Pushing The Limits

Exercise gives our body a physical and mental boost. It's good stress, but it's stress nonetheless. Thus, doing a running warm-up before an interval run or training is integral to get the most benefits out of running.

Neil joins me in this episode to explain the steps in preparing for a running workout. We emphasise the importance of setting your mindset before training. We also cite different examples of run-specific movements, drills and breathing exercises.

If you are a runner wanting to do a running warm-up right, then this episode is for you.

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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. You will learn about the role of stress levels and mindset when preparing for training.
2. Know more about running warm-up and breathing exercises.
3. Discover the importance of run-specific movements.

Resources

• Email [email protected] to know more about my health optimisation consulting.
• Visit my YouTube channel to watch warm-up, workout and training videos for runners.

Episode Highlights [03:47] Understanding Your Bucket of Stress

• The bucket of stress is filled with things going on in your daily life. You layer exercise on top of it.
• Having an overflowing bucket and doing high-intensity interval running will cause more stress to the body, causing injuries and pain.
• Conduct a wellness check to assess your current state. The checklist includes sleep, nutrition, hydration, movement, energy, body, and stress.
• Listen to the full episode to learn more about computing your wellness score!
• Change your warm-up and training to suit how you are feeling.

[12:13] Shifting Your Mindset

• Neil is a father of three. He works out because he wants to be a superhero for his kids.
• Figure out what training means for you.
• Mindset is essential when doing a workout. You need to shift from work mode to training mode.
• Incorporate diaphragmatic breathing exercises to activate your body's parasympathetic state.

[18:47] Activating Your Muscles

• Spiky balls, rolling sticks and foam rollers are some of the tools you can use to activate your muscles.
• Expose your feet to neural stimulation to get them to move freely.
• Because the feet are connected to other parts of the body, activating it will start to relax the muscles and tissues above it.
• Activation may vary from person to person. Some people have a lot of tension in their bodies, while others are hypermobile.

[22:11] Static vs Dynamic Stretching

• Static stretching is holding a single stretch in one position for 30 seconds or longer.
• Doing a static stretch lengthens and switches off the muscles, making them too relaxed. The body thus becomes too floppy.
• Static stretching has its benefits after a run or during a yoga session but not before a run.
• Dynamic movements allow the body to move more freely.

[25:48] Warm-Ups and Fascia

• The fascia connects the different parts of our body from our head to toes. Fascia lines run across the body.
• Warm-ups should help open, lengthen and move the fascia.
• Stretching and moving the fascia allow you to move better and run more freely.

[31:47] Doing Drills

• It is best to do run-specific movements and drills.
• Ball of foot hops and carioca are some of the drills to help you warm up. Listen to the full episode to learn how Neil does his warm-ups!
• Listening to music helps to have cadence. You may create playlists for before and after you run. If you're doing a recovery run, you can use calmer music.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

'That's what training is about. It's not about the actual run where you actually get the results. It's in the recovery phase'.

'How you prepare your mind is going to be key when you understand your "why" before you warm up'.

'A lot of people find their toes are bunched together and tight. If we can get some movement through those, we start to get more benefit from our running as well'.

'Gone are the days of static stretching and standing on the doorstep during your quad stretch, holding. All you're doing there is switching the nervous system off and increasing your likelihood of injury and discomfort'.

'You take which bits of the tools you want out of the toolbox, and then you start using them from your perspective'.

'Looking at what you're currently doing, who you are and how much in a warm-up — what percentage you use each tool for will be quite different for each person'.

'You will have — and I promise you this — a much more fun run, and you'll enjoy it more if you've put the time into this warm-up piece of the puzzle'.

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To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript

Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential, with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of Pushing The Limits. Today, I have Neil Wagstaff, who is my wingman at Running Hot Coaching, and we're going to be talking everything about running and preparation for a good training session — how to tell if you're ready for that session that's on your list today.

We're talking about stress levels. We're talking sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. We're talking activating muscles. We're talking lymph and circulation and a whole lot of great info that you don't want to miss if you're into exercising, fitness or running. Before we go over to the show, though, I just want to remind you please give a rating and review to the show if you enjoy it. Share it with your family and friends.

We've been going now for five and a half years, and we've been in the top 200 globally ranked shows in health and fitness genre, and we really appreciate your support. And every one of those reviews and ratings really helps the show get seen by more people, heard by more people, so that they can get this great information that we're getting out.

Just want to also let you know, we are taking on a small number of clients on one-on-one health optimisation consulting. If you got a really tricky health situation, if you're not getting the results that you want in the normal world, if you are needing help navigating some complicated situations, then we'd love to help you. We only work with a very, very few people at a time. And that requires quite a commitment from us, from the research side of things in helping people optimise their health or navigate their way back to health. So if it sounds like something like you would like to know about, please email me [email protected]. We only work with a very few people at a time at that level. So just letting you know that that's available.

Now over to the show with Neil Wagstaff in Havelock North. And I hope you enjoy this fantastic interview.

Lisa: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have my wingman, Neil Wagstaff. Neil, how are you doing?

Neil: I'm good. Thanks, mate. I'm very good. How are you?

Lisa: It's very hot here. I'm sweating as well.

Neil: Here as well.

Lisa: Very humid! Right, people. Today, we have a really good webinar for you, podcast episode for you, all around the importance of — this one's for runners, really — and it's all around runners warm-ups. Why do you need to do one, what's included, why you need to incorporate breathing into that warm-up routine. It's more than just running warm-ups, believe me, you'll get some great value, if you're a runner in this one, or if you're into fitness.

And we're going to be talking about the importance of running specific movements to prepare for your run. And we're going to be going over some of our top drills to activate your body and get you ready. So, Neil, we did a fabulous session yesterday on this, and it was so valuable we decided we got to record this for the podcast, so… Over to you, mate.

Neil: Thanks, mate. Thanks, and as you say, it is a lot more than just the runners warm-up, but it's… Gone are the days we just lace up your shoes and run out the door. That's what many, you know, we definitely did in the older days. And a lot of our clients we work with do, a lot of people, as you said in the introduction, as well, it's not just the runners. It's in an exercise environment as well. So we put a lot of emphasis on this in the gym environment. So important, there should be some good nuggets for everyone.

So the first thing first before you even think about the warm-up is understanding about what we call your bucket of stress. So the bucket of stress, if you will imagine you've got that bucket sitting in front of you. And within that bucket, there's things that will fill it up. Now some of those things are going to be what's going on in your daily life. They're going to be your kids. They're going to be your work. They're going to be family. They're going to be other stresses that are happening, and then you layer exercise on the top of it.

So with the bucket stress, it's understanding how full yours is. If you're going to go out and do a high-intensity interval run, where you're doing 1K intervals at 80, 90% of your max effort, and your bucket is already overflowing, then that run, those interval runs on top are just going to cause your body more stress or more loads, which will give you a pretty harsh response, which will then result in injuries, niggles and pain.

Lisa: Yeah.

Neil: On days where your bucket is full, what you want to be doing is really changing your workout or changing your routine to suit how you're feeling. Okay, you know, I've had massive conversations over the years about the bucket.

What's your— give us your perspective of it and how you manage your routine a little bit differently now.

Lisa: Yeah, and I'm still probably a bad example some days.

Neil: You're a good work in progress. You're a good work in progress.

Lisa: Do what I say not what I preach sometimes. But it's really, I have really adopted the fact that it is important to do a warm-up when you're preparing for a run. And also to understand what we're trying to get across here is that just because stress is good for your body— I mean, sorry, running is good for your body or exercise is a good stressor, if you like, it is still adding to your total stress load.

So the level that Neil used to run it when he was not a dad of three little children and had a bit more time and didn't have a massive German, a couple of businesses to run, he could dedicate more intense time to training without breaking himself, if it makes sense. Now, because his energies are split in every which way, he has to be a little bit more careful how he prepares for an event, the time that he takes for it, and the time that he prepares his body.

So if your training plan says today, you should be going out and smashing a really long run or a really intense run, but you haven't got the resources because you had a really shitty night sleep, and you didn't drink enough yesterday, and you didn't eat properly, and the kids have been up all night, and goodness knows what else — you've got a lot of stress and a lot of worries on your mind — then you're probably not going to get to that adaption— adaptation, sorry, when you do that training, which is what you're actually doing it for.

It's not just about ticking the box because my coach said or my plan said that I had to do that today. And I've ticked the box, therefore I am good to go. It is about saying, 'Is my body going to respond to this training session today'? Yes or no? Or, 'Would I be permitted to postpone that really intense workout to a little bit later, maybe tomorrow? And I'll get to bed early tonight. And I'll drink well, and I'll hydrate well. An I'll do all the other bits and pieces as well. And then I might be a bit more prepared for that'. Does it make sense? So you're not doing things when your body is not going to get the adaptations because that's what training is about. It's not about the actual run where you actually get the results; it's in the recovery phase. So understanding where your body is at, which is a really good segue into our wellness checklist. Isn't that, Neil?

Neil: Yeah. So yes, you go through as well as, just asking yourself each day, where you're at a number of different things and things we get with our wellness checklist. And you can all do it at home as you listen to this. It's a simple scale of 1 to 10. So 1 to 10 on these things we're going to talk about. How well did you sleep? That's the first one. How well have you eaten, and where you're at from nutrition point of view? Lisa's already mentioned hydration, number three. So how well have you hydrated? How well have you moved? What sort of exercise movement have you done in the past day? On a scale of 1 to 10. And then energy wise, where's your energy score at? 1 being the toilet, 10 being at rock and roll levels, you're ready to party. And body, any niggles, any injuries? And your stress score, so 1 with the stress will be low and 10 will be good. That gives you a total score.

If you've got a score up over 50, and it'd be a good indication that you're ready to go and do a warmup that relates to what's in your program. If it's saying that, we're doing the example, the 1K, then that puts us in a position that we should be ready to do it. If my score is lower, which some days it is, then I'll look at my program and go right, I've got intervals. But I mean, my score's down at 40. So those two workouts don't match up then. So what I then do is go, 'I can still go train, but my training may be a recovery run instead so I feel my energy levels back up'.

If you are continuously having low scores with this full stress bucket, it's not a runner's warm-up you want to be considering. It's about— it's really another strategy, which is how am I going to empty some of my stresses out of my bucket? Because your bucket should be managed on a daily basis. So that you, you know, 80, 90% of the time you're doing what your program says, it's just having the confidence and understanding that some days when things don't go perfectly you can tweak it.

Okay, so just to recap: sleep, nutrition, hydration, movement, energy, body, and stress, scale of one to 10. 1 being in the toilet, 10 being rock and roll. And we can send the, or add the…

Lisa: Yeah, we'll put this in the show notes, actually, the checklist.

Neil: Wellness check to the show notes. Yeah, so that's understanding again really helps you manage your bucket. So before you've even warmed up, you're asking, what's my session I'm going to do? Now, I know what type of warm-up to do. The other bit to consider as well is really, really a little bit about your why. If you are… Many programs out there, what we've looked at over the years, designed by ex-professional runners, often male, without giving them a hard time, and often by men.

And in our business, we work with a lot of ladies. Over 70% of our business is working with females. And a lot of our athletes we're working with, mums or dads, and they have got busy work lives, busy family lives. So those programs are running five, six days a week just doesn't work. So ask the question as well, what's your why? And who are you? So for me, personally, as Lisa knows, my three little ones, Ellen, Cameron, Annie, I love the idea of getting dressed up as Superman. Okay, and we shared a couple of pictures of me dressed up as Superman.

So it's understanding what your why is and why you're doing it. I want to be a superhero for my kids. Therefore, the type of workout is different now, as Lisa said earlier, than I was doing in my… pre-kids. And when I was back in my 30s, then I was thinking more like a professional parkour athlete and wanted it to be doing. So therefore, the warm-up is going to be different. So what we're trying to do, and the big thing especially from Lisa's perspective as well, is how important mindset is. We're really big on that with what we do as well.

So understanding what mindset you're going into this workout in. So for me, I'm going in as a superhero, wanting to be a superhero, for my kids. Some people who are listening will be going in with a professional athlete mentality. So how you prepare your mind is going to be key when you understand your 'why' before you warm up. There's no need for me to warm up like a professional athlete if I'm wanting to go and warm up like a superhero. It's a different mindset as I do that. Does that make sense?

Lisa: Yeah, it does make sense. And I mean, like, I'll give you an example out of my sort of, you know, day. So if I'm, like, full on busy with the business all day, and I'm sitting a lot at the computer and meetings, and blah, blah, blah. And then comes five o'clock and I go right, I'm shutting the computer, I'm out the door. And if I go out without any preparation, and we've had arguments with people, they said, 'Well, I've just slowly increased my pace. Isn't that a warm-up'? No, it's not a warm up. And I'm still guilty of this on occasion when because you're like, you've got half an hour, and you got to get out the door. And you don't want to do a warm-up, and so…

But there's a couple of pieces missing out of that puzzle. One, there's a really important reason why you— firstly, you want to shift your mind, you've been in work mode all day. And now you got to, 'Oh my gosh, I got to go and train'. And the last thing you feel like when you've been sitting for hours in a static position is to go and do a full on workout. So you have to change your mindset because you can fail before you get out the door. And a lot of people have this argument with themselves every single day. It's like, 'That's on my list, but I'm knackered from work, and I don't feel like going out the door. And I just want to go home and eat a packet of chips and sit on the couch'.

And so there's a couple of tricks that I use to get myself out of that thought process. So the couple of rituals that I do. So when I go and I go, 'Right, I'm going to get into my training gear, regardless of whether I'm going out the door or not because I'm just going to do that'. And when I just go and do that, I put my training gear on, that is a ritual for me that I am… My body starts to go, 'Oh, when we're heading for training. We better get ready'. And it gives you enough, a couple of minutes, just to get your mind in that new space. You've been in the work space or the driving space or whatever you've been in, and now you're entering a new phase, and you're bringing yourself into the present moment. You're getting your gear on, and for me, putting my running gear on as always, for me, like putting on my armor, and I'm getting ready for a battle of sorts. It doesn't always have to be a hardcore workout, but I'm getting ready for action.

Then the next thing I do once my gear is on, it's like, well, 'I might as well just do a little bit of a warm-up and see how I go'. Like this is when I'm having those days when I don't want to train, you know, you know those ones. These are the tricks that I do to get myself out the door. So then I start to activate my muscles. And we're going to go through a whole list of things with Neil, right now. But just from a mindset point of view, when I start doing my dynamic stretches and my activation and my thing, and I'm getting my heart rate up. And then by the time I've done that for a few minutes, my mind is ready for the actually going out and then my body is also woken up.

So that's just a little bit of a mindset tip to get yourself out the door and bring yourself into the present moment. We also like to incorporate in that some breathing exercises, just, we could talk for hours on breathing. There is so much to learn about breathing. But just to give you just a simple quick exercise that you can do before you go out. So you've just come from work. You're going to do a box breathing exercise, where you're breathing in for four in the inhale, holding it for four, out for four with the exhale — a nice strong exhale — and then holding it for four. And you just do that box rhythm for maybe three, maybe four breaths. And in that time, close your eyes, seem to yourself into your body, start to feel your heart pumping, start to feel how do my arms and my legs feel, and you're just pulling your focus in, and then you'll be ready. Once the time you've opened your eyes, you'll be ready to get underway or get your warm-up sorted. So those are just a couple of little quick mindset tips to help you over that hump, whether it's in the morning and you get out of bed and you're going training or after work or whatever the case may be.

Neil: Perfect, Lisa. Let's go with the breathing just to add in as well, it's the… often, when you've not just flipping the mindset, you're also flipping things like the diaphragm. A lot of the time, if people have been in a sympathetic state throughout the day, which a lot of us are throughout the day now. Then if we go to, we're breathing through our upper chest and breathing through our shoulders, a lot of people will get massive results, just by them realizing that they can breathe properly into their lungs, and they're actually going out with not having enough energy to run because their breathing patterns, off. So getting that breath going, and as Lisa said, with the nasal breathing is a great thing to add in, a very simple thing to add in as well. As we go through this, this already, we haven't even got to the moving part yet, we've already had quite a long discussion, we want people to realise is we're creating a toolbox for you. That's a toolbox of things that you'll be able to pull out when you need them.

Some of you won't need the breathing as much as others, depending on what else has happened in your day already. It's a great thing to do. But some of you may find you've had quite a relaxing afternoon before you go run, and you're already breathing very nicely. So you don't need to use the breathing as much as someone that's been in a stressful situation for the afternoon or is in a very sympathetic state before they head out.

Lisa: Just briefly on the sympathetic and I think I've covered this in a couple of podcasts. But just to recap.. Sorry, took the computer over. You have a parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. So you, when you're in a sympathetic state, what we're meaning by that is that you're in a hypervigilant, alert, stressed out state, where you are producing quite a lot of stress hormones. Your cortisol levels might be up. Your adrenaline might be up. And your heart rate might be up, and your breathing, very often, is in the upper third of the chest.

And this is telling your body, 'I'm in fight or flight mode. There's dangerous things happening to me', even if those dangerous things are just emails and a shitty telephone call from the boss. Yeah, that isn't necessarily a lion or a tiger that, you know, used to be chasing us when we were back in the caveman days. But it's the same response in the body. And so what we're wanting to do with this breathing exercise is to doing some diaphragmatic breathing, so that's breathing into the belly, and we're going to do sessions on breathing because honestly, that's a couple of bucks worth.

But it's all about flipping it, getting that sympathetic nervous system activated. So you have nerves in the bottom of your lungs. And when you do very good strong exhales are really important in breathing in with the diaphragm, you're actually activating those nerves at the bottom of the lungs and tuning on that parasympathetic state. Now that parasympathetic state is all about rest and digest and recovery and immunity and all those repair processes. Now, we are going into an exercise situation, but to start off in a place of not being stressed is a good place to start. So flipping your mind and flipping your body over from one thing into the next thing. So that's just a very brief touch on sympathetic versus parasympathetic states.

Neil: The next piece in the… or the next tool in the toolbox is going to be our rolling or myofascial release. So the tools we use for this are spiky balls, one of our favourites, rolling stick, which like rolling pin and a foam roller. Easy wins and low hanging fruit are always going to be your feet because they spend most of the day wrapped up in a shoe. And generally, our feet don't move as well as they should. Our feet should ideally move like our hands do, and our toes should move like our fingers. For most of us they don't so getting them out, getting them exposed to more neural stimulation and releasing any tight bits in the feet and getting them moving more freely makes a massive difference. You got...

Lisa: Can you explain the neural stimulation? I think that's— it's really why they're activating those fibers in the feet is the connection to the brain and the coordination and…

Neil: Connection to the brain. One thing it does, it's like waking your feet up. So if I spent all day with my hand, for example, in a big glove and deprived it of senses and deprived it of being able to feel and touch things, I'd lose connection with what was going on around me. So I start to lose connection with understanding what was hot, what was cold and what things should feel like. If I can have that stimulation through my foot, and the great thing with a spiky ball, we're not going to smash it, is it starts to wake the feet up again.

So all I'm saying is, wake up, wake up! I'm sending messages from my feet through my nervous system up to my brain going, 'Ah, that's how I move my big toe'. Ah, that's the big toe, with running real important. But that's how I move it. And that's how my other toes move. A lot of people find their toes are bunched together and tight. If we can get some movement through those, we start to get more benefit from our running as well.

Other people are going to have calves that are locked up and feet that are locked up, everything in your body is connected. So if we start to stimulate the feet, we get massive results with people who've got lower back pain or people who have got shoulder pain or neck pain, because the connection with the fascia in the bottom of your foot, it then runs up the back of your body up across your calf, your hamstrings, your hips, starts to relax a tissue above as well.

So simply two things that are going to happen as you do that. One is you're going to get some muscles relax that need to be relaxed. Then the other thing, you can actually start waking the feet up. Okay, depending on where, and it's gonna be very much dependent on where you're at as a person. Some people are carrying loads of tension in their body, and some people are hypermobile. So those that are hypermobile aren't gonna need these tools as much as those that are rigid and stiff. Yeah, do I make sense?

Lisa: Yeah.

Neil: You need these tools for what you need. And that's the emphasis we want to make is doing this whole thing when we finish talking about it. And its shortest version would be between five and eight minutes or longer version might be 12 to 15 minutes, but some of you are going to use more tools than others.

So some of you, what we've discussed already, may use the breathing more than the rolling. But feet is an easy win, calves are an easy win. Rolling around the hip area, the glutes is a very easy win, the quads and getting those areas both, switching off muscles that needs to be switched off. But also starting to wake up muscles that need to be woken up. And it's easy ways to do that with those tools. Gone are the days of static stretching and standing on the doorstep during your quad stretch, holding. All you're doing there is switching the nervous system off and increasing your likelihood of injury and discomfort.

Lisa: So just to explain what static and dynamic is for those who perhaps aren't familiar with that term. So static stretching, where you're holding a single stretch in one position for, I don't know, 30 seconds or something or longer. And that's not a good thing to do prior to a run or exercise because you're actually lengthening that muscle, and you're switching it off and making it too relaxed and then you're going to be able to flop it, for lack of a better description when you go out. And so you want to be waking it up, activating it, getting the blood flowing through it, but not turning it off.

The static stretching has its value but that comes after the run or if you're doing, say, a yoga session or something like that, then it's a different thing. But you wouldn't go into a yoga class and then go for a run, for example. That would be a recipe for injury, but you're wanting to activate these different areas. The other thing to note with the foam roller was don't smash the crap out of yourself like, it's not go hard or go home.

Cause I used to do that, to be fair, you know, when I first started with foam rolling years ago. It was like, 'Ah, the more it hurts, the more I have to do it', and, you know, as with everything, yep, you fight through the pain. But actually, the more we've learned about lymph and all the other stuff that we've learned in activating, you don't need to go full ball hard. If it's that painful, you should be around, what, six and seven, right, Neil, for what you're doing with the foam rolling. And you know, we have lots of videos and stuff on our YouTube channel if anybody wants to check it out, or, of course, joining our club and you'll find out all that sort of detailed information. So that's the activation phase. Your hips, your calves, your feet are a good place to start.

Neil: It's a good technique, just simple techniques to work with are released with awareness. So we've already talked about breathing. If you find a sensitive spot, you can apply some pressure to that, getting no more than sort of six or seven out of 10. Use your breath, in through your nose, out through your nose to actually release. Your nervous system, we've already talked about and your body is fully connected. So by using my mind to tell my brain and to tell my foot or the muscles in my foot to switch off or switch on, I can have that control over my body.

I'm using the spiky ball to stimulate it, which gives me something to feel and then I can say, right, wake up or tone down. So use the breath with awareness or release with awareness by using the breath to actually switch things off. If something feels tight, you can imagine the muscle actually switching off, toning down, almost like it's got a volume button on it and you're turning it down.

Okay. The next technique, which is a good one, is a pin and stretch. So if you find a niggly spot, thinking about rolling the calves. I'm sitting on the floor with my calf and leg up on a roller. If I find a niggly spot, then I can actually pin it. And then I can move my foot backwards and forwards. So I'm pinning and then stretching. I'm moving my foot in and out of plantar and dorsiflexion. Okay, and then actually flushing the muscles as well is another great technique. We're rolling up and down and across the muscle and a great way to… almost like imagining like your muscle's like a sponge, where you're you're wringing it out and then putting it back in a bucket of water so it can absorb again, and wring it out. So you're flushing out and getting fluid moving backwards and forwards.

Lisa: Yep. And so on. Yeah, that's absolutely, that's key.

Neil: Right So next on our list. So now we've breathed, we've worked out where we're at, if we come back from the top, we've worked out more from mindset, breathing, rolling. And now we're going to look at our — the body is all connected — so we're going to look at our fascia. So the body is connected, again, like static stretching — gone are the days where we should be looking at the body in isolation, and looking at warming up or moving specific muscles like our chest on its own, or biceps or triceps on their own, or our thighs on their own.

The body is connected from toes to head. So the fact that it's connected from toes to head, and there is myofascial lines that are running right across our bodies — front, side, back. We want to be in a position that the movements we're doing in our warm-up should help open, lengthen, move. Imagine your fascia like a superhero suit. I love talking about superheroes and the superhero suit. And you can— that superhero suit should move easily; you should be able to move easily in it. So what we're doing with these big fascia movements, is you want to be in a position where you're getting that superhero suit just to fit a little bit better or fit a bit more comfortably. And if you do that, then it fits more comfortably when you start running. You're running more freely, we haven't got any sticky bits. Okay.

Lisa: So like, just explain a little bit, you know, in two seconds, it's like the chicken skin is. I know. It's like each of these subjects we could do an hour on that seriously, but the fascia, so we all know we've got ligaments, we've got tendons, we've got muscles, but a lot of people really have a struggle. What the hell is fascia then? And what do you mean it's all over my body? And you get that? Like, you know, that…

Neil: Connects absolutely everything. In two seconds, fascia connects everything. It will connect the tissue, like you described the chicken skin on chicken. It's on the superficial level. It connects muscles, it connects bone, it connects your vital organs. So if there's anything locked up in any of that fascia, it's almost like a, like a web, if you look at it.

Lisa: That's a good analogy.

Neil: And have a look at it. And depending on what parts your body you're looking at will depend on how dense that web is.

Lisa: Like a spider cobweb's like.

Neil: Exactly, exactly that. You move that to the… To move freely, if I've got something as locked up and my fascia's sticky, or it's not moving as well as it could, then it could be that I've got a shoulder pain on my left shoulder. And that's actually my right foot. So it's looking at, and all we're doing with these big fascia movements and looking at myofascial lines, and very simply speaking of the anterior, posterior and downside of the body as well, you're starting to get that suit to fit more comfortably. We're starting to iron out any of those sticky spots.

Now, if you find that as you're moving through some of these movements, that you find that you are stickier in some areas and others, it starts to let you know that you've got some imbalances there. Now on top of that, as part of dynamic movement, you then want to add in some run-specific movements. So if I'm going to run, I'm going to be spending time on a single leg. I want to, at some point in my warm-up, I want to be doing something that ideally is on a single leg and is involving opposite arm and opposite leg, like running will.

So the warm-ups and dynamic movements we include as part of our warm-up will include stuff that resembles running, gets blood flow and heart rate up, gets tissue open and ready to move and work and gets me ready for the run. So when I get into the run, I'm not spending the first 2 or 3K trying to iron myself out. Open up my fascia, I'm actually running comfy, my body is now awake; my blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate and tissue are all up and warmer. And I'm in a position where I can move more freely. Yeah, do I make sense?

Lisa: Yep. So without having been able to show you visually here how to do the exercises, what we are working on is giving a little, some sample runner's warm-ups to do that will show you some of the dynamic movements that we're talking about here to open up and get that fascia going. We haven't got that organised yet, have we, Neil. Hopefully, by the time this comes out, we might have something or coming soon. To give you a bit of an example of the types of things that we're talking about here.

So just to recap from the top once again because it sounds like a hell of a lot to do before every single run. But actually, we're talking five to eight minutes. Or if you're doing a really— that's the other thing, if you're doing a super intense workout, you need to warm up longer. Like today I did an interval session, so I spent more time on the rolling and the activating and the getting the heart rate up and doing the drills, which we'll cover in a second.

And before I actually went hard, because I don't want an injury. And the harder the training session is, the more I'm going to be engaging all my muscles to sprint, then I need to have everything at operating temperature. If you think about a car on a winter's morning, if you turn the motor off and then jam your foot on the accelerator and tear off, what's going to happen? Your car's not going to be very happy with you because it hasn't been able to warm up, get the blood going or the petrol going or whatever it is in a car, and get it up to warmth, get it up to speed, before you go flat tech if it makes sense.

So we've done the mindset, changing your mindset, putting your gear on, getting your head in a good space, tricking yourself into just getting out the blumming door for starters. Then we've covered off some breathing. We've covered off some activation exercises — rolling the feet, rolling the calves, rolling around the hips with the foam rollers and the balls. Then we've gone and looked at some warm-up exercises, which is activating all your fascia or getting your heart rate up and so on. And the last piece of the puzzle — and this should all take you five to eight minutes, 10 minutes if you're doing a hard session — the last part of the puzzle, Neil, what's it?

Neil: It's the drills. So we do some run-specific drills that are same with the dynamic movement. And this becomes part of the dynamic movements, there's quite a lot of crossover here anyways. It's part of that movement. So things like we were talking about — opposite arm, opposite leg movement. So things like, some of our favourite ones are simple things like ball of foot hops, which is like a skipping movement, where we're just bouncing, landing on the ball of the foot with the heel kissing the floor.

So warming the body up, starting to get the elasticity and the muscle doing the job it should and getting ourselves ready to roll. We use some other run-specific movements like forward land, which is simple opposite arm, opposite leg movement, where we're starting to really work on the pull of the leg and the action of running. And then another good one that we get some great results with is our carioca, which is a crisscross of the legs. And you can do carioca and have a look, and you'll see that all, we've got videos of these drills, if anyone wants them.

Lisa: Yeah, email us.

Neil: Please let us know. And the whole idea of these is that, again, everything — hips are open, heart rate's up, blood pressure's up, we're ready to move. And we've done some movements that are run-specific, so when we go run, we're actually ready to run. So to break it down and give you an example of what my normal warm-up would look like — I'll always run my feet. Okay, I will always go through my breathing, sort of goes from my breathing start and then go through and roll my feet, and I roll my calves, and I roll across the top of my hips and up either side of my back. So they're my go-tos. From there, I will do three usually big fascia movements, one for the front of the body, one for the solid body, one for the back of the body. And then I go through two or three drills. I'll go and run. On a recovery run that will take me about five minutes.

