474 The Magic Formula For Achieving Optimal Gut Health, Restoring The Soil of Our Intestines, Prebiotic, Probiotic Foods, Using Aloe to Starve Cancer Cells, Constipation, Diarrhea, Heartburn & Healthy Digestion with Dr. Michael Haley

LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe

 - coupon code LTH2022

Aloe: The Magic Formula For Achieving Optimal Gut Health

https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe-the-magic-formula-for-achieving-optimal-gut-health

Highlights:

• What foods to eat to be well
• How to relieve constipation
• Gut, the soil of our intestines
• Nourishing the gut flora
• Food Mood Poop Journal
• Changes you can do if you have chronic gut issues

Keeping our gut healthy is very important because it has an impact on our overall health. How we eat can have a positive or negative effect on our body. Dr. Michael Haley is back on the show and we discuss all things gut health. He talks about how we can nourish the gut flora, keeping a Food Mood Poop Journal to track how food affects us, and simple changes we can make to improve our overall gut health.

Intro:

​​Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am thrilled to finally sit down and publish this episode. As you may have seen, there was a bit of a gap between the last episode and this one. Life has been very interesting. Lots of unexpected twists and turns. I’m actually in the middle of moving again, and it’ll be a good move. We’re moving closer to family members that we’re taking care of and so we will come out on the other side happier and just rolling with the punches. 

It reminds me about the lessons I learned when I studied Neuro-linguistic Programming that the person who has the most flexibility of behavior is able to overcome, and it’s those parts of our lives where we’re most rigid that we end up suffering when it’s required of us to become flexible.

Our guest today is Dr. Michael Haley, who’s a fantastic doctor. I’ve had him on the show before, and he’s come back today to talk about specific and actionable steps that you can take starting today to optimize your gut health, no matter where you are in the grand spectrum of gut health. Whether you are suffering and you’re really looking to get a leg up, or whether you have fairly good gut health and you end there’s always room for improvement, everything that he talks about today is fantastic and you will absolutely love it.

I also love and highly recommend trying out his aloe drink. It’s a medicinal type of aloe. He talks about how they produce it versus the store-bought aloe, which is very different. Store-bought aloe—even the pain you can get at a specialty health food store—is highly processed, filtered, most of the medicinal properties are taken out, and also they tend to be the whole aloe plant, which Dr. Haley talks about in today’s interview and how that’s actually not good for us. Whereas his medicinal aloe is the gel itself, it is unadulterated, it’s frozen immediately the same day that they harvest it from the fields, and then they ship it to frozen. You defrost it and drink it and it has immediate effects.

It’s really cool because he’s got more science on how it supports the body, and he talks about that in today’s interview. If you want to give the aloe a try— I love having it in my freezer because if you ever come down with a stomach bug, I had this happen before wherein its tracks, it immediately stopped all the symptoms of having a stomach bug. It really helps with that if you’re overcoming anything gut-wise. We talk more in-depth about that in today’s interview.

I’ll just leave you with a coupon code because I want you to get this listeners’ discount. He gives us a great discount and then he throws in a gift as well, so I want to make sure that you get that. I made it really easy. Go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That takes you straight to the page where he put the special just for our listeners there. It’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. If you’re ever on his website and you’re checking out other stuff, you can use the coupon code [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe]—as in the year 2022—and give it a shot.

Free to join the Facebook group and chat with us about the aloe. Several listeners have shared how it’s helped them as well. If you have any questions, you can always jump into the Learn True Health Facebook group. Again, the links which will always be in the show notes down in the description of today’s episode at learntruehealth.com, you always go there. And then for the aloe, it’s learntruehealth.com/aloe, and the coupon code is [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe].

Thank you so much for being listeners, and thank you so much for sharing this podcast. I am on this journey with you. You know I’ve recovered. If you’ve been a longtime listener, you probably heard that I reversed diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections for which I was on antibiotics for monthly. I reversed polycystic ovarian syndrome. I no longer have that. I reversed lifelong infertility. I was told after a battery of tests that I’d never conceive and I have. I was told basically that I’d always have to be on medication and I was always going to be sick. I said no, I’m going to go and find better medicine because MD, allopathic, drug-based medicine has its place. It has its place, but it’s not the only medicine we should always turn to.

Just like you wouldn’t take your car to a plumber, why are you taking your body to the person who only has a small fraction of the full scope of medicine? That’s what had me set out on my journey to healing, and I reversed all those conditions by being mentored by Naturopathic physicians, and later becoming a holistic health coach and being mentored and taught by these physicians since 2011. This wonderful journey that I’m on to get optimal health, I am on it with you. If you’re sick and suffering, please know, you don’t have to suffer. There are things that you can do to heal your body.

Now, lately, I’ve been really struggling emotionally with what I’ve gone through in the last year—losing our daughter right after birth and also having COVID. It was pretty brutal because it was right after pregnancy and I was still grieving, so it’s like three punches at once, then unexpectedly moving, and now moving again. With everything going on and then we’ve been taking care of a sick family member, and with all of it, I’ve been really finding that physically I’m strong, but mostly emotionally I’ve been really up against it. Turning to the tools that I’ve learned from all our guests has really helped me and keeping an open mind. That I don’t have all the answers. I have so many answers, but I’m always open to learning more.

I’ve actually spoken with one of our past guests who’s a fantastic Ph.D. in psychology. He and I have spoken and he encouraged me to find counseling around post-traumatic stress. I am going to find some great interviews for that because emotional health is as important as physical health. If you only have one but not the other, you really don’t have both because emotional stress affects us physically, and then physical stress affects us emotionally. We have to have both. Listen to these episodes, listen to the podcast, take all these tools from all these different wonderful experts, continue to learn, and continue to have the mentality that no one has all the answers, but that we can continue to grow and apply all these wonderful tools that we learn.

Now, Dr. Michael Haley today shares some fantastic tools that you’ll be able to apply to your life starting today to improve your health. When we improve our physical health, we also start to improve our emotional health as well as our mental health, and it gives us confidence that we get to continue to grow and strengthen.

Continue sharing this podcast with those you care about and continue listening. Join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to see you there. Thank you for being on this journey with me. I really dream, hope, and wish for you to learn true health, to really feel it in your body, and find what true health is for you. Enjoy today’s interview.

[00:08:26] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 474. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. Michael Haley. When he first came on the show episode 401, we discussed the healing benefits of medicinal aloe and how you can drink medicinal aloe gel to have amazing healing properties for gut inflammation, for helping heal the gut, but also throughout the body that women were noticing better hair and skin.

There were people who noticed that they were in less pain, it brings down inflammation, it basically helps put out the fire. If you think about sunburn on your skin and you put aloe on it, it helps bring down that inflammation, helps the body heal faster. But if you drink it, it does that on the inside as well. We had a great discussion on bringing down that gut inflammation and helping heal the gut.

Since that interview, I had an experience with your aloe gel, Dr. Haley, where my whole family had the stomach flu. I don’t want to give any nasty details but it was like coming out of everywhere. We were all very sick. I took your aloe gel, we started drinking it, and at the time my son was about four and all the symptoms immediately stopped. Nausea, the vomiting, everything had stopped. My son loved it. I can drink it but to get a four-year-old to drink it because it tastes like aloe. It’s not like, oh, this is amazing. It tastes like aloe. I added a little bit of stevia just to sweeten it a little bit and added some lime juice over ice and it is so delicious when you do that. My son loved it. He had such a great experience and to immediately stop the symptoms in their tracks of having gastritis in all of us.

[00:10:35] Dr. Michael Haley: That’s a beautiful thing.

[00:10:36] Ashley James: Yeah, it was amazing. To me, it should be something that’s in everyone’s freezer, and this is described in episode 401, how you guys grow it, fillet it right there, take the gel out, and then immediately freeze it and ship it frozen. So it is pure, it’s fresh, it’s unfiltered. Anything you buy in the store, I love how you described it, the process of buying aloe gel drink in the store. Any store you’re going to buy it from it’s going to be highly filtered, and a lot of the medicinal properties are removed in the process, whereas yours aren’t.

But I think it’s something that should be in everyone’s freezer for those times when you have a tummy upset. It’s so important, and I can just think of a lot of other applications like someone’s going through chemotherapy or someone’s recovering from IBS, someone’s recovering from the stomach flu-like we were. It had an immediate effect. It was wonderful.

A few weeks later, my son overheard a conversation about his school friend who was having constipation. I was on the speakerphone with my friend and he yelled, get him to drink aloe, it’s so good for the tummy. It was really cute.

[00:11:54] Dr. Michael Haley: I love it.

[00:11:55] Ashley James: Yeah, he was giving that advice to his friend. I love your aloe, and listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That takes them to a special that you give us where you give your cream as well as the frozen medicinal drink. Use coupon code [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe] for 10% off in addition to the special where you give us the cream for free, so thank you so much for doing that for us.

Today, I’m really excited because we’re going to dive into more about gut health. I love your perspective and I love how you teach gut health. I think even though it’s not necessarily a new topic, I think it’s a new topic for a lot of people. Especially how you approach it and how you teach it, I think it’s going to give people a perspective that really helps them understand and they’re going to be able to take actions today to increase the health of the microbiome and the health of their own gut. Welcome to the show. Welcome back, I should say.

[00:13:04] Dr. Michael Haley: Ashley, thank you so much for having me on your program here. I love what you just said. You have a child that is six years old that’s already changing lives, helping people know what they should do. That is amazing.

[00:13:19] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s really cute. I mean, he hangs out with me so much that he hears me giving advice on health, and then he’s like, yeah, this aloe drink is so good. It’s so good for your tummy.

[00:13:33] Dr. Michael Haley: It’s funny too because people ask me, does it help with constipation? Does it help with diarrhea? Well, it doesn’t really treat either of those but people that are experiencing those tend to move towards the middle, more normal. It helps things to work more like they’re supposed to. But because you mention that, I do have to tell people, be careful. Meaning, we’re talking about the inside of the aloe leaf. There are products out there that contain the outside of the aloe leaf, and people specifically seek that out because they want the laxative effect on the outer leaf. 

