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Dr. Christianson's Book:
https://amzn.to/2VNVjjCListen to Past Episodes with Dr. Christianson:
https://www.learntruehealth.com/metabolism-reset-diethttps://www.learntruehealth.com/heal-your-thyroid-holistically
www.drchristianson.com
The Thyroid Reset Diethttps://www.learntruehealth.com/the-thyroid-reset-diet
Highlights:
Wolff-Chaikoff effect Iodine vs. iodide Myth-busting halogens Three broad categories of thyroid diseaseIn this episode, Dr. Alan Christianson is back to talk about his new book, The Thyroid Reset Diet. He busts some medical myths about halogens and thyroid diseases. He also shares that it’s not about consuming more or less iodine, but it’s more about how much we need and how much we can tolerate.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have back on the show Dr. Alan Christianson who was in episode 307 and in episode 324. I highly recommend you go back and check out those episodes. You can learn more about him, his story, and the work that he does as a Naturopathic endocrinologist.
I had him on the show previously talking about thyroid, and that was before he had published his book, which we’re discussing today, The Thyroid Reset Diet. He goes into so much more detail in this episode so I’m really excited. And we also had him on the show in episode 307 talking about The Metabolism Reset Diet.
Since his expertise lies in both holistic medicine and in endocrinology, I think it’s fascinating to learn from him. He really does love to bring in the science, bring in the studies, and the proof, the evidence, and the research to dispel the myths. There are so many myths when it comes to medicine, right? There’s so much dogma and so many beliefs that are not associated with actual science, are not grounded in science. So he likes to dispel that, and instead of following assumptions, beliefs, or hypotheses, he sticks with what is true, what’s proven, and then uses holistic medicine as much as possible to support your body’s ability to heal itself so that you can get so healthy you don’t need to be on medication anymore.
I just want that for you so badly. I want everyone to be able to get so healthy that they can reduce their meds and even get to the point where they can safely and healthily get off of medication because they no longer need it. Of course, there’s always the exception to the rule like a type 1 diabetic, but I have even seen type 1 and type 1 diabetics significantly reduce their amount of insulin needed, which is so exciting because they were able to optimize their body’s ability to use insulin in a healthy way instead of having developed insulin resistance. So, with that, there’s so much you’re going to learn from Dr. Alan Christianson today.
And there’s one thing I wanted to touch on. Since this week, I’m really focusing on how supportive using specific infrared therapy is for your health. I used it to detoxify heavy metals, it had such a powerful impact on my life. But there’s actually a lot of evidence to show that if you have thyroid problems, using regular sauna therapy, what that looks like is spending about 20 to 30 minutes every day or every other day in a sauna and specifically the Sunlighten Sauna because they are extremely low toxic.
Most saunas out there, a lot of toxicity, unfortunately. They’re extremely low EMF, which means that even though there are electronics in them, they’re not emitting an electromagnetic field that is dangerous to you. And the Sunlighten Sauna uses the full spectrum, it’s like sunlight. It uses the full spectrum of mid, near, and far.
And the reason why that is better than any other sauna, and I’ve had entire interviews on this. You can search Sunlighten or search sauna when you go to learntruehealth.com. What’s really interesting about the near and the mid-infrared is that it speeds up wound healing, it decreases chronic pain very quickly, and it decreases inflammation. So someone can come into a sauna with pain and walk out with significantly less pain, sometimes it helps pain go away completely depending on the cause of the pain, and decreases inflammation.
Not only does it help with detoxification, which I’ve talked about before, weight loss, and improvement in metabolism, but it also improves collagen production. So there’s that vein inside of us. We’re like, I’d like to avoid wrinkles or I’d like to have firmer skin, have more tone, have healthier-looking skin, and just healthier skin in general, and healthier tissue. That is something that is achieved with sauna therapy because the near and mid-infrared spectrum helps to improve skin health. And so, some women and some men use their sauna, the Sunlighten System specifically, for vanity sake, and why not? But really, my focus has always been on the health aspect.
And so what we’re getting is we’re seeing that through improving the metabolism, decreasing inflammation, improving cardiovascular function, and improving body temperature, you are also supporting the thyroid function. There are studies out there that show it, which is really exciting.
The general benefits of infrared sauna—relaxation, stress relief, which is great, in and of itself, especially if you’re combating a health issue like thyroid problems. Oftentimes, those with stress and especially medical stress, will go to food like sugar, alcohol, or cigarettes as a form of stress relief. The unfortunate part of that is that’s obviously hurting the body. Where we could use sauna therapy every day to improve stress levels because you can actually decrease stress levels in the body by using sauna therapy.
Detoxification, cellular health, and wound healing is improved. Cardiovascular function is improved. Blood pressure is regulated, so if you have high blood pressure or low-pressure blood pressure it actually helps to balance it. Anti-aging and the cleansing of the skin, weight loss, which we already talked about. You burn about 500 calories per sauna session. Circulation improves greatly, and then the pain relief, which we talked about. But there’s even more, there’s so much, and it’s great.
If you want to just internet search thyroid health and sauna therapy or infrared sauna and thyroid health, you’ll see lots of articles, lots of studies. It’s fun to look at. There’s even a study where it increased the thyroid-stimulating hormone. So if you know you have low thyroid-stimulating hormone, it was for a specific cohort of people that had low thyroid-stimulating hormone. So just very interesting how we can utilize nutrition—which we’re going to talk about today—and we can utilize lifestyle changes such as using the Sunlighten Sauna System in order to support overall health. So the whole body, holistic health, emotional health, as well as physical health, and also thyroid health.
Now, Sunlighten does offer my listeners a great discount, so if you do decide to call them, check them out, and ask them questions because they have systems that are big enough for two or three people, and then they have the personal size ones—much, much smaller, especially if you live in a very small space like I do now, then you would be interested in their Solo System. They even have a small sauna that is a wooden sauna, but it’s kind of like a TARDIS if you know about Doctor Who. It actually fits just into the corner of a room, so it doesn’t take up that much space. Two people can fit in it, or one very comfortably can fit in it. But that used to be in the second bedroom of our house. It would just fit into the corner, kind of the size of two small closets or one large closet basically.
They have many different sizes to fit your needs. And what I do love about their company is they’re so health-focused. Their entire purpose is to support your body’s ability to heal itself, be as healthy, and feel as good as possible. I can’t tell you how amazing I feel when I come out of a Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love it. I kind of became addicted to it. I’d rather be addicted to my sauna than addicted to drugs or alcohol for stress relief. So, as addictions go, it’s pretty great when you become addicted to kale and sauna therapy.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for supporting the show by sharing it with those you care about. If you do decide to get a Sunlighten, you know you will get a great discount. I did interview the founder, Connie Zack. You can listen to that episode, and she promised that she would always give a fantastic discount to all the listeners, so make sure you mention Learn True Health with Ashley James when you call Sunlighten. You can just Google them and give them a call, they’re really great there. They’ll answer all your questions.
Right now I know they’re having a special going on in the first part of August or maybe all of August, I’m not sure. But just give them a call and ask the specialist. It’s something like free shipping and a percentage off or a discount off of their models. Just give them a call and let them know Ashley James sent you and that you get that special discount.
And then if you have any more questions, a lot of our listeners are in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, and they also have gotten a Sunlighten Sauna. They’ve shared their experiences so you can start a conversation there. We can all talk about our experiences with the Sunlighten Sauna.
Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview. Please come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. And please talk about this episode if you have questions or comments, want to talk about what you learned, or maybe something that came up for you that you want to discuss with other listeners and myself, I would absolutely love that. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy the show.
[00:09:52] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 465. I am so excited for today’s guests. We have back on the show Dr. Alan Christianson. You can go to drchristianson.com to check out his amazing website. Back when we had you on the show in episode 324, you were sharing with us The Metabolism Reset Diet, which was pretty mind-blowing and you dropped these little nuggets which kind of blew my mind.
One of them was about how most people actually are consuming too much iodine instead of too little, which I just did an interview with a doctor who swears we all need to be taking copious amounts of iodine. So this is going to be one of those things wherein the journey to our health, in our own personal health, we will come across contradictions.
Atkins versus plant-based, right? That’s just one of those big ones. Should I eat more meat or no meat? Should I go all meat or no meat? Should I eat more fat or no fat? There are some people who swear by keto and they’re like, oh, I feel amazing, and some people eat zero fat and they eat a whole food plant-based diet with no added fat and they feel amazing. How is it that complete opposites both can lead to health for certain people?
Well, some doctors swear by iodine and say that no one’s getting enough and we need more, and here you are with an amazing book, The Thyroid Reset Diet. One of the things that just blew my mind was that you share and you back it up with a lot of evidence that we are actually getting too much, which I find really interesting. Now, you’ve also written a book The Adrenal Reset Diet. I’m fascinated about that topic. I’d love to have you on the show again at some point to go over that because so many people suffer from adrenal fatigue, whether they know it or not, and reach for more and more caffeine, sugar, and stimulants to cope with adrenal fatigue. So I’d really love to have you back on the show to teach us about that.
But let’s dive into thyroid. Now, for those who’d like to learn more about Dr. Christianson’s background, you can go to episode 324 because we did cover his bio. You’re a holistic doctor, you’re a Naturopathic physician, and you’re very well researched. I really love your book The Thyroid Reset Diet. In fact, I could hardly hold on to it because every time I was reading it—so I would always read when I went on playdates or took my son to the park, and all the moms would see the cover and be like, I have thyroid problems. Then I’d be like, okay, you can borrow this for three days, but then you have to give it back to me on Thursday when I meet you at gymnastics because I haven’t finished reading this book. I kept lending it.
At one point I just would open it up to the graphs and be like okay, it boils down to this look at this graph, look at this graph, see this, and then they’re like, well, how do I eat? And then I’m like, okay, well, you can eat this way. Go to the back of the book and here’s the diet and here’s the questionnaire. So it was a lot of fun sharing your book in the passion, enthusiasm, of all the women. Actually, one man came to me and he does not look like he has any health problems and he’s like, actually I have a really low thyroid. I lent him the book for a week too.
So, everyone thought it was really interesting and several of my friends ended up just buying a copy for themselves. So, this whole concept first of all of too much iodine is radical because we’re all told in the holistic space that we need more iodine. So I definitely want to jump into that and allow you to teach more about how we can reset our thyroid and support our thyroid in going back to healthy levels. So many people out there have thyroid issues it’s becoming just an increasing problem. First of all, you’ve written all these other books. Did you have an aha moment? What had you want to write an entire book on supporting thyroid health?
[00:14:08] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, the research drove me to it. I saw this story clearly represented in the medical literature and no one was talking about it. I’ve known forever that the thyroid needs iodine. I’m an endocrinologist and that stuff that we learned pretty early on. Starting in about 2002, there became a big fad in the natural health space of giving massive amounts of it. Treating thyroid disease, I saw the complications from people who were taking too much and how it was worsening or causing thyroid disease for those that didn’t have it.
So I was well aware of the dangers of excess, but in the last four or five years, there’s been this mounting body about how excess might not be all that much, and how there may be an opportunity to reverse disease by controlling it. So it was really just driven by data that needed to be given a voice.
[00:14:58] Ashley James: And you show pretty clearly that different countries around the world, when they added iodine in the form of adding it to their salt for example and they added iodine into the food supply and how thyroid problems mounted pretty heavily. Well, one thing that’s been explained, and I’m sure you know way more about it than I do, is this idea of halogen poisoning. That fluoride, bromine, chloride has been added to our water and our food for the last 15 years or so.
What is going on? We’re being poisoned with these halogens, to which iodine is one of them. And my understanding is that things like fluoride block iodine. And so, when you looked at this information and saw that people were consuming more iodine and thus having increasing thyroid problems, did you also take into account that other halogens were increasing like countries started to add fluoride to the water, bromine to the flour, chlorine in the water as well. Did that come into account?
[00:16:13] Dr. Alan Christianson: For sure. Let’s back up a few steps too. People do talk about needing more or needing less. More and less in my vocabulary are four-letter words. So if you think it through, more to take into its ultimate extreme is basically infinite because more is more. Whatever you’re consuming today you need more, so you consume an infinite amount, you consume nothing but iodine, it’s silly. And then less is none, taken to its extreme. No matter how much you’re consuming, if you need to consume less, you’ll eventually get to none. Those are words I don’t like to use in terms of nutrients or foods or really much of anything.
There are amounts and we know that the thyroid needs iodine, it’s not the enemy. It’s necessary, but it’s necessary in certain amounts. There are two big considerations. Here’s how much we require, and how much we can tolerate. And now, of course, people are different. What we see is that the requirement differences are quite small. There are not big differences overpopulations in iodine requirements. Past predictable standards like body size, age, gender pregnancy status. So once you know some of those things, you can pretty well peg iodine requirements. Even absorption doesn’t vary too much. But tolerance varies tremendously.
A lot of people can tolerate occasional high doses or persistent moderately high doses with no big consequences. But they’re not the ones who are apt to get thyroid disease. So those who are apt to get it are those who cannot tolerate much extra. And it really comes down to just how iodine works as a nutrient and how it works in the thyroid.
So, big picture, it’s the richest source of free radicals of all known elements in the nutritional profile. There’s no other nutritional element that generates free radicals like iodine. That’s why it’s been used forever as an antiseptic in medicine. It’s highly reactive. Like bleach or hydrogen peroxide, it’s a good antiseptic.
Now, in the thyroid, it’s oxidized to its active state called iodine, normally it’s in the state of iodide, and iodine binds up with a protein and makes the thyroid hormone. This actually goes way back to the earliest forms of single cellular life, iodine was used as a transport mechanism for high-energy molecules.
But the drawback is that if there’s too much of that in the thyroid, it harms things. It’s just from the free radicals. They can’t be managed and it damages the cells. So we’ve got a lot of built-in mechanisms to protect us. The main one is called the Wolff–Chaikoff effect. And basically, the thyroid quits working when it’s given too much iodine. But that can’t go on forever, and it doesn’t work flawlessly. So sometimes, too much still gets in, and that can then add on autoimmunity for those who are prone to it. Should I talk about the halogens, or were there some comments you had on those comments?
[00:19:14] Ashley James: I definitely want to talk about halogens. You brought up the Wolff-Chaikoff effect, which I think for layman’s terms, some people call it a thyroid storm, right? Or is that different?
[00:19:27] Dr. Alan Christianson: No, it’s different. I can expand on that.
[00:19:32] Ashley James: Yeah, I would love that. Just to have a clear understanding. Let’s say I took a bunch of iodine because I thought it was really good for me. It’s too much and then my thyroid can’t absorb that much in order to protect itself from absorbing too much. It would then shut down for a time?
[00:19:56] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, so the protein that forms thyroid hormones is called thyroglobulin. Think about it like a passenger van. This capacity for 13 passengers, right? So there are 13 spots that are available for iodine. But if saturation levels of iodine are too high, it can get in the wrong spot. It can be like passengers can pile on top of each other and that can make just chaos. So rather than allow chaos, the gland just locks the doors. It just stops more from coming in.
This has been well understood since about the ‘50s, and you talk about thyroid storm. So that’s that phenomenon of Graves’ disease or hyperthyroidism. That’s where there’s this vicious cycle of extra thyroid hormone worsening the autoimmunity that releases extra thyroid hormone. And the amounts in circulation can be life-threatening.
So in situations like that, there’s a lot of medicines that are used to slow the thyroid and we can talk about fluoride too. Before we had current medications, fluoride was used for that purpose and very high doses of it. Yes, they can slow the thyroid, but now there are medications that are used more specifically, but they all take six to eight weeks. So if someone’s in a life or death situation where their heart is about to stop from too much thyroid hormone, the only thing that can stop it at the moment is a massive dose of iodine, and that’s via the Wolff-Chaikoff effect. You can also think of it like just blowing a fuse. If there’s too much current in your wires, you blow a fuse in the fuse box so the house won’t burn down.
[00:21:32] Ashley James: Wow. Yes. So the thyroid, does it take about 24 to 48 hours before it starts to back up again because it has to wait for the kidneys to excrete enough iodine for it to be safe to turn back on?
[00:21:48] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, the Wolff-Chaikoff effect, once it’s engaged, there is variation in how it plays out. So, the most typical scenario is about two to three weeks later the thyroid comes back online again. But there are variations. For some people, it doesn’t come back on correctly, and for others, it can lapse into hyperthyroidism. That’s just called iodine-induced hyperthyroidism.
[00:22:10] Ashley James: Could someone out there in one of the countries in which, like for example the United States where iodine is regularly put in salt. Could someone, through their diet alone, accidentally consume enough iodine to have the Wolff-Chaikoff effect occur?
[00:22:32] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah. And one more thing that I failed to mention that your question brings up is that I described it as like an on or off. We now understand there’s a little more nuance. It can actually be kind of like a parking brake towards not just totally on or off, but there’s a certain number of clicks. So it can be partially engaged, and yeah, it’s very easy to be above one’s personal tolerance and have that be subtly slowing the thyroid on an ongoing basis.
[00:22:58] Ashley James: This is where it gets interesting because in your book you show that too much iodine can cause almost all the symptoms of too little iodine in the diet.
[00:23:10] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah. And also, just a very high level, a lot of concept—iodine, it’s the most researched nutrient on the planet, bar none. We’ve been studying it for well over 150 years. We understood its role before we knew about the role of vitamin C, and we’ve got more data on it. There are about 30,000 studies relating its function to thyroid disease, and there’s a pretty solid body of knowledge. We’ve also tracked iodine fortification efforts all around the globe. And we’ve seen what levels of iodine intake correlate with the best health thyroid disease, higher or lower. So we’ve got all these data points.
Now, in the late ‘90s Just, just a little time after the internet came on like you were talking about earlier, a gentleman made several hypotheses that he bundled together into a series of articles called the Iodine Project. He hypothesized that we really needed more iodine, not less. He argued that halogen compounds were blocking iodine, and he argued that humans needed 400 to 4000 times what’s been considered as the safe upper limit. These ideas have been passed around verbatim ever since then by many other doctors.
They’re things that if you don’t really understand the ways in which iodine can be counterintuitive like you know more is not more. If you don’t get the nuances of how it works in the body. Those ideas are plausible, and a lot of them are internally consistent. They have a lot of explanations, but there’s a whole pile of ideas that are floating around that are just not in alignment with our body of knowledge from iodine from these last 150 years.
[00:24:56] Ashley James: So it’s a medical myth?
[00:25:00] Dr. Alan Christianson: At best, and it’s also harmful though. There are several papers in PubMed about people who have followed these exact guidelines during pregnancy and giving birth to babies with congenital hypothyroidism. And they’ve named these high-dose iodine products by name. They’ve talked about the exact doses used, and these are things that are still written about in guidelines in functional medicine. So it’s harmful, and I’ve seen scores of people that likely otherwise would not have developed thyroid disease, but it came on days after embarking on some of these protocols.
[00:25:30] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That’s so scary because too little iodine during conception leads to lower IQ. They show that it’s healthy to have healthy levels of iodine during pregnancy to have a healthy IQ for the baby.
[00:25:53] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, and let’s talk about that. That has happened, and the last time was in rural China in 1991. The time before that was in Papua New Guinea in 1962. Currently, there have been many studies on how much iodine is best for pregnant women, and they do need some, and the requirements are a little higher than they are in the nonpregnant state. But the Cochrane Review did a recent analysis of the effects of iodine supplementation during pregnancy, and they showed that women that do supplement with iodine during pregnancy, even the amount found in prenatals, they’re not less apt to have thyroid disease, they’re not apt to have better health overall. They’re actually more apt to have elevated thyroid antibodies, they’re more apt to have morning sickness, and there’s also no improvement to the baby’s health.
So yeah, in modern populations, we need some, but by and large, people are getting enough. There’s not a benefit to going out of your to add more even during pregnancy.
[00:26:49] Ashley James: And what you’re saying in your book is that many people are getting too much iodine.
[00:26:54] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, not all but many are. And again, the tolerance varies. So, if we went back to, again, not that far back, the early ‘90s, we had 112 nations on the earth that were considered severely iodine deficient. But as of 2014, Thankfully that problem was eradicated. But now, we’ve got 52 nations that are considered at risk for thyroid disease due to iodine excess. So many things that we know about other nutrients just don’t apply to iodine. Like vitamin C, we need it, we can get too little. Optimal amounts are probably higher than the bare-bones amount that offset the deficiency. We’re rarely in danger of getting too much from common sources. Yeah, none of that’s true for iodine. It’s so different. Our tolerance, those who are prone to thyroid disease, their tolerance is just ridiculously narrow.
[00:27:45] Ashley James: So, we talked briefly about the iodine storm, you said that’s Graves’ disease.
[00:27:50] Dr. Alan Christianson: Thyroid storm.
[00:27:51] Ashley James: Right. I want to talk a bit more about iodide versus iodine, but you said iodine is very inflammatory for the body and that it causes free radicals. Is that what you said?
[00:28:06] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, one of the strongest examples of that is if you see old medicine bottles, they had a skull and crossbones on those. One of the more popular means of suicide in the early part of the 1900s was iodine ingestion. So, high enough amounts, it’s fatal. And almost all of what we’re exposed to, to be precise, is in the form of iodide. It’s bound, it’s not in a free radical state. But when the concentrations are high enough, then it does dissociate into iodine.
Now, normally that doesn’t happen in the body with the exception of inside the thyroid follicles. So right there, that’s the job of thyroid peroxidase. It takes iodide and makes it into iodine, but it does it very cautiously, and only in just exacting amounts.
[00:28:52] Ashley James: So iodine is controlled in the body in exacting amounts, but what if someone consumes it in their diet, in the food because it’s added. It’s added to salt and so much salt is in processed food in excess amounts. So we’re getting iodine in processed foods. Is it iodine or iodide?
[00:29:21] Dr. Alan Christianson: It’s iodide.
[00:29:22] Ashley James: Okay. So iodide, which is bound and it’s not considered inflammatory?
[00:29:29] Dr. Alan Christianson: It comes down to quantities. So if iodide is at an excessive level, then it does still end up becoming too much inside the thyroid. So to be really precise, we talk about excessive amounts and then toxicologic amounts. And so the excessive amounts are where there’s too much for the thyroid to function at optimal capacity, and then toxicologic amounts when there’s so much that even outside the thyroid it’s dissociating into iodine, and that’s where you start seeing kidney damage and systemic organ damage from it. That’s not common. That doesn’t really happen from most sources of iodine, with the exception of a few medications or iodine in some contrast media.
[00:30:09] Ashley James: I’m wondering, is it excessive iodide that causes Graves’ disease because iodine is so inflammatory and we know that inflammation of tissue can lead to autoimmune disease?
[00:30:28] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, so there are links between iodine intake and all types of thyroid disease. The links, it’s not as clear of a smoking gun with Graves’ as it is for a causative factor for Hashimoto’s. There is associated data for excess iodine being also a factor for many types of thyroid cancer, but the strongest clear smoking gun link is for Hashimoto’s. In fact, one group of researchers, they concluded that of all the controllable factors that give rise to autoimmune thyroid disease—and they’re referring to Hashimoto’s in this context—they said that iodine is not the only factor, but it’s more relevant than all the other factors combined.
[00:31:06] Ashley James: And so if we’re helping someone to heal from Hashimoto’s and reset their thyroid so that they no longer have Hashimoto’s and they have a healthy thyroid, you have a diet in your book, and it allows people to control the amount of iodine because you said it’s not about the four-letter words more or less. It’s about the balance that that person needs. And so, if someone has Hashimoto’s, how would they know how much they should control in their diet?
[00:31:38] Dr. Alan Christianson: In a perfect world, we would have a simple blood test or some sense of the way of measuring that. And there are scores of iodine tests that exist, and many of them are useful for evaluating a population’s iodine status. But the problem with individuals, there are two problems. One of which is that none of the existing tests that are used for the nutritional status of iodine, none of them have enough intra-subject consistency. What I mean by that is if you did the test more than once you’d get a different answer. So for urine random iodine, if you tested yourself 10 times in a row, you can be within 80% accuracy. If you want to be within 95% accuracy, it takes over 300 tests.
Now, if you do a 24-hour urine test, then you have to do 200 tests to be within 90% accuracy. But the other question is what is the clinical relevance? So, in some of the studies that showed that regulating iodine could reverse thyroid disease, some of them would test people before embarking upon the reduction of iodine. And the question was, were those whose measured iodine levels high or higher, were they the ones most apt to benefit? And what we’ve learned is that the compartment of iodine within the thyroid doesn’t perfectly correlate with measured iodine in the urine or in the blood. And so, in the studies, many people who were not high in iodine still have benefits to thyroid function through iodine regulation.
[00:33:10] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. So what’s in the urine is not really an accurate representation of what’s going on in the thyroid?
[00:33:19] Dr. Alan Christianson: It’s not an accurate representation of what your averages are, and it’s not an accurate representation of what’s going on inside your thyroid.
[00:33:26] Ashley James: Fascinating. Can you explain how the thyroid uses iodine to make T3, T4? These are the things we’ve heard of. We’ve heard of T3, we’ve heard of T4. You mentioned that there’s a protein. But how does our thyroid—if someone doesn’t know, it’s the gland behind the Adam’s apple in the throat, like a butterfly-shaped gland. Now you say in your book that the thyroid is the only place in the body that has receptors for uptaking iodine, which kind of blew my mind because I thought iodine was used by other tissues in the body too.
[00:34:14] Dr. Alan Christianson: If I did word it that way that wouldn’t have been correct wording. So there’s a compound called NIS or the sodium iodide symporter, and that is found in other tissues. We know that it’s relevant to lactating breast tissue. So, iodine needs to be concentrated to be at physiological useful amounts within the thyroid. And so, the Wolff-Chaikoff effect just stops that concentrator. Now, that’s also true for breast milk. So, the amount of ambient iodine in the blood is not enough for the appropriate iodine concentration in human breast milk, and that’s not true for other nutrients. The amount of magnesium in mom’s blood, that’s about the same concentration that it would be in breast milk. But there needs to be a mechanism to concentrate. So there is this concentrator in breast tissue.
Now, when you really get deep into cellular histology, you will find NIS in many other parts of the body, but the thought is, it’s not biologically active, it’s just linked via embryology. We start off as one cell, two cells, a little blastocyst, right? And many cell types have common ancestors. So a lot of cells that go on to become thyroid cells have ancestors they share with other cell types like those that line the gut, those in salivary tissues, those in the prostate, and some of them might actually concentrate iodine for antimicrobial effects. There are theories about that but they’re not definitive. But as far as we know, the biologically active role for iodine is solely for the formation of thyroid hormone or for the presence of that for the baby’s eventual production of thyroid hormone.
[00:35:54] Ashley James: Oh, that’s fascinating. So then there is a link. I keep saying I’m going to ask you a question then I have another question.
[00:36:04] Dr. Alan Christianson: I’m still waiting on the halogens.
[00:36:06] Ashley James: I know. We’re going to get back to that one too. It’s like, I got a notepad here. I’m going to make sure we get all of it done. See, I’m so glad we have 90 minutes with you today because you’re a wealth of knowledge and your books are actually very easy to read. So I definitely recommend listeners get your books because there’s so much science in your books, but the way in which you present it, I found it to be easy to digest. It wasn’t cumbersome to read your book. You are really a great author as well, but I do appreciate the science and you’re not whitewashing the subject. I really like getting down into the nitty-gritty.
I do definitely want to touch on breasts and breast cancer. But let’s go back to my question that I just asked you, which is how does the thyroid use iodine to make thyroid hormone?
[00:37:02] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, here’s the two-minute version of that answer. So basically, we get iodide from our diet, from other sources, it gets in the bloodstream. It’s circulating the bloodstream. So we’ve got this pump that’s looking for iodine and waiting to pull it inside the thyroid. That’s the NIS. So the pump pulls it in. There are little clusters of thyroid cells called follicles, kind of like a circle the wagons thing, and inside the follicles that is where all the magic happens.
So, a few other steps bring iodide into that follicle and then thyroid peroxidase, you may have heard about that. That’s an enzyme that people think about having antibodies for. That’s an enzyme that helps to oxidize iodide into iodine. And when it’s oxidized, it becomes single and ready to mingle. It’s ready to bind up with something. So then you’ve got a protein called thyroglobulin. And this is a long, long complex amino acid chain comprised of tyrosine and other compounds, and it has those 13 spots to hold various iodine atoms. So, the iodine atoms get on there, they make monoiodotyrosine. So one iodine with a tyrosine. And they make diiodotyrosine.
And then this molecule bends so the monos and the dis connect, and the dis and the dis connect. And one and a two connecting makes a three, and that’s T3. And then a two and a two connecting and it makes four, that’s T4. The molecule itself is then pushed out of those follicles and the thyroid pulls off the active hormone and releases those into the bloodstream, per the body’s overall regulation.
[00:38:42] Ashley James: Could someone have an underproduction of thyroid hormone because they’re missing other cofactors like tyrosine?
[00:38:50] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, not really. The reason there is tyrosine is abundant in all dietary sources, and it’s also a non-essential amino acid. So the body can pretty freely convert it out of phenylalanine, which is also readily available. So tyrosine deficiencies have not been documented in humans. There are some very rare genetic tyrosine hydroxylase enzyme genetic defects, but even those don’t impact thyroid function.
[00:39:19] Ashley James: Oh fascinating. So really, at the end of the day, you’re either getting too much or too little iodine for the thyroid?
[00:39:27] Dr. Alan Christianson: You know, other factors can certainly have some relevance, but again, all of the factors we know about combined are less relevant than the ambient iodine exposure.
[00:39:36] Ashley James: And you share this in your book that what we’re seeing is that culturally, we’re not really experiencing iodine deficiency. It’s very uncommon nowadays.
[00:39:53] Dr. Alan Christianson: That’s correct. No nations are considered they are. And I’m not saying it’s not possible. I actually have seen people develop that there if they’re on all raw foods diets and not really using any salt that has appreciable iodine content. That’s rare, but certainly, it can happen. But those who are on a variety of food categories, all foods have some. No foods have none.
[00:40:15] Ashley James: A friend of mine had a baby and he must be in his late 20s or early 30s, so this is close to 30 years ago. And as a small baby, he had a goiter. This is an Alberta in Calgary, and the doctors called in the Canadian version of CPS because they thought the parents had beat the child because the neck looks so odd. They thought that they were abusing the child, oh the poor parents, and they’re so sweet people. And then one of the doctors who is originally from India identified it as goiter and gave the baby appropriate levels of iodine and that went away.
That’s the only case of goiter I have ever heard of in my life to someone that I know, and yet well most of my friends have thyroid problems. So it’s interesting.
[00:41:07] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, the weird thing about all types of thyroid disease is too little or too much iodine can drive them including goiter. In Denmark, the rates of goiter increased after iodine fortification. They found that some other factors can be relevant to goiter that have nothing to do with iodine, but too much can be a driver for it as well.
[00:41:23] Ashley James: Let’s get on the halogen conversation. What’s been proposed—and I’d love for you to do the medical myth-busting here—is that there are these halogens. Fluoride, which is now added to our water so everyone’s getting fluoride, and I really am of the opinion that sodium fluoride is unhealthy for us. There are many reasons why but it’s being added to the water. Finally, some counties are taking it out. Bromine, which is added into flour so people who are eating the standard American diet are getting plenty of that. Chlorine is in the water, chlorine is in your swimming pool. This concept is that fluoride, bromine, and chloride can block iodine receptors and build up toxic levels in breast tissue and other tissues of the body possibly leading to causing breast cancer. I’d love for you to myth bust that concept.
[00:42:23] Dr. Alan Christianson: Sure. Well, so more depth with that story too is also the idea that these things that any sign, if someone ingests a lot of iodine and anything bad happens, this story has a free pass. And the free pass is that that thing that happened wasn’t from too much iodine, it was from iodine pushing out all these nasty halogens and the halogens caused the harm. Within this belief system, that’s one of the exit strategies they have whenever someone seems to be harmed from too much iodine.
As a lot of things, these are not unanswered questions. These are not data points in which we lack knowledge. They’ve been very well studied. Now, the closest kernel of truth to this is that fluoride, like I mentioned, certainly can have hyperthyroid effects. The threshold seems to be somewhere around 5 to 10 milligrams per day, and the further you get above that the more clear it becomes. So, we do have fluoride in the water, and there are times where it’s fortified. There are some pockets of the world where geologically, there’s just a lot of ambient fluoride in the groundwater.
There are a few pockets of China and also rural Tibet in which that’s been the case, and it has been shown that they’d had more hypothyroidism, not lasting. Once they’re really taken away from the high ambient fluoride in the water, they do better. But municipal fluoride has been thoroughly studied as far as its links to thyroid disease. I don’t have data top of mind for all of their concerns about it, but I’m very aware of the studies about its links to thyroid disease.
And in terms of municipal fluoridation added to water supply, it’s not been shown to affect thyroid function in the amounts that are normally used like one part per million or below those thresholds. And that’s fitting what we know about it having a no observable effect limit of somewhere around 5 to 10 milligrams relative to thyroid function. All bad things have that. They have some point at which we cannot detect their effects.
In terms of chlorine, we do have data on how chlorine acts relative to the sodium iodide symporter. It simply has no effects on that. It doesn’t block it, it doesn’t get taken up by it. The symporter is quite specific to iodine, and there’s also been data on chloride exposure and chlorine exposure relative to thyroid function, and there’s just no known link. If someone is exposed to pools that are densely chlorinated and indoors, especially like indoor pools, that can worsen asthmatic states, but that’s the closest thing I found.
Now, bromide is really fascinating. So, there are brominated dough conditioners that are used for commercial baking. Bromide is not added to flour, however, and that’s a little bit different. In the ‘60s, there were questions asked about just that, whether bromide could have some effect upon thyroid function because it’s sharing a column with iodine. It’s a halogen like iodine is. In studies that were done as recently as the last, last decade, humans were given doses of bromide in excess of—it’s actually found in pretty much all foods and varying amounts, and we have some unavoidable exposure to it from natural sources. And so people were supplemented with doses that represented roughly 50 times a range of doses, but the higher ones represented about 50 times the normal ambient exposure. And they were closely tracked for two months for all facets of the thyroid function.
Now, those on the highest doses of bromide had a slight improvement in their T4 output, but there were no other changes anywhere else. And it wasn’t a dose-related response, so it probably wouldn’t be meaningful to say that bromide was helpful. But there was clearly no harm whatsoever to thyroid function, even in all those doses. And a funny thing too that I learned in researching this paper many years ago, bromide is now categorized as an essential element. We know that the body needs it for basement membrane formation in cellular junctions.
[00:46:28] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I love holistic medicine and I think the biggest frustration for me is how much disinformation there is, but there’s disinformation in every facet of life. Go study theology and you will be absolutely bombarded with contradictions. Go study politics.
[00:46:56] Dr. Alan Christianson: I’ve gone down that same road. I thought I’m just going to throw in the towel. I’m done here. But you’re right, everywhere you look, you just got to do a good look wherever you are.
[00:47:03] Ashley James: Yeah. This is why I also try to focus on mindset when it comes to the idea of holistic health. The reason why I started this podcast five years ago, I was incredibly sick. I share my story in other past episodes. I was incredibly sick for many years. I mean, I never wanted to kill myself because I still find joy in life, but I was miserable. I was suffering. I often just burst into tears from the amount of pain I was in. I really feel like a prisoner of my own body. I really was suffering for so many years, and I’m so grateful that I have my husband who has been my absolute rock and my greatest supporter. We just celebrated our 13th anniversary and he’s phenomenal, such an amazing human being.
So I suffered for so long, and it was actually because of my husband. We found this Naturopath. We found a lecture that he did online and then we started following his work, then we started following one of his mentors’ work, and then he and his mentor became my mentor for 10 years. And I followed this information, cleaned up my diet, took certain supplements, changed parts of my lifestyle, and I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, and chronic monthly infections for which I used to be on antibiotics for constantly. And I also had digestive issues. And all this little stuff I was able to resolve with natural medicine and I became so passionate about it that then I was like I have to share this.
I’ve learned so much from interviewing amazing doctors like yourself, and of course, I feel like I’m on a journey with my listeners. So they’re here having their own issues that they’re suffering with, and I want them to know that they can also heal, even if everyone in their life has told them that they’ll always have it, it’s genetic. I can’t tell you how many doctors told me I’d never have children—I’ve conceived naturally, and told me that I’d always have diabetes—my A1C is 4.7. This idea that doctors tell you you’ll always be sick, I mean, please throw that out the window. Don’t ever limit yourself because there is always a contradiction out there.
The frustrating part about the misinformation, which misinformation is everywhere, not just in the holistic space. The idea of medical myths, they tend to live, we tend to let them have a life of their own. And then if we don’t keep our minds open enough, our mindset needs to be that we don’t grab on to dogma. That we don’t say, well, this diet is the one diet and everyone should be on it. This is not religion, right? Science is never settled, it’s always changing. We’re always learning new things.
So if we can keep our minds open enough and be humble enough to challenge our own belief systems, then we can finally allow to be okay with and hold the paradox of the idea of like the last episode was all about that we need more and more and more iodine, and this episode is like whoa, wait a sec. Let’s look at all the research and see that most people are getting too much. And really, we need to find out what our limit is and what our healthy levels are. And through your book, The Thyroid Reset Diet, we can learn how to adjust our diet to actually create the healthiest levels of iodine for us.
With every interview, we’re learning more, but often interviews will contradict each other because myths are everywhere and we have to be open enough to take in the research and then make our own judgments, and also try it out for yourself. You have used your thyroid reset diet with your patients. I’d love for you to share what you see happen? So when you helped patients eat a healthy diet that limited or controlled the amount of iodine coming into their body, what kind of results did you see?
[00:51:27] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, at the time I was doing a lot of work managing those who were on long-term thyroid medication, and I was seeing more and more people to where they were outgrowing their medicine. It was too much for them and they were getting side effects. So it was a short-term problem, but it was a long-term win. We would keep weaning and adjusting and seeing them need less and less. So that was the main change, and it was a really exciting thing to see happen.
[00:51:53] Ashley James: So through this diet, people have been able to get off of thyroid meds?
[00:51:58] Dr. Alan Christianson: So there’s a pretty big study that was just finished after I completed the manuscript for this book. They took a large group of people, it was about 400, and they gave them very cursory information about avoiding extra iodine like just really, here are some supplements that have it. Here are some foods that are very rich in it, and they then checked the concept of deprescribing. Could they take away their thyroid medications? They were all on third medication.
What they saw is that over 80% of people, it’s actually 84%, who did these most basic things needed less medication. And within that group, 40% needed no medication, and they could retain perfect thyroid function and a symptom-free state without medication. And again, that was really basic one or two steps out of six or seven possible steps.
[00:52:46] Ashley James: I would be so happy if all my listeners, 80% of them could lower their meds and 40% could get off their meds in the next—what did it take? How many months?
[00:52:58] Dr. Alan Christianson: This particular time frame was six months for the study.
[00:53:01] Ashley James: I would love that. I’d love to see all my listeners so healthy that 100% of them didn’t need medication. But realistically, what a win. What a win for all the listeners because I know several women on thyroid meds that are just suffering from the side effects of it. They feel as though it’s a moving target. Oh, my doctor put me on this dose and now I feel miserable. I go back, my doctor does tests, then he puts me on this dose, and then I feel more miserable. It’s like they’re just experimenting on them.
[00:53:36] Dr. Alan Christianson: There’s an untenable belief that thyroid medication levels will stay stable for all people and that they should function as they would if their thyroid was providing those same hormones. And those things we know are just not true.
[00:53:49] Ashley James: That reminds me of a family member who got a pacemaker down in a country in South America. They happened to be traveling there at the time, they didn’t go there for this procedure. They were really miserable for about a year. Their hands and feet were turning blue. They were not looking healthy. We urged them to seek help, but you know with family members, they don’t listen to you, right? They’ll listen to a complete stranger but they won’t listen to you.
One of their caretakers took their blood pressure and took their pulse and said, go to the ER right now, I’m very concerned. What they found out was that in South America, they set pacemakers to 40 beats a minute. Forty beats a minute. Like you mentioned, the way they set a drug, they expect your need for that drug to be constant. Just like they set a pacemaker, your need for heart rate isn’t constant. You walk up a flight of stairs, you want your heart rate to go up to 100 or 120. If your heart rate is always 40, you go up a flight of stairs you’re going to pass out. Your need has increased. Could you explain when someone’s need for thyroid increases? Is it when they’re doing physical activity or when they’re in stress in their life? What happens when we need more thyroid?
[00:55:19] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, our needs for thyroid don’t vary that much and that quickly, but there are other reasons why medications just don’t replace what we have as consistently. Our needs do fluctuate to some extent as the seasons change—hotter or colder ambient temperatures. Also with age, we probably need a bit less. And as our body size changes, we need to balance proportion to our body size.
[00:55:43] Ashley James: So it’s not as severe as the heart rate, but it is fluctuating.
[00:55:52] Dr. Alan Christianson: So there was a big survey done by the American Thyroid Association in 2018. They surveyed over 12,000 people who are active with conventional technologists, and they asked them, how well have your symptoms been managed? And less than 5% consider themselves very satisfied with their symptom management. And in fact, 30% had seen more than six doctors trying to improve their well-being. So yeah, the medications don’t work as well as your own thyroid hormones do. So the more you can make by yourself the better.
[00:56:23] Ashley James: This reminds me of an interview I did at least a year ago, if not more. It was with a man who had a very severe ADHD and when he got on Ritalin—now most people, when they get on Ritalin, are not comfortable with it. When he got on it he said he was the happiest person in the world. For the first time in his life, he could focus. He had extreme ADHD. He didn’t try changing his diet, supplements, or anything. He just went on medication and he said it was a miracle for him.
But then one day, he couldn’t remember his name, he felt as if he had had a stroke. He was very sluggish, he could hardly talk, he had complete amnesia. His wife took him into the ER and what they finally figured out was one of the possible side effects of that medication that he had been on is extreme hypothyroidism, which one of the symptoms is amnesia like the brain is just not functioning. And so he had to get off of the Ritalin, which he was so depressed about because he was actually finally getting a hold of his life. But then, luckily, he was motivated to look holistically, and now he uses supplements and diet to support his brain health and his thyroid health.
But that’s so interesting, this idea that someone could be on a medication that ends up messing with their thyroid. You had mentioned that certain medications have halogens in them. Beyond the fact that we should control our diet to know how much iodine is coming in, are there medications that we should be aware of that can really mess with our thyroid?
[00:58:10] Dr. Alan Christianson: There is a fair number. I do delineate those in the book. Some examples, not the most commonly used, but one of the most severe in its effects is one called amiodarone. And it’s pretty shocking the harm from amiodarone can occur even six or nine months after someone has stopped taking it. It can last in the body for that long. It’s a high concentration of iodine used to regulate the heart rhythm. It can cause blindness, kidney damage, death, thyroid disease, almost everything you can think of. And they’ve even tried to see how much of it is the drug by itself and how much of it is the iodine that’s a problem.
There’s a different version called dronedarone, which is quite similar to the absence of iodine, and it has a completely different, much milder side effect profile. That’s one of the more dramatic culprits, but there are many things. If one’s on prescription medications, it’s good to be aware of possible iodine exposure if they have thyroid disease.
[00:59:08] Ashley James: So there’s been talk of breast cancer being caused by bromine excess, for example, and the use of iodine to detox that from the breast tissue or using iodine as a supplement to support the body in fighting cancer. What are your thoughts or what is the research that you’ve seen in terms of iodine and breast cancer?
[00:59:39] Dr. Alan Christianson: So one thing I’d like to do a quick high-level answer first is that I’d really encourage listeners when they face medical controversies, to evaluate the type of data they’re comparing. A lot of data is hypothesis. Women in Japan have less breast cancer, they consume more iodine, therefore iodine must be helpful. So that’s a hypothesis, and that’s based upon a mechanism. Now the other kind of data is like a real-world outcome. Well, what do we see of women in Japan, how does their iodine intake compare to their breast cancer risk? Or what do we see for breast cancer risk for women when we look at their iodine content?
So when we see outcome data, what actually happens to people in the real world, that always is given more weight than a hypothesis. A hypothesis is plausible and it’s worth looking at more closely, but whenever a hypothesis and an outcome contradict, we ignore the hypothesis because we can make hypotheses about anything we want. That’s like looking at clouds in the sky. We can see patterns. Our minds are very good at that.
So now, to answer your question, that’s how that hypothesis came about was Japanese women. And what we now know is that there’s a spectrum of NIS expression in breast tissue. I mentioned earlier that it’s done for lactation to get some iodine in the breast milk. So lactating breast tissue has a bit of NIS expression. Non-lactating breast tissue, the receptor is present but it’s not active, it’s dormant. So the continuum goes from normal to lactating. Then the next step is fibroadenomatosis. It used to be called fibrocystic breast disease. We now know that’s an overexpression of the sodium iodide symporter. The sodium pulls in more fluid, and there’s fluid retention, there’s pain, there’s engorgement.
The highest expression of NIS shows up in breast cancer. And we know that there’s some correlation between the free radical damage of extra iodine in the tissues and the gene damage that gives rise to cancerous growth. Now, we’ve even seen this in Japanese women.
So when you take Japanese women, and you compare those without breast cancer and those with breast cancer, and you look at their iodine status, it turns out that those with breast cancer are the ones that are exposed to the most iodine. And this has been shown in other cultures as well. Some have even argued that you could use some of the iodine urine tests, they’re not good gauges for the nutritional status of iodine and they’re not good markers of thyroid function, but they may be predictors of breast cancer because it’s been shown in other areas that the more iodine women are excreting in their urine, the more they are at risk for breast cancer.
[01:02:18] Ashley James: Can you explain why? Is it because it’s then showing that they’ve been consuming it? I’m not understanding because if they’re excreting it in their urine then it’s not collecting in the breast.
[01:02:32] Dr. Alan Christianson: There’s some relationship between urinary excretion and what’s present in the breast tissue when that NIS protein is pathologically overexpressed. So it seems that part of the mechanism of some types of breast cancer is that that iodine transporter is overexpressed. It’s pulling in too much iodine, it’s causing free radical damage, and that’s part of the gene changes that can be early along in breast cancer formation.
There’s even been some research as to whether or not iodine can be used to tag radiotherapy. So radioactive iodine is used for thyroid disease, but there’s talk about using that for breast cancer as well because the cancerous breast tissue selectively takes up iodine more so than healthy breast tissue does.
[01:03:15] Ashley James: Oh my. But that wouldn’t help though. I mean, okay, now we know where the cancer is. Would that be feeding or stimulating the cancer to grow?
[01:03:28] Dr. Alan Christianson: That’s the hypothesis. If it were just iodine, but if it were radioactive iodine, then as the cancer takes that up it’s like a trojan—worse.
[01:03:36] Ashley James: Got it. Okay, I’m sorry. I thought you meant radioactive in that we’re using it for an MRI or something. Now I get it. Using it to uptake like they do with insulin and glucose. They’ll inject insulin so that people’s blood sugar drops and then they’ll attach the—
[01:03:58] Dr. Alan Christianson: In this case, radioactive iodine is given for ablating or for destroying unwanted thyroid tissue. So if someone has Graves’ disease and you want to get rid of their thyroid, one method is to give iodine that’s radioactive. And so, a lot of that iodine ends up in the thyroid and that radiation stays localized. I’m not endorsing that as the answer to Graves’ disease, please hear me. So the same process is talked about as being a possible treatment for breast cancer because breast cancer cells also selectively take up iodine.
[01:04:28] Ashley James: You mentioned Graves’ disease and not following the conventional allopathic let’s just burn it out with radiation as a recommended approach. What is your recommended holistic approach to resolving thyroid issues? So we have Graves’ disease, we have Hashimoto’s, but you also talk about in your book hyperthyroid and hypothyroid, both being benefited by the same diet.
[01:05:04] Dr. Alan Christianson: We got good data on that. In one of the more dramatic studies, they took a group of people that were pretty severely hypothyroid. I know you know this, a lot of listeners probably haven’t heard this, but one of the ways we gauge thyroid output is by looking at how much the body is asking the thyroid to work, and that’s the TSH. The higher the TSH is the more the body is asking the thyroid to work. It’s not the only thyroid test that matters. I won’t go into that right now, but proportionately, the further the TSH gets above 2 or 2 1/2, the more the thyroid is slowing. If it’s above 4 1/2, it’s blatantly abnormal.
So in this study, these people had TSH scores that averaged 14.1, they were severely hypothyroid. And they had been pretty steady for about four years in that state, so it wasn’t a recent thing. Many in the group had TSH scores between 100 and 200, so it was a big deal. And there was one sole intervention done. They were not given medication. They were not told to eat a healthy diet or anything else that probably might have been useful as well. They were only counseled to regulate their iodine intake now.
Afterward, they followed up with people to see how well they performed, and a certain number didn’t quite understand the instructions, didn’t comply. We’re people, it happens, we’ll come back to that. But some of them did follow things quite well. And what they saw is that the whole group, for starters, ignoring who did what they’re supposed to and who didn’t. The group as a whole, 78.3% of people were at perfectly normal thyroid function. So TSH average score is under 3 in this context. Within two months, they did nothing else but lower iodine, 70.3%. You know those silly infomercials, but wait, it gets better?
[01:06:58] Ashley James: Yeah.
[01:07:00] Dr. Alan Christianson: But wait, it gets better. The remaining people, the 21.7% if I’m right. The 20-ish% that didn’t get better, so one big chunk of them were the ones that didn’t follow the instructions for whatever reason, no judgment. You got to play to win the lottery, and it’s true for a lot of things. They didn’t play, so we’ll put them aside.
Of the other people who did lower their iodine, there were now two remaining groups, and one group were those whose scores were so insanely high going into it that they were actually improving a lot, but they weren’t yet better. So their scores might have gone from 200 down to 20 or something. So they weren’t normal. They didn’t get in that 78% of those who are totally better, but they were sure heading that way.
And now the final group is those who did do everything just right, but their scores failed to improve at all. That was about 3% of the participants. So, 97% of people, again, some of them didn’t follow along so we don’t know, but of those who did, people got better, they got darn close to it 97% of the time.
[01:08:09] Ashley James: I want to take that 3%, have them work with you and figure out what’s going on. What’s going on? That’d be really interesting.
[01:08:18] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, I’m pretty happy about the 97%
[01:08:20] Ashley James: I’m really happy about the 97%. I mean, ideally that those who get your book have a 97% chance of having a healthy thyroid.
[01:08:31] Dr. Alan Christianson: So those numbers apply to those who are not yet on medication, and the numbers we have for those on medication that were the earlier 84% and 40%. However, those numbers were with very cursory recommendations. I think people could do better with more thorough regulation.
[01:08:47] Ashley James: I’m a health coach. I’m not a Naturopathic physician. I always refer my clients to become patients of good Naturopaths like yourself who are really well researched and in a very caring way help people to balance their diet and supplement intake. But when I work with clients to support them in achieving their health goals, oftentimes they’re on medication because I believe it’s over 70% of the adult population in the United States is on at least one medication, which blows my mind. When you see the world through my eyes and you see what I’ve seen, true health is not having any symptoms. True health is your body being in a beautiful state that you don’t need meds.
There’s always a caveat like someone with type 1 diabetes. My grandmother was one of the first in the world to receive insulin. She was in Toronto, she was dying, she was in the hospital 11 years old or something. She was young and she was one of the first children to receive it, and she lived to be 77 years old, only having amputated a thumb from gangrene. Back then, it was very hard to regulate the body. They had very rudimentary testing for blood sugar, and she showed me how she ate, which is really cool because, to this day, people are finally rediscovering how to eat healthy.
She ate pounds of vegetables and steamed them, and then she would eat the vegetables. She would let the water cool and she’d drink the water because she didn’t want to lose one drop of minerals or nutrients. Anyway, I just watched her and saw how healthy she was in the face of type 1 diabetes.
So, there is always an exception to the rule where we would want someone with type 1 diabetes to be on medication. But for those who are so sick that they get on medication, medication isn’t healing the body. We want to get to the point we’re so healthy we don’t need it for chronic illness. That’s why something like The Thyroid Reset Diet Book is such a good resource because we want to support someone to get off meds.
So when I’m working with a client, let’s say for blood sugar, and I say to them, you’re going to want to go back to your doctor. Go to a doctor, go to a Naturopath, and get tested because if they’re on a bunch of meds like metformin, insulin, and everything, they start eating the way that helps create insulin sensitivity and balances blood sugar. Now all these drugs are going to drive them down too low.
Same with blood pressure. I’ve had clients who stand up and they’re passing out because two weeks into eating a super healthy diet, and now their blood pressure meds are actually pushing them too low. I say you’re going to have to go back to either your prescribing doctor. Go to a doctor that actually believes that you can get so healthy you don’t need meds, let’s start with that. You’re really going to want to make sure that you and them are on top of watching yourself through this diet. You get so healthy that they lower or take you off of meds.
If your doctor is skeptical about taking you off of meds or lowering meds, I really suggest you find one that has the mindset that you can get so healthy, you don’t need medication. Because it’s that kind of doctor that actually looks at research, instead of the medical dogma that they’ve been taught through medical school.
So your book, The Thyroid Reset Diet, and through all of your research, when people who are on medication either for hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, Hashimoto’s, or Graves’. Let’s say the first three months of them being on your diet, what steps should they take? Should they go to their doctor right away and say, hey, by the way, I’m doing this diet? What should they do? What tests should they take? What should they be looking for? When should they go to a doctor and say, I need to lower my meds. I’m correcting myself and I’m afraid these medications are going to now push me too far in the wrong direction.
[01:13:11] Dr. Alan Christianson: They’ll need a good relationship with a doctor who supports them in that journey. I see many blogs that talk about all the thyroid tests to ask for and other things to do. But ultimately, someone’s going to have to help interpret those tests and modify the medications. You need a doctor not just as a rubber stamp to provide those things, but to give some guidance and input. So yeah, you need a trusted partner. And in a perfect world, yeah you could let them know before you even start. But at a minimum, at least the first month into it, you should retest.
The doctors will always have their own tests. They’ll run at least a TSH and their free hormones, but you should retest and see if your needs change. Sometimes, you’ll see that obviously by symptoms even sooner, but you won’t always see it by symptoms of too much. In many cases, the blood levels can show up before the symptoms do, and that’s great. Then you can make adjustments that are early and give your thyroid the best chance to recover. The drawback is that if you do need less and you’re not aware of it, the extra is harmful, but also, it makes your thyroid less able to heal and recover.
[01:14:21 ] Ashley James: Can you elaborate on that?
[01:14:23] Dr. Alan Christianson: For sure. The feedback that tells the thyroid to work is that thyroid-stimulating hormone. And if your medications are more than you need, your body doesn’t know where the extra is coming from and it assumes that it’s its own fault, so your body stops stimulating your thyroid and you lower the TSH. Now below some threshold, there may not be enough TSH just to sustain your thyroid. So you need some TSH to keep your thyroid working and give it a chance to grow and recover. So if your thyroid starts to get stronger but your medications are not adjusted, it bumps up against the ceiling to where the TSH goes down. And even though your thyroid could work better, it won’t because your body won’t allow it to.
[01:15:08] Ashley James: It’s so important to work with a doctor that would lower the medication. Now, what is worse, being on slightly too much, or being on slightly too little? Is it safer to be on a lower dose?
[01:15:24] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, this is one of those things whether it’s worse to get slapped or punched. So, neither one is good. The too much has more short-term medical complications. But it doesn’t always cause symptoms. Some people are more prone to symptoms than others, and some get them at an earlier stage, but the complications are still there. Too little can be rife with symptoms for sure, but there are fewer medical complications in the short term. There are many longer-term medical complications of too little. So yeah, so both are not too good, both may or may not make you feel well. Too much have a greater short-term risk for harm than too little can.
[01:16:09] Ashley James: Are there other minerals that are supportive of the thyroid like selenium that we should make sure that we incorporate in our diet?
[01:16:16] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, and big picture concept, it’s not so much that—back to more again—more is better. It’s more so that none is bound. So your body has a certain amount of buffering that it can do for iodine. We never get the perfect amount of anything. We’ve got all these ways that we buffer our body chemistry from moment to moment. And so too with iodine. Again, our upper limit can vary, so how much we tolerate can be different. Now, if someone’s low in selenium, whatever their iodine ranges will be just incrementally narrower and will have that much harder of a time buffering the fluctuations of iodine.
[01:16:57] Ashley James: Yeah, and that’s something that really fascinated me when we talked about in our last interview that the selenium, making sure that there’s an adequate amount. Selenium is that protector. If you have too much or too little iodine, the thyroid doesn’t overreact. So it does create that buffer, especially while you’re doing something like The Thyroid Reset Diet and really becoming more conscious of how much iodine is in your diet so that you can get to those healthy levels. Again, not saying we’re eating less iodine, but we’re eating the right range, right? So looking at the diet to get ourselves into the right range to support thyroid health.
That something like selenium would then support the thyroid in not fluctuating, jumping too high or too low. That’s something we don’t want. We don’t want the thyroid to get overstimulated or understimulated. We want it to be in a nice healthy range. Are there any other foods or nutrients that are really good specifically for the thyroid? I mean I can think of antioxidants that are super awesome because they decrease inflammation. But is there anything specific to the thyroid that we should definitely make sure we’re consuming?
[01:18:16] Dr. Alan Christianson: You know, really, all nutrients have some play in things, and I think about it more as a matter of not so much that adding above some threshold is helpful, but a lack is bad. So you don’t want to be lacking any key nutrients. Some of the big ones that come up are going to zinc, iron, or vitamin A. But any nutrient you talk about, our body’s chemistry is so connected that it can all come back and have some relevance. So I do encourage iodine-free multivitamins for people at reasonable quantities. I do encourage a broad range of healthy foods from as many food categories as possible.
[01:18:52] Ashley James: You had mentioned TSH, for example, the thyroid-stimulating hormone and just these examples of when it’s too high or too low. What about going back to looking at the hypothalamus or pituitary? Is that ever a concern supporting the hypothalamus and pituitary in terms of thyroid health, or really, the biggest thing we can do is control iodine intake?
[01:19:23] Dr. Alan Christianson: The biggest thing we can do is control iodine. So we talk about three broad categories of thyroid disease: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary means the thyroid is not working because it’s not working. Secondary means the thyroid is not working because the pituitary is not telling it to work. And then tertiary means the thyroid is not working because the hypothalamus is not telling the pituitary to tell the thyroid to work. So, secondary disease happens a few times per 100,000. That’s pituitary disease, but it’s not limited to thyroid function, and it’s rarely subtle.
I see many examples where people are told they have pituitary problems, but they really don’t. I’m sorry. They can occur, but it’s a common thing to be told in natural medicine that it’s a problem when it probably isn’t. And then tertiary disease or the hypothalamus is failing, that happens a few times per year across the globe so it’s extremely rare. So by and large, the main thing is primary disease, and the main controllable factor is Iodine intake.
[01:20:23] Ashley James: Very interesting. Now you haven’t mentioned free T3 and free T4, and that’s something that a lot of Naturopathic physicians like to test as well. Could you touch on that?
[01:20:37] Dr. Alan Christianson: I sure can. So, we look at the amount of hormone the thyroid secretes, and that’s the two that are measurable, and they’re essential, the body needs them. They’re a little different and they’re often misinterpreted because they’re regulated after they’re released. So what we see in the bloodstream is not so much with the thyroid made, it’s more so what the body adjusted. So many look at that and think, oh, the person has too much, too little, and they won’t look at the TSH. So the TSH does reflect what the body is asking the thyroid to do.
The T3 and the T4, they only reflect that when you’re at the most extreme highs or deficiencies. In most cases, when you’re reading them, you’re really reading how the body adjusted those after they were already released. So some talk about how they should be on the high side of normal, that’s not what we see in healthy people. There’s actually a lot of data for T3 saying that those who are consistently high normal are more apt to be obese and diabetic. So yeah, they’re relevant, but they take a bit more depth of understanding as well.
[01:21:42] Ashley James: So when someone is going to an endocrinologist or a holistic physician, they want them to test TSH, but also test T3 and T4, especially if they have an understanding of what the body needs versus what it’s using?
[01:22:00] Dr. Alan Christianson: Correct.
[01:22:02] Ashley James: And in terms of the drugs, there’s this idea that there are healthier thyroid drugs and other thyroid drugs that are less healthy or less effective, or that there are these natural versions where you can get basically a thyroid from a pig. What’s your take on that? Is there a thyroid drug that you would say no one should be on because this has the most side effects, that there’s a better version? What’s the best drug to be on if someone had to be on a drug?
[01:22:38] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, real quick. So we’ve got synthetic versions of T3 and T4, we’ve got natural desiccated thyroid, which is the pig thyroid you alluded to, and then there’s nonprescription cow thyroid. Now the last one I don’t recommend for a lot of safety reasons and stability reasons, so just not good across the board. The synthetics T4 only therapy, the synthetic type, it’s actually the same as what the body makes, and a lot of folks do well on that. It does work for many. For many, they don’t respond as well. They don’t get full control of their symptoms. So, that can work, but it often does not.
T3 only is not recommended because the body also needs T4. And then natural thyroid, that big survey that I mentioned, it did show that of those who are taking natural thyroid, a higher percent did experience better management of symptoms than those on just the synthetics. So yeah, natural thyroid can be a viable option.
And there really is a groundswell of support that’s burgeoning in the conventional community to give people more options. It’s starting to happen and there are more doctors being aware of that. But yeah, people should have multiple options, and sometimes, it is just a matter of adjusting the medication to help. But again, I think at the higher level of if the body can work by itself again, that’s the best outcome.
[01:23:58] Ashley James: That’s what we want. We want everyone listening to get so healthy they don’t need medication anymore, and always find a doctor who also wants to support you in that. I really recommend your book, Thyroid Reset Diet for anyone who has thyroid issues, especially those on thyroid medications. Now, obviously, if someone has had their thyroid removed that’s a different conversation. They would need to be on medication, right? And hopefully, they work with a really good endocrinologist or more holistic-minded doctor to balance that.
But those who are having thyroid problems, what I like about your book is you have quizzes in it, you give a diet that’s really very comprehensive, and an easy way for people to figure out exactly what ranges they need to adjust for their diet. Listeners can go to drchristianson.com, and of course, everything that Dr. Christianson does is going to be the show notes for today’s podcast including the link to his book at learntruehealth.com.
It has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much for coming in and diving into this topic, which is riddled with controversy. So many medical myths.
[01:25:10] Dr. Alan Christianson: It’s been a blast, Ashley. I always enjoy talking with you. You’re crazy smart. We get to go into greater detail about things, and you’re doing a huge service for your listeners. So yeah, I’m really honored to spend time with you again.
[01:25:19] Ashley James: Thank you and thank you so much for coming on the show, and please, come back and let’s talk about your Adrenal Reset Diet because that’s another really fascinating book that I’m sure anyone who has had adrenal issues or has energy—if you’re getting up in the morning and you need coffee throughout the day or you need sugar throughout the day, then you probably need The Adrenal Reset Diet. So I’d love to have you back and we could talk about that. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[01:25:44] Dr. Alan Christianson: That’d be a blast. Thanks again, Ashley.
[01:25:47] Ashley James: Wasn’t that an amazing interview with Dr. Alan Christianson? You know, I could have had him on the show for another hour and we could have dived into even more information about the diet, but unfortunately, he was crammed just back to back with interviews and he had to go. But he was so generous with his time and I really enjoyed having him on the show. I definitely recommend getting the book. Of course, you can go to the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com or the show notes within whatever podcast app you’re listening from and click the links there to be able to get to past episodes with Dr. Alan Christianson that I’ve done with him, and also to the book to get The Thyroid Reset Diet.
Just like I shared with my experience with his book, you’ll get one copy and then you’ll start reading it and everyone that sees it—just go read it in public. People will be like, hey, I have thyroid problems, what’s that all about? Tell me about it. Can I borrow your book? It’s really funny. And it’s also a great gift to give to a loved one who you know has been struggling with thyroid issues because the book is so easy to read, so down to earth, and provides just fantastic science in a way that’s easy to comprehend. So I hope you enjoy the book.
And please, join the Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group and share your experiences with his diet, with his recommendations. I’d love to start a conversation around that for us to all learn from each other.
Now, if you have been thinking about getting a Sunlighten Sauna, now’s a really great time because they have a fantastic discount going on right now. Make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James so that you get the discount that they give us. And if you do have a Sunlighten and you have been enjoying it, come to the Facebook group and share your experience. I just absolutely love it and I know that I know that so many of our listeners, and actually several of my clients, share that they absolutely love their sauna.
One of my dear, dear friends has used infrared sauna therapy to heal her. She had Epstein Barr Virus for many, many years. She incorporated so much holistic medicine, but she noticed that was one of the things that really moved the needle for her in terms of boosting her immune system and making it so that she felt amazing throughout the day. Anytime she feels like she’s dragging, she’ll jump in the sauna, and then a half an hour later, she’ll just feel like a million bucks.
That’s been my experience with the sauna is that whenever I feel down or depressed or I feel sluggish, getting in that sauna, half an hour later, I feel absolutely amazing, the endorphins are going. It’s a good addiction. It’s a really good feeling, so trade in the drugs and alcohol for a sauna, that’s all I have to say.
And check out Sunlighten because they are, in my opinion, the best sauna company on the market. They offer the full spectrum, the near and far infrared, very, very, very non-toxic and low EMF, which is ideal for what we want. Plus the company is in the United States, and they have fantastic customer service.
I had an issue with one part. I stepped on the sauna, I broke a piece, and they immediately, without question, they’re like hey what piece broke? Because I stepped on a corner really hard. And they’re like, okay, and then they sent it off right away and they replaced it immediately. I thought that was really cool.
And then another time I had a problem updating that tablet, I called them, and they helped me right away. I’ve been really, really happy with the customer service there. And that’s why I feel comfortable sharing Sunlighten Sauna with you because you are looking to gain the best health possible. You’re learning about how you can achieve true health, and I know that sauna therapy is a proven way that you can add something to your life every day or every other day to see better results. So there are lifestyle things that we can change. There’s diet, there’s supplements, and there’s lifestyle, and this would fall under the lifestyle category. Why not use the latest technology to support your body’s ability to heal itself? It makes so much sense.
You can also listen to my past in interviews with experts. I have cardiologists on the show swearing that Sunlighten is amazing as well as other doctors. So yeah, you can search sauna or you can search Sunlighten by going to learntruehealth.com and listening to those doctors talk about their love of not only sauna therapy but specifically the Sunlighten Company. And make sure you mention Learn True Health with Ashley James so that you get the greatest discount. I want to make sure that you get that special treatment and the discount when they know that I’m the one telling you guys to go check them out because Connie Zack was on the show. She’s the founder, and I really think she’s awesome.
And if any of my listeners have any problems with Sunlighten, please make sure that you give me a message. You can just message me, email me at [email protected], or you can go to the Learn True Health Group and just let me know if you’ve any problems at all. I will personally contact the owner and the managers there and make sure that it’s all smoothed out.
But I’ve had hundreds of listeners buy saunas from them after our interview, and I’ve only had one out of hundreds that had a miscommunication with one of their staff. I jumped in and then it was immediately resolved right away. It was just a misunderstanding, miscommunication. It was totally resolved. So I’m really happy that they have maintained such high standards. That’s how I want it for all of you guys.
Awesome. Well, I’m so glad you enjoyed today’s interview. Please share this with those who care about, especially those you know who have thyroid problems, and have a fantastic rest of your day.
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Check out other episodes with Dr. Alan Christianson!Episode 307 – Metabolism Reset Diet
Episode 324 – Heal Your Thyroid Holistically
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The Many Benefits of Iodine with Dr. David Brownsteinhttps://www.learntruehealth.com/the-many-benefits-of-iodine-with-dr-david-brownstein
Highlights:
Importance of iodine in the body Halide elements Why fluoride causes more harm than good Why do we need salt in the body Refined salt vs. unrefined saltIn this episode, Dr. Brownstein is back on the show to talk about the importance of iodine in the body. He shares some stories of how two of his patients with breast problems got better after taking iodine. Salt goes hand in hand with iodine, so he recommends taking in unrefined salt with iodine.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m excited for you to learn from today’s guest. He was recently on the show sharing some mind-blowing information, and now he’s back because I wanted to dive deeper and explore thyroid and iodine and how we can use iodine to detox certain chemicals in the body that are wreaking havoc. I’m really looking forward to you listening to this and deepening your knowledge of how you can support your body’s ability to heal itself.
Another way that I support my body’s ability to heal myself, and I would love for you to also do the same, is by using Sunlighten Sauna Technology. I had a heavy metal issue for many years and I didn’t know it. I finally figured out that the cause of a lot of my health issues came from my body not being able to get rid of all the heavy metals that I had accumulated. I was having liver problems. I was having an array of hormonal issues. And as I did the heavy metal detox and this is actually doing the show.
Since I started the show five years ago, I got a Sunlighten Sauna and I used it regularly almost every day, I would say about five times a week. I would sit in that sauna for about half an hour, sometimes 45 minutes. I feel amazing after I get out of a sauna. The Sunlighten Sauna especially because it uses a different kind of technology than the other saunas out there. It uses full-spectrum, and I had a whole episode with a cardiologist on this. Light is a nutrient that our cells have receptors for, which just blows my mind. And when you are in artificial light, you’re not receiving it so we become deplete. We end up missing out on, the cells are lacking this key component.
When we are in a Sunlighten Sauna, we’re getting full-spectrum, it’s actually nutrition, the sunlight nutrition. We’re getting the mid, near, and far-infrared spectrum. So, there are receptors on our cells that receive this information.
What’s great about the Sunlighten is it decreases inflammation, decreases pain, helps the body to lose weight. You burn about 500 calories every time you do sauna therapy. The sweat that comes out of you contains toxins that now your liver doesn’t have to process, your kidneys don’t have to process. There are heavy metals in that sweat, so now you’re removing, you’re eliminating things, not only chemicals but also heavy metals. And it opens up the blood flow in the body, it helps to balance and stabilize blood pressure. People have deeper sleep because they’ve decreased the stress levels in the body, the stress hormones go down. There’s this cascade of events that happen when we use sauna therapy.
I also did an interview with the man who regularly, once a year—and he has a degree in traditional Chinese medicine. Every year he does a 30-day fast and he spent thousands of his own dollars doing lab tests to show that long-term fasting helps the body to eliminate forever chemicals and the chemicals that’s in our food supply now that disrupt hormones. What he noticed is when he did a fast and incorporated sauna therapy as well, he had way greater results than if he just did a fast alone. That’s because sauna therapy allows the body to bypass the liver, bypass the kidneys when it comes to detoxing certain heavy metals and certain toxins, and just everything I explained earlier about all the other things that it can do.
I’ve had several interviews about saunas. If you want to dive into it and learn more about sauna therapy, just go to learntruehealth.com and search sauna. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com and search Sunlighten. I remember five guests off the top of my head that all told me they own a Sunlighten as well and absolutely love it. Now Sunlighten has these big wooden saunas that you can fit into a corner of your room, or if you’re like me and now live in a smaller space, you can get what’s called the Solo System.
The Solo System is something that you lie on, you put on top of you, and then you have a nice good sweat like a cocoon. Then you are able to pack it up and put it away when you are done. The Solo System is so compact because it telescopes into itself that it fits in a closet or under the bed, which is so fantastic. What I also love about it is it’s ultra-low EMF, meaning you won’t have negative reactions like a lot of cheap saunas out there. Unfortunately, if you go to just buy a cheap one, you’re ultimately going to be exposed to high levels of electromagnetic radiation, which is damaging to the body—not good at all.
And then another thing that I love about the Solo System, and all of the Sunlighten products but especially the Solo System, is it is non-toxic. The padding they use for you to lie down on is made of non-toxic bamboo memory foam, which I did not know you could make memory from bamboo, but isn’t that neat? So it’s non-toxic, it’s low EMF. This is what I love about Sunlighten is they truly are thinking about how you can support your body’s ability to heal itself and detoxify.
I know several cancer patients as well who use Sunlighten’s Sauna Technology to support their body’s ability to fight their own cancer and live to tell the tale. So many reasons why I recommend Sunlighten, and I know right now they’re doing a special. They often do specials at least once a quarter for our listeners. So you can give them a call just to ask questions like what size fits in my house, what’s the pricing like, and what’s the payment plan like if you want to do a payment plan? Then be sure to mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health podcast when you do call Sunlighten so that you get the special listener discount. They’re always putting specials on especially for our listeners.
I sat down and had a talk with the founder of Sunlighten and interviewed her, and she gave us a great deal like free shipping, which saves you about $500, as well as $100 off of accessories. My favorite accessory is the bamboo cushion and it has a bamboo cover. The reason you want to use things like bamboo or organic cotton when you’re in a sauna—if you’re not going to be naked, you want to use all-natural fibers because synthetic fibers will block the rays of the frequency of the light. So the mid, near, and far-infrared will be interrupted and you don’t want that.
Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing my podcasts with those that you love and care about. If you’re interested in learning more about detoxifying and using sauna therapy for healthy hormones, for healthy hormone function, for weight loss, for lowering blood pressure, for supporting the body’s ability to fight cancer, and also supporting the body’s immune system, decreasing inflammation, decreasing pain—all these topics are explored in the podcast at learntruehealth.com. Search sauna or search Sunlighten.
I have at least six episodes where we talk about how great it is, and multiple doctors that help their patients detoxify and absolutely love Sunlighten, and I have loved it. It has really, really helped me tremendously and measurably to remove heavy metals from my body.
Thank you so much for you, listeners. Continue to share this podcast with those you care about. If you want to come and discuss what you learn today or if you have more questions, join the Facebook group. Go to learntruehealth.com/group, or you can search Learn True Health on Facebook.
[00:08:33] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 464. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. David Brownstein. Man, when we had you on the show that was just a recent episode, 462. You shared with us how you’ve been successfully treating all of your patients who are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You treat it much like all the other upper respiratory infections you’ve treated for decades with amazing success, just outstanding success. Is it the FTC that came after you because you were sharing for free all this information on your website, and they don’t want anything that could possibly be considered a treatment, a cure, or therapy that is effective to be publicly posted, which just blew my mind? So listeners got to go back to episode 462 for that information.
What’s cool though is that you’re able to publish a book and it’s still protected under your freedom of speech rights. We have had several listeners who’ve read your book since having you on the show in episode 462, and they’ve reported in the Learn True Health Facebook group that your book on basically supporting the structure and function of the body’s ability to fight off viruses and respiratory infections with holistic medicine. How your book’s amazing and they loved it. So I definitely recommend listeners check out all of Dr. Brownstein’s books. You can go to drbrownstein.com. He has so many books that’s why I’m really excited to have him back on the show today.
Today we’re going to talk about something I think is really interesting because there’s a lot of doctors that say we have too much iodine. There are doctors who say we have too little iodine. Some doctors say, don’t worry about it, you’re just got to get enough in your food or just eat fortified salt or whatever. Is it the right kind of iodine? Are we getting too much or too little? What parts of the body use it other than for just creating thyroid hormone? So this is very interesting, we’re going to dive into this because you have some information about preventing cancer as well, which I’m really excited about. Welcome back to the show.
[00:11:06] Dr. David Brownstein: Thank you for having me on, Ashley.
[00:11:08] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I hope to have you on again and again because you have so many amazing topics and you’re such a fantastic doctor. You know what really blew my mind—not only blew my mind but many of my listeners also shared with me how you helped your dad reverse his heart issues by looking at his nutritional levels and balancing his hormones, and that was so cool. That was kind of like your wake-up moment, introduction to seeing how much we’re missing in the allopathic world. The world would be a different place if every doctor had the education that you’ve earned through your clinical experience through the years. I really wish that more doctors would read your books, learn from you, and continue the curiosity of what we can do with nutrition to support the body’s ability to fight off disease and maintain optimal health.
Having said that, let’s dive right in. Tell me, what happened along your journey as a doctor that made you interested in wanting to explore the topic of iodine? Do we need more of it, do we need less of it? What’s going on with iodine?
[00:12:27] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, my journey with iodine began when I started holistic medicine. I talked about that story of my father in that previous episode, right?
[00:12:40] Ashley James: Yes, that was mind-blowing.
[00:12:43] Dr. David Brownstein: Let me give the Cliff Notes version of that because that’ll sort of segue into iodine. My dad had his first heart attack at age 40 and his second heart attack at 42, and he suffered from severe coronary artery disease after that. He had continuous angina for 20 years. I was a conventional doctor at that time, I thought he was dying, and I think he was dying. He was on 12 medications to treat hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. He looked awful and was doing awful.
I was given a book by a chiropractor who told me I should look at this, and it was really my first anything holistic given to me or anything shown to me. It’s called Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright who’s an allopathic physician. I read that chapter on heart disease first and drew a few blood tests on my father and treated him with two natural therapies: natural testosterone and natural thyroid hormone. Within seven days of that, he made a dramatic improvement. His pale and pasty color went pink and healthy-looking. His 20-year history of using nitroglycerin daily for angina for anything he did go away, never to return. His cholesterol in the 300s fell below 200 without changing any of his bad dietary habits, and he looked and acted much better.
When I saw the changes in my father, I knew that’s what I want to do, doing holistic medicine. Because I used two natural hormones in my father—natural thyroid hormone and natural testosterone—every single new patient I’ve seen since then gets a whole hormonal workup. Because part of that hormonal workup is checking thyroid hormones, ovarian hormones, testicular hormones, adrenal hormones, pituitary hormones, and trying to balance the hormonal system and see why the hormonal system is imbalanced if it is.
After I started doing this and using bioidentical natural hormones, I was seeing great results, practice was growing, I was happy. I thought I was doing good in medicine and helping people, which is what I was tasked to do in life. But it was bothering me, why was I having to use so much thyroid hormone? I had the first ten years or so of my holistic practice, I would say I had about 75% of my patients on thyroid hormone, little amounts. They were feeling better, their physiology was better, and their biochemistry looked better on blood testing, and most importantly they felt better, they reported. But it was bothering me, why are there so many people who need to take thyroid hormone? Why is the thyroid gland so screwed up?
I would look at the ins and outs of the thyroid, what makes the thyroid work, what doesn’t make it work well? When you read about the thyroid, you read about iodine. Iodine is an essential element that the thyroid utilizes to make thyroid hormones. Without iodine, the thyroid can’t make thyroid hormone. But it’s not just the thyroid, all the glands in the body need iodine. In fact, every cell in the body needs iodine. But if we’re going to focus on the glands right now, that includes the thyroid, ovaries, uterus, breast, prostate, and pancreas. These glands all make hormones, prostaglandins, and other things. There’s not a hormone in the body that can be produced without iodine.
The highest concentration of iodine in the bodies of the thyroid gland, and the active and inactive thyroid hormones T3 and T4, the four and three refer to how many iodine atoms are attached to the thyroglobulin molecule. The thyroid gland, it’s made of iodine so important that it can concentrate iodine against the gradient, meaning the highest concentration of iodine in the human body is in the thyroid gland. There are very low concentrations in the bloodstream, and the body has developed an intricate mechanism to take iodine from a low concentrated area like the blood and put it into a higher concentrated area of the thyroid.
It’s an ATP-dependent process, so it’s an energy-dependent process. We use up energy to do that. The body doesn’t like the use of energy, it likes to conserve energy, and the reason it utilizes energy is because it’s so important. We can’t live without thyroid hormone. I would look at what makes the thyroid hormone go and think about why this patient needs thyroid hormone, why all these patients need thyroid hormone.
[00:17:30] Ashley James: So many people are on thyroid medication and it’s just amazing. It blows my mind that they’ll be on it for years and years and there’s no question. Okay, well, what’s the root cause, what’s behind it, or why is the body not especially women, and a lot of men don’t go for the tests, or the doctors don’t test men, but men too. Why are they deplete? Why are they having thyroid disruption? And why are there so much Hashimoto’s right now? It’s way more than we had 30, 40 years ago.
[00:18:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Oh, it’s at epidemic rates right now. Hashimoto’s is in epidemic rates. All those conditions I write in my book, and in my newsletters and stuff. I say it’s all related to iodine deficiency. The iodine deficiency causes problems with the thyroid, causes problems with the breast, prostate, pancreas, ovaries, uterus. What do we see in problems of all those tissues? As you mentioned, there’s epidemic rates of thyroid problems from thyroid cancer to autoimmune thyroid disease like Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease, as well as hypothyroidism. The fastest-growing cancer in America right now is thyroid cancer, meaning the most diagnosed cancer.
And then we have one in seven women with breast cancer. We have one in three men with prostate. cancer. We have epidemic increases of pancreatic, ovarian, uterine, and it’s cancers and it’s all related to I think the same thing. Iodine deficiency is a big part of that.
You mentioned that so many people are on thyroid hormone. People are on hormones and the other problem with people being on thyroid hormone and so many people on thyroid hormone and they still feel lousy, they still feel tired, they still feel achy. What many of these people need is iodine. If you put someone on thyroid hormone who’s lacking iodine, you make the iodine deficiency worse. When you put someone on thyroid hormone which increases the metabolic needs of the thyroid gland, it increases the body’s needs for iodine. You make iodine deficiency worse if you put them on thyroid hormone and they’re deficient in iodine.
There are studies, there have been three of them over the last 20 years, that show the longer women take thyroid hormone, the increase in risk of breast cancer goes up over time. After ten years, women who take thyroid hormone for ten years have a 50% increased risk of breast cancer compared to women who don’t take thyroid hormone. How can that be? I struggled with that when these articles came out. I didn’t have a great answer, and I think the answer is they’re iodine deficient.
As I wrote in my book, if you put a woman on thyroid hormone who is iodine deficient, you’re going to make the iodine deficiency worse. And you’re going to make it worse in other tissues besides the thyroid like the breast, the ovaries, uterus, and that’s why you’re seeing these cancers go up with that.
[00:20:49] Ashley James: So, are there receptors for iodine in other places in the body other than the thyroid hormone?
[00:20:57] Dr. David Brownstein: Every single cell in the body needs and requires iodine. The white blood cells need iodine to fight infections. Iodine is needed in fat cells, muscle cells, and immune system cells. Everything needs iodine. The problem is iodine levels have fallen over 50% across the United States over the last 40 years. Iodine is part of the halide family in the periodic table of elements. The halides consist of fluoride, bromide, iodine, and chloride.
[00:21:32] Ashley James: This was my next question. I’m so glad you’re segueing into this, please continue.
[00:21:37] Dr. David Brownstein: So, of those halides, two are toxic and two are essential. Iodine and chloride are essential, we can’t live without them. We need lots of it in our bodies. Bromide and fluoride are both toxic items that are non-essential. We can live and we can thrive without them, we don’t need them because they’re both poison enzymes and they’re not good for our body. The problem is, over the last 40 to 50 years we’ve gotten way more fluoride and bromide from fluoridated water to brominated drink in bromine and flour. It’s a fire retardant used in so many consumer items such as phones, computers, mattresses, carpets, curtains, and things that we become over-fluoridated, over-brominated, and at the same time more iodine deficient.
The halides are very interesting to study because they can competitively inhibit one another, which means that if you get too much of the toxic halides—fluoride and bromide—it’ll kick the body out of the essential halides—chloride and particularly iodine. Conversely, if you get enough iodine in and you’re toxic on the other ones, you’ll be able to release those. We’ve had a double whammy going on for the last 40 or 50 years. Iodine levels have fallen over 40% to 50%. At the same time, our exposure to toxic halides has increased.
That is the main reason I think we’re seeing this rapid rise in thyroid disorders such as autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease, hypothyroidism, and thyroid cancer, as well as all the other iodine deficiency disorders—breast cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and so on and so on.
[00:23:30] Ashley James: So, to put it in a way that we can visualize, the thyroid, like you had mentioned, takes and concentrates iodine tremendously. When we consume fluoride in tap water or bromide in baked goods, for example, that competes with iodine. Is the thyroid, then concentrating the fluoride, does it also then uptake and concentrate that as well?
[00:24:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, we know the thyroid can concentrate bromide, and we know if there’s not enough iodine and excess of bromide that the thyroid hormones can be brominated instead of iodinated. We were designed by our maker to have iodinated thyroid hormones, not brominated thyroid hormones. We don’t quite know what the significance of that is because it hasn’t been studied, but I can tell you, I think the significance of that is increased risk of thyroid cancer, Hashimoto’s, Graves’ disease, and hypothyroidism, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing.
As far as fluoride goes, the conventional mantra is that fluoride helps prevent cavities. If it does, it’s a minimal improvement, but almost every Western country except two, us being one of them, have removed fluoride from the water supply because we realized that if it does decrease cavities, it’s minuscule. The only way that fluoride has been shown to decrease cavities is topically applying it like in toothpaste, not by drinking water.
[00:25:11] Ashley James: I do have a question about that. Sodium fluoride, which isn’t that a byproduct of aluminum production and that’s what we’ve been drinking basically in tap water? I’ve read this so I don’t know if this is true or if this is just something that was published online. But didn’t they put sodium fluoride in certain prisons and certain concentration camps in the water in order to sedate the prison population? Fluoride, in certain amounts, kind of makes a more lazy or less aggressive society. Is that true?
[00:25:53] Dr. David Brownstein: The Germans used it in their concentration camps to do exactly that. Fluoride also has been shown to lower the IQ of newborns, mothers who have high fluoride levels. There have been studies that show the IQ declines in newborns in women who drink fluoridated water at levels like what’s fluoridated in the US.
[00:26:17] Ashley James: So we’re creating a population that is less likely to rise up, rebel, and is also stupid. That’s quite fascinating, and this is why I really believe that we should question everything. Don’t ever trust what’s in your food, what’s in your water, what’s in your medicine. Always, always, always do your own research and never trust anyone with your own health. Always filter your water. Don’t just trust that your water is safe, the air is safe to breathe, or the water is safe to eat, to drink, or the food is safe. We have to be more diligent because there are over 80,000 new man made chemicals in the last 40 years that are in the food supply that we’re now seeing are forever chemicals. And that they enter our body and block our receptors from absorbing certain nutrients and from interacting with hormones. It’s quite scary.
Fluoride is an essential nutrient in small amounts in the soil. It’s in the soil along with all other trace elements and minerals. We’re probably getting enough if we eat enough fruits and vegetables and like you said, you could brush your teeth. But then, there are populations that don’t have any fluoride whatsoever added to their water, and that their teeth are wonderful. So when the body concentrates fluoride, do you think that also is a contributor to other hormone dysregulation and cancer creation?
[00:28:12] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, studies have shown increased fluoride content results in certain bone cancers in young boys. We know fluoride poisons hundreds of different enzymes in the body. It’s a known carcinogenic agent. I think it’s ludicrous to put fluoride in the water. If you can’t afford an expensive filtration system, then you don’t have a choice. You’re just getting fluoridated water. Personal choice comes into play here. Remember, the World Health Organization has done studies with cavity rates and fluoridated non-fluoridated countries, there’s no difference at all. It has been shown for over 40 to 50 years.
The decline in cavity rates that have occurred over the last 50, 60 years has occurred in countries that don’t fluoridate their water as well. There’s really no business in fluoridating water. There’s really no business in our health of doing that.
[00:29:16] Ashley James: I can’t remember the exact information, but I read an article years ago. They did this in rural parts of Canada. I’m originally from Canada but I live in the states now. They gave tablets of fluoride to children because everyone was on well water. One of my friends was part of this experiment—governments like to do that thinking that it’s healthy. It actually had the reverse effect and all the children end up with rotten teeth. There was something about too much fluoride or high concentrations of fluoride actually led to the opposite effect, that led to teeth that decayed rapidly. Maybe because it just threw the body so out of balance, I don’t know.
When I was pregnant, I really looked into everything I could do to ensure my baby was healthy and that his or her IQ would be optimal. I did see that iodine was one of the needed essential nutrients along with essential fatty acids. There were studies that showed that mothers that consumed iodine had smarter children. So, that makes sense that fluoride, since it competes with iodine, would dumb down the IQ, so it’s like that’s the opposite. What you’re saying is we need more iodine. Now, you did mention that iodine helps to almost detox fluoride. So can you discuss that, how to use iodine as a detox agent?
[00:30:58] Dr. David Brownstein: Like I said with competitive inhibition, if you get one of the toxic halides that’s a little too much, you’re going to kick out iodine from the body. Conversely, if you get enough iodine, you can kick out those toxic halides and detoxify the body. Now, one of the problems is if you’re full of bromide and fluoride when you take iodine, you can create what’s called a Herxheimer reaction where you get an overload of detoxification and people don’t feel good. Now, if you’re working with a holistic doctor who is knowledgeable about this can help you avoid that. I don’t find that happens very much in my office, but it can happen. It just needs to be done appropriately.
One of the ways to avoid that happen is when you take iodine, take salt with it. Salt is the second major constituent in the body next to water, and we need adequate amounts of salt. We need over 100 grams of sodium and chlorine at any one time in our body, we’re supposed to have that. Most people are deficient in salt. I’ve been checking people for 28 years on salt levels and recommending salt intake go up for many of my patients because you need a lot of cells in the body. And salt can help usher out the bromide that’s in there.
In years past where medicines with bromide such as Bromo-Seltzer were used and people would get bromide toxic. So one of the ways conventional medicine dealt with it when they got bromide toxic, when they get delirious, very tired, and the brain wouldn’t work very well is they would salt the bromide out with a salt solution IV. But you can do that naturally, which is taking more salt in your diet. I wrote a book about this called Salt Your Way to Health, which is one companion book to the iodine book.
[00:32:48] Ashley James: I love that you’re bringing up salt. So many doctors say that salt is the contributor to high blood pressure and that we should reduce salt or eliminate it completely. We do actually consume more calories when something has salt in it, that’s true. So we still have to manage our food intake, but know that when we add salt—think about a bowl of rice. If it’s just a plain bowl of rice and no salt on it you’re going to eat to satiety. But with a bowl that is salted, we can overeat it because it tastes good. So we still need to be more conscious when we salt things that it does taste good and we might eat past satiety.
But what’s interesting about salt is the body uses chloride and sodium chloride to make hydrochloric acid. There’s an epidemic of heartburn out there and indigestion. Of course, if you’re not digesting your food you’re not absorbing your nutrition, and then everything cascades from there. I’m sure you have a book on that.
[00:33:50] Dr. David Brownstein: I talk about that in my salt book.
[00:33:52] Ashley James: There you go. I knew it. I knew you’d have a book on that, but it’s fascinating. You recommend that people use salt along with iodine. Where should they get their salt? I know you’re not going to say basic table salt or are you?
[00:34:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, there are two types of salt that are available—refined salt and unrefined salt. Refined salt is made by food companies because they refine food products to take out things that degrade. The reason they do that is the refined food products can stay on the shelf forever. It has a longer shelf life and then they make more money because they don’t have to throw products out. So, just as they refined flour to take out some natural things because the natural things will go bad, they refined salt. Refined salt is that thin white stuff that’s pretty much in every restaurant across the United States. It’s the girl with the umbrella on the side of the salt container, I can’t think of the name of it as an example of refined salt.
[00:35:02] Ashley James: Morton’s?
[00:35:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Yeah. It’s just got sodium and chloride plus some other toxic ingredients that shouldn’t be in salts such as ferrocyanide and aluminum silicate in it. That’s compared to unrefined salt, which has a full complement of minerals in it that come with wherever the salt is mined from. Celtic brand sea salt, Redmond Real Salt, and Himalayan salt all have over 80 minerals in them. Now, the minerals are in small amounts, but the minerals are essential and utilized.
I did a little study with my daughter Jessie when she was in middle school. She did it, and we did a study for her science class where we looked at what’s the difference in pH of refined salt and unrefined salts. Refined salt creates an acidic pH environment, unrefined salt helps alkalize tissues, and the minerals help alkalize it. If you eat a bunch of refined foods, you’re going to be too acidic, and that can lead to degenerative problems in the body. You want to have a neutral pH, which is generally 7.2 or so. Unrefined salt can be part of maintaining that neutral pH because we all tend to be acidic if we eat lousy food, we’re stressed, and we become nutrient deficient. So, salt’s really an important substance that’s why I wrote a whole book on that.
[00:36:35] Ashley James: That is fascinating that refined salt versus unrefined salt acts completely different in the body. One is acidic, one is more supportive and alkalizing. One has toxic ingredients, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve even seen certain refined salts where one of the ingredients was sugar. I kid you not, I just laughed. Because so many people don’t read labels.
When I go to a grocery store, my husband gets so frustrated. He calls me the label reader. I will read all the labels, but when we go to a restaurant, you just trust that they’re going to use good ingredients and they don’t. They use the cheapest ingredients. So we really have to be diligent to eat as much as we can at home and to use the healthy salt at home that has those trace minerals that don’t have all those weird agents in it that are very toxic for the body if eaten over time.
I always think about what our health was like 100 years ago versus now. Heart disease, cancer—these things are so much higher than 100 years ago, and we have to look at what we put in our mouth. What we put in our mouth every day is either hurting us or healing us.
So we’ve got our salt, that’s something that we can easily switch to because you’ve given us some good advice on how to find it. What about iodine, how should we take iodine? And we want to avoid that thyroid storm that might occur by consuming too high of a level of iodine because from my understanding if you consume too much, the thyroid shuts down in a protective manner if you consume too much at once. So, how to know how much iodine our body needs every day?
I’ve heard some Naturopaths like to use the skin test where you put some iodine on the skin and watch if acid absorbs, whereas others say that’s really not an accurate way to measure if you need iodine or not. How do we figure out how much we need to take and in what form?
[00:38:54] Dr. David Brownstein: So, the skin test is not an accurate way. There was a study that showed that 80% or so of the iodine placed on the skin sublimates into a gaseous phase and leaves the skin. So there’s no reason to do that. That’s not an accurate measure. A large percentage of the body’s iodine is in the skin so I don’t know if it’s just you’re measuring that.
The best measure of iodine status is a urinary excretion test. A holistic doctor can help you with that one, but the iodine loading test is by far the best test. I was involved in developing that test and working with my mentor, an iodine doctor, Guy Abraham, who developed a test. But we worked together on it, refining it. I got to help refine it. Urinary testing of iodine is the best way to go by far. The skin test doesn’t show you much. What was the other part of your question, Ashley?
[00:39:56] Ashley James: So, what form of iodine should we take and how do we know how much we should be taking?
[00:40:03] Dr. David Brownstein: We should get your levels checked to work with a doctor who’s literate in iodine, so that’s number one. I wouldn’t suggest doing it alone, but I have 30 years of working with iodine. In my first ten years, I couldn’t get it to work clinically in my practice because I was using the wrong form of iodine. I know now what I did wrong and I don’t make that mistake anymore. But with iodine, I think the best form is using a combination of iodide and iodine. What that means is that it’s a reduced and oxidized form of iodine.
For the chemistry people out there, if all the electrons in the outer shower are paired, that’s a reduced element. And if there’s one electron missing, that’s an oxidized element. It’s looking for an electron. The reduced and oxidized forms of iodine are used in different tissues of the body. The thyroid uses iodide, a reduced form. The breast uses iodine, the oxidized form. So, for a whole-body effect for iodine, it’s best to use a combination of the two. So, I use Lugol’s solution, which was first made in the 1800s. It’s a solution of potassium iodide and iodine in water. There are pills of this Lugol’s solution available too. I find it very effective, and by far it’s the best form of iodine out there.
[00:41:44] Ashley James: Oh, fascinating. Now, of course, listeners can buy your book on iodine to get way more information. This was just the tip of the iceberg. How can we find a holistic doctor that is proficient in iodine? Can listeners work with you? Do you do telemedicine, or is there an organization they can look up where they can find a roster of doctors that are proficient with this?
[00:42:20] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I don’t have a roster of doctors. My book describes where you can do the testing and all that stuff. The labs know who’s sending in tests, so the best advice I can give people is to call a lab that’s doing an iodine loading test, and there’s a few of them out there, and they’ll tell you who’s sending in tests in your area. That’s one way to look for who’s doing the iodine testing out there.
Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of misinformation about iodine even in the holistic world. I call it medical iota phobia. They’re afraid to use iodine—it’s been successfully used for over four generations of clinicians—for their own unnatural fears and not looking at the science, and not looking at what’s really true with iodine out there.
[00:43:12] Ashley James: Could you share a few stories of success you’ve had with your patients? How has iodine changed their lives?
[00:43:25] Dr. David Brownstein: I’ve had so many patients whose first ten years I have 3/4 of them on iodine, and then now, I have less than 1/4 of my patients on thyroid hormone because they’re all on iodine. When people are diagnosed with a thyroid problem, I also do hormonal nutritional workups at the same time. So if they’re iodine deficient, what I always teach doctors when I want to teach them about iodine is to correct iodine deficiency first or concurrently with thyroid hormone. Don’t put them on thyroid hormone first because you’ll make the iodine deficiency problem worse as I said earlier.
I have a patient who had a bad fibrocystic breast disease who came to me with a bilateral mastectomy scheduled for three weeks after that visit. I was the last resort for her. She’s a nurse at the University of Michigan and she was miserable. She couldn’t wear a bra. She couldn’t not even wear tight clothes but just form-fitting clothes or something like that. She couldn’t stand anything tight. She was wearing this baggy stuff, which was still hurting her. And if anyone rubbed up against her breast, she’d bumped into anything, she’d start crying.
She’d been to the University of Michigan Cystic Breast Clinic and they told her to come off caffeine and chocolate and clean up her diet. She was eating a bad diet and she tried all that. It helped a little bit, but then symptoms got worse over time. Really, they told her, the only thing you can do is have a mastectomy. She sees a lady in her late 30s scheduling a bilateral mastectomy. She had had enough.
So she came to me as a last resort, read my book on iodine, and read about fibrocystic breast disease. I do an iodine loading test on her. The iodine loading test is where you take 50 milligrams of iodine at time zero, collect 24 hours of urine after that, and measure how much iodine comes out in the urine over the 24 hours.
When you take iodine orally, 98% or so is excreted in the urine. You can measure the amount in and the amount out, subtract the numbers, and know how much the body has hung on to. Generally, when the body hangs on to more iodine, it’s more deficient. So once people get iodine sufficient, they have enough iodine in their body and they take 50 milligrams, they’ll pee out about 45 milligrams or 90%. They’ll hang on to 5% of it or so. That’s iodine sufficiency.
So, in her case, this patient peed out 50% of the iodine and held on to 50% because she was very deficient. So I told her to move her surgery back three months. I said, let’s give this a try. I said it won’t be gone in three months, but it should be markedly better. If it’s not better, it’s too late. I didn’t know if it was too late. Tissue sometimes gets so disorganized and such a mess that you can’t get them to come back sometimes in the body.
So, she called me up after two weeks into it and said she’s starting to feel better. And I saw her a month later, she had moved the surgery back two more months. And she said she’s 50% better. When I did an exam on the first visit, her breast felt like the best description I can give you is when I used to take Taekwondo in my younger days, like that punching bag feel. Like a hard-punching bag with bumps on it. It felt like alien tissue on her chest. I could barely even touch it because she was wincing and in pain.
I didn’t do an exam during the one-month visit, but I asked her to come back in another month. She came back another month and said she’s 80% better. I examined her breasts at that point. It felt like she had a breast transplant. The punching bag feeling was gone. She still had lumps but they were much smaller. Now I could do almost a full exam with very minimal discomfort. She canceled her mastectomy surgery. I saw her back three-month visit, almost normal breast tissue, no bumps.
She went back to her fibrocystic breast clinic and had an exam. The doctor said, wow, what are you doing? It’s way better. So she started to tell him and she said he’s just glazed over his eyes. When she stopped talking, he said, all right, I’ll see you in six months. That’s a good story.
Another good story with iodine is a lady, I diagnosed her with inflammatory breast cancer—the worst kind of breast cancer. Usually, you’re dead in three to six months from diagnosis. I was doing a study on iodine at that time with Dr. Abraham, and I put her in the study group of breast cancer diagnoses. She had very low iodine testing. I put her on iodine at 50 milligrams.
She called me up about two weeks into it and said, I’m having a problem with the iodine. I said, what’s the problem? She goes, my nightshirt is yellow over where my breasts are when I wake up in the morning. I’m on the phone with her and I said oh, well, how do you feel? She goes, I never felt better. I’m able to babysit my grandkids now, my energy is coming back. She goes, I don’t know what to do. I said, well, why don’t you come in, bring your nightshirt with you.
So she brings in the nightshirt and you can clearly see this yellow stain on the inside of her nightshirt. I asked her if I could keep the nightshirt and analyze what the yellow stain was. She had yellow nails. There are not many things that cause yellow nails except for maybe if you got jaundice, but it wasn’t a jaundiced yellow, it was a little different yellow.
[00:49:46] Ashley James: And her eyes weren’t yellow?
[00:49:48] Dr. David Brownstein: Her eyes were not yellow. She’s not jaundiced there, but her nails were this particular yellow color to it. It was not a jaundice yellow but a different shade. It’s hard to describe it. So, I said to her, bromide has a yellow color to it, you’re probably detoxing from bromide. She said, what do I do? And I said, well, I’m going to put my head together with a friend of mine and we’re going to analyze this t-shirt. And I said, since you’re feeling good, up your salt intake to another teaspoon a day. I put her in a teaspoon of salt with it, increase your water intake, and start bathing in Epsom salts and we’ll get this bromide out of you.
She kept on the 50 milligrams of iodine. She was part of a study, so when I tested her, we did a bromide check on day one. When she took out 50 milligrams of iodine, her bromide levels were the highest I’ve ever seen. Thirty days later, I checked her iodine and bromide levels again. Her iodine now was coming up and her bromide was starting to come down. Sixty days later, she didn’t have a lot of bromide and her iodine levels were stabilizing at high levels, and she felt much better.
She lived six more years. She died of inflammatory breast cancer and had a good six years. The only thing I would do differently with her now is I would have put her on more iodine from what I know now. I did have the shirt analyzed, it’s a funny story with that. I lost her shirt. We were moving house.
I was consulting with Charles Hakala from Hakala Labs. We were developing a chemistry experiment to take a gram of the shirt from where over her breast where it’s yellow, and a gram of the shirt from the back (not yellow), and analyze the halides—fluoride, chloride, iodine, and bromide. We know how to do that. We were planning it out and then I lose the shirt. I look all over the place, can’t find it. I look at work, I look at home, and I had moved my home. We were packing stuff up and moving.
So we moved to our next home and I can’t find the iodine, it’s done. So I had some shelves in my office that maybe ten years later from this incident. It was just a couple of years ago. I was cleaning out and lo and behold in the back of the shelf is that shirt in a bag. I had sealed the bag. It was sealed. I couldn’t believe it when I found it because I looked for it for years. I opened the bag and it’s still got the yellow color to it. I called Charles, we pulled up our data, we did the experiments on it, her bromide levels were, I don’t remember the numbers, but they were really high. On the back of the shirt, there was no bromide, and so she was excreting bromide. This was the first case that was ever reported of someone detoxifying from bromide in that way.
[00:53:04] Ashley James: From her breasts.
[00:53:06] Dr. David Brownstein: From her breasts.
[00:53:07] Ashley James: Where the cancer was.
[00:53:09] Dr. David Brownstein: And her nails.
[00:53:10] Ashley James: Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Brownstein. I know you have to go. Thank you so much for coming here today and sharing this information. I think it’s so vital that we continue to seek out information to add to our nutritional protocol and also the idea that using certain things like iodine for detoxification as well is really critical.
It’s always a pleasure speaking with you. Listeners can go to drbrownstein.com. They can also go to centerforholisticmedicine.com. And please, get Dr. Brownstein’s books, go to his website, lots of great information. Of course, listen to episode 462 where he shares his very fascinating story with very successful treatment of his patients over the last year plus that have had coronavirus infections. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[00:54:16] Dr. David Brownstein: No, thanks for having me, Ashley. I would say that if you’re not feeling good out there and you’re sick and you’re not getting answers, really try and find a good holistic doctor who can help work with you and work together with you to find out what’s wrong and what’s imbalanced. The human body is pretty well-designed when we give it what it needs, and we keep away from what it shouldn’t be exposed to. It takes a little bit of work, but the work can be worth it because you should go through life feeling good with enough energy and be happy.
[00:54:50] Ashley James: Absolutely. That is my philosophy as well. Thank you so much and I look forward to having you back on the show.
[00:54:57] Dr. David Brownstein: Thanks, Ashley.
[00:54:57] Ashley James: Have a great day, thank you.
I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Brownstein. I just wanted to remind you, if you’re interested in using the Sunlighten Technology to help your body detoxify and achieve your health goals, I highly recommend going to sunlighten.com, checking it out, listening to my interviews about sauna therapy, and specifically using the Sunlighten Technology, which you can find those by going to learntruehealth.com and using the search function there, or just give them a call. Just Google Sunlighten, Sunlighten Sauna, and give them a call.
Make sure you mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health podcast so that you get this special that they are giving our listeners this month. I want to make sure that you get the best discount and also get the best experience with them. If you have any questions about my experience with Sunlighten, feel free to reach out to me. You can email me, [email protected], and you can also reach out to me in the Facebook group by going to learntruehealth.com/group to be redirected to the group, or just search Learn True Health on Facebook.
So again, that’s Sunlighten Sauna. Google them, give them a call. They’re all wonderful to talk to, and then make sure you mention Learn True Health the podcast and Ashley James to get your special.
I am just so thrilled with the outpouring of information, the sharing from all the listeners these last five years. So many listeners have gotten a Sunlighten Sauna or done other practices that other guests have recommended and then they come back and they share with me, they email me, or they share in the Facebook group. And so many people have been thrilled with their experience using the Sunlighten Sauna, as have I.
This is one thing for me to say that I’ve had a great experience, I’ve had an amazing experience, and my guests to share that they and their patients have amazing experiences. But then when we see it in the Facebook group and listeners are sharing that they love their Solo System, they love their Sunlighten, and that it’s made such a difference in their life, it’s really cool.
As a community, we can come together in the Learn True Health Facebook group and we can share what’s worked for us so that we can learn from each other. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I look forward to you coming and joining the group and sharing with us what you’ve learned and loved learning from the Learn True Health podcast. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.
Get Connected with Dr. David Brownstein!Dr. Brown’s Holistic Medicine
Center For Holistic Medicine
Books by Dr. David BrownsteinA Holistic Approach To Viruses
Drugs That Don’t Work and Natural Therapies That Do! 2nd Edition
Iodine: Why You Need It. Why You Can’t Live Without It. 5th Edition
Ozone: The Miracle Therapy
The Guide to a Dairy-Free Diet
The Guide to a Gluten-Free Diet
Check out more wonderful books by Dr. Brownstein!
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Watch the 4 Hour Event: https://www.flemingmethod.com/recorded-event-2021-presentation-series
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Ashley James and Dr. Richard Fleming
learntruehealth.com/groupHighlights:
Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from What is InflammoThrombotic Response What is FMTVDM or Fleming Method Effective treatment or COVID-19 What kind of diet help to prevent diseaseDr. Richard Fleming on the Most Effective Drug-based Treatment for Covid-19
https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-richard-fleming-on-the-most-effective-drug-based-treatment-for-covid-19
Dr. Richard M. Fleming, PhD, MD, JD is a scientist/physicist and also a cardiologist who discovered that inflammation and heart disease go hand in hand and have patented the Fleming Method (FMTVDM). He led a clinical trial on COVID-19 treatment protocols. In this episode, Dr. Fleming shares where SARS-CoV-2 came from, which medicines are effective for the treatment of COVID-19, and what type of diet helps prevent diseases.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This is a long-awaited episode that I did with Dr. Richard Fleming. I have been so excited to publish this and I apologize for the break that I took. Man, this year has been crazy.
Basically, we moved, we had to move very quickly. We had to use the Marie Kondo method and get rid of most of our belongings that we filled a 2700 square foot house. And now we are living in a beautiful and very small space. We have decluttered our life, and that’s what we have been doing the last two months. We got rid of all of our belongings, only kept the absolute essentials, and we moved. So now we are living in a beautiful area, in a very, very small space, in a more efficient life.
It’s a huge emotional process going through decluttering and just emotionally and energetically removing from my life what no longer served me. I watched the Marie Kondo show on Netflix, many of my friends have read her book, and I read some of her books. What I wasn’t aware of is how much of an energetic release would happen. When we decluttered, we donated, we sold, we gave away, and in some cases had to throw away so much of our belongings. And now, everything we own can fit in basically one room, which feels liberating. Also now, I realize that there’s a whole ‘nother level of organization that we’re going to achieve.
But we’ve taken the last two months, we were very, very busy doing all of that, and finally we’re now set up and I have my computer set up, and I’m able to interview and publish episodes again.
This particular interview is, in my mind, one of the best or one of the most informative pieces that I have ever done. What I really enjoy about Dr. Fleming’s research is—you know, there are some doctors that sell a book, this is how they make a living, and so there’s always a question in the back of your mind like, what’s your motivation? Is it money motivated? I believe everyone has the right to earn a living, you just have to wonder, how much are they selling, right?
Whereas Dr. Fleming, he has everything to lose and nothing to gain from putting this information out there. He loves doing research. He’s a research scientist and cardiologist. He is a patent holder of a method called the Fleming Method that is used today for early detection of heart disease and in some cases cancer. And he really doesn’t like self-promotion, that’s not his thing. Him and I talked about that off the air.
Now, when I interviewed him, he had an event coming up in which he was even upset they were charging $10 to come attend the event. And it was a four-hour lecture that he was giving with over 100 slides that you could download for free. This information is so incredibly valuable and I’m so excited to bring it to you today. Because of my move and everything that’s going on, unfortunately, I’m publishing this after his event. However, the good news is you can go to his website, flemingmethod.com, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. Richard Fleming does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.
You can go to his website and from there you will be able to see, I believe he’s cut it into something like the four-hour lecture into something like 15 parts. You can stream, watch, and I think you might even be able to download his lecture. And definitely download the PDF with all of the slides. What he gives you with all of the evidence is he gives you the paper trail of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Who created it, how it was created, the effects it has on the body from a medical standpoint. The paper trail is very evident. He shows who funded it, the labs have funded it. He shows basically what it does to the body, and if we understand what it does to the body, then we can also understand how to best combat it as well.
He shows his study—which he talks about in our interview today and you’re going to be blown away— where they’ve used medications to see which ones are best at surviving, decreasing the mortality rate of coronavirus infection. He also shows the latest vaccine trials, their efficacy and their safety. He basically pulls all this data and digests it and explains it. So it’s fascinating. I watched the four-hour lecture. I listened to most of it because I was listening to it while I was packing up our house. I’d look over occasionally at the slides that he was presenting, and just my mind was blown. So I’m excited for you to hear this episode. Thank you for your patience. I know you guys have been eagerly waiting to hear it.
Definitely go to his website to listen to his four-hour lecture where he goes into great detail. What’s great about our interview is he goes into stories and explains the backstory as well, so this interview will complement his four-hour lecture very well for you.
If you have any questions, if you want to chat about this interview or anything that Dr. Fleming does, please join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s a great community of holistic-minded people who are all looking to achieve true health and looking to continue learning from each other. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group. That’ll redirect you straight to the Facebook group.
Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you love. This is one of those shareable episodes for sure. I know that there’ll be new listeners and I’m very excited. Welcome guys. I’ve been doing this podcast for five years now, and I continue to just love everything I learned from all the holistic doctors.
Now I’ve got some more episodes in the hopper for you after this one, and I just know that you guys will love the next few episodes that are coming up so stay tuned. Make sure you’re subscribed on your favorite podcast directory. And please, if you love the show, give it a five-star rating and written review. It really does help. The more positive five-star written reviews we get, the more platforms like iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher, the more they, in turn, will promote the show’s search ability to other people. So we can spread this information through giving it great reviews.
So if you like it, give it a great review, and if you don’t like it just write me an email and start a conversation with me, [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you. Either way, thank you so much for being a listener and sharing the show. Enjoy today’s episode, I know you will—some amazing information. I’m so excited to get it out for you today.
[00:07:57] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 463. I am so excited for today’s guest. You just have no idea. We have probably the smartest guy in the world on the show today. I watched a two-hour YouTube video with Dr. Richard Fleming, explaining the link between inflammation, SARS, and COVID. He’s the one that discovered the inflammation and heart disease go hand in hand. Dr. Fleming, your research, what you’re sharing with us on your website, which I recommend all listeners go to flemingmethod.com. He puts out lots of great information. He doesn’t like charging for things. He just wants to keep helping us and get this information out there.
He’s got over 30 videos explaining the science behind COVID and inflammation, and it’s really going to wake people up for real, blow their minds, and get us back in charge of our health. That’s the whole point of this podcast is getting us back in charge of our health. When you understand how these things work in the body and you understand an inflamed body, how it responds to disease and infection versus a body that’s not inflamed, the care that you can do to take care of yourself to prevent things from happening in the future, you’re going to be so much better off.
Dr. Fleming, it’s such a pleasure to have you here today. Now, you have an event coming up in Texas, in Dallas. So if any listeners are in Dallas, they got to go to flemingmethod.com and right there at the top, it says Event 2021. It’s only $10, it’s a whole day event where you can learn from Dr. Fleming and you’re going to learn about COVID. I’m sure you’re going to tell us a little bit today about what this event is, and it’s going to be filmed. So for those who aren’t in Dallas, Texas, we’ll be able to go to your website, flemingmethod.com, and watch the event as well.
You’re going to be giving us the download of all your slides. There are over 100 slides referencing all the studies. We were just talking before we hit record that you’re surprised you haven’t been assassinated. I mean honestly, you’re putting out so much information that would make some government officials very angry, some CDC officials very angry. People that want to keep telling us we all need to follow their guidelines, which I’m not sure how studied their guidelines are. I don’t see the science. I just see them constantly changing directions.
In my state, in Washington, what I’ve seen is almost half of all restaurants have gone out of business. We’re heading for a major disaster if the economy goes this way. Small businesses are being crushed, and so many people are losing their jobs. I am in fear of what is going to happen in the next few years as a result of the government not taking true science into account and making mandates that aren’t necessarily helping any of us. And then, of course, we’re not being told what we can do to actually prevent or support our body in mounting a healthy response.
So there’s all this in the air and Dr. Fleming, I’m so excited to have you here today to share with us what we can do to support our body to prevent heart disease, which you are the expert in, and also, talk a little bit about COVID since you have so much information around that.
[00:12:11] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, first off, thank you for inviting me, Ashley. It’s my pleasure to be here and given an opportunity to try to provide some information for your listeners and let them know about the upcoming event.
It’s interesting that you mentioned the CDC just a few moments ago because back in 2005, the CDC invited me to attend a conference and present on not only the patent FMTVDM, which some people have shortened to the Fleming Method because the name of the patent is rather long. But also, the role that diet and other risk factors for heart disease played for it. So we were talking about heart disease and cancer at that point in time in conjunction with the patent.
Just for the heck of it, the title of the patent is the Fleming Method for Tissue and Vascular Differentiation using same state single or sequential quantification comparisons. I thought I was doing people a favor by the acronym FMTVDM, and now it’s been shortened to Fleming Method, which is fine. This is year number 53 for me doing research—and one of the things that I learned way back and particularly back in medical school when I entered medical school in 1980—was we were told by the dean that 90% of what we’re going to be taught was incorrect. He encouraged those of us who are research-oriented, and I was clearly research-oriented, to investigate different fields of medicine and try to advance it as best we could.
So I’ve spent several of those decades looking at the tests that we do, understanding what causes different disease states, and trying to get a better handle on finding problems earlier, but not from the point of view that there are so many people that get tests done that they don’t quite know what the results of those tests are.
It’s not a matter of having an insensitive test finding things, or an overly sensitive test finding things. It’s a matter of actually measuring things. Much of the work that I’ve done diagnostically has been to look at how we measure things and to define not only disease but our health on a spectrum from one end to the other so that we can find things sooner. Not just so we can attack it using the same old methods, but hopefully so we can do things to improve our health earlier on using, hopefully, less aggressive and less toxic means, and perhaps more fundamental approaches than we’re so used to doing.
One of the things that people need to appreciate or I would hope that they would appreciate about medicine is that much of what medicine has had to focus on is just simply keeping people alive in emergency situations, and that’s where a lot of our focus has been. Only after you tackle that type of problem do you get the luxury of going back and looking at how we can then prevent things. There is not a lot or actually any emphasis by the Federal government on preventing disease.
In the 1960s, that was discussed briefly, and some of the people that raised those questions were advised to stop asking those questions, and they did. The government does not like it when you raise questions and does not like it when you think outside of the box.
[00:15:53] Ashley James: It was pressure by the pharmaceutical industry, you think because there’s no profit in not being sick?
[00:16:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I’ve got two responses to many questions people answer. First off, there’s a heck of a lot of profit for people in not being sick because vitamins, minerals, and lots of different things like that are made by the same pharmaceutical companies that sell you the prescription drugs. But you are correct in that there is an awful lot of money to be made by disease.
It’s like casinos. If you look at a casino and you and you look at what they consider the risk of winning there, you just have to step back for a moment and think, how do they keep the doors open to all these bright shiny places? And it’s not because they’re losing money, they’re making money. Big Pharma is making money. There’s no doubt about it. The SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrated a tremendous capacity to make money.
In fact, billions and trillions have gone into SARS-CoV-2. And the irony is when you look at the evidence about this virus, where it came from, who paid for it, and who’s funding the research not only for this virus but for vaccines, for CRISPR technology, for SAM technology, for transmissible vaccine technology, for all the other components, you’ll find that it’s basically the same groups of people. It’s our Federal government, it’s the Gates Foundation, it’s the Helmsley Foundation. It’s people that were connected with Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive.
You’re right. I mean, those types of things are controversial and I don’t think the powers that be really want that information out there, but unfortunately, they really haven’t, in my opinion, been manipulating something as long as they have been with this pandemic. The amount of time that they’ve been manipulating it had its effect of getting people to not talk to each other and to go along with the flow, but it’s also had a secondary effect, which is a significant amount of the population that I’ve guesstimating is about 30%, have really kind of had it with this process. And that’s caused them to start doing what they’re not supposed to, which is to get together and to talk about things. The more people talk and share information, the less likely they are to be manipulated and controlled by the powers that be.
[00:18:46] Ashley James: Yes, that’s why we’re here today. You guys that are listening to this, that is exactly what you need to know is the more you know, the more you’re not going to be manipulated. We talked about this in past interviews about how we’ve been raised to believe milk is good, milk does a body good. That was marketing.
[00:19:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Oh yeah.
[00:19:10] Ashley James: We’ve been manipulated through marketing, that’s federally subsidized, right? It doesn’t do a body good. There’s so much science now, so many studies show that it’s actually not great for you, and it’s not a great source of calcium. Calcium is much better getting it from vegetables, for example, versus getting it from a cow because that’s so pro-inflammatory for the body and there are higher risks of cancer. We can get into that, but I just want to bring it up, just touching on this a little bit because you did go there.
The word conspiracy is a plot or a scheme to do harm, to do things that are illegal. So when we talk about conspiracy because, in the mainstream media, it’s been twisted. The word conspiracy is, oh, those are the nutjobs who believe the Earth is flat or whatever. They try to paint the word conspiracy, and it’s actually not the definition. The definition is when we are identifying a group of people who are doing harm, who are doing something possibly nefarious. And you mentioned those organizations like the Gates Foundation, those same organizations and people that you mentioned are also connected to or were connected to the Wuhan lab that was studying the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
So just putting it out there, when we go down that rabbit hole, we see that there’s so much to look at. These organizations that are now telling us what we need to do or to our body have been involved for a long time in studying this virus, and creating vaccines. Scary though that every vaccine they’ve ever tried to test on animals for COVID because COVID has been around for a long time just like influenza, different variants have been around for a long time. Every time they go to create a vaccine, all the animals die during the trials. And now, the animals that it’s being given to are humans because it’s a trial now. This is the scary part.
What is the connection? Now considering that you are the discoverer, you are the person who discovered that heart disease and inflammation go together, that inflammation causes heart disease and you can see the two together. I love that then you created this method of measuring it so that we could catch it way early on. Most people know they have heart disease when they have their first heart attack or when they have angina, when they have major they’ve had it for years. They’ve been developing it for years or they develop a stroke. They’ve had it for years, but what if they could have gone through a test and then caught the inflammation early on and then changed their lifestyle so that they didn’t have that inflammation, they didn’t go that route?
Now, this is near and dear to my heart because my dad died of heart disease and my mom died of cancer. These two things, if they had known years before that their body is going to create this disease that will end their life early, they would have made different choices, hopefully. But what is the link between inflammation and maybe how people, when they have COVID, how their outcomes are? Can you see that there are significantly worse outcomes for those who already have inflammation? If their body’s not inflamed, do they have better outcomes? Is there a way of treating the inflammation while they’re in COVID, while they’re infected so that they have a better outcome?
[00:23:31] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Let me walk everybody back to a little bit of history on me so that you can get a perspective of me laying these answers out. So in 1976, I joined American Heart as a faculty member, which made me the youngest faculty member at that point in time in history. I hope nobody has taken me out of those positions at a younger age than I did. But, more power to them if they have. As a result of doing it, I get put on three basic committees. One was basic, one was advanced cardiac life support. And then the other one was a new committee, physician cluster education faculty.
I began on all three of those for the latter one talking to physicians primarily and then expanding beyond that about what caused heart disease and what can be done about it. The primary theory at that point in time was it was cholesterol. I spent a couple of decades teaching that and training that to people. And then in the late ‘80s, I started questioning some of that. From ’89 to ’92, I was actually the cardiology fellow who did the Dean Ornish program studies for them at UT where I did my fellowship in cardiology.
I then questioned further on that because some of that data even is questionable about what the real outcomes were, and proceeded to look at a variety of other factors that people were reporting as significant but not uniformly. And so over the course of time and eventually I took six months sabbatical to just sort this out. I developed what was called the Fleming inflammation and vascular disease theory, the Fleming inflammation and heart disease theory. The inflammation and heart disease theory has been called a variety of things. Presented it at American Heart in 1994 then again in 1995, reduced it to a textbook. So, written up as a chapter in a cardiology textbook in ’99.
And then, from 2000 to 2003, published a couple of studies on bacteria and their specific roles. And then we were on 20/20 in 2004 talking about it. And essentially began with the process that heart disease is an inflammatory process, it’s not a narrowing of an artery, although that occurs later on. About half of the people find out they have heart disease by dropping dead of it, which is not your best approach to find out that you have a problem. It’s the inability of an artery to relax and increase its blood flow upon demand that’s called Flow Reserve and I wrote the quadratic equation for that back in ‘90 or ‘91. So that is the blood flow equation for humans.
Then came up with these 12 factors of which one of those are infectious diseases like bacteria and viruses that produce an inflammatory process. Now, I then also went on to explain that this is what causes diabetes, high blood pressure, cerebrovascular diseases, strokes, cancers, and a variety of health problems. And that obesity is one of the primary reasons why these chemicals exist in the body called cytokines are interleukins, which means they are chemicals that are released from one type of blood cell to another type of blood cell to signal that there’s a problem.
So the entire theory boils down to two things going on: an inflammatory process or a swelling, and a thrombosis or blood clotting process, which at first blush might seem not good for the human body until you realize that really what that does is it tries to kill off something that’s not supposed to have been in the area by releasing chemicals that just perforate or destroy cells that are damaged. And then, depriving them of blood by forming a blood clot so it decreases their nutrients getting in there or their oxygen getting in there so things die. The focus is to attack things that shouldn’t be there.
These chronic inflammatory diseases, however, are the result of us, humans, doing things for our bodies that we shouldn’t. I chuckled at the milk comment because that’s one of the conversations that I’ve had with people in the past. I’ve had lots of criticism from people that they don’t like what I have to say. I like to be liked, but it’s not my goal as a scientist/physician to make you like me, my goal is to tell you the truth. I always tell people that if they’re given the choice between the doctor they don’t like that saves their lives and the one that will hold their hand while they’re dying, go for the first one. The latter one doesn’t have a very good outcome, even if you feel good while you’re doing it.
So, the inflammatory process is designed to protect you. But if you’re doing things to insult your body consistently, it will produce disease and you will stay in a hyperinflammatory, hyper thrombotic or what I call InflammoThrombotic Response, ITR for short because scientists and doctors like to abbreviate things. And then my students get to listen to me say don’t abbreviate, tell me the whole thing. They get to abbreviate when they’re later, older, doing things like I do, and getting tired of using the full phrases.
What we saw with SARS-CoV-2, and it’s important to distinguish between the viral infection and the disease. So SARS-CoV-2 is the virus and COVID-19 is the disease. It’s like cholesterol is a problem, and coronary artery disease is the disease. They are two different things. COVID means that you have developed an InflammoThrombotic Response. Well, why would you develop a potentially lethal, life-threatening InflammoThrombotic Response? Well, it’s because you have comorbidity. You have one of these other health problems that your body is already in hyper or increased inflammation or inflammatory and thrombotic process.
So now, you just simply toss a little bit more gasoline on the fuel by having the virus, and what we see were people’s systems that simply couldn’t hang on anymore, that was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. So that’s what we really saw and see with this disease.
During 2020, I began the process very early in the year of sorting out what was going on with this virus as best I could and looked at treatments. Where everybody else was focused on what type of treatment, was it an anti-malarial or an antibiotic, I was asking a different type of question. Which was, what’s the mechanisms of action or how do these drugs work? Because that’s really the key. It’s not the label that you put on it, it’s how do the drugs work? They do the things that are necessary to treat a) a virus, and b) this InflammoThrombotic Response that can occur to it.
Because I patented FMTVDM or Fleming Method and had already done about two decades’ worth of research, we already have the data that shows where this inflammatory and thrombotic process of infection lies in the measurements of FMTVDM.
The other thing is that I’m not a big fan of doing sloppy research, even though I get a lot of criticism from people who like to do sloppy research because they like to do one drug or two drugs and then compare that, and that’s not very useful. I mean, it’s nice if you have lots of time and people aren’t dying, but when people are dying, you have to take a different approach, in my opinion. And that’s to look at a lot of drugs altogether. You can only do them one at a time, but if you do it intelligently, you can layer them one after another.
We took 1,800 people. I’m going to answer this now because I see criticisms on social media. The study was not changed from 500 people to 1,800 people. The study was designed to end up with 500 people who were hospitalized with the InflammoThrombotic Response of COVID-19. To do that meant that we had 1800 people that we originally saw to get to the 500. In fact, we got to 501 because I didn’t stop at 500. I stopped at 501, big deal.
[00:33:03] Ashley James: When you saw these 1,800 people, were they all positively infected?
[00:33:09] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right, so that’s the thing. They were done in 7 countries, 23 facilities outside of the United States. Because the United States had already established that it wasn’t going to do this type of research, it was going to muddle along at the pace that it was doing and it was going to focus on vaccines.
So I have—I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, but I certainly have now—seen an environment where the Federal government said there are no treatments for these things and you’d better not be treating people for it. So clearly this was not something we could do in the United States, and I make no apologies about that.
[00:33:49] Ashley James: That seems completely unethical.
[00:33:52] Dr. Richard Fleming: I think it’s unethical and considering where this virus came from, everything shows that this is a bioweapon that we’ll get into if we have enough time. And that the same people that said there are no treatments, we’re going to go vaccines, are the same people that paid for this gain of function by a weapon. And I don’t think it’s just unethical, I think it’s criminal. I think they have violated international law. And if I have anything to say about it, they will be held before a second Nuremberg trial and be held accountable.
So we did it outside the country and what we did is we brought them, so they came to see their doctors. I simply coordinated the study and made the patent available without cost and designed a study. So they came to see their doctors. They had to have a positive PCR test, for lack of a better thing. That’s all we had at the time. And then their doctors decided whether they would say, okay, I don’t think you’re symptomatic enough to be treated. Go home, come back in three days. I want to re-evaluate you, or their doctors who would say, well, we have four options to treat from here in an outpatient setting. I think you’re symptomatic, I’m going to start you on that, and then come back in three days.
They were almost evenly distributed, there were slightly more who ended up getting treatment by their physicians. And then in three days, a decision was made. You came back, you looked better, and you get kept on that medication; or if you weren’t getting medication and you got better, everybody said hooray.
In either group, if you didn’t get better, you got hospitalized because you were symptomatic and you were then diagnosed with COVID-19 coronavirus disease 2019. Because it was not the 19th coronavirus, it was discovered in 2019, or at least that’s when all of us were told about it. Although, we have documents that show that SARS-CoV-2 was actually part of a research project out of China in 2007 where they combined hepatitis C virus, HIV virus, SARS-CoV-1, and SARS-CoV-2 in a gain-of-function research project.
[00:36:17] Ashley James: That’s where the bioweapon thing comes in?
[00:36:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, we’ll get into that in more detail, but it’s out of the United States and out of China, primarily.
[00:36:28] Ashley James: Is this a patent that people can see?
[00:36:30] Dr. Richard Fleming: I don’t know if they patented that, but the papers are certainly out there. In fact, I’m writing a book on gain-of-function because I was asked to write a book. Not only was I asked to write a book, but I’ve been asked to provide documents for court.
[00:36:47] Ashley James: I’d love to have you back on the show when you have released your book so that we can promote it because I know my listeners would be very interested in reading it.
[00:36:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: I would be delighted and you know how I feel about promoting things.
[00:37:01] Ashley James: Don’t worry, I’ll do the promotion for you.
[00:37:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Thank you. So they did that and when they came into the hospital, they had an FMTVDM done. They also had a number of other tests, a couple that looked for information, and other things that we were concerned about. They had electrocardiograms, looked at their heart rhythm and the QT interval that everybody stresses out about, and then they were randomly assigned a treatment—1 of 10 treatments. Sorry, that’s just how you do research.
[00:37:36] Ashley James: But this was suspected to help them?
[00:37:42] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Every one of these treatments I had selected based upon the mechanism of action and data that was available that I’m surprised more people aren’t aware of, but that’s the function of a good researcher is to be able to do that type of thing. And then in three days, they had the studies repeated, and one of three things was going to happen. Either they got better, they got worse, or no change. I won’t go through the details of how we did the measurements and what accounted for better or worse, but just using that if they got better, then they were maintained on that drug. If they got worse, the drug was stopped and they were randomly given another one. If there was no significant change, they were randomly assigned to a new drug on top of what they had already received.
So with 10 treatment combinations, we ended up with, in the end, 52 different combinations of drugs that were studied. And because FMTVDM quantifies and measures, we had the ability to statistically analyze that and sort out what worked and what didn’t work, and in what combinations things worked and didn’t work. That boiled it down to three combinations that were 99.83% successful for COVID patients.
Outpatients with SARS-CoV-2 had a variety, about an 83% success rate. Although one drug combination worked 100% of the time, and as I tell people, it worked 100% of the time, my response is yeah. But if we get enough people, somebody is not going to work on it. You just have to be intelligent enough to realize what the information is telling us is what works, and it shows us why the drugs work because these drug combinations, when you tend to look at them, by doing them in combination, decreased hospital stays from 40 to 60 days down to 1 to 2 weeks.
And then the other thing was that we’re very careful about the ventilator settings because using ventilators, the way that they are standardly typically set and used on patients has already been shown in three major publications published in the New England Journal of Medicine—when it was still a journal versus a political tool—had shown previously that if you set ventilators the way we set them routinely for patients, you’ll kill patients with this type of lung disease. And I think we’ve done a great job now of validating those papers as well with all the people that have died, and SARS-CoV-2, for the only positive note I can say on that, is it validated my original theory from 1994. Not where I was going or wanting to go with that, but there you go.
[00:40:36] Ashley James: It originally validated that inflammation is the root cause of disease?
[00:40:42] Dr. Richard Fleming: It validated the fact that bacteria and viruses are one of those pro-inflammatory things that will kill you with heart disease and the other diseases because that’s why people died.
[00:40:53] Ashley James: It exacerbates what’s already there, right?
[00:40:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, they weren’t being treated, that’s the problem. 99.83% of our people survived. So what that tells you is that had everybody else been treated for this InflammoThrombotic Response that I described in the theory, we wouldn’t have had hundreds and thousands and millions of people die. But it’s the attitude of, well, everybody talks about inflammation and heart disease, but it’s lip service to me because nobody then turned around and treated the people.
If the attitude is we don’t have treatments for this, or if we treat you that way that they’re going to come after our medical licenses or throw us in jail, well, understanding that that is the scenario that happened in the United States and around the world, it’s not too challenging to understand why the German Medical Association behaved the way it did under Adolf Hitler. And Göring at the 1947 Nuremberg trials when he knew he was going to be hanged for crimes against humanity, the Germans and Nazis were no different than the Americans, the British, or anybody else.
He said, any government can do this to its people, and the American attorney that was arguing with him said, no, no, no, we’re a free society in the United States. This does not happen. And Göringlooked and he said, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you get a republic, a parliament, communist, socialistic, or fascist society. All you have to do to manipulate the people is tell them there’s a problem. Tell them if they don’t step in line that bad things will happen. Tell them that people that don’t step in line are unpatriotic and you will manipulate the people. And I think we’ve seen a good demonstration of that over the last year and a half.
I mean, at least that’s my perspective on it. Psychologists have known this for a long time since the 1940s if not before, how to modify this. The US Army and government are very good at learning how and controlling people’s behaviors, and yet they continue to repeatedly conduct experiments on US citizens. I mean, you don’t even have to be good at this. You can go to Wikipedia and type in something about US government experiments on its people, something like that, and you’ll pull up a Wikipedia page that will just blow you out of the water.
[00:43:39] Ashley James: Yeah, there’s video footage.
[00:43:41] Dr. Richard Fleming: From [inaudible 00:43:40] experiment to syphilis to radiation exposure on US military personnel—you name it. We’re not living with a bunch of nice folks. If you look at the last 20 to 30 years, you’ll see that the US government has conducted gain-of-function research, and it has paid Peter Daszak of EcoHealth over $61 million, $39 million of which came from the Department of Defense and they provided an advisor, David Franz, who was a former Deputy Commander of Fort Detrick, our bioweapons Center for the US military in the United States. Provided that to Peter Daszak who then provided funds to Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And you don’t have to be really good at this, I don’t think.
I mean, I’ve got a ton of grant data, I’ve got a ton of published papers that showed who paid for the results. There are patents out there that show that Daszak patented for gene manipulation, including humans and viruses and bacteria. The US government gets patent kickbacks on not only that one, but specifically the patent for investigating chimeric, which is the scientific term for gain-of-function, spike proteins on coronaviruses.
So what Anthony Fauci did earlier in the week or during this last week when Senator Dr. Rand Paul asked him about gain-of-function research coming out of NIH and NIAID to Daszak and the others on coronavirus. When Fauci danced around that as he did and said the US government has not funded gain-of-function research, they’ve got a bloody patent that they’re getting the rights and monies for that very type of research. The paper trail of publications and money trail shows that Fauci committed perjury.
[00:45:52] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.
[00:45:55] Dr. Richard Fleming: I mean, Fauci, remember, was pushing the vaccines and he is connected with Pfizer and Moderna.
[00:46:02] Ashley James: Yes. And connected with the Wuhan lab that created the virus, the study.
[00:46:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah. Not only that, but if you go and you look, you will see that Fauci, Gates, Helmsley, and Epstein are all tied together behind the scenes. Epstein not so much anymore because he’s dead, which is what happens to you—speculative on my part, it is my opinion, not a known fact—if you displease powers that be, bad things happen to people, even if they’re powerful people.
[00:46:40] Ashley James: And it definitely sends a message to everyone else step in line.
[00:46:43] Dr. Richard Fleming: It definitely does. I mean, one of the things that I’ve commented to people is—and some people don’t like me to get this off track—I’m Viking ancestry. I frequently tell people that my ancestors had a good way of cutting down recidivism. They just simply cut the heads off their enemies and it sends a very powerful message. I’m pretty sure that my ancestors aren’t the only ones that learned that message. People end up dead, people end up missing. I know more than enough examples of it.
[00:47:20] Ashley James: There’s a lot of holistic doctors, a lot of doctors that have been speaking out, such as yourself, who suddenly passed away even though they were super healthy. It does leave us suspicious. I pray that you are safe. You’ve moved to Texas. We joked about how you moved to Texas, everyone has a gun—you don’t—but everyone has a gun, they’re going to protect you.
You mentioned that 99.8% of people survived. Is that out of the 1,800 people in your initial study, or was that the hospitalized 501?
[00:47:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: It was the whole 1,800. All three people were on a ventilator, one died at three days, one died at four days, and one died at five days.
[00:48:04] Ashley James: Still, to work with people around the world, 1,800 of them who all tested positive, 501 ended up in the hospital, which you have to be pretty sick to end up in the hospital. I know because a few days after I gave birth, many listeners (some don’t), some might be first time listeners.
On April 13th of this year, I gave birth to our daughter who passed away. So I was struck with intense grief, which put my blood pressure through the roof. Normally my blood pressure is actually slightly low, in the healthy low range. And then I think I might have gotten it from one of the paramedics because there were 13 paramedics in our bedroom because we did a home birth.
Just so you know, it’s something that wouldn’t have been prevented if I had gone into the hospital. She died right as she was born. It’s not anything we could have prevented if I was in a hospital either way and there was no detection that we would have known in advance. That’s the thing I struggle with. I couldn’t have prevented it, and it’s really God’s will. That’s what I have to be with.
There are these times when we can take charge of our health, which is what we’re learning today and all our interviews, and then there are times when we have no control. And that’s when we have to just step back and realize that, yes, our life is in God’s hands. We do everything we can to be healthy, and the outcome sometimes is just not in our control at all.
But a few days later I developed COVID, and everyone who was part of the birth, actually most of them who were part of the birth also developed COVID. My son, zero symptoms. I mean, he’s six, he’s healthy. My husband had a stuffy nose. He mowed the lawn for four hours while in the height of having COVID. He’s like, yeah, I kind of have a runny nose. That was his sickest, but I was bedridden.
I was on all the homeopathy and I was on all the supplements, everything I could possibly get my hands on. And it all kind of helped, and then on day eight, which I heard is the day that a lot of people kind of tank, my blood pressure went down. It was like 96/46 or something. I was practically fainting. My blood pressure just all of a sudden tanked. My O2 was down to 93 and I was having problems breathing all of a sudden. The concern was that I developed a clot from pregnancy, which is possible.
It’s like okay, we should definitely get checked out. I went to the hospital to get checked out to make sure that I didn’t have a blood clot from pregnancy because I had just given birth. I got a CT scan for the first time in my life and that was an adventure. You know what was funny, the entire time I was telling the tech about you and your research. I was like, oh, the isotopes. A layperson trying to explain your Ph.D. research to him and he’s like, okay. I’m like, no, it’s so cool, you got to check it out. So I told him to look at your videos.
But anyway, luckily I didn’t have a blood clot. The doctor comes in and he has a very concerned look on his face. Now my oxygen came back up to 95, so I was doing okay. My lungs were kind of sore, it was a little bit hard to breathe, but I had stabilized basically. He said, well, I really want to put you on this experimental drug. It’s not approved by the FDA and he doesn’t know if it’s going to be paid for by my insurance. I’m not going to get a $20,000 bill. I can’t even pronounce it casirivimab and imdevimab.
[00:51:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right, so two antibodies.
[00:51:58] Ashley James: Okay. They wanted to give me that. And so I said, can I please have the paperwork? He prints me out this nice little sales form and I’m looking at it like, well, there’s no statistics on here. So I went to the website, I looked, and I read the studies. They studied two groups of people that were hospitalized, one was 200 and something then the other was 200 something. The ones that were hospitalized and didn’t receive the treatment, 10% of them died. The ones that did receive the treatment, 11% of them died. I’m like, 1% more. I could die. I could have a 1% more chance of dying if I do this.
I look through it and I’m like, you know what, just send me home with an inhaler. I’m going to take my chances. I’m not a guinea pig. I don’t believe in enrolling myself at any—
[00:52:50] Dr. Richard Fleming: Experimental research.
[00:52:51] Ashley James: Experiments, thank you. I’m not a guinea pig. He was really concerned. He’s like, you really need this. We’ve seen this work really well. I felt like he was selling me on it, and I’m like, okay, you know what, I’m going to come back if I get worse, but I really feel like I’m stabilized now. And I didn’t have a fever the whole time, I didn’t have a headache. It was all just breathing stuff. And now that I know I didn’t have a blood clot, I could go home and continue taking all my supplements, just resting, and the inhaler, the albuterol helped tremendously.
I also got on glutathione and almost immediately got better, which is really interesting considering, you see that inflammation absolutely plays a role in the outcomes that people have.
So I get home and then the next day, I get a phone call from the hospital. The pharmacist is trying to sell me on coming back to get the medicine. I’m sitting up on the couch sorting clothes and doing laundry. I’m like, I’m fine. I feel great. I just needed that little help with the inhaler to get me through the tough breathing. I was already on my way back mending, and they’re trying to get me back to get in the study to be part of the experiment. I mean, that they’re trying to sell me on it is pretty interesting.
We, of course, quarantined the whole time, we were at home. But just to see how the medical system and how they were really excited to get me in this experimental thing, right? It’s like, no, thank you. And I got better. It’s interesting. Our son got completely exposed, no symptoms. There are a few people that were in our inner circle during that time that also had no symptoms, so their body must have mounted a response without having to have COVID-19. They were exposed to it but didn’t have to have it.
My husband had minor, minor symptoms. I had more major ones, and the doctor said to me in the ER, you’re not sick enough for me to admit you, but you’re not healthy enough for me to not be worried about you. You should really get on this drug I’m trying to sell you. It’s interesting. Now, I’m very curious, and I’m sure all the listeners are curious. What was the most effective treatment that you guys figured out?
[00:55:18] Dr. Richard Fleming: For outpatient or inpatient?
[00:55:21] Ashley James: Oh, let’s talk about both.
[00:55:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: The combination that we saw for outpatients that were most successful was a combination of primaquine, clindamycin, and hydroxychloroquine. And the reason for that is that you have to look at what the drugs actually do. So, SARS-CoV-2 everybody I think has heard the term ACE2 receptor. If you’ve heard of a site on the cell that the spike protein attaches to, it’s typically the ACE2, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor that we talk about. Although, there are actually four receptors on the cell.
So the first one is ACE2. The second one involved is something called TMPRSS2 or transmembrane serine protease 2. The third one is called a furin cleavage site. And the fourth one is called neuropilin-1. So, the second one TMPRSS2 explains why black people tend to get more infected with SARS than white people because their nose and upper respiratory system have more TMPRSS2 receptors, than do Asians, Latinos, or Caucasians. So they’re more prone to the virus.
And it turns out that when I did my research to look at that upfront, that clindamycin which is an antibiotic works because it interferes with the TMPRSS2 receptor, and it interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself called the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which is the enzymes involved in ribosomes that take the RNA and translate it to protein. For example, the spike protein. And that turned out to be correct. Obviously, I didn’t know it before we started it, but it turned out to be correct.
Then primaquine is an aminoquinoline like hydroxychloroquine but it’s a one-time dose. And, it has a longer-term effect and so it interferes with the binding of the virus to the ACE2 receptor and also interferes with the virus being able to replicate itself. And then hydroxychloroquine does a number of things that interfere with the attachment of the spike protein to the ACE receptor. It decreases an inflammatory process through inhibition of what’s called a toll 7 receptor. It interferes with clotting by interfering with what’s called glycoprotein IIb/IIIa, all of this was back in the original theory in 1994. It slightly increases the pH of something called cytosol, which is where the virus finds itself once it gets inside your cells.
The first thing the virus has to do is get the envelope off to release its genetic material onto our cells. And it turns out that hydroxychloroquine, by slightly increasing that pH—and we’re not talking about anything that you would significantly know, I mean, this is minuscule—it interferes with the ability of the envelope to come off. It opens up a passageway, which is called an ionophore because it’s an ion that passes through. So the ion is zinc, so it opens up the passageway for zinc to come from outside the cell to inside this cell, which interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself again to RdRp, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase.
It also decreases some of the other cytokines or chemicals released by cells to cause tissue damage. So, that’s how it works. It’s not because it’s an anti-malarial because it’s a drug that works by these mechanisms independent of what we call it. So those three together had that effect.
It turned out that for individuals that actually develop full-blown COVID, the best combinations turned out to be three. Two of them included patients who had received an aminoquinoline like primaquine or hydroxychloroquine as outpatients and then got admitted. And if they have that, then two drugs, one called interferon alfa-2b, which interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself again. And another one is called tocilizumab. It’s an interleukin-6 inhibitor, which is a prothrombotic scenario. So again decreasing the ability of the virus to attach to replicate itself and to cut down on the inflammation and subsequently blood clotting. So there was that.
Another combination if they’d gotten an outpatient aminoquinoline like primaquine, hydroxychloroquine, or the combination was to put them on methylprednisolone, which has that same effect on decreasing inflammation and blood clotting. And then the third group were those people who hadn’t received an aminoquinoline as outpatients, and what proved to be successful was the combination of primaquine and clindamycin. And then the same two drugs tocilizumab and interferon alfa-2b. Those were extremely successful. It doesn’t mean that other treatments don’t work, but I did not include them in the protocol to be randomized too.
There was one drug that we were going to use that we elected, the IRB that initially set this up, we decided to avoid it because there were questions about it way back when. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do or not, but we elected not to keep it in the study, so it was deleted between the time that we set it up and the time we actually implemented it.
And then we’re going to look at taking the same approach with mechanisms of action and looking at how vaccines actually work. I’ve assembled based upon the best science that we have more than likely drugs that we think will be beneficial, and we’ll release that. Obviously not prescribing to anybody or telling you to do it. That’s up to you. It’s a semi-free society, emphasis on the semi. So that people can download the material, take it to the doctor, and talk to their doctor. They and their doctor can decide, presuming they’re allowed to anymore. But somewhere somehow, people will be able to take a look at this, investigate it, and see if it doesn’t help.
[01:02:35] Ashley James: If your doctor is not willing to look at the studies that you bring to them, you have to fire them and get a better doctor. You want one that is willing to keep their mind open enough to look at new research.
[01:02:51] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Well, the problem is that there’s so much interference to the practice of medicine that shouldn’t be there. That some of these poor doctors are just simply scared. The question is, what are you scared of? Are you scared of losing your job? Because I know a lot of them are. Are you scared of losing your medical license? I know a lot of them are. Are you scared of losing the life of your patient? You have to balance that in there, and I’m not telling anybody I have the answer for you because I’ve certainly run my role with the Federal government and got taken to task for it, but I would do it again because it was the right thing.
You just have to decide whether you want to practice medicine under heir Hitler and the regime of Nazi Germany and fascism, or whether you want to allow physicians to practice medicine the way that they think. Because if you look at the Constitution of the United States, I have a law degree also and I thoroughly read the Constitution of the United States. I will assure you that I’ve seen nothing in the US Constitution that authorizes the Federal government to determine what healthcare is. It doesn’t mean that they don’t think that they have the right to do it, I’m just telling you that I don’t see anything in the US Constitution either in Article One, Article Two, and clearly not in Article Three because the courts don’t run medicine, although they might think they do. Nothing that gives the Federal government authority to run medicine.
So I’m not sure why we go to medical school and actually get an MD, DO, or whatever people get to practice medicine if they’re not going to be allowed to practice medicine.
[01:04:41] Ashley James: Yeah, this is scary.
[01:04:45] Dr. Richard Fleming: You don’t call up a three-letter Federal agency when you’re sick, do you? I mean, when was the last time you felt sick and you called up NIH, CDC, or any of the others?
[01:05:00] Ashley James: I love that you talk about hydroxychloroquine, and this is something that a lot of people don’t know. What they know is what they’ve been told. What they’ve been told by the media is hydroxychloroquine, and this was right around when Trump was saying—if you remember the last year, I know some people have PTSD and don’t like to remember 2020. But when you think back, I mean really, it’s a big fuzzy blur to me, right?
But when you think back to early 2020, it was right after my birthday, March, 8, the restaurants here closed and the bars closed. They said we need two weeks. We’re going to shut down for two weeks. Governor Inslee, we’ll reopen at the end of March, beginning of April. And then April 1 came.
[01:05:51] Dr. Richard Fleming: They didn’t say what year though, did they?
[01:05:53] Ashley James: Oh, shoot. You got me there. Oh my gosh. And then it was, okay, it’s going to be May, and then, okay, it’s going to be August. I just got angrier and angrier as I saw what was going on. The manipulation and taking away our freedoms. Was it North Dakota or South Dakota, I’m sort of having a brain fart right now, but it was one of those states sort of in the middle there, to the north, where the governor said, I’m not shutting down anything. I’m not going to affect any business. If you want to wear a mask, you wear a mask. If you don’t, you don’t. If you want to stay open, stay open. Let the people decide, but the government is not going to interfere with your businesses.
Fauci said, your hospitals will be overflowing and you’re going to kill people because of this. And she had one of the lowest rates and did not have her hospitals overflowing. People decided to wash their hands and take their own precautions, but they still went out, did stuff, went to restaurants, and lived their lives. Maybe they took a little bit more precautions, but that’s just showing that the shutdowns have not been working because there are states where they didn’t shut down and the numbers are either similar or lower.
I mean, it just boggles my mind. And the numbers, don’t get me started because it’s so easy to manipulate these things. Positive cases don’t mean hospitalization, although there’s a percentage that we can look at. But to say the cases are up doesn’t mean that the hospital stay is up. So you talk about hydroxychloroquine, and it was Trump early on.
[01:07:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Let me stop you for just a moment. I know you’re in a good role, but I want to point out something. Kary Mullis invented the PCR test, Polymerase Chain Reaction test, for the express purpose of finding genetic material. Now, Dr. Mullis, I think he got a Nobel Prize for this. The PCR test is an outstanding test, and for those of you who don’t think so, go read the patent. What you’ll see is that its expressed purpose was to simply find genetic codes.
Kary Mullis also said that if you look at his data on the patent—having a patent I’m particularly sensitive to this that you put down what needs to be known. You may not put down everything but you put down what needs to be known. Didn’t use more than 15 to 20 cycles to do it. And it was not a test for diagnosing disease. Now, around 2006 I think it was, his patent expired.
Right around that same time, the Federal government of the United States got a patent for PCR specifically related to viruses. So it’s interesting to note that with the Emergency Use Authorization, PCR tests were given an umbrella under the EUA by the Federal government who just happens to have a patent on PCR tests. I just think that’s fascinating. Mullis, fortunately for him, died in 2019 before this fiasco really took off.
Unfortunately, I see a lot of similarities in Mullis and myself in our perspectives on many of the people on the powers that be, which is I don’t think they’re smart enough to really understand it but they certainly know how to make money and manipulate the scenario. So, with that said, I just want to put that out there because I think it’s interesting for people to realize that the US Federal Government has a patent on PCR testing. Wow, you can use this for this virus. Okay, go ahead.
[01:10:19] Ashley James: When you hold the patent, you can profit from it.
[01:10:22] Dr. Richard Fleming: There you go, no conflict of interest there at all.
[01:10:28] Ashley James: I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, the cycles that were being used were really kind of oversensitive.
[01:10:38] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, they didn’t stop at 15 to 20 like Mullis said, did they?
[01:10:42] Ashley James: Yeah, and so we were getting false positives?
[01:10:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, here’s the thing. I wouldn’t call them false positives because they detected the genetic sequence, okay. But when the test is designed and the man says, look, at 20 cycles, you get everything you’re going to get that’s of value, then why do you go beyond that?
[01:11:10] Ashley James: Could they be picking up on a different coronavirus or something that’s not necessarily infecting them but just hanging out in their body because they already have an immune response to it?
[01:11:21] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I mean, anything’s possible if it has the same genetic sequence that you’re looking for, okay. An additional point is that it doesn’t define whether you’re going to get sick and need treatment, okay. It doesn’t define whether it’s a virus that’s from living tissue that was in the process of replicating or it’s been laying outside of a cell where it’s dead. It doesn’t give you any of that, which is what Mullis told people. It was to look for specific genetic sequences. It’s an outstanding test. It was used for something it was not designed for, and when his patent expired, the Federal government got up with a very specific twist on it to make money on it.
[01:12:13] Ashley James: It’s interesting. I also find the timing interesting that when the next administration after Trump came in, very soon after, they announced that they were lowering the testing into those ranges that were more accurate.
[01:12:35] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, a very interesting thing that you should notice when the current administration came into power, and I haven’t looked at this for a while, but the vaccine studies stopped recruiting on the National Clinical Trial website. They were actively recruiting patients before that, but on or around the 20th of January, Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen all stopped recruiting, Well, they didn’t need to because you’re either in the experimental group or the control group right now.
[01:13:04] Ashley James: Yeah, we’re all in the experiment. It’s kind of sick. A year ago when this was very new, we’re all just going what is going on? I did an interview with a Naturopath who’d come up with his supplement recommendations to support the body during this time, help the immune system—zinc, vitamin D, the things that we know work. And then also the things that he’d seen were helpful if someone had it.
Interesting that the FDA is really going after NAC right now when NAC is such a powerful, it helps our body with the antioxidant effect, especially in the lungs. It’s a decongestant. There are so many ways the body uses NAC in a very supportive manner and people have been using it preventatively and also when they have COVID. And then now, it’s being threatened to be taken off the market. Not because it hurts people, but because they’re saying, well, we studied this originally as a drug. It’s an amino acid, leave it alone. You can’t patent this, stop it.
Back when we’re all looking around I had that interview and I said to the doctor, I said, years from now, if we ever get to look at the true numbers, if they ever actually have real numbers, years from now, we’re going to study 2020 (now 2021) as the world’s biggest experiment on its people. This is how I felt then and I definitely feel that way now a year later. We have to know more and more information. We have to be tapped in. We can’t just blindly listen to the mainstream media.
Example being, early on when Trump said—coming back to the story—he said, oh, promising information is coming out about using hydroxychloroquine, and all of a sudden the media starts attacking him and attacking what he said. Oh, he’s telling us that we’re going to inject bleach into our bodies or whatever. Oh my gosh, it’s just ridiculous. He was sort of using the layman’s terms of trying to describe some things that he was told work.
He’s just trying to encourage people. Hey, there’s some interesting stuff out there that has some good information. Stay positive, stay safe. And the media went nuts and said he’s trying to kill us all. He’s telling us hydroxychloroquine is going to help us, and then also the study comes out.
Maybe you can fill in the gaps because you know more about this than I do, but when a study came out there’s like 90,000 participants and they said that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work. The media latched on to that and said, Trump’s a loser. He’s telling us a bunch of stuff that’s going to kill us. Don’t listen to him, or whatever they were saying. I just thought this was really interesting. Why is the mainstream media so angry about this drug and this treatment? They’re not doctors. Who are they, right? And then it turns out that a prominent study was completely made up. Maybe you could fill in the gaps of that.
[01:16:47] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s gone on both sides of that so you can’t take much. You have to take it all with a grain of salt because there’s been so much manipulation of the scientific literature, particularly in the last decade or so. I actually resigned from The Lancet and from the British Medical Journal Open Quality journal due to my concerns about the ethics of what’s being published.
So, with all the politics going on and some of it is related to the fact that the Chinese have gotten so many grants from the United States, and some of that money has been invested into actually buying control of the journals, it’s very hard to know what’s—
[01:17:33] Ashley James: What?
[01:17:34] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, you got it. You heard it right. What’s really valid and what’s not. As a researcher, I get a chuckle out of people who criticize individuals publishing in journals that aren’t at the top journals. I mean, I just resigned from two of them because of my concerns about it. When Watson and Crick first published their paper on DNA, they published it in a then relatively unknown journal called the Journal of the American Medical Association. But when Watson and Crick published their little one-column piece, JAMA was not well known. So this is not how you figure out what’s valid and what’s not. The scientific method is what determines that by reproducibility.
So, taking that in mind, let’s address a very specific issue about hydroxychloroquine. Hydroxychloroquine is supposedly a big no, no. Let me back it up. For SARS-CoV-1, Anthony Fauci thought that hydroxychloroquine was a great drug, so I’m not certain what happened between his go-go for that versus it doesn’t work. Oh, wait a minute, there’s that conflict of interest about him being connected with Pfizer and Moderna. Never mind that comment then.
The scenario of hydroxychloroquine is that it will stretch out part of your heart rhythm, the cell’s activity that is called the corrected QT complex. Q and T are areas that we measure on the electrocardiograms. When it gets too long, you get a bad rhythm. If it gets too short, you get a bad rhythm. We have this kind of nice, in-between zone. So, the argument is that hydroxychloroquine will prolong your QT and develop a heart rhythm that could kill. That’s possible, but so do a lot of other drugs that people take every day that nobody seems to stress out about. Here’s the killer in the argument. The rhythms that they’re worried about from prolonged QT are polymorphic ventricular tachy dysrhythmia and torsades de pointes. That’s me as the cardiologist now speaking.
There’s not a single published case since SARS-CoV-2 hit in 2019 that anybody has published in any medical journal anywhere that I’m aware of, since I keep saying it this way in interviews and nobody is correcting me, I’m presuming nobody else has found one either. Not a single published case report of a single person having either one of these two rhythm problems as a result of taking hydroxychloroquine. So, for millions of people around the world, and I don’t know how many people actually have taken hydroxychloroquine, not a single case example of what causes seizure activity in Anthony Fauci’s brain or somebody else’s brain.
[01:20:37] Ashley James: Some people take it prophylactically because they’re in areas with malaria. This is a very well-studied drug, very well-studied.
[01:20:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Look, every drug has side effects. The question is, if you have a drug that has a side effect and it’s the drug that’s going to treat something that could kill you, you might want to look at that in that light.
[01:21:08] Ashley James: Right, absolutely.
[01:21:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Disease that might kill the patient, no, we won’t treat them because this drug might produce your heart rhythm that we’d have to actually do something about. FYI, we included that in the trial protocol too where calcium is one of the things that you use. We made available a drug called esmolol whose side effect is it shortens the QT interval. It’s not like they were going to get hydroxychloroquine for the rest of their life. They were in a hospital with COVID-19 and their QT interval was being monitored because the cardiologist was a member of the team in each one of these places.
That if a decision needed to be made that whoops, look at that QT interval—and by the way, we did collect all that data and it didn’t result in anybody having to stop the drug—you could start IV esmolol, intravenous esmolol, IV in the vein and give them a drug for the period of time they’re getting hydroxychloroquine. They weren’t going to be discharged on it, they weren’t going to be discharged with an IV. If the worst amount of time you have to do is treat for 7 to 10 days, that’s not the end of the world, particularly if it’s saved somebody’s life.
The irony here is that I’ve seen patients that come in with 20 or 30 drugs and half the drugs are to treat side effects from the first set of drugs. It’s like, okay, this is too much chaos going in for my little brain to handle. Maybe we should simplify the regimen. Anyway, I think that the hydroxychloroquine and the nonsense related it to death, even if it could cause the death of anybody.
[01:22:54] Ashley James: Well, thank you for the clarification. So what we have to understand is if you think hydroxychloroquine isn’t effective to help people with COVID-19, it’s because of what you’ve been told. If it’s because of what you’ve been told in the media in the last year, understand that they’re going off of a fake study, of a study that was completely—
[01:23:21] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, it was made up. You’d have to check the motives of those people. But here’s the other thing. Hydroxychloroquine is an FDA-approved drug. Physicians use drugs for what’s called off-label purpose. In other words, a drug approved for one thing and then used for something else. All right. There’s a drug called Procardia or nifedipine. Nifedipine is the drug name, Procardia is the trade name. It came in an orange capsule and it was useful for blood pressure, for chest pain, for angina from the heart, but it frequently dropped the blood pressure too fast, and so it wasn’t the favorite drug for a lot of people.
But here’s the thing, if somebody came in with really high blood pressure, you could either run down the hall and start an IV and run nitroprusside, nitroglycerin, or a variety of medications into them, which you usually required putting them in the intensive care unit. Or you could go and get a Procardia capsule that was an orange capsule and stick a needle into it, squeeze it, and the fluid that Procardia would come out of the hole. Have the patient tilt their head back, lift their tongue up, and squeeze that under their tongue, and you could watch their blood pressure just nicely come down so they didn’t have a stroke, a hemorrhagic bleeding stroke.
Now, since I’m sure the FDA is listening to this, let me assure them and the rest of your listeners that we use that, I use that frequently. It was an off-label use. Completely legal because the drug was FDA-approved and physicians get to practice medicine how they want. So, when a drug is approved for one thing, if a physician believes and their patient is willing—I think that’s called informed consent, not that we’re doing that for vaccines—then you can actually use that medication for the patient for some other purpose.
Classic example minoxidil. Minoxidil is a fairly aggressive drug for lowering blood pressure, which you really should have a cardiologist watching you and monitoring your heart to make sure you don’t have what’s called pericarditis as a result—irritation of the lining around the heart because it’s been known to happen. But a side effect was women grew mustaches. Now, what do they use minoxidil for? Put it on the scalp of men’s heads so they grow hair. Not what it was really FDA-designed for or approved for.
Just because big pharma doesn’t want to go back for every indication doesn’t mean that a drug can’t be used for something else. Patients used to come into me with their medicines and I would say, well, what are you taking this for? They would say, well, you’re the doctor, don’t you know? I would look at them go, well, I do, but there’s more than one thing you can use this medicine for. I thought maybe you, since you’re taking the medicine, might have a clue why the doctor told you. No, no clue. That’s right because too many people get prescribed medicines without a thorough understanding of why they’re taking them, and too many people take medicines without a thorough understanding of why they’re taking them.
[01:26:42] Ashley James: Right. The state of our healthcare is very sad. Off-label use is common, it’s done all the time.
[01:26:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, so what the heck is the FDA and all the other agencies getting involved with this for? And threatening doctors to take away their licenses if they use it and threatening pharmacies and then pharmacists won’t fill prescriptions. I’m sorry, pharmacists, you’re not practicing medicine, you’re practicing pharmacy. Your job is to dispense these medications. It’s not for you to be second-guessing physicians for how they’re treating them. And when pharmacists got to the place where they would say, well, I can fill this prescription for hydroxychloroquine but I need to know why you’re prescribing it. No you don’t, it’s a violation of HIPAA. You’re not the patient’s doctor.
[01:27:37] Ashley James: So when we look at it from this perspective, the conclusion we kind of tend to jump to is the government and the media and other bodies are trying to prevent people from acquiring a treatment that is effective, and then telling them what they should do is, stay in your home, wear a mask, don’t go to restaurants. We’re taking your freedoms away. You have to get a vaccine that, by the way, I don’t even want to call it that because it is not yet. It’s an experiment, it is a trial that you are entering into. This blows my mind. This has not been studied enough to know that it’s safe. The FDA hasn’t approved it, right?
State governments are all saying their own different things, but they’re kind of threatening that your freedoms will not be given back to you unless you enter into this experiment. And then you had mentioned, we’re not really practicing true informed consent when it comes to vaccines.
[01:29:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, so people don’t really know what the side effects are and the consequences are. Let’s run through Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen vaccines as approved under EUA authorization, not FDA approval. Let’s look at what these Emergency Use Authorization documents actually tell us because I think we’ve got enough data.
If we read through the emergency use authorization documents, what you hear from everybody is vaccine efficacy, vaccine efficacy. Most people don’t know how vaccine efficacy is determined, so here’s how it’s determined. It’s 1 minus what’s called the risk ratio. Well, what’s the risk ratio? Well, the risk ratio is, how many people got diagnosed with COVID who got vaccinated, divided by the number of people who got COVID who didn’t get vaccinated. One minus that times 100 for percent tells you the vaccine efficacy.
You don’t take a drug based upon how often it fails. You take a drug based upon how often it works. If I were to come up to you and say, Ashley, I want you to take this pill to prevent diabetes. Now, it doesn’t work any better than not taking anything, but I want you to take it, would you take it?
[01:30:41] Ashley James: No.
[01:30:44] Dr. Richard Fleming: Okay, good. I actually had one guy once say yes because it’s you, Dr. Fleming. Okay, I missed my point on that one. The point was that he trusted me so he presumed that it wouldn’t do what’s been done.
[01:31:02] Ashley James: That’s a good point though. Just like we trust our mechanic. The mechanic says I have to replace the thingamabob. We’re like, do it.
[01:31:09] Dr. Richard Fleming: Which you should be able to trust your doctor. And I’m going to stand my ground on that one. I’m an MD, I believe you should be able to trust your doctor. I’m not accountable for everybody. But I do believe you should be able to trust your doctor.
[01:31:26] Ashley James: But it’s up to us to pick the right doctor that we trust.
[01:31:29] Dr. Richard Fleming: So let’s look at the emergency use authorization documents and ask the intelligent question. How often will we not get diagnosed with COVID, right? That’s the point. Because the reason why people think they’re getting vaccinated is so they don’t come down with COVID or don’t die. And it’s not that they think they won’t come down with COVID, it’s that they think they won’t get infected. Well, here’s a point, vaccines do not prevent you from getting infected or transmitting the infection. Vaccines expose you to something that you’re likely to see with the infection so that it takes you less time to mount a response. Nothing in that says prevents infection or prevents transmission.
All right. Now, if we ask the question of Pfizer and we look at the numbers, and I don’t have them in front of me. You can go read the EUAs, go look at one of the lectures I’ve done or any of the number of things where I pull these out, or come to the June 5th presentation where we’re going to get them in even greater detail.
You look at the numbers, what you will discover is that seven days after Pfizer’s second injection—which is the day that they chose not me, their documents—and you ask that question, how many people did not get diagnosed with COVID who got vaccinated versus how many people who did? You do the statistical analysis—that’s the scientific method of looking at the numbers, not just going, wow, one more than the other. You actually have to look at how much more compared to how many people in the group, and is that statistically significant.
When you do that, you will find out that there’s no difference, statistically, in the number of people who were diagnosed with COVID, who got vaccinated or didn’t. If you do the same thing for Moderna, same results. If you do the same thing for Janssen at 14 days, a slight difference that is statistically significant at 14 days, but at 28 days, 2 weeks later, that difference is gone. No difference in the number of deaths.
So the EUA documents show that there is no statistical difference in you getting COVID or dying whether you get vaccinated or not. I think that’s the end of the conversation.
[01:34:00] Ashley James: It doesn’t stop you from getting it, it doesn’t stop you from transmitting it. It is maybe making it so that your body can mount a response against it faster.
[01:34:13] Dr. Richard Fleming: Although I would love to see the actual data for that because scientists like myself measure T cells, antibody responses, and titers and none of that data is in the EUA documents, and I have seen minimal, I mean miniscule information in the published scientific literature medical papers. In fact, nothing that actually gives the raw data numbers to look at to go, is this real, is this valid? Just percentages.
[01:34:41] Ashley James: Yeah. And then if we look at VAERS, we can see the injuries from it.
[01:34:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: VAERS is an interesting thing. Interesting information about VAERS is that if you look at this Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a lot of people are not turning in material because they have been told that, oh, that’s not the vaccine. A lot of doctors I’ve heard trying to enter data into it and it’s bouncing back, so they’re not actually getting it in there.
Back in the mid-1970s, there was something called swine flu. I was an orderly working in the hospital, taking care of several of these patients who had been vaccinated for swine flu and had something called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a neurologic abnormality that affected their ability to walk, talk, eat, drink, and even breathe.
We lost in the United States right around 25 people from the swine flu vaccine, and they pulled it off the market. We’ve lost how many thousands of people now following these SARS vaccines? It’s over 3,000, I’m not sure if it’s over 4,000. I’d have to look at any given day. I’ve kind of given up watching because the death rates, just if you track bars over the decades, you’ll see it’s relatively flat and then just taste this spike in 2021. Are you with me?
Why in the 1970s did 25 deaths get the attention of people? And today in 2021 with more deaths than were killed in the Twin Tower attacks, we’re still oblivious to saying, wait a minute, we’re using something that is associated with deaths, it’s associated with inflammation and blood clots. And FYI, that stuff’s in the EUA documents. Janssen, Pfizer, Moderna put this stuff in the EUA documents, these side effects, which raises a point I want to make on safety and efficacy.
I want to encourage people to quit saying safety and efficacy. I would like to encourage people to start saying efficacy and safety. Because if it’s not effective, it doesn’t matter whether it’s safe or not, you wouldn’t take it. And the first thing you do in clinical trials, which by the way weren’t done, is to determine if it’s effective. What dose is effective, and then you spread it out beyond phase one.
We took the development of a vaccine from a 3- to a 10-year process—it’s typically 10, but we’ve done it in 3—to a less than 10 months process for all 3 of these. In fact, Janssen started the later phase, phase three, before it started 2A, And it goes phase 1, phase 2, phase 3. And so they started the last phase before they started the second phase. My little scientific brain has challenges with that because that’s not how it’s done. But that’s how it was done. It doesn’t matter how the scientific method is supposed to work. What we did is we took an infection that was man-made, we quarantine the healthy, we pan cultured everybody using a test that its inventor said not to use for that purpose, and then we shoveled money into vaccines that we now know don’t statistically change whether you’re going to get COVID or die.
[01:38:53] Ashley James: But they’re still pushing them and they’re opening up younger and younger ages for part of the trial. This is a trial, this is an experiment. The entire population is being pushed to enter a drug experiment.
[01:39:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Mom and dad, if you’re doing this with your kids, I would never experiment on my kids.
[01:39:20] Ashley James: Thank you. It’s scary.
[01:39:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: Somebody asked me sometime within the last week or so what I thought about it, and anybody who’s listened to me knows that my answers are never really short. I might give you an answer but then I will explain it because I think you’re due that. It’s not because I want to hear myself talk. If you ask me a question, I believe it’s my responsibility not only to give you that answer so that you’re getting an answer as opposed to listening to the explanation, and you’re going, is there an answer in here? So I give you the answer and then I explain it to you so that you know it.
Somebody asked me the other day about what I thought about vaccinating children 12 to 18, and I said I’m going to deviate just a little bit. It’s stupid, and then I explained it. If you don’t care about other people, at least care about your children. I understand everybody’s scared. One of the things I emphasize is that people recognize, everybody recognizes that most people are scared. And if you see people that are sheltering in place and are masked up—I mean, I approached a woman at the store yesterday and I thought she was going to jump through the flowers. I mean, she worked behind the flower ornaments at the store, and I simply wanted to ask if they had something in the store. She almost jumped over the counter to get away from me. It’s like, ma’am, okay, got it. You’re scared, I got it.
[01:41:09] Ashley James: This is right back to what you said—I can’t remember the Nazi General, I can’t remember his name.
[01:41:16] Dr. Richard Fleming: Göring.
[01:41:17] Ashley James: During the trials he said, if you put a population in fear, they will lap up whatever it is that is the solution. Whatever that solution you bring they’re just going to eat it right up because you put them in a place of fear. They’re fearing for their life. Same with 9/11. 9/11 was a great example of taking away freedoms because we’re like here, take them, take them. Take all our freedoms. Wiretap us, we don’t care. Surveil us. Take all of our freedoms away, we don’t care. We want to be safe. We want to feel safe.
[01:41:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: The Founding Fathers frequently said, people who will sacrifice freedoms for security will have neither. US Military Army Reed Hospital was very much involved in some of the early research and control of human beings in the 1940s. And for your listeners, I have most of my master’s studies in psychology, experimental not clinical. Which means I’m a researcher and don’t want to sit down and listen to you tell me your problems.