Okay, on a higher intensity run, as Lisa was saying before, on interval run, that might take me sort of 12 to 15 minutes. But it's you… You take which bits of the tools you want out of the toolbox, and then you start using them from your perspective. The other bit to throw in, just throw the mix, finally, is just looking as well, I'm a big fan of using music. We've talked about this quite a lot before as well as. So music helps me have a cadence. So if I'm doing an interval run, I find music really helps me with cadence to help me keep my cadence up. I'm doing a recovery run, then I don't enjoy using music as much because I'd rather you know, hang out and make it more of a meditative state and chill out from there.

So thinking as well about what's in your playlist. Does music motivate you and help add to the mindset? Or does silence help add to the mindset? Working out what you need for each run and should it be part of that session; I use music often in my warm-up. And the music I choose for recovery run is significantly different than one I use when I'm warming up for an interval run. One's going to be really lifting me intensit-wise and mindset wise, the other is going to be letting me know that this is going to be cruising, it's going to be laid back, it's going to be about recovery. Using music as well can make quite a significant difference.

Lisa: Because it's… Sorry. It's all about the mind part of the puzzle really. You know, you put, I don't know, Thunderstruck on when you're trying to do an interval session. And you're like, yeah! And you going for it, and the cadence helps you and so on. And that's using your body to activate those that, again, in that case, you're activating some adrenaline and getting that going, which you need for that session.

And then you know, you want to calmer ones with you if you're just doing a recovery where you don't want to be smashing yourself and you just want to be cruising, then you want a more cruising music. But just on that note, though, just be aware, if you're in traffic, you know, it can be really dangerous. And I've been hit by a car because I had bloody things in my ears, and I was unaware of the traffic around me. So just being a little bit cautious if you are out running on roads and crossing streets, especially when you come to intersections, and you can't hear that car coming around the corner.

Neil: Pick what you're doing and where you're doing it.

Lisa: Be aware, be aware of your environment.

Neil: Looking, then you should have that toolbox in place now. Looking at what you're currently doing, who you are and how much of a warm-up — what percentage you use each tool for will be quite different for each person. So as we said at the start, some people will need to spend more time breathing. Some people will need to spend more time rolling. Others might need to spend more time with the dynamic warm-up. You'll all do a little bit of each but it's going to be, the percentage will be different. And when you use each tool, it's going to depend on what you're doing and what's on your program.

Lisa: And one other point here is that you will have — and I promise you this — a much more fun run, and you'll enjoy it more if you've put the time into this warm-up piece of the puzzle. Because I know a lot of us are under time pressure and stress. And we've got like, 'I've got 30 minutes, I've got to get my running today. That's all I've got, I don't want to spend 10 minutes warming up'. Okay, negotiate with yourself and try to do at least five minutes, because it's better to get that five minutes because that other 25 is going to bring you more than that extra five minutes of running, if that makes sense.

Because you— if you talk to runners, most people and if you're a beginner, you might not be aware of this, but the first 20 to 25 minutes are absolute crap for everybody all the time. You know, it's very rare, where you just run out the door, if you haven't warmed up, that you'll be enjoying yourself and your body will be stiff, it'll be sore, it'll be not activated, you won't have a good posture, you'll feel like your heart and your cardiovascular system isn't woken up.

All of that can be avoided if you do all of this in the preparation. It's like laying the foundation of a house. If you do it on quicksand, you're not going to have a very stable house. If you do it on concrete and you put your foundations and your poles in properly, you're gonna have a house that stands for a long time. You're going to enjoy your run a lot more. You know, today's session was was a classic example of that, you know, interval session full on, hardcore, big good workout, warm-up prior and the session wasn't nearly so difficult than if I just jumped out the door and done it. So don't underestimate that.

Neil: Good polling, Lis. I liked it.

Lisa: Don't underestimate a good warm-up. So people, if you've enjoyed this content, please share this with your friends and family. Share it, get it out there, get it out in the world, we really appreciate you doing that. And if you, you know, want to come and join us at Running Hot Coaching, this is what we do. And what we love is to help people with their running journeys and inform people. And as you can see, we take a very holistic approach to our running into our health programs and to all of the programs that we do.

Because we look at people as whole people and not as runners or not as 'You've got a health issue or specific health issue'. We look at the whole person the whole time so that you can actually get the best performance because there's no optimal performance without optimal health. That's probably a good place to leave it, actually.

Neil: I like it.

Lisa: Well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, Neil, for your wisdom as always — epic. Really appreciate you, right. And we'll see you again next week. Thanks, guys!

That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

Sepsis is a massive health issue worldwide. According to WHO, nearly 50 million people get sepsis every year, killing 11 million. Here in New Zealand, one in five ICU patients dies because of it. Thus, raising awareness about the role of vitamin C in sepsis can help save lives.

Dr Anitra Carr joins us in this episode to expand our understanding of the role of vitamin C in our body. She also explains how vitamin C functions not only as an antioxidant but also as a cofactor in many different mechanisms, particularly in fighting cancer and sepsis.

Everything we share in this episode will be helpful for you should you find yourself or a loved one admitted to a hospital, so tune in.

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You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.

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Order My Books

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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. Learn more about vitamin C's antioxidant properties.
2. Discover how vitamin C helps patients with pneumonia and sepsis.
3. Learn about vitamin C's role as a cofactor and how it ensures the proper functioning of different body processes.

Resources

• Read more about Dr Carr's study on vitamin C levels in patients with pneumonia.
• Access Dr Carr's review on recommended doses of vitamin C.
• Health and Immune Function Benefits of Kiwifruit-derived Vitamin C by Dr Anitra Carr
• Read more about Dr Carr's ongoing clinical trial on vitamin C and its effect on COVID-19 patients.
• Learn more about Dr Paul Marik's protocol for sepsis using vitamin C and steroids.
• Learn more about Dr Fowler's Phase 1 safety trial of IV vitamin C in patients with severe sepsis.
• Watch Professor Margreet Vissers' lecture on her work on vitamin C.

Episode Highlights [04:40] How Dr Carr's Research on Vitamin C Started

• Dr Carr's research began in 1998, where she studied how reactive oxygen species (ROS) produced by white blood cells react with our tissues.
• White blood cells produce ROS to help kill bacteria. However, they can also react with the tissues and create inflammation.
• Dr Carr then began investigating how vitamin C's antioxidant properties help decrease inflammation.
• She also studied the benefits of vitamin C in preventing atherosclerotic plaques and the development of cardiovascular diseases (CVD).

[09:42] Vitamin C as an Antioxidant

• Vitamin C has real antioxidant properties.
• Metal ions produce oxidants in the body; vitamin C donates electrons to these ions, converting them to the reduced state.
• The recommended daily dose to benefit from the antioxidant potential of vitamin C is 60 to 90 milligrammes in men and 75 milligrammes in women.
• You need a higher dose (120 milligrammes) of the vitamin to protect yourself from CVD and cancer.

[17:57] Vitamin C in Food vs. Vitamin C Tablet

• Dr Carr conducted a comparative dosing study between kiwi fruit and vitamin C tablets.
• She found no difference in the vitamin C obtained from food and tablets. The body recognises the same molecule and takes up the same amount.

[21:36] Vitamin C in Sepsis and Pneumonia

• Patients with pneumonia can develop sepsis, resulting in multi-organ failure, septic shock and, eventually, death.
• In observational studies in patients with pneumonia, Dr Carr found that the lower the vitamin C levels, the higher the oxidative stress.
• The body's requirement for vitamin C goes up by at least 30-fold when you get pneumonia and sepsis; it is hard to get those amounts orally.
• ICU patients need a vitamin C dose of 100 milligrammes per day.
• In these patients, the actual levels of vitamin C measured in the blood is lower compared to the amount they are receiving.

[25:25] Why Is Vitamin C Testing Not a Protocol in Hospitals?

• Doctors are not familiar with the importance, recent research and mode of action of vitamin C because it is not taught in medical schools.
• The hospital system is not set up to routinely measure vitamin C.
• In trials, vitamin C is treated as a drug rather than a vitamin.
• We need to know how vitamin C works to create proper and adequate study designs.

[32:27] What Are Some of the Future Vitamin C Studies We Can Conduct?

• We need studies about the frequency, dosing and timing of its administration.
• We need to learn about the finer details of the vitamin rather than doing the same study designs.
• It is tough to obtain research funding due to the misinformation surrounding vitamin C.
• We also need to educate doctors and patients alike about the science behind vitamin C.

[43:16] Vitamin C as a Cofactor

• Our cells rely on enzymes to carry out chemical reactions. A cofactor helps enzyme function.
• Vitamin C functions as a cofactor for the enzyme that synthesises noradrenaline and vasopressin. These hormones help in blood pressure regulation.
• It's better to give ICU patients vitamin C than giving them vasopressin drugs. This allows the body to naturally produce the hormone, preventing the side effects of getting vasopressin externally.
• Vitamin C is also a cofactor of collagen, which plays a role in stopping cancer metastasis and wound healing.

[54:30] Vitamin C in Epigenetics

• The expression of DNA may be regulated by adding or removing methyl groups.
• Vitamin C is a cofactor for enzymes that modify DNA methylation.
• It controls the switching on and off of genes, playing a possible role in personalised medicine.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

'I'm much more interested in the whole person and how they're feeling, not what's happening inside a single cell'.

'Don't wait until they're at death's door and at septic shock. It's hard for a vitamin to do something at this stage, even a really high-dose vitamin'.

'A lot of these studies were designed to reproduce the first studies that came out to see if they could reproduce it also. That's why they're using similar regimes. But now that we know more about it, each study adds another piece to the puzzle'.

'There's bigger issues at play with the whole pharmacological model that our whole system is built upon, and that nutrients and nutrition isn't taught in medical school. So, we're up against this big sort of brick wall'.

'People go into a hospital setting or something, and they expect to have the latest and greatest information available, that the doctors know all that. And unfortunately, that's not always the case'.

'Every person's life that is saved is a family that's not grieving'.

'It's the reason I'm doing this podcast, and it's the reason you're doing your research. And hopefully together and with many others, we can move the story along so that people get helped'.

About Dr Anitra

Dr Anitra Carr holds a PhD in Clinical Biochemistry/Pathology. She started researching vitamin C when she undertook a postdoctoral research position at the Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University, USA, and was also awarded an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr Carr produced a number of high-impact publications in the field of vitamin C in human health and disease.

Dr Carr is currently a Research Associate Professor at the University of Otago, Christchurch, School of Medicine. She has established her own research group, the Nutrition in Medicine Research Group, and undertakes translational bench-to-bedside research comprising observational studies and clinical trials on the role of oral and intravenous vitamin C in infection, cancer, metabolic health, mood and cognitive health.

Dr Carr endeavours to understand the underlying biochemical mechanisms of action as well as improve patient outcomes and quality of life. She also pursues various ways to improve clinician and general public understanding of the roles of vitamin C in human health and disease.

You may contact Dr Carr through [email protected] or call +64 3 364 0649.

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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn more about the benefits of vitamin C in sepsis and pneumonia.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email ([email protected]) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to the show! This week, I have another fantastic interview with another amazing scientist. But before we get there, I just want to remind you please give a rating and review to the show if you're enjoying the content and share it with your family and friends. I really appreciate that.

And if you haven't already grabbed a copy of my book Relentless, make sure you do, you won't regret it. It's an incredible story that is really about taking control of your own health and being responsible for your own health and thinking outside the box. And it's the story of bringing my mum back to health after a mess of aneurysm. And it will really make you think about those—the way our medical system works and about why you need to be proactive when it comes to health and prevention, preventative health. And it's really just a heart-warming story as well. So, you can grab that on my website at lisatamati.com. Or you can go to any bookshop in New Zealand and order that or get that and it's available also on audiobook for those people who love to listen to books rather than reading them, I know, I certainly do a lot of that.

And just to also remind that if you have any questions around some of the topics that we've discussed on the podcast episodes, please reach out to me [email protected]. And if you want help with one of your health journeys or your performance journeys, or you want to work on some goal setting, on some mindset, please reach out there as well. We'd love to work with you.

So today I have the Dr Anitra Carr, who is a scientist at Otago University. She's currently a research associate professor at the University of Otago, Christchurch School of Medicine. She's established her own research group, the Nutrition in Medicine Research Group and undertakes translational bench to bedside research comprising observational studies and clinical trials on the role of oral and intravenous vitamin C in infection, cancer, metabolic health, mood, cognitive health.

And she endeavours to understand the underlying biochemical mechanisms of action as well as improve our patient outcomes. So, she's a person who loves to actually not just be in the lab and looking at petri dishes, but to actually help people in human intervention study. She currently has a study underway, which I'm really, really excited and waiting with bated breath to see what comes out. It's a sepsis study, in the Christchurch hospital with 40 patients. And we talk a little bit about that today.

And we talk about the role of vitamin C today. Continuing the conversations that we've had with some of the world's best vitamin C researchers. We're looking at the antioxidant properties, we're looking at the pro-oxidant properties, we're looking at vitamin C as a cofactor in so many different mechanisms in the body. We talking about its role in the production of adrenaline and vasopressin, in hypoxia inducible factors, in relation to cancer, and especially in relation to sepsis, which is obviously a very important one for me.

One in five ICU patients in New Zealand dies of sepsis. This is a massive problem. Worldwide, between 30 and 50 million people a year get sepsis. This is something that you really need to know about. You need to understand it and Dr Anitra Carr, also shares why you may not get a doctor in a hospital situation, actually understanding all the information that we're going to be sharing with you today. So, educate yourself, learn from this and enjoy the show with Dr Anitra Carr.

Lisa: Well, hi, everybody. And welcome back to the show. Today I have Dr Anitra Carr, and today we're continuing the series around vitamin C. We've had some brilliant doctors and scientists on in the last few weeks and it's been really exciting to share some of the latest research and we have one of our own Kiwi scientists with us today, Dr Anitra Carr from Christchurch. Welcome to the show.

Dr Anitra Carr: Hi, Lisa!

Lisa: It's fantastic to have you. So, Dr Anitra, can you just tell us a little bit of your background and how you got involved with vitamin C research?

Dr Anitra: Well, I first started researching back in the late 90s. So, 1998 and I had just finished a PhD with the University of Otago and I had been studying how reactive oxygen species that are produced by white blood cells react with our own tissues, damage their own tissues because these white blood cells produce these really reactive oxidants, such as hydrogen peroxide, which is hair bleach, and hypochlorous acid, which is household bleach. So very strong oxidants and they produce these to help kill bacteria in our bodies. But these oxidants can also react with their own tissues and that's what contributes to inflammation and the processes of inflammation.

And so, I've just been studying how these oxidants react to certain components in our tissues. And when I finished that, I thought it'd be really interesting to investigate how antioxidants, such as vitamin C, which is one of the most potent antioxidants in our body, and help potentially protect against this damage. So, scavenge those oxidants before they react with our tissues, and help decrease the inflammation associated with them and features and conditions.

And so, I applied to various people in the United States, I wanted to go to continue my research in the United States. And so I applied to several people over there who are doing research in the area that I was interested in, and they'll write back and say, 'Yes, we have postdoctoral positions available.' And so I selected one, on the advice of my PhD supervisor, and this was Professor Balz Frei. He was at the time in Boston. And after I said, 'Yes, I'd like to work with him.' He wrote back and said, 'Oh, by the way, I'm moving to the west coast to Oregon. And I'm going to be the director, the new director of the Linus Pauling Institute.'

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Dr Anitra: Great opportunity it is. I like the West Coast of the United States. I've done a bit of work in California during my PhD. And so, I was quite happy with it. And so Linus Pauling had died just a few years prior to that. And so, the Linus Pauling Institute, which was in California, at the time, kind of needed a new home, I think they're in Palo Alto.

And so they ended up going to Oregon State University because that was—for a couple of reasons—that was Linus Pauling alma mater. So, he had done his undergraduate research when he was in a cultural college. And also, because the library there was going to be able to host his papers. And so he has this collection of his writings and papers, thousands and thousands of documents, because as you've stated before, he's one of the only people to have been awarded two unshared Nobel prizes. So one was in chemistry around his work on the nature of the chemical bond. And the other one was a Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear campaign.

And so the Oregon State University Library has his complete collection, it's called the Linus Pauling Special Collection. And so I spent a few years at Oregon State University researching how vitamin C can protect against oxidation of low density lipoprotein particles, which are what the body uses to export fat and cholesterol around the body, because the cells need cholesterol. But most people know low density lipoprotein protein as bad cholesterol. I mean, it's not intrinsically bad. But if it becomes oxidized, it can contribute to the development of atherosclerotic plaques and contribute to cardiovascular disease. And so I was looking at how vitamin C can protect against oxidation of this particle, and thereby potentially peak against development of atherosclerosis. And I was...

Lisa: What was the outcome of it? That would be really interesting.

Dr Anitra: Yes. So, I was particularly interested in the oxidants produced by white blood cells, because these can react with these low density lipoprotein particles and oxidized them. And vitamin C is a great scavenger in particular, and I was interested in how much do you need and how the particulars—is the real biochemical level?

And, but also during this time, so late 1990s. We were interested—Professor Balz Frei was interested in the recommended dietary intakes for vitamin C. Because in a lot of countries they are very low—these recommendations, primarily to prevent deficiency diseases, such as scurvy. Whereas, we believe you know, that the recommendations should be high to help reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer and that sort of thing. That's a bit helpful to the outcome.

So, in the late 90s, in 1998, the Food and Nutrition board of the Institutes of Medicine was re-examining the recommended dietary intake for the antioxidant vitamins, the A, C, and E in the United States. And we write a comprehensive review around all the scientific evidence at the time for what sort of doses of vitamin C appear to protect against cardiovascular disease and cancer. And so, we made a recommendation of 120 milligrams a day, which was, at that time twice what the recommended dietary intake in the States, it was 60 milligrams a day at the time. And so we submitted that document, and it was considered by the Food and Nutrition Board. And also another review, I'd written around vitamin C's antioxidant roles in the body versus its pro-oxidant roles. Vitamin C, referred to as pro-oxidant.

Lisa: Yes, I've heard that. To get hit around the antioxidant and as a pro-oxidant.

Dr Anitra: Vitamin C is an antioxidant. It's not a not oxidant, pro-oxidant. But what it does is it can reduce—so antioxidants donate electrons, and they reduce oxidized compounds. So, it reduces transition metal ions such as copper and iron. So, these are metals in our body that can read off cycles so they can produce oxidants.

Lisa: Yes, and we've talked about redox before in the podcast.

Dr Anitra: Yes, so what vitamin C does is it converts these metal ions into a reduced state and metal ions can go on and generate oxidants.

Lisa: So it gives ion and copper a longer life, does it? It sort of gives them—ion and copper away to keep going?

Dr Anitra: Regenerates them so that these metal ions can keep producing oxidants. But in our body, these metal ions are all sequestered away and protected by proteins, they're not floating around free. In the body, vitamin C doesn't seem to do that, based on the evidence, it seems to just have it's true antioxidant roles, not this kind of prooxidant by-product, as you might call it.

So, this sort of evidence was considered by the Food and Nutrition Board and they decided, 'Yes, it does have an antioxidant role in the body.' And, and so they also referred to Mark Levine's seminal work to kind of work out a dose, a daily dose of vitamin C, they thought would be good to help foster this antioxidant potential on the body—potentially protect against these other chronic long-term diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

And so they did end up increasing the RDA for vitamin C instead from 50 to 90 milligrams a day for men, and 75 milligrams a day for women. So that was good, not quite as high as we would have liked to see, but still a step in the right direction.

Lisa: A very conservative, aren't they? They are slow to respond and conservative? Because you think like being the preventative space would be a good thing, if we're trying to...

Dr Anitra: It is. Prevention is a lot cheaper, a lot easier to prevent a disease.

Lisa: Exactly. But I think New Zealand's even worse, isn't it? I think we're at 45 milligrams, which is I think it is.

Dr Anitra: One of the lowest in the world, yes.

Lisa: That's got to change, sorry.

Dr Anitra: So we're trying to generate the evidence to help support them increase in RDA.

Lisa: Gosh, so it's also slow, like you've been doing this for what? 20-like years. And still...

Dr Anitra: They do say that translation of science into medical research into clinical practice takes 15 to 20 years.

Lisa: Wow, that is a really interesting statement. Because this is why I think, like sharing the sort of information direct from the experts, if you like, and I sit this was Professor Margreet Vissers too, that we have to make sort of educated decisions as people in trouble now. Whether you've got cancer or whether like my case who have a dad who had sepsis, you have to make an educated decision now based on you're running out of time. And we're waiting for the research and the research will be great, but it will be another 10 to 20 years down the line before it actually…

And then in the medical world, it seems to be a very slow—Doctor Fowler said that beautifully when I had him on last week. It's like trying to shift a supertanker, Critical Care he was referring to is very, very slowly coming around. And I had Dr Ron Hunninghake on as well from the Riordan Institute, another fantastic doctor, and he talked about Medical Mavericks. Dr Hugh Riordan had written three books on people who were really ahead of their time, got in trouble for it and then actually the research and everything caught up with them later.

So that's interesting. So, if you're listening to this, New Zealand has got 45 milligrams as the RDA, that's just to keep you out of scurvy. Right?

So, okay, so you've done all this antioxidant research and this with RSS and at the Linus Pauling Institute, when did you start to develop an interest in the infectious diseases, sepsis side of that, because I'd really love to...

Dr Anitra: Yes, that's, that's more recent. So, after a few years—three years at the Institute, I decided to have our first child and move back to New Zealand. And I made the decision to quit science and just focus on bringing up our family, ended up having three children. Stayed home for nine years looking out after our children. And I made the decision that they were more important than my career

Lisa: Wonderful. That's an interesting fact, as well as a mom and a scientist, like, an incredibly dedicated career that you'd have spent years getting there and then trying to juggle mum roles with scientist roles, and taking nine years out of your career. Has that hurt your career massively? Or I would have catch up so to speak?

Dr Anitra: It hasn't hurt my career. I mean, I'm 10 years behind my contemporaries, my colleagues because I took that time out. But that's the decision I made. And I stand by it because the first three years of a child's life are very important. So I thought I'll dedicate myself to the children in the early years. And after those nine years, right? I've done my time and really can't get back to work.

Lisa: Mum's going to be a working mum from now on.

Dr Anitra: But I just went back to work part time, so, within school hours, so that I'll still be there for them after school hours. And one of the things that drew me back to work—I was recruited back to run a human intervention study. What really excited me because when I was in the lab doing lead-based research, I always felt too removed from the need to be helping. And so I'm much more interested in the whole person and how they're feeling, not what's happening inside a single cell.

Lisa: Yes. Yes, it makes sense.

Dr Anitra: I was really excited and really grateful to be recruited back, especially after taking nine years out for my... Discoveries have been made during that time that I had no idea until I went back and I've got a bit of catching up to do. And...

Lisa: So what was that first intervention study, that human...

Dr Anitra: This was a kiwi fruit study. So kiwi fruit is very high in vitamin C. In summary, we're interested in how many kiwi fruit do you need to eat to get adequate and optimal vitamin C level. So it's just kind of a dosing study?

Lisa: Brilliant.

Dr Anitra: Then we went on to compare kiwi fruit with tablets. So, animal research had shown our food sources of Vitamin C seemed to be a bit better than tablet sources. And so we would—we thought we'd translate that into a human study. And what we found is there's no difference

Lisa: There's no difference. Uptake of vitamin C from food versus tablets, the body is really good at it. Because we need vitamin C, our body has adapted ways to...

Lisa: Take it wherever it gets it.

Dr Anitra: Take it up, regardless of the source.

Lisa: Wow, that's...

Dr Anitra: The structure of vitamin C's the same in foods as it is in tablets. So the body recognizes it the same, takes up the same amounts. I mean, the benefit of food is that you're also getting all the other vitamins and minerals and fibre. So, we still recommend food. But it is in our daily diets these days, it's very hard to get 200 milligrams a day of vitamin C.

Lisa: Just fruits and veggies. Yes.

Dr Anitra: That's just fruit and vegetables. And as you know, different fruits and vegetables have quite different amounts of vitamin C, which a lot of people aren't aware of.

Lisa: No. No.

Dr Anitra: I mean, people know that kiwi fruit and citrus are high, but they may not realize that apples and bananas are actually quite low in vitamin C.

Lisa: Or capsicums are quite high… You wouldn't think that broccoli… And if you decide to take a supplement, is there a bit of supplement? Like, I have heard concerns about corn-derived vitamin C because of the glyphosate discussion, and that's a bit hard to track really, the types of vitamin C. But is there any sort of research around—I mean, I've talked previously with a couple of doctors and scientists around liposomal delivery. Have you seen anything in that department or any supplementation method that's better?

Dr Anitra: Not convincingly better. I mean, there might be trials that show that's slightly better than just your normal chewable vitamin C. But I just go for the standard, cheap vitamin.

Lisa: Yes, doesn't have to be super special. Like it's a pretty simple molecule, isn't it? Like, the body is pretty, like you say, it needs it, it knows it.

Dr Anitra: Liposomal vitamin C kind of wrapped up in lipids, and the body doesn't need it because like you said it's designed to recognize vitamin C in its natural form, in foods and such like.

Lisa: Yes—who was that? I think Dr Thomas Levy was saying it bypasses some of the digestive issues because with vitamin C, you can get digestive stress when you take a bigger...

Dr Anitra: When you take a higher dose. Some people, we're talking about more than four grams a day, and some people can get stress, it does but you can use that.

Lisa: Okay. So then you've moved into—and forgive me for jumping here—but very keen to talk about the role of sepsis and pneumonia and patients in ICU reasons

Dr Anitra: So, after about five years of doing that research part time, I managed to get at Health Research Council, such as speakers Health Research Fellowship, which allowed me to move into the more clinical arena of studying infection, which was an area I was interested in.

And done some observational studies where we have recruited patients who have pneumonia, measured the vitamin C levels, and levels of oxidative stress. And found that they have very low levels of vitamin C and high levels of oxidative stress. And the more severe the condition, the worse it is, the lower the vitamin C levels, and the higher the oxidative stress.

So, if those patients with pneumonia are going to develop sepsis, and sepsis is kind of this uncontrolled inflammatory response to a severe infection. And that can develop into multi organ failure and the patient's taken to the intensive care unit. And it can go on further to develop into septic shock due to failure of the cardiovascular system. And up to half those patients die, it's the major cause of death in critically ill patients.

Lisa: Yes. And that's what I unfortunately experienced with my dad. And so, with the organs are starting to break down. So, when you get anything like pneumonia or sepsis, the body's requirement just goes up, a hundred-fold or more.

Dr Anitra: Yes, at least 30-fold. Yes. So, it's very hard to get those amounts into a patient orally. And so, when the patients are in the intensive care unit, they're generally sedated because they're being mechanically ventilated. And so, they're given nutrition in two different ways because they can't eat. And so, the main way is to drip feed it directly into the stomach, liquid nutrition in the stomach through nasal gastric tube. The other way is to inject it directly into the bloodstream. And so, the recommended amounts of vitamin C by these means is about 100 milligrams a day.

Lisa: That's nothing.

Dr Anitra: But what we did on one of our studies was we looked at how much vitamin C these patients should theoretically have in their blood based on how much vitamin C they're consuming. Because 100 milligrams a day in a healthy person is more than adequate to—provides adequate plasma, what we would consider adequate plasma levels. And so, we mapped out what it would look like in these patients based on how much they were getting. And then we compared it with what we actually measured in their blood, it's way lower than what theoretically should have been. And so, this, this was an indication that you still need a lot more vitamin C than they're getting in the standard liquid nutrition. And that the body also has these much higher requirements, which has been shown previously by other researchers.

Lisa: And so this leading to almost a scurvy-like situation. I mean, some of these severe sepsis people—I mean, seeing one of your [unintelligible 24:53] that sort of normal community cohort of people, young people, middle aged people, and then down into the more severe pneumonia and then sepsis, and severe sepsis. And they are just over the scurvy level. So basically, their bodies are falling apart because of that, as well as the sepsis if you like. and it's...

Dr Anitra: And that's even on top of being given a day of at least 100 milligrams a day, that's still really low.

Lisa: That's just not touching the sides.

Dr Anitra: Yes and...

Lisa: Why is this not like—for people going into the hospital, why is it that even though—okay, we may not know the dosages, why is not every hospital testing at least the really sick patients, what their vitamin C levels are, and then treating it the nutrient deficiency only? Even apart from the high dose intravenous stuff, but just actually—with my dad, I was unable to get a vitamin C test done to prove my case. I couldn't prove my case because I couldn't get it tested.

Dr Anitra: Yes, no, it's so true. It's because doctors don't learn about nutrients in medical school, it's not part of their training.

Lisa: At all, yes.

Dr Anitra: So they're not familiar with how important they are for the body. They're not familiar with all the recent research around all the different functions and mechanisms of action that vitamin C carries out. Over the last 10 years, all these brand-new mechanisms and functions have been discovered, and they think we know everything there is to know about it.

Lisa: Yes, and we don't.

Dr Anitra: [unintelligible 26:34] the time. It's basically exciting.

Lisa: Yes, it is.

Dr Anitra: So basically, they don't understand. The hospital system isn't set up to routinely measure it. It is only ever measured if scurvy—if someone comes in with suspected scurvy. And even then, a lot of doctors aren't used to recognizing the symptoms of scurvy. It's not something they're familiar with because it doesn't...