You really have to know what products you’re getting and know the difference between whole leaf and inner leaf. Don’t think that, oh, well, it’s coming out all ends, I have diarrhea. I’m going to take the whole leaf and make it better. Oh, you’re not. It’s going to get worse.

[00:14:32] Ashley James: I had that experience. I was really into aloe drinking back when I was in my early 20s, so this is like 20 years ago. Kind of crazy to think that that was so long ago, but I had switched over from eating a really healthy diet to eating the standard American diet. I was in Canada so it was basically just a standard Canadian diet, which at the time was probably just as bad or slightly less bad. I was dating a guy and I was just going to eat what he was eating, and I thought he was eating a good diet because he was a black belt and he was very physically active. So I started eating pizza and Subway sandwiches and just rebelling from my healthy childhood. I got heartburn and I never had heartburn before. So I had no idea how to deal with it, and so I started taking whatever antacids there were.

One day, there was a Naturopathic physician on the TV. I’m pretty sure I was about 19 or 20 actually or just turning 20. She said that stomach acid is coming up into your esophagus not because you have too much acid, it’s because you have too little and your lower esophageal sphincter can’t close because it’s triggered by acid. The acid has to get strong enough for it to want to close. What we need to do is increase the acid. She talked about drinking aloe and she talked about drinking apple cider vinegar.

 I sought out some aloe and I had that experience where I drank a whole aloe plant. I found the whole aloe plant, ground up into a bottle, and that’s when I learned very quickly that you don’t just haphazardly buy whatever aloe is on the market and drink it because the outer shell and filament definitely has the properties of irritating the gut and making you have very bad diarrhea. However, when you get just the gel, which is what you sell, it has a calming effect and it’s wonderful. It’s so wonderful.

[00:16:37] Dr. Michael Haley: For those people hearing this and thinking, oh, well I have constipation, maybe I should try some whole leaf aloe vera. I’m going to caution against that too. Yes, it will loosen things up, but that’s not how you fix constipation. You want to look at your diet and say, do I have enough fiber? Am I drinking enough water? Is there enough fat, which might provide lubrication? Am I eating an alive diet, a probiotic-rich diet, or am I eating chemicals that are killing off my gut flora? Do I need to chew my food better, or am I digesting it properly? Do I need digestive enzymes? We stand back and say, what’s causing this? Let’s not take something to just loosen the bowels, and that’s the experience that you had, unfortunately.

[00:17:25] Ashley James: It was a good lesson to learn. The number one cause or at least the first thing to look for in constipation is dehydration. Then if you go for something like excessive magnesium or drinking a whole aloe, you’re irritating the gut and then you’re going to end up losing more water, so it’s going to be a vicious cycle of further dehydration. The first thing to do is to make sure you’re getting 100 ounces of water a day spread out throughout the day, and like you said, look at your fiber. Make sure you’re eating enough fiber from plants.

Apples are a really good source of fiber because it has soluble and insoluble, and I know that Dr. Natasha—who I’ve had on the show and who has been one of your teachers—loves apples for their very gentle prebiotic properties as well.

[00:18:20] Dr. Michael Haley: I agree. I would say that if you don’t tolerate raw apples, bake them. There are so many good things that we can include in our diet to reverse constipation or diarrhea, to normalize, to make things work like they’re supposed to.

Now, it’s funny because you had a wonderful experience with aloe vera a couple of years back as you described, and sometimes, I do cheat. Meaning, I have a patient that has problems like that and I just give them aloe. I say, here, and they say, wow, we’re doing so much better. 

Now that I have your attention, let’s fix things because quite frankly, if I take the aloe vera away, the problem might come right back. Or if you’re still doing the things that you did that got you there—in your case, it was some kind of stomach virus you have gotten, but for most people that are having these irritable bowel conditions and we put out the fire with aloe vera and they’re doing so much better on day three, well your chronic irritable bowel condition, if I take that aloe vera away from you, your problem is going to come right back because all we did is temporarily speed up the healing, but we haven’t slowed down the damage. We need to slow down the damage. Let’s see what’s causing the damage.

That’s actually the most important part of the equation is what is going in through your mouth causing this and it could be other things. It could be mental stress and everything else that contributes to this, but for the most part and the easiest fix is putting healthy foods and keeping out the poisons. There’s more to it than that, we’re going to talk about it. I love the fact that, oh, okay. As long as I eat a healthy diet, then we don’t change our eating habits, and we’re stuffing it down and swallowing it whole. No, there’s more to it.

[00:20:21] Ashley James: So you got to take that healthy food and then you got to chew it. There’s a difference between cooking food and raw food. My understanding is that if you, for example, cook an apple versus raw apple or cooked broccoli versus raw broccoli, it actually changes the fiber a bit so it feeds a different set of microbiomes.

[00:20:44] Dr. Michael Haley: I would agree with that. I wouldn’t know specifics on it, but yes, it’s going to soften things and almost be like a pre-digested easier, which means probably some microbes would be able to process it easier and others probably want what they feed best on. It does make sense because we have such a variety in our microbiome, such a diverse microbiome with all kinds of different organisms in this wonderful community working together to do what they’re supposed to.

[00:21:16] Ashley James: You have a great way of explaining or painting the picture of gut health and how we can look at the gut in a new light. Can we touch on that?

[00:21:28] Dr. Michael Haley: Before talking about the gut and what’s inside it—the soil of our intestines—let’s consider what’s out in the soil outdoors. Some of the problems that damage the food that we’re consuming, and then we’re going to tie it in with the gut and it’s going to all make perfect sense. For those of us that are growing our own food, we know that if we have dead soil, the only way to really get things to grow in it is to add fertilizers. Well, what killed the soil, to begin with?

Maybe it’s pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides—things that are used to try to control what’s growing around our vegetation but it kills, those things are forms of antibiotics. They’re against life. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides are designed to kill and they’re not very specific. The same things that kill weeds can kill microbiology. In that soil, it’s life that makes that soil nutritious for the things that grow in it.

If you think about it, there are bacteria and fungus in the soil. Those things are probably being eaten by things a little bit bigger than them such as protozoa and other larger microorganisms that are probably being consumed by worms. I used to have chickens, they would eat worms. Birds would eat worms. Frogs will eat smaller things than themselves and bigger things will eat them like alligators might eat the birds and the frogs. 

All of these things up the whole chain are consuming and pooping. Literally, it’s the poop that is the soil. That’s the life. It’s nourishing. It’s pre-digested. It’s taking dead matter, recycling it by giving it life for a period of time, and it gets pooped out and it becomes this nutritious soil. The life that lives in it releases the nutrients so that when the roots of trees, bushes, or whatever you have growing in it, as they’re tapped into this poop into this soil, they absorb the nutrients that that life has released.

Now, if that life was not in the soil, if we had killed it off, the farmers have to use fertilizers for the vegetation to grow big and juicy or whatever they’re trying to create. It’s the same way in our intestines. A tree has these big roots that you see going into the soil. If you were to dig them up, you would see they branch off into secondary roots. They branch off into these tertiary routes with little fine hairs tapping into that rich soil.

Well, let’s start off with the poop. Let’s say they’re filled with poop. We have this tube that has these big folds in it, which are like the primary roots. Coming off of those big villi are these microvilli, which are pointed in the other direction increasing the surface area of our intestines so they can absorb more. That’s like your secondary roots with little filaments perpendicular to them, which are like the tertiary roots. These are the roots of our intestines sinking into the soil of our intestines so they can absorb the nutrients, so that our body can live. Our body is much like a tree or like something growing out in the fields tapping into soil to absorb the nutrients.

Now, who makes the soil nutrient-rich outside? We talked about the microbes. It starts with the bacteria, the fungus, the protozoa, and up the chain to the larger animals that are pooping out all of the smaller things down the chain from them. It’s the same way in our intestines. We have bacteria that have a very purposeful function and even fungus which got a function in our intestines. People think, oh, I have a fungus infection. I got to kill it off. It’s probably there for a reason.

I believe it was Dr. Natasha McBride. I think I read it in one of her books. She was saying that the fungus is there to, I believe, clean up heavy metal toxicity. Oh, no, they may have heavy metal toxicity and they’re multiplying so they can consume it. When they’re done with their job, their numbers will decrease. Well, that’s an interesting concept because we always think, I have an overgrowth of this particular bacteria. I have C. diff, I got to kill it off. Let me take some antibiotics or something like that.

Well, we probably all have fungus, C. diff, and all of these different bacteria that we’re trying to kill off with antibiotics, with medicines, but we’re in different balances. Some of us have a healthy balance and some of us have an out of balance. What’s causing that out of balance? Instead of letting me try to balance it with chemistry that’s going to do more than just damage to that particular fungus or bacteria, let me figure out what’s going wrong here. Am I consuming unhealthy food full of metals? Am I consuming toxic substances that might be throwing things out of balance?

That’s how we have to start thinking about our food. We have to think about that soil inside our intestines. When we eat, we’re making soil. We’re chewing it up so that the smaller things can eat it. Imagine if you just swallow your food whole, what are the bacteria going to do with that? It only has about a day to work with it. Maybe 12 hours, actually, if people’s digestion is really moving quickly and functioning well as it’s passing through. We’ve got to think about not feeding us. We have to feed them because they’re the ones that are digesting the food for us.

It’s a whole different perspective. Imagine sitting down to dinner tonight, you already made sure that you put healthy food on the plate, and you put that first bite in your mouth. If you’re thinking about your babies inside you, if you’re thinking about those microbes as being essential for your health and that you’re feeding them, are you going to just swallow or are you going to chew it and prepare it for them? Because really, you should love them because your life is dependent on them.

We’re probably 80% gut flora, 20% human cells. Actually, we’re probably less than that human cells. If we’re 80% gut flora and we also have flora in our ears, our mouths, and in our organs everywhere, they’re probably taking up some more percentage of the leftover remaining 20. We’re a shell for this microflora to live in, and quite frankly, they’re making a lot of the decisions for us.