The data was very clear, if you take somebody, people, and you tell them there’s a problem that is threatening them. And then you say, but if you do this, you will be safe, and we can measure this so we can tell you if you’re doing it right, and gives you positive reinforcement. That is an extremely effective way of getting people to do whatever you want them to do. If you think that the military does this stuff and then doesn’t apply it, again, the DOD does not work with the Girl Scouts. They’re not selling your cookies.
[01:43:10] Ashley James: Is it true that when you get the vaccine you sign something that says that the DOD is tracking you for the next two years?
[01:43:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: I don’t know because I’m not getting the vaccine so I haven’t seen what they’ve had people sign.
[01:43:25] Ashley James: I listened to a lecture a doctor gave who explained that you are entering into an experiment, but you’re also entering into an experiment that the DOD is watching you.
[01:43:34] Dr. Richard Fleming: Hey, I would love to have that paper. I’d love to see that document. Whoever you did that wants to get that to you and then to me, I would love to have it.
[01:43:42] Ashley James: I will see what I can do, absolutely. I mean, I understand people are entering into experiments, but the DOD is involved in monitoring the results of it?
[01:43:52] Dr. Richard Fleming: The DOD paid $39 million of the $61 million that went to Peter Daszak. And they provided him with a policy advisor.
[01:44:02] Ashley James: You know, always follow the money. Follow the money. That if you ever want to be a researcher and you want to think for yourself and not just believe what you’ve been told, follow the money. Money doesn’t lie. The money trails don’t lie.
So there’s a lot of confusion out there. I’m in a bunch of Facebook groups because I’m interested, and you know what, there’s so much misinformation. When we start talking about conspiracies, again, I’m not talking about conspiracy theory, I’m talking about conspiracy factor. It’s a felony or it’s a group of people who are conspiring to do harm, to do something nefarious and not good. We look to see them. We see there’s a conspiracy over here. An example is governments experimenting on their people, this is documented, many governments including our own.
I love the United States. I love this country. I’m incredibly patriotic. I’m originally Canadian. I love living here. I want to live here forever. I look at that American flag and I actually get emotional because of what it represents, because I love the Constitution. I love the Founding Fathers and how they broke away. If you really study the history, I’m from a country that still worships the queen. So to come here, it’s like this is the country that broke away from or tried to break away from that and create something that gave more freedoms to its people. And I believe that we all deserve, that is our right to have freedom as long as we’re not hurting someone else, right? Just like New Hampshire, New Hampshire Live Free or Die, that is what I believe in.
[01:45:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Iowa is where I’m from originally, and the banner there is Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.
[01:45:55] Ashley James: Right. And each state you find this theme especially in pockets of areas. Certain states are more forward like having an actual motto, but this is what I love about this country. But we have to always protect our rights. We cannot just assume that they’re just given to us. We have to constantly protect them. So anyway, lots of misinformation out there. I’m the most open-minded skeptic. I’m going to listen to information, but then I’m going to use my critical thinking, which we were not taught to critical think. That’s actually something as adults we really should learn how to critically think.
It was systematically taken out of the education system when they introduced the Prussian education system. You can study or read John Taylor Gatto’s books, he talks about that and he has lectures on YouTube. He has since passed away, but he has some amazing eight-hour lectures on YouTube and interviews about how they have designed the education system to make good little factory workers or make good little students that think the way they want them to think and not teaching us critical thinking. We have to learn it ourselves. And I know I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here.
But what I see in Facebook and these communities is they’re talking about that there’s a fear that if you don’t have the vaccine and you’re in close contact with people that do, that you could also be affected. For example, some polio vaccines shed, and I understand that this isn’t a live virus vaccine, but that there’s concern that people can get even sick or harmed that are not vaccinated from being in close contact with those who have. Is there anything in your research, is that completely phooey or is there some basis to that?
[01:48:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, to begin with, my first statement is we don’t have any scientific evidence one way or the other, which is something that raises enough questions that we should be trying to figure out if there’s something going on. I will tell you that back in March of this year when I was giving some lectures here, I was trying to emphasize that I didn’t think that these vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, or Janssen—merely contain the genetic information for the spike protein. It was my opinion then and it’s my opinion now that there’s insufficient information in just that segment for that structural protein, the spike protein, to get that much of a response.
So my proposal was that there is probably something more in these vaccines that enhances that. Now, there is something called transmissible vaccines and something called SAM or self-amplifying mRNA vaccines, hence, SAM. What SAM is, is it has not only the mRNA for what you want built like the spike protein called the structural antigen. But it also contains the earlier part of the genetic sequence that makes an enzyme called replicase to replicate.
Combined together, they produce a substantially larger amount of the spike protein to get an immunologic response. One of the interesting things about getting SARS-CoV-2 person-to-person is that you’ll get,I don’t know how many viruses for a viral load, but it’s not billions. So every one of those viruses gets into your sinuses and potentially the rest of your body and attaches to an ACE2 receptor and starts that sequence I talked about, and it has to have that sequence and it downloads its genetic mRNA.
The lipid nanoparticle vaccines Pfizer and Moderna carry 13.1 billion mRNAs, and the Janssen double-stranded DNA carries 50 billion for every one of those inside an adenovirus that attaches. So we’re talking about billions versus thousands. And so what we’re seeing where people were dying with COVID-19 with comorbidities is we’re seeing a different group of people pop up with responses to the vaccines in a younger age group that are healthy, and that should be what we see with that type of phenomenon because if they’re healthy and they haven’t had a hyperinflammatory disease process going on, then you would expect them to mount a response to those billions of genetic sequences that they just injected into themselves.
Bearing in mind that this is a gain-of-function of spike protein so it’s manmade, so it’s a bioweapon. What they’re doing is injecting themselves with billions of genetic code sequences for a man-made bioweapon. Now, whether that is so amplifying the numbers that there’s spike protein that is shedding or something else is shedding, whether it’s that or if they’re doing transmissible vaccines where it’s already been done and studied were certain viruses you can vaccinate the animal and another animal will come up and touch it and be vaccinated by virtue of touching where the vaccine was injected. Their favorite animal they’ve done this and so far the most are bats.
They’ve also done some studies in rabies viruses and SARS-CoV-2, and a lot of other viruses where they’re looking at transmissible vaccines. And when you read the papers, they’ll tell you the virus and they’ll tell you the vector. Is it a virus, a lipid nanoparticle, or is it something else getting into this cell? And then they’ll tell you the animal—dog, mouse, human, cat. Did you notice what I mentioned there?
[01:52:35] Ashley James: Human.
[01:52:36] Dr. Richard Fleming: Because for rabies and SARS-CoV-2, the animal that’s listed is human. All the other viruses, they’ve got one of the other animals, but for rabies and SARS-CoV-2, the animal listed is human. Not rhesus monkeys, not humanized mice, not anything else—human. You’re the animal. And this research has been going on for two to three decades funded by our government and the groups of people—Helmsley, Gates, and the Epstein’s of the world for two to three decades. This did not just happen. This has been going on.
So, do we need data to really find out what’s going on, absolutely, we do? Can I tell you exactly what’s going on? No, I can’t. Can I tell you this two to three decades worth of work that’s been going on with this type of stuff? Yes, I can.
[01:53:46] Ashley James: Do you know what’s interesting is that the people who are not going to get the vaccine on Facebook and all these groups are afraid of the people who are getting the vaccine and are avoiding them. And the people who are getting the vaccine, there’s a lot of them who are like, I’m going to still wear my mask even though they told me I don’t have to, and I’m going to stay away from those non-vaxxers because they’re going to be contagious. It’s interesting what has been created is this environment of fear—fear your neighbor. We’re the 99%.
[01:54:18] Dr. Richard Fleming: Fear your neighbor, turn on your neighbor, tell on your neighbor.
[01:54:23] Ashley James: It’s very Orwellian. I love Orwell and his work. If you look at it, it’s very sci-fi. I’m a big sci-fi fan and this feels like we’re living in a sci-fi future, it’s very weird. That they’re creating this to fear each other instead of coming together. I mean, when we are divided fighting about political things of the past like abortion rights or race. It’s always been this black and white, let’s fight about two different opposing thoughts. The dichotomy, right? It’s a dilemma. When you have two choices it’s a dilemma, and as long as they keep us fighting—and that’s why I never understood the two-party system.
Being from Canada, there’s like 20 parties or something to choose from. There are three of them that are always sort of somewhat in power, but you have a choice. But here, you’re fighting over one thing or the other—less taxes, more taxes; bigger government, smaller government. And as long as they keep us fighting among ourselves, we won’t rise up together to make a change. We won’t look at what we all stand for.
Let’s say you’re one way, pro-vaccine, and I’m the other way, anti-vaccine, or whatever. Let’s say you’re pro-abortion, I’m anti-abortion, whatever it is. We’re on two opposing sides. But if we actually come up to the bigger picture, we both have the same goal. We both want health, right? We both want to protect people. We want freedom. When we look at the bigger picture, we all actually want the same thing. We have to come up and see, don’t let fear control us.
But it’s very interesting and I feel this has been created, this fear has been orchestrated to keep us from questioning, from thinking for ourselves because that’s what it looks like when you look at the environment the last year and all this craziness that goes on. And now that people are saying that they’re going to stay away from each other and they’re afraid of each other, even though those that are not getting the vaccine are afraid of all the other people. There’s so much fear keeping us silent and keeping us from learning or questioning. So we got to come out of fear.
So it’s interesting that there is a potential for someone who’s unvaccinated to be exposed to in close quarters to someone who’s been vaccinated. That there can be something that transmits. I saw some things printed out from one of the vaccines as part of their trials that talked about it, but I don’t know enough of the science to completely understand it.
[01:57:23] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’ve seen some of that too and I have responded to people by saying, well, it doesn’t really say this is happening, but it does raise a question in my mind scientifically as to why those statements were made.
[01:57:43] Ashley James: You and I could talk for hours, I realized we’ve been talking for quite a while. Seriously, this could be a 16-hour interview. I want to respect your time. I love learning from you, I hope the listeners do too. Actually, I know they will because our listeners are just like me wanting to know as much as possible to support their health, and they’re used to long interviews.
I lost my sense of smell—it was kind of freaky—having COVID, and I tripled my zinc. I was taking 30mg a day, and I tripled it. I took one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening— spread it out. And two days later I got my sense of smell back. I thought that was interesting. My husband lost his sense of smell too. I told him to triple his zinc, he did, and it came back right away. I thought that was really interesting. What are your thoughts on homemade quinine? The simmering of the grapefruit peel and then drinking that a few ounces a day. Is there any basis that if someone couldn’t get their hands on hydroxychloroquine, is that chemically similar enough to hydroxychloroquine—homemade quinine?
[01:58:55] Dr. Richard Fleming: The bottom line answer is I don’t know. One of the things hopefully your listeners are picking up and you as well is that I’m science-oriented. And in the absence of scientific information that gives me an answer on something I won’t pretend to know it because I don’t know it.
[01:59:15] Ashley James: Absolutely.
[01:59:17] Dr. Richard Fleming: Even many of the medications, I don’t know whether they work or not. I know people who claim that certain drugs work, but they didn’t measure actual tissue effects, so I don’t know whether it worked. Half the people who received nothing as outpatients got better, so did they get better because they got nothing? I mean, an outcome doesn’t mean that it’s the result of what you did, unless you can measure something there because there are all sorts of other variables that go on that you don’t know. I mean, was it something else that happened or a combination of things that happened? And that’s why science is supposed to be more rigorous and not guessing.
One of the comments I make about Remdesivir is, well, I know it got cleared EUA for SARS-CoV-2. But in our study, if somebody did not have an aminoquinoline or anything else before they get randomly assigned to receive Remdesivir, 28% of them got better on it. You can take that for whatever it’s meaningful to you, but to myself as a research scientist physician, if you can get better, get worse, or stay the same, you have a 33% and 3% chance of each, and 28% is performing at less than chance.
But, again, thanks to the powers that be, it got cleared for SARS-CoV-2. And I would argue that there’s no scientific data that shows that it’s beneficial. I don’t know if the home approach for trying to get an equivalent aminoquinoline compound out of that would work, number one; two would be adequate dosage-wise to have an effect, I don’t know. I just don’t know.
[02:01:24] Ashley James: Well, I appreciate that. I’ve been getting the feeling since I’ve been following your YouTube videos that you have strong ethics, you’re honest, and you’re here to show us the truth whether we like you or not. I like you, you keep showing me the truth. I like you. Listeners should go to flemingmethod.com, absolutely continue to follow Dr. Richard Fleming.
To conclude our interview. You’ve done so much research around cancer, cardiovascular health, the cause of pretty much all the major illnesses, which is inflammation—it all starts with inflammation. This is what you’ve been saying for years because this is what you see in your research. What can we do to decrease inflammation in the body? What’s really effective, or maybe point us to some resources?
[02:02:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, other than being self-serving and saying go look on Amazon. As far as diet and lifestyles are concerned, again, my parents would probably have a pretty good handle on this, and they didn’t have to go to school like I did. To do the basic things that make sense, which is to not overeat. You actually need about 10 calories per pound per day for your caloric intake. It does not change much from that. Maybe 10%, 20%, 30% if you are a heavy construction worker, which I doubt many people are these days. For total caloric intake, I’ve always advised people to cut down on saturated fat. Saturated fat really doesn’t do much for the human body except provide calories.
I have told people not to eat a lot of refined processed foods, primarily because it’s very easy to consume a large number of calories. If I asked a second grader or a fifth grader what happens if you eat too many calories, they’re usually pretty smart. They’ll say, yeah, you get fat. I asked most adults that and I get the most interesting answers, many of which are not related to getting fat.
Clearly, smoking does not help your body. I’ve not seen a single study that says that smoking is good for people. I mean, I know that it’s a habit that people learn. It’s a drug, it’s addicting, but you can quit. You just have to decide what it is that motivates you for doing that.
I think people should exercise. I like to run, I like to fence, I like to downhill ski, I like to scuba dive. I don’t suggest everybody do that. A lot of people would kill themselves with some of those sports, but you need to be doing something. I’ve always encouraged people to find something at least three times a week for half an hour like running, bicycling, or just walking, and then do something else to be active on the other days. I mean, they used to be that people were so much more active. Clearly, this sheltering in place—a term that I just love because it has very little to do with what you’re doing—did nothing but inactivate people, cause them to eat more, get stressed, and not take care of themselves.
[02:04:50] Ashley James: Increasing comorbidities, which if then they got COVID-19 would increase their chances of dying or having a much harder time with it.
[02:05:00] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, a very well thought out plan. So those types of things. Again, you don’t need nearly as much protein as people think you need. Most people need about 40 grams of protein a day, and plant protein. Your body doesn’t know where those amino acids come from, whether they’re animal products or plant products. I kid you not. When you eat arginine, it doesn’t come with a label that says plant-based versus animal-based.
I chuckled at the milk comment earlier because I’ve gotten way too much abuse from people for saying, not sure why you’re drinking this. We consume more calcium in the United States than the vast majority of people, but what we’ve discovered is that the more protein you have, the more it leeches the calcium out of your bone. The studies that have actually looked at that show that about 800mg a day of calcium with exercise including aerobic and anaerobic—so in other words, exercising your heart and heart rate and then exercising your muscles—are the types of things that keep bone formed and bone forms along what’s called lines of stress. If you use a muscle and a bone, it causes stress along that to be activated and that will lay down the calcium. If you don’t do that, you end up with weak bones, brittle bones, and they break over the course of time.
If you get a hip fracture when you’re older, about half the people will die from the hip fracture because not only is there a broken bone with immobility and blood clots from that, but you can also get fat released from the bones and it can go through your blood vessels. It’s called a fat embolism, and it can kill you. That type of thing.
And I encourage people to be interactive with other individuals because socially, there’s quite a positive feedback for people who get out, and they’re mentally, physically, and (dare I say) spiritually, but that gets into another realm of activity that is positive for people. All of that has been shown to reduce stress levels and improve immune functions. This is the type of stuff that you don’t need somebody like me telling you about.
I never thought in my early life I would have done as much research into these areas as I’d done. It demonstrated some interesting research over the years and I think it was helpful. I mean, it’s certainly provided some of the insight needed to better understand inflammation and disease. A variety of diseases proved to be fortuitous between that and the patent to investigate SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
[02:07:55] Ashley James: What kind of diet do you eat to prevent disease? Can I just eat like you? I want to like you. First of all, you look so young. You look great in your videos, so I know you’re doing something right.
[02:08:13] Dr. Richard Fleming: I got my hair cut the other day so I think I look better.
[02:08:18] Ashley James: Well, how do you eat? I want to know how you eat for preventing disease and staying healthy.
[02:08:23] Dr. Richard Fleming: Very boring for what most people do. A disappointment, I’m not a red meat eater. I don’t even have a taste for red meat, and that’s not to harm people who say that just cut the fat off so you’re not ingesting the fat. You don’t need the fat, I know you like the flavor of it, but your body doesn’t need it.
As far as meats or proteins are concerned, I do like more lentils and lean meats. I would argue that I’m actually more interested in fish than anything else. I like sushi. A lot of fruits and vegetables, and I always remind people that apples, oranges, and bananas are not the only vegetables out there. There’s this whole list of things that if you walk up and down the stores—although not as much today as there had been, but those days will return—you’ll find a whole bunch of things that actually grew in the ground that you can eat. It’s just amazing. They’re called fruits and vegetables.
I avoid canned foods like the bubonic plague, which I thought was a particularly appropriate pun there for SARS-CoV-2 and the plague because I don’t need the added salt. I don’t add salt to my food. People are used to that because it’s flavored. The reason why people are used to the flavor is that when people settled this country in the United States, they started down the east coast and as they moved westward, well, if you pull up vegetables and fruit they only last so long. So people took animals with them. And then to keep those meats from spoiling, they originally used a lot of pepper in Europe to pepper the foods so the meats would not spoil and become infected with bacteria and kill people.
And then, they discovered this really cheap thing in China called salt, sodium chloride, and they found that it did the same thing. So what our ancestors did is they settled this country in North America was they would then salt the food to preserve it so bacteria didn’t grow, and over the course of time, people got used to that flavor. Many people are of the confused notion that that’s what they need to actually make the meats or whatever foods they’re eating taste normal.
You don’t need to add salt to it. If you’re adding salt to it for flavor, you’ve lost your taste and not due to SARS-CoV-2. Find something else to season it with, there are tons of seasonings, and you’ll appreciate what foods really taste like.
Fruits and vegetables are definitely high. Do I eat bread? Yes, I do eat bread. I’m not gluten-free. I’m not certain that many people are really gluten intolerant. My ancestry is Scandinavian, so I would argue I’m probably very lactose intolerant. I’m not a big milk drinker. I like yogurt, but I can’t stand the taste of milk. That’s just a personal preference.
My children grew up with skim milk when they had it. I would prefer that they drink orange juice, but that’s up to them. I had an ex father-in-law who was a dentist who insisted that everybody needed milk for calcium for their teeth. I just had to look at him and say, where did they teach you this in dental school? Well, I was in dental school. You need calcium, but nowhere other than perhaps if the tooth falls out is there a benefit of milk for a tooth. Because if you immerse it in milk it does protect it pretty well. Why get it to a dentist if there’s a chance of it being implanted? But that’s the misperception that they were taught, and so go for it.
Sokolof I did know, he was the guy who bought a million-dollar—the first of the year football game. I forget what it’s called. The once-a-year football game.
[02:13:12] Ashley James: The big one, the Super Bowl.
[02:13:14] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, Super Bowl. Thank you.
[02:13:16] Ashley James: It’s okay.
[02:13:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: I remember that Phil Sokolof, who passed away many years ago now, bought a $1 million 30-second ad so he could take a container of milk, look at the camera, and throw it over his shoulder. Well, you have a million dollars to throw away on that cute commercial. I don’t know if that answered the question for you.
[02:13:43] Ashley James: I liked that you brought up that there’s only a certain amount of calories we really need. That we can get a lot of our protein, we can get all of our protein, all of our amino acids from plants if we wanted to. We can choose to completely eat plants. If you’re going to choose to eat animals, then focus on the leaner ones and avoid things like milk because there’s actually no nutritional benefit to milk. There’s plenty of studies showing that it’s actually a harmful effect to the immune system. It creates phlegm.
I mean, you can get all that calcium and all those minerals that you’re supposedly getting from the cow, which actually, how the cows are getting it is they’re being supplemented. Because these cows are all grazing in minerally rich soil. They’re not eating grass that’s grown in minerally rich soil. You’re buying factory farm milk where the cows never see the light of day for five years while they’re being impregnated constantly, and they’re being forced to give up the milk. And then they’re being supplemented, they’re being given calcium supplements. So why don’t you just avoid the milk, take a calcium supplement, skip the middleman?
[02:14:53] Dr. Richard Fleming: Bypass the middleman?
[02:14:56] Ashley James: Right. Bypass the torturing of an animal. Seriously, it is. It’s animal torture, you don’t need it. Go drink some almond milk, you’re going to get lots of great nutrients, or water. Water is wonderful for you.
Yeah, you had mentioned Amazon. You have books on Amazon. Stop Inflammation Now! is on paperback on Amazon, and the links to all your books and stuff are definitely going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We need to know this information. I love talking to researchers because that’s where we get the real stuff from. Don’t listen to mainstream media. There’s an agenda behind it, they’re being paid.
You don’t like money being involved because money corrupts truth oftentimes because there’s an agenda. You just want to show us the truth without an agenda being behind it. So I really appreciate how candid you are, and I’m looking forward to your talk that’s coming up on June 5th. Listeners got to go to flemingmethod.com. Click on the event 2021 and get that information, especially if you’re going to be in Dallas, Texas or gain access to the video footage. Are you going to live stream it or are you going to record it and provide it later?
[02:16:11] Dr. Richard Fleming: We’re going to record it and we’re hoping to live stream it. We’re talking with a number of people right now who’ve expressed an interest in live streaming it, and we have people all around the world that have asked for that. Our hopes are that we’ll not only be able to live stream it, but receive questions from people around the world at the time that’s happening and then filter that through other people, not myself. Other people that are sitting to the side looking at the questions and going, okay, let’s make this one of the questions that we answer. There’s no way in the world for me to respond to all the questions that come in.
[02:16:55] Ashley James: Right. I see you have a 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM time slot for Q&A, I have a feeling you’re going to be there longer than 1:30 PM.
[02:17:03] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I think that’s a hard cutoff.
[02:17:09] Ashley James: Well, then it’ll be a challenge. Everyone around the world, I challenge you to come up with the coolest question to get submitted. It’s like winning a prize. So that’s going to be a lot of fun. You’re going to talk about the real science behind viruses, vaccines, and treatments. We didn’t really even get into your research around how bacteria and viruses affect inflammation and thus affect cardiovascular disease. You did touch on it. There’s a lot more information on videos that you’ve released. There’s this two-hour one you did, that’s how I found you and I just absolutely fell in love with your work. I’ll try to find it and link that in this episode as well. But that’s going to be a great talk, so I’m really looking forward to you doing that on June 5th. Is there anything that you’d like to wrap up today’s interview? Anything you’d like to leave the listener with?
[02:18:06] Dr. Richard Fleming: I think it’s important that people realize that they’re able to make sense out of this, even though viruses are not something that most people are familiar with. But I think there’s a common sense approach to understanding something. Despite all the advantages I’ve had academically, research experience, medical experience, and even a little legal experience that I’ve had in my life, I just always return (believe it or not) to my parents and my grandparents. I ask just very fundamental questions, which is what would my parents or grandparents think about this? They had a really good sense of looking at something and saying that something just was not quite right.
And that has actually been very useful in my life, both from a research and medical perspective. But as far as sorting a lot of this out with SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, which is the agendas of people, what they’re saying, and why are things inconsistent this go around compared to other things that we’ve all experienced. Which is, why were treatments shut down? I mean, treatments were just simply shut down. Why were vaccines pushed from day one? Why did we quarantine the healthy versus the sick? Why did we pan culture everybody when we’ve never done that before? I mean, I guess what we’ve demonstrated is that, yup, it’s a respiratory virus and it passes from person to person. Okay, that was just outstanding.
We could have used those resources much more efficiently to treat people, get them in and out of the hospital, and save lives. But instead, this was the approach. I think taking my parent’s approach, the common sense approach is the way to do it. The goal of the website and these presentations isn’t for you to just listen to me and go, well, he says to do that, that’s what we should do. If there’s any credibility into what somebody is telling you, you should be able to listen to what they’re doing and look at the information yourself and say, yup, that makes sense.
[02:20:29] Ashley James: Okay, I have one more question. I’m sorry. If we could fire Fauci and put you in his place, if you had Fauci’s job tomorrow, what would be your advice to the American people, to the government? Right now, his advice is to get a vaccine, wear a mask, and stay inside your house. What is your advice if you had his job?
[02:20:59] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’ve answered that question as to what I would have done when SARS first hit. Much to the chagrin, many people don’t like the answer that I gave to that one. What I would do immediately at this point in time is I would, the first thing I would do is I would immediately stop the vaccines, and I would demand that they be run through animal model trials because the animal model trials are more alarming than we’ve talked about in this program, number one. Number two, I would reinvest in emergency funding of research treatments to get a better handle on this, and I would allow physicians to treat them based upon the best knowledge base that they had available with agreement and informed consent from their patients.
Quite possibly, I guess the first thing I would do is I would immediately shut down gain-of-function research where there’s an argument for benefit of gain-of-function research, it has gone way astray. The implementation of that has not been what it was meant for. I would immediately pull off funding and shut down all projects, demand that the vaccines be placed under animal studies to demonstrate efficacy and then safety long before we gave it to people. Make certain that physicians and patients were allowed to use the treatments that we know are available, and then invest massively in clinical trials to validate the treatments that there’s already scientific evidence for, and to expand that, to include medical treatments that have not been considered. So those would be my first three things.
[02:22:58] Ashley James: I love it. Oh gosh, can I vote you in, please?
[02:23:02] Dr. Richard Fleming: I would probably be assassinated.
[02:23:09] Ashley James: So, we need to wake up. We really need to think for ourselves. Please, please, please, please think for yourself and just become an open-minded skeptic. Gather information, question everything. Question what Dr. Fleming says, question everything.
[02:23:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, it doesn’t hurt my feelings.
[02:23:26] Ashley James: Yeah, seriously, question everything, but keep taking in the information. And also, always follow the money, follow the money trail. The doctors have never before been treated this way, and all of a sudden, their hands are tied when it comes to treating their patients. It’s very weird. Well, it’s also that way with cancer treatments in the United States, that’s a whole other topic. But doctors, their hands are tied when it comes to treating cancer patients, and follow the money trail there as well.
But for the majority of illnesses, we’ve never seen this happen before. This is unprecedented. And then now, it’s like a global experiment. We’re going to stay safe, we’re going to stay healthy, we’re going to keep preventing disease as much as possible by eating healthy and lowering inflammation in the body. Getting your book and going to your website, flemingmethod.com, and continuing to gain learning from you. Especially also YouTube, I love your YouTube lectures where you have slides.
[02:24:38] Dr. Richard Fleming: They have pulled those down.
[02:24:40] Ashley James: That’s why I couldn’t find it. I was looking for that two-hour one, I couldn’t find it.
[02:24:47] Dr. Richard Fleming: We have several on Rumble, and then there are several people like Steve Bannon and David Clements and Del Bigtree that have been interviewing lately, and [inaudible 02:24:56]—just a wide variety. We’ve done some interviews out of Italy and Australia. I have a French interview later on this week. There’s a variety of ways that people are getting different messages out there, they’re just having to use alternative channels.
[02:25:13] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, hopefully you’ll be able to host those videos that you’ve created on your website, or like you said, you got it on Rumble. Get it on LBRY. It’s done through the blockchain, they can’t shut it down. But there are ways to host videos that are unmessable, they can’t mess with it.
[02:25:39] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’m hoping we get a very good turnout on June 5th to help get some information out to people.
[02:25:45] Ashley James: Yes, let’s do it. Let’s all make sure we’re there, either in person or virtually on June 5th. And again, all the information is on flemingmethod.com/event-2021. Dr. Richard Fleming Ph.D., MD, JD, I love your work. I pray that you are safe and that no one comes after you, me, or anyone that you talk to for bringing this information out to the public. They certainly don’t want it to be out to the public, and that is deeply, deeply concerning. Stay safe. Thank you so much for this interview, and I really appreciate the work you’re doing.
[02:26:28] Dr. Richard Fleming: My pleasure, Ashley. Thank you for the invitation.
[02:26:30] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Richard Fleming. Please visit his website flemingmethod.com to watch the event. When I interviewed him, it was before the event. I thought I would have enough time to publish this before his event, but unfortunately, with our very quick move, we had to move very quickly out of the house we were in. I didn’t have enough time, and so now I’m publishing it after his event. But like I said in the introduction to today’s interview, in case you missed me saying that, the good news is you can go and watch the entire four-hour lecture, which I highly recommend checking out and just absorb the information.
Listen, my stance is don’t blindly trust anyone. Question everything, even question the guests I have. What I like about Dr. Fleming is he has all of the research behind what he says, and he invites you to check it out. You can download a 100+ page PDF with all of the research that he shows, all the studies he shows, all the information out there so that you can come to your own conclusions. I really like it when guests point us in the direction of resources so that we can do our own digging and affirm what direction we want to go with our health.
I believe that we need to be proactive when it comes to everything we put in our body—be it food or medicine—and that we need to look into research instead of blindly following or trusting anyone. Please don’t blindly trust or follow anyone, me, your doctor—anyone. We should look into information, and that’s why I say I’m an open minded skeptic. I’m going to be skeptical, but I’m going to be open-minded enough to look into the information and be open-minded enough to really check in.
I have to do an ego check. Do I put my ego aside enough to humble myself to be wrong? Is it okay that my belief system can be challenged? Is that okay? Some people it’s not okay. Some people want to blindly, no matter what, trust their belief system even when new evidence comes out that challenges it, and that’s where we can get ourselves in trouble when it comes to health because that then becomes dogma and not actual science.
So are you following science, which science is always changing as new information comes out, or are you following dogma, which is a belief system that would negate new information? We all have to do kind of an ego check and just ask ourselves, am I okay with my belief system being challenged in the light of new information? I know that you are to a certain extent because you’re here listening to this podcast, so you’re seeking information, you’re excited to seek information.
So just remember, being humble, being open minded, and being skeptical are really good strengths to have or to work on for your health.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this information with those you care about. Please join us in the Learn True Health Facebook group, what a great community we’ve been building over the last five years. I feel so privileged and so humbled to be in your presence, to work with all of you there at the Learn True Health Facebook group. Right now we have our community and in a Facebook group, and maybe in the future, we’ll have it somewhere else. Maybe I’ll host it somewhere else, but for now, several thousand listeners are there. Please come join us, it’s a wonderful place to be. Ask questions and also use the search function there to see past conversations as well.
Be sure to look up Dr. Richard Fleming and his website flemingmethod.com and check out his amazing four-hour lecture. I’d love for you to come join the Facebook group or if you already joined, come into the Facebook group afterward and let’s have a discussion about this episode today and also his four-hour lecture. What do you guys think? Let’s talk about it.
All right, thanks so much for being a listener and sharing these episodes. Let’s keep an open mind. One of my past mentors would say, keep your mind so open your brain could fall out. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.
Get Connected with Dr. Richard Fleming!Website
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Books by Dr. Richard FlemingIs COVID-19 a Bioweapon?: A Scientific and Forensic Investigation
CoVid-19 Made Extremely Simple (Unmasking CoViD Book 6)
The Truth About the Diet Grifters in the Era of CoVid-19
CoVid-19 Is Not a Hoax. Exposing The Real Grifters
Unmasking CoViD – Part 1
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Dr. Brownstein's study that he published about his findings with treating patients with Covid-19 can be found here:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Novel-Approach-to-Treating-COVID-19-Using-and-Brownstein-Ng/c1805feeee6e9e68a68a0a0071e98e67e7062399And the PDF can be downloaded here:
https://cf5e727d-d02d-4d71-89ff-9fe2d3ad957f.filesusr.com/ugd/adf864_cc5004cfa84a46d3b1a0338d4308c42c.pdfFind LTH on LBRY:
https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-HealthFind LTH on Bitchute:
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/kGf34VnWr7H9Join the LTH community:
Dr. David Brownstein on Proven Effective and Natural Protocols for Respiratory and Covid Viruses
learntruehealth.com/grouphttps://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-david-brownstein-proven-effective-natural-protocols-respiratory-covid-viruses
Highlights:
Importance of hormones to overall health Importance of maintaining adequate iodine levels Natural therapy for COVID How to maintain a properly functioning immune systemIn this episode, we have Dr. David Brownstein. Dr. David Brownstein is a family physician that specializes in using vitamins, minerals, herbs, and natural hormones, and utilizes nutritional therapies. He shares how he went from being a doctor practicing conventional medicine to becoming a holistic doctor. He talks about how he has helped his patients recover from COVID and gives some tips on strengthening our immune system so we can have a good immune response to stressors or illnesses.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love Dr. David Brownstein who has a very interesting story that he shares right off the bat at the beginning of the show. I don’t want to spoil it, so you’re going to have to listen to it because it really blew my mind. But his story is what got him into holistic medicine, and holistic medicine is where he ended up with a bunch of patients in his clinic who had COVID. He used the same tools he’s been using for several decades, and here we are with this amazing study that he published and the FTC coming after him. Just so much crazy information, I’m so excited for you to hear today’s interview.
I hope you listen to the last interview I did with Dr. Paul Thomas, and I hope you also listen to the next interview I’m going to be publishing. It’s a three-part series. It just so happens I did these interviews and I thought they really go well together. Even though it’s similar information, it’s also very different.
This doctor used a more holistic natural approach to helping his patients boost their immune systems and fight viral infections with great success. And then the next interview I’m going to be publishing one of the things we do talk about is his 1800 person study using pharmaceutical drugs very successfully at supporting the body’s ability to fight this specific viral infection that we are facing at the moment.
Please find the Learn True Health Podcast on BitChute as well as LBRY. And you can just search for BitChute, search for LBRY and find the Learn True Health podcast. You can follow me there, you can follow me on iTunes, or most other podcast directories. But if I become censored because of the information that my guests are sharing, I just want you to know that you can find me in these other places. You can find the podcast in these other places where they still believe in freedom of speech.
You can also find us, our whole community, in fact. Join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It is a fantastic community of very supportive, holistic-minded people, and I just love the community we’ve built there. So you can come and join us there. I don’t have any plans to switch the group to another platform, but with censorship and with holistic practitioners being de-platformed these days and holistic reporters and podcasters being de-platformed, we might have to at some point. So hopefully, all this content is protected by freedom of speech. I’m just here to help holistic doctors and really successful doctors, successful in that their procedures are successfully helping people to gain health.
I’m creating a platform for them to give you the information you need so you can make great health choices for yourself. I’m so excited to continue to do that, and I hope and pray that everything we do here, we get to continue doing. It does concern me that the people I’ve been following have been taken off of platforms like Facebook and YouTube. It does concern me, and these are people who are also sharing similar information.
So, I hope that we can all stay sound, healthy, and safe, and also be able to continue to learn and grow from all these wonderful experts and guests. But do follow us at places like BitChute, LBRY, and our Facebook group. And you could also join the email list by going to learntruehealth.com and the pop-up pops up, just put your email in there. I do not spam. I send very few emails, but you will get notifications from us should there be any news that’s worthy for you to know about.
Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this podcast with those you care about. Today’s episode not only touches on COVID and supporting the immune system, it also talks about heart health, hormone health, and how hormones directly affect heart health. So share this episode with those who care about that may have those concerns as well and want to learn more about that. Come to Learn True Health Facebook group after listening to this and share what you think. This episode really blew my mind, so I’m really excited to start a conversation with you guys about today’s interview. Have a fantastic rest of your day.
[00:04:59] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 462. I am so excited for today’s guest. We are in for such a treat. We have Dr. David Brownstein with us who’s an MD, board-certified family physician, and you got into natural and alternative therapies. I’m always fascinated because medical school does not necessarily like the holistic approach and doesn’t necessarily teach it or focus on it. I’ve met a lot of MDs that their training kind of led them to [inaudible 00:05:43] it or almost look down upon holistic or alternative methods.
I would love to know just jumping into this conversation, and I’m very excited because you have some books that I know my listeners would absolutely love. Your latest one, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, which of course, isn’t that just the big buzz for the last year? But you also have Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. I mean, we can have you on again for an entire episode about that.
You have a book specializing in vitamin B12 for your health, which, again, I would love to have you on multiple times because every book you have, I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s an entire interview. The list goes on and on. The Guide to a Gluten-free Diet, The Guide to a Dairy-free Diet, The Soy Deception, I mean, I have a feeling we’re going to be learning a lot from you. And then Ozone: The Miracle Therapy. I have listed all of your books, they’re all very interesting.
But what I really want to know just jumping into our interview today is what happened as a medical doctor that had you go into that holistic realm, that had you go, I really want to help people, maybe natural therapies instead of just jumping to a drug right away? What happened as a doctor that had you go this route?
[00:07:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Oh, Ashley, thanks for having me on. And I didn’t start off as a holistic physician, I’ve turned into one. You know why? My career in medicine started as a little boy when I used to go to the doctor for severe asthma and just decided I want to be a doctor and help people. So I geared my undergraduate training at the University of Michigan for going to med school. I went to Wayne State University School of Medicine, and I wanted to model myself after my family doctor.
I didn’t come from a holistic household. We didn’t take vitamins in our household. We didn’t do anything holistic. We went to the doctor when we were sick, we took whatever they gave us. We didn’t question anything in my household. That’s what I thought I wanted to do in medicine. So I finished a family practice residency and started practicing conventional medicine as I was taught in my training.
My turning point came around six months into that when, for a couple of nights, I just lost sleep for an unknown reason and became anxious after losing sleep for an unknown reason this anxiety percolated up in me. I remember getting ready to go for work the next day after the sleepless nights and my wife, Allison, was getting ready to go to work. I blurted out to her, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.” It’s the first thing I ever said to her about it.
Now, she has known me since I was 18. I had $100,000 in student loans. I always talked about being a physician, this was all I wanted to be. I want to be a family doctor. So she says to me, what’s wrong? And I said I’m not really helping people. I’m just prescribing all these drugs that don’t really work. I’m prescribing more drugs to treat the side effects from the first drugs, and they’re not getting better. I just said to her, I can’t do this for the next 30 or 40 years. She said, Well, why don’t you do another residency? And I said, I’m not doing that again, one was enough.
What was happening in my life at that time was my father was really sick. He had his first heart attack at age 40, he had a second heart attack at 42. Over the next 20 years. He had two bypass surgeries, he had numerous angioplasties, he was on 12 medications for heart disease, cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes. My dad had suffered from continuous angina over a 20+ year time period. Every day he was having chest pain, it was getting worse. If he did any mild activity, he would start popping nitroglycerin pills like they were candy.
We were all just waiting for the phone call that he had died because he looked so bad. He was pale and pasty. My dad wasn’t the best patient either. He could eat like the best of them, he was overweight, he smoked, and never exercised much.
Those sleepless nights came, I didn’t really know what was going on. I go to work that day and I happen to see a patient. The patient is friends with Allison and I. We’ve gone out and his wife works with Allison. He was bothering me to meet his chiropractor. At that time of my medical career, I never met a chiropractor, I never went to one, never knew what they did. In my medical training, I was taught to not send patients to chiropractors, they were dangerous, and that was it. So I never sent a patient to a chiropractor, and I used to actively tell them don’t go because they were dangerous, even though I never knew what the philosophy was, never knew what they did.
But the patient, Michael, was bothering me to meet his chiropractor, and the chiropractor really helped him out in much more so than back pain through taking some supplements and things like that. So in my anxiety and my lack of sleep state, I took the phone number from him. I remember I called the chiropractor at lunchtime, we set up a dinner meeting for a couple of days the following week. Tuesday comes around for dinner with the chiropractor, and I tell Allison when I get home from work, I’m going to cancel. I don’t want to waste my time with a chiropractor. She said that would be rude, you need to go because you made this date. She said, be nice.
I met the chiropractor, his name was Dr. Robert Radtke. He was using nutritional therapies and he was talking functional biochemistry to me much more so than I knew, way more than I knew at that time. He brought a book Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright who was an allopathic physician. I read that book. I took the book home. First off, Dr. Radtke and I hit it off. He was much more functional biochemistry than I did. He was very smart. He was telling me stories of using nutrition to heal his patients and to help them along. Either Dr. Radtke was lying to me, or there were other therapies out there that I wasn’t exposed to.
So I took that book home. I read that book until late at night. The next morning, I called my dad up before I went to work and said, I want you to come in the office, I want to do a few blood tests on you. I checked two blood tests on him based on talking to Dr. Radtke and what I read in that book—his thyroid hormone levels and his testosterone levels. A few days later, I got his blood work back. His testosterone levels were below detectable limits, they weren’t even reading on the lab test. No one had bothered to check that. His thyroid levels were in the reference range but in the very low part of the reference range. No one had bothered to check anything but a TSH before. So I checked his other thyroid levels of T3, T4, and thyroid antibodies.
So based on that lab work, I started reading and I put my dad on two things. I put him on natural testosterone, and natural thyroid hormone, desiccated thyroid hormone. Within seven days, his 20+ year history of angina melted away and never returned. Stopped using nitros. He actually called me that day. He said, I want you to know, I haven’t used the nitro today. I’m like, why? And he said, because I don’t have chest pain, it seems like maybe it’s going away.
I followed up with him the next couple of days, that was gone, never to return. Instead of looking pale and pasty, he started to look pink on his face and looked healthier. Thirty days later, I checked his cholesterol levels, which were stuck in the 300s on cholesterol-lowering medication. Without changing any of his bad habits, his cholesterol fell below 200. All these inflammatory markers improved his blood work.
Once I saw the changes in my dad, I decided that’s what I wanted to do in medicine. I decided I was going to be a holistic doctor. I didn’t really know what it was, but I knew I couldn’t do this in a conventional office. I went to the partner of the practice and said, I need to leave. He said, why, you’re going to be a partner in a few months? I said, I want to do holistic medicine. He goes, what’s that? I’m like, I’m not really sure yet, but I’m going to figure it out. He said, well, why don’t you do it here? I said, No, I can’t do it here. I need my own office.
So I left and that’s how it started. Since I treated my dad with natural testosterone, natural thyroid hormone and he made such a dramatic improvement, every patient that I’ve seen for the last 27, 28 years has been given a full thyroid, full hormonal workup, and full nutritional evaluation. That’s how it all began. The first book I wrote was The Miracle of Natural Hormones in 1998. I’ve featured my father in that book because of the response he had. Overcoming thyroid disorders came shortly after that because of the response I had with him and seeing all the thyroid effects.
One thing led to another and it was the best thing I did in medicine. Now I know biochemistry much better. You learn it in medical school, you learn it in undergraduate school, but you don’t learn to utilize it in your practice. You learn it to pass the test and then you forget it. Now, I’m studying biochemistry every night. I’ve got biochemistry charts up in my office at home. My goal is to support a patient’s biochemistry, which leads to support for the immune system and leads to better health. It was the best thing I did in medicine. Medicine went from being I can’t do this for the next 30 to 40 years to I’m almost 30 years into it and hope I got another 30 ahead of me to do it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
[00:16:20] Ashley James: Now, the Center for Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, Michigan, that’s your clinic?
[00:16:28] Dr. David Brownstein: That’s mine. I left his office and that’s what I formed when I left that partner’s office. And then lo and behold, about eight years later, I liked him. He and I kept playing tennis and I kept bugging him about, hey, Rick, this is a better way to practice medicine, this is way better. I finally convinced him eight years later, he just walked away from this practice and joined me. There are three doctors in the practice now. We have a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant. We have a busy holistic practice.
[00:17:00] Ashley James: I love it. I’ve been in this space studying intensely holistic medicine for 10 years. Applying it to my own life first and then I became a health coach and I’ve been working with being mentored by Naturopathic physicians for the last 10 years, I have never heard of heart disease being caused by and also then cured by balancing testosterone and thyroid. I mean, it makes sense, but I have no idea what the process is. Why is it that his thyroid was out of balance, his testosterone was out of balance, and he had heart disease because of it? Why is that?
[00:17:48] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, it’s a good question. It took me some research after I saw the improvement he did, so I started researching all these hormones. What I found was that having a balanced hormonal system is just essential to health. If you look at the hormonal pathways of the body, the adrenal and sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, DHA, and progesterone, they’re all produced in the ovaries in women, testes in men, and adrenal glands in men and women. We all have the same pathways. The precursor substance to all this is cholesterol. You can’t make hormones in those glands without adequate amounts of cholesterol.
So here, my dad, he’s got this high cholesterol in the 300s, and he’s got testosterone levels of zero, basically. Now, I checked his other hormone levels like DHA and pregnenolone, they’re all in the same pathways. It’s kind of like driving from town A to town B to town C in order. Your hormones are made in a certain order, one follows the other, and that’s the way it is. If you go from the beginning, cholesterol is really the substrate that fuels this pathway.
So here’s my dad with a cholesterol of 350 or so and he can’t make hormones. They’re all near zero when I checked them all as I started learning about one after another and I put him on small amounts of all of them. Why wasn’t he making hormones? Well, you need adequate thyroid hormone to stimulate that pathway. You need vitamin A as a cofactor to make that pathway go. You need magnesium and some B vitamins to make that pathway go.
So my dad was lacking a lot of basic nutrition like most of the patients that I see are, he was lacking thyroid hormone, and he couldn’t make his hormones. If you look at the literature for heart disease and what causes atherosclerosis, hypothyroidism is known to cause it. That’s been known since the late 1800s. Low testosterone has been known to cause heart disease. Much of the research with that has been out of Europe, but that’s been known for over 50 years.
Maybe I got a little lucky with my dad, but when I put them on those first two things and I went and researched some more, how does that make his angina better? And there was tons of research showing this is why his arteries were blocking up. Either the underlying cause or a major part of the underlying cause of what was causing his problems.
After I treated him with those two things and then I started adding DHA, pregnenolone, and other things in there as I found what he was lacking, but he never had another day of angina in his life. He was able to lose weight without changing his bad habits. Once I saw the changes in him, I knew that’s what I wanted to do in medicine. That’s been my passion, that’s been my drive. It served my purpose and it served my patients’ purpose.
[00:21:06] Ashley James: This is what I want for every listener, to have a doctor on their team that acts like Sherlock Holmes. I want a doctor that questions and goes, what’s going on? Let’s look deeper and understand this. The fact that they never ran these panels on your dad, that they were only looking. It’s like the iceberg story. They’re only looking at the tip of the iceberg. They’re like, oh, heart disease. This is my frustration with allopathic medicine is it’s reductionistic.
He has angina, let’s look at the heart, and they’re not looking at the body as a whole. Hello, we’re not looking at his thyroid, testosterone, or any of his nutrient levels, right?
[00:21:49] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, you’re right. He has angina so he’s got chest pain when he does any activity, right? He walks up a flight of stairs, whatever. Walking up a flight of stairs or walking sometimes a few steps, so you give him nitroglycerin which dilates the arteries and the chest pain goes away.
Well, does he have a deficiency of nitroglycerin? I mean, it’s kind of the reductionist model of conventional medicine. But really, what my father had was no testosterone, his hormonal biosynthetic pathways were not working because he was lacking thyroid hormone, he was lacking vitamin A, he was lacking some B vitamins. Once we corrected those things and supported him with small amounts of hormones, he made a dramatic change in his health. It was really something.
I still think about that today, that got me going in the right pathway for medicine. He was my first patient. All patients are important. He was certainly probably the most important patient in my career.
[00:22:55] Ashley James: Of course, one of our parents would be, wouldn’t they? Now, you mentioned that you use desiccated thyroid hormone, and that surprised me because you were just newly introduced into holistic medicine. The training of an MD is to do more synthetic. Can you explain for the listener what desiccated thyroid hormone is versus the synthetic that we’re so used to?
[00:23:21] Dr. David Brownstein: So I ended up writing a book on this, Overcoming Thyroid Disorders. In med school, I was trained to assess a patient’s thyroid status by drawing a TSH level, a thyroid-stimulating hormone level. That’s a hormone secreted from the pituitary gland in the brain, and that is released from the pituitary gland, hits your bloodstream, goes to the thyroid, and causes the thyroid gland to release thyroid hormone.
Now thyroid hormone released into the bloodstream from the thyroid gland feeds back into the pituitary gland. It was supposed to be this check and balance thing to see if you got enough thyroid hormone. If you don’t have enough thyroid hormone, you should produce more TSH. If you got too much thyroid hormone, you should produce less TSH.
There are multiple places where this pathway gets disrupted. Going back to basic biochemistry and physiology, and just basic biochemical pathways can help. Sherlock Holmes is a good example. As a physician, I’m always thinking, what’s the underlying cause of this? I don’t think this is sent from another planet if the patient’s sick for something. I mean, sometimes you can never figure out why they’re sick or why something happened and many times you can.
Again, I said that from the beginning that supporting the patient’s physiology and biochemistry is really what we should be doing in medicine. And the problem with relying on drug therapies, I mean, look, most of the first two years of medical school are spent on memorizing drugs, their mechanism of action, their half-life, and things like that. When you look at those mechanisms of action, nearly every drug prescribed out there is either poisoning an enzyme or blocking a receptor in the body. For the long term in our lives, I don’t think it’s a good idea to poison enzymes or black receptors. The enzymes and receptors are there for a reason.
Now, there are times to do that. If you’re having an acute heart attack, there are enzymes that might need to be poisoned and receptors might need to be blocked temporarily. But for long-term care, using those drugs doesn’t support physiology, doesn’t support biochemistry, it does the opposite—it disrupts it.
I think that you also have to look at our health statistics in the US. We take more drugs than any Western people on the face of the planet. We spend more money on health care than any people on the face of the planet, and we have worse outcomes than every western country. We are bottom last in almost every outcome, and the only one we’re not bottom last, we’re second to last. That includes infant mortality, neonatal mortality, maternal mortality at birth, longevity in adult males and females, chronic health conditions—the list goes on and on. We have lousy health outcomes.
What’s happened with coronavirus epitomizes how we are as a country. It’s a sad state we’re in right now. I think the sad state is being driven from this lack of education of doctors that have no idea how to holistically approach anybody, no idea just basic holistic things like vitamin C, iodine, or I call these as basic things that people need and they can’t live without. I mean, 99.9% of physicians out there have no clue what these things do with the body, why they’re essential, how to assess them, and how to rectify deficiencies with us.
Unfortunately, we have 600,000 deaths from COVID because, in part, we’re an unhealthy country, and we’re unhealthy because we take too many of these drugs, and we’re unfollowing holistic lifestyle.
[00:27:24] Ashley James: It’s those with comorbidities that have the highest chances of passing away from a viral infection, let alone COVID. But also, in the United States, doctors are being told not to prescribe drugs to try to treat it or try to try to support it. There’s no treatment, you just have to manage the symptoms. It’s just very frustrating.
[00:27:52] Dr. David Brownstein: No, no, no, you can’t manage the symptoms either because there’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID. Therefore, any mention or any action thereof falls in violation of the federal code. That was part of a letter that I received from the FTC for treating COVID patients, and we can get into that.
[00:28:12] Ashley James: We’re definitely going to get into that. I want to go there. The little voice in my head is going, we’re going to be delisted from Google from going there, but we have to, everyone has to understand you. We live in a country where the government—this is unheard of. I feel like I’m in an Orwell novel.
The government is telling doctors how to practice medicine. It’s unconstitutional what’s going on right now, and it’s unethical. It’s unethical that your hands as a physician are being tied and unable to practice medicine. You’re allowed to practice medicine with other illnesses, why are you not allowed to treat the patient the best way you know-how with this one? It is so political and we are killing people, are harming people for politics.
So anyway, I’m just upset, scared, and angry for all the people who are suffering from this when good doctors like yourself could absolutely be saving lives but they’re being told not to. Isn’t that crazy? That sounds crazy. That sounds absolutely crazy, doesn’t it?
[00:29:25] Dr. David Brownstein: I’m 58 years old and I’ve never seen anything like this, never thought anything like this would occur. Orwellian is the right—what is that, an adjective? I’m not quite sure when I use it that way. But it is an Orwellian-like thing where big brother is just controlling everything. The message from the beginning of COVID was to hide in your basement and don’t leave your house except to get food until we have this vaccine.
The message to physicians was you can’t treat it so don’t even try. What physicians were telling their patients from the beginning of COVID, well, nothing I can do. Stay home until you can’t breathe then go to the hospital. We all know what happened at the beginning of COVID. We were, as physicians, we didn’t know how to treat that disease, and we were treating it incorrectly. That’s not blaming anybody, it was a new illness. We really didn’t know what we were doing and we tried our best.
If you went to the hospital and you got ventilated a year ago—March, April, and May—you had an 88% chance of dying. It’s the first illness that I’ve seen that physicians were instructed not to do anything and wait for this vaccine. Waiting for the vaccine caused about 400,000 people to die for doing no therapy. Doctors who were doing therapy like me were silenced. You were warned, either you stop talking about it or you’re not going to be able to practice medicine. You have to make your Sophie’s Choice. I was seeing COVID patients from the beginning. Do you want to get into COVID right now?
[00:31:17] Ashley James: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go there. We’re already there, let’s go there.
[00:31:20] Dr. David Brownstein: So when COVID came, when those first reports out of China in December 2019, an atypical pneumonia. I think it was three or four patients who had this novel coronavirus with atypical pneumonia. I read those reports and I followed it from the beginning. I watched what happened in January and February, Spain and Italy, and Europe experienced it before we did. I knew it was coming. I mean, we all knew it was coming. And then the first cases in the US were in Seattle and California. That was the middle to the end of February of 2020.
COVID was clearly coming, and it was going to come across the country. We didn’t have any immunity to this. I remember I had a meeting with my staff at the end of February 2020 that the media headlines were awful. Everyone’s dying or gets COVID. Italy’s got bodies piled up on the streets. Spain was a mess. It’s only a matter of time until it comes here.
I have this meeting in my office at the end of the workday, the end of Thursday. The tension in the air was palpable. You could cut it with a knife, everybody’s scared. Everybody’s scared. In this meeting with the staff, I said, we got to clear the air here. We’re going to stay open through COVID, and my staff started to question me, why don’t we close? I said, why would we close? This is our time.
I said, I’ve been practicing medicine for I think it was 27 years. I said, 26 years and a few months were for this. This is what I’ve been practicing for. I used to talk we, my partners and I. This is what we were practicing for, to get ready for something like this. This is a novel illness that conventional medicine has no clue what to do yet we do. I said, we’ve been treating flu-like illnesses with 30% of them being coronavirus infections, because it’s known that 30% of all influenza-like illnesses are coronavirus every year, with an approach to support the immune system.
We’ve done the same therapy for over 25 years. The only thing we changed was if we learned something new, we added something new with little tweaks like that. But otherwise, it’s been the exact same therapy for over two decades. The therapy consisted of using high dose vitamins A, C, and D, iodine for four days, and nebulizing a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine.
What we found over the 25+ years was that our patients didn’t get hospitalized, didn’t get pneumonia, and didn’t die at anywhere near the rates of what’s reported every year from influenza-like illnesses during the flu season. Remember, in a light flu season, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 Americans die. In a medium season, it’s up to 80,000 or so. And in a bad season, 100,000 to maybe 120,000 dies. A lot of people die from flu and flu-like illnesses every year in the wintertime in America. Our patients didn’t seem to do that, so this therapy was working.
The other part of the therapy was that if people got worse or they needed a little support, we would do intravenous vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide and then shots of ozone. That was the whole therapy in a nutshell. In the meeting with the staff, I reminded them, we’ve got therapy for this. The question came back to me, how do you know it’s going to work for this new strain of coronavirus? I said, I don’t know if it’s going to work, but why wouldn’t it work? It’s worked for every other strain over the last 25 years.
I said, we have an immune system for a reason. I said, we’re going to support the immune system. The immune system is going to do fine with coronavirus if it’s got the right raw materials. That was my prediction. I said to them, look, I can’t guarantee anything because I haven’t seen this one before, but I don’t see any reason why we’re going to have trouble with this.
So I told the staff, hey, anyone who doesn’t want to work, you don’t have to work. I’m not going to force anybody to work through this. I said, I will work alone if I have to work alone. I said, I’m working until either I get sick or they won’t let me work, but our patients are going to need us more than ever. I said to them, this is our time. This is 27+ years of practicing medicine for this moment. This is our time to shine. That was the meeting. We had about 40%, 50% of our staff. As soon as it hit Michigan, it hit the Detroit area where I was. We were one of the four hotspots, in the beginning, was Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts. It already started in Seattle where you are. We were one of the four hotspots when it moved to the western part of the US.
We were getting phone calls, people couldn’t breathe, the hospitals were filling up, the media headlines were fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. I’m not lying to you, I was scared at the beginning too. Here we were treating patients, we didn’t let them come into the office. We were treating them outside in March in Michigan. Let me tell you, March in Michigan isn’t pretty. It’s snow, sleet, ice, wind—it’s terrible. We were in snowstorms in full hazmat gear trudging out there with ice and stuff and having people put their arms out the windows of the car in freezing weather and giving them IVs. Then when you have them put their buttocks out the door as we were putting shots in the rear end.
[00:37:20] Ashley James: Of what, B vitamins?
[00:37:22] Dr. David Brownstein: Shots of ozone in the rear end. So look, truth be told I was scared for myself. I have a 65-degree scoliotic curve with lung involvement. I have severe asthma, which I used to be in multiple inhalers and wheezing all the time, and adopting a holistic lifestyle, that doesn’t bother me much at all. I play tennis without inhalers. The only time it bothers me is when I get a cold now. But I have severe asthma, I have lung involvement from scoliosis with half a lung missing on one side, and my normal pulse ox is low just because I don’t have a full two lungs like everybody else. And I have an immune system disorder that 1% of the population has.
My immune system disorder is lack of immunoglobulin A, which makes me more susceptible to viral illnesses.
[00:38:17] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s three. That’s like the trifecta.
[00:38:20] Dr. David Brownstein: I went in the wrong profession for my body. Let me tell you, I was scared for myself as well. You know what, I eat well, I take my supplements, and I know what to do for viral flu-like illnesses. So we were treating people. I was reporting it online on my website. I was putting videos of patients as they recovered. Patients who couldn’t breathe, who called their doctor, the doctor told them there’s nothing to do. Take Tylenol or something or stay home until you can’t breathe in and go to the ER. Patients would come in with pulse ox in the 80s and low 80s, even upper 70s sometimes. They were trying to stay out of the ER. Everyone was scared because you were going to die it felt like if you went to the emergency room back then.
About a weekend into this, the fear starts to go away for me and for my partners because people are calling us back, I feel better. They particularly reported they felt better after nebulizing peroxide, and they felt better after getting an IV if they really were sick. Two weeks into it we feel no different than any other flu season except we’re swamped with too many patients. We’re going outside and we’re working after hours, we got cars lined up in the parking lot. We’re all taking turns going outside. We have an assembly line going to meet them outside.
We’re lining up 10 cars on the weekends. Three docs, nurse practitioner, my PA, we’d all show up and do our job. So a couple of weeks into it, we’ve got a pretty good plan, these patients are doing okay. I was doing interviews online, I was talking about it. I was saying what I thought was wrong with conventional medicine. But I titled each of these blog posts, there’s still hope out there because there was no hope from conventional media, there was just no hope. You got COVID, you were going to die. That was the feeling out there. We all remember this. I mean, it’s going to be seared into our psyche.
About two months, March-April, I’m posting my blog post number 30 or something. Out of the blue, I got a letter from Federal Trade Communication. I remember I walked in the door, it was Tuesday night, which is my late night, not only was it my late night at work, but we’re treating patients in the parking lot and it’s tiring.
I’m walking in at 8:00 or 9:00 at night after getting there at 7:00 in the morning. I’m working as hard as I worked as a resident it felt like. I’m way older than I was back then, and so I’m exhausted. I walked in and my wife and daughter were at home. They’re looking at the computer, which I see as soon as I walk in. I’m like, what’s wrong? I thought someone died, from their face. She said, well, come in. I’m like, no, tell me what’s wrong and I’m standing there holding my bag and I got my coat on. She said, you got a letter from the Federal Trade Communication. I said, The FTC? She goes, yeah. I said, what they want? She goes, well, they’re ordering you 48 hours to remove all your blog posts about COVID or else. I said, what? I probably said a few words after that.
[00:41:53] Ashley James: I know, me too.
[00:41:55] Dr. David Brownstein: She said, you have 48 hours to remove it or you’re going to hear from the US Justice Department.
[00:42:03] Ashley James: What happened to freedom of speech?
[00:42:04] Dr. David Brownstein: I was speechless. I come in, my wife’s a lawyer.
[00:42:14] Ashley James: Oh, that’s handy.
[00:42:16] Dr. David Brownstein: So I said to her, maybe it’s time to retire. She said, you’re not retiring over this letter. This is stupid. It’s ridiculous. You’re doing a good thing. You should get an award. You don’t deserve this and you didn’t do anything wrong. If you want to retire because you want to retire, let’s talk about that. But you’re not retiring over this letter. This is stupid.
She talked me off the cliff because I told my mother, I did tell my elderly mother this story. If the FTC released a press release about me and I thought the local papers were going to pick it up, and I didn’t want my mom to read in the papers. I told my mother, I was proud to be the first in the family to have a federal agency after them. I didn’t cheat anybody, I didn’t steal any money. I didn’t hurt anybody. I was doing my job.
When we got the letter, we read it a bunch of times. We pulled everything down off the internet the next day. So in there, I got 20 years of stuff and we just took it all down. It was the last blog post I did, which was in April of last year. I’ve been blogging for 25+ years.
So I was keeping track of the patients I was treating with COVID and we’re doing the same therapy. Out of the first 107 patients, we had a couple of hospitalizations and no deaths, when we should have had—I can’t remember the numbers, they’re in my peer-reviewed paper I published on this. We should have had 8 or 10 hospitalizations and 5, 6 deaths, something like that, from the numbers that were occurring at that time.
My wife, being a lawyer, started communicating with the FTC, the gentleman who wrote the letter. He said, in this original letter, they went through all my blogs and they spent a lot of time bullet pointing what they said was inaccurate information about COVID because they kept repeating the line, “There’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation of federal code…” and it’s a long number. I’ve been cataloging these patients that we were treating, I knew we had 107 patients at that time when that letter came in. In that letter, they said, “because there are no clinical studies indicating what you say is true, there’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation.”
I called a few friends and one of them said to me, if they want a study, why don’t you give them a study. You’ve been treating patients for two months. I retrospectively reviewed the data of my patients that were treated. Since I wasn’t blogging, I had some time on my hands that I’m not used to. I put together a study of 107 patients, case series study, and I got it accepted for peer review. It was peer-reviewed three times. I got it published in a peer-reviewed journal.
When it was published, my wife sent a letter to the FTC saying, well, you said there are no clinical studies, here’s one. She attached it and said, we want to publish this on our website without commentary, just publish the study. And they said, no, this is not a randomized control trial.
[00:46:00] Ashley James: Now they change the story.
[00:46:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Now they changed it. So here we are at the beginning of an illness that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people. There’s no randomized control trial at that point of anything related to COVID because who could do it? You can’t randomize a trial. And I wasn’t going to randomize anybody to receiving therapy and not receiving therapy. Now when I thought it was going to help them. That’s unethical. I should go to jail for that if I did that, and there’s no way I could sleep another night, another minute in my life if I did something like that.
But anyway, there were no randomized control trials at that point, there were only clinical observations. I wasn’t hiding in my basement. I wasn’t closing my office. I was on the frontlines treating people. We get the letter back from the FTC saying, no, not a randomized control trial. That was the last contact we had with them.
We kept doing our thing. Now, we’re over 400 patients. Again, we have a couple of hospitalizations, no deaths from any of our patients related to it. The therapy still works. The consequence of the powers that be telling physicians there’s no therapy and you can’t do anything for your patients and just wait for the vaccine was we had over 400,000 people dead before the vaccine was even started. I believe those were the numbers. When this post mortem is written on coronavirus, it’s going to be ugly.
One other side to that story was, so here I published the study, FTC won’t let me put it on my website. So we hired a first amendment lawyer in DC who really is a specialist with the FTC recommended to me by two prominent people out there. This gentleman’s in his 70s. He’s been doing this for 40+ years.
In the final analysis he said to me, you do not have first amendment protection right now to talk about COVID online. You should, but you don’t. He goes, that’s the political world we live in right now. He said, you have to make a decision whether you want to continue treating patients or you want to fight the FTC. He said, if you want to fight the FTC, I’ll do it for you, but his retainer was multi-millions of dollars that I don’t have. He said, it will go to the US Supreme Court and then we’ll see. But if you don’t have that money and you want to treat patients, then I advise you to stop writing about it. He said, I’ve never done this before in my career, and it’s not right, but this is the world we live in right now.
But I said to him, hey, I’ve been writing this book on my experience with treating viruses. Can I publish it? He said, oh, your book has first amendment protection. He goes, yeah, you can publish anything you want.
[00:49:12] Ashley James: Okay, so explain that to me. You’re not protected by the First Amendment if you’re posting a blog on your website, but you are if you publish a book, why is that?
[00:49:23] Dr. David Brownstein: He said it’s not right, it should go to the Supreme Court, and it should be rectified, but that’s the way it is. He said, me personally, you do not have First Amendment protection. He goes, the book does. Books are treated differently than the web and anything you write.
So I published my book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, the therapy we’ve been doing. It’s been amazing. We just got through another round of COVID in Michigan, in the Detroit area where I live. We were, again, working long hours in the parking lot. I think we’re at the end of that. That seems pretty settled down now, but the therapy still works. There’s nothing better we have than our immune system. It’s what we should be focusing on more than anything as physicians. If the immune system has the basic raw materials it needs, it can do pretty, pretty wonderful things when it’s confronted with stress from a virus or something else.
[00:50:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. So you mentioned that part of your therapy was high doses of A, C, D, and iodine. Did you mention zinc?
[00:50:44] Dr. David Brownstein: No, I did not mention zinc because we did not use zinc as part of our therapy. It’s never been part of our therapy.
[00:50:50] Ashley James: Why is that?
[00:50:51] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, that’s a good question. Why is that is because I’ve been doing holistic medicine for 20 years checking people for nutritional and hormonal imbalances, and zinc is one of the things that I’ve been checking. It never was part of our therapy. So our therapy is what I told you, what you just repeated. I can’t explain why it was never part of our therapy, and part of it was because we’ve been checking zinc levels for years and rectifying zinc levels. Most of our patients weren’t low with zinc going into this thing, but we never found a need for zinc for treating viral illness. It just wasn’t.
[00:51:29] Ashley James: Your patients aren’t deficient, everything was good, and if you saw zinc deficiency, you would handle it.
[00:51:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Of course I would. Do I think zinc should be used for this thing? I can’t speak to you, I didn’t use it.
[00:51:41] Ashley James: Yes. Sure, sure, sure. That makes sense.
[00:51:44] Dr. David Brownstein: I didn’t need to use it. My patients did fine with what we gave them.
[00:51:47] Ashley James: I had COVID. Right after I gave birth and we lost our child, very traumatic. My body’s in shock. My immune system is tanking because I’m in grief and I just gave her, so postpartum. And then I had postpartum high blood pressure, which we weren’t sure if it was—I had no signs of preeclampsia during pregnancy, but it was very high the moment I gave birth, which also having paramedics work on your newborn for an hour while you’re begging for your daughter to be alive, I’m sure that raised my blood pressure. But my blood pressure was through the roof for the first time in my life. That’s a comorbidity in and of itself for COVID.
We think maybe one of the paramedics gave me COVID because a few days later, I developed symptoms, and my husband had it but he had a sniffly nose and he mowed the lawn for four hours in the height of his COVID. He’s like, yeah, I’m kind of tired and I was sniffling. That was it. We did quarantine just to protect everyone else. I’m not going to be a schmuck and just make anyone sick. So we stayed at home, obviously, and I was postpartum.
But I was hit really bad. Normally I’m a very healthy person, but knowing what my body had just been through with giving birth, grief, and high blood pressure from whatever it was from—whether it was grief or whether I did have all of a sudden, out of nowhere, have some preeclampsia. But I had no other symptoms of preeclampsia. It was just like, okay, well, the body acts weird after giving birth, who knows.
So I was hit really hard, I was in bed, and I was exhausted. And then I’d get really lightheaded and dizzy, and my blood pressure all of a sudden tanked into the double digits. I was like 94 over 46 or something crazy, like I was fainting, which I also read is something that can happen. When you have COVID, you can experience all of a sudden these dips or drop in blood pressure. And those on blood pressure meds, there’s this whole article that talked about blood pressure medication and how doctors need to know that patients should be taken off of them because it can cause massive kidney damage to be on blood pressure meds while someone has the active infection that they’re fighting.
I didn’t have a lot of the symptoms like I didn’t have the headaches. There’s a bunch of things I didn’t have, but it was really hard to breathe. My lungs felt like I had asthma. I’ve never had asthma in my life but describing it, it’s like I took a breath and everything hurt, everything was tight, and it was very hard to even get air into my lungs. It felt like it was all tight like asthma. And I lost my sense of smell, it was crazy because I have essential oils. I was just like, all of a sudden I can’t smell peppermint. This is crazy.
What I did was double my zinc. I went from 30 milligrams to 90, and two days later, my sense of smell came back. I was like, okay, maybe my body was using up more zinc to fight the virus and I dipped into a deficiency and so my smells went away, and then it came back when I took more. But basically, my smell came back the moment I took more zinc, which I thought was really cool.
Then my husband noticed his sense of smell went away. So I said, okay, take more of your zinc. He did and his sense of smell came right back. I was like, this is cool because some people lose their sense of smell for a while. I’ve heard weeks and some people, even months later, say they don’t really feel like their taste or smell is back to normal whereas mine is totally back to normal. I definitely incorporated zinc into it. I was taking everything I could, everything I could get my hands on. And now NAC, which Amazon has taken out of their store even though NAC is not illegal. But this is really frustrating.
Also, Amazon also took down I think Colloidal Silver a while ago because they’re like, how dare you use natural medicine to support your body in fighting an infection. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen. This is pretty crazy that major stores like Amazon are limiting our access to natural therapeutics that support the body’s ability to fight infection. Why is that? It boggles my mind.
I’m very excited about your book and I think listeners are. Considering the fact that your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses is protected, giving you free speech, you’re allowed to share everything that you’re not allowed to share online. Are there things in your book that you aren’t even comfortable with saying in an interview? Are there things that are so shocking that you couldn’t say it here? Are you allowed to talk freely about what’s in your book?
[00:56:54] Dr. David Brownstein: First off, I’m sorry, for your loss. I didn’t know any of that.
[00:56:59] Ashley James: Yes, the last month or so has been a little crazy for me.
[00:57:07] Dr. David Brownstein: But no, there’s nothing shocking in the book. It’s a 25-year history of what we’ve been doing. There’s still good news out there, there’s good news in that book. Your immune system was designed by somebody for a purpose, and the purpose was so you can survive, have kids, and perpetuate the species, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. This is what should be done, in my opinion. I think that when you look back at this, and basically CDC, NAAT, Dr. Fauci, and everybody is basically saying there’s nothing to do. Just stay home, social distance, and wear your mask. That’s it.
That was incorrect. We should be supporting the immune system. It’s not rocket science. It’s pretty basic stuff in my mind. I wrote a peer-reviewed paper, I published a book on it, and we’re still doing it. I don’t know. I feel like I’m in Alice in Wonderland where down is up and up is down right now. It’s sad, it’s really sad. When the truth finally comes out about this, people could see through the fog of fear that’s been thrown at them, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of angry Americans out there. I mean, right now, they’re just placid Americans, I don’t quite understand that.
[00:58:40] Ashley James: I don’t understand it either.
[00:58:42] Dr. David Brownstein: We should be in the streets. Europe they’re in the streets. They’re not happy with the situation they’re in. We just do nothing here. We’re just complacent sheep. I’m not quite certain why that’s the case.
[00:58:56] Ashley James: Maybe they’re drinking the fluoride in the water.
[00:58:59] Dr. David Brownstein: Maybe.
[00:59:02] Ashley James: Well, it’s probably because so many people are listening to their friends and family and listening to the mainstream media, and the narrative is very convincing. But we have to start thinking for ourselves. We really do. We have to put on the critical thinking cap and go, okay, I’m going to question everything. I want people to question what I say. I want people to question what you say. I want people to question everything, become the Doubting Thomas. Don’t just blindly listen to anyone. I don’t care how much of an expert they are. I don’t care what level in the government they are, what level in science they are, how big up in leadership they are, question everything. We really, really, really need to put on our thinking caps, what’s going on here?
[00:59:53] Dr. David Brownstein: Let me tell you, I bring back the analogy of Vioxx. Vioxx was a COX-2 inhibitor. It was in the 2000s I think when it came out. The headlines were, we have a new anti-inflammatory medication and it’s not going to cause GI bleeding because tens of thousands of Americans die a year from GI bleeding due to NSAIDs, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use like Motrin, Advil, and prescription NSAIDs.
Here’s Vioxx, it’s not going to cause GI bleeding and it’s going to treat them because it works in the COX-2 pathway instead of a COX-1 pathway, which most anti-inflammatories work on both COX-1 and COX-2.
So, here I go look up the mechanism of the drug when it was announced it’s coming out. I look at the pathways, I look at my biochem charts, I’m like, hey, this is going to prostacyclin, which is an important prostaglandin that needs to be produced to keep blood vessels dilated. So if you don’t have prostaglandin, the blood vessels are going to constrict. If you don’t have prostacyclin, the blood vessels can constrict and you can get strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots.
I saw that and I remember writing about it and said, this may be causing strokes and heart attacks. I’m not going to use this drug, and I never prescribed Vioxx once.
Well, the consequence of Vioxx coming to the market, FDA-approved, touted in all the headlines as the greatest advancement in NSAID therapy. Fifty thousand Americans died that didn’t have to, over 150,000 had strokes and heart attacks that didn’t have to, and the drug was pulled from the market. Merck paid billions of dollars in fines. There was no reason it should have been approved in the first place.
There are many incidents of conventional medicine, missing the boat, and being late to the boat. People do need to think for themselves. They need to not rely on TV personalities and fear to make their decisions. Because really, through this whole COVID crisis, this was being driven by fear decisions from Dr. Fauci on down. It was a fear-based approach of locking yourself in your basement, social distance, and wearing 10 masks when you go outside. Look what we got for it, almost 600,000 dead while we waited for the vaccine. That was just a mess.
[01:02:36] Ashley James: I want to talk about the vaccine, we’re going to get into that in a bit. In your book, do you talk about what we can do to support the body in preventing getting infected? This is my thing, my son was exposed and had zero symptoms. He was exposed to both of us.
We all sleep in the same room. He has his own bed, but we’re all in the same big room. I do that because actually, he has asthma. We have it under control now, but I want to listen to him. I’m like a paranoid mom and I want to listen to his breathing because oftentimes, he would go into respiratory distress at night. He’s been hospitalized twice. It’s allergy-induced, and one of the things he’s allergic to is dust mites. That’s hard with a house that’s carpeted. We just stay on top of vacuuming, but we can’t get rid of all the dust mites in the world, so I like to listen to his breathing.
But he was in the same room as us, he’s in the same house as us, we hugged him. I’m sure he grabbed our glass and started drinking from it. He’s obviously breathing our air. Apparently, this is highly contagious, what I’ve been told, and he never had any symptoms. What I’ve heard is that people can get exposed to the virus, the body will mount a response, the immune system will figure out how to handle it, and they won’t have any symptoms. But some people develop symptoms and develop this COVID-19 sickness. Maybe you could explain why some people either have incredibly minor symptoms or no symptoms at all. Is there anything we can do proactively to support our body so we’re one of those people?
[01:04:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I mean, look, we’re all unique biochemical individuals. I can’t explain why some people’s households got nailed with it and some people got very minimal or didn’t get it at all. I mean, that’s life and that’s how things go. But there are things people can do to minimize the risk of becoming a statistic with COVID, becoming a severe statistic or a death statistic. But it’s not just COVID, it’s with any viral illness, it’s with any infectious illness. If you have a properly functioning immune system, we were designed to withstand things like this. How do you do it?
You do the basics. Number one, eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined food products like refined salt, flour, oil, and sugar. Number two, maintain adequate hydration. Drink half your body weight in water. Take your body weight in pounds, divide it by two, and that many ounces of water a day should be your minimum.
Number three, maintain adequate salt levels. My book, Salt Your Way to Health talks about that where salt is the second major constituent next to water. We need adequate salt levels. Many people find themselves every flu season in the hospital because they become hyponatremic. Their sodium levels fall when they become ill. We want to start off with good sodium levels when you get sick, good salt levels.
Part of the basics for my practice is maintaining adequate iodine levels. Iodine levels have been falling over 50% over the last 40 years across the United States. The vast majority of people are iodine deficient. My testing has shown over 97% of people are iodine deficient, most of them severely iodine deficient. Iodine deficiency explains the epidemic of cancer of the breast, ovaries, uterus, prostate, pancreas, and thyroid that we’re seeing in this country. One in seven women has breast cancer, and one in three men has prostate cancer. Thyroid cancer is the fastest-growing cancer in the US.
I say, iodine deficiency, if not the underlying cause, is a huge part of that underlying cause of why we’re suffering so many endocrine cancers across the US. That’s just basic stuff that I think people should be doing. And then you should work with your holistic doctor to correct your nutritional and hormonal imbalances. When you get exposed to a viral illness, bacterial illness, a parasitic illness, or a stressor in your life, your immune system and your body can fight back and do what it’s designed to do, do what we were programmed to do by our maker. The proof is what I’ve seen in my practice for 28 years. It does work.
On the other hand, you can eat the typical American diet and call it the standard American diet or the sad diet full of refined foods, way too much sugar, way too much refined flour, salt, and oil and be overweight like 2/3 of Americans are. We don’t exercise, we don’t drink enough water, and we probably drink too much alcohol, especially during COVID. And then what’s going to happen to you when you get hit with some stressors, some viral illness? It’s not going to be kind to those people.
I think that this COVID-19 brought forth everything that I’ve been talking about for 28 years, everything I’m seeing in my practice, everything that’s wrong with our country health-wise, and everything that’s wrong with conventional medicine all in one package. It’s an ugly look for us.
Here we spend 20% of our GNP on health care. What the hell do we get for it? It’s 600,000 people dying when Dr. McCullough and others feel that’s probably at least 75% of people with coronavirus, if we treated them early, tried to support their immune system, and treated them with therapies that were known to help support the immune system or to help other viral illnesses, we probably would have had over 75% of people still alive from this.
Maybe we’ll get 150,000 people dead from Coronavirus, which is basically a bad flu season. We wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. We wouldn’t be still talking about masks, social distancing, gloves, and all that stuff. But we’re not, we are here. People need to wake up. They need to get past that fog of fear; start reading for themselves; and start adapting eating better, exercising, and taking better care of their bodies. The proof is in the pudding. It’ll pay off when you’re exposed to something like SARS-CoV-2.
[01:09:29] Ashley James: Your protocol, which you’ve used for many years for other viral infections and lung infections is working tremendously well. I love the statistics that you have that you’re showing. The proof’s in the pudding. The proof in the pudding is in the eating. You are showing that you are having a better outcome than we’re telling you all to sit on your hands and stop treating them and just let him go to the hospital and wait until they get a trial vaccine. That which just again blows my mind that that’s what doctors are being told. So you have this great protocol.
I do have a question. Have you looked into glutathione and supporting glutathione? I’ve heard people have really good success with it. I personally also took oral glutathione and noticed a very positive shift in my health while my body was fighting the infection.
[01:10:40] Dr. David Brownstein: We use glutathione in our practice both orally and intravenously. I’ve used glutathione for the majority of my holistic practice. However, it wasn’t part of our holistic protocol. You should certainly want to have optimal glutathione levels when you get sick. The best I can tell you is it wasn’t part of our protocol. We just didn’t use it and we got the results we got. But I use glutathione in my practice and it is very important. When you take Tylenol, Tylenol blocks the production of glutathione. So if you take a lot of Tylenol, you’re going to be glutathione deficient.
I was talking to my patients on the phone when they were calling and they couldn’t breathe, don’t take Tylenol, unless you absolutely have to. Just get in the bathtub or sponge off with cool water to keep your temperature down. I didn’t want people taking Tylenol unless their fever was over 103.5. It’s because it would deplete glutathione levels, but we didn’t use it as part of our protocol.
It was high dose vitamin A—100,000 units A day for four days. Vitamin C, 1000 milligrams every hour until they got loose stools and they felt better. Vitamin D, 50,000 units a day for four days. Iodine 25 milligrams a day if they weren’t using it, and double whatever they were using if they were going into it with iodine for four days. And then nebulizing 0.03% solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine every hour while they were sick, and then lessen it as they got better.
Then they’d come in the parking lot, they’re still coming in. Not doing as many now, thank goodness. It’s not as bad here. But coming in the parking lot for IV of vitamin C and peroxide and ozone shots. Keep in mind, ozone stimulates glutathione production. Vitamin C helps regenerate glutathione in the body. So, there are mechanisms to get glutathione levels up through doing what I was doing.
[01:12:52] Ashley James: And these patients of yours, you’ve seen them for a while, you’ve helped them adjust their diet, you’ve already been working on helping them with any comorbidities they may have had such as high blood pressure, obesity, or type two diabetes. These are patients who have been seeing a holistic doctor and have been working on building their health.
[01:13:14] Dr. David Brownstein: They were part of our practice.
[01:13:16] Ashley James: Hopefully they were already healthy, to begin with, or at least they didn’t step into this illness with nutrient deficiencies. These were healthier than normal people, would you say?
[01:13:30] Dr. David Brownstein: Probably. That’s one of the criticisms of my study is that they were healthier than regular people. Well, I don’t think that’s a criticism. I think that’s praise. I’m glad they were healthier. But look, we had our share of people with low pulse ox, who couldn’t breathe, who we were scared. We called them every night, the sick ones, to check on them until we felt they were out of the woods. There were some people that kept me up at night that I wasn’t sure are they going to make this or not?
COVID was very random and it seemed to hit harder than others. I was shocked that sometimes some of the healthiest people got really nailed with it. But again, the end of it is our results speak for themselves.
[01:14:12] Ashley James: They do.
[01:14:13] Dr. David Brownstein: It’s a powerful message.
[01:14:17] Ashley James: It is. Who should read your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses?
[01:14:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I think anyone interested in how to properly support the immune system, so it can overcome viral, other illnesses, and other stressors. So who should read it? I think we should all read it. I’ve written 16 books, people ask me, how do you write? I have a full-time practice, I write a newsletter. I was blogging every night during COVID and still writing all this stuff. The books come easy for me because either I write them in one of two moods, either I’m really excited about something, or I’m really irritated about something. But there’s a passion either way with it.
What I write in my books is what I see works in my practice, or what I see doesn’t work in my practice like my Drugs that Don’t Work book. What I see work is easy for me. I’ve done this enough to know this therapy works. I’ve done testosterone enough to know that it helps people with heart disease. I’ve diagnosed thyroid enough to know that I feel like I know what I’m doing. It’s not like I’m not learning, I’m learning every day in my practice and I’m changing things up. I write about what I see works in the practice.
I wrote this book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses because we were seeing it work. We’ve seen it work for 28 years, and we saw it work through COVID. I told you the story. I wasn’t sure, this was a different corona strain, but it helps a third of the flu-like illnesses every year or coronavirus, why wouldn’t it work? That was my view, and it did.
Who should read this book? We’re dealing with SARS COVID 2 right now. Next year, it’s going to be SARS COVID 3 or some other thing. The year after that it would be SARS COVID 4, 5, and 6, or whatever else is out there, This isn’t going to be the last of this stuff. We’re going to have to learn to have a good immune system going into this, otherwise, we’re going to be going through what we just went through over the past year and I don’t want to do that again. I don’t think our country can handle it again.
[01:16:40] Ashley James: No. I mean, we’re the 99%. We need to help our fellow friends, family, and neighbors learn this kind of information. We all need to protect ourselves with knowledge and with the truth. So absolutely buy A Holistic Approach to Viruses. Read it, then pass it along, get all your friends and family to read it, and share this podcast with them. They need to understand that there are doctors like Dr. David Brownstein who are successfully helping those who are infected with the coronavirus. They’re having way better outcomes than just sitting, waiting, and being sick, way better outcomes. And that we can support the body’s ability to fight it off, support the body’s structure and function of the body to heal. We can do that with natural medicine. And I just love the work you do. I love your books. Definitely, please come back on the show.
[01:17:50] Dr. David Brownstein: I’d love to.
[01:17:50] Ashley James: Thank you. Yes, absolutely. We got to go through more of your information because every book you’ve written, I feel like Alice in Wonderland, I don’t know which rabbit hole to go down. There are all these rabbit holes, I can’t wait. I’m very excited.
I do have a few questions about your protocol, and I’m sure that you specify in your book as well. The A, the C, the D, the iodine. It doesn’t matter what form someone gets it in. Like vitamin C, there’s Ester C, there’s these Buffered C’s or whatever. Does it matter what? Obviously D is D3? But is there a specific kind that we make sure that’s the most bioavailable, it’s the cleanest, or are there certain brands that you say this is the best because they’re better quality?
[01:18:39] Dr. David Brownstein: It’s a good question. Before we get into A, C, D, and iodine, the more important thing is to eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined foods. Drink enough water. Maintain adequate salt levels, and maintain optimal iodine levels going into any illness. But having said that, I recommend in the book, ascorbic acid is the form of vitamin C. I don’t think it’s that crucial what form of vitamin C. I certainly don’t think you have to spend expensive amounts of vitamin C. Some companies complain there’s is more absorbable than others. I haven’t seen that occur in my practice.
As far as vitamin A goes, that’s really the only thing I guess to make a point of. I’m talking vitamin A here, not beta carotene. Beta carotene does not have the immune support properties that vitamin A does. I use an emulsified form of vitamin A. Vitamin A can be toxic like all the fat-soluble vitamins we take large amounts of. The four days of this is, in my experience, hasn’t been toxic to anybody. But the emulsified form has less chance of toxicity too. Vitamin D, like you said, is vitamin D3. And then iodine is a combination of iodine and iodide. I write about that in my iodine book. It’s Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. It is important to use the right kind of iodine for whole body support of iodine.
[01:20:10] Ashley James: Oh, man, I got to have you back on the show because I want to start going down this iodine rabbit hole but it’s not really relevant to this conversation. It’s more of just I want to talk more about iodine. I definitely have to have you back. We’ll just leave that on a cliffhanger and say listeners got to keep listening because we’re going to have you back for a whole iodine talk for sure.
I’d love to finish off the interview by discussing these experimental tests, this experimental thing they’re doing where they’re calling it a vaccine, but I don’t even think you can actually call it a vaccine yet because it’s still an experiment. We’re the guinea pigs. We’re not even doing an animal trial. You know, all the animals died or a majority of them died when they did animal trials in the past.
Just like they make flu vaccines, they’ve been trying to make corona vaccines for a long time and all the animals died. But let’s just skip the animals and go to human trials, incredibly scary. This is a trial. This is not an approved drug. This is what really scares me. We have to understand, this isn’t about anti-vax or pro-vax, and that’s what the mainstream media wants to just taint this picture. This is not about that.
I know doctors who are incredibly pro-vaccine who like, yes, I got all the shots. They are very pro-vaccine and they’re incredibly scared of what’s going on right now. So I’d love to know, if you could just paint the picture, what are your thoughts on these trials that are going on right now?
[01:21:55] Dr. David Brownstein: Okay, so the vaccine for COVID. I wrote a long chapter about that in my book, my virus book. I hope the vaccine is safe and effective, but the last two words in that chapter are we’ll see. This is a phase three experiment undergoing right now. As far as the animals go, the animals are waiting for us because they’re not going to take until they see if the human trials are favorable or not. They’re waiting. This is the first time in history that a vaccine has been used like this. The best two words I give you are we’ll see.
Do I think the vaccine should be used for kids? The death rate for kids is near zero, as near zero as you can get it. No, I don’t think the vaccine should be used for kids. Should the vaccine be used for people under 70 where you have a 99.7% chance of surviving? I guess the people can decide that one. Should it be used for over 70 when there’s up to a 5% death rate for those who get COVID? Maybe we could consider it for them. But look, I think if people had a healthier immune system this thing overall doesn’t kill the same percentage that kills the flu. The problem is, it’s killed more people because it’s a novel virus and we’re so unhealthy in our country.
I think the big mistake we made was telling everybody to just wait for the vaccine, wait for the vaccine. This is a new technology that hasn’t been used before, and I am not very quick to use new drugs as I told you with Vioxx.
Let me give you this analogy. I remember when I was a resident, I was rounding with Dr. Solomon. He was so knowledgeable, I thought he knew everything. He was a good family doctor. I said to him, Dr. Solomon, how do you keep up with all these new drugs that are coming out all the time? He says, David, that’s easy. The drug hasn’t been out for two years, use something else. Why would you consider using it? They don’t study well enough. I was a resident back then, I wasn’t even a holistic doctor. I was just a regular doctor and I took his advice to heart, and I certainly took it to heart with Vioxx, which killed all those people.
What do I think about this vaccine? I tell you, I think we’re moving way too fast. And if this vaccine turns out to be problematic, we have vaccinated half of our country right now, 160 million people have it. What the hell are we going to do If this turns out to be a problem going down the road? We’re really not going to know if it’s a problem for a couple of years fully, but we’re going to find out a lot this fall when coronavirus comes back. We’ll see how people’s immune systems respond who have had this vaccine.
I hope it’s safe. I hope it’s effective. I hope it’s a wonderful thing and it’s protected a bunch of people, but I can only leave you with we’ll see. People need to study it, people need to make their own decision. I’m not so thrilled about rolling out something that hasn’t gone through proper safety studies. If this turns into a problem, what the heck are we going to do in this country?
[01:25:36] Ashley James: Especially because all our first responders got it.
[01:25:38] Dr. David Brownstein: Not all the first responders. Not all of us. That’s not true. Now remember, if you look at some of those numbers, I still see the numbers. There’s 40% to 50% of nurses out there who aren’t getting it. The reason they’re not getting it is because they’re on the front line and they’re seeing some of the side effects with these vaccines. We’ve seen in our practice some serious side effects with it.
[01:25:57] Ashley James: What are the side effects that you’ve seen?
[01:25:59] Dr. David Brownstein: In our small practice, we’ve seen three strokes, we’ve seen a couple of pulmonary embolisms, we’re up to six blood clots, and then the host of other problems, some serious other problems. If that’s happening in my small practice, we’re not solely just seeing this, this is happening elsewhere too. I think that time will tell. I’m hoping it’s safe and effective. I think people need to, again, not react as part of fear with this issue but study it and make their decision about what they want to do.
[01:26:44] Ashley James: I’m not a guinea pig. I don’t put myself in drug trials.
[01:26:53] Dr. David Brownstein: This is a drug trial.
[01:26:54] Ashley James: This is a drug trial. And the fact that there are companies, not that I would go to Dick’s Burgers anyway. But here in Seattle, we have Dick’s Burgers. It’s like a really popular local burger joint and they have a sign outside that says, if you’re not going to wear a mask, you have to show your vaccine card to us. Doesn’t that violate HIPAA? That blows my mind.
[01:27:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Show us your papers.
[01:27:24] Ashley James: Right, show us your papers. And then I went to Chipotle a few days ago and they have a sign up that says if you’re, you don’t have to wear a mask. I’m like, oh, all I read was you don’t have to wear a mask so I walked in and the manager’s like, wear your mask. Where’s your mask? I just pointed at the sign, I’m like, your sign says I don’t have to wear a mask. I mean, they can’t. It’s against HIPAA violations to ask me medical questions like that, at least that’s my understanding.
But the fact that we’re being pushed in this direction by businesses, by the media, and we’re being peer pressured. The way they’re doing it, they’re getting your friends and family to pressure you. I’ve heard from several people that they’re feeling pressured by their friends and family. I can’t go to my bridge club or I can’t go to my book club until I get it. Why in the world were you even discussing your private business? That’s private. Your medical decisions are private, and yet the way that they’re marketing it is that we got to do it right now.
You mean, you want the entire population to be in a drug trial? We don’t know the long-term efficacy and safety of this. What is going on? Again, very Orwellian. I’m very concerned for people.
[01:29:04] Dr. David Brownstein: Concerned for our country.
[01:29:05] Ashley James: I’m very concerned for all countries. Look at Israel where people’s freedoms are completely taken away because if you don’t have your vaccine passport, you can’t even practically be a citizen. This is what we’re hearing is that all rights are being taken away, it’s very scary. I keep hearing about they still have outbreaks there because again, trial, right?
Maybe you could speak to explaining vaccines because I think this would be good for those of us to understand the difference between marketing and reality. Marketing is vaccines are this bulletproof, all of a sudden, you won’t get the infection. You won’t get the infection. You won’t be infected, but that’s not what vaccines are. Vaccines don’t stop you from getting an infection.
[01:30:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, a true vaccine should. The measles vaccine should stop you from getting measles. The chickenpox vaccine should stop you from getting chickenpox. This vaccine has never been shown to stop you from getting coronaviruses. In the original studies, they were shown to stop severe illness and hospitalization. It has never been shown to stop transmission, and it’s never been shown to stop you from getting sick.
So this is different from other vaccines that we’ve had, and that’s why you’re seeing some places on the internet where they’re saying, well, it’s really not a vaccine. It’s a genetic device or the kind of medical device to modify your genetic material. But this is a whole different mechanism that they’re titling a vaccine, which is different from how we’re used to vaccines as we know them.
If we take the chickenpox vaccine, I was a resident when the chickenpox vaccine came out and that really stopped chickenpox. Kids don’t get chickenpox anywhere near what they used to get it. This is different. This one’s different. It is a grand experiment and we’ll see. There are many people out there who feel like you do, they don’t want to be part of any big pharma experiments. But this is where we are. I think if people were more aware of that, we see some more hesitation and some more thinking about this. Right now, people aren’t thinking, they’re just reacting in fear that that’s the only way to protect themselves.
[01:31:58] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s the sad part is buying into the fear. So we don’t need to buy into the fear, we need to educate ourselves. Knowledge is power. The more knowledge we have, the more we can utilize the more tools we have in our tool belt.
Slow down, take a deep breath, take in the information. Anytime you make a medical decision, one of my friends was deciding whether she was going to get radiation or not after chemotherapy, or when she was deciding to do chemotherapy or not. They want to just rush her in and they tell her all statistics that make her afraid so that she’ll take immediate action. I thought that was very manipulative.
Let her take a deep breath, let her do the research, and let her decide for herself. They wanted to schedule, okay, we’re going to start your chemo tomorrow. If you don’t do this, you’re going to die. Do you really need to give someone that just found out they have cancer scare tactics? You don’t do that, that’s not helping. Let the person Take a deep breath and give them true informed consent, give them all the information—the good, the bad, the ugly, and also tell them about alternative therapies.
But we’re not experiencing true informed consent with this drug trial because we definitely don’t know all the side effects yet. People are still reporting to VAERS, and that’s even being manipulated. And then they’re not allowing physicians to practice any kind of alternative therapies, so we can’t really get true informed consent. It just boggles my mind.
But what we can do is we can get your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, and we can learn what’s really working to support the structure and function of the body to fight viruses. Thank you for writing this and thank you for coming here and sticking your neck out. They’re trying to silence you and you’re sticking your neck out. I love that you found a workaround by publishing your book. I’m excited that this information is getting out there.
[01:34:05] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, thank you for having me, Ashley. It was a nice talk. Hopefully, we can take the fear knob and start turning it down and then we can become rational people again and make better healthcare decisions.
[01:34:20] Ashley James: Absolutely. And listeners should go to your website, drbrownstein.com. And also, I love this because you’ve been doing this for so long. You bought these really good URLs, centerforholisticmedicine.com. I love it. Those are your websites, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. David Brownstein does including his books will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We’re definitely going to have you back on the show because there are so many rabbit holes we could go down with all the information and all your wonderful books. I’m very excited to have you back.
[01:34:54] Dr. David Brownstein: Thank you.
Get Connected with Dr. David Brownstein!Dr. Brown’s Holistic Medicine
Center For Holistic Medicine
Books by Dr. David BrownsteinA Holistic Approach To Viruses
Drugs That Don’t Work and Natural Therapies That Do! 2nd Edition
Iodine: Why You Need It. Why You Can’t Live Without It. 5th Edition
Ozone: The Miracle Therapy
The Guide to a Dairy-Free Diet
The Guide to a Gluten-Free Diet
Check out more wonderful books by Dr. Brownstein!
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Highlights:
True informed consent Are face masks safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 transmission What you can do to prevent yourself from getting COVID-19 Absolute risk reduction vs, relative risk reduction of COVID-19 vaccinesDr. Paul Thomas is back on the show, and he catches us up on what has happened to him since the last time he was on the show. He shares his research about vaccinated and unvaccinated kids and also some studies about COVID-19. He also touches briefly about masking and its safety and efficacy for children and adults. Dr. Thomas also gives some tips on how to stay healthy.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode and the next two episodes after this one are going to be a series. I am excited and nervous to publish them.
There is a threat that might eliminate my podcast and that is free speech, so I bring you three doctors, these are medical doctors. One of them is also a PhD, cardiologist, and research scientist. Today’s doctor, Dr. Paul Thomas, is a pediatric general physician of over 30 years, and each of my guests—this and the next two, the three episodes—are all doctors who’ve been practicing for a very long time, 30+ years each I believe, and they are being silenced for speaking the truth, for sharing science, and it’s a science that has been so controversial because it goes against what is being taught in the mainstream.
So, I invite you to open your minds, take in all the information, become critical thinkers if you’re not already, and use this information to empower you. We will not fear monger, we will not coerce, it is all about sharing free information and allowing us to think for ourselves. Please share my podcast with those you care about, share this episode with those who want to keep learning, growing, and continue to educate themselves on the best choices possible that they can make for themselves and their family as it pertains to their health.
I interviewed Dr. Paul Thomas back in episode 224 and he shared the stories in his life as a child growing up in Africa to white missionary parents and the perspective it gave him in order to become a doctor. And then his experiences in his early career watching children go through regular wellness checks as we know them today, and experience side effects from vaccines, and see how the CDC schedule was not optimal for every patient. That led him to create his solution, which was to use one vaccine at a time and watch and see how the child reacts to it.
He then wrote a book called The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and his whole approach is that he’s not anti-vaccine, he’s also not pro-vaccine. This sort of upsets people on both sides of the spectrum. I hope that you, like me try to stay in the middle, take in all the information, and not vilify either side. But just take in all the information in order to make informed decisions. Instead of being pressured by fear or coercion, make informed decisions. He shares some amazing information, and he did back in 224. So you can go back and listen to that episode as well.
But today, he shares some information that is so empowering, that is so mind-blowing. I hope you go to the links of the studies he has published in journals that show the findings of his studies. And if you’re like me, you will get excited because this information is empowering when we take it all in without emotion and we really look at it, and then we can decide how to navigate our health choices based on all of the research in this information.
So, I’m excited for you to listen to this episode, and I really, really want you to share it with those that you think will help them to also make informed choices in their life to help them. So, thank you for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Thank you for sharing.
If you ever go to your favorite podcast directory like iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, wherever you listen to my show. If you ever go there and you find my show has been all of a sudden not there anymore, then I have been censored. I post my show also on LBRY. I believe it’s called LBRY. I post it everywhere I possibly can. But just so you know, if you don’t find me there, you can also email me, [email protected]. If you ever all of a sudden can’t find my podcast, if I’ve been censored, deleted, and blocked, just know that I’ll still be publishing in places where censorship doesn’t exist or where there’s still parts of the internet where freedom of speech is still protected. So I will continue to publish in those areas.
You can follow me on LBRY and come to the Learn True Health Facebook group as well. As long as Facebook allows us to be there, we will be there. We’ve got a robust and beautiful Facebook community. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and we have a wonderful community of people who are answering questions, seeking advice and seeking solutions to grow, to learn, to achieve true health.
Enjoy today’s interview and please also listen to the next two interviews that I’ll be publishing because I think that this is a very interesting series to publish and get out there, especially for those who didn’t know this information before. Take care.
[00:06:14] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 461. I am so excited for today’s guest. I’ve had Dr. Paul Thomas on the show. It was episode 224 back in February of 2018. Can you believe how much time has passed? Can we just get on a time machine and go back to 2018? That’d be so great.
[00:06:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. Well, thank you, Ashley, for having me on your show again. So much has happened in my life since early 2018, oh my goodness.
Ashley James: Well, when we had you on the show, you shared some amazing stories. I’ve always referred back to our episode together because I like to try to stay neutral on many topics that are controversial and allow the guests through science and through real research help people to better understand their medical choices.
I think that when we polarize a topic, we really become ignorant because making a choice that’s emotional, making a medical choice based on a belief that’s uninformed can end up harming us. Or making a medical choice based on, well, my doctor just told me to and he created a lot of fear. My mother-in-law is really pushing for it. When there’s fear, emotion, and people are pushing us or we feel peer pressure to make a medical decision for ourselves or our children, we’re not fully informed. We end up paying the price, and so many have.
[00:07:57] Dr. Paul Thomas: Absolutely.
[00:07:58] Ashley James: What I love about what you do is you believe in true informed consent. and I really learned that from you on such a deep level. I’ve actually had to say that since you and I talked on the show in 2018, I’ve had to say that to several doctors—I want informed consent. They just stopped in their tracks and they switched gears. They’re like, oh, okay. It was great because I could see that they were like, okay, I can’t just tell this person what to do. I have to show them all of their options and really go through them.
I actually had one doctor get very excited. My son ended up in a children’s hospital with respiratory distress, it was very scary. Before they stuck a needle in him for an IV, what they were actually giving him magnesium, I had no idea what they were doing. I’m like, I need informed consent. She stopped and she got really excited. She’s like, okay, great. Let me tell you, this is what we’re doing, these are the possible side effects, these are the benefits, these are the alternatives, and she really walked me through it.
I’m like, wow, the doctor that wants to give you true informed consent wants to empower you to make good choices, to make the best choices that you can. The doctors that get upset, that’s a doctor I’d be afraid of. So, I learned so much from you and our listeners learned so much from you. I heard the other day from one of my friends who’s in the medical field that you have been up against it, and she heard you in another interview talk about some very interesting things that have been going on. I’ve been watching you, I follow you on Facebook, and I would love for you to share with the listeners what has happened since 2018 since we had you on the show.
[00:09:41] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my goodness. A lot, and I’ll walk you through the key points. Thank you for highlighting informed consent. It is the ethical principle upon which all medical procedures should be judged. If you’re going to die right in front of me, if I don’t do something, you would just jump in and do something, right?
[00:10:02] Ashley James: Yes.
[00:10:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: But anything else, if you’re not at risk of dying right now, then if I’m proposing a procedure or a treatment—whether it be medication, surgery, vaccines—you deserve as a patient to be informed of the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives, and one of the alternatives for any medical procedure should always be putting it off, not doing it. Because if I’m just here to coerce you, to convince you, to get you to do my procedure, that’s not true informed consent.
I mean, you could pretend like it is, but you as the consumer, you have to know that it is your option, and you’re not going to be judged, you’re not going to be looked down upon, you’re not going to be made to feel bad if you choose not to follow the advice.
Doctors typically have what they think is best, so generally, we go with whatever our doctors say. But, in the area of vaccines, which has been the world I’m most known for, I mean, I’m a general pediatrician. I also do addiction medicine. I really focus on preventative health and wellness, but the area that I’ve become well known for is this vaccine issue, which like you said, it’s so polarizing.
Part of the reason it’s so polarizing is that the mainstream mantra that is funded by huge pharma dollars is the simple marketing slogan—vaccines are safe and effective. That, folks, is not a medical fact. It is a marketing slogan. But unfortunately, physicians, the public, everybody has just adopted that as if it were a truth, as if that were science. So just to dispel that, vaccines are safe and effective because I’m not anti- or pro-vaccine, just like I’m not anti- or pro-antibiotics, or any other procedure. We have to look at the specifics and individualize for this patient in front of us and go through the pros and the cons—risks, benefits, alternatives.
So, vaccines are safe. Well, that’s obviously false. There is no safe medication. How risky a given vaccine depends on the vaccine, and we’ll probably get to this, but COVID is by far, the COVID vaccine is the most dangerous vaccine that has ever been brought to market. We have over 5000 deaths already from the vaccines reported in VAERS, which we know catches about 1%-2%, no more than 10% for sure of the adverse events. It’s more deaths than all other deaths for the past 30 years from all vaccines combined, think about that.
[00:12:47] Ashley James: Can you say that again?
[00:12:49] Dr. Paul Thomas: There are more deaths from the COVID vaccine than there have been deaths from all other vaccines combined over the entire duration of the VAERS system, which is 30 years. This vaccine is so dangerous it should be pulled from the market, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many physicians and scientists. But those opinions are silenced, you don’t hear it on the news, and there is massive suppression of that sort of information because it just seems like this program has a life of its own. They don’t seem to know how to pull back because they’ve invested I don’t know, hundreds of billions of dollars or something, some massive amount. I mean, they’re trying to vaccinate the planet with an experimental vaccine.
Anyway, I went off on the COVID vaccine a little too soon because this guy’s crazy. You know folks, you got to look at the data, and the data is very convincing. But let me walk you back through my journey since we were last together.
So, in 2016 I wrote a book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and that book is not anti-vaccine or pro-vaccine. In fact, I pissed everybody off with that book because the people who truly hate vaccines call me baby killer because I am recommending vaccines, and the people who are pro-vaccine hate me because I’m not recommending all the vaccines or I’m making it too complicated to follow the CDC schedule. People are not going to get all their vaccines, therefore, I’m harming public health.
Well, that is the narrative that has been used by the Oregon Medical Board to come after me. And actually, since around the time you and I talked, actually it was that month I believe. Maybe it was after we talked, around that time I got a notice from the Oregon Medical Board that said prove. They’d already been hitting me with a few complaints. I know there’s an effort to attempt to get rid of me, let’s just say it that way.
I am seen by some as dangerous for the public. If I’m causing patients not to follow the CDC schedule and all I do is give informed consent. I tell people the risks, the benefits, the alternatives, and when you really get the truth about risks and benefits, some vaccines just plain don’t make sense. The easy one is Hepatitis B for newborns.
So in America, every newborn in the hospital is given an injection of 250 micrograms of aluminum for a disease Hepatitis B that you catch from sex and IV drug use. The babies in my practice frankly are not having sex and not sharing dirty needles, so unless their birth mother has Hepatitis B, their risk for that disease is absolutely zero.
The risk of injecting that much aluminum is known, it is fairly significant, although it’s not recognized so that’s the issue. Those of us who are aware of aluminum toxicity, it creates problems with your immune system, allergies, and autoimmunity. We know that it affects neurodevelopment. Since 1990 and before, there were studies about aluminum toxicity and how it harms neurodevelopment, so why would you cause something that’s going to affect your baby’s development and brain for a disease they have zero risks for?
So that’s the kind of informed consent. When you as a parent are actually told those facts. I think I’ve had 1 patient out of the last 3000 in my practice still want to get the Hepatitis B vaccine. That one’s so clear. Now, a lot of them are not so clear because they have risks, but they also have benefits, and that’s where it gets muddied. That’s where in my book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, I tried to navigate that whole issue.
Let me go back to the fact that the board asked me to prove that the vaccine-friendly plan that I talked about in my book was as safe as the CDC schedule. So, I got this letter from the medical board, and you have to produce, by the way, when the medical board comes after you. If you refuse to cooperate, they just yank your license. So, I hired a doctor to come into my office. He was a former pediatrician neonatologist who had then morphed his career into medical record informatics systems. He had designed, I think, almost 50 informatics systems around the world. I mean, this guy’s a nerd genius data guy.
[00:17:33] Ashley James: Just to explain what that means, he’s able to take all the records and he’s able to quantify certain information? Can you just explain what it is he ends up producing?
[00:17:45] Dr. Paul Thomas: What he does. So I asked him to answer the following question. He came and spent a week in my office. Extracting data about vaccines is pretty complicated when you have different health care systems. I had transferred patients from an old practice, and our systems had changed from one to another. It took him a lot more work because of that, but I basically asked him, identify every patient born into my practice. So this practice, Integrative Pediatrics, was opened in June of 2008. At that time we had 10 ½ years of data.
I said, find every patient born into the practice. We want patients who were seen from birth because I get a lot of patients come into my practice because they’ve had other vaccine injuries and they know that I will listen to them, whereas other practices will just kick them out if they don’t follow the CDC schedule. So I attract a lot of higher-risk families, and I wanted a pure sample of just kids born into the practice. So that ended up being over 3,000 kids. And then I said let’s look at every vaccine they got, every single diagnosis they were given, and let’s just plot out the data.
Actually, he wasn’t even going to plot out the data. His job was merely to find the data. He then had it de-identified by an honest broker so that when I sent that data set to my co-author, James Lyons Weiler, he had no clue who was who. He was purely working from raw data.
Now, the guy that came in, when he came in he was not really a believer that vaccines can cause harm. He was more of the old-school vaccines are safe and effective. I said, well, we’ll see. I mean, I honestly didn’t know what we would find.
After the first day, he came out excited like a kid in a candy store. He’s going, oh my God. The data just jumps out at you. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, I’m not looking for the results, but you cannot not see it. The unvaccinated kids just don’t get sick. They don’t get anything. I knew there was some signal he was seeing, but then when we analyzed this data and we published it, we took it through peer review. The article for your listeners is called Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination. It’s published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, published November 18, 2020.
Now, that’s a mouthful for a title but I just wanted you to have it if you’re looking it up. But basically, if you just look for International Journal Environmental Research Public Health 2020 I think you’ll find it, Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses. Sorry about that. Maybe on your show, you can give a link or something. I think I sent it.
[00:20:39] Ashley James: Yes. We actually transcribe all of the interviews and put it on our website, learntruehealth.com. So we’ll make sure the link is there.
[00:20:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Perfect. For those of you who go and get this article, which I highly recommend, see if you can print it out in color because we have a page of graphs all on one page. It’s Figure 5 Analysis 5, and what it shows is for all the major conditions that were looked at, in orange, you have over that whole 10 years the increase in the diagnosis of the various conditions. So we’ve got asthma, allergic rhinitis, breathing issues, behavior problems, ADD, ADHD, ear infections, other infections, eye infections, eczema, dermatitis, and urticaria. So skin problems and anemia.
For every single one of the conditions, the orange line, which is your vaccinated kid—and by the way, these are children in my practice following the vaccine-friendly plan, so they’re getting about half the vaccines that a CDC schedule kid would get. But even then, when you compare them to over 500 kids who were unvaccinated and it was age-matched, so we’re comparing kids of the same age, the unvaxxed kids just don’t get these conditions. It’s almost a flat line in blue and this rising level of problems for the vaccinated kids.
[00:22:03] Ashley James: I’m looking at the graph right now, I just googled it. I’m looking at Figure 5 and it’s unbelievable. There’s no question when you see this data.
[00:22:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it just jumps out at you, and that’s what he was I think seeing when he was just looking at raw data. I didn’t expect it to be this dramatic. Here’s the problem, for listeners to understand, doctors don’t realize that these things have anything to do with vaccines. I mean, who would think that asthma, ear infections, ear pain, dry skin, itchy skin, or even anemia—who would ever have thought that they had anything to do with vaccines? It seems that they do, and we now have other studies. There’s something called the control group that’s just incredibly powerful.
You can go to thecontrolgroup.org and they did a survey. What they found was one-quarter of 1% of Americans are totally unvaccinated. One-quarter of 1%. 99.9.74% have had at least one vaccine, and that was mind-boggling. They surveyed 48 of the 50 states, they had a sample size of I think over 3,000 surveys done. And when they looked at things like heart disease, cancer, or diabetes, the unvaxxed adults had zero—no heart disease, no cancer, no diabetes, zero. And of course, the incidence we know of heart disease in adults is somewhere around 50%, I believe, diabetes 10%.
People don’t know that the chronic things for which you need medication could be related to vaccines because this has never been done. That’s the tragedy of our health system. It has never, because of the sales marketing pitch of vaccines are safe and effective, they’ve never bothered to look. Some of us are waking up to the fact that whoa, we got a problem and we should be looking. That vaxxed-unvaxxed study was published on November 18, 2020. It was first available online at the end of November, and five days after it was available online, the Oregon Medical Board had an emergency meeting and they immediately suspended my license to practice medicine.
[00:24:43] Ashley James: So they asked you for the proof, you gave them the proof, and they suspended your license because you gave them the proof that they asked for.
[00:24:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: There you go. I mean, obviously, I can’t prove that they emergently suspended my license because I published this data. But it’s pretty close to guaranteed proof because of the following. A week before that or maybe it was two weeks before that, they had just sent a new complaint that was absolutely ridiculous. They’ve been sending me new complaints that are anonymous by the way so we don’t know where they’re coming from, who’s initiating these complaints.
[00:25:23] Ashley James: The pharmaceutical company could be.
[00:25:24] Dr. Paul Thomas: I don’t know who, I’ll tell you, but they’ve been endless. I would say the last two, three years, I get complaints every other month and I have to address them. I dig for the data that they’re asking for and give it to them, never hear back. So they’ve never filed any charges, just they’re fishing. So they complain after complaint.
So we were already in the process of trying to respond to another complaint, yet another complaint when this emergency happened. Well, what was the emergency? Nothing had changed. My patients are the healthiest patients in town, and I’ve got data to prove it now that’s been published in a peer-reviewed journal, so where’s the emergency? There can only be one explanation, in my opinion.
So we have other good news to report. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got my attorney to take their situation of yanking my license without making any charges, which is basically illegal, and he took it to a judge. The judge ruled in our favor, and the board actually just two weeks ago gave me back my license.
[00:26:36] Ashley James: Congratulations.
[00:26:38] Dr. Paul Thomas: Thank you. The loss of my license caused me to lose all health insurance contracts. I don’t have health insurance, I don’t have insurance contracts. I lost my board certification from both the Board of Addiction Medicine, the Academy of Pediatrics, and I haven’t worked for the last six months. It’s taken a huge toll on our practice. We’re still open. Thankfully I have four actually, but three mostly working in the trenches nurse practitioners who are doing an incredible job of taking care of the patients. But it’s not been easy.
[00:27:16] Ashley James: Wow. When we spoke, I thought you also had a few doctors and a Naturopath that worked with you.
[00:27:23] Dr. Paul Thomas: I did. You and I talked, at that point, there were 10 of us in the office. So we had a Naturopath who was just amazing. I think we were three doctors, five nurse practitioners, and a Naturopath, 10 in total. If you count me, we’re down to four with one nurse practitioner doing a tiny bit of fill-in here and there.
[00:27:47] Ashley James: I know with Washington state there’s some weird law where you have to be a doctor to employ doctors or something. I don’t quite understand it. Were they not allowed to be employed by the clinic because you lost your license? Why did they leave?
[00:28:04] Dr. Paul Thomas: Most of them left in fear.
[00:28:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.
[00:28:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, they were targeting me and it looked like they were starting to target the practice. So, one of my nurse practitioners, just a lovely, lovely lady, oh my gosh, but she was young. She had gotten her PhD or whatever the doctorate level for nurse practitioners was. She had ambitions to teach. She just had to move on because it was just too risky for her career. I had another doctor who just left, it was just too risky for her career. She still had young children.
Yeah, it’s a lot of pressure that doctors who speak up for informed consent are—I mean, what’s happening in California, it’s just any doctor who’s written exemptions for vaccines is having to fight for their license. I mean, it’s like a witch hunt.
[00:28:59] Ashley James: Wow. So I have a friend, actually, he’s a listener and we became friends. They contacted your office, but it wouldn’t make sense to have a medical exemption written in Oregon if he’s in California. But his son has had major problems, surgeries, and based on his history, of his past, and the kid is I think six now because he’s about the same age as my son. Just based on all of the health conditions he’s gone through and is currently going through, he’s a candidate for exemptions right now because his immune system is compromised, there are all these other things.
Because they’re in California, he can’t find anyone. If he were to go to any other state, a pediatrician would say, absolutely, this is not a candidate right now for a vaccine because he’s compromised. You’re saying there are effects. I don’t even like the term side effects. There are effects of certain medications, and when a person is compromised, those effects are more dramatic.
[00:30:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. The problem is, somehow, pharma has captured the CDC. So the CDC makes recommendations, they also make money on vaccines, and they also are kind of a marketing arm in a real sense for vaccines based on what data they choose to collect and then what data they choose to publish. But the CDC has never done any of the research that’s necessary to answer the question as I did, for example, comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated.
Your friend that was hoping for an exemption, I would actually guess that 90% something, close to 100% of pediatricians would not write an exemption even though it sounds like there’s pretty strong evidence that that would be a mistake to vaccinate that child with all that’s going on, either because they truly believe vaccines are safe and effective. They, in a way, drank the Kool-Aid. I mean, they’re just not doing their own research, or in this day and age, it’s career suicide. I mean, if you write medical exemptions, you’re waving a big old flag to the medical board, come get me. Unless you’re close to retirement, that’s just not an option for a young doctor who’s trying to build a career and maybe feed their family.
[00:31:39] Ashley James: Wow. That’s actually something I wanted to bring up was talking about safety testing. But first, I wanted to point out, I loved that near the end of our interview back in 2018 episode 224, you shared a story.
At that time in February, it’s the tail end of “flu season.” And at the time, I’m up in Washington state. So in the pacific northwest, we had a really bad flu outbreak. My family didn’t get it, but in all of the clinics, all of the hospitals, it was like a four or five-hour wait. They were just full. And down in Oregon as well, you guys had four to five-hour waits in the emergency rooms and clinics were just full.
We got hit really badly with some form of influenza and you said to me, last Friday, our clinic closed early because we didn’t get one phone call. I think you said 10,000 patients, not one phone call from 10,000 patients saying my son Johnny has a fever and sniffles, I need to come in or what should I do? You didn’t get one phone call from all your patients.
About 50% of your practice I think you said was unvaccinated and the other percentage would follow not the CDC schedule but would follow what’s laid out in your book, which is one at a time, wait and see, how does the kid react. And then I said, well, what do you guys do for the unvaccinated children for those that choose to not do it? What do parents do to help keep a child healthy?
And you say, well, all my patients take vitamin D. They all get outside into the sunlight, get fresh air, and exercise. They all eat very clean, very healthy fruits and vegetables. I think you went down a list of everything that regardless of vaccine status, you make sure they all follow these guidelines.
[00:33:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, they’re recommended. I’m not sure how well—
[00:33:52] Ashley James: They’re followed?
[00:33:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. Lifestyle is tough, right?
[00:33:55] Ashley James: It is.
[00:33:57] Dr. Paul Thomas: For adults, you’re supposed to exercise, not drink, eat healthy, and you get your sleep, and how many of us are perfect on that? But no, you’re absolutely right. To this day, I have two waiting rooms—a well and a sick side—because at my old practice, before I started this one, there was this one giant waiting room and it was always like three quarters filled with sick kids, and you have these little well babies and well kids sitting amongst coughing, sneezing, a snotty nose, feverish kids, something. This is not good. You’re exposing healthy kids to so much stuff. I mean, it’s like, stay away from the pediatric office.
So I set this up with two separate completely separate waiting rooms. Our sick waiting room almost never has anybody in it. It was true back then, and of course, it’s really been true with quarantine. Quarantine, for sure for most practices, reduced the volume of visits just in general. How much of that was just people wouldn’t come in for fear of being exposed to somebody with COVID, or that they truly weren’t sick? I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, the fact that people were not in school, we know as a pediatrician, once school opens, just give it a few weeks and we get busy. The states that had no direct student contact schooling, so if it was completely at homeschooling, it definitely reduced illness.
But the other thing that happened with COVID is we had what I’m going to call diagnostic substitution. So, traditionally, in the United States, the CDC has reported there’s, oh, I would say from 30,000 to 60,000 cases of influenza in the US per year. As a practicing busy pediatrician, I can tell you that probably at most 10% of those cases were actually influenza. It’s usually less than 5%, but definitely no more than 10%. How can I say that?
Well, it’s reported by the CDC that’s the case. But when we get a really sick kid in the winter and they’ve got a cough, fever, maybe a little sore throat, body aches, a flu-like illness, today you would call it COVID, probably not even see them. You don’t want to bring that patient into the office, you just assume it’s COVID. But back then, before COVID, you would bring these sickest kids in to figure out what’s going on because they could have bacterial pneumonia and there are antibiotics for that. So you want to know who needs to be treated or are they so sick they need to be in the hospital. Maybe they have a requirement for oxygen.
So, those sickest kids, the last few years we were doing something called a recipe path where you would actually swab the nose and send that off to test for maybe 20 different most common things that would cause an infection in the kid. And it would include influenza a, influenza b, rhinovirus, and the various cold viruses, even coronaviruses on that panel before COVID came around, the bacterial causes, et cetera. And that’s why I know at the height of flu season back then, 5% to 10% max.
So now, I’ll bet you it’s similar to COVID even though it can be a very devastating illness for those who are high risk, it’s no big deal for kids. So if a kid comes in with flu-like symptoms, if we could test them for COVID and use a proper test, not the PCR test that’s high cycles of amplification, we can talk about that. That’s giving so many false positives. But if we had a real test, those with a flu-like, COVID-like illness, I’ll bet you it’s less than 5% who are actually COVID. We just changed.
So, now all the people that used to be labeled as flu because that supported the flu shot campaign, now we’re labeling them as COVID because that supports the COVID shot campaign. The truth of the matter is do that panel of 20 tests and you’ve got some mycoplasma in there, you got some pneumococcus, you got some rhinovirus, some adenovirus, some different coronavirus. You’ve got RSV, parainfluenza, pertussis, influenza a, influenza b. There’s a long list of things that are causing that person’s symptoms, but we don’t bother to figure it out anymore. Right now you just said, stay home until you get better. If you get really bad, go to the hospital. That’s not good medicine, folks.
[00:38:31] Ashley James: That kind of blows my mind because we’re told “flu season,” it’s just a bunch of influenza and that’s it. But really, it’s only ever been 5% to 10% percent and the other infections are different bacteria or viruses. That marketing, that’s right, we’re marketed to.
I remember when the flu shot came out, I was a teenager. I grew up in Canada and the marketing was big. It was all happy people dancing in a field and downhill skiing. Get the flu shot, prevent the flu. And I even got the shot, I think I was 19. I got it at my chiropractor’s office of all things. She was so excited. Free flu shots or maybe it was $25, I don’t remember. She was so excited, it was so innovative. It was so new. And my mom and I never got sick. I don’t know why we were excited about the flu shot. I guess we totally bought the marketing, but my mom and I never ever got the flu ever. I don’t even remember having the flu my entire life.
And then after that shot, my mom and I were so sick. We turned to each other about a week later and said never again are we going to get this shot. This is ridiculous. What were we thinking? I started to go, that’s interesting. It made me question a little bit. And then when my mom was dying in the hospital of a medication the week before she died—she was in the hospital for the last two weeks of her life and I was there with her. I had the radio on and they announced on the news that the medication she had been on that her doctor feared her into taking. It was a synthetic estrogen.
Her doctor said, if you don’t take this, your bones are going to be brittle and you’re just going to break a hip and die, basically. I remember my mom who was the strongest woman I knew came home in tears crying, leaning to get on this medication because her doctor told her she was going to have brittle bones and die if she didn’t take it. And then a few years later, she’s dying in the hospital of cancer, and it was this drug that was taken off the market for causing an insane amount of cancer in women. The doctor that prescribed it got cancer too because she was on it because. She believed the marketing.
[00:40:56] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, doctors believe it themselves.
[00:40:59] Ashley James: Right, they do. I mean, they have conviction around it as well. Something in my brain switched and I’m like, I was raised to blindly trust the marketing, blindly trust it to get excited about drugs. Like, oh, this is going to make me better, this is going to help me.
If I have an infection, I can’t fight it naturally, and it’s getting bad, then yes, I want allopathic medicine at my side. But when we go to a doctor with symptoms that are symptoms of nutrient deficiency, symptoms of lifestyle issues, and we’re put on medication after medication after medication, this is a system that’s failing us, especially when we look at statistically the number one and two and three causes of death in the United States. These things aren’t getting better, and we’re medicating them more and more and more and they’re not getting better.
I have interviewed so many holistic-minded doctors who have amazing results, like you do with your patients, who have outstanding results, and have published these results with reversing chronic illness and preventing disease with natural medicine. So, in my mind, it’s like, if I could help the listeners to think critically and not buy the marketing. I don’t want to say never get X drug. The whole black and white thing, that doesn’t work either, it’s dogmatic.
But they’re being dogmatic and saying always blindly trust this and take it, and I’m saying use critical thinking. Definitely read Dr. Paul Thomas’s book, use critical thinking, and look at his studies and see that we need to question everything we put into our body. People will question a supplement. You recommend a supplement, they’ll be like, well, who manufactured it? What are the safety studies? But then they’ll just go and blindly trust a doctor with a medication. We have to use critical thinking with everything. Where our food comes from too nowadays.
[00:43:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my goodness, absolutely.
[00:43:13] Ashley James: There’s GMO potato. I had a whole episode with Jeffrey Smith who’s an advocate for non-GMO, and he talked about apples and potatoes are now GMO. It’s not just corn and soy. These things are having major health problems. It’s destroying the bacteria of the gut, the microbiome of the gut. The microbiome of the gut produces our serotonin. It actually helps convert some of our thyroid, I think it’s T4 into T3.
If we don’t have a healthy microbiome, we begin to just lose health on all fronts, and GMOs are causing that. Not to go off on a tangent, but just to say that we really need to question everything and educate ourselves on everything we put in our body—clean water, clean food. Even when it comes to medication and supplements, we have to do our own footwork basically.
What always, I guess, confused me, we were told that vaccines are safe because they’re tested. There must be safety studies, right? I mean, drugs are tested for years. My mom died of this, so every drug that was approved to be given to patients in Canada, in the states, any country—I’m going to use the FDA as an example for America—but every drug that’s been taken off the market for doing harm was also first approved. So, these drugs that have then been rescinded, the drug that was rescinded off the market for killing my mother and killing other women was approved at one point. We have to remember that.
Just that alone, we should start to just question things more instead of blindly follow them. But in my mind, I always thought that vaccines were tested. Aren’t they safety tested for years like drugs are safety tested, and don’t they do double-blind studies because that’s their thing, right? Double-blind studies. And then I heard somewhere that vaccines are not safety tested with double-blind placebo studies. They don’t do a placebo that’s inert. Can you explain that?
What I mean is, you think they’re injecting water or saline solution into someone’s arm and they’re the placebo trial, and then they’re injecting the actual vaccine to the other person. But that’s not the case. If they were to take people and just inject saline versus a vaccine, then they actually might show the negative effects like you said with VAERS, the negative effects far outweigh the inert placebo. How do they “do safety tests”? How do they study safety before they release it to the public?
[00:46:21] Dr. Paul Thomas: Awesome question. The problem with vaccine science and research when it comes to safety testing is they have very cleverly gotten completely away from using a true placebo, which would be an injection of just saltwater, saline which is at the same concentration as your blood or plasma. On one group you would have the vaccine, and on the other group you would have saline.
The trick they use is in the case of aluminum, which we know is extremely problematic, they’ll just give aluminum instead of saline, and then the vaccine will be the vaccine antigen plus the aluminum. Their side effects are, look, oh they’re the same, therefore the vaccine’s safe. I call that tobacco science.
So for example. Ashley. why don’t you smoke one pack a day, I’m going to smoke two packs a day, and we’ll have a third group smoke none. We’ll see who died in a week. Nobody died, so it’s safe. That highlights the second problem with vaccine research, which is the duration of the study. How long do they follow these people is very short, much too short to pick anything up other than a little redness at the injection site. That’s why they say, oh, it’s one in a million to have bad side effects except of course you’re going to get a little redness where you got your shot and it’ll be a little sore. They completely intentionally don’t look for long-term side effects.
Autoimmunity and allergies take years sometimes to develop. They’re never going to pick that up. They don’t use a proper placebo, they’re not double-blind controlled studies, and they’re not long enough. That whole phenomenon creates a situation where really, oh, a couple of other huge things because the belief almost like religion is that vaccines are safe and effective, they don’t look at all health outcomes. They only look for a few things that they know are known side effects from vaccines.
So, in my research, for example, they would never be looking for asthma, behavioral issues, ADD, ADHD, allergies, breathing problems, ear infections, ear pain, or eczema. They don’t recognize these things as related to vaccines. If you don’t look, you don’t find it. The trials are set up specifically to look at a certain set of things, and then they shut off the trials before there’s a chance for there to be any difference in the two groups. They can say look, the two groups are similar so the vaccines are safe.
There’s another problem. If you are funding a study. So I’m a pharmaceutical company let’s say and I’m going to study product X. Let’s say I set it all up, I want to show that product X is going to help you live healthier. We get going with this study and it’s not going well. It’s not looking like this study is going to help. Generally, we’re just going to abandon that research. This research isn’t working, we must have designed it wrong. We’re not going to do this research. Sometimes they’ll even get to the point of publication and why would they publish it? It’s going to harm their product.
The people funding the research obviously have a desire for a certain outcome. When they get the outcome they like, they publish it, if they don’t, they often don’t publish it. Worse than that, pharma money has infiltrated the academic institutions, universities, all the PhDs who are doing research in their labs have to apply for grants so they can fund their research. Most of these grants are coming from somehow pharmaceutical money. You don’t get a grant unless you’re researching something that they’re interested in. They have never ever, ever yet funded a true vaxxed-unvaxxed study. This is why my published study is so important because there was no funding. We just did this.
The next set of problems comes. If you ever get something published, which we did with a very rigorous peer review process, they try to get it retracted. And in fact, we are right now under review. Somebody complained and said, well, our methodology is new, it’s not valid. Well, the reason they were complaining is we did it the old way, which is do you have the disease or not right? So if we looked at asthma, ADHD, autism, or whatever, it was just a yes, no. That’s how most research is done.
Well, what we did in this research is we looked at every single diagnosis even how many times it happened. So, if you’re in the study and you’re seen once in your lifetime for an asthma attack, compare that to a child who’s had 20 visits for an asthma attack. That shows an increased severity. The way we designed this study, we did it the old way, we analyzed it that way, and it was significant in a few things. But when you look at severity, it’s highly significant. So we also published this as sort of a shot across the bow for future researchers saying look at all health outcomes and look at all visits so you can pick up severity.
It’s a really clever design, but it’s new. People who want to try to discredit research, they don’t want anything new if it’s going to show what they’re trying to protect in a bad light.
[00:51:53] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I like your way much better because it shows the severity. That makes so much sense. Instead of this black or white, they have it or they don’t have it, well, how many times did they have that incident occur over a period of time shows the severity. That makes so much more sense.
[00:52:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, exactly.
[00:52:16] Ashley James: You really spent the extra time to go into it. I love that that guy came in believing one thing and then the numbers don’t lie. The numbers don’t lie.
[00:52:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s data, and when people take offense to data that’s been peer-reviewed and well researched—what’s so ironic is that as we pointed out at the beginning of this interview, this was the data they asked for. They sure didn’t like what they found.
We also published another study that I’ll just mention, it’s a short little paper. Well, it’s actually not that short, but it’s called Vaccine Practice Payment Schedules Create Perverse Incentives for Unnecessary Medical Procedures – at What Cost to Patients? So this was published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.
Basically, what we did was I took a month’s worth of data from my practice back in August, September a year ago, and we looked at every single superbill. In other words, everybody that walked through the door for that month, and on the back of my super bills, I have a vaccine refusal form. Because we’re so meticulous about documenting informed consent that anytime vaccines are discussed, we flip the superbill over, it’s just a piece of paper that we click off what we’re doing that day so the billing people can double-check they bill appropriately for what was done. That’s all our superbill is.
So on the one side, say they got a CBC to check for anemia, or they got a breathing treatment for asthma, we just check off what we’ve done. And then on the flip side though is this checklist of all the vaccines that we could possibly give. We go through and say, well, looking at your vaccine status, you’re behind on this vaccine. Here’s what other pediatricians would tell you to do so that you’re following the CDC schedule, and the patients either agree to do them or they refuse them.
So we had the ability to actually tabulate which vaccines were given for an entire month by which company because some insurance companies pay better than others. I mean, this was real-world data. The vaccines that were accepted and done, and the vaccines that should have been done if you were following the CDC schedule but were refused. And then we extrapolated that for 12 months and learned that our practice of about 10,000 patients where we bill out about $3 million—well, before all this happened to me it was about $3 million. It’s dropped to about $2 million now. But our gross billings was about $3 million. We have 30 some employees. At that point, we had close to 10 providers.
For a practice billing out $3 million, we were losing over $1 million dollars in just administration fees. You can’t survive as a practice if you’re losing a quarter to a third of your overhead because pediatric practices run about 70%, 80% overhead. So, no wonder I haven’t been able to give my employees a raise. I think they got one raise in the last 10 years.
It is a service of love by everybody that’s working in my practice because we believe in what we’re doing, we’re helping kids. Money’s tight when you’re not getting vaccine money. If I’m leaving $1 million on the table for the last 13 years, that’s $13 million. My employees could have had nice raises and bonuses, and I’d probably be doing just fine, right? I’m the sole owner of this practice. I haven’t taken a paycheck in six months.
The vaccine compensation is set up in such a way that it is so enticing, and pediatricians deny this. I used to deny it. I used to say, oh, no, no. We don’t make any money on vaccines. That’s because the markup that most practices do on vaccines is very, very low. If I buy a vaccine for $100, I might charge you $103 or $105 for it. I’m not making a massive amount of profit on selling vaccines. But the insurance companies give you this payment, it’s called administration fee, and it’s over $1,000 in the first year of a baby’s life. One baby, I’m getting over $1,000 in just the administration fees by the time they’re age one.
[00:56:32] Ashley James: For keeping them on the CDC schedule?
[00:56:36] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup, if you follow the CDC schedule.
[00:56:38] Ashley James: How many babies does a pediatrician typically have in their practice?
[00:56:42] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, a busy pediatrician like I am, I would get about 30 babies a month. I’d say $5,000 to $10,000 maybe?
[00:56:51] Ashley James: So, it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month, upwards of $30,000 a month if a pediatrician were to vaccinate 100% of their infants each month?
[00:57:03] Dr. Paul Thomas: That’s just the admin fee. You still get paid to see the patients.
[00:57:07] Ashley James: Oh yeah. But let’s say a pediatrician gives zero vaccines versus 100% of the CDC schedule. So pediatricians are incentivized, if they see only five to ten babies a month, it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month in their pocket.
[00:57:25] Dr. Paul Thomas: Per year. No, that is per year.
[00:57:27] Ashley James: Per month, they see five to 10 new babies per month?
[00:57:33] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yes.
[00:57:33] Ashley James: So, if they see five to ten new babies per month, then it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month.
[00:57:37] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. I see how you’re doing the math.
[00:57:42] Ashley James: If it’s 30,000 babies a month for you because you’re busy, then that’s $30,000 a month for keeping them on the CDC schedule versus a pediatrician who does informed consent and only attracts parents who wish not to vaccinate 100%. That is significant.
[00:57:42] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s huge, and pediatricians deny that they’re incentivized by money. I think honestly, they don’t know. I just got this published this past year in October of 2020. Or wait a minute, when was this published? This was March of ‘21. That’s right, I knew it was more recent. We just got this published two, three months ago.
I don’t think pediatricians are aware that—here’s the reality in my town. Almost any other pediatrician will not see you unless you follow the CDC schedule. So, that is now a process that the Academy of Pediatrics is okay with ethically. In other words, you can kick people out of your practice if they won’t follow the CDC schedule. However, there is a little caveat. They have to have alternative care available.
So here’s the funny thing. They’re trying to take my license away because I’m honoring informed consent, but I’m the only place these people can go. So if they shut me down, they’re not going to be able to kick these people out. It’s kind of weird. Financially, they’re getting to benefit from getting rid of the patients that kind of costs you money. If you see patients and they’re not vaccinating, it’s actually costing you money because the overhead is so high.
So, let’s get these patients who aren’t getting us in the profits, let’s send them over to Dr. Paul at Integrative Pediatrics. We’ll keep the ones that are lucrative. They’re not thinking that way, but that is the reality.
[00:59:47] Ashley James: You got to imagine, some of them have figured it out.
[00:59:50] Dr. Paul Thomas: Maybe. I’ll tell you what, the office managers know. I remember back in my old office, back in the early 2000s when we figured out we were injecting too much mercury because a lot of the vaccines had mercury in there to prevent fungal infections in those vials. There was data accumulating that that was causing health problems and probably linked to certain cases of autism.
[01:00:15] Ashley James: Wait a second. Mercury is not healthy for you?
[01:00:19] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s not. I think that was called mad hatter disease or something. Chimney sweeps would get too much mercury. No, mercury is not healthy for you. You’re absolutely right, Ashley. Good memory there. I mean, think about it, the old thermometers, you’re not old enough to remember.
[01:00:35] Ashley James: No, no, no. I went to Mexico with my family when I was a kid back in the ‘80s, ‘90s. They used to sell—I don’t know if they still do—this glass jewelry that had mercury in it and I had broken one and played with it. Because it was like the Terminator. Remember the guy would turn into mercury, and I was touching it and rolling it around playing with it. Oh yeah. mercury is not healthy.
[01:01:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: Mercury is a liquid metal but it is not good for you. Anyway, where was I going with that?
[01:01:12] Ashley James: You figured out on the mercury.
[01:01:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: I know what it was. I went to my office manager and I said, I heard they were going to get the mercury out of the vaccines. So I went to my office manager at the time and I said, as soon as we get options to get the vaccines that don’t have mercury, please, please let’s get those instead of the mercury ones. And she said to me, Well, they just became available, but are you willing to pay the $6,000 extra it’s going to cost to buy the newer, more expensive ones because your partners aren’t willing?
At that time, I was a younger pediatrician with a huge family to feed, and no, I couldn’t do that. They wanted me to pay for the difference for everybody. So we kept on using the inferior vaccine until they were no longer available. And that was an economic decision. And unfortunately, pediatrics and medicine, in general, is a business, just as pharmaceutical companies are a business. Sometimes, you’re making decisions that are more important for your business bottom line than are really in the absolute best interest of your patients.
And so, folks, if you’re listening, parents, if we’re talking about making vaccine decisions for your children, you’re the last hope that your child has that you will save them, that you will protect them. They don’t have a choice. You take them to a pediatrician, the pediatrician says this is what you should do. And if you’re not protecting them, if you’re not doing your research, then unfortunately, they are at the mercy of the system.
You are so right, Ashley, earlier to point out this is a sick care system. It’s not a wellness system. Our bodies are naturally capable of being very healthy if we stay away from toxins. You mentioned it near the beginning: drink filtered water, don’t eat pesticides and herbicides, make sure you’ve got non-GMO, if possible organic food, and avoid injected toxins, which are your vaccines.
I’m not telling anybody what to do with vaccines. This is just an educational and informational conversation we’re having here. But folks, look into it. When you really look at the research, vaccines are not safe. They’re borderline effective, depending on which vaccine. And exercise, take vitamin D. You cannot get enough unless you’re living at the equator with your clothes off.
[01:03:40] Ashley James: I’d love to do that. Let’s go to the equator and eat mangoes naked.
[01:03:44] Dr. Paul Thomas: Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah, that sounds good to me. Count me in. I never could bring myself to go to those nude beaches. But yeah, it sounds like a good thing anyway. So, there are things we can do to be healthy. And mostly it’s just letting nature the way it was beautifully designed to keep you healthy.
If you want to pivot a little bit more to COVID, I do want to talk about it a little bit.
[01:04:09] Ashley James: Yeah. All right. So, we were doing a catch-up on everything that happened since our last interview. I love everything you’ve discussed so far. I did see a few times on Facebook you talking about masking children. And, that’s been something that is so cringy to me. I’d love for you to touch on that at some point.
[01:04:35] Dr. Paul Thomas: Sure. So the mask issue I can touch on quite simply. Masks, the medical ones that we use in hospitals, were not designed to prevent viral particles from going back and forth. They were designed to make sure the surgeon doesn’t sneeze on the operating field, drool, or whatever. To try to keep the operating field where you clean the belly. Let’s say you’re doing an abdominal surgery, you clean it really well, scrub, scrub, Betadine, drape it with sterile drapes, and then you’re cutting the abdomen open. You don’t want a surgeon leaning over and sneezing or dripping into the surgical site. I mean, that’s the purpose of those masks.
They are very ineffective at preventing viruses of the size of COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. That virus can get through those masks so easily it’s kind of a joke to think that’s going to protect you.
[01:05:37] Ashley James: It’s like a bumblebee flying through a chain-link fence.
[01:05:40] Dr. Paul Thomas: Exactly. And certainly, if you’re talking about the cloth masks, it definitely is like a fly or a bumblebee going through a chain-link fence. It’s just completely almost worthless. In fact, it’s probably worse than worthless because what you’re doing is you’re creating moisture that’s trapping things. And so you may actually be creating more risk for yourself than benefit. So, that being said, if I was a very high risk person and I was truly scared of coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 virus, I would probably wear N95 and the face shield when I was going to be in close proximity to other people.
So, if you are yourself afraid, there’s something you can do and do it. I mean, if that’s going to help you be able to go shopping, put on an N95, make sure it fits nice and tight, and put a face shield over that and I think you’ll be fine. Except be careful to wash your hands before you touch anything that’s going back home with you because I think the virus does have capability of going from your hands, then you touch your face or whatever, and you get it onto yourself. So, that’s masks.
Children don’t need them for a couple of reasons. One, they don’t work. Well, lots of reasons. Two, they’re more risky than they’re beneficial. Most studies are showing that. So, there’s plenty of garbage studies that show benefits, folks. Remember, that’s pharma trick. Whoever’s got an agenda, we want people to mask up, can fund a study that will show benefit. It’s so easy to do studies like that. But good studies show that they’re not only mostly worthless, but they’re actually probably causing more harm than good.
One of the harms that has not been well studied, I think I’ve read one or two articles about this is when you mask up children and now they’re not being exposed to facial expressions, to smiles—I mean, we’re social creatures. We’re supposed to be interacting in a loving, supportive way with one another. You become a little robot almost. And then you add the fact that we’ve kept kids at home in front of screens.
Before COVID hit, my number one problem in teenagers was anxiety and depression, it was triggered by screens. I mean, that was crystal clear to me. Now we add COVID, isolation, and so much more screen time, and we wonder why we’re having increases in ADD, anxiety, suicides. It’s a disaster. Now, when we know that children—unless they happen to have severe underlying medical conditions—most children, their risk of dying from COVID is less than 1 in 100,000. I mean, they just don’t get seriously ill. Of course, the news is going to report those rare cases and get everybody afraid. So fear is what they’re selling.
The strategy was, we’re going to mask everybody up, we’re going to isolate everybody, and get them so tired of it that when we come through with a vaccine as the savior, they’re going to line up, and it’s worked. I mean, we’re getting so many people vaccinated. And it’s truly tragic, especially now that they’re starting to target children. Parents, the science is in, it’s crystal clear. You’re not hearing it on the news, however, because the news has already been bought and paid for.
You can go to The Highwire, Del Bigtree, his show. You can go to my show, Against the Wind: Doctors & Science Under Fire. You can go to the Children’s Health Defense and look at their daily news called The Defender and get all the science and all the information you need to understand that oh my Lord, the science has been done. This is a very dangerous vaccine. It probably is time. Dr. McCullough was on my show twice already. He’s a mainstream doctor, that’s probably the most published physician in the United States who’s also treating COVID. He’s now calling for the program to be abandoned. That this is no longer safe for humans.
So, we’re at a turning point, and it’s not too late to save the children. If you’ve already gotten this vaccine, I don’t want you to be afraid because fear does not help your immune system. So, if you’ve already gotten the vaccine and you start to have any new symptom, don’t discount it as being unrelated to the vaccine. Just see a physician or healthcare provider who understands natural healing processes. You’ll see we give at the end of my show, every two weeks, I’ve got the show. Just go to doctorsandscience.com. At the very end of each show, we give you resources. And you can use those same resources that are to treat a COVID-19 infection to treat the side effects.
The spike protein in this vaccine is what’s causing the mischief. You can get exposed to the spike protein from the infection, but you also get exposed from the vaccine. My best guess is we’re going to have an interesting fall and winter. I have a feeling based on what I’m reading in the research is it appears that those who have gotten the vaccine are actually going to be at greater risk of problems than those who did not. Just like my data showed, natural immunity appears to be superior.
So, whether it’s a new strain that comes through, they’re having trouble in India, England, and across different parts of the world with new variants they’re calling them. I think the unvaccinated will do much better against new variants than the vaccinated, although time will tell, right? But the good news is there are treatments that work whether you’re vaccinated or unvaccinated, so don’t despair. But please, if you’re a parent, they are pushing hard on the teenagers. I’m hearing stories already of peer pressure, big peer pressure, to get the vaccine.
[01:11:44] Ashley James: The universities are saying that they have to vaccinate if they want to attend class.
[01:11:51] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. The pressure is immense. They’re now talking about rolling out passports. Vaccine passports, to me, are like apartheid South Africa. I grew up in Southern Africa as a kid, and if you are white, you could move about freely, you had total access to the country. If you were not white, you had to carry papers just like a passport. If you didn’t have your papers, you couldn’t enter certain parts of cities. That’s where we’re headed with the vaccine. Don’t call it a vaccine passport, call it a slavery passport. I mean, it is ridiculous.
The least risky people are those who aren’t vaccinated, okay. This is clear from my research on all illnesses, but it’s becoming clear with COVID as well. So, it’s the unvaccinated who should be given free rein, you’re at no risk from them, or let’s not say no risk. That was an exaggeration. There’s risk everywhere, but less risk because the unvaccinated are not as likely to get sick. Their immune systems are going to keep them healthier.
And you know what? COVID-19 illness is real and it can be fatal, it can be serious, so I’m not trying to tell people to be reckless. But it’s not a big deal for kids. They can go to school with no masks, no shields, just go to school. I mean, if it appears that natural infection will give you long-lasting immunity, that will be much more robust than the immunity you get from vaccines.
[01:13:25] Ashley James: Well, that’s right. There are three studies that I know of, and I’m sure more will come up. But there are three studies recently that show that if you’ve had the coronavirus, the COVID-19, that you have lifelong immunity. They even did a study where they took samples of bone marrow and found that months and months and months later, the antibodies were there. The media has told us that you only have three months of protection. If you’ve naturally had wild COVID-19, that in three months, you could get it again, and then another three months you could get it again.
[01:14:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: No.
[01:14:11] Ashley James: But this is what people have been told.
[01:14:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: That’s not true, and the other truth is that those who have had natural infection are actually at greater risk of vaccine side effects.
[01:14:23] Ashley James: Really? Why is that? Do you know why?
[01:14:24] Dr. Paul Thomas: I had a guest on my show who went through that fairly well a while back. He’s a strong proponent for test before you vaccinate. I mean, we have enough testing capability now. So, anybody who’s going to get a vaccine should be tested to make sure they don’t already have antibodies because we’re just simply seeing more reactions. And I think what it is, they call it pathogenic priming. And somehow, having been exposed to that virus before, you already have some immune capability to respond, actually, a very robust capability to respond. And then if you get the vaccine, which is such a massive dose of spike protein and you’re already primed to respond to it, you can have this massive inflammatory response. It’s an unnatural trigger, right?
If you get a natural infection, you just get a few little antigens coming in through your nose, your immune system, boom, knocks it out before it becomes a big deal. If you get a vaccine with a massive exposure to spike protein and you’ve got the capability to respond to that, you need a massive response, so I think it’s related to that.
I did want to cover two things. I want to talk about PCR testing, and I also want to talk about absolute risk reduction and relative risk reduction. So, let’s cover those two things because they are critical to understanding what’s going on.
[01:15:47] Ashley James: I want to cover those. Before we cover those, just wrap up the last topic. You talked about spike protein and people can have reactions to it, regardless of if it’s of through a vaccine, or through natural immunity, or naturally having COVID-19. If someone’s had COVID and they’ve had the spike protein in them, how long until it’s out of them? You mentioned that you have some resources for supporting the body around that. Is this something that we should be watching for problems with spike protein like six months after an infection, or is this only days or weeks after the infection?
[01:16:30] Dr. Paul Thomas: I’m not going to claim to be an expert to answer that question with every authoritative piece of science. I’ve done my best to keep up, but boy, it’s coming fast. I have read that two weeks after a vaccine, you can find spike protein in the blood. I’ve read that for longer than that, after a natural infection, you can find SARS-CoV-2 in the stool. So, some people, I think it’s around 10% of people who get diarrhea, and that virus is present in the stool longer. So, that’s speaking to natural infection. The other study was speaking to the presence of this in the blood in a vaccinated person.
There are these reports—I think we’ll hear more in the very near future—of vaccinated people somehow being able to transmit the spike protein to unvaccinated people. And, so I get a lot of questions about that. I don’t know quite what to tell people because it’s just starting to come out. It’s something that’s just starting to be discovered and researched, but it appears that that can happen. I’m not exactly sure of the mechanism. But it’s one of those things where if you’ve been vaccinated, maybe for a couple of weeks you don’t go around your unvaccinated loved ones. Just a thought. I mean, I don’t have enough hard science to say that’s a firm recommendation. It’s just a thought.
[01:18:08] Ashley James: I’ve heard that. There’s a lot of anecdotal stories out there. So it’ll be interesting to see the studies as the science comes out. I hate that term, the science is settled.
[01:18:23] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh, it’s never settled.
[01:18:24] Ashley James: You know what, dogma, religion is settled.
[01:18:28] Dr. Paul Thomas: Even that.
[01:18:30] Ashley James: But the idea that science is something that’s constantly moving, the target’s constantly changing. We’re constantly learning new things. We’re constantly disproving hypotheses and disproving old studies. The science is settled is a marketing term, is a brainwashing term.
[01:18:50] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it’s a brainwashing term. I was just reading a report. Dr. Kelly Sutton is an MD who wrote some exemptions in California and she’s on trial right now. It started yesterday. And the report was the other side, the people that are trying to take away her license, their attorney was able to silence several complaints by saying, well, that science has been settled. And so, it’s that same thing, we’re not going to go there, it’s been settled.
What’s so ridiculous about that is just think about it folks. Kids born today are so different from their grandparents in terms of the world they’re growing up in. Their grandparents got zero or one or two vaccines. They’ve had 72 vaccines by the time they graduate from high school. They’ve had 40 by the time they’re in school. They live in a world that’s got all this glyphosate, pesticides, and herbicides, and it’s just a different toxic world. You cannot compare the science that was done generations ago to what’s going to happen to a kid today.
Just like with vaccines, most research is done on people who’ve already had so many of them. And so when they’re adding one more and going, see, it hasn’t made anything worse. But you don’t know because you’re not comparing them to an unvaccinated person.
[01:20:15] Ashley James: Okay. The spike protein causes inflammation in the body. Is that also what’s causing the increase of blood clots, especially in healthy people that never had an issue of blood clotting before?
[01:20:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it seems to be definitely the trigger of that. Again, I’m not the scientist that should describe the exact biochemistry or biology of how that happens, but yes, they are definitely related.
[01:20:43] Ashley James: And I definitely urge listeners to go back and watch the previous episodes of your show where this has been discussed. What was the name of the doctor again that talked about it on your show?
[01:20:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: Dr. McCullough.
[01:20:56] Ashley James: Dr. McCullough. Okay, so we can go check out that episode for more information as well, and follow Dr. McCullough’s work as well to get more information if listeners are interested. Okay, you want to talk about PCR tests, right?
[01:21:09] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yes, please. So, when this epidemic started rolling out, none of us knew what was going on. And the main form of testing—especially in the United States, but in a lot of places around the world—was using PCR, polymerase chain reaction testing. This testing has this methodology where they call it amplification. So you throw your sample through a number of cycles of testing, each time you’re analyzing a more dilute sample to try to detect the most minute amount of material. I’ve read two published studies out of Europe that are both showing the same finding that’s just absolutely conclusive and important to understand.
So at somewhere around 13 to 17, or 18 cycles of amplification, if you get a positive test, they can actually grow the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So, in other words, that PCR represents a real virus being there. Think about it on a graph and up to 13,14, 15, 16 cycles, you’re getting a positive culture 100% of the time. Now, as you get into 30 cycles, you’re down to like, I don’t know, 20% of the time you could actually grow a virus.
By the time you get to 34, 35 cycles of PCR amplification, you never grow a virus, it is just noise. And this is why you’ve been able to get positive tests on healthy people who there’s absolutely nothing going on. They don’t have the virus, it’s just genetic noise. They never are able to grow the virus. So, guess what the cycles that are being used in the United States until very recently, how many cycles of amplification are they using?
[01:23:04] Ashley James: How many?
[01:23:05] Dr. Paul Thomas: Thirty-five to 40, sometimes more than 40. And at 35 to 40, you have a 97% chance that it’s a false positive. In other words, that positive test, it’s not COVID.
[01:23:17] Ashley James: Wait, 97% of the time it was a false positive?
[01:23:22] Dr. Paul Thomas: A false positive.
[01:23:23] Ashley James: Are these the cases that they reported to us every day in the news for the last year and a half to fear us?
[01:23:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: You got it. So, it’s a case epidemic, not a COVID epidemic. And then the death numbers are equally amplified because anybody that dies, if they’re in any way connected to a health system which is where most people die, you get sick—
[01:23:47] Ashley James: Heart attack, stroke.
[01:23:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, it doesn’t matter what. Motor vehicle accident—oh, nursing homes. If you die of old age and you test and it’s positive—and remember, 97% of the positives in many instances is false, it isn’t COVID—it gets labeled as death with COVID. It wasn’t from COVID, but it’s with COVID and it gets counted. There are ample reports of this going on.
The other phenomenon that’s jacked up the numbers is that you can get tested multiple times, the same person. So if I’m positive and I go back for another test, I go back for another test because I’m trying to get back to work or whatever reason, I need a negative. Each time I’m positive, that’s a case. In most states, the system doesn’t differentiate, oh, that’s the same person. They’re just reporting positive tests. We have this scare tactic, fear tactics on all the channels of the news, the mainstream media of look at all these deaths, look at all these cases, and then we’ve got a vaccine for you that will solve the problem.
So let me move over to absolute risk reduction and relative risk reduction. Folks, if you get this, you will no longer live in fear. You can set yourself free, walk outside without a mask, which by the way, there are states—I have one of my nurse practitioners who just came to help out from Ohio and nobody’s wearing a mask indoors or outdoors. Florida is the same way. There are several states where masks are a thing of the past.
I’m in Oregon, and I was just at the Oregon Zoo with my grandson, and it felt like 95% of people outside were walking around with masks. So, why is it so different? Is the virus just so much more dangerous in Oregon? No. Oregon has one of the lowest rates in the country. We have fear. Our government, our governor, and our health department have done a masterful job of making sure that everybody is scared out of their wits. It’s a fear campaign.
But here’s the trickery. It’s unconscionable that that reporter can report what they do and not be aware of this fact. So the studies that Pfizer and Madonna did that showed their vaccine was 96% effective, 90% effective, you hear that on the news, right? Get this vaccine, it’s 90% effective or it’s 96% effective. What they’re talking about is a relative risk reduction. So I’m just going to average out numbers. I’m not giving you the exact numbers because I don’t have them in front of me right now. But take for example with Pfizer, and that initial study had 40,000 participants. So 20,000 people were given the vaccine, 20,000 were given saline, a placebo.
[01:26:31] Ashley James: Were they given an inert placebo, or were they given something with other antigens in it?
[01:26:38] Dr. Paul Thomas: I think in that one it was an inert placebo. But I know in some of the trials, they were actually given a different vaccine, which is just weird to me. They picked a really yucky vaccine for side effects and we’re going to give that instead. That will be the placebo, you get this vaccine. It’s like, oh my God, my point is this.
When they were about three months into it, I believe, when they stopped the study, as far as their numbers, there were about 200 cases of positive COVIDs. So out of 40,000 people, there were only 200 positives, and that’s when they stopped the analysis. They found that, wow, 96% of the positives were in the unvaccinated group. So of those 20,000 people who were unvaccinated, what was your risk of having a positive? It was about 1%.
Now the real risk reduction, so the absolute risk reduction, not the relative one. So the 96% was relative to the vaccinated, but the absolute risk was 1%. And what was that risk for? It was at risk for mild COVID symptoms—runny nose, cough, maybe fever. They didn’t look at hospitalizations, they didn’t look at deaths. So folks, would you like to take a vaccine that has about a 50-50 chance you’re going to have side effects, and maybe a 1 in 10 chance you’re going to have serious side effects, and maybe a 1 in 10,000—I don’t remember what the exact number is of death—when your chance of it helping you avoid mild symptoms is 1%. It makes absolutely no sense at all, but it’s never presented that way.
There was an actual mainstream journal, I’m trying to remember it. It was one of the biggies. Was it The Lancet, or The New England Journal, or JAMA—one of those big threes. They had an article titled The Elephant in the Room, and they talked about this very fact. They went through I think three or four of the major coronavirus companies—Moderna, Pfizer, and a couple of the other ones—and they pointed out the percentage of real risk reduction, actual risk reduction (ARD) was around 1% or less. And they’re going, what’s going on. It’s the elephant in the room, nobody’s speaking the actual truth of what’s actually going on.
So, that’s why I get a little frustrated when the narrative is so off. It is just fear-mongering. Especially when it comes to kids, folks. They are just not at risk from this disease, and the risk of the vaccine is just pretty horrendous. I mean, now we’re getting all these heart inflammation reports that are real.
A good friend of mine is writing an article about that, actually, it’s my co-author for my book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, Jennifer Margulis. She’s a really good investigative reporter. She says, can you tell me, Dr. Paul, you’ve been doing pediatrics for a long time. How common are pericarditis and myocarditis? So this is the inflammation around the heart or of the heart. I have seen zero cases in my career.
[01:29:57] Ashley James: And how many patients have you seen in your career would you guess?
[01:30:01] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my God, 100,000, I don’t know? I mean, we have 10,000 patients, I don’t see them all because I have a team. I mean, if you take everybody over 30 years, 10,000 patients times 30 years, that’s a lot of patients who some of them are the same patients year to year, but it’s a lot. I mean, it’s a massive number of patients, and zero.
[01:30:26] Ashley James: Had you known anyone or have heard a colleague talk about, I treated this condition today.
[01:30:35] Dr. Paul Thomas: No, my co-author’s husband got pericarditis before COVID came around. And it’s so rare that he had to be seen up at OHSU, the Oregon Health Science University for Oregon. Rare complicated things, you end up there. I mean, they had the top of the top people in the country consulting to figure out what the heck is going on here. Some rare, I’m guessing autoimmune, they just give it a label that’s just a descriptor. You have inflammation around the heart, but nobody knows why.
We are aware that autoimmunity is a growing cause of a lot of chronic problems, and vaccines are definitely on the list of possible triggers for autoimmunity.
[01:31:20] Ashley James: One thing that you brought up in episode 224 when I first had you on the show—okay. When I was a kid, we didn’t get vaccines as an infant, as a newborn. They didn’t roll that out until—in Canada, they were giving the Hep B. I remember I was in high school, so it’s the late ‘90s. I would be first in line. I was like, oh, their marketing was so good. I rolled up my sleeve, I ran up because I’m not afraid of needles.
I’m so happy that I’m not into drugs and alcohol because I mean, I’m not afraid of needles. I might have been a heroin addict. If I was into drugs, I might have gone there because I’m like, I’m not afraid of needles and I wanted to prove how macho I am. I’m kind of a tomboy. I’m like, yeah, look at me, because all these kids are afraid and I’m like, I’m going to run up and I’m going to get this new Hepatitis.
[01:32:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: How old were you?
[01:32:10] Ashley James: I was in high school, it was in the late ‘90s. I just remember, they were like, oh, this is really great. And I’m like, okay. I mean, in Canada, it’s socialized medicine so their marketing is more about let’s keep costs down by keeping everyone healthy and preventing illness. But in the States, was it 2005 that they started to say, we’re going to give a vaccine that we’ve only previously ever given sex workers, drug addicts, nurses, and those that basically get exposed to this. We’ve never given it out to the public as a common vaccine, and all of a sudden now 100% of the population, the moment they come out of their mother, we’re going to give it to them. Was it around 2005? Was that it?
[01:33:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: A little bit earlier. Your recollection is correct, though. My kids are around your age as well, my oldest ones. I was following the CDC schedule for my kids. They got the vaccine as teenagers, and that was in the ‘90s.
[01:33:23] Ashley James: When did they start giving it to newborns, though?
[01:33:25]Dr. Paul Thomas: So the newborn shift in Oregon, and it felt like it was a national push here in the US, was around 2000, 2003, right around then. Because the interesting thing was I specifically remember it because it was right when they got the mercury out of the vaccines. And I thought to myself, is this a coincidence or is this a planned event? Because I was so excited about getting the mercury out of the vaccine.
I remember going to my youngest son’s kindergarten teacher or first grade teacher, and I said, you see a lot of autism now and a lot of ADD and ADHD. She said, oh, yes. I said, well, don’t worry, in five years, it’s going to be gone. I mean, I was so convinced that that was the leading cause of that brain issue. And it never went away. In fact, it got slightly worse, but we replaced one bad thing—the mercury—with something that’s probably equally bad, maybe worse—huge doses of aluminum.
By shifting that Hep B vaccine to newborn, two months, six months, that’s three big doses of a really bad aluminum product. The data is out there that that birth dose of aluminum is just horrendous or just the Hepatitis B series itself, it’s not a good thing.
[01:34:46] Ashley James: My point that I was getting at is as a child, me growing up in the ‘80s—I was born in 1980 and I never attended school with a child that was autistic, I never saw it. I think I knew one person with asthma. Never did I know a child in any of the schools I attended that had childhood cancer or any autoimmune conditions. Actually, I remember one kid that was allergic to grass, and so she’d get a weird rash if she sat on the grass. But everyone is growing up, super healthy, no problems.
So sometime in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, 100% of all newborns are on a different schedule than when I was growing up. I had very few vaccines growing up comparative to today. I went to a pediatrician who was actually quite famous in Toronto for being a fantastic doctor and he was well known to this day. I followed the schedule that Canada had laid out in the ‘80s and the ‘90s.
Nowadays, the children who are 10 years old, 15 years old, that kind of thing, the levels of childhood cancer, the levels of autoimmune condition comparative to 30 years ago, let’s say like, look at the before and after. What you brought up in our last interview you said, when we take a child and we overexcite the immune system with multiple doses of vaccine—because a vaccine, its intention is fantastic. Its intention is to train the immune system to mount a healthy response, so if you ever come in contact with it, you can have a healthy response and have better outcomes. That’s the intention. That’s a great intention, I want that for everyone. What happens in actuality is it overexcites and makes the immune system become hyperactive.
[01:37:06] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, immune activation it’s called. Think of it almost like carpet bombing. The attempt was, we’re just going to get antibodies against X, Y, or Z. But when it goes wrong, the immune system is now attacking yourself, that’s autoimmunity. So, if you’re attacking the islet cells of the pancreas, you’ve got type one diabetes. If you’re attacking the myelin sheath of your brain, you’ve got MS. If you’re attacking your cartilage in your joints, you’ve got arthritis, and so on and so on.
[01:37:41] Ashley James: So, these children end up with a hyperactive immune system that then becomes autoimmune which is what you just described. And then these children with autoimmune conditions, who are still children, are then put on immune suppressants and years later developed cancer because the immune system is not functioning correctly and can’t clear out the unhealthy cancerous cells. We’re creating wonderful customers for the pharmaceutical and medical industry. We’re creating wonderful customers. Customers for life until they die.
[01:38:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, you just outlined what I like to point out is vaccines are probably the number three moneymaker for pharma. They trigger autoimmunity. When you’re autoimmune, you have to give immunosuppressants as you stated. That’s the number one moneymaker for pharma. And when you suppress the immune system, you get cancers, the number two moneymaker for pharma. So numbers one, two, and three are all intertwined, turning you into an ATM cash machine for pharmaceutical companies. Trust me, folks, their interests are not in keeping you healthy, their interests are financial.
[01:38:48] Ashley James: It is such a dilemma to go upstream. Even me publishing this episode, I’m putting my career at risk. I’m putting my podcast at risk. And you have put your career at risk. I’m so grateful to your bravery and courage for continuing to speak out for the health, wellbeing, and safety of all children and adults.
[01:39:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, thank you as well. You’re absolutely right. You are taking a risk, and you obviously are doing that because you care. That’s the only reason I do this. I mean, that financial incentive paper that I wrote just shows, for example, that there’s no financial reason for me to do what I’m doing. I mean, I walk in and I talk to the patient. I can’t right now, because one of the conditions of getting my license back was I can’t talk about vaccines to patients. I figure I’m covered by free speech on a show.
[01:39:47] Ashley James: Hopefully.
[01:39:49] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, hopefully. And folks, everything we’re discussing here is just informational. Run this by your trusted health care providers, hopefully somebody who’s really aware of what’s going on because too many doctors are not. It’s a real risk because of censorship that’s going on at a very pervasive high level. If you speak out with facts, real data, and science, or even if it was your opinion. I mean, we could say you and I have opinions. We should be allowed in this free country. If it truly is a free country, we should be allowed to share opinions, disagree, and still be civil to one another. And I am trying to do that better these days. I think because you and I might be a lot on the same page, it sounds like we don’t like vaccines, but I’m with you.
At the beginning of the show when you stated, everybody’s got to make their own decisions and we need to love one another and support one another’s opinions because this way of keeping people divided is really not a good strategy for us to have long term good health. It just gives more power to the big businesses that are trying to take more control. They can keep us fighting over you name the issue, whether it’s political, whether you’re this party or that party, or whether it’s over a hot topic of the day.
If we can keep people divided whether it’s on race or some other issue, parties, it doesn’t matter, religion, anything that keeps people divided keeps them distracted from what’s really going on, which is that you are slowly giving up your freedoms, you’re slowly giving up your rights. And right now, they are attacking your body. We’re turning humans into GMO humans. It’s never been done before, it never should have been done, and it’s being done on a massive worldwide stage with an experimental vaccine. This vaccine is not FDA-approved, by the way, folks, it is still experimental. And that’s the one thing I think maybe could put this to an end is these companies that are requiring vaccines.
So if I have to go get a vaccine because this company made me do it and I’m injured, I can sue that company. They aren’t protected, the vaccine manufacturers are protected because of the way the laws have been written, so they’re just going like crazy. Everybody should get it, cha-ching, cha-ching. But companies that insist that you get it in these schools, these universities that are insisting, they are liable. There’s going to be some lawsuits, and when that finally starts hitting in a big way, I think businesses will have to think twice about whether or not they want to become liable for the damage these vaccines are causing because these damages are just going to start accumulating to the point where it’s not going to be possible to keep them hidden.
[01:42:37] Ashley James: You just mentioned, I hope we’re protected on our amendment rights to be able to have freedom of speech. The next episode I’m publishing actually after this one is an interview I did recently with a doctor who has practiced for many years, and he’s an MD who studied holistic medicine. He chose to treat all of his COVID patients with the same formula, the same protocol that he has treated all upper respiratory illnesses for the last 20,30 years using natural medicine. He had such a huge success rate.
He published it on his blog. He’s been running a blog since the ‘90s. And it was something like certain vitamins, certain things, you inhale—all-natural substances. And he also would do an injection in the buttocks of ozone. Most of the stuff you could do at home and take it home, that kind of thing.
At that time, he had treated just about 100 patients and all of them survived. This was early on last year. The FCC wrote him a letter—FCC, not FDA—saying, you’re in violation, you have to take this down. You have to take your blog down. He said, what are you talking about? They said, you cannot make claims that you’re treating COVID-19, you can’t do that. Because there are no published studies. He said, well, I’m practicing medicine. I’m a doctor. Aren’t I allowed to practice medicine the way I see fit? They said, no, you are not allowed to do that.
If he said, I treat arthritis with these vitamins and minerals. I cure arthritis with this, this, this. If he said that, they didn’t have a problem, which he did on his blog for many years. They had a problem with the fact that he was treating and publishing that he was treating COVID-19. So he said, okay, I’ll do what you say. I’m going to go publish a study.
Then he got all of his information together. He’s now out of 400 patients at this point with COVID, and all of them lived and very few hospitalized. I don’t remember the exact numbers. It was like five or something, It was a very small amount. But he had great, great, great success. They recovered really well. And so then he found a journal, and he published it. He came back to the FCC and said, here, a published study proving that I can claim that this is a treatment. They said no, it needs to be a placebo double-blind study. So they keep changing the target. But he said that’s unethical. When I know what works for my patients to then do a placebo and let them die or let them be harmed, that is unethical.
I hope we still have our first amendment rights, he’s married to a lawyer. He tried to fight it. He then took his blog down and then he wrote a book. He found out that a blog on the internet is not protected, for some reason. When he’s laying out the treatment plan for COVID-19. And then he said, but apparently, a book is still considered a protected free speech and so he wrote a book and published it with all of his findings basically. That definitely scares me.
[01:46:30] Dr. Paul Thomas: So I wrote a book early on in this COVID outbreak because I had a dear friend almost die. He was hospitalized before I even knew he was sick. They wanted to intubate him so badly and he just said no way. He’d already been hearing the reports that once you’re intubated, it was an 80% chance of dying. He went with almost very low oxygen for three nights, and couldn’t sleep. You know if he fell asleep he’d be dead. I was able to help him a little bit by just texting him once he could get access to his phone.
But yeah, my book was accepted on Amazon and then last minute was taken down because I did not adhere to the World Health Organization criteria. I didn’t meet World Health Organization standards on the management of COVID.
[01:47:15] Ashley James: What are the World Health Organization standards on the management of COVID? Is it to wear a mask and wait until the vaccine comes out?
[01:47:22] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, you’ve got it. At that point, it was do nothing and wait until you’re bad enough to be intubated. I mean, it was insanity. It was pretty clear that having really robust vitamin D levels is probably the most important thing you can do. Everybody should be doing that now and forevermore, just because that’s the one vitamin we’re almost universally deficient in because you have to be in sunlight to make enough active vitamin D, and we wear clothes when we’re outside. If we’re in the Northern Hemisphere, far away from the equator, the sun doesn’t do its job very well, anyway.
[01:47:56] Ashley James: And you also have to have a healthy liver, healthy kidneys, and enough healthy fats.
[01:47:59] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. Anyway, censorship is alive and well, and it’s getting worse and worse. It’s a real problem for our democracy.
[01:48:07] Ashley James: There’s a concerted effort to make the population do what they say, and that is not in our best interests when we look at the data, and that scares me. There are so many listeners who are like, I trust these people, I trust these organizations. These organizations have good people in them. Yes, every organization has good people in them. We don’t know what’s going on at the top, right? Why is it that these different organizations, why is Amazon is so eager to comply with the World Health Organization instead of the Constitution?
Why are these independent companies so eager to follow this one direction when this one direction is showing it’s doing harm? And why is showing alternatives that are proven safe and effective becoming illegal?
