazen: Even more than that, you can literally just drink water and you can cure yourself of all this and get off those medications. I mean, the elephant in the room that they will not talk about, and really none of us really talk about is an animal-based diet that’s causing these problems and heavy metals and other things. But this gets back to the pressure, the peer pressure and I want to encourage everyone to let go of our fears, our myths and misconceptions, the addictions and negative habits that keep us bound and the peer pressure from family, friends, cultural pressure and corporate peer pressure. Let go of all that. Because that is what is going to continue to keep us harming ourselves. We need to throw all that away. 

Really, I don’t believe that Western Medicine has any other place other than emergencies. Where they really it’s a sick care system. They’re waiting for a symptom that serious to come up and then they just patch it up with these pharmaceuticals and surgeries. That’s all the habits but as you said one podcast and loved it. You said that’s one sliver of medicine. But really for ED and for cardiovascular health, all this, our physical health, Holistic Health is the only way to practice curative and preventative natural modalities without side effects. Side effects are just a symptom that we we’re reducing things too much. We’re not looking at everything. And that’s why we get side effects. They’re looking at one process within one process within one process. They’re not looking at the whole. They never will look at the whole if you expect anything like that from Western Medicine, you will not get it. I guarantee you. You could ask any Western Medicine doctor that truly believes in Western Medicine. 

They will not provide any natural holistic curative and preventative types of healing modalities, period. Only pharmaceutical surgeries. That’s it because that’s what it’s built on. It’s built on sand. It’s got huge limitations. That we need to recognize and stop giving all our power away to corporations with—I even feel pressure to bring up a plant-based diet. Why there’s so much pressure around it? There’s corporations through Big Pharma and animal industry are pressuring us and they’re causing us to pressure each other. And I feel closed down and I’m not allowed to bring it up. That’s not right, because the science shows we should live by the science. Everything I have in my book is 111 scientific studies that are firsthand studies that back it up. We should go by the science. It shows that plant-based diet protects us from the 15 leading causes of death in the world. It actually protects us from cancers and from cardiovascular disease. It fights against that instead of gives it to us. 

I also want to talk quickly before our time ends about a couple more really important biohacks. There’s intermittent fasting which has to do with diet. This burns visceral fat. Visceral fat is the most harmful form of fat. It wraps around our organs. It’s linked with all kinds of diseases, neurodegenerative, cardiovascular diseases, cancers. But when you go from to deeper hours like if you go to 18 to 24 hours of fasting, you start to burn off misshapen cellular components that cause neurodegenerative diseases and cancers. So, that’s an incredible bio-hack I found. I practice it every day. I’ve been doing it for two years. And another bio-hack that I really love is, well, I mentioned donating blood, there’s stem cell PRP for ED. PRP is Platelet, I’m sorry, PRP, it’s where you spend your blood, your own blood at for 15 minutes and it yields a golden nectar for growth factors, and that can be used internally as well as in the lingam.

Also want to dimension EPAT which is Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology. That’s a ultrasound that is used on the lingam and can be used anywhere in your body. It’s actually used primarily to for any sort of pains in the body for and what it’s used for erectile health, and for can be used for anyone, men and women, is for breaking up plaque on the outside. So now we have ability to not only break up plaque and calcification of our blood vessels on the inside through Chelation IV Therapy and plaque acts. But on the outside in we can actually break it up EPAT, with Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technique. And you mentioned Kegels, too. Kegels are highly effective too as a monotherapy for ED, for Organic ED. Again, we get so hyper focused on organic ED.

I like to think of it more as we’re rejuvenating and enhancing our sexual function. But Kegels practice, I have in my book where there’s certain practices where you do it twice a day. And they’ve been shown to be incredibly effective at increasing basically sexual function. And can also, I wanted to tell people that, one thing I discovered was something in the East they’ve been trying to, for millennia, figure out ways to block semen release during sex. I found that Kegels are actually the easiest way to do it. During the process of intercourse, when you can pull out and allow and slow things down and prolong the experience and get fully embody this experience. But then, when that moment does arise, where for men there’s this point of no return, where this automatic process of semen release starts, you can just do the Kegel technique, which is flexing the muscles. There’s three different points, there’s sort of the anus around the lingam, and then in between a coccyx. Now, you can flex that and it’ll keep your semen from going out. I mean, there might be a teeny bit or like it took me a little while to learn this technique, but basically, the main goal is to avoid full climactic semen release as well as partial semen release.

And I was at first, experience a lot of partial semen release, but the Kegels were what really fit perfectly for avoiding semen release because again, avoiding semen release is so critical. It’s keeping all of our life force inside of our body, all those incredible growth factors, hormones and nutrients, cycles throughout our body during lovemaking. And instead of distancing after sex, we’re actually able to stay close to each other in bonds, in timeless, breathless union.

 

[01:14:16] Ashley James: Cuddle time.

 

[01:14:20] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, like pass out time where you go into this other state.

 

[01:14:23] Ashley James: Yeah. Oh, man, I love that. When you nap together in each other’s arms. So good. Right. So it’s so great.

 

[01:14:28] Brooke Hazen: You both in heaven.

 

[01:14:31] Ashley James: Right. So, it’s so great. 

 

[01:14:33] Brooke Hazen: Just for sex, we should we need to honor sex. Sex is part of God. That’s why I wrote this book. We shouldn’t shy away from it. I’m not afraid to talk about it. And I asked everyone to let go of their fears. The only way that you’re going to experience transformation like I’ve gone through and what hundreds of thousands of people are doing now through the NoFap movement, of giving up pornography and addiction, and anything in life. If you want to transform your overall physical health, neurology, your relationships is to let go of those fears because I just want to end this my portion by saying asking each person out there. What is it that is blocking us from becoming the ideal versions of ourselves? I mean, really, look at it. What exactly is it? Just break it down? What is the thing that is keeping you from becoming that ideal version of yourself and working towards that right now? There’s something that’s doing it. And I ask that we just let ourselves go completely to all these misconceptions that our culture has been teaching us and let ourselves go to God and allow God to transform us.

 

[01:15:42] Ashley James: I love it. I love that you brought up the NoFap movement. I learned that from my husband because he’s been on his own journey and he gave me permission to share this, his whole life he struggled and he thought there was like a mental emotional block. But he felt, he internalized so much shame. And for him, it wasn’t an Erectile Dysfunction issue. It was a completion issue. It’s like he was like he couldn’t. It was, he was desensitized, and so there wasn’t as much pleasure and there was a lot of frustration. And then he just felt like he just internalized so much and he thought it was sort of his fault and there’s some you know. 

 

[01:16:27] Brooke Hazen: Yes right.

 

[01:16:29] Ashley James: And so there’s a lot of emotions. So when we married each other, 14 years ago, I was kind of surprised. I’m like, is it me? And he’s like, no, it’s not you. So, of course, at first, I thought, so how many like the other partner thinks it’s them? Right? 

 

[01:16:43] Brooke Hazen: Yes. Exactly that’s what happens.

 

[01:16:45] Ashley James: Right. And he opened up and started sharing. I’m like, Okay, well, let’s work through this because I’m very passionate about personal growth, and I believe if you’re not growing you’re dying. Right? So, we’re like, let’s dive into this. Let’s figure out. So we did a lot of emotional work and we talked through and we were looking at different stuff and he got into looking at how harmful pornography is, and he was like really blown away by that, the NoFap movement. He looked into that and he was telling me about it. One of the biggest things and that of course, it blew his mind when he joined like the NoFap movement and removed pornography and when he did that, huge, huge success around that. But the biggest breakthrough for him was– this was I want to say five or six years ago, maybe a little bit longer. It was right around when medium.com came out, and it was just brand new. And he’s like, hey, you should write on medium.com and I’m like, what is this? He’s like, it’s kind of like a blog but said you have your own blog, everyone, right? 

So everyone writes their own article on this thing. And I’m like, okay, well, let’s look into it. And so I clicked on the health section, because I wanted to see what was in there and the number one health article was on regrowing your foreskin. And at first, we laughed. But then, we realized they’re being serious and we clicked on it and it was this very long and detailed explanation of how to regrow your foreskin. Now, I have had an entire interview on circumcision and also we talked about foreskin restoration, but on circumcision and everything you do lose there’s– it’s actually part of your immune system. There’s over 40,000, I think it’s 40,000 or more nerve endings like there’s a lot that is being removed from you that you’re never get back.

But one thing the foreskin does do is it protects because without a foreskin it becomes completely desensitized. The head. And so, I mean, imagine for women, imagine if your clitoral hood was removed, your clitoris would be raw and become desensitized over time. So it’s the same thing that happens to men. It’s genital mutilation. And so, he regrew most of his foreskin. It took a few years but once he just wore a device, and it wasn’t painful at all, and he was very excited about it. What we discovered that most of his problems from teenage hood up, most of his problems was that and this is a very common thing, they botch over 200,000 circumcisions in America. You’re a botched. And you don’t know, sometimes you know it because it’s obvious, but sometimes it’s too tight and the doctor just does. You don’t know, right? And so, it was too tight. All the scar tissue was too tight, for him and so once he regrew some foreskin, it loosened up and also that it protected it. 

So there’s less desensitization and it was like he could finally breathe. It was so healing for him because he let go of a lot of that shame and a lot of the negativity or when he realized this was a physiological problem. That he’s not broken. Right? And then, in addition to doing the NoFap, and no porn, he’s like, for him, he’s like a new person. And so he was so excited. 

So although, he’s a very private and introverted person, he gave me permission to share this because it could help others even if it’s just one other person. It’s worth it to share. So, again, there’s so many avenues out there, and you’re not going to find the answers by going to one doctor. Right? And this is what we’re taught in a doctor’s office. You have to dive in and dig in and explore. I definitely recommend that listeners get your book, You Are Not Broken. Just like my husband found out that he was not broken. You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide for Men and Women to Heal the Pathways of Sexual Dysfunction and Restore Relational Harmony Together. A beautiful book. The links to that book are going to be on the show of today’s podcast learntruehealth.com. But also, you can just go to brookehazen.com which has so much information there as well. 

 

[01:21:33] Brooke Hazen: Thank You.

 

[01:21:34] Ashley James: Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[01:21:40] Brooke Hazen: Yes. The point you just made, I agree. I look around and it seems like people are just sort of waiting to die like they’re afraid to truly live. And that’s the real message God wants to bring through my book is that we’re actually able to revitalize ourselves to gain that youthful vigor and vitality back in our lives. And I have techniques on every level both spiritual, neurological, energetic, physical, relational that can help us to do this. I just encourage everyone to be open and stay open and let go. Let go of all these myths and misconceptions these fears so that we can actually start living again because I was sort of dead myself before this. I was in the deepest darkness. In the deepest darkness, I’ve found the brightest light and that’s what I want to encourage all of you to do is to live life fully. Don’t be scared of living life. Don’t just wait to die and I do believe that our culture is corporate culture is really caused us to both do and believe things that are slowly killing us. And we need to look out for ourselves now because we don’t want to die because we’re following some mistaken, leadless, corporate monsters that are being given to us and that we’re exerting on others as peer pressure. We want to follow our own hearts and God and in lead what, follow the science and do what it actually is going to lead us to vitality, vibrancy and life. 

 

[01:23:26] Ashley James: Love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with us today and shining a light. We can help men and women lead fulfilled lives and empower them. Letting them know that they can find answers, they’re going to keep digging, they can find answers. And that if a doctor says, well, you’re going to have diabetes for the rest of your life, you just have to learn to deal with it. It’s so not the truth. I had Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City on my show, and they sent him home with a bag full of prescriptions and told me he’d be sick for the rest of his life. Like he have diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol problems and heart disease for the rest of his life. And he said, nope. And he turned to a whole foods diet, he turned to natural medicine, and now he’s on no prescriptions, and he’s super healthy. And that’s just one example of thousands and thousands of examples of that. If your doctor says, you have to be sick. It’s genetic! Whatever they say, do give it a grain of salt. That’s it. Just take it with a grain of salt and go. I’m going to find the answers to my health. Keep digging.

 

[01:24:38] Brooke Hazen: All you have to do is just drink water and literally he’ll be better off than taking the pharmaceuticals. Just stop eating so much animal based foods and stop watching pornography. Stop releasing your semen all the time. Don’t eat blood. Let go. All these things are free. They don’t make them any money. And that’s why they are not interested in telling you about these things. But it’s so simple and easy. We just need to wake up and see the elephants in the room.

 

 [01:25:09] Ashley James: And I’d say, find a holistic doctor as part of your team, naturopath, holistic doctor that believes in looking at all aspects of your life and helping you achieve that balance. It’s really great to have a naturopathic doctor on your team or holistic doctor. Now, there’s some doctors that are greenwashed, they’ll say their holistic but then, they like, they have their prescription pad in their hand ready to–you want a doctor that for 90 minutes of naturopathic are just great. They’ll sit with you for an hour to two hours. Go through your entire life, every aspect of your life and look at what they can do to help you in every way not just what drug can I give you? They’re looking to help you uncover all these different aspects of your life. 

And then hopefully they offer things, like you said, like the Myers’ push or the Chelation therapy and those are the kind of doctors I like that they are on the cutting edge of the holistic science. So, go find one in your area and interview them. Go interview like 15-minute free consultation. Go interview a bunch of holistic doctors and work with the ones who sort of pass your litmus test ask them of what they think of cholesterol meds and see what they say. Like that’s a good litmus test. What do you think of cholesterol meds if I have high cholesterol would you put me on them? And see what they say or what changes would you make for me if I have high cholesterol and see what they say. And that’s a good litmus test. But make sure that you have the right tools for the job and the right tools being the right practitioners to help guide you.

 

[01:26:53] Brooke Hazen: There’s all these scientific studies from really brilliant scientists that we can also, I actually wrote this whole book and researched this whole book with God’s help and through intense research with scientific studies and through experience and experiential evidence from others. We also have the power. Don’t give away our power to Western Medicine, and think that we can’t do anything. I did it. I heal that naturally. I had nobody leading me. They didn’t know what to do with ED. In fact, ED, even naturopaths– I totally encourage naturopath– but even naturopaths don’t necessarily know how to deal with ED. So sometimes you have to just realize that you have the power within you. Don’t give your power away.

 

[01:27:45] Ashley James: Exactly. I love it. Don’t give your power away. You have the  power within you. Keep digging. Keep exploring. Thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us all these little nuggets of your wisdom. I really appreciate you coming today and I hope that this podcast helps so many people. And please come back on the show if you uncover any new science that you want to share about healing Erectile Dysfunction.

 

[01:28:12] Brooke Hazen: Absolutely. I wish everyone the most beautiful life full of journey ahead for you.

 

Get Connected with Brooke Hazen!

Website – Brooke Hazen

Website – Goldridge Organic Farms

Facebook

Instagram

YouTube

Book by Brooke Hazen

You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide for Men and Women to Heal the Pathways of Sexual Dysfunction and Restore Relational Harmony Together

May 18, 2022

More info on Grace and her story:
www.ouramazinggrace.net

Below you will find more information and the links From Former House of Reps Dean Michele Bachmann referenced on the topic of the Biden Administration signing over US sovereignty on public health to the World Health Organization:

Take action: https://takeactionforfreedom.com/stop-who

https://leohohmann.com/2022/04/25/global-govt-alert-threat-to-national-sovereignty-set-to-go-down-may-22-28-at-who-world-health-assembly/
 
https://www.americaoutloud.com/biden-handing-over-u-s-sovereignty-to-who/
 
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18534/who-death-trap
 
"Some Senators are pushing back against this story of the proposed Biden amendments to be voted on May 22-28, 2022, in Geneva, Switzerland, at the World Health Assembly (the UN governing body of the WHO), because it’s hard to believe. But I’ve examined the amendments. One objection is that the International Health Rules of the World Health Assembly (which the US signed onto in 2005), contains an “out” clause that allows a member nation to withdraw from the rules. Formerly, nations could choose to comply with International Health Rules or they could opt out. 
 
The original opt out clause still remains in the current rules document, even if the Biden amendments are adopted, but the new amendments proposed by Biden completely undermine that opt out clause. Article 12 section 2 line 6 strikes the 194 nations' healthcare officers as decision makers over healthcare decisions within their nations, and instead transfers that decision making authority to the Director General of The UN’s healthcare agency, the World Health Organization—(WHO). 
 
The Biden amendments strengthen the WHO and undermine US sovereignty. 
We've just lived through 2 1/2 years of medical authoritarianism in the US, including forcing us to stay locked up for 15 days, shutting down businesses, throwing people out of work, forcing vaccines on people involuntarily, and mask wearing. We witnessed mandating school and public and private closures, denying people standard healthcare procedures, all in the name of Covid. The US CDC issued a recommendation, and Biden told people they no longer had to pay rent, leaving landlords with bills to pay, but no income to pay them. The Congress did not vote for any of these actions. 
 
Biden just issued orders, (and Trump did, too), on the basis of emergency powers. 
We are still living under emergency powers declared by Biden, with no ending date. 
 
These actions were not voted on by Congress. These were just recommendations made by Fauci and the CDC, but these recommendations were portrayed to the public as though they were law when they were not. This includes forced vaccines under pain of losing employment. We continue to experience complete violations of our first amendment rights. 
 
Authoritarian actions could easily happen on a global scale by empowering the Director General of WHO, as the Biden amendments seek to do. 
 
The proposed Biden amendments to the International Health Rules, weakens US and other nations’ authority over healthcare decisions and strengthens global authority through the World Health Organization, Director General at the UN. 
 
Could a nation technically say they won't follow the WHO Director General's orders? 
 
Yes, but ask yourself, why is the Biden administration seeking to pass amendments at the governing body of the WHA to singularly empower the Director General of the WHO and undermine the authority of US healthcare officials? 
 
The amendments are intended to show the policy orientation of the Biden administration toward global decision making and undermine US sovereignty over healthcare. 
 
If everyone can get these links and information to their representatives, and demand they vote on these amendments, that would help." - Michele Bachmann
 
Our Amazing Grace: Whistleblower Reveals How He Lost His Daughter to Medical Malpractice
https://www.learntruehealth.com/our-amazing-grace-whistleblower-reveals-how-he-lost-his-daughter-to-medical-malpractice
 

Highlights

  • What did Scott Schara find out about the hospital’s anomaly?
  • Why did Scott think that his daughter Grace wasn’t given the proper care?
  • What drugs did they put in Grace’s body to cause her sudden death?
  • How much money does the hospital make out of COVID patients?

 

Heartbreaking, but this story needs to be told. This gut-wrenching story of what Scott’s daughter, Grace, went through will not be easy to listen to. . In this episode, Scott Schara will share the intentional deaths happening in the hospitals after losing his loving daughter, Grace.

 

Intro: 

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 479. I am so honored today to have Scott Schara on the show. Scott has a very powerful message for you. And for all of us. This is something that my naturopathic mentors have been warning me about for over ten years that I’ve been studying with them. They’ve kept saying to me the number one cause of death in the United States is done at the hands of doctors on hospitals. And that sounded so outlandish when they first started proposing this, and then they showed me the statistics, and they showed me the literature, they showed me the numbers, and they said—no look, it’s not just accidents that happened, like, “Oh, I meant to give you five milligrams, not 50 milligrams.” It’s not just those. And those do happen. It’s actual effects, not side effects but effects from drugs. It’s mismanagement. I don’t want to say it’s intentional, but there are certain hospitals, when we look at the statistics, they look as though they’re more interested in how many scans they can do, how many tests they can run instead of the health of the patient. They’re looking at the cash cow of the patient. And when we look at the overall picture of the medical system, we see that the medical system is designed for profit. It’s not designed to heal.

I love the doctors out there who want to do good. Who spent so many years of their life going to school because their hearts were in the right place. They want to do good. They’re in a system that is broken because it’s intentionally designed for profit. One of my naturopathic mentors was raised on a farm, very young, when he was feeding the calves with calf pellets. He looked at the ingredients, and he said—“Dad, why do we feed all the calves the vitamins, minerals, all these nutrients? Why are we feeding them all these nutrients with calf pellets? Why don’t we take these nutrients ourselves?” Because he understood even as a child. He understood the veterinary medicine aspect of farming that when you give an animal very good nutrition, it prevents disease. And if we can prevent disease in an animal, it makes the hamburger cost less. And for humans, it’s the opposite.

We wait to get sick and then go to the doctor and get put on very expensive meds. So it’s a backward world where we try to prevent disease in animals to keep them healthy and keep the cost down. But when it comes to our health, we’re not trying to keep the cost down by preventing medicine? So the whole system is just wackadoo. So when my mentor showed me, without a shadow of a doubt, they showed me all the evidence that hospitals and so many shady things go on that lead to the number one cause of death in the United States, and it is actually at the hands of the medical system.

So, Scott, you have a story that really echoes this message I keep hearing, and I’m very excited to have you on the show today because your message will save lives. So, welcome to the show.

 

[00:03:52] Scott Schara:  Thanks for having me. That was a great introduction. I just have a couple of quick comments before you start asking me questions. But what’s interesting, your introduction was well done, and it sets the table and what’s happened in the research only about a month ago. I crossed over to say that Grace’s death was intentional, and it was through research. When you’re at the point where you’re thinking maybe this is unintentional and I’ve come to the point of saying it is.

So the urgency my daughter put it this way which I think is a good way to put it, if you shot somebody on the street, they would put you in jail as soon as possible to stop you from killing more people. And that same thought process has to be applied to the medical professionals who are doing this type of thing like they did to our daughter Grace. And I’m not talking about just the people involved in Grace’s situation– this is running rampant in our country.

 

[00:05:00] Ashley James:  Right, especially in the last two years. We can do a whole talk just on the last two years and what we’ve seen hospitals do because they would get $5,000 or more per COVID patient. And then they would get this huge chunk of money from the government every time they put someone on a ventilator, so they were monetarily motivated. And again, I believe there’s good people in the system, but when we look at the outcomes, the outcomes were so horrendous.

Doctors kept doing the same thing, even though they saw a very slim chance that people would survive once they put them on the ventilator. And that their hands were tied, and they weren’t allowed to use certain medications that they saw or other doctors saw were working. But when we look at all the hospitals, we see that there’s a pattern of looking to monetize and maximize the money from each patient and not necessarily looking for the best outcome for each patient. And this is just the very sick part of the medical system is when someone’s monetarily motivated, they’re not going to make the best ethical choices for our health. So let’s dive into your story. Tell us about Grace.

 

[00:06:26] Scott Schara:  So Grace, I could talk about it for hours and hours. And I’m attempting to give a picture of Grace in a short time. She’s the whole motivation for doing this. There are some days that are exceptionally hard. She was my best buddy. You know when your best buddy is killed, and you know a lot of things happen in your mind. I missed her terribly just this last weekend. For example, we went on an annual fishing trip with Grace and our two grandsons, and I took the two grandsons this year without Grace. So that was tough. You relive what we did last year, and you can’t stop thinking about it. Well, it’s a joy to go on a fishing trip, but also it was so sad. I cried multiple times over the weekend.

It’s easy to do a podcast like this and all the ones we’ve been doing because she was a great kid. She had a love for our Lord that is different than anything I’ve ever seen. She called me earthly dad. And she represented God’s love the way that it’s supposed to be, and I can’t love that way. She did it because she loved me, even when I was a jerk. It gives me the motivation to do these stories and tell about Grace. And tell what happens, so it doesn’t happen to other people.

Grace was 19 when she died. She had Down syndrome. She was on the Down Syndrome scale of people. She was very high functioning, and my wife homeschooled her. She taught her how to read and write, and she could. She played violin at my daughter Jessica’s wedding. She rode horses. I taught her how to drive. She had a sense of humor second to none. She was a funny kid. She saw things through the lens of humor. If she met you for the first time, she would be encouraging. She would share a sense of humor right at the get-go. If she’d met you for the first time, she’d say, ” Well, nice to meet you, beautiful Ashley.” And then she would say– would you like to hear my dirty jokes? Of course, you would say, “Well, and I couldn’t wait to hear them.” And then she would say, “Well, why didn’t the toilet paper cross the road?” So then you’d say, “I don’t know.” “What she would tell you, “because it was stuck in the crack.” And you would say, “well, what about your second one? She would say, “have you read the book Under the Bleachers”? And you’d say no, “I’ve never read that book”. And she said, “Would you like to know who’s written it by?“ “And, of course, you’d say, “yes”. And she’d say, “well, it was written by Seymour Butts.”

We have a website that we started, ouramazinggrace.net. There’s hundreds of pictures, videos, all kinds of cool stuff about Grace and her life, and obviously the stories on the website. You can get to know Grace that way. I get emails every day from people who go to the website and they see how special she was. She was very unique. We see her now as an angel. God gives us an angel to walk around with us for 19 years. And the only way to make sense out of it is with understanding that God’s sovereign. He basically had her unloan to us, and He had a different purpose for Grace.

 

[00:10:28] Ashley James: What is your mission by coming on this podcast and sharing Grace’s story and the website ouramazinggrace.net. What is your desire, your wish, your hope that comes out of all this?

 

[00:10:46] Scott Schara: There’s two very specific things we decided to do this early on, right after the hospital decided to not meet with us. We had written up all of the research that we had done. We had known by November 8 that they killed Grace but at that point, we thought it was an anomaly. So we took all the research that we did, and we were probably over 100 hours at that time. Now, it’s over $600 of research, and we codified it, put it all on documents, and sent it to the hospital requesting a meeting. So, it sounds dumb when you think about it now. I really thought it was just an exception. So, they would want to know and change the protocol, so they don’t do this to somebody else. And when they said, no, we don’t want to meet. We realized, oh my gosh, this is deeper than that.

So then we decided to go public with the story and for two reasons. Number one is to save lives. So that’s the easy one. I mean, you’re going to be motivated to save lives. You don’t want this to happen to anybody else. And when you hear the details, you’ll see what I’m talking about. We want to stop this. So when we started to go on podcasts, then you realized the national media is not going to pick up the story because it’s too out there. So then, the website was developed to post the research so people cannot just believe some dead that’s telling the story. But actually see the documents and see the research, so then they see, oh my gosh, this is true to save lives. So that’s number one.

And I just want to drill that down just a little bit because there’s two very specific pieces of that. Number one is if you need to go to the hospital, look at what is the need to check-in. So go to the emergency room visit for a true emergency which at the time when we took Grace, we thought it was a true emergency in it probably was because her oxygen level could not be maintained above 90%. We did not have to checked her in the hospital if I would had known then what I know now we would have checked her in. We would have said, no, we’re not going to admit her, and they would have sent us home with a prescription for oxygen and steroid, and Grace would be alive today. And I say that with 100% confidence because I went into different hospitals three days after Grace died with symptoms three to four times worse. I was about to die the first night, and they turned me around in 24 hours with a completely different protocol than what was followed with Grace.

Then the second piece of this physical component of saving people’s lives is a lot of the hospitals have been bought, and I don’t mean legally bought. But they’ve been practically bought by the government through a money trail, and they used COVID as an excuse. So Grace died at a hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin. I went to a different hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and by God’s Grace, that hospital, we didn’t know, that hospital chose to do what’s right and follow the hippocratic oath versus doing what’s wrong. And that fact pattern, I think God used it so I could tell the story objectively. But that fact pattern is the second component of the physical piece of the message, which is check out your hospitals in your local area and vet them before the need arises because when you’re sitting in the emergency room, that isn’t the time to figure out if they been bought by the government or not. You need to know which hospitals are the good ones and which one are the bad ones ahead of time.

And then, the second component of what we want to do is the spiritual piece which we thought early on that Grace’s story may be used by God to prepare people’s hearts that they’ve been duped. That the government had duped our entire population, and if that does that to you, when you listened, you realize God wants to bring everybody back to himself and if that causes you to start searching, don’t turn it off. He wants you to search and find the only person who ever walked the face of the earth and who didn’t duped anybody, which is His Son, Jesus Christ.

 

[00:15:26] Ashley James: Thank you. How can we vet hospitals? I’ve got several in the area, but there’s only one I really like in my area. Actually, they publish, and it’s really interesting. This is the most honest hospital in the area.  They published all their statistics. So, for example, around COVID, what surprises me is that they’re being so honest with their statistics that if you look at month to month, the people who have been admitted in the last several months, significantly higher percentage are those who are fully vaccinated with the boosters, so they’ve got three shots. Some of them decided to get four shots, but the ones who are zero shots have a significantly less percentage of being admitted and even coming to the hospital with COVID.

They’re publishing all these statistics. They’re just being, here’s our statistics for this month, this is how many people are in the ICU, this is how many people were admitted. This is how many people who just came into the ER or tested positive. Eventhough, they are tested positive while not having any symptoms. They came in like a broken arm, and they have tested positive like they’re just showing where they’re at. And I thought that was a clue that maybe this hospital would be better than going to other hospitals because they’re being honest. But besides what they’re just showing, how can we question a hospital to know that they are not going to put money in front of my health?

 

[00:17:05] Scott Schara: That’s a great question. I would tell you the common sense approach. I don’t have any checklist, but just add a little critical thinking to your questions, and you can come up with an answer. So the first thing I would do is find out if they are part of a national chain or not. So with Grace’s hospital, St. Elizabeth, it’s part of a section that is a 142 hospital system. That’s big. They’re one of the largest in the country. So the bigger they are, the more likely they’re bought by the government versus the hospital system.

I went into a small region with five hospitals, that doesn’t make it good or bad. But that’s just a first cut. Medical professionals that you already know that are not generally bought by the system—chiropractors for example, dentists–if you have a trusted relationship with them, you can ask some questions to find out. But then ultimately, you’re going to find out their position on things. So, on a bright light question, obvious is, what’s your position on the vaccine? Because that will tell you an awful oath of tons of stories that I’ve heard about people that they went into their regular doctor who they trusted for years, and now he’s pushing the vaccine. Well, what does that tell you? He could be naive if you in the best-case scenario, but in the worst-case scenario, he is one that bought by the government because this thing is no good. And so, to me, the vaccination position is a bright light task. They’re pushing the vaccine. They’re pushing the narrative that’s no good. So they’ve been bought.

 

[00:19:03] Ashley James: It’s so overwhelming. When you think about it, we’re just us as individuals, and it’s this big system and we have to navigate this big system. When we start to go down the rabbit hole, the corruption is endless. So I’ve been looking into, observing, and picking through, and understanding the history of the modern medical system. So I urge everyone to look into that because this system is new in the scope of humanity, it’s been constructed in the last 115 years.

Before that, you could go to a homeopath. You could go to an herbal medicine practitioner. Allopathic medicine is a very new pharmaceutical-based medicine which is very new and most of their medications were made from herbs anyway. We had so many choices. And then, what happened was the entire system and the colleges and the universities were bought by the one person who owned the pharmaceutical company at the time. He made sure what was taught in the schools to the doctors was only pharmaceutical-based medicine. So, there’s been a slander campaign against all other forms of medicine for over 100 years.

Back in the 1980s, the American Chiropractic Association won a huge lawsuit against the AMA force, years and years of slander but the damage was done. There’s a whole generations of Americans and people from other countries who have been told by their primary care physician that chiropractors are quacks because that’s what they told by the AMA to say, but it’s not true. They won in the 80s, but it’s still to this day; people still believe what their doctor told them. The same things with there’s a huge PR slander campaigns around midwives because they wanted everyone to be born in a hospital and die in a hospital to increase their profits.

So, when you see that over the last 100-plus years, the medical system has been built upon the premise of making as much money as possible from each customer, not a patient. A patient is someone you want to heal, and help survive, live, and thrive and not suffer. A customer is someone you want to get as much money out of. There’s individuals in the system that are service to others that want to help, but the system is not designed to help.

So you’ve been looking into this. Can you explain how much money does each hospital gets? Let’s use this COVID as an example. I know others who’ve gone into the system and even before COVID and their care has been mismanaged significantly out of a desire to make more money for the hospital. Could you explain how much money does a hospital get when someone comes in and tests positive for COVID or dies from COVID? Or gets put on a ventilator? How much money are they being incentivized or being given by the government?

 

[00:22:40] Scott Schara:  Good question. I do want your last discussion. I want to just comment on it because it’s critical. You’ve laid it out perfectly. And if people don’t believe Ashley, Mikki Willis did a great job with the Plandemic tool. He laid this out in an hour and five minutes. It lays out this whole setup. So, COVID is just a bluff on the screen. It’s been used as an excuse to implement a whole bunch of stuff that’s been going on for, as you said, 115 years. So it’s important to realize that this COVID is simply being used as the excuse to open up Pandora’s box to this absolute craziness that is heading our way that Grace’s case just emphasizes.

So back to your question about the money. The Center for Medicaid Services has come out with some whistleblowers who have said that the average hospital bonus, this is not the hospital’s profit, this is just a bonus from the government for COVID patients is a hundred thousand. That’s bonus money, and I want to walk through an example so people can grasp how deep this system is being aligned or blocked by the government. So when a person checks into the hospital with COVID, they get a bonus for testing positive. I just want to walk through a ventilator as an example. So most people are pushed to be put on a ventilator, and this is by design, and the money fits the crime. So, a ventilator, when it’s put in the patient, yields a $39,000 bonus.

To set that up, they started the patient on a sedation med, typically Precedex, and that classifies the room as ICU, which is another bonus. That patient will eventually die, 85% of people put on a ventilator for COVID die, that’s a $13,000 bonus for death.

 

[00:24:53] Ashley James: Sorry, hold on. How much money does the hospital make if you die from COVID on a ventilator?

 

[00:25:00] Scott Schara: Just like COVID, death is $13,000.

 

[00:25:05] Ashley James: So COVID death is $13,000. If you had a car accident and you died in the ER, and you happen to test positive for COVID, do they get $13,000?

 

[00:25:19] Scott Schara: Correct, as long as they put it on the death certificate that way. Which their motivation is to do that. They convince the patient–not the patient at that time because they’re dead but they convince the advocate to do that because the government will reimburse your funeral cost of $9,000 for COVID death. So, if they have this way, just think about the government caused the COVID death and they make it, so they have this whole media campaign that it’s released from China and all this crazy stuff that our governments are involved with it. They want to make you think that they’re being your friend by giving you a $9,000 funeral cost reimbursement.

My wife wisely said we’re not taking their dirty money as we never took that in Grace’s case. We just felt that if we did that, we basically agreed that Grace’s death was COVID. It has nothing to do with COVID. So even though her death certificate says COVID, Grace didn’t die of COVID. So anyway, going back to how this plays out. So I just went through the bonuses that they get. The patient was probably already in a Remdesevir, so that’s another bonus. And then, they get an overall 20% bonus on top of a bonus as an added bonus for the entire state. But then, with the ventilator, the average amount of time for patients to keep them alive, they max this out. The average amount of time for patients to be alive on a ventilator is 22 days. So then you get the daily room charge which is the insurance payment and the patient’s payment. It’s approximately 300 grand for a ventilator patient.

So you can see why they pushed to put somebody on a ventilator. In Grace’s case, she was never on a ventilator because we denied it. Thankfully, we got wise to ventilators while we were in the hospital and we denied that push. They wanted us to give them a pre-approval or pre-authorization to put Grace on a ventilator whenever they wanted to, and, ultimately, I believe that because we denied that. They had to figure out a different way to take Grace out. So Grace’s case is extremely unique, not only because we were there, but the way they did it, it’s unbelievable.

 

[00:27:49] Ashley James: Let’s talk about that. What’s the evidence that you have that they maliciously killed your daughter?

 

[00:28:01] Scott Schara: There’s an overabundance of evidence. Again, I would point people to the website and then look at the tragedy tab. Roughly 70% of the research that I’ve done is posted in that tab, so that will point you to evidence. I’ll go through some other pieces that are not on the tab so then you can see–oh my gosh, this is unbelievable. We’ll go through the evidence first if you want to talk about the quality of care because that really sets this up. Because you might think, oh my gosh, how did this all even happen? What was the hospital stay alike?

 

[00:28:40] Ashley James: Why don’t we walk through it? So, her oxygen is lower than 90%. So you bring her into the hospital, and you check her in. Walk us through it.

 

[00:28:52] Scott Schara: So, right in the emergency room when they suggested that we should have met Grace, I just said well, then I’ll be staying with her. And immediately, the attending nurse said, we can’t. And I said, what’s the reason? And she said we don’t allow visitors in the COVID wing. And I said, then I’ll be taking Grace home. Unfortunately, at that point, they came back two hours later, and they said, we had a meeting, and they said, you can stay. So, I say unfortunately because, obviously at that time, I was in the mindset to take her home. I wasn’t going to be an advocate. That’s crazy that I will be going to leave my Down Syndrome daughter in the hospital alone, and no one’s going to do that.

So, they allowed me to stay, and we waited 10 hours in the emergency room for a room to open up. What I believe happened and you can make your own judgment after hearing the details. I believe, basically, we were waiting for somebody else to die. And specifically for them to take somebody else out because the hospital was at maximum capacity at this point with the Delta variant in the emergency room was also at maximum capacity. So when we waited in the emergency room for 10 hours. So about midnight on the 7th, we got in the room. My expectation at that point was that Grace and I were gonna have a mini-vacation for three or four days. It was on the first day, it was like that. So we just goofed and hopped in. They had a great menu. We could order food off the menu and it was really fun.

Towards the end of the day, they put Grace on a high-flow cannula, which is a regular cannula, what’s you see people have with the hose wrapped around their ears, with the tool inserts in the nostrils, and they’re just breathing oxygen.

That’s outmost of what Grace needed, but they insisted on a high-flow cannula. Grace’s really got agitated with that shooting air up your nostrils at 40 miles an hour. So it’s a big deal. So then, thinking oxygen is paramount here and I thought they know better. There’s an attitude that I had, unfortunately, to trust the white coat. And that’s another take-home message is let them earn your trust. Don’t just automatically blindly trust the white coat. And ultimately, based on these examples that I really didn’t trust the white coat because I was taken out of the armed guard. I may still have an overall trust for the white coat, but then they try to harm your daughter. 

So ultimately, I worked with the nurses for a couple of hours to get a BiPAP situated with Grace, and then she calmed down, and everything was fine. On that next morning, on the 8th of October, the doctor came in at eight o’clock and said, you’re going to need to put your daughter on a ventilator in the next two hours. So, I said, what is that recommendation based on? He said we did a blood gas draw the night before. So I said, what time? He said 11:30, and I told him the story about what just happened with the oxygen. And I said, I was watching the monitors. I said at that point when you guys did that, Grace’s blood pressure was 235 over 135, and her heart was racing a hundred beats a minute. So I don’t think that a blood gas draw is subjective. So I’ll let you take another one. So, they did, and Grace’s fine.

We dodged the ventilator bullet, but at that moment, I got educated mentally because I asked what’s the prognosis. I still think the majority of people will—like what you have said with chiropractors who won the lawsuit for defamation but the damage was already done. So, with ventilators, I think the damage was already done too but in a different situation. Something was  said, I think President Trump unknowingly convinced the country that we had a ventilator shortage and that ventilators are a necessary tool in the tool chest.

So I thought that just based on that paradigm that was sold to us at the beginning of COVID. At that point, I asked the doctor what the prognosis is, and he said only 20% of people walk out alive after being put on a ventilator. The attending nurse started crying and I talked with her. She has a daughter named Grace and she knew if I made this decision, Grace would going to die. So I started looking stuff up on my laptop. I had it there in the room. I talked with a doctor friend who’s helping us and we came to the base looking at home. We came to a conclusion, only 15% of people walk out alive and those 15% of people do walk out alive and most of them die in the first year from damage done to their lungs. So we decided then that Grace is not going on a ventilator and that would be crazy.

They pushed us four different times to give them that this doctor thought he had the evidence, but the other four times they pushed for a ventilator was coached in a way that they want us to give up pre-approval or pre-authorization just in case. Just in case, meaning when they decided that they would frame it this way. They said these things tend to happen in the middle of the night when we can’t get the whole family. So if we would have decided this, I mean Grace will be on a ventilator, 30 seconds after we gave him the pre-authorization because of the financial motivation.

The next example I would share with you is half on the very next day on October 9th. There’s probably 50 examples I can share with you. But these two kinds will give you a perspective of what was going on. So, on October 9th, which is a Saturday, Grace and I got up. She was hungry. I ordered food, and I started feeding her. 

Grace, obviously could feed herself, but she had a BiPAP mask on. The nurse came running in and said, you can’t do that. I said, what’s the reason? She said, Grace’s oxygen saturation was only at 85%. So, I processed that for about 15 minutes, and I thought this is impossible. She was at 95% in the emergency room with a regular cannula. Now, we had a BiPAP mask on, and then she should be near 100%. At all my COVID materials in the room, but one thing was an oxygen saturation finger monitor. So, I put it on Grace’s finger, and it read 95%. So I called the nurse back in, and I asked her if my finger meter was accurate, and she said, yes, it is. So, why is my $50 meter more accurate than your $50,000 machine? And she said, well because the lids get sweaty. Well, if you know this, I said, why don’t you proactively change out those lids or whatever you need to do every three, four hours, or whatever it takes so you have an accurate reading. Isn’t this the primary tool you’re using to manage my daughter’s care? And she’s not really responded to me.

You should just be thankful you caught this and we got wise to this one.  I’ve shared this particular example because this hospital is not the exception. I think this hospital has the rule, and they are arbitrarily lowering the oxygen saturation numbers to justify ventilators. So if anybody is wise enough to get the records after they get the call that Uncle Joe just died, and he was on a ventilator, and you started digging into the oxygen numbers, and you see, oh boy, I see where they had to put them on a ventilator is actually when he’s only at 80%. They can make these numbers anything they want and this example shows that. And now, we started monitoring Grace’s oxygen regularly. When I say we, myself when I was there, and then my daughter Jess who became the replacement. On Grace’s last day, death was at 6:02 pm, which was an hour and 25 minutes before Grace died. Grace’s oxygen was at 93%, but the meter that hospital was using was 49% lower. That’s how sick this is.

 

[00:37:12] Ashley James: The machine you’re talking about, the $50 machine called a Pulse Ox. 

 

[00:37:15] Brooke Hazen: Yes.

 

[00:37:17] Ashley James: I have three of them, I think which are scattered around the house because our son has asthma. When he was a toddler, actually, I had a pediatric-sized one as well for his little fingers. You can get them for $35. I just got the other one, and it had the best reviews on Amazon. And I’ve used them whenever my son has beating problems, just to check in, and then, of course, I have other ways I check his breathing like the volume of his breath and it’s allergy-induced asthma. So, we had to figure out all the allergens which are really weird stuff.

But that’s when I got introduced to a Pulse Ox and how interesting it is. When my family and I had COVID, we also used the Pulse Ox, and it’s just a little thing that clips onto your finger and sends a beam of light through your finger and It monitors your heart rate and blood oxygen saturation, which was a really great tool for me when I was going through COVID. I had just lost our daughter, and so I was going through incredible grief and also healing from birth. And then, around day 8 of having COVID, my blood pressure was like, I think it was like  80 over 60. It was some crazy low number. I remember trying to breathe heavily and feeling tightness in my chest, almost like asthma. Breathing heavily and still feeling very lightheaded, I used the Pulse Ox, and I don’t know, I was  86 or something.

I talked to a telemedicine doctor, and he said, you know what I’m not concerned about your problems that you’re having with COVID but I’m concerned that it might be a blood clot in your lungs from the birth. So, you should go in just to get checked. Thank God I’ve never had a blood clotting issue. I had just had a birth, and that is a possibility. So I did go in, and the moment I went in, I felt as if I was a prey. It was the weirdest feeling that the doctors wanted me on experimental drugs. And they said to me basically, I would not live if I don’t get these drugs. And I looked at there’s one doctor, who seemed like, yes he reminded me of my dad. So I felt like this immediate connection to him, and he felt like very kind and concern. I really felt like he had a genuine concern. I can’t feel he was like, haha, I can’t wait to get money out of this patient. Because he doesn’t like to take home the money, it’s the hospital. But he was so convinced that I would not make it like I’d be dead within 24 hours if I didn’t get on this experimental drug.

So, it’s the middle of the night, and I’m texting with my midwife, who is really good at reading research as well, and we go through and I actually asked her for informed consent. So I said, could you please give me your printout, your literature, anything on this? And they gave me a marketing pamphlet basically, I was like, this is the most amazing stuff ever. It’s not FDA-approved yet. So I said, like I’m going into my interview brain and thinking of all the interview questions I’d be asking a doctor about this, I said, what’s your experience using it? And he immediately starts telling me about the doctors on the East Coast and– oh, we’re seeing really promising results on the East Coast in the hospitals there. And I’m like, have you ever used it? What have you seen with your patients? And it turned out that their hospital just started using it and just joined the medical trial? But he didn’t have any experience using it. So he’s just citing. He’s basically the drug rep or whatever has convinced him with little talking points, the marketing points.

So, we go on the pharmaceutical’s website, it’s all the way to the bottom. And you have to scroll for days to get all the way to the bottom. I see one study that shows and this is again on the East Coast they did the study, where they showed that you have a higher percentage of dying if you’re hospitalized, and the only way you can get on this medication is if you’re hospitalized. So basically, those who get on the medication, more of them die than those who get hospitalized with COVID and don’t get on the medication. And that was enough for me. First of all, it’s an experimental medication. I’m not a guinea pig. No, thank you.

So that’s absolutely, no. There’s no way I would ever get on an experimental drug. I like drugs that have been around for like 50 years. You don’t show me a long track record of safety before you put me on anything. And so I’m looking at this and seeing that they really bury. They have to publish these, these studies, but they buried them away at the bottom. Like, how obvious can you get? Just scroll the bottom at the first place, and then more people die. If I were just not get on it, I would have a better outcome. This doctor was pushing it, pushing it and he was convinced. Now I said to him, I don’t have diabetes. I don’t have gestational diabetes, and I was like very clear about my medical history. When I came into the hospital, I said it, i mean, grief, so my blood pressure has been higher, like just from anxiety but it’s extremely low right now due to COVID. I was just worried about it. Listen, it’s kind of hard to breathe. Can you give me some like Albuterol or give me something for breathing? Give me some oxygen.

They wouldn’t send me home with oxygen, but what they did do–because I refuse to be on this medication that they want to put me on. So I said, listen, I’m not going to get admitted. I just want some help with breathing. And they handed me an Albuterol like inhaler. Inhaler that it is the exact same kind of inhaler my son has for asthma. All this is interesting that I could have stayed home–although that’s not legal I think to take someone else’s medication. But I mean, just jokingly, could have I just stayed home and hand me the hospital bill just by taking my son’s inhaler? But what they did was they handed me this inhaler and then they handed me the discharge papers. They’re like, oh welcome, he’s like I’m so worried about you, and you need to come right back to the hospital because the second you start to get worse, because you gonna get worse and you’ve got to get on this medication.

I’m like, listen, dude, I’m going to be fine. I just need a little help breathing. I wish they would have sent me home with lots of oxygen, but at least he gave me an inhaler. It started to work right away. I took a few puffs, my lungs sort of loosened up, and I’ve never had asthma, but it really helped. I was like, wow, I feel more stable already. And I look at my discharge papers, I’m looking because I want to see, and I’ve seen discharge papers before it shows the medication and how to take the medication and its side effects, like everything about the medication. And I looked through everything, and there’s not one mention of the Albuterol they handed me. And I asked the discharge nurse, can you please get the doctor or talk to the doctor like he doesn’t even say on the Albuterol bottle. Should I be doing four puffs or just as needed or four puffs or two puffs or what? And what’s really interesting is that none of my medical records it shows that he prescribed Albuterol because he doesn’t want to be seen as treating COVID with the medication. So, they handed me basically under the table and sent me on my way. So it’s not in any of my records.

It’s a day and a half later, because that’s the middle of the night. So a day and a half later, I’m sitting up, I’m on the couch, and I’m no longer in bed. I’m feeling great. Besides, like once in a while, I get on the Albuterol still because I’m still shaky, and I’m still recovering from COVID. I’m also  taking all my supplements, and I remember sitting up, but I’m helping organize because we’re actually in the middle of packing on top of everything. We’re in the middle of moving, and I get a call from the hospital. And it’s the pharmacist at the hospital and he says, you have to come back and get on this medication. Your records show that you are at high risk because you have multiple comorbidities. I’m like, what comorbidities are you talking about? He said, because you have diabetes. I specifically said I don’t have diabetes. I don’t know how they got that. But he was looking at my record and decided that– you have to get on his medication and it was a sales call. That was the weirdest and I thought was feel like it was in a twilight zone. So the hospital was calling me a day and a half later, begging me to come back and get on their drug that’s a trial medication.

It’s like a twilight zone, and the more I looked into it, I don’t even think this medication has gotten FDA approval, and it just ended up killing too many people. I’m wondering how much money that this hospital get for each patient they convinced to get on this trial. This experimental COVID treatment that was a failure. I mean, I’ve never heard of a hospital calling someone when they’re better days later. It’s not just so much checking–hey, how are you doing? No, it was the pharmacist, like you need to come back and get on this medication, and you’re going to die. I’m looking at my Pulse Ox right now, I’m 98% and I’m great. So, that’s really good, I know, I’ve gone off a little on my own tangent, but it’s a really great idea to own.

Every home should own a thermometer. Every home should own a sphygmomanometer, like a blood pressure cuff, get one for the wrist or get one for the arm, check your blood pressure regularly. That’s a good thing to know and everyone should own a pulse ox. These are the tools that allow us to check in with ourselves. But when you’re in a hospital, do you actually need to bring your own tools in the hospital to verify that their machines are accurate?

 

[00:47:26] Scott Schara: Thats sick, I know. I mean, I thank God we had that because we have so much evidence and it’s an overabundance. But I mean, you can’t orchestrate these coincidences without God being involved. I’m glad we have it.

 

[00:47:48] Ashley James: I am so thankful that you have such strong faith because it has been my faith that had helped me survive the grief of losing my daughter. Although not in any of the same circumstances. It has been drawing myself closer to the Lord, what has saved me mentally and emotionally. I’m so glad that you also have that strong relationship. And anyone who’s ever grieving, turning to the Lord, I highly recommended. It’s been something that’s been so grounding and reassuring.

So let’s keep going through Grace’s story. You were checking her oxygen that you mentioned, you could jump ahead and talk about your daughter taking over for you. Why don’t we go back? Walk us through. What happened before you left the hospital?

 

[00:48:52] Scott Schara: So on Sunday morning, that 10th, seven o’clock in the morning, the head nurse came in with an armed guard and told me I need to leave immediately.

 

[00:49:00] Ashley James: Excuse me?

 

[00:49:03] Scott Schara: So then I said, what is that based on? And she said three things. Interestingly, the official excuse that we received from the hospital was only the third thing. Which is she said the third thing is we suspect you of COVID. And that excuse was so laughable because they’re the ones who told me I was going to get COVID. And if they were so concerned about it, why then they ask me. I tested myself on October 7th, Grace’s first day, because I had a fever at about one o’clock, so I tested myself, and I was positive. I had COVID already for three days before they kicked me out. And if you were also concerned, you could have tested me if I gave you the approval. I mean, that wasn’t the reason. Then, she said, well  you’ve been shutting off the alarms at night.

I said, because that’s how nurses trained me how to do it. The alarms are going off constantly, which is a strange thing. It seems minor in the scheme of things when you hear the whole story, but it isn’t minor. We live in the 21st century, these alarms can go off at the nurse’s station. So I asked her, why can’t you have these go off to the nurse’s station and they lied to me, saying he can’t. The reason I said they lied, it’s because when I went into the hospital three days after Grace died, they asked, what would you like to happen? And I said, I don’t want any alarms going off, and I don’t want anybody coming in the room. I’ll buzz you if I need you, and they honor that request.

Whereas with Grace, I mean, I had to help them train me to shut off the non-essential alarms because they’re going off 20,30 times a night. Many times, it was over 20 minutes before they come in and shut them off. And then the third thing she said was that the last three shifts of nurses, I don’t want you in the room. Which of course, these stories I was telling earlier. I wasn’t doing any wrong, but I wanted to make sure my daughter was taken care of, so I was challenging everything, like with the alarms going off. I challenge right away. So, what’s the reason these alarms are going off so much? And they said, well, every time Grace–just think about these answers. They’re so dumb.

So the nurse, when I asked her this, she says, every time Grace moves her arm, it sets off an alarm. So I said, what’s the reason? She said, well we put the IV in the crux of her elbow. I said, so what’s the reason you did that at? And she said, well it was easier for us. So I said, you got to be kidding me. And of course, I’m challenging all this crazy staff, and they had such an arrogant attitude. They look down on us. They said that we were following the frontline doctors’ misinformation campaign. When they were looking, one of the doctors recommended that Grace gets on Tocilizumab, which may have been the experimental drug they wanted you to go on. So I looked this up and I found out the placebo group did better than the group on the drug. So the doctor comes in the next day asking, what’s your decision on Tocilizumab? Then I said, well, the New England Journal of Medicine has a published study that shows that the placebo group does better than the group on the med, and the med has umpteen side effects. When you see his report– we got to report after the fact. He makes me look like a complete dummy. I mean, I’m not going to put my daughter on a drug that has a better chance of killing her than not. I mean, that’s insane. Who would do that?

 

[00:52:53] Ashley James: You were advocating, I think, what you were doing was the right thing. The hospital kicking you out. I mean, that’s ridiculous. You are allowed ethically and legally. Your patient is allowed an advocate. The hospitals that want a patient to be alone, want an easy job. It’s not about making their job easy. It needs to be– we have one focus. When we go into a hospital, the person, the patient going in comes out alive and better than in the condition that they went in. And also that they don’t have long-term side effects of the treatment. Right? That is the goal. There’s so many good nurses out there. I’m not ripping on nurses, but there’s good people and there’s bad people. Again, I see the system’s broken, but it’s not an accident. The system is built this way. It is not built to make people healthy. So when nurses are taxed, there’s a nurse shortage, they’re working long shifts, extra shifts, overtime, they’re exhausted. Of course, we would want to do things to make it a little easier. The cutting off those corners takes away from the person’s ability to survive is not acceptable. You want to go into a hospital that wants the advocate.

I remember, I lived with my mom in the hospital in the last two weeks of her life. We brought her in, and she was dying. She had cancer. And I was her advocate, and I stayed by her side, lived with her, and this is at Toronto General. And the nurses, for the most part, very happy I was there. I got blankets, and I got water. I actually made their job a lot easier. We didn’t know we were going in to have my mom died. We didn’t know she was at the end of her life. She died very suddenly and it was a big shock. I just remember that the hospital staff—again I was 22, I didn’t have the perspective I have now. Maybe I would have seen it differently. But what I do remember that the staff were very accommodating for me and excited to have an advocate there because they saw they made their job easier.

When my son has been in the hospital and I turned to the doctor in the ER, and I say, stop what you’re doing, I need informed consent. I was expecting a fight. At the time, he was about two and a half. They were hooking him up to an IV, they’re about to pump some unknown liquid into him and I’m like, wait a second. You don’t even look at me or ask me for permission like I get we’re trying to save his life, but I need to know what’s going on. And that doctor got excited. She turned to me and she said, “Oh good, and you want informed consent? Okay, here’s what’s going on.” She explained everything. She explained the good, the bad, and the alternatives. And that’s what informed consent is.

What they’re putting in him was magnesium, so like, oh okay, sure, no problem. I’m very happy that you’re going to start using something more natural or what the body needs. Magnesium relaxes the lungs and helps them breathe, and that’s the first route. I’m not saying every children’s hospital is amazing, but my own experiences with Seattle Children’s Hospitals have been better than any other hospital I’ve been to. So there are exceptions where it’s good. If you go into a hospital and they don’t want an advocate, that is a red flag. That the staff or any of the staff or any of the nurses are frustrated that you’re asking questions that you’re advocating, that you’re there to ask for informed consent, if they are resisting informed consent, or they’re making fun of you, oh, you look something up on Google? If they’re making fun of you or talking down to being condescending or trying to go around or pressure you into something, that is a red flag. That’s a huge red flag. So at that moment when the secured guard was there, could you have taken your daughter and left the hospital?

 

[00:57:24] Scott Schara: Outstanding question. Technically no. I didn’t know that at the time. I learned that afterward. That’s one of the things that the first couple of months, I woke up several times a week with that question. I should have taken Grace with me, I should have taken Grace with me. And ultimately, I would have been able to, but it wouldn’t have been automatic. And the reason is we didn’t understand at that time. They had already studied Grace on the sedation drug on October 9th called Precedex and that fits into the last day when we get into that. But once a patient’s on Precedex, their room gets classified as ICU. So then, it’s one motivation they would the hospital has to get a patient get sedated because it’s not just financial, the room classified as ICU. If you want to take the patient home because you see the care is so bad, it’s not automatic anymore. It’s called against medical advice.

So now, you’ve got to sign off that you’re responsible for the patient—we didn’t ever jump through those hoops. But the way I understand it is you’ve got to sign off that you’re taking responsibility if the patient dies under your care because you’re not following the hospital’s advice anymore, that you’re responsible for the death, etcetera.

Which of course, that would have been a no-brainer. But we didn’t know any of this at the time. When we walk through these details, I try to interject the things that we learned after the fact versus what we knew live because it’s important. If you knew all this stuff live, of course, we would have taken Grace out and we had never checked her in. There were multiple times we would have taken her out. When the oxygen readings are different, and she’s not totally responds, that’s terrible care. Right? That’s an F. You don’t see it as part of an agenda at that time. Now I see it crystal clear, but at that time, I didn’t see any of those.

 

[00:59:35] Ashley James: Their arms have the same octopus, right? So how the staff treats you? It might not be like, oh, that one nurse was really nice and that nurse was not. Okay well, I guess they’re just exhausted. Look at any red flag as a symptom of how the entire complex works because it’s how they’re trained. It’s how they’re taught to work, and it’s the attitude that is alive in that hospital. So you have to really be aware of each red flag.

I know a friend of mine had to transfer her baby in the NICU. She advocated her midwife, and there’s big red flags. They’re doing things to their baby that is so out of the norm. I’m very concerned and so is the mother. She had just given birth. The baby’s in the NICU and she’s like, everything about their care was wrong and all the red flags are going off in her mind. And she goes, I’m transferring care. And they found a different hospital that would take them and that hospital did not want to release them. She’s like, too bad. So she got her baby to a different hospital and that hospital said I cannot believe what the other hospital did to your baby. So they did stuff like putting her on antibiotics with no reason to put her on antibiotics—all these kinds of things they did to a brand new baby, that there’s no medical reason why.

The other second hospital said, that hospital should be sued for things they were overmedicating. There was no reason for it. This happens over and over and over again. And it’s so frustrating and in between countries.

I have a family member who got a pacemaker in Chile and he comes back, and everything’s fine. He does pacemakers and doing his thing. He notices that every time he walks, he faints practically. And he came back. When he came back, he saw his cardiologist here, a good reputable cardiologist who’s been seeing him for years. For some reason, hadn’t caught that he had needed a quintuple bypass. And of course, his cardiologist will just put him on medication and doesn’t tell him to change his diet or anything. I don’t know how good of a cardiologist it is.

 

[01:02:01] Scott Schara: Right.

 

[01:02:02] Ashley James: So anyway, he’s fainting, and falling down, and hurting himself for over a year. Until we advocate for him, and we’re like, you got to go back and tell your cardiologist that something’s wrong. And he finally does, after we really push him to and it turns out they had in Chile they set the heart rate to 60 beats a minute.

So, basically when you have a pacemaker and certain pacemakers are like it’s beating your heart for you. And can you imagine like 60 beats a minute like when you’re sitting? If you’re an elite athlete, and you’re just walking, but if you’re in your 80s and you need to walk downstairs, you need more than 60 beats a minute to get enough oxygen to your muscles and your brain to walk up and downstairs.

So, the cardiologist never caught this. Never looked at it. It’s something so simple, and she’s like  if she knew about—oh yeah, Chile sets it to 60 beats per minute. He‘s been telling you for over a year that he’s been falling down, bleeding everywhere. So she had to go into a program with the pacemaker to beats higher beats a minute on average. Then he saw fainting and saw falling down. This isn’t even a life-saving event. But how many really and critically and important things fall through the cracks if you don’t advocate, if you don’t question, if you don’t push and if you don’t get a second opinion? How many critical qualities of your life, critical things fall through the quacks in medicine? We cannot look to those who wear a white medical coat as gods that are infallible. The organizations are being incentivized and paid. I think that originally the government wanted to help because– oh, the pressure would be on the medical system. So we better make sure we help and take care of it. Maybe it was out of good intentions. But it’s been like any system that monetizes, it will become an incentive for a goal. A monetary goal.

 

[01:04:20] Scott Schara: Well, you’re extending a lot more Grace than I am extending them. I don’t think they had good intentions at all to start with. And I say that with a fair degree of confidence, not because my daughter died, but Dr. Peter McCullough came out and stated the blinding flash of the obvious. Which is why isn’t there a research component to this virus? Why is it all going to bonus payments to hospitals for killing people? In any normal situation, the government would be putting its money behind the research, but that’s not happening with this one.

 

[01:04:58] Ashley James: Well, what has been talked about is that if they did the research, and they uncovered a treatment for COVID that was effective, then the pharmaceutical companies with loosey emergency use authorization for the experimental vaccines, so there’s pressure, there’s lobbying to not have a research because they want their cash cow.

I saw a meme the other day and it made me giggle, but it’s also incredibly sad and demonic. You know how they keep saying follow the science, just follow the science. And the meme says, why keep following the science, but it keeps leading me to the money?

 

[01:05:51] Scott Schara: That’s good. That’s great.

 

[01:05:59] Ashley James: I’m putting myself in your shoes. If my son was in a hospital, and armed guards came to kick me out. Oh my gosh! It would take more than armed guards to rip me from my son. I can’t imagine the intensity of emotions that was going on for you at the time.

 

[01:06:17] Scott Schara: That was quite an event. The armed guard was there the whole time. I argued with this nurse for about an hour. Ultimately, she said, if you don’t leave now we’re calling the Appleton Police Department. So then, I called an attorney who’s a friend and asked his perspective. He suggested leaving peacefully and so I did.

 

[01:06:48] Ashley James: Wrong advice.

 

[01:06:50] Scott Schara: I know, but I did. I gave my buddy a hug and the last time I saw her physically alive was on FaceTime calls. After that, the look in her eye that I will never forget. The armed guard walked me out to the truck and he said, Scott, you need to take this to a higher level. It was encouraging. I mean, he saw what was happening and it was wrong. Thankfully, Grace’s special needs’ attorney was available. This is a Sunday. I called one attorney and I know these people and I had their cell numbers and fortunately picked up. So, Grace’s special needs’ attorney was available and we started planning on how are we going to get an advocate replacement. My wife, Cindy couldn’t be the advocate because she had COVID. So, I called Jess and asked her, “Will you be an advocate for Grace?” And she said, “Yes, I will dad.”

We have 44 hours without coverage because we had to negotiate with the hospital attorney to let Jessica in. Second, during that 44 hours I mentioned earlier, they started Grace on the sedation med called Precedex.

 

[01:08:08] Ashley James:  Did they ask permission to do that?

 

[01:08:12] Scott Schara: To put Grace on Precedex?

 

[01:08:14] Ashley James: Yes.

 

[01:08:15] Scott Schara: No.

 

[01:08:17] Ashley James: So, they were giving her meds without anyone’s consent. I know the whole thing when you go to a hospital, they’re allowed to treat you with whatever because they’re trying to save you’re life, but not exactly, you are allowed informed consent. So do you feel that they went behind your back, went behind her back, and were doing some treatment plan that they didn’t talk to you guys about?

 

[01:06:41] Scott Schara: Absolutely. I mean, the Precedex could maybe make an exception for, but not when you see it in the light of everything.

 

[01:08:50] Ashley James: Why does she need to be sedated? I’m sorry to interrupt. Was she rebellious and throwing things? Was she biting nurses? Why did she need to be sedated?

 

[01:08:57] Scott Schara: There’s absolutely no reason. So the one minor exception you could say would be that first night when Grace had an issue when I was working with her to get the BiPap situation with the nurses. I actually suggested at that time that she needed to be sedated but that was because of that situation, my mind, oxygen was the emergency we had to get this done. I don’t know anything about sedation, but in my mind, we just need to sedate her to get her calm. Let’s get this situated, and then she’ll be fine. So, I actually recommended it down, but that was for that specific instance. So then, if you look at the records, you see that they did that at that time and then they took her off of it. Well, then they put her back on it. There was absolutely no reason. Grace was a super calm kid. She didn’t have anxiety over anything.

What they did, so, they put her back on it on October 9th when I’m still in the room. October 10th, they had her on it and I’m now out of the room during that window of 44 hours. So from eight o’clock in the morning on the 10th, during that 44 hours, subsequent, they increased the dosage seven times, and that’s ridiculous. There would be only one reason to increase the dosage, and that is because you don’t want to invest in your patient to take care of him or her. Otherwise, there’s no reason to have anybody on it. But as we’ve learned in studying, not just the records, but studying what is going on with COVID, Precedex is used as a way to set up the ventilator. So they want these patients on Precedex, just steady drips, then once they decide or the patient agrees to or the advocate agrees to a ventilator, it’s automatic. Boom! The ventilator can be done instantly. So Precedex sets the table for the ventilator.

So, your question as to why. It would be all excuses because there’s no justification to put somebody on a med when the package inserts says specifically to not use it for more than 24 hours. It’s right on the front page of the package insert and this drug is used for anesthesia, for surgery. And the anesthesia nurse that we’ve talked to say that it should never be used for more than three hours. And they had Grace on it for four full days before her last day.

So, if we walk into the last day, as I set this up with the Precedex already, then Jessica was in the room with Grace the entire day on the 12th. Grace died on the 13th of October. On the 12th, it was another good day for Grace, inspite of Grace being sedated. Grace was still herself joking around with Jessica right before they went to bed. Jessica called her two boys, Grace’s nephews, on a FaceTime call. Grace sat up in the bed and hollered through the BiPAP, “hi boys.” Just normal. She’s tickling Jess. Jess tells the story about, so she didn’t climb in bed with Grace but she would grab the chair next to the bed and lay her head on the bed, so she was holding Grace the whole time. She had her head next to Grace’s butt. Grace was tooting [inaudible 1:12:31] sorry Jess, sorry Jess.

Oh, it’s just so cute. For me, that’s typical Grace. She was a very calm person, and there’s no reason to sedate her on top of that. Jess and I were there other than the 44 hours. There were reasons to sedate when we’re not there is to not to do their job. You’ll see that as we now walk through the last day which is even pretty egregious.

 

[01:13:58] Ashley James: Your daughter Jess, how old was she at that time?

 

[01:13:03] Scott Schara: 31. Yes 32, she’ll be 32 coming up here in June.

 

[01:13:08] Ashley James: So, a 31-year-old woman, who’s your older daughter is taking care of her 19-year-old sister with high functioning Down Syndrome in the hospital. She’s being put on more and more and more sedation, although there’s no reason for it. While she’s using your $50 pulse ox to check Grace’s levels of oxygen saturation to see how different they were from the hospital, and she was maintaining that Grace was at high oxygen saturation the whole time?

 

[01:13:43] Scott Schara: In fact, that last night, Grace was at 98-99% the entire night.

 

[01:13:47] Ashley James: So why would she still be in the hospital?

 

[01:13:51] Scott Schara: Great question. I would say because they can. I mean, we weren’t wise enough to get her out. There’s multiple times when you could ask that question. The medical malpractice nurse who reviewed the records basically said that they used Precedex as the way to set up Grace’s death. She called it chemically restraining Grace. So they chemically restrained her to set up the the last day. The doctor called us at eight o’clock in the morning in Grace’s last day. He had talked with us the evening before asking for the fourth time to pre-approve a ventilator. So he wanted our decision. We told him, no again. Then he made that comment that Grace had such a good day yesterday. We should put in a feeding tube. 

 

[01:14:39] Ashley James: What?

 

[01:14:40] Scott Schara: So Cindy and I foolishly agreed to this.

 

[01:14:45] Ashley James: Wait. I don’t understand. Her oxygen is in the high 90s. Why does she need to be put on a feeding tube?

 

[01:14:51] Scott Schara: Well, she was malnutritioned at this same. So remember the story I told you when they wouldn’t let me feed Grace. Well, the same thing that happened with Jess. They wouldn’t let us feed her. That story gets deeper because I even told them, I said, there’s no reason we cannot feed Grace. So I said, I watched. When Grace was on a BiPap, they went through a series multiple times a day, where people would come in, remove the BiPap and then get Grace’s mouth moist because it would dry her mouth out. And I watched how they did it and I’m just right there. Okay, so they put in the high-flow cannula and they turned it down to low pressure, so it’s not at 40 miles an hour. Grace was actually stable the whole time. So, when these nurses would say we can’t feed her. I said, we could feed her and you could do it too, I told them exactly. This is what happens when the ladies come in and the nurses come into what Grace’s mouth.

They said, well the doctor says, we got to have the high flow BiPap at 40 miles an hour. It doesn’t have to be there. They would not listen to me. They have just dump that. So ultimately, Grace by this time is seven days into malnutrition. She’s malnutritioned because they chose not to listen and not do their job.

So we foolishly agreed to this. And ultimately, it plays out until this last day and you’ll see, he called us at eight o’clock and we approved this. Now eight-thirty or so. There’s a 14-year ICU nurse in charge of Grace’s care this day. Very significant because when you start wondering, was this premeditated, was it intentional, all these facts matter. And so your listeners are going to have to make that decision and don’t just believe me. Look at what I’m saying and then look at the research on Grace’s website. Everything I’m talking about now is under the tragedy tab, under Thou Shall Not Kill and I have a slide called Grace’s Last Day. It’s all documented there. This is straight out of the records.

Then Jess says to this 14-year ICU nurse that she must take a shower. And she says, you can’t take a shower here. So when I was there, they insisted and I leave. There’s a shower right in the room. And they said you can’t take a shower here. Jess was afraid to not obey because I was kicked out. She doesn’t want to be kicked out. So she goes home and takes a shower. She was back inside an hour. When she comes back, she started going up. She overhears the doctor and the 14-year ICU nurse talking in the hallway, saying the family’s not going to like this. So she said, “what are they not going to like?” They said, “we had to restrain Grace, while you’re gone.” So she said, “what’s the reason?” So restrain, meaning to strap Grace right down to the bed. So she said, “what’s the reason?” “Well, she wanted to get up and go to the bathroom.” So they made Grace poop in the bed while Jess was gone. So just process this.

One of the attorneys we work with he said, “Scott, do you think that you would have been restrained?” I said, “absolutely not. I would have made the nurses do their job.” But Grace was an obedient kid. She was the greatest kid you could ever have. So one of the people who interviewed me when they heard this, they just said, Grace died a murderous death. I think she did die a murderous death. She was obedient until death, just like Jesus was on the cross. But, of course, it wasn’t as dramatic as Jesus’ death. Just think through. She was just obedient.

So now, they use that as an excuse to ratchet up the Precedex further than instead of waiting for Grace’s numbers to rebound. Now, they insert the feeding tube and this is over. The attending nurse challenged the ICU nurse, I don’t think we should be doing this now. We should wait for Grace’s numbers to rebound. She wouldn’t listen. So they do that. They do the feeding tube next and now they take the Precedex up to max dose. This is at 10:48 in the morning, and Grace was in the max dose of Precedex. This is the equivalent of being knocked out for surgery. Grace was knocked out. For the rest of the day, she was knocked out. Inspite of Grace being knocked out, at 11:25, they gave her a dose of Lorazepam, which an anti-anxiety med. At 5:46, they gave her another dose, and at 5:49, another dose three minutes later. At 6:15, they gave her Morphine as an IV push, which means instantaneously. The package insert for Morphine says to not combine those meds. She’s on a max dose of Precedex, two doses of Lorazepam, and Morphine, all in 29 minutes.

 

[01:19:46] Ashley James: What was the reason behind Morphine? Was she in pain?

 

[01:19:51] Scott Schara: She wasn’t. How can you be in pain when you’re knocked out? 

 

[01:19:55] Ashley James: Exactly.

 

[01:19:57] Scott Schara: She’s not in any pain.

 

[01:19:59] Ashley James: I’ve been wanting to mention this. And so I think this is actually the most appropriate time. For me, it’s a common knowledge in Canada, but I wouldn’t say everyone in Canada knows this, but many do. In the Canadian medical system– so I’m from Canada and moved to the States when I was in my 20s. So I had enough experience with the medical system there. It’s very different and yet very similar. And the differences are it is for-profit and not it is to save money. So I just thought it was hilarious.

When I hurt my ankle, I was travelling in Nevada, and I tripped on a hose at a gas station and my ankle blew up to like the size of a softball, but I thought for sure I had broken my ankle. So I went to the hospital and I could hardly walk. And I could not believe the amount of X-rays they took. I was like are you kidding me? I think they took 20 X-rays. You don’t need that many X-rays, and it hit me. This is for America’s profit system. In Canada, I never got more than two X-rays. I broke an ankle doing sports when I was 12 and actually was the growth plate in my ankle and I fractured it. I remember two X-rays and that’s all you get.

The system in Canada is about saving money. Right? So how much money can we save with each patient? Not spend on each patient. They don’t just like offer you drugs willy-nilly. It’s different. When I came to the States, all of a sudden the doctors were offering me pain meds because I said I had cramps. When I had my period and I’m like, no, I don’t need prescription medication. That’s crazy. Whereas in Canada, a doctor would never have done that. So very, very different experiences in terms of like show me the money, follow the money.

It is common knowledge that they use Morphine to speed up the process of death in Canada. It’s an unwritten rule when someone is in Palliative Care Hospice, and they’re sleeping away at the end of their life. So let’s make it that nurses, and it’s their mercy. It’s their mercy that they would, or the doctors would give them little or doses of Morphine to gently speed up the process of death, and that’s what they did to my mom.

I didn’t know, I didn’t understand this at the time and since I’ve talked to many others and this is just a common practice. Maybe it’s a common practice here in the States. They use IV morphine just to speed up death. I’m kinda doing air quotes as you can’t see it obviously, I’m doing air quotes, in a humanitarian way just to speed up death. Maybe some people would appreciate that knock me out and fill me out with so many pain meds and I croak.

If someone’s at the end of their life from a terminal illness, that’s what they do in Canada. They did that to my mom. I watched them do it and she was in a coma at the end of her life. And  they’re like— okay, we just going to keep increasing the Morphine. So they told me, and the nurse told me we’re going to keep increasing it and help her transition faster in a more peaceful way.

 

[01:23:25] Scott Schara: In Grace’s case, I have become convinced that it wasn’t to transition in a more peaceful way. It was transition to transition period because they had a higher pain patient waiting for them in the emergency room. The hospital was at max capacity the day Grace died, and so was the emergency room. Then since, we didn’t approve the ventilator, they had to figure out a different way to take her out. How can you go from 98-99% oxygen saturation, and doing good? And even so much so that the doctor comments on it, to be dead less than 12 hours later.

It gets substantially worse as we keep going. So now, Jessica, remember she’s in the room. The package insert for Morphine says to not combine these drugs because it causes death. Similarly, the package insert says that the reversal drug is supposed to be bedside and they’re supposed to monitor the patient. After they gave this dose of Morphine, not one medical professional stepped in that room. They didn’t monitor the patient. They didn’t have the reversal drug bedside. They didn’t step in the room until they called Grace’s death.

So Jess is now in the room alone with Grace the entire time. She’s sensing Grace is getting cold. So she goes to the hallway to ask the 14-year ICU nurse. “Is this normal?” Because she wanted to have her take her temperature, she said, “yes, it’s normal, just cover with a blanket.”

 

[01:24:58] Ashley James: So she had a maximum dose of a sedative?

 

[01:25:04] Scott Schara: Yes.

 

[01:25:05] Ashley James: So she’s already out cold, she’s asleep, and she’s completely sedated. Then they begin to give her several doses of anxiety meds. Which is like why? And then they give her an IV Morphine on top of that, all within a matter of minutes. Is it like one doctor, or they’re like a bunch of doctors not looking at her chart doing whatever they want?

 

[01:25:25] Scott Schara: Well, we’ve learned subsequently that not only did a doctor have to order that, but a second doctor had to signed off. And on top of that, their alarm system in their computer, when they’d have the combination of meds, would have went off, and they would have had to override the alarm. Then a 14-year ICU nurse is the one who deliver the meds. So you put that combination together. The doctor who helped us review the records, she went right to intent right away, and she said it’s not even a question. This is intentional. The intensivist who reviewed the records and that intensivist is a doctor who specializes in med combinations. It took him minutes to discern and he wrote me that the meds that killed your daughter is sort of taken out of anybody on the planet. So that’s how severe this is.

 

[01:26:14] Ashley James: How much does your daughter weigh?

 

[01:26:15] Scott Schara: She weighs about 180 pounds.

 

[01:26:17] Ashley James: Okay, in the dosages that they gave, did they give it based on her weight?

 

[01:26:24] Scott Schara: I can’t answer that. 

 

[01:57:26] Ashley James: Okay.

 

[00:57:27] Scott Schara: Right now, I would question if anything was thought through that way because, I would say, it sounded so crazy, but it’s not crazy anymore. I’m going to use that word on this podcast. I would say it’s malicious. I can’t even entertain a logical question like that because none of these fits.

 

[01:26:55] Ashley James: None of it fits

 

[01:26:57] Ashley James: Intentionally, in the United States, in the hospital system, there’s no protocol for treating COVID and they’re not allowed to treat. They’re not allowed to treat with certain medications like Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Z-packs. They’re still certain things that they’re being pressured not to use, although like I had Dr. Fleming on my show who’s a PhD, an amazing cardiologist, whose also a research scientist. He developed the Fleming method.

Please listeners, go to my website, learntruehealth.com, type in Dr. Fleming. Find that interview and listen to it. It’s outstanding. He doesn’t know anything about holistic medicine. It’s very rare, I get something on the show that doesn’t know anything but holistic medicine. He’s 100% all about the science and he’s not anti-vaccine. He’s one of those doctors that got all of them except for the experimental ones because he shows and he has a four-hour lecture on his website, which is outstanding. He shows all the science. He had to go to different countries. So he’s a research scientist. He could not study COVID in the United States because it was banned to study a cure. This is how crazy it is. So he had to go to other countries to study the cure or the best treatment. And he did a study on 1800 COVID-positive patients and he found a combination of drugs that had 100% success. So he says, we put a million people through it, maybe a few will fall through the cracks. But so far, they’ve had a 100% success rate with this combination of three drugs, but the hospitals are not using those three drugs. They’re being told not to. So instead, they’re moving towards using what they’re monetarily incentivized to use, which is having the worst outcomes.

 

[01:29:02] Scott Schara: Absolutely. The next piece of this story is even worse than what I told you so far. So now, Jessica starts panicking. She can’t get any nurse in. She called Cindy, and I on a FaceTime call at 7:20 and said, “Dad, Grace’s numbers are dropping like crazy.” I said, “get the nurses in.” She said, “I can’t, and they won’t come in.” She estimated that 30 nurses are in the hallway at this time because of shift change. Cindy and I started screaming through the FaceTime call. “Save our daughter!” The nurses holler back. “She’s DNR! Don’t resuscitate.” This is the first we knew that she’s DNR. So we holler back. “She’s not DNR! Save our daughter!” They would not come into that room. So we watch Grace die on that FaceTime call at 7:27. This DNR thing is so bad. We found out in our references medical malpractice nurse previously when she reviewed the records that we had requested. She told me, “Scott, there’s at least a thousand pages missing.” I said, “How can that be? We requested everything.” She said, “That’s how what they do.” So she helped write out a request to get the missing pages. There was 948 pages missing. On page 853 is the smoking gun. At 10:56 in the morning, remember I told you at 10:48 was max dose Precedex. Then, at 10:56, the doctor put the illegal DNR order in the computer. During this time, that’s seven minutes when we were on a FaceTime call with Jess. She ran out on the hall to find out what was going on. A nurse had to write up on her computer screen and read off. The doctor put a DNR on Grace, and we can’t do anything about it. That specific fact violated at least seven state statutes. Just common sense would tell you a doctor can’t put a DNR on somebody. That would be illegal. It is illegal. The patient or the patient advocate, which was my wife Cindy, has to request for DNR. But we never requested the DNR. Why would we request the DNR? He tells us how great Grace is doing. We expected Grace to get out of there and not die there. Then he’s supposed to explain it to us and then have us, it would be my wife Cindy come and sign the DNR order, none of that happened. He put it on or her or himself. What’s the coincidence of eight minutes after the max dose Precedex? One of the attorneys made the observation which I think is true. They expected the Precedex to take Grace out. So they needed to have that DNR order in place to accomplish the dirty deed that they intended to do.

What’s even stranger is that at 12:57 that afternoon, the doctor did his notes for the day. He never did them at 12:57 in the afternoon before. Every other day, he did them after his shift was over. These notes are dated and timestamped. So the medical malpractice nurse wisely pointed out that if it was such an issue to get this DNR, that this was important, and you guys agreed to it or whatever excuse they’re going to use. Why he didn’t have you guys come in and sign it? Because that’s required by law.

 

[01:32:35] Ashley James: Yeah,  there’s a signature.

 

[01:32:38] Scott Schara: So, it’s terrible. We find out then when a couple of things happen after Grace died which really helped us to get a sense that this was something we needed to look into and research on our own. One thing was Jess told us afterward that there was an armed guard outside the room. When she went out in the hallway, there was an armed guard. We presume, to prevent any nurse with a conscience from coming in and saving Grace. We know it was an anomaly that he was there because Jess laid down in the bed with Grace after she was pronounced dead. 

And the armed guard stood outside and watched Jess in the bed the whole time. Jess stayed in the bed and waited until Cindy got into the hospital. I took Cindy into the hospital afterward, obviously after Grace died. Then after Cindy and Jess cleaned Grace up, I had to wait in the truck because I had COVID. Our Pastor Matt is there. The funeral director and the Pastor was walking Cindy out in a wheelchair. And one of the nurses had Grace’s belongings on a cart and leaned down and said to Cindy, me and several of the other nurses don’t think that Grace should have died today?

 

[01:34:58] Ashley James: The armed guard that had you, had they escorted you?

 

[01:34:03] Scott Schara: I don’t know if it was the same one.

 

[01:34:05] Ashley James: No, no, I was going to say, he knew something was up?

 

[01:34:09] Scott Schara:  Absolutely.

 

[01:34:12] Ashley James: How much money this hospital or a hospital get from having a patient on their death certificate that says it died out of COVID? How much money do they get in subsidies from the government?

 

[01:34:28] Scott Schara: It’s $13000.

 

[01:34:31] Ashley James: Your daughter’s life. There’s no child’s life that’s worth any amount of money. Do you feel there’s any discrimination against her because she has Down Syndrome? Do you feel like this is a discriminatory act?

 

[01:34:52] Scott Schara: I do. I do believe that and I have some proof. I actually have multiple things. So the first one is I review all of the reports that the doctors submitted. There were 22 reports on Grace’s seven days in the hospital. And I reviewed those one Sunday morning, looking for Down Syndrome and they referenced the fact that Grace had Down Syndrome 36 different times in 22 reports. The other discrimination was they referenced that Grace was not vaccinated six times. They referenced that we were Christian three times. They referenced that we were found in the frontline doctor’s misinformation campaign four times. So this is all the stuff that I found in the research.

The most recent thing is I’ve done stirred to looking at Grace’s death as genocide. The statistics are starting to come out with what actually happened to disabled versus non-disabled, the elderly, the non-elderly and a disabled woman going into the hospital with COVID, and also Grace was disabled, a Down Syndrome is a disability, and a disabled woman is 11 times more likely to die if they entered the hospital with COVID than a non-disabled woman.