[00:29:43] Ashley James: Yes, I was just about to say, I’ve read the research where they’ve seen that your microbiome will produce chemicals that are like neuro receptors received by the neurons and can sway you, sway your decision making to feed them. If you have an overgrowth of candida, for example, they actually hijack the brain and make you crave those foods that feed the candida more, that feed the imbalance more. 

On top of having been stimulated by highly addictive processed foods that are designed to trigger your dopamine, your serotonin, designed to override your critical faculty and hijack your brain, then you’ve got the microbiome. If it’s really out of balance, it’s going to tell you to continue to eat those bad foods because it feeds them. If you’ve fostered a really healthy, strong, robust, good, and balanced microbiome, it will also send out chemicals asking for the kale, asking for the baked apple, and asking for the foods that feed it.

[00:31:08] Dr. Michael Haley: This is so critical and we’re just beginning to understand it. Right now, I’m reading an interesting book by Dr. Jon Lieff. He’s an expert in cellular communications science. The book is called, The Secret Language of Cells. In it, he’s talking about how the immune cells communicate with each other and how they travel throughout the body. Somehow, I believe that our gut flora is communicating with our immune system. We know that the majority of our immune system is in our guts, and it’s directing all of these things, helping our bodies make decisions too on what balance of gut flora we should have and when we should let a certain one proliferate and kill off another one. It kind of keeps everything in check for us if we are giving it what it needs.

We can absolutely give it the wrong things, the chemicals that wipe it out. They can’t do a whole lot when we’re filling them up with antibiotics, and when I say antibiotics, I’m talking about anything that’s against light. Whether it’s chlorine in the water, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides in the food, or preservatives in the food. The preservatives which are there to kill things so that life cannot grow in the food. They’re chemicals, they’re antibiotics in the food put there intentionally to make the food uninhabitable. Well, how is our microbiome going to consume that food and stay healthy?

Any artificial colors, artificial flavors, hydrogenated oils are very antibiotic in the sense. They hydrogenate these things to make the food last longer, a form of preservation. We need to be eating real clean foods that are there to nourish our gut flora, not punish it.

[00:33:06] Ashley James: I agree. Can we dive into what foods you’ve seen have the greatest healing properties? Let’s say we have listeners who know they have gut issues right now. I have a friend I’m thinking about who I’m going to ask to listen to this one and she has had chronic constipation her entire life. Her parents had her on antibiotics. Her parents were giving her some kind of Imodium or something as a child. Her parents just didn’t know. They didn’t know how to help their child have a healthy bowel movement. She would go days and days and days without going to the bathroom, and it’s always been so painful for her.

Well, here she is now an adult and she still is having this problem even though she’s changed her diet. She’s eating really healthy. She’s really focusing on hydration and all the things for her gut health, taking probiotics, eating fermented foods, and it’s still chronic constipation. I’ve been throwing all this information at her and she’s just got this big question like, why do I still have it?

Of course, I think emotional work is important to do as well. Something I’ve talked to her about like Emotion Code is really great for something like that when you’ve tried everything and there’s still something stuck in the body. But for those listeners who know they have gut issues, maybe they have chronic something else like heartburn, if it’s gas, bloating, they feel like maybe they have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth. They are listeners who have had it for a really long time and they need to get something moving. They need some guidance to—like you said, you get your patients on aloe, and then they have a leg up. They’ve gotten some improvement and then you’re like, okay, now we need to make the changes. 

I recommend everyone drink aloe because at least, then they get some movement in the right direction and then they start feeling good. It’s like, okay, now let’s make more changes. What changes should people make who’ve had chronic gut issues and really are motivated to heal but need some direction?

[00:35:31] Dr. Michael Haley: The first thing we have to recognize is that absolutely, everybody is different. As an example, I have an Italian heritage. A lot of people can’t eat gluten. I could. I could snort gluten and be fine. I don’t and I minimize it in my diet because I do know that it’s inflammatory, and if I consume too much of it, I might mess things up. I know that the bread has more gluten in it than it used to. Being a former bread maker, I understand that. We want a lot of gluten. It really makes this stretchy dough. It’s so delicious, but that will ruin people.

As I’m talking about certain things, it’s not a formula for everybody. You have to work within what works well for you. You can take ideas from me and you can try them, but maybe keep a Food Mood Poop Journal. What’s that? Well, a food journal where I eat it and I’m going to document things like my mood, my bowel function, and how I feel. Do things hurt, am I thinking clearly, am I edgy, or do I feel great? Because how you eat affects these things.

As you keep that little journal, you figure out which foods work for you. But if we were addressing constipation specifically, I would say, okay, here are some of the things that we need to think about. When I mention certain foods, it doesn’t mean you need to include these. I make a 2 ½ gallon batch of yogurt every week for me and my family. Dairy might not be right for you. Maybe you want to try it out of nut milk and the whole concept of any yogurt might not work for you. We have to journal to figure these things out.

Number one, chew your food because remember, you’re not feeding you, you’re feeding them. You’re feeding that gut flora and you need to break that food up and pre-digest it for them so that they can have something to work with. As you’re chewing, you’re working in the saliva, and you have these digestive enzyme-type things working into the food that’ll help break it down even further. How many times should you chew it? Jordan Rubin used to say to chew your food 50 times before you swallow. Now, I tried that, and by the time I get to 50, there is nothing left to swallow. But think about how well things would be prepared for them.

Drink a lot of water, especially if you’re eating a lot of fiber. If you’re tolerating fiber well, that is something that needs to be included when you have constipation. You have to make sure you have enough fiber, you have to make sure you have enough water. If you’re consuming fiber without water, you’re actually going to almost make a cement plug in your bowels so it’s going to go the other direction. As you’re eating fiber-rich foods, you’re drinking a lot of water, and they soak up. The fiber soaks up that water and it not only helps cleanse your bowels and it helps provide bulk that moves through well, it stimulates peristalsis, so you start stimulating that very thing that you’re looking for to get things moving through.

When we talk about live food, it’s funny. People say, oh, well, if you cook it, it’s dead and all the enzymes are dead. First of all, I never knew that enzymes have ever actually had real life, but they could be denatured. There’s a good balance between cooked food and raw food, but when I think of live food, I’m thinking about food that is good food for the life that I’m feeding, which is that bacteria inside me. So it is going to be chemical-free. It’s going to be real food. It’s going to be chewed well, and it might even be probiotic, it might even be cultured because remember, the bacteria eat things that are produced by other bacteria.

As soon as you eat that probiotic food, it might die in your stomach acids. But that cultured pre-digested food that happens when I’m making yogurt, it’s pre-digesting the milk, the dairy, turning it into more nutrients that my gut flora can feed off of. It’s pre-digesting it. When I’m making sauerkraut, if I just eat raw cabbage and swallow it whole versus culture it and turn it into sauerkraut which releases all of these nutrients and enzymes, and then I chew it up really good and swallow that, I’m feeding them well.

We’ve got chew your food, fiber, water, probiotics, which is either cultured food or if you’re going to buy a good probiotic, and take them to help nourish that gut flora.

Digestive enzymes. Yes, when we chew, we’re working in our own digestive enzymes. Some people do need a little help or their food doesn’t have enough enzymes in it. There are digestive enzymes in a lot of foods. Aloe vera has a lot of naturally occurring digestive enzymes. 

But for someone that’s having a challenge, they might want to try consuming digestive enzymes in their diet. Things like amylase is a digestive enzyme that helps break down carbohydrates. Lipase will help break down fats and protease. Well, there’s more than just those three. You can get a complex enzyme formula. Usually, it comes in a capsule and they really help get things moving. When people have that, it feels like their food is just sitting there. They ate and it’s just not moving and they can’t sleep at night. A lot of times within 15, 20 minutes of taking a digestive enzyme, that relief that you were looking for is there as it starts breaking down the food.

I’ll never forget the demonstration I had by someone where they made a bowl of oatmeal. In this case, they opened up one of those capsules of green powder, fruit and vegetable powder, that had digestive enzymes in it. That cooked bowl of oatmeal liquefied in the bowl within about 10 minutes from sprinkling the digestive enzymes on it.

[00:42:14] Ashley James: Cool.

[00:42:14] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah, it goes right to work. There are a lot of brands out there, they pretty much work. It’s impressive. They work, they help. Something to try if you’re having that problem. And then, a lot of people don’t eat enough fat. Why do we have this fear of fat? Fat is not only very satisfying and will help us control our appetite to where we’re not eating and craving some of those bad things, but it’s also a form of lubrication in our bowels that can help things move through easier.

When it comes to constipation specifically, I don’t know if I forgot any of this off the top. I hope I didn’t forget anything. Those are the major ones—the chew the food, the fiber, the water, the fat, and the probiotics.

[00:43:13] Ashley James: I just got into this habit about a year ago or maybe closer to two years ago. I eat an avocado for breakfast with sprouts—I sprout myself—and sauerkraut. All organic. I mean, a whole avocado, it’s a lot of fat. It’s also a good amount of fiber. It’s very satiating, and oftentimes, I’m not hungry again until 2:00 PM, and I go what? I’ve calculated it. I don’t think calories are anywhere near the most important thing to look at. I think calories was sold to us by the dieting industry, and it does a great disservice just to focus on calories alone because really, the macronutrients, it’s more important to understand your ratios and understand 500 calories of food really means nothing because it could be chocolate cake, it could be broccoli, it could be an apple, right?

Measuring the calories doesn’t inform you of the nutrition and the healing properties of your food. But just as a point of measurement, it was about 700 calories, my breakfast, when I calculated it, and I wouldn’t eat again until 2:00 or 3:00 PM. I just thought, that’s really interesting that that level of fat, because that’s the most fat I get from my diet is from my avocado or from beans as well, which some beans have a considerable amount of fat and fiber. I found that when I eat foods that have fiber and fat like beans and avocado or a handful of nuts, I’m satiated the most,

Now, I wouldn’t go overboard, eat nuts, beans, or eat avocado all day long, but just make sure it’s in my diet. When I’ve tweaked my diet to not have any foods with fat, I have noticed that I’m definitely more hungry. I definitely have to eat more often throughout the day. I’m just not feeling satiated. That’s right, the fiber and the fat together bring that satiety, and it also really helps, like you said, lubrication within the bowels.

