Check out the inventions that Eileen talks about in this interview: https://www.learntruehealth.com/ozone

For the coffee enema:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/enema

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

Highlights:

• Silver amalgam fillings and mercury
• Toxicity
• What ozone is
• Types of ozone generators
• Ozonated water and its many applications
• Glutathione
• Coffee enemas

If you’re looking to detox your body, try incorporating ozonated water into your daily intake. In this episode, Eileen Durfee discusses a host of benefits and uses for ozonated water. Get your energy back, feel healthy, and discover how it can help you on many different levels. Plus, Eileen’s got a treat for you, guys! Listen to this podcast, learn something new, and get an exclusive discount code for her ozone generator and other products.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today, we have a mind-blowing episode. A former nuclear powerplant engineer needed to become a health inventor in order to save her life and heal her body, and in doing so, has created some amazing inventions, which we talk about today on the show, and has gone on to save many people’s lives and improve the quality of life for everyone. After I did this interview, I came to the realization that every single household should have this device — that is that important. It’s like everyone should have a water filter, everyone should have an air filter. Those are important things. Everyone should have access to a furnace if they're living in an area that gets a cold climate, sort of like essentials, a hot water tank in your house. These things we take for granted. We think that it’s standard to come in a house, and I think her invention should be standard in everyone’s home that it would prevent so much illness and increase health dramatically. Just one thing. There’s over 10 things that this device does for you.

But the one thing is that it kills infections in the teeth, so it stops cavities before they become cavities. And if you use it every day just like a mouthwash, so you just rinse with it and you could spit it out or swallow, it prevents cavities. In fact, dentists use this, a holistic dentist uses this to even treat cavities instead of having to do a lot of drilling and filling with God-knows-what. Some dentists are actually still using metal amalgams which are so detrimental to our health. If you’ve been a long-time listener, you’ve heard of a lot of our holistic doctors talk about the importance of preventing, not using amalgams, metal amalgams, or mercury amalgams. Just who in the right mind thought it was safe to put mercury in the body that would live in your body for the rest of your life. Like, who said “Oh, well, I know mercury is dangerous, but let’s shove it in someone’s mouth”? Like, who does that? This is just such a crazy toxic world we live in, and common sense is not common. That’s why you’re listening to this show.

We have to be the outliers. One in three people in the United States have pre-diabetes or diabetic or have heart disease. It is so common. And 1 in 3 to 1 in 4, depending on whether you’re male or female, will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. If you’re in a room with three or four people, one of you is going to have cancer. One of you already has heart disease. One of you has pre-diabetes or is diabetic. And one of you is obese.

And I love you all, and I don’t want you to suffer and suffer. You should not have to suffer this way. But we have bowed down to the altar of modern medicine, which is Orwellian. I’m going to put my tin foil hat on. So everyone, get your origami tin foil hat for a moment.

George Orwell back in, you know, wrote the book in 1984, right? He talks about how everything is the opposite, right? If you call it healthcare, people will think it’s good. But really, look at our system, look at the state of health our country is in. Is this healthcare? Is this really healthcare or is this disease management where we’re waiting to get sick and then get on a drug that gives us more symptoms and puts more stressors on the body?

Now, I believe that allopathic drug-based medicine has its places. Amazing in emergency care. But if you’re listening to this show, you probably have one or more chronic conditions, and you don’t feel good and you want to feel better and you want to get healthier. So, we need to go outside the box of “modern medicine”, right? We need to go to holistic medicine, which is science-based. But what it does, instead of saying “what drug can I give you,” it says “what can I give your body so your body can heal itself.” 

So, today’s interview is about exactly this. What can we give our body to help our body heal itself? And sometimes, we need to lean on the latest in science and technology in the holistic space to be able to prevent infections like tooth cavities. Can you imagine if you had a machine for your whole family, all you had to do is slosh water in your mouth once or twice a day? And this kind of supercharged mouthwash was only discriminatory to the bad bacteria. And it had no ill health effects. It’s not a chemical, there are ill health effects. And your entire family, as long as you used it, would never have cavities. Do you know how much money you’d save? I have a friend who has three boys and all three of them, she’s constantly taking them to the dentist. It is costing her just crazy amounts of money to treat her sons’ constant tooth decay.

Some people, no matter how they eat, they have this. And my holistic dentist says it has more to do with the microbiome of the mouth. So, if we can balance the microbiome of the mouth, we can support not only our digestion, and as you listened to in a recent previous episode, we can support the cardiovascular system because the good bacteria in the mouth digest our food and creates nitric oxide, which is needed for heart health. So, if we take just regular Listerine or regular mouthwash, we're actually killing and wiping away all the good bacteria along with the bad. And that ends up increasing heart disease, which this doctor I’d interviewed before on nitric oxide, talked about those studies.

So, here we have a guest today who’s going to teach us what we can do in our home to increase our liver function, our detox, increase glutathione, increase superoxide dismutase, and it naturally kills and goes after infected tissue and sick tissue, but it does not damage the healthy tissue and the healthy bacteria.

One of those machines I think is actually quite affordable. There’s two machines; there’s like an at-home one of them and there’s like a professional one that large industries are using. The professional one is totally affordable, which I was really excited. I was surprised. When I went on their website, I was expecting it to be thousands of dollars. I’m like, “This is only a few hundred dollars. What?” So, I was really excited to see that. This is something we can all use to prevent so much illness but also support our body’s ability to heal itself.

So, strap yourselves in, and enjoy today’s show. Please share this with a friend of yours who is struggling with dental issues or detox issues because this episode is really going to help them. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Together, we’re going to help our friends and family and those we care about to learn true health and create true health. Awesome. Have yourself a fantastic day, and enjoy today’s interview! 

Oh, and one last thing before I forget. She’s giving us a discount – a coupon code. I asked her, “Could you please give my listeners a discount?” So, the coupon code is LTH which is I’m just so grateful that she’s giving us a discount. And you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone. That’s LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone and use coupon code “LTH”. The other thing we talked about, she’s an engineer so she’s invented some amazing stuff to help her save her life, which we’ll talk about in the interview. But the other link is LearnTrueHealth.com/enema where you can do coffee enemas and ozone enemas and other kinds of enemas, and we get into that a bit. 

And we’ve talked about it. Dr. Patrick Vickers. You can listen to my previous episode with him. He has a cancer clinic where people go to do the Gerson therapy method and they reverse their cancer. And coffee enemas are essential as part of the protocol because it supports the liver’s detox and also it makes the liver produce a lot of glutathione which is our master antioxidant. 

So, for those who are excited after hearing Dr. Patrick Vickers’ interview and wanting to know more about coffee enemas, she invented a no-mess, there’s zero mess, easy, easy, easy enema system that makes it super easy to do it without all the mess and the weird stuff. So, check that out. You can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/enema. That’s LearnTrueHealth.com/enema. And the links, of course, are going to be in the show notes on today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com and any podcast directory, wherever you’re listening from, go to the show notes in there, and you’ll see those links. LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone and LearnTrueHealth.com/enema, and make sure you use the coupon code “LTH” when you’re going to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone.

Have yourself a fantastic day and enjoy today’s interview!

[00:09:39] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 484.

I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on with us the master of health recovery, anti-aging, get our bodies to a point where we’re feeling amazing and looking 10 years younger. I’m chomping at the bit. I can’t wait to get in and dive in. We’ve got about 10 topics I want to cover, but we're going to do one at a time. 

Eileen Durfee, it’s so wonderful having you on the show. You’re covering things that I’ve been wanting to cover for years and today, we’re going to talk about ozone. But I want to have you back on the show to dive into very simple ways that we can detox like you have simplified coffee enemas to maximize the benefits without all the mess. And you’ve got a way to increase oxygen and immunity, to help with increasing nutrition and detoxification through our skincare. The list goes on and on. I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome!

[00:10:54] Eileen Durfee: Well, thank you, Ashley. It’s a pleasure.

[00:10:56] Ashley James: And you were saying before we have recorded, you said, “You should have seen a picture of me 10 years ago.” And I got to see you, we were on video together, and I got to see. You’re gorgeous, of course. But in the last 10 years, you have actually shed 10 years instead of looked 10 years older. You look 10 years younger. You could do like the 10-year challenge on social media and people would get it wrong. Unless if they knew you, they’d get it right. But people who didn’t know you would be like, “Wait a second. These are like 20-year-old, not 10-year-old challenge,” because you’ve actually lost 10 years when you’re 10 years older.

So, let’s just dive right into your story. What was going on with your health in your life that had you dig deep and discover how to restore the body and how to nurture the body to where it is getting healthier and healthier and looking younger and younger as you age?

[00:11:53] Eileen Durfee: Well, unfortunately, I’ve been sick my whole life. I’m 60 years old, and it started when the doctor ripped me out of my mom with forceps. Then as I started walking, my hips were twisted. The doctors x-rayed me and said, “She doesn’t have any abnormalities,” but I had to wear special shoes because one knee banged into the other knee. I was in pain all the time. I grew 9 inches in three months in the summer of the eighth grade. Then, I was run over by a car in a parking lot. It was like daggers being stabbed in my chest every time I took a breath. I couldn’t raise my arms, just very painful.

Then, when I was 19 years old, I got a silver amalgam filling in my mouth. And that was the downfall. I mean, became allergic to everything, was having hives all over my body, had psoriasis. My hair started falling out. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t remember anything. So, I started going down this rabbit hole. I mean, they had me on antihistamines which made me tired. 

Then, I started having problems with candida and cystitis, and they had me on antibiotics constantly. Then, I became allergic to every antibiotic and I didn’t find out until the mid-'80s from a doctor in Kansas that was going to do some allergy testing. He said, “Oh! You have leaky gut and candida. So, I went on nystatin and ketoconazole, drugs of course that keep that somewhat in check but do damage as well.

And I just couldn’t accept the fact that my body had to have all this medication. So, I started reading and learning and trying a variety of things where I was my own guinea pig. I did the Bernard Jensen, you know, Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management, where it’s colonics. I ate paleo before paleo existed. I did the avoidance where I wouldn’t eat the same thing within 72 hours or I’d become allergic to it. I would do the pulse test so I could tell if I became allergic to something because I had to carry an EpiPen, my lungs would close up. I had to crawl around because my feet were so swollen from hives. And it was very miserable – very miserable to say the least. 

And so, I started all kinds of things. I even got into electronic equipment, Rife machines, the multiple wave oscillator that was developed by a French man named Lakhovsky. He was friends with Nikola Tesla who helped him develop that. And, you know, the Hulda Clark zappers and just everything, the Bob Beck pulsers and zappers, and pulsed electromagnetic frequency machines. I must have had $50,000 invested in all these machines. And I was much better. But it took about an hour and a half a day to do my zapping, I called it.

One day, I was reading about hair analysis. So, it was just one more thing that I was going to try and that was the turning point in changing my life. But I had been through so much pain and suffering that it did, it caused me to dig deep. Not all hair analyses are created equal by the way, but the one that I chose, they don’t wash the hair at the lavatory because if you do, it takes away those water-soluble minerals, so the readings are not accurate.

But I went on a diet. I was pretty about 80 percent on the recommended diet and then the supplements. Now, lo and behold, I found out that some of the supplements that I was chasing my symptoms and medicating for the constipation, for not sleeping and all that, were further suppressing my adrenal gland and my thyroid gland and actually causing the joint pain that had been increasing.

So, it’s really kind of like Russian roulette when you start a supplement regimen because the wellness revolution does not look at the table of elements charts and how like, for instance, zinc lowers sodium and raises potassium, magnesium lowers sodium. The body is just like a plant. The farmers, for instance, to pick out what kind of fertilizer, they do a soil test and they don’t put nitrogen on the soil to raise nitrogen in the plant. With COVID, everybody’s going, oh yeah, zinc, let’s take zinc. Well, nitrogen releases calcium bioavailability in the tissues. Likewise, when we take any vitamin or mineral, it has this give and take where you move one, they all move. So, if somebody already has, for instance, too low of sodium in comparison to potassium and you’re taking excessive amounts of zinc, then they can actually become very susceptible to chronic infections.

So, that was amazing. I started feeling my anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and all these things were improving. I found myself not having to go sit in that multiple wave oscillator for 30 minutes to be pain-free. I could go days and even weeks without it. So, I was just amazed. Then they said, “Oh, get a retest,” and I thought, I’m feeling good, I’m not going to get a retest. Then after five months of taking those same supplements, almost all my symptoms came back and I’m going, what the heck? So, I did a retest, and the only change was instead of taking two tablets of this one supplement three times a day, we only want you to take one three times a day. You wouldn’t think that would be much of a change, right?

Well, all the symptoms within three days went away and gone, and then I was horrified. It’s like these cupboards full of vitamins that I was using. What did I do to myself? But the interesting thing, how all my inventions and all these things that I’ve created since then was because when your body has the right minerals and the cells at the cell level, these ratios, these homeostatic balances, that certain things can flow and happen, it will freely give up junk that it’s been using to survive. Like, the body will use aluminum for magnesium or cadmium for zinc, but those are very toxic. So, this process removed the reason why I had to be a jalopy, why I had to use a junkyard part like duct tape and baling wire to get from point A to point B. 

My body freely gave all that up and if anybody goes on a cleanse, everybody gets warned about, oh man, you can have Herxheimer reaction, you’re going to feel terrible, you know, you just got to tough through it. Well, that would happen. Your body would think it won the lottery and it would get rid of all these toxins. And so, there’s detoxification protocols that you can do to speed up that, get that, because it leaves the organs and tissues then it travels in the bloodstream. When it’s in the bloodstream, if you have insomnia, you might have worse insomnia. Then people give up. But that’s not what I did because I knew that I had to get it out, I had to get the preferred minerals in my cells for me to be like a new car with new car parts.

So, I upped the things I was doing to help my body escort poisons out like jumping out of a trampoline, dry skin brushing, drinking ozonated water which we’re going to talk about today, and doing near infrared sauna therapy. Just all these things to help the body. 

It’s just been kind of a journey because I was a former nuclear powerplant engineer, auditor, and trainer who then went into real estate development, and I designed and built houses and ran construction crews, managed non-profit organizations. When I started regaining my health and just had this passion and desire to share what worked for me, I started my business in 2010.

[00:21:39] Ashley James: I love it. When you were working in the nuclear power plant, were you exposed to anything? Do you feel like your health deteriorated in that environment?

[00:21:52] Eileen Durfee: I believe it deteriorated in that environment a lot of times because you worked 6-7 days a week, 12 hours a day, so the massive amount of stress. But also back then, when they were welding and when they were doing all these kinds of stuff, they didn’t give us fresh air or oxygen hoods or protect the workers like they do now. They really weren’t up on that. So, there was lot of exposure during those times to all sorts of chemicals and fumes. That was right about the time when I got the silver amalgam filling and it was just all downhill from there. Long working hours, stressing out the adrenal glands, then you’re going to be more susceptible to accumulating toxins.

See, if your endocrine system converts your food into energy pretty efficiently, then the body is going to be less likely to use the junk that it’s exposed to. So yes, that was the downfall.

[00:23:09] Ashley James: You had mentioned that the body when it’s missing nutrients, so the body needs the 90+ essential nutrients, the body needs to build the 37.2 trillion cells in your body, and if you’re not getting enough of one nutrient, like you said, it’ll use duct tape, it’ll use something that is not a great alternative. But it’s better than not being able to produce any cells anyway, right? We don’t see people just dropping dead of a vitamin C deficiency. The body kind of chugs along and it starts to develop symptoms. 

So, maybe your gums bleed every time you brush your teeth when you spit out and after you brush your teeth, it’s pink. You have a vitamin C deficiency and you could have other deficiencies along with that because people don’t normally have just one. It’s a pack. They travel in packs. Nutrients are like wolves. You don’t find them alone; they travel in packs. Because there are co-factors and we don’t eat single nutrients. When we eat a meal, it either has like very little nutrients because it’s junk food or highly processed food. But if you’re eating, let’s say, a beautiful salad that you grew yourself, that’s got all those wonderful enzymes, it’s got wonderful vitamins. If you have mineral-rich soil, it has wonderful minerals in it that have been digested by the plant so they are colloidal and your body is able to assimilate it assuming that you don’t have digestive issues and absorption issues.

But when we are deficient in certain nutrients, the body’s going to look to try to put the body together. You mentioned a few. Ones that I’ve heard so often are the halogens. Like, there’s fluoride in our water and our body will use that in place of like chlorine or chloride in water I think it is. We’ll use it in place of the healthier ones. Is there any other sort of replacement ones that you can talk about or touch on just how deficient we are and how out of balance we are when we just go around eating a bunch of processed food? In our past, we did a lot of processed food eating before we realized that we really needed to focus on foods that contained nutrients.

[00:25:31] Eileen Durfee: Even organic food grown today, I read a study comparing minerals. Yeah, I didn’t have the pesticides or herbicides on it. It wasn’t genetically modified. But it really didn’t have the nutrient values of food grown in like the 1920s. I mean, the USDA even says that our foods supplied today have 40 percent less nutrients in it. So when your body doesn’t have the nutrients it needs being a mineral or vitamins or what have you, it has to do something, and that’s called an adaptation. Because it’s like the key to the front door isn’t there so it has to go around to the backyard, climb up a ladder and break in a window. Why are we all fatigued? Because we have so many darn adaptations going on. The body has a lot of pathways to accomplish the same thing. It’s like a backup of a backup of a backup.

And every cell in the body has an enzyme-binding site. Enzymes don’t do anything new, but you can’t bat your eyelashes without enzymes. I mean, I do take digestive enzymes with my food, but if we had the right minerals and our body could get it to the cell-enzyme binding site, the cell would make enzymes for us, and then we’d be more energetic. It’s like the sparkplugs of life. 

So, a common toxicity that I see, that I’d really like people educated on is mercury. Now, that’s the worst one, in my opinion, because mercury will substitute for selenium and our thyroid gland has more selenium than any organ in the body. Our thyroid can become dysfunctional because we have mercury, and it doesn’t let the cell function. Like cadmium, it almost is like drinking caffeine. It will cause the cell to work, but yeah, it makes it brittle and causes all these other diseases, but at least the cell is functioning, where mercury permanently disables, it distorts the enzyme-binding site or it goes alongside the cell and makes it impossible for the right mineral to get in the enzyme-binding site, so it’s just like a cell that’s there that can’t function. Mercury is so toxic and you would not believe how many people have high mercury in their hair, and they don’t have silver amalgam fillings. But they eat high amounts of fish. So, fish, you have to be really careful about sourcing the types of fish or getting ones that are certified not to have all that mercury because it is just so toxic.

Now, I will eat, like, brisling is a species of sardines. Instead of just getting a can of sardines that any small fish can fit into, they’re half the size, the brisling species, and then they’ve got a lot of bioavailable calcium, good omega-3’s, and they taste good. But they don’t eat other fish and they don’t live very long, so they're not toxic. And likewise, I’ll always eat wild-caught fish, and I will do sockeye salmon. But other than that, if I’m eating halibut, bass, especially tuna, the mercury is so poisonous and it just gets in our body and does havoc. So, that’s one of the most problematic toxicities that I see in people.

[00:29:36] Ashley James: Tony Robbins, many people know him. He was at one point homeless, and now he’s a billionaire. He is a motivational speaker. A wonderful guy. I’ve listened to his work for many, many, many years. Recently in the last few years, he almost died. He was kind of pushing himself. He was on stage though, because he’ll be on stage for 8-12 hours doing these really intense weekend workshops with people where there’s like 2000 people in a giant stadium. He was feeling sicker and sicker and sicker until he was collapsing. They tested him and they figured out that his mercury was in the deadly, deadly range. 

Luckily, someone connected with him with a PhD. I’ve had him on the show. Chris Shade, PhD, who developed a type of mercury test that tested mercury and it’s three different forms in the body. Then they were able to get him on chelation and detox. They had to get it done very quickly. Chelation is not something for everyone because of how it often strips other minerals, it strips the body. But he was at the point where he needed immediate detox and emunctory support there.

So, he has just become this huge advocate support for really being careful. Now, he’s a billionaire, he’s a biohacker. He eats impeccably clean. He does not eat out. He has a personal chef. He eats incredibly clean. And he thought it was safe to eat, I think it was swordfish three times a day. I think it was swordfish. It was one of those big fish. And he doesn’t have amalgams. He didn’t work in a mine. He hasn’t been exposed to mercury other than he ate fish a few times a week. 

Now, people can just go out for sushi a few times a week or just go eat fish because they like fish or eat the Mediterranean diet a few times with fish a few times a week because they hear that’s healthy. They can develop incredibly scary toxic heavy metals and mercury in their body. And you might end up in the ER with all these crazy symptoms, that doesn’t necessarily mean the doctors will know what to look for because they’re not always thinking, “Oh, this must be a heavy metal problem, it must be mercury.” So, they’ll see that the thyroid is not working but they're not necessarily going to know that it’s mercury. That’s why we have to go to holistic doctors who are going to look at everything and understand the early warning signs. So, I love that you pointed this out.

Now, we’re talking today about ozone, but I know that ozone helps us in this way and supports us within this realm. Ozone really changed my life. I had really, really bad long-haul COVID symptoms. I had muscle weakness. I had to take one stair at a time, like I would put my foot up and then pull the other leg up to that step and then put one foot up, and I was grabbing the railing, pulling my body up. I didn’t really understand that this muscle weakness was from long-haul COVID because at the same time, I had lost my daughter last year during childbirth and then got COVID really, really bad all at once. So, the recovery, here I was six months later still recovering, but I noticed the brain fog was so bad I couldn’t remember nouns. It was like pass the thing on the thing was how I would talk because my brain wasn’t functioning. And I thought, okay, this must be grief and then I realized, you know what, this is more than that. So, I went to a naturopath here that does ozone IV and we did one session. It was a three-hour session of ozone. They would take my blood, put some ozone in it and then put it back in me and they did that ten times, so it’s called a 10-Pass.

When I walked up, because there’s a bunch of concrete steps going up into the clinic, it was the same thing, I had to walk one foot at a time. One foot and then bring that other foot up to the same step, so one step at a time going up into the clinic. Also in the place where I picked up Azure Standard, which is like this organic bulk food place, they ship direct to an area, and then you can pick it up instead of having to pay for shipping. So, I had two 25-pound bags of I can’t remember what it was, it was like lentils and brown rice or something. And when I was finished with my session, I was like, oh yeah, here let me pick up my order. I grabbed both bags and ran down the stairs, put it in my car, ran back up the stairs, and I nearly started crying. I’m like, my strength is back! My strength is back! My muscle weakness is gone. It’s like I got my body back. For about three days after, it’s like all the stress was gone and my body, I was in healing mode for three days straight. I was laughing with my son for the first time in six months. We were just having fun. We’re having like tickle fights. I was resting and sleeping deep. It was like my body finally let go of the stress and was in healing mode for three days straight. 

It was amazing. Then, the doctor told me that ozone, one of the things it does is it helps heal the mitochondria, and so she was going on and on about all the wonderful things which I want you to get into today. Because not everyone can go find a naturopath that does ozone IV 10-Pass, but there are ways that we can use it in our homes and get the benefits of it.

So, for me, I was so excited when I found out that you’re this expert on how to incorporate ozone at home safely and gain the benefits. Because for me, it helped me overcome something that I didn’t even know that that was as big of a problem as it was until I overcame it. I was like, wow, that’s such a huge difference. And I only needed one session. So, it didn’t come back; that muscle weakness didn’t come back. That brain fog didn’t come back. It was done, it was gone.

Another thing is my friend had cervical cancer, and she went down to Mexico and had 7 or 10 sessions every day of ozone IV and in a week, in a cervical cancer had gone away and she raved about it. She said that the doctor down there says that it explodes all the microbes in the body, allowing the immune system to finally do its work because it doesn’t have to constantly fight off all the sort of dormant and the microbes that are hanging around, waiting to take hold. So, it takes all that stuff out of the body, allows the immune system to focus on what it needs to focus on.

So, I’ve always been super curious about ozone and how it helps us on all these different levels. It’s not just one thing. It’s not just mitochondria. It’s not just microbes. It helps us in many ways. So, I’d love to go through and start learning all these different benefits.

[00:37:11] Eileen Durfee: Sure. It was one of the first things that I started on the natural side of taking care of my health. I learned about drinking ozonated water back in the 1990s. And I had an ozone generator which is different than the ones used for ozonating blood or another treatment that they do with people is they’ll have bags of ozone gas that they put up direct down in the vagina, in the orifices of the body.

Now, the type of ozone generator for those treatments must be fed with oxygen tanks, so that they’re ultra, ultra, ultrapure. But for water ozonators, a good affordable option is a Corona Discharge machine that uses ambient air as the source. Because we have about 15 to 20 percent oxygen in the air then nitrogen and with this Corona Discharge, it converts that into a strong ozone gas. Some people might not even know what ozone is, but it’s just three singlets, O1 + O1 + O1 of oxygen.

Now, in nature, things that are in pairs, positive and negative, are strong and stable. But like with three O1 molecules, the two are great but that third one is like a third wheel, it’s going to break off real soon. And that is one of the two miracles of ozone gas, is the O1 breaks off and it’s got a high oxidation potential where Ashley referred to her doctor about killing the microbes or the pathogens. 

The awesome thing about ozone oxidation, it’s not like an antibiotic where you create superbugs and they become resistant to it. It actually in the cell surface of the pathogen, it blows a hole and it oxidizes it, it destroys it, it breaks it down and it kills it. There is no mutating to survive oxidation. So, the miracle of ozone is its oxidation potential. 

One molecule of ozone, we’ll talk in the form of dissolved ozone because the ozonators that we're going to talk about dissolve ozone gas into water, so it’s like a liquid that we can use. We can drink, we can clean with it. But one molecule of dissolved ozone in water is like up to 10,000 molecules of bleach. So, immediately, your mind should be thinking “I can’t drink bleach. How can I drink ozonated water if it’s even more powerful?”

The answer is this: ozone is smart. In your body, healthy cells have an enzyme coating around them. So, ozone is selective. When you drink ozonated water or if you went to the doctor and they use the ozone in your blood or gave you ozone insufflation, that’s the gas like in the rectum or whatever, it does not destroy healthy cells. It will only attack the weak cells, the infected cells that don’t have that enzyme coating on them. Because every day, your body is making millions and millions of cells and recycling them. So, ozone whether you’re drinking it or getting your blood done or whatever modality of using ozone, it’s helping your body recycle those cells to build healthy cells. It’s anti-inflammatory. There’s all kinds of benefits of it.

But one of the other benefits that’s not really commonly thought about is the oxygen levels in the body. So, there’s water allocation mechanisms in the body, there’s oxygen mechanisms to allocate oxygen in the body. Because our body to survive has this minimum of what we need to keep ourselves healthy and, unfortunately, with most of us being indoors where the climate is controlled, with heating, ventilation and air conditioning system that’s stripping oxygen, negative ions out of the air, so when we're indoors working, we're breathing less levels of oxygen. But also, if you’re not active, you know, they talk about the sitting disease, people are sitting and working too many hours that’s why our fitness reminders are telling us to get up and move so many steps every hour. So, with sedentary lives, we can have lower levels of oxygen. 

The body actually allocates oxygen. It’s smart. It says okay, I’m going to protect the bone marrow over joint cartilage. I’m going to protect the brain over different other kinds of cells. So, cells actually when they don’t have enough oxygen lose the enzyme coating. And what that does is it makes the cell susceptible to infection by a pathogen.

So, not only is the oxidation of ozone so fantastic that it’s going to help your body recycle those cells so they don’t go rouge into cancer or something like that, the byproduct after that O1 breaks off is, guess what, pure O2. Drinking ozonated water boosts your body’s oxygen levels, so then it can protect more cells to make sure they have the enzyme coating around them, so that your immune system is stronger.

Another aspect. I guess there’s three things of ozonated water that are just absolutely phenomenal. It will be something if it only did one of them. We got two. Now, here’s the third bonus. The EPA, when there’s contaminated ground water, they drill wells and they have giant ozone generators and they inject ozonated water into the aquifer to break down heavy metals and pollutants.

Now, think about it. How much of your body is water?

[00:45:21] Ashley James: It’s 70 percent.

[00:45:23] Eileen Durfee: That’s huge. So, here’s another benefit. By drinking ozonated water, you can help decontaminate the liquid toxins in your body. It’s just so amazing. I don’t know of anything that’s this powerful at all.

[00:45:48] Ashley James: Can you dig in a little bit as to how ozone decontaminates?

[00:45:55] Eileen Durfee: It’s through the oxidation again. If the cell doesn’t have the enzyme coating, it will break it down. But when it’s exposed to petrochemicals and hydrocarbons and just all these different chemicals, because everything is just about the number of electrons spinning around the nucleus. Right? That’s all matter is. So, ozone gets in there and disrupts that structure and breaks it apart so it’s no longer what it was and it’s less harmful.

[00:46:35] Ashley James: Got it. For those who don’t know, ozone is three oxygen molecules where it’s normally air that we breathe is two oxygen molecules. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Ozone is less stable, right?

[00:46:53] Eileen Durfee: Yes.

[00:46:54] Ashley James: It’s less stable and so that third oxygen is kind of like shaking around, going, “Ah! I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something.” It’s unstable, it’s active. And this was my understanding, so please, please correct me or explain deeper. We have loose hydrogens jumping around in our body, which are free radicals, so they're piercing through, they're kind of like bullets in the body — piercing through the nucleus of the cells, damaging DNA. 

Just imagine if you’re shooting up these tiny, tiny, tiny bullets that are jumping through the body and just piercing holes into cells. And along comes this ozone, there’s this third oxygen molecule which is unstable and looking to create stability because there’s this magnetic pull. It will part from the two. So, the three oxygen, one will leave, and then now the two is now two oxygens, right? So then that’s what we breathe, that’s oxygen. And that one oxygen molecule will mop up two hydrogens, making water and, therefore, stabilizing. It’s like an antioxidant in and of itself. It’s mopping up those free radicals.

Then now, you’ve got oxygen in your body and more water in your body. And those are two things that are wonderful for your cells. 

So, is that an accurate description?

[00:48:28] Eileen Durfee: Yes. There’s additional studies on NIH.gov under PubMed articles that confirm the benefits of ozonated water. It increases glutathione, peroxidase, superoxide dismutase, catalase, prostacyclin, red blood cell glycolysis rate, and of course, we talked about the oxygen metabolism and it inactivates bacteria, virus, fungi, yeast, and protozoa. It’s like everyone should be using ozonated water, and I know that it’s not very popular because of people talking about our ozone layer, but, also, because breathing ozone is very dangerous. So, it’s hard to use this in your home and that’s why I created an easy-to-use degasser to make it safe.

[00:49:37] Ashley James: So, let’s back up. I want to touch on all those things you just said because it is really important that something that is incredibly healthy for you can also be dangerous used in the wrong way. Right? Like water can kill you if you drown in it. Water can kill you if you drink too much of it. But also, not having enough water will kill you. Right? So, water is incredibly good for you, you bathe in it. It’s absolutely essential for human life but used wrong, it is dangerous.

Ozone – incredibly healthy. One of the tools every single one of us should be using on a daily basis to create health and healing, and if used wrong can hurt us, just like water. So, I want to go on that, but I’d like to back up because I’d like to unpack that list that you talked about from the NIH studies starting with glutathione. A lot of my listeners know glutathione is the master antioxidant that the liver makes. It is so vitally important and I’ve used it before in the past as a supplement. I had taken it before just to see what it would be like, just to go hey, this is interesting because I’m into detox. I’ve had a real hard time with heavy metals in my past and I’ve been healing that through all these different modalities. And I can tell you that when I took glutathione, really, really high-quality glutathione, I felt like a different person. I’m like, wow! I can’t imagine like so. And then that’s when I went I really need to focus on my liver health and focusing on giving my body what it needs to up my glutathione because I should be feeling this way all the time. We should be feeling like on top of the world all the time.

So, let’s dive into how is it that ozone helps glutathione and why is glutathione absolutely so crucial to make sure that we have enough of it?

[00:51:31] Eileen Durfee: Well, after the oxidation and the oxygen boost, I don’t know how to explain why ozonated water increases glutathione production. I don’t know the biochemical, I’d have to ask my son who’s a biologist and a chemist to explain that. But I do know that it’s documented clearly in multiple studies that people can Google on the PubMed and read benefits of ozonated water.

I do know another hack to increase the body’s production of glutathione 600 percent, which we’ll have to talk about another time is coffee enemas.

[00:52:21] Ashley James: Yes, definitely. We had Dr. Patrick Vickers on a few episodes ago and he has a cancer clinic where he helps people with the Gerson method. Gerson plus, I would say, because he has added on some things since Dr. Gerson’s time that amplify the results he gets, where he helps people’s bodies. He supports the structure and function of their bodies to get rid of their own cancer and just feel absolutely amazing. They do six coffee enemas a day and it’s necessary because of the huge amount of detox you need to support the body. When you are killing trillions of cancer cells, when you’re killing all those cancer cells off, your billions and millions —

[00:53:07] Eileen Durfee: The toxins will kill you, not the cancer.

[00:53:09] Ashley James: Exactly. That’s what Dr. Gerson saw back in the ‘50s. He saw that people, if they didn’t do the coffee enemas, they would die of the toxins that would build up from killing cancer too quickly. So, we have to support the emunctory systems to release the heavy burden on the body, and of course, now, our bodies are more burdened than ever. We have 80,000 man-made chemicals in our air, our soil, our water, and our food. These are forever chemicals, they're endocrine disruptors, they’re obesogens; they are harming us for generations. They actually epigenetically change our gene expressions.

We are totally messed up as a race. We are completely messed up from the last 40 years of all the damage that’s been done to our environment and to our food. And so, we need to take matters into our own hands. We need to be very diligent with our food, but we also need to be incredibly diligent and double down on our detox protocols.

That’s why I love coffee enemas. But also, I love ozone. And I’ve only scratched the surface in my research but I do know that it helps with the Krebs cycle. I think that has something to do both with the energy in helping the mitochondria heal. I think there’s something about the glutathione. These things, again, we should talk to your son because I studied biology, but I’m like 101 level biology, and we need to get into like PhD level biology to really dig in.

What were those other points you talked about?

[00:54:46] Eileen Durfee: The superoxide dismutase. Back when I was allergic to everything, I had these Sod pills, superoxide dismutase, because it would cut the reactions, those enzymes. It’s just amazing. Catalase, prostacyclin, red blood cell glycolysis rate. It’s just everything that our immune system needs to function and to survive, that’s what ozonated water can do for us.

And one thing that I don’t know, probably dates me, but I think it was back in the 1980s, there was this Alpine ozone machine. Everybody was using these ozone generators to clean the air and finally, the FTC made them quit selling them because a lot of people, including myself, I’d be breathing large amounts of ozone gas and not knowing that I was actually harming myself. At the time, I had a lot of gut problems where I had bloating and indigestion, which is a direct result of inhaling ozone gas in too high of a level.

I still run across people who say, “Oh, I love the smell of it. It makes me breathe deeper.” I was talking with my son about, well, what’s going on? Why is it bad to breath over .1 part per million ozone in the air? After a while, we had another discussion. He says, “Well, mom, it’s competing with the oxygen receptor sites in the lungs.” So number one, that deep breathing that people are doing is a homeostatic survival response mechanism, so it’s not that their breathing is improving; it’s like trying to overcome that life-threatening circumstance of lower oxygen levels.

[00:56:58] Ashley James: Kind of like carbon dioxide. You’re starting to breathe heavier because you’re trying to get the oxygen in, so it’s competing with the oxygen. That is interesting. I love the smell of ozone. When there’s a thunderstorm, you could smell it in the air. Like there’s certain times when there’s a naturally occurring ozone and you could just smell a little bit of it. But that is really interesting.

Yeah, I was told once that ozone, when you breathe it in, it is like an oxidant for the lungs. Even though it’s an antioxidant for the body, when it gets in the bloodstream or when it gets inside the body, but inside the lungs it’s going to attack the lungs in a negative way, so best not to inhale it.

Our dentist, we have an amazing holistic dentist and he treats cavities and things like that with ozone. The first thing they do, they take a scraping of our mouth and then put it up on a big screen under a little microscope so we can see all the spirochetes and the bacteria, and he can point out what kind of bacteria and whether they cause heart disease and that kind of thing. So, he points out all the different kinds of bacteria and then encourages us to brush twice a day and floss twice a day to get rid of the biofilm that these guys basically build the condo buildings in between your teeth that we got to get out with the dental floss. Then he has us rinse with ozone water because it destroys the bad bacteria before he starts doing any work on the mouth. Like let’s say he scraped the gums as he’s cleaning, he doesn’t want that bad bacteria to get into your body, so he has us rinse with ozone water often and then he uses ozone to treat small cavities and if there’s ever any kind of dental surgery they need to do, they're using ozone before, during and after to increase healing time and significantly decrease infection rates.

My husband had a root canal and when they opened up the root canal to do the work they needed to do, they're like, this doesn’t smell at all. They're like if you go to any other dentist that doesn’t use ozone, it will smell like garbage, it will smell like decaying death. Because all they do is use antibiotics. They don’t use ozone to clean it out first. And our dentist was like, it doesn’t smell like anything. That’s because they use ozone to clean it out. So, it should be used by every dentist. It should be used in so many industries. So, I’m a really big fan.

Superoxide dismutase. I had a guest on recently who said that it’s like one of the keys to life. It’s one of the keys to everything. And he just geeked out on how important superoxide dismutase is to our existence, to our healing, to our health that for him it was one of the major factors. So, just the fact that this is just one of the many things that ozone does for the body is really exciting.

Let’s go back down that list. Was there anything else that you could dive deeper into that helps with?

[01:00:07] Eileen Durfee: As part of the immune system. I’m more of like creating the better widget to get the job done that we’re going to use and making it safe and making sure that it’s nontoxic. And just knowing that it did that was good enough for me, so I did not dive deeper into that. I mean, I explained about the oxygen metabolism and how it prioritizes to protect certain cells and with the enzyme coating, so that’s pretty much part of what it does there. Of course, any of the bacteria, virus, fungi, yeast, and protozoa, it is actually blowing a hole in the cell structure to kill it so it can’t mutate against it.

The one thing about ozonated water is like literally for the city of Los Angeles, they ozonate the sewage water and it’ll end up being as clear as drinking water. So, every pathogen has a concentration and a duration that’s required to kill it. Like E. coli for instance, we’re talking about let’s have good food supply. Well, let’s clean our food before we eat it because everything is grown in dirt so we’re not getting E. coli, listeria, salmonella from our chicken and those kinds of things that can cause food poisoning because the ozonated water, like at .1 part per million, can kill E. coli in 15 seconds.

[01:01:44] Ashley James: What?

[01:01:45] Eileen Durfee: My ozone generator produces 1.5 part per million. I mean, literally, practically on contact, washing your vegetables in ozonated water will kill it. You can take a black light. You know how they say don’t rinse chicken, you’re going to get salmonella everywhere. I always rinse my chicken in ozonated water. You take a black light and it’s crawling with salmonella before, and then it’s gone kind of like your dentist putting it up on the screen, showing you. So, you can make your food safe.

I did want to touch on why it damages the lungs. I do know about that. See, the lung tissue is full of lipids. So, the oxidation of lipids is very sensitive to ozone. It doesn’t take very much of it all and it’s oxidizing that tissue. It’s kind of like getting a sunburn. So what inhaling ozone gas does immediate to the lungs is it causes permanent lung damage. It’s like a sunburn on your lungs.

[01:02:59] Ashley James: Oh, wow!

[01:03:01] Eileen Durfee: Then, when it goes through your body, it causes the gastric bloating, upset, those kinds of things where these people that brag about they love the smell of ozone, it makes them breathe deeper, I go, “Oh, do you have problems with indigestion and bloating?” Oh, yeah. And I go, well, stop breathing ozone gas and see if that goes away.

I had this one person get back to me and say, “Oh, my gosh! That’s gone. You mean I caused my own problem?” I’m going, yeah. That’s why the EPA says not to breathe it.

[01:03:40] Ashley James: When you talked about the enzyme coating on the cells, the healthy cells which protect it from the oxidative stress of ozone, so ozone only attacks things that are infected or pathogens, so viruses, bacteria, fungus, mold, all that stuff, so it’s going to attack, it’s going to go after those, it’s going to go after infected cells and weak cells. What about cancer cells? Do cancer cells lack the enzyme coating?

[01:04:10] Eileen Durfee: Yes, they do.

[01:04:14] Ashley James: So by drinking ozonated water every day, would we be feeding ourselves with that additional support system that attacks the cells that don’t have enzyme coating? 

[01:04:25] Eileen Durfee: Yes. Before they can go rogue, it’s going to help your body recycle them because you get these Frankencells that start growing really fast instead of being recycled. Because every day, every single one of us have cells that are like pre-cancer cells, but our immune system recycles them. So, this is just giving us a leg up. It’s helping us do the job. Besides your doctor had told you that it’s killing the microbes, the level, the load of microbes so then your immune system is free to do the job of keeping your body from having cancer or recovering from cancer.

[01:05:21] Ashley James: I love it.

[01:05:22] Eileen Durfee: So, ozonated water is great. You definitely need to use a degasser so you’re not breathing it. And I made a simple gizmo that can hook up to any typestyle of ozone generator to get the job done. I got the utility patent for it and yeah, it’s just amazing to be able to make some ozone water and not have to leave. Because I used to just turn out the exhaust fan and leave and then come back after it was safe. But then it’s like I’ll forget that I ozonated water because I get doing something else. And ozone in water, that’s the other thing. You can’t go to the store and buy a bottle of ozonated water. Because depending on temperature, pH, and total dissolved solids in the water, that reaction where that third singlet breaks off could be anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, and then it’s done. It’s done.

[01:06:38] Ashley James: Bottled water companies that are saying you’re buying ozonated water. So, a friend of mine, she just moved her clinic, and she was ordering like a new Culligan service that was going to like Crystal Springs or something that was going to deliver her a bottle or two, these giant bottles each week so that her and her clients could drink the water. She goes, “Should I get the kind that is pH and ozonated?” I’m like, sure, why not? I mean, I’m all about the pH water as long as you’re not eating, like you don’t want to drink alkaline water while you’re eating because you don’t want to alkalize your stomach acid. Alkaline water is great in between meals. And I said, you know, I don’t know. I was honest. I don’t know much about ozonated water but I think ozone’s really cool. And I thought in the back of my mind, I wonder how stable that is. Because they do it in their factory and then it gets shipped to her, what, a week later, two weeks later, a month later.

[01:07:39] Eileen Durfee: All bottled water companies have ozonation and it is simply to keep the microbes so it passes their bacterial test. It’s just for sanitation during. There is no way. There is one company who has a patented pressurized type container that can keep the ozone active from breaking down. It’s a special technology. But just your bottled water and Culligan, I mean, I’m a fan of Mountain Valley Spring Water that I get delivered in 5-gallon glass bottles because it’s got the natural minerals in it, and it’s got the sacred geometry, the surface tension in the water so that it’s more hydrating to my cells versus purified water that’s been ozonated and maybe some minerals added back in there, but it’s not alive like spring water just going through those rocks and creating the structure and the sound from all of that is like life in water. Water is so important for the body.

[01:09:01] Ashley James: I had a doctor on the show who swears by that same water and he has it delivered it to him. He says it’s the only water he drinks. He said something about the depth and the structure of the water was so superior to everything else that it hydrated the body better. He had the scientific explanation for it but I was like, water is water, right? It’s like, wrong.

[01:09:24] Eileen Durfee: No.

[01:09:25] Ashley James: I mean, I believe obviously in filtered water but the water that comes out of your tap is actually structured differently than water that comes out of deep springs or artesian wells.

[01:09:35] Eileen Durfee: Yeah. And the energy, you know, it is dead. You look at it under a microscope and it’s like dead water. In reverse osmosis and distilled water, just rip minerals from the body, it’s worse. So, a lot of people are drinking the wrong kind of water. But yeah, water is so important. Oxygen is so important, and that’s why utilizing an ozone generator in your home can just really help with the body hydrating and getting the oxygen. Because oxygen is going to help your body hydrate, too. 

[01:10:16] Ashley James: I’m a big fan of glutathione, the killing of any kind of cell that’s not healthy for the body like cancer and infected cells, the killing of microbes. Does it disrupt parasites at all?

[01:10:32] Eileen Durfee: Yes, it does. Parasites is kind of like there’s not really a silver bullet. I’m a fan of telling people to do their coffee enemas because how it changes the pH and all that, bile that gets produced makes it harder for them to live, and obviously, having oxygen-rich because the hypoxic areas of the body are where these things are going to thrive. So, if you can reduce the amount of low oxygen areas in the body, then you’re obviously to reduce the amount of parasites. Really, digestive enzymes, having enough stomach acid to kill some of these things, but making your food safe. I’m a big fan of breathing clean air so you don’t have to detoxify what you just inhaled.

Likewise, prepping your food, so you’re not ingesting parasite larvae to complete its life cycle in your body. Let’s minimize the amount that we got to have to try to go on a cleanse to get rid of. In Europe, in a lot of the other different places, people will go on antiparasitic cleanses and things like that. In America, it’s like, who does it? Maybe some of the people in the biohacking community, but I imagine the general population are just full of parasites.

[01:12:09] Ashley James: Yes. I’ve had several doctors, the holistic health professionals that say that easily at 1/3 of the world’s population, including Americans have parasites, easily 1 of 3 people. So, it’s definitely something. And we used to do – we used to do annual parasite cleanses a hundred years ago. That was the thing up until about 100 years ago. We’re really blind to the health practices that we have been doing for the last 10,000 years — the health practices that we’ve developed in the west. I’d say in the east, there’s certain practices they’ve been doing for over 5000 years because they work. Right? Like annual parasite cleanses.

And we’re completely blind because in one generation they were able to switch people through great marketing. They were able to switch us from doing our own herbal medicine and homeopathy which there was homeopathic hospitals in 1918. There were herbal hospitals/herbal medicine. These were places that you could go and get natural proven, safe and effective treatments. Then along came pharmaceutical-based patented medicine that is derived from the petroleum industry and the byproducts of petroleum, and they saw a market and they went in for great amounts of marketing and developed this style of medicine. And through the brainwashing of marketing and PR, they were able to make us forget that we ever did these things on a regular basis to help ourselves.

If we could all go back and talk to our great-great grandparents, oh my gosh, the amount. I wish we could all go back in a time machine and learn from our great-great and great-great-great grandparents. And those young men and women could teach us how to grow healthy food, how to eat healthy, the herbs and the plants we could go into the forest and pick and heal our bodies with, but those were the things that they did and they had to do.

Now, we wait to get sick and then get put on a drug that manages symptoms and doesn’t help our body heal from the root cause, like heal from the ground up. Right? So, that’s why all the listeners are super excited to learn how they can heal their body because we have to take matters into our own hands.

So let’s say we have some water, we have an ozone machine, we have your device that makes it so that we can make our own ozonated water in a safe way, so we're not inhaling it. We could put it, what, in a spray bottle and spray down our counters. You say it lasts about up to 30 minutes, so we have to make some and then put in like a glass bottle and then spray down all our counters. How does it work to use it as a cleaner?

[01:15:20] Eileen Durfee: Yeah, you can put it in a spray bottle and spray it down or you can just take a clean rag, have that wet and then just wipe things down. So, there’s several ways of doing it. I’ve got a large model that farmers use that screw a hose in, screw a hose out, and put like a mister on the end of it and they’ll mist plants because it kills powdery mildew and this and that. Or they’ll spray down grow rooms because it kills everything better than bleach does. I’ve got people using it to bathe their pets in. One 4-H farmer sprays down his pig pens every day when he slops the hogs and no flies in the pig pen, if you can believe it, because it killed the larvae. And now, he doesn’t have to put miticide on any of the animal’s eyes.

[01:16:30] Ashley James: Wow! So you’re talking about farmers spraying down plants because it’s killing the bad stuff. But my question is, what about good bacteria? So, we have good bacteria in our mouth, in our gut. The whole lining of our intestines has good bacteria that aids in different functions. The good bacteria in our mouth helps us to make nitric oxide. And I had a whole episode on nitric oxide and people who use mouthwash which indiscriminately kills all the bacteria, the good and the bad. They have higher rates, significantly higher rates of heart disease because they have lower nitric oxide. So, we want to do everything we can to support the body’s ability to make nitric oxide and, in some cases, even supplement with it.

Then, of course, there’s bacteria all throughout the lining, the entire intestines from mouth to anus, and it helps us to digest and assimilate our nutrition and it’s even like a pharmacy. I’ve had several episodes where we talk about that six pounds of bacteria in your gut is like a pharmacy that actually makes these compounds, these healthy chemicals take our food, makes stuff for us, and then we uptake those chemicals like a healthy pharmaceutical and our body uses it. So, we have this wonderful relationship with this six pounds of health bacteria in our gut. Does ozone disrupt healthy bacteria?

[01:17:58] Eileen Durfee: I was on a doctor symposium about two months ago and one of the researchers there that uses ozone did a study, and ozone did not kill the good bacteria. Now, that’s been up for debate for a long time and so, I’m waiting to be able to get my hands on this study once he publishes it. Now, personally, I rinse my mouth with ozonated water. I brush my teeth in ozonated water every day. I haven’t had a cavity since I was 19 years old and I don’t have any gum disease and my gums are healthy. I’ve been doing the ozonated water thing since about 1996. I wash my face in ozonated water. And I drink one glass of ozonated water on an empty stomach in the morning. Not with vitamins because that can break down the goodness of the vitamins and stuff like that.

I know that CancerTutor.com, they recommend cancer patients drinking up to two liters of ozonated water a day, it’s not a standalone cancer protocol. It’s just something that helps raise the body oxygen levels. I mean, I take a good bacteria capsule morning and night just because of how important the gut bacteria and stuff are. But there’s going to be more and more studies coming out about how selective ozone is, how it doesn’t damage the cell with an enzyme coating and how it doesn’t hurt the beneficial bacteria. So, these are going to be exciting things. 

[01:20:01] Ashley James: Just thinking about like for example, children who have a sore throat or children who have ear infections gargling with it, like how you would say okay, you take colloidal silver or gargle with salt water to help kill the bacteria, kill the infection. You could gargle with it. Could you take a few drops and put it in an ear if there’s an outer ear infection? Can you put it on, if there’s a rash or if there’s an infection in the skin or like cystic acne, does it help in those kinds of applications?

[01:20:37] Eileen Durfee: Yeah, I actually had a customer, her legs were so bad and infected that they were almost ready to amputate them. And she was using my first instant on-demand ozone generator and she would run ozone water on her legs and then in little strips and she’d saturate it with ozonated water and then she would wrap them on her legs. The before and after was incredible because all of the lesions and the deep infections in her legs were healed. She had smooth skin.

So, you’re going to want to do something with besides just washing it if you’ve got something really going on with your skin, you could create same bandages and keep the moisture of the ozonated water while it’s active on the problem area. Now, there’s a lot of people who sell like ozonated olive oil in a paste that you can put on your skin for things like that.

My ozone generator is not set up for that because that actually literally takes over a week of constant ozonation to turn an oil into a paste. But those are very healthy for skin issues. I mean, we have our own skincare line with tallows and stuff, they’re very, very, very healing. That’s kind of like on a different nutrient nourishing level. But yes, ozone on the skin, I think that’s why my skin looks so good is I’ve washed my face in ozonated water for many years.

[01:22:34] Ashley James: So every day, we could just wake up in the morning, hit the button, make ourselves some ozone water, drink it, use it, slosh it around our mouth, use it when we brush our teeth, wash our face and clean down our counters, water our houseplants to get rid of the bugs. You could feed it or bathe the dog in it, feed it to the animals, put it on our garden outside. The list goes on. I’m starting to think about all the different applications.

[01:23:08] Eileen Durfee: Yeah, well, I had one rancher that had chickens. He hooked up the bigger unit on a timer to dispense ozonated water in the troughs of the birds. So, the first thing that happened is he never had to clean algae out of the troughs anymore. The second thing that happened is the birds started drinking more water. And they were healthier because normally, from hatching chickens to growth in adults, you just have some birds that die. Ever since he put in the ozonators, he didn’t have any birds die. It kills bird flu on contact.

[01:23:57] Ashley James: Oh my gosh!

[01:23:59] Eileen Durfee: So, literally, they had a washing machine with the one that has the venturi injection where they would clean the rags and stuff, because that stuff is very contagious, so any of the work overalls or anything like that to have it cleaned there to keep things in check. And they started spraying the fly pens because a lot of the chickens too will get lice and different things on their legs and things like that. So with this constant spraying kind of like the pig farmer, any of the eggs, it would cause not as many of them to hatch. So, the populations of just all the stuff that you’d have to deal with reduced.

Then as far as watering ozone plant roots, the one big machine that I’ve got has a dial on it so you can go maximum for foliar feeding. Because foliar feeding, they did a study on onions and cucumbers. It got rid of powdery mildew, mold, but the side effect was the same crop area produced 40 percent more. So, the plants love it when they uptake it through their leaves and so then you’re not having to put stuff to deal with the mold and the mildew and things like that. But then the plants are healthier, they grow more, but for the roots, you really have to dial down the ozone so that the soil microbes stay good and balanced, but yet then it’s up-taking the oxygen.

So, there’s just so many ways and industries where ozonated water can be used, and now, you could do it at home.

[01:26:17] Ashley James: Just the bird flu. My family’s plant-based but I have a lot of friends who rely on chicken and eggs as part of their diet. Several of my friends are freaking out because the bird flu is wiping entire farms across the states, just wiping them out. And there’s a deep concern. I mean, we’ve already seen like a bit of a food crisis in that the prices have gone up, inflation, and that the supply change has been disrupted for the last two years. There’s many farms that have stopped growing crops for various reasons. We’re seeing issues. And then, now, we’re seeing the bird flu. Just crazy.

I don’t know if you know about this but in the last few years, they had to cull more pigs than the entire population of China. It was some wild number of pigs. They had to cull because of the swine flu that it’s like Ebola for pigs. They had to cull so much that it disrupted their food supply and they stopped exporting many of their key foods in the last few years. There’s all these disruptions, right? We’ve got the crops in Ukraine and in Russia disrupted from the war. So, we have all these disruptions and then to add on, in addition to that, in the United States entire chicken farms and egg farms completely destroyed and decimated from the bird flu/the avian flu. And so, if we were to get this ozonated water in all of the farms, it’s leading to a better quality of life.

[01:28:11] Eileen Durfee: This machine that I have has a handle on it with folding legs. You screw a hose in from your faucet and you want the hose to be no longer than 10 feet long. Then, you screw a hose on the outset of it and if you have that more than 10 feet long, you need an inline pumper. You can get that 3/8 inch. It’s like a coiled hose with the sprayer you see on it. Then you’ll have enough pressure to spray and mist and I tell you what, the chicken farmers that I have, one of them just breathing, that’s one that I was talking about, and there’s other ones that are doing the 4H and the home thing.

But it’s normally like these big industrial type ozone machines, they’re making and spraying in the vineyards and all that, most small farms, they don’t have $25,000 to $30,000 for that. And this little machine, it’s a little over $2,000 and you could have this machine and take it and use it wherever you need it. And it produces up to 6 parts per million. It’s a bad boy man. It is powerful.

They did a study where they scrubbed cow feces on the walls. There’s like 50 different pathogens that can grow out of cow feces. They took different concentrations of ozone and sprayed it on there and figured out what it would take to kill it, and you need 4 parts per million. So, my big Tri-Oxy Complete Machine, it makes 6 parts per million. It is just like an annihilator man.

So, that’s meant for using outdoors or in larger areas where you don’t have to worry about breathing too much ozone gas. The growers that are using it in greenhouses, what they do, is like the painters who paint houses, they have that airless paint sprayer, they just fill up a 5-gallon bucket of ozonated water, and they hook it up to their airless paint sprayer, and they’re spraying the plants with ozonated water that way so it coats them completely. So, there’s ways around not having to be in fear about that stuff and protect yourself.

[01:31:05] Ashley James: And all the chemicals. That just eliminated so many chemicals from our air, from our water, from our food, and from our soil. What if every farmer used your machine? We’d be able to eliminate so many chemicals. It’s just amazing.

[01:31:23] Eileen Durfee: I read a study on strawberries, where not only did they not spoil it as much, but their nutrient concentration of ozonated strawberry plants, the produce, the berries actually was higher. It’s just like, is this a miracle or what?

[01:31:46] Ashley James: Well, it makes sense, right? So the plant loves it; the plant uptakes it more and it disrupts the bad microbiome, allowing the healthy tissue to grow. Then because the plant is so happy absorbing all that, it’s absorbing more nutrients as a result. So, that just makes so much sense.

Now, ozone kills mold. So, someone could use it in their bathrooms when they clean, on their windowsills. Like when they see mold in their home, they could be using this as a nontoxic way to combat mold.

[01:32:20] Eileen Durfee: Yes. But also, the ionic refresher, I have a plug-in gizmo that kills 99 percent of pathogens in the air. And every time you flush the toilet, you’re sending E. coli everywhere in the air. And keeping those in your bathroom really reduces molds, spores, and everything else in the air.

But yeah, you go at it from because you don’t want mold spores in the air, but you got to clean mold off of surfaces too. One in two homes have a moisture problem according to the government. And I used to build 12 houses a year and ran construction crews, so I’m very informed about moisture problems in buildings and things that people need to create a safe home.

[01:33:13] Ashley James: And your machine helps us do that. I’m really, really excited because the problem is, is we are using so many chemicals in our environment just to clean. People that don’t know, right? They're using like baking soda or vinegar or something, like spraying down the house with vinegar and then the house attracts flies and smells like something fermented. But that’s what we deal with. We’re realizing everything under our kitchen sink is dangerous for us.

An early interview I did a few years ago was with a woman who puts a device in your home and it’s like an air filter that captures particles. Then, she takes the machine and plugs it into a computer and based on the particle – so this is just air that’s in your home, like you’re walking around breathing in your home. You don’t smell stuff unless you have like Febreze plug-in thing. You’re not smelling anything, right? So she has this machine, you put it in your living room and basically breathe your air just like you breathe your air, and when you breathe, there’s fine particles of chemicals in your air that’s floating around. Your air is not pure unless you have these amazing HEPA air filters all around.

So, you’re breathing in chemicals in the air. And we don’t smell it, we don’t see it, we don’t taste it. We don’t realize that what it does is when it gets into our nasal cavity and then we swallow it and it goes down into our stomach and we absorb it, then it gets into our body, our liver has to process it, it gets into our adipose tissue and hangs out basically until we get overly toxic and then maybe we lose a little bit of weight and something happens. And now it’s released again into the body and the liver has to do something with it again. It just kind of keeps cycling through the body over and over and building up and building up and building up.

But it’s so small and we don’t see it or taste it that we don’t realize it’s there. So, this little machine breathes in our air just like we do. And then, she analyzes it and she can tell you, get this, this has just freaked me out, she goes, “I can tell you which Mr. Clean you are using based on the chemical readout.” The Mr. Clean that is in your cupboard, in your kitchen or down the hallway in your bathroom because every plastic bottle in your house, and if you have an attached garage, every can or jar or bottle of chemicals. So think about if you have an attached garage, all the stuff for automotive, all the paint stuff. Just everything you’ve got in there. All of your stuff you got under every single sink in your house is off gassing all the time. Your liver is processing every chemical that’s in a bottle in your house all the time.

Because these are not like her medically sealed bottles, they’re plastic. And so, it actually leaks through slowly. But it’s this constant slow drip of toxicity and as we’ve heard from many people, many experts that our indoor air population is ten times worse than outdoor air population. You live in New York City? Go outside and breathe the exhaust out there. It’s probably better than what’s trapped in your house because of everything that’s off gassing.

So, if we can get rid of all the junk, all the chemicals and the junk that’s under your sink, and replace it with something that actually works better as a cleaning agent that actually works better as a disinfectant agent that’s safe to wash our produce with, to wash our counters with, to wash our floors with and everything, and wash our face with, and is incredibly effective, that decreases the toxicity in your life while at the same time increasing your health. So, I just think it’s a much-needed device on all those ends.

For those who are excited to dive in and look into it, they can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone. Tell us about the different devices. Once they go there and they’re seeing your systems — you’ve talked about farms versus the home — is it sort of one size fits all or are there different ones that you would explain that people could get based on their needs?

[01:37:47] Eileen Durfee: I have two ozone generators. One that’s called the Tri-Oxy FRESH. It’s a countertop model. I have a nice video on that. And that uses diffusion where we give you the silicon tube with the different diffusers, balls, cylinders that you submerge in water and you can turn on the machine. It’s got a touch panel and a remote control, timer, and all that kind of stuff.

Then, we have the bigger one that has folding legs, it’s all stainless steel with the handle. It’s kind of like the monster that you screw a hose in and screw a hose out that’s got the adjustable from 0 part per million to 6 parts per million. See, the smaller one is 800 mg/hr. So, it’s just under 1 versus this other one producing 6 parts per million.

Basically, you can use the big one with the hose. I have people hooking it up to their washing machines. I have people hooking it up for the farming needs, for watering systems. Then the one for the countertop model, that also comes in a kit. You save money when you buy the kit. There’s this ozone water sterilizer, food, and enema prep kit. It doesn’t have your enema kit in it but it’s got the degasser and the Tri-Oxy FRESH generator. So, you save money buying that together. And you can buy them individually. If somebody already has their ozone generator, they can get the degassing kit.

And that’s it. So, there’s really just the two systems. The big one uses venturi injection. The difference between diffusion, which we didn’t get into, that’s what you use in the water bottle plants. They use diffusion where they’ll have bubbles going up these towers to ozonate the water. So, the smaller the bubble, the quicker it dissolves into water because it’s got more surface area. It’s like versus sand in a container versus rocks in a container. There’s more surface area in sand than the bigger rocks. 

With the FRESH, you’re given multiple different diffusers that have a variety of hole sizes, so you can dissolve ozone gas really fast, which is nice because the ozone generators that I used to buy when I’d use it every day would wear out in a year. I’d have to buy a new machine and when I designed mine, it’s like, man, I don’t want that to happen. So, I have the 8000-hour ozone generator so it’s going to last years and years and years, but still, if I can ozonate water, dissolve the ozone gas in the water faster, that’s better. Because diffusion, only 15 percent of the gas that the machine makes dissolves in the water; 85 percent of it goes to the air. And it’s the absolute reverse for the diffusion, the big guy, 85 percent dissolves and only 15 percent goes in the air.

So, with that degasser, you’re going to get some diffusers that instead of having to run it with the container of water for 30 minutes, you can ozonate that container for 5 minutes. It’s going to extend the life of your ozone generator besides protect your lungs.

[01:37:47] Ashley James: Fascinating. With the countertop one that does 1 part per million in an hour, is that enough to use therapeutically?

[01:42:11] Eileen Durfee: Well, if you ozonate cold water for instance, I have had a meter and measured, it’d all make up to 1.5 parts per million. And that is like the oxygen-fed ozone generators produce less ozone concentration than the corona discharge. So, this is way sufficient for anything that you would want to do with your drinking water doing an enema with ozonated water.

Another comment I wanted to make is that corona discharge still has .003 percent nitrous oxide, and that’s why you cannot use it for ozonating your blood or doing the insufflation with the gas. So, don’t think you’re saving money by buying this unit and not having to have the prescription for the ozone tanks. You can only use this for ozonating the water that you would drink or maybe follow up with an enema or cleaning your food or sterilizing your counters. That’s what this machine was created for – to be easy to use, with the degasser of course.

The degasser is just a 32-ounce glass jar with a handle that has a filter cap that you screw on and the filter media that you put in there one time, which I have a video on how to do it, it will last you 10 years. You only have to put it in there once, screw it on, and then it just basically is copper manganese pallets that when ozone gas interacts with it, it causes that O1 molecule to immediately break off. So then, the only thing left that comes out in the air is nonflammable concentrations of oxygen. So, it’s totally safe. I had one of those ambient meter tests, and sure enough, it degasses 100 percent, so it’s very effective.

[01:44:35] Ashley James: Very cool. I had a man who he healed his own cancer and has gone on to help others do the same and he swears by doing daily enemas with ozonated water or the other way, which is basically getting a bag of ozone gas and holding it up your rectum like a reverse fart. You just have to hold it up there and then it gets into your lymph system and into your venous blood flow system the same way with the coffee enemas, so it gets in you. But it’s not straight IV. Right? That’s something different and a different machine. He swears by that.

He also said we really should look at other countries to see what they're doing and which countries have better rates of success. Because when we compare America, for example, has one of the highest death rates for infant mortality of the industrialized the world, has the worst outcomes for chronic disease. We spend the most money. We’re the number one. The only thing we’re number one in health is we’re the number one spenders of money for a healthcare system that doesn’t work. It’s a healthcare system that’s broken, that has some of the worst outcomes in the world for, when I say industrialized nations, other countries that have access to the same pharmaceutical medicine.

So, the problem is, why are we continually going back to the system that is broken that is continually keeping us sick? It’s because again, it’s like the wolves of our eyes. We don’t know that there’s a better way out there. In the UK, in the EU, in the European Union, it is allowable to give a cancer patient ozone. It’s allowable to do hyperbaric chambers to do treatments where they bring the body up to 109 degrees while protecting the vasculature to the brain. They bring the body up into a state of fever, like getting in a sauna but even higher. With the heat shock protein, it helps kill most cancers. Same with ozone that it’s used and it’s allowed. In the United States, oncologists are not allowed to use those medicines. They are only allowed to do surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and now, there’s been a few immune drugs that still fall under the category of chemotherapy as far as I’m concerned. But they're not allowed to go, oh hey, let’s do a hyperbaric chamber, let’s raise your oxygen levels, let’s do some ozone. They're not allowed to do that. 

Why do we have to go down to Tijuana, Mexico to cancer clinics? There’s cancer clinics lining the border with American doctors who have to go across the border to give you medicines that you can get in hospitals in Europe. Why do we have to feel like we're criminals going across the border to Tijuana, Mexico to do something illegal in the States. Why is finding a better solution illegal in our country. We have to start questioning the status quo because the status quo is killing us. Right? So, that’s why I love your machines. This is something we should all have access to, and people in other countries do.

So, I absolutely am so excited for the solutions that you bring. Of course, listeners, go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone, you’re going to see that. Then, you had said to me before we hit record that you wanted to make sure our listeners got a discount, so please give us some more information on that and anything else in terms of buying this that people should know about.

[01:48:41] Eileen Durfee: I would definitely buy the ozone water sterilizer prep kit because that’s $399.99 versus paying $249 for one and $219 for the other. But I’m going to give Ashley a special coupon code that she’s going to have on her ozone page that you can use for the next 30 days to buy anything on the ozone page and get your discount.

[01:49:13] Ashley James: Thank you for giving us a discount. I really appreciate it when guests do that for us.

So, in terms of the enema kit, you said that there’s all these different kits. Just break it down for us to make it real simple. What should we get when we want to treat our bodies to get better health, to get optimal health. We also want to make sure we’re washing our food, cleaning our counters, that kind of thing, but we also want to do the stuff that helps our body detox and get all the benefits that we talked about throughout the whole episode.

[01:49:46] Eileen Durfee: Yes. We have a standup no-mess coffee enema kit. I call it “the enema fix.” I always gave my clients the two-week coffee enema challenge. If I could just get a person to do it daily for two weeks, I’d never have to ask them again to do it, but the common complaints are… and some of them weren’t excuses. People had back pain or they have problems with their knees, and it was too difficult for them to lay down. Then the people that could, when they would get up, when they had to eliminate, then fecal water matter would go everywhere and make a mess, and so people weren’t too fond of doing the coffee enemas just because it was such a mess, even though it made them feel fantastic.

So, I had a client that was bound and determined to do the coffee enemas. This is back when I had a bag that you could turn inside out to clean because the bags, you couldn’t clean them, so I got one that I could turn inside out. He wouldn’t lay down, but he stood up and he painstakingly rolled the bag so it pumped the fluid up inside him, so he was doing the coffee enemas standing up.

That gave me an idea to get like a pump. And I had a little pump bottle, I would have to fill it up multiple times and the hose was kind of short, and so, I created an adaptor to fit on a glass jar, and by the way, not all glass even though it’s food-safe is toxin-free. So, my glass jar that I had made for both the enema fix and the degasser is SGS certified, and I put all my product testing on the website, too, so there’s transparency there. But I created a jar with a handle that’s 32 ounces, so you can pour. I use my spring water. Then I brew up some coffee and just pour a little bit of that in there. That way, I’m taking room temperature water with hot fresh brewed coffee, pour it in. That way, there’s no waiting. It’s just perfect tepid temperature. Then there’s an adaptor with a pump. So, you can prime out the liquid and you can stand in your shower, and you can fill up with half of it or whatever is comfortable, then you can just massage up your ascending colon across your transfers. Then, when you need to eliminate, you just sit on the toilet. 

So, it just took all the medicine. I was one of those people that I spent $300 and I had a Climaboard. As a matter of fact, I bought three because I was going to make a better one because I didn’t like all of them. But that’s a lot of money for people to have to invest in and after I created the pump, I don’t even use my Climaboard anymore. I put it up. Because this, it’s just cleaning the bottle, not scrubbing the laying surface and all that kind of stuff.

But go to the enema page and there’s the standup no-mess kit. It removes every excuse and you can just enjoy yourself, meditate, you could work on your fascia while you’re in the shower. You can do a lot of different things. I always try to stack my hacks because how else are we going to fit all these wonderful into our daily life?

[01:53:43] Ashley James: Yes, right. I love that idea that we could be using like a fascia brush or we could use a lymph brush and be moving our lymph flow while we’re doing it. We could do some stretches. Well, as long as you’re holding that Kegel, you could do some light stretches. You could be singing in the shower. The acoustics are fantastic. So, there’s all kinds of fun you could do. How long do you do a coffee enema for? Five to 15 minutes? Or is there like a sweet spot?

[01:54:13] Eileen Durfee: The sweet spot in those studies when Hitler’s army was cut off from supplies and they were operating on soldiers without anesthetics and the pain relief was so unbelievable, that’s for a university study, and they found that all of the caffeine and palmitic acid was gone from the rectal solution in 12 minutes. So, I always tell people, I mean nobody’s going to be able to hold it for 12 minutes the first time. You just don’t have those rectal muscles to balance. So, that’s part of that two-week challenge. By the end of two weeks, I bet you can. But I just tell people don’t sweat it. If you can hold it a minute, great. Or three or whatever it is. That’s the purpose of that nice 32-ounce glass jar because you could do half. And then, when you’re done eliminating, you can fill up again. You know, whatever total hold time, our goal is to get to 12 minutes.

[01:55:17] Ashley James: Yes. I like that you said you could do half. Because you don’t have to use all 32 ounces at once. Really, you just need a little bit of liquid in the rectum. This isn’t the American “if some is good, more is better.” I always have to remind myself. We’re not filling the entire colon with coffee. This is a little like one cup, half a cup, one cup to start. Just a little bit, right?

I notice that I would do is first of all, I would do an enema just with warm water just to clean out and then I would do half of the coffee and sometimes I would be able to last one minute, two minutes, and then sit on the toilet. Then that next go, I could go for 15 minutes. As long as I did my little cleanout beforehand and kind of psych my body up with the first installment of coffee, which this coffee is not like Starbucks. It’s very different. And we’ve talked about it with Dr. Patrick Vickers but I’d love to have you back on the show t go into more detail because it is so important as a regular health regimen, as something you could do daily, or weekly to support your body and your liver in detoxification and getting rid of parasites. There are so many benefits to this.

For people who are facing major illness, they want to do it more often. For someone who just wants to maintain health or just a little bit of a leg up, it’s a wonderful solution. I always feel amazing after I do it. And it does become a little addictive simply because of how good you feel afterwards and how good you feel for the rest of the day. You can really feel the difference it makes.

I’m going to make sure that the links to everything are in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone. I’ll also do just to make it easy, I’ll make a link, so LearnTrueHealth.com/enema. That’ll go straight to the coffee enema solution that you’ve made it tremendously easy because man, I can’t tell you. I’ve spent a lot of money on different enema kits and they all are frustrating, and so I’m really excited to try yours because you figured out how to take the mess out of the whole process and make it easy. If you can make something quick and easy, just as easy as brewing a cup of tea or coffee, then we’re going to do it. But if there’s like 20 steps like these other coffee enema kits out there, then the harder it is, the less likely we are to do it. So, you’ve taken the work out of it, made it so that we can easily integrate it into our daily habits for health. And I really appreciate that.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you being here today and I can’t wait to have you back on the show. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:58:31] Eileen Durfee: Just that trying something new is going to get you different results. With the ozonated water, don’t do it at night because it’s going to give you a bunch of energy. People don’t realize how lacking of oxygen they are and when their body has it, you’re just all energized. So, you maybe find yourself drinking too much coffee in the morning. That’s why doing ozonated water in the morning is so fantastic because it just gives you that natural energy that your body is looking for.

[01:59:14] Ashley James: Love it. So there’s that and then there’s also the coffee enemas. Then, you can take the coffee enema kit and use ozonated water, right? 

[01:59:25] Eileen Durfee: Yes!

[01:59:26] Ashley James: So we can also gain the benefits of that.

[01:59:27] Eileen Durfee: Yes! And don’t mix. Don’t mix. Okay, this is the other thing. Remember, ozone oxidizes and breaks everything down. It changes their structure. So we want caffeine and palmitic acid to remain intact. We don’t want the ozone using up its power by breaking down the goodness out of the coffee. So, you have to do them separate.

[01:59:56] Ashley James: Got it, got it. Could you be brewing or simmering the water like that’s kind of getting ready, and you go and you grab the ozone water, and you run into the bathroom and do an ozonated water enema, and then you sit on the toilet, clear out, and then go grab the coffee and then do it?

[02:00:21] Eileen Durfee: Yes, you can.

[02:00:22] Ashley James: So it could be part of the whole routine. How long should we hold the water in the rectum, the ozonated water? Again, this is, what, like a cup of water. It’s again not like a colonic where you’re filling your entire colon. We just need a little bit, so a few ounces of water. How much water is good and how long is good given that the machine, like you said, can make 1 to 1 ½ parts per million? 

[02:00:55] Eileen Durfee: So your body temperature, the higher the temperature, the quicker it oxidizes. So, as you put the ozonated water in your rectum, you’re going to find that it’s oxidizing quite quickly. So, five minutes should give you a lot of benefits.

[02:01:20] Ashley James: Got it. Do we need to use cold water, or can we heat the water?

[02:01:26] Eileen Durfee: Well, it’s up to you. I have a meter that measures ozone, and I actually have an ozone generator set up on my shower.

[02:01:43] Ashley James: Nice.

[02:01:45] Eileen Durfee: So, cold water, I had it at 1 part per million. The hot water, like a hot shower, is .3 part per million. So, you’ll be able to achieve higher concentrations of ozone in the water when it’s cooler. But I would just recommend the tepid because that’ll be somewhere in between. It’s not a hot shower. It’s not ice cold. So, it’s going to be somewhere in between. Like room temperature water, you could get it to 1 part per million very easily.

[02:02:21] Ashley James: And that should be fine. I mean, people who are new to enemas though, maybe start with internal body temperature. I think for those who are not used to enemas, then they put cold water in the rectum, it can cause cramping and kind of shocks them a little bit. So, it’s just like drinking a really, really cold ice water when you’re hot and you weren’t expecting it to be cold and you’re like “ooh!” and the body reacts. So, you want to ease into it. Everything should be easing into it slowly. 

Great. I love that whole idea, that process that we could use the ozonated water for an enema for a few minutes while the coffee water is preparing and then go get the coffee water and do that enema. And the whole process is going to take about half an hour because again, you’re not holding it for a very long time. But this, although half an hour out of someone’s day when they're very busy seems like a lot, something you can do in the morning, wake up a little earlier, go to bed a little earlier, wake up a little earlier. Then, the entire rest of the day, all your cells are singing. Everything is working better that it’s just so exciting to think about your liver is functioning better, it’s making the glutathione, all the antioxidants are going through the body, all the pathogens are exploding and your body is able to recycle those damaged cells. Just all the benefits go on and on.

So, thank you so much for coming on the show. Please come back and continue sharing about the things that we can do to incorporate into our life that we’re not taught, that we should be taught. This should be something that’s in everyone’s home. In Vegas you buy a house and there’s water softener just already there and there’s reverse osmosis just already under the sink. That’s kind of standard for certain parts of America. There should be an ozone machine inside people’s home. This should be something that we have access to because of all the numerous benefits. But it’s up to us – it’s up to us to do it.

So go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone, check it out. I can’t wait to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for all this information today.

[02:04:30] Eileen Durfee: Thank you for having me, Ashley.

[02:04:32] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. I am so excited to get myself one of these ozone machines. I’ve been thinking about everything I’m going to use it for. Our family doesn’t have a lot of cavities. We’re better than most. But just the thought that we could prevent cavities for the next 10-20 years or more, that we could have better oral health, just that alone is really exciting. And to be able to use ozonated water to treat scrapes and little skin infections and maybe my son in 10 years will start developing acne as he goes through puberty, who knows, and just be able to wash our face with that. Of course, everything is about balancing the microbiome. And so the idea that we can support ourselves in this way, support our liver and support our bodies in detoxification, use ozone to mop up those free radicals, those extra hydrogen.

Here’s something you might not know. A former guest recently explained this. You know pH, right? Everyone knows alkaline versus acidic. I’m sure you’ve heard, if you’re listening to a holistic health podcast, you’ve heard, “Oh, we want to eat alkaline. We want to make sure that our body is in a state of alkalinity. The alkaline diet and drink alkaline water.” Of course, don’t drink it while you’re eating. You actually want your stomach to be acidic. There are times when certain parts of your body need to be acidic like your stomach when you’re digesting. The first 75 percent of time that you’re digesting is acidic and then right before the stomach dumps its contents into the small intestines, it neutralizes. So, about an hour or two, maybe two hours after you’ve eaten, you can start drinking alkaline water. If that’s your thing, cool.

But here’s the thing: pH is actually the measurement. So the H is hydrogen. It’s the measurement of loose hydrogen bombarding the body, like I had said, like bullets bombarding the body. So, if we have more acidity, we actually have more loose hydrogen bombarding the body, like bullets piercing through our cells, damaging DNA, which you might know that damaged DNA can turn into or it’s hypothesized that damaged DNA turns into cancer. But also, the more damage we have to cells, we have premature aging, that’s not good. The more damage we have to cells, the more our body has to use up its resources to heal and repair and restore rather than fight off illness and rather than create optimal health, so our body is always just sort of maintaining like rebuilding after a war instead of getting to that next level of health.

So, if we can mop up those free radicals and prevent those free radicals, then our body goes into a state of balance and then it can use all of its resources, enzymes and energy towards becoming even healthier. I’m just so excited for all of us to know this, to use it, to experience it. Please come to the Facebook group. If you’re going to get one of these machines or if you have already gotten one, come to the Facebook group and please, please, please share your experience.

Now, she’s only giving the coupon code for the next 30 days, so I hope you’ve listened to this episode in the first 30 days. After 30 days I’m going to ask her if she could extend that, so I’m hoping she does. So, still try it out, go to LearnTrueHealth.com/ozone, try the coupon code “LTH”. I’m going to go back to her and see if I can get her to permanently extend or something, give us something because I really like giving you guys specials from my guests that I have on and extending that to you guys.

So, if you’re going to use the machine, come to the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook Group. You can go to it by searching LearnTrueHealth.com/group. Come to the Facebook group and share with us your experience. I want to know, I want to hear, what you’re using it for, what’s your health benefit. Let’s talk about this machine.

I have had guests on the show that talk about using this style of machine for their personal cancer protocols and immune boosting protocols. So it’s interesting to hear about the other applications which we talked about throughout the podcast. And I’d love to hear why you’re going to use it and what you’re using it for. So please, come to the Facebook group and share. Or if you have any questions, let’s start conversation and I can see if I can get her to come into the Facebook group and answer those for you. So, come to the Facebook group, let’s start the discussion about today’s episode and I’d love to see you there.

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. It’s through sharing that we’re going to get the word out and help as many of our friends as possible to end their suffering.

You know, about 10 or so, actually it’s been longer than that, 11 years ago when I started to get my health back, which is really exciting. So, let’s say about 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago, I was crying myself to sleep almost every night. I was tortured by a sick body and I wanted out, but I didn’t know how. It wasn’t until I found this naturopath I started to discover this information and it was one step that led to another. And you don’t know in your life the people you care about, because I didn’t tell anyone how miserable I was. I didn’t. Buy you could have looked at me and you could have seen that I was not doing well. I did not look healthy. I did not feel healthy.

Look at your friends and family and those you care about. If there’s something that just might look off, like maybe they're not happy, maybe they're living in a body they're not happy with, maybe they're feeling symptoms and they're not telling you, share my podcast with them because you don’t know that might be the one friend who’s crying themselves to sleep in their pillow so sick of the suffering, living inside the prison of a sick body. And they don’t even know this information exists. So, please, be that hero in their life. Be that angel in their life and share with them an episode that may give them the hope that may open the crack in that door that shows them a whole world of healing. 

I had chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections in which I was on monthly antibiotics for. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told I was infertile after a battery of tests by an endocrinologist that I’d never have kids. I was so sick that every morning I couldn’t get out of bed until about 11. I couldn’t process human language in the morning. The brain fog was so severe. I was constantly hungry; I had to eat every 45 minutes. It drove me nuts. I was so sick. It was agony being in my body. And how many people did I bump into or come across that knew about holistic medicine that knew about these answers but were too shy to tell me? I finally, finally, finally found it. And you can have someone in your life that might be suffering and may have been told just like me by their doctors that they’ll always have this illness. 

Here’s the thing. My doctors told me you just have to take these drugs, you’ll always have type 2 diabetes, you’ll always have chronic adrenal fatigue, you’ll always have these chronic infections, you’ll always have polycystic ovarian syndrome. When I discovered naturopathic medicine and true holistic naturopathic medicine, and I went down that rabbit hole of changing my diet, changing my lifestyle, taking really, really high-quality supplements from TakeYourSupplements.com, when I did that, that’s when within three months I no longer had diabetes, my chronic adrenal fatigue started to go away within 5 days. I woke up on day 5 feeling like a million bucks. And I had been sick for years.

My chronic infections went away the moment that I shopped the perimeter of the grocery store, meaning don’t go in the aisles and buy processed food. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store and choose organic. I was just doing an experiment. My chronic infections went away. That’s how important going organic and not eating processed food is to the immune system. And I thought, holy crow, what else can I heal just by making one change?

So that’s what my whole podcast is about. This one change at a time that you can make, that you can say hey, what your doctor has told you is a lie. Because all those doctors that said to me I’d be on these meds my whole life, I’d always have these problems, you know, my bloodwork has shown for the last two years that I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s actually been longer than two years, but I’m just remembering back to the last few doctor’s appointments. All my blood work shows I no longer have it. My A1c is 4.7. For those who understand diabetes, that’s amazing blood sugar. I have outstanding blood sugar. Type 2 diabetes is reversible within three months. It’s just crazy that doctors are going on and saying you have to be on metformin and insulin the rest of your life when it is lifestyle and diet, and in some cases, it’s a mineral deficiency as well. So, we address that. TakeYourSupplements.com has an amazing blood sugar protocol for increasing insulin sensitivity.

So my point being, that we can heal. And you, our listeners, so I’m already preaching to the choir, but you might have someone in your life who’s suffering and they don’t have to suffer anymore and you have the answers, but maybe you’re afraid to share it, please know there are people in your life just like me who are crying themselves to sleep suffering deeply. And it takes a little bit of courage on your part to say, “Hey, do you want to listen to this podcast I’m really, really enjoying? They might have some answers for you.”

So, I’m just putting it out there because my goal is to end the suffering of millions of people that no longer need to suffer. Eventually, I’m going to get on the radar of big pharma. I am praying to stay under the radar here. But I want to make a difference in millions of people’s lives. And you’re part of that. You’re part of that. I have talked to listeners who are like “I tell everyone!” I had a listener who printed out laminated cards like business cards with Learn True Health podcast and how to listen to it and every single person she came into. I was like, I love her. This is it. Because she understands that people no longer need to suffer. We are able to heal. We are able to heal the body. The body is able to heal itself. We just have to give it what it needs and get out of its way.

That’s what my goal is with each episode, is to extract that information for you and condense it so that you can walk away after each episode going “Okay! I got an action in plan. I’ve got some steps I can take.” So, please share it, come to the Facebook group if you haven’t already. We have very active conversations about health and healing, it’s wonderful. So many people are helping each other and I try to answer every single one. I’m pretty sure I do. It’s every single post we have between 1 and 8 questions a day that come in. I’m in there and we’re all in there answering each other’s questions and helping each other. And I’m discovering resources too. We’re all helping each other in the Learn True Health Facebook group.