Lisa: They think it no longer exists because it's what sailors had in the 1800s.

Dr Anitra: ...the parents and the wisdom.

Lisa: It's basically in the sick population.

Dr Anitra: It is. But I think... So when I first applied for funding to carry out these studies, in pneumonia and sepsis, there were only a couple of papers have been published at that time looking at vitamin C sepsis, and that was Berry Fowler's safety dosing study.

Lisa: That is phase one trial.

Dr Anitra: And another one, small one in Iran. So, there was very, very little information out there at the time. And so, I put in an application for us to carry out an intervention study in our ICU at Christchurch. So just a small one, 40 people—20 placebo control of vitamin C and 20 getting intravenous vitamin C.

And not long after that, Paul Marik's study came out and that stimulated real explosion and research in this field because of the media interest. So the media picked up on it. And it hit the world. I've been talking about this for years to doctors. I see doctors and they're trying to get to talk about it. But it wasn't until it hit the media, and they heard about it through the media, they thought, 'Okay, maybe there's something here.' So that just goes to show how important media can be.

Lisa: Exactly why we're doing the show. I have not seen it. But you know what I mean? We've got to get this from the ground up moving.

Dr Anitra: Yes. And so since then, there's been many studies carried out around the world, all of different quality. And so we're learning more and more information, real-time clinical trials, they take a long time to run. Recruitment being the most difficult part.

The other thing is that, a lot of the clinical trials, the clinical researches are used to running drug trials and so they treat vitamin C like a drug, but it's not a drug. It's a nutrient, it's a vitamin, that the body is specially designed to take up and use very different from drugs. And so they don't always understand how vitamin C works in the body.

And it's important to know how it's working in order to design good studies, good quality studies. So a lot of the data that's come out may be impacted by how well the study was done and thought out. So we still don't know all the important essays about the dose, how often should you give it, when should you give it? I mean, ideally it should be given you know, as early as possible.

Lisa: Early as possible.

Dr Anitra: Don't wait until they're at death's door and septic shock. It's hard for vitamin C to do something at that stage even really high, even a really high dose vitamin. The earlier that you give it, the longer you can get it for digest. Most of these trials have given it for four days and they stop.

Lisa: Yes, I've wondered that.

Dr Anitra: The whole time, they're in the ICU because once pharmacokinetic study showed that when you stop that vitamin C, some of those patients just drop straight back down to where they were. Now they need to keep that continued input.

Lisa: So why? Why has it been made that it's only—all of those I've seen, I think have been 4-day, 96 hour studies. And occasionally one of them is or for the latest day in ICU, but most of them have been 96 hours and most of them have been very, very conservative dosing. From what I understand conservative dosing. And I know Dr Berry Fowler said where there's some consideration about oxalate in kidney function. And I'm like, 'Yes, but this is still a very low risk for somebody who's got sepsis.'

Dr Anitra: If a patient has kidney dysfunction in ICU they put them on haemodialysis anyway, so which clears that excess vitamin C. So it's not such an issue for those patients. But yes, a lot of these studies were designed to reproduce the first studies that came out to see if they are reproducible. so, that's why they're using similar regimes. But now that we know more about it, each study adds another piece to the puzzle. And so hopefully, future studies will look more into what dose we actually need and it only varies depending on the...

Lisa: The severity

Dr Anitra: Severity, etc. How long? And I believe, once they leave the ICU... So patients who survived sepsis, they can go on to have real problems, physical disabilities, cognitive issues, psychological issues, like depression, anxiety. And so, I really believe they keep taking vitamin C when they leave the hospital just orally, that might help with those conditions that hasn't been researched yet. That's a whole area of research that should be carried out to.

Lisa: So, if I was to ask you, in your dream world where your resources are unlimited, and you had lots of money, and you had lots of people to help you do all these and you have enough patience to enrol. What are some other things that you would like as a scientist and you understand some of the mechanisms and the cofactors—which I want to get on to as well—what are some of the studies that you would like to see happen? So, we can move this along faster. What are some of the key things? So, quality of life afterwards? Yes, like dosages, what?

Dr Anitra: Really practical things that the doctors need to know, I think, what's important, like, how much to give, how often to give it? Most of the studies are done four times a day because that's what was done in the initial studies. Is it better to give it continuously? So, when they're in the ICU, can you just use drugs continuously, rather than this kind of bolus dosing? So, do more research around that.

So the frequency and dosing and timing like when do you administer it, how long should you administer it for? I mean, there's so many important aspects around that. And we've got the foundational research done now, we can start teasing out the finer details now, I think. Rather than just doing the same study designs over and over again,

Lisa: Yes and reproducing.

Dr Anitra: Modify their study designs to start addressing these other issues. And there's some really big studies underway at the moment. One in Canada with 800 people. I mean, they'll give us really good information, those sorts of studies, rather than the little studies. Unless you live in small countries.

Lisa: Small countries that can't afford those things that cost millions and millions of dollars. And is there a trouble with funding because it's not a drug that we're developing here? Does it make it harder to get funding?

Dr Anitra: It's extremely hard to get funding because often on the CSUN committee, it's often medical people on these who don't believe in vitamin C. The bad press or the misinformation don't understand the importance, the relevance and so, that's why this outreach is really important. It's just educating people about the science behind it. It's not hocus pocus.

Lisa: Yes, I mean, if I can share—I mean, I've shared a little bit on the past episodes with my case with my dad. I know and I felt they just put me in that, wackery quackery caught and they paid lip service to listening to me. They didn't really and but I'm quite—well in this case, I had to be quite forceful because my dad was dying. And I didn't go away, most people would go away because—and I just wish I knew then what I know now even because I wasn't that deep into the research. And now I am deep into the research and really an advocate for this.

But I was treated like—there was one really good doctor who listened to me, who advocated, he didn't believe in it, he didn't understand the mechanisms of action or any of that sciency stuff. But he did advocate for me at the ethics committee, whereas everyone else would just roll their eyes basically.

And this is why I think it's so important to share this, to come back again and again to the science for science for science, and for them to just open up their eyes just because they didn't learn it in medical school. And it's not in the current textbook for, like you say, because it takes 20 years probably to get it to the textbook. Because it's a vitamin, they just immediately shut down, it's how I felt. They just immediately, 'Well, just eat an orange and you're good to go.'

I mean, the surgeon—I had a friend that was going into surgery, and she was like, 'Should I have intravenous vitamin C, before I go into surgery to prepare my body?' Very logical thing to do in my eyes. It's like, 'You don't need that, just eat an orange,' and it's like, 'Oh, you don't get the whole why and how, and what happens when the body goes through a trauma and a surgery, or a sepsis or any of these things.'And I don't know, like there's a bigger issue at play with the whole pharmacological model that our whole system is built upon. And that nutrients and nutrition isn't taught in medical school. So we're up against this big sort of brick wall.

And when I tell my story to people just, sharing with friends and things, they'll be going, 'But where's the downside? He was dying anyway, why couldn't he have it?' And I said, 'Well, you're up against machinery, you're up against ethics committees, legal battles, and a system that is just very staid and conservative in its approach.'

And that's not to criticize individual people within the system. I'm not wanting to do that. I'm just trying to make people aware because people go into a hospital setting or something, and they expect to have the latest and greatest information available that the doctors know all that. And unfortunately, that's not always the case. Do you find that frustrating?

Dr Anitra: I mean, it's not the doctors' fault as such, because they're very busy people, they don't have time to keep up with all the literature, and they're not likely to be going into the nutrition literature in the first place. Which is why we try and publish as much of that stuff and the clinical literature, they're more likely to see it then.

And they have the patient's best interests at heart. They've just heard the bad things about vitamin C and the misinformation. And so they don't want to do harm to the patient, I guess. It's the view that they're coming from and they don't have time to read all the latest information. And that's why just piece by piece, chip away at theirs, and educate them and hopefully it'll come into the training of the new doctors. And future hopefully, more nutrition courses will be introduced into training because it's not just vitamin C.

The body needs all the vitamins that are all vital to life. That's where the name comes from. You don't hit them, you die. It's as simple as that. So, yes, I think that it is vital that this information gets into the appropriate arenas.

Lisa: Yes. And I think that's why I'm passionate about the show is that my sort of outlook on the whole thing is, 'Yes, I'm not a doctor, but I can give voice to doctors and researchers. And I can curate and I can investigate and I can share.' And this is a very emotional topic for me or for obvious reasons, but I'm trying to take the emotion out of it because that doesn't help the discussion.

And it's really hard but I understand the importance—because I know that if I share things in an emotional manner, then I'll get shut down as having mental health problems in a group being a grieving daughter. When actually I'm an intelligent person who's educated herself in this. I've got the best people, and the best researchers, and the best scientists, and the best doctors sharing the latest research. And I hope that by doing that you can get one mind after the other and just get them to understand rather than the emotional side of things. Because what I do want to also share with the story is that every person's life that is saved is a family that's not grieving. These are not statistics.

When Dr Berry Fowler's research, with Dr Merricks research and you see a drop from, I think Dr Merricks was 40%, mortality to 8% and Dr Berry's was something like 49, down to 29. Don't quote me on the numbers, but big numbers in drops and mortality. And you go, those are just dozens, if not hundreds of lives that are saved. And those families are saved from that grief.

And worldwide, I've heard a couple of estimates between 30 and 50 million people a year who get sepsis. Of those, one in five—I've heard in your research—one in five in New Zealand ICU dies of sepsis. This is a huge problem. This is as big as cancer and actually is one of the complications often of cancer therapies. So, I don't think people understand the enormity of sepsis itself. And then pneumonia, and then we can go into the discussion of COVID, and cancer, and all those other things. It's like we're talking millions of lives every year around the world. So this research is just absolutely crucial. Sorry, I've gotten on my bandwagon a little bit. But I really want to get this information out there. And that I think it's really, really important.

And let's change track a little bit and just talk a little bit briefly because I haven't covered this subject with the other vitamin C interviews that I've done. Around the cofactor, so vitamin C is a cofactor for so many different areas. So I remember from one of your lectures, it has epigenetic influences and hairs like with collagen synthesis, and that's not just for your skin and your and your nails, but also has implications for cancer. You've got your health, which Professor Margreet Vissers talked about your hypoxia inducible factor, tumor growth.

Can you just go and give me a little bit of information around—the vasopressin one would be very good and anything else that pops to mind there.

Dr Anitra: Yes, so the cofactor is a compound that helps enzyme function. So everything in our cells relies on the functions of enzymes to carry out reactions in ourselves or the chemical reactions require enzymes. And so a cofactor supports that function.

And so early on when I was just starting in this area of research in the field of sepsis, I was looking at the different cofactor functions of vitamin C, and one of them is a cofactor for the enzyme which synthesizes noradrenaline. And noradrenaline is one of the main drugs, as you might say, that's given to patients who are going into septic shock. So it's given to the patients to try and increase the blood pressure. And it works by making the muscles around the blood vessels contract. Makes the blood vessels a bit smaller, so it increases your blood pressure.

And so vitamin C is a cofactor for the enzyme that naturally synthesizes noradrenaline in our body. And there's another enzyme which synthesizes hormones, one of which is vasopressin. And this is another drug that's also sometimes given to these patients to help your blood pressure. And it works by increasing the re-uptake of water by the kidney. So, that increases your blood volume and hence, your blood pressure. So, for a lot of ICU patients, they're given noradrenaline and sometimes they're given vasopressin on top of that. Really try and get the blood pressure up.

Lisa: Yes, their collapsing cardiovascular system.

Dr Anitra: And I realized, 'Oh wait a minute vitamin C is also cofactor for this enzyme that synthesizes vasopressin.' So here it is, a cofactor for two quite different enzymes that synthesize vasopressors naturally in our body. And so, if these patients are coming into the ICU, very low in vitamin C, and going into shock, is one of those reasons because they don't have enough vitamin C in the body to support natural vasopressor function. The doctors have to give them these drugs but if we're able to get them vitamin C, early enough that it can potentially support their own natural synthesis of these vasopressors in the body, which is a much better way to do it. Because if drugs are given from the outside, they're often given in high doses and not regulated, and so can cause side effects. There is a difference being produced in the body, the body knows what it's doing. It regulates how much and how often, all those sort of 46:07 engineering emails and so you don't get the nasty side effects.

Lisa: Can I share a bit of a story there? Because both my mom and her case was—she had an aneurysm four years ago, she was on noradrenaline, and could only be given in an ICU. And originally she was in the neurological ward. And they couldn't do it there. And I only realized like she was going into a coma. So she had massive brain damage going into a coma. That when they took her up to ICU, they could give her the noradrenaline that opened up that the vessels in the heat it a little bit, or keep the pressure up, so that the vessels were open to stop the vasospasm in her case, which was killing parts of the brain. But she'd been in the neurological ward where they couldn't give any of that earlier. And so the damage had already been done partly.

And then with the case with my dad, back then I didn't know anything about vitamin C, of course. With the case with my dad in July, this year, I got vitamin C, but it was on day 13 of his 15-day battle, because I had paid to go through ethics committees and all of that sort of jazz. So he was an absolute death's doorstep, should have been dead days ago, according to the doctors. They couldn't believe he was still going but he was one tough man. I don't know how he was still alive but he was. And the very first infusion that we got a vitamin C, immediately we were able to take him off norad for a period of about eight hours. We needed the vitamin C again, that took me another 18 hours before I could get permission to get the second one. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it in the six-hour bolus, which was ideal.

We gave him initially 15 grams. So this was again, multiple organ failure, fecal matter, and the creatinine, desperate, desperate, desperate straits. His CRP, c-reactive protein dropped from 246 down to 115. His white blood cell count improved and his kidney function went from 27% to 33%. And I was able to take him on vasopressors and noradrenaline for about eight hours. That is incredible for someone who could die at any moment. And we eventually—we failed because I struggled to get the second and I struggled to get the third infusion and it really was too late.

But even at that point, I thought it might be interesting for your research—I have all the medical records by the way, if you want to have a look at the data exactly. But it really was a strong—he doesn't need the noradrenaline, his blood pressure was going up. And that was a really, really good sign. As the dropping of the CRP, which was still very high at 115 but it was way better than where it had been.

So goodness, what would have happened if I'd had him on day one from the surgery? Yes. And, and none of it is understood. So that's one of the cofactors that… And that brings to mind just as someone who's connecting the dots, if you have an HPA axis problem, like your adrenals aren't doing the job well. And your cortisol, vitamin C would probably be a good thing to take to support.

Dr Anitra: And sometimes it's referred to as a stress hormone because it is involved in the adrenal response. And people who are under stress, or in animal studies who have stress animals they appear, they use more vitamin C, and they generate more vitamin C, the animals they can synthesize it themselves, they generate more vitamin C to compensate for that. We are not there anymore. So we have to take more if we're under stressful conditions.

Lisa: Exactly. And that's a really—it's just a funny thing of evolution that we've lost the ability to synthesize more as we like animals, like the goat, especially it can synthesize like a ton more when it needs that. We will give them big brains so that we can make vitamin C so we can take it.

What are some of the other cofactors? Just as we start to wrap it up, but just a couple of the other important cofactors. And collagen? Why is collagen important apart from you want my skin and hair, and your joints? Well, I did hear in one of the lectures about collagen helping stop metastasis of cancers?

Dr Anitra: Right, yes, that's one mechanism. It's also very important in wound healing. And, interestingly, a lot of—a reasonable number of surgeons are aware of this and that they're a lot more open to people taking vitamin C around surgery before and after surgery just to help affect wound healing.

Lisa: Oh, wow. Yes.

Dr Anitra: Which is great. And

Lisa: And oncologists, are they sort of open to...

Dr Anitra: Least so

Lisa: Least so. Yes. In fact, I've had friends who have told us, if you take intravenous vitamin C, we won't do any treatments. And this is...

Dr Anitra: And that is primarily around all the misunderstanding around those early, early trials around intravenous. What I'm seeing is when Linus Pauling showed a feat of vital intravenous vitamin C. The clinicians at the Mayo Clinic who tried to reproduce those studies, they used oral doses, so just small doses over a day.

But back in those days, they weren't aware of the different pharmacokinetics of vitamin C, they thought oral and intravenous, are just the same, like the drug. But it's quite different. Oral uptake is a lot lower, much smaller amounts are taken up versus intravenous, you can get really high doses. And very quickly,

Lisa: Up to 200 times. I heard Professor Gabi Dachs, saying that intravenous is up to 200 times for short periods, but that short periods makes a difference, because you can get that into the tumor cells and to—so that… And this is the problem. Professor Margreet Vissers was saying the original controversy around Linus Pauling's work and because they didn't have an understanding of how can possibly this mechanism of action been working. They just pursued it, basically. And it caused this big rift, those on the side, and those on that side, and for the next—what are we? 40 something years later—we'll still actually, it's problematic.

Dr Anitra: Yes, it wasn't really till Mark Levine did his really detailed pharmacokinetic studies that people realized the big differences between oral and intravenous. And also there's more recent discoveries of vitamin C's cofactor functions around regulating genes through herbs and through the epigenetic enzymes. These are all mechanisms, which could be involved and its anticancer mechanisms as such. And so the epigenetic area is a very, very exciting, very interesting area of research. And I think it'll enable us to personalize medicine in the future.

Lisa: Oh! I mean, I have an epigenetics program as one of my health programs. And yes, that's looking at okay, how genes being influenced by your environment, and let's optimize your environment to your genes. And the vitamin C helps serve to give people an understanding, so is vitamin C helping produce the enzymes that read the DNA? And then therefore having the reactions. Is that how it works?

Dr Anitra: It works as a code.

Lisa: the transcription

Dr Anitra: Yes, so it helps the function of the enzymes which modify the DNA. So genetics is about the DNA itself. Epigenetics is above the DNA. So it's a way to regulate the DNA as you know. Usually through adding methyl groups to the dynast DNA, adding and subtracting and that affects how the DNA is read by the enzymes that read DNA and transcribe it.

Lisa: Turning them on or off, or simplify.

Dr Anitra: So vitamin C, regulates the enzymes which modify the methyl groups and stimulates them coming off or stimulates different mechanisms happening. So switching certain genes on, switching certain genes off, now it can teach you to regulate thousands of genes in our body through stimulation of these enzymes.

Lisa: Wow. So yes, I've heard somewhere, I think it was seven or 8000 genes that are possibly affected by this. So we are really at the beginning of the vitamin C journey, as far as the epigenetics mechanisms is concerned. Yes, that's exciting.

Dr Anitra: A lot of its functions, not just in cancer, but in all areas of health and disease, these functions could be playing a role. So yes, huge areas of research possible there.

Lisa: Yes. Yes. Yes. Is there a—I remember Professor Margaret, talking about Tt? Is that one of the enzymes? The Tt one?

Dr Anitra: It is an enzyme, that's right.

Lisa: And that's important for cancer in some way?

Dr Anitra: Now, the enzyme search modifies the methylated DNA, some regulation that epigenetics. And it's definitely difficult.

Lisa: To replicate it in the cancer process. Wow. Okay, we're getting quite technical here.

Doctor Anitra, I just want to say thank you very much for your dedication because I've listened to a couple of interviews with you. And you've actually sacrificed quite a lot to do the research that you're doing because there isn't a heck of a lot of funding and things are out there. So, thank you for doing all that. It's a labour of love, I can imagine. It's a long, slow process, getting the information, getting it to be watertight—scientifically watertight, so that we can actually get people help, who need help. And that at the end of the day it's the reason I'm doing this podcast. And it's the reason you're doing your research, and hopefully together and with many others, we can move the story along so that people get helped.

Is there anything that we haven't covered that you think would be an important message for people listening today?

Dr Anitra: Well, I think—I mean, of course, infection is very relevant these days with COVID. There's a lot of information and misinformation floating around out there about vitamin C and COVID. And at this stage, the studies are still at the really early, early stages. Americans have done a study which shows that patients with COVID in the ICU do have low vitamin C levels, like other similar conditions. COVID is a severe respiratory infection like pneumonia and sepsis or complications with COVID. And so, I think that the key is to stay healthy, eat a good healthy...

Lisa: Boost your immune system, yes.

Dr Anitra: Yes, to support your immune system, it doesn't mean you won't get COVID. But it may decrease the severity and the duration, so it doesn't go on to become the more severe version, the pneumonia and sepsis.

So I think that's an important message and if you do get infection, your requirements, dear God, so you do need to take more vitamin C, you need to take gram amounts, rather than milligram amounts. Want you to prevent getting even more severe. So, I'm all for prevention as much as possible, not leaving it till it's too late. So, I think, yes, just look after yourself, eat well.

Lisa: Yes. And get your vitamin C. Come buy some kiwi fruit, and some oranges today, and some lemons, and capsicum. And some supplements maybe.

Just as a final thing, you yourself, have a study that's currently underway, which is really, really exciting. And this is based in the Christchurch hospital, I believe, in 40 patients and with sepsis. Can you just tell us a little bit, the parameters of that study and when you think you'll have some results from it?

Dr Anitra: So this was patients with septic shock. So once again, at the end. And they were administered either placebo control, so half the patients and the other half were given intravenous vitamin C at a dose of 100 milligrams per kilogram body tissue per day, which equates to about six to seven grams a day. The reason for that, I have wanted to use the high dose, Berry Fowler. But the ethics committee—because when I put this into the ethics committee, there were only the two studies out, which was Berry Fowler's and the small study headed by Iran. And they said, 'Well, slightly more people have received a lot lower dose versus the higher dose. So we'd rather use the lower dose.'' Even though there'd be no adverse events at any dose. And subsequently, no adverse events and any studies.

Lisa: No.

Dr Anitra: And so, we've used the lower dose, we've only just finished recruiting the last patients. It took a while and we had issues of lockdown. And so now we're in the process of analysing the samples that we've collected analysing the data. And so hopefully, we're about to pull that together, sometime next year and publish the results next year.

Lisa: Brilliant. I can't wait to see that. And yes, that's a little bit frustrating because I would have liked to have seen a study with the 15 to 18. And even that I thought was still very conservative compared to some of the cancer dosages. But I understand from what Dr Berry Fowler said because of the decreased kidney function often in septic patients and so on, but it's just like yes, but the dying often. And it's because that was one of the arguments that was thrown at me, I could damage my dad's kidneys. The sepsis was doing that quite nicely and he was dying anyway. So why the hell?

So, but I think even at those dosages, we'll hopefully see some fantastic results come out of it. And hopefully, in future we'll be able to do slightly more high-powered dosages.

Dr Anitra: Yes. Well, the key is also the size of the study, our study is very small. And we were interested in being a scientist. I'm interested in how it's working in the body because once you understand how it's working, it makes it easier to design better studies and not our future studies.

And so, our study will be too small to show a yes or no, it decreases mortality or not—that we're leaving it up to the large studies to show there. And hopefully, we can put a bit more science behind how it's working, what's happening in the body.

Lisa: And it's such a complicated thing to design a study. People don't probably realize how the parameters and the limitations and the number of variables that you can look at and the primary outcomes and the secondary outcomes and so on.

Dr Anitra: Sepsis is such a complex variable that comes in as unique in this situation. So there's huge variability in the data. And that's where the biggest studies are good, because it helps decrease...

Lisa: The statistical...

Dr Anitra: The statistical analyses of those studies. Yes, I'm looking forward to the results of the big studies coming out.

Lisa: Yes, but these, these smaller ones are really, really important. So, and it's great that we've got one going in New Zealand. So, thank you very much for your work, Dr Anitra. It's been absolutely fascinating. And thank you for your dedication to this. I really, really appreciate you.

Dr Anitra: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional

Ascorbic acid or vitamin C is a known antioxidant. Clinicians have conducted numerous studies to discover its role and effectiveness on life-threatening diseases such as sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), cancer and COVID-19.

Dr Alpha 'Berry' Fowler joins us in this episode to share his work on vitamin C and its role in improving the survival of critically ill patients. He also talks about ongoing trials on vitamin C and its possible benefits on COVID patients.

If you want to know more about the research backing up the success of vitamin C in disease treatment, then this episode is for you.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. Learn the mechanism of sepsis in lung disease.
2. Discover the role of vitamin C in treating patients with sepsis and ARDS.
3. Find out more about past and ongoing trials on vitamin C.

Resources

• Learn about Dr Fowler's Phase 1 safety trial of IV vitamin C in patients with severe sepsis.
• Explanation lecture of the CITRIS-ALI study by Dr Fowler
• JAMA publication on CITRIS-ALI
• Article on the sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) scores and mortality of patients involved in the CITRIS-ALI trials
• Dr Paul Marik's protocol for sepsis using vitamin C and steroids

Episode Highlights [04:02] How Dr Fowler's Research on Bacterial Sepsis Began

• Dr Fowler started working on mouse models to investigate sepsis.
• A solution made from mouse pellets was injected into ten mice, five of which received a treatment of vitamin C.
• The septic mice in the control group all died while those treated with vitamin C were crawling around, drinking water and eating.
• Dr Fowler then started using animal models to determine how vitamin C treats sepsis.

[09:05] How Sepsis Damages the Lungs

• In sepsis, the lung barrier is injured.
• The progression of sepsis traps activated neutrophils in the capillary space of the lungs.
• Activated neutrophils release their DNA and enzymes, damaging the capillaries.
• Plasma then fills the air spaces, causing the patient to drown in their fluid.

[09:34] The Role of Vitamin C in a Septic Lung

• In vitamin C-treated mice, the lung's barrier function is preserved.
• Vitamin C stops neutrophils from disgorging their DNA into the extracellular space.
• Free DNA has become a marker to predict mortality.
• Blood reanalysis showed vitamin C lowered free DNA circulation as a result.
• Vitamin C completely inhibits the expression and appearance of inflammatory proteins.

[16:15] Phase 1 Safety Trial Outcomes

• In a randomised, blinded trial, 24 patients were enrolled to determine the safety of vitamin C.
• Organ failure score was tracked in all patients. The higher the score, the higher the incidence of mortality.
• Patients treated with vitamin C saw a dramatic and significant reduction in their organ failure score.
• Vitamin C also improved their chance of survival.
• Intermittent infusion of vitamin C every 6 hours could get the plasma level up to 3000 times the normal level.

[25:47] Phase 2 Proof-of-Concept Trial Outcomes

• Patients enrolled in the study had septic ARDS.
• The vitamin C treatment resulted in no adverse event.
• After 96 hours, 19 of 83 placebo patients died while only 4 of 84 patients with vitamin C died.
• Upon follow-up after 28 days, 46% of placebo patients died while only 30% of treatment patients died.
• This was the first blinded trial to show vitamin C's impact on the mortality of patients with ARDS.

[28:17] Explaining the Inconsistency of the SOFA Score

• Jean-Louis Vincent created the SOFA score.
• Jean-Louis Vincent sent a letter to the editors of Dr Fowler's work that the data was incorrectly analysed.
• Reanalysis showed the patients who died had the top SOFA score.
• Vitamin C significantly impacted organ failure scores.
• Vitamin C treatment resulted in a significant number of ICU-free days, improved mortality and more hospital-free days at day 60.

[36:05] Is There Another Trial Underway?

• The NIH tasked the Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL) Network to turn towards COVID treatment.
• Dr Fowler started a trial on vitamin C as a treatment for patients with early COVID pneumonia, and the results are dramatic.
• There is another trial for sepsis and vitamin C planned by the PETAL Network involving 1000 patients across 69 medical centres.

[39:48] Why Larger Doses of Vitamin C Are Not Administered

• The primary concern for higher doses of vitamin C is the formation of renal stones.
• A safety trial is first recommended before vitamin C treatment for COVID pneumonia can begin.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

'The cage that the mice got the sepsis and the vitamin C, they were all crawling around, drinking water and eating. And I knew at that point that we had stumbled on something pretty significant'.

'One of the first things we found was that the lungs of the treated mice that were septic, they weren't injured'.

'Most people understand sepsis as being a bacterial infection, but they don't understand that it's actually taking all the organs and causing oxidative damage to multiple organs, not just the lungs'.

'We had kind of a basic grasp on the immune system and how vitamin C could alter the septic immune response and how vitamin C could protect the lung'.

'Vitamin C was actually improving the possibility of survival'.

'The amount of vitamin C that you administer is critical. Dose matters'.

'You're going to save not only thousands and eventually more — hundreds and thousands of lives. You're going to reduce hospital bills enormously'.

About Dr Fowler

In his 35 years of service at VCU, Alpha A. 'Berry' Fowler, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Director, VCU Johnson Center for Critical Care and Pulmonary Research, has had a profound influence at VCU and beyond. Considering his robust grant support and over 300 publications and abstracts in clinical areas including adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and sepsis, he might well be lauded for that alone.

Likewise, with over 16 years as Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine (PDCCM) Division Chair, with numerous 'Top Doc' awards and other honours, his pursuit of excellence in clinical care, impacting thousands of patients and their families, might well be the highlight of most careers.

To learn more about Dr Fowler's research on vitamin C, you may contact him at 804-828-9071 or send a message to [email protected].

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To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Hi everyone and welcome to Pushing the Limits. This week I have an exciting interview with intensive care medicine doctor, Dr Berry Fowler, who is an intensivist from the Virginia Commonwealth University. The director of the VCU unit via 35 years of service at the VCU Johnson Center for Critical Care and Pulmonary Research. And he's also the author of a number of studies around vitamin C.