[00:45:46] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. It sounds like we eat alike a lot too. I love my avocados, love my homegrown sprouts. I’ll probably sprinkle a little Herbamare on there and douse it with some olive oil because I like that extra fat, but it’s tremendously, tremendously satisfying. We’ve always got the sprouts growing in our little jar in the sink, you mix them up, and they all have all kinds of different flavors. Some of the bean sprouts have a nice even oniony type flavor.

[00:46:18] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. I have a sprouting mix that I do sometimes that is spicy. I don’t know what it is because there are like five different things, but it is spicy. Maybe it’s the clove and my son’s like, whooo, this is spicy. It has such a delicious flavor. My microbiome craves it because it tells me.

I didn’t used to like kale, for example, and then I started to eat, I started to eat it, and then all of a sudden I started to have the Pavlovian response where I’d be like salivating when I’d think about eating kale. That was definitely my microbiome sending those signals to my brain. We want more of that food, give us more of that, feed us more of that. I can really tell that my body craves the sprouts, which are so chock-full of vitamins. It’s something like 700 times the amount of vitamin C once you take a seed and then sprout it. 

I have a little bit of a different way of sprouting. I soak half a cup of the seeds overnight between 12 and 24 hours, usually closer to 12, and then I put it in a colander in a bowl, and then I put it in a warm dark place which is like my oven is a good example, as long as the oven’s not on. And then I water it twice a day and strain it. It grows in the colander in the bowl, and within five days I’ve got this huge, huge amount of sprouts. I do that two to three times a week. 

I tried the jar method. I don’t know if it’s because of the Pacific Northwest where I live, it just got soggy and died. I think it’s just too moist here to sprout things really well in the jar, but in an open colander, it seemed to do really well. I just think that’s because of the humidity here. It’s really easy to sprout. I was afraid at first when I didn’t know, and then I had some guests on the show and I started learning about it. It’s like, okay, I’m going to give this a try, and then it was ridiculously easy. It’s very hard to screw up. I screwed up a few times, but really, even if you forget to water it, it still grows. It’s going to be okay, it’s going to sprout, and it’s so delicious.

Of course, I’ve had Tim James on the show and he says that about 70% of all his daily food is what he grows in his house. That is so phenomenal, this idea that we could grow really vitamin dense, vitamin-rich foods just on our window sill or in a dark place. It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re sprouting or if you’re doing microgreens, you can grow food that’s fresh. I’m so jealous of you, you could walk outside and pick an avocado. I’d love to get a fresh avocado right from a tree, but I can’t. I can’t grow fresh food in the wintertime here in the Pacific Northwest. I grow my own sprouts and then I’m getting fresh food.

[00:49:20] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing. We love taking our sprouts. We’ll sprout some chickpeas and make some hummus. Maybe mix those into the sprouts and maybe wrap them in collard greens and have one of those all vegetable type burritos where the hummus really holds everything together. Now it’s funny though because one of the things you asked me is, what should somebody eat to get well? As we’re talking so much about fruits, vegetables, and sprouts, we haven’t really talked about animal foods.

When I have people that have gut problems and they’re not eating animal foods, they are the most difficult to get well. Dr. Natasha McBride talks about the fact that our stomachs can really only digest meat, dairy, fish, and eggs. I believe she’s talking about the acidity there because that’s really where we do the digesting. And then, once it goes into our small intestines and starts moving down the path into the large intestine, that’s where the microbiome takes over and does the digesting. They can work on the fruits, vegetables, sprouts, and all those things that we’re eating, but our stomachs really were made to digest animal foods.

Now, why do we need so many more fruits and vegetables now more than ever before? I remember talking to Gabriel Cousens probably seven or eight years ago, and he was talking about adapting with the Earth. We have more toxins now on the earth than ever before. At the time, he had mentioned the fact that Fukushima was still spewing radiation everywhere, and I bet you it still is. He talked about it being measurable even in the grasslands in the central US. Wow, all the way from the other side of the world there and it’s in our grasslands.

Pollution and toxicity are everywhere. One of the functions of phytonutrients is to help cleanse and detoxify the body. Well, shouldn’t I be getting those same nutrients from the animal foods? Yes, we should. But the foods that they’re eating don’t have as many in it as they used to because things are growing differently now. With the toxic planet, we have less nutritious fruits and vegetables, it’s just the way it is. 

An evidence of that, by the way, organic fruits and vegetables are demonstrated to have 40 to 60% more nutrients than inorganic, but we know that even organic is not grown like it was in the Garden of Eden or we’ll say a couple of thousand years ago, before the Industrial Revolution. Things have changed on this planet.

Gabriel Cousens was talking about adapting and consuming more of these things, really as a way of surviving. Not that our bodies were only made for vegetation, I think that would be a poor argument because they’re not, but consuming more of that probably makes sense. Take nutrients like lutein, zeaxanthin, and phytonutrients that we would get from even algae. Well, when the fish eat those, they become part of them, and then we might instead of calling them phytonutrients or plant nutrients, we might call them zoonutrients, but it’s the same nutrient.

We can get these important phytonutrients from eating animal foods, it’s just hard to, especially when all of the animals are fed grains instead of grasses. If they are fed grasses, they’re probably not as nutritious as they used to be. 

When we start thinking about our diet, I agree with what Gabriel Cousens said that we do have to adapt and think, where can I get the most nutrients, and how can I prepare these nutrients for my microbiome as I’m feeding them? How do I save them, make sure they don’t get the chemicals, they’re getting good nutritious food? How do I get the important nutrients from animal foods if I’m not consuming them? How do I get my fat-soluble vitamins? My A, D, and K. Where do I get my B12 from if I’m not consuming animal foods? Probably better off consuming a balance of both.

Animal foods that do have nutrients like collagen and stuff like that that helps heal not only your joints, but your gut, and phytonutrients from not only your animal foods but also from fruits, vegetables, things that grow on the Earth, the sprouts. Lately, I’ve been loving eating algae even, which is that first food.

[00:54:54] Ashley James: Yes. I have about seven episodes on algae and using chlorella and spirulina in healing. It’s so wonderful because the protein is in the most absorbable form in chlorella and spirulina. Within minutes of eating it, you’re absorbing it. You’re getting vitamin K, you’re getting some great vitamins, some trace minerals, but the green nutrients that you’re getting, it’s so condensed. I’m a big fan of algae, especially for heavy metals using chlorella.

Dr. Klinghardt, on the show, who helps the children who present with symptoms as if they were on the spectrum. After going through a heavy metal detox that he guides them through no longer present with symptoms. He gets children coming in who are banging their heads against the wall, rocking themselves, hitting their head because they’re in so much pain that their brain is on fire from the heavy metals. They’re unable to talk. They’re not doing eye contact and they’re nonverbal. It can take years, but after his program, these children are looking you in the eye, speaking with you, calm, happy in their own body, content.

Because he’s been doing this for over 40 years, he says he has children who came to him like that who are now composers, Ph.D.s. He’s so proud of all of his patients, but he uses chlorella with the children that he works with, in addition to many other things. It’s a gentle chelator of heavy metals. 

There’s a caveat. You can’t just eat any chlorella because most of them on the market are cracked with lead balls or cracked with marbles that contain lead. You want the kind that is cracked with a different method. That’s why I like ENERGYbits. There are two companies that I really like and ENERGYbits taste better, I don’t know why. The other company that Dr. Klinghardt uses tastes really fishy to me. I don’t know if it’s just sitting there more, stale, or fishy, but it had like a fish smell to it. And it shouldn’t, but the ENERGYbits doesn’t have that. I really like ENERGYbits. 

I’ve had Catharine Arnston, the founder of ENERGYbits, on the show about seven times. She does give a coupon code, which is LTH, and a lot of listeners have reported that they also love the ENERGYbits, the chlorella and the spirulina.

Now, in terms of animal food, I’ve had so many doctors on the show share about how the plant-based diet is incredibly healing, especially for diabetes and heart disease. That they see amazing results helping people to even reverse blockages in the heart. What I also like to say on the show is we don’t have diet dogma here. We’re not going to just go okay plant-based diet 100% and we’re nothing else because the moment we shut our brains off—even though it has great results and I just see the tremendous benefits these doctors have and I myself have had fantastic results with healing things in my body using the whole food plant-based diet.

However, we can’t buy into diet dogma because then we’re shutting ourselves off from other things that could help us heal. So if we look at food as a tool, when do we pick up the tool of whole food plant-based? When would we pick up the tool of bone broth? Dr. Natasha McBride, who I’ve had on the show, shares how she helps heal the gut in children who are so distressed that their bodies are so broken.

So much so that they also present with autism symptoms, and when she gets them eating the GAPS diet, they heal their gut because of the gut-brain connection. As a result, their brain also heals, the inflammation comes down there, and then they present with much fewer symptoms of a being on the spectrum, or in some cases, they get off the spectrum altogether just from diet. One of the primary things that she uses is bone broth. These are tools and I just want to say that I really value the whole food plant-based diet, and we have to keep an open mind because if there’s a tool that could heal you but if we’re buying into diet dogma, then we’re unable to see that tool. I just want to say that I love the whole food plant-based diet, and if I was dying and bone broth would save me, I would drink it. We can’t just shut off all of the tools. 

However, we should eat an informed diet. We should really listen to our body, eat an informed diet because the standard American diet is just go out and eat lots of meat, eat lots of fried food, get lots of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, get a ton of fried potatoes in you. 

Sixty-seven percent of the consumed calories that adolescents have—there’s a study out of Canada—is from the four food groups that are causing obesity. This is documented that it’s fried potato, gluten flour, high fructose corn syrup, and high fat milk products. Those four categories are the biggest reason why we have obesity and processed food addiction. Children and adolescents are eating 67% of their diet from those four food groups alone.

When we eat uninformed, we just eat whatever we want, and we let the addictive substances control us, the processed food. We’re not eating in a healthy way whatsoever. But when we use food as a tool, so you’re preparing bone broth for the collagen or you’re eating homemade applesauce or homemade plant-based yogurt or dairy yogurt, if that’s what you choose. If you’re being intentional with these tools, then you are working towards healing the gut

I just want to say, no diet dogma, but we’re going to take in the information and look at food as a tool.