So, come join it, share with your friends. Thank you so much for being a listener. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

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Get Dr. Mark's free download: www.sherwood.tv

https://www.learntruehealth.com/483-your-quest-to-wellness-how-to-self-heal-through-food-dr-mark-sherwood

Highlights:

• Diseases and the two major causes of death in the United States
• Allopathic versus naturopathic/holistic medicine
• Sleep dysregulation and emotional trauma
• Inflammation in the body and its effects
• Cortisol
• Metformin
• Foods that cause inflammation and what to cut out in your diet
• Cytokines
• Broccoli is good for you

Nutrition has a tremendous effect on our lives. Some foods harm, and some foods help. In today's episode, Dr. Mark Sherwood speaks about how our emotional health, spiritual health, and lifestyle play a role along with the foods we eat. He also shares tips on healing and getting our health back or taking it to the next level.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. You're going to love today's interview with Dr. Mark Sherwood. He brings some amazing information to help us heal and help get our health to the next level. He said at the end of the interview, “This felt like I was just chatting with my bud and it was such a great conversation.” It's interesting that he said that because a lot of listeners say to me that they feel like they're sitting in the living room with us, chatting with us, and just learning from our guests, asking the questions that they wanted me to ask, so it feels like they're a part of the conversation.

Learning from him in this interview reminded me of my experience with IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. When I went through their year-long health coach training program, I learned from the world's best holistic health experts and functional medicine experts. It was phenomenal. And then, I ended up interviewing many of them on the show. I had Andrea Beaman, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Joel Fuhrman. And I loved them all and I had many more. You can go to my website LearnTrueHealth.com and type in “Institute for Integrative Nutrition” in the search function. You'll find all my episodes where I interviewed many of the graduates, the staff, the founder and the CEO, also health coaches that have come through their program and many of their teachers.

Now, when I was considering doing the course, considering going through the year-long health coach training program with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, I had two problems, two dilemmas in my mind. I didn't have enough time, and I didn't have enough money. What I was really surprised about is that they broke it down so the year-long program, even incredibly busy people can do it because it's about 20 minutes a day. So, sometimes a little bit longer, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but it averages out to be about 20 minutes a day. I did it while I was washing the dishes, cooking, and doing the laundry; I just have it playing. I'd be driving and I'd listen to it. I'd be at the gym listening to it. I would just listen to it whenever I could; I would turn it on just kind of like you're listening to this show, you fit it in maybe while you're driving. If you can listen to a podcast, you can do the program. You can go through their program. So, that eliminated that first dilemma for me.

Then the second dilemma was I didn't have enough money. And it is an incredibly rich program, so of course, it costs money, right? It's not cheap, but also, they deliver so much value that at the end of it, I was like, this was worth every penny. And what I love is they give a discount to my listeners, which is amazing because I talked to the founder and I talked to the CEO, and I talked to some managers there, and I asked them if they could please give a discount to the listeners of my show, and they do. So, if you do want to go forward and check it out, make sure you get the discount from the Learn True Health Podcast with Ashley James. Make sure you get the discount.

But what was great was that I signed up with a payment plan. I was like, okay, that eliminated my last barrier to entry for me, and I was able to jump in and do it because I had a toddler at the time, I was working full-time, go, go, go, go. I was so busy, and yet, I was able to afford it on a payment plan. I was able to do it about 20 minutes a day; I was able to fit it in. And I got so much out of it. Imagine how great the content is on my show and condense that into TED Talks like how great some TED Talks are. Every time I would sit down to learn, it would just be these amazing, amazing health lecturers that were so well thought out and so well-taught that I got so much information out of it. And I was really surprised at how much my life transformed, and then I was able to spill that over and help my friends and family and, of course, go on to help others.

About half the people that take the program don't ever intend to work with clients and be an actual health coach. They just want the tools for themselves and their family and their friends, or they just want those tools because that is for themselves alone, and then maybe it'll be a great addition to whatever they're doing in life. You learn to help people on so many levels. You learn how to communicate with people and really listen to people and help people on so many levels. It's incredibly rewarding.

So if you'd like to check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, you can get a free sample class by going to LearnTrueHealth.com/coach. That's LearnTrueHealth.com/coach. Check it out, and see if it's for you. If it's for you, you can give them a call, or I believe you just go to the IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition's website, and I think they have like an ability to chat with them there. But go ahead and just check it out for free, first of all. Just go get the sample class and see if it's for you, and just dive in and look at it. It was amazing for me.

Now, if you have more time on your hands, let's say about 40 minutes to an hour a day, you'd like to become a health coach sooner, they have a six months program. And recently, in the last year, they spent the year really working at this, and they have completely revamped their whole program. It's so exciting. It's just amazing. So if you geek out on health stuff just like I do and you're also into personal growth and development, this class is for you. And I love that people do it all around the world. You get this big sense of community because you actually participate with people around the world. There's nothing quite like it. I actually remember crying, just bawling my eyes out like good tears, good happy tears the entire first day I was taking the class because I felt like I had finally found my tribe, like I had finally found the people that would understand me. It was such a good feeling to be a part of that and part of that experience. And at one point, you actually get to do coaching calls with a group of people, and you can connect with people locally in your state or province or your territory or your area that are going through the program as well. So, you can make friends, and you feel like, wow, you're not the black sheep anymore, like there's a bunch of other people who are also just totally geeking out on health stuff and personal growth stuff and emotional healing stuff. It's just fascinating. So, check it out.

In this interview today, Dr. Mark Sherwood just reminded me so much of how much I got out of IIN, and so if you just love this interview, you'd probably also love their program. Make sure you go to LearnTrueHealth.com/coach, sign up for the free program and just see if you even like it. Even if you're not interested in signing up, you get a free sample class. Go get it. Maybe you'll get something out of it. Anyways, I know you're going to get something out of this episode, so enjoy today's interview. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Hey, if this interview or if any of my interviews were shared to you by one of my listeners, they really care about you, and that's saying something. Because we have to help each other, right? There's too many people sick out there.

Seventy percent of the adult population is on at least one prescription medication. We're walking around thinking that health is disease management. And that's not the case. Up is down, left is right; everything is backward in this world. Because true health is being symptom-free and off of drugs, true health is feeling amazing, jumping out of bed full of energy. True health is having longevity. And if you do get sick, you recover like that. You recover so fast. That's true health. I want you to have that, and you can have that. I've watched people heal from things that they were told by doctors they could never heal from including myself. And I want you to have that.

So, keep listening, and keep sharing the episodes with those you care about. Let's help our friends and family to learn true health and to experience true health. Enjoy today's episode!

[00:08:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 483.

I am so excited for today's guest! We have Dr. Mark Sherwood on the show. The website to go to is Sherwood.tv. And I just want to point out that he has a great free download. It's an e-book, it's about 27 pages. And it has some fantastic protocols in there and it also will show you what is possible, the healing that is possible for you.

Mark, I'm such a huge fan of the work that you and your wife do because your mission statement is right on par with my mission statement: to eliminate all unnecessary usage of medication, to eradicate all self-imposed choice-driven disease. The thing is, a lot of people are walking around not knowing that their choices have led to their disease. That's what happened to me in my 20's. I developed a lot of diseases, and then I, in my 30's, eradicated them all with my choices. But I was walking around like going with the flow, not being a salmon. I was a good hillstream. I was doing what everyone else was doing, and I developed a bunch of diseases. Then I had to turn around and be a salmon and go totally against the flow, and that's when I eradicated my diseases.

So, a lot of people don't know, and sometimes they might get offended like “I didn't give myself fibromyalgia,” or, “I didn't give myself MS. I didn't give myself autoimmune disease.” We're not saying that people consciously chose to give themselves that, but their choices have led to the state that they're in, and that also allows them to step into their power when they realize that they are now in control. And

Today, Dr. Sherwood is going to teach us that you are in control. All your MDs have been giving you drugs and telling you that you are going to have that disease for the rest of your life, and it's not true. You can heal, and your choices really do make a difference. Welcome to the show! It's so exciting to have you here today.

[00:10:20] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Ashley, thank you. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate what you do, I appreciate your show, and I appreciate the audience that you draw. I know people want to learn. So, I'm excited and it's going to be great.

[00:10:29] Ashley James: Absolutely. Can you start by sharing your story? What happened in your life that led you to become the doctor that you are today?

[00:10:39] Dr. Mark Sherwood: My story's quite unique, actually. During my childhood years, I was not brought up in a healthy environment at all. I didn't know anything about it. As a matter of fact, it was so unhealthy physically and emotionally that I went through a tragedy in my life, the early 2000s, unexplainable, but it was the suicide of my own mother. It was that traumatic. But during the trauma, I was determined to learn a few things on how not to do that in my own life. Even though I didn't learn it, it didn't really come to full fruition until probably the late '80s, when I found myself on the other side of the world in the country of Australia playing professional baseball. I had nothing to do during the day except sit around and wait for the games in the evening, but I decided to start exercising, and before I knew it, I realized there was something to this.

Then shortly thereafter, I joined the police department in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was put in charge of a wellness program. I'm speeding up the story, but you get the idea. And I didn't know what I knew now. I wondered why my colleagues were dying so quickly and I wanted to figure that out.

So, I started to really get into the idea of does stress really have to have this much effect on us and what effect does nutrition have in our lives? And how do those two relate? Do they relate? So, I went on that quest, if you will, Ashley, to determine the answers to those questions. Is our lifestyle creating this increase, this thing I call “sick span”? That led me down the pathway of naturopathic study. I was always a fan of that because it made sense. I thought, okay, if we can take care of ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually, what does that mean? Because I knew enough at the time that conventional medicines and allopathic medicine wasn't working. It was a measurable failure, and it has been for, what, 60 years now. We can look at that simply based upon evidence. We are now growing diseases much, much faster than we're growing people. We have seen disease processes like heart disease, type 2 diabetes and autoimmune conditions, as you were speaking of earlier, that have absolutely skyrocketed. So, when I look at the system, and I looked at the system then, I realized that doesn't work, and I wasn't going to continue to practice insanity. As Einstein said, to continue to go on the same pathway, do the same thing, expect a different result.

So, I went on a mission to find out what I could learn about the human body and its interaction with the environment we live in and other people and nutrition and medicine that's put inside food. I really wanted to understand why. Why? That “why” question was the thing that drove me, and it still does. And so, that kind of began the journey, and now, all these years later, we're still learning, we're asking why. But the most important thing to understand is we're seeing literally thousands of people around the world get well, and I can't be more grateful than that. I'm thankful to God that He gives us the wisdom, the knowledge, and the ability to do that. I'm so happy for people to get well. That's what drives us every day.

[00:14:17] Ashley James: What were your colleagues dying of when you were in the police force, and you started to notice that they were dropping like flies?

[00:14:24] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Well, this is an interesting statistic that's been around for probably five decades that a few people are aware. This is an FBI study: the average male police officer, it's 20 years of service, and this is back in I believe the '70s that was done, the average age of death was 66 years of age. Which is substantially lower than the expected age, right?

[00:14:48] Ashley James: Oh, my gosh.

[00:14:50] Dr. Mark Sherwood: So, in my own city, and this brings me back to the early 2000s, I did a study of the officers that had died, and I did the same analyses that the FBI did, just a smaller group. And I found that the average life expectancy for a 20-year retired male officer was 65. So, I thought to myself, something is wrong with this, but basically, because of shift work, you get a lot of cortisol, you get a lot of blood pressure issues, weight issues, metabolic disorders, blood sugar issues, depression, sleep issues. They were on all these medications, and eventually, they ended up dying of things like cancers or heart disease, so that was predominantly the two causes.

[00:15:36] Ashley James: Which are the two major causes of death in the United States.

[00:15:38] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right. So that led me, as you've picked up there, I looked at the major two causes of death in the US. I found that same thing, and I said, “Okay, well, this must be hitting everybody,” because I used to think that only police officers and the military had PTSD. Right? Then I realized, wait a minute, it's everybody that's had trauma and drama in their lives. All that put together in a big mesh bucket, if you will, was one of the things that I said, “You know what, I can do something about this.” I'm going to believe that if people knew the information, that they know how to do this, they know how to reverse, they're going to do it.

So, with this information quest, I learned as much as I could to communicate then in an effective manner this concept of hope. Now, we've kind of coined the phrase, if you will, my wife Michele and I, who I get to work with every day, we are hope dealers. A hope dealer. We give that away every day, and I pray that the listeners will, during the course of time, gather and grab on to that hope.

[00:16:50] Ashley James: So, MDs are “drug dealers”. [laughs]

[00:16:53] Dr. Mark Sherwood: They are. They really are.

[00:16:54] Ashley James: And Michele and Mark Sherwood are hope dealers.

[00:16:58] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right. And it's funny, my wife, and this is interesting; she came from the conventional system because she's an osteopath as well. So, interestingly enough, she had a drug rep actually call her a “drug whore”. That was the word. We still look back at that in shock and awe and horror, but also, we looked at it like, you know what, that's exactly what that is. And I want everybody to kind of get this. When you go to that conventional doctor, they are looking for what's wrong. “What's wrong?” There's something wrong with that question. When people come in here, they want to know what's wrong. I say, “Wait a minute. Let's turn this around. Let's first look at all the things that are right about you.” So, we don't let them go down that pathway; so, therefore, our diagnostics are not looking for diseases. They are going upstream to look for the root causes of symptoms that are named diseases or disease categories.

[00:18:07] Ashley James: Right. Well, MDs break the body down; allopathic medicine is breaking the body down into its parts and then treating it with a drug. So they're not seeing the body as a whole or finding the root cause. The problem is that philosophically, the lens that they look through is so different from a naturopathic standpoint. Right? The lens that they look through governs their choices — what tests they're going to run and how they're going to interpret those tests. If you took the same tests to an MD that you took to an ND, a naturopathic physician or a functional medicine practitioner, a holistic practitioner, the MD will say, “Oh, your vitamin D is at 35. Okay, we're good with that,” whereas “As long as it's below 30, I'm fine,” that's what the MD says. Or if it was above 60, they go, “Oh, you're toxic. You have to stop taking your vitamin D.” They don't have any training around nutrition. They don't have that training on how to prevent disease and how to reverse disease. Their training lies in pharmacology. They're wonderful diagnosticians; they're fantastic at diagnosing. And treating symptoms or making sure the body shifts into like with drugs, it pushes the body in one direction. Right? But they are not trained in reversing disease and supporting the body's ability to heal itself.

[00:19:45] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That is a very good statement. I agree with all of that. Additionally, we need to understand that all drugs, for the most part, have these are not side effects. These are actual effects. But they will pull out various vitamins and minerals and nutrients, and therefore, when you look at that, you say, okay, well, for example, let's use one drug – the drug metformin. It's always given to people for blood sugar issues to create more insulin sensitivity, in other words. So, somebody's hemoglobin A1c is running at 6 or 7 or whatever or 6.1, slightly over the “normal range,” and so they're going to go on metformin. Well, when you go on metformin, it may help with blood sugar, but it also pulls out vitamin B12 and also folate.

Now, vitamin B12 and folate are critical factors in the methylation cycle. So, if you pull those out of the methylation cycle, again, metformin is looked at as this anti-aging product but let's think about this from a holistic standpoint. If we pull out vitamin B12 and folate from the methylation cycle, we render the methylation cycle ineffective in creating methyl groups. Methyl groups are in charge of, in a nutshell, repairing DNA, maybe helping create neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, and also driving down the transsulfuration cycle, which is going to be creating glutathione. We would be in effect inhibiting glutathione production and neurotransmitter production that could be leading to toxicity issues, oxidative stress issues, or even depression issues.

[00:21:33] Ashley James: Cancer.

[00:21:34] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Cancer. That's right. Something has got to change in the paradigm over the course of time, or we're doomed to be stuck in that system. And that system is not going to create wellness because it's like a male going to a suit store. I'm going to buy a suit, I'm going to go over here, and the first thing we're going to do is try on a pair of pants. Well, then you're going to go over here from the pants department, they go to the jacket department, but the jacket department person is going to say, “I don't care what the pants department said. That's their department.” They're going to get a mismatch, right? And you get the idea it's going to go from the shirt to the tie to the shoes, and you're going to have just a mishmash of stuff that looks terrible.

That's what the body looks like when it goes through that system. It looks terrible. I could go on and on with examples such as that.

[00:22:24] Ashley James: It reminds me of a story I just heard about. I think it's one of my listeners who shared with me that her mom has kidney problems and heart problems. The doctor said, “You have to eat less meat,” and the kidney doctor said, “You have to eat more meat.”

So it's like okay, one diet is going to cause her kidneys to fail, but her heart will be better, and the other diet is going to cause her kidneys to be healthy but her heart, you know, so anyway, it's just back and forth. And so the doctors, she said, “Wait a second, you guys are giving me the opposite diets.”

Now, medical doctors are not trained in nutrition. They get something like 20 hours of nutrition unless they, after graduating medical school, go on to take further courses and actually dive into the studies, which we'd hope that doctors would continue to look at the latest science and studies around diet because it makes sense that everything we put in our mouth is either hurting us or healing us. So, there's the dilemma. Right? There is a lot of confusion around diet.

Now you mentioned heart disease and cancer being the two top killers of police officers after they retire but also, that's what the two major causes of disease are in the United States or the causes of death are. I recently had Dr. Richard Fleming on the show, episode 463. He's a research cardiologist. He's not a holistic doctor at all. He's 100 percent all about the drugs. What I love about his work is he dives into the research. For the last 30 years, he's been looking at the root cause of cardiovascular disease, and he also did studies on cancer and heart disease and found that really the root cause was inflammation. Years, years, years before cancer will appear on a scan, you can see the inflammation that's there beforehand, same with heart disease.

So, really what we're doing is we're looking to decrease, to mitigate all the things in our life that cause the inflammation. My question, because we could definitely talk about foods that harm and foods that help, we could definitely talk about herbs and supplements, but you mentioned the emotional aspect, and my question is, like sleep, the police who are on altered schedules, I'm sure there are lots of listeners who have to do the second or third shift so their sleep is disrupted or maybe they go to bed at 1 in the morning. Does sleep dysregulation and also emotional trauma, do those play a significant role in increasing inflammation in the body?

[00:25:16] Dr. Mark Sherwood: They do. Let me explain to people in a way they'll understand this concept. So, let's look at both of those. When you have trauma or drama or you perceive stress, now stress doesn't have to be real to create this response. You can have this perceived stress. Because you can think about something, it creates the same response as if you're going through it, so we all understand that. So, let's key into the hormone called cortisol, which comes in second after the short-acting adrenalin goes and does its things, and then cortisol is produced. So, cortisol, known as the stress hormone, is produced.

When we have these stressful occurrences, that's originating from the sympathetic nervous system arousal side as opposed to the parasympathetic nervous system arousal side, which is relaxation. So, this yin and yang, if you will, this rest-stress should be balanced, but when we're living perpetually in a cortisol-driven mode which can come through stress and emotional lack of resilience or non-resilience, we combine this with the lack of sleep. Now, lack of sleep, let's think about this whether you're shift work or just not sleeping, we have this opposite effect of melatonin and cortisol. So if you're not sleeping, melatonin should be up but it's not. Cortisol is up. So, cortisol is elevated when we don't sleep as well.

In both cases, cortisol being a glucocorticoid (kind of sounds like glucose), it will elevate glucose because the body can't digest food when you're under stress like that. Our genes have changed 2 percent. That's it, Ashley, in 10,000 years. Two percent. So, when the body is perceiving stress or going through stress and synthesizing cortisol from the adrenals, the body's going to interpret that as if it's being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, trying to eat. So, there are several things that happen in that. We see blood pressure going up, of course, muscle tension going up, perspiration going up, tightness going up, and we see digestion going down. This is a big deal right here because when we see that glucocorticoid coming up, it's going to create some sort of blood sugar because it has to drive the body because you can't get it from food digestion. You don't have time to stop and eat while a saber-toothed tiger is chasing you.

So, what happens is glucocorticoid comes up, blood sugar, the pancreas secretes the insulin to match it, and insulin becomes perpetually elevating, creating, fat-storing all the time. This constant stress creates a lot of fat, belly fat called cortisol belly. Too much fat tissue on the frame is a home for toxins. Too much fat tissue also creates this endocrine disruption creating more inflammation. And the beat goes on.

When you look at this whole metabolic process, this whole obesity crisis that we're having, you can drive at least in part back to this emotional lack of resilience and even lack of sufficient sleep, and of course, that leads us into this idea of comfort food eating which everybody can relate to that, eating the classic standard American diet which perpetuates the same thing. It kind of is a snowball, if you get my drift.

[00:28:46] Ashley James: I remember that snowball so well. I remember I was working towards my black belt, and I was going to the dojo four days a week, sometimes five days a week. Sometimes I'd do it on the weekends also. We do clinics, like all-day Saturday kind of thing. I just remember I was working like crazy. So, I was raised in a household to eat the way a naturopath told us to eat. I was super healthy until I rebelled as a teenager.

But while I was studying and I was 19, I was studying karate, I started eating like all the black belts because I wanted to mimic them, I wanted to model them. We'd all go to Subway. And this was my first time eating wheat and cheese before I had seen a naturopath when I was five years old. Also, I'm eating white bread or I think they did whole bread, whole wheat, but whatever the difference is isn't really that great. It's processed bread, cheese, processed meat, and maybe some lettuce and some tomatoes. I remember, for the first time in my life, having heartburn. But I was just planning on eating exactly like how my Sensei and Shihan and all the black belts and brown belts were eating because I just wanted to model them and be excellent.

And I just started to pack on the pounds. I gained about 50 pounds a year very quickly, and I was exercising like mad, and I thought, what is going on here? My mom passed away of cancer two years later, so I didn't really sit down to think this through like my diet had caused this. I was just in go, go, go mode. But it got worse and worse. I developed chronic adrenal fatigue, type 2 diabetes, and chronic monthly infections for which I was on antibiotics for. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility. I was told after a battery of tests by an endocrinologist that I'd never have children.

I then spent years just eating takeout and whatever, totally forgetting that I had all this wonderful health because in my early years, I ate just like our naturopath told us to. Until 2008 when I watched with my husband, it was one of the first streaming movies on Netflix in 2008, they just started streaming and watched Forks Over Knives and all those health ones. What stuck for me was: shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic. In our first month of doing that, my chronic infections went away. And I still was miserable, I still felt horrible in my body, but at least I was off of antibiotics. So, I just kept searching and searching and searching, and that's when I found naturopaths that became my mentors; and switching my diet, taking the right supplements, changing my mindset, all of that. I eradicated all those diseases and conceived naturally.

For me, that's why I started the show. I started the show because everyone who's suffering doesn't need to be suffering. Seventy percent of the US adult population is on at least one prescription medication. They've been told they have to be on it, but the thing is, most prescriptions, we don't have to be on it. We can get so healthy, that we don't need it. That's why I love the work that you do because you want to show people that they can get so healthy and absolutely it's possible to get so health that they no longer need drugs.

Now, you brought up metformin. And I want to point out that one of my friends who often comes to me for help, she was in and out of the hospital. She lived in a hospital more. This was about two years ago. She spent more time in a hospital than she did out for acute pancreatitis. She lost 80 pounds, she was on a liquid diet, and she was in such bad shape from pancreatitis. I didn't think she was on any meds; I didn't know. Then I said, “Hey, just tell me. What are you taking? Are you taking anything? Let's figure this out. Why do you have pancreatitis?” That's when she told me she was on metformin. I'm like, “Why are you on metformin?” She doesn't have diabetes. What's going on here? And her doctor did that thing, “Oh, it's good for longevity. It'll prevent it later on.” Oh, my gosh.

This is what I say to all my clients: go to the actual drug's website. Go to the website that manufactures that drug and go to the full list of side effects. Not the little WebMD like here's the common ones. Go to the one that shows you the entire list of side effects. Again, they're not side effects; they're effects that you may or may not get. Then, read through them. And sure enough, acute pancreatitis was one of the causes.

But here's what surprised me. Do you know that a side effect of metformin can be hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia? The very reason why they gave it to you, it actually can cause those problems, which blows my mind. And it changes all those pathways in the body, it depletes us of all the nutrition, making us more sick so then we need to be on more drugs. So, I just have a very big distrust.

Now, drugs have their place when they can save my life, and I want people to always use the best tool in the toolbox. I'm not crazy. If there's a tool that's going to save my life, I'm going to use it. The problem is, MDs are only taught to use hammers so everything looks like a nail.

[00:34:56] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right.

[00:34:57] Ashley James: We have to make sure that we hire a whole team of professionals to support us, so that's why I love the work you do. I would hire you, I would hire a chiropractor, and I would hire an acupuncturist. I'd hire a whole team. And then all of them would inform me on what choices I should make for my body instead of just going to an MD. Going to an MD to tell me what to eat is like asking my plumber to the wiring in my house.

[00:35:30] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's awesome. I love that.

[00:35:32] Ashley James: You could keep that one. So, your wife is an osteopath. I'd love to hear a bit about her journey through seeing holistic medicine through the lens that you see it through. When I went to an osteopath for the first time, I think maybe an ovarian cyst was popping or something, I don't know. But I had excruciating pain and I was worried something was wrong with me, like maybe I was having ectopic pregnancy or something. I went to an osteopath, and he stood there, holding his prescription pad, ready to prescribe me a pain med.

Now, I'm from Canada. I live in the States now, but I'm from Canada. In Canada, they don't give out pain meds like candy. I realized they didn't when I was growing up. So, he was like, “Okay, so we're going to give you a pain med.” I'm like, “I'm not here for a pain med. I'm in pain, but pain tells me that there's something wrong. I don't want to just numb it.” I was really surprised. I thought going to an osteopath would have been more holistic. But he was just ready to write me a prescription and make me comfortable.

Your wife is an osteopath. What happened that had her see the holistic medicine versus allopathic medicine in terms of how she can help her patients?

[00:36:51] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Her story is quite unique. She was homeless, believe it or not, at one time, and working as a massage therapist trying to get by. Her story, by the way, is depicted in a just-released movie, believe it or not, called The Prayer List. So, I encourage people to go there. I didn't think about that before we went live, but that's a cool movie. It's called The Prayer List. A wonderful story.

During that time, she had a massage client say, “You got more to your life. Come on. Not that massage is bad,” but she paid for her first year of school. My wife had this healing in her mind in the background and thought, “I'm going to go back and be a doctor and really heal people.” So, she graduates with honors, it turns out she's the valedictorian in her class. Just a wonderful comeback story. She was in martial arts too, by the way. But she got into the system. This was back in the early 2000s. She had been in the system for a couple of years. And she began to show her patients how to cook, how to eat and all that stuff, and then she was chastised by her fellow clinicians and even her bosses about how that's not how we do it here. She still persisted not because she was rebelling at them, but she just knew it was right.

What turns out after being in the system for about three years, she was fired. She was let go because she wasn't contributing adequately to the payer mix. People didn't need to see her as much because she had that kind of a healing mindset going in, and so they fired her. She couldn't find a job anywhere for like six months. It really put her in a tailspin and then, hence, the birth of the Functional Medical Institute. So, she went into that kind of backwards.

And it's been interesting because some of her colleagues that she went to school with come to see us as patients.

[00:38:55] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.

[00:38:57] Dr. Mark Sherwood: The irony of it all.

[00:39:04] Ashley James: How did you two meet? She had her own path leading to holistic medicine, as did you. How did the two of you come together to work together?

[00:39:14] Dr. Mark Sherwood: When she started, she got into medicine basically because of those reasons I stated. But she had really bad experiences with men, quite frankly, like a lot of women have. She was abused and treated badly. The whole story is in the movie. And basically, swore off men because men hadn't treated her well at all.

With that said, I had come through a very horrific divorce where I became the sole custodian for my two-, four- and six-year-old child, respectively. Basically, I swore off women, and I'm not going back to that anymore. So, about 10 years go by where I'm just kind of like doing my thing and she's doing her thing. Then one day, we met, and it was the very first meeting we met, and I saw something in her. Actually, it was just unique and there was a draw there. There were people around, and I said to her, “Dr. Neil,” that's her maiden name, “Dr. Neil, I appreciate the conversation with you. Definitely enjoyed it,” and I stuck out my hand to shake her hand because chivalry is not dead in my world.

And so, when I shook her hand, and it truly happened, I couldn't let go of her hand. It was the oddest thing in the world. Couldn't let go of her hand, and she couldn't let go of mine. It was this really awkward few moments there, and it was so awkward that other people were looking at us, and we were looking at each other, and we're like, I don't know what's going on but for some reason, my hand is glued to your hand. So, I just heard this voice inside me say, “Mark, would you please have some courage for once in your life, dude? Seriously? Ask her out.”

So, I did. I asked her if she would go to dinner with me and she said yes, and so we exchanged numbers, and we really, since that first dinner, have not been apart since. It was truly love at first sight. Since then, it was like that equally yoked, that common theme, that healer mentality, that healer gift that we all have. It just multiplied, and we just feed off of each other. We encourage one another and she's my best friend. And I call her my queen. We have this interaction. We work together in the clinic, and people love that. I will show public display of affection. I will give her a hug and a kiss right in the middle of the work day multiple times. It is interesting because we can't imagine not working together. It's been kind of cool because people come here, and they come here because we're a couple. Right? It's inspiring to them because today, obviously, there's a lot of horrible relationships that people are in and decisions they made that have affected their lives, much like the few moments ago we were talking about the stress, trauma and drama. Well, many times that comes from a relationship, doesn't it?

We give them a sense of hope in that area, too. And every time I'm speaking, literally whether it'd be in front of 5000 people live or a podcast that's audio-only to millions of people around the world, I'm always going to one, thank God for the opportunity to be here, and number two, honor my wife because she is my backbone. I say she's not my spare rib; she's my prime rib. So, that's kind of how we've met. The long story short.

[00:43:02] Ashley James: I love it. That's beautiful. It makes a difference in the work that you do. You both bring your backgrounds to the medicine that you practice. So, let's dive in now that we have an understanding of the philosophy, the lens in which you see our body, our human body, that our spiritual or emotional health and our lifestyle, like when we go to bed really does play a role in our health along with what we eat. Let's talk about how we can eliminate the usage of unnecessary medication and how we can eradicate all self-imposed choice-driven diseases.

[00:43:50] Dr. Mark Sherwood: As you mentioned earlier, the main issue that we see within heart disease and really all other disease conditions is this thing called inflammation, and it's chronic systemic inflammation.

If people can grasp just one concept I'm going to share right now, it will absolutely set you free. Because the immune system is unique, the immune system is one that's like surveillance. It's like the army, navy, air force, marine, coast guards, and space force all combined, magnified. So, it has internal surveillance and external surveillance. It's always looking for something that might be an intruder. We all understand the inducement of the immune system being from the idea of parasites, bacteria, and certainly, in today's world, virus. We understand that. The immune system will respond. And the immune system when it responds like that, it will send out signals or another word for that is cytokines. And some of the cytokines are inflammatory cytokines. So, that's how we get this idea of inflammation. We also know that when we have an injury or something like that, like a cut or a bruise or a broken bone, we get inflammation.

But the greatest inducer of the immune system that creates the most inflammation is the standard American diet because it's got chemicals, it's got genetic modification and all kinds of pollutants in it that the body looks at as foreign. So, just the very intake of a burger and fries is something that the body looks at as like “holy crap, I haven't seen that before. What is that?” That's sending a shockwave to the system, and it's not food. It's an enemy invader. So therefore, we have this chronic bombardment of this inflammatory-driving system that contributes to all these diseases we see.

In our clinic, when we get people off of that, we bring back just the concept of real food. If God packs it like this, it's probably how you eat it. And we don't give people dietary restrictions. We don't even tell them to count calories. We just say if it's on this list of anti-inflammatory foods that we generally believe, then eat it as much as you want. If it's on this list of inflammatory foods, don't eat it, any of it. And guess what? One hundred percent of the people get better. They're like, “Well, that was easy.” Yeah, it's not that hard. So, that's kind of our philosophy in practice, and that's the very first place we go.

[00:46:24] Ashley James: Can you give us homework to help decrease inflammation? Let's dive into the actionable steps we can take.

[00:46:33] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Let's first of all look at a list, and I hope everybody gets their pen and paper out or your phone and just begin to take this down. What are some known inflammatory foods? Well, some of these are going to be really obvious, and some of them not so obvious, and I'll explain why.

The obvious ones are going to be like processed foods, fried foods, artificial sweeteners, sugars, and MSG. We know those things are going to be inflammatory. We would include sodas in there. But let's look at corn, soy, and grains.

[00:47:11] Ashley James: What about non-GMO organic corn or soy grown in our own backyard? Is that going to also be inflammatory no matter what? Or like a store-bought, not organic, non-GMO? Is there a difference? Or should we avoid soy and corn no matter what?

[00:47:35] Dr. Mark Sherwood: There is a difference. And in your case with a non-GMO soy and a non-GMO organic corn, those will be just fine and beneficial because they're in their natural state. What makes corn, soy, and grain so damaging is really multiple things inclusive of the following: the genetic modification is one of them, specifically in the wheat crop, the grains. They've been genetically modified to avoid the effects of the herbicide Roundup. Roundup is sprayed on the soy, the corn, and the grains. And those are subsidized by the US government. So, you got to think about this from that standpoint. If the government tells you to do something in regard to your health, you probably need to do the opposite.

So, with the genetic modification, we have problem number one that's glaring. When these grains specifically come into our body, even though they're going to be genetically modified at a small percentage, the genes again haven't changed but 2% in 10,000 years, so it's still looking at this newfound genetically-modified seed grain crop different. So, it looks at as a foreigner, so therefore we get that immune system inducement, and that's why so many people have so much problem with grains creating this idea of leaky gut or hyperpermeability of the gut, leading to autoimmunity.

We also see when those genetically modified grains are digested, they become exorphins, which turn around and bind to the opioid receptors in our brain, creating a chemical addiction. This is why people have a hard time giving up the bread and the grains because we're talking about real, live, genuine addiction. That's problem number one.

[00:49:30] Ashley James: Same with dairy.

[00:49:32] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right. Dairy.

[00:49:33] Ashley James: There's sugars in dairy that also trigger that same opioid response, the dopamine. Mammal milk is meant for the baby. And the baby, we got to trick the brain into wanting to keep eating, so it grows, so a baby's brain is hooked on its mother's breast milk for a very good reason. God is smart.

[00:50:01] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah. It creates comfort and peace, and that's when a baby can be crying until the baby latches on to that nipple and it's like, “Oh!” That makes them happy. It's not just the milk. It's the chemistry within the process.

That's why it's interesting. They were saying that milk does the body good. No, it doesn't. Don't drink it. Period. You got a double whammy there with milk because the cows in the confined animal feeding operations are fed these corn, soy, and wheat products to get fat fast, the antibiotics and the hormones, so we're selling them by weight, not by health. Therefore, when they put out that milk, I mean, that's fat, so this stuff is carried in the fat, and toxins are stored in the fat, so you have this milieu of just a mess that's subsidized. Again, the government subsidizes dairy. But all that is problem sort of number one.

Problem number two is you got Roundup. I mean, in itself, think about the concept of glyphosate and atrazine, a known carcinogen, known estrogenic compound. Why are people getting so fat so fast? Why are we seeing the feminization of our world in front of us? It's because of these compounds, the chemicals binding to the estrogen receptors creating the same mimicking effect of estrogen. So, we see this troubling trend across our country in the United States specifically, but it's lending itself across the world as well. So, these things are as bad as I just described, as inflammatory as I just described, and even much, much more.

When we talk about this with other people, we're just saying stay away from it. I know what you heard. You can take this argument over here to an allopathic side and the majority of them are going to say, “Oh, that's nonsense.” But it is true. Everything I just said is true, and folks, you can look it up out there, and there's all kinds of studies on that that you can see and the way it works. It's out there. It's not hidden from you. Just search it out and see that it's actually accurate.

[00:52:15] Ashley James: I just read a recent study. Really fascinating. I'm not an advocate for Frankenfoods, for highly processed foods. But this one study took two groups of people, and one group of people, they just said keep eating meat at every meal like just keep eating what you normally eat, get your burgers and your fries and whatever you do. Then the other group, they said keep eating what you eat, keep eating the standard American diet, but you're going to replace five meals a week. And five meals a week is nothing, right? And five meals a week with some non-meat Frankenfood like beyond burger or whatever impossible burger.

Then, they took their stool samples for a month. I don't know, maybe it was six weeks. I think it was six weeks, but it was a short study. So yeah, it was six weeks. They looked at the microbiome and what they found is that eating the Frankenfoods, because there's fiber, even though they're not healthy at all, they have canola oil and all kinds of GMOs and stuff, they're not healthy foods. But what's interesting is that by switching out some meat with something that had fiber, now these people weren't eating the way you and I eat. They weren't eating fresh fruits and vegetables. They weren't getting proper fiber from whole food sources, to begin with. But just adding in something that wasn't meat and instead had fiber in it increased the butyrate that was made, which helps to digest and absorb. It also has other functions in terms of lowering heart disease.

So, I thought that was incredible like just kind of blew my mind. I thought, well, okay, we're not taking blood because I want to see like maybe eating these Frankenmeats is going to increase inflammation because now they're getting more canola oil. But they were told to just keep eating the standard American diet, just replace some meat with something that has fiber in it, the Frankenmeats.

So, I thought that was really interesting. I'm a big advocate of telling everyone to get fiber up to 40-50 grams a day from whole food sources for a variety of reasons. Yeah, the first few weeks maybe you're going to fart more. Your microbiome is going to catch up and get used to it. But oh my gosh, the difference it makes. The difference. It's such a huge, huge difference. Then just to see that that study shows that even just replacing meat with something that has fiber in it for a few meals a week was noticeable in the microbiome within six weeks.

It kind of gets exciting that you can make a health change, something small like a baby step. Some people choose to eat vegetarian dinners, or they choose to eat more plants until 6:00 PM, and then their dinner has meat in it or something. So, I personally have found, because I have done over 30 diets to try to find what works for my body, and I believe, I've come to the conclusion that diet is a moving target because your body's needs change as we age under different circumstances and stress levels. So, you got to listen to your body, right? And also, my body really resonates with the most whole food plant-based possible. The more whole food and plant-based, the less processed food I eat, the more health my body gains. But I don't believe in diet dogma, and I don't tell everyone to eat the same way.

But I do want you to share what you've seen promotes the most health and makes the biggest difference. If everyone followed what you said, like avoid these foods and instead eat these foods for the next six weeks, you're going to see a big shift. So, can you give us sort of what is the biggest bang for our buck in terms of changing? So you've already said cut out, obviously GMO foods, obviously non-organic GMO foods, all the processed foods, the fried foods, the processed meats, the sugar, and the corn and soy. What else has a really big impact in terms of cutting out of the diet?

[00:56:55] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Well, I think you nailed them a moment ago. You bring in more plants with more fiber. It's interestingly enough, the idea of gut health, digestion, and assimilation is very key, and the short-chain fatty acid butyrate that is increased with good fiber intake is going to help heal the leaky gut, and it works to bring about more repair to the tight junctions that get spread apart with the increase of that protein zonulin.

All that said, people can expect, and we tracked that for a long time and we've got thousands of people in our database, this is what we've seen in only 30 days, and we measure what's called body fat percentage. We're trying to get ladies down somewhere in the low 20's more or less percent body fat. Men, I want them below 15, or 15 or somewhere less than that. We see in one month, the percent body fat dropped 2 to 4 percent with ladies. We've seen this consistently. The percent body fat went down 3 to 5 percent in one month with men. We've watched this occur over and over and over again.

Really, it's about our body composition adjustment. We know people have a hard time for 4-5 days if they have heavy addiction to this sugar-grain thing. But once they get past that 4-5 days, their energy level goes up higher, their sleep gets more effective and functional, the clothes fit differently, and the confidence goes through the roof. And that correlates well with the reduction of stress because we now have confidence which is a precursor for resilience, which is required to deal with stress.

[00:58:53] Ashley James: Now, to be clear, you are not promoting a vegan diet. I looked on your website. I saw that one of your smoothies had beef protein powder in it. So, what way of eating are you promoting that gets these great results?

[00:59:14] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah, we are not promoting a vegan diet. As a matter of fact, vegan diets typically lead to deficiencies in omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin B12, many times even iron as well. To that end, we promote more of the quasi-Mediterranean diet, I would say without breads and grains. If you keep that parameter there, a lot of plants, a lot of fruits and vegetables of course. I want to stay away from the white potato more or less, the majority of the time, especially if you have had blood sugar issues and you have metabolic issues. And the white potato is the most polluted vegetable consumed in the United States today. We consume more of that.

Then, you think about nuts and seeds. We want to get nuts and seeds that are not cut or raw, not rolled and roasted in a lot of hot oils. That's not healthy.

With proteins, I want to pick organic grass-fed, wild-caught, and free-range. Those kinds of things like that. Grass-fed is a cool double-term there to think about. But as long as you do that, you're going to have good results. Even further, if you say, “Well, I'm going to have a hard time doing that just off the bat, I'm going to have a hard time flipping that light switch on,” okay, well, do one meal a day that's right. One meal a day under these guidelines and you will feel better, much like you cited in the study that just adds a little bit of fiber to a meat diet. One meal a day can change the microbiome. And we know that mood can change because the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced primarily in the gut, so people feel better, they're more calm, and they're more confident.

You say it like this. Small victories and small successes lead to more successes and more victories. If we just take these steps one at a time and just commit to doing one baby step every day to benefit us physically, emotionally, spiritually, just one thing, it's going to lead to two things. It's going to lead to a lifetime of those things that are perpetual and habitual, and we will have a higher quality of life with the concept of wellness not being just a pipedream but being realized.

[01:01:43] Ashley James: For someone who doesn't want to eat meat, can they eat beans, legumes, and then supplement? Like you said, they might end up with a deficiency. And there are meat eaters that have B12 deficiency, too. So, saying that a vegan diet leads to that, I know plenty of meat eaters that are incredibly deficient in their B12 but also in their intrinsic factor, which leads to B12 and iron deficiency. It all starts with the gut, right? We have to heal the gut. They could supplement with omega 3 to fill in the gap there. I do though say if you're going to eat any bean or lentil to cook it in the Instant Pot because under pressure, it breaks down the lectins. And then you don't fart as much. So, it's easier to cook it in the Instant Pot and just walk away from it. So, there's that.

Do you have any superfoods that are just like if you add this, people are going to get sort of for brownie points, some extra points there? Do you have any super, super, superfoods? Let's say someone is walking around totally feeling inflamed. I've done it. Like once in a blue moon, I'm going to go out, and I think maybe five times in the last 11 years I've been gluten-free, I've had a slice of cake at a party or something and a glass of wine. I drink once a year. I go somewhere, a birthday somewhere, and that happens. Then the next day, I'm walking around feeling a little poopy, a little inflamed. And I own it. I'm like, okay, I'm going to get back on my eating healthy. I'll go to something like quercetin, turmeric, resveratrol, a big green smoothie, something that I know is going to kick that inflammation in the butt. What do you have that kicks inflammation in the butt?

[01:03:45] Dr. Mark Sherwood: I really like the broccoli. If you can take in broccoli. And this is why – because broccoli, and even broccoli sprouts if you can take in broccoli sprouts, that would be number one of those two because a sprout has 100 times more density of nutrients than a full-grown plant. What happens is when that broccoli sprout comes — and this is why I like it because it does so many things — there are two compartments in the broccoli. One has something called glucoraphanin. The other has an enzyme called myrosinase. When you choose this or digest this, these two compartments bust apart, combine together, and we get this wonderful compound called sulforaphane that is yielded inside the body. Sulforaphane upregulates the nerve II pathway genetically, which will increase the antioxidant enzymes and your detox enzymes. You're talking about a triple whammy in the ability to conquer this chronic systemic inflammation caused by the toxicity that is driven by the standard American diet. So, think yielding sulforaphane, and to get that, broccoli sprouts or broccoli.

[01:05:03] Ashley James: I love it. Now, cooked broccoli has the same effect, or does it have to be raw?

[01:05:08] Dr. Mark Sherwood: The more you cook things, the more the degradation occurs with anything. Obviously, if you can find some sprouts. Like raw broccoli can give some people gas.

[01:05:22] Ashley James: Yeah, I just live with it. I know. I love broccoli. I just have to be careful. If I'm going to go and do a meeting with someone, I'm not eating broccoli before that meeting.

[01:05:35] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Oh yeah, you don't want to do that because you're going to have awful gas pains and you let it out, it's probably going to smell bad. That's not cool. But honestly, if you can find a way to grow some broccoli sprouts, those aren't bad at all, and you can put those things on salads. And I haven't seen them cause that gas nearly as much as a full-grown stalk. It's really interesting.

So yes, on the one hand, you want to cook less. But I get it. I'd rather somebody eat/cook broccoli than none/no broccoli.

[01:06:09] Ashley James: I have this health book and I got to find it somewhere. We just moved, so my books are unpacked yet. But it's from, I don't know, the '50s or something. It's this old health book and it's all about juicing for wellness, like way back before its time. It has a whole section on sprouting and how whenever you sprout, either you can sprout lentils, you can sprout beans like mung beans, not all beans, and then seeds. I've been really into sprouting seeds lately. I'll post a picture of last night's dinner. It was brown rice cake, that's my little guilty pleasure. The Ashley in her 20s would not think that that was some little cheap food. But my brown rice cakes with avocado and piles and piles of sprouts on top, it's really delicious. To me, avocado mixed with sprouts is so good. I get like a dopamine high from eating it. It's so delicious.

Sprouting is actually really easy. Go on YouTube, and look it up. Different types of seeds or beans or different types call for sort of different times, but I found it really, really easy. In the Learn True Health Facebook group I'll make sure I'll post how I do it, so listeners that want to try it can do it for themselves. It's so great because even in the winter you can have fresh food. I had a guy on the show recently, Tim James, who said 70 percent of the food he eats, he grows in his house because he sprouts like no one's business. He has a whole wall of sprouts and he mostly eats that. That's how he cured a lot of diseases he had and his friend cured his cancer with it. He's a big proponent of eating live food. But just having sprouts in your house, it's so easy. You don't need sunlight. You just need a dark cupboard. I put it in the oven. You just got to remember it's in the oven and not start the oven.

[01:08:22] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That's right.

[01:08:23] Ashley James: That was a kitchen fire a year and a half ago. My husband and I now understand to always check the oven before we turn it on.

One thing I wanted to bring up. You talked about MSG, and I think it's really important that we not gloss over that. Because just last night, my friends told me about this video, Dr. Katherine Reid. It was a TEDx Talk, “Unblind Your Mind.” It's a great video. I highly recommend everyone listen to it. She shows clips of her autistic daughter, who is in her own world. In the first video, in her own world and not making eye contact. Then they chose to go gluten-free and do a green smoothie every morning. They saw neurological changes. They also went casein-free, so all dairy. All dairy, all gluten. And do a green smoothie. So now we've upped the fiber, gotten a bit better gut health, and now she's able to make eye contact but she's having two-hour meltdowns where she's stuck in a yes-no loop.

I saw when my kid was younger, he did yes-no loops a little bit and we would give him chamomilla homeopathic and it would take him out of it. But I noticed that. Then, she was stuck in these loops. That's when she figured out. Dr. Reid figured out the problem was MSG and that the glutamate is so excessive in our processed food diet that then she went through and made her child's diet 100 percent processed food free in order to eliminate MSG. There are 40 different words for MSG. When you read the packaging, it can say soy protein, but that actually means MSG. There are all these different words for it, right? We might look at a package and think it's clean, but there's actually monosodium glutamate in it. The problem is glutamate is good for us, but the problem is too much, right? So, she eliminated that.

Then the last video, my jaw was on the floor, is of a healthy, happy child making eye contact, speaking clearly and calmly, and having a wonderful discussion about her kindergarten class. She was kicked out of her special needs class and put into a regular class. Her daughter is no longer on the spectrum. Her daughter was diagnosed on the spectrum, moderate autism, and now she has zero autism. And it was 100 percent done with diet.

[01:10:58] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Wow!

[01:11:00] Ashley James: And it was all about the doctor figuring out that eating wheat, barley and rye, and in my opinion, oats as well because oats contain gliadin which is similar enough to gluten. It's kind of a lie when they say gluten-free oats. I'm like, yes, but it has gliadin in it, so don't eat it. By avoiding those grains, we are reducing glutamate. By taking out processed food, we're reducing glutamate. And that affects the brain. It also affects the gut.

So, that is this sort of huge wake-up. I've never heard of this — this standpoint because I've been dairy and gluten-free for so long. But a lot of people see a benefit because they've reduced the free glutamate.

[01:11:48] Dr. Mark Sherwood: That is so right. You think about glutamate being a neuroexcitatory hormone. So we're talking about affecting brain health. You think about an inflamed brain where you think of excess glutamate. So, think brain inflammation. If you don't feel good in the brain, you're not going to make good decisions.

Again, as we've talked about at the top of our conversation, everything is connected. It's not segregated. It's connected. And because of that, just like you said correctly, we have to think about all these different effects it has all around our body. And they are significant, to say the least.

[01:12:28] Ashley James: Amazing. This has been so much fun having you on the show. I absolutely would love to have you back to dive in deeper. I feel like this has been an introduction to the work you do, and I'd really love to get specific, especially specific on how to lower high blood pressure. A lot of patients are like, “Okay, I get it. I don't want to be on meds, but my blood pressure is 160/110, and I'm taking medication. So yeah, what do I do?”

I'd love to have you on the show again. We can discuss how to lower high blood pressure. Think about the most commonly prescribed drugs that we can heal the body by doing these changes like doing these lifestyle and diet changes, to the point where the body is so healthy, it doesn't need the drugs anymore. I'd really love to have you back on the show and dive into the most common drugs that you get your patients off of because you get them so healthy, that they no longer are a candidate for them.

[01:13:33] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah, I would love to come back. Let's do that and talk about high blood pressure. We can talk about osteoporosis, that kind of stuff as well. That's huge. Certainly, we can talk about autoimmunity and reducing the ability to depend on those immunosuppressants. There's all kinds of things, etc. etc. that we can talk about.

[01:13:51] Ashley James: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, so let's come up with a list of the most common drugs that you get people off of. And let's go down that list and talk about the protocols. Wonderful. All listeners can go to Sherwood.tv of course. It links to Dr. Mark Sherwood and everything that he does and his wonderful wife does, Michele. It's going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at Learntruehealth.com. When you go to Sherwood.tv, go to the free download e-book. Didn't you say it was like 27 pages or something? But it gives you some great protocols to start today. I love that your mission is to continue to spread this information. I also want to let listeners know you do have some great books. We didn't even get to talk about them today. We can definitely dive into that next time. I'd love to know maybe some tips from each of your books Quest for Wellness, Fork Your Diet, Surviving The Garden of Eatin‘. That's cute. I love it. Then, of course, watch the movie, the newly released movie, The Prayer List, which sounds fantastic.

Mark, can you give us some homework to do between now and the next time we have you on the show?

[01:15:02] Dr. Mark Sherwood: Yeah. I want people to make a list of what I'm going to give you right now, and I want you to do these couple of things. It's not going to be much, but again, let's celebrate small victories.

I want people to work on having at least a 15-minute walk every day. That's number one. Okay? Number two, I want people to work on 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night. That's very important. I want people to work on having a salad once a day. Just one salad once a day. That's beautiful. Number four, I would like to challenge people to come up with a two or three-sentence positive affirmation that they speak out loud over their life twice a day. For example, it can be “I am a loving being. I am worthy. I am successful.” There you go. There's three things right there. Say that out loud twice a day, every day.

Do those couple of things that I just named off. Do them between now and the next time we talk and watch your life change. Watch how those small little things lead to bigger changes. No matter where you are in your health journey whether you're just getting going on, whether you've just been into this, look, we all have improvement. So, you can take those things right there and you can improve them based on where you are. But I've given you a little bit of homework that you can do every day. It doesn't take much time. You're talking just a little bit of time and thought. We get 1,440 minutes a day. Why can't we spend a little bit of time on self-development so we can make the world a better place?

[01:16:52] Ashley James: Beautiful. We're starting with ourselves, and then we expand out to our friends, our family, our neighborhood or community, our county, our state or province, our country, and the world. We have to think of all of our choices in that ecological way because if our choice is harming ourselves, it's trickling down, and it's harming our children.

I always pick on McDonald's. They're such an easy target. Going to a fast food restaurant in the moment, it's easy because “I'm tired. I'm hungry. My kids are hungry. I'm just going to go through the drive-thru.” That easy choice, right? We have to choose our hearts. We have to just choose our heart. Maybe our heart is getting that salad and doing it. But once we do it, it's going to fill you with so much energy that then you're going to want to do it again and again. But choosing out your heart, the good choices are trickling down to those you love. And the bad choices are also trickling down to those you love.

We have to remember that, especially as women, because we like to put our kids first and put everyone first and then we're left just hungry and tired and just doing takeout. I've been there. Just trust me, I get it. And ultimately, harming ourselves harms those we love. You don't want to imagine a world where you're not here anymore and your children don't have you or your spouse doesn't have you or your family and friends don't have you because we kept putting ourselves last.

So, I love these little things. A 15-minute walk and 8 hours of sleep. Also, it matters when you go to bed. I just want to point out that if you go to bed at 1:00 in the morning versus 10:00 at night. So at 10:30 at night, we get a cortisol spike and that makes it hard to stay in a deep sleep all night long. It'll actually affect the depth of our sleep and when we wake up. Maybe you notice this with your children. If you let them stay up late, they'll actually wake up early in the morning. You're like, “Why didn't you sleep in?” But same with us. We'll have a lighter, restless sleep. You got to make sure you fall asleep by 10 so that you don't have that second wind, and you don't have that cortisol spike. Then, you have a deeper and most restful sleep. You wake up 7 to 8 hours later feeling way more rested. So yeah, I love that.

Then you want us to eat one salad a day filled with lots of wonderful vegetables and hopefully some broccoli sprouts. And then using that positive affirmation is beautiful.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to have you back. This has been wonderful.

[01:19:33] Dr. Mark Sherwood: I can't wait to come back here. It's an honor to be here with you today. And I look forward to it, I truly do.

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The Quest For Wellness

Fork Your Diet

Surviving the Garden of Eatin’

Check out more articles, science, benefits and studes on heat and full-spectrum light therapy using Sunlighten Saunas and light devises:

LearnTrueHealth.com/sunlightensauna

Dr. Wendie's gift to you: www.fivejourneys.com/promo

https://www.learntruehealth.com/detox-self-healing-from-mold-stress-with-dr-wendie-trubow

Highlights:

• The importance of detoxing
• The impact of stress on body functions
• Mycotoxins
• Genetics is not a death sentence
• Microbiome health and leaky gut trifectas
• Why toxicity testing is important in improving our health

Stress has tremendous effects on our bodies. It can affect our ability to detox, digest food, ovulate, have sex, uptake nutrients, and even control our food cravings! In this episode, Dr. Wendie Trubow shares how we can recover from stress and other health issues just by changing our diet and lifestyle!

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today’s episode is really awesome. We have Dr. Wendie Trubow with us today, who, through her own healing journey, discovered a unique way of focusing on supporting the body’s ability to detox, heal the thyroid, balance hormones, especially for women going perimenopause or menopause and just how they get on the other side of feeling poopie and to the point where you’re feeling awesome. Another big thing we talked about is that these toxins can lead to abdominal fat and can lead to depression, and can lead to fatigue. And so many of us are running around getting our coffee fix in the morning, getting our sugar fix in the afternoon, so it’s a self-medicating fatigue, not realizing that fatigue is a symptom of toxicity overload and that by doing daily simple things with our lifestyle and our diet and our nutrition, little fun life hacks that we can maximize our body’s ability to heal itself, maximize the body’s ability to detox and balance hormones and feel amazing.

Wendie, after our interview, said, oh no, I forgot to tell everyone about this freebie that I’m giving away. So I want you to know to go to her website fivejourneys.com/promo, and I’ll make sure that the link for that is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. If you are listening on a podcast directory, just click details or show notes and it’ll all show up there. I’ll make sure that’s there.

Another thing we talked about is one of my absolute favorite tools that I’ve used to help my healing journey because I realized that a lot of my health issues were from toxins, specifically heavy metals, and that’s something we talked about in the interview, so you going to love learning about that. But the thing we both, Wendie and I both used is a Sunlighten Sauna. Now, I’ve been raving about Sunlighten Saunas for about four, five years now, and the reason why is I kept having these really weird episodes where I taste heavy metals in my mouth. My liver will become distended. I’d feel very toxic and very sick. And finally, one of my doctors, one of my naturopaths, just turned to me and said, you know you should really use a sauna because you sweat out these toxins, and it bypasses the liver and the kidneys, so I thought, this is amazing! So when I started to dive into studying the Sunlighten Sauna specifically, because I was looking at all the saunas and I kept hearing Sunlighten. But why the Sunlighten Sauna over every other sauna system out there is it has this incredible patent to technology that allows the full spectrum infrared to be absorbed by your body efficiently. There’s actually receptors on your cells. We talked about this in my interview with Dr. Kahn, who’s a cardiologist, and he uses Sunlighten Saunas with his patients. And he says that on each cell on the body, there’s receptors for light which just like, boggles my mind, right? Because you can’t, like, pour me a cup of sunlight, right?  Or like pour me a cup of infrared, right? You can’t drink it, right? You can’t take it. And so we always think that something physical like things you eat, things you drink, is a physical, tangible thing that you can hold that something that the trillions of cells in your body would absorb and utilize. But then, there’s this medium that our body absorbs and utilizes that is a light spectrum, and that isn’t that just wild. Well if you think about light is energy, and our body is made up of energy, so that makes total sense. Well, in looking at the studies, and there’s so many studies, and then Sunlighten also has worked with doctors and researchers to come up with some studies of their own. But the Journal of Athletic Enhancement published a study of ten national-power level athletes, and they found that the infrared improved the neuromuscular performance during intense training and that balanced and increased the testosterone to cortisol ratio, and they found that these athletes recovered faster, built more muscle, and could train harder, every day using the infrared system. There’s another study published by a top researcher in infrared technology, Dr. Michael Hamblin, and he says that after looking at muscle mass and muscle gain, they did find that with the Sunlighten System that there’s increased muscle gain after training and decreased inflammation and oxidative stress, which is exciting! Because the other day, so normally I’ve just been using my Sunlighten for heavy and metal detox has all these other benefits I kept hearing about but but mainly I was like I feel really good when I get out of my sauna, and for hours later I feel really good like I got a massage good. I’ve been using it to detox heavy metals gently out of the body, so it’s good me time, I feel amazing, I know it decreases stress, I know there’s all these health benefits, but that’s pretty much been my focus. Well, the other day, I did two workouts back to back at the gym, it was like Tuesday and Wednesday, and I did a lot of leg work, and my legs were really sore. It’s kind of hard to walk up the stairs, and I remembered, oh yeah, I’ve heard these studies about using a Sunlighten system to recover faster from athletics. So I jumped in my system that night, and I set it to the relaxation program because I was about to go to bed, I didn’t want to like because sometimes when I do the certain programs, I’m like more awake. So it’s good to do it in the morning for some programs but this one I just want a gentle sweat, I just hit the relaxation, and it was very gentle, it’s easy to breathe, it’s not very hot, it’s warm, you feel nice and warm like you’re in a cocoon. And I enjoyed it, it was very gentle it had the full spectrum, so it’s near, mid and far-infrared, and afterward I felt great, and as I was walking around, I took a shower, and I went to bed, I notice oh I don’t have pain in my muscles anymore, that’s good! But the next day I woke up, and I should have, normally, I would have had more soreness cause you know 2 days after an exercise, I worked out really hard that Tuesday so by Thursday I should have really felt because Tuesday and Wednesday I was doing a lot of work so by Thursday and Friday I should have really had more muscle soreness, I had zero muscle soreness after being in a sauna, and I thought, oh my gosh now I’m definitely going to use the system after every workout. I’ve seen these studies but I never had that personal experience until now. So I thought that was really cool.

It also helps with weight loss, and I always heard that like, oh, it’s good, because you know you’re sweating and you’re burning calories, but I’ve read the study, fascinating! That it increases a type of protein that stimulates the breakdown of fats, of these lipids with inside the fat cells- the adipose tissue. It stimulates the breakdown of that, so can be transported to the liver, and then the body can convert that fat and get rid of it. So I thought that was really needed because it’s actually stimulating the chemistry of the body to go to the process of burning fat.

And then with the anti-aging, it stimulates collagen production. A lot of women love, I mean, you know, and men that want to look great too. It stimulates the collagen production, so women noticed they have less fine lines and wrinkles. My big, big rave about the Sunlighten System is that it decreases stress significantly, so it helps with mental and emotional health as well, especially, in the last year I’ve been going through a ton of stuff emotionally, and using it has greatly helped me to just calm myself down. Have you ever been so stressed out, and the thing is stress is not an emotion, so you just walking around but you know your stress because someone does something and you just snap at them, it’s like you’re incredibly irritable and you have a short fuse, that is a symptom of being in a high state of stress. That’s why I noticed that after using the Sunlighten Sauna every day once a day I notice that, whew, it just brought it down, so my fuse is longer, I’m more patient, I don't snap at people, I’m very slow to anger, we’re supposed to quick to anger, so those are signs that you’ve decreased stress in the body and as Dr. Wendie points out today in our interview, the body cannot tell the difference between a mental stress, emotional stress, physical stress, all the kinds of stressors in the body it’s just a super stress. So whether you’re having physical stress or whether you’re having really hard time emotionally or mentally sometimes even spiritual stress. The body takes it to heart, and it’s all the same to the body. The body’s going to go through a state of stress no matter what. So doing things to decrease stress like walking, prayer, meditation, Sunlighten Sauna, awesome, they all help the body to decrease them.

But what I really like about the Sunlighten compared to other saunas because I’ve been in the sauna at my gym, which is way too hot, it feels like I’m trying to breathe in Vegas in July, it’s just way too hot. It’s hard to breathe. What I like about the Sunlighten is you can sweat at low temperatures. When I said low temperatures, I mean low temperatures for a sauna. When I breathe in a Sunlighten, I’m always surprised, I don’t sense any hot air going into my lungs, right? It’s not hot. It’s a very comfortable temperature, and you could ask my husband, I do not like feeling hot. I immediately turn the AC on when I get in the car. I’m just one of those people. I don’t like feeling hot, but there’s something about the Sunlighten that’s different. So if you’re one of those people who is like, Why, I don’t like feeling hot! You might actually really enjoy the Sunlighten because it’s very gentle, it’s just warm, and then all of a sudden you’re sweating because the infrared technology – the near, mid, and far infrared technology, is getting into the cells and warming you up from the inside. Your core temperature goes up one degree for an hour after your session. So it’s doing all this fantastic work inside you even after you leave the sauna, and they see that for 24 hours, it has this protective response for the whole body and for the cardiovascular system. This is such a cool information and Dr. Wendie agrees with me that it’s so great to use this type of therapy to detox the body from stress and from toxins in a natural way. When I interviewed Connie Zack the founder of Sunlighten, I ask for her to give my listeners a really good discount and she did and she’s honored that for years. I think it’s been five years now so she gives free shipping and she throws in some extra gifts. Call the company and ask them and find out what really great deal that they’re providing for listeners because they always make sure that they take care of you guys, and if you want to go to the link learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna that’s learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna. If you have any questions for me, I’d love to answer them, come join the Facebook group The Learn True Health Facebook group, where like fifty people away from reaching five thousand people, it doesn’t sound like a lot of people, we’ve a lot more listeners, I guess not everyone is on Facebook we’ve a lot more listeners than that but what’s cool about our Facebook group is people are so active and helpful. It’s a fun community where people are really supporting each other. So if you want to join our Facebook group, it’s not toxic, we do not attract that kind of person, it’s very supportive, very loving, very understanding, healing community that everyone’s sharing their information and asking questions, learning from each other and I’m very active on that group. So if you have questions about the Sunlighten System or anything that Dr. Wendie shares today or anything about my experience with detox and transformation, please come, join the Facebook group, you can do that by going to learntruehealth.com/group, or you can just search Learn True Health on Facebook.

And if you’ve been a long-time listener, you may have noticed that this last week we launched our new and improved website. It was a big endeavor. I wanted to make the website even more accessible for you. So we completely revamped it and updated it. The search function is working a lot better than before. So please take your questions to the search function on the website. Type in the topics you’re interested in, find your episodes, we’re almost at five hundred episodes. It’s so exciting that your answers are there for you, and we’re here to help. So join the Learn True Health Facebook group, and I look forward to seeing you there. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about. By sharing, we’re spreading this information. My goal is to help as many people as possible to learn true health. I’d love to turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help millions of people to transform their lives, and you’re a part of that; we’re all part of this ripple effect to help as many people as possible. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day, and enjoy today’s interview.

[00:14:01] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 482.

I am so excited for today’s guest! We have with us today, Dr. Wendie Trubow who specializes in detox but I have a feeling that this detox is going to be a totally different conversation than what we’re used to. You know, we’ve talked about detox, dozens of times, from many different angles, and this angle, and I love this because Dr. Trubow started off specializing in women’s health, right? And we’re going to hear your story but what I do know is that your personal experience led you to dive in to holistic medicine and discover that detox was the most important thing we really, really need to focus on, and supporting those systems of our body so that we can get on the other side of ill health. So, I’m really excited to jump in to this. Welcome to the show!

[00:15:05] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Thank you and feel free to call me Wendie during the show you don’t have to call me doctor.

[00:15:10] Ashley James: Well, it’s a hardened title, but I’m happy to call you Wendie. I know that as a medical doctor you went through excruciating years of higher education and indoctrination into the pharmaceutical industry. And somehow you managed to unbrainwash yourself to the point where you realized that there’s this whole world of healing out here beyond drugs, so, congratulations you’re one of the few amazing medical doctors that made it out  the other side.

[00:15:38] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Thank you. I think there should be a bumper sticker, like, I survived med school and residency. I think that should be a bumper sticker because I lived through it but I did not thrive through it. I can’t say that I thought I survived. That’s all I get.

[00:15:54] Ashley James: Well, it’s really not an environment for thriving, is it? It’s really is excruciating what they do and it definitely a lot of doctors end up jaded, right, through residency, they have kind of going to becoming a doctor like with beautiful dreams of helping people and then through residency they are just completely torn apart. But something happened in your life, and I really want to dive into this, because I think your story will resonate with all of us. Something happened in your life that had you need to go beyond your medical school training to find out how to heal. So I’d love to dive right in and learn more about what happened to you.

[00:16:41] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I’d love sharing the story because what it really underscores, so first I’ll say is Ashley is it my health story has two peaks. The first one, well, let me back up and stop. I want to underscore, it’s really hard to recognize when you are going off the cliff, unless you have a particular world view that only accepts optimal health, okay? So I didn’t have that world view when I went off the cliff for the first time. And so it literally took me years to recognize that all was not right in Wendie Land, until, I got to a point where I thought to myself, oh my god, I have to get up today. I have to get up every day, but I’m so tired. And I got up because I was the primary breadwinner. That’s why I got up the bed, otherwise, uh-uh I would have stayed in bed. Sex drive, forget about it. I had head-to-toe issues. I was losing my hair. My brain wasn’t working. I had anxiety, no, I’m high-strung. I’m not anxious. I’m just happened to be like go, go, go high energy. I had a thyroid dysfunction where it was totally normal. I had heart palpitations, asthma, bloating gas, diarrhea, constipation, sometimes all in the same day, right? I’d be having diarrhea then be constipated then of diarrhea later, like, go figure. I had really heavy periods, I had difficulty conceiving – I made up for that one. And I had wasting in nutritional deficiencies, so I was really a mess, and that happened when I was 35. I was a year and a half out of residency. And I did go off the cliff in residency but again, world view, I didn’t have the view that I was supposed to feel amazing so I can’t just tolerate and feeling all these things.

And the other thing of it all, highlight, Ashley, is it doesn’t happen overnight for most of us. It’s not like Monday I feel amazing. Tuesday I feel terrible. What happened? I’m going to look into this? Now, it was this, slow, slow, deterioration of my health, okay? So I’m 35. I’m barely getting out of my bed and my husband says to me, why don’t you go and see my mentor who was one of the old time functional medicine doctors in Massachusetts? He was mentoring my husband. And our insurance was changing and he took our insurance that we were leaving so we kind of rushed it and got me in for an appointment and he did what I considered at that time a ridiculous work up. He has his proof before functional medicine in my world and he worked it. Fruit sensitivities, minerals, nutrients, and one thing that he did that he didn’t even talked me about was he tested me for Celiac, and it was positive. And on the car right up, I’m six weeks post-partum, I’m like about to lose my mind, I said to my husband, call him. I need to know what’s wrong. I can’t wait any longer. Now, I’ve read it six weeks mind you but it can’t wait another minute. And I said to him, you going to call him. So my husband calls him and says, alright, I’m sorry, but Wendie is freaking out here. Is there anything major that we should know about before we walk into the office? And he’s like, yeah, she’s Celiac disease. And I said, oh my dad has celiac disease! And he says, well it’s genetic. You probably should have been tested. I was like, oops. So at 35 I got diagnosed with Celiac disease and went gluten-free. I want to pause there because sometimes that’s a lot to unpack, and we haven’t even really gotten to peak two. That’s just peak one.

[00:20:23] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important to look at our family history not from the standpoint of, oh, because my dad had heart disease that means I’m going to have heart disease, or  because my grandma had diabetes, I’m going to have diabetes. But it’s really important to look at it as, genetics don’t necessarily cause, it’s only the trigger that pulls the gun, right? It’s the nutrient deficiencies, the foods you’re exposed to, you’re typically eat about the same way, with typically have the same nutrient deficiencies as your family and so if your family has these issues, it’s really, really good to eat a diet that is corrective, to do lifestyle that is corrective, and preventive of those issues and what I’ve heard over and over again is, not only Celiac but gluten intolerance. So the intolerance, it’s not necessarily Celiac but it’s just the intolerance to it, is often, more than not often seen, if the mother has it all the kids have it. Same with dairy, dairy intolerance, something like 51 or 52% of the population of the earth should not, in any way, she’d perform be drinking the breastmilk from any animal, right? So any kind of milk from any animal, and yet we do. And so, if there’s one person, like, I see these moms, who are like, well little Johnny is allergic to milk so we don’t give him milk but the rest of the family does, and I’m like, that doesn’t make sense because if he has dairy intolerance or if you know you had dairy intolerance as a kid it’s more likely that all your children have it and sometimes their symptoms are masked because they’re also eating a bunch of sugar, they’re also, you know, there’s a bunch of other allergens and it takes time you’re going to remove  these food sensitivities, right? Remove those grains and the dairy and the eggs those are the most common ones, right? Remove them for quite a while. I believe that a certain immunoglobulin responses, hyper responses have a 60-day, half-life, some of them, some of them are 30 days, some of them are 60 days. So, it’s like it takes a while to really calm the body down. And it’s not that big of a deal like I know some parents freak out, I wouldn’t know what to feed them if I can’t feed them sugar, right? If I can’t feed them a bunch of cereal and dairy every day, so you’ll figure that out. I don’t know, try fruit. But this is so common that we overlook that our major, major health issues could be something, that’s like, oh yeah my mom is allergic to that, or my mom had to avoid that, or my dad had to avoid that maybe I should, right? And this is what drives me off the wall is that, you’re a doctor, right? But how many doctors did you see? And you yourself are a doctor so you saw yourself? It’s kind of hard to treat yourself, right?

[00:23:25] Dr. Wendie Trubow: You can’t treat yourself. No, you can’t treat yourself. That’s very hard.

[00:23:29] Ashley James: What drives me off the wall is that in all your medial training there wasn’t a class that was like, okay we’re going to talk about food sensitivities and allergies and how we can help our patients to dial in their diet for the most optimal healing, right? That class doesn’t exist.

[00:23:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow: No. And we’d like 2 hours of nutrition training that was it.

[00:23:49] Ashley James: Drives me crazy.

[00:23:51] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah, so it’s not.

[00:23:52] Ashley James: Okay, so you’re in the car. You’ve been given this and also the light bulb goes on. Did you have a glimmer of hope? Did you have a feeling, like, hey maybe this is the answer?

[00:24:00] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I don’t think of things like that. It’s so funny, you know, I’m 51 and a half and I look at those years like a blur because I was in the midst of so many really all-encompassing projects, so the biggest project was reproducing, so I was either pregnant or nursing for 11 years.

[00:24:26] Ashley James: Hmm. Wow.

[00:24:28] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I know. So, and I have four kids. So you all can do the Math.

[00:24:32] Ashley James: Congratulations!

[00:24:28] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Thank you! So, that’s why I say I made up for them, infertility stuff or fertility challenges we should say. So that was kind of in my face, right? I’m trying to grow and feed and raise a lot of little people. So that was really encompassing. Then, the next part to that is I was a new attending doctor so I had to prove myself. Then the next layer to that is my husband, about, let me think about this. What is the timeline? About four years into my career as an attending, my husband decided he wanted to open a functional medicine centre, and so we opened this huge place that grew to be one of the largest functional medicine providers in the country.

[00:25:16] Ashley James: Cool!

[00:24:28] Dr. Wendie Trubow: And we’re on that rollercoaster for seven years and that closed in 2015 and that I feel like when I woke up, you know, because my kids, all of them were weaned. So I was no longer the human food slot machine?

[00:25:33] Ashley James: Creator?

[00:24:35] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I was no longer the human vending machine, like, oh I’ll have a snack now! And it’s free! It’s open 24/7!

[00:25:43] Ashley James: She doesn’t need to sleep!

[00:25:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow: No. I remember craving unbroken sleep in those days. So I didn’t look at it, honestly Ashley, on those early days I was just trying to survive. I was on the rollercoaster of life. I had zero brain space. I could gauge how overwhelmed I was by how long it took me to book an appointment for something, and I remember saying to my hairdresser, if you don’t make me book an appointment before I leave, you will literally won’t see me for nine months, because I’m just too overwhelmed to even think of calling you. So that was sort of the barometer for my life, and one thing hits the max right? You don’t feel well so it’s hard to then take care of yourself, and if you don’t take care of yourself then you’re not going to feel well, so you circle the drain, and that was me, circling the drain. So getting rid of gluten is very impactful because I noticed tremendous improvement head-to-toe immediately. But I’ll always say to patients, it’s like that shark’s mouth. Sharks have seven rows of teeth and when one tooth falls out the next tooth moves forward to takes its place, and that’s when it’s like you’re untangling your health. So, you have layer number one, cool, gluten. Guess what? Layer number two, was candida. And layer number three was dysbiosis. So I’m kind of work through those, and worked on my gut, for tsk, let’s think about this, thirteen years! And I was doing pretty good! I had gotten to a place where I was still extremely, and I still am extremely reactive to gluten. But I felt pretty good. Okay? So fast forward from age 35 to 48 when peak two happens, and peak two, we go on a trip of a lifetime. Now, just so you know, I have four kids, and we travel with both of our mothers. So it’s not just a romantic getaway, it’s like a soccer team that will show up! There was all of us! So we go in this amazing vacation in 2019 to Paris and we spend the week right around Notre dame and, whenever I go on vacation, I work really hard to stay on the eating plan that works for me so I generally don’t gain weight on vacation. So, I came home, same weight, fine, but a month after I came home, I gained 9 pounds. And half the hair on my head started falling out in droves, like, crazy amounts.

[00:28:14] Ashley James: Wow!

[00:28:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow: And I had a rash on my face that would not quit. And what do women care about – hair, skin, weight. Those weren’t ok for a doctor, right? You could’ve a blood pressure of 200 over 100, but you’re like, yeah, it’s been that high before but I just gained 6 pounds! Doc, I need an appointment tomorrow, right? So I freaked, and of course what’s the number one thing when you gain weight? Thyroid. So here’s where you can treat yourself but you can’t treat yourself. So I start to do my test, and by the way, I’m 48 at that point, so I’m perimenopausal. Damn, hormones! So I check my hormones, they’re perfect! I checked my thyroid, its perfect! And now, I’m like, hmm, maybe I’ll do a stool test! Maybe cause you got to run through your body right? So, I start to do a stool test, it looks for me really darn good! So I’m totally stymied. And I spent a month or so sort of flailing around like what am I doing? What’s wrong in here? Maybe it’s just perimenopause, right? Chalk it up! And I’m listening to the radio one day and I hear this report about how when Notre dame burned down it released five hundred pounds of lead dust into the air and the closer you were to Notre dame the more lead exposure you got the further away the less you got, make sense right?

[00:29:35] Ashley James: No.

[00:28:36] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes! And I looked at my husband and I was like, we spend a week there right after it burned! I got a lead exposure! And that threw me off the cliff! And he was like, maybe? I’m like, don’t maybe me! That’s what happened! So I did the testing. Doctors are bad patients. That’s all I have to say. Bad doctor! I had previously done a lead and mercury, heavy metals testing on myself and it was mildly positive. So we, in our practice, treat when the levels are over 8. And I tested at 9 for lead a million of years before and I was like, it’s kind of a pain in the butt program I’m not going to treat for a just slightly positive level knowing what I didn’t know then is that often the first numbers you get when you’re someone that doesn’t detox well, the first numbers you get are often just the tip of the iceberg, and I didn’t realize that then so I blew it off, okay. So my number was 9 years ago and then I do this test after going to Notre dame and my level was 25% higher. That got my attention because I will treat at 12. So I said to my husband, oh my god, I’ve lead! Oh, and mercury by the way. Why go for just half of the bad ones, I’ll go for everything! I didn’t have cadmium, I didn’t have arsenic, and I didn’t have thallium those are really the ones we look at, all five of those. And then I started to think about what other toxins are there. So I did mycotoxins, which are the mold toxins that when you get exposed to mold it puts out toxins in your body those are called mycotoxins. So I did the testing for that. And I had four strains of mycotoxins. Tsk. And now I’m really thick. And I start treatment, I got so much better, like my hair loss slowed, my rash quieted down, I got, here’s the really cool part, I used to be the canary in a coal mine for gluten, so, I never went out to eat because I got so sick, anywhere. And so I don’t know why it has tested out, and instead of having a 3-month recovery to gluten I started to notice that my recovery was instead of 3 months, 6 weeks! And then it was 2 weeks, and then it was 10 days and then it was 5 and then it was 2 and then it was 24 hours and then it was like 12 hours which sounds pretty awful when you think about like brain fog and diarrhea but on the other hand when you compare it to, I used to do it for 3 months, it was such a different world.

[00:32:23] Ashley James: Yep.

[00:32:24] Dr. Wendie Trubow: So I did these treatments from mycotoxins and heavy metals and it’s hard honestly, like, my whole life was organized around detox. Get up, do something, do something an hour later, I did something throughout the day for months and when I was re-tested, I was like, oh my, because the levels of lead were so much higher and mercury was so much higher, and that’s really when we started to dive into, right, if you’re not detoxing it’s just a tip of the iceberg that your body’s able to start to sort of squeeze out, luckily, squeeze out, and then the last part of this was when I re-tested my mycotoxins after a year sort of occur to me like, oh, they also have environmental toxins testing and testing for pesticides so why don’t I do that at the same time, in for a penny, in for a pound, let’s just do it all. So my re-test when I did that I did the other and I was like, oh my, it’s never good news here, and I’ve got all bunch of those things to deal with. So I’ve been systematically addressing and removing things and so what I’ll say is, it’s a long process, A, B, it’s a rewarding process, C, I’d lost more weight than I gained, right? So I gained 9 pounds and I lost 15 pounds when my weight finally shifted, but it took two and a half years into the process before my weight shifted and I think that’s really important for the listeners because whenever someone comes and says, I can’t lose weight and my thyroids are normal. I’m like, great, you’ve most likely got toxins but it’s going to be a couple of years before your body quiets down, it’s not immediate.

[00:34:08] Ashley James: That’s been my experience with my own health. Every doctor I’ve gone through and I go to naturopaths and like holistic doctors. Every doctors, like, I walked in the door, oh, thyroid, you are thyroid, classic thyroid ha-ha-ha and I’m like no actually every test I’ve ever done my thyroid’s fantastic and they kind of look at me like they’re going to be the doctor that fixes my thyroid. Then the blood work comes back and they’re like, oh, okay, you’re right. I showed them all the previous lab tests and my thyroid is fine everything’s fine everything in all my blood tests are fine and when I finally figured out was I have major heavy metals to the point where everything I did like weight loss I’d feel, I could taste heavy metals I’d wake up tasting them in my mouth kind of like an ash tray whatever you imagine that would taste like it was horrible and then my body would exude a smell of burning rubber like when cars are spinning out the burning rubber’s smell like burning garbage that’s what my body would smell like and then my liver would distend to the point where you could see it pushing out from behind the rib cage and it was hard as a rock and one of my doctors wanted to do a biopsy we did the ultrasound and they’re like your liver’s just pissed of there’s nothing wrong we couldn’t find anything wrong here it’s just pissed of,f my gall bladder is fine but my liver was as hard as a rock and pushing out and that’s when it all clicked because I had to do my own sleuthing cause every doctor that I went to was like oh thyroid and I’m like are you kidding me and when it finally clicked my I’m like wow, I’m tasting heavy metals my liver is pissed off and I have MTHFR that’s just one of the many things and I’m sure attribute to..

[00:36:04] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Me too!

[00:34:08] Ashley James: …poor detox, which is what I want to talk about is why there some people can detox, like it’s so funny, there’s this one woman I know whose very similar story to you, if she was in the same room as gluten she’d be in bed for 6 months like she’s just everything she’s so reactive she’s constantly having to work on her health, constantly, constantly, constantly. Her husband, all he eats is pizza all he drinks is beer. He is fine he is the picture of health why is it that some people are easily over burned with toxins unable to like the liver’s unable to process them and seemingly no matter how healthy they feel they eat they’re still it’s just like this uphill battle with detox why are some people like that way and other people could spend their entire lives thru drive in or drive thru and like rarely got a cold, so, what is this? I’ve always heard it’s a microbiome, the microbiome is everything if you have a good microbiome then you are good but there’s so much more than that.

[00:37:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Okay before I answer that question I have to ask you something, can I call you Ash?

[00:37:20] Ashley James: Oh yeah, sure.

[00:37:22] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Okay Ash. So we were privileged enough to interview Alessio Fasano for our podcast and legit when I first read one of his papers I said to my husband this dude’s going to get the Nobel prize and I was like I’ve been a groupie for the last ten years of his. I love him to pieces and he’s  this like beautiful Italian man with the accent and he does great research and It’s all about gluten and so one of the things he said he talks about is yes it is your microbiome and it’s a triad so you have the triad of the microbiome health which really is a term for gut permeability okay that’s what we’re looking at it’s the permeability of the gut and lets come back to that because I want to make sure we talk about the triad and then we will talk about each component. The gut permeability combined with a genetic susceptibility combined with a trigger – that’s your triad. So 40% of the population has the MTHFR gene and like 40% of the people have the gene for Celiac but very few people were actually are diagnosed of Celiac although the numbers much higher than suspect basically there’s more people with Celiac than know they have Celiac they just haven’t been diagnosed but basically when you put that together the thing that seems to set it off is not your genetics its actually your gut permeability so this is where the science gets so cool and so in your gut if your someone who carries a gene for Celiac that’s DQ2 or DQ8 positive it’s on the HLA subtype of antigens. If you have that then you upregulate these receptors called CXCR3 I don’t know why they named it that but that’s the name now when you eat gluten as someone with the gene and now the upregulation of these receptors, you have more receptors that bind to the gluten particles so it’s actually gliadin and the gluten and that upregulates something called zonulins. Zonulins are a substance, now in order to tell you what they do I have to tell you the significance, so zonulins dissolve the tight junction in your gut.

[00:39:48] Ashley James: Yes!

[00:39:50] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Okay. So your gut from your mouth to your anus is essentially one cell wall thick which is crazy to think you think you have this whole big barrier between you and the outside world but no there’s one cell wall that’s each cell is stuck tightly to its neighbour and that lines your entire GI tract now if you have the genes for Celiac and you eat gluten you upregulate the receptors and then zonulin gets pumped out zonulin dissolves the tight junctions and now the outside world is being exposed to your inside world, okay are you with me so far?