[01:49:09] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. There’s a huge financial incentive. It’s all about control and money. Power, control, and money have always been underlying in any major shift. This is modern-day book burning. I mean, we really have a problem on our hands. Listeners, if you’re still with us—this show has been going on a while—take your power back. You the individual have the power to live free, but only if you insist on it because they’re coming for you.
[01:49:44] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Paul Thomas. I value your work. My listeners are used to long interviews because they love really, really learning the nitty-gritty from our guests, and you’ve definitely laid out some very interesting points. We’re going to make sure that all the links to everything that Dr. Paul Thomas said are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.
Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview or anything that you really want to make sure came across in today’s interview?
[01:50:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Listeners, please, just be kind to yourself. Do whatever you can to get away from fear because fear is bad for your immune system. So number one thing for that is just turn off the TV. Get outdoors as much as you can. If you get out into nature, you’re walking in a forest, you’re swimming in the ocean, or in the garden, in any way you can get out in nature, you will notice that the rest of the animal kingdom is absolutely fine. Isn’t that interesting? None of them are lining up for a vaccine. They are absolutely fine even in the toxic world that we have. So, remember that.
You are uniquely gifted by your birth with a very good immune system and a way to heal yourself, but you do need to get the right nutrients, you need to avoid toxins. Just be careful about what you might put into your body, consider it your temple, and take vitamin D if nothing else. And then prepare yourself in the event that you do get sick with this COVID. It’s pretty rare, but if it happens, don’t just sit around waiting to get sicker. Go to the frontline doctors.
Check out my show, doctorsandscience.com. The show is called Against the Wind: Doctors & Science Under Fire. I’m trying to bring to you what you need to know to remain healthy despite this crazy world we’re living in. I’m sending you love and wishing you the very best. Thank you Ashley so much for having me on your show.
[01:51:50] Ashley James: Thank you so much.
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Recommended Book by Dr. Paul ThomasAn Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff
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To buy the Nadovim NAD supplement that Ashley recommends, use coupon code LTH at nadovim.com or use this link to apply the coupon code directly: https://bit.ly/3uL3FEl
Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucliotide Supplement, NADOVIM (NAD+) The Missing Link to Energy, Brain Function and Longevityhttps://www.learntruehealth.com/nicotinamide-adenine-dinucliotide-supplement-nadovim-nad-the-missing-link-to-energy-brain-function-and-longevity
Highlights:
What is NAD+ Benefits of using NAD+ Importance of having passion and purpose for the overall well-being Anything that’s a toxin required NAD+NAD+ is important for the body’s overall function, but not a lot of people have heard of it. In this episode, Caspar Szulc explains what NAD+ is and what are the benefits of taking NAD+. He also shares how Nadovim is different from other NAD+ supplements on the market.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode is about a supplement that I had never heard of. It’s a molecule that our body absolutely needs in order for the mitochondria to convert food into energy. I’m surprised I had never heard of it until a few weeks ago. My friend and I were sitting around talking while our kids were in gymnastics. She said, you know my favorite supplement, have you ever heard of it? And I had not.
She said this is the difference between me just dragging through the day and me skipping through the day, and she’s a very busy mom with a demanding career. I’ve always known her to be full of energy and always be standing and moving around completing stuff. When she has days off she wants to go for hikes. I mean, she’s that kind of person. I’m like, you’re on a day off, why don’t we just chill here? She’s like, no, let’s go. Let’s go do stuff.
She’s one of those people that has such energy, and I never thought she had energy problems. But she told me that she really relies on this and a few other supplements just to make her body function more optimally, which then, in turn, gives her sustainable energy. That’s when I got really excited about learning more about this, and it just so happens that I was interviewing this guest the next week.
Now, when I did the interview, I had never tried the supplement before. Since the interview, I have tried it. I’ve been taking it for the last few days and I really did notice a difference, which is cool because there are so many supplements out there that I haven’t noticed a huge difference. This one I was having a particularly hard day, it was a few days ago and I was having kind of a rough day. If you’ve been a listener and you’ve listened to past episodes, you may know that I was pregnant, I lost my daughter at birth, and then a few days later I got COVID and my body was just really run down because of grief, being in shock, and healing from postpartum.
The last month, my body’s been through a lot, and on top of that, we’re moving. We’re actually downsizing 2700 square feet into a Fifth Wheel RV. Our life has been kind of crazy the last month and a half. So a few days ago I just had really low energy. Emotionally just very drained, kind of feeling depressed but pushing through it. Definitely feeling grief, and I was just continuing to mentally stick to focusing on this positive outcome we’re going to have, focusing on what I’m grateful for, but still, my body was not where my mind wanted to be. It was definitely very low energy.
Caffeine can wake you up, but it doesn’t really give you energy. You can still be awake and exhausted, so that’s not really the answer. I take all my vitamins and I eat as healthy as I can. Then I took this supplement and about an hour later I just noticed I’m not exhausted anymore. It’s not jitters, you’re not feeling hyper. I wasn’t feeling hyper. I haven’t felt hyper on it. I just noticed that all that fatigue was gone. We’ve gotten so much more done since then. We’ve been able to complete so much more of our moving, decluttering, selling, giving away, donating, or getting rid of all of our stuff. That’s really neat.
I’ve also noticed that sort of deep depression has really eased up, the sensations of deep sadness have really eased up. And then in this interview, he talks about that. He talks about how this supplement really supports the brain as well as the body in producing energy, but people have noticed better sleep. I’ve noticed I’ve had, since taking it, much deeper dreams, much more vivid, colorful, detailed dreams, which is really interesting, so I must be getting deeper sleep.
Not that I ever really have had brain fog lately, it’s just coming down from all the events that I’ve had recently, I’ve noticed that this supplement has made things a bit easier. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of really positive payoffs for me. Even late into the evening, I just have the ability to keep going whereas I might have just called it a day at 4:00 or 5:00 PM and said, okay, I’m done with these tasks until tomorrow. Like last night, it was much later in the evening and we’re like, oh, I could keep going. This is really interesting.
It’s what the body uses to convert our food into energy and we’re often depleted in it. We talk about in this interview why we’re depleted in it, where it comes from, and how we can take this supplement. The guy I interviewed, he formulated one that’s very high quality, so I recommend you check out his. The links are going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. He gives us a coupon code. All the listeners, we get a discount which is great. The coupon code being LTH.
Enjoy today’s interview. Share it with your friends who might be going through some mentally or emotionally stressful times. I think it’s good for anyone who wants good sustainable energy, but it’s also good for people who have brain fog or are just really stressed out because I have noticed it has made it easier for me the last few days that I’ve been on it. That’s really exciting.
Enjoy today’s show, share it with your friends. Let me know if you do try it and what your results are. I’m always curious to hear how different natural supplements or natural programs help people. You can join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group, that’ll redirect you to the group. Share what your experiences are with Nadovim and let me know. I’m really curious, let everyone know. I will keep sharing my experiences.
I also shared it with my husband and he noticed that there was just—it’s not like this boom like if you take a shot of espresso, you feel something jittery almost right away. It’s not that, it’s just like an hour later you go, wow, I can feel it. I’ve got more energy. You got more drive, you got more motivation. Your body’s just functioning better, so that’s really cool. Awesome. Well, enjoy today’s show and let me know what you think. I’m really curious to hear the results that the other listeners get, so stay in touch.
[00:07:11] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 460. I am so excited for today’s guest. Caspar Szulc is on the show, President and co-founder of Innovative Medicine. Now, what’s really serendipitous is about two weeks ago I was hanging out with one of my friends while our kids did their gymnastics class together. We were talking about different supplements. She goes, have you ever heard of NAD+? I look at her, I’m like, that sounds familiar but tell me more. She goes, well, it is my favorite supplement. And I said, okay, why?
Now, this is one of my friends who’s super healthy, crazy. Probably the healthiest friend I know. She’s so fit, she always has energy. She has two young kids. She has a career so she’s just like always, always on. She’s always standing or hiking, and I’ve never seen her sit. She just has energy, and I never ever think of her as someone who needs a supplement. But what she tells me about NAD+ is she said she experimented with a lot of supplements and NAD+ had the most noticeable energy boost for her. I’m quoting her, “It’s the difference between dragging through the day and skipping through it,” and I always see her skip through her days. Now I know her magic formula is not cocaine or coffee, it’s NAD+.
Then I saw that I was interviewing you and I thought, whoa, this is so cool because you, your father, and your company created this supplement. I’m really excited to learn about what it does and how it supports our body’s ability to properly produce enough energy so we can skip through our days. Welcome to the show.
[00:09:07] Caspar Szulc: Thanks for having me, and that was a great intro. I’m hoping to skip through this and give people a lot of good information.
[00:09:14] Ashley James: Now, do you take your own supplement?
[00:09:16] Caspar Szulc: Of course. I mean, honestly, I think a lot of what started like why go into the supplement world because we were really in the medical world—we have a medical clinic—was what would be something I would like to take. That’s why I started a company. It’s like what would I want to see? That was the basis of it. So I take Nadovim daily.
[00:09:35] Ashley James: So Nadovim, which the links to everything that we talked about today are going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com, and you’re giving us a discount code. You’re giving us a coupon code. The coupon code is LTH as in Learn True Health. Of course, that’s the one we like to use, so all the listeners know that one.
Nadovim is a supplement, it’s an NAD+ supplement. I have so many questions. We’re going to talk about why is it better than the other brands out there, what it does, how it affects the body, and how it supports the body’s ability to make energy in a really healthy way? But before we get into all that, I’d love a little bit of background information. What happened in your life that led you to where you are now? What happened to lead you into helping create being part of the team that has created and distributed this supplement?
[00:10:34] Caspar Szulc: It’s a good question, one that I get asked a lot. It’s like what happened? I was recently asked this for a survey for top entrepreneurs to fill out that my PR team had me do. It was like, what was your aha moment of all this? I don’t have one. I don’t know, I was frustrated. I was born into this, first off, in a sense, meaning my father is a doctor, my mother’s a psychologist. They come from Europe, they have a little bit of a different background, but I’ve always been around medicine, health, and this idea of being healthy is just something that was really ingrained in me from day one on this earth.
It’s not that this is something new or I had anything happen to get me into the field somewhat. I used to travel around the world with my father. When you go to conferences and just be around doctors as a five-year-old in China or something, that was just normal to me. I had that sort of upbringing, that happened in a sense.
Then I went to school. I went to Boston University and got into finance and marketing, which was a little bit different. My father definitely wanted me to be a doctor. I was just like, you work really hard dad. I see patients and blood isn’t my thing. Here I am 20 years later after that conversation in medicine talking to a lot of patients and working really long hours also.
After I graduated with a finance and marketing degree I went into finance, became a financial analyst, thought this was the corporate road, the ladder to success, and living the American dream. Within a year I was burned out, frustrated, and miserable. It wasn’t what I thought. It wasn’t creative. I was just hitting buttons really and just typing in trades and seeing that they are correct and answering to 10 people above me that didn’t want any input on anything.
A year of that is someone that is creative that really did value health and feeling burned out when you’re 21, 22. That’s not good. That’s a sign that something is going on. There was an opportunity actually that my co-founder who was a family friend growing up who was in medical school at the time and was also frustrated with things and saw what my father was doing in this integrative field because my father left the conventional field and being an anesthesiologist at a hospital to start to help patients regain their health rather than just mass symptoms and manage the disease.
He said, there’s a great opportunity here to get involved with a company side so that would get more people to know about this because not enough people do know about this idea of advanced integrative medicine, of personalizing, of really approaching things at their root causes, and mind, body, spirit, and all these things that are now pretty popular but this was the early 2000s when no one was really talking about it so much.
That’s what led me into this, into starting a company in innovative medicine, into really pushing the boundaries of what we do in our medical center, and still traveling the world as I did like a little child to find out what is new out there. Experts in different countries and continents, what are they doing that we can apply in medicine to help people because we do have a problem right now? Over 60% are chronically ill and people are depressed. They have less energy than ever. They’re just depleted. It’s become a mission.
The whole thing is I’ve done this my whole life, been around it, and I just want to expose more people to it to empower them. That’s really the backstory to everything I do and what I’ve been doing in this company for about 20 years now.
[00:14:29] Ashley James: Now, what you told me before we hit record is that your team for 10 years was researching and developing Nadovim, this NAD+ supplement, but in the last two years it was very intense R&D research. Can you tell us a bit about that?
[00:14:51] Caspar Szulc: Yeah. So I mean 10 years ago would be from the point of, hey, let’s do a supplement. We know there are great things that we’re utilizing within the clinic that are getting great results with patients, and they’re all different types of things. It wasn’t just NAD+. NAD+ we probably introduced around five or so years ago in an IV format into the center after learning more about it. We were looking at everything early on—glutathione—and we were kind of like, what will it be? What will our supplement be? And that was like 10 years.
And then around two, three years ago, maybe a little bit more, we started to really focus on NAD+ because what we saw when applying it intravenously was that patients who had brain fog, neurological disorders, early-onset dementia—anything related really to the brain—saw a vast improvement when using this compound. We’re seeing it firsthand in really tough cases—parkinsonism, Lyme disease, neurological Lyme disease, again, dementia, anyone with a brain injury, and they were improving drastically in some cases.
[00:16:05] Ashley James: Multiple sclerosis?
[00:16:07] Caspar Szulc: MS. I mean, you could go across the board naming neurological pieces or something with a neurological function. When you talk about brain fog or depression, that’s linked to so many chronic conditions also. That’s a symptom, and that was greatly improving as we added this into the treatment—NAD+ infusions.
[00:16:27] Ashley James: What about autism?
[00:16:29] Caspar Szulc: Again, I look at everything from the source. Autism, while it’s a neurological disorder, you could also say it’s a toxicity disorder, it’s a disorder of emotions, and all sorts of things there too. I don’t like to ever say diagnoses that are multi-pronged outside just neurological, especially in children that this is the key or the answer. Again, NAD+ isn’t the answer to anything, I would say really. It’s a wonderful addition to help with the functioning of something, and we could get into that later.
[00:17:05] Ashley James: Perfect. Yes, absolutely. Now, my limited understanding—I’m really excited for you to help us dive in deep and understand it much more—is that this supplement supports the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell. I definitely want to get into that. First, can you tell us what is NAD+? What does that stand for and what is it?
[00:17:26] Caspar Szulc: So nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. NAD+, and there’s a plus added, is basically a coenzyme factor that is in the electron chain transport—the whole transition of it basically. Actually, when I talked to experts about this originally, it was explained to me that it’s as important as oxygen in the body. Every single cell in your body needs NAD+, and it’s basically the way we transfer over from food and everything we take in water into energy within the cells within the mitochondria. It’s incredibly essential.
The one thing I also learned is NAD+ gets depleted rather quickly as we age, and especially with modern-day living, meaning whenever you drink alcohol, one molecule of alcohol, it requires two molecules of NAD+ to get that out of the body. Same with prescription drugs, same with oxidative stress or just general stressors in general.
[00:18:33] Ashley James: This is fascinating, sorry to interrupt. Does the body make NAD+?
[00:18:39] Caspar Szulc: The body basically has stores of NAD+ that it will require to create this energy, but no, it requires an outside source, and you get it from food as well. It’s just things that are usually higher in protein or anything. You could actually do that, it’s just not a large amount you could say. Again, at the rate we deplete today, it is problematic. This is probably the reason so many people don’t know what NAD+ is because if it’s as important as oxygen to life and every single cell needs it, how come we don’t know about this?
I was thinking the same thing, and everyone I spoke to answered because we never really had a problem with it before. We always had these stores, as we age it goes down, but it’s not enough to really cause an issue. If we eat normally, then fine. We have no need to know about this NAD++ because things are working fine. If it’s not broke don’t fix it or you don’t even need to know so much about it.
But because we live in a day and age where we are go, go, go, where we consume lots of things that actually take up our NAD+ supplies, we’re being depleted at an exponential rate. We basically have NAD+ depletion or something called NED that is happening to us, and it’s happening faster and faster and faster. It’s almost like as we’re aging a little bit quicker as well, it’s really the NAD+ that’s shifting out of us. And with that, we have the myriad of things that can go wrong when your mitochondria don’t have the energy to replicate, to do all the functions a cell has to. It’s really at the cellular level that we’re looking at where dysfunction starts to happen and that could turn into so many different things.
[00:20:32] Ashley James: To simplify it, the mitochondria, which is this part of the cell that makes energy, and actually, fascinatingly enough, mitochondria is like a bacteria. So it’s this really interesting beautiful symbiotic relationship we have with it. It needs NAD+ in order to take our food and turn it into energy, and when we don’t have enough of it, we can eat lots of food but it’s not getting converted into energy because NAD+ is being used up because of the stressors in our life—the alcohol, the toxic stress, drugs over the counter or prescription.
70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication, so 70% of Americans are being depleted, their NAD+ is being depleted, and almost everyone drinks alcohol. I feel like an oddity because I very, very, very, very rarely drink. We don’t have alcohol in our house. I could enjoy a glass of wine maybe twice a year, but that’s just it. It’s a very rare treat, and it’s not even a treat. It’s just a very rare thing in my life, and everyone’s ordering drinks. It’s very interesting.
So I imagine the greater population is consuming alcohol on a daily or weekly basis, so they’re depleting their NAD+ significantly. In addition to the NAD+ being depleted from the drugs they’re taking, in addition to the NAD+ being depleted from the toxic environment that their liver is trying to get rid of all the toxins. There are 50,000 man-made chemicals that are new to our body that has been invented in less than the last hundred years. It’s over 50,000. I’ve heard other doctors quote 80,000 chemicals that are in our air, water, and soil, so they’re in our food, they’re in our environment, and our liver does not know what to do with it, but it takes up a lot of resources for the body to have to get rid of this.
No wonder we’re feeling so sluggish. So thinking back to my friend who says NAD+ is the difference between just being draggy all day or just skipping through her day, that makes so much sense. So Nadovim is your NAD+ supplement. Is there anything else in Nadovim? Is Nadovim in any way different from all the other NAD+ supplements out there?
[00:23:05] Caspar Szulc: Yeah, it’s actually drastically different in a number of ways. So Nadovim is one of the first to market that actually uses fully formed NAD+, so it’s not a precursor. Most of the others go with the precursor, which is nicotinamide and nicotinamide riboside (NR). So anytime you take an NR supplement, you require other elements to it as well to then recombine and turn into NAD+. Absolutely, I’m not saying that won’t help, but there are processes that have to happen in the body. Some energy is actually expensed to require you to take that precursor, turn it into NAD+, bring it to the cells, and then fuel those cells.
What we realized was that listen, you don’t use NR in infusions and no doctor does that. They use real full-formed NAD+. It is a larger and delicate molecule, but we also realized when we looked at the research is taken alone, it is true that it gets somewhat hydrolyzed within the small intestine and you lose some of that bioavailability. But when you combine it with other elements, especially ones like coenzyme q10, which have been studied when they take it orally with NAD+, it’s great for chronic fatigue syndrome patients. They showed a study out of Spain that showed great improvement in HRV and general energy levels when done together in specific ratios.
We did that and really we approached this as what is the best synergistic model of different elements we could use in ingredients to get the best results? I always say it’s like creating a wonderful meal. If you’re going to a Michelin star restaurant, they’re never going to just put a really nice piece of steak on your plate and say eat it. They’re always going to garnish it with something. They’re always going to put some nice vegetables that complement it, whatever it is—mashed potato, anything with it that comes together and you get a really good meal.
That’s what you should be looking for also in a supplement—something that enhances each ingredient and works together synergistically. So we also included glycine, great for the brain, great for memory. We included thiamine. We included bacopa, which is of course a known herbal and enhancer of cognitive function. Cat’s claw, inflammation was an issue we looked at as well.
So there are eight ingredients in it together and we looked at the precise dosage of everything in there. So when you have 33 milligrams of coenzyme q10, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s really there to boost the actual NAD+, which you get 200 milligrams of. That increases the bioavailability, which helps with the actual delivery of it. Why we say where most people look at NAD+ or NR supplements is just cellular health and overall well-being, we looked at the brain because we added those elements such as bacopa and everything and realized 20% of all your energy and NAD+ is consumed by the brain. That is where you should be looking if you have things like brain fog, if you have things like memory loss, and even very small.
While we used it in the first year or two strictly within the clinical aspect, gave this to doctors with our network and used it on the tough cases of neurological diseases. Once we opened it to the public and started getting the feedback, you get things like I used to forget certain words, where I put my keys, that doesn’t happen anymore. I used to need that second cup of coffee in the afternoon, that doesn’t happen anymore. I used to forget different things throughout the day, that doesn’t happen anymore.
It was wonderful to see that what we looked into the research, what we planned out, what we did lots of R&D about was actually happening, both in the population that was sick and really required to boost, but also the population that thought they were healthy and thought this was just declined in aging but it really wasn’t. It was NAD+ depletion. Lots of people are going through just fatigue and brain fog, that’s a huge population.
That’s why we created this product because we said, what’s the lowest hanging fruit that could impact the most people? What we saw on our patient basis was brain fog, neurological decline, and then that also related to the general population because I think everyone can say we have a little bit of this depletion and this need for focus more than ever.
Where most people thought they were aging and going through this decline in their just general being, we realized that they were probably being depleted of NAD+, so this addition of this formula that gave them not just NAD+ but gave them the coenzyme q10, gave them bacopa, gave them thiamine, gave them the glycine. These were all together really helpful in restoring the proper brain function, getting rid of that brain fog, and also increasing energy throughout.
[00:28:15] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. You guys, for two years, did almost like a clinical trial? Drug companies do clinical trials. In that, you worked with doctors and their patients, had the doctors observe what was happening with their patients and then reported back to you. Then, of course, you and your own clinic, you’d been using NAD+ intravenously like you had shared, and then you’re using Nadovim in your clinic and seeing the results you were getting before you opened it up for the public to buy.
[00:28:49] Caspar Szulc: Right. And we were fortunate enough that we started as a company that really worked with practitioners first. Where we started this company was really education with other practitioners to show them what we were doing within our clinic. So we built up a network around the world of doctors that we went and spoke to. We were in India, we were in Brazil, we were in all these places showing them different techniques in integrative medicine. So when it came time to introduce a product, we said, well, why don’t we prove it on the medical side of things? It’s one thing to prove it in a lab, it’s another thing to prove it with the toughest cases and actually get the medical and clinical experience of what is going on and to have that come from the doctors themselves.
When the doctor said, I did nothing, I changed nothing in the protocol. I gave this supplement to someone with parkinsonism and their tremors greatly reduced. That was a testament to us. And while that’s not a double-blind placebo, we understand that. We really do value that clinical experience because as we know, tons of things have gone through double-blind placebos and shown great, great success in them only to then be used by the general population they don’t see that same level of success.
We value doctors’ opinions. We really value those connections we had with the medical community itself that was already in this integrated world and trying to look at what else can I give to my patients that can improve their outcomes. When we were able to provide them with Nadovim and some of these people already doing NAD+ infusions, but perhaps it was supplemental to take that home because NAD+ infusions are costly, number one. They’re lengthy, they’re several hours. They do sometimes have some—they’re not side effects, but they’re unwanted. If you push NAD+ too quickly intravenously, you’ll get this tightness in the chest and a feeling of anxiety, and a lot of people don’t like that.
When you could provide them with a daily dose of NAD+ orally and they’re seeing similar results to what they were doing in the IV on let’s say a bi-weekly basis, that’s a wonderful extra option for any doctor to utilize. And then to be able to provide that safely to the public as well, we were really happy with the outcome from what we saw, probably more so than what we thought would happen.
[00:31:06] Ashley James: Oh absolutely. Now, the IV is getting right in the body. How did you figure out how to make NAD+ orally be readily absorbed by the body? Is it the cofactors that are also in the Nadovim supplement? How did you guys figure it out? In many supplements, so much is lost through poor absorption. If someone has a messed up gut, they’re not absorbing all their nutrients. How do you bypass that?
[00:31:40] Caspar Szulc: First off, knowledge of bioavailability is really important and understanding. We’ve worked with so many different compounds orally over the years at the clinic understanding that number one, quality is always the most important I think. There are so many different sources of NAD+, and that’s what sometimes upsets me is just this idea that NAD+ is NAD+. That’s the same idea as like, all right, a car is a car. Show me a Ferrari and then show me like a beat up old car, they’re not the same thing. You will gladly pay a premium for one and some you don’t even want to get into because you might not make it to point B in that.
The same thing goes for supplements that goes for medicine, and I always say, in no other realm is it more important to put quality first than in medicine and health where it literally dictates your results. We had to go around from different suppliers and different nutritional manufacturers and see and test their NAD+, look for those purity sources, look for ones that are unadulterated, and really look for ones that had the highest quality to them. Then when you add in the cofactors on top of that, I think that alone is already a successful way to increase bioavailability.
Now the one thing I’ll say about NAD+, I think it’s still often misunderstood as to how it really works, and I think we’re still learning about it because a lot of the competitors or people in our world state that yes, once you ingest it, it’s hydrolyzed and it won’t make its way into the bloodstream. That’s based on a 1980 study of rats that you could look at, and we did. There were definitely some flaws to that and some conceptions there that didn’t really make all that much sense. Once we did look at other studies that were more recent coming out of Japan and other places, you could see that there is new knowledge to understanding how it can be broken up and basically recombined.
My co-founder who’s a doctor looked into this and started looking at those studies and published an article on the bioavailability of not just precursors but NAD+ itself. There’s a couple of conclusions that it came to.
Number one is that it gets broken apart but then it gets recombined. If you had to take a car through a smaller space than it could fit, what would you do? You take off the wheels maybe, you’ll separate a little bit, but once it’s back in there, you can recombine it pretty easily. As opposed to even the precursors do need to be broken as well to go through and be available, and then they need to recombine with something else that’s in the bloodstream before they become NAD+. So you’re going to require those extra elements whereas you already had the whole car going in.
Then there are new understandings of how certain transporters in the gut can actually take the whole molecule and bring it through. That’s something scientists are just tapping into I think just last year they found that larger molecules host that NAD+ and those that are actually associated with some of the precursors that even larger the NR are crossing fully formed through the gut barrier in and become bioavailable and useful that way.
I mean, science is ever-changing. That whole idea of the science is settled always makes me chuckle a little bit when people say that because science by nature changes almost every single day when we make new discoveries, and we’ll never stop making new discoveries about these things. It’s kind of interesting to see it anecdotally because that’s where we started. We started, okay, you give someone NAD+, they get better. All right, what about oral? They got better too, that’s anecdotal.
And then you start to see the data that’s coming out that you research and it’s matching up. We didn’t even know when we first started putting coenzyme q10 with NAD+ that there were any research papers or anything. We just went off the knowledge of each individually. And then it got brought to our attention, hey there is this study out of Spain where they did it and they put the two together and supplemented over eight weeks and saw a vast improvement in HRV. It was like, oh, wow. That’s basically validating what we were seeing.
That is the breakdown of where we went in this idea of bioavailability—always looking at quality first, looking at the purity of it, looking at what the cofactors can be that can increase not just absorption rate but effectiveness once it gets in, and then, of course, looking at what the data is showing. Are we seeing a placebo in all these patients, or is there something to it? And I think the science is catching up that there is something to it, and I know there are a lot of great, great researchers out there that are just looking at NAD+ and finding new things all the time.
I think we’re still in a relatively early stage of understanding the usefulness and also how it works, the mechanisms of NAD+ within the body that go beyond this understanding of it just supplies the mitochondria with energy, it gets in through this, and you need precursors or you need this. It’s ever-evolving, which is kind of cool. At the same time, I understand it could be a little bit confusing for some. But at the end of the day, we care about results. We care about actually helping people. If that comes first before the data and research can really validate over and over, we’re okay with that. We hope it’ll catch up soon enough.
[00:37:14] Ashley James: So, Nadovim is giving the body the nutrients that are natural to the body, the body needs, but the body is depleted in. That’s vastly different from taking a drug or even self-medicating with coffee, with sugar. I remember a time in my life where I would go to coffee and sugar just to wake up in the morning.
I had a really, really bad chronic adrenal fatigue in my 20s, it was ridiculous. I went to see a functional medicine doctor who actually performed in the Olympics twice. She and I are still friends today, she’s amazing. She’s in her late 70s and she still runs marathons. She’s just super awesome. I want to be her when I grow up. This was 12 years ago and she looked at my cortisol levels and said, I have never seen cortisol levels this low. You absolutely have chronic adrenal fatigue based on all my symptoms and my blood work. And then back then, I went to several MDs and they just brushed me off. They hadn’t learned about chronic adrenal fatigue. They’re like, well, you don’t have Addison’s disease. Just go home, drink coffee, or whatever.
But I went to her and she’s like, okay, we’re going to get you better with supplements, a better diet, and lifestyle changes. It validated me because doctors said there’s nothing wrong with me or whatever until I saw her and she knew to run the labs to see that I had chronic adrenal fatigue. She said, I’d never seen someone so low. The closest I’ve ever seen was after I finished the Olympics, after her training. After very intense, she goes, my cortisol levels were about the same, but I bounced back and you’ve been this way for years.
I know she would absolutely have put me on Nadovim if she had had access to it back then, but how she helped me to start to get on the path to healing was finding out all the different vitamins, minerals, and things that my body was missing and changing my diet.
It took me years of just constantly researching and looking through natural medicine and working with several Naturopathic doctors until it all clicked and I found the keys to solving my health problems.
I’m really excited about Nadovim because it’s what the body is missing, and when I started taking what my body was missing, even a really high-quality methylated multi B vitamin supplement was life turned on. All of a sudden, the lights turned on in my body because my body was depleted. And then I started taking different minerals, 60 minerals highly absorbed by the body, all of a sudden it was like the lights turned on even more and I started to feel my body come online.
These are things that should be in our food but aren’t in our food because they’re food supply. They’re not our food in the amounts that our body needs, and our body is under way more stress so it burns through our nutrients much quicker. Doctors wanted to put me on drugs. They had different drugs for me, and of course, my body doesn’t have a deficiency for whatever drug they wanted to give me. My body was missing these key nutrients that are in Nadovim. So it’s very intriguing.
I’ve had clients who say, because I’ll help them get on like a really great multi B vitamin that’s highly absorbed by the body and actually all 16 vitamins and some minerals. They’ll say, well, how long do I have to take this? I take it every day but when can I get off of it? It’s just such an interesting question. It’s like, well how long do you want to feel healthy because this is what your body uses every day. When you’re supplementing, when you’re filling in the gaps of your nutrient needs, you want to take that every day for the rest of your life.
Your body needs vitamin C every day right, so if you’re not getting enough from your diet you need to supplement in order to give your body all the raw building blocks it needs to have a proper cellular function. So your body’s using everything in Nadovim to properly function. We have to think this isn’t a drug. You get on a drug and you want to know when you’re going to get off the drug, right? But with this, this isn’t a drug. This is supplementing what you are lacking, what your body needs in order to optimally function.
Now, that leads me to my question because biohackers and athletes have really latched on to Nadovim and NAD+ to boost their results. I’d love for you to talk about it because we talked about people who are feeling sick or even just people who think they’re healthy but notice they have a decline in their energy or their mental clarity. But what about those people who are just super healthy like athletes, why are they so excited about Nadovim?
[00:42:27] Caspar Szulc: Well, one thing I want to get to that you say was really interesting that I’ve heard echoed by so many doctors is this idea that you will never be depleted of a chemical. You will never be depleted of a drug or anything. You will be depleted of so many other things, and that’s a cause of the way we live. Even our food supply is depleted, even our soil somewhat being depleted. I had Dr. James DiNicolantonio recently wrote the mineral fix. He said basically the soil we have right now is 30%–50% less magnesium than it was 30 years ago. So we have 30%–50% of Americans are basically depleted of magnesium.
The numbers add up right there, and so much of what is going on is not a depletion of a chemical. It is a depletion of the nutrients, which we require, which are building blocks to our body’s functioning. That’s really important for people to realize that when you go on a drug, that’s just keeping you in a state where you’re managing something, you’re managing the depletion in a sense that is more natural, and then you start to become dependent on a drug. We never like that approach. I do think it’s really important to state that something like Nadovim and everything we do at our company and how we try and teach other doctors to work is not to look at someone as, oh, you’re depleted of a drug, let me give it to you. But let’s find out what’s really going on. What’s at the source of this? What is that underlying dysfunction or root cause and go after that?
That’s a really important distinction of how you approach your health as well because anyone could say, oh, you want more energy, just take in more caffeine. Drink 5-hour Energy all day, some people do it. But trust me, that’s not healthy. That is the opposite of healthy. Our biorhythms and the chronobiological system are totally screwed up when you do that. That’s what causes adrenal fatigue, causes hormones to go out of balance and everything else, and a cascade of other things you don’t want happening.
Now, to get into that idea, I’ve always said that if you look at biohackers and performance optimizers, they are doing the same thing that medicine should be doing, which is absolutely just how do we get you to your best self? How do we optimize your body, mind, and spirit? When we approach medicine, it’s not that we’re just trying to get you to this absence of symptoms, which most of medicine would say, yes, we did it. We cured you because you don’t have symptoms right now. Meanwhile, underlying dysfunction is still there. You probably require ongoing maintenance and you may not feel that good here and there.
Really, if you push the goal and the end zone, let’s say, to having complete optimization of your health, of self-healing, of self-management, of getting you to a state where you don’t require caffeine or other things to wake up or pills to go to sleep, that’s what the aim of any medical treatment should be. And that’s also the aim of where biohackers go. They know this because they’re very, very passionate about it.
So when they’re looking at compounds to help their mitochondrial function, to help how they’re feeling throughout the day, to give them that 1%-2% edge. I was on Dave Asprey’s podcast and he told me about his experience. He said, it’s really nuanced and that’s when I know something works because I’m already healthy. I’m already taking so many things to optimize me and I’m not in a sick state anymore. But you’re looking for these nuanced improvements and being able to say, okay, I could focus for 20, 30 minutes longer without having to take a break. I can go a little bit more in my workout.
We had a professional soccer player who said I’m 21, 22. He said, I’m already full of energy on the field. What was great for me was when I was doing the back area looking at tape and doing all the training that way and the homework you got to do, I was zoned in so much longer after a long day of doing practice. After the physical exertion, I would usually be a little bit mentally exhausted. But with Nadovim, I had that extra edge to now have that mental strength to keep going, to stay really focused when others were zoning out on these things, and I could pick up on the reeds and different offensives I had to defend against.
That’s where when you’re talking about these top performers, they’re looking for just any little edge to get ahead, and Nadovim was able to provide that. So I think that’s why they latched on. You had these big guys taking them, talking about it, and saying yeah, I noticed it. I do everything I can. I take 100+ pills sometimes to see what works and what doesn’t, and Nadovim was one of those that actually did bring them to those nuanced senses of improvement and they actually saw it. For them, that means the world. We’re really pleased with that.
We started with patients, we started with people that are pretty sick and said, hey, can we help you guys? We didn’t even focus, but what became of it was, yes, the biohackers and athletes know what NAD+ is. They’re also depleting it with lots of energy and just what they’re bringing into their body and also expelling. They understood that if you could optimize and even something that we call pre-plenish your NAD+ levels.
It’s not about replenishing. Many of them would probably show that they’re really taking care of themselves and have pretty good levels of NAD+, but what about really stressful times? Can they pre-plenish so that when the stress hits, when they do have to work 12, 14 hour days, or really go deep into the competition, will they have the levels to keep going? That was something really interesting and something we didn’t see and just kind of happened. It happened very naturally that these top biohackers just got into it as something that started in the medical community. That’s something I’m really looking at right now, how do we bridge that gap between medicine and biohacking? Because I think it’s one in the same really. It’s about how do we get you to your most optimized self and basically the spot where you’re healthiest and happiest.
[00:48:53] Ashley James: I love that you brought it pre-plenish because it reminds me of when athletes carb load. They don’t need all the extra glucose stores for day-to-day function, but they are about to do something really big. They know their body is going to go through the stressful event of a marathon, their competition, or their game, and so they’ll make sure that they’re getting enough carbs and then extra so that they’ve got all the full stores of the blood sugar, the glucose stored in their muscles and their liver. So that when their body is under that stress, it can reach into those reserves.
There are certain athletes that are choosing to use ketones for energy, and they don’t have a lick of fat on them so they can’t really wait for the body to burn off some fat for ketones. They’ll supplement with ketones before they go into an event so the body can use up those ketones as energy.
My friend had a question and I thought that was interesting. You just mentioned this so this is perfect. You mentioned that we can preload if we know we’re about to go into a stressful event. Let’s say you’re going out for a night drinking with your girlfriends, you can pre-load some Nadovim. And please, take your B vitamin, hydrate, and all that. I don’t advocate for alcohol, but I understand, once in a while, if you’re going to blow off some steam with your girlfriends or something, there are things you can do so you feel really good the next day instead of really crappy the next day. You definitely want to add Nadovim to that to preload if you’re going into that kind of stress. You’re having fun but you know you’re putting stress on the body.
But is there a point where it becomes toxic? Is there a point where there’s a dose we should avoid, or is it something the body uses? It doesn’t hurt the body to use it. Getting into understanding that, how long does it take for the body to clear it out of the system? Is it cleared out through the kidneys or through the liver? Can you just explain a little bit about just understanding how much we should take? Is there an upper limit to the dose, and what happens if someone takes too much? How is it cleared out of the body?
[00:51:16] Caspar Szulc: With everything, you could have too much water, you could have too much oxygen, you could have too much of anything in this world. I don’t like when people like there’s no way this could ever harm you or anything. I mean, listen, you could take a bunch and this isn’t anything that is toxic. It will be flushed through the liver. It will be broken down. Will it cause some stress? I’m sure if you took an enormous amount.
But you have to understand that a lot of times when you do these infusions, you take in thousands and thousands of milligrams sometimes at a time. We’re talking about 200 that’s going through the oral system, as opposed to 1000 that’s going through an intravenous directly into the bloodstream. There are no toxic elements to that, and that’s a completely safe method of getting NAD+ into the system and utilizing that. It will be somewhat utilized within the cells, and those that aren’t are easily passed out without any of that toxic element that you would have in many synthetic drugs and chemicals.
We found it as an incredibly safe method of delivering something that will provide you with energy and that every single cell utilizes, so you go through a lot of NAD+. Again, if you’re talking about someone that is depleted, then it’s important to look at that as a cause of symptoms as a cause of dysfunction in a healthy state.
When we look at this idea of are there toxicity, I think at any high, high rate, anything can be a toxin to the body. We all say the devil is in the dosage, but there’s a lot of forgiveness with something like NAD+. There’s a lot of forgiveness with applying it through an oral method where you could take double the dosage, four-pill, that really wouldn’t do too much as opposed to something where if you took a synthetic material, if you doubled that, it may have a huge impact on you.
The body is utilizing it. It’s just like with oxygen or anything else, it knows what to do with it. Even if it’s too much, it will change and adapt to that in a way that doesn’t make it toxic that the kidneys can expel, that goes out within the urine and through just through your GI system.
We felt it was a wonderful option for those who are suffering from any type of brain fog, anything like that. And again, I do believe that too many people don’t even recognize that they are suffering from some small kind of version of brain fog, short-term memory loss, all these things. I think it’s almost an epidemic right now where we’re required to focus so much. We’re required to use our brains.
You talk about the industrial revolution, we’re required to use our muscles a lot. Now we’re in the information age. We’re in an age where we sit in front of a computer for long bouts of time and need to process things very quickly. All these tabs open you think about and then you have your phone. You walk around anywhere in this day and age, everyone’s going to be looking down their phone and processing so many pieces of information. That’s just the brain at work. We’re asking so much of our brains these days. That’s why it was really important to find something, well, how do we protect that one thing that top scientists said is the most complex object in the universe is your brain?
It was really important to find out how to do that without being like this limitless pill, let’s say, from the movie that had so many side effects, that was a chemical. There are definitely ways you could stimulate the brain that is chemically induced. Lots of drugs do that. Adderall is a type of methamphetamine that does that, but that has serious consequences. While I would never compare having Nadovim to something like that, to a drug, I would say that I think it’s a happy medium between nothing or just going about your day and being in that state of brain fog and trying something like Adderall or anything else.
We’ve actually had people that were Adderall utilize this and say that it was actually really good to utilize that instead of that and get away from the jitters, get away from the side effects of that, get away from the sleepless nights. I mean, NAD+ is really useful for chronobiological restoration. So people have deeper sleep and we noticed that with people wearing Oura rings. Their sleep score went up dramatically and their deep sleep went up. That was again an unintended benefit for many people who are just trying to enhance their cognitive functioning, then saw better sleep, and saw better skin because again, this is getting into every single cell and helping it regenerate, and helping it do what it needs to do. That’s absolutely going to impact your skin, which needs to regenerate so much. It needs to get toxins out of it, how do you do that? Every cell needs to do that also and expel.
When you really break it down, we are truly happy with creating this because while we were honed in on the brain, it had so many other uses, and we hear that from users all the time that so many other improvements happen on top of improving brain function.
[00:56:47] Ashley James: ADHD, people who have problems with concentration, they were enjoying the benefits of Nadovim and seeing that it helped them much better than Adderall, which like you said has those side effects. I have a really close friend who 15 years ago was on Adderall and to this day still suffers from the side effects because it compromised his ability to make healthy stress hormones. This is 15 years later after he’s off those drugs, his body is still not regulating his stress hormones appropriately, that is a side effect.
You can get off a drug and you may have side effects years later, which just blows my mind. We’re not given true informed consent when we get on drugs. Informed consent is when the doctor tells you here are all the possible things that could go wrong, here are all the things that could go right, and here are all the alternatives that you could choose to do instead of this. I mean, have you ever had that talk with your doctor? No. They’re like, hey, get on this. You might notice diarrhea, call me if you do. They might list three side effects, but they’re not really telling you you might have long-term damage from this. They’re not going to sit down with you and give you all the studies and explain to you, give you true informed consent. We have to essentially advocate for that and also go do our own research, read through some papers, and inform ourselves about the effects of a drug or a treatment, not just leave it up to the doctor. That’s what true informed consent is.
I think if everyone got true informed consent, a lot of people would ask for a second opinion, go see some other kinds of doctors, hopefully, holistic doctors, functional medicine doctors like at your clinic so they’re getting better integrative medicine, and look at other options, look at other choices that would have less side effects or hopefully no side effects and just side benefits seeing other parts of their body healing. Like we’re doing with Nadovim, seeing all these other side benefits like skin. You already knew it was going to help with the brain but seeing that it’s helping improve other systems of the body because every cell that has mitochondria will use NAD+. That makes so much sense.
But the fact that you had the testimonials from people who have been on Adderall or know they have ADHD and are seeing that they’re able to perform better on something natural that isn’t going to harm them. It’s natural in that the body is deplete of this substance. It’s what the body needs, not an artificial substance that has all these side effects that actually ends up depleting the body more of NAD+ because the body has to use up more NAD+ in order to clear out those toxins of the drug. It just blows my mind. We take someone with an illness or with symptoms like ADHD, give them something that then depletes them further of NAD+ when their brain actually needed more NAD+ to function better.
[01:00:23] Caspar Szulc: It’s a vicious cycle and you can’t blame the doctors if that’s the option they’re giving. You can’t blame a handyman if he comes and he only has a hammer and he’s trying to fix the pipe and just using that instead of a wrench. Can you really blame them so much? Another point to that whole informed consent is that I think it’s really difficult nowadays to truly have informed consent because it’s so hard to weed through so many different pieces of information. You have one piece of data that shows it’s good, you have another research study that may show you something else.
The thing that I would love to see with people that are going through anything is the ability to go in a pattern that makes sense to try things that are the least toxic and easiest to get and then work your way up. Why would you come in with a little bit of pain and go straight to surgery? That happens a lot. A lot of doctors are like, oh, this could be this. Let’s go in with back surgery, which my father performed back surgery. There is a lot of complications that may arise when you start opening and start working on the spine, tons.
When I looked at medicine, I thought we had it positioned incorrectly. Aside from the whole informed consent piece of it, it’s that we went from 0 to 100 way too quick. We went from I have pain to being on painkillers like that. Why didn’t you go to a chiropractor first? Why didn’t you go to acupuncture? Why didn’t you try this anti-inflammatory? Why don’t you try turmeric? There’s a list of things we should try. For me, the same is with, okay, you have some brain fog, why go directly to Adderall?
Or you have someone with ADHD, why would you put them on something that is a Class III or so drug that can be abused so easily, that has real side effects? That even if you were informed that much, you could easily find stuff that is just like, whoa, that kind of scares me a little bit what I’m hearing about some people that use this. And of course, you could look at something like Nadovim and be like well, it’s not a double-blind placebo and it doesn’t have a vast, vast improvement in this. Yeah, but sometimes that’s what your body is just craving a little bit. You don’t have to go all-in on something that has all of these side effects.
I sometimes have to sit there and laugh when I watch a pharmaceutical drug commercial. It’s like 10 seconds of people being happy followed by 30 seconds of really quick talk about everything that could go wrong with you.
[01:03:07] Ashley James: It could cause inner leakage and death.
[01:03:09] Caspar Szulc: And then they’re happy in the background, dancing to the nice music and everything. It’s like, why would you turn to that as your first recourse? Unfortunately, what happens and what we see in medicine is that they turn to that, they turn to surgery, they turn to really big things, they still don’t get better, and then they turn back to the easy stuff like Nadovim, going to a holistic center, or something like that when already, it’s like, whoa, there’s a lot going on wrong now. If you came to us first, maybe it would have been much easier.
So I think it’s a little bit backward in that sense alone. Even with informed consent, it’s just about the number of options. If you started training like if you were just out of shape, maybe a little overweight, you wouldn’t go to an Olympic trainer and be like, all right, I’m going all-in with this Olympic trainer—six times a week, three hours, moving into this big gym out there. It would be like, why are you doing that? Just do some push-ups in the morning, start there. Start with something simple and easy that won’t require so much of you and go from there.
On top of doing their own research, which I think is incredibly important, I think what I’ve heard from a lot of people is it’s confusing. There is a research study by the manufacturer of this drug that shows it’s amazing. Then there are people on forums that say they grew a third arm from this. Then there’s this, then there’s that. The paradox of choice isn’t good, that’s not informed consent either in a sense. I think you just want to go with, well, why don’t I try this?
And again, I think there is this element of what do you feel? Don’t listen to the doctors, to the commercials, to the people trying to get your money. Don’t even listen to me in a sense, I would say. What are you feeling? What does your intuition say? And I feel that’s something we’ve totally gotten away from. Because I see patients all the time being like, should I do this? It’s like, I’m not answering that question for you. This medicine isn’t for everyone. There’s a lot of responsibility involved. You’ll have to change your lifestyle, you’ll have to do a lot of things that you may not want to do, but I think this is a great option. But at the end of the day, you have to make the choice. What feels good to you? Maybe going on the drug is right for you right now because you know you won’t go through those lifestyle changes right now. Maybe in a little bit you will.
Where we are with Nadovim is like well why won’t you start there instead of let’s say Adderall or going to something even bigger or really undergoing some big medical procedures for the brain or anything like that. Give it a try. It’s not a huge investment. It is relatively safe, you could say. I won’t sit here and be like it’s absolutely 100% safe. I mean, you could have some reaction to something in there, thymine or something maybe, but incredibly small because again these are all-natural elements. You should be getting them from your food anyway.
That’s my input on that because I do see that happening a lot within the medical field and within just this idea of all right, what are my options? It’s like, whoa, you went really quick from being like I have a little pain to again going under the knife, or I have a little brain fog to being on a high dosage of something that’s addictive and has a lot of side effects.
[01:06:28] Ashley James: Right. I have a friend who’s a Naturopathic physician and she became—I don’t know, jaded maybe because when she first started out, she’d get patients that came in with high blood pressure. She’d be like, okay, you’re going to walk 20 minutes every day, you’re going to eat this way, and take these supplements. Then they’d come back and they still have high blood pressure and they hadn’t done anything or maybe they did one out of three things that she told them to do. It’s like, no, you’ve got to make these lifestyle changes because that’s what’s causing the high blood pressure. We’re going to listen to the symptoms of the body and give the body what it needs.
Not everyone is willing to, motivated to, or are ready to make lifestyle changes that would give them better health, which just blows my mind because I’m like, tell me what to do, I’m ready to do it. I want to be better. I want to be even better. I’m always striving for better health because I suffered for so many years. So many of my listeners are sick of being sick and they’re motivated. They’re here listening, they’re listening for over an hour because they are motivated to make healthy changes in their life. But maybe they have a husband, a friend, an aunt, or whatever that has these problems but they’re not willing to stop drinking a bottle of wine a night. They’re not willing to go for a walk for 20 minutes every day.
You can’t do it for them. The Naturopathic doctor or the functional medicine practitioner isn’t going to come home with you and get you to make these lifestyle changes. It is up to us as individuals. I like that Nadovim is a small thing you can start. If it seems too daunting, too overwhelming to exercise every day. If you haven’t been exercising for years, it’s like oh gosh, that just seems overwhelming. But could you start your day off with a big glass of water and a capsule of Nadovim? Yes.
That’s what my friend does who says she just floats through her day, bounces through her day. She gets up at I think 5:30 in the morning to be able to beat the traffic to drive because she lives pretty far away from Seattle. She has a beautiful cabin in the woods, so she has to get up before everyone else and go downtown Seattle. Then she manages this huge, huge ordeal. She does manage this big company, all the people below her that report to her, and all the decisions she has to make throughout the day.
Every time we make a decision, it uses up our brainpower. There are some fun studies about that at the end of the day, that’s why at 11:00 at night you can’t stick to your diet and you’re standing there in front of the fridge, I’ll just eat everything. Because every time we make a decision, we only have a certain amount of decisions. The power of our brain can only handle so many decisions in a day because the brain now ran out of its NAD+ and it’s just shovel food in my face, I can’t take it anymore. Throughout the day, every decision we make depletes more of that energy of the brain.
I just wonder how NAD+, how Nadovim would help since it’s supporting the brain’s ability to have energy. How that would then translate into increasing our ability to have willpower at the end of the day? So there are fun studies about willpower and how it gets depleted if we work at a job that requires us to make a lot of decisions, a lot of choices throughout the day. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that where you had to make a ton of choices and at the end of the day, your brain is spent and you can actually feel it. It’s like it’s depleted of its energy and nutrients.
But yeah, she just always has energy and always bounces around. I’ve always been impressed by her, now I know her secret, and I’m so excited to know that it’s because she’s been taking the supplement. She said it’s her absolute favorite supplement.
What about depression? You kind of mention that. How does Nadovim help people who have depression?
[01:10:42] Caspar Szulc: Again, depression is one of those things you got to look at from a holistic standpoint. I even read and interviewed Dr. Jodie Skillicorn who wrote a book about healing depression without medication. She basically said the idea being chemical imbalances has been debunked and we’re going about all wrong, depression. There are so many different contributing factors—diet, of course, your microbiome now is really linked to depression and certain strains even being there.
I mean, there are so many different causes of depression. But at the end of the day, if you have the vitality or the energy to make decisions that are going to be better for you, I think that’s everything. I think that’s a huge part of getting out of a depressive state somewhat. Depression is a terrible state to be in, but it’s also one that drains you considerably. It’s one of those states that if you look at the scale of consciousness and what David Hawkins put out there, it’s a negative conscious state, very low and draining of energy, and keeps you down. You need to work yourself up from there—from feelings of guilt, hate, depression, shame—up into neutrality.
The idea that you would have more energy to make certain things, to go to certain things, to get outside, and have these small wins can be the difference in starting to get out of depression. Of course, each case is different. I’m not going to say that if you’re chronically depressed and take Nadovim you’ll be better. There’s a ton of things you probably have to do to get your state into a good emotional state out of depressive moods.
The one thing that I keep turning back to when people ask about these things in general wellness, depression, depressive moods is this idea of you never have time or you’re just stuck and you have this outlook on life that is depressive. I think when you have energy and vitality that shifts. The greatest resource, everyone has 24 hours in the day, do you have the energy to actually do things? Do you, like you said, come home and just lay around, turn on Netflix, sit there, and then start to question your life, what am I doing? I’m just sitting around not meeting people. That could keep you in a depressive mood.
I think what we’ve realized even through this whole lockdown is we need connection, but at the same time, if we don’t have the willingness, the vitality, the energy to even get up out of bed when we get in really early at night, just sit there and like you said, just veg out because we have no will power left, and just sit there and kind of become zombies to a TV screen or even a computer screen. That can lead to a loss of purpose, a loss of connection. I think those are some of the biggest causes of depression. I would much rather look at those sorts of things than look at chemical imbalances and just drug you up and say take this pill, this antidepressant. We know that can have serious consequences as well as dependency.
When I look at something like depression, this feeling which I also correlate with a feeling of lack of purpose, which I see in tons of patients. At one point, we were creating a program for patients of things they could do outside of the office because we knew we only had them an hour or two a week in the office for treatments. So many would ask, what should I do outside? And of course, we gave them all these tips but we wanted to put in a program.
We interviewed hundreds of patients, hundreds of doctors, and really wanted to get it down to an X factor. What’s that one thing that was the difference between two people with the same diagnosis, same treatment plans, same everything, demographic. So what we saw when we took two patients with a similar demographic, similar diagnosis, similar background, and went through similar treatment plans was that if one got better and one didn’t, we wanted to know what the difference was. Why was one receiving the same type of treatment plan getting better and the other one would maybe see improvement but then slide back after the treatment plan was done?
The thing we really broke it down to, this X factor, was purpose. It was this idea that one had a purpose to go live, see her grandchildren, and travel the world. Whereas the other one didn’t. They were still very much stuck on I am disease X, that is who I am. They didn’t really have a purpose. Maybe they’ve been out of work for a while and were chronically ill in bed, and suddenly even the idea of what do I do, what is the next step in my life kind of scared them. And they didn’t have that purpose. We really ingrained in this program, what we did was first, create a purpose for you. It could be anything. It could be I would love to go skiing in the Swiss Alps, or I’d love to run a 5K and just keep that in mind.
I think something like a supplement like NAD+, it gives you the vitality and the cognitive functioning to be able to really focus on that, to be able to do certain things and take those steps. Have that little bit of energy to start with one small win, one small step. Like you said, if it’s getting better, start with just waking up and having that glass of water and that’ll be one step. The next day, get up and take a few deep breaths. The next day, have a little bit more energy and stretch a little bit. See yourself running that 5K more and more and be positive. The next day takes a few more steps down the stairs, maybe walk outside, maybe do 0.1 k your first time right and then keep going from there. I think where Nadovim falls, it gives you that little bit of energy, edge, and clarity to do that and to always be focused on this purpose.
So I think when you look at anything, whether it’s depression, whether it’s getting out of a state of feeling stuck in your life, or being disconnected, it’s about finding what really brings you passion and that purpose. It could be something small, it could be something big. That’s up to you. Don’t look anywhere else for that. Really sit down with a journal. Write that down. But then use little things, little pieces, little tips. Whether that’s breathing techniques or anything else, or Nadovim to then give you the best chances to see that through, to take those little small steps.
I think when you’re really stuck on that, when every day before you go to sleep, when you wake up you’re thinking about that thing, what you want to do, what you want to accomplish, that becomes a priority. Like you said, I think right now what people are suffering from—health isn’t a priority to them. That’s the truth. The unfortunate truth is that for too many people, they have the ability to make the right choices, they have the ability to do these things, and they don’t. They will drink every night. They will stay up late, take pills, or whatever. That’s not to fall. I never like to put blame and guilt, but it’s just to say take responsibility.
If you truly prioritize something, if that means the world to you, you’ll put it at the top. You’ll stop, you’ll close your computer screen at 9:00 PM because you know that’s going to screw up your circadian rhythms and probably keep you up at night stressing. Then you’ll have a bad day, you’ll need coffee again, your adrenals will go down, it’ll become habitual, you’ll need sleeping pills to go to sleep, lots of caffeine in the morning, and suddenly you’re wondering why your hormones all screwed up and you’re chronically ill. That’s the thing.
I think when you take something like Nadovim, it gives you an edge to actually see through those choices. It gives you that little bit of a boost to then say, okay, I want to do this. That’s what I realized. I mean, I’m not immune to any of this. Even though I work in a center, I have access to wonderful things. I live in New York City, it’s stressful. I run multiple companies, that’s stressful. Sometimes I work way too long, but when I do realize, hey, I prioritize health. I have the energy to see through certain things and do them correctly, then I do take 20 minutes to meditate on a stressful day. I do drink more fluids and stand up a lot more even though I could be glued to my computer doing work all day.
I think that’s what leads me to believe where Nadovim’s place in something like depression isn’t the treatment of depression so much. Although it could be the source, you never know. I’m not saying it is or isn’t. NAD+ depletion may be a cause of depression for sure, but at the same time, even if it weren’t, I would say take it also because I think it’ll lead you to have that clarity and that extra mental boost to then see through actions that bring you out of a depressive state, that get you connected again to the world that brings you into your purpose and passion.
[01:19:35] Ashley James: Oh, I love that answer. That’s so fantastic. So many studies have shown that those who have depression or even suicidal, if they volunteer, they find that they get more joy and more out of volunteering than what they’re actually giving. We think volunteering is almost like being a martyr. Oh, I have to give away my time and my energy. But really, you actually get back more. It’s just amazing. You can make an impact on the world and then that is helping you even more. There are so many studies that show that it not only helps with depression, it actually increases longevity. Those who volunteer, who have a life purpose, or feel that they’re making a difference in their community live longer. That makes a lot of sense.
That NAD+ depletion, in and of itself, could be the factor that’s having them feel depressed. Like you said, we’re just starting to understand how this very complex system works—the brain. We’re even discovering that the gut is like a second brain, and then they’re discovering now that the heart is almost like a third brain. We always thought it was just the brain telling the organs information. But what we’re seeing is that all this new information that we’re discovering is that the heart and the gut is actually giving information back to the brain. It’s like these three brains in the body are communicating.
The book, The Holographic Universe—a fantastic book to read—talks about how we think all of our cognitive abilities and all of our neurological functions happen in the brain. It actually happens holographically throughout the entire nervous system. That we can store memories not just in the brain, but in other neurological tissue throughout the body. I recommend reading that book for anyone that wants to just have their mind blown literally. Understanding that what we think we know, what we’ve been taught about neurology is so far off from what we actually are and it’s very complex.
Of course, a nutrient deficiency could be the root cause of these issues. That makes total sense. Also, everyone benefits from focusing on a life purpose, focusing on feeling like they’re making a difference in this world, a difference in their family, or a difference with their friends, whatever is within your value system.
Anti-aging was a big buzzword for a long time. They call it other things now, even reversing aging. Dr. Daniel Amen, I’ve been fascinated with his research and have been following him for the last few years. He was able to scan the brain and see that there are certain pockets in the brain that as people aged, and it depended on their diet, their lifestyle, and their nutrient deficiencies because a 20-year-old can start to have these sort of age spots within the brain. When he did these scans, he could see that there were pockets of the brain that weren’t functioning optimally that it was almost like Swiss cheese. That there are pockets of the brain that weren’t getting enough oxygen, weren’t getting enough nutrition. The blood flow was being restricted.
When we think about heart health, there are certain diets that actually will blood flow and make the arteries healthier and you can reverse heart disease. I had Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn on the show who has performed the world’s longest study on using diet to be able to reverse heart disease and prevent it. He wrote the book How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. He shows pictures of hearts that were totally clogged and the arteries that were not getting blood flow through. Then two years later, the same patient completely clear heart. So we can reverse arterial sclerosis and calcification of the arteries. It’s amazing.
You go to a regular MD or maybe most cardiologists and they want to put you on drugs or put stents in, and they haven’t seen this research. They haven’t seen that we can completely reshape, restore, and reverse the aging or the damage. Maybe we shouldn’t be calling it anti-aging anymore. It’s reversing the damage of living and your lifestyle.
If you eat fries every day, that kind of thing, it puts a huge strain on the cardiovascular system. But Dr. Daniel Amen sees that the same things that cause heart disease, we’re basically having heart disease in the brain. That we’re having cardiovascular disease of the brain. It’s like Swiss cheese brain where there are just whole parts of the brain that aren’t getting enough blood flow and they’re kind of dying off or just not functioning optimally. He’s been doing this for over 30 years. He’s been able to follow patients, change their diet, get them on supplements. I wonder if he’s using NAD+ or Nadovim as one of his supplements, and you should definitely reach out to him if he’s not. He has then maps and does these scans and he can see the blood flow coming back, the brain’s restoring, and the Swiss cheese going away. People were having dementia reversing that.
Anti-aging is one of those keywords, one of those catchphrases, but really, it’s reversing the damage that has happened from living—I don’t want to say from aging but from living—because I think there can be a 20-year-old that’s unhealthy as a 60-year-old given lifestyle choices.
With Nadovim, I know that there’s a lot of anti-aging experts that are really excited about Nadovim and have been using it. What are they seeing in terms of reversing the damage or slowing down the aging process?
[01:26:00] Caspar Szulc: Well, there are two parts of this that are pretty exciting when you look at aging and the reversal of aging. Number one would be the mitochondrial theory of aging. That really all aging starts with the mitochondria, which as you said, was originally a bacteria, one cell kind of an organism that predates as far beyond where humans were around and exist in. Really understanding that that’s where it starts on a cellular level. You want to understand everything.
I think there are two ways to understand it. Number one is through energy because we all are energy really—frequencies and vibrations, and that’s Einstein’s wonderful contribution and many other quantum physicists’ contribution to science and changing it forever was that understanding that we aren’t matter at all. The other way is also to look at things really at the building blocks that are kind of visible are physical. Energy packets are in your cell. Understanding that the function of the cell to regenerate and to get the ones that are no longer functioning out requires energy. Once that stops happening, you’ll have aging occur. You’ll have dysfunction occur. That’s really what is triggering an aging response so that this max life potential is really just dictated by mitochondrial function. So if you can improve your mitochondria, that is one great way to increase the age you can live for.
The other way to look at of course is somewhat through DNA and understanding telomeres and understanding how DNA starts to basically work against this in a sense and how we protect DNA and how we again regenerate ourselves. NAD+ does have a positive impact on both of those. NAD+ is directly correlated to something called [inaudible 01:28:00] which helps out with telomerase and also helps with longevity that way.
Looking at it from those perspectives is that NAD+ is a vital compound into great arenas that you could say are dictating how we age. Now, the other element outside of NAD+ and I think something you mentioned there as well is this idea of us aging. I think aging, what we’re doing is living unnaturally. If you’re closer to nature, if you live a natural existence, I think you age at a natural pace. But when we live with light bulbs on all the time, that disrupts our endocrine system. When we eat things that are unnatural and also disrupts so many systems within the body.
We have to kind of reap what we sow, in a sense. Part of that is aging, it can be seen as disease. If you age the body, the functioning of everything doesn’t work as it should and leads to dysfunction, which leads to disease or symptoms and then a disease really.
Those are things you got to incorporate as well because I hate to sit here and be like, take NAD+ and you won’t age, keep eating poorly, smoking, and doing all these things negatively. Live a natural life and you might not need NAD+. Now, at the same time, I have to say, we live in a day and age where you can’t really go out and just hunker down in a cave and be away from everyone and just live naturally there. We do live within the constrictions of being in this modern world, meaning most of us have cell phones, most of us are around light bulbs all the time. You could protect yourself as much as possible, but you’re still going to have an impact on your body. All the actions you do, you’re going to be impacted in this world right now.
That’s the reason also when people like, well, I probably don’t need NAD+, right? I’m really healthy. I get it, you really are. I take care, I’m really healthy, but you still live in a world that unfortunately has introduced so many unnatural things in it that you’re going to be impacted. Even if you’re living far off now, you’re still impacted. That’s just where we are right now, and that’s why I say something like NAD+ is useful for everyone because even if you’re quite healthy, why not pre-plenish? Why wait? Why not take proactive steps? That’s what I think health really is.
I talk about choices and everything like that, but it’s also being proactive to prevent it. To prevent aging and prevent disease, which I say synonymous, are taking the action before they happen. Every one of us usually waits to go see a doctor until something’s wrong. With a dentist, you get your tooth cleaning. Unless it’s in pain, why would you go see a dentist, right? Really go into it. The same is for a doctor and all these things related to our health.
I wish medicine became more about prevention. I wish it was more proactive. I wish we could catch things earlier on. Even if you didn’t go to a doctor, why not take things like supplementation that you know can absolutely benefit your cellular function, mitochondrial function, all these things that can relate so closely to aging? You could say beauty, to preventing disease, preventing really tough chronic things that again, right now, if you’re healthy, you’re in a minority in the United States. That’s crazy to me. That is a crazy stat that most people don’t realize. That right now, if you’re healthy, you’re a minority. Trust me, in 20 years, you’re going to be a really small minority the way it’s going. It’s going to be 80%, 90% are going to be comorbidities through the roof. Obesity, all of this chronic fatigue, diabetes, it’ll be so normal, then you’re going to be a freak if you’re healthy. That’s scary to me because health is the greatest wealth.
If we don’t start turning things around, we’re in for a really sick society, in many different ways to say that. I will say, be proactive. It doesn’t have to be Nadovim only. I think that’s one little thing. That’s not everything I do. Drink more water, breathe more. All sorts of things. I just wish. I think by taking a pill though you kind of put a burden. You put some money into that pill so there is like a value intrinsic that I’ve seen. It’s almost like when people take medicine they start acting differently almost like a placebo. I’m paying for it, I might as well do other things, and I think that’s a good thing too. I do.
[01:32:45] Ashley James: Yeah, it motivates you.
[01:32:46] Caspar Szulc: It’s why I think you should pay your trainer. Pay them more than you pay up because you won’t skip workouts if it costs a lot and then really take care of yourself. This idea of also free and not having to be responsible for your health, it’s crazy to me. I think it’s part of the reason that the majority of us are sick and waiting for someone to help us out when in reality, we could absolutely take a lot of preventive and proactive steps to being healthy.
[01:33:15] Ashley James: Yeah. The listeners listening right now, we are the people who in a sense we’re like salmon. We’re swimming upstream. We don’t want to be a statistic. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. That is ridiculous. If you’re in a room with three people, one of them is going to have cancer. That is insane. That is absolutely insane.
The idea that our soil is so deplete of minerals and plants can’t make minerals, animals can’t make minerals. They have to come from the soil. If our body is minerally depleted, especially magnesium, which out of all the 60 essential minerals, magnesium is the most important. 1800 enzymatic processes in the body use magnesium. Zinc is the second most important at 800 processes.
Calcium’s not even in the top two, and we’re marketed that we need to drink cow’s milk for calcium. Cow’s milk has a whole host of health issues that it comes with. It causes obesity and heart disease. It depends on who pays for the research, you always have to watch. If there’s a research paper that says cow’s milk is healthy, go follow the money and you’re going to find that it was paid for by someone who benefits from selling cow’s milk. It’s just crazy.
People are unhealthy because of what they were taught, what they were told. We’ve been raised watching McDonald’s commercials and Kellogg’s Fruit Loop cereal, Lucky Charms commercials. We’ve been raised to see that these are actually foods. They’re not foods. They’re something that represents food that’s pretending to be food, but it’s not nutritious for the body. A lot of them are fortified with artificial vitamins that actually do more damage, especially for people who have methylation issues like the MTHFR SNP. So many people have MTHFR because of the toxicity in our environment. That’s what we’re seeing more and more.
My listeners are like salmon, like me. I’m one of those people who’s going to go upstream. I’m okay with not following the herd because if I eat like, act like, and have a lifestyle like the majority of the people out there, then I will be a statistic. I don’t want to be one of those people that one in three has cancer, one in three has diabetes or pre-diabetic.
I was diabetic. I reversed it with natural health changes and following holistic medicine. I’m not going back. My A1C is 4.7. I’m never going back to diabetes. I am just going towards better and better health. I know my listeners are doing the same. They’re highly motivated to make these changes. Even if it’s just adding a supplement and then drinking more water. It’s okay, baby steps. And then going for a walk three times a week. Just add what you can and keep on that path.
My last question is about depletion. When people are on cholesterol meds, and I’ve had several doctors and cardiologists on the show say do not under any circumstances take cholesterol meds. I interviewed a Ph.D. and MD who is also a cardiologist, and he’s a cardiologist researcher. He looks at thousands of patients instead of just one at a time. He was the discoverer of the true cause of heart disease. That the true cause of heart disease is inflammation, and actually the cause of most diseases. You have to look to inflammation, then look to what causes inflammation, and then make diet and lifestyle changes to decrease that inflammation.
This was 30 years ago 40 years ago, while all the doctors were being told to put everyone on cholesterol-lowering meds, he said cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. It’s a symptom that comes later after inflammation has done its damage. What’s causing inflammation? We have to go deeper, go deeper. The symptoms are being treated, but the root cause still continues to progressively do damage to the body.
When people are put on cholesterol-lowering meds, there are so many side effects that happen. The patients end up not being able to feel their hands or their feet, then they can’t walk properly, then they stop exercising, and they live a more sedentary lifestyle. That leads to early death. So that’s just one problem that we see is happening with cholesterol-lowering meds because the neuropathy is caused by reducing the body’s ability to make healthy cholesterol that is used for the myelin sheath of the nervous system. So it’s doing damage to the nervous system.
Well, another thing it does, by taking cholesterol-lowering meds, is that it decreases the coenzyme q10, which if you don’t have any coenzyme q10 in your body, your heart is not going to beat. Your heart will stop beating. That’s fuel for that wonderful muscle that we all love so much. It’s great that there’s some coenzyme q10 in because it’s one of those cofactors that you saw really benefited the nervous system. It’s absolutely needed.
What doctors will say now when they keep their patients on cholesterol-lowering meds, they tell them to take a low dose actually of coq10. Now you mentioned that the body, when it needs to clear out drugs like the liver, has to process the toxins from these artificial chemical drugs and that depletes NAD+ in the body. Are there any drugs that significantly decrease NAD+, like absolutely what doctors should be doing if they ever put them on XYZ drug, that they should be taking an NAD+ supplement because it has such a drastic effect on our NAD+, or is it just like all drugs in general?
[01:39:38] Caspar Szulc: I mean, honestly, it’s all drugs in general. Every single drug has a toxic element to it and it’s going to require NAD+ to then flush that. Anything that’s a toxin and the body basically requires NAD+. That’s why you look at things like oxidative stress within the body and then just free radical formation—all these things are all part of the equation. Of course, the more toxic, the stronger drugs are, the more NAD+ is required. What do we do with everyone that’s on a lifelong intervention? At a certain point, you have to boost because you’re getting used to the drug, right? Your body is adjusting to it in a sense, which the body always does. It always adjusts.
You’re giving it something synthetic, it’s not supposed to be there in a way, the body will adjust. It will try and maintain and go into homeostasis. What do we do? We give stronger drugs. We go higher milligrams and dosage. Guess what, that just depletes more and more NAD+. So we go in this vicious cycle of well, you’re going to need more because you’re not getting the effects of the lower dosage anymore so we’ll put you on this. And then what happens, you get a symptom from that down the line. Okay, that’s a known symptom. No worries. We’ll put you on another drug. Guess what, more NAD+ depletion.
This approach we have with medicine right now, if you really took a step back, it makes no sense. It’s something that we’re just trying to manage everything in the body with something synthetic, which has lots of side effects that we’re not even incorporating. No doctor is thinking about NAD+ depletion when they give you a cholesterol medication. They can care less. They’re solving a problem, in a sense. Your cholesterol is here, we want it here, take this drug. That’s all I care about. That’s all I’ve been taught. And again, I’m not faulting doctors. I love them. My father’s a doctor. He was in conventional medicine for tens of years and I still have tons of friends and very close colleagues that are still abiding by the conventional and orthodox way of going about it. They are taught that way and they are doing good in the sense that someone comes in with pain and they leave without pain.
But the long-term ramifications of chronic disease, you can’t really say that we’re winning that battle. That we’re doing something that’s really getting to the core of it and reversing disease. When you have this many people on this many medications, you’re bound to be depleting not just of NAD+, many other really, really important elements within the body that are critical to just regeneration to health in general.
To anyone listening, I’m not bashing it because it’s required at times. But I would want to take a different approach that yes, it’s required at times, but what’s the quickest way to get off of them? What’s the quickest way to get your body back to where it’s in a self-regulating space? It doesn’t require outside intervention of drugs within the body to do what it should be doing, and that’s really my mission is to show people. Because again, I’m not a doctor, I’m not going to go out there and push all the clinical data on everyone and go in that really technical analysis of each disease.
I’m here to tell you what I’ve seen within the 40 years or so I’ve been in medicine or around it to say that prioritizes health, and understand that your natural state is health. Don’t buy into that disease, I’m going to live with that forever because that’s not a narrative you want to be in because it is one that will lead to depression and this giving up on your own body to do what it should be doing. These miraculous things of healing itself every single day and so many processes that allow us to live are just really phenomenal when you take a step back and say, damn, my body does all of that in one second. Trillions of chemical actions that allow us to live and in perfect unity and harmony doing all this.
Put more faith in your body in a sense and start to understand that there are options out there. One of them is taking, of course, something like NAD+ or Nadovim, but there are so many other options out there to bring you back into a healthy state because as long as you are taking any drugs or anything, that’s kind of the admission that you’re in a disease state. Without the drugs, you are in a disease state and you still are. Your cholesterol is high. Yes, we’re managing it. Then you’re telling me if you got off that pill you’d be healthy, no. It’s not making you healthy. It’s just managing your disease.
I want people to think about it differently. Stop managing disease. Yes, there’s a time and place you need to manage things, but it’s not a lifelong process. It doesn’t have to be. If you prioritize health and you start listening to great podcasts such as this one and start to appreciate a different approach to what health can be, what it should be, which is this natural state where you don’t need this intervention, other people giving you things to make you healthy, that’s when you know there is going to be a breakthrough, I think, not only in yourself but in society as a whole. That’s really what I’m aiming for. If Nadovim is just one of those hundreds of thousands of probably solutions out there, that’s great. Try it out. I will say, experience is what’s going to lead you there. You could look at all the evidence in the world, but until you start experiences, start taking an action, it doesn’t really matter what the evidence says because you’re not applying it to yourself anyway.
It’s one of those things that so many of us rely on medication that in reality, if you broke it down even to this one thing of looking how can I be NAD+ depleted? Because you’re taking lots of medications, that’s one of the reasons. Even to take them, there really should be no contraindications of the medication. I won’t say that for everyone. I do think you need to talk to your doctor before anything. I can’t speak for every medication out there. I know there are somewhere if you provided energy to the mitochondria, you might have a reaction of pushing certain toxins from certain drugs that you may not want to and it may exacerbate some conditions. That’s true I think for anything you do if you’re on certain medications. Do speak with your doctor about it.
I will say this, a lot of doctors don’t even know what NAD+ is, and that’s kind of sad to me because it is such an important compound. But we’ve had customers be like my doctor didn’t know what it was so he didn’t want me on it. I would say you have the power, doctors don’t. They think they do. I know doctors and they’re like, I’m telling you, I went to medical school. If they don’t have patients they don’t have a practice, they don’t have a career. They listen to patients, they really do.
I’m not saying be nosy. Well, you should do research, but just ask your doctor. I’ve heard this, other doctors said this about, maybe you’d want to do a little research. Push back a little bit. I think this idea that doctors are infallible and know everything, that’s just crazy to me. They’re regular people. They don’t know everything, and why would you expect them to?
[01:47:03] Ashley James: Yeah, they’re not machines, they’re not computers.
[01:47:05] Caspar Szulc: No, no, no. They’re not computers. They’re specialists normally. I’ve met doctors that know nothing about other systems of the body and only about the GI. If you ask them anything about the brain, they would know very little. I mean that training, they forget it. You don’t remember everything you trained and learned about in college. I don’t remember my first year of college, what I learned in marketing there. Probably terms they’re completely outdated anyway now.
I think there is something to be said. When a doctor says something, you’re allowed to ask why. Not in an adversarial way because I love doctors and I know a lot of people come in and just print out WebMD things and be like, oh, I think I have this. Doctors don’t like that, but I think there’s this ability to see yourself in a relationship with a doctor.
Our doctors here and everything, they’re coaches. You’re the athlete, you do need to listen, but it’s a back and forth. It’s a relationship of trust. It’s a relationship of being able to look at all the options and both sides doing the research. And be able to find a doctor that you really feel comfortable with I think. It’s not that all doctors are created equal, they are not. There are many different. All I think have good intentions, but that doesn’t mean every doctor is the right one, or just because they’re in your health insurance plan that you should just listen to them. Seek out other options and see, and then maybe one is going to be like, oh yeah, NAD+, I know that stuff. That would be great for you, you should do that.
[01:48:38] Ashley James: Your New York Center for Innovative Medicine, can people from around the world work with your functional medicine doctors through Skype? Can they do telemedicine basically with them, or do they have to go there in order to work with your doctors?
[01:48:57] Caspar Szulc: We’re old school in that way, we want to work with people here. This is where the treatments are. There’s only so much we could do. You could do a consultation. We have a patient ambassador that we speak with that is a practitioner here that you could do consultations with and talk to. But when it comes to actually getting treatment, it’s here because of the fact that we have over 100 therapies here. I mean, we really take pride in the amount of therapies and the way we personalize them to each. But if you’re not here, we can’t do that.
The idea of being training with a coach and him not being there when you’re doing labs or doing all these other things, that’s difficult, that’s tough. A lot of times, if you require an intravenous infusion because you are depleted of something, it’s very difficult to do that when you’re not here. We want to be responsible for that. While we understand that traveling isn’t always easy, we also think health is a priority. If you want to get it done right with us, then come. We’ll make it as easy as possible, trying to do it as quickly as possible if you’re traveling. We have people come here from all over the world and it is unique in that way that you have so many options and it’s not just NAD+. That’s again just one of the tons of different ingredients we’d use in IVs, but we also have spiritual things, psychological. We have a psychologist on hand, psycho-emotional therapies, all types of energy medicines, anti-aging. I mean you got to run the gambit.
Again, if you show up to a house with just a hammer, you may not fix the problem. You want a good tool kit, you do. You want all those things in there. That’s important. But at the same time, I will and everyone here will speak to anybody, even if they can’t come into the center, we have great resources, great information, and a great network of people that can help in some way, shape, or form. So if you’re not ready to make it over to New York or you’re not sure, I mean, there are still so many steps you can take. Whether that’s just taking Nadovim, that’s a great step. It’s learning, listening to our podcast, or doing anything like that. We wanted to make it easy for anyone to empower themselves and make the right choices for their health even if they can’t get into the clinic.
[01:51:15] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you, Caspar Szulc, for coming on the show and sharing about NAD+ and Nadovim. Back when I was just starting to get on the health train, I decided to buy my B vitamin supplements and I had no idea that I had MTHFR. I bought my B vitamin supplements from Trader Joe’s and I didn’t really notice the difference. I didn’t really feel that much more energy. I kind of felt nauseous actually when I took them, and then my pee turned a bright yellow. It wasn’t until years later that I met with a naturopathic doctor who formulated his protocol and it was life-changing. Within five days, I was waking up just so much energy in the morning with mental clarity. I felt like I was a kid again, and that’s the difference between really high quality and it was the same. If you look at the back of the package and they look kind of similar if you don’t know what you’re looking for and you don’t know about the companies, okay, this has B vitamins, that has B vitamins. Why was it that taking one kind of made me nauseous and didn’t really give me energy, and the other one no nausea and it was a total game-changer, totally life-changing, and yet they looked on paper sort of similar supplements?
When you go to a company that puts so much into making sure there’s quality and bioavailability and that really they developed it so that doctors could see a difference, so that they could do blood tests and see a difference, that they could study it and study the effects of it, that company has put in all the work to make something that is quality that you’re going to notice a difference you’ll really notice a difference.
There are other NADs out there I’ve seen, and it’s buyer beware because, in the supplement industry, someone could sell a bottle that says they NAD+ on it, or says ginkgo biloba on it, or vitamin C and there actually has no ginkgo biloba, no vitamin C, or no NAD+ in it. It could be all filler, and that is the buyer beware of the supplement industry. It’s not regulated, which we don’t want it to be because the second it becomes regulated, then they will take it all away and make it drugs. We don’t want it to be regulated, but that means we have to do our research and make sure the company is legitimate and really the company has the ethics and the high-quality standards to make sure that what’s in the bottle is what’s on the label.
That’s why I’m happy to know that Nadovim exists, the quality is there. It’s nadovim.com and the coupon code is LTH for our listeners. I’m really excited for listeners to try it. Get a bottle, just try it for themselves, and then come into the Learn True Health Facebook group and share their experience. I want to hear from everyone, I’m going to do it as well, and we’ll just see what differences we notice. Big differences, small differences, no differences. I’m excited about the energy and the sleep, I think that’s great.
I’m looking forward to, over the next few months, hearing back from listeners as we try it out for ourselves. Just give it a try and see what differences we notice. The proof in the pudding is in the eating so let’s try it and see what happens.
It was wonderful having you on the show. I’m excited to try all this and see for ourselves. Thank you for coming here and explaining it today.
[01:54:41] Caspar Szulc: Thank you. Real pleasure, Ashley.
Get Connected with Caspar Szulc!Nadovim – Website
New York Center for Innovative Medicine
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Caspar Szulc – Twitter
Recommended Reading by Caspar SzulcPower vs. Force by David Hawkins
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Magnesium soak: Use coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com
Radical Longevity: The Powerful Plan to Sharpen Your Brain, Strengthen Your Body, and Reverse the Symptoms of Aginghttps://www.learntruehealth.com/radical-longevity-the-powerful-plan-to-sharpen-your-brain-strengthen-your-body-and-reverse-the-symptoms-of-aging
Highlights:
How to be mentally sharp How to keep skin healthy Importance of vitamin C, magnesium, and zinc Iron and inorganic copper’s connection to Alzheimer’s Disease Tribulus as a precursor to testosteroneAnn Louise Gittleman is back on the show to talk about her new book Radical Longevity. Ann Louise has written so many books about health and nutrition, and the focus of Radical Longevity is how to become a super ager. She shares how to have a healthy brain, skin, and sex drive.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love learning from today’s guest. Ann Louise Gittleman has been one of my heroes in the holistic health space since I was a teenager.
I had her on the show back in episode 284, so I recommend going back and listening to that. She’s written 32 books in her career and quite an amazing woman. She is absolutely the expert when it comes to learning about detoxification, supporting your organs like the liver and the brain, healing the brain, and also parasites. I read her parasite cleanse book back when I was a teenager. My mom and I did her parasite cleanse and it was very effective. We got tested before and after, and I’ve been fascinated by her work ever since.
I also recommend you guys listen to episode 348 and episode 349. I had her husband on the show, James Templeton. His story that he tells is just mind-blowing. He had cancer and he was in really bad shape, and he tells the story of how he actually escaped the hospital when he realized that they were going to kill him. The therapy was absolutely… well, you just got to listen to the story. But in the middle of the night, he escapes the hospital and says I am never going back to doing that kind of chemo and all that stuff. And then he discovered more and more holistic ways of doing things and he healed his body.
He wrote a book on how he did it and how he’s been cancer-free for many, many years. Doctors did not think he would live for five years, and I believe it was something like 25 or 30 years ago. He ended up finding his now wife who has been a holistic hero for going on 40 years, and together they’re such a powerful team.
One thing that we talk about in one of our interviews with him is that he has a YouTube channel where he interviews other people who are survivors of cancer and how they did it, interesting. Not every therapy works for every person, but you learn a lot of new holistic methods, or maybe they’re new to you, but they’re not new by any means, so just really beautiful, inspiring. Both of them love to focus on education and spreading this information which is my calling too. I definitely know that you’ll enjoy listening to those episodes and then following them as well.
And Louise mentions magnesium, and she does have a really great oral magnesium supplement she likes. Now, if you’ve been a long-time listener, you’ve heard me share about how much I love the magnesium soak from Living the Good Life Naturally, and that’s just another way to get magnesium into you.
What I love about that is it bypasses digestion and so you actually absorb. She did tests of the water of the magnesium soak and we absorb 20 grams of magnesium while we’re soaking for one hour. You soak your feet in a bowl of water, any temperature you want, just as long as the bowl is not plastic. It could be metal, ceramic, just any glass, wood I suppose, or you could put it in your bath as well. It’s safe for children, it’s safe for everyone, and it’s natural. That the body absorbs as much as it needs, which is great. You can’t really overdose when you’re absorbing because it’s through diffusion.
We’ve had over 2,000 listeners purchase it and try it, and many of them have purchased it again. You have to comb through our Learn True Health Facebook group, which you can use the search function to do that. We’ve had over 200 listeners over the last few years share testimonials and stories about how the magnesium soak has helped them.
People have reported migraines going away pain. Aches and pains going away. Better sleep, more energy, restless legs going away. I love it because my son who is so energetic and never wants to fall asleep, it calms him down and helps him sleep. I notice that I just overall feel better. It’s also really helped me through supporting my liver and doing the heavy metal detoxing that I’ve been doing for the last few years. I’ve noticed that it really did support my liver and calm it down, and I got better results when I incorporated it in terms of my detoxification.
Plus I notice I just feel better—more vital, more energy. Not that I was getting a lot of restless legs, to begin with, but I did notice a few times that I’d have that sort of itchy feeling in the evening, my legs just kind of itched. The muscles just were like, it’s an indescribable sensation but restless is a really good way to describe it. I was already taking a very good oral magnesium, and then when I got into the magnesium soak, it completely went away. I thought that was really interesting.
But listen to my episodes. I’ve had Kristen Bowen on the show several times. She’s the founder of the magnesium soak that I absolutely love. What I love about her, she has a health journey. Just to give you a little teaser, she was 97 pounds having 30 seizures a day in a wheelchair almost unable to talk, that was her 15 years ago, and today she’s very active, very healthy.
I’m not going to say this is a magic bullet, the magnesium soak, but it was one of the biggest contributing factors to her recovery after she had had surgery to remove some things inside her. Just go listen to the first episode, the magnesium foot soak episode with Kristen Bowen and you will be amazed at her story. So listen to the episodes with Kristen Bowen and learn more about the magnesium soak. You can listen to episodes 294, 341, and 381, those are my three episodes with Kristen Bowen. Definitely go back and listen to episode 294, it’s her story, it’s quite amazing.
Now, to get the listener discount, she does give us a discount. Use coupon code LTH at checkout when you go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and then click on the magnesium products and grab the magnesium soak. I also love the magnesium cream and the muscle cream as well, but really, the magic is in soaking in the magnesium. So that’s coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com.
I also interviewed sort of the magnesium doctor, Dr. Carolyn Dean. It was a very, very long, detailed, lots of information in that interview. It was over two hours, and she shared something very interesting. Now, she’s a naturopath and an MD. She’s been practicing medicine for over 40 years and is very well known in the holistic space as the magnesium doctor. She says that magnesium is the most important mineral of the body. It is used in 1800 enzymatic processes in the body.
Zinc is second most important at 800 enzymatic processes. So if you think about it, if you’re deficient in magnesium, 1800 things in your body aren’t able to fully function and are unable to fully do their job, and then the body starts to display symptoms. Symptoms are the smoke, not the fire. Symptoms are the body saying to us, hey, I don’t have the raw building blocks I need to maintain. Just like if your car was overheating or there was some weird smoke coming out of your car, you need to pull over. The check engine light comes on, you need to pull over. You need to get that belt changed and get the oil changed. There’s maintenance, there are things the car needs, and the body is the same way. The body needs a certain amount of all these nutrients to function.
If you’re zinc deficient, there are 800 things that can go wrong in the body, one of them is losing your sense of smell, losing your sense of taste. I know a naturopathic physician here locally who told me that one of her patients came into her after going to all kinds of doctors, doing all kinds of tests, and they told her it was in her head. She couldn’t feel her entire body. She touched things and her fingers were numb, her hands were numb. She didn’t feel pressure, her entire body didn’t have a sensation of pressure. My friend who’s a naturopath said, you know what, I’m going to get you on some zinc. And sure enough, it was such a severe zinc deficiency that her nervous system could not function properly.
That’s how important these minerals are, and there are actually 60 minerals the body needs. So if you’re deficient in one, you’re usually deficient in several because it’s really hard to just isolate, eat food that only is missing one nutrient. If you have any symptoms of health issues, typically it’s a mineral deficiency because there are 60 minerals the body needs, and we’re usually deficient in a bunch of them. We have to supplement because we’re not getting enough in our diet.
We talked about this with Dr. Joel Wallach, I had him on the show a few times. He’s one of my mentors. He’s mentored me for the last 10 years. He has a degree in soil agriculture, a naturopath, and he’s a research scientist. He’s published so many things and what he saw was that there’s a deficiency in our soil because of the farming practices, and there is a direct link between that and 900 diseases. Over a 12-year study he conducted that was actually federally funded, he discovered that 900 diseases across species lines are linked to 90 essential nutrients the body could be missing. If you’re missing a handful of them, then you could have several diseases. Now the good news is we can reverse them through diet and supplementing the diet with specific nutrients.
So the good news is we can heal the body. The body isn’t a pharmaceutical drug deficient, it’s nutrient deficient. Ann Louise Gittleman talks about this today. She talks about some nutrients that we can make sure that we’re getting.
I also recommend checking out takeyoursupplements.com. These health coaches are absolutely amazing. They give their time for free, they help you to determine the right supplements for you, and I have been working with them. They’re really, really great health coaches that help you to pick out the right supplements for you that are based on the symptoms you’re having. The symptoms tell us what nutrient deficiencies you are experiencing. So check out takeyoursupplements.com and talk to them about how you can reverse the symptoms you’re having by addressing those nutrient deficiencies.
Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing the Learn True Health podcast with those you care about. Enjoy today’s episode. It is chock full of amazing, really, really great information. Have yourself a fantastic day.
[00:12:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 459. I am so excited for today’s guest. I’ve actually been a fan of our guest since I was a teenager. Not to age you, but you know what, given the topic today—Radical Longevity—you do live what you teach. Back when I was a teenager, I think I was about 15, my mom brought home a book called Guess What Came to Dinner. We did our first parasite cleanse. My mom was big into health and holistic medicine, and I was right there with her. As a young child, I remember going to the health food store with her.
Well, we got on a parasite cleanse and we actually tested positive for three parasites. That’s what they could test for gosh knows what we actually had, but it was amazing. That blew my mind that why isn’t everyone talking about parasites? We all have them. If you’ve been to a different country, if you’ve had cats or dogs. There are so many ways that you can get them, and so I’ve been a big fan of yours forever.
Then you came on the show in episode 284, so listeners can go back in and listen to that one as well. Today, you’re here to share about your new book that just got released, so it’s fresh off the press, and of course, the links to your book are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Radical Longevity: The Powerful Plan to Sharpen Your Brain, Strengthen Your Body, and Reverse the Symptoms of Aging. I look forward to learning how you’ve been doing that because you’re in amazing health. We’re all going to live to be 120 reading your books. Welcome to the show.
We have the genetic potential to do it, why not? Let’s do it. Welcome to the show.
[00:14:28] Ann Louise Gittleman: Absolutely.
[00:14:29] Ashley James: Welcome back to show, I should say. I’d love to hear what motivated you to write this book?
[00:14:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s such a good question, Ashley. This is my 37th book.
[00:14:42] Ashley James: I love it. I love your fire and I love that you have helped so many people for so many years. It’s just wonderful.
[00:14:53] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, in that regard my dear, and I’m so appreciative of your kind words. I’ve written about parasites, Guess What Came to Dinner. I’ve written about weight loss, detoxification, men’s health, women’s health, hormones, premenopause, post-menopause, menopause and beyond, so there was nothing else to cover except for the concept and the arena of longevity and anti-aging. Although I don’t like the term anti-aging, that’s really what we understand today to be the next frontier, so to speak. I’m 70 years young, so this was the time. This is like enlightened self-interest.
I figured I had a conglomerate, everything I’ve ever learned, researched, and studied and put it into a book for my fellow compatriots and people coming before us and after us.
[00:15:40] Ashley James: Why don’t you like the term anti-aging?
[00:15:43] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, because I’m pro-aging. I really think that aging is a privilege, and I want people to really stop and appreciate that. It’s a privilege. Not all of us are going to have the opportunity to live long enough to say that they’re a super ager, so it’s a privilege. It’s denied to too many people. When I was looking at all the people—my friends, my associates, my compadres that had passed on before me and before their time and they’re all in the acknowledgments—I thought to myself, what were they missing? I wish they had this book in hand because maybe they’d still be with us.
[00:16:17] Ashley James: Super ager, I love that. I want to live to 120. I want to be a super ager, but also be very healthy through my golden years, which is the point, right? We want to be able to get out there, live, and be alive.
[00:16:34] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s the point. We want to extend the youth span. I talk about preserving the youth span, extending the period of life when you have vitality, grace, gratitude, and resilience. We want to do this with resilience so that we learn to bend and not break.
[00:16:49] Ashley James: And the older we get, the wiser we get. We wish we had all these lessons when we were young, but what we really want to do is maintain a vital, youthful body throughout our life so that we can at least take advantage of all this wisdom we’ve been collecting so we can go live.
So let’s talk about the first part, which is to sharpen your brain. What are some things that you teach that keep us mentally youthful, mentally sharp?
[00:17:25] Ann Louise Gittleman: To keep mentally sharp you have to keep physically active. Whether that means walking daily, it could mean walking up and down your stairs if you’re in an apartment or in a condo and can’t get outside because of the weather. It means moving your body. It means dancing on a daily basis. It means being physically active because that helps the body, mind, and spirit, so that would be number one.
Number two, what helps the brain is physical contact, connectivity, which we don’t have because of the pandemic in this day and time, but hopefully, that will change. You want to have relationships with your family, with your friends, with your loved ones. It could even be virtual relationships, but connectivity is one of the traits of those super agers that we aspire to be.
And then you want to have a purpose-driven life. You want to wake up every morning with a purpose. Whether that’s being a volunteer, whether that’s still working as I do at the age of 72 and going on, well I’ll be 72 in June so I guess I’m 70+. But it means really having a passion for what you do. Never give up on the joie de vivre of life, and that’s exceedingly important.
Of course, eating properly, taking certain supplements, which I cover at length in the book. And then I think the other aspect that’s important is really having a spiritual, mental, or religious practice.
[00:18:44] Ashley James: You just listed the fountain of youth, the keys to life. That is exactly what people need to do. So many of us get caught up in the minutiae of life and we forget to move our body in a way that brings us joy every day. We forget to really make those meaningful connections. I love that you brought up volunteering because there are so many studies that show that people who volunteer do live longer and have less depression, less suicide. People who are depressed who go into volunteering end up having an increase in their mental health. That there’s something about serving and being part of a community, of being of service to others that actually rewards us more than the effort that we put out.
Volunteering isn’t about you sacrificing or being a martyr. It’s actually you get more out of volunteering than what you give, and that’s so cool to be part of a community where you’re getting so much mental health, emotional health, and as a result physical health from volunteering. What kind of volunteering work do you do?
[00:20:01] Ann Louise Gittleman: I volunteer on Facebook all the time. I’m answering questions 24/7. I consider that a divine volunteering job quite frankly because I’m helping so many people. At least point them in the direction of their health. If I can’t answer them directly online because that becomes a little dicey giving that kind of advice on the people that have such severe issues, at least I can point them in the right direction. Give them the tools, give them the website, give them the book, give them the supplement, and then they’re on their own. So that’s what I consider my divine passion.
[00:20:33] Ashley James: Oh, I love that. That’s so great. You said that you cover in-depth the supplements and the diet, can you give us a few pointers, really, really important pointers around diet and supplements?
[00:20:50] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, the thing that I discovered that was the aha moment in writing the book was really the chapter on the brain and the chapter on minding your minerals. I think we call it misbehaving minerals. There are two minerals that can stockpile in the brain if they’re not the proper form of the mineral or the proper cofactor, and that is the iron and the copper. You have to make sure that your levels of iron and copper are kept in the minimum amounts. Taking a ferritin test on a yearly basis would be very important for those people that have a history of Alzheimer’s because stockpiling iron in the brain has been dramatically connected to all kinds of cognitive disorders, so that would be number one.
Get a ferritin test immediately. It’s got to be under a certain degree. I give you the levels of what’s optimally healthy and what the typical lab is going to show, but you want what’s optimally healthy. the healthiest people in the world have low serum ferritin levels, so you want to approximate what the long-living populations have of the blue zones.
[00:21:53] Ashley James: Yes. In the last year, they just published a study, I thought it was fascinating, that said this could be the reason why those who eat a more plant-based diet live longer because they have more managed, not deficient, but managed lower iron levels because they’re not you know over-consuming animal flesh, which contains high in iron. It’s sort of a very oxidative form of iron. They saw that people who had lower iron levels lived longer.
[00:22:27] Ann Louise Gittleman: They do, but if you’re a meat-eater or a carnivore, if you’re a paleo kind of person, there’s help involved with that because there are ways that you can circumvent the iron by eating iron blockers, and we talk about that, whether that’s red wine. See, red wine is healthy because of the fact that it’s a blocking agent to iron. That’s the secret of the Mediterranean diet and the French paradox. It’s the blocking effect of wine, which I go into the blocking effect of certain types of dairy foods, the blocking effect of tea, the blocking effect of coffee.
[00:23:02] Ashley James: Oh, that’s fascinating. I think there are a few listeners who are liking you even more right now.
[00:23:09] Ann Louise Gittleman: So here’s to some wine. Here’s to some vino. Healthy vino, not more than one small glass a day if you’re a female, maybe up to two if you’re a male because too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing.
[00:23:19] Ashley James: Right, exactly. And then also, just watching and seeing if you become stressed out. Some people have bad sleep and then that stresses them out the next day, and then that spirals downwards. We have to watch out. Some people can’t function properly when they drink any alcohol and they just have to check in with their body and see what’s going on. And listen to your advice because maybe they need to do some more cleaning up of their diet and killing parasites.
[00:23:49] Ann Louise Gittleman: But they’re easy fixes, this is not an involved program. I mean, it’s comprehensive because we talk about the brain, the heart, the bones, the sex drive, the hair, the nails, the skin. I’m not sure if I’ve covered just about everything there. We talk about all the major body organs and glands that people are concerned about, but the fixes are as easy as can be. If you want to spend more money, then go for that. You can as well. But taking that yearly blood test is a real key, and then of course the copper connection, which I go into in great detail is also important in checking the copper levels of your current water supply, which you can do easily online, and I give you the levels which are optimally healthy. Those that may be a precursor to Alzheimer’s.
[00:24:29] Ashley James: Is water the most common way we’re getting copper or are there certain foods that we should be avoiding?
[00:24:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, it’s the copper that’s the copper that you don’t want. It’s the divalent or inorganic. You see, what I learned from the book and it was because a researcher contacted me out of the blue, Ashley. I always think that the universe sends me messages and messengers when I’m writing a book. He is a researcher, his name is George Brewer. He’s out of the University of Michigan. He’s in the genetics department, and he called and said I think I have the key to Alzheimer’s. I said, oh my gosh, what is it? And we have a discussion. He’s written profusely and he believes it was the implementation of copper water pipes in Europe that started the Alzheimer’s epidemic. He’s correlated that in many of his different publications.
It’s the inorganic copper, the copper that’s in the food is food-based, that’s fine, and we’ve got plenty of it in the diet and the avocados. That’s the seeds, the beans, the shellfish, but it’s the inorganic synthetic copper that the body has no method of metabolizing healthfully. It doesn’t go to the liver the way the food-based copper does, it goes to the brain.
[00:25:41] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s fascinating. I’m so glad you’re pointing this out.
[00:25:46] Ann Louise Gittleman: And nobody has written about it before, which just blows my mind. So the idea here is that if you’ve got issues with Alzheimer’s or want to prevent any type of dysfunction cognitively, you should get the book and read the chapter on the brain and on the misbehaving minerals because it will widen your eyes. It will open your eyes, it’ll open your mouth, it’ll be jaw-dropping as it was for me.
[00:26:09] Ashley James: I bet. Our brain’s the most important part. I liked learning from Dr. Amen. He helps people reverse aging in the brain, but it’s all about cardiovascular function, which your program is comprehensive. It’s treating the body as a whole. But that’s why I thought it was fascinating because if you can make your brain stay healthy, you’re actually making your heart stay healthy, you’re making your whole body stay healthy. So if you’re focusing on brain health, everything else falls into line. That’s why I love that you’ve given us this checklist—moving your body, that connectivity, eating healthy, the supplements, and watching those levels of minerals. Of course, I know that your book is going to be chock full of amazing information.
Now, you did mention skin health. I know that sagging skin and loose skin. We’re vain, we don’t like it. We don’t like it when our skin gets a little saggy, a little wrinkly, so I’m interested to hear about some skin tips for firming up the skin. And then you mentioned sex drive and I think all of us want to know how we can feel youthful and still have fun with our partner no matter what age we are. So give us some of those pointers from your book for healthy skin and for healthy sex drive.
[00:27:42] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I’m not a big believer in collagen per se, I’d rather go to the vitamin c, which is the precursor to collagen. I’m a big vitamin c believer. The Vitality C that I talk about from UNI KEY Health is the C that I use on a daily basis. And the more that you can accommodate without getting loose bowels, the more that you need vitamin C. I go to 20 grams a day without an issue whatsoever.
I’m a big believer in vitamin C, a precursor to hydrogen peroxide. It’ll stop cancer from progressing, as you know from my husband’s book. I used to have cancer, and that is in addition to lysine. Nobody talks about the amino acid lysine or proline, those are the two biggest assists for great skin, and I can say to you that at the age of 72, I have better skin now than I did at 25.
[00:28:30] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. You mentioned your husband, James Templeton. I’ve had him on the show. I absolutely adore his work. I definitely recommend listeners go back and check out those interviews with James Templeton.
Vitamin C is really interesting because a goat will have about 16 grams of vitamin C coursing through its veins at all times, and a wolf has about 32 grams, and we don’t make vitamin c, but animals do. So how many grams do you think we should have? We’re about maybe the same size or bigger than a wolf, so taking 20 grams a day isn’t that unheard of, isn’t that surprising. It’s actually what our body needs.
[00:29:14] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, it’s what my body needs is probably because of all the mercury fillings that I had years ago. But people are very individual. I believe in biochemical individuality. So I can say that what I can tolerate you might not be able to. But one scoop of the Vitality C gives you four grams of C plus D-Ribose for your heart, plus MSM for your skin. So my point being is it’s the best bang for your buck with this buffered vitamin C. And the more that you can tolerate, the more you need it. Some people can only tolerate one scoop. So for some reason, they just run through their system and they can’t accommodate it, but for those of us that can accommodate it, we’ll see a big difference in the collagen and the dewiness of the skin, the lack of wrinkles, and the lack of sagginess.
[00:30:00] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. Well, it’s so hard to get enough vitamin C from our diet because our food isn’t fresh.
[00:30:07] Ann Louise Gittleman: Impossible.
[00:30:08] Ashley James: You’re not going out into your garden and picking something right away and eating it yourself, and eating fruits and vegetables fresh all day long like we’re supposed to. That the food that you’re getting is weeks old, and the vitamin C is just not there anymore. We’re definitely, as a nation, not eating enough plants. So we’re not getting enough vitamin C from our diet, and that’s why supplements are so important because we are not eating in a natural way because we’re not walking outdoors and immediately eating fresh food. So we have to supplement in order to catch up with the modern diet.
[00:30:43] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s a part of it, but modern-day stress will skyrocket your need for vitamin C. We’re all under stress. I mean, look at the news, that’s stressful. Seeing what’s going on in our daily political spheres is very stressful no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. So all that is going to be stressing us, plus getting older is stressing us, the pandemic is stressing us. There are so many things in the body that will respond to, and vitamin C, as well as magnesium and zinc, are lost because of a stress response. So you have to keep supplementing.
[00:31:15] Ashley James: That’s such a good point.
[00:31:17] Ann Louise Gittleman: But the other thing is for those of us that have had any kind of PTSD because we’ve had concussions and I’m one of them, the body needs more vitamin C because it’s an anti-stressor.
[00:31:27] Ashley James: What else does a body need to help heal concussions?
[00:31:31] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, that’s a good question because there’s one that had a near-fatal concussion back in 2007. One needs brain training. It’s not so much nutrients, it’s re-patterning the brain. So I’m a big believer in the brain training methodology that was pioneered by a group called Cereset. So I’ve gone and done the brain training myself. I’m out of PTSD to some degree, but once you’ve had the PTSD, you get re-triggered by any kind of life event, and then your needs for all these stress-related vitamins and minerals really go way over to the stratosphere.
So that goes back to the brain, and whatever you can do to heal that brain with all the things we talked about—the connectivity, the volunteerism, having a spiritual practice. But not getting triggered is very difficult. So you have to work on it on a daily basis. I personally take GABA 750mg morning, noon, and night. I live on Rescue Remedy and take a great deal of magnesium.
[00:32:26] Ashley James: Excellent. What form of magnesium do you take?
[00:32:30] Ann Louise Gittleman: It’s the one I formulated called Mag-Key, which has the orotate, the glycinate, the taurinate, and the threonate.
[00:32:38] Ashley James: That sounds great. I love me some magnesium. I’ll take all of it.
[00:32:45] Ann Louise Gittleman: As well as some Epsom salt baths. So whatever you can do. Stress is a big killer, but it’s very difficult to escape stress in this day and time.
[00:32:54] Ashley James: Right. So we got to keep working on ourselves and stay conscious. We got to take the supplements, like you said, have a spiritual practice, get outside and ground yourself or do some earthing. Walk barefoot on the earth and breathe in nature. Take time to consciously bring down the stress is so important.
Now, you talked about sex drive and we all want to know, how do we maintain those healthy hormones especially post-menopausally? How do we stay very youthful and healthy in the bedroom with our partner?
[00:33:30] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I have one little tip in the book, which involves a particular vitamin which I will not give away to anybody until they get the book, and then we can talk about it then. But there’s one little tip that will heighten the intimate encounter. And then there’s an herb which I will tell you about called Tribulus which is a precursor to testosterone. Men and women can both take that at 250 milligrams three times a day. Very important for testosterone, which is the hormone of desire that goes south with both men and women once they reach a certain age and stage of life.
So using the Tribulus, using this little particular vitamin to heighten the encounter, maybe a little lubrication for women, as well as some natural estrogenic products I think is really the tip of the iceberg, and that’s the key.
[00:34:16] Ashley James: Thank you. Now I know you’re pinched for time. I was so happy to have you on the show. You’re definitely welcome back anytime. I’d love to have you. You’re a wealth of knowledge. We’ve learned so much in such a short period of time. How can we find you on Facebook to be part of your community to continue learning from you?
[00:34:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: Let’s see, where do we go? To Ann Louise Gittleman, Ph.D., CNS, that’s the Facebook page. And then you can get the book at radicallongevitybook.com.
[00:34:48] Ashley James: Excellent. We’re going to make sure the links to everything you do are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We definitely want to all get the book, Radical Longevity. It would also be a great gift to give to our loved ones as well. Is there anything that you’d like to say or give us some homework to wrap up today’s interview?
[00:35:07] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I would say that the brain is very important, but so is the liver, and those are two organs that can regenerate themselves. So I put a lot of emphasis on the brain, of course, because we’re all afraid of Alzheimer’s, but the liver is the regenerative organ for metabolism, for metabolizing toxins, hormones, and all the poisons in the environment.
So taking care of your liver daily. Liver detox is not a seasonal event, it’s a daily event. So you’ve got to take something to get the poisons out daily. It’s not the fact that we’re accumulating poisons. It’s the fact we’re not excreting them that’s the key, and that’s where I like more fiber in the diet. I’m a big believer in psyllium husks, and that’s where I like some sort of liver-loving food, whether that’s artichoke hearts or artichoke chlorophyll. Maybe a little milk thistle and even Oregon grape root, but the liver is the key. It means long life. So keeping your liver will make sure that you enhance and ensure a long life.
[00:36:05] Ashley James: I am such a fan of taking care of the liver. My mom died of liver cancer, and I’ve had liver issues with detoxification. I’ve been working for the last six years now on supporting my liver, and I saw a huge shift in my health when I started doing that. So I absolutely, 100% agree with you. Which one of your books or maybe there’s several of them would you recommend we read for supporting our liver? Of course, Radical Longevity, but do you have any other ones that are more specific to liver health?
[00:36:34] Ann Louise Gittleman: Radical Metabolism.
[00:36:37] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. And that was the last book we talked about in episode 284. Excellent. Thank you so much again, Ann Louise Gittleman, for coming on the show. You’re welcome back anytime. We’d love to have you. I’m a big fan of your work. I definitely recommend listeners read all your books and continue following you. I can’t wait to interview you when you’re 120.
[00:37:00] Ann Louise Gittleman: We’ll see on the other side of 100, my love. You’re a sweetheart. God bless.
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Ashley’s Update For the Learn True Health Listenershttps://www.learntruehealth.com/ashleys-update-for-the-learn-true-health-listeners
In this episode, I give an update about what happened during the last two months since the previous episode. I share how I’m coping with the loss of a loved one. I also share my COVID experience and how I recovered from it.
Hello, true health seekers, it’s so good to be back. I know many of you probably are wondering what’s going on. I took some time off. The last time I was posting episodes you may have heard me talk about how I was pregnant and I had a beautiful pregnancy. I was very healthy the whole time, as was the baby. And if you’re not in our Facebook group, then you probably haven’t heard but I lost our child during delivery. She was born still earlier this month. We’re still waiting for some answers, but it looks like perhaps the cord was interrupted right at the very last few minutes of delivery.
She had a very strong and healthy heartbeat the whole time, and everything was smooth right up until the very end. And then just at the very end, sometime in the last three minutes, we lost her heartbeat right as she was coming out. Dealing with that, facing the grief, obviously recovering from labor, postpartum recovery, and then I got COVID. That was an adventure.
So this last month has for me been about emotional, spiritual, and physical recovery and healing. I kept thinking about you guys, and I kept thinking about what I would say, how I would share, and how much I wanted to share my journey with you. I’m really wanting to get on the microphone. If you’ve been a long-time listener, you know that all of my experiences I want to share because I want everyone to learn as I am learning. I’ve healed so many illnesses and diseases, I’ve come so far in my healing journey, and I continue to grow healthier and stronger. It’s not all just physical, right? It’s emotional, it’s mental healing and growth as well, it’s personal growth.
When the paramedics were working on her, the paramedics came very fast. It was a home birth, and the thing is, this would have happened in the hospital as well because there’s nothing we could have done. Everything was going perfectly and then all of a sudden she was gone. There wouldn’t have been time for any kind of medical intervention.
As I was lying on the bathroom floor and the paramedics were working on her and the first words out of my mouth were God, if it is in your plan, if it is your will please save her. That surprised me. I didn’t go to anger, I don’t feel any anger about it. I mean, obviously, I grieved and I grieved and I grieved because I lost. I lost the life I was going to have as a mother to this gorgeous baby girl. My husband and I grieved, and all our family and friends around us who are looking forward to being with her, they’ve all shared the impact with me that this has had.
But I didn’t go to anger. Something in me trusted that my life, my fate is in God’s hands. And I’ve never had that level of faith before, I’ve never felt it. It was unknowing, it was a deep, deep knowing, and it’s something that I don’t think I could teach anyone to do. It’s something you have to go within and you feel it and it’s unknowing. I just knew. I have no control over this situation. I have no control and this is 100% in God’s hands.
And so that experience surprised me. I didn’t know that I would grow spiritually so much from this. So I’ve really looked to God, and that spiritual component is I think really crucial in terms of mental and emotional healing. Being able to just pray and say, okay, I don’t have control over this aspect of my life, I don’t.
There are things I can control. I can control what I eat. I can control how much water I drink. I can control the vitamins I take. I can control what kind of media I take in, which affects our mental and emotional health. I can control, for the most part, the people that are around me or the people I choose to be around. So there are so many things I can control about my life, but these moments like a car accident, a death, an illness, a sudden infection. You can control how you react, but you can’t control the outcome.
Now, how you react can sometimes affect the outcome when someone’s already gone, when someone’s already dead. Now it’s time to focus on healing and growth and focus on what we can do. And then it’s okay. I really got that it’s okay that I can’t control everything. That there’s some peace, some grace in handing that part of my life over to God and just being this is out of my control, it’s in your hands.
I’ve had some very spiritual experiences this last month since she’s passed where I know she was here with me. Very interesting and I’ve heard from other friends who have lost loved ones. A song will come on at a specific time, a rainbow will all of a sudden appear, or a lamp or a device will all of a sudden just turn on when no one turned it on, that kind of thing. So I’ve had a few of those and I thought that was very interesting. There’s a song that I chose to play at her funeral and that song came on the radio. It was Yo-Yo Ma’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and that song came on the rainbow the next day as I was talking with my husband about her daughter. What are the chances, right? It was really beautiful.
So I wanted to come on the microphone and give you guys an update. I am every day getting better and better. It’s just one step at a time. I know everyone listening has lost someone or lost something in their life, has had to go through a process of grief. I’ve lost both my parents and so I’ve experienced it, but each one’s different. Each loss is different, but the feeling of going through grief, there are certain stages that are similar. What I can say is I’m really happy that I haven’t gotten stuck.
When I lost my mom, I got stuck in depression for months and months and months and I didn’t move out of that. I didn’t move out of the anger and the depression really that first shock. I was in denial most of the time, just bouncing back between denial, anger, and depression.
This time because we surrounded ourselves with loved ones and we’re talking it through and we’re working on it, and I also believe in my faith that God has a plan. And I have those spiritual beliefs about where we go when we die. That there’s a purpose, there’s a reason. I think that really helped me as well. But of course, that still doesn’t help because I want her to be here, I want her to be with me. She was so beautiful, she is so beautiful. Join the Facebook group, I posted a picture of her. She is so beautiful, and she was very gentle in the womb. She had a calm, gentle, loving energy the whole time. Really a sweetheart.
So I’m learning a lot about healing from loss. With every loss, we become stronger. We can, we have the potential to become stronger. So I’ve learned so much about myself those last few weeks, and I’ve thought about how I could then take that and incorporate that into the podcast so that I can help you. We all learn from each other. That’s something really beautiful also about our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group is that we are learning from each other and that we’re growing together.
I will continue to share the lessons that I’ve learned from this experience through the podcast as I find amazing guests to interview and have these great discussions with guests. If you’re new to the podcast, we focus on mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, and physical health. So there’s not a separation. When someone has a physical disease, they’re affected emotionally, they’re affected mentally. Sometimes, when people are in spiritual crisis, they experience mental and emotional health, as well as physical health issues. I mean, you can’t separate that.
You may have a diagnosis like diabetes, for example, and changing your diet and changing your lifestyle can reverse type 2 diabetes 100%. I did it myself. I reversed type 2 diabetes. My A1C is 4.7. I have amazing blood sugar, and I was diabetic for years. The point is though that those health changes weren’t just physical changes. I had to change my mindset, I had to do emotional work, I had to work on myself on a personal growth level.
So we enrich our lives by focusing on all areas, all aspects of health. That’s why the podcast is where I have doctors on the show, counselors, therapists, healers, and spiritual leaders on the show so that we can gain lessons from all these people. We can collect them all and apply what works for us.
So having COVID, that was really interesting. I used homeopathy, I worked with a homeopath, I worked with my naturopath. I got on all the natural stuff, and my body was just really, really worn down because of the grief and because I was postpartum. I was a few days postpartum. It hit me hard and I recovered fast. That’s what I’m so grateful for is that I was sick for less than 10 days. It was really bad. On day eight, I was very worried. It was hard to breathe, very worried for myself. But by day 10 I was totally on the road to recovery. Now I’m exercising. I’m a month postpartum and I’m back to exercising. I thank God. I thank God I don’t feel any of the effects. Some people experience long-term effects. I don’t have any of that.
I really contribute that to the fact that I eat clean and healthy. I take supplements. I’m not deficient in zinc. I take zinc every day. I did lose my sense of smell, and that was the weirdest because we have flowers throughout the house. So many people have given us beautiful flowers that are just smelling amazing as condolences for losing our daughter. All of a sudden I realized I couldn’t smell them. I grabbed my essential oils and I realized I couldn’t smell them either. I was like, oh no.
So I tripled up on my zinc. I started taking 90 milligrams of zinc a day and the zinc I take I really like this. Pure Encapsulations is the company, and it’s a zinc picolinate. It’s just 30 milligrams, and 40 milligrams is a very common safe dose for adults, so 30 is even less. But I decided to triple up on it. I took three, but not the same time—one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. And two days later, I got my sense of smell back 100%. My husband had a similar experience, and then I talked to a friend who was also going through COVID and they were having a similar experience, but they lost their sense of taste and smell. I told them that I had increased my zinc, they increased their zinc and it came back right away.
I thought that was very interesting. I’ve had a suspicion, and we’ve had a few interviews about that last year. My suspicion is that we use up the zinc when we have viral infections, especially like COVID. So then we become extremely deficient. By increasing it, then we’re just addressing the deficiency. That’s my suspicion.
I took all the supplements that I knew that have been shared through the podcast and that also we talk about in the Facebook group. Those all helped a lot. You know what really helped was glutathione. I ordered some liquid glutathione through a friend of mine who’s a holistic practitioner and that really helped as well. So there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’m back on my feet, and every day I am healing and growing stronger.
So jumping back into doing the podcast, I’m also in the process possibly of moving. We might have another disruption in podcast episodes, but I’m back. I want to start publishing weekly. I have some episodes I recorded before I gave birth. I’m going to be publishing those soon. If episodes, I might mention something about being pregnant so just a heads up. Those episodes were recorded about two months ago. They’re still very relevant, the information. So if that happens, just know that I am no longer pregnant currently. However, those were past recorded episodes, which I’ve been meaning to get up. I just got to the point in the pregnancy where I’m like, okay, my brain’s not working. I think it was at 38 weeks. I’m like, I need to take some time off.
Thank you guys for being on this journey with me. There are over 4000 people in the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you guys have been so supportive as I shared my experiences of having lost our daughter. Your support and your comments were so helpful. I read every single one of them. Often I read them to my husband, and often I cried.
There are so many listeners like me who have lost a child, either to miscarriage, to stillbirth, early infant death, or even later. You’re not alone. That’s something that’s really important to know. Surround yourself with loving people who make you feel like you’re not alone and make you feel heard and listened to, and continue to share. No matter how sad you are, how lonely you feel, or how upset you are around losing someone you love, especially a child, your impact on the world matters and you being here matters.
Vale, our daughter, was only here for a short time living inside me, and she had such an impact on my life. And then I heard that she had an impact on others. A few friends came to me and said that this whole experience has given them so much gratitude for their children and for their health. They were worried that that would sound selfish, and it’s not. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s their experience. Of course, if you’re hearing that I lost a child, you’re going to want to go and hug your child, or hug your spouse, hug the person you love most. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here, right?
Sometimes we get so caught up in the minutiae of life, in the stressors of life, and that rat race of paying bills, coming home, and just popping yourself in front of the boob tube. We go unconscious, so many times in our life going conscious about what we’re eating or how we’re not taking care of our bodies, and then all of a sudden we’re 30 pounds heavier. We’re like, what just happened? Especially this last year with COVID, people changed their routines, they went unconscious, they started self-soothing with food, alcohol, drugs, and TV. It’s easy to lose sight of the people you love the most and the amount of gratitude you have for them.
So sometimes we need that wake-up call, that reminder, what is most important to us? Put down the remote control. I’m guilty too. I’m talking from personal experience. But put down the sugary, alcoholic beverages, or whatever we are using to sell soothe, and go be present with the person or the people that you love most. Have that experience where you’re in touch with the gratitude for those people.
I am hugging my son harder than ever before now. I’m so grateful for my husband and my son. That’s another thing I noticed that when I realized I’d lost her is I started to think about all the things I was grateful for. Obviously, I’m in deep sorrow. I was in absolute shock, and this was one of the most painful experiences of my life. But it absolutely immediately shined a light on what I do have. What am I grateful for, and that also really helped me is constantly thinking I’m alive. I could have died, right? There are women who in these situations, they die during birth along with the baby. I mean, I’m alive. I’m so thankful for that. I have an amazing son. I have an amazing husband. There are so many people I’m grateful for in my life, so many friends I’m grateful for. There are so many things I have to be grateful for, and I am. I’m grateful for the time I got to have with our daughter. So I keep focusing on that as well.
Gratitude is a healing tool. I’m not ignoring the sadness. I’m not ignoring the grief or any of those other emotions that come with it. I’m holding that, I’m honoring her in my heart, and I’m also getting in touch with the gratitude because that allows me to not be unconscious in my life. Stay on the path of taking care of myself, which is really important. I noticed both losing my mom especially and losing my dad, I stopped taking care of myself. I just went to self-soothe with food. Luckily, I was never one of those people that liked self-soothing with alcohol or drugs. It was more just sugar, which I’m not into anymore, thank God.
I would self-soothe with TV and food, go unconscious, and not take care of myself, not even brush my hair. That’s why I really knew I was in a hole, I was in depression when I lost my mom when I just didn’t take care of myself. With this, I watched and I made sure I’m still taking care of myself. I’m focusing on gratitude.
Keep listening to the podcast, join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group if you haven’t already. Some amazing episodes, these interviews I did, like I said, before I gave birth. There are a few episodes I’ve got to post that are really good, and I’ve been looking forward to sitting down and editing them, getting them posted. And then I’ve got some great interviews lined up this whole month. I’ve got some really cool guests, so I’m looking forward to having you listen to all that.
Come join the Facebook group so that you can be part of the community and part of the conversations that we have about guests and about things that we learn together and just come be part of that. It’d be great to have you. It’s a very supportive community, and I just love being a part of that growing community of holistic like-minded people.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. Life is a blessing, and it’s hard. Without the loss, how can we truly feel the gain, right? I am hopeful for the future. Of course, there are moments where I just completely break down, but I’m just present in the moment with all the emotions.
I also have been doing some Emotion Code work. Oh my gosh, that stuff works. Go back and listen to that episode, it was a few episodes ago. A friend of mine who’s a mental health counselor, she’s been studying it, so she’s done some with me and it really works. I’m feeling it, which is really cool. I mean, I knew it would, but to experience it firsthand it’s very neat. It’s a very gentle process, and then all of a sudden you’re like wow, I feel different. I feel good, I feel better, I feel whole. I’m just noticing I don’t feel fractionated. It’s very interesting. So, yeah, check that episode out if you haven’t already, especially if you know you’ve got some emotional work that you want to release from your body.
All right. Well, I’m about to go in a few minutes and do an interview. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast.
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Highlights:
What to expect from takeyoursupplements.com How takeyousupplements.com helps clients with their concerns What does takeyoursupplements.com offer aside from supplementsIn this episode, Jennifer Saltzman is back on the show and talks about what takeyoursupplements.com offers to their clients. She shares some testimonials of clients that have improved their health after going through a takeyoursupplements.com protocol. Jen also shares that their level of care for their clients is what sets them apart from others.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today is March 1st. It is our fifth anniversary of the Learn True Health podcast. Can you believe it? Five years. I can hardly believe it. I remember the day that my husband and I decided to pursue this and do the podcast. You don’t hear his voice, but he’s behind the scenes. He’s been such a huge supporter and helper. When there are tech things I can’t figure out, he’s right there to help me, so really, it’s a journey that we’ve both taken this last five years.
We actually started something like six months before just planning it out, studying. We had to teach ourselves all kinds of things, what kind of equipment to use, what kind of programs to use, editing software, how to get guests, what kind of format to use, all of that. All that stuff we had to figure out, and we poured through all the research. Of course, I’ve been listening to podcasts for years so I had a deep affinity for them. I would always want to do one, and it just made so much sense that I wanted to share my healing journey.
If you’re a new listener, you may not have heard, but I suffered for many years with a chronic illness. I had type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, for which I was on monthly antibiotics for. I was told by an endocrinologist after a battery of tests that I would never have kids, that I was completely infertile. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I was basically told that I was barren. I was just getting worse and worse and worse. I felt like I was a prisoner trapped in my own body. I would just burst into tears all the time because I was constantly hungry, my blood sugar was out of control, and I just had this gnawing pain in my body. It was hunger, it was restless legs.
It’s an indescribable sensation when the body is so deficient in minerals that your skin crawls, your muscles crawl. I had problems sleeping, and then all day I was exhausted. In the morning times, I couldn’t process human language. I had such bad brain fog. My husband would talk to me and I couldn’t even understand him. This was me in my late 20s and my early 30s. This was the quality of my life, and I was young. This is when we’re supposed to go out, just climb mountains, and have fun. There I was just feeling like I was on death’s door.
It was holistic medicine and our journey that my husband and I started back in 2008 when we decided to shop the perimeter of the grocery store to buy organic, to seek out functional medicine, to seek out Naturopathic medicine. We kept searching and searching because we really saw that the mainstream medical system was good at prescribing drugs and maintaining chronic disease but had no tools to help me get better. I saw so many doctors, and I’m sure if you have any kind of chronic illness you have had the same frustrations.
If you’re sick of being on drugs and you’re sick of just being told that you’re just going to have it because of your genetics, because of your age, because of your sex, or because of your heritage. MDs are not trained in how to reverse disease, and I value MDs as part of the full spectrum that is offered to us in medicine in general, but they only are one piece of the puzzle. They’re only one piece of the pie if you think about it, but we’re taught growing up that they’re the only doctor to see.
I can’t tell you how many people, how many listeners in the last five years have reached out to me and said thank you. Because of your show, I learned that there are doctors other than MDs out there. There are doctors of Naturopathic medicine that have the ability to prescribe drugs if they want to. They have the ability to run labs. They’re fantastic diagnosticians, but their focus is on healing the body with nutrition.
Now we have health coaching and health coaching has taken off. It’s the number one growing career several years in a row in the field of health, and that is because you get this level of care, accountability, and partnership that was not designed to get that from our doctor. Our doctors look through our labs, analyze us, and listen to our symptoms. If it’s a good doctor, helps us with maybe diet changes, supplement changes, herb changes if they’re a Naturopath. Then you go home and then you try to do what they told you to do. A health coach, this is where they shine is that they help you to implement these changes on an emotional level, on a day-to-day level help you to make these habit changes.
In the last 10 years, I’ve mentored under several very amazing Naturopathic physicians, very amazing doctors. They’ve taught me, they mentored me. I went back to school, I became a health coach. Not only did I reverse all of my health conditions using supplements. One of the things we’re going to talk about today are the supplements that I got on that helped me to reverse all of these conditions, but I was able to conceive our son completely naturally and on the first try. Same with the baby I’m carrying right now. When my husband and I decided, okay, let’s go for it, it was again on the first try.
Now, coming from a woman who was told her entire adult life up until a few years ago that I could never have kids ever, that I didn’t have a cycle. I had very severe polycystic ovarian syndrome for which I do not have anymore. This is something that MDs will tell you can’t reverse. Those MDs out there will tell you you can’t reverse diabetes either. Type 2 diabetes is 100% reversible. It was probably one of the easiest things that I was able to reverse, but it was the thing that I was probably suffering from the most because blood sugar imbalance is incredibly uncomfortable.
I’m sharing a little bit about my journey for those who are newer and haven’t heard this, and of course, you can go back and listen to past episodes—episode 0, the beginning one. You can go to the website learntruehealth.com. For about 15 minutes I share my story in more detail. But it was because of this, I was able to reverse the things that I was constantly suffering from using natural medicine. I decided to launch the show five years ago because this needs to get out. People are suffering needlessly and we need to help. We need to continue to share this information, and I love that the listeners of the Learn True Health podcast share these episodes with their friends and family. This is how we’ve grown. We’ve had millions and millions of downloads, and I’m so excited that we’re helping so many people to discover that true health is possible even if they’ve been told their whole life by doctors that it’s not. You’re seeing the wrong doctor if your doctor doesn’t believe in you.
If your doctor doesn’t believe that your body can heal itself, go get a second opinion from a doctor that believes in you, that wants you to have optimal health, and that’s very important—the distinction between maintaining disease and achieving optimal health. Even if you have a condition let’s say type 1 diabetes for which you’re on insulin for. There is a broad spectrum of health within that space.
I know a gentleman actually who had raging out of control blood sugar, and he was at the highest end of insulin that he was injecting. Then he saw a Naturopath, got on the same supplements that actually I got on to reverse my type 2 diabetes, and it helped him—between the diet that the Naturopath recommended and the supplements that the Naturopath had him on. All of the minerals that are so good at helping the body become even more efficient, he was able to cut his insulin by 75% because his insulin sensitivity went up. His blood sugar became more stabilized as a type 1 diabetic.
So imagine, no matter what condition you have, there’s a spectrum in which you can achieve optimal health within that. Now I know people who’ve reversed diseases that you and I believe are fatal, you and I have been told are irreversible. The body is amazing, and if you believe that you can heal, you want to make sure your practitioners believe that you can heal as well. Health coaches believe in you and believe in your ability to shift your life, not only to have great health but have an amazing, fulfilling life with joy in every area of your life, with fulfillment in every area of your life. That’s why I’m such a big advocate for sharing this information, for continuing the podcast.
I can’t believe we’ve been doing this for five years. I’m very happy we have. That was my goal to continue to share this information. So here’s to the last five years and all the wonderful lives that we have helped. And here’s to the next five years and how many people can we help as a community. Continue sharing this podcast, and let’s turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to achieve true health.
[00:10:15] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 458. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show probably one of my favorite guests, and you have not heard from her in a while, Jennifer Saltzman. Jennifer, you were in episodes 9, 10, 31, 179, and 180. So listeners can go back to those episodes to hear more about Jen’s story of healing.
In one of those episodes, she interviews me and that’s a fun one turning the tables on me. I share my full story of healing and the things that we’ve both struggled with and ended up finding our salvation through holistic medicine. I should say our physical salvation to be able to come from such suffering for so many years and multiple illnesses, to be thrown away by the mainstream medical system and just told that you’re going to be on a drug for the rest of your life or this is just how it is. And then to find natural medicine—a really, really good natural medicine—that allows your body to heal, that gives your body all the nutrients it needs, the raw building blocks it needs to heal to the point where you no longer have any of those problems.
That’s something that Jen and I both have experienced. That’s one of the reasons why I started the podcast is I suffered for so many years, and as did Jen. So you can go back and listen to those episodes to hear more about her story. But she has basically been in the health industry for over 20 years and has been helping her clients to gain a foothold into their health that they never thought possible and to overcome things that they never even imagined could or dreamed could be possible using natural medicine.
Jen, I’m so excited for you to be here today because one thing you do now, of course, you work with clients. You help them through the website takeyoursupplements.com, and I definitely recommend listeners go there and sign up for a free conversation with you or one of the other amazing health coaches at takeyoursupplements.com. By doing that, the coaches don’t charge you, which is a very unique system that we have at takeyoursupplements.com. The coaches help you to determine what supplements you need to take, some very specific diet recommendations to support your needs, then you buy the supplements, you follow their protocol, and you see fantastic results. It’s actually a very affordable way to do it.
Now, Jen, you work with people at takeyoursupplements.com, but you also have been helping people who want to become health coaches. People who either are health coaches who want to incorporate holistic supplements and herbs into their existing practice, or people who are lay people who are just really interested in health and they would love to now help others as well. We’re here to talk about that today, this idea that we can heal the body with natural medicine and that we can then help others do the same. Welcome back to the show.
[00:13:43] Jennifer Saltzman: Thank you so much, Ashley. What an honor to be with you again today. I am quite moved, I have to say in this particular season. Since the last time we have talked, I feel like my prayers have been answered. In an earlier interview, I think I talked about being very, very sick as an age 25-year-old person on welfare, bedridden for most of the day. I prayed a prayer that was the following, that none of my sufferings would be in vain. That God would use all of my sufferings and turn it for good.
I have to tell you, I am feeling like that season is upon me and that there is an immense amount of grace and an immense amount of success that I’ve been having particularly in this last, I would say, the two-year season of working with clients. Not only have I recovered my health significantly. I mean, there’s one little thing I’m still waiting on but it’s happening. I’ve learned to live with it, and I’m 99% there. My energy has returned. I can work a lot of hours now. I’m so blessed to be able to put it into practice helping others now.
But what’s so incredibly encouraging to me in this particular season is that there are systems in place now with Take Your Supplements and some of the tools that we’re using and my ability to help and coach other health coaches—and we’ll talk more about that as we go—that is just systematically producing phenomenal results. I’m kind of pinching myself to be honest with you.
I’m just really excited to share with your listening audience breaking down what exactly they can expect if they do decide to go and join us in our journey with Take Your Supplements. What kind of support they can expect to receive, what kind of results we have had, and also what it might look like if somebody’s really excited about becoming an influencer for their people in their sphere of influence to really up elevate those people’s health with tools, self-advocacy. It’s amazing. That’s what I’m really excited to share with you today.
[00:16:15] Ashley James: That’s so awesome. There are a few things I want to touch on. The first thing is I’ve never told any listener, I haven’t said this on any podcast yet but I just remembered. Do you know who named takeyoursupplements.com? I had a client, this was over six years ago before we gave birth to our son. I always say we, by the way, I try to say we because I know I was the one that gave birth but my husband’s involved. It’s the two of us. It takes an effort on both parts.
My client came to me, I remember her so well. She had hot flashes so bad that she was just drenched in a puddle and she lived in the desert and she was still drenched in a puddle all day long. She was really broke. She said I just have almost no money to put towards this but I just have to get my health back. I did the assessment, which is part of the scoring assessment that is taught to the health coaches. So if someone wants to become a health coach, they can talk to Jennifer Saltzman and get with the program. It’s a very affordable program that teaches this style. It’s actually taught from the Naturopathic philosophy of listening to the body, listening to the symptoms, and addressing the nutrient deficiencies based on the symptoms.
I talked to her and I said okay, there’s this really good supplement we have, it’s very comprehensive, it’s also affordable, and it was less than $50 a month for this one bottle. It included a lot of minerals, it included a good amount of vitamins. If she had a bigger budget I would have done more with her, but I explained some things to change in diet and take this one supplement because at least she would be sort of filling up the mineral deficiencies she had.
Well, she called me back less than a month later and she said, “You’re not going to believe this but my hot flashes are 100% gone.” She goes, “I’m on board. I want to learn everything about this. I have to tell all my friends about this. My husband says I’m a different person. I’m no longer frustrating to be around,” to put it nicely.
[00:18:40] Jennifer Saltzman: We know another word.
[00:18:42] Ashley James: There’s another word for it. She was so amazed, and I said, “Yeah, this is it.” The thing is, we weren’t even addressing the major nutrient deficiencies that often accompany hot flashes. But what I was addressing were the most common mineral deficiencies just with this one particular liquid multivitamin, mineral supplement that is really, really high quality that is provided through takeyoursupplements.com.
Anyway, she got on board and talked to her husband. They decided to put more money towards her protocol so she could have everything her body needs. She said she had never felt so good. She kept calling me and just to update me. She said, “I’m in my 50s, I feel like I’m in my 20s again. I can’t believe it. I feel so good.” And this is something I hear so often from my clients, but the fact that in the first month that she went from hot flashes, sitting in a pool of her own sweat daily to none at all within one month, I just love that. I love hearing people’s results. Even though I’ve seen it time and time again, I love hearing it.
So she started just telling all her friends and family, and of course, it’s hard to get people to listen when they’re not ready to change. So she started yelling take your supplements, take your supplements. That’s where I got the name takeyoursupplements.com because she was just like why don’t people just take your supplements.
[00:20:16] Jennifer Saltzman: That is so funny.
[00:20:18] Ashley James: That was just one of my clients in the last 10 years that have had such great success. The thing is supplements are like the mortar, they’re not the bricks. I’m not saying you can just keep doing everything else you’re doing in life. I like to use the example you can’t just go to McDonald’s, take a vitamin C, and expect it all to go away. That’s not the point.
But if you have a major mineral deficiency, you can’t get on top of it with diet changes because of the farming practices of the last 100 years, which is what we’ve discussed in past interviews. I’ve even had a man who has a degree in soil agriculture and he talks about we cannot get enough minerals from plants even if we’re eating plants all day long because of the way minerals are distributed across the soil. Because he’s tested soil, he’s actually worked with the Amish and worked with certain populations in China. If their populations live off of the land they often have major health issues because they have major mineral deficiencies because their soil is depleted.
These are the things that we can get really good health from eating a very clean and healthy diet, and we can still have mineral or nutrient deficiencies that we want to fill in the gaps with supplements and herbs. I love herbs. Herbal medicine is so amazing when you have the right quality, when you have the right dose, and when you have the right one your body needs. There are so many things that we can do there.
One thing you mentioned though is that you are struggling with one little tiny thing, and what I have to point out about Jen if anyone else had the thing that Jen has, they would be on massive pain meds and probably would have had surgery. Jen is on no pain meds and is fully functioning. When she said, I’ve learned to live with it, her version of learn to live with it is that she does physical therapy, exercises, and takes supplements. She takes care of her body so that her body doesn’t produce the amount of pain that other people would have been on massive pain meds for. I have to really give Jennifer credit. If anyone who’s listening has chronic pain, you got to talk to Jen. She’s really experienced in the realm of how to work with and manage pain on a natural level if that’s someone’s goal.
This is something where you and I have really been parallel. You and I have been friends for many years, and our lives have been really parallel together in that we both suffered and we both didn’t want our suffering to be in vain. I also looked at losing both my parents—I lost my mom to cancer, my dad to heart disease, and I said I don’t want their deaths to be in vain either. I want to learn how I can help others. I can’t save my parents, but if I can help a listener save theirs or save themselves from that fate so that their children can have their parents longer, that’s exactly what I’m here to do.
You’ve been helping people for many years with holistic health, but you said in the last two years, you’ve really seen just a very significant improvement. Once we do something for over 10 years or over 20 years, it’s like we mature into that field. You really see that you’ve gone into this with a new level of understanding and efficiency when it comes to helping your clients gain their health back. What do you think happened in the last two years that really helped you with that?
[00:23:57] Jennifer Saltzman: Well, a couple of things. I’d say the main thing is a more streamlined version of what you referred to as the—I can’t remember if you call it the health intake, we call it the health evaluation. Basically, we’ve had renditions of that over the years that we’ve worked with. But essentially looking at what people would call what’s bothering them, their symptomology. From a Naturopathic perspective, we understand that it all works together. But we do look at the body in these categories based on a lot of research from Naturopathic doctors over the years. But the advent of it becoming digitized, believe it or not, has been a huge piece. Not only has it become digitized, but it’s easier to share. Just the technology around it has become very, very, very, very good, and the systematic use and revisiting of that.
As an example, when a client works with me or any of our coaches, we start out by giving them this health evaluation and they get what’s called a health score. What we do is we track that over the course of 90 days. Usually, I really like to retake the health evaluation in 90 days, but the most significant changes that I have found within the last couple of years are because I’ve been so consistent with using that, not only as a place to know exactly how to start somebody so that they’re getting the most bang for their buck. We’re looking at their overall nutritional needs and then any fine-tuning things so that things that they have been struggling with for years—particularly ones that from our perspective are not that difficult to help rectify or help elevate in terms of their health score—are getting very quick results.
Examples of those things would be for instance acid reflux, digestive distress, bloating, constipation. Those things are things that we see rectify very, very quickly. But the other thing that I have done systematically over the last couple of years is set into place a very astute follow-up schedule with people. The level of care, the level of support that people get working with us without having to pay us for our time is really something that sets what we do apart. My follow-up with people—I set up monthly check-ins with them. There’s just a lot of support.
If they need anything, they reach out. If they have questions, they’re not out there on their own trying to figure out what the next step is. There’s a lot of fine-tuning that goes in. Because of that, we do not work with clients unless they’re willing to. I mean, we will every once in a while, sometimes it happens. But we really can’t work with everyone because we only have so much time and availability. But for those that choose to understand the value of what we provide because it’s an extreme amount of value, the financial responsibility at this point—I’m not sure it will always be that way—is just for the supplements.
[00:27:23] Ashley James: What you’re saying is when someone goes to takeyoursupplements.com, they’re working with a health coach and the health coach is not charging them for their time. They do make a very small, and I have to really stress, it is a small commission off of the supplements, which is nice. It’s nice because we’re being compensated for our time, and the client really feels like they’re getting a deal because they’re getting their life back and their health back.
Should the client wish to hire a health coach and work with them long-term and pay them, that’s fine. But this isn’t some kind of upsell or you get roped into something. There’s no sales pitch. What is it called when you go like look at a vacation home and you’re getting like roped into a presentation?
[00:28:13] Jennifer Saltzman: Right, timeshare.
[00:28:16] Ashley James: Yeah, this is not like buying a timeshare. You go and you actually talk to a real health coach that probably has no sales training whatsoever. We have no system for trying to charge you for our time. If someone was like, oh man, I just want to keep talking to you every week, can I pay you for your time? I’m sure you and your health coach could work that out. But this is purely we’re trying to help people get on the right supplements they need that are very high quality, that is reasonably priced, and that really help people get results. This is a thing where we help as many people as we can, and these people don’t want to get off the supplements because they have amazing results and then they tell their friends and family.
One of my clients ended up sending me his entire family and it’s so cool. Now, not everyone could get their entire family on board. I can’t even get my entire family to listen to me. We often can’t, but this was one thing where he was like, “I really want to help my whole family.’ I said to him, I just had this epiphany. Sometimes God just sends you a message like you just have this divine inspiration.
I said to him, “Who is the matriarch of your family that if you helped that one person the entire family would fall into line?” Because they have a very tight family unit. He goes, “My grandmother is the one person that if we could help her health conditions, we would have all my cousins. We would have everyone listening.” She had edema that was so bad her legs were purple. She was in so much agony and you should see this woman now. It has been almost 10 years, and you should see. She’s in her 80s, she’s super healthy. She got healthy so fast the entire family was like what are you doing? This is then when my client said you have to talk to my health coach. Just do what she says. Just listen to her and do what she says.
This is one of those things where we’re trying to help people. Our main goal is you don’t have to suffer anymore, and your loved ones don’t have to suffer anymore, we’ve got this information. Sometimes, I guess, people have been jaded in the past. I’ve gone through that where I thought I was getting a really good experience and then a company tried to upsell me or tried to sell me something I didn’t need, so we became jaded. The frustration is that when real good information comes along, sometimes we listen through jaded ears because we’ve had bad experiences.
What I can say is our number one goal is to help people get healthy. What’s also really cool—and I think you were about to say this—is that the supplements actually have a money-back guarantee. It’s all about helping the person get healthy.
[00:31:13] Jennifer Saltzman: One of the things that you had asked me was the difference between what changed two years ago and what I’ve been doing for the last two years. Here’s the thing, I personally ask my clients to commit to a 90-day period of time. The doctors that we work with, that comes straight out of them. That’s for anything that a person can do. If somebody isn’t really interested in doing that, then I have to say, you know what, that’s okay but I want you to really consider that you can’t just start an exercise program for a week or a month and then think, oh I’m done.
The reason that I find that people have so much success working with us is because of the way I schedule my follow-ups, part of the way. Sometimes, with the different options that we have in terms of using supplements with people, there can be four or five different versions of a certain type of product like a multiple vitamin, mineral complex, as an example, or digestive support as an example. It’s my job to make sure that the person is having an excellent experience with the supplements.
As an example, if something doesn’t agree with the person within the first month of them taking it, I know that I know that I know that if they’ll give me a chance to make some adjustments perhaps in the way they’re dosing something, perhaps in the time of day they’re taking it, or perhaps in the version of the product we’re using, I can almost always get them right back on track within sometimes two tries, but usually just one. The thing that people don’t realize is obviously, we try to get people as much information before they get started so they understand all of what we do and they have a real sense of who we are. We are all very leery of jumping into anything in this day and age with the internet and everything, so I get it. But it is really a very unique service that we provide. As a matter of fact, I’ll share a story with you that just happened to me yesterday.
I have a gal that I’ve been working with for probably two months now, and she’s been doing great. She’s had nothing but great results over the last couple of months. It’s been getting better and better and better. But she brought something to my attention because we do a follow-up. We do a follow-up every single month. Until somebody says, you know what Jen, I’m on a really good program. I’ll check in with you in two months or let’s put us on four times a year. I don’t ever want to lose track of people because as people’s things change, the weather changes, the environment changes, the immune reality changes in our world as we all know. Whatever changes, I want to be there to say you know what, have you considered that if things are not going as well, maybe we need to just tweak something. It’s so easy for me to make a little tweak for somebody that might take them so much frustration of years of pain. Here’s the example I’m going to give you.
This gal yesterday tells me, “I’ve had chronic yeast infections since I was a kid, and I have had chronic bad breath since I was a kid.” I said to myself, “Have you ever gone on a candida program?” And I started talking to her about an overgrowth of yeast and all this other stuff. She says. “Well, actually, I have.” So listen, long story short, her doctor had told her, okay, if you have a vaginal yeast infection I want you to take antibiotics. She tells me this and I’m thinking to myself, oh my God. “So have you ever used a topical antifungal cream?” “No.” I’m thinking to myself, fire all your doctors. What is going on with this? They’re giving you antibiotics for fungal infection and they’re not giving you fungicides for a topical vaginal infection? What’s wrong here?
Anyway, she was practically in tears because I said all I want you to do is go take a candida test online and tell me what comes back. If it comes back like I think it’s going to, we’re essentially going to go after—we had already given her the digestive support and the basic essential nutrients and she was already starting to feel better, but she said this is still going on. This is what I ate and this is how it happened. It all came to me. This is a total picture, yeah, I get it because I’ve walked through so much of this stuff myself. I’ve been to see 17 different Naturopaths myself. Just the learning that I’ve done with these doctors over the last eight years, I mean, I just have enough information to be able to guide people in the right direction. I’m not a doctor, I’m not going to diagnose them, but I have enough information to empower them to do a really simple thing that probably will be life-changing.
She was literally in tears that I cared enough to be able to give her this information. And I said. “I feel like we might be onto something here. I don’t know for sure, it’s going to be trial and error, but that would be no different than if you went to a Naturopath, the same thing. You’ve probably been to Naturopaths, I certainly have. Yes, they have great intentions, but sometimes it’s trial and error.” So that’s why I ask people to commit to at least 90 days of working with me because if they can’t give me that amount of trust, I possibly cannot help them because we sometimes have to fine-tune.
[00:36:37] Ashley James: I like the boundary. You have a healthy boundary there, and that’s because it’s a unique system in which we’re not charging for our time. Now as a health coach, I charge for my time so people pay me for my time, and I’m working with them not only with supplements but I work with them because I help them adjust their lifestyle. We look at every aspect of their life. But when someone goes to takeyoursupplements.com, they’re not paying for their coach’s time. They’re just buying the supplements that are really meant for them specifically to help them adjust their issues. They’re being given something at such an extreme discount that you have to have a boundary as a health coach. You have to say you need to commit.
So for me, my clients commit in that they pay me money. If they don’t want to show up for their appointment, I mean, that would be sad because I really want them to get their results. Or if they don’t do the homework I give them, if they’re only putting 50% of their effort into it, I still got paid. I’m a health coach, I still got paid. I came to the table, I helped them as much as I could, but they’re not willing to do the work, that’s on them not on me. I do my best.
But for you, you could be helping someone like the next person because you only have so much time in your day, and you want to help people who are going to be 100% committed to working with you, to fine-tune, to help dial in, to help be the detective, and figure out what’s going on so that they can get the maximum results out of the supplements they’re taking. Your boundary is, please, if you’re going to go to takeyoursupplements.com, be willing to commit to doing the work because you’re showing up to the table to help them basically for free, you really want them to get healthy, and you want them to also do the work as well so that they get the best results possible.
[00:38:32] Jennifer Saltzman: And here’s the clincher though, here’s the deal, in 90 days, here are some examples of people’s health score. This one gal started out at a -1. So our scoring system, the ultimate goal for someone’s health evaluation is to come out between 90% and 100%. That’s on the positive. This gal started at a -1 with all different kinds of issues. By the time we retook the health evaluation, this particular one was a little longer. It was at the four-month mark, her score went up to an 87. That’s 88 points. Almost at 90% within four months.
As a matter of fact, her testimony is on the Learn True Health. Her name is Jennifer Arnold, she gave me permission to give her testimony. We posted it on there. She’s got pictures of what she can do now, how she feels better, and all that.
[00:39:27] Ashley James: Do you mean the Facebook group?
[00:39:28] Jennifer Saltzman: I mean the Facebook group. Sorry, what did I say?
[00:39:30] Ashley James: No, you said Learn True Health and I’m thinking, is that on the website? No, it’s in the Facebook group.
[00:39:36] Jennifer Saltzman: It’s on the Learn True Health Facebook group. Another example, a gal who started with me was a -20 when she first started.
[00:39:48] Ashley James: Can you give us an example? What kind of symptoms did she have as a -20. People might not know. What does it feel like on the day of a life of a -20?
[00:39:58] Jennifer Saltzman: When somebody takes their health evaluation, we look at things in four different categories of health. I’m not going to get into necessarily what those all are, but they’re digestion, hard tissue, soft tissue, and blood sugar. Those are the main ones. Those mean different things. That’s a heading, but there’s symptomology that falls under each one of those.
[00:40:24] Ashley James: And the symptomology allows us to understand the different nutrient deficiencies on a much deeper level.
[00:40:31] Jennifer Saltzman: Exactly. This particular gal has a very, very severe amount of pain around her cycle, for instance. She has I think PCOS, it’s not really clear but she has a lot of pain. So significant amounts of pain, digestive issues. I mean, many different kinds of things. What’s unique about what we do versus how a lot of people approach health is—and this is what really sets this program apart in my opinion—somebody might come and say, listen, I have terrible migraines, and that’s all they tell you. Can you help me fix, heal, or elevate my health in the face of terrible migraines?
Well, if you will show me everything going on in your digestive category, your soft tissue category, your heart tissue category, and your blood sugar category, I’m going to have a heck of a lot better chance of helping you elevate your health in the face of migraines than I am if you just tell me you have migraines. That’s what the health evaluation does.
Somebody might have this important goal that they want to get rid of, this thing that’s bothering them, their motivation for contacting us, but I’m going to address their issues based on what I’m seeing based on their health evaluation. That’s where people get results because 5 times out of 10, at least, it’s something going on with their digestion. That’s at the root of their issue. They don’t really say they have a lot of digestive issues but they come up with a really high health score and some going on in their digestion, I’m going to give them digestive support. Then cleaning up their diet, eliminating the inflammation issues. We’re going to have success with those migraines much faster than if we just try to throw a bunch of stuff that’s specific to migraines that’s something. Does that make sense?
[00:42:26] Ashley James: Absolutely.
[00:42:28] Jennifer Saltzman: Here’s another example. A guy comes to me, he’s got high blood sugar, high blood pressure, swelling and edema, all this other kind of stuff. His score went up 68 points in exactly three months. He’s 100% on board. He’s starting to tell his sphere of influence. He just can’t even keep his mouth closed about it because he’s so excited about the results.
Another gal I spoke with and followed up with lately, her score improved 110 points in three months. Terrible fibromyalgia pain, terrible pain in her hands, sleep issues, blood sugar issues. Most people don’t just have something going on in one of these categories. They have something going on in most of these categories, and this is why our program gets such good results because the basic program that we give everybody on some level addresses things at a cellular level that contribute to ill health or dysregulation in all four of those categories.
The reason I never got the kinds of results when I worked with—I’ve worked with 17 different Naturopathic doctors, healers, and different people. Got a little bit of benefit probably from most of those that I worked with, otherwise, I wouldn’t have continued. But they never really addressed this foundational issue of wow, you’re malnourished. You don’t have enough minerals. I mean I had so many different things that got better.
[00:44:03] Ashley James: I remember m, you actually had a positive diagnosis of Lyme disease and the co-infections. You were seeing Naturopaths and you were working hard at it, I remember that. And then you got on board with the supplements that we’re using now with our clients and the comprehensive minerals, and that was the major change you made. Within less than three months, you went back for another test and you were negative. The Naturopath said your body needed these raw building blocks in order to even fight the infection. This was something that you would not have gotten. You could have spent years going to really good Naturopathic doctors, but they weren’t addressing the foundation of your health problems. Your body needs the raw building blocks to fight infection.
[00:44:58] Jennifer Saltzman: Well, one of the things that I tell a lot of my clients—I have a lot of clients that I work with that are either considering seeing a Naturopathic doctor or currently are seeing a Naturopathic doctor. We are all for Naturopaths. Obviously, they’re fantastic.
A couple of things. Sometimes, people come and they’re seeing a Naturopath but they feel like they’re just not quite getting what they need. This is where I will often suggest that they add in our program and then go back to the Naturopaths. The Naturopaths are really, really good at getting people out of any kind of a very acute situation. If they’re in trouble, they need to probably work with a Naturopath. I love it when they do both, but I’ve had many clients who have worked with me as a coach, do our program, and then use their Naturopath. Maybe they have one that they’ve been seeing for years. They go back to that person for any kind of really challenging fine-tuning thing that either we can’t figure out or they just love their Naturopath, and they want to do both.
But invariably, their health score elevates tremendously and significantly more quickly than it had been during the time that they were just working with their Naturopath. Like I said, you can’t test. There isn’t a test to show the deficiencies that we address. It doesn’t even exist. The hair mineral analysis test is probably the closest, but it’s still not perfect. So for me, for example, I was spending $250 a month on supplements plus whatever the fees were to see my Naturopath. She thought I had been cleared of Lyme disease based on her protocols that she had given me. It was a lot of killing of things—antivirals and all this other stuff, which was great, but I had absolutely no energy. I mean none whatsoever. She was starting to do things that it felt to me, she had the best intentions. I mean, I loved her, don’t get me wrong, but it just wasn’t hitting the mark anymore. It was just not any longer applicable really. She was trying this, trying that, and doing this, and it just didn’t feel right.
So when I heard about this program and started it, I actually was doing both programs for the first two months. I was doing these supplements that we now use and her program, and finally one day I’m driving to her and I’m thinking this is obsolete. I’m not going to do this anymore. Here’s the clincher, when I met one of the doctors who we work within the program that we used to take your supplements, he asked me the following question. “Did your Naturopath tell you exactly when you’re supposed to be feeling better? Did she give you a timeline of when you’re going to feel better?” And I said, “No, she didn’t.” He said, “I want you to go back and ask her for one, and I’m going to tell you mine is three months. I want 90 days. If you’ll give me 90 days and do exactly this, I want you to come back and tell me how you feel.” Well in five days I knew something was different.
[00:47:50] Ashley James: You mean five days on the new protocol?
[00:47:53] Jennifer Saltzman: On the new protocol. Five days on the new protocol.
[00:47:55] Ashley James: The one that we use now?
[00:47:56] Jennifer Saltzman: Yes. I woke up in the morning on the fifth day. My husband and I started at this exact same time. For the first four days, we’re looking at each other, “Did you feel anything? Did you feel any?” Neither of us felt anything for the first four days. On the fifth day, I woke up in the morning at 5:00 AM with lucidity and clarity that I had not had for years.
[00:48:17] Ashley James: That happened to me too. That was the exact thing.
[00:48:19] Jennifer Saltzman: I wasn’t all better, but I was alive, awake, and I felt this hope. I was just like something’s going on here. My husband who has had a benign tremor since the time he was a kid—shakes. He’s benign but he shakes. Within five days, it went down by like 80%. He had a pain in his shoulder that he didn’t even tell me about because he thought I’d worry. He then told me on the fifth day my shoulder is completely better.
The crazy part about this is it’s not rocket science. It’s raw materials that the human body requires at a cellular level for optimal function. That’s the simplest way I can say it. When you don’t have that and you’re trying to spot treat Lyme disease, spot treat blood sugar issues, spot treat this, and spot treat that without the foundation, you’re going to be spot treating forever. What I love doing is if you need spot treatment and I can’t figure out how to do that, I’m not going to spot treat with you first. I won’t do it. It’s not going to work. You’ve already been doing that so let me do the foundational work and we got to fix the gut. There’s no question. We look at people’s gut. You don’t have to change their diet based on what we recommend, but if they will do the things that we recommend, it’s more of elimination of inflammation and oxidative producing foods. They will get faster results.
I have people who clean up their diet in the first week before they get their supplements. They work with me, we decide what they’re going to do after the health evaluation, et cetera. I say, “Okay, can you eliminate these foods?” I send them the email with the foods right away. They get off the food. By the time I call them to tell them how to go take the supplements, their stomach is already feeling better most of the time because there are certain foods that just frankly create so much havoc in the body, and they are in most people’s diet.
A lot of your listeners are not. A lot of my clients will come to me and they’re currently not on a lot of these foods because they’re already a bit more educated, which is also possibly why in the last couple of years, I’ve had better results because people know more. They know more since the advent of your podcast, and they know how to clean some things up.
At any rate, it’s not rocket science, it’s like God science, it’s like earth science. It’s just food science. It’s just science, it just works. We’ve had so many years of research that have gone into figuring these specific nutrients out like over 50 years gone specifically into the formulation of these supplements in terms of research, testing, and all the stuff.
Here’s another example. One of the coaches that work with us in Take Your Supplements also went through IIN. So she’s a really well-trained coach. She loved IIN. She’s just a junkie for information. She’s amazing.
[00:51:16] Ashley James: Just to clarify for those who don’t know what you’re talking about. Takeyoursupplements.com is where you go to get these health coaches because you can’t say Take Your Supplements, but takeyoursupplements.com. And IIN is a health coach training institute that takes a year to do. It’s an online program. They don’t teach you supplements. They teach you how to be a really good health coach from a psychological standpoint, and they also teach you 100 dietary theories. I did IIN and I loved it, but they teach you zero—they don’t teach you what a vitamin C is, they don’t teach you what a calorie is. It’s not about nutrients.
So IIN is about how to be a good health coach in the emotional aspect and in the diet aspect. I absolutely love IIN, and I recommend listeners check it out. If a listener is interested in getting more information about IIN, they can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That redirects them to a page that gives them a free module of IIN. So you can check it out. Just to clarify, it’s a year-long program that you do part-time at home while you’re still doing the rest of your life. It’s about 20 minutes a day that you do it for a year.
It teaches you the psychology of being a good health coach, and it teaches you about diet. There’s no information about helping people heal through nutrition. That’s not what IIN really focuses on, but they get good results in helping people change more on an emotional level and on more of a habit level.
What Jen offers, what takeyoursupplements.com offers is listeners can do a health coach training program. It’s actually a holistic health coach training program. It’s much shorter. You do it at your own pace but it is much shorter. You can complete it in weeks not months, and that teaches you exactly how to use these supplements and also the certain things to eliminate from the diet to help people get incredible results by getting to the root cause, and the foundation of what the people need specifically.
So those two programs, although completely separate and they’re both considered health coach programs, are very different and they complement each other really well. You’re saying that in takeyoursupplements.com, there is a health coach that works there. They’ve done both programs. Sorry, I just wanted to clarify.
[00:53:45] Jennifer Saltzman: Absolutely, I’m so glad you did. Let me just change the subjects for a quick second. I’m going to just expand on that. We have a lot of coaches that have taken our coaching program to learn about how to help people the way that we do who are IIN graduates. IIN, Institute of Integrative Nutrition, a lot of my clients have been through that program and they absolutely love it. Nobody has said a single negative thing. As a matter of fact, they’re just crazy about it.
However, like you’re saying, it’s such a great adjunct to then come and do our program with that background. On the other flip side of the coin, people don’t have to go through a year-long program in order to engage and learn to take our health certification program, which is much shorter. At six weeks it could be both, either, or whatever. But they do really complement one another. A lot of your listeners are very hungry for information. They are information people. They just love learning. I have a lot of people who have already contacted me and us about going through the health coach certification course that we offer through Take Your Supplements. It’s not our program, but we help people get started with it.
I’ve had probably 25 people that I’ve worked with go through the program already.
[00:55:13] Ashley James: Your clients have gone through it?
[00:55:16] Jennifer Saltzman: My current clients, yep. And at least five of them, maybe more. I can’t quite recall. At least five of them have also been through IIN. But my point is that this one gal where I was starting to say before, one of the coaches that work with us, she has been on so many different supplements and some brands that I have a tremendous amount of—there’s a couple of other brand supplement programs that I particularly like, one in particular. This gal worked with that brand forever and she has never felt anything at all from supplements until she started taking ours, which to me is a big deal.
The point is we get results. We get results but we get results because the supplements work. A lot of times, people just take the supplements, they get great results, and it’s set it and forget it kind of thing. But in the last couple of years, to take it to another level, I have taken it upon myself to really dive in the ditch with people and figure out how to really get them great results. That’s what I love about what I do, and I figured out how to do it so we don’t have to charge for our time. We’ve already gone over that, but the point is that even though I am not IIN-trained or whatever, I still do work with folks like okay why are you not taking? I work with them on compliance. I work with them not in-depth because they have half an hour with me once a month or whatever rather than a weekly coach or whatever. But I really try, I refer them, I try to get them the resources if I can’t do it with them so that they start working with a counselor or they’ve checked out this.
The point is that we at Take Your Supplements and the health code certification course are very holistic. We work with mindsets, we work with exercise, we work with hydration. It’s not just the supplements. We work with diet. We really help people understand that if they really want to elevate their health and we can’t give them the resource, we’re going to guide them to the right resource.
It’s just awesome. A lot of people that work with us have gone through the health coach certification course, and I just want to talk about that a little bit, it’s ridiculously inexpensive. I mean ridiculously. Everybody can afford it I promise. It’s just completely affordable. But I’ve had people go through it without working with me as a client, and I’ve had people go through it working with me as a client. The people who have had phenomenal success and basically have gone on to share and be a coach to their friends and family have been ones that have been a client first.
[00:58:09] Ashley James: Or people that go on to become successful health coaches.
[00:58:13] Jennifer Saltzman: Yes.
[00:58:15] Ashley James: Just to clarify what you said, people who work with you, so clients who go to takeyoursupplements.com, they go to takeyoursupplements.com, they get you, you start working with them.
[00:58:29] Jennifer Saltzman: Or one of our other coaches.
[00:58:33] Ashley James: But your experience is people working with you. So people who are working with you get on the protocol. You walk them through the entire process as being a client. So they’re a client, they’re doing their health score, they’re getting on the protocol, they’re eliminating those foods. Eliminating those foods alone will not solve all the problems although it does really help. But you’re right, I have had clients who refuse to get off those foods and they still saw results with the supplements. But I’ve also had clients who were like, well, I’m going to try just getting off these foods and not getting on the supplements. Inflammation will go down but you’re not going to fill your nutrient tanks that are depleted. Getting off of some foods isn’t going to change your vitamin D levels, zinc levels, magnesium levels, or any of the 60 minerals, but it will help to stop putting fuel on the fire. Those two go hand in hand.
The clients who work with you and really, really focus for 90 days on a protocol
[00:59:32] Jennifer Saltzman: Or even two months, even a month they just have to really have a follow-up with me and feel like, okay, I get this. I’m getting results. As long as they’re getting their feet wet with the process. They’ve taken the health evaluation, they understand how it works. They’re engaged, let’s call it. They’re already engaged. They understand the premise of why we need to do this, that kind of thing. I’ve had people do it after a month with tremendous success. The ones that just say, oh, this is a good idea I want to do it. Even the ones that have been through IIN, even those, this is cool. I want to do it but they haven’t taken the supplements themselves or been on the protocol, they don’t have the same level of engagement. I don’t know how to explain it, and they really never ended up doing anything with the program. Do you follow me?
[01:00:23] Ashley James: Yeah, and I totally get it. When you have a visceral experience of success, even for those who are like, well I’m fairly healthy and I really just want to learn this for my clients. Everyone has a visceral experience. you’re just having the experience of being the standpoint of the client.
[01:00:44] Jennifer Saltzman: It’s so important.
[01:00:45] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s really good information to collect for someone who wants to become a holistic health coach, to be on the side of the client, to experience that. And then when you go do the online course to become a holistic health coach, you really understand why you want to learn these things about the research behind it and what symptoms the body exhibits when we have certain nutrient deficiencies. It just gets really fascinating. You’re invested also. You’re invested. Once you become a client and you experience the supplements, you have a physical experience, but then you’re also invested in it. And then when you go take the course you’re like, oh, that’s why I felt this. That’s why this works. That’s why there’s this ingredient or that’s why there’s this amount of this nutrient in it.
I just geek out on all these kinds of details. But if someone just went in, just took the course, and has never had any experience of the supplements or any experience from the client-side, they’re missing out on the full understanding of it. I get why you’d want someone to go to takeyoursupplements.com and then work with a coach, experience it, and then go do the course.
[01:02:03] Jennifer Saltzman: I mean they don’t have to. Certainly, folks have taken it that haven’t, but my experience has been that it’s not nearly as beneficial. Not everybody that takes the health coach course is going to want to be a health coach. I’ve had at least maybe a third of the folks take the course, maybe not quite that many, a quarter maybe who have really done it because they just want to increase their own advocacy for them and their family. They really want to understand how to basically take care of themselves. I mean, I help them to the best of my ability. But the more that they can know stuff for themselves just like why they listen to your podcast. They’re empowered and they’re empowered by knowledge.
A lot of times, people benefit from taking the course even if they don’t necessarily want to go on to actively have a client-based health coaching practice, but just really want to learn and be equipped with. Because at the end of the day, it’s not that complicated. Once you understand the basic four categories of health, how we have to balance things, nutrify the body at a foundational level, and then fine-tune as needed, it’s not like somebody has to have a super—I mean I don’t have any kind of a degree. I don’t have that super medical background right, and people ask me that. Well, what’s your background? Well, you know what, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. I am a health coach and I’m certified in what I’m good at. I’m going to stay within my lane. If you need to go talk to a doctor about some diagnosis, that’s what you’re going to do.
We’re not diagnosing anything, we’re not doing that. We’re supporting the body from a very foundational level, and the body is doing the work that it’s designed to do because it now has the building blocks to do it completely rather than missing a little of this, missing a little of that. One of the interesting things about the problematic things about, for instance, people say, I heard selenium’s really good for you. I’m going to go out and eat five brazil nuts every day. People tell me that a lot and I say, you know what, that’s wonderful. Sorry to burst your bubble, but unless the soil that that brazil nut—which you don’t know where it was—has selenium in it, you’re not going to get any selenium in that brazil nut. Being that soils have veins of minerals in them, not every spot has selenium in it.
[01:04:32] Ashley James: Fly across the country or remember the last time you flew and you looked down. I always get the window seat. I think then when I married my husband that he insisted on getting the window seat, and I think we kind of fight over the window seat. Now that we have a kid, we have another on the way, I think I’ll never get the window seat again. But when I was a kid, I always got the window seat. I would watch for hours as the terrain changed.
We would fly from Toronto to Puerto Vallarta so we saw a big chunk of the continent. I would watch as the farmlands, the soil would change color. There are areas where it’s red, there are areas where it’s almost pink, there are areas where it’s black. Obviously, moisture does play a role, but color largely—when it comes to soil—you can see the different mineral compositions are obvious in some ways. In other ways, you’d have to actually go and test the soil itself. But there’s not an even amount of iron distributed throughout the whole crust of the earth.
There are more than 60 minerals and elements that exist. But there are specific 60 minerals that the body requires. Everyone knows calcium, magnesium, and zinc. Everyone knows those ones, but farmers will only put NPK back in the soil. Most farmers don’t remineralize the soil with all the trace minerals and elements.
If someone’s been farming that land for 100 years, that soil is absolutely depleted. Organic doesn’t necessarily mean more nutrients, but it definitely doesn’t mean less. Organic simply means that they’re not using—and there’s something like 2000 chemicals that are even approved for organic farming, so it doesn’t necessarily mean chemical-free, but it does mean free of the really, really bad chemicals like glyphosate which is an active ingredient in Roundup. Roundup is a chelator. It binds to certain minerals, metals, and elements and it removes them, it washes them away from the soil.
So if we’ve been farming land and putting these specific kinds of chemicals on the land that are chelating the land, even with tilling. The way they destroy the composition of the nutrients by tilling. There are all these farming practices that are designed to maybe help make a big yield now but completely destroy the nutrition for later. If we’re relying on a brazil nut for our selenium, we’re living in a fool’s paradise. Just like if we’re thinking we’re going to get our iron from spinach, or our calcium and magnesium from broccoli, you can even see it. You could google it and start looking into this yourself that they did tests in the 50s and 60s for carrots and the nutrients in carrots and then the carrots today have significantly fewer sugars, nutrients, even the beta carotene is lower. It’s just that our food is becoming less and less nutritious.
Now, of course, there’s always an exception to that. There are a handful of farms out there that remineralize their soil, that does practices that protect the soil to make the most nutritious food, and of course, you can grow your own. One of the Naturopaths that we work with at takeyoursupplements.com and as part of the supplement program, you can buy in large quantities this special kind of humic shale. It’s black, it’s beautiful, and it is absolutely amazing to put into the garden. If you put it into your lawn, your lawn is the envy of your entire neighborhood, but I don’t like growing lawns. I like growing gardens. You use it for any amount of vegetable or fruit, you see such a yield you wouldn’t believe it.
It’s even in Japan, they use it there in certain fields. There’s a machine that’ll measure the sweetness, they’ll measure the sugar content and it puts it through the roof. When I say sugar content, I don’t mean all of a sudden that the food is now unhealthy because there’s more sugar in it. I mean it’s more flavorful, it has more phytonutrients, phytochemicals, it has more minerals in it. As a result, you really, really taste it. Nowadays, I taste a carrot, the carrots taste like cardboard. Back when I was a kid, you bit into a carrot, it was like eating dessert. That just goes to show you how much our food has been stripped of the nutrients we’re supposed to be getting.
I believe that a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago when we traveled more, when we ate more food from different regions and all these foods were grown naturally, the soil wasn’t depleted. Think about the Nile. The Nile would flood every year and bring new minerals to the soil, and then the Nile would go back and they’d grow. They grow all the crops there in that freshly remineralized soil. We almost had no chronic disease. People died of other things like because of sanitary reasons, but we didn’t have the diseases we have now. We didn’t have the nutrient deficiencies that we have now.
It’s just really interesting to look at, what are we dealing with now? What’s changed? Especially in the last few hundred years, what’s really changed? But now we require supplements. I don’t think we always required supplements. I think that as humans we were getting enough nutrients at some point but now we’re not. So we really need to fill those nutrient gaps. If the body’s missing a little bit of something, it doesn’t really have any major symptoms. It’s when we’re significantly missing a nutrient that we start to have major symptoms. MD-based medicine is not designed to look at the body from the standpoint of nutrient deficiency unless it is so overt like a goiter. Unless it is so overt you basically have to look like you have come from a starving village in a different country for an MD to go, well, maybe you should take a multivitamin or something.
But what we’re looking at because Naturopathic medicine doesn’t wait till you get sick to then treat you with a drug. Naturopathic medicine goes, let’s look at where you are now, and let’s help you get to optimal health. They’re trained differently. Naturopathic medicine is a different standpoint. We’re trying to get you to optimal health and to completely fill up all your nutrient tanks and making sure every cell is running optimally. MD medicine is an intervention that has to wait until you get sick enough to give you a drug to intervene.
We should have both in our lives, but we should not rely only on one. We should definitely know when to go to emergency medicine and when to go to holistic medicine. Holistic medicine to get us healthy, MD-based medicine to catch us when we need emergency surgery, when we’re suffering from an infection that our body can’t handle, when we’ve been in a car crash. That’s when we want MD-based medicine. But chronic issues because of chronic lack of nutrients, that’s when we have a problem, and we need to address it by filling the body up with the nutrients it needs.