[01:02:00] Dr. Michael Haley: I like what you said there and I want people to also look at it from a perspective of sometimes it sounds dogmatic and it’s not, meaning it comes from a certain perspective. I was lucky enough to be taught by Dr. Natasha McBride. I remember when she came to I think it was in Chicago and I spent a few days in class with her, she’s very big on bone broth, whether it be beef stock or chicken stock, but she is focused on healing guts for the sake of well GAPS gut and psychology syndrome and also physiology syndrome. Those are the two P’s—psychology and physiology.

But I did ask her and I remember her answer even though it was seven or eight years ago. I said well, what about if it was someone with cancer? She said, well, these are growth foods, not necessarily the best thing for someone with cancer. They need cleansing, detoxing food, which is going to be your plant-based diet. She even recognized. She might seem dogmatic about including animal foods, but she’s focused on healing the gut. In other words, it’s the right tool for the right job. In the case of cancer, your emphasis is going to be plant-based. She specifically used the word, animal foods are growth foods. I look at a growth food, my favorite example, if I was in the NFL playing line, I’d probably want maximum growth foods. It doesn’t mean it’s the most anti-cancer diet.

A lot of times we hear people that sound so dogmatic, but if we realize where their emphasis is coming from and what their expertise is—weight loss, that’s a whole different emphasis.

[01:04:15] Ashley James: Right. Using food as a tool. If I had heart disease, I would be going to Dr. Esselstyn and following the plant-based diet because he’s got great results. If I had massive gut issues, I would go to Dr. McBride because she has a fantastic track record with the GAPS diet. If I hadn’t been able to heal it with anything else, I’d definitely go to her.

I have a friend who almost died and the GAPS diet saved her life. She loves Dr. McBride so much, just loves her so much. She says, this woman is a miracle worker. I was on death’s door and her diet saved me. This is a dear friend of mine, so I had to look at that and go, okay. It seems like a paradox, right? How could something that reverses heart disease so clearly and reverses type 2 diabetes, this diet—the whole food plant-based diet—be so different from Dr. McBride’s diet, and yet both of them heal and save lives.

Food is a tool, and we have to know what tools we’re putting in our body to feed the six pounds of microbiome in our gut. Six pounds, it’s crazy to think. We really do have like a little koala bear. I like to think of a little chihuahua or something. We are feeding an animal inside our gut. However many trillion cells this is, they poop out nutrients that we absorb, and so we need to feed it. We need to know what to feed it and when defeated to support it.

It’s a really big thing to wrap our brains around. When you say take into account and take note of, journal, can you give us some guidance on how we can listen to our bodies? I feel like sometimes people are a bit overwhelmed. It’s like, well, where do we even start? So where do we start?

[01:06:26] Dr. Michael Haley: It’s funny, I stole the name of the journal from David and Karla [inaudible 01:06:30] just the other day, but the concept I took from Dr. Natasha McBride being the food journal, and imagine just a piece of paper with three columns on it. It’s really easy. The first column is the time and day stamp. Right now, it’s whatever day at such and such a time. The second column is what you ate, and sometimes in some of these entries, column two is going to be blank because the third column is how you feel. Sometimes, you’re making a day and timestamp and you’re going to enter what you ate, other times it’s going to be how you feel. Sometimes it’s going to be both. I’m eating this and I feel great, or I’m eating this and I don’t feel good.

The most important part of this is patterns and let me use a real good example. My father the other day, I went to see him in the hospital. It seemed like he was having a stroke of some kind. My first question was, well, what medicines are you taking? Is it possible you took the same medicines twice? Had he been documenting we would have known. After all kinds of exams for two or three days of this, we realize that actually, one of his medications got changed and in his case, it was too much high blood pressure medicine, which means his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, so he had confusion and dizziness.

What we’re consuming and how do we feel? Well, we noticed a pattern by day two or three, and that was that when he took his medications, a couple of hours after, he would get groggy, confused, and dizzy, and then several hours later, he would start coming back to normal. That was a pattern that we established in a couple of days, and we actually realized one of his doctors made a little mistake and instead of cutting his blood pressure medicine in half, he doubled it. That was the mistake causing the problems, lowering his blood pressure too much.

We were able to track that by making a note of what time he took what and what happened to him symptomatically. That feel section is not only because we called it a Food Mood Poop Journal. It’s what you eat and at what time and it’s the mood, how are you feeling? I’m very clear-minded, I’m focused, or I’m confused. I’m supposed to do something, what was it? Oh, I just feel so scattered today. What have you been eating? The last time you felt scattered, what did you eat? We start developing these patterns.

The last time you were feeling really energetic, clear-minded, you’re sleeping well, and your bowel function is good, what foods were you eating? You start developing a list. This is my naughty list. I don’t want to eat these because they make me feel this way, I get constipation, I get diarrhea, or I get heartburn. These are foods that I feel great. My digestion is good. I’m clear-minded. I’m energetic. I love life. I’m happy. The foods that make you happy and your bowels function great are probably going to be different than the ones that do it for me.

[01:10:18] Ashley James: Another thing to note is that you got to really look at it for 24 to 48 hours. Food sensitivities can affect you and histamine. It might not hit you right away, it may not hit you within three hours because it depends on what immunoglobulin response you’re having. It can also be a build-up over time, right? Maybe you have an IgG response. Let’s say you’re allergic to oats, you had some for breakfast, you had some dinner, and then you had some for breakfast again, and then then the histamine gets to that tipping point where then you’re having the histamine symptoms, which can present differently for different people, but it could be asthma, runny nose, burning eyes, gut issues, skin issues. 

The behavior we have to really look at. So you said mood but also behavior. Are you yell or are you quick to frustration? Are you noticing your behavior? Sometimes it feels like I’m normal, but everyone else is pissing me off. It’s like, well, okay, then you’re really irritable. Your fuse, you have a short fuse. And then also looking at the next day. How did you wake up in the morning? Were you groggy and how is your energy and do you have to reach for the coffee or can you survive without coffee? 

I think it’s really important to remove the things that are suppressing your mood, right? So if things are suppressing you. Alcohol, caffeine, sugar—these are blocking your ability to listen to your body and really hear where it’s at. If you’re drinking coffee and drinking alcohol at night to “calm yourself” and then you’re eating sugar, you’re not really getting an accurate food mood journal because you’re masking the symptoms your body is telling you. I think it’s also important to look at that and consider doing a complete sugar fast, a complete sugar detox, and getting off of caffeine. 

It takes four to eight days to detox from sugar, so you got to get to day nine before you judge it, but you’re going to go through the withdrawals, right? A little bit of headache, achy, cranky, then day nine, it’s going to be like you’re coming out of the woods and you feel like a million bucks compared to how you did. When your body gives you symptoms, when you eat something and your body loves it versus eat something your body doesn’t love it, the signals are going to be so much clearer.

When I do blood sugar coaching with people, we monitor blood sugar along with the food mood journal because seeing that like, okay, what you ate for breakfast not only affects your day, but it can actually affect tomorrow. If you drank wine last night, it’s affecting you for the next 24 hours, and they can see it. It’s subjective versus objective, right? They see, okay, this external device is telling them, okay, this isn’t working for me. That meal wasn’t working for me, and then they can dial in the meals that are working for them.

Dr. William Davis who wrote the book, Wheat Belly, came on the show and he said that he thinks that every 100% of the population should have a glucometer and check in once in a while and check to see two hours after a meal, was that meal good for me? Because we’re not looking for diabetes, but we’re looking for how did your body react to that meal. Is it driven too high blood sugar, too low, or was it able to stabilize and come back to normal within two hours? Just check in with yourself because that would be a real reality check.

I like the food mood journal, and then I also like those sometimes external reality checks. Even putting on a little pulse ox on your finger and checking your pulse. A Naturopath told me, one of the ways to test for food sensitivities is to monitor your pulse after a meal. You got to be calm, take a few deep breaths, but if your pulse is really high, that’s a stimulant. Even though you have no stressors and you’re just chilling out and your pulse is really high afterward, then there’s something that your body is stressed out about from the meal you ate.

There are these little external ways like blood pressure and taking vitals to see how our body is responding to the foods. I love the idea of tracking it though because I don’t even remember what I ate yesterday. I’m trying to think, I don’t remember what I ate yesterday. I definitely don’t remember what I ate the day before.

[01:15:43] Dr. Michael Haley: it was sprouts and avocado.

[01:15:44] Ashley James: I definitely ate sprouts and avocado. I just ate my last avocado, so I’m not going to have it tomorrow unless I go get some groceries. I don’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday. I might not have had lunch that’s probably why I don’t remember, but I don’t remember eight two days ago. But if I was thinking to myself, well, where did this rash come from or why do I feel so crummy? Well, if I didn’t write it down, then how can I track it? Every time I’m crummy, I’m going to go look back and be like, oh, every time I feel crummy it’s after I eat strawberries. Okay, I’m going to have to cut strawberries out to figure out what’s going on.

[01:16:19] Dr. Michael Haley: When you talk about the alcohol, the sugar cravings, and stuff, remember, we’re highly influenced by our gut flora. Something so simple like cultured foods or probiotics can even decrease those cravings for alcohol or sugar. Anyone that is struggling with those things, try it. It’s almost a calorie-free way of testing to see if you can decrease cravings. Wouldn’t that be awesome if you weren’t craving things that are harming you? That would be phenomenal.

I got to be a little transparent. I’m a little embarrassed to tell you this, but I’m going to because I think it’s going to benefit somebody that’s listening, probably a lot of people. The reason I’m embarrassed, and I have to preface and say, this is going back a good 25 years. I wasn’t the healthiest. I was like the one that you mentioned early in the show. I thought that it didn’t matter what I ate. I would just exercise into this beautiful physique of muscle and strength. You can’t do that. You only get away with that for so long. It’s not good for you.