 

[01:36:18] Ashley James: I’ve also seen that those African Americans are treated differently. African American women are specially treated differently. They’re not listened to. They’re written officer, oh, that she’s hysterical, their symptoms and what they’re explaining, I mean, this is in every case but statistically, there’s a bias going on. It’s not the same level of care for everyone.

 

[01:36:52] Scott Schara: I agree 100%. This is when the lead could get completely taken off of this as if we have enough time. I think, we’re going to see this is all part of a bigger agenda to depopulate the world and just had a financial payoff. In the United States, the financial payoff is to take out the elderly and the disabled. The elderly and disabled on Medicaid and Medicare are also on social security, that accounts for 39% of the federal budget. So with the average $100,000 bonus paid to the hospital, take out one of these people that costs the taxpayer $32,000 a year. So there’s a three-year payback period in business. Anytime you could do a three-year payback period on any asset, you would do it. You’d buy it because you want your money back in three years. So that’s a 33% rate of return on your investment. Just from a financial perspective, this fits like a glove.

 

[01:37:55] Ashley James: I know that there’s definitely listeners are going, this is crazy. The government isn’t bad. The government wouldn’t intentionally harm us. Maybe the source of thinking, yes, okay, this brat hospital was mismanaging her care, but the government, that’s not some giant conspiracy. That’s absurd. When we have to look back at history, I don’t want to pick on just the United States. I love living here. I love this country. There’s so many good people here. There’s so many good.

Can you think of any other country in the world that was founded on the Christian values? What I just learned, which is so interesting, when the pilgrims came. The Mayflower was the first round of pilgrims, for the first 50 years, there was no war. There’s peace. They got along incredibly well with those who were already here. And they had peace for the first 50 years, and that’s something that is not taught.

If you go back and you dig through the actual history, you find out that those people who were actually radicals. They left their Christian church because they were radicals who believed in the Holy Spirit, and they believed within the Holy Spirit, sort of what’s Pentecostal now. They’re like the Pentecostals of the 1600s. I think it was 1620 or something like. So when they came here, the first 50 years was peace. I was watching them. I was doing a lecture on understanding of America’s history and in Christianity. It was really interesting.

So there’s a lot of misinformation when it comes to this country and history. But when we look back, the government took African Americans and said they would give them free health care. But instead, what they were doing was they were giving them a venereal disease. So they could observe how they died from this disease. And this is well documented. What’s also well documented is this government, it’s not the same people, but when I say this government, it’s not the same officials, it’s not the same people, but it’s the system. So the system isn’t perfect, and within the system, we have lied to and harmed the black community by purposely giving them venereal disease.

Then we took Indigenous women, and we would say, we’re giving them free health care instead, we would make them infertile by putting X-ray machines on their pelvises for 10 minutes, running for 10 minutes to make them infertile. These are just some of the examples of the things that have gone on within the government over the last 100 years or so.

So now, the military took– and again, I’m not bashing the entire system, but we have to sort of pull the wool from our eyes. The military took hundreds of young, beautiful men and put them on the bow of these giant ships, brought them out into the middle of the ocean and set off nuclear bombs, atom bombs, miles from where they were, as a science experiment. So that they could see what would happen to these men, who all develop cancer and horrible things, and post-traumatic stress. They said, that although their eyes were closed, their hands–they were told to sit on the bows with their hands over their eyes and they said, when the atom bomb went off, they could see even though their eyes were closed and their hands over their eyes, they could see because of the X-rays. They could see the bones of their hands, and we could see everyone else’s skeletons.

So these are just three examples of hundreds. I believe there’s good people in this world. I’m not saying that everyone was out to get us. When you actually look at the definition of conspiracy, it’s a group of people that are conspiring to do something that’s illegal, or elicit, or harmful. So, when we say that this is a conspiracy theory, it’s not a theory, these are actual recorded periods of history. We need to not repeat the history. We need not let history be repeated. We need to stop organizations that use us as guinea pigs or practice genocide for the profit. We need as individuals empower ourselves by listening to stories like yours and learn from Grace and learn what she went through and pass this information on and be an advocate for your family and for your friends. So you do not succumb to the medical system, which is not perfect and it’s designed for profit. Again, I believe there’s a good people in the medical system. But the system is designed for profit, even at the expense of your life. And that’s what we have to remember. And the takeaway here is to question everything, advocate, advocate, advocate. And if there’s red flags, you might need to fire your doctor. You might need to go get a second or third, or fourth opinion. Make sure those opinions are outside of the same—like if you’re going in a hospital, okay, can I have a second opinion on a different doctor of the same hospital in the same network? You need to go outside the network. You need to go to a completely different network to get an actual honest, maybe an honest opinion.

Robin Openshaw has been on my show. I’ve been on her. She’s a wonderful, outspoken advocate for hope not only holistic health but for human rights. In the last two years, for really understanding the politics of what’s going on, and she said, she has uncovered scams in dental as an example. When she dug deep, she found that dentists will regularly, not all of them but many, will say you have a cavity when you don’t. You’re a cash cow. You’re in there. How do you know? You’re looking at a screen. They’re pointing at something on-screen and saying that’s a cavity. And you have to go to a second opinion. Take your mouth to a different dentist and say, okay, do I have any cavities? You might need to go to a few different dentists.

And she says, when she’s heard back from so many people that have done this, she couldn’t believe how many dentists were trying to scam them and this is just dental work. Imagine,all the other forms of– they have both payments too. This isn’t life or death, but this is just an example. Money motivates people. If there’s money involved, and then if there’s livelihood involved, they might choose to do the wrong thing. Right? So we have to really advocate for ourselves.

There’s one more thing I want to bring up because it’s timed. One thing I love about America—there’s so many things, but there’s one thing I love is that we can go to the state that has our values. If you don’t like the state you’re in, you can go to a different state. Each governor’s or manages like a little island, each state serves its own country in that. So the governor could say, let’s say pandemic, and you love masks, and you want everyone to be vaccinated. You should have gone to New York, or Washington, or California. Right?

But if you’re the opposite, I think masks are dumb. I can’t wear them for whatever reason. I’m never going to submit myself to an experimental vaccine. You should have gone to Florida or Texas. So we just knew and we just saw this very clear that these last two years had never seen it so clearly before. It really matters who was in the governor’s seat because here in Washington State, Governor Inslee shut down our state so many times for so long that almost half of the small businesses went under. I cannot tell you how many restaurants and how many businesses are shut down permanently.

Overnight, it was something like 40,000 people went on unemployment. Now the numbers are out and it shows that you could compare every state to the state that did no shutdowns to the states that had the most shutdowns. The states that had mandates to the states that had no mandates. We have the same level of cases. We can’t really tell whether the fatalities are accurate. Like what you’ve said, someone can go in and they’re incentivized that write on the death certificate that it is COVID. So both the same amount of cases are reported from state to state. So it was a big experiment. Right? What I really love about the state is that you can go to a different state. If you’re like, hey, I don’t want to live in a state that it’s forcing my family to do a medical procedure that I don’t feel comfortable with. Right? So you can go to that state that you could move. It’s about people, but you could move where you have a choice. The choice is the freedom.

What’s happening this week, it’s very crucial. I’m going to publish this episode right away. I’m going to have the links in the show notes because I’m not going to explain it. I’m not going to give the level of explanation it deserves. But President Biden is right now signing into with the World Health Organization, which is like an arm of the UN. Right? He is signing so that he’s giving our sovereign medical freedom, medical choices over to the World Health Organization. It’s not a treaty. But many other countries, the big countries, the top, and known countries have signed it. This is a weird thing. Once we’ve signed it, the only way to get out is to let the countries agree. And basically, what’s happening is it doesn’t matter what state you go to. It’ll be federal.

If America signs this, if Joe Biden signs us into this, the World Health Organization will be able to control all health decisions in all states. They could say every single vaccine is mandated. You can’t even go to the grocery store without having all your papers. The World Health Organization could say that. It would be in law, and it wouldn’t matter what state we are in. This is something that sounds so bizarre. I’m sure people think I’m absolutely nuts, and I’m just the messenger. But I’ve learned this from several politicians that this is happening. So I have links to this and I’m going to put them in the notes. The only thing we can do is call our local representatives and all the links to that will be in the show notes of today’s podcast called A Local Reps and tell them we’ve got to go up the chain and say no. We need to protect our freedom to choose. I’m not saying you should be anti or force something. I want you to have the freedom to choose. Scott, I want you and everyone in America, and in the world– but we’re in America we’re talking about– I want everyone to have the freedom to be able to say I didn’t like this hospital. I’m going to a different hospital because a different hospital practices medicine differently. Under this, we will not have a choice. These hospitals will be not have a choice to practice differently. So this is a big deal.

 

[01:50:44] Scott Schara: I saw that in Steve Castor’s newsletter last week. It is a big deal to our church.

 

[01:50:50] Ashley James: Yes. I will make sure that the links– everyone listening need just to take five minutes. We need to write and call our elected officials, and we’ve got to cry out to try to stop this. And also, please, if you’re a follower of Jesus or a faith that believes in prayer to God, please pray over this. That we do not succumb to signing over our sovereignty to the UN and the World Health Organization. We need to keep our freedoms. This is unprecedented and it’s never happened in America. This is completely unprecedented that America would give over its sovereignty. It boggles my mind what’s been going on over the last two years.

We have to get back to you. I love Scott that you are getting active, that you’re sharing, and advocating because the information you share today will save lives. So thank you. Is there anything else you could share to wrap up today’s interview? Standing assurance to teach us how to be the most alert, watchful advocates that we can be for ourselves or for our loved ones.

 

[01:52:12] Scott Schara: Sure. How I would summarize? It would be to compare it to what we are becoming familiar with in the public school system. So I was born in 1963. So people my age who went through the public school system everybody believed in God. We did the pledge of allegiance. It was pretty normal, and now they’re teaching critical race theory. So my paradigm of a public school system has changed. So, I would not send the child to the public school system, period.

 

[01:52:52] Ashley James: In Washington State, they’re teaching Sex Ed. I believe in Sex Ed for like teenagers. To teach them like, “Hey, how about you abstain from having sex because that’s going to stop. If you don’t have sex, you’re not going to get STDs!” “You’re not going to have unwanted pregnancies!” I remember being taught, starting in grade seven and being taught how to have sex? What’s the penis? What’s the female reproductive system? What’s the male reproductive system? How does this all happen? How does babies happen? How does STDs happen? I remember being taught from grade seven all the way up. I also remember a few students opting out because they were Muslim or they had a different faith. The parents felt that their 13-year-old shouldn’t be learning this.

I think, I was grateful for the Sex Ed I got in high school because it taught and helped me make good decisions. We want to help teenagers make good decisions. What they’re doing now is they’re teaching it in Washington State, and they started in pre-kindergarten. They’re starting to teach children– I’m sorry to be crass– but how to pleasure themselves by touching themselves at a very young age. There’s pictures like the fourth graders are being shown how to do this to themselves and others– and it’s grooming! This level of education, we have a literacy problem, right? We don’t need to teach children how to touch themselves. I like to teach children how to stop adults from touching them. Right? Like no, you’re not allowed to touch or my bathing suit touches me, right?

I want to teach children to say no, but teach children how to read and write. So we have a huge literacy problem and yet in Washington State, there’s a lot of funding going into this new level of sex education in the public school system. I’ve talked to several parents who have shown me the literature as it’s in the school system. It would make your blood boil and freeze at the same time. It feels like grooming. We have to remember the public school system is government controlled essentially.

Read any of the books by John Taylor Gatto. One of his books is Weapons of Mass Instruction. Fascinating books explain the history of the modern education system, which is called the Prussian Education System. It was very intentionally designed to make good little factory workers. They on purpose to stop teaching, the critical thinking in the education system that we have now on purpose. So the education system is designed on purpose to shape and model citizens in the way the government wants us to be shaped and modeled. So we have to remember that.

I’m sorry for interrupting and going on my little tangent, but this is something that is really we started to see ramp up. It’s breaking the family unit apart with the public school system is doing now. It shouldn’t be called a public school. It should be called government schooling, government brainwashing.

 

[01:56:14] Scott Schara: Of course, right on to the point. So my paradigm of the public school system has completely changed and I think there’s a lot of people that’s happened to. My paradigm of the hospital system didn’t change fast enough. Of course, it’s changed now. Until your paradigm or your belief about something changes, there can’t be change in actions because beliefs motivate all actions. So my closing statement would be if you believe what I’m saying, that should cause you to change your belief relative to the hospital systems. If that changes your belief, it’ll save your life.

 

[01:56:54] Ashley James: And there’s times when we want to take our bodies, or a loved one’s body takes us into a hospital system and we should be prepared ahead of time. Like you said, do the research around local hospitals. Find the ones that are small networks that have the best outcomes. Don’t go to a doctor that’s “the top doctor in the state” or “the top doctor in the city”.

What I learned from one of my naturopathic mentors is he said, “you know that big billboard that has this picture of this oncologist and it says, top oncologist in Seattle or top oncologist in Washington State, you know how they measure that? Because I thought it was an outcome.” So I was like, oh, that oncologist must be amazing and helping people survive cancer. No! When they say top doctor, it is the doctor makes that hospital the most money. They build the most money, that’s what makes them the top-rated doctor. It’s not be rated in outcomes. So you don’t want to go to the top-rated doctor because they’re just going to put you through the wringer. They’re going to put unnecessary tests and unnecessary medications, and attempt to make more money. You really have to question that, you want to go to the doctor who has the best outcomes and long-term outcomes as well. 

Scott, thank you so much for what you do. Thank you for continuing to add to your website, ouramazinggrace.net. So, are you suing? What are we looking at in terms of legal outcomes?

 

[01:58:31] Scott Schara: We haven’t sued yet. The doors are opening up at a fairly rapid pace. I can’t talk about some of the things that are happening just because we’re at that point. So I would believe that’s going to happen. Time will tell. It’s a lawsuit. It’s very tough in this environment because there’s no immunity from liability under the prep act. But we have enough things in Grace’s case that we believe will prevail. But we’re just waiting patiently for these doors to open up.

 

[01:59:06] Ashley James: Hopefully, you don’t get a corrupt judge. That’s another thing. How far does this go, right? Would you close this interview off with a prayer for all of us?

 

[01:59:20] Scott Schara: I’d love to do that. Heavenly Father, we come to You knowing that you don’t change. We can always come to You with our problems, and You will always provide a steady rocking solution for us. Thank You for opening up our eyes and to shine light on evil. Thank You for the opportunity today for Ashley’s interview. Please help this time to be able to change people’s hearts to call. You want everybody to be called back to You and get closer to You. I hope that this time that we have just done will do that for everybody listening and that people will share the message so that we can have more people believe in Your Son Jesus Christ. I pray all these things and many more things Lord, in Your Name. Amen.

 

[02:00:30] Ashley James: Amen. And I pray that we put the armor of God on and the robes of faith, and that we look to truth, veritas, we look to truth, we listen for truth, and that we can see through the lies. Satan is the king of lies and he spreads lies and that is his work. He works for his lies. I pray that we can all see through the lies and hear through the lies and cut through like a flaming sword. We cut through the lies until we can see the truth and that the truth is exposed to everyone. Thank you, God. In Jesus’ Name, we pray. Amen.

 

[02:01:18] Scott Schara: Amen. Thank you, Ashley.

 

[02:01:20] Ashley James: Thank you, Scott. I appreciate everything you do. Keep up the fight. And please can you stay in touch with us or come back on the show when you’ve got a verdict and when you’ve got more to share? We want to hear your story as you continue to spread this ripple like a tidal wave and help save so many lives. So thank you.

 

[02:01:46] Scott Schara: You’re very welcome. 

 

Get Connected with Scott Schara!

Website

Facebook

Vimeo

Apr 29, 2022

Coupon Code LTH at www.n1o1.com for the listener discount!

 

Nitric Oxide for Preventing and Reversing Heart Disease with Dr. Nathan Bryan

https://www.learntruehealth.com/nitric-oxide-for-preventing-and-reversing-heart-disease-with-dr-nathan-bryan

 

Highlights

  • The importance of nitric oxide in our body
  • What is Nitric Oxide Deficiency and its causes
  • What is nitric oxide’s role in our heart health?
  • Why mouthwash could raise the risk of heart disease?
  • How does face cream increase nitric oxide production?
  • What are the two main signs of toxicity of nitric oxide?

 

Nitric oxide is one of the most important molecules produced in the human body that controls and regulates most cellular functions. In this episode, Dr. Nathan Bryan shares how nitric oxide helps promote proper blood flow, which may improve exercise performance, lower blood pressure, and improve the function of the brain.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. So this is going to be a fun one. We have an amazing doctor on, Dr. Nathan Bryan. He’s over 20 years of experience in studying nitric oxide. I first heard about nitric oxide in my interview with Dr. Essylstyn. When he talks about how he took– I believe 24, 26 patients who are on their deathbeds. The cardiologist said we’ve given you everything, go home to die. There’s nothing we can do for you. Your heart disease is so far gone. Your moments away from death. And Dr. Esselstyn took these people and put them on a whole food plant-based diet. So put them on food that significantly increased the body’s nitric oxide, and they all bounced back. It was absolutely amazing. And of course, he went on to publish this and publish other studies and then write his book, How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease. 

So when I heard about how he uses certain foods, like leafy greens and balsamic. And you can do some really delicious things or some really delicious balsamic stuff out there. I particularly love this one balsamic and I’m not a fan of that strong vinegar taste but this balsamic doesn’t taste like that at all. It has a hint of maple and fig to it and it’s so delicious. And you use that to cover your cooked vegetables and your steamed vegetables, which increases nitric oxide. And there are other foods we’ll talk about in today’s interview, where you will learn how to increase nitric oxide naturally in the body. And why it is the key to preventing and reversing disease and anti-aging. 

Now Dr. Nathan Bryan just talks about a product he developed and did. And also developed a few pharmaceuticals that increase nitric oxide that has now, they’re doing studies, they’re doing trials, and they’ve saved people’s lives in ER. So that is very exciting. Of course, we want to prevent ourselves from ever needing to be in the ER in the first place by increasing nitric oxide naturally. He also developed a way supplement that can help you as well. And he talks about that. He also developed a really interesting skincare line because nitric oxide would put on the skin. It cures things like rosacea and fine lines and wrinkles and helps pushes oxygen into these newly constructed cells. Then they appear younger and healthier and healthier. 

And I had this rosacea. My grandmother had it. My mom had some. I always thought it was just part of the women in my family. I’ve been using the cream and so I love it. It’s very high quality and I really like it. So I’m noticing that my rosacea is starting to get better, which I thought was really interesting. So I am noticing now that I’m eating more foods with nitric oxide and knowing I’ve got more energy. This is great. I can’t wait to put it to the test and do some heavy hiking this summer. 

But what I have noticed by using his products since I did the interview is I have seen a difference and that’s really exciting. And he does say some things that I think are really important to take the heart and share with everyone you love, especially when he talks about certain habits that we have that can decrease your nitric oxide so much that they’re significantly important in increasing heart disease. So we want to make sure that none of our friends and family are doing these activities that are noted to decrease nitric oxide in the body, increase heart disease, and shorten people’s lifespan. So this will be an episode you want to share with everyone. I’ve already told so many of my friends. I can’t wait for you guys to listen to this episode because if you follow the simple tools he gives you today. The simple lifestyle habits that he gives you today. You’re going to increase the nitric oxide and substantially increase the quality and your life as a result. So definitely want to share this with your friends and family. 

Thank you so much for being a listener of the show and if you’re interested in getting any of his products, including his book, Dr. Nathan Bryan’s book. You will go to his website, which is n1o1.com. It’s a chemical formula for nitric oxide. So that’s N, in the letter N, one, the number one and then the letter O, the number one.com And of course, use the coupon code LTH, that’s Learn True Health code. LTH will give you a discount. I made sure that my wonderful listeners were going to get a great discount when they went to the website by Dr. Nathan Bryan’s book. Or his nitric oxide-based skincare line or his special supplement, which increases nitric oxide in the body. And of course, the links to everything that Dr. Nathan Bryan does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast on learntruehealth.com. So come and join the Facebook group so we can talk about all this stuff after you listen to the episode. I can’t wait to hear from you guys in the Learn True Health Facebook group. And I’m so grateful that we’re here today. To be able to learn together and grow together. So we’re on a health journey together on Learn True Health. I’m glad you’re here. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. And enjoy today’s interview.

 

[00:05:37] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 478. I am so excited for today’s guest. This topic is going to be so cool. I love geeking out with the science. Dr. Nathan Bryan, I know I just got introduced to you recently and I’m surprised I haven’t heard of you sooner because we can navigate the same circles. I’ve had Chef AJ on the show a few times, and I absolutely love her. She introduced you to me. And man, I’m thrilled to just dive into what you’re doing, especially this idea that we can heal the endothelial lining of our cardiovascular system and lower blood pressure naturally. 

My husband had to be at one point in his life. He had to be on blood pressure meds. It was considered that we go to a naturopathic physician and do all this healthy stuff. It was kind of a shock. He had chronic blood pressure problems his whole life and we finally addressed it and his doctor listened. You’ve tried all this other stuff and let’s get you on meds. And that’s only lowered at about eight points. Like it wasn’t anything substantial yet. All these side effects happen, lowering your life expectancy the more meds you’re on. So, I don’t know if that’s exactly direct causation. I know that medication makes the body have to burn through its nutrient store faster. So it burdens the body to have to metabolize drugs. So, there’s this give and take. Here we have a population; 1/3 of the population is obese, pre-diabetic, or diabetic. 

Heart disease is one of the top killers, along with cancer. And, of course, the statistics now cancer is on the rise. And so we have the roulette of what you want to suffer from the last 20 years of your life. Diabetes, cancer, heart disease, but that’s if we go with the flow. If we eat the standard American diet, we watch mainstream media and do what everyone else is doing. So we follow Hollywood basically and follow the mainstream media diet and agenda. So we do what everyone else is doing. Go to the doctor, just let her prescriptions at you. And if you just go with the flow, you’re guaranteed to be a statistic. So now you’re going against the green and figured out a way to help people lower blood pressure naturally. So to heal their heart and prevent disease in a really exciting way. I’m just bubbling. I’m so excited. Welcome to the show. I can’t wait for our listeners to learn how we can take control of our health with the latest science that you’re involved in. So welcome.

 

[00:08:37] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Thank you Ashley. It’s a pleasure to be with you. 

 

[00:08:39] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well let’s start by hearing about you, your story and what led you to decipher this information.

 

[00:08:47] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, it’s like a journey, right? So I think the longer I lived, the clearer the more I realized how little influence I had. I think God puts people in our lives at certain points and forces us to pivot. We have some of the grand plans when we’re early starting in our careers. So it’s not where we end up. I live up with no regrets and everything that’s happened, the good and the bad, that got us to where we are today. But I grew up in small-town Texas and went to the University of Texas at Austin, where I got a degree in ministry. I had an opportunity to do undergraduate research there and I fell in love with discovery. I mean that was a time in the early 90s when we were overexpressing protein and bacteria. And then isolating those proteins, then being able to do structure-function analysis. So I try to figure out how does an intact protein work and what goes wrong in certain diseases. 

So then, after a degree in biochemistry, I do a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry in the job market, isn’t that great? So I knew I had to go on and extend my education. I went to LSU School of Medicine, where I got a Ph.D. in Molecular Cellular Physiology. There I was introduced to nitric oxide. It was a little early 2000s, right after a Nobel Prize was awarded for its discovery. And so that’s when I just really got entrenched in the science of nitric oxide. We knew it was important, but at that time, there were no methods to detect nitric oxide in biological systems. It was really well known about the science of what goes wrong and people that can’t make it. What are the clinical symptoms of such and there certainly weren’t getting knowledge or science around any create or recreate nitric oxide in the human body? So that was an exciting time. We developed methods that allowed us to detect nitric oxide in biological samples, whether blood or tissue biopsies. I found a number or published a number of papers during that time and then left there. I went to the Boston University Medical Center in Boston at the Cardiovascular Institute. I had a fellowship in cardiology and vascular biology, and again, I had some pretty profound discoveries. And I made a name for myself as a young investigator. I was recruited to join the faculty at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston by Fred Murad, who was the department chair there. He was one of the gentlemen that shared the Nobel Prize. I found a home because it was a nitric oxide-centric department at the Institute of Molecular Medicine. 

For the first couple of years, all I did was do experiments and try to enable patents. At that point, we had enough information and the methods available that I could figure out and produce nitric oxide in biological systems. So for the first two years, I did nothing but experiments and patents to the University of Texas. Those patents were soon issued after that and then the next stage of my career was to make sure that discoveries and technology saw the light of day to retire from full-time academia in 2015. 

And I’ve been an entrepreneur since and on the number of companies commercializing nitric oxide technology. So my objective today is to introduce nitric oxide-based product technology and every major market segment around the world, including drug therapy, where we have drugs in phase three clinical trials for COVID. With some drug applications going in for ischemic heart disease and topical drugs for diabetic ulcers. The exciting thing is that nitric oxide does so much and is so important in human disease that there’s really no indication that we could not go after any type of drug therapy. So that’s kind of a 20-year story in that two minutes.

 

[00:12:58] Ashley James: Maybe we let’s back it up to the basics for someone who’s never heard of the term nitric oxide. Why is it so important? What is it do? Why is it so exciting that you’ve been able to figure out a way to increase it in the human body? 

 

[00:13:14] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, it was discovered about 30 years ago, so it’s still a new discovery in the medical sciences. But it’s a signaling molecule. It tells how cells in the body communicate with one another. It is mostly recognized as vasodilation, meaning that it dilates the blood vessels throughout the body and increases oxygen and nutrient delivery. But it’s a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. Our immune cells actually generate nitric oxide to prevent the virus from replicating and proliferating throughout the body. It shuts down bacterial respiration. So it’s part of our host defense. Understanding that and all that nitric oxide does, it becomes obvious that if you lose the ability to produce nitric oxide, which occurs as we age and are really dependent upon like diet and lifestyle. A lot of bad things happen you lose the regulation of blood flow. You can no longer dilate blood vessels, so you develop sexual dysfunction. You develop vascular dementia develop high blood pressure, which two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation and blood pressure. You develop them. You become immunocompromised. So if you’re exposed to a virus-like Coronavirus, or like the flu, you get sick from it and develop the neurological disease. 

I thought the science was very clear at the time that the older you get, the less nitric oxide you make. That is what’s responsible for the age-related disease, including cardiovascular disease, the number one killer of men and women worldwide. So that’s what science has told us over the past 20 years. That’s the missing part– the science is clear, but how do you fix it? And that’s been my contribution to the field because we figured out how to develop a shelf-stable, solid form with nitric oxide. And perhaps I’ll take a step back because maybe your listeners don’t realize that nitric oxide is a gas. So it is produced in the lining of the blood vessels. When this gas was produced, it was gone in less than a second. To be able to develop drug therapy or any type of product technology shelf-stable that recapitulates nitric oxide signaling in the human body has been very, very challenging. In fact, big pharmaceutical companies have tried to do this for the past 30 years. They’ve been largely unsuccessful. But through our research program and kind of thinking differently, thinking outside the box, we figured this out and they’ll have. So I think over two dozen issued patents claim to fame as we know how to make nitric oxide that’s extremely valuable and profound in the way that I think people are going to be healed over the next 40-50 years.

 

[00:16:00] Ashley James: The first time I heard about nitric oxide was when I interviewed Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn and I’m sure you know of his work. He’s also a friend of Chef AJ. He came on the show and explained that he takes people who are basically at death’s door. Their doctors have given up on them. They have multiple clogs in their heart. They’re even too sick for bypass surgery. The doctors say just go home and die. Unfortunately, when people usually find Cadwell Esselstyn and his book, How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease and he gets them on a whole food plant-based diet with no salt, sugar, and oil. Incredibly strict. He lately added a factor, which every few hours, like every four hours, he has the meat of a bowl of steamed greens, just any kind of leafy greens, like 12 of them. Pick a leafy green, steam it and then cover it in as much balsamic as you want. Any kind of balsamic. There are all kinds of flavors out there. And he says that balsamic vinegar and greens increase if, especially balsamic vinegar, it increases nitric oxide and helps heal the endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system. And I thought that was fascinating. 

And then I heard it again when I watched the movie, The Game Changers, where they follow these athletes like the Olympic athletes who have gotten plant-based. And there’s this one woman who was 29 or 30 years old. She beat people almost half her age and won the gold in cycling at an almost age of 30 which is like an 80-year-old beating a 40-year-old in a marathon, right? So she said that her biggest thing was beats– because before and after exercise would increase the nitric oxide and help with lactic acid clearance. She found her recovery to be faster and she had her endurance higher up just by eating whole food plant-based, avoiding salt, sugar, and oil, and making sure she’s getting enough beats and enough greens in her diet. 

So I hear that there are certain nutrients the body loves in order to make nitric oxide. You said that as we age, we make less. Is it because we’re age and we’re older like our telomeres are shorter or is it because as we age, we beat up our body so much, it’s like failing us and we’re not eating healthy, right? Eating enough nutrients like what is it about aging that has us make it less? And is it really about age? Or is it about lifestyle and diet?

 

[00:18:53] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, those are very good questions. And yes, I’m friends with Dr. Esselstyn and he made an enormous contribution to medicine. His observations are what led them through that being able to reverse heart disease. And it was our science that basically provided a mechanism for his observation. So to understand this age-related loss of nitric oxide production, there are two ways the body makes mycotoxin. The first one to be discovered was an enzyme called nitric oxide synthase. And that’s the enzyme that’s found in our endothelial cells. Like every second upon me, that’s what produces nitric oxide when you need to increase blood flow. For instance, if you’re trying to remember where you parked your car. Part of the memory recall is you got to increase blood flow to the prefrontal cortex to recall memory. If you can’t dilate the blood vessels to get improved blood flow and perfusion to that area, you develop cognitive disorders and become forgetful. Same thing if you want to perform sexually, you get to dilate those blood vessels to get engorged, and you get increased blood flow. You can’t make nitric oxide and you can’t. 

So that’s the pathway. This becomes more compromised the older we get. The biochemistry in the enzymology is well understood that it’s basically due to oxidation of a molecule called tetrahydrobiopterin or BH4 that leads to enzyme uncoupling and endothelial dysfunction. So that is what we lose with age. The other pathway that Dr. Esselstyn exploits is that you can use a diet thru green leafy vegetables, and then there’s a molecule called nitrate. It’s inorganic nitrate. It’s found primarily in dark green leafy vegetables. So when you consume those, about 90 minutes after you consume, let’s say spinach or beets or kale or any green leafy vegetable that is concentrated, that nitrate is taken up in our guts and put it in our salivary glands. 

This has been known since the late 70s. And then each time we salivate now for the next five or six hours, our secreting nitrate in our saliva, in our oral cavity. And then, under normal conditions, we have nitrate-reducing bacteria that live on the crypts of the tongue in our mouth. Then these bacteria reduce the nitrate to nitrite and nitric oxide. This happens for the next six or eight hours. When we swallow our own saliva, it’s enriched in nitrite. The nitrite becomes nitric oxide as long as there’s stomach acid being produced. So Dr. Esselstyn is very correct in the fact that if you eat green leafy vegetables and put balsamic vinegar, which is basically acetic acid. So you’re acidifying the lumen of the stomach to allow that nitric oxide being produced when it’s broken down by the bacteria and then digested in your stomach. So mechanistically, that’s how it’s designed to work. 

The problem is that if you’re using mouthwash to kill the bacteria in your mouth because of bad breath or just because of habit, then you disrupt this pathway. Or, if you’re using antacid to prevent stomach acid production, you shut down nitric oxide production. And this was really the epiphany when I first had a conversation with Dr. Esselstyn. Like with any clinician, you have patients who get better and you use the same protocol on another patient and don’t get better.

So why is it that one patient responds beautifully and the other patient doesn’t respond at all? The explanation for that is because Nathan goes and never asks my patients if they’re using mouthwash. I’ve never asked my patients that I put on a plant-based diet if they’re using acids because clearly, if they are on that plant-based diet, it’s not going to work for them because there’s no nitric oxide being produced by that plant-based diet. So that was the epiphany to him and I think to a lot of people, it’s because it’s the microbiome, right? A lot of people are focused on the microbiome of the gut and how important that is. There are very few people besides us who ever focused on the oral microbiome or if there’s dysbiosis in the gut. So you get symptoms and human disease if dysbiosis in the mouth becomes nitric oxide deficient. And there’s clear evidence now. We’ve published on a number of others that people who use mouthwash have a higher blood pressure than those who don’t. 

We’ve also published on the fact that if we take normal tensive healthy people and the only thing we do is we don’t change their diet, don’t change any other aspects of them. We just give them a mouthwash twice a day for seven days. In some patients, we see as much as a 26-millimeter increase in their blood pressure in one week. And that’s the effects on blood pressure. There’s also evidence now that if people use mouthwash and exercise, he loses the cardioprotective benefits of exercise. I mean, that is earth-shattering because for the most part, people try to do the right thing with good intentions. They exercise, they eat a plant-based diet, their dentist has told them at some point in life, that they should use mouthwash to keep gum disease and gingivitis away. So they use mouthwash. But yet, when they do that, they eliminate the benefits of their diets. They eliminate the benefits of exercise, and they’re basically putting themselves at risk for the advanced progression of cardiovascular disease. 

So 200 million Americans use mouthwash every day and 200 million Americans have an unsafe elevation of blood pressure. That’s not a coincidence. There’s a clear causal relationship between the oral bacterium and steady-state blood pressure. So if you’re using mouthwash, you have to stop.

 

[00:24:54] Ashley James: I want to back up and unpack that because I’m in shock and my listeners are too. So you said if you don’t have the microbiome in your mouth and you exercise, you’re losing the cardiovascular protection of nitric oxide. I’m a little confused, though. I thought you said that it was also produced in the endothelial lining. So, if you don’t have the bacteria in your mouth, does that mean your endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system doesn’t produce it or do you get less because the bacteria also produce it?

 

[00:25:33] Dr. Nathan Bryan: We thought early on, probably 15 years ago, these were two mutually exclusive events. So they were completely separated so one could compensate for the other. So that’s why young kids can get away with not eating a lot of vegetables or could die because they have good in the single function. And that endothelial functions are the nitric oxide is produced. The blood vessel lining can compensate and overcome a lack of a good die. But the older you get, we know that we get the less functional. Our endothelial becomes the less nitric oxide we make. So we have to compensate for that through the diet. But this evidence points to the fact that the benefits of exercise are improvement and endothelial function. But the issue is if you’re in moderately good shape and you begin to exercise, that creates some shear stress in that skeletal muscle, whether it’s in the legs if you’re running or biking or if it’s in the biceps if you’re doing curls. So the muscle tells, I need more oxygen and nutrients being delivered because you’re working me harder. So the only way to do that, especially in the heart, is to dilate the blood vessels production of nitric oxide. 

So if your body can make sufficient nitric oxide, it does. And then there’s an adaptive response where it actually improves the ability. So if you’re stressing your body and your body goes, I need to up my game because I need to be ready for the next stressful event. There’s an improvement in nitric oxide. The problem is when you have endothelial dysfunction, like older patients who have chest pain or shortness of breath. They go to a cardiologist, put them on a treadmill, and come up with some leads on EKG. As they increase the workload, and if the coronary arteries can’t produce nitric oxide to dilate the coronary arteries, then that heart becomes hypoxic because it can increase the oxygen delivery to meet the increased metabolic demand. So there are changes in electrical activity. So they failed an exercise stress test. 

So your ability to produce nitric oxide predicts how well you can perform. So there’s a clear association between, if you’re using mouthwash, there’s an association with endothelial dysfunction. So you’re losing the protective benefits of exercise. There’s a bit of an explanation for that because when you produce nitric oxide, it’s oxidized almost immediately to nitrite and nitrate. Then your body’s kind of the biomarkers we look at or plasma levels of nitrite and nitrate. So when you’re exercising and that’s where things like beetroot extract or titrating up your nitric oxide levels prior to sports performance because it is when oxygen is needed to make nitric oxide and the lining in the blood vessels. 

So when you reach that anaerobic threshold and oxygen becomes limiting, your nitric oxide production stops from the enzyme that makes nitric oxide. If you’ve created a pool of nitrites because you’ve generated a lot of nitric oxides prior to the anaerobic threshold. The nitrite under those low oxygen conditions actually generates nitric oxide in an enzyme-independent manner.

 

[00:28:57] Ashley James: Does your body take the nitrite and then in an anaerobic state, turning into nitric oxide?

 

[00:29:07] Dr. Nathan Bryan: That’s right. So what happens? The pKa of nitrites is about 3.4. So they’re mammalian enzymes that, specifically as the pH of the muscle decreases or the tissue decreases, that nitride becomes nitric oxide. So then, what does that nitric oxide do? It does a lot of things. Number one, it binds to cytochrome c oxidase and mitochondria so that you get oxygen diffusing further into tissue. And you push that anaerobic threshold back, so you get less lactic acid buildup. You can oxygenate that tissue to where you can turn the nitric oxide back on. It’s a self-feeding or feed-forward mechanism that’s all dependent upon your steady-state levels of nitrite. And your ability to titrate up these nitrite stores prior to reaching that anaerobic threshold.

  

[00:29:54] Ashley James: Now, we don’t need to get smoked bacon with potassium nitrite in it to get our nitrites. It’s a different kind of nitrite and nitrate. I’ve always thought if people knew what they put in deli meat to preserve the meat, so the meat didn’t look gray. How it affects the kidneys and how it affects the circulation in the body that they would not eat that. Those preservatives in that state are not what you’re talking about. Can you explain how do we help the body? Where are we getting the nitrites and nitrates from our food? Is it more leafy greens and the beet? Is that the best thing to do to get it from our food as the best source?

  

[00:30:50] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, yes. So it’s been a misconception and this may not be surprising to you but the media and big Pharma have not always told the truth. In terms of what’s good for us and what’s bad for us. So the nitrites and nitrates found in green leafy vegetables are the exact same molecule they used to cure hotdogs. So there are a lot of other preservatives in those curing processed meats that probably aren’t good for you. But nitrate and nitrite are protected. 

If you think about the science of curing, what are they doing? Well, you’re preventing lipid oxidation, but that’s pretty important in human physiology. So nitrite has that. So that they end up in processed meat, it prevents listeria clostridium along with these foodborne pathogens. Well, that’s pretty important in human physiology as you can prevent bacterial outbreaks, and then it binds to the iron of myoglobin, turning into a nice pink color. It does the same thing to hemoglobin. It binds to hemoglobin and allows oxygen to be delivered throughout the body. So the same chemistry involved in meat curing is the same chemistry that we’re utilizing in human physiology to prevent oxidative stress, prevent inflammation, and improve oxygen delivery to a working muscle. 

So here’s where the misconception came and I don’t deny the data on the fact that there’s an increased relative risk on people who eat curing processed meats and have a slight increase in the risk of certain gastrointestinal cancers. That’s called an association, but it’s certainly not causation. In order for you to establish causation, you have to have a biologically plausible mechanism that explains that observation. So in the 1960s and early 70s, they go– oh, well, it has to be nitrite and nitrate in the curing processed meats because of those form nitrosamine and nitrosamine cause cancer. So there’s their biologically plausible mechanism. 

That stood for about 40 years until the discovery of nitric oxide. Then it was realized, well, nitrite and nitrate are actually produced and obviously, why would our bodies naturally produce carcinogens? And then, the national government, the National Institute of Health and Public Health and Human safety, did long-term safety studies on nitrite and nitrate in our food supply. What they found was the National Toxicology Program, that’s the Gold Standard in Toxicology. So they did those escalations for both nitrite and nitrate in male and female mice, rats, and rabbits. Do you know what they found? They prevented cancer. They didn’t cause cancer. Actually, in many cases they prevented cancer. 

So that story began to fall apart, and then if that were true because 85% of the nitrate and nitrite exposure we get from our diet is from green leafy vegetables. Only 5% comes from cured and processed meats. The other 10% comes from swallowing their own saliva. It’s 10% because the nitric oxide produced endogenously is oxidized to nitrate. That nitrate in the body doesn’t discriminate the nitrate that comes from spinach versus on which is formed from enzymatic NO production. So then our body puts the nitrate in our salivary glands, we salivate, generate nitrite, swallow the nitrite, and become nitric oxide gas. So if that were the case, vegetarians or people who had a plant-based diet would have about a 10 times higher incidence of cancer and heart disease than non-vegetarians and we know it’s just the opposite.

 

[00:34:33] Ashley James: Right. If nitrates and nitrites were the cause. So interesting, though. We want the benefits that you’re talking about having plentiful amounts, adequate enough amounts with as much nitric oxide as the body needs, right? We want that and it doesn’t sound like we’d get it from eating a lot of cured meats. You might get like you said, 5% and you’re not getting all the benefits on all the other nutrients that come from eating plants. So there’s a significant percentage when you eat plants versus the cured meats, but also really important. Its 10% is from your oral health and having a healthy microbiome in your mouth, and not using mouthwash. It makes me think about people who are on antibiotics, and if that’s wipe-out those good bacteria, they immediately wipe out 10% of their nitric oxide production.

I know you’d blow my mind in this interview, and we’re just warming up. I only knew about vasodilation and that’s why I was excited. I knew that people reported that it helps with endurance and recovery. So it helped lower lactic acid buildup and vasodilation which is so important. Can you talk a bit more about the signaling of it? These new discoveries about how nitric oxide is used to help the parts of the body signal and talk to each other.

 

[00:36:10] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, one of the most profound discoveries and realizations in nitric oxide signaling was in 2015 with Jonathan Stamler, a good friend and colleague in Case Western, who published a paper that revealed that nitric oxide is required for oxygen delivery. As part of its signaling, nitric oxide can bind the metals or activate second messenger systems. But it can also bind to tiles on proteins. These are the sulfur-containing amino acids on proteins. So in oxygen delivery, when you breathe, you pick up oxygen and exhale CO2. And when the red blood cells go from the arterial side to the venous side through the capillaries, they release oxygen. That’s where oxygen and CO2 exchange occurred in a small red blood vessel. In order for oxygen to come off hemoglobin, nitric oxide has to be bound. If we don’t have nitric oxide bound to hemoglobin, it doesn’t undergo that structural change, which is called the Bohr Effect, and oxygen doesn’t come off. This became obvious over the last two years in COVID because the problem with COVID is a loss of blood oxygen saturation. So they become hypoxemic and put them on oxygen. If they don’t improve their oxygen saturation, they put on a ventilator and 90% of people put on a ventilator and die. That’s the root cause of COVID. 

In 2020, we got an investigational new drug application approved by the FDA, where we started our nitric oxide drug and phase three clinical trials for COVID. We see the importance of nitric oxide and oxygen uptake and oxygen delivery. In our drug study, we’re seeing COVID patients that get sick and they get blood oxygen saturation in their below 80, sometimes in their high 70s. Typically, that patient would be put on vent immediately. But they take our nitric oxide drug, and within eight minutes, we see blood oxygen saturation goes to the high 90s. 

And that explains everything we know about COVID over the past two years and that 15 years was the first SARS COV-1. The people who get sick and hospitalized from COVID are the ones that can make nitric oxide. Who are those? Those are the elderly African Americans, people with underlying cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and smokers. Is that patient population this nitric oxide deficient? And few are nitric oxide deficient and you get exposed to COVID. The virus rapidly replicates and proliferates throughout the body. You get the systemic disease, you lose oxygen saturation, and in the hospital, you are put on a bed and you die. The simple fix is simply taking our nitric oxide drug, improving signaling, preventing vascular inflammation, improving oxygenation and you kill the virus.

In 2005 papers were published showing that nitric oxide prevents Coronavirus replication. So that’s probably one of the most important aspects of signaling. In the other aspects of signaling, you said earlier that loss of nitric oxide production causes telomere shortening. The signaling aspect is that you need nitric oxide to transcribe and make the telomeres enzyme, preventing telomere shortening. It co-localizes with nitric oxide synthase. If you can’t make nitric oxide, you don’t get to the polymerase, and you get telomere shortening. The other important component may be the most important is stem cell function. Nitric oxide is what tells our own body and tells our own stem cells in need to mobilize and differentiate. If you have a cough or an injury, nitric oxide is the signal that says, hey, I’m getting an injury. We need to mobilize our immune system and increase blood flow to that side of injury. And we need to make new cardiac myocytes, for example, or we need to make new neurons because we had a stroke. And if you can’t make nitric oxide in the body, it doesn’t get the signal to go there and repair any damaged tissue. The result is you don’t recover from injury. If you have a heart attack or stroke, typically, you lose neurological function. You lose cardiac function unless you do stem cells or stimulate your body’s own stem cells. And you can only do that through improving nitric oxide.

 

[00:40:48] Ashley James: I see that application for your drug for the emergency room. Someone comes in with a stroke, they just had one, and it would make sense to give it to them. Someone just comes in having a heart attack, and it makes sense to give it to them. You want to do everything you can to increase oxygen to oxygen-starved tissues because of a stroke or a heart attack. But, of course, my goal in this podcast is to help people prevent illness in the first place and help people reverse illness wherever they are. Whether they’re in early stage or even late stage. As long as your heart’s beating and you’re breathing and you’re able to take action for yourself, then there’s hope. And there are things you can do to help your body heal itself. But even if someone were to go to the emergency room, this was available to them. And they didn’t know about natural medicine and then they got sick. So that would be a fantastic emergency medicine at that moment to help them have a better outcome. So I’m really excited about your drug. 

As a society, we overuse drugs, but drugs aren’t all inherently bad. There are some amazing lifesaving drugs and the problem is that if you only go to the doctor, they throw drugs at you and don’t help you change your lifestyle and diet. And doesn’t look into the latest science of things. Then there were just throwing a bunch of drugs at a problem that might have been a diet or nutrient deficiency or diet problem or a lifestyle problem. So it’s really good, my listeners know. Does anybody have new listeners that haven’t thought of it this way? You don’t take your broken-down car to a plumber. I mean, that’s not plumbers, it’s a mechanic, right? So you take your car to a mechanic. Don’t take your health, always to the same doctor who only has a limited world view on health right?

I remember I’m from Canada. I remember I’m coming to the states and I picked out that I thought it was a good doctor. He was an osteopath, so I thought it was more holistic-minded. This is back, and we lived in Vegas, I lived in Henderson. So I went to an osteopath, really great guy. He was referred to me by my chiropractor’s wife, who’s a functional medicine practitioner and she thought that this would be good. I go to him and I’m complaining about this pain in my ovary and I don’t know if I’m having a cyst or what’s going on. I just want an ultrasound. I just want to make sure everything’s okay. I’m kind of nervous about it. And he walks into the office holding his prescription pad, writing a prescription for pain, and he’s walking in. I’m like– I don’t want pain medicine. I’m in pain, but that’s okay because pain is like notifying me that there’s something wrong and as a Canadian, it’s harder to get pain medicines that I don’t know. 

It’s different now, this is back in 2008, but it’s harder to get paid for medicines in Canada. But in the States, all I had to do was say I’m in pain and they’re like– oh, how many pain prescriptions do you want? I remember I went to a doctor, doesn’t stick to the sore throat. It’s just a sore throat, but it’s not going away. I just want to get it checked out. I’m feeling a little nervous about it. And this was before I was into Holistic Health. She wrote me a prescription for some cough syrup that had a bunch of pain meds in it. I thought this was crazy. Like I’ve never taken a cough syrup with pain meds before. Of course, it numbs my throat and everything. But it’s just this idea that we’re over-drugging ourselves. 

So we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If there’s a drug and you’re developing a drug that can increase nitric oxide that can save lives at the moment, that’s amazing. And then, of course, in the long term, I’d love for everyone to learn what they can do to increase nitric oxide in their lifestyle and in their diet as much as possible. But, as you’ve already mentioned, eating leafy green vegetables helps hugely and making sure to take care of your oral microbiome. Don’t do things that kill the microbiome in your mouth. So we’ve got two very easy to follow and very effective tips. Are there any other lifestyle tips for ensuring the protection of our nitric oxide production and in anything else we can do to enhance nitric oxide production?

 

[00:45:20] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes, there’s a lot. So let me go back because you make some very important points there. Interestingly, when I first found the patents and some medical school faculty, we had access to the hospital and patients. Actually, Jim Wilson, who’s a famous cardiologist who unfortunately passed away last year, his idea was to use it for heart attack. So if you’ve got what’s called an ischemic patient, [inaudible 00:45:47] which is ischemia, then the problem is they have an acute obstruction in a coronary artery so we could dose them in the field, bring them back and see if we can protect the heart from injury. So, it made perfect sense. But obviously, that’s a high-risk patient population. People are going to die and so we just made the decision well. With this early technology, let’s not put it in high-risk patients. But you hit the nail right on the head. So whether it’s an ischemic stroke or heart attack, it’s a very important application. But as you also said, prevention is much easier than treatment. So we have to address it before you have a heart attack.

Then going back to drugs, I’m trained as a drug discovery chemist that’s designed to understand human disease to the extent that we can rationally design drugs. My philosophy is much different than major drug manufacturers because what they do is create a synthetic compound. It’s typically, probably 90% of the drugs out there what’s called enzyme inhibitors preventing the activity of a certain enzyme. That’s called pharmacology and there are always consequences that cause side effects or body is not designed to inhibit an enzyme for the rest of our lives, which is what drug therapy does. So what we’ve done is called restorative physiology. We understand the enzymology of many different proteins and enzymes, primarily nitric oxide-producing enzymes. We know what goes wrong in people and we can restore the function of that enzyme.

So when the drug therapy that we develop is restorative in nature. It’s not an inhibitor. It’s basically giving back to the body what’s missing in terms of nitric oxide. So we know how much nitric oxide a healthy human makes, and we basically deliver that and recapitulate nitric oxide-based signaling in the human body. So drugs or anything that goes through FDA-approved clinical trials, and their prescription. Although we do have a drug discovery program and biotech company through, nitric oxide innovations are different than the drugs on the market. For most people and probably many holistic people, drugs are bad words. But what we’re doing is really a drug intended to give the body what it needs. The body heals itself. So that’s our drug discovery platform. Trying to get these different drugs through the FDA-approved clinical trial, which by the way, is a very heavy lift, especially competing against people like Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. Government employees doing their clinical trials for them. But you don’t need that. 

Going back to what we can do to stimulate our own nitric oxide production or prevent the age-related decline. You do two things, you stop doing the things that disrupt nitric oxide production and start doing the things that stimulate it. So we can address both of those. So number one, if you’re using mouthwash, you have to stop. The evidence is clear. I was in the Doctor Show last year where we revealed that mouthwash makes the blood pressure goes up. With mouthwash, you lose the benefits of exercise. So if you’re using mouthwash, you have to stop. Don’t overtake antibiotics. Over 200 million prescriptions are written every year for antibiotics. If you get an active infection, the antibiotics are very important but don’t overdo it because you’re killing the bad guys, but you’re also killing the good guys. 

The other thing is fluoride toothpaste or fluoride rinses, Fluoride to antiseptic. It’s a neurotoxin, and it kills your thyroid function. So if you’re using fluoride toothpaste, throw that away. Never buy fluoride toothpaste again. There’s a reason we have an epidemic of hypothyroidism. Fluoride competes with iodine binding to thyroid hormone can’t convert T4 to T3 with Iodine. Then the other thing is antacids. In over 200 million prescriptions are written for antacid every year and that’s not even counting the number of over-the-counter purchases. You have to have stomach acid and as Dr. Esselstyn says, take some apple cider vinegar before each meal. Acidify the stomach to get a better breakdown of proteins. You get your nitric oxide being produced. So those are the three things that will really make a huge difference in people’s health. Throw out the Fluoride, stop using mouthwash, and stop using an antacid. So those are the three things you must do to get out of your body’s waste that can make nitric oxide. And then do the things that stimulate more green leafy vegetables, moderate physical exercise, and 20 to 30 minutes of sunlight a day. For those that live in the North and there are long winters, you have to get an infrared sauna or infrared light.

 

[00:50:30] Ashley James: I have Sunlighten Sauna and it’s the coolest thing ever. It’s near, mid, and far-infrared. I feel like a new person. I love using it. I live out in the Pacific Northwest and it’s 4:30. The sun goes down at night and doesn’t come back until 7:30. So we got those long winters, but I feel like a new person since I got that Sunlighten Sauna and I absolutely love it. I interviewed the founder of Sunlighten and it was a great interview. She started the company because her brother was dying of cancer and doing everything he could to fight it. Maybe it was cancer because it was a few years ago when we did the interview. I’m pretty sure it’s cancer but he was very sick. I can’t remember what it was. It might have been cancer or might have been Lyme Disease but he was basically laid out flat on the couch. He was super sick. And then he found out that infrared could help him and it gave him a leg up. Then she developed that company and it’s all non-toxic.

My listeners get a great discount when they check out Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love Sunlighten Sauna technology. Now, I know another reason why I love it. It increases nitric oxide production and helps my body to do that. So you talk about Fluoride, my question is, what about Fluoride and Chlorine in that drinking water? We should do our best to drink water that doesn’t have Fluoride in it and Chlorine. Does Chlorine also affect nitric oxide and does it not also disrupt the microbiome?

 

[00:52:06] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Chlorine and Fluoride. If you go back to the periodic table, these are a group of elements called halogens. There’s Fluoride, Chlorine, Iodine, and Bromine– I don’t have in front of me, but those are the major ones. The biggest thing with Fluoride, Chlorine, and chloride is they compete with Iodine, binding the thyroid hormone. So most Americans are deficient in Iodine, 95% of Americans because the only dietary sources of Iodine are typically seaweed or iodized salt. So we don’t get enough Iodine in the body, yet we’re exposed to Fluoride in our drinking water. Fluoride in toothpaste. Most humans have more Fluoride and chloride in their blood-streaming cells than Iodine. They’re the same type of chemistry with the same halogen properties on that one row on the periodic table. They have similar functions and similar chemistry. So they act as competitors in binding Iodine to thyroid hormone. So, you become hypothyroid. I tell people that everybody has to supplement with Iodine. Everybody’s deficient in Iodine. 

Going back to your question, the municipal waters are probably the worst thing in the world you can drink. Not only does it have Fluoride and Chlorine, but it has drug metabolites in it. So you have to have a pump filtration system to remove all these toxins from the water supply. People think it’s bad to drink it. What’s worse, it’s bad to cook in it. So it’s even worse to bathe in it because you’re heating the bathwater up to sometimes 104, 110 degrees, then you volatilize and there are chloramines and you inhale it. So you get better absorption, transdermal through inhaling it. Volatilize by heating the water and people get sick and get a chronic illness. So you have to eat, drink and bathe in good clean water and not municipal water coming out of the pipes of major metropolitan areas.

  

[00:54:12] Ashley James: I absolutely agree with you. I felt amazing when I lived in a place with the well water. It makes such a difference to bathe in water, drink water, and cook with water that is from the ground that doesn’t have any fluoride, Chlorine, or any chemicals in it. Oh, so good. I recently found a water filter that’s affordable, that removes everything. It’s called Zero water. I’ve been meeting to contact the company and see if they could get whether science guys to come on and explain how it works. But it’s better than any other filter I found and it’s like 30 bucks, and it looks like any other kind of picture. They have the bigger ones, like a 23 cup one, and that’s the one I got. But it comes with a tester that tests the total dissolved solids of parts per million. And sure, it sets to zero and they give you the little machine that tests the water for you. 

So that you know when it starts showing numbers on it and when to replace the filter. It takes for me about every two months to replace the filter. I’m sure up it works as well as a four hundred dollars in reverse osmosis and it’s only like 30 bucks. So lately, I found out a few months ago and the water tastes so good coming out. Now that we’re living in a place with municipal water, I need to find something better, even better than my Berkey. My Berkey wasn’t removing everything. But it [inaudible 55:45] everything. So I thought that was really cool. You’ve given us so much information and I keep thinking. You’ve created some products that we can use because I’m going to do everything you said. And in addition to that, I want to take it to the next level. I’m sure my listeners are the same, or they’re like—well, what else I can do. 

You’ve given us the life hacks and things that we can make sure that we’re doing, which are simple enough. Clean water, clean toothpaste, no mouthwash, take care of the microbiome, eat foods like nice leafy greens, and eat food that increases nitric oxide. But in addition to that, what else can we do to take it to the next level and get the maximum benefit considering that nitric oxide does so much more than I thought that it helps. If it’s helping with telomeres, it’s helping extend life. It’s helping literally tell your DNA to live longer. I heard you mentioned how it helps mitochondrial function. I don’t quite understand exactly what you said and how it affects viral or suppresses viral production in bacterial production. I understood that it is fundamental to the immune system that your immune cells help make it and the signaling within the cells. Vasodilation like there are so many aspects. One point alone, it increases oxygen, drives deeper into the tissue and pushes back lactic acid. When I go to exercise, I hate it when I’m getting started and my muscles are already fatigued, burning and I’m already anaerobic. 

I look at my son, who’s about to be seven. I remember having energy for days. I can take this kid to play areas and I’m waiting for him; my butt gets numb, or my feet get cold. Something like my body is hanging out and chilling with other moms. I’m waiting for my kid to get tired—three and a half hours into a play area. I’m bored and cold and ready to go home and he’s just like—go, go, go. To have that fitness level again, anything to increase that ability to go longer and feel like you’re seven again. 

So tell us about the products you’ve created and offer a fantastic discount to the listeners. We are so grateful for giving us 10% off. Every little bit helps these days. The coupon code, of course, we’re all everything when we get a discount. We always ask for the coupon code LTH, which is Learn True Health podcast. So LTH is a discount. You have several websites, but the best website for all our listeners to go to and the easiest one is n as in the letter n, one, o, one dot com. It’s n1o1.com. I’m sure there’s a reason for that. Is that the nitric oxide molecule?

 

[00:59:17] Dr. Nathan Bryan: That’s one Nitrogen and one Oxygen. 

 

[00:59:20] Ashley James: Yes, like H2O is water. So it’s n1o1.com, and that one does not spell out n1o1.com. But, of course, the links to everything that we’re talking about today was going to be in the show in today’s podcast in learntruehealth.com. But when we went to n1o1.com, I was surprised about the products because the first thing I saw was some face creams. And I’m all about looking good. But here you are, scientists, about how to increase nitric oxide production. So let’s start with the obvious, what’s up with the face creams?

 

[00:59:55] Dr. Nathan Bryan: This has been an evolution. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and as I mentioned early on, when we started going and when we solved the riddle on how to create nitric oxide in a safe and effective manner, it changes everything. So when we started developing product technology, we first launched in the dietary supplement space, and we set good results there. And then I get to think, what else that is people forget the skins and organs. Like the heart, if you have an interruption of blood supply to the heart, what happens? The heart fails. If you have a disruption in the blood supply to the brain, well, the brain fails. Just like any other organ, if you have decreased blood flow to the skin, what happens? It fails. What does the failing skin look like? When you lose collagen and you lose hydration, fine lines and wrinkles start to appear and the skin hangs and drupes, you get dermatitis, and you get age spots, and that’s aging. 

What is the root cause of aging? Well, it’s a lack of nitric oxide production. So we figured out how to deliver a solid dose form of nitric oxide in the form of a lozenge. So we created a door chamber serum that when you mix these two components together, you basically take one pump from one side, one pump from the other. So you mix it together, then chemistry starts as normally would on the skin’s surface and we generate nitric oxide gas. This is the coolest show in the history of any product technology. Aesthetics and skincare’s multibillion-dollar. People buy a lot of stuff and most cosmetic skincare products are masking. They hide the blemishes, and they hide the fine lines and wrinkles. They don’t get to the root cause. 

When you apply this to the skin, you’ll see it turned pink. What is that? That’s the infusion of blood and oxygen to that area. The nitric oxide is the gas part that diffuses above the skin, but part of it diffuses into the dermis and opens up capillaries. It gives blood oxygen which is blood, into the cells, just like everything we’ve discussed. What does that mean when you get oxygen nutrient deliveries? Stem cells begin to turn on, so you get to regenerative cells, so they slough off the old cells. We regenerate new cells, and we do biopsies. We’ve seen improvement in collagen deposition, cellular hydration, infections, whether it’s some dermatitis or acne. We kill the bacteria, fine lines and wrinkles disappear, and so just like we can recover. 

Our nitric oxide can make a heart attack, but there’s injury and reduced blood supply to the heart. We can overcome the effects of loss of fusion to the skin by providing a source of mycotoxins in the body. Otherwise, it didn’t make it. The result is that we’ve got four published clinical trials on that and see improvements from fine lines and wrinkles to scar remediation, acne, eczema, and any type of dermatitis. Again, it doesn’t mask. We’re getting to the root cause of that underlying skin disorder or just preventing the looks of aging. So that was the N101 serum and then we created an entire line. We had a glycolic wash that helps remove the old cells because we’re improving cellular turnover like a colic wash that gets rid of the old cells so that the new cells can come forward. We got an eye cream and a face cream that contains peptides and growth factors. It’s a really remarkable system and as they said, you don’t have to guess if this product is working. You can see it working right between your eyes. We call it the pink glow, the Pneuma glow.

 

[01:03:46] Ashley James: So it’s helping increase oxygen to the cells that aren’t getting enough oxygen, which is then all the cells are just functioning better. It sounds like the fountain of youth. It sounds like it’s going to pour the fountain of youth on my face. I’m really excited about that. Luckily, I don’t have any major skin issues. But I hit my 40s now and I want to prevent looking like a leather boot in 10 years. I’m excited about that. I have a little bit of rosacea that my grandmother and my mom had. I’m not going to blame my genes. I’m sure that there’s something I can do to change. I’ve always been figuring out things in my diet and my lifestyle to improve. But it would be neat if it helped with that. Does it help reduce acne because the bacteria are anaerobic bacteria? The bacteria that causes acne, is it basically killed because the tissues are oxygen?

 

[01:04:54] Dr. Nathan Bryan:  It does two things. There’s clear evidence of a mechanism of how nitric oxide kills bacteria. It binds to the iron-sulfur centers, which are the respiratory sites of bacteria. So basically, it suffocates the bacteria. So there are clear antimicrobial, antibacterial effects of nitric oxide. So in acne, it’s doing two things. It kills the bacteria’s active infection in the pustules but also calms the inflammation and mobile and gets the blood supply there. So you shut down the immune response because the immune system doesn’t need to be activated. There are no bacteria and then you suppress the inflammatory response. That’s how you get rid of acne.

 

[01:05:35] Ashley James: I apologize if you said this before. I just really want to be clear about it. Does nitric oxide in every tissue of the body decrease inflammatory response?

 

[01:05:53] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes. I mean, that’s part of nitric oxide drops. In acute inflammation, whether it’s an injury, whether it’s a cut or whether it’s an exposure to an infection. An acute inflammatory response is necessary for our survival and part of that is mediated through nitric oxide. So you have to mobilize your immune system, dilate the blood vessels, and then go and isolate that source of infection or injury to the immune cells. So it generates a lot of nitric oxide at the site of injury. And that happens for four or five hours and then the inflammatory immune cascade goes away. 

The problem with chronic inflammation, there’s no off switch. So what nitric oxide does, when you have whether it’s acute inflammation in the gut, whether it’s ulcerative colitis or inflammatory bowel disease or rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or any autoimmune disease with chronic inflammation, it shuts down systemic nitric oxide production. So nitric oxide, one of its roles is to shut down the inflammatory response and inflammation. The earliest stages of that are what’s called microvascular inflammation. 

When you get monocytes and neutrophils that stick to the lining of the blood vessel, they migrate through. They elicit an immune response. And that’s the inflammation, oxidative stress and immune dysfunction that occur in every inflammatory condition. If you restore nitric oxide production, primarily endothelial nitric oxide production, you prevent that entire inflammatory cascade. You suppress inflammation. You suppress the immune dysfunction or shut down the oxidative stress associated with all of it. One of my patents is on a method of reducing inflammation as measured by C-reactive protein. So when we improve nitric oxide production in the human body, we decrease C-reactive protein, which is an acute-phase marker of inflammation.

 

[01:07:50] Ashley James: That is so cool because so many doctors say inflammation is the root cause of the problem and it’s like– no, you’re going to go deeper.

 

[01:08:03] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Inflammation is the consequence of loss of nitric oxide.

 

[01:08:05] Ashley James:  Right. I’ve interviewed several doctors that say too much lactic acid is the cause of all diseases. It’s like they all have a piece of an elephant. Have you heard that? I don’t know if it’s a parable. You’ve heard the story of 12 Blind Men is all touching a part of an elephant. And they’re all arguing like– no, describe the elephant. Well, it feels large and leathery. No, it feels like a rope. No, it feels like a very thin thing. No, it feels round like a hose. So each person is touching a different part of the elephant. So we have to be careful not to treat the smoke but go after the fire. Imagine every time you show up to a fire, and we saw firemen putting it out, and we’re like—aha, firemen caused the fire because every time we see a fire, there’s firemen. Or oh, let’s start treating the smoke. See the smoke? There’s smoke. We should treat it and what’s causing the fire and how to put it out. 

So inflammation is a byproduct. Lactic acid is a byproduct where we need to keep going deeper. Yes, everyone wants to address decreasing inflammation. Everyone wants to eat a low inflammatory diet. Doesn’t want to do anything in your lifestyle, your diet that increases inflammation, just like you don’t want to have too much lactic acid. And you want to make sure you have enough oxygen for yourself and this is all very important. But what is the root? Get to the root. We’re seeing that nitric oxide is the absolute root. We have to make sure we have enough of it or else everything just becomes the standard American statistic. One in three people is dying of something right now and 70% of our population is on at least one prescription medication. I would say 70% of people in America probably have low nitric oxide, given what we’re hearing today.

 

[01:10:10] Dr. Nathan Bryan: You made a very good point. I just want to expound because I get questions and everybody can research now. They can go to Google and put it in and find anything they’re looking for. You can get the answer to whatever you’re looking for, whether it’s right or wrong. There’s an answer out there. I read a paper that says in chronic inflammation, and nitric oxide contributes to tissue damage during that inflammation. So nitric oxide should be contraindicated inflammatory disease. If you read the literature, we looked in lupus or Parkinson’s disease or ulcerative colitis in these scientific papers. In the tissue pathology reports, we found an increase in nitrotyrosine and peroxynitrite. So nitric oxide is causing that damage. So it’s the exact same analogy you use.

When there’s a crime, the police show up at the crime scene. The interpretation isn’t that the police cause the crime. But, of course, nitric oxide is there in that inflammatory. That’s its job because it’s there doesn’t mean that it’s contributed to the crime or caused the disease. So it’s there to clean up the mess. So you have to be careful on how you interpret data. And scientists are famous for this. You give the data and there’s a misinterpretation of the data. Most of the data out there can sometimes be misinterpreted by the authors of the paper and even by the people who read it. 

So it’s clear that low nitric oxide is bad. Too much nitric oxide is bad. Too little water is bad, too much water– obviously, if you drink too much water in a short period of time, your [inaudible 01:11:55] and you’ll die. So everything in moderation. It’s very important to realize that you have to figure it out and generate the right amount of nitric oxide at the right time and in the right place. That’s what we’ve been able to figure it out over the past 20 years and nobody else has been able to figure this out.

 

[01:12:13] Ashley James: Okay, that brings me to the question. How much is nitric oxide too much? How do we know if we’re reaching toxic levels of nitric oxide? To eat four cups of leafy greens a day, you’re not going to kill yourself. If you try to eat four grocery bags a day, probably you would explode. Could we get toxic with nitric oxide through– you’ve got nitric oxide lozenges. I’m excited about learning about that. It is my next and I want to explore that. But we’re doing okay. So we’re going to do everything you’ve already said, eat healthily, and make sure we’re not killing the bacteria in our mouths. And, of course, under natural intervention, we wouldn’t have too much nitric oxide, at least. I’m guessing. Let me know if I’m wrong. In addition to that, I want to increase my nitric oxide more and I want to take your lozenges. Could I become nitric oxide toxic?

 

[01:13:13] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes, very good questions. Now, let me go back and hit on the points that you brought up earlier again. So you mentioned green leafy vegetables and eating a good clean diet. Here’s the challenge. We did this and we published this in 2015. We wanted to answer that same question you asked. How much broccoli or celery would I need to eat? How much spinach do I need to eat in one serving to get enough nitrate in that food to normalize my blood pressure and improve nitric oxide production? A very important question because if we can answer that question, we can change the strict guidelines. We can get people off blood pressure medicine simply through dietary intervention. 

And we can recapitulate Dr. Esselstyn’s work in patients with full-blown coronary artery disease. So in order to answer that question, we went to five different cities across the US. We went to the same retail grocery, we bought the same vegetables and brought them back to the lab and analyzed them. So what we found was pretty striking. We found that if you lived, for instance, in Dallas or Chicago, and you went to what’s called [inaudible 01:14:29] or some retail grocery. So you bought six stalks of celery and you consume those six stalks within 20 minutes, which would give you enough nitric to normalize your blood pressure. 

If you lived in New York, you’d have to eat about 40 stalks of celery. So there are regional differences in the nitrate content of vegetables, and it’s all across the US. So we went to New York, and we went to Raleigh, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. There’s as much as 50-fold difference in the nitrate content of broccoli or celery in New York, as there in Dallas or Los Angeles. It holds true for lettuce, spinach, and every vegetable we measure. So the point of that is that there’s no way in hell we can make recommendations because it depends on where you live and how your vegetables are grown. By the way, those were conventionally grown vegetables. We also compared it to organically grown vegetables and found that organically grown vegetables across the board have as much as the five to 10 times less nitrate than conventionally grown. The variation is much higher, maybe a hundredfold difference in nitrate content of organically grown vegetables from different regions of the US.

So the point is, you cannot eat enough, just like you can’t eat enough curing processed meats to get enough nitrite/nitrate to lower your blood pressure. You can’t eat enough organic vegetables to get enough nitrate because to have an organic label, and you’re not allowed to add nitrogen-based fertilizers to the soil. So as a consequence, the soil is nitrogen deficient, and the vegetables that are grown in it don’t accumulate nitrate. Without nitrate or nitrogen, they don’t assimilate other vitamins and minerals. So organically grown vegetables are healthy simply because they’re not exposed to herbicides or pesticides. But they’re depleted of most nutrients, including nitrate. 

So, that adds another level of complexity to trying to do the right thing. Yet not getting what we are designed to be and I’ve seen data. Since the 1940s, there’s been a 90% decline in the trace minerals and nutrients in the food that’s grown in the US. So we have to feed a growing planet, and that increased deficiency of food production has led to a decrease in nutrient absorption and assimilation. So we’re producing a less nutritious product globally. 

 

[01:16:58] Ashley James: Exactly. And then we’re getting all these nutrient deficiency diseases, and someone can be obese and nutrient deficient at the same time. And one of my mentors, Dr. Joel Wallach, talks about his first degree was in soil agriculture. And then, he was a veterinarian, pathologist, and research scientist and later became a naturopathic physician. So here’s a fun story. You should check out his story of it. He saw early on like calf pellets of all these great vitamins and minerals. So he started eating calf pellets as a kid because he looked at the package and asked his dad– Dad, why are we giving all these minerals and vitamins? He’s in his 80s, so like it was 70 years ago. So why are we giving all these nutrients? Why are we taking these nutrients? It was explained to him that– we’ll if we use a human medicine which is a way to get sick and go to the doctor and take a bunch of tests and be put on drugs, right? Human medicine.

If you use human medicine for cattle, for beef farming, right? The steak would be $500 or $1,000 like a burger with beef, $50 or more. That’s because it’s for profit medicine. But with the poultry, pork, and beef, they need to keep the costs down while keeping the animals alive and making big animals. So what do they do? They try to prevent disease and they do that by making sure that there’s enough nutrition in their feed. Yet they make sure there’s enough nutrition in our food. 

So Dr. Wallach jokes about it, but he says that your chickens are being treated better than you are in terms of the amount of nutrients. In terms of the amount of nutrition there, the food industry is not interested in making sure you have 60 essentials, meaning the body needs these things to function. It’s 60 minerals the body needs, and there are 77 trace minerals and elements that we thrive on. They’re not in our food, and yet we’re giving vitamins and minerals to animals to help prevent disease and make nice big animals so they can make a profit. So it just drives me nuts hearing about that. 

Someone in Texas eats a few stalks of celery, lowers their blood pressure and is great. But someone is listening in Wisconsin, or Seattle or New York, or in a different country altogether. No matter how many stalks they can fit in their mouth, they are not really getting the results and that’s super frustrating. But that goes to say when selenium. People will say– off to sleep and don’t have to be grown in selenium-rich soil just like– oh, my iron is low. I’m going to have more spinach. I love spinach. Most spinach is hydroponically grown. It only needs NPK water and sunlight to grow that can be completely void of 50 or more minerals. So there doesn’t have to be minerals in your food for them to grow food anymore. Even if you look at Franken foods that are packaged foods, these foods don’t have to have nutrients that your body needs. Which now we know is directly related to your nitric oxide production. 

So, what’s the solution? Obviously, still eating a clean and healthy diet, try not to get pesticides and all that. I mean, growing our own food and making sure we put in blood meat or whatever it has high nitrogen in the soil as we grow our own food. That would be one solution. But what’s the solution for someone who is done feeling sick and wants the benefits that you spend over 40 minutes talking about all the benefits of nitric oxide. What’s the solution? If it is your lozenges that you’ve created. The next concern is what’s the good amount to take because that person in Texas is actually eating just accidentally getting enough nitrates and nitrites to produce nitric oxide. They could take two lozenges versus someone in New York who can be taken few. How do we gauge this?

 

[01:21:23] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes. A very, very good question and very important question. And that’s where the innovation comes in because we realized a long time ago that very few people do through diet, work, or lifestyle or getting enough nitric oxide. So you almost have to have product technology. You almost have to supplement with trace minerals and nutrients, which I do every day. Because we’re not getting it from our food supply and I live on hundreds of acres in Texas. We grow our own food. We raise our own beef in the food we eat. So even if we’re still not getting all the trace minerals we need, you have to supplement. 

There are two main causes or two main signs of toxicity for nitric oxide. There are only two. So one is methemoglobinemia which means that you take so much that you oxidize the iron and your red blood cells and you can no longer transport oxygen. So what that looks like is cyanosis. The people get blue around the lips, and they basically suffocate like cyanide poisoning. You would have to take a hundred of those lozenges to see any changes in methemoglobinemia. The other is low blood pressure. But you take too much nitric oxide, you’ll see systemic vasodilation, and you’ll see a drop in blood pressure. You’ll get sick of it. You get lightheaded because you can’t profuse the brain because of low blood pressure. Those are the only signs of toxicity based on the chemistry of nitric oxide. 

So the trick has been– how do you restore? Again, the keyword is restore. We don’t want to give the body more than what it’s used to seeing or what it would normally produce. And that’s what we’ve learned over the past 20 years. How much nitric oxide to generate over a certain period of time to recapitulate it basically. The only way to do that is through a lozenge because we generate. If your body can’t make nitric oxide, we do it for you. That lozenge is designed to have a resonant time of about six or seven minutes. You put it in your mouth. It’s activated by your saliva in regenerating nitric oxide gas. And that nitric oxide is absorbed in the oral cavity. It’s oxidized to nitrite. It’s transported to bind to the glutathione and transported as an S-nitrosoglutathione. And that extends the biological activity from one millisecond out to hours. 

Again through research, we know what normal plasma levels of these biomarkers are. We know what normal salivary levels of these biomarkers are. We give back what the body’s missing. It’s no different than anything else. If you’re low in vitamin D, what do you do? You take vitamin D. How do you know you have enough? Where do you get your blood labs drawn? If your vitamin D is 80, you’re vital right on the spot. So keep doing what you’re doing. 

Same thing with this. There’s no clinical measure of nitric oxide. Unfortunately, there are no labs that you can tell, like vitamin D or cholesterol, or triglycerides. So what do we have to do? We have to test our saliva, which there are salivary test strips out there that I developed over 12 years ago. They can tell you what your nitric oxide levels are. Or the best measure is check your blood pressure. It’s easy. It’s not invasive and you know if your blood pressure’s normal. The beauty of what we do is, for instance, my blood pressure runs about 116 over 68 or 72. So when I take a lozenge, it doesn’t trump my blood pressure and that’s called homeostasis. If your blood pressure’s high, you take it and it normalizes it. If blood pressure is normal or low, you won’t further reduce your blood pressure. So it’s a very important safety aspect about what we do because we don’t want to lower blood pressure more in people with already low blood pressure.

 

[01:25:18] Ashley James: Some people have low blood pressure. By the way, Dr. Wallach says that the first thing he goes to is the calcium deficiency, but that doesn’t mean you eat more dairy. You want to make sure you’re getting an absorbable form of calcium that is useful to the body. I have a family member who was fainting from standing up. He was bedridden just recently. He tries to stand up with a walker and immediately, his blood pressure drops so low that he is fainting. So I gave him the liquid calcium and multi-mineral from takeyoursupplements.com. I read about them and so many interviews. Within days, he’s able to stand without fainting. And that’s so cool. 

There are always other reasons that can cause low blood pressure, but for him, it’s the first thing to try when you hear some good information from a holistic doctor. You try it and you get some results. I just love that. I’m so excited to get these lozenges. We used to be on for about seven years. We moved last year, but we have been drinking nitrites for seven years. There are high levels of nitrites in our well water. It wasn’t high enough to cause Blue Baby Syndrome. That’s what I was concerned about. When my son was a baby, I was concerned about that. It was naturally high in our area. There was no agricultural area and it was kind of weird. And I was concerned about it. 

My husband’s blood pressure was really under control in those seven years. He was getting nitrites and one of the sources was from our well water. They would test it often and it was high. It’s high normal but not dangerous, but still high. I thought to myself, that’s interesting. Maybe think back to when we were cavemen and we’re drinking water that naturally has nitrites in it, maybe because of the breakdown of stuff. One of the reasons it’s in well water is the breakdown of vegetation and things like that. And that can be dangerously high and toxic because if you’re getting unclean well water from the farmland, that leech to it. One of the sources that someone could get it from. So it’s interesting. I’m excited to get these lozenges because I want to give it to my husband. Lately, his blood pressure has been creeping up, which can also be from stress. We’re under high stress right now because of taking care of sick family members. I’m just really excited and I’m already on your website buying the lozenges right now. I’m very excited to get him on it and I will come back and share it with the listeners after my husband takes it in and let them know what happens with his blood pressure. So I’m going to take some too and then work out at the gym and I’m going to let everyone know what I felt. If I noticed a difference in my ability to keep going at the gym or if I gave up after five curl-ups. 

 

[01:28:43] Dr. Nathan Bryan: It involves science. We’ve learned a lot over the past 20 years and continue to pivot and improve. We’ve learned over the 20 years that nitric oxide is clinically important, but it’s not a silver bullet. It’s not an end-all, be-all, and cure-all. But what’s clear is that your body cannot and will not heal or perform optimally unless you have sufficient nitric oxide being produced. Going back to what you said earlier about these mineral deficiencies, I’ve been in basic science for almost 25 years. What’s clear to me is that people get sick for two weeks in two weeks only. It didn’t matter if it was cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or Diabetes. So the body is missing something that it needs, or it’s exposed to something that it doesn’t need. 

In that model, in that paradigm, there’s no room for drug therapy. If you’re deficient in the mineral, you’ll get sick. If we supplement and give back what’s missing, we remove any toxin, whether it’s fluoride or herbicides or pesticides or EMF or infections from root canals. If we remove the source of exposure to toxins and give back what the body’s missing, the body heals itself. That’s the only way people are going to get better. It’s not through drug therapy. It’s not putting band-aids on and not getting to the root cause. So the end result of all that, whether you are toxic or your mineral deficient, leads to a loss of nitric oxide production. They reduce blood flow, increase inflammation, oxidative stress and immune dysfunction and that’s the hallmark of every single chronic disease. 

 

[01:30:30] Ashley James: Fascinating. Do you have any information about cancer and nitric oxide?

 

[01:30:40] Dr. Nathan Bryan: When nitric oxide is known to regulate cell cycle and cell proliferation, this goes back to the 1940s, and this is called the Warburg effect that cancer cells only respire and proliferate in low oxygen, in low pH environment. So it’s a mitochondrial disease. It’s mitochondrial dysfunction. So it’s typically caused by some toxins. So it got to remove the source– and this is what frustrates me about oncologists. It does not matter if it’s breast cancer, prostate cancer, or brain cancer. They only have three tools– surgery, chemo, and radiation. The frustration is the oncologist never asked the patient, why did you have cancer? How can you treat something if you don’t know why you got it? To throw into those three responses to every single cancer case that they see. Nobody’s ever been cured of cancer from surgery, chemo, or radiation. It’s never happened. 

If they put them in regression, it may extend their life, but it’s never cured cancer. It’s never in the history of the world that cancer has been cured with standard chemo, radiation, and surgery because they don’t understand the etiology of cancer. What’s poisoned the mitochondria to allow them to what’s called anaerobic fermentation and to disrupt normal cellular metabolism. That’s the root cause of cancer. We have to figure out what’s poisoning the mitochondria. It’s usually some toxins and usually, it’s a toxin from some infections that you have in the body. Whether it’s a brown section or whether it’s bacterial on asymptomatic bacterial infection in root canals. We’re finding most solid tumors can be traced back to an infection in a root canal tooth. So we have to remove the source of infection, extract the root canal teeth, clean up the infection, and then support the body so it can basically heal. Get some voltage, an oxygen increase, while pH increases oxygen delivery. So you do that partly through nitric oxide and then the body heals itself. It’s really very clear to me. 

 

[01:32:57] Ashley James: I love it. I’m just so excited about what you’re delivering today to the listeners and how it can help them. Those who are suffering from major diseases. Those who want to prevent major disease or want to reverse the disease or those who want to feel better. Wherever they are, they just want to feel better. This some very, very, very excited. So when we started taking lozenges, we started slow. I’m going to take it once a day and see how it goes. Then maybe once or twice a day and see how it goes. Is there anything about body weights, like a 100-pound woman and a 350-pound man taking different amounts?

 

[01:33:40] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Regarding what we do, whether it’s in dietary supplements, the only thing we have to do is demonstrate safety. Obviously we can’t make drug claims. But everything we do is tailored toward a 70 to an 80-kilogram person, which is 130 to 160-pounds human. And that’s the benchmark. So that’s how drugs are developed. So obviously, if you got a 60,70-pound kid, take half. If you’re older than that, our total body volume is more than that. So the pharmacokinetics are going to be much different than a 120-pound person. 

But I think what we have nitric oxide and what we do in that lozenge, technology is nitric oxide over a certain period of time and people typically get the same response. So that doesn’t mean that a 240-pound person should put two lozenges into their mouth at one time. I wouldn’t recommend that. We found that one wasn’t like for me. I’m 48 years old and the vascular age of a 28-year-old. I’m in pretty good health. I don’t have any issues with blood pressure. Labs are pretty good, actually, very normal for a 48-year-old. So I take one lozenge a day because it gives me that support I need. But I try to eat and I go to the gym every day. I send an infrared sauna and every day. I’m in a hyperbaric chamber every night when I’m at home. I’m not at home pretty much because I travel a lot. 

So I do everything that my body needs to optimize nitric oxide production. So I don’t need that much more health. Everybody’s busy. People don’t always eat a good diet, and certainly, most people don’t have time or the discipline to go to the gym everyday and get modern physical exercise. So those are the people that need the most support. Not us that are health conscious and try to do the things. Watch what we eat and take on the discipline to do the right things even though it’s hard work and very time-consuming to stay healthy. But for me, it’s worth it because the last thing I want to do if you’re unhealthy– our health is our greatest asset. We can’t enjoy life if we don’t have good health. It’s worth the hard work, and your body will thank you for it.