[01:12:22] Jennifer Saltzman: Right. Well, one of the things that come to mind too as you’re talking is a couple of things. One of them is I’m always really surprised when I have a client that’s really young and has a terrible health score. But I shouldn’t be surprised because unfortunately, they’re younger than me, I mean by half usually. It gets worse through the generations of lack of nutrition. If your mother was depleted and your father was depleted, it’s going to be worse in the next generation. But it’s really shocking and alarming the level of autoimmune issues, digestive issues, all kinds of things that people in their 20s are appearing with.
One of the things I also wanted to share about what we do and why our community because it really actually is a community. Whether a person decides to work with us at Take Your Supplements as a client only or as a person that wants to get more involved and learn about how they might influence a few of their friends and family or a lot of their sphere of influence. We have all different kinds of ways that people can engage, and that’s what I love about it because there’s never any pressure to do anything. It’s always where do you fit and how can we serve you.
But those that do decide to partake and learn, we also have an amazing ongoing level of support all for free, besides just working with the coaches. I mean, for those who want to learn more and take the health coach course. There are weekly free calls five days a week on different topics where our gut specialist comes on. Different specialists that we have that work with different parts of the supplement protocols who are skilled in different areas, there’s ongoing training on a weekly basis all for free. It all comes within the ridiculously low cost of the health coach course.
For those that are clients that work with us but they really want to become better advocates, they don’t want to take the course, or they don’t want to do the training, we also have an amazing level of educational materials and ways for them to plug into the community similar to how you have on your Learn True Health Facebook page. People can get into the community that way. We have our private Facebook groups but we also have educational webinars and lectures on different health topics from the perspective of this foundational nutrition plus the necessary add-ons that people can continue to learn.
Really our main goal is to not only help people have success with their own health, educate themselves about not having to be reliant. So for example, if your doctor tells you, oh you have a yeast infection. Please take some antibiotics. You’re going to understand that you would never do that. That’s the exact opposite thing that you need to do to get rid of a chronic yeast infection is to take an antibiotic. I mean, I get a little bit irate when it comes to stuff like that. This person was thinking yesterday and I talked to her, she’s like, “I feel so dumb.” I said, “You’re not dumb. Your doctors are completely uneducated. It’s a crime.” It’s a crime against humanity, the level of information that was suppressed early on in the early part of the century about all of this. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the whole political part of it. Don’t get me started.
The point is that we have a lot of value as your podcast has a lot of value, but it’s specific to what we do. So I just encourage people to come check us out, have a free consultation if they want to chat about what the options are. And then I just want to say one other thing and that is we have specific protocols too. For example, I mentioned a gut specialist. I want to share with you just something that happened with one of my clients.
She did years and years of cleansing thinking she had parasites, and she did a lot of aggressive parasite cleansing. She was seeing a lot of stuff and different things were happening, but when she came to me, she didn’t have very good energy. She had scattered mental issues, not really focused. A lot of things going on and a pretty negative health score. I got her on the basics and I worked with her for a while. We started with some extra digestive support, and we got her up and running so she was doing better and better. But after about four months, it became obvious to me that she really needed to do our full 20-day gut restoration protocol because she had had years of antibiotics, and she had had years of now cleansing from parasites, which is great but you can’t just cleanse, cleanse, cleanse, cleanse. You’ve got to put the good stuff back in.
After we did the 20-day full gut restoration protocol, which has been incredibly successful with people who have either chronic digestive issues, chronic health issues that won’t resolve, or chronic allergies—histamine response, skin rashes. Those are the things we’ve seen the best results with this particular protocol. But after she did that, her health score significantly went up. Now she’s sort of smooth sailing into the realm where I like to get my clients where she’s like, okay Jen, we can talk every three months now because we got her over this hump. She knew it and I knew it. I could tell just by the way she was responding back to me that it was like, oh yeah, I’m good. I’m starting to actually feel like I made progress. Even though she was getting better and better through that whole time.
So I’ve gotten a little bit more savvy to recognize when somebody might need to actually start with that protocol. Sometimes, in this last season, I will start my clients right away on that 20-day gut protocol before I will even start them on the basic foundational supplements, only because they’ve had chronic diarrhea or chronic antibiotic use or something like that.
I mean, so many of the people that you have interviewed are talking to us about the absolute vital essentialness of getting our gut on track, and so our gut specialist put together this particular protocol. A particular ND gut specialist studied the microbiome for years. She put together this very, very comprehensive protocol, and I have had phenomenal results with that.
[01:19:07] Ashley James: I love it. Well, Jen, I’m just so excited that you and I work together in this way to support the listeners. So many of them have come back to me and said, “I’ve worked with Jen.” I mean they’re just glowing. They’re so excited. I get feedback all the time that people have had such great results, listeners. And of course, listeners can go to the Facebook group. Now we’re coming up on, can you believe it, our fifth year anniversary of the Learn True Health podcast. The Learn True Health is going to be five years old. March 1st I believe is when we launched it, and it’s been a dream of mine to have a podcast ever since the podcast came out.
I didn’t ever know it would go in this direction, but when I got my health back, when I was suffering for so many years and I got my health back, I knew I wanted to turn around and tell everyone, and I did. I told my friends, a bunch of my friends got on the same protocols and had amazing results. I’ve shared that in past interviews. I mean, Jen has said this over and over again in this interview, and I’ve said it—if you want to help your friends and family. That’s because when you get results, when you no longer are suffering from what you’re suffering from, you want to tell those you love. It’s really hard not to, and it’s sort of a natural human instinct.
That’s why I love that we set this up because I helped so many of my friends and family and then they went on to help their friends and family. Let’s spread the word. We’re mission-based. We have a mission to help as many people as possible to learn true health. We have a mission to help you to no longer suffer. Suffering should be optional. When you stick with a health care system that is designed to manage the disease, you are going to be in a state of disease. That’s just it. But that’s the only thing we’re sold. I know that listeners come here because they’re sick of that system. What they want is they want more information and they realize they have to advocate for their own health. Everyone at takeyoursupplements.com has all been through the same thing. Have all had health problems, have overcome them with this protocol, with these supplements, and with removing these foods. All of them have then gone on to train and become health coaches and help others—help clients, help friends, and help the family.
We’re all in this together spreading this information, and that is the same mission that I’ve been so empowered for the last 10 years. But the Naturopaths that have trained us, that built this system, this was their experience too. Their patients, I should say, the best way that they grew their business as a Naturopath is that it was all word of mouth because their patients would get better like real results, and then they’d go tell everyone. It just grew that way. This is a word-of-mouth effort, and we’re helping as many people as we can. So keep sharing it, keep spreading it. Keep sharing the podcast, share this episode.
If you have some health complaint of any kind, even if you’ve been told you will have it for the rest of your life—we have one man, he was on the maximum dose of insulin and type 1 diabetic. Maximum dose. There wasn’t anymore it would take, and his body was not responding well to the insulin, and it was really not looking good for him. Then he got on this protocol and he was able to cut his insulin down by 75%, and he got his body back in order.
So even things that you’ve been told you have for your whole life like type 1 diabetes, you can even see improvement within that realm. Or if you’re told you have an autoimmune condition, you’ll always have it, or maybe you’ve had certain organs removed like your gallbladder. This is the thing you’re stuck with and an MD will say, well, you just have to live with it. You don’t know how amazing the body can actually improve when given all the nutrients it needs to improve given the constraints it has. Just like Jen, you have a physical constraint in your spine because of a car accident. Anyone else I know would be on massive medication and bedridden. You walk around freely because of how you’ve learned to take care of yourself with holistic medicine. This is the point is if you’re suffering from anything, even if you’ve been told you can’t get over it by a doctor. Don’t listen to those doctors.
I was told I’d never have kids. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I had type 2 diabetes. I had chronic adrenal fatigue. I had chronic infections. I had a very angry and inflamed liver, and I was going down a path of deep suffering for many years until I finally found this way of healing the body. I no longer have infertility. I was told by an endocrinologist that I would never have kids. We conceived our son naturally. We conceived the baby that I’m carrying right now naturally. And 31 weeks into the healthiest pregnancy, my midwife who has been a midwife for over 20 years says it’s the healthiest pregnancy she’s ever seen.
Just to give you that idea, you don’t even know. If you just listen to an MD tell you that your limitations and you believe those limitations, those are your limitations. But if you say I do not buy into this, I will not allow these to be my limitations. I’m going to go see how much I can heal my body with natural medicine. You go to takeyoursupplements.com and you just try it. Like Jen said, just try it for 90 days and see how far you can get and then keep going from there. If you get results, keep going and just see how far you can get because look what I did and look what Jen did. That’s why I’m on my soapbox. I’m so passionate that you can have amazing health. You just got to go in this direction and give it a try.
[01:25:02] Jennifer Saltzman: And on that note, I want to bring up a couple of things. Sometimes people feel a little uncomfortable with the concept. They want to share this amazing information with their friends and family, or they want to help their friends and family but (a) they don’t have the time, or (b) they’re shy or whatever.
So one of the other things that we do is we have a program where that person would become like a connector. Sometimes those people may really want us to help their friends and family but they don’t want to take the course. We have that option also. I just want people to know that we work with all sorts and all types of conditions of man, so to speak. We really can try to work out whatever a person needs scenario-wise. I don’t want people to think, well, they have to necessarily take the course to get their friends and family help or anything like that. They can refer people. We are so grateful for that and we can help their friends and family with them. They can learn how to do it, any different way.
And then the other thing I want to bring up is that sometimes people are on a really limited budget and they’re like, well, can I still get help? Can I still get benefits? Absolutely. Obviously, the more people can invest the faster they get results. That’s why we’re so encouraging of folks to work with us because we talk about all those things, we look at it. We honestly try to go, okay, how much can you genuinely do on a monthly basis? Let’s do the very best that we can for you with that so that you aren’t getting stressed about money too, you know what I mean? We take it all into consideration.
I just got done with this one gal the other day and she was going to go see a Naturopath. Not that this is a bad thing to do, but not everybody needs to do this. She really doesn’t have that many health problems, but she was going to go spend $500 just to get her blood drawn. Let’s just get the process started to then figure out what she needs to do from there. I said, “Please, feel free to do that if that’s what you want, but let me suggest, work with me for 90 days, and if you still are not feeling like you’re doing as well as you need to, please go do that.”
I mean, why should somebody that’s wearing a white coat—even a Naturopathic doctor. This is so crazy, but I don’t know. It must have been a prophetic thing. I worked with a Naturopath when I was maybe 27 years old, one particular guy. He says to me, “One of these days you’re going to know more than most doctors.” How is that even possible? The truth of the matter is it’s true. It really is true. It’s not that I know anything about surgery or anything like that. I don’t understand everything, by any means. I’m still completely learning myself, but I can help people enough to get them feeling better very quickly.
[01:27:56] Ashley James: I like how humble you are. You know a lot. You use a very specific type of medicine where we don’t need to look at labs because we’re coming at it from a different angle. Now, that’s not to say that people shouldn’t get a yearly physical. Go get a physical from a Naturopath because Naturopaths at least spend an hour to 90 minutes with you. They really comb through your whole life, and they’re great to go. For your annual physical, see a licensed Naturopath if you can.
Annual physicals are good. You should always just be conscious of the labs. But remember, if you go to an MD, they’re looking at your labs to see what drugs they can put you on. That’s it. They’re not looking at your labs to tell you to eat better, take a supplement, or go for a walk. Unless you’re seeing an MD that’s been trained outside of the norm and gone for holistic training or gone for functional medicine training, the average MD is looking at your labs to see when they can put you on Lipitor, when they can put you on whatever medication. It’s two totally different philosophies. Are you looking to get optimal health? Are you looking to get so sick that you need to manage disease?
I’ve helped people get so healthy that their doctors took them off of meds, and I know you have too. My goal is to help everyone get so healthy that you don’t have a life sentence from a doctor from some diagnosis. You no longer have a diagnosis because you no longer have all the symptoms and you’re just feeling great. That’s exactly what we’re here to do.
Jen, thank you so much for coming to the show. Thank you so much for sharing this information. I’m really excited to hear the results of this episode. I’m really excited to hear the listeners come. Come to the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, and share their experiences working with Jen and working with the other coaches at takeyoursupplements.com as you go through it. I would just love to hear more feedback from the listeners.
This is something that I’m so passionate about because I’ve been through it and I went out the other side. It’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave. I don’t know if you guys know. It’s 2500 years old, it’s beautiful. You should go google allegory of the cave and watch what little YouTube videos that they make of it. But basically, Plato talks about these men that were chained in a cave their entire lives, and all they saw were shadows dancing upon the back of the cave. So they thought the entire world was two-dimensional in black and white. One day, one man escapes his chains, runs outside, and all of a sudden he sees three dimensions and color and he can’t believe it. He comes back into the cave to try to wake up his fellow man and they attack him for it because they’re not ready to hear that reality isn’t black and white and one-dimensional or two-dimensional.
So the point is, those who are listening to this podcast are escaping the cave. They’re ready to have their reality change. They’re ready to heal their body in a holistic manner, and it’s taking on a new paradigm. So take on a new paradigm and try it. You like me will become just absolutely smitten with holistic medicine when you can say that you overcame all these things that you were told you’d never overcome. It’s just amazing. The body has an amazing innate ability to heal itself.
I’m so thrilled that you’re doing the work you do. I feel blessed to work with you, Jen, and that you have helped so many of the listeners. Thank you for the work that you do. You are tirelessly daily investing all of your time into helping all these people. I have to acknowledge that the hard work you do is paying off and that all those people that you’ve helped, their lives are affecting so many people so it’s a ripple.
You’re talking to one person at a time but really you have helped hundreds of people at a time because their life goes on to help others, so thank you for the work that you do.
[01:32:04] Jennifer Saltzman: Thank you so much for saying that, Ashley. I really appreciate you saying that. Most of the time it’s very rewarding and people are very grateful. Once in a while, when something happens, you think oh my gosh, am I making any difference? It really is nice to hear you say that. I know it’s true, and I do receive that.
I want to share one last story with you about just the way that things happen prophetically in life. When I was really at my sickest, I met a man and he was very spiritual. He said something to me. He said, “Jen, your complete healing is not going to come, it’s going to be like a patchwork quilt. It’s going to happen when it affects the most number of people. It’s going to be like a domino effect. That’s how your life is going to be, your complete healing,” and for me, it’s been years of layers of healing—spiritually and in many different ways. You can go back and listen to my story. I think it was episodes 9 and 10 you said.
I was talking to my husband about this. Everything that I have been through but that has not been in vain, it just has not been. I think that’s what he meant when he said that thing about the patchwork quilt because if we genuinely have a desire to serve and help other people and not be in it just for ourselves, I feel like the blessing of when you look back over your life and see what you’ve had to walk through and the level in which now it’s helping other people. It’s the silver lining basically of your suffering. I just really feel so grateful, particularly in this season. It just feels like a really blessed season where a lot of people are getting help, particularly when the world is waking up to the fact that there’s so much misinformation on so many different levels.
I just feel so blessed to be able to give this much value. I am so grateful for you and the way in which we’ve been able to share this information through your amazing listening audience because we wouldn’t be reaching near the numbers of people had it not been for this podcast. Thank you for the amazing work that you do. I am always getting so much feedback from your listeners, which is a good chunk of my clients. They just are so incredibly grateful for the way that the podcast has changed their outlook on health and continues to evolve them as people. Thank you.
[01:34:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well, let’s just keep evolving together. All of us are evolving and growing together in this health journey. I do feel truly blessed. Our suffering has not been in vain. Let no one’s suffering be in vain here as long as we are committed to helping ourselves and then helping others. We will keep growing together spiritually and physically. I can’t wait to have you back on the show to hear more stories of success. I just love it.
[01:35:10] Jennifer Saltzman: Awesome. Well, I look forward to it. Thank you so much.
[01:35:14] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode with Jennifer Saltzman. If you’re interested in getting some more information about becoming a health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, go ahead and go to learntruehealth.com/coach to get a free module. You can always give them a call and mention my name, Ashley James, to get the listener discount if you do choose to sign up and do the IIN program.
And then if you’d like to talk to Jennifer Saltzman or one of our health coaches that help you figure out the right supplements for you and the right diet based on the Naturopaths that we work with and the protocols that have been designed by them that work really well—these are the protocols that I was able to use to reverse all of my chronic health conditions, and Jen has used as well. We have been using it for the last 10 years with our clients having great success, then you can go to takeyoursupplements.com. All you do is fill out the information and then we reach out to you by text and email and schedule a phone call. There’s no obligation to buy anything, and there’s frankly no signup, no paying of the health coach. You talk to us and then we help you to get on the right supplements, and then you buy the supplements. There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee, so really there’s no risk and it’s all reward.
We set it up that way so that we help people as much as possible to get their health back and get their life back because we know what it’s like to suffer. We’ve been there. We’ve been in your shoes. We really, really want to help as many people as possible to get on the other side and to get healthy. Honestly, most of our customers come from referrals because one person gets healthy and then their entire family and their friends go wait a second, what just happened? You look amazing, we’ve never seen you this way. That’s how most of our referrals come. It’s really word of mouth and that is to the credit of how great this program works.
Go to takeyoursupplements.com and check us out. Also, if you’re a health coach yourself and you want to learn more about how to become a health coach that uses these protocols, there is—as Jen talked about—a very quick program online, done at your own time, done on your own pace. You can complete it in a matter of weeks and it teaches you all of the protocols. Then there’s ongoing weekly training and support, which is really cool, and it’s a very, very, very affordable program which I love because we want to make this accessible to the masses.
You can go to takeyoursupplements.com and fill it out. If you wanted to talk to them about getting involved as a health coach or taking the health coach program through takeyoursupplements.com. We’d love to have you. Both these programs—both IIN and also the Take Your Supplements program—really complement each other as we talked about in the interview because one really specifically deals with protocols for specific illnesses, nutrition, and diet. Whereas IIN helps teach you how to be a great coach, to help people change their habits, and understand the broader nutrition. They both go really well together.
If you just want to be part of a great community, come join our Facebook group. Just find Learn True Health on Facebook or learntruehealth.com/group. That’ll direct you to the Facebook group. Come join the group. We’d love to have you there. It’s a fantastically supportive community of holistic-minded people like yourself like me all seeking true health.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Happy fifth anniversary to the Learn True Health podcast. Here’s to the next five years and continuing this journey with you. Thank you for sharing these episodes with those you care about. That is how we grow. That is how we help as many people as possible to learn true health.
Get Connected With Jennifer Saltzman!Take Your Supplements
To contact Jen to purchase the supplements she recommends: [email protected]
Get on our email list to stay tuned for a video of Jennifer Saltzman demonstrating Pilates training. Visit FreeDoctorCourse.com
Catch Jennifer Saltzman in these episodes!Episode 9: Pilates: What It Is, Benefits, and More!
Episode 10: Heal Emotional Pain Through Spiritual Health
Episode 31: Supplement Confusion
Episode179: Finding The Cure
Episode 180: Taking Supplements and Eating Right
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Energybits - LearnTrueHealth.com/energybits - Use coupon code LTH
Medicinal Aloe for gut healing - LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe - Use coupon code LTH
At Home Gut and Mitochondrial Test - Viome.com - Use coupon code LTHBecome a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach
Breast Implant Illness: Signs, Symptoms, Treatment & More!https://www.learntruehealth.com/breast-implant-illness-signs-symptoms-treatment
Highlights:
Silicone is a neurotoxin Breast implants can cause issues with the mitochondria Importance of removing breast implants properly Different sources of toxins Alternatives to breast implantsDo you have breast implants or other foreign objects placed in your body? In this episode, Sarah Phillipe shares the dangers of having breast implants. Sarah enumerates different signs and symptoms of breast implant illness, the best way to remove the breast implants, and what could happen if the breast implants weren’t removed properly. She also enumerates different things that need to be addressed to recover from breast implant illness fully.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode really blew my mind even more so than I thought it would. If you’ve ever had plastic surgery or implants, you definitely want to listen. For those who haven’t, I still think you’re going to get a lot out of listening to this episode.
In this episode and in others, I’ve shared a bit about my journey, and one problem I really struggled with was detoxification. In the last five years, I’ve been focusing heavily on supporting my liver and on doing heavy metal detox because I discovered that was the underlying cause of a lot of my health issues. I want to point out a few things that really have helped me because if you have an illness that you think has stemmed from having implants, and of course, listening to today’s episode you will definitely gather more information to help you come to some really good conclusions and give you some directions that you’ll greatly benefit from.
For me, what’s really helped—actually doing this podcast has really helped because I followed a lot of the advice of my guests. When I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt—that’s a really good episode to go back to. He specializes in helping people who have difficulty detoxing for those, for example, who are on the spectrum, for those who suffer from mitochondrial disease, from Lyme disease, from heavy metal toxicity. He discusses a few things that we can do on a daily basis to support the body’s ability to remove heavy metals and toxins and support the liver and the emunctory systems of the body.
I began to implement what he recommended and found I had fantastic results. So one is doing almost daily sauna therapy, and I chose to invest in a Sunlighten Sauna. They do have a payment plan program, and I opted in for that. It’s like a credit card payment, and they ship you a sauna. You can get a wooden one, it’s about the size of a closet. It fits into a corner of a room, or you can get the portable one that folds up. You can tuck it away under the bed or in a closet. I did actually interview the founder of Sunlighten Sauna, so you can go back and listen to that episode.
The reason why I chose Sunlighten is they have a fantastic track record for being 100% non-toxic, and also they have a full spectrum system. So it is not just far-infrared, it’s near-infrared and mid-infrared, which shows that there are so many other benefits. For example, a decrease in pain and an increase in collagen production and elastin. There’s a youthful look that we can achieve by using the Sunlighten Sauna. But for me, it was about the heavy metal detox, which I’ve had fantastic results working with, and also decrease inflammation in my body.
The next was the Platinum Energy System, and I have interviewed Kellyann Andrews several times. Of course, you can listen to those episodes. The Platinum Energy System allows us to pull out heavy metals from our feet, which I know sounds so crazy, but she sends the water off to the labs and has graphs and charts and shows that it does pull things out. What’s really neat is I’ve given treatments to my friends, and the sludge that comes out of people when they’re in this system smells like the chemicals they’ve been using to clean with.
Someone who’s a swimmer in a Platinum Energy System and the water will smell like chlorine, will smell like pool water. It’s really crazy. But what’s awesome is anytime I feel sluggish, down, sort of toxic, I jump in the Platinum Energy System and within 30 minutes, I feel amazing. So I’ve had a great experience with it, so have my friends and my family. So you could check out those episodes with Kellyann Andrews and learn more about the Platinum Energy System.
And then the third thing I learned from Dr. Klinghardt is eating chlorella and spirulina, specifically chlorella because chlorella will naturally and very safely—in a gentle way—chelate, bind to heavy metals in the body. Now he does discuss how to eat them. Chlorella is a crop, not a supplement, so people think oh, I don’t want to overdose. Are you going to overdose on broccoli? Yes, to a certain point. You wouldn’t want to eat 20 pounds of broccoli. That’s too much. But you’re not going to overdose by having two cups of broccoli, right? You’ll feel full, but you’re not going to overdose.
So for chlorella, they dehydrate it, press it into little tablets, and you chew it. In our family, we call it the green crackers. But you want to take 30 of them at a time. So you can put them in your smoothie, or you can chew them and drink water. You do that ideally before a sauna, but you can do it every day, and that helps the body chelate these heavy metals. If you don’t eat enough of them, there becomes a problem because it kind of stirs up the toxins, and there’s not enough to bind to it. So you actually want to eat more, not less. So between 30 and 60 of these little tablets, and they also are a great source of amino acids and other nutrients.
I interviewed the founder of ENERGYbits, Catharine Arnston, who has a wonderful story about how her sister used chlorella and spirulina as part of her holistic protocol to recover from breast cancer. That’s what had Catharine Arnston start ENERGYbits because she saw that out there, most of the chlorella and spirulina in the market is tainted with heavy metals and lead. That’s why I really don’t want you to go to some website like Amazon or some store and just buy it because most of the brands out there are toxic. If you look at the bag and somewhere on the bag it says California regulation says this can cause cancer, well that’s because there’s lead in it because of how they very cheaply process the chlorella.
There are only two companies I know of on the planet that processes their chlorella and spirulina so purely that there are no heavy metals in it, and the one that I like better because I think it tastes better is ENERGYbits.
Now all these companies I mentioned I’ve asked them to give a discount to our listeners. So Sunlighten Sauna, which I absolutely love Sunlighten. Definitely give them a call and get more information from them if you want to support your daily detoxification. By the way, their benefits to sauna are amazing. Type sauna into learntruehealth.com to see the episodes or hear the episodes on that. I did have a cardiologist on, Dr. Kahn, who talks about how much he loves Sunlighten Sauna because it helps to tonify the cardiovascular system and will lower high blood pressure. That’s just one of the amazing factors. I happened to do it because I wanted to support my body in detoxification, losing inflammation, and weight loss. But other people do it for other reasons like a reduction of pain and inflammation or to support the cardiovascular system.
When you do call Sunlighten, you can mention that you heard about them through learntruehealth.com, through the Ashley James podcast.
When you talk to Kellyann Andrews about the Platinum Energy System, make sure that you mention my name because she does give a fantastic discount to those who are getting the Platinum Energy System. And then as far as the ENERGYbits, use the coupon code LTH and you will get the discount that they give for the listeners as well.
If you have any questions about this, and of course, those are my three biggest things but I do other stuff on a daily basis to support my emunctory systems, but those are my big three.
The fourth one I could throw in is on a daily basis I do take the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. Those supplements turned my life around. I’ve been taking them for 10 years. I was very sick. I had many, many health issues, and that was the biggest turning point for me. I had been on all kinds of supplements before, never saw a difference until I got on the supplements from takeyoursupplements.com. It’s all about quality. It’s all about giving your body the raw building blocks it needs in the bioavailability it needs. So you can go to takeyoursupplements.com and check them out. They will talk to you for free and help you. Their health coaches will talk to you absolutely for free and help you get on the right protocol.
So those are my four big tips for detoxification, but if you do have any more questions about that you can always reach out to me. You can go to our Facebook group. Join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and ask away. I’m there every day answering questions. Other guests that have been on the show are actually in the group as well answering questions, other holistic health practitioners, health coaches are there, and just passionate people like you and me who are out seeking true health through holistic means. We’re all there to support each other.
I just hope that you get so much out of this episode because truly, this information is not in the mainstream and it should, but luckily it’s here. Enjoy today’s episode. Please share it with those you care about so that we can continue to spread this information and help as many people as possible to learn true health.
[00:09:54] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 457. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Sarah Phillipe on the show. Her website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Now, if you don’t have any breast implants I still think you should listen, even if you’re a man—we got a lot of great male listeners—you should still listen because this is such an important topic when it comes to understanding the immune system’s response to materials placed in the body.
I interviewed Kristen Bowen and I’ve had her on the show a few times. She’s the one that created my favorite magnesium soak, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I talk about it all the time. The coupon code is LTH for those who want to get that magnesium soak. She went down to 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, in a wheelchair because they put things in her body when she had surgery, and they said these things were harmless. Now we know years later that we could have an autoimmune response to even what is thought to be inert items. I’m sure Sarah is going to educate us on that.
Obviously, the person who would benefit the most from listening to this is someone who’s had plastic surgery performed on them. However, I think everyone should listen because understanding what the body goes through when we’ve had surgery and if something’s been left inside us is so important, and then how to recover from that. Sarah, welcome to the show.
[00:11:36] Sarah Phillipe: Thank you so much, Ashley. I’m really happy to be here and to be sharing this really important information with your audience.
[00:11:44] Ashley James: Absolutely. I had a listener reach out and say that you’re amazing and that we absolutely had to interview you. Now, before we get into learning about this, I had never heard of breast implant illness, although I’ve heard of autoimmune responses to objects being placed in the body. I have a dear friend—my best friend’s wife—has had issues with not breast implants but with other plastic surgery items being placed in the body. The doctors guaranteed it was safe and absolutely nothing wrong would happen and she almost died.
So it’s one of those stories that you just don’t know until it happens. The thing is that what you’re going to teach us is that it can be something where it creates a chronic illness not something sudden but someone can have it for years and not realize that it has to do with the breast implants. Before we get into that though, can you tell us about your past, about your history? What happened both personally and professionally in your life that led you to want to be an expert in this topic, illuminating this topic, and helping us better understand it?
[00:12:58] Sarah Phillipe: Sure. It was a place going from a place of pain to purpose really for me like a lot of us who are in the holistic health space, right? We have experienced something, a decline in our health for a particular reason or a multitude of reasons, and modern medicine hasn’t been able to help. So that leads us down this functional medicine or holistic health path of just wanting to discover the root cause.
For me, I had always wanted larger breasts. I mean, this really came from childhood, which is interesting. You don’t always think about a desire like that coming from childhood, but it really started in this pivotal moment in my life when I was a young girl. Someone really important to me—and I don’t think she had ill intentions, of course, but—unknowingly said to me you’re going to be 4’11” just like me, but don’t worry, you’re going to have the Johnson boobs. So it was that really pivotal moment for me where I just realized how important breasts are, and I had no understanding of that before that moment.
That really stuck with me and it really shaped my perception about my body as I matured and didn’t get the Johnson boobs. I put a lot of worth into the physical appearance. I didn’t really realize who I was on the inside, not just who I was on the outside and. I think there were some driving factors there that led me to make that decision to get my breast implants placed.
I had them placed in 2011. Prior to that, I was working in a very busy teaching hospital, night shift—very hard on my body. I was pushing my body to the brink at the gym. Tons and tons of heavy weight lifting, cardio, cyclical dieting, and just really a lot of stress. When I got the breast implants placed, that for me I believe was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. Everything else had kind of set the stage for the fall. That was just my tipping point. That just overflowed my bucket.
Within six months I started developing symptoms, symptoms that I had never had before. I didn’t have a symptom to speak of before that. So while my body may not have been healthy, it wasn’t expressing itself in symptoms yet. But within six months, I had all kinds of symptoms. I was developing chronic fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, I had brain fog, difficulty concentrating, poor word retrieval, memory loss. I would have to read something probably 10 or 15 times to really absorb the information and be able to tell you what I read. Muscle aches and pains, joint pain, hair loss, weight gain, temperature intolerance, low libido, heart palpitations, shortness of breath. I had night sweats. I had insomnia. My mind would just race and race and race all night long. I had hormone imbalances.
I ended up getting diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. My thyroid was low, my thyroid hormone was low. I was very sensitive to light, sound, and chemical smells. I had lots of GI symptoms, so gas and bloating, loose stool, really painful abdomen. The more I ate the more my belly hurt. I knew there was something wrong. Lots of food intolerances, these things were never a problem before.
So I went down this path of trying to figure out what was going on. I went to medical doctors who always told me, your labs look fine. Maybe you need counseling or maybe you should spice up your sex life.
[00:16:52] Ashley James: Wait a second, wait a second. You had a doctor say that to you?
[00:16:55] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.
[00:16:56] Ashley James: You had this whole host of symptoms. You were suffering daily and you had a doctor—was it a male doctor?
[00:17:04] Sarah Phillipe: Yes.
[00:17:05] Ashley James: And he said to you, you just need more sex.
[00:17:07] Sarah Phillipe: Well, yeah. I mean, with the low sex drive complaints and low hormone, he was just thinking maybe I needed to spice it up a bit.
[00:17:16] Ashley James: Oh, so it’s your fault that you have low hormones and low libido, and if you just spiced it up and were more active in the bedroom, that would raise your hormones. I wonder what medical journal he got that from.
[00:17:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, very interesting.
[00:17:33] Ashley James: I had a doctor say that to me once actually. This is why I want to just emphasize, it’s so frustrating as a woman to have all these symptoms, all these medical problems, and not be taken seriously. the hubris of the MDs training. Anytime I get on my soapbox where I talk about MDs, there’s a lot of them that are really well-intentioned, right? But we’re talking about the ones that you saw. You went to so many specialists and they were like well it’s in your head, you just need to have more sex, or whatever. I mean, all this is just ridiculous.
They’re just making stuff up, and the hubris of their training is that they can’t be wrong and they can’t say I don’t know what it is. Let me go find the answers for you. Let me go peer through medical journals. Let me go think about things that it could be that I don’t have training around. Most of them don’t do that. Most of them just are listening to symptoms to give you a drug, to send you on your way, and not looking to heal the root cause. This is my biggest frustration. You want a doctor that’s a detective. You want a doctor that’s holistic, that’s going to look at you your whole life and go okay, why is this happening? And not blame you. It’s your fault. You’re not having enough sex, or it’s all in your head. You just need to go for a walk and see a counselor or whatever. I mean, that’s ridiculous.
You had all these symptoms that gradually started over time after your breast implants, and a really good diagnostician would have traced it back and seen okay yes, you were working really hard long hours and that deteriorated your health. But then, what was that one point where it all exacerbated, right? So what happened in your story that you clued in that it was your breast implants, or was it a specialist that finally figured it out?
[00:19:37] Sarah Phillipe: No, you know it’s interesting because I even eventually went down the path of looking for more functional medicine types of physicians. So I worked with a functional medicine doctor that I found locally and was diagnosed with SIBO and treated for that. That didn’t get better, of course. Multiple rounds of rifaximin and still no results.
Then I found a holistic health practitioner who was a chiropractor working with a lot of people with Lyme, mold illness, and just different really chronic conditions, and so I thought this would be the perfect person for me. I point-blank asked him do you think that my breast implants are a problem? Do you think they could be creating all of these symptoms and the reason why I’m not getting better having done all these things because I had done a lot. I’ve made a lot of dietary changes, a lot of lifestyle changes. I’d really been trying to figure out how I could recover my health, and he said no. I think that if we can get Lyme under control because he had anecdotally kind of diagnosed me with Lyme. If we get the lime under control, then you’re going to be fine. The breast implants won’t be a problem.
[00:20:49] Ashley James: I have a question. Why did you think it could possibly be your breast implants?
[00:20:55] Sarah Phillipe: I think I just had this gut instinct, I had this intuition. At the time, I mean this was a long time ago. Nobody was talking about this back then. There were no Facebook groups, no websites, no podcast interviews where anyone was talking about breast implant illness. So it was just kind of this little voice in the back of my head or just in my gut telling me that it could be the breast implants and just having that medical background, I understood that something inside of me that doesn’t belong there maybe could possibly make me sick and cause all this downstream dysfunction.
At the time though, I didn’t have enough concrete evidence. That wasn’t enough for me to just go on a hunch to have them removed. It took me a long time to get to the point of deciding to have them removed. I mean, many years of going down this rabbit hole. So, yes, I had the intuition, but I didn’t trust my intuition initially.
[00:21:52] Ashley James: This is so interesting because this is a very similar story. We’ve had many people come on the show and share, many practitioners come on the show—these are professionals, these are scientists, these are doctors—and they too have a similar story where they were sick and when no one else knew what it was, their intuition was sort of whispering I feel like it’s this. Then they would second-guess it, and how often do we do that? How often do we second-guess? If your intuition says bring an umbrella and it’s a sunny day, or bring a sweater and it’s a warm day, how often do we second-guess that first voice? That first voice is the quietest, but that’s the truth. That is our truth.
We have to quiet our mind, stop second-guessing ourselves, listen to that gut instinct, and then find practitioners that’ll listen to us and listen to what our gut is saying. So then what happened? It took many years. What happened that had you go, wow, I think I’m right?
[00:22:58] Sarah Phillipe: I’m pretty grateful for the whole experience that I went through because it really ended up leading me down this journey of becoming a health detective, so to speak, becoming a holistic health practitioner so that I could try to figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix myself.
I was no longer really in alignment with modern medicine or conventional medicine because I saw that they couldn’t help me, they weren’t helping me, and they didn’t understand why I was not doing well, why I had all these symptoms. So I knew I had to take a different approach.
That led me down this road of becoming a holistic health practitioner, completely changing everything about my life and the way that I was living. I did a lot of work on myself. I did a lot of detox work, addressing the gut, and working on all these different things that we do in holistic health in general because a lot of these things, regardless of what the source, is there’s only really a handful of things that create chronic illness in today’s world. So they tend to be fairly similar across the board, it’s just what is the source, right?
So for me, it got to the point where my husband and I were trying to get pregnant, and we had been trying for a couple of years without success. I had ended up going to a gynecologist who specializes in endometriosis because I also had a hunch that I had endometriosis. Four or five years before that I had an ultrasound and they couldn’t find anything and sent me on my way. This particular specialist did an MRI and we discovered it was stage four. So I had bowel involvement, I had vaginal wall involvement, I had my left fallopian tube completely blocked. So there was a lot of inflammation in my pelvic floor and just my uterus, ovaries, and all of that.
So I just knew like I had been really thinking about it a lot and kind of in my mind mentally preparing myself for it and also talking about it out loud with my husband just to prepare him for it because I knew I was going to make that decision. So it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to get pregnant, and I had been thinking in my mind if these implants are this toxic to me and causing all this dysfunction in my own body, what are they going to do? Even if I do get pregnant, what are they going to do to a growing child in me, in my uterus? What kind of problems could that pose to a growing baby, and what about breastfeeding? Am I going to pass all these toxins along to a baby who’s breastfeeding? I just didn’t want that for my future children, and it was really that whole experience with infertility that led me to finally making the decision to explant.
So I did. Once I made that decision, I had my implants out about two months later.it was really quick once I finally committed to it.
[00:26:05] Ashley James: Well I take it they put you under to take them out, you weren’t awake during the procedure, right?
[00:26:15] Sarah Phillipe: Right.
[00:26:16] Ashley James: So when you woke up, did you notice the difference right away?
[00:26:21] Sarah Phillipe: I wouldn’t say that I had much of a difference right away. I mean, I had definitely made a fair amount of improvement, which is the work that I had been doing before my explant. So for me, I feel like I probably felt a little bit more alive, happier, just my outlook in life was improved. I felt lighter and brighter, and everyone else could see that in me. They just felt like when they were having a conversation with me, that I just came off a bit different. I just came off less intense, just calmer, more peaceful. Probably that’s because I didn’t have this chronic source of toxic exposure just overwhelming my detox pathways that can definitely create a lot of irritability, anxiety, and rage even—I’ve seen that as well. So a lot of different symptoms can come from toxic overload.
So those things I noticed right away, but I did a lot of work post explant as well. It wasn’t just this miraculous healing story for me. I had to actually go and do a lot of detox work, a lot of gut work, dealing with infections things like that because there’s the downstream effect of having breast implants, and it’s not just about removing the source. There’s more work to be done after that.
So over time, I would say it took me about a year of work before I felt pretty darn good, but I also needed to have a second surgery in between that time. So I did decide to go ahead and have a laparoscopy for that endometriosis. That surgery was a far more difficult recovery than the explant. It was a six-month recovery because I had to have a bowel resection, part of my vaginal wall was cut out. I had a fallopian tube removed and a lot of clean-up there. It was an eight-hour surgery. So that recovery was quite challenging, but I’ve never felt better and I’m really glad I did it. I wouldn’t say that excision for endometriosis is appropriate for every situation, but for mine, it was just so invasive and it had taken over so many different organs that it really needed to be done.
So after those two surgeries and doing a lot of work, I would say about a year after that is when I felt quite good. And then about two years afterward is when I really hit the point where I felt better than I had in over a decade.
[00:28:55] Ashley James: Amazing. May I ask you a personal question?
[00:29:00] Sarah Phillipe: Mhmm.
[00:29:01] Ashley James: Have you guys had kids?
[00:29:03] Sarah Phillipe: We haven’t had kids yet, we have been trying, and it’s been a long time. We’ve been trying for probably four or five years now. I’ve lost count. But for me, the interesting part that was a huge blocking factor for me was my mindset, just my beliefs about what my body was capable of. Going into a fertility specialist or an endometriosis specialist like I did, it can be really disheartening to hear really discouraging words like your chances of getting pregnant are this, then your age, and then you’re only having one fallopian tube now because we had to take it out, here are your chances. So I think that was such a mental block for me.
So over the past year, I’ve actually done a lot of mental-emotional work—working on healing past traumas, working on my belief about what my body’s capable of, and shifting that belief. And I know I’m going to get pregnant. I know my baby’s coming, but I didn’t know that before. I had doubts, disbelief. Even when I would say out loud, I know it’ll happen at the right time, I don’t think I really truly believed that. Our thoughts are so powerful. Even if we don’t speak it out loud, our cells are listening to whatever our thoughts are and responding as if it’s true.
[00:30:37] Ashley James: You’re a nurse and you’re a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. You have many credentials. You work with clients, but you’re also working on yourself. When I hear that of a practitioner, that’s the practitioner I want to see. I want to go to the practitioner who is working on themselves mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, energetically. Who acknowledges that emotional, mental health is as important as physical health. Spiritual health and energetic health play a role in overall health and vitality.
Now, I got to tell you, I was told by an endocrinologist that I would never have kids, never—0% chance that I would have kids, and my husband I tried for six years. So I just want to let you know absolutely, 100% possible. And it was holistic medicine alone that helped me to become fertile. My issue is not yours. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, not what you had. However, I’ve seen so many women with so many different complications using a really holistic approach to be able to conceive healthfully.
Once we got everything in order with our diet, nutrition, lifestyle, mental, emotional health—when we got all of it together, and for us the last step was adding just some Chinese herbs that our Naturopath was like, okay, these are the last thing. We’re just going to put this in place. Then we had to decide to watch for ovulation because, in the past, I didn’t ever track it because I was told I never had it to begin with.
When we saw ovulation, we’re like, oh my gosh. We did it. We’re ovulating. Our very first detection of ovulation we conceived our son, and now we’re pregnant again. We’re having a daughter. And it was both on the first tries. For that to go from six years of really trying but also not having a regular cycle, not having everything lined up, but using supplements, diet, herbs, and all that.
I love that you’re looking at every aspect, and the belief system is so important because if I didn’t believe, then I would have never even gone as far as to ask my Naturopath for help in that area, for herbs, and I would have never even been conscious ever looking for when I ovulated. It’s like our belief system has us look for the evidence, has us look for the evidence that something is possible that we then can act upon. That’s why it’s so important to work on our belief system and to clean up past traumas so that we can believe in ourselves and we can believe in our own body’s ability to heal itself.
My understanding of your situation with breast implants is that it was a toxic accumulation over time that affected all the systems. Is that because what is leaching into our bodies when we have a breast implant are endocrine disruptors? Can you maybe explain what kind of chemicals are slowly leeching into our body?
[00:34:11] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. Breast implants are a stressor on a couple of different levels, and one of them is that they’re a chemical stressor. It’s not just silicone breast implants, it’s saline also. Saline breast implants most people think are safer because well it’s just water, it’s just saline water. But it’s not true. The shell of the saline breast implants are made of silicone, and so silicone in and of itself is a neurotoxin.
There is evidence that it chelates neurotransmitters in the brain. We’re exposed to a lot of different sources of silicone these days. If you think about different kitchen utensils, all of the silicone that is in our personal care products, our makeup, our skincare, and things like that. There’s a lot of silicone out there, and there is one researcher who believes that it’s actually silicone toxicity that we’re dealing with when we have breast implants. That it’s a cumulative effect of not just the breast implants but all the different sources of silicone that we’re exposed to. And of course, breast implants are a pretty significant source of exposure, and they’re living in the body.
But beyond that, there’s a lot of different cytotoxic, neurotoxic, carcinogenic chemicals, and heavy metals that are really inflammatory to our cells, tissues, and organs that are in silicone breast implants specifically. So there are 37+ different toxic chemicals and heavy metals in silicone breast implants. This means things like methyl ethyl ketone, cyclohexane, acetone, xylene, phenol—these are all neurotoxins. And then they contain things like dichloromethane, toluene, benzene—those things are carcinogens. And then you have things like talcum powder, formaldehyde, lacquer thinner, printing ink, and metal cleaning acid.
What are these things doing in breast implants? And then you have heavy metals like aluminum, tin, lead, and platinum. I actually developed some kind of reaction to my platinum wedding rings and I could no longer wear them. My finger just was like on fire every time I put it on. When I got my breast implants removed, that never happened again.
[00:36:35] Ashley James: Wow.
[00:36:36] Sarah Phillipe: So, that was a really interesting correlation there.
[00:36:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. So wait, have you ever taken these breast implants and had them analyzed by a lab to read out all of the heavy metals that are leaching into our body from them and all the chemicals? Is that information available for people to see? I bake with silicone, like it’s safe. Wait a second.
[00:37:02] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. It’s not non-stick Teflon, right?
[00:37:06] Ashley James: Yeah, well exactly. I’ve always had that little intuitive voice we talked about, that little voice which I told it to shut up because I wanted the silicone baking pans because I thought they were so cool. I didn’t have to use oil. I’m like, look, they’re so much easier to clean. Oh my gosh, that little voice my heart was like this does not sound healthy. This sounds like it leeches stuff. Come on, don’t go for the silicone. Don’t buy into it. So, man, my little intuitive voice was right, my gut was right. The stuff we use in our baking in our kitchen that’s made of silicone, are you saying that this is also off-gassing or releasing chemicals into our food?
[00:37:55] Sarah Phillipe: I haven’t looked at studies on that, but I would say it’s a safe bet to assume so.
[00:38:01] Ashley James: Well I mean, if medical-grade silicone that they put in women is leeching stuff, can you imagine what the non-medical grade stuff in our kitchen’s doing?
[00:38:09] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly. There have never been like studies in humans examining what happens at body temperature with these implants, right? But there have been some animal studies that have shown that when the implants are heated to body temperature, that they do bleed out into the body. It’s called gel bleed. So, yes, they are a solid material but when they’re heated up, they do bleed into the body and the breast area is so full of dense lymphatic tissue that it’s like a highway for these chemicals to start traveling throughout different parts of the body. Not only is silicone toxic to the body, but there are some researchers out there that believe that it is considered an adjuvant connected to certain autoimmune conditions.
So basically, it’s a trigger that can trigger certain autoimmune conditions. Autoimmunity is also partly genetic. It can trigger whatever your genetic susceptibility is. It can look different from person to person. It’s not always going to be the same autoimmune condition.
[00:39:12] Ashley James: You’re touching on exactly my next question to you, which is some women swear they have no problems with their breast implants. I have a friend, I was surprised to hear that she had breast implants because I honestly thought they were natural. She’s so gorgeous, but she was like are you kidding me? I was flat as pancakes. She said she breastfed successfully with them. She’s very happy with them. I knew my interview with you was coming up so I started asking her questions. I’m like, how’s your health? Do you think you’ve had any negative impacts?
Well, I know she’s been focusing with her doctor—she sees a Naturopath—on brain fog, and she is a night owl. She has insomnia, and she cannot handle any stimulants. So even a little bit of coffee would drive her nuts, but I don’t know if that was how it was before the breast implants. But she says other than that, she’s in really good health, nothing to complain about. I thought, man, what if the accumulation of toxins being solely released is just exacerbating those issues?
[00:40:24] Sarah Phillipe: I get this question a lot of the time about will everyone get sick who has breast implants, and I tend to think of them as a ticking time bomb. From my perspective, why wait until your health spirals downhill because, usually, what I see is one of a couple of scenarios. Either someone has had a lot of different sources of toxic exposure as a child, kind of like a long history of toxic exposure. Maybe mercury amalgam fillings in the mouth, maybe they were born via a C-section and not breastfed, or maybe had a lot of antibiotics as a child and then they have amalgam fillings placed. Maybe they get breast implants and the breast implants are just that thing that overflows the bucket.
And then I see another scenario where someone maybe had a pretty healthy, pretty uneventful childhood. Not a lot of toxic exposure, a healthy diet, not sick a lot. Maybe they got breast implants and have had no problems, and it’s been decades and they’re thriving. And then maybe later on in life, they experience divorce, loss of a loved one, or a car accident. And then maybe they have root canals and end up developing cavitations, which are infections in the jaw, and something ends up becoming the tipping point.
So there’s a lot of these different types of stressors that accumulate, build up in the body, and tax the body’s ability to cope with more. At some point, there can be something that becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and then someone develops a lot of symptoms. Symptoms don’t happen early on when there’s dysfunction occurring. They’re one of the last things to occur. And when symptoms start happening, it’s usually that the body has been breaking down for quite some time and the symptoms are just the body’s way of communicating to you that it is time to start waking up and paying attention to what’s going on.
[00:42:25] Ashley James: What about MTHFR? How much does that play a role in this? I have a friend who has just the most severe form of MTHFR. I tried to say to her, there are phases of it, or I was trying to explain that you could have different snips like the 25%, 25% on each side, or 50% on each side, or 75% percent, and she has 100% which means she says her body only can methylate 23% and everything affects her. That she walked into a store and inhaled some perfume, she’d have a migraine. Anything that her body has to detox something, she’s down and out for the count. So she has to lead the cleanest lifestyle.
Do you have something like that where their liver cannot process phase one and phase two of detoxification properly? Everything gets backed up because of that. So someone who knows that they have any variant of MTHFR would definitely not be a candidate for having anything implanted in their body, which could then slowly over time increase toxicity, that it would just put this added stressor on the liver. Have you seen a link between those with MTHFR and breast implant illness?
[00:44:03] Sarah Phillipe: I have, and I think I’m a little biased though because the women that come to me that I work with are women who are quite ill even after their explant surgery. So I tend to see women who do have a lot of struggle regaining their health after having their explant. Usually, there is an MTHFR gene mutation or two. Well, I’m heterozygous for C677T, but I don’t have a really, really down-regulated methylation activity in the body. My body is methylating fine.
So in my mind, it goes back to the difference between what your body is able to handle versus what you’re exposed to. I kind of liken it to either a two- or a four-lane highway at rush hour, which one is going to be moving more traffic? Obviously, if you have more lanes, the traffic’s going to flow better. And if you have fewer lanes, the traffic’s going to get jammed up a lot more easily.
So I think it’s not all about the MTHFR. It’s really about the fact that we’re living in a very, very toxic world dealing with far more than our bodies were ever designed to cope with, and then we add something like breast implants on top of that and it can be devastating. I don’t think it’s just our genes, it’s how the environment is interacting with our genes.
[00:45:34] Ashley James: I hesitate to use the word mental illness because there’s such a stigma around it, but what kind of emotional problems arise in women who have had breast implants who are experiencing this toxic load? We talked about insomnia and brain fog. Does it increase depression, anxiety? You talked about anger. Can we talk about the emotional aspects because women who are more likely to get breast implants are more likely to see a doctor for emotional issues and then be put on drugs for that as well further increasing the toxic load? I love that highway analogy.
Based on how much you’re methylating, based on how much you’re able to detox, let’s say you only have two lanes, the breast implants are adding more cars. Any pharmaceutical drug is adding more cars. Even some herbs the body has to then process adding more cars, right? What’s in our air, what’s in our water, what’s off-gassing from our carpets, right? If you go get your nails done, your hair did, and whatever kind of cosmetic products you use—all these chemicals. There are over 80,000 man-made chemicals made in the last 50 years that our bodies were not designed to have to handle, and here we are having to handle it. It’s all adding more cars to the highway, thus slowing it down, causing a backup, causing a toxic load in the body.
We need to start, obviously, removing those loads. But for someone who begins to have that load build, they may not recognize physical symptoms as a problem. For you, someone said you have Hashimoto’s, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you have this problem, you have this physical problem, you have this physical problem. So they were addressing them. You have Lyme disease, and all these different doctors, because they’re looking for what they specialize in and they’re seeing symptoms. Oh, these symptoms match so we’re going to treat you for this. It doesn’t seem as obviously connected to the breast implants.
But what about emotional issues? If you’re someone who’s never really been prone to anxiety or maybe just minor anxiety and all of a sudden you have panic attacks to the point where you’re being put on anxiety meds, or you have depression, or you have insomnia, or these emotional issues come up. Can you talk about the emotional side effects of breast implant illness?
[00:48:09] Sarah Phillipe: Absolutely. It’s very, very common. I see a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of panic attacks, and a lot of feelings of overwhelm like you just can’t handle any kind of stress whatsoever. To me, that really signals the fact that your body is completely overloaded, and any kind of stimulation just is overwhelming for your body to try to cope with. Any kind of stress whatsoever triggers that stress response.
For me, I experienced this pretty significantly. It started off with just a very irritated nervous system to where when I would go down into the garage to do my workouts, I had to have complete silence like no music. I cannot work out with my husband in the garage because his heavy breathing irritated me. In between my sets, I would have to sit down and gather myself because it was so incredibly stressful on my body. Any kind of additional stress was just throwing me over the edge. It made me very irritable, really hard to recover from stress, and even a difficult conversation, I couldn’t handle that. I would blow up and start screaming and yelling because I couldn’t handle one more thing.
So for me, the anxiety, the anger outbursts, heart palpitations, symptoms of anxiety, of chest tightness, feeling like I couldn’t take a deep breath. When I would go out into public, that was really hard for me because any stimulation from a crowd would just send me into this downward spiral. And even just being around family, if they were being loud and rambunctious. I have a husband with triplet brothers, so you can imagine there’s a lot of wrestling going on and stuff like that, a lot of competition. When we would all get together, I sometimes would just have to leave the house because I couldn’t handle even the audible stimulation. That to me was overwhelming.
So those types of things that I experienced are really, really common. No one understood what the heck was going on with me. People thought I was crazy.
[00:50:34] Ashley James: Well, this makes so much sense because it’s almost like inflammation on the brain. It’s inflammation of the nervous system having to handle this toxic load. But at the same time, a lot of what you just shared sounds like the autonomic nervous system being stuck in the sympathetic mode of fight or flight. There are ways of measuring that. We can look at heart rate variability now.
I’m just curious. Let’s say breast implants, if having them puts the body in a state of stress like just triggers the autonomic nervous system so that we’re in fight or flight, which would then easily explain why would people have insomnia, why would they have that irritability, why would they have outbursts, why would they be on edge? And then you’re being told by a doctor it’s all in your head, you’ve got to go see a counselor.
Well, no. The root is in the body. Our physical body and our emotional body are connected. So when we have emotions, yes, of course, sometimes we get to come at it from healing traumas. We also have to come at it from looking at what’s going on in the body that’s putting us in this state, and it sounds like you were in fight or flight. Have you been able to measure that at all or look into that at all with your clients to see if they are kind of stuck in fight or flight?
[00:52:02] Sarah Phillipe: Well, when I did my own testing back when I was really, really sick, my neurotransmitters were completely tanked. I didn’t really produce a whole lot of neurotransmitters, which when you’re dealing with a lot of different sources of stress, you need norepinephrine and epinephrine in order to cope with that. That gives your body energy and the ability to either fight or flee, and I didn’t have that ability. I didn’t have those neurotransmitters at the adequate level that I needed them, which of course resulted in a lot of symptoms.
My heart rate variability—and this is true for a lot of my clients—was very low. It was like a deep parasympathetic more than a fight or flight. I think a lot of us that are stuck with these chronic symptoms and not getting better, it’s more of this deep parasympathetic that we’re just not coming out of. And it’s more of a result of the mitochondrial function and how the mitochondria are really just going to bat for you rather than producing energy for you. So they go into this battleship mode rather than energy production mode, and that takes away from your cells and their ability to function, which your organs are made up of cells so you have different organs not functioning as well as they should. Hormone production takes a back burner, neurotransmitters take a back burner, things like that that are just required for someone to feel good, right?
So that’s really a lot more common than fight or flight. I think the longer you’re dealing with chronic illness the more your body just goes into this deep parasympathetic mode and your mitochondria are just shut down. It’s like hibernation.
[00:53:48] Ashley James: Right, total exhaustion. That makes sense. I had chronic adrenal fatigue and I can relate to that. It’s like you’re walking dead. The overwhelm was real. Any stimulus was overwhelming. That makes sense. So what part of the breast implant harms the mitochondria? Is it a direct causality, or is it somewhere cascading down the way?
[00:54:17] Sarah Phillipe: I think that it’s on a few different levels. I think the toxic exposure, so toxins are one stressor that can definitely shut down the mitochondria, and they’re very delicate, right? They’re the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, so they’re very easily damaged.
[00:54:37] Ashley James: Well, they’re bacteria. I mean that’s the fascinating part is that just like our gut bacteria can be easily harmed, so can our mitochondria because they’re bacteria. We really have to take care of them because they’re what keeps us alive, they’re what creates our cellular energy.
I was fascinated by interviewing the woman who cured her MS using this theory that the MS was a mitochondrial disease, and then she ate a diet full of all the nutrients the mitochondria needed and removed all the foods that could harm the mitochondria. Lo and behold, she went from practically being months away from being dead to being able to walk again, then ride a bike, and ride a horse. I am having such a brain fart right now, I’m going to blame pregnancy brain, which I can. I’m allowed to. But she’s quite amazing, Terry Wahls?
[00:55:41] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, I know Terry.
[00:55:42] Ashley James: The Wahls protocol and her TED Talk. She gave a TED Talk I believe is 2012. I love that she shows pictures of her in her special wheelchair that would have her feet higher than her head because that’s what she had to do. The doctors were basically saying that she was months away from death, and she stopped it and reversed it. She went to all the best doctors in the world for MS. They wanted to give her chemotherapy, they wanted to do all these things to her, and she just sat down one day and her goal was to live long enough to see her kids graduate high school. She sat down and thought, okay, well this is a mitochondrial problem. How do I heal my mitochondria?
Isn’t that interesting that it just takes one doctor with that detective mind we talked about to stop thinking inside the box that they’ve been trained to think in and start looking at the body and going what’s going on and how do we support the body with nutrition?
So here we have this toxic overload. You said the mitochondria is incredibly sensitive, and just the toxins from breast implants can cause some issues for the mitochondria. What else in this big picture is affecting the mitochondria?
[00:56:57] Sarah Phillipe: Well, you also have the fact that breast implants are foreign objects. They don’t belong in the body, and so that is a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s chronic inflammation recruiting inflammatory cytokines. They’ve been able to show even through just doing cultures on the implants the fluid inside the implants if they’re saline, and then also the capsule and the fluid around the capsule in between the capsule and the implant.
They’ll do cultures for those things, and they’ve been able to show 10+ different bacteria that are growing between the breast implants and the capsule themselves. It’s like a petri dish, basically, for all these different microbes to start growing, and it can be even a low-grade growth of these microorganisms that is just this chronic source of immune stimulation. Your body really can’t get those things under control because it’s got this foreign body that is like this big distraction. Your body’s trying to go to work to address that foreign object.
That’s the reason that it creates a capsule around the implant. It’s scar tissue. It’s trying to wall that implant off so that it can protect your body from that exposure. But unfortunately, our breasts are not sterile. There’s a lot of bacteria even within the breast tissue, and it’s a perfect environment for all kinds of different microbes to grow, wreak havoc, and thrive in the body that kind of goes undetected by the immune system.
Part of that going undetected is the fact that they create biofilm around themselves to protect themselves from the immune system in general. The biofilm is the biggest problem with regards to breast implants and different infections, the causation, and the connection there. So we’ve got lots of different types of toxins coming from breast implants, which sets you up for this perfect storm situation because different unwanted microbes thrive in toxic terrain. They use toxins and heavy metals to create their biofilm, and some things like parasites will feed off of those things, will feed off of heavy metals, and candida as well will feed off of heavy metals.
So you can have a lot of downstream dysfunction going on as a result of breast implants being in place. Chronic immune stressor because they’re a foreign object, and then a chronic chemical stressor because of all the different toxins that can bleed into your body from that exposure.
[00:59:46] Ashley James: That is fascinating. The body creates scar tissue around the breast implant. I mean, any woman who’s been pregnant or breastfed knows about mastitis. The breasts are designed to make breast milk that has all these good bacteria in it. We’re giving healthy bacteria and an immune system to an infant, so of course, it’s not a sterile environment inside the breast. To think that anything skin deep, anything below the skin is sterile is silly.
Putting a foreign object there, then it creates scar tissue around it, and then there are bacteria that are growing like a bad culture that can develop in your gut. Imagine the bad cultures developing around your breast tissue, and they themselves—even if it’s a low-grade constant low-grade infection—any kind of microbial presence as they die off creates toxins. Essentially, whatever they poop out is a toxin. That’s why we feel so crummy when we’re coming off of a cold, flu, or food poisoning. It’s actually the toxins left behind the poop and also the bacteria that are dying. All the toxins left behind make us feel so horrible because it is such a stressor on the body to have to handle those toxins.
So not only is the body having to deal with that slow constant release of whatever’s in the breast implant, which you’ve mentioned some items that don’t sound too savory. And then it’s also dealing with any kind of bacteria or any kind of microbial buildup around the breast implants because it’s so hard for the body to get to that area to clear it out. And the immune system’s all kind of revving up and having to work on that.
I’m sure you’ve looked at the meta-analysis. Statistically, women with breast implants, do they have a higher likelihood of developing cancer?
[01:02:15] Sarah Phillipe: That’s an interesting topic that I haven’t delved a lot into, but I do know that there is a connection between breast and someone women who have breast implants and a higher incidence of colon cancer, which is interesting, right? Not breast cancer. The theory is because the implants are putting a lot of pressure on that area.
[01:02:38] Ashley James: The immune system looking at it.
[01:02:41] Sarah Phillipe: I tend to think about it in a different way with regards to colon cancer where a lot of the toxins we’re exposed to end up going right to the gut. That’s one of the ways we eliminate through the liver and then dump it into the gut for elimination. So I have to wonder too, how much of the toxicity component is playing a part in the development of abnormal cells in the colon?
[01:03:04] Ashley James: I had this explained very scientifically once, and I’m going to try to do it in my layman’s terms. These 80,000 chemicals that are in our environment, our food water, and our breast implants, all that, the body doesn’t recognize these. So the liver gets rid of them but then the colon will reabsorb them if we don’t poop three times a day. If we don’t have enough fiber to bind to those the toxins in the bile and let’s say you have a little bit of constipation, the body does not see the difference between bile just to reabsorb because bile is costly, so the body wants to reabsorb it and reuse it. But there are these toxins that are in it. The colon doesn’t go oh wait, I shouldn’t reabsorb these because I’m actually just reabsorbing all the toxins again.
This is why it’s so important whenever you’re doing certain detoxes and certain parasite cleanses to consume binders. People eat clay and they eat activated charcoal, or they take a lot of fiber in their diet. If you’re going to do one of those cleanses, I highly recommend doing it with a practitioner that knows what they’re doing. Don’t just randomly buy stuff.
I really like Dr. Jay Davidson. I had him on the show twice. I really recommend listening to those two episodes. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and search Jay Davidson for those two episodes. He explains a bit more about the binders and stuff, but here we have the body reabsorbing all the toxins the liver worked hard at to get rid of. So no wonder if the colon wall is being bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing and bathed and reabsorbing these toxins. That makes sense.
[01:04:58] Sarah Phillipe: I absolutely agree that people out there in the world should not be attempting to do detox work on their own without a trained professional. I think that’s so important. I’ve seen so many women just make themselves so much worse.
[01:05:13] Ashley James: Can you explain a bit why? Because a lot of listeners, myself included, have attempted our own detoxes because we read an article, we hear from a friend, or maybe we listen to a show, and then we just go to town and make our own version of it. Going out and getting a colonic is fine, or going out and doing sauna therapy and eating chlorella, that’s fine. But if you have, for example, Lyme disease and then you decide to take all these herbs to kill it or something and you don’t have the right dose or you’re not preparing the body, all the emunctory systems correctly beforehand. You don’t have something to break down the biofilms. I mean, there are just all these things to focus on before we go to just kill the parasite or kill the infection, which can make it much worse like you said.
Could you give an example? Maybe teach us a little bit. We have women who are listening, let’s say they have breast implants. We have some women that have breast implants, and we have women that don’t have breast implants, and maybe they’ve already had them removed. How do we recover from breast implant illness?
[01:06:29] Sarah Phillipe: Well, that’s a loaded question.
[01:06:33] Ashley James: Give us the starting point. Where should we set ourselves up mentally? What should we start really looking into focusing on doing because you’re a detox expert? You’re an expert on breast implant illness, so let’s talk about the women who do have breast implants first. So they have breast implants, you’ve now opened their eyes to the possibility that this may be putting a major stressor. They can’t pinpoint exactly, oh it’s definitely causing this, or it’s definitely causing that. They’re starting to hear all these things that it could be causing, now you’ve got their interest. What can we do to support their health?
[01:07:16] Sarah Phillipe: With regards to healing in any situation, with regards to any root cause, I think the very first step is removing the source. We can do a lot to support our body with good clean water, clean food, good nutrition, exercise movements, good sleep, and things like that, but without removing the source, we can never really truly heal.
Removing the source means getting the breast implants removed, and there’s a very specific way that needs to be done to protect you. So I would look for a surgeon who has lots and lots of experience with explants, ideally even a surgeon who no longer places breast implants because they’re more likely to believe what you’re going through is real, believe that the breast implants are a problem, and do everything in their power to remove them properly so that you have the best chance at recovering your health.
[01:08:23] Ashley James: When you say remove them properly should they also remove that scar tissue capsule the body has built around them?
[01:08:29] Sarah Phillipe: Yep, absolutely because within that matrix of the capsule is going to be a lot of the different toxins that are found in breast implants because they bleed into that capsule, and also biofilm, bacteria, maybe even mold, mycotoxins, and things like that. So really important to get that source out. That’s what I mean when I say properly is that ideally, it would be done on block which means that the implants on the capsule are removed together as one unit rather than cutting the capsule open and taking the implant out first. A lot of really reputable explant surgeons who’ve been doing this for years and years will be able to remove your implants on block.
The ones who say it’s not necessary or I’m not comfortable with that, I’ll probably look elsewhere because you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. It doesn’t even matter if it’s saline or silicone, especially with silicone, you don’t know if you have a rupture until you’re in there. With saline, you tend to have an idea because it’ll start shrinking, or it’ll just go flat. But you can have a slow leak and it can change in size a little bit but not significantly enough to notice.
You don’t want to have that capsule cut open and risk whatever contents are in there spilling out into your chest cavity and then getting into the lymphatic system and traveling throughout the body. So that’s why it’s important to have them removed on block so that we’re protecting you from that exposure. And then if they can’t be removed on block or if any speck of capsule is left behind, the surgeon should go in and remove every tiny piece of capsule that’s in there. Sometimes that means scraping the ribs, sometimes that means removing a little bit of your own tissue to get it out, but that’s an important piece.
Having any capsule left behind is just going to be a chronic source of immune stimulation. It’s a little bit harder to recover from. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible because I don’t like absolutes, but it’s definitely more challenging.
And then once the implants are out, once you give your body enough time to heal from that surgery, I think that’s important to allow your body to rest, recover, and heal from that generally for about a month. As long as there are no complications, no hematomas, no seromas, no infections, no wound dehiscence, and things like that. As long as everything heals properly, then about a month after that, you can start doing some work on detoxing your body, addressing infections, and things like that.
How I like to look at each unique person, and you could do this on your own, is I have people write me a self-narrative of their life from birth until now. It doesn’t have to be a long novel. It can be really a timeline of you plotting every different type of stressor you’ve encountered in life starting from birth. It can be physical, it can be chemical, it can be mental, emotional, it can be structural, it can be any type of stressor. I like to have people do that because it’s really helpful for me to be able to see how you got here, and then we can work backward with trying to figure out how we’re going to start incorporating some of these things into the plan for how we’re going to address them.
And then I always think that functional lab work is helpful to look for other hidden stressors because not only are there going to be downstream effects of having breast implants like different types of microbial imbalances and toxicity. There are also going to be potentially other different types of hidden stressors in the body that may be unrelated. Maybe you had some health issues prior to the breast implants going in. Maybe you had ulcerative colitis, SIBO, candida overgrowth, or things like that. Those things also have to be taken into consideration.
A lot of hidden things that people most people don’t think about or don’t even know exist to know to think about or look for are hidden infections in the jaw. If you’ve ever had any tooth pulled or a root canal, there is a significant chance that you have cavitation in the jaw, which is an infection in the jaw. That’s another source of low-grade chronic inflammation stimulating the immune system. We discuss to release their own toxins into your body that travel throughout the bloodstream. That can be one thing that keeps people sick. Amalgam fillings, silver fillings in the mouth—that’s another chronic source of toxic exposure.
We have to look for other sources beyond breast implants because it’s a cumulative effect. As far as healing goes, I think it’s important to always start with supporting the downstream detoxification pathways, which means you have to be pooping two to three times a day—that’s a priority. If you’re not pooping, you’re not detoxing. Dr. Jay Davidson talks about this a lot, you have to think about the detox pathways as a funnel. The bottom of the funnel is the gut. You need to be removing your bowels regularly, that’s waste, that’s toxic waste. The more it sits there, the more it’s going to be reabsorbed back into circulation.
The next above that is going to be your kidneys and liver and then your lymph above that. So if you’re someone who’s going out and getting lymphatic massages but you’re not pooping every day, how are those toxins going to get out? You’re probably going to feel a lot worse after a lymphatic massage. That’s the order of things and making sure those are well-supported and functioning the way that they should, proper hydration and minerals.
When the body is ready, I think you can start addressing more of the gut—working on balancing the gut. Whether that looks like just introducing probiotics that can help balance the gut or whether that looks like going after specific pathogens like parasites, fungal overgrowth, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth—whatever that looks like for you, it’s going to be different from person to person. But addressing the gut I think is a helpful place to start after that because when you get into deeper detox work, you’re going to be dumping toxins into the gut and that can be very irritating to the gut. We want the gut to be in a good place before we start doing that.
And then I think the next step—from my approach anyway—is oral chelation. Using true binders, strong binders that are able to get past the gut lining, get into your cells, and bind onto toxins strongly and long enough to be able to get them out of the body. So a lot of the binders that people are using out there, a lot of the time I see people using one product like a zeolite and nothing else. That’s their detox. If all you’re doing is using something like zeolite, yeah, that will bind toxins but you also have to think about the source.
Some zeolites are not tested for heavy metals, and that’s another source of toxic exposure to you because that’s a natural curator in the environment and so it can be contaminated and adding to the level of toxicity. And then if all you’re doing is binding and you’re not supporting other pathways, you’re going to burn out, you’re going to crash. You’re going to burn through your methyl groups, you’re going to burn through glutathione. That’s assuming that your detox pathways are open and working well.
[01:16:09] Ashley James: How do you test—as a practitioner—your clients’ detox pathways?
[01:16:16] Sarah Phillipe: It can be a little tricky to test for those things because we don’t have a really solid test that says, yes, you’re methylating really well or you’re glutathione stores are adequate. But I generally look at a comprehensive blood panel. There are some clues we can pick up on there about methylation and glutathione. I like the organic acids test as well. There are some clues there we can look at for methylation activity, glutathione, and things like that.
As far as kidneys and liver, you’re not going to see anything show up abnormal on blood work until there’s pathology, until there’s a disease, so you won’t usually see that. I generally go by just how someone is feeling overall. If they’re feeling unwell, generally speaking, the detox pathways are not well supported. They’re probably congested. Usually, once we start supporting those pathways, people feel quite a bit better pretty quickly just being able to eliminate things.
[01:17:28] Ashley James: So you’re listening to people instead of telling them it’s in their head, they need more sex. You’re listening to how they’re feeling, and that’s very important. That’s why I like going to naturopaths over medical doctors because naturopaths will look at the same labs but they have a totally different way of analyzing the labs.
If you go to an MD, you’re lucky to spend 15 minutes with them. If you go to a Naturopath—a good one, I mean there’s bound to be good and bad doctors out there regardless of whether holistic or not. Find a good Naturopath that’s been practicing for a long time, and they sit down with you to six for 60 to 90 minutes to go over your comprehensive labs. They’re looking for, are you out of optimal ranges, and how can we get you back in optimal ranges? So their sensitivity to the lab. So if they look at kidney function, they’re looking, are you even remotely nearing towards not optimal? The red warning bells are going to go off in their head if they see signs that you are even in low normal.
Whereas an MD is waiting for you to be so sick they can put you on a drug because they don’t have any other tools until you’re sick enough for them to give you a drug to “manage,” not cure your symptoms. Whereas going to a holistic practitioner like yourself, a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, going to a good Naturopathic physician have so many tools. They’ve got diet, herbs, lifestyle, all these things that scientifically are backed and proven to support the body to get back into optimal ranges. But we have to look at the labs differently. We have to look at them from the standpoint of are you in optimal health, are you creeping out of optimal health?
And then of course listen to the client and believe them when they say, I feel this way, I feel this way, I feel this way. Believe them and go, okay, and take that into account along with the labs for understanding the whole picture about the person. That’s why I like going to like yourself, a functional medicine practitioner or a Naturopath, that spends enough time with you that they can really get the full picture of what’s going on in your life and they can do that detective work.
I know almost every episode of my show, over 450 episodes, has been kind of a commercial for seeing holistic practitioners because I spent years beating my head against a wall seeing medical doctors just being given drug after drug and I was so sick. If I stayed in that world, if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I don’t even know if I’d be alive. But if I stayed in mainstream medicine, I’d still be on monthly antibiotics, I would still be infertile, my weight was out of control so I imagine I’d probably be one of those people on gurneys. My type 2 diabetes was completely out of control. I had really bad polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and adrenal exhaustion so bad I could barely function. It was getting worse and worse and worse, and that was in my 20s.
If I had stayed that way and kept seeing MDs, I would just keep getting worse and keep being put on more and more drugs. I don’t even know if I’d be here. I’m so grateful for holistic medicine and for just snapping out of it and going I reject this entire system. I will gladly go to an ER if I need emergency medicine like I have a broken arm or something, or I have an infection that I can’t handle. I would gladly go to an ER—allopathic, reductionistic medicine when they take you apart, look at your little organs, and don’t look at you as a whole. That is fantastic for saving your life if you’re in a state of life or death. That’s where they shine. I don’t want to go to a Naturopath if I have a broken bone that needs to be reset and put in a cast or whatever.
But when it comes to chronic illness, that system of medicine is causing more chronic illness than healing. It perpetuates chronic illness, and it also perpetuates the idea that if you have, for example, an autoimmune problem, you will always have it. I was told I’d always have diabetes. I was told I’d always have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I’m sure you were always told that you would have the conditions that they diagnosed you with. And all of our listeners who have been to enough MDs who have had enough health problems have been told, oh, it’s because of your genetics. You will always have this. Or it’s because of your age or because of whatever. They tell you with such hubris that you will always have this condition.
Here we have Sarah teaching us that you can go see her and she’s going to look at your labs in a different way. She’s going to listen to you, listen to your symptoms, and she’s going to help you completely change your lifestyle, your diet in a good way. Sometimes that’s a little overwhelming and scary for people, but holding your hand doing it. I’m a health coach so I know. I’m not going to throw the kitchen sink at you but get your body to the point where your body is so healthy you feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your life.
You can’t get that from MD medicine. You can’t get that from pharmaceutical-based medicine to feel the healthiest you’ve ever felt in your entire life from causing more toxins to the body. It all starts with the mindset, and I believe you talked about this before. It really does start with the mindset. We have to change our mindset, completely rewire our mindset to go into this new way of thinking. Believe the body can heal itself and then act accordingly.
[01:23:50] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah, absolutely. And I believe that the body was designed with this God-given innate intelligence to self-heal if we take responsibility for our health and take the actionable steps needed to get it back. That mindset component is so huge, and I think it even bleeds into how we think about our condition and how it happened.
With women with breast implants, I think this is so important because a lot of women with breast implants who are sick and they discover breast implant illness, the feelings—initially can become chronic—are of shame, guilt, regret, and then also anger towards the medical system. Why didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t I told? There’s a lot of anger towards doctors and the medical model, and I think that’s not a healing mindset. We have to get out of the victim mentality in order to heal.
[01:24:59] Ashley James: I think it’s good to bring that up. I think it’s good to address. Anger, if held on to, is toxic. But anger that is processed is healthy because if we bury it, we don’t process it, or if we just try to stick it somewhere without really processing, working through it, healing it, that’s also holding on to a toxin. I know because that was me. But actually facing the anger, being with it because there are two forms of anger. You can take a negative emotion, it’s a negative emotion about the past.
For every time you’ve been hurt by someone you felt angry about it, that’s a gestalt in your neurology that you’re holding on to. That’s a chain of all of the events from your past, and that’s incredibly toxic because that gets reanimated inside our neurology every time we relive something that brings up anger. But anger in the moment about something that’s happening, let’s say, to us which I understand I don’t want to go into victim mode either, but something that’s happening that is violating our boundaries.
Anger is our body and our mind’s way of saying my boundaries are being violated. You got to do something about it. And if we take action to stop our boundaries from being violated and then process the anger, work through it, heal it, release it, and don’t hold on to it, don’t stay in it, but acknowledge it. Acknowledge, yes, my boundaries are being violated.
Once we take action towards not allowing our boundaries to be violated like firing the MDs that no longer help you and hiring new doctors and new practitioners that are going to serve you. That is an actionable step because if you’re staying in victim mode, you’re going to stay with your captors, you’re going to stay with the people who victimized you. But taking all the actions to ensure that your boundaries are healthfully enforced. When anger comes up go ask yourself, is this anger because my boundaries have been violated, or is it anger from the past? And work through it.
Getting to that point, I think anger is healthy when it allows us to see that we have been down a path that’s hurt us, and now we’re seeing all the things that did hurt us. As long as we can go, okay, I’m going to enforce my communication, my boundaries, my research, everything. My mindset is now shifting. I am asserting myself, I am advocating for myself, and I will only put medical professionals on my team that is in alignment with my values and my boundaries, and just acknowledging that that anger was a motivation to get you there.
But don’t stay in it. Don’t say in victim mode because like you said, that shame, guilt, and that anger—we turn it inwards and start beating ourselves up, why did I do this to myself? Why did I let this happen to me? That is really unhealthy, so we have to let it go. I love that you’re acknowledging that because I think there’s so much emotional process work we have to do if we’re coming to terms with a choice we made in our past that has led us down this really negative route and now we’re looking to reverse it. So we also have to reverse and heal all the emotions associated with it.
And then what about everything that led up to a woman choosing breast implants? I know it’s unique for each woman, and I don’t have breast implants so I can only imagine that for me to choose to get breast implants, I would have had such an insecurity—and this was just me, I’m not saying all women—that I needed to get them so that I would stop feeling that way about myself. Do you also look at that and look at what happened emotionally that had you want to get them, and is there anything to heal there?
[01:29:11] Sarah Phillipe: Certainly. I think there’s a lot of reasons why people get breast implants, and it’s not always vanity. For some people, it is a decision after having a mastectomy from breast cancer. For other people, they went in to have a lift after they were done having children and the doctor convinced them that they needed to have breast implants.
[01:29:37] Ashley James: Good salesmen. He had a boat payment.
[01:29:42] Sarah Phillipe: And then for other people, they were like me and just really had a lot of insecurity. The breast implants made them feel a lot more beautiful, sexy, or worthy. I think there’s a lot to think about, and I think it really just takes doing a bit of digging, reflecting, and processing everything that has happened. I really don’t think that this kind of thing happens to us. I really think that it happens for us. Personally, I can’t speak for everyone but for me, I really feel like I went through this partially to really discover who I really am inside as a person, as a human being beyond just the physical appearance. There’s so much growth that happened as a result of that, and I will say I’m probably not the same person that I was 10 years ago.
Secondly, I think it really has taught me how I should be living just to maintain my health, to keep my health for life and rather than just struggle through life with a lot of symptoms and bounce around from doctor to doctor, this surgery and that surgery, and all these different prescriptions like most Americans. But it taught me how I should be living in order to really live a healthful vibrant life full of joy that we deserve.
I think that we can take this experience and really learn a lot about ourselves, about who we are, and about how we should be living. It can be a positive experience once we can get to that place of going through those emotions of whether it be anger, sadness, regret, shame, or whatever, and acknowledging those things, and then letting them go, moving on, moving forward, and not looking back. Continuing to take the next right step each day towards your future.
[01:31:51] Ashley James: I’m sure you’ve been asked this, is there a safe alternative to breast implants? Wave your magic wand.
[01:32:02] Sarah Phillipe: I’m sure they’re working on those things as we speak just based on the uproar that’s going on with women right now with regards to breast implants and how they’ve contributed to poor health. So I know there are probably things in the work that we don’t know about, but one other thing that I do know is there is always the option of having a fat graft. There are a couple of different techniques that I know of. One is a fat flap technique basically where they take fat from underneath the armpit or potentially underneath the breast and rotate it around to make a breast out of it.
I think that’s a great option, however, with regards to breast cancer patients, I don’t know if that’s a safe option. We don’t have any long-term studies showing that that’s safe. And then there’s liposuction with fat transfer to the breasts. That also has its own wrists. It’s an aggressive surgery. The cannula that they use—if you’ve ever seen a video of liposuction, it’s pretty darn aggressive and it’s superficial layers that they’re working with. How much does that disrupt the lymphatic system, how much is that impacting your ability to detoxify and remove waste products, and how and how much is that impacting your ability to get nutrients to the cells?
I think that there are an upside and a downside to any option. Personally, I will say, I did have liposuction with fat transfer at the time of explant. Had I known now what I didn’t know then about lymphatic and how it really can impact the lymphatic system, I probably would have made a different decision. It didn’t really even stick for me, so my breasts are pretty much the same size they were as before I had my implants placed. That’s the other downside of it is that you don’t know if it’s going to stick because once you remove the blood supply of the fat, the fat dies. So whether or not it reestablishes the blood supply quickly enough in its new place is a whole nother story.
So I’ve just gotten to a place where I’ve learned to love and accept myself for how I was created, and see the beauty in that. So that’s my hope for most people so that we stop trying to alter our appearance and realizing that you are beautiful just the way you are, and you don’t need to alter your body to be beautiful.
[01:34:37] Ashley James: Yeah. Do the emotional work to get to the point where you love your body. You love every square inch of it. There’s no such thing as perfection. There’s so much healing to take place. Look at what a damaging society it is that as girls growing up, we are developing these belief systems about what we should look like. This is not a new discussion. If we look at fashion through history, we can see that we have been subjected to basically being cattle for men but also for society and for other women for the acceptance of society. How we appear externally is going to determine whether we’re accepted or not. This is of course the mind of a child, the mind of a little girl analyzing the world.
I believe that at our core, we have this need to be accepted because that’s part of how we survived, however long we’ve been here. Thousands upon thousands of years, we are a tribal people, and if you got exiled from the tribe, that was death. Being part of the tribe and being accepted and loved, and the first acceptance is being accepted into your family when you’re born. Feeling as part of a family, then part of a community, part of a school system, part of a church system, or whatever you are in growing up. If you are bullied, if you are judged, if you are pushed aside, if you’re feeling unworthy, unloved—all these things are processed in the mind of a girl growing up thinking that her physical appearance played a role in the rejection, and the hurt and the trauma from that.
If only I put on makeup, do my hair, and look as sexy as I can, and spend all of my waking moments up making myself look good and appear nice, then I will be accepted. This is what the media tells us. Really, the most beautiful thing about a woman is true confidence. You kind of get to that point, I’m 40 now. Somewhere around 35, 36, right after I gave birth I kind of went screw this. I am not playing this game. I’m living for me. I’m living for my loved ones. I’m not living to look good for anyone. I’ve lost shallow friends over it, great. I’ve made some deeper friends because of it.
I know that there are women who are in industries where they have to look good in order to get a raise, in order to get a promotion. This is the sad part about society, but we need to analyze how we grew up, analyze the world and realize that we internalized this idea that our looks need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted, and then we do something like give ourselves implants or do plastic surgery causing further harm.
I love that right at the beginning of the show, you brought up that this is as much of a physical healing journey as it is in a mental and emotional one, and to work on all aspects of it.
[01:38:29] Sarah Phillipe: Right. Women today, young girls today, gosh, I would hate to have grown up in today’s world as a younger girl. When we were young we had magazines, billboards, commercials, movies, and things like that. But now, everywhere you look it’s in your face all over social media. Having a constant connection to social media the way people do today is a recipe for disaster for young girls. We’re in the midst of this body positivity movement and loving and accepting all different shapes and sizes. But at the same time, we have that message, we have the other side of a different message, which leads us to do all of the things that we do that leads us to have our eyebrows tattooed on our face and have eyelash extensions, get breast implants, get Botox, get lip injections, get cheek implants, chin implants, and butt implants. We’re trying to create this body or this look that doesn’t really exist in real life naturally.
[01:39:47] Ashley James: Right, and Hollywood and the media have done us no justice. I read an article recently, really interesting about young children. It was doing a cross-section of the young children who are questioning whether they were born in the right body. What I found interesting—and I really didn’t know this because I thought maybe just from what we see in the media—that it’s more skewed towards boys wanting to be girls. But in fact, the statistic was something crazy like closer to 90% of these children were girls who felt more like they were boys. They’re all in the questioning phase, but no wonder. No wonder In this world where we have to achieve this level of perfection.
If I was a girl now, I’d rather be a boy than have to live up to this idea of what it looks like to be a woman. It’s a total false, it’s made up, it’s not real. That’s not what it is to be a woman. But it just seems a lot safer, it just looks a lot easier to live life as a boy, right? No wonder there’s so much confusion. The way society is, the way the media is, the way social media is, we’re making it impossible for women to feel comfortable in their own skin, unless they do their own work. Unless they go within, they reject the external input, and they go with it and they love who they are on the inside, how they were born, and just be with themselves. Instead of trying to change who they are, just go within and do the emotional work.
I just thought that it was really interesting that this level of confusion like very young children. I see that it makes sense that we’re trying to falsify what it is to really be a woman. Not us but the media making it very confusing.
I love the work that you do. You’re exposing something that allows us to analyze our entire life and our body image, and then support ourselves on a level of detox, emotionally and physically. So tell us about how people can work with you. What does it look like to work with you as a practitioner? Obviously, you do it through Zoom or Skype. What does it look like to work with you?
[01:42:33] Sarah Phillipe: I’ve worked with women all over the world, and that’s really thanks to technology today. The women that I’ve worked with, it’s always been one-on-one. We work together for a minimum of six months. It really involves teaching women the tools that they need to heal themselves, and I think that’s really empowering because you can take that information and use it to help your family and keep your family healthy. So it’s not just about how it’s helping or impacting you, it’s about even the next generation. Teaching people how they should be living for a healthy body and a healthy life.
Once dysfunction has occurred, how to restore function. What things we need to look into, what things we should address and what order, how to go about it, and all of that. I’m teaching women these things. I’m not doing the work for them. I can give someone the best plan in the world, but if they can’t implement it or if they’re not able to implement it, then they’re not going to get well. I think education is the most valuable thing because they can use that information for the rest of their lives.
Soon, mid-year or so, probably around June, I’ll be shifting how I work with women and it’s going to be done in a group setting. We’ll be doing an online group program.
[01:44:02] Ashley James: That’s great.
[01:44:04] Sarah Phillipe: It’ll still be the same exact thing that I do now, it’ll just be in a group and a lot more connection and shared experience. I think that’ll be really valuable for people to go through things like this together. Because a lot of women who are going through this don’t feel like anyone really understands them. No one understands, no one gets it, people think I’m crazy, people don’t believe me. This is really great to connect with other women who are going through it at the same time that you are and be able to connect on that level and have that shared experience. Know that there are other people that you can talk to that get it and that understand what you’re going through. That’s what I’m working on putting together now. It’s basically my brain in an online program.
[01:44:48] Ashley James: I love it. Would people still be able to like do labs with you and get a consult?
[01:44:53] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. The way I’m setting it up is we’ll have weekly or bi-weekly group calls and then there will be an option to have a one-on-one call scheduled with me.
[01:45:06] Ashley James: Great. Awesome. Is there anything else that people or women should know? I mean, men can get implants too. I was surprised that there are calf implants for men because they’ll work out in the gym forever but they don’t get that definition of their calf that they really wanted, and so they’ll get basically the silicone implants or something put in their calves to make them look more muscular. There would be a percentage of men that would be experiencing all these same issues but to male physiology. Is there anything else though that future students and clients should know when it comes to working with you about this program?
[01:45:51] Sarah Phillipe: One thing that I’m always telling potential clients is that you have to be mentally and emotionally mindset-wise prepared for the work. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes because usually, the people that come to me are the people who’ve gone from doctor to doctor to doctor, no one has been able to help them, and I’m kind of like their last resort. I ask a lot of my clients. It’s not always easy. There’s going to be bumps in the road. Healing is never a straight path, so you have to expect that it’s going to be challenging and it’s going to sometimes require that you step outside of your comfort zone because the way that we heal the body is not the way that you’ve been taught by modern medicine.
[01:46:47] Ashley James: And when you have those bumps in the road that’s feedback, that’s actually good. When you feel bad that’s good because you bring that to Sarah and then she goes, oh okay, then we need to make these tweaks. She understands, but you have to be vocal about how you’re feeling.
That’s something that happened to me. I was doing methylcobalamin injections back in December. My B12 plummeted and then my iron plummeted as a result during the pregnancy, and so I took some methylcobalamin injections. I was feeling great for the first three injections, I was amazing. It was like two a week. I was like, oh wow, I feel normal again. I feel good. This is great.
And then about two or three weeks into the injections, they would make it so I was totally out for the whole day. I was in bed. I’m like, what is going on? I talked to my midwife who’s amazing. Absolutely amazing, she’s been my midwife for over 20 years. She looks at me and she goes well, Dr. Ben Lynch, and I’ve had him on the show by the way so I was just really impressed that she starts off by quoting him. “Well, Dr. Ben Lynch says that methylcobalamin shares the same pathways as insulin, and if you don’t need any more methylcobalamin, then it’s actually reducing your capacity for your body to use the insulin.” She’s going on and on about all the pathways and I’m looking at her like I should have you on the show.
So she told me, okay, I want you to do this instead. I went from I felt good but then I started feeling really bad, then she adjusted it, and I felt even better. That’s the thing is you have to be in communication with your practitioner. The practitioner—a good one like Sarah—who knows what to do with that information.
So yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also then on the other side of the challenges is incredible rewards. But they have to be willing to put the work in. If you say stop eating gluten, they have to stop eating gluten. Or if you say you have to stop eating sugar, you have to stop drinking coffee, or whatever like some vices. You probably are going to have to give up some vices, but on the other side of it is how much do you want that amazing health, that vitality?
[01:48:55] Sarah Phillipe: Exactly, and I think that leads to another really important point is that people need to have a strong enough why. They really need to get in tune, in touch with their why. What is the reason that you want to get your health back? What’s the reason you want to work together? When someone says because I want to be healthy, that’s not a why. Why do you want to be healthy? What is the driving force that keeps you motivated to take the next right step each day in your healing journey? What do you want to be doing with your life that you are not able to currently do because of your symptoms, because of how much you’re struggling?
For most people, it’s a struggle just to get out of bed every day. All the other things that they want to be doing with their life they’re not doing.
[01:49:43] Ashley James: Yeah, and the guilt and the shame that builds up from that. I want to live a life free of guilt and shame and be able to get out of bed. You’re like, yeah. Okay, great. Now do everything I tell you to do.
[01:50:00] Sarah Phillipe: Yeah. So I think that’s important because it keeps you motivated even when things get hard.
[01:50:05] Ashley James: Absolutely. Sarah, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is reversingbreastimplantillness.com. Are there any resources you want to send us to or homework you’d like to leave us with to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:50:27] Sarah Phillipe: Well, I have one resource that I find really valuable. It’s something that I use with all of my clients to just assess where they’re at and assess progress. It’s my neurotoxic questionnaire. It’s divided up into four different categories, each of them looking at a different type of toxicity. The first section looks at heavy metals, the second section looks at symptoms connected to general chemical toxins, the third category looks at some connected biotoxins and mycotoxins. Those are toxins that come from living organisms like mold, bad bacteria, parasites, and things like that. And then the fourth category is looking at symptoms that are connected to a combination of heavy metals and general chemical toxins. That’s really helpful.
And then your total score you can look at where you fall into the range of mild, moderate, or severe neurotoxicity, which is important in determining whether it may be the thing that helps you make the decision to explant, or it may help you assess that even after explant you have some work to do. And then it helps you reassess progress as you go through your journey.
[01:51:44] Ashley James: How can they find that?
[01:51:46] Sarah Phillipe: I can share that link with you to share with your audience, or you can also find it on my website.
[01:51:55] Ashley James: Awesome. I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you Sarah for being on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure, and I’d love for you to come back when new exciting information comes out about breast implant illness. You’re welcome. I know you’ve got your ear to the ground. When really interesting stuff comes out that we all need to learn more about, please come back on the show.
[01:52:27] Sarah Phillipe: Of course, I’d be happy to, and thank you so much for having me, Ashley. It was such a pleasure and I really enjoyed our conversation.
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Recommended Reading by Sarah PhillipeYou Are the Placebo by Joe Dispenza
https://reversingbreastimplantillness.com
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Contact Dr. Vienna Lafrenz www.natural-therapeutics.com
The Windows to True Health: Iridology and Tongue Readinghttps://www.learntruehealth.com/the-windows-to-true-health-iridology-and-tongue-reading
Highlights:
What is Iridology What to look for in the eyes Benefits of fasting What to check in the tongue Heal the child from childhood trauma to heal the adultDr. Vienna Lafrenz is a wealth of information. She’s back on the show to share even more information to improve our health. Dr. Vienna talks about looking and checking our eyes and tongue as an indicator of how healthy we are. She also shares how she was able to change the taste of food by collecting saliva on the seeds before sowing.
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. Dr. Vienna and I had such a great time going back and forth discussing some very interesting topics that you may not have learned about or dove into, or maybe you’ve heard of it but you really haven’t heard about it from this angle. So you’re going to learn more about how you can analyze your own body in order to help direct what you’re doing with your health. It’s all very, very, very interesting stuff.
As you’re listening to this interview and as you listen to all my interviews, if you think to yourself you would love to do what I do—you’d love to become a health coach—please check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Just google IIN and give them a call. You can also go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach, and there you get a free module from IIN that will allow you to see if it’s something that’s right for you.
Now, I’ve interviewed the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and I’ve also interviewed their most recent CEO. Both interviews are fascinating and I’ve had actually several graduates on and several of their professors or teachers on as well. So you can go back and listen to all my interviews with those folks. You can always search my website, learntruehealth.com, to find episodes.
What I have found fascinating about IIN is that about 50%—it was something like 54%, it was very close to 50%—of students that choose to do the year-long health coach training program have no intention of becoming a health coach but want to do it for their own personal growth. Going into it, I wanted to add this tool to my tool belt. I was already in the health coaching space, to begin with. I’ve been doing coaching for years, and I wanted to just continue to learn and grow as you as a listener continue to want to learn and grow that’s why you’re here. You’re here to listen, learn, and grow.
What I found through the program is I did receive a lot of personal growth. All the work that you learn to do with your clients you do with yourself as well as you go through the program, so that was very gratifying. That was very rewarding.
So if you’re someone who just really loves personal growth or you’ve just decided it’s the beginning of a new year and you go, I’m ready. I’m ready to take my life to the next level. I’m not satisfied with certain areas of my life. I want more joy and vitality in certain areas of my life, then you might want to just do the program for your own personal growth. You’ll be getting great tools in your tool belt for yourself, your communication skills. It’ll improve your relationships. It’ll improve your relationship with your own body, your health, your spirituality, and your level of joy and vitality. So go ahead, check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach and just get the free module. See if it’s right for you.
Now, I did negotiate with IIN that all my listeners get a fantastic deal, and I know that in the month of February they were running a special. They might still be running it so you can give them a call and check that out. But they give us always—they always give the Learn True Health listeners—an extra special deal, so make sure you mention my name Ashley James and Learn True Health podcast to get that special deal. They do have a payment plan. So if you’re someone like me, I did the payment plan. It’s like a credit card payment basically every month.
What was really interesting is when I enrolled, the woman who helped me enroll who, by the way, when you call them, everyone that answers the phone has been through the program as a health coach themselves and can really help you better understand the program and there’s no pressure. It’s not like a sales pitch. It’s just people genuinely wanting to help. What I thought was really interesting is they encourage you. They said the best graduates pay it off completely before they have finished the program because, for those who choose to be a health coach and want to do this as a career or add to their career in the health space, it’s a year-long program. After the first six months, you begin to take on clients. You can actually have it all paid off by the time you have graduated and have a successful health coach business up and running.
Now, if you do want to do IIN, you heard about it through me but you have questions or you’d love a bit of mentorship, I’m absolutely here for you. Please feel free to give me an email, [email protected], or you can reach out to me on Facebook. We have our great Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. Reach out to me. I’d love to support you in your success. The world needs more health coaches right now. The world needs more holistic-minded practitioners right now.
What’s great is IIN is a stepping stone. You can go with that. You can go into focusing on functional medicine in terms of hormones, fertility, more mental and emotional health. There are so many different avenues that you can go, sports medicine. There are health coaches now that are being hired by insurance companies, hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices, or you can work independently like me. So the sky’s the limit. That’s really exciting. So go check it out. IIN, google it, give them a call, see if it’s right for you. But definitely get the free module by going to learntruehealth.com/coach.
Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. I constantly hear from new listeners who say that their friends or family have turned them on to this. For new listeners, welcome. It’s very exciting.
Now we’re about to reach our—is it our four-year anniversary? Has that time just flown? I can’t believe it. We launched in March of 2016, and so we’re approaching our anniversary which is really exciting. We’ve helped millions of people through all the downloads. Help them to get better health, and that’s my goal is to help you to achieve the true health that you’re seeking.
If practitioners or doctors have told you what you have is genetic, what you have is because of your age, because of your sex, or because of whatever, and you’ll always have it, you have to be on some drug for the rest of your life. If you’ve just been put in a box and told that you’ll always be sick, you’ll always feel this way, please find a new practitioner. Keep listening to this podcast.
I was told that I’d never have kids. I was told that I would be diabetic for the rest of my life. I was told that I’d be sick for the rest of my life, and I finally broke away from all those MDs who kept me in a box, who wanted to just keep me medicated, who didn’t have answers for my true health. I went and I sought natural medicine. Through my journey of health, I was able to recover all those diseases, and now this is why I do what I do is to help you do the same.
So if you have any friends or family in your life who suffer needlessly and don’t want to suffer anymore, they want to put the work into their body to heal—even if they’ve been told they’ll always have that condition and they want to get to be as healthy as they can possibly be—keep listening, keep sharing. We’re going to get you there. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s a very supportive community to help everyone achieve true health.
[00:07:30] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 456. I am so excited for today’s returning guest. We have Dr. Vienna Lafrenz on. Vienna, you were on episode 450, so not too long ago. Many listeners have contacted you to work with you, and you have had some really great experiences with our listeners.
This is the common thing. So I’m letting all you guys know—all the listeners know—that I’ve had other guests reach out to me. I hear from many people, including Vienna, that the listeners of the Learn True Health podcast are just simply amazing, wonderful people. This is something I commonly hear. I’ve never heard a guest complain about when a listener contacting them, let’s just put it that way. We’re all in good company here.
Vienna, today we’re going to continue our discussion, which I’m really looking forward to because where we left it off last time was you were going to teach us how to assess our tongue. So we could look in the mirror and we can learn more about our health, and that’s really exciting. Also, get into a bit of your iridology.
Since we had you on the show, your clinic—you work with people remotely around the world but you also have a physical clinic. You moved to Republic, Washington and you’re in a beautiful space there. So if anyone lives near the Okanagan Valley or in the Okanagan Valley, they can come to see you in person, which is really exciting. Congratulations on the move of your clinic. Natural-therapeutics.com is Vienna’s website.
Now, just to preface, for the listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, Vienna lives on a mountain with six feet of snow in Washington and she’s on satellite internet. So sometimes it may sound like we’re talking over each other, that’s because there is a delay on the line. So we’re not trying to talk over each other, but we’re going to do our best. We had a wonderful discussion last time, and we’re going to continue that great discussion this time. Welcome back to the show.
[00:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, and I do have to say, the listeners that you have on your show are so amazing. They all have the same interest at heart, and that is to get their best health possible in the best means there is. It’s wonderful. They implement things, they follow through them. It’s wonderful.
[00:10:06] Ashley James: Right. Now, for listeners who didn’t hear episode 450, I urge you to go back. I mean, you can listen to them out of order. You could listen to this one and then go back to 450. But I have to tell you, there is a story about a woman who had parasites crawling out of her body, literally running away from this woman’s body because the type of work that Vienna does makes parasites not even want to be in your body. So if you geek out on that kind of stuff like I do, you’re going to want to definitely work with Vienna and absolutely listen to episode 450 as well.
Today we might get into some really cool stuff, probably not as gross as that, although I’m not grossed out by it. I think it’s awesome because if there’s something you can do naturally that has no negative side effects, it makes parasites not want to live in your body anymore, sign me up. Before we talk about tongue assessment, which I think is so interesting, since we had you on the show, you worked with several of our listeners. And without obviously disclosing their identities or their names, are there any stories of success that you want to share with us?
[00:11:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh, absolutely. So I have several actually. One in particular that really stands out is a person who had 20 years’ worth of chronic pain—daily, daily, daily pain. And with that, of course, the cognitive issues with it because as we know, the brain shrinks with as many years of pain that there is, which is reversible of course. But this person was having a ton of brain fog, memory losses, and forgetting people’s names, even for getting phone numbers of relatives and such. But the chronic pain was the biggest thing where there was no joy anymore. Basically waking up every morning thinking okay, what am I going to deal with today?
As we started working on the biofeedback, identifying some of the areas where the pain was coming from, and truly finding the source of where the pain was coming from—not just the symptoms, just the side effects, or the emotional component, but truly finding the root cause of where the pain came from—was actually a nerve. As we did the biofeedback on nerves and worked on different pathways, neuropathies, and things like that, the pain went away to the point where this person was originally going to go in for surgery. But because of COVID and the fear of going into hospitals right now or whatever, or even just the availability of getting surgery right now, they were so far down the list that basically said okay let’s just do it one more time. Let’s try one more thing and really good results. That’s one big thing. Also got them back into dancing, which was really fun and phenomenal.
The second thing would be digestion. Digestion is a big thing with many of my clients. Not understanding why their body is not responding very well to different types of diets, cleanses, detoxification, or things like that. And then seeing it manifest in the skin. So I’ve had about three to four of your listeners call me about digestive issues, and again finding the root cause behind what is causing this digestive issue including allergies—unbeknownst allergies or symptomologies of allergies that are showing up, and being able to implement some of the food back into their diets that they had been craving and missing for so long.
So really just finding out the digestive process and what’s going on, and of course, the constipation that goes with that. I had two that were maybe having a bowel movement once a week, which of course was a big concern for me. Once we got started, it’s now regular.
[00:14:16] Ashley James: Can you specify what regular is? Because people sometimes think once every three days is regular.
[00:14:21] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, exactly. And they say, oh, I’ve had this constitution my whole life. That is not regular. If you work in any kind of hospital or nursing home, if somebody doesn’t go for three days, that’s a sentinel event where there’s something wrong and they could land in the hospital. Regular means if you have three meals a day, you should be having about three bowel movements a day, and that has to do with the amount of transit time that it goes to the digestive process.
From the mouth to the anus is the transit time. And so if it’s taking two days to digest food, there’s something going on within the digestive system. It could be anything related to a virus, bacteria, slow peristalsis of the intestines that could be leading to that, even just toxicity. It could be parasites. It could be a lot of different things. Yeah, enzymes.
[00:15:15] Ashley James: Not enough fiber, lack of minerals.
[00:15:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, the types of foods, the chemicals that are in our foods. If there’s a lot of prefabricated foods that you’re eating where it’s not raw, live foods.
[00:15:32] Ashley James: I love that, pre-fabricated foods. I’ve never heard it put that way. That makes you think that there are microplastics in the food. It’s been pre-fabricated.
[00:15:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, isn’t there?
[00:15:47] Ashley James: Oh, absolutely. Just this week an article came out that said that for the first time ever, they’ve discovered microplastics in the placenta of babies. I mean, this is really sad. This is really sad. So the more factory food we eat, the more microplastics we’re consuming. There are microplastics in the ocean right now, so when we consume fish we’re consuming microplastics. Like you said, if you focus on foods that are whole, living, alive, like something I can identify—there’s an apple, there’s broccoli—you’re less likely to eat prefabricated foods with microplastics and chemicals. I love that saying. That’s great.
[00:16:33] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: They’re even finding plastic in white rice. It’s pretty crazy. So you just have to be really careful about the types of food you eat. If you think about it, we’re 99.99999% energy. So the foods that we consume should have a high level of energy in them.
[00:16:52] Ashley James: You just said something that I really, really want to touch on. You just said that we’re almost 100% energy. People go, well, over 70% water, what do you mean? Can you just elaborate? From the standpoint of physics, chemistry, and quantum physics, why are we almost 100% energy?
[00:17:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it. So, we’re 99.99% energy and 0.001% matter. So what that means is what do you think transports the lymphatics, the blood, the water? That we’re 75% to 85% water—what do you think transports that? Energy. So the heart can conducts energy to the blood, to the water, to the lymphatic system. It gets it to move. The environment that we’re in, our whole auric being surrounding us is all energy. The physical part is really just the sack that we reside in, which is a meat suit comprised of skin, comprised of bone. But even that has energy in it as well.
When you think about it, the whole body is comprised of energy—from the organs, how they emit energy, how they respond to energy, as well as the blood, the lymphatics, the brain. The brain, yes, has this spongy type of gelatinous fibers within the skull, but it is also energy as well. It needs energy to conduct all the neurons, the fibers, and the hormones that are going from one organ to another. It’s all being done by energy. If you think about the meridians, the chakras, those are all energy vessels that that move the energy from one location to another and can be so influenced from the outside world to the inside world to the emotions to everything—that it’s all energy.
[00:18:58] Ashley James: I was really surprised when you did the quantum biofeedback machine on me remotely back in February, so 2020. I was sick as a dog, in bed, gasping for air, with a fever, sore throat. I mean, you could say all the symptoms of COVID, although, at the time, I know a lot of people in the Seattle area that all had these same symptoms but no one knew what COVID was. My Naturopath diagnosed me with strep throat, although I think I’m just one of those people that will always test positive for strep throat no matter what. I’m a strep carrier. It’s like, okay, but strep throat doesn’t normally do all these other things.
So I’m lying in bed and I’m really suffering. You did quantum biofeedback with me, and I felt it so much so that within the three-hour session—I fell asleep during the session, I woke up and my suffering had ended. The fever broke. I could breathe again. It took me a few days to recover. It was a really bad sickness I was going through, but I was on all kinds of supplements and stuff like that for my Naturopath. What I just noticed is how quickly things turned around.
Similar to my son going through the same energy work, I could feel it. I was in the same room as him because we did it in person with you and I could feel it. What’s described to me is that the mom always has an energetic cord-like umbilical cord attached to our children. As he was getting the treatment, I could feel it. The second you turned on the machine, I didn’t know when you had turned it on. I don’t know how this machine works. I’m just sitting in the room and all of a sudden I felt like I was being electrocuted but in a good way. I don’t know how to describe it any other way other than like my body was buzzing in a very odd way. I’m like, “Okay, is it on now?” And you’re, “Yup, the program’s running. We’re doing it.” And I can feel it.
That we can do something with energy remotely, with an intelligence and an intention for healing on such a deep and specific level is phenomenal. It’s just amazing. And since learning more about it from you, I’ve heard from a few other practitioners who are deep into this kind of work and they all have a very similar experience.
We’re raised in society to believe that most people—it’s almost like atheism when it comes to the medical realm in terms of not believing that anything—if you can’t see it, if you can’t measure it in a lab with blood work, if you can’t see it on an ultrasound, an MRI, or blood work it doesn’t exist. MDs, if you go and tell them symptoms but they can’t find proof of those symptoms, a lot of times MDs will say you should go to a psychologist. It’s all in your head. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we can’t measure it, so it doesn’t exist. There’s this entire realm that’s missing.
Whether you get into spirituality, religion, or energy work, we can’t ignore the fact that we are almost 100% made up of energy and thus we would be affected by energy. To bring it back to your point—which is what you were saying is we’re made up of almost 100% energy—of course, the foods we eat would not just only affect our physical health, of course, they’d affect our energetic health as well. The energy transfers—the heart does, the brain does—because when we eat foods that are alive, that have energy in it as opposed to prefabricated factory foods, which are very low-frequency foods, it just makes so much sense, right?
So when we’re eating, we’re consuming energy. But more than just calories, we’re consuming the living energy of that plant, which is actually measurable. I’ve had episodes about that where there are scientists that can measure the frequency of plants versus dead meat, for example, and that we receive a lot more frequency and energy from plants.
So this idea that we can raise our vibration, that we can heal digestion, that we can heal emotional health and physical health by focusing on energy and frequency very specifically is in our diet but also with the therapies that you provide, it’s phenomenal, and this is something that’s so missing from the medical world because the medical world is blind to it. That’s really sad, but this is why we’re listening to you and this is why we’re here learning about this work, so I’m really excited.
If I sound out of breath, it’s because the baby is pushing on my diaphragm right now. I feel like I’m just running a marathon just talking. I’m 31 weeks pregnant and the baby has taken up the entire breadth of my diaphragm. I apologize if I sound out of breath, but I’m quite happy with the baby kicking my diaphragm at the moment.
How did you help? So was there was a listener who was having digestive problems and only having a bowel movement once a week, which is really scary. What happened after they worked with you?
[00:24:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay, one of the first things we always ask during our sessions is okay, tell me about your bowel movements, how are they looking? And of course, many are a little skeptical at first and not really open to talking about that as openly as I am. And then after a while, they get to be very open about it because now they can have something to look forward to. When I see that they started having bowel movements on a regular basis meaning at least first thing in the morning they may be having one or two bowel movements.
So this person went from one bowel movement a week to now three bowel movements in a day and takes the time to really look at it and say oh, wow, look at the color. Look at the texture, that it doesn’t sink. It’s right in the center. It’s one whole form. I mean, they really break it down for me, which is nice. That tells me that they’re integrating the information that they’re learning, and they actually see the value of their digestive process and how important it is to tell you exactly what’s going on based on how it looks. So that’s been fascinating.
Just the fact that they’re realizing that they don’t have to wait a week to have a bowel movement, that they’re having one every day, and then how good they feel. They feel lighter, they feel more energetic, they’re not as depleted. That’s the amazing part. But to go back to when you were talking about how you felt as a parent as the receiver while I was working on your son is one thing that also helps with the quantum biofeedback is the energy of the person receiving it—how open they are.
I have huge results with people who are empathic, that are very open to energy, that are very receptive to it, that also understand it. If you have somebody that’s very closed to situations, to information, very guarded, they may not do as well until they actually start to feel it. But there’s also an in vitro aspect of it to where as a mother, you could be a surrogate for your son while I’m working on him because of that perinatal connection that you make during the time that he was in your womb. That connection will never go away as I’m sure you’ve already seen that already. That’s why you responded so well is that you are an energetic person, an energetic being, and so your body just craves energy healing, which is exactly what this biofeedback does.
[00:27:31] Ashley James: I was really skeptical. I like to say on my show I’m the most open-minded skeptic. I guess I just don’t want to be sold snake oil. Does that make sense? But I also don’t want to close myself off from the amazing possibilities out there because, in my heart, I’ve always believed that our Creator—in whatever way you see God—is this amazing scientist.
I think science is our way of understanding God better because when you look at, when you really, really, really study, for example, single-cell organisms. Just really go and look at YouTube videos of single-cell protozoa swimming, and there are some videos where the microscopes go to the point where you can see the mechanics because these things are almost see-through. You could see the mechanics of their tails, and it’s like a machine. It’s an intricate complex machine, and yet it’s a single-cell organism that can propel itself through fluid and respond to stimulus. How in the world does this incredibly complex, intricate, and beautiful single-cell life form just happen? Because chemicals and explosions occurred billions of years ago. It’s just this idea. So for me, it’s never sat well this idea that everything happened randomly. I really feel that there’s so much to this world we don’t even understand.
The fact that we can use energy work to heal, and you can use it on children who don’t understand. My son didn’t know what was going on, so you can’t call it a placebo effect when he had results. You can’t call it a placebo effect when homeopathy helps newborn babies and pets. How is that a placebo effect? The reason why I bring up homeopathy is it sort of goes in the same category as energy medicine because it’s not molecular medicine, it’s energy medicine.
So we have these great results, and I had a two-part interview on frequency-specific microcurrent. That one is a good interview to go listen to. I asked the woman my first question and an hour later I get to ask her my second. It was the most amazing first hour because it was just her telling the story, which will blow your mind, and it’s all about how her very, very specific form of energy healing using frequency specific microcurrent, which is a machine you can find in a lot of physical therapy clinics. I’m sure you’ve worked with this as an occupational therapist, but done in a specific way.
When you’ve changed the frequencies. For example, when someone has nerve damage, you change the frequencies and it will stimulate the body to heal that nerve really fast, like super, super, super fast to the point where while people are on the table, they’ll stop having pain or Parkinson’s people will stop shaking. I mean, just really, really cool results. It’s energy and it’s frequency.
Yes, our bodies can heal when we figure out exactly what they need on an energy and frequency level. This is what’s so exciting is that so many people are walking around looking for the drug they need, looking for maybe the diet they need or the drug they need, and yet there’s this entire world that’s really, 90% of the healing is all these different forms of energy and frequency healing and medicine. We’re stuck only being sold on the 10% drug-based, physical-based medicine.
[00:31:40] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: See, if we took the time that we take in taking the drugs or the prescriptions, going to the doctors, getting them refilled, all that kind of stuff into the food preparation. What I mean by that is for the people like out here in Eastern Washington, everybody plants their own garden, we harvest our own food, and all that kind of stuff. If we have excess, we give it to people, we exchange. It’s about surviving out here, livelihood. So everybody plants their own gardens.
One thing we did this year that was quite different than the past was as we were cultivating our seeds and we were planting them into the garden, we would put the seed in our mouth and collect the saliva on the seed, and then we would plant that seed. So then what happens is our DNA is now going into that seed, and then the food is then now grown more nutritiously, more specific to what our innate needs are based on the saliva that was put on that seed. What we found was when we grew our garden, we had the most plentiful garden you wouldn’t believe. The cucumbers, the zucchini, the tomatoes, the peppers, and our lettuces were just amazing and quite nutritious. It had different flavors to them. My husband’s would taste a little different than mine. It was really, really interesting the difference in that.
You can actually have some fun with how you can influence the quality of your food, even the preparation that takes place. If you go to a restaurant, for example, and you see the cook in the back that’s cooking. He’s angry, he’s yelling at everybody, and all of that, I don’t think I’d want to eat that food because there’s a lot of anger, which is an emotion, which is energy put in that food. I’d much rather take it from somebody who’s singing in the background, who’s singing in the kitchen and having a wonderful day at work, and putting all that love into that food as it’s being prepared.
My husband does the same thing. When he cooks a meal, he puts this beautiful music on in the background. He puts some loving energy into each stroke of the knife or whatever he’s doing to make the food much more energetically loving to ourselves as we eat it. The environment is everything. But the food just tastes better when you put love in it. I’m sure you know that because you put a lot of love into your food.
[00:34:16] Ashley James: One of my favorite books as a young adult, as a teenager was Como para agua chocolate, which is Like Water for Chocolate. The movie didn’t do it justice, it’s a beautiful book. The author went on to write a sci-fi novel, which is even better, but it’s a sci-fi novel about healing, about emotional healing. About a society that when you’re sent to prison, they believe that you commit a crime because you really weren’t surrounded with enough love and understanding. The prison they send you to is a place where people surround you and give you love and understanding until you process why you did that crime and you really heal on an emotional level, and then you grieve for the victims. It’s very interesting. I don’t remember the name of that book, but a really interesting thing to get into.
But one thing about Como para agua chocolate is that this woman, when she would cry, her tears would go into the food and then everyone at the table would cry. When she was in love and her sweat fell into the food because it was hot and she was in love, all of a sudden, everyone was lusty and in love. It painted this picture in my mind as a young teenager about how the mood that we’re in can be contagious. And also, when you’re feeding people, there’s that energy exchange there that occurs.
Now, when you said that you held the seeds in your mouth, you’re not saying your literal DNA went into the literal DNA of the lettuce, but you’re saying your energy, the energetic DNA affected the lettuce on an energetic level, right? Because it’s not like that lettuce is now part human.
[00:35:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: No, no, no, no, no. Thank you for clarifying that. It’s similar to like—I think you had Viome on where they take a sample of your feces and then they make vitamins based on what your excrement is. So the same thing goes. The theory that I’ve formulated in my brain is that when you take the seed, then you stick it in your mouth, and your digestive enzymes from your saliva get onto that seed, then when you plant it in the earth the nutritious needs that your body is needing—whatever you’re lacking—will then grow into that vegetable.
We found that between the ones that were done by my husband and myself, it was the same seed but he had a different color than mine, it grew differently, or things like that. This is a little experiment that we did. We saw that—it was the same from the same batch of seeds in the package—produced a different vegetable—vibrancy, color, consistency.
[00:37:12] Ashley James: It’s so cool. I want to know what influenced your desire to do this experiment.
[00:37:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you think about how do you best describe how does biofeedback works with taking a saliva sample, hair sample, or something like that? Well, how else can you show the influence that could have? The digestive enzymes, the saliva, your own characteristics, your own constitution, how can that affect things? So I thought, well, what better way than to see how will my DNA, my saliva influence a growing thing? Now, I’m not going to swap saliva with my dog just to see if it would influence my dog. So I thought what better way than take an inanimate object that we think of as inanimate—this seed—then place it in the mouth, then plant it, and see what would make a difference.
When you’re sitting around a table talking with friends and then this idea comes up, it’s like, hey, I bet that would have an influence so we just tried. Lo and behold we saw a difference.
[00:38:20] Ashley James: They say kissing your baby and also giving a bit of your saliva to the baby, or kissing their cheek—I don’t know if it’s pheromones. I have actually no idea why it does this, but that changes breast milk. Also, their saliva on the nipple of the mother changes the breast milk will change the immune cells that the breast milk is making for the baby. It’s a biofeedback loop between the baby and the mother so that the mother’s body knows how to formulate breast milk to support the immunity of the baby at the time. I thought that was really interesting.
Now, the experiment I’d like you guys to do this year is I want you to do a batch where you don’t hold the seeds in your mouth. There needs to be a control. The lettuce over here just put in the ground, don’t do anything with it right, and then the lettuce over here is the one the seed you held in your mouth, maybe did a prayer, do some love to it, and your husband does the same, and then you guys compare. Because it’s all going to be in the same sunlight, same soil, all come from the same seed packet. It’d be interesting to see if you notice a really significant difference from the plant that received your energy signature before planting it versus the one that received nothing.
[00:40:01] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we actually did do that because we truly did want to make it an experiment. That’s what was so amazing for us why we were able to see such a huge difference in the crop was the one that we didn’t put any of our salivae on, it was lifeless almost. The color was different. It wasn’t as vibrant. We didn’t have as much of a harvest from it either. Once we would clip, it didn’t always come back as far as like in some of the lettuces and stuff, and also the reseeding of it. We didn’t see huge pollination. We didn’t see a lot of the seeds going to pollination. The yield was much smaller with those that we did not put our saliva on.
[00:40:56] Ashley James: That’s interesting.
[00:40:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Now, I’d be interested though to see how our food would influence other people that ate our food. Think about that. I mean, I’m not saying that our DNA is going to change theirs. This is another example and this kind of leads into the iridology piece is that when animals like cats, for example, I have two mama cats right now who are both producing little kittens. When one mama cat is feeding the other mama cat’s kittens, we noticed that the color of their iris would change.
[00:41:34] Ashley James: What?
[00:41:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, and what I mean by that is not that the background color, which is the main color, but speckles in the eyes would show up, or we’d see little lacunae that would show up in the iris that wasn’t there before. That’s when they start picking up the other mother’s genetic characteristics. It’s pretty cool the way you can see that happen.
You can also see if there’s something wrong with the animal-based on where color changes occur in the eye. If you start to see more dots or you see lines starting to appear—white lines or things like that—that’ll tell you that there’s inflammation in a particular area so let’s check that area out. It will tell you whether they’ve got some problems with their liver. Same thing with humans.
Animals have the same characteristics that humans do. Their eyes change when they have an injury. That’s actually how it came about was a little boy that was 11 years old found an owl that had broken its leg. He saw the there were some color changes in the eye of the owl as it was healing. It was kind of fascinating to see that happen. I see the same thing in my dog. I look at my dog’s eyes and I can say, oh yeah, she’s got some issues going on. We need to work on that. It’s pretty cool.
[00:42:57] Ashley James: When you look at your clients when they’re with you in person do you see a big difference from the beginning of a session to the end of the session, or is that something that changes more gradually over time?
[00:43:11] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It doesn’t always happen that quickly. It’s usually gradual over time, and it depends on what it is that we’re working on. I’ve kind of switched my focus because usually when I’m talking to people and I’m talking to them live, face to face, I look at their tongue a lot because the tongue will tell me things. But now I’m also starting to look at the eye even more, and it really depends on the type of light I have to see the eye to see if I can actually see the little spots or the little lines in the eye that tell me something, or the rings, or even just discolorations that are occurring. Or if they’ve got some bloodshot eyes, that’ll tell me a little bit of what’s going on in the sclera.
People have caught on to the fact that I look at their tongue, and so now they kind of block their mouth when I’m talking to them. Well, now they have to block their eyes if they want me to not look at their eyes to tell them what’s going on. But I can look at their eye and say, are you having some digestive issues? They’ll say, well, yeah. How’d you know? Oh, you got this little speck here that’s telling me that you’ve got some digestive issues. Looks like you might have a little bit of heavy metal going because of these little rings that are showing up or things like that. It’s pretty cool.
[00:44:19] Ashley James: Now, iridology—I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t it a fairly old, widely studied, and it’s practical but it’s repeatable. It’s a science.
[00:44:41] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It is.
[00:44:41] Ashley James: How old is it? For those who’ve never heard of iridology, which is being able to basically to look in the different aspects of someone’s eye and see what organs and what systems need help. Can you tell us the history of it?
[00:45:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. It goes way back to the 1800s even. Even way before then, they even have pictures of drawings within cave dwellings and stuff like that of the eye. But back in the 1800s, the one that I was referring to earlier Dr. Von Peczely I believe was his name, was the 11-year-old boy that found the owl that had a marking on the owl’s eye that was depicted kind of by where the leg is, which is in the lower part of the eye. As the bird was starting to heal, he started noticing the change in the eye and the color of the eye change.
I don’t know if that was the main reason why he went back to medical school, but he went to medical school and became a doctor. As he started seeing more and more of his clients and more and more of his patients, he started seeing that the eyes were reflecting what was going on in the body. As the body was healing, the eye was healing. So he could actually see that significant change.
Now, whether it can change from the beginning of a session to an end of a session, typically not because basically, it depends on if it’s a congenital thing because you can actually see things that you’ve inherited from your parents, or if it’s something that is an acute, subacute, or chronic, or even a degenerative issue. But the beautiful thing it’s similar to biofeedback in that it can predict. It may not be something that you have right now, but it’s a precursor, so it’s leading up to it.
Just like biofeedback identifies things that are symptomatologies and energies that are leading to dis-ease, the same thing goes with the eyes is that it leads to dis-ease as well. It’s kind of like here’s something that’s coming on, and if you don’t do something about it now, this could end up being something that you’re going to have to deal with later that will take the quality of your life away. That was the first thing, but then there was Dr. Jensen who is an American iridologist who really brought the science and the use of it in the homes. He made it so that people would understand it.
And then there’s also another physician out there, Verghis, who actually put the behavior. So he made behavior iridology. What are some of the emotions that show up, the personalities that are showing up within the eyes? You can see if somebody’s an extrovert versus an introvert based on the amount of fibers that are showing up. You can tell if they’re a right-brain or left-brain person by the amount of activity in one eye versus the other. It’s really cool, so it helps you understand. If you’re interviewing somebody for a job, you can actually look at their eyes and say, is this somebody who is more of a creator person or more of a left-brained person that’s more focused on let’s just get the task done. You can actually hire somebody based on where their brain is activating and working the most.
[00:48:17] Ashley James: That’s really fascinating.
[00:48:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s quite fascinating.
[00:48:20] Ashley James: So I’m a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming, and as part of that, we really study how to understand people’s personalities in a passive way. Because if one were to choose to—let’s say they are a headhunter for Microsoft, for example. They’re the recruiter for Microsoft. It’s illegal to give personality tests in America and in several other countries. There are certain countries where it’s not illegal. I’m sure it’s a lot easier to do hiring in those countries, but in the United States, you’re not allowed to do a personality test because it could be considered discriminatory.
I mean, I’m not going to discriminate against an introvert or an extrovert. It’s like if you’re hiring an accountant that’s going to be in the basement never surrounded by anyone else, you really want to hire an introvert. They’re going to be a lot more focused and happy there. You don’t want to hire an extrovert accountant. They’re going to be miserable. So there are just certain personality traits that are best if you understand the job you’re hiring for it’s best. Or if you’re dating. If you’re examining potential mates, even meeting new friends, or hiring a babysitter or a nanny—certain things you want to know about that person.
In neuro-linguistic programming, we learn how to read people, gain rapport with them and read people, not in a malicious way at all. Although, Hollywood loves to paint the picture of NLP in a very malicious way because that sells movies, TV shows, or whatever. But neuro-linguistic programming is simply becoming so observant that you can understand more about human behavior and all the signs are right there for everyone to read. If you can look into someone’s eyes and you study your iridology, you have the ability to understand their health, also their emotional health, and also their behavioral tendencies. I think that is really powerful.
This is something that would interest me. For example, being a mom, and again I saw studies recently, some articles published about how they see the differences in brain patterns that women actually see a larger spectrum of color than men do. That is they believe because we can detect micro changes in the vasculature of our children such that we will see if they’re developing a fever if they’re developing a flush. The capillaries around their cheeks, are they more white, are they more dark? What’s going on? That is all playing a role in telling us are they in a state of stress, are they going into a sickness? We have to look at our children all the time and judge, especially young ones who can’t talk to us.
I don’t know why the scientists found out that moms can do it more than dads because I mean, all power to the stay-at-home dads, right? But for whatever reason, we have been designed to be able to see, adapted, or grew in a way to be able to see and detect even further more minute changes in the nuances of how the body is expressing itself. So reading eyes is something that I think moms who are like crunchy moms who are into holistic health would be really excited to study more about. And then also the tongue, and I really want to get into talking about the tongue too. It’s kind of hard to teach people iridology through an audio podcast, but maybe you could direct us to resources that the layperson could study.
[00:52:31] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Absolutely. For example, when you were talking about this whole connection with the child and things like that, why do you think that they say that moms have eyes in the back of their heads? Well, they do.
[00:52:45] Ashley James: I have freaked my son out so many times. My son’s almost six. Now, he was an early talker. When he was 18 months old he knew the alphabet backward and forwards. We would just do fun games with the alphabet, he picked it up, and he could say really complex words. He could say avocado before he was two. By the time he was two, he was talking full sentences. He’s always been really communicative, which makes sense given who his mom is. And also, we talk to him all the time. We talk to our son all the time like an adult. We don’t do baby talk. We talk to him all the time, engage with him all the time, and he’s very communicative.
So at a really young age, I’ll be in the kitchen, our son will be in the living room, my back is turned to him, and I’ll say, “Stop doing that. You know you’re not allowed to do that.” He’s like, “How did you know?”
[00:53:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Right. If you think about that, so you do actually have an eye on the back of your head because when you think about where the pineal gland is actually located in the brain. It is actually towards the back of the brain, and that is where your sense of intuition is. That’s also where all the hormones, the hypothalamus, the thalamus, and all that are coming through. So basically, I mean, not only are we emotional and hormonal beings but we’re also seers and feelers and key into that energy. That’s why that sense of intuition is so strong. When you feel somebody approach your child you say stranger danger, that this is not a good person. That was because we were designed that way. That’s one of the beautiful things about the differences between men and women is we were given that that intuition.
So, of course, we have the eyes in the back of our heads for that reason. That pineal gland is actively firing [inaudible 00:54:43] stranger danger, do not approach, stay away from my child kind of thing, and me as well.
But there are certain things that you can actually look for in the eye that can give you an idea of some things that would just be something to follow up with. For example, if you see rings in the eyes meaning circular rings on the outer of the iris towards where the sclera is, if you see a white ring around that, that typically, first of all, is one of the signs of old age. You’ll see that in some of the elderly, but it’s also circulation. So kind of looking at that. That’s also a condition of the skin. The aging of the skin is part of the aging process. Maybe too much sun, not enough hydration, that kind of thing. It’s all about melanin as well.
But what most people don’t realize is there are truly only two-colored eyes—there’s brown and there’s blue. I have green eyes so I’m like wait a minute, where do I fall in that. Well, there is a mixed color, and that’s called a biliary. That’s where the greens and the hazel’s come in. Typically, the hazel would be like a brown, but it has some discoloration around the pupil, which could be toxins, it could be genetic things that have come in, it could be that you have a very strong constitution. If you see some strings in the eyes that are emanating from the pupil, that’s usually your constitution. They liken it to different types of fabric.
For example, the strongest constitution person will look like satin, meaning that the color of the pupil is very tightly woven. The striations coming from the pupil are very tight, so they have a very strong constitution meaning their digestion is going to be very strong, that their body’s going to be strong, everything’s going to be strong. Then if they have a very loose-looking pupil, meaning that they’ve got openings and stuff like that, not only does that mean—and the previous person would be more of an introvert. If you think about that type woven, very tight with their time, tight with personality, things like that. They’d be more of an introvert.
Whereas the one with the eyes that have a lot of light coming in them, they have open areas that we call lacuna that make them look very like a flower. Those are very extroverted people that also are very much emotional type. They tend to be more of a right-side brain dominant. They tend to be more spontaneous and creative, but you also want to see if there are color changes within the color. So if you have a blue eye but then you have some brown specks in it, typically that means that there’s a psora, which means there are some toxins and stuff going on within that area.
So there are certain things that you can look for in the eye that might change as a result of things. If you hurt your ankle, you’re going to see a change in the bottom of your eye where the ankle is located, and you might actually see a speck. That spec might show that the body is trying to heal. You can actually see long-term phase versus acute. You can tell based on the color if it is an acute episode and if it’s going to convert it to long-term. You can actually stop it at the acute level before it even goes chronic. That’s the thing that I love the most about this is to be able to detect. It’s like a timescape. You can see, okay, you’re in the acute phase of this. If you change this now, it does not have to be a chronic disease later. That’s what I love the most.
If you see some white colors, let’s say you have a blue eye and you have some white striations in there, oftentimes that may mean there’s a kidney imbalance or there’s too much acid. It’s in the acute stage of the disease. It could also mean that you have a very hard life that we need to look at the psychological aspects of it. They may over rationalize things. They may have a hard time forgiving.
Yellow tends to mean that there is an adrenal imbalance. Oftentimes, the emotion associated with that would be fear, anger, or worry. So of course, if you think about that, it does influence the adrenals.
If there’s a bright orange color to it—so you can see some of that sometimes in the hazel eyes the bright orange—oftentimes that’s a pancreas imbalance. You’ll see that a lot with people who have diabetes, and oftentimes it’s a lack of grieving. They haven’t had a chance to grieve for something, whether it’s grieving for their loss of independence in their life, their ability to enjoy the food that they’ve wanted to, or even grieving of lifestyle, people who have left, or even childhood issues.
If you see dark orange, oftentimes, that would be a pancreas or gallbladder issue, or sometimes there’s something going on with the gallbladder. If you can actually catch this in advance, then you might be able to save your gallbladder at some point because it’s an early indication of something going. Usually, that’s a long-standing lack of joy that somebody’s had. So you might see some of this in some of your friends when you see some of these emotions showing up, and then you see some of the conditions like with traditional Chinese medicine, typically if I see something going with the pancreas and the gallbladder, I’ll also see hip issues or knee issues going on as well because it goes right along that gallbladder, or they might have headaches as well.
Then if there are reddish-brown specks in there, that could be a spleen or blood weakness. Typically you’ll see that in the tongue as well, and I can explain that when we go into that. But that’s typically irritability or depression that the person is having some issues with.
And then if you see some light or dark brown specks in there, that’s usually a liver imbalance and a sign of chronic disease. You can see the color spectrum. White, they’re in the acute phase. It’s more of a lymphatic thing. As the color gets deeper and deeper into the texture, then that’s the progression of the disease process. You can also just look at your own eyes and see some of those things as an indicator.
[01:01:14] Ashley James: The location matters though, right? Like you said, the lower part of the eye was the leg of the owl, for example. So you’re seeing these different colors in the eye, and the location also plays a role. I think studying it would be fascinating as a layperson, but I also think going to an iridologist and one that has been trained both in the physical but also the personality and the emotional to get a full sort of reading of what’s going on. I think that’d be a lot of fun.
And then doing the work like you said if, for example, heavy metals come up. I spent the last five years doing heavy metal detox and really noticing a huge difference in my labs. All of my labs improved, my liver improved, my blood sugar improved—all the functions of my body—my hormones improved. Everything improved because I was doing that, and of course eating an even healthier diet because I can’t say I was eating unhealthy before that. I’ve been pretty consistently eating as healthy as possible for the last 10 years. But in the last five, I’ve been really focusing on everything I can do to support the body and removing heavy metals.
Man, it would have been really interesting to get sort of a camera like a really close-up camera shot of my eyes five years ago versus now to see. I know I made these changes, but then to also have that confirmation to see that the changes took place over time in my eyes. That would be neat to go maybe once a year or something and get a picture of your eye and then see those changes as you do the work.
[01:03:05] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh yeah. You can see a change within a month. You can actually see it within a couple of days. So for example, I did a fun thing. The other piece of it is I’ve been having some of my clients who I’ve been seeing for biofeedback sending me pictures of their eyes, and they’ve been really, really good about that in that they can then send me an email of their eye, and they have to specify right and left—open that eyeball is as high as they can.
So typically, I’ll have them keep their eyeball open with their fingers while their spouse or whoever takes a picture of it, and then that way I can get a really good picture, of course with the flash off. so there’s no glare coming from it and making sure you’re not getting a glare from windows. But then I can actually blow that up and really look at it and then get a really good idea. There are over 90 areas of the eye that we look at. That’s why it’s very important you do go to an iridologist for that.
The beautiful thing is that you can actually see the changes from one aspect to another. So for example, before each full moon, I do a fast—three to four days before a fast and even before the new moon. So I’m usually doing a fast two times a month. So I’ll do my fast so. Before I do my fast I’ll do a picture of my eye and I’ll analyze it and take a look at it. And then I’ll do my fast and then after my fast I’ll look at that and go wow, look at that. You can actually see a difference within that time frame—that four days. You can see a difference in the eyes—the clarity, the color.
You might have had some people say like for me, I can be green eyes one day and blue eyes another day. Sometimes it depends on the color I wear, it sometimes depends on the mood I’m in. It’s kind of like I got motoring eyes or something like that. They could turn the little color so the yellow will come out more. But my eyes, when you look in the camera, are actually blue—a very pretty blue. But when you truly look at it with the naked eye they’re green, and that is because of the coloration that I have around the pupil.
[01:05:09] Ashley James: My dad was the same way. My dad had these hazel eyes that could be green, they could be blue, they could be brown. It was almost like golden brown, and they would change. I mean, the most change I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes my dad had that, and I thought that was fascinating, considering my mom was just pretty much always blue. I was like, what’s up with my dad? I thought that was really interesting.
Now, I love fasting. I’ve had several episodes on fasting, and some people who’ve never heard of therapeutic fasting think you’re crazy. Why wouldn’t you want to eat when you have access to perfectly good food? Episode 230 of my podcast, so I recommend listeners go back and check that out. Episode 230 talks about water-only fasting on a therapeutic level, and the results that you can get.
Back in 2012, a Japanese doctor discovered that the body goes through on day three of a water-only fast. It’s somewhere around hour 30 it kind of ramps up. The body digests pathological tissue, cancer—and I’m not saying this is a cure for cancer, although it has been documented and this is something that we talked about in episode 230. But the body will digest scar tissue to the point where people have seen scars go away during long fasts. Fibrous tissue, so women with fibroids, women with very thick breast tissue, women with fibroids around their uterus or their ovaries, they’ve seen a significant improvement.
It’s just fascinating because if you weren’t into health, you would probably never go—unless you had to for a colonoscopy or something—skip a meal, right? And yet, we are designed, we have a self-cleaning mechanism. It’s like you put your oven on the self-clean setting. Even my washing machine has a self-clean setting, and I just thought that was so funny our body has a self-cleaning setting. That if we don’t eat for three to five days, our body goes through this huge cycle of self-cleaning and breaking down pathological tissue. That is absolutely amazing. There are so many health benefits.
So you fast twice a month. Why do you choose to fast around the new moon and the full moon? What is your reasoning behind choosing the amount of days, like you said, about four days? Why do you choose the amount of time and the timing?
[01:07:50] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The number of days was really random—three to four days. First of all, I always like the number three, so that’s one of the main reasons. But I always choose the lunar cycle because that’s when many things are more active in the body. That’s when a lot of things will actually start to show up. For example, that’s when parasites are much more active in the bodies during a lunar cycle. So if I’m wanting to clean my body out of any kind of parasites that may be remaining because we do all have parasites, it’s just how active are they. Then what better time than the lunar cycle? So why not use mother earth to help us heal?
So the more in tune that we get to all of these different frequencies and vibrations of the world, of the earth, then our body responds so much better to it. Why not do these drastic changes during lunar cycles and during these full moon episodes because that’s when your body’s going to be much more receptive to it. And I’ve noticed the difference between a fast in between, during a full or a new moon, and it just heightens everything. It heightens the meditations, it heightens the interaction that you have with the world, your senses become much more interactive. When you’re cleaning your body out, then it opens up every sensory system within your body to become much more viable, much more vital. That fast during that time just speeds everything up. My meditations get deeper, everything gets deeper.
[01:09:26] Ashley James: Very cool.
[01:09:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So why not do a fast during that time?
[01:09:30] Ashley James: What’s really neat about even just a three to four-day fast, and the fact that you do it twice a month is fantastic. What’s really interesting is that people are often afraid that it lowers the metabolism, which slows down the metabolism. What studies have shown—they’ve repeated these studies—is that when we lower the caloric intake, let’s say you decided to go on a 1,200 calorie a day diet, and then you did that for three months, and then you went back to eating 2,000 calories, you would start to gain weight from the 2,000 calorie diet.
Let’s say you always ate 2,000 calories and you were always consistently the same weight. If you lowered your caloric intake significantly like to 1,500 or 1,200 calories, and then went back to eating 2,000 calories, which was seemingly healthy for you for years, all of a sudden now you’re gaining weight. What they find is that by eating a lower calorie diet, our metabolism slows. The body goes into a starvation mode and goes, okay, we’re in famine now. We need to conserve energy, and so we’re going to convert everything to fat to survive. We’re going to really sluggish slow it all down, make less heat.
This kind of flies in the face of all the diets out there. All the mainstream diets tell us to eat less. That creates more customers for more diet books because now we are in this perpetual cycle of, and I’ve been on over 30 diets in my life and I know. The more dieting you do, even healthy ones like the Mediterranean diet, so healthy. The Zone diet, and the doctors, all this stuff. All those diets out there cause the metabolism to slow.
Now, everyone gets results in their first month. You shift your way of eating and oh, I lost 15 pounds. Well good. Some of that was water weight from removing inflammation because maybe you stopped eating sugar, you stopped eating junk food, fast food, or whatever. You’ve changed your lifestyle. But in the long term, it slows the metabolism, which is really bad so that you can’t actually eat a healthful diet without the body going into fat-storing mode.
Now fasting—and I’m not talking about intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is something different. The jury’s still out about it. Some people have really negative effects from intermittent fasting, some people have really positive effects. When I work with clients that are pre-diabetic or diabetic, I do not get them to do intermittent fasting right away. It’s not the best for everyone because in some cases, it causes the body to go into a state of stress and actually maintain a higher state of glucose. Although, like I said, with some people, intermittent fasting is amazing for them. I don’t think it’s a good thing for everyone. I think it’s kind of a try it and see and notice how you feel and notice how your body responds kind of thing. But with the fasting that you’re talking about, which is a three- to four-day water-only fast, that—in a most fascinating way—speeds up the metabolism.
My husband did a 17-day fast last year. He does a few fasts every year. The metabolism will stay fairly high, and here you and I think well you’re not eating so wouldn’t the body conserve energy? Well, no. It actually does the opposite. The body goes, I really need to go find food. We got to go forage. We got to go walk miles and miles to find food. Let’s ramp up the metabolism, and so things actually ramp up. Now that you’re not having to spend all your energy digesting, now the body is spending all that energy healing.
It’s very exciting this idea of incorporating fasting, and I like that you mentioned doing it around a new moon and a full moon because you’re ramping up your own metabolism, but also you’re supporting a very healthy stimulus to your immune system, and at the same time, you’re starving the parasites. I think that’s really neat that you’ve adapted that. How long have you done this habit?
[01:13:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, we’ve been doing this for, I would say, about nine months now, and we’ve been seeing a huge difference with it. First of all, it’s that interaction with mother nature. It’s really listening to her rhythm, responding to it, and allowing our body to succumb to that rhythm because when we do, that’s when true healing occurs and that’s when we really get a good response back from the fast itself. But it also gave you freedom. What I mean by freedom, how many of us are so stuck to the time that we eat? It’s 9:00 AM, it’s time that we’re supposed to be eating. At 6:00 PM we’re supposed to be having dinner. Based on how about how do you feel, do you even feel like you want to eat? Are you even hungry even, or is it more of a craving, is it more of something else?
[01:14:40] Ashley James: Or is it thirst.
[01:14:42] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, thirst is one of the biggest reasons. A lot of people think you have to drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated. I personally like to drink a 25-ounce glass of water first thing in the morning on my way to work and drink the whole thing, then I drink another one on my way home, and then I have some during the day. But then I really get a good flush and then it stays there because the biggest mistake most people make is they try to drink their water throughout the day and then they don’t get enough water in. Whereas if you start with a really nice big glass in the morning with some lemon in it, some apple cider vinegar, or something like that to really get that cellular structure to become more alkaline, then you’re doing much better that way.
But then, the other piece of it is the freedom that it gives you. So let’s say that you’re going on a trip somewhere and you’re on a plane. You’re thinking, there’s no way I’m going to eat this food. But you’re like, but I’m going to be hungry. When you go through a fast you realize I don’t have to eat because I actually have gone three or four days I’ve gone without eating anything.
The first time you do one you’re going to have a major headache. It’s going to feel like your head is about to explode. I keep thinking that’s all these toxins that I’m releasing. It’s parasites, it’s all these things are saying, let me out, let it out, and they’re wanting to come out. They do, they eliminate quite drastically. After that first or second day of the headache, which happens the first time you do the fast. When you do your second fast, the third fast, and the fourth fast, you don’t have those headaches anymore because your body’s saying, oh yeah. Okay, that’s what she’s doing. We’re in this. We know what to do now. She’s not going to starve us completely.
But think of the yogis that have gone 40, 45 days, 60 days, 7days without food. The body is very, very smart. I’ve heard of a lot of doctors actually saying that it’s actually healthy to have a little bit of fat on you. The reason for that is, for this reason, there’s a fat store in there that if there’s a disease, a virus, or something that comes into the body, it’s going to go after the fat first and not the organs. So when you see somebody who’s extremely thin, we’re talking like anorexic thin, they tend to—when they get sick—it starts to attack the organs more because there’s no fat to go for.
I always like it when I see my clients with a little bit of meat on them versus real thin because of that reason. The same thing goes with COVID. I’ve noticed with some of the COVID clients that I’ve been seeing through biofeedback, those that have a little bit of meat on them respond better to the biofeedback energetically, and they respond faster to the healing process. Whereas those that may be thinner, and I think part of that is because of the parasites. I think the parasites are greatly impacting or interacting within the person that is being exposed to COVID. That’s what’s making it change so much is the parasites within the body are making the characteristics of COVID change. That’s why they’re having a hard time keeping ahead of it, I believe.
Parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse, parasite cleanse. Do your foot spas that I know that Kellyann and the Platinum Energy System. I have one of those and I love it. That I do also at the end of my fast is I do a nice little foot spa too. That takes the dredges, the rest of the stuff out that that I didn’t quite complete with my fast. That was probably a long answer, wasn’t it?
[01:18:35] Ashley James: No, no, it was great. It’s all very interesting. Once you start getting into looking into parasites, you’re going down the rabbit hole chasing the white rabbit.
[01:18:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes.
[01:18:56] Ashley James: I’m going to mix up my metaphors, it’s like Dorothy going down the rabbit hole.
[01:19:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: She could be going there too.
[01:19:03] Ashley James: It just keeps going and going. I had a man on the show who’s married to a woman who is very famous, and I’ve also had her on the show. Of course, pregnancy brain, I’m not going to remember anyone’s names right now, I apologize. But she’s famous for the book she wrote in the ‘90s called Guess What Came to Dinner. She’s written a bunch, but she’s famous for parasite cleanses. I’m like 15 years old or 12 years old, my mom brings this book home. I’ve been into health stuff my whole life I just. I just decided to rebel. In my teen years, I decided to rebel and I paid for it in my 20s, basically, and I spent my entire adult life having to recuperate from all the damage I did to myself in my teen years rebelling against all the cool stuff that I was into and I still am.
We did a parasite cleanse with my family and we all got tested, and we had three parasites. We had two parasites from owning cats, and one parasite that we picked up from Mexico. This is in the ‘90s. Then we did a parasite cleanse and then we didn’t have them anymore. Reading the book, Guess What Came to Dinner, was like oh my gosh. And then to have her on the show I was just starstruck. I’m like you’ve been part of my whole life.
[01:20:25] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Are you talking about Hulda Clark?
[01:20:26] Ashley James: No, not Hulda Clark. She’s another amazing one. Anyways, her husband who I’ve also had on the show and he came on the show twice. His first time on the show—it was a two-parter—he shared that he about his cancer journey and how he was like in the middle of this weird chemotherapy that was killing him. He escaped the hospital in the middle of the night because he really realized that they will kill me in here. He escaped the hospital, and he’s like I’m just going to do something natural because I don’t want to go through this treatment anymore because the treatment’s killing me. And then he ended up completely healing his body using natural medicine, and it’s been his journey. That’s how he met his now wife who’s famous for parasite cleanses.
So he came on the show the second time to talk about—he has this YouTube channel where he interviews people who have overcome cancer naturally and what they did, and so that’s a big eye-opener. But one guy he interviewed got on an anti-parasitic over-the-counter medicine that you buy for animals. It’s been on the market forever.
[01:21:43] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Ivermectin.
[01:21:44] Ashley James: And his cancer went away. They’ve had over 60,000 people part of this—there’s a blog or a forum where they all gather online and they all share their experiences. He goes through and talks about five different reasons why it strips the coating on the tumors so that the immune system identifies it. I mean, it does like five different things. Again, you can’t say this is a cure-all because there are people out there who it didn’t work for. I’ve never ever, ever seen anything that was a 100% success rate when it comes to cancer, and I believe that’s because cancer is not just one thing.
When I interviewed the Italian doctor, Dr. Simoncini—for whatever reason I never forget his name. He’s fascinating. He was a surgeon, and he’s not a holistic doctor at all. So I always find it interesting when I interview doctors who’ve been kicked out of the mainstream realm for finding a cure and they’re not holistic doctors. Now they have to go around and hang out with all the holistic doctors because they’re the only ones that believe them.
So Dr. Simoncini, as a surgeon, cut open a tumor and said, “Why do tumors look like cottage cheese? Why do tumors look like candida overgrowth?” So he took a dying patient who was on their death bed anyway and they had a catheter set up to deliver chemotherapy right into the vasculature of the tumor.
So he made up a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and water, which is baking soda and water, and that is a very alkaline mixture right. He says, well, this is what you would do if you had a yeast infection. The person was going to die anyway. They’re on their deathbed. He pours it into the tumor and the person lives. The tumor melts away, and he freaks out. I said, “Well, okay. What’s your success rate?” Because he does it all the time. This is his full-time job is he goes around basically installing catheters into the vasculature of tumors then pouring these sodium bicarbonate solutions into the tumors. He says about 70% of the time. I mean, 70% is better than any. Think about it, there’s no chemotherapy, no radiation that gets 70% of all kinds of cancer.
[01:24:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Let’s talk about side effects.
[01:24:19] Ashley James: Yeah, don’t even get me started. I’ve talked to oncologists and there’s commonly, if you’ve had chemotherapy, you have a 2% chance of developing secondary cancer from the chemotherapy. Similar to radiation, and the statistics vary from treatment to treatment. That’s just one side effect. But my point is that if all tumors were candida, then why wouldn’t this work 100% of the time? That’s because I believe that—I mean, based on talking to all these doctors that that help patients no longer have cancer, no longer have tumors—it’s not always one thing. There are multiple reasons, and we have to look at all these different aspects. We have to look at parasites.
When interviewing Viome, I’ve had two people on the show talking about the Viome company, which I love. If anyone wants to get this stool test, it’s phenomenal. I did it and it’s so informative. It’s a few hundred dollars, and it’s a home test. You can do it at home and you mail it in, and you get a coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health—gives you a discount.
What I love about Viome is it’s going to give you the information you can’t get anywhere else because blood tests don’t show this. It’s showing the genetic expressions of the microbiome in your body and the chemicals they’re making from the food you eat because there’s a pharmacy in your gut. So it gives you this whole missing link of information. But what they said is there are new studies that just came out recently that show that tumors have their own unique microbiome. We can begin to detect tumors before they even become tumors because we can detect the microbiome of cancers.
That leads me to think, just wrap your brain around that, what if the microbiomes are creating the tumors or stimulating the tumors? What if there are parasitic personality traits that a certain kind of microbiome is like a parasite and then the body is reacting to it. I mean, there’s this whole world that opens up, and unfortunately, science progresses one death at a time. We have to really push for research in this regard, but the research dollars only go towards something that’s going to make people profit because the medical system’s a for-profit industry, which is super frustrating.
So if any listener out there wins the lottery, please figure out how to invest money into helping to get these answers solved when it comes to what truly is, what truly are these diseases? How come 70% of cancer just resolves itself after being treated with sodium bicarbonate solution, according to Dr. Simoncini.
[01:27:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, think about it, don’t most diseases grow in an acid environment? And then if you add on top of that, I bet he would probably improve his rate of improvement or cure if he also addresses the emotional components of cancer and look at the traditional Chinese medicine aspects of what organs hold, what memories, or what emotions. Typically that’s the one that’s going to get the disease. That’s when you look at the whole person. That’s what I absolutely love about what I do in integrative medicine is I integrate the two sides of the world.
I integrate the medical side and the natural side and make them all make sense to the point where we can all work happily in the same play yard. But it’s addressing the whole person, not just the physical symptoms, the dis-ease, but also what got them there. They have shown that cancer actually starts growing seven years in advance before it’s even detected. If you can actually see the formation of it before it even starts, whether it’s through your emotions, the ones that you’re holding, the personality, the worry, all of that, that would actually help to reverse it in addition to any of the natural remedies. I love the idea of baking soda. I mean, that’s amazing. I take baking soda every night before I go to bed.
[01:28:55] Ashley James: I asked him about that. Why can’t we just drink it? The thing is that the body has a buffer system. Drinking baking soda is not really going to get the alkalinity and the concentration it’s needed for a tumor. If you’re on an empty stomach, it doesn’t hurt to drink some baking soda just like if you’re on an empty stomach or you’re about to eat food, it doesn’t hurt to drink some apple cider vinegar. When you first wake up in the morning, it’s very helpful to drink lemon juice because even though lemon is acidic, when the body interacts with it on a cellular level, it has an extra hydrogen molecule that binds to—there’s a chemical process. I heard it and it made sense to me, but then repeating it I feel like I’m not doing it justice.
In one of Ty Bollinger’s first docu-series where he goes down to—
[01:29:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The Truth About Cancer.
[01:29:48] Ashley James: Yeah, The Truth About Cancer. It’s like season five, basically. It was back in season two of The Truth About Cancer where he went to Mexico. I don’t think it’s in Tijuana. It’s Mexico, and he worked with the Gerson Clinic. They explained the process that happens in the body that when we drink certain juices like lemon juice—even though it’s acidic—putting it in the body actually has a process it goes through on a cellular level which then alkalizes. I found that fascinating.
We want to do it safely. You don’t want to alkalize your stomach acid when you’re trying to digest it. The first half of digestion in the stomach is acidic, and then right near the end, the body turns it more to neutral so that it can empty it into the small intestine. So when you take a digestive enzyme or apple cider vinegar, do it at the beginning, don’t do it at the end of a meal. Don’t eat and then an hour later, I forgot to take my digestive enzyme. I might as well take it now. Because if there’s hydrochloric acid in it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
You got to drink the apple cider vinegar in the beginning, or you take the hydrochloric acid digestive supplement in the beginning, not at the end. And then definitely don’t drink carbonated beverages during a meal. Any kind of fizzy beer, club soda, anything that’s carbonated that’s fizzy during a meal will lower stomach acid, will help to neutralize stomach acid, which is not a good thing during digestion. You certainly don’t want to drink baking soda during a meal either. But in between meals, go nuts. There’s my little safety rant for alkalizing, and I like to just get it from food as much as possible. Get your greens in, get your berries in. The body knows what to do with it when it comes to balancing out alkalinity.
[01:31:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I don’t know if you ever listened to Dr. Zach Bush, but I absolutely love the man. He talks a lot about getting the nutrition from your food versus supplements and versus the other things. He basically says the supplement industry has taken over the pharmacy in that there are so many supplements out there that people are so confused as far as what it is. What they should be taking and how much, and is there an overload.
I prefer to get your supplementation from your food because that is truly your life force. There’s a life force in that food. There’s a life force in the eating of it, the preparation of it, and the growing of it. But yes, there are times that you have to take supplements. It’s like you said, it’s not one of those end-all-be-all. You can’t just have this cookie cutter for everybody. It’s got to be very individualized. But the more we can get it from our food, the better. That’s why I really don’t like diets per se. Maybe it’s the word itself because the first three letters is die. For me, that’s kind of like do I really want to do that? Plus, does it really stick?
I’d much rather find a lifestyle plan, something that you can maintain your whole life versus just times that you want to fit into a dress, fit it into a pair of pants, or do something. You’re facing this life issue and now you got to drop the weight. How about you find something that is doable in your system that is like your ability to grow your own food or things like that that you can live with, that’s a long-term thing, that becomes a habit. That your body is growing with and fortifying with and so on, versus all these trendy little diets that keep showing up.
Let’s find it from the food and then take the pressure off. Because usually when you’re on a diet, there’s something that you’re having to eliminate. Usually, that thing that you’re having to eliminate is something that you really, really like. Now you’re going through this stress of not being able to ever have that ever, ever again, which you know you’re going to have again. But it’s that whole thing of the all or none. Like in ayurvedic, we talk about using different colors to enhance your food, to get the most nutrition from your food, and things like that. As well as the emotion that you put into it and the enzymes.
Why people have cravings is usually because we’re missing a taste in that food, whether it’s a sweet, a sour, or a salt. It’s missing. And so if you get all the flavors in your meal, you tend to not have the craving anymore because the taste buds have picked up that craving, that texture, that flavor, or that taste. All the taste buds on the tongue have been appeased. They’ve been relieved. They’re not saying, hey, I was left out so therefore I’m going to crave more of that, so the salt side. So then you start craving salty foods. So bring all those foods in. That was probably a tie into the tongue because I know we were really wanting to talk about the tongue.
[01:35:00] Ashley James: We’re going to get there. About diet, 10 years ago I went gluten-free—barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Now, once in a blue moon and I mean once in a blue moon, I will have something that has gluten in it. Not a huge detrimental thing happens if I have it once in a blue moon. I had such a profound change in my health in the first month of cutting it out. I’ve shared this on the show before, so I apologize to listeners for hearing me say this again.
I completely removed barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and my husband did at the same time. So there are 12 foods that we choose to cut out, and it was other things that are a little bit easier like no nitrates or nitrites. So if you’re going to have deli meat, you don’t have any nitrates or nitrites. No fried food, no oil in a bottle. So when you’re cooking you don’t cook with oil, and there’s a reason. I mean, I can go through and explain each one, and I have in the past in other episodes. But there are 12 foods that do harm to the body, and there are scientific reasons why.
You can be a vegetarian, you can be a paleo. I mean, you can be any lifestyle. You can be eating a diet from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and it’s just removing 12 things. And then there are of course things you can replace it with.
No barley, wheat, rye, and oats were the biggest shift for me. I lost 25 pounds of water weight. This wasn’t fat. This was all water weight. My rings, which were custom fit for me sort of flying off my fingers, same with my husband. He dropped water weight, which was inflammation, and his wedding ring started flying off his hand which was custom-made for him. We had been married at the time for several years so we never had that problem.
We decided to wait a few months. So we waited about six months to get our rings resized because what if it just bounces back? I didn’t want to [inaudible 01:37:10] it off it anymore. So six months of our rings flying off our fingers we were like okay. We got to a point where we had to tie elastic hair bands around our fingers to keep our rings on. When we realized, well, we’re not going back to eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats so we’re not going to gain all this water weight back from the inflammation of these foods. Our body isn’t going to all of a sudden bounce back so our rings are going to be fine.
So we went and got them resized, and that’s when we found out that my husband went down two whole ring sizes and I went down one and a half ring sizes. That was such a profound difference for me that I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. For me, there are so many others. If I want grains, there are so many replacements for grains.
Just last night my midwife—she’s amazing—made flourless brownies, and they are to die for. There are less than five ingredients, and they’re so good. The main ingredient is cooked chickpeas, and you would not know, but these are the most moist, dense, delicious brownies you’ve ever had, and there’s no flour in it. It’s high in fiber and protein. The first ingredient is chickpeas, the second ingredient is peanut butter, and you can have other nut butter if you want or seed butter. You can add either dates or maple syrup. You can do dark chocolate. Anyway, hers were delicious.
What’s so neat is that when you get creative in the kitchen, you don’t miss these things. But I like that you brought up that when people “diet,” they remove something suddenly from their life, and all of a sudden they’re missing that flavor profile. The fun that I’ve had the last 10 years as I’ve adjusted my diet because now I eat more whole food plant-based, as close to nature as possible. The fun for me has been how do I maintain that balance of flavors but find the healthiest version possible?
About five years ago, I went completely sugar-free like I did a sugar detox, and I had to read all the labels. I love hot sauce, I can’t tell you how many hot sauces out there have sugar in them. I absolutely love hot sauce, but it took me a long time to find a variety because I kind of get bored with hot sauce. I want a different hot sauce. I want to be able to choose different hot sauces, and so many of them have sugar in it. I found two, three, or four over time. I had to go to different stores to find one that had zero sugar and also zero of the other really gross ingredients that can be in processed foods. How did you put it, in prefabricated foods?
So I try to find the most natural artesian hot sauces with no sugar. But I really went to the extreme of absolutely no added sugar and my palate changed. I stopped craving sugar. I was always eating something with sugar in it, and I got to the point where I don’t want things that are that sweet. Even dates for me are too sweet, but I’ll go for some fruit. I’ll go for sweet potato, and that has an amazing sweet flavor. You can even make a chocolate mousse out of blending…
[01:40:36] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Avocado.
[01:40:38] Ashley James: Yes, you can do it out of avocado and raw cacao powder. But you can do it also out of—because I like to feed my son this because he’s allergic to avocado—I can feed him baked caramelized yams, take the skin off, blend it with raw cocoa powder. The sweetness of the yam—you don’t add any sweetness in. If you want to change the consistency you can add nut milk to it like coconut milk or something. But it tastes rich, chocolatey, velvety, and delicious. Then you feed it to your kid and you’re just sitting there laughing because you’re like, hahaha, I’m getting to eat something super healthy. They’re like, haha, my mom just fed me chocolate mousse. This is awesome.
You can have a lot of fun replacing those things as long as you acknowledge, like you said in Ayurveda, it’s about getting that balance of bitter, astringent, sweet, pungent, salty. There’s one more word that they incorporate in the flavors.
[01:41:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, I wasn’t sure which ones you already covered. One of the biggest ones that people always come to me about is I’m craving sweets. I usually recommend that they just get a bitter spray. You can buy that bitter you make your cocktails with, or you can get them at a health food store that may have a little flavor to them and you spray them on your tongue.
[01:42:06] Ashley James: Swedish Bitters.
[01:42:07] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, you spray it on your tongue and there goes your craving.
[01:42:13] Ashley James: And it’s really good for the liver.
[01:42:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, well that’s the part is why? What is it? What emotion is driving that craving? You got to get back into the motions as well, but also then what is lacking in the diet? What’s lacking in emotion? What’s lacking in that aspect? I’ve thought about creating on the bestseller list of creating this diet that’s called the love diet. That should solve this question.
[01:42:41] Ashley James: You should do it.
[01:42:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I should. The question is, is this loving to me? That’s always going to be the question. So there’s really no food that you’re going to have to look at, but it’s really just saying when you look at this food, is this loving to me? Meaning is it going to feed me, is it going to nourish me, is it going to make me more vital, is it going to regenerate my cells, is it going to be something that helps my mind become clearer, my thought become clearer, my breath, whatever? Is this loving to me? And if it’s not, then put it away and then identify why am I not wanting to be loving to myself by the food that food selection that I’m choosing, the amount of water, the type of beverage I’m choosing to drink?
Am I choosing a Pepsi over water, why? Is this Pepsi loving to me or is the water more loving to me? And some people may say well I get more enjoyment from the Pepsi. Well then let’s find out why are you getting enjoyment from that sugar. What’s missing?
[01:43:39] Ashley James: Well, enjoyment isn’t love, right? It’s kind of like going on Tinder, getting a date and having really, really empty sex. Sure, we can have a romp around for an evening. I remember before I met my husband feeling so empty. I mean, sure, sex is great with someone. But there’s not that connection that love, that intimacy that you have with your spouse. I end up feeling shame and guilt, and that’s the same thing.
Yeah, I could go to McDonald’s and sure I’m in the moment—by the way, McDonald’s is disgusting. Once you start eating super healthy, you can’t go back to those foods. I could find some kind of like pizza or whatever, some kind of gluten-free pizza. I could find something that is delicious at the moment or some kind of fried egg roll. At the moment it’s delicious—yum, but then I might feel gross, my digestion slows, maybe I don’t get to poop three times a day. I feel sluggish, I get brain fog. It’s kind of abusive. It’s not loving. It’s kind of abusive to go and have a bunch of empty dates, have a bunch of them sexcapades, and then just feel empty and shame. It’s kind of similar. Or go drinking every night. You’re getting that fulfillment at the moment, but is it really loving yourself? Is it an act of love for you? And no, it’s not. It’s a form of abuse. I think you’ve got to write that book.
[01:45:22] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, when you’re asking people to love you, if you don’t love you either like if you don’t love yourself, then how can they love you? How do they even know how to love you if you don’t even know how to love yourself? If we really start with loving ourselves first, then we teach other people how to love us too. That’s really what it’s about is teaching people how to love us. Sometimes that’s setting the boundaries, that’s setting limits. That’s saying no, that’s not acceptable in my love field, let’s say.
When you eat the foods that are loving to you, you become much more loving. If you make decisions that are much more loving to you, then you are much more loving to yourself and then you exude that out in the energy kind of like we started this conversation about in the very beginning was about energy. When we exude love for ourselves that love exudes out. What else do we attract? We attract love back, so we get more loving people in our relationships. We can get more loving people in our atmosphere, in our gang, in our crew, in our team, in our tribe—whatever you want to call it. More loving things come to us. More loving opportunities come to us when we’re more loving for ourselves.
When we’re more self-destructive, we get more self-destructive things, more self-destructive friends, more self-destructive ideas or things. So you go down that forbidden path. Well, I’m just going to have 1 bite that then leads to 20 more bites that lead to the whole cake being eaten, and then you go down that deep dark despair. They even show it in movies where somebody has a heart broken, so what do they do? They go to the store and buy all this chocolate, they sit in their own little pajamas, they eat, cry, and do all that stuff, and then they feel horrible the next day when they’ve recovered their heart.
So let’s just tune into the love of our heart and what’s loving for ourselves, eat things that are loving for us, and get rid of those that aren’t. One of the things that I like to show people, especially in biofeedback, is how to do muscle testing on themselves and see, is this food, is this medication, or is this supplement healthy for you? When you get to teach them how to do that, I see people in the grocery store now that are out there muscle testing themselves on food before they buy it, and I love it. It’s like, yes. I love it when I see that happening. I see their bodies swaying. I’m like, oh, yeah that’s a good one, and then it makes them have better choices.
When some people are saying I don’t think my medication’s working for me anymore. I think I may be taking too much or something like that. Then I’ll say, well, let’s take out your prescription and how much you’re supposed to take. Now, what does your body say? I’m not saying this is for everybody, and it should always be under your care of a physician as far as whether you’re coming off your medications. But it’s just letting you know intuition-wise how in tune are you with your body. If your body’s saying I think I’m getting weaker on this stuff. I don’t think I need as much possibly. Maybe I can start titrating myself down, then I say then go to your doctor and start talking to them about can I start taking myself off of this? If so, what would be the best route to do it because I really feel like I’m not needing as much anymore or something like that.
[01:48:39] Ashley James: Oh, man, I can’t tell you that’s phenomenal how many times clients have come to me with really weird symptoms, and I say okay give me the list of meds you’re on. Not all my clients are on meds, but sometimes they come to me on meds and then I just have them sit on Google with me and we go through. Again, I’m not the prescribing doctor, I’m definitely not a doctor, and I don’t tell people they have to get off their meds but I ask them most of the time. I’ve only ever had one client say, no, I believe in medication and I want to be on it. I’m like, okay, this is your choice. But I want you to know the fullest of the side effects.
So my question to them as I ask, do you want to be so healthy your body no longer needs this medicine? Now, that doesn’t always apply. There are some cases where people like for example, type 1 diabetics will require some amount of insulin. It doesn’t mean they have to be on the amount of insulin they’re on now because I know a type 1 diabetic who cut it down by 75% by changing a few things in his diet, not major. Just a few things, minor things.
He did cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats as well, and he started taking a type of mineral supplement that did include chromium, vanadium, and other minerals because that helps to resensitize the insulin. Basically, insulin receptors don’t respond if there’s a chromium deficiency, and this was discovered in the ‘50s. That a doctor in California—I forget which university but in the ‘50s, and you could look at this on Wiki. A doctor could turn type 1 diabetes on and off in lab rats by starving them of chromium or by giving them chromium. So chromium is good, but it’s not the only thing. There are other things like B6 is incredibly important. There’s a whole process that B6 goes through when it comes to blood sugar regulation.
So there are multiple nutrients, and there’s this whole world of how people have been able to completely rid themselves of type 2 diabetes with diet alone, which is 100% doable, documented, written about, and I’ve had interviews about. But as far as type 1 is concerned, people can get so healthy that they can lower their amounts, and of course they know they’ve been taught how to measure themselves. But if you’re on an anti-anxiety, antidepressant, something to that regard, a high blood pressure med, a water pill, or a cholesterol med, and then you change your diet to be healthier, you do all these other healthier things, and not have your medications checked. It’s kind of like, but your body is getting healthier. What if you could have a reduced amount or completely have yourself taken off of it?
So that’s the goal. That the goal is to get so healthy that your body no longer requires that intervention or would require a minimal amount of intervention. What I do is if I have a client with a bunch of symptoms who are on medication, I will have them go on Google with me and we look at not the shortlist but the full list of side effects and we go down the list. They will start freaking out because they will go, oh my gosh. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. That’s the reason why they put me on this one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients have epiphanies because they thought their bodies were breaking down further into the disease they were diagnosed into when it was the many of the side effects of the meds they were put on.
If your doctor isn’t willing to help to work with you either to find a different drug, to find a lower dose, or to get you so healthy you no longer need it. If your doctor’s not willing to work with you to get you healthier, to get you to not have symptoms and side effects, you can fire your doctor and hire a new one. They work for you. Don’t ever let the hubris of a doctor and their ego scare you into following their advice. Find one that is supportive of your health goals to be the healthiest person possible.
It drives me nuts when people give over their personal power to a doctor. I know there are really good MDs out there who really, really, really want you to be healthy. They’ll take advanced courses, they’ll become functional medicine practitioners, they’ll go take extracurricular courses, and they want to help you either get on a different drug, get on a lower dose, or get you so healthy you no longer need it.
That’s why I said there are so many good doctors like that out there that if you are stuck with a doctor who’s like nope we’re going to keep you on these meds no matter what. We’re not changing them no matter what because there many doctors out there that say diet doesn’t matter. You still have to be on this cholesterol med. It doesn’t matter that you’re eating a whole food plant-based diet and your cholesterol is lower. We’re going to just keep driving it down lower even still. Because cholesterol medication bruises the liver and stops the production of about 30% of our cholesterol, which is required. The liver makes it because the body needs it. Lots of books out there about that.
[01:53:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The liver is so key to emotion. In traditional Chinese medicine, the liver is where happiness is, so happy liver happy life. If you think about it, the liver is what filters everything. When you see someone who is not the happiest type of person, that’s pretty negative, angry, and very reactive, typically I’d want to say we got to work on some liver stuff here. Do a liver cleanse or something like that because the liver is processing everything from environmental toxins, to internal toxins, to our own emotional toxins. I mean, I feel like liver is one of the most important organs we have in the body.
[01:54:42] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you and I could talk for hours and you get me all riled up. You get me on my soapbox so I get so excited. I want to talk about the tongue, man. Something happened to me it must have been about a year ago or so. It feels really recent but then when I think about it I’m like that was like over a year ago. Where all of a sudden, my tongue—and my tongue when my Naturopath says stick out your tongue or I go to acupuncture and they’re like stick out your tongue, I kind of stick it out with pride. I’m kind of like, oh I know I’m so healthy and you’re going to look at my tongue and you’re going to be like impressed.
Well, all of a sudden, just over a year ago, my tongue did the weirdest thing out of nowhere and it had cracks in it like lines running down it like it split open. I had a geographic tongue and it really hurt for three days. I was kind of freaking out.
But I have a friend who’s very much into energy medicine. He did energy work with me and he said this is an energetic problem. I’m not going to get too much into the details, I might freak people out, but basically, he helped me to resolve that, and then gradually my tongue healed. But super weird that it just came on suddenly and all of a sudden I had really, really deep fissures in my tongue out of nowhere. It felt more of an energetic problem and then we resolved energetically. But everywhere I looked online was like well people think it might be a virus, people think it might be a nutrient deficiency, but we don’t really know.
So you can read the tongue and weird obvious things like once people stick out their tongue and if there are cracks down the middle, geographic tongue, or if there’s tongue separates and it looks like the Grand Canyon on their tongue, that means something. Let’s talk about the more obvious because the people who look at their tongue and they’re like well, my tongue just looks like a tongue. There are no lines, there are no bumps, it just looks like a tongue. I’m sure you could probably point out things for them, but the more overt like if you look at your tongue and it’s doing this weird thing over here, tell us about that first.