I was drinking Diet Coke. I did not know why I had tinnitus. Eventually, I realized I needed to quit drinking Diet Coke, and it was a long time before tinnitus went away. I certainly did not know they were connected. I probably slipped up a few times, and I wondered, why is my tinnitus back? I remember one time when I drank Diet Coke and the next day I’m thinking, I have tinnitus again. I haven’t had this in so long. What is going on? It stuck with me for a few days and I started thinking about that. I wonder if it’s the Diet Coke?

Well, I realize it’s not only the Diet Coke that does it. It’s also Halloween candy. I don’t know which Halloween candy because it comes in and that’s the one day you cheat for the whole year, right? If you’re going to cheat, you’re all in. You got a big variety, might as well do it all. I haven’t figured out which of that mix that the kids would bring home, but now I haven’t had tinnitus in years because I recognize that these things make my ears ring. It doesn’t matter what the symptom is—pain, confusion, weakness, it could even be something like sciatica. There’s a good chance that your body chemistry, largely under the influence of your diet, is causing it.

[01:19:03] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s a big one. It is addictive. Even though there’s no sugar in diet soda, it still triggers the insulin response, which is so frustrating for those people who think they’re doing something healthy because it says diet. Also, if you leave diet soda—I think it’s aspartame that when you heat it up, it creates formaldehyde. If the diet soda in transit was in a hot place or you left it in the car and it was hot, you’re drinking formaldehyde. I don’t imagine that’s good for you either.

I also watched a documentary about aspartame a long time ago. 2008 or 2009, I watched this documentary about the hidden things about aspartame and how just awful it is. It’s a really interesting history though to look at aspartame, but certain military personnel was not allowed to drink it within a certain amount of time like one or two hours of flying certain military airplanes because it is a neurotoxin that limits reflexes. If you’re going Mach 4 you might screw up because you drank the diet soda. I mean, that’s really scary.

My husband who was a carpenter for 20 years (commercial carpenter), he could open up a blueprint and just understand it. I look at a blueprint, I’m like, what’s going on? But he could understand it and he could look at a room and basically, almost with his eyes, measure the room and know how much material he needed. He was really good at looking at blueprints and doing the math to figure out all the material needed.

Well, I was just getting into wanting to be healthier and I said, okay, I know you’re drinking Monster energy drinks, can you just switch to diet because sugar’s so bad for you? Well, he came home and he said, I couldn’t do math. I couldn’t do it. He goes, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I looked at the blueprint, I tried to do calculations after drinking two Diet Monster drinks and my brain shut off. I could not even do the math to do my job, so he just had to come home. That’s when we started looking into it, and this was a long time ago. We looked into aspartame and saw it is a neurotoxin and it does have links to causing MS. It also is really bad for the gut. I don’t know if you know that. It is the chemicals in diet sodas, particularly the sweeteners, that is very bad for the microbiome as well.

[01:21:48] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah, I haven’t had a soda of any kind in many, many years. I know that for a moment there, I probably completely discredited everything I had set up to that point. It was years ago, okay. It was years ago.

[01:22:05] Ashley James: The living glass houses don’t throw stones. We’ve all been there, right? We want to get healthier. I love sharing my health journey because I’m definitely not perfect by any means. But look how much I’ve come. I’ve healed like five diseases. Look how far I’ve come, and I continue my journey. I also love helping people learn through my sharing of what’s possible.

What is possible is you can heal your body, your body can heal itself. You have an innate God-given ability to heal, and we just have to figure out what your body needs and what your body doesn’t need. Doctors will tell you that you can never get better and they’re not true. They might really believe what they say, they’re not trying to lie, but MDs are trained in a type of medicine. They’re not informed on how to heal the body. They will tell you, you can’t heal.

For example, you’ll have A-fib forever. My husband no longer has A-fib and it’s because of his chiropractor and his Naturopath. It’s not a heart condition if it is the kind of A-fib he had, which was impingement of a thoracic nerve. His Naturopath said, there’s nothing wrong with your heart. Your thoracic spine is impinging and causing you to have acute A-fib attacks every time we lift something heavy up. We went to a cardiologist and he was a candidate for a pacemaker. Thank God we didn’t go down that route, we went the holistic route, and he is healthy as a horse.

I reversed my polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told by an endocrinologist and doctors that you can never reverse polycystic ovarian syndrome. You will have it for the rest of your life. All the women I talked to that have it say, well, I will have it forever. No. Just like type 2 diabetes, I reverse that. You don’t have to have it forever. All the things that you have, you don’t have to have forever. Your body becomes out of balance and you can bring your body back into balance. That’s why I think it’s so important to talk about the way you talk about good health. Think about it like you’re a gardener and you’re trying to feed the worms in your garden so that those worms could feed your plants, right? You’re trying to feed the healthy microbiome so the healthy microbiome feeds your body.

[01:24:39] Dr. Michael Haley: I’m kicking myself right now.

[01:24:41] Ashley James: Why?

[01:24:42] Dr. Michael Haley: You said something and it triggered a memory, and it’s like, ugh.

[01:24:47] Ashley James: Tell me the memory.

[01:24:50] Dr. Michael Haley: It belongs approximately 45 minutes ago in the story. We were talking about constipation and we talked about everything diet-related. You brought up chiropractic and I got to tell you about an early patient and I’m a new chiropractor. Charlie comes in with pain radiating down his leg and pain radiating down his arm. I remember taking an X-ray of his back and just seeing this like crooked lumbar, I think it was like his L2, It was just tilted to one side, didn’t look right, and I’m being a new chiropractor at the time—it was easily 25 years ago. I’m going to fix it in one adjustment, that’s my method.

I put him on his side, I grabbed onto that bone, and when I shoved that thing in place, I’m telling you, it sounded like I just sat on a bag of Doritos. Have you ever seen the movie Caddyshack where Rodney Dangerfield was driving this speedboat? It wasn’t a speedboat. It was a huge yacht, but he’s got it wide open and it may as well be a speedboat. There’s this little black man fishing on a canoe and Rodney’s headed right for him. The man looks, sees the boat coming, then looks back, and then he realizes what’s happening. He looks again at Rodney’s boat coming charging towards him, and his eyes get about as big as doughnuts.

The way that man looked, if you remember that scene, that was Charlie on the chiropractic table when I adjusted him. His eyes just lit up just like that man that was fishing on Caddyshack. I thought, oh, maybe it’s because it made so much noise and he didn’t know what was happening, or I didn’t tell him. He hadn’t been in forever or was it his first visit? I forget, but maybe I just didn’t explain things. He just had this look of fear.

Well, the next day he came back. He said, Dr. Haley, I don’t even know why I came back. I’m thinking, oh, man, I must have hurt him or something. I didn’t explain that what I do might cause a little discomfort as I make a change because I really did set out to fix it in one shot. He said something you did? I said, well, okay, what’s going on? He said, well, I don’t have any more pain going down my leg. Something you did. Okay, what else? Well, I don’t have any more pain going down my arm. I did adjust his neck too, but that’s not what the story is about. So what’s going on?

The first thing he said is, I can have sex again. I said, oh, wait a second. You didn’t say anything about that. I opened up his entrance forms and there was no checkmark where that was a potential problem. I said, why didn’t you check that box? He said, I didn’t know that I could have anything. I said, how long have you been having this problem? He said 10 years.

[01:27:57] Ashley James: So he had erectile dysfunction for 10 years.

[01:28:01] Dr. Michael Haley: And it was simply something caused in his spine. I said, what else? He said, I don’t have constipation anymore. I said, really? How long have you had that problem? He said 10 years. So for 10 years, he had nerves choked in his spine that weren’t causing pain, but they were shutting down the function of things below it because the nerves come out of the spine and go downward. I said, Charlie, what was that look on your face? He said, I had to go to the bathroom. As soon as I adjusted him, it was one of those moments like, oh, this is not good. How much it’s going to take me? And he’s calculating whether or not he can make it home for this explosive emptying of 10 years’ worth of being backed up. Sometimes it’s not your diet.

​​[01:29:04] Ashley James: It’s a really good point to make. This again comes to the idea of how we’ve been raised. We’ve been raised to believe that allopathic MD-based medicine is the only form of medicine. That we wait to get sick and then go to the doctor. 

Holistic medicine looks at the body through a whole different lens, so we have to shift our thinking. It really comes down to how we see the world, how we see our body. We have to shift our thinking. Are we a petri dish waiting to attract germs—the germ theory versus the terrain theory—or is the terrain, the soil so healthy that it doesn’t get affected? How are some people walking around, they’re like, oh, I haven’t had a cold in years, and then there’s another person who just catches everything in sight. There’s something about that.

Even Louis Pasteur on his deathbed said that he was wrong. It’s not the pasteurization, the killing off of. He goes, no, the terrain of the body is the most important thing. Understanding of the healthier your body is in terms of the healthy microbiome, then the body can easily fight off things. But when the body is weakened, the microbiomes weakened, and everything’s weakened from the processed food, chemicals, stress, addictive substances, and all these things that are weakening the body, then you are more likely to attract and grow. You become the petri dish that grows these negative things.

Looking at the body holistically, looking through the lens and going we are the soil, the body as a whole. Nerves come out of the brain, so we have to understand that nerves innervate the organs of what’s going on in the spine. What about inflammation? Everything, the gut affects the brain, right? So if someone’s presenting with brain problems or emotional problems, we can’t just focus on the brain. We have to look to the gut. If someone has constipation, we can’t just focus on food, we have to look to the spine. It’s the body as a whole. We cannot just laser focus in on one part of the body. We have to look at the body as a whole and see how everything affects each other.

That’s why I love having a team of holistic health providers, having a chiropractor that’s really good. I like to say see chiropractors that have at least 15 years of experience. My chiropractor is about to retire. I think he’s been practicing for close to 40 years. I love him to death and I tell him that we have to clone him before he retires because I don’t want to lose him. He’s amazing. See a Naturopath that has at least 15 or more years of experience. You just want to have really good experienced holistic health providers on your team that are all informing you and educating you so that you can make the best decisions for yourself.

My husband no longer has A-fib because of his chiropractor and because his Naturopath pointed it out. Then we went to the chiropractor and the chiropractor fixed it but also gave him exercises to strengthen and to continue to keep it strong. The most important thing to know is that your body can heal itself. We just have to get the right information and your body can heal itself. When you were learning from Dr. McBride, did you have any aha moments that you want to share with us?