[00:40:32] Ashley James: Hmm-hmm

[00:40:34] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Now what’s really interesting is anyone who eats gluten opens up their tight junctions for about 15 minutes anyone genes are not but if you have the genes you open your tight junctions for like 4 hours and so what that means is that when you look at people eating a standard American diet, what’d you eat for breakfast? Huh, bagel, cereal, okay, what’d you eat for lunch? Sandwich what’d you eat for dinner? Pasta with chicken and broccoli, or lasagna or pizza, you basically, if you’re someone who’s genetically at risk you’ve opened your tight junctions for the entire day. So the outside world meaning bacteria, toxins, hormones, whatever, right? Food particles, you can pretty much start naming them all of those things you’re getting into your bloodstream, and your bloodstreams like what in the holy name of you know what is this? This is not me? This is not part of what I want to do. This is not normal. Your body starts to generate an immune response, and then things go haywire. So your body starts to attack everything because it’s like confused basically, okay? So one major part of the triad is genetic susceptibility combined with the gut permeability and then anything that gets through the gut serves as a trigger. Unless you went to Notre dame right after it burned and got a huge lead load and here’s where those three things don’t adequately explain everything, okay. Because the next layer to it I will just describe it like your health is the sandwich, the gluten-free sandwich, between of a bun, a gluten-free bun  and that bun is your environment and your genetics and epigenetics and we can talk about epigenetics in a minute, the meat of that sandwich or if you’re vegetarian the vegetables of that sandwich are your sleep, your thoughts, your gut health, your nutrients status, your ability to move your body, your intimacy with others, how often you poop, all the stuff about you is the meat or vegetables of that sandwich put that all together and all of that is influencing whether you’re going to be someone who can do drive thru for their life eat Dunkin’ Donu.. I’m in Boston, so it’s Dunkies, it’s been Dunkies since I was a kid, so if you could go to Dunkies every day and get a coffee and a donut or if you’re someone who’s just driving by Dunkies is gonna make you sick like me, so it all kind of re-smooshed in and I’ll always say to people it’s hard to taste out the exact thing because think of yourself like a blended soup you can no longer pull out one ingredient because it’s already been blended together.

[00:43:22] Ashley James: Right

[00:40:23] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  That’s your health. Okay.

[00:43:26] Ashley James: Before you move forward I really want to unpack what you said because I think it’s the most impactful, I want every single listener to really, really sit with, including myself to sit with what you just said for a moment and just really unpack it. So when you say from your mouth to your anus which is one long tube right so we’re kind of like a donut if you think about it because we always think that when you put stuff in your mouth and you swallow your quote unquote inside of your body but it’s actually not inside your body it’s a tube, that tube is kind of like the outside world in a sense, right? Because we’re like a pull noodle, we’re a pull noodle, and so when you say that from your mouth to your anus the only protection we have from the outside world I mean besides things like stomach acid hopefully kill things right is this one layer of epithelial tissue, right,  like it’s a type of skin. Can we just get an image in our mind is it like the thickness of a hair or is it…

[00:44:39] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Thinner.

[00:44:42] Ashley James: It’s thinner than that? Is it so thin we can’t visibly see with the human eye?

[00:44:45] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Correct.

[00:44:47] Ashley James: So we have a layer protecting us from all the craziness of the world, that’s thinner than what we can perceive with the human eye, and when we eat barley, wheat, rye, I’m going to say oats because they contain gliadin.

[00:45:05] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  They’re often cross-contaminated too.

[00:45:07] Ashley James: Right. So let’s just like throw out this notion of marketing which is gluten-free oats, just throw it out, because oats do the damage too. So barley, wheat, rye and oats if we eat anything even if we don’t have celiac let’s say you are the luckiest person, you won the genetic lottery and you have perfect, perfect, perfect genes, perfect digestion, it’s still even with perfect genes and perfect digestion causes leaky gut for 15 minutes so that tiny imperceivable with the human eye barrier between your insides like your bloodstream and your lymph system, your immune system and while you’re eating that barrier is dissolves slightly like the junctions are weakened and food particles that are not fully digested are allowed to enter into your body and then your immune system freaks out has to attack it then it causes this cascade of inflammation your lymph system freaking out and that could trigger all kinds of things and that’s for the healthy people.

[00:46:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Hmm. Hmm. Don’t forget, not just food. It’s food and bacteria, and molds, and toxins, and something that you walked by a perfume that you inhaled anything you swallowed, any chemicals on your water, it’s any chemical and toxin, not just food.

[00:46:37] Ashley James: Can we also dare to say parasites?

[00:46:43] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yup! Have at it! Anything that you can ingest you can absorb.

[00:46:48] Ashley James: Alright. So, basically the outside world, the crazy, crazy toxic outside world is getting into our bloodstream and our body has to deal with it and our liver has no idea what’s going on and now has to figure out how to deal with it, and that’s for the healthy people.

[00:47:02] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yup!

[00:47:03] Ashley James: And the unfortunate people, likely if you are listening to our podcast you’re not one of those people who is always healthy never sick, right. Like those people aren’t motivated necessarily to listen.

[00:47:14] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Right.

[00:47:15] Ashley James: It’s all of us who are like working on ourselves right, like, I’m on a health journey, I’ve healed a lot, you’ve healed a lot, when I’m done healing we’re still getting better and better. All my listeners I know still getting better and better. So we can’t be gluten-free once in a while, because that once in a while is still enough to cause this triggering, right,  so we need to be really diligent and even more when in a restaurant we need to be hyper hyper diligent and not consume this because it causes even 15 minutes of that tiny, tiny, tiny layer of protection like removing that, I mean that’s really blows my mind I’ve talked to so many doctors about being gluten-free and why but you explained it in such a way that is so understandable and I think of so many people who are like, oh yes! I’m gluten-free but you know once a week I couldn’t, but that whole week your body is still cascading from inflammation, having to clean up the damage of one meal, like you said, one meal really worth that? Okay I’m getting of my gluten soapbox. So thank you. Is there anything else that you want to say that really have us fully grasp the necessity of a 100% of the population removing barley, wheat, rye, and oats because of how damaging it is to everyone.

[00:48:45] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Honestly Ashley, I think that’s a stronger statement than I would make even as a Celiac. What I would say is, there’s so many layers to this okay, so back like in the 1940’s, 1950’s there were food shortages and gluten, wheat, is not genetically modified okay, but I don’t really understand the difference, okay between hybridization and genetic modification because basically the end result is that they bred it so that it grows faster, it will stand drought, it will stand pests, and it doesn’t fall over in heavy rains or winds. That’s genetic modification in my world but it’s called hybridization.

[00:49:25] Ashley James: But what happens in the lab, right? With there like where going to take the genes of a fish, and we’re going to put it into a tomato, right? That’s GMO, right? Or we’re going to take this wheat and we’re going to make it so it’s resistant to, we’re going to actually create it Bt toxin so that the wheat itself kills bugs. I don’t like some crazy nonsense, now you’re like eating something that has the genes of something else. But breeding something when wheat even a hundred years ago is not even recognizable to the wheat we have today or even in the 40’s the amount of gluten is so much more it’s crazy it’s used to just be like a handful of little seeds at the end of the stalk and now it’s like a hundred seeds right on the end of the stalk it’s completely different and they also increased the amount of gluten in wheat, but yes, you’re right that overtime these crops were bred and now they bred to produce so much more gluten that people are reacting to that but don’t react to like ancient grains

[00:50:33] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right. Right. So that’s one part of it and then the next part of it is that, as Americans we often are eating it much more frequently so we’re not necessarily cooking breakfast and cooking lunch and cooking dinner so faster food has become needed and that faster food is typically gluten so here you have the layer of where it’s more allergenic we’re eating it more, we’re eating more of it, you know, my god, I remember being a kid I found a dress of my mom’s. My mom was born in 1944 and I remember finding like I think it was her wedding dress, it’s kind of a midi, white dress it’s like a size 0. People are eating more we’re actually bigger than we were 50 years ago, we’re physically bigger, so we eat more and then the next layer of that is that you mention stomach acid there’s a really cool association between stomach acid and gluten sensitivity so if you have the gene for gluten sensitivity or celiac that you see more likely to have low stomach acid it’s not clear which is the chicken and which is the egg and which came first but there’s some kind of association okay, so the next layer is our lives are much more chaotic and so we aren’t taking the time to slow down and eat properly, chew our food, so there’s always layers to what we eat, we eat with  stress that suppresses our stomach acid, that makes us more likely to let bacteria and not breakdown our food properly, into the next phase which is the small intestine so there’s all these layers to it, Ashley that just keep propagating but I don’t know that I would say everybody shouldn’t eat gluten period what I would say is the best and healthiest way to eat is a way that has a minimum amount if any of processed food and food from a package and if you start with that that becomes sort of naturally a gluten-free diet but it’s not gluten-free for the purpose of gluten-free it’s gluten-free for the purpose of getting higher quality nutrients that do more for your body and sustain the mitochondria and the telomeres and your DNA and your vitality that’s the reason not just to do gluten-free for the sake of it because of how you’re feeling as a result.

[00:53:04] Ashley James: Got it, got it. The mycotoxins you talked about I’ve been excited to uncover that can we jumped into that?

[00:53:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Definitely! Mycotoxins are nasty little bookers.

[00:53:20] Ashley James: Yup! So what are they and where did they come from and how do we avoid them?

[00:53:25] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Well, step into my office. So the most common sources are water damaged buildings and when you say this to someone have you been in a water damaged building? Most people are like I don’t know, not that I know of. That thing that you drill into, okay did you go to school? In a school? And they will, yes, okay schools are typically moldy. Did you go to college and live in a dorm? Yes. Okay, dorms are typically moldy, oh okay. A lot of government buildings are typically moldy. Old homes are typically moldy. Homes that are built in wet climates are typically moldy. Homes that have water damage like I live in Massachusetts and we had the snowmageddon winter in 2015 and a million and one people had ice dams which essentially opened up their roof to the outside world and then they have water in their walls so that kind of stuff is really hard to remediate so if you got water in your walls you got to fix it. So all of these layers, right, that’s the big exposure. I did randomly have a patient who had mold in her car that’s not the most common but she said when I diagnosed her she was like I know my car is moldy and she tested it and it was so that’s another possibility. And then there’s food. There are number of foods that are particularly moldy including all grains and that’s because when you think of how grains are harvested they cut them now I’m not that familiar with honestly harvesting but I know that they get cut, they get threshed, they get stored and that storage process they’re often wet so here’s where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t because if you eat organic grains they’re not sprayed with glyphosate which is a good thing you don’t what glyphosate in your body it’s terrible for you, actually I just had a whole long call with Michael Antoniou, Antoniou who’s a British researcher and has published some really landmark studies on glyphosate because I’m giving a talk on glyphosate and I was like I really want to dig into this with him and he was kind enough to do the data with me and the ultimate upshot is that glyphosate was developed as a, it was actually discovered as a chelating agent and then in 2006 Monsanto patented it as antibiotic and how it works is to inhibit certain enzymes in bacteria and other microorganisms and that inhibition throws off the function and creates lead cell death and its going on around us so if you’re grains sprayed with glyphosate you’re getting glyphosate you don’t want to do that. But if you’re getting organic, the glyphosate helps dry out the crops that’s why it’s helpful. But if you’re getting organic grains that haven’t been sprayed there is chance they’re moldy because they are sitting around waiting to be processed, and if it rained the day before they got processed they are sitting around so and there’s mold spores in the environment. Often for people in Massachusetts I will always find my patients are flaring in April and September, they’re like what’s going on? It’s the mold. It’s the rainy season. In our rainy season people flare in our neighbourhood. So mycotoxins when you got exposed to them again it comes down to genetics if you’re someone who’s sensitive and obviously I’ve got the gene because I’m really reactive to mold and once it gets into your body it just kind of hangs  out and if you’re not a good detoxer it just hangs out. Then if you layer on, you eat a standard American diet and don’t get enough fibre to bind them or don’t do detoxing or stress the body and your body just stores it and hangs on to it because it’s got no other option it’s kind of backed into a corner.

[00:57:12] Ashley James: Can mold live inside our body like in our bloodstream or our lymph system?

[00:57:25] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Hmm. That’s a good question, Ashley. I normally think that the mycotoxins which are the toxins that molds put out as what’s stored in our fat and our organs but what you do bring up, you know, candida is a strain of mold, candida is a yeast and mold they’re related so you can have candida in the bloodstream its less common you can have antibodies to candida which is very common you can have candida in the gut so you can have it in your body but typically it’s the mycotoxins not necessarily the mold itself

[00:57:59] Ashley James: So if someone is having a mycotoxin you know exposure and I don’t want to talk about how you’d figured that out but let’s say they’re having exposure, they realize it’s their office let’s say and they moved offices to a place that is clean now the exposure’s gone! So eventually, the mycotoxins get cleared out or we now concerned that there’s mold living inside them? Because I’ve heard from some people that like if they’ve had a cinema mold exposure that mold is now like continuing to live inside them but this is environmental mold like not internal mold like you’re saying candida that lives inside you it continually produces mycotoxins now we’ve got to do a candida detox replenishing of the gut in the good way and rethink our diet for removing candida and so then that gets rid of the mycotoxins cause you’re not addressing the mycotoxins you’re addressing the cause of them. Is that my understanding?

[00:59:08] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s kind of both. So certainly you wanted to get out of the exposure, no questions, it is sort of schizophrenic to try to heal from mold when you are continuing to be exposed that doesn’t make sense now on the flip side I will say Ashley I always say to people who have silver fillings if you have mercury let’s start getting you detox and take your fillings out in the middle of the detox so that you’re protected from any mercury that gets into your system because we’re already binding it, right,  but mycotoxins it’s more like we want to get you out of the scenario were you’re being exposed to mycotoxins so you stopped the madness because it’s just throwing off your body and jacking up your immune system and it really throws people off you want to get them out of the scenario wherever it is and then start to remove the mycotoxins that they have stored in their body.

[01:00:05] Ashley James: You know we haven’t even plugged your book at this point as a listener I’ll be like okay I’m sold how do I do this? How do I work with Wendie? How do I do this? Oh my gosh! I’m going to make sure that the links to everything is in the shownotes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com including the book, Dirty Girl, Ditch the Toxins Look Great and Feel Freaking Amazing. I definitely want to talk more about your book but I really want to understand the mycotoxins so either it could be in our food and you know I’ve seen this actually with coffee, back then my husband and I were on coffee we switched to mold-free like certified mold-free coffee and noticed the difference I was like what, what, like I really noticed the difference, I was like that is crazy, and so it could be in our food which freaks me out because I have brown rice in bulk you know I buy it in bulk I’m just thinking like is this moldy? How do we know?

[01:01:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s typically the oats, the barley, the wheat, the rye, it’s the grains, rice is a funny one because it sort of lumped in but it’s not so much rice, it lasts, it’s more of the I think of grains, not sure I let you get it that well

[01:01:34] Ashley James: So, okay, well, no, barley, wheat, rye, oats that kind of stuff right?

[01:01:35] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yeah, yeah

[01:01:37] Ashley James: So we should look into foods that are more likely to contain mold and coffee is the big one because of how they processed coffee so if you’re heavy coffee drinker really get mold free coffee I know Bulletproof coffee is one of those brands that are there that prides themselves you don’t have to put like MCT oil and butter or bacon fat or whatever they put in bullet-proof drinks you don’t have to do that you can buy the actual bag that says Bulletproof and give that a try.

[01:02:09] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah. Purity, purity is also, and there was a third one that I just hear about that I’m blanking on but there’s another brand I think if you do a Google search it’s like mold plus free plus beans you should get it.

[01:02:16] Ashley James: Yeah, there you go. So we want to make sure it’s not in our food, make sure it’s not in our home, in our car, we had a beautiful truck we still miss it but man it was full of mold because an animal had chewed through the barrier and gone into the cab because the way they make these trucks now they lined it like a soy lining it’s made from soy so it’s basically edible so you made an edible truck for the animal and because we live in a forest we live in western Washington lots of animals and an animal made its home, its cute little home inside the dashboard and all of a sudden, one day, I look at them and why is there moisture inside the truck? And this is like a newer truck, we opened the door and there was like three inches of fuzz it looks like shag carpeting on every surface especially the areas where the babyseat was because that’s like CSI where you like shine the black light over like that the mold was insane over by the babyseat I’m like what, that’s where he threw up and that’s where he spilled his drink or whatever but the whole thing was mold and our insurance you got to love AllState, our insurance totalled the car and paid us for it, which it sucks I’d rather have a truck than have a paid-off truck but I have paid off not truck, but yeah, that was our experience with it, AllState were like this is unsafe to drive at this point because of all the mold.

[01:03:55] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Well think about it, you know, Katrina, hurricane Katrina in what 2014 all those literally people were submerged up to the top of the first floor which includes cars and so a few of the cars that was in any hurricane, but hurricane Katrina I have pictures of where you can’t imagine see the cars because they are submerged so if that’s your car that has mold you should not be driving that car get rid of it.

[01:04:19] Ashley James: Yes and what if you bought a car, that’s why car facts are so important. 

[01:04:22] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I know.

[01:04:22] Ashley James: Because if you bought a car that’s used you don’t know if that was in Katrina like you don’t know right and I did a few interviews of Green Homes Solutions I don’t know have you been part of them

[01:04:32] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I have.

[01:04:33] Ashley James: Sweet! So I’d interviewed the head scientist and then the CEO slash founder whatever, they are amazing guys but they created an enzyme that digests mold safely so it doesn’t allow for all the toxins to continue to build the spores or whatever to continue to be removed in the environment and then they also test to make sure they’ll comeback to test for years to make sure that it’s safe but Green Homes Solutions that’s my plug for them because I was so impressed with their treatment, we had mold in our bathroom and that I was so impressed with it and I love interviewing them because I got so much information but I can’t believe how many people I’ve talked to friends, friends family and also through the podcast and clients of mine and mold is so common it’s such a common problem and it’s so overlooked so once we removed ourselves from the molds what is the most important thing we should do to help ourselves recover from that exposure.

[01:05:44] Dr. Wendie Trubow: See a functional medicine provider who’s senior I used to be like see a functional medicine provider but it’s really see a senior functional medicine provider who’s comfortable doing toxins testing that’s the criteria right and then tests and then target your treatment to get rid of those strains from you.

[01:06:04] Ashley James: How do we test? Are we testing for mycotoxins or are we testing for mold? What is the testing?

[01:06:09] Dr. Wendie Trubow: You test for mycotoxins. You test your house for mold and you test your body for mycotoxins.

[01:06:15] Ashley James: Got it. And let’s say we removed the mold or removed ourselves from mold, like we got rid of the car, or we moved offices or whatever and we now know where no longer in the mold environment how long do we wait until we test for the mycotoxins because isn’t it gonna clear up of our system?

[01:06:31] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah I think this is really a nuanced question Ashley, so there are people who are not sensitive to mold so it’s so funny as I said that I thought huh I’m not sure if the studies have been done to look at because mold is implicated in to degenerative diseases, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, all of the toxins are pre-strongly implicated in those diseases so I’m thinking about I don’t know the answer too so I’m completely hypothesizing here, okay  this is the part where you’re like it’s not data I’m thinking.

[01:07:07] Ashley James: Right, or it’s the stubborn husband that says I’m fine, I’m fine, I don’t feel anything.

[01:06:31] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right but the thing about it is there are people who are not genetically susceptible to mycotoxins or mold so what I honestly don’t know is what percentage of people with dementia don’t have mycotoxin genes I don’t know that okay I don’t know so I’m just thinking about if you are exposed to mold yes so you want to get out with it but if you are exposed to mold and you feel amazing that’s different when you’re exposed to mold and you feel terrible, right, so the behaviours are different if you’re someone who really is reactive to mold, you don’t do well in moldy environments you have a reaction then I’d say you’re someone who wants to then test and treat, if you get out of the moldy environment and you feel amazing I don’t know that I would go down to spend lots of time and energy and money on functional medicine visits and testing because maybe you don’t need it but the thing that  I’ll say is amazing meaning vital vibrant healthy able to and interested in intimacy able to move your body bring working well not noticing any body system because its functioning optimally your weight is optimal you cardiovascular and metabolic status is perfect if that’s you cool you don’t have to do anything but if that’s not you then I will recommend testing and targeting your treatment.

[01:08:34] Ashley James: You answered my next question which is what the symptoms we should look for and that was awesome! Give us some more, give us some more symptoms of mycotoxin exposure.

[01:08:48] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Sure, so hair loss all things skin mycotoxins cause a lot of skin stuff so rashes, acne, itchiness just sort of being like god my skin just really not right, asthma, all respiratory disorders, weight issues, difficulty losing weight, I personally found that my gut got a lot more regulated when I started to deal with the mycotoxins. The mycotoxins was the most impactful thing that I did to quiet down my celiac canary in a coal mine stuff cause I started that first actually and so gut health…

[01:09:26] Ashley James: I’m sorry to interrupt I’m thinking about what you said, about hair loss, and about skin, and your story where you came home from Notre dame, were you also exposed to mold as well as lead like when the building burned I imagined parts of the building were moldy did that exposed you to mycotoxins

[01:09:44] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I may have. No, the burning building did not expose me to mycotoxins but I mean we stayed; we stayed in the historical French region. Like who knows, right, I have no idea where I got exposed to but it’s very possible but I already knew that I have a mycotoxin issue but it was like the sum total of all the exposures sent me over the edge, right, and the most pressing exposure that I got was a clear lead exposure, but I already you know theres so much we haven’t talked about Ashley I am a child of the 70’s, I had pneumonia when I was 6 months old which means I got antibiotic when I was a 6-month old I had multiple ear infections and strepthroat growing up it was sort of a path I was a poster child for food sensitivities but I didn’t know it and I’ve two genes for celiac and I had what occurred to me was a very stressful events in childhood and then I went to med school I couldn’t simply do a family practice no I had to OB-GYN cause it was hard and I got to stay up at night delivering babies sounds great until something goes wrong right and we forgot about the part where I grew up in the 80’s and microwaves came out and we had those pre-packaged meals in plastic and we took advantage of them and I have a whole bunch of fillings in my mouth, I had, I should I say so when you really start to look at my toxin package I was the whole package man I had everything so because the time when I got to the lead exposure I had mercury some existing lead, mycotoxins, environmental toxins, and now a little bit of lead that I got from being in Notre dame was the straw that broke my back that was it.

[01:11:47] Ashley James: So you were just waiting. Your body was just waiting to have that one additional stressor and for some people it’s not a physical stressor like leads for some people it’s an emotional event.

[01:11:58] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah or perimenopause hormone changes can absolutely be a stressor but you’re right on emotional event is a hugely stressful it’s a life changing something happens a breakup a death a traumatic loss and ending a friendship whatever that is a terrible boss who just keeps chipping away your self-esteem these are all massive stressors and can have a tremendous effect on our body’s ability to detox and I’ll be happy to dive in to that one cause that’s a great conversation.

[01:12:31] Ashley James: Ooh yeah, because I’ve had stories of people where it’s like I don’t know what happened but I had this emotional event and my health was never the same, their memory was like their health was so much better before but you’re saying that they could have been just on a precipice right they could have just been slightly over toxic or just you know had a little bit too much of the lead or just had a little bit of candy that sort of had this everything just sort on that edge and maybe they woke up tired 3x a week instead of everyday, right, and so they’re just on the edge and then they had an event and for someone then it’s pregnancy because that is emotionally stressful that is physically stressful and then there’s the possibly four five years of breastfeeding I know of a mom that went up to seven years of breastfeeding mostly people do two or three years but if you have several kids in a row like you can be eleven years or breastfeeding so that’s the broken up sleep and then we just say oh it’s just because I’m not sleeping it’s just because and we don’t listen to our body and we negate because we go oh it’s just because I didn’t have enough sleep or didn’t eat well or I’m running around chasing the kids or I’m stressed out because of the kids and we don’t take the time to go wait a second I never recovered from that pregnancy I never recovered from that and that could have been when we’re at that breaking point even the emotional stress was enough so yeah let’s talk just about something that is so  intangible as emotional or mental stress could have a physiological effect on setting us over the edge especially when it comes to detox.

[01:14:21] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I love talking about this. So, it’s pretty cool the body does not distinguish between types of stress so the body doesn’t have a bucket for Madame Boss or that darn Massachusetts drivers, that’s not another bucket or the bucket of my spouse’s irking me or my kids are driving me crazy, none are those were separate buckets in the body whatever you say to me I’m going to say to you it’s all going into the stress bucket. So your adrenals are these tiny little organs that sit on top of your kidneys and they are magical they literally determine whether you live or die and under these tiny little things, important things come in small packages so they sit here and they are responsible for a number of behaviors and when you go ten thousand feet, big picture, the primary goal of your adrenals is fight, flight, freeze and maintaining your blood pressure so that’s your life or death pathway and your adrenals are going to do that at any cost and then your nice to have pathway is your hormone balance which becomes particularly important specially if you’re woman when you start to transition into menopause and the ovaries no longer do the job of making the estrogen your adrenals pick it up, okay, but if you have any stress in that bucket your adrenals interpret it in a particular way. So I call it the trinity I apparently like things of three but that’s just how it’s been presented. So there’s your adrenals, when your adrenals experienced that they are being stressed or something stressful is occurring to your body and that could be anything you interpret it at a cellular level like a lion is going to eat you that’s how primitive we are and when a lion is about to eat you it is not important to, digest your food, have sex, ovulate, uptake your nutrients, detox, none of that stuff happens it’s not important because what is happening  your body is experiencing an existential crisis, like I’m going to die we need to focus here and what happens is a really cool cascade so the adrenals signals to the liver, liver, don’t you detox because what we really need to do is focus on getting sugar to the muscles so two things happened at that point your lives takes the sugar that it stores called glycogen out of the liver and makes it into glucose so you have glucose in the bloodstream and simultaneously your body will signal you, I really need some quick sugar, so you’re going to start craving carbs, usually carbs and candy are typically what people like I’m craving and I’m like oh alright you’re stressed so your body is telling you.

[01:17:23] Ashley James: Yes, just think about our society you have a breakup you go for ice cream you have a stressful moment you go for the chocolate bar like how many times is that reinforced that we go for sugar in times of stress.

[01:17:43] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yeah at least the ice cream has some fat hopefully but yeah so you craved sugar and you take sugar out of your liver now simultaneously what’s happening in your gut and that sugar goes to your muscles in your legs by the way so you can run cause ultimately your body is primed to run from a lion okay we haven’t kept up with the technology our bodies haven’t evolved that the same pace the technology has so then in your gut your adrenal signal the gut you know right now digestion and absorption is not our priority stop so if you just had a big meal that made its way to your intestines it sits there and it rots and then the bacteria that are anaerobic that are there to digest you when you die they are psyched cause they are like, oh a meal and they get going and those are the bacteria that make you bloat and gassy and gross that really disgusting cause those are dysbiotic bacteria okay and the other part of it is when you eat that sugar candida in your system you know it’s common to have candida and I would say even a small is normal but if you have a large amount it starts to run the show and when you eat sugar it gets fed and then it needs to eat more cause it just reproduced so it makes you crave more so now you are on the rat wheel of OGs I’ve just increased my candida in the system along with my stress so all those things are going on simultaneously right and in the adrenals you start to use up the raw materials that you have to make cortisol you start to use them up because you are constantly turning now this is what happens in the short term, in the long term, your body starts to go into long term crisis management because it’s like wait a minute obviously we’re not running and instead of starting to sort of increase your metabolism and burning and put sugar where it belongs you start to actually collect your calories and depose fat and usually that fat is called the angry fat and its full of interleukins and inflammatory mediators that are seating right in your gut. So people are like oh it came all this way right in my mid-section, I’m like yup that’s your stressed gut and so this is what starts to happen long-term issue you hold on to every calorie the metabolism starts to slow and you go down the inflammation pathway because you’ve deposited all of these fat around your intestines, then you will get fatty liver because you’re now in a dysfunctional pattern it’s pretty creepy actually.

[01:20:09] Ashley James:  So you’re saying that the fat around the mid-section so like pear-shaped people or like Bart Simpson got or does it look like you’re pregnant like that shape where it’s just a bunch of fat deposited right there that is more likely than not stress gut deposits of angry fat from long term being in fight or flight mode?

[01:20:51] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes and, It felt like I’m on in broad, yes and, and because when you’ve shut down detox your liver’s no longer doing the job what’s happening is I mean we’re exposed to thousands of chemicals every day humans have created over a hundred forty thousand unique chemicals and we created an additional unique fifteen hundred chemicals every year so as we moved for a day we’re exposed to thousand of chemicals and it’s like death by a thousand cuts because obviously none of them are in  amounts that are going to kill us but they are in amounts that are high enough to torture us and so what’s happening is instead of your liver working on those and by the way alcohol is a toxin and it isn’t a cute toxin. So if you’re get exposed to alcohol you’re going processed that because it will kill you directly so you start to store this toxins in your fat and so if you’re having trouble losing weight and your thyroid is normal where I go is toxins cause it’s been about four years and I’ve been in this stance and it’s like everything kind of comes down to toxins and food and inflammation.

[01:22:13] Ashley James:  Hmm-hmm toxins, food and inflammation. Seriously?

[01:22:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow: In a nutshell that’s your health

[01:22:20] Ashley James:  So when you talked about the trifecta where you’re saying adrenals liver gut?

[01:22:29] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes, yes

[01:22:30] Ashley James:  Got it.

[01:22:31] Dr. Wendie Trubow: On top of the trifecta of leaky gut trigger and genetics slash epigenetics that’s another trifecta. I really like the word trifecta much better than trinity because I feel it was a religious reference and it’s not.

[01:22:48] Ashley James:  That really sounds such a positive thing to be like the trinity that’s killing you, you know like, ha!

[01:22:53] Dr. Wendie Trubow: The trifecta. Actually the perfect storm and the trifecta of- I love that language it’s great I’m going to steal that blindly.

[01:23:00] Ashley James:  You should do that. It’s yours now with bow on it. So, to wrap that up it’s very important to the emotional work and emotional healing and check in with yourself and it’s as important to makes sure you’re regulating your emotional stress and mental stress as it is your physical stress and your environmental stressors they’re all equally important because your body cannot distinguish between your emotional stress and the burger you ate to the drive thru or the plastics you’re exposed to or the lead you’re exposed to like stress, stress, stress but more importantly when our body is under threat, right, when you feel anxiety. Anxiety is the message, it’s like the red warning light on the dashboard saying hey we’re under attack were under attack and we can be totally safe but if we’re imagining something even just sitting there because the body’s always listening to our thoughts even if you are sitting there imagining something we don’t want to have happen is enough to trigger the stress response. So we’d have to be really careful, clear, we have to be very clear unintentional with our thoughts and do the emotional work, the emotional healing I’ve got great interviews on that but that is as important as the other stuff because if we trigger the fight or flight response we go into that cascade like you said and long term our body were fermenting or rotting food in our stomach, we’re feeding bad bacteria, we’re getting more mycotoxins in our body like that’s horrible, that’s all from just being careless with our thoughts and allowing the let’s say the mainstream media go somewhere there’s cable tv and watch it, not in my house, but go somewhere there’s cable tv and just turn to any news channel watch it for five minutes and you’re going to be rotting your food instead of digesting and absorbing your food right and then your body’s going to like what you’ve said in the long term you’d gain weight in the mid-section and that weight is also carrying with it a lot of toxins so we need to reverse that let’s err you know turn around make a U-turn go back and let’s go back to where we’re every day taking time to check-in within ourselves emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically and really be responsible for our state of stress and our state of triggering the autonomic nervous system parasympathetic response of our rest and digest you know it takes going for that walk five minutes three times a day just getting out there and breaking up your day doing deep breathing doing five minutes of meditation doing a few breaths and chewing your food slowly and making sure you sit, you sit before you eat and you’re in a calm state you know so all these little things add up hugely and that’s been my journey as well and I’ve seen this with so many of my clients like just making sure we’re taking ourselves out of the stress response so I loved that you associate that and you showed us, it’s like you see those crime shows where they show you the board and there’s a bunch of like these pins and strings on the board. You’re like the crazy detective that no one’s listening to until they finally realized that your crazy conspiracy board was actually true and you’re like look look you know you’re stressed out because your job is actually causing you to gain weight and also causing your candida which causing your brain fog and they’re all connected. So you got this great way of putting it all together and

[01:26:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Yes, truly!

[01:26:49] Ashley James:  So you’ve got the great way of putting it all together and allowing us to really see it. So thank you for the pin board. That’s wonderful. So we want to make sure that we’re checking off all these boxes are we go through. You want to talk about this epigenetics and I love this conversation because so many people are told by their well-intention doctors who are not trained in functional medicine or holistic medicine that’s like oh well you have diabetes because its genetic take this pill for the rest of your life, goodbye! You know it’s like what wait a second that’s totally not the case, epigenetics is a beautiful dance where the body can express in certain ways and due to nutrients or due to toxins could express in a different way so I love for you to enlighten us why it’s so important for us to understand our epigenetic tendencies and how we can utilize them to best detox and regain our health back

[01:27:51] Dr. Wendie Trubow: I’m going to use myself as an example because it’s such a clear example honestly so epigenetics is this, think of it like a small supporting cast of genetics that’s support your DNA and depending on what happens in your life, your parents life, your grandparents life, okay so we go back pretty far whatever happens on those three I guess you think of it the other way whatever happens on your grandparents life and your parents life and then your life influence whether your genes are going to turn on or not turn on, are you with me so far? Because this is really epigenetics insane it’s really cool so when I said I will share about myself I essentially come from a line of celiacs because my dad has celiac and I have celiac and my two brothers they’re half-brothers genetically to me my two half-brothers genetically who I consider emotionally my full brothers but really genetically they’re my half-brothers they have celiac and then when you go up the line my grandmother died of dementia which is strongly implicated in celiac and gluten sensitivity and then my uncle I’m pretty sure he’s got celiac but he won’t get tested and then his three kids out of the three two of them are sensitive to gluten and one of them has ADHD which is implicated in gluten sensitivity okay so and  by the way of my four kids two of them are fairly sensitive to gluten we figured out that I have two copies of the celiac gene, a dubious genetic overachiever, I’ve got two copies for celiac, two copies for MTHFR, and two copies for Vitamin D deficiency. So I by default…

[01:29:51] Ashley James:  Oh geez!

[01:29:53] Dr. Wendie Trubow: Right? At that point I stopped counting I was like I’m not looking at anything else so by default I passed that along to all my kids and we allowed my older two to have gluten at preschool and by that time they were done with preschool they were both sensitive to gluten so by the time we have this like second generation of kids you know  we call them the bigs and the littles, the bigs were sensitive and the littles we were like no you’re not getting any gluten because we have epigenetically enhanced nasty genes for celiac and now let me talk to you about some things, so my dad was like pretty sick in his 20’s and this is before he had me his dad was very sick his whole life and was an immigrant, my grandmother she was intimate and immigrant but her parents were both immigrants and they lived a pretty successful life but they always lived in fear okay and then on the other side of my family my grandmother was an immigrant my grandfather was an immigrant and so my mom was the first generation born in the country and so those stressors acted to turn on those genes okay and so when you then layer on this is why it becomes a blended soup when you then  layer on yes I eat sloppy Joe’s as a kid I had the microwave food and all the antibiotics that messed with my gut permeability and my microbiome by the time you get to med school when I’m super stressed and eating on the run and eating a lot of gluten my ability to fight this off has really been diminished and deteriorated and so epigenetics is what turns on or off these genes and sometimes they’re carved before you even born so you’re at the affective other peoples choices which kind of stinks but the  good news is you’re only 15% right if I have lived a life of not eating gluten or if I have lived a life of not honestly not abusing myself in terms of putting myself in stressful situations I may not be where I was until I am now in terms of being so sensitive to gluten right knowing now what I did not know then but I didn’t know those things. Can I share a really cool study?

[01:32:15] Ashley James:  Yes!

[01:32:16] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I want to share a really cool study. I heard about it on NPR I was driving from Western Mass to Eastern Mass where I live and I have my kids in the car and for once they were quiet I was like shh we got to listen to this so it’s such a really cool study of this tiny town in Sweden I’m pretty sure it’s Sweden they keep meticulous records on their inhabitants of their town and their records went back to like the 17th or 18th hundreds, it was a couple of hundred years and these 2 epidemiologists went there I don’t know why they did this but they went there and they started just combing through the records of this town and here’s what they found that was so so creepy and yet so such a huge thing for us to be able to make choices about our health that what they found was that if your grandparent when they were going through puberty experienced a feast meaning they had a good crop they had lots of food they ate a lot then their offspring two generations down this is the impact of epigenetics their offspring two generations down were significantly more likely to have diabetes and heart disease and on average died six years earlier than the general population and if you’re grandparent went thru a famine when they hit puberty their offspring two generations down were significantly less likely to experience diabetes and cardiovascular disease and on average lived twenty-five years more than the general population so there this spread of 30 years based on what happened to your grandparent when they went thru puberty.

[01:34:05] Ashley James:  Can you explain why? I’m trying to wrap my brain around it. Is that because they were fasting and that has protective properties? I would’ve imagined a famine would cause stress on the body but why did that actually worked to their favour?

[01:34:24] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I have no idea. Honestly. This is what’s being studied now. So some of the reasons how do I say this it’s easy to feel victimized right because we can’t do anything about it it’s done it happened and the stuff that happened to my grandparents to my dad is seventy-five years to a hundred fifty years old and so we don’t have any control over that but your genetics again are 10 to15% of the total mix and we do have control over the 85 to 90% of it, meaning you have control over your eating, your sleeping, your pooping, your relationships,your intimacy your thoughts , how much you exercise, you have control over all of that and so that work is inspiring because you’re not your genetics. Yes, they put you at risk and it’s helpful to know what you are at risk for but you are not your genetics.

[01:35:29] Ashley James:  That really makes me wonder if the protective properties of fasting went in to play and if so if you chose let’s say you do a 5-day fast every quarter or 3-5 day fast or 3-day fast there’s so many like that, when someone fasts for months and months and months they actually see the benefits of those fast when they continue to do blood work and check up on the person so there’s protective properties that happen when we fast and I’m just wondering if it then now were seeing evidence that it’s actually goes down a few generations, which boggles my mind.

[01:36:18] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s amazing.

[01:36:19] Ashley James:  Right? So amazing. Cause we also see on the other side of that people who like for example were in the holocaust or you know very very traumatic experiences during the war that they’re able to see higher levels just observed ambient natural stress like higher level of natural stress hormones in the grand children of holocaust survivors and they talked about how people who like have normal stress lives versus incredibly stressful lives that even two generations there it’s seen in their genetic makeup which means it’s even more important if you know your grandparents your parents or your grandparents went thru really really, really, really, really, really hard times it’s even more important for you to take it seriously to check yourself to lower your stress levels or it’s even more important to get Wendie’s book and detox the stress levels and focus on you know ditching those toxins Dirty Girl Ditch the Toxins I’m excited for your book cause the way you teach, you handle this information in such an easy visual way right that’s what I love I want the science I want you to tell us the science but I also want people to understand it and be able to use it you know everyone must have walk away from this interview going okay now I know how to tackle that those 15 pounds on my stomach that I can never get rid of no matter what I do now I know  now I get to look into my stress levels my mycotoxins all the stuff right the go down the checklist.

[01:38:04] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yeah, I mean look. I co-wrote it with my husband. I co-wrote it reading the book is like talking to me basically and it’s meant to be a roadmap right because you know if you think about how many toxins we’re exposed to it’s paralyzing and so we’re not going to tell you that you’re going to be toxin-free what I’m going to tell you is it you want to get your body burning of toxins down enough that it’s not messing you up so you can live a vital vibrant healthy life able to be interested in intimacy until you are at least a  hundred, that you get better every decade, that is my philosophy and I will go to the Math, fighting for that one because that is my why, something you said earlier we have to talk about the why you have to know why you are doing this right it’s not because you have an event coming up and you want to look good for it, nope, it’s because you want to be healthy enough to see your great grandchildren and play with them and have them remember you in fifty years, right, or you make a legacy impact that is felt by millions you got to find some why that is massive because if it’s like I want to look better for the wedding I am going in to September after September you’ve no more future that pulls you forward this powerful enough, so you want to pick a big, big scary goal that you can accomplish in your lifetime but it gives you strength when you like oh, I really wish I could eat that, I really feel left out, oh I used to eat that at Thanksgiving, right, there’s a lot of emotion around food so when you are stripped to feel that emotion to get something bigger like yeah I did always used to do that and remember how I felt and here is  what I want to do with this new found health.

[01:40:01] Ashley James:  Uhumm-uhumm… you know it really helps me I’ve cut a lot of foods I used to eat and I imagine how it’s going to make me feel and I go I don’t want to feel that tomorrow and then I could imagine the way it’s doing to the tiny, tiny very less than paper thin lining of my gut and how eating for example fried food is a bunch of free radicals that’s like punching holes like bullets through the nucleus of my cells and causing all kinds of havoc just inflammation and havoc and craziness and then the oil, the fried oil in the food is suffocating the good bacteria in my gut and creating an anaerobic environment for all the bad stuff to takeover, because there’s this war that means there’s this real war going on your gut all the time and it’s the good versus the evil right they should make a movie there’s a war and there’s 6 pounds of bacteria in your gut it’s like there’s a Chihuahua or like I don’t know baby kangaroo living in your gut and there’s a war between like 2 or 3 pounds of bad bacteria and 2 or 3 pounds of good bacteria and they’re going at it and hopefully you have less than 30 pounds of bad bacteria but for all the people who are sick and so every single meal and every single decision could be is it going tip the scales for the bad guys or the good guys right, and then there’s the bad stuff in your gut that’s making the mycotoxins and you eat a little bit of gluten and all those mycotoxins are (slurps) sucked up into your body and affecting your brain. Do mycotoxins crossed the blood brain barrier?

[01:41:46] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Ooh, I don’t know the answer to that. I know that when you have a patient with dementia and get rid of the mycotoxins it improves brain functions so I have to say yes but I don’t know for sure, speculation.

[01:41:59] Ashley James:  Both my grandfathers died of dementia I mean you can’t’ really figure out their Alzheimer’s until after right so they just called it dementia I was really young and this was in the 80’s when they died and when you said that likely people who passed away of dementia likely there’s a relationship between that and barley, wheat, rye, and oats right so likely right so that’s another thing is if you know of direct relatives that passed away of dementia or have dementia that you, yourself and people related to them could benefit from cutting out those grains right to prevent them. Our genetics is not a death sentence which is  what you said, right, they’re not a death sentence. So if everyone in your family got a heart disease it doesn’t mean you have to as well it means that that’s the thing to circle on the chalkboard for you I need to live a life preventing this and I need to live a life creating heart health, focusing on heart health don’t focus on dying of our disease focus on everything that you can do, you wake up in the morning your feet at the ground you go, good what I’m going to do to create heart health today? I’m going to go for a walk, I’m going to drink my water, I’m going do my meditation or my prayer, I’m going to eat bowls and bowls of greens and beans and a little bit of balsamic vinegar for the nitric oxide you know so you build up this list in your mind of all these wonderful things and if you follow this daily habit of I’m going to create this health for me then that 15% genetic factor isn’t going to do you under right because we have to live a life of this actionable steps. And your book has a bunch of actionable steps can you share I mean you taught us so much but can you give us some homework some tidbits from your book you know tantalize us with the tidbits from your book because we’re all going to run out and buy it and afterwards and starts following it diligently but like set us a separate now what we can do starting today to improve our health

[01:44:15] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I love this question. I really encourage people to always start with food because you do it 2 to 3x a day at least and it’s the cornerstone of what we do so you have to take stock of what you are and get real so if you’re someone who’s eating a relatively standard American diet meaning something processed for breakfast lunch and dinner then action item #1 is to pick a meal and get rid of the processed food at that meal once you’ve won go on to the next meal, and once you’ve won at both of those both meals go to the third meal. So that the food you are eating generally is devoid of processed food yes you can have special occasions yes you can have a treat and what you want to watch out for is it’s not a slippery slope meaning you have it once in a while but then you start having them every day and then you are like oops, sorry, so it’s important to start with food and that is actionable right? And no matter where you live and I’m cognizant that not everyone has the same financial resources so ideally in a world where you have all choices you would go for no processed and organic and then do your best you can get frozen foods that are organic that are often much cheaper than fresh and those are pretty good so if it’s a choice between something that has pesticides versus something that is frozen that has no pesticides I would go for the frozen especially because it’s fresh frozen so it’s preserved all the nutrients in it and don’t cook it to death because then you’ll get rid of all the nutrients, so lightly cooked it. It’s so funny in our book what we go through is like if this is where you are starting for food do this and if this is what you are starting do this because we recognize you could be on a huge spectrum of places for food. So we start with figure out where you are and then start to level up.  Now I always say to people most of the people, well actually all people that see me our female because I’m a gynecologist so I always see females but my husband’s partner sees men also and I always say to my patients watch your language, language is really critical and so this isn’t a diet, a. it’s is a lifestyle and b. there’s no cheating on your lifestyle there’s just what you do and whether or does or doesn’t work for you because you know they call me we have these calls since like, bless me Dr. T, I have sinned, oh my god, I’m not a confessional booth, you have not sinned you are perfect, incomplete and sometimes you do things that don’t work for you move on but then the question is let’s Monday morning quarterback this did you eat that at that party because you were a. hungry b. forget to prepare c. left out d. acting out what was the source of it, let’s get down to the source of it so next time you can have a win when you go to the party that you at the end of it say oh, I actually ate in a  way that I’d feel good the next day, so we really look a lot of that in our book, are you sleeping, are you moving your body, what is your genetic risk, all of that. All of the stuff we talked about today or things that we talked about in our book, and we’re really drilling to it, is like one per chapter, we got a whole chapter on each of these things.

[01:47:37] Ashley James:  Nice. I love it.

[01:47:40] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  And you may want to cut this out, this is the part where if you want to cut it out I’m totally fine with but my experiences as a perimenopausal woman lead me to say to my husband we need to write a book about how to navigate perimenopause in a way that is empowering and so that book we’re starting tomorrow actually and that would be out in 2023

[01:48:00] Ashley James: Congratulations! I’m not cutting this out. That is a fantastic thing and I can’t wait to have you back.

[01:47:06] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Thank you! 

[01:48:07] Ashley James: Talking about this I’ve a girlfriend of mine and she is a listener so it’s so funny when like my legit friends in real life then became my fans of my show, I heard that episode! Oh my gosh, this is cool, but kind of crazy and so we’ve known each other for years and she started becoming a listener, and I’m not preachy to my  friends, I kind of can’t help myself so if I listen to any their conversation and I’m like oh I did an interview with this doctor and then I’ll catch myself because I’m like I’m sorry guys I know I’m like this I act like this you know like Lisa Simpson about health stuff but it’s kind of my thing I truly do geek out all the time 24/7  this is who I am and so a friend of mine didn’t tell me she had this health issues she’s had 7 kids, 7 kids, she knows at least 2 languages that I know, lived in several countries and just really had this very eclectic life at times incredibly stressful, really beautiful life, they do ministry where they opened their home to people who are recovering drug and alcohol addicts they are sober but they’re going thru their program, and they opened their home with their children opened their home and they bring them in because now this is a clean and sober environment so they for many years have ministered to these people who are like it so hard to recover from like fentanyl addiction like these crazy street drug addiction their kind of like their side gig is they constantly helping these people to get back on their feet and they’re called to do that and they also run a construction business so she’s like one thing or another and she said to me, oh I listen to this episode now I don’t have migraines anymore because I did what this top doctor told me to do, like just a major life thing, and then I did this, she’s done several things from several different guests but what she’d told me which I can’t wait for her to hear this episode so she’s listening. Hello!

[01:50:24] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Shout out! Shout out!

[01:50:26] Ashley James: Shout out! Yeah, she said to me something really interesting because she’s like really really healthy she looks really healthy and she goes, I hit a total wall and I don’t know where she’s in her 40’s I don’t know where her energy drops down to the floor like I don’t know where and I’ve heard people talk about it and but you say things several times in this interview you said things it’s like I’ve heard it but it never landed and you had these tidbits really land in my listening and I’m hoping for all the listeners too I bet it has and so for her I think because she’s at that moment where you said if your adrenals are taxed  which I bet hers are because she’s lived such an amazing life, just beautiful, brilliant life so far her adrenals are taxed and then her ovaries were like well guess what we’re plucking out! Perimenopause. Welcome, welcome to the beginning of menopause and so now she’s like boom hits the wall completely slides all the way down to the floor so I can’t wait for her to read you book also because I bet that’s really going to help her.

[01:51:43] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Late spring 2023! It’s coming.

[01:51:45] Ashley James: Oh awesome! Welcome back on the show, can’t wait to have you back. I’d said earlier that I had that distended liver tasting heavy metals like I was crazy and I had switched over to a very healthy very clean totally no processed diet in an attempt to heal because anytime I was actually doing keto and meat and everything but that was made it all come flaring out, that was made it all, it was keto with a doctor we’re following and every week working with this doctor and it was so bad like three months of keto with this doctor my liver was crazy I was going through all this tests my liver enzymes were through the roof they’re very concerned they want to do  biopsy and I was like, no no no then I did an interview that really turned me around and had me do 100% unprocessed whole food plant based very healing like a lot of raw food also one of my doctors said you really need to sweat because that is one of your emunctory systems that’s where your detox system that allows you to bypass the liver so I looked around and looked around talked to a bunch of doctors and finally settled on Sunlighten Sauna, have you heard of the Sunlighten?

[01:53:04] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  I have one. I love it.

[01:53:05] Ashley James: You have one! Yes! So I have the 3-in-1 it says it’s about the size of a small closet I’m actually sitting right beside it right now that’s my Sunlighten and it’s in the office in the corner of the office, and my husband and I can actually fit in it even though it’s for one person we can both fit in it on a bench although, you know what it’s not as fun as it sounds to be sitting with your husband sweating that was fun for the first few times but I’d just like to just spread a little bit and have my space so we go back to back but what I thought that’s really interesting is my  electricity bill didn’t go up well we turn off the heat because it’s the summer time and I just check the electricity bill so we’ve probably using the sauna a lot and it didn’t change so its about as much as having the heat on in which we didn’t have heat on much cause we’re in a very neutral area, Seattle, we hardly ever have the heat on but with the detox I started with the sauna and I noticed that everything slowly got better my liver went down within a few weeks my liver went down I stopped tasting heavy metals I’m sweating almost everyday in the sauna I would sweat everyday but if I didn’t really stay on top of my hydration then I wouldn’t do it that day it’s my reward at the end of the day for being hydrated all day long and that was about four years, four, was it four years ago it’s like time is sort of crazy, 2018 I think and what happened  was for the first time in my life I successfully lost weight and kept it off it was 80 pounds and that was over the course of two years but you’re right the weight didn’t just start coming off right away it was gradual and it was definitely after the first few months like a little bit of first because that was inflammation but using the Sunlighten consistently was one of my best tools for detox and then I was introduced to other stuff as well I’m never going to say that it’s just one thing

[01:55:14] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  No, it’s never just one thing.

[01:55:15] Ashley James: Right. It’s never just one thing that’s why getting your book is so important because what if it’s 10 things or 12 things and maybe we’re doing 3 of them and we need to add the rest that’s why you’re book is so important because it’s going to let us know about all the stuff we’re not doing that we could be doing to take ourselves to the next level so here I am I’ve come so far but I know there’s more for me to do and that’s why I’m excited for your book, I’m so excited for all your books all the books that you’re going to come out for the future but this one thank you for writing it I really appreciate that you came here today to share this and I just know that you’re helping so many people so many women but I think that this message can help men as well just like you wrote it with your husband and your addressing everyone so thank you, thank you for the future generations cause imagine the parents or let’s say people who are listening who aren’t parents yet make this changes and that’s a trickle effect down generations after generations so when you get up in the morning I just want you to think about all the generations that you are touching based because you’re sliding this information so thank you.

[01:56:23] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Oh it’s really a privilege. I think I love how you put that out there. It’s not that just for you it’s for future generations. That’s where the magic lives.

[01:56:34] Ashley James: And even let that be the motivator for not eating that thing at the party because I know some dads are like super endearing dads also but I can only say for my experiences as a woman because that’s what I am, in the moment, I want to eat that whatever that blank that’s going to be tasty really good in the moment but if I were think that this would harm future generations, my unborn generations, like my grandchildren or if you know if I have that idea in my mind, and even if I’m done having kids my health impacts my children my mom died when I was 22 and she was 55 and she was the epitome of health to me until she died, that was devastating to my life and what if I die young and how that impacts my son these are lifestyle choices that we can make their little tiny ones that add up every day and that is the difference between being around for you grandkids or not every listener you are important your life matters and the impact you have on your family on your future generations matter so you’re worth it to say no in the moment there’s temptations for the long term benefit of future generations they get to be with you and I think that is really beautiful and so we should remember that our life choices and every life choice we make does have even a small impact on those we care about.

[01:58:09] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Yes, small changes add up to huge impact over the course of the year. It’s really impactful.

[01:58:18] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Please come back when you have your sexy book written.

[01:58:26] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  It’s going to be a fun one. Once we embargo the title I’ll share it with you. The first one is Dirty Girl you can kind of imagine what the second one might mean. You probably can’t imagine the title but it’s certainly not going to be tame and boring.

[01:58:40] Ashley James: Okay good, good, I mean we’re talking about sex and health right so we need to make this fun.

[01:58:48] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  We should. Not just fun but accessible we can do this we’ve got this we’ve got the tools, and no, it’s not normal to experience these things it’s fixable.

[01:58:40] Ashley James: I love that, I love that. Thank you so much Dr. Wendie Trubow this has been such a pleasure having you on the show and oh, I want to make sure that listeners also know that your website now I have fivejourneys.com is that the best for you or is there another website you want them to know about.

[01:59:17] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Well, I’m into world domination so that’s our clinic it’s fivejourneys.com the book is on Amazon that’s the best place you’ll get it for the least price we have my Instagram at wendietrubow.md and we have our own podcast which is five journeys podcast live like you matter.

[01:59:34] Ashley James:  Nice definitely check that podcast. Awesome. Well thank you so much have yourself a fantastic day and I can’t wait for you to comeback on the show.

[01:59:42] Dr. Wendie Trubow:  Me too, thank you so much Ashley, this has been great!

[01:59:46] Ashley James:  I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Wendie Trubow. She was amazing, wasn’t she? And you know what, right after I recorded this I realized there’s 2 more studies I didn’t tell you about that I’m really excited about when it comes to utilizing light and heat therapy found in the Sunlighten Sauna System which offers the full spectrum the near mid and far infrared there’s two really incredible things and that’s increasing nitric oxide in the body and also the heat shock protein so the Sunlighten system when you use it on a daily basis it increases cardiovascular health and decreases high blood pressure actually there was a study I just read recently that it increases nitric oxide and if you’ve been an avid listener you know we talked about nitric oxide in the past because it is directly related to preventing cardiovascular events preventing like heart attacks and supporting longevity and the health of the cardiovascular system so we want to have a healthy level of nitric oxide in the body now there’s something called heat shock protein and we talked about this in episode 410 that’s really important cause Marcus Friedmann talks about the natural treatments for cancer that some countries are freely using in hospitals for whatever reason we get into that episode before, for whatever reason are not being used in this country but have been highly, highly studied in other countries so the use of heat therapy stimulates heat shock protein and there are some types of cancers that are unable to survive in the higher heat and so they find out that when you stimulate heat shock protein they’re also seeing that some cancers can’t survive in that and that’s why we have other certain countries they’re using a heat therapy as an adjunct with the other cancer treatments very successfully so episode 410 is really good to listen to about that but that’s what I love about the Sunlighten System is that it helps your body to increase the heat shock protein which heat shock protein and there’s tons of studies on it, it helps the body maintain homeostasis by forming new proteins reactivating misfolded proteins and it works as a chaperon to stabilize unfolded proteins and deformed cells which helps the body to prevent type 2 diabetes, obesity, arteriosclerosis and of course cancer, because we’ve seen some that cancers are DNA’s gone awry in some cases but there are many other diseases that we see where DNA’s gone awry thru oxidative stress so this is helps greatly to reduce oxidative stress there’s whole component of our innate immune system that heat shock proteins stimulates and boosts reduce free radicals and heat shock protein alone also aids in faster muscle recovery and repair and then heart protection as well there’s many studies I read but I just want to highlight a few of the ones I thought we’re really interesting heat shock protein also helps in relieving chronic pain and depression and in the studies they saw that people who were depressed reported that they had increased appetite they had a sensation of a relaxed mood and they had an alleviation from their depression which is amazing and it goes back to the fact that when we reduce stress in the body we could be we were doing something physical we’re sitting in the sauna our body is sweating it actually affecting our emotional state our mental state it’s helping us detox it’s having this anti-aging effect it’s having this really positive effect on the immune system and in our cardiovascular system so it’s always wonderful things happening all at once as far as all the healing tools that I have collected over the years it’s the Sunlighten Sauna System is the one tool that does the most things it’s like the Swiss army knife of holistic tools that I have in my arsenal that I use on a regular basis sometimes I’m going to use an oral health example it was kind of life changing for my oral health when I started using the tongue scraper and I realize that your mouth has never been cleaned until you’ve used the tongue scraper it’s a game changer the stuff that comes off your tongue twice a day is amazing you should definitely get a metal tongue scraper it does one thing it just that one thing and it does that very well and that’s effective and I like it and I have all kinds of health tools and bio hacking health tools to help me just optimize my life that I use all the time but the Sunlighten Sauna does over 20 things to the body and I’m learning more and more every time I look into it I’m learning more and more about what this light and heat therapy does for my health and so as far as investing in your health you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck by using a tool on a daily basis that accomplishes all these different health results at once just like shifting your diet all of a sudden, oh all of these wonderful things are coming online epigenetically your gene starts expressing differently when you changed your diet when you lower stress your genes actually starts expressing differently your different enzymes start happening your body goes into this huge healing mode where it’s able to finally deliver resources to healing and to repair and to restoring and regenerating when you make this one time, you make this one change just one switch all of these things come on line and that’s what I’ve noticed with the Sunlighten System I just want a detox but I’ve got so much more so there’s my 2 cents and then some with inflation I don’t know here’s my 2 dollars on the Sunlighten System. Please if you haven’t already joined our Facebook group I’d love to see you there, I’d love to chat with you, if you have any questions or if you just want to share about your healing journey so many of us are on our healing journeys together and it’s so great to come in to a community and feel like you are not alone so please join the Facebook group say hi to me and thank you for being a listener thank you for sharing this episode to those you care about and I can’t wait for you to hear what’s coming up we’ve got some great interviews in the pipeline that we’re going to be publishing in the next month or so, so watch out for those and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and please do something today to love yourself.

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Dirty Girl: Ditch the Toxins, Look Great, and Feel Freaking Amazing!

Visit Sunlighten Sunlighten.com to see the different infared technologies and how they can help you lower your stress levels and support optimal health and healing.

https://brookehazen.com Book  https://amzn.to/3zqzWX9 "You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide for Men and Women to Heal the Pathways of Sexual Dysfunction and Restore Relational Harmony Together"

https://www.learntruehealth.com/pornography-induced-erectile-dysfunction-treatment-and-intervention

• Understanding Erectile Dysfunction (ED)
• What are the three different kinds of ED
• What is Chelation Therapy
• Bad effects of pornography and semen release addiction
• Dopamine Addiction

Erectile Dysfunction, commonly referred to as ED, is when it is hard to get or keep an erection firm enough for sex. ED is often a symptom of another health problem or made worse by emotional problems. In this episode, Brooke Hazen shares his wisdom on the causes of Erectile Dysfunction and how to heal the devastating effects without relying on medication.

Intro: 

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 480. I am so excited to have Brooke Hazen on the show. Brooke is an organic farmer, lifelong athlete, physical coach, health and fitness enthusiast, and an author. I’m really excited to talk about our subject today which is a deep dive into ED, and uncovering what’s going on in your health that is obstructing your sexual health. So what I love to look at is the body speaks to us its symptoms. And this is something I was been taught by many of my naturopathic mentors over the years that the body– we were born with a manual. Right? But if we listen really closely to the symptoms of our body, we can begin to hear the messages our body’s trying to tell us. 

In Erectile Dysfunction both in men and women or I should back up sexual dysfunction in men or women, anyone, any adult who notices that they have a difficult time being aroused or painful sex or just all the issues around that or not even wanting it. Any of that is a great indication of hormone imbalance, of pelvic floor dysfunction, of nutrient deficiency, and the list goes on and on. In fact, Erectile Dysfunction just for men, as an example is an early sign of diabetes and heart disease as a result because it’s a cardiovascular issue. One of the actual issues is cardiovascular.

Brooke, what I love is that you’re really going to dive down deep into it and show us the different aspects of this dysfunction and how we can heal our body holistically as a whole to have a healthy sexual life because that means it’s a symptom. Right? It means, if you have a healthy sexual life, it means that your hormones are balanced, your cardiovascular system is healthy. There’s a lot of great things going on. Your pelvic floor is healthy. So we’re going to dive into all those things up, but first, I’m just so curious about your organic farming company. I want to learn more about that as well. Can we talk about that first? 

[00:02:40] Brooke Hazen:  Yes. Thank you for having me on. Sure. 

[00:02:42] Ashley James:  Yeah, absolutely. So you have this beautiful organic farm in California. And you make, you cultivate medicinal herbs and a special type of olives that are high in healing properties. How can we buy your products? Because I know you’ve got this little organic farm to help people gain access to these medicinal products that aren’t just in the grocery stores. 

[00:03:15] Brooke Hazen:  Well, I’m moving largely direct to customer at this point. So my website has all the information for getting engaged with my organic farming, part of myself besides my author first and it’s called goldridgeorganicfarms.com.

[00:03:32] Ashley James: goldridgeorganicfarms.com. Great. Well, of course, the links to everything that Brooke does is going to be on the show of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. And of course the link to your book, You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide For Men And Women To Heal The Pathways Of Sexual Dysfunction And Restore Relational Harmony Together. That’s a mouthful. 

[00:03:55] Brooke Hazen:  Yes, it is. 

[00:03:56] Ashley James:  Absolutely. Well, I’ve been seeing a Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist, healing from my last two pregnancies and just I’m learning so much about how for both men and women. In men, it just goes so much more undiagnosed than women. And that, if there’s an imbalance in the pelvic floor, it can lead to all kinds of pain or sexual dysfunctions and they might not even think to look there. 

So but that’s just one aspect, right? The majority of it is diet and nutrition. Which of course, being an organic farmer and being really interested in medicinal foods, you’re seeing that there’s a difference that when you consume medicinal quality foods versus just going and eating conventionally grown foods. You see a big difference in your health. What led you because you’re such an enthusiast around health and fitness. What led you to become an organic farmer and dive into this world?

[00:04:58] Brooke Hazen:  Well, I just love to be connected to nature and I wanted to do something with my hands that I could see the results of my work. And so I was interested in natural resources at first and then over time, I came a bit down to earth and started getting into organic farming.

[00:05:18] Ashley James:  And how many years have you been doing it?

[00:05:21] Brooke Hazen:  My whole adult life. I studied it in college and ever since I got out in evening college I started apprenticing and afterwards, I eventually started my own farm.

[00:05:32] Ashley James:  Love it. Now a little bit off-topic, but I’m really curious with this state of affairs going on. Are you being affected by the global fertilizer shortages?

[00:05:45] Brooke Hazen:  No. I believe that’s more synthetic fertilizers and I’m organic and so those are usually natural materials. They aren’t natural materials.

[00:05:57] Ashley James:  Fascinating. So we’re going to see sort of a bump in the organic farming world because they aren’t reliant on the fertilizers that now we have a massive shortage of.

[00:06:09] Brooke Hazen:  Yeah. Yeah, we should. Hopefully. 

[00:06:12] Ashley James:  Cool. Well, keep buying organic. Keep supporting those local farmers that are doing such good for our bodies and for the world. I love it. 

[00:06:19] Brooke Hazen: Thank you.

[00:06:20] Ashley James: Okay, so tell your story. So what happened to you, when you went to school to become a farmer? You got super excited about organic farming. What led you down this path that had you write this book?

[00:06:33] Brooke Hazen:  Well, this beautiful journey started several years ago when I started noticing the symptoms of Erectile Dysfunction. I don’t even like to use that word, Erectile Dysfunction because that’s really a word that’s meant to sort of cast a veil of mysticism and disempowerment over us. When I’m going to end up breaking it down for you, it’s really nothing that could be further from the truth. We have a very simple and easy solutions for all the different types of ED unidentified whether that’s organic, or neurological, or energetic, and I actually had more of an arousal issue that’s neurologically based. 

So that’s Dopamine, mainly. I also had an energetic ED from releasing my semen too often and I was doing this because I was addicted to pornography. It really isn’t an addiction and I’ll tell you why, when we get into this further. So what I did at that time I had no idea what all this was. And I did what everyone else thought which was to reach out to Western Medicine. And they, of course, they prescribed me the only remedy they have which is a very specific pharmaceutical for cardiovascular blood flow. 

And I actually had in millions of men actually, and women, actually have porn-induced Erectile Dysfunction, which is the neurologically-based form of Erectile Dysfunction or really an arousal dysfunction where we become desensitized to sex, to our partner, and to life. And it can escalate to the point where eventually you no longer could get aroused to not only your partner, a real-life partner. Which is what was happening to me– but also your favorite pornography. Eventually, you become fully desensitized to life completely on every level. So, I didn’t know all of this, so I was experiencing debilitating side effects because I was being misdiagnosed and misprescribed. Just like millions of men right now with blood flow-inducing pharmaceutical drugs. When I actually had something that was easily fixable and curable that was neurologically based. 

So we don’t realize how the immense burdens that men are under when they’re addicted to pornography. There’s a few different things happening all at once. There’s this unneeded burden of debilitating side effects from the Erectile Dysfunction drugs I just mentioned, which causes fatigue and all kinds of horrible symptoms. But there’s also, what I found out later was debilitating side effects of being addicted to pornography, which is perpetual dopamine crashes and associated fatigue, and mood imbalance, and distancing in the relationships that takes place. 

Furthermore, we have this undue burden of The Scarlet Letter that Western Medicine places on men which is the word Erectile Dysfunction, and all the associated loss of identity, and confidence, and confusion, and disempowerment that comes with it. So I was going through all these burdens at the time and the reason I wrote this book because I want to help others avoid this and there are millions going through this right now. The fastest-growing segment of ED is Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction and this energetic form of semen release through pornography. 

So, as I was going through this process, I was going through so much. I’ll never forget that I felt like a gerbil on an experimental wheel with all these different types of pharmaceutical EDs and they were debilitating, they were exacting and mechanical and I was dependent on them. It was not in resonance with who I am, my heart, and my soul. But during this time, I was praying to God and I was praying for a natural drug which could not have side effects and works. And I was never going to get that prayer answered because God had so much more in store for me besides a drug that I was dependent on, whether that’s natural or that’s pharmaceutical. As I ran out of options, there was nothing left for me in the pharmaceutical realm. I fell into a deep depression for weeks at a time. And now, it’s when I began to let go of my control and release myself completely into God’s arms and pray for a true healing miracle. 

It was at that time, God actually did hear me and gave me a true healing miracle. And God decided to start the journey that I was to take place of restoring not only the most incredible sexual health beyond what I ever could have imagined, but also my overall physical health, my relational health, and my mental and emotional health. And God also showed me how this is all intertwined. God is the ultimate, holistic healer, the power behind all holistic healing. If we just let God in, we can unleash all the power, unlimited potential of our minds. And the key to doing that, I have found and I’ll never forget why God led me first to Your Brain On Porn website by Gary Wilson, was to show myself and everyone that this key, this foundation, all starts with our neurology. Having healthy neurology meaning balanced dopamine levels, as well as our overall chi sexual energy by simply getting rid of our addictions to pornography and semen release. That is really where we must start and that’s where is the foundation for really launching us into massive transformation on every level. It’s all intertwined and connected. It is all holistic.

[00:12:45] Ashley James: I love it. You were led to this website, Your Brain On Porn and how long did it take to reverse this issue and be healed?   

[00:13:01] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, that’s a great question. So this process of rewiring, and rebuilding, and regrooving our neuro chemistry, these neurotransmitter hormones of dopamine because this is a dopamine addiction when you’re addicted to pornography, on par with actually the same level as cocaine and morphine addicts. In fact, the dopamine levels have been measured to be just as low as cocaine and morphine addicts. But this process takes anywhere from, it takes at least months but sometimes a year. It could go as long as two years but what I’ve found is this process of rewiring and re-sensitizing ourselves to life, actually can take a couple of years and I’m still seeing increased sensitivity to everything around me. And this includes also sort of refraining from virtual type of imagery, not just pornography, but this whole fantasy of pixels on a screen because it’s really our neurology is getting desensitized to life by this whole fantasy of what’s going on in our brain. 

And our brain cannot actually tell the difference between a fantasy and a real life. So men actually believe they’re on this successful campaign with meeting a wide range of novel needs, which is getting into the mating behaviors that is so prominent in pornography and in relationships today that is really poisonous to long-term sustainable relationships. 

But there’s really three different kinds of ED and I want to demystify them. I want to educate us about it because I believe that there’s so much myths and misconceptions around it that really Western Medicine sort of promotes indirectly because they really have one tool for resolving it and that is this one form of medication. They have no idea what to do with the fastest-growing segment of ED which is neurologically based ED. And they’re never going to give you a holistic approach that’s curative and preventative. You can try as much as you want, they will never give that to you. They only have this one tool and even that one tool does not actually resolve organic ED which is physical source of ED, which was everyone talks about. 

You were talking about Kegels and I get into all that deeply in the book. The second half of my book covers all of organic ED. But first, we have to really focus on the real problem. We have to go to neurologically-based ED and energetic ED first. And those are the first two that I’ve found are the preprominent source of EDs taking place today and where we must go first. 

And we’re actually the only ones capable—we’re so empowered. We’re the only ones capable of actually resolving the first two major types of ED which is neurologically-based and energetic-based by simply refraining from pornography and semen release. Mainstream Western Medicine can’t do that for us. Nobody can do that for us. Except each individual has to do that, that has this addiction. So the three types are PIED, Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction. Which we don’t talk enough about neurology but we need our neurology for getting aroused, knowing to sex in our partner back to life. And the second form is Energetic ED, which is has to do with our semen release, releasing our semen too often and that just causes a depletion in our chi sexual energy. 

Our chi sexual energy cannot be separated from our overall energy because chi is really our life force. It’s God within us. And dopamine is our drive or inspiration, determination, and the will of God for us to become our ideal selves. God has given us this gift of neuro chemistry and energies that we’re simply abusing. And Eastern traditions are totally familiar with this. It’s just in the West we aren’t and we are simply abusing these gifts that had been given by God and the answer is really easy and simple. It’s to give up this addiction to pornography and semen release. That’s the answer.

And then, Organic ED is the third one. That’s the one that we always go to. And we’re sort of brainwashed to go to automatically. We gets so focused on Organic ED and I’m not saying that we shouldn’t. I’m saying at first, we need to focus on the first two because the reason is that you can have even if Western Medicine does prescribe, if they look out and that one little slippery tool that they have for ED does actually land our selves on someone that has Blood Flow Restricted ED. They still maybe watching pornography and releasing semen in pornography and they will not resolve their ED until they first resolved those two. And then, we can look at whether we have a blood flow issue or we have a hormonal issue and all this is Physical Organic ED is definitely resolvable naturally without side effects. 

I go into it in my book with the Chelation IVs for arteriosclerosis. Western Medicine doesn’t even with their ED medication, Viagra, and all that, the blood flow inducing nitric oxide, inducing medications, doesn’t actually cure anything. I just saw it clear. I know, you know this Ashley, but those listening, it doesn’t cure a thing. It actually just bypasses the real underlying source of vision which is what I get into my book in my exploration that God led me on. 

I got the real source of what is causing blood flow ED which is arteriosclerosis. But even deeper than that, it’s not just arteriosclerosis. Arteriosclerosis is a symptom. What actually is causing nitric oxide dysfunction that Western Medicine is jumpstarting with nitric oxide-inducing pharmaceutical ED medication. Well, the answer is what goes in our mouths. It’s what we drink or breathe through the form of heavy metals. It’s what we eat with an animal-based diet which is full of saturated fats, carcinogens, and free radicals, as well as pollutants, and smoking. That’s the source of arteriosclerosis. Arteriosclerosis is really a symptom. It’s a conglomeration of plaque, calcification, and heavy metals. And we have ways to get rid of all this through Chelation IV therapy, Plaque X IV therapy, and we can break up that conglomeration. I did it myself, actually. 

There’s numerous studies which also that I’ll cite later that show that we do not need to have people dying anymore of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks. We do not need to have people suffering with this The Scarlet Letter of Erectile Dysfunction. I have solutions in my book that God has given me to give to everyone that I pulled together all aspects of holistic health related to sexual health. Because sexual health is intertwined with everything else, our neurology, our cardiovascular, our hormonal in our nervous system, as well as our mental health, emotional health, and our relationships. It’s all intertwined and I think Western Medicine wants to make us think you can isolate sexuality, sexual dysfunction to simply the genital pelvic region can take one pill. One little pill that’s going to resolve it. That pill will never replace true healing.

[00:21:35] Ashley James: Right. You just summed up my entire podcast.

[00:21:42] Brooke Hazen: I knew, you’ve loved that.

[00:21:44] Ashley James: Drug-based medicine has its place. If you’re looking for results, if you’re looking for getting to the root cause, if you’re looking for true health, pharmaceutical-based medicine is a very small slice of the pie. Very, very small. But what we’ve been raised to believe is that it’s the whole pie or 95% of the pie and then there is some alternative pie you can go explore. But really first, you should get into a bunch of drugs. So the first thing we have to do is we have to pull ourselves out of the matrix that we’ve been born and raised in. We have been brainwashed since birth to believe that the medical industry is the best, and has all the answers, and the MD with their little prescription pad has all the answers. Right? 

And if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have a clue that they don’t. I’ve had so many doctors on my show who went through the medical system and spent half a million dollars and 8-12 years to become these amazing doctors, only to find that they are just paid for and education on how to sell drugs. And that they weren’t getting results. They were actually helping their patients. And so many of the doctors that interviewed them had health issues of their own and their own style of medicine couldn’t heal them. So then they had to find natural medicine and that’s what healed them. And then they woke up and they went, oh my gosh, I was brainwashed in a system. 

This drug-based system, again, is a very small slice of the pie, but the problem is we’ve been brainwashed to believe, it’s the pie, its the whole pie. Once we wake up and realized, we have to advocate for ourselves. We have to do things like listen to podcasts and read books. Learn from people like Brooke Hazen, who’s showing us that the mainstream medical system will never ever talk to you about your dopamine levels, about porn addiction, about your energetic health, about your pelvic floor health, about ways that you can reverse heart disease, and the diet, and the chelation. All the things that you can do to reverse heart disease, your doctors won’t going to talk to you about that. You have to go out. You have to find the right holistic doctor. You have to find the books. You have to find the information yourself. We have to advocate and we have to be the conductor of our orchestra. Right? It’s the orchestra is the holistic people that we go to. The chiropractor, and the homeopath, and the acupuncturist, and naturopath like our whole orchestra are there to help us and we’re the conductor. We have to take matters into our own hands and be willing to explore different things like be willing to throw out, unplug the TV, unplug it, stop watching the news. Like you said, stop watching the screen and put the cell phone away. Stop watching porn and address the dopamine imbalance. And this is for men and women. I know, statistically, largely more men than women watch porn but this is not just a male issue. I believe that all people, all adults. And the problem now is children have access to it, younger and younger and younger.

In my state of Washington, they’re teaching masturbation to fourth-graders in our public school system. It’s getting kind of weirder and weirder out here. But what we have to get is that addiction. 

I had a great interview with Dr. Joan Ifland and we talked about this addiction brain is not just alcohol, or methamphetamines, or cocaine. It can be porn, right? It can be alcohol. Yes, but it could also be something that’s more socially acceptable. Right? It could be sugar, it could be drinking wine, but it could be porn, it could be whatever you’re addicted to, whatever that causing this dopamine imbalance. And then, the dopamine balance gives you this plethora of effects, of side effects which one is your sexual dysfunction but the other is like you said, you have distance with your partner. Maybe you’re quick to anger, maybe you’re depressed, maybe you’re unmotivated or agitated. It’ll show up in your work performance. It’ll show up even in your willingness to live, willingness to like go out there and live a life, and your enthusiasm or your zest for life, starts just to deplete.

And from, I don’t know, but it’s more of a spiritual sense. It’s almost like demonic energies, demonic vampires are sucking the life out of us when we plug into these little outlets that gives us temporary pleasure but then so drain us. They suck us dry of the vital life force. So we have to be really protective of where we go to get our pleasure. Go get your pleasure from walking with your partner, holding their hand, and looking at a sunset, or go play with your kids, or grandkids, or either your nieces or nephews at the park. Get pleasure from something that’s wholesome and protects you from these outlets that might give you a temporary boost and pleasure but then completely suck you dry of your vital life force. So I see, you’re talking about is part of this grand scheme to keep as rats just so preoccupied, running around preoccupied and we don’t wake up. Let’s advocate for ourselves.

[00:27:58] Brooke Hazen: It’s kind of amazing because the elephants in the room are so in front of us but nobody’s talking about it in Western Medicine with blood flow issues related to ED. Nobody’s talking about diet when it comes to arteriosclerosis. Nobody talks about the root cause of it. Heavy metals have been shown to be a very big factor now, but also, what we’re eating. The food what we’re eating is what’s causing it, as well as smoking and environmental pollutants. 

The other elephant in the room nobody talks about with ED is this pornography epidemic. We’re at the end of a two-decade-long massive experiment on the global population with free internet porn. And the results are in and they are harrowing. There’s an entire generation of young men who are unable to perform sexually with a real partner and engage with any connected, intimate relationship. It’s really a dopamine addiction. And I want to tell you why this is. We don’t understand in the West but Eastern traditions are well aware for millennia is the enormous tool in ejaculation really is semen release. That’s why I don’t say it as ejaculation but I say semen release because we can still ejaculate and have full-body orgasms. It’s the semen release that causes this intense dopamine drop where dopamine crashes and prolactin rises. And this intense refractory period and period of replenishment takes place where the body pulls all the most precious resources of growth factor hormones and nutrients from all the parts of our body with the sole purpose of replacing that vital sperm. That’s really is our liquid gold.

So the pornography and semen release is a super stimulus and it because it combines the two. It combines the semen release with that dopamine effect that I just mentioned, which causes massive mood swings, fatigue, and distancing in our relationship. But it’s also the super stimulus of the novelty. The constant novelty that takes place with pornography, where we’re just desensitizing and building these neural pathways in our brain that’s specific to just gets us aroused. And this is what slowly replaces our partners in real life. That’s actually what’s happening. 

So this super stimulus that’s taking place and actually the brain cannot tell the difference between a chemical addiction like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and in neurological addiction which is pornography. And so, what happens is the brain actually is completely overwhelmed with this super stimulus of the imagery, combined with the dopamine crashes and the semen release. And the brain starts canceling out dopamine receptor sites and dopamine levels, and they crash to very low levels. And so, as I mentioned, these are gifts we’ve been given. This affects not just our sexual performance, but our arousal to life really, to everything because our physical selves, our physical health is completely inseparable from sexual health. 

Millennia is the protruding member of a vast orchestra, as you mentioned of neurological, nervous, cardiovascular, or hormonal health. It’s really the canary in the coal mine that will shout out what our level of health or disease is currently within those systems. But again, the key to unlocking and to making it easier for us to make massive transformations physically lies in this neurology, the balanced neurology, and the balanced energy levels. And people freak out around the concept of semen retention but really it’s such a misconception. It’s actually, the opposite of what we think. 

The benefits of semen retention is so enormous. First, you have increased sensitivity and potency, sexually. Then, you also have a prolonged sexual experience where you’re actually able to cum into alignment with your partner. And women are usually just getting warmed up at the moment and the man is finished. So this gets us in alignment where we can have a much more connective relationship. And most importantly, is we avoid the poison and the decency that takes place through this mating behavior of releasing semen with the sole goal of getting to climax. 

We can cope through Karezza, Tao, and Tantra for Millennia. Eastern cultures have been aware of this, that has been supplanting that’s mating behavior with moaning behaviors. And this actually can build long-term relationships through eye gazing, caressing, deep connective sensual play, and respecting, honoring, communication, embracing, and holding, all these behaviors build connection through oxytocin. Mating behaviors are focused really driven by dopamine. We wanted to skip that imbalance. We’d have balanced dopamine levels by disengaging in any form of pornography and we want to get balance energy through semen retention. And we want to have connective relationships through building oxytocin-based behaviors.

[00:33:58] Ashley James: Can you give us examples of behaviors that would help us to balance this in our day-to-day lives?

[00:34:07] Brooke Hazen: Yeah. Well, mating and bonding behaviors- this is something that Marnia Robinson, who wrote a review for my book because she went into detail about in her book, Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow. My book actually draws together all the different types, the neurology of pornography, the neurology of relationships, and then, also organic ED, and overall physical and mental, emotional health, and spiritual health. I tie it all together, but she talks about in there how through studies have shown that over hundreds of thousands of years, the brain has developed these neural pathways of either bonding or mating-based behaviors. We have both. 

And we’re able to actually talk about biohacking. Biohacking is reclaiming our vitality, vibrancy, and youthful vigor. This is actually a big biohack is supplanting mating behaviors with bonding behaviors. And these bonding behaviors are built over 100,000 years through family, friends, through our immediate culture, through our babies, through our immediate family. These are the kind of behaviors that are extremely connected and build oxytocin. So the mating brain, the mating behavior, which pornography fits perfectly into is actually incredibly poisonous and destructive to long-term relationships because the real sole goal of the mating brain and mating behavior is to spread maximum genetic diversity to a wide range of novel mates. And there’s really no end to this search. There’s no end to this dopamine addiction of this novel search and this dopamine crashes. In fact, as I mentioned, the dopamine crashes, when we have this semen release, the brain’s dopamine levels crash. This process of replenishment and the refractory period lasts for up to two weeks. 

In fact, the largest reverberations can take place at the two-week level. I can tell you as a man that when we’re addicted to pornography and even just in masturbation in general, but usually pornography is involved almost all the time. Men are releasing their semen not just every few days, definitely not every two weeks, but they’re doing it daily usually, and sometimes multiple times per day. Now what that means is we’re getting a perpetual state of chronic fatigue, mood imbalance, and distancing in the relationship. It’s truly poisonous to relationships and that’s where sexual health crosses into relational health.

[00:37:15] Ashley James: What is interesting, this concept is that by overstimulating yourself with pornography or over masturbation that the brain is in this mindset of wanting to spread the seed as opposed to grow roots in a relationship. And so they become restless within the relationship, they’re become agitated, they’re not bonded, they’re not connected to emotionally to their partner. And are they looking around? Are they looking to cheat? Is this pornography lead to infidelity?

[00:38:07] Brooke Hazen: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. At least, it’s going to inevitably lead a partner towards finding a new novel mate in the relationship. Just like it’s happening with pornography, it’s an escalating addiction where men and women, that actually women are also can get addicted to pornography. It’s just that, women, she has more connective behavior. So only 26% of women end up watching pornography weekly, whereas men are at 80%. I think it’s probably more.

[00:38:45] Ashley James: You talked about this two week, it takes up to two weeks after one ejaculation for dopamine to rebalance. Can you keep and dive into that and explain that a bit more?

[00:38:57] Brooke Hazen: Yeah. So, science shows that when a semen is released, that this refractory period. This period of replenishment where prolactin rises and dopamine crashes, continues in that sort of ratio for up to two weeks, and it weaves up and down. So maybe, in a few days, it’ll sort of you’ll come out the overwhelming haze of the first few days can tend to be more intense, but this does continue for up to two weeks that has been shown. So what we’re getting is overlapping cycles of dopamine crashes and prolactin rising. 

I mean, forget it, if men are releasing semen multiple times per day, or once a day, or even every few days. They’re in a chronic perpetual state of crashed dopamine levels. And again, dopamine is our driver, inspiration, our determination. That’s how we become our ideal selves. It’s that motivation to be the best we can be. We don’t have that anymore. 

And it’s entertainment about pornography, this is also new to people that don’t understand this in the West. But this is a new experiment that is coming too. But we don’t understand what men are going through. Prolactin is actually going back to the replenishment cycle. Prolactin is actually what causes fatigue. It’s a chemical that causes fatigue. And the dopamine is that important, what’s we need for life. And so, well, I think, as I’m gonna say is that we don’t realize that this truly is an addiction that like if we had a cocaine or morphine addict or an alcoholic, per se, and that was our partner in real life, we would not expect them to be fully capable of having an intimate, beautiful—that’s the relationship that can possibly have to be at their peak of physical conditioning and to have balanced neurology. Would we? We could expect that.

[00:41:18] Ashley James: While they’re fighting the addiction or while they’re in the addiction or while they’re using?

[00:41:23] Brooke Hazen: While they’re in addiction. While they’re aware of addiction. Even while they’re still in the grips of it. Even if they’re aware that they want to get out of it. 

[00:41:29] Ashley James: Right. 