[01:57:00] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So first of all, I want to touch on that geographic tongue because in the geographic tongue, there are actually two different types. There’s one that’s a surface geographic and then there’s the one with the deep fissures like you’re talking about. The deep fissures is definitely an energetic issue that needs to be resolved, but there’s also a geographic tongue where on the surface of the tongue you’ll actually see where the papilla are. On the actual surface, you’ll actually see the geography of the mapping of the tongue. So the tongue is mapped geographically based on where the organs are.
So for example, the tip of the tongue is where the heart is, then right behind that tip is where the lung is, then on the sides of the tongue is where the liver and gallbladder resolves, then right down the center is the stomach and the spleen, and then right towards the back of the tongue is where the kidney, bladder, and the intestines are located. So when you’re looking at the tongue, similar to the eye, you’re looking at geography. If you see any changes within that aspect or that area of the tongue, then you go, ah, we’ve got to look further into that.
So when we’re looking at the tongue, we’re looking at the color first and foremost. The color tells us so many different things whether there’s inflammation, if there’s blood deficiency, if there’s too much cold, too much heat in the body, you’re looking at the color. So one of the first things I look at is if it’s a deep red tongue like it looks like a raw steak, then that’s a lot of inflammation in the body. That person is dealing with some pain issues, they’re dealing with a lot of maybe inflammation of the organs. That there’s some great illness going on there.
If it’s a pale tongue, then that means they’re very deficient in blood or in the yang aspect of things. They tend to be a little cooler, circulation tends to be their hands are cold, their feet are cold. If there’s a purplish color to the tongue—and a lot of people will say, well I don’t see the purple, because it’s very subtle—purple is a stagnation of blood meaning there’s an injury somewhere. Typically, when I see purple, it’s affecting the muscles and the joints, pain in the muscles and the joints. If it’s blue, then the person’s really, really cold. They’ve got a lot of coolness in the body itself, and so that means the organs are also running cold.
I look at the color first. I always look for a coating as well. it’s normal to have a little bit of coating, but the coating is also based on what is the color of the coating and the consistency. So how thick is it? So if it’s really thick, then that means there are pathogenic issues going on? They probably have some candida, some yeast, parasites, those kinds of things. If there’s an absence of coating, that means that they’re they’ve got a yin deficiency so they don’t have enough heat in the body. If there is a white then there’s cold present, so that means there might be coming down with something.
One of the things I used to do with my kids was if they didn’t feel like they wanted to go to school and they wouldn’t want to act like they were sick, I’d always say let me see your tongue. If that tongue didn’t have any coating they’re going to school. They can’t pull, they just can’t.
[02:00:26] Ashley James: Did you look at their eyes too?
[02:00:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Of course.
[02:00:30] Ashley James: You’re like let me look at your eyes, let me look at your tongue. No. Do you have a test today? You’re going to school.
[02:00:35] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I was looking to see which direction they went because if they were having to create something, they were going up into the right brain. If they were telling me the truth they’re going to the left. That would tell me if they’re lying, so I look at that.
But also the moisture of the tongue. So if it’s really wet, then that means that there’s a lot of internal damp going. If they’re dehydrated it’s going to be really dry, too much heat going on in the body. So for example, if I see the tip of the tongue and it’s really red, then there’s heat in the heart. So that’s a really good way to look at that. I’m trying to think of what that state would be, but too much heat in the heart would be like a heart condition of some sort, not where you have congestive heart failure that would be the tongue on the tip would be wet and it would be of a different color not heat. I look at that.
The crease down the center of the tongue typically means there’s something going on with the spine, so they’ve had a long-term spinal issue. So if I see that deep crease down the center I ask them, so tell me about your back. What’s going on with that? And they’re like, how do you know about my back? Then I’ll say, well, you got that deep crease going on, so they’ll tell me. But if there are more lines in the middle of the tongue, that means it’s a new thing. It’s more of an acute episode. If it’s a decrease and it’s been a long-term thing, I tend to see a deep crease on someone who has scoliosis, for example.
If I see bite marks on the outside of the tongue where the liver and the gallbladder are located, and typically I mean by that is where the ridge of the outside the tongue is, if I see bite marks there, either that’s a spleen deficiency where the blood is not coursing through the body as well, so there’s usually a pain issue or something going on with the blood. They need a blood cleanse of some sort, or they’ve got some pathogens going on.
But typically, if it looks like they’re biting their tongue, that means they’re not absorbing their food. So either they’re not eating their food enough—chewing it enough, or they’re needing a digestive enzyme. Their body’s not developing that enzyme. It could also mean they’re having difficulty processing protein like meat proteins, for example. So then their body is not being able to bring up enough of the digestive enzyme to break down that particular type of protein, so we may need to look at that instead.
The best way that I do this is when I’m doing my biofeedback with somebody and I’m doing my first session with them I’ll say, okay, let me look at your tongue, and then they stick their tongue out. So I cue people that the best way to see what the health and status is of yourself is first thing in the morning before you drink any water whatsoever or drink anything, go look at your tongue—
[02:03:45] Ashley James: Or brush your teeth.
[02:03:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And then scrape your tongue. Yeah, or even brush your teeth. Always look at your tongue first before you do anything, and that’ll tell you exactly what’s going on—how much bacteria you’re developing throughout the night as you’re sleeping. What the color is, just how much of a coating you have. And then before they drink any water I ask them to scrape their tongue.
What I mean by that is not with a toothbrush where they scrape it back and forth while they’re brushing their teeth because then they’re just pushing the bacteria or whatever is on the tongue deeper into the papilla kind of like when you had those creases and those crevices. Imagine if you were to take a toothbrush and scrape your tongue that way, it would push it deeper down into those crevices and then you’re going to get a great outgrowth of bacteria.
So I basically recommend that they scrape it. You can get those tongue scrapers. There’s a metal one, bamboo, or you can even get the plastic ones. I say just grab a spoon, a big old tablespoon from your drawer and just use that and then you just scrape it and then rinse—scrape, rinse, scrape, rinse, and keep scraping until no more of this stuff comes off. Whether you floss your teeth or you brush your teeth first and then floss, but then you floss and then do an oil pulling. The oil pulling will do the last little bit of pulling out all the rest of that bacteria that you might have missed and that’ll help a lot. So I usually recommend doing that.
[02:05:13] Ashley James: Explain oil pulling for those who don’t know how to.
[02:05:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So oil pulling, you just take a coconut oil—whether it’s the fractionated coconut oil or the solid oil. You just take a teaspoon or a tablespoon of it, then you stick it in your mouth, and you swish it around. It’s going to melt because your mouth is very warm. It’s going to melt it and then you swish it for five minutes. Most people, if they can’t tolerate five minutes, just two minutes then and then you spit it out. I want to caution people, do not spit it down your drain because it will congeal and then you’ll get a clogged drain. I don’t want husbands or spouses mad at me because they got a clogged drain now because of the oils going into the drain.
So typically, spit it in a garbage can or something that you’re going to dispose of, and that’s the best way to do an oil pulling.
[02:06:07] Ashley James: What about sesame oil? I’ve heard use sesame oil, so why coconut oil?
[02:06:12] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I like coconut oil because people like the flavor of coconut oil, and if you like it you’re going to do it. Whereas sesame can be very seasoned or a taste that most people have a tendency to try to acquire, but either oil would be good. I also use MCT oil, that medium-chain triglyceride. That’s also a very good oil to use as well.
[02:06:38] Ashley James: It’s not like that coconut oil has more anti-microbial properties than another kind of oil, it’s just a matter of taste?
[02:06:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, yeah. First of all, it’s availability. I try to make suggestions based on availability for most people. Taste and acquireness of taste because if they’re not going to like it they’re not going to do it, and how readily do they have it. So yes, I do like coconut oil for that reason—the anti-micro microbial, which is why the MCT works so well, why it’s so good for pulling the bacteria and the virus stuff out. But the sesame, yeah. I have sesame oil and I use it myself. I use it actually on my skin quite a bit, it’s wonderful. I love the taste. I also put it on my popcorn too.
[02:07:30] Ashley James: If they had any oil, I mean any plant-based oil, not canola oil. You throw that canola oil out. If you have oil in your house, you just throw that out. But if you have olive oil, any kind of oil as long as you like the flavor you’re swishing it around your mouth. And of course, saliva comes in also so your mouth is now full of saliva and a little bit of oil. Your mouth feels so clean after you do oil pulling, it’s really interesting. It really does.
[02:08:03] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And I also encourage the use of bentonite clay, and I like bentonite clay especially with the brushing aspect of it. So most people don’t really like the flavor of bentonite clay because it’s clay. So I usually suggest that if they have a fluoride-free, aspartame, or sugar-free type of toothpaste that they really like, then go ahead and put the toothpaste on the toothbrush and then dab it into your bentonite clay. And the bentonite clay goes further into pulling out that bacteria.
If somebody has gingivitis or really bad cavitation or things like that in their teeth, which if most people understood the dental aspect of your teeth, they’re all associated with an organ. Each tooth is associated with an organ. So if you have an infection going in one of your teeth, it’s probably affecting that organ or it may be coming from that organ.
The eyes, the tongue, everything about us is so fascinating. There’s always a map to something, and so the teeth are the same thing. So if you have an infection in the teeth, bacteria, or gingivitis then you’re going to have a lot of health issues. That’s where you find a lot of hidden things that aren’t being tested in the medical field. That’s why 85% of the people that come to me say I’ve gone to every specialist there is and nobody’s been able to find anything wrong with me except saying I need a psych eval, kind of like what you mentioned. I always go to the teeth, I always want to look at the teeth. That’s the second or third thing I look at is the teeth too.
[02:09:44] Ashley James: Eyes, tongue, teeth.
[02:09:46] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: But the bentonite pulls it up. Well, ears, everything else.
[02:09:48] Ashley James: Poop.
[02:09:49] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, poop, you name it. Nothing is left untouched or looked at.
[02:09:57] Ashley James: I mean, once someone when someone’s gone to you they’re like what do MD? You go to an MD, they might see you for 15 minutes if you’re lucky. They barely look in your eyes ever, and it’s like how much information are they actually gathering? Well, they’re not trained to. And again, there are good MDs out there—the ones that really go for extracurricular courses and stuff—but traditional MD training, you don’t really look in someone’s eyes, tongue, mouth, ears, discuss their poop.
But as a doctor, you’re supposed to be a detective. Only looking at the objective versus also considering the subjective, and only looking at labs. That’s just one piece of that picture. You’re missing out on so much. So I really do love that you’re incorporating many different medicine modalities from around the world that show us windows into our health, not just physical but energetic, emotional, and showing us that they’re more than just a meat sack. It’s quite interesting.
[02:11:18] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I love learning. I’m kind of a nerd.
[02:11:22] Ashley James: You’re in good company.
[02:11:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I got a look at that. Yes, in fact, that’s what I find with most of your listeners is that they’re very learned. Many of them are like oh hey like I’ve learned a lot from some of my… and that’s the thing about healthcare. That’s the thing about being an integrative doctor is that when you stop learning, you should stop practicing because we should always be open to learning something.
[02:11:46] Ashley James: Right, same with teachers. I think if teachers stop learning they should stop teaching. We should always be expanding and always be excited. If you’re burnt out in your field you’re not serving. If you’re in a field where you service people, which there are very few fields where you don’t in some capacity service someone or service someone’s needs. But if you really are burnt out and you’re not growing as a person in that field, if you’re not growing and interested, you’re doing your customers a huge disservice and also yourself because being stagnant is akin to being in purgatory. Being stagnant, everything gets clogged up.
Find what you’re passionate about and then dive into it and it’ll radiate. When you’re passionate and you’re absorbing information, you want to help others. But like you said, you surround yourself with those like-minded people. When I cut out sugar and fast food, I noticed that I wasn’t surrounding myself with people that love to go to bars, drink alcohol, eat fast food, and eat sugar.
There were even some moms that our son was hanging out with, there’s a bunch of kids, and there were some moms who were really excited. We’re going to go to McDonald’s next. I’m like, okay, have fun. Bye. She was all excited, and she was a nice person don’t get me wrong, but she wanted to go to McDonald’s like every day and she did every day with her kids. She wanted all the other moms to meet there so that all the kids can play in the play area.
My husband, he’s so great. He goes, our son will never enter McDonald’s because I don’t want him breathing in the heterocyclic amines from the fried food. I look at my husband and I’m like I love you. I love you so much. I was even willing to go. Okay, well maybe we’ll just let him play in the play area, which is disgusting by the way. The McDonald’s player is disgusting. I mean, you want a kid to be a kid and just have fun. My husband’s like, no. He’s not even going to breathe in that poisonous air. What are you talking about?
So you just end up surrounding yourself with people. Over time, I just found these crunchy moms that some of them are more crunchy than me if you can believe it. I had one mom reading labels more than I read labels. I didn’t think that was possible. It’s just raise your standards, find people that are in line with your health goals, and surround yourself with those people. So I just noticed that over the last few years, my friend base has really changed in a good way. I don’t throw people away, it’s just people that naturally will gravitate away from and gravitate towards depending on your focus.
Going back to the things you were talking about when you talk about loving your body like truly, you look at that food, is this loving me? Not is this giving me instant gratification and pleasure, but is this loving me? Because if there’s a component of like well I’m going to have great pleasure eating it and then there’s going to be a period of shame and guilt afterward, that’s not love. That’s not loving you. That’s not nourishing you. That is creating healthy boundaries. That is learning how to create healthy boundaries within oneself. And when you learn to love yourself as authentically as you have illustrated, we find it easier to then inform others of our boundaries as to how we want to be treated.
This is getting into the idea of that there are no villains or victims. Coming from the standpoint of if you believe there are no villains or victims because we choose based on all of our conscious and unconscious choices, we choose how to tell people how to treat us. We are the ones that choose to be in social situations. Now, this is not like a black or white situation. This is just an exercise in thinking to give us new access to information. So if we come at life from a standpoint of I am empowered in my life, I am responsible for my life and my choices, then what we do is we say to ourselves in this life that I have—sorry, my kids playing in the background it’s distracting me. I’m trying to focus here. The pregnancy brain has taken over. I’m surprised I made it this long.
[02:16:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: A sparkly thing.
[02:16:40] Ashley James: He’s playing with the jack in the box and I’m just like, ahh.
[02:16:48] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s kind of funny that you were talking about McDonald’s, you know jack-in-the-box.
[02:16:52] Ashley James: Oh, right, right, right. Well no, the old toy. He’s playing within the background. It’s so funny my brain just goes oh. In terms of enforcing boundaries, this is what’s so exciting about enforcing boundaries, and if people want to get into this deeper, go look into non-violent communication and you can find hours of videos on Youtube. The man who invented this passed away, but his family created a foundation. You could pay something like $12 or $20 a month or whatever to gain access to thousands of hours of his training. There’s a lot of great lessons you can learn, but the focus is this. If you identify as a victim, you give up your personal power because you’ve given up your ability to say I am at cause in my world, I enforce my boundaries, and I teach people how to treat me.
So when we decide to not identify as a victim but instead go okay, things have happened to me and I get to now choose how to train people how to treat me. I am in control in that I will teach them how to treat me. That is a measure of self-respect and love that will come more naturally when we start to do things like you said—choosing foods and even routines in our life like going to bed at 9:00 PM versus midnight is an act of self-love. It creates a discipline that is enforcing a boundary that says I love myself so much this is my personal boundary.
And so then if you decide that your bedtime is always 9:00 PM. You get into bed, you read for an hour, and you go to sleep. And then someone wants to go drinking with you or do a behavior that would keep you up late at night, then you get to decide, am I going to teach these people in my life that this is my boundary and for them to respect it. And then you teach them and you show them this is my self-love. Over time, it gets easier and easier. But at first, people will abreact, will push against you, and try to bulldoze your boundaries.
[02:19:16] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Or shame you.
[02:19:17] Ashley James: Every form of manipulation, right? So when we go into health stuff and then we have friends and family that don’t understand it, then they really try to get us to go eat and behave the old way. That’s why I love it if we keep coming at it from how Dr. Vienna said everything you put in your mouth and every health choice you make, ask yourself, is this authentically loving me? And that will help open you up to understand boundary setting on a whole new level when it comes to your health. Then you have to teach people gradually over time how to treat you in this new way where they will respect the boundaries of your self-love instead of trying to manipulate, hurt you, or have you stumble or fall.
They’re all doing that unconsciously too. They’re not like hahaha, how am I going to make her get off her diet? It’s largely unconscious, but our friends and family will try to bulldoze our boundaries at first. This is why I like nonviolent communication because they teach you step by step how to, in a loving way, hold a boundary in place and not let toxic behaviors continue.
I just wanted to incorporate that into what you said.
[02:20:34] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, and I agree with all of that. You summarize it very nicely. When did we start making time so important? Okay, you didn’t develop to develop this illness overnight, so then why are you expecting recovery overnight. So allow yourself the time to heal, the time to develop that habit, the time to develop that good behavior because oftentimes, what happens is January 1st, everybody’s starting on this new year’s resolution, which I don’t believe in. Every day should be a resolution. But you start this new year’s resolution. Oh, I’m going to not eat sugar for however long, and then two days in you eat sugar. Then you go through the shaming of yourself, your psyche, everything. See, I can’t hold myself to anything. I’m just weak. No, you start out with I’m strong, doing the I ams. It’s a very powerful two-letter word—I am—and really working on that.
But then it’s also really thoroughly enjoying the process, thoroughly enjoying it and finding out what’s the root cause behind that emotion. So many times, in the two-hour sessions that I have with people because really, that is about what it takes for people to just even open up is you find out the past hurts, the childhood hurts, the childhood traumas that made you the adult you are today. And so when you could go into those childhood traumas and you can heal that child, then guess what, the adult heals too.
When the adult is healed, then that adult makes better choices, then they start to love themselves more, and then they become better parents because then they see, oh my gosh, I told myself I was never going to be like my parents and here I am, I’m becoming like my parents. Not like their parents were bad either, it’s just the way in which we were perceived or the way in which we were taken. But I see a lot of those childhood traumas that affect the choices they make today.
So when we could go back and heal that, and that’s where I feel true healing comes in, where the true aha moment comes in. Because when you ask the question were you a child that got to be heard, or were you the child that could be seen and not heard? When they tell me I was the one that could be seen but not heard, oftentimes there’s that thyroid, there’s the immune system going on where they have a thyroid issue because of that or they don’t have a voice.
So they tend to be a victim because then they choose partners that are similar to that to where there’s comfort because back when that emotional intelligence was being developed in that childhood, that’s what they lean into as an adult. Therefore, that influences every decision they make, the friends they hang out with, the choices they make as far as the companion they want to be with for the rest of their lives.
It’s not until you actually start to heal yourself to where you actually start to find that root issue that is making you destroy who you are internally, externally, emotionally, psychologically—all of that. Once you find that thing—that one thing—then you can actually build on it, and that’s where the true healing starts to begin and you start to see it physically. When people start to rebuke and when they start to sabotage possibly, it’s because they see this person who has made all of this wonderful effort.
I have this one friend of mine. She has lost over 100 pounds and she’s done it the right way—with healthy food, with exercise, with walking, and you could just see the total vitality that is emanating from her. You can see this vitality of wanting to exercise. Everybody says, well if you just get off the couch you could lose some weight. Do you know how much it takes to have an extra 40 pounds on you, and then to have the motivation to lift those 40 pounds to go exercise? Yet you got to have that internal motivation, and that internal motivation is the love of life.
I saw this friend of mine who doesn’t allow himself to eat sugar very often, but when he does, he thoroughly enjoys the moment. Anybody who is around him gets to see him thoroughly enjoying it just from his facial expressions. When he takes that bite of that—he might only just take one bite of a cheesecake, for example, but the facial expression. Your mouth is almost drooling just watching him because he’s thoroughly enjoying that moment.
So if you’re giving yourself a moment to have that one bite of that one thing that you said I could never have again, but you take such sheer pleasure in enjoying it—let all your taste buds break down every ingredient of that food, of that I item, then you don’t need more because now you’re fully engulfed, almost an orgasmic experience that you’re having right now with that food because you’re allowing yourself to truly enjoy it. That’s how every meal should be taken.
We tend to dilute it with beverages, with entertainment, with conversation, with our phone in front of us, our TV on, or something like that takes away that pleasure. But if you just take that one little plate of food, you take a bite of it, you close your eyes, and you let your taste buds taste every little taste or every little essence that’s in that food, you won’t need as much food to finish. You’ll be very nourished, you’ll feel gratified after your meal, and it would be one of the best meals you’ve ever had because you went in full-blown with every sensory perception there is in there.
[02:26:38] Ashley James: I love it.
[02:26:39] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So thoroughly enjoy it.
[02:26:40] Ashley James: And make it be an act of self-love the fact that you’re not binging. Even like you said, people will eat and they’re not even conscious of the food that they’re eating. They’re just looking at their phone, watching TV, or whatever, and they’re not even experiencing it. They’re not enjoying it. When you do really, really, really enjoy it, you don’t have to just blindly overeat. You can really get the satisfaction out of each bite, and slowing down to chew your food—like really chew 20 times kind of thing with each bite—really helps digestion. We talked about this last time that you and your husband do. But there’s this amount of being conscious.
Sometimes people go unconscious around their finances, or they go unconscious around their budget. They go unconscious around food. Wherever we go unconscious in life, we don’t really have healthy strategies, I’ve got to tell you. Look at an area of your life that’s been in your blind spot that you’ve really been unconscious of, that you’ve been neglecting, and look if you have healthy strategies holding that part of your life up, or are you kind of like being a teenager where it’s just instant gratification, looking for pleasure, and not really worrying about the consequences.
So it does take that emotional quotient, that delayed gratification and being conscious of that one area of your life. Shine light on it not to grow shame and guilt, but shine light on it and build healthy habits around that area. I’ve got lots of episodes on building healthy habits, and of course, listeners can go to learntruehealth.com, use the search function there, and type in healthy habits. I’ve got several episodes all about doing that. Like you said, don’t rush it. What’s this idea that we have to do it right away? It has to all be done right away. Start. Start and get conscious.
If it’s something like getting conscious about how much water you drink. Getting conscious about the foods you’re putting in your mouth and staying conscious during a meal. Getting conscious while you’re moving your body in a way that brings you joy. Getting conscious about things around your body, your health, and your emotional state, and getting conscious about your eyes, your tongue, and those kinds of habits that you pointed out. How we can manage our oral health in a way that’s going to bring even more vitality.
But getting conscious allows us to make really positive changes in a much more rapid fashion, and then also bringing that learning about how to enforce healthy boundaries with others. Because once you start making changes, sometimes other people in our life don’t like it. It’s like crab in the bucket. I don’t know what it is. I want to protect you as the listeners in a healthy way to be able to not allow the people that love you to squish your efforts. Tall poppy syndrome I think it’s called in Australia.
When you’re just sprouting, when you’re just like a little baby sprout in the garden, it’s so easy to squash the plant as opposed to at the end of the season, when the plant’s huge now and it’s hard to squash it. So that habit is very delicate at first right, so protect that habit as you grow it and don’t let others around you squash it. Continue to protect it and also teach others that these new healthy habits are your self-love. Watch it flourish and watch it grow.
Dr. Vienna, Lafrenz, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. You and I could go on for hours and hours, as we often do. Your website is natural-therapeutics.com, and of course, links to everything that Vienna does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[02:30:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to the listeners who have reached out to me in the past from the last podcast because we’ve developed some wonderful friendships from that, and I’ve learned a lot from them as well. The way that this iridology piece would work is they would send me a picture of their eyes and then I would spend some time analyzing it, and then we’d sit down and actually go through it together.
Don’t be afraid of your tongue, not only with the appearance but also what comes off of it. Speaking our truth and like you were saying, standing up for ourselves and making sure that people are aware. I think truly, the consciousness, when we become more aware of our environment, aware of our feelings—developing our awareness actually adds to the consciousness piece. And so that heightened awareness of what is driving this craving? What is driving this mood? What is driving this reaction? And what is driving the reaction from another?
So if you have someone who’s close to you that might be trying to sabotage you, what is driving that? Maybe they’re envious of the fact that you can stick to something so strong as cutting out sugar and they want to do it themselves. Oftentimes it’s a mirror that they’re looking into, and so you can help others. That’s what I like.
[02:32:19] Ashley James: I’ve seen this so many times. I had a boyfriend who we were together for like five years. I started to do a lot of personal growth work and that really threatened him. He tried to sabotage me every step of the way, it was really interesting. It finally came out, I finally sat down with him. I’m like listen, we need to talk. What is up with your inappropriate behavior around my choices? These are healthy choices I’m making. What are you doing? I pulled it out of him and he said to me I’m afraid you’re going to leave me because you’re going to grow so much that we’re not going to see eye to eye. It was all of his insecurities that came forward, and I think that’s really common.
I like watching the show My 600-lb Life, not because of the health advice. Please, please, do not watch that show for health advice. It’s awful health advice. My 600-lb Life, you’re following people who are morbidly obese, and then they do things like gastric bypass surgery and eating a very bad diet like low-fat yogurts that have sugar in them. I mean, it’s just really weird. But they’re eating less than 1200 calories a day.
Oftentimes, they go through periods where they fail and then they go to counseling. I watch that show, they follow them for a year, and then they have another show where you follow them for a second or third year. The ones who make it, every single time—you watch a few seasons of this you start seeing a pattern—there’s going to be one or more enablers because these people were over 600 pounds someone had to bring them food. Someone had to keep bringing them the food. The enablers, if it’s a husband or a boyfriend, most of the time end up leaving the person one once they’ve achieved their goal weight or when they’re on their weight achieving their goal weight because they couldn’t handle the person getting healthy, getting their life back, and not being dependent on them.
I know it’s a really overt example because it’s oftentimes it’s covert in our life, but it’s very overt when you watch that show. And then for those who watch that show, if you do watch the show, please read the book or listen to the audio version of the book by Dr. Garth Davis called Probenazole. He is a weight loss surgeon who saw that he was gaining weight and losing his health on the same diet he had all of his 600-pound patients on.
He had to go back to the drawing board because he realized that everything he was doing was wrong and really not helping people in the long run. So his book is all about the actual science of eating healthy for health, for reversing disease. Now he doesn’t have to cut people’s stomachs out because he has a program that is about nourishing the body based on science. So I love his book Probenazole, and I highly recommend listening to it.
I like watching My 600-lb Life because you see the psychological changes that occur when someone is making major, very overt changes, and how they learn how to enforce boundaries and love themselves, and how other people sometimes end up moving away from them or moving towards them based on whether they were there to actually support or whether they couldn’t handle it.
It’s a very interesting thing when we start to make these changes in our life, know that some people are threatened by it, and that’s because they’re afraid you’re going to leave them or they’re afraid that they’re not going to be needed anymore. It’s all insecurities. The thing is if we live through fear, fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s best to get it out in the open and come from love, which is what you teach.
[02:36:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: When I was working as an occupational therapist, I specialized in people with size. What I found in many cases is the enablers didn’t know any other way to express love, and that was to feed them, to provide them the pizza, to do all those other things. They didn’t know any other way. So then that’s when it comes down to let’s have a conversation about what other ways you can show love because you don’t always want to discourage the relationship to end.
In many cases, when you see such a loving relationship, you don’t want to encourage them to leave their partners or things like that, but how about let’s work with a partner too. I’m not saying that that’s what you’re saying. What I’m saying is let’s get everybody involved and let’s show a different way of love.
So if this person is on this path of wanting to eat healthily, then let me show you another way you can demonstrate love. How about giving them a foot massage, a little reflexology, back massage, or just a little effleurage where you’re doing a little bit of soft mobilization which also circulates the fat and gets us the cellulite to disperse as well. Let’s show other ways. Whether through essential oils or other means. When you can give them that other avenue, then they can be part of the solution versus part of the problem. Then they also then can say, oh, so there are strategies to get around this. Once they learn how to love that person, they’ll start to learn how to love themselves, and so then it’s a wonderful thing.
[02:38:01] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show again. And of course, listeners can work with you. You help people gain profound results, and I feel that you’re affordable considering everything you offer, so I highly recommend listeners all around the world can work with you remotely. And of course, if they’re in the Okanagan Valley in Washington, they can go to Republic and see you in person as well, which would be fun. Natural-therapeutics.com is Dr. Vienna Lafrenz’s website.
Well, we’re going to have to have you on the show again at some point and hear about how your garden goes this year with your experiments that you’ll do this time. Maybe sharing your food with others and seeing how it affects others, that would be very interesting.
Man, I’d love to study the microbiome of different plants and the contrast that the microbiome has based on whether you held the seeds in your mouth or not. I think that would be really interesting, or the frequency. There are machines you can hook up the plants to and see is there a different frequency of energy or is there a different sugar content? Is there a different nutrient value? It’s all grown in the same soil, same sunlight, same amount of water, but what other changes can we see, and what are the changes can we see in other people?
[02:39:26] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Also, the ones that were my seed for example, if I went through a depression or something like that, would it affect my plant? I bet it would. I think that’d be fascinating.
[02:39:38] Ashley James: Right. Fun.
[02:39:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So if I stop growing will my plants stop growing?
[02:39:47] Ashley James: I like to see the chain of custody. I like to think about the chain of custody of my food. The farmers, were they treated well? Was it a local farm, family farmers? Were they people who were happy with their job, or were they working in really poor conditions? Then there’s the distribution center, how those people had to handle your food. And then it goes to the grocer, unless you can source it straight from the farmer, which would be awesome. All the grocers that work there for minimum wage, are they treated well? How’s their level of happiness, and how long does it sit on the shelf? What country did it come from? How long did it have to fly?
So it’s the environment, how many weeks has it been since that apple was picked or months because apples can be stored in a way that it’s been months? How long has it been out of the soil basically dying slowly, and how many hands came across it? This is just talking about whole foods. Imagine if it’s these factory manipulated pseudo food, how many hands and how many chemicals had to go into that food? So if we can get the closest to the source as possible and be the one that influences the plant on that level, I mean that is such a cool experience to have even if you’re just growing microgreens inside your apartment, you know what I mean?
It’s such a cool experience to have to be able to influence directly, grow directly, nourish your body, and have zero chains of custody. You, you’re the chain of custody, that’s it. That is such a cool experience for your body to go through.
[02:41:51] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I noticed a big change when I moved off-grid for several reasons because when you’re talking about the chain of custody, when you’re looking at electricity when you’re looking at the water when it’s coming into your house, where did it go through? What chain of custody did it go through? How many households did that electricity go through? How many households did the water go through? How many different way lines did it go through to get to your house? So based on that, how much anger, how much frustration, how much toxins, pollutants, and all that is going into the water, into the electricity?
Here, in my house, I have a well that’s 800 feet down. I know exactly the source of where that water is. So there’s my custody right there, it’s right from the well itself. There are no other pipes it’s gone through, through the city, or anything like that. It’s come straight from the earth. So that water is so healing.
[02:42:45] Ashley James: There are no pharmaceuticals in your water. And because your water actually is so deep and under pressure, it’s likely that it’s structured water. I’ve had an interview about structured water.
[02:42:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s got minerals, absolutely fabulous minerals.
[02:42:57] Ashley James: So good. I love well water, I just love it.
[02:42:59] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: So when people come to my clinic, they don’t get water from the city, they get water from my house. I take in a gallon jug of water every day with my freshwater that people get to drink when they come to my clinic because I want them to have my live water. It’s fabulous water. The same with electricity. I know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from my solar panel. It’s fabulous. It feels good. That’s another topic.
[02:43:22] Ashley James: Well it is, it totally is. I have a whole interview, I have several actually but one specifically of I think it’s like a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He talks about how most houses have dirty energy because of the grid. It’s not aligned correctly, and the transformer in your neighborhood is not aligned correctly. If a home is not wired correctly, it actually goes back as a feedback loop and affects the rest of the grid. So it’s very rare to have a house that doesn’t have dirty electricity. It’s very rare to have a clean where the electricity is at a frequency that is normal and healthy and within healthy ranges.
His clientele, he goes and he helps. There are certain things he can do with someone’s house, and sometimes it takes replacing a transformer. But most of the time, there are things he can do within that home in the wiring to make the electricity clean.
There’s so much when it comes to health, and we always like to go down these rabbit holes. But basically, get back to nature as much as possible. One thing at a time. I don’t want to overwhelm people. One thing at a time. Choose something to do today to love yourself and keep doing it.
[02:44:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yup, and what’s the trigger.
[02:44:38] Ashley James: Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming to the show. As always, it’s been such a pleasure.
[02:44:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you, Ashley. I always love our conversations. Like you said, they always go down a rabbit hole but that rabbit hole’s wide and big.
[02:44:54] Ashley James: And we all fit in it together.
[02:44:57] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Lots of topics, lots of topics. So thank you.
Get Connected with Dr. Vienna LafrenzWebsite
Facebook – Dr. Vienna Lafrenz
Book by Dr. Vienna LafrenzWakeUp: Miracles of Healing around the World
Recommended Reading by Dr. Vienna LafrenzBreaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza
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Dr. Bradley Nelson's websites:
http://www.discoverhealing.com
The Emotion Code by Dr. Bradley Nelson
http://www.drbradleynelson.com
http://www.emotioncodegift.comhttps://www.learntruehealth.com/the-emotion-code-by-dr-bradley-nelson
Highlights:
What is the Emotion Code What is the Heart-Wall Trapped emotions can accumulate in one area and cause pain The Emotion Code can be used on humans as well as animalsWe all have emotional baggage but does yours cause you physical pain? In this episode, Dr. Bradley Nelson talks about the Emotion Code and how it can help release trapped emotions and alleviate the pain that is caused by emotional baggage.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so thrilled that you’re here today to learn from Dr. Bradley Nelson and his Emotion Code, how you can heal physical illness through healing the emotional body. He has just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of testimonials on his website. You can check out hundreds of thousands of people around the world that have had amazing results, so you’re going to love today’s interview.
Now, I got to tell you about a special that’s happening right now. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you’ve heard me talk about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That’s the online health coach program that I took to become a health coach. It’s either a six-month program if you’re a full-time student. Or if you’re like me you’re a busy mom or dad or just busy with school or career and you just want to be able to become a health coach but fit it into your very busy life, then you would take their year-long program.
It adds up to about 20 minutes a day of videos and audios, and over the course of that, you learn over 100 dietary theories. But more importantly, they teach you how to be an amazing health coach from the standpoint of counseling, of that emotional side of health coaching because really, everyone knows to drink more water, go to sleep early, but why don’t we, right? What’s going on there? You teach your clients how to create new healthy habits that stick and how to go through the emotions to get to the point where you’ve increased their joy and vitality in every area of their life, and that’s something that IIN will teach you how to do as a health coach.
Now, I was surprised to find out because I’ve interviewed the CEO and also the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It was very interesting for me to find out that about half the students take their year-long health coach training program just for their own personal growth because the program offers so much more personal growth. So if you want to become a health coach just for your personal growth you can absolutely do that by going to IIN, or if you want to become a health coach, you can also go to IIN. They’re having a great sale right now for the month of February, so you’re going to want to call them and check it out.
They already offer a great discount for my Learn True Health listeners. So when you call IIN, just mention my name, Ashley James, and Learn True Health podcast. But right now they’re giving my listeners an even better deal for Valentine’s day. And of course, isn’t that so appropriate? This month we’re all focusing on the energy and vitality of love, just bringing in more love and joy into our life and focusing it on maybe a bit of that romantic love. But also the familial love, the love for friends and family, especially the love you have for yourself, so let’s do some self-care.
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Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.
[00:03:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 455. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Dr. Bradley Nelson. I absolutely am thrilled to introduce you to his technique, and you should get his book The Emotion Code. You can also go to one of his websites, which is emotioncodegift.com and he gives you some great free goodies. Dr. Bradley, I’m really excited to have you on the show because in so many cases I’ve seen where people can heal their body on the physical level when addressing emotional blockages. And when going in and healing things on an emotional, mental, and even spiritual and energetic, everything comes back online. The vitality of the body and the joy comes back online.
I’ve seen so many people with chronic pain when they address the emotional side of their chronic pain, even though for years they’ve been going to chiropractors, getting acupuncture, or maybe even getting injections of some kind of steroid. But when they address the emotions, the pain went away and it’s absolutely fascinating.
I even had a woman on the show recently talk about her Ph.D. thesis was scanning people’s brains while they did emotional work and saw that the pain would actually leave the body. She could see it in the brain, and that sometimes, that chronic pain was in the emotional centers. It lived in the emotional centers of the brain, and how fascinating is that? And this is something that you specialize in is helping people to heal on the emotional level like we should be focusing on.
We focus on healing the body physically, we should be focusing that much effort if not more effort on making sure we’re healthy emotionally. I’m thrilled that today you’re going to teach us more about your technique, the Emotion Code. Welcome to the show.
[00:05:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s really great to be here.
[00:05:26] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, you have this really fascinating story that led you—both personally and professionally—to where you are today. I would love for you to share with our listeners so they can fully understand what happened in your life that had you become the healer you are today.
[00:05:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, it really started when I was seven years old I was really sick with the measles, and I’d overheard my parents talking. I knew that the plan was I was going into the hospital the next day and I was going into something called an oxygen tent. You know how it is when you’re a kid and you overhear your parents and they don’t think that you’re listening, but you are. So I knew the plan.
That night, I was lying on the couch. My parents had made a bed for me on the couch so that I could be near their room. I’m lying there on the couch just feeling really sick, and everyone else has gone to bed. My parents came into the room and my mother said to my father, “Honey, will you kneel down with me and say a prayer for our boy here so that he’ll be able to get well,” and so they did. Knowing my dad, I’m sure it was probably the first time that I ever heard my dad pray. My dad was a really great guy but he just was very private in that way.
Anyway, here they are, they’re kneeling down by the side of the couch. My dad is praying for me that I’ll be able to get well, and in the middle of this prayer, I had this unbelievable thing that happened. It started at the top of my head and it went whoosh through my body to the soles of my feet, and I was healed just instantly.
Now to go from being really sick one moment to being completely well in the next moment is just so bizarre, so impossible, and so unforgettable that I remember that like it happened yesterday after all those years. So I held my tongue until my dad was done praying, which didn’t take long. When he was done I said, “I’m better. I’m totally better. I’m totally better.” And they said, “That’s fine, go back to sleep. Tomorrow you’re going into the oxygen tent.” But the next day proved it. I was totally well.
So I filed that away. What I learned from that experience was that there is a higher power that we can draw upon, that higher power goes by different names, and I don’t think that it really matters too much. I think that we all have that capacity that we can ask for help from that invisible higher power, so that’s what I learned.
Fast forward about another seven years, things tend to run in those seven-year cycles, right? I started having these pains in my back that were so extreme they’d come out of nowhere and they would take my breath away or put me on the ground. I mean, it was like being stabbed with a knife or being run through with a sword or something. It was really extreme. My parents took me to the hospital and they ran all these tests on me. My parents were told that I had kidney disease, that it was about 50% fatal I found out years later from my mother, and that they had nothing to offer. There was no medical treatment, and my parents were told that my kidneys were either going to survive or not. If they didn’t survive, I wasn’t going to survive basically because they didn’t do kidney transplants back then. It was a long time ago.
My parents decided that they would take me to see some alternative doctors, some holistic doctors. Now, these doctors were actually a couple of old-time osteopathic doctors. If you go to an osteopath nowadays, in most cases it’s like going to a medical doctor. They prescribe books and so on, and there are some of them who still do some of the things that the old-time osteopathic doctors used to do. Their profession was a lot like chiropractic is now back in those days.
What happened was I think in the early 1960s or maybe the late ‘50s, the medical profession basically came to the osteopathic profession and said, look why don’t you just join us and we’ll make you like us and you can prescribe drugs and so on, and so they did. But these two, it was a man and a woman and I never really knew for sure, but I think they were kind of fond of each other. They may have a relationship, I never knew. They stayed out and didn’t want to have anything to do with becoming allopathic medical doctors, and so they stayed out of it.
They practiced out on the edge of town in a wheat field in a trailer house. I remember sometimes going there and there would be a busload of people that would just be leaving. People in other states would charter buses and come out and have treatments from these people. They were really really amazing people, really great healers. Dr. Alan Baine and Dr. Ida Harmon were their names.
So my folks took me to see these people. I can remember scraping the mud off my shoes trying to get into their trailer, and it was such a different experience from being in this big multi-million dollar clinic where they ran all these tests, where they couldn’t help me, they had nothing to offer. These people started working on me and right away I started feeling better. The pains right away were less severe, less frequent. And within about a month, I had pretty much forgotten that I’d never been sick. My parents took me back to the hospital and they ran all the tests on me, and as I recall they ran the tests twice. They said, “Well, that’s a spontaneous remission. Whatever we did must have helped.”
I was only 13 years old, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that these people had actually helped me. So I decided at that time this is what I want to do with my life. I want to be a healer, and if I need to practice out on the edge of town in the middle of a wheat field in a trailer house, hey, that’s fine with me. Because those doctors seemed to know what was going on with me, and they seemed to know what I was doing. As far as I knew at age 13, doctors that were found in trailer houses out in wheat fields on the edge of town that seemed to be their natural habitat of doctors got results.
[00:12:25] Ashley James: Man, I want to see a doctor in a treehouse. Just imagine what they could do for you.
[00:12:33] Dr. Bradley Nelson: I did see a doctor in a treehouse once. It was in Hawaii. I’d hurt my back and found a chiropractor. I remember I was waiting in his office and it was on the north shore of Oahu. He actually climbed up the tree and then all of a sudden hopped into the open window from the tree into the waiting room. I thought, okay, I’m in the right place.
[00:13:01] Ashley James: This is my doctor.
[00:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Exactly.
[00:13:06] Ashley James: What kind of things did the osteopaths do to you? I mean, I’m imagining some form of almost like osteopathic or chiropractic adjustments, but what else did they do to help you heal your body so that your kidneys functioned again?
[00:13:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, mainly they were realigning my spine and they ultimately ended up giving me various different kinds of potions and concoctions that they had put together. But that’s mainly what it was back then. I had misalignments going on in my spine that were interfering with the communication between my brain and my kidneys that weakened my kidneys. They started realigning things for me. It was amazing how well it worked. I mean, really, the change in my body was something that was very obvious to me, something that I could really feel. That’s what happened back then.
So then, time went on and in 1980, I spent a semester at Brigham Young University Hawaii campus, which is in Laie on the North Shore of Oahu. That’s how I met that chiropractor that came in through the window. Anyway, I took a class in computer programming, and man, that was just something that I just immediately took over my life—computer programming. I became a computer programmer, and as time went on, I used to do consulting.
I had a business, I called myself the Computer Tutor, which I thought was really clever. Back in the early ‘80s when people would buy computers for their business and they’d have absolutely no idea what to do with it. It would just sit there. They’d hire me to come in and look at the business, program things, and get things set up. So that’s what I did, and I really, really loved that. There was something about computers that appealed to the perfectionist in me. If I wrote a program and it wasn’t actually perfect, it wouldn’t work. That had a great appeal.
So what happened was time went on. At the time, I was going to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah eventually and studying various different things. But I was about six months away from going into the MBA program to get my Master’s in Business, and I had decided that’s the direction I was going to go. I had this dream of going into the healing arts years before, but I kind of lost sight of that.
So my wife and I went back to Montana where I’m from and we were sitting around with my folks. It was Christmas time 1983. Out of the blue, my dad said to me, “Are you sure that you don’t want to go to chiropractic school because it seems like such a great career and you’ve always wanted to do it?” I said, “No, I’m going this other direction.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you think about it one more time?” So I said, “Okay.”
So my wife and I made up a pro and con list, on the one hand getting an MBA and going to work for some big company, and then on the other side going into the healing arts. If you’ve ever done a prone con list like that, I mean, there were appealing things on both sides, and doing that exercise didn’t really help me. But having learned years before that there’s a higher power that you can draw upon, that night I got on my knees and I prayed. I just said, “Father in heaven, if you have anything to say about this, help me to know what to do because I’m kind of in the middle of the fence now. I could go either way and be happy.”
So that night I was awakened three different times. When I would wake up it would almost be like I’d been having a dream, but it was an unremembered dream. I would wake up and my mind would be full of all these thoughts of how great it is to be able to help people naturally, heal people naturally, serve people, and so on. I would think, well, yeah. That’s true. But then, on the other hand, the computers and then I’d fall back asleep. That happened three times that night, so I’m still not convinced the next day and still don’t know what to do.
So that night I’m on my knees again and I’m praying and asking God can help me to figure this out because I still don’t know what to do—kind of thick-headed, apparently. That night, the second night, I had this experience where I was awakened again three different times like the night before, but on the second night, each time that I was awakened, the thoughts that I had when I was awakened, the feelings that I had were—if you can imagine—really exponentially more powerful each time. So that on the second night on the third time that I was awakened it was overwhelming at the thoughts of service to mankind, humanity, and the whole planet. I mean, it was absolutely overwhelming. And right then, I heard a voice that spoke to me as clearly as I’m speaking to you right now, Ashley, and it said, “This is a sacred calling.” And I thought, okay, I get it. Thank you. So that was it. I never looked back.
When I got into practice I figured well, God’s gotten me into this, maybe he’ll help me now. So I developed this habit, and the habit was that before I would go to work on someone I would just take a moment and just ask for help. I just say, “Father in heaven, please help me to help this person. Help me to know what they need in Jesus name, Amen,” basically like that. And it was a totally private, totally personal habit. Nobody ever knew that I was saying a prayer for them, but I was, and it was just a momentary pause really. But I’ll tell you something. I absolutely know for a fact that that higher power—whether you refer to it as God, Father, Jesus, the Creator, source energy, or whatever you want to call—is real, knows what we’re doing, and is aware of our lives.
There were times back then when somebody would come in to see me and I didn’t know sometimes what to do. I didn’t know how to approach this problem, I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to help this person. And in response to that silent prayer, the information that I needed would just flood into me like an avalanche of understanding. Sometimes it would be a totally different way of looking at things than I’d ever either ever considered before, and that nobody else had ever considered before either.
So basically, I was in practice for 17 years in a brick and mortar practice and for about another two and a half years in a distance practice. I had that habit all those years and nobody ever knew it was a totally private thing. Now I teach it as part of what I teach to people how to use the Emotion Code, how to use the body code. It’s part of what you do and what we teach people all over the world that it’s an important thing. Whatever you believe, it’s not a denominational thing. It’s just that if you believe in a higher power, well then, you’d be silly not to ask for help because you can get it. It’s available for the asking.
So one of the most powerful things that I learned during those years was that all of my patients—no matter how old or young they were, no matter what they were suffering from, whether they were dealing with migraine headaches, neck pain, back pain, knee pain, infertility, asthma, digestive problems, depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, PTSD, eating disorders, or self-sabotage of some kind—I saw the gamut. All of those people had something in common, and it was that they were suffering from what you might call emotional baggage.
We use that phrase emotional baggage, right? And we usually use it in reference to somebody else. We usually say things like, that guy’s really got a lot of emotional baggage, and it’s true. The thing is we all have emotional baggage, but what I learned is that our emotional baggage is actually a real thing. That our emotional baggage is a lot more concrete than we have ever thought. To understand how this works, you have to understand what the body really is.
If you look at your hand, for example, that hand looks pretty solid. You can slap it down on your desk. It makes a nice thunk sound. But if you were to put your hand under a big microscope like say an electron microscope, and if you were to keep zooming in and zooming in and magnifying your hand more and more and more, pretty soon you’d be looking at cells, then pretty soon you’d be looking at this parts of the cell, then pretty soon you’d be looking at the DNA, and then pretty soon you’d be looking at individual molecules. At somewhere between a million and maybe 850 million times magnification, eventually, you’re looking face to face at a single individual atom. If you keep magnifying a little more, you see inside the atom. There’s really nothing in there. It’s empty space. Our bodies are pure energy.
Now, we think of energy and we think of the matter, and we think that they’re different, but they’re really not. Albert Einstein said that there really is no matter. That all that matter is energy that has had its vibrations slowed down enough to a point that we’re actually able to perceive it. And so that’s what our bodies are. Our bodies are made of pure energy.
Some quantum physicists actually figured out recently that because our bodies are energy, you could easily put all 7.8 billion people on earth into a little box the size of a sugar cube and there would be room for even more. That is if you could take all of the empty space out of these bodies of ours.
It’s a strange thing really, our existence and these bodies of ours. That they are really more of a force field than anything else. But if you talk to any quantum physicist, they’ll all tell you that that is absolutely the truth about our existence, which is hard for us to wrap our heads around but that’s the truth of our reality, the truth of our existence.
So anyway, sometimes we feel intense emotions. Sometimes our parents are arguing, we’re little, and we’re crying ourselves to sleep at night. Sometimes we’re in high school, we go through a breakup, and it’s devastating. Sometimes somebody close to us dies or is sick, or sometimes we have a bad job. I mean, who knows. We have all kinds of things that go on, and we experience all kinds of emotions, and emotions are a tremendous gift. If we didn’t have emotions, I don’t think our lives wouldn’t be worth living. I think our life would just be a flat line.
So we have these emotions, and we have positive ones like joy, happiness, and so on, but we also have negative ones. It’s the negative ones that tend to cause trouble for us. Think about a time in your own life when you were really upset about something. Maybe it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it was today. Maybe it was last week. Were there things that you went through in your life that was difficult? Did you ever cry yourself to sleep at night, were you ever abused, or did you ever go through anything that was difficult to bear? The reality of it is the vast majority of people, with few exceptions, have gone through emotionally difficult things.
Now, the problem is when you’re feeling an intense emotion of anger or maybe it’s resentment, frustration, grief, or sadness—whatever it might be. When you’re feeling an emotion like that, if you’re feeling it powerfully enough, your whole being—that whole energy field that is who you are—can be resonating and vibrating with that particular frequency. Sometimes what happens is that emotion can be too powerful, and it can actually then become lodged in the body, and this is emotional baggage. We refer to this as trapped emotions.
A trapped emotion is a ball of energy that is from about the size of a baseball to about the size of a softball, and these become lodged in the body. They can lodge anywhere in the body, and then they will cause a couple of different effects. They will cause physical effects. Pain is one of the big effects that they tend to cause. Again, when I was in practice and I had all kinds of people suffering from all kinds of different problems, I found that emotional baggage or trapped emotional energies were often at the root of all of these problems.
So to give you an idea of how this can work, there was a man that came in to see me many years ago. He had really severe low back pain. It was a 9 on a 0-10 scale, he said. He rated himself. If it’s a 10 you go to the ER and he was a 9. He was in a lot of pain, and I tested him using the Emotion Code. And with the Emotion Code, what we’re able to do is we’re able to very simply, very easily tap into the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is where all the good information is. It’s the part of you that is keeping track of everything that’s ever happened to you in your life. It’s the part of you that remembers everything you’ve ever done, every face you’ve ever seen in a crowd, everything you’ve ever eaten, tasted, touched, or smelled. All the emotional energies that have gotten trapped in your body.
I’m testing him and I find he has trapped emotion, the emotion is anger. Testing a little bit further, I found this had occurred about 20 years before, and he immediately spoke up and remembered what had happened. He said it was a work situation. He had been falsely accused of something and was really angry about it. That was the emotion, that was what created this trapped emotional energy in his body. So I released that trapped emotion, and his pain level went from a nine to a zero in the snap of a finger, boom. It was gone. It was unbelievable. He kept bending over, walking around in my office, twisting this way that way, and exclaiming he couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle really, and I was grateful that it worked so well. Why did that happen?
There are two parts really to this story, but the first part is the pain relief that this guy got. Why did that happen? Well, you see, when you have a trapped emotion, it literally is a ball of emotional energy. What it’s doing is it’s residing somewhere in your body, and it’s distorting the normal energy field of your body. When the normal energy field of your body is distorted, that’s all your body is ultimately an energy field. This guy had a trapped emotion of anger. It was in his low back, and after 20 years of having all of those tissues distorted by that anger energy, eventually, it was causing severe pain. With the release of that trapped emotion, the pain was gone because that distorting force that that emotion was creating in those tissues suddenly was gone.
Well, the story didn’t end there. A couple of days later he came back in to see me for a follow-up visit. He said to me, “My back pain is still gone. I still can’t quite believe it, but I have to tell you something. When I came here I had another problem that I didn’t tell you about. For as long as I can remember, I’ve basically been what you would call a rage-a-holic. I’m always yelling at my wife and my kids. I’ve got to watch road rage. I’ve been to anger management several times, it hasn’t really helped me. I’m just an angry person. I’m just kind of on edge all the time.
Since you worked on me and you released that emotion of anger, I feel really different. Things that would set me off before don’t set me off now. I feel kind of relaxed and I feel a certain level of peace. How did you do that? How does that work?” At the time I said, “Well, I really don’t know. I just work here.” But here’s what we believe, okay. Think about this, and this is I believe the actual truth about emotional baggage.
This guy’s got this ball of energy, this ball of anger in his low back, which seems very strange but I’m telling you that’s how this works. It’s distorting the energy field in his low back until eventually, it’s bad enough that he comes to see me. But overall of those 20 years, it has altered his personality because when a situation would come along in his life where he might tend to become angry, he would become angry much more readily, much more easily. Why? Because part of his body is feeling that emotion of anger 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You see, every emotion is a frequency, it’s an energy, and it’s a particular vibration. Because part of his body was already vibrating at that frequency—that vibration of anger—it was easy for him to fall into that resonance. That’s why after 20 years, he believed that he was an angry person until that trapped emotion was released.
That’s a great example you see of what our emotional baggage does to us and how it affects us. It’s such an incredible thing. Sometimes people have physical injuries that leave them with pain for years and years and years, and by removing their emotional baggage, sometimes that just disappears even though it was a physical injury in the beginning.
In fact, just a couple of days ago—we post a new testimonial every day on our site. We have far too many that we can actually post. Our site is at discoverhealing.com, by the way. I’m looking at our site and there’s a testimonial I want to share with you.
This was from February 2nd this year. A woman named Sabrina from Valbonne in France said, “Twenty years ago, I had a big car accident with two whiplashes in a row. It was very painful and for years I had substantial neck problems and vertigo. The agony became worse over the years and, because I had children, I could not get any rest. Eventually, five years ago, my body collapsed with neuralgia and I had to stay in bed for days.” Neuralgia is nerve pain. “The pain was so intense that I went to see several doctors and chiropractors, but it did not help very much. Sometimes it was so excruciating that they could not even touch me.
Then I heard of the Emotion Code and it was like a miracle. I healed myself! Today I can play tennis, run, look after my kids, and work once again. This method saved my life! Many thanks! I want to share it with everyone who is in pain because I know how much things can improve!”
There’s a great example of that, right? Somebody who had a really bad car accident 20 years ago and using the Emotion Code on herself she was able to, apparently, get out of pain. She says it saved her life.
[00:34:35] Ashley James: I’d be curious to know—and maybe you wouldn’t know maybe from her but from others—was the trapped emotion about the car accident or did she create the car accidents because of a trapped emotion? The reason why I bring that up is one of my past mentors was getting in a series of fender benders until she realized that she was creating them. It was other people hating her, but there were so many. It was like 12 of them. So many of them that she realized because she was very spiritual and did a lot of emotional work herself—master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. She saw in herself when she went back and went okay, why am I creating this? What’s my belief system? What’s going on.
She realized that she was creating them because of the emotional distress she was having around her job and how much her unconscious was fighting her because it was completely going against her value system. Staying in that job was going against every fiber of her being but she kept shoulding herself like golden handcuffs, like I should stay here. So she was creating these disruptions to basically not go to work, but there’s a lot of emotions around her work, around feeling neglected and abused. So she had to work on that, get away from the job, work on the emotion, and then she stopped creating car accidents.
But she thought isn’t this interesting that some people—if you get out of victim mode in life right, and I really always have to preface this when I talk about being victim versus being at cause. I’m in no way saying that rape victims created it for themselves. This is just an exercise, it’s a mental exercise.
But if you can take on the mental exercise of being at cause in your world versus being a victim of things that have happened to you, then from the standpoint of being at cause you can go, so why did I create that? And not for blame but more for what’s going on at the unconscious level that I put myself in this position to be in this accident? Even if someone else hit me, what’s going on? Can I own this from the standpoint of what can I learn from it? How can I grow from this and what is there for me to learn here? Is there something that happened in my life that had me put myself in this situation?
Because all of our conscious and unconscious choices have led us to where we are today. And so if we own them and then we can learn from them, then we can look back and go, oh maybe this is connected to the emotions that were happening, the turmoil, or the unresolved issues that were happening prior to the accident.
I just wonder if in her situation, if she couldn’t heal fully from the neck pain because of emotions that created during the accident like feeling the injustice of being in a bad accident, or was it that she was having issues with motherhood, with her husband—whatever dissatisfaction in her life, whatever stuff was happening before the accident, still her body was holding on to that pain from the injury for years later because she hadn’t worked on it.
So I would just be interested to know what is the root cause? In a lot of cases, when it comes to an injury that lasts for years, is the root cause prior to the injury oftentimes, or is it the emotions from that injury itself?
[00:38:19] Dr. Bradley Nelson: It depends. If I had to bet, I would say that probably there was some emotional baggage that helped to precipitate the accident. When we have trapped emotions, what they do is they send out—they’re continually broadcasting their vibration out into the universe. And so then that tends to draw things to us that tend to create more of that.
The other thing that happens is when you have an injury—the intense emotional experiences that you go through after that for years or decades—will often tend to become trapped in that area and make the distortion worse. A great example of this is a guy that I worked with many years ago. This guy came into my office, his name was Steve and he came in with his wife. He had a really severe tennis elbow. I mean, his arm was in a sling and he couldn’t turn the keys to start his car. It was so excruciating. I was barely able to touch the area, there was so much pain there.
So I started working with him and doing the normal chiropractic things and I wasn’t having too much success with it. So at the time, I was just learning about the emotional side of this, I was learning about trapped emotions. So I asked his subconscious mind, and we use muscle testing different types to get answers from the subconscious, and it’s all taught. We teach it very clearly in the Emotion Code book.
So I asked his subconscious mind, is there a trapped emotion that is contributing to this tennis elbow? And the answer immediately was yes. What I found was that he had a number of trapped emotions that had become lodged in that area of his elbow during the years that he was in high school. Now he was about 42 years old when I was seeing him. So he’d been out of high school for a long time, but it was funny because every trapped emotion had to do with a girl who had basically rejected him.
It was so funny because his wife was sitting there, and I’m muscle testing him and he’s saying, “Well, let’s see. Was it Sheila?” His arm would go down, “No, okay. Was it Cheryl? No. Shawna? Oh, yeah. That one’s strong. Yeah, Shawna. Yeah, she dumped me.” And so it was all these trapped emotions about that.
Here’s the thing, he was on the tennis team in high school. So what’s happening is as he’s dating these girls and they’re rejecting him, he’s also playing tennis and he’s incurring micro-trauma to those muscles that are being used the most. So that’s where the trapped emotions would lodge. The interesting thing about it is I think there were six different trapped emotions that needed to be released. The story’s in the book actually. It was so funny.
But the amazing thing really is that every time we’d release a trapped emotion, the pain level would just instantly drop. The pain level just kept dropping and dropping and dropping with the release of each trapped emotion until finally, we cleared the last trapped emotion and the pain was completely, completely gone. He couldn’t believe it. He took the sling off and he’s moving his arm around. I could go in and I could press deeply into those muscles, there was no pain anymore. I remember that was the first time that I had seen this phenomenon where you can have more than one trapped emotion in one place.
But that was a great example to me of how trapped emotions can accumulate in an area and can eventually cause just extreme pain. What we find now is that about 90% of all the physical pain that people have is actually due to their emotional baggage to trapped emotions. We’ve got almost 7,000 practitioners of the Emotion Code now in 80 countries around the world, and we’re all finding the same thing. That if you’re in pain, there’s a very high probability that that pain is actually due to some emotional baggage. It’s actually really simple.
[00:43:02] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming timeline therapy and hypnosis. Back in 2005, my mentors were enamored with the book Healing Back Pain.
[00:43:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yeah, by Dr. Sarno.
[00:43:24] Ashley James: Yes, Sarno. So what he discovered—unfortunately, he has passed away. I tried to get him on the show but he had passed away. Well, he was working, and I don’t think he was a medical doctor. I mean, this was back in 2005 I read the book. But he was doing work with hospitals and looking at the records and more administration work, looking at all the administration stuff seeing that all these back surgeries these patients were still having pain. Oh, we got rid of their bulging disc. We surgically removed it. Why do they still have pain? Why are they still on disability? Why are they still on these drugs?
So he started to look at stuff and found that—I can’t remember the statistic right now, I wish I could remember off top of my head, but it was so crazy something like 70% of all the MRIs they do, there’s some form of a bulging disc and yet people are asymptomatic. He’s like, how can we have someone who has a bulging disc that has no pain, but when people have pain in their back we always assume it’s a bulging disc. So we do these scans, then we blame the disc, and then we remove the disc, but they still have pain so it’s not the disc. So what is it?
And then he just dove in like you did, figuring it out. What he saw was that there was ischemia, which is a cutoff of blood flow to the muscles when there was an emotion withheld. So I had a client come to me, this was 2006. So still, a long time ago. She was a long-distance runner, she was in a lot of pain, she was very fit, and she was in her 50s closing in on her 60s.
She said, “I’m on Tylenol—three every day—and I really don’t want to be on it because it’s not exactly good for you.” I started talking to her. I was like, “Well, how long have you had the pain?” She’s like, “Oh, you know a few years maybe four or six years.” And as we kept going back in her history, it’s like her brain couldn’t fully accept or remember. It actually had been more like 15 years that she had been in pain and been on these drugs. She’s like, “Oh wow, I didn’t realize how much time had passed.”
I got to the root cause because guilt kept coming up as we talked, and what we figured out was she’s catholic and she had an abortion. She felt so guilty about it and she said to herself, “I have to pay for this guilt with pain.” She actually said that. She wouldn’t allow the doctor to give her pain medicine during her abortion, and she said, “I have to pay for it with pain.” And she did, but what was interesting because I was also in Canada, I was a registered massage therapist and worked in sports rehab, in sports medicine.
Before we started our session I said, “Can I palpate your back?” because she was pointing towards the quadratus lumborum on the left side, and I palpated. On the left side, it was hard as a rock ice cold. Now, this was in Florida. I was living in Florida at the time. I mean, it’s warm. On the right side, it’s flush, it’s a very good color, it’s warm and palpable. But on the left side, it’s like I’m touching granite. I thought this was interesting. This is ischemia. The whole muscle is just not letting any blood flow in, and that’s incredibly painful. Of course, when bands of muscle cause ischemia around the innervation of the nerve, it will create just incredible pain. Sometimes the pain will travel to different areas, but it’s very painful.
As she gets into talking about guilt, the pain goes up. I keep asking her where is your pain level? Now, I mean, my session with her was like six hours long. Sounds like your session would have been like six minutes. Your program sounds like maybe it’s more effective in that it sounds a lot quicker. But by the end of it, we released the negative emotion of guilt at the root level. I said, “Where’s your pain?” and I’m kind of expecting it to be less. She’s like, “It’s gone. It’s gone.” She’s like jumping up and down. She’s like, “How is it gone? How is it gone?”
So she goes back to her hotel room and I didn’t tell her to do this because I’m not a doctor, but she flushed all of her meds down the toilet. She was on three meds, one of them was an anti-anxiety med. She came to me the next day she’s like, “I took myself off all my meds. I’m not on the pain meds. I’m not on the anti-inflammatory meds. I’m not on the anxiety meds. I feel like a million bucks. I feel amazing.” And her pain was still gone. “Can I touch your back?” and her back on both sides were warm and palpable.
That was the most amazing thing for me to see that someone physically that their muscles that were holding—I mean like you said, the size of a softball or a baseball. Her entire quadratus lumborum, which is quite a big muscle, so bigger than a softball was hard, ischemic, cold, and holding on to guilt for 15 years. That to me just blew my mind. How many people are on meds, emotional medication, and also physical medication, and suppressing and putting a band-aid on and just pushing it down and pushing it down and pushing it down and then poisoning their bodies? And they’re not free of it.
That affects every area of their life just like one of your clients whose anger spilled over into every area of his life. Her guilt spilled over into every waking moment of her life, so just to be free of that. I’m so excited that people can learn your technique through your book and they can also then train. Can anyone become a practitioner of the Emotion Code?
[00:49:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes, anybody can become a practitioner. There’s really no prerequisites. It’s a simple program. It’s a six-month program, most people do it in about half the time. If you’re interested, there’s more information there—discoverhealing.com is our website.
Listen to this one because it never ceases to amaze me. Here’s one that came in from a guy named Robbi Cuijpers from Posterholt in the Netherlands. This was posted on the third, so today’s the ninth. Anyway, he said, “One night I woke up with a terrible toothache. It was around 2:00 AM and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I was suffering so much I was about to call the emergency desk and go to the hospital. It felt dreadful. Then suddenly the question popped into my head, “Could there possibly be some trapped emotions causing this horrible pain?”
“So, I gathered all the willpower I could find, jumped out of bed, and started sway testing for trapped emotions.” That’s where you stand up and your body will sway forward for yes and backward for no. “And yes, I had some trapped emotions that were causing the tooth pain. With the release of each emotion, my toothache instantly subsided. With the fifth and last emotion released, the pain was practically zero.
I then went to bed feeling on top of the world knowing the power of The Emotion Code.”
[00:50:43] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I love it. And the unconscious mind controls all of our muscle movements. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen it where you can ask your unconscious mind questions and it can control the micro muscle movements of a finger or an arm, or like you said, the sway test. If someone is in a wheelchair, there are other ways. You could do it because the unconscious mind controls the muscles of the body. You can communicate with it, which not that many people know.
I was always afraid of my unconscious mind when I began to study, learn more, and dive into it, and then once I developed a relationship with my unconscious mind, it was actually the most rewarding thing because it’s you, it’s the rest of you. It’s the rest of you and your unconscious mind. It’s just you, it’s just more of you, but it’s the rest of you that loves you. Your unconscious mind adores you, loves you, wants to keep you safe, wants to keep you healthy.
I mean, trying to understand John E. Sarno’s philosophy behind why the unconscious mind creates this ischemic pain? I’m not saying it’s always ischemic pain because like you’ve mentioned it can be injuries and joints and things like that, although I’d love your opinion. I guess the hypothesis is that the unconscious mind wants to resolve these issues and so it’s bringing it to your attention.
[00:52:06] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, that’s exactly how I look at it. Yes, the symptoms that we have are really just the subconscious mind trying to get our attention so that we can open a dialogue and figure out what’s really going on. What the underlying cause of our problem really is. What is it that’s unresolved? What do we need to deal with that we’ve never dealt with? I love what you said about the subconscious—that it adores us and it is the rest of us. It’s absolutely so true. That’s what it is.
It’s not just pain. Listen to this one. This is another one. This was posted on February 8th, I guess yesterday. This woman Susan from Utah wrote and she said, “My husband, John, recently went through radiation therapy for prostate cancer. One of the side effects has been a terrible itching that would not stop after his therapy. His radiation doctor said that John could be allergic to something new but didn’t think the medication he had prescribed was doing it. John went to a dermatologist and was told that all older men get dry skin and that was it. I had recently read the Emotion Code and I tried it on his itching. The next day he completely stopped itching! In his eyes, this was a miracle!” You never know. Try it on anything.
[00:53:25] Ashley James: Right. Well, the thing is, all day long we have emotions. All-day long we have experiences, and how often do we actually sit back and unpack those experiences, process those emotions, and digest them like you would digest a very healthy meal? It’s like we’re taking care of our bodies, and so many of the people who are listening would sit down and eat a beautiful very nutritious meal, chew each bite until it’s fully digested, and really give themselves, bathe themselves in nutrition. Give themselves the time, the space, and the peace to digest their food because they know nutrition is so important.
And yet when it comes to our emotions, we treat it like we’re going through the drive-thru and just scarfing it down and not even tasting it and then just throwing it back and expecting our body just to deal with it. Just deal with it. It’s so funny that we’re treating our body like we’re eating fast food when it comes to our emotions, but we take our physical body so seriously and we don’t take our emotional body that seriously.
I also believe there’s a stigma, and it depends on your generation. I see the younger generation. I’m 40 years old. I’m turning 41. Hopefully my mid-life is years to come, but I look at the younger kids and I see that they’re more open to counseling and therapy because there’s not a stigma for them. For the older generations, there was a large stigma around going to counseling. The thing is that working on your emotions is like going to the gym. You’re just going to the gym for your heart and your mind and just find the right trainer. Not every trainer out there is going to be the right trainer for you. Not every counselor is going to be the right counselor for you.
But I have clients who say that their sessions, working with their therapist have been the most rewarding thing possible because it’s just the place they get to digest, absorb, process, release, let go of, and understand their emotions and how they react. And then they notice that they stop just reacting and spewing onto their family and spewing onto their kids. They actually catch themselves, they take a deep breath, and they’re able to then come from a place of communication that has love and has respect because they processed all the stuff that happened last week, last month, last year instead of just bottling it up and then spewing at people.
This particular idea of sitting down and respecting our emotional and physical body by working with the Emotion Code I think could be so rewarding.
Now back to my question about ischemia, is it always muscles? Is it always ischemic pain, or do you find sometimes there’s bone pain? I know you mentioned that man had tooth pain. That could have also been a referral pain from a trigger point. Do you think it’s always ischemia though, or have you seen it where there’s absolute evidence that it’s not created in a muscle?
[00:56:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, yes. See the thing about it is trapped emotions can lodge in different areas. They can really lodge anywhere. They can lodge in a specific organ. So the way that we look at it is a little different from Dr. Sarno’s, and I have tremendous respect for what he did and the consciousness that he was able to create for people that this kind of thing goes on. But trapped emotions can lodge in different places. One of the most fascinating things that we see is that they will often form into a wall around the heart to protect the heart from being broken, and we call that a Heart- Wall. That’s one of the most interesting things that we see.
With the Heart-Wall, it’s not necessarily that we see the ischemic pain so much. Although sometimes, people do have that. But there’s a whole another dimension to it. Anciently, the ancient peoples believed that the heart was the seed of the soul, the source of love, the source of romance, the source of creativity, and really the core of our being. Even now, after all these thousands of years, anywhere you go on earth, if it’s Valentine’s day or if someone is romancing you, they’ll give you a box of something tasty that’s probably shaped like a heart. So these are ancient ideas.
I mean, the word heart is mentioned just shy of a thousand times in the bible, for example. There are these scriptures in the bible that say things like God doesn’t look on the outward appearance of a person, instead, he looks on the heart. There’s another one that says that as we think in our hearts, so we will be. In the west, we’ve never really paid much attention to those old ideas because medicine is still very mechanistically oriented, still very rooted in Newtonian physics. So the heart is just a muscle and we know it’s a muscle. It just pumps blood, that’s all it does, and that’s how we’ve looked at it for many, many years.
But in the last 20 years or so, there has been new instrumentation developed, and new studies that have been done that show some amazing things. For example, they found that when one person is feeling love or affection for another person that their heartbeat will become measurable in the brain waves of that other person on an EEG. They found that their heartbeats will synchronize. So there’s this connection going on between all of us that we have not necessarily been aware of.
But what we discovered, what was actually shown to us back in 1998, my wife had a dream. She asked me to help her decipher her dream. As I’m trying to do that, all of a sudden I have this experience that I can only describe as a waking vision where the room that I was in suddenly disappeared and I’m looking instead of this incredibly beautiful hardwood floor with this understanding that my wife’s heart is underneath this floor.
Now, this is one of the strangest things that I’ve ever experienced, and I don’t take drugs. I don’t even use caffeine anymore. I’m very straight that way. But anyway, this lasted for several minutes. I told my wife what I was seeing and understanding. She didn’t know what it meant either. We prayed, asked God to help us figure this out.
We started muscle testing her, and what we found was that when she was two years old—because she was born into a very volatile, very dysfunctional family—she, at some point around that age, thought her heart was going to break and so she started building a wall around her heart. This wall was literally made from layers of her emotional baggage. So she’d had this wall around her heart all of these years. We asked if we could start removing these, and it took us a couple of weeks to take down this wall one emotion at a time.
When the last one was removed, all of a sudden, things really shifted for her because for one thing, whatever group of friends that she’d ever been with, she never really truly felt like she belonged anywhere like she was always the odd person out. She always felt kind of expendable until that was removed, then suddenly, she felt like she belonged. The depression, the anxiety that she had to deal with decreased dramatically.
Initially, when we discovered this, it was really shown to us. It’s very much a God thing trying to get this out into the world this understanding. Initially, I thought it was maybe just her, that she was the only person on earth that had this. But what we find now is that about 93% of people have this phenomenon going on, and it’s called a Heart-Wall.
The most recent testimonial that I have about this—we’ve got about 10,000+ testimonials on our site. We get new ones every single day. We’ll pick one every day and post it. This one came in on February 4th. This is from a woman named Fawn. Apparently, one of our practitioners from Ohio said, “My most meaningful experience using the Emotion Code is with a client named Paul. He is a 70-year-old man who had such a horrific and abusive childhood that he built a Heart-Wall to protect himself. He never married or even had a close relationship. He has had many acquaintances but no close friends.
After our Emotion Code sessions, he is now transformed! He went out and got his motorcycle endorsement at 70! And now he is actively looking for a lady to enjoy it with him. He simply shines! The transformation is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed.”
Think about this, 93% of people have this phenomenon, this Heart-Wall phenomenon going on. What it does is it interferes with your ability to give and receive love for one thing, but also to really create the life that you want because the best ideas that you’ll ever have are not in your brain, they’re in your heart. And the heart we know now is really a second brain. The heart is filled with gray matter and white matter, it really is a second brain.
In fact, when scientists a number of years ago looked at the communications along the nerves between the brain and the heart, they found the vast majority of communications were going from the heart to the brain, and they were expecting it to be just the opposite.
What one of the first people that I saw after we worked on my wife with this was a nurse that came in to see me. She was 38 years old, and she came in because she had this terrible neck pain that she’d seen a couple of doctors for—they haven’t been able to help her. As I was talking with her she told me that she was single. She had not dated in eight years and was never going to date again.
So she’s 38, hasn’t dated in eight years, she’s basically celibate. She was an attractive person. I said, “Well, why do you feel this way? What happened to you?” She said eight years before, she’s really deeply in love with this guy who dumped her and broke her heart. That was it. She hadn’t dated since then. So I tested her and found, sure enough, she had put up a wall around her heart from that breakup. There were three emotions, three layers making up this wall. We cleared those emotions one at a time, and when the last one was gone, instantaneously the neck pain was gone—instantaneously.
When we see instantaneous pain relief like in this case and like in the case with the guy that I told you about in the beginning that had the anger from 20 years before, I think there’s more going on than just the ischemia. I think if those arteries and veins open up a little bit, it’s going to take a little bit of time for things to shift, but we see instantaneous relief of pain in many cases. That’s what happened to her.
That’s not the end of the story though. She left the office feeling totally fine and didn’t come back for three months. When she came back into my office—I’ll always remember this—she looked great. I said, “Hey, you look great. I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you?” She said, “You know, my neck’s been fine since I was here. You cleared that Heart-Wall for me, that really works. About two weeks after I was here, I found out my childhood sweetheart has been living right around the corner from me for almost eight years. We’re dating and we’re in love, and I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.” Wow, what a shift. Holy smokes.
[01:06:04] Ashley James: You got me fascinated when you said that it can manifest in the organs. We often hear anger in the liver and fears in the lungs or the kidneys. If someone has something with their pancreas, an illness with their pancreas because, with type 2 diabetes, it’s not necessarily a pancreatic issue. If someone has a known illness with an organ or like fatty liver disease or they have a traumatic brain injury, have you seen people take something—either acute or chronic—that’s in an organ that’s been labs diagnosed, been tracking it, seeing that yes there’s an injury or there’s a disease state and they worked on the emotions that were there? Have you seen people, their bodies heal to the point where they’ve been able to heal organs?
[01:07:16] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes. For example, one of the most common examples of that that we see is actually infertility where we find trapped emotions, for example, in the uterus. By removing those trapped emotions [inaudible 01:07:35] conceive. Think about all the different organs. The first thing that you have to understand is that every disease process that people experience has an emotional component every single time. In our experience now, doing this for 32 years, there’s always an emotional component.
If you identify the emotional component and you release that emotional baggage that’s affecting that area, then yes, things turn around. We’ve seen it happen over and over and over, so yes. In fact, trapped emotions can affect very specific parts of the body. For example, you might have a trapped emotion affecting your pineal gland, maybe the hypothalamus, or the pituitary. You might have trapped emotions that are affecting the thyroid gland. See all that this does really is it just removes the encumbrances that are in the body’s way of being able to function like the body wants to.
The body wants to be healthy, it wants to function normally, but when you’ve got emotional baggage, those are encumbrances, those are blockages to really being able to heal and to function normally. In fact, here’s a really dramatic story that I haven’t thought of for many, many years. But in talking about this, it’s reminded me of this.
There was a woman that came in to see us once who had fibromyalgia, which is this pain that you get all over the body that is very difficult, no known cure, and so on. I was able to help her with that, and then she told my wife and I about her daughter. What had happened with her daughter was that her daughter had gotten married about six months before, but her daughter suffered from vaginismus, which is the tightening down of the opening of the vagina.
She and her husband, still after six months, had not been able to have intercourse. They’d never been able to consummate their marriage. The marriage is starting to show signs of stress, and so she asked if we would look at her daughter. So we did so. Her daughter came in and we checked her. My wife found something that I don’t think we’d ever seen before, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen it since. But this girl had what we ended up calling a vaginal wall.
So in the sense, if you think about a Heart-Wall, if you feel like your heart is going to break, you’re feeling a physical sensation like there’s an elephant sitting on your chest, or maybe like you can’t breathe. There’s a physical thing going on there. The subconscious mind will put up a wall. The wall is an invisible wall to us, but to the subconscious, it’s very, very real I think. My wife’s Heart-Wall, the symbolic material was wood. She grew up in a house with hardwood floors.
So the subconscious will always choose some kind of material, and we’ve seen heart wall symbolic materials everything from plastic to glass to iron. But anyway, this young woman had a wall that her subconscious mind had put up in that area of her body to protect herself, and then she told us that she had been sexually abused at some point as a child. So anyway, we cleared the trapped emotions that were creating that, and it was the next day her mom called us and she said, “Guess what? Everything’s working. Thank you.” And in fact, she said, “Her husband is coming home. He’s spending his lunch breaks at home now for a catch-up.”
[01:12:02] Ashley James: I had a friend who had that and she had to have surgery. She had surgically had her vaginal opening altered so that she could have intercourse. It’s very interesting that she had the same condition. She spent years doing everything. Obviously, she didn’t learn about the Emotion Code. It would have been a lot easier than having surgery.
[01:12:31] Dr. Bradley Nelson: That was their next step really. Their next step is surgery. But luckily, we were able to avoid that.
[01:12:37] Ashley James: I’m just going to throw this out there, I like to get weird. What about people who are in a coma who has maybe dementia. Maybe children who are nonverbal autistic or adults who are non-verbal autistic. Is there any way to do this technique with people who can’t clearly communicate with you?
[01:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yes, absolutely. It’s not a problem at all. The reason why is because the subconscious mind never sleeps. So it doesn’t matter. People can be worked on when they’re asleep, when they’re in a coma. In fact, let me tell you a story. This is actually in the Emotion Code book. We have twin boys. My wife and I had seven kids together, and then she had a daughter before we met. So we have a total of eight, but we have twin boys that are 31 years old now. When they were four years old, we thought that one of them had a problem with his hearing because he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. His brother on the other hand was a total chatterbox, but he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. We just didn’t know what was wrong.
So we took him to a hearing specialist thinking maybe he was a little bit deaf, but his hearing was totally fine. At that time, we were really first learning about trapped emotions. So one night, we decided to work on him when he was asleep. Now, in the book, we explain how you do this. It’s a simple process, but we worked on him when he was asleep and we found that he had an inherited trapped emotion of anger from my wife’s father.
So in other words, when my wife was conceived in the womb, there was emotional energy of anger that was passed from grandpa. When we conceived this little boy of ours, that energy was passed to him. So we cleared that, released that. He’s asleep so we’re working on him when he’s asleep, no problem, subconscious never sleeps. We cleared a couple of other trapped emotions. The next morning at breakfast, guess who will not shut up. My wife and I are just looking at each other like a couple of owls like we just cannot believe what’s happening.
We all have emotional baggage, and getting rid of it is so important. If you think about it, if you’ve got a heart-wall and there’s about a 90% chance that you do, then what that’s doing is it’s interfering with your ability to give and receive love and your ability to really create the life that you want because your best life and the best creative ideas that you have are actually in your heart, are not in your head.
The beautiful thing about the Emotion Code is that it’s really, really simple. Anybody can do it. Kids can do it. We have kids that are having great success with it in different parts of the world. You can learn how to do it yourself, you can use it yourself, use it on your own kids, you can use it on your husband, on your wife, on your children, and so on.
[01:16:25] Ashley James: Can you do it with babies?
[01:16:27] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with babies. You can even do it with babies before they’re even born. When they’re in the womb you can work on them.
[01:16:35] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That is so cool. I’m 32 weeks pregnant so I better start reading. Can you do it with animals?
[01:16:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with animals. In fact, let me see, there was a story that I was just looking at here on our site. Let me see if I can find that really quick.
[01:16:56] Ashley James: I consider myself an open-minded skeptic, like a really, really open-minded skeptic. I wouldn’t be prompted to ask that question if I hadn’t had an experience where a friend of mine asked me to do emotional work on her dog and I’m like I’ll try.
Basically, the dog’s parents are splitting up. The two owners were going their separate ways, and the dog was picking up on the tension and it was a wiener dog. All of a sudden, his back legs stopped working. He became paralyzed, and the vet said this is common with wiener dogs. But there was no trauma. He didn’t fall down, get kicked, or hurt. He didn’t bump himself. He just all of a sudden, his parents are splitting up. There’s tension in the household, and now he isn’t working.
So I sat with him, I held him in my hands, and I just started my heart communicating to his heart. All of that information came flooding to me. I’m like, okay, let’s fill you with love and get you to see that your parents love you. You’re going to be in their lives and you get to have two homes now. They’re going to share. Your parents are getting divorced but you still have them. They’re not leaving you. They’re just leaving each other. The three of us were talking to him and telling him that, and then he got up and started by his tail and his legs worked again. We’re like okay, that works.
I’ve had other people on the show who are healers. One guest of mine helped a horse with her fertility issues. She was having miscarriages basically and this horse wasn’t able to conceive. So he did emotional work with the horse and the horse was able to heal from the emotions of all the sadness from the lost pregnancies. And then the next one worked and she was able to get pregnant. I’m like, okay. You know what, there’s something very interesting going on here. Of course, animals have emotions. If you’ve ever had a cat or dog, you make a connection with them, and there’s more there. There’s love, there’s acceptance, there’s joy. They have some very interesting emotions.
There are so many studies done now where they can actually see that animals have emotions. I’m not doing a debate as to whether they have a soul or not, or whether they go to heaven or not. I mean, those are all very interesting conversations to have. But the fact is that if we as humans can—and we’re animals too—but if we can heal physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, energetically by using the Emotion Code and working on our emotions and healing them, why not animals? I love that you said we can work with babies.
I just imagine the parents who have autistic children who are non-verbal could be doing this with their children. How beautiful is that? Sorry, you had a testimonial about working with animals?
[01:19:55] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh, right. This one just came in. This is from a woman named Beate in Germany. This came in on the first of February. She said, “Lilly, the dog of a family friend, suddenly no longer wanted to go up the stairs in her home and only managed to do so with a lot of start-up and motivation from her owner. Nothing seemed to be wrong physically. By the time my friend shared this with me, sitting together in a cafe, it had been going on for a long time. So, right there I connected remotely with Lilly the dog, and released a few of her trapped emotions. When my friend got home that afternoon, Lilly ran up the stairs without any complaints. A few days later, when her “fear of stairs” came back, I was able to solve a few more things. Now Lilly has no more problems walking up the stairs.”
And what’s interesting about this one too is that this was done at a distance. Of course, that’s because this is energy medicine really in its purest form. It’s not bound at all by distance, and so that’s a fun one, huh?
[01:20:59] Ashley James: Right. When you start studying quantum physics, you realize we’re all in the milieu together. It doesn’t matter if we’re 1,000 miles away or 1 foot away from each other. We have this energetic connection. I just love that. It blew my mind. It completely changed my life. My life took a 180 after I saw the movie What The Bleep Do We Know because I went like oh my gosh. This energy. Stop thinking in terms of chemicals and matter. Think in terms of energy. It’s all about energy. So that just makes total sense that emotions are energy and having them trapped in the body, very interesting.
You lived and went to school in Hawaii for a while. I studied Huna because I thought of the ancient Polynesian technique. I wouldn’t even call it a religion because it was more like their lifestyle. It was how they breathed, how they loved, how they healed, how they fished. Huna was their philosophy for living, and in Huna, there’s a belief. Now, this is hundreds or thousands of years old, who knows, but it’s an ancient Polynesian belief system about living and life.
They believed that emotions would become trapped in the body like black boulders stored in bags inside us. Like if you looked at a river and saw a river with no boulders would be calm, but a river with many boulders would be turbulent. So they had this idea that the more trapped emotions you had, the more the chi was turbulent within you and was thrown off. So I’ve always carried that imagery in my mind. So of course we would want to heal and release these emotions.
Now you’ve talked about getting the book the Emotion Code, but you’ve also talked about this course. Could someone who was very passionate like I am wanting to do this to all their friends and family, let’s say, and themselves and obviously the family being receptive, would the book be enough? Would it suffice, or should someone who really wants to do this technique with their animals, their kids, their husband, and their friends—should they take the course? Who should take the course and who should read the book?
[01:23:24] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, the information is definitely in the book. People all over the world are reading the book, putting it into practice, learning how it works. If you really want to master it or if you want to actually charge people for sessions, then we do want you to go through the certification program. The certification program that we have is an online program, and it’s available—you can go to discoverhealing.com. It’s actually on sale right now. It’s not an expensive program. It’s all online. You go through at your own pace. Most people will go through it in about three months, the record is two weeks. It just depends on how motivated you are.
But the nice thing about that is that it gives you rails to run on. I mean, think about it, I know that you’ve done this because I’ve done this and I think so many people have done this where you go to some really great course or something and you buy some materials and then a year later you come across it when they’re still shrink-wrapped. You think, oh yeah, I really wanted to learn that.
So the certification program gives you some deadlines, enables you to really learn it well, and get a lot of practice. You have a student advisor that helps you and gives you any kind of feedback that you need. But it also is all in the book. I mean, if you want to learn it from the book and use it on your friends, family members, and so on, by all means, go for it. It’s all in there. But if you want that added experience of getting certified, then yeah. If you want to do it for a living, then we want you to do that for sure.
[01:25:12] Ashley James: So why specifically? Because we have a lot of health coaches that listen to the show. I’m sure they’re all perked up and already on your site ready to sign up because this would be a great adjunct to health coaching. What is different in the live course that’s from the book? Are you teaching them how to work with people, what to look for, or the precautions? What is it that you get out of the live course that really helps you work with people on a professional level?
[01:25:44] Dr. Bradley Nelson: The course, in part, consists of 10 different recordings. They’re basically presentations where I go through with two of our top practitioners that have been doing this for many, many years. We discuss and kind of bounce things off of each other in explaining things. So what we try to do is we try to explain all of it from the very beginning in a way that makes it very easy for everybody to understand. That’s part of it.
You’ll gain insights from certification that you won’t get from the book. But also, in the certification program, you have homework. Your homework actually is the book itself. We supply the text of the book and the book on audio for you. You’ve got homework and then you work on yourself, and you’re one of the people. There are, I believe, 20 people that you have to work with, but you can count yourself as one of those people.
As you’re working with people and you’re releasing trapped emotions, you’re recording everything that you’re doing online on our site at discoverhealing.com in the back end at a location that’s just for you for this, and you record all that information. Then as you’re doing that, you do have to work with some animals, you have to totally clear the Heart-Wall from a number of people. What it does is accelerates your ability to do this because it’s like coaching. I mean, nobody really gets to the Olympic level of any sport without having a coach. It’s not possible.
That’s kind of what this program does. You’re able to see videos of other people doing this and sample sessions that are actually done that our practitioners are doing. You learn how to do this the right way. You learn how to do it better at a distance and so on. And then you’re quizzed on everything. There really is no final exam. You basically pass off each part of it as you go and so each part builds on the next part. But we have lots and lots of people doing it. It’s a great program. We consistently get very, very high 90% feedback from everybody doing it, that it’s a great program.
Anyway, the book itself if you’re just wanting to explore this a little bit maybe, you can go to emotioncodegift.com. There you can download the first couple of chapters of the book for free. We can give you those for free, you can try those out. If you want to get the book, the book’s available on Audible if you want to listen to it, amazon.com of course, Barnes & Noble—are they still in business? I think they are.
[01:29:09] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s Borders that went under.
[01:29:12] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Borders, yeah. What about B. Dalton? Are they still? I can’t remember.
[01:29:14] Ashley James: I was so bummed. Where I lived in Vegas—Henderson, Nevada just off of Stephanie, there was a Barnes & Noble and a Borders practically beside each other. That would be my favorite Saturday afternoon activity. I’d go pour through all of Barnes & Noble and then I’d pour through all the Borders. They would actually have different books depending. I would always go with the self-help, personal growth, and spiritual sections. That was my shtick. It was funny.
My husband’s and my second date we did that. We went to Barnes & Noble and Borders. I pointed out every book I ever read and he bought every book I ever read. He walked to the register with his hands full. He spent hundreds of dollars, and I looked at him. I’m like this guy listening to me. He’s serious. This guy’s serious. Oh, man. That was cool because he said he was into personal growth but then he was like putting his money where his mouth was. That was pretty hot I’d have to say. But we’ve been married for almost 13 years. I pretty much knew almost instantly that there was something special there. So yeah, I miss Borders.
Barnes & Noble’s around. I still do shop there occasionally. I love that you have an audiobook. I’m absolutely getting your audiobook because I love listening to audiobooks. I’m excited about that. Any listener can listen to your book or read your book and begin to immediately apply these techniques. They don’t have to take the course, but if they want to do it professionally they should take the course because they’re going to get it on a much deeper level.
That is so exciting. While I’ve been interviewing you I’ve made a list of at least 12 friends, clients, and family members that I want them all to get your book. I imagine all the listeners have done the same. No wonder you’re so popular. This is so needed in this world.
Dr. Bradley, I really want to have you back on the show. I’d love for you to continue to dive into this topic and explore it. Today was just to get us an introduction, get our foot in the door, and of course, everyone’s going to go get the book. I’m going to definitely go listen to your book, but I’d love to have you on the show you know after I’ve finished the book, and then maybe we can go deeper a bit into this topic. I know my listeners will absolutely love that, especially since they’re all going to go out and get your book too. And of course, they’re going to go to emotioncodegift.com and get the gift you’re giving out.
Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:31:51] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, I would just say that we’re living in this very unique time of the earth’s history where the world is in this transformational process. To me, it’s almost like the earth is in labor. It’s trying to give birth to this new world where so many of us want it to go. A world where people are living from their heart, and a world that is just so different from the world that we’re used to where darkness has so much influence over so much that’s been done in the world. This work, the Emotion Code, is part of this transformation. It’s just a little piece of it.
Think about when you read about somebody that is hurting someone else or has done some terrible thing, you can bet that there’s a Heart-Wall there because you see we feel with our heart. That’s why if someone is really hurting us or we’re really deeply grieved, we feel it in our chest, we feel it in our heart. And the brain that is in our heads doesn’t really feel. I mean, using the brain that is in our heads, the extension of that has created the world that we’re in now in many ways where we’re still using war to settle differences between nations, dropping bombs, blowing people up, and all kinds of crazy things, which seems to the logical mind to be perfectly appropriate.
But eventually, we are moving now towards a world where we’re all going to be living from our heart, you see, where love is going to rule the day. This work is about helping us to get there. It happens on an individual level. Get the book, learn how to do this. You can work on yourself, you can work on your family members, you can do so much healing not only for your own family that’s alive, but when you remove emotional baggage that has been inherited and passed down your line, you’re releasing it from them as well. We might want to talk about that next time because I’ve got some great stories I can tell you about that.
[01:34:11] Ashley James: Let’s do that. Awesome. Let’s have you back on the show and we’ll talk about inherited emotions. I have some amazing experiences about that as well. Again, an open-minded skeptic, wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t experienced it with my own experience. It’s pretty amazing, and it’s been documented actually. They’ve scientifically proven that the stress from trauma is passed down. They’ve been able to measure it, which is just so fascinating. But you can get very specific, and very specific trauma, very specific emotion that can be passed down for generations.
So it’s up to us to stop that, to heal it, and to allow the healing to go in both directions for past generations and future generations. So I’d love to have you come back on and we can talk about generational healing. I’d also like to ask you about past life healing if that’s ever come up because that is something that will challenge us in a very interesting way.
Dr. Bradley Nelson, I had the absolute pleasure having you on the show and can’t wait to have you back. It’s truly a gift and an honor to be in this day and age when we are birthing a world and we heal ourselves, heal thyself, help heal our friends and family. And if enough of us are going to tip the scales, we can help birth a world where love, peace, and consciousness are the things that we strive towards, the things that we resonate—coming from the heart instead of coming from the mind, like you said.
[01:35:50] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yeah. We’re going that direction. Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s been really fun. Let’s do it again.
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Highlights:
What is the Emotion Code What is the Heart-Wall Trapped emotions can accumulate in one area and cause pain The Emotion Code can be used on humans as well as animalsWe all have emotional baggage but does yours cause you physical pain? In this episode, Dr. Bradley Nelson talks about the Emotion Code and how it can help release trapped emotions and alleviate the pain that is caused by emotional baggage.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so thrilled that you’re here today to learn from Dr. Bradley Nelson and his Emotion Code, how you can heal physical illness through healing the emotional body. He has just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of testimonials on his website. You can check out hundreds of thousands of people around the world that have had amazing results, so you’re going to love today’s interview.
Now, I got to tell you about a special that’s happening right now. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you’ve heard me talk about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That’s the online health coach program that I took to become a health coach. It’s either a six-month program if you’re a full-time student. Or if you’re like me you’re a busy mom or dad or just busy with school or career and you just want to be able to become a health coach but fit it into your very busy life, then you would take their year-long program.
It adds up to about 20 minutes a day of videos and audios, and over the course of that, you learn over 100 dietary theories. But more importantly, they teach you how to be an amazing health coach from the standpoint of counseling, of that emotional side of health coaching because really, everyone knows to drink more water, go to sleep early, but why don’t we, right? What’s going on there? You teach your clients how to create new healthy habits that stick and how to go through the emotions to get to the point where you’ve increased their joy and vitality in every area of their life, and that’s something that IIN will teach you how to do as a health coach.
Now, I was surprised to find out because I’ve interviewed the CEO and also the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It was very interesting for me to find out that about half the students take their year-long health coach training program just for their own personal growth because the program offers so much more personal growth. So if you want to become a health coach just for your personal growth you can absolutely do that by going to IIN, or if you want to become a health coach, you can also go to IIN. They’re having a great sale right now for the month of February, so you’re going to want to call them and check it out.
They already offer a great discount for my Learn True Health listeners. So when you call IIN, just mention my name, Ashley James, and Learn True Health podcast. But right now they’re giving my listeners an even better deal for Valentine’s day. And of course, isn’t that so appropriate? This month we’re all focusing on the energy and vitality of love, just bringing in more love and joy into our life and focusing it on maybe a bit of that romantic love. But also the familial love, the love for friends and family, especially the love you have for yourself, so let’s do some self-care.
If you want a free module from IIN, you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out. If you want to learn more, just give them a call. Just google IIN. Their phone number comes right up, and those who answer have actually been through the program so they can help you.
Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.
[00:03:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 455. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Dr. Bradley Nelson. I absolutely am thrilled to introduce you to his technique, and you should get his book The Emotion Code. You can also go to one of his websites, which is emotioncodegift.com and he gives you some great free goodies. Dr. Bradley, I’m really excited to have you on the show because in so many cases I’ve seen where people can heal their body on the physical level when addressing emotional blockages. And when going in and healing things on an emotional, mental, and even spiritual and energetic, everything comes back online. The vitality of the body and the joy comes back online.
I’ve seen so many people with chronic pain when they address the emotional side of their chronic pain, even though for years they’ve been going to chiropractors, getting acupuncture, or maybe even getting injections of some kind of steroid. But when they address the emotions, the pain went away and it’s absolutely fascinating.
I even had a woman on the show recently talk about her Ph.D. thesis was scanning people’s brains while they did emotional work and saw that the pain would actually leave the body. She could see it in the brain, and that sometimes, that chronic pain was in the emotional centers. It lived in the emotional centers of the brain, and how fascinating is that? And this is something that you specialize in is helping people to heal on the emotional level like we should be focusing on.
We focus on healing the body physically, we should be focusing that much effort if not more effort on making sure we’re healthy emotionally. I’m thrilled that today you’re going to teach us more about your technique, the Emotion Code. Welcome to the show.
[00:05:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s really great to be here.
[00:05:26] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, you have this really fascinating story that led you—both personally and professionally—to where you are today. I would love for you to share with our listeners so they can fully understand what happened in your life that had you become the healer you are today.
[00:05:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, it really started when I was seven years old I was really sick with the measles, and I’d overheard my parents talking. I knew that the plan was I was going into the hospital the next day and I was going into something called an oxygen tent. You know how it is when you’re a kid and you overhear your parents and they don’t think that you’re listening, but you are. So I knew the plan.
That night, I was lying on the couch. My parents had made a bed for me on the couch so that I could be near their room. I’m lying there on the couch just feeling really sick, and everyone else has gone to bed. My parents came into the room and my mother said to my father, “Honey, will you kneel down with me and say a prayer for our boy here so that he’ll be able to get well,” and so they did. Knowing my dad, I’m sure it was probably the first time that I ever heard my dad pray. My dad was a really great guy but he just was very private in that way.
Anyway, here they are, they’re kneeling down by the side of the couch. My dad is praying for me that I’ll be able to get well, and in the middle of this prayer, I had this unbelievable thing that happened. It started at the top of my head and it went whoosh through my body to the soles of my feet, and I was healed just instantly.
Now to go from being really sick one moment to being completely well in the next moment is just so bizarre, so impossible, and so unforgettable that I remember that like it happened yesterday after all those years. So I held my tongue until my dad was done praying, which didn’t take long. When he was done I said, “I’m better. I’m totally better. I’m totally better.” And they said, “That’s fine, go back to sleep. Tomorrow you’re going into the oxygen tent.” But the next day proved it. I was totally well.
So I filed that away. What I learned from that experience was that there is a higher power that we can draw upon, that higher power goes by different names, and I don’t think that it really matters too much. I think that we all have that capacity that we can ask for help from that invisible higher power, so that’s what I learned.
Fast forward about another seven years, things tend to run in those seven-year cycles, right? I started having these pains in my back that were so extreme they’d come out of nowhere and they would take my breath away or put me on the ground. I mean, it was like being stabbed with a knife or being run through with a sword or something. It was really extreme. My parents took me to the hospital and they ran all these tests on me. My parents were told that I had kidney disease, that it was about 50% fatal I found out years later from my mother, and that they had nothing to offer. There was no medical treatment, and my parents were told that my kidneys were either going to survive or not. If they didn’t survive, I wasn’t going to survive basically because they didn’t do kidney transplants back then. It was a long time ago.
My parents decided that they would take me to see some alternative doctors, some holistic doctors. Now, these doctors were actually a couple of old-time osteopathic doctors. If you go to an osteopath nowadays, in most cases it’s like going to a medical doctor. They prescribe books and so on, and there are some of them who still do some of the things that the old-time osteopathic doctors used to do. Their profession was a lot like chiropractic is now back in those days.
What happened was I think in the early 1960s or maybe the late ‘50s, the medical profession basically came to the osteopathic profession and said, look why don’t you just join us and we’ll make you like us and you can prescribe drugs and so on, and so they did. But these two, it was a man and a woman and I never really knew for sure, but I think they were kind of fond of each other. They may have a relationship, I never knew. They stayed out and didn’t want to have anything to do with becoming allopathic medical doctors, and so they stayed out of it.
They practiced out on the edge of town in a wheat field in a trailer house. I remember sometimes going there and there would be a busload of people that would just be leaving. People in other states would charter buses and come out and have treatments from these people. They were really really amazing people, really great healers. Dr. Alan Baine and Dr. Ida Harmon were their names.
So my folks took me to see these people. I can remember scraping the mud off my shoes trying to get into their trailer, and it was such a different experience from being in this big multi-million dollar clinic where they ran all these tests, where they couldn’t help me, they had nothing to offer. These people started working on me and right away I started feeling better. The pains right away were less severe, less frequent. And within about a month, I had pretty much forgotten that I’d never been sick. My parents took me back to the hospital and they ran all the tests on me, and as I recall they ran the tests twice. They said, “Well, that’s a spontaneous remission. Whatever we did must have helped.”
I was only 13 years old, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that these people had actually helped me. So I decided at that time this is what I want to do with my life. I want to be a healer, and if I need to practice out on the edge of town in the middle of a wheat field in a trailer house, hey, that’s fine with me. Because those doctors seemed to know what was going on with me, and they seemed to know what I was doing. As far as I knew at age 13, doctors that were found in trailer houses out in wheat fields on the edge of town that seemed to be their natural habitat of doctors got results.
[00:12:25] Ashley James: Man, I want to see a doctor in a treehouse. Just imagine what they could do for you.
[00:12:33] Dr. Bradley Nelson: I did see a doctor in a treehouse once. It was in Hawaii. I’d hurt my back and found a chiropractor. I remember I was waiting in his office and it was on the north shore of Oahu. He actually climbed up the tree and then all of a sudden hopped into the open window from the tree into the waiting room. I thought, okay, I’m in the right place.
[00:13:01] Ashley James: This is my doctor.
[00:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Exactly.
[00:13:06] Ashley James: What kind of things did the osteopaths do to you? I mean, I’m imagining some form of almost like osteopathic or chiropractic adjustments, but what else did they do to help you heal your body so that your kidneys functioned again?
[00:13:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, mainly they were realigning my spine and they ultimately ended up giving me various different kinds of potions and concoctions that they had put together. But that’s mainly what it was back then. I had misalignments going on in my spine that were interfering with the communication between my brain and my kidneys that weakened my kidneys. They started realigning things for me. It was amazing how well it worked. I mean, really, the change in my body was something that was very obvious to me, something that I could really feel. That’s what happened back then.
So then, time went on and in 1980, I spent a semester at Brigham Young University Hawaii campus, which is in Laie on the North Shore of Oahu. That’s how I met that chiropractor that came in through the window. Anyway, I took a class in computer programming, and man, that was just something that I just immediately took over my life—computer programming. I became a computer programmer, and as time went on, I used to do consulting.
I had a business, I called myself the Computer Tutor, which I thought was really clever. Back in the early ‘80s when people would buy computers for their business and they’d have absolutely no idea what to do with it. It would just sit there. They’d hire me to come in and look at the business, program things, and get things set up. So that’s what I did, and I really, really loved that. There was something about computers that appealed to the perfectionist in me. If I wrote a program and it wasn’t actually perfect, it wouldn’t work. That had a great appeal.
So what happened was time went on. At the time, I was going to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah eventually and studying various different things. But I was about six months away from going into the MBA program to get my Master’s in Business, and I had decided that’s the direction I was going to go. I had this dream of going into the healing arts years before, but I kind of lost sight of that.
So my wife and I went back to Montana where I’m from and we were sitting around with my folks. It was Christmas time 1983. Out of the blue, my dad said to me, “Are you sure that you don’t want to go to chiropractic school because it seems like such a great career and you’ve always wanted to do it?” I said, “No, I’m going this other direction.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you think about it one more time?” So I said, “Okay.”
So my wife and I made up a pro and con list, on the one hand getting an MBA and going to work for some big company, and then on the other side going into the healing arts. If you’ve ever done a prone con list like that, I mean, there were appealing things on both sides, and doing that exercise didn’t really help me. But having learned years before that there’s a higher power that you can draw upon, that night I got on my knees and I prayed. I just said, “Father in heaven, if you have anything to say about this, help me to know what to do because I’m kind of in the middle of the fence now. I could go either way and be happy.”
So that night I was awakened three different times. When I would wake up it would almost be like I’d been having a dream, but it was an unremembered dream. I would wake up and my mind would be full of all these thoughts of how great it is to be able to help people naturally, heal people naturally, serve people, and so on. I would think, well, yeah. That’s true. But then, on the other hand, the computers and then I’d fall back asleep. That happened three times that night, so I’m still not convinced the next day and still don’t know what to do.
So that night I’m on my knees again and I’m praying and asking God can help me to figure this out because I still don’t know what to do—kind of thick-headed, apparently. That night, the second night, I had this experience where I was awakened again three different times like the night before, but on the second night, each time that I was awakened, the thoughts that I had when I was awakened, the feelings that I had were—if you can imagine—really exponentially more powerful each time. So that on the second night on the third time that I was awakened it was overwhelming at the thoughts of service to mankind, humanity, and the whole planet. I mean, it was absolutely overwhelming. And right then, I heard a voice that spoke to me as clearly as I’m speaking to you right now, Ashley, and it said, “This is a sacred calling.” And I thought, okay, I get it. Thank you. So that was it. I never looked back.
When I got into practice I figured well, God’s gotten me into this, maybe he’ll help me now. So I developed this habit, and the habit was that before I would go to work on someone I would just take a moment and just ask for help. I just say, “Father in heaven, please help me to help this person. Help me to know what they need in Jesus name, Amen,” basically like that. And it was a totally private, totally personal habit. Nobody ever knew that I was saying a prayer for them, but I was, and it was just a momentary pause really. But I’ll tell you something. I absolutely know for a fact that that higher power—whether you refer to it as God, Father, Jesus, the Creator, source energy, or whatever you want to call—is real, knows what we’re doing, and is aware of our lives.
There were times back then when somebody would come in to see me and I didn’t know sometimes what to do. I didn’t know how to approach this problem, I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to help this person. And in response to that silent prayer, the information that I needed would just flood into me like an avalanche of understanding. Sometimes it would be a totally different way of looking at things than I’d ever either ever considered before, and that nobody else had ever considered before either.
So basically, I was in practice for 17 years in a brick and mortar practice and for about another two and a half years in a distance practice. I had that habit all those years and nobody ever knew it was a totally private thing. Now I teach it as part of what I teach to people how to use the Emotion Code, how to use the body code. It’s part of what you do and what we teach people all over the world that it’s an important thing. Whatever you believe, it’s not a denominational thing. It’s just that if you believe in a higher power, well then, you’d be silly not to ask for help because you can get it. It’s available for the asking.
So one of the most powerful things that I learned during those years was that all of my patients—no matter how old or young they were, no matter what they were suffering from, whether they were dealing with migraine headaches, neck pain, back pain, knee pain, infertility, asthma, digestive problems, depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, PTSD, eating disorders, or self-sabotage of some kind—I saw the gamut. All of those people had something in common, and it was that they were suffering from what you might call emotional baggage.
We use that phrase emotional baggage, right? And we usually use it in reference to somebody else. We usually say things like, that guy’s really got a lot of emotional baggage, and it’s true. The thing is we all have emotional baggage, but what I learned is that our emotional baggage is actually a real thing. That our emotional baggage is a lot more concrete than we have ever thought. To understand how this works, you have to understand what the body really is.
If you look at your hand, for example, that hand looks pretty solid. You can slap it down on your desk. It makes a nice thunk sound. But if you were to put your hand under a big microscope like say an electron microscope, and if you were to keep zooming in and zooming in and magnifying your hand more and more and more, pretty soon you’d be looking at cells, then pretty soon you’d be looking at this parts of the cell, then pretty soon you’d be looking at the DNA, and then pretty soon you’d be looking at individual molecules. At somewhere between a million and maybe 850 million times magnification, eventually, you’re looking face to face at a single individual atom. If you keep magnifying a little more, you see inside the atom. There’s really nothing in there. It’s empty space. Our bodies are pure energy.
Now, we think of energy and we think of the matter, and we think that they’re different, but they’re really not. Albert Einstein said that there really is no matter. That all that matter is energy that has had its vibrations slowed down enough to a point that we’re actually able to perceive it. And so that’s what our bodies are. Our bodies are made of pure energy.
Some quantum physicists actually figured out recently that because our bodies are energy, you could easily put all 7.8 billion people on earth into a little box the size of a sugar cube and there would be room for even more. That is if you could take all of the empty space out of these bodies of ours.
It’s a strange thing really, our existence and these bodies of ours. That they are really more of a force field than anything else. But if you talk to any quantum physicist, they’ll all tell you that that is absolutely the truth about our existence, which is hard for us to wrap our heads around but that’s the truth of our reality, the truth of our existence.
So anyway, sometimes we feel intense emotions. Sometimes our parents are arguing, we’re little, and we’re crying ourselves to sleep at night. Sometimes we’re in high school, we go through a breakup, and it’s devastating. Sometimes somebody close to us dies or is sick, or sometimes we have a bad job. I mean, who knows. We have all kinds of things that go on, and we experience all kinds of emotions, and emotions are a tremendous gift. If we didn’t have emotions, I don’t think our lives wouldn’t be worth living. I think our life would just be a flat line.
So we have these emotions, and we have positive ones like joy, happiness, and so on, but we also have negative ones. It’s the negative ones that tend to cause trouble for us. Think about a time in your own life when you were really upset about something. Maybe it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it was today. Maybe it was last week. Were there things that you went through in your life that was difficult? Did you ever cry yourself to sleep at night, were you ever abused, or did you ever go through anything that was difficult to bear? The reality of it is the vast majority of people, with few exceptions, have gone through emotionally difficult things.
Now, the problem is when you’re feeling an intense emotion of anger or maybe it’s resentment, frustration, grief, or sadness—whatever it might be. When you’re feeling an emotion like that, if you’re feeling it powerfully enough, your whole being—that whole energy field that is who you are—can be resonating and vibrating with that particular frequency. Sometimes what happens is that emotion can be too powerful, and it can actually then become lodged in the body, and this is emotional baggage. We refer to this as trapped emotions.
A trapped emotion is a ball of energy that is from about the size of a baseball to about the size of a softball, and these become lodged in the body. They can lodge anywhere in the body, and then they will cause a couple of different effects. They will cause physical effects. Pain is one of the big effects that they tend to cause. Again, when I was in practice and I had all kinds of people suffering from all kinds of different problems, I found that emotional baggage or trapped emotional energies were often at the root of all of these problems.
So to give you an idea of how this can work, there was a man that came in to see me many years ago. He had really severe low back pain. It was a 9 on a 0-10 scale, he said. He rated himself. If it’s a 10 you go to the ER and he was a 9. He was in a lot of pain, and I tested him using the Emotion Code. And with the Emotion Code, what we’re able to do is we’re able to very simply, very easily tap into the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is where all the good information is. It’s the part of you that is keeping track of everything that’s ever happened to you in your life. It’s the part of you that remembers everything you’ve ever done, every face you’ve ever seen in a crowd, everything you’ve ever eaten, tasted, touched, or smelled. All the emotional energies that have gotten trapped in your body.
I’m testing him and I find he has trapped emotion, the emotion is anger. Testing a little bit further, I found this had occurred about 20 years before, and he immediately spoke up and remembered what had happened. He said it was a work situation. He had been falsely accused of something and was really angry about it. That was the emotion, that was what created this trapped emotional energy in his body. So I released that trapped emotion, and his pain level went from a nine to a zero in the snap of a finger, boom. It was gone. It was unbelievable. He kept bending over, walking around in my office, twisting this way that way, and exclaiming he couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle really, and I was grateful that it worked so well. Why did that happen?
There are two parts really to this story, but the first part is the pain relief that this guy got. Why did that happen? Well, you see, when you have a trapped emotion, it literally is a ball of emotional energy. What it’s doing is it’s residing somewhere in your body, and it’s distorting the normal energy field of your body. When the normal energy field of your body is distorted, that’s all your body is ultimately an energy field. This guy had a trapped emotion of anger. It was in his low back, and after 20 years of having all of those tissues distorted by that anger energy, eventually, it was causing severe pain. With the release of that trapped emotion, the pain was gone because that distorting force that that emotion was creating in those tissues suddenly was gone.
Well, the story didn’t end there. A couple of days later he came back in to see me for a follow-up visit. He said to me, “My back pain is still gone. I still can’t quite believe it, but I have to tell you something. When I came here I had another problem that I didn’t tell you about. For as long as I can remember, I’ve basically been what you would call a rage-a-holic. I’m always yelling at my wife and my kids. I’ve got to watch road rage. I’ve been to anger management several times, it hasn’t really helped me. I’m just an angry person. I’m just kind of on edge all the time.
Since you worked on me and you released that emotion of anger, I feel really different. Things that would set me off before don’t set me off now. I feel kind of relaxed and I feel a certain level of peace. How did you do that? How does that work?” At the time I said, “Well, I really don’t know. I just work here.” But here’s what we believe, okay. Think about this, and this is I believe the actual truth about emotional baggage.
This guy’s got this ball of energy, this ball of anger in his low back, which seems very strange but I’m telling you that’s how this works. It’s distorting the energy field in his low back until eventually, it’s bad enough that he comes to see me. But overall of those 20 years, it has altered his personality because when a situation would come along in his life where he might tend to become angry, he would become angry much more readily, much more easily. Why? Because part of his body is feeling that emotion of anger 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You see, every emotion is a frequency, it’s an energy, and it’s a particular vibration. Because part of his body was already vibrating at that frequency—that vibration of anger—it was easy for him to fall into that resonance. That’s why after 20 years, he believed that he was an angry person until that trapped emotion was released.
That’s a great example you see of what our emotional baggage does to us and how it affects us. It’s such an incredible thing. Sometimes people have physical injuries that leave them with pain for years and years and years, and by removing their emotional baggage, sometimes that just disappears even though it was a physical injury in the beginning.
In fact, just a couple of days ago—we post a new testimonial every day on our site. We have far too many that we can actually post. Our site is at discoverhealing.com, by the way. I’m looking at our site and there’s a testimonial I want to share with you.
This was from February 2nd this year. A woman named Sabrina from Valbonne in France said, “Twenty years ago, I had a big car accident with two whiplashes in a row. It was very painful and for years I had substantial neck problems and vertigo. The agony became worse over the years and, because I had children, I could not get any rest. Eventually, five years ago, my body collapsed with neuralgia and I had to stay in bed for days.” Neuralgia is nerve pain. “The pain was so intense that I went to see several doctors and chiropractors, but it did not help very much. Sometimes it was so excruciating that they could not even touch me.
Then I heard of the Emotion Code and it was like a miracle. I healed myself! Today I can play tennis, run, look after my kids, and work once again. This method saved my life! Many thanks! I want to share it with everyone who is in pain because I know how much things can improve!”
There’s a great example of that, right? Somebody who had a really bad car accident 20 years ago and using the Emotion Code on herself she was able to, apparently, get out of pain. She says it saved her life.
[00:34:35] Ashley James: I’d be curious to know—and maybe you wouldn’t know maybe from her but from others—was the trapped emotion about the car accident or did she create the car accidents because of a trapped emotion? The reason why I bring that up is one of my past mentors was getting in a series of fender benders until she realized that she was creating them. It was other people hating her, but there were so many. It was like 12 of them. So many of them that she realized because she was very spiritual and did a lot of emotional work herself—master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. She saw in herself when she went back and went okay, why am I creating this? What’s my belief system? What’s going on.
She realized that she was creating them because of the emotional distress she was having around her job and how much her unconscious was fighting her because it was completely going against her value system. Staying in that job was going against every fiber of her being but she kept shoulding herself like golden handcuffs, like I should stay here. So she was creating these disruptions to basically not go to work, but there’s a lot of emotions around her work, around feeling neglected and abused. So she had to work on that, get away from the job, work on the emotion, and then she stopped creating car accidents.
But she thought isn’t this interesting that some people—if you get out of victim mode in life right, and I really always have to preface this when I talk about being victim versus being at cause. I’m in no way saying that rape victims created it for themselves. This is just an exercise, it’s a mental exercise.
But if you can take on the mental exercise of being at cause in your world versus being a victim of things that have happened to you, then from the standpoint of being at cause you can go, so why did I create that? And not for blame but more for what’s going on at the unconscious level that I put myself in this position to be in this accident? Even if someone else hit me, what’s going on? Can I own this from the standpoint of what can I learn from it? How can I grow from this and what is there for me to learn here? Is there something that happened in my life that had me put myself in this situation?
Because all of our conscious and unconscious choices have led us to where we are today. And so if we own them and then we can learn from them, then we can look back and go, oh maybe this is connected to the emotions that were happening, the turmoil, or the unresolved issues that were happening prior to the accident.
I just wonder if in her situation, if she couldn’t heal fully from the neck pain because of emotions that created during the accident like feeling the injustice of being in a bad accident, or was it that she was having issues with motherhood, with her husband—whatever dissatisfaction in her life, whatever stuff was happening before the accident, still her body was holding on to that pain from the injury for years later because she hadn’t worked on it.
So I would just be interested to know what is the root cause? In a lot of cases, when it comes to an injury that lasts for years, is the root cause prior to the injury oftentimes, or is it the emotions from that injury itself?
[00:38:19] Dr. Bradley Nelson: It depends. If I had to bet, I would say that probably there was some emotional baggage that helped to precipitate the accident. When we have trapped emotions, what they do is they send out—they’re continually broadcasting their vibration out into the universe. And so then that tends to draw things to us that tend to create more of that.
The other thing that happens is when you have an injury—the intense emotional experiences that you go through after that for years or decades—will often tend to become trapped in that area and make the distortion worse. A great example of this is a guy that I worked with many years ago. This guy came into my office, his name was Steve and he came in with his wife. He had a really severe tennis elbow. I mean, his arm was in a sling and he couldn’t turn the keys to start his car. It was so excruciating. I was barely able to touch the area, there was so much pain there.
So I started working with him and doing the normal chiropractic things and I wasn’t having too much success with it. So at the time, I was just learning about the emotional side of this, I was learning about trapped emotions. So I asked his subconscious mind, and we use muscle testing different types to get answers from the subconscious, and it’s all taught. We teach it very clearly in the Emotion Code book.
So I asked his subconscious mind, is there a trapped emotion that is contributing to this tennis elbow? And the answer immediately was yes. What I found was that he had a number of trapped emotions that had become lodged in that area of his elbow during the years that he was in high school. Now he was about 42 years old when I was seeing him. So he’d been out of high school for a long time, but it was funny because every trapped emotion had to do with a girl who had basically rejected him.
It was so funny because his wife was sitting there, and I’m muscle testing him and he’s saying, “Well, let’s see. Was it Sheila?” His arm would go down, “No, okay. Was it Cheryl? No. Shawna? Oh, yeah. That one’s strong. Yeah, Shawna. Yeah, she dumped me.” And so it was all these trapped emotions about that.
Here’s the thing, he was on the tennis team in high school. So what’s happening is as he’s dating these girls and they’re rejecting him, he’s also playing tennis and he’s incurring micro-trauma to those muscles that are being used the most. So that’s where the trapped emotions would lodge. The interesting thing about it is I think there were six different trapped emotions that needed to be released. The story’s in the book actually. It was so funny.
But the amazing thing really is that every time we’d release a trapped emotion, the pain level would just instantly drop. The pain level just kept dropping and dropping and dropping with the release of each trapped emotion until finally, we cleared the last trapped emotion and the pain was completely, completely gone. He couldn’t believe it. He took the sling off and he’s moving his arm around. I could go in and I could press deeply into those muscles, there was no pain anymore. I remember that was the first time that I had seen this phenomenon where you can have more than one trapped emotion in one place.
But that was a great example to me of how trapped emotions can accumulate in an area and can eventually cause just extreme pain. What we find now is that about 90% of all the physical pain that people have is actually due to their emotional baggage to trapped emotions. We’ve got almost 7,000 practitioners of the Emotion Code now in 80 countries around the world, and we’re all finding the same thing. That if you’re in pain, there’s a very high probability that that pain is actually due to some emotional baggage. It’s actually really simple.
[00:43:02] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming timeline therapy and hypnosis. Back in 2005, my mentors were enamored with the book Healing Back Pain.
[00:43:22] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yeah, by Dr. Sarno.
[00:43:24] Ashley James: Yes, Sarno. So what he discovered—unfortunately, he has passed away. I tried to get him on the show but he had passed away. Well, he was working, and I don’t think he was a medical doctor. I mean, this was back in 2005 I read the book. But he was doing work with hospitals and looking at the records and more administration work, looking at all the administration stuff seeing that all these back surgeries these patients were still having pain. Oh, we got rid of their bulging disc. We surgically removed it. Why do they still have pain? Why are they still on disability? Why are they still on these drugs?
So he started to look at stuff and found that—I can’t remember the statistic right now, I wish I could remember off top of my head, but it was so crazy something like 70% of all the MRIs they do, there’s some form of a bulging disc and yet people are asymptomatic. He’s like, how can we have someone who has a bulging disc that has no pain, but when people have pain in their back we always assume it’s a bulging disc. So we do these scans, then we blame the disc, and then we remove the disc, but they still have pain so it’s not the disc. So what is it?
And then he just dove in like you did, figuring it out. What he saw was that there was ischemia, which is a cutoff of blood flow to the muscles when there was an emotion withheld. So I had a client come to me, this was 2006. So still, a long time ago. She was a long-distance runner, she was in a lot of pain, she was very fit, and she was in her 50s closing in on her 60s.
She said, “I’m on Tylenol—three every day—and I really don’t want to be on it because it’s not exactly good for you.” I started talking to her. I was like, “Well, how long have you had the pain?” She’s like, “Oh, you know a few years maybe four or six years.” And as we kept going back in her history, it’s like her brain couldn’t fully accept or remember. It actually had been more like 15 years that she had been in pain and been on these drugs. She’s like, “Oh wow, I didn’t realize how much time had passed.”
I got to the root cause because guilt kept coming up as we talked, and what we figured out was she’s catholic and she had an abortion. She felt so guilty about it and she said to herself, “I have to pay for this guilt with pain.” She actually said that. She wouldn’t allow the doctor to give her pain medicine during her abortion, and she said, “I have to pay for it with pain.” And she did, but what was interesting because I was also in Canada, I was a registered massage therapist and worked in sports rehab, in sports medicine.
Before we started our session I said, “Can I palpate your back?” because she was pointing towards the quadratus lumborum on the left side, and I palpated. On the left side, it was hard as a rock ice cold. Now, this was in Florida. I was living in Florida at the time. I mean, it’s warm. On the right side, it’s flush, it’s a very good color, it’s warm and palpable. But on the left side, it’s like I’m touching granite. I thought this was interesting. This is ischemia. The whole muscle is just not letting any blood flow in, and that’s incredibly painful. Of course, when bands of muscle cause ischemia around the innervation of the nerve, it will create just incredible pain. Sometimes the pain will travel to different areas, but it’s very painful.
As she gets into talking about guilt, the pain goes up. I keep asking her where is your pain level? Now, I mean, my session with her was like six hours long. Sounds like your session would have been like six minutes. Your program sounds like maybe it’s more effective in that it sounds a lot quicker. But by the end of it, we released the negative emotion of guilt at the root level. I said, “Where’s your pain?” and I’m kind of expecting it to be less. She’s like, “It’s gone. It’s gone.” She’s like jumping up and down. She’s like, “How is it gone? How is it gone?”
So she goes back to her hotel room and I didn’t tell her to do this because I’m not a doctor, but she flushed all of her meds down the toilet. She was on three meds, one of them was an anti-anxiety med. She came to me the next day she’s like, “I took myself off all my meds. I’m not on the pain meds. I’m not on the anti-inflammatory meds. I’m not on the anxiety meds. I feel like a million bucks. I feel amazing.” And her pain was still gone. “Can I touch your back?” and her back on both sides were warm and palpable.
That was the most amazing thing for me to see that someone physically that their muscles that were holding—I mean like you said, the size of a softball or a baseball. Her entire quadratus lumborum, which is quite a big muscle, so bigger than a softball was hard, ischemic, cold, and holding on to guilt for 15 years. That to me just blew my mind. How many people are on meds, emotional medication, and also physical medication, and suppressing and putting a band-aid on and just pushing it down and pushing it down and pushing it down and then poisoning their bodies? And they’re not free of it.
That affects every area of their life just like one of your clients whose anger spilled over into every area of his life. Her guilt spilled over into every waking moment of her life, so just to be free of that. I’m so excited that people can learn your technique through your book and they can also then train. Can anyone become a practitioner of the Emotion Code?
[00:49:23] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes, anybody can become a practitioner. There’s really no prerequisites. It’s a simple program. It’s a six-month program, most people do it in about half the time. If you’re interested, there’s more information there—discoverhealing.com is our website.
Listen to this one because it never ceases to amaze me. Here’s one that came in from a guy named Robbi Cuijpers from Posterholt in the Netherlands. This was posted on the third, so today’s the ninth. Anyway, he said, “One night I woke up with a terrible toothache. It was around 2:00 AM and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I was suffering so much I was about to call the emergency desk and go to the hospital. It felt dreadful. Then suddenly the question popped into my head, “Could there possibly be some trapped emotions causing this horrible pain?”
“So, I gathered all the willpower I could find, jumped out of bed, and started sway testing for trapped emotions.” That’s where you stand up and your body will sway forward for yes and backward for no. “And yes, I had some trapped emotions that were causing the tooth pain. With the release of each emotion, my toothache instantly subsided. With the fifth and last emotion released, the pain was practically zero.
I then went to bed feeling on top of the world knowing the power of The Emotion Code.”
[00:50:43] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I love it. And the unconscious mind controls all of our muscle movements. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen it where you can ask your unconscious mind questions and it can control the micro muscle movements of a finger or an arm, or like you said, the sway test. If someone is in a wheelchair, there are other ways. You could do it because the unconscious mind controls the muscles of the body. You can communicate with it, which not that many people know.
I was always afraid of my unconscious mind when I began to study, learn more, and dive into it, and then once I developed a relationship with my unconscious mind, it was actually the most rewarding thing because it’s you, it’s the rest of you. It’s the rest of you and your unconscious mind. It’s just you, it’s just more of you, but it’s the rest of you that loves you. Your unconscious mind adores you, loves you, wants to keep you safe, wants to keep you healthy.
I mean, trying to understand John E. Sarno’s philosophy behind why the unconscious mind creates this ischemic pain? I’m not saying it’s always ischemic pain because like you’ve mentioned it can be injuries and joints and things like that, although I’d love your opinion. I guess the hypothesis is that the unconscious mind wants to resolve these issues and so it’s bringing it to your attention.
[00:52:06] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, that’s exactly how I look at it. Yes, the symptoms that we have are really just the subconscious mind trying to get our attention so that we can open a dialogue and figure out what’s really going on. What the underlying cause of our problem really is. What is it that’s unresolved? What do we need to deal with that we’ve never dealt with? I love what you said about the subconscious—that it adores us and it is the rest of us. It’s absolutely so true. That’s what it is.
It’s not just pain. Listen to this one. This is another one. This was posted on February 8th, I guess yesterday. This woman Susan from Utah wrote and she said, “My husband, John, recently went through radiation therapy for prostate cancer. One of the side effects has been a terrible itching that would not stop after his therapy. His radiation doctor said that John could be allergic to something new but didn’t think the medication he had prescribed was doing it. John went to a dermatologist and was told that all older men get dry skin and that was it. I had recently read the Emotion Code and I tried it on his itching. The next day he completely stopped itching! In his eyes, this was a miracle!” You never know. Try it on anything.
[00:53:25] Ashley James: Right. Well, the thing is, all day long we have emotions. All-day long we have experiences, and how often do we actually sit back and unpack those experiences, process those emotions, and digest them like you would digest a very healthy meal? It’s like we’re taking care of our bodies, and so many of the people who are listening would sit down and eat a beautiful very nutritious meal, chew each bite until it’s fully digested, and really give themselves, bathe themselves in nutrition. Give themselves the time, the space, and the peace to digest their food because they know nutrition is so important.
And yet when it comes to our emotions, we treat it like we’re going through the drive-thru and just scarfing it down and not even tasting it and then just throwing it back and expecting our body just to deal with it. Just deal with it. It’s so funny that we’re treating our body like we’re eating fast food when it comes to our emotions, but we take our physical body so seriously and we don’t take our emotional body that seriously.
I also believe there’s a stigma, and it depends on your generation. I see the younger generation. I’m 40 years old. I’m turning 41. Hopefully my mid-life is years to come, but I look at the younger kids and I see that they’re more open to counseling and therapy because there’s not a stigma for them. For the older generations, there was a large stigma around going to counseling. The thing is that working on your emotions is like going to the gym. You’re just going to the gym for your heart and your mind and just find the right trainer. Not every trainer out there is going to be the right trainer for you. Not every counselor is going to be the right counselor for you.
But I have clients who say that their sessions, working with their therapist have been the most rewarding thing possible because it’s just the place they get to digest, absorb, process, release, let go of, and understand their emotions and how they react. And then they notice that they stop just reacting and spewing onto their family and spewing onto their kids. They actually catch themselves, they take a deep breath, and they’re able to then come from a place of communication that has love and has respect because they processed all the stuff that happened last week, last month, last year instead of just bottling it up and then spewing at people.
This particular idea of sitting down and respecting our emotional and physical body by working with the Emotion Code I think could be so rewarding.
Now back to my question about ischemia, is it always muscles? Is it always ischemic pain, or do you find sometimes there’s bone pain? I know you mentioned that man had tooth pain. That could have also been a referral pain from a trigger point. Do you think it’s always ischemia though, or have you seen it where there’s absolute evidence that it’s not created in a muscle?
[00:56:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, yes. See the thing about it is trapped emotions can lodge in different areas. They can really lodge anywhere. They can lodge in a specific organ. So the way that we look at it is a little different from Dr. Sarno’s, and I have tremendous respect for what he did and the consciousness that he was able to create for people that this kind of thing goes on. But trapped emotions can lodge in different places. One of the most fascinating things that we see is that they will often form into a wall around the heart to protect the heart from being broken, and we call that a Heart- Wall. That’s one of the most interesting things that we see.
With the Heart-Wall, it’s not necessarily that we see the ischemic pain so much. Although sometimes, people do have that. But there’s a whole another dimension to it. Anciently, the ancient peoples believed that the heart was the seed of the soul, the source of love, the source of romance, the source of creativity, and really the core of our being. Even now, after all these thousands of years, anywhere you go on earth, if it’s Valentine’s day or if someone is romancing you, they’ll give you a box of something tasty that’s probably shaped like a heart. So these are ancient ideas.
I mean, the word heart is mentioned just shy of a thousand times in the bible, for example. There are these scriptures in the bible that say things like God doesn’t look on the outward appearance of a person, instead, he looks on the heart. There’s another one that says that as we think in our hearts, so we will be. In the west, we’ve never really paid much attention to those old ideas because medicine is still very mechanistically oriented, still very rooted in Newtonian physics. So the heart is just a muscle and we know it’s a muscle. It just pumps blood, that’s all it does, and that’s how we’ve looked at it for many, many years.
But in the last 20 years or so, there has been new instrumentation developed, and new studies that have been done that show some amazing things. For example, they found that when one person is feeling love or affection for another person that their heartbeat will become measurable in the brain waves of that other person on an EEG. They found that their heartbeats will synchronize. So there’s this connection going on between all of us that we have not necessarily been aware of.
But what we discovered, what was actually shown to us back in 1998, my wife had a dream. She asked me to help her decipher her dream. As I’m trying to do that, all of a sudden I have this experience that I can only describe as a waking vision where the room that I was in suddenly disappeared and I’m looking instead of this incredibly beautiful hardwood floor with this understanding that my wife’s heart is underneath this floor.
Now, this is one of the strangest things that I’ve ever experienced, and I don’t take drugs. I don’t even use caffeine anymore. I’m very straight that way. But anyway, this lasted for several minutes. I told my wife what I was seeing and understanding. She didn’t know what it meant either. We prayed, asked God to help us figure this out.
We started muscle testing her, and what we found was that when she was two years old—because she was born into a very volatile, very dysfunctional family—she, at some point around that age, thought her heart was going to break and so she started building a wall around her heart. This wall was literally made from layers of her emotional baggage. So she’d had this wall around her heart all of these years. We asked if we could start removing these, and it took us a couple of weeks to take down this wall one emotion at a time.
When the last one was removed, all of a sudden, things really shifted for her because for one thing, whatever group of friends that she’d ever been with, she never really truly felt like she belonged anywhere like she was always the odd person out. She always felt kind of expendable until that was removed, then suddenly, she felt like she belonged. The depression, the anxiety that she had to deal with decreased dramatically.
Initially, when we discovered this, it was really shown to us. It’s very much a God thing trying to get this out into the world this understanding. Initially, I thought it was maybe just her, that she was the only person on earth that had this. But what we find now is that about 93% of people have this phenomenon going on, and it’s called a Heart-Wall.
The most recent testimonial that I have about this—we’ve got about 10,000+ testimonials on our site. We get new ones every single day. We’ll pick one every day and post it. This one came in on February 4th. This is from a woman named Fawn. Apparently, one of our practitioners from Ohio said, “My most meaningful experience using the Emotion Code is with a client named Paul. He is a 70-year-old man who had such a horrific and abusive childhood that he built a Heart-Wall to protect himself. He never married or even had a close relationship. He has had many acquaintances but no close friends.
After our Emotion Code sessions, he is now transformed! He went out and got his motorcycle endorsement at 70! And now he is actively looking for a lady to enjoy it with him. He simply shines! The transformation is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed.”
Think about this, 93% of people have this phenomenon, this Heart-Wall phenomenon going on. What it does is it interferes with your ability to give and receive love for one thing, but also to really create the life that you want because the best ideas that you’ll ever have are not in your brain, they’re in your heart. And the heart we know now is really a second brain. The heart is filled with gray matter and white matter, it really is a second brain.
In fact, when scientists a number of years ago looked at the communications along the nerves between the brain and the heart, they found the vast majority of communications were going from the heart to the brain, and they were expecting it to be just the opposite.
What one of the first people that I saw after we worked on my wife with this was a nurse that came in to see me. She was 38 years old, and she came in because she had this terrible neck pain that she’d seen a couple of doctors for—they haven’t been able to help her. As I was talking with her she told me that she was single. She had not dated in eight years and was never going to date again.
So she’s 38, hasn’t dated in eight years, she’s basically celibate. She was an attractive person. I said, “Well, why do you feel this way? What happened to you?” She said eight years before, she’s really deeply in love with this guy who dumped her and broke her heart. That was it. She hadn’t dated since then. So I tested her and found, sure enough, she had put up a wall around her heart from that breakup. There were three emotions, three layers making up this wall. We cleared those emotions one at a time, and when the last one was gone, instantaneously the neck pain was gone—instantaneously.
When we see instantaneous pain relief like in this case and like in the case with the guy that I told you about in the beginning that had the anger from 20 years before, I think there’s more going on than just the ischemia. I think if those arteries and veins open up a little bit, it’s going to take a little bit of time for things to shift, but we see instantaneous relief of pain in many cases. That’s what happened to her.
That’s not the end of the story though. She left the office feeling totally fine and didn’t come back for three months. When she came back into my office—I’ll always remember this—she looked great. I said, “Hey, you look great. I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you?” She said, “You know, my neck’s been fine since I was here. You cleared that Heart-Wall for me, that really works. About two weeks after I was here, I found out my childhood sweetheart has been living right around the corner from me for almost eight years. We’re dating and we’re in love, and I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.” Wow, what a shift. Holy smokes.
[01:06:04] Ashley James: You got me fascinated when you said that it can manifest in the organs. We often hear anger in the liver and fears in the lungs or the kidneys. If someone has something with their pancreas, an illness with their pancreas because, with type 2 diabetes, it’s not necessarily a pancreatic issue. If someone has a known illness with an organ or like fatty liver disease or they have a traumatic brain injury, have you seen people take something—either acute or chronic—that’s in an organ that’s been labs diagnosed, been tracking it, seeing that yes there’s an injury or there’s a disease state and they worked on the emotions that were there? Have you seen people, their bodies heal to the point where they’ve been able to heal organs?
[01:07:16] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yes. For example, one of the most common examples of that that we see is actually infertility where we find trapped emotions, for example, in the uterus. By removing those trapped emotions [inaudible 01:07:35] conceive. Think about all the different organs. The first thing that you have to understand is that every disease process that people experience has an emotional component every single time. In our experience now, doing this for 32 years, there’s always an emotional component.
If you identify the emotional component and you release that emotional baggage that’s affecting that area, then yes, things turn around. We’ve seen it happen over and over and over, so yes. In fact, trapped emotions can affect very specific parts of the body. For example, you might have a trapped emotion affecting your pineal gland, maybe the hypothalamus, or the pituitary. You might have trapped emotions that are affecting the thyroid gland. See all that this does really is it just removes the encumbrances that are in the body’s way of being able to function like the body wants to.
The body wants to be healthy, it wants to function normally, but when you’ve got emotional baggage, those are encumbrances, those are blockages to really being able to heal and to function normally. In fact, here’s a really dramatic story that I haven’t thought of for many, many years. But in talking about this, it’s reminded me of this.
There was a woman that came in to see us once who had fibromyalgia, which is this pain that you get all over the body that is very difficult, no known cure, and so on. I was able to help her with that, and then she told my wife and I about her daughter. What had happened with her daughter was that her daughter had gotten married about six months before, but her daughter suffered from vaginismus, which is the tightening down of the opening of the vagina.
She and her husband, still after six months, had not been able to have intercourse. They’d never been able to consummate their marriage. The marriage is starting to show signs of stress, and so she asked if we would look at her daughter. So we did so. Her daughter came in and we checked her. My wife found something that I don’t think we’d ever seen before, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen it since. But this girl had what we ended up calling a vaginal wall.
So in the sense, if you think about a Heart-Wall, if you feel like your heart is going to break, you’re feeling a physical sensation like there’s an elephant sitting on your chest, or maybe like you can’t breathe. There’s a physical thing going on there. The subconscious mind will put up a wall. The wall is an invisible wall to us, but to the subconscious, it’s very, very real I think. My wife’s Heart-Wall, the symbolic material was wood. She grew up in a house with hardwood floors.
So the subconscious will always choose some kind of material, and we’ve seen heart wall symbolic materials everything from plastic to glass to iron. But anyway, this young woman had a wall that her subconscious mind had put up in that area of her body to protect herself, and then she told us that she had been sexually abused at some point as a child. So anyway, we cleared the trapped emotions that were creating that, and it was the next day her mom called us and she said, “Guess what? Everything’s working. Thank you.” And in fact, she said, “Her husband is coming home. He’s spending his lunch breaks at home now for a catch-up.”
[01:12:02] Ashley James: I had a friend who had that and she had to have surgery. She had surgically had her vaginal opening altered so that she could have intercourse. It’s very interesting that she had the same condition. She spent years doing everything. Obviously, she didn’t learn about the Emotion Code. It would have been a lot easier than having surgery.
[01:12:31] Dr. Bradley Nelson: That was their next step really. Their next step is surgery. But luckily, we were able to avoid that.
[01:12:37] Ashley James: I’m just going to throw this out there, I like to get weird. What about people who are in a coma who has maybe dementia. Maybe children who are nonverbal autistic or adults who are non-verbal autistic. Is there any way to do this technique with people who can’t clearly communicate with you?
[01:13:05] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh yes, absolutely. It’s not a problem at all. The reason why is because the subconscious mind never sleeps. So it doesn’t matter. People can be worked on when they’re asleep, when they’re in a coma. In fact, let me tell you a story. This is actually in the Emotion Code book. We have twin boys. My wife and I had seven kids together, and then she had a daughter before we met. So we have a total of eight, but we have twin boys that are 31 years old now. When they were four years old, we thought that one of them had a problem with his hearing because he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. His brother on the other hand was a total chatterbox, but he wouldn’t speak in full sentences. We just didn’t know what was wrong.
So we took him to a hearing specialist thinking maybe he was a little bit deaf, but his hearing was totally fine. At that time, we were really first learning about trapped emotions. So one night, we decided to work on him when he was asleep. Now, in the book, we explain how you do this. It’s a simple process, but we worked on him when he was asleep and we found that he had an inherited trapped emotion of anger from my wife’s father.
So in other words, when my wife was conceived in the womb, there was emotional energy of anger that was passed from grandpa. When we conceived this little boy of ours, that energy was passed to him. So we cleared that, released that. He’s asleep so we’re working on him when he’s asleep, no problem, subconscious never sleeps. We cleared a couple of other trapped emotions. The next morning at breakfast, guess who will not shut up. My wife and I are just looking at each other like a couple of owls like we just cannot believe what’s happening.
We all have emotional baggage, and getting rid of it is so important. If you think about it, if you’ve got a heart-wall and there’s about a 90% chance that you do, then what that’s doing is it’s interfering with your ability to give and receive love and your ability to really create the life that you want because your best life and the best creative ideas that you have are actually in your heart, are not in your head.
The beautiful thing about the Emotion Code is that it’s really, really simple. Anybody can do it. Kids can do it. We have kids that are having great success with it in different parts of the world. You can learn how to do it yourself, you can use it yourself, use it on your own kids, you can use it on your husband, on your wife, on your children, and so on.
[01:16:25] Ashley James: Can you do it with babies?
[01:16:27] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with babies. You can even do it with babies before they’re even born. When they’re in the womb you can work on them.
[01:16:35] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That is so cool. I’m 32 weeks pregnant so I better start reading. Can you do it with animals?
[01:16:42] Dr. Bradley Nelson: You absolutely can do it with animals. In fact, let me see, there was a story that I was just looking at here on our site. Let me see if I can find that really quick.
[01:16:56] Ashley James: I consider myself an open-minded skeptic, like a really, really open-minded skeptic. I wouldn’t be prompted to ask that question if I hadn’t had an experience where a friend of mine asked me to do emotional work on her dog and I’m like I’ll try.
Basically, the dog’s parents are splitting up. The two owners were going their separate ways, and the dog was picking up on the tension and it was a wiener dog. All of a sudden, his back legs stopped working. He became paralyzed, and the vet said this is common with wiener dogs. But there was no trauma. He didn’t fall down, get kicked, or hurt. He didn’t bump himself. He just all of a sudden, his parents are splitting up. There’s tension in the household, and now he isn’t working.
So I sat with him, I held him in my hands, and I just started my heart communicating to his heart. All of that information came flooding to me. I’m like, okay, let’s fill you with love and get you to see that your parents love you. You’re going to be in their lives and you get to have two homes now. They’re going to share. Your parents are getting divorced but you still have them. They’re not leaving you. They’re just leaving each other. The three of us were talking to him and telling him that, and then he got up and started by his tail and his legs worked again. We’re like okay, that works.
I’ve had other people on the show who are healers. One guest of mine helped a horse with her fertility issues. She was having miscarriages basically and this horse wasn’t able to conceive. So he did emotional work with the horse and the horse was able to heal from the emotions of all the sadness from the lost pregnancies. And then the next one worked and she was able to get pregnant. I’m like, okay. You know what, there’s something very interesting going on here. Of course, animals have emotions. If you’ve ever had a cat or dog, you make a connection with them, and there’s more there. There’s love, there’s acceptance, there’s joy. They have some very interesting emotions.
There are so many studies done now where they can actually see that animals have emotions. I’m not doing a debate as to whether they have a soul or not, or whether they go to heaven or not. I mean, those are all very interesting conversations to have. But the fact is that if we as humans can—and we’re animals too—but if we can heal physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, energetically by using the Emotion Code and working on our emotions and healing them, why not animals? I love that you said we can work with babies.
I just imagine the parents who have autistic children who are non-verbal could be doing this with their children. How beautiful is that? Sorry, you had a testimonial about working with animals?
[01:19:55] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Oh, right. This one just came in. This is from a woman named Beate in Germany. This came in on the first of February. She said, “Lilly, the dog of a family friend, suddenly no longer wanted to go up the stairs in her home and only managed to do so with a lot of start-up and motivation from her owner. Nothing seemed to be wrong physically. By the time my friend shared this with me, sitting together in a cafe, it had been going on for a long time. So, right there I connected remotely with Lilly the dog, and released a few of her trapped emotions. When my friend got home that afternoon, Lilly ran up the stairs without any complaints. A few days later, when her “fear of stairs” came back, I was able to solve a few more things. Now Lilly has no more problems walking up the stairs.”
And what’s interesting about this one too is that this was done at a distance. Of course, that’s because this is energy medicine really in its purest form. It’s not bound at all by distance, and so that’s a fun one, huh?
[01:20:59] Ashley James: Right. When you start studying quantum physics, you realize we’re all in the milieu together. It doesn’t matter if we’re 1,000 miles away or 1 foot away from each other. We have this energetic connection. I just love that. It blew my mind. It completely changed my life. My life took a 180 after I saw the movie What The Bleep Do We Know because I went like oh my gosh. This energy. Stop thinking in terms of chemicals and matter. Think in terms of energy. It’s all about energy. So that just makes total sense that emotions are energy and having them trapped in the body, very interesting.
You lived and went to school in Hawaii for a while. I studied Huna because I thought of the ancient Polynesian technique. I wouldn’t even call it a religion because it was more like their lifestyle. It was how they breathed, how they loved, how they healed, how they fished. Huna was their philosophy for living, and in Huna, there’s a belief. Now, this is hundreds or thousands of years old, who knows, but it’s an ancient Polynesian belief system about living and life.
They believed that emotions would become trapped in the body like black boulders stored in bags inside us. Like if you looked at a river and saw a river with no boulders would be calm, but a river with many boulders would be turbulent. So they had this idea that the more trapped emotions you had, the more the chi was turbulent within you and was thrown off. So I’ve always carried that imagery in my mind. So of course we would want to heal and release these emotions.
Now you’ve talked about getting the book the Emotion Code, but you’ve also talked about this course. Could someone who was very passionate like I am wanting to do this to all their friends and family, let’s say, and themselves and obviously the family being receptive, would the book be enough? Would it suffice, or should someone who really wants to do this technique with their animals, their kids, their husband, and their friends—should they take the course? Who should take the course and who should read the book?
[01:23:24] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, the information is definitely in the book. People all over the world are reading the book, putting it into practice, learning how it works. If you really want to master it or if you want to actually charge people for sessions, then we do want you to go through the certification program. The certification program that we have is an online program, and it’s available—you can go to discoverhealing.com. It’s actually on sale right now. It’s not an expensive program. It’s all online. You go through at your own pace. Most people will go through it in about three months, the record is two weeks. It just depends on how motivated you are.
But the nice thing about that is that it gives you rails to run on. I mean, think about it, I know that you’ve done this because I’ve done this and I think so many people have done this where you go to some really great course or something and you buy some materials and then a year later you come across it when they’re still shrink-wrapped. You think, oh yeah, I really wanted to learn that.
So the certification program gives you some deadlines, enables you to really learn it well, and get a lot of practice. You have a student advisor that helps you and gives you any kind of feedback that you need. But it also is all in the book. I mean, if you want to learn it from the book and use it on your friends, family members, and so on, by all means, go for it. It’s all in there. But if you want that added experience of getting certified, then yeah. If you want to do it for a living, then we want you to do that for sure.
[01:25:12] Ashley James: So why specifically? Because we have a lot of health coaches that listen to the show. I’m sure they’re all perked up and already on your site ready to sign up because this would be a great adjunct to health coaching. What is different in the live course that’s from the book? Are you teaching them how to work with people, what to look for, or the precautions? What is it that you get out of the live course that really helps you work with people on a professional level?
[01:25:44] Dr. Bradley Nelson: The course, in part, consists of 10 different recordings. They’re basically presentations where I go through with two of our top practitioners that have been doing this for many, many years. We discuss and kind of bounce things off of each other in explaining things. So what we try to do is we try to explain all of it from the very beginning in a way that makes it very easy for everybody to understand. That’s part of it.
You’ll gain insights from certification that you won’t get from the book. But also, in the certification program, you have homework. Your homework actually is the book itself. We supply the text of the book and the book on audio for you. You’ve got homework and then you work on yourself, and you’re one of the people. There are, I believe, 20 people that you have to work with, but you can count yourself as one of those people.
As you’re working with people and you’re releasing trapped emotions, you’re recording everything that you’re doing online on our site at discoverhealing.com in the back end at a location that’s just for you for this, and you record all that information. Then as you’re doing that, you do have to work with some animals, you have to totally clear the Heart-Wall from a number of people. What it does is accelerates your ability to do this because it’s like coaching. I mean, nobody really gets to the Olympic level of any sport without having a coach. It’s not possible.
That’s kind of what this program does. You’re able to see videos of other people doing this and sample sessions that are actually done that our practitioners are doing. You learn how to do this the right way. You learn how to do it better at a distance and so on. And then you’re quizzed on everything. There really is no final exam. You basically pass off each part of it as you go and so each part builds on the next part. But we have lots and lots of people doing it. It’s a great program. We consistently get very, very high 90% feedback from everybody doing it, that it’s a great program.
Anyway, the book itself if you’re just wanting to explore this a little bit maybe, you can go to emotioncodegift.com. There you can download the first couple of chapters of the book for free. We can give you those for free, you can try those out. If you want to get the book, the book’s available on Audible if you want to listen to it, amazon.com of course, Barnes & Noble—are they still in business? I think they are.
[01:29:09] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s Borders that went under.
[01:29:12] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Borders, yeah. What about B. Dalton? Are they still? I can’t remember.
[01:29:14] Ashley James: I was so bummed. Where I lived in Vegas—Henderson, Nevada just off of Stephanie, there was a Barnes & Noble and a Borders practically beside each other. That would be my favorite Saturday afternoon activity. I’d go pour through all of Barnes & Noble and then I’d pour through all the Borders. They would actually have different books depending. I would always go with the self-help, personal growth, and spiritual sections. That was my shtick. It was funny.
My husband’s and my second date we did that. We went to Barnes & Noble and Borders. I pointed out every book I ever read and he bought every book I ever read. He walked to the register with his hands full. He spent hundreds of dollars, and I looked at him. I’m like this guy listening to me. He’s serious. This guy’s serious. Oh, man. That was cool because he said he was into personal growth but then he was like putting his money where his mouth was. That was pretty hot I’d have to say. But we’ve been married for almost 13 years. I pretty much knew almost instantly that there was something special there. So yeah, I miss Borders.
Barnes & Noble’s around. I still do shop there occasionally. I love that you have an audiobook. I’m absolutely getting your audiobook because I love listening to audiobooks. I’m excited about that. Any listener can listen to your book or read your book and begin to immediately apply these techniques. They don’t have to take the course, but if they want to do it professionally they should take the course because they’re going to get it on a much deeper level.
That is so exciting. While I’ve been interviewing you I’ve made a list of at least 12 friends, clients, and family members that I want them all to get your book. I imagine all the listeners have done the same. No wonder you’re so popular. This is so needed in this world.
Dr. Bradley, I really want to have you back on the show. I’d love for you to continue to dive into this topic and explore it. Today was just to get us an introduction, get our foot in the door, and of course, everyone’s going to go get the book. I’m going to definitely go listen to your book, but I’d love to have you on the show you know after I’ve finished the book, and then maybe we can go deeper a bit into this topic. I know my listeners will absolutely love that, especially since they’re all going to go out and get your book too. And of course, they’re going to go to emotioncodegift.com and get the gift you’re giving out.
Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:31:51] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Well, I would just say that we’re living in this very unique time of the earth’s history where the world is in this transformational process. To me, it’s almost like the earth is in labor. It’s trying to give birth to this new world where so many of us want it to go. A world where people are living from their heart, and a world that is just so different from the world that we’re used to where darkness has so much influence over so much that’s been done in the world. This work, the Emotion Code, is part of this transformation. It’s just a little piece of it.
Think about when you read about somebody that is hurting someone else or has done some terrible thing, you can bet that there’s a Heart-Wall there because you see we feel with our heart. That’s why if someone is really hurting us or we’re really deeply grieved, we feel it in our chest, we feel it in our heart. And the brain that is in our heads doesn’t really feel. I mean, using the brain that is in our heads, the extension of that has created the world that we’re in now in many ways where we’re still using war to settle differences between nations, dropping bombs, blowing people up, and all kinds of crazy things, which seems to the logical mind to be perfectly appropriate.
But eventually, we are moving now towards a world where we’re all going to be living from our heart, you see, where love is going to rule the day. This work is about helping us to get there. It happens on an individual level. Get the book, learn how to do this. You can work on yourself, you can work on your family members, you can do so much healing not only for your own family that’s alive, but when you remove emotional baggage that has been inherited and passed down your line, you’re releasing it from them as well. We might want to talk about that next time because I’ve got some great stories I can tell you about that.
[01:34:11] Ashley James: Let’s do that. Awesome. Let’s have you back on the show and we’ll talk about inherited emotions. I have some amazing experiences about that as well. Again, an open-minded skeptic, wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t experienced it with my own experience. It’s pretty amazing, and it’s been documented actually. They’ve scientifically proven that the stress from trauma is passed down. They’ve been able to measure it, which is just so fascinating. But you can get very specific, and very specific trauma, very specific emotion that can be passed down for generations.
So it’s up to us to stop that, to heal it, and to allow the healing to go in both directions for past generations and future generations. So I’d love to have you come back on and we can talk about generational healing. I’d also like to ask you about past life healing if that’s ever come up because that is something that will challenge us in a very interesting way.
Dr. Bradley Nelson, I had the absolute pleasure having you on the show and can’t wait to have you back. It’s truly a gift and an honor to be in this day and age when we are birthing a world and we heal ourselves, heal thyself, help heal our friends and family. And if enough of us are going to tip the scales, we can help birth a world where love, peace, and consciousness are the things that we strive towards, the things that we resonate—coming from the heart instead of coming from the mind, like you said.
[01:35:50] Dr. Bradley Nelson: Yeah. We’re going that direction. Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s been really fun. Let’s do it again.
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Kellyann's website:
Small Changes in Daily Habits can make the Biggest Difference for a Clean and Functioning Body, Mind and Spirit
http://www.platinumenergysystems.ca
Morning exercise that Kellyann recommends:
https://www.yoqi.com/qigong-videos
Kellyann also recommends looking into Cells or tissue Salts," otherwise known as homeopathic mineral salts. Hyland's brand often is a reliable and easy to find brand sold in most health stores.https://www.learntruehealth.com/small-changes-in-daily-habits-can-make-the-biggest-difference-for-a-clean-and-functioning-body-mind-and-spirit
Highlights:
Inflammation is caused by inflamed thoughts and feelings Routines that support cellular health What is nerve toxicity Importance of breathing properly How to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous systemWhen we’re stressed, our body goes into fight or flight mode, which negatively affects our body. Kellyann Andrews is back with more tips on keeping our stress levels low and how to return to the rest and digest mode. She also shares more success stories with the PES system.
[00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 454. Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. We have here today with us back on the show Kellyann Andrews from platinumenergysystems.ca. You were on episode 292, 293, 329, and 330. This time would be your fifth episode. Welcome back to the show.
[00:00:41] Kellyann Andrews: It’s lovely to be here, Ashley. Thank you so much. It’s such an awesome thing that you’re doing for people to give them the sense of their liberty because they can make their own choices.
[00:00:55] Ashley James: Absolutely. We’re raised in a system where we’re told how to think, where to go, and that we only have one system of medicine. And then we look around and realize, wait a second, I can think for myself, and there isn’t only one system of medicine. There are many systems of medicine. It’s not all one system fits all. You don’t take all the problems in your house to a plumber. Why would you take all your health problems to a doctor that only has one set of tools?
Now, MDs are fantastic diagnosticians. That’s really where they shine. That is not diagnosing everything. There are certain things that haven’t caught up yet in the MD-based world, but they’re great diagnosticians. They’re great to go to for emergency medicine. They’re wonderful at stitching you back up. But when it comes to chronic illness, the problem is that they don’t have the toolset, the philosophy, or the training.
[00:02:04] Kellyann Andrews: It’s not their department.
[00:02:05] Ashley James: It’s not their department, and there are so many wonderful MDs out there who really want to make a difference and who do make a difference. There are wonderful MDs who choose to become holistic doctors and they have to get a lot of additional training. But for some people who listen to this show who are sick of being sick and tired, they don’t know why they’re sick and tired, and they’re really sick of being given drug after drug. Maybe they don’t want to be given drugs to manage symptoms that create more problems. Then we need to look at all the different possible avenues for us.
A lot of times, listeners decide to take matters into their own hands and learn from many episodes like today’s episode and learn from people like you. And they decide to do things like daily supportive detoxification and nutrition just to help the body manage the daily stressors that we have right now. There are over 80,000 new man-made chemicals in our air, water, food, and soil. We just are not detoxing at a rate that we can handle to get rid of all this pollution, and then that leads to further deterioration.
Kellyann, you specialize in supporting the body’s ability to detox. We’ve talked about this in past interviews, and so I highly recommend listeners go and check those out. Today, you’re back here to continue the discussion of focusing on cellular health and resilience. Especially now coming into winter. Resilience allows us to bounce back, to resist illness, and bounce back from it. That’s what we definitely want to create within our health this idea of resilience.
So many of the listeners have shared that they’ve had amazing experiences with you with the Platinum Energy System machine, which I have shared in the past episodes my thrilling joy in using and experiencing the detoxification of working with your machine. Again, listeners, go back and listen to those past episodes because Kellyann fills us in on that. But a lot of interesting stories have come to the surface of listeners who have used your system with their children, with their husbands during times when they have a cold or flu, during times when they’re feeling really ill. They’re all noticing hugely positive benefits.
I have a friend who has a developmentally delayed son who’s very hard to understand in his speech. After one session, she was almost crying. She couldn’t believe it. She started recording him just to prove it to herself and show it to others. After one session, which is 30 minutes, he was speaking so clearly you could understand every single word. He said his name, he spelled his name, and he was talking like every other child his age. That was amazing that when we support the body’s ability to detox, it affects the brain, it affects the nervous system, it affects every organ in the body. What we need to do is look at how we can support the body’s ability to detox and have cellular health and resilience.
So thank you so much for coming back to the show to continue to share with us your information. I know you have so much you want to share today. Since we had you on the show last, how has it been working with all the Learn True Health listeners who have contacted you?
[00:05:58] Kellyann Andrews: It’s so lovely. I just so enjoy being in this field and having the insights and the understanding of toxicology and physiology. Just continuing the journey down the road with the people that are already using it. I mean, daily, they’re calling and saying this transformation has occurred or that transformation. So it’s just a total joy to hear the stories of recovery.
[00:06:33] Ashley James: Are there any specific stories that come to mind that you’d like to share?
[00:06:38] Kellyann Andrews: I mean, there was one case where a little girl was very autistic, very internalized. If you looked at her on a spectrum of introversion versus extroversion, she’d be way down major introversion. She was very inside herself. She was very grumpy. She was cranky. Disposition was not pleasant at all, and she was very impatient, demanding, and just irritable altogether. So they put her in the foot spa. Her father actually is a physician himself, a psychiatrist.
Anyway, she went into the foot spa and they said they knew something was occurring because she started to smile, then she started laughing, and then she started communicating and holding eye contact. So all the behaviors reversed towards the scale of extroversion within that session. At the end of the session, she was just happy. And then she went outside and she started galloping around the back garden. The father said he had never seen her do that behavior her whole life.
[00:08:02] Ashley James: Was this temporary or did they continue to see progress with her?
[00:08:09] Kellyann Andrews: They continued to see progress with her and her communication skills became more acute. There was another grandmother who had—I forget the age, I think she was six or eight, I think she was eight—an interesting story because she was always constantly having to check in with the mother when she was trying to write anything to find the words to assist her in the process. But as they noticed when she progressed through the sessions, she started to be able to initiate the sentences by herself. And then the grandmother called her an inventor because in the end she was just happily creating all these different stories and very finite articulate communication skills were occurring without the mother’s help anymore.
[00:09:07] Ashley James: I love it. I spoke recently to one of our listeners and she said that she’s had such great success with the PES. She’s really into holistic health and she has a son who I think participated in the Special Olympics so he’s quite athletic. But her husband’s really not into anything holistic, and they all got the flu, which I noticed any time I feel like we’re catching something like the cold or flu which isn’t often but when we do, we jump in the PES. We notice it speeds up our healing time.
So her husband was suffering the most out of everyone in the household probably because he didn’t take care of himself a great deal, and she exclaimed that it helped him so much to get better quicker that it started to almost make him a believer in holistic health. She was excited to notice that, but that’s what I noticed.
Our son has been doing the PES I think since about three, but he would come to us in the morning if he started feeling like he had sniffles or had a cold and he’d ask us for the foot treatment. I thought that was really cute. Without us prompting him, he said, “I want the foot treatment,” because he really did notice he started to feel better after it. That’s fun. Talking about focusing on detox, cellular health, and resilience, I’d like to get into that. How can we support ourselves to the point where we’re creating resilience?
[00:10:59] Kellyann Andrews: That is such a great question because toxicity and illness go hand in hand. That’s what Bruce Lipton was addressing in his book, The Biology of Belief. The focus needs to turn back into the body. We’re always looking outside of our body for the causative factors, but we’re forgetting that it’s the internal environment within the body that is such a key aspect because that is the key to the genetic expression of the epigenetics.
Whether health or illness is being expressed either on a physical level, emotional, or mental, the mindset, the attitude, and emotions are such a key thing as to what is actually environmentally going on inside the body. So at the core of health, there’s one major aspect, and that’s whether you feel safe or not. That’s the bottom line. It’s so interesting to come across this research.
It’s your own thoughts and feelings that you’re expressing that are communicating to the brain and the brain’s communicating to the body of whether you feel safe or not. So the brain and the body then activate a response accordingly to whether you feel safe or not, and that in turn activates your nervous system into action.
Now, if you feel safe, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system. But if you don’t feel safe, then you activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight and flight response. This, at the core, is so important because just think about it for a second, Ashley. When you feel safe, how does that feel in your body? What does safe feel like in your body?
[00:13:27] Ashley James: Calm, warm, restful, peaceful.
[00:13:33] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. So guess what you are communicating to the brain and the brain is communicating to the nervous system. When you feel safe, your body functions come literally back online because you are in a relaxed, at ease, mellow space. But what happens is that when the body and the brain respond to stress—that feeling of not safe—you activate something that’s called the cell danger response. So not safe again activates that fight and flight response, and the brain has sensors in it. So these sensors are monitoring the entire system the whole entire time like the control tower at the airport.
It’s monitoring what are the oxygen and pH levels in the body. Of course, stress and toxicity decrease oxygen and increase acidity. So now, the brain starts signaling a not safe alert and the cell danger response turns on. Now, this system of alerts was designed as a short-term response. But the trouble nowadays with COVID ongoing is it’s turned into chronic stress. So it’s become long-term stress and what that causes in the body is the cell danger response to be stuck on. When that happens, then the body is being triggered by those negative emotions and negative thoughts. When the body feels not safe, the person feels agitation, anxiety, and fear.
What happens when the body is in that feeling of not safe? It’s in the fight and flight response so here’s how the body responds. It’s set up to flee. The blood goes to the limbs. The energy is increased in the body so the body puts out more glucose. The heart rate goes up, adrenaline comes up, blood flow increases so it brings more oxygen and nutrients. The respiration increases, digestion, and immunity go down, and susceptibility and vulnerability go up.
This is where the bad microorganisms, the pathogens move into the body and when the stress is chronic, that’s what turns into chronic infections. So now you have a situation of inflammation, and the inflammation is caused by inflamed thoughts and feelings. I mean, when you just look at it so logically, you can just see.
So the key thing is that in that moment of stress, whatever that is that hits the button of reacting within your body being in nature, we’ve got to stay conscious in that moment because the fight and flight response takes you to the hindbrain and you just go into the step on the cat’s tail reaction. You’ve got to catch yourself in that moment because if you can consciously shift back to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is activated by feelings of safe, it governs your digestion, your immunity, your respiration, your heart health, your brain health, your ability to detoxify, and it also brings down inflammation.
So in the moment of stress, it is just so interesting to see and just look at this in your own life—how are you responding in that moment of stress? Because what is happening is you’re telling yourself, your biocomputer, and all of your biologies that you’re not safe and so you go into that fight and flight response. But what we need to shift to is to realize the impact that our negative emotions and thoughts are having on our biochemistry.
So anxiety, worry, anger, frustration—they’re all causing the sympathetic nervous system to go into overdrive in the fight and flight response, and it’s all activated by what you’re thinking. But what it’s affecting is your organs—your liver, your kidneys, your lungs, your spleen. And this all occurs when a person feels unsafe. So isn’t it interesting, Ashley, how Louise Hay completely focused on this in that if you look at her affirmations, she always brought in I am safe. So she intuitively got it, but she didn’t really understand the science behind it.
But even on a mental level, it impacts the body because the interesting thing about the body is the body only knows now. Whether the stressor is real or imagined, so it could be a negative projection, it could be anticipation, it could be an actual restriction or even a sense of loss of freedom. All of these are stressors and they all bring our ability to heal, repair, and have the immune system active. It all decreases all of the above. So what we have instead is a higher level of acidity and toxicity, and that also impacts the fight and flight response, impacts the body’s ability to detoxify itself. It actually inhibits the body to detoxify.
[00:20:33] Ashley James: I mean, we talk about detoxification as a concept. I think when people hear detox, they think of some major cleanse like doing a liver detox, a liver cleanse, or a colon cleanse. My neighbor, who knows I’m into holistic health, texted me the other day and said, “I want to do a lung and colon cleanse.” I think he even used the word detox. He wanted to detox his lungs, and I said, “Listen, we need to actually sit down and talk about this.” So we had a call. Because there’s one thing to think about detox as an annual sort of cleaning of the house. Sometimes people do a spring detox, like a spring cleaning where they drink a bunch of juice, do a bunch of yoga, and they just do like a week’s worth, a weekend, or something.
Sometimes people will do a fast, but it’s this idea that it’s separate from the rest of our routine and our life and that it’s this one time a year. It’s like taking letting the body have a vacation and we just nurture the body in this cleanse or detox session. But why is it actually important to focus on supporting the body’s ability to detoxify every day and incorporating that even into coming into the holidays? Especially now with the higher levels of stress and coming into a time where people might be drinking more, eating more sugar, taking less notice of what they’re putting in their body. What kind of routines can people incorporate on a small scale, on a day-to-day basis that supports cellular health?
[00:22:20] Kellyann Andrews: Where do we begin? I loved what you said there because the point is that it isn’t a once a year kind of event, it’s every day. I mean, would you clean your house once a year? Would you clean your car once a year? You do clean the chimney once a year, but that’s about the only thing.
The body gets clogged up by a continuum of toxicity coming into it. And as you mentioned at the beginning, the volume of chemicals that are now on the planet that we’re exposed to. The unfortunate part is that the planet has become 100 times more toxic in just 30 years. So a lot of these women that I’m assisting have children within that category of the last 30 years. The wonderful thing about children is that they do respond quicker because they haven’t been on the planet as long. But the unfortunate thing for the children is that they have been on the planet when it’s been the most toxic.
So there are so many different aspects that you can address, and the key of course is you’ve got to get the body moving. You’ve got to get the lymphatic system moving. I mean, there are so many different ways to be able to assist that, but the most important thing is that we’ve always got to bring back into the formula the emotional aspect. So if you’re going to go do exercise, don’t do something that you absolutely hate doing or that you’re resenting that you’re having to get up at 5:00 AM in the morning and go to the gym in the cold. Do something that makes you feel good, that you enjoy, that you love doing.
Being out in nature is the most quieting thing to the human nervous system and just to tune in. I remember when COVID first happened, I just stood on my porch and listened to the birds. I thought well the birds don’t know anything about all this that’s going on, and they were sounding so joyful and so chirpy because the noise of the humans had come down. So the joy of the birds had come up.
So when you can just tune your sensory perceptions into what makes you feel alive, what makes you feel energized, what makes you feel good? What are those things? Whether it’s aromatherapy, yoga, tai chi, or Shiba Fa, the key thing is to move the body. And when you do it in a method that’s slow and purposeful with the breath, you just have so much greater impact because the key is that when we get these toxins on board internally, toxins are inhibiting our bodies to detoxify themselves. They’re actually causing what I call log jam beaver dam.
Toxins are poisoning the nerve’s sensory perceptions and inhibiting the signaling communication of the body. The body’s ability to censor what’s going on in different parts, and it’s affecting our arcadian rhythms. So that’s where you see people with sleep disturbances, agitation, restlessness, and anxiety. When the body has so much on board in terms of toxic content, it destabilizes the cell membranes. It poisons the tissue and the enzymes. It poisons the entire neurological system.
Here’s an example of a woman that we met. Actually, she was a spa director at Sofia a few years ago. We were there, we had the equipment, and so we were giving sessions to the spa people. We walked in and this woman, I have to tell you, looked like she had—you spoke about partying—the world’s worst hangover. I mean, she just had this hangdog look. So I just said try to be polite, “What happened to you?” So then she said that she had just found out that she was living in a house that was full of mold. And she was down in your area. The volume of rain in the wintertime there, it’s not surprising. Anybody in that zone hasn’t got massive mold issues.
She was experiencing physically in her body that she had an extreme amount of fatigue, and at that time, why she had the hangover look was because she was just completely in a brain fog. I mean, her face was white. Her whole disposition was completely submerged. So what happened in the process of her detoxifying is that she released a lot of fatty content, and that was what was clogging up her lymph system. So of course, that was causing the inflammation in her body. So the sinuses started to drain the, lymph nodes behind the ears that were swollen actually shrunk during the session, which was really awesome. And at the end of it, her brain fog was completely gone. She was so thrilled, amazed, and shocked. She said, “This is the first time I’ve done any kind of intervention where I’ve had such dramatic results in the first session.”
But the interesting thing is that Dr. Stephen Genius is a doctor here in Edmonton, Canada. He said, and this makes such sense when you think about it, “The idea that heavy metals, chemicals are harmful to our bodies, and that they are in fact preventing our bodies from detoxifying effectively is the key to our present and future state of health. The body forces constantly are in a fight mode to try to stay healthy. Toxic chemicals and heavy metals compromise our immune system. Our detoxification organs—liver, lungs, kidney, colon, skin—cannot function properly to remove the toxicity.”
That’s what you saw in the case with this woman with mold was that her body was already compromised, and then she got assaulted with one more thing that literally just caused the dominoes to go backward in the wrong direction.
So it’s been such an interesting journey to see all these people coming in. The trouble nowadays, as you understand Ashley, is that 200 plus diseases and more are all increasing daily and they’re all autoimmune. So autoimmune diseases are diseases of contamination. It affects the body organs because what happens is the toxicity attaches to protein molecules and they’re contaminated. Now, they go throughout the body and they attach to healthy tissue, and the immune system finds them and it tries to clean them out and it goes after them.
So it’s misunderstood that the body is attacking itself. What it’s trying to do is just move the toxicity out. The bottom line is that we got to clean out this toxicity. For example, Ashley, with your own body, what signals and symptoms cue you that it’s time that you need to detox? What is the feeling inside your body?