So today we're continuing that conversation that we've been having in the last few weeks around the importance of vitamin C. Last week, we had Professor Margreet Vissers on, from Otago University, talking about—who worked with vitamin C in cancer. She's been studying this for 20 years. And Dr Berry Fowler has been studying vitamin C in regards to sepsis and pneumonia and how to use it in COVID. And he's been researching in this area with vitamin C for over 15 years. So some really amazing insights into this incredible vitamin and how it can help with all of these things. So please don't miss this episode.

If you enjoy the content, please share it with your family and friends. You know, there's some important messages that we're wanting to get out in this vitamin C thing that I've been doing, because I lost my father recently and this would have been a major player and I was desperate to get him help with intravenous vitamin C, and I was unable to until way too late. And so I'm desperately wanting to get out the information about this research about the clinical studies that have been done, the research that's been done, to share this really important information.

As always, I really appreciate a rating or review for the show. If you can do that, that'd be so so appreciated. And if you've got any questions, please email me at support@lisa tamati.com, if you want to discuss anything that was brought up in these topics, in this podcast. I'm also doing some one on one consultations. I have a limited number of spaces available for people who are wanting to work with me one on one. If you are facing difficulties in areas from whether it be around some of your health aspects like head injuries, obviously I've spent five years researching head injuries. I have a lot of knowledge around vitamin C. I have a lot of knowledge around biohacking, around epigenetics trained as an epigenetics coach, gene testing, and so on. And I work with a very small number of people who are needing help with these areas. As well as of course run coaching and mindset in high performance. So if you're wanting to get some one on one support with me, please reach out to me it's [email protected]. And I can send you the information there.

Right over to the show now with Dr Barry fellow who is sitting in Virginia in the USA. Well welcome everybody to Pushing the Limits. This week. I have a very special interview continuing our series around intravenous vitamin C or vitamin C in general. I have Dr Barry Fowler with me, who is sitting in Virginia and Dr Fowler has agreed to come and have a little chat today about his work in this area. Dr Fowler, I've done a wonderful extra introduction. So we won't go into all your amazing credentials and your achievements, of which there have been many. But Dr Fowler, can you just give us a little bit of background? You are the director of the VCU Virginia University over in the States. Can you tell us a little bit about your work and your background?

Dr Berry Fowler: Okay, well, I am professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine and I'm one of the ancient doctors in the division, just turning 71 last week. I trained at the Medical College of Georgia in the US, then went to the Medical College of Virginia in the US, then went to the University of Colorado for pulmonary and critical care disease training, and then came back and joined the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University which used to be the Medical College of Virginia, it's now VCU, in 1982 and I've been here ever since.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: I rose slowly through the ranks. I led the pulmonary division for a number of years, for approximately 17 years, and then stepped aside in 2016. And all during this time, at least for 13 years now, we've had this interest in vitamin C. And it's interesting how our interest in vitamin C developed. It first started at a very molecular level where we were studying cardiac ischemia, but some of the heart attendings. And then slowly began to get back to what we have been doing for years which was bacterial sepsis. And we had some molecular reasons that drove us towards vitamin C.

And so first thing we did was we created an animal model of sepsis. And let me explain that. It was pretty straightforward to create. We had 30 gram mice and we went to the mouse cage and collected mouse pellets. Then took them to the laboratory and sonicated them really hard until it became a solution.

Lisa: So this is the fecal matter. Yes.

Dr Berry: And we would take that solution and centrifuge it really hard so that all the solid matter went to the bottom of the tube and we just took off the liquid from the top, which contained multiple different kinds of organisms.

Lisa: So all the bacteria. Yes.

Dr Berry: Yes. And so we took that, put it in the refrigerator overnight and then came in the next morning. And we had 10 mice. We had 5 control mice and then 5 treatment mice. So all the mice first were injected into their peritoneal space, you mentioned that earlier, with a tenth of an mL of this solution containing all this bacteria. And so all 10 mice. And then in the mice that were going to receive the vitamin C, we injected a tenth of an mL, which was 200 micrograms per gram of bodyweight of the mice and then closed off the light. By that point, it was about 4:00 in the afternoon. And just let the mice sit in the laboratory where we had left them and I always get to work at 6:00 in the morning and I was thinking, 'Holy cow, I got to see what's going on.' And so I went into the lab where we had the mice and the cage that was the control mice that were septic. They were all dead. In the cage that the mice got the sepsis and the vitamin C, they were all crawling around drinking water and eating.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: And I knew at that point that we had stumbled on something pretty significant. This take us back to around 2010. Maybe 2009. My laboratory has had this intense interest in sepsis ever since I finished my training at the University of Colorado. And so what we decided is that we would begin to use the treatment animals and some control animals to determine exactly how vitamin C was working.

Lisa: To look at the molecular, the mechanism of action. Why is this happening? Why are they surviving better?

Dr Berry: So what we did was—in these studies, we were always comparing the control mice to the treated mice. And one of the first things we found was that the lungs of the treated mice that were septic, they weren't injured.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: And we have a number of ways to determine the way a lung is injured. One of the things that happens in sepsis, and this might have been what you and I were talking about earlier, is the lungs barrier function, which is the ability to keep the blood in the blood and keep the air in the air.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: It gets injured. And so the bloodstream floods into the airspaces of the lung.

Lisa: And fills it.

Dr Berry: Yes. And one of the things we discovered was lung barrier function was preserved and the vitamin C treated septic mice.

Lisa: Wow. So you're perceiving that it's stopping the plasma and the neutrophils getting into the alveolar space.

Dr Berry: Exactly.

Lisa: And the NET— of one of your lectures, you talk about neutrophil extracellular traps (NET). Is that a part of the barrier function?

Dr: Berry: Very nice. When are you starting medical school?

Lisa: Thank you, Dr Fowler.

Dr Berry: So what happens as sepsis progresses is that there are a bunch of molecules that live in the capillaries of the lung that begin to get expressed. And what they do is they trap neutrophils that are activated in the capillary space of the lung. And one of the things that happens in a highly activated neutrophil is they disgorge their DNA and all of the enzyme systems inside a neutrophil begin to damage the capillaries. And then what happens as the capillaries get injured, the plasma from the lung, just a vein from the bloodstream, just flows into the lungs.

Lisa: So you're basically lost—it's like your skin barrier, if you like, between the ear and your insides is disintegrating.

Dr Berry: Well, one injury from sepsis is like drowning.

Lisa: Wow, so you fill it with your own fluid.

Dr Berry: The airspaces of the lung fill up with your own plasma.

Lisa: So when you have, cause sepsis—I don't think most people are not aware of the progression of sepsis to acute respiratory distress syndrome. That this is a sort of a linear progression that happens, isn't it? That you actually get lung—because most people understand sepsis as being a bacterial infection but they don't understand that it's actually taking all the organs and causing oxidative damage to multiple organs, not just the lungs, but particularly the lungs. And so this is a very important finding that what you've had here because this means that if you can stop the vitamin C, if the vitamin C can stop the neutrophils from disgorging their own DNA into the extracellular space, which is then, that's in a marker, isn't it? That cell-free DNA, when you take a plasma drawn and you see that cell-free DNA floating around at a certain level, that's a predictor of mortality, isn't it?

Dr Berry: Listen, you've done some fabulous reading. But let me just tell you, it's been known for several years that in septic individuals, one of the unfortunate things that will predict mortality is how high the cell-free DNA arises in the circulation. And I don't want to jump too far here, but I will tell you and the vitamin C trial that we reported one year ago this month, that when we reanalyzed the blood from those individuals, we found that vitamin C dramatically lowered the cell-free DNA in the treated patients.

Lisa: Wow. That was in the CITRIS-ALI study?

Dr Berry: Exactly.

Lisa: Oh, okay. That's a new finding from that study because, yes, we will go through that progression of how you got to do that study. So let's bookmark that for a moment and backtrack because that is a very important finding for that study. So let's backtrack a little bit.

So we are talking about vitamin C being able to protect the lungs if we put it very simply and protect the barrier function of the lungs, stop the neutrophils from disgorging the DNA and causing these traps, which is a predictor of mortality. What are other things is vitamin C doing? And why is a septic patient, without fail, going to be very low in vitamin C? So you're using that for Vitamin C.

Dr Berry: I'll get to that in a minute. But what we demonstrated in a huge number of murine mouse studies is that the septic lung in a control animal, the septic lung began to express many inflammatory proteins. And that's just your endogenous immune system trying to protect itself. But we showed in the next cage, in the septic mice that we had treated with Vitamin C, that the expression and the appearance of those inflammatory proteins was totally inhibited completely.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: Yes. The idea of leaping from preclinical animal studies into humans was that we had kind of a basic grasp on the immune system and how Vitamin C could alter the septic immune response and how Vitamin C could protect the lung. Well, protecting the lung in terms of septic critical illness is very, very important.

Lisa: Absolutely. And so then you went to a phase one safety trial, which was really to look at some basic markers. Is this going to be damaging for people if they get vitamin C and look at hypertension? And is it going to affect the kidneys and so on. I think some of those safety mechanisms. Can you tell us a little bit about that phase one safety trial and then the outcomes of that trial?

Dr Berry: Well, I can tell you, I had this really close colleague. His office sat right next to mine. He's a molecular biologist, basic scientist. And after we'd done all these murine studies, one day he walked in, he looked at me, said, 'Fowler, this needs to go into the hospital. We've developed all this data. You've got to make it happen to get it into the hospital'. We designed this little safety trial, enrolled 24 patients. The safety trial was randomized and it was blinded. And so half the trial was just controlled sepsis. The other half was septic patients treated with Vitamin C and we had no idea who the hell was giving vitamin C to people who were critically ill.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: And we found it had no impact. But one of the things we were shocked at, and we were just trying to define, was vitamin C safe?

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: One of the things we tracked was what is called an Organ Failure Score. And we found that all of the patients treated with Vitamin C, their Organ Failure Score reduced dramatically and significantly.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: And the way Organ Failure Scores, basically you're counting numbers. A higher number is a higher incidence of mortality. Lower numbers are improved and that vitamin C was actually improving the possibility of survival.

Lisa: So this is like, in my father's case, is the sepsis progressed and I was unable to get him Vitamin C as we discussed earlier, Dr Fowler, early enough for him to get to survive. But as I watched his sepsis progress, more and more organs started to fail. So his liver started to fail. His kidneys started to fail. His heart started to fail. And so this is the Organ Failure Score. If this person's Organ Failure Score is going up, that is a very strong predictor of mortality.

Dr Berry: Yes.

Lisa: Okay, so this was reduced with the people who received the Vitamin C in the small trial.

Dr Berry: So what we did, we took the data, we combined it with our preclinical data, and applied to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. They had just published an announcement where they were asking for anybody who could think of some clever trial. And we said, 'Well'. And so we submitted an application. What the NIH wanted, they wanted the proposal for a phase two, proof of concept trial.

Lisa: Right.

Dr Berry: And so what we proposed was a trial that had seven medical centers. I have friends in seven medical centers around the US. And with this application in and that was I guess you guys don't remember Hurricane Sandy.

Lisa: Yes, I do.

Dr Berry: Hurricane Sandy was just—it killed the Atlantic Coast of the US. And the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute happens to sit on the Atlantic Coast in Washington, D.C. And it was a year and a half before we found out that we had received the highest priority score because of the application that we had submitted. And the NIH gave us 3.2 million dollars to do a multicenter, randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trial, proposing to administer 50 milligrams per kilogram of intravenous Vitamin C every six hours for ninety six hours. Patients were continuously receiving vitamin C.

Lisa: Can you explain why that continuous topping up that level is important every six hours?

Dr Berry: That's a great question. So from the safety trial that we had performed, we analyzed the plasma Vitamin C levels that we had achieved by infusing. So basically someone your size, for example, would probably get maybe 3 1/2 grams intravenously every six hours for ninety six hours. And what we showed was, we could get the plasma level up to basically three thousand times the normal plasma level. So from a normal diet, human plasma levels of vitamin C are about 70 to 80 micromolar. When you give the protocol that we had settled with, we got the Vitamin C levels up to five millimolar.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: Yes. And so that's what we were shooting for in this NIH trial. And that's what we did. We charged into it, the trial. What we had proposed again, was the Organ Failure Score as well as the two biomarkers. We also proposed in the secondary outcomes, days on mechanical ventilation.

Lisa: Yes, which is hugely important.

Dr Berry: And what we were studying specifically, was patients who were septic, who had gone on to develop acute lung injury called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, ARDS. And so when a patient was septic, like your father, we would become a fly on the wall and visit the patient every day until a lung injury developed. And that's when they would get randomized.

Lisa: This was a critical—from my analysis of the data, that was a critical thing in the phase. So you had to wait until I basically had developed ARDS before you were able to put them. So this wasn't really a sepsis trial, but more of an ARDS trial. So the progression of the sickness comes into play here, doesn't it? If you've gone through day one, like in the phase...

Dr Berry: In the safety trial...

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: The second aseptic individual walked in the door, that's when they got random.

Lisa: Which is a much better, more effective with the timing.

Dr Berry: We had a couple of patients who got Vitamin C in the emergency room.

Lisa: Yes, wow.

Dr Berry: You know you have to get informed consent. You have to get the pharmacy on board and get the patient enthused.

Lisa: I wish I'd had you tending to my father. We could have had that from the moment he got to the emergency. That would have been, I think we would have had a different outcome. But so this was a key point that you had to wait until I had developed ARDS. So in this CITRIS-ALI trial, so here you have, I think it was 47 patients in the control and 47 in the intervention group, was it right?

Dr Berry: 83. And 84 in the Vitamin C treatment.

Lisa: Oh, 83. I'm sorry. Sorry. So 167. One of the big questions I had in my— why was mortality not one of the primary objectives of the study?

Dr Berry: That has been the most frequent question. When we answered the NIH, they had put out a program called, UM1, and we applied to the UM1 program and they were not interested in mortality as a primary outcome. Part of it was this. There had been hundreds of sepsis trials and nobody had ever shown any impact on a treatment for sepsis. And so NIH didn't want to get burned again so they said that they wanted a physiological outcome. That was the Organ Failure Score. And they wanted a biochemical outcome. Those were the biomarkers.

Lisa: It's the C-reactive protein, procalcitonin and thrombomodulin. And yes. So the reasoning was that we don't want to shoot for the stars here and automatically hope for a decrease in mortality and a decrease of days in hospital. We're going to go for something else just to see if this has legs, so to speak, if this treatment is possible, possibly going to work. And that's why they went for the safer scores, rather than the mortality. Looking back, do you think...

Dr Berry: By the way, we haven't talked about this yet, but SOFA stand for Sequential Organ Failure Assessment Score.

Lisa: Thank you. Yes, it's amazing the jargon that you pick up and then forget that you haven't explained yourself. So what actually was the outcome? This was a seven multicenter trial. You did a double blinded. This was incredibly important because I know Dr Paul Marik had also done a study with intravenous Vitamin C, thiamine, and hydrocortisone. And one of the criticisms that was thrown at him was that it wasn't a double blind, randomized controlled trial, so it didn't have any meaning, which is absolutely tragic. So this was—what was the outcomes of this phase two trial?

Dr Berry: So we enrolled 170 patients. One of the placebo patients we had to take out because that patient did not have septic ARDS. They had Acute Eosinophilic Pneumonia. That's something else to discuss later. And then in the Vitamin C arm, we had two patients with Acute Leukemia who had no coagulation in their bloodstream and they were hemorrhaging into their lung and that was not sepsis. So as I mentioned, we had 83 in the control placebo and 84 in the vitamin C-treated group. First of all, we saw no, and I emphasize capital N-O, adverse events. There was not a single adverse event.

Lisa: Exactly.

Dr Berry: All right. And so what we showed was in 96 hours, placebo patients in the trial, 19 of 83 died within 96 hours.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: In the Vitamin C group, 4 of 84 patients died. And if you look at the statistics and the analysis of that, the difference is P=0.0007. We then followed the patients out because in sepsis trials, there's always this demand to see what is happening to a patient at 28 days.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: And what we showed was 46% of placebo patients died and only 30% of the Vitamin C treated septic patients with ARDS died.

Lisa: Wow, that's a huge result in my mind.

Dr Berry: And that was the first trial. I'm not slapping myself on the back, but I will just tell you, that was the first trial to ever show in a blinded fashion, an impact on ARDS.

Lisa: Yes. On mortality of ARDS.

Dr Berry: Yes.

Lisa: And this was extremely sick people. Now, unfortunately, the SOFA scores didn't show any difference and the C-reactive protein markers didn't show any difference.

Dr Berry: So let me explain.

Lisa: Is it because... Yes, is it because of the mortality.

Dr Berry: So we thought publishing the results of the trial in probably one of the most important journals on the planet, JAMA, which as it turns out, is a very, very conservative journal. And they had their ideas about what we could and we couldn't say. So we published, and this is very important for you to listen to and all of your listeners, we published that there was no difference in the SOFA scores at 96 hours. And immediately, letters to the editor started coming in and one of the most important letters to the editor was the person who created the SOFA score. His name is Jean-Louis Vincent in Brussels, Belgium. He told us that we had analyzed the data incorrectly and that what we were reporting was a survivorship bias.

Lisa: What does that mean?

Dr Berry: And what he said we needed to do, and he provided five publications where he had important statisticians tell him that analyzing the data, like we reported, as a worst rank, best rank scenario, that we had to reanalyze it so that the patients who died, what we were reporting was the SOFA scores on the people who had survived.

Lisa: Not the ones who died.

Dr Berry: We had not considered the SOFA score on the patients who died.

Lisa: And because they died so quickly.

Dr Berry: So what we did was we went back and the people who died along the way, those 19 patients, they got the top SOFA score. The patients who survived and left the unit, they got a low SOFA score. And so when we reanalyzed the data, according to the way these letters that had come in from Dr Vincent and two or three other colleagues, it turns out that Vitamin C significantly impacted the Organ Failure Score.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: And then we—here's the important thing, we reported that February 25th of 2020. So you can go to JAMA, you can look it up and you can see our response to the SOFA score reanalysis.

Lisa: Because this was a key factor in my father's case. They threw the CITRIS-ALI trial at me and the original data from JAMA, which said negative result, which when I analyzed...

Dr Berry: That lets you know that the doctors were not reading JAMA.

Lisa: Exactly. And they weren't on the up to date and they did not look at secondary outcomes and they did not look at the parameters of the score and I was not able to present the case. They had just read it briefly.

Dr Berry: Let me go on. We had a strong trend to ventilator-free days and the people who got the Vitamin C, but it just missed statistical significance.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: But we had a strong significance for the people who got Vitamin C in Intensive Care Unit-free days.

Lisa: Which is huge.

Dr Berry: So the people who got Vitamin C had a significantly higher number of ICU-free days. There was an improved mortality. The other thing is patients who got Vitamin C had significantly more hospital-free days at day 60.

Lisa: Wow. So they were actually out of the system altogether. Do you think—now this is controversial, I'm playing devil's advocate here. But do you think the fact that it costs so much for someone to be in ICU when they have sepsis—I think in America it's something like, to the order of 60,000 dollars US a day—and the medications that they are typically on are costing around 20,000 dollars a day, do you think that if you come along with Vitamin C and you start dropping the mortality rate, you start dropping the days? Is that part of the resistance to accept and acknowledge these findings, that the pharmaceutical companies are going to lose out on profit?

Dr Berry: Oh no no no. No, no, no. At VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University—that Anitra knows well—the average care cost per day is about 46,000 per day because that accounts for medical care, nursing care, radiology, all laboratory data, respiratory care, caring for the ventilator. All of that is somewhere in the neighborhood of about 45 to 50,000 dollars per day. And so, if you have a treatment, first of all, that gets people out of the ICU earlier and keeps them out of the hospital, think about the impact on the cost of care.

Lisa: Yes, it'd be huge.

Dr Berry: But here's the other thing. There's not going to be any drug company out there who would argue with that. They are all trying to do the best they can with their different antibiotics, but the common antibiotics that are administered in an ICU when patients are septic levofloxacin, meropenem, vancomycin. Just one day of meropenem is 1500 per day.

Lisa: Exactly. It's a lot of money.

Dr Berry: Yes.

Lisa: So you don't think that...

Dr Berry: And listen to this. That's the cost of the drug. That's not the cost of pharmacy preparing the drug, cost of nursing administering the drug and so on and so on and so on.

Lisa: Okay, so all right. So if you can work this problem out and if you can get this in all ICUs around the world, we're going to save not only thousands and eventually more hundreds of thousands of lives, you're going to reduce the hospital bills enormously. So this is incredibly important work. And you've proven—so the statisticians proved in that phase two trial that the way that you are measuring it was incorrect because a lot of people, as you said, 19 died in those first four days in the control group and only four, so that skewed—if you like—the statistics to initially look like we hadn't had a win here. Now, that's been rescinded and you've managed to get JAMA to publish it in a different light, that the SOFA score was impacted. What has been the effect now? Have you got another trial underway or have you got one in sight? Because this work's too important, obviously, not to be taken further into a phase three.

Dr Berry: All right, so you are in New Zealand where there's not much COVID.

Lisa: No.

Dr Berry: We are in the United States, where it's a pandemic, where we are close to 220,000 people who have died from the virus. We are at 50,000 new cases per day.

Lisa: Oh my God. It's so...

Dr Berry: And there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,800 to 2,000 patients dying per day of COVID. And so because of that, the network that I'm part of, that unfortunately—I'm going to have to jump off and listen to it, because it's been going on since 2:00, the annual meeting of the Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury Network, abbreviated P-E-T-A-L, the PETAL Network. The PETAL Network was tasked by the NIH to turn sharply towards COVID treatments.

Lisa: Yes. That makes sense.

Dr Berry: And so we were thinking, 'Well, maybe vitamin C to treat patients with early COVID pneumonia'. And so what we did was we started a trial. We have studied 20 patients now and that trial is complete, where patients who develop COVID infection and develop early COVID pneumonia, so it's just at the start of an oxygen requirement, are treated with Vitamin C and the results have been pretty dramatic. We are in the midst of writing that up. But again, it's a—open label trial. It's not blinded. Everybody in the world knows that an open label trial does not have the power like we did with CITRIS-ALI.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: And so what is happening at a world level is that all of the health organizations around the world have come to bear to try to design treatments for COVID pneumonia.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: And that is ongoing right now. And there are like 9 or 10 major networks in, across the world. Probably, I'm not sure if New Zealand is included in that, but Europe, the US, possibly Australia. I don't know if they commit to participating in what is called the network of networks formation.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: So right now, the next trial for patients with sepsis that's not COVID is going to be conducted by the PETAL Network where we will be probably next April, starting a trial with a thousand patients.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Berry: Using vitamin C conducted by the PETAL Network.

Lisa: Gotcha.

Dr Berry: And the PETAL Network has 69 medical centers. So doing a trial that would get a thousand patients can be done within a year.

Lisa: Wow. So this is exciting stuff because this is hopefully you'll be able to reproduce and show a strong correlation between intravenous vitamin C and I'd like to see the decrease in the mortality rate. That would be a key factor. Some centers are already using vitamin C because as you mentioned before, there were no adverse reactions. And this is like in all of the studies that I've seen there has never— this is a low risk intervention and my argument when fighting for my father was that, 'He's dying. There is no other options. Why can't I throw the bus in? Why can't I put intravenous Vitamin C'? And they were like, 'You still have to go through all the ethics committees'. I had to sign off from every single doctor and every single nurse in the ICU unit of which there are many.

Dr Berry: Well, let me make another statement. So Paul Marik, who was using 1.5 grams of Vitamin C, 200 milligrams of thiamine and 50 milligrams of hydrocortisone, administered every six hours. That meant that the patients were only getting 7 grams.

Lisa: Very small amount.

Dr Berry: In the CITRIS-ALI, I mean, some patients got 16 to 18 or 20 grams.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: According to body weights, 50 milligrams per kilogram. In the aftermath of that article that you mentioned that Marik published, there have been efforts to repeat that trial. The vitamins trial came out in January, using that and it failed. Then another trial, the ACTS trial using the Marik protocol failed. And then a trial that I just participated in called the VICTAS trial completely failed. And so the Marik protocol is not an effective treatment for sepsis. And well, look. As I think Anitra Carr mentioned to me a couple of years back, the amount of vitamin C that you administer is critical.

Lisa: Absolutely.

Dr Berry: So dose matters. And the adult, again, of your size, you probably weigh 120 pounds or something would probably get somewhere in the neighborhood of about 12 and a half to 13 grams, spread out over a 24-hour period. And then you would get it for four days.

Lisa: Yes. And that is still a relatively low dose.

Dr Berry: It is.

Lisa: When I'm doing intravenous vitamin C with my mum, I did it with my dad prior and unfortunately, months prior to his aneurysm. Too little, too late. We were getting 30 grams. We get 30 grams a week. When I take my mum and niece today for an intravenous Vitamin C is a prophylactic as I try to keep her, as a 79 year old healthy, 30 grams. So why—I had this question certainly with Dr Marik's protocol. It seemed to me to be very low, although the six hourly is obviously a very important point as well. Why not do the bigger dosages? Like in Japan, I know they did a study with up to a hundred grams of Vitamin C in a burns case, a burns trial, where they had some markers of sepsis there. Why are you not trying higher levels?

Dr Berry: Let me come in here quick? Because I'm going to have to jump off in about 8 minutes. But listen to this. The major concern for those high doses of vitamin C, and if you talk to the oncologists who have been using it for years, they will give, like you said, they will give massive doses. And I'm talking massive, like in somebody with pancreatic cancer, they will get 60 to 80 grams intravenously, Monday, Wednesday and Friday for seven weeks.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Berry: But the major concern, in somebody who's septic, who's hypotensive, in shock, that you're giving vitamin C, one of the major concerns is that it causes a significant rise in oxalate crystals formatiion in the kidneys. Now, I will mention here in the CITRIS trial, we had no evidence of renal stone formation.

Lisa: No. And I mean, that was one of the arguments that the doctors had at me, 'You could have damaged his kidneys'. And I said, 'Well, the last time I looked, being dead damages your kidneys too'. To me, that wasn't even a consideration. And he had—after the very first vitamin C, and for my dad, his kidney function went from 27 percent to 33 percent. He's actually improved his kidney function overnight. And I know that's just one anecdotal case, but kidney stones are not going to kill you either. So surely that's not the most important consideration here when you've got a septic patient who is on death's doorstep.

Dr Berry: With vitamin C struggling in the United States after the CITRIS trial, the Federal Food and Drug Administration, they always have to be concerned about adverse events. And we have put together a trial randomized and double blind using Vitamin C in patients with COVID-pneumonia. That's about to start.

Lisa: Wonderful.

Dr Berry: And we had, I unfortunately let my IND, Investigational New Drug lapse after CITRIS. And so I've had to claw our way back into the good graces of the FDA. And one of their major, major, major complaints was, 'You're going to be forming renal stones'. And we're using the same protocol that we used in CITRIS. So FDA got their nephrologists involved and finally gave us the IND. But for us to begin treatment of COVID pneumonia, they have demanded that we first do a small safety trial to show that we are not causing any renal stone formation. We can get that done. We currently have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 COVID patients in the MCV hospitals right now.

Lisa: Wow. Well, Dr Fowler, look, I know I'd love to spend another five hours with you discussing all this because I think it's incredibly important, both for COVID and for the sepsis and for pneumonia and for obviously, for cancer. I just want to thank you for your dedication to this. I mean, you could be in retirement and sunning yourself somewhere, relaxing, but, you know...

Dr Berry: That's right.

Lisa: You know that this work is critically important. And I heard one of your lectures is the equivalent of two 747 planes going down every day filled with people.

Dr Berry: Every day in the United States.

Lisa: In the United States alone.

Dr Berry: That's just in the U.S.

Lisa: Yes. And these people, thousands of families being destroyed with losing loved ones. I'm one of those, unfortunately, sitting here all the way in New Zealand. And so this work is incredibly important. So please keep going. And I'm desperate to hear what comes from this COVID clinical trials and the other sepsis trials, obviously. So thank you so much for your work, Dr Fowler, and I really appreciate you.

Dr Berry: It's been wonderful meeting you and speaking with you, and your and your audience. And when you have Anitra on a couple of weeks, give her my regards.

Lisa: I will definitely do that, Dr Fowler. That's been awesome. Thank you, Dr Fowler. And all the very best there in Virginia.

Dr Berry: Take care. Bye.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional

The battle against cancer has been ongoing for hundreds of years now. But recently, interest in using vitamin C to improve outcomes for cancer patients has been growing. And the results of these various studies look promising.

Biochemist and medical researcher Professor Margreet Vissers joins us in this episode to explain her current research on vitamin C and how it helps the immune system fight cancer. She also talks about the other health benefits of vitamin C, as well as some of its limitations.

Is vitamin C the cancer treatment we've been looking for all along? Tune in to find out.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. You will learn about vitamin C's role in controlling tumours.
2. Discover how humans metabolise vitamin C differently from other animals.
3. Know how intravenous vitamin C turned around a leukaemia patient's relapse.