 

[01:35:57] Ashley James: If you have paid good money to buy a house, you have to replace the roof every 10 years with one of those really cool roofs for every 40 years. You’ve made all this money and put all this effort into buying a house and paying off a mortgage. You’re not going to let the roof rot. Then just completely destroy your investments and where you live. Your body is where you live. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt to make lifestyle changes and make habit changes and make diet changes. 

I have a little brat inside me that she’s like about six and she just wants, what she wants, what she wants. She wants to go to the drive-thru. She wants to eat all the junk they sell at the movie theater. Like she just wants what she wants, what she wants it and that’s what she wants that dopamine spikes. She wants those feel-good chemicals that happen in the brain when she gets her way. She gets to eat fried foods, sugary, greasy, whatever kind of food. We all have that brat inside of us that is drug-addicted. Addicted to processed food that wants that rush. 

For some people, it’s potato chips. For some people, it’s fast food. For some people, it’s alcohol, right? Alcohol is something I bet decreases nitric oxide production. So I’m just going to guess. Am I right? Does that have any effect on nitric oxide production? 

 

[01:37:24] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, it does but increasingly not. We published data probably 15 years ago. Moderate alcohol consumption is cardioprotective. So meaning that there are observational data that if you have a heart attack after one or two drinks, the heart suffers less injury from a heart attack than people who say they didn’t have a drink. So mechanistically, we know that a moderate alcohol consumption upregulates some enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase. It also causes an aldehyde dehydrogenase and extends the biological half-life of nitric oxide. 

That’s moderate and it’s called ethanol preconditioning. Again, there’s a very narrow opportunity there to do that. So you can quickly overdo it and then you overburden the liver. You upregulate p450 enzymes and it leads to a number of problems. But moderate alcohol consumption is actually cardioprotective.

 

[01:38:22] Ashley James: You have those two glasses of wine and then have a heart attack. Can’t you have two glasses of wine yesterday and have a heart attack right? Are you saying it’s just after moderate alcohol consumption?

 

[01:38:38] Dr. Nathan Bryan: That’s right. 

 

[01:38:40] Ashley James: Everyone’s walking around with a glass of wine like I’m going to sip just in case, moderately protective of my heart. What’s better is eating super clean, super healthy, and getting some good nitric oxide. So let’s prevent damage to our heart by preventing heart disease in the first place. It’s been so much fun having you on the show. I’m really excited to dive in and also you have this great book on your website. So when listeners go to your websites, it’s very easy, it’s very clean and not cluttered. It’s n1o1.com. There’s the cool skincare stuff. There are the little lozenges and then there’s your book. So very simple. To rapid up, tell us about your book. What would we get into your book more than what we got today in this great interview? What more would we get if we got your book? Should we even get your book? Is your book is something we should dive into? 

 

[01:39:36] Dr. Nathan Bryan: I mean, this is in rapid-fire and this is 30 years of research and distilled down into 90 minutes. Most people learn through repetition. So the book is called Functional Nitric Oxide Nutrition. It basically distills down a very complex, complicated science into a story that’s easily digested and easily understood. The plan and digestive. It’s how you can use diet and lifestyle to restore your nitric oxide production. It’s an easy read. It takes about an hour and 15,20 minutes, depending on how fast a reader you are. It’s a good reference because you can go back and mark pages then over time, this is all going to make sense. So the point is simple strategies. Start to see changes in your own health and wellness. 

 

[01:40:32] Ashley James: Yes. I’m seeing nitric oxide now—you’re like Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. You’re way ahead of your time. That song is like he’s way ahead of his time. These are early pioneering stages and think back to 100 years ago when they discover something about health. It’s like– oh my gosh, there’s a single vitamin C. It’s amazing. We just discovered this but today, we take it for granted. We take vitamins for granted when they were first discover to prevent scurvy and all these other diseases. It’s amazing. Vitamin C, it’s revolutionary.

We take it for granted, but 100 years from now, everyone’s going to be like– yes, don’t get your nitric oxide check, what’s wrong with you? You’re completely low nitric oxide. Like– oh, you’re low in vitamin C, get some even though this is not very new to us. So 100 years from now, no doubt, we need nitric oxide. This is something your lozenges are going to be on every shelf. It’s going to be very needed and also common. Right now, it’s not common because it’s just the only groundbreaking field that’s growing. I’m so excited to see the body of work as a science dive deeper into understanding human physiology and how to support the body in reversing and preventing disease. 

We can do so much of it from diet lifestyle, but also understanding their diet is compromised. It doesn’t mean that they give up and go to McDonald’s. Our diet is compromised because even no matter how healthy you eat, our farming practices over 100 years have messed up our food. So if you can grow your own food, it’s great. If you can make a relationship with a farmer and that grows really clean, healthy, and re-mineralizes the soil and uses a nitrogen-based fertilizer. It’s awesome. You can eat that food too. 

Check out the website of Dr. Nathan Bryan, which is n1o1.com. Use the coupon code LTH to get the awesome stuff. I’m going to share my results as I said and as I go forward using your stuff. Check out the book. I love the idea of real repetition, taking your 30 years of work and humility down to something that we can understand and absorb. And then take that to heart because this is the root. This is something so important. I don’t want to overlook that if we can increase nitric oxide to healthy levels. We can have a healthy immune system, cardiovascular system, mitochondria, and healthy signaling in the body, and the list went on and on. So you guys are still discovering more benefits to it as well. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[01:43:30] Dr. Nathan Bryan: No, I think just to touch on what you said, we’re way ahead of our time. Nitric oxide is today where fish oil was 30 years ago. And now official is ubiquitous. Everybody knows. Most people supplement with it. But now, the science is very clear that your body cannot and will not heal without nitric oxide. So we have to start employing strategies and understand what are we doing on a daily basis that’s disrupting our body’s ability to produce nitric oxide. So we have to stop that and start doing the clinically proven things to promote it. I will share that I got an educational website. I’m not a big promoter of products and more on providing education and awareness. So you and your listeners can make informed decisions. So I’ve got an educational website called drnathansbryan.com. There’s a six-minute video on there. I do a monthly blog. I try to provide some timely and practical tips that people can employ and hopefully, you can learn something. You can follow me on InstagramDr. Nathan S Bryan.com or LinkedIn.

 

[01:44:40] Ashley James: Love it. And of course, the links to everything you just mentioned will be in the show notes of today’s podcast, learntruehealth.com or the description wherever you’re listening from. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Please come back on the show when you have more breakthroughs. We’d love to be updated as you continue to innovate and dive into this. When your drug is full, all the testing is done, all these studies have been completed and it’s now approved for FDA use. I’d love to also hear more stories about that. 

Again, I’m not a fan of drugs, but I’m a big fan of drugs that will save someone’s life. I’d rather be on a drug alive. So if we can have saved your life with a drug, let’s do everything we can to get your healthy again. Just do everything to get you healthy, so you don’t need the drug. But I’m so glad that emergency medicine is available to us. It shouldn’t be the only medicine we go. We don’t want to wait until we get sick and then go to the emergency room. So let’s do everything we can to prevent never having to go there in the first place. But still, when your drug is totally approved, in, and available in ERs. I’d love to have you back on the show to hear more about the studies, the success, and the results. Of course, with anything that you’re innovating around this, please come back. We’d love to hear more. 

 

[01:45:57] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Thank you so much. 

 

[01:45:59] Ashley James: I hope you had a fantastic time listening to today’s interview. Wasn’t that mind-blowing? I look forward to the next few interviews because I have some more mind-blowing fantastic interviews in the pipeline. I want to make sure you know to go to Dr. Nathan Bryan’s website and use the coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health for the amazing discount he’s giving all the listeners. You can go there by going to n1o1.com. Look for the show notes of today’s podcast learntruhealth.com to get all of the details of all the links for Dr. Nathan Bryan. Please come join the Facebook group if you haven’t already. It’s a very supportive group. We’ve got thousands of listeners there who love asking questions, answering them, and sharing their information, experiences, and testimonials. You can use the search function in the Facebook group. We’ve had the Facebook group for years. You can use the search function and dig through and read so many resources. There are so many wonderful resources in the Facebook group. And you might not know this, but you can go to learntruehealth.com, my website and use the search function there as well. So we’re coming up on 500 episodes soon. 

We have a lot of resources there. You can read the transcripts of the interviews as well. Should you want to peruse through other topics. We cover everything from emotional health, mental health, spiritual health, energetic health, and physical health. Even episodes on lifestyle and improving lifestyle, improving building healthy habits that stick and decreasing anxiety. All kinds of wonderful topics to explore in learntruehealth.com. 

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. My goal is to help as many people as possible to Learn True Health. Unfortunately, there is suffering that is not mandatory. Suffering is optional. That’s why I want to help people who are suffering as I suffered for so many years because the doctors I went to didn’t have the tools to help me. The doctors on my show, the holistic doctors, have the tools. They get the results. So I bring people on the show who get results that you don’t need to suffer anymore. So your mom, your dad, your sister, your friends, and your children don’t need to suffer anymore. 

And it’s a matter of finding the information, finding the right doctors, and applying it to lives. And that’s why I’m so grateful that you continue to share my podcasts with those you care about because together, we can help end suffering. So suffering shouldn’t be mandatory. It should be optional. There’s so much information out there. People have reversed Diabetes, reversed cancer, and reversed heart disease. People have reversed that they’ve suffered from reversed depression and addiction. They have done that. And we can help those you care about. We have the resources. So I suffered for so many years until I found holistic medicine and applied it to my life. I found the doctors that help and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. We can take this information to those we care about and help them heal and help them no longer suffer. So let’s end the suffering of those we care about. Continue to share this information. If you have any feedback and if you have any doctors you want me to interview that helped you, I love to hear from you. Come to join in the Facebook group and let me know. Come and feel free to email me at ashley@learntruehealth.com. We’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much. Enjoy and have a wonderful rest of the day.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Nathan Bryan!

Website – Dr. Nathan Bryan

Website – NO2U

Website – N101

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

Book by Dr. Nathan Bryan

Functional Nitric Oxide Nutrition: Dietary Strategies to Prevent and Treat Chronic Disease

Apr 14, 2022

Join the Learn True Health Facebook Group: LearnTrueHealth.com/group

BOOKS:
Proof of Heaven:
https://amzn.to/3JHSELt

The Map of Heaven:
https://amzn.to/3vjNQ9V

Living in a Mindful Universe:
https://amzn.to/3JK2Kvt
 
FREE online course in mindfulness is available to all at this link: http://ebenalexander.com/33days
 
 FREE meditation is available on the Sacred Acoustics website: https://www.sacredacoustics.com/pages/free-download-sign-up

 

Proof of Heaven: Neurosurgeon Shares His Journey into the After Life, Dr. Eben Alexander

https://www.learntruehealth.com/proof-of-heaven-neurosurgeon-shares-his-journey-into-the-after-life-dr-eben-alexander

 

Highlights

  • Understanding Gateway Valley on Dr. Eben’s life
  • What is Earthworm’s eye view
  • Interpretation of Near-Death Experience (NDE) and Shared Death Experience
  • What is the Coherence Technique of HeartMath Institute
  • What is Binaural Beat

 

NDE or near-death experience, for some people, is an uncomfortable topic to listen to or understand. Some testify to it being able to experience it first hand themselves, and our guests for today, Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell, will be sharing some more insights about NDE, as well as with The Mysteries of Consciousness, Death, Eternal Nature of the Soul, Afterlife, Heaven itself on their personal perspective.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. If you listen to the last episode with Dr. William Davis, Episode 476, we talked about a very specific strain of really healthy bacteria for the gut, Lactobacillus reuteri, and its many benefits. He shares how to culture it that you can get all the benefits, including a natural antidepressant, and helps even people with lifelong insomnia. He had shared that his sleep problems are lifelong sleep problems recovered after starting to eat the Lactobacillus reuteri. A yogurt that takes 36 hours at 100 degrees to culture and he uses cow dairy. Because my whole family is allergic to cow dairy, and we’re dairy-free. I’ve been experimenting with the different methods of using it. I made the most delicious batch and best batch yet. I was so excited that I wrote out the recipe and put it in the Facebook group. The Learn True Health Facebook group has the non-dairy recipe for making the Lactobacillus reuteri, which an antidepressant. It helps with sleep, increases joy, and stabilizes mood. It helped me tremendously, and I suffered from post-traumatic stress attacks in the last few months. Since eating the lactobacillus reuteri, I learned from Dr. William Davis and it all has in his book. You can listen to the last episode to get that information.

I want to tell you if you’re dairy-free and you’ve wanted to try his lactobacillus reuteri recipe, I’ve found a way to make it so delicious. I’ve tried with soy and it tastes really bad but it worked. I got all the benefits from it, but it didn’t taste great. Then I made it with coconut, which also did not taste great. I didn’t even want to eat it, but it still worked.

Then I tried to make water kefir which was unsuccessful, and I’m going to look into what I can do to see and I still want to try to make a drink out of it. Then I made it with organic raw cashews, and it was successful. So I laid out everything I did and put it in the Facebook group. Come and join the Learn True Health Facebook group. If you can’t find the post, just use the search function in the Facebook group and search for yogurt or the word cashew or Lactobacillus reuteri and you’ll find it there.

I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. It’s a bit different. Sometimes we do episodes that aren’t about physical health. We’ve done episodes about addiction, mental health, and emotional health and occasionally, we also cover spiritual health. I think it’s really important to have this attitude of no stone left unturned. Keep our minds so open that our brains would fall out. That was one of my favorite sayings. I learned about 14 years ago from a man I was listening to his podcast. He would cover topics so far out there, even for me. It helped me realize when we expand our minds and get into the learning state.

Being open to what we don’t know that doesn’t invalidate our belief system, like I’m learning different spiritual beliefs, wouldn’t make me less Christian. I still have very strong rooted beliefs in my spiritual practices, but understanding other people and other systems help me better understand the world. If we can gain a deeper foothold into our health by taking in new information and seeing the world through other eyes, that is a positive thing.

In today’s interview, we have a neurosurgeon who has documented a near-death experience. His brain was so sick that it could not have been performing the hallucinations or the visions that he was having. He had a one in a billion chance of surviving. He was so incredibly sick. All the doctors were amazed when he came back to life when his 10-year-old son was standing there begging him to come back to life and then he did. After seven days of being in a coma, his brain was absolutely beyond damaged. So the doctors were saying– well, okay, pull the plug, let’s let him go, that would be a humane thing to do.

He shares his story and his adventures since where he has been studying near-death experiences and sees that there are millions, in fact, documented near-death experiences that all have very similar qualities. So we can take that and look at our own lives and how we’re living our own life now. I think this is a positive message for humanity.

In today’s interview, if you don’t have any spiritual beliefs, it’s going to be beautiful. It won’t challenge anything, but for those who are strongly rooted in certain religions, it might not align with your religion, and that’s okay, too. This episode isn’t meant to change anyone’s beliefs about their religion. It complements because what it shows us, God is love. The infinite source of creation is there with a love that has been the documented experience of millions of people who’ve had near-death experiences, which is fascinating. We explore this topic. We also explore tools that can help people who are in anxiety and depression, feeling disconnected, and feel they’ve lost their purpose.

Please share this episode with those who would benefit from being uplifted. At the beginning of the interview, I shared that yesterday was the anniversary of my daughter’s birth and death. Last year, I faced that question– where’s my daughter? What happens to us when we pass and a close family member of mine is in their final moments of life right now? We’ve been facing hospice care for the last few months, helping with that. My husband’s been doing hospice care. Looking at our family and our life from that lens, this time on Earth is short. I hope that everyone listening comes away after listening to this interview feeling uplifted and feeling inspired to live the best life. No matter how long or short it is, leave a positive impact on the world, know that you’re loved, and focus on gratitude.

 

[00:07:45] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 477. I am so excited for today’s guests. We have on the show two amazing people, Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell. This is perfect in divine timing. As far as I’m concerned, this is the feedback I got after doing this podcast for six years now. The feedback I get from my listeners is that I’ve been searching for this information. I just looked in the last week and then boom– your podcast came up or I was having this problem with my child and the next episode that came out was the answer to my problem. Many times there’s this divine timing, although I typically have about ten or so interviews in the hopper to edit and publish. I feel guided when and what to publish. It’s like I’m told– okay, now’s the time for this topic that needs to be learned. Everyone needs to hear about this next topic. Its divine timing can be for the listeners, but sometimes the divine timing is for me too, because interviews will happen in my life right as I need them. I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me and where it was the problem I was going through. It just so happened that the interview was scheduled for the right time.

A very close family member of mine is in the final hours of their life right now. He’s been in hospice care for months and to have this interview be today even though we had to reschedule it, who was rescheduled to be at this moment. Where we’re all questioning what happens after we die? When we’re stuck with this realization, we’re not going to be here forever, which is motivating to live your life to the fullest now and do the best work we can while we’re here in this earthly realm. So what happens after we die? Do we just decompose? Is that it, or is there more?

What I love, our guests today have so much to share in this realm. The other piece of the divine timing for me in this particular interview was yesterday. I celebrated with my family the birth and death of my daughter. It was our first anniversary. This whole last year, I’ve been faced with grief and death and thinking about where we go when we die. Where’s my daughter? She’s not here. Where is she? Is there an afterlife? I’ve always had the knowledge of believing I was raised and I was Christian. I’ve had a very strong feeling that I’ve felt the presence of God with me. But not everyone hasn’t had that experience in their life.

To come from a scientific standpoint and in scientific observation, it’s very helpful to get a different perspective. I think today it’s going to be really exciting for everyone and this is something that we all have two things in common. We’re all born and we’re all going to die. That’s like if we can just sit around and go. It doesn’t matter where we were born, who we were born to. We all have these two things in common. There are a few more things in common like we all need to breathe and drink water. We start to see that we have a lot of common ground, but the fact is, we’re all faced with this sense of our own mortality and questions about what happens to the afterlife.

Welcome to the show, guys. I’m really excited to have you here today.

 

[00:11:45] Dr. Eben Alexander: Ashley, thank you so much for having us on. It’s great to be here.

 

[00:11:49] Karen Newell: Yes. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

 

[00:11:51] Ashley James: Absolutely. Dr. Alexander, your first book, I believe, was Proof of Heaven, then you wrote the Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe, of course with Karen. Could you both share what happened and what led you to this point you were authoring these books? I know there are some pretty big stories you have to share.

 

[00:12:23] Dr. Eben Alexander: Well, of course, it all started with the experience I had back in November of 2008. At that time, I was a 54-year-old neurosurgeon. I’d spent 15 years teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School thought I had some idea of how the brain, mind, and consciousness work. Then I had this extraordinary experience. It was one that absolutely should have killed me, severe gram-negative bacteria, meningoencephalitis. So I go into all the medical details in the book, Proof of Heaven.

Luckily, there’s also a medical case report published ten years after my coma by three doctors not involved in my care. Who went a lot further than I did in assessing my medical records, analyzing them, and making two major conclusions. One is that my brain was documented to be way too ill to have supported any dream or hallucination that was not possible given the extent of my illness. The other thing was that I spent a week in a coma due to this severe and very rare and adults of bacterium, Indigo encephalitis.

My doctors had estimated early in the week, and I had a 10% chance of survival. By the end of the week, only a 2% chance with no chance of recovery. That’s why on that Sunday morning, day seven of coma, they recommended just stopping the antibiotics and letting nature take its course. But, of course, that’s when I came back to this world. But the point that the case report doctors were making is that my recovery was miraculous. The medical peer reviewers at the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases published it. The case report in September 2018 challenged the doctors who wrote it and said, how do you explain this? This case is absurd. This kind of patient doesn’t end up making a full recovery.

That’s when they said, well, because he had a near-death experience, he was gifted with this miraculous recovery. And the peer-reviewing medical scientists said, okay, that’s good enough for us, and they published it. The reason why the doctors who wrote the case report knew of other cases, for example, Anita Moorjani, who had advanced stage four lymphoma, a profound near-death experience, and then she came back from all that and cured cancer. Likewise, Mary C. Neal, an orthopedic surgeon, had an over 30-minute warm water drowning and then recovered from that completely. So anyway, that’s the main point for all of us because in Learning True Health, truly, the power of this kind of mind over matter healing here even goes far beyond the placebo effect is something available to all of us. And that’s one of the main reasons I’ve shared my story.

 

[00:15:07] Ashley James: That’s so beautiful. We now understand your background. Karen, where do you come into play with all this?

 

[00:15:16] Karen Newell: Well, I met Eben about three years after his coma and this is before any of his books had come out. We were at a workshop learning how to use sound to get into expanded states of consciousness and I heard that he had a near-death experience. I’ve met others who’d had near-death experiences. Just to start a conversation, since I didn’t know his story, I went right to the heart of the matter. I said, what was the big lesson you learned? What was the big thing you came back with? Because near-death experiencers always come back with some usually deep personal lesson.

He looked at me and said that the brain doesn’t create consciousness, and I was confused. I said, well, why would anyone think that it does. When we met, Eben came from this very materialist background where he thought it was birth to death and nothing more. So the physical world is all that exists, and everything else is just an illusion. I was coming from the opposite like you described when I was young. I just had this knowing many of us do, and we have this knowing that we’ve been here before. This isn’t just the beginning, and we may come back again. Certainly, this idea of a soul to me was very certain in my mind, and it wasn’t through any specific religious teachings.

Although, like you, I was raised Christian, it just came from my own kind of inner understanding. When Eben said the brain doesn’t create consciousness, I never thought the brain created consciousness. I thought that consciousness was what we are, or a soul consciousness, energy, spirit. That’s where we realized we were coming from opposite ends of the spectrum and Eben had just learned this profound lesson through his direct personal experience. That’s what intrigued him and I was taken aback when he said the most profound lesson he learned had to do with science. To him, this evidence could end the entire worldview belief system of reductive materialism. So I asked him, and I said, didn’t you experience love? What about the love? Wouldn’t that maybe be a more profound personal lesson? And he said, well, yes, I definitely experienced that love, but you can’t bring that back here.

It’s so intense and overwhelming on Earth. It’s not possible to experience that kind of love. So I looked at him again, a little confused. And I said, well, I’ve experienced that love without a near-death experience through spiritual, meditative experiences that I cultivated intentionally. I had experienced the love that many of these near-death experiencers talk about. That’s what intrigued Eben and he said–Oh, my gosh, and so you can tell just from that information, how many areas we had to discuss in order to find that common ground that we felt when we met?

 

[00:18:24] Ashley James: Can you share any details you remember from your near-death experience?

 

[00:18:30] Dr. Eben Alexander: Yes, there’s a tremendous amount to the story, but just too abbreviated for this discussion. It’s important to point out that one of the atypical features of my near-death experience was that I was amnesic and had no memory of Eben Alexander’s life. I had no words, no language, no knowledge of Earth as the universe, and it really was an empty slate. So I realized in the months after my coma that was absolutely necessary for me to learn some of the deeper lessons of the journey. It had to have some of those atypical features for me to avoid rejecting it out of hand is impossible to make sense of. Then the journey itself and this amnesic state started in what I call the earthworm’s eye view, a very primitive course, a kind of unresponsive realm. It was like being in dirty jello. So there came this spinning malady of light that opened like a portal and led up into this rich, ultra-real Gateway Valley, where I found myself next.

The Gateway Valley would be the kind of realm where all of us would reunite with our higher souls, with souls of departed loved ones, go through life reviews, and then make plans for the next incarnations. All that kind of thing. But in my world in this Gateway Valley, I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There were millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling and vast formations. There was an incredibly beautiful landscape down below us. That was a meadow surrounded by forests with waterfalls and the crystal blue pools, thousands of beings dancing. They were all dressed in very simple but very colorful garb.

All of the festivities I witnessed there, including all the rich plant life with no signs of death or decay, were being fueled. Because up above are these floating orbs of angelic choirs emanating chants and anthems and hymns that were just thundering through my awareness and completely enlivened that entire scene. That’s when I recognized that I wasn’t alone on the butterfly wing.

A beautiful spiritual guide was a young woman with sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, a broad forehead, and a broad smile. She never said a word. She didn’t have to. Her deep emotional truth came straight into my awareness, telepathically and emotionally. That message, I think, was the central message I was to bring back to this world through all fellow beings. You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You’re deeply cared for. I can’t tell you how refreshing and reassuring that was at that time.

At that point, I was aware of all of the lower four-dimensional space-time, this material world collapsing down all of that spiritual realm of the Gateway Valley, including a different ordering of causality, then I call deep time. That’s what allows for things like life reviews, which are not just remembering events of your life but reliving them in a detailed fashion.

I witnessed all that stuff collapsing as the angelic choirs provided yet another musical portal to higher and higher levels. That portal led me up into what I call the core. The core was a complete resolution of all dualities and kinds of paradoxes of this existence, into that oneness with the Divine. An infinitely loving healing force that God forces that so many have encountered.

Over thousands of years, I would say that those encounters are the basis of all of our great religions, from prophets and mystics. I’ve realized that even though when I came back to this world, people who’ve read Proof of Heaven will realize, I called that deity alm. Because that was the sound, I heard the resonance in this infinity and eternity. That’s what I brought back and I realized that it’s a waste of time to say whether this is God or Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it. So there’s some profound agreement about the love, compassion, mercy, and acceptance of that infinitely loving source of our very conscious awareness. That’s what I realized in this core realm.

I was told there would teach you many things, but you’re not here to stay. You’ll be going back. But, of course, all of those mini-lessons about reincarnation, the eternity of the soul about the fact that we’re sharing one mind. All of that was presented to me in this powerful passion. But then I would tumble back down to that earthworm eye view. That’s what I came to realize by remembering the musical notes. This melody would conjure up that light portal back into the Gateway Valley, and I always experienced that same beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing and different lessons that would happen in that Gateway Valley. But always, I would ascend back up through the angelic light portal into the core realms, that oneness with the Divine.

There finally came a time when they weren’t kidding, and I could no longer conjure up the musical notes of the melody to bring me that passageway up out of the earth worm’s eye view. To say I was sad at that point would be an understatement. I also realized a trust in the universe at that point. That’s also when I witnessed six faces that turned out to be what are called vertical time anchors. Five of them were physically present in the ICU room for the last 24 hours, and I was in a coma. One of them was Susan Ranches, a family friend I’d first met back in the early 1970s in freshman college English class. So many decades later, my family knew that she had done channeling work with coma patients, which helped some of them return to life. My family asked her to intervene. She channeled to me from 120 miles away. Her presence was clear to me as the physically present people in the ICU room.

I had first-hand experience of the absolute reality of channeling, which I would have denied to even existed before my coma. But, of course, I’ve grown a lot from this coma, and at any rate, it was at that point that the six-face that I saw were the ones that brought me back to this world. That was the face of a 10-year-old boy, who was my son Bond. Even though I said, my amnesia was still very active. I had no idea who this being was. But it was on day seven of coma.

Sunday morning, the doctors had just till the family conference, saying it was time to withdraw medical care and let me go. When Bond overheard that, even though they protected him from the worst news during the week, he ran down the hallway. I was lying there on my ventilator as I had been for the last seven days. He pulled up my eyelids, and I promise you, I did not see him with the eyes. I didn’t hear him with my ears. But he was pleading with me– Daddy, you’re going to be okay as if somehow that would make it. And now, all of a sudden, deep in the spiritual realms, I had assumed that this whole adventure could continue or cease. It didn’t matter. All of a sudden, I realized there was another soul involved. I had a tremendous responsibility to him. I did not understand his words, but I could sense that I knew I had to come back to this world from his pleading.

When I did, within the next few hours, opening my eyes, struggled, and fought the ventilator. That’s when the doctor pulled the breathing tube out. To their shock, I was coming back and saying words and showing some neurologic signs of progress. Although I still didn’t recognize loved ones at the bedside, my mother, sisters, and sons, those memories came back very rapidly. As did language over hours and the next few days, all my semantic knowledge of cosmology, physics, and neuroscience came back over about two months.

During that time, of course, I was wrestling back and forth with how to interpret my experience. When I first tried to tell my doctors about it, they said we couldn’t even understand how you’re coming back to us. But you can forget about it because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. My first statement to my son, Eben the fourth, who was majoring in neuroscience at the time and came home two days after I got out of the hospital, I told him it was way too real to be real. That’s how I interpreted the experience in the context my doctors tell me the dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. But over the next weeks and months, going back to the hospital, talking about doctors, going through medical records, neurologic exams, scans, all of that. I realized that my brain was in no shape to harbor any dream or hallucination, much less the most extraordinary, detailed, memorable, and meaningful experience of my entire life. How did that happen when my brain was so demonstrably offline? That’s why the medical community takes my case so seriously. You find it probably mentioned, for example, in the recent bigelowinstitute.org contest concerning the best scientific evidence for survival of consciousness beyond permanent bodily death.

 

[00:27:32] Ashley James: This experience that you’ve had and other people have had, it’s not common. A lot of people who are in comas, not everyone has the experience you had. But some have the medication, and it was the coma, and it was brain damage, and just things are firing off weird. Someone could explain it like that, but this isn’t common. If that were the case, then everyone in a coma or with brain damage or an infection in their brain would have the same experience?

 

[00:28:16] Dr. Eben Alexander:  Well, this is the beauty of my case. The facts when you line them up from a medical perspective, as that case report does. They make it crystal clear that this brain could not have had any experience. There was no way for it to support a dream or hallucination because of the extensive damage to the neocortex. Then, of course, you’ve got the healing to explain. The healing completely defies medical expectations. There are no other cases of this kind of severe meningitis resulting in somebody who makes a full recovery. So that’s why this kind of exceptional case makes the point.

But to get back to your original statement, it turns out that NDE is quite common. Probably 15 to 20% of people with cardiac arrest have some elements of a true near-death experience. They’re insanely common when you start to look at all of it. So when you follow Gallup polls, that kind of information suggests 3 to 5% of people on Earth have had NDE. Four hundred million people or more have had NDE. Their commonality is far more striking than that they don’t happen to everyone.

 

[00:29:29] Ashley James: You call it a near-death experience. A friend of mine was pronounced legally dead and then came back to life and shared his experience with me of what we don’t know what to call heaven paradise. The Bible says we go to paradise first and heaven later. Wherever he was, he was clearly in the presence of God. He describes that tremendous love that is so intense, beautiful, and divine. He says it was like God is a son, that we’re all orbiting around his experience. His friend, whom he had met, had committed suicide and was distraught about that.

He met up with his friend, and his friend said that his guilt kept him from getting close to his love. It kept him like Pluto is like way out there orbiting but just not close enough, and that he was wrestling with the guilt of what he had done. And the hurt that he had caused his friends and family. So my friend ended up having a near-death experience again, saying that his friend had resolved it in the spiritual realm, had resolved and healed from it. Just these interesting experiences that people are having, and there are commonalities like everyone describes that love. Intense love is the sensation of being close to God and being close to our Creator. So that it is, it’s intense love.

Karen, you say that through your spiritual practices you have tapped into that and have experienced it. Do you teach this in the book Living in a Mindful Universe?

 

[00:31:26] Karen Newell: Somewhat, you can teach with your words but the experience of love must be generated as an experience. When we just talk about it, it doesn’t have the same sort of impact. Yes, I teach practices where people can start cultivating these kinds of experiences. I know for me, at first, it wasn’t easy. I grew up in a family where we were not demonstrative when it comes to our love. We weren’t saying I love you and all of that. We were a perfectly normal family. There wasn’t abuse going on or anything like that, but I wasn’t used to expressing love. As I got older, my parents had been divorced. I had a whole idea about how love is not necessarily always successful. I just was so curious, and eventually, when I started reading about it, I could only understand it intellectually, which is just not the same as the experience.

It was the work of HeartMath Institute that brought me to where I am now. That’s because they’ve been studying the heart for decades. They find that the heart emits an electromagnetic field. It expands and contracts around our body, and the brain also has one. The heart’s electromagnetic field is much, much bigger than the brain. The electric part is 60 times greater, and the magnetic part is 3000 times greater than the brain. So it expands and contracts around your body based on your emotional state.

Emotions like love, happiness, and joy will create a very large electromagnetic field, whereas emotions like grief, sadness, or anger might create a small electromagnetic field. What’s interesting is that this electromagnetic field seems to influence people around you. Whatever emotions are inside of you are the ones that are being radiated by your heart naturally. So I took this very seriously. I don’t want to have anything in my heart that might offend someone else. I was thinking mostly about my family and friends. I don’t want to affect them in a bad way.

I started to learn some of the HeartMath techniques, and they have one called Coherence Technique. It’s as simple as generating a feeling of gratitude in your heart, and it sounds simple. Let me generate a feeling of gratitude, and all I could do was generate thoughts of gratitude. I could think of things I was grateful for, but it didn’t change how I felt. I took the advice given and had to go over several different kinds of sessions where I had memories from my past. What made me feel joyful? What can I be grateful for? It’s going to be different for each of us. It was a memory of a stray dog my mom had taken in and turned out to be my childhood dog through college. She ended up having puppies underneath my bed just a short time after we adopted her, and for me, it was a magical moment. My mom probably thought it was a big mess, and I thought it was just beautiful, living, cute, little, lively creatures right there under my bed. And my dog trusted me to have them under my bed, not my brothers.

It was to memory, and from there, I remembered all the dogs I had ever known and loved. That connection with dogs and animals started to allow me to feel this flicker, this warm, glowing flicker in my heart. I thought— Oh my gosh, that’s it, and then it went away. So I had to go to a little practice. Eventually, when you’re able to generate these feelings of gratitude, you can have the intention to attract that love that exists from the source, from God, from the universe, whatever you want to say.

Once you’re able to generate it from within, it expands, and you attract this greater love. It is a framework of how it works, but that’s exactly how it worked for me. Everyone can learn how to do this, and we feel that love is just as overwhelming as your friend was driving. I can’t know if it’s the same as when in your near-death experience or feeling it may not be as intense. But wow, it’s certainly wonderful to feel. If I’m just feeling a fraction, five or 10% of what they’re feeling is worth it. So you feel this warm connection to something greater. You feel like you are always well in the universe that nothing can be wrong even if you’re in the middle of hardships, and all seems to make sense.

The love that I feel is our birthright when you think about the term making love. Ideally, we’re making love when a baby is created. I love how Eben puts it, and he calls them homes for souls. When you create a baby from the love between two individuals, you’re creating and making love. You’re creating a home for a soul to live in. I always think it wouldn’t be just an ideal world if that’s how every baby was created. But if not, we can still rediscover that love even if we’re not gifted with it throughout our lives.

 

[00:37:18] Ashley James: My husband had a similar experience growing up. Similar to that, there wasn’t a lot of demonstrative affection and love in his household. His dad just said to my husband in his 50s, just two months ago, said I love you for the first time. There’s a lot of emotional healing going on. In my life and my family’s life, just imagine being 50. So what is my husband,53? For the first time hearing, I love you, and his dad never said it to anyone. He didn’t see his dad give you a handshake, not a hug. These last few months, there’s been a lot of love and a lot of discovery of gratitude. So when our daughter was born and died, we turned to gratitude to focus on what we’re grateful for, or you’re focusing on what we don’t have.

A lot of people get wrapped up, especially in the material world. If only I had that Tesla. If only I had a house and only I had a million dollars. If only I had a better job. If only I had a better body or this or that. If only I had this carrot on a stick that we get wrapped up in. It’s the chasing of what we don’t have. I find it interesting to look at other religions or spiritual practices like Buddhism style or Zen. They say attachment creates suffering, and I would say attachment to what you don’t have to create suffering because the things I do have them attached to if I can stay focused on the gratitude around what I have. So what I have now, be grateful for what I have that makes me feel so much joy and thankfulness. That’s a prayer that I love to do. I take God if you don’t know what to pray for. It’s like we’re not asking Santa. It’s not like a Christmas list. I don’t want a pony. So when we’re praying, we could just be grateful. It could just be listing off everything you’re grateful for every day. Just thank You, God, for what you’ve given me. Thank You for what I have. Thank You for the help I do have.

 

[00:40:00] Karen Newell: You bring up an interesting point that we often look for objects outside of us to meet our needs. One way that we like to teach intention. If you want to create something in your life, it’s not to think– oh, that Cadillac or Tesla, whatever it is. But it’s what is the feeling you would have when you have that thing. Instead, focus on the feeling you’d like to feel. Generate that feeling. Just imagine you already have that thing that you want. What does it feel like?

When you generate that feeling instead of a thought of a particular thing you want, somehow the universe seems to know how to provide you with whatever will continue for that feeling to go on. Sometimes we don’t know if that Tesla may not be the thing that makes us feel that way. Maybe it’s a vacation to South Africa. Who knows? Sometimes, when we get an attachment to things can be so damaging because they may, even once we finally get them, not satisfy us in the way we had hoped. So it’s just a different way.

 

[00:41:05] Dr. Eben Alexander: I just pointed out one of the deepest lessons from a near-death experience. I think most near-death experiencers would agree that the true currency of a soul in terms of successfully navigating and growing through this life is all about relationships. You’ve been able to share love and kindness and compassion and mercy with others. The more successfully you can harvest the love of the universe for all that is. This focus on material things definitely falls away after a near-death experience because we learn truly. It’s all about our relationships. The more we can foster that sense of love and kindness and help others, our lives will be better.

 

[00:41:52] Ashley James:  I did an interview a few years ago with a man traveling the world and studying depression and addiction. He talked about a study where they looked at cultures with the most material possessions and cultures with the least—looking at the level of satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy in one’s life. What I found fascinating is that you think the child with the most toys would be the happiest, and it’s the opposite of the children in South America who have one possession, and that’s a soccer ball, are the happiest. They’re far happier. These families with far less are far happier, more satisfied, feel more grateful, and have less depression than those in North America who have all the possessions we could ever want because they have the one soccer ball.

These kids have one soccer ball, and they get like 15, 20, and 30 friends together to play. It’s the relationships they have. In Latin America, the focus is strongly on the family. Everyone has cousins and aunts and uncles in the family structure, and relationships are important. More important than possessions. In America, culturally, it looks like we value possessions more than relationships. So it’s interesting to shift what we value.

 

[00:43:35] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say the whole world of addiction and alcoholism is all about this notion of trying to fill this hole with material goods, material stuff, and substances that give you certain feelings. And what you realize in that addiction and alcoholism were you’re trying to fill a spiritual hole with material stuff. The only way to fill a spiritual hole is a spiritual matter. So growth of [inaudible 00:44:03] soul and a deeper understanding of one’s relationship. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the ego because the ego-mind, that little voice in our head, is not our ally in this journey.

The ego would rather see a toe’s dead and see itself dead that’s why many therapists do a ritual sacrifice. The ego allows it to be reborn in a much healthier kind of higher soul form, and not one so self-centered because that ego can lead us into tremendous toxicity, trying to satisfy its needs. The more we come to recognize this kind of bigger picture of who we are, it’s all about relationships, and it’s all about love and sharing kindness and compassion and mercy with others. The more satisfied we are with our lot in life. That’s done with gratitude, and forgiveness gives us tremendous tools to overcome most of the apparent hardships that human beings face.

 

[00:45:48] Ashley James: In the early days after your coma, did you begin to look at other examples? Can you share some other stories that struck you that made you realize others have had the same experience? You did mention two or three people shared the stories of what surprised you as you were in the early days you were doing your research and understanding that what you had was a visit to heaven.

 

[00:45:32] Dr. Eben Alexander: One of the people common things to encounter in near-death experience or just the dying experience in hospice care, in terminal patient care. What are you encountering in the soul of the departed loved one? In fact, for me, that means you’ve got an authentic experience right there. But, of course, the [inaudible 00:45:52]coma has said that the hallucinations you’re encountering as a whole of a departed loved one. I now know those are very real encounters; in fact, that’s imprimatur proving it to be real. Many other features of NDEs are quite common. The notion of going from darkness into light is sometimes described through a tunnel. Certainly, encountering that infinitely loving and healing God force is something that many NDEs involve. They also can involve encountering religious figures, although that’s much less common. For example, encountering Jesus Christ or Muhammad or something like that is not very common. Certainly, the encounters with the souls of departed loved ones can be very evidential to help someone realize that it’s all about relationships and that our souls do not die.

The biggest gift to me in this whole experience of sharing my story publicly is that thousands of people share their experiences with me. That kind of thing has proven the reality of this. We shared the resonance and overlap of these stories in the second book, The Map of Heaven. In our third book, Living in Mindful Universe, we go the distance to make this argument that science and spirituality are coming together. So the only way for them to move forward is by this kind of shared acknowledgment of rehab of spiritual reality. So that is one where our minds are all connected. That’s one of the deepest pieces of evidence for the reality of this afterlife, and all that is this notion of one mind.

I would say that the game has just changed dramatically in the last year about this question of an afterlife. Robert Bigelow, an aerospace engineer in Las Vegas, put up $1.8 million in prize money and challenged scientists who study this question– what is the best evidence for survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death? He received over 200 essays written by groups studying the question of the afterlife for more than five years from a scientific perspective. The 29 winning essays are available to the public for free right now, at bigelowinstitute.org.

If you go and read the first place essay by Jeffrey Mishlove, who spent more than half a century studying this evidence, you’ll realize, of course, there’s an afterlife. We don’t understand how it works yet. Certainly not going to fit into you all kinds of religious or scientific wishes of the day. The more we investigate and the more we find out its reality, not only in the afterlife realm. Many of those essays also discuss the scientific evidence for reincarnation.

Reincarnation was never anything I considered as part of reality before my coma. My coma journey showed me very clearly that our souls come back again and again. In this process of continued refinement, but given the importance of relationships, you never have to worry that a loved one who is reincarnated before they would be available to you at your own passage. Some people worry a lot about that. That’s where that whole notion of deep time and a different causal ordering from this spiritual perspective is so important to get. So if you go to bigelowinstitute.org and start reading those essays, you’ll find a tremendous amount of evidence. Reading those essays, no rational person will ever doubt the reality of the afterlife and reincarnation again.

It just means we need a much bigger theater of operations to understand and explain the brain-mind relationships and the nature of reality that we seem to witness as human beings.

 

[00:49:49] Ashley James:  In science, because of your latest book, you talk about how science is now catching up to the spiritual in understanding it. Is there anything from your book scientifically that helps us better understand the spiritual realm or the afterlife?

 

[00:50:12] Dr. Eben Alexander: Yes, we go into great detail in the book Living in a Mindful Universe to do two major things. One is to make the scientific case for the primacy of consciousness of philosophical opposition, known as objective idealism. I think the whole world of quantum physics has been poised to acknowledge that reality for a long time. And the founding fathers of the field sifted the primacy of consciousness and the oneness of mind. In fact, in the second place winning essay Dr. Pim Van Lommel wrote a beautiful scientific explanation based on NDEs that he studied for over decades as a cardiologist.

Towards the end of this essay, he makes the argument for the one mind. We’re all sharing this one consciousness of [inaudible 00:51:02] to top-down calls of principles of the universe. He lists four scientific resources for this one-mind idea. One is the book, One Mind, by our friend and colleague, Dr. Larry Dossey, which came out in 2013. A wonderful expert vision of this oneness of mind between human beings that we share with other life forms, too—a very important concept.

He also mentioned the book Spiritual Science by Steve Taylor. He mentioned a Beautiful Paper by Bernardo Kastrup. I think it’s in the Journal of Consciousness studies entitled The Universe in Consciousness. Then he lists our book Living in a Mindful Universe as the fourth major scientific resource of the one mind. I would add Pim Van Lommel’s book, Consciousness Beyond Life. I think those five resources together will give people a full-blown scientific view of this concept of the one mind and how top-down causality from the mental air of the universe explains a tremendous amount of quantum physics about the hard problem of consciousness. So this is an impossible problem for materialism to try and conjure up a way for phenomenal experience to emerge from any arrangement of physical matter like the substance in the brain.

We also go into the apparent unity of consciousness, known as the binding problem in the philosophy of mind. Especially in this discussion of the consilience of supporting the one mind hypothesis for the primordial mind hypothesis, as we call it in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe. All the evidence for nonlocal consciousness comes out of the world of parapsychology. So this is the kind of evidence that I would have dismissed and debunked before my coma out of pure willful ignorance.

I know now that’s a pretty foolish position to take the evidence for things like telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, presentiment, psychokinesis, distance healing, power of prayer, near-death experiences, shared death experiences. These are identical in quality to near-death that happened in very healthy people and past life memories and children suggestive of reincarnation.

You go to uvadops.org— University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies. For more than six decades, they’ve accumulated over 2500 cases of past life memories in children, 1700 plus of those cases have been quoted solved. That is the research. They identify the person described as living the previous life of that described by that child. All this evidence is what we cover in Living in a Mindful Universe. It takes a store to a very profound consilience and consolidation of scientific evidence supporting the notion of the one mind. Our souls come back and again in this refinement process towards oneness with the Divine.

 

[00:54:04] Ashley James: Karen, as you wrote this book with Eben, the Living in a Mindful Universe, I always like to talk to authors because although they are the experts of their book, they’re also the students. To get into that position of learning while you’re researching for your book, I love what unfolds for authors. What unfolded that surprised you the most as you guys wrote this book together?

 

[00:54:36] Karen Newell:  What unfolded surprised me? Eben is very scientific, as you can hear from how he explains everything. Our goal was to make it accessible to the non-scientific mind while also ensuring that these science-minded people would not be thinking– Oh, you took shortcuts and all of that. I thought science was not something that was my forte and one of the exercises we went through in the book is when Eben did write with a very scientific passion. So I had to understand that goal, and that’s how it would stay in the book.

I learned a lot about quantum physics and the experiments in quantum physics, the double-slit experiment. Everyone always talks about the difference etween a photon and a wave. None of that had been of any interest to me, and I had to learn that. So in the process of doing it, I learned how to describe it in ways that laypeople would understand. That was interesting, a topic that I had avoided for my whole life. Then, suddenly, I was helping to try to explain it so that other people could understand it.

That was a really interesting few months, and we still go through that now. Not as much because I’ve learned so much, but when he’s trying to explain a concept, if I don’t get it, the burden is on him to make sure that I do. That’s been an interesting exercise to bring together the hardcore heavy science into a more accessible format. So that people who are more spirit-minded can access it and understand why it matters in our daily lives. Because of all of these things we can talk about, the philosophers pontificate about the reality of our universe, but when it comes down to it, it’s the experience. Individual people are walking around in this world. So that’s what matters. So that’s what we brought together. For me, that challenge was bringing science in.

 

[00:57:02] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would simply add that was a huge part of our effort. The book was not just to explain these things from a scientific perspective. But to offer people tools to explore their own life and consciousness because I had come to realize within two years in a coma if I had any hope of understanding the deeper nature of my journey. I had a much more active cultivating, navigating, and exploring my consciousness, which I ended up doing through meditation.

In Living in a Mindful Universe, we also talk about Karen’s work. She’s the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, and that’s a form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment that I use an hour to a day and have been doing for the last ten plus years. In my own personal exploration, we wanted to share a personal experience with people. The book also has some indicators and information to help people in their own exploration of consciousness.

 

[00:58:00] Ashley James: I love hearing that a neurosurgeon likes the binaural beats music and uses it. So this is exciting because I’ve loved listening to these different melodies with different wavelengths, and I’ve always found it really helpful. I found this one on YouTube that’s like—come, focus and study for ADHD people, and I put that on. I could focus for like an hour while I was listening to it. It’s just beautiful melodies going back and forth. It helps me focus that I always laugh because it’s like for ADHD people to focus and study. I juggle so many things, I have a kid at homeschool, taking care of everyone and everything in my life, and then I’ve got the podcast. I’m constantly being interrupted by all these other things. So I think it’s my environment that makes me ADHD.

 

[00:59:04] Karen Newell:  You’re not alone. It’s not just you don’t have to label it as ADHD. We all can use the tools to help us get into a better state of focus you mentioned in these YouTube videos. We create at sacredacoustics.com. We create the same type of recordings. Just to caution on YouTube, the audio quality can only be so high when you merry it with a video. You’re not getting the best quality, the best potential to deliver binaural beats. You might want to check out sacredacoustics.com.

We have a free download that you can get by entering your email address. We also have something called the whole mind bundle, and it includes recordings that deliver Delta, Theta, and Alpha signals. Those Alpha signals that you’re probably listening to help you get into that more focused state. Theta signals will help you go a little deeper into a more meditative state, and Delta signals will help you sleep. So many, many people listen to these recordings to help them sleep.

So this whole mind bundle it’s available at sacredacoustics.com. We use that in a pilot study. A psychiatrist in New York City applied them in her psychiatric practice. She prescribed this set of recordings that people can sometimes listen to flexibly while doing other activities, just like you said. Also, there are shorter recordings that people can use for like 20 minutes a day to help them establish a regular meditative practice.

What she found with Dr. Anna Yusim and then published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in February 2020 was that a 26% reduction in anxiety occurred. People were able to sleep better, focus better, and reduce their anxiety. The control group, the patients in the same practice, did not listen to the recordings but only had regular therapy. Over the same period of about two weeks, they saw a 7% reduction in anxiety. So 26 versus 7% just by adding listening to these recordings.

Even if you’re listening to them to help you focus, they could potentially help to reduce your anxiety. One obvious way is if you’re able to focus and get your work done, you’re not as anxious about getting everything finished. Do they seem to play another role in really helping to relax the brain? Beta is the state we’re in when we’re walking around, talking, and anxious, and that’s a higher state. Binaural Beats are designed to deliver these lower states of awareness by delivering one signal to one year. A slightly different signal to the other ear. The difference between those two frequencies gives you the brainwave state we’re trying to deliver.

So Delta, the border between delta and theta, is right at four hertz. So many of our audio recordings deliver a four-hertz signal that borders between awakening asleep. So this allows you to support the body and profound relaxation, but the mind doesn’t fall asleep. It’s still aware. That’s the meditative space, the hypnagogic state where we can start to release all the emotional traumas, focus on feelings that we want to manifest in our lives, ask questions about problems that we might be having, and get some answers. We can also use that space to do lucid dreaming kind of activities.

It’s also possible to connect with your departed loved ones. Those who have passed from this world are often trying to contact and stay connected to people who are still here living on Earth in their human bodies. So when we are more open to that, when we can get into a relaxed state, we might more readily notice this attention they’re trying to give us.

There are many applications that people use these recordings for, not just focus. Certainly, the focus is one of those primary tasks that we all need help with during the day. Certainly, these days, anxiety, addiction, all of that is just running rampant. So any kind of tool that people can use at the beginning of COVID, that’s right when this study came out. Actually, right when it was published. I wanted to make these recordings available to others right when we entered into these lockdowns when people were panicking and so nervous and upset about what was going on.

I drastically reduced the price of these recordings to $19 for a whole set of nine recordings and a PDF guide that teaches you how to use that. I also made a free option because many people are in financial uncertainty. I didn’t want there to be any barrier at all. So many people have taken us up on that offer, and I feel gratitude towards them because I understand we are all part of one mind or one consciousness and one heart. So I feel that each of us takes the time to quiet the mind, release emotional traumas, focus on that essence of who we truly are, and find that meaning and purpose in our lives. As each person does that, I am so grateful because that contributes to the whole. So this is what I feel every one of us can do to contribute to the whole. We’re not only helping ourselves, but we’re helping everyone else by bringing our health into balance.

 

[01:05:08] Ashley James: I love it, and thank you so much for making that free for those in financial hardships. I am so grateful for people who are helping people. That experience of being we are all connected, I said that at the beginning. We’re all born, we all die, we have a lot in common, and if we could take on this idea that we’re all part of these raw pieces of the puzzle. I read something once God loves you so much. You’re one of his children. He also loves you so much that he is like your worst enemy. The person that you hate so much. He loves them just as much, and it’s like being a parent with two fighting kids.

If you can look at that person who you despise, maybe because of where they come from, or their background or what they believe in, their different political beliefs or different religious beliefs, or they’re just on the opposite spectrum of one of your values or one of your beliefs. You look at them, and you can’t understand them. You don’t like them as an entire group of people because they’re on the opposite part of the belief system than you. If you can look at those people and get that even though on this plane of existence at this very moment in the mindset and you guys can’t see eye to eye. You might not like each other because of your beliefs and values and whatever it is.

If you can both get that you were born into a family, you all have many things in common. That God loves you. That you are loved, showered with love and gratitude, and can transmute even your worst enemy in your mind. When you realize that this person, as much as you don’t like them or because of their beliefs, you guys have so much more in common than you think. If we could all live that way, we could all look at every one. Imagine if all politicians could look across the other side and go; we have so much in common.

Why don’t we focus on what we have in common and the common good we want to do? Of course, it doesn’t sell headlines. The mainstream media wants to keep us in fear, keeps us like it’s clickbait. Life right now could be social media’s clickbait and everything that is causing turmoil. There have been studies done that prove that things on Facebook and Instagram are increasing suicide among youth. I think suicide is now the second leading cause of death in youth under the age of 24. Mental and emotional health that’s the true pandemic right now. If we look at how many people are on antidepressants and anxiety meds.

I love that you talked about what we’re missing in cultivating spiritual health when we cultivate spiritual health that helps us heal our mental and emotional health. I found a new church. I just love it and have been going several times a week. And that’s where I’ve been doing so much of my emotional healing and working through the post-traumatic stress that I’ve had over the last year. We’re worshiping and praising, and we have so much gratitude. Everyone is in a state of gratitude, and then the whole, there are hundreds of us, and we all feel what’s described as the Holy Spirit. We all feel a connection to God, and it is so intense and so beautiful. It just feels so real.

I understand what you said about how you can practice spiritual experiences, especially with gratitude that gets you in that state of love. I’d love for you guys to talk about– either one of you. What kind of tools could be helpful that you already have mentioned a few? Do you have any more tools that could be helpful for those who are suffering from grief, loss, depression, and anxiety which is something I feel that so many are suffering from right now?

 

[01:10:05] Karen Newell:  What is one of the very simple tools I often recommend to people is just to imagine that your breath is moving in and out of your heart. You can imagine your breath. A lot of meditative teachers will have you practice imagining what is coming in and out of your left toe. Something anywhere on your body it’s an exercise in moving your awareness. But when you imagine that it’s moving in and out of your heart, it’s filling up a bubble around your body, a little sphere. If you can imagine that your breath moves in and out of you in all directions, this really moves you out of your thinking mind. That’s where your distress is coming from. The heart does not have a linguistic center. Interesting Heart Math will tell you that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.

I feel like it’s collecting information out in the world and sending it up to the brain. Then the brain has to assign meaning to it and come up with words to describe it. We can escape those words, that little voice that maybe is telling us we’re not good enough or keeping us in a state of procrastination instead of productivity. Whatever it is, move your awareness to your heart. Imagine your breath is moving in and out of there. That’s a beautiful exercise that can help get people wrapped around it. I will tell you that some addiction doctors have used our free recordings, the alm recordings, right on patients when they’re in distress. They’ll come in, and they’ll be all strung out, and they can’t get them to come to have a conversation. So this doctor will pop the headphones. You have to use headphones to get the full power of these recordings. Put the headphones on the patients, and they just get calm right away. So lots and lots of tools related to the sound and just how you hold your awareness.

 

[01:12:14] Dr. Eben Alexander: The only other point I was making is a key starting point for people. Kind of new to this is in this kind of meditation, going within what you’re doing is acknowledging that this kind of mental air of the universe is something shared throughout the universe with great influence. The important step to take at the beginning of any such meditation is that one has to realize they are not to identify without running a stream of thoughts in their head. So many people think the running stream of thoughts in their heads is who they are. It’s their identity.

I’ll point out that it is your ego-mind, and that certainly serves some purpose in the general survival of biological systems on Earth. And yet we are far beyond the predator, prey, and dance that involves so much of biology. So that’s no longer humankind of preoccupation. My point is that we can discover that we’re much more than just our physical bodies. So we’re much more than just running a stream of thoughts.

In his book, The Untethered Soul, I love how Michael Singer calls running a stream of thoughts in your head the annoying roommate, and that’s a very important way to look at it because that’s not truly who we are. We can come to much greater discovery by cultivating the sense of connection across the veil with a unified mind with God-consciousness that has the highest and best good for all involved as its primary interest.

There’s something I would paraphrase from Einstein, and he said the true value of this whole depends on how much they’ve liberated themselves from the concept itself. That’s where this ego-mind, this voice in our head, can be so misleading. And Rene Descartes, a renowned French philosopher of hundreds of years ago, said, I think therefore I am. I wish he clarified it a little bit and said, I am aware of my thoughts, and therefore I exist.

That awareness of them, that’s the part that outlasts the death of the body and brain. That’s the part that actually expands when we die. That’s what near-death experiencers tell you: your awareness doesn’t shrink down to nothing as a materialist would postulate. Still, it expands when you’re liberated from the shackles of the physical brain and body. This is something we can all practice through meditation. Flipping these surly bonds of Earth in the material realm and the apparent here now and this kind of sense of self. We all have the freedom within meditation and centering prayer to escape from that kind of false imprisonment of the illusion of being isolated as an individual physical being. We’re much more than that, and that’s really one of the deepest lessons to start within this adventure is exploring that shared consciousness.

 

[01:15:20] Ashley James: Now, you lost your sense of self. You had mentioned that it’s like your ego wasn’t there, you didn’t know who you were, but that needed to happen so you would learn and accept what was going on? I’ve heard of near-death experiences where people didn’t know who they were, and they did see fellow members who had passed or met Jesus and knew who they were.

 

[01:10:50] Dr. Eben Alexander: Right.

 

[01:15:52] Ashley James: Is your experience uncommon that people don’t know who they are? Or are there some experiences people do and some don’t know? How can we better understand near-death experiences if this really happens when we die?

 

[01:16:15] Dr. Eben Alexander: I think the important thing to point out is that near-death experiences, as we said earlier, probably 400 million people around the world patterns are very common. And when you study them, you find a lot of commonalities, and you’re exactly right. Most people go into this with full memory of their lives. All this tells me is if my experience was incomplete, if I’m going to die, I would have gone on to that next level of going through the life review. Now it’s important to point out, though, that I did witness life reviews with a very powerful passion, even though I cannot have an Eben Alexander life review because of my amnesia.

The way I saw them, and these both occur in separate passages through the core realm, first was what I call the Flying Fish analogy, and that was basically where I experienced becoming flying fish. And when we’re down in the water, we are dumbed down. We didn’t have all the knowledge of our higher soul. We were buying into this material incarnation and that’s it. It gives a skin in the game. But then when I popped up out of the water into the air, as flying fish, I was in that space between lives and reunited with a higher soul and all that kind of thing.

Now, this next vision was even grander and happened on a separate passage through the core; it’s what I call the Indras Net Vision. That was this extraordinary higher dimensional network of interconnected threads, and the threads represented soul lines of an individual soul from multiple incarnations approaching this incredible enlightenment and oneness with the Divine. In that particular vision, that ultimate goal was reflected as this kind of golden center to this web network to which we were all kind of attached and working our way through these incarnations. The life review and reincarnation were very clearly presented to me in these visions. 

Now the important thing to stress is months after my coma, and this is something we explained in Living in a Mindful Universe. If I had scripted my NDE first and foremost, my father would be there. My doctor father was a world-renowned neurosurgeon. He was very important in my life. It passed over four years before my coma. And surprising to me, especially because I’ve never had NDE in the literature before after my NDE, at the advice of my older son majoring in neuroscience, who knew every time you revisit a memory, you change it. So he told me to write everything that I could remember from my NDE before I read anybody else’s NDE. That was important information. I wrote 20,000 words over six weeks or so. 

And then, I started reading the NDE literature and that’s when I was totally blown away by a lot of similarities. I was surprised by the absence of my father and we explained that especially in the third book, Living in Mind for Universe, how he appeared to me in meditation two and a half years after my coma. It made it very clear that if he had been apparent to me as he could, he could not be apparent to me in my NDE. Despite a one in ten million diagnosis from an E.coli bacteria of meningitis in an adult, despite a one in a billion recovery, if my father had been the one on there, I would have been more tempted to dismiss it. So you only see what you want to see all the way out. So it’s a psychological factor, that’s why my guardian angel had to be who she was. Someone deeply important to me in my life. Anyway, that’s kind of the longer version of NDEs, of life reviews, of my father’s presence and discovering the importance of why he couldn’t be there in my original NDE.

 

[01:20:07] Karen Newell: You touched on how we can know that Eben’s experience or people who have near-death experiencers have the same kind of experience we would have when we actually go on to die. Fortunately, we have data on that. Christopher Kerr is a director and doctor at Hospice Buffalo, and he started doing studies on hospice patients some years ago. He wanted to hear from them directly. So what is it that you’re experiencing as you get closer to death because up until then, it was only clinicians who had reported their observations of what people were going through?

No, actually asked for dying patients themselves and that was brought up at the institutional review board where this is going to be proper. Dr. Kerr explained that these patients are actually benefited by having the opportunity to talk about their experiences. What’s so remarkable is that around 90% of the subjects stated did have what he called End of Life Dreams and Visions. The dreams happen when the subject is asleep. When they’re awake and have these experiences, they’re called visions.

It’s the same type of experience that the subject is usually the same whether you’re awake or asleep, which is so weird for us. People who just have dreams think they’re a little different at any rate. These were very realistic types of dreams. These people reported them to be hyper-real, more real than real, and they would say as if they were actually lit. Which is remarkably exactly how near-death experiencers describe near-death experiencers. Their experiences say that they’re more real than real.

The other thing that happens is that people will say that there are scenes of travel where they know they’re going somewhere, that they’re packing or they’re in a car or bus, and they’re going somewhere. But they don’t necessarily know where they’re going. So the idea that it’s the end is not really brought out in these experiments. The other thing that’s very common in these experiences is that people will start to relive their life.

So when Eben talks about this life review, people in the– let’s say a couple of weeks before they die, say they’re in the hospice center. The first dreams that they started to have are up to their childhood. They’ll stretch or relive childhood events and connect with people they knew back then. They could still be alive, or they could still be dead at this point. But as they get closer to death, the prevalence of dreams and visions involving deceased relatives increases dramatically.

Often they’re just seen as being present, quietly observing, always emanating this loving energy, and other times they actually interact. We can be quite certain that actual death is very similar to what near-death experiencers tell us. It seems that life review starts to begin before you actually die. Once you actually die, it just continues in another form. And near-death experiencers, of course, are dying, necessarily in a natural way. So many people are oftentimes natural because it couldn’t have to do with a heart attack or something, but it’s a sudden way. If they’re not being led into death over many weeks and then days and then hours. It happens suddenly and they just pop right into their life reviews without a chance to start gradually. So this gives us a lot of information that can make us very confident that our awareness continues that we encounter the souls that departed loved ones. That love is a thief that’s another thing they say is that– everything is related to love and those loving bonds. We often call it the binding force of love because it keeps us connected even into the afterlife.

 

[01:24:23] Ashley James: We’ve talked about beautiful positive things. I’m going to turn to something negative now, but I hope there’s hope here. I feel like we’re in dark times. Hopefully, not everyone feels the same way. Hopefully, there are people who don’t feel like we’re in dark times, but there’s a strong sense that there’s a spiritual war. A lot of people that I know believe that there are demons. There are negative entities that there are forces out there that are not wanting what’s in our best interest. In your research in studying near-death experiences, studying the afterlife, and spirituality. Have you come across the concept where people are struggling with demonic possessions or a feeling like there are negative forces that are hindering them from being able to live that life full of gratitude and love and connect with God and move into a positive spiritual realm?

 

[01:25:37] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say, especially, when you look at the broad literature on near-death experiences and combine it certainly with Christopher Kerr’s work as Karen was discussing the end-of-life experience so commonly encountered. You find that 90 to 95% of it is just this beautiful, blissful kind of finding of a spiritual realm. You don’t find that there’s some battle between good and evil going on in the spiritual realm. In fact, even that kind of predefined set of near-death experiences that are turned into hellish NDEs or negative NDEs is often involved– for example, someone who has been so busy handing out pain and suffering to others that their life review might seem kind of hellish because you have to be on the receiving end of that in life.

Your life review is not from your perspective. But from the perspective of those around you who were influenced by your actions and thoughts. But the overall ambiance of that kind of community and those reports. This even includes, for example, if you go to the really negative kind of expectations, you might have to say, for example, inadequate prison where with rapists and murderers, you find that when prisoners work as hospice workers for fellow prisoners, they still uncover these same stories of kind of redemption of forgiveness of people facing the bad that they’ve done in this life, but seeing it in this light of love that guides them more towards a loving presence.

That’s why I think overall, the evolution of humanity, given this huge kind of factor NDEs and the loving ambiance in the background, that over a period of time, we do become more loving and move away from this kind of false sense of separation in comes of materialistic thought. I would agree with you that our current world is very apparently conflicted, polarized, lots of conflicts, violence, warfare, economic polarization, corporate greed, climate change, and all that. I would say that the answer to that is a spiritual awakening. It simply involves more and more people becoming aware of this deep truth about our existence that in many ways is very optimistic.

When you look at the big literature on NDE reports, for example, the ions website hosts thousands and thousands of reports with these kinds of experiences. The overall background is one of a very positive transformation of humanity. Kenneth Ring is one of the founders of the International Association of near-death studies. He wrote it three decades ago. It’s about how just people knowing NDEs could change their own reality.

You don’t have to have an NDE just knowing about these experiences and their commonality helps all of us to come into a deeper sense of the higher good that we can practice in meditation, centering prayer, and through the way that we live our lives and all the choices, we make every day. But despite the apparent hardships, and I would say that the hardships are there, just as in the world of alcoholism and addiction study where people have these hardships that they’re dealing with. It’s like getting a bottom, a gift of desperation that they’re able to bounce back up and gain the energy to improve themselves.

Likewise, society is facing a collective gift of desperation with all these apparent hardships, conflicts, political polarization, etcetera. There is a way out, and that is for humanity to truly become wise. Homo sapiens, the word sapiens, means wise. Yes, you could attribute much of the scientific advances in medicine, communication, transportation, etcetera. Over the last two centuries to been a wise move. When you look at the ugly underbelly of all our addiction to fossil fuels, the floating gyre of plastic twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, these are obviously very negative sides of our technological growth. So it’s time for humanity to really grow up and quit living this kind of myth of false separation from each other.

We’re all in this together. We need to take care of each other. And we need to have a much longer timescale. Politicians and corporate leaders look at the next quarterly report for next year’s elections. We need to look at 50 years in the future and our children and the quality of their lives and start doing what’s right for them. So that’s where I think this world can start to take stewardship as we should truly. If we’re going to call ourselves Homo sapiens and start leading this world in a much more positive direction, that’s beneficial to all.

 

[01:30:39] Ashley James: Your book Living in a Mindful Universe, there’s a lot of tools, a lot of actionable steps, can you guys certainly want to leave with us or teach the listeners today?

 

[01:30:51] Dr. Eben Alexander: I think the main thing is just to take time each day to go with that. Realize that little ego voice with a lot of its demands on you is not who you truly are. To try and cultivate a richer relationship across the veil with that primordial mind, that God force that has love, kindness, compassion, and mercy right at the core of all of this activity.

 

[01:31:15] Karen Newell: When we say go within, that may look different for each of us. It really is incumbent on each of us to try different practices. Find that combination of practices that work best for you because it’s going to be different for each of us. We are both very big fans of using sacred acoustics recordings to get into expanded states that not everyone will respond the same way, and so if that doesn’t work, you try something else. Some people like to do movement sorts of things, and others do centering prayer. I like how you said when you go to your church, and there’s a community of people, you’re all focused on generating that connection to the Holy Spirit together. Doing this with other people can strengthen the experience exponentially. I like to imagine that it is all about our heart energies interacting, and we are supporting each other in this effort. When you’re not nearby other people, you can always imagine that your highest energy expands all the way out to the entire Earth. It’s interesting at Heart Math when they measure that electromagnetic field. Whatever device they use, we seem to go to the maximum distance that it can measure. Who knows, it might be unlimited. Eben will always remind me that we can’t get confused and think that the electromagnetic field, which is a material thing, is all that it is. It’s a very useful mechanism that we can focus on that we know is happening, whether we realize it or not.

 

[01:32:53] Dr. Eben Alexander: There’s a much deeper form of information overlay between minds that presents in quantum physics as entanglement, and that would be my point. This kind of communication goes beyond just electromagnetic things that will be limited by the speed of light. Also, in adding to the comments you were making, I would point out that we’ve started developing a community of like-minded people, and you can access that at unitedinhopeandhealing.com. Very specifically, Karen had the idea that since all of our jobs were canceled back in March 2020 for the summer, she decided we would interview the scientists and fellow experiencers that we would have been meeting up with at those conferences. We would just interview them for the benefit of the public at large, and those interviews we did once every two weeks for most of the pandemic. They’re available at unitedinhopeandhealing.com for free to the public. We hope that those will help people realize there’s a community of like-minded people growing up around all of this kind of teaching and effort.

 

[01:34:00] Karen Newell:  On that same website is a membership platform. The webinar access is all free. People can also connect, and we do on our platform, our teaching platform, where we have some core classes, but then also we do monthly Q&As, where people can submit any questions they want. So we take about 90 minutes to answer them. That’s also going on that same website if people are interested.

 

[01:34:25] Dr. Eben Alexander: There’s also a course available for mental health practitioners co-taught by Karen, myself, and Dr. Anna Yusim. I would say that course can be very valuable in helping people deal with mental health issues in the modern era.

 

[01:34:43] Karen Newell: One last resource is an online companion workbook that we created to go with Living in a Mindful Universe, and it’s called your 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness. If you go to ebenalexander.com, you’ll find a link to that 33-day journey. It’s an email. Just get an email once today with a note and a personal practice, and it’s all related to the book Living in a Mindful Universe.

 

[01:35:15] Ashley James: Excellent because I was actually just to ask about the free online course that you guys have, that’s ebenalexander.com/33days. Of course, the links to everything you talked about are going to be in the show notes for today’s podcast, learntruehealth.com. So listeners go to learntruehealth.com to catch that or in the description whatever podcast platform you’re listening from. Go in the description, and I’ll make sure that all those links are there, of course, the links also to the books as well. This is such a beautiful thing to focus on. You’ve given us so many tools. I love the idea of making sure that we take time every day to stand in gratitude. To imagine when it comes to wanting something we don’t have, imagine what it would feel like to have it. Then imagine yourself having that feeling, that same feeling, and what other things you can experience or other relationships you can cultivate that will also give you that feeling. Stepping away from– I will be happy until I have this physical object and stepping towards your whole complete imperfect now as you are in and your possessions aren’t really don’t bring joy. But focusing on building relationships and staying grounded in love. Remember that even those people you don’t necessarily like or understand or get along with they’re just like you. They’re all part of the same soup. We’re all in it together. We’re all God’s children. And even these little mind shifts can help us live a more fulfilled life and a life where we’re focusing on being just beautiful human beings. I saw someone yesterday who was wearing a pin that said—humankind, be both. It’s exactly, be both, be kind and be human.

 

[01:37:31] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would like to think they go hand in hand.

 

[01:37:34] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show guys. This has been a pleasure and if you have more resources or discover more information and you want to come back and share more science. I would love you back.

 

[01:37:50] Dr. Eben Alexander:  Ashley, great talking with you. Thanks for having us on.

 

[01:37:53] Karen Newell: Yes, and thanks for all you do to help others as well and get all of this information and 20 more other people that you interview out into the world. Thank you so much.

 

[01:38:03] Ashley James: It is my pleasure.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Eben Alexander

Website

Facebook

Twitter

YouTube

 

Books by Dr. Eben Alexander

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife

Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness

The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife

Seeking Heaven: Sound Journeys into the Beyond

Apr 5, 2022
BioGaia LACTOBACILLUS REUTERI for fermenting:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AH3RT9Y/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_66EPKQ3B46MSWZEQMB85&subject

Best Yogurt Maker for this type of fermentation:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PQ2KWHS/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_ZN6Y7CKZ757KHCDGGS0J&subject

BOOK: Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B096RTDMXV&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_2Q1YVTR4GATHAW0G5MMS&tag=mighty91com-20

 

Antidepressant Probiotic Homemade Yougurt Lactobacillus Reuteri, Dr. William Davis

https://www.learntruehealth.com/antidepressant-probiotic-homemade-yougurt-lactobacillus-reuteri-dr-william-davis

 

Highlights

  • Benefits of TRPV1 in our gut
  • Benefits of lactobacillus reuteri
  • Losing weight by focusing on gut health support
  • Importance of fermented food for the gut

 

After the success of Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis is back with a new book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. Super Gut explains how we can eliminate bad bacteria and breed good bacteria in the gut. In this episode, Dr. Davis shares specific bacteria that we can ferment that can target specific areas such as deeper sleep, increased libido, and muscle injury reduction.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Okay, I’ve got a few really exciting things to share with you before we dive into today’s interview, so you don’t want to skip this part. I interviewed Dr. William Davis, this is today’s interview, back in February. My life’s been crazy. I have been wanting to sit down and publish this since I did the interview. It was late February.

We were in the middle of moving, packing, moving, and it was total chaos. I’m so happy, I finally have a moment to sit down today and publish this. I’ve got 10 more interviews. I’m just backlogged with interviews that I want to get out there and publish. Just watch out. They’re going to start coming out more frequently now. I’m so excited to finally get back onto a regular schedule now that we’ve landed in our new location.

This interview was so life-changing for me because in January and February, I was having breakdowns, emotional breakdowns. My mind was okay, I was like, hey, I can taskmaster. Give me five things and I’m going to just bang them out. My mind was totally clear, but all of a sudden, I just noticed that my physical body was incredibly stressed out.

I am definitely handling a lot of things in the last year and then I had a lot on my plate. Mentally I felt fine, This is the whole thing, I don’t feel stressed. Stress is not an emotion. I started noticing that the littlest thing would have me in tears. It wasn’t just one part of the month, it was two months straight. I was in tears at the littlest thing. I felt so bad for my husband and my son who is so good-hearted. I’m sure it was scary all of a sudden like seeing my mom smiling one second then mom’s crying another, what’s going on. I tried to explain as best I could. I did notice that my body was definitely emotionally in overwhelm. This was just such perfect timing to get this interview.

At the beginning of the interview, I had no idea that this was going to be the answer to what I needed. With what Dr. William Davis shared, I took his information and I made one of the things he shares about today is a specific kind of—it’s hard to call it yogurt but it’s a fermented thing that you can make to eat. I made it out of soy milk and then I made it out of coconut milk just to try different plant-based options because I’m allergic to dairy but if you’re not allergic to dairy you can follow his recipe. What was just so cool and I’m so excited to share with you is that I had a result the same day I took it.

The last time I had such a profound effect was when I got on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells back 11 years ago. I think it was about 11 years ago. I was so sick. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, type 2 diabetes, and chronic adrenal fatigue so bad that I couldn’t process human language in the morning. I was in really rough shape.

Getting on those supplements and going gluten-free, so cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and then getting on the supplements, the trace minerals they sell, especially the liquid vitamin which is really bioavailable and absorbable, and the trace minerals, within 24 hours of being on those, I noticed my blood sugar began to balance. That constant gnawing hunger went away within five days of being on the supplements. My energy levels were the highest they had been in 20 years. For somebody who has chronic adrenal fatigue, it’s amazing. It wasn’t like energy that was jittery, it was just like real energy like my body started coming back online because it was so deficient in those minerals.

Often, when we have a mineral deficiency, we have symptoms across the board that doesn’t make sense to doctors because the doctors are not taught what trace mineral deficiency looks like, that’s just not in their wheelhouse. By getting on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells, I was able to—they’re very specific to each person and their needs—turn around within five days. I thought this was amazing. In terms of getting better from feeling horrible to feeling great, it was one to five days, boom, that was amazing.

Since then, I have had great experiences with many products. Using what Dr. William Davis shares today had me go from crying and just—I’m pretty sure I was still struggling with depression and all the changes that have happened with our family. Then I took the stuff that he told me to ferment, a very, very specific strain of probiotic, and 4I noticed a shift. That day was the last day I broke down crying for (I don’t want to say) no reason, but it’s kind of like crying over spilled milk like a way to overreact. Something small would happen, and my body would just completely meltdown.

Since I started introducing this specific probiotic, it’s a specific strain that affects the brain chemistry. How cool is that? It helps balance the brain chemistry so you feel happier. It also helps with insomnia so you get better sleep. I don’t have bad sleep, but I started getting better sleep. I started waking up wow, that was a really deep sleep. It helps with sleep. It helps with joy and a feeling of contentment, a feeling of connection, connectivity to the people you care about. It has a few other really cool positive results that Dr. William Davis is going to go in today. I wanted to let you know that since this interview, I tried it and I’ve been eating it, and I’ve been getting fantastic results. There’s my testimonial.

Please share this interview with everyone you know who has insomnia and also who wants to have more joy and feel even keel in terms of their emotional state, definitely share it with them. Another cool benefit to this specific strain of probiotic that you need to ferment yourself to get enough of it so you can eat it to get it in you is it increases the body’s ability to produce collagen so that wrinkles go away. Even for vanity’s sake, it’s worth thinking about because it’ll make you have better hair, skin, and nails. People are noticing all kinds of positive results.

I love this concept. The whole interview today is about this concept that there’s a pharmacy that we could tap into in our gut that we could prescribe ourselves specific strains of probiotics. These are healthy bacteria that live in our gut. Prescribe ourselves specific ones that have specific outcomes. It’s already well established. I’ve had dozens of interviews about this. You can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find all my interviews about gut health. The doctors I’ve had on who talk about gut-brain access, that there’s a direct correlation with what goes on in your gut.

There are about four to six pounds. Think about you have a little chihuahua-sized animal that lives in your gut and it’s made up of thousands of different strains of probiotics. You want to have the good kind and you want to make sure you mitigate the bad kind. They actually digest our food for us. They make nutrients for us by digesting the food that we absorb. They make chemicals for us that affect our brain, affect our chemistry, and affect our hormones. It’s amazing. This is just scratching the surface. It’s so cool. We’re on the cutting edge.

Dr. William Davis shares that information today. That was the one thing that I wanted to share with you. The next thing I wanted to share with you is I’ve done some recent interviews which I’ll be publishing soon about some pretty amazing stuff like how to increase nitric oxide in the body which has just a host of amazing health benefits. I’ve been pouring through all these studies and what I’m seeing is thermal therapy, using the Sunlighten Sauna, the reason why I say Sunlighten Sauna specifically is the Sunlighten Sauna has near, mid, and far-infrared. It goes into the different depths of your tissue and it binds to receptors.

Now I had a cardiologist on, Dr. Joel Kahn, and he talks about this that in our cells, we have receptors for hormones, we have receptors for nutrients like let’s say calcium, and glucose, right? Insulin being like hormones, we have receptors for those things. We also have receptors for light. That these infrared lights, the spectrum affects our cells. There’s one specific protein that is triggered by heat and this protein is called TRPV1.

This protein when triggered by heat—I believe it’s over 41 degrees Celsius is what I read—then helps the body to turn pre-muscular cells into muscle cells. They’re seeing that for the elderly, it helps to lower the chances of wasting away. It increases muscle, continuing to have more muscles so the muscles don’t waste away. It plays a huge role in helping with cardiovascular health to the point where this one study I read showed that they’re now doing therapy with people who are in cardiac failure. They’re really far gone in terms of their cardiac disease and heart disease, and that using heat therapy actually helps to increase nitric oxide in the body which supports the endothelial function of the cardiovascular system.

It reduces the oxidative stress of the cardiovascular system that supports the autonomic nervous system. They’re seeing that there are so many things. It also helps balance blood pressure. They’re seeing so many benefits to using heat therapy for cardiovascular health. Well, I was looking into this specific protein, the TRPV1, because there’s also a role that plays in breaking down and helping the body break down fat and in burning fat as fuel. Everyone who wants to be healthy wants to make sure we have healthy levels of fat. Brown fat is linked to better health and better health outcomes and burns off excess fat.

What we’re seeing is, when you’re in a sauna, yes it increases the body’s heat, your core temperature, and thus you’re burning off calories. They say about an average of 500 calories. Obviously, it depends on the person and how long they stay there and how hot it is. They also see now the reason why being in a sauna helps people lose fat is that it is creating these specific proteins, it is binding to these receptors. When it was explained to me, it was like, imagine a fat cell has these triglycerides that are built inside the cell and then they’re too big to get out. You have to tell the triglyceride inside the cell to break down. Kind of like a sectional couch, you can’t take your sectional sofa out the front door until you break it down into its parts.

Using the Sunlighten Sauna therapy is one of those ways to trigger to create that cascade effect to the body that triggers the fat cell to break it down so that it can leave the fat cell so that the triglyceride can break down to leave the fat cell, which I found fascinating. There are all these health benefits that I keep reading as I’m pouring through this information, but just the fact that sauna therapy increases nitric oxide in the body, in my next episode you will be learning more about nitric oxide and how the amazing benefits of it.

Everyone says inflammation is the root of all. At the very core of all diseases, there’s inflammation. Then people say, actually lactic acid is the root. No, lactic acid and inflammation are the result of the root cause and the root. We go deeper than that when the body cannot make enough of the nitric oxide that causes inflammation, that causes lactic acid, that causes all these cascades of negative outcomes that we see. When we’re looking at the common factor between everyone with disease and we’re going well, everyone with disease has more lactic acid and has more inflammation. Therefore, those are bad things we need to manage. Those are results of not enough nitric oxide in the body. My next interview is going to be about that.

How cool was it that the Sunlighten Sauna increases nitric oxide production which is linked to longevity by the way and not having enough of it is linked to early death. Also, so many health benefits of looking better and feeling better. What I want to say about Sunlighten is I’ve had mine for a few years. I absolutely love it. I’ve gotten so many health benefits from it. I am always in touch with the owner of the company there. They offer a great discount for listeners. Please give them a call. If you have any questions, they’re fantastic. They can help you out, give you the literature, give you the science. Also make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James because they will give you a fantastic discount, including free shipping. If you ever have any questions about it or anything at all, you can also contact me at ashley@learntruehealth.com and I would love to help.

I’m so excited for you to hear today’s interview because what Dr. William Davis shares today has changed my life. It’s now April and when I did that experiment with the probiotic that he recommended, that was near the end of February. All of March, even in the midst of the chaos of my move, we moved in March, I did not have any of those emotional overwhelm that I had before. I was able to navigate just by introducing this probiotic. You know what I said to my friend, I said that I’m on an antidepressant. She of course looked at me with big eyes. I said no, you don’t understand, not a pharmaceutical. This stuff that Dr. William Davis shares today, I said to her, this feels like I’m on an antidepressant. I feel amazing. I’m going through a very chaotic move and yet it’s not affecting me, it’s like the stress is gone.

That’s why I’m so excited for you today because imagine if the whole world was able to get their body to the point where they’re just feeling so calm and happy, and how much we could accomplish instead of feeling overwhelming stress. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Continue to please share, this episode is going to change lives I just know it. Come into the Learn True Health Facebook group because I’d love to hear your experience as you also experiment and play around with the things that Dr. William Davis shares today.

 

[00:17:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 476. I am so excited for today’s guest, we have back on the show with Dr. William Davis. Dr. Davis, you were on the Learn True Health podcast back in episode 167 which was eons ago but I have to tell you that you had a profound impact on my life and my husband’s life back in, this was like back in 2011, 2012, somewhere around there.

 

[00:17:48] Dr. William Davis: It was like the 19th century, wasn’t it?

 

[00:17:55] Ashley James: Yes, the dinosaurs roaming the earth. We went gluten-free. Actually, we cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Oats contain gliadin, which is a protein similar to gluten. Some people react to it, some people don’t. We were just like, let’s just throw them all out anyway and we noticed a profound difference. I love sharing the information that you shared in your book, Wheat Belly, was so eye-opening for us. It really helped us solidify our decision to eliminate barley, wheat, rye, and oats.

Then what happened was amazing, my husband and I lost so much water weight. In one month actually, I lost 25 pounds of water weight and both of us had our wedding rings flying off our hands. I’d like to go to point, oh, the remote is over there, I’d point my hand in that direction and my rings would go flying across the living room. We had our rings custom fitted. We waited about six months because I thought this might be temporary because women are more in tune with the water weight of their body than men possibly. I was like, well, this might be the time of the month and by the next time of the month, it won’t be like this.

Six months go by and we’re still not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. The 25 pounds of water weight is still off of me and I can’t believe it. I couldn’t push a finger into my skin and then have an indent, it wasn’t like that. It was just overall inflammation. Then six months later we went and got our rings resized. That’s what we found out, I went down one and a half ring sizes. My husband went down two whole ring sizes.

Then I was able to overcome a lot of other health issues. I mean, the diet was a major factor and also nutrition. I brought in specific very high-quality supplements and I tweaked my diet, but I was able to reverse type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue. I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome. Every doctor I talked to was like, you can’t reverse that. Watch me and look at my labs, they’re like, oh my gosh, I love showing to doctors my labs. They don’t believe it. It’s like, these are two different people.

I reversed infertility, all these great big things, but really the big thing was eliminating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. I have had so many friends say, oh, I tried that. I was gluten-free for two weeks, and I didn’t notice a difference. I’m not allergic to gluten. I definitely want to get into that.

You have a new book out, which I’m really excited about, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. I love that you have a deep dive into supporting this microbiome. It’s like six pounds of bacteria in our gut that we can actually use to heal our whole body. We talked about this that your book has very actionable steps that people can take to restore their health. I’m really looking forward to you teaching us that today. Welcome back to the show.

 

[00:21:10] Dr. William Davis: Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for the invitation. Glad to be back.

 

[00:21:13] Ashley James: Absolutely. Fill us in. What happened in the last four or five years since you were on the show with us?

 

[00:21:20] Dr. William Davis: Well, as you experienced, the Whole Wheat Belly lifestyle really can change people’s lives if they get it right. As you see, a lot of people say things like, I went gluten-free. Meaning they may have cut back on wheat and unrelated grains, but then turn to gluten-free garbage, which is awful. They make that mistake. Those gluten-free processed foods are just horrible for your health. It shocks me that that industry continues to grow and they fill store shelves with something that’s far worse than sugar.

If people get it right, they do experience as you have. By the way, reversing polycystic ovary syndrome is a huge advantage in health. As you see, the 15% of ladies who have it shouldn’t have it. Doctors say there’s really nothing we can do except give you diabetes medications, give you insulin, give you anti-hypertensive drugs, and then go through procedures for fertility, which is ridiculous. As you experience, it is readily reversed back to normal, including the hormonal distortions just by shifting your diet and maybe addressing a handful of nutrients that are lacking in modern life.

People are doing this and experience as you have dramatic life-changing improvements in health, weight, et cetera. But I also saw this, people say things like, I lost 73 pounds, but I have another 40 to go and I’m stuck. Or my joint pain from my rheumatoid arthritis is better, but I’m not off all the drugs yet. In other words, people were having successes but not 100% all the way back to perfect health, so I asked what is missing.

Now in the basic program, even back then, I was advocating adding a high potency multispecies, probiotic, fermented foods, and prebiotic fibers. But even those efforts to address the microbiome were insufficient for many people. I continued to dig and look for answers in the microbiome. I was shocked at the kind of things you can uncover in the microbiome. It led to an explosion and actionable solutions. Things you can do to take back control over their health.

 

[00:23:34] Ashley James: As you’re looking at the microbiome, what was the biggest, the first aha moment that really shocked you that made you go, oh my gosh, I have to dive into this deeper?

 

[00:23:44] Dr. William Davis: It was a series of things that I stumbled on was a series of very elegant research studies from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted between 2013 and 2017. This cancer group was looking at a microbe lactobacillus reuteri named after the German microbiologist who discovered this microbe in breast milk in 1962. They were looking at this microbe because they were looking into how it prevented colon cancer. It has very potent anti-cancer effects.

They gave it to mice and they noticed something unusual. They noticed that within a few days of getting lactobacillus reuteri, these mice developed what they described as rich luxuriant fur. They decided to explore it and they found all sorts of unexpected phenomena. They found, for instance, that healing was remarkably accelerated. If you inflicted a wound, it healed in half the time. Hair grew faster and thicker. They found that skin thickness increased dramatically because there’s an explosion of collagen in the dermis, the dermal layer of skin.

There was one study, they did a very elegant series of studies. They compared two groups of mice both fed a really crappy diet, a fast food diet, essentially. White flour, sugar, hydrogenated oils, fried foods, et cetera. One group just got the diet, they got fat, old, lost their hair, stopped playing with each other, stopped mating. They got old, fat, and died. The other group was fed the crappy diet also but given reuteri. These mice stayed slender, had thick and luxurious fur, played with each other, mated, and stayed young until they died. When that would get really interesting. They even made some other interesting observations.

There’s a restoration of youthful immune response in old mice. There’s a dramatic restoration of youthful testosterone in male mice. There’s an increase in growth hormone. But the pivotal finding, the real central finding in all these studies, was that all those effects came because reuteri that colonizes the entire length of the GI tract, by the way, not just the colon, sends a signal to the brain to release oxytocin. This group worked out all the details. If you cut the vagus nerve, the whole effect is turned off. It’s so-called gut-brain access via the vagus nerve. The reuteri sends a signal to the brain, the hypothalamus, to release oxytocin and there’s a 300% increase in oxytocin.

I found that really interesting even though the group said, isn’t that interesting? Do with it what you may. I got a hold of the same microbe that they used in these studies. It was available as a commercial product from Sweden. The company is called BioGaia and the product is called Gastrous. The problem is, these tablets are made for infants, and they were targeted for reducing infantile colic, regurgitation and diarrhea after antibiotics. The tablets had very low counts of microbes, I would challenge that they’re even enough for a baby. They had such low numbers, I made yogurt out of that, but not yogurt in the conventional sense. I made yogurt in a very different way. I fermented for a long, long time, 36 hours, not the usual four hours or 12 hours that some people use at home. I want as many microbes as possible.

We performed flow cytometry on the yogurt and we’re getting around 250-260 billion bacteria per half cup serving. We increased the number of reuteri by a thousandfold over what was contained in the tablets. Then I want to see if we could mimic these effects in humans. Me and thousands of other people, including my entire neighborhood, are eating this yogurt. We all start to see all the same stuff.

People got that boost in oxytocin and said things like, I like my family better. They don’t annoy me as much. I like my spouse better. I like my coworkers better. I understand other people’s points of view more readily. My skin is smoother, I’m losing my wrinkles. I heal faster. My sleep is deeper with vivid dreams. I’m no longer hungry, my appetite has been turned off completely. I’ve regained youthful muscle and strength. I have an increase in libido. I’m having erotic dreams like I used to have as a teenager or in my 20s.

Increased muscle, increased libido, thicker hair, smoother skin. Ashley, this one microbe turns the clock back 10 or 20 years. That’s just one microbe but it became clear. It was an illustration, Ashley, just how potent it could be to restore this one microbe, which by the way, almost all of us have lost. When Gerhard Reuter was exploring reuteri in mother’s breast milk and stool, he found it in almost everybody. In the indigenous populations on this planet who have been studied for this, they all have reuteri. If you look at chipmunks, squirrels, dogs, and raccoons, they all have reuteri. Modern people have lost it. Very few of us have it anymore because it’s very susceptible to many things like the antibiotic ampicillin. If you took ampicillin for your urinary tract infection or upper respiratory infection, you’ve likely lost your reuteri. We restore this ubiquitous microbe and spectacular things happen.

 

[00:29:40] Ashley James: I’m just imagining how many women are breastfeeding diligently thinking that they’re supplying their baby with this and they’re not, because at some point they had a UTI infection and they lost it forever. It’s not something that’s in our food supply that we can get back once it’s gone.

 

[00:30:10] Dr. William Davis: No, it’s not in the food. Not to say there aren’t wonderful microbes in fermented foods. You eat, say some kimchi, which is my favorite fermented food of all. By the way, people in South Korea have among the lowest incidences of cardiovascular disease in the world, far less than we do. There are probably a lot of factors but I think a major factor is their enthusiastic consumption of fermented foods like kimchi. Kimchi’s got wonderful microbes. It’s got something called leuconostoc mesenteroides and pediococcus pentosaceus. These are really beneficial microbes, but we can get species like lactobacillus reuteri, we actually have to get it specifically.

Now, one of the things that I think we’re in the process of figuring out is we have to pay attention. When you play with microbes, you have to pay attention to strain. Not just species but strain. To illustrate, you have E. coli, I have got E. coli, your listeners had E. coli in their colons. What if you ate romaine lettuce tainted by cow manure from the Central Valley of California? Well, you could die of that E. coli. Same species, E. coli, different strain. The strains that we use from the gastric tablets are two strains. It’s 17938 and 6475. I have seven other strains now of reuteri, they are in my refrigerator. I’ve made yogurt with all of them. I’ve experienced the same effect or greater with these other strains.

Now, we have a mouse study lined up. We’re going to compare five strains and see if any of them are better at provoking oxytocin than the others. That’s going to get underway in just a few weeks. We’ll be smarter. What I want to do at some point is say, Ashley, this is the strain you want to use. It’s the best at generating this effect. But right now, we can’t say that, so just to be sure, we stick to the Gastrous stains.

Let me tell you an embarrassing story. We get a boost in oxytocin from reuteri. Ashley, I think it’s safe to say, the restoration of reuteri makes us better human beings. Now, I did something crazy. I got another strain of reuteri from a microbiologist friend. He’s a master at generating super-duper high counts of unique strains. He was actually about half an hour from my house at a place called BioSource, his name is Suresh. He gave me some of his reuteri strains. It was super-duper high potency. I made yogurt out of it. Tastes the same, nothing different.

I had it that night and then I went to sleep. During sleep, I had this incredibly vivid dream. Really embarrassing, Ashley, but I will tell you anyway. I dreamt this imaginary woman came to me and I could see her in vivid detail. I could see her hair color, her eye color, and her facial features. She introduced me first and last names, which I have never had happened in a dream before. I felt overwhelming love and affection for this imaginary woman. When I woke up, the odd thing was that overwhelming love and affection continued for this imaginary person for many hours into the day. It was intoxicating. I hadn’t had that feeling for a real person in years.

I’ve not been able to recreate that feeling, but I think if we can recreate it, we can almost turn this on and off. It also makes me wonder, Ashley, if modern humans have lost reuteri and thereby the capacity to enjoy very high levels of oxytocin. Is the intensity of love and affection today less than it was 60, 100, or 10,000 years ago? Tough but I believe it might have been.

 

[00:34:11] Ashley James: Just think of maybe are there other groups of people that had higher levels of it naturally because their lifestyle didn’t degrade it? For example, in the history of the First Nations people in North America, what they taught in schools is so manipulated from the truth. When you actually dive into it, you find that most of the tribes were at peace with each other. They traded with each other. There were tribes up in the northern regions of the United States that had conch shells because they traded all the way down from the Mexico area. They trade routes. There was a lot of peace. There’s a lot of prosperity. There is vibrance, right? Then when they teach us that they were all savages, they’re all killing each other. That’s what they taught me in school.

Then I go and actually find out that it’s highly manipulated, the history that they teach. They had so much beauty in their cultures, of course, some war with each other but there’s more peace than war. There’s more togetherness, trading, and helping each other. I just wonder if cultures were more in touch with herbal medicine and nature if they had higher levels of these strains versus cultures that maybe were drinking alcohol and messing around with substances that would disrupt the microbiome.

 

[00:36:12] Dr. William Davis: I think we can only speculate. It will be tough to prove. I got the oxytocin levels, the blood levels of three primitive indigenous populations. I got unpublished data from a researcher in California who went to New Guinea and very bravely got the blood of some very—these are people who just two generations ago were cannibals who were eating other humans. He got the blood from these people and measured oxytocin.

I have also the data from the Somali, another indigenous population, and from the Bodango people in the Republic of the Congo. These are all people who have not been exposed to antibiotics and are not exposed to glyphosate, the herbicide. Do not get herbicide and pesticide residues in their food. Don’t take statin drugs or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They have essentially a stone age microbiome and thereby presumptively higher oxytocin dose.

Unfortunately, the methods to measure oxytocin are so wildly different that it’s almost impossible to compare their levels to modern levels. Different methods, different tests, and platforms. I have the data, but I can’t say that they had higher oxytocin. I wanted to prove that primitive people with reuteri have higher levels of oxytocin. Unfortunately, this kind of a mess of data surrounding oxytocin prevents us from doing that. We’ll likely never know unless we have a time machine and go back in time, draw blood, and run those tests using modern methods.

 

[00:37:50] Ashley James: There are thousands and thousands of different bacterial strains, healthy helpful bacterial strains that we can have in our gut. You’ve isolated one and played around with one and found that your healing room time, your collagen, and people are getting younger. People are getting more feeling wonderful in their bodies and connecting with other people. That alone, yes, I think that you’ve sold everyone. Everyone’s like, okay, sign me up. That’s just one. Now, you talk about making yogurt. Can I take the same stuff and go make some fermented food with it? Just add it to the brine, add it to the saltwater and ferment some cabbage and get the same result, or do you find that we have to make yogurt and can it be a plant-based yogurt?

 

[00:38:40] Dr. William Davis: It doesn’t have to be dairy and it doesn’t have to be yogurt. It could be coconut milk. It could be veggies. What I don’t know Ashley is the number of microbes you obtain from that. If you were to ferment let’s say some eggplant and cabbage, the reuteri will compete with the microbes that are on the surface of the vegetable like say Leoconostoc. I can’t say that you get the same kind of numbers. That’s a work in progress. We’ll probably quantify that. That requires DNA analysis. Flow cytometry is a quick and dirty way to count microbes. When you have different microbes, several of them to tell them apart, you have to do DNA analysis to tell them apart and count them. We have not done that, but you can indeed do that.

You know what, you can gauge this by the effect. Personally, for instance, I go from terrible insomnia, terrible for years, decades taking horse doses of melatonin just to get a good night’s sleep. Now whereas I used to watch TV or read books at two or three o’clock in the morning. Now I sleep straight through nine hours of sleep.

By the way, those of us who wear actigraphy graphic devices like an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, or an aura ring, see that REM sleep, the deep restorative phase of sleep that helps you maintain good mental health is extended by about 20%. That’s another thing that needs to be formally documented with AEG, not just an active graphic device. I know I get a very deep sleep with vivid, colorful dreams. I know if I take a microbe that’s not working or I’m not getting enough microbes, I’ll revert back to being an insomniac. I have my own little built-in gauge. If your listeners do this, you try to ferment something else, and you lose the effect, then you know that the microbe count might not be enough.

One thing you’ll find in the world of the microbiome that’s not well explored is what’s called dose-response. The drug people, as much as I despise that industry, those people are very good at dose-response dies. They have a new drug, they’re going to test all variations in dose 0.25 milligrams, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 5.0, 10, 15, 25, 50. They have deep pockets.

In the microbiome world, we don’t have deep pockets like that. We do have a human study where we are going to take a stab at dose-response, 10 billion and 50 billion with a strain of reuteri. My gut’s sense, forgive the pun, it takes probably 50 billion more microbes to generate an effect. What I don’t know is, let’s say you fermented sauerkraut with reuteri, will you get sufficient numbers of reuteri when it competes with other species? That I don’t know. But you know what, this is fun, it’s benign, it’s very low cost. In fact, you save money.

One of the things I advocate is you can spend a ton of money on these fancy commercial probiotics, which by the way have some real problems. Nonetheless, you can buy a probiotic. Pay a lot of money for it. You can ferment foods with it. It cuts back on your need to buy it again. If you make the yogurt, for instance, you don’t make future batches from tablets of reuteri, you make it from a little bit as a prior batch. That’s how I have my entire neighborhood making reuteri yogurt. I give them a little bit of the yogurt and they make their yogurt from that prior batch.

 

[00:42:18] Ashley James: Yes, right. Maybe you could clarify, I think a lot of people thought if you take a probiotic, it’s like planting a seed in a garden. Then you don’t have to keep planting seeds every day. Right? Whatever you planted is going to grow and then reproduce its own seeds and then keep growing. The idea is, if you take a probiotic, wouldn’t that one course of probiotics populate the gut and now the reuteri is living in your gut and that’s it. It’s over with. You do not have to eat anymore. Or do you have to constantly eat it because it doesn’t reproduce in the gut?

 

[00:42:57] Dr. William Davis: You raise a fundamental question, Ashley. That is how come if mom gave you a microbe, you’d likely have it for decades, if not an entire lifetime. If you take it as a probiotic or yogurt, you’ll have it for a few days, maybe weeks, and then it dies. Why? Well, it points toward all the inadequacies of the current understanding of commercial probiotics. The commercial probiotic is when nothing more than a slapdash, half-hazard collection of microbes just put together with no rhyme or reason. That’s the current crop.

The probiotic of the future will have other factors built-in. For one, they must specify strain for the reasons we talked about. If you don’t specify strain, you have no idea what you have. For instance, there’s a strain of lactobacillus rhamnosus, that GG strain that has very good evidence for abbreviating post-antibiotic diarrhea. If you take lactobacillus rhamnosus non-GG strain, it doesn’t have that effect. You need to know the strain. That’s one issue.

Another issue is microbes are just like people. We don’t live in isolation all by ourselves. We have partners, families, neighborhoods, and communities. Bacteria are the same way. They have guilds or consortia and they work together. Almost no probiotic preparation factors in that phenomenon. The only product I know of that does that is one out of Colorado called BiotiQuest’s Sugar Shift. I have no relation to the people who developed it.

My friends Martha Carlin and Dr. Raul Cano, a microbiologist with 40 years of academic experience. They formulated this because this group of microbes work together and generate bigger effects. They call it Sugar Shift because it reduces blood sugar quite substantially, by the way. Most other probiotics do not incorporate that phenomenon. Another deficiency of modern probiotics is they fail to include keystone species. These are foundational species that support other species like plankton in the ocean. Without plankton, you don’t have whales or jellyfish. It’s foundational or keystone.

We need to have restored keystone species. Reuteri is a keystone species. There are others like lactobacillus gasseri, faecalibacterium prausnitzii is another, don’t memorize these of course. When you buy a commercial probiotic, many of them lack. In their defense, a lot of this is a work in evolution. But the bottom line here is a probiotic is probably one of the least important things you can do to restore the microbiome. Among the most important is to include fermented foods. Bring back fermented foods, just like your great-grandmother did.

Kimchi, kombucha, kefirs, yogurts, fermented veggies, fermented meats, all those things, you get these wonderful microbes. The curious thing is the microbes you get from fermented foods like leuconostoc mesenteroides do not actually take up residence for very long. By some odd twist, just having those guys restored allows healthy microbes to re-emerge. It’s not quite clear how that works but this is very interesting data out of Stanford.

The Sonnenburgs, Eric and Justin, husband and wife microbiology team published a very important study that showed that fermented foods hands down are the most important thing that you can reincorporate into the modern diet. That is something that most people forgot about. In fact, most modern people think that fermented foods are rotten. They’ll often throw away something that ferments. We need to add those things back and that’s a really big advantage for the restoration of rebuilding a microbiome.

 

[00:47:06] Ashley James: I love it. What about prebiotic foods? Fibers that are non-wheat, there are some indigestible fibers that we don’t necessarily eat because we’re going to digest it but it feeds the microbiome. It just enriches it. How important is making sure that we eat prebiotic food?

 

[00:47:33] Dr. William Davis: Very important, Ashley. As you suggested, including sources of prebiotic fibers. If you and I were primitive, indigenous populations, you wouldn’t go to a grocery store, of course. You would dig in the dirt and look for roots and tubers. That’s where you get the majority of your prebiotic fibers. You would also kill animals, and as disgusting as modern people find it, in addition to eating the brain, heart, tongue, and pancreas, we would also eat the intestines and stomach, and sometimes do that raw.

That is the real version of prebiotic fibers and probiotics. Modern people cannot stomach those kinds of things so we have to compensate for it. I say all of that because sometimes things we turn to get our prebiotic fibers seem a little odd. Like a raw white potato is filled with prebiotic fibers. It seems a little odd because we’re not used to that. We’re trying to recreate what indigenous populations did by digging in the dirt. Raw white potatoes, inulin powder is an easy convenient way to get it.

Legumes, white beans, black beans, kidney beans, peas, chickpeas, hummus, root vegetables, dandelion greens. There’s a long list of these things and they’re very, very important. The problem that people encounter though is modern people have so massively disrupted their microbiome in the form of either dysbiosis that is unhealthy microbes in the colon or worse, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, where all 30 feet of the GI tract are filled with unhealthy mostly stool microbes that they say things like, I can’t eat beans because when I do, I have explosive diarrhea, panic attacks, bloating, and other effects.

There’s nothing wrong with the beans or other foods you’re intolerant to and that could be, by the way nightshades, FODMAPs containing foods, histamine foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food. There’s something wrong with your microbiome. These are modern phenomena. People say things like, I had the testing, I can’t eat these 42 foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food, it’s your microbiome. People have to get beyond this idea that there’s something wrong with the food. It is something wrong with you, the microbiome.

 

[00:49:55] Ashley James: Right. It’s fascinating that our microbiome actually helps us digest our food and turns it into chemicals that we absorb. Without the microbiome, we would not survive. It’s so important, but like you pointed out, it also plays a major role in our mood. Often we sort of live life letting our mood guide us. They woke up on the wrong side of the bed. People make decisions most of the time, not logically, but most of the time from their emotions. They’re letting their gut run them, right?

 

[00:50:29] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, I’m always impressed just how much our internal dialogues—the things we tell ourselves, conversations we have in our heads—are colored by our microbes. A really good illustration of this is when you try to undo all these bad things. Let’s say you have all these stool microbes like E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, and Proteus, and all these are filling your 30 feet of GI tract. Well, you do something to kill them. It could be an antibiotic, it could be an herbal antibiotic. It could be something I called SIBO yogurt. We make yogurt that I think is proven to be effective in eradicating SIBO.

You kill these microbes and when they die, they shed their breakdown products, some of which get into your bloodstream and people call it die off but the real name is called endotoxemia. People will say things like this as they are in the process of killing microbes. They say, I’m having terrible panic attacks. I’m having dark thoughts and nightmares. People are chasing me, I’m falling off a cliff. My heart is racing. I’m having a low-grade fever. I ache all over.

That’s a vivid illustration of the kinds of things that happen when unhealthy microbes die off. Outside of that situation of die off, just having microbes living in your GI tract—these microbes don’t live for hours, they do not live for decades. If you had trillions of microbes occupying 30 feet of your GI tract, and they live and die in rapid succession, they shed their breakdown products, some of it gets in your bloodstream, that’s endotoxemia. Even when you’re not trying to kill them, some of it gets into your bloodstream.

That’s the thing that colors your internal dialogue and your mood. There’s a very interesting but disturbing set of studies from Germany where they took people who are non-depressed, normal people, they took that endotoxin to break down prompts and bacteria and injected it into these normal people. Which is really scary because if you miscalculate the dose, you can kill somebody quite easily. They somehow got into the review board. An injected bacterial endotoxin into these people, within three hours were profoundly depressed and had all the hallmarks of depression by MRI. It’s just one illustration of the potent effect that microbes have on your internal dialogue and mood.

 

[00:53:10] Ashley James: That is scary. What about someone who puts on an antibiotic? Does that have a similar effect? Does endotoxemia occur when we go on antibiotics?

 

[00:53:23] Dr. William Davis: It can. It depends on the antibiotic, where it was targeted towards. But yes, people do get quite sick taking antibiotics. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the die off effect from the disease you’re treating. If you’re treating pneumonia, you’re already sick, feeling awful, and having a fever. The die off effect just makes you feel a little worse. This is a well-established phenomenon. That’s known for about a century. It’s not just unique to these efforts in the microbiome. It is known to occur with virtually any infection where you’re killing off microbes.

It is an illustration of the power of microbes and their breakdown products that color human mood and our internal dialogues. It makes you wonder, hate has always been part of the world. Humans are a violent species. As you pointed out, has it gotten worse? Did indigenous populations actually enjoy a lot more peace than we give them credit for? Part of that at least do the microbiome, such as loss of reuteri and thereby oxytocin, the hormone of love, affection, and understanding of other people’s points of view. We can only speculate, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is somehow we prove it to be true.

 

[00:54:41] Ashley James: You are a cardiologist. I wonder from that filter, from that viewpoint, have you seen that restoring the microbiome positively affects heart health?

 

[00:55:01] Dr. William Davis: I think so. That’s an area where the microbiome science has simply not been explored sufficiently. It’s my prediction that the microbiome plays a very important role in coronary disease. That is heart attacks and those diseases of the heart’s arteries. I think it plays a big role in cardiomyopathies, heart muscle diseases, congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and other heart rhythm disorders. I predict that managing the microbiome will become a major—the problem with this of course, Ashley, is that practicing physicians, including my immediate colleagues and cardiologists, are typically 20 years behind in the science.

I still have colleagues say to me, there’s no such thing as SIBO, which is ridiculous, of course. There are thousands of published research studies on SIBO. They say things like, we know that probiotics don’t do anything. Well, we’ve got some criticisms of probiotics, but to say that they don’t do anything is completely nonsense. That’s the nature of things that the science has marched way ahead and the practicing physician is way behind. That’s why I think it’s so important for what you’re doing, what I’m trying to do, and that is broadcast these messages so that your listeners can take the reins. Yes, and their doctor will say, Ashley, did you consult doctor Google again? Right?

 

[00:56:23] Ashley James: I would fire that doctor and hire a more informed one. That’s what I will do.

 

[00:56:28] Dr. William Davis: That’s what you have to do. Take the reins yourself. That’s one of the great things about the microbiome. If you can tolerate a little bit of digging and understanding, it’s not that difficult. People have astounding control over their health if given a little bit of direction. The reuteri yogurt and other yogurts. I should tell you about the SIBO yogurt. This problem of SIBO, that is 30 feet of microbes, largely stool microbes that have ascended up into the small bowel.

I used to think this was uncommon or rare until something came out called the AIRE device made by a company in Dublin, Ireland. Invented by a Ph.D. engineer named Dr. Angus Short. He made this device because he saw his girlfriend, now wife, struggle with her irritable bowel syndrome when she was told to go on a low FODMAPs diet. He saw a low fiber low sugar diet. He saw how difficult that was for her and when she did get exposed, how she’d have bloating, diarrhea, and other effects. He invents this device for her that measures hydrogen gas in the breath because bacteria produce hydrogen gas but humans do not. You can use it to map out where microbes are. He commercialized this device a few years ago thinking it was just a device for people with IBS and FODMAPs intolerance.

I got a hold of it and I called him up and I said, Angus, this is far bigger than you think. This is a device that maps out where microbes are in the GI tract and helps people navigate all food intolerances. FODMAPs, nightshade, histamine-containing foods, sorbitol, fructose, fruit, legumes, nuts, all that stuff. He now knows that this is a far more important device than ever thought. I had thousands of people testing their breath now for hydrogen gas. Ashley, what shocked me was it’s everywhere. People are testing positive left and right.

It’s the uncommon person who tests negative. My crude estimation is that at least a very conservatively estimated, at least 100 million Americans have SIBO. I think that’s a dramatic underestimation. It’s gotten a whole bunch worse just the last few years. People say things like, this is too complicated. It’s too much to worry about. It is scaring me. It’s very unwise to ignore this because if you have SIBO, which is true for a lot of people—at least one in three—over time it leads to autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, colon cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders. In other words, it leads to a whole host of diseases. Of course the doctor is more than happy to dispense all kinds of fancy drugs including biologics for many thousands of dollars per month.

 

[00:59:40] Ashley James: Just thinking about what led us here? I mean, antibiotic use is on the rise, right? Glyphosates in our foods, just one of the thousands of chemicals in our food. Glyphosate, although was first designed as a chelator, is now known back, I think, 2010 or 2012, they published that it’s also an antibiotic. Glyphosates, which is in the Roundup. Which is in so much of our food. Even if you buy organic at home, if you go out to a restaurant to eat something, you’re eating glyphosate.

That is basically antibiotics in your food. There are chemicals in our food that are harming our microbiome, then there’s the diet itself. I heard somewhere that eating high fat and when I say high fat, I mean a highly processed oil, standard American diet like eating french fries, like eating canola oils, right? This very high unhealthy fat diet, just go out and eat at restaurants basically. That oil itself suffocates the good microbiome. It makes it like an anaerobic environment. I’m just exploring, just in my mind, I’m exploring all the factors that we have in this modern era that are killing the good bacteria.

 

[01:01:26] Dr. William Davis: You know, Ashley, I could devote an entire episode of your podcast just talking about that because you’re making an essential point. We’re drowning in the factors that disrupt the microbiome. You’re right, antibiotics. Most of us by age 40 have already taken 30 courses of antibiotics. For every thousand children, over 1,300 prescriptions for antibiotics are written every year. That’s just antibiotics. You making an essential point with the glyphosate. Yes, an herbicide but also a potent antibiotic. Other herbicides, pesticides, a linoleic acid-rich diet that is a diet that includes lots of vegetable oils, corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil does disrupt the microbiome.

We have to be careful here. I love talking to a microbiologist. I’m not of course a microbiologist but I talk to a lot of microbiologists. I love talking to them because they have such great insights into microbes. The problem with microbiologists is they are microbiologists. They don’t understand nutrition. I mentioned that because you’ll see in a lot of the studies, they say, we gave our mice a high-fat diet just like unhealthy Americans.

They’ve subscribed to this ridiculous and outdated notion that we should all be low fat, which of course is absurd. The low-fat mantra has damaged so many billions of people’s health and lives and it’s a big driver of obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics we now have, so we have got to be careful. You’re right that the linoleic acid omega 6-rich oils do contribute to the disruption of the microbiome.

On the other hand, it’s omega 3, the EPA DHA, not so much the linoleic acid that has microbiome protective effects. One of the things that the omega 3 fatty acids do is activate an enzyme that lines the intestinal wall called intestinal outland phosphatase. One of the effects of that enzyme is to deactivate that endotoxin that microbes release and tries to get into your bloodstream. Even good old fish oil has beneficial effects on the microbiome.

 

[01:03:44] Ashley James: I love it. I love all these tidbits. Let’s talk more about your book because I’m sure I want to go make the SIBO yogurt. We’re going to make it out of coconut milk or something. I really want to make that. My husband has had mild SIBO. We did that test, eating a certain diet, then you blow into the little tubes and you send it off to the lab.

I also wonder about small intestinal fungal overgrowth, which the doctor who coined that and the first person who ever published studies on it, I had him on the show. He says it’s a man-made illness because without antibiotics and all the things we’ve done to disrupt—basically take healthy food and turn it into junk food, turn it into processed food, and all the chemicals we now eat. Mostly it’s the overuse of antibiotics. He sees that fungal overgrowth is now taking effect in the small intestines. He had a wealth of data to support this and he was criticized heavily by his peers.

It’s just funny that we can have a mountain of evidence. It’s like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We can have a mountain of evidence, but when we challenge people’s belief systems, especially someone who has had more education around their profession, challenging that education sometimes leads to a lot of resistance. We have to remember to keep our minds open enough that our brains could fall out. Just think critically. Don’t take everything at face value. Question everything, but keep your mind so open.

What if you could cure your insomnia and depression because you changed what you ate? So many doctors out there will say that’s impossible, take this prescription. Yet here we have this book, Super Gut by Dr. William Davis. He’s showing us that we can do simple, small, actionable steps each day, and we could cure lifelong insomnia. We can look younger. We can have more love in our life. We can start to reverse major health issues and get off medications like diabetes.

For SIBO, it causes so much discomfort. Like you said, it can lead to colon cancer, it can lead to all these other issues, that it causes distension. I have a friend who has such a bad SIBO that she only eats meat. She’s so careful. She can’t even use spices. She can’t put onion on something. Any form of fiber and she is so sick. She gets a migraine. She gets bloated and she’s so sick that the only thing she can do is use a small amount of meat each day. She is becoming skinnier and skinnier in a very unhealthy way. She’s always in pain.

I can’t wait to give her your book. I am going to cry. I’m so excited for her because I know her case is extreme. It was years and years leading up to it. For those who notice that they have gut issues, they have digestion issues, and eliminating one food after another and after another. It is going to get to the point where it’s like, what can you eat? Whereas when we heal the gut and that we have a strong healthy microbiome, the microbiome is working with us, the healthy microbes are working with us to help digest our food, and assimilate our food, then we won’t have those issues anymore. The SIBO yogurt is that in your book?

 

[01:07:41] Dr. William Davis: It is. I came to it by just sheer logic, just reasoning this out. Because when you think about it, if you have SIBO that is 30 feet of trillions of microbes, if you take a commercial probiotic off the shelf, can it get rid of your SIBO? No, it might reduce bloating and diarrhea a little bit, but it really wants to get rid of these misplaced bacteria in the upper GI tract. That’s why people use things like Rifaximin, the prescription antibiotics, and some of the herbal antibiotic regimens that have some proven efficacy like the good the bad, and the FC biocides regimen that I discussed in the book. That we use for a couple of years successfully.

But I asked some different questions. I asked, what if we chose bacterial species that colonize the upper GI tract? Because that’s where SIBO occurs. What if we chose species that produced what are called bacteriocins? These are natural antibiotics effective against this species of SIBO.

I chose a strain of Lactobacillus gasseri. Gasseri colonizes the upper GI tract and produces up to seven bacteriocins. It was a bacteriocin powerhouse. I chose those strains of reuteri that also colonize the upper GI tract and produce up to four bacteriocins and a strain of bacillus coagulans. We co-ferment them as yogurt. It doesn’t have yogurt, but in this case, I use yogurt. Extended fermentation to achieve very high bacterial counts and we consume half a cup per day. Ashley, so far, this is only about 30 people but 90% have converted to hydrogen gas negative by the AIRE device.

So far, it’s holding up. We have several clinical trials in the works. We’ll probably do that one down the road, not as yogurt but we’ll have to encapsulate microbes to control the dose. We’ll probably look at that formally and see if this holds true, but so far I think it’s working. The downside is you have to eat it for about four weeks. It’s a little slower than antibiotics. There is a die off phenomenon upfront. You do get the little bloating, anxiety, and those light effects, but Ashley, it’s just yogurt. It’s such a nice way to approach it.

 

[01:10:11] Ashley James: Instead of having to go through the FODMAPs diet, that is infinitely easier than getting rid of SIBO traditionally.

 

[01:10:20] Dr. William Davis: Right. Now, one thing we’ve not done is test how well this works in non-dairy fermentation that I just don’t know. I believe you can do quite well though. We’ve had a number of people do this well with coconut milk, canned coconut milk. The only difference is when you ferment canned coconut milk, there are a few additional steps you have to add because coconut milk likes to separate into fat. You don’t want to get this big layer of fat. You have to add some guar gum. We preheat. We don’t preheat dairy, that’s an unnecessary step. They do that in conventional yogurt making because they start with skim milk or low-fat milk. I start with organic half and half, 18% fat. For all the problems that dairy may have, the least problem or no problem is the dairy fat or fat is fine.

This notion of low-fat nonfat dairy is ridiculous. I start with organic half and half 18% fat. You can also start with organic coconut milk. You’ll just have to add a few additional steps like adding a little bit of guar gum and then we also blend it with a blender until it thickens up. All of these additional steps discourage separation in the final product.

 

[01:11:37] Ashley James: This is so interesting. I’ve made plant-based yogurt before and I used whatever I thought was a healthy probiotic. It turned out well. I’m excited to play with your system and what’s in your book. Your book is Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan, so let’s talk about this. It is a four-week plan just to reprogram your microbiome to restore health and lose weight. Give us a glimpse into what it looks like for the next four weeks. We’re all going to get your book and then we’re going to do it for four weeks. How much time does this take? What kind of fun experiments are we going to be cooking up in the kitchen? Give us a layout of what it looks like for the next four weeks.

 

[01:12:26] Dr. William Davis: If we spend the first week, I liken this, Ashley, to a backyard vegetable garden. Let’s pretend it’s May or June and you’re going to layout a 10×10 plot. How do you do that? Well, you lay out your plot, then you pick out the stones and the twigs, and then you plant seeds. Then you want to fertilize it for the growing season. After a couple of months, you’ve got a whole bunch of eggplant, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, and zucchini. The same kind of thing happens in your microbiome. We have to prepare the soil. It’s done the first week of preparing the soil means undoing all the things that screw up your microbiome such as getting filtered water, and choosing organic foods over conventional foods wherever possible to minimize your exposure to herbicides and pesticides.

Working to get off medications like statin drugs and anti-inflammatory drugs. This might take longer than a week but at least you have a whole week to try to reorganize your life and clean up your microbiome. We also approach diet. I’m guilty of reintroducing some of the Wheat Belly-type concepts just because as you saw, even though the concepts in Wheat Belly did not take the microbiome 100% of the way back, it was a great start because one of the things that happen with brain consumption is huge intestinal inflammation. You experienced it, you lost all that water weight.

 

[01:13:56] Ashley James: Yeah, the inflammation weight.

 

[01:13:59] Dr. William Davis: When you lose water weight, that is very important because it means you were retaining water because you were inflamed. Getting rid of all that inflammation, water is a huge step. We reintroduce the diet like we’re already doing the diet simpler for them. I also introduce nutrients that are largely lacking in modern life. Not because of the diet but because of the way we conduct our lives. We can’t drink from the river because it’s got sewage, pesticides, and herbicides. We have to filter our water. All water filtration removes all magnesium. We all begin with profound magnesium depletion. We’ve replaced that and that helps the microbiome as well as other aspects of your physiology.

We’ve replaced vitamin D because we don’t eat liver and most of us live indoors and wear clothes when we’re out in public, we replace the vitamin D. Iodine and omega 3 fatty acids, similar reasons, which we’re because we’re just not getting enough from our diets. One departure we have to talk about is people get all excited when they hear about the reuteri yogurt and how you turn the clock back 10 or 20 years, the infantis yogurt that we use in babies that has dramatic effects on their future development and IQ, or bacillus coagulants, how it helps athletes recover faster.

But the problem with that is those are really powerful strategies but they work much better if you don’t have SIBO or SIFO. Many people have to stop the program and then deal with their SIBO or SIFO. It’s not that difficult, but it means there’s a delay. You might not do it in four weeks because if you’re going to do the SIBO yogurt, that alone is about four weeks. If you do the candibactin regimen of herbal antibiotics, that takes a couple of weeks. If you don’t have SIBO or SIFO, that’s a lot simpler. Then you start talking about these fermented foods, including yogurt to get these outsized effects.

 

[01:16:07] Ashley James: That’s really exciting. It’s exciting that people will be in touch with their bodies. They’ll notice these changes. They’ll go, okay, I’ve got to stop and go and do the SIBO regimen and then come back. It empowers people. It gives them confidence. I’ve experienced this as well. So many of us, because we’re raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then go to the doctor and the doctor is on their pedestal that will heal us. Then they write a prescription and which most drugs don’t heal, they suppress. They manipulate the body, suppress, and they don’t actually help the body overcome and get healthy again. Because the body was out of balance because it was missing nutrients, mostly it’s our diet.

We got to bring and we got to correct the diet. We’ve got to make sure our diet includes the prebiotics and the probiotics, the fermented foods. Like you said, first correct the overgrowth if there’s an overgrowth in the small intestines. We’ve been raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then see the doctor. It’s so backward. This is sort of the mainstream idea of health is that we are helpless and the all-seeing, all-knowing doctor is going to help us.

That’s the perfect business model. It’s perfect PR perfect marketing for big pharma. It’s perfect, a lifelong customer, for doctors and big pharma. Then there are doctors like you who are like let’s get so healthy we don’t need to get sick all the time, go to the doctor, and get a prescription. Let’s get so healthy that we prevent getting sick.

 

[01:18:06] Dr. William Davis: You make such a crucial point that I agree completely. That is, we need to get away from this idea of treating diseases like type 2 diabetes. What are they doing for type 2 diabetes? One, the American Diabetes Association diet is absurd. It raises blood sugar and sustains diabetes, so they’re no help.

The doctor introduces drugs whether it’s insulin, Metformin, Byetta injections, or other drugs to reduce blood sugar. They don’t address the cause. What you’re advocating is we identify the root causes of these conditions. In the case of type 2 diabetes, let’s remove the foods that raise blood sugar and cause insulin resistance. Let’s address the nutrients that are largely lacking that also contribute to insulin resistance. Let’s address the microbiome that via endotoxemia contributes largely to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes goes away in the vast majority of people.

I was a diabetic 30 years ago. I’m no longer a diabetic on nothing except my nutrients and food. I have perfect blood sugar and perfect hemoglobin A1C. I’ve done this with many, many people, and there’s actually published evidence to this effect, but unfortunately, it doesn’t drive revenues. While you and I know this, your listeners know this, my colleagues don’t give a crap because there’s no pot of gold involved.

 

[01:19:40] Ashley James: This is a really scary part of the medical system. You as the patient need to be incredibly informed and we have to pull our heads out of the sand. We cannot blindly take our bodies to a doctor that is just going to put us on the conveyor belt of allopathic medicine. We need to take charge. That can seem daunting and overwhelming, especially if we have a large family. I know as a mom, I’m responsible for feeding everyone every day, every meal, and it gets a little overwhelming and gets a little old.

If we can sort of step back and just take these baby steps, and I love that your program, let’s just make this yogurt and eat it for the next two weeks, that’s doable. What else are some doable steps that we can take? Nothing overwhelming, but something that really gives us some bang for our buck.

 

[01:20:45] Dr. William Davis: I have a really cool one. It’s not in the book, but it’s consistent with the program. It is on my website. I had my Wheat Belly blog for years. It had 30 million visits and I converted it over to drdavisinfinitehealth.com. I had so many websites and social media. I combined a lot of it into one website, this drdavisinfinitehealth.com. One of the things I’ve been advocating is that there’s a fungus, not a bacteria but a fungus called saccharomyces boulardii. It’s a cousin of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae that’s used to ferment wine and beer.

Saccharomyces boulardii is better adapted to the human body. It doesn’t take up long-term residence. It acts as a kind of a traffic cop in your microbiome that when you get exposed to this microbe, it does all kinds of cool stuff. It encourages growth, a proliferation of healthy bacterial species. It discourages unhealthy species including fungi like candida albicans, candida glabrata and malassezia. If you take it during a course of antibiotics, it minimizes the disruption of your microbiome because it’s not susceptible to antibiotics. It’s a fungus. We take this microbe and you could buy it in the US at Walgreens, Walmart, or Target as a product called florastor. Florastor has different names in other countries but in the US it is called florastor.

As often happens, they sell it in low numbers. What we do is take a capsule of the Florastor and empty it into some juice. Apple cider is a really good one. I recently made mango passion fruit juice. You have just had to make sure there are no preservatives in it. Look for potassium sorbate or those kinds of things. Don’t buy those, you want one with no preservatives because preservatives inhibit the microbe. Get a natural juice, it’s going to have a lot of sugar, but fermentation by saccharomyces boulardii reduces the sugar because it eats the sugar.

Take a capsule, empty it into any volume—a quarter, a gallon, whatever you want. Cap it lightly, not tightly, because you’re going to see within 24 hours as it sits on your kitchen counter it will be bubbling with carbon dioxide. Let it go for 48, not more than 72 hours refrigerated. You’re going to have sparkling juice. It’s effervescent, it’s delicious. You’re getting a wallop of saccharomyces boulardii that helps bring your bacterial and fungal microbiome back in order.

This is a great adjunct to the other things you’re doing like SIBO yogurt, the candibactin regimen, or whatever else you’re doing to reorder your microbiome. It’s a big advantage. Just be sure not to cap it tight because you’ll have an explosion because of so much carbon dioxide. It tastes like apple soda or whatever kind of juice you ferment. It’s effervescent like soda.

 

[01:23:59] Ashley James: It sounds like making water kefir where the bacteria eats the sugar and poops out the bubbles.

 

[01:24:02] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, yes.

 

[01:24:05] Ashley James: I love it. I have a dear friend who has lifelong constipation. Her parents had her on courses of antibiotics as a baby. I just think this is such a common problem. She has tried everything. Everything that I’ve given her because I have lots of health information. I’m like, all right, try this healing gut soup. Now, try this herb and try just everything and she says it’ll work for a bit. Then the second she gets off it, it’s a high-fiber vegetable soup. It’s really nice when she takes it but the moment she stops taking it, she’ll go back to incredible constipation. Nothing seems to last. Nothing seems to stick. Every supplement she’s tried, every diet change she’s tried, and it doesn’t have any lasting effect. She’s tried on over-the-counter probiotics. She has to be on high doses of oral magnesium just to keep her moving.

What would you say to someone who has lifelong constipation that has never been able to get it under control? I really feel like it’s a microbiome issue because she knows she was on antibiotics her entire childhood and it totally destroyed her gut. All the conventional ways of restoring the microbiome haven’t worked for her. What would you say for those who have very chronic constipation?

 

[01:25:32] Dr. William Davis: First, Ashley, I’m very impressed she knows you and she knows about magnesium because magnesium is a really big advantage. It abbreviates the so-called transit time. The amount of time it takes for food to pass through your GI tract. She’s already done that. That’s a great thing to do.

Another thing is called obstipation. It’s the most severe form of constipation that seems to respond to nothing. Getting rid of wheat and grains is important because of the gliadin-derived opioids. Of course, opioids are very constipating. Anybody who’s taking oxycontin or other opioids knows he gets terrible constipation from opioids. The gliadin protein in wheat and the related proteins and other grains become opioids and they are likewise extremely constipating for many people.

I had a woman way back when Wheat Belly first came out and she said, you’re not going to believe what happened to me. I moved my bowels once every three weeks. My abdomen is so distended. I’ve had numerous endoscopies and colonoscopies and all they tell me is to take laxatives, enemas, and stool softeners and nothing works. I went wheat and grain-free and I lost 30 pounds in a week.

For the first time in her lifetime, she’s moving her bowels every day. Then her family left the house for a day and she’s hungry for lunch. She says, what the heck, I’m going to make a sandwich. She had a sandwich with bread and it all came back. It took her about another week to get off of it and have her bowel movements returned. I’ve seen things like that. That’s called obstipation. The gliadin-derived opioids can be very potent.

The other thing here is likely she has, of course, methanogen overgrowth. That is an overgrowth of not bacteria and not fungi but these peculiar creatures called archaea. These are really fascinating creatures because they’re also called extremophiles. They live in the boiling water geysers in Yellowstone National Park. They live at the bottom of the ocean with extreme weight upon them. They survive in all kinds of extreme environments, the Dead Sea with extreme salinity and the human GI tract. No one knows how they got there or why they’re there, we are filled with methanogens. When they overgrow and possibly ascend into the upper GI tract, the telltale sign is unremitting constipation.

The newest AIRE device that came out literally two weeks ago, the old AIRE device only measured hydrogen gas. The newest device measures hydrogen gas and methane. She can do that and prove to herself whether she has methanogen overgrowth or she can do a stool analysis and see if she has an excess of so-called methanogens.

These are microbes like methanobrevibacters smithii and some others. One of the problems we have with methanogen overgrowth, it’s not quite clear how we best manage it. There’s some evidence that the Rifaximin antibiotic has an effect. There is some data and we’ve seen some successes with the Candibactin Herbal antibiotic regimen. There may be some other things, but they’re very poorly documented.

We’re not quite clear on exactly what to do with methanogen overgrowth, though I personally would consider the newest aire device and consider the Candibactin regimen. If you have methanogen growth, you’d likely have other disruptions in the microbiome. All the other things we do like saccharomyces boulardii sparkling cider, maybe the SIBO yogurt, all those kinds of things probably have value as well.

 

[01:29:26] Ashley James: The candibactin regimen is that in your book?

 

[01:29:30] Dr. William Davis: It is. It’s from metagenics. It’s Candibactin-AR and Candibactin-BR. I was very skeptical about these herbal antibiotics because when you combine things, when you say things like this, let’s throw in a little oil of oregano because it’s effective against E. Coli. Let’s throw a little this herb because it’s effective against this other microbe. You really can’t concoct antibiotics that way. There has to be formal evidence and these were concocted very sloppily. I was very skeptical.

Then there was a study from Johns Hopkins that compared incredibly Rifaximin to conventional antibiotics with two herbal antibiotic regimens. The ones I’ve mentioned, the Candibactin regimen and the dysbiocide regimen from Biotics Research. Lo and behold, the herbal antibiotic regimens outperformed the Rifaximin and the Rifaximin failures, of which there are many, responded to the herbal antibiotics. Lo and behold, some evidence that there are herbal antibiotics. Now, there are lots of other herbal antibiotics but they have no evidence for efficacy.

I have no reason to take them on faith. Those two regimens have worked for us. But lately, I’ve been inching towards this idea that you know what, if you have SIBO, not methanogen overgrowth, try the SIBO yogurt. There is one small study, I believe it was done in Italy looking at reuteri that suppress methanogens. But I’m skeptical, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s really going to play out in the real world. I wouldn’t advocate the reuteri alone for methanogen overgrowth and constipation.

 

[01:31:13] Ashley James: It sounds like a pretty stubborn microbe to get rid of like it lives in the Dead Sea and lives in geysers. It sounds like it’s going to take a bit more to move it out of the body.

 

[01:31:30] Dr. William Davis: Here’s an oddity. If we look at the microbiomes of indigenous populations like the ones that have been studied in Africa, South America, and elsewhere. They have methanogens more than we do. In other words, if we use them as a comparator to see what a healthy microbiome should look like, this is kind of puzzling, they have more methanogens than we do. I think what’s happening here—by the way, beyond constipation, methanogen overgrowth has not yet been blamed for any human disease. It’s not quite clear what these things are doing. I think what that means when you look at the Hodza, for instance like Maasai, Yanomami, or the people in the jungles of New Guinea, they have all these methanogens.

What the real story here is with the presence of methanogens per se may not be harmful. It’s the company it keeps in the rest of the microbiome. In other words, maybe those indigenous populations define with methanogens because they have more spirochaetes that we don’t have any of. They have more Prevotella and they don’t have any by sort of bacteria. They have a very different microbiome. Maybe it’s the setting that occurs. In other words, it’s not quite clear what we do about methanogen overgrowth but for the sake of your poor friend’s constipation, it’s still worth considering, like the candibactin regimen. I think in the future, we’re going to have to rethink this whole situation within the methanogens.

 

[01:33:09] Ashley James: Fascinating. I love it. I’m really excited to apply these to my life and get my friends and the whole neighborhood. I’m very excited to play with it. I’m very excited for my listeners to get your book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight.

Lastly, let’s talk about this idea of losing weight simply by focusing on supporting gut health. We touched on how by removing grains, you can lose the water weight. How even just with the Lactobacillus reuteri improves the oxytocin and you feel so good and you’re not hungry so it curbs the appetite. Beyond those things, how does your book help us lose weight by creating a healthy microbiome?

 

[01:34:09] Dr. William Davis: Back to your reuteri and oxytocin, you may recall one of the effects of the boost in oxytocin is the so-called anorexigenic effect. It really turns off your appetite. If you go wheat and grain-free, you’ve eliminated gliadin-derived opioid peptides. They’re not only constipating, but they’re also very potent appetite stimulants. That’s why you see people, for instance, have a big bowl of pasta, they’re filled to bursting, yet they’re still hungry. That’s the gliadin-derived opioid peptide appetite-stimulating effect.

Wheat and grain-free, you’re given tremendous control over your appetite. Cultivate reuteri, get a boost in oxytocin and you become profoundly in control. Food is great of course, but you are no longer tempted. Hunger feels completely different. It’s no longer that gnawing desperate feeling. I personally feel hunger as slight restlessness after I haven’t eaten for maybe six to eight hours. It’s a very different experience. The oxytocin effect is a big, big advantage.

Then there are microbes like Lactobacillus gasseri that have been shown in two studies to reduce waist circumference quite significantly. If you did an MRI or CAT scan of your abdomen and measure the cross-sectional area of visceral inflammatory fat, you would see dramatic reductions in visceral fat. It’s not quite clear why that is, but I think it’s because gasseri is so good at reducing endotoxemia. We call that endotoxemia. The breakdown products of microbes that enter the bloodstream is a big contributor to insulin resistance.

If we took somebody who is slender and active and measured their fasting insulin, it’s likely something two micro units per liter. If we took somebody who was pre-diabetic, had a big waist, a lot of visceral fat, and we measured their fasting insulin, it’s probably 30, 70, 100 microunits per liter. In other words, it’s not 20% worse, it’s manyfold worse. When you have high insulin, it causes weight gain and prevents weight loss. One of the big drivers of that high insulin is endotoxemia. If we get microbe gasseri that reduces endotoxemia, your body is allowed to reduce insulin and thereby release weight. Those are the two biggest strategies that I’m aware of.

 

[01:36:41] Ashley James: I love it. I just had another thought for cardiovascular health. Is there a microbiome fix for high blood pressure?

 

[01:36:53] Dr. William Davis: What we do with high blood pressure is we start with the diet, which alone has huge effects because we lose visceral fat. Insulin drops, we don’t have insulin resistance, and that releases fluid as you experience. That alone is huge. We add the nutrients largely lacking in modern light, vitamin D, magnesium, omega 3, fatty acids, and iodine. Those four things all together have a huge impact on further reducing insulin resistance and reducing blood pressure.

Just the magnesium alone reduces blood pressure. Then taking the steps to restore a healthy microbiome, thereby reducing inflammation and endotoxemia also reduces blood pressure. Getting fermented foods reduces blood pressure. Those microbes, let’s say kimchi or fermented sauerkraut, like Leuconostoc Mesenteroides and Pediococcus they reduce blood pressure. We’re not actually treating blood pressure, we’re addressing the factors that allow blood pressure to emerge in the first place, and almost people walk away with a blood pressure of like 106.

 

[01:38:07] Ashley James: That’s awesome. When we go to make our yogurts, like you’ve mentioned, the Lactobacillus gasseri, the reuteri, and all these other really great ones, can we take all of them and throw them in and make a concoction, or do they compete and we really should make individual batches with each one?

 

[01:38:26] Dr. William Davis: That’s a good question, Ashley. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You can do that, you can combine them, but it’s like your backyard garden. If all you have growing your gardener tomatoes, you’re going to have a ton of tomatoes. What if you grow tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and squash, you have fewer tomatoes. The same kind of things and it depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

If you’re a competitive athlete, you want to reduce the amount of muscle injury you have with extreme exertion. You should take Bacillus Coagulans, probably fermented by itself from natural effects. You want to get smoother skin, deeper sleep, and restore youthful muscle strength, that’s a reuteri effect, you probably want to ferment reuteri by itself. What if maybe you have somebody in their 20s who doesn’t really need to reverse age yet and would also like some better recovery, and maybe wants to have lower blood pressure and a smaller waist? Maybe we could co-ferment reuteri, gasseri, and bacillus coagulans. You can do that.

We make future batches of yogurt from a little bit of the prior batch. As you get further and further in subsequent batches, there can be shifts in relative numbers of different microbes. One of the things that happen with the SIBO yogurt is you’ll lose the reuteri probably by your 10th batch. That’s an instance where you want to re-inoculate or start from scratch again.

A lot of this is a work in progress, we have not done DNA analyses and all the different combinations. You can do this, you can combine microbes. This is very useful for younger people. All humans are supposed to have reuteri. What if you have a 10-year-old or an 18-year-old? They probably don’t want to superduper the high numbers were getting. They can co-ferment several microbes and still get reuteri replenished and get those other benefits as well.

 

[01:40:29] Ashley James: I love it. Does your book have a list of all these different ones that talk about each one of them like an encyclopedia, all the different microbes that we could be fermenting to repopulate to get specific outcomes?

 

[01:40:49] Dr. William Davis: Approach it like a menu at a restaurant. If you and I walk into a restaurant and the waitress hands us a menu, you don’t freak out and say, oh my God, I can’t order all these appetizers, main dishes, and desserts. We pick and choose the dishes we want. We do the same thing with the microbiome. Pick the microbes for the effect you want. If you want deeper sleep, greater libido, and smoother skin, let’s ferment the reuteri.

If you want a reduction in knee pain from arthritis, let’s ferment the bacillus coagulans. If you have a baby and you want that baby to sleep through the night, take longer naps, and have half as many bowels movements, thereby half as many diaper changes, have less asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, type 1 diabetes, autoimmune disease, have a higher IQ for a lifetime, and are less likely to become obese as adults. Let’s ferment Bifidobacterium infantis. You can pick and choose the microbe you want for the effect you want just like a restaurant.

 

[01:41:51] Ashley James: This is amazing, everything you listed. I’m really just imagining the listeners are just getting so excited to get your book, try it out, and start making this yogurt. You don’t have to eat bowls and bowls of it. You’re just having a few spoonfuls of this yogurt. Then the question that arises is, because there’s an acid on my stomach, doesn’t it kill all the bacteria anyway?

 

[01:42:16] Dr. William Davis: There’s a drop in numbers, but the microbes that were using largely survived stomach acid and bile. These microbes are fairly tolerant to the stomach. There are microbes that do indeed die, but the ones that we’re using are the ones that have been shown to be tolerant to those kinds of things. If you eat, for instance, 250 billion, maybe only 100 billion survived, but it’s sufficient to give you a big wallop of an effect.

By the way, the saccharomyces boulardii that we make those sparkling juices with, by the way, you don’t want to overdo those juices. They do still have some sugar. It cuts the fermentation process and cuts sugar by 50% or more. If anybody’s ever interested, you can get a hydrometer from your brewing. If you have a beer-making store they have these things called hydrometers. With just a few dollars, you can measure the sugar content of your juice so you can calculate how much sugar you’re getting. I suggest people drink no more than a quarter cup a couple of times three times a day so you’re not getting a bunch of sugar all at once.

 

[01:43:27] Ashley James: As we’re drinking it, is it making it into the intestines, is it making it to the colon?

 

[01:43:35] Dr. William Davis: The saccharomyces, in particular, are very tolerant. That’s a really big advantage. By the way, it’s also tolerant to alcohol. You can make an appletini and other martinis with it.

 

[01:43:50] Ashley James: Some of these are supposed to populate in the colon not in the small intestine, is that correct?

 

[01:43:55] Dr. William Davis: That is true. Unfortunately, some of the probiotic manufacturers have ignored this whole issue of SIBO which is a big miscalculation. They do things like double encapsulate their capsule so that it does not dissolve in the small bowel. I think that’s a real mistake because even if you don’t have SIBO, there are so many factors that are trying to make you have SIBO that it’s worth always having microbes in the small bowel to discourage E. Colis and Klebsiellas of the colon from ascending.

You’re just taking Ranitidine or Prozac for a few weeks is not to give you SIBO. Just having an all-you-can-eat vacation in Mexico where you drink too many margaritas over three days, that’s enough to give you SIBO. There are so many things conspiring to make those microbes rise in your small bowel that I think is worth having those release in the small bowel and not trying to keep them in the colon alone.

 

[01:44:55] Ashley James: Which makes the yogurt make so much sense.

 

[01:45:00] Dr. William Davis: Yes.

 

[01:45:01] Ashley James: I can talk to you all day. This is so fascinating. I’m really excited about your book. Of course the link to the book, Super Gut, is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast down the description, learntruehealth.com, and in whatever podcast directory you’re listening from right now. Dr. Davis, is there anything you’d like to share to wrap up today’s interview? Any homework? Any suggestions? Of course, we’re going to have the link to your website and everything you do. Also in the show notes that people can follow you and read your blog and continue to learn from you. Please, impart us with final words of wisdom.

 

[01:45:40] Dr. William Davis: As you know, Ashley, the lesson to pass on is that if you desire, if you want to, you have astounding power over your health. The last person you want to consult and how to become healthy is the doctor. The doctor has no idea. If you said, hey, doc, I’m interested in boosting my oxytocin by getting reuteri. I’m trying to make the sparkling apple cider so I get a big wallop of saccharomyces boulardii, what do you think about that?

You’re going to get glazed eyes, they’ll make fun of you, or say something like, hey, did you consult Dr. Google again? Sadly, people in healthcare have abdicated their responsibility because of making more money for their healthcare system. So important to emphasize that people have huge power.

Also, it’s important to know that what you’re doing is so crucial. People like you and me are no longer welcome on major media. We can’t get on TV. We don’t get interviewed by major magazines or newspapers because there’s too much money at stake from big pharma. Big pharma now funds so much of the media via direct consumer drug advertising and other means that people like you and me have missed on his health, nutrition can’t get in anymore. It means that podcasts, blogs, and social media are the ways we have to get these types of messages. It’s not coming from the doctors, it’s not coming from the media, we’ve got to get these messages out because they’re so powerful and they empower people.

 

[01:47:20] Ashley James: I am so thankful that you came on the show. Again, thank you so much for sharing this information. We really do need to empower ourselves. We really do need to educate ourselves and keep our minds so open that our brains would fall out. We just have to be willing to challenge the belief system we grew up in. We have to be willing to be the salmon.

I like to say this often on the show, if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. One in three people has a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. I think it’s one in three women and one in two men. It’s ridiculous. There’s a 50% chance that you’re going to get cancer if you just do what everyone else is doing. My listeners on the show don’t. They love to be the salmon, swim upstream, be the black sheep, and choose to take charge of their health.

Sometimes that’s overwhelming. Just taking one step at a time, just one little thing that you can do today to improve your health and continue doing that. If you want to have diabetes, one to two people are diabetic or pre-diabetic, obesity, it’s so common now. Heart disease and cancer are the top killers, and of course, diabetes is a trifecta because diabetes causes heart disease. Then there’s dementia. There’s just a deterioration, a quick-aging, quick deterioration, dying younger and younger.

If you want that in your life maybe not now but in the future, then do what everyone else is doing. Go eat what everyone else is eating. Just go to your doctor and get put on older drugs he wants to put you on. Going with the flow leads to being a statistic. We have to look at the statistics of health in our country and realize that doing what everyone else is doing is going to give you that life. You have to go against the grain. You have to throw the grains out and listen to Dr. William Davis. What I love is Dr. Davis brings science-based, holistic, you in charge of your health healing medicine that is backed by studies, that is backed by science. We don’t need to wait to get sick. We can take actionable steps today.

Definitely get Dr. Davis’s book, I’m so excited about this, and start to take these actionable steps and then do it with your friends and family. It’s so easy to hand a spoonful of yogurt to your husband, wife, sister, or whatever. Just hey, try eating every day. Just a few spoonfuls a few times a day, and here, drink this little sparkling beverage in here. Eat some fun fermented food I made. It doesn’t take cups and cups or bowls and bowls of it. Just a spoonful at a time, little tweaks at a time we can completely take back our health.

I know everyone is really excited about introducing the reuteri and having a better sex life, feeling amazing on oxytocin, and having better collagen and twice as fast healing. That alone I think has sold all of us on buying your book, Super Gut. Of course, following you on your blog and continue to learn from you.

Thank you for everything you do. I’d love to have you back on the show when you have more information. I know you’re just constantly digging into the bleeding cutting edge of all the science coming out. Please, come back to the show when you have more to share.

 

[01:51:10] Dr. William Davis: I will Ashley, happily, anytime.

 

[01:51:11] Ashley James: Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

 

[01:51:15] Dr. William Davis: Thank you, Ashley. Keep up your great work.

 

[01:51:17] Ashley James: I hope you enjoy today’s interview with Dr. William Davis. Wasn’t that amazing? I bet you’re so excited to jump on probiotics, go experiment, and make some yourself. I am going to put the links to what he recommends in the show notes of today’s podcast. Wherever you’re listening from, just go to the notes below of this recording, the description. You can go to learntruehealth.com or from wherever you’re listening, just click on the podcast and you’ll see the notes in the description. I’ll make sure I put the links there for the probiotics that he recommends to culture. Also yogurt maker and other stuff like that. Make sure that’s there so you could immediately go and give it a try.

Come join the learn true Facebook group and let us know how it goes. Of course, I’ve already shared my testimonial at the beginning of the interview. I look forward to hearing yours as well, I’m very, very excited. Please, join Learn True Facebook group, come share your experience, give it a shot.

I’m all about experimenting and the kitchen is such a fun place to do some great fermenting, culture some great probiotics, do some health experiments, and just try it for yourself. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and I’m just really excited for the journey that you’re on. If you’re new to this podcast, welcome. Please join the Learn True Health Facebook groups so that you can ask questions and jump into the community.

I also recommend going to takeyoursupplements.com as they are amazing health coaches that help you through a naturopathic doctor-created program. Get on exactly what your body is craving, what your needs, and what your body’s missing, as well as helping you understand the nutrients that certain foods are hurting you, certain foods are helping you. They help you in that way to guide you. So if you’re looking for a bit more hand-holding, definitely want to check out takeyoursupplements.com as well.

Dive into the group, into the community because we’d love to see you there. You can even use the search function in the Facebook group to dive in and learn from so many amazing people from past conversations and start your own new conversation. Just throw some questions out there and it’s a very supportive group. I’m there every day helping people and I look forward to meeting you and seeing you there as well.

Get Connected with Dr. William Davis!

Website

Facebook 

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Spotify

Books by Dr. William Davis

Super Gut

Wheat Belly

Undoctored

 

 

Mar 5, 2022

Medicinal Aloe Gel Drink

LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe

 - coupon code LTH2022

 

Dr. Vickers website:

http://www.gersonclinic.com

 

Reversing Cancer with Advanced Gerson Therapy, Dr. Patrick Vickers 

https://www.learntruehealth.com/reversing-cancer-with-advanced-gerson-therapy-dr-patrick-vickers

 

Highlights:

  • History of Gerson Therapy
  • Importance of alkaline diet
  • Importance of coffee enema in detoxing the body
  • What a Gerson meal looks like

 

Dr. Patrick Vickers is the Director and Founder of the Advanced Gerson Therapy Clinic. He studied under Charlotte Gerson and applied everything he learned about the Gerson Therapy and tweaked it to enhance Gerson Therapy based on scientific studies. In this episode, Dr. Vickers shares the Gerson Therapy and Gerson meals look like.

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. Patrick Vickers who shares the Dr. Max Gerson protocol and then the add-ons that he has added on that he has found in his clinical practice to even enhance the effects.

So Dr. Max Gerson and the stories shared in today’s interview, but to give you a little bit of a teaser trailer, Max Gerson was able to cure very stubborn migraines. Then he found out his migraine diet cured tuberculosis, and this is right before World War II when there was no cure for it. It was something that was very stubborn, can stick around for years, and was entirely fatal for many people. And then he found out it cured cancer. And then he found out it reversed even very stubborn diabetes, and so he treated tens of thousands of people with all kinds of conditions using this very specific protocol that he dialed in, and it is a specific diet, but it also involves other things and we’re going to learn about that today.

I’m so excited for you to learn from this episode. And if you don’t have any of those conditions, what’s really great is you can still apply what you learn today and add a bit of it to your life to prevent disease as well. Please share this interview with those you love who have migraines, who have digestive issues, who have cancer or have cancer in the family and they’re concerned about getting cancer. For those who have immune problems because this protocol helps the body have such a robust immune system, and for those who have blood sugar problems, even type 1 and type 2 diabetes really, really respond well to this protocol. So basically, everyone can benefit from listening to today’s interview.

Now, Dr. Patrick Vickers also mentions that he’s added on certain things to Dr. Gerson’s protocol that he found in his clinical practice to supercharge the program. One of those things he says is absolutely essential to supercharge the program is the Organic Medicinal Aloe Gel Drink that we talked about in the last episode, in episode 474 that Dr. Michael Haley talks about where they take the aloe straight from the field.

Dr. Michael Haley owns this farm and they take the aloe, they cut it open, they cut open the filet, they take just the gel, and then they immediately freeze it and ship it to you, and then you drink it. It’s so different from what you get in the store. It’s completely different. What you get in the store has been filtered, pasteurized, and all the medicines have been taken out. But when you drink only a few ounces of the stuff a day, Dr. Michael Haley spoke about it in the last episode that it will block the cancer cells. The cancer cells try to absorb it, it binds to the cancer cells kind of like stuffing their mouths full, and then they cannot digest it because the polysaccharides in the aloe gel cannot be digested by cancer, but cancer thinks it’s a sugar so it tries to absorb it but then it can’t digest it. But it basically blocks the cancer from absorbing any more nutrients, thus starving it out.

And so Dr. Patrick Vickers today talks about how he adds the aloe gel to every freshly pressed juice drink that he gives daily to his cancer clients and patients at his clinic and he tells people to do it. I love this aloe gel. I noticed it really helps our family. I have friends who take it and notice that even their hair, skin, and nails get healthier, their digestion gets healthier. So it’s just something wonderful to add to your smoothies or to your freshly pressed juice, or you can just do a few shots of it today. And in the last episode, I share how to make it taste good so kids even like it because my son thinks it’s delicious when I do these little tweaks and he thinks it’s really great as well, and we noticed that improvement for him as well.

You can get a fantastic discount that Dr. Michael Haley’s giving all of our listeners by going to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe and there you can get a few frozen jugs. It’s great to keep it in the freezer for times if you ever have any digestive issues, it’s great to just have on hand because for me, for our family, when we had either food poisoning or some kind of stomach bug, we drank it and it immediately stopped all the symptoms—the diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, all of that stopped it in its tracks for all three of us. I thought that was pretty awesome.

It’s like medicine. It’s good to have on hand as well as a good to take for prevention. You can also use the coupon code LTH2022 and he’s going to give you his cream as well, which is an aloe cream. I really like it because it’s not greasy and I like to have it at my desk. I love anything natural to put on my body or to put in my body that helps. So that’s learntruehealth.com/aloe coupon code LTH2022. It’s a wonderful adjunct to the Dr. Gerson protocol, as well as anyone who wants better hair, skin, and nails, better digestion, less inflammation, less pain. People even with arthritis are noticing an improvement, which of course Dr. Michael Haley talked about in our last episode and of course in the first episode where I had him on about a year ago and he shared some amazing stories.

You can find lots of fantastic interviews on the podcast by using the search function at learntruehealth.com. You can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find all kinds of wonderful episodes. I have a ton of episodes on reversing cancer. Cancer and heart disease are the two largest killers. My dad died of heart disease, my mom died of cancer. My mom was the healthiest person I knew until she passed away of cancer suddenly, and that has helped fuel me to want to learn how I can help others. I can’t save my parents, but I maybe can help you save yours, or I can help you save yourself or save someone that you love. So let’s turn this ripple into a tidal wave and let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health and to reverse and prevent disease.

The body has an amazing ability to heal itself. We just need to give it what it needs and stop giving it what it doesn’t need. Dr. Patrick Vickers today shares exactly what we can do to support the structure and function of the body to cure disease. The body can cure its own disease when we help it, and I’m so excited for you to learn from today’s episode.

Thank you for sharing this podcast. Come join us in the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’d love to see you there. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and check out the aloe, let me know what you think about it. learntruehealth.com/aloe, use the coupon code LTH2022. Do a challenge. Do a whole bottle. Do about four to eight ounces a day depending on your medical conditions, what you like to reverse, and at the end of the bottle, notice any changes in your hair, skin, and nails, your digestion, your inflammation. Just notice it and then I’d love for you to come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and let us know different positive changes that you’re experiencing.

 

[00:08:09] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 475. I am so excited for today’s guest we have with us Dr. Patrick Vickers here to share about Gerson Therapy. His website is gersonclinic.com. Of course, links to everything that Dr. Patrick Vickers talks about today are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Welcome to the show.

 

[00:08:45] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Thank you very much for having me, Ashley.

 

[00:08:47] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m really, really excited, but as we were joking around before we hit record, we were bound to meet because you kind of know all my friends or we have mutual friends. You’ve been on the Tim James show, of no relation. You’ve been with Dr. Michael Haley, who is also awesome. I’m sure if we sat around we could talk more and probably figure out we have a lot more friends in common.

I have been fascinated with Dr. Max Gerson’s therapy. I watched some documentaries on it. I highly recommend checking them out. There are a lot of documentaries out there so just pick one and go for it. There’s some on Amazon, the Gaia TV, and all that stuff, or just YouTube Dr. Gerson. I’ve actually watched some documentaries on YouTube also. What fascinates me is his entire story, and then of course the controversy, right? Because you can’t steal the money, the profits from the people trying to sell the drugs. If you create a system that eliminates a disease, you will be kicked out of this country, time and time again we’ve seen it.

This therapy is so effective, but you have to follow it to a tee. It’s so effective that he was able to help people completely reverse and no longer have cancer. That’s near and dear to my heart. I held my mom’s hand as she died of cancer at 55 years old, and she was the healthiest person I knew. Watching her pass away from cancer, I’ve always wanted to know what I could have done differently. I was 22 years old. I was just learning about all this, but if I could go back in time, absolutely, I would have taken her to your clinic to do Gerson Therapy.

I’ve had friends ask me, what would you do if you had a cancer diagnosis? I would 100% do Gerson Therapy. That makes me sit and think, well, why am I not doing it now? Maybe that’s something we could talk about. Just the other day my friend said, I know all the things I need to do to get healthy, but I’ll probably do them when I get sick enough to need it.

She was being honest. She was being very blunt that, you know, my life is busy. I’m taking care of two kids. I’m running a business, and really, I’m not going to actually take care of my health like seriously spend six hours a day between nutrition and exercise preparing food and all the things it takes. She’s sacrificing the time it takes to take care of herself until her back is up against the wall.

I’m like, okay, if my backs up against the wall with a cancer diagnosis, I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m 110% in on Gerson Therapy, ozone IV, and all the other kinds of modalities, but why am I not doing that amount of intensity into building health? Why do we wait for a diagnosis? I definitely want you to introduce Gerson Therapy and talk about Max Gerson, but maybe we can talk a little bit about is this podcast just for people who have cancer, or can we utilize Gerson Therapy or should it be utilized for people who don’t have cancer?

 

[00:12:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, I mean, that is the proverbial issue, isn’t it? I mean, how often have you heard an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? And so, we’re [inaudible 00:12:36] virtually every single degenerative disease including terminal cancer, so why wouldn’t it make sense that that would be also used as a lifestyle of prevention, which it is. I mean, you look at Charlotte Gerson who died three years ago this month, actually, at the age of 98. She used the therapy her entire life as a means of prevention after her father cured her of advanced tuberculosis when she was 12 years old.

This is a dietary therapy not just for reversing disease, but its principles are utilizable for prevention as well and should be. To wait until you get sick, let me tell you, I’ve had this clinic now for over 10 years. You don’t want to wait until you get sick because quite often, it can be too late by the time you’re diagnosed. So to live under those premises that I’ll just wait until I get sick, it’s not a very smart strategy.

[00:13:37] Ashley James: I know Gerson Therapy takes several hours a day between food prep and also certain bathroom routines you would be performing, to say it politely. It’s a part-time job to Gerson Therapy well, to do it to the tee, right? I mean, once you get into the routine, maybe you can shave some time off. But is there Gerson therapy for doing cancer reversal and is there Gerson Therapy light for just creating—like maybe just one coffee enema a day instead of six and maybe once a day instead of 12 times a day? Is there like a Gerson Therapy light for just preventing disease?

 

[00:14:28] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yes, of course, there would be. Our intensive protocol for the cancer patient is completely different from a standard detox protocol at home just to change your life and maintain health. But the principles, which hopefully people will learn on the show today, that protect your cellular health, particularly your metabolism, are going to remain the same for every patient, whether it’s a detox or a cancer patient. But certainly, the intensity is going to be different for varying cases. The detox would simply be much less than the intensive cancer protocol, no doubt about it.

 

[00:15:08] Ashley James: Got it. Well, I’d love for you to, later on in the interview, explain what we can do on a regular basis. Give us some actual homework on what we can do on a day-to-day basis to prevent disease using the Gerson Therapy for maintaining health. But let’s talk about Max Gerson. Give us a rundown, who was Max Gerson and how did he discover the Gerson Therapy protocol?

 

[00:15:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s a great question. And as you said, Dr. Gerson’s story is truly one of the greatest stories and tragedies in American history for certain, if not world history. Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer called Dr. Gerson the greatest genius in medical history. Eight years before Schweitzer won the Nobel Prize, Dr. Gerson cured Schweitzer of severely advanced diabetes within six weeks. In six weeks, he was able to completely reverse Dr. Schweitzer’s advanced diabetes and he cured Schweitzer’s wife, Helena, of terminal tuberculosis when they had a little girl who was only three or four years old at the time.

Gerson, his life, his story, his therapy, I mean, it is just a classic tragedy, so to speak, and we’re going to go into that, but who was he? So he was born in 1881 in Wagrowiec, Germany, which is now Wagrowiec, Poland. It was under German annex at that time. At the age of 18, when he wanted to go to university, back at that time, if you wanted to go to university in Germany, you had to pass an exit exam out of school. You just didn’t go to university based on grades or based on your SAT scores. You literally had to pass an exam out of high school.

Well, his calculus professor put a question on there that he’d never seen before. He managed to come up with such an elaborate solution that his teacher couldn’t even tell him whether it was right or wrong. So she sent it to all the top university math professors in Germany at that time and every single one wrote her back and said, we have a mathematical genius within our country and they all tried to recruit him for math. Recognizing that they had something very special in their midst, the Gerson family got together shortly thereafter one night at the Gerson home—aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins all got together to discuss what Dr. Gerson would study at university. They all agreed that he should study medicine because they felt that’s where he would have the greatest impact on humanity.

Here we are now, that was 120 years ago, literally 1900 and here we are 120 years later, talking about the man who truly had the greatest impact in medical history on his ability to reverse advanced terminal disease. He goes off to university at the University of Freiburg, and while he’s there, he’s suffering from severe migraine headaches. Now, this is at a time when Germany was leading the way in medical research. If you wanted a superior medical education, you went to Germany to get it. He had the top professors in the world at his disposal. None of them could help him. They had nothing to offer him.

He set out to completely cure himself of his disease by radically altering his diet. He cut out all the fat, all the salt, all the processed foods, the alcohol, all of it of a standard German diet of that time and completely cured himself of his migraine headaches.

Well, he graduates from the University of Freiburg, opens up practice in Bielefeld, Germany. And in Bielefeld, Germany starts using this migraine diet on his patients when one of his patients comes back completely cured of their tuberculosis. Now, this is at a time when tuberculosis was “pandemic”, for lack of a better word. It was literally killing over a million people in Europe at that time, and so that was a big thing. All of a sudden, he now recognizes that he can cure TB. So he starts treating all these TB patients and curing them of their TB.

When a guy by the name of Ferdinand Sauerbruch gets word that there’s this doctor curing advanced TB, now Ferdinand Sauerbruch was Europe’s leading thoracic surgeon. He was the guy operating on all these tuberculosis lung patients. And so when he heard this guy Gerson was carrying TB, he approached Dr. Gerson and he asked him to embark on a study of 460 tuberculosis patients. He said to Dr. Gerson privately, if you can cure but one of these patients, I will believe every single word you have to say, and Dr. Gerson cured, and this is no joke, 450 out of the 460 tuberculosis patients with his migraine diet.

 

[00:20:29] Ashley James: Let’s just pause there. I want to pause there because this one point, I think a lot of us just take for granted, oh yeah, cure TB, no worries. TB back then was like having the plague. If you were in a hospital with TB, you probably were going to die. What was the percentage? I don’t remember exactly what they said, but didn’t he expect something like only 4% to survive? How many people should have died under the normal care for TB out of those 460 patients?

 

[00:21:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, when he approached Gerson and said, if you cure but one of these patients, I’ll believe every single word that you have to say. So clearly, he wasn’t expecting much, was he?

 

[00:21:20] Ashley James: He wasn’t expecting any of them to live.

 

[00:21:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, exactly. I mean, I would imagine he was expecting some of them to live, but to cure 450 out of 460, and this is what we tell people—cancer is the monster, that’s the difficult thing to cure. We can still cure it. Viruses, bacteria, do you know how simple those things are to cure? You take tuberculosis and it’s easily curable with something as intensive and radical as the Gerson Therapy. So he became renowned at that point, Ashley, for reversing advanced tuberculosis.

And then Hitler came to power, Gerson and his family were German Jews. He lost his entire family in the Holocaust. He himself nearly died in the Holocaust and he was the only one left. He was on his way to Vienna to give a lecture on his curing of tuberculosis when the SS Army stopped the train and entered his cabin when they started looking for IDs. They were asking for their IDs looking for Jews.

There were two or three other men in Dr. Gerson’s cabin with him, and when the SS officer came in, Dr. Gerson actually panicked, but the SS officer turned to the other gentleman first and asked for their IDs. And then when the SS officer turned to Dr. Gerson, he didn’t immediately ask him for his ID. He asked him where he was going. And so Dr. Gerson told him he was on his way to Vienna, Austria to give a lecture because he was curing advanced tuberculosis.

Now, if you’re the SS officer, you’re like, yeah, whatever. Come on, you’re carrying tuberculosis. And so Dr. Gerson threw up two x-rays in the window and he showed the SS officer a before and an after x-ray of a TB patient that he cured. The SS officer was so shocked he forgot to ask her son for his ID and he led him off to Vienna, Austria. And as soon as he finished in Vienna, Austria, he immediately made his way back home, immediately packed up his family, Charlotte Gerson included who was probably only eight or nine years old at that point, and he fled to France.

When Hitler invaded France, Gerson fled to Manhattan and he set up practice on Park Avenue. Literally, I kid you not, a hundred feet around the corner from Memorial Sloan Kettering, the largest cancer research hospital, arguably, in the United States if not the world and he began to practice in Manhattan literally right around the corner from Memorial Sloan Kettering on Park Avenue. This is when it became known that he could cure advanced cancer and the story goes like this.

So a woman in New Jersey, I believe, was suffering from advanced gallbladder, stomach, and liver cancer, all three. Yeah, all three, and she had heard that Dr. Gerson was practicing in Manhattan. She approached him and begged him for his tuberculosis treatment for her cancer and he refused her. Now this is back in the early to mid-30s maybe and he refused to treat her. Now, why would Dr. Gerson refuse to treat her even back then? Because even back then as a medical doctor, under your licensure to treat cancer with anything other than the standard accepted forms of conventional treatment at that time risked losing your license, risking ridicule, ostracization from your colleagues, and so he refused to treat her. She kept coming back and she would not take no for an answer.

Finally, he said to her, all right, I’m going to treat you in secret, and he ended up treating her. Lo and behold, he completely reversed every single one of her cancers. It was at that point that he said, I can no longer turn my [inaudible 00:25:39] away from this deadly scourge of cancer. He dedicated the rest of his entire life to treating cancer patients at the risk of everything that he would suffer from that point on, and let me tell you, did he suffer?

He was completely ostracized and ridiculed by his medical colleagues. They took away his licensure at some point. They took away his membership from the New York State Medical Society. Up until that point, Gerson was one of the most published doctors in the world. He had a litany of publications in major medical journals around the world on his treatment protocols. And from that point on, he became a marked man and became prohibited from publishing in all major medical journals around the world. They destroyed him.

 

[00:26:37] Ashley James: How many cases of cancer did he cure in the United States before they did that before they took his medical license away?

 

[00:26:47] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, that’s a good question. I don’t really know, but he was able to get his license back. They briefly took it away. What they ended up permanently taking away was his membership from the New York State Medical Society. But between 1910 and 1959 when he died, he probably literally cured thousands of patients in that timeframe. From 1930 when he arrived in the United States to 1959, you’re probably looking at 5,000 to 10,000 during that time frame, I would imagine. He was a marked man from day one.

Let’s say he cured that woman somewhere around the mid-30s, 10 years later in 1946, word’s out that Dr. Gerson, this guy in Manhattan, is reversing advanced cancer. Well, in 1946, the Pepper Neely Anti-cancer Bill came to the floor of the United States Senate. It’s designed to appropriate $100 million in funding to anyone who can show promise in the realm of cancer research.

Well, they invited Dr. Gerson to testify July 1st through the 3rd, 1946 and he brought five of his most terminal cancer patients that he ever had and all five walked through the Senate chambers door and testified on his behalf. So shocked were everybody in those chambers that Senator Claude Pepper himself, who to this day remains the longest-serving senator and congressman in American history. He said Dr. Gerson dedicated his life to the mastery of this scourge of cancer and all should honor his great work.

So why haven’t you heard of him? Why isn’t his protocol standard among medical care? Well that day, Gerson was to give an interview to the international press after he gave his testimony. So they whisked him away to the international press room where he sat alone in a room for over an hour and a half. They never showed up.

They were whisked away to another room and an impromptu party was thrown on their behalf. They were not allowed to interview Dr. Gerson. Why? Gerson wasn’t only talking about being able to reverse the dance cancer during his testimony. He was asked why is cancer growing at such a rapid rate? What are the causes of cancer? And he exposed every single industry that are the huge lobbying organizations paying the politicians’ campaigns.

As soon as he started talking in those Senate chambers, red flags went up through all of Washington, and that man, Dr. Gerson, was prohibited from being interviewed any further by the international press. However, present at his testimony was a man by the name of Raymond Gram Swing. Now, who’s Raymond Gram Swing? Well, back then, if you wanted to listen to your news every night, you didn’t have a TV, you had a radio. You had the option every night at 7:00 PM Eastern to listen to ABC, NBC, or CBS radio. Each one had their own nightly anchor like we had Tom Brokaw growing up, right? Well, they had Edwin Murrow, the famous Edwin Murrow was the anchor for CBS. I’m not sure who the anchor was for NBC, but the anchor for ABC News Radio was Raymond Gram Swing, and he’d been working for ABC News Radio at that point for 33 years.

Well, he was present at all of Gerson’s testimonies and he went on his program one night and he said to the entire country, and probably the world parts of the world were probably listening as well. He said to the entire country that night, folks, forgive me if I don’t have my morals correct in talking about these top stories. The Truman Anti-Racketeering Bill had been signed. Something regarding Trieste and Italy and World War II has been agreed upon. Those would have been major stories for the entire night. He spent an entire 30 to 45 minutes talking about how the cure for cancer had been found. He spent the entire time talking about Dr. Gerson and his therapy.

Well, right after that, for nine hours straight at the ABC News switchboard in Manhattan, it lit up for nine hours straight from people all over the world calling, begging to find out where do we find this cure for cancer. Two weeks later, Raymond Gram Swing was fired from his job at ABC News Radio.

This is what we dealt with then. This is what we deal with today. If you are an editor of any major media outlet, your sole fiscal responsibility is to promote the financial interests of your organization. It has nothing to do with giving your eye the truth, and that is why any editor would be out on their butt on the street if they were to ever reveal something of this nature, then and now. That is essentially the history of the Gerson Therapy and what Dr. Gerson suffered up until his death in 1959.

 

[00:32:44] Ashley James: Did he always practice in the United States? I know that there’s the Gerson Clinic in Mexico. Did he open that or was it his children that opened that?

 

[00:32:55] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right. So up until then, there were no laws prohibiting him from opening a clinic in the United States and treating people with that. The only thing would have been his license at risk, and all the other ridicule and the ostracization, which he went through wholeheartedly. It wasn’t until later when Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1971 and the pharmaceutical industry started to gain a tremendous amount of power in the realm of treating cancer that then they made it illegal.

So like right now in the United States, it is literally illegal to treat cancer with anything other than chemo, radiation, and surgery, that is the law. If you want to treat people with Gerson Therapy, you cannot do it in the United States. You have to be outside the states. In 1977, 18 years after Dr. Gerson died, the therapy actually died with him. Nobody did it for 18 years until someone offered Charlotte Gerson in 1977 all the money necessary to open up the first Gerson Clinic, which was opened up in Tijuana Mexico, and she became the face of the Gerson Therapy, essentially up until the day she retired and obviously until the day she died.

It was in 1977 it was opened in Mexico, and that’s what remains to this day.

 

[00:34:28] Ashley James: Now, is that your clinic or you have a different clinic?

 

[00:34:33] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yes, I have a different clinic and there are reasons for that, right? So the Gerson Institute which Charlotte originally opened and she retired from over 10 years ago, if you go to a clinic like that, you only get the Gerson Therapy as Dr. Gerson left it in 1959. That was probably the biggest tragedy that Charlotte Gerson left in her legacy. She never tried to improve on her father’s therapy. Her father was the consummate scientist. He was constantly changing and perfecting his therapy based on what was coming out in the scientific literature.

So if he were alive today, his therapy, while the dietary portions may look quite similar, a lot of the things that have been revealed to us since 1959 in the scientific literature is proving beneficial to the cancer patients, there’s a myriad of things that have come out. Charlotte stopped the therapy dead in its tracks from 1959. Why she did that I have my own ideas. I think having been the longest living Gerson survivor up until her death, she was the longest living Gerson survivor because her father cured her of tuberculosis at the age of 12. I mean, it almost brings tears to my eyes to even say that. You can imagine how endeared she was to her father.

I think that emotional psychological attachment made it really hard for her to change what her father left behind when he himself would have completely gone to work with the scientific literature, and that is where we are different from what remains of the Gerson Institutes Clinic.

We have taken Dr. Gerson Therapy, kept the basic foundational protocol he left for us, and we’ve added proven scientific therapies beneficial to the cancer patient and other degenerative disease patients. Nothing we do at our clinic is not in the scientific literature plain and simple, and so that is the difference between us and them.

 

[00:36:50] Ashley James: So you’re just taking Gerson Therapy and then turbocharging it?

[00:36:58] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That is exactly right.

[00:37:02] Ashley James: What comes to mind is Dr. Michael Haley, one of our mutual friends. He was on my show talking about how there’s a new study around aloe and consuming aloe blocks cancer. So the cancer thinks it’s food because cancer loves glucose, love sugar. The aloe looks like sugar to it, but it can’t digest it and eat it. So it binds to it kind of like it stuffs its mouth. It stuffs the cancer’s mouth but then the cancer can’t swallow it. And so then, it starves it because now the actual food can’t get in. When he explained that I was mind blown.

[00:37:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And so that’s how I know Michael, right? Well, of course, we use Michael’s Aloe. Our patients get one ounce of that aloe in every single juice they get throughout the day in 13 juices. That’s not the most powerful healing component of Michael’s aloe. When you realize that cancer and any disease is related to gut health, you have to restore the gut. There’s not a more potent healer of connective tissue and gut tissue than the aloe, Dr. Haley’s raw aloe. You can’t buy aloe off the store shelf, it’s toxic. It’s been deodorized, it’s been depolarized, it’s had preservatives added to it. It’s toxic and dead.

Dr. Mike Haley’s aloe is living, live, fresh aloe, and so that healing power, and there’s a myriad of things that aloe does apart from what you and I have just discussed, but those are the two major healing properties. So this is what I mean. We’ve taken Dr. Gerson’s therapy and we’ve added these things to enhance exactly what Dr. Gerson would have probably done had he had access to this information.

[00:39:15] Ashley James: Right. Yes. I love it. Okay. Now we know about Dr. Gerson. He discovered the system of how to reverse many diseases because first of all, he went to reverse his migraines and he did. Then one of his migraine patients was like, hey, by the way, my TB’s gone. He’s like, wait a second, I wasn’t treating you for that. He’s like, I thought this just got rid of migraines. So it gets rid of TB, that’s crazy because that’s like the Black Plague of the day, right? And then he’s like, well, this must affect the immune system, what else can we treat with this?

Then he goes on to cancer, like you said. He helped Albert Schweitzer reverse his diabetes. He was trying to figure out why this diet can reverse diabetes, cancer, and migraines? So let’s talk about that. If you go to an allopathic doctor, and we didn’t talk about you. We haven’t even talked about you yet and your background, but you don’t come from the standard allopathic medical school. But if you go to a standard—and again, I could get on my soapbox and start ranting about the allopathic medical system.

 

[00:40:45] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I won’t stop you. Go ahead.

 

[00:40:48] Ashley James: Individuals who go to medical school aren’t inherently evil. I’m sure some of them might be statistically, but inherently, they want to do good, right? The problem is they’ve been indoctrinated—through their medical schools—into a system that for 150 years has been designed to brainwash the doctors into thinking their form of medicine is the only form of medicine, and everything else is “alternative”. This is a quote from one of my old Naturopathic mentors. That’s like saying, a golden retriever is the only kind of dog and every other dog is an alternative dog, all right.

I mean, it’s ludicrous to think that drug, chemical-based, pharmaceutical medicine is the only kind of medicine that’s standard, and everything else is some back of the bus quackery, when in fact, we’ve been using holistic medicine, was the traditional form of medicine was the standard, and it was allopathic drug-based medicine that came in and tried to do through wonderful marketing the last 100 years, PR, and lobbying has brainwashed the public.

Hollywood also played a role in brainwashing everyone to believe within three generations that you wait to get sick, then you go to your doctor, and you get put on drugs. You wait to get sick, you go to your doctor, you get put on drugs like we’re cattle. Except they treat cattle better because they’ve tried to prevent illness in cattle because it would cost the farmer too much money.

If you waited for a cow to get sick and then they’d have a $2,000 medical bill, that would make your hamburger be $50 instead of $5, right? So they try to keep costs down by preventing disease in the farms. This comes from one of my other Naturopathic mentors, Dr. Joel Wallach, who talks about how—oh, you know Dr. Wallach.

When I was 12 years old—I have a distinct memory—I’m sitting in the back of my mom’s car and she’s driving around. I’m super bored, it’s a Saturday, and she has to run errands. I’m just sitting in the back of the car bored. My mom pops in because we’re like, okay, well, you’re bored. Let me pop in this tape. Bootlegged health lecture from Dr. Joel Wallach called Dead Doctors Don’t Lie and I was on the edge of my seat. My mom was really crunchy and really into holistic medicine, so she’d read me the journals and stuff that our Naturopath would give us for bedtime reading. She never read me like nighttime stories, but she opened up the newsletter or the articles that her Naturopath would write and she’d read them to me. I learned about antioxidants when I was like nine. I’m like, this is fascinating.

Anyway, my entire life has changed. I listened to Dr. Wallach and I realized the system is broken. I’m 12 years old. I’m getting it like it’s hitting me. Why is this so important? We have to shift our perspective because we’ve been taught that there’s a specialist for your eyes. There’s a specialist for your liver. There’s a specialist for your skin, right? Even if you go to the Mayo Clinic, which I’ve heard several people say, they felt very disenfranchised because they thought it would be this—now I’m sure people have good experiences there too. I’m not saying that no one’s going to have a good experience with these kinds of clinics, but what I am saying is that they still felt like there wasn’t enough communication between the liver specialist, the colon specialist, and the nose, throat, and ear specialist. Whatever they were doing, it still felt like they were being taken apart and only looked at their parts.

I have a listener whose mom has kidney problems and heart problems. The kidney doctor gave her a diet that will cause her to die from heart disease. The heart doctor gave her a diet that will cause her to die from kidney failure. She was so baffled. She was like, why aren’t my doctors talking to each other? They’ve both given me diets that will kill me. She finally got them to talk, they argued a lot, and they both could not figure out what kind of diet to put her on because they don’t know about Gerson Therapy. But the point is, we’re not being looked at as a whole, right?

So from the standpoint of our own training, because we have all been trained through the media to have a certain perspective, that’s why we need to examine our own belief system, and really learn the history of modern medicine so we really get that we’ve been constantly being bombarded by a narrative that is swaying our belief system towards what they want us to think. We need to come back to the truth. The body has an innate ability to heal itself. We have to give it what the body needs.

From an MD medical standpoint, it does not make sense that a protocol, you can’t give a drug to someone that’s going to cure migraines, tuberculosis, cancer, and diabetes in one drug, one protocol.

 

[00:46:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right, but you can sure make a lot of money coming up with a protocol for each, can’t you?

[00:46:43] Ashley James: Right. By the way, you wouldn’t be curing any of them. You would be managing the disease. Oh, Metformin. I’m so livid that doctors still prescribe this. Go read the side effects of Metformin. One of the side effects can be that it causes blood sugar imbalance. This drives me nuts. It also put my friend at a hospital for a year, and the doctors never took her off Metformin. I was the one that pointed out to her, one of the causes can be acute pancreatitis. She was in the hospital for a year with acute pancreatitis, and the doctors never took her off of it. She was just on it because she’s at the age where you just want to prevent—

Excuse me, that’s not how you prevent diabetes by giving people drugs before they’re even remotely diabetic, but doctors are still doing it. They’re off-label prescribing all the time. Seventy percent of the adult population of the United States is on at least one prescription medication, which means 70% of the adult population, not only is it completely indoctrinated in the system, but also is so sick and so unhealthy that they’re using drugs to manage the symptoms. Most drugs don’t cure, we have to remember that. There are only a few handful of drugs that really helped to reverse the disease. Most drugs out there do not cure, they do more harm than good, and they just manage symptoms. My thing is we have to start questioning everything so that we can undo the brainwashing.

Could you please tell me, Dr. Vickers, why is it that Gerson Therapy, what did he discover about his protocol, and why is it that it can reverse all those different diseases that seemingly are not related?

 

[00:48:39] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And they all are related. That’s a great question. The question is, what’s the secret to the Gerson Therapy? Eight movies have chronicled this man’s work, no other therapy can boast even more than one or two max, but eight have chronicled5 Dr. Gerson’s work, which is why Schweitzer calling the greatest genius in medical history. And if you ever read Dr. Gerson’s book that he published a year before he died, that’s called A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Case, if you ever read that, you can see the absolute work of a genius. But in that genius, it is so ridiculously simple because the secret to reversing advanced disease, which is the secret to preventing cancer and degenerative disease I literally learned in biochemistry 101.

Everything that you read in that book is biochemistry 101 ultimately, and when you read it, when you read that book, there’s one word that he talks about over and over and over again, which is the secret of health and disease and what is that one word? Metabolism. We learned metabolism the first three weeks of biochemistry 101 in chiropractic school. Let’s start there because that is the crux of the matter. What is metabolism? Metabolism, by definition, is the breakdown of food into energy. Okay, that’s it. If there’s anything that we’re going to grasp, its metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy.

When you see someone who’s sick and dying, what do you notice? They’re lethargic. Why are they lethargic? Because they’ve lost the capacity to produce energy on a cellular level, and the immune system requires massive amounts of energy on a daily basis just to maintain health, let alone cure a sick and dying body. Metabolism again is the breakdown of food into energy. Every sick patient has lost that capacity. So is it any wonder, where are we taught? What are we taught? That 70% of our immune system is where?

 

[00:51:20] Ashley James: Our gut?

[00:51:20] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly. Seventy percent of our immune system is in our gut. Well, part of the breakdown of food into energy begins in the gut. By definition, metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy starts in the gut. Every single sick human being has a deranged gut, so you must heal that. Now, where’s the other 30% of the immune system? Well, once the gut breaks down the food, you must now be able to convert it into energy. So the gut absorbs everything you need for that into the bloodstream, and now cells must convert that into energy. That’s where we also have destroyed everything from the day we were born.

Once the body breaks the food down, it now must convert it into energy. How does it do that? Well, inside your cells, you have this little thing called mitochondria. Mitochondria take sugar and in the presence of oxygen—and this is so absolutely vitally important, this is the other crux of the matter other than the gut. The mitochondria—only in the presence of oxygen—will convert sugar into energy. Only in the presence of oxygen. If oxygen is not present, then sugar will get converted by the mitochondria into lactic acid. We also know that as what? Fermentation, right? That’s how you make wine, that’s how you make beer, that’s how you make kombucha. You cut off oxygen so that the sugars get converted into alcohol and/or lactic acid ultimately.

Once you heal the gut, now the gut can properly absorb the nutrients, you now have to be able to convert those nutrients into energy, which requires oxygen. In 1931, Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in medicine for proving that cancer viruses and bacteria can not survive in a body where the cells are properly oxygenated. He went on to completely write this thesis and win the Nobel Prize on the fact that the primary factor in the body’s ability to oxygenate the cell is an alkaline diet.

[00:54:19] Ashley James: Why? Do you understand why? Can you explain why?

[00:54:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I can’t exactly explain why and it is so simple. Now, we’ve already discussed the gut, now we have to address the cell. I told you, inside the cell, you have little things called mitochondria that convert sugar into energy in the presence of oxygen. Now, what’s around that cell? Around our cells, we have a cell membrane. That cell membrane is the gatekeeper. It determines what can go in, what has to go in, what can’t go in, and it determines what must come out and what can’t leave the cell. That’s all determined at the level of the cell membrane.

What is that cell membrane made up of? It’s made up of fats. It is a phospholipid. Lipid means fat, right? Okay, so that cell membrane’s made up of phospholipids, but what fats are that cell membrane made up of?

[00:55:30] Ashley James: Cholesterol?

 

[00:55:31] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Whatever fats you’re feeding it. Whatever fats you’re feeding your body, your body’s going to naturally use that to maintain the cell membranes. Well, what kind of fats is everyone eating today? Cookies, cake, ice cream.

[00:55:54] Ashley James: Polyunsaturated, fatty acids.

 

[00:55:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, on the contrary. Well, I mean, in some of the cooking oils and stuff, right? But most people are being bombarded with saturated fats. Cookies, cake, ice cream, dairy, milk, ice cream, pizza, pasta, meat. All of these things are loaded with saturated fats, and this is what’s going to make up these cell membranes. Now, why is this significant? We’re going to get to the issue of alkalinity here and acidity. How many times have you heard alkalinity promotes health, acidity promotes disease, right? Yeah, how many times have we heard that, but it’s never really explained on a cellular level what are the health implications of that very statement. Alkalinity and alkaline diet promotes health and acidic diet promotes disease, what does that mean?

So today, our cell membranes are made up of saturated fats. When we are talking about saturated fats, what does that mean? What are saturated fats? Saturated with? Saturated fats are saturated with hydrogen. This is very important to understand, they’re saturated with hydrogen. Your fats are carbon chains and the definition of that fat will be dependent on how much those carbon chains are saturated with hydrogen. When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, what are we talking about? We’re talking about pH, right? Alkalinity and acidity, when we’re talking about those two terms, we’re talking about pH. What does pH stand for? Its potential hydrogen. That’s it. PH is potential hydrogen.

Do you know what the definition of acidity is? The true scientific definition of acidity.

 

[00:58:26] Ashley James: How much hydrogen is present?

[00:58:29] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That is exactly right. The buildup of hydrogen in the body, particularly at the level of the cell membrane. Why is this significant? That cell membrane, the way it determines what gets in, what gets out is based on the electrical charge at the level of the membrane, and that electrical charge is dependent on the type of fats at the level of the cell membrane.

So if your body is bombarded with saturated fats like when you read a label as well, partially hydrogenated oil, right? Have you ever read a label and it says partially hydrogenated oils? Companies have learned that you can bubble hydrogen into their products, and when you do so, you stabilize it. When you can stabilize it, you can store it on the shelves until Christ returns. That’s what they do with these products, but then there’s naturally saturated fats, all the things that I mentioned previously.

What’s happened is when you saturate something, you completely stabilize it and change its electrical. potential. and charge. When oxygen goes and approaches that cell, that charge literally cannot accept it and it repels it away. When you are acidic, you cannot get oxygen into the cells. So again, acidity, by definition, is the buildup of hydrogen in the body, particularly at the level of the cell membrane. By definition, acidity is the improper utilization of oxygen.

This is exactly what Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1931 on by demonstrating these very principles, which I’m not going to go into it or maybe later I can, but by the way, Gerson was already demonstrating this very principle for 20 years with his dietary therapy. He already knew and understood this. Where did he graduate from? The University of Freiburg. Where did Warburg win his Nobel Prize? At the University of Freiburg.

My personal opinion is he won the Nobel Prize riding on Dr. Gerson’s back. He was a researcher, Gerson was a clinician. He knew Dr. Gerson no ifs, ands, or buts about it. He won the Nobel Prize based on that very principle. When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, we’re talking about pH. When those cell membranes are loaded with hydrogen in the form of saturated fats, you cannot oxygenate tissues and you will cause disease in the body because cells then go into a state of fermentation.

What are we talking about cancer? It’s a fungal fermentative organism. When it’s exposed to oxygen, it cannot survive. The way you restore oxygen to the body, to the cell is through massive amounts of nutrients in the form of glucose. Glucose sugar does not cause cancer and feed cancer. It actually heals cancer. How often have you heard sugar feeds cancer? It doesn’t. Sugar heals cancer. If sugar fed cancer, Ashley, we would be sending patients to their graves exponentially quicker than they’re trying to get not to there because our patients are getting 3500 to 4000 calories a day in sugar in the form of fresh-pressed juices daily.

It’s sugar in the presence of oxygen that gets converted into energy that rallies the immune system so that the immune system can destroy the disease. Sugar, hypothetically and theoretically, would feed cancer in an acidic body because you can’t convert that sugar into energy, it would get broken down into lactic acid fermentation, and that would continue to feed the disease.

However, sugar in an alkaline body, an alkaline diet as is the Gerson Therapy, is what cures the human body of all diseases because you now reestablish the body’s ability to oxygenate tissues. How do you do that? First, you have to change the fats at the level of the cell membrane. Gerson tried every oil available to him and the only oil that did not cause cancer to worsen was flax oil. Why? What is flax oil? Flax oil is a complete polyunsaturated fatty acid. Let me give you an example.

If I put flax oil, coconut oil, and olive oil in the freezer, and I put them overnight, I take them out, It’s going to take me about five, six hours for me to get two to three tablespoons of coconut oil out of that jar because coconut oil is so highly saturated, it’s so stable that when it freezes, it takes so long to unfreeze to thaw.

If I put olive oil in there, within two to three hours, I can probably get a few tablespoons. Why? Because olive oil is a monosaturated fat, meaning some of its carbon bonds are saturated with hydrogen, some aren’t, so it’s rather neutral.

Flax oil, when I put that flax oil on the freezer and I take it out, it is frozen solid. In five minutes it is completely liquid. Why? Because it has no hydrogen saturating its bonds. When you take flax oil internally and it goes to start restoring the cell membranes, the charge of flax oil literally acts as a magnet to draw oxygen into the cell. It literally sucks it into the cell. This is powerful medicine. This is how you restore metabolism. You have to restore metabolism to restore health.

Is it any wonder when we’re watching the news, reading newspapers, reading magazines, and we’re reading about cancer, what is one of the precipitating factors of you getting cancer? Obesity. How many times have you heard the obesity cancer link? It’s because of metabolism. When you’re obese, obviously your metabolism has become faulty. You restore metabolism, you restore health. It starts at the gut, then you must repair the cell. You must repair the cell membrane with the fats. Then the other thing you’ve got to do, you have to get all the other hydrogen running around the body out of the body and neutralize it. How do you do that? There’s only one way—an alkaline diet. Let me explain.

When you juice, and the Gerson patients are getting 17 pounds of fruits and vegetables every single day in the form of juices. Do you know if you test that juice with litmus paper before you drink it, it tests acidic? But when you drink it, it gets broken down into potassium hydroxide. Now potassium hydroxide is so highly alkaline now how do you write potassium hydroxide chemically? The way you write a hydroxyl molecule chemically is OH-. How do you write the acidic hydrogen molecule? H+. So you have all these H+ molecules running around the body. You need OH- molecules to neutralize those H+ molecules. There’s only one way to do that. There is no other way, it’s juicing.

 

[01:08:17] Ashley James: Does that become water?

 

[01:08:18] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly.

 

[01:08:21] Ashley James: You get OH- plus a hydrogen is H20.

 

[01:08:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Is H2O. So all of a sudden, you start bombarding the body with these massive amounts of juices, which you’re creating OH- ions. They immediately start acting and interacting with the positive ions, go through the reaction, and the reaction creates H2O. H2O water is a neutral charge and all of a sudden, oxygen can begin to flow again in the body. And all of a sudden, all these sugars that you’re taking in can now get converted into energy.

So you’ve now repaired the gut, which you can only do with food and juices. You’ve now neutralized the acidity, which there’s only one way to do it, which is food. And now, there’s one more thing you’ve got to do. We have to destroy the mitochondria’s ability to function inside the cell. How have we done that? Salt.

Rule number one on the Gerson Therapy, absolutely no sodium other than what occurs in fruits and vegetables naturally. Why? There are two reasons why. When you eat salt and it doesn’t matter if it’s table salt, Celtic Salt, Himalayan Salt, salt is salt is salt. When you eat salt, you cause cellular edema. Salt and water enter the cell and they swell the cell up. My patients and the companions, they will all lose 7 to 15 pounds on a two to three-week stay when they come to our clinic just from the salt and water that they’re storing and stuck inside their cells because the only way you can get that salt out once it’s in there, that salt and water, is through potassium. The only way you get potassium is through raw fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables. There is no other way, other than possibly supplementation, right? But dietarily, the only way you can get salt and water out of the cell is through potassium. And who’s eating enough fruits and vegetables to get salt and water on their cells today? Hardly anyone, that’s the reality.

Rule number one on the Gerson Therapy is no salt, bombard the body with potassium not in the diet only but Dr. Gerson created a special potassium powder that the patient gets in all their juices. That just forces the excess salt and water out of the cells. The other reason why salt is so destructive to the human body is your thyroid gland. Your thyroid gland is specifically responsible—this is really important to understand—reproducing the mitochondria. The thyroid gland makes the mitochondria, the very things you need to convert sugar into energy.

So is it any wonder when someone’s overweight, they’re cold all the time. They have no energy. Their hair’s falling out. What do we say? They’re hypothyroid. The body’s not producing the amount of mitochondria necessary to convert food into energy.

Well, what’s the thyroid completely dependent on? It’s completely dependent on iodine? What is salt? Salt is sodium chloride. Chloride displaces iodine from the thyroid gland. That’s why when they came out with table salt, which is 99.999% sodium chloride, what happened? Everybody started getting goiter walking around looking like turkeys because they were getting goiter. So what did they do? They iodized it right? Just to the point so you don’t get goiter.

Take Celtic Salt, Himalayan salt, it’s 86 to 87% sodium chloride. You need very, very little salt on a daily basis to maintain optimal health, less than a quarter of a teaspoon. We are consuming exponentially more than that, and we’re just growing the mitochondrial ability to convert food into energy.

So it is all these principles from the gut, to the cell membrane, to the neutralization of hydrogen, and the restoration of the mitochondrial function inside the cell that makes up our metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy, which is the secret to the Gerson Therapy. Dr. Gerson talks about this extensively. All of these things I’ve just spoken about, he talks about them extensively in his book. It’s why Warburg won the Nobel Prize. This is how you must address all diseases. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

 

[01:14:21] Ashley James: My mind is spinning. I mean, I have so many questions.

[01:14:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Go ahead.

[01:14:28] Ashley James: So when you said the thyroid gland makes mitochondria, can you please clarify? Does that make the mitochondria for the whole body, or is it the thyroid’s making mitochondria for the thyroid gland?

 

[01:14:43] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, that’s its job. Its job is mitochondrial production. It is responsible for replicating, reproducing mitochondria for the cells.

[01:14:51] Ashley James: All the cells, the whole body?

 

[01:14:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s its job. It is responsible for mitochondrial production.

 

[01:14:59] Ashley James: I did not expect to learn that today. That is kind of mind-blowing and I really want to go down that rabbit hole. Your thyroid gland needs to be optimally functioning so that your mitochondria can replicate in a healthy manner. The thyroid, does it talk to the mitochondria throughout the lifecycle of the cell, or is it simply responsible for making sure the mitochondria get produced?

 

[01:15:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s a great question. I can’t answer that, to be perfectly honest with you.

 

[01:15:35] Ashley James: Regardless, we understand that the thyroid hormone is important in the metabolism, which we’re talking about, right? So we got to like a little bit of a big picture, thyroid is really important. The potassium powder in the juices that you make helps the body. Now, we have to be careful. I’m sure this is why people who are on medications, right? Like people who know they’re really, really off-kilter, they should be under a Gerson-trained physician like yourself, they should come to your clinic because you can’t just take potassium nilly willy. If you’re already sick, you could cause heart issues, muscle issues, or whatever. We can’t just take potassium powder nilly willy, right? We have to make sure we’re doing it correctly.

 

[01:16:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: This is definitely correct. That is correct. So someone who has heart problems, kidney problems, you obviously have to be careful with the amount of potassium levels that they get, right? But I’m going to tell you something. What we’re taught in chiropractic school is the same thing they’re taught in medical school—too much potassium could throw the heart into AFib, A fibrillation.

Ironically and clinically, that always isn’t necessarily the case. So this potassium powder has to get diluted in 32 ounces of water and then dissolved into solution. Then it’s that solution that goes into the patient’s juices. We have had patients go home, not dilute the potassium, and put three tablespoons or three teaspoons of that powder into each juice. If you told the medical doctor that they would absolutely freak out because that patient would immediately go into AFib.

Well, we’ve had countless patients do that for decades because they didn’t listen and they just call us up complaining that their stomach hurts, that it burns, and that they’re peeing like a racehorse. That’s it because they’re just dumping so much sodium and water, right? It’s amazing some of the things we learn hypothetically and theoretically and what ends up happening in clinical practice, right? However, with that said, people on meds, people with heart problems, people with kidney problems, you don’t screw around with potassium regardless. You do have to clarify that, but anyway, yeah.

 

[01:18:06] Ashley James: So salt, which is in everything, right?

 

[01:18:12] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Everything.

 

[01:18:13] Ashley James: Any packaged food, it’s hard to find a packaged food that doesn’t contain fats that are harmful that have hydrogen in it and salt. I try to buy healthy snacks for my son because I mean, there’s only so much fruit he will eat. I swear, I will feed him three bananas a day and four oranges and five apples, it just gets to the point where like in between meals—because I don’t know if you know about kids, but kids have two stomachs. They have a stomach the size of a pea and that’s for meals like mealtime, and then they have a stomach that is the size of the moon and that’s for snacks. My son, when it comes to eating meals, it’s like I’m not hungry. He takes one bite. I’m full now. But then it’s like five minutes later hunger, hunger, hunger. I just have to always have snacks with me.

So sometimes I need packaged or like shelf-stable food because we’re busy and I have a really hard time finding things that don’t have any hydrogenated fat and it just drives me up the wall. And then, of course, tons of salt. So we really need to become food detectives if we’re going to eat something from a package. I really like a whole food plant-based diet simply because it’s really easy. There’s broccoli, I eat it, like one ingredient foods. There’s spinach, I eat it. There’s brown rice, I eat it. There’s potato, I eat it. It’s very simple. One ingredient, no reading, my husband loves that. It drives him up the wall, anytime I touch a package in a grocery store you bet I’m flipping it over to read the ingredients.

 

[01:19:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Me too. Me too, Ashley.

 

[01:19:58] Ashley James: And then he goes, ugh. My husband’s just like, no. But he just stands there but then he’s just like, come on. Every grocery trip is 90 minutes. And now when I buy groceries online, then I could sit there for hours and read ingredients, right? But yeah. You and I could go grocery shopping, make a day of it, and read labels. It would probably be like, oh, look at this one, this is crazy. We should do that, it’d be fun.

 

[01:20:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s true, Ashley. Our stores today, even our health food stores, they’re so deceptive. It’s so deceptive.

 

[01:20:40] Ashley James: Yeah, you can’t really call them health food stores anymore since the ’80s. Not that I get off-topic in my interviews, but some listeners are like, why don’t you just ask questions? And I’m like, it’s conversational, we’re going back and forth. I love having conversations. We have to understand the history, the last hundred years, study, really understand the history of our food system and really understand the history of our modern medical system.

If you understand big pharma, big agra, and big food, if you could just take those three and really study the history of it, you will make such better choices for yourself because you will understand what is going into your body and it’s so sad that we have to do this. But back in the ’80s, and I had a great interview with Joan Ifland, who is a Ph.D. in basically food and addiction. She’s the one that made it into the DSM-IV, which I think it’s DSM-5 now. She made it into the DSM-IV processed food addiction understanding.

She talked about that back in the ’80s when the cigarette companies realized that tobacco companies were like, hey, we’re probably going out of style starting in the ’80s and they needed to do something about it because the word was out, tobacco causes cancer. They could only keep the lid on that for so long. And then they’re like, well, you know what, we’re in the business of addiction. We’re not in the business of tobacco. We need to continue being an addiction business.

So they started to buy up every single processed food company like Kraft and all these major food companies. Basically, if you go to this grocery store and you randomly put your hand out and touch a package, it’s probably owned by a tobacco company. The food made in that package was actually formulated by food scientists who are designed to figure out the exact amount of fat, sugar, and salt to cause a dopamine response similar to getting your fix of meth, heroin, or whatever, right? They really dialed in the exact chemicals and even in the healthy foods because Kashi was bought by one of those companies. So all these “healthy food companies”, once they get big enough they get bought out, and then they just get slightly changed so that there’s just enough salt in it to make you crave it and make you need that dopamine high from your food.

We have to get that this is an addiction. It’s like if you take a child and they were born from a mother who was on heroin, that baby was born but it’s not their fault they’re addicted to heroin, right? Everyone listening, unless you’re like no packaged food whatsoever, everyone who eats packaged food or any kind of processed food, you are like a baby born from addiction. This was given to you as a child, the cereal, and you didn’t know it. Unknowingly, they triggered the four chemicals in your brain that cause addiction.

So when you go to make these health changes that Dr. Vickers is explaining today, know that there’s going to be a transition where your brain starts screaming, give me the salt, give me the salt. That’s because salt, sugar, and fat, which is outlined in my episode 230 with Dr. Goldhamer. He wrote the book called The Pleasure Trap, a great book. It explains that salt, sugar, and fat are used in the food system to override your brain. So it’s kind of like quitting cigarettes, right? You can do it. People can do it. People do it all the time. You have to be intentional.

When you’re going to cut salt out of your diet, you have to know that it’s like quitting cigarettes. You can do it, but you have to be ready for the cravings, and it’s temporary. The cravings are temporary. You’re saying the number one rule is cutting out salt, which obviously, there’s a transition period. It takes about a month, I’ve heard from Dr. Goldhamer. He says it takes about a month for people to become neuro-adapted so that they start tasting food.

 

[01:25:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s amazing. That is exactly right. That’s the experience of our patients at the clinic. You have receptors on your tongue, right? You have receptors on your tongue for salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Your receptors have become so dull that they can no longer taste the natural sodium in fruits and vegetables. When patients come to our clinic, the first week or two, they absolutely hate the food. Even though the food is absolutely delicious, they hate it. But right around the end of their second week, third week, they start raving about the food because they have neuro-adapted those receptors. They’ve cleansed those receptors to now where they can actually start to taste what real food is supposed to taste like. That man, that’s brilliant because that’s exactly our experience.

 

[01:26:23] Ashley James: The Gerson diet—just to recap what you said in the big picture—is making your cells so healthy again, because the salt is swelling them and not letting oxygen in. If you don’t let oxygen into the cell, then the mitochondria is going to ferment your food in because there’s not enough oxygen and it needs the oxygen and the sugar, but if there’s a lack of oxygen, it’s anaerobic, so it causes fermentation, it increases lactic acid, and then you feel sluggish and slow, you get stiff, and you get achy. People go like, I have arthritis or I kind of feel achy. It feels very gross. It feels like your muscle’s flu-like symptoms. Sometimes you have too much lactic acid.

You’re kind of achy, you’re really slow, you’re tired, you’re sluggish, you’ve got brain fog, and you just feel like poop, right? Unfortunately, when people feel like that, they go towards the foods that will mask it.

 

[01:27:23] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Quick fix.

 

[01:27:24] Ashley James: The quick fixes, right? Like sugar, coffee, and fast food, something that’ll just kind of get them through the day, unfortunately. Coffee doesn’t give us energy. It suppresses the nervous system experiencing tiredness. It’s just like if you had a headache, you took Advil, it doesn’t make the headache go away. It just makes the experience get numbed. So coffee doesn’t give us energy. It just tricks you into thinking you’re not as tired as you actually are.

 

[01:27:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s ultimately stimulating metabolism, right? Which is energy, right? It’s stimulating energy production. The caffeine is, and it’s deriving some of that probably from fat or stored up glucose somewhere, stored glycogen, but that’s why you’re getting a quick hit of energy obviously, which is like any drug like cocaine or whatever.

 

[01:28:15] Ashley James: Right. The problem is it’s not from your mitochondria, that energy is not from your mitochondria.

 

[01:28:19] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It is the mitochondria.

 

[01:28:22] Ashley James: Sorry, yes, performing in a healthy way. You’re forcing it to do something, but it’s not performing in the optimal, in a healthy way.

 

[01:28:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s right.

 

[01:28:32] Ashley James: Okay. So salt is not helping because it’s swelling the cell. We need oxygen into the cell. The oxygen’s not getting into the cell because the fats we’re consuming are full of hydrogen. Can you explain why is it that—I’m imagining. If we can all just imagine a cross-section of a cell and you’ve got this fat layer that’s the cell wall, if there’s hydrogen all through that, why is oxygen having a hard time passing through the cell?

 

[01:29:02] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s the charge.

 

[01:29:03] Ashley James: Okay.

 

[01:29:04] Dr. Patrick Vickers: See, so that cell membrane’s charged based on the fat. That cell’s either going to accept the charge or repel a charge. A saturated fat membrane is literally going to repel oxygen away from the cell. It will literally drive it away. Whereas flax oil, which has no saturated bonds, literally acts as a magnet. It draws it into the cell. Yeah, that’s it.

 

[01:29:38] Ashley James: So fascinating.

 

[01:29:39] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It is, it’s incredible. It’s an issue of biophysics, not an issue of biochemistry, ultimately. It’s actually biophysics.

 

[01:29:48] Ashley James: I love it. Okay. So no salt, take some flax oil daily, and drink fresh juice daily.

 

[01:29:57] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right.

 

[01:29:58] Ashley James: First thing in the morning, best time to drink it, throughout the day. When’s the best time to drink it?

 

[01:30:04] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Our patients are getting every hour on the hour for 12 hours straight. They’re getting 13 juices a day.

 

[01:30:10] Ashley James: Okay. And how many ounces is that?

 

[01:30:13] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Eight ounces.

 

[01:30:14] Ashley James: Okay. And they’re also eating food in addition to that. This isn’t the juice fast.

 

[01:30:20] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right, and this needs to be very understood. So when a patient comes to you, comes to our clinic, what did I say in the beginning when we started talking science? What is completely destroyed and deranged? Their gut, right? Their gut is completely destroyed and deranged.

If you put a cancer patient on an all-raw diet, they won’t do well. So if you give them the juices and you give them meals that are all raw, they will not do well. Gerson was absolutely adamant that their three meals every day were thoroughly cooked. Well people say, well, oh, it destroys the nutrients, it destroys the enzyme. He didn’t care. You were getting all the nutrients in the enzymes in the 13 fresh-pressed juices, 17 pounds every single day. Those are absorbed into the bloodstream almost as quickly as alcohol with very little energy and enzymes required to utilize them.

Meals on the other hand, cancer patients cannot handle raw cauliflower, raw broccoli, raw carrots, raw whatever. It needs to be thoroughly cooked because cooking is actually a form of pre-digestion so that they can easily convert that food into energy. That was a huge, huge, huge issue for Dr. Gerson. He was so adamantly against a raw food diet for a cancer patient apart from the juices on a daily basis.

 

[01:31:59] Ashley James: Now, you mentioned that cancer is a fungal infection.

 

[01:32:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, it’s fungal and fermentative in nature. That’s how it survives. We know what survives on anaerobic metabolism. That’s how it survives.

 

[01:32:26] Ashley James: Except that there’s a form of lung cancer that doesn’t, but all other cancer does. There’s one form of lung cancer they found that didn’t do that, which is kind of weird. I can’t remember the doctor that told me about it, sorry. You said it’s fungal fermentation. Do you believe that tumors are an encapsulated fungal infection?

 

[01:32:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, I don’t necessarily believe that. Look, you and I have cancer, right? We all have cancer. Every single day, our body’s destroying that cancer. There comes a point, and it’s usually right around the fifth decade of life because that is the standard mean age of the people who come to my clinic that the body just loses the capacity to destroy cancer cells and these cancer cells start to accumulate and accumulate then they form a tumor ultimately. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily a fungal infection, so to speak. No.

 

[01:33:36] Ashley James: Okay. But it’s acting like fungus in that it is anaerobic?

 

[01:33:42] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s right.

 

[01:33:44] Ashley James: Okay. Does Gerson Therapy help the immune system see the cancer? Because the problem with cancer is that the immune system doesn’t see it. It’s like it has a cloaking device.

 

[01:34:00] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, it’s able to put a biofilm around itself, right? So cancer cells, and that’s a great question because melanoma and lymphoma, which are our two greatest successes, do not have the ability to put a biofilm around themselves to make themselves undetectable to the immune system. Whereas all your other cancers have that ability. Clearly, the Gerson Therapy is able to break down that biofilm.

Well, how would you break down that biofilm? Simple, I mean, we know ellagic acid like in cranberries. We know that that can break down the biofilm. So no doubt these fruits and vegetables are breaking down those, and then the massive amounts of enzymes that we also give, you can rest assured those enzymes are going to dissolve that biofilm that the cancer cell puts around itself, and then the immune system can readily attack it. But again, that’s why lymphoma in melanoma, they’re so easy to treat and they’re easy to treat because they can’t hide from the immune system. So you put someone on the Gerson Therapy and the immune system readily attacks the cancer because it has no defense. Pretty cool stuff, huh?

 

[01:35:14] Ashley James: It is really cool. So for those who don’t have those two kinds of cancers and they do have a kind of cancer that has a biofilm, you give them supplements.

 

[01:35:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I don’t give ellagic. I’ve been banging around the idea of giving patients ellagic acid as a supplement because you can get it as a supplement, but I’m just not sure how the digestive tract in the body can handle that in a cancer patient. I just haven’t been quick to jump on giving that as a supplement. If somebody said to me, hey, I’m interested in doing ellagic acid when I go home, I mean, I probably say, well, okay, I mean, I guess give it a shot. But I mean, historically, look, if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it, right?

Historically, clearly, we’ve been able to break down biofilm and cure cancer because that’s 120 years of the history of the Gerson Therapy. Whatever we’re doing is breaking down that biofilm, and so I’m just not ready to take that leap where we’re just bombarding the body with things to break down the biofilm because clearly, we’re already doing that.

 

[01:36:29] Ashley James: If someone ate cooked cranberries like they made a cranberry sauce, would they get enough of it in their food?

 

[01:36:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s a great question. I’m not sure how much. When you cook things high in oxalic acid, you actually eliminate the risk of a buildup of oxalic acid. I don’t know if you cook something, what happens to the acid when you’re doing that. So if they cooked the cranberries, I really don’t know. But I will say something. Chris Wark from Chris Beat Cancer who’s been in my clinic many times, he endorses my clinic. He once sent me a study somewhere where they tested all the fruits that we have available to us today. I don’t know if it’s in the states, around the world, or whatever.

But in that study, they tested all fruits, its effect, and its ability to stop cancer dead in its tracks. Of all the fruits they studied, two stood out clearly amongst the rest as being able to stop cancer dead in its tracks. That was lemon and cranberry. They stood out like way beyond the rest—lemon and cranberry. We’ve actually added lemon to the Gerson protocol, which Gerson had lemon before he changed his juicing protocol in 1952. He had lemon, so we’ve reintroduced it so to speak. Yeah, we put in our carrot juice now.

 

[01:38:01] Ashley James: Yum. And I love fresh lemon squeezed into water just first thing in the morning, also. Count that one back. What do we need to understand about preventing disease? Pretty much everyone who’s listening wants to be healthier than they are now, right? Not everyone listening has a cancer diagnosis or a major disease diagnosis.

 

[01:38:32] Dr. Patrick Vickers: We’re going on one out of every two if we’re not there already, right?

 

[01:38:40] Ashley James: Yeah. My listeners are enlightened. They’re with you. They’re like, yeah, we’re going to go drink the juice and screw that salt. We’re with you. I say this all the time on my show, so if you’re a longtime listener you’ve heard me say, if you want to be a statistic, eat like everyone else. Go  with the herd. Go with the flow, drive-thru McDonald’s, drive-thru Starbucks. Just go through the drive-thrus, order takeout. Just eat like everyone else, get some frozen pizza, drink some beer, just be like everyone else. Be like how everyone else is doing it and you will be part of the statistics, right?

So the statistics is one in three people have diabetes or are pre-diabetic. One in three people are obese and soon to be morbidly obese, and the thing is there’s so much shame and guilt around that. The fact is again, it’s like the baby being born of a mother who is addicted to heroin. It’s not the baby’s fault. This is not your fault. You were put in a system since birth that is designed to make you sick, not healthy. As we can see from Dr. Gerson’s life, he is the man who figured out how to cure cancer almost a hundred years ago, right?

 

[01:40:09] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And virtually every other disease as well.

 

[01:40:11] Ashley James: And was completely squashed on purpose. The system that we live in does not want you to know the truth about anything that would eliminate their power and their profits. The diseases you have now, they’re not your fault in that you didn’t know these forces have been controlling your life. This is like the matrix, right? But once you are outside the matrix, it is your fault if you continue to choose the behaviors, and still I don’t fault you because again, it’s an addiction, we’re constantly being bombarded by our friends, our family, the media.

We have to become the salmon. We have to become the black sheep. We have to become the salmon. We have to go upstream. But imagine you’re the only salmon in the stream and every other fish is going to the ocean and we’re like, no, I got to go this way going against the grain. Sometimes it’s lonely. Join our Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group then you’re not going to be alone. Thousands of listeners are just like you in the same boat. They’re the black sheep of their family. They want to get healthy. The rest of their friends are wanting to go out partying, drink beer, eat wings, or whatever.

The thing is it takes a complete mental shift, and it also takes being kind to yourself because you are that baby born of an addicted mother. You’re born into this and now you’re being birthed out of it. Now you get to decide, are you going to go down the steps and eliminate salt, increase your potassium drinking juice? Are you going to incorporate flax oil and cut out all other unhealthy oils? Are you going to go through the list, and I’m sure that Dr. Vickers has a lot more homework he can give us.

But now that we understand the science, the science is to heal the cell wall, heal the cell, heal the metabolism of the cell, and don’t do anything to impede it. Support the thyroid and the mitochondria to work healthfully to receive oxygen. That alone decreases inflammation in the body, removes the oxidative stress from the body, and helps restore the gut. I mean, those things, I don’t know an illness that that wouldn’t help. It’s very exciting. What we have to understand is that it just doesn’t end today, just listening to this. This is now the stepping point where we need to start taking action. We need to take actionable steps.

So, like I said, not everyone listening is in a disease state right now. There are some people listening who need to do it 110% go to your clinic and do that. Absolutely go to gersonclinic.com, check it out, go to your clinic, and get doctor-supervised transitioning into this therapy. And then there are those of us who have some minor things they’re dealing with and want to prevent it from getting worse and want to start heading in the right direction.

 

[01:43:34] Dr. Patrick Vickers: We have programs for them as well, right?

 

[01:43:36] Ashley James: Do you have virtual programs?

 

[01:43:38] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, we don’t do online remote consulting at this point just because I’m so busy. I mean, I’m just ridiculously busy and I don’t have people trained up to provide that sole service, and that’s why we have a clinic where people come and they spend a week and do a detox or two weeks and do a detox. I mean, on my website, we just created a store within the last six months. There is like a month supply or a three-month supply of the Gerson Therapy supplements and included in that is a one-hour consultation with me. My time is so limited that if everybody started buying that, I don’t think I’d be able to keep up. But I do offer that included in that package, but that’s really the only thing that we have that’s of that nature.

 

[01:44:31] Ashley James: Got it. I would love to see in the future something where one of your cohorts of people coming into your clinic, you recorded all the seminars or educational pieces and then put that together online. So either those who need a refresher could take it or those who want to learn more, if they can’t travel for whatever reason, it would be really cool to get that, maybe have a digital course.

 

[01:45:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, for your listeners, for example, if your listeners go to our website, there’s a section you can click on that says gift. If you go to gift, your listener goes to gift, click on gift and put in the password podcast. They can actually listen to our private video series that’s only for our clientele that comes to the clinic. You can tell your listeners to do that. Hit the gift section on our website, put in the password podcast, and they can watch all of my interviews, my lectures on the very things we’re talking about on the therapy, all of those private videos they can have access to.

 

[01:45:52] Ashley James: Sweet, awesome, thank you. I mean, of course I want everyone to go to your clinic, but for those of us who can’t at this very moment, I love them. I’d love for people to just today do that because we got to start learning more and making it part of our routine. When I learned something completely revolutionary, I’m like, oh, yeah, I’ve got to do this. And then life happens and all of a sudden I’m back in that old routine. We need to make sure that we make this a habit that lasts.

We’ve talked about some things that people do for major illnesses. What homework do we do to prevent disease that’s really important?

 

[01:46:40] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, we’ve addressed the nutritional portions and how to reverse the underlying causes of a disease. We’re at the ultimate restoration of metabolism, which you do through diet, right? But there are some things we haven’t talked about. For example, you have to address the issue of toxicity. Patients coming to us, they’re so incredibly toxic from years of a toxic lifestyle, toxic environmental exposure. Then when you put them on a therapy like this, you’re generating even more toxicity, right? You’re breaking down diseased tissue, you’re breaking down tumor tissue, you’re rebuilding new tissue. The juicing is pulling toxicity stored up for years, decades out of the cells back into the bloodstream.

If you don’t detoxify those patients, they’ll all die. You cannot put them on the dietary regimen without the proper detoxification.

You kind of alluded to this at the beginning of the interview with bathroom procedures. Dr. Gerson made the coffee enema famous. Our patients are getting five coffee enemas per day—five per day. There’s not a more powerful way to detoxify the human body than a coffee enema, and that includes prevention as well.

 

[01:48:06] Ashley James: That’s one thing they mentioned in one of the documentaries I saw is that Gerson was having great success in Germany reversing cancer. And then when he came to New York City, when did he come to York City? What year?

 

[01:48:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I want to say probably the mid-30s.

 

[01:48:25] Ashley James: So mid-30s. Gasoline was leaded, I believe, so we can imagine in a busy city, people are breathing in lead all the time. There are no regulations for factories not dumping into anything—mercury, any kind of sludge—into the creeks, and then people might eat the fish like the Minamata disaster in Japan where people were born with major mercury deformations because of the mercury being dumped into the streams that led out into Minamata, which was a fishing village.

This is the same thing happening, and all of a sudden, he does the same protocol that was working in Germany, but he noticed that the people would immediately die. You didn’t mention that because it probably isn’t a great part of the story like, and then everyone died of the therapy. But what I found fascinating was that he figured out, he had to troubleshoot, why are people in Germany living and beating cancer, and then I come here with the same protocol and people in New York City will drop dead very quickly of toxicity?

 

[01:49:43] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Oh, no. I think he discovered early on in Europe that if he didn’t detoxify his patients he would lose them. I’m not sure that was discovered necessarily in the United States.

 

[01:49:56] Ashley James: Well then the movie got it wrong, but I thought that was really interesting and I thought maybe it had to do with America being more toxic, and I mean, still toxic today, but in terms of lead in the gasoline so the environment.

 

[01:50:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Maybe it was the cancer patient then because he didn’t start treating cancer until he got to the United States, right? That might have happened with the cancer patients, some of the cancer patients at first. The first one he did he completely cured her, right? How he did that without coffee enemas, I’m not sure if he maybe didn’t do enough coffee enemas going forward, I don’t know. At one point during his practice, he lost his first few patients because he didn’t detoxify them heavily enough and they went into more toxic shock, ultimately, and that’s where the five coffee enema protocol was ultimately derived.

 

[01:50:53] Ashley James: That’s why I think it’s so important to point this out because some people say, well, I’m going to do Gerson therapy, but I’m not going to do the coffee enemas because that’s weird.

 

[01:51:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: You can’t.

 

[01:51:02] Ashley James: Some people are like, well, I’m going to do it, but I’m not going to eat breakfast because I don’t like eating breakfast or whatever. If you’re reversing your cancer with Gerson therapy, you don’t cherry-pick what you like and what you don’t like.

 

[01:51:13] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right.

 

[01:51:14] Ashley James: He trialed and errored this and got to the point he’s having the greatest success, and you could add things on like aloe. It’s not going to hurt, it’s only going to help more, but you don’t take things away. So you say one coffee enema a day for those who are just looking to prevent disease.

 

[01:51:32] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I’ve been doing one a day for 25 years.

 

[01:51:36] Ashley James: So could you explain why coffee enemas help to detox the body?

 

[01:51:44] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Absolutely. And it’s pure science, it’s not voodoo science. Your liver produces an enzyme called glutathione transferase. Glutathione transferase is the most potent detoxifying enzyme or one of the most potent detoxifying enzymes in the human body. Well, your liver needs palmitic acid in order to create glutathione transferase. Well, properly roasted organic coffee from a specific bean, not a drinking bean, is loaded with palmitic acid.

It’s been demonstrated scientifically by Peter Lechner, you can Google it, Peter Lechner. It has been demonstrated that when you do one coffee enema, the production of glutathione transferase by the body goes up 600 to 700% greater than normal. I mean, there is nothing that can produce that kind of detoxification.

Now, what people don’t understand is when you do the coffee enema and you stimulate that production, that requires massive amounts of nutrients. So if you’re not replenishing the body with nutrients in the form of juices and massive amounts of organic produce on a daily basis, you’ll actually cause yourself more harm than good over time because you’re going to deplete the body over time. That’s why drinking coffee, you deplete your body of nutrients so much because you’re losing so many vitamins and minerals because it’s a diuretic. It’s artificially stimulating metabolism, which requires nutrients.

When you do a coffee enema, the rule is three to four juices for every coffee enema. So if I do one coffee enema day, I’m literally eating three to five pounds of fresh organic produce every single day, raw. That’s to balance my system. But that’s the main thing that the Gerson coffee enema does.

The other thing it does, is as you and I are sitting here, if we’re talking for 15 minutes, our blood is circulating through our liver and our kidneys. It’s being cleansed two and a half times in a 15-minute period going through our liver and our kidney for cleansing, dialysis, so to speak.

When you do a coffee enema, it must be because of the hypovolemic state because you’re now adding a quart of liquid to you. You must increase the flow of fluid through the body. You’re actually running your blood through the liver and the kidneys five times rather than two and a half times. So it’s a natural form of dialysis, so to speak. That’s another side benefit, so to speak, of the Gerson therapy.

Finally, the other thing it does is it releases bile and it causes bile to flow, and that’s what your toxins are ultimately bound to. The way the liver detoxifies is cholesterol gets converted into bile acids, and then bile binds toxins and eliminates it through the intestines and the kidneys. So that’s the other thing that the Gerson coffee enema does. It produces bottom bile flow, which is also enhancing detoxification.

 

[01:55:01] Ashley James: And then we have to make sure that we have something that’s going to carry that all the way out, so don’t be constipated because the body tries to reuptake cholesterol from bile and it’ll reuptake some of those forever chemicals. All those chemicals the body’s trying to get rid of because the gut doesn’t know the difference, right? It’s costly to make bile, and so the body tries to reabsorb it. We want to make sure we’re getting enough fiber, that 15 grams a day, that average American diet, that’s not going to cut it. Aim for 50 grams of fiber a day, 100 grams of fiber. But the juices, there’s still some fiber in juice, right? I know that we do remove pulp, but can you also take some pulp and throw them back in or can make dehydrated crackers out of it.

 

[01:55:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: There’s no reason. If you’re eating three Gerson meals a day, there’s no reason.

 

[01:56:00] Ashley James: What is a Gerson meal? Maybe we should give it a picture. What does it look like to eat three Gerson meals a day?

 

[01:56:08] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Every morning is oatmeal with dried fruit stewed into it, so prunes, raisins, and mango. What else do we eat? Sometimes we throw currants in there. That’s it. It’s oatmeal and dried fruit, and then they get an orange juice every morning. Flax oil is mandatory. Two tablespoons of flax oil every single day is mandatory. And they can have a natural sweetener. They can have up to two to three teaspoons a day maximum of a natural sweetener, so honey, a sucanat, maple syrup they can put in their oatmeal, so that’s breakfast.

Lunch and dinner, mandatory are potatoes. Potatoes are a staple. They’re so easily converted into energy by the body, and so Gerson made potatoes staple. There’s also something called Hippocrates Soup. Mandatory is Hippocrates Soup at lunch and dinner. It was actually a soup created by Hippocrates 2500 years ago. Now, Hippocrates is considered the greatest physician that ever lived. Ironically, Gerson used his work and Paracelsus’ his work to come to his conclusions and ultimately formed the Gerson therapy.

So Hippocrates Soup and potatoes are a staple, then any other vegetable. It might be asparagus, it might be squash, it might be onions or tomatoes, all of those things can make up another vegetable dish. That pretty much derives the Gerson Therapy meals, they’re simple.

We have very artistic chefs. We have vegetarian artistic chefs. I mean, they’re brilliant. They take fruits and vegetables and they literally turn it into appetizing art, and so it’s amazing what you can do with what God gave us. I mean, fruits and vegetables and the combinations you can make are just fascinating and just scrumptious.

 

[01:58:16] Ashley James: I love it. I didn’t hear any—some people are going to freak out—protein in that. Can you please explain? How am I going to get my 500 grams of protein a day that everyone tells me I need?

 

[01:58:35] Dr. Patrick Vickers: One of the biggest fallacies out there is how much protein the human body needs and what kind of protein the human body needs. I can’t tell you how many times people ask me that question, where am I going to get my protein on this diet? Well, where does a horse or a cow get their protein from? Are they cannibals? Are they pumping iron all day long and building that muscle mass that way? No, they’re not. How are they getting their protein to support their massive structures? They’re eating grass all day.

 

[01:59:16] Ashley James: Elephants.

 

[01:59:18] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, they’re eating greens.

 

[01:59:19] Ashley James: Right? Largest land mammals.

 

[01:59:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly. They’re eating greens. Greens are loaded with proteins. Carrots are loaded with protein. Potatoes are loaded with protein. They are, I thought they were a carb? No. They’re a carb, they’re a protein, they’re virtually a perfect food. Oatmeal, protein; lentils, protein; quinoa, protein. I mean, you combine these things and you get them all in your diet on a daily basis and your body will be able to take those amino acids and completely make a protein for your optimal survival.

You do not need meat, you do not need eggs, you do not need milk, you do not need cheese in order to get protein into your diet. It is one of the biggest fallacies and tragedies out there because meat and all those other things I mentioned, are such inferior proteins. They’re inferior proteins to keep the body optimally fit and healthy.

 

[02:00:25] Ashley James: And the fat, the diet is pretty much naturally low in fat minus the flax oil that you’re adding. How much flax oil should someone eat a day? Is it something they’re eating just by the spoonful, pouring it kind of like cod liver oil into the spoon, or are they putting it on their salad? Obviously, they’re not cooking with it? How much flax oil should someone be consuming a day and how do they eat it?

 

[02:00:58] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Just to clarify something, all our foods, whether it’s a fruit, a vegetable, or whatever, pretty much comes with everything we need from protein, to sugar, to even essential fatty acids. You wouldn’t even necessarily have to supplement with flax oil if you’re eating a proper diet. Even spinach and greens have essential fatty acids in them.

A healthy person, if they got one tablespoon of flax oil a day, that would probably be optimal. It’s a highly, highly concentrated fat right? I mean, how many freaking flax seeds do you have to press to get a tablespoon of flax oil, right? Our patients have to do two per day when they’re cancer patients, but then at six weeks, they have to go down to one because you can’t bombard the body that long with such a highly concentrated fat and it’s not necessary. In the beginning, they needed to do that because they need to restore the proper fats at the level of the cell membrane, but after six weeks, Gerson felt like he could wean them off or wean them down. They would continue one tablespoon for the rest of their protocol.

To put one tablespoon a day into your diet, whether it’s on a salad or in the oatmeal. I put it on the oatmeal, I put it in the potato, I put it on the salad until I have essentially a tablespoon a day. I don’t take more than that.

 

[02:02:41] Ashley James: What kind of flax oil because I know there are doctors out there like Dr. Wallach who say we shouldn’t eat any oil out of a bottle because it’s rancid and it’s going to increase—

 

[02:02:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: This is true.

 

[02:02:57] Ashley James: It can potentially increase the hydrogen in the body. It can give it more free radicals. Of course, this entire diet would really help to mitigate that. What kind of flax oil is best to take?

 

[02:03:10] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Okay. So obviously, it has to be cold-pressed right, and there are a few companies that produce a really high quality flax oil. We get ours from Omega Nutrition. Barlean’s, perfect. Barlean’s not a problem. They’re just as good of a producer as Omega. Those are the two that I would highly recommend.

Now, in terms of getting rancid, you’re exactly right. Flax oil is highly volatile. What makes it volatile is what? It doesn’t have any hydrogen bonds, that’s what gives it its volatility and it’s quick to go rancid. Now, what does quick to go rancid mean?. Well, that cold-pressed oil is in an opaque bottle and it’s also refrigerated, so it’s not exposed to light, heat, or air until you open it then it’s exposed to air. But it’s not exposed to light and it’s not exposed to heat.

 If you continue to refrigerate it, a 12-ounce bottle will last you for three weeks. It should last you for three weeks. At the end of three weeks, that’s when it’ll start to break down. But for two to three weeks, you can use that oil perfectly, keep it refrigerated, and it will stay completely fresh. And then from there, they say pretty much after three to four weeks, you might want to consider throwing it away because it’ll start to break down even if you just open it up, pour it, close it, put it in the fridge. But it should last you anywhere for around three weeks.

But fish oil. Do you know fish oil they say is like 5 to 10 times more volatile than flax oil? And so, these supplements, they put them into these capsules, they put them into bottles and stuff. When you take those fish oils, you know how you burp and it has that fishy taste? That’s already gone rancid. These companies that are producing fish oil, they’ll tell you publicly because they’re trying to sell you their product how pure, unrefined, and how un-rancid their oils are. But reality is, behind closed doors, it is impossible to keep their oils pure. That’s why when you take them, you burp, and you taste that fishy taste, that means it’s gone rancid because true fish oil right from the fish when you eat it, it doesn’t have that taste. It has a pure almost like flax oil taste.

Fish oil, I would never touch it. Not to mention, where’s that fish oil coming from? It’s coming from the fat of the fish. Where do the mercury and the toxicity in the oceans get stored? In the fat of the fish. However much you try to distill it and distill the heavy metals and stuff out there, you’re not going to succeed in getting most of that out. I don’t buy it. I never touch it. Flax oil is my go-to guy.

 

[02:06:19] Ashley James: I love it. This is something we can all do. We can incorporate these things. It does take about a month to neuro-adapt fully, but we can look to see significantly less inflammation. This is incredible for those who are in pain. I mean, just the whole food plant-based diet alone. No oil, let’s say. A whole food plant-based diet, no oil, so no processed food, no oil. My friend Naomi who actually had her on the show because she reversed a major heart condition with the whole food plant-based diet with no oil.

Her parents got on it. I think they’re in their 70s, really nice people. Her mom reversed her arthritis-like major arthritis pain, kind of like preventing needing surgeries in the future kind of arthritis. She no longer has arthritis, and I think it was like three weeks in which she said to her daughter, hey, my arthritis pain is gone. That just blew my mind because we’re taught that arthritis is wearing away of the cartilage. I’ve seen people reverse arthritis. I’ve seen Dr. Wallach reverse arthritis. I know it’s reversible.

MDs will tell you it’s not. I remember back in college, [inaudible 02:07:47] was a neurosurgeon in Croatia and he escaped the war and came over to Canada. He was my professor. Later I think he was like the Dean of the Naturopathic College in Toronto. I remember in anatomy class, he said, you cannot regrow cartilage. This is like 1999. He goes, you cannot regrow cartilage. Once you have arthritis, you will always have arthritis. He was really adamant. Do not even think that arthritis is reversible. Once you’ve lost cartilage you could never get it back.

I thought, this is ridiculous. You’re expecting me to think that like you were the cartilage you’re born with is the cartilage you’re always going to have or something. It’s so silly. Of course, the body can regenerate cartilage. Are you wearing your body down faster than you can regrow it? If you’re not giving yourself the raw building blocks, if you’re not giving yourself the material it needs to grow—the bones, the joints, the cell walls—and then you’re dosing gasoline on yourself and then lighting it on fire every day with your habits, of course you’re going to go downhill. Of course, the cartilage is going to wear away because you’re dousing yourself with flames and then not giving yourself anything to rebuild, not enough. It’s like everyone else. You can be like everyone else; you’re going to become a statistic.

But we can reverse these diseases. That’s exciting. MDs will tell you you cannot reverse these because that’s their training. We have to start thinking for ourselves and question everything. Question absolutely everything and don’t take our word for it, question us too. Go look into this stuff. Go try it for yourself. See how you are. Give it three months, I’d say. What happens to people in three months? If we all jumped in and did this for the next three months, what would we expect to feel, what would we expect to happen in our bodies?

 

[02:10:05] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Oh, wow. I mean, look like Albert Schweitzer, severely advanced diabetes six weeks, Dr. Gerson cured him. Someone scheduled for triple quadruple bypass surgery, in one month we’re canceling their surgeries. You want to lose weight? Our patients are losing anywhere from a quarter to a pound a day until they’re normal weight. Now people say, well, how on earth can you lose a pound a day if you’re consuming 3500 to 4000 calories? Because the experts say that you have to consume anywhere from a maximum of 1200 to maybe 1500 if you’re going to lose weight.

Well, how is it that on the Gerson Therapy consuming 3500 to 4000 calories per day that you can lose anywhere from a quarter to a pound per day?

 

[02:10:55] Ashley James: You’re healing the metabolism.

 

[02:10:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Because the issue of weight loss has nothing to do with caloric intake. It has everything to do with being able to convert those calories into energy, and that is everything that we have spoken about today. We have restored metabolism from the gut, to the cell membrane, to the internal part of the cell so the mitochondria can convert those calories into energy, and that is proper and healthy weight loss. Massive amounts of caloric intake. Imagine that, and the experts tell you you’ve got to starve yourself on 1200 to 1500 calories per day if you want to lose weight. That’s bogus. It’s nonsense. They don’t understand the cellular science behind it, and that’s what made Gerson such an elemental genius.

He has taken modern nutritional ideas and theories, whether it’s weight loss, the ketogenic diet, and turned it up on its head. This is what you can expect on the Gerson Therapy. Skin conditions. Do you have a severe skin condition? A lot of our patients come in with severe skin conditions because typically, your skin conditions are underlying metabolic errors and preconditions to cancer. They come in with skin conditions, within three months, their skin conditions are completely resolved—three months. This is what you can expect.

 

[02:12:35] Ashley James: I love it. This is so exciting. I realized I’ve had you on the show for two hours now. I could talk to you for another five. I’d love to have you back on the show. Dr. Patrick Vickers, it has been such a pleasure having you.

This way of eating goes completely against the grain, in terms of weight loss, great read. I listen to the book. Who figured, right? I love podcasts, I like listening to books. Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis, just listen to the first chapter. He tells his story. He’s a second-generation weight loss surgery doctor. He made a name for himself cutting people’s stomachs out. He was in Texas and he was working with 600-pound plus patients, and his dad did too. He was on Bravo, he had a reality show, he had a book out. He was all about the lower fat, processed food, 1200-calorie day diet.

In his 30s, he started feeling sluggish, he started getting a little tubby. He started feeling more and more tired. He was eating the same thing that he told his patients to eat like high protein, low carb, low fat cheese, low fat yogurt, and he just started to just feel sicker and sicker.

He used to think his patients were just lazy because they said, I’m too tired to go to the gym. He’s like, you’re just lazy, and then he noticed he was too tired. He’s like, oh man, this diet that I put everyone on I’m on, it’s failing me. So then the kicker, he’s 35 years old, he’s a surgeon, and he starts to lose his eyesight. He goes to the eye doctor and they say, you have cholesterol deposits in your eyes so bad that your eyes are like a 60-year-old man and you’re going to have to be on, and he gives him like a long list full of drugs for the rest of your life. Cholesterol meds, high blood pressure, all blood thinners, whatever. He was put on so many meds.

He goes home and he sits there and goes, my lifespan is now just cut short because these meds will cause my lifespan to be cut short. He’s 35 years old and he has to eat humble pie. He realizes everything he’s been telling all his patients is wrong.

He goes back to the drawing board and that’s when he discovers the stuff that you’re teaching. That this way of eating is the way to heal the body, and then he heals himself and he has to completely eat humble pie, and that’s when he produced the Proteinaholic, which is his journey of discovering the true science of health. He debunks like 30 different diets. He debunks keto. He debunks everyone that’s all mainstream, and he does it in a very fun manner. It’s a really interesting book. I apologize, this isn’t meant to offend you. I don’t think there’s one doctor on the planet that has the entire truth.

 

[02:16:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, exactly, right?

 

[02:16:03] Ashley James: But it is up to us as the individual consumer to go and learn from each one and then figure out what works for me, right? We listened to Dr. Patrick Vickers and we listened to this doctor here and this doctor here, and we started to get this full picture. Dr. Wallach says no oil all the time ever. So I’m like, okay, great. No oil time ever. But then Dr. Patrick Vickers comes along and says, well, actually, flax oil has all these benefits. You take it in this way, and also, yes, I agree the other oils are good. And then we look at that and go okay, I’m going to try this on. We just have to continue to get the information from these amazing doctors, especially the clinicians because they’re boots on the ground seeing the results.

 

[02:16:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right.

 

[02:16:54] Ashley James: Implement it into our lives. Question everything. I like to say, I’m the biggest open-minded skeptic. Question everything, but also have an open mind enough to take in information that goes against your belief system.

I was a meat eater through and through and I was scared of having one meal without meat. You bet this challenged me and I didn’t want to hear it. I did not want to hear it. My husband went overnight, after I did these interviews like I did some plant-based interviews, my husband started looking into this information. Overnight, he went from never eating vegetables, only eating meat, to never eating meat again four years ago. He woke up and said, I’m never eating meat.

He would make a joke,I eat vegans daily because all he ate was beef. He’d eat pork for breakfast and then before lunch and dinner, and that was it, or eggs maybe, but that was it. That was his diet. He was on a carnivore diet. And then a switch flipped in his brain. He’s not a health nut, but a switch flipped in his brain, and I watched him do it. He said four days into eating this—you got to get he was like 100% meat to 0% meat. I had to all of a sudden learn how to cook whole food plant-based, like delicious meals that weren’t gross, that weren’t plain but also weren’t full of junk.

He said, four days into this, this food tastes so good. If you told me this food too would taste so good I would have done this years ago. He says this food tastes way better, way better. It’s just a matter of giving it a try.

The Proteinaholic book is great because he shares his own personal journey. He says at the beginning, you don’t have to be a vegan. You don’t have to go there and do that. But just look at the science, look at the results, look at it for yourself. Try this on, try this way of eating on. He just shows. Okay, you want to eat chicken breast once a week? Well, here’s the damage. Here’s the potential damage to the body. He just shows it. It’s interesting, right?

We have people out there who want to go and reverse disease and you’ve got fantastic answers, we want them to your website, gersonclinic.com. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. I definitely want to have you back. Anytime you want to come to teach new things, share new things. This has been fantastic.

 

[02:19:25] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I just want to share one anecdote with you. I lived with Charlotte Gerson, right? She invited me to come live with her for two months at her home in San Diego, where she had all her father’s handwritten files of all his patients between 1910 and 1959, which I’m one of maybe a handful of people who’ve ever had the opportunity to actually go through those files, but guess who lived on the same street as Charlotte Gerson. Joel Wallach.

 

[02:19:56] Ashley James: No way. Shut the front door.

 

[02:20:02] Dr. Patrick Vickers: He lives on the same street when I was living with her, yeah. And Joel and I actually have lectured at the same venue a couple of times. We’ve lectured in the same venue. A guy by the name of Vincent [inaudible 02:20:15] holds a thing in Missouri from time to time and we lectured on the same stage. But I met JoeI. I saw Joel walking up and down the street back in 1998.

 

[02:20:27] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is so cool.

 

[02:20:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: When that video or that tape that you’re referring to, that’s when it was huge. He was iconic at that point. But he lived on the same street as Charlotte, go figure.

 

[02:20:42] Ashley James: Him and I have traveled together. I’ve helped him with his lectures, and he’s this little short dude, right? I mean, he’s stout, right? He’s not a pushover, but he’s really short. My husband’s 6’7″, and I’m also pretty tall. I’m 5’10”. For a woman I’m tall. We both got muscle, my husband and I, and when we were traveling, we were running through the airport and he had two 80 pound bags. They’re hockey bags or huge duffel bags. Two 80 pound bags and we tried to help him because we had our suitcase. We tried to help him and we were struggling. He picks both of them up like their feathers and starts running through the airport. We were winded. This dude is fit and that was about eight years ago.

 

[02:21:51] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Because he is tiny.

 

[02:21:53] Ashley James: He’s tiny, but he’s fit. I love his work. And again, I don’t think every doctor on the planet has the answers, but Dr. Wallach has a lot of answers that other doctors don’t. We just have to keep going down the rabbit hole, and I’ve had him on the show twice and it was great. I can’t wait to have him back. I can’t wait to have you back. This has been amazing. And of course, listeners need to go to gersonclinic.com and then go to the gift section, put in the password podcast to start getting your videos.

I’d love to come to your clinic one day, that would be so great. I hope that my listeners who need the help will seek your help. I just pray that this episode and all that you do, all your endeavors will fall on ears that are ready to hear and will make a ripple turn into a tidal wave and help so many people to beat cancer and other diseases. Thank you for helping end the needless suffering. That’s really important.

 

[02:22:55] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Thank you, and don’t forget, your listeners can go to that gift section and put in podcast, and they can listen to all the science that we’ve talked about today and even then some because there’s a lot we didn’t talk about. That’s only for our paid clientele, they have access to that. Those are our private videos. Have them go there, gersonclinic.com

 

[02:23:20] Ashley James: Awesome. All right, thank you so much. And please, come back to the show. Don’t be a stranger.

 

[02:23:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: You just let me know when and I’ll oblige.

 

[02:23:27] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode with Dr. Patrick Vickers. Wasn’t it amazing? I just love this protocol. I have a family member who is in hospice care at the end of their life. They chose to go through traditional cancer treatments and now they are in the final stages of their life deteriorating, which they deteriorate quite quickly after doing the traditional methods, the cut, burn, and poison methods.

I convinced them to just try some freshly pressed juice. They’re not willing to use any form of natural medicine, but they’re feeling so awful. I said, would you just be willing if I bought organic vegetables and fruit and I made some juice for you, would you be willing to do it? And so they said, yes. And I said, would you be willing to try this diet, the Gerson protocol? I’m not expecting them to do the whole thing. Just would you be willing to do it, and they said, okay, well, I’m willing to do most of it. So they’re not willing to do all of it, but again, I just wanted to make them more comfortable. They’re not willing to fight for themselves and use natural medicine to reverse their disease so I can’t force them, but I did provide them with freshly squeezed juice every day and some healthy meals.

What happened would really blow your mind. They’ve been bedridden, unable to walk. If they try to stand, they faint because their blood pressure is so bad. There’s weakness in their body. They can’t stand, they have to be carried. Within 12 hours of them drinking juice, they were perky, peppy, sitting up without having sudden blood pressure drops. Within 24 hours, with a walker, they were able to take a little walk around the house first time in two months. That was so cool.

We’ve just been giving them some juice and basically, Gerson-style meals and they are feeling so much better. Now, the person is still in hospice care, they’re still at the end of their life. They’re still going downhill much slower now and having much more quality of life. We actually noticed their confusion went away. Their dementia where they didn’t know how to work a remote anymore went away. They’re able to use the remote control without asking how to use it.

Another thing, they had stopped reading, which they love to do, and they stopped using their cell phone. They were just, for the last two months, sitting in bed confused, staring at the TV. After about two days of being on most of the Gerson protocol, like I said, they’re not doing the coffee enemas, but they’re drinking some juice. Not drinking as much juice as you would if you were trying to save your life, but they’re drinking a bunch of juice, vegetables, and some fruits, and then eat some of the meals.

They started reading again. They started looking on another phone again. They started sitting up and talking. The color came back in their face. Pain became less. Bowel movements became much easier, going to the bathroom became much easier. Their mobility became much easier. It improved quality of life more than any drug that that hospice care could give them in less than a week.

If that doesn’t speak to the profound effect that food is medicine, that what you put in your mouth every day, that if you go through the drive-thru, what you’re putting in your mouth is hurting you is poison. If you spend the time to eat organic, fresh, raw and cooked vegetables, and the juice, you are blasting your cells with high oxygen nutrients that help the body to be healthier and healthier and healthier.

Another thing to remember, this has just given me such a perspective. How you manage your stress, how you take time to take care of yourself, the self-care that you put in in the kitchen, not just in the bathroom. I’ve heard people say, oh, I’m going to take an extra-long bath and that’s my self-care. Your self-care starts with the kitchen. What you do, what you put in your mouth, what you drink, what you eat, that is the biggest self-care. Go for a walk, pray, meditate, read, try to ground yourself. Go lie down in some grass. Literally, go hug a tree. Get out in nature. Give yourself moments of joy and nourish every cell in your body.

What you do now will affect the quality of your life in the last 20 years of your life. The last 20 years can be miserable or they can be filled with joy.

I’m a friend of a woman who’s a doctor and we’ve been friends for many years. She’s in her early 80s and you wouldn’t know it. You’d think she was in her 40s. She runs marathons. She’s been in the Olympics. She’s so wonderful and she took care of her body her whole life, and now, there’s the return on her investment. Because I know 80-year-olds that are going blind, that are losing their comprehension, that is losing their mobility. Whereas my friend has the same functionality as a 40-year-old and she’s loving life in her 80s.

That’s the blessing you get by really taking what you learned today and applying it. Just remember that, apply it. The investment in yourself can make such a difference and just try it for a week. I cannot believe what’s happening to my family member who clearly has seen benefits from this just a week into doing it. So I’d love for you to just give it a try and just commit to seven days of juicing and eating this diet and see what happens. See the miracle that unfolds in your body. I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear how you respond after a week. What are the changes? Even just the subtle changes, what are the benefits that happen? Please come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and share, I’d love to hear.

And also, remember to go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and get some of that Medicinal Aloe Gel and drink it every day. Let me know how that helps you. The coupon code is LTH2022, and that’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. I look forward to hearing from you after you do all this. I want to know how this helped you. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this with others. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.

Get Connected with Dr. Patrick Vickers!

Website

Facebook

YouTube

Instagram

 

 

 

 

Feb 22, 2022

LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe

 - coupon code LTH2022

 

Aloe: The Magic Formula For Achieving Optimal Gut Health

https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe-the-magic-formula-for-achieving-optimal-gut-health

 

Highlights:

  • What foods to eat to be well
  • How to relieve constipation
  • Gut, the soil of our intestines
  • Nourishing the gut flora
  • Food Mood Poop Journal
  • Changes you can do if you have chronic gut issues

 

Keeping our gut healthy is very important because it has an impact on our overall health. How we eat can have a positive or negative effect on our body. Dr. Michael Haley is back on the show and we discuss all things gut health. He talks about how we can nourish the gut flora, keeping a Food Mood Poop Journal to track how food affects us, and simple changes we can make to improve our overall gut health.

Intro:

​​Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am thrilled to finally sit down and publish this episode. As you may have seen, there was a bit of a gap between the last episode and this one. Life has been very interesting. Lots of unexpected twists and turns. I’m actually in the middle of moving again, and it’ll be a good move. We’re moving closer to family members that we’re taking care of and so we will come out on the other side happier and just rolling with the punches. 

It reminds me about the lessons I learned when I studied Neuro-linguistic Programming that the person who has the most flexibility of behavior is able to overcome, and it’s those parts of our lives where we’re most rigid that we end up suffering when it’s required of us to become flexible.

Our guest today is Dr. Michael Haley, who’s a fantastic doctor. I’ve had him on the show before, and he’s come back today to talk about specific and actionable steps that you can take starting today to optimize your gut health, no matter where you are in the grand spectrum of gut health. Whether you are suffering and you’re really looking to get a leg up, or whether you have fairly good gut health and you end there’s always room for improvement, everything that he talks about today is fantastic and you will absolutely love it.

I also love and highly recommend trying out his aloe drink. It’s a medicinal type of aloe. He talks about how they produce it versus the store-bought aloe, which is very different. Store-bought aloe—even the pain you can get at a specialty health food store—is highly processed, filtered, most of the medicinal properties are taken out, and also they tend to be the whole aloe plant, which Dr. Haley talks about in today’s interview and how that’s actually not good for us. Whereas his medicinal aloe is the gel itself, it is unadulterated, it’s frozen immediately the same day that they harvest it from the fields, and then they ship it to frozen. You defrost it and drink it and it has immediate effects.

It’s really cool because he’s got more science on how it supports the body, and he talks about that in today’s interview. If you want to give the aloe a try— I love having it in my freezer because if you ever come down with a stomach bug, I had this happen before wherein its tracks, it immediately stopped all the symptoms of having a stomach bug. It really helps with that if you’re overcoming anything gut-wise. We talk more in-depth about that in today’s interview.

I’ll just leave you with a coupon code because I want you to get this listeners’ discount. He gives us a great discount and then he throws in a gift as well, so I want to make sure that you get that. I made it really easy. Go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That takes you straight to the page where he put the special just for our listeners there. It’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. If you’re ever on his website and you’re checking out other stuff, you can use the coupon code [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe]—as in the year 2022—and give it a shot.

Free to join the Facebook group and chat with us about the aloe. Several listeners have shared how it’s helped them as well. If you have any questions, you can always jump into the Learn True Health Facebook group. Again, the links which will always be in the show notes down in the description of today’s episode at learntruehealth.com, you always go there. And then for the aloe, it’s learntruehealth.com/aloe, and the coupon code is [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe].

Thank you so much for being listeners, and thank you so much for sharing this podcast. I am on this journey with you. You know I’ve recovered. If you’ve been a longtime listener, you probably heard that I reversed diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections for which I was on antibiotics for monthly. I reversed polycystic ovarian syndrome. I no longer have that. I reversed lifelong infertility. I was told after a battery of tests that I’d never conceive and I have. I was told basically that I’d always have to be on medication and I was always going to be sick. I said no, I’m going to go and find better medicine because MD, allopathic, drug-based medicine has its place. It has its place, but it’s not the only medicine we should always turn to.