[00:41:30] Brooke Hazen: We wouldn’t expect that but with pornography, we’re completely unaware that this is the same as an addiction, the brain cannot tell any difference between an alcohol, cocaine, or morphine addiction, and a porn addiction because these are all dopamine addictions that even we have food addictions that are dopamine-driven also. All these are dopamine and that’s why I get into organic ED which I want to get into.

Diet is so important. I mean, we could end up using Chelation therapy and get rid of our symptom, arteriosclerosis as is a symptom. Which is we can get rid of the free radical damage. We can get rid of calcification, and plaque buildup, and heavy metals. But if we’re continuing to eat an animal-based diet, which is the source of this free radical damage, oxidation through saturated fats, and carcinogens. As we continue to not to deal with the heavy metal buildup in our bodies which is so important and collate that out. Work through the diet. We’re going to continue just to keep creating the same problem. We’ll never resolve the source of organic ED through cardiovascular. There’s really a few different markers that neurologists just look at with organic ED which is the physical ED that’s where we always jump. We’re always like, oh my god, oh my god, physical ED. 

Well, first we got to deal with neurological and energetic but we can also heighten up even if we don’t have organic ED. We can increase our sexual health and prevent further possible organic ED in the future by looking at hormonal. That’s what they look at first and that or they look in addition to blood flow. They don’t really look at blood flow, they just prescribe medications. But hormonal, we can resolve easily with Bio-identical Pellet Therapy, TRT-Testosterone Replacement Therapy. It’s bio-identical and it’s natural. It’s a pellet that mimic as best as we can find the natural cycles of hormones, testosterone within our body. They’ll look at blood flow and that’s where I get to the root source of it. And that’s where, if we don’t look at this holistically, where we’re looking at diet too. We’re going to just continue to have the same problem because there’s this big elephant in the room that is standing right in the middle of our living room that Western Medicine and Western culture is not willing to talk about, which is what we’re eating, this heavy metal exposure we have, environmental pollutants, smoking, pornography, and too much semen release.

[00:44:32] Ashley James: So it’s like all lifestyle. I mean, it’s all lifestyle and then we go to the doctor and they want to give us a drug. I love the meme. I keep seeing it on Facebook. I love the meme, you know, I keep trying to follow the science but it keeps leading me to the money. And the pharmaceutical industry which is petroleum-based — and please if you want to go down to a fun rabbit hole, go down the rabbit hole of the history of the modern medical system beginning with petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. I’ve had a few guests on that talk about it. But it is a wild trip to go down the understanding last 150,120 years and what’s led us up to where we are now.

When you go to a doctor and we put them on such a pedestal, and then they give us a drug that it’s not in anyway like giving you an Advil or a Bandaid. It’s not in any way figuring out why you had the headache in the first place. It’s just that not fixing the problem whatsoever. The problem like you said it’s neurological. We have such a dopamine addiction epidemic. If you don’t watching porn, look in your life, where you have a compulsion or an addiction. Do you have to watch cooking segmented TV or sugar or like I have a friend, who, she has to drink alcohol on the weekends. Like she’ll not drink alcohol on Monday through Friday, but on the weekend, she has to drink alcohol. And it’s just like, I’m not saying you’re an alcoholic. Right? Because you and I think, maybe an alcoholic is someone who’s like shaking up if they’re not drinking alcohol. Right?

I talked to her because we’re talking about doing a long-term fast and she’s like, I can’t fast. I have to drink alcohol on the weekends. I have to. I have to drink alcohol on the weekends. So I’m like, you can’t skip a weekend? Because we’re talking about doing it like a seven-day or longer fast. Absolutely not an option. She has to drink alcohol on the weekend. And if you have there’s like, I have to do this and you’re not flexible then there’s an addiction there. If the substance is controlling your life and you can’t leave that substance, like I dated a guy when I was a teenager who couldn’t fly on airplanes because he wasn’t able to smoke on the airplane. Like he wasn’t willing to not have a cigarette for two hours to take a flight somewhere. 

So if a substance is controlling your life, that’s an obvious answer. But there’s less obvious ones and sometimes our dopamine addictions are really in our blind spots. So talking to someone who’s in your life that you really and trust you get vulnerable with to uncover what’s going on but like food is a big one. Right? Food is a really big one. Do you get upset if you don’t have access to the food you want? Like if you don’t get to have dessert or if you don’t get to have there’s some kind of food you want that you don’t have access to it. Do you get angry or irritated? You have to have it. Right? That’s just an example. There’s a food addiction that can be obvious that you know like you’re binge eating. There could be less obvious ones like you always, always have to have a certain thing in your house because you have to eat it every day. So looking at how we can uncover this. 

I had a friend, unfortunately passed away, a really nice guy who was a raging alcoholic. And then he quit cold turkey because his family was losing everything including his family. So he quit cold turkey, and he was amazing after that. Sober for 20 years. But every time I visited him, he had a cigarette in one hand and a candy bar in the other. He absolutely traded one addiction for another. Now he was sober and he was paying the bills and loving on his family. But he always had Halloween candy all year round. It was amazing. How many bags of Halloween candy he buy because he always had giant bags of Halloween candy surrounding him when inside the couch. And a cigarette in one hand, and like just constant candy and sugar in the other. And if he go to a meeting, you’ll see always he have copious amounts of sugar. Yes, I’m so proud of them for gaining sobriety from alcohol but they actually didn’t stop. They did not conquer the addiction. They didn’t bounce their dopamine levels, they’re still using. They’re just traded in one drug for another. 

So when someone stopped porn, the first thing the brain was going to do is trade in one addiction for another and that’s what we want. Make sure we set ourselves up for a success so we don’t do that. We want ourselves up so that we heal—like what you’ve said, heal the nervous system, heal the dopamine levels. Dopamine is not the only chemical going on in our brain like my interview with Joan Iffland, who’s a Ph.D. in addiction. And she talks about bouncing different brain chemicals by love. 

Brooke, you are a shining light on this taboo subject because we really want to take – so men, and again, women are affected by this two indifferent way. Like I believe they’re affected in a similar way, I should say. But men in our society still are taught and not allowed to be vulnerable. They have to be strong and tough and not allowed to have emotions, that they are not allowed to have breakdowns, and there’s a lot of shame and hidden shame. And so for you to shine a light on such a taboo subject where men feel so like they cannot talk about it, right? So you’re bringing healing to a part of humanity. Where humanity has not been allowed to shine light on this and heal. So I love the work that you’re doing.

[00:50:36] Brooke Hazen: Thank you. Well, dopamine is a cycle that builds further dopamine addictions. It’s cyclical. So that’s why I said, and God really is telling us that the gateway to allowing God into our lives and for massive transformation on healing level holistically, opening that door to that massive change in our life really starts with balancing the neurology and the energies that we have within us. Those gifts we have, it has to start there. 

[00:51:08] Ashley James: You’re going to mention some studies, that you said, you talk about later. Do you have these studies?

[00:51:14] Brooke Hazen:  Yeah. I do want to get into that also. I just want to say to about, I mean, my books were full of biohacks. I mean, the mother of all biohacks is what I just said is that nobody that talks about is, balanced neurology and energy. That’s the launching pad for that I’ve experienced. I can tell you firsthand, this is how I went through this incredible transformation. I believe that’s why God led me to this and had me write this book. I promised God to write this book. But I also want to get into the organic further and talk about when I mentioned the plant-based diet, or I mentioned the animal-based diet, and how that’s elephant in the room. We can have a plant-based diet and this is really the pinnacle of all diets is a plant-based diet, but if we’re not careful, we can still have problems with a plant-based diet.

[00:52:10] Ashley James: You know, Oreos are vegan. The Oreos are vegan. 

[00:52:13] Brooke Hazen: Yeah. Right. 

[00:52:14] Ashley James: You going to watch out this plant-based. If you buy packaged foods and it says plant-based on it like just walk away. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store. Don’t go down the aisles. Like these Frankenfoods, they’re not healthy. They’re full of oil like full of these processed oils, polyunsaturated, fatty, whatever, like all that stuff. You don’t want to eat it. You don’t want to eat the canola oil and all that stuff, right? You want to eat real food.

[00:52:40] Brooke Hazen:  Yeah, because if we eat like lots of flours, not all flours, but grain flours. We’re going to end up having a lot of obesity take place which I’ve experienced myself in the past. So I’ll call it a light, plant-based diet meaning it’s full of light, like high-end vegetables and fruits in different forms, how we prepare it, nuts. If we’re going to have grains just have a small amount of quinoa or whole grains but stay away from processed flours, but that’s really important. I also want to talk about, before we get into your question about the Chelation therapy and those studies. I want to mention that something that really amazing which is another biohack is donating blood. 

You never would have guessed this but donating blood decreases the chance of heart attack by 88% which is one donation per year. Now, we should be practicing this on every level but Western Medicine doesn’t clearly not telling us about this, but I’m telling you now, donate blood. It’s like an oil change for your body. It reduces iron stores and oxygens in our body and increases antioxidant capacity. And when going back to when I mentioned earlier about the source of arteriosclerosis, a source of blood flow ED at which we’re also scared of because that’s the only tool that Western Medicine has. They really don’t know what they’re doing. So that’s all they can do is prescribe that one medicine because it’s money driven. But the source is free radical damage. 

So the different ways to get to that is to get rid of the free radicals which is the heavy metals through the IV Chelation Therapy block x which gets rid of–it’s a natural source from soybean, which gets rid of the plaque buildup that gets rid of that, that breaks apart the arteriosclerosis. But we also can add in antioxidants, both IV as well as orally. It’s just that IVs are much more transformative than oral because it bypasses the digestive tract in 100% of these chelations, nutrients and antioxidants are able to go to every cell of our body as opposed to a fraction through oral and actually holistic health sector of our medicine is moving more and more in this direction. We can heal cancers, arteriosclerosis, immune system issues through Myers’ cocktail. I’ve seen an enormous boost in my immune system. And I had NED which NED is anti-aging. It’s another biohack that these are incredible biohacks. 

NED increases the length of our DNA strands which is literally anti-aging and happening in front of our eyes increases energy levels, clarity, mental clarity and also rebuilds receptor sites like dopamine that have been and we can rebuild chemically, neuro chemically from ED, from addiction to pornography, or dopamine crash levels. But the studies for the Chelation therapy are astounding. There was a study in 1991, well, there’s been a TACT one study and a TACT in two study that’s recent but this other study from 1991 involved 22,765 patients, and 87% of them had market improvement and vascular disease which is one course of disodium EDTA. Now, in this podcast, I’ll tell you, I recommend calcium EDTA does the same thing as disodium EDTA but back then they were using disodium EDTA for the study in there. They estimated that in 1991 that 363,000 of the 407,000 bypass surgeries that year could have been avoided saving an estimated 8 billion dollars. Yeah, 8 billion dollars. With a B.

[00:56:56] Ashley James: When you say saving, you have to remember, no, no, no, it was making them 8 billion dollars. It was profit.

[00:57:04] Brooke Hazen: Exactly. And that’s the politics. This is astounding. So the TACT one study which is the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy. It’s a government-based study showed a 51% reduction in cardiac events and a 43% reduction in mortality in patients with diabetes. And I’ll repeat that again, a 51% reduction of cardiac events and a 43% reduction in mortality in patients with diabetes after receiving one course of disodium EDTA which is I believe it’s around, it can be anywhere from 20 to 30 different IVs but when you combine black x with this, as I mentioned before, this is sort of a trifecta of getting rid of this heavy metal calcification and plaque x which causes arteriosclerosis. Now we should be practicing this in on a massive scale and actually as holistic health people, we need to be demanding this because right now we’re at war with the FDA and the different political bodies and insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries, who are selling statins. And they are trying to hinder and harass this process of obtaining these. So we should demand this. We should absolutely demand that they need to stop killing people because statins are actually been shown to increase deaths from cancer and heart attack because they’re actually lowering our LDL cholesterol artificially, while again, they’re missing the entire picture. LDL is a symptom. LDL cholesterol is produced in increasing amounts. It’s an antioxidant, antiviral, anti-cancer. And it’s our only source to protection other than these Chelation IV therapies from free radical damage. They’re missing the entire picture that the source of arteriosclerosis is free radical damage. Arteriosclerosis is a symptom of what they’re trying to sell us with these statins, these pharmaceuticals, and they’re actually doing the opposite. They’re actually killing people by giving them the statins.

[00:59:20] Ashley James: So, I’m going to get on my soapbox for a little sec to do that.

[00:59:24] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, go for it.

[00:59:25] Ashley James: So statins, and so for those who don’t know, because this is so monumentally important. I was taught this by my naturopathic physician mentors. Statins, so that they believe that cholesterol causes heart disease because they looked at let’s say, your heart and they said, Oh, look, there’s a clog in the heart. There’s cholesterol in that clog, therefore, cholesterol causes heart attacks. That is like saying showing up to a house fire seeing that there’s firemen there and saying, there’s always firemen when I see a fire, so firemen cause fires. 

[01:00:01] Brooke Hazen: Exactly.

[01:00:03] Ashley James: That is, so cholesterol, the blockage is not the cause, it is a symptom of a problem.

[01:00:10] Brooke Hazen: Yes. 

[01:00:11] Ashley James: What they decided to do is the pharmaceutical industry just like the pharmaceutical industry decided to “treat or cure ED” by like giving you Viagra or some kind of vaso, something that increases the vasculature when we know it’s actually seldom just a blood flow problem. It’s seldom a blood flow problem, but they’ve got a pill and they’re treating all forms of Erectile Dysfunction with a pill that only forces the body to do one thing. Right? 

So the same with “preventing heart disease.” Right? They give you a statin and what statin do? And this is very enlightening. Cholesterol is so important for your health, that your liver makes it. I could be eating a raw food vegan diet where I’m only eating salads and fruit, occasionally some nuts. There’s many people out there that eat that way. I could be eating that diet and I still have cholesterol in my body. Right? My liver makes it. It’s so important. Your liver makes it. It’s protective of every cell in the body. Every cell, 37 trillion cells in the body have a fat layer that is the cell wall. Your nervous system has insulation just like your house, all the wires in your house have insulation, so there’s not a electrical fire. So to your nervous system has insulation and the insulation is made of cholesterol. So made of healthy fats. 

So your brain has cholesterol. Your sex hormones and stress hormones, both of them very important for your optimal health are derived from these healthy fats, of this type of cholesterol. So your body needs this. I’m not saying go out there and eat a keto diet or like always eating fat. I’m not saying consume high amounts of fat. I’m just saying that is so important.

[01:02:11] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, that could be dangerous.

[01:02:13] Ashley James: Yes, it’s so important that I can eat a very sort of clean and not eat any cholesterol. Right? No cholesterol at all. Right? I’m not eating any animals. I can eat no animals, just like salads and apples and some seeds and my liver will make all the cholesterol my body needs. Now, statins, what they do is they bruise the liver so much. They damage the liver that the liver ceases to produce the amount of cholesterol it was producing. That’s all statins do.

So the doctor says to you, oh, your our cholesterol is high. I’d like you to have more cholesterol. Here, please take this drug. Now back until I was up until I think it was 2012, then you can go and it’s actually a wiki. It’s like on mainstream websites. You can find the history of the statins but up until 2012, you had to go in for regular blood tests as either every three months or every six months but regular like more regular than once a year. If you’re on statin, you had to go for regular blood tests to test your liver enzymes to make sure that those statins were not over damaging your liver and basically over-compromising your body because the drug is designed to punch your liver to the point where your liver stops functioning enough that’s what statins do. Now, as a side effect of hurting the liver so much, as a side effect, you then develop neuropathy. How many and just raise your hand if you have a family member who has been on statins and now can’t feel their hands or feet and starts falling because I have three family members who won’t listen to me. I mean, this is the problem that because the doctor has the plaque behind that and the half a million-dollar medical degree that says they know better and that these people are now, they’re elderly, so their body doesn’t have enough cholesterol, it’s damage their liver now, it’s damaged their sex hormones. Now, it’s damaged their nervous system, their Myelin sheath is being eaten away because you don’t have enough for this healthy cholesterol. And you get neuropathy, and you also have neuropathy from other things too. But statins are known to long term effect caused neuropathy, so that you can feel your feet and then you can’t, you end up falling. 

So I actually have three family members who were constantly falling and hurting themselves because of the neuropathy because of the long term use of statins. Very frustrating that statins are still being recommended on a regular basis when it is like saying, we have to get rid of firemen. We need to defund the fire department because firemen cause fires. That’s the same logic. I’ve had, I believe five cardiologists on my show, award-winning cardiologists on my show and all of them say, statins should not be on you, got to throw them out. Well, don’t move down the toilet but really take it back to the pharmacy and have them dispose of correctly. Throw them, throw them out. They do not work. 

I had Dr. Esselstyn on my show and he wrote the book, How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease. And he shows that with a very clean whole food plant-based diet, very specific. He has a specific, so he lays it out, a plan, and when you follow it, people’s Erectile Dysfunction goes away but their heart disease goes away within tears, all clogs, all arteries are gone. So you can mop up and clean up the cardiovascular system with a clean, healthy diet. And it’s something to look into and I often have guests on the show that boast the benefits of the whole food plant-based diet and then listeners think that I’m being biased and this is a vegan show. 

Listen, I have also have had guests that talk about the benefits of eating organ meats. Just the fact is look at the proof. If you take someone who has heart disease and you put them on Dr. Esselstyn diet, three months down the road, their angina is gone. They’re not winded anymore. Now, they can walk long distances, whereas they couldn’t before. The blood clots they had in their legs are gone. Like you don’t get that from any other.

[01:06:35] Brooke Hazen: Even more than that, you can literally just drink water and you can cure yourself of all this and get off those medications. I mean, the elephant in the room that they will not talk about, and really none of us really talk about is an animal-based diet that’s causing these problems and heavy metals and other things. But this gets back to the pressure, the peer pressure and I want to encourage everyone to let go of our fears, our myths and misconceptions, the addictions and negative habits that keep us bound and the peer pressure from family, friends, cultural pressure and corporate peer pressure. Let go of all that. Because that is what is going to continue to keep us harming ourselves. We need to throw all that away. 

Really, I don’t believe that Western Medicine has any other place other than emergencies. Where they really it’s a sick care system. They’re waiting for a symptom that serious to come up and then they just patch it up with these pharmaceuticals and surgeries. That’s all the habits but as you said one podcast and loved it. You said that’s one sliver of medicine. But really for ED and for cardiovascular health, all this, our physical health, Holistic Health is the only way to practice curative and preventative natural modalities without side effects. Side effects are just a symptom that we we’re reducing things too much. We’re not looking at everything. And that’s why we get side effects. They’re looking at one process within one process within one process. They’re not looking at the whole. They never will look at the whole if you expect anything like that from Western Medicine, you will not get it. I guarantee you. You could ask any Western Medicine doctor that truly believes in Western Medicine. 

They will not provide any natural holistic curative and preventative types of healing modalities, period. Only pharmaceutical surgeries. That’s it because that’s what it’s built on. It’s built on sand. It’s got huge limitations. That we need to recognize and stop giving all our power away to corporations with—I even feel pressure to bring up a plant-based diet. Why there’s so much pressure around it? There’s corporations through Big Pharma and animal industry are pressuring us and they’re causing us to pressure each other. And I feel closed down and I’m not allowed to bring it up. That’s not right, because the science shows we should live by the science. Everything I have in my book is 111 scientific studies that are firsthand studies that back it up. We should go by the science. It shows that plant-based diet protects us from the 15 leading causes of death in the world. It actually protects us from cancers and from cardiovascular disease. It fights against that instead of gives it to us. 

I also want to talk quickly before our time ends about a couple more really important biohacks. There’s intermittent fasting which has to do with diet. This burns visceral fat. Visceral fat is the most harmful form of fat. It wraps around our organs. It’s linked with all kinds of diseases, neurodegenerative, cardiovascular diseases, cancers. But when you go from to deeper hours like if you go to 18 to 24 hours of fasting, you start to burn off misshapen cellular components that cause neurodegenerative diseases and cancers. So, that’s an incredible bio-hack I found. I practice it every day. I’ve been doing it for two years. And another bio-hack that I really love is, well, I mentioned donating blood, there’s stem cell PRP for ED. PRP is Platelet, I’m sorry, PRP, it’s where you spend your blood, your own blood at for 15 minutes and it yields a golden nectar for growth factors, and that can be used internally as well as in the lingam.

Also want to dimension EPAT which is Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology. That’s a ultrasound that is used on the lingam and can be used anywhere in your body. It’s actually used primarily to for any sort of pains in the body for and what it’s used for erectile health, and for can be used for anyone, men and women, is for breaking up plaque on the outside. So now we have ability to not only break up plaque and calcification of our blood vessels on the inside through Chelation IV Therapy and plaque acts. But on the outside in we can actually break it up EPAT, with Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technique. And you mentioned Kegels, too. Kegels are highly effective too as a monotherapy for ED, for Organic ED. Again, we get so hyper focused on organic ED.

I like to think of it more as we’re rejuvenating and enhancing our sexual function. But Kegels practice, I have in my book where there’s certain practices where you do it twice a day. And they’ve been shown to be incredibly effective at increasing basically sexual function. And can also, I wanted to tell people that, one thing I discovered was something in the East they’ve been trying to, for millennia, figure out ways to block semen release during sex. I found that Kegels are actually the easiest way to do it. During the process of intercourse, when you can pull out and allow and slow things down and prolong the experience and get fully embody this experience. But then, when that moment does arise, where for men there’s this point of no return, where this automatic process of semen release starts, you can just do the Kegel technique, which is flexing the muscles. There’s three different points, there’s sort of the anus around the lingam, and then in between a coccyx. Now, you can flex that and it’ll keep your semen from going out. I mean, there might be a teeny bit or like it took me a little while to learn this technique, but basically, the main goal is to avoid full climactic semen release as well as partial semen release.

And I was at first, experience a lot of partial semen release, but the Kegels were what really fit perfectly for avoiding semen release because again, avoiding semen release is so critical. It’s keeping all of our life force inside of our body, all those incredible growth factors, hormones and nutrients, cycles throughout our body during lovemaking. And instead of distancing after sex, we’re actually able to stay close to each other in bonds, in timeless, breathless union.

[01:14:16] Ashley James: Cuddle time.

[01:14:20] Brooke Hazen: Yeah, like pass out time where you go into this other state.

[01:14:23] Ashley James: Yeah. Oh, man, I love that. When you nap together in each other’s arms. So good. Right. So it’s so great.

[01:14:28] Brooke Hazen: You both in heaven.

[01:14:31] Ashley James: Right. So, it’s so great. 

[01:14:33] Brooke Hazen: Just for sex, we should we need to honor sex. Sex is part of God. That’s why I wrote this book. We shouldn’t shy away from it. I’m not afraid to talk about it. And I asked everyone to let go of their fears. The only way that you’re going to experience transformation like I’ve gone through and what hundreds of thousands of people are doing now through the NoFap movement, of giving up pornography and addiction, and anything in life. If you want to transform your overall physical health, neurology, your relationships is to let go of those fears because I just want to end this my portion by saying asking each person out there. What is it that is blocking us from becoming the ideal versions of ourselves? I mean, really, look at it. What exactly is it? Just break it down? What is the thing that is keeping you from becoming that ideal version of yourself and working towards that right now? There’s something that’s doing it. And I ask that we just let ourselves go completely to all these misconceptions that our culture has been teaching us and let ourselves go to God and allow God to transform us.

[01:15:42] Ashley James: I love it. I love that you brought up the NoFap movement. I learned that from my husband because he’s been on his own journey and he gave me permission to share this, his whole life he struggled and he thought there was like a mental emotional block. But he felt, he internalized so much shame. And for him, it wasn’t an Erectile Dysfunction issue. It was a completion issue. It’s like he was like he couldn’t. It was, he was desensitized, and so there wasn’t as much pleasure and there was a lot of frustration. And then he just felt like he just internalized so much and he thought it was sort of his fault and there’s some you know. 

[01:16:27] Brooke Hazen: Yes right.

[01:16:29] Ashley James: And so there’s a lot of emotions. So when we married each other, 14 years ago, I was kind of surprised. I’m like, is it me? And he’s like, no, it’s not you. So, of course, at first, I thought, so how many like the other partner thinks it’s them? Right? 

[01:16:43] Brooke Hazen: Yes. Exactly that’s what happens.

[01:16:45] Ashley James: Right. And he opened up and started sharing. I’m like, Okay, well, let’s work through this because I’m very passionate about personal growth, and I believe if you’re not growing you’re dying. Right? So, we’re like, let’s dive into this. Let’s figure out. So we did a lot of emotional work and we talked through and we were looking at different stuff and he got into looking at how harmful pornography is, and he was like really blown away by that, the NoFap movement. He looked into that and he was telling me about it. One of the biggest things and that of course, it blew his mind when he joined like the NoFap movement and removed pornography and when he did that, huge, huge success around that. But the biggest breakthrough for him was– this was I want to say five or six years ago, maybe a little bit longer. It was right around when medium.com came out, and it was just brand new. And he’s like, hey, you should write on medium.com and I’m like, what is this? He’s like, it’s kind of like a blog but said you have your own blog, everyone, right? 

So everyone writes their own article on this thing. And I’m like, okay, well, let’s look into it. And so I clicked on the health section, because I wanted to see what was in there and the number one health article was on regrowing your foreskin. And at first, we laughed. But then, we realized they’re being serious and we clicked on it and it was this very long and detailed explanation of how to regrow your foreskin. Now, I have had an entire interview on circumcision and also we talked about foreskin restoration, but on circumcision and everything you do lose there’s– it’s actually part of your immune system. There’s over 40,000, I think it’s 40,000 or more nerve endings like there’s a lot that is being removed from you that you’re never get back.

But one thing the foreskin does do is it protects because without a foreskin it becomes completely desensitized. The head. And so, I mean, imagine for women, imagine if your clitoral hood was removed, your clitoris would be raw and become desensitized over time. So it’s the same thing that happens to men. It’s genital mutilation. And so, he regrew most of his foreskin. It took a few years but once he just wore a device, and it wasn’t painful at all, and he was very excited about it. What we discovered that most of his problems from teenage hood up, most of his problems was that and this is a very common thing, they botch over 200,000 circumcisions in America. You’re a botched. And you don’t know, sometimes you know it because it’s obvious, but sometimes it’s too tight and the doctor just does. You don’t know, right? And so, it was too tight. All the scar tissue was too tight, for him and so once he regrew some foreskin, it loosened up and also that it protected it. 

So there’s less desensitization and it was like he could finally breathe. It was so healing for him because he let go of a lot of that shame and a lot of the negativity or when he realized this was a physiological problem. That he’s not broken. Right? And then, in addition to doing the NoFap, and no porn, he’s like, for him, he’s like a new person. And so he was so excited. 

So although, he’s a very private and introverted person, he gave me permission to share this because it could help others even if it’s just one other person. It’s worth it to share. So, again, there’s so many avenues out there, and you’re not going to find the answers by going to one doctor. Right? And this is what we’re taught in a doctor’s office. You have to dive in and dig in and explore. I definitely recommend that listeners get your book, You Are Not Broken. Just like my husband found out that he was not broken. You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide for Men and Women to Heal the Pathways of Sexual Dysfunction and Restore Relational Harmony Together. A beautiful book. The links to that book are going to be on the show of today’s podcast learntruehealth.com. But also, you can just go to brookehazen.com which has so much information there as well. 

[01:21:33] Brooke Hazen: Thank You.

[01:21:34] Ashley James: Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:21:40] Brooke Hazen: Yes. The point you just made, I agree. I look around and it seems like people are just sort of waiting to die like they’re afraid to truly live. And that’s the real message God wants to bring through my book is that we’re actually able to revitalize ourselves to gain that youthful vigor and vitality back in our lives. And I have techniques on every level both spiritual, neurological, energetic, physical, relational that can help us to do this. I just encourage everyone to be open and stay open and let go. Let go of all these myths and misconceptions these fears so that we can actually start living again because I was sort of dead myself before this. I was in the deepest darkness. In the deepest darkness, I’ve found the brightest light and that’s what I want to encourage all of you to do is to live life fully. Don’t be scared of living life. Don’t just wait to die and I do believe that our culture is corporate culture is really caused us to both do and believe things that are slowly killing us. And we need to look out for ourselves now because we don’t want to die because we’re following some mistaken, leadless, corporate monsters that are being given to us and that we’re exerting on others as peer pressure. We want to follow our own hearts and God and in lead what, follow the science and do what it actually is going to lead us to vitality, vibrancy and life. 

[01:23:26] Ashley James: Love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with us today and shining a light. We can help men and women lead fulfilled lives and empower them. Letting them know that they can find answers, they’re going to keep digging, they can find answers. And that if a doctor says, well, you’re going to have diabetes for the rest of your life, you just have to learn to deal with it. It’s so not the truth. I had Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City on my show, and they sent him home with a bag full of prescriptions and told me he’d be sick for the rest of his life. Like he have diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol problems and heart disease for the rest of his life. And he said, nope. And he turned to a whole foods diet, he turned to natural medicine, and now he’s on no prescriptions, and he’s super healthy. And that’s just one example of thousands and thousands of examples of that. If your doctor says, you have to be sick. It’s genetic! Whatever they say, do give it a grain of salt. That’s it. Just take it with a grain of salt and go. I’m going to find the answers to my health. Keep digging.

[01:24:38] Brooke Hazen: All you have to do is just drink water and literally he’ll be better off than taking the pharmaceuticals. Just stop eating so much animal based foods and stop watching pornography. Stop releasing your semen all the time. Don’t eat blood. Let go. All these things are free. They don’t make them any money. And that’s why they are not interested in telling you about these things. But it’s so simple and easy. We just need to wake up and see the elephants in the room.

 [01:25:09] Ashley James: And I’d say, find a holistic doctor as part of your team, naturopath, holistic doctor that believes in looking at all aspects of your life and helping you achieve that balance. It’s really great to have a naturopathic doctor on your team or holistic doctor. Now, there’s some doctors that are greenwashed, they’ll say their holistic but then, they like, they have their prescription pad in their hand ready to–you want a doctor that for 90 minutes of naturopathic are just great. They’ll sit with you for an hour to two hours. Go through your entire life, every aspect of your life and look at what they can do to help you in every way not just what drug can I give you? They’re looking to help you uncover all these different aspects of your life. 

And then hopefully they offer things, like you said, like the Myers’ push or the Chelation therapy and those are the kind of doctors I like that they are on the cutting edge of the holistic science. So, go find one in your area and interview them. Go interview like 15-minute free consultation. Go interview a bunch of holistic doctors and work with the ones who sort of pass your litmus test ask them of what they think of cholesterol meds and see what they say. Like that’s a good litmus test. What do you think of cholesterol meds if I have high cholesterol would you put me on them? And see what they say or what changes would you make for me if I have high cholesterol and see what they say. And that’s a good litmus test. But make sure that you have the right tools for the job and the right tools being the right practitioners to help guide you.

[01:26:53] Brooke Hazen: There’s all these scientific studies from really brilliant scientists that we can also, I actually wrote this whole book and researched this whole book with God’s help and through intense research with scientific studies and through experience and experiential evidence from others. We also have the power. Don’t give away our power to Western Medicine, and think that we can’t do anything. I did it. I heal that naturally. I had nobody leading me. They didn’t know what to do with ED. In fact, ED, even naturopaths– I totally encourage naturopath– but even naturopaths don’t necessarily know how to deal with ED. So sometimes you have to just realize that you have the power within you. Don’t give your power away.

[01:27:45] Ashley James: Exactly. I love it. Don’t give your power away. You have the  power within you. Keep digging. Keep exploring. Thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us all these little nuggets of your wisdom. I really appreciate you coming today and I hope that this podcast helps so many people. And please come back on the show if you uncover any new science that you want to share about healing Erectile Dysfunction.

[01:28:12] Brooke Hazen: Absolutely. I wish everyone the most beautiful life full of journey ahead for you.

Website – Brooke Hazen

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You Are Not Broken: A Holistic Guide for Men and Women to Heal the Pathways of Sexual Dysfunction and Restore Relational Harmony Together

More info on Grace and her story: www.ouramazinggrace.net

Below you will find more information and the links From Former House of Reps Dean Michele Bachmann referenced on the topic of the Biden Administration signing over US sovereignty on public health to the World Health Organization:

Take action: https://takeactionforfreedom.com/stop-who

Highlights

• What did Scott Schara find out about the hospital’s anomaly?
• Why did Scott think that his daughter Grace wasn’t given the proper care?
• What drugs did they put in Grace’s body to cause her sudden death?
• How much money does the hospital make out of COVID patients?

Heartbreaking, but this story needs to be told. This gut-wrenching story of what Scott’s daughter, Grace, went through will not be easy to listen to. . In this episode, Scott Schara will share the intentional deaths happening in the hospitals after losing his loving daughter, Grace.

Intro: 

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 479. I am so honored today to have Scott Schara on the show. Scott has a very powerful message for you. And for all of us. This is something that my naturopathic mentors have been warning me about for over ten years that I’ve been studying with them. They’ve kept saying to me the number one cause of death in the United States is done at the hands of doctors on hospitals. And that sounded so outlandish when they first started proposing this, and then they showed me the statistics, and they showed me the literature, they showed me the numbers, and they said—no look, it’s not just accidents that happened, like, “Oh, I meant to give you five milligrams, not 50 milligrams.” It’s not just those. And those do happen. It’s actual effects, not side effects but effects from drugs. It’s mismanagement. I don’t want to say it’s intentional, but there are certain hospitals, when we look at the statistics, they look as though they’re more interested in how many scans they can do, how many tests they can run instead of the health of the patient. They’re looking at the cash cow of the patient. And when we look at the overall picture of the medical system, we see that the medical system is designed for profit. It’s not designed to heal.

I love the doctors out there who want to do good. Who spent so many years of their life going to school because their hearts were in the right place. They want to do good. They’re in a system that is broken because it’s intentionally designed for profit. One of my naturopathic mentors was raised on a farm, very young, when he was feeding the calves with calf pellets. He looked at the ingredients, and he said—“Dad, why do we feed all the calves the vitamins, minerals, all these nutrients? Why are we feeding them all these nutrients with calf pellets? Why don’t we take these nutrients ourselves?” Because he understood even as a child. He understood the veterinary medicine aspect of farming that when you give an animal very good nutrition, it prevents disease. And if we can prevent disease in an animal, it makes the hamburger cost less. And for humans, it’s the opposite.

We wait to get sick and then go to the doctor and get put on very expensive meds. So it’s a backward world where we try to prevent disease in animals to keep them healthy and keep the cost down. But when it comes to our health, we’re not trying to keep the cost down by preventing medicine? So the whole system is just wackadoo. So when my mentor showed me, without a shadow of a doubt, they showed me all the evidence that hospitals and so many shady things go on that lead to the number one cause of death in the United States, and it is actually at the hands of the medical system.

So, Scott, you have a story that really echoes this message I keep hearing, and I’m very excited to have you on the show today because your message will save lives. So, welcome to the show.

[00:03:52] Scott Schara:  Thanks for having me. That was a great introduction. I just have a couple of quick comments before you start asking me questions. But what’s interesting, your introduction was well done, and it sets the table and what’s happened in the research only about a month ago. I crossed over to say that Grace’s death was intentional, and it was through research. When you’re at the point where you’re thinking maybe this is unintentional and I’ve come to the point of saying it is.

So the urgency my daughter put it this way which I think is a good way to put it, if you shot somebody on the street, they would put you in jail as soon as possible to stop you from killing more people. And that same thought process has to be applied to the medical professionals who are doing this type of thing like they did to our daughter Grace. And I’m not talking about just the people involved in Grace’s situation– this is running rampant in our country.

[00:05:00] Ashley James:  Right, especially in the last two years. We can do a whole talk just on the last two years and what we’ve seen hospitals do because they would get $5,000 or more per COVID patient. And then they would get this huge chunk of money from the government every time they put someone on a ventilator, so they were monetarily motivated. And again, I believe there’s good people in the system, but when we look at the outcomes, the outcomes were so horrendous.

Doctors kept doing the same thing, even though they saw a very slim chance that people would survive once they put them on the ventilator. And that their hands were tied, and they weren’t allowed to use certain medications that they saw or other doctors saw were working. But when we look at all the hospitals, we see that there’s a pattern of looking to monetize and maximize the money from each patient and not necessarily looking for the best outcome for each patient. And this is just the very sick part of the medical system is when someone’s monetarily motivated, they’re not going to make the best ethical choices for our health. So let’s dive into your story. Tell us about Grace.

[00:06:26] Scott Schara:  So Grace, I could talk about it for hours and hours. And I’m attempting to give a picture of Grace in a short time. She’s the whole motivation for doing this. There are some days that are exceptionally hard. She was my best buddy. You know when your best buddy is killed, and you know a lot of things happen in your mind. I missed her terribly just this last weekend. For example, we went on an annual fishing trip with Grace and our two grandsons, and I took the two grandsons this year without Grace. So that was tough. You relive what we did last year, and you can’t stop thinking about it. Well, it’s a joy to go on a fishing trip, but also it was so sad. I cried multiple times over the weekend.

It’s easy to do a podcast like this and all the ones we’ve been doing because she was a great kid. She had a love for our Lord that is different than anything I’ve ever seen. She called me earthly dad. And she represented God’s love the way that it’s supposed to be, and I can’t love that way. She did it because she loved me, even when I was a jerk. It gives me the motivation to do these stories and tell about Grace. And tell what happens, so it doesn’t happen to other people.

Grace was 19 when she died. She had Down syndrome. She was on the Down Syndrome scale of people. She was very high functioning, and my wife homeschooled her. She taught her how to read and write, and she could. She played violin at my daughter Jessica’s wedding. She rode horses. I taught her how to drive. She had a sense of humor second to none. She was a funny kid. She saw things through the lens of humor. If she met you for the first time, she would be encouraging. She would share a sense of humor right at the get-go. If she’d met you for the first time, she’d say, ” Well, nice to meet you, beautiful Ashley.” And then she would say– would you like to hear my dirty jokes? Of course, you would say, “Well, and I couldn’t wait to hear them.” And then she would say, “Well, why didn’t the toilet paper cross the road?” So then you’d say, “I don’t know.” “What she would tell you, “because it was stuck in the crack.” And you would say, “well, what about your second one? She would say, “have you read the book Under the Bleachers”? And you’d say no, “I’ve never read that book”. And she said, “Would you like to know who’s written it by?“ “And, of course, you’d say, “yes”. And she’d say, “well, it was written by Seymour Butts.”

We have a website that we started, ouramazinggrace.net. There’s hundreds of pictures, videos, all kinds of cool stuff about Grace and her life, and obviously the stories on the website. You can get to know Grace that way. I get emails every day from people who go to the website and they see how special she was. She was very unique. We see her now as an angel. God gives us an angel to walk around with us for 19 years. And the only way to make sense out of it is with understanding that God’s sovereign. He basically had her unloan to us, and He had a different purpose for Grace.

[00:10:28] Ashley James: What is your mission by coming on this podcast and sharing Grace’s story and the website ouramazinggrace.net. What is your desire, your wish, your hope that comes out of all this?

[00:10:46] Scott Schara: There’s two very specific things we decided to do this early on, right after the hospital decided to not meet with us. We had written up all of the research that we had done. We had known by November 8 that they killed Grace but at that point, we thought it was an anomaly. So we took all the research that we did, and we were probably over 100 hours at that time. Now, it’s over $600 of research, and we codified it, put it all on documents, and sent it to the hospital requesting a meeting. So, it sounds dumb when you think about it now. I really thought it was just an exception. So, they would want to know and change the protocol, so they don’t do this to somebody else. And when they said, no, we don’t want to meet. We realized, oh my gosh, this is deeper than that.

So then we decided to go public with the story and for two reasons. Number one is to save lives. So that’s the easy one. I mean, you’re going to be motivated to save lives. You don’t want this to happen to anybody else. And when you hear the details, you’ll see what I’m talking about. We want to stop this. So when we started to go on podcasts, then you realized the national media is not going to pick up the story because it’s too out there. So then, the website was developed to post the research so people cannot just believe some dead that’s telling the story. But actually see the documents and see the research, so then they see, oh my gosh, this is true to save lives. So that’s number one.

And I just want to drill that down just a little bit because there’s two very specific pieces of that. Number one is if you need to go to the hospital, look at what is the need to check-in. So go to the emergency room visit for a true emergency which at the time when we took Grace, we thought it was a true emergency in it probably was because her oxygen level could not be maintained above 90%. We did not have to checked her in the hospital if I would had known then what I know now we would have checked her in. We would have said, no, we’re not going to admit her, and they would have sent us home with a prescription for oxygen and steroid, and Grace would be alive today. And I say that with 100% confidence because I went into different hospitals three days after Grace died with symptoms three to four times worse. I was about to die the first night, and they turned me around in 24 hours with a completely different protocol than what was followed with Grace.

Then the second piece of this physical component of saving people’s lives is a lot of the hospitals have been bought, and I don’t mean legally bought. But they’ve been practically bought by the government through a money trail, and they used COVID as an excuse. So Grace died at a hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin. I went to a different hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and by God’s Grace, that hospital, we didn’t know, that hospital chose to do what’s right and follow the hippocratic oath versus doing what’s wrong. And that fact pattern, I think God used it so I could tell the story objectively. But that fact pattern is the second component of the physical piece of the message, which is check out your hospitals in your local area and vet them before the need arises because when you’re sitting in the emergency room, that isn’t the time to figure out if they been bought by the government or not. You need to know which hospitals are the good ones and which one are the bad ones ahead of time.

And then, the second component of what we want to do is the spiritual piece which we thought early on that Grace’s story may be used by God to prepare people’s hearts that they’ve been duped. That the government had duped our entire population, and if that does that to you, when you listened, you realize God wants to bring everybody back to himself and if that causes you to start searching, don’t turn it off. He wants you to search and find the only person who ever walked the face of the earth and who didn’t duped anybody, which is His Son, Jesus Christ.

[00:15:26] Ashley James: Thank you. How can we vet hospitals? I’ve got several in the area, but there’s only one I really like in my area. Actually, they publish, and it’s really interesting. This is the most honest hospital in the area.  They published all their statistics. So, for example, around COVID, what surprises me is that they’re being so honest with their statistics that if you look at month to month, the people who have been admitted in the last several months, significantly higher percentage are those who are fully vaccinated with the boosters, so they’ve got three shots. Some of them decided to get four shots, but the ones who are zero shots have a significantly less percentage of being admitted and even coming to the hospital with COVID.

They’re publishing all these statistics. They’re just being, here’s our statistics for this month, this is how many people are in the ICU, this is how many people were admitted. This is how many people who just came into the ER or tested positive. Eventhough, they are tested positive while not having any symptoms. They came in like a broken arm, and they have tested positive like they’re just showing where they’re at. And I thought that was a clue that maybe this hospital would be better than going to other hospitals because they’re being honest. But besides what they’re just showing, how can we question a hospital to know that they are not going to put money in front of my health?

[00:17:05] Scott Schara: That’s a great question. I would tell you the common sense approach. I don’t have any checklist, but just add a little critical thinking to your questions, and you can come up with an answer. So the first thing I would do is find out if they are part of a national chain or not. So with Grace’s hospital, St. Elizabeth, it’s part of a section that is a 142 hospital system. That’s big. They’re one of the largest in the country. So the bigger they are, the more likely they’re bought by the government versus the hospital system.

I went into a small region with five hospitals, that doesn’t make it good or bad. But that’s just a first cut. Medical professionals that you already know that are not generally bought by the system—chiropractors for example, dentists–if you have a trusted relationship with them, you can ask some questions to find out. But then ultimately, you’re going to find out their position on things. So, on a bright light question, obvious is, what’s your position on the vaccine? Because that will tell you an awful oath of tons of stories that I’ve heard about people that they went into their regular doctor who they trusted for years, and now he’s pushing the vaccine. Well, what does that tell you? He could be naive if you in the best-case scenario, but in the worst-case scenario, he is one that bought by the government because this thing is no good. And so, to me, the vaccination position is a bright light task. They’re pushing the vaccine. They’re pushing the narrative that’s no good. So they’ve been bought.

[00:19:03] Ashley James: It’s so overwhelming. When you think about it, we’re just us as individuals, and it’s this big system and we have to navigate this big system. When we start to go down the rabbit hole, the corruption is endless. So I’ve been looking into, observing, and picking through, and understanding the history of the modern medical system. So I urge everyone to look into that because this system is new in the scope of humanity, it’s been constructed in the last 115 years.

Before that, you could go to a homeopath. You could go to an herbal medicine practitioner. Allopathic medicine is a very new pharmaceutical-based medicine which is very new and most of their medications were made from herbs anyway. We had so many choices. And then, what happened was the entire system and the colleges and the universities were bought by the one person who owned the pharmaceutical company at the time. He made sure what was taught in the schools to the doctors was only pharmaceutical-based medicine. So, there’s been a slander campaign against all other forms of medicine for over 100 years.

Back in the 1980s, the American Chiropractic Association won a huge lawsuit against the AMA force, years and years of slander but the damage was done. There’s a whole generations of Americans and people from other countries who have been told by their primary care physician that chiropractors are quacks because that’s what they told by the AMA to say, but it’s not true. They won in the 80s, but it’s still to this day; people still believe what their doctor told them. The same things with there’s a huge PR slander campaigns around midwives because they wanted everyone to be born in a hospital and die in a hospital to increase their profits.

So, when you see that over the last 100-plus years, the medical system has been built upon the premise of making as much money as possible from each customer, not a patient. A patient is someone you want to heal, and help survive, live, and thrive and not suffer. A customer is someone you want to get as much money out of. There’s individuals in the system that are service to others that want to help, but the system is not designed to help.

So you’ve been looking into this. Can you explain how much money does each hospital gets? Let’s use this COVID as an example. I know others who’ve gone into the system and even before COVID and their care has been mismanaged significantly out of a desire to make more money for the hospital. Could you explain how much money does a hospital get when someone comes in and tests positive for COVID or dies from COVID? Or gets put on a ventilator? How much money are they being incentivized or being given by the government?

[00:22:40] Scott Schara:  Good question. I do want your last discussion. I want to just comment on it because it’s critical. You’ve laid it out perfectly. And if people don’t believe Ashley, Mikki Willis did a great job with the Plandemic tool. He laid this out in an hour and five minutes. It lays out this whole setup. So, COVID is just a bluff on the screen. It’s been used as an excuse to implement a whole bunch of stuff that’s been going on for, as you said, 115 years. So it’s important to realize that this COVID is simply being used as the excuse to open up Pandora’s box to this absolute craziness that is heading our way that Grace’s case just emphasizes.

So back to your question about the money. The Center for Medicaid Services has come out with some whistleblowers who have said that the average hospital bonus, this is not the hospital’s profit, this is just a bonus from the government for COVID patients is a hundred thousand. That’s bonus money, and I want to walk through an example so people can grasp how deep this system is being aligned or blocked by the government. So when a person checks into the hospital with COVID, they get a bonus for testing positive. I just want to walk through a ventilator as an example. So most people are pushed to be put on a ventilator, and this is by design, and the money fits the crime. So, a ventilator, when it’s put in the patient, yields a $39,000 bonus.

To set that up, they started the patient on a sedation med, typically Precedex, and that classifies the room as ICU, which is another bonus. That patient will eventually die, 85% of people put on a ventilator for COVID die, that’s a $13,000 bonus for death.

[00:24:53] Ashley James: Sorry, hold on. How much money does the hospital make if you die from COVID on a ventilator?

[00:25:00] Scott Schara: Just like COVID, death is $13,000.

[00:25:05] Ashley James: So COVID death is $13,000. If you had a car accident and you died in the ER, and you happen to test positive for COVID, do they get $13,000?

[00:25:19] Scott Schara: Correct, as long as they put it on the death certificate that way. Which their motivation is to do that. They convince the patient–not the patient at that time because they’re dead but they convince the advocate to do that because the government will reimburse your funeral cost of $9,000 for COVID death. So, if they have this way, just think about the government caused the COVID death and they make it, so they have this whole media campaign that it’s released from China and all this crazy stuff that our governments are involved with it. They want to make you think that they’re being your friend by giving you a $9,000 funeral cost reimbursement.

My wife wisely said we’re not taking their dirty money as we never took that in Grace’s case. We just felt that if we did that, we basically agreed that Grace’s death was COVID. It has nothing to do with COVID. So even though her death certificate says COVID, Grace didn’t die of COVID. So anyway, going back to how this plays out. So I just went through the bonuses that they get. The patient was probably already in a Remdesevir, so that’s another bonus. And then, they get an overall 20% bonus on top of a bonus as an added bonus for the entire state. But then, with the ventilator, the average amount of time for patients to keep them alive, they max this out. The average amount of time for patients to be alive on a ventilator is 22 days. So then you get the daily room charge which is the insurance payment and the patient’s payment. It’s approximately 300 grand for a ventilator patient.

So you can see why they pushed to put somebody on a ventilator. In Grace’s case, she was never on a ventilator because we denied it. Thankfully, we got wise to ventilators while we were in the hospital and we denied that push. They wanted us to give them a pre-approval or pre-authorization to put Grace on a ventilator whenever they wanted to, and, ultimately, I believe that because we denied that. They had to figure out a different way to take Grace out. So Grace’s case is extremely unique, not only because we were there, but the way they did it, it’s unbelievable.

[00:27:49] Ashley James: Let’s talk about that. What’s the evidence that you have that they maliciously killed your daughter?

[00:28:01] Scott Schara: There’s an overabundance of evidence. Again, I would point people to the website and then look at the tragedy tab. Roughly 70% of the research that I’ve done is posted in that tab, so that will point you to evidence. I’ll go through some other pieces that are not on the tab so then you can see–oh my gosh, this is unbelievable. We’ll go through the evidence first if you want to talk about the quality of care because that really sets this up. Because you might think, oh my gosh, how did this all even happen? What was the hospital stay alike?

[00:28:40] Ashley James: Why don’t we walk through it? So, her oxygen is lower than 90%. So you bring her into the hospital, and you check her in. Walk us through it.

[00:28:52] Scott Schara: So, right in the emergency room when they suggested that we should have met Grace, I just said well, then I’ll be staying with her. And immediately, the attending nurse said, we can’t. And I said, what’s the reason? And she said we don’t allow visitors in the COVID wing. And I said, then I’ll be taking Grace home. Unfortunately, at that point, they came back two hours later, and they said, we had a meeting, and they said, you can stay. So, I say unfortunately because, obviously at that time, I was in the mindset to take her home. I wasn’t going to be an advocate. That’s crazy that I will be going to leave my Down Syndrome daughter in the hospital alone, and no one’s going to do that.

So, they allowed me to stay, and we waited 10 hours in the emergency room for a room to open up. What I believe happened and you can make your own judgment after hearing the details. I believe, basically, we were waiting for somebody else to die. And specifically for them to take somebody else out because the hospital was at maximum capacity at this point with the Delta variant in the emergency room was also at maximum capacity. So when we waited in the emergency room for 10 hours. So about midnight on the 7th, we got in the room. My expectation at that point was that Grace and I were gonna have a mini-vacation for three or four days. It was on the first day, it was like that. So we just goofed and hopped in. They had a great menu. We could order food off the menu and it was really fun.

Towards the end of the day, they put Grace on a high-flow cannula, which is a regular cannula, what’s you see people have with the hose wrapped around their ears, with the tool inserts in the nostrils, and they’re just breathing oxygen.

That’s outmost of what Grace needed, but they insisted on a high-flow cannula. Grace’s really got agitated with that shooting air up your nostrils at 40 miles an hour. So it’s a big deal. So then, thinking oxygen is paramount here and I thought they know better. There’s an attitude that I had, unfortunately, to trust the white coat. And that’s another take-home message is let them earn your trust. Don’t just automatically blindly trust the white coat. And ultimately, based on these examples that I really didn’t trust the white coat because I was taken out of the armed guard. I may still have an overall trust for the white coat, but then they try to harm your daughter. 

So ultimately, I worked with the nurses for a couple of hours to get a BiPAP situated with Grace, and then she calmed down, and everything was fine. On that next morning, on the 8th of October, the doctor came in at eight o’clock and said, you’re going to need to put your daughter on a ventilator in the next two hours. So, I said, what is that recommendation based on? He said we did a blood gas draw the night before. So I said, what time? He said 11:30, and I told him the story about what just happened with the oxygen. And I said, I was watching the monitors. I said at that point when you guys did that, Grace’s blood pressure was 235 over 135, and her heart was racing a hundred beats a minute. So I don’t think that a blood gas draw is subjective. So I’ll let you take another one. So, they did, and Grace’s fine.

We dodged the ventilator bullet, but at that moment, I got educated mentally because I asked what’s the prognosis. I still think the majority of people will—like what you have said with chiropractors who won the lawsuit for defamation but the damage was already done. So, with ventilators, I think the damage was already done too but in a different situation. Something was  said, I think President Trump unknowingly convinced the country that we had a ventilator shortage and that ventilators are a necessary tool in the tool chest.

So I thought that just based on that paradigm that was sold to us at the beginning of COVID. At that point, I asked the doctor what the prognosis is, and he said only 20% of people walk out alive after being put on a ventilator. The attending nurse started crying and I talked with her. She has a daughter named Grace and she knew if I made this decision, Grace would going to die. So I started looking stuff up on my laptop. I had it there in the room. I talked with a doctor friend who’s helping us and we came to the base looking at home. We came to a conclusion, only 15% of people walk out alive and those 15% of people do walk out alive and most of them die in the first year from damage done to their lungs. So we decided then that Grace is not going on a ventilator and that would be crazy.

They pushed us four different times to give them that this doctor thought he had the evidence, but the other four times they pushed for a ventilator was coached in a way that they want us to give up pre-approval or pre-authorization just in case. Just in case, meaning when they decided that they would frame it this way. They said these things tend to happen in the middle of the night when we can’t get the whole family. So if we would have decided this, I mean Grace will be on a ventilator, 30 seconds after we gave him the pre-authorization because of the financial motivation.

The next example I would share with you is half on the very next day on October 9th. There’s probably 50 examples I can share with you. But these two kinds will give you a perspective of what was going on. So, on October 9th, which is a Saturday, Grace and I got up. She was hungry. I ordered food, and I started feeding her. 

Grace, obviously could feed herself, but she had a BiPAP mask on. The nurse came running in and said, you can’t do that. I said, what’s the reason? She said, Grace’s oxygen saturation was only at 85%. So, I processed that for about 15 minutes, and I thought this is impossible. She was at 95% in the emergency room with a regular cannula. Now, we had a BiPAP mask on, and then she should be near 100%. At all my COVID materials in the room, but one thing was an oxygen saturation finger monitor. So, I put it on Grace’s finger, and it read 95%. So I called the nurse back in, and I asked her if my finger meter was accurate, and she said, yes, it is. So, why is my $50 meter more accurate than your $50,000 machine? And she said, well because the lids get sweaty. Well, if you know this, I said, why don’t you proactively change out those lids or whatever you need to do every three, four hours, or whatever it takes so you have an accurate reading. Isn’t this the primary tool you’re using to manage my daughter’s care? And she’s not really responded to me.

You should just be thankful you caught this and we got wise to this one.  I’ve shared this particular example because this hospital is not the exception. I think this hospital has the rule, and they are arbitrarily lowering the oxygen saturation numbers to justify ventilators. So if anybody is wise enough to get the records after they get the call that Uncle Joe just died, and he was on a ventilator, and you started digging into the oxygen numbers, and you see, oh boy, I see where they had to put them on a ventilator is actually when he’s only at 80%. They can make these numbers anything they want and this example shows that. And now, we started monitoring Grace’s oxygen regularly. When I say we, myself when I was there, and then my daughter Jess who became the replacement. On Grace’s last day, death was at 6:02 pm, which was an hour and 25 minutes before Grace died. Grace’s oxygen was at 93%, but the meter that hospital was using was 49% lower. That’s how sick this is.

[00:37:12] Ashley James: The machine you’re talking about, the $50 machine called a Pulse Ox. 

[00:37:15] Brooke Hazen: Yes.

[00:37:17] Ashley James: I have three of them, I think which are scattered around the house because our son has asthma. When he was a toddler, actually, I had a pediatric-sized one as well for his little fingers. You can get them for $35. I just got the other one, and it had the best reviews on Amazon. And I’ve used them whenever my son has beating problems, just to check in, and then, of course, I have other ways I check his breathing like the volume of his breath and it’s allergy-induced asthma. So, we had to figure out all the allergens which are really weird stuff.

But that’s when I got introduced to a Pulse Ox and how interesting it is. When my family and I had COVID, we also used the Pulse Ox, and it’s just a little thing that clips onto your finger and sends a beam of light through your finger and It monitors your heart rate and blood oxygen saturation, which was a really great tool for me when I was going through COVID. I had just lost our daughter, and so I was going through incredible grief and also healing from birth. And then, around day 8 of having COVID, my blood pressure was like, I think it was like  80 over 60. It was some crazy low number. I remember trying to breathe heavily and feeling tightness in my chest, almost like asthma. Breathing heavily and still feeling very lightheaded, I used the Pulse Ox, and I don’t know, I was  86 or something.

I talked to a telemedicine doctor, and he said, you know what I’m not concerned about your problems that you’re having with COVID but I’m concerned that it might be a blood clot in your lungs from the birth. So, you should go in just to get checked. Thank God I’ve never had a blood clotting issue. I had just had a birth, and that is a possibility. So I did go in, and the moment I went in, I felt as if I was a prey. It was the weirdest feeling that the doctors wanted me on experimental drugs. And they said to me basically, I would not live if I don’t get these drugs. And I looked at there’s one doctor, who seemed like, yes he reminded me of my dad. So I felt like this immediate connection to him, and he felt like very kind and concern. I really felt like he had a genuine concern. I can’t feel he was like, haha, I can’t wait to get money out of this patient. Because he doesn’t like to take home the money, it’s the hospital. But he was so convinced that I would not make it like I’d be dead within 24 hours if I didn’t get on this experimental drug.

So, it’s the middle of the night, and I’m texting with my midwife, who is really good at reading research as well, and we go through and I actually asked her for informed consent. So I said, could you please give me your printout, your literature, anything on this? And they gave me a marketing pamphlet basically, I was like, this is the most amazing stuff ever. It’s not FDA-approved yet. So I said, like I’m going into my interview brain and thinking of all the interview questions I’d be asking a doctor about this, I said, what’s your experience using it? And he immediately starts telling me about the doctors on the East Coast and– oh, we’re seeing really promising results on the East Coast in the hospitals there. And I’m like, have you ever used it? What have you seen with your patients? And it turned out that their hospital just started using it and just joined the medical trial? But he didn’t have any experience using it. So he’s just citing. He’s basically the drug rep or whatever has convinced him with little talking points, the marketing points.

So, we go on the pharmaceutical’s website, it’s all the way to the bottom. And you have to scroll for days to get all the way to the bottom. I see one study that shows and this is again on the East Coast they did the study, where they showed that you have a higher percentage of dying if you’re hospitalized, and the only way you can get on this medication is if you’re hospitalized. So basically, those who get on the medication, more of them die than those who get hospitalized with COVID and don’t get on the medication. And that was enough for me. First of all, it’s an experimental medication. I’m not a guinea pig. No, thank you.

So that’s absolutely, no. There’s no way I would ever get on an experimental drug. I like drugs that have been around for like 50 years. You don’t show me a long track record of safety before you put me on anything. And so I’m looking at this and seeing that they really bury. They have to publish these, these studies, but they buried them away at the bottom. Like, how obvious can you get? Just scroll the bottom at the first place, and then more people die. If I were just not get on it, I would have a better outcome. This doctor was pushing it, pushing it and he was convinced. Now I said to him, I don’t have diabetes. I don’t have gestational diabetes, and I was like very clear about my medical history. When I came into the hospital, I said it, i mean, grief, so my blood pressure has been higher, like just from anxiety but it’s extremely low right now due to COVID. I was just worried about it. Listen, it’s kind of hard to breathe. Can you give me some like Albuterol or give me something for breathing? Give me some oxygen.

They wouldn’t send me home with oxygen, but what they did do–because I refuse to be on this medication that they want to put me on. So I said, listen, I’m not going to get admitted. I just want some help with breathing. And they handed me an Albuterol like inhaler. Inhaler that it is the exact same kind of inhaler my son has for asthma. All this is interesting that I could have stayed home–although that’s not legal I think to take someone else’s medication. But I mean, just jokingly, could have I just stayed home and hand me the hospital bill just by taking my son’s inhaler? But what they did was they handed me this inhaler and then they handed me the discharge papers. They’re like, oh welcome, he’s like I’m so worried about you, and you need to come right back to the hospital because the second you start to get worse, because you gonna get worse and you’ve got to get on this medication.

I’m like, listen, dude, I’m going to be fine. I just need a little help breathing. I wish they would have sent me home with lots of oxygen, but at least he gave me an inhaler. It started to work right away. I took a few puffs, my lungs sort of loosened up, and I’ve never had asthma, but it really helped. I was like, wow, I feel more stable already. And I look at my discharge papers, I’m looking because I want to see, and I’ve seen discharge papers before it shows the medication and how to take the medication and its side effects, like everything about the medication. And I looked through everything, and there’s not one mention of the Albuterol they handed me. And I asked the discharge nurse, can you please get the doctor or talk to the doctor like he doesn’t even say on the Albuterol bottle. Should I be doing four puffs or just as needed or four puffs or two puffs or what? And what’s really interesting is that none of my medical records it shows that he prescribed Albuterol because he doesn’t want to be seen as treating COVID with the medication. So, they handed me basically under the table and sent me on my way. So it’s not in any of my records.

It’s a day and a half later, because that’s the middle of the night. So a day and a half later, I’m sitting up, I’m on the couch, and I’m no longer in bed. I’m feeling great. Besides, like once in a while, I get on the Albuterol still because I’m still shaky, and I’m still recovering from COVID. I’m also  taking all my supplements, and I remember sitting up, but I’m helping organize because we’re actually in the middle of packing on top of everything. We’re in the middle of moving, and I get a call from the hospital. And it’s the pharmacist at the hospital and he says, you have to come back and get on this medication. Your records show that you are at high risk because you have multiple comorbidities. I’m like, what comorbidities are you talking about? He said, because you have diabetes. I specifically said I don’t have diabetes. I don’t know how they got that. But he was looking at my record and decided that– you have to get on his medication and it was a sales call. That was the weirdest and I thought was feel like it was in a twilight zone. So the hospital was calling me a day and a half later, begging me to come back and get on their drug that’s a trial medication.

It’s like a twilight zone, and the more I looked into it, I don’t even think this medication has gotten FDA approval, and it just ended up killing too many people. I’m wondering how much money that this hospital get for each patient they convinced to get on this trial. This experimental COVID treatment that was a failure. I mean, I’ve never heard of a hospital calling someone when they’re better days later. It’s not just so much checking–hey, how are you doing? No, it was the pharmacist, like you need to come back and get on this medication, and you’re going to die. I’m looking at my Pulse Ox right now, I’m 98% and I’m great. So, that’s really good, I know, I’ve gone off a little on my own tangent, but it’s a really great idea to own.

Every home should own a thermometer. Every home should own a sphygmomanometer, like a blood pressure cuff, get one for the wrist or get one for the arm, check your blood pressure regularly. That’s a good thing to know and everyone should own a pulse ox. These are the tools that allow us to check in with ourselves. But when you’re in a hospital, do you actually need to bring your own tools in the hospital to verify that their machines are accurate?

[00:47:26] Scott Schara: Thats sick, I know. I mean, I thank God we had that because we have so much evidence and it’s an overabundance. But I mean, you can’t orchestrate these coincidences without God being involved. I’m glad we have it.

[00:47:48] Ashley James: I am so thankful that you have such strong faith because it has been my faith that had helped me survive the grief of losing my daughter. Although not in any of the same circumstances. It has been drawing myself closer to the Lord, what has saved me mentally and emotionally. I’m so glad that you also have that strong relationship. And anyone who’s ever grieving, turning to the Lord, I highly recommended. It’s been something that’s been so grounding and reassuring.

So let’s keep going through Grace’s story. You were checking her oxygen that you mentioned, you could jump ahead and talk about your daughter taking over for you. Why don’t we go back? Walk us through. What happened before you left the hospital?

[00:48:52] Scott Schara: So on Sunday morning, that 10th, seven o’clock in the morning, the head nurse came in with an armed guard and told me I need to leave immediately.

[00:49:00] Ashley James: Excuse me?

[00:49:03] Scott Schara: So then I said, what is that based on? And she said three things. Interestingly, the official excuse that we received from the hospital was only the third thing. Which is she said the third thing is we suspect you of COVID. And that excuse was so laughable because they’re the ones who told me I was going to get COVID. And if they were so concerned about it, why then they ask me. I tested myself on October 7th, Grace’s first day, because I had a fever at about one o’clock, so I tested myself, and I was positive. I had COVID already for three days before they kicked me out. And if you were also concerned, you could have tested me if I gave you the approval. I mean, that wasn’t the reason. Then, she said, well  you’ve been shutting off the alarms at night.

I said, because that’s how nurses trained me how to do it. The alarms are going off constantly, which is a strange thing. It seems minor in the scheme of things when you hear the whole story, but it isn’t minor. We live in the 21st century, these alarms can go off at the nurse’s station. So I asked her, why can’t you have these go off to the nurse’s station and they lied to me, saying he can’t. The reason I said they lied, it’s because when I went into the hospital three days after Grace died, they asked, what would you like to happen? And I said, I don’t want any alarms going off, and I don’t want anybody coming in the room. I’ll buzz you if I need you, and they honor that request.

Whereas with Grace, I mean, I had to help them train me to shut off the non-essential alarms because they’re going off 20,30 times a night. Many times, it was over 20 minutes before they come in and shut them off. And then the third thing she said was that the last three shifts of nurses, I don’t want you in the room. Which of course, these stories I was telling earlier. I wasn’t doing any wrong, but I wanted to make sure my daughter was taken care of, so I was challenging everything, like with the alarms going off. I challenge right away. So, what’s the reason these alarms are going off so much? And they said, well, every time Grace–just think about these answers. They’re so dumb.

So the nurse, when I asked her this, she says, every time Grace moves her arm, it sets off an alarm. So I said, what’s the reason? She said, well we put the IV in the crux of her elbow. I said, so what’s the reason you did that at? And she said, well it was easier for us. So I said, you got to be kidding me. And of course, I’m challenging all this crazy staff, and they had such an arrogant attitude. They look down on us. They said that we were following the frontline doctors’ misinformation campaign. When they were looking, one of the doctors recommended that Grace gets on Tocilizumab, which may have been the experimental drug they wanted you to go on. So I looked this up and I found out the placebo group did better than the group on the drug. So the doctor comes in the next day asking, what’s your decision on Tocilizumab? Then I said, well, the New England Journal of Medicine has a published study that shows that the placebo group does better than the group on the med, and the med has umpteen side effects. When you see his report– we got to report after the fact. He makes me look like a complete dummy. I mean, I’m not going to put my daughter on a drug that has a better chance of killing her than not. I mean, that’s insane. Who would do that?

[00:52:53] Ashley James: You were advocating, I think, what you were doing was the right thing. The hospital kicking you out. I mean, that’s ridiculous. You are allowed ethically and legally. Your patient is allowed an advocate. The hospitals that want a patient to be alone, want an easy job. It’s not about making their job easy. It needs to be– we have one focus. When we go into a hospital, the person, the patient going in comes out alive and better than in the condition that they went in. And also that they don’t have long-term side effects of the treatment. Right? That is the goal. There’s so many good nurses out there. I’m not ripping on nurses, but there’s good people and there’s bad people. Again, I see the system’s broken, but it’s not an accident. The system is built this way. It is not built to make people healthy. So when nurses are taxed, there’s a nurse shortage, they’re working long shifts, extra shifts, overtime, they’re exhausted. Of course, we would want to do things to make it a little easier. The cutting off those corners takes away from the person’s ability to survive is not acceptable. You want to go into a hospital that wants the advocate.

I remember, I lived with my mom in the hospital in the last two weeks of her life. We brought her in, and she was dying. She had cancer. And I was her advocate, and I stayed by her side, lived with her, and this is at Toronto General. And the nurses, for the most part, very happy I was there. I got blankets, and I got water. I actually made their job a lot easier. We didn’t know we were going in to have my mom died. We didn’t know she was at the end of her life. She died very suddenly and it was a big shock. I just remember that the hospital staff—again I was 22, I didn’t have the perspective I have now. Maybe I would have seen it differently. But what I do remember that the staff were very accommodating for me and excited to have an advocate there because they saw they made their job easier.

When my son has been in the hospital and I turned to the doctor in the ER, and I say, stop what you’re doing, I need informed consent. I was expecting a fight. At the time, he was about two and a half. They were hooking him up to an IV, they’re about to pump some unknown liquid into him and I’m like, wait a second. You don’t even look at me or ask me for permission like I get we’re trying to save his life, but I need to know what’s going on. And that doctor got excited. She turned to me and she said, “Oh good, and you want informed consent? Okay, here’s what’s going on.” She explained everything. She explained the good, the bad, and the alternatives. And that’s what informed consent is.

What they’re putting in him was magnesium, so like, oh okay, sure, no problem. I’m very happy that you’re going to start using something more natural or what the body needs. Magnesium relaxes the lungs and helps them breathe, and that’s the first route. I’m not saying every children’s hospital is amazing, but my own experiences with Seattle Children’s Hospitals have been better than any other hospital I’ve been to. So there are exceptions where it’s good. If you go into a hospital and they don’t want an advocate, that is a red flag. That the staff or any of the staff or any of the nurses are frustrated that you’re asking questions that you’re advocating, that you’re there to ask for informed consent, if they are resisting informed consent, or they’re making fun of you, oh, you look something up on Google? If they’re making fun of you or talking down to being condescending or trying to go around or pressure you into something, that is a red flag. That’s a huge red flag. So at that moment when the secured guard was there, could you have taken your daughter and left the hospital?

[00:57:24] Scott Schara: Outstanding question. Technically no. I didn’t know that at the time. I learned that afterward. That’s one of the things that the first couple of months, I woke up several times a week with that question. I should have taken Grace with me, I should have taken Grace with me. And ultimately, I would have been able to, but it wouldn’t have been automatic. And the reason is we didn’t understand at that time. They had already studied Grace on the sedation drug on October 9th called Precedex and that fits into the last day when we get into that. But once a patient’s on Precedex, their room gets classified as ICU. So then, it’s one motivation they would the hospital has to get a patient get sedated because it’s not just financial, the room classified as ICU. If you want to take the patient home because you see the care is so bad, it’s not automatic anymore. It’s called against medical advice.

So now, you’ve got to sign off that you’re responsible for the patient—we didn’t ever jump through those hoops. But the way I understand it is you’ve got to sign off that you’re taking responsibility if the patient dies under your care because you’re not following the hospital’s advice anymore, that you’re responsible for the death, etcetera.

Which of course, that would have been a no-brainer. But we didn’t know any of this at the time. When we walk through these details, I try to interject the things that we learned after the fact versus what we knew live because it’s important. If you knew all this stuff live, of course, we would have taken Grace out and we had never checked her in. There were multiple times we would have taken her out. When the oxygen readings are different, and she’s not totally responds, that’s terrible care. Right? That’s an F. You don’t see it as part of an agenda at that time. Now I see it crystal clear, but at that time, I didn’t see any of those.

[00:59:35] Ashley James: Their arms have the same octopus, right? So how the staff treats you? It might not be like, oh, that one nurse was really nice and that nurse was not. Okay well, I guess they’re just exhausted. Look at any red flag as a symptom of how the entire complex works because it’s how they’re trained. It’s how they’re taught to work, and it’s the attitude that is alive in that hospital. So you have to really be aware of each red flag.

I know a friend of mine had to transfer her baby in the NICU. She advocated her midwife, and there’s big red flags. They’re doing things to their baby that is so out of the norm. I’m very concerned and so is the mother. She had just given birth. The baby’s in the NICU and she’s like, everything about their care was wrong and all the red flags are going off in her mind. And she goes, I’m transferring care. And they found a different hospital that would take them and that hospital did not want to release them. She’s like, too bad. So she got her baby to a different hospital and that hospital said I cannot believe what the other hospital did to your baby. So they did stuff like putting her on antibiotics with no reason to put her on antibiotics—all these kinds of things they did to a brand new baby, that there’s no medical reason why.

The other second hospital said, that hospital should be sued for things they were overmedicating. There was no reason for it. This happens over and over and over again. And it’s so frustrating and in between countries.

I have a family member who got a pacemaker in Chile and he comes back, and everything’s fine. He does pacemakers and doing his thing. He notices that every time he walks, he faints practically. And he came back. When he came back, he saw his cardiologist here, a good reputable cardiologist who’s been seeing him for years. For some reason, hadn’t caught that he had needed a quintuple bypass. And of course, his cardiologist will just put him on medication and doesn’t tell him to change his diet or anything. I don’t know how good of a cardiologist it is.

[01:02:01] Scott Schara: Right.

[01:02:02] Ashley James: So anyway, he’s fainting, and falling down, and hurting himself for over a year. Until we advocate for him, and we’re like, you got to go back and tell your cardiologist that something’s wrong. And he finally does, after we really push him to and it turns out they had in Chile they set the heart rate to 60 beats a minute.

So, basically when you have a pacemaker and certain pacemakers are like it’s beating your heart for you. And can you imagine like 60 beats a minute like when you’re sitting? If you’re an elite athlete, and you’re just walking, but if you’re in your 80s and you need to walk downstairs, you need more than 60 beats a minute to get enough oxygen to your muscles and your brain to walk up and downstairs.

So, the cardiologist never caught this. Never looked at it. It’s something so simple, and she’s like  if she knew about—oh yeah, Chile sets it to 60 beats per minute. He‘s been telling you for over a year that he’s been falling down, bleeding everywhere. So she had to go into a program with the pacemaker to beats higher beats a minute on average. Then he saw fainting and saw falling down. This isn’t even a life-saving event. But how many really and critically and important things fall through the cracks if you don’t advocate, if you don’t question, if you don’t push and if you don’t get a second opinion? How many critical qualities of your life, critical things fall through the quacks in medicine? We cannot look to those who wear a white medical coat as gods that are infallible. The organizations are being incentivized and paid. I think that originally the government wanted to help because– oh, the pressure would be on the medical system. So we better make sure we help and take care of it. Maybe it was out of good intentions. But it’s been like any system that monetizes, it will become an incentive for a goal. A monetary goal.

[01:04:20] Scott Schara: Well, you’re extending a lot more Grace than I am extending them. I don’t think they had good intentions at all to start with. And I say that with a fair degree of confidence, not because my daughter died, but Dr. Peter McCullough came out and stated the blinding flash of the obvious. Which is why isn’t there a research component to this virus? Why is it all going to bonus payments to hospitals for killing people? In any normal situation, the government would be putting its money behind the research, but that’s not happening with this one.

[01:04:58] Ashley James: Well, what has been talked about is that if they did the research, and they uncovered a treatment for COVID that was effective, then the pharmaceutical companies with loosey emergency use authorization for the experimental vaccines, so there’s pressure, there’s lobbying to not have a research because they want their cash cow.

I saw a meme the other day and it made me giggle, but it’s also incredibly sad and demonic. You know how they keep saying follow the science, just follow the science. And the meme says, why keep following the science, but it keeps leading me to the money?

[01:05:51] Scott Schara: That’s good. That’s great.

[01:05:59] Ashley James: I’m putting myself in your shoes. If my son was in a hospital, and armed guards came to kick me out. Oh my gosh! It would take more than armed guards to rip me from my son. I can’t imagine the intensity of emotions that was going on for you at the time.

[01:06:17] Scott Schara: That was quite an event. The armed guard was there the whole time. I argued with this nurse for about an hour. Ultimately, she said, if you don’t leave now we’re calling the Appleton Police Department. So then, I called an attorney who’s a friend and asked his perspective. He suggested leaving peacefully and so I did.

[01:06:48] Ashley James: Wrong advice.

[01:06:50] Scott Schara: I know, but I did. I gave my buddy a hug and the last time I saw her physically alive was on FaceTime calls. After that, the look in her eye that I will never forget. The armed guard walked me out to the truck and he said, Scott, you need to take this to a higher level. It was encouraging. I mean, he saw what was happening and it was wrong. Thankfully, Grace’s special needs’ attorney was available. This is a Sunday. I called one attorney and I know these people and I had their cell numbers and fortunately picked up. So, Grace’s special needs’ attorney was available and we started planning on how are we going to get an advocate replacement. My wife, Cindy couldn’t be the advocate because she had COVID. So, I called Jess and asked her, “Will you be an advocate for Grace?” And she said, “Yes, I will dad.”

We have 44 hours without coverage because we had to negotiate with the hospital attorney to let Jessica in. Second, during that 44 hours I mentioned earlier, they started Grace on the sedation med called Precedex.

[01:08:08] Ashley James:  Did they ask permission to do that?

[01:08:12] Scott Schara: To put Grace on Precedex?

[01:08:14] Ashley James: Yes.

[01:08:15] Scott Schara: No.

[01:08:17] Ashley James: So, they were giving her meds without anyone’s consent. I know the whole thing when you go to a hospital, they’re allowed to treat you with whatever because they’re trying to save you’re life, but not exactly, you are allowed informed consent. So do you feel that they went behind your back, went behind her back, and were doing some treatment plan that they didn’t talk to you guys about?

[01:06:41] Scott Schara: Absolutely. I mean, the Precedex could maybe make an exception for, but not when you see it in the light of everything.

[01:08:50] Ashley James: Why does she need to be sedated? I’m sorry to interrupt. Was she rebellious and throwing things? Was she biting nurses? Why did she need to be sedated?

[01:08:57] Scott Schara: There’s absolutely no reason. So the one minor exception you could say would be that first night when Grace had an issue when I was working with her to get the BiPap situation with the nurses. I actually suggested at that time that she needed to be sedated but that was because of that situation, my mind, oxygen was the emergency we had to get this done. I don’t know anything about sedation, but in my mind, we just need to sedate her to get her calm. Let’s get this situated, and then she’ll be fine. So, I actually recommended it down, but that was for that specific instance. So then, if you look at the records, you see that they did that at that time and then they took her off of it. Well, then they put her back on it. There was absolutely no reason. Grace was a super calm kid. She didn’t have anxiety over anything.

What they did, so, they put her back on it on October 9th when I’m still in the room. October 10th, they had her on it and I’m now out of the room during that window of 44 hours. So from eight o’clock in the morning on the 10th, during that 44 hours, subsequent, they increased the dosage seven times, and that’s ridiculous. There would be only one reason to increase the dosage, and that is because you don’t want to invest in your patient to take care of him or her. Otherwise, there’s no reason to have anybody on it. But as we’ve learned in studying, not just the records, but studying what is going on with COVID, Precedex is used as a way to set up the ventilator. So they want these patients on Precedex, just steady drips, then once they decide or the patient agrees to or the advocate agrees to a ventilator, it’s automatic. Boom! The ventilator can be done instantly. So Precedex sets the table for the ventilator.

So, your question as to why. It would be all excuses because there’s no justification to put somebody on a med when the package inserts says specifically to not use it for more than 24 hours. It’s right on the front page of the package insert and this drug is used for anesthesia, for surgery. And the anesthesia nurse that we’ve talked to say that it should never be used for more than three hours. And they had Grace on it for four full days before her last day.

So, if we walk into the last day, as I set this up with the Precedex already, then Jessica was in the room with Grace the entire day on the 12th. Grace died on the 13th of October. On the 12th, it was another good day for Grace, inspite of Grace being sedated. Grace was still herself joking around with Jessica right before they went to bed. Jessica called her two boys, Grace’s nephews, on a FaceTime call. Grace sat up in the bed and hollered through the BiPAP, “hi boys.” Just normal. She’s tickling Jess. Jess tells the story about, so she didn’t climb in bed with Grace but she would grab the chair next to the bed and lay her head on the bed, so she was holding Grace the whole time. She had her head next to Grace’s butt. Grace was tooting [inaudible 1:12:31] sorry Jess, sorry Jess.

Oh, it’s just so cute. For me, that’s typical Grace. She was a very calm person, and there’s no reason to sedate her on top of that. Jess and I were there other than the 44 hours. There were reasons to sedate when we’re not there is to not to do their job. You’ll see that as we now walk through the last day which is even pretty egregious.

[01:13:58] Ashley James: Your daughter Jess, how old was she at that time?

[01:13:03] Scott Schara: 31. Yes 32, she’ll be 32 coming up here in June.

[01:13:08] Ashley James: So, a 31-year-old woman, who’s your older daughter is taking care of her 19-year-old sister with high functioning Down Syndrome in the hospital. She’s being put on more and more and more sedation, although there’s no reason for it. While she’s using your $50 pulse ox to check Grace’s levels of oxygen saturation to see how different they were from the hospital, and she was maintaining that Grace was at high oxygen saturation the whole time?

[01:13:43] Scott Schara: In fact, that last night, Grace was at 98-99% the entire night.

[01:13:47] Ashley James: So why would she still be in the hospital?

[01:13:51] Scott Schara: Great question. I would say because they can. I mean, we weren’t wise enough to get her out. There’s multiple times when you could ask that question. The medical malpractice nurse who reviewed the records basically said that they used Precedex as the way to set up Grace’s death. She called it chemically restraining Grace. So they chemically restrained her to set up the the last day. The doctor called us at eight o’clock in the morning in Grace’s last day. He had talked with us the evening before asking for the fourth time to pre-approve a ventilator. So he wanted our decision. We told him, no again. Then he made that comment that Grace had such a good day yesterday. We should put in a feeding tube. 

[01:14:39] Ashley James: What?

[01:14:40] Scott Schara: So Cindy and I foolishly agreed to this.

[01:14:45] Ashley James: Wait. I don’t understand. Her oxygen is in the high 90s. Why does she need to be put on a feeding tube?

[01:14:51] Scott Schara: Well, she was malnutritioned at this same. So remember the story I told you when they wouldn’t let me feed Grace. Well, the same thing that happened with Jess. They wouldn’t let us feed her. That story gets deeper because I even told them, I said, there’s no reason we cannot feed Grace. So I said, I watched. When Grace was on a BiPap, they went through a series multiple times a day, where people would come in, remove the BiPap and then get Grace’s mouth moist because it would dry her mouth out. And I watched how they did it and I’m just right there. Okay, so they put in the high-flow cannula and they turned it down to low pressure, so it’s not at 40 miles an hour. Grace was actually stable the whole time. So, when these nurses would say we can’t feed her. I said, we could feed her and you could do it too, I told them exactly. This is what happens when the ladies come in and the nurses come into what Grace’s mouth.

They said, well the doctor says, we got to have the high flow BiPap at 40 miles an hour. It doesn’t have to be there. They would not listen to me. They have just dump that. So ultimately, Grace by this time is seven days into malnutrition. She’s malnutritioned because they chose not to listen and not do their job.

So we foolishly agreed to this. And ultimately, it plays out until this last day and you’ll see, he called us at eight o’clock and we approved this. Now eight-thirty or so. There’s a 14-year ICU nurse in charge of Grace’s care this day. Very significant because when you start wondering, was this premeditated, was it intentional, all these facts matter. And so your listeners are going to have to make that decision and don’t just believe me. Look at what I’m saying and then look at the research on Grace’s website. Everything I’m talking about now is under the tragedy tab, under Thou Shall Not Kill and I have a slide called Grace’s Last Day. It’s all documented there. This is straight out of the records.

Then Jess says to this 14-year ICU nurse that she must take a shower. And she says, you can’t take a shower here. So when I was there, they insisted and I leave. There’s a shower right in the room. And they said you can’t take a shower here. Jess was afraid to not obey because I was kicked out. She doesn’t want to be kicked out. So she goes home and takes a shower. She was back inside an hour. When she comes back, she started going up. She overhears the doctor and the 14-year ICU nurse talking in the hallway, saying the family’s not going to like this. So she said, “what are they not going to like?” They said, “we had to restrain Grace, while you’re gone.” So she said, “what’s the reason?” So restrain, meaning to strap Grace right down to the bed. So she said, “what’s the reason?” “Well, she wanted to get up and go to the bathroom.” So they made Grace poop in the bed while Jess was gone. So just process this.

One of the attorneys we work with he said, “Scott, do you think that you would have been restrained?” I said, “absolutely not. I would have made the nurses do their job.” But Grace was an obedient kid. She was the greatest kid you could ever have. So one of the people who interviewed me when they heard this, they just said, Grace died a murderous death. I think she did die a murderous death. She was obedient until death, just like Jesus was on the cross. But, of course, it wasn’t as dramatic as Jesus’ death. Just think through. She was just obedient.

So now, they use that as an excuse to ratchet up the Precedex further than instead of waiting for Grace’s numbers to rebound. Now, they insert the feeding tube and this is over. The attending nurse challenged the ICU nurse, I don’t think we should be doing this now. We should wait for Grace’s numbers to rebound. She wouldn’t listen. So they do that. They do the feeding tube next and now they take the Precedex up to max dose. This is at 10:48 in the morning, and Grace was in the max dose of Precedex. This is the equivalent of being knocked out for surgery. Grace was knocked out. For the rest of the day, she was knocked out. Inspite of Grace being knocked out, at 11:25, they gave her a dose of Lorazepam, which an anti-anxiety med. At 5:46, they gave her another dose, and at 5:49, another dose three minutes later. At 6:15, they gave her Morphine as an IV push, which means instantaneously. The package insert for Morphine says to not combine those meds. She’s on a max dose of Precedex, two doses of Lorazepam, and Morphine, all in 29 minutes.

[01:19:46] Ashley James: What was the reason behind Morphine? Was she in pain?

[01:19:51] Scott Schara: She wasn’t. How can you be in pain when you’re knocked out? 

[01:19:55] Ashley James: Exactly.

[01:19:57] Scott Schara: She’s not in any pain.

[01:19:59] Ashley James: I’ve been wanting to mention this. And so I think this is actually the most appropriate time. For me, it’s a common knowledge in Canada, but I wouldn’t say everyone in Canada knows this, but many do. In the Canadian medical system– so I’m from Canada and moved to the States when I was in my 20s. So I had enough experience with the medical system there. It’s very different and yet very similar. And the differences are it is for-profit and not it is to save money. So I just thought it was hilarious.

When I hurt my ankle, I was travelling in Nevada, and I tripped on a hose at a gas station and my ankle blew up to like the size of a softball, but I thought for sure I had broken my ankle. So I went to the hospital and I could hardly walk. And I could not believe the amount of X-rays they took. I was like are you kidding me? I think they took 20 X-rays. You don’t need that many X-rays, and it hit me. This is for America’s profit system. In Canada, I never got more than two X-rays. I broke an ankle doing sports when I was 12 and actually was the growth plate in my ankle and I fractured it. I remember two X-rays and that’s all you get.

The system in Canada is about saving money. Right? So how much money can we save with each patient? Not spend on each patient. They don’t just like offer you drugs willy-nilly. It’s different. When I came to the States, all of a sudden the doctors were offering me pain meds because I said I had cramps. When I had my period and I’m like, no, I don’t need prescription medication. That’s crazy. Whereas in Canada, a doctor would never have done that. So very, very different experiences in terms of like show me the money, follow the money.

It is common knowledge that they use Morphine to speed up the process of death in Canada. It’s an unwritten rule when someone is in Palliative Care Hospice, and they’re sleeping away at the end of their life. So let’s make it that nurses, and it’s their mercy. It’s their mercy that they would, or the doctors would give them little or doses of Morphine to gently speed up the process of death, and that’s what they did to my mom.

I didn’t know, I didn’t understand this at the time and since I’ve talked to many others and this is just a common practice. Maybe it’s a common practice here in the States. They use IV morphine just to speed up death. I’m kinda doing air quotes as you can’t see it obviously, I’m doing air quotes, in a humanitarian way just to speed up death. Maybe some people would appreciate that knock me out and fill me out with so many pain meds and I croak.

If someone’s at the end of their life from a terminal illness, that’s what they do in Canada. They did that to my mom. I watched them do it and she was in a coma at the end of her life. And  they’re like— okay, we just going to keep increasing the Morphine. So they told me, and the nurse told me we’re going to keep increasing it and help her transition faster in a more peaceful way.

[01:23:25] Scott Schara: In Grace’s case, I have become convinced that it wasn’t to transition in a more peaceful way. It was transition to transition period because they had a higher pain patient waiting for them in the emergency room. The hospital was at max capacity the day Grace died, and so was the emergency room. Then since, we didn’t approve the ventilator, they had to figure out a different way to take her out. How can you go from 98-99% oxygen saturation, and doing good? And even so much so that the doctor comments on it, to be dead less than 12 hours later.

It gets substantially worse as we keep going. So now, Jessica, remember she’s in the room. The package insert for Morphine says to not combine these drugs because it causes death. Similarly, the package insert says that the reversal drug is supposed to be bedside and they’re supposed to monitor the patient. After they gave this dose of Morphine, not one medical professional stepped in that room. They didn’t monitor the patient. They didn’t have the reversal drug bedside. They didn’t step in the room until they called Grace’s death.

So Jess is now in the room alone with Grace the entire time. She’s sensing Grace is getting cold. So she goes to the hallway to ask the 14-year ICU nurse. “Is this normal?” Because she wanted to have her take her temperature, she said, “yes, it’s normal, just cover with a blanket.”

[01:24:58] Ashley James: So she had a maximum dose of a sedative?

[01:25:04] Scott Schara: Yes.

[01:25:05] Ashley James: So she’s already out cold, she’s asleep, and she’s completely sedated. Then they begin to give her several doses of anxiety meds. Which is like why? And then they give her an IV Morphine on top of that, all within a matter of minutes. Is it like one doctor, or they’re like a bunch of doctors not looking at her chart doing whatever they want?

[01:25:25] Scott Schara: Well, we’ve learned subsequently that not only did a doctor have to order that, but a second doctor had to signed off. And on top of that, their alarm system in their computer, when they’d have the combination of meds, would have went off, and they would have had to override the alarm. Then a 14-year ICU nurse is the one who deliver the meds. So you put that combination together. The doctor who helped us review the records, she went right to intent right away, and she said it’s not even a question. This is intentional. The intensivist who reviewed the records and that intensivist is a doctor who specializes in med combinations. It took him minutes to discern and he wrote me that the meds that killed your daughter is sort of taken out of anybody on the planet. So that’s how severe this is.

[01:26:14] Ashley James: How much does your daughter weigh?

[01:26:15] Scott Schara: She weighs about 180 pounds.

[01:26:17] Ashley James: Okay, in the dosages that they gave, did they give it based on her weight?

[01:26:24] Scott Schara: I can’t answer that. 

[01:57:26] Ashley James: Okay.

[00:57:27] Scott Schara: Right now, I would question if anything was thought through that way because, I would say, it sounded so crazy, but it’s not crazy anymore. I’m going to use that word on this podcast. I would say it’s malicious. I can’t even entertain a logical question like that because none of these fits.

[01:26:55] Ashley James: None of it fits. 

[01:26:57] Ashley James: Intentionally, in the United States, in the hospital system, there’s no protocol for treating COVID and they’re not allowed to treat. They’re not allowed to treat with certain medications like Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Z-packs. They’re still certain things that they’re being pressured not to use, although like I had Dr. Fleming on my show who’s a PhD, an amazing cardiologist, whose also a research scientist. He developed the Fleming method.

Please listeners, go to my website, learntruehealth.com, type in Dr. Fleming. Find that interview and listen to it. It’s outstanding. He doesn’t know anything about holistic medicine. It’s very rare, I get something on the show that doesn’t know anything but holistic medicine. He’s 100% all about the science and he’s not anti-vaccine. He’s one of those doctors that got all of them except for the experimental ones because he shows and he has a four-hour lecture on his website, which is outstanding. He shows all the science. He had to go to different countries. So he’s a research scientist. He could not study COVID in the United States because it was banned to study a cure. This is how crazy it is. So he had to go to other countries to study the cure or the best treatment. And he did a study on 1800 COVID-positive patients and he found a combination of drugs that had 100% success. So he says, we put a million people through it, maybe a few will fall through the cracks. But so far, they’ve had a 100% success rate with this combination of three drugs, but the hospitals are not using those three drugs. They’re being told not to. So instead, they’re moving towards using what they’re monetarily incentivized to use, which is having the worst outcomes.

[01:29:02] Scott Schara: Absolutely. The next piece of this story is even worse than what I told you so far. So now, Jessica starts panicking. She can’t get any nurse in. She called Cindy, and I on a FaceTime call at 7:20 and said, “Dad, Grace’s numbers are dropping like crazy.” I said, “get the nurses in.” She said, “I can’t, and they won’t come in.” She estimated that 30 nurses are in the hallway at this time because of shift change. Cindy and I started screaming through the FaceTime call. “Save our daughter!” The nurses holler back. “She’s DNR! Don’t resuscitate.” This is the first we knew that she’s DNR. So we holler back. “She’s not DNR! Save our daughter!” They would not come into that room. So we watch Grace die on that FaceTime call at 7:27. This DNR thing is so bad. We found out in our references medical malpractice nurse previously when she reviewed the records that we had requested. She told me, “Scott, there’s at least a thousand pages missing.” I said, “How can that be? We requested everything.” She said, “That’s how what they do.” So she helped write out a request to get the missing pages. There was 948 pages missing. On page 853 is the smoking gun. At 10:56 in the morning, remember I told you at 10:48 was max dose Precedex. Then, at 10:56, the doctor put the illegal DNR order in the computer. During this time, that’s seven minutes when we were on a FaceTime call with Jess. She ran out on the hall to find out what was going on. A nurse had to write up on her computer screen and read off. The doctor put a DNR on Grace, and we can’t do anything about it. That specific fact violated at least seven state statutes. Just common sense would tell you a doctor can’t put a DNR on somebody. That would be illegal. It is illegal. The patient or the patient advocate, which was my wife Cindy, has to request for DNR. But we never requested the DNR. Why would we request the DNR? He tells us how great Grace is doing. We expected Grace to get out of there and not die there. Then he’s supposed to explain it to us and then have us, it would be my wife Cindy come and sign the DNR order, none of that happened. He put it on or her or himself. What’s the coincidence of eight minutes after the max dose Precedex? One of the attorneys made the observation which I think is true. They expected the Precedex to take Grace out. So they needed to have that DNR order in place to accomplish the dirty deed that they intended to do.

What’s even stranger is that at 12:57 that afternoon, the doctor did his notes for the day. He never did them at 12:57 in the afternoon before. Every other day, he did them after his shift was over. These notes are dated and timestamped. So the medical malpractice nurse wisely pointed out that if it was such an issue to get this DNR, that this was important, and you guys agreed to it or whatever excuse they’re going to use. Why he didn’t have you guys come in and sign it? Because that’s required by law.

[01:32:35] Ashley James: Yeah,  there’s a signature.

[01:32:38] Scott Schara: So, it’s terrible. We find out then when a couple of things happen after Grace died which really helped us to get a sense that this was something we needed to look into and research on our own. One thing was Jess told us afterward that there was an armed guard outside the room. When she went out in the hallway, there was an armed guard. We presume, to prevent any nurse with a conscience from coming in and saving Grace. We know it was an anomaly that he was there because Jess laid down in the bed with Grace after she was pronounced dead. 

And the armed guard stood outside and watched Jess in the bed the whole time. Jess stayed in the bed and waited until Cindy got into the hospital. I took Cindy into the hospital afterward, obviously after Grace died. Then after Cindy and Jess cleaned Grace up, I had to wait in the truck because I had COVID. Our Pastor Matt is there. The funeral director and the Pastor was walking Cindy out in a wheelchair. And one of the nurses had Grace’s belongings on a cart and leaned down and said to Cindy, me and several of the other nurses don’t think that Grace should have died today?

[01:34:58] Ashley James: The armed guard that had you, had they escorted you?

[01:34:03] Scott Schara: I don’t know if it was the same one.

[01:34:05] Ashley James: No, no, I was going to say, he knew something was up?

[01:34:09] Scott Schara:  Absolutely.

[01:34:12] Ashley James: How much money this hospital or a hospital get from having a patient on their death certificate that says it died out of COVID? How much money do they get in subsidies from the government?

[01:34:28] Scott Schara: It’s $13000.

[01:34:31] Ashley James: Your daughter’s life. There’s no child’s life that’s worth any amount of money. Do you feel there’s any discrimination against her because she has Down Syndrome? Do you feel like this is a discriminatory act?

[01:34:52] Scott Schara: I do. I do believe that and I have some proof. I actually have multiple things. So the first one is I review all of the reports that the doctors submitted. There were 22 reports on Grace’s seven days in the hospital. And I reviewed those one Sunday morning, looking for Down Syndrome and they referenced the fact that Grace had Down Syndrome 36 different times in 22 reports. The other discrimination was they referenced that Grace was not vaccinated six times. They referenced that we were Christian three times. They referenced that we were found in the frontline doctor’s misinformation campaign four times. So this is all the stuff that I found in the research.

The most recent thing is I’ve done stirred to looking at Grace’s death as genocide. The statistics are starting to come out with what actually happened to disabled versus non-disabled, the elderly, the non-elderly and a disabled woman going into the hospital with COVID, and also Grace was disabled, a Down Syndrome is a disability, and a disabled woman is 11 times more likely to die if they entered the hospital with COVID than a non-disabled woman.

[01:36:18] Ashley James: I’ve also seen that those African Americans are treated differently. African American women are specially treated differently. They’re not listened to. They’re written officer, oh, that she’s hysterical, their symptoms and what they’re explaining, I mean, this is in every case but statistically, there’s a bias going on. It’s not the same level of care for everyone.

[01:36:52] Scott Schara: I agree 100%. This is when the lead could get completely taken off of this as if we have enough time. I think, we’re going to see this is all part of a bigger agenda to depopulate the world and just had a financial payoff. In the United States, the financial payoff is to take out the elderly and the disabled. The elderly and disabled on Medicaid and Medicare are also on social security, that accounts for 39% of the federal budget. So with the average $100,000 bonus paid to the hospital, take out one of these people that costs the taxpayer $32,000 a year. So there’s a three-year payback period in business. Anytime you could do a three-year payback period on any asset, you would do it. You’d buy it because you want your money back in three years. So that’s a 33% rate of return on your investment. Just from a financial perspective, this fits like a glove.

[01:37:55] Ashley James: I know that there’s definitely listeners are going, this is crazy. The government isn’t bad. The government wouldn’t intentionally harm us. Maybe the source of thinking, yes, okay, this brat hospital was mismanaging her care, but the government, that’s not some giant conspiracy. That’s absurd. When we have to look back at history, I don’t want to pick on just the United States. I love living here. I love this country. There’s so many good people here. There’s so many good.

Can you think of any other country in the world that was founded on the Christian values? What I just learned, which is so interesting, when the pilgrims came. The Mayflower was the first round of pilgrims, for the first 50 years, there was no war. There’s peace. They got along incredibly well with those who were already here. And they had peace for the first 50 years, and that’s something that is not taught.

If you go back and you dig through the actual history, you find out that those people who were actually radicals. They left their Christian church because they were radicals who believed in the Holy Spirit, and they believed within the Holy Spirit, sort of what’s Pentecostal now. They’re like the Pentecostals of the 1600s. I think it was 1620 or something like. So when they came here, the first 50 years was peace. I was watching them. I was doing a lecture on understanding of America’s history and in Christianity. It was really interesting.

So there’s a lot of misinformation when it comes to this country and history. But when we look back, the government took African Americans and said they would give them free health care. But instead, what they were doing was they were giving them a venereal disease. So they could observe how they died from this disease. And this is well documented. What’s also well documented is this government, it’s not the same people, but when I say this government, it’s not the same officials, it’s not the same people, but it’s the system. So the system isn’t perfect, and within the system, we have lied to and harmed the black community by purposely giving them venereal disease.

Then we took Indigenous women, and we would say, we’re giving them free health care instead, we would make them infertile by putting X-ray machines on their pelvises for 10 minutes, running for 10 minutes to make them infertile. These are just some of the examples of the things that have gone on within the government over the last 100 years or so.

So now, the military took– and again, I’m not bashing the entire system, but we have to sort of pull the wool from our eyes. The military took hundreds of young, beautiful men and put them on the bow of these giant ships, brought them out into the middle of the ocean and set off nuclear bombs, atom bombs, miles from where they were, as a science experiment. So that they could see what would happen to these men, who all develop cancer and horrible things, and post-traumatic stress. They said, that although their eyes were closed, their hands–they were told to sit on the bows with their hands over their eyes and they said, when the atom bomb went off, they could see even though their eyes were closed and their hands over their eyes, they could see because of the X-rays. They could see the bones of their hands, and we could see everyone else’s skeletons.

So these are just three examples of hundreds. I believe there’s good people in this world. I’m not saying that everyone was out to get us. When you actually look at the definition of conspiracy, it’s a group of people that are conspiring to do something that’s illegal, or elicit, or harmful. So, when we say that this is a conspiracy theory, it’s not a theory, these are actual recorded periods of history. We need to not repeat the history. We need not let history be repeated. We need to stop organizations that use us as guinea pigs or practice genocide for the profit. We need as individuals empower ourselves by listening to stories like yours and learn from Grace and learn what she went through and pass this information on and be an advocate for your family and for your friends. So you do not succumb to the medical system, which is not perfect and it’s designed for profit. Again, I believe there’s a good people in the medical system. But the system is designed for profit, even at the expense of your life. And that’s what we have to remember. And the takeaway here is to question everything, advocate, advocate, advocate. And if there’s red flags, you might need to fire your doctor. You might need to go get a second or third, or fourth opinion. Make sure those opinions are outside of the same—like if you’re going in a hospital, okay, can I have a second opinion on a different doctor of the same hospital in the same network? You need to go outside the network. You need to go to a completely different network to get an actual honest, maybe an honest opinion.

Robin Openshaw has been on my show. I’ve been on her. She’s a wonderful, outspoken advocate for hope not only holistic health but for human rights. In the last two years, for really understanding the politics of what’s going on, and she said, she has uncovered scams in dental as an example. When she dug deep, she found that dentists will regularly, not all of them but many, will say you have a cavity when you don’t. You’re a cash cow. You’re in there. How do you know? You’re looking at a screen. They’re pointing at something on-screen and saying that’s a cavity. And you have to go to a second opinion. Take your mouth to a different dentist and say, okay, do I have any cavities? You might need to go to a few different dentists.

And she says, when she’s heard back from so many people that have done this, she couldn’t believe how many dentists were trying to scam them and this is just dental work. Imagine,all the other forms of– they have both payments too. This isn’t life or death, but this is just an example. Money motivates people. If there’s money involved, and then if there’s livelihood involved, they might choose to do the wrong thing. Right? So we have to really advocate for ourselves.

There’s one more thing I want to bring up because it’s timed. One thing I love about America—there’s so many things, but there’s one thing I love is that we can go to the state that has our values. If you don’t like the state you’re in, you can go to a different state. Each governor’s or manages like a little island, each state serves its own country in that. So the governor could say, let’s say pandemic, and you love masks, and you want everyone to be vaccinated. You should have gone to New York, or Washington, or California. Right?

But if you’re the opposite, I think masks are dumb. I can’t wear them for whatever reason. I’m never going to submit myself to an experimental vaccine. You should have gone to Florida or Texas. So we just knew and we just saw this very clear that these last two years had never seen it so clearly before. It really matters who was in the governor’s seat because here in Washington State, Governor Inslee shut down our state so many times for so long that almost half of the small businesses went under. I cannot tell you how many restaurants and how many businesses are shut down permanently.

Overnight, it was something like 40,000 people went on unemployment. Now the numbers are out and it shows that you could compare every state to the state that did no shutdowns to the states that had the most shutdowns. The states that had mandates to the states that had no mandates. We have the same level of cases. We can’t really tell whether the fatalities are accurate. Like what you’ve said, someone can go in and they’re incentivized that write on the death certificate that it is COVID. So both the same amount of cases are reported from state to state. So it was a big experiment. Right? What I really love about the state is that you can go to a different state. If you’re like, hey, I don’t want to live in a state that it’s forcing my family to do a medical procedure that I don’t feel comfortable with. Right? So you can go to that state that you could move. It’s about people, but you could move where you have a choice. The choice is the freedom.

What’s happening this week, it’s very crucial. I’m going to publish this episode right away. I’m going to have the links in the show notes because I’m not going to explain it. I’m not going to give the level of explanation it deserves. But President Biden is right now signing into with the World Health Organization, which is like an arm of the UN. Right? He is signing so that he’s giving our sovereign medical freedom, medical choices over to the World Health Organization. It’s not a treaty. But many other countries, the big countries, the top, and known countries have signed it. This is a weird thing. Once we’ve signed it, the only way to get out is to let the countries agree. And basically, what’s happening is it doesn’t matter what state you go to. It’ll be federal.

If America signs this, if Joe Biden signs us into this, the World Health Organization will be able to control all health decisions in all states. They could say every single vaccine is mandated. You can’t even go to the grocery store without having all your papers. The World Health Organization could say that. It would be in law, and it wouldn’t matter what state we are in. This is something that sounds so bizarre. I’m sure people think I’m absolutely nuts, and I’m just the messenger. But I’ve learned this from several politicians that this is happening. So I have links to this and I’m going to put them in the notes. The only thing we can do is call our local representatives and all the links to that will be in the show notes of today’s podcast called A Local Reps and tell them we’ve got to go up the chain and say no. We need to protect our freedom to choose. I’m not saying you should be anti or force something. I want you to have the freedom to choose. Scott, I want you and everyone in America, and in the world– but we’re in America we’re talking about– I want everyone to have the freedom to be able to say I didn’t like this hospital. I’m going to a different hospital because a different hospital practices medicine differently. Under this, we will not have a choice. These hospitals will be not have a choice to practice differently. So this is a big deal.

[01:50:44] Scott Schara: I saw that in Steve Castor’s newsletter last week. It is a big deal to our church.

[01:50:50] Ashley James: Yes. I will make sure that the links– everyone listening need just to take five minutes. We need to write and call our elected officials, and we’ve got to cry out to try to stop this. And also, please, if you’re a follower of Jesus or a faith that believes in prayer to God, please pray over this. That we do not succumb to signing over our sovereignty to the UN and the World Health Organization. We need to keep our freedoms. This is unprecedented and it’s never happened in America. This is completely unprecedented that America would give over its sovereignty. It boggles my mind what’s been going on over the last two years.

We have to get back to you. I love Scott that you are getting active, that you’re sharing, and advocating because the information you share today will save lives. So thank you. Is there anything else you could share to wrap up today’s interview? Standing assurance to teach us how to be the most alert, watchful advocates that we can be for ourselves or for our loved ones.

[01:52:12] Scott Schara: Sure. How I would summarize? It would be to compare it to what we are becoming familiar with in the public school system. So I was born in 1963. So people my age who went through the public school system everybody believed in God. We did the pledge of allegiance. It was pretty normal, and now they’re teaching critical race theory. So my paradigm of a public school system has changed. So, I would not send the child to the public school system, period.

[01:52:52] Ashley James: In Washington State, they’re teaching Sex Ed. I believe in Sex Ed for like teenagers. To teach them like, “Hey, how about you abstain from having sex because that’s going to stop. If you don’t have sex, you’re not going to get STDs!” “You’re not going to have unwanted pregnancies!” I remember being taught, starting in grade seven and being taught how to have sex? What’s the penis? What’s the female reproductive system? What’s the male reproductive system? How does this all happen? How does babies happen? How does STDs happen? I remember being taught from grade seven all the way up. I also remember a few students opting out because they were Muslim or they had a different faith. The parents felt that their 13-year-old shouldn’t be learning this.

I think, I was grateful for the Sex Ed I got in high school because it taught and helped me make good decisions. We want to help teenagers make good decisions. What they’re doing now is they’re teaching it in Washington State, and they started in pre-kindergarten. They’re starting to teach children– I’m sorry to be crass– but how to pleasure themselves by touching themselves at a very young age. There’s pictures like the fourth graders are being shown how to do this to themselves and others– and it’s grooming! This level of education, we have a literacy problem, right? We don’t need to teach children how to touch themselves. I like to teach children how to stop adults from touching them. Right? Like no, you’re not allowed to touch or my bathing suit touches me, right?

I want to teach children to say no, but teach children how to read and write. So we have a huge literacy problem and yet in Washington State, there’s a lot of funding going into this new level of sex education in the public school system. I’ve talked to several parents who have shown me the literature as it’s in the school system. It would make your blood boil and freeze at the same time. It feels like grooming. We have to remember the public school system is government controlled essentially.

Read any of the books by John Taylor Gatto. One of his books is Weapons of Mass Instruction. Fascinating books explain the history of the modern education system, which is called the Prussian Education System. It was very intentionally designed to make good little factory workers. They on purpose to stop teaching, the critical thinking in the education system that we have now on purpose. So the education system is designed on purpose to shape and model citizens in the way the government wants us to be shaped and modeled. So we have to remember that.

I’m sorry for interrupting and going on my little tangent, but this is something that is really we started to see ramp up. It’s breaking the family unit apart with the public school system is doing now. It shouldn’t be called a public school. It should be called government schooling, government brainwashing.

[01:56:14] Scott Schara: Of course, right on to the point. So my paradigm of the public school system has completely changed and I think there’s a lot of people that’s happened to. My paradigm of the hospital system didn’t change fast enough. Of course, it’s changed now. Until your paradigm or your belief about something changes, there can’t be change in actions because beliefs motivate all actions. So my closing statement would be if you believe what I’m saying, that should cause you to change your belief relative to the hospital systems. If that changes your belief, it’ll save your life.

[01:56:54] Ashley James: And there’s times when we want to take our bodies, or a loved one’s body takes us into a hospital system and we should be prepared ahead of time. Like you said, do the research around local hospitals. Find the ones that are small networks that have the best outcomes. Don’t go to a doctor that’s “the top doctor in the state” or “the top doctor in the city”.

What I learned from one of my naturopathic mentors is he said, “you know that big billboard that has this picture of this oncologist and it says, top oncologist in Seattle or top oncologist in Washington State, you know how they measure that? Because I thought it was an outcome.” So I was like, oh, that oncologist must be amazing and helping people survive cancer. No! When they say top doctor, it is the doctor makes that hospital the most money. They build the most money, that’s what makes them the top-rated doctor. It’s not be rated in outcomes. So you don’t want to go to the top-rated doctor because they’re just going to put you through the wringer. They’re going to put unnecessary tests and unnecessary medications, and attempt to make more money. You really have to question that, you want to go to the doctor who has the best outcomes and long-term outcomes as well. 

Scott, thank you so much for what you do. Thank you for continuing to add to your website, ouramazinggrace.net. So, are you suing? What are we looking at in terms of legal outcomes?

[01:58:31] Scott Schara: We haven’t sued yet. The doors are opening up at a fairly rapid pace. I can’t talk about some of the things that are happening just because we’re at that point. So I would believe that’s going to happen. Time will tell. It’s a lawsuit. It’s very tough in this environment because there’s no immunity from liability under the prep act. But we have enough things in Grace’s case that we believe will prevail. But we’re just waiting patiently for these doors to open up.

[01:59:06] Ashley James: Hopefully, you don’t get a corrupt judge. That’s another thing. How far does this go, right? Would you close this interview off with a prayer for all of us?

[01:59:20] Scott Schara: I’d love to do that. Heavenly Father, we come to You knowing that you don’t change. We can always come to You with our problems, and You will always provide a steady rocking solution for us. Thank You for opening up our eyes and to shine light on evil. Thank You for the opportunity today for Ashley’s interview. Please help this time to be able to change people’s hearts to call. You want everybody to be called back to You and get closer to You. I hope that this time that we have just done will do that for everybody listening and that people will share the message so that we can have more people believe in Your Son Jesus Christ. I pray all these things and many more things Lord, in Your Name. Amen.

[02:00:30] Ashley James: Amen. And I pray that we put the armor of God on and the robes of faith, and that we look to truth, veritas, we look to truth, we listen for truth, and that we can see through the lies. Satan is the king of lies and he spreads lies and that is his work. He works for his lies. I pray that we can all see through the lies and hear through the lies and cut through like a flaming sword. We cut through the lies until we can see the truth and that the truth is exposed to everyone. Thank you, God. In Jesus’ Name, we pray. Amen.

[02:01:18] Scott Schara: Amen. Thank you, Ashley.

[02:01:20] Ashley James: Thank you, Scott. I appreciate everything you do. Keep up the fight. And please can you stay in touch with us or come back on the show when you’ve got a verdict and when you’ve got more to share? We want to hear your story as you continue to spread this ripple like a tidal wave and help save so many lives. So thank you.

[02:01:46] Scott Schara: You’re very welcome. 

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https://www.learntruehealth.com/nitric-oxide-for-preventing-and-reversing-heart-disease-with-dr-nathan-bryan

Highlights

• The importance of nitric oxide in our body
• What is Nitric Oxide Deficiency and its causes
• What is nitric oxide’s role in our heart health?
• Why mouthwash could raise the risk of heart disease?
• How does face cream increase nitric oxide production?
• What are the two main signs of toxicity of nitric oxide?

Nitric oxide is one of the most important molecules produced in the human body that controls and regulates most cellular functions. In this episode, Dr. Nathan Bryan shares how nitric oxide helps promote proper blood flow, which may improve exercise performance, lower blood pressure, and improve the function of the brain.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. So this is going to be a fun one. We have an amazing doctor on, Dr. Nathan Bryan. He’s over 20 years of experience in studying nitric oxide. I first heard about nitric oxide in my interview with Dr. Essylstyn. When he talks about how he took– I believe 24, 26 patients who are on their deathbeds. The cardiologist said we’ve given you everything, go home to die. There’s nothing we can do for you. Your heart disease is so far gone. Your moments away from death. And Dr. Esselstyn took these people and put them on a whole food plant-based diet. So put them on food that significantly increased the body’s nitric oxide, and they all bounced back. It was absolutely amazing. And of course, he went on to publish this and publish other studies and then write his book, How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease. 

So when I heard about how he uses certain foods, like leafy greens and balsamic. And you can do some really delicious things or some really delicious balsamic stuff out there. I particularly love this one balsamic and I’m not a fan of that strong vinegar taste but this balsamic doesn’t taste like that at all. It has a hint of maple and fig to it and it’s so delicious. And you use that to cover your cooked vegetables and your steamed vegetables, which increases nitric oxide. And there are other foods we’ll talk about in today’s interview, where you will learn how to increase nitric oxide naturally in the body. And why it is the key to preventing and reversing disease and anti-aging. 

Now Dr. Nathan Bryan just talks about a product he developed and did. And also developed a few pharmaceuticals that increase nitric oxide that has now, they’re doing studies, they’re doing trials, and they’ve saved people’s lives in ER. So that is very exciting. Of course, we want to prevent ourselves from ever needing to be in the ER in the first place by increasing nitric oxide naturally. He also developed a way supplement that can help you as well. And he talks about that. He also developed a really interesting skincare line because nitric oxide would put on the skin. It cures things like rosacea and fine lines and wrinkles and helps pushes oxygen into these newly constructed cells. Then they appear younger and healthier and healthier. 

And I had this rosacea. My grandmother had it. My mom had some. I always thought it was just part of the women in my family. I’ve been using the cream and so I love it. It’s very high quality and I really like it. So I’m noticing that my rosacea is starting to get better, which I thought was really interesting. So I am noticing now that I’m eating more foods with nitric oxide and knowing I’ve got more energy. This is great. I can’t wait to put it to the test and do some heavy hiking this summer. 

But what I have noticed by using his products since I did the interview is I have seen a difference and that’s really exciting. And he does say some things that I think are really important to take the heart and share with everyone you love, especially when he talks about certain habits that we have that can decrease your nitric oxide so much that they’re significantly important in increasing heart disease. So we want to make sure that none of our friends and family are doing these activities that are noted to decrease nitric oxide in the body, increase heart disease, and shorten people’s lifespan. So this will be an episode you want to share with everyone. I’ve already told so many of my friends. I can’t wait for you guys to listen to this episode because if you follow the simple tools he gives you today. The simple lifestyle habits that he gives you today. You’re going to increase the nitric oxide and substantially increase the quality and your life as a result. So definitely want to share this with your friends and family. 

Thank you so much for being a listener of the show and if you’re interested in getting any of his products, including his book, Dr. Nathan Bryan’s book. You will go to his website, which is n1o1.com. It’s a chemical formula for nitric oxide. So that’s N, in the letter N, one, the number one and then the letter O, the number one.com And of course, use the coupon code LTH, that’s Learn True Health code. LTH will give you a discount. I made sure that my wonderful listeners were going to get a great discount when they went to the website by Dr. Nathan Bryan’s book. Or his nitric oxide-based skincare line or his special supplement, which increases nitric oxide in the body. And of course, the links to everything that Dr. Nathan Bryan does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast on learntruehealth.com. So come and join the Facebook group so we can talk about all this stuff after you listen to the episode. I can’t wait to hear from you guys in the Learn True Health Facebook group. And I’m so grateful that we’re here today. To be able to learn together and grow together. So we’re on a health journey together on Learn True Health. I’m glad you’re here. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. And enjoy today’s interview.

[00:05:37] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 478. I am so excited for today’s guest. This topic is going to be so cool. I love geeking out with the science. Dr. Nathan Bryan, I know I just got introduced to you recently and I’m surprised I haven’t heard of you sooner because we can navigate the same circles. I’ve had Chef AJ on the show a few times, and I absolutely love her. She introduced you to me. And man, I’m thrilled to just dive into what you’re doing, especially this idea that we can heal the endothelial lining of our cardiovascular system and lower blood pressure naturally. 

My husband had to be at one point in his life. He had to be on blood pressure meds. It was considered that we go to a naturopathic physician and do all this healthy stuff. It was kind of a shock. He had chronic blood pressure problems his whole life and we finally addressed it and his doctor listened. You’ve tried all this other stuff and let’s get you on meds. And that’s only lowered at about eight points. Like it wasn’t anything substantial yet. All these side effects happen, lowering your life expectancy the more meds you’re on. So, I don’t know if that’s exactly direct causation. I know that medication makes the body have to burn through its nutrient store faster. So it burdens the body to have to metabolize drugs. So, there’s this give and take. Here we have a population; 1/3 of the population is obese, pre-diabetic, or diabetic. 

Heart disease is one of the top killers, along with cancer. And, of course, the statistics now cancer is on the rise. And so we have the roulette of what you want to suffer from the last 20 years of your life. Diabetes, cancer, heart disease, but that’s if we go with the flow. If we eat the standard American diet, we watch mainstream media and do what everyone else is doing. So we follow Hollywood basically and follow the mainstream media diet and agenda. So we do what everyone else is doing. Go to the doctor, just let her prescriptions at you. And if you just go with the flow, you’re guaranteed to be a statistic. So now you’re going against the green and figured out a way to help people lower blood pressure naturally. So to heal their heart and prevent disease in a really exciting way. I’m just bubbling. I’m so excited. Welcome to the show. I can’t wait for our listeners to learn how we can take control of our health with the latest science that you’re involved in. So welcome.

[00:08:37] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Thank you Ashley. It’s a pleasure to be with you. 

[00:08:39] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well let’s start by hearing about you, your story and what led you to decipher this information.

[00:08:47] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, it’s like a journey, right? So I think the longer I lived, the clearer the more I realized how little influence I had. I think God puts people in our lives at certain points and forces us to pivot. We have some of the grand plans when we’re early starting in our careers. So it’s not where we end up. I live up with no regrets and everything that’s happened, the good and the bad, that got us to where we are today. But I grew up in small-town Texas and went to the University of Texas at Austin, where I got a degree in ministry. I had an opportunity to do undergraduate research there and I fell in love with discovery. I mean that was a time in the early 90s when we were overexpressing protein and bacteria. And then isolating those proteins, then being able to do structure-function analysis. So I try to figure out how does an intact protein work and what goes wrong in certain diseases. 

So then, after a degree in biochemistry, I do a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry in the job market, isn’t that great? So I knew I had to go on and extend my education. I went to LSU School of Medicine, where I got a Ph.D. in Molecular Cellular Physiology. There I was introduced to nitric oxide. It was a little early 2000s, right after a Nobel Prize was awarded for its discovery. And so that’s when I just really got entrenched in the science of nitric oxide. We knew it was important, but at that time, there were no methods to detect nitric oxide in biological systems. It was really well known about the science of what goes wrong and people that can’t make it. What are the clinical symptoms of such and there certainly weren’t getting knowledge or science around any create or recreate nitric oxide in the human body? So that was an exciting time. We developed methods that allowed us to detect nitric oxide in biological samples, whether blood or tissue biopsies. I found a number or published a number of papers during that time and then left there. I went to the Boston University Medical Center in Boston at the Cardiovascular Institute. I had a fellowship in cardiology and vascular biology, and again, I had some pretty profound discoveries. And I made a name for myself as a young investigator. I was recruited to join the faculty at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston by Fred Murad, who was the department chair there. He was one of the gentlemen that shared the Nobel Prize. I found a home because it was a nitric oxide-centric department at the Institute of Molecular Medicine. 

For the first couple of years, all I did was do experiments and try to enable patents. At that point, we had enough information and the methods available that I could figure out and produce nitric oxide in biological systems. So for the first two years, I did nothing but experiments and patents to the University of Texas. Those patents were soon issued after that and then the next stage of my career was to make sure that discoveries and technology saw the light of day to retire from full-time academia in 2015. 

And I’ve been an entrepreneur since and on the number of companies commercializing nitric oxide technology. So my objective today is to introduce nitric oxide-based product technology and every major market segment around the world, including drug therapy, where we have drugs in phase three clinical trials for COVID. With some drug applications going in for ischemic heart disease and topical drugs for diabetic ulcers. The exciting thing is that nitric oxide does so much and is so important in human disease that there’s really no indication that we could not go after any type of drug therapy. So that’s kind of a 20-year story in that two minutes.

[00:12:58] Ashley James: Maybe we let’s back it up to the basics for someone who’s never heard of the term nitric oxide. Why is it so important? What is it do? Why is it so exciting that you’ve been able to figure out a way to increase it in the human body? 

[00:13:14] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, it was discovered about 30 years ago, so it’s still a new discovery in the medical sciences. But it’s a signaling molecule. It tells how cells in the body communicate with one another. It is mostly recognized as vasodilation, meaning that it dilates the blood vessels throughout the body and increases oxygen and nutrient delivery. But it’s a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. Our immune cells actually generate nitric oxide to prevent the virus from replicating and proliferating throughout the body. It shuts down bacterial respiration. So it’s part of our host defense. Understanding that and all that nitric oxide does, it becomes obvious that if you lose the ability to produce nitric oxide, which occurs as we age and are really dependent upon like diet and lifestyle. A lot of bad things happen you lose the regulation of blood flow. You can no longer dilate blood vessels, so you develop sexual dysfunction. You develop vascular dementia develop high blood pressure, which two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation and blood pressure. You develop them. You become immunocompromised. So if you’re exposed to a virus-like Coronavirus, or like the flu, you get sick from it and develop the neurological disease. 

I thought the science was very clear at the time that the older you get, the less nitric oxide you make. That is what’s responsible for the age-related disease, including cardiovascular disease, the number one killer of men and women worldwide. So that’s what science has told us over the past 20 years. That’s the missing part– the science is clear, but how do you fix it? And that’s been my contribution to the field because we figured out how to develop a shelf-stable, solid form with nitric oxide. And perhaps I’ll take a step back because maybe your listeners don’t realize that nitric oxide is a gas. So it is produced in the lining of the blood vessels. When this gas was produced, it was gone in less than a second. To be able to develop drug therapy or any type of product technology shelf-stable that recapitulates nitric oxide signaling in the human body has been very, very challenging. In fact, big pharmaceutical companies have tried to do this for the past 30 years. They’ve been largely unsuccessful. But through our research program and kind of thinking differently, thinking outside the box, we figured this out and they’ll have. So I think over two dozen issued patents claim to fame as we know how to make nitric oxide that’s extremely valuable and profound in the way that I think people are going to be healed over the next 40-50 years.

[00:16:00] Ashley James: The first time I heard about nitric oxide was when I interviewed Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn and I’m sure you know of his work. He’s also a friend of Chef AJ. He came on the show and explained that he takes people who are basically at death’s door. Their doctors have given up on them. They have multiple clogs in their heart. They’re even too sick for bypass surgery. The doctors say just go home and die. Unfortunately, when people usually find Cadwell Esselstyn and his book, How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease and he gets them on a whole food plant-based diet with no salt, sugar, and oil. Incredibly strict. He lately added a factor, which every few hours, like every four hours, he has the meat of a bowl of steamed greens, just any kind of leafy greens, like 12 of them. Pick a leafy green, steam it and then cover it in as much balsamic as you want. Any kind of balsamic. There are all kinds of flavors out there. And he says that balsamic vinegar and greens increase if, especially balsamic vinegar, it increases nitric oxide and helps heal the endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system. And I thought that was fascinating. 

And then I heard it again when I watched the movie, The Game Changers, where they follow these athletes like the Olympic athletes who have gotten plant-based. And there’s this one woman who was 29 or 30 years old. She beat people almost half her age and won the gold in cycling at an almost age of 30 which is like an 80-year-old beating a 40-year-old in a marathon, right? So she said that her biggest thing was beats– because before and after exercise would increase the nitric oxide and help with lactic acid clearance. She found her recovery to be faster and she had her endurance higher up just by eating whole food plant-based, avoiding salt, sugar, and oil, and making sure she’s getting enough beats and enough greens in her diet. 

So I hear that there are certain nutrients the body loves in order to make nitric oxide. You said that as we age, we make less. Is it because we’re age and we’re older like our telomeres are shorter or is it because as we age, we beat up our body so much, it’s like failing us and we’re not eating healthy, right? Eating enough nutrients like what is it about aging that has us make it less? And is it really about age? Or is it about lifestyle and diet?

[00:18:53] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, those are very good questions. And yes, I’m friends with Dr. Esselstyn and he made an enormous contribution to medicine. His observations are what led them through that being able to reverse heart disease. And it was our science that basically provided a mechanism for his observation. So to understand this age-related loss of nitric oxide production, there are two ways the body makes mycotoxin. The first one to be discovered was an enzyme called nitric oxide synthase. And that’s the enzyme that’s found in our endothelial cells. Like every second upon me, that’s what produces nitric oxide when you need to increase blood flow. For instance, if you’re trying to remember where you parked your car. Part of the memory recall is you got to increase blood flow to the prefrontal cortex to recall memory. If you can’t dilate the blood vessels to get improved blood flow and perfusion to that area, you develop cognitive disorders and become forgetful. Same thing if you want to perform sexually, you get to dilate those blood vessels to get engorged, and you get increased blood flow. You can’t make nitric oxide and you can’t. 

So that’s the pathway. This becomes more compromised the older we get. The biochemistry in the enzymology is well understood that it’s basically due to oxidation of a molecule called tetrahydrobiopterin or BH4 that leads to enzyme uncoupling and endothelial dysfunction. So that is what we lose with age. The other pathway that Dr. Esselstyn exploits is that you can use a diet thru green leafy vegetables, and then there’s a molecule called nitrate. It’s inorganic nitrate. It’s found primarily in dark green leafy vegetables. So when you consume those, about 90 minutes after you consume, let’s say spinach or beets or kale or any green leafy vegetable that is concentrated, that nitrate is taken up in our guts and put it in our salivary glands. 

This has been known since the late 70s. And then each time we salivate now for the next five or six hours, our secreting nitrate in our saliva, in our oral cavity. And then, under normal conditions, we have nitrate-reducing bacteria that live on the crypts of the tongue in our mouth. Then these bacteria reduce the nitrate to nitrite and nitric oxide. This happens for the next six or eight hours. When we swallow our own saliva, it’s enriched in nitrite. The nitrite becomes nitric oxide as long as there’s stomach acid being produced. So Dr. Esselstyn is very correct in the fact that if you eat green leafy vegetables and put balsamic vinegar, which is basically acetic acid. So you’re acidifying the lumen of the stomach to allow that nitric oxide being produced when it’s broken down by the bacteria and then digested in your stomach. So mechanistically, that’s how it’s designed to work. 

The problem is that if you’re using mouthwash to kill the bacteria in your mouth because of bad breath or just because of habit, then you disrupt this pathway. Or, if you’re using antacid to prevent stomach acid production, you shut down nitric oxide production. And this was really the epiphany when I first had a conversation with Dr. Esselstyn. Like with any clinician, you have patients who get better and you use the same protocol on another patient and don’t get better.

So why is it that one patient responds beautifully and the other patient doesn’t respond at all? The explanation for that is because Nathan goes and never asks my patients if they’re using mouthwash. I’ve never asked my patients that I put on a plant-based diet if they’re using acids because clearly, if they are on that plant-based diet, it’s not going to work for them because there’s no nitric oxide being produced by that plant-based diet. So that was the epiphany to him and I think to a lot of people, it’s because it’s the microbiome, right? A lot of people are focused on the microbiome of the gut and how important that is. There are very few people besides us who ever focused on the oral microbiome or if there’s dysbiosis in the gut. So you get symptoms and human disease if dysbiosis in the mouth becomes nitric oxide deficient. And there’s clear evidence now. We’ve published on a number of others that people who use mouthwash have a higher blood pressure than those who don’t. 

We’ve also published on the fact that if we take normal tensive healthy people and the only thing we do is we don’t change their diet, don’t change any other aspects of them. We just give them a mouthwash twice a day for seven days. In some patients, we see as much as a 26-millimeter increase in their blood pressure in one week. And that’s the effects on blood pressure. There’s also evidence now that if people use mouthwash and exercise, he loses the cardioprotective benefits of exercise. I mean, that is earth-shattering because for the most part, people try to do the right thing with good intentions. They exercise, they eat a plant-based diet, their dentist has told them at some point in life, that they should use mouthwash to keep gum disease and gingivitis away. So they use mouthwash. But yet, when they do that, they eliminate the benefits of their diets. They eliminate the benefits of exercise, and they’re basically putting themselves at risk for the advanced progression of cardiovascular disease. 

So 200 million Americans use mouthwash every day and 200 million Americans have an unsafe elevation of blood pressure. That’s not a coincidence. There’s a clear causal relationship between the oral bacterium and steady-state blood pressure. So if you’re using mouthwash, you have to stop.

[00:24:54] Ashley James: I want to back up and unpack that because I’m in shock and my listeners are too. So you said if you don’t have the microbiome in your mouth and you exercise, you’re losing the cardiovascular protection of nitric oxide. I’m a little confused, though. I thought you said that it was also produced in the endothelial lining. So, if you don’t have the bacteria in your mouth, does that mean your endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system doesn’t produce it or do you get less because the bacteria also produce it?

[00:25:33] Dr. Nathan Bryan: We thought early on, probably 15 years ago, these were two mutually exclusive events. So they were completely separated so one could compensate for the other. So that’s why young kids can get away with not eating a lot of vegetables or could die because they have good in the single function. And that endothelial functions are the nitric oxide is produced. The blood vessel lining can compensate and overcome a lack of a good die. But the older you get, we know that we get the less functional. Our endothelial becomes the less nitric oxide we make. So we have to compensate for that through the diet. But this evidence points to the fact that the benefits of exercise are improvement and endothelial function. But the issue is if you’re in moderately good shape and you begin to exercise, that creates some shear stress in that skeletal muscle, whether it’s in the legs if you’re running or biking or if it’s in the biceps if you’re doing curls. So the muscle tells, I need more oxygen and nutrients being delivered because you’re working me harder. So the only way to do that, especially in the heart, is to dilate the blood vessels production of nitric oxide. 

So if your body can make sufficient nitric oxide, it does. And then there’s an adaptive response where it actually improves the ability. So if you’re stressing your body and your body goes, I need to up my game because I need to be ready for the next stressful event. There’s an improvement in nitric oxide. The problem is when you have endothelial dysfunction, like older patients who have chest pain or shortness of breath. They go to a cardiologist, put them on a treadmill, and come up with some leads on EKG. As they increase the workload, and if the coronary arteries can’t produce nitric oxide to dilate the coronary arteries, then that heart becomes hypoxic because it can increase the oxygen delivery to meet the increased metabolic demand. So there are changes in electrical activity. So they failed an exercise stress test. 

So your ability to produce nitric oxide predicts how well you can perform. So there’s a clear association between, if you’re using mouthwash, there’s an association with endothelial dysfunction. So you’re losing the protective benefits of exercise. There’s a bit of an explanation for that because when you produce nitric oxide, it’s oxidized almost immediately to nitrite and nitrate. Then your body’s kind of the biomarkers we look at or plasma levels of nitrite and nitrate. So when you’re exercising and that’s where things like beetroot extract or titrating up your nitric oxide levels prior to sports performance because it is when oxygen is needed to make nitric oxide and the lining in the blood vessels. 

So when you reach that anaerobic threshold and oxygen becomes limiting, your nitric oxide production stops from the enzyme that makes nitric oxide. If you’ve created a pool of nitrites because you’ve generated a lot of nitric oxides prior to the anaerobic threshold. The nitrite under those low oxygen conditions actually generates nitric oxide in an enzyme-independent manner.

[00:28:57] Ashley James: Does your body take the nitrite and then in an anaerobic state, turning into nitric oxide?

[00:29:07] Dr. Nathan Bryan: That’s right. So what happens? The pKa of nitrites is about 3.4. So they’re mammalian enzymes that, specifically as the pH of the muscle decreases or the tissue decreases, that nitride becomes nitric oxide. So then, what does that nitric oxide do? It does a lot of things. Number one, it binds to cytochrome c oxidase and mitochondria so that you get oxygen diffusing further into tissue. And you push that anaerobic threshold back, so you get less lactic acid buildup. You can oxygenate that tissue to where you can turn the nitric oxide back on. It’s a self-feeding or feed-forward mechanism that’s all dependent upon your steady-state levels of nitrite. And your ability to titrate up these nitrite stores prior to reaching that anaerobic threshold.

[00:29:54] Ashley James: Now, we don’t need to get smoked bacon with potassium nitrite in it to get our nitrites. It’s a different kind of nitrite and nitrate. I’ve always thought if people knew what they put in deli meat to preserve the meat, so the meat didn’t look gray. How it affects the kidneys and how it affects the circulation in the body that they would not eat that. Those preservatives in that state are not what you’re talking about. Can you explain how do we help the body? Where are we getting the nitrites and nitrates from our food? Is it more leafy greens and the beet? Is that the best thing to do to get it from our food as the best source?

[00:30:50] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, yes. So it’s been a misconception and this may not be surprising to you but the media and big Pharma have not always told the truth. In terms of what’s good for us and what’s bad for us. So the nitrites and nitrates found in green leafy vegetables are the exact same molecule they used to cure hotdogs. So there are a lot of other preservatives in those curing processed meats that probably aren’t good for you. But nitrate and nitrite are protected. 

If you think about the science of curing, what are they doing? Well, you’re preventing lipid oxidation, but that’s pretty important in human physiology. So nitrite has that. So that they end up in processed meat, it prevents listeria clostridium along with these foodborne pathogens. Well, that’s pretty important in human physiology as you can prevent bacterial outbreaks, and then it binds to the iron of myoglobin, turning into a nice pink color. It does the same thing to hemoglobin. It binds to hemoglobin and allows oxygen to be delivered throughout the body. So the same chemistry involved in meat curing is the same chemistry that we’re utilizing in human physiology to prevent oxidative stress, prevent inflammation, and improve oxygen delivery to a working muscle. 

So here’s where the misconception came and I don’t deny the data on the fact that there’s an increased relative risk on people who eat curing processed meats and have a slight increase in the risk of certain gastrointestinal cancers. That’s called an association, but it’s certainly not causation. In order for you to establish causation, you have to have a biologically plausible mechanism that explains that observation. So in the 1960s and early 70s, they go– oh, well, it has to be nitrite and nitrate in the curing processed meats because of those form nitrosamine and nitrosamine cause cancer. So there’s their biologically plausible mechanism. 

That stood for about 40 years until the discovery of nitric oxide. Then it was realized, well, nitrite and nitrate are actually produced and obviously, why would our bodies naturally produce carcinogens? And then, the national government, the National Institute of Health and Public Health and Human safety, did long-term safety studies on nitrite and nitrate in our food supply. What they found was the National Toxicology Program, that’s the Gold Standard in Toxicology. So they did those escalations for both nitrite and nitrate in male and female mice, rats, and rabbits. Do you know what they found? They prevented cancer. They didn’t cause cancer. Actually, in many cases they prevented cancer. 

So that story began to fall apart, and then if that were true because 85% of the nitrate and nitrite exposure we get from our diet is from green leafy vegetables. Only 5% comes from cured and processed meats. The other 10% comes from swallowing their own saliva. It’s 10% because the nitric oxide produced endogenously is oxidized to nitrate. That nitrate in the body doesn’t discriminate the nitrate that comes from spinach versus on which is formed from enzymatic NO production. So then our body puts the nitrate in our salivary glands, we salivate, generate nitrite, swallow the nitrite, and become nitric oxide gas. So if that were the case, vegetarians or people who had a plant-based diet would have about a 10 times higher incidence of cancer and heart disease than non-vegetarians and we know it’s just the opposite.

[00:34:33] Ashley James: Right. If nitrates and nitrites were the cause. So interesting, though. We want the benefits that you’re talking about having plentiful amounts, adequate enough amounts with as much nitric oxide as the body needs, right? We want that and it doesn’t sound like we’d get it from eating a lot of cured meats. You might get like you said, 5% and you’re not getting all the benefits on all the other nutrients that come from eating plants. So there’s a significant percentage when you eat plants versus the cured meats, but also really important. Its 10% is from your oral health and having a healthy microbiome in your mouth, and not using mouthwash. It makes me think about people who are on antibiotics, and if that’s wipe-out those good bacteria, they immediately wipe out 10% of their nitric oxide production.

I know you’d blow my mind in this interview, and we’re just warming up. I only knew about vasodilation and that’s why I was excited. I knew that people reported that it helps with endurance and recovery. So it helped lower lactic acid buildup and vasodilation which is so important. Can you talk a bit more about the signaling of it? These new discoveries about how nitric oxide is used to help the parts of the body signal and talk to each other.

[00:36:10] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, one of the most profound discoveries and realizations in nitric oxide signaling was in 2015 with Jonathan Stamler, a good friend and colleague in Case Western, who published a paper that revealed that nitric oxide is required for oxygen delivery. As part of its signaling, nitric oxide can bind the metals or activate second messenger systems. But it can also bind to tiles on proteins. These are the sulfur-containing amino acids on proteins. So in oxygen delivery, when you breathe, you pick up oxygen and exhale CO2. And when the red blood cells go from the arterial side to the venous side through the capillaries, they release oxygen. That’s where oxygen and CO2 exchange occurred in a small red blood vessel. In order for oxygen to come off hemoglobin, nitric oxide has to be bound. If we don’t have nitric oxide bound to hemoglobin, it doesn’t undergo that structural change, which is called the Bohr Effect, and oxygen doesn’t come off. This became obvious over the last two years in COVID because the problem with COVID is a loss of blood oxygen saturation. So they become hypoxemic and put them on oxygen. If they don’t improve their oxygen saturation, they put on a ventilator and 90% of people put on a ventilator and die. That’s the root cause of COVID. 

In 2020, we got an investigational new drug application approved by the FDA, where we started our nitric oxide drug and phase three clinical trials for COVID. We see the importance of nitric oxide and oxygen uptake and oxygen delivery. In our drug study, we’re seeing COVID patients that get sick and they get blood oxygen saturation in their below 80, sometimes in their high 70s. Typically, that patient would be put on vent immediately. But they take our nitric oxide drug, and within eight minutes, we see blood oxygen saturation goes to the high 90s. 

And that explains everything we know about COVID over the past two years and that 15 years was the first SARS COV-1. The people who get sick and hospitalized from COVID are the ones that can make nitric oxide. Who are those? Those are the elderly African Americans, people with underlying cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and smokers. Is that patient population this nitric oxide deficient? And few are nitric oxide deficient and you get exposed to COVID. The virus rapidly replicates and proliferates throughout the body. You get the systemic disease, you lose oxygen saturation, and in the hospital, you are put on a bed and you die. The simple fix is simply taking our nitric oxide drug, improving signaling, preventing vascular inflammation, improving oxygenation and you kill the virus.

In 2005 papers were published showing that nitric oxide prevents Coronavirus replication. So that’s probably one of the most important aspects of signaling. In the other aspects of signaling, you said earlier that loss of nitric oxide production causes telomere shortening. The signaling aspect is that you need nitric oxide to transcribe and make the telomeres enzyme, preventing telomere shortening. It co-localizes with nitric oxide synthase. If you can’t make nitric oxide, you don’t get to the polymerase, and you get telomere shortening. The other important component may be the most important is stem cell function. Nitric oxide is what tells our own body and tells our own stem cells in need to mobilize and differentiate. If you have a cough or an injury, nitric oxide is the signal that says, hey, I’m getting an injury. We need to mobilize our immune system and increase blood flow to that side of injury. And we need to make new cardiac myocytes, for example, or we need to make new neurons because we had a stroke. And if you can’t make nitric oxide in the body, it doesn’t get the signal to go there and repair any damaged tissue. The result is you don’t recover from injury. If you have a heart attack or stroke, typically, you lose neurological function. You lose cardiac function unless you do stem cells or stimulate your body’s own stem cells. And you can only do that through improving nitric oxide.

[00:40:48] Ashley James: I see that application for your drug for the emergency room. Someone comes in with a stroke, they just had one, and it would make sense to give it to them. Someone just comes in having a heart attack, and it makes sense to give it to them. You want to do everything you can to increase oxygen to oxygen-starved tissues because of a stroke or a heart attack. But, of course, my goal in this podcast is to help people prevent illness in the first place and help people reverse illness wherever they are. Whether they’re in early stage or even late stage. As long as your heart’s beating and you’re breathing and you’re able to take action for yourself, then there’s hope. And there are things you can do to help your body heal itself. But even if someone were to go to the emergency room, this was available to them. And they didn’t know about natural medicine and then they got sick. So that would be a fantastic emergency medicine at that moment to help them have a better outcome. So I’m really excited about your drug. 

As a society, we overuse drugs, but drugs aren’t all inherently bad. There are some amazing lifesaving drugs and the problem is that if you only go to the doctor, they throw drugs at you and don’t help you change your lifestyle and diet. And doesn’t look into the latest science of things. Then there were just throwing a bunch of drugs at a problem that might have been a diet or nutrient deficiency or diet problem or a lifestyle problem. So it’s really good, my listeners know. Does anybody have new listeners that haven’t thought of it this way? You don’t take your broken-down car to a plumber. I mean, that’s not plumbers, it’s a mechanic, right? So you take your car to a mechanic. Don’t take your health, always to the same doctor who only has a limited world view on health right?

I remember I’m from Canada. I remember I’m coming to the states and I picked out that I thought it was a good doctor. He was an osteopath, so I thought it was more holistic-minded. This is back, and we lived in Vegas, I lived in Henderson. So I went to an osteopath, really great guy. He was referred to me by my chiropractor’s wife, who’s a functional medicine practitioner and she thought that this would be good. I go to him and I’m complaining about this pain in my ovary and I don’t know if I’m having a cyst or what’s going on. I just want an ultrasound. I just want to make sure everything’s okay. I’m kind of nervous about it. And he walks into the office holding his prescription pad, writing a prescription for pain, and he’s walking in. I’m like– I don’t want pain medicine. I’m in pain, but that’s okay because pain is like notifying me that there’s something wrong and as a Canadian, it’s harder to get pain medicines that I don’t know. 

It’s different now, this is back in 2008, but it’s harder to get paid for medicines in Canada. But in the States, all I had to do was say I’m in pain and they’re like– oh, how many pain prescriptions do you want? I remember I went to a doctor, doesn’t stick to the sore throat. It’s just a sore throat, but it’s not going away. I just want to get it checked out. I’m feeling a little nervous about it. And this was before I was into Holistic Health. She wrote me a prescription for some cough syrup that had a bunch of pain meds in it. I thought this was crazy. Like I’ve never taken a cough syrup with pain meds before. Of course, it numbs my throat and everything. But it’s just this idea that we’re over-drugging ourselves. 

So we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If there’s a drug and you’re developing a drug that can increase nitric oxide that can save lives at the moment, that’s amazing. And then, of course, in the long term, I’d love for everyone to learn what they can do to increase nitric oxide in their lifestyle and in their diet as much as possible. But, as you’ve already mentioned, eating leafy green vegetables helps hugely and making sure to take care of your oral microbiome. Don’t do things that kill the microbiome in your mouth. So we’ve got two very easy to follow and very effective tips. Are there any other lifestyle tips for ensuring the protection of our nitric oxide production and in anything else we can do to enhance nitric oxide production?

[00:45:20] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes, there’s a lot. So let me go back because you make some very important points there. Interestingly, when I first found the patents and some medical school faculty, we had access to the hospital and patients. Actually, Jim Wilson, who’s a famous cardiologist who unfortunately passed away last year, his idea was to use it for heart attack. So if you’ve got what’s called an ischemic patient, [inaudible 00:45:47] which is ischemia, then the problem is they have an acute obstruction in a coronary artery so we could dose them in the field, bring them back and see if we can protect the heart from injury. So, it made perfect sense. But obviously, that’s a high-risk patient population. People are going to die and so we just made the decision well. With this early technology, let’s not put it in high-risk patients. But you hit the nail right on the head. So whether it’s an ischemic stroke or heart attack, it’s a very important application. But as you also said, prevention is much easier than treatment. So we have to address it before you have a heart attack.

Then going back to drugs, I’m trained as a drug discovery chemist that’s designed to understand human disease to the extent that we can rationally design drugs. My philosophy is much different than major drug manufacturers because what they do is create a synthetic compound. It’s typically, probably 90% of the drugs out there what’s called enzyme inhibitors preventing the activity of a certain enzyme. That’s called pharmacology and there are always consequences that cause side effects or body is not designed to inhibit an enzyme for the rest of our lives, which is what drug therapy does. So what we’ve done is called restorative physiology. We understand the enzymology of many different proteins and enzymes, primarily nitric oxide-producing enzymes. We know what goes wrong in people and we can restore the function of that enzyme.

So when the drug therapy that we develop is restorative in nature. It’s not an inhibitor. It’s basically giving back to the body what’s missing in terms of nitric oxide. So we know how much nitric oxide a healthy human makes, and we basically deliver that and recapitulate nitric oxide-based signaling in the human body. So drugs or anything that goes through FDA-approved clinical trials, and their prescription. Although we do have a drug discovery program and biotech company through, nitric oxide innovations are different than the drugs on the market. For most people and probably many holistic people, drugs are bad words. But what we’re doing is really a drug intended to give the body what it needs. The body heals itself. So that’s our drug discovery platform. Trying to get these different drugs through the FDA-approved clinical trial, which by the way, is a very heavy lift, especially competing against people like Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. Government employees doing their clinical trials for them. But you don’t need that. 

Going back to what we can do to stimulate our own nitric oxide production or prevent the age-related decline. You do two things, you stop doing the things that disrupt nitric oxide production and start doing the things that stimulate it. So we can address both of those. So number one, if you’re using mouthwash, you have to stop. The evidence is clear. I was in the Doctor Show last year where we revealed that mouthwash makes the blood pressure goes up. With mouthwash, you lose the benefits of exercise. So if you’re using mouthwash, you have to stop. Don’t overtake antibiotics. Over 200 million prescriptions are written every year for antibiotics. If you get an active infection, the antibiotics are very important but don’t overdo it because you’re killing the bad guys, but you’re also killing the good guys. 

The other thing is fluoride toothpaste or fluoride rinses, Fluoride to antiseptic. It’s a neurotoxin, and it kills your thyroid function. So if you’re using fluoride toothpaste, throw that away. Never buy fluoride toothpaste again. There’s a reason we have an epidemic of hypothyroidism. Fluoride competes with iodine binding to thyroid hormone can’t convert T4 to T3 with Iodine. Then the other thing is antacids. In over 200 million prescriptions are written for antacid every year and that’s not even counting the number of over-the-counter purchases. You have to have stomach acid and as Dr. Esselstyn says, take some apple cider vinegar before each meal. Acidify the stomach to get a better breakdown of proteins. You get your nitric oxide being produced. So those are the three things that will really make a huge difference in people’s health. Throw out the Fluoride, stop using mouthwash, and stop using an antacid. So those are the three things you must do to get out of your body’s waste that can make nitric oxide. And then do the things that stimulate more green leafy vegetables, moderate physical exercise, and 20 to 30 minutes of sunlight a day. For those that live in the North and there are long winters, you have to get an infrared sauna or infrared light.

[00:50:30] Ashley James: I have Sunlighten Sauna and it’s the coolest thing ever. It’s near, mid, and far-infrared. I feel like a new person. I love using it. I live out in the Pacific Northwest and it’s 4:30. The sun goes down at night and doesn’t come back until 7:30. So we got those long winters, but I feel like a new person since I got that Sunlighten Sauna and I absolutely love it. I interviewed the founder of Sunlighten and it was a great interview. She started the company because her brother was dying of cancer and doing everything he could to fight it. Maybe it was cancer because it was a few years ago when we did the interview. I’m pretty sure it’s cancer but he was very sick. I can’t remember what it was. It might have been cancer or might have been Lyme Disease but he was basically laid out flat on the couch. He was super sick. And then he found out that infrared could help him and it gave him a leg up. Then she developed that company and it’s all non-toxic.

My listeners get a great discount when they check out Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love Sunlighten Sauna technology. Now, I know another reason why I love it. It increases nitric oxide production and helps my body to do that. So you talk about Fluoride, my question is, what about Fluoride and Chlorine in that drinking water? We should do our best to drink water that doesn’t have Fluoride in it and Chlorine. Does Chlorine also affect nitric oxide and does it not also disrupt the microbiome?

[00:52:06] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Chlorine and Fluoride. If you go back to the periodic table, these are a group of elements called halogens. There’s Fluoride, Chlorine, Iodine, and Bromine– I don’t have in front of me, but those are the major ones. The biggest thing with Fluoride, Chlorine, and chloride is they compete with Iodine, binding the thyroid hormone. So most Americans are deficient in Iodine, 95% of Americans because the only dietary sources of Iodine are typically seaweed or iodized salt. So we don’t get enough Iodine in the body, yet we’re exposed to Fluoride in our drinking water. Fluoride in toothpaste. Most humans have more Fluoride and chloride in their blood-streaming cells than Iodine. They’re the same type of chemistry with the same halogen properties on that one row on the periodic table. They have similar functions and similar chemistry. So they act as competitors in binding Iodine to thyroid hormone. So, you become hypothyroid. I tell people that everybody has to supplement with Iodine. Everybody’s deficient in Iodine. 

Going back to your question, the municipal waters are probably the worst thing in the world you can drink. Not only does it have Fluoride and Chlorine, but it has drug metabolites in it. So you have to have a pump filtration system to remove all these toxins from the water supply. People think it’s bad to drink it. What’s worse, it’s bad to cook in it. So it’s even worse to bathe in it because you’re heating the bathwater up to sometimes 104, 110 degrees, then you volatilize and there are chloramines and you inhale it. So you get better absorption, transdermal through inhaling it. Volatilize by heating the water and people get sick and get a chronic illness. So you have to eat, drink and bathe in good clean water and not municipal water coming out of the pipes of major metropolitan areas.

[00:54:12] Ashley James: I absolutely agree with you. I felt amazing when I lived in a place with the well water. It makes such a difference to bathe in water, drink water, and cook with water that is from the ground that doesn’t have any fluoride, Chlorine, or any chemicals in it. Oh, so good. I recently found a water filter that’s affordable, that removes everything. It’s called Zero water. I’ve been meeting to contact the company and see if they could get whether science guys to come on and explain how it works. But it’s better than any other filter I found and it’s like 30 bucks, and it looks like any other kind of picture. They have the bigger ones, like a 23 cup one, and that’s the one I got. But it comes with a tester that tests the total dissolved solids of parts per million. And sure, it sets to zero and they give you the little machine that tests the water for you. 

So that you know when it starts showing numbers on it and when to replace the filter. It takes for me about every two months to replace the filter. I’m sure up it works as well as a four hundred dollars in reverse osmosis and it’s only like 30 bucks. So lately, I found out a few months ago and the water tastes so good coming out. Now that we’re living in a place with municipal water, I need to find something better, even better than my Berkey. My Berkey wasn’t removing everything. But it [inaudible 55:45] everything. So I thought that was really cool. You’ve given us so much information and I keep thinking. You’ve created some products that we can use because I’m going to do everything you said. And in addition to that, I want to take it to the next level. I’m sure my listeners are the same, or they’re like—well, what else I can do. 

You’ve given us the life hacks and things that we can make sure that we’re doing, which are simple enough. Clean water, clean toothpaste, no mouthwash, take care of the microbiome, eat foods like nice leafy greens, and eat food that increases nitric oxide. But in addition to that, what else can we do to take it to the next level and get the maximum benefit considering that nitric oxide does so much more than I thought that it helps. If it’s helping with telomeres, it’s helping extend life. It’s helping literally tell your DNA to live longer. I heard you mentioned how it helps mitochondrial function. I don’t quite understand exactly what you said and how it affects viral or suppresses viral production in bacterial production. I understood that it is fundamental to the immune system that your immune cells help make it and the signaling within the cells. Vasodilation like there are so many aspects. One point alone, it increases oxygen, drives deeper into the tissue and pushes back lactic acid. When I go to exercise, I hate it when I’m getting started and my muscles are already fatigued, burning and I’m already anaerobic. 

I look at my son, who’s about to be seven. I remember having energy for days. I can take this kid to play areas and I’m waiting for him; my butt gets numb, or my feet get cold. Something like my body is hanging out and chilling with other moms. I’m waiting for my kid to get tired—three and a half hours into a play area. I’m bored and cold and ready to go home and he’s just like—go, go, go. To have that fitness level again, anything to increase that ability to go longer and feel like you’re seven again. 

So tell us about the products you’ve created and offer a fantastic discount to the listeners. We are so grateful for giving us 10% off. Every little bit helps these days. The coupon code, of course, we’re all everything when we get a discount. We always ask for the coupon code LTH, which is Learn True Health podcast. So LTH is a discount. You have several websites, but the best website for all our listeners to go to and the easiest one is n as in the letter n, one, o, one dot com. It’s n1o1.com. I’m sure there’s a reason for that. Is that the nitric oxide molecule?

[00:59:17] Dr. Nathan Bryan: That’s one Nitrogen and one Oxygen. 

[00:59:20] Ashley James: Yes, like H2O is water. So it’s n1o1.com, and that one does not spell out n1o1.com. But, of course, the links to everything that we’re talking about today was going to be in the show in today’s podcast in learntruehealth.com. But when we went to n1o1.com, I was surprised about the products because the first thing I saw was some face creams. And I’m all about looking good. But here you are, scientists, about how to increase nitric oxide production. So let’s start with the obvious, what’s up with the face creams?

[00:59:55] Dr. Nathan Bryan: This has been an evolution. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and as I mentioned early on, when we started going and when we solved the riddle on how to create nitric oxide in a safe and effective manner, it changes everything. So when we started developing product technology, we first launched in the dietary supplement space, and we set good results there. And then I get to think, what else that is people forget the skins and organs. Like the heart, if you have an interruption of blood supply to the heart, what happens? The heart fails. If you have a disruption in the blood supply to the brain, well, the brain fails. Just like any other organ, if you have decreased blood flow to the skin, what happens? It fails. What does the failing skin look like? When you lose collagen and you lose hydration, fine lines and wrinkles start to appear and the skin hangs and drupes, you get dermatitis, and you get age spots, and that’s aging. 

What is the root cause of aging? Well, it’s a lack of nitric oxide production. So we figured out how to deliver a solid dose form of nitric oxide in the form of a lozenge. So we created a door chamber serum that when you mix these two components together, you basically take one pump from one side, one pump from the other. So you mix it together, then chemistry starts as normally would on the skin’s surface and we generate nitric oxide gas. This is the coolest show in the history of any product technology. Aesthetics and skincare’s multibillion-dollar. People buy a lot of stuff and most cosmetic skincare products are masking. They hide the blemishes, and they hide the fine lines and wrinkles. They don’t get to the root cause. 

When you apply this to the skin, you’ll see it turned pink. What is that? That’s the infusion of blood and oxygen to that area. The nitric oxide is the gas part that diffuses above the skin, but part of it diffuses into the dermis and opens up capillaries. It gives blood oxygen which is blood, into the cells, just like everything we’ve discussed. What does that mean when you get oxygen nutrient deliveries? Stem cells begin to turn on, so you get to regenerative cells, so they slough off the old cells. We regenerate new cells, and we do biopsies. We’ve seen improvement in collagen deposition, cellular hydration, infections, whether it’s some dermatitis or acne. We kill the bacteria, fine lines and wrinkles disappear, and so just like we can recover. 

Our nitric oxide can make a heart attack, but there’s injury and reduced blood supply to the heart. We can overcome the effects of loss of fusion to the skin by providing a source of mycotoxins in the body. Otherwise, it didn’t make it. The result is that we’ve got four published clinical trials on that and see improvements from fine lines and wrinkles to scar remediation, acne, eczema, and any type of dermatitis. Again, it doesn’t mask. We’re getting to the root cause of that underlying skin disorder or just preventing the looks of aging. So that was the N101 serum and then we created an entire line. We had a glycolic wash that helps remove the old cells because we’re improving cellular turnover like a colic wash that gets rid of the old cells so that the new cells can come forward. We got an eye cream and a face cream that contains peptides and growth factors. It’s a really remarkable system and as they said, you don’t have to guess if this product is working. You can see it working right between your eyes. We call it the pink glow, the Pneuma glow.

[01:03:46] Ashley James: So it’s helping increase oxygen to the cells that aren’t getting enough oxygen, which is then all the cells are just functioning better. It sounds like the fountain of youth. It sounds like it’s going to pour the fountain of youth on my face. I’m really excited about that. Luckily, I don’t have any major skin issues. But I hit my 40s now and I want to prevent looking like a leather boot in 10 years. I’m excited about that. I have a little bit of rosacea that my grandmother and my mom had. I’m not going to blame my genes. I’m sure that there’s something I can do to change. I’ve always been figuring out things in my diet and my lifestyle to improve. But it would be neat if it helped with that. Does it help reduce acne because the bacteria are anaerobic bacteria? The bacteria that causes acne, is it basically killed because the tissues are oxygen?

[01:04:54] Dr. Nathan Bryan:  It does two things. There’s clear evidence of a mechanism of how nitric oxide kills bacteria. It binds to the iron-sulfur centers, which are the respiratory sites of bacteria. So basically, it suffocates the bacteria. So there are clear antimicrobial, antibacterial effects of nitric oxide. So in acne, it’s doing two things. It kills the bacteria’s active infection in the pustules but also calms the inflammation and mobile and gets the blood supply there. So you shut down the immune response because the immune system doesn’t need to be activated. There are no bacteria and then you suppress the inflammatory response. That’s how you get rid of acne.

[01:05:35] Ashley James: I apologize if you said this before. I just really want to be clear about it. Does nitric oxide in every tissue of the body decrease inflammatory response?

[01:05:53] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes. I mean, that’s part of nitric oxide drops. In acute inflammation, whether it’s an injury, whether it’s a cut or whether it’s an exposure to an infection. An acute inflammatory response is necessary for our survival and part of that is mediated through nitric oxide. So you have to mobilize your immune system, dilate the blood vessels, and then go and isolate that source of infection or injury to the immune cells. So it generates a lot of nitric oxide at the site of injury. And that happens for four or five hours and then the inflammatory immune cascade goes away. 

The problem with chronic inflammation, there’s no off switch. So what nitric oxide does, when you have whether it’s acute inflammation in the gut, whether it’s ulcerative colitis or inflammatory bowel disease or rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or any autoimmune disease with chronic inflammation, it shuts down systemic nitric oxide production. So nitric oxide, one of its roles is to shut down the inflammatory response and inflammation. The earliest stages of that are what’s called microvascular inflammation. 

When you get monocytes and neutrophils that stick to the lining of the blood vessel, they migrate through. They elicit an immune response. And that’s the inflammation, oxidative stress and immune dysfunction that occur in every inflammatory condition. If you restore nitric oxide production, primarily endothelial nitric oxide production, you prevent that entire inflammatory cascade. You suppress inflammation. You suppress the immune dysfunction or shut down the oxidative stress associated with all of it. One of my patents is on a method of reducing inflammation as measured by C-reactive protein. So when we improve nitric oxide production in the human body, we decrease C-reactive protein, which is an acute-phase marker of inflammation.

[01:07:50] Ashley James: That is so cool because so many doctors say inflammation is the root cause of the problem and it’s like– no, you’re going to go deeper.

[01:08:03] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Inflammation is the consequence of loss of nitric oxide.

[01:08:05] Ashley James:  Right. I’ve interviewed several doctors that say too much lactic acid is the cause of all diseases. It’s like they all have a piece of an elephant. Have you heard that? I don’t know if it’s a parable. You’ve heard the story of 12 Blind Men is all touching a part of an elephant. And they’re all arguing like– no, describe the elephant. Well, it feels large and leathery. No, it feels like a rope. No, it feels like a very thin thing. No, it feels round like a hose. So each person is touching a different part of the elephant. So we have to be careful not to treat the smoke but go after the fire. Imagine every time you show up to a fire, and we saw firemen putting it out, and we’re like—aha, firemen caused the fire because every time we see a fire, there’s firemen. Or oh, let’s start treating the smoke. See the smoke? There’s smoke. We should treat it and what’s causing the fire and how to put it out. 

So inflammation is a byproduct. Lactic acid is a byproduct where we need to keep going deeper. Yes, everyone wants to address decreasing inflammation. Everyone wants to eat a low inflammatory diet. Doesn’t want to do anything in your lifestyle, your diet that increases inflammation, just like you don’t want to have too much lactic acid. And you want to make sure you have enough oxygen for yourself and this is all very important. But what is the root? Get to the root. We’re seeing that nitric oxide is the absolute root. We have to make sure we have enough of it or else everything just becomes the standard American statistic. One in three people is dying of something right now and 70% of our population is on at least one prescription medication. I would say 70% of people in America probably have low nitric oxide, given what we’re hearing today.

[01:10:10] Dr. Nathan Bryan: You made a very good point. I just want to expound because I get questions and everybody can research now. They can go to Google and put it in and find anything they’re looking for. You can get the answer to whatever you’re looking for, whether it’s right or wrong. There’s an answer out there. I read a paper that says in chronic inflammation, and nitric oxide contributes to tissue damage during that inflammation. So nitric oxide should be contraindicated inflammatory disease. If you read the literature, we looked in lupus or Parkinson’s disease or ulcerative colitis in these scientific papers. In the tissue pathology reports, we found an increase in nitrotyrosine and peroxynitrite. So nitric oxide is causing that damage. So it’s the exact same analogy you use.

When there’s a crime, the police show up at the crime scene. The interpretation isn’t that the police cause the crime. But, of course, nitric oxide is there in that inflammatory. That’s its job because it’s there doesn’t mean that it’s contributed to the crime or caused the disease. So it’s there to clean up the mess. So you have to be careful on how you interpret data. And scientists are famous for this. You give the data and there’s a misinterpretation of the data. Most of the data out there can sometimes be misinterpreted by the authors of the paper and even by the people who read it. 

So it’s clear that low nitric oxide is bad. Too much nitric oxide is bad. Too little water is bad, too much water– obviously, if you drink too much water in a short period of time, your [inaudible 01:11:55] and you’ll die. So everything in moderation. It’s very important to realize that you have to figure it out and generate the right amount of nitric oxide at the right time and in the right place. That’s what we’ve been able to figure it out over the past 20 years and nobody else has been able to figure this out.

[01:12:13] Ashley James: Okay, that brings me to the question. How much is nitric oxide too much? How do we know if we’re reaching toxic levels of nitric oxide? To eat four cups of leafy greens a day, you’re not going to kill yourself. If you try to eat four grocery bags a day, probably you would explode. Could we get toxic with nitric oxide through– you’ve got nitric oxide lozenges. I’m excited about learning about that. It is my next and I want to explore that. But we’re doing okay. So we’re going to do everything you’ve already said, eat healthily, and make sure we’re not killing the bacteria in our mouths. And, of course, under natural intervention, we wouldn’t have too much nitric oxide, at least. I’m guessing. Let me know if I’m wrong. In addition to that, I want to increase my nitric oxide more and I want to take your lozenges. Could I become nitric oxide toxic?

[01:13:13] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes, very good questions. Now, let me go back and hit on the points that you brought up earlier again. So you mentioned green leafy vegetables and eating a good clean diet. Here’s the challenge. We did this and we published this in 2015. We wanted to answer that same question you asked. How much broccoli or celery would I need to eat? How much spinach do I need to eat in one serving to get enough nitrate in that food to normalize my blood pressure and improve nitric oxide production? A very important question because if we can answer that question, we can change the strict guidelines. We can get people off blood pressure medicine simply through dietary intervention. 

And we can recapitulate Dr. Esselstyn’s work in patients with full-blown coronary artery disease. So in order to answer that question, we went to five different cities across the US. We went to the same retail grocery, we bought the same vegetables and brought them back to the lab and analyzed them. So what we found was pretty striking. We found that if you lived, for instance, in Dallas or Chicago, and you went to what’s called [inaudible 01:14:29] or some retail grocery. So you bought six stalks of celery and you consume those six stalks within 20 minutes, which would give you enough nitric to normalize your blood pressure. 

If you lived in New York, you’d have to eat about 40 stalks of celery. So there are regional differences in the nitrate content of vegetables, and it’s all across the US. So we went to New York, and we went to Raleigh, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. There’s as much as 50-fold difference in the nitrate content of broccoli or celery in New York, as there in Dallas or Los Angeles. It holds true for lettuce, spinach, and every vegetable we measure. So the point of that is that there’s no way in hell we can make recommendations because it depends on where you live and how your vegetables are grown. By the way, those were conventionally grown vegetables. We also compared it to organically grown vegetables and found that organically grown vegetables across the board have as much as the five to 10 times less nitrate than conventionally grown. The variation is much higher, maybe a hundredfold difference in nitrate content of organically grown vegetables from different regions of the US.

So the point is, you cannot eat enough, just like you can’t eat enough curing processed meats to get enough nitrite/nitrate to lower your blood pressure. You can’t eat enough organic vegetables to get enough nitrate because to have an organic label, and you’re not allowed to add nitrogen-based fertilizers to the soil. So as a consequence, the soil is nitrogen deficient, and the vegetables that are grown in it don’t accumulate nitrate. Without nitrate or nitrogen, they don’t assimilate other vitamins and minerals. So organically grown vegetables are healthy simply because they’re not exposed to herbicides or pesticides. But they’re depleted of most nutrients, including nitrate. 

So, that adds another level of complexity to trying to do the right thing. Yet not getting what we are designed to be and I’ve seen data. Since the 1940s, there’s been a 90% decline in the trace minerals and nutrients in the food that’s grown in the US. So we have to feed a growing planet, and that increased deficiency of food production has led to a decrease in nutrient absorption and assimilation. So we’re producing a less nutritious product globally. 

[01:16:58] Ashley James: Exactly. And then we’re getting all these nutrient deficiency diseases, and someone can be obese and nutrient deficient at the same time. And one of my mentors, Dr. Joel Wallach, talks about his first degree was in soil agriculture. And then, he was a veterinarian, pathologist, and research scientist and later became a naturopathic physician. So here’s a fun story. You should check out his story of it. He saw early on like calf pellets of all these great vitamins and minerals. So he started eating calf pellets as a kid because he looked at the package and asked his dad– Dad, why are we giving all these minerals and vitamins? He’s in his 80s, so like it was 70 years ago. So why are we giving all these nutrients? Why are we taking these nutrients? It was explained to him that– we’ll if we use a human medicine which is a way to get sick and go to the doctor and take a bunch of tests and be put on drugs, right? Human medicine.

If you use human medicine for cattle, for beef farming, right? The steak would be $500 or $1,000 like a burger with beef, $50 or more. That’s because it’s for profit medicine. But with the poultry, pork, and beef, they need to keep the costs down while keeping the animals alive and making big animals. So what do they do? They try to prevent disease and they do that by making sure that there’s enough nutrition in their feed. Yet they make sure there’s enough nutrition in our food. 

So Dr. Wallach jokes about it, but he says that your chickens are being treated better than you are in terms of the amount of nutrients. In terms of the amount of nutrition there, the food industry is not interested in making sure you have 60 essentials, meaning the body needs these things to function. It’s 60 minerals the body needs, and there are 77 trace minerals and elements that we thrive on. They’re not in our food, and yet we’re giving vitamins and minerals to animals to help prevent disease and make nice big animals so they can make a profit. So it just drives me nuts hearing about that. 

Someone in Texas eats a few stalks of celery, lowers their blood pressure and is great. But someone is listening in Wisconsin, or Seattle or New York, or in a different country altogether. No matter how many stalks they can fit in their mouth, they are not really getting the results and that’s super frustrating. But that goes to say when selenium. People will say– off to sleep and don’t have to be grown in selenium-rich soil just like– oh, my iron is low. I’m going to have more spinach. I love spinach. Most spinach is hydroponically grown. It only needs NPK water and sunlight to grow that can be completely void of 50 or more minerals. So there doesn’t have to be minerals in your food for them to grow food anymore. Even if you look at Franken foods that are packaged foods, these foods don’t have to have nutrients that your body needs. Which now we know is directly related to your nitric oxide production. 

So, what’s the solution? Obviously, still eating a clean and healthy diet, try not to get pesticides and all that. I mean, growing our own food and making sure we put in blood meat or whatever it has high nitrogen in the soil as we grow our own food. That would be one solution. But what’s the solution for someone who is done feeling sick and wants the benefits that you spend over 40 minutes talking about all the benefits of nitric oxide. What’s the solution? If it is your lozenges that you’ve created. The next concern is what’s the good amount to take because that person in Texas is actually eating just accidentally getting enough nitrates and nitrites to produce nitric oxide. They could take two lozenges versus someone in New York who can be taken few. How do we gauge this?

[01:21:23] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Yes. A very, very good question and very important question. And that’s where the innovation comes in because we realized a long time ago that very few people do through diet, work, or lifestyle or getting enough nitric oxide. So you almost have to have product technology. You almost have to supplement with trace minerals and nutrients, which I do every day. Because we’re not getting it from our food supply and I live on hundreds of acres in Texas. We grow our own food. We raise our own beef in the food we eat. So even if we’re still not getting all the trace minerals we need, you have to supplement. 

There are two main causes or two main signs of toxicity for nitric oxide. There are only two. So one is methemoglobinemia which means that you take so much that you oxidize the iron and your red blood cells and you can no longer transport oxygen. So what that looks like is cyanosis. The people get blue around the lips, and they basically suffocate like cyanide poisoning. You would have to take a hundred of those lozenges to see any changes in methemoglobinemia. The other is low blood pressure. But you take too much nitric oxide, you’ll see systemic vasodilation, and you’ll see a drop in blood pressure. You’ll get sick of it. You get lightheaded because you can’t profuse the brain because of low blood pressure. Those are the only signs of toxicity based on the chemistry of nitric oxide. 

So the trick has been– how do you restore? Again, the keyword is restore. We don’t want to give the body more than what it’s used to seeing or what it would normally produce. And that’s what we’ve learned over the past 20 years. How much nitric oxide to generate over a certain period of time to recapitulate it basically. The only way to do that is through a lozenge because we generate. If your body can’t make nitric oxide, we do it for you. That lozenge is designed to have a resonant time of about six or seven minutes. You put it in your mouth. It’s activated by your saliva in regenerating nitric oxide gas. And that nitric oxide is absorbed in the oral cavity. It’s oxidized to nitrite. It’s transported to bind to the glutathione and transported as an S-nitrosoglutathione. And that extends the biological activity from one millisecond out to hours. 

Again through research, we know what normal plasma levels of these biomarkers are. We know what normal salivary levels of these biomarkers are. We give back what the body’s missing. It’s no different than anything else. If you’re low in vitamin D, what do you do? You take vitamin D. How do you know you have enough? Where do you get your blood labs drawn? If your vitamin D is 80, you’re vital right on the spot. So keep doing what you’re doing. 

Same thing with this. There’s no clinical measure of nitric oxide. Unfortunately, there are no labs that you can tell, like vitamin D or cholesterol, or triglycerides. So what do we have to do? We have to test our saliva, which there are salivary test strips out there that I developed over 12 years ago. They can tell you what your nitric oxide levels are. Or the best measure is check your blood pressure. It’s easy. It’s not invasive and you know if your blood pressure’s normal. The beauty of what we do is, for instance, my blood pressure runs about 116 over 68 or 72. So when I take a lozenge, it doesn’t trump my blood pressure and that’s called homeostasis. If your blood pressure’s high, you take it and it normalizes it. If blood pressure is normal or low, you won’t further reduce your blood pressure. So it’s a very important safety aspect about what we do because we don’t want to lower blood pressure more in people with already low blood pressure.

[01:25:18] Ashley James: Some people have low blood pressure. By the way, Dr. Wallach says that the first thing he goes to is the calcium deficiency, but that doesn’t mean you eat more dairy. You want to make sure you’re getting an absorbable form of calcium that is useful to the body. I have a family member who was fainting from standing up. He was bedridden just recently. He tries to stand up with a walker and immediately, his blood pressure drops so low that he is fainting. So I gave him the liquid calcium and multi-mineral from takeyoursupplements.com. I read about them and so many interviews. Within days, he’s able to stand without fainting. And that’s so cool. 

There are always other reasons that can cause low blood pressure, but for him, it’s the first thing to try when you hear some good information from a holistic doctor. You try it and you get some results. I just love that. I’m so excited to get these lozenges. We used to be on for about seven years. We moved last year, but we have been drinking nitrites for seven years. There are high levels of nitrites in our well water. It wasn’t high enough to cause Blue Baby Syndrome. That’s what I was concerned about. When my son was a baby, I was concerned about that. It was naturally high in our area. There was no agricultural area and it was kind of weird. And I was concerned about it. 

My husband’s blood pressure was really under control in those seven years. He was getting nitrites and one of the sources was from our well water. They would test it often and it was high. It’s high normal but not dangerous, but still high. I thought to myself, that’s interesting. Maybe think back to when we were cavemen and we’re drinking water that naturally has nitrites in it, maybe because of the breakdown of stuff. One of the reasons it’s in well water is the breakdown of vegetation and things like that. And that can be dangerously high and toxic because if you’re getting unclean well water from the farmland, that leech to it. One of the sources that someone could get it from. So it’s interesting. I’m excited to get these lozenges because I want to give it to my husband. Lately, his blood pressure has been creeping up, which can also be from stress. We’re under high stress right now because of taking care of sick family members. I’m just really excited and I’m already on your website buying the lozenges right now. I’m very excited to get him on it and I will come back and share it with the listeners after my husband takes it in and let them know what happens with his blood pressure. So I’m going to take some too and then work out at the gym and I’m going to let everyone know what I felt. If I noticed a difference in my ability to keep going at the gym or if I gave up after five curl-ups. 

[01:28:43] Dr. Nathan Bryan: It involves science. We’ve learned a lot over the past 20 years and continue to pivot and improve. We’ve learned over the 20 years that nitric oxide is clinically important, but it’s not a silver bullet. It’s not an end-all, be-all, and cure-all. But what’s clear is that your body cannot and will not heal or perform optimally unless you have sufficient nitric oxide being produced. Going back to what you said earlier about these mineral deficiencies, I’ve been in basic science for almost 25 years. What’s clear to me is that people get sick for two weeks in two weeks only. It didn’t matter if it was cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or Diabetes. So the body is missing something that it needs, or it’s exposed to something that it doesn’t need. 

In that model, in that paradigm, there’s no room for drug therapy. If you’re deficient in the mineral, you’ll get sick. If we supplement and give back what’s missing, we remove any toxin, whether it’s fluoride or herbicides or pesticides or EMF or infections from root canals. If we remove the source of exposure to toxins and give back what the body’s missing, the body heals itself. That’s the only way people are going to get better. It’s not through drug therapy. It’s not putting band-aids on and not getting to the root cause. So the end result of all that, whether you are toxic or your mineral deficient, leads to a loss of nitric oxide production. They reduce blood flow, increase inflammation, oxidative stress and immune dysfunction and that’s the hallmark of every single chronic disease. 

[01:30:30] Ashley James: Fascinating. Do you have any information about cancer and nitric oxide?

[01:30:40] Dr. Nathan Bryan: When nitric oxide is known to regulate cell cycle and cell proliferation, this goes back to the 1940s, and this is called the Warburg effect that cancer cells only respire and proliferate in low oxygen, in low pH environment. So it’s a mitochondrial disease. It’s mitochondrial dysfunction. So it’s typically caused by some toxins. So it got to remove the source– and this is what frustrates me about oncologists. It does not matter if it’s breast cancer, prostate cancer, or brain cancer. They only have three tools– surgery, chemo, and radiation. The frustration is the oncologist never asked the patient, why did you have cancer? How can you treat something if you don’t know why you got it? To throw into those three responses to every single cancer case that they see. Nobody’s ever been cured of cancer from surgery, chemo, or radiation. It’s never happened. 

If they put them in regression, it may extend their life, but it’s never cured cancer. It’s never in the history of the world that cancer has been cured with standard chemo, radiation, and surgery because they don’t understand the etiology of cancer. What’s poisoned the mitochondria to allow them to what’s called anaerobic fermentation and to disrupt normal cellular metabolism. That’s the root cause of cancer. We have to figure out what’s poisoning the mitochondria. It’s usually some toxins and usually, it’s a toxin from some infections that you have in the body. Whether it’s a brown section or whether it’s bacterial on asymptomatic bacterial infection in root canals. We’re finding most solid tumors can be traced back to an infection in a root canal tooth. So we have to remove the source of infection, extract the root canal teeth, clean up the infection, and then support the body so it can basically heal. Get some voltage, an oxygen increase, while pH increases oxygen delivery. So you do that partly through nitric oxide and then the body heals itself. It’s really very clear to me. 

[01:32:57] Ashley James: I love it. I’m just so excited about what you’re delivering today to the listeners and how it can help them. Those who are suffering from major diseases. Those who want to prevent major disease or want to reverse the disease or those who want to feel better. Wherever they are, they just want to feel better. This some very, very, very excited. So when we started taking lozenges, we started slow. I’m going to take it once a day and see how it goes. Then maybe once or twice a day and see how it goes. Is there anything about body weights, like a 100-pound woman and a 350-pound man taking different amounts?

[01:33:40] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Regarding what we do, whether it’s in dietary supplements, the only thing we have to do is demonstrate safety. Obviously we can’t make drug claims. But everything we do is tailored toward a 70 to an 80-kilogram person, which is 130 to 160-pounds human. And that’s the benchmark. So that’s how drugs are developed. So obviously, if you got a 60,70-pound kid, take half. If you’re older than that, our total body volume is more than that. So the pharmacokinetics are going to be much different than a 120-pound person. 

But I think what we have nitric oxide and what we do in that lozenge, technology is nitric oxide over a certain period of time and people typically get the same response. So that doesn’t mean that a 240-pound person should put two lozenges into their mouth at one time. I wouldn’t recommend that. We found that one wasn’t like for me. I’m 48 years old and the vascular age of a 28-year-old. I’m in pretty good health. I don’t have any issues with blood pressure. Labs are pretty good, actually, very normal for a 48-year-old. So I take one lozenge a day because it gives me that support I need. But I try to eat and I go to the gym every day. I send an infrared sauna and every day. I’m in a hyperbaric chamber every night when I’m at home. I’m not at home pretty much because I travel a lot. 

So I do everything that my body needs to optimize nitric oxide production. So I don’t need that much more health. Everybody’s busy. People don’t always eat a good diet, and certainly, most people don’t have time or the discipline to go to the gym everyday and get modern physical exercise. So those are the people that need the most support. Not us that are health conscious and try to do the things. Watch what we eat and take on the discipline to do the right things even though it’s hard work and very time-consuming to stay healthy. But for me, it’s worth it because the last thing I want to do if you’re unhealthy– our health is our greatest asset. We can’t enjoy life if we don’t have good health. It’s worth the hard work, and your body will thank you for it.

[01:35:57] Ashley James: If you have paid good money to buy a house, you have to replace the roof every 10 years with one of those really cool roofs for every 40 years. You’ve made all this money and put all this effort into buying a house and paying off a mortgage. You’re not going to let the roof rot. Then just completely destroy your investments and where you live. Your body is where you live. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt to make lifestyle changes and make habit changes and make diet changes. 

I have a little brat inside me that she’s like about six and she just wants, what she wants, what she wants. She wants to go to the drive-thru. She wants to eat all the junk they sell at the movie theater. Like she just wants what she wants, what she wants it and that’s what she wants that dopamine spikes. She wants those feel-good chemicals that happen in the brain when she gets her way. She gets to eat fried foods, sugary, greasy, whatever kind of food. We all have that brat inside of us that is drug-addicted. Addicted to processed food that wants that rush. 

For some people, it’s potato chips. For some people, it’s fast food. For some people, it’s alcohol, right? Alcohol is something I bet decreases nitric oxide production. So I’m just going to guess. Am I right? Does that have any effect on nitric oxide production? 

[01:37:24] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Well, it does but increasingly not. We published data probably 15 years ago. Moderate alcohol consumption is cardioprotective. So meaning that there are observational data that if you have a heart attack after one or two drinks, the heart suffers less injury from a heart attack than people who say they didn’t have a drink. So mechanistically, we know that a moderate alcohol consumption upregulates some enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase. It also causes an aldehyde dehydrogenase and extends the biological half-life of nitric oxide. 

That’s moderate and it’s called ethanol preconditioning. Again, there’s a very narrow opportunity there to do that. So you can quickly overdo it and then you overburden the liver. You upregulate p450 enzymes and it leads to a number of problems. But moderate alcohol consumption is actually cardioprotective.

[01:38:22] Ashley James: You have those two glasses of wine and then have a heart attack. Can’t you have two glasses of wine yesterday and have a heart attack right? Are you saying it’s just after moderate alcohol consumption?

[01:38:38] Dr. Nathan Bryan: That’s right. 

[01:38:40] Ashley James: Everyone’s walking around with a glass of wine like I’m going to sip just in case, moderately protective of my heart. What’s better is eating super clean, super healthy, and getting some good nitric oxide. So let’s prevent damage to our heart by preventing heart disease in the first place. It’s been so much fun having you on the show. I’m really excited to dive in and also you have this great book on your website. So when listeners go to your websites, it’s very easy, it’s very clean and not cluttered. It’s n1o1.com. There’s the cool skincare stuff. There are the little lozenges and then there’s your book. So very simple. To rapid up, tell us about your book. What would we get into your book more than what we got today in this great interview? What more would we get if we got your book? Should we even get your book? Is your book is something we should dive into? 

[01:39:36] Dr. Nathan Bryan: I mean, this is in rapid-fire and this is 30 years of research and distilled down into 90 minutes. Most people learn through repetition. So the book is called Functional Nitric Oxide Nutrition. It basically distills down a very complex, complicated science into a story that’s easily digested and easily understood. The plan and digestive. It’s how you can use diet and lifestyle to restore your nitric oxide production. It’s an easy read. It takes about an hour and 15,20 minutes, depending on how fast a reader you are. It’s a good reference because you can go back and mark pages then over time, this is all going to make sense. So the point is simple strategies. Start to see changes in your own health and wellness. 

[01:40:32] Ashley James: Yes. I’m seeing nitric oxide now—you’re like Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. You’re way ahead of your time. That song is like he’s way ahead of his time. These are early pioneering stages and think back to 100 years ago when they discover something about health. It’s like– oh my gosh, there’s a single vitamin C. It’s amazing. We just discovered this but today, we take it for granted. We take vitamins for granted when they were first discover to prevent scurvy and all these other diseases. It’s amazing. Vitamin C, it’s revolutionary.

We take it for granted, but 100 years from now, everyone’s going to be like– yes, don’t get your nitric oxide check, what’s wrong with you? You’re completely low nitric oxide. Like– oh, you’re low in vitamin C, get some even though this is not very new to us. So 100 years from now, no doubt, we need nitric oxide. This is something your lozenges are going to be on every shelf. It’s going to be very needed and also common. Right now, it’s not common because it’s just the only groundbreaking field that’s growing. I’m so excited to see the body of work as a science dive deeper into understanding human physiology and how to support the body in reversing and preventing disease. 

We can do so much of it from diet lifestyle, but also understanding their diet is compromised. It doesn’t mean that they give up and go to McDonald’s. Our diet is compromised because even no matter how healthy you eat, our farming practices over 100 years have messed up our food. So if you can grow your own food, it’s great. If you can make a relationship with a farmer and that grows really clean, healthy, and re-mineralizes the soil and uses a nitrogen-based fertilizer. It’s awesome. You can eat that food too. 

Check out the website of Dr. Nathan Bryan, which is n1o1.com. Use the coupon code LTH to get the awesome stuff. I’m going to share my results as I said and as I go forward using your stuff. Check out the book. I love the idea of real repetition, taking your 30 years of work and humility down to something that we can understand and absorb. And then take that to heart because this is the root. This is something so important. I don’t want to overlook that if we can increase nitric oxide to healthy levels. We can have a healthy immune system, cardiovascular system, mitochondria, and healthy signaling in the body, and the list went on and on. So you guys are still discovering more benefits to it as well. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[01:43:30] Dr. Nathan Bryan: No, I think just to touch on what you said, we’re way ahead of our time. Nitric oxide is today where fish oil was 30 years ago. And now official is ubiquitous. Everybody knows. Most people supplement with it. But now, the science is very clear that your body cannot and will not heal without nitric oxide. So we have to start employing strategies and understand what are we doing on a daily basis that’s disrupting our body’s ability to produce nitric oxide. So we have to stop that and start doing the clinically proven things to promote it. I will share that I got an educational website. I’m not a big promoter of products and more on providing education and awareness. So you and your listeners can make informed decisions. So I’ve got an educational website called drnathansbryan.com. There’s a six-minute video on there. I do a monthly blog. I try to provide some timely and practical tips that people can employ and hopefully, you can learn something. You can follow me on Instagram, Dr. Nathan S Bryan.com or LinkedIn.

[01:44:40] Ashley James: Love it. And of course, the links to everything you just mentioned will be in the show notes of today’s podcast, learntruehealth.com or the description wherever you’re listening from. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Please come back on the show when you have more breakthroughs. We’d love to be updated as you continue to innovate and dive into this. When your drug is full, all the testing is done, all these studies have been completed and it’s now approved for FDA use. I’d love to also hear more stories about that. 

Again, I’m not a fan of drugs, but I’m a big fan of drugs that will save someone’s life. I’d rather be on a drug alive. So if we can have saved your life with a drug, let’s do everything we can to get your healthy again. Just do everything to get you healthy, so you don’t need the drug. But I’m so glad that emergency medicine is available to us. It shouldn’t be the only medicine we go. We don’t want to wait until we get sick and then go to the emergency room. So let’s do everything we can to prevent never having to go there in the first place. But still, when your drug is totally approved, in, and available in ERs. I’d love to have you back on the show to hear more about the studies, the success, and the results. Of course, with anything that you’re innovating around this, please come back. We’d love to hear more. 

[01:45:57] Dr. Nathan Bryan: Thank you so much. 

[01:45:59] Ashley James: I hope you had a fantastic time listening to today’s interview. Wasn’t that mind-blowing? I look forward to the next few interviews because I have some more mind-blowing fantastic interviews in the pipeline. I want to make sure you know to go to Dr. Nathan Bryan’s website and use the coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health for the amazing discount he’s giving all the listeners. You can go there by going to n1o1.com. Look for the show notes of today’s podcast learntruhealth.com to get all of the details of all the links for Dr. Nathan Bryan. Please come join the Facebook group if you haven’t already. It’s a very supportive group. We’ve got thousands of listeners there who love asking questions, answering them, and sharing their information, experiences, and testimonials. You can use the search function in the Facebook group. We’ve had the Facebook group for years. You can use the search function and dig through and read so many resources. There are so many wonderful resources in the Facebook group. And you might not know this, but you can go to learntruehealth.com, my website and use the search function there as well. So we’re coming up on 500 episodes soon. 

We have a lot of resources there. You can read the transcripts of the interviews as well. Should you want to peruse through other topics. We cover everything from emotional health, mental health, spiritual health, energetic health, and physical health. Even episodes on lifestyle and improving lifestyle, improving building healthy habits that stick and decreasing anxiety. All kinds of wonderful topics to explore in learntruehealth.com. 

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. My goal is to help as many people as possible to Learn True Health. Unfortunately, there is suffering that is not mandatory. Suffering is optional. That’s why I want to help people who are suffering as I suffered for so many years because the doctors I went to didn’t have the tools to help me. The doctors on my show, the holistic doctors, have the tools. They get the results. So I bring people on the show who get results that you don’t need to suffer anymore. So your mom, your dad, your sister, your friends, and your children don’t need to suffer anymore. 

And it’s a matter of finding the information, finding the right doctors, and applying it to lives. And that’s why I’m so grateful that you continue to share my podcasts with those you care about because together, we can help end suffering. So suffering shouldn’t be mandatory. It should be optional. There’s so much information out there. People have reversed Diabetes, reversed cancer, and reversed heart disease. People have reversed that they’ve suffered from reversed depression and addiction. They have done that. And we can help those you care about. We have the resources. So I suffered for so many years until I found holistic medicine and applied it to my life. I found the doctors that help and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. We can take this information to those we care about and help them heal and help them no longer suffer. So let’s end the suffering of those we care about. Continue to share this information. If you have any feedback and if you have any doctors you want me to interview that helped you, I love to hear from you. Come to join in the Facebook group and let me know. Come and feel free to email me at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much. Enjoy and have a wonderful rest of the day.

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Functional Nitric Oxide Nutrition: Dietary Strategies to Prevent and Treat Chronic Disease

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https://www.learntruehealth.com/proof-of-heaven-neurosurgeon-shares-his-journey-into-the-after-life-dr-eben-alexander

Highlights

• Understanding Gateway Valley on Dr. Eben’s life
• What is Earthworm’s eye view
• Interpretation of Near-Death Experience (NDE) and Shared Death Experience
• What is the Coherence Technique of HeartMath Institute
• What is Binaural Beat

NDE or near-death experience, for some people, is an uncomfortable topic to listen to or understand. Some testify to it being able to experience it first hand themselves, and our guests for today, Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell, will be sharing some more insights about NDE, as well as with The Mysteries of Consciousness, Death, Eternal Nature of the Soul, Afterlife, Heaven itself on their personal perspective.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. If you listen to the last episode with Dr. William Davis, Episode 476, we talked about a very specific strain of really healthy bacteria for the gut, Lactobacillus reuteri, and its many benefits. He shares how to culture it that you can get all the benefits, including a natural antidepressant, and helps even people with lifelong insomnia. He had shared that his sleep problems are lifelong sleep problems recovered after starting to eat the Lactobacillus reuteri. A yogurt that takes 36 hours at 100 degrees to culture and he uses cow dairy. Because my whole family is allergic to cow dairy, and we’re dairy-free. I’ve been experimenting with the different methods of using it. I made the most delicious batch and best batch yet. I was so excited that I wrote out the recipe and put it in the Facebook group. The Learn True Health Facebook group has the non-dairy recipe for making the Lactobacillus reuteri, which an antidepressant. It helps with sleep, increases joy, and stabilizes mood. It helped me tremendously, and I suffered from post-traumatic stress attacks in the last few months. Since eating the lactobacillus reuteri, I learned from Dr. William Davis and it all has in his book. You can listen to the last episode to get that information.

I want to tell you if you’re dairy-free and you’ve wanted to try his lactobacillus reuteri recipe, I’ve found a way to make it so delicious. I’ve tried with soy and it tastes really bad but it worked. I got all the benefits from it, but it didn’t taste great. Then I made it with coconut, which also did not taste great. I didn’t even want to eat it, but it still worked.

Then I tried to make water kefir which was unsuccessful, and I’m going to look into what I can do to see and I still want to try to make a drink out of it. Then I made it with organic raw cashews, and it was successful. So I laid out everything I did and put it in the Facebook group. Come and join the Learn True Health Facebook group. If you can’t find the post, just use the search function in the Facebook group and search for yogurt or the word cashew or Lactobacillus reuteri and you’ll find it there.

I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. It’s a bit different. Sometimes we do episodes that aren’t about physical health. We’ve done episodes about addiction, mental health, and emotional health and occasionally, we also cover spiritual health. I think it’s really important to have this attitude of no stone left unturned. Keep our minds so open that our brains would fall out. That was one of my favorite sayings. I learned about 14 years ago from a man I was listening to his podcast. He would cover topics so far out there, even for me. It helped me realize when we expand our minds and get into the learning state.

Being open to what we don’t know that doesn’t invalidate our belief system, like I’m learning different spiritual beliefs, wouldn’t make me less Christian. I still have very strong rooted beliefs in my spiritual practices, but understanding other people and other systems help me better understand the world. If we can gain a deeper foothold into our health by taking in new information and seeing the world through other eyes, that is a positive thing.

In today’s interview, we have a neurosurgeon who has documented a near-death experience. His brain was so sick that it could not have been performing the hallucinations or the visions that he was having. He had a one in a billion chance of surviving. He was so incredibly sick. All the doctors were amazed when he came back to life when his 10-year-old son was standing there begging him to come back to life and then he did. After seven days of being in a coma, his brain was absolutely beyond damaged. So the doctors were saying– well, okay, pull the plug, let’s let him go, that would be a humane thing to do.

He shares his story and his adventures since where he has been studying near-death experiences and sees that there are millions, in fact, documented near-death experiences that all have very similar qualities. So we can take that and look at our own lives and how we’re living our own life now. I think this is a positive message for humanity.

In today’s interview, if you don’t have any spiritual beliefs, it’s going to be beautiful. It won’t challenge anything, but for those who are strongly rooted in certain religions, it might not align with your religion, and that’s okay, too. This episode isn’t meant to change anyone’s beliefs about their religion. It complements because what it shows us, God is love. The infinite source of creation is there with a love that has been the documented experience of millions of people who’ve had near-death experiences, which is fascinating. We explore this topic. We also explore tools that can help people who are in anxiety and depression, feeling disconnected, and feel they’ve lost their purpose.

Please share this episode with those who would benefit from being uplifted. At the beginning of the interview, I shared that yesterday was the anniversary of my daughter’s birth and death. Last year, I faced that question– where’s my daughter? What happens to us when we pass and a close family member of mine is in their final moments of life right now? We’ve been facing hospice care for the last few months, helping with that. My husband’s been doing hospice care. Looking at our family and our life from that lens, this time on Earth is short. I hope that everyone listening comes away after listening to this interview feeling uplifted and feeling inspired to live the best life. No matter how long or short it is, leave a positive impact on the world, know that you’re loved, and focus on gratitude.

[00:07:45] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 477. I am so excited for today’s guests. We have on the show two amazing people, Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell. This is perfect in divine timing. As far as I’m concerned, this is the feedback I got after doing this podcast for six years now. The feedback I get from my listeners is that I’ve been searching for this information. I just looked in the last week and then boom– your podcast came up or I was having this problem with my child and the next episode that came out was the answer to my problem. Many times there’s this divine timing, although I typically have about ten or so interviews in the hopper to edit and publish. I feel guided when and what to publish. It’s like I’m told– okay, now’s the time for this topic that needs to be learned. Everyone needs to hear about this next topic. Its divine timing can be for the listeners, but sometimes the divine timing is for me too, because interviews will happen in my life right as I need them. I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me and where it was the problem I was going through. It just so happened that the interview was scheduled for the right time.

A very close family member of mine is in the final hours of their life right now. He’s been in hospice care for months and to have this interview be today even though we had to reschedule it, who was rescheduled to be at this moment. Where we’re all questioning what happens after we die? When we’re stuck with this realization, we’re not going to be here forever, which is motivating to live your life to the fullest now and do the best work we can while we’re here in this earthly realm. So what happens after we die? Do we just decompose? Is that it, or is there more?

What I love, our guests today have so much to share in this realm. The other piece of the divine timing for me in this particular interview was yesterday. I celebrated with my family the birth and death of my daughter. It was our first anniversary. This whole last year, I’ve been faced with grief and death and thinking about where we go when we die. Where’s my daughter? She’s not here. Where is she? Is there an afterlife? I’ve always had the knowledge of believing I was raised and I was Christian. I’ve had a very strong feeling that I’ve felt the presence of God with me. But not everyone hasn’t had that experience in their life.

To come from a scientific standpoint and in scientific observation, it’s very helpful to get a different perspective. I think today it’s going to be really exciting for everyone and this is something that we all have two things in common. We’re all born and we’re all going to die. That’s like if we can just sit around and go. It doesn’t matter where we were born, who we were born to. We all have these two things in common. There are a few more things in common like we all need to breathe and drink water. We start to see that we have a lot of common ground, but the fact is, we’re all faced with this sense of our own mortality and questions about what happens to the afterlife.

Welcome to the show, guys. I’m really excited to have you here today.

[00:11:45] Dr. Eben Alexander: Ashley, thank you so much for having us on. It’s great to be here.

[00:11:49] Karen Newell: Yes. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

[00:11:51] Ashley James: Absolutely. Dr. Alexander, your first book, I believe, was Proof of Heaven, then you wrote the Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe, of course with Karen. Could you both share what happened and what led you to this point you were authoring these books? I know there are some pretty big stories you have to share.

[00:12:23] Dr. Eben Alexander: Well, of course, it all started with the experience I had back in November of 2008. At that time, I was a 54-year-old neurosurgeon. I’d spent 15 years teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School thought I had some idea of how the brain, mind, and consciousness work. Then I had this extraordinary experience. It was one that absolutely should have killed me, severe gram-negative bacteria, meningoencephalitis. So I go into all the medical details in the book, Proof of Heaven.

Luckily, there’s also a medical case report published ten years after my coma by three doctors not involved in my care. Who went a lot further than I did in assessing my medical records, analyzing them, and making two major conclusions. One is that my brain was documented to be way too ill to have supported any dream or hallucination that was not possible given the extent of my illness. The other thing was that I spent a week in a coma due to this severe and very rare and adults of bacterium, Indigo encephalitis.

My doctors had estimated early in the week, and I had a 10% chance of survival. By the end of the week, only a 2% chance with no chance of recovery. That’s why on that Sunday morning, day seven of coma, they recommended just stopping the antibiotics and letting nature take its course. But, of course, that’s when I came back to this world. But the point that the case report doctors were making is that my recovery was miraculous. The medical peer reviewers at the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases published it. The case report in September 2018 challenged the doctors who wrote it and said, how do you explain this? This case is absurd. This kind of patient doesn’t end up making a full recovery.

That’s when they said, well, because he had a near-death experience, he was gifted with this miraculous recovery. And the peer-reviewing medical scientists said, okay, that’s good enough for us, and they published it. The reason why the doctors who wrote the case report knew of other cases, for example, Anita Moorjani, who had advanced stage four lymphoma, a profound near-death experience, and then she came back from all that and cured cancer. Likewise, Mary C. Neal, an orthopedic surgeon, had an over 30-minute warm water drowning and then recovered from that completely. So anyway, that’s the main point for all of us because in Learning True Health, truly, the power of this kind of mind over matter healing here even goes far beyond the placebo effect is something available to all of us. And that’s one of the main reasons I’ve shared my story.

[00:15:07] Ashley James: That’s so beautiful. We now understand your background. Karen, where do you come into play with all this?

[00:15:16] Karen Newell: Well, I met Eben about three years after his coma and this is before any of his books had come out. We were at a workshop learning how to use sound to get into expanded states of consciousness and I heard that he had a near-death experience. I’ve met others who’d had near-death experiences. Just to start a conversation, since I didn’t know his story, I went right to the heart of the matter. I said, what was the big lesson you learned? What was the big thing you came back with? Because near-death experiencers always come back with some usually deep personal lesson.

He looked at me and said that the brain doesn’t create consciousness, and I was confused. I said, well, why would anyone think that it does. When we met, Eben came from this very materialist background where he thought it was birth to death and nothing more. So the physical world is all that exists, and everything else is just an illusion. I was coming from the opposite like you described when I was young. I just had this knowing many of us do, and we have this knowing that we’ve been here before. This isn’t just the beginning, and we may come back again. Certainly, this idea of a soul to me was very certain in my mind, and it wasn’t through any specific religious teachings.

Although, like you, I was raised Christian, it just came from my own kind of inner understanding. When Eben said the brain doesn’t create consciousness, I never thought the brain created consciousness. I thought that consciousness was what we are, or a soul consciousness, energy, spirit. That’s where we realized we were coming from opposite ends of the spectrum and Eben had just learned this profound lesson through his direct personal experience. That’s what intrigued him and I was taken aback when he said the most profound lesson he learned had to do with science. To him, this evidence could end the entire worldview belief system of reductive materialism. So I asked him, and I said, didn’t you experience love? What about the love? Wouldn’t that maybe be a more profound personal lesson? And he said, well, yes, I definitely experienced that love, but you can’t bring that back here.

It’s so intense and overwhelming on Earth. It’s not possible to experience that kind of love. So I looked at him again, a little confused. And I said, well, I’ve experienced that love without a near-death experience through spiritual, meditative experiences that I cultivated intentionally. I had experienced the love that many of these near-death experiencers talk about. That’s what intrigued Eben and he said–Oh, my gosh, and so you can tell just from that information, how many areas we had to discuss in order to find that common ground that we felt when we met?

[00:18:24] Ashley James: Can you share any details you remember from your near-death experience?

[00:18:30] Dr. Eben Alexander: Yes, there’s a tremendous amount to the story, but just too abbreviated for this discussion. It’s important to point out that one of the atypical features of my near-death experience was that I was amnesic and had no memory of Eben Alexander’s life. I had no words, no language, no knowledge of Earth as the universe, and it really was an empty slate. So I realized in the months after my coma that was absolutely necessary for me to learn some of the deeper lessons of the journey. It had to have some of those atypical features for me to avoid rejecting it out of hand is impossible to make sense of. Then the journey itself and this amnesic state started in what I call the earthworm’s eye view, a very primitive course, a kind of unresponsive realm. It was like being in dirty jello. So there came this spinning malady of light that opened like a portal and led up into this rich, ultra-real Gateway Valley, where I found myself next.

The Gateway Valley would be the kind of realm where all of us would reunite with our higher souls, with souls of departed loved ones, go through life reviews, and then make plans for the next incarnations. All that kind of thing. But in my world in this Gateway Valley, I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There were millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling and vast formations. There was an incredibly beautiful landscape down below us. That was a meadow surrounded by forests with waterfalls and the crystal blue pools, thousands of beings dancing. They were all dressed in very simple but very colorful garb.

All of the festivities I witnessed there, including all the rich plant life with no signs of death or decay, were being fueled. Because up above are these floating orbs of angelic choirs emanating chants and anthems and hymns that were just thundering through my awareness and completely enlivened that entire scene. That’s when I recognized that I wasn’t alone on the butterfly wing.

A beautiful spiritual guide was a young woman with sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, a broad forehead, and a broad smile. She never said a word. She didn’t have to. Her deep emotional truth came straight into my awareness, telepathically and emotionally. That message, I think, was the central message I was to bring back to this world through all fellow beings. You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You’re deeply cared for. I can’t tell you how refreshing and reassuring that was at that time.

At that point, I was aware of all of the lower four-dimensional space-time, this material world collapsing down all of that spiritual realm of the Gateway Valley, including a different ordering of causality, then I call deep time. That’s what allows for things like life reviews, which are not just remembering events of your life but reliving them in a detailed fashion.

I witnessed all that stuff collapsing as the angelic choirs provided yet another musical portal to higher and higher levels. That portal led me up into what I call the core. The core was a complete resolution of all dualities and kinds of paradoxes of this existence, into that oneness with the Divine. An infinitely loving healing force that God forces that so many have encountered.

Over thousands of years, I would say that those encounters are the basis of all of our great religions, from prophets and mystics. I’ve realized that even though when I came back to this world, people who’ve read Proof of Heaven will realize, I called that deity alm. Because that was the sound, I heard the resonance in this infinity and eternity. That’s what I brought back and I realized that it’s a waste of time to say whether this is God or Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it. So there’s some profound agreement about the love, compassion, mercy, and acceptance of that infinitely loving source of our very conscious awareness. That’s what I realized in this core realm.

I was told there would teach you many things, but you’re not here to stay. You’ll be going back. But, of course, all of those mini-lessons about reincarnation, the eternity of the soul about the fact that we’re sharing one mind. All of that was presented to me in this powerful passion. But then I would tumble back down to that earthworm eye view. That’s what I came to realize by remembering the musical notes. This melody would conjure up that light portal back into the Gateway Valley, and I always experienced that same beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing and different lessons that would happen in that Gateway Valley. But always, I would ascend back up through the angelic light portal into the core realms, that oneness with the Divine.

There finally came a time when they weren’t kidding, and I could no longer conjure up the musical notes of the melody to bring me that passageway up out of the earth worm’s eye view. To say I was sad at that point would be an understatement. I also realized a trust in the universe at that point. That’s also when I witnessed six faces that turned out to be what are called vertical time anchors. Five of them were physically present in the ICU room for the last 24 hours, and I was in a coma. One of them was Susan Ranches, a family friend I’d first met back in the early 1970s in freshman college English class. So many decades later, my family knew that she had done channeling work with coma patients, which helped some of them return to life. My family asked her to intervene. She channeled to me from 120 miles away. Her presence was clear to me as the physically present people in the ICU room.

I had first-hand experience of the absolute reality of channeling, which I would have denied to even existed before my coma. But, of course, I’ve grown a lot from this coma, and at any rate, it was at that point that the six-face that I saw were the ones that brought me back to this world. That was the face of a 10-year-old boy, who was my son Bond. Even though I said, my amnesia was still very active. I had no idea who this being was. But it was on day seven of coma.

Sunday morning, the doctors had just till the family conference, saying it was time to withdraw medical care and let me go. When Bond overheard that, even though they protected him from the worst news during the week, he ran down the hallway. I was lying there on my ventilator as I had been for the last seven days. He pulled up my eyelids, and I promise you, I did not see him with the eyes. I didn’t hear him with my ears. But he was pleading with me– Daddy, you’re going to be okay as if somehow that would make it. And now, all of a sudden, deep in the spiritual realms, I had assumed that this whole adventure could continue or cease. It didn’t matter. All of a sudden, I realized there was another soul involved. I had a tremendous responsibility to him. I did not understand his words, but I could sense that I knew I had to come back to this world from his pleading.

When I did, within the next few hours, opening my eyes, struggled, and fought the ventilator. That’s when the doctor pulled the breathing tube out. To their shock, I was coming back and saying words and showing some neurologic signs of progress. Although I still didn’t recognize loved ones at the bedside, my mother, sisters, and sons, those memories came back very rapidly. As did language over hours and the next few days, all my semantic knowledge of cosmology, physics, and neuroscience came back over about two months.

During that time, of course, I was wrestling back and forth with how to interpret my experience. When I first tried to tell my doctors about it, they said we couldn’t even understand how you’re coming back to us. But you can forget about it because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. My first statement to my son, Eben the fourth, who was majoring in neuroscience at the time and came home two days after I got out of the hospital, I told him it was way too real to be real. That’s how I interpreted the experience in the context my doctors tell me the dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. But over the next weeks and months, going back to the hospital, talking about doctors, going through medical records, neurologic exams, scans, all of that. I realized that my brain was in no shape to harbor any dream or hallucination, much less the most extraordinary, detailed, memorable, and meaningful experience of my entire life. How did that happen when my brain was so demonstrably offline? That’s why the medical community takes my case so seriously. You find it probably mentioned, for example, in the recent bigelowinstitute.org contest concerning the best scientific evidence for survival of consciousness beyond permanent bodily death.

[00:27:32] Ashley James: This experience that you’ve had and other people have had, it’s not common. A lot of people who are in comas, not everyone has the experience you had. But some have the medication, and it was the coma, and it was brain damage, and just things are firing off weird. Someone could explain it like that, but this isn’t common. If that were the case, then everyone in a coma or with brain damage or an infection in their brain would have the same experience?

[00:28:16] Dr. Eben Alexander:  Well, this is the beauty of my case. The facts when you line them up from a medical perspective, as that case report does. They make it crystal clear that this brain could not have had any experience. There was no way for it to support a dream or hallucination because of the extensive damage to the neocortex. Then, of course, you’ve got the healing to explain. The healing completely defies medical expectations. There are no other cases of this kind of severe meningitis resulting in somebody who makes a full recovery. So that’s why this kind of exceptional case makes the point.

But to get back to your original statement, it turns out that NDE is quite common. Probably 15 to 20% of people with cardiac arrest have some elements of a true near-death experience. They’re insanely common when you start to look at all of it. So when you follow Gallup polls, that kind of information suggests 3 to 5% of people on Earth have had NDE. Four hundred million people or more have had NDE. Their commonality is far more striking than that they don’t happen to everyone.

[00:29:29] Ashley James: You call it a near-death experience. A friend of mine was pronounced legally dead and then came back to life and shared his experience with me of what we don’t know what to call heaven paradise. The Bible says we go to paradise first and heaven later. Wherever he was, he was clearly in the presence of God. He describes that tremendous love that is so intense, beautiful, and divine. He says it was like God is a son, that we’re all orbiting around his experience. His friend, whom he had met, had committed suicide and was distraught about that.

He met up with his friend, and his friend said that his guilt kept him from getting close to his love. It kept him like Pluto is like way out there orbiting but just not close enough, and that he was wrestling with the guilt of what he had done. And the hurt that he had caused his friends and family. So my friend ended up having a near-death experience again, saying that his friend had resolved it in the spiritual realm, had resolved and healed from it. Just these interesting experiences that people are having, and there are commonalities like everyone describes that love. Intense love is the sensation of being close to God and being close to our Creator. So that it is, it’s intense love.

Karen, you say that through your spiritual practices you have tapped into that and have experienced it. Do you teach this in the book Living in a Mindful Universe?

[00:31:26] Karen Newell: Somewhat, you can teach with your words but the experience of love must be generated as an experience. When we just talk about it, it doesn’t have the same sort of impact. Yes, I teach practices where people can start cultivating these kinds of experiences. I know for me, at first, it wasn’t easy. I grew up in a family where we were not demonstrative when it comes to our love. We weren’t saying I love you and all of that. We were a perfectly normal family. There wasn’t abuse going on or anything like that, but I wasn’t used to expressing love. As I got older, my parents had been divorced. I had a whole idea about how love is not necessarily always successful. I just was so curious, and eventually, when I started reading about it, I could only understand it intellectually, which is just not the same as the experience.

It was the work of HeartMath Institute that brought me to where I am now. That’s because they’ve been studying the heart for decades. They find that the heart emits an electromagnetic field. It expands and contracts around our body, and the brain also has one. The heart’s electromagnetic field is much, much bigger than the brain. The electric part is 60 times greater, and the magnetic part is 3000 times greater than the brain. So it expands and contracts around your body based on your emotional state.

Emotions like love, happiness, and joy will create a very large electromagnetic field, whereas emotions like grief, sadness, or anger might create a small electromagnetic field. What’s interesting is that this electromagnetic field seems to influence people around you. Whatever emotions are inside of you are the ones that are being radiated by your heart naturally. So I took this very seriously. I don’t want to have anything in my heart that might offend someone else. I was thinking mostly about my family and friends. I don’t want to affect them in a bad way.

I started to learn some of the HeartMath techniques, and they have one called Coherence Technique. It’s as simple as generating a feeling of gratitude in your heart, and it sounds simple. Let me generate a feeling of gratitude, and all I could do was generate thoughts of gratitude. I could think of things I was grateful for, but it didn’t change how I felt. I took the advice given and had to go over several different kinds of sessions where I had memories from my past. What made me feel joyful? What can I be grateful for? It’s going to be different for each of us. It was a memory of a stray dog my mom had taken in and turned out to be my childhood dog through college. She ended up having puppies underneath my bed just a short time after we adopted her, and for me, it was a magical moment. My mom probably thought it was a big mess, and I thought it was just beautiful, living, cute, little, lively creatures right there under my bed. And my dog trusted me to have them under my bed, not my brothers.

It was to memory, and from there, I remembered all the dogs I had ever known and loved. That connection with dogs and animals started to allow me to feel this flicker, this warm, glowing flicker in my heart. I thought— Oh my gosh, that’s it, and then it went away. So I had to go to a little practice. Eventually, when you’re able to generate these feelings of gratitude, you can have the intention to attract that love that exists from the source, from God, from the universe, whatever you want to say.

Once you’re able to generate it from within, it expands, and you attract this greater love. It is a framework of how it works, but that’s exactly how it worked for me. Everyone can learn how to do this, and we feel that love is just as overwhelming as your friend was driving. I can’t know if it’s the same as when in your near-death experience or feeling it may not be as intense. But wow, it’s certainly wonderful to feel. If I’m just feeling a fraction, five or 10% of what they’re feeling is worth it. So you feel this warm connection to something greater. You feel like you are always well in the universe that nothing can be wrong even if you’re in the middle of hardships, and all seems to make sense.

The love that I feel is our birthright when you think about the term making love. Ideally, we’re making love when a baby is created. I love how Eben puts it, and he calls them homes for souls. When you create a baby from the love between two individuals, you’re creating and making love. You’re creating a home for a soul to live in. I always think it wouldn’t be just an ideal world if that’s how every baby was created. But if not, we can still rediscover that love even if we’re not gifted with it throughout our lives.

[00:37:18] Ashley James: My husband had a similar experience growing up. Similar to that, there wasn’t a lot of demonstrative affection and love in his household. His dad just said to my husband in his 50s, just two months ago, said I love you for the first time. There’s a lot of emotional healing going on. In my life and my family’s life, just imagine being 50. So what is my husband,53? For the first time hearing, I love you, and his dad never said it to anyone. He didn’t see his dad give you a handshake, not a hug. These last few months, there’s been a lot of love and a lot of discovery of gratitude. So when our daughter was born and died, we turned to gratitude to focus on what we’re grateful for, or you’re focusing on what we don’t have.

A lot of people get wrapped up, especially in the material world. If only I had that Tesla. If only I had a house and only I had a million dollars. If only I had a better job. If only I had a better body or this or that. If only I had this carrot on a stick that we get wrapped up in. It’s the chasing of what we don’t have. I find it interesting to look at other religions or spiritual practices like Buddhism style or Zen. They say attachment creates suffering, and I would say attachment to what you don’t have to create suffering because the things I do have them attached to if I can stay focused on the gratitude around what I have. So what I have now, be grateful for what I have that makes me feel so much joy and thankfulness. That’s a prayer that I love to do. I take God if you don’t know what to pray for. It’s like we’re not asking Santa. It’s not like a Christmas list. I don’t want a pony. So when we’re praying, we could just be grateful. It could just be listing off everything you’re grateful for every day. Just thank You, God, for what you’ve given me. Thank You for what I have. Thank You for the help I do have.

[00:40:00] Karen Newell: You bring up an interesting point that we often look for objects outside of us to meet our needs. One way that we like to teach intention. If you want to create something in your life, it’s not to think– oh, that Cadillac or Tesla, whatever it is. But it’s what is the feeling you would have when you have that thing. Instead, focus on the feeling you’d like to feel. Generate that feeling. Just imagine you already have that thing that you want. What does it feel like?

When you generate that feeling instead of a thought of a particular thing you want, somehow the universe seems to know how to provide you with whatever will continue for that feeling to go on. Sometimes we don’t know if that Tesla may not be the thing that makes us feel that way. Maybe it’s a vacation to South Africa. Who knows? Sometimes, when we get an attachment to things can be so damaging because they may, even once we finally get them, not satisfy us in the way we had hoped. So it’s just a different way.

[00:41:05] Dr. Eben Alexander: I just pointed out one of the deepest lessons from a near-death experience. I think most near-death experiencers would agree that the true currency of a soul in terms of successfully navigating and growing through this life is all about relationships. You’ve been able to share love and kindness and compassion and mercy with others. The more successfully you can harvest the love of the universe for all that is. This focus on material things definitely falls away after a near-death experience because we learn truly. It’s all about our relationships. The more we can foster that sense of love and kindness and help others, our lives will be better.

[00:41:52] Ashley James:  I did an interview a few years ago with a man traveling the world and studying depression and addiction. He talked about a study where they looked at cultures with the most material possessions and cultures with the least—looking at the level of satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy in one’s life. What I found fascinating is that you think the child with the most toys would be the happiest, and it’s the opposite of the children in South America who have one possession, and that’s a soccer ball, are the happiest. They’re far happier. These families with far less are far happier, more satisfied, feel more grateful, and have less depression than those in North America who have all the possessions we could ever want because they have the one soccer ball.

These kids have one soccer ball, and they get like 15, 20, and 30 friends together to play. It’s the relationships they have. In Latin America, the focus is strongly on the family. Everyone has cousins and aunts and uncles in the family structure, and relationships are important. More important than possessions. In America, culturally, it looks like we value possessions more than relationships. So it’s interesting to shift what we value.

[00:43:35] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say the whole world of addiction and alcoholism is all about this notion of trying to fill this hole with material goods, material stuff, and substances that give you certain feelings. And what you realize in that addiction and alcoholism were you’re trying to fill a spiritual hole with material stuff. The only way to fill a spiritual hole is a spiritual matter. So growth of [inaudible 00:44:03] soul and a deeper understanding of one’s relationship. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the ego because the ego-mind, that little voice in our head, is not our ally in this journey.

The ego would rather see a toe’s dead and see itself dead that’s why many therapists do a ritual sacrifice. The ego allows it to be reborn in a much healthier kind of higher soul form, and not one so self-centered because that ego can lead us into tremendous toxicity, trying to satisfy its needs. The more we come to recognize this kind of bigger picture of who we are, it’s all about relationships, and it’s all about love and sharing kindness and compassion and mercy with others. The more satisfied we are with our lot in life. That’s done with gratitude, and forgiveness gives us tremendous tools to overcome most of the apparent hardships that human beings face.

[00:45:48] Ashley James: In the early days after your coma, did you begin to look at other examples? Can you share some other stories that struck you that made you realize others have had the same experience? You did mention two or three people shared the stories of what surprised you as you were in the early days you were doing your research and understanding that what you had was a visit to heaven.

[00:45:32] Dr. Eben Alexander: One of the people common things to encounter in near-death experience or just the dying experience in hospice care, in terminal patient care. What are you encountering in the soul of the departed loved one? In fact, for me, that means you’ve got an authentic experience right there. But, of course, the [inaudible 00:45:52]coma has said that the hallucinations you’re encountering as a whole of a departed loved one. I now know those are very real encounters; in fact, that’s imprimatur proving it to be real. Many other features of NDEs are quite common. The notion of going from darkness into light is sometimes described through a tunnel. Certainly, encountering that infinitely loving and healing God force is something that many NDEs involve. They also can involve encountering religious figures, although that’s much less common. For example, encountering Jesus Christ or Muhammad or something like that is not very common. Certainly, the encounters with the souls of departed loved ones can be very evidential to help someone realize that it’s all about relationships and that our souls do not die.

The biggest gift to me in this whole experience of sharing my story publicly is that thousands of people share their experiences with me. That kind of thing has proven the reality of this. We shared the resonance and overlap of these stories in the second book, The Map of Heaven. In our third book, Living in Mindful Universe, we go the distance to make this argument that science and spirituality are coming together. So the only way for them to move forward is by this kind of shared acknowledgment of rehab of spiritual reality. So that is one where our minds are all connected. That’s one of the deepest pieces of evidence for the reality of this afterlife, and all that is this notion of one mind.

I would say that the game has just changed dramatically in the last year about this question of an afterlife. Robert Bigelow, an aerospace engineer in Las Vegas, put up $1.8 million in prize money and challenged scientists who study this question– what is the best evidence for survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death? He received over 200 essays written by groups studying the question of the afterlife for more than five years from a scientific perspective. The 29 winning essays are available to the public for free right now, at bigelowinstitute.org.

If you go and read the first place essay by Jeffrey Mishlove, who spent more than half a century studying this evidence, you’ll realize, of course, there’s an afterlife. We don’t understand how it works yet. Certainly not going to fit into you all kinds of religious or scientific wishes of the day. The more we investigate and the more we find out its reality, not only in the afterlife realm. Many of those essays also discuss the scientific evidence for reincarnation.

Reincarnation was never anything I considered as part of reality before my coma. My coma journey showed me very clearly that our souls come back again and again. In this process of continued refinement, but given the importance of relationships, you never have to worry that a loved one who is reincarnated before they would be available to you at your own passage. Some people worry a lot about that. That’s where that whole notion of deep time and a different causal ordering from this spiritual perspective is so important to get. So if you go to bigelowinstitute.org and start reading those essays, you’ll find a tremendous amount of evidence. Reading those essays, no rational person will ever doubt the reality of the afterlife and reincarnation again.

It just means we need a much bigger theater of operations to understand and explain the brain-mind relationships and the nature of reality that we seem to witness as human beings.

[00:49:49] Ashley James:  In science, because of your latest book, you talk about how science is now catching up to the spiritual in understanding it. Is there anything from your book scientifically that helps us better understand the spiritual realm or the afterlife?

[00:50:12] Dr. Eben Alexander: Yes, we go into great detail in the book Living in a Mindful Universe to do two major things. One is to make the scientific case for the primacy of consciousness of philosophical opposition, known as objective idealism. I think the whole world of quantum physics has been poised to acknowledge that reality for a long time. And the founding fathers of the field sifted the primacy of consciousness and the oneness of mind. In fact, in the second place winning essay Dr. Pim Van Lommel wrote a beautiful scientific explanation based on NDEs that he studied for over decades as a cardiologist.

Towards the end of this essay, he makes the argument for the one mind. We’re all sharing this one consciousness of [inaudible 00:51:02] to top-down calls of principles of the universe. He lists four scientific resources for this one-mind idea. One is the book, One Mind, by our friend and colleague, Dr. Larry Dossey, which came out in 2013. A wonderful expert vision of this oneness of mind between human beings that we share with other life forms, too—a very important concept.

He also mentioned the book Spiritual Science by Steve Taylor. He mentioned a Beautiful Paper by Bernardo Kastrup. I think it’s in the Journal of Consciousness studies entitled The Universe in Consciousness. Then he lists our book Living in a Mindful Universe as the fourth major scientific resource of the one mind. I would add Pim Van Lommel’s book, Consciousness Beyond Life. I think those five resources together will give people a full-blown scientific view of this concept of the one mind and how top-down causality from the mental air of the universe explains a tremendous amount of quantum physics about the hard problem of consciousness. So this is an impossible problem for materialism to try and conjure up a way for phenomenal experience to emerge from any arrangement of physical matter like the substance in the brain.

We also go into the apparent unity of consciousness, known as the binding problem in the philosophy of mind. Especially in this discussion of the consilience of supporting the one mind hypothesis for the primordial mind hypothesis, as we call it in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe. All the evidence for nonlocal consciousness comes out of the world of parapsychology. So this is the kind of evidence that I would have dismissed and debunked before my coma out of pure willful ignorance.

I know now that’s a pretty foolish position to take the evidence for things like telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, presentiment, psychokinesis, distance healing, power of prayer, near-death experiences, shared death experiences. These are identical in quality to near-death that happened in very healthy people and past life memories and children suggestive of reincarnation.

You go to uvadops.org— University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies. For more than six decades, they’ve accumulated over 2500 cases of past life memories in children, 1700 plus of those cases have been quoted solved. That is the research. They identify the person described as living the previous life of that described by that child. All this evidence is what we cover in Living in a Mindful Universe. It takes a store to a very profound consilience and consolidation of scientific evidence supporting the notion of the one mind. Our souls come back and again in this refinement process towards oneness with the Divine.

[00:54:04] Ashley James: Karen, as you wrote this book with Eben, the Living in a Mindful Universe, I always like to talk to authors because although they are the experts of their book, they’re also the students. To get into that position of learning while you’re researching for your book, I love what unfolds for authors. What unfolded that surprised you the most as you guys wrote this book together?

[00:54:36] Karen Newell:  What unfolded surprised me? Eben is very scientific, as you can hear from how he explains everything. Our goal was to make it accessible to the non-scientific mind while also ensuring that these science-minded people would not be thinking– Oh, you took shortcuts and all of that. I thought science was not something that was my forte and one of the exercises we went through in the book is when Eben did write with a very scientific passion. So I had to understand that goal, and that’s how it would stay in the book.

I learned a lot about quantum physics and the experiments in quantum physics, the double-slit experiment. Everyone always talks about the difference etween a photon and a wave. None of that had been of any interest to me, and I had to learn that. So in the process of doing it, I learned how to describe it in ways that laypeople would understand. That was interesting, a topic that I had avoided for my whole life. Then, suddenly, I was helping to try to explain it so that other people could understand it.

That was a really interesting few months, and we still go through that now. Not as much because I’ve learned so much, but when he’s trying to explain a concept, if I don’t get it, the burden is on him to make sure that I do. That’s been an interesting exercise to bring together the hardcore heavy science into a more accessible format. So that people who are more spirit-minded can access it and understand why it matters in our daily lives. Because of all of these things we can talk about, the philosophers pontificate about the reality of our universe, but when it comes down to it, it’s the experience. Individual people are walking around in this world. So that’s what matters. So that’s what we brought together. For me, that challenge was bringing science in.

[00:57:02] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would simply add that was a huge part of our effort. The book was not just to explain these things from a scientific perspective. But to offer people tools to explore their own life and consciousness because I had come to realize within two years in a coma if I had any hope of understanding the deeper nature of my journey. I had a much more active cultivating, navigating, and exploring my consciousness, which I ended up doing through meditation.

In Living in a Mindful Universe, we also talk about Karen’s work. She’s the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, and that’s a form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment that I use an hour to a day and have been doing for the last ten plus years. In my own personal exploration, we wanted to share a personal experience with people. The book also has some indicators and information to help people in their own exploration of consciousness.

[00:58:00] Ashley James: I love hearing that a neurosurgeon likes the binaural beats music and uses it. So this is exciting because I’ve loved listening to these different melodies with different wavelengths, and I’ve always found it really helpful. I found this one on YouTube that’s like—come, focus and study for ADHD people, and I put that on. I could focus for like an hour while I was listening to it. It’s just beautiful melodies going back and forth. It helps me focus that I always laugh because it’s like for ADHD people to focus and study. I juggle so many things, I have a kid at homeschool, taking care of everyone and everything in my life, and then I’ve got the podcast. I’m constantly being interrupted by all these other things. So I think it’s my environment that makes me ADHD.

[00:59:04] Karen Newell:  You’re not alone. It’s not just you don’t have to label it as ADHD. We all can use the tools to help us get into a better state of focus you mentioned in these YouTube videos. We create at sacredacoustics.com. We create the same type of recordings. Just to caution on YouTube, the audio quality can only be so high when you merry it with a video. You’re not getting the best quality, the best potential to deliver binaural beats. You might want to check out sacredacoustics.com.

We have a free download that you can get by entering your email address. We also have something called the whole mind bundle, and it includes recordings that deliver Delta, Theta, and Alpha signals. Those Alpha signals that you’re probably listening to help you get into that more focused state. Theta signals will help you go a little deeper into a more meditative state, and Delta signals will help you sleep. So many, many people listen to these recordings to help them sleep.

So this whole mind bundle it’s available at sacredacoustics.com. We use that in a pilot study. A psychiatrist in New York City applied them in her psychiatric practice. She prescribed this set of recordings that people can sometimes listen to flexibly while doing other activities, just like you said. Also, there are shorter recordings that people can use for like 20 minutes a day to help them establish a regular meditative practice.

What she found with Dr. Anna Yusim and then published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in February 2020 was that a 26% reduction in anxiety occurred. People were able to sleep better, focus better, and reduce their anxiety. The control group, the patients in the same practice, did not listen to the recordings but only had regular therapy. Over the same period of about two weeks, they saw a 7% reduction in anxiety. So 26 versus 7% just by adding listening to these recordings.

Even if you’re listening to them to help you focus, they could potentially help to reduce your anxiety. One obvious way is if you’re able to focus and get your work done, you’re not as anxious about getting everything finished. Do they seem to play another role in really helping to relax the brain? Beta is the state we’re in when we’re walking around, talking, and anxious, and that’s a higher state. Binaural Beats are designed to deliver these lower states of awareness by delivering one signal to one year. A slightly different signal to the other ear. The difference between those two frequencies gives you the brainwave state we’re trying to deliver.

So Delta, the border between delta and theta, is right at four hertz. So many of our audio recordings deliver a four-hertz signal that borders between awakening asleep. So this allows you to support the body and profound relaxation, but the mind doesn’t fall asleep. It’s still aware. That’s the meditative space, the hypnagogic state where we can start to release all the emotional traumas, focus on feelings that we want to manifest in our lives, ask questions about problems that we might be having, and get some answers. We can also use that space to do lucid dreaming kind of activities.

It’s also possible to connect with your departed loved ones. Those who have passed from this world are often trying to contact and stay connected to people who are still here living on Earth in their human bodies. So when we are more open to that, when we can get into a relaxed state, we might more readily notice this attention they’re trying to give us.

There are many applications that people use these recordings for, not just focus. Certainly, the focus is one of those primary tasks that we all need help with during the day. Certainly, these days, anxiety, addiction, all of that is just running rampant. So any kind of tool that people can use at the beginning of COVID, that’s right when this study came out. Actually, right when it was published. I wanted to make these recordings available to others right when we entered into these lockdowns when people were panicking and so nervous and upset about what was going on.

I drastically reduced the price of these recordings to $19 for a whole set of nine recordings and a PDF guide that teaches you how to use that. I also made a free option because many people are in financial uncertainty. I didn’t want there to be any barrier at all. So many people have taken us up on that offer, and I feel gratitude towards them because I understand we are all part of one mind or one consciousness and one heart. So I feel that each of us takes the time to quiet the mind, release emotional traumas, focus on that essence of who we truly are, and find that meaning and purpose in our lives. As each person does that, I am so grateful because that contributes to the whole. So this is what I feel every one of us can do to contribute to the whole. We’re not only helping ourselves, but we’re helping everyone else by bringing our health into balance.

[01:05:08] Ashley James: I love it, and thank you so much for making that free for those in financial hardships. I am so grateful for people who are helping people. That experience of being we are all connected, I said that at the beginning. We’re all born, we all die, we have a lot in common, and if we could take on this idea that we’re all part of these raw pieces of the puzzle. I read something once God loves you so much. You’re one of his children. He also loves you so much that he is like your worst enemy. The person that you hate so much. He loves them just as much, and it’s like being a parent with two fighting kids.

If you can look at that person who you despise, maybe because of where they come from, or their background or what they believe in, their different political beliefs or different religious beliefs, or they’re just on the opposite spectrum of one of your values or one of your beliefs. You look at them, and you can’t understand them. You don’t like them as an entire group of people because they’re on the opposite part of the belief system than you. If you can look at those people and get that even though on this plane of existence at this very moment in the mindset and you guys can’t see eye to eye. You might not like each other because of your beliefs and values and whatever it is.

If you can both get that you were born into a family, you all have many things in common. That God loves you. That you are loved, showered with love and gratitude, and can transmute even your worst enemy in your mind. When you realize that this person, as much as you don’t like them or because of their beliefs, you guys have so much more in common than you think. If we could all live that way, we could all look at every one. Imagine if all politicians could look across the other side and go; we have so much in common.

Why don’t we focus on what we have in common and the common good we want to do? Of course, it doesn’t sell headlines. The mainstream media wants to keep us in fear, keeps us like it’s clickbait. Life right now could be social media’s clickbait and everything that is causing turmoil. There have been studies done that prove that things on Facebook and Instagram are increasing suicide among youth. I think suicide is now the second leading cause of death in youth under the age of 24. Mental and emotional health that’s the true pandemic right now. If we look at how many people are on antidepressants and anxiety meds.

I love that you talked about what we’re missing in cultivating spiritual health when we cultivate spiritual health that helps us heal our mental and emotional health. I found a new church. I just love it and have been going several times a week. And that’s where I’ve been doing so much of my emotional healing and working through the post-traumatic stress that I’ve had over the last year. We’re worshiping and praising, and we have so much gratitude. Everyone is in a state of gratitude, and then the whole, there are hundreds of us, and we all feel what’s described as the Holy Spirit. We all feel a connection to God, and it is so intense and so beautiful. It just feels so real.

I understand what you said about how you can practice spiritual experiences, especially with gratitude that gets you in that state of love. I’d love for you guys to talk about– either one of you. What kind of tools could be helpful that you already have mentioned a few? Do you have any more tools that could be helpful for those who are suffering from grief, loss, depression, and anxiety which is something I feel that so many are suffering from right now?

[01:10:05] Karen Newell:  What is one of the very simple tools I often recommend to people is just to imagine that your breath is moving in and out of your heart. You can imagine your breath. A lot of meditative teachers will have you practice imagining what is coming in and out of your left toe. Something anywhere on your body it’s an exercise in moving your awareness. But when you imagine that it’s moving in and out of your heart, it’s filling up a bubble around your body, a little sphere. If you can imagine that your breath moves in and out of you in all directions, this really moves you out of your thinking mind. That’s where your distress is coming from. The heart does not have a linguistic center. Interesting Heart Math will tell you that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.

I feel like it’s collecting information out in the world and sending it up to the brain. Then the brain has to assign meaning to it and come up with words to describe it. We can escape those words, that little voice that maybe is telling us we’re not good enough or keeping us in a state of procrastination instead of productivity. Whatever it is, move your awareness to your heart. Imagine your breath is moving in and out of there. That’s a beautiful exercise that can help get people wrapped around it. I will tell you that some addiction doctors have used our free recordings, the alm recordings, right on patients when they’re in distress. They’ll come in, and they’ll be all strung out, and they can’t get them to come to have a conversation. So this doctor will pop the headphones. You have to use headphones to get the full power of these recordings. Put the headphones on the patients, and they just get calm right away. So lots and lots of tools related to the sound and just how you hold your awareness.

[01:12:14] Dr. Eben Alexander: The only other point I was making is a key starting point for people. Kind of new to this is in this kind of meditation, going within what you’re doing is acknowledging that this kind of mental air of the universe is something shared throughout the universe with great influence. The important step to take at the beginning of any such meditation is that one has to realize they are not to identify without running a stream of thoughts in their head. So many people think the running stream of thoughts in their heads is who they are. It’s their identity.

I’ll point out that it is your ego-mind, and that certainly serves some purpose in the general survival of biological systems on Earth. And yet we are far beyond the predator, prey, and dance that involves so much of biology. So that’s no longer humankind of preoccupation. My point is that we can discover that we’re much more than just our physical bodies. So we’re much more than just running a stream of thoughts.

In his book, The Untethered Soul, I love how Michael Singer calls running a stream of thoughts in your head the annoying roommate, and that’s a very important way to look at it because that’s not truly who we are. We can come to much greater discovery by cultivating the sense of connection across the veil with a unified mind with God-consciousness that has the highest and best good for all involved as its primary interest.

There’s something I would paraphrase from Einstein, and he said the true value of this whole depends on how much they’ve liberated themselves from the concept itself. That’s where this ego-mind, this voice in our head, can be so misleading. And Rene Descartes, a renowned French philosopher of hundreds of years ago, said, I think therefore I am. I wish he clarified it a little bit and said, I am aware of my thoughts, and therefore I exist.

That awareness of them, that’s the part that outlasts the death of the body and brain. That’s the part that actually expands when we die. That’s what near-death experiencers tell you: your awareness doesn’t shrink down to nothing as a materialist would postulate. Still, it expands when you’re liberated from the shackles of the physical brain and body. This is something we can all practice through meditation. Flipping these surly bonds of Earth in the material realm and the apparent here now and this kind of sense of self. We all have the freedom within meditation and centering prayer to escape from that kind of false imprisonment of the illusion of being isolated as an individual physical being. We’re much more than that, and that’s really one of the deepest lessons to start within this adventure is exploring that shared consciousness.

[01:15:20] Ashley James: Now, you lost your sense of self. You had mentioned that it’s like your ego wasn’t there, you didn’t know who you were, but that needed to happen so you would learn and accept what was going on? I’ve heard of near-death experiences where people didn’t know who they were, and they did see fellow members who had passed or met Jesus and knew who they were.

[01:10:50] Dr. Eben Alexander: Right.

[01:15:52] Ashley James: Is your experience uncommon that people don’t know who they are? Or are there some experiences people do and some don’t know? How can we better understand near-death experiences if this really happens when we die?

[01:16:15] Dr. Eben Alexander: I think the important thing to point out is that near-death experiences, as we said earlier, probably 400 million people around the world patterns are very common. And when you study them, you find a lot of commonalities, and you’re exactly right. Most people go into this with full memory of their lives. All this tells me is if my experience was incomplete, if I’m going to die, I would have gone on to that next level of going through the life review. Now it’s important to point out, though, that I did witness life reviews with a very powerful passion, even though I cannot have an Eben Alexander life review because of my amnesia.

The way I saw them, and these both occur in separate passages through the core realm, first was what I call the Flying Fish analogy, and that was basically where I experienced becoming flying fish. And when we’re down in the water, we are dumbed down. We didn’t have all the knowledge of our higher soul. We were buying into this material incarnation and that’s it. It gives a skin in the game. But then when I popped up out of the water into the air, as flying fish, I was in that space between lives and reunited with a higher soul and all that kind of thing.

Now, this next vision was even grander and happened on a separate passage through the core; it’s what I call the Indras Net Vision. That was this extraordinary higher dimensional network of interconnected threads, and the threads represented soul lines of an individual soul from multiple incarnations approaching this incredible enlightenment and oneness with the Divine. In that particular vision, that ultimate goal was reflected as this kind of golden center to this web network to which we were all kind of attached and working our way through these incarnations. The life review and reincarnation were very clearly presented to me in these visions. 

Now the important thing to stress is months after my coma, and this is something we explained in Living in a Mindful Universe. If I had scripted my NDE first and foremost, my father would be there. My doctor father was a world-renowned neurosurgeon. He was very important in my life. It passed over four years before my coma. And surprising to me, especially because I’ve never had NDE in the literature before after my NDE, at the advice of my older son majoring in neuroscience, who knew every time you revisit a memory, you change it. So he told me to write everything that I could remember from my NDE before I read anybody else’s NDE. That was important information. I wrote 20,000 words over six weeks or so. 

And then, I started reading the NDE literature and that’s when I was totally blown away by a lot of similarities. I was surprised by the absence of my father and we explained that especially in the third book, Living in Mind for Universe, how he appeared to me in meditation two and a half years after my coma. It made it very clear that if he had been apparent to me as he could, he could not be apparent to me in my NDE. Despite a one in ten million diagnosis from an E.coli bacteria of meningitis in an adult, despite a one in a billion recovery, if my father had been the one on there, I would have been more tempted to dismiss it. So you only see what you want to see all the way out. So it’s a psychological factor, that’s why my guardian angel had to be who she was. Someone deeply important to me in my life. Anyway, that’s kind of the longer version of NDEs, of life reviews, of my father’s presence and discovering the importance of why he couldn’t be there in my original NDE.

[01:20:07] Karen Newell: You touched on how we can know that Eben’s experience or people who have near-death experiencers have the same kind of experience we would have when we actually go on to die. Fortunately, we have data on that. Christopher Kerr is a director and doctor at Hospice Buffalo, and he started doing studies on hospice patients some years ago. He wanted to hear from them directly. So what is it that you’re experiencing as you get closer to death because up until then, it was only clinicians who had reported their observations of what people were going through?

No, actually asked for dying patients themselves and that was brought up at the institutional review board where this is going to be proper. Dr. Kerr explained that these patients are actually benefited by having the opportunity to talk about their experiences. What’s so remarkable is that around 90% of the subjects stated did have what he called End of Life Dreams and Visions. The dreams happen when the subject is asleep. When they’re awake and have these experiences, they’re called visions.

It’s the same type of experience that the subject is usually the same whether you’re awake or asleep, which is so weird for us. People who just have dreams think they’re a little different at any rate. These were very realistic types of dreams. These people reported them to be hyper-real, more real than real, and they would say as if they were actually lit. Which is remarkably exactly how near-death experiencers describe near-death experiencers. Their experiences say that they’re more real than real.

The other thing that happens is that people will say that there are scenes of travel where they know they’re going somewhere, that they’re packing or they’re in a car or bus, and they’re going somewhere. But they don’t necessarily know where they’re going. So the idea that it’s the end is not really brought out in these experiments. The other thing that’s very common in these experiences is that people will start to relive their life.

So when Eben talks about this life review, people in the– let’s say a couple of weeks before they die, say they’re in the hospice center. The first dreams that they started to have are up to their childhood. They’ll stretch or relive childhood events and connect with people they knew back then. They could still be alive, or they could still be dead at this point. But as they get closer to death, the prevalence of dreams and visions involving deceased relatives increases dramatically.

Often they’re just seen as being present, quietly observing, always emanating this loving energy, and other times they actually interact. We can be quite certain that actual death is very similar to what near-death experiencers tell us. It seems that life review starts to begin before you actually die. Once you actually die, it just continues in another form. And near-death experiencers, of course, are dying, necessarily in a natural way. So many people are oftentimes natural because it couldn’t have to do with a heart attack or something, but it’s a sudden way. If they’re not being led into death over many weeks and then days and then hours. It happens suddenly and they just pop right into their life reviews without a chance to start gradually. So this gives us a lot of information that can make us very confident that our awareness continues that we encounter the souls that departed loved ones. That love is a thief that’s another thing they say is that– everything is related to love and those loving bonds. We often call it the binding force of love because it keeps us connected even into the afterlife.

[01:24:23] Ashley James: We’ve talked about beautiful positive things. I’m going to turn to something negative now, but I hope there’s hope here. I feel like we’re in dark times. Hopefully, not everyone feels the same way. Hopefully, there are people who don’t feel like we’re in dark times, but there’s a strong sense that there’s a spiritual war. A lot of people that I know believe that there are demons. There are negative entities that there are forces out there that are not wanting what’s in our best interest. In your research in studying near-death experiences, studying the afterlife, and spirituality. Have you come across the concept where people are struggling with demonic possessions or a feeling like there are negative forces that are hindering them from being able to live that life full of gratitude and love and connect with God and move into a positive spiritual realm?

[01:25:37] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say, especially, when you look at the broad literature on near-death experiences and combine it certainly with Christopher Kerr’s work as Karen was discussing the end-of-life experience so commonly encountered. You find that 90 to 95% of it is just this beautiful, blissful kind of finding of a spiritual realm. You don’t find that there’s some battle between good and evil going on in the spiritual realm. In fact, even that kind of predefined set of near-death experiences that are turned into hellish NDEs or negative NDEs is often involved– for example, someone who has been so busy handing out pain and suffering to others that their life review might seem kind of hellish because you have to be on the receiving end of that in life.

Your life review is not from your perspective. But from the perspective of those around you who were influenced by your actions and thoughts. But the overall ambiance of that kind of community and those reports. This even includes, for example, if you go to the really negative kind of expectations, you might have to say, for example, inadequate prison where with rapists and murderers, you find that when prisoners work as hospice workers for fellow prisoners, they still uncover these same stories of kind of redemption of forgiveness of people facing the bad that they’ve done in this life, but seeing it in this light of love that guides them more towards a loving presence.

That’s why I think overall, the evolution of humanity, given this huge kind of factor NDEs and the loving ambiance in the background, that over a period of time, we do become more loving and move away from this kind of false sense of separation in comes of materialistic thought. I would agree with you that our current world is very apparently conflicted, polarized, lots of conflicts, violence, warfare, economic polarization, corporate greed, climate change, and all that. I would say that the answer to that is a spiritual awakening. It simply involves more and more people becoming aware of this deep truth about our existence that in many ways is very optimistic.

When you look at the big literature on NDE reports, for example, the ions website hosts thousands and thousands of reports with these kinds of experiences. The overall background is one of a very positive transformation of humanity. Kenneth Ring is one of the founders of the International Association of near-death studies. He wrote it three decades ago. It’s about how just people knowing NDEs could change their own reality.

You don’t have to have an NDE just knowing about these experiences and their commonality helps all of us to come into a deeper sense of the higher good that we can practice in meditation, centering prayer, and through the way that we live our lives and all the choices, we make every day. But despite the apparent hardships, and I would say that the hardships are there, just as in the world of alcoholism and addiction study where people have these hardships that they’re dealing with. It’s like getting a bottom, a gift of desperation that they’re able to bounce back up and gain the energy to improve themselves.

Likewise, society is facing a collective gift of desperation with all these apparent hardships, conflicts, political polarization, etcetera. There is a way out, and that is for humanity to truly become wise. Homo sapiens, the word sapiens, means wise. Yes, you could attribute much of the scientific advances in medicine, communication, transportation, etcetera. Over the last two centuries to been a wise move. When you look at the ugly underbelly of all our addiction to fossil fuels, the floating gyre of plastic twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, these are obviously very negative sides of our technological growth. So it’s time for humanity to really grow up and quit living this kind of myth of false separation from each other.

We’re all in this together. We need to take care of each other. And we need to have a much longer timescale. Politicians and corporate leaders look at the next quarterly report for next year’s elections. We need to look at 50 years in the future and our children and the quality of their lives and start doing what’s right for them. So that’s where I think this world can start to take stewardship as we should truly. If we’re going to call ourselves Homo sapiens and start leading this world in a much more positive direction, that’s beneficial to all.

[01:30:39] Ashley James: Your book Living in a Mindful Universe, there’s a lot of tools, a lot of actionable steps, can you guys certainly want to leave with us or teach the listeners today?

[01:30:51] Dr. Eben Alexander: I think the main thing is just to take time each day to go with that. Realize that little ego voice with a lot of its demands on you is not who you truly are. To try and cultivate a richer relationship across the veil with that primordial mind, that God force that has love, kindness, compassion, and mercy right at the core of all of this activity.

[01:31:15] Karen Newell: When we say go within, that may look different for each of us. It really is incumbent on each of us to try different practices. Find that combination of practices that work best for you because it’s going to be different for each of us. We are both very big fans of using sacred acoustics recordings to get into expanded states that not everyone will respond the same way, and so if that doesn’t work, you try something else. Some people like to do movement sorts of things, and others do centering prayer. I like how you said when you go to your church, and there’s a community of people, you’re all focused on generating that connection to the Holy Spirit together. Doing this with other people can strengthen the experience exponentially. I like to imagine that it is all about our heart energies interacting, and we are supporting each other in this effort. When you’re not nearby other people, you can always imagine that your highest energy expands all the way out to the entire Earth. It’s interesting at Heart Math when they measure that electromagnetic field. Whatever device they use, we seem to go to the maximum distance that it can measure. Who knows, it might be unlimited. Eben will always remind me that we can’t get confused and think that the electromagnetic field, which is a material thing, is all that it is. It’s a very useful mechanism that we can focus on that we know is happening, whether we realize it or not.

[01:32:53] Dr. Eben Alexander: There’s a much deeper form of information overlay between minds that presents in quantum physics as entanglement, and that would be my point. This kind of communication goes beyond just electromagnetic things that will be limited by the speed of light. Also, in adding to the comments you were making, I would point out that we’ve started developing a community of like-minded people, and you can access that at unitedinhopeandhealing.com. Very specifically, Karen had the idea that since all of our jobs were canceled back in March 2020 for the summer, she decided we would interview the scientists and fellow experiencers that we would have been meeting up with at those conferences. We would just interview them for the benefit of the public at large, and those interviews we did once every two weeks for most of the pandemic. They’re available at unitedinhopeandhealing.com for free to the public. We hope that those will help people realize there’s a community of like-minded people growing up around all of this kind of teaching and effort.

[01:34:00] Karen Newell:  On that same website is a membership platform. The webinar access is all free. People can also connect, and we do on our platform, our teaching platform, where we have some core classes, but then also we do monthly Q&As, where people can submit any questions they want. So we take about 90 minutes to answer them. That’s also going on that same website if people are interested.

[01:34:25] Dr. Eben Alexander: There’s also a course available for mental health practitioners co-taught by Karen, myself, and Dr. Anna Yusim. I would say that course can be very valuable in helping people deal with mental health issues in the modern era.

[01:34:43] Karen Newell: One last resource is an online companion workbook that we created to go with Living in a Mindful Universe, and it’s called your 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness. If you go to ebenalexander.com, you’ll find a link to that 33-day journey. It’s an email. Just get an email once today with a note and a personal practice, and it’s all related to the book Living in a Mindful Universe.

[01:35:15] Ashley James: Excellent because I was actually just to ask about the free online course that you guys have, that’s ebenalexander.com/33days. Of course, the links to everything you talked about are going to be in the show notes for today’s podcast, learntruehealth.com. So listeners go to learntruehealth.com to catch that or in the description whatever podcast platform you’re listening from. Go in the description, and I’ll make sure that all those links are there, of course, the links also to the books as well. This is such a beautiful thing to focus on. You’ve given us so many tools. I love the idea of making sure that we take time every day to stand in gratitude. To imagine when it comes to wanting something we don’t have, imagine what it would feel like to have it. Then imagine yourself having that feeling, that same feeling, and what other things you can experience or other relationships you can cultivate that will also give you that feeling. Stepping away from– I will be happy until I have this physical object and stepping towards your whole complete imperfect now as you are in and your possessions aren’t really don’t bring joy. But focusing on building relationships and staying grounded in love. Remember that even those people you don’t necessarily like or understand or get along with they’re just like you. They’re all part of the same soup. We’re all in it together. We’re all God’s children. And even these little mind shifts can help us live a more fulfilled life and a life where we’re focusing on being just beautiful human beings. I saw someone yesterday who was wearing a pin that said—humankind, be both. It’s exactly, be both, be kind and be human.

[01:37:31] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would like to think they go hand in hand.

[01:37:34] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show guys. This has been a pleasure and if you have more resources or discover more information and you want to come back and share more science. I would love you back.

[01:37:50] Dr. Eben Alexander:  Ashley, great talking with you. Thanks for having us on.

[01:37:53] Karen Newell: Yes, and thanks for all you do to help others as well and get all of this information and 20 more other people that you interview out into the world. Thank you so much.

[01:38:03] Ashley James: It is my pleasure.

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Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife

Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness

The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife

Seeking Heaven: Sound Journeys into the Beyond

Best Yogurt Maker for this type of fermentation: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PQ2KWHS/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_ZN6Y7CKZ757KHCDGGS0J&subject

BOOK: Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B096RTDMXV&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_2Q1YVTR4GATHAW0G5MMS&tag=mighty91com-20

https://www.learntruehealth.com/antidepressant-probiotic-homemade-yougurt-lactobacillus-reuteri-dr-william-davis

Highlights

• Benefits of TRPV1 in our gut
• Benefits of lactobacillus reuteri
• Losing weight by focusing on gut health support
• Importance of fermented food for the gut

After the success of Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis is back with a new book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. Super Gut explains how we can eliminate bad bacteria and breed good bacteria in the gut. In this episode, Dr. Davis shares specific bacteria that we can ferment that can target specific areas such as deeper sleep, increased libido, and muscle injury reduction.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Okay, I’ve got a few really exciting things to share with you before we dive into today’s interview, so you don’t want to skip this part. I interviewed Dr. William Davis, this is today’s interview, back in February. My life’s been crazy. I have been wanting to sit down and publish this since I did the interview. It was late February.

We were in the middle of moving, packing, moving, and it was total chaos. I’m so happy, I finally have a moment to sit down today and publish this. I’ve got 10 more interviews. I’m just backlogged with interviews that I want to get out there and publish. Just watch out. They’re going to start coming out more frequently now. I’m so excited to finally get back onto a regular schedule now that we’ve landed in our new location.

This interview was so life-changing for me because in January and February, I was having breakdowns, emotional breakdowns. My mind was okay, I was like, hey, I can taskmaster. Give me five things and I’m going to just bang them out. My mind was totally clear, but all of a sudden, I just noticed that my physical body was incredibly stressed out.

I am definitely handling a lot of things in the last year and then I had a lot on my plate. Mentally I felt fine, This is the whole thing, I don’t feel stressed. Stress is not an emotion. I started noticing that the littlest thing would have me in tears. It wasn’t just one part of the month, it was two months straight. I was in tears at the littlest thing. I felt so bad for my husband and my son who is so good-hearted. I’m sure it was scary all of a sudden like seeing my mom smiling one second then mom’s crying another, what’s going on. I tried to explain as best I could. I did notice that my body was definitely emotionally in overwhelm. This was just such perfect timing to get this interview.

At the beginning of the interview, I had no idea that this was going to be the answer to what I needed. With what Dr. William Davis shared, I took his information and I made one of the things he shares about today is a specific kind of—it’s hard to call it yogurt but it’s a fermented thing that you can make to eat. I made it out of soy milk and then I made it out of coconut milk just to try different plant-based options because I’m allergic to dairy but if you’re not allergic to dairy you can follow his recipe. What was just so cool and I’m so excited to share with you is that I had a result the same day I took it.

The last time I had such a profound effect was when I got on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells back 11 years ago. I think it was about 11 years ago. I was so sick. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, type 2 diabetes, and chronic adrenal fatigue so bad that I couldn’t process human language in the morning. I was in really rough shape.

Getting on those supplements and going gluten-free, so cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and then getting on the supplements, the trace minerals they sell, especially the liquid vitamin which is really bioavailable and absorbable, and the trace minerals, within 24 hours of being on those, I noticed my blood sugar began to balance. That constant gnawing hunger went away within five days of being on the supplements. My energy levels were the highest they had been in 20 years. For somebody who has chronic adrenal fatigue, it’s amazing. It wasn’t like energy that was jittery, it was just like real energy like my body started coming back online because it was so deficient in those minerals.