[01:32:52] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, yeah, you know what, a couple of them. One I already mentioned, and that was the fact that she talked about plants being very detoxifying, cleansing, and important in an anti-cancer diet. Because for me, that was the moment I think that I realized, oh, that’s why so many nutritionists disagree with each other, or seemingly do. When you turn to the internet for information and you do a search about what things you should eat, well, this person says that and that person says that, so that was one of those moments when I realized, oh, it’s because we have a different focus on what we’re trying to accomplish. That was big for me, and there’s probably a lot of people listening right now that say, you’re right, I get upset because one person says this and another person says don’t.

It’s a tool like you had pointed out, and it’s a certain tool for a certain job. Some jobs require it and some don’t. I think that was probably a big aha moment. I loved her book, and this one was her book. She has a lot of books. This is one of the GAPS books, but this is the physiology syndrome. This is the blue book. I love how she talks about the soil of the intestines, which we talked a little bit about, but she goes into tremendous detail about how that works. It changed my perspective. I’ve been putting nothing but good food in my body for a long time, but now I chew it better and that can make a huge difference.

[01:34:48] Ashley James: Yeah, the chewing is pretty crazy. When I was first taught about chew 25 times, I thought that was crazy. My jaw is going to get sore, and sure enough it did, but put down your fork. I couldn’t believe I was sometimes swallowing without even chewing. When I caught myself I was like, wow, we just inhale food. So to chew, to put down the fork, chew 25 times or more, and to take a minute with each bite allows for you to get the most out of your food. you’ll probably save on groceries because now your body’s absorbing the nutrients and you’re not eating as much.

[01:35:34] Dr. Michael Haley: You’re trying to break it down into portions small enough for bacteria that are so small you can’t even see them with the naked eye. You have to break it down. You have to break it down for them. Imagine if you took your bite and you were thinking about them.

[01:35:56] Ashley James: We’ve got to. I’m going to try that. Maybe print out a little piece of paper with a picture of a microbiome, cute little cells smiling back at you. Get your kids to draw a picture of some cute little cells smiling back at you, mommy, daddy, please feed me. Chew 25 times, I want to eat.

[01:36:20] Dr. Michael Haley: Or maybe a picture of one being crushed by a piece of meat the size of a planet, what am I supposed to do with this?

[01:36:34] Ashley James: I know that everyone’s different, and you’ve given us some great advice, especially for constipation. The constipation advice you gave could be like across the board good for all gut health. Do you have any recipes for gut health or any combination of foods that across the board are really good for everyone?

[01:37:00] Dr. Michael Haley: Do you ever juice?

[01:37:02] Ashley James: Yes.

[01:37:05] Dr. Michael Haley: What do you do with everything that’s leftover?

[01:37:07] Ashley James: Oh, that’s a good question. I put it in the garden, but I always feel bad because I’m like, I should bake with this or something. I think I baked it once. There’s a listener actually who figured out how to make really good dehydrated crackers out of it. What do you do with it?

[01:37:23] Dr. Michael Haley: I make really good crackers.

[01:37:25] Ashley James: Oh, sounds so good.

[01:37:29] Dr. Michael Haley: Oh my goodness, that’s great. Yeah, because it’s a whole food. We think, oh, all the nutrients are in the juice. Well, guess what, the fiber is amazing for your microbiome. It’s food for them and it’s going to provide bulk, help things move, and it’s cleansing. It’s a whole food. You want both parts of the food, and it’s so easy to do. You just take it, you throw it in a bowl. If you want them to stick together really good, you use a lot of things like flaxseed and chia seeds that gel up, and that turns into your dough. You can put whatever herbs, spices, maybe some sea salt, peppers, or even hot peppers if you want it nice and spicy. You mix it up like a gelatinous that you can spread out on a dehydrator tray and you dehydrate it. They are delicious.

They have a lot of strength from those seeds so it has a lot of scoop-ability to it if you want to make some homemade hummus and scoop up some hummus, absolutely delicious. I promise you, eat enough of that in about a day, you’re going to sit on the throne and have the bowel movement, the kind where you want to call your friends and say, this is amazing.

 [01:38:52] Ashley James: I’ve had several episodes where we talk about different aspects, pulling it all together, fiber binds to the toxins your liver has collected. So these toxins are toxins from your cellular toxins, but they’re also toxins from the environment and from food itself like pesticides, things you don’t want in your body anymore. For women, when your body is done with the estrogen it has produced, it breaks it down into a form that it can release out of the body. We want to get rid of that because that estrogen, if reabsorbed, is toxic. So estrogen is a catch-all phrase for a ton of different hormones, but anyway, it becomes a very unhealthy form of estrogen to remain and collect in the body. Estrogen dominance is not great for us whatsoever.

The liver takes all this stuff—takes hormones that it needs to get rid of, it takes the metabolites, it takes toxins from inside our body but also outside that have come into our body, and it puts it in the bile to get bound to fiber. Bile itself is costly for the body to make, and so it wants to reabsorb bile in the colon. All these chemicals have only been around for maybe just 150 years, let’s say. We weren’t exposed to man-made chemicals for thousands and thousands of years. Our body, the way it was designed, you can say design or evolved, whatever your belief system is, either way, it was not meant to be around 80,000 manmade chemicals.

These chemicals bind to your bile. It comes into your bile and then it binds to it. Your colon reabsorbs bile. So these forever chemicals, these obesogens, these endocrine disruptors, they’re then brought back and they’re reabsorbed in the colon, and especially if you have constipation because it sits there and sits there and sits there and your body reabsorbs it back in and you become more and more toxic. The only way to make sure that your liver is being honored, being respected when getting that stuff that your liver filtered out the first time getting it out of the body so it doesn’t accumulate over time and create cancer is to have enough fiber, have enough water, and have enough mobility so that you’re pooping three times a day—well-formed poops, not diarrhea—and that the fiber is binding to and not letting your body reabsorb that bile that has the man-made chemicals attached to it.

The body was designed to reabsorb your bile, but the bile is now attached to the man-made chemicals, so when we do reabsorb it, we’re also reabsorbing all the bad stuff too. Sometimes constipation can be the cause of something much greater like cancer down the road or systemic inflammation and brain fog because one of the reasons is the body is constantly absorbing these toxins.

I love fiber from the perspective of it’s binding to what your body needs to get rid of it. You see a deep mine in the old days when they had the little cars, the mine cars coming out and dumping the coal out. You got to get it out. We’ve got to get it out of the body. If it slows down, then it can get reabsorbed.

When you dehydrate your crackers out of the pulp left from your juicing, do you put them in the dehydrator? Do you put it in the oven? Can you tell us how to make it?

[01:43:09] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. I forget the particular brand of it. For the dehydrator, if you don’t have one and you’re going to get one, make sure you get one with the trays that are well horizontal but the fan is on the back of the unit not on the bottom.

[01:43:27] Ashley James: Yeah, the Excalibur is my favorite for that particular design.

[01:43:32] Dr. Michael Haley: So that it blows the air through all of the trays because if it’s on the bottom blowing up, then you’re going to dry the bottom tray real good and you have to rotate them all the time.

[01:43:44] Ashley James: Oh no, that sounds bad.

[01:43:45] Dr. Michael Haley: It doesn’t work. I spread them on those trays and depending on what dehydrator you get, I think mine does like 12 trays at a time. It’s awesome. We make a lot of crackers because they last a long, long time. But my favorite seeds to put them, and I mentioned the chia and the flaxseed. The flax really gives it a really good stick, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, all of the textures that you like, roll them in there. They’re amazing.

Play with how much pulp you put in there to get the fiber and the texture you want. Go nuts with the spices. What flavor you’re craving, do you wish you had like an Italian herb bread or do you wish you had something more of Mexican flavor? Go for it, man. It’s incredible.

​​[01:44:49] Ashley James: That sounds delicious, I love it. I’ve shared this on the show, but every listener might not listen to every episode. So to reiterate, my husband had lifelong constipation. He would poop maybe twice a week and I did not know this until we went to a Naturopath who has been practicing for a very long time and she has you go through her little checklist. Before she even treats anything, she’s going to make sure you’re drinking enough water, you’re eating enough fiber, you’re sleeping well, you’re exercising like you’re moving your body every day. You’re getting your vitamin D, your basic vitamins, and you’re pooping. We came to the poopy question and he’s like, I don’t know, once or twice a week. She’s like, whoa, okay, we got to work on this.

So she sent us home. She said to make a soup with cabbage in it. There were not many instructions. She’s like, make a cabbage soup. I’m like, okay. I’m very culinary-inclined and so I know that for liver—because I was working on my liver health at the time—so I’m like okay, I’m going to add beats for liver health and I’m going to make it really delicious, add a lot of fiber to this. A big pot on the stove. 

At the time, my husband was not vegan. He has since decided to go vegan, but at the time he wasn’t so I made bone broth, and then in the bone broth I simmered a whole head of cabbage, celery or the heart of celery, either one because I’d go back and forth. I put a sweet potato in. I had put carrots in and beat, and then I’d simmer them for about 45 minutes. There’d be a bay leaf in there, and then I turned off the stove and I’d add a whole handful of cilantro like a really nice big handful of cilantro. I take the immersion blender, I would blend it, and he drank that every day for a whole week. By the end of the week, and this was before our son was born, I was pregnant at the time, so that was seven years ago, his lifelong constipation was gone and it hasn’t come back.

I learned that cabbage has tremendous healing properties for the gut, and of course with that recipe, I have it on my website. You can type gut healing soup into Learn True Health and you’ll find it. But with that, it was so amazing to see something so simple. Your grocery store can be your pharmacy, that’s just absolutely amazing.

We went to the right doctor, if we had gone to an MD and not that MDs are bad, it’s just we have to understand their training. They would have put him on a drug for constipation that wouldn’t actually have fixed the problem. So we have to fix the problem from the root, and now he’s got perfect bowel movements. I’m proud of him.