Just like you wouldn’t take your car to a plumber, why are you taking your body to the person who only has a small fraction of the full scope of medicine? That’s what had me set out on my journey to healing, and I reversed all those conditions by being mentored by Naturopathic physicians, and later becoming a holistic health coach and being mentored and taught by these physicians since 2011. This wonderful journey that I’m on to get optimal health, I am on it with you. If you’re sick and suffering, please know, you don’t have to suffer. There are things that you can do to heal your body.

Now, lately, I’ve been really struggling emotionally with what I’ve gone through in the last year—losing our daughter right after birth and also having COVID. It was pretty brutal because it was right after pregnancy and I was still grieving, so it’s like three punches at once, then unexpectedly moving, and now moving again. With everything going on and then we’ve been taking care of a sick family member, and with all of it, I’ve been really finding that physically I’m strong, but mostly emotionally I’ve been really up against it. Turning to the tools that I’ve learned from all our guests has really helped me and keeping an open mind. That I don’t have all the answers. I have so many answers, but I’m always open to learning more.

I’ve actually spoken with one of our past guests who’s a fantastic Ph.D. in psychology. He and I have spoken and he encouraged me to find counseling around post-traumatic stress. I am going to find some great interviews for that because emotional health is as important as physical health. If you only have one but not the other, you really don’t have both because emotional stress affects us physically, and then physical stress affects us emotionally. We have to have both. Listen to these episodes, listen to the podcast, take all these tools from all these different wonderful experts, continue to learn, and continue to have the mentality that no one has all the answers, but that we can continue to grow and apply all these wonderful tools that we learn.

Now, Dr. Michael Haley today shares some fantastic tools that you’ll be able to apply to your life starting today to improve your health. When we improve our physical health, we also start to improve our emotional health as well as our mental health, and it gives us confidence that we get to continue to grow and strengthen.

Continue sharing this podcast with those you care about and continue listening. Join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to see you there. Thank you for being on this journey with me. I really dream, hope, and wish for you to learn true health, to really feel it in your body, and find what true health is for you. Enjoy today’s interview.

 

[00:08:26] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 474. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. Michael Haley. When he first came on the show episode 401, we discussed the healing benefits of medicinal aloe and how you can drink medicinal aloe gel to have amazing healing properties for gut inflammation, for helping heal the gut, but also throughout the body that women were noticing better hair and skin.

There were people who noticed that they were in less pain, it brings down inflammation, it basically helps put out the fire. If you think about sunburn on your skin and you put aloe on it, it helps bring down that inflammation, helps the body heal faster. But if you drink it, it does that on the inside as well. We had a great discussion on bringing down that gut inflammation and helping heal the gut.

Since that interview, I had an experience with your aloe gel, Dr. Haley, where my whole family had the stomach flu. I don’t want to give any nasty details but it was like coming out of everywhere. We were all very sick. I took your aloe gel, we started drinking it, and at the time my son was about four and all the symptoms immediately stopped. Nausea, the vomiting, everything had stopped. My son loved it. I can drink it but to get a four-year-old to drink it because it tastes like aloe. It’s not like, oh, this is amazing. It tastes like aloe. I added a little bit of stevia just to sweeten it a little bit and added some lime juice over ice and it is so delicious when you do that. My son loved it. He had such a great experience and to immediately stop the symptoms in their tracks of having gastritis in all of us.

 

[00:10:35] Dr. Michael Haley: That’s a beautiful thing.

 

[00:10:36] Ashley James: Yeah, it was amazing. To me, it should be something that’s in everyone’s freezer, and this is described in episode 401, how you guys grow it, fillet it right there, take the gel out, and then immediately freeze it and ship it frozen. So it is pure, it’s fresh, it’s unfiltered. Anything you buy in the store, I love how you described it, the process of buying aloe gel drink in the store. Any store you’re going to buy it from it’s going to be highly filtered, and a lot of the medicinal properties are removed in the process, whereas yours aren’t.

But I think it’s something that should be in everyone’s freezer for those times when you have a tummy upset. It’s so important, and I can just think of a lot of other applications like someone’s going through chemotherapy or someone’s recovering from IBS, someone’s recovering from the stomach flu-like we were. It had an immediate effect. It was wonderful.

A few weeks later, my son overheard a conversation about his school friend who was having constipation. I was on the speakerphone with my friend and he yelled, get him to drink aloe, it’s so good for the tummy. It was really cute.

 

[00:11:54] Dr. Michael Haley: I love it.

 

[00:11:55] Ashley James: Yeah, he was giving that advice to his friend. I love your aloe, and listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That takes them to a special that you give us where you give your cream as well as the frozen medicinal drink. Use coupon code [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe] for 10% off in addition to the special where you give us the cream for free, so thank you so much for doing that for us.

Today, I’m really excited because we’re going to dive into more about gut health. I love your perspective and I love how you teach gut health. I think even though it’s not necessarily a new topic, I think it’s a new topic for a lot of people. Especially how you approach it and how you teach it, I think it’s going to give people a perspective that really helps them understand and they’re going to be able to take actions today to increase the health of the microbiome and the health of their own gut. Welcome to the show. Welcome back, I should say.

 

[00:13:04] Dr. Michael Haley: Ashley, thank you so much for having me on your program here. I love what you just said. You have a child that is six years old that’s already changing lives, helping people know what they should do. That is amazing.

 

[00:13:19] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s really cute. I mean, he hangs out with me so much that he hears me giving advice on health, and then he’s like, yeah, this aloe drink is so good. It’s so good for your tummy.

 

[00:13:33] Dr. Michael Haley: It’s funny too because people ask me, does it help with constipation? Does it help with diarrhea? Well, it doesn’t really treat either of those but people that are experiencing those tend to move towards the middle, more normal. It helps things to work more like they’re supposed to. But because you mention that, I do have to tell people, be careful. Meaning, we’re talking about the inside of the aloe leaf. There are products out there that contain the outside of the aloe leaf, and people specifically seek that out because they want the laxative effect on the outer leaf. 

You really have to know what products you’re getting and know the difference between whole leaf and inner leaf. Don’t think that, oh, well, it’s coming out all ends, I have diarrhea. I’m going to take the whole leaf and make it better. Oh, you’re not. It’s going to get worse.

 

[00:14:32] Ashley James: I had that experience. I was really into aloe drinking back when I was in my early 20s, so this is like 20 years ago. Kind of crazy to think that that was so long ago, but I had switched over from eating a really healthy diet to eating the standard American diet. I was in Canada so it was basically just a standard Canadian diet, which at the time was probably just as bad or slightly less bad. I was dating a guy and I was just going to eat what he was eating, and I thought he was eating a good diet because he was a black belt and he was very physically active. So I started eating pizza and Subway sandwiches and just rebelling from my healthy childhood. I got heartburn and I never had heartburn before. So I had no idea how to deal with it, and so I started taking whatever antacids there were.

One day, there was a Naturopathic physician on the TV. I’m pretty sure I was about 19 or 20 actually or just turning 20. She said that stomach acid is coming up into your esophagus not because you have too much acid, it’s because you have too little and your lower esophageal sphincter can’t close because it’s triggered by acid. The acid has to get strong enough for it to want to close. What we need to do is increase the acid. She talked about drinking aloe and she talked about drinking apple cider vinegar.

 I sought out some aloe and I had that experience where I drank a whole aloe plant. I found the whole aloe plant, ground up into a bottle, and that’s when I learned very quickly that you don’t just haphazardly buy whatever aloe is on the market and drink it because the outer shell and filament definitely has the properties of irritating the gut and making you have very bad diarrhea. However, when you get just the gel, which is what you sell, it has a calming effect and it’s wonderful. It’s so wonderful.

 

[00:16:37] Dr. Michael Haley: For those people hearing this and thinking, oh, well I have constipation, maybe I should try some whole leaf aloe vera. I’m going to caution against that too. Yes, it will loosen things up, but that’s not how you fix constipation. You want to look at your diet and say, do I have enough fiber? Am I drinking enough water? Is there enough fat, which might provide lubrication? Am I eating an alive diet, a probiotic-rich diet, or am I eating chemicals that are killing off my gut flora? Do I need to chew my food better, or am I digesting it properly? Do I need digestive enzymes? We stand back and say, what’s causing this? Let’s not take something to just loosen the bowels, and that’s the experience that you had, unfortunately.

 

[00:17:25] Ashley James: It was a good lesson to learn. The number one cause or at least the first thing to look for in constipation is dehydration. Then if you go for something like excessive magnesium or drinking a whole aloe, you’re irritating the gut and then you’re going to end up losing more water, so it’s going to be a vicious cycle of further dehydration. The first thing to do is to make sure you’re getting 100 ounces of water a day spread out throughout the day, and like you said, look at your fiber. Make sure you’re eating enough fiber from plants.

Apples are a really good source of fiber because it has soluble and insoluble, and I know that Dr. Natasha—who I’ve had on the show and who has been one of your teachers—loves apples for their very gentle prebiotic properties as well.

 

[00:18:20] Dr. Michael Haley: I agree. I would say that if you don’t tolerate raw apples, bake them. There are so many good things that we can include in our diet to reverse constipation or diarrhea, to normalize, to make things work like they’re supposed to.

Now, it’s funny because you had a wonderful experience with aloe vera a couple of years back as you described, and sometimes, I do cheat. Meaning, I have a patient that has problems like that and I just give them aloe. I say, here, and they say, wow, we’re doing so much better. 

Now that I have your attention, let’s fix things because quite frankly, if I take the aloe vera away, the problem might come right back. Or if you’re still doing the things that you did that got you there—in your case, it was some kind of stomach virus you have gotten, but for most people that are having these irritable bowel conditions and we put out the fire with aloe vera and they’re doing so much better on day three, well your chronic irritable bowel condition, if I take that aloe vera away from you, your problem is going to come right back because all we did is temporarily speed up the healing, but we haven’t slowed down the damage. We need to slow down the damage. Let’s see what’s causing the damage.

That’s actually the most important part of the equation is what is going in through your mouth causing this and it could be other things. It could be mental stress and everything else that contributes to this, but for the most part and the easiest fix is putting healthy foods and keeping out the poisons. There’s more to it than that, we’re going to talk about it. I love the fact that, oh, okay. As long as I eat a healthy diet, then we don’t change our eating habits, and we’re stuffing it down and swallowing it whole. No, there’s more to it.

 

[00:20:21] Ashley James: So you got to take that healthy food and then you got to chew it. There’s a difference between cooking food and raw food. My understanding is that if you, for example, cook an apple versus raw apple or cooked broccoli versus raw broccoli, it actually changes the fiber a bit so it feeds a different set of microbiomes.

 

[00:20:44] Dr. Michael Haley: I would agree with that. I wouldn’t know specifics on it, but yes, it’s going to soften things and almost be like a pre-digested easier, which means probably some microbes would be able to process it easier and others probably want what they feed best on. It does make sense because we have such a variety in our microbiome, such a diverse microbiome with all kinds of different organisms in this wonderful community working together to do what they’re supposed to.

 

[00:21:16] Ashley James: You have a great way of explaining or painting the picture of gut health and how we can look at the gut in a new light. Can we touch on that?

 

[00:21:28] Dr. Michael Haley: Before talking about the gut and what’s inside it—the soil of our intestines—let’s consider what’s out in the soil outdoors. Some of the problems that damage the food that we’re consuming, and then we’re going to tie it in with the gut and it’s going to all make perfect sense. For those of us that are growing our own food, we know that if we have dead soil, the only way to really get things to grow in it is to add fertilizers. Well, what killed the soil, to begin with?

Maybe it’s pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides—things that are used to try to control what’s growing around our vegetation but it kills, those things are forms of antibiotics. They’re against life. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides are designed to kill and they’re not very specific. The same things that kill weeds can kill microbiology. In that soil, it’s life that makes that soil nutritious for the things that grow in it.

If you think about it, there are bacteria and fungus in the soil. Those things are probably being eaten by things a little bit bigger than them such as protozoa and other larger microorganisms that are probably being consumed by worms. I used to have chickens, they would eat worms. Birds would eat worms. Frogs will eat smaller things than themselves and bigger things will eat them like alligators might eat the birds and the frogs. 

All of these things up the whole chain are consuming and pooping. Literally, it’s the poop that is the soil. That’s the life. It’s nourishing. It’s pre-digested. It’s taking dead matter, recycling it by giving it life for a period of time, and it gets pooped out and it becomes this nutritious soil. The life that lives in it releases the nutrients so that when the roots of trees, bushes, or whatever you have growing in it, as they’re tapped into this poop into this soil, they absorb the nutrients that that life has released.

Now, if that life was not in the soil, if we had killed it off, the farmers have to use fertilizers for the vegetation to grow big and juicy or whatever they’re trying to create. It’s the same way in our intestines. A tree has these big roots that you see going into the soil. If you were to dig them up, you would see they branch off into secondary roots. They branch off into these tertiary routes with little fine hairs tapping into that rich soil.

Well, let’s start off with the poop. Let’s say they’re filled with poop. We have this tube that has these big folds in it, which are like the primary roots. Coming off of those big villi are these microvilli, which are pointed in the other direction increasing the surface area of our intestines so they can absorb more. That’s like your secondary roots with little filaments perpendicular to them, which are like the tertiary roots. These are the roots of our intestines sinking into the soil of our intestines so they can absorb the nutrients, so that our body can live. Our body is much like a tree or like something growing out in the fields tapping into soil to absorb the nutrients.

Now, who makes the soil nutrient-rich outside? We talked about the microbes. It starts with the bacteria, the fungus, the protozoa, and up the chain to the larger animals that are pooping out all of the smaller things down the chain from them. It’s the same way in our intestines. We have bacteria that have a very purposeful function and even fungus which got a function in our intestines. People think, oh, I have a fungus infection. I got to kill it off. It’s probably there for a reason.

I believe it was Dr. Natasha McBride. I think I read it in one of her books. She was saying that the fungus is there to, I believe, clean up heavy metal toxicity. Oh, no, they may have heavy metal toxicity and they’re multiplying so they can consume it. When they’re done with their job, their numbers will decrease. Well, that’s an interesting concept because we always think, I have an overgrowth of this particular bacteria. I have C. diff, I got to kill it off. Let me take some antibiotics or something like that.

Well, we probably all have fungus, C. diff, and all of these different bacteria that we’re trying to kill off with antibiotics, with medicines, but we’re in different balances. Some of us have a healthy balance and some of us have an out of balance. What’s causing that out of balance? Instead of letting me try to balance it with chemistry that’s going to do more than just damage to that particular fungus or bacteria, let me figure out what’s going wrong here. Am I consuming unhealthy food full of metals? Am I consuming toxic substances that might be throwing things out of balance?

That’s how we have to start thinking about our food. We have to think about that soil inside our intestines. When we eat, we’re making soil. We’re chewing it up so that the smaller things can eat it. Imagine if you just swallow your food whole, what are the bacteria going to do with that? It only has about a day to work with it. Maybe 12 hours, actually, if people’s digestion is really moving quickly and functioning well as it’s passing through. We’ve got to think about not feeding us. We have to feed them because they’re the ones that are digesting the food for us.

It’s a whole different perspective. Imagine sitting down to dinner tonight, you already made sure that you put healthy food on the plate, and you put that first bite in your mouth. If you’re thinking about your babies inside you, if you’re thinking about those microbes as being essential for your health and that you’re feeding them, are you going to just swallow or are you going to chew it and prepare it for them? Because really, you should love them because your life is dependent on them.

We’re probably 80% gut flora, 20% human cells. Actually, we’re probably less than that human cells. If we’re 80% gut flora and we also have flora in our ears, our mouths, and in our organs everywhere, they’re probably taking up some more percentage of the leftover remaining 20. We’re a shell for this microflora to live in, and quite frankly, they’re making a lot of the decisions for us.

 

[00:29:43] Ashley James: Yes, I was just about to say, I’ve read the research where they’ve seen that your microbiome will produce chemicals that are like neuro receptors received by the neurons and can sway you, sway your decision making to feed them. If you have an overgrowth of candida, for example, they actually hijack the brain and make you crave those foods that feed the candida more, that feed the imbalance more. 

On top of having been stimulated by highly addictive processed foods that are designed to trigger your dopamine, your serotonin, designed to override your critical faculty and hijack your brain, then you’ve got the microbiome. If it’s really out of balance, it’s going to tell you to continue to eat those bad foods because it feeds them. If you’ve fostered a really healthy, strong, robust, good, and balanced microbiome, it will also send out chemicals asking for the kale, asking for the baked apple, and asking for the foods that feed it.

 

[00:31:08] Dr. Michael Haley: This is so critical and we’re just beginning to understand it. Right now, I’m reading an interesting book by Dr. Jon Lieff. He’s an expert in cellular communications science. The book is called, The Secret Language of Cells. In it, he’s talking about how the immune cells communicate with each other and how they travel throughout the body. Somehow, I believe that our gut flora is communicating with our immune system. We know that the majority of our immune system is in our guts, and it’s directing all of these things, helping our bodies make decisions too on what balance of gut flora we should have and when we should let a certain one proliferate and kill off another one. It kind of keeps everything in check for us if we are giving it what it needs.

We can absolutely give it the wrong things, the chemicals that wipe it out. They can’t do a whole lot when we’re filling them up with antibiotics, and when I say antibiotics, I’m talking about anything that’s against light. Whether it’s chlorine in the water, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides in the food, or preservatives in the food. The preservatives which are there to kill things so that life cannot grow in the food. They’re chemicals, they’re antibiotics in the food put there intentionally to make the food uninhabitable. Well, how is our microbiome going to consume that food and stay healthy?

Any artificial colors, artificial flavors, hydrogenated oils are very antibiotic in the sense. They hydrogenate these things to make the food last longer, a form of preservation. We need to be eating real clean foods that are there to nourish our gut flora, not punish it.

 

[00:33:06] Ashley James: I agree. Can we dive into what foods you’ve seen have the greatest healing properties? Let’s say we have listeners who know they have gut issues right now. I have a friend I’m thinking about who I’m going to ask to listen to this one and she has had chronic constipation her entire life. Her parents had her on antibiotics. Her parents were giving her some kind of Imodium or something as a child. Her parents just didn’t know. They didn’t know how to help their child have a healthy bowel movement. She would go days and days and days without going to the bathroom, and it’s always been so painful for her.

Well, here she is now an adult and she still is having this problem even though she’s changed her diet. She’s eating really healthy. She’s really focusing on hydration and all the things for her gut health, taking probiotics, eating fermented foods, and it’s still chronic constipation. I’ve been throwing all this information at her and she’s just got this big question like, why do I still have it?

Of course, I think emotional work is important to do as well. Something I’ve talked to her about like Emotion Code is really great for something like that when you’ve tried everything and there’s still something stuck in the body. But for those listeners who know they have gut issues, maybe they have chronic something else like heartburn, if it’s gas, bloating, they feel like maybe they have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth. They are listeners who have had it for a really long time and they need to get something moving. They need some guidance to—like you said, you get your patients on aloe, and then they have a leg up. They’ve gotten some improvement and then you’re like, okay, now we need to make the changes. 

I recommend everyone drink aloe because at least, then they get some movement in the right direction and then they start feeling good. It’s like, okay, now let’s make more changes. What changes should people make who’ve had chronic gut issues and really are motivated to heal but need some direction?

 

[00:35:31] Dr. Michael Haley: The first thing we have to recognize is that absolutely, everybody is different. As an example, I have an Italian heritage. A lot of people can’t eat gluten. I could. I could snort gluten and be fine. I don’t and I minimize it in my diet because I do know that it’s inflammatory, and if I consume too much of it, I might mess things up. I know that the bread has more gluten in it than it used to. Being a former bread maker, I understand that. We want a lot of gluten. It really makes this stretchy dough. It’s so delicious, but that will ruin people.

As I’m talking about certain things, it’s not a formula for everybody. You have to work within what works well for you. You can take ideas from me and you can try them, but maybe keep a Food Mood Poop Journal. What’s that? Well, a food journal where I eat it and I’m going to document things like my mood, my bowel function, and how I feel. Do things hurt, am I thinking clearly, am I edgy, or do I feel great? Because how you eat affects these things.

As you keep that little journal, you figure out which foods work for you. But if we were addressing constipation specifically, I would say, okay, here are some of the things that we need to think about. When I mention certain foods, it doesn’t mean you need to include these. I make a 2 ½ gallon batch of yogurt every week for me and my family. Dairy might not be right for you. Maybe you want to try it out of nut milk and the whole concept of any yogurt might not work for you. We have to journal to figure these things out.

Number one, chew your food because remember, you’re not feeding you, you’re feeding them. You’re feeding that gut flora and you need to break that food up and pre-digest it for them so that they can have something to work with. As you’re chewing, you’re working in the saliva, and you have these digestive enzyme-type things working into the food that’ll help break it down even further. How many times should you chew it? Jordan Rubin used to say to chew your food 50 times before you swallow. Now, I tried that, and by the time I get to 50, there is nothing left to swallow. But think about how well things would be prepared for them.

Drink a lot of water, especially if you’re eating a lot of fiber. If you’re tolerating fiber well, that is something that needs to be included when you have constipation. You have to make sure you have enough fiber, you have to make sure you have enough water. If you’re consuming fiber without water, you’re actually going to almost make a cement plug in your bowels so it’s going to go the other direction. As you’re eating fiber-rich foods, you’re drinking a lot of water, and they soak up. The fiber soaks up that water and it not only helps cleanse your bowels and it helps provide bulk that moves through well, it stimulates peristalsis, so you start stimulating that very thing that you’re looking for to get things moving through.

When we talk about live food, it’s funny. People say, oh, well, if you cook it, it’s dead and all the enzymes are dead. First of all, I never knew that enzymes have ever actually had real life, but they could be denatured. There’s a good balance between cooked food and raw food, but when I think of live food, I’m thinking about food that is good food for the life that I’m feeding, which is that bacteria inside me. So it is going to be chemical-free. It’s going to be real food. It’s going to be chewed well, and it might even be probiotic, it might even be cultured because remember, the bacteria eat things that are produced by other bacteria.

As soon as you eat that probiotic food, it might die in your stomach acids. But that cultured pre-digested food that happens when I’m making yogurt, it’s pre-digesting the milk, the dairy, turning it into more nutrients that my gut flora can feed off of. It’s pre-digesting it. When I’m making sauerkraut, if I just eat raw cabbage and swallow it whole versus culture it and turn it into sauerkraut which releases all of these nutrients and enzymes, and then I chew it up really good and swallow that, I’m feeding them well.

We’ve got chew your food, fiber, water, probiotics, which is either cultured food or if you’re going to buy a good probiotic, and take them to help nourish that gut flora.

Digestive enzymes. Yes, when we chew, we’re working in our own digestive enzymes. Some people do need a little help or their food doesn’t have enough enzymes in it. There are digestive enzymes in a lot of foods. Aloe vera has a lot of naturally occurring digestive enzymes. 

But for someone that’s having a challenge, they might want to try consuming digestive enzymes in their diet. Things like amylase is a digestive enzyme that helps break down carbohydrates. Lipase will help break down fats and protease. Well, there’s more than just those three. You can get a complex enzyme formula. Usually, it comes in a capsule and they really help get things moving. When people have that, it feels like their food is just sitting there. They ate and it’s just not moving and they can’t sleep at night. A lot of times within 15, 20 minutes of taking a digestive enzyme, that relief that you were looking for is there as it starts breaking down the food.

I’ll never forget the demonstration I had by someone where they made a bowl of oatmeal. In this case, they opened up one of those capsules of green powder, fruit and vegetable powder, that had digestive enzymes in it. That cooked bowl of oatmeal liquefied in the bowl within about 10 minutes from sprinkling the digestive enzymes on it.

 

[00:42:14] Ashley James: Cool.

 

[00:42:14] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah, it goes right to work. There are a lot of brands out there, they pretty much work. It’s impressive. They work, they help. Something to try if you’re having that problem. And then, a lot of people don’t eat enough fat. Why do we have this fear of fat? Fat is not only very satisfying and will help us control our appetite to where we’re not eating and craving some of those bad things, but it’s also a form of lubrication in our bowels that can help things move through easier.

When it comes to constipation specifically, I don’t know if I forgot any of this off the top. I hope I didn’t forget anything. Those are the major ones—the chew the food, the fiber, the water, the fat, and the probiotics.

 

[00:43:13] Ashley James: I just got into this habit about a year ago or maybe closer to two years ago. I eat an avocado for breakfast with sprouts—I sprout myself—and sauerkraut. All organic. I mean, a whole avocado, it’s a lot of fat. It’s also a good amount of fiber. It’s very satiating, and oftentimes, I’m not hungry again until 2:00 PM, and I go what? I’ve calculated it. I don’t think calories are anywhere near the most important thing to look at. I think calories was sold to us by the dieting industry, and it does a great disservice just to focus on calories alone because really, the macronutrients, it’s more important to understand your ratios and understand 500 calories of food really means nothing because it could be chocolate cake, it could be broccoli, it could be an apple, right?

Measuring the calories doesn’t inform you of the nutrition and the healing properties of your food. But just as a point of measurement, it was about 700 calories, my breakfast, when I calculated it, and I wouldn’t eat again until 2:00 or 3:00 PM. I just thought, that’s really interesting that that level of fat, because that’s the most fat I get from my diet is from my avocado or from beans as well, which some beans have a considerable amount of fat and fiber. I found that when I eat foods that have fiber and fat like beans and avocado or a handful of nuts, I’m satiated the most,

Now, I wouldn’t go overboard, eat nuts, beans, or eat avocado all day long, but just make sure it’s in my diet. When I’ve tweaked my diet to not have any foods with fat, I have noticed that I’m definitely more hungry. I definitely have to eat more often throughout the day. I’m just not feeling satiated. That’s right, the fiber and the fat together bring that satiety, and it also really helps, like you said, lubrication within the bowels.

 

[00:45:46] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. It sounds like we eat alike a lot too. I love my avocados, love my homegrown sprouts. I’ll probably sprinkle a little Herbamare on there and douse it with some olive oil because I like that extra fat, but it’s tremendously, tremendously satisfying. We’ve always got the sprouts growing in our little jar in the sink, you mix them up, and they all have all kinds of different flavors. Some of the bean sprouts have a nice even oniony type flavor.

 

[00:46:18] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. I have a sprouting mix that I do sometimes that is spicy. I don’t know what it is because there are like five different things, but it is spicy. Maybe it’s the clove and my son’s like, whooo, this is spicy. It has such a delicious flavor. My microbiome craves it because it tells me.

I didn’t used to like kale, for example, and then I started to eat, I started to eat it, and then all of a sudden I started to have the Pavlovian response where I’d be like salivating when I’d think about eating kale. That was definitely my microbiome sending those signals to my brain. We want more of that food, give us more of that, feed us more of that. I can really tell that my body craves the sprouts, which are so chock-full of vitamins. It’s something like 700 times the amount of vitamin C once you take a seed and then sprout it. 

I have a little bit of a different way of sprouting. I soak half a cup of the seeds overnight between 12 and 24 hours, usually closer to 12, and then I put it in a colander in a bowl, and then I put it in a warm dark place which is like my oven is a good example, as long as the oven’s not on. And then I water it twice a day and strain it. It grows in the colander in the bowl, and within five days I’ve got this huge, huge amount of sprouts. I do that two to three times a week. 

I tried the jar method. I don’t know if it’s because of the Pacific Northwest where I live, it just got soggy and died. I think it’s just too moist here to sprout things really well in the jar, but in an open colander, it seemed to do really well. I just think that’s because of the humidity here. It’s really easy to sprout. I was afraid at first when I didn’t know, and then I had some guests on the show and I started learning about it. It’s like, okay, I’m going to give this a try, and then it was ridiculously easy. It’s very hard to screw up. I screwed up a few times, but really, even if you forget to water it, it still grows. It’s going to be okay, it’s going to sprout, and it’s so delicious.

Of course, I’ve had Tim James on the show and he says that about 70% of all his daily food is what he grows in his house. That is so phenomenal, this idea that we could grow really vitamin dense, vitamin-rich foods just on our window sill or in a dark place. It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re sprouting or if you’re doing microgreens, you can grow food that’s fresh. I’m so jealous of you, you could walk outside and pick an avocado. I’d love to get a fresh avocado right from a tree, but I can’t. I can’t grow fresh food in the wintertime here in the Pacific Northwest. I grow my own sprouts and then I’m getting fresh food.

 

[00:49:20] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing. We love taking our sprouts. We’ll sprout some chickpeas and make some hummus. Maybe mix those into the sprouts and maybe wrap them in collard greens and have one of those all vegetable type burritos where the hummus really holds everything together. Now it’s funny though because one of the things you asked me is, what should somebody eat to get well? As we’re talking so much about fruits, vegetables, and sprouts, we haven’t really talked about animal foods.

When I have people that have gut problems and they’re not eating animal foods, they are the most difficult to get well. Dr. Natasha McBride talks about the fact that our stomachs can really only digest meat, dairy, fish, and eggs. I believe she’s talking about the acidity there because that’s really where we do the digesting. And then, once it goes into our small intestines and starts moving down the path into the large intestine, that’s where the microbiome takes over and does the digesting. They can work on the fruits, vegetables, sprouts, and all those things that we’re eating, but our stomachs really were made to digest animal foods.

Now, why do we need so many more fruits and vegetables now more than ever before? I remember talking to Gabriel Cousens probably seven or eight years ago, and he was talking about adapting with the Earth. We have more toxins now on the earth than ever before. At the time, he had mentioned the fact that Fukushima was still spewing radiation everywhere, and I bet you it still is. He talked about it being measurable even in the grasslands in the central US. Wow, all the way from the other side of the world there and it’s in our grasslands.

Pollution and toxicity are everywhere. One of the functions of phytonutrients is to help cleanse and detoxify the body. Well, shouldn’t I be getting those same nutrients from the animal foods? Yes, we should. But the foods that they’re eating don’t have as many in it as they used to because things are growing differently now. With the toxic planet, we have less nutritious fruits and vegetables, it’s just the way it is. 

An evidence of that, by the way, organic fruits and vegetables are demonstrated to have 40 to 60% more nutrients than inorganic, but we know that even organic is not grown like it was in the Garden of Eden or we’ll say a couple of thousand years ago, before the Industrial Revolution. Things have changed on this planet.

Gabriel Cousens was talking about adapting and consuming more of these things, really as a way of surviving. Not that our bodies were only made for vegetation, I think that would be a poor argument because they’re not, but consuming more of that probably makes sense. Take nutrients like lutein, zeaxanthin, and phytonutrients that we would get from even algae. Well, when the fish eat those, they become part of them, and then we might instead of calling them phytonutrients or plant nutrients, we might call them zoonutrients, but it’s the same nutrient.

We can get these important phytonutrients from eating animal foods, it’s just hard to, especially when all of the animals are fed grains instead of grasses. If they are fed grasses, they’re probably not as nutritious as they used to be. 

When we start thinking about our diet, I agree with what Gabriel Cousens said that we do have to adapt and think, where can I get the most nutrients, and how can I prepare these nutrients for my microbiome as I’m feeding them? How do I save them, make sure they don’t get the chemicals, they’re getting good nutritious food? How do I get the important nutrients from animal foods if I’m not consuming them? How do I get my fat-soluble vitamins? My A, D, and K. Where do I get my B12 from if I’m not consuming animal foods? Probably better off consuming a balance of both.

Animal foods that do have nutrients like collagen and stuff like that that helps heal not only your joints, but your gut, and phytonutrients from not only your animal foods but also from fruits, vegetables, things that grow on the Earth, the sprouts. Lately, I’ve been loving eating algae even, which is that first food.

 

[00:54:54] Ashley James: Yes. I have about seven episodes on algae and using chlorella and spirulina in healing. It’s so wonderful because the protein is in the most absorbable form in chlorella and spirulina. Within minutes of eating it, you’re absorbing it. You’re getting vitamin K, you’re getting some great vitamins, some trace minerals, but the green nutrients that you’re getting, it’s so condensed. I’m a big fan of algae, especially for heavy metals using chlorella.

Dr. Klinghardt, on the show, who helps the children who present with symptoms as if they were on the spectrum. After going through a heavy metal detox that he guides them through no longer present with symptoms. He gets children coming in who are banging their heads against the wall, rocking themselves, hitting their head because they’re in so much pain that their brain is on fire from the heavy metals. They’re unable to talk. They’re not doing eye contact and they’re nonverbal. It can take years, but after his program, these children are looking you in the eye, speaking with you, calm, happy in their own body, content.

Because he’s been doing this for over 40 years, he says he has children who came to him like that who are now composers, Ph.D.s. He’s so proud of all of his patients, but he uses chlorella with the children that he works with, in addition to many other things. It’s a gentle chelator of heavy metals. 

There’s a caveat. You can’t just eat any chlorella because most of them on the market are cracked with lead balls or cracked with marbles that contain lead. You want the kind that is cracked with a different method. That’s why I like ENERGYbits. There are two companies that I really like and ENERGYbits taste better, I don’t know why. The other company that Dr. Klinghardt uses tastes really fishy to me. I don’t know if it’s just sitting there more, stale, or fishy, but it had like a fish smell to it. And it shouldn’t, but the ENERGYbits doesn’t have that. I really like ENERGYbits. 

I’ve had Catharine Arnston, the founder of ENERGYbits, on the show about seven times. She does give a coupon code, which is LTH, and a lot of listeners have reported that they also love the ENERGYbits, the chlorella and the spirulina.

Now, in terms of animal food, I’ve had so many doctors on the show share about how the plant-based diet is incredibly healing, especially for diabetes and heart disease. That they see amazing results helping people to even reverse blockages in the heart. What I also like to say on the show is we don’t have diet dogma here. We’re not going to just go okay plant-based diet 100% and we’re nothing else because the moment we shut our brains off—even though it has great results and I just see the tremendous benefits these doctors have and I myself have had fantastic results with healing things in my body using the whole food plant-based diet.

However, we can’t buy into diet dogma because then we’re shutting ourselves off from other things that could help us heal. So if we look at food as a tool, when do we pick up the tool of whole food plant-based? When would we pick up the tool of bone broth? Dr. Natasha McBride, who I’ve had on the show, shares how she helps heal the gut in children who are so distressed that their bodies are so broken.

So much so that they also present with autism symptoms, and when she gets them eating the GAPS diet, they heal their gut because of the gut-brain connection. As a result, their brain also heals, the inflammation comes down there, and then they present with much fewer symptoms of a being on the spectrum, or in some cases, they get off the spectrum altogether just from diet. One of the primary things that she uses is bone broth. These are tools and I just want to say that I really value the whole food plant-based diet, and we have to keep an open mind because if there’s a tool that could heal you but if we’re buying into diet dogma, then we’re unable to see that tool. I just want to say that I love the whole food plant-based diet, and if I was dying and bone broth would save me, I would drink it. We can’t just shut off all of the tools. 

However, we should eat an informed diet. We should really listen to our body, eat an informed diet because the standard American diet is just go out and eat lots of meat, eat lots of fried food, get lots of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, get a ton of fried potatoes in you. 

Sixty-seven percent of the consumed calories that adolescents have—there’s a study out of Canada—is from the four food groups that are causing obesity. This is documented that it’s fried potato, gluten flour, high fructose corn syrup, and high fat milk products. Those four categories are the biggest reason why we have obesity and processed food addiction. Children and adolescents are eating 67% of their diet from those four food groups alone.

When we eat uninformed, we just eat whatever we want, and we let the addictive substances control us, the processed food. We’re not eating in a healthy way whatsoever. But when we use food as a tool, so you’re preparing bone broth for the collagen or you’re eating homemade applesauce or homemade plant-based yogurt or dairy yogurt, if that’s what you choose. If you’re being intentional with these tools, then you are working towards healing the gut

I just want to say, no diet dogma, but we’re going to take in the information and look at food as a tool.

 

[01:02:00] Dr. Michael Haley: I like what you said there and I want people to also look at it from a perspective of sometimes it sounds dogmatic and it’s not, meaning it comes from a certain perspective. I was lucky enough to be taught by Dr. Natasha McBride. I remember when she came to I think it was in Chicago and I spent a few days in class with her, she’s very big on bone broth, whether it be beef stock or chicken stock, but she is focused on healing guts for the sake of well GAPS gut and psychology syndrome and also physiology syndrome. Those are the two P’s—psychology and physiology.

But I did ask her and I remember her answer even though it was seven or eight years ago. I said well, what about if it was someone with cancer? She said, well, these are growth foods, not necessarily the best thing for someone with cancer. They need cleansing, detoxing food, which is going to be your plant-based diet. She even recognized. She might seem dogmatic about including animal foods, but she’s focused on healing the gut. In other words, it’s the right tool for the right job. In the case of cancer, your emphasis is going to be plant-based. She specifically used the word, animal foods are growth foods. I look at a growth food, my favorite example, if I was in the NFL playing line, I’d probably want maximum growth foods. It doesn’t mean it’s the most anti-cancer diet.

A lot of times we hear people that sound so dogmatic, but if we realize where their emphasis is coming from and what their expertise is—weight loss, that’s a whole different emphasis.

 

[01:04:15] Ashley James: Right. Using food as a tool. If I had heart disease, I would be going to Dr. Esselstyn and following the plant-based diet because he’s got great results. If I had massive gut issues, I would go to Dr. McBride because she has a fantastic track record with the GAPS diet. If I hadn’t been able to heal it with anything else, I’d definitely go to her.

I have a friend who almost died and the GAPS diet saved her life. She loves Dr. McBride so much, just loves her so much. She says, this woman is a miracle worker. I was on death’s door and her diet saved me. This is a dear friend of mine, so I had to look at that and go, okay. It seems like a paradox, right? How could something that reverses heart disease so clearly and reverses type 2 diabetes, this diet—the whole food plant-based diet—be so different from Dr. McBride’s diet, and yet both of them heal and save lives.

Food is a tool, and we have to know what tools we’re putting in our body to feed the six pounds of microbiome in our gut. Six pounds, it’s crazy to think. We really do have like a little koala bear. I like to think of a little chihuahua or something. We are feeding an animal inside our gut. However many trillion cells this is, they poop out nutrients that we absorb, and so we need to feed it. We need to know what to feed it and when defeated to support it.

It’s a really big thing to wrap our brains around. When you say take into account and take note of, journal, can you give us some guidance on how we can listen to our bodies? I feel like sometimes people are a bit overwhelmed. It’s like, well, where do we even start? So where do we start?

 

[01:06:26] Dr. Michael Haley: It’s funny, I stole the name of the journal from David and Karla [inaudible 01:06:30] just the other day, but the concept I took from Dr. Natasha McBride being the food journal, and imagine just a piece of paper with three columns on it. It’s really easy. The first column is the time and day stamp. Right now, it’s whatever day at such and such a time. The second column is what you ate, and sometimes in some of these entries, column two is going to be blank because the third column is how you feel. Sometimes, you’re making a day and timestamp and you’re going to enter what you ate, other times it’s going to be how you feel. Sometimes it’s going to be both. I’m eating this and I feel great, or I’m eating this and I don’t feel good.

The most important part of this is patterns and let me use a real good example. My father the other day, I went to see him in the hospital. It seemed like he was having a stroke of some kind. My first question was, well, what medicines are you taking? Is it possible you took the same medicines twice? Had he been documenting we would have known. After all kinds of exams for two or three days of this, we realize that actually, one of his medications got changed and in his case, it was too much high blood pressure medicine, which means his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, so he had confusion and dizziness.

What we’re consuming and how do we feel? Well, we noticed a pattern by day two or three, and that was that when he took his medications, a couple of hours after, he would get groggy, confused, and dizzy, and then several hours later, he would start coming back to normal. That was a pattern that we established in a couple of days, and we actually realized one of his doctors made a little mistake and instead of cutting his blood pressure medicine in half, he doubled it. That was the mistake causing the problems, lowering his blood pressure too much.

We were able to track that by making a note of what time he took what and what happened to him symptomatically. That feel section is not only because we called it a Food Mood Poop Journal. It’s what you eat and at what time and it’s the mood, how are you feeling? I’m very clear-minded, I’m focused, or I’m confused. I’m supposed to do something, what was it? Oh, I just feel so scattered today. What have you been eating? The last time you felt scattered, what did you eat? We start developing these patterns.

The last time you were feeling really energetic, clear-minded, you’re sleeping well, and your bowel function is good, what foods were you eating? You start developing a list. This is my naughty list. I don’t want to eat these because they make me feel this way, I get constipation, I get diarrhea, or I get heartburn. These are foods that I feel great. My digestion is good. I’m clear-minded. I’m energetic. I love life. I’m happy. The foods that make you happy and your bowels function great are probably going to be different than the ones that do it for me.

 

[01:10:18] Ashley James: Another thing to note is that you got to really look at it for 24 to 48 hours. Food sensitivities can affect you and histamine. It might not hit you right away, it may not hit you within three hours because it depends on what immunoglobulin response you’re having. It can also be a build-up over time, right? Maybe you have an IgG response. Let’s say you’re allergic to oats, you had some for breakfast, you had some dinner, and then you had some for breakfast again, and then then the histamine gets to that tipping point where then you’re having the histamine symptoms, which can present differently for different people, but it could be asthma, runny nose, burning eyes, gut issues, skin issues. 

The behavior we have to really look at. So you said mood but also behavior. Are you yell or are you quick to frustration? Are you noticing your behavior? Sometimes it feels like I’m normal, but everyone else is pissing me off. It’s like, well, okay, then you’re really irritable. Your fuse, you have a short fuse. And then also looking at the next day. How did you wake up in the morning? Were you groggy and how is your energy and do you have to reach for the coffee or can you survive without coffee? 

I think it’s really important to remove the things that are suppressing your mood, right? So if things are suppressing you. Alcohol, caffeine, sugar—these are blocking your ability to listen to your body and really hear where it’s at. If you’re drinking coffee and drinking alcohol at night to “calm yourself” and then you’re eating sugar, you’re not really getting an accurate food mood journal because you’re masking the symptoms your body is telling you. I think it’s also important to look at that and consider doing a complete sugar fast, a complete sugar detox, and getting off of caffeine. 

It takes four to eight days to detox from sugar, so you got to get to day nine before you judge it, but you’re going to go through the withdrawals, right? A little bit of headache, achy, cranky, then day nine, it’s going to be like you’re coming out of the woods and you feel like a million bucks compared to how you did. When your body gives you symptoms, when you eat something and your body loves it versus eat something your body doesn’t love it, the signals are going to be so much clearer.

When I do blood sugar coaching with people, we monitor blood sugar along with the food mood journal because seeing that like, okay, what you ate for breakfast not only affects your day, but it can actually affect tomorrow. If you drank wine last night, it’s affecting you for the next 24 hours, and they can see it. It’s subjective versus objective, right? They see, okay, this external device is telling them, okay, this isn’t working for me. That meal wasn’t working for me, and then they can dial in the meals that are working for them.

Dr. William Davis who wrote the book, Wheat Belly, came on the show and he said that he thinks that every 100% of the population should have a glucometer and check in once in a while and check to see two hours after a meal, was that meal good for me? Because we’re not looking for diabetes, but we’re looking for how did your body react to that meal. Is it driven too high blood sugar, too low, or was it able to stabilize and come back to normal within two hours? Just check in with yourself because that would be a real reality check.

I like the food mood journal, and then I also like those sometimes external reality checks. Even putting on a little pulse ox on your finger and checking your pulse. A Naturopath told me, one of the ways to test for food sensitivities is to monitor your pulse after a meal. You got to be calm, take a few deep breaths, but if your pulse is really high, that’s a stimulant. Even though you have no stressors and you’re just chilling out and your pulse is really high afterward, then there’s something that your body is stressed out about from the meal you ate.

There are these little external ways like blood pressure and taking vitals to see how our body is responding to the foods. I love the idea of tracking it though because I don’t even remember what I ate yesterday. I’m trying to think, I don’t remember what I ate yesterday. I definitely don’t remember what I ate the day before.

 

[01:15:43] Dr. Michael Haley: it was sprouts and avocado.

 

[01:15:44] Ashley James: I definitely ate sprouts and avocado. I just ate my last avocado, so I’m not going to have it tomorrow unless I go get some groceries. I don’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday. I might not have had lunch that’s probably why I don’t remember, but I don’t remember eight two days ago. But if I was thinking to myself, well, where did this rash come from or why do I feel so crummy? Well, if I didn’t write it down, then how can I track it? Every time I’m crummy, I’m going to go look back and be like, oh, every time I feel crummy it’s after I eat strawberries. Okay, I’m going to have to cut strawberries out to figure out what’s going on.

 

[01:16:19] Dr. Michael Haley: When you talk about the alcohol, the sugar cravings, and stuff, remember, we’re highly influenced by our gut flora. Something so simple like cultured foods or probiotics can even decrease those cravings for alcohol or sugar. Anyone that is struggling with those things, try it. It’s almost a calorie-free way of testing to see if you can decrease cravings. Wouldn’t that be awesome if you weren’t craving things that are harming you? That would be phenomenal.

I got to be a little transparent. I’m a little embarrassed to tell you this, but I’m going to because I think it’s going to benefit somebody that’s listening, probably a lot of people. The reason I’m embarrassed, and I have to preface and say, this is going back a good 25 years. I wasn’t the healthiest. I was like the one that you mentioned early in the show. I thought that it didn’t matter what I ate. I would just exercise into this beautiful physique of muscle and strength. You can’t do that. You only get away with that for so long. It’s not good for you.

I was drinking Diet Coke. I did not know why I had tinnitus. Eventually, I realized I needed to quit drinking Diet Coke, and it was a long time before tinnitus went away. I certainly did not know they were connected. I probably slipped up a few times, and I wondered, why is my tinnitus back? I remember one time when I drank Diet Coke and the next day I’m thinking, I have tinnitus again. I haven’t had this in so long. What is going on? It stuck with me for a few days and I started thinking about that. I wonder if it’s the Diet Coke?

Well, I realize it’s not only the Diet Coke that does it. It’s also Halloween candy. I don’t know which Halloween candy because it comes in and that’s the one day you cheat for the whole year, right? If you’re going to cheat, you’re all in. You got a big variety, might as well do it all. I haven’t figured out which of that mix that the kids would bring home, but now I haven’t had tinnitus in years because I recognize that these things make my ears ring. It doesn’t matter what the symptom is—pain, confusion, weakness, it could even be something like sciatica. There’s a good chance that your body chemistry, largely under the influence of your diet, is causing it.

 

[01:19:03] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s a big one. It is addictive. Even though there’s no sugar in diet soda, it still triggers the insulin response, which is so frustrating for those people who think they’re doing something healthy because it says diet. Also, if you leave diet soda—I think it’s aspartame that when you heat it up, it creates formaldehyde. If the diet soda in transit was in a hot place or you left it in the car and it was hot, you’re drinking formaldehyde. I don’t imagine that’s good for you either.

I also watched a documentary about aspartame a long time ago. 2008 or 2009, I watched this documentary about the hidden things about aspartame and how just awful it is. It’s a really interesting history though to look at aspartame, but certain military personnel was not allowed to drink it within a certain amount of time like one or two hours of flying certain military airplanes because it is a neurotoxin that limits reflexes. If you’re going Mach 4 you might screw up because you drank the diet soda. I mean, that’s really scary.

My husband who was a carpenter for 20 years (commercial carpenter), he could open up a blueprint and just understand it. I look at a blueprint, I’m like, what’s going on? But he could understand it and he could look at a room and basically, almost with his eyes, measure the room and know how much material he needed. He was really good at looking at blueprints and doing the math to figure out all the material needed.

Well, I was just getting into wanting to be healthier and I said, okay, I know you’re drinking Monster energy drinks, can you just switch to diet because sugar’s so bad for you? Well, he came home and he said, I couldn’t do math. I couldn’t do it. He goes, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I looked at the blueprint, I tried to do calculations after drinking two Diet Monster drinks and my brain shut off. I could not even do the math to do my job, so he just had to come home. That’s when we started looking into it, and this was a long time ago. We looked into aspartame and saw it is a neurotoxin and it does have links to causing MS. It also is really bad for the gut. I don’t know if you know that. It is the chemicals in diet sodas, particularly the sweeteners, that is very bad for the microbiome as well.

 

[01:21:48] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah, I haven’t had a soda of any kind in many, many years. I know that for a moment there, I probably completely discredited everything I had set up to that point. It was years ago, okay. It was years ago.

 

[01:22:05] Ashley James: The living glass houses don’t throw stones. We’ve all been there, right? We want to get healthier. I love sharing my health journey because I’m definitely not perfect by any means. But look how much I’ve come. I’ve healed like five diseases. Look how far I’ve come, and I continue my journey. I also love helping people learn through my sharing of what’s possible.

What is possible is you can heal your body, your body can heal itself. You have an innate God-given ability to heal, and we just have to figure out what your body needs and what your body doesn’t need. Doctors will tell you that you can never get better and they’re not true. They might really believe what they say, they’re not trying to lie, but MDs are trained in a type of medicine. They’re not informed on how to heal the body. They will tell you, you can’t heal.

For example, you’ll have A-fib forever. My husband no longer has A-fib and it’s because of his chiropractor and his Naturopath. It’s not a heart condition if it is the kind of A-fib he had, which was impingement of a thoracic nerve. His Naturopath said, there’s nothing wrong with your heart. Your thoracic spine is impinging and causing you to have acute A-fib attacks every time we lift something heavy up. We went to a cardiologist and he was a candidate for a pacemaker. Thank God we didn’t go down that route, we went the holistic route, and he is healthy as a horse.

I reversed my polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told by an endocrinologist and doctors that you can never reverse polycystic ovarian syndrome. You will have it for the rest of your life. All the women I talked to that have it say, well, I will have it forever. No. Just like type 2 diabetes, I reverse that. You don’t have to have it forever. All the things that you have, you don’t have to have forever. Your body becomes out of balance and you can bring your body back into balance. That’s why I think it’s so important to talk about the way you talk about good health. Think about it like you’re a gardener and you’re trying to feed the worms in your garden so that those worms could feed your plants, right? You’re trying to feed the healthy microbiome so the healthy microbiome feeds your body.

 

[01:24:39] Dr. Michael Haley: I’m kicking myself right now.

 

[01:24:41] Ashley James: Why?

 

[01:24:42] Dr. Michael Haley: You said something and it triggered a memory, and it’s like, ugh.

 

[01:24:47] Ashley James: Tell me the memory.

 

[01:24:50] Dr. Michael Haley: It belongs approximately 45 minutes ago in the story. We were talking about constipation and we talked about everything diet-related. You brought up chiropractic and I got to tell you about an early patient and I’m a new chiropractor. Charlie comes in with pain radiating down his leg and pain radiating down his arm. I remember taking an X-ray of his back and just seeing this like crooked lumbar, I think it was like his L2, It was just tilted to one side, didn’t look right, and I’m being a new chiropractor at the time—it was easily 25 years ago. I’m going to fix it in one adjustment, that’s my method.

I put him on his side, I grabbed onto that bone, and when I shoved that thing in place, I’m telling you, it sounded like I just sat on a bag of Doritos. Have you ever seen the movie Caddyshack where Rodney Dangerfield was driving this speedboat? It wasn’t a speedboat. It was a huge yacht, but he’s got it wide open and it may as well be a speedboat. There’s this little black man fishing on a canoe and Rodney’s headed right for him. The man looks, sees the boat coming, then looks back, and then he realizes what’s happening. He looks again at Rodney’s boat coming charging towards him, and his eyes get about as big as doughnuts.

The way that man looked, if you remember that scene, that was Charlie on the chiropractic table when I adjusted him. His eyes just lit up just like that man that was fishing on Caddyshack. I thought, oh, maybe it’s because it made so much noise and he didn’t know what was happening, or I didn’t tell him. He hadn’t been in forever or was it his first visit? I forget, but maybe I just didn’t explain things. He just had this look of fear.

Well, the next day he came back. He said, Dr. Haley, I don’t even know why I came back. I’m thinking, oh, man, I must have hurt him or something. I didn’t explain that what I do might cause a little discomfort as I make a change because I really did set out to fix it in one shot. He said something you did? I said, well, okay, what’s going on? He said, well, I don’t have any more pain going down my leg. Something you did. Okay, what else? Well, I don’t have any more pain going down my arm. I did adjust his neck too, but that’s not what the story is about. So what’s going on?

The first thing he said is, I can have sex again. I said, oh, wait a second. You didn’t say anything about that. I opened up his entrance forms and there was no checkmark where that was a potential problem. I said, why didn’t you check that box? He said, I didn’t know that I could have anything. I said, how long have you been having this problem? He said 10 years.

 

[01:27:57] Ashley James: So he had erectile dysfunction for 10 years.

 

[01:28:01] Dr. Michael Haley: And it was simply something caused in his spine. I said, what else? He said, I don’t have constipation anymore. I said, really? How long have you had that problem? He said 10 years. So for 10 years, he had nerves choked in his spine that weren’t causing pain, but they were shutting down the function of things below it because the nerves come out of the spine and go downward. I said, Charlie, what was that look on your face? He said, I had to go to the bathroom. As soon as I adjusted him, it was one of those moments like, oh, this is not good. How much it’s going to take me? And he’s calculating whether or not he can make it home for this explosive emptying of 10 years’ worth of being backed up. Sometimes it’s not your diet.

 

​​[01:29:04] Ashley James: It’s a really good point to make. This again comes to the idea of how we’ve been raised. We’ve been raised to believe that allopathic MD-based medicine is the only form of medicine. That we wait to get sick and then go to the doctor. 

Holistic medicine looks at the body through a whole different lens, so we have to shift our thinking. It really comes down to how we see the world, how we see our body. We have to shift our thinking. Are we a petri dish waiting to attract germs—the germ theory versus the terrain theory—or is the terrain, the soil so healthy that it doesn’t get affected? How are some people walking around, they’re like, oh, I haven’t had a cold in years, and then there’s another person who just catches everything in sight. There’s something about that.

Even Louis Pasteur on his deathbed said that he was wrong. It’s not the pasteurization, the killing off of. He goes, no, the terrain of the body is the most important thing. Understanding of the healthier your body is in terms of the healthy microbiome, then the body can easily fight off things. But when the body is weakened, the microbiomes weakened, and everything’s weakened from the processed food, chemicals, stress, addictive substances, and all these things that are weakening the body, then you are more likely to attract and grow. You become the petri dish that grows these negative things.

Looking at the body holistically, looking through the lens and going we are the soil, the body as a whole. Nerves come out of the brain, so we have to understand that nerves innervate the organs of what’s going on in the spine. What about inflammation? Everything, the gut affects the brain, right? So if someone’s presenting with brain problems or emotional problems, we can’t just focus on the brain. We have to look to the gut. If someone has constipation, we can’t just focus on food, we have to look to the spine. It’s the body as a whole. We cannot just laser focus in on one part of the body. We have to look at the body as a whole and see how everything affects each other.

That’s why I love having a team of holistic health providers, having a chiropractor that’s really good. I like to say see chiropractors that have at least 15 years of experience. My chiropractor is about to retire. I think he’s been practicing for close to 40 years. I love him to death and I tell him that we have to clone him before he retires because I don’t want to lose him. He’s amazing. See a Naturopath that has at least 15 or more years of experience. You just want to have really good experienced holistic health providers on your team that are all informing you and educating you so that you can make the best decisions for yourself.

My husband no longer has A-fib because of his chiropractor and because his Naturopath pointed it out. Then we went to the chiropractor and the chiropractor fixed it but also gave him exercises to strengthen and to continue to keep it strong. The most important thing to know is that your body can heal itself. We just have to get the right information and your body can heal itself. When you were learning from Dr. McBride, did you have any aha moments that you want to share with us?

 

[01:32:52] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, yeah, you know what, a couple of them. One I already mentioned, and that was the fact that she talked about plants being very detoxifying, cleansing, and important in an anti-cancer diet. Because for me, that was the moment I think that I realized, oh, that’s why so many nutritionists disagree with each other, or seemingly do. When you turn to the internet for information and you do a search about what things you should eat, well, this person says that and that person says that, so that was one of those moments when I realized, oh, it’s because we have a different focus on what we’re trying to accomplish. That was big for me, and there’s probably a lot of people listening right now that say, you’re right, I get upset because one person says this and another person says don’t.

It’s a tool like you had pointed out, and it’s a certain tool for a certain job. Some jobs require it and some don’t. I think that was probably a big aha moment. I loved her book, and this one was her book. She has a lot of books. This is one of the GAPS books, but this is the physiology syndrome. This is the blue book. I love how she talks about the soil of the intestines, which we talked a little bit about, but she goes into tremendous detail about how that works. It changed my perspective. I’ve been putting nothing but good food in my body for a long time, but now I chew it better and that can make a huge difference.

 

[01:34:48] Ashley James: Yeah, the chewing is pretty crazy. When I was first taught about chew 25 times, I thought that was crazy. My jaw is going to get sore, and sure enough it did, but put down your fork. I couldn’t believe I was sometimes swallowing without even chewing. When I caught myself I was like, wow, we just inhale food. So to chew, to put down the fork, chew 25 times or more, and to take a minute with each bite allows for you to get the most out of your food. you’ll probably save on groceries because now your body’s absorbing the nutrients and you’re not eating as much.

 

[01:35:34] Dr. Michael Haley: You’re trying to break it down into portions small enough for bacteria that are so small you can’t even see them with the naked eye. You have to break it down. You have to break it down for them. Imagine if you took your bite and you were thinking about them.

 

[01:35:56] Ashley James: We’ve got to. I’m going to try that. Maybe print out a little piece of paper with a picture of a microbiome, cute little cells smiling back at you. Get your kids to draw a picture of some cute little cells smiling back at you, mommy, daddy, please feed me. Chew 25 times, I want to eat.

 

[01:36:20] Dr. Michael Haley: Or maybe a picture of one being crushed by a piece of meat the size of a planet, what am I supposed to do with this?

 

[01:36:34] Ashley James: I know that everyone’s different, and you’ve given us some great advice, especially for constipation. The constipation advice you gave could be like across the board good for all gut health. Do you have any recipes for gut health or any combination of foods that across the board are really good for everyone?

 

[01:37:00] Dr. Michael Haley: Do you ever juice?

 

[01:37:02] Ashley James: Yes.

 

[01:37:05] Dr. Michael Haley: What do you do with everything that’s leftover?

 

[01:37:07] Ashley James: Oh, that’s a good question. I put it in the garden, but I always feel bad because I’m like, I should bake with this or something. I think I baked it once. There’s a listener actually who figured out how to make really good dehydrated crackers out of it. What do you do with it?

 

[01:37:23] Dr. Michael Haley: I make really good crackers.

 

[01:37:25] Ashley James: Oh, sounds so good.

 

[01:37:29] Dr. Michael Haley: Oh my goodness, that’s great. Yeah, because it’s a whole food. We think, oh, all the nutrients are in the juice. Well, guess what, the fiber is amazing for your microbiome. It’s food for them and it’s going to provide bulk, help things move, and it’s cleansing. It’s a whole food. You want both parts of the food, and it’s so easy to do. You just take it, you throw it in a bowl. If you want them to stick together really good, you use a lot of things like flaxseed and chia seeds that gel up, and that turns into your dough. You can put whatever herbs, spices, maybe some sea salt, peppers, or even hot peppers if you want it nice and spicy. You mix it up like a gelatinous that you can spread out on a dehydrator tray and you dehydrate it. They are delicious.

They have a lot of strength from those seeds so it has a lot of scoop-ability to it if you want to make some homemade hummus and scoop up some hummus, absolutely delicious. I promise you, eat enough of that in about a day, you’re going to sit on the throne and have the bowel movement, the kind where you want to call your friends and say, this is amazing.

 

 [01:38:52] Ashley James: I’ve had several episodes where we talk about different aspects, pulling it all together, fiber binds to the toxins your liver has collected. So these toxins are toxins from your cellular toxins, but they’re also toxins from the environment and from food itself like pesticides, things you don’t want in your body anymore. For women, when your body is done with the estrogen it has produced, it breaks it down into a form that it can release out of the body. We want to get rid of that because that estrogen, if reabsorbed, is toxic. So estrogen is a catch-all phrase for a ton of different hormones, but anyway, it becomes a very unhealthy form of estrogen to remain and collect in the body. Estrogen dominance is not great for us whatsoever.

The liver takes all this stuff—takes hormones that it needs to get rid of, it takes the metabolites, it takes toxins from inside our body but also outside that have come into our body, and it puts it in the bile to get bound to fiber. Bile itself is costly for the body to make, and so it wants to reabsorb bile in the colon. All these chemicals have only been around for maybe just 150 years, let’s say. We weren’t exposed to man-made chemicals for thousands and thousands of years. Our body, the way it was designed, you can say design or evolved, whatever your belief system is, either way, it was not meant to be around 80,000 manmade chemicals.

These chemicals bind to your bile. It comes into your bile and then it binds to it. Your colon reabsorbs bile. So these forever chemicals, these obesogens, these endocrine disruptors, they’re then brought back and they’re reabsorbed in the colon, and especially if you have constipation because it sits there and sits there and sits there and your body reabsorbs it back in and you become more and more toxic. The only way to make sure that your liver is being honored, being respected when getting that stuff that your liver filtered out the first time getting it out of the body so it doesn’t accumulate over time and create cancer is to have enough fiber, have enough water, and have enough mobility so that you’re pooping three times a day—well-formed poops, not diarrhea—and that the fiber is binding to and not letting your body reabsorb that bile that has the man-made chemicals attached to it.

The body was designed to reabsorb your bile, but the bile is now attached to the man-made chemicals, so when we do reabsorb it, we’re also reabsorbing all the bad stuff too. Sometimes constipation can be the cause of something much greater like cancer down the road or systemic inflammation and brain fog because one of the reasons is the body is constantly absorbing these toxins.

I love fiber from the perspective of it’s binding to what your body needs to get rid of it. You see a deep mine in the old days when they had the little cars, the mine cars coming out and dumping the coal out. You got to get it out. We’ve got to get it out of the body. If it slows down, then it can get reabsorbed.

When you dehydrate your crackers out of the pulp left from your juicing, do you put them in the dehydrator? Do you put it in the oven? Can you tell us how to make it?

 

[01:43:09] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. I forget the particular brand of it. For the dehydrator, if you don’t have one and you’re going to get one, make sure you get one with the trays that are well horizontal but the fan is on the back of the unit not on the bottom.

 

[01:43:27] Ashley James: Yeah, the Excalibur is my favorite for that particular design.

 

[01:43:32] Dr. Michael Haley: So that it blows the air through all of the trays because if it’s on the bottom blowing up, then you’re going to dry the bottom tray real good and you have to rotate them all the time.

 

[01:43:44] Ashley James: Oh no, that sounds bad.

 

[01:43:45] Dr. Michael Haley: It doesn’t work. I spread them on those trays and depending on what dehydrator you get, I think mine does like 12 trays at a time. It’s awesome. We make a lot of crackers because they last a long, long time. But my favorite seeds to put them, and I mentioned the chia and the flaxseed. The flax really gives it a really good stick, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, all of the textures that you like, roll them in there. They’re amazing.

Play with how much pulp you put in there to get the fiber and the texture you want. Go nuts with the spices. What flavor you’re craving, do you wish you had like an Italian herb bread or do you wish you had something more of Mexican flavor? Go for it, man. It’s incredible.

 

​​[01:44:49] Ashley James: That sounds delicious, I love it. I’ve shared this on the show, but every listener might not listen to every episode. So to reiterate, my husband had lifelong constipation. He would poop maybe twice a week and I did not know this until we went to a Naturopath who has been practicing for a very long time and she has you go through her little checklist. Before she even treats anything, she’s going to make sure you’re drinking enough water, you’re eating enough fiber, you’re sleeping well, you’re exercising like you’re moving your body every day. You’re getting your vitamin D, your basic vitamins, and you’re pooping. We came to the poopy question and he’s like, I don’t know, once or twice a week. She’s like, whoa, okay, we got to work on this.

So she sent us home. She said to make a soup with cabbage in it. There were not many instructions. She’s like, make a cabbage soup. I’m like, okay. I’m very culinary-inclined and so I know that for liver—because I was working on my liver health at the time—so I’m like okay, I’m going to add beats for liver health and I’m going to make it really delicious, add a lot of fiber to this. A big pot on the stove. 

At the time, my husband was not vegan. He has since decided to go vegan, but at the time he wasn’t so I made bone broth, and then in the bone broth I simmered a whole head of cabbage, celery or the heart of celery, either one because I’d go back and forth. I put a sweet potato in. I had put carrots in and beat, and then I’d simmer them for about 45 minutes. There’d be a bay leaf in there, and then I turned off the stove and I’d add a whole handful of cilantro like a really nice big handful of cilantro. I take the immersion blender, I would blend it, and he drank that every day for a whole week. By the end of the week, and this was before our son was born, I was pregnant at the time, so that was seven years ago, his lifelong constipation was gone and it hasn’t come back.

I learned that cabbage has tremendous healing properties for the gut, and of course with that recipe, I have it on my website. You can type gut healing soup into Learn True Health and you’ll find it. But with that, it was so amazing to see something so simple. Your grocery store can be your pharmacy, that’s just absolutely amazing.

We went to the right doctor, if we had gone to an MD and not that MDs are bad, it’s just we have to understand their training. They would have put him on a drug for constipation that wouldn’t actually have fixed the problem. So we have to fix the problem from the root, and now he’s got perfect bowel movements. I’m proud of him.

 

[01:48:04] Dr. Michael Haley: I love how food can make such a difference. The last video I put on YouTube about a week ago—it’s so funny that we’re talking about this—the title of it is The Perfect Poop. If you search that on YouTube with my name, with Dr. Haley, you’d probably come right to it. But it’s essentially about fiber in food and poop. I actually interviewed someone that makes a food product and it’s a very high fiber food. Their customers came up with the name. They actually called it the Perfect Poo without the P, but it’s the same thing right. It’s amazing what fiber will do. I haven’t tried it with cabbage. I don’t know if it’s fiber in cabbage that’s doing it or if there are other secret nutrients in there, but it’s amazing what food will do.

 

[01:49:06] Ashley James: This was a few weeks after our daughter died and her name is Vale. I was lying in a tub and I wanted to watch a documentary on my phone. I thought, I want to watch a juicing documentary because it always inspires me. I’ve never seen a juicing documentary where I didn’t cry for some time through the documentary. It’s like my Hallmark. Some people watch the Hallmark Channel to cry. If I cry in a good way, every juicing documentary I’ve ever watched I’ve cried in a good way.

I went on Amazon and it had been a while since I had checked and there was a new free juicing documentary to watch and I burst into tears because the man’s last name is Vale. I was thinking of my daughter and I had just lost her. His name is Jason Vale and he did a juicing documentary and I watched it, of course, I cried. It’s really good. 

There’s this one man who is on every medication. He went to this retreat in I can’t remember what country but it was a tropical country like South America and it’s really beautiful. It might have been Peru. I’m sorry, I really don’t remember the country, but it was gorgeous. He came with two suitcases. One was for his clothes—he was there for a month—and the other suitcase was his medication. It’s ridiculous. These people that came were so sick and nothing was working. He had such bad (I think it was) Crohn’s disease. It was either colitis or Crohn’s disease, but either way, it was really bad inflammation and ulcers along the intestines. He was on a maximum amount of steroids, maximum out of everything, and he still was in total pain.

They’re drinking juice 24/7, but every day he had one glass of cabbage juice mixed with apple juice to make it taste good because come on, cabbage juice doesn’t sound really great. He’d drink it down and he just started to get better and better and better. At one point, he was just crying because he’s like, I’ve never felt so good. I thought I was going to have to kill myself. I think he was 26. He was going to choose to end his life because his life was nothing but constant suffering and he was on every medication and It still wasn’t working. He was able to walk out of there free of his symptoms of colitis, Crohn’s, or whatever it was. Free of the symptoms of the horrible prison sentence he felt like he had. He was free.

I just love that. Juicing is great, and it’s not something we should do all the time. Dr. Natasha McBride says it’s like we use raw foods, for example, as a cleanse, right? We use it as a point of a reset, as a cleanse, it’s a healing tool, but there could be other people that if they only juiced they’d become worse because that wouldn’t be the tool for them at the time. We have to understand that it is a powerful tool, it’s a tool we should have in our tool belt, and we should know when to use it.

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show and having this conversation. I feel like it’s only been 10 minutes. Time just flies when we’re talking.

 

[01:52:51] Dr. Michael Haley: I love you, Ashley. You’re amazing.

 

[01:52:54] Ashley James: I love you too. What you do is wonderful. I just love our first episode together, episode 401, because I was so excited to hear about your company and the aloe because of this. When people are suffering and you are able to—with something very safe and healthy—bring down that medicine. The aloe brings down that inflammation and it speeds up. You had cited studies where it doubles healing time. It cuts the time in half, so you’re healing twice as fast. And then your body can finally get a foothold and then you start to make the changes. It’s not that it’s going to be the root cause cure-all, but it helps to get you there. It helps to get you moving in the right direction, and sometimes that’s what people need. So I love your product.

To wrap up today’s interview, do you have any more studies, any more science, or data that’s come to mind about medicinal aloe and your product particularly, which is clean, it’s pure, it’s just the gel, and it’s fresh. It’s freshly frozen and then shipped to you frozen so that you can keep it in your freezer and use it when you need it. I’ve already shared how to make it taste good, so don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about the taste. It doesn’t taste bad, but even to get kids to drink it, my son is very picky and I could make it taste good for him. Do you have any more studies or information to share about using aloe internally to help heal?

 

[01:54:34] Dr. Michael Haley: I found this one study that was done with 240 stage four cancer patients. The study was done by a chemotherapy company, I forget which one, but they divided them into two groups. Everybody got chemotherapy. One of the groups got one ounce of aloe vera a day. The other group just got chemotherapy, and they divided the people into four categories based on how they did. The fourth category was the complete result or the most healing from their cancers. There were 119 patients that got the one ounce of aloe vera and there were 121 patients that only got the chemotherapy.

This is what blows me away because we tell our customers to drink so much more than just an ounce. The group that got the one ounce of aloe vera, there were 10 of them that were in the complete result group versus only three in the complete result group from the ones that only had the chemotherapy. That is significant, and then of course, everyone else, if you look at a whole and the other groups as well, closer towards that better, more healing category for the ones that got aloe vera versus just the chemotherapy.

They realize that the sugar molecule—this blows people away when I tell them aloe vera is largely sugar—the slimy mucopolysaccharides, a polysaccharide is a very complex carbohydrate. Polysaccharide really means complex carbohydrates. Well, it’s a bunch of sugar molecules joined together and the sugar molecule is mannose. Mannose when they tested it on lab rats in the ’30s, put them in ketosis, and gave them mannose, somehow, they stayed in ketosis. So it’s not processed like sugars, which explains why diabetics can consume aloe vera and lower their blood sugar levels.

Now, their understanding is that what ends up happening is the cancer cells want to consume the sugar because cancer loves sugar, so it grabs onto the mannose or binds to it, but it can’t consume it and it can’t release it. So it’s almost like having your mouthful—

 

[01:57:19] Ashley James: It starves it.

 

[01:57:21] Dr. Michael Haley: Exactly, and that’s what their theory in the research is that the aloe vera somehow starves the cancer cell while the chemotherapy kills it, which personally, I think if you starve something long enough, it’ll die anyway. Not only that, but when the mannose is on that cancer cell, it’s actually like waving a flag for the macrophage to come eat it. It’s also a signal to the macrophage. The things that we’re learning now about all of these intracellular communications, the things that are happening, and how they communicate with each other and signal each other for certain things to happen, it’s really quite fascinating. We’re just beginning to understand it. 

Prior to that, I had known that Acemannan would increase tumor necrosis factor interferon and interleukin, because Acemannan , by the way, is a nutrient found in aloe vera. Those chemicals in the bloodstream would essentially increase intercellular communication and help the immune cells identify the cells that were cancerous. We’re starting to understand more and more how that happens now. So, it’s neat. We’re going to see more science about this down the road. No doubt we’re learning more every day.

 

[01:58:53] Ashley James: I got chills hearing about how it helps the body basically identify kidney cancer cells, and also, it starves the cancer like stuffing it’s mouthful with something it can’t eat. That gets me so excited. Oh my gosh. I mean, it’s such a good tool to have in your tool belt. Buy the aloe, have it in your freezer. I bought your aloe several times, big jugs, right? I keep giving it away to my friends. A friend of mine whose son had his constipation, my other friend had constipation, or another friend had stomach flu or something. I’m just like, oh, I’ve got something for you, and I just hand her a jug of frozen aloe. Oh my gosh, this stuff is amazing.

Learntruehealth.com/aloe gets you the free gift basically that you’re giving us. I love the cream, it’s not greasy. I have it on my desk, I use it as a hand cream. I really enjoy it. It makes my hands very soft and supple, but it doesn’t leave any grease because I don’t want grease on my hands when I’m typing or doing other stuff on my desk, so I really like your aloe cream. And then also the coupon code, which is [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe]. Thank you for giving us a discount and thank you for the gift of your cream in addition to when we buy the frozen jugs it gets shipped to us.

I thoroughly enjoy it and I have several friends that are now hooked on your aloe as a result. Thank you for coming on the show. I’d love to have you back anytime you have new information to share. Is there anything you want to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[02:00:43] Dr. Michael Haley: Thank you for what you do. One podcast at a time, you’re changing the world helping people learn things about their health. They’re learning true health, so just thank you for all that you do.

 

[02:00:53] Ashley James: And thank you. I’m a little jealous because where you live it’s so gorgeous and sunny. You’re in Costa Rica, right?

 

[02:01:00] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, right now I’m in South Florida.

 

[02:01:05] Ashley James: Okay, you’re in South Florida.

 

[02:01:08] Dr. Michael Haley: I might go outside. We’re in the wintertime, I might go make some vitamin D naturally without having to eat anything.

 

[02:01:14] Ashley James: I’d love to live in Florida. My husband doesn’t want to live there so I probably won’t end up, but we’ll definitely go visit. But if I had it my way, I’d definitely be living in Florida. Love that weather. I dream of the day that I could walk outside my door and pick a fresh avocado. I think that would be a lot of fun. Enjoy the beautiful day. Wherever everyone is, enjoy your day, but particularly we know that Dr. Michael Haley will be enjoying his day because he lives in Florida.

I hope you enjoy today’s interview with Dr. Michael Haley. You can also check out my other episode with him, episode 401. Be sure to go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and use coupon code [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe] to check out his medicinal aloe drink, which is amazing.

Please come to the local Facebook group and share your experiences with the aloe. We’ve had listeners talk about how they’ve had benefits to seeing improvements in their hair, skin, and nail health, as well as their digestive health. Just for vanity sake, I think it’s a fun thing to try out. I just noticed that it brings calmness to my body, and I think that’s because it has such a profound anti-inflammatory effect on all tissues in the body. So I do notice that I’m emotionally and mentally calmer, more focused brain fog, although I don’t have a ton of that, but brain fog clears up. Just more mental acuity comes to me. Which just reminds me, I should go have some aloe right now. 

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and be sure to check out the next two episodes I’m going to be publishing. I’ve already done these interviews and I’m really looking forward to hearing them because they’re really, really good, so just stay tuned. The next two are pretty awesome. And remember, learntruehealth.com/aloe to check out Dr. Michael Haley’s Medicinal Aloe gel drink.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Michael Haley!

Haley Nutrition

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

YouTube

Recommended Readings by Dr. Michael Haley

The Maker’s Diet  by Jordan Rubin

The GAPS Diet by Dr. Natasha Campbell – McBride

Jan 21, 2022

Psalm 23 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIrS3h7cH_A

BOOK: The Survival Paradox https://amzn.to/3AkKkOL

Modified Citrus Pectin https://amzn.to/33xG02N

Medical Center, Amitabha Medical Clinic in Santa Rosa, CA: www.amitabhaclinic.com

 

The Survival Protein: Dr. Isaac Eliaz’s Integrative Approach To Healing Cancer & Other Conditions

https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-survival-protein-dr-isaac-eliazs-integrative-approach-to-healing-cancer-other-conditions

 

Highlights:

  • What is The Survival Paradox
  • What is Therapeutic Apheresis
  • Inflammaging

 

Dr. Isaac Eliaz is an integrative medical doctor that focuses treatment of cancer and chronic, degenerative conditions. He founded Amitabha Medical Clinic and Healing Center. In this episode, he talks about The Survival Paradox.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am particularly excited to bring this episode to you because the topic of healing cancer and other complex illnesses is near and dear to my heart. If you’ve been a longtime listener, you know my mom died of cancer—even though she was the healthiest person I knew—and my dad died of heart disease. I have conquered several major illnesses myself. I’m on my own personal journey, on my road to healing, and so are you. We’re all looking to become healthier, stronger, and the best version of ourselves.

I share in this podcast that health is not just physical, that it’s mental, emotional, and spiritual. If we don’t nurture all these aspects of ourselves, then no matter how much we exercise or eat healthy, if we’re lacking in our spiritual health or spiritual growth, if we’re lacking in our emotional health, emotional growth, mental, or energetic, there are so many other aspects to just physical health. If we ignore those, then we can create a state of stress in the body that leads to poorer and poorer physical health, even though the root cause might not have begun in the physical. That’s one of the messages our guest shares today.

Right before I started editing this show today to post it, I was talking to a dear friend of mine and he brought up a Psalm. We were discussing a Psalm in the Bible and it just hit me. I’m going to see if there’s a really good video on it and I happened to find a different video on a different song, but I was called to it. You know when you’re called to something, maybe you’re called to listen to this podcast, I had to hear it.

I was like, okay, well, this is only a 4-minute and 40-second video. I can totally listen, and it really blew me away. It’s great. I’m going to put it in the show notes of today’s podcast so you can click on the description and you’ll see the link there. It talks about Psalm 23, which everyone’s heard of. It’s usually read at funerals, and it talks about how the Lord lays us down in green pastures as if we’re sheep and he’s our shepherd. 

Of course, you’re probably imagining—as I did my whole life—that green pastures were these beautiful rolling green hills. If you’re a sheep, you’re just getting mouthfuls and mouthfuls, there’s no worry in the world, and the Lord is our shepherd. We’re just happy little sheep eating up all the alfalfa and we don’t have a care in the world. That’s what I imagined, right?

Because I’m from North America, there’s lots of green grass. This one video, which you can totally go check out if you want to, it’s going to be in the show notes. It’s actually a man standing in Israel in the surrounding area. He explains what it was like back then and what it is now. You hardly see any grass. It’s very, very, very little. But the shepherds know where to take the sheep just to get one mouthful here and then one mouthful there, but if you look to the untrained eye, it doesn’t even look like there’s any green. He said, this is what it means by green pastures. Then he said a quote from a rabbi, “Worry is dealing with tomorrow’s problems on today’s pasture.” And then it clicked, right?

So we often will worry about all the things that are coming up in our life, but we’re thinking about the resources we have today. For example, let’s say there are bills or there are some events that are coming up in the future and we’re worrying about them because they’re in the future and we’re not prepared for them with today’s resources. That’s the message that I wanted to share from a spiritual perspective because my guest shares how he helps people to heal disease by turning off the stress response. 

I think a lot of times, our worry or anxiety, focusing on a future we don’t want to happen because we’re so worried because we don’t have these resources today. In the Bible, it talks about that in Psalm 23 that the Lord is our shepherd and he lays us down in green pastures, but these green pastures are not green. There are tiny little bits here and there, but the shepherd knows where to take the sheet so that it gets fed.

So it’s not saying that life isn’t going to be a struggle, but it is saying that you have the resources today to get through today, you do. And focusing on that instead of focusing on all the things that could go wrong in the future, which is what we often do. We often focus on all the things that could go wrong, and that creates huge anxiety and stress in the body. That puts our body in a state of inflammation and disease.

I teach a technique on eliminating anxiety, so if you haven’t heard me do it, please just internet search my name Ashley James and the word anxiety. I’ve been interviewed on so many, dozens of other people’s podcasts teaching this technique. I’ve also taught this technique on my show, Learn True Health, so you could also go to learntruehealth.com and type in anxiety and you’ll find where I teach this technique. It’s a very quick technique. It takes like 30 seconds, but I teach you how to turn off the stress response in the brain.

Now, our guest today goes several steps further and teaches you that there’s a way to turn it off on a biochemical level as well. But if you keep doing the thinking, the anxiety thinking that constantly creates worry and puts the body in the state of stress, then you’re constantly creating that state of disease. So we have to address it with our thinking. 

I hope you can just take a little bit of time to reflect on this message that worry is dealing with tomorrow’s problems on today’s pasture. God gives us enough. It’s not like everyone wins the lottery, right? That’s not what enough means. It’s that you’re given the resources for today. Be in today and focus on today. Focus on doing what you can to be healthy today. Focus on doing what you can to love yourself, love your neighbor, and love your family today. That ultimately, being in the now, being in a state of love is the highest form of healing, both spiritually, physically, and emotionally.

If you’re thinking about the worries, concerns, the what-ifs and the what-ifs and the what-ifs for tomorrow, and you’re lamenting on that, then you’re creating a state of disease in the body. Meditate and pray on love for yourself, for your body, for your God, and for your friends and family today.

Enjoy today’s episode. You’re going to love it. This doctor is awesome. He has so many degrees, my head was spinning. I just love that with all the medical training, he really does see that there’s a connection between our spirit, our body, and our mind, that it’s one, and we need to address it. He also takes all this wonderful information about the biochemical aspects of our meat sack that our soul is living in and how to take care of it on all these different levels. Enjoy today’s episode. 

Please join us in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’ve got so many wonderful listeners helping each other and answering questions. I answer questions there, and many guests also come in and answer questions, so it’s a really supportive community. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

 

[00:08:38] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 473. Today we have on the show with us Dr. Isaac Eliaz. I’m very excited because what he teaches is the key. It is the key. You could be doing everything else right and still be sick if you don’t do the things that he teaches. I’m just so excited that he has taken what I think is the foundation, the fundamental foundation to true health and he’s put it in a book. It’s so, so, so monumental. I’m very honored to have you here today.

Your website is survivalparadox.com, and of course, the links to everything that Isaac does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Welcome to the show. I’m thrilled that my listeners get a chance to learn from you today because I think what you teach could be the key to so many people ending their suffering.

 

[00:09:43] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Ashley, thank you so much for inviting me. I’m pretty excited about this podcast. What you’re saying, there’s a lot of truth to it because The Survival Paradox really offers a new, fresh, and deeper paradigm shift in our understanding of what health is and how we can improve it.

 

[00:10:07] Ashley James: Can you tell us about what happened in your life? In terms of going to become a doctor, what happened that made you want to become a doctor, and then later, what happened that led you to discovering and writing the book, Survival Paradox?

 

[00:10:26] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yes, of course. So this book is really a culmination of my life journey and my medical journey. I started my interest in the healing art really as a teenager when actually, my hobby was raising bees. I was like the youngest beekeeper in Israel. Just watching the bees, I made a deep connection with nature and understanding how bees cope with nature? And then at age 15, my father was a civil engineer and we traveled to South Korea. I got to learn and practice taekwondo with the Korean National Team because I had to learn English. So I was very fortunate to get trained, really, by, at that time, all the world champions. And I learned yoga and martial arts.

When I went to medical school in Israel, which is a seven-year process, I already knew I’m going to do holistic medicine. It was really very early on like 1981 and I became a yoga teacher. I taught in yoga teachers’ courses. I learned shiatsu. I created a [inaudible 00:11:31] acupuncture school, so I can learn acupuncture, and I learned herbal medicine. Then I had a successful center for integrative medicine as a physician who does also Chinese medicine, but I felt it was too early for me to be successful. There’s much more learning I have to do, so we moved to the North Bay to Northern California where I obtained the Master of Science in Chinese medicine, became a licensed acupuncturist, and then, later on, got my medical degree here, my medical license.