Resources

• Watch Professor Margreet Vissers' lecture on her work on vitamin C.
• "The power of C" on University of Otago Magazine
• Das, A. B., Kakadia, P. M., Wojcik, D., Pemberton, L., Browett, P. J., Bohlander, S. K., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2019). Clinical remission following ascorbate treatment in a case of acute myeloid leukemia with mutations in TET2 and WT1. Blood Cancer Journal, 9, 82. doi: 10.1038/s41408-019-0242-4
• Vissers, M. C. M., & Das, A. B. (2018). Potential mechanisms of action for vitamin C in cancer: Reviewing the evidence. Frontiers in Physiology, 9, 809. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.00809
• Ang, A., Pullar, J. M., Currie, M. J., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2018). Vitamin C and immune cell function in inflammation and cancer. Biochemical Society Transactions, 46, 1147–1159. doi: 10.1042/bst20180169
• Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Cook, J. S. (2015). Parenteral vitamin C relieves chronic fatigue and pain in a patient with rheumatoid arthritis and mononeuritis multiplex secondary to CNS vasculitis. Case Reports in Clinical Pathology, 2(2), 57–61. doi: 10.5430/crcp.v2n2p57
• Dachs, G. U., Munn, D. G., Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Robinson, B. A. (2014). Consumption of vitamin C is below recommended daily intake in many cancer patients and healthy volunteers in Christchurch. New Zealand Medical Journal, 127(1390). Retrieved from https://www.nzma.org.nz/journal
• Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Cook, J. (2014). Parenteral vitamin C for palliative care of terminal cancer patients. New Zealand Medical Journal, 127(1396). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal
• Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., & Cook, J. (2014). Relief from cancer chemotherapy side effects with pharmacologic vitamin C. New Zealand Medical Journal, 127(1388). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal
• Pullar, J. M., Carr, A. C., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2013). Vitamin C supplementation and kidney stone risk. New Zealand Medical Journal, 126(1384). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal
• Carr, A. C., Pullar, J. M., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2013). Beating the blues: The association between fruit and vegetable intake and improved mood. New Zealand Medical Journal, 126(1384). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal
• Carr, A. C., Vissers, M. C. M., Lewis, J., & Elder, P. (2012). Multiple nutrient insufficiencies: Hypovitaminosis D and C in young adult New Zealand males. New Zealand Medical Journal, 125(1364). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal
• Carr, A. C., & Vissers, M. C. M. (2012). Good nutrition matters: Hypovitaminosis C associated with depressed mood and poor wound healing. New Zealand Medical Journal, 125(1362). Retrieved from http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal

Episode Highlights [04:50] Vitamin C and White Blood Cells

• After killing bacteria, white blood cells destroy themselves so that the toxicity doesn't spill into tissues.
• Vitamin C plays a role in regulating the cell death pathway.
• Margreet observed that white blood cells low in vitamin C did not go to resolve the end of the infection.

[07:15] How Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETs) Work

• NETs are a variation of vitamin C's mechanism.
• Neutrophils are cells attracted to infection and eat hundreds of bacteria. They have oxidants that kill bacteria.
• Neutrophils eject 'niche' or the DNA package inside them. The niche has microbicidal proteins. The niche forms 'traps' that localise bacteria on the site of infection.

[13:18] Vitamin C Production in Animals

• All animals make their vitamin C mostly in the liver; some produce the vitamin in the kidney. Animals that can make vitamin C do it on demand. They can increase production a hundred times to keep blood levels saturated.
• Humans lost the gene to make vitamin C; thus, we are dependent on food for supply. When we are sick or infected, our body consumes vitamin C fast. If we do not replenish our vitamin C, our body levels will decline.

[16:35] Route of Vitamin C Administration

• Plasma vitamin C levels go up to a maximum level of 100 micromolars.
• Kidneys filter and regulate vitamin C. Saturated tissues will not absorb any more vitamin C; the excess will be released in the urine.
• Oral intake is suitable for day to day intake while people with severe illnesses will need infusion.
• Vitamin C infusion results in high plasma levels for a short period. Any excess will pass, and the plasma levels will be back to normal in 8 or 9 hours.

[22:01] Function of Vitamin C

• The enzyme needed to produce collagen needs vitamin C; thus, the vitamin is good for the skin.
• It plays various roles in inflammation, wound healing, controlling infection, and even brain function.
• Vitamin C regulates gene expression.
• Vitamin C supports the production of serotonin, as well as other hormones that regulate mood and reproduction.

[27:48] What Vitamin C Dosages Do We Need?

• The Ministry of Health recommends 200 milligrammes a day for wellness.
• Foods high in vitamin C, such as kiwi fruit, capsicum, and broccoli, are recommended. But only a few people eat a good range of fresh fruit and vegetables.
• Margreet says if the aim of vitamin C intake is to alleviate illness, it is usually not achievable through our daily diet.
• Each condition requires a different recommended intake.

[34:17] The Role of HIF Protein in Cancer

• Hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) is a transcription factor protein that switches genes on and off.
• HIF is present in all cells at all times and responds to low levels of oxygen.
• Under low oxygen levels, areas with poor blood vessels are provided with oxygen by generating new blood vessels.
• Cancer cells hijack this mechanism to have their supply of blood vessels, making the cells grow more.
• Hijacking the HIF protein also results in switching the cancer's energy source to sugar.

[39:06] The Role of Vitamin C in Cancer

• The HIF proteins need to be shut off to prevent cancer from worsening.
• Enzymes that need vitamin C can switch off HIF proteins that need to be shut down, slowing down the tumour's growth rate.
• Though it is tough to prove preventive action, many cancer rates have significantly decreased to half when vitamin C status is good.
• To maintain your well-being, keep vitamin C levels at optimum levels.

[45:07] Does Vitamin C Pose Any Risk?

• Vitamin C's oxidation products need to be cleared out of the body.
• No toxic dose has been identified, provided you have good kidney function.
• There is no actual risk of kidney stone formation and kidney injury.
• People getting an infusion must be tested for kidney function.

[49:10] IV vs Oral Vitamin C Administration for Cancer

• Any amount of oral vitamin C has not shown potential to benefit solid tumours.
• Infusion is more advantageous than oral administration because it gets vitamin C to the core of the cancer to switch HIF protein off.
• Margreet shares the story of Anton Kuria, a previous leukaemia patient on IV vitamin C who experienced remission for two years.
• Vitamin C restored the normal functioning of the cells and wiped out most of the cancer cells.
• He relapsed not because he stopped vitamin C but because the cancer cells acquired new mutations.

[59:30] How Vitamin C Contributes to Quality of Life

• Vitamin C regulates adrenaline and boosts energy because it is key to making molecules that help energy production.
• It also alleviates the side effects of chemotherapy.
• Vitamin C also improves brain fog, concentration, mood, pain, nausea and fatigue.
• It does not interfere with other cancer treatments.

[1:06:02] Applications in the Clinical Setting

• Vitamin C is probably not going to kill cancer, but it can control it.
• Vitamin C gives an insight on how to manage the disease in the clinic.
• The excellent response to vitamin C is an opportunity to make it work better with other treatments.
• There will almost certainly be a quality of life benefit. It can alleviate the side effects of cancer and the disease itself.
• The beneficial effects manifest, so it is worth doing.

[1:16:56] What Needs to Be Done?

• We need to figure out how to apply vitamin C clinically and under specific circumstances.
• Give people the best information so that they can make the right choices.
• With better information, clinicians can also make informed choices for the benefit of their patients.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

'All of these things that cancers do to promote their survival is mediated by this response, and right at the center of this is the vitamin C off switch'.

'Vitamin C is a very labile molecule, so very easily lost. And if you're not putting in more supply, then your body level is going to drop'.

'If there's any wealthy people sitting out there, if you want to support this sort of research — it is absolutely essential because we're losing people left, right and center to these horrible diseases like cancer, like sepsis'.

'I'm excited about this research, I really am, because it's going to save lives'.

'That's why we try to do the research — because doctors have the patient's best interests at heart'.

'Our clinical people, they're at the coalface, and they're having to make life and choice decisions for their patients all the time'.

'Many cancer rates significantly decreased by up to half for a number of cancers if your vitamin C status is good rather than bad'.

About Professor Vissers

Professor Margreet Vissers is a biochemistry academic from Waikato University and is currently the Principal Investigator and Associate Dean (Research) at the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand. She has written and published journals and books about how vitamin C can help cure and prevent cancer.

If you want to learn more about oxidative medicine from Professor Vissers, you may contact her at [email protected].

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Lisa

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Welcome everybody back to Pushing The Limits. This week I have Professor Margreet Vissers with me who is sitting in Christchurch. Now Professor Vissers, I'm just super excited. I'm a little bit nervous and excited to be talking to you today. Margreet, so can you tell us firstly, what your background is? Give us a little bit of context. You have a PhD done, free radical research and oxidant research from what I understand, and now you are very much deep into vitamin C research. Can you give us a bit of your background first?

Professor Margreet Vissers: Okay, yeah, yeah. Morena, Lisa. it's lovely to chat with you. I've trained originally as a biochemist. So when I was at Waikato University, I had this lecturer who kind of got me excited about biochemistry, it was a new thing at that time. And so I continued, that's become my passion, just understanding how things work in our bodies. So, I became interested in white blood cells. When I was doing my PhD, my PhD was on white blood cells that fight infections.

And something we know about white blood cells is that they need a lot of vitamin C. They have a lot of vitamin C and we never knew why. So, all our white blood cells have a lot of vitamin C. So, there was always this question as to why do they need that. And that kind of percolated away in the background while we were researching other things. And then one day, these experiments where you added vitamin C and to kind of knock out any oxidant fixed because it's a well-known antioxidant. And it has this remarkable effects on the cells that I was working with which was the complete opposite of what I had expected. And when this happens in the lab, you usually think, 'Are my samples in the wrong way'? I've got the best hunches.

So instead of acting as an antioxidant, it seemed to be enabling cell death. And which was like really paradoxical. And, and so we did it again. And you know, same thing happened again. And not only was it a really strong effect, which antioxidants usually are, they're usually more graded. It was also an on-off event. So, if there was no vitamin C, it didn't happen. And if there was just a bit, it happened really well.

And so we're looking for another activity. This is not an antioxidant, actually. We're looking for a different kind of function. And so this was in about 2001. And at the same time—so that wasn't work with white blood cells, that I was doing that, and that was a cancer work.

And so, around about the same time, there was a discovery made overseas about this new class of enzymes that regulates hypoxia, the hypoxic responses, survival response, and that those enzymes require vitamin C to function. And I realized that what I'd—because I've been gone on thinking, 'If it causes cells to die. Maybe it does this in white blood cells because that's the one thing that we need our white blood cells to do'. Apart from kill bacteria, we then need them to die themselves off.

Lisa: Yes.

Prof. Margreet: And to die tidally. Without, we need them to devastate the tissues around. It's a very controlled process. And I thought, 'Maybe that's what vitamin C is doing in the cell. That it's regulating the cell death pathway'. And so I did these experiments with white blood cells that didn't have any vitamin C and essentially showed that exactly to be true. That if white blood cells were low in vitamin C, they did not go on to resolve this what would be the end of an infection. So…

Lisa: So they wouldn't end up...

Prof. Margreet: They would end up. So, normally you have your white blood cells that kill the bacteria. They then destroy themselves in that process, because it's an endpoint reaction, and we need to clear those white cells. And so you need to clear them. They're full of all kinds of toxic things. You need to clear them in a way that doesn't spill all that toxicity into the tissues. Other white blood cells come along and eat those white blood cells. So they—it's like wrapping your garbage.

So that if they didn't have vitamin C, that didn't happen. So, the other white blood cells would come in, but they basically couldn't see those other cells around them. And so they get the cell death and cell leakage. And I thought, 'Ah, so scary. There's all kinds of things that happen when you're low in vitamin C'. And so this, and then I realized also that actually, this factor that controls this process, is also the thing that allows cancer cells to grow. And, and so this is a normal response in ourselves, and we need it for survival. You know, I swear, every day survival is dependent on this process working well.

Cancer cells hijack the system to enable them to survive. And so, that means that it allows them to grow outside of an oxygen supply to make new blood vessels, to create a different energy source, so they can live on sugar instead of a more complex energy. It enables them to evade chemotherapy and enables them to undergo metastasis. All of these things that cancers do to promote their survival is mediated by this response, and right at the center of this is vitamin C off switch.

Lisa: Code that. So can we just pick up just a tad there. So, I've listened to a lecture by Dr. Berry Fowler that we mentioned earlier, talking about NETs, Neutrophil Extracellular Traps. So, is that what we're talking about here? So the neutrophils are coming along, eating the bugs?

Prof. Margreet: That's a variation on that thing. So yes, neutrophils are astounding cells. And so, their function is to kill bacteria. The primary way that they do that—so they are attracted to any place where there's an infection. The primary way that they act is to first of all, eat the bacterium so that one neutrophil can swallow hundreds of bacteria. And then inside that pocket inside themselves, they pour onto those bugs within minutes, toxic enzymes and oxidants, including chlorine bleach that kills the bug.

So, what they also do is they can inject from themselves, from the cell, they can inject their DNA. They can kind of melt the nucleus inside the cell with the DNA package. They can unpackage that, and then they can inject that from the cells, and that's what we call a niche. And that niche is coated with some of those microbicidal proteins. DNA is, as you might have seen pictures of it, that's a really sticky line…

Lisa: Yes, like egg white.

Prof. Margreet: …molecule. And so that can basically go a long way, and it doesn't degrade very easily. So, your body doesn't have a lot of DNAs floating around that can chew up DNA. So, these traps can sit there and they trap the back. They literally physically trap the bacteria onto the site of the infection. So, that can basically help localize that infection so that it's not traveling to other parts of the body.

Lisa: Does it even cause things like, if this infection was, say in the lungs, you'd get whiteout and that's the whiteout. Actually, what you're saying…

Prof. Margreeet: The whiteout in the lungs is either lots of neutrophils, just a lot of neutrophils, or a lot of fluid. Where we're seeing new neutrophil NETs, or their traps, and in the lungs as in COVID patients. So, there are these peculiar things going on in the lungs of COVID patients, where they're seeing quite localized and didn't wash out. So, not the kind of diffused whiteout that you see in a pneumonia, someone with respiratory distress, but very localized pockets. And we think that looking like, as all this information's unfolding pretty much as we speak. It looks like neutrophil NETs central to that process that enhances that cytokine storm in COVID patients who end up with severe disease. So currently, the literature is jumping with…

Lisa: With vitamin C, and what would be helpful or not in the COVID scenario? No one's know it yet?

Prof. Margreet: No, it's not jumping with vitamin C and COVID. The Chinese, interestingly, published protocols for how to handle COVID patients. And they have they recommend, as soon as the patient comes into, into the hospital, should be giving them intravenous vitamin Cl to keep them out of ICU. And, or as soon as they get into ICU, to prevent them progressing. They've got very careful protocols about… Actually, their protocols say that helps. This is definitely a helpful step. We haven't taken that up, the rest of the world, despite some people advocating for it.

Lisa: So why would that be? Is it because… or we don't want to go into that?

Prof. Margreet: That's a very good question. I've struggled with answering that question we come up against it all the time. That people will give vitamin D before they get vitamin C. Even though people have been—we've shown that patients who are really ill, have low vitamin C, unless you give them more.

Lisa: So, the sicker we get, the more vitamin C—and I've seen some of your lectures where you've shown graphs of people coming into hospital, and then the levels of plasma vitamin C are very low compared to the generally well, population. And I know from other research that I've done too, in this case, like my father's with sepsis. He would have been probably at the level of scurvy. I can't show that because they couldn't explore it, and would have been needing massive dosages of vitamin C. So the sicker we are… so, this is what's funny people is that animals produce their own vitamin C. The goat is the king of vitamin C making. I believe from Linus Pauling's work. And the goat can produce up to 70 grams a day of vitamin C. We don't

Prof. Margreet: So yes. All animals bear a few, make their own vitamin C in the liver, and some animals in the kidneys. There's a few miscellaneous animals, including all primates, of which we have one—so, chimpanzees and gorillas and monkeys in us, who way back, lost the gene to make it. And so we're dependent on eating it. Guinea pigs similar, and fruit bats are the other most common species.

So, we're dependent on eating it for our supply. Now, all animals that make their own, make it according to demand. So, they keep their blood level saturated, no matter what. So if they get sick, and their body starting to consume more, their liver makes more. And so they just keep themselves saturated. And they can increase production up to 100 times, in order to maintain that level. So we can't do that. So we're totally dependent on what we put in our mouth.

And so, once we get sick, and our bodies consuming more, if we're not compensating for that, then our body levels will decline. So it's totally about supply and demand. So, when you're normally well, your body's just ticking over a little bit. A good diet is good to keep you optimal under those circumstances. You get a cold, you're consuming a little bit more. Now most people, when they get a cold, they run off and get some citrus or something because that's what that feels like eating them naturally. If you get a flu, that demand goes out even more. If you get pneumonia, it goes up even more. And so the sicker you are, the more vitamin C your body's consuming. Not all. Some illnesses are more oxidative than others.

But any infection, like the minute you ramp that up, and that can be like a local infection. It can be burn infection. So it doesn't have to be like a whole body infection. We just recently did this—have been doing a study with people with chronic wounds like leg ulcers, and most of those people have low vitamin C status. And that won't be helping the wound. So as soon as your body has a demand to put on it, vitamin C is a very labile molecule, so very easily lost. And if you're not putting in more supply, then your body level is going to drop.

Lisa: And then we're also limited out with the oral administration of vitamin C. Our bowels can only tolerate, before we get diarrhea, or something like that. So if our power intake to the levels that we might need if we were severely ill, we wouldn't get up—because our plasma levels only go to 100 micromolar from what I understand. We can't actually get higher than that from all dosing.

Prof. Margreet: Oh well, only a little bit transiently. So, if you wouldn't take a one gram tablet, your plasma level would go up to above 100 for a little while. So maybe that might get up to 150. But your kidneys will clear that. And so I always kind of give the analogy of a dry sponge. So if you imagine that you're pouring water on a dry sponge, that your body is... Your blood is only the delivery mechanism, so vitamin C is going to get from your blood into the cells. If your blood levels are low, your tissue levels will be low. So that's a dry sponge.

So if you pour more vitamin C onto there, it will go into circulation. But as soon as it's in the blood supply, it will be sucked out into those tissues. So your kidneys will never see that above 100 micromolar. Once your tissues are saturated, so the whole sponges which you might, if you pour more on and then you touch, and then your blood supply goes up over 100, stays over 100 because your tissues are not taking up any more than they need. Then there's a filter in the kidneys that regulates that all vitamin C passes out, and then it's like, 'How much is in the bloodstream'? 'Do I need any more'? 'And then I'll take it back up'. So it gets taken back up or not. And if the body's got enough, then no more be taken up and end up down the toilet which is fine.

Lisa: Yes, it's not going to hurt you. But if so, then intravenous vitamin C has a different mechanism though, isn't it? We can get the micromotors up quite high.

Prof. Margreet: Intravenous delivery is such fast, express delivery. And so it's to be what—it can do two things. What we think, it can be useful in under two circumstances. So normally for your day to day health, oral intake, this is ample. If you are really—a lot people in ICU, or who are people with severe pneumonia who are turning over vitamin C at a great rate, it's really hard to get like you might need to give those people seven or eight grams of vitamin C a day, in order to restore, get their plasma level sit close to normal. So it's hard to give that amount of oral intake to people who are that sick.

And so under those circumstances, the easiest thing to do is just to inject that, and that's what we call infusion. So then you bypass the gut, you can just infuse it straight into the circulation. And the rate of infusion determines that that plasma level will be very high for a very short time, then it will go out into the body where it needs to be. And any excess will pass out. And then urine. So after about eight or nine hours, you're back to normal. But your tissues, your sponges.

Lisa: Yes, so that they are in what they need. The vitamin C that's actually in the cell will stay around longer than, won't it? And do its actual job, if it's in the mix.

Prof. Margreet: It's doing its job, that's right. So those cells that had become depleted and now have a function restored. And what we've discovered is, it's not just one function anymore. So in the last 10 years, vitamin C has been shown to be involved in supporting... So initially there—everyone will know about... Walk into any chemist and you'll see vitamin C creams for sale, cosmetics. Rub it on your face, or whatever. But because we all believe that vitamin C is good for our skin. And it is good for your skin, actually. It's really good for your skin. But getting a few rubber done, it doesn't actually get into your skin when you rub it on.

Lisa: Right. Don't waste your money on expensive cream.

Prof. Margreets: We know that... That's right. We know that it makes collagen juicy. So the enzyme that makes collagen, that needs vitamin C to work, was the first member of a family. Of about at the moment, there's about 60 members of this family. So, and apart from making collagen, they do all kinds of other things. So including regulate all about gene expression. So what we've discovered is that, it's really important to support enzymes that determine how your cell function changes. So…

Lisa: It reads the DNA so to speak. So this enzyme, one of these enzymes..

Prof. Margreet: These enzymes apply or remove marks from the DNA that say, 'Read this gene, or don't read this gene'. And that's changing all the time. As cells respond to different stresses in different scenarios, and go through different growth phases. And vitamin C turns out, is absolutely critical for that process to be working well. And so you know, sort of…

Lisa: This kind of fit everything in the body. Pretty much like every single cell in your body.

Prof. Margreet: To greater and lesser extent. And so that said, that's at the most fundamental level. It seems that that process is actually quite extraordinarily sensitive to changes in Vitamin C. So, I kind of make the analogy, about a car running, when running on three cylinders, or two cylinders, instead of four cylinders. Yeah, you can still get it to go along the road. But, you know you're not getting the best ride…

Lisa: Not the best of your motor.

Prof. Margreet: ...that you might get. And so you know, it is we're discovering so many things, so many fundamental processes that require vitamin C to work optimally. And also that they are responsive to small changes— relatively small changes in vitamin C status. So there are mood enhancing enzymes that do the same thing. We've just published a study with students from Otago, who are all extremely well. Probably one of the wealthiest populations we've ever studied but they don't eat well. When we gave them kiwi fruit today, it just brought their vitamin C levels up. They felt well, then they're already well.

Lisa: They're already healthy. They don't have...

Prof. Margreet: They are surely well. So, they were—and even not at the extremes of deficiency. So it's like you can… we should be where animals are—optimal all the time.

The dialogue around vitamin C for decades and decades was about avoiding deficiency. The only thing that became a problem was when you had scurvy, and were dying, and anything else was fine. And so what we're discovering now is that—it's not fine. You need to be the best you can be in order to avoid all kinds of scenarios. So it's…

Lisa: It's about optimizing…

Prof. Margreet: Probably the most, of all the vitamins that we've—well actually, vitamin B6 has a very fundamental… But probably the most diverse in that section of all the vitamins. So it's doing many things, in many places that affects an awful lot of functions.

Lisa: So we're talking like inflammation, wound healing, infectious states, and controlling infection. We're talking about skin collagen production...

Prof. Margreet: Absolutely, our brain is loaded with vitamin C.

Lisa: Well, it is one of the biggest users of the vitamin C.

Prof. Margreet: Yes, yes. So it's… Our brain is very hungry for vitamin C. So it's near for many reasons, including the support of molecule size serotonin, which is like your feel good moods. The production of other hormones that regulate mood reproduction.

Lisa: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Prof. Margreet: The list goes on and on.

Lisa: My mind just goes wow. This could help with things like brain injuries, which I'm heavily into helping...

Prof. Margreet: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Lisa: And RDA is one of the lowest in the world, isn't it? It is 45, I think milligrams or something ridiculous. That is not okay. Why can't we get this changed? You know we need 200 to 500 at least, don't we?

Prof. Margreet: Yeah, there is a recommendation from the Ministry of Health that 200 milligrams a day as the recommended target for wellness. But RDAs are a confusing measure because they're actually the number at which 90% of people will avoid deficiency. So which is, right at the bottom, what do we need, in order to not die, basically? And so that message gets a little bit confused with, 'This is how much we need, total'. And so 45 milligrams a day is, most countries around the world have up to the limit to at least double federal muster around 100, which is still in the minimum. But we just want bet our aims to get the New Zealand RDA…

Lisa: So maybe say one of your cats in a… I think it was work by Dr. Levine or [29:00] Maggie's showing the rates from the 45 milligrams type thing up to 2.5 grams a day. It was a steep curve. Well, 50 milligrams in 500, where you get a huge benefit and then, even if you wanted to optimize, you could go even up to two and a half.

And of course then if you have one, oh no some horrible disease, or you have a lot of stress, or you have cognitive issues, or you have sepsis, or you have pneumonia, and then you may need like up to I don't know how many times. And that's one of the questions, isn't it? That you are trying to elucidate is that, 'What are the dosages that we need'?

Prof. Margreet: That's right, and I think we were hoping to hit, as instead of seating a whole new RDA for everything, is to have a recommended intake for different conditions.

Lisa: Absolutely.

Prof. Margreet: So that you'd know if you hit a few, or if you do have a medical challenge of some sort. They use vitamin C infusions for burns patients.

Lisa: Yes.

Prof. Margreet: Because we know that burns patients chew through vitamin C. So that kind of massive inflammatory response does require your body who needs to be given a lot more vitamin C. So there is your, I can recommend it to intake for burns patients.

Well, if we knew that, when you have the flu, 'Here's your recommended intake'. But when you have, if you have issues with this or that, you should be taking this amount. So which I think might be easier for people to get their head around than just one level, because we think that if we sit a daily intake aimed at alleviating illness, then that's normally not that achievable through our daily diet. And so you can't see it as an unachievable target for people to take vitamin C that they can't get from their diet because... So we always recommend food first and that is, so, 200 milligrams a day is what you would get if you did as you were told, an eight five plus. One of those five of the high vitamin C food, then you'll be fine.

Lisa: You're in the range.

Prof. Margreet: So easily. So one kiwifruit, or some capsicum or a good amount of broccoli, or just if you can mix it up. But if you are eating a good range of fresh fruit and vegetables, you would be there.

Lisa: But if you're eating just bananas or something that is on the five a day, but isn't high on the vitamin C level, you won't be meeting those recommendations. So we need to get a little bit more specific.

I want to go now into the cancer story, because I know like in the 1970s, Linus Pauling, who was a brilliant man, double Nobel Prize-winning scientist, sort of jumped in two feet first—if you like—with cancer. His studies that he did with cancer and vitamin C have extended the lives of these cancer patients that he was dealing with, four times as long.

But he sort of started a storm—if you like—of controversy, because back then there was no mechanism of action that was understood as, 'How could this be happening'? And from there, it was sort of, plucked out of the year. Where is this vitamin C thing'?

You and your colleagues around the world have now sort of elucidated some of the mechanisms of action, and actually given some validity to what Linus Pauling was saying and later researchers.

So now if we go into the cancer story, there's still—I mean I've lost two friends this week to cancer. We desperately need this research to be completed or furthered fast. So if there's any wealthy people sitting out there, if you want to support this sort of research, and is absolutely essential, because we're losing people left and right to these horrible diseases like cancer, like sepsis. We know that they're going to be beneficial. But you've actually discovered, so the HIF. I wanted to talk about the HIF protein… the HIF-1.

Prof. Margreet: Yeah, that's the protein that I was mentioning…

Lisa: Yes, earlier when I'm…

Prof. Margreet: It's also active in the white blood cells.

Lisa: Yes. Can you explain what the HIF protein does in regards to tumor growth, and why vitamin C is so important in regards to that.

Prf. Margreet: Okay. So what is that, that's an acronym for Hypoxia-inducible Factor. Scientists are great at giving meaningless acronyms to meaningless terms. So, it's a protein, it's what we call a transcription factor protein. So it's a protein that travels to the DNA, and switches genes on and off. These are master regulations proteins in these families of transcription factors.

So HIF is a major transcription factor that is present in all our cells all the time. Its role is to respond to low levels of oxygen. And so, if for some reason our oxygen supply is cut off. For example, if you had a tourniquet applied to a part of the end, and you cut off your blood supply, those cells in that tissue would get hypoxic. We need that not to die off. We need that to survive, that tissues, that when you restore the blood supply, that everything's actually fine. That's the normal function of the HIF protein, under conditions of low oxygen, just switch on a survival response.

It also does that, if you know has a lot of responses to basically regulate oxygen around your body. So it will, in areas where there are poor blood vessels, it will regenerate new blood vessel formation. You can't live without this protein. So we can't generate an animal that doesn't have it, doesn't survive beyond birth.

So this process is hijacked by cancer cells. So if you imagine, you will have seen pictures of a growing tumor starts off as a few cells. When that tumor, when that little clump of cells gets to be two millimeters across, it's very small, that doesn't have its own blood supply. And no oxygen will get to them, will get to the center cells, and they'll die. And this two millimeter tumor will die off. So but what happens when those cells run out of oxygen, because they switch on this HIF protein. And so when that switched on, those cancer cells now say, 'Aha, I can make new blood vessels'.

Lisa: They grow.

Prof. Margreet: And it does that, it makes new blood vessels, can grow bigger. And as it grows bigger, every time it starts to run out of oxygen in the center, it makes new blood vessels. And so the tumor can grow, and grow, and grow. As well as switching on that formation of new blood vessels, it also turns those cancer cells into, 'If I'm not getting enough oxygen, I need to get my energy from sugar now. I can't use our oxidative mechanism of energy creation'. So they become glycolytic. So then they start to depend on sugar for energy. We know that this is a property of tumors, that they're totally switched on to that. And when they get switched on to that, they stay on that. And so then they're able to become acidic, and they get all of these properties that cancer cells have. And it's all switched on initially by this protein.

And so the more HIF is expressed in your cancer cells, the worse off—the better off the cancer is, and the worse off patient is. So there's a huge effort being put on to trying to switch HIF off than cancer cells. Unfortunately, switching it off is not as easy as switching it on. And because it's switched off by a mechanism you have to turn on. And so the turning on of that mechanism requires either supplying of these enzymes. The switching off of HIF is done by these enzymes that need vitamin C. So when you supply vitamin C, you're then supplying energy to the off switch. And the off switch will dampen down that tough response. So that means doesn't come on as easily, you know, much how you keep it going...