[00:31:32] Ashley James: Well, when I was younger, I became very in tune with my body because I had an allergy to dairy. So for the first six years of my life, I wasn’t on a restricted diet. My parents didn’t know any better, I ate dairy, and was feeling sick all the time. I had a sore throat. Luckily, I didn’t develop ear infections, which is incredibly common for children who drink cow milk. But I did have constant sore throats, and sore throats for me was the first sign that my body was weakened. And then I have burning in the eyes and I’d feel tired.
And then we went to Dr. D’Adamo in Toronto. He had a clinic in Toronto and I believe a clinic in Philadelphia. I was six years old and he said you need to stop eating milk, yeast, wheat, and sugar. And overnight, my mom transformed our kitchen. So I grew up, from then on, living on soy milk, no sugar, and very less gluten, I suppose. We didn’t know gluten was back then, but we didn’t have any wheat in the house.
What I noticed is that my resilience went through the roof because I almost never got sick, and when I did, it would always start with a sore throat. That was my body saying you’re run down. If I pulled an all-nighter because I’m a kid, I don’t want to go to bed, and I’m at a birthday party or something or at a sleepover. But when I would run myself down or if I snuck a bunch of candy at Halloween, my body, when it was run down, would start with a sore throat. That was always my body’s saying okay, even if I didn’t have an infection my body would get a sore throat telling me it’s time to back up, rest, and start following a better protocol.
And then as I got older, that wasn’t my body’s first response. Since I’ve been pregnant, exhaustion because, of course, hormones in pregnancy are kind of crazy. I’ve had about four hormone-induced migraines, which started with the aura during my pregnancy, especially in the first and the beginning of the second trimester where I got the aura. I had blind spots like I couldn’t see in front of me, and I wasn’t afraid because I knew what was happening. I know it’s a migraine coming on that’s induced by hormones.
So I got the spots. The spots kind of clouding my vision I could hardly see. And what I have done each time to prevent it from becoming a full-blown migraine because I would never take any kind of pain medication, especially during pregnancy, right? I took the Magnesium Cream from livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I love their Magnesium Soak and I got the Magnesium Cream. Listeners have heard it. If they’ve been listening to the show, they know how much I love that. There’s a coupon code, LTH, and I use that cream—the Magnesium Muscle Cream—and I rub it all over my neck. I drink plenty of water and then I jump in the PES. I get a session of PES and then I lie down in a darker room just to hang out. Each time, it has stopped the migraine in its tracks.
[00:35:20] Kellyann Andrews: Awesome.
[00:35:21] Ashley James: I know, it’s just amazing. That would have been a full day’s worth of suffering. Because when you get the aura, you have about two hours before it becomes—I mean, everyone’s different right, but for me, I have about two hours before it’s a full-on migraine. Each time I followed that procedure and I found that it was just so remarkably quick how I could just stop the inflammation in its tracks.
[00:35:48] Kellyann Andrews: Let me give you insight around that because I’ve had a series of car accidents in my life, and my poor head has been crushed too many times. Anyway, I used to get those visual—what do you call it—prism. A prism light where it’s almost like you’re looking in through the crystals that hang down from the chandeliers.
[00:36:16] Ashley James: Distortion.
[00:36:17] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah, distortion and just like those weird mirrors in the circus. So anyway, one time it happened to me when I was out driving. Luckily, at that time, I was just coming back into the car and so I sat down. But I had just been to the health food store and in the front seat, I happened to have a whole bunch of biochemical tissue salts. The tissue salt line the Schuessler is the originator of it, and then Hylands is the brand. Well anyway, I had in the car #6, #8, and #10. So I just immediately started taking them like crazy about every 5 minutes, and within about 10 or 15 minutes, the whole thing completely disappeared. I had no headache, nothing. Because I always use my body as the field test. It’s like, okay body, is this what you want?
So it’s always a question of experience and experiment. So what I came to realize was those migraines, because the brain is so hypersensitive to acidity and so are the eyes, that it was an acidity symptom. So you did exactly the right thing because magnesium is an alkalizer, and then you went to the foot spa and that detoxified you of the acid. So when you download the acid and you uptake the nutrients that alkalize you, bingo, immediately there’s a shift.
Now, here’s an example, which is really quite interesting. So there was a woman who was opening a clinic during COVID. Can you imagine? I mean, opening a clinic at any time would be unbelievably stressful, and just the logistics of all that entails. But she was opening it in COVID time. I mean, if we want to talk about fight and flight, she was about 1000%. Anyway, I had her test her pH before the session. Then I usually wait about 20 minutes to half an hour after the session, if possible, because that gives the body that little bit of time to recalibrate, as I call it. Because we were doing a draining, she just went ahead and did the pH before, then she did the pH right when she came out of the system, and then I had her do it half an hour later.
So what was so interesting to see was before her session, her pH score was 6.5. After her session, her pH was 5. For me, my God, this thing’s supposed to rebalance my pH. What the heck happened? But then, I had her take it half an hour later and her score was up to 7.5. So what happened there was prior to her session, she had a mineral drink and it was full of alkalizing agents. So she brought her pH level up so I called that an influencer. That she took an influencer prior to her session. So the 6.5 was her influencer score, but after her session, that was her native score where her body was really at. Then having dumped the acid, and we knew she dumped the acid because her feet exfoliated like crazy. We’ve tested the water and we know that acid water helps get rid of all that dead epidermal skin.
So then we had a retest in half an hour later—having dumped the heavy metals, having dumped the acid—now she was at 7.5.
[00:40:40] Ashley James: When someone gets your foot spa—I think the term foot spa really doesn’t do it justice. It’s six different complicated technologies in one, and doesn’t it come with pH test strips?
[00:41:01] Kellyann Andrews: Yes.
[00:41:03] Ashley James: And they’re great. It’s my favorite brand, in fact, of the pH test strips that it comes with. It’s so much fun to test yourself before and after and see that, in fact, your pH does become even healthier after doing it. But you also did some interesting work with athletes, I believe. That you saw that it decreases lactic acid in the body. Can you talk a bit about that?
[00:41:29] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. When the other people that have very high levels of lactic acid are people with Lyme. So we tested both Lyme patients and actually Olympic athletes. These Olympic athletes, I mean, if you want to talk about a diagnostic ability, these guys in the gym and the equipment that is available to them and the fine-tuning. I mean, their fine-tuning is just shaving seconds off their performance, but those seconds can make a difference between being a gold and a bronze. So their ability to monitor what is happening in the body is phenomenal—the equipment they have.
Anyway, so what they found was they had the athlete do his training performance. I mean, some of these people in what they do with the athletes—I mean, I feel so sorry for athletes—they actually train them to exhaustion. There’s almost not left in them. Then the pH got tested and the acidity was very high, but the lactic acid level was skyscraper high. So then what they did was they let the body just recalibrate and readjust after that normal adaption to see what the level of resilience was, and then test their agility, their flexibility, and their timing. I mean, it’s just so amazing how finite it is
So then what happened was did the same thing all over again, but this time after the training event put them in the foot spa. At the end of the foot spa, retested the lactic acid and it was street level again. And it’s really interesting because working with people with Lyme, we’ve also seen this recovery aspect. I mean, I’ve had so many Lyme patients phone me up and say yours is my go-to because it’s the only thing that makes me feel good. But you just think about that acid in the body. I mean, if you have acid on your skin, you know exactly what that feels like. Well, can you imagine what a poor little nerve cell feels like? I mean, it’s just incredibly overwhelming to the nervous system that level of acid, and it just so undermines the whole entire performance of the body and the body’s ability to be able to operate at any kind of level.
The number one thing that the body will do is to focus on getting that acid out of the body. We know that from examples of diseases such as arthritis where the body is literally cannibalizing itself in terms of its skeletal system because it can’t find enough alkalizing nutrients or minerals in the body. So it will pull from whatever sources it has because the body’s number one mission is to stay at a conscious level. That’s its number one function is to stay conscious, and it will sacrifice all other aspects.
So when we do things like extreme sports, extreme stress, or staying up overnight, we just completely knock the body’s balance and rhythm out of orbit. And then the body has to try to recalibrate, but it’s that recovery. How quickly are you recovering from these broadsiding events—the setbacks, the stressors? And that tells you a whole lot about where your body’s at. And if you’re able to recover quickly, then your systems are online. But if it’s taking you a long time to recover and you’re what I call dragging anchor through life, then you know that your reserves are low. But the number one thing is that you’ve got a high level of acidity on board.
[00:45:58] Ashley James: So you’d brought up what I notice in my body when I’m just starting to feel run down, acidic, or just noticing higher toxicity. I think that’s something really important to acknowledge that we need to become in tune with the first steps, the first signs that we’re going down the wrong path. Back before I cut out a lot of unhealthy foods in my diet, I just felt bad all the time and so that was kind of like my normal. I didn’t know because I was habituated. I didn’t know that was my normal.
A lot of people are walking around eating foods that inflame them, living a lifestyle that inflames them, and then they have to compensate by drinking lots of caffeine in the morning, drinking alcohol at night, up-regulate themselves, downregulate themselves, taking aspirin or Advil, taking in sugar just to manage, just to try to get through the day. They’re using substances.
[00:47:06] Kellyann Andrews: Self-medicating.
[00:47:07] Ashley James: Self-medicating throughout the day just to survive, and if we’re unconscious about that, we’ll just continue to drive our health deeper and deeper into the ground. And then you take that person and you get them off of—I’m going to say for me it was dairy, gluten, pesticide food, GMO food, and they’re eating less processed foods. So avoid flour as much as possible. So now you’re eating foods that are just whole plants, whole foods.
[00:47:44] Kellyann Andrews: I call it food in God’s format.
[00:47:46] Ashley James: God food. So walking through the Garden of Eden. I like to call it single-ingredient food. There’s an apple, I eat it. For those who choose to eat animals, just choose something that’s closest to nature as possible. Not a factory farm, but something that lived in a pasture and was very happy about its whole life eating organic, and living a full life that didn’t involve a factory farm. That makes a difference. You take that person off of everything that inflames them, and then a month goes by and they have a new normal. And then if you give them the old foods that inflame them, they, all of sudden, feel like they have a hangover the next day. That’s how I feel.
I remember the first time, we had cut out all alcohol because we decided to go sugar-free. Not that either one of us drank excessively. We would drink socially, but we cut out all alcohol, all sugar, we went gluten-free, and we were eating 100% organic. I remember we went down for Thanksgiving, this was 10 years ago just coming up to our 10-year anniversary. We each had a shot of Crown Royal. I don’t know what it is about Crown Royal, I always used to love it. I think it was just one shot each but we ended up, on the way home—because it was a three-, a four-hour drive home from Portland to Seattle with the traffic—we had both splitting headaches.
By the time we got home, we were hungover. We had splitting headaches and we felt as though we had partied all night long and had a hangover already. We hadn’t even had the opportunity to sleep, and we thought that’s so interesting that we came from such a clean diet and then went back to eating just sugar, dairy, and whatever was served basically at thanksgiving. How quickly our body said, no, don’t do that.
[00:49:53] Kellyann Andrews: You’re body said what the heck?
[00:49:55] Ashley James: What the heck? And that was us feeling the body revolting from feeding it poison. So if we eat poison all the time, we’re habituated, and that’s our new normal. But then when we take it up to the next level, now our new normal feeling even more energy, vitality. Once we start cleaning up our diet, we need to be in tune with what it feels like to start to go backward, slip backward? What is your body’s first warning system for slipping backward? For some people, it actually starts with emotions. We cannot disconnect the emotional body from the physical body.
So when we eat certain foods, we can have an emotional response, and it’s very apparent in children. You give children too much sugar, they become frustrated easily. They have temper tantrums. They cannot control their emotions very well. Adults do too, but we mask it a little better than them, and we ignore and push aside our emotions. We don’t realize that when you eat things that are inflaming your body, it can actually come out as feeling angry, frustrated, losing your temper quicker in certain circumstances, or everyone’s irritating you. So you feel normal but everyone else is to blame.
[00:51:18] Kellyann Andrews: Isn’t it interesting how toxic thoughts create toxic substances, and toxic substances create toxic thoughts?
[00:51:26] Ashley James: I think we just have to check in with ourselves and each go—for me it could be fatigue, it might be my first sign that my body’s going in the wrong direction or becoming more acidic, needing a detox, needing to come back to the foundations of health. And it can be something as simple as what does dehydration feels like in you? This morning I woke up and I felt like I’m a little dehydrated. I’m going to really push the water, even more, today and get in some minerals. I checked in with myself, but if we don’t check-in and go, okay, I have a little bit of tension in my shoulders. I might be wearing my stress. My mom would say don’t wear your shoulders like earrings.
[00:52:11] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah, that’s a great expression. That is classic.
[00:52:15] Ashley James: Right. We both would wear our emotional stress in our physical body, and so we have to check-in. Check-in with yourself as you wake up in the morning, where’s the tension? Is there tension? Are you tired, or do you have mental clarity? Are you wide awake? Are you happy? Are you irritated? What’s going on? Your body is telling you right now if there’s something off or not, and it can be something very simple like really getting back to a cleaner diet. It can be needing to shift your thoughts into less toxic thoughts. I mean, it could be an accumulation of many things, but it does take checking in every day and then making little adjustments every day. That makes the biggest difference.
You’ve talked about why is it so important to have these healing thoughts rather than toxic thoughts. Because our body’s always listening to our internal dialogue, our body creates the stress response based on what we’re thinking and what we’re focusing on. So it is true that toxic thoughts create toxicity in the body and vice versa.
[00:53:21] Kellyann Andrews: Now the interesting thing is to see how broad range the signals or the symptoms of toxicity are in the body. So we already talked about fatigue, brain fog, and what I call dragging anchor. We talked about the headaches and the migraines, but mental confusion—a drugged kind of feeling—and then, of course, the classics are puffy eyes, baggy eyes, dark circles under the eyes. But most people will just try to minimize that they have gas, indigestion, irritable bowels, and reflux. They try to just ignore those signs, but the trouble with the body is the volume is very low at first and it increases up to a scream when you don’t attend.
So if people have sluggish or slow elimination, then that’s going to show up as acne and skin issues. But it’s so interesting, Ashley. I have people phone me up all the time and say how come I’ve never had this issue before and now they’re 40, 50, or 60. When the beginning, people used to phone us up when they were in their 50s, 60s, and 70s with degenerative issues. But now, we have people phoning us up in their 20s, 30s, and 40s with what used to be considered degenerative senior citizens diseases. But nowadays, we’re hearing that even teenagers are having heart attacks.
So some of the other symptoms that where you need to detox, the one classic one that people phone up all the time is about achy joints and muscles or stiffness. But even slight things like people have a low-grade fever, but the feeling level, the ones where people aren’t recognizing these are symptoms of needing to detox is depression, anxiety, anger, sadness, frustration, irritability, restricted breathing, sleep issues, restlessness, and pain. A lot of people aren’t associating that with the need to detox.
So I always say if you have symptoms in your body, you have toxicity on board. I was watching someone else’s podcast or video the other day, and this person specializes in toxicology issues. They were saying that 90% of illnesses out there are related to toxicology issues.
[00:56:26] Ashley James: Scary.
[00:56:28] Kellyann Andrews: It’s pretty astounding. But when you think, if you have an environment that’s highly acidic, it’s full of heavy metals, it’s got agriculture and industrial chemicals in it, the more toxins that are present, the more parasites love that environment. Parasites thrive in the toxic environment, and what does that do in the body? That decreases your circulation, it increases what I call a log jam or beaver dam where it impedes the flow of blood and lymph through the body, and basically, people have clog ups in circulation. Of course, that’s exactly what edema is. But they’ll have a clog up on an organ level. The increase of toxicity in the body causes increased inflammation.
But the saddest thing that I ever am exposed to is these poor children that are either ADHD, autism, or along that line, and they’re experiencing brain inflammation. What happens is that when the lymph system up to the brain gets clogged up—one of the things that have really been endorsed these days and I really need to bring this to people’s attention are the keto and paleo diets where they’re really emphasizing a lot of protein and a lot of fats. But what I’m witnessing in all our clients is that’s what’s clogging up their lymph system because they’ve got a hyper acidic environment and then they got all these fats on board. The liver and the gallbladders are not responding to be able to that load of fat in the body. It’s not digesting it and it’s clogging up the system.
So now, up to the brain, it’s congesting the circulation to the brain. Now the brain goes into an edemic kind of state. It becomes swollen, but because the brain cannot expand because of the skull, that’s where you’re seeing these children that are experiencing inflammation in the brain and they’re knocking their heads on the ground to try to stop the pain, to numb the pain. I mean, it’s just so horrifying. But what they’re finding now is that it’s the vagus nerve that controls the parasympathetic nervous system, and the vagus nerve is what actually Dr. Klinghardt has found. That 90% plus of his patients all have toxic vagus nerves.
[00:59:29] Ashley James: Can you explain for those who don’t know? What is the vagus nerve? What’s it responsible for? Why is it so important?
[00:59:36] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. It’s the control tower at the airport. So the interesting thing is that what inhibits the vagus nerve—before I answer that question—is toxic thoughts, toxic substances, chemicals, and heavy metals, stress and stress patterns, physical toxicity, and of course the vagus nerve is right up above the jawline. That’s where all of the dental issues are manifesting, and so of course amalgam fillings, heavy metals, and all the chemicals that they use in dentistry are completely toxifying that. Of course, then you have viruses and infections.
The bottom line of the vagus nerve—so what happens is you have, first of all, the human nervous system. You have the autonomic nervous system covering all unconscious functions such as digestion, heart rate, respiration. So the vagus nerve is the signal highway that connects the brain to the rest of the body. It connects to the digestive organs, the liver, the lungs, the spleen, the kidney. It’s how the body monitors blood sugar’s heart rate, respiration, oxygen levels. The vagus nerve is the on and off switch for the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system.
[01:01:19] Ashley James: So when you say Dr. Klinghardt, who we’ve had on the show. He’s the one that turned me on to the Platinum Energy System because he has had great success with the last 40 years working with children on the spectrum and seeing that detoxing them of heavy metals and eliminating things that are causing them to have inflammation, but especially detoxifying heavy metals from their brain. That they go from, for example, being unable to speak or hitting their head—nonverbal, to being able to make eye contact, talk, emotion, communicate in such a short period of time.
He’s been doing this for 40 years, and one of the big things he uses is your system in his clinic. He recommends his patients, especially those with Lyme disease, although he does have a lot of autoimmune patients that are sort of mystery patients, and he’s great at working with them as well. He’s been doing this for over 40 years. So I had Dr. Klinghardt on the show. But that’s what made me so fascinated was that we could speed up the detoxification of organs such as the brain to remove heavy metals using this method, and that was quite exciting.
He says most of his patients though have vagus nerve, inflammation, or toxicity. What does that mean to have nerve toxicity?
[01:03:04] Kellyann Andrews: That whole understanding is that you have a clogged lymph system going up to the brain. It causes inflammation, basically, through the neck, the carotid artery, and all of that area. The circulation is limited, so now the brain can’t get the nutrients up into it. But even more so, at night, you can’t get the toxicity out of it. So now, everything that’s up there is getting locked in and saturating into the tissues. So heavy metals are the number one thing that they’re finding that is inside the nerves.
What they’ve also found is that the heavy metals are like a doorway for how the toxicity or the heavy metals are actually using the nerves as a pathway. So when the vagus nerve gets toxic, it affects everything downstream, as I said, all those different organs. So what they’re seeing with vagus nerve toxicity is symptoms such as autoimmune, brain, and memory issues, anxiety, arthritis, even anorexia and bulimia, autism, infections, parasites, fungal, viral, bacterial. And then all of a sudden, because it controls the blood sugars as well, people are becoming insulin resistive. It also controls heart health, digestive issues, and systemic inflammation.
So people are experiencing things like fatigue, food sensitivity, nerve pain, fibromyalgia, heart issues, migraines, tendonitis, MS, mood disorders, and on and on and on because you just think of all of the organs that the vagus nerve connects with. Well, if the vagus nerve is toxic, the vagus nerve is not functioning normally, and now the sympathetic nervous system is on overdrive because of the stress levels, and people can’t go into rest and digest mode anymore.
You see people who have insomnia, what happens is when the brain gets too toxic, the whole entire brain area is antagonistic because of the hyperacidity because that’s not the environment it was designed to be in, slight alkalinity it was. And now, that’s just driving the nerves crazy. So it’s sort of like a mouse or a gerbil on a wheel. It just won’t settle down, and that’s why you find people that cannot sleep at night or they wake up and their brain is just like that mouse on a wheel.
[01:06:30] Ashley James: So many people have problems with anxiety and then they will become so desperate they turn to medication, which makes the system more toxic because it stresses the liver. Any time we take a medication—this is something really important to know. You can google this. This isn’t like far out there. It’s known, and it’s actually taught to MDs, but they don’t really stress it enough. Every medication, both prescribed and over the counter depletes, the body of something—vitamin C, CoQ10, and many, many different minerals. It takes the body effort to process. The liver has to process a man-made chemical. Medications are artificial.
Now, I’m not here saying don’t ever get on medication, medication is bad. What I’m saying is that we have to be very cautious, and we have to understand that any time we take one, it does harm the body. We need to be aware of that.
[01:07:40] Kellyann Andrews: The other thing is that it stops its signaling ability. Antidepressants, I mean, it just shuts down the body feeling. It’s a tough one because medications, as you have pointed out, do have their place in acute care. When you’re in the emergency room, you definitely want to have something that will stimulate your heart if your heart stops. However, where we get in trouble with medications is where we take them long term and they weren’t designed for chronic care. They were only designed for acute care. And then you do start to go into the side effects because that’s the accumulative toxicity effect in the body. A lot of times, it’s hyperacidity.
[01:08:35] Ashley James: Right. So here we have a person who has, let’s say, the toxicity of the vagus nerve. They are starting to realize they might have that because you’ve mentioned that one of the known symptoms or signs that we have is that we can’t turn it off. We’re constantly worried, we’re constantly stressed. We can’t get out of stress mode.
[01:09:07] Kellyann Andrews: Obsessive thinking.
[01:09:10] Ashley James: We can’t get into feeling safe mode. We can’t get into healing the parasympathetic nervous system response of rest and digest. That’s definitely a sign that we’ve been probably unhealthy for a while or going down the wrong path for a while. Whenever it finally sinks in, for someone to go, okay, now I need to make changes. I need to find a better direction. How do we start to heal the vagus nerve? How do we start to detoxify that?
[01:09:49] Kellyann Andrews: What’s really interesting is that for the longest time, I was just fascinated to watch clients recovering from the process of detoxification. I just thought, wow, it’s so brilliant what is occurring. But the brilliancy is the body knowing what it needs. If we would just trust our bodies to know, I mean, it has thousands of years of intelligence designed into it. That’s what instinct means is that there’s an inner knowing—a GPS system, a true north navigational system—that has the understanding of how to rebalance itself. What we got to do is to create a healing environment, and we need to create an internal environment in which the body can then come optimally on board again online.
What we’ve found by working with clients using our system is that one—the key factor is—get that lymph system moving. Because everybody who comes to us, and believe me, I have clinics sending me their most vulnerable patients. People that they can’t even work with because they have been so chronically sick for so long and they’re in such a state of inflammation and congestion. I call that state cellular constipation where everybody has a clogged lymph system no matter what their symptoms are. The severity of the symptoms equals the severity of the clog up. It’s like an LA freeway in traffic hour, nothing’s happening.
With the immune system, that’s like the UPS trucks can’t leave the warehouse. They can’t deliver the parcels. So when the lymph system’s clogged up, it just log jams the entire body’s circulatory system. So number one, you’ve got to get that lymph system open. You’ve got to get the flow happening because all the other drainage routes downstream will start to work. It’s like, as a simple visual, the liquid Drano commercial. The sink’s all clogged and nothing’s happening, and it sure doesn’t look pleasant either.
So the thing is that once that lymph system is moving, what we see categorically come out are heavy metals and then everything else that shouldn’t be in the body because the body’s wisdom knows what’s a nutrient and what’s a toxic substance. It is trying its hardest to get rid of that toxic substance. But when the exit routes are log jammed and beaver dammed, it tries to get it out any way possible, and of course, that’s when you see it coming out on the skin.
But what we found is that most patients have a history of mold toxicity, and then, of course, parasites, bad microbes, heavy metals, and toxic chemicals. But there is a commonality also with the dental work being done and of course the amalgam fillings, and that’s what’s causing the huge problem, of course, with the vagus nerve.
So you’ve got to open the lymph first. You’ve got to get hat drainage happening, especially out of the brain. Then what you begin to see is that the health returns. And the way that it returns is you decrease the acidity, you increase the oxygen—which increases energy, you increase the blood flow, you increase the lymph flow. Now the body can sleep and relax because its parasympathetic nervous system is back online, you see tension and stiffness go down, you see digestion and elimination go up, ang you see calmness return to the system.
[01:14:24] Ashley James: Don’t we all want that? You said we have intuition, and I believe we do. I really feel we’ve been trained to not listen.
[01:14:45] Kellyann Andrews: Wait. I need to pause there for one second. You have the right concept but we need to do a slight edit in that sentence. And it’s you that chose that. It’s the person themselves that chose that. What we have to do is we have to retrain the brain because you’re right, in a way. Society has trained us from school onwards to shut down the signals of the body. When you’re in the middle of class, you can’t get up to go to the washroom, it’s inconvenient, or whatever. So we do start to dummy down the signal. The body is brilliant at communicating but the key is are you listening and then are you responding?
[01:15:29] Ashley James: So it does take really listening. I interviewed Dr. Alan Goldhamer who co-wrote a book called The Pleasure Trap. It’s a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. He talks about how our brain developed over—however long we’ve been here, thousands of years. That we look to seek pleasure from eating, from reproducing, and from resting. That’s how we survived as long as we’ve survived is that we take the time to rest when we can. We take the time to reproduce, to procreate, to pass on our genetic code, and we eat.
The foods that give us the biggest dopamine hit are the foods that will also have the highest calorie density, and that really helped us a thousand years ago when there wasn’t any processed food. But it doesn’t help us now because now it’s so easy to acquire foods that are high in hyper-palatable ingredients that trigger dopamine. I think that part of it is society has trained us to not listen to our intuition, but we’re also—from a very young age—been marketed to look at substances like food and beverages to increase dopamine, to increase pleasure. We seek dopamine more the unhealthier we are because we have less and less dopamine when we’re sick, when we’re tired, when we’re toxic, when we’re inflamed.
[01:17:16] Kellyann Andrews: That’s like wanting to be in the rocking chair, be held, and just feel good. So we’re doing whatever we think on a self-medication level that tries to restore that feel-good aspect. But one of the things that can quickly help you that’s easy is just getting your oxygen levels up in the body because, of course, when the oxygen levels go down, that’s when you feel tense, stiff, tight, and your intercostal muscles can’t expand. So the tight tissue inhibits blood flow. It inhibits the intercostal muscles to have any flexibility for better movement, and then, of course, that even affects the hips in terms of flexibility and the pelvis being able to move freely.
So the more flexible you are, the more oxygen moves through your body, and it’s like the analogy of a fish through water. So the trouble too, which you pinpointed, is our lifestyle these days where we’re living sedentary lives because of our jobs. We’re sitting at a computer where we’re not mobile like we used to be in ancient times. As the stiffness increases, so does the poor circulation, and the body’s more vulnerable to stress and anxiety. So the way we think and how we feel also increases that tension or relaxation. It increases the acidity and toxicity or decreases it by how we physically respond.
So breathing is so not only essential—it can’t last long without it, but it actually will shift a degeneration cycle to a rejuvenation cycle. Chronic stress can be turned around to be instead of chronically stressed, you can be relaxedly alert, and it will improve your digestion, your optimal health. But the trouble is that almost everybody isn’t breathing the right way.
Now it’s really interesting even with the yogas. The yoga and exercise groups are training people to stop being chest breathers, shallow breathers, just the upper respiratory sort of your upper lung capacity. But they’re using the belly to breathe in and out so the belly should expand and the belly should contract. But in doing the investigation into the best breathing methods was nose breathing.
Now a lot of people have congestion in the sinuses. I mean, that makes it a little tough. But as you start to nose breathe more and more, I’ve found with clients that it starts to open up the upper respiratory, all of the sinuses. So nose breathing is number one to bring up your resilience and your health creation. So try this as a method. Do a big exhale first, but what I want you to focus on is your diaphragm not your belly. So I want you to focus on the diaphragm going up and down like an elevator.
So now do a big inhale but do it slowly and focus on your diaphragm and really notice how that diaphragm moves down towards the belly button with inhale. Now it’s almost the opposite. So now, when you do a big inhale, bring the diaphragm down, and then once it’s down then continue that inhale, and you have to train yourself to be able to do it. It can be a little frustrating at first because we’re not used to doing it this way, but then what you want to do is you want to take the air down to the lower part of the lung so that you actually expand the intercostal muscles to expand out because that is what creates more capacity and more volume.
So what’s very interesting—tying this back into the nervous system—is that the vagus nerve is connected to the diaphragm. So when you do diaphragmatic breathing, so literally it massages your organs, but it signals your body that you’re safe. So one of the things that you can do in that moment of stress—whatever the stressor is—you catch yourself completely tensing up. As you said, your mother-in-law saying about the shoulders up as earrings. So catch yourself in that moment of stress. Now, in your body somewhere is a center that signals you when you’re uptight.
So a lot of people it’s the gut. As soon as they have the stress moment, they get tight. Usually, people stop breathing or hardly breathe at all. But there’s a place in your body and you just need to find it, and how you find it gets triggered by stress. Find that part in your body that is your signal of stress, and what you do is you breathe right into that. But when you do that diaphragmatic breathing, you literally are choosing at that moment a new choice and the choice is to stay in the parasympathetic nervous system, not move into fight and flight, and just to stay in mellow mode.
When you stay in mellow mode, you can make brilliant decisions. You see that you have options. You look at your life more from an eagle point of view rather than an ant point of view. To an eagle, it looks down and everything is very small. All the issues in life are just put in perspective. It’s a very wide-angle camera kind of view of life. But when you’re an ant, everything looks like skyscrapers, and that’s when you’re in the sympathetic nervous system mode where you globalize that everything in your life is not working. Where it’s one aspect that’s not working and then you just need to shift back to your forebrain, which is the mammalian side of the creativity of thinking, the front part of the brain.
So the things you can do is one is diaphragm breathing, two is to bring your awareness to your forebrain, which is your thinking center. The back part of the brain is the reactive, animalistic, fight-or-flight part. So bring yourself to the front part of the brain. Now you can do that by actually tapping on the brain or just visually push on the brain because wherever the pressure is the attention goes. So by pushing on the forebrain, you literally cause your awareness to come to the frontal lobes.
But the other thing you can do is just now, at this moment, look throughout through your eyes very consciously. And if you’re in a room, outside, or whatever, look to see colors and textures as if you’re an artist and you’re going to draw this landscape or whatever. So just really focus on the difference between colors and textures. By coming to the forebrain through your eyes, you’re actually bringing the energy of the brain to the front of the brain and that will bring you into your thinking centers. Then you start to focus on solution orientation. But if you’re in the hindbrain, in fight and flight, you’re totally in that reactive mode, there isn’t any sense of options. There’s just a feeling of entrapment.
[01:26:29] Ashley James: Well, I think we’ve really illustrated the point of how physical health, diet, our lifestyle, and our emotions are all connected and they all affect each other.
[01:26:48] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah, it’s interesting. On that level, just one more thing—which I think is really important because it ties into both the physical and the emotional—is at what frequency is your body operating at, and that is hugely impacted by your emotions and your thoughts. So when you have a setback, you want to see how quickly your resilience level is in rebounding out of that situation, is it a short-term thing, or are you carrying it forward? Do you continue to re-go over whatever derailment happened or do you move on? But what’s interesting, Ashley, is the frequency aspect of the human body.
Now, healthy is about 58, but when you have a cold of the flu, your frequency drops down to 57. When you have candida overgrowth, it drops to 55. When you’re receptive to Epstein Barr, it drops down to 52. And when you have cancer, it’s 42 and death begins at 25. So it’s so important to keep your frequency at a high level because that will affect everything in your body because your body is designed to operate at that set level. I mean, life is disturbing. It’s like a lake that’s beautifully serene and calm and then all of a sudden these storms come along. What’s your ability to recover from the storm?
[01:28:42] Ashley James: How quickly can you bounce back? How soon do you detect that there’s something off, and how quickly will you bounce back?
[01:28:50] Kellyann Andrews: One of the keys is your energy level, and that’s why I wanted to bring in frequency because there’s a huge correlation between your energy level and your toxicity level and the impact that it has on the mitochondria inside the cells. Because the mitochondria or your power creators are their energized bunny creators.
So when cells are toxic, they’re inhibited in being able to create energy. We need to make our mitochondria really happy. What makes them happy is breathing, water, and nutrients. So the key to cellular health is creating that energy, and the greatest thing that I’m so happy to share is that thiamine B1, is the fuel source for the mitochondria. It’s so amazing because if you feed the mitochondria, then their ability to do their job is just heightened.
But when the mitochondria aren’t functioning, the nerves aren’t able to fire properly. The acidosis in the body starts to cause edema and inflammation. The glucose utilization goes down. The blood flow goes down. The health in the gut goes down. The whole ability of the autonomic nervous system, its ability to function, and the signal goes down. So it all depends on the mitochondria. The mitochondria are key of course to be able to help the body detoxify.
[01:30:57] Ashley James: I just did an interview with the scientists behind Viome, the at-home testing company that helps with understanding what chemicals your bacteria make from the food you eat. Because there are hundreds of thousands of pathways of genetic expressions of your bacteria. Mitochondria are bacteria in our cells, and they have a unique relationship with the bacteria in our gut. They’re actually finding that our gut will send signals to our mitochondria throughout our body and that we want to, obviously, establish a very healthy microbiome that can also help the mitochondria.
We’re just scratching the surface in terms of understanding the importance of the bacteria in our body. Eating foods that contain highly processed foods, sugar, alcohol, oil has even been known to harm the good bacteria in our body while inviting and creating that environment—the petri dish—that allows the unhealthy, not only bacteria, but yeast and parasites to thrive. If people who are not really listening to the body, it isn’t until they’re really sick that they’re noticing a difference. But those of us who really listen and really focus on and listen to our body, we’ll start to feel off fairly soon into going down the wrong path.
That’s why I like doing a symptom inventory checklist. I write down symptoms, and I get all my clients to do this as well. Write down all your symptoms no matter how big or how small, even the ones your doctor says oh you have that because it’s genetic, you have that because of your age, you have that because you’re a woman or because you have a uterus, or because of your work. Whatever it is, write down every symptom you have and then make three columns: frequency, duration, and intensity.
So how often does it happen is the frequency. Duration, how long does it last? An intensity, on a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is it? Either it’s every how many times a day, how many times a week, how many times a month, and then you come back to that list a month from now. You can also even notice like on times during the full moon and during a new moon, do your symptoms get worse? Is your sleep disrupted during a full moon or new moon? Do you find yourself craving things, more tired? Those are absolute signs that you have an imbalance in the gut, whether it be a parasite, candida, or otherwise.
So we have to listen to the symptoms of the body, and then if your symptoms are getting worse and not better, we really need to pump the brakes and go in a different direction, figure out what’s going on. If you’re staying the same, okay, well that’s good, but let’s see what we can do to improve. Maybe pick one and look at what you can do to improve it. And then if you’re getting better each month, keep at it. It’s a fantastic way to just check in because we often forget.
I had a client once who made some changes to her diet and she started taking supplements and six months later she said I forgot I used to have weekly migraines. She hadn’t had a migraine in six months.
[01:34:31] Kellyann Andrews: It was a joy that she forgot.
[01:34:33] Ashley James: Yeah, but she was like I can’t believe it. I actually forgot. I had to remind her.
[01:34:38] Kellyann Andrews: I know. I see that all the time. It’s so fun people come in with all these derailments, and that’s why I have them—from a nursing background—monitor their own health and chart their progress. And that’s why doing the pH for three days is so awesome because it’s not just one moment in time. Because as we saw with the women who had it at 6.5, it’s what you did right before that made that difference. But when you track it for three days doing it three times a day—both urine and saliva—you get a whole different picture.
[01:35:10] Ashley James: Listeners can go back and hear our episode all about pH that we did.
[01:35:18] Kellyann Andrews: That was 293.
[01:35:20] Ashley James: Yeah, that was episode 293. You’ve shared stories in the past, but after sharing this information with us, do you have any more stories of client recoveries, returning to health after changing these factors in their life?
[01:35:39] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. I mean, I could go on for days.
[01:35:43] Ashley James: Please do.
[01:35:44] Kellyann Andrews: It’s just so amazing. We had one girl who came to us, and she actually had down syndrome. Her own mom described her as a zombie, which is just really sad. But anyway, she had a series of sessions, huge lymph clog up, and then a massive download of other content including heavy metals. But it was like she popped out of the cocoon. She was so incredibly internalized and then she became literally like a butterfly just so outgoing and gregarious. When the downs people smile, it’s like their whole body lights up. But what happened was she initially had sessions at a clinic and then the mother purchased. So it was a month before we were able to actually do them in her home environment, and in that month’s period of time she clogged all up again.
So by the time she got back home, she was back in the cocoon again. I assisted her in the first session over the phone and it was so amazing because the mom said during the session she said oh, I think she’s feeling better because she’s smiling big time. So then, after the session, mom and I were doing the cleanup, tidy up, and all of the procedural stuff. So then I said we’ll have her go and just go check in with her body and see how she feels.
Well, she came back into the room and she was clapping, dancing, and singing around the room and I could hear her. I think that’s just such a perfect illustration, image, and visualization for all of us in whatever life experiences we’re having, especially in this COVID time where you just feel like you’re in a box and there are no doors. Can you imagine what this poor girl felt inside her body not being able to communicate? We’ve actually had autistic children have a series of sessions.
A teenager, I remember one time, after she cleared enough of this toxic content out of her body being in the brain, she was able to communicate what her experience was. One of the things was that she would never let anybody touch her and that she had to dress herself. Well, that sort of drove the family crazy because she was so slow in the process. But later she told the reason that was because her skin was burning, and if anybody touched her, it was just super painful.
[01:38:43] Ashley James: Do you have any stories that you can share of long-term working with your system for a while? What kind of results do people get after long-term use?
[01:38:58] Kellyann Andrews: I mean, whatever they experience in the short term just becomes more pronounced over time. We’ve had people who have been with us since 2004, and it’s been a fun journey because I had this one man. I think he came to us when he was in his 60s, and he was in quite a state. He had heavy metal toxicity‚ really extremely, and he had to literally go out and stand in the snow to calm down the burning of his feet.
After a series of sessions, he no longer needed that. Now he’s in his 80s and he phones me up and he’s just chirping away like a robin in springtime. He’s just so outgoing, energetic, gregarious, and just a happy camper. He says, “When I came to you in my 60s, I was really going downhill rapidly and I just didn’t even want to be here. But now, I get up at 6:00 AM in the morning. Do you know all those people that have to have a cup of coffee? Not me. I get up and I’m just ready to go.”
[01:40:20] Ashley James: I love it.
[01:40:21] Kellyann Andrews: So it’s really fun, but one of the cases that happened recently that really astounded me because I’ve seen a lot of people coming out of themselves, so to speak, when they’re introverted and going extroverted. But this man was really unusual. He grew up in a toxic sort of like an Erin Brockovich story. He grew up in one of the most toxic cities in New Jersey. They actually told me what it was but I can’t remember what it was now. It’s probably better I don’t tell anyway. So he ended up with cancer and went the traditional route in which then they did chemotherapy, radiation, CAT scans, dyes, meds, and the whole pathway.
So anyway, by the time I got to be with him, it was actually his wife who was my client. But she actually had crashed her own body because she was caretaking him, and that’s sometimes what we see is the caretakers end up going first because they’re so exhausted. But in this case, she asked me to look after him while she used the system to balance her issues out.
So I did the first session with both of them, and I mean when the guy came on the phone, I was just shocked. He spoke a few words and then there’d be this huge pause and then a few more words and a huge pause. So I was moving at about a fifth gear at the time so I slowed it down to first and just connected in the space, time, and place that he was in, and then just kept him going through the session and checking in. By the end of the session, he was talking like he was the old record player when you played it at 33 and it went to a very slurry kind of level. That’s how he was talking. But by the end of that session, he was talking like you and I, normally at a 45-degree speed. So then I had him get out.
Now this man was a lawyer, so you can imagine how much he would value his ability to communicate and his articulation. So he got out of the foot spa and I knew that he had had a shift because of the tone in the voice, the clarity, and the speed. I had never really experienced that so dramatically on an auditory level. We got him out of the system. Because of his mental orientation, I said, “So how are you feeling? Do you feel a little more alert and awake? And he said, “Yes.” I mean, it was like a disc jockey kind of tone and volume that came out of it and it was so awesome. And then what happened was he said, “And something else.” And I said, “What are you experiencing?” And he said, “Everything in the room is brighter.”
So I had him tune into his eyes. I said, “Okay, well let’s look through your eyes and tell me what you’re experiencing.” So he looked outside and he said, “Oh my God, everything has come back into focus again.” So I was just astounded. But you know what, when you think about it in Chinese medicine, of course, it’s the liver and the eyes. But the nervous system and the eyes, the nerves, and the eyes are the most vulnerable to high levels of acidity. Of course, he was loaded with heavy metals. I mean, he had a huge pH shift in his session and his skin exfoliated like crazy, so we knew that he had downloaded a lot of acids. But instantaneously, the body responded to that, and that’s what’s so great.
I mean, here’s a guy that’s in a chronic, debilitated for years kind of situation—able to do a reset. And of course, that’s the immediate thing, but then the clog up comes up. It’s like onion layers. So then you just have to continue to unlayer as the body starts to allow that toxicity to come out. But it’s just so astounding how significantly toxicity affects human physiology and especially the system.
[01:45:14] Ashley James: I love it. Well, these are the kind of experiences I’ve had with the PES. I have a family member who was, back in July, on many medications, using a walker, barely able to walk. Then started using it diligently three times a week, and about a month or a month and a half into using it diligently, he had a physical therapist coming to the house to offer in-home care. He took his blood pressure and said you have to go to your doctor right away. I’m very concerned. Your blood pressure is dangerously low.
They actually went that day to the doctor. I mean, I was so happy that they got such quick care given that with COVID, it’s been difficult at times. The doctor that day took him off of some medications and decreased the dosage of other medications. So he eliminated some medications. It’s been several months, he’s been using it diligently three times a week. He hasn’t changed his diet, he’s stubborn like that, and isn’t taking supplements. There’s only so much you can do, but what I did see is that he’s gone from barely able to walk with a walker to now he no longer uses the walker. There’ll be times when he crawls in and gets in the machine and then 30 minutes later he’s got a bounce in his step. He has color. Oh my gosh, he looked gray and white. He looked like a ghost. We really didn’t think he’d live very long, and now he has color again.
It’s really, really interesting to see the people use it for several months straight diligently how much they’re getting out of it. Now imagine if he then shifted his diet to be even healthier.
[01:47:30] Kellyann Andrews: The domino effect.
[01:47:32] Ashley James: Right. I’m hoping he also would benefit from shifting his thinking into healthier thoughts.
[01:47:44] Kellyann Andrews: But as they start to feel better that’s what’s really awesome. I had a woman who came to us in the beginning, and she had a fatty liver. Her liver enzymes were off the chart. Her blood sugar was so bad they wanted to put her on insulin. But you know what, it was their attitude. I was jokingly saying with my husband, “Boy, you can feel that person’s attitude 20 feet away.” So her attitude was just completely negative that it was like focused on everything in the world was wrong and what everybody else did was wrong.
But in the process of her using it for six months, she went back and got retested and no longer had a fatty liver, liver enzymes normalized, her blood sugars normalized. She lost 60 pounds of weight because she didn’t need the storage closets for the toxicity anymore, but it was the attitude change that was so awesome. She started going to a new sewing group, she became much more involved with their church, she became more social in the community, involved in causes, and now everything in the world was right.
[01:48:51] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love it. I’m a big, big fan of the PES. I’ve had great experiences. In our Facebook group, we have several listeners raving about the results they get with themselves and with their families. I highly recommend getting the system and using it for yourself. Listeners can contact you. So you don’t put much information on the website, you’re very hands-on. Listeners can go to platinumenergysystem.ca and talk to you, give you a call and actually talk to you. The feedback we get—the listeners have given—is that you are so giving of your time and so generous, and you really, really care and really help people. Everyone has had a very positive experience working with you.
If someone’s not sure they want to buy one because they want to try it out, you will help them find a practitioner in their area that has one so they can go and get a session. I know Dr. Klinghardt charges something like $80 a session, whereas if you own it yourself it would be like $12.50 a session. You’re obviously saving money in the long run if you have one yourself. But if you just want to try it out, I would definitely go find a practitioner if you can and get a few sessions and try it out for yourself.
[01:50:21] Kellyann Andrews: Right now that’s kind of interesting. Did you know that California just went into lockdown?
[01:50:27] Ashley James: Yeah.
[01:50:30] Kellyann Andrews: They even have a curfew now. So the ability to go to practitioners right now is limited, but also because of our presence—we’re in Canada. We don’t have a huge population of practitioners in the US.
[01:50:46] Ashley James: Well, I suppose it would just depend on what area they are in. It’s worth asking, right? It is worth asking. If you have the means, get one. You do give a really beautiful discount to listeners, and you’re so giving of your time. I’ve been very impressed with your system and your services. I know it’s helped me a great deal. My liver was inflamed and I’ve shared this before. I was struggling with the ability to detox heavy metals. Listen to my interview with Ben Lynch. He’s a naturopath actually local to me. We have not yet crossed paths in person, but I have interviewed him. His book is called Dirty Genes, it’s a great book. You can also listen to the episode to get really a really good glimpse into the book.
He talks about different things in our daily life that epigenetically shift our gene expressions to shut down our ability to detoxify. One of which, I mean these are simple changes you can make in your life. If you cook with a gas stove, there’s formaldehyde in gas. And if you don’t always have the hood on or the fan to suck it all outright, or if you have your gas oven on and you don’t have the vent on, we are inhaling. We’re increasing the pollution in our house, and considering many people around the world are now stuck at home almost all the time. They’re increasing their air pollution, which it’s known that the internal air pollution of our house can be 10 times more toxic than being downtown, outside.
[01:52:32] Kellyann Andrews: And you’re in it although these days.
[01:52:35] Ashley James: Little things. There are little changes you can make to help your body detoxify, and this is what I was looking for because my liver was really inflamed. I was waking up tasting heavy metals in my mouth. My body was creating a stench of burning rubber. It was very interesting. So I kept struggling and also my because my liver couldn’t handle it, every time I went to those weeks, every time I made a health change like eating even healthier my body would shed more weight, and then my liver would become even more inflamed because it couldn’t handle the toxins that were stored in the fat. Our body stores heavy metals in our fat tissue as a way to get it away from the organs if the liver can’t process it.
So here I had, for years, this difficulty with a hugely inflamed liver. I did not have fatty liver or cirrhosis liver, I’m thankful. My liver was distended, you could actually see it pushing outside under the rib cage. In the ultrasound, she said it was just a very upset angry liver, very inflamed. I was having problems. My liver could not detoxify perhaps because I have MTHFR gene expression that doesn’t allow me to methylate B vitamins. I was really focusing on getting all the nutrients that my body needed at the correct levels. Maybe there’s something inflamed in my diet, but really, it was my body having such a hard time with detoxifying.
My naturopath said, “Why don’t you try finding ways to bypass the liver sweating in a sauna and a foot a foot spa.” There are so many knockoffs out there. There are so many bad saunas out there. There are so many knock-offs of this technology that you sell, and I knew that.
[01:54:39] Kellyann Andrews: I call them the wannabes.
[01:54:41] Ashley James: Right. You could go on eBay and buy something for $200 that claims it’s what you do but it’s not. It’s a knockoff from China.
[01:54:49] Kellyann Andrews: I wouldn’t be putting my feet in that water knowing what I know.
[01:54:53] Ashley James: No, absolutely not. It’s quite scary, and I like how you’ve actually tested the water. Putting the array in the water and testing the water with the machine running with no feet in it. You share that information. You’re not actually creating more toxins by putting your feet in this water, and then you have results where you’ve shown what comes out of people and you have that water sent to a lab and tested.
So I spent a long time looking for the real McCoy, the right sauna that actually gets results at eliminating heavy metals, and also with your technology as well. I speak more about how I found you back in podcast episode 292, which is a great one to go back and check out to learn more about the technology of how this works.
But using your system and using the sauna, I have had such amazing results, and of course, adjusting diet to have more greens and more herbs that help the body get out heavy metals. My liver went back to normal. I no longer taste heavy metals. I no longer have a problem with detoxifying. My liver is happy. Actually, all my lab work—and I’m so proud of it. The last time I got all my lab work, which was about, let’s see. I’m 20 weeks pregnant and I got it when I was about 9 weeks pregnant. Okay, about 11 weeks ago I got all my lab work and it was the best lab work I’ve ever had. Every year, it just keeps getting better and better and better. My liver, enzymes, all of them are finally in normal ranges. I attribute that hugely to working with your system. I adore it.
Any time a friend comes over I give them a treatment and they love it. I’ve had some amazing experiences. I share that in one of the previous episodes where I had a friend who got in it, she was feeling very sick, she had a cold. Afterward, she was up and running and jumping around but also the water smelled heavily of something like Febreze and chlorine. She looked at me and it was shocking how much that water smelled heavily of these substances. She said “15 years ago, I was a maid and I never wore gloves. These are the chemicals that I used,” and they were stuck in her body and they got pulled out.
I was in a pool in February before the shutdown happened. I was swimming in a chlorinated pool, and then it was a few months later. I don’t remember if I took a break from doing the PES, but I remember two months later I jumped in the PES and the water smelled hugely of chlorine, like pool water chlorine. I thought that’s really interesting, and every time I do go in a chlorinated pool, which isn’t often, my PES water—even if it’s weeks or a month later—the stuff that comes out of me actually pulls the chlorine. Because I live on a well so I never have exposure to chlorine, and it pulls the chemicals from the pool out of my body. You can smell it in the water. I also feel like a million bucks. I feel lighter. I have energy, I have mental clarity, I feel amazing.
[01:58:20] Kellyann Andrews: Your body’s brilliant at detoxing. It knows how. You just had to get the exit roots open. I mean, we see that when we eat things like asparagus. The next time you go to pee you smell asparagus.
[01:58:38] Ashley James: Because the body is eliminating the sulfur.
[01:58:42] Kellyann Andrews: Right but also asparagus is great for the kidneys because it helps to detoxify the kidneys.
[01:58:50] Ashley James: Sulfur-containing foods—I mean, for some people it’s not healthy, but for most, it’s quite required by the nervous system. But also, it’s required in repairing cartilage. Cartilage requires sulfur. I thought that was really interesting.
[01:59:11] Kellyann Andrews: Well, you think of the sulfur drugs in terms of antibiotic, but that’s where garlic was a classic antifungal, antiviral, anti-everything. Get all the bad guys out.
[01:59:22] Ashley James: Eat your garlic.
[01:59:25] Kellyann Andrews: Just the bad guys out, but I always used to joke. It keeps the bad guys away, but it keeps the people who have the bad guys away too.
[01:59:35] Ashley James: Yeah, because you’re smelling wonderfully of garlic. That’s true.
[01:59:39] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah, exactly. But you look at those cultures that have longevity built into them. They’re eating those kinds of foods. When you have a clean aquarium and you feed the fish the right food, is it really surprising that they’re thriving?
[02:00:00] Ashley James: I love that you do continue to bring up the analogy of having a clean aquarium because a clean aquarium invites the good bacteria in. For anyone who’s successfully had fish, I used to breed African Malawi cichlids that require making sure you have a very healthy tank. I used to actually have over 10 running fish tanks in my house. It was how I got out of my depression after my mom died. My boyfriend at the time just noticed that the only thing that brought a smile to my face was watching live fish, and so he encouraged me. I learned all about how to foster healthy fish tanks.
The first month or so with a fish tank is really messy because you don’t have an established microbiome. It’s kind of like taking antibiotics and all of a sudden all your good bacteria are dead. Now, whatever you eat, you’re either going to create crazy bad cultures in your gut or you’re going to create good cultures—same with the fish tank. So there are many similarities between managing a fish tank towards better balance and better health because that always invites the good bacteria, which sustains the entire environment. Thus also relating back to our own body, that the cleaner our body is the better the environment is for everything else to live in harmony.
[02:01:32] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. The mucky aquarium is the analogy that—of course, as you pointed out—the human body, and the fish are the cells. But in the murky aquarium—the one that’s green, slimy, and yucky—is an environment that’s high acidity, low oxygen; but the clean aquarium is high oxygen, low acidity, slight alkalinity, and high minerals. That’s why the fish thrive.
[02:02:03] Ashley James: It has been such a pleasure having you here today. You’ve shared so much. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[02:02:11] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah, a couple of things. How to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. Again, just retrain the brain. So the number one thing in that moment of stress—whatever it is that’s triggering you to have a derailment—catch yourself on a breathing level and do that diaphragm breathing. So on inhale, the diaphragm goes down; on exhale the diaphragm comes up. And then if you can train yourself to be a nose breather it’s just better because you could create a higher level of nitric oxide, which helps to vasodilate your whole circulatory system.
The other thing is because of this time and the weirdness—I mean, we’ve never ever experienced anything like this on the planet where it is such a pivotal point in history that I so want to help you all in terms of being able to find balance. So here’s on the emotional level—Bach Flowers. Bach himself was a bacteriologist in England, and he was a Harley Street doctor, so really highly regarded. But anyway, he would get into emotional states, he’d go out in nature, and he’d be drawn to what made him feel good again. What was the balancing factor in nature? So he created (I think) 32 or so remedies.
But in terms of Bach Flower, when COVID first happened, my first response to COVID was to go to the health food store and get two bottles of Mimulus. How I remember that is when you’re on the computer and you hit the minus screen, so this is to minus fear. Mimulus is to minus fear. Willow the trouble with what we’re experiencing is it’s so, so easy to go into victim mode around all of these regulations and restrictions. So to stay out of victim mode because you want to stay in the driver’s seat, not be in the backseat of the trunk, you want that feeling that you’re the one who’s making the choices. So willow is great for that. Cerato is the one that increases your intuition, and that will cause you to stay in the forebrain.
And then because of all of these things that are occurring and all of the changes, walnut is really great for any kind of change and especially when there’s a resistance to change.
[02:05:05] Ashley James: Is that just eating walnuts, or is this something else?
[02:05:08] Kellyann Andrews: No, this is the Bach Flower walnut.
[02:05:10] Ashley James: Back Flower walnut, got it.
[02:05:14] Kellyann Andrews: These are all the remedies from Bach. So Bach Flower Remedies. The other thing that’s really important is to feed your nervous system. So in the cell salt line, Hyland’s is the brand that’s in the US, #6—there’s 12 in the line—is kali phos. Now, what’s really interesting about that, Ashley, is that it’s potassium. Kali is potassium. So a lot of us get a lot of sodium but we don’t get the balance of the potassium. So this is potassium phosphate and it physically feeds the nervous system and calms it down.
When I went on the doctor’s call with that company, they’re doing a webinar, and they had a person on there who’s whose client was a naturopath. He was telling the story and he said mainly the naturopath had women as his patients. But he gave all of his patients that one cell salt, #6 kali phos, and 80% of their symptoms disappeared on that one cell salt. That’s because we’re nervous system beings, and this literally feeds the nerves.
Now on the other level, B1 thiamine, anybody who has MS is completely deficient in thiamine because thiamine is involved in creating the myelin sheath. I mean, everybody does research on thiamine. You would be amazed at how significant thiamine is. But it’s number one for feeding the mitochondria.
Well, when you think of the mitochondria or your power cells in every cell of the body, they’re what create the ATP or energy—the glucose kind of thing—for the body to power up to do its signaling, to do its communications, to do its function, to do its enzymes, to do absolutely everything. With Ashley, the focus is always to feed the body.
So I always jokingly say when you go up in the mountains it says don’t feed the bears. So I say don’t feed the bugs. So instead, when you’re stressed, do not underline four times reach for what is classically called comfort foods because the last thing they will do is create comfort in your body. But instead, have a cupboard—and this is what I do. I have a cupboard that I open and then I create green drinks. So I’ve got about four different green powders and I’ve got turmeric in there, barley grass, then I took a bunch of chlorella, then protein sources, and all these things.
So anyway, in the moment of stress, take what would be normally an addiction to junk food and change that—train the brain to change the crave to power nutrients and feed that to your cells and watch what happens. And then the other thing was just a reminder about tapping your brain in the front. Either tap or press on it, focus on the eyes and look at colors and textures. That will bring you to your forebrain.
Now the things that will help to stimulate the vagus nerve, the interesting thing, Ashley, is the combination of essential oils clove and lime. What you do is you put it on the mastoid bone—the back of the ear has that rounded part. You put it right on there with some oil. Never put your essential oils on straight. You always want to put a carrier oil in there. So put that right on the mastoid bone and it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system.
But here are the other things that also do—the deep breathing, which we mentioned diaphragmatic breathing; yoga; and interestingly enough, gagging. So that’s quite interesting. Gagging actually stimulates it, but when you think of where it is right up in that jawline a little bit north, I mean, it’s right in that whole area. So gargling, your whole oil pulling process will stimulate it.
Freezing cold water will do it too. I mean, what have we all been told is to have a shower and end it with cold water, but I can tell you that probably 90% of this population is not doing that. I’ve just started to stimulate it myself at the end of a bath. I will pour cold water over my head and then part of it will go down my body. It is a shock to the system, but again you’re stimulating that zone of the body. And then things like singing, humming, chanting, laughter, and smiling.
The key to all that we’ve said today is really your body is so absolutely brilliant at healing, but it needs your help to do so by the choices you make daily. And as a matter of fact at the moment. So the first step in any healing journey is to create a clean healing environment. Amen.
[02:11:22] Ashley James: Amen.
[02:11:24] Kellyann Andrews: It’s awesome to be with you. I always love being with you. We could talk for days. But gratitude is so important. Just tell the people you love that you love them. Leave them cards. Let the world around know that you love them, acknowledge their good behavior. Just minimize their bad behavior, but acknowledge their good behavior. There’s a movie years ago and I wished I had remembered. I saw it when I was a teenager. It was about this woman who got married and her mother, as a wedding gift, gave her this book and it was a dog training book to train the husband including rubbing behind his ears, how fun is that.
I often think about that movie and it’s a question of training ourselves to the good behaviors, but to acknowledge the people around you. What the world needs now is love, sweet love. The more that you can focus on being a sunshine presence of love, not only does that hugely bless your own physiology, your emotional being, your mental being, but you radiate that out into the environment.
When you see all these people out in the stores, and of course, now the stores that are a whole other topic on toxicity what’s on the floors and making you do hand sanitizers. The thing is that when those people sergeant major you—use the hand sanitizer, I just smile at them and I say I’m sorry I can’t do that because I’m very chemically sensitive. But I just smile at them. I mean, it’d be really easy just to give them back their own energy level. But you got to switch it. You just got to change it around so that you’re giving out beautiful energy. Because if there’s ever a time on the planet that everybody needs love, and Jerry Jampolsky said that in his book, Love is Letting Go of Fear. If people aren’t coming from love, it’s because they’re needing love.
[02:13:48] Ashley James: And their vagus nerve is toxic.
[02:13:52] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah, their vagus nerve is toxic and it’s in dormant mode.
[02:13:58] Ashley James: They’re stuck in stress gear.
[02:14:01] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. So when you smile at people, all those people that are so frightened because you’re within 12 feet of them, you just smile at them and send them this loving energy and watch what happens to their face. They just completely light up too because they don’t want to be in a state of fear. None of us do.
[02:14:24] Ashley James: And even if you’re wearing a mask I’ve noticed—and I thought this was really interesting that you can tell someone’s smiling by looking at their eyes. You can even see the shift in their face.
[02:14:35] Kellyann Andrews: Yes, it’s their energy level.
[02:14:38] Ashley James: Just because they can’t see you smile, you could actually hear someone smile. That’s what I learned. A long, long time ago, I was a sales manager for an international training company that did personal growth and development work, and I learned that people can hear you smile. Actually, listeners have given me feedback. They’re like I know you’re smiling. Just because someone can’t see you smile, maybe someone’s blind, they can feel it. They can feel the intention, the energy, they can hear it.
[02:15:11] Kellyann Andrews: It’s a frequency thing.
[02:15:12] Ashley James: Right. If they’re not looking at your mouth, they can see it in your physiology. When we’re actually authentically smiling, our whole physiology has micro muscle movements that change. There’s a really great woman on YouTube. I’m forgetting her name right now. It’s really great. She takes all these different political speeches and she gives you the insights as to their physiology—whether they’re lying, whether they’re apprehensive, whether there’s something else going on.
[02:15:46] Kellyann Andrews: Lie detector.
[02:15:47] Ashley James: Yeah, she’s a lie detector, but she’s actually a body language reader. There was one person that was doing a fake smile and she paused and she says, “See, they’re moving their mouth but nothing else is moving. They’re not actually smiling. You will know someone’s smiling when their eyes move, when their ears move, when they’re actually engaging all these muscles in their head.”
[02:16:13] Kellyann Andrews: Unless they’ve had Botox.
[02:16:17] Ashley James: Yes, that’s another thing But when someone’s authentically smiling, they’re smiling with their energy, they’re smiling with their voice, they’re smiling with everything.
[02:16:27] Kellyann Andrews: They’re smiling with their soul.
[02:16:29] Ashley James: Right. So use the energy of a smile as your shield, as you’re exuding love and acceptance. I think a lot of people need that right now.
[02:16:43] Kellyann Andrews: Yeah. We all stood in line to be here at this time, which is very, very interesting in terms of the pivotalness of this historical moment. I mean, the whole thing is that you came here to be an evolving—well, the only way that I can say it is an evolving sun presence because the more you can be sunny on the inside, you radiate that out. I mean, the challenges of moment-to-moment life are going to absolutely challenge that. I had a couple of derailments happen yesterday and I just caught myself laughing and just saying, okay, is this a moment of resistance or resilience? So we have to train the brain to resilience.
[02:17:40] Ashley James: Because when there’s resistance, things break. When you see something that’s resisting in nature, it breaks. Right now, we have lots of wind storms in my area. The branches that are not flexible break.
[02:17:57] Kellyann Andrews: The difference between an oak and a willow.
[02:17:59] Ashley James: Right. We need to have more resilience to bounce back, to be flexible, to flex. I interviewed a woman recently on reversing osteopenia and osteoporosis and preventing bone degeneration. She said it’s not about how much bone density we have. This is the misnomer. You can have bone density, but your bones can be fragile because they don’t have flexibility. She says the Japanese have one of the lowest rates in the world of hip fractures, and these people live a long time and they’re quite active. It’s because their diet has given them flexible bones.
[02:18:45] Kellyann Andrews: And they’re physically active.
[02:18:47] Ashley James: They are. Their bones are strong but they’re not so minerally dense that they’re fragile, that they have resistance, that they break under pressure. They flex under pressure.
[02:19:01] Kellyann Andrews: That’s why rebounds are so great because you’re actually creating three different forces on your bones all at the same time, but it creates that flexibility. The flexibility of the muscles in the bones is the same with the emotions and thoughts. So in the moment of stress, you’ll notice that you want to have a total no response, that you’re totally going resistant. But at that moment, if you can absolutely accept whatever is happening, then you can shift gears and move through it. But if you get stuck in resistance, you’re not going anywhere. It’s just going to antagonize your thoughts, your emotions, and your physiology.
[02:19:48] Ashley James: A lesson I learned from Tony Robbins—and I really, really love it. He says when something is happening that you’re resisting, that you disagree with, that you don’t like. Something is happening in your life and you don’t have control because it’s something that’s happening regardless. You ask yourself what’s good about this, not in a joking manner, in a really serious what is good about this? He gave the example of a client who is a lawyer and his partner was retiring, selling, or something was happening. I think he was also going through a divorce, but there’s so much wrong in his life. He’s losing his company, he was trying to make a partnership, he was losing his marriage, and he couldn’t see any positive way out of it. Tony kept saying the same thing over and over again, “What is good about this? What’s good about this situation? Honestly, genuinely, what is good about this?”
[02:20:53] Kellyann Andrews: What’s the silver lining?
[02:20:55] Ashley James: Right, but what good could come of this? What good could you make come of this? What is good here? And at first, he couldn’t think of anything, which is often the response. Then he started to see things. He goes, “Well, my son is graduating and I’ve always wanted to work with him.” I think he was also graduating as a lawyer, and there was no room in that other company for him and his son to work together. He, by the end of the session, had realized that now he has the opportunity to start a new company with his son. And then he’s like, “Well, now I’m not attached to this building I’ve been driving to, and I hate the location.” It was somewhere in LA. “I’ve always wanted to live on the beach and work on the beach.” Now that all these things have changed in his life, now he gets to actually do what he’s wanted to do but couldn’t because of other restrictions.
So by the end of the session, he had decided he was going to move to Venice beach, work and live there so there’s almost no commute, and spend a lot of his time with his son and build this new business. All of this was just so exciting to him, but at the beginning of the session, he couldn’t even see past all the bad. Yes, there are bad things. Bad things will always happen. And if we resist and push and resist and push, we’re constantly triggering the stress response. And if we look for what’s good about this, in this bad situation, what good can I make of this genuinely? We may find all these wonderful opportunities for healing, for growth that we never saw before because we could not let ourselves see that because we were too focused on pushing back and resisting what we didn’t want to change.
[02:22:45] Kellyann Andrews: It’s a classic of the hindbrain, forebrain response. So when you come to the forebrain, then you can see the options. But if you’re stuck in the back brain and animalistic fight or flight, you just feel trapped.
[02:23:00] Ashley James: Yeah. So do that deep breathing, do everything that Kellyann said to do today. Go to her website, platinumenergysystems.ca, give her a call. Check out the Platinum Energy System, I love it. Get those Bach Flower remedies and the essential oils that she talked about. Deep breathing is so important. Then catch yourself and turn your thinking into healing thoughts that don’t trigger the panic response in the body.
[02:23:28] Kellyann Andrews: Exactly. Love your body to health.
[02:23:32] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been such a pleasure to have you back on.
[02:23:37] Kellyann Andrews: Well, wonderful to be here and to visit with you. All right, God bless everybody because this is quite a time that we’re in. But the awesome thing is that you have full capability of turning this around in all of your lives, in all the ways to being—as Ashley just said—where’s the good in this?
Get Connected With Kellyann Andrews!Official Website
Recommended Readings by Kellyann AndrewsBiology of Belief by Bruce Lipton
Quantum-Touch by Richard Gordon
The New Human by Richard Gordon
Power of Now+Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle
A Return To Love by Marianne Williamson
Check out other interviews of Kellyann Andrews!Episode 330 – Holistic Habits And Success Stories (Part 2)
Episode 329 – Stories of Success Through Detox
Episode 293 – Balancing pH
Episode 292 – Creating Wellness
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Check out the Healthiest Non-Toxic Mattress Webinar: LearnTrueHealth.com/bed
Check us out on Lbry
https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-Health:f
Andy's website:
https://www.thegreendesigncenter.com/consultation-services
Achieving a Non-Toxic Home and Work Environmenthttps://www.learntruehealth.com/achieving-a-non-toxic-home-and-work-environment
Highlights:
Why measuring indoor air quality a false premise for certifying something as a green building What is a VOC What is greenwashing Things that off-gas in the home Actionable steps that you can take to have a cleaner/healthier homeMost of us think that since we’re mostly at home nowadays, we’re already safe from harmful chemicals, but that could be far from true. Just because we don’t see or smell the chemicals doesn’t mean that it’s not harming us. In this episode, Andy Pace shares the things that we have in our homes that are toxic and off-gas. He also gives us some actionable steps that we can do to have a healthier home.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Welcome to 2021. I hope you guys had an amazing December and got some time to rest and relax as I did.
I’m now officially in my third trimester of being pregnant with our second child. If this is news to you, I’ve mentioned it a little bit on the show. I used to be completely infertile. I was diagnosed infertile, actually, by an endocrinologist who told me I’d never conceived children naturally. I had severe polycystic ovarian syndrome. I had a bunch of other health conditions as well including type 2 diabetes, chronic infections, and chronic adrenal fatigue, and I used natural medicine and holistic medicine in the last 12 years to regain all of my health.
I no longer have any of those issues, and we conceived our first son totally naturally and on time and intended. We decided to go for it. The timing just felt really right for us, and we conceived again on our first try. We’re having a girl this time, we’re so excited. I’m now 27 weeks, going into 28 weeks pregnant. What’s amazing is this pregnancy has been so much easier compared to the last one, and that’s something that I want to explore in further episodes because I spent six years focusing on going from really poor health to getting myself to the point where I was fertile again and healthy. That was for our first son, and that pregnancy was still very, very difficult for me.
A lot of issues came up, and I addressed them with my Naturopathic physician and my midwives. We were able to have a healthy birth, but it was still very, very stressful, and difficult on my body. And so after we had our son, I spent the last five years—and of course doing the podcast as well—learning so much from all these amazing guests we’ve had on. I spent the last five years really focusing on getting to even the next level of health.
So if you’ve been a long time listener or you’re a new listener, go back and listen to those episodes because, in the last 453 interviews, I’ve really taken to heart so much of this information that we’ve absorbed from all these great guests, all the courses I’ve taken online, and of course, my continuing mentorship with several really old-school holistic doctors and Naturopathic doctors that I’ve been mentored by over 10 years now.
What happened in the last five years is I focused on really getting specific with what diet is the most healing and restorative for my body? What can I do to detox heavy metals, remove parasites, support my liver and other organs? I shed a lot of even further inflammation and weight, and I saw my blood levels be the healthiest they’ve ever been.
What’s really, really cool is I just had that freedom. The freedom I’m experiencing in my body is something I haven’t had since I was a child, and that is so exciting. I keep telling my husband when the baby kicks, I actually forget I’m pregnant, even though I’ve got this really big round belly in front of me. There’s definitely an obvious baby belly, but I forget through the day that I’m pregnant. So when she kicks, I’m like oh yeah, oh my gosh, I’m pregnant. And that’s so funny because, with the first pregnancy, I was so sick the entire time. I never forgot I was pregnant. And now I walk around, I just feel normal until the baby kicks.
That to me is a great example of what you can achieve with holistic medicine, what you can achieve with health. That there are these levels of health. And when you think you’re like I’ve spent the last six years, two years, one year, six months, or how long you’ve spent investing in your health. You might plateau and you’re like okay, this is good. I’m good. And then you learn something else and you decide to take it to the next level. Maybe do a cleanse, a detox, a fast. Maybe change up your exercise routine or your sleep habits. Whatever you do to take it to the next level, just look back after a few years of doing that and go wow, everything that I’m going through now is so much easier than it used to be. And that is such a cool, cool feeling.
I never would have thought that I would have achieved this much in my health 10 years ago, let alone 5 years ago. I’m so excited to be on this journey with you. Wherever you are in your health journey, whether you’re a total health nut like me, and you’re in really, really great shape, or like most listeners, they have some health complaints, they have some things. We have some listeners that are newer to the holistic space, and they’re really sick of suffering. They’re just really sick of medications that are not really helping them to get there, to get to their health goals, and they’re just ready. They’re ready to make some amazing changes.
In this podcast, my goal is to get you that information, to help you to achieve not only your health because physical health is just one aspect of your life. But when you have physical health, how much more ease you have to love yourself, to love your family, to be connected to your friends, to be connected to your creator, to be connected in nature, and have that energy moving through you and just experience the world. Your body is your vessel, and your experience of the world is greatly affected by the health of your vessel.
By giving your body everything it needs, all the nutrition it needs to achieve optimal health, you’re giving your entire life and all those you love a better experience, an increase in joy, vitality, and a sense of purpose. So continue on this path no matter where you are. Let’s make 2021 be just such an amazing transformative year. You get to say if this is your year of transformation, and I’m going to bring you episodes that are going to help you to continue to transform your life, to make it into the one that you want. The one that you see in your future as the one you want.
My goal was to have an easier and healthier pregnancy this time around, and I didn’t even know that it could be this good. I’m letting you know it’s so exciting the things that you can achieve.
Now today’s guest, I am absolutely ecstatic for you to learn from because this is an area we have touched on a little bit on the show. I mean, over 450 episodes, there’s a lot to cover. But the idea that everything in our surroundings—our carpeting, our mattress, the paint on the walls, all of this goes into our health. And our guest today is an incredibly experienced man when it comes to non-toxic environments. He has been in the building industry and focusing on materials used in homes, even in cars, and offices that are non-toxic for the human body long before we ever heard the word green, green technology, or green building. All that kind of came out in the ‘90s. He’s been doing this long before that, and he tells this story and it’s just absolutely fascinating. He has a lot of great actionable information.
And so if you’re thinking this year you’re going to renovate your bathroom, repaint some part of your house, or get new flooring, what’s really cool is you can contact him. We talk a little bit about this in the interview. You can contact him, and he’ll do really quick 15-minute consultations, and he’ll point you in the right direction so that it can fit in your budget and be non-toxic. He has so many great resources. It doesn’t have to be expensive to create a healthier environment for yourself. So just strap in, enjoy this episode. There’s so much to learn.
Now I want to let you know about a webinar that I was part of creating with Jason Payne, who is the founder of my favorite mattress of all times. I really took mattresses for granted. I was just sleeping on whatever, and then we went and bought what I thought was a really expensive mattress at a box chain store a few years ago, and it was the highest end one that was within our budget. I thought man, this is going to last us 10 years. It didn’t even last us three years until it was so warped that my husband and I were in so much pain and just so stiff every morning. I was really upset about that, and I looked and I looked and I looked.
I talked to a lot of other holistic people in this space, and the more I dug, the more I realized that most mattresses out there, first of all, are designed to only last a few years, are off-gassing really bad stuff for our health. They’re designed in a way that doesn’t allow us to have deep restorative sleep. So I finally found a mattress that I absolutely love. I did a ton of digging, and I cannot tell you what a life-changing experience this has been. I had the creator of this mattress on the show a while back, and then we decided to make this webinar so you can see and learn more.
What I want you to do is go to learnturehealth.com/bed. That’s learntruehealth.com/bed. Sign up for the free webinar. It’s going to teach you a bit about mattresses in general, non-toxic mattresses, what’s the difference between that and regular stuff out there, probably between that and what you’re sleeping on now. And in this specific mattress, how the technology works to make it so that you don’t have pressure points so that you stay in deep restorative sleep longer. You come out no longer in pain, no longer stiff. Some people have actually gotten off of pain meds because of this bed. It’s pretty amazing.
Check it out, learnturehealth.com/bed. Why this webinar is relevant to the topic of today’s episode is because this is just another thing in your house that you want to replace. When you’re ready to replace your bed, you want to replace it with this one because it is non-toxic, and it also will last over 25 years. That will save you a ton of money. If you think about it, if you have to buy a mattress every five years because they get warped or have to go to the chiropractor, you’re in pain, and so you’re compensating for that pain because you have a wonky mattress that’s off-gassing some chemicals. That doesn’t save us money and save us our health. This is why I love this mattress, and I can’t say enough good things about it. Go to learntruehealth.com/bed and check out that webinar.
Come join us in the Facebook group if you’re on Facebook. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook, we’d love to see you there. It’s such a supportive and wonderful community, and you can always reach out to me there in the community if you have questions. And of course, you can always email me, [email protected]. Thank you so much for being a listener, and thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. If you have any friends or family that are looking to renovate this year or looking to change anything in their home or office, you definitely want to share this episode with them. It’s going to make a big difference. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day, and remember, go to learntruehealth.com/bed and check out that webinar.
[00:12:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 453. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Andy Pace, the founder of thegreendesigncenter.com.
Now, how I found Andy, it’s been quite interesting. If you’ve been a long-time listener, you’ve heard me interview the Sternagels. I had Teddy Sternagel and her husband, Ryan Sternagel, on the show. They have a child who had cancer and had been through treatments twice. His cancer came back. Thank God, praise God, I am so thrilled to share that their child is cancer-free. They did a lot of holistic medicine.
Through that, they really became aware of how toxins in our home, how things that we take for granted, that things that are completely “safe”, that are sold in stores are actually contributing to the amount of toxic load in our body, and thus contributing to cancer and other diseases. They became so acutely aware of this that they moved from Washington state. They bought a beautiful plot of land in Utah, and they built their home. Every single square inch of this house is non-toxic or the most absolute healthiest choice possible of material.
I asked Ryan, how did you do this? You became an expert on everything non-toxic. He goes, “No, you have to talk to Andy. Andy’s the guy.” So I said, “Andy, please come on the show and share with us…” Obviously, for those who want to build our dream non-toxic home, we’d want to talk to Andy. But for those who live in a house or even a rented house or rented apartment, there are so many choices we can make to make better choices for our home environment to decrease the amount of toxic load in our bodies and also for our pets.
I’m sure we can discuss this, but some people will spend thousands of dollars on their pets and not take care of themselves. So I got to tell you that the cancer rates for our pets have gone up, and pets live in our homes 24/7. They don’t get to leave much unless we take them out. They’re seeing now that it’s the toxicity of the off-gassing and everything inside the house that contributes to increases in pet cancer. And of course, if we’re seeing that in animals, we’re seeing that in humans.
So, Andy, I’m so excited to have you on the show today. You’re going to really open our eyes and share with us all the things that we can do to clean up our environment so that we’re living a non-toxic or the least toxic possible lifestyle. Welcome to the show.
[00:15:13] Andy Pace: Thank you so much, Ashley. It really is my pleasure to be with you and your audience today. It’s always exciting for me to talk to a new group of listeners out there in the world, and to hopefully open up some eyes to what’s really happening and how to make our living environments much, much healthier.
[00:15:37] Ashley James: Absolutely. We’re going to get into it. You have so much to share with us today. Now you do podcasts. Do you have your own podcast?
[00:15:46] Andy Pace: I do. It’s called Non-Toxic Environments.
[00:15:49] Ashley James: Awesome. And I’m sure my listeners will want to check that out. Of course, the links to everything that Andy Pace does is going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. I’m really curious to find out though, what happened in your life that made you want to become an expert in non-toxic environments and non-toxic homes? Did you just wake up as a seven-year-old and you said I really want to become an expert in flooring, paints, and home design for green living? What happened in your life?
[00:16:16] Andy Pace: Well, quite a coincidence there, I actually kind of did as a child want to get into the business of selling building materials, and here’s why. My family has owned a commercial construction material supply company that dates back to the 1930s, and we’ve been here in Wisconsin ever since. When I was in high school, actually before that, as a small child I remember sitting around the dinner table. Unlike most homes, when you’re having dinner conversation, we weren’t talking about sports or school. I was listening to my mom and dad talk about these architects, these contractors, and projects. At a very young age, I just got really interested in the entire building process.
During high school and during college, I actually was helping the family company program computers. This is the late ‘70s, early ‘80s when computers really first started coming around, and I was setting up a computer system for our family business and again got to learn more. But when I got to college, for me, it was just a no-brainer that I was going to enter the family business of selling commercial construction materials.
For the first two years of my career, I was involved in working with some of the largest commercial architectural firms in the country and assisting them in specifying and detailing the proper products for certain types of applications. My specialty at that time was industrial coatings. We carried a couple of lines of these industrial coating materials—very specialty. They were used in very intricate applications of airplane hangars or humane society projects.
This particular one that really got me going on the health kick was a project that was a below-grade parking structure. So essentially, it was three underground floors of parking underneath a 20-story condominium complex. The architectural firm and engineering firms that were hired to do this project brought me in to make sure we supplied the right materials to cover the concrete to withstand all the oils and greases of cars.
Well, after our crew installed the primer coat onto the concrete—essentially, they prepared the concrete, cleaned it all up, put the primer on, and you have to remember that all of the products that we’re supplying were water-based because we knew this is an underground parking garage. There are people living and working in the condominiums and offices above. We can’t use anything that has a lot of solvent to it. We made sure to use water-based products.
Well, after the primer coat was applied, we started getting phone calls from people living and working in the condominiums above the parking garage. We couldn’t really understand why because we were using a water-based product. We made sure to put up plastic barriers so that the fumes wouldn’t carry throughout the building—obviously, that didn’t work. After we received a phone call from a United States senator’s office who happened to be in this building—I remember this vividly—about 20 minutes after that phone call and we were all standing around talking about how we’re going to proceed with this project, three of our workers collapsed.
[00:20:34] Ashley James: You’re all standing around?
[00:20:35] Andy Pace: Yes. Three of our workers collapsed. They couldn’t breathe. There were inhalation complications due to the coating that we were using, and we could not understand why. It’s a water-based product. Well, I learned the hard way—at the age of 22 years old—that a water-based coating doesn’t mean solvent-free, it doesn’t mean toxin-free. It means that 50% of the liquid component in the product is water. The other 50% can be whatever the manufacturer chooses to make their product apply better, cure faster, so on and so forth.
When this product was curing, it was an epoxy material. It actually sucked the oxygen out of the room. So we had three workers rushed to the hospital due to these inhalation complications, and they ended up being fine. But the important thing was it taught us a very vivid lesson. Just because something is water-based doesn’t mean it’s safe, and just because a manufacturer or somebody says oh don’t worry it’s fine, to not take that seriously.
[00:22:02] Ashley James: Just because it’s sold in stores. That’s something we really, really need to wrap our brains around. I’m from Canada, I live in the states. I love living here. This is my home, and Canada is also my home. But in both countries, I think we walk around feeling a little bit bulletproof. We’re privileged in that we don’t live in squalor and poverty. Obviously, I wish everyone in the world was taken care of, and that’s the utopia I wish we could create for us. But the truth is that we are so privileged. Just to be in Canada, in the United States—some of the richest economies in the world—we are definitely more privileged than other countries. So I think we walk around feeling a bit bulletproof.
People assume we don’t have any parasites. People assume that’s something that happens with one of those countries but not this country. And then when we look that the European Union has banned thousands upon thousands of chemicals that are in food, that are in building supplies, that are different medications, and they’re not banned here. You got to scratch your head. Why are there chemicals banned in other countries but are readily being used and are on the shelves here?
We have to really get that it is buyer beware when it comes to food, when it comes to anything you use in your home, when it comes to cosmetics. There are over 80,000 man-made chemicals that have been invented in the last 10 or 20 years. Our bodies don’t know what to do with these chemicals. The liver doesn’t know how to process it. And we’re seeing all kinds of health problems continue to rise. So that was your first big wake up, and that’s interesting because your family had been in the business for so many generations. But these chemicals weren’t around in the 1930s like they are now. There were different chemicals, but now there are some really scary chemicals available, especially when it comes to building homes.
What did you do in your business? You’re 22 years old, you’re getting a wake-up call around these solvents. How did you change your business? Did you go back to school? What happened next?
[00:24:38] Andy Pace: What I did was I just started researching, and this is before the internet. I couldn’t just jump on Google and start looking at article after article of these stories about chemicals and so forth. I actually had to do it the old-fashioned way and go to the library. I had to talk to people in the medical field. It’s interesting. What really did it for me was on this project, we still had a contract with the owners of this building to supply a coating and so we had to finish the job. But we realized we couldn’t finish it with the products that we started with.
I did a lot of research, talked to a lot of people, a lot of friends in the industry, and finally, the manufacturer that made the coating for us said, I think I know somebody who might be able to help you with this job. He put me in touch with a very, very small company out of—at the time—Riverside, California. A company called American Formulating and Manufacturing. I never heard of them. This company started in 1980-81, and they manufactured paints and coatings.
So I started a conversation with them, and it turns out that AFM was a company that was founded by a man who himself developed cancer being in the paints and coatings industry as a formulator in a lab tech. He made it his life-ending mission—literally, his life-ending mission because he died of cancer—to formulate recipes for paints, coatings, and specialty products that are completely free of the health hazards and toxins that got us into the problem in the first place.
I was introduced to the company, and I spent probably a good two years just trying to figure out what am I going to do with this information? Again, I came from the commercial construction industry. I’m used to working with architects, engineers, and contractors. But when I first started researching the materials from AFM, I thought to myself, I’ve got to go to somebody who I know in the field that can maybe give me some feedback. It just so happens that a good friend of mine was the head of buildings and maintenance for the largest medical complex in Wisconsin.
I reached out to my friend Jim and I said, “Jim, I’ve got this new paint product. The manufacturer claims that it is good for people who are subject to sick building syndrome, environmental illnesses, and something called multiple chemical sensitivity.” I said, “I’ll give you the product. Just use it in one room of the hospital so we can get some feedback so we know what’s going on with this.”
Well, he did that for me, and I was there when the painting crew was applying it to one of the rooms. It was amazing. I was watching this crew applying AFM safe coat paint on this hospital room. I couldn’t smell a thing. It looked absolutely gorgeous, and the crew gets done. They’re talking to Jim, the head of maintenance and buildings and so forth. I’m thinking to myself, this is wonderful. They must use thousands of gallons of paint a year. I would love to be able to work with a medical facility like this.
Jim comes back to me and says, “Yeah, they’re not going to use it.” “What? What’s wrong with it? He said, “They didn’t like the way it applied it. It was thinner, thicker, or something than what they’re used to.” Gave me all of these really ridiculous excuses why they didn’t want to use the paint. After doing this though, I remember getting one doctor and one nurse—separate times—who came up to me and came up to us during this and said, “This is amazing. Where can I buy this for my house?” I thought, well, it’s not available. It’s only available commercially for hospitals, schools, and so forth.
This nurse said specifically, “I have to make sure that whenever they’re painting in my department, that it’s got to be on my time off because I literally get headaches instantly when they start to paint. It could be 15 rooms down. I’m getting a headache.”
That’s when I really started looking at the whole chemical sensitivity thing. But it also dawned on me at that time, well maybe I should just start selling this to people who are asking for it, not try to sell it to companies who are just caring about the bottom line. Really, that’s what happened with the hospital is that I found out later on.
The next day, Jim calls me and he says, “I’ll tell you what. The reason why they don’t want to use your paint is because when the painting contractors have a contract for the hospital, they buy paint at this really low price in bulk. But they can also use it for all their side jobs. So they would lose that profit margin for all their side jobs. And they will refuse to use anything that takes away that profit margin.”
I learned, at that point, that hospitals are not necessarily always looking out for our best health. So, it really opened my eyes to the industry. From that point on, the conversations I had, we launched a catalog company—because again, there were no internet websites at the time—selling what we called Common Sense Healthier Building Materials. This was 1992 when we did this, 1996 I believe is when the United States Green Building Council was formed. And the late ‘90s, early 2000s is when the LEED program started, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The entire green building movement started in the late ‘90s really, and that’s when that term became so popular—the term green building.
What happened was those years of studying chemical sensitivity, chemistry, how it affects the human body and so forth—as soon as green building became the norm and became so popular, the entire health aspect was completely forgotten about by the industry. They just focused on energy efficiency and global environmental concerns, which are of course both important, but had nothing to do with human health.
[00:32:45] Ashley James: That is absolutely fascinating. I have a friend, she got a degree in green buildings. She’s one of the very few females in the industry in Seattle who manages these high-rise buildings. She’s right there at the top. She manages all the general contractors. She works with the architects and manages these two- to four-year projects where they build these huge mega buildings. She was passionate about, not only energy saving but non-toxic.
When we started this interview, I was thinking to myself, what kind of degrees did he get in this? But you were in it before there was even a class you could take.
[00:33:46] Andy Pace: Correct. There wasn’t anything. That’s the thing is that people who are actually getting degrees in sustainable building, sustainable management, or are becoming certified by the U.S. Green Building Council and the LEED program, nothing against what they’re doing. It’s fabulous what they’re doing, but you have to look back to the entire premise of green building and what is used as a metric to validate a building and it’s indoor air quality. In my eyes and many others’ eyes out there, the entire premise is false.
[00:34:39] Ashley James: Explain why. So we’re talking about indoor air quality. Why is measuring indoor air quality a false premise for certifying something as a green building?
[00:34:49] Andy Pace: Okay. We’ve all heard that stat that indoor air quality can be 10 to 100 times worse than LA on a bad day.
[00:34:59] Ashley James: Right. Especially that we’re all at home. I mean, so many people this year work from home. Many children are at home for school instead. I’m not saying that these office buildings or school buildings would be any better or worse but now is even more important to focus on the air quality inside our home and what’s off-gassing in our home. It’s interesting that you say that isn’t the best metric for a non-toxic home or a green home.
[00:35:29] Andy Pace: Well, it’s not necessarily that part. The fact that indoor air quality can be 10 to 100 times worse than LA on a bad day is actually true. But how do they measure? What is the main metric used for measuring indoor air quality?
[00:35:55] Ashley James: I was going to guess that it was some kind of measuring the amount of chemical particles.
[00:36:03] Andy Pace: Okay. Specifically VOCs. You hear this everywhere. VOCs are regulated by the EPA. VOCs have to be lowered in manufacturers’ materials, very similar to the CAFE standards of automobiles. For example, a paint manufacturer decides to start making a zero VOC paint. Not only does it meet the regulations for what a water-based low VOC paint is, but it also allows the manufacturer on the whole to manufacture some of their other products that are very high in VOCs because overall, the average is lower.
[00:36:50] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. And for those who don’t know what VOCs are, volatile organic compounds, can you just go back? For listeners who have no idea what you’re talking about, what are VOCs?
[00:37:01] Andy Pace: This ties a bow around this whole thing that I’m talking about. Let me give you the exact definition of what a VOC is. A VOC means a volatile organic compound. A volatile organic compound is any carbon-based molecule that’s readily vaporized at room temperature that could rise to the upper atmosphere combined with nitrogen and UV and create smog.
[00:37:31] Ashley James: So that really doesn’t sound like it’s applicable in a house.
[00:37:33] Andy Pace: No, and this is what I’m talking about that the premise is entirely wrong. Just because something is a VOC doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy for humans. And toxic materials—things that are harmful to humans—are not necessarily VOCs.
[00:37:59] Ashley James: So give us an example of a VOC that isn’t toxic. If I was diffusing peppermint essential oil in my home, would that show up as a VOC?
[00:38:12] Andy Pace: It can. How about this. Peel the skin off of an orange, it’ll release 850 grams per liter of VOCs.
[00:38:20] Ashley James: Clearly something that’s healthy for us or non-toxic for us to peel an orange.
[00:38:26] Andy Pace: You know what acetone is, nail polish remover?
[00:38:31] Ashley James: Yeah.
[00:38:32] Andy Pace: Open up a can of acetone in your house. Just open it up, let it sit there.
[00:38:39] Ashley James: I hate that smell so much.
[00:38:41] Andy Pace: Within 15 minutes, everybody who lives in that house will have detectable levels of acetone in their liver.
[00:38:46] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.
[00:38:47] Andy Pace: But according to the EPA, it’s not a VOC. So you have to remember the premise of the whole VOC regulation. It’s because of outdoor air pollution only. There is no regulation on the books based upon VOCs because of their inherent danger to humans. It’s alluded to, it’s talked about, it’s referenced, but it’s not actually a real regulation. The reason is because you mentioned it before. There are over 80,000 chemicals used in the production of building materials and home goods. Out of those 80,000 chemicals, only 3% have ever been tested for the toxicological effects on humans.
[00:39:40] Ashley James: Oh wait, hold on. I think that warrants a little bit more discussion. This is crazy. We assume that every drug on the market has gone through rigorous testing, right? And then we take that same assumption and assume that every man-made chemical that is available for our house, for our body, or for our food has been rigorously tested. And you’re saying that only 3% has been tested for safety with humans?
[00:40:10] Andy Pace: Correct.
[00:40:11] Ashley James: And they haven’t been tested in combination with other chemicals.
[00:40:17] Andy Pace: No, not at all. What happens is in the United States, when a manufacturer invents a new chemical compound—and keep in mind, this is happening at a more rapid pace because of things like the VOC regulations, and I’ll get to that in a second. The manufacturer comes out with a new chemical. It submits it to the EPA. I could be wrong about the exact number of days. I believe it’s 120 days that the EPA has to essentially approve it or reject it. So they get 120 days after the application date to approve it or reject it, and they could say, nope, we reject this because it’s going to kill off half the population.
However, because manufacturers are coming out with these new chemical compounds at such a rapid pace, and there’s something like a two-year backlog to do testing, the regulations as they are written today state that if the EPA can’t get to actually testing them within that time period or initially they rubber-stamp it approved.
[00:41:36] Ashley James: And how do they test it? On animals? Really, how do you test these chemicals?
[00:41:41] Andy Pace: That’s also kind of an unknown. The fact of the matter is that if they get 120 days to test and they don’t test it within 120 days, they have to automatically approve them because there’s a two-year backlog for testing. What happens then is they leave it up to the consumer to essentially file class-action lawsuits with other consumers who’ve gotten sick because of it.
If this were a true leave it up to the marketplace sort of thing where manufacturers were forced to disclose their ingredients, then I can see that would actually be, in my opinion, a better way to go because now you have a complete list of everything that’s in these materials. I’ll use paint because I know paint the best.
On the MSDs or the safety data sheets for a gallon of paint, it’s not an ingredients list. It’s essentially a list of certain chemicals that make up more than 1% of the volume or are not part of a proprietary blend. And they have to list those certain chemicals that may have a hazard component to them. When a manufacturer puts together something like a gallon of paint, you look at the MSDs, and you see three things listed, how could paint be made of three things? Well, it’s not. It’s made of 30 things. Most of those ingredients each make up less than 1% of the volume, therefore do not have to be listed on the safety data sheet.
That’s where the real bad stuff is hidden. You’ve got to remember that the VOC regulations, the safety data sheet regulations, everything out there are written for the protection of the manufacturer, not the consumer. The entire green building movement and indoor air quality component of the green building movement is based upon reducing VOCs in a space. Yet VOCs have nothing to do sometimes, most times, with the true hazardous component of what’s being used inside of a building. Because there are only a couple hundred chemicals used in building materials that’ll be classified as VOCs, yet there are 80,000 chemicals that are available for use.
We’re focusing on the wrong things. We’re not focusing on the toxicity of the ingredients, and the reason why we’re not is because we can’t. Because manufacturers are not being forced to disclose their ingredients. Because they’ve lobbied enough to say to every governmental agency out there that listen, I don’t want to give up my ingredients list because that’s proprietary. I don’t want somebody to copy my products. It really is difficult for somebody.
Believe me, I’ve given this presentation to architectural societies—a room full of people who have been practicing architecture for decades. They’re experts in buildings, and some of these people are experts in green buildings. I tell them about this whole VOC thing and their jaws just drop open. It’s not talked about whatsoever. It’s not talked about that the EPA actually publishes a list of 27 different toxic chemicals that are fully allowed to be used in zero VOC formulations of materials because they specifically do not create a low-level smog. Because they don’t react with nitrogen the way that most carbon-based chemicals do. Manufacturers are allowed to use acetone, ammonia, butyl acetate, and trichloroethane.
[00:46:17] Ashley James: These are chemicals that are stressing the liver, causing health issues. But because they don’t contribute to smog, they’re fine, they’re safe. I don’t trust the EPA.
[00:46:29] Andy Pace: Because it’s the EPA. They’re the environmental protection agency.
[00:46:34] Ashley James: Here’s why I don’t trust them. On 9/11, so many of the emergency responders and the volunteers have gotten major health problems. The EPA was very quick to say—and you can google this and watch news videos of it on 9/11—the air is safe to breathe. The air was not safe to breathe, and these workers and volunteers that were trying to find anyone alive in the rubble or they’re working through the rubble day and night were all exposed to what has either killed them by now or given them a lifelong crippling disease. And the EPA completely failed them. They should have said no, the air is not safe to breathe.
Anyone with an understanding of what was in that air would have said the air is not safe to breathe. They need protection. They need some kind of protection to go in there. That for me I have not trusted them since then. When we trust an organization with our health, we tend to become relaxed. We have to look at how our relationship is as adults with organizations because I think we sometimes become children. I trust this big organization that’s supposed to be looking out for me. It’s like we become children again trusting our parents to do the right thing for us.
So we have to get that it’s always buyer beware, always, always—even if there’s an FDA, a CDC, and all these alphabet soup organizations. They’re not the ones responsible for our health, even though we’ve given them that responsibility. We still have to do our research. We still have to know that everything that we put in our mouths, put in our bodies, and put in our environment is our responsibility. It’s scary. This is the dark side of the way our manufacturing is, the way our consumerism is. That it is buyer beware. And I love that you found the AFM so early on because it allowed you to find a company that was ethical.
I love finding ethical companies to work with like yourself who are going to spend a few more dollars to make sure that the building materials you’re using are safe. Now, what do you think about the environmental working group? Do you like them as a resource when it comes to looking at ingredients for what could be healthy?
[00:49:26] Andy Pace: I do. I certainly use a lot of the information they publish. I also look at the product declaration and health declarations that some companies are now having done by a third party. I think that there are certainly many more responsible manufacturers out there now than there ever used to be. I chalked that up to the fact that again, I was telling the story of how we got really started with this. The green building really hit its zenith in about 2005, 2006. At the time, I was actually the president of one of the largest architectural associations in the country. I was talking to friends and colleagues all around the country, and all they talked about was green building.
What happened in the late 2000s? The big recession happened. From a residential standpoint, it used to be that I’d have a customer come in and say, we’re remodeling the bathroom. I want to use this really cool concrete with a recycled glass countertop in the bathroom. I’d say, okay, well here’s the price. It’s a little more expensive than these other materials that are more commercially available. They said that’s all right. I love the fact that it’s recycled content. I think it’s going to be great to tell my neighbors and friends about it.
At that time, people were spending money to buy anything green because that was just the wave we were going on. Then the recession hit and nobody spent money on new homes, remodeling. It was the first time in history that when the new construction market went down, usually what happens is remodeling goes up. Well, first time in history where new construction went down, remodeling went down because people were losing value in their homes for no reason. We were finding that the homes were just overvalued. And so people were losing the equity in their homes. They didn’t want to put any more money into them because it’s just going to be a waste.
That didn’t really correct itself until about 2013. When those customers started coming back into the marketplace, it’s interesting. The individuals who were buying green for the sake of buying green before, a lot of those folks were coming back to us saying, “Hey, remember I worked with you a few years ago?” “Yeah, I remember.” They would say, “We’re remodeling one of our rooms, and we’re looking for healthy flooring or healthy paint.” Their mindset changed during that time. They realized that if they’re going to spend—as you pointed out before—a little more money buying something that’s green, well what is it doing for them personally?
They came back to the marketplace saying it’s got to help us personally as well if I’m going to spend more. I might as well buy something that’s actually healthier for us because while 50% of the world at any given time is going to tell you that the green building movement is garbage. We don’t have to worry about it. Probably closer to 95% of people would say yeah, but if it’s healthier for me and healthier for my family, now it’s worth it.
They almost re-educated themselves to say all right, here’s why we’re going to spend a little more because I don’t have to worry about the toxicity of this stuff. Since then, we’ve seen an explosion in the healthy building market, and very rarely do I get a customer now calling up and asking me if there’s any recycled content in the product that they’re buying. They’ll say, “How does it affect my family? I’ve got somebody in the household who’s got an immune disorder.”
[00:53:56] Ashley James: I like that you said healthy building market because green like you’ve said, some kind of builder who’s been certified in green material, that might not even be non-toxic.
[00:54:10] Andy Pace: Correct.
[00:54:12] Ashley James: I’ve interviewed two people from this mold mitigation company that I really like, Green Home Solutions. I really like them because they invented a kind of enzyme that cracks open mold and digests it. So the mold is not there anymore. If you bleach mold, it’s still there. Even though it’s dead it’s still releasing the toxins. They have something that kills the mold and stops it from releasing its toxins, and then it even stops it for up to two years or something like that and it’s all-natural. It’s just an enzyme that’s completely safe.
In the interviews, they shared that these newer homes that are “green” are worse for mold than 100-year-old homes that are drafty. Drafty is actually good. Let’s say you bought a home that’s built in 2018 and it’s “green,” they made it so heat effective to keep in the heat so you use less energy, to keep in the air conditioning so you use less energy. There are so many barriers and there’s very little flow from outside air, and that ends up trapping moisture in parts of the building—either the basement or the attic. And then they’re seeing in these newer homes a ton of mold.
I thought that was fascinating because here I’m thinking we’ve been constructing houses for thousands of years. This is not a new science, and yet we expect that the latest in architecture and building homes—especially because they call it green—would mean that it is healthier and safer. So what you’re saying is that a green home isn’t necessarily healthier or safer, and could actually be more toxic because it’s trapped the air in thus keeping these chemicals, not necessarily VOCs, but these chemicals. Like you mentioned the acetone for example that within 15 minutes of inhaling it, it’s in our liver. Keeping what’s off-gassing inside the house, and then if it had mold somewhere in the house, keeping all the toxins inside the house and the house isn’t breathing enough, that’s kind of scary.
You do a healthy building. I don’t like the term green building because that makes us give up our power again. That makes us go, it’s a green building, I trust everything here. We stop looking. We stop questioning. So we have to continue to question even though something is “green.”
[00:57:07] Andy Pace: Yes. About 15 years ago, I created a building product rating system of my own. There’s a green garden, there’s a green seal, there are scientific certification systems, and all these different organizations’ floor score and so forth. All these third party solutions give us information about whether or not a product is considered green. Well, what I found was when I was trying to train my own staff here and trying to make it so that when a customer called up, everybody on staff would be able to give the same information, without influence, to our potential customers.
What we found out was, after our extensive research on this, there are actually 27 different reasons why you can call a building material green—27 different reasons—and all boils down to three main categories: environmental health, sustainability, and human health. So a lot of these reasons why products are called green essentially go into a category that we would call greenwashing, which is when a manufacturer or a salesperson essentially over exaggerates the overall environmental and health benefit because of maybe one little component, and I’ll give you examples.
There was a very large big box home improvement store here in the US that at the time, in the 2000s, they started adding these eco tags to several products that they were selling in their stores. Eco option or something like that, I forget what the terminology they’re using. This is an eco option, and they put an eco option tag on bags of fiberglass insulation, which first off it’s not an option. Here in Wisconsin, when it gets to be 30 below 0 in the wintertime, it’s not an option to use insulation. It’s actually building code, but they were selling it as an option because that’s an energy saver. They were putting an eco option tag on an electric chainsaw because it uses electricity to cut down trees instead of fuel. That’s a prime example of greenwashing.
There was a manufacturer here down the street that was making, I forget at the time what it was, but they started advertising in the trade publication saying that they were a green company because they have all local manufacturing. Nothing was made overseas until you found out that 98% of the components that they were using were manufactured overseas before they finally put it together here—greenwashing.
Patagonia, I love their products. They were winning environmental award after environmental award because of their eco fleece jackets, hats, and gloves. What eco fleece essentially is taking plastic soda and water bottles, they melt it down, they spin it into a fleece fabric. Great, you’re taking stuff out of the landfills. You’re taking stuff out of the ocean, which in and of itself is fantastic. However, the chemist that originally invented PET back in the ‘30s said in his original report that this product should never come in contact with human skin because it enters into the blood system, it can turn chemicals into trihalomethanes, and essentially eat the body from the inside out.
So we’re giving awards to manufacturers for poisoning us. These are all forms of greenwashing. And so I use this to create what I call my degree of green program. When a customer comes in, we have three main customers that come to one of our showrooms. The first customer comes in and says we are building a new house. It’s got to be as human toxin-free as possible. We have a seven-year-old with autism. She responds very negatively to chemical off-gassing and exacerbates her symptoms and so forth. We need a house that is as synthetic chemical-free as possible. Can you help us?
The next customer walks in and she says I’ve been on this earth for 55 years. I’ve been a burden to the earth for 55 years. Can you help me remodel a home using all recycled, repurposed, and renewed materials? I want nothing manufactured virgin for my house. The third customer walks in and says can you help me build a home with the lowest carbon footprint?
Now, which one of those customers is wrong? None of them. They’re all right in their own way. They’ve all developed their own personal degree of green. The first customer is about human health. The second customer, it’s about sustainability. The third customer is about environmental concerns. All of them are right, yet the industry as a whole treats everybody the same—they call it green.
[01:03:01] Ashley James: But the one who’s using recycled material, that’s not necessarily a healthy home.
[01:03:07] Andy Pace: No, not at all.
[01:03:09] Ashley James: And the one that’s doing the lowest carbon footprint isn’t necessarily a healthy home. It’s not necessarily a low toxic home either.
[01:03:16] Andy Pace: And that’s the thing. So yes, I focus on health. That’s what I do. I focus on human health first. What I do is I help customers who are trying to build a new home, I act as their consultant liaison with the architects, the contractors, and all their subs. I always look out for the customer’s best interest when it comes to human health first. And sometimes, that means you have to maybe give up a little bit of the eco-friendliness or the sustainability aspect. The healthiest floor material may not be made in the United States, might be made in the Netherlands. The healthiest paint product may not be natural, it may actually be synthetic.
These are the things that we have to look at and say there is no broad brush for everything. We have to actually look at the ingredients, and we use a heck of a lot of anecdotal information from the 30,000 customers I’ve worked with over my career to say, generally speaking, here’s what they can tolerate. These are the most chemically sensitive of people out there, and here’s what they say worked for them. So after we have enough knowledge and enough data of our own, we can say, on the whole, these are the ones that work the best.
[01:04:32] Ashley James: Fascinating. I interviewed a guy who—his name’s escaping me right now, but he worked for the DEA, that was it. He was going after the kind of like Miami Vice. He described it as like back in the ‘70s or ‘80s, he’s like Miami Vice. He was going after the mob basically down there. He went into a new office building and then he got poisoned so bad he was in the hospital. He got his whole detective team trying to figure out who poisoned him because they were taking down the mob, they honestly thought the mob had poisoned him. It took him years before he figured out that he was exposed to building chemicals.
Basically, back then, there weren’t any regulations for when they build a new building. These are high rises like condos and office buildings. And office buildings have different standards than condos. My husband was a union carpenter for 20 years and so he loved to point out the differences in building materials from living in an apartment to working in an office. There are a lot more regulations in an office building so it doesn’t burn down. I’m like why aren’t the same regulations in an apartment building? I always thought it was interesting, but they use different materials and so there are different toxic levels.
He was in an office building that was just built in Miami. They turned on the AC and all the air was recycled. There was no new air coming in. So you can imagine this is like a 50-, 60-story building with all the off-gassing of the new carpets and the paint. A few other people had a similar experience, but he was hit pretty bad. Who knows why. It could be genetics, it could be nutrient deficiencies. Whatever happened he almost died.
It took him I think it was 15 years to recover. He found a Naturopath that figured out what his issue was and actually nursed him back to health. But for something like 10 or 15 years, he had to live in the desert. He couldn’t be exposed to any electricity at all. Any electricity would cause his body to go haywire. He had to live in a house that was metal that had nothing that could off-gas, living in the desert, and he called himself basically bubble boy.
He wrote a book about it. It was a very interesting interview because it really made me see how some people who are exposed to these toxins cause lifelong debilitation, and if you continue to go to MDs who are not experienced in this realm, they might treat you for fibromyalgia or something that’s sort of like a catch-all without knowing that your migraines are triggered by this chemical or that chemical that’s just in your environment.
I have another friend. She and her daughter were debilitated for the last few years because she was exposed to PCBs, radon, lead, and furans—I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. There’s an alternative school here in Monroe, Washington, and there’s a really good AP article on it. Basically, a major company that I’m not going to mention their name because of the lawsuit, and I don’t want them coming after me.
Let’s just say it’s a chemical company that was more recently, in the last few years, bought by a pharmaceutical company. There’s a huge class-action lawsuit with hundreds of students and parents, several of which have died of cancer and other diseases because of their exposure to these chemicals in the school building. The school district said the school was safe when it still wasn’t safe. There were PCBs basically dripping from the ceiling and leaking onto the children, onto their desks from these old light fixtures.
Just the horror stories that came out of this building. These are old buildings. They said that the chemicals are in the caulking, that they’re in the light fixtures. There are several building materials that were even 60 years later still causing health issues. We have major, major issues with old buildings like the ones with PCBs. And then we have issues with the very new buildings, right?
It’s not like you can say, oh well, my condo was once a schoolhouse that was renovated. It’s a 100-year-old building or a 50-year-old building so it must not have the 80,000 chemicals in it. That’s not necessarily true. What we’re looking at is any home can be toxic.
[01:09:38] Andy Pace: Any home can be toxic. The question I get quite often from clients is can you give me a time frame? If I’m going to look for an existing home, and I do have a number of clients who’ll actually hire me to help them go through Zillow listings to see which homes might be best for them. Is there a certain time frame that I should be looking at or that I should be avoiding?
[01:10:03] Ashley James: When were homes the healthiest? What era?
[01:10:08] Andy Pace: Interestingly enough, homes that were the healthiest were the ones built prior to World War II. After the war, this is when manufacturing really started ramping up with plastics. Could there be things like lead in the house? Yes, but that’s easier to remediate. Asbestos wrapping around pipes and insulation, easy to remediate. We can see it. We can take care of it.
[01:10:40] Ashley James: Copper pipes or whatever.
[01:10:41] Andy Pace: But homes themselves, as you said before, were built so energy-inefficient that it allowed for fresh air to come to the house. Homes that were built after the war and specifically homes built in the ‘70s and ‘80s are the ones that I typically avoid. The reason for that is the whole sick building syndrome and environmental illness thing really started becoming problematic after the oil embargo of the early ‘70s by OPEC. Because building materials and buildings themselves were being built tighter, more energy-efficient because of the cost of energy.
I mean even in commercial buildings that you could adjust the amount of fresh air coming into these commercial spaces, the building managers would essentially cut down the amount of fresh air just so they didn’t have to pay to heat or cool it. This is when we first started really learning about environmental illness inside of a building.
In the ‘80s, that really came to a head because this is when manufacturers really started ramping up with new technologically advanced building materials and things like building wraps that were used on the outside of a structure before your siding that would slow down water come into the building, but it would also slow down the water leaving the building—any moisture inside that cavity—and this is when mold started, and really to be a big problem in the ‘80s.
You had building materials that were made out of wood dust instead of solid wood. That wood dust was held together using urea formaldehyde-based adhesives, and all this is just a recipe for mold. Homes that were built to be sort of airtight but not really just means that moisture gets locked in that exterior cavity wall and eventually you’re going to find a mold spore on some of the lumber that’s going to proliferate because of the environment.
Homes that were built in the ‘90s, 2000s, this is when you started getting homes that were being built, utilizing a bit more of what’s called building science. But they still weren’t really focusing on the human aspect—a human living inside of the space. And now with what we call the healthy building, that’s first and foremost. That’s the very first thing we look at is the health of the human occupant. Everything else is secondary.
[01:13:45] Ashley James: As it should be. I mean, it’s your home. If you’re focusing on the health of the human, then the health of the pets is going to come with it. And it’s not like we’re doing this every day. You build the home once, and hopefully, you live in it for a really long time. If it does have a carbon footprint, if it does have an environmental impact, I mean you’re not doing it all the time. You’re doing it once, and hopefully, because you built it to your specifications, it’s your forever home.
[01:14:13] Andy Pace: That’s the thing. Part of the equation of building a healthy home is also to utilize materials that you don’t have to replace too often because every time you have to do a project in the home and bring in outside contractors, you’re causing disruption to family life. You’re causing disruption in the air handling equipment. You’re bringing in potential chemical toxicity. So if I can use a flooring material that’s going to last 50 years as opposed to something that lasts 20, even though that flooring material is a little more expensive, in the long run not only is it less expensive because it lasts twice as long, but it’s also going to cut down on any potential toxicity in the future.
We make decisions based on human health first. Now the number one question I get from customers is how expensive is it to build a healthy home? It’s got to be more expensive.
[01:15:11] Ashley James: That’s the first question my husband asked me last night. I told him how excited I was about this interview. We were cooking dinner and cleaning dishes, and I told him how excited I was. His first question was, “Well, I wonder how much more expensive is it?” I said, “I mean, Ryan and Teddy had spent pretty much all of their money on all the holistic treatments for their son.” I mean they told their story. This isn’t the secret, but they had to sell their house and they spent all their life savings on their son, and yet they were still able to afford to build their dream non-toxic healthy home.
I told my husband, I’m like, “Well, if Ryan and Teddy could do that after years of exhausting all their resources on saving their son’s life, it sounds like yeah sure, it could be a bit more expensive, but it doesn’t sound astronomical. It doesn’t sound out of one’s reach.”
[01:16:17] Andy Pace: Well, there are two things at play here. Number one, what are your tastes for design? Do you want plastic switchblade covers or do you want brass? Think about that. Do you always gravitate towards things that are in the higher price range because you like the better style and you like things that are flashier and so forth?
The other thing is quality level, longevity of materials plays the biggest impact. I actually had an email conversation with a potential client yesterday, and she just can’t wrap her head around the fact—she says, “I’m sorry, but every time I start doing research on healthier building materials, it seems like my prices are going up.” And I said, “Well, what are they going up from?”
What I mean by that is then let’s take paint for instance. Again, I know paint the best. If you’re choosing a gallon of paint that is considered low-cost paint, you put it on the wall, it looks fine. But in six months, the paint starts to dust and shock chalk off the wall, starts to lose its color, lose its luster. You can’t wash it cause it’ll wash right off the wall. This is what’s called an architectural grade or commercial grade paint. It’s used extensively in the commercial industry, and the reason why is commercial buildings are typically repainted every three to five years. That’s just the schedule they’re on.
Inside of a home, if you ever paint your house, you never want to do it again. It’s not an easy task. You have to move furniture. You have to mask everything. You got to take time off of work, or you hire somebody and you spend gobs of money but they do quality work. The fact is that most homeowners never want to repaint walls, or they don’t want to do it any more often than every 20 years.
So premium grade residential paint is far superior in durability, longevity, and color retention than any commercial architectural grade paint out there. When you call a contractor to give you a price on a home, you’re calling three contractors. Most often, these paint contractors are going to be bidding on paint that’s at a very low price point because they just want to get the job. And most homeowners, let’s be honest, don’t have extensive knowledge of paint. I wouldn’t expect them to.
People don’t call up and say I want this quality. This is the product I want. They just say, can you give me a price to paint my house? They’ll give them a price and there it is. 60% to 80% of the price that they get from the contractor will actually be labor and overhead, and a very smaller percentage of 20% to 40% is actually the material itself. If you double the cost of material, you don’t double the cost of the project.
When people compare pricing and they say it’s so expensive to buy healthy paint, the difference is when you buy healthy materials, 9 times out of 10 you’re also buying higher quality materials, longer-lasting materials because we’ve taken that into the equation. This is why we sell it because you’re not going to have to repaint in 20 years unless you get sick of the color.
So when you say this really price-conscious paint is $30 a gallon and your toxin-free, human-friendly paint is $60 a gallon, but ours lasts four to five times longer. And it’s free of toxins, it just so happens to be. So you’re not paying the extra because it’s healthy, you’re paying the extra because it’s better quality. So now let’s look at an entire home. Use that mentality for an entire home.
If you were to build a home-based upon big-box deals and lumber yard seconds, you can build a home for $120 bucks a square foot. If you’re going to build a home that you want to be your life-ending home, and you want to be able to resell this home and not lose value because of the quality, you want it to improve value. You might spend $180 to $250 dollars a square foot because it’s better quality. It’s lasting longer, and you can see it. You can feel it in the home.
So it has nothing to do with the health component, the pricing. It has to do with quality.
[01:21:13] Ashley James: So, if someone could have a budget and build their home, I mean they don’t need the granite countertops, they don’t need the brass light fixtures. If they have a budget in mind and their sole purpose is we want a non-toxic home, but I like that you say let’s look at investing a bit more if you can. Let’s look at what lasts 50 years versus 20 versus 5. If you’re doing this, you’re hopefully building your forever home.
Now, what about people because it’s less likely that everyone’s listening is going to build their home, although that is my dream. That’s my win the lottery; I’m calling you tomorrow. But if someone’s remodeling, and especially again, I hate to bring up the fact that so many people are homebound these days and may continue to be. Major companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have said that they’re thinking everyone’s going to be basically working from home for the next year. And then who knows with the schools, but many kids are homeschooling or long-distance learning.
So the whole family is at home—not everyone, but a lot of us—and you’re looking around going, man, I really wish I had a better floor. I know I’m looking at my carpet wishing I could replace it right now. And if I did, I’d replace it with something that was non-toxic, of course. So there are certain things that people want to fix up around the house, maybe even just choosing a caulking, looking at their bathtub going, wow, I really need to re-caulk this bathroom before some mold comes in. Or I want to repaint a certain area. Maybe a little do-it-yourself home project. Where would they go to get some resources? Your website is great. The greendesigncenter.com has great information, but could someone hire you to consult them on small projects as well around the house?
[01:23:11] Andy Pace: Interestingly enough, I think most of my day is spent on consulting calls with customers all over the world who just have a few quick questions. Unlike a lot of consultants that are hired only for projects, I spend most of my day on 15-minute phone calls. You have a couple of questions that somebody says listen, we’re looking at getting a new heating and ventilating system for our house. Can you just give me a few things to look for? Or we’ve got a contractor here and they’re helping us fix the deck outside. What should we look for a finish or for construction adhesive and so forth?
I would love to have our website be a 100% effective educational tool for all of these things, but the fact of the matter is that it’s impossible. It’s impossible to be able to service everyone just with the information online because everybody’s projects are so different. They all have their own little quirks and issues to deal with, and the only way that I can help is with that conversation. We talk it through, we figure it out.
I’ve got a wonderful client in Hawaii that will hire me every couple of weeks for between 15 minutes and an hour. He himself was a commercial developer for years. He’s retired now, but he said to me last time after working with him for about two years, he goes, “You know Andy, I’ve worked with a lot of consultants in my career. You’re the only one I can actually have a conversation with and you get it. You understand it.”
I come from the building industry, but I’m so used to working with people who have little issues that just need to be fixed. Whether I sell the product or not is kind of irrelevant when I’m being hired as a consultant because I just want you to get the best help that you can. If there is another company that I know of in your area that can provide the services or the materials that you need, I’m going to point you in that direction because ultimately, you’ve got to get this taken care of quickly.
The first customer that I can remember who I really, really went to school with, I’ll say, is a client in Northern Illinois back in ’95. She called me up and she said that she’s been living in one room of her home coated in aluminum foil for the last two years.
[01:26:06] Ashley James: I believe it.
[01:26:09] Andy Pace: I mean, you talk about the person you were speaking of who lives in an aluminum box. This is essentially what they did. There’s a product out there called Dennyfoil. It’s essentially an industrial aluminum foil that we use to cover things that are off-gassing. When nothing else works, this does. It’s ugly, it’s metallic, it’s shiny and slippery, but it works. When people have no other thing that they can do, this is what they do. She lived in that room for two to three years. For the last six months, her husband was remodeling the house and I was helping her husband choose materials and so forth. She was able to move into that house. Every once in a while, I still get a card or a letter from her just to say thank you.
I’m in business to sell materials and to sell my services, yes. But I can’t tell you what it’s like to have customers who call or email and say you saved my life. I’m not a physician. No, I don’t save people’s lives. I don’t think so. But there are people who have such extreme health issues they’re just looking for somebody to believe them, number one. Because let’s face it, a lot of these folks have been trying to go to their regular doctors and they’re basically being told they’re crazy because no, that can’t happen. You can’t be allergic to chemicals, so on and so forth. But they find somebody who understands it, has been there before. I myself have some sensitivities. I know what it’s like.
And then we have customers now that we have helped like the Sternagels who can live in a house that is safe for them and their family. I mean, it makes it for me getting up every morning and going to work, it’s remarkable and really indescribable.
[01:28:24] Ashley James: I love it. When they say you’ve saved my life, you’ve saved the quality of their life.
[01:28:30] Andy Pace: Yes.
[01:28:31] Ashley James: I mean, they certainly might have died sooner. I mean, we’re all eventually not going to be here in this body. Eventually, we all move on, and it is really about the quality of life that we can create. Having true health means being symptom-free and having a long healthy life that is as symptom-free as possible, as long as possible. I love hearing about 100-year-olds that run marathons. That’s the kind of 100-year-old I want to be. I don’t want to be the 100-year-old that’s suffering in tremendous pain. I want to be 100-year-old running marathons and gardening. I want to die when I’m 120.
The life I live now is what is going to determine the quality of my life later, barring any accidents. That’s what we need to think about when we invest in the health of our home. That that all these materials that come into our life, our food, everything we intake, everything we breathe in, everything we apply to our skin, everything we ingest, it all plays a role in whether we’re going to live that long, healthy, symptom-free life or whether we’re going to suffer now or suffer later.
In holistic medicine, Naturopathy, they look at what they call the Vis or the constitution. And there are two types of constitutions that people have, and you would know both of them because everyone has a friend in their life who has a very weak constitution. The weather changes and they’re bedridden or something. Maybe they eat a little bit of sugar, drink too much wine or too much coffee late at night, and the next day they’re wrecked. They just have a very weak constitution. Those people typically take better care of themselves than the ones like me who have a strong constitution. I can plow through anything. The iron stomach, I can handle anything. We typically don’t slow down to take care of ourselves until we pass out.
I’m imagining the three construction workers, three strapping young men who are standing there in that meeting probably feeling woozy all day not telling you until they completely pass out. They probably had symptoms, but they didn’t listen to those symptoms because it’s not manly to go, I have a slight headache or I feel a little weak. Maybe I need to sit down, and then they pass out. That’s the strong constitution. And in Naturopathic medicine, the ones who have a weak constitution actually typically live longer healthier lives, believe it or not, because they slow down to take care of themselves and listen to their body. It’s the people like me who had to wait for the cosmic 2X4 to hit me over the head before I went, oh I guess I should take care of myself.
So the ones with the strong constitutions, I’m speaking to you guys, even though we’re not affected necessarily by all the things that are off-gassing—although I hate the smell of acetone. My body goes ew, but I don’t get a migraine from it. I know other people do. Okay, my liver is processing it. I don’t want to over toxify my liver. My liver is doing a lot of good for me right now. But it doesn’t put me down and out to have acetone in my environment. Whereas other people, like the woman you mentioned who had to live for three years with aluminum foil around her, would be put down and out if she was inhaling acetone.
[01:32:10] Andy Pace: Without a doubt.
[01:32:12] Ashley James: Right. So those who are very quick to have symptoms typically will take better care of themselves, and hopefully though, they don’t go to the first drug available because that just masks symptoms. It doesn’t actually get to the root cause. And those of us who have strong constitutions who are like I could live in any home, I don’t care. Well, not everyone in the immediate family that’s going to be living in that home has a strong constitution. The husband might be strong, but the wife is always suffering or vice versa. So that’s one reason to really focus on having a healthy home instead of just toughing through it. And then understanding that those of us who tough through it will suffer later because eventually, the body will break.
[01:33:01] Andy Pace: I love the way you describe this because it helps to talk about the fact that everybody is different. The example I use with customers is everybody is born with a drum inside of their body, that all the chemicals and pollutants that we are exposed to on a daily basis, they all filter into this drum and then there’s a spigot on the bottom of that drum that filters it out of the body. Well, sometimes that drum gets filled up faster than others. Some people’s drums aren’t as big. Once that drum fills up and it’s actually filling up faster than it’s draining out, it starts to spill over the top. That’s what chemical sensitivity is. It’s the fact that the body says no more, I can’t do it.
There are three main ways that a person becomes chemically sensitive. One is massive exposure. This is where you hear of somebody who is exposed to a massive chemical. You said about the person you were talking about earlier, massive exposure because of new construction. And there’s probably some chemical—formaldehyde-based—that caused that exposure. I’ll give you a good example of that.
When the EPA built its own headquarters in Washington DC 30 years ago.
[01:34:37] Ashley James: Oh my god, I’m just imagining the disaster. Okay, go on.
[01:34:41] Andy Pace: So the EPA built its new headquarters, and within the first two weeks, I believe it was 1200 people who worked in that building had to go home because of getting sick. It turns out it was the carpet and the carpet adhesive that was causing everybody to get sick. To this day, 30 years later, there are over 100 people who are still on permanent disability.
[01:35:12] Ashley James: No. This is such a great example. So many people blindly trust that the EPA is out for our best interest. They wouldn’t approve a chemical in our environment that would harm us, but they themselves were poisoned by their own building materials that they were supposed to approve.
[01:35:36] Andy Pace: Correct. That’s because of just what they’re looking for. They’re not looking for human health issues. That’s an example of massive exposure. Or another example would be legionnaires disease. When you have these legionnaires in Philadelphia who are massively exposed to this bacteria. The second way that people become chemical sensitive is typically a high-impact medical procedure—car accidents resulting in surgery, childbirth changes the chemistry and electrical impulses in a person’s body. It’s something to do with a health-related issue that changes the chemistry in the body. So you hear this all the time that somebody just has a medical procedure and all of a sudden they get rashes every time they use a certain type of soap. It just changes the chemistry of the body.
[01:36:44] Ashley James: Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Joel Wallach—who’s one of my mentors, I’ve had him on the show a few times. He’s been my mentor for the last 10 years. 80-year-old Naturopathic physician who’s also a research scientist, a pathologist, a veterinarian, and has a degree in soil agriculture is really interesting. He would say that when we go through major health events, the body becomes depleted of certain nutrients.
For example, selenium is a trace mineral that the liver needs in order to recycle glutathione, and the body also needs in order to protect the thyroid. When we go through major issues like childbirth, an infection, or surgery, and if we’re not getting enough of that in our food, which so much of our food is depleted in certain minerals, then the body becomes more depleted. Then the liver cannot process toxins in the same way it used to because it’s just deficient.
He often says if people all of a sudden have these chemical sensitivities after some kind of health event, that we have to look at nutrient deficiencies that were exacerbated by these life events. Well, you mentioned legionnaires. For those who don’t know anything about that, can you fill us in?
[01:38:01] Andy Pace: A little bit. Legionnaire’s disease is essentially a bacterial infection that was caused by legionella—I shouldn’t say bacterial infection. It was actually a mold that was growing in the HVAC system of a large convention center. These people, these conference-goers, these American legion, the legionnaires—where this kind of came from—were getting sick. And after much research, I realized that this is what caused it. It was mold in the HVAC system in a stagnant drip pan that was not cleaned out properly.
[01:38:57] Ashley James: And so they end up having lifelong issues and exposure. So anytime they’re exposed to other toxins—that’s something that a lot of people don’t know is that when you’re exposed to mold, mold could actually live in your bloodstream and mold can continue to cause toxins for years to come inside your body. Just like a parasite would continue to grow or bacteria or yeast. It’s similar to that, and there are certain foods, herbs, and supplements we can take to mitigate that and help the body rid it. But that’s like that barrel that you mentioned.
I interviewed Dr. Stephen Cabral who wrote a book, The Rain Barrel Effect, and it’s almost the exact same thing that you said. Our barrel gets full, and we’ve got the spigot at the bottom. The spigot is like how healthy are your kidneys, how healthy is your liver, how healthy is your emunctory system to remove the toxins, and how much is coming in on the top. And then eventually, when it overflows, we’ve got these weird symptoms like someone will have migraines, someone will have rashes, someone will have digestive issues, and someone will just be exhausted all the time or be in pain all the time.
[01:40:19] Andy Pace: That’s what comes in the third way that people become chemically sensitive and it’s the most common—low-level exposure over a long period of time. And again, it’s just that barrel fills up. Maybe it’s when you’re 30 years old, 20 years old, or 80 years old, and at some point, the barrel fills up. What I see—and I’m not an MD nor am I a chemist, but years of experience showed me that when your barrel fills up, it’s typically something that is petrochemically related to what caused the spill that will cause the next symptom or the next reaction.
[01:41:09] Ashley James: Can you explain that?
[01:41:10] Andy Pace: And in our experience, formaldehyde is that key trigger. Formaldehyde is found in so many products around our home.
[01:41:20] Ashley James: Give us some examples.
[01:41:22] Andy Pace: Well, the best example I can give you is a carpet. Not to scare anybody.
[01:41:28] Ashley James: My bare feet are on the carpet right now. I’m kind of freaking out.
[01:41:31] Andy Pace: Okay. I will warn you that I have been told by some people that I scare them once in a while, but I don’t try to.
[01:41:43] Ashley James: I think every guest scares us a little. The thing is, we don’t want to be the ostrich with our head in the sand because that’s how we end up with long-term exposure, to begin with. And you’re not the total bearer of bad news because you’re giving us some resources to fix it. But okay, here we have formaldehyde and carpet. Is it all carpet or only some carpet? And does it eventually all off-gas, or is 50-year-old carpet, 20-year-old carpets, or 10-year-old carpets still have it?
[01:42:12] Andy Pace: So if someone were to ask me what’s the one thing I can do in my house today to make it healthier, I will always say remove the carpet. I’d rather have you live on a plywood subfloor until you can afford new flooring material. Now, I know nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to walk around their house barefoot on plywood. I understand the logistics of what I’m saying, but I say this because—and barring a couple of shining examples of some healthy materials that are out there.
A company called Nature’s Carpet from Canada, another one called Earth Weave from here in the US. They do make a synthetic chemical-free carpet that my most sensitive clients can actually use. But their materials—in the grand scheme of things—are used in 1/100 of 1% of homes in the United States, if that. So that’s why I say removing the carpet and here’s why.
There was a researcher chemist years ago named Rosalind Anderson. She did an amazing study on the effects of carpet and the effect of a shaft of light coming through a window and heating up a space of carpet. Because back when she was doing these tests she was using lab rats, she found that carpeting as old as 20 years old would still off-gas enough to literally kill laboratory rats.
[01:44:07] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. And just think anyone’s cat loves to go lie in the sun on the carpet.
[01:44:15] Andy Pace: Yes. So you mentioned before when you were talking about how this also affects animals, that’s exactly what I’m thinking of. How do I wrap a bow around this? Several years ago, I was introduced to a testing system that actually AFM used for their paints and coatings to prove the effectiveness of their materials. There was a very well-known scientist in Japan, Dr. Nagasawa, and he created a method to determine the emissivity of formaldehyde off-gassing from a fixed surface. I’m trying to explain this as easy as possible.
[01:45:11] Ashley James: I mean, by all means. If you want to get a little technical or get into the science, we’re all for it. You don’t need to dumb stuff down for us. My listeners are super smart.
[01:45:21] Andy Pace: I’m sure they are and so allow me to geek out a little bit.
[01:45:25] Ashley James: Yeah, please do. Let’s geek out. All right, let’s do it.
[01:45:28] Andy Pace: This is what makes me happy. So if you’re a building biologist or an indoor air quality scientist, you walk into a space, you’ve got a handheld monitor, and it tells you that you have elevated VOCs and elevated formaldehyde. You might even do an air capture test where you’re absorbing air into a tube and you’re actually looking in a lab either with a spectrophotometer or the types of devices to read what the chemical compound is in the air.
So a customer calls and says I’ve done these really, really intense tests and I found that I’ve got a formaldehyde problem in my house. Where’s it coming from? Well, AFM years ago started working with Dr. Nagasawa and found that he used the system to actually determine what in the house was releasing formaldehyde. We can all guess it’s from the carpet, maybe from paint that’s still off-casting, maybe from cabinetry, or this or that. But when you are trying to remediate something inside of your home and you’ve got a formaldehyde problem, you’re literally throwing darts at what you think can be the problem.
I mean I had a situation a few years ago where a client of mine called up and said, “All right, we’ve had two air quality scientists in our house. They tell us we’ve got elevated formaldehyde. The whole family is sick. And what we’ve determined and what they’ve determined is well it’s this we put in new prefinished hardwood flooring in our house. They have all said we’ve got to remove it and replace it with something else. So I’m calling you to verify that and can we get a flooring material that’s not going to off-gas formaldehyde?”
I said, “Yes, you can get a foreign material that’s not going to off-gas, but let’s just make sure it’s not something else.” Well, I drove up to Minneapolis, and I actually had what’s called a FRAT system—formaldehyde release attenuation test. We import it from Korea. We’re the only company in North America that uses this test. I use the FRAT system in her house, little sensors I placed all over the place to prove that it was the flooring material that was causing the formaldehyde off-gassing. After a half-hour, and I took those sample collectors from all over the house all over the floor, found that the newest new flooring material released zero formaldehyde. But yet they had ultra-high levels of formaldehyde in the house.
So I started thinking to myself, well, what else in the space could be releasing formaldehyde at that level? I checked cabinetry. I checked the painted walls. I checked the furniture. I even put a sensor on a return on an outlet thinking that maybe I’d get some off-gassing from the insulation in the wall that would come out through the outlet and maybe we’d prove it’s that. After about two hours of testing, it dawned on me, what’s the only other thing in the house that was new that could cause this type of off-gassing?
Again, this is a 5,000 square foot home, $50,000 or $60,000 dollars worth of new hardwood flooring, but every room had an area rug. I tested every area rug to find that the formaldehyde off-gassing from the area rugs was well over the toxic limit. We’re looking at between 300 and 500 parts per billion of formaldehyde coming just from each area rug in the house, and every room has at least one or two.
[01:49:32] Ashley James: I mean, okay, so it’s a hardwood floor but it’s a huge house—sounds really fancy. But these area rugs, are you talking about the kind you could just pick up at Ikea?
[01:49:42] Andy Pace: Sure. Once you find an Ikea, Target, or the ones you buy online for thousands of dollars, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that formaldehyde is used in the chemical dyes, formaldehyde is used as antimicrobials and flame retardants in the backing.
[01:49:59] Ashley James: So even if you get one of those really expensive Persian rugs, they still have the formaldehyde off-gassing?
[01:50:04] Andy Pace: There can. It may be less because there’s no backing to a Persian rug, but there are dyes used. This is what got me on the whole carpet kick. I mean really got me on the carpet kick. It taught me two things. Number one, for the cost of the testing, I improved this family’s life instantly. It’s a six-hour drive from where I live to Minneapolis. So I drove home, and by the time I got home, there’s an email from my customers saying everybody is starting to feel better already. All they did was remove the area rugs and put them in the garage. They were actually talking about either replacing the material or actually building a new home because they didn’t know what to do.
[01:50:56] Ashley James: What did they do with the area rugs? Did they throw them out? I mean, you don’t want to donate them. Were they waiting for them to off-gas?
[01:51:03] Andy Pace: That’s a dilemma. I mean, that’s one of those environmental sustainability dilemmas. You don’t want to throw it out to add to a landfill. You don’t want to donate them because it’s dangerous. Again, it’s not always dangerous to everybody because they don’t have as small of a bucket as they had. So I’m not exactly sure what they ended up doing with them. I do know that they replaced them with healthier area rugs and it made a difference.
So formaldehyde we know is a big, big trigger, and that’s why we use this FRAT system now to help test homes. I have clients around the world sending me samples of what they want to install, and we’re going to test it first. So let me get back to Dr. Rosalyn Anderson who is doing the testing of this carpet. It got me testing carpet in homes like regular wall-to-wall carpet, and people would hire me to test 30-year-old carpet. I’d find that 30-year-old carpet still off-gases toxic levels of formaldehyde.
[01:52:04] Ashley James: Does this test heat it up? I’m sorry to interrupt. Does this test heat up the carpet, or is it just testing it at the same temperature like 70 degrees?
[01:52:12] Andy Pace: Pacificity at room temperature. I’ve done some elevated heat tests just to show the difference. But when I test carpet in somebody’s home, I always test it at the temperature that they’re going to keep it at.
[01:52:28] Ashley James: You might be coming in the fall and their windows are open and it’s 67 degrees and they like it. But in the wintertime, maybe they crank up the heat.
[01:52:41] Andy Pace: About a 10- to 15-degree variance doesn’t do much. Do you know what I found that does more? Humidity. Now, this is where it starts to really get into the wonky building science stuff. I am finding that most people’s homes and the health of the occupants are just as affected by the elevated humidity or elevated moisture than they are from the chemicals themselves. And the reason is when you get humidity in a home or moisture in a home that gets into a surface, as it evaporates out of the surface, it carries with it the chemical footprint of where it was.
So chemicals in materials are more apt to become airborne and therefore ingested, inhaled, or absorbed by us if they come off of a surface with the humidity coming from that surface.
[01:53:42] Ashley James: That makes total sense because so much of the body is water and humidity allows for toxins to travel farther and also get absorbed by the body more readily. That makes sense. So if someone’s living in the desert, the formaldehyde coming off of their carpet is less, or the body’s ability to absorb it is less?
[01:54:08] Andy Pace: It comes down to the individual, but I find that the body’s ability to absorb chemicals—there’s just more chemicals available in the air when you have higher humidity.
[01:54:30] Ashley James: Okay. So that’s good to know.
[01:54:35] Andy Pace: This is where this subject becomes there’s no right or wrong, there’s just more information. The more information we get the better. When a customer says they’re having a problem in their home, I’ll ask them, have you done an air test? Do you know what the humidity level is? Do you like to open up the windows? And they’ll say, “Yeah, we painted today and we opened up the windows.” Well, that brought in more humidity. There are so many things that could cause, which is why this is just not an exact science yet, and we really have to take each customer individually.
[01:55:11] Ashley James: Right. We got off track, but you’re telling a story of using this special machine and you’re using it on carpets. You’re finding formaldehyde, which is only one of many things that off-gases from most carpets.
[01:55:34] Andy Pace: Correct. There are many things that come off of carpets, but we always look for formaldehyde as the one thing that we can not only test for but we can control.
[01:55:46] Ashley James: Now I interviewed Dr. Ben Lynch, it’s episode 225, and he wrote a book called Dirty Genes. I highly recommend that book, and he mentioned some simple things that we can do in our lifestyle right now to reduce toxic overload. But one thing he said, which just floored me because I’ve always cooked with gas, very seldom have I used an electric stove. I’ve opted for homes, apartments, condos, or whatever that has gas. I’m a foodie, I love cooking healthy food, but gas for me is so much fun to cook with versus an electric stove or induction stove.
He says if you cook with gas, you absolutely 100% of the time have to have the ventilation on, the hood on, and there are even homes and I’m surprised I’ve met two friends who have gas stoves and have zero ventilation, zero hood. That surprised me, but what he said was if you’re using natural gas, you are breathing in formaldehyde because formaldehyde is in natural gas. I don’t know if it’s just in it or they add it to it. But it is in natural gas to the point where if you don’t ventilate, you’re breathing in more formaldehyde.
What he said was—and I’m trying to remember, he obviously can say it in more scientific terms, but it essentially causes an epigenetic shift in our gene expression in the ability for our liver to handle toxins. So it shuts down or suppresses our ability to handle toxins, which then is going to make it worse.
[01:57:18] Andy Pace: It overloads the system, and that’s the thing. Now, the flip side of that is you start cooking using electricity and now you have to be concerned about electromagnetic fields. So this is where with our clients I’ll have to say, there is no perfect solution for everybody. There’s no one thing that helps everybody. So Ben is right in saying that if you’re cooking with gas, it has to be well ventilated, and I’ll take that one step further.
If you’re going to use a gas range top or stove, you better make sure it’s the absolute best quality unit you can afford because as the quality level goes up—and this is why I always recommend using Wolf, Viking, or Thermador. I know they’re very expensive, but when you get to the more expensive units, they have sealed burners. So yes, when you’re cooking you have to have the vent on. But what if you’re not cooking? What if the unit is just sitting there being unused? The lesser quality systems will actually leak little bits of gas out of each burner.
I own a natural gas detector, and I go around to some people’s homes. It’s like oh my gosh, this is a toxic level of gas that’s coming out. And beyond that, even with the expensive units, you have to be concerned about the connections of the gas pipe itself. Making sure that was done properly and you inspect it every couple of years to make sure it’s not leaking. Because that’s where you’re going to get natural gas leaking in your home passively without you even using the stove.
Nobody is going to run their exhaust hood 24/7 in case that happens. We only run it when we’re using the stove. So be mindful of the quality. If you know somebody with a meter or buy one yourself and just check it. I use it around the house all the time to make sure that my furnace isn’t leaking, my hot water heater isn’t leaking. I’ve used it in commercial buildings. I mean it’s just an invaluable tool.
[01:59:41] Ashley James: That is so fascinating. What other things are really common that is mind-blowing that people don’t know about?
[01:59:52] Andy Pace: So inside of a home, when it comes to chemical toxicity or chemical off-gassing, 90% of what you can experience in that indoor air quality is going to be because of things you can see and touch. Floors are number one. Floors are always the first thing we look for, and obviously, you know how I feel about carpet, but floors, in general, can be the biggest offender in a home. Second thing, walls and ceilings. All of your painted, wallpapered, or finished surfaces. The third thing would be cabinetry and woodwork. The last thing would be your own furnishings and finishes. Your window treatments, your furniture, your clothing, and things like that.
Those four things cover 90% of the potential toxins in your home. Insulation behind the walls, sheathing, roofing materials, additives in concrete—things like that only constitutes up to 10% of the toxicity. The problem is that when you’re remodeling a home, you typically don’t get involved in testing or fixing those things. You typically only have one chance to choose the right materials for those applications, and that’s during new construction.
So if you’re living in an apartment, if you’re living in a home that you just want to help and you can’t do anything structural, and I’m not saying throw out your furniture, throw out this, throw out that. When it comes time to buy something new, then let’s try to choose things that are organically sourced materials that are actually being sold as being free of health hazards and toxins.
You can’t really replace your cabinetry when you’re renting, but you can improve the indoor air quality by maybe getting a portable air purifier. Keep in mind that the bedroom in anybody’s residence, home apartment, it doesn’t matter. If you own, you rent, the bedroom is the sanctuary, it should be. This is where we spend, hopefully, six to eight hours a night and the body regenerates itself. You have to be in a pristine environment in order for the body to do its best work. Make sure that is the healthiest room.
[02:02:45] Ashley James: I have an Austin air filter and we got it a few years ago. My son has had some issues with asthma, which we finally figured out was related to some allergies, which no one in our family has these allergies so we’re like what’s going on. But sometimes kids will grow out of them. It has allowed us to dive into this world of looking to clean up the air quality even better.
A few years ago—I think it was about three years ago—there were some really bad forest fires in BC, in Washington, and the whole western seaboard was basically on fire a few years ago, as it was this last year. Back then we didn’t have an air filter. I wasn’t even thinking about it. We had all the windows open, and it was kind of really hot. I think it was maybe August or September. It was so hot out that we had a box fan blowing cool air into the bedroom. Of course, it was blowing all the smoke into the bedroom, and I wasn’t really thinking about it because there weren’t any forest fires near us. But the air quality was so poor that it damaged our lungs. All of us ended up, within a month or two, with bronchitis.
I talked to my Naturopath who said that pretty much all of her clients that didn’t have an air filter ended up with some form of bronchitis or pneumonia, and that’s what led me to look into this. I kind of was like hitting myself because I’m so into health, how could this have been in my blind spot? But this is how we learn. After research and talking to a lot of holistic doctors, I ended up getting an Austin air filter. It is an investment, it’s between $600 and $800, depending on the unit you get. I decided to get the one that removes mold and viruses. I mean really tiny particles, and we have loved it.
When we walk into the bedroom, it actually smells like a forest. The air changes when we walk in. It’s very interesting, and I don’t particularly feel like I live in a toxic home, but that air filter we run in the bedroom, and it really does change the feeling of the air, the smell of the air—just the quality overall. We run it all night long, and now I don’t even want to sleep without it on. I just love it.
[02:05:11] Andy Pace: That’s my personal favorite brand too. As a matter of fact, you speak of the fires that were happening a couple of years ago. I had a customer of ours living in Northern California that actually went around to all of her neighbors in her subdivision because she bought one from us, loved it so much she went to every neighbor in her subdivision and said if you want to improve the air quality of your home instantly, you need one of these. She organized the purchase of two pallets, two full shipping pallets of Austin airs to be shipped to her house so she could get them to all the neighbors.
[02:05:51] Ashley James: I just love her. The big one, the one that I got that’s like the big bedroom unit does 1500 square feet. When there is bad air quality from the fires, we move it out into the living room, which is kind of the grand room and it very quickly recycles or cleans out all the air pretty much in all the major living spaces in the house.
Don’t cheap out and get the small one because you can move it around. It’s on wheels and you can move it around different parts of the home. If you’re hanging out in the kitchen, living room, dining room area during the day, just have it running there. I’ve moved it into the office before. It’s a little overkill in a 200 square foot office, but better than getting the smaller unit and then regretting not being able to clean out the whole house.
[02:06:43] Andy Pace: Right, and the larger units just do it quicker also in those smaller rooms. That’s the only limitation of a portable is that it can only really purify the air in the space that it’s in. Because we sell the Austins and we’ve been very happy with that, but we have a lot of situations where customers are looking for a whole-house solution. They have kids in different bedrooms and people in different areas of the home. There are whole-house solutions as well, but tell you what, Austin has the highest amount of carbon in their units of any other system we’ve used before. They’re just highly effective, they work. They might be a little noisy for some people. I’m used to it.
[02:07:29] Ashley James: I like the sound. I don’t know. It doesn’t make a squeaking noise or any kind of high-pitched noise. It’s just a nice whooshing sound. It’s air moving, and I got used to it really fast and actually enjoyed the sound. We put it on medium when we’re sleeping, but when I first go into the bedroom, I’ll turn it on high and let it do its thing. And then I put it on medium and I find that that speed for me is great. I don’t like the sound of the low speed. I resonate with the medium speed sound. It’s not annoying at all for me. I do know some people who are like I can’t sleep with any sound on. And then for me, I’m like, okay, well then have it run on high for a few hours before you go to bed and then turn it off, or just try to get used to it.
[02:08:14] Andy Pace: yeah I turn it on high when I leave for the office, and I turn it on medium or low when I get home.
[02:08:19] Ashley James: That’s a good idea. And these filters last forever. They’re four or five years before you have to replace it. It’s not like something you have to replace every few months like the filters in your furnace. I was thinking, you have been in this business for so long, having been connected to so many people around the world, is there a country that’s doing it right? Is there a country that you can say like Finland? Is there just a country without a doubt, across the board, has healthier homes?
[02:08:51] Andy Pace: This is going to be an interesting conversation I think because I used to hear this all the time from people. I wish we did things like they did in Europe. Well, you have to remember that here in North America, the way we build homes is based upon what we have the most access to. In Europe, the way they build homes is what they have the most access to. It just so happens that here in North America, we are plentiful with hardwood. So homes since the 1600s have been built using a lot of wood. The problem is there are not a lot of homes that remain from the 1600s because wood is a natural material that eventually breaks down. It eventually absorbs water, warps, and molds, and cracks and is subject to weathering.
When I was in Italy many years ago, the villa that I stayed in was built in the 1400s. And it still operates today as a hotel 600 years later. The Colosseum built 2,000 years ago still stands. Why is this? And that’s because they use a lot of stone, a lot of concrete because that’s what’s plentiful there. Now, of course, they’ve adapted to the marketplace, and they’ve started using wood for a lot of construction. But you got to remember that they still have that mindset of using materials that last a long time.
Homes in Sicily when I was there on that same trip, they’re not designed to be the latest fashion and the latest color and craze. They’re designed to last because they pass them along to the next generation.
Carpet, this is a good example of here, in the United States, we use a lot of carpets. In Europe, they don’t use a lot of carpets. If they have carpet in their house, it’s typically a wool rug, and it’s typically a wool rug that they can roll up and take with them if they ever move because wool lasts 80 years. Whereas the plastic and synthetic carpets that we use here are designed to last 7 to 20 years at maximum because we typically either move or we get bored with what we have and we want to change it to make it look different.
It’s the mindset of that. They’re not as concerned about trends, fashions, and comfort per se. They’re more concerned about cost, longevity, and passing along to the next generation. So I guess I’d say Europe has a lot of things on us. Older countries than the United States, the United States is so young. We’re only a few hundred years old. When you take an airplane from New York to Los Angeles and you notice that 99% of what you fly over is greenery and not homes, they’re not people, you’re flying over unhabituated space.
When you go to Europe and you say well Italy’s got 50 some million people living in it, and it’s the size of the state of Wisconsin. We’ve got 5 ½ million people. It’s that there are more people there. They’ve been around longer there. They’ve learned to live within their environment. So that’s just the way it’s done. There are a lot of countries that still don’t do things like refrigeration for foods because they can’t afford it or they don’t have a good electrical grid. They buy the food that they prepare for the day, and whatever’s left they don’t save for tomorrow, they usually give it to the farm animals. That’s done. Tomorrow we’ll buy food for tomorrow. And so that’s the mindset they have.
They do a lot of recycling because they have to, they don’t have a choice. Now, I wish there are things that they would do that were better. I think the rest of the world does a very, very poor job in recycling specifically plastics. I think the United States leads the world in recycling, and the reason is because we’ve figured out a way to monetize it and make it worth everybody’s while. So there are things that we are doing here. I think from a health aspect, we’re doing some things that are better than what’s done in Europe. But I just think that they have that mindset of longer-lasting and therefore they look at things a little bit differently.
[02:14:20] Ashley James: Only coming from the standpoint of a healthy home, and I love that explanation because it’s true. It’s based on the history of the culture, it’s based on the materials that are readily available. But in terms of only looking through the lens of a healthier home or the healthiest homes, is there a country out there that is standing above the rest who has better regulations? Who their version of the EPA is actually doing their job, or they don’t allow for formaldehyde in their carpets? Is there any country that’s just really standing above the rest?
[02:15:04] Andy Pace: I think that there are a number of European countries that are doing some things that in my eyes just really stick out just from a common-sense standpoint. And I’ll be fair, there are some states here in the US that are also doing that. There are some states now where it’s building code you have to put in a heat recovery ventilator to bring in the fresh air. Because as we talked about a little while ago in our discussion, new homes are being built so tight that we’re not getting those natural air flows into the home, natural fresh air because it’s against the building science to have energy leaks.
Well, the state of Minnesota several years ago adopted into their building code that you have to have an air exchange system for new construction to bring in the fresh air because they recognize that these homes are being built so energy tight, so efficient that people aren’t getting enough fresh air so I think that’s happening.
[02:16:14] Ashley James: Right. Especially if someone has a few fireplaces going, they’re really burning through their oxygen.
[02:16:21] Andy Pace: It sucks all the oxygen out of the house, right?
[02:16:23] Ashley James: Yeah, scary.
[02:16:24] Andy Pace: Now, I worked with an automobile manufacturer many years ago—BMW out of Germany. At the time, ng this is when they just started manufacturing cars here in the US. One of their material vendors in Michigan was supplying a plywood component for their SUVs. So when you open up the back hatch there’s a flat panel and you lift up that panel, that’s where the spare tire was. Well, that flat panel was being made from plywood. It was Malaysian plywood that they were bringing into the states, and they were putting carpet on one side and paint on the underside.
Well, the SUVs for BMW were only being made in the United States, they weren’t making these in Germany. So they had to export essentially the SUV to Germany to be sold for the German market. The German government wouldn’t allow this SUV to be sold in Germany because the plywood was releasing formaldehyde.
[02:17:35] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.
[02:17:37] Andy Pace: And in Germany, if you make a car that’s to be sold in the German market, there cannot be formaldehyde in the air, in the cab. So this company had something like $2million dollars’ worth of cut plywood to be installed into the BMW SUV, and it halted production because the German government wouldn’t allow it.
Now, we were able to provide them with a couple of AFM coatings to solve that problem, and it met the requirements of zero formaldehyde because the safe coat coatings covered up the off-gassing.
[02:18:13] Ashley James: Now, did they give you a BMW X5 as a gift?
[02:18:19] Andy Pace: I wish. But no, it actually got me on the whole kick of finding manufacturers that utilize healthier processes.
[02:18:27] Ashley James: That’s really cool.
[02:18:28] Andy Pace: I mean, if you’re looking for a healthy vehicle, if you buy a BMW, it’s got to be one that was made in Germany for the German market that they also exported to the US.
[02:18:40] Ashley James: Could it be any German car though? I have a VW, I love it. I love my VW. I’ve had BMWs in the past, I’m not actually a fan of new BMWs anymore. In my opinion, their quality has gone down. We have a 1983 BMW and that thing’s still kicking.
[02:19:01] Andy Pace: Oh yeah, it’s solid.
[02:19:03] Ashley James: It’s solid. My husband just replaced the engine a few years ago, but the newer ones, they’re really only meant to last till the end of the warranty, and you do not want to be out of warranty. We saw that coming. But with the VWs, they’re a lot of fun. They’re really great on gas mileage. I’m very impressed.
[02:19:22] Andy Pace: I’ve owned many VW’s over the years, and I absolutely love them. So yes, German cars—
[02:19:28] Ashley James: Made in Germany for Germans, basically. You got to make sure it’s not made for the US market.
[02:19:35] Andy Pace: That’s it, that’s the thing. And a number of these manufacturers now are starting to make cars in North America, so that changes the dynamics. So you got to look for something that was built in Germany.
[02:19:49] Ashley James: We need to—as a consumer—petition the US government, and for Canadians petition the Canadian government to raise the standards.
[02:20:01] Andy Pace: Yes. This is the problem we get into because of lobbying by the big companies. And again, there is no standard for health. All the standards that are being written—at least what I’ve seen—are based upon VOCs. This whole concept of VOCs is just ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. People use a VOC like oh, I bought this paint, it’s zero VOC. I guess I’m safe. I guess I can paint in my house with the windows closed and no mask on. No, there have been class-action lawsuits against paint manufacturers because of people getting sick because their zero VOC paint is less healthy than their regular stuff.
The FTC here in the US has fined many paint companies because their zero VOC paint basically dupes the public. Utilizing a VOC as the one and only metric to determine whether or not a product is safe is dangerous because of everything we talked about before.
[02:21:14] Ashley James: Fascinating. Just because you’ve got a whole list of companies, give me a few more. So like you said, cars built in Germany. Not necessarily just BMW, but all cars built in Germany for Germans. Are there any other countries or major products that you are like yes, this is the one to go with when it comes to buying major, like you said, appliances or major purchases for the home?
[02:21:41] Andy Pace: So like I said before when you’re buying appliances, specifically gas appliances, getting the higher-end materials unfortunately are far more expensive but are less likely to have gas leaks. So that’s going to be things like Wolf, Viking, Thermador. Even the GE Profile, really good brand. These units will have sealed burners. It makes them more efficient for cooking because if it says that a burner is 16,000 BTU, you don’t want a leak that lowers the BTU output. So that’s what you’re paying for. You’re paying for that 16,000 BTU.
Again, it’s interesting how everything kind of comes back to this. The quality level of the product also means that it’s a healthier material. So if I’m buying 99¢ a square foot flooring from some big box store, chances are if the average price of similar material—just an average price—is $3 a square foot, and the price of really good material is $5 a square foot, chances are the 99¢ per square foot product is going to be inferior in quality and in health. There are some exceptions. There are always exceptions, but generally speaking, you get what you pay for.
[02:23:14] Ashley James: And those companies have to cut corners.
[02:23:17] Andy Pace: It’s coming from somewhere folks. It’s coming from the cost of manufacturing. Paint, I referred to this before. Paint that’s $20 a gallon is not going to last as long as paint that’s $70 a gallon. And I’m not just talking about AFM safe coat, I’m talking about Benjamin Moore Aura, which is $70 a gallon. Great product. It’s not necessarily considered healthier, but it’s a great long-lasting material.
Paints can off-gas anywhere from three and a half years to five years on a wall. Once it’s reached a full cure—coalescing of the film—the material still continues to off-gas, and this is something that I think a lot of people don’t understand. Chemical off-gassing and I referred to this throughout our conversation, is actually the release of unreacted chemical monomers from a cured or a solid-state of a surface. Paint can off-gas for three and a half to five years. Little bits and pieces of some of the components that come off as kind of like dust from a surface.
Formaldehyde can off-gas from the carpet. I’ve tested carpet up to 30 years old that still off-gases formaldehyde. Plywood because of the urea-formaldehyde used in the glues. I’ve tested 35-year-old engineered wood that off-gases formaldehyde because we cover it up with other flooring materials and it stops off-gassing because it’s covered up. Open it back up again and remodel, you’re just exposing it to come back out again.
So all these things can off-gas for very long periods of time. You may not smell it, you may not know it, you personally may not even sense it, but somebody in the house might. And you combine that with all the other things that are in the home that are off-gassing and it creates this chemical soup. So the average home that’s built today has anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 chemicals in it just from the manufacturing of the home, the building of the home.
Formaldehyde is just one of those chemicals. It happens to be the one that’s probably the biggest problem causer, but there are so many other things that come off of the surface. And then you have somebody that walks in the home that has freshly dry cleaned clothes or maybe, God forbid, they smoked a cigarette on the way home. And that adds another 2500 chemicals. You can see where we get inundated with chemicals on a daily basis.
There is no perfect way to take care of this, I wish there was. I wish there was the perfect healthy home. I wish there was a perfectly healthy product. So what we try to do as a company, as a consultant is to help lower the exposure. We’re never going to get it, 100% folks, it’s just impossible. But we’re going to try to get it lower. We don’t strive for perfection, we strive for tolerance. Let’s get that overall load lower so maybe it’s not going to fill up that bucket at all in your lifetime. Or at least get to a point where we make the home tolerable.
People who have lived in that one room of their home covered in aluminum foil understand they’re not going to get perfection. They want perfection because they’ve lived with this horrible problem for years, but they also understand if I can just make it tolerable, I know that when I leave my home I’m going to get inundated with chemicals from other people. But when I come home at least I’m coming to a healthy sanctuary, and that’s what we strive for.
[02:27:09] Ashley James: I love it. Well, you are such a fantastic resource, and of course, I definitely recommend listeners checking out your podcast so they could continue learning from you. They could give you a call and hire you for a quick consult like a 15-minute or a longer consult if they’re looking at replacing flooring or replacing cabinetry, or if they’re just got some concerns about what’s in their house, or thinking about repainting that kind of stuff. We haven’t even scratched the surface. You have so many years of experience, and you, like me, love to dive in and learn. You have had experience with thousands upon thousands of clients. I’m sure there are areas we didn’t even get to talk about today, but we did cover some really well-rounded things and shed light on more of the common things that people need to know about when it comes to the environment of their home.
I like that we touched on cars because we spend a lot of time in our home and a lot of time in our cars. Obviously less time on our cars than our home, but sometimes cars can be a more toxic environment especially in the winter. We’re not cracking open the windows, we’re not breathing in the fresh air, and we can quickly build up the things that are off-gassing—all the flame retardants and stuff that are in our cars in the air. You may not experience any symptoms now, but it is filling your bucket and other family members or pets may be worse off than you and not know it. That’s maybe why some people in your home are more prone to aches and pains, are more prone to headaches, are more prone to being fatigued, or having sleep problems. Very common signs of just the body having to deal with more toxins.
To wrap things up, what are some actionable steps that people can take? Should we just open our windows even if it’s the wintertime? You’ve already mentioned getting an Austin air filter. They could actually buy it from you, which is great. Are there any others—I don’t want to say quick fixes, and you did mention getting some handheld device that they can test to make sure their appliances aren’t leaking gas? Is there something they could do today, some actual steps they can take today to start to turn things around in the environment of their home?
[02:29:39] Andy Pace: So a lot of that has to do with their living situation, whether they own or they rent. But the first thing I’ll say is if you are just noticing a general uncomfortableness when you’re in your house, you have flu-like symptoms. I know right now it’s a little difficult because as you say, we’re all spending a lot more time in our homes than ever before, and COVID is running rampant. I myself have had it, and it can give you all those same flu-like symptoms. But if generally speaking, when you come back home to your place of living, if you just don’t feel comfortable—there could be anxiety issues. These are all symptoms of some type of indoor air quality problem. Be it from chemical exposure, mold exposure, or even electromagnetic field exposure.
So I recommend getting your air quality tested. There are some pretty inexpensive systems on the market that allow you to test the indoor air quality of your home to at least give you an idea of what we’re dealing with. And then from that, again, carpet is an issue, area rugs can be an issue, but most important is to make your bedroom a healthy sanctuary. At least try to get those six to eight hours a night of really undisturbed healthy time to allow your body to heal. Make sure you’re using cleaning materials that aren’t adding to the chemical toxic soup in your house.
Probably the best thing I can say for people who are renting is, as a consumer, at least the things that you bring into your house try to make sure that you are doing your best to eliminate chemical off-gassing. Again, it’s very difficult as a renter because a lot of times you’re buying furniture from the big boxes to fill the space and a lot of times, that furniture is made with formaldehyde laden particle boards and plywoods. But if you can, if the budget allows, find better quality materials. It means usually getting products that are made with solid woods. The side benefit is it’s going to be a healthier piece of furniture.
So things like that. Just think about how the product might be made, and maybe, if that means holding off on buying something until you can afford something that is of higher quality, that’s going to help you in the long run.
[02:32:32] Ashley James: I love it. Everyone wants to save money, but when you look at buying furniture the cheaper, the material the quicker the furniture is going to break down, and then you have to replace it more often. My bed, for example, I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of health experts before we settled on the type of mattress we were going to buy. And I am so thankful we did because the mattress we bought, not only is it non-toxic and they really pride themselves on this. They’ll even give you 100% of the whole list of chemicals or building materials that have been used to make this bed, but it’s also designed to make the deepest, most healing restorative sleep.
If you’re sleeping on something for eight hours and your face is right against it, you could be breathing in God knows what, and there are so many mattresses that have flame retardants and all that kind of stuff that you could be breathing in. I’m so happy that my bed is one of those that don’t. Just like you said, you make healthy buildings, and this is a healthy bed. It’s an investment, it’s a more expensive mattress. It’s double the price of normal mattresses, but they also have a guarantee that it lasts for 20 years or more. They stand behind that. They’ll replace your mattress if there’s any warping or at all for 20 years. Normally, people will replace mattresses every five years because they warp.
The cheaper ones just don’t hold up and they cause health problems like back pain and then you have to go to the chiropractor. Some people just choose to get on medication for pain not realizing that they’re cheaper mattresses they saved money on one end, but it costs them on the other end. It’s better to invest in the furniture and the bed that is going to last for 20 years and also be the healthiest for you, and I like that that goes hand in hand. The quality of your health is often something that’s going to last longer.
Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been so enlightening, and I know my listeners are going to love following you. Andy Pace, it’s been such a pleasure. Your website is thegreendesigncenter.com, and of course, the links to everything that Andy does is going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. And you’ve got your podcast. Give us the plug again, what’s the name of your podcast?
[02:35:01] Andy Pace: Non Toxic Environments, three words. You’re going to find it on iTunes, of course, and all the major podcast providers.
[02:35:10] Ashley James: Fantastic. And Andy, I want you to come back anytime you have some new exciting information or if there’s a topic which we haven’t explored yet that you think worth teaching us on. Come back, I’d love to have you back.
[02:35:24] Andy Pace: I would absolutely love to. You can tell I love to talk, so that’s not a problem.
[02:35:28] Ashley James: You’re in good company. We love to listen to you.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Andy Pace. Wasn’t that amazing, so eye-opening, especially I just love that story about how BMW. They can sell formaldehyde-soaked vehicles to us here in the United States, but they can’t manufacture their own formaldehyde-soaked vehicles and then import them from America into Germany because Germany has higher standards. I mean doesn’t that just blow your mind? And that happens everywhere.
And that story about the EPA’s own building is so toxic that it has done permanent damage to 100+ employees these last 10 years. I mean, they must just be kicking themselves. The idea that they themselves rubber-stamped and approved all the chemicals that were used in the building process of their new building, and is something we have to deeply consider when purchasing anything for our environment, for our home. Just because you can’t smell it and you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not doing irreparable damage to our bodies, to our families, and to our pets.
I’m just so happy that we had Andy on today so that he could share with us this information. This kind of information will empower you. And no matter what your budget is, there is a way to make sure that future choices are healthier ones or non-toxic ones for us, and I’m so looking forward to my future choices being more educated ones because of all the work that Andy’s done and he provides for us.
Now, be sure to go to learntruehealth.com/bed, even if you’re not thinking about buying a mattress right now, it’s still really good information to have. And please share it with your friends and family who might be looking for a mattress, especially those who have been in pain who are experiencing inflammation, stiffness, and regularly having to go to the chiropractor because they’re constantly out. They’re like, how did my neck go out, how did my back go out? I was just sleeping.
Well, they definitely have to see this webinar. Learntruehealth.com/bed, check it out. Let me know what you think. I am such a raving fan of this company because they have taken all the materials that are non-toxic to make an amazing bed, but then they created the science to make a bed be the healthiest for us in terms of the deepest, most restorative sleep possible. And of course, we go into discussing that and teaching more about that in the webinar. So go to learntruehealth.com/bed.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode and all the other episodes. And of course, you can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function on the website to check out all of the rest of our great interviews. If you are curious about different topics, just type that topic into the search bar and you’ll find us. And if you’re on LBRY, be sure to check us out there as well. The links will be in the show notes of today’s podcast. That’s just another platform that you can find our podcast.
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Fermenting Kit that Ashley recommends: https://amzn.to/3oz2XHJ
Specials:
Energybits - LearnTrueHealth.com/energybits - Use coupon code LTH
Medicinal Aloe - LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe - Use coupon code LTH2020
At Home Test - Viome.com - Use coupon code LTHSandor's website https://www.wildfermentation.com
Food Fermentation: Process, Benefits, Foods to Try, Tips, and More!https://www.learntruehealth.com/food-fermentation
Highlights:
How fermented foods affect the immune system Vinegar pickle vs. fermented pickle Fermented foods and beverages are full of unique metabolic byproducts Pre-digestion of fermented foods makes the nutrients more bioavailable Can fermented foods be frozen?Have you ever made your own fermented food or drink? In this episode, Sandor Ellix Katz, founder of wildfermentation.com, talks about what foods can be fermented and the basics of fermenting food. He explains the benefits of eating fermented foods. He also gives some tips on how to encourage kids to eat fermented food.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode today is about gut health and fun things that you can do in your kitchen right now to help you build a healthier, happier gut. Before we get to today’s episode, I got to tell you about three resources that have been life-changing, not only for me but for many of my listeners. We actually have specials on right now that this company is offering us.
The first one I want to talk about is Stockton Aloe. I had the founder on my show. He is a doctor who has a very unique company. It’s medicinal aloe, and it is the only company that delivers fresh aloe harvested the same day and totally unadulterated. It’s considered raw aloe, it is not processed at all other than they fillet it, and they remove the gel from the inside, excluding the outer layers of the aloe, the outer skins, which can cause irritability in the gut. Often, most aloe drinks on the market don’t exclude those, so most aloe drinks out there produce diarrhea, which is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to help heal the good.
There are many studies that show that by consuming, drinking medicinal aloe that we speed up healing time, not only in our gut but also in other parts of the body. People notice that their skin is more radiant. They’re noticing their face is looking more beautiful and their skin is more toned. Obviously, their hair, their nails, and their digestion are better. Everything starts to get better.
I’ve personally given some aloe to a few friends who’ve had some serious medical conditions. I had a friend who was going through cyclical vomiting from a migraine that triggers vomiting, and she was just in absolutely dire straits. I gave her a jug of this and she said it was totally life-changing to drink it every day. I’ve had several friends that have had these similar issues like IBS or heartburn, and with all of them, I’ve noticed that by them drinking this aloe, they immediately see results.
What’s really fun is that when our family had a bout of what might have been food poisoning, or it might have been some little gastrointestinal bug. I’m not sure what it was, but our whole family was sort of down and out for the count. Our little son, I got him to start drinking the aloe right away as we had the unfortunate experience of basically having all the symptoms of food poisoning. We all started drinking it, but what I noticed is that it immediately stopped the vomiting. It stopped indigestion, it stopped nausea.
Our son, who I believe was four at the time, started really enjoying it. It doesn’t taste like candy so to have a kid actually like something that’s healthy for you is exciting. And then when one of his friends had a gut issue, my son said, “Hey, drink aloe. It’s really good for you.” To hear a little kid start giving health advice to his other kid friend, it was a very proud mom moment there. But what I’ve noticed is by drinking this, it makes a huge difference in gut health.
And since today’s episode is all about gut health, I have to let you know you’ve got to also listen to that interview that I have. You can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe and use the coupon code LTH2020. That’s all of December we’re going to get a discount from them. He also gifts us his aloe cream as well which is really nice as a hand cream, especially if you’ve been washing your hands extra or using hand sanitizers extra, you might notice your skin is a bit irritable. I really do enjoy his hand cream. It doesn’t leave your hands feeling greasy, and it’s full of aloe so it’s very rich in moisture but not in grease. He includes that as well.
And then what you do is it comes frozen, you keep it in the freezer. When you’re ready to drink it, it is absolutely fresh. Now, we do talk about it in the interview. I highly recommend going to learntruehealth.com and just searching aloe, checking out that interview, and listening to it because he does share a lot of science behind why drinking aloe is so good, not only for healing the gut but for other conditions as well. To buy it, go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. Use coupon code LTH2020.
The other company I really, really like is ENERGYbits. I’ve had Catharine Arnston, the founder of ENERGYbits on the show I believe at least seven times. She has amazing information that she shares about utilizing the healing power of algae specifically chlorella, and her chlorella is only one of a few handful of companies out there that guarantees no heavy metals and no lead. Most chlorellas, if you go to the health food store, go to whatever store and you buy some chlorella, there’ll be a little warning that says that it can cause cancer. Well, that’s because most companies, how they process their chlorella, add lead to it which is clearly not healthy. But her ENERGYbits does not have any heavy metals or lead, and she tests them both in the United States and where she grows the crop as well. She talks all about the quality of her ENERGYbits.
What I love about chlorella is it provides a plethora of vitamins and it does have minerals in it, but it also contains readily available amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. So for someone who’s looking to heal the gut and get readily available nutrition from a food source, this is considered a superfood, then you would love ENERGYbits. Go to learntruehealth.com/energybits. That’s learntruehealth.com/energybits and use coupon code LTH to get the best discount.
I’ve really enjoyed them. I also interviewed several doctors actually who all talk about using chlorella to naturally and safely remove heavy metals from the body because it does something inside of us where it will chelate or bind to heavy metals. You can use chlorella as part of your very gentle detox, and in fact, it’s even safe for children. I’ve had Dr. Klinghardt talk about how he uses chlorella routinely with children, especially those children who have autism-like symptoms from heavy metal deposits in their neurology. That’s very exciting. You can absolutely type in chlorella into Learn True Health in the search engine at learntruehealth.com to listen to those interviews and learn more about chlorella. And to purchase it, go to learntruehealth.com/energybits. Again, use coupon code LTH.
The last company I want to tell you about is viome.com. I recently had both the founder and one of the chief science officers on the show—both amazing interviews. I’ve really enjoyed my results with Viome. It’s an at-home test where you give them a very small stool sample and blood sample and mail it to them. They test over 100,000 genetic pathways that are of your microbiome, of your gut bacteria, and of your mitochondria. And then from that, based on the chemicals that your microbiome produces from the food you eat, then they tell you what kind of diet you can eat to further enhance your health and what foods you should avoid based on the chemicals that your gut produces.