[01:48:04] Dr. Michael Haley: I love how food can make such a difference. The last video I put on YouTube about a week ago—it’s so funny that we’re talking about this—the title of it is The Perfect Poop. If you search that on YouTube with my name, with Dr. Haley, you’d probably come right to it. But it’s essentially about fiber in food and poop. I actually interviewed someone that makes a food product and it’s a very high fiber food. Their customers came up with the name. They actually called it the Perfect Poo without the P, but it’s the same thing right. It’s amazing what fiber will do. I haven’t tried it with cabbage. I don’t know if it’s fiber in cabbage that’s doing it or if there are other secret nutrients in there, but it’s amazing what food will do.

[01:49:06] Ashley James: This was a few weeks after our daughter died and her name is Vale. I was lying in a tub and I wanted to watch a documentary on my phone. I thought, I want to watch a juicing documentary because it always inspires me. I’ve never seen a juicing documentary where I didn’t cry for some time through the documentary. It’s like my Hallmark. Some people watch the Hallmark Channel to cry. If I cry in a good way, every juicing documentary I’ve ever watched I’ve cried in a good way.

I went on Amazon and it had been a while since I had checked and there was a new free juicing documentary to watch and I burst into tears because the man’s last name is Vale. I was thinking of my daughter and I had just lost her. His name is Jason Vale and he did a juicing documentary and I watched it, of course, I cried. It’s really good. 

There’s this one man who is on every medication. He went to this retreat in I can’t remember what country but it was a tropical country like South America and it’s really beautiful. It might have been Peru. I’m sorry, I really don’t remember the country, but it was gorgeous. He came with two suitcases. One was for his clothes—he was there for a month—and the other suitcase was his medication. It’s ridiculous. These people that came were so sick and nothing was working. He had such bad (I think it was) Crohn’s disease. It was either colitis or Crohn’s disease, but either way, it was really bad inflammation and ulcers along the intestines. He was on a maximum amount of steroids, maximum out of everything, and he still was in total pain.

They’re drinking juice 24/7, but every day he had one glass of cabbage juice mixed with apple juice to make it taste good because come on, cabbage juice doesn’t sound really great. He’d drink it down and he just started to get better and better and better. At one point, he was just crying because he’s like, I’ve never felt so good. I thought I was going to have to kill myself. I think he was 26. He was going to choose to end his life because his life was nothing but constant suffering and he was on every medication and It still wasn’t working. He was able to walk out of there free of his symptoms of colitis, Crohn’s, or whatever it was. Free of the symptoms of the horrible prison sentence he felt like he had. He was free.

I just love that. Juicing is great, and it’s not something we should do all the time. Dr. Natasha McBride says it’s like we use raw foods, for example, as a cleanse, right? We use it as a point of a reset, as a cleanse, it’s a healing tool, but there could be other people that if they only juiced they’d become worse because that wouldn’t be the tool for them at the time. We have to understand that it is a powerful tool, it’s a tool we should have in our tool belt, and we should know when to use it.

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show and having this conversation. I feel like it’s only been 10 minutes. Time just flies when we’re talking.

[01:52:51] Dr. Michael Haley: I love you, Ashley. You’re amazing.

[01:52:54] Ashley James: I love you too. What you do is wonderful. I just love our first episode together, episode 401, because I was so excited to hear about your company and the aloe because of this. When people are suffering and you are able to—with something very safe and healthy—bring down that medicine. The aloe brings down that inflammation and it speeds up. You had cited studies where it doubles healing time. It cuts the time in half, so you’re healing twice as fast. And then your body can finally get a foothold and then you start to make the changes. It’s not that it’s going to be the root cause cure-all, but it helps to get you there. It helps to get you moving in the right direction, and sometimes that’s what people need. So I love your product.

To wrap up today’s interview, do you have any more studies, any more science, or data that’s come to mind about medicinal aloe and your product particularly, which is clean, it’s pure, it’s just the gel, and it’s fresh. It’s freshly frozen and then shipped to you frozen so that you can keep it in your freezer and use it when you need it. I’ve already shared how to make it taste good, so don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about the taste. It doesn’t taste bad, but even to get kids to drink it, my son is very picky and I could make it taste good for him. Do you have any more studies or information to share about using aloe internally to help heal?

[01:54:34] Dr. Michael Haley: I found this one study that was done with 240 stage four cancer patients. The study was done by a chemotherapy company, I forget which one, but they divided them into two groups. Everybody got chemotherapy. One of the groups got one ounce of aloe vera a day. The other group just got chemotherapy, and they divided the people into four categories based on how they did. The fourth category was the complete result or the most healing from their cancers. There were 119 patients that got the one ounce of aloe vera and there were 121 patients that only got the chemotherapy.

This is what blows me away because we tell our customers to drink so much more than just an ounce. The group that got the one ounce of aloe vera, there were 10 of them that were in the complete result group versus only three in the complete result group from the ones that only had the chemotherapy. That is significant, and then of course, everyone else, if you look at a whole and the other groups as well, closer towards that better, more healing category for the ones that got aloe vera versus just the chemotherapy.

They realize that the sugar molecule—this blows people away when I tell them aloe vera is largely sugar—the slimy mucopolysaccharides, a polysaccharide is a very complex carbohydrate. Polysaccharide really means complex carbohydrates. Well, it’s a bunch of sugar molecules joined together and the sugar molecule is mannose. Mannose when they tested it on lab rats in the ’30s, put them in ketosis, and gave them mannose, somehow, they stayed in ketosis. So it’s not processed like sugars, which explains why diabetics can consume aloe vera and lower their blood sugar levels.

Now, their understanding is that what ends up happening is the cancer cells want to consume the sugar because cancer loves sugar, so it grabs onto the mannose or binds to it, but it can’t consume it and it can’t release it. So it’s almost like having your mouthful—

[01:57:19] Ashley James: It starves it.

[01:57:21] Dr. Michael Haley: Exactly, and that’s what their theory in the research is that the aloe vera somehow starves the cancer cell while the chemotherapy kills it, which personally, I think if you starve something long enough, it’ll die anyway. Not only that, but when the mannose is on that cancer cell, it’s actually like waving a flag for the macrophage to come eat it. It’s also a signal to the macrophage. The things that we’re learning now about all of these intracellular communications, the things that are happening, and how they communicate with each other and signal each other for certain things to happen, it’s really quite fascinating. We’re just beginning to understand it. 

Prior to that, I had known that Acemannan would increase tumor necrosis factor interferon and interleukin, because Acemannan , by the way, is a nutrient found in aloe vera. Those chemicals in the bloodstream would essentially increase intercellular communication and help the immune cells identify the cells that were cancerous. We’re starting to understand more and more how that happens now. So, it’s neat. We’re going to see more science about this down the road. No doubt we’re learning more every day.

[01:58:53] Ashley James: I got chills hearing about how it helps the body basically identify kidney cancer cells, and also, it starves the cancer like stuffing it’s mouthful with something it can’t eat. That gets me so excited. Oh my gosh. I mean, it’s such a good tool to have in your tool belt. Buy the aloe, have it in your freezer. I bought your aloe several times, big jugs, right? I keep giving it away to my friends. A friend of mine whose son had his constipation, my other friend had constipation, or another friend had stomach flu or something. I’m just like, oh, I’ve got something for you, and I just hand her a jug of frozen aloe. Oh my gosh, this stuff is amazing.

Learntruehealth.com/aloe gets you the free gift basically that you’re giving us. I love the cream, it’s not greasy. I have it on my desk, I use it as a hand cream. I really enjoy it. It makes my hands very soft and supple, but it doesn’t leave any grease because I don’t want grease on my hands when I’m typing or doing other stuff on my desk, so I really like your aloe cream. And then also the coupon code, which is [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe]. Thank you for giving us a discount and thank you for the gift of your cream in addition to when we buy the frozen jugs it gets shipped to us.

I thoroughly enjoy it and I have several friends that are now hooked on your aloe as a result. Thank you for coming on the show. I’d love to have you back anytime you have new information to share. Is there anything you want to say to wrap up today’s interview?

[02:00:43] Dr. Michael Haley: Thank you for what you do. One podcast at a time, you’re changing the world helping people learn things about their health. They’re learning true health, so just thank you for all that you do.

[02:00:53] Ashley James: And thank you. I’m a little jealous because where you live it’s so gorgeous and sunny. You’re in Costa Rica, right?

[02:01:00] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, right now I’m in South Florida.

[02:01:05] Ashley James: Okay, you’re in South Florida.

[02:01:08] Dr. Michael Haley: I might go outside. We’re in the wintertime, I might go make some vitamin D naturally without having to eat anything.

[02:01:14] Ashley James: I’d love to live in Florida. My husband doesn’t want to live there so I probably won’t end up, but we’ll definitely go visit. But if I had it my way, I’d definitely be living in Florida. Love that weather. I dream of the day that I could walk outside my door and pick a fresh avocado. I think that would be a lot of fun. Enjoy the beautiful day. Wherever everyone is, enjoy your day, but particularly we know that Dr. Michael Haley will be enjoying his day because he lives in Florida.

I hope you enjoy today’s interview with Dr. Michael Haley. You can also check out my other episode with him, episode 401. Be sure to go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and use coupon code [https://www.learntruehealth.com/aloe] to check out his medicinal aloe drink, which is amazing.

Please come to the local Facebook group and share your experiences with the aloe. We’ve had listeners talk about how they’ve had benefits to seeing improvements in their hair, skin, and nail health, as well as their digestive health. Just for vanity sake, I think it’s a fun thing to try out. I just noticed that it brings calmness to my body, and I think that’s because it has such a profound anti-inflammatory effect on all tissues in the body. So I do notice that I’m emotionally and mentally calmer, more focused brain fog, although I don’t have a ton of that, but brain fog clears up. Just more mental acuity comes to me. Which just reminds me, I should go have some aloe right now. 

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and be sure to check out the next two episodes I’m going to be publishing. I’ve already done these interviews and I’m really looking forward to hearing them because they’re really, really good, so just stay tuned. The next two are pretty awesome. And remember, learntruehealth.com/aloe to check out Dr. Michael Haley’s Medicinal Aloe gel drink.

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