Throughout this journey, my focus medicine-wise was on integrative oncology, on how to improve on cancer treatments, and how to cure illnesses. I’ve learned, as part of my journey, classical homeopathy and a lot of naturopathic aspects.

And so parallel to this, I developed a research career where I made a lot of the discoveries of the importance of blocking Galectin-3, our survival protein. So I had this interest in integrative medicine. I had the research part, but then I got also very deeply engaged in meditation practices and I spent decades learning and training in meditation. I spent 10 years doing a half-day meditation and 20 years going to the mountains for about 2 months a year. Some of my patients were really the most legendary meditation masters in the Himalayas.

This all came together, my inquisitive mind, being an innovator, and spending time to really observe the fundamental principles of our health. I came to the realization after really learning a lot of esoteric practices of meditation and combining them with different medical methods and decades of clinical experience, I realized that the key to healing is having an open heart is love and compassion. And really, what prevents us from connecting with this infinite healing potential is our imbalanced survival response. This is really culminated with the book The Survival Paradox because it is a paradox that what makes us survive is the same mechanism that makes us sick, shortens our life, and causes a lot of suffering, pain, and illnesses, both acute and chronic.

In the book, I take people through the journey of understanding what The Survival Paradox is, how it is driven biochemically, how it affects metabolism, circulation, and how to block Galectin-3 with Modified Citrus Pectin with PectaSol. Then the end of the first part or the chapter called The Heart of Survival where I really introduce the key concept that the survival of the heart is to allow us to heal and break free of The Survival Paradox. And then I go through different illnesses, organs, and systems starting with cancer, which is of course something I focus on through my career, and then talking about the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, metabolic diseases, neuroinflammation, microbiome, and immune responses,

It’s been an eye-opener on how to look at our health and our organ systems in a different way, and then I bring to the three last chapters really the solutions—detoxification, healing our scars of survival, and transforming the survivor paradox. And through the book, the book is full of stories of patients, really my heroes, inspiring stories of patients that really didn’t really change the expected outcome and how they did it, so the book is full of real-life examples.

 

[00:15:47] Ashley James: Through your sharing of your life, I think it’s so funny that a little footnote is, and then I became a medical doctor because some people that’s the highlight. The highlight of their life is they became a medical doctor, and that was sort of like one of the footnotes. You’re like, and then I got my medical degree. I wish every doctor was like you. I wish we could clone you. I wish every doctor had as much background and experience in all the different modalities that you’ve specialized in to really have a deep understanding of the human body and how it heals. That we’re not just meat sacks. That there’s so much more than just a physical body, and that our emotional, mental, spiritual, energetic—everything that happens in our life—affects the meat sack, and we have to see that this whole life affects the body.

Now, I really want to know, what happened in your life that made you want to focus on cancer? Was there a specific decision or moment that made you want to go down that rabbit hole?

 

[00:17:00] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: No, it’s very interesting. I had an interest in it early on. My grandfather that I’m named on after—Isaac, his name was Isaac—he was a Holocaust survivor, and his story is in my book in the chapter about healing the scars of survival. I’ll talk a little bit more about the topic of healing scars of survival later, and he died from cancer at an early age, at the age 50. And then, towards the last year of medical school, my father got cancer. We jumped to integrative treatments, he was one of the first patients in the world to get immunotherapy and his cancer disappeared. Then he died from a side effect of a treatment in 20 minutes 3 years later. But he died really in good health.

When you treat cancer, you really treat everything. People who have cancer are in a crisis and the crisis where your whole reality—everything you believed, everything you expected, you had planned and suddenly, you really see death in front of you, it’s very impermanent. And it really gives a profound opportunity for deep change. So it really fits my approach, and there are so many ways that you can help cancer patients from support, to after treatment, to maintain their good health for a long period of time, to supporting them in their dying process. It’s all part of the journey. It’s all part of healing.

So I had a deep interest and I made some very important discoveries about the development of oncological nutritional support that are very important, the main one being PectaSol Modified Citrus Pectin, which I developed over 26 years ago and has over 70 published papers. So it’s a field that I’m really deeply involved in. A lot of the integrative treatments that I use today, I mean, some of them have been developed by me in my clinic, but as I got more experience, my interest shifted more and more into a deeper understanding. Because, the deeper our understanding of who we are of our health, the better we can help ourselves and others with less aggressive tools. 

And it’s all about the right integration, for the right person, at the right time. And about being humble enough to recognize that we don’t know everything. What we believe in may be right and may be wrong. That’s a key thing that doctors have to remember, sometimes we forget. So that’s a little bit of an issue.

 

[00:20:02] Ashley James: So as you dove into oncology and helping patients heal when they have cancer, what surprised you? What began to surprise you in terms of helping patients heal cancer?

 

[00:20:18] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: You know, it’s a big question, of course, what helped. I think that if we look, again, we really can’t understand cancer patients unless we have cancer in one level because as one of my students told me, you are the best person who understands cancer who actually didn’t have cancer. But I still don’t know, it’s not my direct experience. 

It’s to see how vulnerable a cancer patient is to the system, how sensitive they are, how every word makes a difference, how much power doctors have when they come into treating cancer. It’s just important for us, the health providers in us, to really understand the responsibility of supporting people who are really facing death and a big change in their life, change in their dreams and plans, and how we can support them in a genuine, honest, but optimistic way because there are always choices. There are always options no matter what is happening. 

It’s about allowing the patient to make the right choices. When we are stuck in an automated survival response, which is a reactive response that is automated and immediate, we can’t really make the right choices. We can’t see our options. This is part of the value of recognizing the issue of imbalance survival response.

 

[00:22:08] Ashley James: I think that leads perfectly into what is The Survival Paradox?

 

[00:22:13] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: So, to really look into the survivor paradox, we have to first recognize the principle of the survival response. So, if I take a step back before I explain it and look at medicine and health, there is a greater recognition that inflammation drives every chronic disease and every acute disease. I mean, COVID is an example. It’s a strong inflammatory cytokine storm response. It is something I’ve been working on for decades, then people get organ failure and die.

But if we look at inflammation, it’s often pointed out to be the cause of many illnesses. It’s really not the cause. It’s really a process. What drives inflammation, what drives inflammatory response is our survival response. So the survival response is innate and built-in to each of us from the beginning of time—our ancestors, animals, every living being. So if we look at the survival response, if it’s so innate in us, it has to be automated, we can’t really control it and it has to start on its own.

So The Survival Paradox really demonstrates the same mechanisms that help us survive is the same mechanism that causes us to shorten our life. It causes chronic and acute diseases, and it will eventually also kill us earlier than expected. When we want to understand it and we understand how innate it’s in us, then we come to look at how it operates in our body. There is this automated system that it operates with, which is our autonomic nervous system. So our sympathetic response is automated. 

We can’t control it, our pulse goes up, our breathing gets faster, our heart works harder, the [inaudible 00:24:20] constriction so more blood can get to where it needs to be so we can run away. The basic response is fight or flight. We run away or we fight, and the running away is physically running away and it’s also hiding, isolating ourselves. So this is an automated response and it’s built to really start within seconds and it’s also built to stop very, very quickly. So this is something that is within us.

And then, on the second level, Ashley, there is a biochemical response. The biochemical response is really governed by a protein that we call alarmins.

 

[00:25:21] Ashley James: Can you spell that?

 

[00:25:24] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Alarmin is like alarm.

 

[00:25:26] Ashley James: Oh, alarmings.

 

[00:25:28] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah. And the main protein that I’ve been researching for 26 years, Galectin-3. I call it the survival protein. So this protein really drives our survival. So in our embryogenesis when we are in the uterus, it helps to produce healthy organs. When we are in life, it protects us from injury, from stress, from danger. The mechanism it uses to protect us to reduce inflammation, fibrosis, dysregulations, immune dysfunction, cancer, autoimmune diseases, practically every disease, every organ. Why? Because it’s so fundamental in us.

So when we understand this and we understand that there is this biochemical alarm clock that never turns off, we also understand that it can be turned on by different things—by traumas, by infections, by heavy metals, by toxins, by genetic predisposition, by epigenetics. We get a deeper understanding of what drives it and then we get a better understanding of how we can actually change the outcome.

 

[00:26:49] Ashley James: I have written down a quote from you. “Your body has an innate ability to heal from a disease as long as your fight or flight survival response doesn’t stand in the way.” So, I’m a little bit confused about this survival protein because it sounded like we need it for some things, but then when we have too much of it, it causes disease and early death?

 

[00:27:13] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Exactly. So one thing is having too much of it and the other thing, it gets activated for too long. So for example, we’ve done fascinating research. I just published two really important papers on acute kidney injury, on injury to the kidneys from an acute illness, either from infection from sepsis or COVID. Forty percent of hospitalized COVID patients have AKI and 50% of them will die. So we have kidney damage, it kind of makes us deteriorate fast due to either sepsis or problems in the circulation. We showed that Galectin-3 spikes much earlier than any of the other cytokines like Interleukin 6, which is talked about a lot. And when we block Galectin-3 in these very well-established animal models, then we can change the outcome, we can improve the outcome.

So our ability to survive is innate in us, it will always be there. So Galectin-3 will always turn on when it’s needed. The problem is either we have too much of it, or it turns on too much and it doesn’t turn off, and this is when we get in trouble. So that’s the paradox. The reason why you say I can’t understand it is because it’s a paradox. But through the book, one comes to the understanding of what drives the survival response, what drives the survival paradox, and how to change it. 

Our survival response is truly automated on an autonomic nervous system, and then it moves to the biochemical system, which is much more serious because we know if we have a sympathetic response and our breathing goes up and our heart rate goes up, when we just go outside, we just gaze at nature, we take 10 deep breaths, or sit for a few minutes and relax, we’ll feel relaxed because we’re able to turn off the autonomic nervous system very quickly. 

But when it’s a biochemical response it’s a little bit more difficult, it goes a little bit deeper. It started many, many pathways, what we call downstream proteins, downstream cytokines, downstream molecules, downstream pathways that already start a cascade of events. In many ways, Galectin-3 is what starts the waterfall. So if you can shut down the waterfall from the top, there will be no waterfall. Once the waterfall falls and hits the bottom, you want to stop it, it’s not so easy, right?

So we often chase the symptoms instead of understanding what is the origin. So The Survival Paradox offers us a window into the origin of illness and the origin of how to transform our health. That’s really the deep message of the book. That’s the feedback I get from people. It really shifted my understanding of my health and about my life.

 

[00:30:26] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. It’s been something that I’ve been focusing on with my clients for years is getting them out of that extended or period where they’re in sympathetic, they’re in the fight or flight too long and helping them with tools to change the way they think because the body listens to our thoughts. You can actually think yourself into anxiety. 

Just like we can sit and watch a zombie movie and if we hooked ourselves up to machines, the machine would notice that our heart rate has increased, our respiratory has gotten shallow and faster, that we have a cortisol spike. We’re safe. We’re sitting in a living room watching a TV, our body isn’t under physical stress, but watching a scary zombie movie, our body’s listening to that, listening to our thoughts, watching it as if it’s real, as if it’s happening to us. So our body is reacting to what it thinks is a stressor, and this is the real kicker is that we’re not just a physical meat sack. What is going on inside of our body, our body responds to. And then like you said, there’s the nervous system response, but then there’s the cascading waterfall of physiological biochemical cascades that occur.

One time I was working with a client and I noticed that so many of her habits were triggering her into a state of stress. I’d given her homework to do throughout the day to help alleviate that and she wasn’t doing the homework. I asked her, I confronted her, and I said, you’re doing everything else. You’re eating healthy, you’re doing everything, but you’re not doing this. Why is that? She goes, well, I don’t feel stressed. And I said, that’s right, it’s not an emotion. People often who are in a long term state of stress don’t even know it or if they grew up in a very rough environment, their norm is—

 

[00:32:42] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: It’s a great example, and I just talked about it in another podcast earlier today. It’s a great example, Ashley, because if we are caught in a continuous chain of stressors and stress responses, we don’t have the space between the thoughts, the space between our automated actions to connect with how we feel. So one of the first things that happen, for example, in meditation, when people start meditating for the first time, they feel, wow, really. Either they fall asleep or they feel very, very restless. Why are they feeling restless? It’s not because of meditation. They always felt restless. They just were not connected with it. Now that they slow down and they took a step back, they start noticing the stress.

Actually, I get to this level of mind training in the last chapter of the book once the whole journey is complete. I have a diagram of pebbles. You make a distance between the pebbles, things start surfacing—feeling, emotions, insights, traumas—and we connect with our stress, we connect. And then of course, what we are interested in from my perspective is not what we experience, it is our response to the experience. Do we have a survival response, or can we have a transformative response? Our body, our physiology is built to do both. We are built to have a survival response, obviously. But we are also built to have a transformative response. We can talk about it when we talk about the role of the heart in healing. That’s a key role of the heart.

 

[00:34:32] Ashley James: How do we help people then if we go outside? We tell them, go outside, breathe in, be part of nature, ground yourself, do meditation. That’s helping them stop the waterfall at the top, but now we’ve got, like you said, your body’s still in that state of stress from a biochemical standpoint. What can we do from a biochemical standpoint to help regulate the survival protein so that we don’t exacerbate it, we don’t have too much of it, and end up creating disease and early death in our body?

 

[00:35:16] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: As you said, we are not just physical beings. We are an integration of the physical aspect, an emotional aspect, the psychological aspect, the mental aspect, and the psycho-spiritual aspect. It’s all within us. This means that all of these levels are also becoming doors to heal ourselves. Changing our lifestyle, changing our diet, changing our way of thinking, working with ourselves psychologically—all of these will have an effect. So on the physical level, the one thing that we do have to do is we have to block Galectin-3. That’s why it’s such a great value of PectaSol, of Modified Citrus Pectin because it blocks Galectin-3.

So if we look at over 70 published papers on PectaSol, they cover so many different health conditions. How is it possible that it can be such nutritional support for so many conditions? Because it addresses this upstream molecule.

So the first step is understanding the survival paradox, and then understanding it really affects our inflammation and it affects fibrosis. It creates fibrosis, it creates organ dysfunction, tissue dysfunction. And we understand this and we understand how the heart is the door to changing it, then we can start taking action. The actions are many different methods and I go a lot through it in the book, of course, but right now, within this discussion, if we allow ourselves to destress long enough, it will affect our physiology.

When you do a one-hour yoga lesson, Qi Gong, or meditation, there are at least 100 different genes that open and close, and that’s the power of epigenetics. So we are made from endless people who have made us over multiple generations, and I talk about it in the chapter about healing this scar of survival. Our scars of survival are from this life, but also, we carry the scar of our ancestors—both their genetic scars, scars that affected their genetic makeup and were passed on, and even more important, the epigenetic scars. Epigenetics like above genetics because it’s very hard to change genetics, but we have a choice if a gene will express itself or will not express itself.

One beautiful Talmudic Hebrew saying says, [Inaudible 00:38:07], which means, everything is predetermined yet we have a choice. The predetermination is our genetics. The choices are our epigenetics. So we have to recognize that how we feel, what we do, and how we respond is not always because of what we did. It’s often because of habits and traumas that we carry on through our ancestors.

In my book, in the chapter about healing the scars of survival, I tell the story as the grandson of Holocaust survivor of my grandfather Isaac who I’m named after, my grandmother, a little bit my mother, and then me. I always, from a very early age like the age 11, 12, had this upper back pain, but the pain is the center of my chest in my sternum. Whenever I would touch it, I would jump. It would be very painful, and I carried it all my life. I knew it had a deeper meaning. When I finally connected with it through meditation, through deeper work, I realized I’m carrying the Holocaust trauma of my grandfather. When I healed it, I just opened up. A few years ago, like 50 years later, my chest is open, my posture is open. But interestingly enough, my grandfather is not alive, but it affected my mother without her knowing that I did this work, and that’s a multi-generational healing power of changing these very, very deep patterns. Galectin-3 is our biochemical driver, but our heart is really what allows us to change and to shift from a survival-based unhealthy response to nourishment, love, and compassion because of this physiology of the heart.

 

[00:40:11] Ashley James: That is so fascinating. I’ve heard that they can actually take like yourself, children, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, that they can see in bloodwork higher cortisol, and they can see a higher state of stress just genetically passed down. There are other studies I’ve seen where they did trauma to mice or rats, and that for up to five generations, they could see the epigenetic expressions of chronic stress

 

[00:40:51] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Completely. So it’s interesting. For me, my grandfather died at a very early age. He came to Israel with my grandmother and my mother. They escaped through Romania, and miraculously, they made it to Israel and he died in 1950, maybe 1952 at age 50—very, very young. He died from stomach cancer. And then my grandmother who saved the family in the Holocaust lived to 98, overcame two cancers, and died, as I said, at the age of 98, like in 2000, whatever. Around 2008, I think.

So, just on her graveside, my mother told us as a small comment, your grandfather, five out of his eight siblings, and his parents were killed by the Nazis. I never told this, so it was never spoken and he held his trauma in his stomach. That’s where he got his cancer. I could feel that I’m holding some of his trauma. I did before healing when I could feel my connection with him. But when I really released, when I released my trauma and my negative emotions around the Holocaust in a transformative way, and I gained this ability of freedom, my mother could never watch a program about the Holocaust ever. And then suddenly, two months later, like the day of the Holocaust remembrance, suddenly she turned on TV. Now she goes to ceremonies about [inaudible 00:42:40], about the Holocaust without her knowing what I did because by me healing the epigenetics that came from my grandfather, it affected his daughter, which is my mother.

That’s the power of multi-generational healing because time doesn’t go just forward. Time goes backward and forward. We just can’t see it because we are stuck at freezing time. That’s really the root of the Survival Paradox is holding two things—not understanding that everything changes all the time. Once we start shifting in this direction, then instead of having a life that is just goal-oriented, we start living the journey, we start living the moment, and we start not holding even to the moment because everything changes all the time.

This leads to one of my most favorite sayings, not everyone will be a miracle, but anyone can be a miracle. And why? Because everything is changing. Everything is changeable. Nothing is permanent. That’s the absolute truth that nobody can argue regardless of your belief system. It’s a fact. Now we understand this, we can look at the physiology of our body because if survival is so innate in us, it will be reflected in us. When you look at our body, we have, I’m rounding up, about 50 trillion cells. Trillion means a thousand times a thousand is a million, then a million times a thousand is a trillion times 50.

Each of these cells can have up to 1 million reactions a second. Ashley, it’s incomprehensible, okay.

 

[00:44:31] Ashley James: It is.

 

[00:44:32] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Fifty trillion cells having a million reactions a second, and we all work in harmony. Why? Because we are all working together for the greater good, for the good of our whole body, right? We are holding, we are identifying with our body, with our being, with our ego as an independent entity and we want to support it. Every cell knows it’s going to be created, it’s going to do its work, and then it’s going to go away through apoptosis. But when a cell goes into an inappropriate survival response and doesn’t want to die, how can he do it if the body’s telling you it’s time to die? It has to change its biochemistry just to change its environment.

That’s the same like the flight, running away. It creates a microenvironment by surrounding itself with a lattice formation made out of Galectin-3 that binds to different inflammatory compounds, and this environment now has a different metabolism. It’s no longer as responsive to oxygen. It doesn’t communicate anymore. And when it stops communicating, it becomes its own independent entity, and then it starts to proliferate, to grow, and it wants to take over. How do we call it? We call it cancer. Or it wants to attack other organs, how do we call it? Autoimmunity.

So these diseases are a reflection of an abnormal survival response. When we understand it and we apply this principle to health, maintenance, and to treatment, if somebody has cancer, we naturally will get better results.

So if we look at our body, if we look at our cell, our cell is a membrane, which is like the skin of the cell, and the membrane decides what comes in and what goes out. So the cell will take in what it needs and will release what it doesn’t want. It detoxifies and it nourishes. And in the membrane, you have to exchange the transformation. So the cell does it this way, the tissue does it in this way, the organs do it in this way. I don’t want to take too much to describe too many organs, but it’s a vital principle that organs take nourishment and let go of venous dirty blood. This is how the system is maintained because it’s being balanced by the heart.

The heart works completely differently, and that’s why open heart medicine is so powerful. That’s why the healing power of the heart is so powerful. What the heart does as part of its survival, the heart has to get dirty blood. The heart does not get clean blood. It gets venous blood. It gets all the stuff that the body doesn’t want, all the stuff that comes from the perspective of the heart from the past because it was released from the organs and tissues earlier on and it arrives into the heart. What does the heart do? It doesn’t say, no, no, I don’t want to take it. The heart accepts everything. It connects with the universe through our lungs, through our breathing, exchanges, releases carbon dioxide, volatile toxins, absorbs oxygen, and then the heart gives blood without discrimination. 

The aorta, the main artery that comes from the heart, is a rigid artery. It doesn’t contract. It gives blood everywhere. And who does the heart nourish first? The first organ that the heart nourishes is itself through the coronary arteries. So that’s the beauty. Our heart nourishes itself in order to nourish others and as part of nourishing others. That’s why from this approach, self-love and self-compassion come as part of love and compassion for others, very different from narcissistic focus. And if we look at the heart, one of the things which are kind of mind-blowing and again, for some reason, nobody has made this correlation until I came up with this image, but it’s obvious to me. The heart nourishes itself only after it finishes its work, only when it finishes accepting dirty blood—releasing the carbon dioxide and oxygenating the blood. Now it’s giving it to all the body only then, as really as a selfless organ, it also takes care of itself.

Physiologically, anatomically, the coronary arteries could have been in the right, in the left atrium, in the left ventricle. There’s already clean blood there. But no, the heart takes care of itself only when it’s done with serving others. It’s done with sending the blood out. That’s a selfless survival power of the heart that allows us to transform our health, and that’s the transformation of the survival response.

So how will it be, for example? So it’s done anyway even if we are anxious and we respond to everything with a survival negative emotion, the heart physiologically does this otherwise we won’t be alive. But because it’s done physiologically, it’s easier to take a ride on it and make emotional, psychological, mental, psychospiritual changes in a genuine way. So when you start applying it in different levels, when a situation in life comes, instead of responding with it with anger or fear, we respond to it with an open heart, with love, compassion, and empathy and it changes our physiology because the electromagnetic field of the heart is the largest electromagnetic field in the body. It’s 100 times bigger than the brain’s electromagnetic field.

So the electromagnetic field of the heart at any given moment reaches every cell of our body and reaches the people around us. We are connected heart to heart. So just like cells are connected to each other and the heart is the glue that keeps everything together through the circulation, so we as people are connected to each other right now, and of course from a genetic point of view realizing how many generations made us, there is no way that each person have had a mutual parent, sibling, child, or relative at one time in the past because we have been made out of an infinite number of people. So this gives us a little bit of a different perspective about health and life, right?

 

[00:51:10] Ashley James: The analogy of the heart is so beautiful and so perfect. It doesn’t discriminate. It brings in the old and the past and it connects to the universe, detoxifying, bringing in the nourishment, and then nourishing itself first before other organs so that it continues to nourish other organs. It loves itself so it can love others. I think that it is beautiful, perfect, and so needed. We have to remind ourselves that self-love and compassion are how we’re going to have the most love and compassion for those around us. I love it.

You talked about apoptosis program cell death, and another thing I’m interested in is autophagy, which is the body’s mechanism for digesting pathological tissue. I think combined with triggering apoptosis and triggering autophagy, that’s the cleaning mechanism to ensure we don’t develop cancer out of control. Does Galectin-3 turn off apoptosis and autophagy? Does it affect it in that way? Does it affect the mechanisms the body uses to prevent cancer?

 

[00:52:34] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: You know, Galectin-3 will speed apoptosis of normal cells, which we don’t want, but it will prevent apoptosis of cancer cells, for example, because they will move into glycolysis. Autophagy is really a repair mechanism of the cell and of the body. As you said, it’s a cleanup mechanism, and it’s often disrupted when we have an abnormal glucose metabolism. When we have normal glucose metabolism something called AMPK, adenosine monophosphate kinase, in the cell that produces energy from glucose by working properly with the mitochondria. When there’s not enough oxygen or when another pathway called MTO1 turns on, then you get abnormal metabolism, the mitochondria shuts down, the cell goes into a survival response.

It moves into glycolysis. Why? It can produce energy 100 times faster but at a heavy cost. Only two molecules of ATP from one molecule of glucose instead of 36, and a lot of nasty byproducts—lactic acid, et cetera. So autophagy is key to clearing the system because it will reduce the activity of this MTO1 and will restore the activity of AMPK. And yes, Galectin-3 will have a harmful effect and when we block it with modified citrus pectin and we block Galectin-3, indeed it will support healthy autophagy. And of course, I talked about in the book in detail, what really supports autophagy is intermittent fasting.

 

[00:54:27] Ashley James: Yes. That was next question was about fasting. This is great.

​​

[00:54:31] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: I talk about it a lot in the book. So intermittent fasting and how long you have to fast depends on what food you eat. If you eat a lot of sugars, you have to fast longer because you have more glycogen. If you have less carbohydrates, then even at 13, 14, 15 hours, autophagy starts, and that’s why intermittent fasting is a very valid way of eating used by multiple cultures because you think in old times, it was too late. You would eat when it was early on, easy to cook, easy to prepare food. There wasn’t light, and then you went to sleep. You ate at 5:00 PM, 4:00 PM then ended the day. Then the next morning you wake up, you will do your stuff, and then you will eat once you do some activity like at 8:00 AM, 9:00 AM, 10:00 AM. So you had 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating.

So, really, intermittent fasting is a good strategy on a long term basis. It’s different from the ketogenic diet. It’s worthwhile mentioning it because when the ketogenic diet became very popular in cancer, I remember I was teaching at A4M in the integrative oncology module like certification, I was one of the teachers. When people got excited, I warned them. I told them, look, don’t overuse it because the ketogenic diet is a survival diet. A ketogenic diet allows us to survive on a long term basis. But if the ketogenic diet was our ideal diet, it wouldn’t be our alternate diet. It would be our day-to-day diet because the body is smart.

The ketogenic diet is very useful on an intermittent basis. So for example, for my patient who will go through chemotherapy or radiation, I will use a ketogenic diet intermittently during the cycle, not all the time. But intermittent fasting is something that we can really adapt into our diet on a daily basis. You can do a longer fast, one day a week, every two weeks, or two days a month, but it really gives a break to the glucose pathways and it allows us to clean them up, to fix them. Meanwhile, if we need, then yeah, the fat ketogenic metabolism will kick in and things will be okay, and then we go back when it’s cleaner and it gets erased. It’s like giving a break. It’s like changing the oil on many levels. That’s really what it is.

So it’s important to really recognize this very important role of intermittent fasting. It’s also important to recognize because I have a fascinating chapter on detoxification in the book, and really, honestly, it’s like a topic of its own because everybody talks about detoxification and detoxification, but detoxification is really something we do all the time. Our body is a balance between detoxification and nourishment. Where if we look at our lungs, the big detoxifier, the lung naturally contracts, when it contracts, it lets go of air, it releases. The exhalation is twice as long as inhalation, which means we detoxify longer than we nourish.

When we come to this world, the first thing we do is we cry, we let go, we detoxify. The lungs let go. The last thing we do before we leave this world is we take an exhalation. So detoxification and letting go at our basis are innate to us, but we have to recognize that when we are detoxing, it’s a process and we’re going to get rid of things that we may have been hiding in certain places in our body, in certain boxes like I call it in the book. So when we open the boxes, when we throw everything from the closet on the ground, it’s going to be a mess. So we have to be equipped to clean the mess, and that’s part of what we do on a daily basis. For example, intermittent fasting is an example, right? The cleanup just like you mentioned that’s why I’m elaborating. Then when we do more concerted, longer, targeted seasonal detoxification all-around treatments and diseases, then it requires more support. But when done properly, it is effective and almost universally side-effect free, if done properly.

 

[00:59:11] Ashley James: How about longer fasts? Three- to five-day fasts or 21-day fasts. Is there any harm in doing a longer fast or do you find them to be helpful as well?

 

[00:59:26] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: No, there are a lot of spiritual traditions that use longer fasts and water fasts, and when we peel off, it’s a catabolic process. We break a lot of tissue and when we break a lot of tissue, we also break and release a lot of the toxins, a lot of the trauma that has been in the tissue. And if we clean them in nature with good food and clean water, it definitely can have a profound effect, but we are not built to shut down our system. If you look traditionally like in different religions, most of the fasts are one day or you’ll fast during the day like in Islam, which is for a month, which is pretty much intermittent fasting, right?

So from a health perspective, it’s better to drink a lot of water when you fast so you can help the clean-up. But fasting has a profound effect because it really turns off our maintenance activities so our body and our being can tune into deeper things. I’m personally not a supporter of long term fasting. I don’t think it’s physiological. It’s much better to do it in a moderate way through intermittent fasting with a one-day fast with water. We just peel off gradually. The more we do things gradually, the more we create a gradual change, the more sustainable it will be.

 

[01:01:04] Ashley James: I’m all about making sustainable, gradual, healthy changes instead of trying something really big, blowing up on our face, beating us up, and then going back to our old habits that were hurting us, right? It’s good to do small steps that then get solidified into our daily habits.

 

[01:01:23] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah. In The Survival Paradox in the chapter of detoxification, I really map the process of detoxification from preparation to exposure of what you want to detoxify, to binding the toxins, to processing them, to supporting the system, and I explain the phases and how to do it. So afterward, either it’s a health provider helping others or it’s somebody doing it, there is a better understanding of what’s happening. And then in the appendix, I provide a very detailed detoxification protocol. It’s about 80 pages in the appendix of multiple protocols, supplements, how to do, and when to do it. But the book itself is more about changing the journey. It’s about a really deeper understanding than the appendix that I give the different details.

 

[01:02:22] Ashley James: I hope that everyone that reads your book will take this as a life guide to helping them in the long term and integrating what you teach in the long term. This isn’t like one of those magazines that say 30 days to lose 30 pounds. It’s not a get quick, do something for only 30 days, get a result, and then go back to your old habits. This is something that is life-changing and you have to integrate so it takes time to integrate these changes. Can you give us homework? Give us some things we can start today, some habits we can change today to make a difference.

 

[01:03:07] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: So the first thing is to start by doing small changes. For example, try to make sure that your room is really dark when you go to sleep so your melatonin level goes up. Unplug electronics from your surroundings, especially your cell phone, put it away. When you wake up in the morning, start your day by drinking two glasses of water so you will hydrate. This is a simple thing also before bedtime. And then find the time for yourself to unwind in whatever way works for you. Whatever your belief system is, in whatever method you want. 

If you have a very busy life, then start it for a few minutes in bed before you get out of bed. Sit in bed and meditate for a few minutes, and then before you go to bed, sit for a few minutes and meditate. Just allow your mind to expand, allow your breathing to slow down, and then open your heart to yourself into every other living being that wants to be happy. Everybody wants to be happy and then go to sleep with this energy. 

The other part is actually, believe it or not, read my book. It really takes you through a process. And then when it comes to the clinical part from chapters 7 to 13, I mean, if somebody was really interested in medicine, in health, and specifics, it’s okay to skip it also. It has a lot of inspiring stories. The book is full of dozens of inspiring stories of patients, my heroes. But really, it will give you an understanding of how life is inseparable from our health and how intertwined, interdependent things are, and it gives us the power back to own our health, to own our well-being, which is so needed. I mean, self-empowerment is really not overly available these days. In a manipulative, divisive survival response, and negative environments.

One thing why certain things are so important now is because when it’s very dark, one small candle can be seen really well. When there’s a lot of light, when the sun is shining, you can turn on a candle, nobody will see it. But when it’s dark, every small light will shine far away. That’s really the value of understanding what drives us and that we have the power to change it, we really do.

 

[01:05:49] Ashley James: We talked a bit about healing the scars of survival. Do you have specific tools? What tools did you use to heal that emotional pain that was showing up as physical pain near your heart and your body? Do you have any recommendations?

 

[01:06:09] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah, of course, of course. So part of what I do, I teach meditation and healing retreats. I teach it very extensively in Israel where I have a few thousand students. But now with the book being out here, I’m going to have a one-week masterclass about transforming the survival paradox sometime in the second quarter of 2022. Then I’m going to actually have a summit about it with different guests in November of 2022. But when I do these few days of retreats, it’s what people go through profound healing, profound.

But in general, we really have to address our being on these multiple levels and really find places where it’s relatively easy for us to change. Don’t be hard on yourself. I mean, life is not always simple, unfortunately.

 

[01:07:14] Ashley James: I studied a lot of these different modalities and my favorite one for getting to the root cause and healing unresolved negative emotions that are stuck inside us is Time Line Therapy, and I highly recommend checking out timeline therapy. It was created by Tad James, of no relation. I love him but we’re not related. We have the same last name. And then also, Emotion Code I’ve had really good experiences with as well. I’ve studied Time Line Therapy and done it for many years with clients, and I’ve seen huge results. Those are the two methods that I have seen help people resolve the root cause of negative emotions, but also release them from the body like when it’s trapped in the body physically.

 

[01:08:03] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Right, right. So let me expand on this a little bit. In the clinic setting, we addressed the scars with healing, with acupuncture, with different supplements, but I also specialized in a procedure called Therapeutic Apheresis, which is similar to dialysis. I’m really a disruptor in the field even on a global level where I use an Apheresis device. It is FDA approved. And Apheresis is similar to dialysis. It’s a fancy procedure where you take the blood, you separate the cells from the plasma, and you filter the inflammatory compounds, the [inaudible 01:08:42] lipids from the plasma. And what happens, you allow the body’s opportunity to recalibrate. That’s on a physical. That’s on one end. Most develop in our special column that will remove just Galectin-3. It’s a medical device project I have with some NIH grants.

But on a healing level, it’s exactly what you talked about. It’s understanding the multi-generational and timeline events. The way we respond now is a result of things that happened in our past, happened in the past of our ancestors, and to make things really complicated, it’s a result of what happened in the future because the future goes backward just like time goes forward. I have a diagram when I present it and teach it usually in the context of retreats, and then I use a lot of scar injections where I will inject a scar with Procaine, it’s called neural therapy, with different homeopathics. Universally, scars will get smaller. 

Universally, scars from laser, from surgery that have been there for 20, 30, 40 years and you put Procaine, the scar gets numb for 45 minutes and then it gets smaller and smaller by 10%, sometimes smaller and thinner by 60, 70%. Now what’s mind-blowing, it will never come back. How is this possible? Because the scar has a relationship with the nervous system where there is a message coming to the brain that there is a scar, that something is not functional there. When we numb it, we cut this ongoing automated response, which is part of a survival response on a neurological level. And then we allow the body to relearn, to create a new memory, what we call memory reconsolidation. It’s really a psychological system. It’s not my system, but I use it on a physiological level. So this healing of the scar, I do it on a physical level, and I do it with acupuncture, healing, and visualization, so it’s a little bit more powerful. But we also do it emotionally or with different systems like you described. But they all come to allow us to be ourselves. At the moment, as much as possible, without having all these strings to our past mainly that make us react in a way that is really not how we would react if there was no past that was affecting us.

 

[01:11:23] Ashley James: I love it. That procedure where you filter the blood, I want to do that. That sounds fascinating. How can we do that? Do we have to come to you in California or other places?

 

[01:11:36] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: No, no, no. That’s actually a very specialized procedure that I specialize in. It’s really what I do. It’s usually done more in hospitals for people with genetic hypercholesterolemia, but I specialized it for inflammatory purposes and I have a lot of publications in the field. And yes, it’s done in Amitabha Medical Clinic. But important is to do this in a larger context just like you and I talk today.

 

[01:12:10] Ashley James: Right you can’t fix it by going and getting a machine to filter it because if you don’t change your lifestyle, you don’t do the emotional healing, and you don’t change your habits it’s just going to come back.

 

[01:12:20] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Sometimes if you are in really bad shape, the machine will give you a chance to recalibrate because people try to heal and try to heal and it just gives you a break. You just get a moment where something else is doing the work for you and then suddenly, you finish the treatment and your blood is a way towards when you were like 18 years old, and then suddenly, the tissue can let go and changes can happen. That’s the power of the procedure.

 

[01:12:49] Ashley James: How can we measure that what we’re doing is working? So I know heart rate variability is a good way of measuring if the body is under stress. But that’s not measuring the cascade effect, like you said. Is there a way to measure or would you give us some examples of how we know the changes that we’re making from your book, right? Like I’d say we start integrating these changes. How do we know it’s working? How do we know we’re reducing our Galectin-3 and that we’re getting our physiology back into a state of healing?

 

[01:13:28] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: So the first thing that we see that we know is we just feel better. We’re not as tired, we are more spacious, we’re not as reactive, we are happier. We smile more. The same interaction doesn’t bring up negative emotions. We are more tolerant. That’s one thing. Our inflammatory markers go down if you’d see reactive protein or fibrinogen activity, et cetera. We can also measure Galectin-3, which is an FDA-approved inexpensive test that is done by all labs. It’s supposed to be paid by insurance, almost always is. If not, if you don’t have insurance, it’s one of these things where people who pay without insurance pay 10 times more than insurance, which anyway, I won’t get into this. I can’t solve it, unfortunately. 

But when you look at Galectin-3, you have to be careful about relying on the level of Galectin-3 because of genetic differences, people can still have a damaging effect of Galectin-3 with low levels. But if you think that you are healthy, you do a blood test, and your Galectin-3 is elevated, then this can be like a wake-up call that something is going on in the body. And then following Galectin-3 is important.

So one of the basic things and why this is my number one recommended supplement is the PectaSol Modified Citrus Pectin, not because I developed it. If you look at my programs 10 years ago or 15 years ago, let’s say, yeah, some of my patients got it, but not all of them. Now it’s the first thing I did, why? Because it blocks the Galectin-3, it helps to stop this damaging process. At the same time, it removes heavy metals, it regulates the immune response, and supports the microbiome. So it has this amazing benefit. So that’s why just like the starting point, you can take as little as 5 grams a day for maintenance, or if you have serious health problems, you take 15 grams a day, either powder or capsules.

That’s a basic thing that we want to do. And then our pains get better, our memory improves because it’s all driven by the same inflammaging. This undercurrent of subclinical inflammation is not evident but it’s causing damage and rapid aging. Yes, so it’s a combination of how we feel and changes of course in our blood test also. It changes our perspective of life because when we are more tolerant, when we’re not as reactive, then some of our life dramas just go away because some of it, unfortunately, is objective difficulties that so many people have. It breaks my heart. Some of it is our reaction to our life, right? People can react to the same thing in different ways and shifting from reactivity to tolerance to what we call loving, compassionate, responsiveness instead of reactivity. It really shifts our physiology and our being. These days, Ashley, it is so critical to go to these places for all of us.

 

[01:16:57] Ashley James: You said inflammaging like inflammation and aging, and oh my gosh, that hit me so hard. I say this all the time on the show. If you want to be a statistic, live like everyone’s living. Go eat the same food everyone’s eating, go watch TV until one in the morning, binge on Netflix, or vape whatever everyone’s vaping. Just go with the mainstream flow, Hollywood, just follow what everyone else is doing and jump from fad diet to fad diet. Do what everyone’s doing and eat a ton of candy, drink a ton of alcohol, and you’re going to be a statistic. 

But if you don’t want to be a statistic, and right now, the statistic is one in three people will have cancer. One in three people has diabetes or a prediabetic. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are the three top killers. Stroke is the fifth, I believe, top killer. That is your future and early death is your future if you live like how everyone else is living. We have to be a salmon and completely go against the grain and stop the inflammation and the early aging, right? Inflammaging, I just love that.

 

[01:18:16] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Inflammaging is very much driven by Galectin-3, by the abnormal survival response by the survival paradox. In the book, I just show how it’s driven through all diseases.

 

[01:18:30] Ashley James: But it’s never too late. Do you have any success stories you can share of people who were in their 60s, 70s, 80s and they turned themselves around and gave themselves a healthier living experience?

 

[01:18:44] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: A lot and a lot of stories about cancer patients. Of course, the book is full. Every chapter is between one and five stories. So there are dozens of stories of healing, absolutely. I mean, I share my own story of healing, absolutely. As I said, everything is changeable because nothing stays the same, everything flows, right? The moment the heart stops contracting and blood stops flowing, we are dead. There’s always a flow. There’s always a movement, nothing freezes. There’s a difference between ice and water, right? Everything flows. 

So as long as things are changing, everything is possible, and this is really the key for tapping into our infinite healing potential [inaudible 01:19:39]. That’s why I mentioned already in this podcast, my favorite saying, not everyone will be a miracle but anyone can be a miracle. Because when we change our habits, we change our biochemistry, we change our physiology, and we change the outcome. That’s the beauty of the infinite healing power that each of us has.

 

[01:20:05] Ashley James: You brought up scar tissue and I think it’s really fascinating because every cell in our body is different within seven years. Every atom, every molecule of our body is new every seven years, right? We renew our body from the earth, from what we eat, we renew it from what we breathe, and yet, our body can remember to hold on to a scar. But I have actually seen people do emotional healing work and scars disappear. They no longer hold on to the memory of the scar and the body lets go.

 

[01:20:40] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Absolutely. That’s the idea, multi-dimensional. So you do the emotional work, you do the psychological work, you create space in the mind, and you do the physical work. That’s why amazing things can happen. That’s why anything and everything is possible.

 

[01:20:56] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. So I definitely encourage listeners to read your book, the number one most important book. We should be buying this for Hanukkah, for Christmas, and for the holidays regardless of what you’re celebrating. December is kind of the time to buy presents for our friends and family and those we love, and I just think your book, Survival Paradox, is a wonderful gift for those we love who we want to help them stop the inflammaging and live a healthier, happier life balancing all aspects of their life. Regardless of how long you’re going to live, it’s all about quality of life. Let’s increase the quality of life now and extend life but extend the quality of our life, and I think that’s so important.

And of course, all the links are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been wonderful. I’m really looking forward to hearing the feedback from my listeners as they dive into Survival Paradox and begin to incorporate these practices into their life. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[01:22:05] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me and being interviewed by somebody who understands what I’m talking about makes it easier, of course, and I really appreciate it. It’s a process. I mean, the book is a guideline, but if you’re really interested, use the opportunity. I’m going to start teaching more, in classes more, and offering more of these. It’s like offering my heart. You can get a sense even in a recording, I’m coming from my heart, and I’m sharing decades of studies and experience. It’s not something that I just came up with after a few months. I’ve been in the healing arts for almost 50 years, so there is a lot of experience, a lot of fun observation, and multicultural different parts of the world. Like a sponge, I absorbed and absorbed. Now I distilled it and I really want to offer this important healing advice to as many people as possible. It’s my third act.

 

[01:23:15] Ashley James: Well, I’m looking forward to your fourth and fifth, and I definitely want you to come back on the show when you have more to share and when you have more to teach. Your summit in 2022 sounds fascinating. I’d love for you to come back and continue to share with us. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

 

[01:23:28] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day.

 

 

Get Connected with Dr. Isaac Eliaz!

Amitabha Medical Clinic & Healing Center 

Website – https://www.dreliaz.org/

Facebook

Instagram

Books by Dr. Isaac Eliaz

The Survival Paradox

 

 

 

Jan 14, 2022

Check out the sample class from IIN visit LearnTrueHealth.com/coach

 

Institute for Integrative Nutrition Health Coach Training Program, Jim Curtis 

https://www.learntruehealth.com/institute-for-integrative-nutrition-health-coach-training-program-jim-curtis

Highlights:

  • What makes IIN different from other health and wellness schools
  • Bio-individuality
  • What’s new at IIN

Jim Curtis is the Chief Revenue Officer & Head of Brand at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). Before joining IIN, Jim helped develop WebMD, Everyday Health, and Remedy. He is also the author of The Stimulati Experience. In this episode, Jim shares what’s new at IIN and what you can gain from studying at IIN.

Intro:

Hello, true health-seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. Back when I started this podcast, I had come really far in my healing journey but I wasn’t done. And you’re never really done, are you? But I had accomplished reversing type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility, and that’s a lot. And I’ve been working on myself to get to a point where I’ve considered myself to have optimal health. I’m not there yet, but I am way closer to my goal than I’ve ever been.

So when I started the podcast, I had already accomplished all that, and I was still working on solving some of my health issues, right? I did not know what health coaching was when I started my podcast. I was actually doing a lot of coaching with clients for years, but I didn’t really have a strong grasp on the definition of what it is to be a health coach. I kind of wrote it off as something froufrou or something really superficial like probably someone who tells you to go for walks and drink water. I didn’t respect it because I didn’t understand it.

But as you know, if you’ve been a listener for a while, I am the most open-minded skeptic. I’m going to think critically, but I’m going to give things that maybe I just write off or just dismiss, I’m going to give them a chance. I’m going to have an open mind and try things on even if they go against my belief system because I want to grow. I want to grow outside of my own belief system, I want to learn things like the things you don’t know you don’t know.

That’s the realm of possibility where you’re so open to learning about the unknown. You see, there are things we know we know, right? We know we know how to tie our shoes. We know we know how to drive a car, and there are things we know we don’t know. I know I don’t know advanced calculus or I know I don’t know how to fly a plane. Just taking the stuff you know you don’t know and learning it is only about 5% of your life. That is not nearly as fun as being open. Opening your mind up to the things you don’t know you don’t know. You don’t even know there’s this whole world out there of possibilities. You don’t even know they exist and you don’t even know you don’t know them yet.

That’s where I like to live. And especially with my podcasts, I like to have guests that show me a world I didn’t even know existed and show me that it’s possible. It’s been through holistic medicine that what I didn’t know I didn’t know came to light. I didn’t even know there was this world where I could reverse disease naturally. That my body was deficient in nutrients that could reverse disease because I was raised in that same system you were where we waited to get sick, then we went to the doctor, and we were put on drugs to manage something but never cure it, never reverse it.

I was, for many years, told by an endocrinologist and doctors that I would always have these conditions, always have these issues—diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility. I was told I’d absolutely never have kids. That’s the reality that most people live in. But there’s this whole other world you don’t even know exists. And of course, you’re listening to this podcast so you do know that there is holistic medicine and that the body can heal itself. But there’s this whole other world that is waiting for us, and that’s 95% of reality out there is what you don’t know you don’t know. That’s the exciting part. So open your mind and let the unknown come in and show you that there’s another way of being that allows you to transform your life.

With today’s guest, it’s a little bit different. I had Joshua Rosenthal on the show back in episode 106, so that was quite a while ago. Joshua Rosenthal is the founder of IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and that’s a great episode. You should go back and check it out, episode 106.

When I first started the podcast, I had no idea what health coaching was. I looked down upon it because I didn’t respect it, I didn’t know what it was. And I had a health coach on the show. This was very early on, probably in the first 40 episodes. He told me about the school that he graduated from, IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and he said that it’s an online program. It’s been around since 1992 and they’re the world’s first health coach training program, also the world’s largest, and the most organized.

So I looked into it, I spoke with them, and that same day I enrolled. I went from being completely skeptical, but you know, open-minded, to just absolutely feeling that this was my path, that this was the next step for me. I learned so much about myself and about how to help people through that program. What I loved is that health coaching is not just eating apples, drinking water, and going for walks. Health coaching, most of it, is actually emotional counseling. It’s helping people to peel back the layers and really help themselves to bring joy and expression, love and vitality into every single area of their life, and to help balance every area of their life with that experience of joy.

The fun part about health coaching is that you help people—by asking the right questions—to uncover their joy in each area of their life. Even though you do learn 100 dietary theories in the health coaching program through IIN, most of the time you’re not even talking about food because so much of it is about our habits, behaviors, beliefs, and emotions. And so health coaching really is about helping someone achieve the goals that they set out for themselves.

What I like about IIN is that they are the most authentic company I’ve ever met. What they teach they also practice. So behind the scenes, I’ve actually had the CEO on the show as well. I’ve had a few of the staff members on the show, kind of just getting a glimpse, pulling back the curtain. I kind of love doing that, pulling back the curtain and seeing what goes on behind the scenes?

Well, today, we have another staff member who is high up in the company, and he gets to pull back the curtain a bit and show you what it means to have a truly holistic company. If you are a business owner, imagine how you can shape your business so that your employees and you have the most healthy experience. Now, they have a very low rate of attrition. They have a really profitable model because they actually invest in the health and well-being of their staff. And that’s really exciting because I see that they’re modeling something that is the wave of the future. If you can imagine every single business truly being holistic and taking care of their staff, how beautiful and how healed this world would be.

So enjoy today’s episode as you listen from the perspective of imagining this world, imagine a futuristic sci-fi where every single company treated their staff like IIN treats their staff, how neat that would be. And then if you’re interested in adding tools to your tool belt, I highly recommend checking out the free sample class. So you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach, and there you’ll get a free sample class and you can check out IIN yourself. We do talk a bit about the program. They have a 6-month program, they have a 12-month program. It’s a 12-month program, you can do part-time or full-time.

They also have smaller classes. They have newly adopted smaller classes, a few week-long classes if you are looking just to not become a health coach but looking to grow yourself. I love the health coach training program. About half of the people that go through it every year go through it just for their own personal growth and to help them become healthier and help them help just their family and friends. So that’s definitely something to check out. I highly recommend it.

And of course, IIN gives the listeners a really great price. So when you do talk to them, you can mention that you heard it from me, Ashley James, the Learn True Health podcast. And also use coupon code LTH most of the time when I interview someone. I asked them to get us a coupon code LTH and give the listeners a discount. And when you do, mention my podcast. They do give all the listeners a really, really great discount.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing my podcast with those you care about. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, we’d love to see you there. Check out the IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition sample class. It was quite moving. I thought it was awesome. It’s free. Check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach. Enjoy today’s interview.

 

[00:09:58] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 472. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Jim Curtis on the show. Now, you are the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Brand Officer of IIN, is that correct? Is that how I say it?

 

[00:10:23] Jim Curtis: Yes. I handle the business side of things. So marketing, sales, community. I wear many hats here.

 

[00:10:32] Ashley James: Now, why that excites me to interview you is because this is a health podcast. We’re approaching 500 episodes. I’ve had many of the teachers that teach the students of IIN, IIN being the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, the school that I graduated from a few years ago. I graduated in 2017 I think it was. Time kind of flies. All of a sudden you look back and it’s been years and years, but I have interviewed many of the teachers that have made videos for the students of IIN. We’ve had actually hundreds of my listeners, either they already are graduates of IIN or they signed up and became students of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition after hearing my podcast, so it’s really exciting.

What I love about IIN is I walked in thinking I’m just going to learn a lot about nutrition and I learned so much. That was just such a fraction of the piece of the pie. I learned so much about myself, about creating really true happiness, and balance in every aspect of my life. There’s so much more in terms of fulfillment, emotional, spiritual, and mental health. Doesn’t that just really make so much sense when it comes to health coaching, right? It’s not about how many carrots you eat and how many glasses of water you drink. At the end of the day, if every other part of your life is falling apart and you’re miserable but you’re eating healthy, you’re still not achieving health.

So I love that I learned from my IIN how to help myself, my family, my clients, and my friends to find the things in each area of their life that they want to enrich and all the tools that I gained to help them do that. 

What I was excited about having you on the show, I’ve had your CEO on the show who was so amazing. I had the founder of IIN on the show, who I’m such a big fan of Joshua, and then to have you on the show. And of course, I’ve had graduates and I’ve had other staff members who share fun stories like you guys have free avocados for your employees. There’s a yoga and there’s a meditation room.

Your company believes in that work-life balance, and I think that if every company on the planet modeled themselves after IIN, we would have such a happier world. Companies would save money because they wouldn’t have such a high turnover rate of employees. I want to know more about you and the branding and marketing side of IIN because this isn’t like Amazon where you guys exhaust and work your employees to the bones. You are a company of the future. You are a company that I want to learn from because you’re a company that models holistic health for your employees and for your customers, for the students. It’d be really interesting, from a health perspective, to look at how IIN markets itself, brands itself, but also, I hear really exciting things are coming in 2022. I’m so excited to learn from you, welcome to the show.

 

[00:13:52] Jim Curtis: Oh, it’s so great to be here. I love all those things that you said about the business. It’s particularly important to me because, for 20 years, I’ve been a coach, a wellness teacher, and in business. I think that goes hand in hand for everybody who’s listening to this too who are both trying to run a coaching business or another wellness business and be the teacher in that business. So IIN is kind of a great example, and I think I’m a good example of my own career, how I brought the two together, and how we kind of help our students to bring the two together.

I think that some of our employees would disagree with you about working them to the bone because we work people so hard here and they work so hard here. But what we know is that oftentimes, we’re sacrificing and working the weekends because it has such a profound effect on the health of people. We can see it from a one-to-one basis meaning we will get a story written constantly of a student or a graduate that we’ve changed their life so dramatically and had such an impact that the hard work, the sacrifice, the late hours, and the weekends are worth it. So that’s kind of what we’re doing.

And yes, we do spend an enormous amount of money on avocados, more when we are actually in the office more often. We do have a chiropractor and acupuncturist. We cater a delicious lunch for everybody every day that people are in the office now. We’ll just shut the office for a week around the holidays or we’ll take all the employees on a trip where you don’t have to do any work or even meet. They just go out and have dinner. The last time it was in North Carolina. There are a lot of lifestyle elements, and of course, everybody in the company can take the courses. That’s some of the perks of IIN.

 

[00:15:53] Ashley James: I love it. Because when I was first looking into IIN, any staff member I spoke to when I called were also graduates, and I thought that that was really neat. I know it’s not every single staff member is a graduate, but more often than not, you throw a stone in IIN and you’re going to hit a graduate. They’re health coaches as well. So talking to them didn’t feel like a high-pressure sales call, which is what I was really expecting because I’ve called other companies who do online education and it felt like they were trying to sell me used car insurance. But with IIN, the conversation was more about my goals, where I want to see myself, how would this help me, and how would this help me help others. So the conversation was more about the ripple effect and the fulfillment that IIN can bring as a student and as a graduate.

 

[00:16:50] Jim Curtis: The authenticity in business is super important to us. I have so many students and grads writing to me just talking about how they position themselves as wellness pioneers and coaches with authenticity. Over the last two years since health coaching has become so popular, there’s been a lot of schools that pop up. We kind of look and say, are they walking their own walk? Are their employees actually trained health coaches, or is it you just sign up online and then go take your videos type of thing?

Ninety percent of our employees are trained by IIN, and then when you come and start at the company, you can take the course, which most people do. And we really believe in a path to employment. When people graduate from IIN, our alumni services help get them and show them job opportunities. So we partner with companies like Wellory and many others so that IIN graduates get hired first, and then we hire our graduates. 

We’ve hired hundreds of people who have graduated to be employees, and oftentimes, they don’t have the exact background that we need in business but we can teach them. We know that they’re amazing people and very well trained because they’ve been through our program for a year or in a very intensive six months. So that authenticity, that eat your own dog food type of saying is so true to us and important to us.

 

[00:18:35] Ashley James: You, before joining IIN, have been part of some major health brands that we would recognize. What was attractive about IIN that had you want to join and work for them? Because I think you could have had your pick of so many different companies.

 

[00:18:59] Jim Curtis: I was. I had started my own businesses and exited them. I’ve had a pretty successful career in business, and I could really choose where to go next. I was just a few blocks away in New York City from the IIN offices running a wellness center that I had started there with a partner, a med spa and a wellness center, and it was going well. Someone called me up and said this role is available at IIN and they’re interested in you. I was immediately interested because IIN is such a pervasive name and wellness for so long. They’ve created the health coaching field. They had all the major health influencers and leadership from the beginning and oftentimes built those careers, but they’re still relatively unknown. It’s kind of a niche thing that you get to know IIN when you get into that wellness world.

I had been in the world and I knew what a great brand it was. I had so many people in my life who had gone through the program that I immediately was interested. It was something that I saw that this could be a great project, and this could get very big under the leadership that was in place. Not only that, we could really expand upon that mission of changing the health of the world. I could see how it wasn’t just like a media company or another company that started that puts out information and then people read it. This is a direct contact with a person whose life you’re going to change. I wanted to do that for millions of people, so it was a really exciting project.

 

[00:20:52] Ashley James: So you joined IIN and then and then you took the course. You hadn’t yet taken the course. So while you were taking the course and working for IIN, what really surprised you about going through the health coach training program?

 

[00:21:09] Jim Curtis: Well, I thought that I was the expert, right? I was the speaker. I had started the business, I had done everything, and I thought that I was really the expert and that I wouldn’t learn much from the course, but I was very wrong. And also, I had known of the IIN brand, but I was impressed by it but not connected to it.

One, I learned firsthand that, okay, food really does change everything. I focused a lot on the mental aspects of wellness, the scientific aspects, or what’s trending in wellness in terms of devices or science or how do you change your mindset to be successful. I was what I thought was a healthy eater, but I started to cook more for myself. I started to incorporate far more whole foods, raw foods, and vegetables. I realized that I was eating out way too much. The oils that were inflammatory were a lot in my diet, and it just really changed everything in that respect for me. I started to really realize what food changes everything mean, so that really impacted me.

I started to realize that IIN can teach anybody something even if you think you’re an expert because it really taught me also how to hone my coaching skills. You can be an expert, you can be someone who comes to for advice, but it’s a whole nother ball game when you’re trained in coaching how to listen, how to how to actually lead someone through the coaching continuum where you leave with a result. That was really interesting to me.

And then I loved hearing Joshua talk about why the brand is the brand. What is integrative nutrition? That’s a term he coined. Nutrition is more than food. It’s everything that feeds you. It’s integrative from what feeds you spiritually, what feeds you in your relationships, what feeds you in your career, and how you move your body, what feeds you for exercise. And then, you start talking about what colors and foods are on your plate.

That was a huge impact on me. And even all the way to Joshua’s story about the color red and why IIN uses so much of it. How he was in India and he had traveled there for many, many years. He would study with the monks there and they all wore red robes. Red really signified one, the color of our blood and how everything that we consume becomes our blood, and how we all have the same color of blood. It’s an equality. We all have red blood. Our economic status or the color of our skin doesn’t affect our blood. It’s the equalizer and a connector.

He really wanted the red symbol—that is shaped like DNA, by the way—to be the hallmark of IIN and really stand for something. He also loved it because it was different. One thing IIN is always touted is fitting out. You don’t have to do what everybody does. Even though wellness is becoming much more accepted and much more mainstream, oftentimes, you’re kind of out there if you’re practicing Reiki and trying a new diet that only eats raw foods, vegan, vegetarian. He said it was important not to fit into the general society of the world that is pertaining to just one thing.

 

[00:24:55] Ashley James: I love that idea that the red represents what’s on the inside and everyone’s got the same thing. We’ve all got blood. I have a family member who’s in hospice right now and it’s having me really reflect on end of life and how none of us get out alive, right? Death is the real equalizer. It’s something that we’re all going to have at some point. What’s really important is how we live now. I think we get really caught up in the day-to-day minutia. We get dissociated from what’s in the now and we start becoming more like robots. They say human doings instead of human beings. And then all of a sudden we’re just highly unsatisfied.

The unconscious mind, that’s where most of us are stored. The unconscious mind doesn’t want us to just go with the flow, go with the motions day-to-day. Go to a job, pay a bill, come home, go to sleep, eat. Eat, sleep, eat, sleep, repeat. The unconscious mind, that’s where our values are and our desires are. Sometimes we stuff that down and what pops up is depression, sometimes physical pain. Physical pain can manifest in the body when we’re really just not living our path. It can feel so uncomfortable in the body. If we’re disconnected from it, it can become uncomfortable physically, but then uncomfortable emotionally and we don’t know where to put it, right?

Some people fall into illness because they’re not eating healthy and they seek out a health coach. And then if it’s an integrative nutrition health coach, that health coach is helping them analyze and look at all areas of their life and really listen to them. That’s what I love because it isn’t a program where you just are scripted and you’re just telling people what to do. You’re listening. You’re listening for the deepest layers of concern, right? You’re listening and you’re listening, and then you ask questions that help them dig deeper themselves.

It’s not about you talking at them. It’s kind of funny how as a health coach, how little talking we do. When you’re doing it really well, you’re asking the right questions that drill down and drill down and allow a person to see what’s beneath the layers that they themselves have, it’s been in their blind spot. Then they have their own aha moments and oftentimes they’ll even tell you what their homework is. When you’re really doing it well, all you’re doing is just being this amazing listener. You said that that’s a skill or a tool that you learned when you went through the IIN program.

I was so impressed with—before I did the program, I’m also a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. I really feel like I’ve trained myself in listening, and IIN really had me slow down and listen even more, and listen even more, and listen even more. My husband who’s an introvert always says, God gave us one mouth and two ears so use them proportionally.

 

[00:28:15] Jim Curtis: Right. I love that. I mean, active listening is a real skill. You’ve almost become magnetic when you’re a great listener. When you’re listening more than you’re talking, it has more of an impact when you say something because people know that you’re really processing what they have to say, and that’s kind of what coaching is all about—learning those things.

 

[00:28:38] Ashley James: You said active listener. I’ve said in the show in the past (I think a few years ago), you know, some people have never ever actually been heard. And going to an integrative nutrition health coach, going to an IIN graduate may be the first time in their life that they’ve actually had someone truly hear them and truly listen without ulterior motive, without their judgments of their past. Just someone really authentically being 100% present to them. That in itself is so cathartic. It allows the person to slow down and really feel honored, respected, and heard as a human being. 

I feel like growing up, we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others, comparing yourself to the Kardashians, whoever’s on Instagram, or whoever was popular in school. I think everyone has that in their mind, maybe the imposter syndrome, or maybe they feel like there’s always someone who is better than them and so they’re not good enough, right?

They’ve never felt like just being honored as an individual because it is an even playing field. We all have the same color blood, and we’re all going to die. It is more about how we live in the now. We can cultivate physical things on the outside like I can have a lot of material goods, but that doesn’t leave me with anything that I’ve cultivated on the inside. But the more we cultivate on the inside, that’s something that can never be taken away from us.

That’s what I love about the health coaching program because it’s like 99% of it was called feeding on the inside, and then 1% of it was here’s like 100 different dietary theories. I thought it was going to be the opposite. I thought I was going to learn just a bunch of nutrition stuff. Boy, was I wrong. I love the program and the impact that it has. What are some other skills that you were surprised that you learned like active listening? Were there any other skills that you were really surprised that you learned when you went through the program?

 

[00:30:46] Jim Curtis: There is something called bio-individuality, meaning we go through life getting taught that this is the right diet for you. This is the way you should eat, this is what a diet is, and then there’s always this pull between keto is right or vegan is right, and you have these two groups. What I love is that it kind of bridges the gap there. Diets are ways of eating. When we say diet, I mean nutritional diet, not going on a diet. Ways of eating that are right for many different people.

Vegan may not be right for one person, but it could be right for another. As opposed to, okay, there’s this belief that everybody has to be vegan or everybody has to be keto. That was something that I learned. I was really impressed with the concept of crowding out, meaning we put a lot of pressure on good and bad, right? I’m bad, I didn’t exercise. I’m good, I exercised. I’m bad, I ate a doughnut. I’m good, I ate broccoli. There’s no good or bad, right? There’s food.

You can start to crowd out foods that make you feel better or worse. Meaning, if you’re used to drinking 12 Diet Cokes a day, start to drink 10 Diet Cokes and 2 glasses of water, or 6 glasses of water and 6 Diet Cokes until you crowd out the food that is making you feel less good, right? Instead of getting really down on yourself for having the food, understand that you’re a work in progress and that what you’re consuming is just food and we put the good and bad on it, and that we want to consume more things that give our body and our cells more energy. I always really love those types of things, which I didn’t think of in that way before. I’ve always been, I feel guilty, emotional eater type of person, and that really set the stage for me.

The other thing I noticed with the program is that you don’t have to become a health coach, right? A lot of people are doing this just for them. Although I did some coaching and I’ve always been a coach, I did the program and it affected me profoundly as an individual and how I was relating to people. I didn’t actually have to go and be a full-time health coach. By the way, integrative means that you’re also life coaching. This is not just food. This is life coaching and health coaching in one, but you don’t have to do that.

A lot of people just do it to start with them. They’d use it to coach themselves, their families, or their friends. Some people write books. There’s a book in everyone, and some people say, I’m doing this so I can be more credible or have more information when I want to write my book, my health story. Some people nowadays even become health influencers. They start a content-driven media type of health influencing in the sense of they’re reaching millions of people on a massive scale or hundreds of people, it doesn’t matter how many people. It’s just how you’re reaching them with health information. That’s very much what you’re doing, which I’m impressed with. Those were all things that I learned very quickly.

 

[00:34:36] Ashley James: And hospitals are hiring health coaches, insurance companies are hiring health coaches. My insurance company offers me a free health coach through my insurance because they see it saves them money when someone is actively going through health coaching, they’re working towards achieving their health and wellness goals, and then they don’t end up going on a bunch of medications and costing them money. So they would rather pay upfront for preventive medicine, which is what health coaching can be because it can help us to go from feeling good to feeling great or feeling great to feeling awesome. But most people wait until there’s a pain point, and the pain point doesn’t have to be physical health. It can be dissatisfaction with their marriage, with their work, with their body image to be able to go to an integrative nutrition health coach and work on those areas.

You’re not allowed to call it counseling because of how they define counseling now, but it was once called counseling back in the day before they changed the rules of what you’re allowed to call counseling and not call counseling. But like I said, with active listening, you’re really just guiding that person and helping them to get to the root. I love that.

Take us to the environment of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and share with us what changes, what improvements have you made since you joined the team?

 

[00:36:25] Jim Curtis: Well, what can I say to that? The changes that I’ve really made since being here are accessibility, meaning we have provided a lot more content for free. People can come on our Instagram, YouTube, webinars, or lives that I do. So I’m constantly interviewing our visiting teachers so people can have access to them on a live basis, whether it’s a webinar, an Instagram Live, it’s a live event for the community, or it’s a special event for the community that people go to. So there’s a lot more access for people who aren’t students for free content. And then there’s a lot more community access for the graduates and the students so that they can interact, get information, and talk with me, so that’s one thing.

We’ve gone a lot deeper into business. The folks that are like, I’m really good at coaching or I’ve learned a lot and I’m ready to start my wellness career but I really don’t know the first thing about business, we do a lot to help people along the way. You can now just sign up online. You know what we’re finding is that a lot of people are younger that are signing up and they’re of the generation that doesn’t like phone calls. They just want to sign up online, not talk to anybody, and communicate via chat and email. We accommodate and do that now a lot more.

What has made the biggest impact here is that we’ve hired a lot more people at the company. The company’s size has grown so that we have a lot more touchpoints with alumni services, with student success. We are constantly creating new courses. We have two new specialty courses on Whole Person Health with Deepak Chopra and Detox Your Life so that we have more people to service the students more often, and we have more content that is either cheap or is less expensive and free. That’s the impact that I hope that I’ve made, that I’ve made it more accessible for many more people.

 

[00:38:48] Ashley James: Well, it sounds like there’s a lot more courses and content since I graduated. Back when I joined, there were I think three courses. It was the main one, you had to take the main one first, which was yearlong at the time. For me, I invested about 20 minutes a day, or if I got really busy in my life I would spend an entire Sunday afternoon once a week and Sunday afternoon evening going through and studying. But day-to-day, I could listen to the lectures in the car, while I’m doing laundry, while I was cooking. I was able to fit in the training for a whole year in my very busy schedule being a career mom and all the stuff I do.

So many people have asked me, do you think I could do this? I have a family and a career, or I’m a student and they have a family or whatever? I say, yeah, I think anyone who wants to do this could do this because you can do the training while you’re doing tasks as long as you can listen. You don’t even have to necessarily watch. Although there are slides and there’s a person on stage sometimes.

What I would do is I download the slides, I’d look at them, then I’d listen to the lecture, and then I’d go back and look at the slides. If I’m, for example, driving or exercising, I definitely do it while I was exercising like if I was on the machine. And cooking, I just have it on the speaker and then I’d go and pop my head over and look at the slide when they reference something.

It is available to people. It is accessible to busy people, and it was designed for busy career moms basically, who could fit it in 20 minutes or 30 minutes a day. And then you guys came out with—and there’s a few other courses. There was a write your own book course and I think there was like an autoimmune. There are advanced courses that someone who was a graduate could take. And then after I graduated, you guys came out with a six-month-long program basically condensing it so someone could be considered a full-time student. Although, I still think you could have a career and be a “full-time” student with IIN given that it’s in six months. So now you have all these other trainings. Are there training that people can take before they become an integrative health coach? Could you explain that, walk us through that?

 

[00:41:17] Jim Curtis: Certainly. You’re absolutely right. I mean, you did a great job balancing everything, and I think that we try to make the program so you can. But also so that you still have contact with over phone calls and now a lot more virtual Zoom type of stuff. And then live events, we’re still meeting in person less but still doing it. Now there’s a Spanish course. So if you only speak Spanish, there’s Spanish Assist, so there’s been a lot of enhancements.

You don’t have to go through the health coach training program anymore to say I want to take a course. We have short-form courses like Whole Person Health, which in over seven weeks you can learn from Deepak Chopra and others. It’s less than $500. I think Detox Your Life where you find out how to remove toxins from your food, from your home, and from the people around you, that is under $300. We also have courses on emotional eating, hormone health, gut health, and even business courses that you can take. Oftentimes, you don’t have to be a grad.

There is an advanced licensing course that oftentimes graduates take so that they can sit for the advanced licensing of a third-party accreditation. You do have to be a grad for that. But there are many courses now that you don’t have to be a grad of the 6- or 12-month course to take, and that’s part of the accessibility that we wanted to offer this to more people in the world.

 

[00:42:58] Ashley James: That’s really exciting. For those shorter courses that are more specific, do you find that people then graduate and then join to become a holistic health coach, that they see the benefit in continuing to study with IIN?

 

[00:43:13] Jim Curtis: In some cases, yeah. In some cases, people work on their wellness a little bit slower, so it’s different for everybody and that’s really apropos to what we’re all about. We want to deliver the wellness that is right for you. So in some cases, people will go on and say that was amazing. I want more, and they go on to take the health coach certification course, which is the health coach training program and they do really well. Others say, I like that but I’m going to go on to take the Hormone Health course, or I’m super interested in the Gut Health course because I have gut health problems. I see you’re working with a company called Seed. I love that probiotic. They give a supplemental course to that too so they go on and do it. It’s really what meets your needs, and that’s important to us.

 

[00:44:11] Ashley James: I love it. Now your background is in business and so you’ve obviously had an impact on the new business training that IIN provides for health coaches. That’s actually something I’ve seen in my past. I’ve been in this industry since I was a teenager. Actually, I took all the courses that I could with Landmark Education and became a coach through many of their programs, and then I was hired to be on staff in my early 20s with Landmark Education. Then I went on to study neuro-linguistic programming and did coaching through that until I found IIN. 

One thing I’ve learned working with training coaches because I did that through Landmark and then also through neuro-linguistic programming, I saw that the biggest problem was that they didn’t know how to market themselves. They didn’t know how to grow a business. There’s a stigma around money, business, and charging people. They felt kind of like, I don’t know what to charge people. Their tools would change someone’s life, would completely change someone’s life. I mean, you can’t quantify that, right?

I mean, you don’t want to charge too little because they don’t take it seriously. You don’t want to charge too much. And then there’s a person worth, right? The health coach feels like there’s this, what am I worth? I don’t want to charge that much because I don’t want people to say no. They go through this fear because there are so many negative stigmas around money, charging, and knowing what you’re worth, but also creating a fair business model so that you have a mutual win-win. You really have to face a mirror and look at yourself, look at all the negative emotions and looming decisions around money when you’re getting into doing your own business. What kind of advice can you give health coaches when it comes to these kinds of concerns?

 

[00:46:13] Jim Curtis: It’s really common. First off, don’t feel like it’s just you. I did all the Landmark courses too, by the way. I love Landmark. I started with them when I was 19 years old and I moved to New York City. I took a year off of college because I was dealing with an illness and I moved to New York City and I started Landmark. It’s just, I mean, really wonderful and impactful. I can see how that would lead to IIN because it’s very much about rapid transformation.

When people go through this course and they start to say, am I worth it? Am I ready to be a coach? And then if I’m selling wellness, should I really be charging? How do you combine those two? Because oftentimes, people see sales as a dirty word and wellness as the good word so they want to give it for free. But here’s the important thing. One is you’ve been through the training, you’re there to help someone, you deserve fair compensation for that. 

Sales is really a service. I mean, if you’re selling something that’s hurting people, if you’re selling cigarettes or junk food, yeah, I can understand you’re doing the marketing that is tricking people into something that’s not great for them. But you’re providing a service. Your sales is a service that’s helping people change and better their lives, and then better the lives of the people around you.

Knowing that your mission is really beneficial for the world is the first step. Knowing that you are uniquely positioned because one, you want to do it, you have a desire and a passion to do it, and because you’ve been trained to do it. But sometimes, you just have to go through the fear and know that you are the one, believe it, start to do it, and it becomes very real to you. And that you’re worth it. You need to be financially stable to make people financially stable. You need to be working on your finances and your health so that you can help other people with that.

I always lead people to Marianne Williamson’s book called The Law of Divine Compensation. And in The Law of Divine Compensation, it really talks about there are real rules around exchange of energy and receiving payment for the service that you’re doing. That’s a great book to read for anybody that’s kind of struggling with this, and that’s kind of how I approach it. We work with a lot of students. I particularly work with a lot of students on that because it’s common, and if you’re feeling that, you’re not alone at all and you can overcome it.

 

[00:48:56] Ashley James: Do you have to be an IIN grad to take business training, or do you have business training at any health coach they graduate from anywhere take?

 

[00:49:09] Jim Curtis: We have business training that any health coach who graduated from anywhere take. We have the Advanced Business course. We’re constantly updating our course. It’s been around for 30 years, but every year, we add new content, change things, and we have more business in the course now. Then I do a lot of free training. People can sign up for webinars with me. I, on Instagram, every Thursday do business basics where I answer questions. We know that having confidence and understanding your value and how you’re contributing to the world is an issue sometimes, so we do a lot to help train people on that.

 

[00:49:50] Ashley James: Now what I loved about the IIN program, back when I took it it was 12 months long. Within the first half, you’re learning how to do health coaching, but then you actually start working with people halfway through. The rest of the program is like fine-tuning that and teaching you how to grow your business. It’s not like IIN just teaches you how to be a health coach then throws you to the wolves like, okay, grow your business, bye. You’re actually growing your business. Something that Juliet, she was the person that helped me on the phone because that was before you guys had a robot on the website.

 

[00:50:26] Jim Curtis: She’s still here.

 

[00:50:27] Ashley James: Juliet’s amazing. I love talking to her. For those listeners who just sign up online, you should just give them a call just to experience it because I really had a blast talking to Juliet. She was so helpful and I called her many times asking her questions. She was always a wonderful resource. I really love her. She said, you know, the most successful IIN students pay off their entire program before graduating. I said, really? She said, yeah, because you start working with clients halfway through, and so then you’ve got another six months of growing your business and being trained to. You have IIN teachers to talk to and to connect with. You get to grow while there’s kind of a safety net because you’re still in the school, and I thought that was really cool.

Then of course, with your full time course, it’s after three months of doing it then you start growing your business for the next three months while you’re still in the program. I just like that IIN always creates a soft place to land while someone is completely changing their career path.

Now, I’ve heard something like 50% of graduates don’t go on to become health coaches. They did it purely for their own personal growth, which I can totally see doing that or to augment it or just bring tools to what they already do. So about half of the graduates do go on to become health coaches, and many of them then want to start their own business. There are so many mediums, like you said. You could become a content creator, write a book, do social media, work for a hospital, or work for a clinic. I know so many clinics now where they have a health coach with a chiropractor, with a doctor because it’s looking at the person as a whole.

There are a lot of opportunities out there, whereas I don’t think 15 years ago it didn’t even exist then, even 10 years ago. There are so many more opportunities now. I heard Joshua say about two years ago, he said that this is the number one growing field in the health space.

 

[00:52:39] Jim Curtis: Coaching is, if you look at the jobs report, one of the number one growing professions. We’ve transcended just health. It’s like, okay, coaching is something that people want to do, why? It’s because people are looking for a purpose in their lives. This allows you to make a great living while serving something greater than you, and that is other people serving a bigger purpose. That’s changing the health of the really sick United States. Although we’re in 175 countries, the United States is the most ill of 133 million people suffering from diabetes or obesity. It’s a place that really needs health coaches and so in demand.

We talk about all the different things health coaches can do, and I always say set up multiple revenue streams, meaning see some clients directly one-on-one. Work part time. There are so many tech companies now hiring health coaches like Wellory or Kensho, wellness centers like The Well or even hospitals like Cleveland Clinic. Mark Hyman says he only hires health coaches from IIN, same with Frank Lippmann hires IIN health coaches. There are many different ways, many revenue streams, we say, as a health coach that you can become really financially stable doing what you love and something good for the world.

 

[00:54:10] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Are there any testimonials that you feel really connected to? You say that people write in all the time. Maybe in terms of the business training that you give, do you have a testimonial that you feel you’ve earned because you’ve had a direct impact on the lives of the students?

 

[00:54:37] Jim Curtis: You know, we have so many of them. I just read a three-page testimonial yesterday about a woman who started IIN during a really difficult time because her daughter was diagnosed with cancer. She was ill, she was having trouble with what she was doing and her finances, and she knew she had to make some changes. She wrote literally a three-page letter about IIN and how it really gave direction and opened the doors that she took that changed the rest of her life. I hear that so often. We put them up on our site and we have thousands of people commenting on Trustpilot and that kind of thing.

But even when I just interviewed some of these folks that have become superstars like Melissa Wood or the founders of Sakara Life, I could name even Bobbi Brown cosmetics, they talk about how IIN was really the jumping-off point that allowed their lives to change. They dedicated themselves to this study, and by opening that door, it opened up so many other doors. Whether it was in their career or in their health. 

I wish I had them in front of me to read, but we have our admissions reps who are all IIN graduates and we go over every week, who did you speak with? Because we’d love to hear the stories. We have women that are grandmothers, they’re in their 80s. During the pandemic, their daughters and their grandchildren came to live with them and she took the course because she wanted to make sure that she was cooking right for them. She was into wellness, she had retired, and she wanted something to do. I love that story.

There was one woman who had diabetes and she lost her fingers due to diabetes. Her daughter had juvenile diabetes and she’s like, okay, this stops here. I’m not going to see my daughter lose her fingers. She started the course. And then sometimes you see families go in together like mother and daughter to take the course together. Guess what, we even have some guys now. We have a lot more doctors and a lot more people from sports. We have Olympic athletes, we have ex-NFLers, and we have a lot more men signing on. Before it was 100% women and now it’s about 90% women. Even guys are getting into this a little bit.

 

[00:57:18] Ashley James: That’s funny because the person I interviewed when I first learned about IIN, it was on my show. It was the first year I was doing my show and I interviewed a graduate of IIN. He was talking about how he reversed his ADHD that he had had since he was a kid with food. At the time, honestly, I was really skeptical of this title health coach. I thought it was hokey. I thought anyone called themselves a health coach. I had no idea, I had no concept as to what it was. I asked him in the interview where did he learn from? He told me about IIN and I signed up that day after the interview.

I talked to my husband. I mean, it’s a major commitment, right? For me it was a year-long commitment, it’s a financial commitment. But after that I called Juliet, I had a few conversations with her. I picked through the website—super impressed by all of the visiting teachers. I was like, oh my gosh, these are all the people I look up to and learn from anyway. I love these people. I read their books. I watch their YouTube videos. I talked to my husband, he was like, why are you still talking to me? Go, sign up. Start, do it. I was just in love with the program.

But it’s so funny how that morning I woke up and health coaching wasn’t on my radar. When I heard the word, I don’t know, I poo-pooed it because I didn’t know what it was and so I thought it was hokey. By the end of the day, I’m like, yes, I’m becoming a health coach. This is amazing. It was so funny.

 

[00:58:51] Jim Curtis: That’s awesome. At one time, chiropractic and acupuncture were considered hokey too, and then insurance started covering it, it became more accessible to people, and they saw the real benefits from it. That’s what’s happening with health coaching right now as well.

 

[00:59:05] Ashley James: Right. Has there been any traction in terms of insurance covering graduates of IIN?

 

[00:59:14] Jim Curtis: Well, it’s in the process. Right now, one insurance is called CPT Codes. It’s in the code process where they’re collecting data. They will make the case that health coaching increases health outcomes. And then from there, they submit for coverage. So that usually takes a couple of years and it’s been a year and a half in. IIN, unlike any other school, has lobbyists in DC that are working on healthcare bills and getting health coaching inserted into those bills, and we’re making real progress.

We’re, as a company, just trying to move it in general. We’re not setting up an online training with videos just so that we can make money. We’re trying to change the health of the world, and that includes hiring lobbyists and people that work for the company to represent health coaches in DC, in government, and move the insurance process forward. So it’s happening.

 

[01:00:19] Ashley James: I hope my listeners now understand. This is why I was excited to have you on the show because it’s not just a company that wants to make money off of you. When you look at other companies like I look at Amazon, you feel like they’re just like, give me your wallet. Just give me your wallet. You get convenience out of it, but there really doesn’t feel like there’s this huge humanitarian effort behind it. Whereas when you look at IIN, you guys want to change the world, and you’re doing it and you’re working on it.

I know that when I first signed up that night, I have a really clear memory of watching the first modules crying tears of joy. My mirror neurons were just firing. I felt the oxytocin and the sense of connection and community as Joshua was starting the whole year. There’s a huge audience. Even though I’m watching a video, I felt like I was in that audience. I’m brought back to that moment just crying because I felt like this is it. We are here to make a difference in the world. This is my mission and I am on this path with all these people.

Every graduate, whether they go on to be a health coach or not, they are part of that ripple that wants to make a difference in this world. That is so exciting to be part of this bigger picture together as a collective moving forward, having this common goal of helping people live happier, healthier lives in all aspects of their life. I would just love it if we could take the model that IIN uses and duplicate it for all companies in the world.

In closing, I’d love for you to share—you’ve been with so many companies. You started companies, you’ve been with major, major companies, and what’s the difference? When you first walked into it IIN, walked into the building, what is the sense, the ambiance of IIN versus all the other businesses that you’ve worked with?

 

[01:02:33] Jim Curtis: Well, people really feel a responsibility. Everybody feels a responsibility, meaning the content they create, the people that we partner with, everybody is really concerned with, does this fit the mission? There’s nothing that we launch, partner with, teacher that comes on, or even if we’re writing something that’s about staff picks because the staff may love some products and we want to communicate them. There has to be a group consensus, meaning, is this to the benefit of the people that we’re talking to? Does this give a holistic view of it? Does it pertain to bio-individuality?

People really feel that they can make a difference in the product and that their view matters because it does because everybody here has a health coach. So it’s really important that we’re living up to what we teach. It’s a business. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes we’re working really hard hours and we’re hitting deadlines. It’s for-profit for sure, so we have to be financially healthy just like our health coaches do. But what’s different here is that there is real care and concern, it’s not just a job, and that to me means everything.

 

[01:04:09] Ashley James: That is so cool. I love it. Thank you so much, Jim Curtis, for coming on the show and sharing about IIN. I know there’s a lot in the hopper, and I know that there’s a lot we can’t talk about, but is there anything you can talk about future projects that are in the hopper?