Often, when we have a mineral deficiency, we have symptoms across the board that doesn’t make sense to doctors because the doctors are not taught what trace mineral deficiency looks like, that’s just not in their wheelhouse. By getting on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells, I was able to—they’re very specific to each person and their needs—turn around within five days. I thought this was amazing. In terms of getting better from feeling horrible to feeling great, it was one to five days, boom, that was amazing.

Since then, I have had great experiences with many products. Using what Dr. William Davis shares today had me go from crying and just—I’m pretty sure I was still struggling with depression and all the changes that have happened with our family. Then I took the stuff that he told me to ferment, a very, very specific strain of probiotic, and 4I noticed a shift. That day was the last day I broke down crying for (I don’t want to say) no reason, but it’s kind of like crying over spilled milk like a way to overreact. Something small would happen, and my body would just completely meltdown.

Since I started introducing this specific probiotic, it’s a specific strain that affects the brain chemistry. How cool is that? It helps balance the brain chemistry so you feel happier. It also helps with insomnia so you get better sleep. I don’t have bad sleep, but I started getting better sleep. I started waking up wow, that was a really deep sleep. It helps with sleep. It helps with joy and a feeling of contentment, a feeling of connection, connectivity to the people you care about. It has a few other really cool positive results that Dr. William Davis is going to go in today. I wanted to let you know that since this interview, I tried it and I’ve been eating it, and I’ve been getting fantastic results. There’s my testimonial.

Please share this interview with everyone you know who has insomnia and also who wants to have more joy and feel even keel in terms of their emotional state, definitely share it with them. Another cool benefit to this specific strain of probiotic that you need to ferment yourself to get enough of it so you can eat it to get it in you is it increases the body’s ability to produce collagen so that wrinkles go away. Even for vanity’s sake, it’s worth thinking about because it’ll make you have better hair, skin, and nails. People are noticing all kinds of positive results.

I love this concept. The whole interview today is about this concept that there’s a pharmacy that we could tap into in our gut that we could prescribe ourselves specific strains of probiotics. These are healthy bacteria that live in our gut. Prescribe ourselves specific ones that have specific outcomes. It’s already well established. I’ve had dozens of interviews about this. You can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find all my interviews about gut health. The doctors I’ve had on who talk about gut-brain access, that there’s a direct correlation with what goes on in your gut.

There are about four to six pounds. Think about you have a little chihuahua-sized animal that lives in your gut and it’s made up of thousands of different strains of probiotics. You want to have the good kind and you want to make sure you mitigate the bad kind. They actually digest our food for us. They make nutrients for us by digesting the food that we absorb. They make chemicals for us that affect our brain, affect our chemistry, and affect our hormones. It’s amazing. This is just scratching the surface. It’s so cool. We’re on the cutting edge.

Dr. William Davis shares that information today. That was the one thing that I wanted to share with you. The next thing I wanted to share with you is I’ve done some recent interviews which I’ll be publishing soon about some pretty amazing stuff like how to increase nitric oxide in the body which has just a host of amazing health benefits. I’ve been pouring through all these studies and what I’m seeing is thermal therapy, using the Sunlighten Sauna, the reason why I say Sunlighten Sauna specifically is the Sunlighten Sauna has near, mid, and far-infrared. It goes into the different depths of your tissue and it binds to receptors.

Now I had a cardiologist on, Dr. Joel Kahn, and he talks about this that in our cells, we have receptors for hormones, we have receptors for nutrients like let’s say calcium, and glucose, right? Insulin being like hormones, we have receptors for those things. We also have receptors for light. That these infrared lights, the spectrum affects our cells. There’s one specific protein that is triggered by heat and this protein is called TRPV1.

This protein when triggered by heat—I believe it’s over 41 degrees Celsius is what I read—then helps the body to turn pre-muscular cells into muscle cells. They’re seeing that for the elderly, it helps to lower the chances of wasting away. It increases muscle, continuing to have more muscles so the muscles don’t waste away. It plays a huge role in helping with cardiovascular health to the point where this one study I read showed that they’re now doing therapy with people who are in cardiac failure. They’re really far gone in terms of their cardiac disease and heart disease, and that using heat therapy actually helps to increase nitric oxide in the body which supports the endothelial function of the cardiovascular system.

It reduces the oxidative stress of the cardiovascular system that supports the autonomic nervous system. They’re seeing that there are so many things. It also helps balance blood pressure. They’re seeing so many benefits to using heat therapy for cardiovascular health. Well, I was looking into this specific protein, the TRPV1, because there’s also a role that plays in breaking down and helping the body break down fat and in burning fat as fuel. Everyone who wants to be healthy wants to make sure we have healthy levels of fat. Brown fat is linked to better health and better health outcomes and burns off excess fat.

What we’re seeing is, when you’re in a sauna, yes it increases the body’s heat, your core temperature, and thus you’re burning off calories. They say about an average of 500 calories. Obviously, it depends on the person and how long they stay there and how hot it is. They also see now the reason why being in a sauna helps people lose fat is that it is creating these specific proteins, it is binding to these receptors. When it was explained to me, it was like, imagine a fat cell has these triglycerides that are built inside the cell and then they’re too big to get out. You have to tell the triglyceride inside the cell to break down. Kind of like a sectional couch, you can’t take your sectional sofa out the front door until you break it down into its parts.

Using the Sunlighten Sauna therapy is one of those ways to trigger to create that cascade effect to the body that triggers the fat cell to break it down so that it can leave the fat cell so that the triglyceride can break down to leave the fat cell, which I found fascinating. There are all these health benefits that I keep reading as I’m pouring through this information, but just the fact that sauna therapy increases nitric oxide in the body, in my next episode you will be learning more about nitric oxide and how the amazing benefits of it.

Everyone says inflammation is the root of all. At the very core of all diseases, there’s inflammation. Then people say, actually lactic acid is the root. No, lactic acid and inflammation are the result of the root cause and the root. We go deeper than that when the body cannot make enough of the nitric oxide that causes inflammation, that causes lactic acid, that causes all these cascades of negative outcomes that we see. When we’re looking at the common factor between everyone with disease and we’re going well, everyone with disease has more lactic acid and has more inflammation. Therefore, those are bad things we need to manage. Those are results of not enough nitric oxide in the body. My next interview is going to be about that.

How cool was it that the Sunlighten Sauna increases nitric oxide production which is linked to longevity by the way and not having enough of it is linked to early death. Also, so many health benefits of looking better and feeling better. What I want to say about Sunlighten is I’ve had mine for a few years. I absolutely love it. I’ve gotten so many health benefits from it. I am always in touch with the owner of the company there. They offer a great discount for listeners. Please give them a call. If you have any questions, they’re fantastic. They can help you out, give you the literature, give you the science. Also make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James because they will give you a fantastic discount, including free shipping. If you ever have any questions about it or anything at all, you can also contact me at [email protected] and I would love to help.

I’m so excited for you to hear today’s interview because what Dr. William Davis shares today has changed my life. It’s now April and when I did that experiment with the probiotic that he recommended, that was near the end of February. All of March, even in the midst of the chaos of my move, we moved in March, I did not have any of those emotional overwhelm that I had before. I was able to navigate just by introducing this probiotic. You know what I said to my friend, I said that I’m on an antidepressant. She of course looked at me with big eyes. I said no, you don’t understand, not a pharmaceutical. This stuff that Dr. William Davis shares today, I said to her, this feels like I’m on an antidepressant. I feel amazing. I’m going through a very chaotic move and yet it’s not affecting me, it’s like the stress is gone.

That’s why I’m so excited for you today because imagine if the whole world was able to get their body to the point where they’re just feeling so calm and happy, and how much we could accomplish instead of feeling overwhelming stress. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Continue to please share, this episode is going to change lives I just know it. Come into the Learn True Health Facebook group because I’d love to hear your experience as you also experiment and play around with the things that Dr. William Davis shares today.

[00:17:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 476. I am so excited for today’s guest, we have back on the show with Dr. William Davis. Dr. Davis, you were on the Learn True Health podcast back in episode 167 which was eons ago but I have to tell you that you had a profound impact on my life and my husband’s life back in, this was like back in 2011, 2012, somewhere around there.

[00:17:48] Dr. William Davis: It was like the 19th century, wasn’t it?

[00:17:55] Ashley James: Yes, the dinosaurs roaming the earth. We went gluten-free. Actually, we cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Oats contain gliadin, which is a protein similar to gluten. Some people react to it, some people don’t. We were just like, let’s just throw them all out anyway and we noticed a profound difference. I love sharing the information that you shared in your book, Wheat Belly, was so eye-opening for us. It really helped us solidify our decision to eliminate barley, wheat, rye, and oats.

Then what happened was amazing, my husband and I lost so much water weight. In one month actually, I lost 25 pounds of water weight and both of us had our wedding rings flying off our hands. I’d like to go to point, oh, the remote is over there, I’d point my hand in that direction and my rings would go flying across the living room. We had our rings custom fitted. We waited about six months because I thought this might be temporary because women are more in tune with the water weight of their body than men possibly. I was like, well, this might be the time of the month and by the next time of the month, it won’t be like this.

Six months go by and we’re still not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. The 25 pounds of water weight is still off of me and I can’t believe it. I couldn’t push a finger into my skin and then have an indent, it wasn’t like that. It was just overall inflammation. Then six months later we went and got our rings resized. That’s what we found out, I went down one and a half ring sizes. My husband went down two whole ring sizes.

Then I was able to overcome a lot of other health issues. I mean, the diet was a major factor and also nutrition. I brought in specific very high-quality supplements and I tweaked my diet, but I was able to reverse type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue. I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome. Every doctor I talked to was like, you can’t reverse that. Watch me and look at my labs, they’re like, oh my gosh, I love showing to doctors my labs. They don’t believe it. It’s like, these are two different people.

I reversed infertility, all these great big things, but really the big thing was eliminating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. I have had so many friends say, oh, I tried that. I was gluten-free for two weeks, and I didn’t notice a difference. I’m not allergic to gluten. I definitely want to get into that.

You have a new book out, which I’m really excited about, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. I love that you have a deep dive into supporting this microbiome. It’s like six pounds of bacteria in our gut that we can actually use to heal our whole body. We talked about this that your book has very actionable steps that people can take to restore their health. I’m really looking forward to you teaching us that today. Welcome back to the show.

[00:21:10] Dr. William Davis: Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for the invitation. Glad to be back.

[00:21:13] Ashley James: Absolutely. Fill us in. What happened in the last four or five years since you were on the show with us?

[00:21:20] Dr. William Davis: Well, as you experienced, the Whole Wheat Belly lifestyle really can change people’s lives if they get it right. As you see, a lot of people say things like, I went gluten-free. Meaning they may have cut back on wheat and unrelated grains, but then turn to gluten-free garbage, which is awful. They make that mistake. Those gluten-free processed foods are just horrible for your health. It shocks me that that industry continues to grow and they fill store shelves with something that’s far worse than sugar.

If people get it right, they do experience as you have. By the way, reversing polycystic ovary syndrome is a huge advantage in health. As you see, the 15% of ladies who have it shouldn’t have it. Doctors say there’s really nothing we can do except give you diabetes medications, give you insulin, give you anti-hypertensive drugs, and then go through procedures for fertility, which is ridiculous. As you experience, it is readily reversed back to normal, including the hormonal distortions just by shifting your diet and maybe addressing a handful of nutrients that are lacking in modern life.

People are doing this and experience as you have dramatic life-changing improvements in health, weight, et cetera. But I also saw this, people say things like, I lost 73 pounds, but I have another 40 to go and I’m stuck. Or my joint pain from my rheumatoid arthritis is better, but I’m not off all the drugs yet. In other words, people were having successes but not 100% all the way back to perfect health, so I asked what is missing.

Now in the basic program, even back then, I was advocating adding a high potency multispecies, probiotic, fermented foods, and prebiotic fibers. But even those efforts to address the microbiome were insufficient for many people. I continued to dig and look for answers in the microbiome. I was shocked at the kind of things you can uncover in the microbiome. It led to an explosion and actionable solutions. Things you can do to take back control over their health.

[00:23:34] Ashley James: As you’re looking at the microbiome, what was the biggest, the first aha moment that really shocked you that made you go, oh my gosh, I have to dive into this deeper?

[00:23:44] Dr. William Davis: It was a series of things that I stumbled on was a series of very elegant research studies from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted between 2013 and 2017. This cancer group was looking at a microbe lactobacillus reuteri named after the German microbiologist who discovered this microbe in breast milk in 1962. They were looking at this microbe because they were looking into how it prevented colon cancer. It has very potent anti-cancer effects.

They gave it to mice and they noticed something unusual. They noticed that within a few days of getting lactobacillus reuteri, these mice developed what they described as rich luxuriant fur. They decided to explore it and they found all sorts of unexpected phenomena. They found, for instance, that healing was remarkably accelerated. If you inflicted a wound, it healed in half the time. Hair grew faster and thicker. They found that skin thickness increased dramatically because there’s an explosion of collagen in the dermis, the dermal layer of skin.

There was one study, they did a very elegant series of studies. They compared two groups of mice both fed a really crappy diet, a fast food diet, essentially. White flour, sugar, hydrogenated oils, fried foods, et cetera. One group just got the diet, they got fat, old, lost their hair, stopped playing with each other, stopped mating. They got old, fat, and died. The other group was fed the crappy diet also but given reuteri. These mice stayed slender, had thick and luxurious fur, played with each other, mated, and stayed young until they died. When that would get really interesting. They even made some other interesting observations.

There’s a restoration of youthful immune response in old mice. There’s a dramatic restoration of youthful testosterone in male mice. There’s an increase in growth hormone. But the pivotal finding, the real central finding in all these studies, was that all those effects came because reuteri that colonizes the entire length of the GI tract, by the way, not just the colon, sends a signal to the brain to release oxytocin. This group worked out all the details. If you cut the vagus nerve, the whole effect is turned off. It’s so-called gut-brain access via the vagus nerve. The reuteri sends a signal to the brain, the hypothalamus, to release oxytocin and there’s a 300% increase in oxytocin.

I found that really interesting even though the group said, isn’t that interesting? Do with it what you may. I got a hold of the same microbe that they used in these studies. It was available as a commercial product from Sweden. The company is called BioGaia and the product is called Gastrous. The problem is, these tablets are made for infants, and they were targeted for reducing infantile colic, regurgitation and diarrhea after antibiotics. The tablets had very low counts of microbes, I would challenge that they’re even enough for a baby. They had such low numbers, I made yogurt out of that, but not yogurt in the conventional sense. I made yogurt in a very different way. I fermented for a long, long time, 36 hours, not the usual four hours or 12 hours that some people use at home. I want as many microbes as possible.

We performed flow cytometry on the yogurt and we’re getting around 250-260 billion bacteria per half cup serving. We increased the number of reuteri by a thousandfold over what was contained in the tablets. Then I want to see if we could mimic these effects in humans. Me and thousands of other people, including my entire neighborhood, are eating this yogurt. We all start to see all the same stuff.

People got that boost in oxytocin and said things like, I like my family better. They don’t annoy me as much. I like my spouse better. I like my coworkers better. I understand other people’s points of view more readily. My skin is smoother, I’m losing my wrinkles. I heal faster. My sleep is deeper with vivid dreams. I’m no longer hungry, my appetite has been turned off completely. I’ve regained youthful muscle and strength. I have an increase in libido. I’m having erotic dreams like I used to have as a teenager or in my 20s.

Increased muscle, increased libido, thicker hair, smoother skin. Ashley, this one microbe turns the clock back 10 or 20 years. That’s just one microbe but it became clear. It was an illustration, Ashley, just how potent it could be to restore this one microbe, which by the way, almost all of us have lost. When Gerhard Reuter was exploring reuteri in mother’s breast milk and stool, he found it in almost everybody. In the indigenous populations on this planet who have been studied for this, they all have reuteri. If you look at chipmunks, squirrels, dogs, and raccoons, they all have reuteri. Modern people have lost it. Very few of us have it anymore because it’s very susceptible to many things like the antibiotic ampicillin. If you took ampicillin for your urinary tract infection or upper respiratory infection, you’ve likely lost your reuteri. We restore this ubiquitous microbe and spectacular things happen.

[00:29:40] Ashley James: I’m just imagining how many women are breastfeeding diligently thinking that they’re supplying their baby with this and they’re not, because at some point they had a UTI infection and they lost it forever. It’s not something that’s in our food supply that we can get back once it’s gone.

[00:30:10] Dr. William Davis: No, it’s not in the food. Not to say there aren’t wonderful microbes in fermented foods. You eat, say some kimchi, which is my favorite fermented food of all. By the way, people in South Korea have among the lowest incidences of cardiovascular disease in the world, far less than we do. There are probably a lot of factors but I think a major factor is their enthusiastic consumption of fermented foods like kimchi. Kimchi’s got wonderful microbes. It’s got something called leuconostoc mesenteroides and pediococcus pentosaceus. These are really beneficial microbes, but we can get species like lactobacillus reuteri, we actually have to get it specifically.

Now, one of the things that I think we’re in the process of figuring out is we have to pay attention. When you play with microbes, you have to pay attention to strain. Not just species but strain. To illustrate, you have E. coli, I have got E. coli, your listeners had E. coli in their colons. What if you ate romaine lettuce tainted by cow manure from the Central Valley of California? Well, you could die of that E. coli. Same species, E. coli, different strain. The strains that we use from the gastric tablets are two strains. It’s 17938 and 6475. I have seven other strains now of reuteri, they are in my refrigerator. I’ve made yogurt with all of them. I’ve experienced the same effect or greater with these other strains.

Now, we have a mouse study lined up. We’re going to compare five strains and see if any of them are better at provoking oxytocin than the others. That’s going to get underway in just a few weeks. We’ll be smarter. What I want to do at some point is say, Ashley, this is the strain you want to use. It’s the best at generating this effect. But right now, we can’t say that, so just to be sure, we stick to the Gastrous stains.

Let me tell you an embarrassing story. We get a boost in oxytocin from reuteri. Ashley, I think it’s safe to say, the restoration of reuteri makes us better human beings. Now, I did something crazy. I got another strain of reuteri from a microbiologist friend. He’s a master at generating super-duper high counts of unique strains. He was actually about half an hour from my house at a place called BioSource, his name is Suresh. He gave me some of his reuteri strains. It was super-duper high potency. I made yogurt out of it. Tastes the same, nothing different.

I had it that night and then I went to sleep. During sleep, I had this incredibly vivid dream. Really embarrassing, Ashley, but I will tell you anyway. I dreamt this imaginary woman came to me and I could see her in vivid detail. I could see her hair color, her eye color, and her facial features. She introduced me first and last names, which I have never had happened in a dream before. I felt overwhelming love and affection for this imaginary woman. When I woke up, the odd thing was that overwhelming love and affection continued for this imaginary person for many hours into the day. It was intoxicating. I hadn’t had that feeling for a real person in years.

I’ve not been able to recreate that feeling, but I think if we can recreate it, we can almost turn this on and off. It also makes me wonder, Ashley, if modern humans have lost reuteri and thereby the capacity to enjoy very high levels of oxytocin. Is the intensity of love and affection today less than it was 60, 100, or 10,000 years ago? Tough but I believe it might have been.

[00:34:11] Ashley James: Just think of maybe are there other groups of people that had higher levels of it naturally because their lifestyle didn’t degrade it? For example, in the history of the First Nations people in North America, what they taught in schools is so manipulated from the truth. When you actually dive into it, you find that most of the tribes were at peace with each other. They traded with each other. There were tribes up in the northern regions of the United States that had conch shells because they traded all the way down from the Mexico area. They trade routes. There was a lot of peace. There’s a lot of prosperity. There is vibrance, right? Then when they teach us that they were all savages, they’re all killing each other. That’s what they taught me in school.

Then I go and actually find out that it’s highly manipulated, the history that they teach. They had so much beauty in their cultures, of course, some war with each other but there’s more peace than war. There’s more togetherness, trading, and helping each other. I just wonder if cultures were more in touch with herbal medicine and nature if they had higher levels of these strains versus cultures that maybe were drinking alcohol and messing around with substances that would disrupt the microbiome.

[00:36:12] Dr. William Davis: I think we can only speculate. It will be tough to prove. I got the oxytocin levels, the blood levels of three primitive indigenous populations. I got unpublished data from a researcher in California who went to New Guinea and very bravely got the blood of some very—these are people who just two generations ago were cannibals who were eating other humans. He got the blood from these people and measured oxytocin.

I have also the data from the Somali, another indigenous population, and from the Bodango people in the Republic of the Congo. These are all people who have not been exposed to antibiotics and are not exposed to glyphosate, the herbicide. Do not get herbicide and pesticide residues in their food. Don’t take statin drugs or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They have essentially a stone age microbiome and thereby presumptively higher oxytocin dose.

Unfortunately, the methods to measure oxytocin are so wildly different that it’s almost impossible to compare their levels to modern levels. Different methods, different tests, and platforms. I have the data, but I can’t say that they had higher oxytocin. I wanted to prove that primitive people with reuteri have higher levels of oxytocin. Unfortunately, this kind of a mess of data surrounding oxytocin prevents us from doing that. We’ll likely never know unless we have a time machine and go back in time, draw blood, and run those tests using modern methods.

[00:37:50] Ashley James: There are thousands and thousands of different bacterial strains, healthy helpful bacterial strains that we can have in our gut. You’ve isolated one and played around with one and found that your healing room time, your collagen, and people are getting younger. People are getting more feeling wonderful in their bodies and connecting with other people. That alone, yes, I think that you’ve sold everyone. Everyone’s like, okay, sign me up. That’s just one. Now, you talk about making yogurt. Can I take the same stuff and go make some fermented food with it? Just add it to the brine, add it to the saltwater and ferment some cabbage and get the same result, or do you find that we have to make yogurt and can it be a plant-based yogurt?

[00:38:40] Dr. William Davis: It doesn’t have to be dairy and it doesn’t have to be yogurt. It could be coconut milk. It could be veggies. What I don’t know Ashley is the number of microbes you obtain from that. If you were to ferment let’s say some eggplant and cabbage, the reuteri will compete with the microbes that are on the surface of the vegetable like say Leoconostoc. I can’t say that you get the same kind of numbers. That’s a work in progress. We’ll probably quantify that. That requires DNA analysis. Flow cytometry is a quick and dirty way to count microbes. When you have different microbes, several of them to tell them apart, you have to do DNA analysis to tell them apart and count them. We have not done that, but you can indeed do that.

You know what, you can gauge this by the effect. Personally, for instance, I go from terrible insomnia, terrible for years, decades taking horse doses of melatonin just to get a good night’s sleep. Now whereas I used to watch TV or read books at two or three o’clock in the morning. Now I sleep straight through nine hours of sleep.

By the way, those of us who wear actigraphy graphic devices like an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, or an aura ring, see that REM sleep, the deep restorative phase of sleep that helps you maintain good mental health is extended by about 20%. That’s another thing that needs to be formally documented with AEG, not just an active graphic device. I know I get a very deep sleep with vivid, colorful dreams. I know if I take a microbe that’s not working or I’m not getting enough microbes, I’ll revert back to being an insomniac. I have my own little built-in gauge. If your listeners do this, you try to ferment something else, and you lose the effect, then you know that the microbe count might not be enough.

One thing you’ll find in the world of the microbiome that’s not well explored is what’s called dose-response. The drug people, as much as I despise that industry, those people are very good at dose-response dies. They have a new drug, they’re going to test all variations in dose 0.25 milligrams, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 5.0, 10, 15, 25, 50. They have deep pockets.

In the microbiome world, we don’t have deep pockets like that. We do have a human study where we are going to take a stab at dose-response, 10 billion and 50 billion with a strain of reuteri. My gut’s sense, forgive the pun, it takes probably 50 billion more microbes to generate an effect. What I don’t know is, let’s say you fermented sauerkraut with reuteri, will you get sufficient numbers of reuteri when it competes with other species? That I don’t know. But you know what, this is fun, it’s benign, it’s very low cost. In fact, you save money.

One of the things I advocate is you can spend a ton of money on these fancy commercial probiotics, which by the way have some real problems. Nonetheless, you can buy a probiotic. Pay a lot of money for it. You can ferment foods with it. It cuts back on your need to buy it again. If you make the yogurt, for instance, you don’t make future batches from tablets of reuteri, you make it from a little bit as a prior batch. That’s how I have my entire neighborhood making reuteri yogurt. I give them a little bit of the yogurt and they make their yogurt from that prior batch.

[00:42:18] Ashley James: Yes, right. Maybe you could clarify, I think a lot of people thought if you take a probiotic, it’s like planting a seed in a garden. Then you don’t have to keep planting seeds every day. Right? Whatever you planted is going to grow and then reproduce its own seeds and then keep growing. The idea is, if you take a probiotic, wouldn’t that one course of probiotics populate the gut and now the reuteri is living in your gut and that’s it. It’s over with. You do not have to eat anymore. Or do you have to constantly eat it because it doesn’t reproduce in the gut?

[00:42:57] Dr. William Davis: You raise a fundamental question, Ashley. That is how come if mom gave you a microbe, you’d likely have it for decades, if not an entire lifetime. If you take it as a probiotic or yogurt, you’ll have it for a few days, maybe weeks, and then it dies. Why? Well, it points toward all the inadequacies of the current understanding of commercial probiotics. The commercial probiotic is when nothing more than a slapdash, half-hazard collection of microbes just put together with no rhyme or reason. That’s the current crop.

The probiotic of the future will have other factors built-in. For one, they must specify strain for the reasons we talked about. If you don’t specify strain, you have no idea what you have. For instance, there’s a strain of lactobacillus rhamnosus, that GG strain that has very good evidence for abbreviating post-antibiotic diarrhea. If you take lactobacillus rhamnosus non-GG strain, it doesn’t have that effect. You need to know the strain. That’s one issue.

Another issue is microbes are just like people. We don’t live in isolation all by ourselves. We have partners, families, neighborhoods, and communities. Bacteria are the same way. They have guilds or consortia and they work together. Almost no probiotic preparation factors in that phenomenon. The only product I know of that does that is one out of Colorado called BiotiQuest’s Sugar Shift. I have no relation to the people who developed it.

My friends Martha Carlin and Dr. Raul Cano, a microbiologist with 40 years of academic experience. They formulated this because this group of microbes work together and generate bigger effects. They call it Sugar Shift because it reduces blood sugar quite substantially, by the way. Most other probiotics do not incorporate that phenomenon. Another deficiency of modern probiotics is they fail to include keystone species. These are foundational species that support other species like plankton in the ocean. Without plankton, you don’t have whales or jellyfish. It’s foundational or keystone.

We need to have restored keystone species. Reuteri is a keystone species. There are others like lactobacillus gasseri, faecalibacterium prausnitzii is another, don’t memorize these of course. When you buy a commercial probiotic, many of them lack. In their defense, a lot of this is a work in evolution. But the bottom line here is a probiotic is probably one of the least important things you can do to restore the microbiome. Among the most important is to include fermented foods. Bring back fermented foods, just like your great-grandmother did.

Kimchi, kombucha, kefirs, yogurts, fermented veggies, fermented meats, all those things, you get these wonderful microbes. The curious thing is the microbes you get from fermented foods like leuconostoc mesenteroides do not actually take up residence for very long. By some odd twist, just having those guys restored allows healthy microbes to re-emerge. It’s not quite clear how that works but this is very interesting data out of Stanford.

The Sonnenburgs, Eric and Justin, husband and wife microbiology team published a very important study that showed that fermented foods hands down are the most important thing that you can reincorporate into the modern diet. That is something that most people forgot about. In fact, most modern people think that fermented foods are rotten. They’ll often throw away something that ferments. We need to add those things back and that’s a really big advantage for the restoration of rebuilding a microbiome.

[00:47:06] Ashley James: I love it. What about prebiotic foods? Fibers that are non-wheat, there are some indigestible fibers that we don’t necessarily eat because we’re going to digest it but it feeds the microbiome. It just enriches it. How important is making sure that we eat prebiotic food?

[00:47:33] Dr. William Davis: Very important, Ashley. As you suggested, including sources of prebiotic fibers. If you and I were primitive, indigenous populations, you wouldn’t go to a grocery store, of course. You would dig in the dirt and look for roots and tubers. That’s where you get the majority of your prebiotic fibers. You would also kill animals, and as disgusting as modern people find it, in addition to eating the brain, heart, tongue, and pancreas, we would also eat the intestines and stomach, and sometimes do that raw.

That is the real version of prebiotic fibers and probiotics. Modern people cannot stomach those kinds of things so we have to compensate for it. I say all of that because sometimes things we turn to get our prebiotic fibers seem a little odd. Like a raw white potato is filled with prebiotic fibers. It seems a little odd because we’re not used to that. We’re trying to recreate what indigenous populations did by digging in the dirt. Raw white potatoes, inulin powder is an easy convenient way to get it.

Legumes, white beans, black beans, kidney beans, peas, chickpeas, hummus, root vegetables, dandelion greens. There’s a long list of these things and they’re very, very important. The problem that people encounter though is modern people have so massively disrupted their microbiome in the form of either dysbiosis that is unhealthy microbes in the colon or worse, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, where all 30 feet of the GI tract are filled with unhealthy mostly stool microbes that they say things like, I can’t eat beans because when I do, I have explosive diarrhea, panic attacks, bloating, and other effects.

There’s nothing wrong with the beans or other foods you’re intolerant to and that could be, by the way nightshades, FODMAPs containing foods, histamine foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food. There’s something wrong with your microbiome. These are modern phenomena. People say things like, I had the testing, I can’t eat these 42 foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food, it’s your microbiome. People have to get beyond this idea that there’s something wrong with the food. It is something wrong with you, the microbiome.

[00:49:55] Ashley James: Right. It’s fascinating that our microbiome actually helps us digest our food and turns it into chemicals that we absorb. Without the microbiome, we would not survive. It’s so important, but like you pointed out, it also plays a major role in our mood. Often we sort of live life letting our mood guide us. They woke up on the wrong side of the bed. People make decisions most of the time, not logically, but most of the time from their emotions. They’re letting their gut run them, right?

[00:50:29] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, I’m always impressed just how much our internal dialogues—the things we tell ourselves, conversations we have in our heads—are colored by our microbes. A really good illustration of this is when you try to undo all these bad things. Let’s say you have all these stool microbes like E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, and Proteus, and all these are filling your 30 feet of GI tract. Well, you do something to kill them. It could be an antibiotic, it could be an herbal antibiotic. It could be something I called SIBO yogurt. We make yogurt that I think is proven to be effective in eradicating SIBO.

You kill these microbes and when they die, they shed their breakdown products, some of which get into your bloodstream and people call it die off but the real name is called endotoxemia. People will say things like this as they are in the process of killing microbes. They say, I’m having terrible panic attacks. I’m having dark thoughts and nightmares. People are chasing me, I’m falling off a cliff. My heart is racing. I’m having a low-grade fever. I ache all over.

That’s a vivid illustration of the kinds of things that happen when unhealthy microbes die off. Outside of that situation of die off, just having microbes living in your GI tract—these microbes don’t live for hours, they do not live for decades. If you had trillions of microbes occupying 30 feet of your GI tract, and they live and die in rapid succession, they shed their breakdown products, some of it gets in your bloodstream, that’s endotoxemia. Even when you’re not trying to kill them, some of it gets into your bloodstream.

That’s the thing that colors your internal dialogue and your mood. There’s a very interesting but disturbing set of studies from Germany where they took people who are non-depressed, normal people, they took that endotoxin to break down prompts and bacteria and injected it into these normal people. Which is really scary because if you miscalculate the dose, you can kill somebody quite easily. They somehow got into the review board. An injected bacterial endotoxin into these people, within three hours were profoundly depressed and had all the hallmarks of depression by MRI. It’s just one illustration of the potent effect that microbes have on your internal dialogue and mood.

[00:53:10] Ashley James: That is scary. What about someone who puts on an antibiotic? Does that have a similar effect? Does endotoxemia occur when we go on antibiotics?

[00:53:23] Dr. William Davis: It can. It depends on the antibiotic, where it was targeted towards. But yes, people do get quite sick taking antibiotics. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the die off effect from the disease you’re treating. If you’re treating pneumonia, you’re already sick, feeling awful, and having a fever. The die off effect just makes you feel a little worse. This is a well-established phenomenon. That’s known for about a century. It’s not just unique to these efforts in the microbiome. It is known to occur with virtually any infection where you’re killing off microbes.

It is an illustration of the power of microbes and their breakdown products that color human mood and our internal dialogues. It makes you wonder, hate has always been part of the world. Humans are a violent species. As you pointed out, has it gotten worse? Did indigenous populations actually enjoy a lot more peace than we give them credit for? Part of that at least do the microbiome, such as loss of reuteri and thereby oxytocin, the hormone of love, affection, and understanding of other people’s points of view. We can only speculate, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is somehow we prove it to be true.

[00:54:41] Ashley James: You are a cardiologist. I wonder from that filter, from that viewpoint, have you seen that restoring the microbiome positively affects heart health?

[00:55:01] Dr. William Davis: I think so. That’s an area where the microbiome science has simply not been explored sufficiently. It’s my prediction that the microbiome plays a very important role in coronary disease. That is heart attacks and those diseases of the heart’s arteries. I think it plays a big role in cardiomyopathies, heart muscle diseases, congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and other heart rhythm disorders. I predict that managing the microbiome will become a major—the problem with this of course, Ashley, is that practicing physicians, including my immediate colleagues and cardiologists, are typically 20 years behind in the science.

I still have colleagues say to me, there’s no such thing as SIBO, which is ridiculous, of course. There are thousands of published research studies on SIBO. They say things like, we know that probiotics don’t do anything. Well, we’ve got some criticisms of probiotics, but to say that they don’t do anything is completely nonsense. That’s the nature of things that the science has marched way ahead and the practicing physician is way behind. That’s why I think it’s so important for what you’re doing, what I’m trying to do, and that is broadcast these messages so that your listeners can take the reins. Yes, and their doctor will say, Ashley, did you consult doctor Google again? Right?

[00:56:23] Ashley James: I would fire that doctor and hire a more informed one. That’s what I will do.

[00:56:28] Dr. William Davis: That’s what you have to do. Take the reins yourself. That’s one of the great things about the microbiome. If you can tolerate a little bit of digging and understanding, it’s not that difficult. People have astounding control over their health if given a little bit of direction. The reuteri yogurt and other yogurts. I should tell you about the SIBO yogurt. This problem of SIBO, that is 30 feet of microbes, largely stool microbes that have ascended up into the small bowel.

I used to think this was uncommon or rare until something came out called the AIRE device made by a company in Dublin, Ireland. Invented by a Ph.D. engineer named Dr. Angus Short. He made this device because he saw his girlfriend, now wife, struggle with her irritable bowel syndrome when she was told to go on a low FODMAPs diet. He saw a low fiber low sugar diet. He saw how difficult that was for her and when she did get exposed, how she’d have bloating, diarrhea, and other effects. He invents this device for her that measures hydrogen gas in the breath because bacteria produce hydrogen gas but humans do not. You can use it to map out where microbes are. He commercialized this device a few years ago thinking it was just a device for people with IBS and FODMAPs intolerance.

I got a hold of it and I called him up and I said, Angus, this is far bigger than you think. This is a device that maps out where microbes are in the GI tract and helps people navigate all food intolerances. FODMAPs, nightshade, histamine-containing foods, sorbitol, fructose, fruit, legumes, nuts, all that stuff. He now knows that this is a far more important device than ever thought. I had thousands of people testing their breath now for hydrogen gas. Ashley, what shocked me was it’s everywhere. People are testing positive left and right.

It’s the uncommon person who tests negative. My crude estimation is that at least a very conservatively estimated, at least 100 million Americans have SIBO. I think that’s a dramatic underestimation. It’s gotten a whole bunch worse just the last few years. People say things like, this is too complicated. It’s too much to worry about. It is scaring me. It’s very unwise to ignore this because if you have SIBO, which is true for a lot of people—at least one in three—over time it leads to autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, colon cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders. In other words, it leads to a whole host of diseases. Of course the doctor is more than happy to dispense all kinds of fancy drugs including biologics for many thousands of dollars per month.

[00:59:40] Ashley James: Just thinking about what led us here? I mean, antibiotic use is on the rise, right? Glyphosates in our foods, just one of the thousands of chemicals in our food. Glyphosate, although was first designed as a chelator, is now known back, I think, 2010 or 2012, they published that it’s also an antibiotic. Glyphosates, which is in the Roundup. Which is in so much of our food. Even if you buy organic at home, if you go out to a restaurant to eat something, you’re eating glyphosate.

That is basically antibiotics in your food. There are chemicals in our food that are harming our microbiome, then there’s the diet itself. I heard somewhere that eating high fat and when I say high fat, I mean a highly processed oil, standard American diet like eating french fries, like eating canola oils, right? This very high unhealthy fat diet, just go out and eat at restaurants basically. That oil itself suffocates the good microbiome. It makes it like an anaerobic environment. I’m just exploring, just in my mind, I’m exploring all the factors that we have in this modern era that are killing the good bacteria.

[01:01:26] Dr. William Davis: You know, Ashley, I could devote an entire episode of your podcast just talking about that because you’re making an essential point. We’re drowning in the factors that disrupt the microbiome. You’re right, antibiotics. Most of us by age 40 have already taken 30 courses of antibiotics. For every thousand children, over 1,300 prescriptions for antibiotics are written every year. That’s just antibiotics. You making an essential point with the glyphosate. Yes, an herbicide but also a potent antibiotic. Other herbicides, pesticides, a linoleic acid-rich diet that is a diet that includes lots of vegetable oils, corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil does disrupt the microbiome.

We have to be careful here. I love talking to a microbiologist. I’m not of course a microbiologist but I talk to a lot of microbiologists. I love talking to them because they have such great insights into microbes. The problem with microbiologists is they are microbiologists. They don’t understand nutrition. I mentioned that because you’ll see in a lot of the studies, they say, we gave our mice a high-fat diet just like unhealthy Americans.

They’ve subscribed to this ridiculous and outdated notion that we should all be low fat, which of course is absurd. The low-fat mantra has damaged so many billions of people’s health and lives and it’s a big driver of obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics we now have, so we have got to be careful. You’re right that the linoleic acid omega 6-rich oils do contribute to the disruption of the microbiome.

On the other hand, it’s omega 3, the EPA DHA, not so much the linoleic acid that has microbiome protective effects. One of the things that the omega 3 fatty acids do is activate an enzyme that lines the intestinal wall called intestinal outland phosphatase. One of the effects of that enzyme is to deactivate that endotoxin that microbes release and tries to get into your bloodstream. Even good old fish oil has beneficial effects on the microbiome.

[01:03:44] Ashley James: I love it. I love all these tidbits. Let’s talk more about your book because I’m sure I want to go make the SIBO yogurt. We’re going to make it out of coconut milk or something. I really want to make that. My husband has had mild SIBO. We did that test, eating a certain diet, then you blow into the little tubes and you send it off to the lab.

I also wonder about small intestinal fungal overgrowth, which the doctor who coined that and the first person who ever published studies on it, I had him on the show. He says it’s a man-made illness because without antibiotics and all the things we’ve done to disrupt—basically take healthy food and turn it into junk food, turn it into processed food, and all the chemicals we now eat. Mostly it’s the overuse of antibiotics. He sees that fungal overgrowth is now taking effect in the small intestines. He had a wealth of data to support this and he was criticized heavily by his peers.

It’s just funny that we can have a mountain of evidence. It’s like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We can have a mountain of evidence, but when we challenge people’s belief systems, especially someone who has had more education around their profession, challenging that education sometimes leads to a lot of resistance. We have to remember to keep our minds open enough that our brains could fall out. Just think critically. Don’t take everything at face value. Question everything, but keep your mind so open.

What if you could cure your insomnia and depression because you changed what you ate? So many doctors out there will say that’s impossible, take this prescription. Yet here we have this book, Super Gut by Dr. William Davis. He’s showing us that we can do simple, small, actionable steps each day, and we could cure lifelong insomnia. We can look younger. We can have more love in our life. We can start to reverse major health issues and get off medications like diabetes.

For SIBO, it causes so much discomfort. Like you said, it can lead to colon cancer, it can lead to all these other issues, that it causes distension. I have a friend who has such a bad SIBO that she only eats meat. She’s so careful. She can’t even use spices. She can’t put onion on something. Any form of fiber and she is so sick. She gets a migraine. She gets bloated and she’s so sick that the only thing she can do is use a small amount of meat each day. She is becoming skinnier and skinnier in a very unhealthy way. She’s always in pain.

I can’t wait to give her your book. I am going to cry. I’m so excited for her because I know her case is extreme. It was years and years leading up to it. For those who notice that they have gut issues, they have digestion issues, and eliminating one food after another and after another. It is going to get to the point where it’s like, what can you eat? Whereas when we heal the gut and that we have a strong healthy microbiome, the microbiome is working with us, the healthy microbes are working with us to help digest our food, and assimilate our food, then we won’t have those issues anymore. The SIBO yogurt is that in your book?

[01:07:41] Dr. William Davis: It is. I came to it by just sheer logic, just reasoning this out. Because when you think about it, if you have SIBO that is 30 feet of trillions of microbes, if you take a commercial probiotic off the shelf, can it get rid of your SIBO? No, it might reduce bloating and diarrhea a little bit, but it really wants to get rid of these misplaced bacteria in the upper GI tract. That’s why people use things like Rifaximin, the prescription antibiotics, and some of the herbal antibiotic regimens that have some proven efficacy like the good the bad, and the FC biocides regimen that I discussed in the book. That we use for a couple of years successfully.

But I asked some different questions. I asked, what if we chose bacterial species that colonize the upper GI tract? Because that’s where SIBO occurs. What if we chose species that produced what are called bacteriocins? These are natural antibiotics effective against this species of SIBO.

I chose a strain of Lactobacillus gasseri. Gasseri colonizes the upper GI tract and produces up to seven bacteriocins. It was a bacteriocin powerhouse. I chose those strains of reuteri that also colonize the upper GI tract and produce up to four bacteriocins and a strain of bacillus coagulans. We co-ferment them as yogurt. It doesn’t have yogurt, but in this case, I use yogurt. Extended fermentation to achieve very high bacterial counts and we consume half a cup per day. Ashley, so far, this is only about 30 people but 90% have converted to hydrogen gas negative by the AIRE device.

So far, it’s holding up. We have several clinical trials in the works. We’ll probably do that one down the road, not as yogurt but we’ll have to encapsulate microbes to control the dose. We’ll probably look at that formally and see if this holds true, but so far I think it’s working. The downside is you have to eat it for about four weeks. It’s a little slower than antibiotics. There is a die off phenomenon upfront. You do get the little bloating, anxiety, and those light effects, but Ashley, it’s just yogurt. It’s such a nice way to approach it.

[01:10:11] Ashley James: Instead of having to go through the FODMAPs diet, that is infinitely easier than getting rid of SIBO traditionally.

[01:10:20] Dr. William Davis: Right. Now, one thing we’ve not done is test how well this works in non-dairy fermentation that I just don’t know. I believe you can do quite well though. We’ve had a number of people do this well with coconut milk, canned coconut milk. The only difference is when you ferment canned coconut milk, there are a few additional steps you have to add because coconut milk likes to separate into fat. You don’t want to get this big layer of fat. You have to add some guar gum. We preheat. We don’t preheat dairy, that’s an unnecessary step. They do that in conventional yogurt making because they start with skim milk or low-fat milk. I start with organic half and half, 18% fat. For all the problems that dairy may have, the least problem or no problem is the dairy fat or fat is fine.

This notion of low-fat nonfat dairy is ridiculous. I start with organic half and half 18% fat. You can also start with organic coconut milk. You’ll just have to add a few additional steps like adding a little bit of guar gum and then we also blend it with a blender until it thickens up. All of these additional steps discourage separation in the final product.

[01:11:37] Ashley James: This is so interesting. I’ve made plant-based yogurt before and I used whatever I thought was a healthy probiotic. It turned out well. I’m excited to play with your system and what’s in your book. Your book is Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan, so let’s talk about this. It is a four-week plan just to reprogram your microbiome to restore health and lose weight. Give us a glimpse into what it looks like for the next four weeks. We’re all going to get your book and then we’re going to do it for four weeks. How much time does this take? What kind of fun experiments are we going to be cooking up in the kitchen? Give us a layout of what it looks like for the next four weeks.

[01:12:26] Dr. William Davis: If we spend the first week, I liken this, Ashley, to a backyard vegetable garden. Let’s pretend it’s May or June and you’re going to layout a 10×10 plot. How do you do that? Well, you lay out your plot, then you pick out the stones and the twigs, and then you plant seeds. Then you want to fertilize it for the growing season. After a couple of months, you’ve got a whole bunch of eggplant, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, and zucchini. The same kind of thing happens in your microbiome. We have to prepare the soil. It’s done the first week of preparing the soil means undoing all the things that screw up your microbiome such as getting filtered water, and choosing organic foods over conventional foods wherever possible to minimize your exposure to herbicides and pesticides.

Working to get off medications like statin drugs and anti-inflammatory drugs. This might take longer than a week but at least you have a whole week to try to reorganize your life and clean up your microbiome. We also approach diet. I’m guilty of reintroducing some of the Wheat Belly-type concepts just because as you saw, even though the concepts in Wheat Belly did not take the microbiome 100% of the way back, it was a great start because one of the things that happen with brain consumption is huge intestinal inflammation. You experienced it, you lost all that water weight.

[01:13:56] Ashley James: Yeah, the inflammation weight.

[01:13:59] Dr. William Davis: When you lose water weight, that is very important because it means you were retaining water because you were inflamed. Getting rid of all that inflammation, water is a huge step. We reintroduce the diet like we’re already doing the diet simpler for them. I also introduce nutrients that are largely lacking in modern life. Not because of the diet but because of the way we conduct our lives. We can’t drink from the river because it’s got sewage, pesticides, and herbicides. We have to filter our water. All water filtration removes all magnesium. We all begin with profound magnesium depletion. We’ve replaced that and that helps the microbiome as well as other aspects of your physiology.

We’ve replaced vitamin D because we don’t eat liver and most of us live indoors and wear clothes when we’re out in public, we replace the vitamin D. Iodine and omega 3 fatty acids, similar reasons, which we’re because we’re just not getting enough from our diets. One departure we have to talk about is people get all excited when they hear about the reuteri yogurt and how you turn the clock back 10 or 20 years, the infantis yogurt that we use in babies that has dramatic effects on their future development and IQ, or bacillus coagulants, how it helps athletes recover faster.

But the problem with that is those are really powerful strategies but they work much better if you don’t have SIBO or SIFO. Many people have to stop the program and then deal with their SIBO or SIFO. It’s not that difficult, but it means there’s a delay. You might not do it in four weeks because if you’re going to do the SIBO yogurt, that alone is about four weeks. If you do the candibactin regimen of herbal antibiotics, that takes a couple of weeks. If you don’t have SIBO or SIFO, that’s a lot simpler. Then you start talking about these fermented foods, including yogurt to get these outsized effects.

[01:16:07] Ashley James: That’s really exciting. It’s exciting that people will be in touch with their bodies. They’ll notice these changes. They’ll go, okay, I’ve got to stop and go and do the SIBO regimen and then come back. It empowers people. It gives them confidence. I’ve experienced this as well. So many of us, because we’re raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then go to the doctor and the doctor is on their pedestal that will heal us. Then they write a prescription and which most drugs don’t heal, they suppress. They manipulate the body, suppress, and they don’t actually help the body overcome and get healthy again. Because the body was out of balance because it was missing nutrients, mostly it’s our diet.

We got to bring and we got to correct the diet. We’ve got to make sure our diet includes the prebiotics and the probiotics, the fermented foods. Like you said, first correct the overgrowth if there’s an overgrowth in the small intestines. We’ve been raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then see the doctor. It’s so backward. This is sort of the mainstream idea of health is that we are helpless and the all-seeing, all-knowing doctor is going to help us.

That’s the perfect business model. It’s perfect PR perfect marketing for big pharma. It’s perfect, a lifelong customer, for doctors and big pharma. Then there are doctors like you who are like let’s get so healthy we don’t need to get sick all the time, go to the doctor, and get a prescription. Let’s get so healthy that we prevent getting sick.

[01:18:06] Dr. William Davis: You make such a crucial point that I agree completely. That is, we need to get away from this idea of treating diseases like type 2 diabetes. What are they doing for type 2 diabetes? One, the American Diabetes Association diet is absurd. It raises blood sugar and sustains diabetes, so they’re no help.

The doctor introduces drugs whether it’s insulin, Metformin, Byetta injections, or other drugs to reduce blood sugar. They don’t address the cause. What you’re advocating is we identify the root causes of these conditions. In the case of type 2 diabetes, let’s remove the foods that raise blood sugar and cause insulin resistance. Let’s address the nutrients that are largely lacking that also contribute to insulin resistance. Let’s address the microbiome that via endotoxemia contributes largely to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes goes away in the vast majority of people.

I was a diabetic 30 years ago. I’m no longer a diabetic on nothing except my nutrients and food. I have perfect blood sugar and perfect hemoglobin A1C. I’ve done this with many, many people, and there’s actually published evidence to this effect, but unfortunately, it doesn’t drive revenues. While you and I know this, your listeners know this, my colleagues don’t give a crap because there’s no pot of gold involved.

[01:19:40] Ashley James: This is a really scary part of the medical system. You as the patient need to be incredibly informed and we have to pull our heads out of the sand. We cannot blindly take our bodies to a doctor that is just going to put us on the conveyor belt of allopathic medicine. We need to take charge. That can seem daunting and overwhelming, especially if we have a large family. I know as a mom, I’m responsible for feeding everyone every day, every meal, and it gets a little overwhelming and gets a little old.

If we can sort of step back and just take these baby steps, and I love that your program, let’s just make this yogurt and eat it for the next two weeks, that’s doable. What else are some doable steps that we can take? Nothing overwhelming, but something that really gives us some bang for our buck.

[01:20:45] Dr. William Davis: I have a really cool one. It’s not in the book, but it’s consistent with the program. It is on my website. I had my Wheat Belly blog for years. It had 30 million visits and I converted it over to drdavisinfinitehealth.com. I had so many websites and social media. I combined a lot of it into one website, this drdavisinfinitehealth.com. One of the things I’ve been advocating is that there’s a fungus, not a bacteria but a fungus called saccharomyces boulardii. It’s a cousin of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae that’s used to ferment wine and beer.

Saccharomyces boulardii is better adapted to the human body. It doesn’t take up long-term residence. It acts as a kind of a traffic cop in your microbiome that when you get exposed to this microbe, it does all kinds of cool stuff. It encourages growth, a proliferation of healthy bacterial species. It discourages unhealthy species including fungi like candida albicans, candida glabrata and malassezia. If you take it during a course of antibiotics, it minimizes the disruption of your microbiome because it’s not susceptible to antibiotics. It’s a fungus. We take this microbe and you could buy it in the US at Walgreens, Walmart, or Target as a product called florastor. Florastor has different names in other countries but in the US it is called florastor.

As often happens, they sell it in low numbers. What we do is take a capsule of the Florastor and empty it into some juice. Apple cider is a really good one. I recently made mango passion fruit juice. You have just had to make sure there are no preservatives in it. Look for potassium sorbate or those kinds of things. Don’t buy those, you want one with no preservatives because preservatives inhibit the microbe. Get a natural juice, it’s going to have a lot of sugar, but fermentation by saccharomyces boulardii reduces the sugar because it eats the sugar.

Take a capsule, empty it into any volume—a quarter, a gallon, whatever you want. Cap it lightly, not tightly, because you’re going to see within 24 hours as it sits on your kitchen counter it will be bubbling with carbon dioxide. Let it go for 48, not more than 72 hours refrigerated. You’re going to have sparkling juice. It’s effervescent, it’s delicious. You’re getting a wallop of saccharomyces boulardii that helps bring your bacterial and fungal microbiome back in order.

This is a great adjunct to the other things you’re doing like SIBO yogurt, the candibactin regimen, or whatever else you’re doing to reorder your microbiome. It’s a big advantage. Just be sure not to cap it tight because you’ll have an explosion because of so much carbon dioxide. It tastes like apple soda or whatever kind of juice you ferment. It’s effervescent like soda.

[01:23:59] Ashley James: It sounds like making water kefir where the bacteria eats the sugar and poops out the bubbles.

[01:24:02] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, yes.

[01:24:05] Ashley James: I love it. I have a dear friend who has lifelong constipation. Her parents had her on courses of antibiotics as a baby. I just think this is such a common problem. She has tried everything. Everything that I’ve given her because I have lots of health information. I’m like, all right, try this healing gut soup. Now, try this herb and try just everything and she says it’ll work for a bit. Then the second she gets off it, it’s a high-fiber vegetable soup. It’s really nice when she takes it but the moment she stops taking it, she’ll go back to incredible constipation. Nothing seems to last. Nothing seems to stick. Every supplement she’s tried, every diet change she’s tried, and it doesn’t have any lasting effect. She’s tried on over-the-counter probiotics. She has to be on high doses of oral magnesium just to keep her moving.

What would you say to someone who has lifelong constipation that has never been able to get it under control? I really feel like it’s a microbiome issue because she knows she was on antibiotics her entire childhood and it totally destroyed her gut. All the conventional ways of restoring the microbiome haven’t worked for her. What would you say for those who have very chronic constipation?

[01:25:32] Dr. William Davis: First, Ashley, I’m very impressed she knows you and she knows about magnesium because magnesium is a really big advantage. It abbreviates the so-called transit time. The amount of time it takes for food to pass through your GI tract. She’s already done that. That’s a great thing to do.

Another thing is called obstipation. It’s the most severe form of constipation that seems to respond to nothing. Getting rid of wheat and grains is important because of the gliadin-derived opioids. Of course, opioids are very constipating. Anybody who’s taking oxycontin or other opioids knows he gets terrible constipation from opioids. The gliadin protein in wheat and the related proteins and other grains become opioids and they are likewise extremely constipating for many people.

I had a woman way back when Wheat Belly first came out and she said, you’re not going to believe what happened to me. I moved my bowels once every three weeks. My abdomen is so distended. I’ve had numerous endoscopies and colonoscopies and all they tell me is to take laxatives, enemas, and stool softeners and nothing works. I went wheat and grain-free and I lost 30 pounds in a week.

For the first time in her lifetime, she’s moving her bowels every day. Then her family left the house for a day and she’s hungry for lunch. She says, what the heck, I’m going to make a sandwich. She had a sandwich with bread and it all came back. It took her about another week to get off of it and have her bowel movements returned. I’ve seen things like that. That’s called obstipation. The gliadin-derived opioids can be very potent.

The other thing here is likely she has, of course, methanogen overgrowth. That is an overgrowth of not bacteria and not fungi but these peculiar creatures called archaea. These are really fascinating creatures because they’re also called extremophiles. They live in the boiling water geysers in Yellowstone National Park. They live at the bottom of the ocean with extreme weight upon them. They survive in all kinds of extreme environments, the Dead Sea with extreme salinity and the human GI tract. No one knows how they got there or why they’re there, we are filled with methanogens. When they overgrow and possibly ascend into the upper GI tract, the telltale sign is unremitting constipation.

The newest AIRE device that came out literally two weeks ago, the old AIRE device only measured hydrogen gas. The newest device measures hydrogen gas and methane. She can do that and prove to herself whether she has methanogen overgrowth or she can do a stool analysis and see if she has an excess of so-called methanogens.

These are microbes like methanobrevibacters smithii and some others. One of the problems we have with methanogen overgrowth, it’s not quite clear how we best manage it. There’s some evidence that the Rifaximin antibiotic has an effect. There is some data and we’ve seen some successes with the Candibactin Herbal antibiotic regimen. There may be some other things, but they’re very poorly documented.

We’re not quite clear on exactly what to do with methanogen overgrowth, though I personally would consider the newest aire device and consider the Candibactin regimen. If you have methanogen growth, you’d likely have other disruptions in the microbiome. All the other things we do like saccharomyces boulardii sparkling cider, maybe the SIBO yogurt, all those kinds of things probably have value as well.

[01:29:26] Ashley James: The candibactin regimen is that in your book?

[01:29:30] Dr. William Davis: It is. It’s from metagenics. It’s Candibactin-AR and Candibactin-BR. I was very skeptical about these herbal antibiotics because when you combine things, when you say things like this, let’s throw in a little oil of oregano because it’s effective against E. Coli. Let’s throw a little this herb because it’s effective against this other microbe. You really can’t concoct antibiotics that way. There has to be formal evidence and these were concocted very sloppily. I was very skeptical.

Then there was a study from Johns Hopkins that compared incredibly Rifaximin to conventional antibiotics with two herbal antibiotic regimens. The ones I’ve mentioned, the Candibactin regimen and the dysbiocide regimen from Biotics Research. Lo and behold, the herbal antibiotic regimens outperformed the Rifaximin and the Rifaximin failures, of which there are many, responded to the herbal antibiotics. Lo and behold, some evidence that there are herbal antibiotics. Now, there are lots of other herbal antibiotics but they have no evidence for efficacy.

I have no reason to take them on faith. Those two regimens have worked for us. But lately, I’ve been inching towards this idea that you know what, if you have SIBO, not methanogen overgrowth, try the SIBO yogurt. There is one small study, I believe it was done in Italy looking at reuteri that suppress methanogens. But I’m skeptical, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s really going to play out in the real world. I wouldn’t advocate the reuteri alone for methanogen overgrowth and constipation.

[01:31:13] Ashley James: It sounds like a pretty stubborn microbe to get rid of like it lives in the Dead Sea and lives in geysers. It sounds like it’s going to take a bit more to move it out of the body.

[01:31:30] Dr. William Davis: Here’s an oddity. If we look at the microbiomes of indigenous populations like the ones that have been studied in Africa, South America, and elsewhere. They have methanogens more than we do. In other words, if we use them as a comparator to see what a healthy microbiome should look like, this is kind of puzzling, they have more methanogens than we do. I think what’s happening here—by the way, beyond constipation, methanogen overgrowth has not yet been blamed for any human disease. It’s not quite clear what these things are doing. I think what that means when you look at the Hodza, for instance like Maasai, Yanomami, or the people in the jungles of New Guinea, they have all these methanogens.

What the real story here is with the presence of methanogens per se may not be harmful. It’s the company it keeps in the rest of the microbiome. In other words, maybe those indigenous populations define with methanogens because they have more spirochaetes that we don’t have any of. They have more Prevotella and they don’t have any by sort of bacteria. They have a very different microbiome. Maybe it’s the setting that occurs. In other words, it’s not quite clear what we do about methanogen overgrowth but for the sake of your poor friend’s constipation, it’s still worth considering, like the candibactin regimen. I think in the future, we’re going to have to rethink this whole situation within the methanogens.

[01:33:09] Ashley James: Fascinating. I love it. I’m really excited to apply these to my life and get my friends and the whole neighborhood. I’m very excited to play with it. I’m very excited for my listeners to get your book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight.

Lastly, let’s talk about this idea of losing weight simply by focusing on supporting gut health. We touched on how by removing grains, you can lose the water weight. How even just with the Lactobacillus reuteri improves the oxytocin and you feel so good and you’re not hungry so it curbs the appetite. Beyond those things, how does your book help us lose weight by creating a healthy microbiome?

[01:34:09] Dr. William Davis: Back to your reuteri and oxytocin, you may recall one of the effects of the boost in oxytocin is the so-called anorexigenic effect. It really turns off your appetite. If you go wheat and grain-free, you’ve eliminated gliadin-derived opioid peptides. They’re not only constipating, but they’re also very potent appetite stimulants. That’s why you see people, for instance, have a big bowl of pasta, they’re filled to bursting, yet they’re still hungry. That’s the gliadin-derived opioid peptide appetite-stimulating effect.

Wheat and grain-free, you’re given tremendous control over your appetite. Cultivate reuteri, get a boost in oxytocin and you become profoundly in control. Food is great of course, but you are no longer tempted. Hunger feels completely different. It’s no longer that gnawing desperate feeling. I personally feel hunger as slight restlessness after I haven’t eaten for maybe six to eight hours. It’s a very different experience. The oxytocin effect is a big, big advantage.

Then there are microbes like Lactobacillus gasseri that have been shown in two studies to reduce waist circumference quite significantly. If you did an MRI or CAT scan of your abdomen and measure the cross-sectional area of visceral inflammatory fat, you would see dramatic reductions in visceral fat. It’s not quite clear why that is, but I think it’s because gasseri is so good at reducing endotoxemia. We call that endotoxemia. The breakdown products of microbes that enter the bloodstream is a big contributor to insulin resistance.

If we took somebody who is slender and active and measured their fasting insulin, it’s likely something two micro units per liter. If we took somebody who was pre-diabetic, had a big waist, a lot of visceral fat, and we measured their fasting insulin, it’s probably 30, 70, 100 microunits per liter. In other words, it’s not 20% worse, it’s manyfold worse. When you have high insulin, it causes weight gain and prevents weight loss. One of the big drivers of that high insulin is endotoxemia. If we get microbe gasseri that reduces endotoxemia, your body is allowed to reduce insulin and thereby release weight. Those are the two biggest strategies that I’m aware of.

[01:36:41] Ashley James: I love it. I just had another thought for cardiovascular health. Is there a microbiome fix for high blood pressure?

[01:36:53] Dr. William Davis: What we do with high blood pressure is we start with the diet, which alone has huge effects because we lose visceral fat. Insulin drops, we don’t have insulin resistance, and that releases fluid as you experience. That alone is huge. We add the nutrients largely lacking in modern light, vitamin D, magnesium, omega 3, fatty acids, and iodine. Those four things all together have a huge impact on further reducing insulin resistance and reducing blood pressure.

Just the magnesium alone reduces blood pressure. Then taking the steps to restore a healthy microbiome, thereby reducing inflammation and endotoxemia also reduces blood pressure. Getting fermented foods reduces blood pressure. Those microbes, let’s say kimchi or fermented sauerkraut, like Leuconostoc Mesenteroides and Pediococcus they reduce blood pressure. We’re not actually treating blood pressure, we’re addressing the factors that allow blood pressure to emerge in the first place, and almost people walk away with a blood pressure of like 106.

[01:38:07] Ashley James: That’s awesome. When we go to make our yogurts, like you’ve mentioned, the Lactobacillus gasseri, the reuteri, and all these other really great ones, can we take all of them and throw them in and make a concoction, or do they compete and we really should make individual batches with each one?

[01:38:26] Dr. William Davis: That’s a good question, Ashley. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You can do that, you can combine them, but it’s like your backyard garden. If all you have growing your gardener tomatoes, you’re going to have a ton of tomatoes. What if you grow tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and squash, you have fewer tomatoes. The same kind of things and it depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

If you’re a competitive athlete, you want to reduce the amount of muscle injury you have with extreme exertion. You should take Bacillus Coagulans, probably fermented by itself from natural effects. You want to get smoother skin, deeper sleep, and restore youthful muscle strength, that’s a reuteri effect, you probably want to ferment reuteri by itself. What if maybe you have somebody in their 20s who doesn’t really need to reverse age yet and would also like some better recovery, and maybe wants to have lower blood pressure and a smaller waist? Maybe we could co-ferment reuteri, gasseri, and bacillus coagulans. You can do that.

We make future batches of yogurt from a little bit of the prior batch. As you get further and further in subsequent batches, there can be shifts in relative numbers of different microbes. One of the things that happen with the SIBO yogurt is you’ll lose the reuteri probably by your 10th batch. That’s an instance where you want to re-inoculate or start from scratch again.

A lot of this is a work in progress, we have not done DNA analyses and all the different combinations. You can do this, you can combine microbes. This is very useful for younger people. All humans are supposed to have reuteri. What if you have a 10-year-old or an 18-year-old? They probably don’t want to superduper the high numbers were getting. They can co-ferment several microbes and still get reuteri replenished and get those other benefits as well.

[01:40:29] Ashley James: I love it. Does your book have a list of all these different ones that talk about each one of them like an encyclopedia, all the different microbes that we could be fermenting to repopulate to get specific outcomes?

[01:40:49] Dr. William Davis: Approach it like a menu at a restaurant. If you and I walk into a restaurant and the waitress hands us a menu, you don’t freak out and say, oh my God, I can’t order all these appetizers, main dishes, and desserts. We pick and choose the dishes we want. We do the same thing with the microbiome. Pick the microbes for the effect you want. If you want deeper sleep, greater libido, and smoother skin, let’s ferment the reuteri.

If you want a reduction in knee pain from arthritis, let’s ferment the bacillus coagulans. If you have a baby and you want that baby to sleep through the night, take longer naps, and have half as many bowels movements, thereby half as many diaper changes, have less asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, type 1 diabetes, autoimmune disease, have a higher IQ for a lifetime, and are less likely to become obese as adults. Let’s ferment Bifidobacterium infantis. You can pick and choose the microbe you want for the effect you want just like a restaurant.

[01:41:51] Ashley James: This is amazing, everything you listed. I’m really just imagining the listeners are just getting so excited to get your book, try it out, and start making this yogurt. You don’t have to eat bowls and bowls of it. You’re just having a few spoonfuls of this yogurt. Then the question that arises is, because there’s an acid on my stomach, doesn’t it kill all the bacteria anyway?

[01:42:16] Dr. William Davis: There’s a drop in numbers, but the microbes that were using largely survived stomach acid and bile. These microbes are fairly tolerant to the stomach. There are microbes that do indeed die, but the ones that we’re using are the ones that have been shown to be tolerant to those kinds of things. If you eat, for instance, 250 billion, maybe only 100 billion survived, but it’s sufficient to give you a big wallop of an effect.

By the way, the saccharomyces boulardii that we make those sparkling juices with, by the way, you don’t want to overdo those juices. They do still have some sugar. It cuts the fermentation process and cuts sugar by 50% or more. If anybody’s ever interested, you can get a hydrometer from your brewing. If you have a beer-making store they have these things called hydrometers. With just a few dollars, you can measure the sugar content of your juice so you can calculate how much sugar you’re getting. I suggest people drink no more than a quarter cup a couple of times three times a day so you’re not getting a bunch of sugar all at once.

[01:43:27] Ashley James: As we’re drinking it, is it making it into the intestines, is it making it to the colon?

[01:43:35] Dr. William Davis: The saccharomyces, in particular, are very tolerant. That’s a really big advantage. By the way, it’s also tolerant to alcohol. You can make an appletini and other martinis with it.

[01:43:50] Ashley James: Some of these are supposed to populate in the colon not in the small intestine, is that correct?

[01:43:55] Dr. William Davis: That is true. Unfortunately, some of the probiotic manufacturers have ignored this whole issue of SIBO which is a big miscalculation. They do things like double encapsulate their capsule so that it does not dissolve in the small bowel. I think that’s a real mistake because even if you don’t have SIBO, there are so many factors that are trying to make you have SIBO that it’s worth always having microbes in the small bowel to discourage E. Colis and Klebsiellas of the colon from ascending.

You’re just taking Ranitidine or Prozac for a few weeks is not to give you SIBO. Just having an all-you-can-eat vacation in Mexico where you drink too many margaritas over three days, that’s enough to give you SIBO. There are so many things conspiring to make those microbes rise in your small bowel that I think is worth having those release in the small bowel and not trying to keep them in the colon alone.

[01:44:55] Ashley James: Which makes the yogurt make so much sense.

[01:45:00] Dr. William Davis: Yes.

[01:45:01] Ashley James: I can talk to you all day. This is so fascinating. I’m really excited about your book. Of course the link to the book, Super Gut, is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast down the description, learntruehealth.com, and in whatever podcast directory you’re listening from right now. Dr. Davis, is there anything you’d like to share to wrap up today’s interview? Any homework? Any suggestions? Of course, we’re going to have the link to your website and everything you do. Also in the show notes that people can follow you and read your blog and continue to learn from you. Please, impart us with final words of wisdom.

[01:45:40] Dr. William Davis: As you know, Ashley, the lesson to pass on is that if you desire, if you want to, you have astounding power over your health. The last person you want to consult and how to become healthy is the doctor. The doctor has no idea. If you said, hey, doc, I’m interested in boosting my oxytocin by getting reuteri. I’m trying to make the sparkling apple cider so I get a big wallop of saccharomyces boulardii, what do you think about that?

You’re going to get glazed eyes, they’ll make fun of you, or say something like, hey, did you consult Dr. Google again? Sadly, people in healthcare have abdicated their responsibility because of making more money for their healthcare system. So important to emphasize that people have huge power.

Also, it’s important to know that what you’re doing is so crucial. People like you and me are no longer welcome on major media. We can’t get on TV. We don’t get interviewed by major magazines or newspapers because there’s too much money at stake from big pharma. Big pharma now funds so much of the media via direct consumer drug advertising and other means that people like you and me have missed on his health, nutrition can’t get in anymore. It means that podcasts, blogs, and social media are the ways we have to get these types of messages. It’s not coming from the doctors, it’s not coming from the media, we’ve got to get these messages out because they’re so powerful and they empower people.

[01:47:20] Ashley James: I am so thankful that you came on the show. Again, thank you so much for sharing this information. We really do need to empower ourselves. We really do need to educate ourselves and keep our minds so open that our brains would fall out. We just have to be willing to challenge the belief system we grew up in. We have to be willing to be the salmon.

I like to say this often on the show, if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. One in three people has a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. I think it’s one in three women and one in two men. It’s ridiculous. There’s a 50% chance that you’re going to get cancer if you just do what everyone else is doing. My listeners on the show don’t. They love to be the salmon, swim upstream, be the black sheep, and choose to take charge of their health.

Sometimes that’s overwhelming. Just taking one step at a time, just one little thing that you can do today to improve your health and continue doing that. If you want to have diabetes, one to two people are diabetic or pre-diabetic, obesity, it’s so common now. Heart disease and cancer are the top killers, and of course, diabetes is a trifecta because diabetes causes heart disease. Then there’s dementia. There’s just a deterioration, a quick-aging, quick deterioration, dying younger and younger.

If you want that in your life maybe not now but in the future, then do what everyone else is doing. Go eat what everyone else is eating. Just go to your doctor and get put on older drugs he wants to put you on. Going with the flow leads to being a statistic. We have to look at the statistics of health in our country and realize that doing what everyone else is doing is going to give you that life. You have to go against the grain. You have to throw the grains out and listen to Dr. William Davis. What I love is Dr. Davis brings science-based, holistic, you in charge of your health healing medicine that is backed by studies, that is backed by science. We don’t need to wait to get sick. We can take actionable steps today.

Definitely get Dr. Davis’s book, I’m so excited about this, and start to take these actionable steps and then do it with your friends and family. It’s so easy to hand a spoonful of yogurt to your husband, wife, sister, or whatever. Just hey, try eating every day. Just a few spoonfuls a few times a day, and here, drink this little sparkling beverage in here. Eat some fun fermented food I made. It doesn’t take cups and cups or bowls and bowls of it. Just a spoonful at a time, little tweaks at a time we can completely take back our health.

I know everyone is really excited about introducing the reuteri and having a better sex life, feeling amazing on oxytocin, and having better collagen and twice as fast healing. That alone I think has sold all of us on buying your book, Super Gut. Of course, following you on your blog and continue to learn from you.

Thank you for everything you do. I’d love to have you back on the show when you have more information. I know you’re just constantly digging into the bleeding cutting edge of all the science coming out. Please, come back to the show when you have more to share.

[01:51:10] Dr. William Davis: I will Ashley, happily, anytime.

[01:51:11] Ashley James: Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

[01:51:15] Dr. William Davis: Thank you, Ashley. Keep up your great work.

[01:51:17] Ashley James: I hope you enjoy today’s interview with Dr. William Davis. Wasn’t that amazing? I bet you’re so excited to jump on probiotics, go experiment, and make some yourself. I am going to put the links to what he recommends in the show notes of today’s podcast. Wherever you’re listening from, just go to the notes below of this recording, the description. You can go to learntruehealth.com or from wherever you’re listening, just click on the podcast and you’ll see the notes in the description. I’ll make sure I put the links there for the probiotics that he recommends to culture. Also yogurt maker and other stuff like that. Make sure that’s there so you could immediately go and give it a try.

Come join the learn true Facebook group and let us know how it goes. Of course, I’ve already shared my testimonial at the beginning of the interview. I look forward to hearing yours as well, I’m very, very excited. Please, join Learn True Facebook group, come share your experience, give it a shot.

I’m all about experimenting and the kitchen is such a fun place to do some great fermenting, culture some great probiotics, do some health experiments, and just try it for yourself. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and I’m just really excited for the journey that you’re on. If you’re new to this podcast, welcome. Please join the Learn True Health Facebook groups so that you can ask questions and jump into the community.

I also recommend going to takeyoursupplements.com as they are amazing health coaches that help you through a naturopathic doctor-created program. Get on exactly what your body is craving, what your needs, and what your body’s missing, as well as helping you understand the nutrients that certain foods are hurting you, certain foods are helping you. They help you in that way to guide you. So if you’re looking for a bit more hand-holding, definitely want to check out takeyoursupplements.com as well.

Dive into the group, into the community because we’d love to see you there. You can even use the search function in the Facebook group to dive in and learn from so many amazing people from past conversations and start your own new conversation. Just throw some questions out there and it’s a very supportive group. I’m there every day helping people and I look forward to meeting you and seeing you there as well.

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Medicinal Aloe Gel Drink

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 - coupon code LTH2022

Dr. Vickers website:

http://www.gersonclinic.com

https://www.learntruehealth.com/reversing-cancer-with-advanced-gerson-therapy-dr-patrick-vickers

Highlights:

• History of Gerson Therapy
• Importance of alkaline diet
• Importance of coffee enema in detoxing the body
• What a Gerson meal looks like

Dr. Patrick Vickers is the Director and Founder of the Advanced Gerson Therapy Clinic. He studied under Charlotte Gerson and applied everything he learned about the Gerson Therapy and tweaked it to enhance Gerson Therapy based on scientific studies. In this episode, Dr. Vickers shares the Gerson Therapy and Gerson meals look like.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited for you to hear today’s interview with Dr. Patrick Vickers who shares the Dr. Max Gerson protocol and then the add-ons that he has added on that he has found in his clinical practice to even enhance the effects.

So Dr. Max Gerson and the stories shared in today’s interview, but to give you a little bit of a teaser trailer, Max Gerson was able to cure very stubborn migraines. Then he found out his migraine diet cured tuberculosis, and this is right before World War II when there was no cure for it. It was something that was very stubborn, can stick around for years, and was entirely fatal for many people. And then he found out it cured cancer. And then he found out it reversed even very stubborn diabetes, and so he treated tens of thousands of people with all kinds of conditions using this very specific protocol that he dialed in, and it is a specific diet, but it also involves other things and we’re going to learn about that today.

I’m so excited for you to learn from this episode. And if you don’t have any of those conditions, what’s really great is you can still apply what you learn today and add a bit of it to your life to prevent disease as well. Please share this interview with those you love who have migraines, who have digestive issues, who have cancer or have cancer in the family and they’re concerned about getting cancer. For those who have immune problems because this protocol helps the body have such a robust immune system, and for those who have blood sugar problems, even type 1 and type 2 diabetes really, really respond well to this protocol. So basically, everyone can benefit from listening to today’s interview.

Now, Dr. Patrick Vickers also mentions that he’s added on certain things to Dr. Gerson’s protocol that he found in his clinical practice to supercharge the program. One of those things he says is absolutely essential to supercharge the program is the Organic Medicinal Aloe Gel Drink that we talked about in the last episode, in episode 474 that Dr. Michael Haley talks about where they take the aloe straight from the field.

Dr. Michael Haley owns this farm and they take the aloe, they cut it open, they cut open the filet, they take just the gel, and then they immediately freeze it and ship it to you, and then you drink it. It’s so different from what you get in the store. It’s completely different. What you get in the store has been filtered, pasteurized, and all the medicines have been taken out. But when you drink only a few ounces of the stuff a day, Dr. Michael Haley spoke about it in the last episode that it will block the cancer cells. The cancer cells try to absorb it, it binds to the cancer cells kind of like stuffing their mouths full, and then they cannot digest it because the polysaccharides in the aloe gel cannot be digested by cancer, but cancer thinks it’s a sugar so it tries to absorb it but then it can’t digest it. But it basically blocks the cancer from absorbing any more nutrients, thus starving it out.

And so Dr. Patrick Vickers today talks about how he adds the aloe gel to every freshly pressed juice drink that he gives daily to his cancer clients and patients at his clinic and he tells people to do it. I love this aloe gel. I noticed it really helps our family. I have friends who take it and notice that even their hair, skin, and nails get healthier, their digestion gets healthier. So it’s just something wonderful to add to your smoothies or to your freshly pressed juice, or you can just do a few shots of it today. And in the last episode, I share how to make it taste good so kids even like it because my son thinks it’s delicious when I do these little tweaks and he thinks it’s really great as well, and we noticed that improvement for him as well.

You can get a fantastic discount that Dr. Michael Haley’s giving all of our listeners by going to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe and there you can get a few frozen jugs. It’s great to keep it in the freezer for times if you ever have any digestive issues, it’s great to just have on hand because for me, for our family, when we had either food poisoning or some kind of stomach bug, we drank it and it immediately stopped all the symptoms—the diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, all of that stopped it in its tracks for all three of us. I thought that was pretty awesome.

It’s like medicine. It’s good to have on hand as well as a good to take for prevention. You can also use the coupon code LTH2022 and he’s going to give you his cream as well, which is an aloe cream. I really like it because it’s not greasy and I like to have it at my desk. I love anything natural to put on my body or to put in my body that helps. So that’s learntruehealth.com/aloe coupon code LTH2022. It’s a wonderful adjunct to the Dr. Gerson protocol, as well as anyone who wants better hair, skin, and nails, better digestion, less inflammation, less pain. People even with arthritis are noticing an improvement, which of course Dr. Michael Haley talked about in our last episode and of course in the first episode where I had him on about a year ago and he shared some amazing stories.

You can find lots of fantastic interviews on the podcast by using the search function at learntruehealth.com. You can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find all kinds of wonderful episodes. I have a ton of episodes on reversing cancer. Cancer and heart disease are the two largest killers. My dad died of heart disease, my mom died of cancer. My mom was the healthiest person I knew until she passed away of cancer suddenly, and that has helped fuel me to want to learn how I can help others. I can’t save my parents, but I maybe can help you save yours, or I can help you save yourself or save someone that you love. So let’s turn this ripple into a tidal wave and let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health and to reverse and prevent disease.

The body has an amazing ability to heal itself. We just need to give it what it needs and stop giving it what it doesn’t need. Dr. Patrick Vickers today shares exactly what we can do to support the structure and function of the body to cure disease. The body can cure its own disease when we help it, and I’m so excited for you to learn from today’s episode.

Thank you for sharing this podcast. Come join us in the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’d love to see you there. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and check out the aloe, let me know what you think about it. learntruehealth.com/aloe, use the coupon code LTH2022. Do a challenge. Do a whole bottle. Do about four to eight ounces a day depending on your medical conditions, what you like to reverse, and at the end of the bottle, notice any changes in your hair, skin, and nails, your digestion, your inflammation. Just notice it and then I’d love for you to come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and let us know different positive changes that you’re experiencing.

[00:08:09] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 475. I am so excited for today’s guest we have with us Dr. Patrick Vickers here to share about Gerson Therapy. His website is gersonclinic.com. Of course, links to everything that Dr. Patrick Vickers talks about today are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Welcome to the show.

[00:08:45] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Thank you very much for having me, Ashley.

[00:08:47] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m really, really excited, but as we were joking around before we hit record, we were bound to meet because you kind of know all my friends or we have mutual friends. You’ve been on the Tim James show, of no relation. You’ve been with Dr. Michael Haley, who is also awesome. I’m sure if we sat around we could talk more and probably figure out we have a lot more friends in common.

I have been fascinated with Dr. Max Gerson’s therapy. I watched some documentaries on it. I highly recommend checking them out. There are a lot of documentaries out there so just pick one and go for it. There’s some on Amazon, the Gaia TV, and all that stuff, or just YouTube Dr. Gerson. I’ve actually watched some documentaries on YouTube also. What fascinates me is his entire story, and then of course the controversy, right? Because you can’t steal the money, the profits from the people trying to sell the drugs. If you create a system that eliminates a disease, you will be kicked out of this country, time and time again we’ve seen it.

This therapy is so effective, but you have to follow it to a tee. It’s so effective that he was able to help people completely reverse and no longer have cancer. That’s near and dear to my heart. I held my mom’s hand as she died of cancer at 55 years old, and she was the healthiest person I knew. Watching her pass away from cancer, I’ve always wanted to know what I could have done differently. I was 22 years old. I was just learning about all this, but if I could go back in time, absolutely, I would have taken her to your clinic to do Gerson Therapy.

I’ve had friends ask me, what would you do if you had a cancer diagnosis? I would 100% do Gerson Therapy. That makes me sit and think, well, why am I not doing it now? Maybe that’s something we could talk about. Just the other day my friend said, I know all the things I need to do to get healthy, but I’ll probably do them when I get sick enough to need it.

She was being honest. She was being very blunt that, you know, my life is busy. I’m taking care of two kids. I’m running a business, and really, I’m not going to actually take care of my health like seriously spend six hours a day between nutrition and exercise preparing food and all the things it takes. She’s sacrificing the time it takes to take care of herself until her back is up against the wall.

I’m like, okay, if my backs up against the wall with a cancer diagnosis, I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m 110% in on Gerson Therapy, ozone IV, and all the other kinds of modalities, but why am I not doing that amount of intensity into building health? Why do we wait for a diagnosis? I definitely want you to introduce Gerson Therapy and talk about Max Gerson, but maybe we can talk a little bit about is this podcast just for people who have cancer, or can we utilize Gerson Therapy or should it be utilized for people who don’t have cancer?

[00:12:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, I mean, that is the proverbial issue, isn’t it? I mean, how often have you heard an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? And so, we’re [inaudible 00:12:36] virtually every single degenerative disease including terminal cancer, so why wouldn’t it make sense that that would be also used as a lifestyle of prevention, which it is. I mean, you look at Charlotte Gerson who died three years ago this month, actually, at the age of 98. She used the therapy her entire life as a means of prevention after her father cured her of advanced tuberculosis when she was 12 years old.

This is a dietary therapy not just for reversing disease, but its principles are utilizable for prevention as well and should be. To wait until you get sick, let me tell you, I’ve had this clinic now for over 10 years. You don’t want to wait until you get sick because quite often, it can be too late by the time you’re diagnosed. So to live under those premises that I’ll just wait until I get sick, it’s not a very smart strategy.

[00:13:37] Ashley James: I know Gerson Therapy takes several hours a day between food prep and also certain bathroom routines you would be performing, to say it politely. It’s a part-time job to Gerson Therapy well, to do it to the tee, right? I mean, once you get into the routine, maybe you can shave some time off. But is there Gerson therapy for doing cancer reversal and is there Gerson Therapy light for just creating—like maybe just one coffee enema a day instead of six and maybe once a day instead of 12 times a day? Is there like a Gerson Therapy light for just preventing disease?

[00:14:28] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yes, of course, there would be. Our intensive protocol for the cancer patient is completely different from a standard detox protocol at home just to change your life and maintain health. But the principles, which hopefully people will learn on the show today, that protect your cellular health, particularly your metabolism, are going to remain the same for every patient, whether it’s a detox or a cancer patient. But certainly, the intensity is going to be different for varying cases. The detox would simply be much less than the intensive cancer protocol, no doubt about it.

[00:15:08] Ashley James: Got it. Well, I’d love for you to, later on in the interview, explain what we can do on a regular basis. Give us some actual homework on what we can do on a day-to-day basis to prevent disease using the Gerson Therapy for maintaining health. But let’s talk about Max Gerson. Give us a rundown, who was Max Gerson and how did he discover the Gerson Therapy protocol?

[00:15:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s a great question. And as you said, Dr. Gerson’s story is truly one of the greatest stories and tragedies in American history for certain, if not world history. Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer called Dr. Gerson the greatest genius in medical history. Eight years before Schweitzer won the Nobel Prize, Dr. Gerson cured Schweitzer of severely advanced diabetes within six weeks. In six weeks, he was able to completely reverse Dr. Schweitzer’s advanced diabetes and he cured Schweitzer’s wife, Helena, of terminal tuberculosis when they had a little girl who was only three or four years old at the time.

Gerson, his life, his story, his therapy, I mean, it is just a classic tragedy, so to speak, and we’re going to go into that, but who was he? So he was born in 1881 in Wagrowiec, Germany, which is now Wagrowiec, Poland. It was under German annex at that time. At the age of 18, when he wanted to go to university, back at that time, if you wanted to go to university in Germany, you had to pass an exit exam out of school. You just didn’t go to university based on grades or based on your SAT scores. You literally had to pass an exam out of high school.

Well, his calculus professor put a question on there that he’d never seen before. He managed to come up with such an elaborate solution that his teacher couldn’t even tell him whether it was right or wrong. So she sent it to all the top university math professors in Germany at that time and every single one wrote her back and said, we have a mathematical genius within our country and they all tried to recruit him for math. Recognizing that they had something very special in their midst, the Gerson family got together shortly thereafter one night at the Gerson home—aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins all got together to discuss what Dr. Gerson would study at university. They all agreed that he should study medicine because they felt that’s where he would have the greatest impact on humanity.

Here we are now, that was 120 years ago, literally 1900 and here we are 120 years later, talking about the man who truly had the greatest impact in medical history on his ability to reverse advanced terminal disease. He goes off to university at the University of Freiburg, and while he’s there, he’s suffering from severe migraine headaches. Now, this is at a time when Germany was leading the way in medical research. If you wanted a superior medical education, you went to Germany to get it. He had the top professors in the world at his disposal. None of them could help him. They had nothing to offer him.

He set out to completely cure himself of his disease by radically altering his diet. He cut out all the fat, all the salt, all the processed foods, the alcohol, all of it of a standard German diet of that time and completely cured himself of his migraine headaches.

Well, he graduates from the University of Freiburg, opens up practice in Bielefeld, Germany. And in Bielefeld, Germany starts using this migraine diet on his patients when one of his patients comes back completely cured of their tuberculosis. Now, this is at a time when tuberculosis was “pandemic”, for lack of a better word. It was literally killing over a million people in Europe at that time, and so that was a big thing. All of a sudden, he now recognizes that he can cure TB. So he starts treating all these TB patients and curing them of their TB.

When a guy by the name of Ferdinand Sauerbruch gets word that there’s this doctor curing advanced TB, now Ferdinand Sauerbruch was Europe’s leading thoracic surgeon. He was the guy operating on all these tuberculosis lung patients. And so when he heard this guy Gerson was carrying TB, he approached Dr. Gerson and he asked him to embark on a study of 460 tuberculosis patients. He said to Dr. Gerson privately, if you can cure but one of these patients, I will believe every single word you have to say, and Dr. Gerson cured, and this is no joke, 450 out of the 460 tuberculosis patients with his migraine diet.

[00:20:29] Ashley James: Let’s just pause there. I want to pause there because this one point, I think a lot of us just take for granted, oh yeah, cure TB, no worries. TB back then was like having the plague. If you were in a hospital with TB, you probably were going to die. What was the percentage? I don’t remember exactly what they said, but didn’t he expect something like only 4% to survive? How many people should have died under the normal care for TB out of those 460 patients?

[00:21:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, when he approached Gerson and said, if you cure but one of these patients, I’ll believe every single word that you have to say. So clearly, he wasn’t expecting much, was he?

[00:21:20] Ashley James: He wasn’t expecting any of them to live.

[00:21:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, exactly. I mean, I would imagine he was expecting some of them to live, but to cure 450 out of 460, and this is what we tell people—cancer is the monster, that’s the difficult thing to cure. We can still cure it. Viruses, bacteria, do you know how simple those things are to cure? You take tuberculosis and it’s easily curable with something as intensive and radical as the Gerson Therapy. So he became renowned at that point, Ashley, for reversing advanced tuberculosis.

And then Hitler came to power, Gerson and his family were German Jews. He lost his entire family in the Holocaust. He himself nearly died in the Holocaust and he was the only one left. He was on his way to Vienna to give a lecture on his curing of tuberculosis when the SS Army stopped the train and entered his cabin when they started looking for IDs. They were asking for their IDs looking for Jews.

There were two or three other men in Dr. Gerson’s cabin with him, and when the SS officer came in, Dr. Gerson actually panicked, but the SS officer turned to the other gentleman first and asked for their IDs. And then when the SS officer turned to Dr. Gerson, he didn’t immediately ask him for his ID. He asked him where he was going. And so Dr. Gerson told him he was on his way to Vienna, Austria to give a lecture because he was curing advanced tuberculosis.

Now, if you’re the SS officer, you’re like, yeah, whatever. Come on, you’re carrying tuberculosis. And so Dr. Gerson threw up two x-rays in the window and he showed the SS officer a before and an after x-ray of a TB patient that he cured. The SS officer was so shocked he forgot to ask her son for his ID and he led him off to Vienna, Austria. And as soon as he finished in Vienna, Austria, he immediately made his way back home, immediately packed up his family, Charlotte Gerson included who was probably only eight or nine years old at that point, and he fled to France.

When Hitler invaded France, Gerson fled to Manhattan and he set up practice on Park Avenue. Literally, I kid you not, a hundred feet around the corner from Memorial Sloan Kettering, the largest cancer research hospital, arguably, in the United States if not the world and he began to practice in Manhattan literally right around the corner from Memorial Sloan Kettering on Park Avenue. This is when it became known that he could cure advanced cancer and the story goes like this.

So a woman in New Jersey, I believe, was suffering from advanced gallbladder, stomach, and liver cancer, all three. Yeah, all three, and she had heard that Dr. Gerson was practicing in Manhattan. She approached him and begged him for his tuberculosis treatment for her cancer and he refused her. Now this is back in the early to mid-30s maybe and he refused to treat her. Now, why would Dr. Gerson refuse to treat her even back then? Because even back then as a medical doctor, under your licensure to treat cancer with anything other than the standard accepted forms of conventional treatment at that time risked losing your license, risking ridicule, ostracization from your colleagues, and so he refused to treat her. She kept coming back and she would not take no for an answer.

Finally, he said to her, all right, I’m going to treat you in secret, and he ended up treating her. Lo and behold, he completely reversed every single one of her cancers. It was at that point that he said, I can no longer turn my [inaudible 00:25:39] away from this deadly scourge of cancer. He dedicated the rest of his entire life to treating cancer patients at the risk of everything that he would suffer from that point on, and let me tell you, did he suffer?

He was completely ostracized and ridiculed by his medical colleagues. They took away his licensure at some point. They took away his membership from the New York State Medical Society. Up until that point, Gerson was one of the most published doctors in the world. He had a litany of publications in major medical journals around the world on his treatment protocols. And from that point on, he became a marked man and became prohibited from publishing in all major medical journals around the world. They destroyed him.

[00:26:37] Ashley James: How many cases of cancer did he cure in the United States before they did that before they took his medical license away?

[00:26:47] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, that’s a good question. I don’t really know, but he was able to get his license back. They briefly took it away. What they ended up permanently taking away was his membership from the New York State Medical Society. But between 1910 and 1959 when he died, he probably literally cured thousands of patients in that timeframe. From 1930 when he arrived in the United States to 1959, you’re probably looking at 5,000 to 10,000 during that time frame, I would imagine. He was a marked man from day one.

Let’s say he cured that woman somewhere around the mid-30s, 10 years later in 1946, word’s out that Dr. Gerson, this guy in Manhattan, is reversing advanced cancer. Well, in 1946, the Pepper Neely Anti-cancer Bill came to the floor of the United States Senate. It’s designed to appropriate $100 million in funding to anyone who can show promise in the realm of cancer research.

Well, they invited Dr. Gerson to testify July 1st through the 3rd, 1946 and he brought five of his most terminal cancer patients that he ever had and all five walked through the Senate chambers door and testified on his behalf. So shocked were everybody in those chambers that Senator Claude Pepper himself, who to this day remains the longest-serving senator and congressman in American history. He said Dr. Gerson dedicated his life to the mastery of this scourge of cancer and all should honor his great work.

So why haven’t you heard of him? Why isn’t his protocol standard among medical care? Well that day, Gerson was to give an interview to the international press after he gave his testimony. So they whisked him away to the international press room where he sat alone in a room for over an hour and a half. They never showed up.

They were whisked away to another room and an impromptu party was thrown on their behalf. They were not allowed to interview Dr. Gerson. Why? Gerson wasn’t only talking about being able to reverse the dance cancer during his testimony. He was asked why is cancer growing at such a rapid rate? What are the causes of cancer? And he exposed every single industry that are the huge lobbying organizations paying the politicians’ campaigns.

As soon as he started talking in those Senate chambers, red flags went up through all of Washington, and that man, Dr. Gerson, was prohibited from being interviewed any further by the international press. However, present at his testimony was a man by the name of Raymond Gram Swing. Now, who’s Raymond Gram Swing? Well, back then, if you wanted to listen to your news every night, you didn’t have a TV, you had a radio. You had the option every night at 7:00 PM Eastern to listen to ABC, NBC, or CBS radio. Each one had their own nightly anchor like we had Tom Brokaw growing up, right? Well, they had Edwin Murrow, the famous Edwin Murrow was the anchor for CBS. I’m not sure who the anchor was for NBC, but the anchor for ABC News Radio was Raymond Gram Swing, and he’d been working for ABC News Radio at that point for 33 years.

Well, he was present at all of Gerson’s testimonies and he went on his program one night and he said to the entire country, and probably the world parts of the world were probably listening as well. He said to the entire country that night, folks, forgive me if I don’t have my morals correct in talking about these top stories. The Truman Anti-Racketeering Bill had been signed. Something regarding Trieste and Italy and World War II has been agreed upon. Those would have been major stories for the entire night. He spent an entire 30 to 45 minutes talking about how the cure for cancer had been found. He spent the entire time talking about Dr. Gerson and his therapy.

Well, right after that, for nine hours straight at the ABC News switchboard in Manhattan, it lit up for nine hours straight from people all over the world calling, begging to find out where do we find this cure for cancer. Two weeks later, Raymond Gram Swing was fired from his job at ABC News Radio.

This is what we dealt with then. This is what we deal with today. If you are an editor of any major media outlet, your sole fiscal responsibility is to promote the financial interests of your organization. It has nothing to do with giving your eye the truth, and that is why any editor would be out on their butt on the street if they were to ever reveal something of this nature, then and now. That is essentially the history of the Gerson Therapy and what Dr. Gerson suffered up until his death in 1959.

[00:32:44] Ashley James: Did he always practice in the United States? I know that there’s the Gerson Clinic in Mexico. Did he open that or was it his children that opened that?

[00:32:55] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right. So up until then, there were no laws prohibiting him from opening a clinic in the United States and treating people with that. The only thing would have been his license at risk, and all the other ridicule and the ostracization, which he went through wholeheartedly. It wasn’t until later when Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1971 and the pharmaceutical industry started to gain a tremendous amount of power in the realm of treating cancer that then they made it illegal.

So like right now in the United States, it is literally illegal to treat cancer with anything other than chemo, radiation, and surgery, that is the law. If you want to treat people with Gerson Therapy, you cannot do it in the United States. You have to be outside the states. In 1977, 18 years after Dr. Gerson died, the therapy actually died with him. Nobody did it for 18 years until someone offered Charlotte Gerson in 1977 all the money necessary to open up the first Gerson Clinic, which was opened up in Tijuana Mexico, and she became the face of the Gerson Therapy, essentially up until the day she retired and obviously until the day she died.

It was in 1977 it was opened in Mexico, and that’s what remains to this day.

[00:34:28] Ashley James: Now, is that your clinic or you have a different clinic?

[00:34:33] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yes, I have a different clinic and there are reasons for that, right? So the Gerson Institute which Charlotte originally opened and she retired from over 10 years ago, if you go to a clinic like that, you only get the Gerson Therapy as Dr. Gerson left it in 1959. That was probably the biggest tragedy that Charlotte Gerson left in her legacy. She never tried to improve on her father’s therapy. Her father was the consummate scientist. He was constantly changing and perfecting his therapy based on what was coming out in the scientific literature.

So if he were alive today, his therapy, while the dietary portions may look quite similar, a lot of the things that have been revealed to us since 1959 in the scientific literature is proving beneficial to the cancer patients, there’s a myriad of things that have come out. Charlotte stopped the therapy dead in its tracks from 1959. Why she did that I have my own ideas. I think having been the longest living Gerson survivor up until her death, she was the longest living Gerson survivor because her father cured her of tuberculosis at the age of 12. I mean, it almost brings tears to my eyes to even say that. You can imagine how endeared she was to her father.

I think that emotional psychological attachment made it really hard for her to change what her father left behind when he himself would have completely gone to work with the scientific literature, and that is where we are different from what remains of the Gerson Institutes Clinic.

We have taken Dr. Gerson Therapy, kept the basic foundational protocol he left for us, and we’ve added proven scientific therapies beneficial to the cancer patient and other degenerative disease patients. Nothing we do at our clinic is not in the scientific literature plain and simple, and so that is the difference between us and them.

[00:36:50] Ashley James: So you’re just taking Gerson Therapy and then turbocharging it?

[00:36:58] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That is exactly right.

[00:37:02] Ashley James: What comes to mind is Dr. Michael Haley, one of our mutual friends. He was on my show talking about how there’s a new study around aloe and consuming aloe blocks cancer. So the cancer thinks it’s food because cancer loves glucose, love sugar. The aloe looks like sugar to it, but it can’t digest it and eat it. So it binds to it kind of like it stuffs its mouth. It stuffs the cancer’s mouth but then the cancer can’t swallow it. And so then, it starves it because now the actual food can’t get in. When he explained that I was mind blown.

[00:37:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And so that’s how I know Michael, right? Well, of course, we use Michael’s Aloe. Our patients get one ounce of that aloe in every single juice they get throughout the day in 13 juices. That’s not the most powerful healing component of Michael’s aloe. When you realize that cancer and any disease is related to gut health, you have to restore the gut. There’s not a more potent healer of connective tissue and gut tissue than the aloe, Dr. Haley’s raw aloe. You can’t buy aloe off the store shelf, it’s toxic. It’s been deodorized, it’s been depolarized, it’s had preservatives added to it. It’s toxic and dead.

Dr. Mike Haley’s aloe is living, live, fresh aloe, and so that healing power, and there’s a myriad of things that aloe does apart from what you and I have just discussed, but those are the two major healing properties. So this is what I mean. We’ve taken Dr. Gerson’s therapy and we’ve added these things to enhance exactly what Dr. Gerson would have probably done had he had access to this information.

[00:39:15] Ashley James: Right. Yes. I love it. Okay. Now we know about Dr. Gerson. He discovered the system of how to reverse many diseases because first of all, he went to reverse his migraines and he did. Then one of his migraine patients was like, hey, by the way, my TB’s gone. He’s like, wait a second, I wasn’t treating you for that. He’s like, I thought this just got rid of migraines. So it gets rid of TB, that’s crazy because that’s like the Black Plague of the day, right? And then he’s like, well, this must affect the immune system, what else can we treat with this?

Then he goes on to cancer, like you said. He helped Albert Schweitzer reverse his diabetes. He was trying to figure out why this diet can reverse diabetes, cancer, and migraines? So let’s talk about that. If you go to an allopathic doctor, and we didn’t talk about you. We haven’t even talked about you yet and your background, but you don’t come from the standard allopathic medical school. But if you go to a standard—and again, I could get on my soapbox and start ranting about the allopathic medical system.

[00:40:45] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I won’t stop you. Go ahead.

[00:40:48] Ashley James: Individuals who go to medical school aren’t inherently evil. I’m sure some of them might be statistically, but inherently, they want to do good, right? The problem is they’ve been indoctrinated—through their medical schools—into a system that for 150 years has been designed to brainwash the doctors into thinking their form of medicine is the only form of medicine, and everything else is “alternative”. This is a quote from one of my old Naturopathic mentors. That’s like saying, a golden retriever is the only kind of dog and every other dog is an alternative dog, all right.

I mean, it’s ludicrous to think that drug, chemical-based, pharmaceutical medicine is the only kind of medicine that’s standard, and everything else is some back of the bus quackery, when in fact, we’ve been using holistic medicine, was the traditional form of medicine was the standard, and it was allopathic drug-based medicine that came in and tried to do through wonderful marketing the last 100 years, PR, and lobbying has brainwashed the public.

Hollywood also played a role in brainwashing everyone to believe within three generations that you wait to get sick, then you go to your doctor, and you get put on drugs. You wait to get sick, you go to your doctor, you get put on drugs like we’re cattle. Except they treat cattle better because they’ve tried to prevent illness in cattle because it would cost the farmer too much money.

If you waited for a cow to get sick and then they’d have a $2,000 medical bill, that would make your hamburger be $50 instead of $5, right? So they try to keep costs down by preventing disease in the farms. This comes from one of my other Naturopathic mentors, Dr. Joel Wallach, who talks about how—oh, you know Dr. Wallach.

When I was 12 years old—I have a distinct memory—I’m sitting in the back of my mom’s car and she’s driving around. I’m super bored, it’s a Saturday, and she has to run errands. I’m just sitting in the back of the car bored. My mom pops in because we’re like, okay, well, you’re bored. Let me pop in this tape. Bootlegged health lecture from Dr. Joel Wallach called Dead Doctors Don’t Lie and I was on the edge of my seat. My mom was really crunchy and really into holistic medicine, so she’d read me the journals and stuff that our Naturopath would give us for bedtime reading. She never read me like nighttime stories, but she opened up the newsletter or the articles that her Naturopath would write and she’d read them to me. I learned about antioxidants when I was like nine. I’m like, this is fascinating.

Anyway, my entire life has changed. I listened to Dr. Wallach and I realized the system is broken. I’m 12 years old. I’m getting it like it’s hitting me. Why is this so important? We have to shift our perspective because we’ve been taught that there’s a specialist for your eyes. There’s a specialist for your liver. There’s a specialist for your skin, right? Even if you go to the Mayo Clinic, which I’ve heard several people say, they felt very disenfranchised because they thought it would be this—now I’m sure people have good experiences there too. I’m not saying that no one’s going to have a good experience with these kinds of clinics, but what I am saying is that they still felt like there wasn’t enough communication between the liver specialist, the colon specialist, and the nose, throat, and ear specialist. Whatever they were doing, it still felt like they were being taken apart and only looked at their parts.

I have a listener whose mom has kidney problems and heart problems. The kidney doctor gave her a diet that will cause her to die from heart disease. The heart doctor gave her a diet that will cause her to die from kidney failure. She was so baffled. She was like, why aren’t my doctors talking to each other? They’ve both given me diets that will kill me. She finally got them to talk, they argued a lot, and they both could not figure out what kind of diet to put her on because they don’t know about Gerson Therapy. But the point is, we’re not being looked at as a whole, right?

So from the standpoint of our own training, because we have all been trained through the media to have a certain perspective, that’s why we need to examine our own belief system, and really learn the history of modern medicine so we really get that we’ve been constantly being bombarded by a narrative that is swaying our belief system towards what they want us to think. We need to come back to the truth. The body has an innate ability to heal itself. We have to give it what the body needs.

From an MD medical standpoint, it does not make sense that a protocol, you can’t give a drug to someone that’s going to cure migraines, tuberculosis, cancer, and diabetes in one drug, one protocol.

[00:46:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right, but you can sure make a lot of money coming up with a protocol for each, can’t you?

[00:46:43] Ashley James: Right. By the way, you wouldn’t be curing any of them. You would be managing the disease. Oh, Metformin. I’m so livid that doctors still prescribe this. Go read the side effects of Metformin. One of the side effects can be that it causes blood sugar imbalance. This drives me nuts. It also put my friend at a hospital for a year, and the doctors never took her off Metformin. I was the one that pointed out to her, one of the causes can be acute pancreatitis. She was in the hospital for a year with acute pancreatitis, and the doctors never took her off of it. She was just on it because she’s at the age where you just want to prevent—

Excuse me, that’s not how you prevent diabetes by giving people drugs before they’re even remotely diabetic, but doctors are still doing it. They’re off-label prescribing all the time. Seventy percent of the adult population of the United States is on at least one prescription medication, which means 70% of the adult population, not only is it completely indoctrinated in the system, but also is so sick and so unhealthy that they’re using drugs to manage the symptoms. Most drugs don’t cure, we have to remember that. There are only a few handful of drugs that really helped to reverse the disease. Most drugs out there do not cure, they do more harm than good, and they just manage symptoms. My thing is we have to start questioning everything so that we can undo the brainwashing.

Could you please tell me, Dr. Vickers, why is it that Gerson Therapy, what did he discover about his protocol, and why is it that it can reverse all those different diseases that seemingly are not related?

[00:48:39] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And they all are related. That’s a great question. The question is, what’s the secret to the Gerson Therapy? Eight movies have chronicled this man’s work, no other therapy can boast even more than one or two max, but eight have chronicled5 Dr. Gerson’s work, which is why Schweitzer calling the greatest genius in medical history. And if you ever read Dr. Gerson’s book that he published a year before he died, that’s called A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Case, if you ever read that, you can see the absolute work of a genius. But in that genius, it is so ridiculously simple because the secret to reversing advanced disease, which is the secret to preventing cancer and degenerative disease I literally learned in biochemistry 101.

Everything that you read in that book is biochemistry 101 ultimately, and when you read it, when you read that book, there’s one word that he talks about over and over and over again, which is the secret of health and disease and what is that one word? Metabolism. We learned metabolism the first three weeks of biochemistry 101 in chiropractic school. Let’s start there because that is the crux of the matter. What is metabolism? Metabolism, by definition, is the breakdown of food into energy. Okay, that’s it. If there’s anything that we’re going to grasp, its metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy.

When you see someone who’s sick and dying, what do you notice? They’re lethargic. Why are they lethargic? Because they’ve lost the capacity to produce energy on a cellular level, and the immune system requires massive amounts of energy on a daily basis just to maintain health, let alone cure a sick and dying body. Metabolism again is the breakdown of food into energy. Every sick patient has lost that capacity. So is it any wonder, where are we taught? What are we taught? That 70% of our immune system is where?

[00:51:20] Ashley James: Our gut?

[00:51:20] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly. Seventy percent of our immune system is in our gut. Well, part of the breakdown of food into energy begins in the gut. By definition, metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy starts in the gut. Every single sick human being has a deranged gut, so you must heal that. Now, where’s the other 30% of the immune system? Well, once the gut breaks down the food, you must now be able to convert it into energy. So the gut absorbs everything you need for that into the bloodstream, and now cells must convert that into energy. That’s where we also have destroyed everything from the day we were born.

Once the body breaks the food down, it now must convert it into energy. How does it do that? Well, inside your cells, you have this little thing called mitochondria. Mitochondria take sugar and in the presence of oxygen—and this is so absolutely vitally important, this is the other crux of the matter other than the gut. The mitochondria—only in the presence of oxygen—will convert sugar into energy. Only in the presence of oxygen. If oxygen is not present, then sugar will get converted by the mitochondria into lactic acid. We also know that as what? Fermentation, right? That’s how you make wine, that’s how you make beer, that’s how you make kombucha. You cut off oxygen so that the sugars get converted into alcohol and/or lactic acid ultimately.

Once you heal the gut, now the gut can properly absorb the nutrients, you now have to be able to convert those nutrients into energy, which requires oxygen. In 1931, Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in medicine for proving that cancer viruses and bacteria can not survive in a body where the cells are properly oxygenated. He went on to completely write this thesis and win the Nobel Prize on the fact that the primary factor in the body’s ability to oxygenate the cell is an alkaline diet.

[00:54:19] Ashley James: Why? Do you understand why? Can you explain why?

[00:54:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I can’t exactly explain why and it is so simple. Now, we’ve already discussed the gut, now we have to address the cell. I told you, inside the cell, you have little things called mitochondria that convert sugar into energy in the presence of oxygen. Now, what’s around that cell? Around our cells, we have a cell membrane. That cell membrane is the gatekeeper. It determines what can go in, what has to go in, what can’t go in, and it determines what must come out and what can’t leave the cell. That’s all determined at the level of the cell membrane.

What is that cell membrane made up of? It’s made up of fats. It is a phospholipid. Lipid means fat, right? Okay, so that cell membrane’s made up of phospholipids, but what fats are that cell membrane made up of?

[00:55:30] Ashley James: Cholesterol?

[00:55:31] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Whatever fats you’re feeding it. Whatever fats you’re feeding your body, your body’s going to naturally use that to maintain the cell membranes. Well, what kind of fats is everyone eating today? Cookies, cake, ice cream.

[00:55:54] Ashley James: Polyunsaturated, fatty acids.

[00:55:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, on the contrary. Well, I mean, in some of the cooking oils and stuff, right? But most people are being bombarded with saturated fats. Cookies, cake, ice cream, dairy, milk, ice cream, pizza, pasta, meat. All of these things are loaded with saturated fats, and this is what’s going to make up these cell membranes. Now, why is this significant? We’re going to get to the issue of alkalinity here and acidity. How many times have you heard alkalinity promotes health, acidity promotes disease, right? Yeah, how many times have we heard that, but it’s never really explained on a cellular level what are the health implications of that very statement. Alkalinity and alkaline diet promotes health and acidic diet promotes disease, what does that mean?

So today, our cell membranes are made up of saturated fats. When we are talking about saturated fats, what does that mean? What are saturated fats? Saturated with? Saturated fats are saturated with hydrogen. This is very important to understand, they’re saturated with hydrogen. Your fats are carbon chains and the definition of that fat will be dependent on how much those carbon chains are saturated with hydrogen. When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, what are we talking about? We’re talking about pH, right? Alkalinity and acidity, when we’re talking about those two terms, we’re talking about pH. What does pH stand for? Its potential hydrogen. That’s it. PH is potential hydrogen.

Do you know what the definition of acidity is? The true scientific definition of acidity.

[00:58:26] Ashley James: How much hydrogen is present?

[00:58:29] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That is exactly right. The buildup of hydrogen in the body, particularly at the level of the cell membrane. Why is this significant? That cell membrane, the way it determines what gets in, what gets out is based on the electrical charge at the level of the membrane, and that electrical charge is dependent on the type of fats at the level of the cell membrane.

So if your body is bombarded with saturated fats like when you read a label as well, partially hydrogenated oil, right? Have you ever read a label and it says partially hydrogenated oils? Companies have learned that you can bubble hydrogen into their products, and when you do so, you stabilize it. When you can stabilize it, you can store it on the shelves until Christ returns. That’s what they do with these products, but then there’s naturally saturated fats, all the things that I mentioned previously.

What’s happened is when you saturate something, you completely stabilize it and change its electrical. potential. and charge. When oxygen goes and approaches that cell, that charge literally cannot accept it and it repels it away. When you are acidic, you cannot get oxygen into the cells. So again, acidity, by definition, is the buildup of hydrogen in the body, particularly at the level of the cell membrane. By definition, acidity is the improper utilization of oxygen.

This is exactly what Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1931 on by demonstrating these very principles, which I’m not going to go into it or maybe later I can, but by the way, Gerson was already demonstrating this very principle for 20 years with his dietary therapy. He already knew and understood this. Where did he graduate from? The University of Freiburg. Where did Warburg win his Nobel Prize? At the University of Freiburg.

My personal opinion is he won the Nobel Prize riding on Dr. Gerson’s back. He was a researcher, Gerson was a clinician. He knew Dr. Gerson no ifs, ands, or buts about it. He won the Nobel Prize based on that very principle. When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, we’re talking about pH. When those cell membranes are loaded with hydrogen in the form of saturated fats, you cannot oxygenate tissues and you will cause disease in the body because cells then go into a state of fermentation.

What are we talking about cancer? It’s a fungal fermentative organism. When it’s exposed to oxygen, it cannot survive. The way you restore oxygen to the body, to the cell is through massive amounts of nutrients in the form of glucose. Glucose sugar does not cause cancer and feed cancer. It actually heals cancer. How often have you heard sugar feeds cancer? It doesn’t. Sugar heals cancer. If sugar fed cancer, Ashley, we would be sending patients to their graves exponentially quicker than they’re trying to get not to there because our patients are getting 3500 to 4000 calories a day in sugar in the form of fresh-pressed juices daily.

It’s sugar in the presence of oxygen that gets converted into energy that rallies the immune system so that the immune system can destroy the disease. Sugar, hypothetically and theoretically, would feed cancer in an acidic body because you can’t convert that sugar into energy, it would get broken down into lactic acid fermentation, and that would continue to feed the disease.

However, sugar in an alkaline body, an alkaline diet as is the Gerson Therapy, is what cures the human body of all diseases because you now reestablish the body’s ability to oxygenate tissues. How do you do that? First, you have to change the fats at the level of the cell membrane. Gerson tried every oil available to him and the only oil that did not cause cancer to worsen was flax oil. Why? What is flax oil? Flax oil is a complete polyunsaturated fatty acid. Let me give you an example.

If I put flax oil, coconut oil, and olive oil in the freezer, and I put them overnight, I take them out, It’s going to take me about five, six hours for me to get two to three tablespoons of coconut oil out of that jar because coconut oil is so highly saturated, it’s so stable that when it freezes, it takes so long to unfreeze to thaw.

If I put olive oil in there, within two to three hours, I can probably get a few tablespoons. Why? Because olive oil is a monosaturated fat, meaning some of its carbon bonds are saturated with hydrogen, some aren’t, so it’s rather neutral.

Flax oil, when I put that flax oil on the freezer and I take it out, it is frozen solid. In five minutes it is completely liquid. Why? Because it has no hydrogen saturating its bonds. When you take flax oil internally and it goes to start restoring the cell membranes, the charge of flax oil literally acts as a magnet to draw oxygen into the cell. It literally sucks it into the cell. This is powerful medicine. This is how you restore metabolism. You have to restore metabolism to restore health.

Is it any wonder when we’re watching the news, reading newspapers, reading magazines, and we’re reading about cancer, what is one of the precipitating factors of you getting cancer? Obesity. How many times have you heard the obesity cancer link? It’s because of metabolism. When you’re obese, obviously your metabolism has become faulty. You restore metabolism, you restore health. It starts at the gut, then you must repair the cell. You must repair the cell membrane with the fats. Then the other thing you’ve got to do, you have to get all the other hydrogen running around the body out of the body and neutralize it. How do you do that? There’s only one way—an alkaline diet. Let me explain.

When you juice, and the Gerson patients are getting 17 pounds of fruits and vegetables every single day in the form of juices. Do you know if you test that juice with litmus paper before you drink it, it tests acidic? But when you drink it, it gets broken down into potassium hydroxide. Now potassium hydroxide is so highly alkaline now how do you write potassium hydroxide chemically? The way you write a hydroxyl molecule chemically is OH-. How do you write the acidic hydrogen molecule? H+. So you have all these H+ molecules running around the body. You need OH- molecules to neutralize those H+ molecules. There’s only one way to do that. There is no other way, it’s juicing.

[01:08:17] Ashley James: Does that become water?

[01:08:18] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly.

[01:08:21] Ashley James: You get OH- plus a hydrogen is H20.

[01:08:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Is H2O. So all of a sudden, you start bombarding the body with these massive amounts of juices, which you’re creating OH- ions. They immediately start acting and interacting with the positive ions, go through the reaction, and the reaction creates H2O. H2O water is a neutral charge and all of a sudden, oxygen can begin to flow again in the body. And all of a sudden, all these sugars that you’re taking in can now get converted into energy.

So you’ve now repaired the gut, which you can only do with food and juices. You’ve now neutralized the acidity, which there’s only one way to do it, which is food. And now, there’s one more thing you’ve got to do. We have to destroy the mitochondria’s ability to function inside the cell. How have we done that? Salt.

Rule number one on the Gerson Therapy, absolutely no sodium other than what occurs in fruits and vegetables naturally. Why? There are two reasons why. When you eat salt and it doesn’t matter if it’s table salt, Celtic Salt, Himalayan Salt, salt is salt is salt. When you eat salt, you cause cellular edema. Salt and water enter the cell and they swell the cell up. My patients and the companions, they will all lose 7 to 15 pounds on a two to three-week stay when they come to our clinic just from the salt and water that they’re storing and stuck inside their cells because the only way you can get that salt out once it’s in there, that salt and water, is through potassium. The only way you get potassium is through raw fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables. There is no other way, other than possibly supplementation, right? But dietarily, the only way you can get salt and water out of the cell is through potassium. And who’s eating enough fruits and vegetables to get salt and water on their cells today? Hardly anyone, that’s the reality.

Rule number one on the Gerson Therapy is no salt, bombard the body with potassium not in the diet only but Dr. Gerson created a special potassium powder that the patient gets in all their juices. That just forces the excess salt and water out of the cells. The other reason why salt is so destructive to the human body is your thyroid gland. Your thyroid gland is specifically responsible—this is really important to understand—reproducing the mitochondria. The thyroid gland makes the mitochondria, the very things you need to convert sugar into energy.

So is it any wonder when someone’s overweight, they’re cold all the time. They have no energy. Their hair’s falling out. What do we say? They’re hypothyroid. The body’s not producing the amount of mitochondria necessary to convert food into energy.

Well, what’s the thyroid completely dependent on? It’s completely dependent on iodine? What is salt? Salt is sodium chloride. Chloride displaces iodine from the thyroid gland. That’s why when they came out with table salt, which is 99.999% sodium chloride, what happened? Everybody started getting goiter walking around looking like turkeys because they were getting goiter. So what did they do? They iodized it right? Just to the point so you don’t get goiter.

Take Celtic Salt, Himalayan salt, it’s 86 to 87% sodium chloride. You need very, very little salt on a daily basis to maintain optimal health, less than a quarter of a teaspoon. We are consuming exponentially more than that, and we’re just growing the mitochondrial ability to convert food into energy.

So it is all these principles from the gut, to the cell membrane, to the neutralization of hydrogen, and the restoration of the mitochondrial function inside the cell that makes up our metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy, which is the secret to the Gerson Therapy. Dr. Gerson talks about this extensively. All of these things I’ve just spoken about, he talks about them extensively in his book. It’s why Warburg won the Nobel Prize. This is how you must address all diseases. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

[01:14:21] Ashley James: My mind is spinning. I mean, I have so many questions.

[01:14:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Go ahead.

[01:14:28] Ashley James: So when you said the thyroid gland makes mitochondria, can you please clarify? Does that make the mitochondria for the whole body, or is it the thyroid’s making mitochondria for the thyroid gland?

[01:14:43] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, that’s its job. Its job is mitochondrial production. It is responsible for replicating, reproducing mitochondria for the cells.

[01:14:51] Ashley James: All the cells, the whole body?

[01:14:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s its job. It is responsible for mitochondrial production.

[01:14:59] Ashley James: I did not expect to learn that today. That is kind of mind-blowing and I really want to go down that rabbit hole. Your thyroid gland needs to be optimally functioning so that your mitochondria can replicate in a healthy manner. The thyroid, does it talk to the mitochondria throughout the lifecycle of the cell, or is it simply responsible for making sure the mitochondria get produced?

[01:15:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s a great question. I can’t answer that, to be perfectly honest with you.

[01:15:35] Ashley James: Regardless, we understand that the thyroid hormone is important in the metabolism, which we’re talking about, right? So we got to like a little bit of a big picture, thyroid is really important. The potassium powder in the juices that you make helps the body. Now, we have to be careful. I’m sure this is why people who are on medications, right? Like people who know they’re really, really off-kilter, they should be under a Gerson-trained physician like yourself, they should come to your clinic because you can’t just take potassium nilly willy. If you’re already sick, you could cause heart issues, muscle issues, or whatever. We can’t just take potassium powder nilly willy, right? We have to make sure we’re doing it correctly.

[01:16:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: This is definitely correct. That is correct. So someone who has heart problems, kidney problems, you obviously have to be careful with the amount of potassium levels that they get, right? But I’m going to tell you something. What we’re taught in chiropractic school is the same thing they’re taught in medical school—too much potassium could throw the heart into AFib, A fibrillation.

Ironically and clinically, that always isn’t necessarily the case. So this potassium powder has to get diluted in 32 ounces of water and then dissolved into solution. Then it’s that solution that goes into the patient’s juices. We have had patients go home, not dilute the potassium, and put three tablespoons or three teaspoons of that powder into each juice. If you told the medical doctor that they would absolutely freak out because that patient would immediately go into AFib.

Well, we’ve had countless patients do that for decades because they didn’t listen and they just call us up complaining that their stomach hurts, that it burns, and that they’re peeing like a racehorse. That’s it because they’re just dumping so much sodium and water, right? It’s amazing some of the things we learn hypothetically and theoretically and what ends up happening in clinical practice, right? However, with that said, people on meds, people with heart problems, people with kidney problems, you don’t screw around with potassium regardless. You do have to clarify that, but anyway, yeah.

[01:18:06] Ashley James: So salt, which is in everything, right?

[01:18:12] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Everything.

[01:18:13] Ashley James: Any packaged food, it’s hard to find a packaged food that doesn’t contain fats that are harmful that have hydrogen in it and salt. I try to buy healthy snacks for my son because I mean, there’s only so much fruit he will eat. I swear, I will feed him three bananas a day and four oranges and five apples, it just gets to the point where like in between meals—because I don’t know if you know about kids, but kids have two stomachs. They have a stomach the size of a pea and that’s for meals like mealtime, and then they have a stomach that is the size of the moon and that’s for snacks. My son, when it comes to eating meals, it’s like I’m not hungry. He takes one bite. I’m full now. But then it’s like five minutes later hunger, hunger, hunger. I just have to always have snacks with me.

So sometimes I need packaged or like shelf-stable food because we’re busy and I have a really hard time finding things that don’t have any hydrogenated fat and it just drives me up the wall. And then, of course, tons of salt. So we really need to become food detectives if we’re going to eat something from a package. I really like a whole food plant-based diet simply because it’s really easy. There’s broccoli, I eat it, like one ingredient foods. There’s spinach, I eat it. There’s brown rice, I eat it. There’s potato, I eat it. It’s very simple. One ingredient, no reading, my husband loves that. It drives him up the wall, anytime I touch a package in a grocery store you bet I’m flipping it over to read the ingredients.

[01:19:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Me too. Me too, Ashley.

[01:19:58] Ashley James: And then he goes, ugh. My husband’s just like, no. But he just stands there but then he’s just like, come on. Every grocery trip is 90 minutes. And now when I buy groceries online, then I could sit there for hours and read ingredients, right? But yeah. You and I could go grocery shopping, make a day of it, and read labels. It would probably be like, oh, look at this one, this is crazy. We should do that, it’d be fun.

[01:20:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s true, Ashley. Our stores today, even our health food stores, they’re so deceptive. It’s so deceptive.

[01:20:40] Ashley James: Yeah, you can’t really call them health food stores anymore since the ’80s. Not that I get off-topic in my interviews, but some listeners are like, why don’t you just ask questions? And I’m like, it’s conversational, we’re going back and forth. I love having conversations. We have to understand the history, the last hundred years, study, really understand the history of our food system and really understand the history of our modern medical system.

If you understand big pharma, big agra, and big food, if you could just take those three and really study the history of it, you will make such better choices for yourself because you will understand what is going into your body and it’s so sad that we have to do this. But back in the ’80s, and I had a great interview with Joan Ifland, who is a Ph.D. in basically food and addiction. She’s the one that made it into the DSM-IV, which I think it’s DSM-5 now. She made it into the DSM-IV processed food addiction understanding.

She talked about that back in the ’80s when the cigarette companies realized that tobacco companies were like, hey, we’re probably going out of style starting in the ’80s and they needed to do something about it because the word was out, tobacco causes cancer. They could only keep the lid on that for so long. And then they’re like, well, you know what, we’re in the business of addiction. We’re not in the business of tobacco. We need to continue being an addiction business.

So they started to buy up every single processed food company like Kraft and all these major food companies. Basically, if you go to this grocery store and you randomly put your hand out and touch a package, it’s probably owned by a tobacco company. The food made in that package was actually formulated by food scientists who are designed to figure out the exact amount of fat, sugar, and salt to cause a dopamine response similar to getting your fix of meth, heroin, or whatever, right? They really dialed in the exact chemicals and even in the healthy foods because Kashi was bought by one of those companies. So all these “healthy food companies”, once they get big enough they get bought out, and then they just get slightly changed so that there’s just enough salt in it to make you crave it and make you need that dopamine high from your food.

We have to get that this is an addiction. It’s like if you take a child and they were born from a mother who was on heroin, that baby was born but it’s not their fault they’re addicted to heroin, right? Everyone listening, unless you’re like no packaged food whatsoever, everyone who eats packaged food or any kind of processed food, you are like a baby born from addiction. This was given to you as a child, the cereal, and you didn’t know it. Unknowingly, they triggered the four chemicals in your brain that cause addiction.

So when you go to make these health changes that Dr. Vickers is explaining today, know that there’s going to be a transition where your brain starts screaming, give me the salt, give me the salt. That’s because salt, sugar, and fat, which is outlined in my episode 230 with Dr. Goldhamer. He wrote the book called The Pleasure Trap, a great book. It explains that salt, sugar, and fat are used in the food system to override your brain. So it’s kind of like quitting cigarettes, right? You can do it. People can do it. People do it all the time. You have to be intentional.

When you’re going to cut salt out of your diet, you have to know that it’s like quitting cigarettes. You can do it, but you have to be ready for the cravings, and it’s temporary. The cravings are temporary. You’re saying the number one rule is cutting out salt, which obviously, there’s a transition period. It takes about a month, I’ve heard from Dr. Goldhamer. He says it takes about a month for people to become neuro-adapted so that they start tasting food.

[01:25:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s amazing. That is exactly right. That’s the experience of our patients at the clinic. You have receptors on your tongue, right? You have receptors on your tongue for salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Your receptors have become so dull that they can no longer taste the natural sodium in fruits and vegetables. When patients come to our clinic, the first week or two, they absolutely hate the food. Even though the food is absolutely delicious, they hate it. But right around the end of their second week, third week, they start raving about the food because they have neuro-adapted those receptors. They’ve cleansed those receptors to now where they can actually start to taste what real food is supposed to taste like. That man, that’s brilliant because that’s exactly our experience.

[01:26:23] Ashley James: The Gerson diet—just to recap what you said in the big picture—is making your cells so healthy again, because the salt is swelling them and not letting oxygen in. If you don’t let oxygen into the cell, then the mitochondria is going to ferment your food in because there’s not enough oxygen and it needs the oxygen and the sugar, but if there’s a lack of oxygen, it’s anaerobic, so it causes fermentation, it increases lactic acid, and then you feel sluggish and slow, you get stiff, and you get achy. People go like, I have arthritis or I kind of feel achy. It feels very gross. It feels like your muscle’s flu-like symptoms. Sometimes you have too much lactic acid.

You’re kind of achy, you’re really slow, you’re tired, you’re sluggish, you’ve got brain fog, and you just feel like poop, right? Unfortunately, when people feel like that, they go towards the foods that will mask it.

[01:27:23] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Quick fix.

[01:27:24] Ashley James: The quick fixes, right? Like sugar, coffee, and fast food, something that’ll just kind of get them through the day, unfortunately. Coffee doesn’t give us energy. It suppresses the nervous system experiencing tiredness. It’s just like if you had a headache, you took Advil, it doesn’t make the headache go away. It just makes the experience get numbed. So coffee doesn’t give us energy. It just tricks you into thinking you’re not as tired as you actually are.

[01:27:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s ultimately stimulating metabolism, right? Which is energy, right? It’s stimulating energy production. The caffeine is, and it’s deriving some of that probably from fat or stored up glucose somewhere, stored glycogen, but that’s why you’re getting a quick hit of energy obviously, which is like any drug like cocaine or whatever.

[01:28:15] Ashley James: Right. The problem is it’s not from your mitochondria, that energy is not from your mitochondria.

[01:28:19] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It is the mitochondria.

[01:28:22] Ashley James: Sorry, yes, performing in a healthy way. You’re forcing it to do something, but it’s not performing in the optimal, in a healthy way.

[01:28:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s right.

[01:28:32] Ashley James: Okay. So salt is not helping because it’s swelling the cell. We need oxygen into the cell. The oxygen’s not getting into the cell because the fats we’re consuming are full of hydrogen. Can you explain why is it that—I’m imagining. If we can all just imagine a cross-section of a cell and you’ve got this fat layer that’s the cell wall, if there’s hydrogen all through that, why is oxygen having a hard time passing through the cell?

[01:29:02] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s the charge.

[01:29:03] Ashley James: Okay.

[01:29:04] Dr. Patrick Vickers: See, so that cell membrane’s charged based on the fat. That cell’s either going to accept the charge or repel a charge. A saturated fat membrane is literally going to repel oxygen away from the cell. It will literally drive it away. Whereas flax oil, which has no saturated bonds, literally acts as a magnet. It draws it into the cell. Yeah, that’s it.

[01:29:38] Ashley James: So fascinating.

[01:29:39] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It is, it’s incredible. It’s an issue of biophysics, not an issue of biochemistry, ultimately. It’s actually biophysics.

[01:29:48] Ashley James: I love it. Okay. So no salt, take some flax oil daily, and drink fresh juice daily.

[01:29:57] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right.

[01:29:58] Ashley James: First thing in the morning, best time to drink it, throughout the day. When’s the best time to drink it?

[01:30:04] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Our patients are getting every hour on the hour for 12 hours straight. They’re getting 13 juices a day.

[01:30:10] Ashley James: Okay. And how many ounces is that?

[01:30:13] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Eight ounces.

[01:30:14] Ashley James: Okay. And they’re also eating food in addition to that. This isn’t the juice fast.

[01:30:20] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right, and this needs to be very understood. So when a patient comes to you, comes to our clinic, what did I say in the beginning when we started talking science? What is completely destroyed and deranged? Their gut, right? Their gut is completely destroyed and deranged.

If you put a cancer patient on an all-raw diet, they won’t do well. So if you give them the juices and you give them meals that are all raw, they will not do well. Gerson was absolutely adamant that their three meals every day were thoroughly cooked. Well people say, well, oh, it destroys the nutrients, it destroys the enzyme. He didn’t care. You were getting all the nutrients in the enzymes in the 13 fresh-pressed juices, 17 pounds every single day. Those are absorbed into the bloodstream almost as quickly as alcohol with very little energy and enzymes required to utilize them.

Meals on the other hand, cancer patients cannot handle raw cauliflower, raw broccoli, raw carrots, raw whatever. It needs to be thoroughly cooked because cooking is actually a form of pre-digestion so that they can easily convert that food into energy. That was a huge, huge, huge issue for Dr. Gerson. He was so adamantly against a raw food diet for a cancer patient apart from the juices on a daily basis.

[01:31:59] Ashley James: Now, you mentioned that cancer is a fungal infection.

[01:32:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, it’s fungal and fermentative in nature. That’s how it survives. We know what survives on anaerobic metabolism. That’s how it survives.

[01:32:26] Ashley James: Except that there’s a form of lung cancer that doesn’t, but all other cancer does. There’s one form of lung cancer they found that didn’t do that, which is kind of weird. I can’t remember the doctor that told me about it, sorry. You said it’s fungal fermentation. Do you believe that tumors are an encapsulated fungal infection?

[01:32:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, I don’t necessarily believe that. Look, you and I have cancer, right? We all have cancer. Every single day, our body’s destroying that cancer. There comes a point, and it’s usually right around the fifth decade of life because that is the standard mean age of the people who come to my clinic that the body just loses the capacity to destroy cancer cells and these cancer cells start to accumulate and accumulate then they form a tumor ultimately. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily a fungal infection, so to speak. No.

[01:33:36] Ashley James: Okay. But it’s acting like fungus in that it is anaerobic?

[01:33:42] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s right.

[01:33:44] Ashley James: Okay. Does Gerson Therapy help the immune system see the cancer? Because the problem with cancer is that the immune system doesn’t see it. It’s like it has a cloaking device.

[01:34:00] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, it’s able to put a biofilm around itself, right? So cancer cells, and that’s a great question because melanoma and lymphoma, which are our two greatest successes, do not have the ability to put a biofilm around themselves to make themselves undetectable to the immune system. Whereas all your other cancers have that ability. Clearly, the Gerson Therapy is able to break down that biofilm.

Well, how would you break down that biofilm? Simple, I mean, we know ellagic acid like in cranberries. We know that that can break down the biofilm. So no doubt these fruits and vegetables are breaking down those, and then the massive amounts of enzymes that we also give, you can rest assured those enzymes are going to dissolve that biofilm that the cancer cell puts around itself, and then the immune system can readily attack it. But again, that’s why lymphoma in melanoma, they’re so easy to treat and they’re easy to treat because they can’t hide from the immune system. So you put someone on the Gerson Therapy and the immune system readily attacks the cancer because it has no defense. Pretty cool stuff, huh?

[01:35:14] Ashley James: It is really cool. So for those who don’t have those two kinds of cancers and they do have a kind of cancer that has a biofilm, you give them supplements.

[01:35:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I don’t give ellagic. I’ve been banging around the idea of giving patients ellagic acid as a supplement because you can get it as a supplement, but I’m just not sure how the digestive tract in the body can handle that in a cancer patient. I just haven’t been quick to jump on giving that as a supplement. If somebody said to me, hey, I’m interested in doing ellagic acid when I go home, I mean, I probably say, well, okay, I mean, I guess give it a shot. But I mean, historically, look, if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it, right?

Historically, clearly, we’ve been able to break down biofilm and cure cancer because that’s 120 years of the history of the Gerson Therapy. Whatever we’re doing is breaking down that biofilm, and so I’m just not ready to take that leap where we’re just bombarding the body with things to break down the biofilm because clearly, we’re already doing that.

[01:36:29] Ashley James: If someone ate cooked cranberries like they made a cranberry sauce, would they get enough of it in their food?

[01:36:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s a great question. I’m not sure how much. When you cook things high in oxalic acid, you actually eliminate the risk of a buildup of oxalic acid. I don’t know if you cook something, what happens to the acid when you’re doing that. So if they cooked the cranberries, I really don’t know. But I will say something. Chris Wark from Chris Beat Cancer who’s been in my clinic many times, he endorses my clinic. He once sent me a study somewhere where they tested all the fruits that we have available to us today. I don’t know if it’s in the states, around the world, or whatever.

But in that study, they tested all fruits, its effect, and its ability to stop cancer dead in its tracks. Of all the fruits they studied, two stood out clearly amongst the rest as being able to stop cancer dead in its tracks. That was lemon and cranberry. They stood out like way beyond the rest—lemon and cranberry. We’ve actually added lemon to the Gerson protocol, which Gerson had lemon before he changed his juicing protocol in 1952. He had lemon, so we’ve reintroduced it so to speak. Yeah, we put in our carrot juice now.

[01:38:01] Ashley James: Yum. And I love fresh lemon squeezed into water just first thing in the morning, also. Count that one back. What do we need to understand about preventing disease? Pretty much everyone who’s listening wants to be healthier than they are now, right? Not everyone listening has a cancer diagnosis or a major disease diagnosis.

[01:38:32] Dr. Patrick Vickers: We’re going on one out of every two if we’re not there already, right?

[01:38:40] Ashley James: Yeah. My listeners are enlightened. They’re with you. They’re like, yeah, we’re going to go drink the juice and screw that salt. We’re with you. I say this all the time on my show, so if you’re a longtime listener you’ve heard me say, if you want to be a statistic, eat like everyone else. Go  with the herd. Go with the flow, drive-thru McDonald’s, drive-thru Starbucks. Just go through the drive-thrus, order takeout. Just eat like everyone else, get some frozen pizza, drink some beer, just be like everyone else. Be like how everyone else is doing it and you will be part of the statistics, right?

So the statistics is one in three people have diabetes or are pre-diabetic. One in three people are obese and soon to be morbidly obese, and the thing is there’s so much shame and guilt around that. The fact is again, it’s like the baby being born of a mother who is addicted to heroin. It’s not the baby’s fault. This is not your fault. You were put in a system since birth that is designed to make you sick, not healthy. As we can see from Dr. Gerson’s life, he is the man who figured out how to cure cancer almost a hundred years ago, right?

[01:40:09] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And virtually every other disease as well.

[01:40:11] Ashley James: And was completely squashed on purpose. The system that we live in does not want you to know the truth about anything that would eliminate their power and their profits. The diseases you have now, they’re not your fault in that you didn’t know these forces have been controlling your life. This is like the matrix, right? But once you are outside the matrix, it is your fault if you continue to choose the behaviors, and still I don’t fault you because again, it’s an addiction, we’re constantly being bombarded by our friends, our family, the media.

We have to become the salmon. We have to become the black sheep. We have to become the salmon. We have to go upstream. But imagine you’re the only salmon in the stream and every other fish is going to the ocean and we’re like, no, I got to go this way going against the grain. Sometimes it’s lonely. Join our Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group then you’re not going to be alone. Thousands of listeners are just like you in the same boat. They’re the black sheep of their family. They want to get healthy. The rest of their friends are wanting to go out partying, drink beer, eat wings, or whatever.

The thing is it takes a complete mental shift, and it also takes being kind to yourself because you are that baby born of an addicted mother. You’re born into this and now you’re being birthed out of it. Now you get to decide, are you going to go down the steps and eliminate salt, increase your potassium drinking juice? Are you going to incorporate flax oil and cut out all other unhealthy oils? Are you going to go through the list, and I’m sure that Dr. Vickers has a lot more homework he can give us.

But now that we understand the science, the science is to heal the cell wall, heal the cell, heal the metabolism of the cell, and don’t do anything to impede it. Support the thyroid and the mitochondria to work healthfully to receive oxygen. That alone decreases inflammation in the body, removes the oxidative stress from the body, and helps restore the gut. I mean, those things, I don’t know an illness that that wouldn’t help. It’s very exciting. What we have to understand is that it just doesn’t end today, just listening to this. This is now the stepping point where we need to start taking action. We need to take actionable steps.

So, like I said, not everyone listening is in a disease state right now. There are some people listening who need to do it 110% go to your clinic and do that. Absolutely go to gersonclinic.com, check it out, go to your clinic, and get doctor-supervised transitioning into this therapy. And then there are those of us who have some minor things they’re dealing with and want to prevent it from getting worse and want to start heading in the right direction.

[01:43:34] Dr. Patrick Vickers: We have programs for them as well, right?

[01:43:36] Ashley James: Do you have virtual programs?

[01:43:38] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, we don’t do online remote consulting at this point just because I’m so busy. I mean, I’m just ridiculously busy and I don’t have people trained up to provide that sole service, and that’s why we have a clinic where people come and they spend a week and do a detox or two weeks and do a detox. I mean, on my website, we just created a store within the last six months. There is like a month supply or a three-month supply of the Gerson Therapy supplements and included in that is a one-hour consultation with me. My time is so limited that if everybody started buying that, I don’t think I’d be able to keep up. But I do offer that included in that package, but that’s really the only thing that we have that’s of that nature.

[01:44:31] Ashley James: Got it. I would love to see in the future something where one of your cohorts of people coming into your clinic, you recorded all the seminars or educational pieces and then put that together online. So either those who need a refresher could take it or those who want to learn more, if they can’t travel for whatever reason, it would be really cool to get that, maybe have a digital course.

[01:45:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, for your listeners, for example, if your listeners go to our website, there’s a section you can click on that says gift. If you go to gift, your listener goes to gift, click on gift and put in the password podcast. They can actually listen to our private video series that’s only for our clientele that comes to the clinic. You can tell your listeners to do that. Hit the gift section on our website, put in the password podcast, and they can watch all of my interviews, my lectures on the very things we’re talking about on the therapy, all of those private videos they can have access to.

[01:45:52] Ashley James: Sweet, awesome, thank you. I mean, of course I want everyone to go to your clinic, but for those of us who can’t at this very moment, I love them. I’d love for people to just today do that because we got to start learning more and making it part of our routine. When I learned something completely revolutionary, I’m like, oh, yeah, I’ve got to do this. And then life happens and all of a sudden I’m back in that old routine. We need to make sure that we make this a habit that lasts.

We’ve talked about some things that people do for major illnesses. What homework do we do to prevent disease that’s really important?

[01:46:40] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, we’ve addressed the nutritional portions and how to reverse the underlying causes of a disease. We’re at the ultimate restoration of metabolism, which you do through diet, right? But there are some things we haven’t talked about. For example, you have to address the issue of toxicity. Patients coming to us, they’re so incredibly toxic from years of a toxic lifestyle, toxic environmental exposure. Then when you put them on a therapy like this, you’re generating even more toxicity, right? You’re breaking down diseased tissue, you’re breaking down tumor tissue, you’re rebuilding new tissue. The juicing is pulling toxicity stored up for years, decades out of the cells back into the bloodstream.

If you don’t detoxify those patients, they’ll all die. You cannot put them on the dietary regimen without the proper detoxification.

You kind of alluded to this at the beginning of the interview with bathroom procedures. Dr. Gerson made the coffee enema famous. Our patients are getting five coffee enemas per day—five per day. There’s not a more powerful way to detoxify the human body than a coffee enema, and that includes prevention as well.

[01:48:06] Ashley James: That’s one thing they mentioned in one of the documentaries I saw is that Gerson was having great success in Germany reversing cancer. And then when he came to New York City, when did he come to York City? What year?

[01:48:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I want to say probably the mid-30s.

[01:48:25] Ashley James: So mid-30s. Gasoline was leaded, I believe, so we can imagine in a busy city, people are breathing in lead all the time. There are no regulations for factories not dumping into anything—mercury, any kind of sludge—into the creeks, and then people might eat the fish like the Minamata disaster in Japan where people were born with major mercury deformations because of the mercury being dumped into the streams that led out into Minamata, which was a fishing village.

This is the same thing happening, and all of a sudden, he does the same protocol that was working in Germany, but he noticed that the people would immediately die. You didn’t mention that because it probably isn’t a great part of the story like, and then everyone died of the therapy. But what I found fascinating was that he figured out, he had to troubleshoot, why are people in Germany living and beating cancer, and then I come here with the same protocol and people in New York City will drop dead very quickly of toxicity?

[01:49:43] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Oh, no. I think he discovered early on in Europe that if he didn’t detoxify his patients he would lose them. I’m not sure that was discovered necessarily in the United States.

[01:49:56] Ashley James: Well then the movie got it wrong, but I thought that was really interesting and I thought maybe it had to do with America being more toxic, and I mean, still toxic today, but in terms of lead in the gasoline so the environment.

[01:50:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Maybe it was the cancer patient then because he didn’t start treating cancer until he got to the United States, right? That might have happened with the cancer patients, some of the cancer patients at first. The first one he did he completely cured her, right? How he did that without coffee enemas, I’m not sure if he maybe didn’t do enough coffee enemas going forward, I don’t know. At one point during his practice, he lost his first few patients because he didn’t detoxify them heavily enough and they went into more toxic shock, ultimately, and that’s where the five coffee enema protocol was ultimately derived.

[01:50:53] Ashley James: That’s why I think it’s so important to point this out because some people say, well, I’m going to do Gerson therapy, but I’m not going to do the coffee enemas because that’s weird.

[01:51:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: You can’t.

[01:51:02] Ashley James: Some people are like, well, I’m going to do it, but I’m not going to eat breakfast because I don’t like eating breakfast or whatever. If you’re reversing your cancer with Gerson therapy, you don’t cherry-pick what you like and what you don’t like.

[01:51:13] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right.

[01:51:14] Ashley James: He trialed and errored this and got to the point he’s having the greatest success, and you could add things on like aloe. It’s not going to hurt, it’s only going to help more, but you don’t take things away. So you say one coffee enema a day for those who are just looking to prevent disease.

[01:51:32] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I’ve been doing one a day for 25 years.

[01:51:36] Ashley James: So could you explain why coffee enemas help to detox the body?

[01:51:44] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Absolutely. And it’s pure science, it’s not voodoo science. Your liver produces an enzyme called glutathione transferase. Glutathione transferase is the most potent detoxifying enzyme or one of the most potent detoxifying enzymes in the human body. Well, your liver needs palmitic acid in order to create glutathione transferase. Well, properly roasted organic coffee from a specific bean, not a drinking bean, is loaded with palmitic acid.

It’s been demonstrated scientifically by Peter Lechner, you can Google it, Peter Lechner. It has been demonstrated that when you do one coffee enema, the production of glutathione transferase by the body goes up 600 to 700% greater than normal. I mean, there is nothing that can produce that kind of detoxification.

Now, what people don’t understand is when you do the coffee enema and you stimulate that production, that requires massive amounts of nutrients. So if you’re not replenishing the body with nutrients in the form of juices and massive amounts of organic produce on a daily basis, you’ll actually cause yourself more harm than good over time because you’re going to deplete the body over time. That’s why drinking coffee, you deplete your body of nutrients so much because you’re losing so many vitamins and minerals because it’s a diuretic. It’s artificially stimulating metabolism, which requires nutrients.

When you do a coffee enema, the rule is three to four juices for every coffee enema. So if I do one coffee enema day, I’m literally eating three to five pounds of fresh organic produce every single day, raw. That’s to balance my system. But that’s the main thing that the Gerson coffee enema does.

The other thing it does, is as you and I are sitting here, if we’re talking for 15 minutes, our blood is circulating through our liver and our kidneys. It’s being cleansed two and a half times in a 15-minute period going through our liver and our kidney for cleansing, dialysis, so to speak.

When you do a coffee enema, it must be because of the hypovolemic state because you’re now adding a quart of liquid to you. You must increase the flow of fluid through the body. You’re actually running your blood through the liver and the kidneys five times rather than two and a half times. So it’s a natural form of dialysis, so to speak. That’s another side benefit, so to speak, of the Gerson therapy.

Finally, the other thing it does is it releases bile and it causes bile to flow, and that’s what your toxins are ultimately bound to. The way the liver detoxifies is cholesterol gets converted into bile acids, and then bile binds toxins and eliminates it through the intestines and the kidneys. So that’s the other thing that the Gerson coffee enema does. It produces bottom bile flow, which is also enhancing detoxification.

[01:55:01] Ashley James: And then we have to make sure that we have something that’s going to carry that all the way out, so don’t be constipated because the body tries to reuptake cholesterol from bile and it’ll reuptake some of those forever chemicals. All those chemicals the body’s trying to get rid of because the gut doesn’t know the difference, right? It’s costly to make bile, and so the body tries to reabsorb it. We want to make sure we’re getting enough fiber, that 15 grams a day, that average American diet, that’s not going to cut it. Aim for 50 grams of fiber a day, 100 grams of fiber. But the juices, there’s still some fiber in juice, right? I know that we do remove pulp, but can you also take some pulp and throw them back in or can make dehydrated crackers out of it.

[01:55:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: There’s no reason. If you’re eating three Gerson meals a day, there’s no reason.

[01:56:00] Ashley James: What is a Gerson meal? Maybe we should give it a picture. What does it look like to eat three Gerson meals a day?

[01:56:08] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Every morning is oatmeal with dried fruit stewed into it, so prunes, raisins, and mango. What else do we eat? Sometimes we throw currants in there. That’s it. It’s oatmeal and dried fruit, and then they get an orange juice every morning. Flax oil is mandatory. Two tablespoons of flax oil every single day is mandatory. And they can have a natural sweetener. They can have up to two to three teaspoons a day maximum of a natural sweetener, so honey, a sucanat, maple syrup they can put in their oatmeal, so that’s breakfast.

Lunch and dinner, mandatory are potatoes. Potatoes are a staple. They’re so easily converted into energy by the body, and so Gerson made potatoes staple. There’s also something called Hippocrates Soup. Mandatory is Hippocrates Soup at lunch and dinner. It was actually a soup created by Hippocrates 2500 years ago. Now, Hippocrates is considered the greatest physician that ever lived. Ironically, Gerson used his work and Paracelsus’ his work to come to his conclusions and ultimately formed the Gerson therapy.

So Hippocrates Soup and potatoes are a staple, then any other vegetable. It might be asparagus, it might be squash, it might be onions or tomatoes, all of those things can make up another vegetable dish. That pretty much derives the Gerson Therapy meals, they’re simple.

We have very artistic chefs. We have vegetarian artistic chefs. I mean, they’re brilliant. They take fruits and vegetables and they literally turn it into appetizing art, and so it’s amazing what you can do with what God gave us. I mean, fruits and vegetables and the combinations you can make are just fascinating and just scrumptious.

[01:58:16] Ashley James: I love it. I didn’t hear any—some people are going to freak out—protein in that. Can you please explain? How am I going to get my 500 grams of protein a day that everyone tells me I need?

[01:58:35] Dr. Patrick Vickers: One of the biggest fallacies out there is how much protein the human body needs and what kind of protein the human body needs. I can’t tell you how many times people ask me that question, where am I going to get my protein on this diet? Well, where does a horse or a cow get their protein from? Are they cannibals? Are they pumping iron all day long and building that muscle mass that way? No, they’re not. How are they getting their protein to support their massive structures? They’re eating grass all day.

[01:59:16] Ashley James: Elephants.

[01:59:18] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, they’re eating greens.

[01:59:19] Ashley James: Right? Largest land mammals.

[01:59:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly. They’re eating greens. Greens are loaded with proteins. Carrots are loaded with protein. Potatoes are loaded with protein. They are, I thought they were a carb? No. They’re a carb, they’re a protein, they’re virtually a perfect food. Oatmeal, protein; lentils, protein; quinoa, protein. I mean, you combine these things and you get them all in your diet on a daily basis and your body will be able to take those amino acids and completely make a protein for your optimal survival.

You do not need meat, you do not need eggs, you do not need milk, you do not need cheese in order to get protein into your diet. It is one of the biggest fallacies and tragedies out there because meat and all those other things I mentioned, are such inferior proteins. They’re inferior proteins to keep the body optimally fit and healthy.

[02:00:25] Ashley James: And the fat, the diet is pretty much naturally low in fat minus the flax oil that you’re adding. How much flax oil should someone eat a day? Is it something they’re eating just by the spoonful, pouring it kind of like cod liver oil into the spoon, or are they putting it on their salad? Obviously, they’re not cooking with it? How much flax oil should someone be consuming a day and how do they eat it?

[02:00:58] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Just to clarify something, all our foods, whether it’s a fruit, a vegetable, or whatever, pretty much comes with everything we need from protein, to sugar, to even essential fatty acids. You wouldn’t even necessarily have to supplement with flax oil if you’re eating a proper diet. Even spinach and greens have essential fatty acids in them.

A healthy person, if they got one tablespoon of flax oil a day, that would probably be optimal. It’s a highly, highly concentrated fat right? I mean, how many freaking flax seeds do you have to press to get a tablespoon of flax oil, right? Our patients have to do two per day when they’re cancer patients, but then at six weeks, they have to go down to one because you can’t bombard the body that long with such a highly concentrated fat and it’s not necessary. In the beginning, they needed to do that because they need to restore the proper fats at the level of the cell membrane, but after six weeks, Gerson felt like he could wean them off or wean them down. They would continue one tablespoon for the rest of their protocol.

To put one tablespoon a day into your diet, whether it’s on a salad or in the oatmeal. I put it on the oatmeal, I put it in the potato, I put it on the salad until I have essentially a tablespoon a day. I don’t take more than that.

[02:02:41] Ashley James: What kind of flax oil because I know there are doctors out there like Dr. Wallach who say we shouldn’t eat any oil out of a bottle because it’s rancid and it’s going to increase—

[02:02:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: This is true.

[02:02:57] Ashley James: It can potentially increase the hydrogen in the body. It can give it more free radicals. Of course, this entire diet would really help to mitigate that. What kind of flax oil is best to take?

[02:03:10] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Okay. So obviously, it has to be cold-pressed right, and there are a few companies that produce a really high quality flax oil. We get ours from Omega Nutrition. Barlean’s, perfect. Barlean’s not a problem. They’re just as good of a producer as Omega. Those are the two that I would highly recommend.

Now, in terms of getting rancid, you’re exactly right. Flax oil is highly volatile. What makes it volatile is what? It doesn’t have any hydrogen bonds, that’s what gives it its volatility and it’s quick to go rancid. Now, what does quick to go rancid mean?. Well, that cold-pressed oil is in an opaque bottle and it’s also refrigerated, so it’s not exposed to light, heat, or air until you open it then it’s exposed to air. But it’s not exposed to light and it’s not exposed to heat.

 If you continue to refrigerate it, a 12-ounce bottle will last you for three weeks. It should last you for three weeks. At the end of three weeks, that’s when it’ll start to break down. But for two to three weeks, you can use that oil perfectly, keep it refrigerated, and it will stay completely fresh. And then from there, they say pretty much after three to four weeks, you might want to consider throwing it away because it’ll start to break down even if you just open it up, pour it, close it, put it in the fridge. But it should last you anywhere for around three weeks.

But fish oil. Do you know fish oil they say is like 5 to 10 times more volatile than flax oil? And so, these supplements, they put them into these capsules, they put them into bottles and stuff. When you take those fish oils, you know how you burp and it has that fishy taste? That’s already gone rancid. These companies that are producing fish oil, they’ll tell you publicly because they’re trying to sell you their product how pure, unrefined, and how un-rancid their oils are. But reality is, behind closed doors, it is impossible to keep their oils pure. That’s why when you take them, you burp, and you taste that fishy taste, that means it’s gone rancid because true fish oil right from the fish when you eat it, it doesn’t have that taste. It has a pure almost like flax oil taste.

Fish oil, I would never touch it. Not to mention, where’s that fish oil coming from? It’s coming from the fat of the fish. Where do the mercury and the toxicity in the oceans get stored? In the fat of the fish. However much you try to distill it and distill the heavy metals and stuff out there, you’re not going to succeed in getting most of that out. I don’t buy it. I never touch it. Flax oil is my go-to guy.

[02:06:19] Ashley James: I love it. This is something we can all do. We can incorporate these things. It does take about a month to neuro-adapt fully, but we can look to see significantly less inflammation. This is incredible for those who are in pain. I mean, just the whole food plant-based diet alone. No oil, let’s say. A whole food plant-based diet, no oil, so no processed food, no oil. My friend Naomi who actually had her on the show because she reversed a major heart condition with the whole food plant-based diet with no oil.

Her parents got on it. I think they’re in their 70s, really nice people. Her mom reversed her arthritis-like major arthritis pain, kind of like preventing needing surgeries in the future kind of arthritis. She no longer has arthritis, and I think it was like three weeks in which she said to her daughter, hey, my arthritis pain is gone. That just blew my mind because we’re taught that arthritis is wearing away of the cartilage. I’ve seen people reverse arthritis. I’ve seen Dr. Wallach reverse arthritis. I know it’s reversible.

MDs will tell you it’s not. I remember back in college, [inaudible 02:07:47] was a neurosurgeon in Croatia and he escaped the war and came over to Canada. He was my professor. Later I think he was like the Dean of the Naturopathic College in Toronto. I remember in anatomy class, he said, you cannot regrow cartilage. This is like 1999. He goes, you cannot regrow cartilage. Once you have arthritis, you will always have arthritis. He was really adamant. Do not even think that arthritis is reversible. Once you’ve lost cartilage you could never get it back.

I thought, this is ridiculous. You’re expecting me to think that like you were the cartilage you’re born with is the cartilage you’re always going to have or something. It’s so silly. Of course, the body can regenerate cartilage. Are you wearing your body down faster than you can regrow it? If you’re not giving yourself the raw building blocks, if you’re not giving yourself the material it needs to grow—the bones, the joints, the cell walls—and then you’re dosing gasoline on yourself and then lighting it on fire every day with your habits, of course you’re going to go downhill. Of course, the cartilage is going to wear away because you’re dousing yourself with flames and then not giving yourself anything to rebuild, not enough. It’s like everyone else. You can be like everyone else; you’re going to become a statistic.

But we can reverse these diseases. That’s exciting. MDs will tell you you cannot reverse these because that’s their training. We have to start thinking for ourselves and question everything. Question absolutely everything and don’t take our word for it, question us too. Go look into this stuff. Go try it for yourself. See how you are. Give it three months, I’d say. What happens to people in three months? If we all jumped in and did this for the next three months, what would we expect to feel, what would we expect to happen in our bodies?

[02:10:05] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Oh, wow. I mean, look like Albert Schweitzer, severely advanced diabetes six weeks, Dr. Gerson cured him. Someone scheduled for triple quadruple bypass surgery, in one month we’re canceling their surgeries. You want to lose weight? Our patients are losing anywhere from a quarter to a pound a day until they’re normal weight. Now people say, well, how on earth can you lose a pound a day if you’re consuming 3500 to 4000 calories? Because the experts say that you have to consume anywhere from a maximum of 1200 to maybe 1500 if you’re going to lose weight.

Well, how is it that on the Gerson Therapy consuming 3500 to 4000 calories per day that you can lose anywhere from a quarter to a pound per day?

[02:10:55] Ashley James: You’re healing the metabolism.

[02:10:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Because the issue of weight loss has nothing to do with caloric intake. It has everything to do with being able to convert those calories into energy, and that is everything that we have spoken about today. We have restored metabolism from the gut, to the cell membrane, to the internal part of the cell so the mitochondria can convert those calories into energy, and that is proper and healthy weight loss. Massive amounts of caloric intake. Imagine that, and the experts tell you you’ve got to starve yourself on 1200 to 1500 calories per day if you want to lose weight. That’s bogus. It’s nonsense. They don’t understand the cellular science behind it, and that’s what made Gerson such an elemental genius.

He has taken modern nutritional ideas and theories, whether it’s weight loss, the ketogenic diet, and turned it up on its head. This is what you can expect on the Gerson Therapy. Skin conditions. Do you have a severe skin condition? A lot of our patients come in with severe skin conditions because typically, your skin conditions are underlying metabolic errors and preconditions to cancer. They come in with skin conditions, within three months, their skin conditions are completely resolved—three months. This is what you can expect.

[02:12:35] Ashley James: I love it. This is so exciting. I realized I’ve had you on the show for two hours now. I could talk to you for another five. I’d love to have you back on the show. Dr. Patrick Vickers, it has been such a pleasure having you.

This way of eating goes completely against the grain, in terms of weight loss, great read. I listen to the book. Who figured, right? I love podcasts, I like listening to books. Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis, just listen to the first chapter. He tells his story. He’s a second-generation weight loss surgery doctor. He made a name for himself cutting people’s stomachs out. He was in Texas and he was working with 600-pound plus patients, and his dad did too. He was on Bravo, he had a reality show, he had a book out. He was all about the lower fat, processed food, 1200-calorie day diet.

In his 30s, he started feeling sluggish, he started getting a little tubby. He started feeling more and more tired. He was eating the same thing that he told his patients to eat like high protein, low carb, low fat cheese, low fat yogurt, and he just started to just feel sicker and sicker.

He used to think his patients were just lazy because they said, I’m too tired to go to the gym. He’s like, you’re just lazy, and then he noticed he was too tired. He’s like, oh man, this diet that I put everyone on I’m on, it’s failing me. So then the kicker, he’s 35 years old, he’s a surgeon, and he starts to lose his eyesight. He goes to the eye doctor and they say, you have cholesterol deposits in your eyes so bad that your eyes are like a 60-year-old man and you’re going to have to be on, and he gives him like a long list full of drugs for the rest of your life. Cholesterol meds, high blood pressure, all blood thinners, whatever. He was put on so many meds.

He goes home and he sits there and goes, my lifespan is now just cut short because these meds will cause my lifespan to be cut short. He’s 35 years old and he has to eat humble pie. He realizes everything he’s been telling all his patients is wrong.

He goes back to the drawing board and that’s when he discovers the stuff that you’re teaching. That this way of eating is the way to heal the body, and then he heals himself and he has to completely eat humble pie, and that’s when he produced the Proteinaholic, which is his journey of discovering the true science of health. He debunks like 30 different diets. He debunks keto. He debunks everyone that’s all mainstream, and he does it in a very fun manner. It’s a really interesting book. I apologize, this isn’t meant to offend you. I don’t think there’s one doctor on the planet that has the entire truth.

[02:16:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, exactly, right?

[02:16:03] Ashley James: But it is up to us as the individual consumer to go and learn from each one and then figure out what works for me, right? We listened to Dr. Patrick Vickers and we listened to this doctor here and this doctor here, and we started to get this full picture. Dr. Wallach says no oil all the time ever. So I’m like, okay, great. No oil time ever. But then Dr. Patrick Vickers comes along and says, well, actually, flax oil has all these benefits. You take it in this way, and also, yes, I agree the other oils are good. And then we look at that and go okay, I’m going to try this on. We just have to continue to get the information from these amazing doctors, especially the clinicians because they’re boots on the ground seeing the results.

[02:16:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right.

[02:16:54] Ashley James: Implement it into our lives. Question everything. I like to say, I’m the biggest open-minded skeptic. Question everything, but also have an open mind enough to take in information that goes against your belief system.

I was a meat eater through and through and I was scared of having one meal without meat. You bet this challenged me and I didn’t want to hear it. I did not want to hear it. My husband went overnight, after I did these interviews like I did some plant-based interviews, my husband started looking into this information. Overnight, he went from never eating vegetables, only eating meat, to never eating meat again four years ago. He woke up and said, I’m never eating meat.

He would make a joke,I eat vegans daily because all he ate was beef. He’d eat pork for breakfast and then before lunch and dinner, and that was it, or eggs maybe, but that was it. That was his diet. He was on a carnivore diet. And then a switch flipped in his brain. He’s not a health nut, but a switch flipped in his brain, and I watched him do it. He said four days into eating this—you got to get he was like 100% meat to 0% meat. I had to all of a sudden learn how to cook whole food plant-based, like delicious meals that weren’t gross, that weren’t plain but also weren’t full of junk.

He said, four days into this, this food tastes so good. If you told me this food too would taste so good I would have done this years ago. He says this food tastes way better, way better. It’s just a matter of giving it a try.

The Proteinaholic book is great because he shares his own personal journey. He says at the beginning, you don’t have to be a vegan. You don’t have to go there and do that. But just look at the science, look at the results, look at it for yourself. Try this on, try this way of eating on. He just shows. Okay, you want to eat chicken breast once a week? Well, here’s the damage. Here’s the potential damage to the body. He just shows it. It’s interesting, right?

We have people out there who want to go and reverse disease and you’ve got fantastic answers, we want them to your website, gersonclinic.com. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. I definitely want to have you back. Anytime you want to come to teach new things, share new things. This has been fantastic.

[02:19:25] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I just want to share one anecdote with you. I lived with Charlotte Gerson, right? She invited me to come live with her for two months at her home in San Diego, where she had all her father’s handwritten files of all his patients between 1910 and 1959, which I’m one of maybe a handful of people who’ve ever had the opportunity to actually go through those files, but guess who lived on the same street as Charlotte Gerson. Joel Wallach.

[02:19:56] Ashley James: No way. Shut the front door.

[02:20:02] Dr. Patrick Vickers: He lives on the same street when I was living with her, yeah. And Joel and I actually have lectured at the same venue a couple of times. We’ve lectured in the same venue. A guy by the name of Vincent [inaudible 02:20:15] holds a thing in Missouri from time to time and we lectured on the same stage. But I met JoeI. I saw Joel walking up and down the street back in 1998.

[02:20:27] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is so cool.

[02:20:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: When that video or that tape that you’re referring to, that’s when it was huge. He was iconic at that point. But he lived on the same street as Charlotte, go figure.

[02:20:42] Ashley James: Him and I have traveled together. I’ve helped him with his lectures, and he’s this little short dude, right? I mean, he’s stout, right? He’s not a pushover, but he’s really short. My husband’s 6’7″, and I’m also pretty tall. I’m 5’10”. For a woman I’m tall. We both got muscle, my husband and I, and when we were traveling, we were running through the airport and he had two 80 pound bags. They’re hockey bags or huge duffel bags. Two 80 pound bags and we tried to help him because we had our suitcase. We tried to help him and we were struggling. He picks both of them up like their feathers and starts running through the airport. We were winded. This dude is fit and that was about eight years ago.

[02:21:51] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Because he is tiny.

[02:21:53] Ashley James: He’s tiny, but he’s fit. I love his work. And again, I don’t think every doctor on the planet has the answers, but Dr. Wallach has a lot of answers that other doctors don’t. We just have to keep going down the rabbit hole, and I’ve had him on the show twice and it was great. I can’t wait to have him back. I can’t wait to have you back. This has been amazing. And of course, listeners need to go to gersonclinic.com and then go to the gift section, put in the password podcast to start getting your videos.

I’d love to come to your clinic one day, that would be so great. I hope that my listeners who need the help will seek your help. I just pray that this episode and all that you do, all your endeavors will fall on ears that are ready to hear and will make a ripple turn into a tidal wave and help so many people to beat cancer and other diseases. Thank you for helping end the needless suffering. That’s really important.

[02:22:55] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Thank you, and don’t forget, your listeners can go to that gift section and put in podcast, and they can listen to all the science that we’ve talked about today and even then some because there’s a lot we didn’t talk about. That’s only for our paid clientele, they have access to that. Those are our private videos. Have them go there, gersonclinic.com

[02:23:20] Ashley James: Awesome. All right, thank you so much. And please, come back to the show. Don’t be a stranger.

[02:23:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: You just let me know when and I’ll oblige.

[02:23:27] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode with Dr. Patrick Vickers. Wasn’t it amazing? I just love this protocol. I have a family member who is in hospice care at the end of their life. They chose to go through traditional cancer treatments and now they are in the final stages of their life deteriorating, which they deteriorate quite quickly after doing the traditional methods, the cut, burn, and poison methods.

I convinced them to just try some freshly pressed juice. They’re not willing to use any form of natural medicine, but they’re feeling so awful. I said, would you just be willing if I bought organic vegetables and fruit and I made some juice for you, would you be willing to do it? And so they said, yes. And I said, would you be willing to try this diet, the Gerson protocol? I’m not expecting them to do the whole thing. Just would you be willing to do it, and they said, okay, well, I’m willing to do most of it. So they’re not willing to do all of it, but again, I just wanted to make them more comfortable. They’re not willing to fight for themselves and use natural medicine to reverse their disease so I can’t force them, but I did provide them with freshly squeezed juice every day and some healthy meals.

What happened would really blow your mind. They’ve been bedridden, unable to walk. If they try to stand, they faint because their blood pressure is so bad. There’s weakness in their body. They can’t stand, they have to be carried. Within 12 hours of them drinking juice, they were perky, peppy, sitting up without having sudden blood pressure drops. Within 24 hours, with a walker, they were able to take a little walk around the house first time in two months. That was so cool.

We’ve just been giving them some juice and basically, Gerson-style meals and they are feeling so much better. Now, the person is still in hospice care, they’re still at the end of their life. They’re still going downhill much slower now and having much more quality of life. We actually noticed their confusion went away. Their dementia where they didn’t know how to work a remote anymore went away. They’re able to use the remote control without asking how to use it.

Another thing, they had stopped reading, which they love to do, and they stopped using their cell phone. They were just, for the last two months, sitting in bed confused, staring at the TV. After about two days of being on most of the Gerson protocol, like I said, they’re not doing the coffee enemas, but they’re drinking some juice. Not drinking as much juice as you would if you were trying to save your life, but they’re drinking a bunch of juice, vegetables, and some fruits, and then eat some of the meals.

They started reading again. They started looking on another phone again. They started sitting up and talking. The color came back in their face. Pain became less. Bowel movements became much easier, going to the bathroom became much easier. Their mobility became much easier. It improved quality of life more than any drug that that hospice care could give them in less than a week.

If that doesn’t speak to the profound effect that food is medicine, that what you put in your mouth every day, that if you go through the drive-thru, what you’re putting in your mouth is hurting you is poison. If you spend the time to eat organic, fresh, raw and cooked vegetables, and the juice, you are blasting your cells with high oxygen nutrients that help the body to be healthier and healthier and healthier.

Another thing to remember, this has just given me such a perspective. How you manage your stress, how you take time to take care of yourself, the self-care that you put in in the kitchen, not just in the bathroom. I’ve heard people say, oh, I’m going to take an extra-long bath and that’s my self-care. Your self-care starts with the kitchen. What you do, what you put in your mouth, what you drink, what you eat, that is the biggest self-care. Go for a walk, pray, meditate, read, try to ground yourself. Go lie down in some grass. Literally, go hug a tree. Get out in nature. Give yourself moments of joy and nourish every cell in your body.

What you do now will affect the quality of your life in the last 20 years of your life. The last 20 years can be miserable or they can be filled with joy.

I’m a friend of a woman who’s a doctor and we’ve been friends for many years. She’s in her early 80s and you wouldn’t know it. You’d think she was in her 40s. She runs marathons. She’s been in the Olympics. She’s so wonderful and she took care of her body her whole life, and now, there’s the return on her investment. Because I know 80-year-olds that are going blind, that are losing their comprehension, that is losing their mobility. Whereas my friend has the same functionality as a 40-year-old and she’s loving life in her 80s.

That’s the blessing you get by really taking what you learned today and applying it. Just remember that, apply it. The investment in yourself can make such a difference and just try it for a week. I cannot believe what’s happening to my family member who clearly has seen benefits from this just a week into doing it. So I’d love for you to just give it a try and just commit to seven days of juicing and eating this diet and see what happens. See the miracle that unfolds in your body. I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear how you respond after a week. What are the changes? Even just the subtle changes, what are the benefits that happen? Please come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and share, I’d love to hear.

And also, remember to go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and get some of that Medicinal Aloe Gel and drink it every day. Let me know how that helps you. The coupon code is LTH2022, and that’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. I look forward to hearing from you after you do all this. I want to know how this helped you. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this with others. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.

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