Basically, we have a six-pound pharmacy living in our gut known as our microbiome. What is healthy food to me might be actually toxic food to you based on the chemicals that your microbiome produces. They also give you superfood and supplement recommendations to optimize gut health, and it really, really works. I’ve been very impressed. So to learn more about that, you can type Viome into the search box at learntruehealth.com and listen to those interviews to get the test kit, which right now they have a great special on this month for Learn True Health listeners. Go to viome.com and use coupon code LTH. Check it out, I know you’re going to love it.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this information with those you care about. I want to see absolutely everyone listening to this show producing amazing gut health and going into the new year with really healthy, strong guts. Let’s all focus on feeling great and getting to a whole new level of health and vitality for 2021.
[00:09:22] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 452. I’m very excited for today’s guest. We have with us Sandor Ellix Katz, the founder of wildfermentation.com. I’m such a huge fan of live culture fermented foods, and the best way you can eat them is when you do it yourself. It’s actually really easy. I was so nervous about fermenting foods because I thought maybe I’d give myself food poisoning. It’s really hard to mess up once you learn the basics, and I’m so excited that we’re going to learn from Sandor today the health benefits of eating our own homemade fermented foods. Welcome to the show.
[00:10:10] Sandor Ellix Katz: Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be with you.
[00:10:13] Ashley James: Absolutely. Go back to your life. Tell us your life story about fermentation. What happened in your life that made you become incredibly passionate about spreading this information?
[00:10:24] Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I would say that there were a few steps in the development of my interest in fermentation. The first was as a kid, I loved pickles. My grandparents were immigrants to the US from what’s now Belarus. In our kitchen or in our refrigerator, we always had eastern European style fermented cucumber pickles. I just loved that flavor. I didn’t know how they were made, I wasn’t thinking about fermentation, but I was very drawn to the lactic acid flavor of fermentation.
I spent a couple of years when I was in my mid-20s following a macrobiotic diet and macrobiotics places some emphasis on the digestive benefit of pickles and other kinds of live culture foods. I started noticing that these pickles that I had always loved to eat that whenever I would eat them I would feel the salivary glands under my tongue squirting out saliva. I began to associate these foods in a very concrete way with getting my digestive juices flowing. I started really eating them regularly as a health practice, but still, I wasn’t making them myself.
The catalyst to learn how to make them myself was that in 1993, I moved from my hometown of New York City to rural Tennessee, and I started gardening. I was such a naive city kid that it had never occurred to me that in a garden, all of the cabbage would be ready at about the same time, and all the radishes would be ready at about the same time. The first year I was gardening—when I was faced with this reality that in retrospect seems really obvious—I decided I’d better learn how to make sauerkraut. I knew I loved sauerkraut. I knew that sauerkraut had something to do with preserving cabbage.
I looked in the most basic American cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, and I found out I’ve had a recipe for sauerkraut. I saw how incredibly simple the process was. I shredded a couple of cabbages, salted them, added some caraway seeds, smashed them a little bit, and packed them into a crock. I just fell in love with the simplicity and ease of the process, and then I started playing around with different vegetables, sourdough, country wines, and yogurt making. Before I knew it, I just was down the rabbit hole of fermentation.
At first, it was just a personal obsession, and then I got a little bit of a reputation. I was teased by my friends for always showing up with sauerkraut, but I did get invited—after a few years—to teach a sauerkraut making workshop at a local event that was described as a food skill share event. I just loved teaching about it. I loved demystifying the process for people. I mean, you mentioned that you were a little bit scared the first time that you fermented vegetables. That’s a very common reaction, and for whatever reason, I never had that.
But as soon as I started teaching about fermentation, I came into contact with people projecting their anxiety about bacteria onto the process. It turned out, it was really fun and interesting to figure out how to demystify it for people and make people more comfortable with it. The initial teaching experiences led me to self-publishing a small pamphlet of my recipes, and then I decided to expand that into a larger book. What began as a book tour in 2003 just became a way of life as an itinerant fermentation educator.
At this point, I’d say I’ve probably taught a thousand workshops. I have a few different books. Wild Fermentation is the original book that I wrote. The Art of Fermentation is a bigger book that came out in 2012, and actually, I’ve just published another book that’s not so much about how to ferment things but it’s called Fermentation as Metaphor. It’s sort of addressing how we use the word fermentation in the English language also to describe really any kind of phenomenon that would be bubbly and get things agitated and mixed up. Anyway, I have lots of different interests in fermentation, and I love to share them with people.
[00:15:05] Ashley James: Now, it doesn’t sound like you had any major health issues. Did you notice anything shifting in your body as you continued to incorporate more and more fermented foods? Did anything change about your health?
[00:15:18] Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I mean I definitely have had health issues. I’ve been living since 1991 with HIV, so I’m approaching my 30th anniversary of living with HIV. The thing is that these foods have always been part of my life. Even before I was thinking about them as a health practice, I was eating pickles all the time, I was eating yogurt all the time. I would say what I notice more is sometimes in my international travels, I find myself in places where I don’t have regular access to live fermented foods. I notice the absence of them. I notice how sluggish my digestive processes become when I’m not eating these foods, and so that really affirms for me how helpful they are in our ability to effectively digest food.
[00:16:16] Ashley James: You said 30 years you’ve been living with HIV?
[00:16:20] Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah.
[00:16:21] Ashley James: In your 30-year quest to maintain complete optimal health, and I think that you are such a prime example of what we really want to focus on is no matter what we’re faced with, let’s give our body absolute optimal health instead of buying into the fear-mongering that having a diagnosis tends to give us, especially in the mainstream. You are living in incredible health, and you’re looking every day at what you can do to give yourself that vitality. Have you seen studies or looked further into how fermented foods affect the immune system?
[00:17:02] Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, sure. Let me also just clarify for you and your listeners. I mean, I’ve been taking HIV meds since 1999. For the last 21 years, I’ve been on antiretroviral medications. I wish I could say that my story was that eating fermented foods prevented HIV from ever progressing, but I experienced the period of getting very sick and the meds completely shifted the situation.
But the one thing I would say is that almost everyone else who I’ve met who’s taken the HIV med cocktails has experienced digestive problems as a side effect of the medications, and I have never experienced that. That really affirms once again that it’s not always just a choice of one approach or another. You can be in a situation where you choose to do the medical recommendations, take the recommended medications, and still, your digestive processes are important. What you eat has a bearing on your well-being day-to-day.
Now, to answer your original question that you asked about immune function, sure, I mean there’s a lot of evidence that first of all, the bacteria of the gut are a huge part of what we call the immune system. That increasing biodiversity in the gut is a great way of improving overall immune function. In addition to the power of the probiotics and the bacteria themselves, fermented foods are nutritionally enhanced in a number of ways. Nutrients get broken down into simpler forms that are often more accessible to our bodies, so nutrients become more bioavailable. The bacteria that are fermenting the food produces various metabolic by-products, some of which have been found to have specific beneficial activity.
So for instance, fermented vegetables—which I think is the most basic, the easiest kind of ferment to make yourself at home—have these compounds called isothiocyanates, which were already of interest to cancer researchers because they’re regarded as anti-carcinogenic. Beyond ingesting the lactic acid bacteria themselves, which have this probiotic benefit, the metabolism of the organisms before you eat the kraut produces this byproduct, which is regarded to be anti-carcinogenic. The world of fermented foods and beverages is full of these unique metabolic byproducts, some of which have been found to have really powerful therapeutic potential.
[00:20:09] Ashley James: That’s so exciting. You mentioned that as part of the fermentation process, it’s almost like the plant becomes a little pre-digested for us making the nutrients inside the plant more accessible, for example, sauerkraut. Do you have any specific examples of what nutrients become more readily available to us through fermentation?
[00:20:31] Sandor Ellix Katz: Sure. The most dramatic examples of this are beyond the realm of fermenting vegetables because nutrients in vegetables tend to be fairly accessible to us but think about soybeans. The reason why nobody ever cooks and eats a bowl of soybeans for dinner is that all of that protein in the soybean—soybeans are regarded as the plant source food with the most concentrated protein, but our human bodies are not capable of extracting the protein from a soybean that has been simply cooked. That’s why people never sit down and eat a bowl of soybeans the way they might with lentils, chickpeas, or other kinds of beans. It’s just so dense that our bodies can’t access the protein.
The indigestibility of soybeans was recognized by the Asian cultures that pioneered soy agriculture thousands of years ago. They developed various ways of making it more digestible, and fermentation is the most straightforward way of making the protein of the soybean more accessible.
There are all these different methods that people use to ferment soybeans. There’s soy sauce, there’s miso, there’s tempeh, there’s natto, there are many, many other variations of fermented soybeans. They have different flavors, different methods, different organisms, different amounts of time, different environmental conditions they require, but what they all have in common is that that protein gets broken down into amino acids—the building blocks of proteins, and so they become more bioavailable to us and the soybean becomes more nutritious.
In grains and certain beans, the minerals get tied up in these chemical bonds that are called phytate bonds that our bodies can’t break down. But a long enough bacterial fermentation will break it down and so the minerals become more bioavailable. There have been all these interesting studies where—okay, I’m going to use the example of this south Indian fermented crepes called dosas that are made of a batter of lentils and rice. But if you just cook lentils and rice and send it to a lab for analysis and then you ferment it into this batter, make dosas, and send the dosas to the same lab made from the same lentils and the same rice, what you find is that the fermented food—based on the same ingredient—has much higher measurable levels of calcium, iron, and other dietary minerals. This is another example of the pre-digestion of fermentation making the nutrients in food more bioavailable.
[00:23:28] Ashley James: That is so fascinating. Do you ferment your own beans and lentils?
[00:23:33] Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, sure. I dabble in all the ferments. I mean, it’s not like I ferment everything all the time. But I actually did a workshop just the other afternoon demonstrating via Zoom how to make dosas. I have a jar of dosa batter sitting in the fridge. Every other day or so, I’ve been making some dosas and enjoying them. But I definitely ferment beans. I make miso, I make tempeh, I make natto. I do lots of fermenting.
[00:24:09] Ashley James: That sounds really cool. That sounds kind of advanced.
[00:24:13] Sandor Ellix Katz: One thing I’d just like to say generally is there is nothing that we can eat that cannot be fermented. If we can eat it, it can be fermented. It doesn’t mean everything has equally prominent traditions of fermentation. I mean, some foods have much more elaborate traditions of fermentation than others, but anything we could possibly eat can be fermented.
[00:24:40] Ashley James: That’s interesting because my friend has a really beautiful garden and he was disappointed to find out that kale shouldn’t be fermented. Because he had a lot of kale, there isn’t a good way to ferment it that makes it taste good. Do you disagree? Is there a way to ferment kale or preserve it that makes it taste good?
[00:24:58] Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, kale and any dark green vegetable with a lot of chlorophyll have a strong taste when it is fermented. Personally, I find the flavor of pure kale fermented to be kind of strong. I love kale as a minor ingredient if it was like 90% cabbages and radishes and 10% kale, I think it’s a lovely accent flavor. But I have met more than one person who’s told me that their favorite vegetable to ferment is kale.
So I have really learned not to assume anything about people’s taste or that everybody’s taste is going to be the same. You can ferment kale but you might or might not like the way it tastes. I encourage people to experiment and not be fearful to experiment but to experiment in small batches so if they try something and they don’t like it, they’re not discarding a lot of food. I mean, another question people always ask about is zucchini because so many people with gardens have a moment in the summer when there’s more zucchini than they know what to do with.
Yes, you can definitely ferment zucchini, but in hot weather, watery vegetables tend to get very soft and mushy during fermentation. The fermentation won’t really preserve the texture of the vegetables for very long unless you have a very cool root cellar to store it in so it might end up being soft and mushy. Yes, you can ferment zucchini, but if you’re planning to ferment lots of it for months, you’re going to end up with something that at least I would find very unappealing by virtue of texture rather than flavor.
[00:26:41] Ashley James: Now, I’d love you to dispel some myths. People often will go by pickles. They’re stored on the shelf, they’re made with vinegar. That’s not a fermented food, is it? That’s not a good probiotic. We want to look for the thing that says live culture, that has been made with lactic acid. Can you clear up some things about this?
[00:27:01] Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, sure. Okay, let me say two things. First of all, you can find sauerkraut in the store in a can. That was made by fermentation just the way if you want to make sauerkraut at home you would make it, but then it’s heat processed so it can be in a can on a shelf without refrigeration indefinitely. Heat processing kills the bacteria.
Now the word pickle covers a lot of ground. A pickle is anything preserved in an acidic medium. The old world mate way of making pickles in most places is you put the cucumbers or whatever the vegetables you’re using might be or the fruit in a brine solution, a saltwater solution. Then you add some seasonings if you like, but the acid that develops is lactic acid from bacteria on the vegetables breaking down carbohydrates in the vegetable and acidifying the environment of the brine.
What supermarket shelves are full of are the 20th-century pickles. When the process was developed around the middle of the 20th century, what we now know as distilled white vinegar—the vinegar that’s cheaper than water at the supermarket—ushered in a period of vinegar pickles. Vinegar pickles have been traditional, especially in wine-making regions of the world. But in most places in the world, the traditional pickles have been brined pickles and the acid is lactic acid, which is a different flavor than acetic acid which is what vinegar is. But if you make a vinegar solution and pour it over vegetables those are also a pickle. But generally, it’s a hot vinegar solution and it’s a strong enough vinegar solution that the heat and the high acidity will kill the bacteria of the vegetables.
Yes, if you want to have live culture pickles, you’re basically going to either be buying them fresh out of an open vessel—the old world way, or if you find it in a health food store or something like that, it is likely to be in a refrigerator. Because if it’s still alive, then you need the low temperatures to prevent a buildup of carbon dioxide in the jar which could make it leak or potentially explode.
[00:29:29] Ashley James: Now, when you have this bountiful harvest of cabbages in your garden and you go to make all this sauerkraut. You fermented it, it ferments for an average of six days. I hear some people do it up to two weeks, but then when you’re done, when you like the flavor, you finish fermenting, I’ve always been told that we put a mason jar lid on it and put it in the fridge. That kind of slows down the fermenting. How do you then make it shelf-stable, or do you need to store it in a fridge or in a cold cellar at that point?
[00:30:05] Sandor Ellix Katz: A cold cellar or you’re in a place that’s just where it just gets cold enough. I mean, I’ve seen people store sauerkraut outside if it gets extremely cold—that becomes problematic, but a cellar would be the traditional way to do it. In Korea, the tradition was you store the winter’s kimchi, you bury your ceramic crock in the yard so that you have the temperature modulation of the earth to prevent it from getting too cold and to prevent it from getting too warm. If you let it sit in your heated home, what happens is that it’s not that it would become toxic. I mean, you can ferment things for a very, very long time.
I’m down to the last pint of what was originally 200 liters—about 55 gallons—of radish kraut from last November. I’ve just made this year’s batch, but I’m eating up the very end of last year’s batch. Now it was just in my cellar from November until June, and then it’s been in the refrigerator since June. But if I let it get hot in the summer temperatures, what happens is that these enzymes that are part of all vegetables will break down the pectins and make it get really soft and mushy like I talked about a few minutes ago with the zucchini ferments.
That’s the main reason why you have to keep things cool. I mean, one week two to a few weeks, that’s a very contemporary interpretation of how you do these foods. In temperate regions, people would ferment it for months, and they wouldn’t wait months before they start eating it, but they would let it just keep fermenting through the entire winter because there was no refrigerator to put it into.
But then people would always try to finish it up before it gets hot because that’s when the texture will be destroyed. And then also, just in terms of the real practical necessity of it, by the time summer comes there are lots of fresh vegetables to eat. This historically has been primarily something that was about preservation, about getting vegetables and vegetable nutrients through a long winter where there was no or very little fresh vegetable food.
[00:32:37] Ashley James: I interviewed a Ph.D. in Anthropology who figured out—his whole thing is he goes back to humans a hundred thousand years ago. They find all the tools that they could possibly find fossilized. They try to figure out how we ate that long ago, how our ancestors ate. What he sees is that there’s so much evidence for fermenting. That we figured out how to ferment even back then to secure the nutrients out of foods. He says look at a duck, ducks have two stomachs—one grinds the grain, and the other ferments it and that’s how you access it.
For example, corn, we don’t access nutrients from corn very easily unless we put it through a process where we can grind it, ferment it, and fermentation allows those nutrients to become available to us. We figured that out a long time ago, which is really neat cause I feel like, in the last 100 years, we all have amnesia from our ancestral roots. We need to come back to how we have been eating for thousands of years, and fermenting is such a large part of that.
[00:33:51] Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, sure. I mean, fermentation is ancient. The current archaeological record suggests that people were fermenting at least 10,000 years ago, but personally, that tells us mostly about the history of pottery because the earlier vessels—before people figured out pottery to have vessels to ferment liquids in—were all biodegradable things. They were either animal membranes, hollowed-out trunks of trees, or gourds. But at some point, people realized that they could stabilize clay and get the clay to hold liquids. Those are the shards that we find.
Berries spontaneously ferment into alcohol without human assistance, and there’s a lot of interesting documentation of different insects, birds, mammals, and other animals being drawn to the smell of fermenting fruit. You can watch YouTube videos of elephants gorging themselves on fermenting durian fruits in Malaysia, then getting disoriented, falling over, and basically getting drunk. I think it’s safe to assume that our evolutionary forebears like primates—contemporary primates are definitely drawn to the smell of fermenting fruit. I think it’s safe to assume that our ancestors were drawn to this, and we did evolve with enzymes to enable us to digest alcohol. I mean, fermentation has been part of the landscape.
Really, if we want to talk about the deep evolutionary past, the earliest organisms were all bacteria, archaea, and all these anaerobic organisms that were fermenting. One of their byproducts was oxygen, and that the buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere has something to do with these fermenting organisms that are ancient. All the multicellular organisms that descended from the original single-cell life forms all live with associated bacteria. All the forms of life that the original bacteria and archaea evolved into—all the plants, all the fungi, all the animals—have microbiomes. They have associated populations of bacteria that enable them to effectively function. We’re not alone in this regard.
Fermentation is very, very, very ancient, and certainly, in the context of human cultures, it’s just been an integral part of how people in every part of the world figured out how to make effective use of whatever food resources were available to them.
[00:37:11] Ashley James: Absolutely. I want you to teach us. Pretend that everyone who is listening hasn’t fermented something. What’s your favorite beginner recipe so we can all go out and just start fermenting something today?
[00:37:26] Sandor Ellix Katz: What I almost always recommend for people as a first fermentation project is fermenting vegetables, for a few reasons. I mean, first of all, it’s really, really simple and straightforward. It’s just incredibly powerful and supportive of good health. And then to the degree that people might be projecting some anxiety onto the process. While all fermentation processes are safe and foods that are fermented are safer than the same food before they are fermented. But in the case of fermenting vegetables, there are no documented cases anywhere in the world of food poisoning or illness. This food is as safe as it gets.
We hear every year about people getting sick from raw vegetables. A couple of months ago, it was red onions. It was lettuce one year, it was spinach one year, it was cabbage one year. Clearly, there’s the possibility that vegetables can be exposed to pathogenic bacteria and make people sick, but if you took those vegetables—even if they’d been exposed to some potential pathogen and then you shred it, salt it, get it juicy, and pack it into a vessel to ferment, the indigenous bacteria will always dominate over incidental pathogens. The lactic acid bacteria that are always on the vegetables—in fact, always present on all plants growing out of the soil on planet earth—will dominate. And then as they acidify the environment, if there were some cells of salmonella, E. coli, or other things that we associate with food poisoning, what they all have in common is that they cannot tolerate an acidic environment. As that environment acidifies, they get destroyed.
Fermenting vegetables is the place to start. Generally, what I would say is pick your vessel. I would suggest the easiest thing would be a wide mouth jar. I like to use wide-mouth quart-size canning jars, but you could also just use a jar leftover from mayonnaise or something. Then you need to get some vegetables. You really could work with any kind of vegetables. I mean, any kind of cabbage, any kind of radish is foolproof. But you can also experiment with other kinds of vegetables. I like to mix a few vegetables together. Carrots are beautiful, turnips.
But for a quart jar, it takes about two pounds of vegetables and then adjust accordingly. If it’s a gallon jar, you probably need about eight pounds of vegetables. If you’re working with a pint jar, you might just need one pound of vegetables. Then shred it. It doesn’t matter how finely. You can do it super fine, you can do it in coarse pieces, they don’t all have to be even. It doesn’t matter, but you’re just trying to create some surface area. And then you salt it. It doesn’t matter how much salt. I mean, it matters in terms of how it tastes and I would say because people have such varied tastes for salt, salt it lightly, mix it all up, taste it, just evaluate it, and add more salt if you want. This is not rocket science. It does not rely upon some precise proportion of salt.
There are some places where the tradition is to ferment vegetables without any salt at all. There was even a commercial business in the US that was doing that for decades. The kraut wasn’t very good. I mean, I didn’t like it. I mean, the salt really balances out the flavor. The salt helps maintain a nice crispy, crunchy texture to it, but you don’t have to make it extremely salty.
If you’re from a Russian or German family where your grandparents were making sauerkraut, their grandparents were making sauerkraut, chances are the family recipe is extremely salty because going back just a few generations, this was an important survival food. But if your context is not so much making it to survive through a long harsh winter but rather making something that’s delicious, that’s going to support your good health, there’s no reason to make it super salty. You can just make small batches every few weeks. They don’t have to be preserved for long periods of time. They don’t need that much salt. I just salt to taste.
I use sea salts. A lot of the literature says to stay away from iodized table salt. I’ve done so many demos where the organizers handed me iodized table salt. I can tell you with confidence, it works even with iodized table salt. Don’t get too precious about thinking you need a certain kind of salt. Vegetables, salt, and season it as you like. You could put a little bit of garlic, ginger, or both, some chili peppers, some caraway, or nothing. Just have it be simple salted vegetables. But you can season it in any way you like. Sometimes people add a little bit of fruit. In the Korean tradition, often, there’s a fishy element—either little dried shrimp or a little fish sauce to add complexity to the flavor. You can do any of that, you cannot do any of that.
The most basic is shred vegetables, salt them, mix them around. What I like to do is spend a couple of minutes squeezing the vegetables with my hands when I’m doing it on a small scale. What this does is it basically breaks down cell walls and helps release juice from the vegetables more quickly. On a larger scale, people might use some big heavy tamping tool, or the story I hear over and over again—usually from people older than me who grew up in Eastern Europe—is people remember having their feet scrubbed as children and being put inside of a barrel to jump up and down on the vegetables that their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles are shredding.
However, you do it, breaking down the cell walls a little bit just helps the vegetables give up their juice so you can get the vegetable submerged, which is the most important environmental factor—getting the vegetables submerged. Usually, I use some sort of little weight at the top. I’ve got these little glass discs that I sometimes use if I’m using a jar. If you don’t have anything like that, you can improvise. What I sometimes do is I save an outer leaf from the cabbage with a heavy spine and use that spine like a little spring to hold the vegetables down. Or sometimes, I’ll take the end of an onion or a fat carrot or something and let that be a top piece to hold things down. Sometimes people fill a little sandwich-sized bag with a little bit of water and let that hold everything down.
On a larger scale, if I’m working with a crock, I’ll put a plate that fits inside the crock that can sit on the surface of the vegetables and then a little jar filled with water holding that down. There are different ways to do it, but you want as best you can keep the vegetables submerged because the bacteria don’t need oxygen. Lactic acid bacteria are anaerobic. The place where it meets the air with the oxygen, that’s where all the funky stuff happens, and it’s not unusual. Don’t be freaked out if you get a film developing on the top of your vegetables.
There’s a yeast called kahm yeast that sometimes grows. Sometimes these hairy molds that are totally harmless grow. I just skim them off as best I can and discard them, but know that that’s a possible scenario. The warmer your environment is, the faster that’ll happen. The less salt you use, the faster that’ll happen. But that’s it.
Then leave it for at least three or four days and then start tasting it. Everybody’s taste is different. Some people love it the sourer it gets. The acidity accumulates over time. So to get very sour sauerkraut takes some time. The temperature will have bearing on that. The metabolism of these organisms is faster when it’s warmer, slower when it’s cooler. If you’re doing it in a place where it’s very warm, you’ll get a certain level of acidity faster than you will in a cooler environment.
In general, if you have a choice, a longer slower fermentation will generally yield superior flavors to a faster shorter fermentation. Taste it periodically, evaluate the flavor, and harvest it when it tastes right to you. But I’ve had people tell me that two-day-old sauerkraut was the best kraut they ever had in their life. I had someone tell me that two-month-old sauerkraut was very good for coleslaw.
People are all over the place with the flavor they like, and so rather than thinking that you need to conform to some idea of how sour sauerkraut is, just taste it periodically and monitor the evolving flavor. When you feel like you don’t want it to get any stronger—I should say, if you ever feel that you don’t want to get any stronger, move it to the fridge. I often have batches that never make it to the fridge.
[00:47:03] Ashley James: Because you just start eating them, they’re so delicious, and you start sharing them with your friends?
[00:47:07] Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it never gets to the point where I have a reason to slow it down. Sometimes I just finish it before I move it to the fermentation slowing device.
[00:47:18] Ashley James: I got to share my two favorite recipes—super simple. Get fresh ginger—not frozen. Just rinse it lightly, put it in the food processor in the thinnest possible setting. Some food processors let you adjust the thinness of the cut. Then I just take just a spoonful of salt and I massage the ginger, like you mentioned, until there’s some juice, until it gives up its juice. And then I cram it into a mason jar, pack it in tight. Of course, the salt is now melted. The juice of the ginger has become a brine, and then I push it down with a fermenting stone like a glass disc you mentioned. Put a lid on it loosely and then put it in a warm dark place for a few days.
For me, the temperature of my house, six days seems appropriate. Oh my gosh, it is the most delicious thing. You just take a pinch of it and add it to every meal. It is so freaking delicious. It’s still raw ginger, right? It’s very spicy. It’s very hot, but the heat is so warming to the digestion. It’s amazing.
And then my second favorite one, there’s a little bit more work. I saw my friend make a fermented pico de gallo salsa on Facebook and I thought, oh my gosh, I never even thought that you could ferment a pico. I chopped up tomato, onion, and then pineapple—some fresh pineapple, not canned—and then a little bit of jalapeño. Mixed in some salt, don’t add any water. Put it in the jar, packed it down again. The tomato really gives up a lot of liquid, and then I fermented it for three days in a warm dark place. Then I add lime and cilantro, mix it together, and put it in the fridge. It was the most—I made two giant jars of it. I took them to all my friends’ homes that few weeks sharing it. I can’t tell you. It’s so much fun when you get into this because the fermenting changes the flavor and you’re making this new thing, and then you can add it to dishes. It’s very exciting.
[00:49:41] Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah. Your two examples really illustrate perfectly the versatility of this process because both of those really follow the process that I just described generically that you could do with any kind of a vegetable. When you use tomatoes, they’re sugary, so the fermentation goes much faster. It would be hard to do tomatoes for six weeks. I mean, it wouldn’t be hard. You’d lose all of the sweetness, and it would get extremely sour. Like you, I love a short fermentation of anything tomatoey.
[00:50:19] Ashley James: Now, for parents that want to encourage their children to try this, it’s great to get children in the kitchen doing it with them. I hear that fermenting green beans is a good place to start to get kids excited about this. Do you have any suggestions for parents on what they could start fermenting with their kids to get them excited? My son hates sauerkraut but loves pickles, for example.
[00:50:40] Sandor Ellix Katz: I’ve seen so many kids who just go gaga for fermented vegetables. I think one key is introducing it young. I mean, if you wait until your kid is eight years old and then you put this food in front of them, they’re probably going to reject it. But if they’ve been around it since they were two, then it’s just normal and they’re always going to love it.
The other thing I would say is to always get kids tactile. Get their hands in it, whatever it is you’re fermenting. You’re fermenting ginger, you’re fermenting salsa, you’re fermenting cabbage, you’re fermenting radishes, you’re fermenting string beans—whatever it is, let the kids get their hands in it. Once their hands are in it, then they’re going to be impatient. They’re going to be when is that ready, when can we try it? I think getting tactile is really great, but I love to ferment green beans. I always make a little bit of dill and garlic in brine and make basically dilly beans, so delicious.
In my experience, a lot of kids love pickles, love sauerkraut but I think a real key is trying to introduce the food early. If you want to introduce your kid and they’re already a big kid, then I would say that getting their hands in it might be one strategy to get them more interested in it. Using it as a condiment on something they really like already might be another way to get them to think about it.
I’ve heard great stories from parents who have kids who have rejected the idea of fermented vegetables and their strategies for getting their kids to eat them. I remember talking to this one woman who would take the kraut juice, mix it with fruit juice, and freeze it into little popsicles that she would give to her kid.
[00:52:40] Ashley James: Freezing process, do the bacteria survive the freezing process? Can you freeze sauerkraut?
[00:52:46] Sandor Ellix Katz: Okay, it turns out that the issue with freezing bacteria has to do with the water content. When you freeze water into ice, it expands. If your ferment is watery, then you’re going to have some cells bursting, but they don’t all burst at once. Every freeze and thaw cycle, you’ll end up with diminished potency. Bakers often back up their sourdough starters in the freezer, and the typical process would be to thicken it up into a solid-state. You add more flour so it’s a thicker thing and there’s a lower water content so less expansion, so less diminished cell viability.
[00:53:44] Ashley James: Very cool. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show. Your website is wildfermentation.com, and you’ve shared that you have Zoom calls. People can learn from you and watch you. People can buy your books. Is there anything else that you want people to know about your website?
[00:54:04] Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, sure. I teach lots of workshops, and I list them all on my website. I also have a page of media links where you can listen to previous presentations, interviews, articles, and such. I also have a section of links just of fermentation related resources, and it turns out, there’s just a vast array of resources for people interested in fermentation out on the world wide web. Definitely check out my website wildfermentation.com. My books are just full of practical how-to ferment different things at home. Fermenting vegetables is a great beginning but it doesn’t have to be the ending. There’s just such incredible diversity in fermentation traditions around the world, and I’m so glad to have this time to share a little bit about it with you and your listeners.
[00:54:57] Ashley James: Absolutely. It’s been such a pleasure, Sandor, having you on the show. Please feel free to come back anytime you want to teach us more about the benefits of fermenting and share more recipes with us.
[00:55:07] Sandor Ellix Katz: Great. Have a great day.
[00:55:09] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview all about how you can utilize your kitchen to make some powerful and delicious fermented foods. Start experimenting. Now is the time to go out and just experiment and make something that sounds delicious. Try something new. It’s so much fun once you start getting into fermenting. I’ll make sure that I put a link in the show notes of my favorite fermenting lid that you can get for wide mouth mason jars. It’s so easy.
I tried all these different kits, and honestly, so many of them are just flimsy, they break, they leak, they’re plastic, and then they’re kind of complicated. And then there’s this one that’s so simple. It has a spring and it has a lid that has a little valve and that’s it. It’s very affordable, and I will make sure I put the link to it in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Just go to the notes, wherever you’re listening. If you’re listening to this on iTunes, you can just go into the notes in the details of this episode and you’ll see those links. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com once we publish it there with the full transcript and you’ll see the links there. I’ll make sure I include the links to my favorite canning stuff.
Now, if you listen to the intro of this interview, I did talk about three companies that are fantastic resources for you. Viome.com, use coupon code LTH. They have a great sale for the month of December for Learn True Health listeners. You have to use the coupon code LTH to get an even deeper discount. This is a fantastic at-home test kit that you do the test at home, then you send it off to them, and they give you results. You can’t get this information anywhere else. It’s absolutely amazing, but it’s information that will guide you in a totally new way and help you make better choices that will speed up your healing. Not only for your gut but also for mental and emotional health. Most of our serotonin is made in the gut. We could be eating foods that are seemingly healthy but actually lowering your serotonin leading to—sometimes for people—anxiety, depression, lack of motivation. Things that don’t look like they have anything to do with the gut can be absolutely related to the gut.
As I shared in one of my interviews with Viome, we talked about my results actually in a recent interview. We talked about how certain foods I had been eating were causing heart health issues. These are foods that are healthy for other people, but because my microbiome converted them into unhealthy chemicals for me, that it was causing issues in other organs. This is what’s happening to all of us. The test results you get from Viome can be totally life-changing for you. So go to viome.com, use the coupon code LTH right now, and get their test kit.
Also, I really like their supplements. Their supplements are not a replacement for a multivitamin or a multi-mineral. Their supplements are specifically designed based on your results from your test kit, and they’re designed to support your microbiome to be the healthiest it can be. I started taking them and I noticed right away a shift. I thought that was really cool because I’ve never taken a pre- or probiotic in my life that I immediately noticed great results with, and with theirs I did. Theirs is genetically specifically designed for my microbiome, no wonder I saw results. It was very cool to see that.
And then, of course, you can go to learntruehealth.com and search Viome to listen to my two interviews with the founder, with the science officer, so that you can learn more about the science and hear more about Viome. And to get it, go to viome.com, use coupon code LTH, and check that out.
I talked about aloe and how much drinking medicinal aloe can help specifically for speeding up gut healing. You can search aloe when you go to learntruehealth.com and listen to my interview about it. To purchase it and get the discount that’s being given to us for the month of December, go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and then use coupon code LTH2020. He’s including a great discount for us, and on top of that, giving us also his aloe cream which is quite nice as a hand cream. I really do enjoy it.
And then last, ENERGYbits, which I’ve had Catharine Arnston on the show several times. Go type in algae or chlorella into the search bar of learntruehealth.com and listen to those interviews with Catharine Arnston. She shares a lot of science, a lot of stories, and a lot of very interesting information that was new to me, and I’m a health nut, this is my life. I love learning about this stuff. If you kind of consider yourself a little bit of a holistic health nut just like me, then you will absolutely geek out on listening to those interviews with Catharine Arnston.
To get her discount that she’s giving us right now, you can go to learntruehealth.com/energybits. That’s all one-word learntruehealth.com/energybits and use the coupon code LTH.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. Almost every day, I hear from you guys either on Facebook or in email, and I hear that you have learned about this from friends, from family. It’s so great that this is a grassroots movement to helping those we care about to gain access to holistic health information that’s not readily available, it’s not being talked about in the mainstream of course so we have to go to the source. We have to listen to awesome interviews from these holistic health experts that want to get this information out there.
Please continue to listen, continue to explore, continue to go to learntruehealth.com, and utilize my website as a resource for you. And also, if you’re on Facebook, come join the free Facebook group. We have over 4000 members, and it’s such a wonderful active supportive community where everyone every day—I wake up every morning and one of the first things I do is log in and look at everyone’s questions. I help answer them as best I can throughout the day. So many other amazing health coaches, doctors, nurses, tons of holistic health experts, and just people like you and me who are also just like health nuts love to share, answer questions, give advice, give support, and give encouragement. It’s a great community to be a part of.
Just search Learn True Health on Facebook. Come join the group. We’d love for you to be part of our community. And if you have any questions for me, please feel free to reach out. You can email me at [email protected]. You can also reach out in the Facebook group.
Thank you so much. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Enjoy the holiday season. All the interviews I’ve ever done about mental health include gratitude. No matter how bad it is right now or how good it is, make sure that you take time even 30 seconds to focus on what you’re grateful for. Focus on what you do have in your life that you absolutely are so thankful for. Just that 30 seconds of gratitude shifts your body out of stress response and into a healing mode.
The more you do it, the more often you do it, especially if you can incorporate breathing, especially if you can incorporate, moving your body in a way—that brings you joy, getting outside into sunlight—this helps the body shift out of stress mode and into healing mode. Let’s focus on right now, what are you grateful for today? Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day filled with gratitude.
Get Connected With Sandor Ellix Katz!Website
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Books by Sandor Elliz KatzWild Fermentation
The Art of Fermentation
Basic Fermentation: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Cultural Manipulation
Fermentation as Metaphor
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Use listener coupon code LTH at viome.com for the gut and mitochondrial testing and food & supplement recommendations.
Viome Gut Microbiome Testing’s Results Interpretation and Food and Supplement Recommendationshttps://www.learntruehealth.com/viome-gut-microbiome
Highlights:
No one good food is always good for everybody What does metabolites do for the body What does microbiome-induced stress mean How does Viome help improve our health What is the difference of Viome’s supplementsAre all foods, especially fruits and vegetables, beneficial for all people? In an ideal world, all fruits and vegetables would be good for everyone. But that is not the case. In this episode, Ally Perlina shares with us the revolutionary tests that Viome has created. She explains how they came about their food and supplement recommendations and how to interpret their test results. She also shares how their supplements are different from others.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. It’s been a few weeks since I did this interview, so I do have more updates for you. I discuss in this interview the results of the Viome test. You may remember a while back, I interviewed the founder of Viome. Viome is a company where they send you an at-home test kit. It’s very easy to use, and you give them a tiny sample of your blood and your stool. And then soon you’ll also be able to give them your saliva. They run hundreds of thousands of genetic expression pathways on the bacteria of your gut and your mitochondria.
What that provides is allows them to see what your bacteria do in terms of what chemicals it makes once you eat. So when you eat something, the bacteria turn it into chemicals. Some of these chemicals are incredibly harmful and cause disease, and we don’t even realize it. Someone could be eating a carrot and that’s causing them to have health problems because their microbiome is transforming something seemingly helpful into a negative chemical for them specifically.
For me, it was actually very interesting. My results were incredibly interesting. I have implemented their advice, and I also started taking their supplements. Right away, which really shocked me, I noticed a change in my gut. I have good gut health, but I noticed this entirely new level of gut health. I’m like holy crow, that was amazing. I’m really very intrigued by the results. I think that if you have the means to do so, everyone should do a Viome test kit. It gives you the information you could not possibly ever get from going to any doctor. It’s absolutely state of the art. Today I have on the scientist, the mastermind behind it all, so she’s going to explain.
This is why it is a longer interview because she does go through my own results and then explains. I try to have her explain it from the perspective of other people as well and how this would also pertain to reversing disease, preventing disease, increasing longevity, reversing age. You can actually reverse cellular age, which is phenomenal and quite exciting. So all this information is shared today, and I want to let you know that Viome does give us a great discount, both on their home test kits and their supplements. Go to viome.com and use the coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. So always use the coupon code LTH every time you buy from them and you’ll get the discount.
I want to let you know that very soon, and for a very limited time during the American Thanksgiving Cyber Sale that’s coming up really soon, they’re going to be giving us an even bigger deal. So I highly recommend marking that in your calendar and checking it out.
You can also join the Learn True Health Facebook group because there are about six other wonderful health companies that have offered the Learn True Health listeners incredible deals for the cyber sales that are coming up during Thanksgiving. I’ll be releasing all that information into the Facebook group, and also email it out for anyone that’s on the email list. You can get on the email list by going to learntruehealth.com, checking that out. Thank you so much for sharing this with your friends and family. Continue to share these episodes. They are life-changing. I’m really looking forward to hearing about today’s episode. It’s going to be a great one.
[00:03:30] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 451. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have a very special woman on the show today. Ally Perlina, you and I have spent the last few hours talking about my results from my Viome test. Back in episode 441, we had one of the founders of Viome on the show—Naveen, and that was quite an eye-opener. I am really in love with Viome.
Now I’ve come to know that you’re this mastermind—I don’t want to say mad scientist, but you’re the mad scientist behind it all. You have such an amazing understanding of the expressions of our microbes. When we feed them certain foods, they produce certain metabolites, and how those metabolites affect the rest of our body and potentially create disease or heal the body. We could really use food as medicine on a deeper more individualistic level when we understand our unique microbiome and also understand our cells on a deeper level, which is what your company allows us to do—much more affordably than I ever thought.
I’m really excited to have you here today to teach us more about how we can understand—on a cellular level—how to gain health. How to really, really gain health, how to really support our immune system, how to support all of our hormonal systems, how to support our body’s ability to metabolize and to utilize nutrition all by making sure that we focus on what we can feed and what we shouldn’t feed our unique microbiome. Ally, welcome to the show.
[00:05:39] Ally Perlina: Thank you so much, Ashley. I’m so privileged to be doing this with you. I really enjoyed our conversations so far. I think it’s amazing how aware you are of all of the things that are important to look out for and pay attention to when it comes to your health. How curious you are about learning all of the different new technologies and ways of gaining insights about the biology of your body, which is what we’re here to do. I think it is really important to get this understanding and to spread this word, which is what you’re doing here. I’m more than happy to really delve into the results and the data and explain all of this because it’s not always just about talking about the concepts. Because I think to make it relevant, you have to put it in the context of the actual person’s results.
So here we are with your results, and I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to review it with you and your listeners.
[00:06:37] Ashley James: Awesome, very cool. Well, before we dive into that though, I want to learn a bit more about you and your background. What happened in your life that led you to become an expert in the science of the microbiome?
[00:06:52] Ally Perlina: What happened to me to make me such a mad scientist? What had to happen in my life? I will speak to that. I actually identify myself in a way as a systems biologist. That involves not only understanding the microbiome but really getting into the complexities and the mechanisms that turn all the knobs and all the different levels of our biological systems. From cells, even microbes are cells in a way. Some are unicellular, right? Our cells, tissues, and fluids to organs and organ systems. From the really biochemical levels of biology all the way to physiology, which is why at Viome, I’m a Chief Translational Science Officer. Translational science is basically about something I’ve been trying to do all my life is to translate the science of all of these different molecules, pathways, and the biology of the situation into something that is immediately actionable for health.
I’m a scientist that basically has all the background in biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology, and human genetics as well, but who’s always worked in a clinical setting—clinical or pharmaceutical type of setting. I worked with many different pharma companies. I worked for clinical diagnostic labs that became part of Quest for four years. I’ve really worked on things from drug and target discovery to clinical trials. More recently, before Viome, I worked at Human Longevity with Craig Venter that has its own basically clinic component called Health Nucleus and is still there. I was there from early on.
In all of the different endeavors and efforts, I’ve always created new novel innovations to connect all of the data at scale to inform clinical healthcare and wellness, especially here in Viome with the wellness space. It’s more scientifically powered. I always felt like a lot of this expertise that we’re given when we get our education, our training as scientists stays in the early discovery, the academics, or early discovery phases within pharmaceutical tracks.
But sometimes, we have enough knowledge to take all of these different points of information and analyze it in maybe some novel and creative ways to scale it, deliver it, and do something really sensible with it to impact the health of people right now. Not all of it needs to go through 12 years of any molecular specific drug development process. When it comes to health and wellness like food and supplements, there are so many things that are well-known that we want to be able to just package and scale that knowledge.
I’ve always been extremely motivated in actually harnessing this power in information. You can’t do that without embracing the complexity. So in order to translate all that information to health care and to empower people to take control of their health, somebody out there needs to be able to get into the complexities of all the systems. Hence, the term systems biology where you really look at all of the different components and figure out what are the mechanisms of health versus disease.
What are the mechanisms that can give us these points of intervention that we know how to deal with? We can take nutraceuticals. We can take nutrients from drugs or supplements and how they all work together. Because when it comes down to it, it’s molecules in food, molecules in supplements, molecules in your drugs talking to molecules in your microbiome, talking to molecules in your cells, in your lymphocytes, in your brain cells. All of these routes of communication are what I basically specialize in. Those are some of the things we call pathways. That’s the essential part of systems biology, which is needed to embrace the complexity and deliver something actionable for your health.
[00:11:17] Ashley James: How many pathways does a Viome test when they look at the full RNA sequencing and expressions of your mitochondria and their very complex microbiome?
[00:11:38] Ally Perlina: Good question, Ashley. It’s about a couple of hundred thousand.
[00:11:42] Ashley James: Wow. Just a couple of hundred thousand. We went through a few of them, and we’re going to talk about a few of them in our interview today. But that was one of my first questions because as we were going through them, I thought just how many pathways are you looking at. And each individual, as you were going through my results, it was so interesting that you said, if I were to look at half your results, I would have predicted differently the other half. And this is why it’s so interesting how unique we are that we have to look at the full picture to see where each individual person is along their healing journey, and how we can help them right now.
My first time speaking with you I brought up that I had figured out that I could not eat eggs. That was the last thing to go to become whole food plant-based. I was still eating eggs, but I was basically like an ovo vegetarian. But I noticed I had these heart palpitations, and I didn’t know where they were coming from. I don’t know why they just presented themselves as they did. But I had completely changed my diet, and thus the microbiome changes I suppose. Because I’d shed all these other foods, it was the last animal product to go. And so these heart palpitations were so frequent they were getting kind of scary.
I consulted a cardiologist. I wore a device for several days and it monitored my heart. In the end, he said there’s nothing wrong with your heart, but that there’s a stressor. There’s some stressor your body is going through that is putting your heart in this position, your heart’s reacting to the stressor. He had no tools, of course. I mean, he was a great cardiologist, but he’s like listen, come back to me when you need cholesterol meds. There was nothing beyond that he had for me.
The frustrating part is MDs are trained to catch us when we’re ill and hopefully help us so we’re not going to die at that moment. But they’re not trained in how to take you from let’s say just slightly poor health and help you get to optimal health. That’s just not in their wheelhouse. Their wheelhouse isn’t systems biology, looking at the way that each individual person works, how their genetics are expressing, and the genetics of their microbiome is expressing. That’s where you guys come in.
I figured out, something just hit me. Why don’t I do an experiment, not eat eggs for a while then eat eggs and see if that’s it? I did that with other foods, but when I took eggs out, my heart palpitations stopped completely. And then about seven days later I had an egg, and by the time I’d finished eating the egg, the heart palpitations were back. And I thought this is very interesting. I attempted the experiment several times, and sure enough, I can give myself basically an irregular heartbeat by eating eggs or not.
You saw that in my gut biome. You saw it in my Viome results. You said, oh. When you said it, it was like watching a masterpiece. The way you explained how it all works and how that was feeding this particular microbiome, which creates this type of metabolite which then my liver converts to this, and then my heart reacts to it this way. All the pathways made complete sense from a to b. But as you and I talked, it became so clear to me. If we could explain to people who aren’t biologists what a microbiome is, the bacteria, the complex system that is in our gut, and how much we need it for life and health. I came to the conclusion that it’s like having a factory, having a pharmacy inside our gut. You like that.
Some people say it’s like having an animal because it’s about six pounds, so it could be like having a chihuahua in your gut. But it’s actually much more complex than that. It’s like having a pharmacy in your gut or a factory. What you put in is what it puts out, and the metabolites. So it’s not that you necessarily have a bad microbiome, but it’s that when I put in eggs from the choline, my unique microbiome is going to produce something that all these pathways then come together to irritate my heart and could lead to further heart disease down the road.
Whereas other people have no problem with choline and wouldn’t have that reaction. But there are other pathways that you put into the microbiome, not necessarily sugar. Everyone thinks you eat sugar, it causes diabetes. Someone could put cauliflower or whatever, they could put something that’s somewhat healthy for someone else, but because of how their pathways are expressing, they put that into their little pharmacy factory—which is their microbiome gut—into it, and then what comes out are the metabolites that would put the stressors on the body that could lead to diabetes, or either cause it or contribute to it. That you can see that many diseases that we’re suffering could be corrected by making sure we know exactly what we as individuals should and shouldn’t be eating.
[00:17:37] Ally Perlina: Right. So let me just get back to a couple of points you said that I think are really important, and maybe some of the listeners are well aware of them. But just to be absolutely clear, I think it’s important to emphasize that no one good food is necessarily always good for everybody, and sometimes it can actually be bad, so it depends. And if you know what it depends on, then we would not be doing justice to health care and wellness. If we didn’t actually delineate what it depends on, put it into some sort of logic, rules, and content, and scale it so it can help the masses.
That’s one of the reasons why when I came to Viome, I made it a huge point right away to make sure that when I developed the scoring system for the pathways or how we connect this to the personalization of the foods, that it’s something that does not need another alley or anyone from my team in the loop to be able to actually release the results. That it’s end-to-end automated. Because if we know what it depends on—whatever it may be—and when it’s good or bad for you, then we need to be able to inform people so that at least they can make more biologically informed choices when it comes to eggs or broccoli.
So back to your egg example, what you have are two things why egg yolk may not be good for you, and it’s actually on your avoid list. One of the things is TMA production by your microbiome. So your microbes actually use the choline that they would get from egg yolk, not so much from the egg white. That’s still fine and a source of protein and all, but egg yolk is on your void because it has choline and choline is what serves as a substrate for your microbes in the gut to take it and then convert it to trimethylamine also known as TMA.
So when we say convert, it means there are some of these sequences of events that happen, and that’s what we call a pathway. So a biological pathway is a sequence of molecular interactions or biochemical reaction steps that has a beginning, middle, and an end sort of tells you a story and says what is actively happening? What’s coming? What’s going? So in your case, in the egg case, that choline is coming and TMA is being produced and then it’s going. TMA is trimethylamine, so microbes use the substrate as choline converted to TMA. We see those pathways because we see RNA. So it lights up the gene expression values along these pathways that we reconstruct. We build them so we can score them. We can see, okay, you have higher than usual trimethylamine production in your microbiome.
So what that means is that now that you have this TMA and it’s made in your gut, it can actually then become available to the circulation. And through the portal vein, it can go to your liver where it gets naturally converted to TMAO. TMA as well to some degree is associated with harmful or no beneficial effects on cardiovascular health. So that could be some of the association. Again, I’m not claiming any causation and it causes multiple factors usually for something to actually go wrong, but it’s a very, very peculiar phenomenon that you’re sharing about your effects that you felt physically after eating eggs.
So this could be part of it or the main part of it that you have this TMA, TMAO pathway in which your gut microbiome plays a key role. And that is something that we can measure with our metatranscriptomics technology. That’s how we go from basically gene expression that we get from your stool sample, gene expression from RNA sequencing called metatranscriptomics technology. It tells us how much are those genes expressed, are they up or down. How do they factor into these pathways that we have put together so we can tell you then what? Then it’s like, okay, we get it that TMA is happening and more than what we usually see then it goes and can be converted to TMAO, which we know is not good for cardiovascular health.
So what do you do about that? One of the things is you can limit inputs into the TMA production pathway by the microbiome, so that’s why egg yolk is on your avoid, it has a lot of choline in it. Whereas for other people, choline is actually just fine. It can be good for rebuilding your membranes and maintaining them. It can be good for the gut-brain axis and support some of the neuronal-glial health. So for you, it’s good to basically stay away from egg yolk, and that’s one of the reasons. The other reason that could have something to do with cardiovascular health is that you just have another score in your report that involves multiple pathways—hundreds of them actually—that assesses overall gut microbiome induced stress. Stress response, in general, there are many different types and different reasons for it.
So one of the things that you have is you have a sub-optimal score on your microbiome induced stress. That’s a functional area score that involves many different pathways, and we’ll cover many of them or at least some of them, which include sulfide production, ammonia production, and those things that can contribute to overall stressors that may come through the gut into your bloodstream. In your results, they’re not enough to actually cause overall inflammation, we’ll talk about that as well, but it could be a slight culprit besides the TMA-TMAO story.
And then back to the egg example, another reason why it’s on avoid, it’s not enough to just have one thing necessarily off a little bit. Sometimes it’s more than one, many times it’s more than one factor that places food into your superfood, avoid, or other categories. In this case, there is another factor that placed your egg yolk on avoid, and it’s the fact that it’s high in sulfur. With your profile, sulfur goes into the sulfide production pathways a bit too much—more than we’d like. So sulfide is not necessarily a villain, it’s not necessarily absolutely bad, but when too much sulfide gas is produced in your gut, it can be disruptive to your gut lining and it can be—for apparent reasons—disruptive to your digestive symptoms and your gut health. It can also have a negative impact on your gut motility.
So because the egg has sulfur, it’s one of the two main reasons why egg yolk specifically is on your avoid. Because you have too much hydrogen sulfide gas production by your microbiome. So that’s another part of the story, and again, it’s many to many. So the other part of that piece—the sulfide story—is actually your cruciferous vegetables. When you see a score that says sulfide gas production pathways, a lot of times, people will ask well what does it mean? What can I do about it?
In our food recommendations, you can see when a food explanation refers to a specific score. You will see that in your egg yolk as well as broccoli and cabbage, it will tell you that the reason it’s on your avoid has—or at least one of the reasons has to do with—your sulfide gas production pathway score being too high. It means we have too much of that activity lit up with all of the gene expressions along these pathways saying your microbes are making too much sulfide gas. What they use as a substrate is something that comes from these cruciferous vegetables. It actually explains in the paragraph there that a compound class called glucosinolates—part of the organosulfur compounds—is actually what serves as in a way a culprit. It can be good for some people, but for you, it’s a culprit because it can serve as a substrate for the sulfide gas production indirectly.
First, it gets converted to sulfate, and then from sulfate, it goes and gets converted to sulfide gas by your microbiome. The thing that converts it to sulfate, Ashley, is myrosinase, and it’s an enzyme that’s in the vegetable and gets activated when you’re chewing it. So raw vegetable chewing actually activates this enzyme and gives you more of the sulfate, which is a direct substrate for more of the sulfide gas production. So do you know what you can do if you still want to have a little bit of those avoid foods but you want to minimize the effect of this sulfate substrate production for your sulfide gas?
[00:26:40] Ashley James: What can I do?
[00:26:41] Ally Perlina: You can steam it just a little bit because it will destroy the enzyme because it’s heat sensitive, so it will destroy or inactivate the enzyme in the food, myrosinase, which is needed to convert glucosinolates into sulfates. So you will diminish that action a little bit. It’s not going to completely get rid of the organosulfur content in the food, and it can still—in one pathway or another—feed your microbes, but it really diminishes these results. Based on what people report, they actually see or feel less of that bloating or gas production.
So I would ask you, do you feel any difference or do you feel any gas production effects with cruciferous vegetables versus other vegetables like arugula, kale, or something?
[00:27:33] Ashley James: I would say yes. But up until I got my Viome results 17 days ago, I ate cruciferous vegetables daily. Although gas was always around in certain amounts, it wasn’t smelly, so I didn’t think that there was a big problem with it. I just thought, okay. I also eat beans although I soak them and cook them in the Instant Pot. But I do notice, especially raw broccoli, raw cauliflower, or raw cabbage—I really enjoy raw cabbage in a salad. Especially in kale and raw purple cabbage in a salad would produce gas more so than if I were to eat zucchini, for example.
[00:28:29] Ally Perlina: How about arugula, just because it came to me?
[00:28:32] Ashley James: I don’t often eat arugula on its own.
[00:28:39] Ally Perlina: Spinach.
[00:28:41] Ashley James: Yup, I don’t have a problem with gas in spinach. I do eat raw spinach, I eat cooked spinach. The arugula I do eat is fermented actually in a really delicious fermented arugula pesto.
[00:28:56] Ally Perlina: Mmm.
[00:28:57] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s so good. If I have arugula, it’s usually mixed with other greens, but I don’t seem to notice quite a difference. But then again, like I said, up until 17 days ago, I was eating cruciferous vegetables for almost every meal. So gas was all the time. It wasn’t unbearable though. But then again, most of the time, I would cook those foods.
The reason why I wanted Ally to give a little bit of a deep dive into my results, your results are going to be different, everyone’s results are different. But just to hear how much information you get, how much guidance you get from a Viome test, and how unique each person’s experience is going to be is actually quite exciting because, in the last few years, I’ve been the healthiest I have felt in a long time. As much whole food plant-based as I possibly can, and of course gluten-free. Ever since cutting eggs out, I feel great, but I felt like throwing darts in the dark. I’m going to try this, I’m going to try that, and I do love doing that. I do love listening to my body and trying different things.
I felt like there was a missing piece, and I really feel like Viome has been, for me, the missing link to pulling it all together for me because I would have never considered lowering my cruciferous vegetable intake. Never ever would have thought that. In the other foods that were recommended I reduce, those are my daily staples as well like coconut. Since I have cut that out—really significantly reduced coconut—and I feel like I’ve come into a new chapter in my health because I also understand why.
Although everything that Ally says sounds quite complicated and science-based, I want her to explain the science behind it. When you get your Viome results, it’s very clear, simple, and easy to understand. And then you click through and there’s more detail. And then if you want to learn more, then you click through and then there’s even more detail when you click through, and there are scientific references. If you want to just stay surface, if you’re one of those people that just need to be told what to eat, what not to eat and that’s all the bandwidth you have, then you get those.
If you’re like me and you want everything, you want the Ph.D. version of your Viome results, then you get that too which is exciting. I really do like how you have set up Viome so that people have to click through and click through and click through to chunk down into more and more detailed information so they don’t get overwhelmed. The results themselves are not overwhelming, but at the first sight, I was disappointed I’m like, oh, this is it? And then I click through I’m like oh there’s more, click through again, oh there’s more. It is quite interesting. In the future, you guys are going to have even more coming out.
When I had Naveen on the show in episode 441, I had not taken the Viome test yet. And I have to share that I absolutely adore the test. It’s a home kit. It is in a beautiful little box and the instructions couldn’t be easier. They’re very simple. And when I sat down to draw my blood, it is as easy as just a prick of the finger, and then and then this little tiny plastic thing sucks the drop of blood up into it. It’s so easy to do. It’s not intimidating at all. I commend you on how beautiful and simple the system is. It’s not overwhelming. You just have to read the instructions in advance to know that you want to be fully hydrated, you want to do the blood sample in the morning. Just take some time to read the instructions and know when you’re going to do the stool and the blood when you’re going to do each one. And then you send it in. I really enjoyed the whole process of sending in my kit. I enjoyed the process of receiving all the information.
I then ordered your supplements, which we’re going to talk a bit about that as well because you make individualized supplements based on the genetic expression of our microbiome and mitochondria and all the results—the cellular health results that you have. I’m very excited to receive those, so I hope to do a later interview talking about my experience with your supplements because I’m already on supplements, but my supplements are more just for the whole body health—vitamins and minerals—but your supplements are specific to looking at the genetic pathways, like you said, a few hundred thousand pathways, and supporting the body and coming back into balance in such an individual way. That’s very, very exciting.
[00:34:12] Ally Perlina: We’ll talk about some of your supplements as an example, but I think that’s a good idea to actually review your supplements and everything you’ve been taking and the Viome supplements that you’ll get and then see how you’re responding to them. then drill into it a bit more as a follow-up if you’d like.
[00:34:32] Ashley James: I’d love that.
[00:34:33] Ally Perlina: I think we noticed there were some themes or some things that you were already aware of, which is great. So some of your digestive related components like protein fermentation and being able to digest your proteins and keep your stomach acidity levels at the right level and optimal. So all of these things can be adjusted or manipulated, to some degree, with supplements. Some of them are digestive enzymes that you already know about, and some of them can come from foods as well as supplement delivered nutrients. So bromelain, papain come from pineapple and papaya respectively, and then there’s betaine. Originally it got the name because it came from the beet.
Those are some of the natural ways to help your digestion, and in your case, the reason it’s specific to your pathways that we see is that we do see some of these a little bit more active than usual. Protein fermentation pathways, which means that the microbes are fermenting aka metabolizing different proteins more than you would expect them to in the gut. That means that you, the host, did not make enough of an effort or enough turns in there in your metabolism to completely process all of the different protein sources that you get.
Again, sometimes it could be the vegetable sources or the nuts and seeds that have a very dense protein that make it hard to process it all. Then it gets to your colon and then microbes go oh my goodness, a lot of unprocessed proteins. So you encourage those microbes called protein fermenters to be very active. So that means you encourage more and more of them to thrive. When there are too many of them, again, it’s not about the microbes themselves. But what they’re doing, they crank up these pathways that yield production of those types of—you could call it—the pharmacy is producing some of the chemicals that are not so good for you.
So what you see reflected in your report, not even something that is just behind the scenes that I’m sharing with you. But right in the report, it says you have high ammonia production pathways, you have high sulfide production pathways, you have high putrescine production pathways. All of these different things are byproducts of protein fermentation. So we talked about sulfide already. We actually just covered one type of pathway that came from sulfate or elemental sulfur in your foods, but we didn’t cover the other side which means that actually sulfide in your microbiome can also be produced from sulfur amino acids, which came from your proteins.
So that’s another byproduct of protein fermentation. So you’ll see a theme in what we talk about is that it’s always like many to many, so there are multiple types of pathways and inputs that can feed one microbial metabolite production like sulfide gas. The way to mitigate the sulfide could be from many different foods, and some of them have a high content of a certain nutrient, and some have low content. we have all that part of the knowledge base so that we can tell you from many to many which foods or nutrients supplements are best for you and are most important superfood or to avoid them.
For the pathways, you could see that sulfide for instance it’s part of the pro-inflammatory activity because it can have an inflammatory effect on your gut lining and overall, but it is also part of your protein fermentation theme. Those themes are like the functional scores that level in our UI you’ll see that you probably already have, those are the functional score areas. Then there are the pathway scores like ammonia, sulfide, and putrescine that I just mentioned. Those are pathway scores that feed into the functional area scores, and multiple functional area scores ultimately get aggregated into the health level scores.
So on the level of a health score, you have gut microbiome health, you have cellular health, immune system health, and stress response health. Those health scores, you have them actually for the most part in an average zone. There’s also mitochondrial health I forgot to mention. But once you start drilling into it, you will actually see how, just like you said, you drill into it if you want to know the details. Why is it not 100%? Why is this score not perfect? Then you see that on a more granular level, aha, it’s the protein fermentation, which is part of digestive efficiency. And then there’s the inflammatory activity, which both have the sulfide gas production and ammonia production pathway score.
So as you drill in even further and you say, okay, my food said something about this sulfide thing. I want to learn about that score. Then you learn about that score and you see that actually, even that is many different pathways that can lead to sulfide gas production, which is why even in that pathway score, it’s still plural. It’s called sulfide gas production pathways because there are many, many different routes like hundreds of them that can lead to the ultimate production of sulfide by your microbes.
So understanding which ones of those are most lit up and how active those pathways are is what helps us to connect on the molecular level this whole system of many to many from scores on different levels to nutrients in either food and or supplements.
Anyway, bringing it back to the whole point is that you have various health areas, You have your digestion, and you have your protein fermentation. So to address the protein fermentation and the other route of sulfide gas production, that’s why you see some of the digestive enzymes, which you’re already getting in your supplements. You will see some of the foods that give you more bioavailable elemental amino acids, so some of the sprouted foods. I think you have the grapefruit and some of these like betaine and papain sources.
And then you also have to stay away from cruciferous vegetables for the sulfide reasons and things like that. So that tells you how many different areas of superfood and avoid recommendations, enzymes, and other types of nutrients in your supplements all have to do with various aspects of multiple scores. There’s protein fermentation, there’s sulfide reduction, there’s an inflammatory activity, and all of these different components.
Sometimes, when people say, okay, just tell us exactly what is this one thing or how to improve this one score. A lot of times, there is more than one way to improve them, and to different people are different foods that will actually do the trick. So one score can influence many foods, and one food can be influenced by many, many different scores before it’s actually placed into your minimize or avoid. So if you want us to like spell out every single piece of the logic that is taking place for your results, then it’s almost like you have to be careful what you wish for because it could be hundreds of pages of different lines of code that took all these things into consideration and said okay, it’s really avoid for you.
[00:42:20] Ashley James: Just avoid it.
[00:42:21] Ally Perlina: That’s how it goes. Just avoid it, or just get these supplements, it’s good for you. Now, when we can, we highlight that. If you get your report and just even find on page—Control F or Command F—and you say score, then you will see all of the references in your food recommendations pages to any score. Whenever it’s a very obvious one that you can pin it more or less on that one score to focus on, we do tell you that except you’ll see more than one food most likely that alludes to that score when it needs help. That’s just the thing.
We try the best we can and thank you for the kind words saying that we’ve done a pretty good job, but we need to do probably even better to strike that balance between giving people all that information because we truly want to empower them with all this knowledge. But at the same time, not overwhelming them and making it very simple and clear. Okay, some of these things, they’re not optimal so you see it in the red. These are the foods you need to focus on, these are your superfoods, these are your avoid foods, and these are your supplements.
So at least, if that’s all they want to get out of this, they don’t want to be burdened with all this extra info, they can get that and take it to action immediately on that day because that’s extremely important. If you overwhelm people, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, it’s not about that. You’re not helping them if it loses them. We need to be very much mindful of this concept of balance.
[00:43:52] Ashley James: It’s interesting talking to you, I think I identified that I have been eating less and less protein from plant sources because it does—in large amounts—give me quite a bit of bloating. Even with too much tofu, it’s upsetting, and just thinking about beans, I think I just have gradually been eating less and less or smaller portions, I should say. That and I’m very satisfied with how many grams of protein I consume. Although now I’m pregnant and my midwife has made it abundantly clear that she wants me eating more protein. But as far as the average female, 40 grams of protein for the average female is quite sufficient, 60 if you’re an athlete, which is easily doable from multiple plant sources.
However, if I were to consume a great deal of any kinds of protein powder like pea protein, pumpkin seed protein, or edamame. Any large amount I would get bloated and that is interesting that you say that it’s because you can see it in my microbiome that it is fermenting, it’s not properly digesting, it’s fermenting, and then it’s leading to metabolites. What do these metabolites do to the body?
[00:45:32] Ally Perlina: Great question. So in your case specifically, I mean, I want to put it in the context that there are many things they can do, but there is this aggregate functional score called microbiome induced stress. I know it sounds quite general until you drill into it and you see exactly what it is. It will explain to you that within microbiome induced stress, which you have in the red zone so it’s not optimal. it’s not terrible or anything but it’s in the suboptimal zone. You’ll see that is where you have that ammonia production, uric acid, sulfide production, and even TMA production I believe as well. All these pathway scores are part of the microbiome induced stress.
So what does it mean microbiome induced stress? I mean, there are so many different types of stress. So microbiomes can secrete those or produce those metabolites, which are small molecules, and they can cross the gut lining, the intestinal barrier pretty easily even if you have a pretty good gut lining, which according to our test seems like you do. But some of these really, really small molecules like ammonia it’s pretty tiny. It can really cross easily and go into the bloodstream, and in the bloodstream, it can really cause its own pro-inflammatory or stress response type of reaction. In a way, it can be somewhat of a toxin. Again, not to sound scary or anything like that, but it’s all about the relative amounts.
So sulfide, ammonia, putrescine, cadaverine, the byproducts of protein fermentation—that’s one source. The other source of microbiome induced stress or potential pro-inflammatory type stress is your uric acid production, and that’s something that can actually be felt or experienced by some people—to some degree, depends on how much of it you have and how quickly your body gets rid of it, mitigates it, or clears it.
All of these different pathway scores actually tell you well why you need to even know about this pathway? Because if it’s not insightful for your health or it’s not actionable, then who would want to log in just to learn biology, right? There are textbooks for that. Of course, we’re learning something new about biology in this new context, but still, we only give you something that is insightful and actionable. You can read about it and there are references, but just to summarize, all of these different small molecules, the microbes make. If they make too much they cross the gut lining, and then they go into the bloodstream. And they can actually inflict a little bit of the damaging response to certain cellular membranes or stress your system to be able to keep up with clearing or detoxing some of these different molecular entities.
If you don’t have your entire system up to the task, it’s somewhat of a warning sign to make sure that you mitigate that. That’s why for the overall health level of stress response health, you’re still fine, You’re in the average zone. But when it comes to microbiome induced stress, that’s where you can read more about these pathways like ammonia, sulfide, and the other ones that I just mentioned so you could see what it does to your body. We already talked about some of the foods and digestive strategies that you need to focus on that are part of your recommendations and foods and supplements so you can be prepared and mitigate.
So even if nothing really palpable is already happening, the point is to keep you in the wellness space and keep as much illness optional as possible so that you can take action on your biology. Like you said, you don’t want to just throw darts at some fad diets or trendy supplements. You want to be able to make biologically informed choices that are smart for you, that are informed by your own pathways, your own biology with molecular-level precision. That’s basically what we’re all about. I hope that answers your question, or if you want, we could go more specifically.
[00:49:49] Ashley James: Well, I love that you said biologically informed choices. I mean, that’s a writer downer right there. I told you about my history with the ketogenic diet, the paleo diet. I’ve been on at least 25 diets. I’ve read every diet book you could touch because I’m a seeker of health, though. I was trying to figure out what my body best requires. Everyone that writes a diet book says that theirs is the best and they have the science to back it. When I went through the institute for integrative nutrition—it’s a year-long health coach training program—you learn a hundred different dietary theories, and every week we’re trying a new one. Once you learn one you want to try it.
Within the first week or so, we’re doing the raw vegan diet. I lasted six days on that. I felt fantastic, but boy was I gassy. I expected the gas to go away because all the raw vegans say that’ll go away, that’ll go away, and now I know why I was gassy, first of all. Luckily, the gas is not smelly, it’s just plentiful. So when I was doing the raw vegan diet, that was just like I could have powered a vehicle. Each experience with different health routines showed me just how wrong it is to listen to one expert and do one diet that’s apparently supposed to be for everyone. Because if I can’t eat cruciferous vegetables because of the genetic expressions of my unique microbiome, then any diet that incorporates cruciferous vegetables is not going to be beneficial to me as an individual.
But with the ketogenic diet, which many have touted as being just a miracle for them, left me in such a bad state of health that it took me a few years to recover. And it left my husband in such a bad state of health that he was immediately put on two medications—actually three I believe and then he was down to two—because it damaged his kidneys. We were actually under the supervision of a naturopath while we were doing this ketogenic diet, but it destroyed my husband’s kidneys. It took him a few years, but he was able to completely recover using natural medicine. That’s when we adopted a whole food plant-based diet, that was right around that time. For me, it damaged my liver and I had such bad digestive distress from the ketogenic diet.
Again, if we apply what you’re teaching, which is making biologically informed choices based on the unique complexity of the own expression of the bacteria that are in us and part of us, then we can craft the most healing diet for us. If someone leans more towards eating paleo, more towards eating the Mediterranean, more towards eating their native diet—maybe their South American, Central American, or Asian diet. If they lean more towards looking at their ancestors and eating more what their ancestors ate in that way and they feel good, then they take your kit and they get the results back. Your kits give you lots of foods you can eat. You give lots of foods that are superfoods that are incredibly healing for your body, and then you give a dozen or so or two dozen absolutely avoid these, and here are the reasons why.
Someone could take that and adapt it to any way of eating that best suits them. But since I have removed all of the do not eat that you have on my list, and since I have increased the superfoods—which I’m so excited about, I’m absolutely loving them—without guilt, I am avidly eating my avocados again, and all the other things in the superfood list. You even give how much of each one to reduce. Here, just have half a cup of this at most. I’ve taken that so seriously and I really feel—in the last 17 days—a huge shift in my digestion, even though I am going through the stages of pregnancy that would actually leave me in worse digestion. I’m feeling the least bloated I have in a very long time.
I came to Viome without any real health concerns. I just wanted to take it to the next level, but people come to you who have major health problems, who have MS, have Hashimoto’s, or have major gut dysbiosis. I have several listeners who have expressed concerns that they now can only eat a dozen foods or less because most foods make them sick. They feel very pinned into a corner where they now only have just a small handful of foods that they can eat because they’ve done an elimination diet and they’ve really discovered that almost everything makes them sick.
Well, if they had this information at hand it would help them to understand why. Maybe something as simple as the supplements that your results show because you show here is the different digestive enzymes you’re low in. If you were to incorporate those, then maybe they would have been able to then eat a larger variety of foods. Because it’s not always about what we’re allergic to, it’s about what metabolites our microbiome produces, and those metabolites can cause damage.
Now just to get back to some very specific examples because this is all wonderful information you’re sharing, but I want people to be able to relate it to their life specifically. Can you give a real-world example of a metabolite or metabolites that are created in the gut, and what symptoms or illness could people have as a result of specific metabolites created by the microbiome?
[00:56:42] Ally Perlina: Yeah, absolutely. So we talked a little bit about a few of them. Just to say that look, if you have microbiome-induced stress or inflammation, then you may have all kinds of feelings of either a toxic burden where you feel a little unwell, tired, queasy; or you may have more brain fog because it can also cross. Those things can cross the blood-brain and gut blood barriers. That could be one of the themes but, I didn’t touch on the other themes.
There are really well-known pro-inflammatory molecules that are produced by the microbiome like LPAs—lipopolysaccharide. Specific types of lipids and carbohydrate subunits, that’s why the lipopolysaccharide. Saccharide is for the carbs, and lipo is the lipid part. They get together and in slightly different conformations based on what microbes are there. they can be actually found in the blood especially if you have more of a leaky gut. The reason I didn’t bring it up right away, especially in your context, is because you don’t have an LPS score for LPS biosynthesis. The production of this LPS molecule, you don’t have it in the red, you don’t have it as suboptimal. So you’re more or less fine on that, and you also have a good gut lining health score.
In general, we do see quite a few. It’s a pretty common case. I would say 30% of our Viome population, quite a few people have LPS production on the higher side. And if it goes hand in hand with your gut lining score being suboptimal as well, then you’re really at risk of triggering an immune response. The way it happens is this LPS molecule, which is just part of the normal outside coding of some of the microbes, not all. It goes into the bloodstream and it elicits this immune response. The blood cells start to notice it and recruit other blood cells, say hey, come over here. We’ve got an issue. So to do that, they have to secrete certain molecules themselves, and that’s the signaling that happens now on the blood side of things, which we also test with the health intelligence kit. The service gives you this kit to test the blood that you mentioned already.
So you collect your blood. We look at gene expression, not only within your microbiome now, but now we look from the blood side to see are those pathways on, and are they really active that tell us that you have immune triggering happening a bit too much? Do you have it really high? Because that’s exactly what can happen if some of the pro-inflammatory metabolites can cross the gut lining and actually instigate some of this reaction. So that the T cells of different kinds will start to get overly active and secrete these proinflammatory molecules in order to combat the foreign type of substance that has entered the blood. And those molecules are called some of the cytokines or pro-inflammatory cytokines. Maybe some of you have heard of interleukins and TNF alpha.
It can cause other types of molecules to be elevated. And ultimately, if they don’t come down, so to speak, then some damage can be done to cellular components and membranes. And a lot of the cellular energy can be expanded towards mitigating this inflammation, which really should not even be there in the bloodstream, as opposed to healing and rejuvenating itself. In that sense, we’re waiting to get to the point like okay, well, how do I sense it? How do I feel it aside from testing it?
That’s the tricky part because depending on what you’re doing to yourself, what you’re eating, what you’re susceptible to, and what else is going on, inflammation can actually take residents in different parts of a human body. some people, like I said, the inflammation can actually be manifested in the brain, in the mind, in such a way that is just subtle enough that you won’t think of it like aha, I feel inflammation because you just might experience a little bit of irritability, insomnia, brain fog, confusion, or anxiety.
Actually, some of the pro-inflammatory pathways that can stem from the gut microbiome have been implicated in lowering dopamine levels, which can make people feel depressed. They have also been implicated in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases because if enough of these molecules or the microbes themselves like the small viruses from the gut can actually go all the way through the blood into the brain, they can activate now inside the central nervous system. They can activate pathways to where the glial cells actually overreact, and then they start to get destroyed and inflammation in the brain can cause neuronal damage, which then contributes to—like you were mentioning—a mess and other things. They can be part of the entire picture of some of the neurodegenerative, cognitive, or mood disorders. So that’s one set.
And then another set of inflammation examples that we all probably heard of a lot is the autoimmune joint conditions. There’s the more local, obviously, IBD—inflammatory bowel disease, which is right there in the gut. And then there are a lot of customers that say that following our regimen really helps them who have joint, skin, and other types of inflammatory conditions where you can really see it and feel it. Because inflammation is not created to be equal in any one organ. Whatever you have going on, it depends on the ecosystem and the system’s biology of the entire body of all the systems. Wherever you have the weakest link, that’s where inflammation will take residence and manifest itself first and foremost and then all the other places.
Some people may not feel it or may not realize that aha, this could be some low-grade inflammation, and some people may truly feel it. Where you feel it completely depends on you, but some of the top symptoms that seem to have improvement in time within our customer base—and we have over 100,000 customers now—deal with mood and autoimmune inflammatory conditions from psoriasis, to rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel conditions, to mood and sleep, and cognitive and digestive disorders in general. Like I said, it can be different places where it manifests itself.
I wanted to ask you, so far, when we talk about any of these pathways. We talked about TMA a little bit, but then there was a set of pathways you had suboptimal like ammonia, sulfide, and uric acid. Would you say that any of them—even just from reviewing the information—ring a bell with something that you know you had before or you could feel before?
[01:04:25] Ashley James: In regards to?
[01:04:32] Ally Perlina: So uric acid, for example, is something that can come from either purines or protein fermentation, but it’s something that people may not feel and other people may feel it if a lot of it accumulates. And that’s what’s causing gout usually, so I’m just curious.
[01:04:42] Ashley James: Got it. Okay. Absolutely, yes. My blood results from the last few years have shown higher levels of uric acid, especially when I ate meat. Especially back when I did a ketogenic diet, my liver was incredibly angry at me. It was actually sticking out. It was quite inflamed. I had to get an ultrasound and they said I didn’t have a fatty liver, I didn’t have a cirrhosis liver. I just had an inflamed liver, very angry from the ketogenic diet, and then a very high uric acid level.
I didn’t experience gout like the typical person does where it’s in their big toe. I had this pain at the base of my foot almost like plantar fasciitis. I was like, I wonder is this plantar fasciitis, is this a bone spur? And just on a gut instinct level—and this is long after I had left the ketogenic diet but right before I transitioned into eating no meat at all. I grabbed some tart cherry juice from the health food store, and I started drinking between two and four ounces a day of the concentrate, and I’d add it to water. And very quickly, within a day or two, the pain in my foot was gone. I know that tart cherry juice is also very anti-inflammatory. It helps the body produce more melatonin, so people get great sleep when you take it. It’s a wonderful whole food supplement to take, and it’s quite delicious. But knowing that the pain went away immediately I thought, that must be basically gout in my foot manifesting.
At the time, I never really cared for organ meat, so I wasn’t gorging on any kind of meat. But my naturopath did say that based on looking at my diet and looking at my blood work, I tended to lean more towards having a build-up of uric acid. That’s something though that I feel like I’ve gotten under control because I don’t eat any meat so there’s really a low purine diet. And then I avoid the other foods that contain purine. And then if I ever do get that feeling in my foot, I just start drinking the tart cherry juice. Although, I haven’t had it lately, which is quite exciting. But my liver is getting healthier and healthier. It’s interesting because that actually came up in my Viome results, which I never thought that there could be a link to the metabolites produced from the bacteria in my body.
[01:07:36] Ally Perlina: So that is actually very, very interesting because it can actually accumulate to some degree in different tissues, and you may feel a little achy or a little bit of stiffness or limitation of movement, and that could be due to uric acid. Uric acid is something that can be pro-inflammatory, and it’s interesting what it’s made of by the microbiome. The pathways can come from either the urea cycle, which is from the different amino acid inputs, so back to your protein fermentation protein digestion patterns. Or it can come from purines and purines are high in different meats, fish, seafood, and also some of the vegetables as well.
You could see in your results the haddock, for instance, is to be avoided because of the purines in it, the uric acid potential to promote those pathways. For you, if you did want to eat some fish maybe once in a while, salmon would be a much better choice. Whereas I think it’s also halibut, haddock, and trout would not be good because they have a lot of purines. It’s not just organ meats and you’ve done yourself a great favor that you avoid that because of the TMA issue that we talked about and the protein fermentation and digestive efficiency issue. But also now because of the purines.
Some people feel absolutely great eating all kinds of meats, and they cannot take all of these different vegetables. They get so bloated and they feel awful, right? Just like you said, some people feel absolutely great on a ketogenic diet and it’s like the biggest blessing that happened to them. But it’s not just one type of diet that works for all. Unfortunately, it’s usually some complexity of different mixes of things that work just for you. You are your own personalized menu that you need to work out for yourself, and there’s just no shortcut around that.
In your case, you’ve done so great that even before having this information, you’ve avoided all of these different meats, organ meats, and those types of foods because you naturally just don’t have the biology to deal with them in the best way where something beneficial would happen to you. It’s actually on the contrary. Plus they come together with all of the TMA, the lipids, and the fats, which could be also tough for your liver. And we also see some of these bile tolerant organisms in there.
So together with that and the uric acid pathways, it’s really painting this more comprehensive picture now that especially that you’ve shared some of these things with me that you won’t do well on this high protein, high-fat diet. Whereas other people I know personally and based on the stats as well, they do so and they report that they feel great on even a really greasy protein diet. But they cannot take all of these different starchy vegetables.
Again, no healthy food is healthy for everybody, and no specific source of protein or whatnot is necessarily a villain either—or good or bad. It all depends on personalization, and that’s the real trick. The key is in that that you have to basically deal with the complexity to do what’s right for you and to be biologically informed about it.
[01:11:30] Ashley James: I feel like the next question that’s on everyone’s mind is, is it forever? Because we’re taught that the microbiome is always changing and that we could take probiotics. Although that’s been disproven that probiotics drastically change the microbiome. But we could eat fermented foods, go gluten-free, eat organic, get a variety of different prebiotics, and nourish a more diverse microbiome. Over time, can we change our microbiome so that it would create different metabolites?
[01:12:17] Ally Perlina: That’s a great question, actually. In terms of changing the microbiome, people are taught to think about microbiome as this list of microbes and seeing how much of who’s there do I have. What we’re doing is a bit of a paradigm shift in that you care less about who is there and how much of them are there. You care about how active they are, but most importantly, you care about what they are actively doing? So that’s the microbiome part. And then you care about the host because in your case, you have a microbiome actively doing some of this pro-inflammatory activity in your gut. That’s why you have a microbiome score called biofilm chemotaxis and virulence pathways are not optimal.
That would make somebody worry and think well, they’re making something that signifies that there is some harmful pro-inflammatory activity. But then you also look at the closed part and you see that actually your immune system activation score—which would tell us if you have ultimately a high level of inflammation or not—is actually on the good side. Whatever happens in your gut stays in your gut. So you still need to take care of it, right? But you need to see what is being produced, what is being actually excreted, secreted, and made that I need to worry about.
On the level of the gut microbiome, you don’t want to necessarily make it a super task to completely rebuild it because you have to actually get the most out of the hand that you’re dealt. The microbiome that you have, the easiest way to reap rewards from it is to get the microbiome you have to do what’s right for you. You figure out, okay, if I give it so much of this sulfur, cruciferous vegetables, organ meats, or salt, your microbes are stressed out by too much salt or whatever and that’s bad for your probiotic microbes. You want to lower that a little bit.
You figure out, based on our recommendations, what are those things you need to optimize in your diet. Even with the microbes you have, you get them to give you the best nutrients. With all of the greens that you eat—and it shows, all of the really beneficial complex carbs that you ingest—turn into really nice butyrate production. Not everybody has that. That’s actually not a given that just because you eat vegetables you have high production of butyrate. It’s a very beneficial short-chain fatty acid, and it may just be one of the main reasons why your gut lining is pretty happy because it’s a very good nourishing component that colonocytes use for energy and it helps the anti-inflammatory effects. Even if you have your microbes secreting these virulence factors and things like that, you have some of the mitigating strategies in place as well.
When you ask about how do we take this to action and what does it all mean? You have to see—on the grand scheme of things—first of all, are my microbes really doing something bad? Not so much who is there, but are my microbes doing something bad? Is there something that tells me this is what you need to improve the score? Because if you just do that, you may already have some really beneficial outcome of that, even if who is there—the microbes themselves—have not drastically changed. And then you basically end up with a story that is not about rebuilding the entire microbiome because most of it is neither good nor bad. Most of the microbiome is just that’s your normal at this point. Completely trashing it is not necessarily a good thing, and you’re not going to take antibiotics to do that either.
What’s important is to reach a balance, and by balance, I don’t mean just a balance of good versus bad microbes because, again, most of them are neither good nor bad. But the balance of these beneficial versus harmful activities and functions. Balance of good versus bad pathways that give you good versus bad biochemical outputs—these metabolites, these molecules that then go into your bloodstream or can protect or harm your gut lining.
That’s a different way of thinking because you’re thinking what is happening, that is what matters. And what’s happening is telling me what I should do to my system. So it becomes less about treating a microbe and looking at the microbiome more as a means to an end, not the end game itself. Microbes tell us something about the host like your digestion, your patterns of what’s happening with your fats and bile acids, and things like that. They can tell us those secrets about you in a way, and so we need this very important readout from microbial activities.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that based on it we’re going to expect to overthrow our entire microbiome. Actually, we should expect to reap the rewards of our microbiome that we have, and then if some changes are needed, the way you go about it is not with some antibiotics or anything like that, but by enhancing your probiotic and prebiotic activities so that you get the right ones. And even for probiotics, yeah, I mean there’s some controversy out there, but the thing is these probiotics do have different actions even down to the strain level. So not all the lactobacilli are the same. Not all acidophilus species are the same.
So even strain by strain, they have different benefits and they produce different things. Some can actually have histamine promoting effects. Yeah, and people can get this sensitivity when they get certain probiotics. Whereas other people need more of a boost to their immune system, and they need that very much so they’ll take those probiotic species and they’ll feel great. It’s just that people haven’t figured it all out, and they’re trying to go black and white again to go quickly. Probiotics: good, bad. And doesn’t it remind you back to how we were talking about ketogenic: good, bad? Meat: good, bad? Or paleo: good, bad? We just want to hear that because it’s really easy to act on.
What I want to remind people of is that it’s not all good or bad, it depends, and it depends on your personal biology. The key is in personalization, and you can’t personalize if you don’t have the molecular level details to do it with molecular-level precision. We try to do that work for you, and hopefully, that helps.
[01:19:02] Ashley James: I love it. You said earlier before we hit record that your goal is to help people embrace complexity and do something good about it. Health is complex. You just totally threw a few listeners for a loop that some of them could have actually developed further histamine problems, meaning increase their allergy symptoms by taking what they thought was a very healthy probiotic. Everyone knows that we should all be in some form of probiotic. This is the thing that everyone says, be on probiotics.
I am quite fascinated because you brought me back to when my son was an infant and he developed food allergies. We were trying to figure out why, but we did have him on a bunch of probiotics and he started to express more of a histamine reaction. And I just wonder if that was one of the things? Of course, it’s never one thing only, like you said, it’s an accumulation of several things. But if we can look at a few hundred thousand pathways of the genetic expressions of our very complex microbiome that creates all of these pharmacy-grade chemicals in our body, some of which masterfully. Some of which help us to feel happy. Some of which help us to have healthy thyroid function.
25% of our T3 is converted in the gut. 90% of our serotonin comes from the gut. We keep hearing these things from health experts, but you take it way deeper by going let’s look at your individual gut microbiome.
Now you have so many clients now that you can see the metadata as they do, and I’ve actually had some listeners reach out to me and say I’ve been doing Viome for the last few years and they shared their experience. And my Naturopath, I came to her for my annual physical after I had submitted my results and I was looking forward to receiving them from Viome. She said, oh, Viome. Obviously, she didn’t mention their names, but she said I have had several patients who couldn’t figure. We did allergy testing, we did everything, and we went through all the tests that naturopaths have, which is so much more complex than most physicians because they’re looking at the body as a whole system.
They couldn’t pinpoint, but Viome—your test—was able to get the person the different cases that she had, was able to help them get exactly the information they needed that they couldn’t get from other tests because you’re not looking at a food allergy or an immune response. You’re taking it to a whole new place that is not looked at from anywhere else. It’s quite exciting.
Coming back to the real-world application. If someone is tired, they have brain fog, they have the laundry list of symptoms that they’re not incredibly happy with—weight gain, the stress in the body like high cortisol, and fatigue. How much of that can be corrected by knowing what to feed your microbiome? How much have you seen corrected? Since you can look at the meta-analysis of so many clients, as they retest and as they share their results, what have you seen accomplished in people’s health as they’ve utilized the Viome results in their life?
[01:23:21] Ally Perlina: Well, it could be on a level of these pathways and microbial communities and how active they are, and it can also be in terms of the symptoms. Some of the common responses in terms of improvement that people see—besides the ones I mentioned about just mood, some of the pains and aches, and things like that—are sleep, brain functioning, and just overall energy. That’s another one I did not mention, but it’s energy, performance, stamina, and endurance.
I’m not just talking about athletic endurance because we do have a number of really professional athletes that turn to us and they really like our program, but it’s more about actually just endurance of going through the stresses and burdens of life. Some people have it really tough and some people maybe have it even tougher with all of the COVID times, unfortunately. It just helps the body rejuvenate itself and protect itself, and some of that can come from microbes just simply making more of the short-chain fatty acids. That can help on even the epigenetic level and it can help reduce some of the inflammation.
And then other people, it could be more of the immune-boosting effects. Certain microbes can promote immune stimulation but in a way that you need it, not the inflammation to be lingering or anything like that, but the immune-boosting effects. And can promote epithelial cell turnover in the gut, which helps your gut lining be healthy. You seem to have a good gut lining, but certain communities of the microbes start to produce these nutrients that are basically like your B vitamins, vitamin K, and things that you may think you’re getting from your pills or your diet. But at the same time, when it’s made naturally in the gut from something that is already part of your biological ecosystem and it’s in that right place basically at the right time, then there’s nothing like it that you can just like swallow as a pill.
So they can make antioxidants for you, which can then protect your cells, give your cells more energy, and that is something that you can even feel on the overall system level. Even some of the lipids and things that can enhance the functionality of your mitochondria and cellular membranes can also be promoted from the pathways that get turned on by a microbiome.
So back to the real world, it’s really just a number of different things that can be responsible for the success that we see. Even B12, we see a lot of that being produced by the microbiome. We see if there are glutathione and selenium pathways activated in the microbiome that can be part of the antioxidant theme. We can see if microbes are helping you detox in a way and help you mitigate any of the reactive oxygen species, which is part of the oxidative stress, and then we measure that in the blood test now with the Health Intelligence Service. That gives you that blood kit and helps you understand your stress levels and your mitochondrial health. Your mitochondrial health is actually pretty good, but it’s not perfect, so maybe you need a bit more of that boost.
Back to foods and supplements, you could see that you’re recommended some of the resveratrol, nicotinamide riboside, but it may not be good for everybody. For people who have high senescence, NAD may actually promote that if you also have high inflammatory pathways. But if you don’t, it may be great for you.
Now if you take that and if you take some people to take Metformin just because they read something about it, but you may need to supplement as well with some of these polyphenols that nurture the microbiome and the gut lining and also have the anti-aging and antioxidant effects like quercetin, curcumin, and resveratrol. Because without it, you don’t know when some nutrient that is just like being buzzed about is good for you or it’s actually harmful to you.
If you take things that inhibit some of these pathways, you may need to supplement with CoQ10 so you don’t deplete your energy because having too much NAD in a certain context without supplementing with CoQ10 may not be the most optimal mix for you. So that’s where we get to this whole next chapter which I’m sure we’ll talk about some more that I’m really proud of is the personalized supplements where we take the nutrient level precision even farther and give you your own personal blend with your name on it of exactly what you need and nothing that you don’t. Because there’s so much of the good stuff that can actually cause harmful mixtures for some people—but not others—that we want to actually simplify for you and deliver it so that you just need to stick to these capsules and a stick pack per day with pre- and probiotics.
You will get exactly the dosages that are specific for you, exactly what you need and none of that extra redundant or harmful stuff that you don’t.
[01:28:54] Ashley James: Right. I can imagine that there are supplements that I’ve taken that have choline in it because that’s healthy for some people, but not for me based on my microbiome. You’ve actually cued me to want to go and look at all my supplements and see which ones may have choline in it because I’m going to chuck those, for me. I could give them to my husband, maybe they’re good for him. It’s so interesting.
When I got my Viome results, I remember I was sitting on the couch with my family. We were all hanging out. I opened up the app. You can do it in a browser. My husband, he’s all thumbs so he doesn’t like using his phone. He used the website and he quite liked that, and then I used the app. I thought that when I did the kit that I wouldn’t buy the supplements. I thought I’ve got enough supplements, I’m just going to follow the food recommendations.
I think within five minutes of receiving and reading through—I hadn’t even finished, I mean, there’s a lot of information. I remember having been going to read it to me, what does it say? And I’m like, there’s a lot of information here. I’m going to have to digest this in chunks. As I’m going through all my information, of course, it’s so easy because you start off by just giving—here are the foods to eat, avoid, and eat less of, and here are your superfoods, which is simple. But then, of course, I want to know more and want to know more and go deeper and deeper into my results. At each turn, it would explain why my microbiome is expressing in this way which produces this and these pathways are happening. Here are the supplements that can help to mitigate that or help to push it in this direction. I thought, how comprehensive is this? It’s amazing.
One of the supplements they’ve wanted me to take was the tart cherry, basically, a cherry extract, which you say comes from tart cherry juice. That’s my exact experience, my body really resonates with that. Your test shows that my unique and individual supplement that you guys would create for me—I looked through and I recognized some of the ingredients as foods, superfoods, or extracts that I have really resonated with. And then there’s a laundry list of different wonderful probiotic strains and explaining why these for me specifically.
You compile them together and ship them off to me as a monthly supply. I thought it was so funny that I opened up the app, sure I would not buy supplements from you, and within five minutes, I’m like, I want to try this. This looks so cool. It’s made just for my body and just for me, and it’s going to help me come back into balance even more. It got really exciting especially because most of it’s from whole food sources that are very specific extracts.
Now, you guys give a discount, which thank you so much. The coupon code is LTH as in Learn True Health. When you buy the Viome kit itself, you can use the coupon code LTH to get the listener discount, but you can also use the coupon code LTH when you order the supplements, and that’s nice too. I got a little bit of a wonderful discount, so thank you, and I placed my order and I’m looking forward to them arriving.
It’s only eight capsules. You and I have talked about this because I thought how could you have eight capsules for anyone regardless of their size, but then again, it’s not about all the cells in the body. It’s really about the microbiome and about the metabolites it creates and about supporting cellular health on a different level. Plus these are very refined extracts that are quite concentrated, so you assured me of the potency. Tell me about the results that people are getting from these supplements. Have you had any feedback, or have you performed studies? I know that even gold medalists are part of your program.
[01:33:17] Ally Perlina: Yup. Precision supplements is a completely brand new program. We just started it, and we’re going to do all kinds of studies to report our results, but until this moment in time, for all these years we’ve been recommending off-the-shelf branded supplements before we started making our own, and that’s a completely different type of setup as you can probably imagine. You’re limited to only what is formulated and commercially available to suggest to people. We would still operate on the level of nutrients. Look for any supplement that has the following ingredients, but we have no partnerships or we don’t endorse any brands. We don’t even talk to them. It’s completely unbiased. What that left us with is basically the impetus for this whole precision supplements program.
Yes, we’ve heard of some really good feedback and good results that we’ve collected and we have the numbers to show it, but they were so limited and hampered by our inability to choose to just get the nutrients from the available formulations that you need in the amounts that you need so you don’t have to take 200 pills if you don’t need them, and none of the extra stuff that comes with it that you do not need.
If you know that these are the only providers of this particular ingredient, and whoever makes the ingredient is selective about who they give it to sell the ingredient, then you’re stuck with whatever those providers formulate. If they formulate it with magnesium stearate, silica dioxide, and all of these different things in high amounts that are not good for you, there’s very little control you have. You basically cannot have the flexibility to just pick out the active ingredients in the best concentrated potent form without all of the extras, without the fillers, with picking the right sources and types of the capsule itself, or what should go in the stick pack. We just wanted that flexibility.
Even though we do have some preliminary reports to tell us that yes, we are on the right track with supplements, this program is completely new. We just launched it and are very excited about it, but that doesn’t mean that there is no evidence behind our recommendations. Actually, my team and I spent so much time on all of the different rationales and references so that even to the point that it could be overwhelming to some people because we don’t want to make it look like we just list some ingredients and we just think it’s going to be good for you.
We actually specify exactly which mechanisms of action are being targeted by these ingredients, and which scores are tied to these mechanisms of action. We also give you this bibliography that tells you, okay, it has been shown that this ingredient has antimicrobial effects.
For instance, for you, Ashley, you have some of these oral microbes, which are not necessarily pathogens, but they get into your gut and they are overly active. They’re more than you would like them to be. That means that maybe some of the nutrients that solve your stressors’ types of pathways that also have antimicrobial effects would be great for you. We try to shoot most birds with fewer stones and give you just those nutrients that you need. You have ginger, I believe, in your foods, and you have mastic gum in your supplements—among other things—that have some of the beneficial polyphenols and carbs. But also have the antimicrobial effects that you need to keep these populations of microbes at bay, and the other ones that are also responsible for the biofilm and chemotaxis types of pathways.
We try to address all of these different things giving you exactly why this is recommended for you and giving you the references. It’s the summary that you don’t get anywhere just by googling an ingredient. You’ll get some high-level things. But in the actual recommendations for every food and supplement ingredient, you’ll see exactly why it’s recommended for you.
Back to the eight capsules topic, it’s actually the dosage that is very custom-tailored to you. Just because everybody gets eight capsules does not mean that everyone gets the same dosage whatsoever. Actually, everybody gets a completely different dosage. So cherries are something that has actually already worked well for you. For you it’s 879 milligrams in your supplement mix of this cherry powder, other people will only have maybe 300 milligrams of cherry powder, and many people won’t have any of the cherry powder. You need the cherries and not just because of the uric acid and other of the pro-inflammatory pathways, but because it also helps to feed some of your microbes associated with beneficial metabolic fitness pathways. That’s one of the scores that you need to improve.
In every single one of these nutrient explanations, you will see what scores it helps improve, it also helps with your cellular stress, and then basically why you need to take them and the evidence is there. For our program, we will show in more formal clinical studies what the evidence will be, but for now, the evidence for every single one of them is there. The dosage is there to fit perfectly within eight capsules the things that are most important for you in a dose-dependent way to address your biology.
[01:39:03] Ashley James: I love it. I’m so excited. Ally, do you take the supplements that Viome creates?
[01:39:09] Ally Perlina: Oh, I take everything. I’ll try anything twice.
[01:39:14] Ashley James: I mean, you’re part of this system. You’re the Chief Translational Science Officer. Who came up with your title at Viome? Did you come up with that?
[01:39:29] Ally Perlina: It’s a team effort.
[01:39:32] Ashley James: it’s a team effort, I bet. When you first started taking your own supplements based on your unique Viome results, what did you notice? Did you notice anything different at first when you started taking them?
[01:39:50] Ally Perlina: Yeah, the ways that stress and inflammation manifest in my body are headaches. I’m such a headachy person. I’ve had headaches since 10 years of age, and I have all kinds. The works, basically from migraines and some of the hormone-related ones to things that I think are more because of my protein fermentation issues. I do eat animal products and things like that. I’ve gone through phases in my life when I went completely vegan and vegetarian and somehow I keep going back to having more of a variety including the animal products in the diet. I think that I’m actually not doing well for myself with those things. When I take bromelain and some of the protein proteolytic types of enzymes, I notice that it helps me. It does better for me even with headaches and things like that.
Also just in terms of stress, and I do have a little bit of a histamine thing coming and going depending. I had asthma as a kid, so when I take quercetin along with other things, I know that’s one of the ingredients that seems to make me feel better. Without it, it’s not the same. I do notice that some probiotics, I swear they do make me feel—I get itchy eyes. I don’t have it all the time, but I get itchy eyes from some probiotics. I don’t want to give any probiotics bad names, but there are some probiotics that have even been published to cause a bit more of this histamine sensitivity, or even in the gut, they bring about like the Th17 response. Which for some people could be good because with just a little bit of inflammation in the colon environment, you will stimulate the rejuvenation and proliferation replenishment of colon cells, which you need for your gut lining to be young and active. But if too much of that happens, then you don’t want to elicit that response.
I’ve learned a little bit from all kinds of trials and errors, and I try branded supplements too. I try so much, I rotate them, I forget them, I order new ones, and I try our own, and I try all the packets from our suppliers, obviously. I noticed that some of the probiotics just cause a little bit of the itchy or whatever response in me, and some things will illicit headaches. If I have too much B12, I’m done. I can have just excruciating tension headaches, debilitating ones.
[01:42:37] Ashley James: This is when you take over-the-counter supplements, not your unique Viome supplements?
[01:42:44] Ally Perlina: Actually, for me, if I take too much B12 from anywhere, I’m going to be in trouble. But having said that, methylcobalamin is much better for me than cyanocobalamin for B12. And I hear that’s also true for other people. So the type of formulation, the chemical formula that you pick to get your active ingredient in is also very important. The source, where you derive, what is the natural source of the supplement, how is it extracted, how is it prepared, what are the excipients in the formula? Are there any fillers used? Is the capsule vegan or vegetarian? What’s it made of? All of those things actually play a role.
Yes, it’s very important to make sure that all of that is well selected and quality control because not the same B vitamin is the same in all the sources. But just in my example, with B12, I just know that if I take too much B12 some people think that more is better and it clears because it’s water-soluble it’s no problem. But I’m really sensitive to it and I’m sensitive to some of the bifidobacteria. I just am and other people are not.
[01:43:55] Ashley James: That makes a lot of sense considering if you had the MTHFR expression mutation snip. I’ve heard it called different names, but basically if you have MTHFR issues that non-methylated—sorry?
[01:44:16] Ally Perlina: Sorry, just some polymorphisms that can come up that make those issues more or less—the variance in your DNA that can make you a poor metabolizer or not.
[01:44:28] Ashley James: Right, polymorphisms. Thank you. I was reaching for that terminology. Do you know if you have the MTHFR polymorphism?
[01:44:39] Ally Perlina: Not the kind that’s well documented. More like benign, not the kind that’s really debilitating. I get messed up with B12, whether it’s methylcobalamin or cyanocobalamin. Too much B12 messes me up.
[01:45:00] Ashley James: Can you see in your Viome readings? Is it a gut thing? Is it a microbiome issue, or is it something else that has you specifically sensitive to B12 when taken in excess?
[01:45:19] Ally Perlina: I’m not sure, that’s a mystery. But I have read on some, just browsing reviews of commercially available products that have high dosages, there’s always a subset of people who gave one star who say, oh terrible headaches. Of course, it’s a subset so the product can still have high ratings. But if you go to the one-star reviews, especially for products that have 45,000 reviews, you get a really nice sampling. So you get to see those people who really suffered, what did they suffer from? Except my package didn’t, pills were broken, that’s the usual. That happens sometimes.
[01:45:52] Ashley James: Right. What were their symptoms?
[01:45:54] Ally Perlina: Yeah, that’s how I learn. We really try to do our absolute best to do no harm. Even when it’s something that is not a known medically-documented fact, we still all do our research—going to Amazon and other things. We have our PubMed phase, which is the bulk of it. And then with my team, we actually have this thing—we call it like the industry market perspective research. When we’re done doing our sciency, geeky stuff, and then we put it aside, and everybody in the team owns their condition and owns their ingredients and say, for your ingredient, your condition you own. Now go to Amazon and then search all of the reputable brand products where there are tons of reviews and search the one-star reviews and see what people are hurting from when they’re taking this product. Because maybe, it could be related to the active ingredient, maybe not, but it’s good to be aware of that.
That’s part of the research that we do. You got to do it. That’s the reality check because you may have PubMed saying how great everything is, but then what if you’re about to give it in a certain default dose for a certain score or biological area, and then you see actually all the bottles that happen to have it above one something milligrams have more reviews reporting like debilitating headaches, your eyes twitching, or insomnia.
There’s a lot that talks about palpitations, by the way, that has to do with ginkgo, ginseng, and some hidden caffeine sources and things like that. Some people are sensitive to it, some people are not. The fast metabolizers can be sensitive to just about anything. Just a little bit of that can make somebody feel really wired and not able to sleep. People even have anxiety sometimes. It’s good to see those reviews, and it’s really revealing.
Then you go back to PubMed and you search all the different results reports from either case studies or actually broader types of research work, and then you realize, aha, now it makes sense because it puts it more in the sciency geeky way again. But what prompts it sometimes is actually people’s anecdotes and personal reviews. It’s really important to keep that reality check and the perspective of how people actually feel so we don’t do any harm.
[01:48:13] Ashley James: I love that you go and use the reviews as market research to collect data. That’s so smart. I’ve actually done that. I’ve actually looked at one-star reviews of supplements myself. It’s very interesting to collect that information and then wonder why. Why is there a percentage of people that have this issue where the large majority doesn’t, but there’s going to be a small percentage that do? Why is that? And then digging deeper. I love that you did that.
You are so in touch with your body. You’ve figured stuff out. So you’ve had headaches, and now the root cause. Have your headaches diminished, or do you feel like you completely have control over them now that you have implemented your Viome results and you take the supplements that are recommended by your Viome results?
[01:49:13] Ally Perlina: Well, yeah I think it really helps, I just don’t always do my best. Sometimes it’s the basic things like I don’t go outside, drink enough water, or something, and that can mess you up no matter what.
[01:49:32] Ashley James: Wait a second, you’re human? You ate a big piece of chocolate cake last night, what?
[01:49:39] Ally Perlina: I don’t have a sweet tooth, thank goodness because then I would be even more in trouble. I mean, I eat anything and I try to be more mindful of what’s good for me. And I know, by the way, for me I cannot do raw broccoli. I mean, not so well or raw cabbage, but I can do the sauerkraut. I’m okay with that, also not too much. But our servings, actually if you see the one you have on superfoods for sauerkraut, it’s not actually a really high amount. That’s why for you, with all the fermented and probiotic type of components, it’s really good. Same for me. I’m actually the same way in that regard.
I cannot do really high amounts of raw cruciferous vegetables, but if it’s sautéed like the brussels sprouts and things like that then they do better. I actually feel better. I feel really great with kale. I can do spinach, you can do spinach too by the way because your oxalate pathways are fine. You have the microbes that help you process your oxalate, which is you’re not as likely to be facing gallstones or kidney stones as some people are who don’t have that extra helping from the microbiome actively processing oxalate.
I know what I need to do. I’m just saying it’s a matter of me knowing how to control all this stuff and then me actually taking control on a daily basis and sticking to it. That’s a little bit harder to control, but I do my best. I know exactly and I’m guilty of being my own enemy.
[01:51:14] Ashley James: I love that you brought up the oxalates. So my friend Naomi and I—she went whole food plant-based after I did, but I was easing into it and she went 100% overnight. The two of us have shared wonderful meals together, and we even film ourselves cooking in the kitchen together. We created a membership called Learn True Health Home Kitchen where we teach all kinds of delicious meals that are super wholesome. She got a scare because she realized that she was eating a ton of spinach. We became a little obsessed with a few of these dishes that are so spinach heavy and so delicious.
In between the huge amount of spinach and kale she was consuming, there began a concern in her family about how much oxalates she was consuming. I don’t think she’s ever had a stone. She’s never had a scare of a stone—kidney stone or otherwise—but of course, we hear about this. We hear that spinach is healthy but you shouldn’t eat too much of it because it’s high in oxalates and you could get stones from it. She never had any symptoms. I kind of laughed because I’ve gone through phases where I ate pounds and pounds of spinach and I’ve never had any problems. It is interesting that my microbiome processes it for me so that I could manage to eat a lot of spinach on a regular basis.
[01:52:47] Ally Perlina: Not a lot, not a huge amount.
[01:52:49] Ashley James: Okay. Eat a nice bowl of it. I’m lucky to have never had that problem, never had stones—kidney stones or any stones in my body. I’m quite happy that I haven’t had it.
[01:53:05] Ally Perlina: Good, that’s great to hear.
[01:53:07] Ashley James: She hasn’t either, so the two of us who have been heavy on spinach at times in our lives have not had that problem. I wonder if she also has that same aspect in her microbiome where it helps to process oxalates. Whereas other people may not and they may be super sensitive to spinach and just have to avoid high foods with a lot of oxalates in them. It’s interesting that we could look at that and we could see why some people get kidney stones and others don’t. It could actually be their gut biome, which is one of the contributing factors to preventing kidney stones. I mean, that’s fascinating, right?
[01:53:54] Ally Perlina: Absolutely.
[01:53:56] Ashley James: And there’s so much we could talk about, get into, and understand how the body works in relation to the metabolites the microbiome is producing.
[01:54:07] Ally Perlina: Right. Speaking about microbiomes, we didn’t really talk about probiotics. Well, we talked about some of the potential side effects. But some of the probiotics ones you have I believe like lactobacillus rhamnosus gg. There are different strains of it, but some of the strains that you have are actually known to counter the sulfide gas producing activities in your gut. It’s like the microbes that you put in as probiotics can also counter the effects of microbes that are already in your gut.
Instead of always thinking of let’s say just getting that nutrient to manipulate the pathway, to take something away, or to supplement with something, one of the things we supplement with is this specific lactobacillus is just one example. But there are also microbes that actually help counter ammonia production in the gut that happens to be activated by other things you do like protein fermentation that you have. You have ammonia production and sulfide gas production, and these microbes will counter the effects and the activities and suppress the effects of these other microbes that are engaged in these pathways making the sulfide and ammonia.
All these things we do explain in those narratives the explanations, but I think that’s very important to be mindful of because it’s slightly a new science. The effects are stemming from that all the way to the hypothalamus-pituitary axis. Also, you brought it up several times in the conversation, but the endocrine balance that’s a whole other story altogether. We see the connections with microbes and then your own cellular health and foods from the endocrine perspective as well. In some cases, you need more of the hormone boosting type of microbes like Tribulus Terrestris, and I think you have that one. There are also other nutrients that we have that boost some of the specific hormone levels or just help you modulate them. In a way, they help the body adapt and tune to its own best levels.
Then there are those activities that we see where microbes actually go and recycle some of the estrogen metabolites into more powerful potent forms of estrogen, which could be great for women who are entering menopause or postmenopausal but may not be so good for people who don’t need even more estrogen because that can contribute to some of the sensitivities. It could contribute to weight gain, it can be pro-inflammatory, it could even potentially be carcinogenic.
We can see those pathways, and then we can see in the blood side—we’ll come out with those scores really soon in the near future to actually show it to the users as well. We will see if on the blood side we see a lot of this androgen receptor or estrogen receptor ESR1 hormone stimulation of the transcription factor program that then turns on a lot of the different cellular signaling pathways. That is something we can see from this blood test as far as the Health Intelligence Service. Then that can be modulated appropriately with some of the nutrients that we have.
Then when it comes to the foods, for instance back to cruciferous vegetables, you might know that you don’t want to have a lot of those if you have an underactive thyroid like hypothyroid function. That is something that traditional regular western medicine has accepted I think for a while because even for those who have hyperthyroid people who need to lower the activity one of the drugs, I think that’s one of the older drugs that used to be given, maybe still is given. Now it’s called PTU, propylthiouracil. It was actually made from an extract of cabbage. It’s one of those components, among others, that makes cruciferous vegetables responsible for lowering the thyroid effects.
It’s basically one huge interwoven circle cycle complex system there that we’re deciphering at the moment.
[01:58:29] Ashley James: Right, interesting. Some functional medicine doctors have shared with me on the show that they do not limit cruciferous vegetables for their hypothyroid patients. In fact, they don’t see any difference if they have their patients eat it or not eat it. They think the benefits—for those whose microbiome can handle it—of cruciferous vegetables far outweigh any thyroid diminishing effects. It’s interesting to look at. We have to myth bust at every turn these old beliefs that have been the health system for so long. We have to come back with a fresh look and go, is this true for everyone? Is this true for every hypothyroid case? Especially when we can take our Viome results and look at someone, okay, you have a hypothyroid but it shows that you actually do really well on cabbage or broccoli. It would be very interesting.
[01:59:40] Ally Perlina: Right, benefits outweigh the risks, in which case you may have some. Maybe it’s still not going to be a bucket of broccoli that for some people could be good, but I agree. You could also do it in different ways with steaming, without steaming, and figure out the way that works best for you. The fermented cabbage could be better than raw cabbage and all these things.
[02:00:00] Ashley James: Right, absolutely. There’s a well-detailed questionnaire that we fill out after we mail in our test kit. One of them is asking what supplements or medications we’re on. Do you take into account people’s medications when creating the individual supplements to make sure that they don’t interact with each other in a negative way?
[02:00:28] Ally Perlina: Absolutely. Especially for supplements, we needed to make sure that we work it out absolutely right. We still, of course, put a label that just like with any dietary supplement, if you’re on medications and have certain medical conditions, you need to consult your healthcare professional. We’re not trying to replace the need for medical guidance, but at the same time, we’ve taken care of all of these different interactions.
For people who are let’s say on SSRIs and some MAOIs, they will get tryptophan for instance not on their list or it would be an avoid food equivalent, but for supplements. It’ll be on their to avoid. In terms of nutrient recommendations, they won’t get that. Then for people who take ACE inhibitors, there’s going to be a specific potassium limitation or avoiding potassium in people who take blood thinners, vitamin K, and many other rules. People who are taking metformin and statins, will get extra priority to make sure we get them the CoQ10 or PQQ that they need to make sure that they replenish that mitochondrial energy production activities and all these things. We take all that into account.
[02:01:57] Ashley James: Yes. Over 20 years ago, I was put on Metformin and it made me sick as a dog and I immediately stopped taking it. I had every symptom. Anytime I have a client that’s on medication, I like to go down the list of all the side effects of the medication just to make sure they’re not experiencing it because it’s very concerning. I’m a health coach, I’m not a doctor, and I always tell my clients that you definitely want to work with a holistic doctor like a naturopathic physician that’s licensed to be a physician because they have a deep understanding of how the body works and also how the body interacts with supplements and medication. I’m really concerned that doctors do not sit down with their patients and really scrutinize over every symptom that appears after they get on medication.
I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve worked with where they tell me they’re on Metformin, for example, and I say, okay, let’s just go through and read the actual list on the Metformin website of the complete list of potential side effects. I had a client in the hospital for eight months with acute appendicitis caused by being on Metformin. That in rare cases, Metformin can cause appendicitis. She lost over 80 pounds because she could not eat. For over a year, she could only con sip tea and bone broth, and this was all stemming from.
Now, this is, of course, a rare event, but medication can, in some cases, have a detrimental effect. I’m really looking forward to the day when like Viome, the pharmaceutical industry could make a unique and realize that based on your DNA and based on all of your body’s biology, that Metformin would be a horrible drug for you because they could tell. Could you imagine the day when they could make a special exactly what you need? Oh, your body just needs this pathway and needs this just to go in this direction. We could incorporate holistic medicine so much smoother just like Viome is doing.
But anyway, I’ve had several clients who realize that they’re, after talking to them and going through the list, if you look at what Metformin does—I mean, we’re picking on Metformin as an example but it could be any pharmaceutical, over-the-counter or prescribed drug. That one of the side effects is hypoglycemia and another side effect is hyperglycemia. What they’re taking to treat could actually exacerbate, in some cases. But you’re right, any medication we take can reduce nutrients in the body because it’s something that the body has to metabolize.
In the case of cholesterol medication, either cholesterol medication depletes the body of CoQ10, and it is mainstream knowledge that those who are taking—now I do not know why they don’t just put CoQ10 in with the cholesterol medication, but they have to supplement with CoQ10. I think that people should supplement a lot more CoQ10 than they’re told to take. But Metformin depletes the body of certain nutrients. Magnesium is a nutrient that is often depleted by many over-the-counter and prescribed drugs.
[02:05:25] Ally Perlina: Exactly, yeah. And B vitamins.
[02:05:28] Ashley James: B vitamins, exactly. Selenium or glutathione. We’re looking to help bring the body back into balance. We want to go to medicine because we’re sick and we want to feel better. In some cases, it’s a matter of life and death and these meds are going to save our lives, and in other cases, we’re going to the wrong doctor. The doctor that’s not going to actually tell you how to heal or reverse disease, but just going to put you on a med to manage certain things but are going to have a bunch of other symptoms pop up. This is where I get so frustrated because medicine should be personalized like Viome provides.
I love that you guys do take into account the medications people might be on, the supplements people might be on when constructing their unique supplements for them. Is there any feedback that you’ve gotten? I know it’s a fairly new program. You guys have really bet-tested it a great deal. Is there any feedback that you’ve gotten from taking the supplements that are specifically designed for people that just pops into your mind that you’d love to share?
[02:06:36] Ally Perlina: You know what, let’s table this for when you have taken yours and we will have more feedback from people just like you who’ve already experienced this. Because I don’t want to stretch it based on one-off internal examples or anecdotes from ourselves, basically. It just won’t be a fair representation of information.
[02:07:00] Ashley James: I’m curious. I want to know what everyone in the lab because I’m sure all of you guys are your own guinea pigs, and I want to know. I know that Naveen has shared his results and his wife’s results and how amazing—they’ve had such a great experience. And of course, everyone in your lab is having fun experiences. Okay, I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to having my own experience with the individualized supplement for me and then coming back and talking more about it.
This has been so much fun Ally. We could really talk a long time, and you did touch on several times that the metabolites that come from our microbes—based on what we feed it—can actually stress the body to the point of cancer, could create carcinogens, and could even increase unhealthy estrogen levels, which is absolutely linked to breast cancer and in men is linked to prostate cancer.
[02:08:00] Ally Perlina: Yes, androgen pathways of all different kinds actually. That can come from the microbiome, not just estrogen.
[02:08:08] Ashley James: And they say, statistically, one in three people—the average standard American diet eating person—will have a diagnosis of cancer in our lifetime. My mom died of liver cancer, my dad died of heart disease—two major illnesses that we look to correct with diet and prevent with diet as well. Anything you can share about how Viome can help people to live so healthy or correct certain things in their life that we could prevent cancer?
[02:08:41] Ally Perlina: I guess this is not surprising if it comes as an answer from me, but we really just invest all that we got, not just from our own brains and expertise, but from all of the published clinical trials in literature and from the internal studies that we have to empower you with actionability in your hands. You don’t have to yourself, or your Naturopath or any other doctor read 200,000 pathways because even ourselves—as uniquely positioned as we are—we’re not doing this manually day in and day out. It would be impossible to keep it unbiased and objective.
What we do is we pour every single bit of actionable information and insight into our entire infrastructure that gives you these recommendations for foods and supplements. I mean that’s part of a mission. That’s always been the driver in my mind and my heart. What I do is to make sure that we can scientifically power the medicine, and that stems from specific functional areas that we cover today to the overall wellness, and illness prevention, and longevity. It stands to actually revolutionize, not only the wellness space but also how we approach pharmaceuticals, not just nutraceuticals. Because we do collaborate with pharma, and we’re going to do more of that. That is something that brings me back to the eight years that I spent working with various top pharma in the world to help understand these pathway outcomes of drugging different targets.
What are some of the off-target effects or opportunities for repositioning from one disease to another? And also, what makes one person respond to Metformin, for instance, quite well, whereas other people have quite detrimental effects. What can be done to ameliorate that? Anything from companion diagnostics to adjuvant therapeutics and new therapeutics can actually come from this platform that we built because it all comes back to the molecules.
If your molecules are telling you that from the microbiome this is what’s happening, from the blood side this is what may impact your hormones, your health. This is what the immune system is stressed. Then you know these intervention points, which can be targeted with not only food or supplement nutraceuticals, but it can be targeted with actual drugs that can be already in development, or it can be a new generation of drugs that are made with this information. I feel like that’s just part of the bigger future vision.
As for now, I think that this is for wellness. Taking the holistic approach, which we’re all very passionate about food and supplements. If you get these tests, get familiar with your body, and don’t shy away from grabbing this knowledge and seeing what it can do for you. Being more in tune with the information and with what your body needs. Because the more you get into it, the more prepared you will be to really shield yourself from various conditions and to augment this whole healthspan and lifespan. As you know, we have this aging score, which is a unique thing and a relatively new thing itself that you can also track over time and see if you are getting younger. You’re younger than your chronological age, so congratulations on that.
[02:12:38] Ashley James: Thank you.
[02:12:40] Ally Perlina: But that’s also one of the things. It’s a very important area called longevity. You think it’s one area but actually, to extend longevity—like a healthy lifespan, that means you need to address all possible illnesses and prevent them or reverse them in order to prolong human health. Longevity is not actually just this one area just like any one disease. It’s actually getting all the diseases, plus helping you stay at your best, your optimal, and your youngest feeling and looking. That’s longevity, it’s all the diseases taken care of and then some.
So now, we have—more than ever—this mechanistic insight into aging, and we publish that. I will send you actually the links to this publication and our glycemic response prediction, which is part of our recommendations that we discussed before. I’m very excited about it because our machine learning efforts—very proud of our AI—it’s given us something that our data science group actually proposed for us to look at. My group, the translational science, we looked at it and was like, oh my goodness, this is a gold mine. The things that go up with age are those things that are more of the pro-inflammatory microbiome activities.
Like methane production, some of these gas production pathways actually happen to be going more and more and more pronounced with aging, so more associated with age. It makes sense because it can be harmful for your digestive system and therefore can contribute to your aging. Therefore, for some people who have really high methane production pathways—it’s not the only thing, but they may also sometimes see a less favorable aging score. But what’s fascinating is that we’ve seen the T cell deterioration and senescence, and all kinds of other types of gut-neuro and not so gut neurofunctional decline signatures as part of both GI—the gut intelligence, and also the blood transcriptome test features that were part of these pathway and functional knowledge nuggets within our aging model.
When we looked at what this AI machine learning model produced and we really dug into those features it was like these—sorry for the noise. When we look at all the features, it’s like the mechanisms of this multi-functional, multi-system progressive decline started to just resurface in a new light. I’m quite excited about what we can do and to see how that score—along with all the others that are on a functional level telling you what’s happening—may change when you take not only food recommendations into account now, but also take our precision supplements.
I think we should probably have a follow-up because so many new things were just delivered this year. The Health Intelligence Service, this aging score, and now the precision supplements. They’re so new. They’re all built on the foundation of something we did before, but they’re so novel and new that I want to follow up with closing that loop. Maybe in a few months.
[02:16:12] Ashley James: Okay, sounds great. You say new, but it’s by no means not supported by science. You’ve beta-tested it. There’s a lot that’s gone into it. It’s years in the making, and now it’s finally available to the public, which is very exciting. It’s everything you’ve built upon like you said. It’s new that it’s now finally available to us. Because I’ve talked to you guys several times and learned more about Viome. It’s something that’s been built upon for years, and I love that at the core of Viome is just a bunch of really geeky scientists that are very experienced and very excited about this. As am I, I’m very excited about it.
I love that you guys do your own studies. You’re going to give me links to some of the studies. But you’re constantly tinkering in the lab with a lot of guinea pig people, which is really exciting. One study I’m particularly excited about—we’ll wrap up the interview by talking about this because I’ve taken up so much of your time. I’m so thankful you’ve been so generous with sharing with us. This is the cutting edge. I don’t fully know if everyone completely has grasped how cutting edge this is. How unbelievably amazing this is.
This would have cost over 10,000 or more even something like six or seven years ago to have these tests done in such a detailed way. This is something that Naveen talked about in our interview—episode 441, but that because of the AI, it’s something that people can afford. You might have to save up for it, but it’s equivalent to a lot of other lab tests out there. Just the cost of it is something that the majority of the market can do, which is exciting because it’s giving us access to information about ourselves, which is absolutely revolutionary. The fact that then we can take that one step further and look at a list of specific food extracts, of superfoods supplements—based on hundreds of thousands of pathways—understand why our body uniquely will respond in an excellent way to those foods specifically or those supplements specifically. And then why we should avoid others because of the metabolites that are created. Whereas other people could thrive on our do not eat list. It’s so brilliant that this is really going to be the key or the answer, that missing piece of the puzzle for many people who have been seeking health for so long.
Now what I love is one of the studies you did was you did a continuous glucose monitor on a group of people, and then you took in a detailed account of the food they ate and how their body uniquely responded based on a glycemic index. I’ve read the book The Glycemic Index Diet. It was created by a cardiologist in Toronto who noticed that he actually had some patients completely reverse heart disease by changing their diet, and that got him really curious. He went through and saw that some foods will metabolize very quickly into sugar. You can eat fruit, it would metabolize quickly, whereas something slow like a complex starch would take longer. But I thought that everyone would react to potatoes the same way. I just thought, okay, it’s on the glycemic index here and everyone reacts to it the same way. You guys found something very different. Share with us.
First of all, how many people were part of the continuous glucose monitor study, how long did you do it for, and what were the results?
[02:20:17] Ally Perlina: Well, the whole study, it took us like a whole year to actually carry it out. That’s also part of the enrollment. For several months, it was several hundred people, and a total of I don’t know how many tens of thousands of meals ended up being tracked. We actually tracked the sleep and all of these things as well. We looked at their glycemic response. Every 15 minutes there would be a reading that gets electronically taken basically by the glucose monitor. In the end, we analyzed all of this data. Our AI team I did all these great analyses and built our own machine learning model so that we can predict if a white potato is good or bad for you, or the yams are actually good or bad for you. Because there’s this never-ending argument. Which ones are more glycemic? Good or bad in terms of glycemic.
Being overly glycemic is something that you want to avoid. The more of these spikes you have of sugar spikes the more you’re on the track to insulin resistance. Your insulin sensitivity really starts to diminish with those types of patterns. You want to avoid that. Also, this whole insulin resistance is part of a bigger inflammatory pattern that a lot of times just goes hand in hand.
Long story short, as a result of the study, we have our own model. And as features of the model, those things that the model takes as input, we have all the different levels of the data. The gene expression, the microbes that are active, and also some of the scores like scores that assess your metabolic fitness pathways and some of the inflammatory pathways. They can go on with their own outcomes for each individual once we process your sample along with other features to help us tell you if a banana is too glycemic for you or not. Because if it’s not, actually it has some inulin, and it can feed your butyrate producers to produce more of that beneficial short-chain fatty acid for you. But if it’s too glycemic, then you might see bananas on minimize.
And then for potatoes, actually, potatoes can really enhance fecal and bacteria and [inaudible 02:22:47], which is another beneficial microbe that’s a butyrate producer. You don’t have that available as a probiotic, so you can’t just take it. Plus, as you know, probiotics don’t always stick around or colonize well. You want to be able to promote these beneficial microbes and their beneficial functions by having the right type of diet. For some people, white potatoes—I mean, not deep-fried of course—may be quite good. But for those people that have this predicted glycemic response outcome by our model that says it might be too high for you, they won’t see the white potato in their enjoy or superfood list.
those are the types of things that help us personalize with much better precision. And it’s very true about the berries. It’s quite interesting. For some people, strawberry, raspberry, or blackberry maybe on the minimized list because of the glycemic response, versus for other people, they have no predicted high glycemic response and they actually feed your akkermansia, which for you is good. That’s part of the reason you have all these berries—the strawberry, the blackberry I believe, and the cherries as well. Akkermansia is good for metabolic fitness and usually is associated with a leaner phenotype. Also, some of the berries—and you have pomegranate—feed some of the ellagic acid metabolizers that take ellagic acid and can turn it to urolithin A, which is a very powerful antioxidant that you would benefit from if you feed them those berries versus others don’t. Plus, we also discuss the uric acid production and mitigating strategies with the sour cherry. For some people, it would be too glycemic so you cannot have it. But we will try to mitigate it with other strategies through food or supplements.
Taking all that into account, just to summarize, just another example that came to mind, what if you do need help with overall insulin sensitivity and sugar control issues? For some people, they cannot have some of the berries or they cannot have some of the beneficial prebiotic type foods. But let’s say in supplements, we can suggest that for them, berberine might be good because it has sugar-lowering benefits. If you have these microbial opportunistic activities and some pathogens or the oral microbes, maybe for those people, berberine is especially good because it has antimicrobial properties. Whereas in food, you will get slightly different things recommended for you.
And then another example that I think Naveen likes very much but I think it doesn’t even know that it came from my personal anecdote as well is with strawberry—just speaking of berries—may not necessarily be just a glycemic issue. It could be for some people that it’s histamine inducing, because it’s histamine inducing, you may not reap the rewards that strawberry has to offer. But you may get a lot of the anthocyanins and fisetin, which is a senolytic and basically anti-aging compound. Back to the whole longevity topic, you can get that as a supplement in your nutrients. In a way, that’s your super ingredient. You take it and extract it, then you don’t have to deal with either glycemic or histamine promoting properties of strawberry.
That’s just another example of personalization. The supplements are there to literally supplement what you can and cannot have in terms of the foods, and on both supplement levels, it’s really this beauty of this systems biology dynamic interplay that we can see with our RNA data that we address because it’s many-to-many. You could see many reasons why something can be avoided superfood for you, and many reasons why you may need a combination of foods and specific nutrients in your arsenal of this nutrient diet and recommendation plan. You have your own precision food and supplements that are made for your unique biology.
There’s just no simple way to summarize it all or display in like five bullet points because it is years and years of work that’s based upon years and years of knowledge and evidence, and this new data that makes it all possible. I really truly believe in that. As we come up with more studies—we’re constantly working on a lot more than we got a chance to cover—I will be happy to talk about it and then send you links for all of the things that we put out there so far.
[02:27:45] Ashley James: Wonderful, exciting. For those who don’t have blood sugar as a concern, although one-third of those in the United States—and similar for other countries that follow the similar diet and lifestyle of those in the United States—have pre-diabetes or are diabetic type two, meaning more of insulin resistance, more of a problem at the cellular level not at the pancreatic level, which is type one. But the problems at the cellular level utilizing insulin and metabolizing carbohydrates, and there’s a lot that goes into that. There are 16 minerals required to make insulin work correctly with the cell and when they’re missing—chromium being the major one, vanadium being another—that insulin cannot work correctly with the cell.
And then there’s evidence showing that eating a high-fat diet from oil or animal products actually promotes insulin resistance. Those that cut out oil, cut out animal products, see almost within a week increase in insulin sensitivity. I mean, all this stuff is coming together. Like you said, it’s not just one thing. And then we have to take into account the metabolites created by our unique microbiome based on what we’re feeding it and those metabolites will have an effect on the blood sugar and on our ability to metabolize the blood sugar.
But looking at, why is it important for people who are not even remotely diabetic or pre-diabetic, and that is that Dr. William Davis, who I interviewed all the way back in episode 167—it feels like a lifetime ago—he’s the author of Wheat Belly and also the author of Undoctored. That was a great interview because he explains that he gets people—in order to heal heart disease and reverse it and even prevent it—he has them monitor their glucose and everything they take in.
Let’s say you do not have any diabetes at all. And even what you did with the continuous glucose monitor, if someone could wing that and get their doctor to prescribe them one. But he has them eat a meal, write it down, and then one or two hours later take their glucose and see—even though they’re not diabetic—how does their body react two hours later? Is their blood sugar 140, 130, or is it 97? Where is it at?
If you eat a meal and then you see that two hours later you still have high blood sugar, even though you’re not diabetic, he says you got to look at what happened in that meal. What is in that meal and you need to write that down? Are you able to dial in your meals and eat foods that then you see a beautiful blood sugar, a nice rise up and then down, and the body comes back into balance?
You notice that you can maintain your blood sugar in a very healthy way, then keep eating those meals. He says that has for him has been—and of course, he says everyone should avoid barley, wheat, rye, and in some cases oats. He’s able to help people reverse heart disease and prevent heart disease by making sure that even those without diabetes have healthy blood sugar, and have a healthy glycemic response to all the foods they eat.
Your specific, based on your study, when someone gets the Viome kit from you and gets their own results, some of the foods they’re told to avoid or to minimize are because their unique body and their unique metabolism microbiome will have a high glycemic reaction to those specific foods. Thus eliminating so much of that guesswork, and also setting them up. If they follow the Viome results as best they can—because we are human—they could be preventing heart disease and other diseases because they’re keeping their blood sugar in balance as much as possible.
That’s really exciting that these are the biomarkers you’re looking for, and you’re looking to promote as much health as possible. Not looking to replace doctors, but really looking to change the health system by diving deep into the individual’s needs. That was such an eye-opener for me because I thought based on—I loved studying the glycemic index diet—everyone reacts to potatoes this way, and everyone reacts to strawberries this way. Not true. What a wonderful revolutionary study that you have published that you’ve done. That then you can take all that information and put it into the Viome experience as someone goes through.
I highly recommend listeners go to viome.com, use coupon code LTH, get the listener discount. Get the test kit, it’s really fun, and it’s such a great experience. The question that I was left with is how many times a year do I do this kit? Should I do it once a year? Should I do it every four months? If I take the supplements that are recommended, eat the diet that’s recommended, how much should I see change, and when would be the best time to then test again? So that, okay, don’t eat bananas, or now you can eat bananas. How many changes when you get the retest and how often should people retest in order to achieve optimal health?
[02:33:45] Ally Perlina: That’s an important question to cover because many people say, okay, well I don’t want to be bothered to do this too often. I also don’t want to miss the changes that my body goes through as I follow the recommendations. We used to say every quarter, so basically three, four times a year. I think that may still be a good idea for the first year, or maybe just two times a year may be enough because we don’t want to make people feel forced or burdened by multiple many, many times a year testing. Although some people like to get all of the digital data on their biology so they retest many, many times a year.
Just as a rule of thumb I’ll say for the first year, if you’re especially going through a lot of changes, then at least two times would be good. And then from that point on, unless you just experienced something, you had a surgical procedure, or you had a huge change either huge good or huge bad—hopefully not bad. But when you see that there are some really big changes in the environment, you’re trying a completely new lifestyle or whatnot, then you might want to retest just to get the before and after and see what it’s doing to your body so you don’t miss that moment of changes. But in general, twice a year would probably be a good overall benchmark to aim for. Does that make sense? One more part of the question that I didn’t answer is how much change do you expect?
What we’ve noticed from our just internal observations is that when what we recommend for you to do is not that different from what you’ve been doing, so down to specific details like what do you use to target your TNF alpha or whatnot, that may change actually. But if the ultimate outcome is there is this action, this action, this action that you’ve already had covered with your food and supplement before whether you knew it or not, or if your diet is very similar like you did not eat animal protein or almost did not before, and now it’s the same with the Viome diet. You did not eat milk products or dairy altogether, now it’s the same, then your changes will not be maybe huge and drastic right away.
Whereas those people who were eating drastically different diets before, got the recommendations and said, I’m going to change everything about my life. I’m going to follow this and this is a huge difference, then you do see more of the difference in their microbiome and their human blood transcriptome happening because you would always anticipate that. You know that there is a link between molecules in the food and your supplements and the molecular patterns in your body. When the change is drastic, you’re going to see the change reflected in your body as well. You would expect to see more, and that’s what we see.
If you’re more or less the same, then it will just take longer to move that needle, especially on these bigger aggregate scores that cover hundreds of pathways, and it may take a little bit longer. But that’s okay, we still see those changes. Just keep up the good work. Some scores don’t need improvement and they’re not in the red zone, but you want to still get the more perfect score, or you want to maintain a good score that you have. That’s why you should follow these recommendations. Just because you don’t see earth shattering huge changes doesn’t mean that it’s not good or it’s not working.
Testing a couple of times a year and expecting some changes because RNAs is dynamic and it helps us to be as dynamic as you are, but expecting them to be basically in a way dependent on how big is the change that you’re implementing with Viome recommendations. That’s how big of a magnitude of a change that you would be likely to see, and that’s how fast it may or may not come.
[02:38:10] Ashley James: Exciting. Well, I’m excited. I’m excited to see this unfold. We’ve already had several listeners share in the Facebook group those who have been working with you and implementing results for a while shared that it has been amazing. They’ve gotten great results, something as simple as removing one food and adding in a few more can be life-changing for some people, but they just didn’t know and they didn’t know the science behind it. And then also, by following your system, by following the unique recommendations, it is going to alter the microbiome in a sense and create a more hospitable environment for the gut, for our hormones, and for everything. It’s exciting.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this information. I can’t wait to talk with you again in a few months after I have been on your supplements for a while, after I’ve really had a few months to incorporate. I’ve been incorporating the results of the feedback that I got from the Viome test for the last 17 days already. I am not bloated. There were times when I really couldn’t pinpoint what meal it was that I would feel like my belly button’s about to pop off. It would come and go, but I always felt like I had lots of energy. Everything was good, it’s just that was that one last piece.
I haven’t had that problem in the last 17 days, and that’s very exciting. I can’t wait to try the supplements. I’m so excited to hear from more of the listeners who are going to go to viome.com, use coupon code LTH, get the test kit. And then when they get the results, use coupon code LTH again to get the supplements and try it out. Come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and share your experience with Viome and share your experience with following the product, their recommendations, and what happened in your health.
Just the fact that you’re able to now control your headaches that were a lifelong problem and so many people suffer from migraines that aren’t able to just put their finger on it. If they could get this information, what quality of life changer that it could be for so many people. The aches and pains that people have can go away because of the metabolites that the dysbiosis in their gut is producing based on what they’re eating. Their aches and pains can go away. This is so exciting that the quality of life will really go up.
It’d be interesting if you could—maybe I’ll just put this in your thinking cap for you to gnaw on. What if we could somehow measure the quality of life index? Some kind of improvement score based on the quality of life—a decrease of pain, a decrease of inflammation, an increase of energy. And there’s some way that you could score to see—over the course of a year, for example, that someone was working with Viome—how much of an improvement in the quality of life that they were experiencing. Have you thought of doing that?
[02:41:20] Ally Perlina: Yes, absolutely. We have these things called progress questionnaires, which you will probably see and you can fill them out every week. Some people fill it out less frequently, and you also have a bigger questionnaire when you re-test. After several months when you want to repeat the testing and you order your new kit you will also tell us about what things changed.
Some of the things that we put into the questionnaire are actually some of those known standard medical questionnaires that are used by different medical systems. Alternative medicine, Naturopathic medicine, and integrated functional medicine are specifically geared at assessing your overall satisfaction with life. It’s just different compilations of different questions that actually make up the core of such known questionnaires that have been validated to do exactly that. It’s just a matter of actually coming out with the final ultimate score, and somehow displaying it or communicating it back to our users. That would probably be great at closing that loop.
I really like that you put that thought in my head because we’re actually reworking our questionnaires right now. I know it’s a lot of questions, we all know that. We’re trying to make it a little bit more smart and savvy on how the user experience goes with that. This could be a great time that you brought it up because we may think of how best to deliver some of the outcomes back to the users of what we learned about their progress and how we see them tracking along. Because for some people, they may not see improvements in scores really fast, but they may start feeling better. For others, it’s fascinating, they may not feel better. Some even feel worse in the beginning. It’s hard to change so much and stick to the new diet. But then we see after several months their scores improve.
It’s very interesting to have the biological metric as well as the overall wellness and lifestyle satisfaction metrics that we want to be able to analyze and meaningfully communicate back. I believe that would be a great way to close the loop.
[02:43:39] Ashley James: Exciting. Awesome, well thank you. I love hearing about all the work that you do. I just geek out on it. It’s just so exciting just imagining where we’re going to be 10 years from now, 50 years from now because of the work that you’re doing. Do you ever think about that? I know you and I could talk forever, this is going to be my last question. But do you ever think about the future of medicine and how you and the work that you do with all of the wonderful co-workers in your lab that you guys are going to help shape medicine?
[02:44:18] Ally Perlina: Yeah, all the time. That’s basically the big mission. We all come from different walks of life, but the same mission that Naveen actually puts out there as our tagline it’s in a way my mission and mission of people in Viome is to make illness optional. It just sounds like it’s too grand and huge, but you got to take some steps on how you’re going to get there. If you don’t have a route even planned out at all, then you’re never going to get there just because you’re going to say it’s too ambitious of a goal. We actually imagine that it will get us from the wellness space to something that gets more accepted by the healthcare systems that hey, this is actually really important. It’s changing people’s lives. We’re going to be showing this in as formal of ways as needed with double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials, which we already have geared up.
We’ve launched supplements, now we’re getting into the more formal trials. I’m not going to say disrupt, but at least augment, enhance, and add to the health care system. One is from the health care practice, the other one is back to pharmaceutical industries like I said because you need to understand what drives these different patient cohorts to respond or not respond because that can be a make or breaker for the next big drug that can help people. But what if it only helps 45% of people marvelously, and some of it is actually defined by your microbiome-driven or the human cellular pathways that you can measure? And 45% would do just absolutely great, but the other—more than half the population—may not do so great. If you figure out what are these culprits and what are the different ways from food and supplement to help the future pharmaceutical trials succeed, that would be a huge breakthrough.
And then the ultimate breakthrough is to have new engineered probiotics and prebiotics that help us modulate our health and completely new chemical pharmaceutical compounds. Maybe it’s a small molecule, maybe it’s a monoclonal antibody, that is designed having this information in mind that is the ultimate next step. And then doing it in an integrative and again, biologically informed ways because we already know that. The medical system knows that there’s no one drug that fits all perfectly. They almost just don’t exist, or the ones that happened to exist. It was more like a lucky break and still, people have these side effects that we all know about.
To actually take control of all that, you have to embrace the complexity you have to actually figure it out. I feel like we’re at the cutting edge of this and we’re as close as anyone has ever come to this point in the world. When it comes to envisioning this life may be a decade from now, I think that first of all, people will be a lot more informed. The medical system will be a lot more equipped with these latest scientifically and technologically powered methodologies to serve you best in your health journey. The pharmaceutical companies will also adjust their ways and embrace these new perspectives to design new drugs and improve the drugs that maybe have failed at some point before. And all of that is to bring the different levels together to give you these ways to extend your healthy lifespan and reverse your already existing conditions with molecular level precision.
[02:48:03] Ashley James: I love it. Ally, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you so much for sharing with all of us. You’ve been so generous with your time. And this is the cutting edge. We’re hearing it first here.
[02:48:21] Ally Perlina: Thank you so much.
[02:48:22] Ashley James: We’re willing to throw the old system out and help reinvent this new system that is more specialized, more personalized, and you guys are working on that. Thank you. This is awesome. Please, listeners, go to viome.com, check it out. Use coupon code LTH and join me in finding out exactly what you should and shouldn’t be eating and supplements specifically for you and just see what happens. You never know. Even if you feel healthy, you never know. You could be taking it to a whole nother level just like Naveen shared in his interview. He and his wife were pretty healthy, and then it was like oh my gosh, that was health? I can’t believe it. This is like a whole new level. It’s quite exciting
I am very much looking forward to the coming months and seeing the results that I personally have as well as hearing from all the listeners. You’ve said so much already. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview or anywhere you want to point us, any directions you want to point us in?
[02:49:28] Ally Perlina: I just want to basically say that you should keep learning and seek the kind of knowledge that will empower you to take control of your health. I think, Ashley, what you’re doing is just absolutely wonderful, you’re brilliant at it, and you’re so curious and you should stay curious. You’re teaching others how to go about this. I actually appreciate that you said, my listeners, they want to know some of the geeky details. Maybe some will want to know even more so don’t hold back, and some may skip through this and that’s okay.
I like that you’re encouraging this, so you have this attitude of why don’t you reveal a little bit more of the interesting facts that really make it what it is. What’s it like to take this approach and then have it make a difference for your health because if you don’t understand it, you don’t seek to, and you don’t make people curious about it, then they’re not going to be as empowered because they won’t know. How does it matter? It’s all the same, or it’s all you never know what’s really right. Tomorrow it’s going to be wrong. But then when you really, really start to understand, it’s like you feel more in control because knowledge is power.
I just want to say good luck on your health journey and, thank you so much for sharing this and for encouraging your listeners to be part of this journey of actually improving their knowledge, their health, and really taking true control of it. I’m not going to say just point you to one place and go to viome.com. You already did a great job about that. There’s just so much unbelievably interesting fascinating information, and you can start by even googling something that is related to you, that’s fine. But read the journals, read the news, stay informed, and stay curious. Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed and give up. Just little by little, we’re all on this journey together. Every day we’re learning something. None of us have everything figured out. We don’t have all the answers for everything. We’re all learning all at our different levels one step at a time.
I just want to say, thank you, Ashley, for doing this. I just want to encourage people to keep at it and go along in your wellness and your learning journey together with you, Ashley. Thank you so much for having me here. I really enjoyed spending this time with you.
[02:52:03] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you too, Ally. Stay curious.
[02:52:09] Ally Perlina: That’s right.
[02:52:12] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. Be sure to use coupon code LTH when you visit viome.com to get the at home test kits. After you get your results with a test kit, then you can order their custom made supplements. I definitely encourage you to just try it for one month and see what changes you notice. I was very surprised at the changes I noticed in such a positive manner. And then all the science behind it and how much information you get about you specifically and how your microbiome and your mitochondria are working and how you can work with them to support your optimal health. It’s just absolutely so fascinating how much unique information you get from this test kit. I highly recommend checking it out.
So use coupon code LTH at viome.com and then come to the Facebook group and share your results. We’d love to hear and learn from your experiences and learn from other listeners’ experiences as well. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy the holiday season.
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Contact Dr. Vienna Lafrenz www.natural-therapeutics.com
Christmas Gift Ideas! Energybits.com and the magnesium products at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com use coupon code LTH for both!
Visit TakeYourSupplements.com to get on Dr. Wallach's protocol & the supplements that Ashley and her family have been taking for the last ten years.
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Remote Healing with SCIO Quantum Biofeedbackhttps://www.learntruehealth.com/remote-healing-with-scio-quantum-biofeedback
Highlights:
What remote Biofeedback is What therapeutic ultrasound is Self-love and healing Emotion has a huge impact on healing Different modalities for healing How food choices affect our body and moodDid you know that you can get remote healing? In this episode, Dr. Vienna Lafrenz shares how she helps her clients heal by using different modalities. One amazing tool that she uses is the SCIO machine, which works through remote Biofeedback. She explains what the SCIO does and how it helped her clients. What’s fascinating about Vienna’s healing approach is that she helps her clients heal holistically—emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and energetic. She explains that if we don’t have self-love, it hinders us from healing fully, so having self-love would be the first thing that needs to be worked on to heal.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re in for such a ride today with Dr. Vienna. I can’t wait for you to hear today’s episode.
You know, there are 53 days left until Christmas if you’re listening to this the day I publish it. If you’re listening to it later, Christmas is just around the corner. I love giving holistic presents to my friends and family. I’m going to tell you a few that I absolutely love.
The Magnesium Soak, you can listen to my interviews. Just type in Magnesium Soak at learntruehealth.com and listen to those interviews. Absolutely amazing. Kristen Bowen, I think she said she was 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, in a wheelchair, and unable to talk. Now, she’s in perfect health. One of the biggest things that helped her was her magnesium soak that she sells on her website, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Be sure to use the coupon code: LTH when you go to her website, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Coupon code: LTH.
I love the Magnesium Creme. I love the Magnesium Soak. You put it in a foot bath or put it in your bathtub for you and your kids. I also love the Magnesium Muscle Creme, which is amazing for aches, pains, and tension headaches. That absolutely must be on your Christmas gift list, your holiday gift list.
The other great gift I love giving my holistic friends is ENERGYbits. Go to energybits.com. Grab a few of the bags of ENERGYbits for your sister, your mom, your best friend. They’re fantastic snacks. Kids love them too because they make your tongue turn green or blue, depending on whether you get the chlorella or spirulina. They help to detox the body. They’re filled with readily available protein and tons of vitamins. I think I have seven different interviews about chlorella and spirulina, specifically about the ENERGYbits brand. I’ve interviewed the founder of that company.
There are only two companies I know of that do not contain any lead in their chlorella. If you buy some over the counter, go to some health food store and buy chlorella, there’s going to be that little warning on it that says, in the state of California, this causes cancer. That’s because there’s actually lead in those bags of chlorella. But in ENERGYbits, in their chlorella, there’s zero because of their process of how they grow their crop and how they then turn the crop into little edible tablets.
So listen to my interviews on the Magnesium Soak with Kristen Bowen. Listen to my interviews about algae, the healing benefits of algae, and how it’s such an awesome superfood snack to carry around with you. Listen to my ENERGYbits interviews and use coupon code LTH at energybits.com and coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Those are two amazing websites to check out for your Christmas gift ideas. I always use coupon code LTH.
I try to get companies who I absolutely love and adore and recommend to always use the same coupon code. Just always try coupon code LTH on all these health websites, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you get a great discount. Awesome. Enjoy today’s interview. Come check us out in our Facebook group if you haven’t already. We have such a supportive and wonderful community. You can ask your health questions there and support the other members as well. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and come join the excellent community of very supportive holistic community there. Awesome. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.
[00:03:41] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 450. I’m so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. Vienna Lafrenz on the show, a Ph.D. in Integrative Medicine. Vienna, you and I met through my friend Jennifer Saltzman. You have a beautiful clinic. Oh my gosh, just a gorgeous clinic in one of the most beautiful parts—remote parts—of Washington state. You’re near is it Republic, Washington? Is that where you’re near?
[00:04:21] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, I’m actually in Republic.
[00:04:25] Ashley James: That was Republic that we drove to, okay. Gosh, it’s so beautiful out there. You’re just in probably the most beautiful part of the world. I just couldn’t believe it. It’s hard to drive the car because you just want to stare at nature, the mountains, and the scenery the whole time. It’s really beautiful. You have this gorgeous clinic and what a gem in the middle of nowhere to stumble upon you and all the work that you do.
You gave a Biofeedback treatment to our son. That was amazing, the results we saw. And then I was quite sick back in February—just fever, gasping for air, burning lungs, sore throat—the works. I was just suffering for days. I did telemedicine with my Naturopath. I was on all kinds of supplements, and then you did a remote session with me. This was days into just high fever, sore throat, really burning lungs, and hard to breathe. At the end of the session, it was like the suffering had ended. My fever broke, and I slowly recovered after that.
About a week later, I was back to my normal self, but that was the point where the suffering ended. I thought that was really interesting. I’m always kind of skeptical but open-minded about things we can’t see like oh, energy work. Long-distance energy work. We can’t see it. I don’t think I could say it’s placebo because I didn’t believe in it. I’m like, okay, I’m open to it, but I didn’t have a strong belief like yes, no matter what, I think this is going to work. Because I w
as sitting there suffering pretty badly or lying there pretty badly, and it was quite amazing that for a few hours of the session, I felt my body shift into super healing mode.
That was my experience with it, but I’ve actually talked to others who have experienced the type of remote feedback that you do, including Eric Thornton, who I’ve had on the show several times. Everyone I talked to that has experienced the SCIO, which is one of the machines that you use, have all told me that they’ve had incredible results.
I’m really excited to learn more from you today about what remote Biofeedback is because I’ve had a personal experience. I’ve seen my son, I’ve talked to others. What a great tool to have in our tool belts especially when we’ve exhausted all the other resources. We’re eating healthy, we’re taking our supplements, we’re getting plenty of fresh air, sunshine, and walking. But if there’s still something not getting better in our health, we should absolutely look to energetic medicine. I’m really excited to dive into this.
Before we dive into what remote Biofeedback is, specifically the SCIO and the work that you do, I want to learn a bit more about what happened in your life that made you want to become a Ph.D. in Integrative Medicine and work with people using these types of therapies?
[00:07:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, I’m glad you asked. Prior to that, I was an occupational therapist for 30 years. I was working in nursing homes. I was traveling all over the United States. I was a consultant where I worked for the largest rehab provider in the whole United States. I would go to all these different nursing homes, hospitals, acute care hospitals, long-term care hospitals, all these outpatients, and things like that. I would go to where they needed me, and basically it was where either clients weren’t making progress and they were plateauing, or where business was really short, the therapists were having a hard time identifying clients, or just knowing what to do with them.
They would call me in and I would spend the week there. During that time, I would consult on the clients, I would teach the therapist. They’d be sitting right there with me while I’m working with the patient, and then have them do it so there’d be a return demonstration so that the client would get better and they’d be able to go home. I would also spend that time doing some continuing education where I would provide courses that I would teach and things like that, and I loved it.
About 10 years into my OT practice was when I first got involved with reiki. I learned reiki from a reiki master. That just opened up the whole new perspective of what energy is and how it works. How you can do distance healing, and how you can change somebody’s energy just either hands-on or remote. That opened up my eyes. Then I went into aromatherapy, then acupressure. So it just started developing, I started going to all these courses, getting certifications, and things like that.
I started implementing that into what I was teaching through OT, through all the places that I’ve been going. I really specialized in pain management, so I would bring different modalities from the eastern world of medicine into the western side and started to integrate those two. When I started doing that, I started seeing a huge improvement in the clients’ outcomes and how they were responding in the healing process overall.
[00:10:13] Ashley James: You were using reiki, which is energy work, and you’re using essential oils and acupressure. Acupressure is a form of energy work in a sense that you are stimulating the nervous system, but also, you’re stimulating the meridians, which is more of an energy work. You could even consider aromatherapy, although aromatherapy is herbal medicine. There is an energetic frequency component to it. Along with your many years of experience and rehabilitation as an occupational therapist, you’re bringing in this energy work and herbal medicine to your—is it the senior patients that you were working with already?
[00:11:05] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes. At the same time, I was teaching the therapists how to use this information. See, when it came to the acupressure, I also used ultrasound, electrical stimulation, infrared, and all different types of modalities that we’ve always used in therapy in OTPT. We’ve used those types of types of modalities in our practices. Bringing those into the eastern world as well was really nice because a lot of people have a fear of acupuncture because of the needle. Whereas with ultrasound, you get the same result as if you’re using a needle.
[00:11:48] Ashley James: Now, when you say ultrasound, just to clarify—I apologize for interrupting you. The listener might not know this but because you’re on satellite internet, there’s a delay. When we talk there’s a delay, and sometimes we sound like we’re interrupting each other. We don’t mean to be. When you say ultrasound, could you clarify because a lot of people think ultrasound is imaging and not. That it’s actually using deep heat or a wave of energy that creates heat in deeper tissue.
[00:12:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: This is considered therapeutic ultrasound. It does not diagnose like when people go in for an ultrasound to find out if they have a baby or not. This is actually called therapeutic ultrasound, and there are two settings. There’s a heating setting, and there’s a non-thermal setting. The one that I use with the acupuncture points is a non-thermal. Basically what it is is there’s a little sound. There’s like a little crystal within the sound head that vibrates and so it creates a frequency. That frequency then interacts within the person’s energy and it gets the energy to flow through blood, through lymphatics, through the nerve system, through the musculoskeletal system, and through all of those different systems, and it gets it to move.
How it works with the acupuncture point is that when you use acupuncture as in a needle, you have to be very precise where the acupuncture point is. With the ultrasound, because there’s this sound wave that is vibrating within the sound head, when you get it over the acupuncture point, it will either flow into the body or release the energy from the point. It’s similar to when you’re using a needle. You either tap it or twist it to get the result you’re looking for. Whether you’re trying to push energy into that point or whether you’re trying to release it.
I use the non-thermal, which doesn’t go deep into it because the acupuncture point is so superficial to the skin that you don’t have to go deep.
[00:13:58] Ashley James: Fascinating. Tell us about these results that you started seeing. You’ve got these clients. Have you been working with them for a while? You were traveling, were you always working with new people, or did you come back to the same patients? And then what kind of results did you see when you went from just regular occupational therapy rehab to occupational therapy rehab plus energy work, acupressure with therapeutic ultrasound, non-thermal with essential oils? When you added those three modalities in, what kind of results did you start seeing?
[00:14:39] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, first of all we started seeing results right away, I mean during that session. What I mean by that is and actually, because I was an educator for the company, I was able to go to so many different types of continuing education so I could actually open up my toolbox and have as many tools available to work with clients as I needed. It was wonderful. I got my myofascial release training. I got some craniosacral lymphatic. You name it, I was able to get all these different types of tools in my toolbox. I just started implementing them every time I would learn something and master it.
When I would work with a chronic pain patient, for example, I’d be just into the facility for the first time, meeting this person for the first time. The therapist is giving me as much information, I read the medical record, and then I start to work with them with the therapist. Literally, I would say 98% of the clients that I got to see while I was traveling would show an immediate, if not significant improvement, within that first session. Which is why it started becoming so popular for me to come to different locations and help some of the most sick or chronically disabled people.
What evolved from that was just an excitement within all the therapists that we have other tools that we can use. We have other theories, we have other philosophies that we can implement. It also stayed within their scope of practice. They were able to expand their scope of practice within their scope and get the best results that they could from their clients.
[00:16:19] Ashley James: Can you remember early on a specific client that had this incredible before and after that you can share with us?
[00:16:31] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, it actually happens to be one that I reiterated in my book. This was a gentleman, I want to say he was in Indiana. He was there because he’d had a really bad stroke, and he was combative as well. When the caregivers would try to help him, he would just either strike out or just get really angry. Part of it was because his body wasn’t working the way he wanted it to, and he would get really, really frustrated with it.
[00:17:11] Ashley James: It also depends on where the brain damage is because brain damage can cause that kind of erratic behavior, anger, and outburst just depending on where the inflammation or damage is in the brain, right?
[00:17:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Absolutely. Within this particular situation though, he was becoming more frustrated with the fact that his body wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do to the point where he didn’t like his body anymore. He wasn’t finding that he could even rely on it to do what he wanted to. As a general, he’s used to commanding things and wanting things to work like they’re supposed to. When his body was giving up on him, he was extremely depressed, frustrated, and took it out on everybody. It was preventing the healing process of where he needed to go, and he wanted to go home. So they called me in.
I had the therapist show me exactly what they’ve been working with him. I actually have a certification in what’s called NDT, which is neurodevelopmental treatment. It’s a specialized process for people who’ve had strokes or any kind of neurological deficit. I went to go work with him. While we’re getting him to do certain things and perform certain tasks, he starts getting frustrated and he starts yelling. He starts yelling at his leg and he says, “See, it’s worthless. It doesn’t work. It’s broken. I just don’t need it anymore. Just cut it off.” I’m like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Basically we just stopped right there and I just said, “I need you to repeat this phrase for me.” I said, “I want you to repeat, I love my body and my body loves me back.”
Well, okay, so imagine this general. He’s looking at me like are you crazy? Seriously? He does this very sarcastic I love my body and my body loves me back. I’m like, “Not good enough. Say it like you mean it. And he goes, “Okay, well I love my body and my body loves me back.” And I went, “Okay, really mean it.” And I leaned into him and I looked him straight in the eye and I said, “Say it like you really mean it.” He literally started to cry and he goes, “I love my body and my body loves me back.” And I said, “Now let’s do it.”
We started doing the same exact task we’ve been trying to do over and over and over again and failed and he succeeded. I mean to perfection. He was like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy. Can we keep going?” I said, “Absolutely.” So we perform that task over and over and over again, which is of course creating muscle memory and also decreasing the neurological exchange that’s going on, that is a deficit. He sits down on the mat completely exhausted, and he’s like, “You’re a miracle worker.” And I said, “No, you are. Once you started to believe in your body and to love your body back it rewarded you back by saying it loves you too.”
Why I bring that up is because that’s one of the things I’ve learned throughout the time that I’ve been an integrative medicine doctor as well as a therapist. It’s the mind, it’s the emotions, it’s the psychological, it’s the mental that gets in the way many times, and if we don’t look at that whole person and address all of that, then we’re not going to get complete healing. You wouldn’t learn that until you go through energy work, until you start to learn some of these different modalities and different methods to help people heal. We can’t just heal the physical, we got to address the whole person.
[00:21:19] Ashley James: That is so true. We cannot just address the physical. We can’t just take our bag of symptoms to a doctor and get given drugs. That’s not health care. That’s disease management, that’s sick care. Health care is really holistic care, looking at emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and energetic. Getting that they’re all connected, and there’s not one that’s more important than the other. They all need to be addressed and they all affect each other. Sometimes, when we’ve tried doing physical and we’re not getting results, then we need to look at energetic, spiritual, or mental, and emotional, and come in from that angle as well.
[00:22:08] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, his mind was getting in the way. That’s one of the things that I would say that 85% of the clients that I see currently, truly there’s an emotional and a mental deficit that is preventing them from healing. Part of that is the knowledge and the belief system that they can heal themselves, that they have that potential.
[00:22:36] Ashley James: Especially if they’ve been told by an MD, this is the way it is. This is as good as it’s going to get. You can’t heal. I was told by an endocrinologist when I was 19 that I’d never have kids, never. I was told by MDs that I would have diabetes the rest of my life. I can’t even tell you how many countless times I was told by medical doctors that I would always be sick. This is as good as it’s going to get. We’re going to manage your disease with drugs, and there’s no hope of a cure, no hope of getting healthy. And if you believe that, then all your behavior is going to reinforce that. Luckily, I go against the stream. I’m one of those stubborn people, and I’m going to completely do the opposite. I was like I’m not going to believe you and I’m not going to let my unconscious mind believe you either. But we have to catch ourselves.
[00:23:33] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I’m going to prove you wrong.
[00:23:34] Ashley James: Right, but we have to catch our belief system and go what is in my belief system that has me sick, that has me staying sick, or has me not looking for answers?
[00:23:47] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Like I was saying, about 85% of the people who come to me, they come to me after they’ve been to every single specialist there is and every single one of them say there’s nothing wrong with you. Here’s a psych eval. Go get a psychological evaluation because there’s nothing wrong with you. We can’t find anything wrong with you. Yet this is a person who is showing up with so many chronic diseases of autoimmune, of thyroid, of lack of appetite, depression, anxiety. I mean you name it, and then of course, hearing that they don’t know what’s wrong with you only adds to the anxiety, only adds to the hopeless despair that is being created. I get a lot of that.
[00:24:33] Ashley James: So people come to you after, it’s kind of like you’re their last hope. Luckily you have a bag of tools to address everything—all the different angles. And you have a lot of experience with working with—I don’t want to say hopeless cases but people who feel like hopeless cases, or people who the medical system has given up on them, or they’ve fallen through the cracks, or they’re sick of being sick and they’re sick of just being drugged and just having their symptoms managed instead of actually getting better, actually getting healthier.
There you were working with all these tools, realizing that there was a psychological, spiritual, and energetic component to rehab, to healing, in addition to all the physical manipulations that you can do to support people in their healing. What next? I love that reiki was your gateway into all this because reiki’s awesome. I’ve been doing it since I was like 16 years old, I think. What happened next that had you go fully into becoming a Ph.D. in Integrative Medicine?
[00:25:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, the difficult thing for me was as an occupational therapist, you had to always have an order from an MD to do what it was that you wanted to with a patient. When they don’t believe in what you’re doing, then oftentimes, those orders wouldn’t be approved. Therefore, you couldn’t deliver it to that client or to that patient. If you say you want to do essential oils for pain management, they’re like well there’s no science in that so no, we’re not going to do it. Or there’s no science in the acupuncture, acupressure, or anything like that. We’d get turned down a lot of the services that we wanted to provide, and so that was very discouraging because I knew that these modalities would actually help these clients.
When I would see that happen a lot, especially with particular physicians or something like that, I would always invite them to come and observe a session or let me teach you. Let me show you exactly what this is about. Or I’d say give me your worst client that you have. The one that you’ve either been struggling with for pain management or something like that and just let me do what I do and then you can tell me whether you find that this is valid or not.
In fact, I’d have some of the physicians come and attend some of my classes, and they would stay afterwards and I would show them because they’d say there’s no evidence that these acupuncture points exist. I said, “Yes, there is and let me show you.”
[00:27:19] Ashley James: It’s only a 5000-year-old system of medicine. No evidence—5000-year-old system of medicine.
[00:27:28] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Exactly. I would hook them up with an electrical stim unit and allow them to feel the acupuncture points. When they would be over an actual point, they would feel the intensity move up their finger as they’re tracing the meridian. When they would go over a master point, which is an extremely powerful acupuncture point, the intensity would go up even higher. Then they’d be like, “Oh my gosh.” And I said, “Follow that meridian all the way and they would feel every single point.” And then they’re like, “Okay, okay, okay. I get it, I get it. Who did you want to see?” So they would start giving me the list.
That got me to start thinking about what I want to do? It all started with my niece who she was diagnosed with a very bad cancer, a tumor in her brain. It had been misdiagnosed for almost a couple of years. All they kept looking at were the symptoms. She was having pain in her head, she’d have weakness, she’d have some issues with cognition to where she would forget where her classes were, which when you’ve been going to school for a couple of years at the same school you don’t forget where your classes are. She’d have a hard time concentrating. She’d have some visual deficits and things like that that would just show up.
They kept treating her as if she had allergies, if she had sinus infections, or things like that, and they would just give her medications. Until the day that one whole side of her body went paralyzed and then of course parents took her in the emergency room, instantly got a CAT scan and they found a tumor about the size of a grapefruit in the back of her brain. She instantly went in for surgery and I loved her surgeon. This neurosurgeon was amazing. He had the best bedside manner. He was really, really good.
She went through the surgery, they got about 98% of it out, and then she was a candidate then for chemo and radiation. They got enough of it out but it grew so fast that she never got to have that. I mean, she did take some radiation and stuff like that but the side effects were so horrific.
[00:29:52] Ashley James: Of the chemo and radiation?
[00:29:55] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: The chemo and the radiation. She was basically on every kind of trial there was to try to overcome it. Every single one of them just failed and made her feel worse. She gained over 150 pounds because they put her onto a steroid, that steroid just packed the pounds on her, and she basically became immobile. She basically was stuck in her bed for the last, I’d say, six months of her life. This was a very active, vibrant, vivacious young girl and to see this happen.
I would go down to her house every weekend for the whole two years that she was sick, give her mom some relief, and just have fun with her. I would use some of my modalities. I would use some of the reiki. I would use some of the acupressure. I would use some of the aromatherapy with her and found that she was getting some really good relief. She wasn’t having the nightmare. She wasn’t having the painful episodes, the difficulty with cognition, things like that, and it gave her some quality of life. So that in itself told me that this was working.
After she had passed, she did pass away when she was 18. She actually passed on her mother’s and my birthday. We consider that her new birth, but that actually got me motivated to want to do more and to use more of the holistic way of healing. I started looking for universities. That’s when I decided to go back to school. I want to say I was 54 or 52 when I went back to school. I thought you’re never too old to go back and get your Ph.D., just do it. So I did, and I’m so glad I did.
[00:31:52] Ashley James: That is so cool. Her death and her suffering, at the hand of the medical system, showed you that you really wanted to explore tools that could have helped her.
[00:32:15] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, and as a Ph.D., I don’t diagnose and I don’t treat. I know that sounds strange, then how do you work with clients? Well, I don’t treat because when you talk about diagnosing and treating, that’s more of the MD side of things—the medical doctor side of things. When it comes to a Ph.D., I’m allowed to be able to identify energetic imbalances in the body that cause disease, and then train the body, train the person on how to overcome those imbalances or those that lead to the disease state.
I always make that really clear with my clients is that they get a little confused with the treatment part, but what I’m doing is training the body to return back to homeostasis. Training sticks, treating doesn’t. Treating is really just treating the side effects and it’s really just, like you said, a maintenance type of program. Whereas I truly feel that the training piece, which includes education of that client; which includes resources; which includes training the brain, training the muscles, and training the neurological system to do what it’s supposed to.
As a Ph.D., I’m allowed to do what I want to with my clients. I don’t have to have a physician’s order to do what I want to, and that’s what really drove me into the Ph.D. program was to be able to say what it is that I want to do with this client and not have someone telling me I can’t do this and manage it. That’s where the true empowerment came from.
[00:33:59] Ashley James: In studying integrative medicine, you have many tools now. You gave me the tour of your clinic—and in this room, and in this room, and in this room—you have a lot of tools, and it’s really cool. You can work long distances with people. You can also do work in person, if someone wants to come to Republic, Washington, which is a beautiful place. Do you feel now that you have tools that could have helped your friend? I mean, this is all hypothetical. But had she not chosen chemo and radiation, do you think you have tools that could have helped her?
[00:34:44] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: That’s hard to say because originally, I didn’t even know she was having any symptoms or anything going on with her until the diagnosis came. And at that point, it was so huge and so big at the time that it’s hard to say whether I could have. Now, with the remote Biofeedback, yes, I can work with degeneration, which is a form of the cancer and the use of the modality, but I’m not sure if I can actually say that I would have been able to cure her. I feel sometimes we have to go through a process. I know this is going to sound terrible, but I think we had to go through this process with her so we could learn how to live because that’s the one thing that she taught us was how to live. How to live while you’re dying.
She had this wonderful phrase where she said, she would always say that she had a really great sense of tumor versus sense of humor.
[00:35:55] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That’s really beautiful. My mom passed away of cancer, and she did not do chemo radiation She chose not to. By the time they found it, it was end-stage. I guess she was just so healthy. When you look in Naturopathic medicine there’s an idea that we have a strong vis or the body has a strong will to be healthy. Some people have a weak vis or their constitution is weaker. Those who have a strong constitution, which my mom did, unfortunately, those kind of people will push their body to the point of breaking before they know something’s wrong, and that was my mom. She was healthy, healthy, healthy, dying of cancer. It was just like that—one or the other.
It was Easter of 2002, Easter came late that year, it was like late March. Easter 2002, she was having pain in her side, went to her chiropractor because she thought she threw her rib out during yoga. She called me and I was having the same pain. I’ve got that intuition thing where if someone’s injured I feel the pain in the same area. I called my mom and I was telling her about my pain. She’s like, I have the pain in the same area too, which is like the liver radiating and she thought it was a rib.
She goes to the chiropractor, the chiropractor immediately sends her—he’s such a good chiropractor—says, “You are going in today for an ultrasound of your liver. Something’s wrong.” She was in Florida. She got an ultrasound. That day flew to Ottawa, Canada, got into an MRI that night, and by that night was diagnosed with liver cancer. She passed away July 26 of that year. She was just doing some natural medicine, which the doctors actually think extended her life by a few months because of the size of the cancer and how it had metastasized to her lungs, her colon, and all these other areas.
But watching her go through that emotional process of knowing you’re dying, accepting it, and also—living while dying. Yeah, I can understand that. There was a lot of sadness and regret, and also a lot of love and surprise. She couldn’t believe how supportive my dad was during that time because my dad was always one of those people that’s just like, suck it up. You’re not sick. Stop telling your body you’re sick. Suck it up. He was by her bedside 24/7 and there’s so much love pouring out of him.
My mom never in a million years would have thought that he would be so nurturing, and he’s like of course, this is real. He never wanted to give any mental power to feed into an illness. When you have a fever, just tell your body you’re well. That was his thing, mind over matter. But she thought he would just tell her to suck it up. You have cancer, suck it up. It’s just really funny watching that they actually healed their marriage, and it was really beautiful to watch. There is so much love and healing going on.
Yeah, I can look at aspects of her final weeks and months and see the emotional beauty in it. We’re all going to die, and if we can gain those lessons, those learnings, if we can spread that love then, then that’s beautiful.
[00:39:52] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: She also knew where she was going as well. She had a very strong belief system. She was able to share with me what it was like, where she was going. That also gave her some of that comfort as well and that strength. What was so beautiful was just that she maintained her humor through the whole thing. She would make us laugh even when she was hurting. She also helped me understand how I can help others when they’re going through that process as well. Everybody has a to-do list, something that they’ve wanted to accomplish, something that they wanted to get done. That was my job was to help her with the things that she needed to accomplish before she passed.
One of those was we wrote letters to every single one of her family members that she wanted to leave information to, her friends and so on. When she was having some of those lucid moments where she could keep some make some really good language and express what she wants to, I wrote so quickly what it was she wanted them to hear and say and kind of her last memories of them. So on the day of the service, I was able to give those letters to each of these individuals, which was one of the greatest gifts that she’s given to any of them because she lived on. We recorded every session that we had together. We videotaped things, just so that we could share the memories.
She has two younger sisters that are twins. I interviewed her for all the moments that she was going to be missing like prom, graduation, and things like that that the kids would be involved in. I said, “Okay, so the twins are getting ready for their prom. What’s the day like and what are you guys doing?” I recorded that so that they could have that memory too because I know. It’s not just us that’s losing this wonderful person, it’s the family too. She got to live on, and she still does.