Lisa: Not grow as fast...

Prof. Margreet: And the HIF is ramped down and the cancer will grow more slowly. So that's one mechanism that we have now very good evidence for, indicating that giving vitamin C to cancer cells…

Lisa: Slow tumor growth treatment

Prof. Margreet: … is a really good idea.

Lisa: So this, I saw another one of the charts with the mouse model that you had on the tumor growth showing the ones who had the vitamin C, the tumor growth was much slower than the ones who didn't, so that was because the HIF was switched—in effect switched off by the vitamin C.

Well, I'm excited about this research, I really am. Because it's going to save lives. And this is the whole point of the call. And I don't know if this conversation gets a little bit scientific, but hang in there with us people because this stuff's really important for life.

So can this prevent cancer? So if I want to be prophylactic, I want to be like, I don't want I've got cancer, perhaps genetically in the family, and I've got a higher risk. Can I take higher dosages of vitamin C with the hope of keeping the HIF from ever been switched on? Would that mean...

Prof. Margreet: We know that having optimal vitamin C makes it harder to switch that HIF on. The other thing we know, it's very hard to prove any kind of preventative action, because you need to have huge studies to do that, with thousands of people. Those studies that… there's a lot of epidemiological work out there that has looked at people's vitamin C status, and their susceptibility to different cancers. And so, but there can be many factors can play a part in that, and we don't know whether that's just the HIF, or whether that's a boost in your immune surveillance, or whatever functions there may be. But many cancer rates significantly decreased by up to half for a number of cancers, if your vitamin C status is good rather than bad.

Lisa: Wow. Being over the 50 micromolar level...

Prof. Margreet: Yes. So if you're—people who are that kick themselves to optimal level, have lower incidences of many diseases, actually. And they live longer, and just all measures of well-being are improved. But they also have much lower cancer rates.

Lisa: Wow, so there's a reason, even if we don't have the whole answer yet for dosages and so on, would be to keep your vitamin C levels at the optimum, not at the minimum, your entire life, if that's possible. What you mentioned before that there is a technology that's perhaps underway, that will be able to just, with a fingerprint, a prick of blood, be able to tell us what is in our blood, that would be amazing. I want one of those exactly where we are.

Prof. Margreet: I think your doctor's surgery once…

Lisa: Yes, they definitely don't, because that would be just gold. I mean, in a situation like with my dad at the hospital, I couldn't get a vitamin C test to prove that he had a nutrient deficiency and so therefore, didn't treat the nutrient deficiency because I couldn't do the test.

Prof. Margreet: Yeah, it's very difficult. It's a very… it's not an easy test to do. And so a lot of standard labs don't do it regularly. So you got to be fussy with the blood sample. And it's often a challenge in a clinical setting.

Lisa: Okay, I hope that they do manage to do this because this would be very beneficial for everybody's health, because it's everything from heart disease to blood—we mentioned collagen to having good skin, to all of these sorts of things. But we would be well advised to make sure that we are getting our optimal vitamin C dose.

Is there a danger, like I'll be completely upfront, I have an intravenous vitamin C once a week at the moment and my mum's on it for once a week. I won't keep that up forever. I'm also taking oral vitamin C as well. I usually take between two and four grams a day, and I'm not saying that I recommend that for anybody but that's just what I'm doing because I want to... There is no toxicity with vitamin C, is there? There's no risk, I mean on one hand an expensive way but that's...

Prof. Margreet: Yes well. No, no toxic dose has never been identified, provided you have good kidney function. So you do need to be on the clear. If you can't clear it, or if you're dehydrated, and you're not producing any urine, you'd need to be on the clear because it will oxidize in your body. And when it does, those oxidation products need to be cleared out. And so you know it is, that's the waiver.

So your body clears it to 100 micromolar for a reason because you don't actually want to have massive amounts running around all the time. And providing your tissues is saturated, any additional excess that you put on, it's not going anywhere, just going out.

Lisa: So I had down Dr. Ron Hunninghake on the podcast a couple of weeks ago there. He's a doctor from the Riordan Institute. I don't know if you know the Riordan Institute. And he said he's overseen personally as a doctor over 200,000 IV, vitamin C sessions, if you'd like. And I said to him, 'Well, you know, one of the arguments that I face with doctors with my dad, was that it could damage his kidneys'. Apart from the fact that they did damage your kidneys too, which was my argument back. They said that kidney stones could be an issue. And that was one of the problems.

Dr. Hunninghake, I posed that question to him. And he said in his 200,000 IVs, he's had three people with kidney stones, but they all had them previously. And he doesn't think there is—again, he hasn't done the clinical studies—but he doesn't think that there is a huge risk for kidney stone formation that is also dependent on the calcium being in the kidneys from what I understand. So that that is one of the arguments. That is…

Prof. Margreet: That's right. Yes. Because it's the thing you will hear. It's the first reason why you wouldn't want to take vitamin C. And I think we are trying to… it is important that you can clear it. So you do need, and I think for, rather than causing kidney injury, you don't—You need a functioning kidney. You need functioning kidneys to clear it. Otherwise, you will end up with problems. But anyone who's given an infusion is usually tested or checked for that. But...

Lisa: Or in a case, like with dad's, there wasn't any option. So like, it was that or nothing. He wasn't going to survive.

Prof. Margreet: You only need to clear... as long as you're making urine. Unless your body is, as you know, completely deficient. It is something that you need to lift. So it's a little bit… do say to people… if our patients are dehydrated, we give them a drink, right? Because we give them fluids if they're dehydrated, we give them fluids. So if your body is missing something that it's supposed to have to function, should give them some.

Lisa: Yes, it would be a simple thing, especially if we can test it.

Prof. Margreet: It would not, it's not a big deal, really, to give them some. I think the cancer story is a little more complex than that. Because what we think with solid tumors is that, because any amount of oral vitamin C has not been shown to benefit solid tumors paricularly. And what our hypothesis was, is that if you give intravenous vitamin C, you achieve a higher level in the plasma. So you're basically trying to get the vitamin C to the place where the vasculature is poor, which is that hypoxic center of the tumor. The oxygen can't get to because the blood vessels are poor, vitamin C can't get there either. And you need both to get there. So…

Lisa: To kill the chamber basically,

Prof. Margreet: ...to switch that HIF off in that place. So we think that if you give infusions, then that increased dose actually gets to that core of the tumor.

Lisa: And this is where?

Prof. Margreet: So this is where an infusion is an advantage than oral vitamin C. This is where Linus Pauling got into, where he got into strife bit, and he was giving intravenous doses. He maintained that they had an additional benefit. The conditions at the time, didn't believe that. And they repeated his experiments with oral dosing, and found it to have no effect. And so he didn't, that time we didn't know about half, and he didn't. So he was arguing back and forth. And so it just became a bun fight, actually. There was no resolution, and a lot of acrimony, and never did the cause any good for him, or the clinicians either, and certainly not the patients.

Lisa: This is such a shame, really, because it is also something.

Prof. Margreet: So, kind of tone was set at that time. And, and it's taking a long time to pick that conversation. I think now we have not only the health mechanism, but we have these epigenetic, or the genetic regulatory enzymes that are also involved in many cancers. And in fact in a number of cancers, those enzymes are the mutated enzyme. They're the mutation in those enzymes that will drive the cancer. It's very common in hematological cancers, common in some glioblastoma, so brain cancer, and bowel cancer.

So there are two mechanisms whereby vitamin C might work. And so, we have just recently shown with myeloid leukemia that if you have a mutation in that enzyme, and you give additional vitamin C to those cancer cells, then… So if you have a mutation, you have two copies of every enzyme. If you take one out, 50% left. That 50% is trying to do the job at a hundred percent, and it isn't able to. So if that enzyme, that last 50% needs vitamin C given a vitamin C boost, within upping its level, you can upregulate it. And we think that it's now restoring normal function to those—they didn't stop behaving like cancer cells...

Lisa: And actually...

Prof. Margreet: ...and just behave like normal cells. And so this would be a great treatment adjunct for chemotherapy. Famous illogical cancers, because you now have cells that would respond normally rather than be these aberrant, crazy cells.

Lisa: I know that you had a case, so I won't mention the name in case and that's not okay. But I know that you…

Prof. Margreet: Oh, it is okay to mention the name. Because Anton's family have actually asked me to mention his name.

Lisa: Okay. So yes, I heard about Anton Kuraia's journey with leukaemia and how he had intravenous vitamin C, and that put him into remission. And he unfortunately lapsed later on and if you pick up the story there, but you got a tissue analysis, or you managed to get some tissue when he relapsed later on. In the two enzymes, the TT2, is it? And the W . . .

Prof. Margreet: That's one of these enzymes. So Anton is the case that we've learned a lot. And he, very generously when he read that… So he had this turn around, like a miracle response to vitamin C. And which really piqued our interest at the time we didn't know about the TT enzymes, and I almost lost my money on that. And thought, he wouldn't surprise me if he had one of these mutations, but he was in complete remission for two and a half years. And while he maintained a vitamin C regime, so he was taking it continued with intravenous vitamin C, each injectable, for couple of weeks, or something during that time. And when I spoke with him, I said, 'You know what? I'd really like is I'd like to figure out just why this has happened and lapsed some of your cancer cells. But you haven't got any sign', which is great.

Lisa: Yes, which is great.

Prof. Margreet: And we had no idea, quite what was going on, and how long that remission would hold for. And, unfortunately, two and a half years later, he relapsed. But at that point he said, 'You know how you wanted some cancer cells? Well, I have some, and I don't want to know that'. But he pushed through and sent us a sample. And it was of his bone marrow, which, we had one sample, and I'm like, 'Well, we need to think about what we do with this one'. We had a really good plan. And, and we managed to get a bit of funding from the local bone marrow cancer research trust for a project. And they're like, 'If you got a good project', and I'm like, 'I do actually have a really good project'.

So I put a young post-doc onto that, who has been absolutely marvelous, and together with the clinicians in Auckland, we tracked down the risks of Anton samples that were in the Auckland clinic, and ran the DNA analysis, the genetic analysis on his cancer, and discovered that he had not one but two mutations that involved a requirement for TET2 activity. And so both of the clients, so myeloid leukaemia is a clonal disease. One clone can have one mutation, another clone can have another mutation or both. They're two clones, each one with a mutation that required TET2 or a feature TET2 activity. Both of those clones were wiped out by the vitamin C.

Lisa: Wow. So they kicked them alive?

Prof. Margreet: Yes, yes. But what we discovered was that, that didn't wipe out the cells completely because that one of the clones came back.

Lisa: Was it because he stopped the vitamin C, like if…

Prof. Margreet: What we discovered was that when it came back, that clone had acquired additional mutations, as they do often. And so cancers do that, they cause you to be more and more aberrant as it continues. So the original mutation was still there, but so were additional mutations. And so the second time around, the vitamin C treatment worked a little bit. It seemed like it was trying to work. He went and had more chemotherapy. And then that didn't work, got sent home again. With weeks to live anyway, back onto the vitamin C, and got better. But the blood cell count never came down to zero again, and…

Lisa: So basically the cancer was stronger the second time with more aberrant mutations.

Prof. Margreet: Yes. But he didn't, he didn't seem to know what's going on. But my gut has got really good.

Lisa: So something was, so that brings in the quality of life because that's proven, isn't it? If you're having to have chemotherapy, and having vitamin C can be very beneficial for quality of life. Least fatigue, least nausea, all of those sorts of horrible things that happened to poor chemo patients can be...

Prof. Margreet: That's a story we believe, of just replenishing the depleted supply in your body. So basically, you're giving your body these toxic cocktails, you're expecting your body to function, and then respond. And at the same time that's running out of a vital nutrient. And so if you, if you can restore that, then your fatigue levels… so one of the things that vitamin C does is it supports the promotion of energy. So it regulates adrenaline. Absolutely key to making adrenaline, to making molecules that support energy production, energy metabolism.

And so, if you're starting to run low on those things at the same time as you're undergoing the chemotherapy, what can be written off as a side effect of the chemotherapy can be alleviated. A few can restore some of those normal functions. So a lot of the kind of brain fog, things, ability to concentrate, mood things, pain, and nausea and fatigue, a lot of the measures improve.

Lisa: Wow. So that alone is a reason to be considering it.

Prof. Margreet: It's a very important consideration.

Lisa: Absolutely, it's quality of life.

Prof. Margreet: Absolutely, as far as we can tell, it does not interfere with any other cancer treatments. Because that's the other worry that people have, doctors have, that, 'I don't know, because it might interfere with the treatment I'm trying to give you for your cancer'.

Lisa: And this is a problem when people go to their oncologist, their local oncologist. They'd be saying, 'Don't do vitamin C'. This is why this information is so key to be able to share it.

Prof. Margreet: Well, that's why we tried to do the research. Because doctors have the patient's best interests at heart. And they worry when patients come in and say, 'You know, should I take this? Can I take that'?and they're throwing everything they can at the cancer. And they worry that something else that you're doing might work against that. And so they are always very cautious and rightly so. Because we want our doctors to be working from evidence, from an evidence base.

And currently, we don't have those answers here. That we can absolutely say… I mean, this is why we're working so hard to try and identify the causes, and how vitamin C is working. So that then we can give that information to the clinicians, who can then put that together with their patient information and say, 'Well, for you on this drug, this will be fine. You do that, you know, and in fact, it will help with this and this and this'. So or, 'Under these circumstances, now, I'd rather you didn't do that, until you've got this out of the way', or whatever. So we can manage better advice and give patients an idea as to what they can expect.

So like, with the haematological patients, we're starting to identify what genetic subgroups of the cancer might respond. So then you might be able to say to you, to a cancer patient, 'Looks like you've got this mutation. This is very likely to be helpful for you', or 'It looks like you don't have this mutation. It's unlikely that it's going to help you. You can try, but it's unlikely'. So we can be a little bit more…

Lisa: more nuanced?

Prof. Margreet: …real, rather than just a kind of blanket response.

Lisa: The hard thing is and when people are in dire straits. You haven't got the luxury of waiting another 10 years perhaps until the research is done. And so you're in this catch 22 type of situation. And you have to, as a patient or looking after a loved one, sometimes make calls on the direction that you are going to go based on this that you acknowledge without actually having 100% proof in. This is an argument that nobody can really win because I mean, it's a really tough situation.

And I certainly, with it with my dad, but in with my mum's story as well. And so I understand the frustration of people and what they're going. But with Anton for example, he obviously went and got the intravenous vitamin C, prior to it being proven to help, and it obviously gave him a few more years.

Prof. Margreet: That's right. And at the moment, we're at the point where we're learning a lot from patients like that. If he hadn't done that, he hadn't done that, no one would have done it. And we wouldn't know what we know now. And we're learning from other patients like that, as well. So let's see…

Lisa: Anecdote versus...

Prof. Margreet: So there is anecdotal evidence, what I say to people and often get asked by cancer patients, 'Should I do this or not'? One of the things that we're learning and we've learned, we are moving the story forward. The things that we've learned, even from Anton's case, is that vitamin C is not probably not going to kill your cancer. So in his case, even when he went into complete remission, the vitamin C was controlling his cancer. That was it. It didn't eliminate it. So that knowledge is gold.

Lisa: Yes. Actually.

Prof. Margreet: And because that gives us an insight into how we might manage that in the clinic. If we were going to do this in the clinic. We would know that if we're seeing a response from a cancer patient, we're seeing a good response to vitamin C, there's an opportunity. It buys you more time. But it can give us insights into how we might work better than with other treatments. So that information is gold.

The one thing that you know, I can understand entirely how any individual cancer patients like, 'Well, I need the answer now. I have this in my own life, with my husband. I'm not waiting for the research. I'm not going to wait for that'.

Lisa: Exactly.

Prof. Margreet: 'You need to announce it now'. But suddenly my priorities can then change upfront. I now have voice inside and I want, 'We want an answer now'. And so, as far as, you know, the vitamin C treatment does, I often think, 'Well, what would I do myself'? And I think from what we know now, knowing that, we know, there will be a quality of life benefit. Almost certainly. And that in itself would be worth raising payment for. So just to alleviate, as many of the horrible scientific treatments, and the disease itself.

Secondly, is that, if what we know is that if you are going to see a benefit from vitamin C infusions in cancer, you would see it quite quickly. So, this is not something that would take months and months to manifest. So, if it were doing something, you would notice something quite, quite soon. I mean, Anton's case was quite remarkable. In a case with a cancer like that, within two weeks he was beating it. Nearly tears.

Lisa: From nearly dead to better.

Prof. Margreet: A month later, he had a bone marrow biopsy taken. And he was back to normal. So if it's going to work, and I think even with a solid tumor, if it were having a beneficial effect, you will know quite quickly.

Lisa: So it's worth doing.

Prof. Margreet: So if you wanted to try, then you first try, but you have to pay to try.

Lisa: You have to find a doctor to do it.

Prof. Margreet: So it is, there are good people around who . . . It's an unproven treatment.

Lisa: And that's what you're working on.

Prof. Margreet: And so, we're trying to move that story forward. It's inordinately slow.

Lisa: And it's a shame that the arguments, or the problems, the controversy that has surrounded the original research, if you like, has colored some of the reactions you get, now. You get this polarizing effect that hopefully reason will calm things down eventually. We can just talk about the scientific evidence, the evidence, the evidence, the evidence. And then perhaps we can just bring it back down to a non-emotional level. Because as a loved one who's just lost somebody, because I believe we could have had a chance to get him back, my dear back, if we had had access to vitamin C from day one, but not day 14. It's hard not to be emotional about that.

Prof. Margreet: Absolutely. It really is. And I can understand that entirely. And this is why we're not giving up.

Lisa: Yes. But it's so important, the size, it's so important.

Prof. Margreet: But the controversy around this is what it is. I'm trying very hard to walk a line between that were drawn by either side. And my argument is always, for what do we actually know, and what if we actually measured?

And let's just stay with it? Because we can… I thought that's what I'm trained to do, actually. So that's what I should do. The narrative is being influenced, I think the discovery of the new enzyme activities is helping a lot. Because people are starting to see how it might work. And just showing how it's working, is very key to getting people to accept what just what they need to do. So, little by little.

Lisa: Little by little we'll get there.

Prof. Margreet: Little by little, I hope I live long enough to...

Lisa: Long enough to… yes. In the meantime, we can make our own educated… This is what—that you've coming from a scientific background, I'm coming from an anecdotal background, or a background of I have to make decisions, life and death decisions for my loved ones. I'm going to take certain risks because the alternative was not a good one. And so, I think both—as a loved one of a patient, I desperately need that research to be done. I want that hurried up. We all want it, we want the results.

Prof. Margreet: Me too. I want it hurried up.

Lisa: And meanwhile, I'm going to make some educated decisions myself, on what I do for me and my family. And I think that's the best approach that we can do. Because we can't always wait until, when we haven't got the timeline, when we love somebody who's sick. And so we're headed to make those educated decisions ourselves, and then live with the consequences.

But what I think is important that we have informed consent, informed discussions around these things, and that we try to take the emotions out of the whole thing. And actually, instead of—in the hospital I was sort of shut down because, 'You're not a doctor, and you don't know anything'. And that's not true. And there was no willingness to even look at the clinical studies that I presented, that they were coming from my doctor friends who are supporting me on the outside, to try to present this on the inside of the hospital. It came down to legal arguments, more than anything else. And that's frustrating to think that perhaps you lost somebody because of a legal situation. The work that Dr. Merrick has done in this area and Dr. Berry Fowler, who's coming on the show next week. It's really, really exciting for me.

Prof. Margreet: Well, those two clinicians have some very compelling stories to tell. I do, I do understand. I understand entirely, that I sit here in my office just above ambulance bay watching, and above the ICU board, and seeing…

Lisa: seeing people struggle every day,

Prof. Margreet: …thinking, there are things we could be doing better. And it is about getting those conversations going. So far, I think we're getting good traction in New Zealand with getting with conversations. But it's, it is extremely…

Lisa: It is extremely slow. But then you and Doctor Anitra Carr, looked at his stuff as well. And that's exciting that we are making progress. And so I just want to, we've covered a lot of ground today. And we've really gone through in all sorts of places, but I just want to thank you for your sacrifice, because I know this is a huge amount of work. This is your life's work, basically. And I don't know if everybody was recognized for what their contribution, they're actually making to humanity. And I think and what you're doing is just absolutely wonderful. So thank you, because it is going to save lives. It has, has already saved lives.

Prof. Margreet: Well, I don't know that I have. But we have some wonderful colleagues globally as well. And so, there is a network of people who support each other on this, and some very good people doing excellently in a lot of places. Quote Mark Levine. What that man has done is extraordinary. In terms, he has provided the best information that we've ever had on vitamin C. With his own interesting stories to tell about how his colleagues' treated...

So, some wonderful work has been done, and eventually people will just see. Actually, this is just, I just keep saying, this is just a thing that we need to eat. It's a vitamin that we need, an orange to keep our bodies functioning. Just like we need food, and we need to breathe, and we need water to drink. Now, we don't argue with those things.

But this is just one of those things, when we need to figure out how we do this, how we do this piece. And under what circumstances so, you know, let's try to take the emotion out of it…

Lisa: Yes, you're very good at it.

Prof. Margreet: I think it's the only way forward. And to give people the best information so they can make fit, so they can make the right choices, so clinicians can be making informed choices that they know is for the benefit of their patients. Because our clinical people, they're at the coalface and, and they're having to make life and choice decisions for their patients all the time. And so they have high degree of caution around that. And that's what we want from them. So we need to provide them with the best information that we can get for them to make those clinical judgments.

Lisa: I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up. Professor Margreet Vissers, you've been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for the work that you and your team are doing. Please continue. And if there are any rich people out there listening, please fund this research. Continue to fund this research because it's very, very important work and we desperately need it. So thank you for your time today.

Prof. Margreet: My pleasure.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional

Sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome, cancer and COVID-19 are seemingly incurable illnesses. We say 'seemingly' because there is a way to battle all of these diseases.

Cardiologist and lawyer Dr Thomas Levy joins us in this episode to explain vitamin C's role in disease treatment. He also talks about other essential therapies and nutrients that can help prevent illness and improve our health.

If you want to know more about intravenous vitamin C's benefits and how it can save lives, then this episode is for you.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. You will learn how oxidation causes disease.
2. Discover how vitamin C fights oxidation.
3. Learn more about the other key players in oxidative therapy and other useful nutrients in health and disease.

Resources

• Join Lisa's free live webinar on epigenetics to know more about personalising health according to your genes.
• You can also join her free live webinar for runners to learn how to run faster and longer without burnout or injuries.
• Grab a copy of Lisa's book Relentless from Amazon, her website or in bookshops near you.
• If you want to develop mental toughness, enrol in Lisa's online course, MINDSETU.
• If you love running adventures, stream the documentary Desert Runners on TVNZ.
• Access Dr Levy's books through his website.
• Learn more about Dr Paul Marik's protocol for sepsis using vitamin C and steroids.
• Access the VICTAS study investigating the efficacy of combined use of vitamin C, thiamine and corticosteroids on patients with sepsis.
• Learn more about the controversy surrounding the CITRIS-ALI trial investigating IV vitamin C in patients with sepsis-induced acute respiratory distress syndrome.
• Watch Professor Margreet Vissers' lecture on her work on vitamin C.
• Read on Dr Rhonda Patrick's assessment of clinical data on Vitamin C and her findings.

Episode Highlights [06:10] How Dr Levy's Vitamin C Research Began

• Dr Hal Huggins, a leading biological dentist, asked Dr Levy to do medical consultations on his patients and follow them long-term.
• Dr Levy saw a patient with an advanced neurologic disease but remained energetic after numerous dental work.
• He began his research into vitamin C when he learned that Dr Hal gives the woman 50 grams of vitamin C through an IV.

[18:46] What Causes Disease?

• When you have an excessive amount of oxidation among your biomolecules, it causes disease. Oxidation happens when a molecule loses electrons.
• A biomolecule in an oxidised state loses some or all of its functionality.
• Toxins cause toxicity and secondary disease by oxidising biomolecules.
• Toxins have different physical and chemical characteristics that allow them to penetrate organs and tissues, resulting in various clinical diseases.

[21:52] How Does Vitamin C Work?

• Vitamin C is a small molecule with a structure similar to that of glucose. It also uses the same cell uptake mechanism as glucose.
• Vitamin C battles oxidation by reduction, a process by which electrons are donated to biomolecules. Vitamin C donates two electrons instead of one.
• The give and take of electrons induce a microcurrent.
• The process of oxidation and reduction helps relocate the energy-containing molecule where it is needed.

[26:46] How Is Vitamin C Administered?

• IV administration gets enormous amounts of vitamin C into the body more quickly and at a higher concentration. It is usually given to patients in dire straits, but if you are needing higher doses due to things like sepsis, ARDs, pneumonia or cancer then IV vitamin is the best method.
• Liposome-encapsulated vitamin C gets absorbed almost completely into the gut, unlike other oral forms.
• Liposome itself is a complementary supplement. It contains a lipid called phosphatidylcholine, which is identical to the natural cell wall of our body.
• All modes of vitamin C administration (intravenous, oral, liposome capsules) are equally important, depending on a patient's situation.
• In the hospital setting, vitamin C is given at constant levels every six hours. As a result, this keeps a more or less steady state of vitamin C in the body.

[31:59] Controversies Surrounding Vitamin C Studies

• Dr Levy says controlled trials are necessary only when a drug with potentially positive effects also has potential downsides.
• Since vitamin C is an essential nutrient, Dr Levy thinks it's not necessary to do a trial with a large sample size.
• Large trials are designed to support pharmaceuticals.

[53:09] What Are the Other Key Players in Oxidative Therapy?

• Hydrogen peroxide kills pathogens and hydrates and oxygenates tissues to heal them.
• Nebulisers with 3% hydrogen peroxide or less help with acute viral infection, respiratory problems, and coronavirus.
• Ozone is the most potent anti-pathogen agent.

[58:07] Why Are Vitamin C & Oxidative Therapy Not Mainstream Treatment?

• Mainstream medicine is ignoring broad-spectrum treatments such as hyperbaric therapy, ozone, hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C.
• Pharmaceuticals are multibillion-dollar companies. Doctors can only implement treatments in such a fashion that does not threaten those profits.
• There is more politics in medicine. Patients are being told something that is factually not true and, sometimes, a deliberate lie.

[1:06:10] What Are Other Nutrients Beneficial to the Body?

• Magnesium is the most important single supplement. It antagonises intracellular oxidative stress caused by calcium.
• The recommended dose of magnesium is 600 to 1000 milligrammes.
• No other nutrient can substitute for magnesium. Magnesium deficiency can cause and worsen many diseases.
• People should never take iron supplements unless you have iron deficiency anemia.
• Keep ferritin levels at 25 or 30 microgrammes per millilitre. Only take enough iron to get the blood level back to normal.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

'Take responsibility for your own health and understand that we are all humans and that one person's education may not have included some of the things that are happening now'.

'We are co-learners with our patients'.

'If you have a doctor who is annoyed by your questions or not open to explanations don't just walk away, run away from there and find one who is willing to work "with" you'.

'Deal with your emotions, talk to some family and good friends, start your own research track and be the captain of your health care'.

'Be preventative, not the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. And if you are in deep trouble, make sure you are vigilant. Make sure you ask questions'.

'If everybody on the planet had access to hydrogen peroxide nebulisation and started doing it, there wouldn't be a single case of coronavirus on the planet in a week'.

'If you're a clinician, and you've given just one patient who is just absolutely on death's doorstep intravenous vitamin C, and the next day they're well or 90% well, you don't need to repeat that with a thousand patients. You don't need to repeat it with five patients'.

About Dr Levy

Dr Thomas Levy is a board-certified cardiologist and a bar-certified attorney. After practising adult cardiology for 15 years, he began to research the enormous toxicity associated with much dental work, as well as the pronounced ability of properly administered vitamin C to neutralise this toxicity.

He has now written 11 books, with several addressing the wide-ranging properties of vitamin C in neutralising all toxins and resolving most infections, as well as its vital role in the effective treatment of heart disease and cancer. Others address the important roles of dental toxicity and nutrition in disease and health.

Recently inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, Dr Levy continues to research the impact of the orthomolecular application of vitamin C and antioxidants in general on chronic degenerative diseases. His ongoing research involves documenting that all diseases are different forms and degrees of focal scurvy, arising from increased oxidative stress, especially intracellularly, and that they all benefit from protocols that optimise the antioxidant levels in the body.

He regularly gives lectures on this information at medical conferences around the world. His 11th book, Hidden Epidemic: Silent Oral Infections Cause Most Heart Attacks and Breast Cancers, was published in September of 2017.

If you want to learn more about oxidative medicine from Dr Levy, you may contact him at [email protected] or through his website.

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To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Transcript of the Podcast

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Welcome, everybody. I'm absolutely excited about this next interview that I have for you today. It is with Dr Thomas Levy who is sitting in Miami in America. And he is a board-certified cardiologist. He's also an attorney at law, and he has written 11 books. Now, talk about overachiever, this man is amazing. But above all, he is a humanitarian. He is someone who writes about what he believes. He's a straight talker. And today we're going to be talking about vitamin C, continuing on this journey after my experiences in hospital recently with my father who died of sepsis, and I was unable to get him vitamin C. I am on a mission to let people know about how intravenous vitamin C works in the cases of things like sepsis, pneumonia and corona.