 

[01:04:25] Jim Curtis: Stay tuned. There’s more coming, that’s what I’ll say. There’s definitely more coming from IIN that will blow your socks off, just stay tuned.

 

[01:04:33] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m really excited and I’m bummed we can’t talk about it. But like you said, stay tuned, it’s happening soon. I’m very excited. Now, listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That takes them to a page where they can get a free module from IIN. They can check it out and get a feel for the training. I recommend listeners do that. Jim, is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[01:04:57] Jim Curtis: Well, I just want to say, thank you so much. I’m proud of you as a student that’s doing so many amazing things and inspiring so many people on the platform that you’ve built. It’s really impressive, and thanks for having me on.

 

[01:05:10] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on. I know you’re super busy. You’re doing really great work. I’m very proud of IIN. Again, I keep saying that this is the model I wish all other businesses were, but could you imagine if all for-profit businesses looked at the ecology of their community, their customers, and the planet? Ecology means that it’s healthy, that it takes everything into account, right? If any company, if a farm, let’s say, said is this ecological for us to spray this on the food versus do a different kind of farming that doesn’t require any chemical. If every company really started with, is this an ecological decision for my community, for my employees, for the planet?

Can you imagine if Amazon took into account the health of their employees and the health of their customers, how different would this world be? And so I love that IIN really for me, yes, it’s a for-profit company and that’s exactly what I want it to be because I want it to be the example that all other companies should look to to see that there can be a profitable business that takes care of its employees and its customers and looks to make the world a better place.

Thank you so much for being part of this project, and I can’t wait to see what IIN can create in the future. I’m thrilled that you guys are shaping the health industry. There’ll be a day when insurance will pay for someone to see an IIN grad. And that level of satisfaction, growth, happiness, and balance that that person receives and it’ll all be because of the money that you guys invested in lobbying and that you guys invested in marketing. So I thank you for all the work that you’re doing now that’s going to have such a profound impact for generations to come.

 

[01:07:01] Jim Curtis: Thanks. I appreciate that.

 

[01:07:04] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview about IIN and looking behind the scenes, learning more about the health coaching training program. If you’d like to check out the sample class, go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out.

If you have any questions for me, feel free to reach out to me you can join the Learn True Health Facebook group. We have dozens of health coaches in the Learn True Health Facebook group, probably hundreds now. We’re almost at 4,000 members. It’s a really amazing group of holistic-minded people. You can come in and ask questions and get a lot of fantastic feedback from me and from all the other people out there as well, the community, the listeners have joined the group. Several guests actually have joined the group and like sharing and helping out as well.

But if you have any questions about IIN, you can ask it in the Facebook group, and not only will you hear from me, but you’ll also hear from a lot of listeners who’ve graduated from the program and have gone on to help their friends and family, have built careers around it. There are also people who are already in the health business in some capacity and used it just to grow their tool belt. You can use it as a launching pad to completely change your career path and start a new one, or if you’re already on a career path, you can use these tools to aid yourself.

What I love about this episode though is this idea that we could take this model and we could replicate it for every business to flourish, to grow. Imagine if every business’s number one priority along with income, along with profit, right? Every business wants profit. But imagine if they said, okay, we want to make a profit and we want to take care of our employees as much as we value taking care of our customers.

Could you imagine how better this world would be if profit, taking care of customers, and taking care of the staff was equally as important? Because the staff who feel taken care of then, in turn, takes care of the client, the customer better and takes care of the company better. Everyone’s healthier, everyone’s happier. I just think that this is such a needed thing. That’s why I love interviewing staff to learn more about IIN’s business model.

Thank you so much for listening to this show. Thank you so much for sharing it with your friends. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to hear from you. And again, check out the sample class. It’s awesome, learntruehealth.com/coach. Have a fantastic rest of your day.

 

Get Connected with Jim Curtis!

Instagram

Linkedin

Book by Jim Curtis

The Stimulati Experience

Jan 2, 2022

Go to TakeYourSupplements.com to speak with a holistic health coach so you can get on the right nutrient protocol for your needs and health goals!

Joan's Websites:
Join the Online Addiction Reset Community: https://www.processedfoodaddiction.com
Free evidence-based handouts:
www.foodaddictionresources.com
Food Addiction Books: www.foodaddictionbooks.com
Food Addiction Reset: www.foodaddictionreset.com

 

471: Healing Processed Food Addiction with Dr. Joan Ifland Using Neuroscience, Mirror Neurons

https://www.learntruehealth.com/healing-processed-food-addiction-with-dr-joan-ifland-using-neuroscience-mirror-neurons

 

Highlights:

  • What is food addiction
  • How do you get food addiction
  • Processed foods attack cell function in eight different ways
  • Processed foods impair major frontal lobe functions
  • What are mirror neurons
  • 11 behaviors in addiction diagnosis

 

Dr. Joan Ifland is a food addiction expert and the lead editor and author of the textbook, Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery. She has helped thousands of people overcome their food addiction and recover from diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, fatigue, isolation, and obesity. In this episode, Joan explains what food addiction is, how it affects people’s lives with food addiction, and what you can do to overcome it.

Intro:

Do you have supplement confusion? Do you wish you could speak to an expert and figure out what you should take and why? If so, then you’ll definitely want to go to takeyoursupplements.com because they let you speak to a holistic health coach for free. Takeyoursupplements.com health coaches have been helping people gain their health back and dial in their supplement protocols for over 20 years.

Our health coaches want to help you gain your health back naturally with the best holistic medicine. They work with the highest quality vitamins, minerals, and herbs to support you in increasing your health and achieving your fitness goals. More energy, mental clarity, balanced hormones, and blood sugar, better sleep, stamina, fertility, immune and digestive health, and the list goes on and on. Natural medicine gives your body the raw building blocks it needs to create new healthy tissue, repair, and heal. Everyone who supports their body’s ability to heal itself with the right natural medicine protocols feels and sees a substantial positive shift in their well-being.

So if you want to feel and look healthier, go to takeyoursupplements.com, fill out the form, and one of our amazing highly experienced health coaches will speak with you for free and help you order the right supplements for you at the right price. They help you to order directly from the manufacturers so the savings are passed on to you. Plus there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee so you know you will get results or your money back.

These are the exact same supplements that my husband and I have been on for years and then the same supplements that we give to our child. I love these supplements. They’ve really worked, of course, alongside a very healthy diet, which another benefit of going to takeyoursupplements.com is you will have the aid of your health coach who will help you dial in your diet and your supplement protocols to help you gain your health back and gain all of your health and fitness goals. So it’s really a win-win situation for you.

Visit takeyoursupplements.com today and try them out. Give them a try and see just how amazing you feel with their help. Takeyoursupplements.com

 

[00:02:24] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 471. I’m so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. Joan Ifland on the show who has groundbreaking research in how to recover from food addiction. She’s designed a program that helps people with severe processed food addiction overcome that. What I really like, Joan, is that you mentioned that those who have food addiction have been severely disrespected in the media, even from certain therapies. It’s a not well-understood addiction, it has a really negative stigma, and people feel a lot of shame and guilt about their food addiction. I’m really excited for you today to unpack what is food addiction.

It’s such a strange thing to me because we have to eat, right? You don’t have to drink alcohol. You don’t have to smoke cigarettes. You don’t have to do heroin, but we have to eat. To have such day-to-day, moment-to-moment struggle with the internal desire for food, that hunger that never goes away, and all the body shame around that really eats the person alive. And then to feel like they can’t get any help because there’s such a stigma around it.

I love the work that you do. You’re making such headway in this field, and I’m looking forward today for you to share some tools and for us to dive into this. I think that there are degrees of food addiction and there are degrees of recovery. And so I hope that for all listeners who have caught themselves realizing that for whatever part of the spectrum they’re on in their recovery or in food addiction, that they’re able to gain a foothold, some healing today, and some tools that they can take away and continue to grow. So welcome to the show.

 

[00:05:00] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yay. Thank you. Wow, that was the best introduction. Well done. You’re very clear on the issues and the context in which these issues have developed. Well done. Well done.

 

[00:05:16] Ashley James: I want to start by saying that this topic is no stranger to me. I watched my father struggle with food addiction. I watched my mother and I don’t know what flavor of food addiction she had, but she definitely had body shame, body issues. She was always dieting. It was like the last 15 pounds to lose. My mother was never overweight, but there was a lot of control around food. Then she would binge red jujubes and that was her secret. She would eat almost nothing. She would have almost nothing and then she would maybe eat handfuls of red jujubes.

She believed low fat, so she bought into, okay, I’m going to grill a chicken breast and I’m going to have half a cup of broccoli and that’s my lunch. She believed that any starch was really unhealthy, so she would yell at me if we were at a restaurant and I ordered a fish with a side of rice. She did this one. She stood up at the restaurant and yelled at me. I was about 12 and she shamed me and yelled at me because I ordered rice. I mean, in her mind, she was so afraid that if you ate starch that you would get fat.

So I grew up in this very controlling, food was very controlled, and she had a lot of emotion and upset around it. And then my dad on the other hand, snuck food and was always up and down 100 pounds and just yo-yoing. And then for me, I really have seen that food, and I don’t gravitate towards processed food because I’ve learned it’s so not healthy for me and for anyone, but for me, I have worked on the emotions around food, around binge eating, overeating, and food addiction. I’ve been working on that for years.

I’ve seen people who are sort of worse off than me and people who are better off, and like I said, that’s what I feel it’s a spectrum. I feel that even someone who seemingly looks healthy could have a food addiction. Just like any addiction, in my experience—I’d love for you to fill in the details—we go towards an addiction, for that dopamine, for that sense of control, and that sense of relief. It’s a stress relief that dopamine in the brain. It is a coping mechanism, but it’s also like our blanket, our Binky, something that comforts us when we’re in high stress and it gives us that relief.

What I’d love to dive in and find out, what starts food addiction? Why do some people go towards heroin and don’t have a food addiction and other people have food addiction? What is it about the people that end up with food addiction, why didn’t they end up with heroin addiction? It’s such a different thing.

 

[00:08:48] Dr. Joan Ifland: This is a really, really great way to start the interview. I do want to say I’m sorry for the modeling and the behavior of your parents. But it does answer your opening question, which is how the heck do we get this? You got it from your parents, the processed food industry, the health industry, and the diet industry. They all contribute to the development of processed food addiction in different ways.

But let me start out with mechanics. So what is actually going on in the brain? This is a great gift that brain imaging technology has given us is an understanding of what’s going on in the brain. Because prior to a clear understanding of the mechanics, these brain cells are hyperactive, these brain cells are not active. Prior to that, people made up stories about addictions. This person was weak-willed. If they just had more willpower, they’d be able to conquer it. They don’t like themselves, they lack self-control, or they’re even immoral.

So all these stories about addicted people have sprung up, and none of them are true. None of them are true at all. It’s simple in concept and thousands of complexities in implementation for recovery, but the concept is quite simple, and it happens in stages.

So step one is the reward system brain cells are taught through Pavlovian conditioning to explode with feel-good neurotransmitters. How do you teach a cell to explode with feel-good neurotransmitters? You ingest substances that cause those cells to explode. Literally flood the brain with enough craving neurotransmitters to control behavior, and that is the key to everything. Once we have addicted brain cells and they are putting out this flood of neurotransmitters, that alone is capable of controlling behavior. 

So those neurotransmitters go over to the motion center, the behavior center in the brain, latch on to the behavior of brain cells, and you are going to get the substance. So here’s what is not happening is the frontal lobe which is where rational thought lives—

 

[00:12:03] Ashley James: Yeah, where’s the frontal lobe in any of this?

 

[00:12:07] Dr. Joan Ifland: So the blood flow has been pulled off to the addicted brain cells and the frontal lobe is not firing. It’s literally not firing, so all the good things that you’ve learned, the determinations, all that stuff is not available. It’s like that part of your computer has crashed. There’s no data in, there’s no data out, and there’s certainly no control.

Well, here’s the next step then. Anything associated with those substances is actually more powerful in being able to trigger the addicted brain cells. Maybe you have a friend and you go and you get addictive substances with that friend. That friend is now what’s called an associative cue, an associative trigger. That just seeing that friend can set those addicted brain cells off to creating this flood of cravings. 

In the case of processed foods, there are so many different substances that all four of the major feel-good reward pathways have become addicted. So that’s dopamine, serotonin, opiate, and cannabinoid. This is one of the reasons why this particular addiction is so hard to give up.

And then the other piece of it is that the processed food industry was really taken over by big tobacco in the mid-1980s. They have an addiction business model. They deliberately train those feel-good pathways to become reactive to cueing, so you associate processed foods with everything because they’re everywhere. They’re at your school, they’re at your faith organization, they’re at your workplace. They’re all over your house. Hopefully not anymore, but they’re on the road. They’re on TV. They’re everywhere. 

You are constantly, by association, being stimulated to release those craving brain chemicals. If they build up enough, they will get control of behavior. That’s how you get an addiction. This substance is ingested, the substance causes this eruption, and then you begin to get the cued eruption. You’re not using the substance, but you have an association with it, and that starts setting off this flood that controls behavior. Let me just stop there. Does that help?

 

[00:15:15] Ashley James: That’s great and I have questions. When you said there’s an associated person, but that’s like the Pavlovian trigger, the anchor. It could also be a location. It could be smells. It can be marketing like you see the brands, you see the logo, or the box. o for me, location. I think back to a location where I would have ingested a substance that causes all of the feel-good or chemicals to go off. Then just even thinking about being back in that location for me. 

It could be music if music was playing at the time of the heightened—so maybe not everyone knows what the Pavlovian response is. It’s when you’re at a heightened emotional state and there’s another stimulus around, your brain will then anchor those two together. A song is playing when you’re in a heightened state, the next time that song plays it will trigger that heightened state, not as much but it will trigger it enough for you to think back and maybe start wanting that again.

My husband said something very interesting. He goes, the first time you do—I’m just going to say substance because it could be drugs, alcohol. Whatever the substance is, the first time you do it is not as good as the next time or the time after. He did a substance, let’s say it’s a chocolate chip cookie or whatever the substance was, he did it and he loved it so much. Then he did it 20 more times throughout a few months trying to chase that high and he said it was never as good as the first time. 

Can you explain why is it that the first time is amazing and then we tend to try to chase that high of maybe in our memory it feels like it’s so amazing and then we get disappointed? I ate a chocolate chip cookie and it’s like, wow, this wasn’t as good as that other time. I’m going to keep trying to find the chocolate cookie that brings back that first time.

 

[00:17:38] Dr. Joan Ifland: You’re asking a super excellent question. Let me elaborate on the first part of what you just said, and then I’ll go into the kind of diminishing return. Why is it that the brain so easily picks up these associative cues? People, places, things, time of year, time of day? Why? 

It’s because if you believe in evolution, every time a human for 7 million years found food, the brain would mark every, every, every, every detail of that moment because a year later with no ability to record anything, just relying on memory, that human would have to find that place again at that time of year and maybe even at that time of day. If for example it was maybe an egg and you needed to go up and get the eggs when the parent birds were off foraging.

The brain timestamps every, every, every detail, and this is also true for addictions because these foods are not food. The sugar, flour, gluten, excessive salt, dairy, processed fats, caffeine, food additives, the brain is not registering those as food. They’re registering them as addictive drugs, but addictive drugs timestamping works the same way. 

If you were a human a million years ago and you found food, your brain would timestamp every, every detail of that moment. The weather, the plants, the mountains, the path, the location of the stream, the time of day, who’s with you, the terrain, the soil, every, every detail so that you could find it again in a year with no ability to record any detail of it. So it’s every detail.

I mean, you may think, oh, it could be a color, it could be anything, the brain will just look at every, every detail. And then, of course, the food industry exploits that by putting those associative cues in front of people all the time. Okay, so I just wanted to reinforce exactly what you were saying.

 

Now, why are there diminishing returns? This is called tolerance or progression. There are two easy things to understand. One is when the brain has had a big an over like an abnormal amount of anything, there is a counteracting emotion. When the feel-good pathways have had this extraordinary flood, the counteracting motion is for the stress pathway to release stress.

It’s called the corticotropin-releasing factor pathway, and it sends messages to the adrenal glands to release cortisol, create some stress, and put the brain back into balance. That part of the brain also gets trained to respond, and it will respond sooner and sooner and sooner as it picks up the Pavlovian conditioning. That’s one reason why there is a diminishing return.

The other reason is that the way two neurons, two brain cells communicate is across a gap called a synapse. The way it works is cell number one releases the neurotransmitter. Cell number two has a receptor. In the case of the reward pathways, the receptor is a C-shaped receptor, so the neurotransmitter actually hits like a ball into a C.

What happens over time because those receptors are not designed to maintain that level of bombardment, the first time it happens, all of the neurotransmitters hit the receptors and the pleasure is transmitted through the nervous system. But the second time, the body is saying no, no, no, no, we cannot tolerate this amount of excitement, pleasure. We’re not designed to do that. 

The brain will start to shut down receptors to prevent that surge. Over time, it just shuts down more and more and more and more. This is why you don’t get the pleasure from it, but you continue to pursue it because if you stop, then only the stress pathways are active and it hurts. It hurts to stop. That is withdrawal. That’s how we know that this is drugs.

People continue to use processed foods. This could take months or years. At some point, you’re not getting any pleasure out of it at all. There are so many receptors that are shut down. We actually see this on PET scans, Positron Emission Tomography scans, where a healthy person has these bright red dopamine receptor fields. Obese people don’t have them and cocaine-addicted people don’t have them. It’s one of our strongest pieces of evidence that this is drug addiction, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with eating. 

Just like the tobacco industry hid nicotine in cigarettes and addicted people by hiding the addictive substance. Once tobacco came into processed foods, they hired a consultant, Howard Moskowitz, to hide the maximum amount of sugar, fat, and salt in foods before people could detect it. It’s just diabolical, but none of it was our fault.

In the progression, you feel worse and worse and worse, the depression and anxiety are increasing, but it’s increasing in response to the substances, to the mechanical almost like an allergic reaction now. You have this big flood of neurochemicals being released. There are fewer and fewer neurotransmitter receptors to send the message and you’re still having this stress reaction. So people’s emotional profiles just fall apart.

 

[00:24:43] Ashley James: A few years ago I was reading a study that talked about these PET scans. The TLDR was people who are not obese don’t think about food, they don’t really get pleasure from thinking about food or planning it, but when they eat, they actually receive pleasure. Those who had obesity or food addiction spent a lot of time thinking about and planning their next meal and planning their next snack and really getting stimulated. The pleasure center’s getting stimulated over thinking about it. But then when they went to eat, it was so disappointing. 

Kind of like porn addiction, fantasy is better than reality and I thought that was fascinating. Is there a way to reverse it? Is there a way to reverse it so that those who have a food addiction and also cocaine addiction that those centers of the brain aren’t lighting up anymore? Is there a way to heal the brain and come back from this?

 

[00:25:55] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. What you have to do is give the whole system a big rest. You have to stop stimulating it. Now if for alcohol or cocaine addiction, you avoid the cues. So you avoid the people that you used with and you don’t drive past the crack house, find another way. This is part of the complexity of recovering from processed food addiction is it’s everywhere.

You have two pathways. One is to avoid the cueing and two is to neutralize cues. You can rewire the brain to associate the substances with pain and people are more driven by pain aversion than they are by pleasure-seeking. This is great research coming out of the economics field.

In our programs, we encourage people to come into the program and talk about a lapse so that they can then immediately associate the pain with it. There’s a lot of pain from processed foods—physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral. It’s quite destructive. It’s just as destructive. It looks very different, but it’s just as destructive as any drug addiction. 

The name of the game is to train the brain that when you think about that food you think about the headaches, stomachache, screaming at your children, fatigue, not able to sleep, racing thoughts, intense cravings, breaking out of the skin, stomach ache, asthma, inflammatory properties, infections, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Processed foods attack cell function in eight different ways. There are 144 conditions associated by research with processed foods. It’s not hard to come up with a very long list of things that go haywire when you eat processed foods. 

Let me go back to something that you started out saying, Ashley, we have to eat. That would be saying to an alcoholic, well, figure out how to use alcohol because you have to drink. No. We all know how to divide the world of beverages into safe and alcoholic, non-alcoholic and alcohol, and then there’s really a third category, which is the druggie sugared beverages.

We do the same thing with food. We have safe unprocessed foods and then we have addictive processed foods. It is the processing that concentrates natural endorphins in the food to the point where they’re strong enough to train these reward centers to release craving neurotransmitters.

 

[00:29:13] Ashley James: Is there a particular diet that helps us heal the brain faster or the fastest diet that doesn’t overstimulate the pleasure centers?

 

[00:29:30] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yeah. If it’s okay if I mention a website.

 

[00:29:35] Ashley James: Sure.

 

[00:29:36] Dr. Joan Ifland: Processedfoodaddiction.com and just sign up for the free information and you will get to two lists. One is the excluded food list. This is based on research. I wrote and edited the textbook for the field, Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery. I wrote the whole food plan chapter in that textbook. It’s based on 250 studies. We know—the research is clear—that there’s a whole range of addictive substances that have been added to our food or just presented through advertising that they are food. They’re not food, they’re drugs.

It’s just like the tobacco industry was able to persuade us that cigarettes are sexy. Cigarettes are disgusting and repulsive. Cigarettes are rebellious. No, they’re killing you. Or that they’re sophisticated, they’re modern, or any of those things. They’re none of those things. So these are fantasies that the tobacco companies created in order to get people to use the addictive substances often enough to create the conditioning of the reward centers.

They’ve done exactly the same thing with these drugs. They’ve created the delusion that they are food. They’re not food. They’re just not food. We do have the excluded list, and then we have the clean list. Now inside our programs, we teach people a rotation method to figure out which foods on the unprocessed list are harmful to that individual. 

There’s not a food plan. My food plan is completely different from anybody else’s food plan. I’m 70 years old. When I was 44 almost 26 years ago, I had a completely different food plan. The commonality from all these food plans is a highly individualized personalized food plan is they don’t have drugs in them. 

Step one is to get the drugs out of your food and step two is to use a rotation method to see if you’re allergic to any of the unprocessed foods. I can’t eat the nightshade group, I can’t eat the citrus group, and I can’t eat the gourds—the melons, zucchini, and squash. I can’t. Those are just three groups. I have had lifelong asthma and they kick up my asthma, so I don’t eat them.

 

[00:32:34] Ashley James: And for others, the symptoms might be not as obvious. Figuring out your food sensitivities is a fun game. You could benefit from working with an experienced naturopathic physician or functional medicine practitioner. There’s also evidence that suggest that leaky gut syndrome, which of course we can definitely develop from eating processed foods and particularly gluten, grains, barley, wheat, rye, and even oats, which contain gliadin similar to gluten. That causes leaky gut syndrome, which increases food sensitivities and the body overreacts to certain foods.

Healing the gut and also the microbiome, and I have several episodes on that. Listeners could go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find them, but several interviews on healing the microbiome of the gut and healing leaky gut syndrome. There are ways to support the body in overcoming some food sensitivities, but then others are baked into the cake like for you, you’ve noticed that nightshades do not complement your physiology and so you avoid them.

I think it’s really important to also listen to the body because problems with sleep, problems with concentration, mood swings, and even skin problems all can be from foods that we’re having sensitivities towards. But my big thing is whole foods. If it came from the ground or if it’s the whole form it’s not processed, and therefore, it’s much more likely to not trigger the hyper response that processed foods are designed to like designer drugs, right?

 

[00:34:30] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. This is a business model that is used by alcohol, marijuana, vaping, tobacco, and processed foods. Even the pharmaceutical industry used it to start the opioid epidemic. The way they marketed it to doctors, very deceptive, were hidden addictive properties to the product, which they did not tell the doctors about so the doctors prescribed it freely and people became very addicted. It’s very, very sad. It’s very sad. Our government just stands by and lets it happen.

 

[00:35:13] Ashley James: No, the government actually invests in it but through food subsidies. We’re subsidizing crops that directly benefit the processed food industry. Not only that, the processed food industry lobbies so that these foods are fed to prisoners and to children in schools. I cannot even begin to wrap my brain around when you look at what public school children are fed, the amount of processed food they are fed, the amount of sugar, and then they’re given drugs for ADHD. It is just like the perfect storm. 

Big food and big pharma got together and said, let’s both work together to lobby to increase our profits. Let’s fill children with sugar and with artificial dyes, and then we’ll create a drug that they need because they’re going to be so hyper off the wall because their brains are being put on a barbecue. They’re putting them in the deep fryer, basically. Their brains are so hopped up on all these excitotoxins and all the neurotransmitters that are so hyped up it’s like they’re on cocaine and then we’re going to have to give them drugs.

When I was a kid, in a classroom of 30 kids, there’d be one kid with ADHD. One kid was on Ritalin, and now it is so much more common. These children’s brains are still developing and to put them on these drugs will affect them for the rest of their lives. The long-term devastating effects of being put on Ritalin or Adderall is incredibly harmful to a growing child. Food is the main culprit.

 

[00:37:06] Dr. Joan Ifland: Processed foods.

 

[00:37:07] Ashley James: The processed foods, I apologize. Yes, processed foods are the culprit that is creating this. I have several episodes on ADHD and overcoming it, healing the brain, healing the body, and correcting the diet for ADHD. We have to get the 30,000-foot view and we have to study the history of the last 100 years to really understand the amount of marketing, the creation of what we live in today.

I’ve said this on the show before, so I grew up in the ‘80s. I was born in 1980. I’m 41 years old, and I grew up in Canada. So a little bit different than the states, but not much. I remember watching Kellogg’s commercial, “Milk does a body good,” watching Tony the Tiger, and all these different childlike characters for all the different cereals and it made me feel good. Now, I never ate any of these cereals because my mom wouldn’t let any sugar in the house. My mom was very controlling of our food. It did have its benefits.

Once a year, on my birthday, I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted and you bet I ate cereal. I ate Honeycomb even though it tore my mouth up. I remember that. But once a year I was allowed to have Pizza Pops and whatever junk food, but the rest of the year there was no junk food. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing, but I think that there needs to be a balance to teach a child how to make their own choices so they don’t rebel when they’re older like I did. 

I remember watching the marketing and then going into the grocery store and seeing it on the shelves. You know what it instilled in me although I never ate them? It instilled in me a sense of safety. I remember because I grew up with all this marketing and then I walk past all these cereal boxes. Oh, the familiar faces. Look, there’s that rooster. There’s that little ghost character. There’s Tony the Tiger. It was like all these familiar faces, the branding.

You see these companies, the tobacco companies, they don’t just mark it for the next 5 or 10 years. They are generational marketing. They plan on paying for marketing so that a four-year-old will buy their products when they’re 40. When you said that we have to take ourselves away from the stimulant and choose foods that aren’t going to create that stimulant but also just walk into a grocery store alone, you’re bombarded by all the logos even from your childhood.

 

[00:40:04] Dr. Joan Ifland: We have innovated a very, very new approach to this particular addiction. We get it deep, deep, deep down on the inside to spend three years full-time developing, editing, writing, and researching the textbook. There are two things I got out of doing that. One, we’ve never had such a severe addiction on the face of the earth because there are so many different substances, because we’re being bombarded with cueing because the illnesses to develop are so debilitating.

But you hit on the thing that’s never really happened before. Once high fructose corn syrup was introduced to the market, the drugs could be cheap enough to be marketed heavily to children. So if you are born to parents using processed foods, the very first DNA replication will be of an addicted DNA strand, and you’d never have one minute. If your mother’s eating sugar, the sugar’s coming through the breast milk. If they’re not, then the baby formula industry has loaded sugar into baby formula, so it starts at a very young age.

There are many complications of that. The blood flow is being pulled to the addicted brain cells and away from their frontal lobe. So all the major frontal lobe functions are now impaired, and that includes being able to pay attention, learn, make decisions, control impulses, and remember. So you see these epidemics of impairment in those areas.

 

[00:41:54] Ashley James: Can we pause for a second? Can you go back? I think that just really is something that needs to be underlined. What are the functions of the brain that are impaired?

 

[00:42:05] Dr. Joan Ifland: The whole frontal lobe is not getting blood flow. The very highly specialized cells in the frontal lobe that distinguish us from animals are things like the ability to pay attention to something for a long time. That’s not getting any blood flow. That’s an attention deficit. Learning is in the frontal lobe. This is very different from just mechanical Pavlovian conditioning of the midbrain or the primitive brain, so you have learning difficulties.

Here’s the thing, if I’m going to assert that this is a very, very widespread addiction, then you have to show things. You have to show an agent who’s creating the addiction. Okay, we have the processed food industry and we have the complicity of the government. You’re absolutely right if you say big pharm. You have the blood flow being pulled away from the frontal lobe where you have attention paying. You have decision-making, and this is different from the reflexive behaviors that come out of the midbrain. 

The frontal lobe is able to create conscious behavior if those cells have blood flow, but in the addicted brain, the blood flow is going back into the addicted brain cells, the stress pathways, and the locomotion pathways.

If you don’t have good decision-making, which we see rampantly, you don’t have impulse control and you don’t have memory. Those are all frontal lobe functions, so you have an epidemic of Alzheimer’s and you have an epidemic of poor impulse control. I know I went into kind of the “online basement” of the US Department of Agriculture to write. Our research team published the first description of refined foods in addiction in the Academic Press. We got to name the disease. 

But for that article, I said, I’ve got to show exactly which substances were increased in use through the obesity epidemic. I think I went to like 1970 and 1997, and these substances that were increased in use were high fructose corn syrup, gluten-containing flour, high-fat dairy, and potatoes, so frozen potatoes, french fries, fried potatoes. Beans did not increase, red meat did not increase, none of those real foods increased.

They’re always trying to point, oh, see, carbs are bad or red meat is bad. No, no, the consumption of those did not increase in between those two years. If I’m going to say that processed food addiction is behind these cognitive impairments, this mental impairment, I’ve got to make all those pieces fit together and they do. The research is just incredibly consistent. If you say, well, these foods are causing the problems, then you better be pointing at epidemics of those problems. 

At that point, in 1997, people were eating a pound per person per day of sugars, gluten-containing flour, high fat dairy, and fried potatoes. That was then. As we were just talking, the progression, the tolerance eating more of the substances over time, that data is from 20 years ago. Now we have new research actually coming out of Canada, showing that adolescents are eating 67% of their calories in these processed foods, and that probably doesn’t include dairy. People don’t know to include dairy in the category of processed foods. 

If you’re going to say that processed foods caused these problems, then you’re going to have to point to epidemics of those problems at that consumption level, and there they are. There are the epidemics—diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, Alzheimer’s, dementia, learning disabilities, attention span, poor decision making, poor impulse control, memory loss, and then all the rest of them you would have to see gut disorders. You would have to see inflammatory diseases, and they’re all there. They’re all epidemics.

 

[00:47:34] Ashley James: Everything that you mentioned makes them feel worse. This is the catch 22; this is the cycle, right? They feel bad because they have those conditions, and then they need that pick me up because they feel bad, so then they reach for one of these foods.

 

[00:47:52] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s the insanity. It’s the mental illness aspect of it. You also have all the emotional disorders because of the downregulated—it’s called downregulated when those feel-good receptors start collapsing. They look like the head of a dead [inaudible 00:48:13]. Now you cannot process quick feelings. You see this very minuscule but very disturbing not yet statistically significant increase in suicides across all ages but among children.

 

[00:48:33] Ashley James: Yes. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among children today.

 

[00:48:39] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s because their world, all the pathways in the brain that would bring reasons for optimism or some kind of future, has collapsed. It’s a mechanical problem, and so you have depression. Now you have all this extra adrenaline because remember, the stress pathways are compensating for these surges of euphoria. You have extra adrenaline, which is anger and anxiety. I got into this field 26 years ago because I got off of sugars and flours to solve a weight problem and my raging went away. I wasn’t expecting that.

The sinus infection went away. The bloating went away. The weight was coming off easily. The cravings went away. The brain fog went away. All that stuff went away and I was thrilled. The allergies went away, fatigue. It was amazing. It was like I was winning the lottery every day. But when I got to the third week of that program, I realized that I hadn’t raged at my husband or children. I hadn’t yelled, I hadn’t criticized, I hadn’t found anything wrong with them. I got a new career. 

I was a Stanford MBA. I had a corporate career, which I had to let go of because I was too sick, too allergic to go back to work, too tired, too brain fog. But instead of going back into the corporate world, I began looking for research. That was 26 years ago. The impact on the personality of these drugs is horrifying.

 

[00:50:28] Ashley James: Sorry to interrupt, you describe my mom. Ninety percent of the time she ate so strictly because she had to keep her figure. But then she would sneak these jujubes, she’d sneak these chocolates, and then she’d just rage at us, just snapped. 

Like I said, she stood up in a restaurant and started yelling at me because I ordered a dish that had a side of rice with steamed vegetables and a grilled fillet of fish. I purposely made this really conscious effort. I really wanted to impress her with making a good choice on the menu and then she just stood up and screamed at me. She would throw things. She would just snap and start raging. That does really describe that.

She had huge problems concentrating. I remember she couldn’t follow movies. She was wonderful as a businesswoman. She owned her own business. It was incredibly successful, so she had a lot on her mind. She admitted that when we went to plays or musicals, she couldn’t follow the plot. We watched movies, she didn’t really follow the plot, and she read all the time. I found her to be incredibly intelligent, but her concentration and her raging, I mean, I wonder if that was linked to her own food addiction.

 

[00:51:55] Dr. Joan Ifland: Totally. These are drugs. These are characteristic behaviors of people with cocaine addiction or alcoholism, these really vast mood swings. On top of the elevated adrenaline, these processed carbohydrates particularly get into the bloodstream all at once. They’re pre-digested, there’s no breaking down process. So you get these glucose highs, and then the pancreas can be conditioned to anticipate this surge of glucose in the bloodstream, which is deadly by the way. 

If your glucose is too high, your brain goes out, so it’s deadly. The pancreas is on red hot alert, oh, it’s coming, It’s coming, it’s coming. It’ll start releasing insulin before the glucose even gets there so you constantly have these highs. And then in the crash, it’s the adrenal gland that goes back over to the fat cells and pulls glucose out so that you don’t die from low blood sugar. 

There are two danger zones—the high blood sugar and the low blood sugar—and then there’s the safety zone in between. So when you are crashing, the insulin has been released and your blood sugar is falling, you totally lose control of behavior. Eighty percent of violent offenders in prison have hypoglycemia, not enough, so it’s unstable blood glucose. And then on top of that, you lay on the caffeine. 

Caffeine works by blocking a calmness function on the nervous system. The part of the nervous system that is designed to emit messages of calmness, peacefulness, contentment, caffeine blocks that function. You can’t feel calm. Caffeine doesn’t work because you’re more alert. Caffeine works because you’re less calm. It’s a nasty combination.

 

[00:54:15] Ashley James: It blocks the part of the brain that tells you you’re tired. So your body is tired, but your brain’s not going to tell you you’re tired. It’s blocking the tiredness. I mean, that is just such a great example of our entire food industry, our entire processed food industry. It’s like, we’re going to jack you up. You wake up and you’re tired.

Okay. Dr. Molly Niedermeyer is a naturopathic physician. She was the Dean of Naturopathic Medicine at Bastyr University. I think she was one of the first deans. She’s been practicing for well over 30 years. I had her on the show and she said a 5% reduction in hydration leads to a 25% reduction in energy production. ATP can’t be created as well if we don’t have enough water. So we wake up dehydrated and what do we do? 

We’re tired, we’re cranky because we had a bad night’s sleep because we’re rolling on the sugar highs and lows and all the stimulants from the processed foods, and so then we reach for caffeine. Caffeine dehydrates us further and blocks the ability for us to even recognize and get in touch with our body and feel that we’re that tired. Then what you said is it blocks the calmness in the brain, so now we’re more agitated, then add sugar to that and we rage.

 

[00:55:46] Dr. Joan Ifland: Exactly. It impairs, it just makes painfully dysfunctional every system in the body.

 

[00:56:01] Ashley James: We don’t have access to the logic centers of our brain anymore, so we can’t think critically. And then we go around our life reacting to things instead of planning and controlling our behaviors. If we control our behaviors, we control our outcomes in life. If we don’t have control of our behaviors, we don’t have control of our outcomes, we feel out of control, and then we reach towards substances that allow us to, at the moment, feel like we have control, which furthers the cycle.

 

[00:56:28] Dr. Joan Ifland: Feelings drive the whole thing and feelings are now being controlled by the substances. But can I offer your listeners a ray of hope?

 

[00:56:38] Ashley James: Yes. I’m glad we’ve painted the picture though. I think it’s really important to really understand that someone who is involved in food addiction and possibly even their parents, their grandparents, this could be generational. It’s not because, like you said, they’re weak-willed, they don’t love themselves enough, or there’s something wrong, bad, and shameful about them. Their brain chemistry has been hijacked by an industry, for some people, since birth.

 

[00:57:07] Dr. Joan Ifland: Since conception. There’s one system in the brain in the body which works no matter what. No matter what else is going on, this one system continues to work, and the fact that it continues to work will either kill you or save you. I am talking about mirror neurons. 

They’re quite a recent discovery. It was discovered in a monkey lab in Italy. What they do is they copy. They copy the behavior of the people they see the most. They’re the second most powerful system in the brain. The most powerful system in the brain is the autonomic system, which is making our heartbeat and our blood flow. Then there is, under one particular circumstance, the fear of famine brain, the food-seeking brain will become more and more powerful than mirror neurons. There has to be a pretty severe famine going on for it to take precedence over mirror neurons.

So mirror neurons are the second most powerful system in the brain for a very good reason. For seven million years of human evolution, if you were accepted into a tribe of 7 to 12 other humans, you lived, you survived because they could find food, find shelter, protect your children, and protect you from predators. If you’re the kind of person who likes wandering off by yourself, well, the predators were waiting for you.

The evidence on this is kind of shocking. But in prehistoric hyena caves, anthropologists and archeologists have found human bones in the bone piles. So we know that at least hyenas ate humans. In evolution, if you had really good mirror neurons you would live. So in the evolution of humans, mirror neurons take just increasing precedence in the hierarchy of the brain. 

Now, the food industry knows this tragically well, and this is why you will see commercials on TV that feature people sitting on sofas watching TV. When you see one of those commercials, your mirror neuron says, oh yeah, that’s my tribe. I’m going to the kitchen because I need something to eat.

The opportunity to get free of all of the brain malfunctions, all the brain dysfunction is to find a tribe of 7 to 12 people that you are going to spend most of your time with. This is the breakthrough that we have incorporated into our online community. We offer 15 hours a day of live programming. There is a real trained person on that Zoom screen. Because you can just pop in, you can pop in for five minutes, you can pop in for an hour, you can pop in for all 15 hours, and then you can fill in the gaps through the day with videos from our video library that we have made ourselves. And it’s pretty cool. I mean, it’s just so cool. 

So hopeful is what a short period of time it takes for mirror neurons to swing away from the unhealthy people in our lives over to the healthy people. We are seeing that screens work perfectly well. Only 2% of the brain is the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is teensy, teensy, teensy tiny. The frontal lobe cannot win in any kind of competition with any other nodules, nodes, cortexes in the brain. It’s too tiny. It’s way too tiny. But what the frontal lobe can do is it can control the messaging that reaches the other 98% of the brain, and that’s the hope of the world.

 

[01:01:53] Ashley James: Fascinating. So throughout the day, if someone is struggling or catching themselves in the middle of a food choice, they could login. What does that look like? They log into the group video chat. What does that look like?

 

[01:02:13] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s a Zoom Room. We have a Zoom Room for those 15 hours. One of those hours is a conference call because then we can record the conference call. We don’t record anything on Zoom for confidentiality, but we do record the conference call. They can listen to that conference call then any time of day.

The idea for this came from writing the textbook. There are 11 specific signs for addiction and I wrote a full chapter on how present those signs are in overeaters. There are 11 chapters in the textbook describing each one of those diagnostic criteria as they manifest in overeating. They are criteria that are adapted from diagnosing the existence of alcoholism, so they’re adapted to overeating. That’s also on the processedfoodaddiction.com website.

Once I got that, oh, it’s a severe addiction. Oh my gosh. And people are severely traumatized by having had it, the addiction itself alone would be traumatizing. It creates so much pain. But then you get all this insanity out of the health industry. The diet industry is working away to wake up your fear of famine brain. Now you have fear of famine on top of the addiction. It’s another reason why it’s so severe. Well, I’m in the middle of researching what do you do for severe addiction?

You go to residential treatment for a couple of years. You go for a fully committed year and then you go maybe on a work-release program where you go to work during the day and then come back to the facility at night. And then maybe you go to a halfway house for another couple of years. We’re not doing that for the hundreds of millions of people who are addicted to processed foods. 

The next level of treatment is something called intensive outpatient (IOP). Well, hospitals don’t have a clue and hospitals are profiting from this, so they don’t want to fix it either. I mean, they do, but the pharmaceutical industry has got their claws into the medical community. They’re trained to believe anything outside of the pharmaceutical is quackery, so they’re not going to be supporting this.

But right at that time, Zoom came along. Literally, I turned in the manuscript for the textbook in May of 2017. I was already doing a daily phone call, which wasn’t working. A daily phone call was not nearly enough to rewire 100 billion brain cells. I mean, I’m serious, you need to rewire every friggin’ brain cell, and there are 100 billion of them. Zoom came along and I thought, wow, I wonder if this would work.

We did a beta the first week of January 2018. These were people who had been on my daily phone call and they were all eating clean by the end of the week. They had not been able to get to eating clean going through withdrawal from all these different substances, maintaining the elimination of these. They hadn’t been able to do it with a daily phone call for two years. But boom, within one week, they were all eating clean.

I had scheduled a pay the public week the following week, same thing, same friggin’ thing. Even at the end of day one, everybody from the outside—so we had the people from the beta who were on and that. I didn’t know about mirror neurons at this point, but the fact that there were people eating clean from the week before, you need at least five people to fully engage brain cells. The more similarities between the people the better this works. But by the end of the first day, I think we had 7 or 10 people from the outside, they were all eating clean. I was shocked.

Ashley, at that point, I had spent 22 years looking for a reliable method. I’m going to start tearing up here. Twenty-two years looking for a reliable way to get people off of processed foods. I mean, I started out with a handout. I’m sure that once people know they should eat this and all that they’ll just do it. No, no, no. I went through 14 different really highly committed efforts to get people off of processed foods, and there it was. It was probably January 7 or January 8, 2018. There it was. After 22 years of looking, there it was, the mirror neuron engagement.

 

[01:07:24] Ashley James: So the mirror neurons don’t engage when it was just auditory, it needs to be visual as well?

 

[01:07:31] Dr. Joan Ifland: So you can get some mirror neuron engagement from auditory, but getting the visual, the eye-to-eye. When you think about how these brain cells developed over seven million years. For 7 million years until humans developed language capabilities, everything they saw was true, so that’s why in 98% of the brain, there is no filter. The brain absorbs messaging and files it away as if it were true. 

This is how the food industry has made—they kill a million Americans every two years. A million Americans die of diet-related diseases every two years. The epidemic of COVID would not have happened unless it was coming in on top of processed food addiction with compromised immune systems.

How is the food industry able to do that? How was it able to persuade those reward system brain cells to accept this messaging? It’s because only this little tiny frontal lobe, 2% of the brain, has the ability to tell the difference between something true and something not true. The only reason that capability developed is because language developed. Until you had language, there was no way to lie or deceive another person.

Once you stop bombarding the addictive brain cells and the blood flow stops being taken up by the addicted and stress pathways, it will return to the frontal lobe. It’s the coolest thing. I mean, people think losing weight is the coolest thing, no. Getting your frontal lobe online is really cool. 

People have been told, for example, that they’re stupid. They’ve been told that they’re slow. They’ve been told that they’re dumb. Boom, the frontal lobe starts getting blood flow and they’re brilliant. These are the kinds of very, very cool fun things. This is why it is worth it. It is worth it to get off the processed foods and get off the messaging. Get off the cueing, get off the triggering. Train the brain to go to the pain rather than the deceptive pleasure. Retrain the brain.

It’s like learning a language, and it takes years. This quick weight loss thing, all it does is to fire up the fear of famine brain.

 

[01:10:25] Ashley James: Right. They certainly know how to market us to keep us cycling through this endless loop. We really need to step back from the dieting industry, the food industry, and all of the marketing and messaging. I think it’s so good to go back actually closer to 150 years. Go back and really understand the history of modern medicine and understand the amount of marketing and it’s generational marketing. Understand Edward Bernays and the history of propaganda. Since your grandparents, it has been in place and it’s a machine. It really is akin to The Matrix, isn’t it?

We are plugged in, you are doped up, and you are plugged into a matrix where it is designed to keep us as cattle. We are fighting amongst ourselves. When I came from Canada to the United States and saw the difference in our political systems, I’m not saying that a parliamentary system is any better or any worse, but I am saying that is just a new perspective as an adult coming into the United States going, oh, okay, two parties. That’s interesting. Two is not a choice. Two is a dilemma. When you’re only given two, it’s a dilemma, right? 

What I really clearly saw was that the way they set up the two-party system is it’s moral- and value-based arguments so that they keep us, the 99%, fighting amongst ourselves because how do you control a population when there’s less than 1% of the people controlling us? You keep fighting amongst ourselves. How do you control the cattle? If they constantly keep up abortion, and I’m not saying these issues aren’t legitimate issues. But the way the politicians fight on camera and then go behind the scenes and shake hands and they’re all buddy, buddy behind the scenes, it’s professional wrestling. 

We need to use that very small 2% of our critical faculty of our frontal brain and we need to get the 30,000-foot view of how the entire society is set up to control you, to suck money out of your wallet, and to keep you sick and suffering. Not to do that to depress you but to free you. When you see the matrix you can free yourself from it.

Another point is you touched on the autonomic nervous system, and one thing that happens when our body goes into fight or flight, which is a sympathetic response, is that it shunts blood away from the logic centers of the brain. We think, oh, well, I’m not in fight or flight.

I had a client once tell me, because repeatedly she would do all my homework except do the homework that surrounded calming her nervous system, getting her out of fight or flight. She wouldn’t do that homework. I thought it was really interesting. She’d eat a pound of broccoli, but she wouldn’t take five deep breaths, go for a walk, meditate, or whatever. 

After five sessions I said, there’s a lot of stress in your life. Why aren’t you doing this homework? She said, I don’t feel stressed. At the time, her mom was dying of cancer, she had a very busy job as a manager, then she came home and she had a daughter and a husband to cook and clean for, and there’s a lot of symptoms that she was expressing were unmanaged stress-related. Physical stress, her body was in the sympathetic nervous system response. 

I said, I’m glad you said that because stress isn’t an emotion. Your physiology is switched over into emergency mode. Certain enzymatic processes stop happening so your body is not healing. Your body shunts resources. The analogy I like because I’m a big sci-fi fan, if you’ve ever watched Star Trek, Captain Picard will say when they’re under a Borg attack they’re really losing, that he needs to shut down the floors that are in use and divert all energy to the shields. That’s what this is. 

So being in stress mode, your body is shutting down anti-cancer properties, immune properties, healing the lining of your stomach and your intestines. All these properties that aren’t essential for immediate survival get suppressed.

 

[01:15:36] Dr. Joan Ifland: They’re deprived of blood flow. The blood flow is going to the muscles.

 

[01:15:41] Ashley James: Yes, so that you can fight, flee, or survive in some way. The problem is people think, well, I wasn’t in any “stressful situation” today. I wasn’t in a car crash, I didn’t fight a bear. Yet what people don’t know is that you could be sitting here listening to this podcast and already be in fight or flight because your thoughts can trigger it, the processed foods you eat can trigger it. There are so many things. You don’t actually have to do anything external to trigger your ancient mechanism of survival.

 

[01:16:22] Dr. Joan Ifland: It can be habitual.

 

[01:16:25] Ashley James: Yes, habituated to it. Right.

 

[01:16:26] Dr. Joan Ifland: All your glands and organs are trained to be in that state and you might not even be aware of it. But it’s just what you’re saying.

 

[01:16:37] Ashley James: What do you do to help turn that off, get us out of sympathetic nervous system response, get us back into parasympathetic nervous system response of rest and digest, and get the blood flow going back into the frontal lobe so that we can begin to really make behaviors consciously?

 

[01:17:04] Dr. Joan Ifland: The big thing about our program is called the Addiction Reset Community. The very first stressor that is vastly relieved by coming into the program is isolation. You immediately get oxytocin releases, so those systems in the brain, that feel-good systems in the brain aren’t working too well. But being among a community releases oxytocin, and oxytocin will help the dopamine system start to work again. 

Immediately, the fear of being eaten by a predator, which has been instilled for over seven million years, is gone because you now have people around you, and 98% of the brain doesn’t know that those people aren’t right there. Ninety-eight percent of the brain does not understand screens.

It really does believe that those people are right in the next room or they’re right in front of us, but they’re in our house. They’re a couple of feet away. So immediately, the stress of isolation, and not just physical isolation, but processed foods cut off our ability to connect to other people. We have brain fog, we have cravings, we have shame, and we have a body shape that people are eyeballing disdainfully. We are raging, we are anxious, we are making up stories about how they don’t like us. We’re not connecting.

You come into the ARC, the Addiction Reset Community, and people in the ARC, the managers are trained to let the members know that we understand what’s going on with them. We also have been through periods where we have lost control over food, where we have this deep depression. Just almost immediately, that mirror neuron engagement, oh, this person is like me. They understand me. They’re not telling me to push back from the table for heaven’s sakes.

Now, why is that so important? Go back. Go back to the 7 million years of evolution and if you were able to communicate to another person, if you could look them in the eyes and make enough sounds to say there is a tiger behind that bush you would live. If you went to that person and you signaled with your eyes and your fingers that there was something wrong there and that person just said, oh, calm down. Let’s see. Oh, you have hyperexcitability. Let’s give you some medication for that, then you would die because the tiger would pounce.

The ability for another person to see exactly what is going on with you, acknowledge it, affirm it, and agree that it is a huge relief.

From there then you get into the complexities of changing your food. What we’ve learned over these 26 years is that there may be other problems that have to be solved before you can start eating in a different way. 

You might have emotional, mental, or physical abuse going on in the household. You may have to work on relationship boundaries before you can even begin to go grocery shopping. You may be subjected to cueing, you might be working in a food environment, you may have a saboteur at home, or you may be too tired or brain fogged and it may be that somebody else is going to have to get on and order some groceries for you. You may have to start with sleep because fatigue and sleep deprivation are huge cues. 

You may have to start with turning off screens earlier and earlier in the evening before you can have enough mental clarity—because screens are there to also scramble your brains—that you could actually put in a chicken breast and some broccoli. We give people the option to use starches or not just to make a meal. Get a couple of scrambled eggs going. You may have to solve other problems before you can even start on the food.

But the thing that’s so cool is no matter how deep the cognitive impairment, the brain fog, the confused thinking, and the cravings, mirror neurons will take you there. The whole rest of the brain can be just so badly addicted and the cognitive impairment can be so severe you cannot think. Inflammation because these foods are inflammatory and they inflame the brain. The inflammation cuts off the ability to think. But through all that mess, through all that fog, mirror neurons are working. 

People would just be so surprised. I ordered groceries and I made clean meals. I have been trying to do that for 20 years. I did it today. I’ve only been in here two or three days but I did it today. I made clean meals today. I’ve been trying to do this for 20 years. What happened? Oh, see, you were on the Zoom. You were on the ARC all day Monday and Tuesday and so Wednesday you made clean meals. It’s just so incredible. 

It’s like you’ve been swimming in these rough cold seas for your entire life. And finally, the lifeboat came along and threw you a life preserver and somebody on the boat instructed you to grab onto the life preserver. When you got dragged over to the side of the boat you decided to get in. It’s so incredible, Ashley, now I’m crying here but it’s amazing to be able to get somebody to safety in just a few days.

 

[01:23:51] Ashley James: Yes. I’ve heard this quote several times from different people so I don’t know who came up with it originally, but whoever it is, mirror neurons describe it. You are the summary of the five people you spend the most time with.

 

[01:24:08] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, that’s exactly right.

 

[01:24:10] Ashley James: JLD is a podcaster, Entrepreneur on Fire, and he was one of the people I modeled learning different technical things about podcasting and editing. It was about six years ago when I was studying. It was six years ago so it’s December, so it has been six years. I started studying how to do podcasts and I looked to him as well as Andrew Warner of Mixergy. Those are my two biggest models. JLD, with almost every episode, would say, you are the summary of the top five people you spend time with, meaning it can also include the podcast you listen to, it can also include the content you are consuming, right?

As I’ve been listening to you, I’ve been thinking about reflecting on the last few years of my life because as I said in the intro, I’m on my own journey of overcoming my negative relationship with food and healing my body. I’ve healed my body from a lot of things. I used to have type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections for which I was on constant antibiotics for, and I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told by an endocrinologist after a battery of tests that I would never have kids, that I’ve conceived naturally twice. I don’t have diabetes anymore and don’t have chronic adrenal fatigue anymore.

For the last several years, I do not have polycystic ovarian syndrome, but I just got my blood work again because I do that bloodwork once or twice a year with my naturopath. Sure enough, there’s zero evidence of polycystic ovarian syndrome and yet it plagued me for over 20 years. If you go to an MD or an endocrinologist, they’ll say you have it for the rest of your life. It’s a falsehood just like diabetes, you don’t have to have those things.

What I’ve been working on is weight loss and my problem has been my liver. I couldn’t figure out why every time I went to do—I have done over 30 diets my entire life, and I’ve shared this on the podcast before. That has definitely negatively impacted my body and I’ve learned from that and learned about how it harms the metabolism, the body goes into freak-out mode. 

But even with healthy diets, when I started to lose weight healthfully, my liver would become inflamed and would stick out and become distended. You could actually see it pushing out. I went and got ultrasounds. What I finally figured out is that my phase two of liver detox is so gummed up, I have some genetic SNPs like MTHFR. So for me, in the last three or four years, I’ve been really working on heavy metal detoxification and lots of interviews about it. 

But since I started the podcast, my mirror neurons have really benefited from these interviews. They’re not video interviews, but I have found myself after an interview about food addiction or about healthful eating, eating to nurture the body, and eating to bring stability and balance to hormones or to emotions, I’ve always found myself making better and better choices and then celebrating those choices.

What really also helped me, because I’m just seeing this now, is that I did take a yearlong health coach training program through IIN, Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where it was videos but they were recorded videos of the audience and of the lecturer. Then they would break out and they would show the audience. I always felt like I was in the audience. I’d cry with everyone, I’d laugh with everyone. I felt like I was in the community and they were recorded videos. 

My food choices and my health choices like going to sleep at a better time or removing certain things that were not healthy, adding certain things that gave me vibrance, joy, and health, and activities that improved my health. All these little steps, every baby step I felt like was definitely easier. I felt like I was celebrating it with this community as I’m watching this video.

It makes so much sense that your Zoom calls live would create that sense. I can feel this warmness in my stomach, I can feel it even now in my body.

 

[01:29:07] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. You’re getting an oxytocin release.

 

[01:29:10] Ashley James: Right. Last year we had such a hard time, everyone did with COVID, but we have a child who is such an extrovert. He craves other children’s attention, and so I found a small community of moms—like-minded, very holistic. I called us crunchy moms with very holistic organic eaters, gluten-free, and all that kind of stuff. They all have kids and they all wanted to create a community where the kids can play freely in the parks. 

We’ve been doing that together for a year and a half now and I noticed that I’m almost addicted to going to the park and doing our weekly meetups because I feel so good in their presence. We just gab about whatever, give each other ideas, and share with each other.

But that sense of that oxytocin, that sense of community, there’s nothing like it. It’s just wonderful. I can totally see why your Zoom calls would be so quick to help people start to make better and better choices. 

Okay, so they step into the Zoom call, their mirror neurons are firing. It really does help them overcome the withdrawal, the physical withdrawal. Can you walk us through more of the biochemical or what’s happening in the brain when someone is stepping into these Zoom calls?

 

[01:30:38] Dr. Joan Ifland: So the dopamine is working better. Oxytocin actually works by supporting the dopamine system. If your dopamine system isn’t working at all, you get an oxytocin release that you will feel better for sure. Withdrawal avoidance is one of the reasons why people can’t get off particularly of the refined carbohydrates.

But one thing I hope all of your listeners know is that withdrawal from refined carbohydrates—so sugars, flours, and sweeteners—is four to eight days. People will get to day three and maybe their cravings intensify. Day four, their cravings are still just unbearable. Hang on because that is going to go away. We also encourage people to take that list very slowly. It might take a couple of years to get off of the seven major categories of addictive substances because they are affecting four different pathways.

The other thing to remember is that it only takes about three weeks for the dopamine receptors to open up again. People feel better within a couple of days because the pancreas is no longer pumping out vast amounts of insulin which is driving down blood sugar, which is releasing the adrenaline. So the anxiety levels start going down and getting better within a day or two or three or four. So people do start feeling calmer. They’ll say that. They’ll come on day two and say, wow, I can’t believe this just happened and I didn’t blow up. They begin to like themselves more. There’s a lot of self-hatred, self-blame, self-stigmatization.

We use a lot of science to explain to people what happened to them and disengage them from the mythology that the recovery industry, the therapeutic industry has created. Because when therapists can’t get on top of this addiction in their patients because they’re not giving the patient enough immersion recovery. I think there are 167 hours in a week. One hour versus 167 hours, you are not going to retrain 100 billion brain cells by that approach. You need hours and hours and hours per day. You need a residential level of recovery. 

Mirror neurons are watching other people get off of sugars and flours. We do have a pretty sophisticated method for managing the headache, the lethargy, the depression, the anxiety that comes with withdrawal. We know how to manage those and make it not quite so painful. It’s very important that withdrawal not be painful.

 

[01:33:57] Ashley James: Right, then you’re training the brain to not like it, to not like being off of those things like you said earlier. That makes so much sense.

 

[01:34:04] Dr. Joan Ifland: The cueing is so intense and the addictive brain cells are so sensitive, if you have a lapse, you want to be able to go straight back into withdrawal. You don’t want that lapse to drag on for days or even years. You want to have a lot of confidence, okay, I’m really good at managing withdrawal. I’m going to put the rest of this down the disposal and get back into withdrawal.

So yeah, it’s part of the training. I feel like the Addiction Recovery Community is a training community. What happens when children are born addicted is that they’re trying to get life skills through an addicted brain—an inflamed brain, a craving brain, a brain that’s impaired cognitively, and it just doesn’t happen.

I remember I said, oh, you know what, I’m going to start trying to describe all the skills that we teach in this community. The spreadsheet got longer and longer and longer. Finally, I sat back and I said why? Oh, it’s because it is one of the tenets of addiction that when the addiction starts, personality development stops. So if you started drinking at age 13, you have a different recovery than somebody who starts drinking heavily in their late 20s. You’ve just missed 15 years of personality development. Well, we never get any.

I’ve been in New York now for four years. I have a very, very traumatic upbringing. I had that raging mother, I had a raging father. I had a raging older sister. This is in the 1950s and already women were being positioned, oh, modern women use convenience foods. We had Crisco, cake mixes, Tang, juice concentrates, jelly, white bread, and Velveeta cheese. We had all those processed foods already in the 1950s. Now, we were skinny as rails because we didn’t have the 15-pound packages of potato chips in our house, but we had personality disorders. We were always fighting, all five of us.

I didn’t get life skills. Now, in the ARC, we lead with compassion. We lead with gentleness. We never tell our members what to do. We’re using a form of communication called motivational interviewing where we are listening carefully to the person’s strengths, the member’s strengths, and then we’re really discussing in detail their strengths. 

What’s happening there is you are literally rewiring the part of the brain that says I can’t do this. You’re rewiring that part of the brain that says I can do this. Look, everybody around me is doing this. I can do this of course, and you’ve got the cooperation and the collaboration of the mirror neurons to do that. It works like gangbusters. It is shocking how well it works.

Four years later, I’ve thrown off I don’t know what percentage of my parent’s’ negativity because their own self-confidence, self-esteem were so low they were using caffeine, sugar, processed foods, alcohol, and cigarettes every day—typical 1950s. He was a corporate executive, a Ph.D. biochemist, and a commander in the Navy, so he was a very authoritarian person. And then my mother was always drinking caffeine and sugar and she had that totally wacko emotional profile where you never knew—she could go from calm to belting you in 60 seconds.

So growing up in that kind of a traumatic household, I was carrying a tremendous amount of fear, self-loathing, and self-doubt. But over four years of being in the ARC, we do a lot of what we call ARC exercises where we rewire a brain and it’s so simple. It’s so incredibly simple. 

So an example would be what we call the because card. Because of ___ I used to ___, but now because of ___I ___. So when you say because of ___ I used to ___, you are opening up the synapse between two memory cells. And when you do that, you can put new information in there so that if the memory comes up, it doesn’t control behavior anymore. The new information controls behavior.

So if I say because I was addicted to processed foods I used to rage, but now that I have eliminated processed foods, toxic media, toxic behaviors, and toxic people I am calm in all circumstances. So if something should happen to trigger a memory of raging, instead of being pulled back into raging, no, there’s new information there. I am calm in all circumstances. It works. It’s incredible. It’s so simple. 

None of us are therapists. We’re not providing any therapy. We’re providing peer support, a structure, an environment, and a community in which people can get back in touch with how wonderful they are.

So the way advertising works is it wants to persuade us that we have a pain, there’s something wrong with us, and we need to buy a product to fix it. None of that is true. We are incredible. We’re spectacular. We have incredible resources inside of us. We need very little. We need shelter, transportation, clean food, and good company. It just works, but that is how you do it. We have members all over the world. It’s a 24 hour a day operation. That 15 hours of live programming is extended over 24 hours.

 

[01:40:47] Ashley James: I love it. Oh, it’s so exciting that you’re having these results. The question that’s been on my mind is because we talked about your recent work and all the work that led up to these breakthroughs. I’m really curious though, what was your thesis when you earned your Ph.D. in addictive nutrition?

 

[01:41:05] Dr. Joan Ifland: So it was to validate the DSM, that’s the Diagnostic Manual for Mental Illness. Addictions are considered a mental illness. It was to validate the DSM for diagnostic criteria for alcoholism, for overeating, and we did it right out of the box and went to go with a really small sample. I’m teary because I remember, I had to go to school for new fields to get that Ph.D. I went to Union Institute & University in Cincinnati. The way it works is you have to collect faculty from other schools because you’re in a new field so there’s no existing faculty.

I got the greatest people to work with me. Yeah, it was only 64 people. We got statistical significance, no problem. These characteristics of alcoholism are running rampant in overeaters.

 

[01:42:16] Ashley James: Where would the food addiction field be if it wasn’t for your work?

 

[01:42:26] Dr. Joan Ifland: Oh, Ashley. Oh, dear. It would still be in the dark ages. I have to tell you this little story if you don’t mind.

 

[01:42:41] Ashley James: I’d love to hear it.

 

[01:42:46] Dr. Joan Ifland: I have to think about how old I was, but  mid-60s, how in the world do I carve out three years full time to research and write? The textbook is 240,000 words. It’s built on 2000 studies. I wrote 70% of it and I persuaded other scientists to write the other 30% and I edited the other 30%. I persuaded food addiction practitioners to co-write the chapters on behaviors. It was just such a confluence of factors.

My dad died in 2014, the same year that CRC Press came to me and asked me to write the textbook. One of my failed attempts to get other people to recover was a prepared meal company. There I was in Houston spending my divorce settlement to run this company. I thought, just give people clean food. They’ll feel so great they’ll want to continue, which is like saying to an alcoholic, oh listen, I’m just going to give you this nice clean water. Just drink this water in place of the alcohol, you’ll see how great you feel, and then you’ll just want to do it.

 

[01:44:10] Ashley James: I love your intentions, though. I think they were the best of intentions, but like you’ve outlined, it’s not that simple. It’s not a matter of just making good food choices. I mean, that’s like saying to all the people that have a food addiction, why don’t you just eat healthy? You know what to eat, just eat fruits and vegetables. Just go eat healthier.

 

[01:44:32] Dr. Joan Ifland: Why didn’t I think of that?

 

[01:44:34] Ashley James: There’s so much, like you said, stigma and shame around it.

 

[01:44:41] Dr. Joan Ifland: There’s all this mythology.

 

[01:44:42] Ashley James: Mythology, yes.

 

[01:44:44] Dr. Joan Ifland: All this insanity, this confusion. People have made up stories about what’s going on for they’re not—I’m not going to say this. I was going to say for their profit. But I know my daughter, my MD daughter, I have a daughter who’s an MD. She’s also an MBA, fortunately, because she finally said to me one day, mom, I cannot fix people in an eight-minute office visit, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life trying. She has now left practice. She’s now a full-time consultant. She’s a well-intentioned person, and she left behind in her clinic well-intentioned doctors. The whole system is set up so that the only thing that doctor can do is be a marketing person for the pharmaceutical industry.

 

[01:45:40] Ashley James: They’re trained drug dealers, and like you said, MDs are not bad people. Inherently, they’re good people. The system is corrupt that it has been since its birth, and that’s why it’s so good to go back and study the history of the modern medical system and see that from day one, the universities that teach the medical schools, the pharmaceutical companies have been funding them and have been controlling what they can do. 

All of that is designed to keep out real cures. Doctors who’ve come up with systems that have actually cured cancer more successfully than the cut, burn, and poison method have been run off to other countries basically time and time again.

You’re not allowed to have a cure. One of my mentors, he’s in his late 80s. I’m not sure how old exactly, but I think it’s 86. Thirty-five, 40 years ago, around then, he worked at Yerkes Primate Research Institute. He has multiple degrees. He’s a pathologist. He’s a veterinarian. He’s a naturopathic physician now, but he started out as a large animal vet and then was into the research. He’s written many papers.

He discovered by accident the cause and cure for cystic fibrosis. Other pathologists confirm his findings. He brought it to the Yerkes Primate Research Institute, and they fired him and blacklisted him from the research field. He went back to his alma mater and was going to be a professor. He was unpacking and the dean came in and showed him a letter that said that the university would lose all their funding if he would remain there because he discovered a cure that basically, in one generation, we could completely stop and never again have cystic fibrosis.

Get this, it’s a selenium deficiency in utero, just like neural tube defects are caused by folate. Well, we know that. He also discovered, at the moment of conception, zinc deficiency causes Down syndrome, and selenium deficiency can also cause muscular dystrophy, it depends. It causes one or the other. A lot of his research was around nutrient deficiency in utero and the diseases it causes, but all of it was completely suppressed. He fought and fought and fought and fought and all the doors were closed because that would have cost the pharmaceutical companies billions.

Now, your daughter, the MD, is not taught this. She’s taught how to prescribe drugs. She’s not taught that there’s a cure and that there’s a way to prevent these illnesses in the first place because MDs are not trained in this.

 

[01:48:39] Dr. Joan Ifland: She’s taught that everything you’ve just described is quackery. It’s very bad out there. Well, anyway, my dad died and CRC Press appeared at the same time, and he left me enough income. My stepmom was living in Cincinnati, so I moved from Houston back to Cincinnati to get her through the end of her life. I walked into the first apartment I looked at—a beautiful little tiny apartment overlooking the Ohio River. 

Three years, I turned in the manuscript and my stepmother died, and I moved out here in Seattle. But it was just like the universe cleared out three years of my life where I could sit full time and write and edit that textbook.

Today, anybody who says, oh, it’s so controversial. They are lying. You just open the textbook and there are 2000 citations. Why is there so much research on this? It’s because of the amount of research on obesity, eating disorders, and drug addiction. We have brain imaging technology, we know exactly what an addicted brain looks like. Overeaters’ brains are addicted brains. All that obesity and eating disorder research is actually describing aspects of the addiction diagnosis.

The addiction diagnosis is 11 behaviors. Its unintended use, failure to cut back, time spent, cravings, unfulfilled roles, relationship problems, activities given up, hazardous use, use despite knowledge of consequences, tolerance or progression, and its withdrawal. All of those things are used to diagnose alcoholism and they are all rife. They’re everywhere in overeating.

 

[01:50:51] Ashley James: One thing I’d like to clarify because we use the term overeating. Like you said, you guys were skinny when you grew up, but it would have been considered food addiction. Some people overeat and are obese, but my mother was never obese. Sometimes she’d say she’s 15 pounds overweight. I think she was five. She’d point to her tummy and she had a little tiny pooch that could not have been more than the size of a kitten. She was always a size six, just a very, very fit woman. She did step classes. She was kind of addicted to exercise and really controlling food. And then, like I said, she then had these side projects of sugar that she had to dig into secretly.

And then there was alcohol every night socially. My parents would split a bottle or two of wine. So there were these things, which also leads to the sugar going up and down. A lot of times, there are similarities between bipolar and sugar spiker. It’s really important to understand oneself and also one’s partner in life. 

My husband, and I’ve said this on the show before, he gave me permission to say this. We noticed that every single argument we’ve ever had—I mean, I’m not perfect. In arguments where he’s being irrational and I’m calm and he’s freaking out, I’m like, why are you doing this? We figured out it was low blood sugar. That’s when we really started to dig into—this is 2014. 

I said, okay, but at the time, he had chosen to be a vegan. He’s now a vegan, but back then, so let me scramble you some eggs and then let’s talk in 20 minutes. He’d eat some eggs and two minutes later and he’s like, I don’t know why. He said to me, I feel like Jekyll and Hyde. I’m watching myself and I can’t even control myself being that way, being so nasty, and he’s not nasty. He’s a very sweet and loving person, but when he’s low blood sugar, watch out.

 

[01:53:01] Dr. Joan Ifland: That’s exactly why I got into this field 26 years ago. It’s personality.

 

[01:53:09] Ashley James: I think the term overeating is people go, well, I don’t overeat. I don’t overeat at all. I’m not fat. Maybe you could just distinguish the difference between overeating, emotional eating. There’s binge eating, right? There’s binging, but they all fall into the category of food addiction, is that correct?

 

[01:53:33] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. I think the American Psychiatric Association, which is the author, of course, of this Diagnostic Manual, they cannot get their brains wrapped around the idea that processed food addiction exists, so they’ve tried to describe other syndromes.

Let’s just take binge eating disorder. It’s very interesting but binging is not a requirement. The word binging does not appear in any of the diagnostic criteria for addictions for any kind of addiction. How did the American Psychiatric Association decide how to diagnose an addiction? It’s through behaviors. 

So when you don’t have your frontal lobe and the addicted brain cells are controlling behavior, very specific things happen. You have relationship problems. You start dropping activities because you’d rather go home and use. You have relationship problems for the reasons that you just described. You have this Jekyll and Hyde personality. You can’t fulfill your roles because you’re too tired, drunked, drugged up, or passed out from processed foods, so you have behaviors.

As it turns out, the first four criteria are things that are going on inside the person. You have a plan to use a certain amount and you don’t follow the plan. That’s unintended use. You’ve tried to cut back, and this is again where you see prevalence. So over 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. They don’t want to be that way. They’ve tried to cut back and failed. This is something else you would have to see. We’d have to see really widespread prevalence. 

Time spent. They might stop at three fast food places on their way home from work. And then when they do get home, they might go back out in the evening and get more grocery items. Cravings, everybody has cravings. Cravings are so prevalent that people don’t even know that it’s possible to not have them. You have it starting inside the person with those first four, and then in the next three, you have it affecting their behaviors—failure to fulfill roles, relationship problems, and activities given up. 

And then the last four are measuring progression. It’s getting worse. You are getting sick from it. You use in spite of knowledge of consequences is a very common manifestation of addiction. You know you shouldn’t be. You start to say it, I know I shouldn’t, but, and then you go and use it. That’s a sign of an addiction. Eating more of a substance, you see that over the years and the manufacturers are just making larger and larger containers of these substances. 

And then withdrawal. You’ll see people using processed foods, not because they’re hungry, it’s because they’re tired, they’re irritable, they’re anxious, they’re depressed, or they’re foggy. Those are withdrawal avoidance. They have a headache, they have a stomachache, they’re lethargic, they’re bored, or they can’t think. Those are withdrawal avoidance.

This is how you decide, and you’re right, I say overeaters, but they’re people who are using processed foods in those 11 ways. You’re right, 20% of diabetics are not overweight. Twenty percent of people accumulate fat around their organs and not under their skin, you can’t see it. But the way the American Psychiatric Association trains psychiatrists and therapists of all varieties to tell whether the person in front of them is suffering under an addiction, they ask those 11 questions. That’s how you know, and it’s not a weight issue.

In fact, thin people who have food addiction are more traumatized in some ways because they have sought help from the health professionals and the doctors or whoever just look at them and say, you don’t have a problem. Get out of here. They are being traumatized right in front of their very eyes. 

I don’t know if your listeners would relate to this phenomenon, but I call it the robot. The remote control robot phenomenon where your frontal lobe is screaming, no, no, no, no. But the addicted brain cells in the midbrain have control over behavior. Like a robot or like a zombie, you are walking to the kitchen, out to the car to go for fast food. You’re two different people. It’s terrifying to have that experience, and thin people have that experience.

 

[01:59:24] Ashley James: I’m so excited about your program. The more I think about how someone could plug themselves in and get those mirror neurons firing, get the oxytocin of community firing to their advantage to help them overcome it is amazing. 

Little things that I’ve seen work for me is I order my grocery. Now, I love going to the grocery store like picking up my own fresh produce. It’s not that I don’t like going to the grocery store. But what I noticed is I’ll add a bunch of stuff to my cart online, then I’ll stare at the cart, and I’ll ask myself with each item, do I really need this? I get to slow down. I kind of have that internal dialogue. Because what you described that robot, for me it’s more like a possession, right? It’s like an entity, like a satanic possession trying to force you, overcoming your own consciousness to do bad to you. 

So I look at that list of foods and I’m like, okay, I’ve got my vegetables there, and then, oh, wait, okay. I’m going to say cookies. I don’t add cookies, but I can’t think of something bad at the moment. Okay, there are those cookies there. I’m like, do I need that? Do I really need that? How am I going to feel after I eat that? Does that really serve me? Does that really help me and my family? Because whatever I’m buying everyone’s eating. And then I hit the delete button. 

Then there’ll be that, no, wait, you’ll… And then the fear of missing out, that FOMO kicks like, you’ll feel bad if you don’t. You’ll regret not having it in your cart. You’ll regret it. It’s like a conversation I have with myself.

 

[02:01:08] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s a battle.

 

[02:01:09] Ashley James: It is, it’s a battle.

 

[02:01:10] Dr. Joan Ifland: It is a battle between the addicted brain cells and the frontal lobe. People don’t realize that different cortices of the brain can battle each other. And that addicted cortex, it does not want to give up control, and it’ll keep coming back. It sleeps with one eye open, and it will never go away. That programming is there permanently. This is something that we have to protect ourselves against for the rest of our lives.

The thing is, it’s not just food addiction, it’s screen addiction, and it’s porno addiction. The addiction will happily slide over to some other source—shopping, addiction, gambling, whether it’s a behavior addiction like a process addiction or whether it’s a substance abuse like alcohol, prescription drugs, or any of the other recreational drugs, it’ll happily slide around. This is something else that we’re very aware of in our community. We are creating a very fundamental foundation of self-regard, self-respect, and from that self-caring, self-likings, self-loving. From that comes the urge to protect ourselves. So we’re starting in the right place.

 

[02:02:27] Ashley James: Your work is tremendous. If it wasn’t for you, we would be in the dark ages still, like you said, with understanding food addiction and understanding what’s going on in the brain and really acknowledging it, and taking the stigma away. There are so many people needlessly suffering. 

We need not look farther than the statistics of disease. In the United States alone and every other country tends to follow. We’re the worst in the United States. We really are, it’s unfortunate. The United States spends the most money in the world on “healthcare” and yet it’s the worst for many outcomes.

We have to acknowledge that this system is broken and we need to take ownership of our health. That’s why you’re listening. Anyone who’s listening is taking ownership of their health, not waiting to get sick, and then go to a doctor to be given a drug. They’re taking ownership of their health. If it wasn’t for you, we would still be stuck in the dark ages when it comes to understanding how processed food, there is an addiction. It is designed to be addictive like cigarettes. 

Literally, the cigarette companies went, well, how are we going to use addiction in other places, right? It’s just phenomenal. So thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the groundbreaking work that you do. I’m so excited for our listeners to check out foodaddictionresources.com, which is your website. It provides free evidence-based handouts, and then you have foodaddictionbooks.com as well.

 

[02:04:13] Dr. Joan Ifland: Hang on. The best place to go is processedfoodaddiction.com. That’s the hub of all of our other websites. Go there, take the self-quiz to see if you’re experiencing the signs of processed food addiction, then sign up for the free information, and just get on our email list. Then you can start to consider the programs that we have.

 

[02:04:41] Ashley James: Awesome. I’d love to have you back on the show at some point to continue sharing. It sounds like you’re constantly learning. You’re tapped into the research when it comes to the brain and all the latest research. Your community, which started in 2018 and it’s just taken off, and you’re seeing that people, within three days of being in the community, are able to finally start to cook healthy foods. Just that oxytocin in that community is helping them overcome the four- to eight-day withdrawal period. So I’m very excited about that. It’s processedfoodaddiction.com. Everything that Dr. Joan Ifland does is going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

 

[02:05:33] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. This is not your fault. These are things that were done to you for profit. This is not your fault, not the weight regain, not the loss of control, not the hiding, not the binging, not the weight, not the diet-related disease, none of this is your fault. It requires a lot of skill-building and training to get out of it, but it’s not your fault. It’s not because of your child’s issues. It’s because you have an addiction to substances.

 

[02:06:11] Ashley James: And through Joan’s program, I’m very excited that she’s getting results, and you can get results too. I love that there’s a supportive community that can help you. I’m excited to check it out as well. 

I like to say, keep your mind so open your brain can fall out, right? I’m an open-minded skeptic. Try everything. Try everything. Obviously, you have to go but try everything. I’m all about growing. It sounds like your community helps people to learn new life skills. If I can figure out where my personality stopped developing because of addiction, I don’t know what age. I’ve seen it in others, but we have blinders to our own self, right? So it’s easy to see in others, we can’t see it ourselves. But if I could learn more new life skills to grow, I’m all for it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

 

[02:07:06] Dr. Joan Ifland: Thanks for having me. This was amazing. Truly amazing, Ashley. You’re a gifted podcaster.

 

[02:07:13] Ashley James: Thank you. I really appreciate that and I can’t wait to have you back.

 

[02:07:16] Dr. Joan Ifland: All right, take care.

 

[02:07:18] Ashley James: Awesome. That’s a wrap. How do you feel it went?

 

[02:07:21] Dr. Joan Ifland: Oh my God. This might be the best interview I’ve ever done. I don’t cry very often during interviews, but there’s something about your understanding and your own knowledge that made it safe for me to feel my emotions in this situation. We are saving lives.

 

[02:07:44] Ashley James: You’re saving lives. You are saving lives.

 

[02:07:47] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yeah. And saving people from really, really painful lives. We’re not just preventing them from dying. We’re also preventing them from missing out on their lives.

 

[02:08:02] Ashley James: Do you feel like you’re missing something? Are you searching for the right answers to solve your health issues? Do you feel like you should have more energy and mental clarity? With everything you’re doing for your health, you may be missing one key component. Our body needs 90 essential nutrients every day to function optimally—60 minerals, 12 amino acids, 2 fatty acids, and 16 vitamins each and every day. Because of the farming practices over the last 100 years, most of our food has 60% fewer vitamins and minerals compared to just 50 years ago.

So if you aren’t eating eight cups of a variety of fruits and vegetables each day, you may be missing some of your essential nutrients. These are the raw building blocks the body needs to create new healthy tissue, healthy hormones, a balanced digestive system, strong muscles, bones and joints, and maintain an optimal functioning nervous system. 

Especially, if you’re experiencing more stress or if you’ve gone through an illness like an infection, that takes more resources. So if you’re not consuming more vitamin C, more of all the 16 vitamins, and all the 60 minerals when you’re going through more stress either physical stress, emotional stress, mental stress, those stressors take more nutrients to survive those bumps in the road in life. Over time, that whittles away. That depletes our nutrient tanks, our stores in our body. Without these 90 essential nutrients, things start to break down. 

Now, you’ve experienced these breakdowns. Maybe you get migraines, maybe you’re exhausted, maybe your hormones are out of balance, your digestion is out of balance, or you have some aches and pains. Maybe you’ve even been diagnosed with something. You have a series of symptoms and if those symptoms all look like something, then we can diagnose it right? That’s what MDs can do. MDs will treat these breakdowns with drugs and mask your symptoms. But if your body has a nutrient deficiency, no amount of drugs will fix the problem.

Seven years ago, I embarked on a journey to cure my diabetes, infertility, PCOS, high blood pressure, and chronic adrenal fatigue. I felt like I was a mess. Through my research, I found a company that made natural supplements to address these nutrient needs. They formulated their supplements to exceed all standards of quality. Their minerals are the most bioavailable and absorbed by the body that I have ever found. 

After getting on their protocols for healthy hormones and blood sugar along with their dietary recommendations for better health, I reversed my type 2 diabetes, I reversed my infertility. I no longer had high blood pressure. My energy and vitality came back. After six years of trying to get pregnant with my husband before we found these supplements, once we got on the supplements, we were able to conceive our wonderful healthy son who’s now three years old and he is amazing. We would have never had that had we not found this company.

Speaking of our son, he’s also taking these supplements for optimal health. His pediatrician thinks they’re amazing. If you’d like to give these supplements a try and see for yourself if you’re experiencing a nutrient deficiency, please go to takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Their health coaches are phenomenal. I personally know all of them, they’re amazing people. 

I just want you to know, as my listener, I feel like I need to protect my listeners. I would never promote anything that I didn’t 100% believe in and I didn’t feel was healthy or good for you. I feel like you’re my tribe, and I’m sharing this information. In fact, I’ve been doing this podcast so that I can help as many people as possible gain their health back.

The health coaches at takeyoursupplements.com I really trust that they will make sure that you’re well taken care of. They will work with you to help determine the best protocol for your nutrient needs and work within your budget. They will also help to implement a holistic protocol that includes supporting a healthy diet and lifestyle. 

Go to takeyoursupplements.com, fill out the form, and one of their health coaches will get back to you really shortly. And then you guys can schedule a time to talk on the phone and they will work with you to help you dial in all your nutrient needs.

I really look forward to hearing about your experience with them. Please feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me on our Facebook group. Go to Facebook, search Learn True Health, and join our group. Let me know what you think about the wonderful health coaches at takeyoursupplements.com

By the way, when you go to takeyoursupplements.com and you get assigned to a health coach, they’re your health coach. You’re not going to keep getting a different person every time. You get one person, they work with you, and they hold your hand for months down the road. They’re there for you to support you month after month while you’re on your nutrient protocol and they’re helping you dial in your nutrient needs. They’re really wonderful like that.

I know you’ll enjoy your experience with them, and I’d love to hear about your experience with them. Please feel free to email me as well, ashley@learntruehealth.com. I love hearing success stories. Like I said, I’ve been working with this supplement company for my own health. I love sharing this information because I think that many of you will be able to resolve your issues with nutrition just like I’ve seen many people do. 

With that said, go to takeyoursupplements.com, fill out your information, and a health coach is very excited to start working with you and helping you get your health back.

 

Get Connected with Dr. Joan Ifland!

Website – Processed Food Addiction

Food Addiction Education Facebook Group

Instagram

YouTube

Twitter

Book by Dr. Joan Ifland

Processed Food Addiction

Recommended Reading by Dr. Joan Ifland

Metabolical – Rob Lustig

1