[00:42:06] Ashley James: And really, healing is about not just our body. We’re not just a meat sack. We have to look at the impact we have on others and our family and go beyond that. That’s really beautiful to take into account as part of healing. To take into account those around us that both impact our life and that we impact their lives. I love that idea of recording for future events. That’s really beautiful.
What comes to mind is Dr. Hamer’s work with Meta-medicine. Where do you stand on that? I’m sure you’ve studied that as one possible way of understanding cancer. Where do you stand on that now as a perspective with your experience with your friend who passed away of brain cancer?
[00:43:06] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, I truly feel like whatever the body creates the body can heal. When we have a virus such as cancer that invades our body, I truly feel we can heal it, and it’s on the way in which we approach it. With my niece, the way we approached it was the way that she was able to manage some of her pain and also to try to decrease that tumor as it was starting to grow is we started using visualization techniques where I said, “Okay, act like it’s a Pac-man and that Pac-man is eating that tumor.” She’d try it and then she would go, “Yeah, it doesn’t work.” I said, “What would work?” And she goes, “How about Alka-Seltzer? I’m putting this little Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water and it’s just sizzling, and as it’s bubbling away it’s destroying the tumor.” I said, “Go for it.”
She was even using a form of meditation at that point. I feel like when we can actually identify that there is something foreign in our body, because we all know we have cancer that resides in our body. It’s just not active at this point. When we identify and it’s starting to show some symptoms that we do have it, then let’s destroy it through our body. Let’s identify it and use all the means we can.
I feel that that’s where this integrative medicine comes in is identifying it, using the body’s potential to heal itself, and to get rid of it. Some medications won’t work. I agree that sometimes we do want to use medications, and that would be in the acute episodes of a distressful situation such as heart attacks, high blood pressure, or something like that. Get people to a point where they’re stable, but now we have to take them off the medication.
I think that’s where we are not really doing what we need to in the medical field right now is getting people off the medications that got them to a point where they’re stable. Get them to a point where they’re able to manage it through their diet and do these drastic changes that need to happen in their lifestyle changes and then let’s get to work. But get them off the medications because we’re not designed to be on them.
[00:45:19] Ashley James: Yeah, no kidding. I know cancer’s a tough one because if we’re looking at everything that led up to it, the terrain of the body and the years it took. There are holistic oncologists and naturopathic oncologists and they say it can take somewhere up to eight years before it actually appears as a tumor right. Some cancers and some forms of cancer take many years to get to the point where the body’s gotten sick enough, worn down enough, or toxic enough to create that cancer.
There are different schools of thought like with Dr. Hamer’s work, the belief that that it’s an emotional event so jarring that the person could not comprehend or overcome it, and the body’s neurological and hormonal response to a major emotional event, which he did over 30,000 case studies on and was able to actually help some of those people reverse the cancers by working on the emotional component of what triggered it.
I’m sorry, I’m having a brain fog. I interviewed him, I’m having a brain fog at the moment. His last name is Dr. Simoncini in Italy. He believes all cancer is a form of candida basically. He’s been able to, with over 70% success rate, kill tumors—even brain tumors—by making a—and this is a great interview to listen to by the way for anyone who wants to listen to something just totally freaky. He creates a port, but he’s a surgeon. He creates a port going into the vasculature that feeds the tumor and then makes a solution of sodium bicarbonate, which he says everyone knows. Everyone knows that’s how you kill candida. You kill yeast with sodium bicarbonate solution.
He would just basically mix these two together in a very specific solution and pour it into the tumor. It’s not going to damage the body. The body just has a buffer system to bring up or down the pH as needed. But he pours this into the tumor and most of the time, that day or within days the tumor is dead—gone. He has over 70% success rate, which means maybe in some cases it’s not candida. But we’re looking at this, for these holistic doctors who have exceptional results with cancer, that on some levels, there’s an emotional component and people’s cancer goes away after that. On some level, we’ve heard of some people who had like skin cancer just completely fall off and go away when they used a concentrated form of cannabis topically. We hear these things.
[00:48:38] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, Rick Simpson.
[00:48:39] Ashley James: Right, Rick Simpson oil. There are some great videos that are like 15 years old on YouTube of Rick Simpson talking about these or about 12 years ago. It’s all fringe because of course with the way our medical system is now, the only acceptable form of medicine in the United States and in many other countries that follow suit is surgery, chemo, radiation. But if we go to Europe, a standard form is also used, in addition to those. They also use hyperbaric chambers, ozone therapy, and hyperthermia. Those treatments are not allowed to be used by oncologists here, but are regularly used by oncologists in Europe with success.
And then we have the more fringe stuff like Dr. Simoncini putting sodium bicarbonate. Can you imagine if all the oncologists in the United States just started off by using sodium bicarbonate solution directly poured into the vasculature of the tumor through a port, just to see if that could kill it first. First of all, how many lives we could save, how much money the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t make right. Unfortunately, there’s that money component.
But looking at this, there’s also a belief that tumors are related to parasites. Just this summer there was some great research that came out where they were able to isolate the microbiome of tumors. They discovered that specific tumors have a different microbiome than the rest of the body, and now they’ve started creating diagnostic tools that they can actually detect—either in blood or saliva—the microbiome of tumors. Specifically identify before the tumor ever gets big enough to show on a scan.
They’ll be able to detect the tumor because the microbiome, which then leads us to think if the body is so out of balance that it has these kinds of bacteria in it. The body’s like a petri dish. It’s going to give this bad bacteria a home. Is that the cause of the cancer, or does the cancer itself then create? What happens? Does the cancer create the microbiome? Does the microbiome create cancer? There’s so much to explore here, and we’re really limited in the holistic space because we’re up against the pharmaceutical industry that really wants to protect its dollars. But we have to be open-minded.
You have, at your fingertips, the tools that support the body’s ability to come into balance. You can work with nutrition, you can work with energy, lifestyle changes, detoxification methods. Your whole thing is not treating the disease but actually just supporting the body’s ability to come back into balance. Because if the petri dish of the body is so healthy, it cannot support the candida. It cannot support the parasites. It cannot support that disease from living in it. This is where we are. We have to rise above the pharmaceutical philosophy where they’re just treating symptoms, and come at it from your perspective.
Since you graduated and you became a Ph.D. in Integrative Medicine, you’ve been working with all kinds of amazing clients doing this kind of therapy. What have you been really happy to achieve? I know you don’t do the work, the person does the work. I get you’re not treating them, but what are you really happy about? With the results that your clients have received, what are you really, really excited about?
[00:52:34] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, first of all, to go back to what you were talking about, I agree with everything you said about the emotions, about the bioterrain, about parasites, and candida. I have found that candida has been a leading cause of many of the people that I see related to cancer. We started working on getting rid of the candida through diet and through different supplements and stuff like that, as well as through detoxing. Found that they started to show a decrease in those symptoms as well. I agree with everything you said.
Louise Hay actually talks about how emotions have a huge impact on our disease process and looking at some of the unresolved emotions that may be leading to those diseases and causing them. That’s one of the things that I always recommend to my clients is that they read that book, for example, because oftentimes, there is an unmet emotion or unresolved emotion that is causing some of this disease in their body.
But to get back to your question, yes, I have these resources that are available, and I love it. What I love the most about what I’m able to provide to my clients is giving them their power back. What I mean by that is giving them their power to heal themselves, to know that they can, to love themselves again—that’s a big one, to resolve some of those hurts, and to realize that we don’t have to always look for other people’s approval of who we are, what we’ve become. It’s really only our own approval of what we are doing, who we are, what we want to become.
I think because of the advent of social media and how much social media people are involved in and just media in general, we’ve given our power to so many other people that now they own our power. The medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, they own our power because they basically say, I can’t heal you unless you take this, or I don’t know what’s wrong with you therefore you need to have a psych eval, or all of this. Yet the power is within. We just have to help them find it.
That’s what I love when I see my client say, oh, aha. They have an aha moment or they go, so this is why, and then they resolve it and they’re feeling so amazing. All the symptoms that they were having are gone and they’re actually having a joyous life. Then they’re like is this supposed to be what it’s like? Because they’ve been living in this world for so long of lack, of feeling that they’re not worth it. One of the questions I always ask is what do you love about yourself? If it takes 10 minutes to come up with one thing that they love about themselves, we need to work on that self-love first because healing will have a hard time happening if you don’t love yourself.
That’s what I like the most is what I’m passing on to most of my clients is that ability to love themselves and knowing that it’s okay to do it. That you don’t have to do this brainwashing, and really work with the children now too. I am working with younger children and helping them realize to love your body, to love your mind, love who you are. Don’t let others turn you into somebody that you aren’t because of getting their approval, wanting them to be liked, or something like that. Just shine bright and live very comfortably in that light.
[00:56:28] Ashley James: Can you share with us some specific results that clients have achieved through working with you?
[00:56:38] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: How long is your show?
[00:56:44] Ashley James: Stories of success. Any that come to mind that you want to share.
[00:56:48] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, I actually have several. One of the first ones is a lady who had come in to see me mainly just because she just wanted to feel better. Really had no real specific illness or anything like that. Just didn’t feel quite herself and just wanted to feel better. As I’m doing my assessment on her and I’m reviewing her symptomology and the things that she wants, one of the first things I always ask is can I look at your tongue? As she’s sticking her tongue out I notice that half of her tongue is paralyzed. I’m like, “Interesting, what happened here?” She goes, “Oh, I had a surgical procedure. It was an endarterectomy and they nicked a nerve. Basically, this half of my tongue has been paralyzed ever since.” I said, “Well, how long was that?” She goes, “About three years ago.”
I went, “Really? And it hasn’t regenerated?” She goes, “No, they said basically, there’s nothing they can do.” She’d gone to speech therapy, she went to different things and nothing changed. I went, huh, okay. I’m thinking to myself, I’m going to look at that and see if I can address that with my Biofeedback. So I did, and I worked on her for a total of three sessions. After the first session she came back the next week and she said, “Is it my imagination or is my tongue getting better?” I said, “Well, let me look at it.” So she sticks it out and there is some movement. I’m like, it does look like it’s getting better, but I didn’t want to give her false hope so I said, “Well, I think there is some improvement.”
So I worked on her again, and the next time she comes back and she goes, “Oh there’s definitely some improvement.” I said, “Show me,” so she showed me again. The last time I saw her she had full function of her tongue. The one thing that we were working on was the slurring of the speech because as a result of the tongue being paralyzed for so long, she had developed these behaviors or these patterns within her speech where it would come off as slurred speech, so she sounded like she was always drunk.
She had called me one day and left me a message and said, “You’re not going to believe it but now I have full function on my tongue. I actually got to eat a hamburger for the first time without having to chop it up into little bites. And I didn’t have to take my finger and sweep the inside of my cheek to get the pocketing of the food out. I was actually able to use my tongue. Now, when I speak, people don’t think I’m drunk all the time because I’m not slurring my words.” When I see her in town I’ll ask her, “Stick out your tongue,” and she’ll stick it out very sassily with a lot of flair because she can because it’s working.
Did I anticipate that that would work, or that I would see an improvement in that? I didn’t, but the belief system you know is a strong thing. Sometimes we’re giving miracles like that, and she was one of those miracles where I really didn’t think—I mean, not that I didn’t think it would work. I was just keeping it open. Letting the universe do the work that it needed to.
[01:00:13] Ashley James: You didn’t have expectations. The way you do the Biofeedback, which you can do in person or remote, which is my experience. The remote worked. It’s helping whatever the body needs to correct. It goes through every system of the body and whatever the body needs to correct it does. It’s so interesting. I’m a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. My teacher worked with a client who was in a fire and had half of his face scarred. He did emotional work called timeline therapy where he healed from the emotional scarring of those events, and the man’s skin—this is years before. The doctors are like you will always have a disfigured face, you always have these scar burns.
What I think is really interesting is how the skin remembers to keep creating scar tissue. I’ve taken anatomy in college. I understand. There are layers of the skin. You damage the layer deep enough, you damage that third layer, and you’re done, you’ve always got a scar. This is what the medical system says. But the body has to keep creating scar tissue because we constantly are shedding skin. The body has to remember to not produce healthy normal skin and instead produce a scar over and over and over and over and over again long after the scar isn’t needed anymore. The scar isn’t needed, but the memory, the body keeps doing it.
This is what I think is funny because we’ve learned now in more recent years that even adults have stem cells. If our body has the ability to produce stem cells, we can recreate healthy skin. What’s going on? But there’s a belief to hold on to scars. After he did this emotional work called timeline therapy, which I’m a huge fan of and also a master practitioner and trainer of, his face started having the scar dissipate over time because it takes a few weeks or whatever for new skin to rise to the surface and he no longer had the scars on his face of the fire. That’s just one example. There are so many other examples or stories where the body, whence the emotions are healed, the belief system changed, the body follows suit.
For your client, was the nerve actually damaged three years later, or was she holding on to them—the body on an energetic level is holding on to the memory of the injury and continuing to perpetuate the injury into the future? You’ve seen this in occupational therapy because people will hold on to a holding pattern in their gait. You watch them walk in their gait as they walk away towards you, and you’ll see where the body is holding on to an old injury or compensating for an injury that’s no longer there.
Z-Health is a great form of medicine designed by a chiropractor where you wipe away mentally by working on the nerves in all the joints. You wipe the slate clean so your brain resets back to normal. I’ve seen people who have been holding on to old injuries after doing even one session of Z-Health walk differently, move their bodies differently like more freely. Again, you cannot separate the unconscious, the mind, or energy or energetic body, from the physical. It’s all connected. But how much of our illness is being perpetuated by our belief system? How much of our illness is being perpetuated by a memory that our body has to continue to hold on to it?
I love the work you do because you’re resetting the brain, you’re resetting the belief system, you’re resetting the body back to homeostasis.
[01:04:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, it’s also finding out how this disease serves this person. That’s one thing that is a hard question to ask because most people will say what are you trying to say? That I’m coming up with this on my own and that I’m manifesting this? I said, “Well let’s talk about that.” Because some of the really big breakthroughs that I’ve seen as well with clients is when you realize that they have become their diagnosis. Now they associate themselves with it.
For example, I learned this in some of the work with Dr. Joe Dispenza. When we keep referring to our diagnosis of let’s say fibromyalgia. He calls this the water cooler conversation when all the people at work get together, they start talking about their weekend, and they’re standing at the water cooler. Everybody will be talking about the fun that they had, and then you have that one person that says, well because of my fibromyalgia I wasn’t able to do this, because of my fibromyalgia I wasn’t able to do this, and because of that, I wasn’t able to do this.
So basically, they’re making their fibromyalgia much stronger in their body. It’s wherever you place your focus you place your energy. The more energy they put towards that fibromyalgia, the more symptoms that they would have. So then, you have to ask what do you gain from telling people you have fibromyalgia or even acknowledging that you have it? What’s the gain that you get? Oftentimes, this is where I’ve seen some huge breakthroughs with my clients because that’s a question that’s really hard to ask because then they have to ask themselves that same question about what am I gaining from it?
In many cases, what they’re getting is the attention of people. They’re getting the love from, let’s say, a spouse that because you have this pain I’m going to take care of this for you, or not having to do the housework, or not having to do this or what. So internally, there is a return on that investment of fibromyalgia.
Once you can actually identify, and I’m not saying this happens with everybody, but in some of the most chronic conditions that I’ve seen where it’s really been debilitating when we can do that level of work and get that acknowledgment or even who hurt you when you’re a child? Or going to the ancestral piece of healing and going back to that child and healing the child from all these traumas that they may have experienced that now is starting to manifest as an adult.
When we can go back and do that, that’s when you get that aha, you see it, and it’s like wow. And then they come back and they say, ”You’re not going to believe what happened. I went a whole week without any pain because I didn’t need it anymore. It wasn’t serving me anymore. I didn’t need it anymore.” And that’s a beautiful thing.
[01:08:03] Ashley James: Fascinating. You’ve worked with people who have the symptoms of fibromyalgia?
[01:08:12] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes. I work with all different types of pain.
[01:08:16] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, I bet. But specifically, fibromyalgia is very invasive. I have a friend—this was 10 years ago, 12 years ago. She showed me two drawers in her nightstand, two nightstand drawers full of meds to manage her fibromyalgia. She also had a morphine pump. She had some kind of pump attached to her body that would constantly drip a pain medicine. I think it was morphine. I was talking to her about nutrition and how Dr. Wallach, who’s one of my mentors, says that fibromyalgia is a nutrition deficiency—largely mineral deficiency—and a lot of times, even just incorporating selenium really helps.
I talked to her about wanting to get her on all 90 essential nutrients—vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids. I think she just went out to any old store and bought selenium. I don’t even know if it was good quality selenium or whatever, but she got on it. I was talking to her like, “Okay, please, take some vitamins, take some minerals.” I was showing her the ones that I’ve been using for the last 10 years, and she reported to me that she cut her pain meds in half. Literally, an entire nightstand drawer of meds is gone. That’s just by incorporating one of the 60 minerals that the body needs. That just goes to show.
Now, of course, you have to look at the mental and emotional component, the spiritual, and the energetic. You have to look at everything, but man, if you can have just that much leeway—cut your meds in half by incorporating one mineral. That would be the gateway. Okay, I’m all in. Let’s do holistic medicine. Let’s see how better I can get. But when we have a secondary gain from a disease—like if it really is on an unconscious level—giving us something that we’re lacking, then then we’re not really motivated to fully heal it. Because maybe it’s part of our identity at that point, or maybe it’s how we compensate for wanting love or attention.
[01:10:34] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I actually got to see this with my dissertation that I did for my Ph.D. My topic was on chronic pain, and I was using ultrasound over acupuncture points as my intervention. I was using qEEG, which is qualitative EEG, to map the brain prior to the intervention and after the intervention to see how the brain would change as a result of this intervention. I would do the EEG first and see where the pain manifested itself in the brain based on the brain wave activity. And then I would do the intervention. The intervention was based on whatever their pain was and everything else. I used the same five points with each of my clients, and then I used five different points based on their specific level of pain. That way, I could do a really good analysis of how the points work.
Every single person in my study showed a significant reduction in their pain just from one session of the ultrasound over acupuncture points. But what I did find—I was expecting to see this but I wasn’t sure if I would—is that the people who had an emotional attachment to the pain. What I mean by that is whether it was brought on by another person’s accident, an injury, or let’s say a physical abuse of some sort, if there was a huge amount of emotional attachment to it, the pain symptoms went down, but the pain response moved from the sensory-motor cortex of the brain to the emotional part of the brain.
That showed me how strongly the emotions hold pain in the body. That also opened up a whole new avenue for me to address pain and really look at the emotional attachment to it. The ones that had no emotional attachment to the pain, their pain completely went away. That showed me, first and foremost, that this intervention works.
The second thing that was a wonderful experience was to see how emotions have a huge impact. That’s why when we’re giving pharmaceuticals, why the pharmaceuticals don’t work. When someone who is in so much pain wants to get an increase in their pharmaceutical medication or another one, and they’re being considered a drug seeker or something like that from the pharmacy or from the physician or whomever, it’s because we are not actually getting to the root cause of the pain. We’re just covering it. It’s up to the practitioners to identify that, and we haven’t. That’s where we’re failing our clients.
When I saw this study, when I actually saw it with my own eyes, I looked at pain in a whole another way. That in itself has helped so much with my clients getting better. Because one of the things with the Biofeedback—when I am assessing somebody on that—it will always bring emotion to whatever we’re looking at, and it’s a subconscious unconscious emotion. When I see this emotion come up, I’ll ask them, “So this is showing a resistance to change. Let’s talk about that.” They’re like, “Oh, yeah. That’s totally me.” Or there’s some anger, frustration, anxiety, or something associated with it. Let’s talk about that. Let’s resolve that so that this condition has a better potential to heal.
[01:14:27] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Your Ph.D. dissertation sounds amazing. What an incredible experience to actually see that for those who were holding on an emotional level, the pain was there. Physical pain was there actually because there was emotion around it. That you could actually see it move into the emotional centers of the brain. Were you able to help those people? Did you work on healing emotions? And then did you see in the brain scan that it was gone?
[01:15:07] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, for the time of the study I didn’t get to actually do any additional testing afterward because I was leasing the equipment and it was quite expensive, so I wasn’t able to do that one. But when I was able to share the results with these individuals—as far as the emotional component to it—then that actually started the work of the healing of really identifying that when it came to that. The ones that had the healing from just the points and no emotional component, I just showed them which points to use and how to press on those points and to help relieve their pain if it should ever come back. That gives them their tools as well. That gives them their power back. But yeah, we did address the emotional piece to it.
[01:15:56] Ashley James: Normally I don’t glorify pharmaceuticals, as you can imagine. I did this really interesting interview with a psychologist who works with ketamine for healing emotions. He has a clinic that has an incredible success rate. I think it’s over 70% success rate in helping people with addiction. Whereas I think Betty Ford, for example, is 30% or less than that success rate—in terms of people quitting alcohol or drugs and then never getting back on them. They have an incredibly high success rate, and that’s because of the ketamine—much like LSD but half the half-life in the body. LSD maybe you’re tripping for 12 hours or something, whereas ketamine, they can dose it so you’re only in that state for about four to six hours. And then during that time, they do therapy.
But what it does, and these are people who have huge emotional wounds. People who have come back from war, they have post-traumatic stress, they’ve been in abusive relationships. They’re using substances to just numb and cope with the horrors that their brain keeps reliving. The ketamine, like LSD—and they’ve done studies on this for many years, and also microdosing psilocybin—magic mushrooms. Some psychologists do that as well. They all pretty much do the same thing where it has the critical faculty melt away and allow us to gain positive learnings from those experiences without being triggered and traumatized while working through them.
What’s very interesting—so this doctor has a clinic and he’s working with the ketamine basically helping people open up so they can do the therapy, and then they really get to the root cause, and they have incredible results. But he himself had chronic, chronic, chronic shoulder pain for years that was debilitating shoulder pain. He didn’t want to get addicted to pain meds, and it was because he tore a bunch of stuff in his shoulder from martial arts years before. He kept re-injuring it. It was just a really messy deal. He did one dose of ketamine without any therapy—just one dose of ketamine—and the pain went away for six months. One tiny dose, and then he says every six months he takes a microdose. He takes a microdose every six months.
It’s interesting because he said some people get emotional healing by themselves. They just do this one dose of ketamine, and of course, this is all in a therapeutic setting. They take away cell phones, they don’t have the TV on, there are no magazines, there are no books because your mind is open now and anything could come in. But some people go through huge healing just by being in that state and working out stuff, working out stuff on their own. That’s what he did.
[01:19:19] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I love it.
[01:19:20] Ashley James: He has had people who no longer have post-traumatic stress, no longer have major psychological episodes, and no longer have an addiction. The side effect of this treatment is also people who are in chronic pain for years no longer have chronic pain. Again, I don’t love to glorify any kind of medication, but there are tools that we can use when we need it. But looking that it sped up the process so they could actually do the emotional work, and the emotional work was able to then have them no longer have chronic pain, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, fear running their life, and substance abuse, which is fascinating.
If we can heal and really acknowledge that our pain and disease can be at the root, in the emotional centers of the brain. When we work on that in conjunction with eating a healthy diet and all those other things to just support the body as a whole, but that acknowledge that mental and emotional health is incredibly important and that we can address it with these amazing technologies like remote Biofeedback, which is really cool.
[01:20:40] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, you know what, Ashley, I learned a lot from this one client pertaining to this particular topic. As we were doing the emotional work when it came to her pain level, she was basically saying, “I have all these friends and family that never come to see me, but the pain is something I can rely on every day that will come.”
[01:21:05] Ashley James: Whoa.
[01:21:07] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I was like, yeah, exactly. I had the same response. I was like, wow, that really showed a lot of work on her part to acknowledge that, to notice it, and then to say this is why I have it. This is why I keep it because it’s the one thing I can rely on every single day that will show up at my door is pain. I never looked at it that way, but that was quite mind-blowing for me. The pain had actually become her friend.
So it made me look at it in a different light, and then we just needed to identify something else. That was really her own sense of self-worth, and that you don’t need outside people to provide you the love and all of that. Let’s work on the love inside and let’s work on that own self-esteem, that self-love to where you don’t care if people call you, want to speak to you, or whatever because you have the joy in your heart. You have that joy.
But that was kind of an aha moment for me as well. I love it when I get to learn from my clients because I feel like every opportunity that we are with clients is a learning opportunity as well. As far as how we can help others, as far as how we can help even ourselves in our own personal life. That was pretty profound for me to hear that.
[01:22:27] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I’m still blown away by your work when you did your Ph.D. dissertation. What an incredible experience and also to then turn around and show the client like see, here’s your brain. Look, the chronic pain moved into these emotional centers. I know several people with chronic pain who there’s no medical reason for it. They do scans, oh there’s nothing. There’s nothing there. There’s no medical reason for it. Go for a psych eval, whatever. They just get on stronger and stronger pain meds, which the body adapts to and can basically override. The medical system doesn’t answer for them because they don’t see anything on a scan.
When you show someone here’s your pain—in your brain here’s the pain—and look it moved now because of the acupressure. Here, the root of it’s actually over here in the emotional center, and you’re showing them. First of all, you believe them. There’s actual evidence. There’s a reason for it. You’re not crazy. It’s not all in your head. It’s in your brain, but it’s not all made up.
It’s very validating. I just remember feeling so sick for so many years and the doctor’s really not having any answers for me until I went to natural medicine. It was very validating 12 years ago when I went to a holistic—she was an MD who actually gave up her MD-ness, gave up her license when she realized she was just a drug dealer. What she really wanted to do was be an integrative functional medicine practitioner and really ahead of her time.
She showed me in labs that no other MD had drawn because they all said, okay, there’s nothing really wrong with you. She showed me in labs why I was so sick and that I needed natural medicine to get better. She showed me that path, and that was so validating. Oh, here’s why you can’t get out of bed. Here’s why you are so tired. Here’s why you are like walking dead every day. She showed me on those labs and she could validate it instead of all the other doctors that basically just wanted to put me on drug after drug and said there’s no evidence for it. And then natural medicine got me well so fast that I dedicated my life to wanting to share this information, you have as well.
So helping someone who has been suffering for years, to show them that their suffering is valid—it’s real—then help them heal from it, and then help them come back into balance. Can you tell us more about the remote Biofeedback, specifically the SCIO—the work that you do? How does it work? Can you just walk us through or paint the picture so we have a deeper understanding of it?
[01:25:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Absolutely. Well, first of all, I have the pleasure and the leisure of being able to have as long of a session with the client as I want. My minimum amount of time that I spend with a client is two hours, and that’s almost unheard of these days. But in those two hours, you get a lot accomplished. What I see is that most of the time, within the first 15, 20, 30 minutes, the client is just getting warmed up.
What I mean by that is they’re just getting comfortable with someone actually sitting there actively listening, hearing what they have to say, believing in what they have to say as well, and validating. Like what you just said, that their symptoms are real, that they’re not going crazy, that they know their body better than anybody else, and they know when it’s not right.
Intuitively, they know there’s something wrong with their body. For me to be able to spend the two hours that I want to with a client allows me that opportunity to really get to know them, not only the emotional, but like you, I do the neuro-linguistic programming as well, and I look for that non-verbal language that’s telling me things that they’re not ready to tell me yet but their body’s telling me. That helps me identify areas to look into when I go into the Biofeedback.
The way that the Biofeedback works, especially remotely, is they send me a sample of hair or saliva and a questionnaire that I sent to them to complete that I can actually then enter that data into the computer. Most of the time, I like to have them on the phone with me on Skype or in other means so that they can also see the same screen that I am using with the Biofeedback because I feel education is so important. Especially educating them as to how their body works and how it responds, and looking at it in a different perspective, not as a computer, but that this is a live being that is full of emotions and psychological issues and so on.
The way that the Biofeedback works, with the hair sample, it’s not a cut sample. It is actually hair that is pulled from the scalp that has the root ball. Because anybody who’s ever had a hair analysis, you want to pull the hair and get a root ball because that’s your DNA and so it reads your DNA. Similar to a cell phone, with a cell phone you have a specific phone number. You can be anywhere in the world and you can be located. That’s how this Biofeedback works.
When I put that hair sample or the saliva sample on the SCIO box, it has this metal plate on the top that reads things. If somebody wants their water tested, for example, they just bring in a water sample and I place it on the box and it’ll read their water to tell me if there are any pollutants in there that are not working for them. It’s going against their own constitution and things like that if there are any heavy metals things like that in there.
The same thing with their hair or their saliva, it reads it. It’s being able to then to find them wherever they are in the world. They can either be on the phone or just be completely laying on their couch with no connection with me whatsoever, it’s still working. Like the phone, it picks up their frequency, their vibration, and then it reads it. On my computer then with the SCIO, it’s reading everything energetically from the lymphatic system to the blood, to hormones, to scanning the spine, the nerves, the cranial nerves, teeth. I can actually do a dental assessment to see five different areas of decay and things like that’s going on, which is absolutely amazing. The chakra systems, the auras, I mean everything. Literally, I don’t know if there’s anything that I can’t touch at this point, and it reads it.
As it’s reading it, it does a three-minute assessment, and then it comes up with this record. It’s literally 10,000 options of symptoms as well as training that you can provide to that client. And then it grades it on a scale of the most acute, to the next acute, to the third, and to the fourth, and then what’s considered chronic. Maybe hanging around for a while and undetected. That’s where I find a lot of things that have not been detected by the medical side of things because all the symptomatology is taking all the attention where the root cause is sitting behind the scenes. That’s typically where I’ll find some of the root causes of their disease process, and then we look at it all.
It’ll tell me about allergies and sensitivities. It’ll tell me if they’ve got parasites, if they’ve got worms, if they’ve got pathogens of some sort that is causing this disease. And then we start identifying it as a team. What I mean by that is I say, “What is on this screen that you’d like to look at further?” Then I educate them as far as what it’s doing, how this is working. As we identify, I can actually test each particular area even further to see just how reactive their body is to that particular thing. That’s when it actually will show me what it’s linked to. Is it linked to blood, is it linked to the liver, is it linked to organs? And it’ll also give me an emotion that it’s linked to.
For example, if it’s a parasite, then I’ll say, “There’s this one particular parasite it’s taking a while to rectify, and what I mean by rectifying is that rectification means that you’ve been able to switch the energetics of that particular thing to where it’s no longer reactive in the body. Once I get it to this rectification, then we move on. But prior to that, that’s when I can actually test it individually to say what else is going on? That’s when the emotions will show up, and I’ll say, okay there’s this emotion showing up. What do you think about this?” And they said, “Well, I thought I resolved that a while ago.” “Well, it’s probably still hanging around a little bit.” It’s absolutely fascinating.
Like I said, somebody could have a pain in their body, for example, like sciatic nerve pain. Anybody who’s had it it’s painful. As I’m doing the spinal scan, they could actually see the picture of a spine, and it’ll show a little box where they’re showing the most energetic issues going on within the spine. I’d say a good 95% of the cases that’s exactly where the pain is actually coming from, which part of the spine is it coming from.
What most people don’t realize is that a lot of the pain symptoms we have, most of the time either come from the spine or the nerves that are coming through the spine and through the spinal cord. When we can identify that, we can get to the root cause of what that pain is and then, therefore, resolve it.
That’s where I think a lot of the aha moments go for the client is to be able to see, oh, so it’s not actually the muscle that’s damaged or hurt, it’s the nerve that feeds the muscle. Absolutely. So we’re going to work on this nerve—give it some good energy, give it some good frequencies and some vibrations because we can actually raise the frequency in each of these different modalities within the SCIO to where we’re raising it to where now the body has the potential to heal. That’s a beautiful thing.
Many people will say, are you working on my eyes right now? I can feel you in my liver, I can feel you in my gallbladder, or I can feel you in the bladder. Wow, I actually feel really good right now. I feel like I’m getting this big jolt of energy. I love it when people can actually feel that energetic exchange that’s going on between the SCIO, myself, and them. That’s how it works.
[01:34:19] Ashley James: Have people had something really overt happen around parasites after working with you doing remote Biofeedback where dead parasites have come out of their stool or something? You’re laughing. Can you share some stories of success with parasites?
[01:34:37] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Oh, yes. I have some pretty horrific stories.
[01:34:42] Ashley James: I can’t wait. Tell me, tell me.
[01:34:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Actually, a couple of people, not just one in particular, but this one really stands out. She had come to me because she wanted to lose weight and was very stagnant. Everything was stagnant in her body. Just really didn’t feel like she had any energy and all that. One of the first things I found was parasites and a ton of different types of parasites. It wasn’t just one parasite. It was several that were residing in her body.
[01:35:08] Ashley James: It never is. It’s never just one parasite. It’s so true. All the doctors I talked to that work on parasites, it’s never just one because the body has created this environment where they’re all invited to the party.
[01:35:26] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, and the more types of food that we feed it that it likes then it’s like yeah, we’re going to stay here because they’re feeding us well. But in this one particular case, I was working on her parasites on the Biofeedback. She’s in the room with me, so she’s got the harness on, she’s got the wristbands on, they’re all connected to the computer, and they’re all reading it. As I’m working on her—okay, this is going to freak you out, but I saw something moving in her eye.
[01:35:59] Ashley James: I knew you were going to say that.
[01:36:03] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I looked in closely and there’s this parasite coming out of her eye—the eyeball itself, and it was just wiggling around. She could feel it. She’s like, “I feel like I have something in my eye.” That’s what made me look at her eye closer. “Let me see,” because I didn’t see her rub her eye or anything so I didn’t think she could have gotten anything in it. As I get closer, there’s this parasite and it’s wiggling around. I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s so disgusting. What do you say? “You got a parasite hanging out of your eyeball.” That’s pretty much what I told her, and she’s like, “Oh my gosh.” Of course, she wants to look at it, so she’s looking at it through a mirror and she could actually see it. She goes, “That is so gross.” Then the parasite came out and her eye went back to its normal healthy state.
Then later she called me because that pretty much freaked her out, and of course, I came home and was a little freaked out myself. She called me and she said, “That didn’t stop.” I said, “What do you mean?” She goes, “I had more.” And I said, “What do you mean?” She goes, “I had one actually come out of my stomach.”
[01:37:13] Ashley James: What? Like her skin?
[01:37:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes.
[01:37:18] Ashley James: Her belly button or her skin?
[01:37:21] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, out of the skin.
[01:37:21] Ashley James: Oh my God.
[01:37:22] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It was out at the side of her belly button. And then her first bowel movement, she said she just saw a ton of them just writhing in the bowel, in the excrement. She had been eliminating them for quite a couple of days after that. But the whole idea is that we made the environment inhospitable for the parasites and so they decided they wanted to leave.
[01:37:51] Ashley James: Any means necessary, exiting her body in any way they could.
[01:37:58] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes. Where the parasite had exited from her stomach a blister had started. It did leave a little behind. We monitored that for quite a while, but she continued to get rid of the parasites. She had lost eight pounds in one day.
[01:38:24] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.
[01:38:25] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Is that all parasites? Maybe not. Some of that may have also been that she was constipated and there was Ebola stuck in her intestines for some time, and it needed to go. Then all the other toxins that were residing within the gut. That’s one of the things I like to work on a lot with my clients is gut health because I find that gut health is the key to the majority of the autoimmune issues that we have, as well as a lot of the chronic illnesses that we have, is gut health. What are we feeding it?
Also, for people who have Alzheimer’s, dementia, or any kind of cognitive like brain fog, oftentimes it’s what we are feeding the gut because the gut-brain connection is huge. The gut-heart-brain connection is huge as well, so it’s really addressing the gut. When you can address the gut and what we’re feeding it and also getting it cleaned out, then we’re going to get a much better response and a longer-lasting response.
[01:39:24] Ashley James: How many sessions did you do with her, and did you get to the point where the Biofeedback machine was saying that she was parasite-free?
[01:39:33] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah. I still work with her because what happens is once you resolve one thing, then it’s like, oh, can I work on this, can I work on that, and can I work on that.
[01:39:49] Ashley James: Once you have worms crawling out like it’s running for the exit doors in every possible way, I’m coming to you every week for the rest of my life, no kidding.
[01:40:02] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Exactly.
[01:40:03] Ashley James: You still work with her, she no longer has parasites, right? The machine said she doesn’t have parasites. She’s accomplished what she wanted with you? Did she get to the point where she’s got her weight loss, and now she’s just working on maintaining optimal health with you?
[01:40:20] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah. Now she just comes once a month just for a little pick-me-up or maintenance, not everybody needs that, but I think she also likes the interactions that we have together. I think it’s more of that emotional-spiritual connection that we have. That entangled hierarchy that happens between the clinician and the client. I think that’s the majority of it. While we’re at it, we’re pretty much doing an overall test to see how she’s doing physically, with inside—everything. Emotionally and energetically too. It’s like you’re taking your car into the shop for a tune-up, and that’s what she comes in for.
[01:41:05] Ashley James: You’ve worked with thousands of people, both remotely and locally. How many clients have you had where the machine said this person has parasites, like on a percentage? Do you think most people have parasites or 70% percent? What percentage?
[01:41:22] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I would say most.
[01:41:24] Ashley James: Really?
[01:41:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I would say a good 89%. It really depends on what they eat.
[01:41:36] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s so huge. Everyone thinks, oh well, I don’t eat sushi so I probably don’t parasites. But I’m telling you, it’s about the environment of the body. They’re in our environment, they’re in our food. But I’m working with a health coaching client for the last six weeks, and she has gotten such great results.
She came to me for—same with you, for weight loss. I’m just helping her like health coaching. I got her on some supplements, changed some things in her diet. She had heartburn so bad that it was constant. Constant heartburn, wake her up in the middle of my heartburn really, really, really bad. I think she said on the sixth day of being on my protocol, her heartburn was gone, and she couldn’t believe it. Then it came back a few times when she went off course, so it’s like the body’s talking to her. She’s like, oh, okay. Feedback. Not going to do that again.
She’s changed her diet completely, changed her routine completely. Going to bed earlier, wearing blue-blocking glasses. We went down the whole list, and I’m not really addressing anything specifically with the gut, although she’s eating very healthy, lots of fiber, getting lots of nutrition into her, doing lots of fun little detox things, going for walks, jumping on rebounding for lymphatic—that kind of stuff. Haven’t really gotten into any herbs or anything. Just generally getting the body cleaned up, and now she just started passing dead eight-inch long parasites. I’m not even doing the work like you do the work. Within an hour of the work that you do you’re getting parasites coming out of people.
All I was doing was helping her clean up the environment of her body. Detoxify, eat healthily, take some general supplements for overall nutrition, clean up the stress in her life. Just very, very, very basic like foundation building a strong body. That was enough—within the last six weeks—to change the environment of her body where it’s becoming an inhospitable environment for the parasites.
That is so cool to see that if we just get the body to the point where it’s an inhospitable environment to parasites, that means it’s a hospitable environment to our cells. It’s like the best environment we can create for our cells on an energetic level, nutrient level, and oxygen level. That is the most inhospitable environment for cancer, candida, parasites—all that kind of stuff. But you get results much faster because you’re using this Biofeedback machine.
Do you want to tell us what it’s like working with you? Let’s say listeners—who are all around the world by the way—decide they want to have a session with you. Can you walk us through step by step what it looks like? So we mail you saliva and our hair pulled from the root, which I did with you, by the way. When we visited you, my husband and I and our son gave you samples, and you keep them. I don’t want to be paranoid, but I’m always cautious that companies don’t sell my DNA. This is in-house, you don’t sell the DNA.
You have it, so you put it in the machine, and the machine, like you said, is like a phone number. The machine energetically links to us no matter where we are in the world. This is very quantum physics level stuff.
[01:45:28] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It is.
[01:45:30] Ashley James: The client—who’s anywhere around the world doesn’t have to be local to you—sends you their stuff— their hair and their saliva—and then what? Can you just walk us through what the experience is working with you?
[01:45:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah, absolutely. The first thing is they can actually get to my website, which is www.natural-therapeutics.com. There is a contact form where they can actually send me an email saying that they’re interested in wanting to receive some Biofeedback, even reiki, or even just like you said, health coaching. Once I get the email, then I send them a form to complete, which is basically a medical form that tells them what the Biofeedback does. It has the HIPAA information as well as their history so that I can get a good idea. And then I instruct them to either send me a hair sample in a baggie. If they don’t have hair because I’ve had some that say well my husband’s bald and they would want to send me hair from another part of the body and I would say no, saliva would be fine.
[01:46:45] Ashley James: Is it hair or saliva?
[01:46:48] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Hair or saliva. It does not have to be both.
[01:46:51] Ashley James: Got it. It’s not hair and saliva.
[01:46:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes. Hair from the head and/or saliva. Some people have really short hair and they can’t get a good hair sample, so they will then send me a saliva sample in a plastic bag.
[01:47:11] Ashley James: Got it.
[01:47:12] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Once I get all of that and I get the form that’s been completed, then I contact them to set up a time where we could get on a remote session. Whether it’s through Skype, whether it’s through Zoom, whether it’s through other means, or in some situations some people will say I just don’t have time. Can you just run it and then let me know. I prefer our first session as always together because there is a lot of interaction and exchange that occurs during that time. But in a situation where that’s not possible, then I could do it without them.
Then we set up the session. I say please allow two hours. Drink plenty of fluids before our session because that will enhance the outcome of the session, and try to be as free from any type of distractions as possible. If you can get into a nice comfortable position that would be good, and just plan to be available for two hours while I work on you. And then if they’re on Skype or Zoom where they can actually see my session, then I explain everything to them. Because the more they know and understand their body and how it works, especially how it works energetically, then that makes them more of a steward for their body and gives them that power back.
Then the first part is I enter information from them, which is on the form that they complete that has their demographic information, it has post health issues such as how many surgeries, how many amalgams that they have, how many medications are they on if they’ve had any steroids, how much coffee, sugar, or alcohol do they. How much fat is in their diet or processed foods? How much water do they drink, those kinds of things? How much weight would they like to lose if they want to, that kind of thing?
Once I get that information, then I start the assessment. That information then will give them a score, and that score is called the SOC, which is suppression and obstruction to a cure. It’s basically all of those things that are preventing them from being their ultimate and allowing them to be healthy. Then I let them know what the score means, and that score is their potential to heal themselves. Then it goes through what is considered the VAR HOPP panel, which is the voltage amperage resistance hydration oxygenation proton pressure, which is your pH balance electrons. And then also some other numbers that make sense as far as their healing potential and what’s preventing them from healing.
Then the screen comes up with all of the 10,000 different remedies and symptomatology that is identifying for them, and then I explain what each of those levels means. The acuity levels, what they mean for that particular person. If there are particular ones, this is when I start to ask for feedback from them. Okay, is there anything on this screen that you’d like to investigate further that doesn’t quite make sense to you or what? If they don’t have anything, then I go ahead and pick some that I feel has a lot to do with how they’re feeling, what they’re complaining about, and so on, and then we start the testing.
Once we finish the testing on that particular thing, as far as what is the acuity and how much reactivity it’s having to them, then I train. Basically, the system starts to train the body to return it back to its homeostasis and return it back to normal. Then we go down different categories, so I can go into the allergies and sensitivities. We can go into parasites and the blood and look at some of those things as well to see what’s going on. I go into the spine. The computer already picks a couple of programs that it wants to run based on the way in which the assessment was completed. I run those and then we go down particular areas that they’d like.
If somebody’s having some pain issues, then I’ll scan the spine and the spine will then tell me where their energetic blockages within the spine, then let’s resolve them, and then what emotion is holding that. We could look at the chakras and all that. If they have teeth issues, which oftentimes if I see there’s a ton of bacteria going on, or if there’s resistance, which means how much energy is flowing through the organs. If I see a really low resistance meaning that it’s probably a lot of the organs are very toxic because they’ve even either had a lot of heavy metal exposure, mold exposure, yeast, fungus, parasites, that’s going to make that number really low. So then I look into that further. The whole idea is let’s evacuate as much of that as possible so that we can get you into a really healthy state.
Now, what most people don’t realize is that when we’re talking about detoxification, especially when it comes to heavy metals, candida, or some of those is that oftentimes the organs are already toxic so they can’t filter like they’re supposed to. For example, the liver is what filters all of the prescriptions that people are on. If the liver is already toxic and it’s not able to filter or release all of those toxins, oftentimes, people will see skin eruptions happening to where now they have psoriasis, eczema, or some kind of acne that is occurring because their liver basically can’t filter like it’s supposed to, so it’s going through the skin instead, which is the largest organ we have anyway.
There’s usually a correlation between skin, liver, and detoxification. I usually like to get them started on high levels of essential fatty acids so that the detoxification process can happen better. What I mean by that is one of my favorite recipes I like to give people is bulletproof coffee. The reason I like it is because of the MCT oil, which is a medium-chain triglyceride, and the ghee, which is a really wonderful organic clarified butter. When they place it in a regular cup of coffee like a black cup of coffee and they blend it and they drink it, what happens is that those essential fatty acids then allow the organs to—it’s kind of like they grease the organ so that things can flow through it easier.
You’ll actually see people showing a huge change in their cognition where they had brain fog before. Now they’re like, oh my gosh, I even remember my locker combination from high school since I started bulletproof or things like that. They have greater energy. Then it’s really looking at dietary changes too to help that process.
Once we finish the SCIO and we’ve finished all of the different programming and all that kind of stuff that’s going in there, then I create a customized plan for them. This customized plan is basically every morning do this, every afternoon do this, every evening do this, and then the resources to help them with that. I give them what their allergies or sensitivities are so they’ll know which foods they should avoid for a little bit.
Homework, I give them homework because they need to be just as motivated and involved in their healing process as I am, if not more so. I give them homework, and that homework is going to be let’s change your diet. Let’s do some energetic work. If you don’t do meditation, grounding, or something energetically let’s work on that. If I need to have you write a love letter to yourself we’re going to do that so we can actually start to improve some love in you. Identifying some of the stressors, things like that. It’s really a whole body, a whole person type of program.
And then we set up the next session. Typically, when I start somebody, it really depends on what their level of chronicity is, how sick they are, and how stagnant their energy is. If it’s really bad, then I would usually recommend that we do a session once a week just for a couple of times just to see how their body is engaged in it and how they’re responding to it. In some situations, it might be once every other week, and in some sessions, it might be once a month. It really depends on the individual person. That’s how that works.
Once I finish the first session and they get their customized plan and then we meet the next time, then they get an updated progress report after each session. That’s so that they can track their progress. I’ve had some people who’ll actually put their progress report on their refrigerator because they’re excited because they see the numbers improving, they see fewer things that they’re having to address, they see the pounds going down, or whatever it is. It’s kind of like they’re taking credit for their homework that they’ve been doing. That’s how that works.
[01:56:28] Ashley James: Very cool. I love it. I had a very interesting experience. I remember our son had his session in person, but we didn’t end up hooking him up to the machine because he is…
[01:56:48] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Very active.
[01:56:50] Ashley James: I think he was still four at the time. He’s five and a half now. I think he was about to become five. Yeah, that’s right. He was four turning five. That’s right because it was just after Christmas. He was still four, very active, and wanted to run around. You actually did a remote session in a sense. He was in the building, but you basically were doing a remote session. It took about two hours, give or take. Maybe a bit longer. What’s interesting is I felt it, and it’s because the mom has the energetic cord attached to their children. The second you turned on the program I felt my body vibrating. I’m like, oh boy. By the end of it, I felt drunk. I could feel it. My husband couldn’t feel it.
Our son started to talk very clearly. He doesn’t have a speech impediment, but like a four-year-old, they’re not enunciating like an adult. He started to talk incredibly clearly, very sophisticated, and he actually has an incredible vocabulary. I remember at two or two and a half he could say the word avocado, and I’m like that’s a lot of syllables for a young kid. But he says some very sophisticated things. His grandfather, who’s a master’s in linguistics, is constantly surprised by the stuff coming out of our son’s mouth because of how multi-layered the sentences are.
Anyway, as the session’s going on, he starts talking much clearer, even more, complicated sentences. He started talking like really deep thought patterns about crystals and healing, and he’s just going off on all these interesting things that are coming to his mind. But then after the session, he went to the bathroom. He eats a pretty clean diet, actually, his bowel movements don’t really make a smell. I’ve never noticed a smell. I mean there’s nothing, it’s not even a smell.
He made a smell so putrid, so horrible I thought like there was roadkill in the bathroom. I mean it was the most horrible, but his body was just expelling whatever it was expelling. It was just right after the session, and he actually normally doesn’t have a bowel movement at that time of day. He’s pretty much clockwork. His digestion is really good like clockwork. He expelled whatever it was. Just amazing came out of him, all those toxins, and then he fell asleep. He just went boom, fell asleep in the car.
He didn’t have any major health issues other than he was struggling with high histamine and allergies to a lot of foods. Anytime he was exposed to one of his allergens he would have a major asthma attack. Since that time, he has only needed his inhaler twice in the last 10 months. So just looking back, really, he’s only had one session from you, but he was at the point where he was like he was needing his inhaler a lot because he would be exposed to it because he’s allergic to about nine or twelve different things.
There’s a ton of fish he’s allergic to so I just kind of say okay, that’s fish. He doesn’t eat any fish, but he also has weird allergies like garlic, which garlic is in everything, so I make everything from scratch for him pretty much because garlic is in everything. But he’s also allergic to dust mites. If he goes over to a friend’s house and they didn’t vacuum every day, basically he comes home with an asthma attack. He did, but after his session with you, he only needed his inhaler while his body was working through a cold or flu, which has been two times in the last 10 months. His reaction to what he’s allergic to has really diminished. I didn’t really think about it, but I saw that there was that turning point in his health after he had one session with you 10 months ago.
And then my session with you, my one session, was also remote. I was unconscious at the time. For most of the session, I wasn’t on the phone with you because I was incredibly sick, lying in bed, in and out of consciousness. But I felt you working on me. I kept waking up and then going back to sleep, I felt it. Like I said when I woke up and the session was over, my suffering was gone. All of a sudden I knew that now I’m going to be in recovery. The sickness is over, the suffering is over. Now I’m going to be in recovery.
That was really a very interesting experience. Both of those are remote, I mean he was in the vicinity, but still not attached to the machine. We saw results both times—remote. We could talk for hours.
[02:02:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: When I have children in my clinic, I tend to do them remotely because it’s very hard. The youngest I worked with is two, so far. The youngest has been two, and they can’t sit still for two hours. I’m sorry, they just can’t. If I need to, then I will have them wear the harness for the first 10 minutes. Let’s keep them occupied and all that for the first 10 minutes. Basically, that first 10 minutes is the device doing the assessment, the calibration, and all that. Then I can release the child and they can just run. I have tons of toys in the clinic so they can have some fun with that.
This is the thing that I like to make sure that most people are aware of is that with a remote or even in person, the person that I’m working with has to give permission for the device to work. A lot of people get a fear factor going thinking, oh, she’s just going to work on me no matter when I’m not even thinking about it. No, no, no. The reason I contact people and say can we do this on this date at this time is because then, they’re giving me permission to work on them. This device works so much better when you have permission from the client.
I won’t ever work on anybody without them knowing it, plain and simple. That goes against my own ethics, but it also goes against the ethics of the system as well. That’s what I really love about it because a lot of people will think, well, if things go sour with us as a relationship, then she could do some bad things to me. No. First of all, that’s not in my heart. That’s not who I am. But the device also won’t allow me to do that either.
[02:04:13] Ashley James: Right, it’s a healing device.
[02:04:15] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s a comfort, yes.
[02:04:17] Ashley James: It’s a healing device. It can’t be weaponized.
[02:04:23] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Vindictive.
[02:04:28] Ashley James: Unless the person doesn’t want to be healed, right?
[02:04:32] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes, and then that will come up as an emotion, subconsciously, in one of their systems, whichever one it’s impacting. Usually, it’ll show up as resistance to change as an emotion, and then we talk about that and say, okay, the resistance to change is showing up what is this meaning? Or there’ll be another emotion that’ll show up that will identify that they’re wanting to hold on to this for a reason.
Sometimes, this is another piece—it’ll pick up psychic attack information. If there is someone within your energy field who is not wishing you well, who is vindictive or just left their energy on you. For example, you go to someone’s house and you could actually feel the negativity in the house or you can feel something, and then you go home, that psychic attack number could be really high. So then we have to clear that aura. We have to clear that energy out. I do it through the Biofeedback, but then I also give them tools that they can use to also do it as well because if they’ve been attacked once, it’s potentially been attacked again and again and again. So let’s teach you ways in which you can actually resolve that and protect yourself.
I also teach people how to do muscle testing on themselves to see what food is good for you and what food is not good for you. When they’re in the grocery store—in my little small town, I could be walking through the grocery store and I see people muscle testing themselves. I’m like yes.
[02:06:09] Ashley James: I love that. I love that. That happened to me. There’s a store near me, it’s a gluten-free store, which is so cool. We’ve been gluten-free for 10 years—no barley, wheat, rye, or oats. This store is celiac gluten-free. Everything is certified for celiac. There is this woman who was like I don’t know if I’m going to react to this or not. I think she was choosing all the different breads. I can’t remember what she was choosing but there were a bunch of different ones that she wasn’t sure which one to go with. It was her and I was the only customer in the store at the time. I was like, “Have you ever heard of muscle testing?” I had her drop her purse and her cart. The owner, who’s the only employee at the time in the store, is staring at us kind of looking at me like I’m crazy. I showed her how to muscle test, and it was very clear about one product.
I had her close her eyes so she didn’t know which one it was, but I showed her and then it was really clear which one. It was just a really strong signal. This is the one, the other two were weaker. I showed her and she was just like, “Oh my gosh. That is so cool.” It’s pretty interesting when we listen to our bodies when we check in with ourselves. Even if you just check in yourself after a meal. Do I feel weakened? Do I feel tired? Do I feel energized? Check-in with yourself even emotionally.
How do I feel emotionally after a meal? Because my husband and I both noticed that with certain foods we’ll feel angry afterward, or we’ll feel really easily irritated. I’m fine but everyone else is pissing me off. It’s just interesting that we’ve been able to correlate that with certain kinds of food or certain kinds of meals. That it affects our energy, it affects our emotions, it affects our hormones. There are so many things beyond just digestion that are affected by what we bring into our bodies.
[02:08:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Not only that but there’s also how we eat with intention. Because sometimes, I would say the majority of our population is very distracted when we eat. We’re either watching TV, we’re reading, we’re having conversations, we’re drinking way too much water, or we’re drinking too much of something while we’re eating. We’re not chewing our food enough, so we’re wolfing it down. We’re eating a meal within 30 minutes and it’s done, or sometimes 15 minutes because that’s how long you have for your break. But that’s a leading reason why people have acid reflux and acid indigestion is because they’re not chewing their food enough.
Like I mentioned with you before is that 50% of the digestive process happens in the mouth. That’s where the digestive enzymes start. If people aren’t chewing their food enough, then the stomach then has to produce so much acid to break down that food so that it can actually go through the whole rest of the digestive process. People aren’t chewing their food enough, really tasting it, enjoying it, and loving every moment of it, then they’re not getting the true essence of that food. That also goes for smoothies.
We’re into these smoothies of nice, wonderful plant-based smoothies that have wonderful greens, vegetables, fruit, and all that in it, and protein powders, and we’re gulping it down. Well, the same thing happens. The gut still has to process that, it still has to break it down. We need to go through a chewing motion even with smoothies and just activate the digestive enzymes when you’re starting to drink that smoothie and you’ll get more nourishment. You’ll get more nutrients. You won’t have as much acid. As we know, alkaline is the way we want our bodies to be. The more alkaline we can get our body the better. Less disease process, less breakdown, less degeneration.
If you eat slowly, eat with intention, eat with love attached to that food. Also, there’s another trick that I learned when I was in nursing homes because oftentimes, appetite would be a big issue for us where we couldn’t get them to eat. Serve food on a red plate. Use red in your utensils on the serving plate because red actually increases appetite. You could tell that through all the advertising. Think of all the fast-food restaurants. What color is very prevalent in their advertising? Red.
[02:10:58] Ashley James: Yeah, red, yellow, and orange. I remember in the ‘90s, any fast food restaurant you went to was all variations of red, yellow, and orange. They’ve kind of come away from that. Well, people aren’t eating in anymore, they’re all drive-thru. But a lot of their logos are that color, and like you said their advertising and their packaging is that color.
[02:11:22] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Look at the size of our plates.
[02:11:27] Ashley James: They’re huge.
[02:11:29] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes. Back in the olden days, the plates were about the size of our butter plates now or our salad plates. When you would fill up that plate you would look like, okay, that’s a lot of food. Well, now, if you look at most of the plates that are in our homes, they’re platters. We feel like we need to fill that platter. So then we fill it up and then we are eating not consciously, so then we eat that whole platter.
[02:11:58] Ashley James: And we’re not chewing. Like you said, we’re not chewing. When we don’t chew enough, we’ll eat twice as much volume until the satiety mechanism is triggered in the brain. But if you don’t chew enough or you eat too fast and not chew—which is what almost everyone does—you’re not triggering the liver, the pancreas, and the stomach. All three of them need to be told to start producing their enzymes, the hydrochloric acid, and the bile—just start producing all of it for release into the stomach and into the small intestines. Chewing is turning on the whole system. It’s like you don’t put your clothing in the washing machine and just leave it. You have to turn it on, program it, and set it, but that’s what turns on digestion.
But when we have a huge serving, which like you said, we’ve gone from a 6-inch plate to a 12-inch plate, we’re doubling the amount of food we’re consuming each meal and eating it so fast the satiety mechanism isn’t triggered. That and the food most Americans eat is so low in fiber that it doesn’t bulk up, plus we’re not drinking enough water so we’re chronically dehydrated. All these things lead to digestive disasters and creating that perfect environment for all the worms and parasites to live.
[02:13:31] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Also, when you think about how long does it take for certain things to digest? For example, fruit takes about two to three hours to digest, vegetables three to five hours, meat could take up to three days to digest. And then you add the heat of the digestive process, which is all the acid that’s breaking it down like you said the hydrochloric. If you think about the food choices that you make as well, the longer it sits in the gut the more bacteria it will grow, which is why we get a lot of constipation, why we get a lot of digestive issues.
Think about how long it takes for things to go bad if you were to leave it out on your counter. For example, if you were to leave an apple on your counter for two to three hours, do you think it’ll be fine for you to eat?
[02:14:23] Ashley James: Sure.
[02:14:26] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yes. As it’s going through the digestive process, it’s clean food to eat. The vegetables, if you put a piece of broccoli out on your counter for three to five hours, will it be safe to eat? Yes, if it hasn’t started to break down yet. Raw.
[02:14:44] Ashley James: Yeah, raw. Totally raw.
[02:14:45] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Raw, it’s going to be a little limp possibly. It’ll be fine, but it’ll go through the digestive process. Now, put that nice piece of red steak out, and I’m not telling people they have to be vegetarian or vegan. But if you put that red steak out on a counter for three to five days raw, will it still be good?
[02:15:02] Ashley James: No.
[02:15:03] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Okay. So then, as it’s going through the digestive process, why are we assuming that it’s going to be okay and that we’re not going to get any bacteria or, let’s say, parasites and stuff like that coming from that meat? When we make our food choices, we need to keep that in mind as far as how quickly does it dissipate? How quickly does it digest? How quickly does it go through the digestive system? If it doesn’t go through quickly, then we know we’re going to have some digestive issues. So let’s do some things that are going to help the digestive process—mastication. Eat it, chew as much as you can.
I remember the first time I heard about this whole thing about chewing your food 30 times per bite. My husband and I were at a seminar, and what was so funny is that night we decided let’s do this. Basically, we made this dinner. He took the first bite and he holds it up and he goes, “This bite is going to improve my eyesight.” And then he chews it and he chews it 30 times. So then I take a bite and I say, “This bite is going to give me the best bowel movement ever.” As we were going, we kept saying with intention what each bite would do, and we had the most fun at that dinner. We basically took almost two hours to eat. We ate half the food, and we were very happy with the amount of food that we got.
[02:16:23] Ashley James: Satiated.
[02:16:24] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Satiated, yeah. We just had so much fun with that meal. If people just did that, they would actually see a huge change in their whole digestive process plus lose a lot of weight as well.
[02:16:36] Ashley James: Yes, I love it. And then eat food with lots of fiber like fruits and vegetables. That’s something I learned when I was about six years old. My mom and I were both very sick from the standard Canadian diet, standard American diet, and my mom took us to see Dr. D’Adamo. He gave us this poster on food combining and it hung in our kitchen until we moved when I was 19 years old. I have it memorized in my brain because I saw it for so many years. This concept really stuck with me early on. I’ve been fascinated with natural medicine since I was six. Just wanting to—like yourself—absorb everything I could possibly get my hands on. Just having an insatiable curiosity.
As a child, just that child-like desire to consume knowledge. This idea that an apple—and you said digestion takes two to three days. What you meant was the entire from beginning to end, but in the stomach itself, an apple takes about 20 minutes just give or take. A steak could take about one to three hours just give or take how much you ate, how much you chewed. Dr. D’Adamo’s point was if you ate a steak dinner with an apple pie, the apple only needed to be in your stomach for 20 minutes before it should have been passed on to the next phase of digestion and absorption through the small intestine. But because you also ate steak in the same meal, so it’s food combining, your body is now fermenting the apple for two hours.
Beyond digestion, it’s fermenting at this point, which is unhealthy for the body to have any large amount of fermentation of food while it’s trying to digest the apple. Different enzymes are used for apples, and different juices are used for digesting steak, and so they’re combining. And then finally gets passed on to the small intestine, but at this point, it’s just fermenting the entire way down, which can actually and what I’ve learned more recently, feeds the microbiome of our gut—the very complex microbiome—feeds it sort of unhealthy nutrients, which then the microbiome turns around and makes things like ammonia, and makes other chemicals in the body, which then go into our bloodstream and affect our brain. Food combining is a huge thing.
[02:19:14] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: And we become inflamed.
[02:19:16] Ashley James: Right, the whole body. It’s even more so what we eat, when we eat, how we chew all of that, and then what our microbiome will then turn it into. We have to really consider when you eat meat, how long does it stay in your body? That’s rotting flesh that is creating that petri dish for the bacteria. And if you don’t chew, then it really is doing a number, and your microbiome actually then turns it into other things that are unhealthy for the body as well. If someone says, well, meat’s not necessarily unhealthy. The microbiome will turn into chemicals that are unhealthy for the body, especially if you didn’t chew, especially if you don’t have strong digestion.
It’s all those things we have to take into consideration. I think you may have answered this question already, but just to be very clear. When you work with people, does the remote Biofeedback look at this specifically? Look at digestion at this level?
[02:20:28] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Not as far as where it is in the digestive process. Part of that is the information that we exchange together. First of all, one of the first questions I ask—well, several questions down the road—is how many bowel movements do you have on a given day? If they say, oh, maybe one every other day. Then I’ll say, that’s not enough. Especially how many meals do you have? If you have three meals a day you should be having three bowel movements a day. And if they’re not, then that’s basically saying that their digestive process is too slow, and so, therefore, it’s growing bacteria, it’s growing all these different things in the microbiome that is not healthy for it.
That could be leading to why they’re so fatigued because that food, basically if you’re not getting the nutrients, you’re not getting the food you need to fuel your muscles, fuel the blood, fuel all that, plus whatever disease process we’re starting because of that rotting flesh or whatever.
But then, I also ask, what is the quality of the food you eat? Here where I live, most of the people here grow their own, they have their own cows basically. They’re grass-fed. They love them all the way to the slaughterhouse all that. But when you’re buying the meats from stores that may be having these farms of cows, chickens, or whatever where they are not living in a very good environment, and then the stress hormone is released as soon as they go into the slaughterhouse.
Then if you see a change in your mood like you’re mentioning sometimes you’ll eat certain foods and all of a sudden you’re irritated, irritable, angry, or whatever, oftentimes people who are very energy sensitive meaning that they may be an empath or they may be taking on other people’s energies or other souls. They may be actually feeling or consuming that soul of the cow, the chicken, or whatever was killed. If it wasn’t killed in a kind way or in just the general slaughterhouses, then the stress hormone gets released into the meat. And then when they consume the meat, they are then consuming the stress of that animal.
I always say, just be careful and cautious and really think about what it is that you’re eating and what did that part that that animal go through during their life process, and was it healthy? If it was one that was created on those manufactured places where they have no quality of life, they’re just in a stall, then that meat is going to be very stress-related, there’s not going to be a lot of nutrition in it, and therefore there’s probably more hormones and things like that’s been added to it, so you’re not getting good quality. Just be really careful about your food selection, where you get it.
If you do eat from farms and stuff like that where they love their animal all the way to the slaughterhouse, then you can pretty much rest assured that there should be less stress-related hormones in the in as well. But that’s a consideration to think of too.
[02:23:47] Ashley James: I’ve heard that from other people who are empaths as well that they’ve had that personal experience. My husband and I had that experience when we lived in Las Vegas long before we became plant-based. We were 100% meat-eaters, carnivore diet all the way. Meat at every meal. Sometimes just meals with only meat.
We went to a place called Roberto’s, which had the best or Mexican food. We got home and we ate the same thing we always eat there. It was a carne asada burrito or something. We had had it 50 times before, but this particular time for, whatever reason, both of us had pounding hearts. We felt like we had done—I haven’t done street drugs but it was kind of like cocaine or something. Our hearts were pounding out of our chest, we’re both sitting there in our chairs just sweating, breathing heavily, feeling incredibly scared. We don’t know what’s going on.
If only one of us had had that experience we would have been like take me to the hospital, I’m having a heart attack. But both of us felt terrified and our hearts were pounding. We’re like, this is from the meat. Something happened to this cow. This happened, Duffy and I, 12 years ago, and that really stuck with me, that memory, and it lasted for hours. We’re just sitting there with our hearts pounding and just in total fear, both of us like we had taken some crazy drugs. That was just really clear to us that there was something about that cow that we felt, that was imprinted on us.
We just have to think of energy is so powerful that you, Vienna, can do energy work across the world and help someone gain health back, then energy from our food could heal us or harm us. Bring us closer to being in balance or further away from being in balance. We have to take that into consideration. I love that practice you developed with your husband where you chewed each bite 30 times and talked about the intention of what each bite would heal. Now, I’ve met you in person. You look like you’re in your 40s, but how old are you, may I ask?
[02:26:17] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: I’m actually 58. I’m 58.
[02:26:19] Ashley James: Did you notice that as you did all this work with integrative medicine that you got younger, that you looked younger, that you felt younger? Did you notice that?
[02:26:28] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Absolutely. And also, what adds to that is I do a daily practice. Every morning and every night I do my meditation and my yoga first thing every morning, I don’t miss it. And then I also do the same practice in the evening as well, and I don’t miss that either. That’s me loving myself. Since I’ve started that, oh my gosh, the change has been so phenomenally different. First of all, sometimes I could have a lot of people after me, for whatever reason. I don’t feel it, I don’t give it attention. It doesn’t affect me. Minor stresses like things that are happening in your life that could typically be a major stressor, it doesn’t stress me out anymore. I’m just in this wonderful little vortex of love, gratitude, and blessings.
One of the things that I do that is really good homework for everybody is to start your morning with at least five minutes of gratitude. Be grateful for whatever it is that you have in your life or what it is that you want in your life and assume that it’s already happened. Let’s say I’m wanting this vacation, for example, and wanting the airways to allow us to fly again and all of that. I’ll just say thank you so much for my trip to Hawaii or whatever. I’m enjoying it so much or whatever, but I’ll spend some time in gratitude in the morning as I’m starting my day and saying what I’m grateful for that’s going to happen that day.
And then in the evening, I spent another five minutes in gratitude for what I was grateful for, what happened that day or what’s going to happen throughout the evening. That I’ll sleep well, the pain that I have in my back will go away, or whatever, and just spend that time and just sharing out the gratitude.
Right now, in this world that we’re in right now, there’s so much division, there’s so much anger, there’s so much resentment. I believe that if we just approach each person with love, with understanding, with gratitude, with blessings, with the highest level of energy and frequency that we can, that we can change this world. But right now there’s so much anger, and there’s one word in the vocabulary that I don’t allow in my vocabulary that I don’t even say, but it’s the h-a-t-e word.
I don’t include that because it’s used so frequently in vocabulary these days. You can hear somebody talk and say how much they don’t like this one thing, and you’ll hear them use that word 25 times within the conversation. That is such a strong word, and it’s not only the words that we say outside, it’s the words that we say internally. What is our own internal monologue saying?
We’re always comparing ourselves to other people, that we’re in lack, we’re not good enough, or whatever. If you just start your day out with the blessings, the gratitude, the I am powerful, the I am phrases, and things like that, then we can change our own internal bio terrain without medications, without lots of intervention. It’s just what we say to ourselves because our own self-talk can be very toxic in itself, and it will make us toxic. That’s what’s made me younger is that daily process.
I’m also plant-based, so I don’t do meat. If I’m at somebody’s house and they’re serving meat, I will just bless it rather than make them feel uncomfortable about serving me that. There’s only one that I typically won’t, and that would be pork. I pretty much will stay away from that just because most people don’t realize that pigs do not have sweat glands. Whatever they eat is in their meat, so I avoid it.
[02:30:35] Ashley James: And the horrible, horrible conditions that the poor pigs are raised in. I’ve said on the show before, I loved eating meat. I was really into it and then I just kept learning over and over and over and over more and more about the benefits of not eating it, and the benefits of eating plants. My husband, actually, was the biggest carnivore in the world. He just woke up and said, “I’m never eating meat again.” And I’m like okay, I guess I’m cooking that way since I’m the one that cooks for everyone in the family.
I was very afraid of not eating meat. I really thought that I would become weak, frail, that I would be sick because I tried being vegan before, I tried being vegetarian before. Doing it all wrong—eating a lot of processed food in the mix and just really feeling sick. I tried to go vegetarian when I was a teenager, and I ate just like vegetarian pizza and subs. Obviously not healthy choices, but in my mind, it’s like oh I’m not eating meat. I should feel great. Oh, I feel worse. Apparently, meat makes me feel good.
In my mind, I had this belief, and I met a lot of people with this belief that meat gives you energy, meat makes you feel healthy. Whole food plant-based is not vegan, it’s not vegetarian in that Oreos are vegan. A whole food plant is I’m choosing to not eat processed food, but also it’s not black and white. I really like that you acknowledge that you’re not 100% never ever ever ever eating any animal product. Because I think that in our minds, it’s like a black or white issue like. I either—for the rest of my life—can’t eat any of that. Oh my gosh, too much restriction, I can’t do it.
You’re just doing your best every day. You’re just making really good choices every day. If once in a while you have an animal product like you said, you bless it, you’re grateful for it, you’re grateful for the life it gave you, and you move on. But you focus on eating as many plants as you can, and nurturing your body as best you can. Because that guilt and shame that comes with feeling like I can’t do it, oh my gosh I failed, or whatever, all of that are toxic.
[02:32:54] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: That’s the self-talk we were talking about.
[02:32:56] Ashley James: Right, yeah. There’s this idea about being vegan is like it’s all or nothing. I’ve met even vegans they’re like no, no, no. There’s vegan shaming out there, so it’s like you start getting shamed by a vegan, and there’s a lot of negative emotions around it. And then people get really turned off by it. It’s not on or off. It’s do as best you can—good, better, best. If everyone just did as best they could. Just how long can you go just eating an amazing variety of plants? Great, you made it two meals without meat, great, you know what I mean? That’s sometimes what it starts with. Sometimes it’s just meatless Mondays, two meals a day, or a whole week of meatless meals. Maybe only at Thanksgiving or whatever.
It’s your ability to just choose healthy foods for you. I think as a society, we’re over-consuming meat products and totally under consuming plants. I think we need to switch it up. We need to over-consume plant products in the most balanced and healthy way.
[02:34:06] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: It’s also looking at how we prepare it too. Another thing that we do in our home is when we are preparing our dinner or our meals, we have wonderful music playing in the background. We are putting love into our food. We’re purposefully putting that love of intention into the food. That this food that we are preparing with our own hands is going to provide so many nutrients and so much love to this person who is consuming it, and we surround ourselves with it. We have these nice essential oils going on, we have the music, and therefore we’re influencing it with our own energy as well. And then oh my gosh, the taste is amazing after that because like wow.
Versus if you’re making a meal in anger. Let’s say you’re angry at your husband or you’re angry at your wife and you’re making this meal, then they’re ingesting your anger in that meal as well. It’s similar to that animal going to slaughter. If you’re making a meal in anger, frustration, resentment, or even just sheer fatigue, then how does that influence your food? It influences a great deal, even if it is a plant-based food because plants have energy as well. They actually communicate.
There was actually a lie detector expert who was testing his plants one day on his lie detector equipment. He found that they respond to his thoughts or his words, and he tested them. He was testing them by adding cold water to see how they would respond. The needle would move but they would recover. Then he would add hot water, and the needle would move even further but it would recover. Then he clipped the plant. Yeah, okay. It didn’t like it. The needle would move but the plant still recovered. Then he had this thought, I wonder what would happen if I burned the plant. The needle moved and the plant never recovered from that. The needle stayed where it was.
[02:36:06] Ashley James: Just the thought of burning the plant.
[02:36:08] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Never even burned the plant. Just the thought of burning the plant. Those people out there that say they don’t have a green thumb, change your perspective, love that plant, put a lot of love into it when you water it, when you talk to it, and all that kind of stuff and you will be a green thumb. But the same thing goes with the preparation of your food, put love into it.
[02:36:26] Ashley James: While you’re preparing and loving your food and loving your body, that’s actually turning on digestion even then. Maybe an hour before you sit down to eat, you’re chopping the food, you’re sautéing, your steaming. All of that you’re seeing it with your eyes, you’re smelling it with your nose. Maybe you’re even tasting things as you’re seasoning it with the herbs, and you’re in a state of not stress. You’re in the autonomic nervous system’s parasympathetic response of rest and digest, and not in the state of fight or flight right because you’re listening to the music, you’re in a state of love.
So now you’re turning on digestion with the nervous system response, getting out of stress mode. So you’re prepping, you’re spending an hour before you even eat the food. Your body is preparing for and getting ready for and excited to help you digest, and then you sit down, you have gratitude and prayer, and you chew your food slowly and plentifully. The entire time, your body is going to get the most amount of nutrients out of that food because it’s in parasympathetic nervous system response to rest and digest. All your hormones are in alignment with taking that food and turning it into nutrients.
It really does come back to the holistic approach that our lifestyle choices matter. That your meditation and gratitude, daily yoga, all of that really does matter. That you intentionally cook, prep, grocery shop, plan, and eat with intention of love and healing your body. That matters and that the amount of stress that we go under. Think about people who are stressed out, go through drive-thrus, wolf down their food, hardly spend any time digesting or prepping the body for digestion, don’t even chew very much, and are choosing foods that sit in their body and rot. No wonder we have the nutrition nutrient deficiencies we do and the state of disease we do when we’re not really taking time to energetically, emotionally, and physically nourish ourselves every day.
You’re such a wealth of information. I’d love to have you back on the show. You have a segment where you’re going to teach us how to read our tongues, but I’d like to save that for our next interview.
[02:38:56] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Perfect.
[02:38:57] Ashley James: I’m going to make sure the links to everything that Vienna Lafrenz does is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Now you also have a book you wrote a chapter in with many other very famous healers and holistic practitioners. The link to the book is going to be in the show notes as well. The book is called Wakeup: Miracles of Healing From Around the World. Can you tell us a little bit about that book and what people would get out of reading it?
[02:39:27] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Yeah. It’s a compilation of about 40 different authors, and they’re all healers of some form or fashion. Basically, we were asked to write a chapter on the miracles that we have experienced whether in our own lives or through the lives of our clients. It’s really a complication of all of that.
I think it’ll give some people a really nice fresh perspective of the potential of the body to heal, as well as the mind and all of the different stories. There are some really amazing healers out there, different modalities that are being used. I truly feel like it’ll open up a lot of people’s minds and perspectives to just the potential of the body to heal, the number of amazing stories that were shared, and the different types of healers that are out there, and just the sheer love that they have for the healing process.
[02:40:19] Ashley James: Awesome, Vienna, your website is natural-therapeutics.com, and of course, that link and the link to the book is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learnsharehealth.com. I want to have you back, there’s so much more we have to talk about. After you and I spoke, you got a Platinum Energy System, which I’ve had Kellyann Andrews on the show several times. Many of my listeners, I think at least a hundred of them, have purchased a Platinum Energy System and are using it for themselves and their family, and some of them for their clients.
I keep getting some amazing feedback coming back from one of our listeners. I believe she says she’s an ophthalmologist. Her family was diagnosed with COVID actually, all positive tests. When they used the PES, their suffering ended, and that it sped up their healing. It was really cool to see that. I’ve had that experience with the PES before or any time I have a cold or flu, which I don’t often. But when I do, I jump in it and I really feel it sets the body back into healing mode quickly. You’ve had some great experiences with that in your clinic, which would be cool just to hear about because I love hearing stories of healing and success, especially with natural medicine.
And then you have all other kinds of therapies. Of course, today, we focused on remote Biofeedback. One of the reasons why I really wanted to focus on that is that obviously, many of my listeners are not near Republic, Washington. How you can help them, and you can, is by working with them remotely. You do that on a holistic level. You’re looking at emotional, mental, spiritual, energetic, and physical while working with people around the world.
And then it’d be really cool to talk more about the other therapies that you have in-house, especially because so many of my listeners are either in the holistic space, in one way or another, or want to become a practitioner. You’re inspiring future generations with what you’ve shared today. I’d love to have you back. I also really am eager to learn from you about the tongue and how to read it, and what we can do with that information. We’ll have you back and you’ll share with us all about that. That’d be really cool. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[02:42:39] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Well, first of all, I love your interviews. They’re very thorough, they’re fun, they’re exciting. Obviously, we could go on for hours, and it’s always nice to be able to talk to a friend like that. I love the fact that they’re also widespread as far as different topics. I feel like we need to have more of this type of stuff going on so that it meets more ears that are open and that are kind of at that desperation stage of what do I do now?
I think even more so now with the whole COVID-19, one of the things that really opened things up for me was this remote healing piece because of the lack of potential to go to people in person and the way in which it helps to heal. Also, the other pieces of it with the emotional frustration that people are having of not being able to see their loved ones and stuff like that, so it’s even more so.
But I love what I do. I love giving people their power back and helping them realize that they don’t even need me necessarily to heal. I may be working myself out of a job, but the more empowerment that we could give our clients to where they are able to then see their own potential and their basically limitless potential of healing themselves, then that’s where I feel like I’ve done my job is getting them to that level and not needing me anymore.
[02:44:11] Ashley James: Yes. You work yourself out of a job by helping people get to the point where they don’t need you anymore. But it’s fun to do the check-ins. I know I definitely want to have a few more sessions with you. It’s so cool because it’s layered, you peel the layers away. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been such a pleasure having you, and I can’t wait to have you back.
[02:44:35] Dr. Vienna Lafrenz: Thank you I appreciate it, and I appreciate your listeners as well.
[02:44:42] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. You know, there are 53 days left until Christmas if you’re listening to this the day I publish it. If you’re listening to it later, Christmas is just around the corner. I love giving holistic presents to my friends and family. I’m going to tell you a few that I absolutely love.
The Magnesium Soak, you can listen to my interviews. Just type in Magnesium Soak at learntruehealth.com and listen to those interviews. Absolutely amazing. Kristen Bowen, I think she said she was 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, in a wheelchair, and unable to talk. Now, she’s in perfect health. One of the biggest things that helped her was her magnesium soak that she sells on her website, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Be sure to use the coupon code: LTH when you go to her website, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Coupon code: LTH.
I love the Magnesium Creme, I love the Magnesium Soak. You put it in a foot bath or put it in your bathtub for you and your kids. I also love the Magnesium Muscle Creme, which is amazing for aches, pains, and tension headaches. That absolutely must be on your Christmas gift list, your holiday gift list.
The other great gift I love giving my holistic friends is ENERGYbits. Go to energybits.com. Grab a few of the bags of ENERGYbits for your sister, your mom, your best friend. They’re fantastic snacks. Kids love them too because they make your tongue turn green or blue, depending on whether you get the chlorella or spirulina. They help to detox the body. They’re filled with readily available protein and tons of vitamins. I think I have seven different interviews about chlorella and spirulina, specifically about the ENERGYbits brand. I’ve interviewed the founder of that company.
There are only two companies I know of that do not contain any lead in their chlorella. If you buy some over the counter, go to some health food store and buy chlorella, there’s going to be that little warning on it that says, in the state of California, this causes cancer. That’s because there’s actually lead in those bags of chlorella. But in ENERGYbits, in their chlorella, there’s zero because of their process of how they grow their crop and how they then turn the crop into little edible tablets.
So listen to my interviews on the Magnesium Soak with Kristen Bowen. Listen to my interviews about algae, the healing benefits of algae, and how it’s such an awesome superfood snack to carry around with you. Listen to my ENERGYbits interviews and use coupon code LTH at energybits.com and coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Those are two amazing websites to check out for your Christmas gift ideas. I always use coupon code LTH.
I try to get companies who I absolutely love and adore and recommend to always use the same coupon code. Just always try coupon code LTH on all these health websites, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you get a great discount. Awesome. Enjoy today’s interview. Come check us out in our Facebook group if you haven’t already. We have such a supportive and wonderful community. You can ask your health questions there and support the other members as well. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and come join the excellent community of very supportive holistic community there.
Get Connected with Dr. Vienna LafrenzWebsite
Facebook – Dr. Vienna Lafrenz
Book by Dr. Vienna LafrenzWakeUp: Miracles of Healing around the World
Recommended Reading by Dr. Vienna LafrenzBreaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza
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Your Body in Balance: The New Science of Food, Hormones, and Health: https://amzn.to/31G9bfw
Your Body in Balance: The New Science of Food, Hormones, and Health by Dr. Neal Barnardhttps://www.learntruehealth.com/your-body-in-balance-the-new-science-of-food-hormones-and-health-by-dr-neal-barnard
Highlights:
How to lower estrogen levels Impact of decreasing estrogen levels on hormone-related illnesses Soy products affect hormone levels Why does eating animal products disrupt hormones Effects of dairy consumptionDo you have hormone-related issues like PCOS, PMS, endometriosis, or type 2 diabetes? In this episode, Dr. Neal Barnard shares how those can be healed by removing meat and animal products from our diet. He explains the effects of dairy consumption and why we should remove dairy products from our diet.
[00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 449. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Dr. Neal Barnard. You were in episode 256 so it’s been a while. Now we’re in the 400s of our interviews. We had you on for one of your books, the Cheese Trap, which was amazing. I highly recommend listeners go back and check out episode 256 if you haven’t already. Dr. Barnard, you are on the forefront of the whole food, plant-based movement showing people that we can heal our body with food, and now you’ve come out with a book teaching us—especially women—how we can balance our hormones, gain fertility, breeze through menopause, and even how to manage things like cancer—when it’s hormone-related cancers—all using food as medicine. I’m very happy to have you back on the show.
[00:01:08] Dr. Neal Barnard: Well, thank you. It’s great to be back.
[00:01:10] Ashley James: Absolutely. We did dive a bit into your bio in our last interview and what led you to want to become a doctor that practices whole food, plant-based food as a way of healing people. So I want to jump right in, why did you write your latest book, Your Body In Balance? What compelled you to want to help use food to balance our hormones?
[00:01:34] Dr. Neal Barnard: Up until now, most people have thought of food in rather modest terms. That if you’re eating the wrong kinds of foods, you’ll gain weight. You change your diet and lose weight. Maybe your cholesterol will go down, your blood sugar can improve—that kind of stuff. We can be much more ambitious than that when it comes to tuning up our health.
Almost every function of your body is controlled by hormones. Hormones are made in one organ. They go through the bloodstream to reach another organ, and they tell it what to do. If you could control your hormones, let’s say you can control thyroid hormone, which gives energy to your cells, you can control estrogens, which controls sexual function, reproductive function. What if you can control insulin, which deals with your blood sugar levels? There are so many more. If you can control all those, you can control your health in a far more sophisticated way than you might have imagined. Amazingly enough, the key to it is food.
[00:02:36] Ashley James: Why is that? When did you first start seeing that food had such a profound impact on hormones?
[00:02:45] Dr. Neal Barnard: Well, it actually started out sort of by accident. I was sitting at my desk. A young woman called me up, and she had terrible menstrual pain. Many women have some menstrual cramps, but for maybe 1 in 10, it’s just off the scale, I can’t go to work today type pain, and that was her situation. I realized I could give her painkillers for a couple of days, but what would that do for the next month, the month after that, or the month after that? So I said to her, “Let me give you some painkillers for now, but how about if we try and experiment and see if we can prevent this from happening next month?” I have to confess, I just made an educated guess.
I said, “For the next four weeks, how about this, no animal products in your diet at all and keep oils to a bare minimum.” She called me up four weeks later and said, “This is the most amazing thing. My period arrived, I don’t have a single cramp—nothing.” And the month after that, the month after that. She was completely fine. I then did a randomized clinical trial with Georgetown University’s department of obstetrics and gynecology where we tested this in a larger group of women, and it was very effective. Different women got different effects. For some, though, it just was like night and day.
Anyhow, I can explain to you why that works, why that kind of diet change would affect estrogen levels. But the bottom line was I discovered that by changing the fiber content, the fat content to the food, and a few other things, we could control menstrual cramping. If you can control that, then that, in turn, means you have some control over endometriosis, over fertility, over all the things that estrogens will control.
[00:04:34] Ashley James: This is fascinating. So, you talk about not only fertility but menopause and even the sex hormone-related cancers in your book. Do you also talk about how to reverse type 2 diabetes in your book?
[00:04:50] Dr. Neal Barnard: Oh, yes. In fact, that’s what we’ve been really known for more than anything else. Type 2 diabetes is of course—well, maybe I should just back up. The problems we’ve been discussing so far like menstrual cramps or endometriosis, those are problems of estrogen. Estrogen is made in the ovaries, for the most part. If you have too much of it, it thickens up the uterine lining too much.
Researchers learned a long time ago that a high fiber diet will bring it down, a lower-fat diet will bring it down, and avoiding dairy products, in particular, will help because dairy products have estrogens that come from cows. I put all that together, I thought all right. A vegan diet doesn’t have any animal fat at all, and it’s very high in fiber so that’s what I’ve used. We kept oils low and that was the reason it cured her
But with diabetes, it’s a different thing. The hormone now is not estrogens, it’s insulin. It’s made in the pancreas, but I can control it with a remarkably similar diet. In 2003, the NIH gave our team a grant to try to find a better diet for controlling type 2 diabetes. What we have found is that a diet that’s really remarkably similar to the estrogen-controlling diet, using an insulin-controlling diet, you once again get rid of animal products, you keep oils really low, and you can do a couple of other things.
What we started to see was something we had never seen before, which was diabetes going away. I’m talking about diabetes being just gone in people that had it for years. Not to say that that always happens, but it almost always happens that people do improve, and they reduce their blood sugars and their medication requirements. Sometimes they just get rid of the disease, which I have to tell you is the most amazing feeling for the patient, and for their own outside doctors. They have never seen a patient cure themselves of what had been an incurable disease.
[00:06:53] Ashley James: If you can cure yourself of a hormone-related disease by changing your diet, then was it the food they were eating that caused the disease in the first place?
[00:07:05] Dr. Neal Barnard: Yes. Yes, it was. Sometimes in the face of genetic vulnerabilities. In other words, a diet loaded with Velveeta and fried chicken isn’t necessarily going to cause diabetes in everybody, but it does cause it in a lot of people. Right now, about 1/3 of the American population has either diabetes or pre-diabetes. and that is not because of sugar, bread, or rice. It’s not from carbohydrates. It’s because of eating fatty foods. The fat gets into the muscle and liver cells leading to a condition called insulin resistance, and we’ve been studying this, and then we’ve figured out how to make it go away and we’re just controlling the hormones by food.
[00:07:54] Ashley James: I used to have type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I reversed both with a whole food, plant-based diet and taking supplements because I was very deficient in minerals like chromium. That was, for me, a complete game-changer to see that changing my diet had such a profound impact on my life. I know a woman who had such bad endometriosis. She was a friend of mine’s roommate. I saw her once a month for a whole week. She was in bed crying, curled up in a ball, and unable to work.
Then she became a vegetarian. She called it vegetarian but I watched her basically cut out dairy and meat out of her diet. I watched her be able to function now only in bed for two or three days instead of a whole week. She didn’t know to give up oil, she didn’t know to give up eggs, but I just saw an improvement in just that amount of switching. Why is it that eating meat, eating the flesh of an animal disrupts hormones, or making our body increase insulin resistance and also increasing estrogen? Why is it having that effect on our body?
[00:09:16] Dr. Neal Barnard: Yeah, it’s a fascinating thing. These are all the things that they don’t teach in medical school either, I have to tell you. We’ve had to discover them on our own. Maybe I shouldn’t be blaming the medical schools because much of the research just wasn’t done back then, but we do have it now, and it’s important for people to understand it. The means of controlling insulin, it’s almost the same kind of diet, but the mechanism turns out to be completely different.
Let’s take endometriosis. That’s what your friend had where she was just terrible, terrible cramps. For people who don’t know what we’re talking about, endometriosis is a really painful condition where cells that are supposed to be lining the uterus—that’s called the endometrial layer, the very inside of the uterus. Those cells, which are supposed to be kind of a little cushion when a baby is developing inside the uterus, some of those little cushiony cells have escaped. And they’ve flown out the fallopian tubes. Now they’re in the abdominal cavity, and they implant around the implant on the intestines, on the fallopian tubes themselves, on the surface of the ovary. And they expand and contract, they bleed, they cause scarring, and they hurt like crazy.
However, it’s been clear for a long time that they’re driven by estrogens. They’re driven by sex hormones. So if a woman has less estrogen in her blood, they’re going to regress. The reason that I started jumping into this was I had become aware that as part of cancer research, researchers discovered that estrogen drives the growth of cancer. I mean, this is not surprising. If you have more estrogen it makes cancer cells grow. But I found that some researchers had discovered that if you reduce fatty foods in the diet—whether it’s meat fat, cheese fat, or even donut type fat, any kind of grease—if you reduce grease in the diet, it brings estrogen levels down.
Completely independent of that, if you boost fiber which means fruits, vegetables, and beans, that also brings estrogens down. That was the reason why the young woman with menstrual pain, I said vegan diet then there’s no animal fat at all and everything’s got a lot of fiber. It’s going to be the best of all worlds.
Dairy is a particular issue because dairy actually has estrogens in it that come from the cow. You don’t have any dairy at all in your diet. If you do those things, people with endometriosis very often feel dramatically better.
There was a young woman whose story I described in my book, Your Body In Balance. She was in the Air Force. She had terrible endometriosis. She was slated for a hysterectomy because nothing could control her symptoms. She went on the diet that I’m describing and her endometriosis was simply gone. What was particularly amazing was that her doctor was convinced that not only would she be in pain every month because of endometriosis, but also that it had robbed her of her fertility. This disease process was so profound.
Well, not only did the diet change cure her endometriosis, but she wasn’t infertile at all. She was fine. She’s got three children now. She still got her uterus. She’s got her kids. She’s got a healthy vegan diet. She’s probably got a new doctor. Anyway, you see my point.
How many people go to the doctor and are told your menstrual cramps, your fertility issues, your endometriosis, it’s a sign of your hormones being out of balance. Here’s how you choose your breakfast to get your hormones into a better balance. Here’s how I would choose my lunch. Here are the best snacks for you. It never happens. It’s all some pharmaceutical solution that may work, or it may not work.
[00:13:15] Ashley James: But it really just masks it and it doesn’t address the root cause.
[00:13:18] Dr. Neal Barnard: Or worse, you can go to the doctor and have your uterus and ovaries removed and be told that this is God’s will. When in fact, it might have been the will of Kraft, McDonald’s, KFC, or something. But it had nothing to do with a deity bringing this on.
So anyway, you asked me why did I write Your Body In Balance? Because I thought people need to know how to control, not just diabetes, endometriosis, or PCOS, which you were dealing with. PCOS is a hormonal condition, which to a great degree, is responsive to food changes and things like thyroid conditions.
People don’t even know where their thyroid is. All they know is I got out of bed today. I got zero energy. I stepped on the scale, and I’ve gained a pound since last week. I look in the mirror and my hair doesn’t look right. You go to the doctor and these are all non-specific symptoms, but the doctor says to you this is fitting a pattern. Let me do a blood test. And the doctor finds your hypothyroid—you’re low in thyroid. Your thyroid gland is at the base of your neck. It gives your cells energy, and when it’s just not working, you just feel rotten.
What does the doctor do? Puts you on thyroid replacement medication, which you will be on for the rest of your life. What we have discovered is that there are—in some cases—dietary causes of it that are really easy to rectify. You may need medical care, you may well. Don’t fire your doctor or cancel your doctor’s appointment, but let’s see if there’s a dietary change that can get you back on track.
[00:15:06] Ashley James: There’s also a list of plant-based doctors. I don’t remember the name of the website. I’ll probably put it in the show notes, but you can google plant-based doctors. There’s a directory of doctors who study your work, study these studies, want to do labs, and help their patients balance their hormones. Maybe using medication at first, but then also help them with their diet. That’s something to look at.
I’ve always gone to naturopathic doctors because they love looking at labs, diet, and nutrition first before entertaining the idea of putting you on a prescription as a last-ditch effort. Whereas many other doctors, like you said, this is how the schooling was—the medical school was at the time. They didn’t have the resources to teach us that food can be medicine, and now we see it plain as day.
You’ve talked about really doing your best to reduce or eliminate oil altogether, cut out all dairy products from cows. Of course, you can do plant-based dairy. You could make it in your own home. It’s just made from nuts, soy, rice, or oats, and then looking at eating lots of fiber from plants. But what about specifically the harm that comes to our hormones by eating animal flesh—by eating fish, cows, and chickens? Why does that disrupt hormones?
[00:16:47] Dr. Neal Barnard: Okay. By the way, first, to the point you’re making earlier about finding a doctor who understands this. There are different sites, and the one that I might recommend—if you go to the website pcrm.org, that’s Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, pcrm.org. Just in the little search thing, put find a doctor. You’ll see lots and lots and lots and lots of names that come up. About five years ago, we launched a primary care clinic because we were doing so many research studies that other people could not participate in if they didn’t have exactly that condition. We have a primary care clinic here. It’s called Barnard Medical Center and we do telehealth visits.
[00:17:32] Ashley James: Excellent.
[00:17:33] Dr. Neal Barnard: Yeah. Many, many, many states of the United States, people can do telemedicine if they are able to, and then we’re gradually expanding beyond that. It’s just barnardmedical.org.
[00:17:46] Ashley James: Excellent. I’ll make sure the links to everything you mentioned are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. That’s exciting that someone could work with you, one of your staff members, or one of your colleagues and look at their specific needs and adjust their diet accordingly. So getting onto them, I’m really excited to understand specifically what it is about eating animal flesh that disrupts our hormones?
[00:18:12] Dr. Neal Barnard: Okay. If we are speaking of insulin, insulin is a hormone that is made in the pancreas, it goes through the bloodstream to the surface of a muscle cell. Let’s say I’m eating animal flesh, I’m eating a hamburger. The hamburger is some protein but a fair amount of fat. Even if it’s “lean meat,” there’s a surprising amount of fat in there. Even if it’s the leanest chicken—you take off the skin, it’s only chicken breast—it’s still about 23% fat. That animal fat is absorbed by the body, enters the muscle cell. And then when insulin tries to get that cell to do what it’s supposed to do, which is to pull glucose out of the blood, the fat stops it from working. The fat in animal products interferes with insulin sensitivity. It causes insulin resistance.
That’s also a problem with PCOS. In women who have polycystic ovary syndrome, they are very often insulin resistant as well. So getting the animal products out of the diet means there’s no animal fat to interfere with insulin action.
The other thing about it is that animal products don’t have certain things in them. They don’t have any fiber. They don’t have any complex carbohydrates, and so as a result, fiber normally helps the body to eliminate excess hormones. Your liver removes estrogens from the blood, and it sends them through the bile duct into the intestinal tract and out they go, but it only works if fiber is there to escort them. Fiber is like a broom that sweeps it out.
If you ate chicken breast or salmon for lunch, they’re not from plants, they’re from animals so there’s no fiber in them at all. If that’s the case, the estrogens in your intestinal tract that the liver carefully removed don’t go through the intestinal tract anymore. They reabsorb back into the blood. The fiber is essential to making that happen. So what’s wrong with animal products? They got a lot of fat, they don’t have any fiber, and if you want a contaminated product, animal products are always the worst. They are the ones that tend to be filled with chemicals much more than plants.
[00:20:30] Ashley James: Well, that makes sense. We’ve heard that eating a sardine, there’s less mercury in a sardine than in a tuna because the tuna went around eating all the sardines. The cow is consuming tons and tons of grain, soy, or whatever it’s been fed that has pesticides. Pesticides concentrate in its muscles, and then when you eat the cow you’re getting the concentration of all the feed it was ever given with all those pesticides and chemicals. Even organic I have to question. What about the idea that there are hormones in animal meat? If you’re eating a cow and the cow has its own hormones—even though it says no hormones added—the cows were making their own hormones. Is that a factor? I mean, we’re eating the estrogen that was once a cow’s estrogen?
[00:21:24] Dr. Neal Barnard: I think it matters for dairy, I think it matters less for meat. The reason I say that is dairy products—well, on meat just very, very quickly. If you go out to a farm, many of the cows will have hormones injected into a little pellet on their ear that will release either testosterone or synthetic testosterone, or estrogen or synthetic estrogens into their blood. The reason the farmers do it is that they get better growth of the animal per unit feed, so it makes money for them. But with dairy, it’s a bigger issue because every glass of milk you ever had came from a cow who was impregnated annually. Which by the way is not a treat for anyone. If you ever happen to go buy a dairy and say I want to see how you artificially inseminate your cows, it is a creepy process.
The other creepy thing is that after nine months of gestation, their babies are not allowed to stay with them. Their babies are taken away, and they basically go through this annual procedure where they’re artificially inseminated, their babies are taken away just so that we can take their milk, which nature had in mind something else.
Apart from the ethical issues of it, they are milked during much of their pregnancy. A pregnant cow makes extra estrogen and extra progesterone, and it gets in the milk. The milk concentrates them as it’s turned into cheese. The average American adult eats 37 pounds of cheese every year, plus milk, plus ice cream, plus yogurt, plus butter, and so you’re getting estrogens and other hormones from the milk and the milk products.
Now, people will rightly say it’s only a trace. True. However, in research studies, you can see a clear-cut association between dairy consumption and fertility issues in men, in cancer mortality in women, in breast cancer incidents in women. A brand new study from California just showed a substantially higher risk of breast cancer in milk-drinking women.
How much estrogen do you want to feed to your seven-year-old daughter or your or your eight-year-old son? It is completely unnatural, but you and we all grew up with this idea—milk for strong bones. Nature said, wait a minute, cows don’t make calcium, cows eat calcium. It’s an element in the earth that gets into the grass, and if you’re eating vegetable matter like grass, you get calcium.
Hopefully, you’re not eating grass, but you’re eating broccoli, kale, collards, brussels sprouts, or other greens that you like. That’s where calcium comes from. The whole idea that you need dairy for calcium is an invention of the dairy industry.
[00:24:20] Ashley James: I’ve heard—possibly you said it—that there was a study where they looked at a meta-analysis of all the countries that have the lowest rates of osteoporosis. They found that those that drink the least amount of dairy or no dairy actually had the strongest bones in comparison to those countries that drank the most cow dairy had the weakest bones and the highest rates of osteoporosis. Can you speak to that?
[00:24:53] Dr. Neal Barnard: The evidence that dairy products help protect against bone fractures is extremely weak, not that it hasn’t been studied. The dairy industry has been very eager to come up with health rationales for consuming a bowl of ice cream, but the fact of the matter is it really doesn’t work very well. All kinds of problems come along with it. Anyway, to just speak to your point, there are confounding variables here. People who tend to avoid milk have a number of other health benefits. They’re eating other things. That may account for why they have stronger bones. But at a minimum, you just can’t really find robust research showing that dairy helps. I think that’s the most conservative thing to say. It’s just not going to benefit you.
But along the way, a researcher at Harvard named Dan Cramer years ago started looking at infertility. As you know, when women are maybe in their mid-20s, that’s sort of peak fertility time. When she’s 10 years older than that, she’s in her mid-30s or late 30s, her fertility is less. She started getting calls from her mother who says, I know your career is important to you, but you better not wait. Your clock is ticking. That kind of stuff.
So Cramer looked at a variety of countries, and he looked at the decline in fertility as women go from their late 20s to their late 30s. He compared it to dairy intake. Thailand, not a big ice cream eating country. Cheese pizza is not their thing. It’s not a lot of dairy in Thailand. And the drop in fertility during that time from the late 20s to late 30s in women is maybe about 25% reduction.
Then you look at Brazil. Brazil, a little more dairy, more cheese. About a 50% loss of fertility during that time. You look at the United States where it’s all dairy all the time, and the reduction in fertility is about 80%. If you look at a variety of other countries, it’s not a perfect pattern but it’s quite compelling that high dairy intake appears to interfere with ovarian function. What we are speculating is the issue is that the problem here, in this case, isn’t just the estrogen or progesterone from the cow, but it could be—surprisingly enough—dairy sugar.
The sugar in milk is lactose. And in your digestive tract, if you can digest it, it breaks apart to release galactose. Galactose and glucose come out of the lactose sugar. The galactose can be toxic to the ovary. What supports this is that researchers have also shown that galactose is linked to ovarian cancer. What we think is happening is that there’s not free galactose in much of anything that people eat—very little of it. And your body doesn’t take it in.
But dairying countries, dairying regions of the globe—maybe many thousands of years ago—started to spawn genetic mutations so that in some populations—particularly what you might refer to as Caucasian populations—carry this mutation so that they can break down the lactose sugar to release galactose. They think this is a wonderful advantage because I’ve got a new food source, and I don’t get the digestive problems that the rest of the world gets. Most of the world is lactose intolerant. You get diarrhea when you drink milk, but not these white people. For white people, maybe 85% are lactose tolerant. They don’t get digestive symptoms.
Well, that’s not so great because what happens is then you are digesting the sugar to release galactose into your blood, which is going to harm your fertility, increase the risk of ovarian cancer—according to the best evidence we have—and create all kinds of havoc that nature never thought in a million years humans would find nutrition in the udder of a cow. But people are creative. I mean, we stumble into all kinds of problems. So there you have it.
[00:29:20] Ashley James: You’ve taught us how to naturally decrease the estrogens to healthy levels. What changes can we make in our diet to helpfully increase progesterone for women who have low progesterone?
[00:29:34] Dr. Neal Barnard: Well, it’s largely a question of balance. If you bring down the estrogen in the right way, progesterone will take care of itself. Now there are people who will say that yams have natural progesterone in them. That’s true, but the bioavailability of it is modest in my view. There are people who will turn it into creams that they will sell you, and you’ll see them online. I am not aware of any toxicity of them. You can certainly try them. You look up natural progesterone creams, they’re typically yam-derived, perfectly fine. Whether they will work for you or not is another issue.
[00:30:10] Ashley James: It’s a matter of eating so healthy the body comes back into balance. Well, the idea that sex hormones and stress hormones are derived from fat, that the body takes—isn’t that a form of cholesterol that it then turns into these hormones?
[00:30:28] Dr. Neal Barnard: Yeah, isn’t that funny? Cholesterol is a bad actor, and it really is, but your body actually does make modest amounts of cholesterol to turn into testosterone, estrogen, and a variety of other compounds. Cholesterol is sort of this raw material. The way we run into trouble is if we start eating cholesterol from eggs or other animal products.
One area that’s been a surprise—and you’re speaking about these hormonal changes—menopause is a time when many women really suffer from hot flashes. Here, it’s not so much the hormones causing it as the hormone roller coaster causing it. Your estrogen levels were high when you were 48, but now you’re 52 and your hormones have changed dramatically, so you get hot flashes that can persist.
Back in the 1980s, I believe it was, a researcher from McGill University named Margaret Lock went to Japan. She interviewed about 1200 women, and they just didn’t report hot flashes. The question was, well, maybe Japanese women are kind of reticent. They don’t want to talk about their intimate things. So she did really in-depth interviews. It’s kind of a backache. When I went through menopause. I was a little moody for a little while. Did you have hot flashes? No, I didn’t really have it. There was no Japanese word for it. Same with China, same with parts of rural Mexico.
What all these places had in common was that their dietary staples were plant-derived. There might have been some animal products, but not much dairy in particular. When Japan westernized—McDonald’s, KFC, and everybody came in—the rice was discarded in favor of chicken, pizza, and dairy. We started to see hormonal problems come in. Breast cancer rates doubled. Menopausal symptoms became common. Depression became much more common. The other piece is that soy products seem to have an anti-hot flash effect.
Anyway, in Your Body In Balance, when I wrote this book, I described all of this. I talked about soy, and I suggested that women who have hot flashes go on a vegan diet and consume soy. A woman called me up about six weeks ago. She said, “Dr. Barnard, I did what you said. I got terrible hot flashes. I did it in a certain way. I didn’t want to just do soy milk. You don’t know what it is in the soybean that’s good for you.” She said, “I took my pressure cooker, and I just took whole soybeans that I got at the co-op. I threw them in there, and I’ve been eating half a cup a day. My hot flashes were gone in three days.” I was like, “Holy cow. That’s amazing.”
Whether this will work for a large group of people, I don’t know. There have been quite a number of studies on it, and what intrigued me was that these studies have been done on extracts or soy foods where it’s a part of the soybean. But in her case she said, I’m going to use the whole damn thing. I’m using the whole soybean, half cup a day. If anybody’s listening to this broadcast and hot flashes are driving you crazy and you can’t sleep more than 90 minutes at night without being awakened by night sweats, you might try this approach. No animal products in your diet at all, keep oils low, take out your Instant Pot, boil up a big batch of whole soybeans, which you’ll find online. Have a half a cup of them a day—they’re like pine nuts really—on your salad. It’s really not much. You just eat them, see what happens, and let me know.
[00:34:25] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. I heard that the plant estrogen—the phytoestrogen—actually binds to oxygen receptors and thus blocking our real estrogen from taking hold. So it sort of lowers estrogen dominance in that way. There are so many misconceptions about soy. That it would cause men to have breasts, which is not the case. It actually helps to lower the estrogen to healthy levels, plus you mentioned that it has fiber which helps our body to regulate estrogen. That’s great for women, but is it healthy for men to eat half a cup of cooked soybeans a day?
[00:35:04] Dr. Neal Barnard: Sure. If you happen to go to the gym and mention that you like soy products, some of the guys will say that’ll give you man boobs. That’s what you’re talking about. This concern that soy will make a man effeminate. Go to the beach in August. If you’ll see a chunky guy taking off his shirt and you notice that he’s got a little bit of breast enhancement, go right up to him and ask how much tofu did you eat this week? Tell me about your soy yogurt consumption. He’s going to say, what are you talking about? I don’t eat any of that stuff at all.
[00:35:45] Ashley James: I drink beer and I eat cheeseburgers.
[00:35:49] Dr. Neal Barnard: And wings and so forth. What has happened in his body is that as he’s eaten animal products and the fat they contain, he’s gained weight. Fat cells are not just bags of calories. Fat cells convert testosterone into estrogen. Yes, and they do it even while you’re asleep. This happens in women, and it happens in men. As he’s gained weight, he’s got more estrogen in his blood. So some of what he’s got at the breast area is fat, some of what he’s got is breast tissue.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Gynecomastia, a little bit of breast tissue, is extremely common. Most men have a little nubbit of it here somewhere, and particularly when they’re an adolescent, but they can have it. But the idea that soy is encouraging that is not true. With regard to women, let me be clear. Soy products do affect your cancer risk, and here’s how they do. They reduce it.
[00:36:43] Ashley James: Yes.
[00:36:44] Dr. Neal Barnard: Soy products reduce cancer risk by about 30%. This is really important because you’ll hear people say that soy has phytoestrogens that cause cancer. By about 2004, we had maybe eight really good studies comparing women who consumed zero soy to consuming a really large amount of soy. I’m talking about soy milk, tofu, tempeh, or something like that. The pattern was striking. The women consuming the most so had about 30% less risk of developing breast cancer. And then researchers started looking at women who had had cancer in the past, and all be darned. It did not turn out to be the case that their cancer would progress from soy. It was the opposite. Women consuming the most so they had about a 30% reduction in the likelihood of dying of their cancer.
What we now know is that there is more than one estrogen receptor on a breast cell or on other cells too. There are alpha receptors and there are beta receptors. The soy isoflavones are attached to the beta receptor. The way you can think of it is in your car, you got the gas pedal. You step on the gas your car goes. You got the brake. You step on the brake, what happens? It stops. You’ve got more than one estrogenic receptor. If you’re trying to calm things down, a product that attaches specifically to the beta receptor is going to be your friend.
[00:38:13] Ashley James: Fascinating. What about prostate cancer?
[00:38:20] Dr. Neal Barnard: It’s quantitatively similar. Men who consume the most soy, once again, have about a 30% lower risk of developing prostate cancer, but there’s more to it here. If you’re consuming soy milk you are not consuming cow’s milk. Cow’s milk—completely separate from soy—is a driver of prostate cancer.
[00:38:47] Ashley James: Wow.
[00:38:48] Dr. Neal Barnard: At Harvard, this must go back 20 years, the Physicians’ Health Study—huge study—brought in physicians because they’re good reporters of their health and they track what they eat if you ask them to. The men consuming the most cow’s milk had about a 34% increased risk of prostate cancer. They followed it up with a much bigger trial, and they showed that if anything, it was an even higher risk, maybe 60% higher risk. What we now know is that in the same way as a calf suckling from a mother cow—when the dairy products go into the cow’s stomach, it triggers the production of something in the blood of the calf called IGF-1—insulin-like growth factor—that helps the calf to grow. So milk in the calf’s body encourages growth.
Well, you might be a 55-year-old man but milk does the same. It increases IGF-1 levels in your blood, and IGF-1 is a potent growth stimulus specifically for cancer cells. You do not want to treat your body as if you are a calf hell-bent on growing. There is a reason why nature does not ever permit adult animals to drink dairy products. Every single mammal drinks milk from their mother. Every single mammal goes through a weaning process where that growth stimulus is shut off. Human beings being so creative and restless, we always figure out ways to defy what nature had in mind for us. This lifelong suckling at Dairy Queen is creating all kinds of problems for us.
[00:40:36] Ashley James: Fascinating. I could talk to you for hours about this. I know that you’re very busy and you have to go. I’d love to have you back on the show any time to continue sharing this information. I urge listeners to get your latest book, Your Body In Balance. Of course, the link to buy your book is going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at Learn True Health. I love that you discuss how men and women can balance every hormone in their body. You have mentioned several times eating a healthy vegan diet. Of course, Oreos are vegan. That would be considered the unhealthy vegan diet.
For those who’ve never considered a plant-based diet to balance their hormones and decrease their chances of getting cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, and also balance their weight accordingly, and also increase their longevity. We could go on and on about the benefits of eating a whole food, plant-based diet. Could you just wrap up the interview today by explaining what it looks like to eat a healthy vegan diet that promotes healing and decreasing disease?
[00:41:45] Dr. Neal Barnard: Sure. Let me describe how we walk people through this change. If you ever quit smoking or something like that, this transition is much easier than that, and the payoff is enormous. Here’s how we do it and I’ll tell you what the foods look like.
The patient comes in, they got diabetes, they want to get rid of it. Or they’ve got cramps, they want to get rid of it. They have PCOS, whatever the issue is. Step one is we’re going to take seven days. During the seven days, we’re not going to change any part of the diet, but what we are going to do is take a piece of paper and I’m going to write on the paper the word breakfast, leave a little space and then I’ll write lunch, then I’ll leave a little space I’ll write dinner, and I’ll leave some space and I’ll write snack.
I’ll say please take this paper and come back seven days from now, and I want to see a list of foods that have no animal products in them that you actually would like to eat in each category. The patient says that’s it? Okay. They come back and they say, “Well, my first breakfast item is I have corn flakes with cow’s milk normally, but I went to the store and I got some almond milk. It’s pretty cool, so that’s on my list. I have oatmeal but I have to top it with cinnamon and raisins and then I’d like that. I tried this vegan sausage that’s pretty cool.” So they got their list.
“For dinner, let’s see, my partner and I went out. We went to an Italian place and they made angel hair pasta with an Arrabbiata sauce. The next week we had a bean burrito without the cheese.” Okay, great. By seven days, they got a pretty good list. So I say, “Now, step two is three weeks. During the three weeks, I want you to eat from your list. No animal products at all for the three weeks. You’re going to be vegan now but it’s easy because it’s only 21 days, and you already picked out the foods you like.” “That’s it?” “Yeah, that’s all I want you to do.”
You keep in touch with them because they’ll hit some bump in the road. But after three weeks, two things will have happened. Number one, they’re feeling better, they’re losing weight. Physically, things are changing, but they also discover that their feelings about foods are changing because they haven’t had any animal products for three weeks. That is more than enough time to completely rethink your foods. Now, you say to them, “Well, how do you like it?” “Well, I kind of like where I’m going. Can I do this for another week, doc? And I say, “Yeah, let’s just keep going and see how it goes.” Okay, great. So it’s very easy.
As the months go by, if they have diabetes, their medication requirements drop. If they’ve got menstrual pain, they discover it’s changing. All kinds of things will change within their bodies. The foods are in four categories: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans, or legumes. So that turns into foods that are on international scale staples for everybody. I already mentioned pasta with marinara sauce, vegetables. In a Latin American restaurant, beans, rice, and tortillas. In a Chinese restaurant, rice, vegetables, or tofu dishes. You go to the sushi bar, you don’t have the fish sushi but you have the cucumber roll, the sweet potato roll, or the asparagus roll. You can have the seaweed salads, the regular salads, and the miso soup.
What I discovered, I grew up in North Dakota. Every day of my life was roast beef, baked potatoes, and corn. Pretty simple diet. When I went vegan, I now live in Washington DC. It’s amazing. The palette of foods available is huge. If somebody said, no, you can’t have any more you know spaghetti Arrabbiata, you can’t have any more bean burritos, you can’t have any more Thai food, Vietnamese food, Ethiopian food, go back to North Dakota and just eat your roast beef. That to me would feel depriving.
A vegan diet is extremely vast. It does require thinking things through a little bit, but after two weeks you’re a master. Instead of thinking in simple terms that foods cause me to gain weight or raise my cholesterol, you now have a much more complex view that foods allow me to control my hormones that control every other aspect of my body. I can control them for ill, I control them for good. It’s like driving your car. You can drive recklessly, or you can drive in a really careful way that gets you where you want to go.
The reason I wrote Your Body In Balance was to give this owner’s manual to people. And if you don’t mind, I want to brag just really quickly.
[00:46:23] Ashley James: Oh please do.
[00:46:24] Dr. Neal Barnard: Lindsey Nixon is a genius in the kitchen, and she did all the recipes for it. When she sent me the recipes, she said, “Neal, you’re going to really love these recipes. They’re easy, they’re quick, they’re all 100% vegan, but they are so familiar and wonderful.” She’s right, they’re great. But she sent a note with them that said, “Dr. Barnard, this way of eating that you’re describing cured my cramps too.” I thought okay, that’s validation.
[00:46:51] Ashley James: That’s so cool.
[00:46:53] Dr. Neal Barnard: I hope people will give it a try, and more importantly, I hope they’ll share this with somebody else. The work that you do in sharing this information, not just me but the other people that you talk to, you have a real talent for getting life-saving and life-changing information out to people. So I hope people won’t just benefit themselves and keep it to themselves. They got to tell other people about what you’re doing.
[00:47:15] Ashley James: Every woman has a friend with horrible cramps, hot flashes, or endometriosis. It’s like every woman. Some men too think about their sisters, their wives, their moms, or some of their best friends. Listeners, think about it, how many women can you list right now on your fingers, how many women can you count that you know—you’re close to, that you’re friends with, your family, your acquaintances with, or that you work with—that have expressed hormonal problems, concerns about breast cancer, or thyroid? How many women?
I mean, most women I know express concerns about their thyroid or are on thyroid medication or diabetes. Like you said, one in three people in the United States is diabetic or pre-diabetic. The entire population would benefit from your book. I know Christmas is a few months away, now’s a great time to buy several copies of Your Body In Balance and gift them. Give them early though. Don’t wait until Christmas. Give them early out of love and care for those for all the women and men in our life who suffer from thyroid-, prostate-, breast cancer-, estrogen-related imbalance. We can help. We can turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help so many of our loved ones.
I wish I’d had your book when I was—in high school, I was keeled over suffering from cramps so bad it was so incredibly painful. By the time I was 19 I was told I was infertile and I’d never have kids. Because of nutrition and because of food, we conceived our son naturally who’s 5 ½, and I’m currently pregnant with our second one. That is all due to holistic medicine. It is all due to using nutrition, using food, and a whole food, plant-based diet.
I’m a raving fan. I wish I’d had your book back when I was 16. This is a book we could give to all the young women and all the people in our life we love. I’m thankful that you came to the show. I’m thankful that you’re spreading this information. I’m excited to dive into your book and those recipes sound great. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and please, come back any time. We would just love to have you here.
[00:49:37] Dr. Neal Barnard: Great. Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s been really fun talking with you today, and thanks for spreading the word.
Get Connected With Dr. Neal Barnard!The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
21-Day Vegan Kickstart Program
Facebook – Dr. Neal Barnard
Facebook – 21 Day Vegan Kickstart
Twitter – Dr. Neal Barnard
Instagram – Physicians Committee
Books by Dr. Neal BarnardYour Body in Balance: The New Science of Food, Hormones, and Health
The Cheese Trap
Power Foods For The Brain
Reversing Diabetes
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Highlights:
What inspired Rip to go whole food, plant-based How Rip started working with the firefighters Impact of eating whole food, plant-based How to stay on whole food plant-based while travelingIn this episode, Rip Esselstyn tells his origin story on how he became a healthy eating advocate. He shares how he started helping firefighters and other people to eat whole food, plant-based. He talks about his different ventures, including his Plant-Strong Podcast, his Engine 2—soon to be Plant-Strong—food products, and the events they’re hosting to help people get started and stay on the whole food, plant-based diet.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I know you’re going to love today’s episode. Before we get to it, I got to tell you about a super awesome deal that’s going on right now. As you may know, if you have listened to several episodes, you might have heard me rave about the Sunlighten Sauna company.
It took a long while to research which sauna I wanted to buy. I talked to several Naturopaths that have worked with different companies, interviewed each company, looked at the specs, looked at the wood, the materials they used to build it. Is there any toxic material? Where does it come from? Where is it manufactured? Their track record. The online feedback that I could see that customers had shared, and I finally decided to purchase a Sunlighten Sauna.
This is about three years ago, and I decided to use it because I have been working on detoxing heavy metals, and also supporting my immune system, supporting overall health. I kept learning more and more about the power of using an infrared sauna, especially if it’s a non-toxic, low EMF infrared sauna to support the body’s ability to heal itself. I have been so impressed with Sunlighten. Well, their customer service is great, but their products are fantastic. I’ve been very, very happy with the results that I’ve gotten—the detoxification results. It’s a very gentle detox when we sweat out toxins.
They have a special going on right now with their Solo System. Now, what I like about the Solo System, it’s ultra-low EMF, it’s made of non-toxic material, and you can store it in your closet. It basically becomes the size of a massage table. You can put it in your closet when you’re not using it or under the bed. That’s fantastic for people who don’t have 6×6 space in their house, their condo, or their apartment to dedicate to housing a giant wooden sauna. This isn’t a wooden sauna. This is a Solo System.
They’re having a huge sale right now from now until the 18th, so only the next few days. They’re giving 25% off, and then in addition to that, they’re giving our listeners an additional discount plus free shipping. The link is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast, so just go to the notes. If you’re using iTunes or wherever you’re listening, go to the notes and you’ll see the link. You can also join the Learn True Health Facebook group because the information is posted there. You want to use the link. The link gives you the 25% off, and then in addition to that, you use this coupon code: TRUEHEALTHSOLO, and that also gives you free shipping and an extra discount on top of it.
I’ve had several doctors on the show of holistic medicine and functional medicine swear by the system, including Dr. Mark Hyman, who lives in a condo. And he says it would be impossible to have a big sauna in his condo, and he loves traveling with the Solo System. I also had Ryan and Teddy Sternagel on the show, and they talked about how they helped their son who had two rounds of cancer.
He had cancer and then it came back. A very young baby. At about a year old, he was diagnosed with cancer. And now, thank God, he is cancer-free. I think he’s about seven years old now, and they used the Solo System. They traveled with it because he had several surgeries at different hospitals throughout the United States. I think he spent months in a hospital at one point, and they would use this system in the hospital with their young son when he was three, four, or five, helping him to get through the cancer treatments.
This is something obviously you’d want to talk to your holistic pediatrician about. But you can use this system with children—responsibly, with adults. It’s a gentle system. It allows you to detox through sweating. If that’s something that interests you, check it out, go to the link, come join the Facebook group and check out the information there, and use the coupon code: TRUEHEALTHSOLO to get the additional discount. This is a quick sale that they’re doing. It is ending on the 18th.
But if you’re interested in getting any kind of sauna, check out Sunlighten. And if you choose to buy Sunlighten, make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James as they give all my listeners a great discount. I made sure of that when I interviewed the founder, Connie Zack, and you can go back and listen to that interview as well.
Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. If you ever want to reach out to me, please, join the Learn True Health Facebook group. We answer holistic health questions there all the time. There’s a lot of questions. People just want to know what you recommend for this, or I’m looking for a good recipe for that, or how you would handle this situation with cleaning products, or dealing with colds and flu. Not only do I help and answer questions, but there are so many other wonderful community members that are in the holistic space that help as well.
You’d really be joining a fantastic community that’s looking to support you in your health success. Just join the Learn True Health Facebook group and definitely check out the Sunlighten Solo System using the coupon code: TRUEHEALTHSOLO, and the link that is provided in the show notes of today’s podcast, or go to the Facebook group. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.
[00:05:39] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 448. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Rip Esselstyn. I am such a fan of your work. In fact, you don’t know this but we met a few years ago. Of course, you’ve met thousands of people when you tour around the country giving lectures and talking about your books and your products, but I actually met you with my husband, me, and our son. It was at Whole Foods. Actually, I think our son was napping so my husband’s staying in the car. But I ran in and I absolutely loved it. You signed my book, which I gave to one of my friends who also became plant-based, and I love your recipes. What I love about your recipes is they’re so hearty and they’re so kind of manly. They’re really easy to make for men to show them how delicious eating plants can be.
Actually, since then, my husband went 100% vegan. He woke up one day and he said I’m never eating another animal again, and I was shocked because he only ate meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then he woke up one day and said absolutely never again. About five days into eating just plants, he turns to me and he goes, “If I knew this tastes so good, I would have done this years ago.” So there’s a lot to say about this. For those who haven’t tried it yet—haven’t tried a plant-based day or a plant-based week, get Rip Esselstyn’s books and just go to town.
Now, you also have wonderful products that are sold at Whole Foods. I love everything you do, and I can’t wait to hear more from you and have the listeners learn from you today. Welcome to the show.
[00:07:34] Rip Esselstyn: Thank you, Ashley. Actually, I’m surprised. So you ran into the store to get your book signed, but your husband stayed in the car and napped?
[00:07:47] Ashley James: No, no, our son. I was just remembering. Our son was a baby at the time. He’s 5 ½ now. It might have been about five years ago, and it was in Redmond, Washington. I ran in. I had ordered the book on Amazon because I heard you were coming, and I think we were all planning on going in, but then the kid fell asleep in the car. You just don’t wake a baby up. You’re like, okay, he’s taking a nap. I ended up staying for the whole lecture while our son napped in the car, but it was fantastic. I mean, the stories you told and what I learned from you. Of course, I went home and binge-watched every YouTube video I could get my hands on—all the documentaries you’ve been in.
I had recently had your father on the show. I love telling everyone I’m within about 5’of—I’ll tell them, do you know that there’s a cardiologist that reverses heart disease with food? I think it’s amazing what you and your family do. Of course, I’m like this gushing fan over here. Let’s get to you and learn more from you. Rip, what happened in your life? Obviously, your dad and his work, but what happened to you personally that made you want to, not only go plant-based for yourself but help the world become healthier?
[00:09:07] Rip Esselstyn: For me, it’s been a journey. It all started with my father. I mean, it started with my father’s research at the Cleveland Clinic. You just said something that was a little bit off so I’ll correct you just to get it right. My father has never been a cardiologist, and he often is mistaken as one because he’s done such groundbreaking work in the field of halting, preventing, and reversing heart disease. But he’s a general surgeon, and his specialty was the thyroid, the parathyroid, and the breast.
[00:09:47] Ashley James: Fascinating.
[00:09:48] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. What I find to be so—and I’ll use your word—fascinating, is the fact that you look at Dr. Dean Ornish, you look at Nathan Pritikin back in the ‘70s, you look at my father. None of these people were, per se, in cardiology. It took somebody from outside the field of cardiology to basically shine a light and say, you know what, this is really a food created disease of our own making. If we can just eliminate all of the building blocks that promote heart disease, you know what, we don’t have to go down that path.
My father got there because he wanted to actually try and show in his lifetime that the same thing could be true with breast cancer, and by association prostate cancer, and some of these major cancers. But he knew that he could do it quicker if he tried to do it through heart disease because he’d read some studies where they’d done some research with green monkeys where they were able to actually reverse their heart disease through just the power of a whole food, plant-based diet.
And then we dove into the research, looked at the epidemiological studies, and found swaths of people living on the planet that had 1/100 the incidence of heart disease, 150th the rate of breast cancer and prostate cancer. The common denominator of all these cultures was a predominantly whole food, plant-based diet. And then you look at the work that Dan Buettner has done with the Blue Zones, with Loma Linda; with Ikaria, Greece; with Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy where you have the longest living populations on the planet—the most centenarians. The common denominator there of course is a predominantly whole food, plant-based diet.
I went to the University of Texas at Austin on a swimming scholarship. I ate on the athletic training table with the football players, the basketball players, the tennis players, and the golfers. Every meal was chicken, fried steak, cheese, pepperoni pizzas, and bacon and eggs. We had a soft-serve ice cream machine where we could go to town, but none of us knew any better.
[00:12:39] Ashley James: It sounds like a 12-year-old’s birthday party, not an athletics college.
[00:12:44] Rip Esselstyn: No, you’re right. One of the premier universities in the nation, especially when it comes to the athletic program, right? God, how far we’ve come since I was going to school over 35 years ago now. While I was there at school was when my father was really putting his shoulder up to the grindstone to show what was possible when you initially took this population, this cohort of 22 people that he got from the Cleveland Clinic that was referred to him because they were so bad off that they were not candidates for another bypass, stent, angioplasty, or anything like that. He took these 22—what somebody referred to as the walking dead.
Every other week for five years, they came in and they saw him. He went over their food diary. He also weighed them, did their blood pressure, and did a lipid panel, and checked their total cholesterol—LDL, HDL, triglycerides. He went over their food log, and these guys were compliant. They were not messing it up. Again, it just goes to show the power of when you do this and you implement the program correctly, none of these people had any more events. The men that were in wheelchairs were able to get out of the wheelchairs and start walking. The angina, the chest pain basically went away. These people were dancing again. They were golfing. They were walking the malls. They were playing tennis almost like too good to be true like miracles.
So I heard the stories while I was at the University of Texas of my father and working with these walking dead and how they were basically coming back to life in more ways than one. And I was just so inspired by his ability to try and find this truth, to go against the grain, and do something as novel and important as this. Also, something about it just felt right. When I graduated, I was off the training table, and I was able to cook on my own and all that, I immediately started eating this way. That was back in January 1987. For the most part, I haven’t looked back. It’s now been 33 years that I really embrace this.
It’s just now about finessing it and accumulating more information. One thing has led to another, and the dots have continued to connect. I find myself now, 33 years later, being in a place that I never ever anticipated being in where I’m a healthy eating advocate. I have written four different books. As you mentioned—I’m going to use this word and we can talk about—I had a food line in Whole Foods for almost eight years. We put on seven-day medical immersion programs. We’ve been doing that for 10 years. Because of COVID now we’ve started doing these virtual events with thousands of people. I’ve started my own podcast following in your steps, Ashley, about a year and a half, two years ago. It’s called the Plant-Strong Podcast. It’s become pretty all-encompassing.
[00:16:49] Ashley James: I love it. Watching documentaries, seeing your story in them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen The Game Changers. My friend, my husband, and I went to see it in the theaters for that one-day special. And on the way home, I was calling people non-stop. Oh my gosh, you have to see this. You have to do this right now. And I called a friend who is caring for her friend who was a recent quadriplegic with out-of-control diabetes because they were in the hospital and she was taking care of them as an advocate. I said you’ve got to check this out.
She immediately got the hospital to get him to go plant-based, zero oil. Overnight, his number started to get better. The water retention went away. He actually started gaining muscle. He was fighting bedsores, and he started healing his bedsores so fast they couldn’t believe it. It was a stage four bedsore. They thought he was going to die from it and his healing went through the roof. They could not believe it, and she had to inspect every meal because they kept trying to sneak in things like dairy, oil, and all that. It was just amazing watching people. Their bodies heal so much faster when you remove the foods that are inhibiting the body and you give the body all the nutrients it needs. It’s mind-blowing. Now, can you tell us a bit about your work with firefighters?
[00:18:25] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this whole thing started because I was a firefighter with the City of Austin. I got on board with the Austin fire department in 1997 after a 10-year career as a professional triathlete where I was swimming, biking, and running for a living fueling myself with the power of a whole food, plant-based diet. It’s funny, for the first five, six years that I was a firefighter in the Austin fire department, I got ridiculed, harassed, and belittled until the cows came home about the way I ate.
Then, we had a bet to see who had the lowest cholesterol level and we drove down to the local laboratory the next morning—me and the other guys on the Station 2 C Shift crew—and we found out that one of my brothers had cholesterol at the age of 33 of 344 milligrams per deciliter, which is phenomenally high. We also found out that he had a horrendous family history of men in his family dying from heart disease before the age of 50. So not only did this firefighting brother of mine have a genetic predisposition for a really elevated cholesterol level, but he also ate—and this is his words not mine—like a third-generation redneck.
The center of the plate was always some sort of meat, typically or favorably deep-fried. When you have a genetic predisposition and you make deep-fried meat at the center of your plate, that’s not a good combination. And then to boot, the firefighting culture is very masculine. It is the food that these firefighters make is very, very toxic. So everything’s deep-fried. Screw half a stick of butter, let’s do one whole stick of butter. Let’s do Crisco on everything. Let’s use a pound of cheese on top of this casserole. For dessert, we’re going to split a tub, and I mean a tub a gallon of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream. And it just goes on and on—Hamburger Helper, Tuna Helper. The food at the firehouse is abysmal.
So the funny thing is you mentioned firefighters. If there’s one culture on this planet that needs us more than anybody else, it’s firefighters. Firefighters, in some ways, they consider themselves superheroes. They are there when we when the sh** hits the fan, and they need saving. They expect a superhero, gold medal decathlete, to come to the rescue. The unfortunate reality is that so many of these firefighters are overweight. They’re pre-diabetic. They’ve had a shot across the bow with cancer.
It’s funny though how many fire departments across the country—at a really slow and steady rate and firefighters—have been reaching out to me for help. Literally, right before I jumped on this interview with you, I got an email from a firefighter who’s telling me he’s battling PTSD. His weight has ballooned back up to almost 300 pounds. The stress of the job, he’s starting to drink again—just all these things—and would I be willing to talk to him once a week? I’ve got fire departments that have reached out to me and asked me to do videos that they can then circulate out throughout their department.
Anyway, the fire service is slowly but surely coming around to this message that the plants really are king when it comes to nutrition. But there’s still a lot of dinosaurs in that firefighting culture, no doubt about it. I’ll give you another example. When I wrote my first book, The Engine 2 Diet, I did a pilot study that was comprised of 62 people for the first round, and we did before and after biometric screenings on everything just like my father did with his patients back in 1984, 1985. I weighed them in, we did blood pressure. I had a relationship with a lab and we did a full biometric screening. I had a medical director. We did a three-minute step test where people did this step test and then we measured their before and after heart rate to see how their heart rate was doing. And then we did all this again four weeks later.
But one of the people that took part in this was a guy, a firefighter that I went through the training academy with. His name was Tim, and Tim was probably 220. He was one of the biggest firefighters when we went through the six-month-long academy together in 1997. And then, when I was looking for people that wanted to participate in this pilot study for my book, he happened to call the station for some reason. I said, “Hey, Tim. How are you doing? He said, “I’m doing good. Put on way too much weight.” I said, “Oh, really? Where are you?” He said, “I’m over 300 pounds.” I’m like, “Oh, Tim. Wow. Well, hey. You know what, I’m doing this pilot study. If you’re willing to eat just whole plants for 28 days, I’d love to have you be one of the participants.” He said, “Sure, I’d love to do it. I got nothing to lose.“
Tim lost 33 pounds in 28 days. And surprisingly, his cholesterol was not that high, to begin with. It was 172, and so for a big boy, that’s not very high. But at the end of 28 days, it came down to 88. So he was below 100 on his total cholesterol. His LDL came down below 40, and it was just miraculous what he was able to do. But the reason why I’m telling you this story is that most firefighters, after they graduate from the fire academy, will typically go out into the fire service and they let their guard down. They get pulled into this toxic food environment where they’re eating the same unhealthy food that everybody else is eating. They’re gaining somewhere between three to five pounds, on average, a year.
You look at Tim, again, he was doing this in 2008. We went through the academy together in 1997. So almost 11 years later, he had gone from 220 to 303 pounds. He put on over 83 pounds in 11 years. Tim, he was the first to admit. He had become a liability to himself, a liability to his crew. If he was to go down in a building or in a house fire, nobody’s going to be able to pick him up and drag him out because think about it, he’s 303 pounds. You add on to that his bunker gear, his boots, his helmet, his air pack that he’s got on, and now you can add on another almost 65 pounds. Somebody’s got to try and haul out 375 pounds.
[00:27:09] Ashley James: In a fire?
[00:27:11] Rip Esselstyn: In a fire where you can’t see. It’s probably 400, 500 degrees depending upon where you are in the structure. That’s a problem.
[00:27:25] Ashley James: Yeah, he’s putting his own health and life at risk, but he’s also putting his fellow brothers at risk. That’s something to consider. If we know that we’re eating a certain way, we’re gaining weight, or we’re not taking care of ourselves, at what point are we actually putting other people’s lives at risk? We could have a heart attack while driving, we could die and our dependents all of a sudden don’t have us to take care of them. If you’re not willing to make the changes for yourself, you’ve got to think about those you love most to get to start making changes.
[00:28:02] Rip Esselstyn: Completely. And to take it a step farther, I mean, if you want to open up this pandora’s box, look at the predicament that we’re in right now—the United States of America. We’ve got COVID-19 that has struck. I believe, and I may be off here by a percent or two, but 98.5% or 99% of the people that are being hospitalized for COVID-19 and are subsequently dying have some sort of underlying comorbidity. Whether it’s high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, or weakened or suppressed immune system. Unfortunately, if you’re obese, the latest figures that I just saw from the CDC show that 42%. A couple of years ago, we were at 35% obesity. We’re at 42% obesity now. I think that 50% of people over the age of 40 are now on some sort of hypertensive medication because their blood pressure is too high.
[00:29:27] Ashley James: And that comes with a list of side effects including those who are on long term for high blood pressure meds have shorter lifespans. So being put on a med doesn’t solve the problem. It masks the symptoms for now, but it makes things worse in the long run because we’re not addressing the root cause. My head spun so fast watching—so I’ve been a health coach for many years. (I watch the blood pressure, the triglycerides, the cholesterol, and blood sugar, especially, come into healthy ranges so fast when people get off of oil salt, sugar, processed food, and get on whole food, plant-based. I cannot believe how quickly people can heal and come back into normal ranges and go back to their doctor and get taken off of meds. It’s mind-blowing.
A friend of mine’s mother, within weeks of going plant-based, said all her arthritis and all arthritis pain was gone. All her pain was gone.
[00:30:32] Rip Esselstyn: Well, it’s such an anti-inflammatory way of eating. Like you just said, the effects happen so quickly. I mean, you look at the seven-day medical immersion programs that we’ve been throwing with Whole Foods’ unhealthiest team members since 2011, and the results that we got were so phenomenal. I was able to track all these different data points literally. It’s now over 2000 people that I had to write a book about, and that’s why my third book is called The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet. And when I say rescue, it’s not me rescuing, it’s you rescuing yourself with the simple power of food.
But let’s go back for a second, Ashley because where I was going with this thing with COVID-19 was that somebody asked. I saw this interview with Dr. Fauci where they asked him, “Why don’t we open society back up?” And he said, “We can’t. We have too many sick citizens.” Again, when you look that we have 42% of the population that’s literally considered obese. When you look at all the numbers of people that are diabetic or pre-diabetic, and I think it’s now over 50% and he says that, it’s like wow. COVID-19 is crippling this society because we’re so unhealthy because we have not embraced, of course, there are so many conflicting messages and there’s so much noise out there with paleo, keto, and all this stuff.
If we could—as a culture, as a society—embrace something as simple as eating a whole food, plant-based diet, we wouldn’t be in the predicament we’re in now. This thing would probably be able to blow over, herd immunity. Sure, some people that are young and healthy are going to get hit pretty hard, but for the most part, like I said, 99% of people that are affected have some sort of underlying comorbidity and are over the age of 70. If you’re in that subset, you just really need to be super, super careful.
But anyway, I’ll throw out one more thing. That is a long time ago Winston Churchill said something very, very profound, and that is, “Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country has.” I mean, again, look at where we are right now, 20 cents out of every dollar goes to healthcare costs. Heart disease, the number one killer of Americans right now. 50% of us will have a brush with cancer in our lifetimes. Like I just mentioned, the fact that almost 50% of this country is considered now either pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic, these are all lifestyle created diseases. I don’t know at what point we’re going to be able to wake up and confront this.
The Game Changers did a phenomenal job, and the latest that I’ve heard is that this documentary has been seen by more eyeballs. We’re approaching now close to 100 million views of The Game Changers. It’s the most-watched documentary on the planet.
[00:34:27] Ashley James: I love that.
[00:34:28] Rip Esselstyn: But I still have to wonder, what’s it going to take? What is it going to take? You have this phenomenal documentary, the most-watched documentary in the history of the planet. I mean, it’s moved the needle, but it’s not moving it enough, it’s not. And then you look at everything that’s going on right now with climate change, the environment, and sustainability. It’s like come on people. We all got to be pulling in the same direction, and we got to do it fast.
[00:35:08] Ashley James: I really don’t like the phrase climate change because it so removes—did you watch that George Carlin clip? This is years ago where he said in World War One it was called shell shock, and in shell shock, you can feel the emotional impact. Like oh, he came home with shell shock. Through the years, they kept changing the diagnosis’s name to be so sterile that now we call it PTSD, and there is so much humanity removed from what they actually are experiencing.
Climate change feels like something big, out of our control, and not anything that really affects us, but okay, maybe when the weather’s weird. What I like to do is go back to the root, which is pollution. Look at that word. Okay, I don’t want to breathe in pollution. I don’t want to eat pollution. I don’t want it to be in my food. I don’t want it to be in my water. We have to come back to this really strong emotional word. We’re polluting this planet. Our food supply is compromised. Our air is compromised. Our water is compromised with pollution.
When we look at the places in the world that help to clean our water and air like these forests, they are being torn down by the hectare every day. Just unspeakable amounts of acres and acres of these rainforests, which we will never get back, in order to feed cattle. That is just one of the many problems. If everyone just ate more plants. If everyone just chose some meals that had plant-based protein and just tried that and then kept going more and more and more towards plants, we could actually start to heal the rainforest. We could start to stop pollution.
We have to think about the impact that’s happening right now, which is we’re poisoning our bodies by poisoning the planet, and we are voting with our fork. When you go to the grocery store, go online to buy your groceries, your purchases say where you want your money to go. And if you are buying products that require us to tear down forests in order to feed the cattle because they are growing crops to feed cattle, instead buy just crops and eat them. It’s much more complex than, but it can get as simple as vote with your fork. Do some research on the foods that you buy and vote with your fork where you want the earth to heal, you want your body to heal.
That’s my little beef about the word with, and there needs to be a vegan word for beef. That’s my schtick. I have such frustration with the word climate change because it takes the responsibility away from us. Whereas if we can really focus on the fact that—remember in the ‘80s they call it acid rain? It’s like, geez, I don’t want to go outside and get rained on by acid rain. That’s what we’re experiencing now is the pollution in our local environment because of the choices we make, and we can make better choices, which will directly—impact our lifetime—lessening the pollution and reversing it. That’s why it’s so important that your message is for healing our bodies, and it’s for healing the planet because there’s no difference between the two.
[00:38:44] Rip Esselstyn: Bravo, and thank you for bringing that up. I actually like that a lot more. We’re polluting the planet, right?
[00:38:58] Ashley James: Right, and there’s no political like, oh, climate deniers. You can’t deny pollution. It’s right out of your front door. You can test the water, soil, and air. We are polluting this planet. You can’t get political about it. It’s the truth. That way, there’s no denying it, but we can make choices based on all of our consumption. Based on what car we’re going to drive. Based on the clothing we’re going to buy, if it’s used, new, or local, or whether we’re going to buy local groceries or grow our own. Every single choice with our dollar really does go towards making a sustainable and healthier planet for our own health right now. Anyway, that’s my soapbox.
[00:39:45] Rip Esselstyn: No, it’s good.
[00:39:46] Ashley James: Thank you.
[00:39:48] Rip Esselstyn: Let me add to that. You look in the grocery space and what has been growing about 20% year over year? It’s the plant-based meats, it’s the plant-based cheeses, it’s the plant-based milk, it’s the plant-based yogurts. Plant-based is on a tear right now, and people are voting with their dollars, and they’re voting that they want more plants and fewer animals. That’s very, very telling. James Cameron, we were talking about The Game Changers. He was one of the executive producers, but I had the privilege of getting to meet James Cameron several years ago. I also helped get him on board with The Game Changers project.
You said you went to the opening night of The Game Changers. Did you see the 20-minute clip afterward?
[00:40:50] Ashley James: Yes.
[00:40:51] Rip Esselstyn: James was basically the star of that bonus footage. And in it, he says the single most important and powerful thing that you can do starting tomorrow is just to start eating plants. As far as starting to heal the planet and not polluting nearly as much. When you look at some of the data that’s out there, and there’s some from the Worldwatch Institute that’s part of the World Bank that has the global greenhouse gas emissions that are caused by livestock. They wrote a paper. I believe it’s called Livestock’s Long Shadow. That 51 of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture between the supply chain and the life cycle of us as a world having this insatiable diet for animal protein. 70 billion animals, it’s incomprehensible. Anyway, I want to add that to the whole conversation we were just having.
[00:42:20] Ashley James: I really like the visuals in the documentary Cowspiracy. I don’t like watching documentaries that lay down the guilt trip or make you feel like you’re hopeless, and there’s a little bit of that in there. But I just like to urge listeners just to watch it because the visuals are really good. For example, for that one hamburger that you eat, how much water actually needed to be used in terms of the crops and also feeding the cow versus if you just had a bean burger. You can see the environmental impact of that, or how much gas was used and how much CO2 emissions. But also how much fecal matter, right?
[00:43:03] Rip Esselstyn: I was just going to say, how much poop is produced by animals. It’s staggering, right?
[00:43:09] Ashley James: Yeah. In our environment, there are parts of the Carolinas, when there are storms, the water and all of the soil is really so unhealthy for the humans that live in those areas. And it’s documented that the humans that live in those areas have incredibly high rates of cancer, but they’re kind of impoverished, they can’t move away, and they just have to suffer because there’s so much fecal matter. All the waste from the big pig farms out there. But just imagine if there are billions of animals that we’re raising for slaughter, how much waste they create that is going to polluting the planet.
So, yes, there’s a huge environmental, but we have to keep coming back to environmental equals our health. So a healthy environment equals a healthy body, and we can come back to the science which is just eating plants but a whole food meaning not processed or as little process as possible so that we’re eating the whole plant and getting all the nutrients we require from it. And there’s so much science and you’ve mentioned some of the doctors and scientists that have made the published studies. Listeners can go through your books, through your dad’s information. You can go through learntruehealth.com, search whole food, plant-based. and listen to all the other experts that I’ve had on the show about it. You can collect lots of information and see that science is there and the science is sound and proven.
You were in—a while ago—a documentary called the Marshall Plan. It’s on YouTube. I highly recommend listeners watch it. That blew my mind that an entire town took up a challenge to get healthy through the whole food, plant-based diet and that you actually went there. Met with the fire guys there, the firemen there, and that you got all the labs, then you help them with the diet, and then you got the labs afterward. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with the town of Marshall in Texas?
[00:45:22] Rip Esselstyn: Well, yeah. That was almost nine years ago now if I’m not mistaken. What happened is the mayor of the town of Marshall and his wife—two just phenomenal people—got bit by the whole food, plant-based bug. It’s really a testament to what can happen when one person that has a little bit of power, can try and just spread the wealth. When we went there, there were restaurants that were serving these whole food, plant-based options. We put on a whole weekend-long healthy eating symposium for the citizens of Marshall, Texas. Like you mentioned, I spent some time working with some of the firefighters.
Again, Ashley, and I apologize, I’ve worked with so many different firefighters and fire departments that I can’t specifically remember.
[00:46:46] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. Nine years ago, I want you to remember all of the numbers.
[00:46:50] Rip Esselstyn: But I can’t specifically remember how it went down.
[00:46:53] Ashley James: But they just have to watch the documentary for that.
[00:46:55] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah, and I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t seen the documentary. To this day the Marshall of Texas, I think they continue to hold a weekend-long event. The restaurants are carrying—and I can’t remember what the term is now that they have. They had some sort of special term for Marshall and the whole food, plant-based options there. For a little while, it was Engine 2 approved, but then they changed it. They’ve done something really phenomenal there in Marshall, Texas. Of all the places in the world, who would have thought Marshall, Texas.
[00:47:40] Ashley James: Right, a town in Texas. Anyway, it’s a great documentary. They show how much everyone loves meat and how incredibly unhealthy everyone was, and then the whole transformation of the town. You’re in it, your dad’s in it, and all the stars of the whole food, plant-based world are in it. My favorite, Chef AJ, who I’ve had on the show is in it. The meals look really delicious, and I think it’s a very authentic documentary. It feels very indie, which I love. I’m going to make sure the link to the Marshall Plan documentary is in the show notes of today’s podcast. Even though it’s nine years old, it’s still incredibly relevant. What I liked is having you walk through it with the firefighters. More time was spent on it even in the Game Changers where you got to walk through with the firefighters and show them what your arteries look like.
[00:48:31] Rip Esselstyn: Really.
[00:48:32] Ashley James: They slowed it down and they interviewed the firefighters. You felt the emotion with them. They don’t want to die, they don’t want to drop dead out of a heart attack. It’s very cool how much their lives changed because of it. But there are so many videos out there that you’re in that are like that, which is just wonderful.
You do a lot of traveling, and this has been a question on my mind. What and how do you eat when you’re traveling? Because you’re in airplanes, you’re at hotels. Sometimes you’re in areas of the world where it’s not like Marshall, Texas where there’s a bunch of whole food, plant-based restaurants. How do you stay true to the whole food, plant-based, no processed, no oil diet?
[00:49:24] Rip Esselstyn: Well, that’s a great question, and it’s been really easy the last six months because I haven’t really traveled at all.
[00:49:33] Ashley James: I fell into that one.
[00:49:35] Rip Esselstyn: But you’re right. Before that, for the last 10 years when I was a healthy eating partner with Whole Food market stores, I was on the road probably somewhere between 80-100 days a year. Basically sharing with people the good news about plants. Let me say, the good news is that typically, whenever I went on the road, I always was going to Whole Foods. Literally, I always had the ability for lunch to pick up something if I did a lunch event. I’d fill up my cart and I’d buy some stuff either something that was prepared for dinner, or I could go and they always have a little rice cooker. I could do rice, I could do beans from the salad bar, and then top it off with all kinds of veggie relish.
But, aside from that, I would always go on the airplane with cereal. I always travel everywhere with my commercialized Rip’s Big Bowl cereal. And then at the airport, because you can’t take milk through the detectors with you, I would usually go to a Starbucks and I’d ask them for a plain glass of almond milk. I’d also carry with me typically raisins or bananas, so I make my own bowl because a lot of times, I have to get up early like 4:30 AM, 5:00 AM for some of these early morning flights. I always travel with cereal. I always travel with fruit. Sometimes I’ll travel with a homemade burrito or a sandwich.
I can always go out to dinner and make it work. You just got to be a little bit of a pain in the butt and ask for what you want. You can go to Indian, Thai, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. Typically, you always get some sort of rice, lentils, vegetables to that effect. In a pinch, I’ll do Chipotle. Obviously, Chipotle’s got a lot more sodium and a lot more oil than I want, but I’m not so perfect that I don’t sometimes do that.
You just figure out a way. I typically get hotels where they’ve got a microwave in it. Sometimes they’ve got a little kitchenette in it. I have the ability to cook a few things. If you really want something bad enough, you’ll figure out a way to make it work. John Mackey who’s become a great and cherished friend, the CEO of Whole Food market stores, travels with a miniature rice cooker and he makes his own steel-cut oatmeal in the morning. He’ll make his own brown rice in the hotel room, and then he’ll add to it the toppings that he wants, the beans, the sliced up vegetables.
I have found out that nothing is as important as your health. If it requires you traveling with a rice cooker if it requires you at the restaurant saying, hey, you know what, I want this cooked and I don’t want it cooked in any oil or any butter, then you deserve the right to make that request, no doubt about it.
[00:53:15] Ashley James: There’s a Mexican restaurant near where my parents-in-law live in Seattle or just north of Seattle, and I get them to do veggie fajitas with no oil. They put every vegetable known to man. I love their veggie fajitas. Some places just do bell peppers. This place does everything. There are broccoli, mushrooms, zucchini, and every bell pepper known to man—there’s just everything, and it’s a huge pile of vegetables on a sizzling skillet. They’ll do zero oil for me and then I’ll get their platter with the beans, the corn, tortillas, and the guacamole, and you feel great. You feel full. It’s just wonderful. I love it. And then there’s usually enough to take home.
You just have to ask. You just have to be willing to ask, can you cook that with no oil, or can you steam that? A lot of Thai restaurants will have—in the back of their menu for a few dollars—a side of steamed vegetables and brown rice. You can bring your own sauce. I love the 3-2-1 sauce that Chef AJ teaches, which is three parts balsamic, two parts any kind of mustard, and then one part maple syrup. But that’s too sweet for me so I do half that amount, just put it in a jar, shake it up, and then just bring that wherever you go. You can put it on vegetables. It tastes amazing. It absolutely tastes amazing. You put it on steamed vegetables, put it on rice. You can get creative.
I like to do road trips, and Wendy’s has baked potatoes. I don’t eat the skins. They probably pour oil on it anyway, but you can find a way but you have to get creative. I think some people don’t take the first step into trying even a whole food, plant-based meal because they’re like, well, I’m tired. I’m busy. My mind is spinning, I have bills to pay, and this is just another thing I have to learn how to do. It’s kind of learning a new language. But once you do it, once you jump in, learn, and just try it, then it becomes very easy.
I travel with my Instant Pot. I learned that from Chef AJ. I will not go to a hotel that doesn’t have at least some form of a fridge. I just check in advance, make sure they have a fridge or mini-fridge, and I bring my Instant Pot always, always, always, and then go to the grocery store once we get there. We just do a little cookout in our room. There are even some hotels that have hot plates that they will provide for you if they don’t have a kitchenette. I found that out when we went to Idaho a few months ago. We just get really creative, but sometimes I’m tired, I’m hungry, I just want to like to do take out. This isn’t one of those opportunities to cheat or eat unhealthily. I don’t want to feel bad the next day. I want to feel better and healthier, so we got to get creative.
That’s where probably having some food either do big meal preps. You already have food cooked in the fridge. I can just go grab some cold sweet potatoes and eat them. Or have some meals that you’ve already made that you’ve frozen, so I’ve had to learn because I’m the one that cooks for our family. I’ve had to learn, and what I’m always blown away is how delicious your recipes are. So yummy. No wonder you can convert big firemen that love to eat steak to a whole plant-based diet because your recipes are delicious. I know that you’ve had some of your family members make these recipes as well.
[00:57:04] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. Well, Ashley, let me say that you have really embraced the lifestyle, and you got it going on between doing the bulk cooking for leftovers, and then freezing, but you get into a routine where you learn how to do it and it’s not that difficult and it’s so worthwhile.
[00:57:29] Ashley James: Absolutely.
[00:57:30] Rip Esselstyn: You mentioned the food being good. I mean, there’s no way that I could have gotten a bunch of Texas male firefighters to do this if they thought they were eating a bunch of rabbit food, twigs, berries, and nonsense like that. Literally, from the beginnings of this, it was always hearty—as one person said—mantastic food that fills you up and sticks to your ribs. That’s why, if you look at the Engine 2 cookbook or Plant-Strong, you’ll see that it’s a lot of pizzas, burritos, casseroles, stews, and chilies. It’s just hearty filling food. And of course, we’ve got our fair share of really big muscular salads as well, but it’s very intentional that the food leans towards being more firefighter man-friendly, and that’s not at all a knock on women.
[00:58:56] Ashley James: No, as a woman, I can say that we as all women—I will speak for all women—would be happy to bring home a cookbook for our male counterparts in our lives that they would embrace because it’s so delicious, and we’re secretly also helping them get super healthy. There are not a lot of whole food, plant-based cookbooks out there that would make a man feel like they could do this if they’ve eaten meat every day of their life. That’s what I love about yours is they are super hearty. I love the chilies. Oh my gosh, don’t get me started. I make them all in the Instant Pot by the way so it’s really easy to make.
What’s interesting about the Instant Pot, I don’t know how much you’ve looked into—they call them the anti-nutrients. Some people are really sensitive to—makes them have gas and bloating. But when you cook beans and lentils in the Instant Pot, it destroys the anti-nutrients. People that often go, oh well, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t eat that way because I’d get gassy. Well, if you use the Instant Pot, the pressure and the heat of the Instant Pot destroy the anti-nutrients and make it so much easier to digest and it doesn’t cause that gas problem. That’s why I love using Instant Pot for all the beans and lentils that I make.
[01:00:26] Rip Esselstyn: Isn’t that interesting?
[01:00:27] Ashley James: It is.
[01:00:28] Rip Esselstyn: Well, we have a rice cooker. I don’t have an Instant Pot, and I probably should get one. I know that Chef AJ would be very happy if I decided to get one.
[01:00:40] Ashley James: You really need to get one, and you guys should do like a little video together where she teaches you how to use the Instant Pot. I actually own three Instant Pots. Last Thanksgiving I made the most delicious—I came up with this recipe for like a shepherd’s pie. I got four huge disposable aluminum tins to bake them in because I got one for us for home. I brought one to the in-laws for Thanksgiving, and I gave two away. One to a funeral who were Seventh-Day Adventists, and they just lost their daughter in a car crash. I donated that to their funeral and they really appreciate that. I mean, it’s the least I could do. And then the fourth one was given to my friend’s family.
My dear friend Naomi went whole food, plant-based to reverse her heart disease, and then everyone else in the family started to. She has three sons and a husband. Now the husband raves about it, and her parents rave about it. But the three boys, they could never like the same thing. They’re all very picky eaters, and this was the first whole food, plant-based dish that all three boys and the entire family liked. The reason why I got three Instant Pots—because I used to only have one—is that when making it, I did the potatoes on one, the lentils on the other, and the vegetables in the third.
I made a layered dish because I was running out of time, so I ended up getting three Instant Pots to make the whole thing. I constantly use three Instant Pots. I’ll make potatoes, rice, sweet potatoes, or yams in one; I’ll make beans or lentils in the other; and then I’ll steam vegetables in the third. I hardly ever use my stove. If I use the Instant Pots, I hardly ever use the stove. It’s actually way quicker to use the Instant Pot, and the food comes out really fresh instead of something that’s been cooked too long. Anyway, I’m a raving fan of the Instant Pot. You should definitely get one and play with it.
[01:02:50] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you say all that because do you know who Nina and Randa Nelson are and Jeff Nelson and Sabrina Nelson—a VegSource?
[01:02:59] Ashley James: No, I don’t.
[01:03:01] Rip Esselstyn: Well, Nina and Randa, you should have them on your show. They had this awful cystic acne that was almost debilitating, and these guys were actresses and singers out in LA. They’ve been following a vegan diet their whole life, but what happened is they decided to then go off all the peanut butter, the tofu, and all the processed refined vegan stuff. Literally, within a couple of weeks, their acne cleared up. They wrote a book about it called The Clear Skin Diet, and it is phenomenal. But Jeff and Sabrina have been in the space since 1990. They were the first ones to start throwing some of these live in-person plant-based events.
But the reason I bring them up is I stay at their house sometimes when I’m out in LA, and they have three Instant Pots going all at one time. Typically in one, they have one some sort of grain, let’s just call it brown rice. In one they have a bean, so let’s just call it homemade black beans. And then the other one they have steel cut oats or oatmeal. At any point in time during the day, you can go in and take a spoonful of whatever you’re in the mood for and then you put whatever you want on top. It’s brilliant. I’m kicking myself that I still have not bought.
[01:04:30] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Guess what you’re doing this weekend.
[01:04:32] Rip Esselstyn: I think you might be right.
[01:04:33] Ashley James: You’re going to be playing with your new Instant Pot this weekend. When you call up Chef AJ for some advice, tell her it was me that finally pushed you over the edge.
[01:04:43] Rip Esselstyn: All right, I’ll say that Ashley James—
[01:04:46] Ashley James: Ashley James got you to finally get one. They’re so much fun. I burned a bunch of stuff the first time I used it, and I almost never went back. But then I think it was videos like Chef AJ’s videos that got me to try it again. You have to be willing to experiment and fall on your face in the kitchen. You’ve got to be willing to burn a few things because that’s how we learn, and it’s okay. Some of your meals don’t have to be awesome, but please, learn from those experiences because now I’m like such a passionate chef at home because food is the gateway to our health. You walk into your kitchen, you’re walking into your pharmacy. That’s just one of my favorite tools is the Instant Pot because it saves me so much time, but also it’s actually a health aide because it does break down those anti-nutrients for many of the grains, beans, legumes, and lentils.
Awesome. Now, you’ve got a program coming up. I definitely want to make sure we talk about it. You used to do—with thousands of people—these boot camps where you change their lives and then like you said, you documented it and wrote about it in one of your latest books. I got to see that actually because I met several Whole Foods employees who had been through your program. It’s life-changing, absolutely. I love the stories that came out of that, and then with COVID now you’ve gone digital, which is great because now actually more people can have access to this boot camp.
So you’ve got a program coming up really soon. Tell us all about it. What would we get by joining it? What is the experience like? And when what kind of people is this meant for?
[01:06:31] Rip Esselstyn: This will be our third virtual event of 2020. The first one we did was called the Plant-Strong Primer, and it was just for anybody that needed a little tune-up on all things plant-based for those who were new to the space. We had great attendance, and it was a whole weekend. The second one that we did was—we’ve had our annual Plant-Stock event for nine years now, and typically, it’s happened either at the backyard at the Esselstyn family farm in Upstate New York. And then recently, we moved it to the Black Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.
But when COVID hit, we had to figure out what to do. We moved it actually back to the Esselstyn Farm, and Plant-Stock is just a celebration of all things plant-based, and we have a wide range of really what we call the brock stars in the plant-based movement come and speak. God, we probably had 22 different speakers, but the backdrop of the whole event was the Esselstyn Family. We got to give people a really nice backstage pass to the farm, which was in Forks Over Knives and it’s been in a lot of different documentaries. It’s a very, very special place for the Esselstyns because it’s been in the family for almost 350 years.
[01:08:09] Ashley James: Geez, wow.
[01:08:11] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. We’re so grateful. As a family, we know how lucky we are to have this in our lives, this special resource. So we wanted to share it with people. That’s on my father’s side of the family, so my father grew up on this farm in Upstate New York. This next event that we’re doing on October 23 and 24, it’s called the Engine 2 Kitchen Rescue, and it’s actually going to take place in Cleveland, which is where I grew up. It’s where my father spent over 40 years at the Cleveland Clinic. But my father met my mother in Cleveland. He was going to Case Western Reserve Medical School. My mother grew up in Cleveland. Her grandfather was the founder of the Cleveland Clinic, believe it or not. In 1921 he founded the Cleveland clinic.
My mother’s father—we call him Barney—was just an absolutely revolutionary surgeon. He really single-handedly brought to this country instead of doing the radical mastectomy, he believed in the partial lumpectomy, which is not nearly as disfiguring. At the time it was considered a radical approach to treating breast cancer, but it is now the preferred method for breast cancer. I don’t want to get too far off track. My father was going to medical school. His father and my mother’s father both went to Yale and crossed paths because my dad’s father actually played football at Yale and was one of the coaches after he graduated. So he was one of the coaches for my mother’s father while he was going through Yale and on the football team.
It’s a small world, and my dad got invited over to my mother’s place for a meal. They met and they fell in love. This Kitchen Rescue event is going to take place at a place called The Knob. It’s this really phenomenal woodsy location in Northeast Ohio. It’s about 20 miles outside of Cleveland. It’s the second-highest point in Northeast Ohio, and you’ve got all these pine trees. The glaciers came through there and left all these crazy rock formations and white quartz pebbles everywhere.
[01:11:17] Ashley James: The Precambrian shield I think it’s called.
[01:11:19] Rip Esselstyn: Oh, yeah? Say that again. The what?
[01:11:21] Ashley James: I think it’s called the Precambrian shield.
[01:11:24] Rip Esselstyn: Wow.
[01:11:26] Ashley James: Because that’s what created the great lakes and all the terrain in Upstate New York and also Ontario, which is where I’m from, have these beautiful sections of the forest. There’s just exposed rock in granite and just gorgeous rock out of nowhere and these giant rock cliffs. Part of it was these big glaciers kind of scraped away and left behind. I think it’s called the Precambrian shield, but it’s a very unique landscape and just gorgeous, right?
[01:12:03] Rip Esselstyn: Oh, it’s gorgeous. The views, you can see over 7 ½ miles from this point all the way to Lake Erie. You can see the freighters going across on clear days. The cliff where you can get these views, it’s almost a 70-foot drop. There are sandstone formations everywhere, but this is a piece of property that has been in the Crile side of the family—my mother’s side of the family—since 1910. There’s this cool house that my parents built that’s on top of it now that’s made from these huge 5×3 foot sandstone rocks, and these huge Douglas fir beams that came from somewhere in Lake Erie that my father—one of his heart patients was a truck driver. And he got this truck driver to basically load up and go and bring back like 15 of these huge Douglas fir beams that serve as the part of the structure of this house.
But we’re going to have this as the backdrop to the Kitchen Rescue. We’re going to be making all kinds of fantastic meals going into the holiday season. Do you know who Dr. Will Bulsiewicz is?
[01:13:33] Ashley James: The name sounds familiar, but no I don’t.
[01:13:36] Rip Esselstyn: Okay. He wrote a book called Fiber Fueled.
[01:13:38] Ashley James: Oh, okay. Right, right.
[01:13:40] Rip Esselstyn: It’s so hot. Will will be joining us. We’re going to have a couple of amazing transformational stories, but mostly, it’s going to be time in the kitchen. We’re going to send out to all of our attendees all the different recipes, grocery lists that people want to cook along with us. We’re going to teach people how to read labels, pantry clean-out, what to put in place of some of the no-no’s that maybe a lot of us have in our freezers, our refrigerators, and in our pantries. It’s going to really be highlighted by my sister Jane, my mother Ann, my father, myself, and my brother-in-law Brian. Everything will be videoed. It’ll be live. This isn’t something that’s pre-recorded—it’s all going to be live. And then afterward, people will have access to the videos for up to a year. Anyway, in a nutshell—a big nutshell—that’s the extent of it.
[01:14:48] Ashley James: This is cool. Who should attend this? Is this for newbies, is this for people with major health problems? Who would get the most out of attending your upcoming event—October 23 and 24.
[01:15:03] Rip Esselstyn: Well, to me, it’s for anyone that is looking to get their head around some new exciting recipes, some mantastic recipes going into the holiday season. It’s for anyone that wants to be inspired, and it’s for anyone that feels alone out there and wants to feel like they’re really part of a very special family and community. What we discovered after our primer event in the spring and our Plant-Stock event in the summer is that the bonding that happens in the chat room over the course of the weekend is really special. And then afterward, we send everybody—that wants to—to a free community group where we continue on with all the relationships and the bonds that were formed over the course of the virtual weekend
[01:16:10] Ashley James: That’s very cool. I know several very happily married couples who have met in chat rooms much like what you’re describing. Also good for singles who would like to meet other singles who are looking to get healthy together. I always believe in divine intervention, just like how your dad met your mom. That feels a lot like there is some divine guidance going on and how I met my husband. It took a lot of divine intervention to bring us together.
[01:16:46] Rip Esselstyn: It’s funny you say that because there were people in the chat room during Plan-Stock that were like I can’t date anybody anymore that’s a meat-eater. I just can’t do it. I have to find somebody that shares the passion and the values that I have around plants. And then there are people that are divorced that are looking for somebody as well. Luckily, I am happily married and we have a Plant-Strong family. The kids are all on board, everybody’s on board with it. It’s really nice when you can have a united front with your partner, your kids, and your family. But I can tell you if I was starting over again—just like I don’t think I could ever marry a smoker—I don’t think I could ever, ever marry a meat-eater. Just the smell of the meat in the kitchen, cheese in the refrigerator, chicken breast, fish—I just find it all to be, frankly, just so revolting now.
[01:18:01] Ashley James: What’s really interesting about that—so again, my husband who ate beef breakfast, lunch, and dinner, maybe he had pork for breakfast. But that’s all he ate when I met him, and I tried to get him to eat something else other than meat. That was just meat, meat, meat every single day, and we’ve been married for 12 years. He just woke up one morning and said never again, never ever, ever again. Within a matter of weeks, he began to become disgusted by the smell of meat, by the sight of meat. He is actually completely turned off by it, and what a 180 degree just transformation.
But I noticed it in myself too, and I never ever thought. I saw it in him, I never thought it would happen in me. But I also noticed that the more you stay away from it, the more it actually feels unnatural to consume any animal or animal products, and I was very pro-eating animals before this. But it was my health journey that led me, and this podcast and interviewing because I want to interview everyone on all these different points. I want to bring in all the information that I can and to help people to heal because I suffered from many diseases including diabetes and reversed it with nutrition.
Just through my own learning and adapting this way, I noticed that my desires, my cravings changed now. I have a Pavlovian response to kale. I just start salivating when I think about plants. It’s really interesting how our bodies will adapt and change. I think for people who are still primarily meat-eaters, just try a meatless Monday, try just a few meals a week, or just try a seven-day challenge like the one that Rip wrote about in his book and just notice how great you feel. Let that motivate you to use food to heal your body.
Now, I’m very excited about your upcoming event on October 23 and 24—Plant-Strong Primer: Kitchen Rescue. It’s going to be delicious, I just know that. By then, you will have bought yourself an Instant Pot. You and hopefully all the listeners will get themselves an Instant Pot, and then we can all cook along with everyone in your live online event. The links to it are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.
It has been such a pleasure having you on the show today, Rip. You are welcome back anytime you want to come and share more stories of success, more information about your future events and books. We would love to have you back on the show.
[01:20:58] Rip Esselstyn: Oh, thank you so much. In closing, let me say one thing because I mentioned it earlier on and we didn’t ever have the opportunity to circle back to it. That is the answer to your food products that have been at Whole Foods for eight years. What’s happened is they have turned the brand back over to me. It was a ten-year contract.
[01:21:23] Ashley James: I didn’t want to ask in case it was really sensitive.
[01:21:28] Rip Esselstyn: No, no, no. It’s really good because now, what we’re doing is we’re revamping the whole look and feel. We’re giving the brand a whole refresh. Instead of being called Engine 2, it’s going to be called Plant-Strong. We are going to have a little Engine 2 in the upper right-hand corner just to give a nod because that’s the whole origin story at a fire station—Engine 2. But the packaging is so beautiful, it’s so colorful, and it’s so wonderful. And we’re going to have a limited variety of products at retail outlets including Whole Foods starting in February 2021.
We’re going to start with some veggie broth, then also some chilies, and some soups. And then online, we’ve started an e-commerce store where people can go right now today. We have the cereals and the granolas, and we have the pizza kits with the pizza crust and the sauce packs. And then we’re slowly, every couple of months, going to be adding more and more products to the e-commerce side of things. But in 2020, as we’re dealing with COVID-19, we’re just trying to figure out how to be smarter and more streamlined with our offerings and what makes sense. The D2C play, e-commerce, people are buying more and more food that way. This way, it allows us to get food to people—these premium products—at a better price point.
[01:23:08] Ashley James: Oh, great. Well, I love that. I just started buying all my groceries online because it just freed me up from so much time, and I used to love going grocery shopping. But with COVID, masks, hand sanitizers, and people looking at you worried like, oh, are you six feet away from me? I just don’t want to cause people to stress or live through that stress. I feel very, very blessed and fortunate to live in an area where I can have my groceries delivered, or I can order stuff online. I just ordered some whole food, plant-based cereal just last night. I normally don’t eat cereal, but I’m pregnant right now with our second child. My cravings, luckily, have been healthy ones.
[01:23:56] Rip Esselstyn: Good for you.
[01:23:58] Ashley James: Absolutely. Rip, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to attend your event coming up on October 23 and 24, Plant-Strong Primer: Kitchen Rescue. And of course, all the listeners are invited to attend as well. See you all in the chat, especially the singles who want to get healthy together. I just think that’d be so cool to hear some love stories.
[01:24:19] Rip Esselstyn: We’re going to do it. Just so you know, there’ll be several thousand people that will be partaking. This is going to be a big party. It will be a pre-holiday kitchen party where we’re going to get in, roll up our sleeves, and make potatoes, lasagnas, and pizzas together. It’s going to be a blast.
[01:24:41] Ashley James: Sounds great. Can’t wait. Thank you so much, Rip. Please, come back to the show at any time. We’d love to have you.
[01:24:46] Rip Esselstyn: Thank you so much, Ashley.
Get Connected with Rip Esselstyn!Website – Plant Strong
Plant Strong Podcast
Plant-Strong Foods
Facebook – Plant Strong by Engine 2
Instagram – engine2diet
Instagram – RipEsselstyn
Twitter – Plant Strong by Engine 2
Books by Rip EsselstynThe Engine 2 Cookbook: More than 130 Lip-Smacking, Rib-Sticking, Body-Slimming Recipes to Live Plant-Strong
The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet: Eat Plants, Lose Weight, Save Your Health
The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter’s 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds
Plant-Strong: Discover the World’s Healthiest Diet–with 150 Engine 2 Recipes
My Beef With Meat: The Healthiest Argument for Eating a Plant-Strong Diet — Plus 140 New Engine 2 Recipes
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