And I'm getting a series of experts, we've already had Dr Ron Hunninghake on the show a couple of weeks ago. And this is his colleague, Dr Thomas Levy. You know, Dr Thomas has written a book called Curing the Incurable about vitamin C and its history, which is over 80 years old, a huge amount of evidence, a huge clinical experience with vitamin C. And Dr Levy, he knows how it works, the mechanisms of action, some of the reasons why this is not in the mainstream hospital care for these for viruses, and for cancers, and so on. And I really hope you get a lot out of today's episode.

You know, he is a man who does say it as it is. And I really, really respect him for doing that. Because, it's very, very hard for a doctor to criticize anything within the medical world and the way things are set up. But Dr Levy sort of tells us how it is—some of the systemic problems we have. And it's a really interesting interview, above all, about vitamin C and its mechanisms of action. So please take a good listen. Take heed of his advice. And make sure you share this with family and friends, especially if anybody is dealing with any major sort of health issues; it would be really beneficial.

Just as a reminder, we are holding every couple of weeks with our company Running Hot Coaching, a running master class every second Tuesday at 12:30pm, New Zealand time. You can register for the next one at runninghotcoaching.com/webinar. On alternate weeks at the same time on a Tuesday at 12:30, New Zealand time, we are holding our Epigenetics webinar, which is all around personalizing health according to your genes and helping you understand this great set of genes that you inherited and what you can do to optimize your life, your fitness, your nutrition, your mindset—everything according to your genes and your epigenetics, how they are expressing right now. So register for that at epigenetics.lisatamati.com. That's epi—E-P-I—genetics.lisatamati.com

And as a reminder, go and grab my book Relentless, my new book. If you haven't read my old books, Running Hot & Running To Extremes and you like running adventures, make sure you check those out. And just as a side note too, Desert Runners, which was a movie that I was involved with, is now playing on TVNZ OnDemand. It's on the Pulse Channel, I believe, under Documentaries. If you haven't seen that movie and you love adventures and running adventures, please go and check that out on TVNZ if you're in New Zealand.

Right before we head over to Dr Levy, just a reminder, please, please, please give the show a rating and review if you enjoy the work that we do. This is a huge amount of work that goes into each one of these episodes. And it is for love, definitely not for money. And I really appreciate a rating and review. We are going to be introducing a way that you can support the podcast as a Patreon if you'd like in the coming weeks, so that you can actually support the work we do and get some bonuses for doing so. So stay tuned for that. Right, over to Dr Thomas Levy in Miami.

Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This is Lisa Tamati here. And today I'm absolutely jumping in on my skin from excitement because I have Dr Thomas Levy, who is one of the world's most renowned researchers and doctors in vitamin C among a whole lot of other things. Dr Levy is also a board-certified cardiologist and a lawyer to boot. Go figure that one out. But Dr Levy is sitting in Miami, and he has given up an hour of his time today to share information that I think is absolutely crucial that you guys pay attention. So whatever you are doing, drop it and listen to this interview, because the work that Dr Levy and many of his colleagues have been doing, it's been 40 years in the making and we're going to be talking today about vitamin C.

Now recently, I had Dr Ron Hunninghake from the Riordan Institute on the show and we had a great interview. And now we're going to continue that conversation with Dr Levy, with his experience. So welcome to the show. Dr Levy. It's fantastic to have you.

Dr Levy: Thank you, Lisa. Glad to be here.

Lisa: So Doctor, can you tell us a little bit—just in brief—your background and your journey towards vitamin C?

Dr Levy: Well, in a nutshell, I was a garden variety, mainstream cardiologist some 25 years ago. And through a bunch of circumstances that I won't go into it's—I don't know, call it karma or destiny or something like that. At the same time, I decided to wind down my cardiology practice, I met Dr Hal Huggins in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Dr Huggins, in my opinion, was the first and the world's leading biological dentist. He just wasn't a tooth mechanic, he took care of the whole body while addressing what was going on to the mouth.

And anyway, to make a long story short, he ended up asking me to do medical consultations with his patients and follow them up long term. But that only occurred after I visited his clinic a few times. And I saw things that, well. In med school, you're taught: don't exist. As an intern and resident in internal medicine, you're taught these responses can't take place. And in addition to seeing just overall dramatic improvement in patients—and I'm not going to say this is routine, don't get me wrong—but I saw a couple patients that had been wheelchair-bound with MS for over a year. And they took a few steps at the end of two weeks. I mean, so there was clear stuff going on physiologically.

But the thing that really hooked me was, one day, early on, he had this very elderly patient with advanced neurologic disease. He was getting a ton of dental work—extractions. I mean, the type of stuff that puts a college kid in bed for a week. What he did, he gets his wisdom teeth yanked out, he just goes. 'Ugh, I got to rest'. Well, at the end of several hours of this work, this woman was energetic. I couldn't believe, and I said, 'Something's wrong here'. I said, 'Hal, what's going on'? And if you knew Hal, you'd know Hal is a very dry, sarcastic person. I loved it.

And he just pointed at the IV, I said, 'Okay, yeah, that's an IV, Hal. Thanks'. 'What does that have to do', I said, 'What's in it'? 'Okay Hal, what's in it'? And he said, '50 grams of vitamin C'.

Lisa: Wow. 50 grams...

Dr Levy: And that just came from left field, smacked me between the eyes, and I literally and figuratively went rolling across the room. And as the expression goes, 'I wasn't going to be misled by my lying eyes'. I saw something. It happened. Something was going on here and at that point in time that began my research with vitamin C and just about everything else.

Lisa: Wow. So that's the story. And this is coming from dentist—Dr Hal Huggins was very, very famous for making us aware of amalgam fillings from what I understand and root canals. I need to go back and read his books after discovering him in one of your lectures and thinking, 'Crikey, I've got a heck of a lot of those'. So I need to look into those for myself.

Dr Levy: Absolutely.

Lisa: Yeah. Got me a bit worried. I've already spent a bloody fortune on this. So I don't know. So, you've come from cardiology and internal medicine and to this. And then you went to a law degree. Just to add to the achievements that you've had. And then...

Dr Levy: I might add, Dr Huggins has taught me more real medicine than I ever learned before. So, my really—my second medical education was the one that counted.

Lisa: Wow. And so this is really important. So, because people I think, Dr Levy—and we were talking previously—a lot of just people listening, when you go to your doctor, they are not God, and they don't know everything on the planet. And what I try to advocate—and I'm not saying that your doctors paid or whatever—but what I'm saying is take responsibility for your own health and understand that we are all humans, and that one person's education may not have included some of the things that are happening now.

Dr Levy: So along those lines, I like to tell people that, just as you pretty much said, you have to take responsibility for your health. And you need to understand and you need to proceed at your comfort level, which means if you have a doctor, he or she who is put off or doesn't want to take the time or is irritated by you asking questions, don't walk out of that office, run out.

Okay, so you need to find physicians, medical care, that will work with you. And as we all know, I mean, hey, physicians like to believe they're brilliant, but it's mostly in their head. Okay, so, you know, they spend their time, they do their time in school, but in my humble opinion—and I know this is somewhat snide and sarcastic, but I gotta say it anyway—I find that most physicians view getting a medical degree as the validation that they no longer need to think the rest of their lives. 'I'm a doctor, now I don't need to do anything else'. Okay, that's obviously only the beginning. And you should be continuing to learn and realize that you made a lot of mistakes until the day you die or lose cognitive function.

Lisa: Yeah. And this is remaining humble in your process to learning. And this is not just for doctors, this is for everybody. You know, like we have to be constantly learning. I love what Dr Hugh Riordon said in one of his talks, that we are co-learners with our patients. And I thought, 'That is brilliant'.

Dr Levy: That's a good way of putting it.

Lisa: That's how a doctor should be approaching this. Okay, let's dive deep into the weeds here with vitamin C. So Dr Levy has written a book called Curing the Incurable, please go out and get this book, among many other books. He's written over 11 books. One was Death by Calcium, The Magnesium Reversing Disease. Yes, I'll find my notes here. Primal Panacea. His website, by the way, before we go any further is peakenergy.com. If you want to find out more about those books, really, really highly recommend people go and do that.

But let's go into Curing the Incurable when I listened to this book, unfortunately, Dr Levy after my father passed. I was just like, 'What the hell? And why has this been such a battle? And why is my dad not with me still'? Because I am sure if you had been his physician from day one, my father would be still with us. And that's a big call to make, but this is what I believe based on your book and other research that I've done around this. Can you tell us, Curing the Incurable, you talked about Dr Klenner, you talked about Linus Pauling, Dr Iriwn Stone. Can you give us a little bit of background—this is 40 years that you guys have been saying this stuff, you and your colleagues that vitamin C is a cleanser...

Dr Levy: Well Klenner in 1940, that's 1940. So that's 80 years.

Lisa: 80 years? Wow. Okay, got that wrong. 80 years with Dr Klenner. And then Dr Linus Pauling—Linus Pauling Nobel Prize winner, two times in the 70s I believe, was the next sort of step in the process. Yeah. So like, we've known about this for so long, why is it not getting that message across? You know, why?

Dr Levy: Well, this is not a medical issue. But you asked a the direct question, I'll give you a direct answer. Money. Money runs everything. And the pharmaceuticals are multibillion dollar industries. So what I've said many, many times is, 'you don't bump out a billionaire'. Billionaires who will not be excluded, they're not being minimized. The only way you get something done is to hopefully analyze the situation and implement it in such a fashion that it doesn't threaten those profits. Okay?

So I mean, if you can put an additive into gasoline to make it a little more efficient, but not eliminate the gasoline, and the companies will probably let you be. But if you come along with something that replaces gasoline, don't think the gasoline, oil companies are gonna take it lying down.

It should not come as something surprising to people, except for the fact, and this is what people need to realize, doctors are the same type of people as any other profession. All right. We beat our chest and we try to make ourselves angels, if you will, but we're not even close. You have wonderful politicians, you have vicious politicians. You have wonderful physicians, you have, I won't say vicious, I'll say physicians that do not place the patient's welfare as their number one concern. Whereas you have other physicians, unfortunately, of a tiny minority who would give their life for their patient.

Lisa: Yeah. And you really put them first, and these are quite rare. And this is why, you know, this is, like, having Dr Ron Hunninghake on, recently. He's one of those, you know.

Dr Levy: Yes, he's spectacular.

Lisa: He's spectacular.

Dr Levy: He is one of my best friends. But that's one of the reasons why he's my best friend.

Lisa: Yeah. Because, and we just connected so well, because I could see the heart and the man and the compassion. And, you know, I have had the privilege of having some of those types of doctors, and scientists as well, on the show because I searched those types of people out who are not cowards. I mean...

Dr Levy: Let me say this, since you mentioned Dr Hunninghake. I don't have a clinical practice. But I often get emails from around the world of people, 'How can I see you? How can I do that? Can you recommend somebody'? Well, there's only one person on the planet that pretty much practices the way I would practice, and that's Dr Hunninghake. So for someone who would be interested in following up on the type of concepts—in our, we're in this day and age of Zoom conferences and everything like that. They have the facility to offer video consultations in which he can analyze the data. And even if you could never see him directly, he can get you going in the right direction.

Lisa: Absolutely. That's a really good recommendation, you know, especially if you're fighting something serious. So back to the vitamin C story. So Linus Pauling, or Dr Klenner firstly, was using this in practice back in the 40s. And had some miraculous—and that word is probably not a good one to use because it implies something—but had some incredible recoveries and saw this. And then Linus Pauling's work where he had cancer patients who lived four times longer in his study. And he was only using quite small doses of vitamin C. And then of course, the Mayo Clinic coming along and replicating his study. But using oral vitamin C, that's not a replication, and that one is still being quoted.

So what is it that vitamin, C does? Let's get into a bit of biochemistry here and help us understand. Why is it such a broad spectrum panacea? Why can it help sepsis, coronavirus, any virus, hepatitis, shingles right through to cancer?

Dr Levy: Well, first, I would say let's understand what causes disease. there. And when I say that I mean all disease. I'm not talking about a percentage of the disease. What causes all disease is having an excessive amount of oxidation among your biomolecules relative to their normal state of reduction. So oxidation is when a molecule loses electrons and then it's in an oxidized state. When you have a biomolecule, RNA, DNA, protein, fat—you name it—enzyme, and that molecule gets oxidized, it loses one or more electrons. It either becomes less functional or completely devoid of function. So you completely take one biomolecule out if you will when it's oxidized.

Now you have different ages that oxidize and they're known as toxins. Toxin is the same thing as a pro oxidant, free radical, they're synonyms. So the enemies of health if you will are toxins no matter how you encounter them, because all toxins cause toxicity and secondary disease by oxidation, nothing else.

Now you might say, well, how could then just that cause so many different diseases? Well, that's because the toxins have different physical and chemical characteristics. One toxin goes in the fat, others goes in water soluble, one penetrates membranes, one's ionic, one concentrates in this tissue—that gives you a variety of clinical disease, because different areas and different biomolecules are being concentrated to varying, in different degrees throughout the body. That's the entirety of what causes the disease.

So when we hear this idea that oxidation causes disease, well, yes, that's true, but it's much more accurate to say, oxidation is disease. Okay? A tissue of a given disease, liver disease, whatever, there's not an additional ill-defined thing that's wrong with that tissue other than the unique array of oxidation. Now, having said that, your basic overall goal of therapy is to reduce—in other words, donate electrons back to biomolecules that have been oxidized. And the extent to which you can do this pretty much dictates the extent to which you can either stop the progression, reverse the progression, and in early stages even resolve chronic disease, no matter what the disease. So this is an antioxidant. Okay, the toxin is a pro-oxidant, an oxidizing agent. And the antioxidant is a reducing agent. A toxin takes away electrons, antioxidant donates electrons.

Now vitamin C, even though there are many, many antioxidants out there, they all have a positive impact. The thing about vitamin C is, number one, it's a small molecule. Number two, it's very closely structured to glucose. Now we know every cell in your body takes up glucose. So vitamin C tags along and uses the same mechanisms as glucose for uptake into the cell, right? Number three, each vitamin C molecule can donate two electrons rather than one. So that makes it doubly important. Number four, it has an intermediate stable state. We know we talked about how vitamin C gets used up quickly, that's true. But it's sort of a biochemical phenomena type thing, when the vitamin C loses one electron it can stay indefinitely in the intermediate state where it can either donate another electron or actually go in the opposite direction. And when you have a lot of vitamin C in the cell, what happens when you reduce, oxidize, reduce, oxidize? Give, take, give, take, give, take? You induce microcurrents.

So electron flow is a current. Right. The more effectively vitamin C can do this trillions of times a second, determines as to how well you can establish healthy microcurrents inside your cells with healthy transmembrane voltages across the membrane.

Lisa: So this is meaning— oxidation isn't always a bad thing, is it though? Like when I...

Dr Levy: No, not at all.

Lisa: So when I exercise, I'm causing an oxidative stress onto my body and it's causing a hormetic effect that hopefully my body's going to see more soldiers to build my muscles stronger or whatever the case might be. And so this is like a redox, it's like a cycle that is important and it's for cycling of the electrons that creates this microcurrent.

Dr Levy: The whole thing is designed—you're right—there's oxidation reduction and oxidation is part of it. The thing about a toxin is, a toxin takes electrons and keeps it.

Lisa: I gotcha, so yeah.

Dr Levy: Vitamin C gives electrons and then when you take them away from electrons it goes back and forth, back and forth. But the toxin once it takes the electrons it becomes electronically more stable, biochemically more stable, and it doesn't give the electrons up. So that's a net fact of electrons from the tissues.

Lisa: Wow. Yeah. So this is stealing your energy.

Dr Levy: And the thing about it is with the oxidation, you need oxidation to stay alive. The thing about—one of the things oxidation does is it helps you relocate the energy-containing molecule where you need it. Okay, so, when you have vitamin C in the blood, you need active transport, you need to consume energy to get vitamin C inside the cell. And so the purpose of part of the energy is to get your energy providing substance in an area where it better does its function. So yeah, you absolutely need oxidation to balance back and off this.

And the other thing, too is, when your oxidized vitamin C level gets high in the blood, then you pass into the cell without the consumption of energy, but then you need to consume energy inside the cell to restore the vitamin C back to its reduced state. But the important thing there is, the vitamin C, has unique ways of taking that energy and getting it where it's needed. So just because you're consuming another antioxidant to reduce vitamin C back to its normal state, that's not a loss of energy. It's a translocation of energy.

Lisa: Yep. So that's when things like will define we know it's going backwards and forwards. So this is the transporter of—what was that—the SVCT2 transporter that's getting it into the cell, that's getting the vitamin C into the cell. So if we go and say intravenous versus oral, versus liposomal delivery of vitamin C. Oral has certain limitations, although important for everyday use. Liposomal vitamin C, like we're all hearing about liposomal vitamin C, is that a better way of delivery? What is the difference between intravenous, oral, and liposomal—in short, perhaps?

Dr Levy: Well, first of all, when somebody says, what would you use? My answer is all of them.

Lisa: All of them, yeah.

Dr Levy: Okay. And I'm not going to arbitrarily if I'm sick, just use one and not the other. They all have their own unique contribution. Intravenous, obviously allows you to get an extremely large amount of vitamin C inside the body much more quickly and at a higher concentration than you could by any other form. However, I also just told you that the vitamin C in the blood, you need to consume energy to get the vitamin C inside the cell, and it's reduced for.

Okay, well, when you take liposome encapsulated, vitamin C, because it's like a little cell, a little fat, globule cell-like structure that's got the same construction, around the liposomes as the natural cell membranes in your body. So that gets absorbed almost completely and very properly in the gut, unlike the other oral forms. And then once it's inside there, it's either in the lymph or the blood. The lymph eventually makes its way into the blood. And then as the blood circulates, the liposomes can then get inside the cell without the consumption of energy.

Lisa: So if you've got a very sick patient who isn't really responsive to recovery, like can't handle a lot of oxidative stress. This would be a better delivery system, perhaps to get it to them without...

Dr Levy: Well, certainly if you have a loved one who's in the hospital, and…

Lisa: He can't get intubated.

Dr Levy: ...the doctors are giving you a hard time and they're don't they don't have a tube down the throat.

Lisa: Yes. And I would have done that if I had my case with my father. But he was unfortunately intubated. So I was stuffed in that. I had liposomal in the hospital room ready to go for when he was extubated. But unfortunately, we never got there. So I was really reliant on the intravenous way. And the intravenous is, like you say, a very, very powerful way for someone who is in such dire, dire straits. You know, as my father was in sepsis.

Can we answer just one question on the liposomal? I was concerned about the number of omega-6, like that's a phospholipid, and there's a lot of omega-6 in the delivery mechanism. Is that going to be a problem when you've got—we tend too many omega-6 and not enough omega-3 in our diet. If you're taking a lot of liposomal vitamin C that way, is there the issue? Well, not really?

Dr Levy: I don't think so. The type of lipid that's in the liposome—in this case, we're talking about the LiveOn product, I got to say that because there's a lot of fraudulent liposomes out there. That LiveOn became so prosperous so quick. Everybody wanted to jump on the bandwagon. And in the process, not realizing that it's a very complicated process to make quality liposomes. But those other companies had no problem with it; they just lied.

Waiting to get the letter so that they can stop, but have been made an ungodly amount of profit until they're told to stop. But, the liposome lipid is past the phosphatidylcholine. And this phosphatidylcholine is identical to the phosphatidylcholine that's in the natural cell walls of your body. So, really it's the liposome itself is a positive supplement in addition to what's inside the lens.

Lisa: Uh-huh. Oh, that clears that one up for me. Because I was concerned about the amount of omega-6 that I might be giving to my mom, in this case, recently through liposomal delivery.

Okay, so now let's go into—I was fascinated by the work of Dr Marik, Dr Paul Marik. I think you know of his study with intravenous vitamin C in the ICU setting. Unfortunately, it wasn't a double blind, placebo controlled trial. But he had a small trial with 96 patients, 47 in the control and 47 who received vitamin C. Now these were very small doses. And Dr Berry Fowler has also done this similar work. And Dr Berry fellows coming on in a couple of weeks.

So Dr Marik—he reduced—this is the statistic that got me and what I used when I was advocating for my father, a 40% mortality rate was in the control group with sepsis; 8%, when they got the vitamin C, along with hydrocortisone, and thiamine and that's a hell of a drop. And those are all people. Those are people that are still walking around now, and this is a small study.

Dr Levy: And the thing that maddens me is when you want to try something different, some of the standard opposition is where you don't have a double blind placebo control bla bla bla. Number one, if you have something, which as a competent clinician, you know has helped, and very importantly, has no defined toxicity, and is not experimental, and is inexpensive. The only time the trials that you're talking about are warranted, is when you're using a drug that has the potential to have a greater or positive effect, but also has the potential downside for negative side effects. So you need to balance one against the other.

When you're talking about something like vitamin C, which is the most important nutrient in your body, it's a ridiculous and foundationless argument. So it's, to me, unethical to the highest degree, if you're a clinician, and you've given just one patient, who is just absolutely on death's doorstep, intravenous vitamin C. And the next day they're well, or 90% well. You don't need to repeat that with 1000 patients. You don't need to repeat it with five patients. Okay, so we really have—if you'll excuse the expression—a back-ass-wards way of approaching research. But it's all designed, as I said before, to do one thing: support the pharmaceuticals.

Lisa: And this is a legal thing, isn't it? Because evidence-based, it really was—and this is Dr Ron Hunninghake said this to me, 'Evidence-based is not evidence-based, it was designed for the pharmaceutical companies so that they could defend their drug in a court case that they did with a placebo controlled group that didn't get it, so that they could prove it'. But it's not a practical approach for all of medicine to do it in this style.

I mean, hyperbaric, I'll use as an example. I do hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It was a key player in my mother's rehabilitation for her brain aneurysm. Also in the oxidative medicine family. They did a trial—a clinical trial—but the people know if they're getting hyperbaric. So they did, the control was 1.3 atmospheres and the other one was 1.5 atmospheres. 1.3 atmospheres, it's not a placebo, that's a treatment. So they all got better. And they said, 'Well, they all got better. So therefore there is no'... And it's just like, seriously? Or in Dr Marik study with a— or in the CITRIS-ALI study, sorry, where the SOFA scores were taken as the primary endpoint and not mortality is sort of backwards in my head. Surely we should be looking, 'Did these people die or not'? Rather than this sequential multi-organ failure score. I get why they did it, because they were an early stage study, but it did throw a spanner in the works. And that wasn't a sepsis of study. That was an ad study, because they already had sepsis for too long. And that's why we probably didn't see the dramatic results in that one. Because that was one of the studies that was checked back at me when I was fighting for my father, the CITRIS-ALI study, bla bla bla. Didn't help with the SOFA score. Didn't help with the CRP. Didn't help with a couple of the other markers. And I was like, mortality and days in ICU, it did help with. And these people were already extremely sick because when they came into the study, they were already very far along the process.

Dr Levy: Which is what Madison likes to do with their prescription drug. Right now with the coronavirus in the US, I suppose elsewhere in the world, they have Remdesivir. And they're doing trials over Remdesivir with the endpoint of looking for less days hospitalized. So I mean that the same thing that they trashed on the one hand, but that's their endpoint with this insufficient drug therapy, if you will. 'Let's see if it helps a little bit. And now we're going to get all excited. We took our prescription drugs, and we lessen the hospital days by 10, 20, 30, 40%'.

Lisa: Yeah, and 'But we'll ignore vitamin C that could actually get the people and prevent them from dying'.

Dr Levy: Even though it's also been documented by Hackney studies to decrease like the hospitalization as well,

Lisa: As well. And they have been studied around the world now with the coronavirus with vitamin C. So, a really sarcastic question. Do you think President Trump is getting vitamin C right now? Or is he on Remdesivir?

Dr Levy: Well, I don't have a crystal ball. But I think he is getting what was reported, which was—this is significant. Nobody talks about this but had this happened at the beginning of the pandemic, it would have been just incredible news, but shows like yours, the articles on the orthomolecular medicine news service, all this stuff… It's absolutely mind blowing to me that it's in the mainstream news, very casually mentioned, that President Trump was getting zinc, vitamin D, melatonin.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Dr Levy: Yes. Okay, and I mean, that was out there up front. What the medical community must have just choked on their tongue when they saw that our president was getting at least some natural approach to bring his virus under control? I doubt he was using vitamin C. But it's possible.

Lisa: Wow. But at least he's on the melatonin and the zinc. I mean, that is a step forward. So but you know, like, you hear this coming from the head of the FDA, 'None of that has been proven to help. Vitamins A, B, C, D, zinc, melatonin, vitamin C, none of those has been proven'.

Dr Levy: That's where politics gets into medicine. I've often said—and I'm sad to say it, and I don't mean to be sarcastic at all—there's more politics in medicine than there is in politics.

Lisa: Yes, yeah.

Dr Levy:You have a better chance of a politician giving you an honest statement about a controversial issue than you have a drug representative or a physician representing a drug company, giving you the straight scoop about drugs. What you just said, and they'll say it all the time, 'There's no study this. There's no study that'. It's a bald faced lie. What could you say beyond the fact that they're just lying? Now, let me say, let me backtrack with lie. I should say they're telling something that's wrong. Lie means intent. So I can't tell you whether it's their intent to lie, like, 'I know I'm telling you something that's wrong'. But there's no question that most of the time, they're just telling you something that's factually not true. And I dare say most of the time, a deliberate lie.

Lisa: And it's ignorance.

Dr Levy: No, nothing wrong with ignorance,

Lisa: So they won't go and look at the damn study and its data.

Dr Levy: Ignorance can't be remedied because ignorance doesn't mean, you have to have a closed mind. It just means you have a mind that hasn't been exposed.

Lisa: Yeah. I mean, don't we, you know, with the situation with my father. I had the studies, I was working with doctors outside who were helping me get the studies, present the studies, and they said 'Don't want to see them. Won't be presenting them. All you're worried about is, is it legal? And with our staff are not trained in doing vitamin C infusions, and whether we are allowed to do it'. It was not about the clinical

Dr Levy: Well in New Zealand it was a registered medicine.

Lisa: And not in the hospitals. I was told point blank is an unlicensed medicine in our...

Dr Levy: I think, I'm not sure but I think you can say that was another lie. A lot of times our pharmacy, they'll do, they'll lie like anybody else. It's something they don't want to do. So they'll just toss it aside, always not allowed. Until you take the law book, and stick it in their face, and say, 'You're wrong, Stop lying'.

Lisa: But you, you know, as a lawyer, and as someone who's brilliant, can do that. A loved one who's fighting for their family who hasn't slept in two weeks, who doesn't know about the law is buggered to be quite fear [41:16]. And so this is—why I'm doing these interviews because I want people to be just made aware of this sort of situation.

So, okay, vitamin C, can help. And we've seen the studies now. And perhaps we'll link to some of the studies in the show notes with sepsis. And Dr Berry Fowler said, used this analogy, just in the States, 'Two 747s of people are dying every single day of sepsis who don't need to be dying', who are crashing into the ground, basically. There are a number of people, are dying daily in the States alone. Let alone the rest of the world from sepsis, which could be drastically helped with intravenous vitamin C. Do you think, like Dr Marik included thiamine and hydrocortisone? Is there a necessary additive or a beneficial additive to that protocol? Or is vitamin C the key player here?

Dr Levy: Yeah, no, they're not necessary at all. That's not to say they didn't have a positive impact. I mean, like when people ask about supplements, 'So what supplements should I take'? And I mentioned something, that they 'What about this, this, and this'? I said, 'Well those are all good, too, but as far as being vital to the response, no'.

And in fact, predating Dr Marik's study about a year earlier, they did a study in Iran, of all places, with patients with sepsis getting roughly the same dose of vitamin C every six hours. And that was it. And they got the same response and mortality rate.

One thing about the hydrocortisone that makes it especially unnecessary in sepsis is, sepsis is a state where you have massive infection, massive increased oxidative stress throughout the body. When you have increased oxidative stress, what are you going to do? You're gonna, like we talked earlier, oxidized biomolecules? Well, as it turns out, in addition to oxidizing a lot of biomolecules, you also oxidize the cortisol receptors. Cortisol has receptors they bind to. Well, I just said, what happens when you oxidize a biomolecule that doesn't work? So those receptors aren't taking up the cortisol anymore, so the body's natural reflex is to produce a large amount of cortisol.

In fact it is documented in sepsis patients, that there's already a high level of indiginous hydrocortisone. So then what happens when you give vitamin C? When you give vitamin C, one of the first things it does, is it starts reducing those oxidized hydrocortisone receptors, and then the hydrocortisone that's already circulating in the body can bind to the receptor, gets taken up into the cell. Okay, and one of the primary functions of hydrocortisone—not well known, I don't believe—is that it profoundly increases the uptake of vitamin C inside the cell.

Lisa: In that way it would be beneficial? Is it why Dr Marik perhaps used it in this case? We don't—can't really…

Dr Levy: No, I don't think so. Because if that was the case, he wouldn't have given the hydrocortisone at all. I mean, you're already, there's already present and high amounts of it inside the body. So I can't say for sure what his reasoning was.

Lisa: Yeah. Well, maybe it was a limitation of the study. And he had to use a drug. Possibly we conjecture here. So when you release cortisol—just for the people listening—it is an anti inflammatory, isn't it? It is one of the stress hormones and it basically takes energy away from you making inflammatory responses. And that's its beneficial use

Dr Levy: Right and it's my opinion, based on the evidence, as I reviewed over the years is that vitamin C, of course is a powerful anti-inflammatory. And I would tell you that the reason hydrocortisone is a powerful anti-inflammatory, is because it gets the most important anti-inflammatory vitamin C inside the cells where it's needed.

Lisa: That makes good sense. Are you aware of...

Dr Levy: Remember anti-inflammatory just means you're in an area of increased oxidative stress that needs more electrons brought into it, that's all inflammation is. And another point to just to buttress all of this is when you have inflammation starting anywhere—often talking about the coronary artery getting inflamed, vitamin C levels go down to nil. So you have a lot of oxidative stress inside the blood vessel. Okay. And what's the first immune cell to show up?

Lisa: Neutrophil

Dr Levy: Neutrophils more specifically, the macrophages. The macrophages has 8,000% more vitamin C inside of the blood. So all you're doing in my humble scientific opinion, I think—personally and scientifically—that the primary role of the immune system since it's precipitated always by areas of increased inflammation increase oxidative stress. My opinion is the primary—not the only but the primary—role of the immune system, is to bring vitamin C where it's most depleted.

Lisa: Wow. And that's what the macrophages are doing. So are you aware of the work of Professor Margreet Vissers? She's a professor here in New Zealand at Otago University and Dr Anitra Carr as well. But Professor Vissers is coming on next week, on the show.

And forgive me, I don't have a scientific background. I'm trying to get my head around all this science, biochemistry, but she had showed on one of her lectures, the neutrophils coming to the site of infection, say, pneumonia or sepsis, eating the bacteria into into the neutrophils, they gorge on those bacteria, it's a good thing. The bacteria then inside the neutrophils and if the neutrophils don't have vitamin C in them, they vomit out—for the want of a better description—their own DNA. Eventually, they sort of explode and leave out and put all this DNA into the cytoplasm? And this is causing—so when you get wiped out on the lungs, that's lungs being filled up with neutrophils. And then the macrophages are made to come along and eat the neutrophils from what I understand. And they will only do that if there is vitamin C in the neutrophils.

Dr Levy: Both the macrophages and the neutrophils are phagocytic. Okay. And even though the macrophage has the most, I said 8,000% more vitamin C than the blood. The neutrophils have 4 to 5,000% more vitamin C in the blood. So they're sort of like—with regard to vitamin C content—they're right up there with the macrophage. And both the macrophage and the neutrophil, gave these phagocytic Pac Man like qualities, if you will.

Lisa: Yeah. And they're eating the bugs and getting rid of them. So she was talking about—no, Dr Berry Fowler—god I'm mixing my things up. NETS, neutrophil extracellular traps), have you heard of those? And the vitamin C prevents—from what I understand. And we'll have Professor Margaret on next week—that it stops the neutrophils from regurgitating basically their own DNA and poisoning the space around them and then the macrophages won't eat them. And then in the case of say, as acute respiratory syndrome, you've got white out and you can't get rid of it. It's not going to go away and it's not going to be taken out by the macrophages. Yeah, it'd be interesting to work to look at those NETS, neutrophil extracellular traps. That was Dr Berry Fowler that was talking about that. But I've got so much research in my head, I'm probably mixing professors up. I don't have a biochemistry degree anyway. I'm doing my best. So hopefully I haven't butchered it.

Okay, so what should people do—on a practical standpoint—if someone is in hospital with a loved one, they've got pneumonia, they've got coronavirus, they've got sepsis, how can they get their doctors to give intravenous vitamin C or liposomal delivered vitamin C? What would be your—so they're not in a situation like I was fighting against the machinery.

Dr Levy: So we're talking about someone who's not intubated yet.

Lisa: Yes. Because when they're intubated, you're buggered. But you gave me a couple of things that I never thought to bring into the conversation with the doctors. I brought them the clinical studies, I brought in the evidence. But I was saying to the doctor, 'I'm going to come after you. And I'm going to sue you if you don't do this, because the evidence is there'.

Dr Levy: And draw the vitamin C level and when it comes back low, 'This doctor is a nutrient level that's low, please treat it'.

Lisa: Yep. Okay, so get the vitamin C treated, by the way, in my local hospital, they were unable to test it. Okay, so that's just ridiculous. So is it a very difficult thing to test for vitamin C levels?

Dr Levy: I think so. Not that I know of. It involves a certain technique, and you either have the technique or you don't, but it's not something sort of exotic or out there.

Lisa: Oh wow. So anyone who is in that situation, basically, you need to get vitamin C, in somehow. And ideally, you're having it in six hourly, intermittent, constant levels, so that your, because vitamin C has a very short half Life, can you explain that a little bit? Why the intermittent—the every six hours is crucial?

Dr Levy: Well, it's just excreted, that rapidly of the blood, once it's in the—it's excreted that rapidly in the kidneys, once it's in the blood. Like that, it goes down quickly. And that's why you have every six hours, so that as it starts going down, you have another bump up so that you more or less keep a steady state. Which is also why liposomes are so good because once they get taken up inside the cell, they effectively become a long acting form of vitamin C because they've been taken out of the area where they can be rapidly excreted.

You know, you're talking about what to do for a patient in the hospital. And this would help anybody but it will especially help with the acute viral infection, respiratory problem, and the coronavirus. And believe it or not, it actually relates back to vitamin C. And that's the nebulization or inhalation of hydrogen peroxide.

Lisa: Oh, yes, I wanted to ask that.

Dr Levy: Hydrogen peroxide. Okay, little known facts, number one inside the body and inside the lungs, after it kills the pathogen, you know what's left? Oxygen and water. That's the breakdown products of hydrogen peroxide. So at the same time, you kill the pathogen. You do the two things that are most important for healing tissue. You hydrate it and oxygenate it.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Levy: Number two is we now know, that the respiratory lining of the lungs naturally produces and excretes hydrogen peroxide 24/7. So that you actually have hydrogen peroxide, existing already endogenously to protect you against new pathogens as you breathe in. And when you get an infection, that production increases, so all you're doing with hydrogen peroxide nebulization is you're augmenting a natural response.

Lisa: Wow

Dr Levy: And add to that the fact that there's been no infections, pathogens of any type that have been found to be resistant to hydrogen peroxide. Now, vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide. The Fenton reaction, vitamin C goes in, donates the electron to iron which passes along to peroxide, make hydroxyl radical oxidized, kills the cell or the pathogen or whatever.

Another thing, little known fact that vitamin C does, is outside of the cell, it stimulates hydrogen peroxide production. So it causes more peroxide to be produced, which then passes easily into the cell and continues to give the vitamin C inside the cell more fuel to resolve the oxidative reaction that kills the patch.

Lisa: Wow. So okay neutralizing hydrogen peroxide. So just a normal 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide that you can buy at the chemists or the...

Dr Levy: Right. 3% or less. So only 3% percent is a little potent but if it's not, that's great but you could get a very positive response with half a percent or a 10th of a percent but I said don't I say, why not go up to the percent that you easily tolerate and get the job done a little more quickly'?

Lisa: Is there any danger with people you know going out buying nebulizers? So when you buy a little nebulizer, is it like the essential oil sort of thing that you have? You need to have a towel over your face or like you do when you get a cold and you put menthol or something in it. If you've got one for me. Oh, okay. No, that wasn't what I was picturing. Okay. Oh, great. nebulizer. Okay. And you just put it in here.

Dr Levy: Put the liquid in.

Lisa: Yeah. Yep. And then you just breathe it. And for 5 to 10 minutes, sort of, a day.

Dr Levy: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah. And if you've got a cold or something like that, it would help or flow things like that.

Dr Levy: That sounds grandiose. But I want to say to anybody that's listening, if you have this device, if you have your peroxide, you need never suffer from a cold or respiratory virus again, which also means influenza or flu. Wow, you should never suffer from that again. I don't know. I can't make it any clearer than that.

Lisa: No, that's amazing.

Dr Levy: But once you have the nebulizer, you know, how much the vitamin C cost? To heal your cold or flu? Less than 10 cents.

Lisa: Really? Like the vitamin C side of things?

Dr Levy: No, it's much cheaper than vitamin C.

Lisa: The hydrogen peroxide.Okay, so, hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C...

Dr Levy: And if people want protocols or articles, you could give them my email. I don't I don't try to hide from people who I get all upset and agitated about something. And I mean, I can't do consultations. But if people want information, a little guidance, you can give them my email address.

Lisa: Wow. Are you sure?

Dr Levy: Yeah. No problem. It's been available for many years now.

Lisa: Okay. That's, that's amazing. What is the email address that people can get you on the inductance?

Dr Levy: It's my initials, T-E, Thomas Edward. Last name, Levy, L-E-V-Y-M-D. [email protected].

Lisa: Wow, that's very, very, very generous of you. Is ozone, because I have been studying ozone as well. I've got a home ozone machine here. Is it—that's related to hydrogen peroxide too?

Dr Levy: Yes, it's interesting. Hydrogen peroxide, ozone, ultraviolet light, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Yep, they're all basically doing the same thing, just but by different routes and different points of access. Well, I gotta say it for the peroxide too. But ozone is probably, if you had to pick one, the single most potent anti pathogen agent, there is. You put ozone in the presence of a pathogen, pathogen's gone. Okay. But most of these therapies that I'm telling you about have an equal impact if you apply them correctly.

And of course, the only reason that ozone shouldn't be at the number one on top of the list is, access, ozone machine, position, control. What I said with hydrogen peroxide, unless you don't have current, you can use batteries, you can do in the Serengeti in Africa. So you can have access everywhere on the planet to—and the other thing too, is even if you don't have a nebulizer, and you're really want to take it down to bare bones, you can take a little spray and spray the back of your throat several times early on, and that will probably do the trick as well, just not as effectively if you've already let it get down into your lungs, whatever the infection is.

But this is, you're using nature's natural antibiotic. Peroxide is produced in every cell of the body in the extracellular space. And it breaks down into water and oxygen what horrible metabolic byproduct.

Lisa: So there's all this whole family of oxidative medicines. I mean, I've studied hyperbaric, I've been in a hyperbaric clinic, I've got ozone here, I'm gonna get the peroxide, I'll definitely do intravenous vitamin C, and all sorts of vitamin C. These are all in the oxidative family and they all have the ability to get more oxygen delivered to the cells and more nutrients, in the case of vitamin C, to the cells. So they all have a very similar basis or mechanism of action, don't they?

Dr Levy: Yes

Lisa: And this is why they work on such a broad spectrum, from corona to cancer in the powerful agents, because I think the pharmaceutical, they don't like broad spectrum things either. Because if you've got something that can fix that, but that and that as well, then 'Oh, I can't possibly be right. And we can't sell the drug for this, for this, for this if we've got that'. And then for this oxidative medicine family it's just being ignored across the board. So ozone is also facing the same issues. Hyperbaric is facing the same issues. As is vitamin C. I haven't studied UV radiation, but that's next on my radar as well. So it's the same problem right across.

And I have seen with my latest book, telling the story with my mom, bringing her back, that hyperbaric oxygen therapy was a massive part of her brain's recovery. We could get oxygen to the cells. I got into vitamin C later in the piece, and she has an intravenous vitamin C, every week. And we do six grams a day for her orally, as well. And my mom is now 79, and she was at 74 and a half. Or she's turning 79. And we were told she would never do anything, again, never have any quality of life, put her in an institution and she'll be gone within a few months very likely. And I just absolutely refuse to believe this. And not—even though I'm not a doctor, I was able to find all these great things by accessing great minds like yourself, reading the books, doing the hard yards, doing the thousands of hours of retraining the brain, and doing the research, doing the hard yards. And now I've got my mum back.

And so that really makes me want to fight for people too, because I get frustrated. I've lost a friend this week to cancer. I've lost parents of friends a few weeks ago. People, unfortunately, when I go to tell them something and send them off in the right area of research very often go, 'No, my doctor says, 'That's rubbish. And therefore I'm not listening to you''.

Dr Levy: But I just said let me put a little punctuation mark and an exclamation point of what I just said. But if everybody on the planet had access to hydrogen peroxide nebulization and started doing it, there wouldn't be a single case of coronavirus on the planet in a week.

Lisa: Wow, wow. That's a really big call. So we should be getting this in our arsenal at home right now, all around the world, because this is something that's achievable, easy, cheap, and something that we can do proactively. Are there any dangers with people doing peroxide, can we overdose? Can we do anything?

Dr Levy: Only if you start going to very high concentrations, anything that's pro-oxidant. And obviously hydrogen peroxide is pro-oxidant. Because it's killing the pathogens. You're not killing the pathogens with an antioxidant effect. If you continue on high dose peroxide, yeah, you can start causing oxidative damage, just like with anything else. But at 3% or below, the only thing you might notice if you're doing too much is you might start getting a little irritation in the nose, a little soreness in the throat where you've really gone too far. But only because you've killed all the pathogens. And now you're starting to irritate the normal tissue.

Lisa: Right? So with ozone it's different. So like with ozone, you can't breathe ozone.

Dr Levy: You can take it just about anywhere else but the lungs don't like the ozone at all. And the interesting thing too is I told you, too, about peroxide breaking down to water and oxygen, if you use an oximeter. And you read it about 95 and then you start to nebulize after 30 seconds to a minute, you're going to start seeing that oxygenation level go up 96, 97, 98, 99, sometimes 100.

Lisa: Wow, that is absolutely—I've got oximeter coming up because breathing techniques are another thing that can actually change your whole chemistry in your body with carbon dioxide and so on. This is also a very interesting and powerful mechanism I don't know if you're aware of the work of Patrick McKeown, the great book The Oxygen Advantage, and again it's helping the body use its own mechanisms, breathing in this case, to optimize the delivery of oxygen by raising our tolerance to carbon dioxide levels, which has been a very fascinating read that I'll be covering off in another episode.

Dr Levy you've—just before I let you go because I know we've recorded on for a few while [1:05:36] and covered a lot of ground. I heard you talk in one of your lectures and I haven't read this book yet The Magnesium Reversing Disease. Briefly touch, was in the Death By Calcium book as well. This was news to me, that calcium—if we start there—calcium, we need in the body is an essential nutrient, but if it's in the wrong places, we can be running into trouble and this is causing...

Dr Levy: It's a toxic nutrient. Iron, copper, and calcium are your three toxic nutrients. You absolutely need them in low levels. And above those levels, they're all absolutely toxic. Okay, so every disease cell, I don't care what the disease is—whether it's an infection, toxin, lupus, scleroderma—every disease cell has increased intracellular oxidative stress, which is always caused by calcium.

Increase the calcium, you increase the stress and then magnesium is the yin and yang. You increase your magnesium, you decrease your calcium, They're physiological antagonists. That's why magnesium is, hey this may shock some, people your most important single supplement. Because when you're magnesium deficient, nothing can substitute for magnesium and most people are deficient. But let's say you're deficient in vitamin C, you can partially compensate by taking other antioxidants.

So when people like to just play well, 'What's your most important oxidant, supplement'? Yeah, magnesium. Of course, I'm going to take vitamin C and vitamin D and vitamin K, too, as well, and iodine. But magnesium is the only one that cannot be substituted—for well, vitamin D can be substituted for either—but a magnesium deficiency causes many diseases and makes all diseases worse.

Lisa: Is there a good type of magnesium? Because there's like carbonate, threonate…

Dr Levy: You know the really good ones, you have the anion and you have the cation. Okay, you've got the magnesium, the cation, and the anion can be of no consequence or major consequence of clinical impact on your body as well. Magnesium Chloride, interestingly, is extremely important in inhibiting and eradicating infections, especially viral. So I'm going to talk about coronavirus. I say your magnesium supplementation should be in the magnesium chloride form. You know when you're dealing with a brain problem, well then your magnesium three and eight, that gets across the blood brain barrier well. But all of the glycinate and the carbonate, they all have their own unique features. And it's just a question of what else you want to take along with it.

Lisa: So you take a mixture of different types of magnesium perhaps to cover all your bases ideally. Yeah...

Dr Levy: If they're not covered within the supplements. Yes.

Lisa: Okay, so 600 to 1000 milligrams, I've heard you say is a good, is it correct?

Dr Levy: Yeah, that's about right. The thing is the magnesium is like the vitamin C orally. You take too much, too quick, you get the asthmatic diarrhea and the loose bowels. So you're probably never going to take enough magnesium if you take a one single dose a day rather than spreading it out. Because if you spread it out, you can get a lot more in without causing the loose bowel

Lisa: That's why you get the diarrhea. So go to that point but just before diarrhea and then have this intermittently throughout the day. You mentioned iron as being a new—essential nutrient but a toxic and higher doses. I'm a little bit concerned because I have suffered with anemia my entire athletic career so I've been an extreme endurance athlete. and I've taken a lot of Iron. Have I done myself damage?

Dr Levy: No, you do a lot of aerobic and you do a lot of sweating. And the one study they show way back then was, roughly 50% of young, athletic men and women in different schools in different sports, were able to push them themselves into an iron deficiency anemia by the end of their athletic season. Which it just reflects how much iron you can lose in your sweat. So without looking at your ferritin levels, I would say statistically speaking, unless you just took a ton of iron, you're probably still in a nice low range of iron because of the fact that sweating is part of your lifestyle.

But you should never supplement iron unless you have, got an anemia. But an iron deficiency anemia. Which is not just any old anemia, it has to be an anemia, secondary to iron deficiency, which has a characteristic morphology, what's called hypochromic and microcytic. Tiny, tiny, blood—tiny blood cells with small amounts of hemoglobin inside, that's an iron deficiency anemia. And then you only take enough iron to get your blood level back to normal because you don't want your ferritin going above say 35, 25, 30 or so.

Lisa: Wow. Okay, so mine in my mind is always, you know, hovered around the 10 to 12. And it's always been good.

Dr Levy: But, the 10 to 12 probably indicates that your anemia was iron deficient. So, just without knowing about detail, it sounds like you're minimal and taking the iron was appropriate for your particular condition.

Lisa: Yeah, because I was constantly as an athlete, of course, my ability to carry oxygen, with my hemoglobin being low. And my, iron deficiency, it was always a problem for a competitive athlete, because you just couldn't have the lungs or the ability to carry enough oxygen. Okay, and iodine, is there a danger? Because I've heard Dr Brownstein talk about the essential nature of iodine. If someone has Hashimoto's, is that a caveat for having iodine though? Because I gave my mother iodine, and she has Hashimoto's.

Dr Levy: I can't get a yay or nay on that. I'm not really an expert on that particular thing. So, my inclination is, it's still fine to take the iodine, but I don't have a sophisticated level of knowledge on that. So I don't want to give you an absolute—it's important though, with thyroiditis, inflammation, autoimmune, all autoimmune comes from oral infections.

Lisa: Oh, okay.

Dr Levy: So the teeth, the gums, the sinuses and the tonsils. In one way or another, with your thyroid gland draining all the garbage in your mouth. It's like a toxin screen for everything that's in your mouth.

Lisa: Okay, so get your mouth cleaned up, get your hydrogen peroxide, get your teeth looked at, all that sort of stuff. When we're going to our dentist, who isn't Hal Huggins? What are we asking them to look for apart from amalgam fillings being removed? That's an obvious one. But so I've got root canals. Have I got an issue there? You know, what are we looking for? Is it something that they've put into it? I haven't read Dr Huggins book.

Dr Levy: Well, first of all, 100% of root canals are infected. They're all infected, okay? Because they take out the nerve and the blood supply. So there's no way the body can keep the tooth sterile up there, that's just not a possibility. And this has been documented with toxicological studies and over a 5,000 consecutive extracted root canals that Dr Haley—Dr Boyd Haley—and Dr Huggins did.

Now if your thyroid status is perfect, if your supplementation is perfect, if your CRP is perfect, well below one, like below point five. And interval change shows that the level of infection in your root canal is not changing, they can be of inconsequential impact on your health, but that's a really small percentage. And we're talking about a perfect reverse T3 T3 ratio. Because when that gets out of balance, infections metastasize, just like cancer metastasized. The title of my book Hidden Epidemic, the subtitle is, Silent Oral Infections Cause Most Heart Attacks and Breast Cancers.

Lisa: Okay, yeah.

Dr Levy: So you send me an email, I'll send you the e-book on there. Because what you need is a 3D Cone Beam examination of the mouth. Because many times even other teeth can be affected but do not hurt.

Lisa: That's got me really concerned because I got a really, you know, got a whole lot of implants too.

Dr Levy: That's where the 3D would be important too, because it could tell you whether the implants are stable or infected.

Lisa: Okay. Wow. So people, Hidden Epidemic get that book as well. You've got a lot of readings after this episode. Dr Thomas Leavy, you've been absolutely amazing. I really just thank you and honor you for your work, the passion you bring, the compassion that you bring, it's phenomenal. And I just wish there were more people like you on the planet. So thank you, so, so much for everything.

Dr Levy: You've done a lot of passion in this too. So...

Lisa: I do.

Dr Levy: We're doing it together.

Lisa: Yeah,I'll put my two cents and make a difference in this world. And hopefully we can make it a better place for people.

So if people want to reach out to Dr Levy, in his website and his email, we'll put in the show notes website is peakenergy.com. Go and get those books Curing the Incurable, The Magnesium Reversing Disease, Death by Calcium, Primal Panacea, The Toxic Tooth. There's so many, there's 11, I can't say them. You probably can't say them. Go and get some of them. Start reading, start learning, start educating yourself, and take responsibility for your health. Any last words Dr Levy?

Dr Levy: Well, we touched upon it earlier, but just that people realize, it is difficult, I know when you're sick, you're frightened. You don't want to be thinking a lot. You just want to put yourself in the hands of somebody and let them take off with it. All I could say is that's a mistake. You got to collect yourself. Deal with your emotions. Talk to some family and good friends. Start your own research track and be the captain of your health care.

Lisa: Love it. And that is everything that I believe in and stand for in a nutshell. Take as much control as your heart can. Even if you're not a doctor, even if you don't have a background, we have access through things like this podcast to get the best information and be proactive in your health. Be preventative, not the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. And if you are in deep trouble, make sure you are vigilant. Make sure you ask questions. And if you get pushed back from the doctors, find another doctor, if you can.

Okay, Dr Levy, thank you so much for your time. It's been absolutely amazing.

Dr Levy: Very good. Thank you for having me, Lisa.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

This week Lisa sits down with Major League Baseball Player/ Ironman Athlete and Business Coach Andy Neary to discover how Andy has taken the habits and rituals he used to compete in professional baseball and Ironman racing to help business professionals EXCEL IN BUSINESS AND LIFE. When you mix discipline with accountability, you create massive action! The work you put in when no one is watching is the key to professional success. Andy's Bio Andy Neary is a former Professional Baseball Player, a two-time Ironman finisher, Business Coach, and Founder of the Complete Game coaching program. Andy's mission is to help business professionals build the mindset, habits, and rituals "off the field" that lead to all-star performance on it. It's about developing a #majorleaguemindset.

As an undersized athlete, Andy's ability to master the daily habits and rituals helped him far exceed expectations on the Pitcher's mound. He attributes all the work he put in when no one was watching, to his successful college career and the opportunity to pitch at baseball's highest level. With discipline and accountability anything is possible.

Completing an Ironman race is one of the most grueling tasks on the planet. Swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and running a marathon (26.2 miles) in one race, requires a clear mind and high-performing body. To "show up" on race day, one must put in consistent daily work on the bike, the road, and in the pool. Andy attributes his success in Ironman competitions to the same daily habits and rituals he applied to his professional baseball career. You can find out more about Andy and his work at www.andyneary.com

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Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds"

Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn.

She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying.

This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy.

Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine.

This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.

We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.

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The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

In this weeks episode Lisa sits down to talk with Joe Cohen serial entrepreneur, biohacker, genetics expert and founder of Self Decode a genetic testing website, Lab Test Analyzer and SelfHacked.com They dive deep into DNA and what it can teach us about ourselves and how to use the latest in scientific information about our genes to improve our daily lives, prevent disease and improve our health. If you are not knowledgeable about your specific genes you are just guessing in everything that affects your health. From your diet to supplements, to exercise to mood and behaviour influences, to gut health to detox abilities to cardiovascular health, even through to medications. This world is not a "one size fits all" and having such an approach can never help us optimise our lives, our performance and health. Learn how you can discover what your genes are doing and how to interpret them using the fantastic program and tools Joe and his team of scientists have put together. You can find out more at https://selfdecode.com/?a_aid=lisatamati and use the code Lisa10 at checkout and if you want help with your results and implementing a personalised approach to your health visit Lisa and her team at www.lisatamati.com or email [email protected] for details on working with them.

We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:

For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com

For Lisa's online run training coaching go to

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.

Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home

For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit:

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds"

Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn.

She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying.

This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy.

Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine.

This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.

We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.

**If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes**

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

Wouldn't it be great if your body came with a user manual? Which foods should you eat, and which ones should you avoid? When, and how often should you be eating? What type of exercise does your body respond best to, and when is it best to exercise? Discover the social interactions that will energize you and uncover your natural gifts and talents. These are just some of the questions you'll uncover the answers to in the Epigenetics Testing Program along with many others. There's a good reason why epigenetics is being hailed as the "future of personalised health", as it unlocks the user manual you'll wish you'd been born with! No more guesswork. The program, developed by an international team of independent doctors, researchers, and technology programmers for over 15 years, uses a powerful epigenetics analysis platform informed by 100% evidenced-based medical research. The platform uses over 500 algorithms and 10,000 data points per user, to analyze body measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home. In this episode Lisa and Neil discuss how they use the program to help people optimise their health, performance and well-being. For more information on the epigenetics health program visit https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/ or to join Lisa and Neil on their next live epigenetics webinar register at https://epigenetics.lisatamati.com/

We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:

For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com

For Lisa's online run training coaching go to

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.

Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home

For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit:

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds"

Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn.

She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying.

This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy.

Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine.

This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.

We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.

**If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes**

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

In this interview Lisa sits down with one of the most successful running coaches in America Jason Fitzgerald of Strength Running. Jason is a USATF certified coach and he and Lisa whose running training philosophies collide get deep into the weeds about what makes up a good running program, how to listen to your body, why mindset is so important and how strength and mobility work is an integral part of running success. Jason has a wealth of knowledge and with a PB in the marathon of 2:39 he also walks the talk. www.strengthrunning.com and check out his blog on common mindset mistakes: https://strengthrunning.com/2020/06/mindset-traps-mental-self-sabotage/ About Jason: Jason Fitzgerald is the host host of the Strength Running Podcast and the founder of Strength Running, an award-winning running blog with hundreds of thousands of monthly readers. A 2:39 marathoner and USATF-certified coach, he's coached thousands of endurance athletes to faster finishing times and fewer injuries with his results-oriented coaching philosophy.

He's the winner of the 2011 Morraine Hills Half Marathon, 2012 Maryland Warrior Dash, and the 2013 Potomac River Run Marathon. During his collegiate career, he was a member of the 2002 National Championship-qualifying cross-country team and a top ten finisher in the steeplechase at the 2006 New England Championships.

Jason is a member of the Greatist Expert Network, a speaker for industry conferences and major brands like Anheuser-Busch, and an instructor at adult fitness retreats and running camps. His work has been featured in the Washington Post, Runner's World, Health Magazine, Lifehacker, The Huffington Post, and other major media.

He lives in Denver, Colorado where you can find him trail running in the nearby Flatirons or at the playground with his wife and three children.

We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:

For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com

For Lisa's online run training coaching go to

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.

Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home

For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit:

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds"

Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn.

She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying.

This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy.

Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine.

This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.

We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.

**If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes**

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

Recently Lisa had her own DNA tested doing a comprehensive Genome report and Hormone report - testing offered by The DNA Company (www.thednacompany.com) and in this episode Dr Mansoor explains Lisa's genomic results and the implications for her health. The depth of the normal report means they only got to touch on a few of the gene results but the full comprehensive genomic report covers areas like:

• Cardiovascular health
• Mood and behaviour genes
• Methylation genes
• Metabolism genes
• Hormones

The insights garnered from these reports can help you avoid the possible major problems that could be coming your way if you aren't aware of them. This information is by no means fatalistic or deterministic but rather to empower the individual to be aware of where certain risk factors lie and how you implement the diet, lifestyle and exercises changes required to avoid problems further down the track. Hormone Report with The DNA Company If you would like to have your hormone test done, understand your genetics in regards to your hormones and would like to then have these interpreted by Lisa, please go to this link to get the test done. Lisa will then contact you once the DNA has been processed to have a consultation. Please note the consultation will take an hour and will cost $190, which is extra to the actual report. The Report can be purchased here: https://www.mydnacompany.com/products/lisa-tamati-and-the-dna-company-female-male-hormone-profile

Please note The DNA Company is based in Canada and this price is in Canadian dollars. It may take up to 6 weeks depending on where you are located in the world for your results to get back to you.

For any questions, please email [email protected].

WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS? Functional genomics is the study of how our genome interacts with the world around us. Because it's not just about where you come from. It's about where you can go. Through a simple sample of your saliva, The Dna company are able to extract the information they need to provide you with a customized health report. To order a report contact [email protected] to arrange testing today.

We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:

For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com

For Lisa's online run training coaching go to

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.

Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home

For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit:

https://www.lisatamati.com/pag...

Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds"

Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatam... for more Information

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn.

She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying.

This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy.

Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine.

This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.

We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.

**If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes**