Learn True Health with Ashley James

Link to the Solo Sunlighten Sauna 25% off Sale: Use coupon code: TrueHealthSolo https://primer.plantstrong.comhttps://www.sunlighten.com/cartflows_step/solo-system/?utm_source=AshleyJames_LearnTrueHealth&utm_medium=Partner&leadsource=AshleyJames_LearnTrueHealth&promocode=TrueHealthSolo&utm_campaign=Solo-Prime-Week   Plant Strong Primer Kitchen Event: https://primer.plantstrong.com   Rip Esselstyn of Engine 2: Prevent Obesity, Cancer, and Heart Disease with A Delicious Plant Strong Diet https://www.learntruehealth.com/rip-esselstyn-of-engine-2-prevent-obesity-cancer-and-heart-disease-with-a-delicious-plant-strong-diet   Highlights: What inspired Rip to go whole food, plant-based How Rip started working with the firefighters Impact of eating whole food, plant-based How to stay on whole food plant-based while traveling   In this episode, Rip Esselstyn tells his origin story on how he became a healthy eating advocate. He shares how he started helping firefighters and other people to eat whole food, plant-based. He talks about his different ventures, including his Plant-Strong Podcast, his Engine 2—soon to be Plant-Strong—food products, and the events they’re hosting to help people get started and stay on the whole food, plant-based diet. Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I know you’re going to love today’s episode. Before we get to it, I got to tell you about a super awesome deal that’s going on right now. As you may know, if you have listened to several episodes, you might have heard me rave about the Sunlighten Sauna company. It took a long while to research which sauna I wanted to buy. I talked to several Naturopaths that have worked with different companies, interviewed each company, looked at the specs, looked at the wood, the materials they used to build it. Is there any toxic material? Where does it come from? Where is it manufactured? Their track record. The online feedback that I could see that customers had shared, and I finally decided to purchase a Sunlighten Sauna. This is about three years ago, and I decided to use it because I have been working on detoxing heavy metals, and also supporting my immune system, supporting overall health. I kept learning more and more about the power of using an infrared sauna, especially if it’s a non-toxic, low EMF infrared sauna to support the body’s ability to heal itself. I have been so impressed with Sunlighten. Well, their customer service is great, but their products are fantastic. I’ve been very, very happy with the results that I’ve gotten—the detoxification results. It’s a very gentle detox when we sweat out toxins. They have a special going on right now with their Solo System. Now, what I like about the Solo System, it’s ultra-low EMF, it’s made of non-toxic material, and you can store it in your closet. It basically becomes the size of a massage table. You can put it in your closet when you’re not using it or under the bed. That’s fantastic for people who don’t have 6×6 space in their house, their condo, or their apartment to dedicate to housing a giant wooden sauna. This isn’t a wooden sauna. This is a Solo System. They’re having a huge sale right now from now until the 18th, so only the next few days. They’re giving 25% off, and then in addition to that, they’re giving our listeners an additional discount plus free shipping. The link is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast, so just go to the notes. If you’re using iTunes or wherever you’re listening, go to the notes and you’ll see the link. You can also join the Learn True Health Facebook group because the information is posted there. You want to use the link. The link gives you the 25% off, and then in addition to that, you use this coupon code: TRUEHEALTHSOLO, and that also gives you free shipping and an extra discount on top of it. I’ve had several doctors on the show of holistic medicine and functional medicine swear by the system, including Dr. Mark Hyman, who lives in a condo. And he says it would be impossible to have a big sauna in his condo, and he loves traveling with the Solo System. I also had Ryan and Teddy Sternagel on the show, and they talked about how they helped their son who had two rounds of cancer. He had cancer and then it came back. A very young baby. At about a year old, he was diagnosed with cancer. And now, thank God, he is cancer-free. I think he’s about seven years old now, and they used the Solo System. They traveled with it because he had several surgeries at different hospitals throughout the United States. I think he spent months in a hospital at one point, and they would use this system in the hospital with their young son when he was three, four, or five, helping him to get through the cancer treatments. This is something obviously you’d want to talk to your holistic pediatrician about. But you can use this system with children—responsibly, with adults. It’s a gentle system. It allows you to detox through sweating. If that’s something that interests you, check it out, go to the link, come join the Facebook group and check out the information there, and use the coupon code: TRUEHEALTHSOLO to get the additional discount. This is a quick sale that they’re doing. It is ending on the 18th. But if you’re interested in getting any kind of sauna, check out Sunlighten. And if you choose to buy Sunlighten, make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James as they give all my listeners a great discount. I made sure of that when I interviewed the founder, Connie Zack, and you can go back and listen to that interview as well. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. If you ever want to reach out to me, please, join the Learn True Health Facebook group. We answer holistic health questions there all the time. There’s a lot of questions. People just want to know what you recommend for this, or I’m looking for a good recipe for that, or how you would handle this situation with cleaning products, or dealing with colds and flu. Not only do I help and answer questions, but there are so many other wonderful community members that are in the holistic space that help as well. You’d really be joining a fantastic community that’s looking to support you in your health success. Just join the Learn True Health Facebook group and definitely check out the Sunlighten Solo System using the coupon code: TRUEHEALTHSOLO, and the link that is provided in the show notes of today’s podcast, or go to the Facebook group. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.   [00:05:39] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 448. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Rip Esselstyn. I am such a fan of your work. In fact, you don’t know this but we met a few years ago. Of course, you’ve met thousands of people when you tour around the country giving lectures and talking about your books and your products, but I actually met you with my husband, me, and our son. It was at Whole Foods. Actually, I think our son was napping so my husband’s staying in the car. But I ran in and I absolutely loved it. You signed my book, which I gave to one of my friends who also became plant-based, and I love your recipes. What I love about your recipes is they’re so hearty and they’re so kind of manly. They’re really easy to make for men to show them how delicious eating plants can be. Actually, since then, my husband went 100% vegan. He woke up one day and he said I’m never eating another animal again, and I was shocked because he only ate meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then he woke up one day and said absolutely never again. About five days into eating just plants, he turns to me and he goes, “If I knew this tastes so good, I would have done this years ago.” So there’s a lot to say about this. For those who haven’t tried it yet—haven’t tried a plant-based day or a plant-based week, get Rip Esselstyn’s books and just go to town. Now, you also have wonderful products that are sold at Whole Foods. I love everything you do, and I can’t wait to hear more from you and have the listeners learn from you today. Welcome to the show.   [00:07:34] Rip Esselstyn: Thank you, Ashley. Actually, I’m surprised. So you ran into the store to get your book signed, but your husband stayed in the car and napped?   [00:07:47] Ashley James: No, no, our son. I was just remembering. Our son was a baby at the time. He’s 5 ½ now. It might have been about five years ago, and it was in Redmond, Washington. I ran in. I had ordered the book on Amazon because I heard you were coming, and I think we were all planning on going in, but then the kid fell asleep in the car. You just don’t wake a baby up. You’re like, okay, he’s taking a nap. I ended up staying for the whole lecture while our son napped in the car, but it was fantastic. I mean, the stories you told and what I learned from you. Of course, I went home and binge-watched every YouTube video I could get my hands on—all the documentaries you’ve been in. I had recently had your father on the show. I love telling everyone I’m within about 5’of—I’ll tell them, do you know that there’s a cardiologist that reverses heart disease with food? I think it’s amazing what you and your family do. Of course, I’m like this gushing fan over here. Let’s get to you and learn more from you. Rip, what happened in your life? Obviously, your dad and his work, but what happened to you personally that made you want to, not only go plant-based for yourself but help the world become healthier?   [00:09:07] Rip Esselstyn: For me, it’s been a journey. It all started with my father. I mean, it started with my father’s research at the Cleveland Clinic. You just said something that was a little bit off so I’ll correct you just to get it right. My father has never been a cardiologist, and he often is mistaken as one because he’s done such groundbreaking work in the field of halting, preventing, and reversing heart disease. But he’s a general surgeon, and his specialty was the thyroid, the parathyroid, and the breast.   [00:09:47] Ashley James: Fascinating.   [00:09:48] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. What I find to be so—and I’ll use your word—fascinating, is the fact that you look at Dr. Dean Ornish, you look at Nathan Pritikin back in the ‘70s, you look at my father. None of these people were, per se, in cardiology. It took somebody from outside the field of cardiology to basically shine a light and say, you know what, this is really a food created disease of our own making. If we can just eliminate all of the building blocks that promote heart disease, you know what, we don’t have to go down that path. My father got there because he wanted to actually try and show in his lifetime that the same thing could be true with breast cancer, and by association prostate cancer, and some of these major cancers. But he knew that he could do it quicker if he tried to do it through heart disease because he’d read some studies where they’d done some research with green monkeys where they were able to actually reverse their heart disease through just the power of a whole food, plant-based diet. And then we dove into the research, looked at the epidemiological studies, and found swaths of people living on the planet that had 1/100 the incidence of heart disease, 150th the rate of breast cancer and prostate cancer. The common denominator of all these cultures was a predominantly whole food, plant-based diet. And then you look at the work that Dan Buettner has done with the Blue Zones, with Loma Linda; with Ikaria, Greece; with Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy where you have the longest living populations on the planet—the most centenarians. The common denominator there of course is a predominantly whole food, plant-based diet. I went to the University of Texas at Austin on a swimming scholarship. I ate on the athletic training table with the football players, the basketball players, the tennis players, and the golfers. Every meal was chicken, fried steak, cheese, pepperoni pizzas, and bacon and eggs. We had a soft-serve ice cream machine where we could go to town, but none of us knew any better.   [00:12:39] Ashley James: It sounds like a 12-year-old’s birthday party, not an athletics college.   [00:12:44] Rip Esselstyn: No, you’re right. One of the premier universities in the nation, especially when it comes to the athletic program, right? God, how far we’ve come since I was going to school over 35 years ago now. While I was there at school was when my father was really putting his shoulder up to the grindstone to show what was possible when you initially took this population, this cohort of 22 people that he got from the Cleveland Clinic that was referred to him because they were so bad off that they were not candidates for another bypass, stent, angioplasty, or anything like that. He took these 22—what somebody referred to as the walking dead. Every other week for five years, they came in and they saw him. He went over their food diary. He also weighed them, did their blood pressure, and did a lipid panel, and checked their total cholesterol—LDL, HDL, triglycerides. He went over their food log, and these guys were compliant. They were not messing it up. Again, it just goes to show the power of when you do this and you implement the program correctly, none of these people had any more events. The men that were in wheelchairs were able to get out of the wheelchairs and start walking. The angina, the chest pain basically went away. These people were dancing again. They were golfing. They were walking the malls. They were playing tennis almost like too good to be true like miracles. So I heard the stories while I was at the University of Texas of my father and working with these walking dead and how they were basically coming back to life in more ways than one. And I was just so inspired by his ability to try and find this truth, to go against the grain, and do something as novel and important as this. Also, something about it just felt right. When I graduated, I was off the training table, and I was able to cook on my own and all that, I immediately started eating this way. That was back in January 1987. For the most part, I haven’t looked back. It’s now been 33 years that I really embrace this. It’s just now about finessing it and accumulating more information. One thing has led to another, and the dots have continued to connect. I find myself now, 33 years later, being in a place that I never ever anticipated being in where I’m a healthy eating advocate. I have written four different books. As you mentioned—I’m going to use this word and we can talk about—I had a food line in Whole Foods for almost eight years. We put on seven-day medical immersion programs. We’ve been doing that for 10 years. Because of COVID now we’ve started doing these virtual events with thousands of people. I’ve started my own podcast following in your steps, Ashley, about a year and a half, two years ago. It’s called the Plant-Strong Podcast. It’s become pretty all-encompassing.   [00:16:49] Ashley James: I love it. Watching documentaries, seeing your story in them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen The Game Changers. My friend, my husband, and I went to see it in the theaters for that one-day special. And on the way home, I was calling people non-stop. Oh my gosh, you have to see this. You have to do this right now. And I called a friend who is caring for her friend who was a recent quadriplegic with out-of-control diabetes because they were in the hospital and she was taking care of them as an advocate. I said you’ve got to check this out.  She immediately got the hospital to get him to go plant-based, zero oil. Overnight, his number started to get better. The water retention went away. He actually started gaining muscle. He was fighting bedsores, and he started healing his bedsores so fast they couldn’t believe it. It was a stage four bedsore. They thought he was going to die from it and his healing went through the roof. They could not believe it, and she had to inspect every meal because they kept trying to sneak in things like dairy, oil, and all that. It was just amazing watching people. Their bodies heal so much faster when you remove the foods that are inhibiting the body and you give the body all the nutrients it needs. It’s mind-blowing. Now, can you tell us a bit about your work with firefighters?   [00:18:25] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this whole thing started because I was a firefighter with the City of Austin. I got on board with the Austin fire department in 1997 after a 10-year career as a professional triathlete where I was swimming, biking, and running for a living fueling myself with the power of a whole food, plant-based diet. It’s funny, for the first five, six years that I was a firefighter in the Austin fire department, I got ridiculed, harassed, and belittled until the cows came home about the way I ate. Then, we had a bet to see who had the lowest cholesterol level and we drove down to the local laboratory the next morning—me and the other guys on the Station 2 C Shift crew—and we found out that one of my brothers had cholesterol at the age of 33 of 344 milligrams per deciliter, which is phenomenally high. We also found out that he had a horrendous family history of men in his family dying from heart disease before the age of 50. So not only did this firefighting brother of mine have a genetic predisposition for a really elevated cholesterol level, but he also ate—and this is his words not mine—like a third-generation redneck. The center of the plate was always some sort of meat, typically or favorably deep-fried. When you have a genetic predisposition and you make deep-fried meat at the center of your plate, that’s not a good combination. And then to boot, the firefighting culture is very masculine. It is the food that these firefighters make is very, very toxic. So everything’s deep-fried. Screw half a stick of butter, let’s do one whole stick of butter. Let’s do Crisco on everything. Let’s use a pound of cheese on top of this casserole. For dessert, we’re going to split a tub, and I mean a tub a gallon of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream. And it just goes on and on—Hamburger Helper, Tuna Helper. The food at the firehouse is abysmal. So the funny thing is you mentioned firefighters. If there’s one culture on this planet that needs us more than anybody else, it’s firefighters. Firefighters, in some ways, they consider themselves superheroes. They are there when we when the sh** hits the fan, and they need saving. They expect a superhero, gold medal decathlete, to come to the rescue. The unfortunate reality is that so many of these firefighters are overweight. They’re pre-diabetic. They’ve had a shot across the bow with cancer.  It’s funny though how many fire departments across the country—at a really slow and steady rate and firefighters—have been reaching out to me for help. Literally, right before I jumped on this interview with you, I got an email from a firefighter who’s telling me he’s battling PTSD. His weight has ballooned back up to almost 300 pounds. The stress of the job, he’s starting to drink again—just all these things—and would I be willing to talk to him once a week? I’ve got fire departments that have reached out to me and asked me to do videos that they can then circulate out throughout their department.  Anyway, the fire service is slowly but surely coming around to this message that the plants really are king when it comes to nutrition. But there’s still a lot of dinosaurs in that firefighting culture, no doubt about it. I’ll give you another example. When I wrote my first book, The Engine 2 Diet, I did a pilot study that was comprised of 62 people for the first round, and we did before and after biometric screenings on everything just like my father did with his patients back in 1984, 1985. I weighed them in, we did blood pressure. I had a relationship with a lab and we did a full biometric screening. I had a medical director. We did a three-minute step test where people did this step test and then we measured their before and after heart rate to see how their heart rate was doing. And then we did all this again four weeks later. But one of the people that took part in this was a guy, a firefighter that I went through the training academy with. His name was Tim, and Tim was probably 220. He was one of the biggest firefighters when we went through the six-month-long academy together in 1997. And then, when I was looking for people that wanted to participate in this pilot study for my book, he happened to call the station for some reason. I said, “Hey, Tim. How are you doing? He said, “I’m doing good. Put on way too much weight.” I said, “Oh, really? Where are you?” He said, “I’m over 300 pounds.” I’m like, “Oh, Tim. Wow. Well, hey. You know what, I’m doing this pilot study. If you’re willing to eat just whole plants for 28 days, I’d love to have you be one of the participants.” He said, “Sure, I’d love to do it. I got nothing to lose.“ Tim lost 33 pounds in 28 days. And surprisingly, his cholesterol was not that high, to begin with. It was 172, and so for a big boy, that’s not very high. But at the end of 28 days, it came down to 88. So he was below 100 on his total cholesterol. His LDL came down below 40, and it was just miraculous what he was able to do. But the reason why I’m telling you this story is that most firefighters, after they graduate from the fire academy, will typically go out into the fire service and they let their guard down. They get pulled into this toxic food environment where they’re eating the same unhealthy food that everybody else is eating. They’re gaining somewhere between three to five pounds, on average, a year. You look at Tim, again, he was doing this in 2008. We went through the academy together in 1997. So almost 11 years later, he had gone from 220 to 303 pounds. He put on over 83 pounds in 11 years. Tim, he was the first to admit. He had become a liability to himself, a liability to his crew. If he was to go down in a building or in a house fire, nobody’s going to be able to pick him up and drag him out because think about it, he’s 303 pounds. You add on to that his bunker gear, his boots, his helmet, his air pack that he’s got on, and now you can add on another almost 65 pounds. Somebody’s got to try and haul out 375 pounds.   [00:27:09] Ashley James: In a fire?   [00:27:11] Rip Esselstyn: In a fire where you can’t see. It’s probably 400, 500 degrees depending upon where you are in the structure. That’s a problem.   [00:27:25] Ashley James: Yeah, he’s putting his own health and life at risk, but he’s also putting his fellow brothers at risk. That’s something to consider. If we know that we’re eating a certain way, we’re gaining weight, or we’re not taking care of ourselves, at what point are we actually putting other people’s lives at risk? We could have a heart attack while driving, we could die and our dependents all of a sudden don’t have us to take care of them. If you’re not willing to make the changes for yourself, you’ve got to think about those you love most to get to start making changes.   [00:28:02] Rip Esselstyn: Completely. And to take it a step farther, I mean, if you want to open up this pandora’s box, look at the predicament that we’re in right now—the United States of America. We’ve got COVID-19 that has struck. I believe, and I may be off here by a percent or two, but 98.5% or 99% of the people that are being hospitalized for COVID-19 and are subsequently dying have some sort of underlying comorbidity. Whether it’s high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, or weakened or suppressed immune system. Unfortunately, if you’re obese, the latest figures that I just saw from the CDC show that 42%. A couple of years ago, we were at 35% obesity. We’re at 42% obesity now. I think that 50% of people over the age of 40 are now on some sort of hypertensive medication because their blood pressure is too high.   [00:29:27] Ashley James: And that comes with a list of side effects including those who are on long term for high blood pressure meds have shorter lifespans. So being put on a med doesn’t solve the problem. It masks the symptoms for now, but it makes things worse in the long run because we’re not addressing the root cause. My head spun so fast watching—so I’ve been a health coach for many years. (I watch the blood pressure, the triglycerides, the cholesterol, and blood sugar, especially, come into healthy ranges so fast when people get off of oil salt, sugar, processed food, and get on whole food, plant-based. I cannot believe how quickly people can heal and come back into normal ranges and go back to their doctor and get taken off of meds. It’s mind-blowing. A friend of mine’s mother, within weeks of going plant-based, said all her arthritis and all arthritis pain was gone. All her pain was gone.   [00:30:32] Rip Esselstyn: Well, it’s such an anti-inflammatory way of eating. Like you just said, the effects happen so quickly. I mean, you look at the seven-day medical immersion programs that we’ve been throwing with Whole Foods’ unhealthiest team members since 2011, and the results that we got were so phenomenal. I was able to track all these different data points literally. It’s now over 2000 people that I had to write a book about, and that’s why my third book is called The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet. And when I say rescue, it’s not me rescuing, it’s you rescuing yourself with the simple power of food. But let’s go back for a second, Ashley because where I was going with this thing with COVID-19 was that somebody asked. I saw this interview with Dr. Fauci where they asked him, “Why don’t we open society back up?” And he said, “We can’t. We have too many sick citizens.” Again, when you look that we have 42% of the population that’s literally considered obese. When you look at all the numbers of people that are diabetic or pre-diabetic, and I think it’s now over 50% and he says that, it’s like wow. COVID-19 is crippling this society because we’re so unhealthy because we have not embraced, of course, there are so many conflicting messages and there’s so much noise out there with paleo, keto, and all this stuff. If we could—as a culture, as a society—embrace something as simple as eating a whole food, plant-based diet, we wouldn’t be in the predicament we’re in now. This thing would probably be able to blow over, herd immunity. Sure, some people that are young and healthy are going to get hit pretty hard, but for the most part, like I said, 99% of people that are affected have some sort of underlying comorbidity and are over the age of 70. If you’re in that subset, you just really need to be super, super careful. But anyway, I’ll throw out one more thing. That is a long time ago Winston Churchill said something very, very profound, and that is, “Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country has.” I mean, again, look at where we are right now, 20 cents out of every dollar goes to healthcare costs. Heart disease, the number one killer of Americans right now. 50% of us will have a brush with cancer in our lifetimes. Like I just mentioned, the fact that almost 50% of this country is considered now either pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic, these are all lifestyle created diseases. I don’t know at what point we’re going to be able to wake up and confront this. The Game Changers did a phenomenal job, and the latest that I’ve heard is that this documentary has been seen by more eyeballs. We’re approaching now close to 100 million views of The Game Changers. It’s the most-watched documentary on the planet.   [00:34:27] Ashley James: I love that.   [00:34:28] Rip Esselstyn: But I still have to wonder, what’s it going to take? What is it going to take? You have this phenomenal documentary, the most-watched documentary in the history of the planet. I mean, it’s moved the needle, but it’s not moving it enough, it’s not. And then you look at everything that’s going on right now with climate change, the environment, and sustainability. It’s like come on people. We all got to be pulling in the same direction, and we got to do it fast.   [00:35:08] Ashley James: I really don’t like the phrase climate change because it so removes—did you watch that George Carlin clip? This is years ago where he said in World War One it was called shell shock, and in shell shock, you can feel the emotional impact. Like oh, he came home with shell shock. Through the years, they kept changing the diagnosis’s name to be so sterile that now we call it PTSD, and there is so much humanity removed from what they actually are experiencing. Climate change feels like something big, out of our control, and not anything that really affects us, but okay, maybe when the weather’s weird. What I like to do is go back to the root, which is pollution. Look at that word. Okay, I don’t want to breathe in pollution. I don’t want to eat pollution. I don’t want it to be in my food. I don’t want it to be in my water. We have to come back to this really strong emotional word. We’re polluting this planet. Our food supply is compromised. Our air is compromised. Our water is compromised with pollution. When we look at the places in the world that help to clean our water and air like these forests, they are being torn down by the hectare every day. Just unspeakable amounts of acres and acres of these rainforests, which we will never get back, in order to feed cattle. That is just one of the many problems. If everyone just ate more plants. If everyone just chose some meals that had plant-based protein and just tried that and then kept going more and more and more towards plants, we could actually start to heal the rainforest. We could start to stop pollution. We have to think about the impact that’s happening right now, which is we’re poisoning our bodies by poisoning the planet, and we are voting with our fork. When you go to the grocery store, go online to buy your groceries, your purchases say where you want your money to go. And if you are buying products that require us to tear down forests in order to feed the cattle because they are growing crops to feed cattle, instead buy just crops and eat them. It’s much more complex than, but it can get as simple as vote with your fork. Do some research on the foods that you buy and vote with your fork where you want the earth to heal, you want your body to heal. That’s my little beef about the word with, and there needs to be a vegan word for beef. That’s my schtick. I have such frustration with the word climate change because it takes the responsibility away from us. Whereas if we can really focus on the fact that—remember in the ‘80s they call it acid rain? It’s like, geez, I don’t want to go outside and get rained on by acid rain. That’s what we’re experiencing now is the pollution in our local environment because of the choices we make, and we can make better choices, which will directly—impact our lifetime—lessening the pollution and reversing it. That’s why it’s so important that your message is for healing our bodies, and it’s for healing the planet because there’s no difference between the two.   [00:38:44] Rip Esselstyn: Bravo, and thank you for bringing that up. I actually like that a lot more. We’re polluting the planet, right?   [00:38:58] Ashley James: Right, and there’s no political like, oh, climate deniers. You can’t deny pollution. It’s right out of your front door. You can test the water, soil, and air. We are polluting this planet. You can’t get political about it. It’s the truth. That way, there’s no denying it, but we can make choices based on all of our consumption. Based on what car we’re going to drive. Based on the clothing we’re going to buy, if it’s used, new, or local, or whether we’re going to buy local groceries or grow our own. Every single choice with our dollar really does go towards making a sustainable and healthier planet for our own health right now. Anyway, that’s my soapbox.   [00:39:45] Rip Esselstyn: No, it’s good.   [00:39:46] Ashley James: Thank you.   [00:39:48] Rip Esselstyn: Let me add to that. You look in the grocery space and what has been growing about 20% year over year? It’s the plant-based meats, it’s the plant-based cheeses, it’s the plant-based milk, it’s the plant-based yogurts. Plant-based is on a tear right now, and people are voting with their dollars, and they’re voting that they want more plants and fewer animals. That’s very, very telling. James Cameron, we were talking about The Game Changers. He was one of the executive producers, but I had the privilege of getting to meet James Cameron several years ago. I also helped get him on board with The Game Changers project. You said you went to the opening night of The Game Changers. Did you see the 20-minute clip afterward?   [00:40:50] Ashley James: Yes.   [00:40:51] Rip Esselstyn: James was basically the star of that bonus footage. And in it, he says the single most important and powerful thing that you can do starting tomorrow is just to start eating plants. As far as starting to heal the planet and not polluting nearly as much. When you look at some of the data that’s out there, and there’s some from the Worldwatch Institute that’s part of the World Bank that has the global greenhouse gas emissions that are caused by livestock. They wrote a paper. I believe it’s called Livestock’s Long Shadow. That 51 of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture between the supply chain and the life cycle of us as a world having this insatiable diet for animal protein. 70 billion animals, it’s incomprehensible. Anyway, I want to add that to the whole conversation we were just having.   [00:42:20] Ashley James: I really like the visuals in the documentary Cowspiracy. I don’t like watching documentaries that lay down the guilt trip or make you feel like you’re hopeless, and there’s a little bit of that in there. But I just like to urge listeners just to watch it because the visuals are really good. For example, for that one hamburger that you eat, how much water actually needed to be used in terms of the crops and also feeding the cow versus if you just had a bean burger. You can see the environmental impact of that, or how much gas was used and how much CO2 emissions. But also how much fecal matter, right?   [00:43:03] Rip Esselstyn: I was just going to say, how much poop is produced by animals. It’s staggering, right?   [00:43:09] Ashley James: Yeah. In our environment, there are parts of the Carolinas, when there are storms, the water and all of the soil is really so unhealthy for the humans that live in those areas. And it’s documented that the humans that live in those areas have incredibly high rates of cancer, but they’re kind of impoverished, they can’t move away, and they just have to suffer because there’s so much fecal matter. All the waste from the big pig farms out there. But just imagine if there are billions of animals that we’re raising for slaughter, how much waste they create that is going to polluting the planet. So, yes, there’s a huge environmental, but we have to keep coming back to environmental equals our health. So a healthy environment equals a healthy body, and we can come back to the science which is just eating plants but a whole food meaning not processed or as little process as possible so that we’re eating the whole plant and getting all the nutrients we require from it. And there’s so much science and you’ve mentioned some of the doctors and scientists that have made the published studies. Listeners can go through your books, through your dad’s information. You can go through learntruehealth.com, search whole food, plant-based. and listen to all the other experts that I’ve had on the show about it. You can collect lots of information and see that science is there and the science is sound and proven. You were in—a while ago—a documentary called the Marshall Plan. It’s on YouTube. I highly recommend listeners watch it. That blew my mind that an entire town took up a challenge to get healthy through the whole food, plant-based diet and that you actually went there. Met with the fire guys there, the firemen there, and that you got all the labs, then you help them with the diet, and then you got the labs afterward. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with the town of Marshall in Texas?   [00:45:22] Rip Esselstyn: Well, yeah. That was almost nine years ago now if I’m not mistaken. What happened is the mayor of the town of Marshall and his wife—two just phenomenal people—got bit by the whole food, plant-based bug. It’s really a testament to what can happen when one person that has a little bit of power, can try and just spread the wealth. When we went there, there were restaurants that were serving these whole food, plant-based options. We put on a whole weekend-long healthy eating symposium for the citizens of Marshall, Texas. Like you mentioned, I spent some time working with some of the firefighters. Again, Ashley, and I apologize, I’ve worked with so many different firefighters and fire departments that I can’t specifically remember.   [00:46:46] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. Nine years ago, I want you to remember all of the numbers.   [00:46:50] Rip Esselstyn: But I can’t specifically remember how it went down.   [00:46:53] Ashley James: But they just have to watch the documentary for that.   [00:46:55] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah, and I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t seen the documentary. To this day the Marshall of Texas, I think they continue to hold a weekend-long event. The restaurants are carrying—and I can’t remember what the term is now that they have. They had some sort of special term for Marshall and the whole food, plant-based options there. For a little while, it was Engine 2 approved, but then they changed it. They’ve done something really phenomenal there in Marshall, Texas. Of all the places in the world, who would have thought Marshall, Texas.   [00:47:40] Ashley James: Right, a town in Texas. Anyway, it’s a great documentary. They show how much everyone loves meat and how incredibly unhealthy everyone was, and then the whole transformation of the town. You’re in it, your dad’s in it, and all the stars of the whole food, plant-based world are in it. My favorite, Chef AJ, who I’ve had on the show is in it. The meals look really delicious, and I think it’s a very authentic documentary. It feels very indie, which I love. I’m going to make sure the link to the Marshall Plan documentary is in the show notes of today’s podcast. Even though it’s nine years old, it’s still incredibly relevant. What I liked is having you walk through it with the firefighters. More time was spent on it even in the Game Changers where you got to walk through with the firefighters and show them what your arteries look like.   [00:48:31] Rip Esselstyn: Really.   [00:48:32] Ashley James: They slowed it down and they interviewed the firefighters. You felt the emotion with them. They don’t want to die, they don’t want to drop dead out of a heart attack. It’s very cool how much their lives changed because of it. But there are so many videos out there that you’re in that are like that, which is just wonderful.  You do a lot of traveling, and this has been a question on my mind. What and how do you eat when you’re traveling? Because you’re in airplanes, you’re at hotels. Sometimes you’re in areas of the world where it’s not like Marshall, Texas where there’s a bunch of whole food, plant-based restaurants. How do you stay true to the whole food, plant-based, no processed, no oil diet?   [00:49:24] Rip Esselstyn: Well, that’s a great question, and it’s been really easy the last six months because I haven’t really traveled at all.   [00:49:33] Ashley James: I fell into that one.   [00:49:35] Rip Esselstyn: But you’re right. Before that, for the last 10 years when I was a healthy eating partner with Whole Food market stores, I was on the road probably somewhere between 80-100 days a year. Basically sharing with people the good news about plants. Let me say, the good news is that typically, whenever I went on the road, I always was going to Whole Foods. Literally, I always had the ability for lunch to pick up something if I did a lunch event. I’d fill up my cart and I’d buy some stuff either something that was prepared for dinner, or I could go and they always have a little rice cooker. I could do rice, I could do beans from the salad bar, and then top it off with all kinds of veggie relish. But, aside from that, I would always go on the airplane with cereal. I always travel everywhere with my commercialized Rip’s Big Bowl cereal. And then at the airport, because you can’t take milk through the detectors with you, I would usually go to a Starbucks and I’d ask them for a plain glass of almond milk. I’d also carry with me typically raisins or bananas, so I make my own bowl because a lot of times, I have to get up early like 4:30 AM, 5:00 AM for some of these early morning flights. I always travel with cereal. I always travel with fruit. Sometimes I’ll travel with a homemade burrito or a sandwich. I can always go out to dinner and make it work. You just got to be a little bit of a pain in the butt and ask for what you want. You can go to Indian, Thai, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. Typically, you always get some sort of rice, lentils, vegetables to that effect. In a pinch, I’ll do Chipotle. Obviously, Chipotle’s got a lot more sodium and a lot more oil than I want, but I’m not so perfect that I don’t sometimes do that. You just figure out a way. I typically get hotels where they’ve got a microwave in it. Sometimes they’ve got a little kitchenette in it. I have the ability to cook a few things. If you really want something bad enough, you’ll figure out a way to make it work. John Mackey who’s become a great and cherished friend, the CEO of Whole Food market stores, travels with a miniature rice cooker and he makes his own steel-cut oatmeal in the morning. He’ll make his own brown rice in the hotel room, and then he’ll add to it the toppings that he wants, the beans, the sliced up vegetables. I have found out that nothing is as important as your health. If it requires you traveling with a rice cooker if it requires you at the restaurant saying, hey, you know what, I want this cooked and I don’t want it cooked in any oil or any butter, then you deserve the right to make that request, no doubt about it.   [00:53:15] Ashley James: There’s a Mexican restaurant near where my parents-in-law live in Seattle or just north of Seattle, and I get them to do veggie fajitas with no oil. They put every vegetable known to man. I love their veggie fajitas. Some places just do bell peppers. This place does everything. There are broccoli, mushrooms, zucchini, and every bell pepper known to man—there’s just everything, and it’s a huge pile of vegetables on a sizzling skillet. They’ll do zero oil for me and then I’ll get their platter with the beans, the corn, tortillas, and the guacamole, and you feel great. You feel full. It’s just wonderful. I love it. And then there’s usually enough to take home.  You just have to ask. You just have to be willing to ask, can you cook that with no oil, or can you steam that? A lot of Thai restaurants will have—in the back of their menu for a few dollars—a side of steamed vegetables and brown rice. You can bring your own sauce. I love the 3-2-1 sauce that Chef AJ teaches, which is three parts balsamic, two parts any kind of mustard, and then one part maple syrup. But that’s too sweet for me so I do half that amount, just put it in a jar, shake it up, and then just bring that wherever you go. You can put it on vegetables. It tastes amazing. It absolutely tastes amazing. You put it on steamed vegetables, put it on rice. You can get creative. I like to do road trips, and Wendy’s has baked potatoes. I don’t eat the skins. They probably pour oil on it anyway, but you can find a way but you have to get creative. I think some people don’t take the first step into trying even a whole food, plant-based meal because they’re like, well, I’m tired. I’m busy. My mind is spinning, I have bills to pay, and this is just another thing I have to learn how to do. It’s kind of learning a new language. But once you do it, once you jump in, learn, and just try it, then it becomes very easy. I travel with my Instant Pot. I learned that from Chef AJ. I will not go to a hotel that doesn’t have at least some form of a fridge. I just check in advance, make sure they have a fridge or mini-fridge, and I bring my Instant Pot always, always, always, and then go to the grocery store once we get there. We just do a little cookout in our room. There are even some hotels that have hot plates that they will provide for you if they don’t have a kitchenette. I found that out when we went to Idaho a few months ago. We just get really creative, but sometimes I’m tired, I’m hungry, I just want to like to do take out. This isn’t one of those opportunities to cheat or eat unhealthily. I don’t want to feel bad the next day. I want to feel better and healthier, so we got to get creative. That’s where probably having some food either do big meal preps. You already have food cooked in the fridge. I can just go grab some cold sweet potatoes and eat them. Or have some meals that you’ve already made that you’ve frozen, so I’ve had to learn because I’m the one that cooks for our family. I’ve had to learn, and what I’m always blown away is how delicious your recipes are. So yummy. No wonder you can convert big firemen that love to eat steak to a whole plant-based diet because your recipes are delicious. I know that you’ve had some of your family members make these recipes as well.   [00:57:04] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. Well, Ashley, let me say that you have really embraced the lifestyle, and you got it going on between doing the bulk cooking for leftovers, and then freezing, but you get into a routine where you learn how to do it and it’s not that difficult and it’s so worthwhile.   [00:57:29] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [00:57:30] Rip Esselstyn: You mentioned the food being good. I mean, there’s no way that I could have gotten a bunch of Texas male firefighters to do this if they thought they were eating a bunch of rabbit food, twigs, berries, and nonsense like that. Literally, from the beginnings of this, it was always hearty—as one person said—mantastic food that fills you up and sticks to your ribs. That’s why, if you look at the Engine 2 cookbook or Plant-Strong, you’ll see that it’s a lot of pizzas, burritos, casseroles, stews, and chilies. It’s just hearty filling food. And of course, we’ve got our fair share of really big muscular salads as well, but it’s very intentional that the food leans towards being more firefighter man-friendly, and that’s not at all a knock on women.   [00:58:56] Ashley James: No, as a woman, I can say that we as all women—I will speak for all women—would be happy to bring home a cookbook for our male counterparts in our lives that they would embrace because it’s so delicious, and we’re secretly also helping them get super healthy. There are not a lot of whole food, plant-based cookbooks out there that would make a man feel like they could do this if they’ve eaten meat every day of their life. That’s what I love about yours is they are super hearty. I love the chilies. Oh my gosh, don’t get me started. I make them all in the Instant Pot by the way so it’s really easy to make. What’s interesting about the Instant Pot, I don’t know how much you’ve looked into—they call them the anti-nutrients. Some people are really sensitive to—makes them have gas and bloating. But when you cook beans and lentils in the Instant Pot, it destroys the anti-nutrients. People that often go, oh well, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t eat that way because I’d get gassy. Well, if you use the Instant Pot, the pressure and the heat of the Instant Pot destroy the anti-nutrients and make it so much easier to digest and it doesn’t cause that gas problem. That’s why I love using Instant Pot for all the beans and lentils that I make.   [01:00:26] Rip Esselstyn: Isn’t that interesting?   [01:00:27] Ashley James: It is.   [01:00:28] Rip Esselstyn: Well, we have a rice cooker. I don’t have an Instant Pot, and I probably should get one. I know that Chef AJ would be very happy if I decided to get one.   [01:00:40] Ashley James: You really need to get one, and you guys should do like a little video together where she teaches you how to use the Instant Pot. I actually own three Instant Pots. Last Thanksgiving I made the most delicious—I came up with this recipe for like a shepherd’s pie. I got four huge disposable aluminum tins to bake them in because I got one for us for home. I brought one to the in-laws for Thanksgiving, and I gave two away. One to a funeral who were Seventh-Day Adventists, and they just lost their daughter in a car crash. I donated that to their funeral and they really appreciate that. I mean, it’s the least I could do. And then the fourth one was given to my friend’s family. My dear friend Naomi went whole food, plant-based to reverse her heart disease, and then everyone else in the family started to. She has three sons and a husband. Now the husband raves about it, and her parents rave about it. But the three boys, they could never like the same thing. They’re all very picky eaters, and this was the first whole food, plant-based dish that all three boys and the entire family liked. The reason why I got three Instant Pots—because I used to only have one—is that when making it, I did the potatoes on one, the lentils on the other, and the vegetables in the third. I made a layered dish because I was running out of time, so I ended up getting three Instant Pots to make the whole thing. I constantly use three Instant Pots. I’ll make potatoes, rice, sweet potatoes, or yams in one; I’ll make beans or lentils in the other; and then I’ll steam vegetables in the third. I hardly ever use my stove. If I use the Instant Pots, I hardly ever use the stove. It’s actually way quicker to use the Instant Pot, and the food comes out really fresh instead of something that’s been cooked too long. Anyway, I’m a raving fan of the Instant Pot. You should definitely get one and play with it.   [01:02:50] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you say all that because do you know who Nina and Randa Nelson are and Jeff Nelson and Sabrina Nelson—a VegSource?   [01:02:59] Ashley James: No, I don’t.   [01:03:01] Rip Esselstyn: Well, Nina and Randa, you should have them on your show. They had this awful cystic acne that was almost debilitating, and these guys were actresses and singers out in LA. They’ve been following a vegan diet their whole life, but what happened is they decided to then go off all the peanut butter, the tofu, and all the processed refined vegan stuff. Literally, within a couple of weeks, their acne cleared up. They wrote a book about it called The Clear Skin Diet, and it is phenomenal. But Jeff and Sabrina have been in the space since 1990. They were the first ones to start throwing some of these live in-person plant-based events. But the reason I bring them up is I stay at their house sometimes when I’m out in LA, and they have three Instant Pots going all at one time. Typically in one, they have one some sort of grain, let’s just call it brown rice. In one they have a bean, so let’s just call it homemade black beans. And then the other one they have steel cut oats or oatmeal. At any point in time during the day, you can go in and take a spoonful of whatever you’re in the mood for and then you put whatever you want on top. It’s brilliant. I’m kicking myself that I still have not bought.   [01:04:30] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Guess what you’re doing this weekend.   [01:04:32] Rip Esselstyn: I think you might be right.   [01:04:33] Ashley James: You’re going to be playing with your new Instant Pot this weekend. When you call up Chef AJ for some advice, tell her it was me that finally pushed you over the edge.   [01:04:43] Rip Esselstyn: All right, I’ll say that Ashley James—   [01:04:46] Ashley James: Ashley James got you to finally get one. They’re so much fun. I burned a bunch of stuff the first time I used it, and I almost never went back. But then I think it was videos like Chef AJ’s videos that got me to try it again. You have to be willing to experiment and fall on your face in the kitchen. You’ve got to be willing to burn a few things because that’s how we learn, and it’s okay. Some of your meals don’t have to be awesome, but please, learn from those experiences because now I’m like such a passionate chef at home because food is the gateway to our health. You walk into your kitchen, you’re walking into your pharmacy. That’s just one of my favorite tools is the Instant Pot because it saves me so much time, but also it’s actually a health aide because it does break down those anti-nutrients for many of the grains, beans, legumes, and lentils. Awesome. Now, you’ve got a program coming up. I definitely want to make sure we talk about it. You used to do—with thousands of people—these boot camps where you change their lives and then like you said, you documented it and wrote about it in one of your latest books. I got to see that actually because I met several Whole Foods employees who had been through your program. It’s life-changing, absolutely. I love the stories that came out of that, and then with COVID now you’ve gone digital, which is great because now actually more people can have access to this boot camp. So you’ve got a program coming up really soon. Tell us all about it. What would we get by joining it? What is the experience like? And when what kind of people is this meant for?   [01:06:31] Rip Esselstyn: This will be our third virtual event of 2020. The first one we did was called the Plant-Strong Primer, and it was just for anybody that needed a little tune-up on all things plant-based for those who were new to the space. We had great attendance, and it was a whole weekend. The second one that we did was—we’ve had our annual Plant-Stock event for nine years now, and typically, it’s happened either at the backyard at the Esselstyn family farm in Upstate New York. And then recently, we moved it to the Black Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. But when COVID hit, we had to figure out what to do. We moved it actually back to the Esselstyn Farm, and Plant-Stock is just a celebration of all things plant-based, and we have a wide range of really what we call the brock stars in the plant-based movement come and speak. God, we probably had 22 different speakers, but the backdrop of the whole event was the Esselstyn Family. We got to give people a really nice backstage pass to the farm, which was in Forks Over Knives and it’s been in a lot of different documentaries. It’s a very, very special place for the Esselstyns because it’s been in the family for almost 350 years.   [01:08:09] Ashley James: Geez, wow.   [01:08:11] Rip Esselstyn: Yeah. We’re so grateful. As a family, we know how lucky we are to have this in our lives, this special resource. So we wanted to share it with people. That’s on my father’s side of the family, so my father grew up on this farm in Upstate New York. This next event that we’re doing on October 23 and 24, it’s called the Engine 2 Kitchen Rescue, and it’s actually going to take place in Cleveland, which is where I grew up. It’s where my father spent over 40 years at the Cleveland Clinic. But my father met my mother in Cleveland. He was going to Case Western Reserve Medical School. My mother grew up in Cleveland. Her grandfather was the founder of the Cleveland Clinic, believe it or not. In 1921 he founded the Cleveland clinic. My mother’s father—we call him Barney—was just an absolutely revolutionary surgeon. He really single-handedly brought to this country instead of doing the radical mastectomy, he believed in the partial lumpectomy, which is not nearly as disfiguring. At the time it was considered a radical approach to treating breast cancer, but it is now the preferred method for breast cancer. I don’t want to get too far off track. My father was going to medical school. His father and my mother’s father both went to Yale and crossed paths because my dad’s father actually played football at Yale and was one of the coaches after he graduated. So he was one of the coaches for my mother’s father while he was going through Yale and on the football team. It’s a small world, and my dad got invited over to my mother’s place for a meal. They met and they fell in love. This Kitchen Rescue event is going to take place at a place called The Knob. It’s this really phenomenal woodsy location in Northeast Ohio. It’s about 20 miles outside of Cleveland. It’s the second-highest point in Northeast Ohio, and you’ve got all these pine trees. The glaciers came through there and left all these crazy rock formations and white quartz pebbles everywhere.   [01:11:17] Ashley James: The Precambrian shield I think it’s called.   [01:11:19] Rip Esselstyn: Oh, yeah? Say that again. The what?   [01:11:21] Ashley James: I think it’s called the Precambrian shield.   [01:11:24] Rip Esselstyn: Wow.   [01:11:26] Ashley James: Because that’s what created the great lakes and all the terrain in Upstate New York and also Ontario, which is where I’m from, have these beautiful sections of the forest. There’s just exposed rock in granite and just gorgeous rock out of nowhere and these giant rock cliffs. Part of it was these big glaciers kind of scraped away and left behind. I think it’s called the Precambrian shield, but it’s a very unique landscape and just gorgeous, right?   [01:12:03] Rip Esselstyn: Oh, it’s gorgeous. The views, you can see over 7 ½ miles from this point all the way to Lake Erie. You can see the freighters going across on clear days. The cliff where you can get these views, it’s almost a 70-foot drop. There are sandstone formations everywhere, but this is a piece of property that has been in the Crile side of the family—my mother’s side of the family—since 1910. There’s this cool house that my parents built that’s on top of it now that’s made from these huge 5×3 foot sandstone rocks, and these huge Douglas fir beams that came from somewhere in Lake Erie that my father—one of his heart patients was a truck driver. And he got this truck driver to basically load up and go and bring back like 15 of these huge Douglas fir beams that serve as the part of the structure of this house. But we’re going to have this as the backdrop to the Kitchen Rescue. We’re going to be making all kinds of fantastic meals going into the holiday season. Do you know who Dr. Will Bulsiewicz is?   [01:13:33] Ashley James: The name sounds familiar, but no I don’t.   [01:13:36] Rip Esselstyn: Okay. He wrote a book called Fiber Fueled.   [01:13:38] Ashley James: Oh, okay. Right, right.   [01:13:40] Rip Esselstyn: It’s so hot. Will will be joining us. We’re going to have a couple of amazing transformational stories, but mostly, it’s going to be time in the kitchen. We’re going to send out to all of our attendees all the different recipes, grocery lists that people want to cook along with us. We’re going to teach people how to read labels, pantry clean-out, what to put in place of some of the no-no’s that maybe a lot of us have in our freezers, our refrigerators, and in our pantries. It’s going to really be highlighted by my sister Jane, my mother Ann, my father, myself, and my brother-in-law Brian. Everything will be videoed. It’ll be live. This isn’t something that’s pre-recorded—it’s all going to be live. And then afterward, people will have access to the videos for up to a year. Anyway, in a nutshell—a big nutshell—that’s the extent of it.   [01:14:48] Ashley James: This is cool. Who should attend this? Is this for newbies, is this for people with major health problems? Who would get the most out of attending your upcoming event—October 23 and 24.   [01:15:03] Rip Esselstyn: Well, to me, it’s for anyone that is looking to get their head around some new exciting recipes, some mantastic recipes going into the holiday season. It’s for anyone that wants to be inspired, and it’s for anyone that feels alone out there and wants to feel like they’re really part of a very special family and community. What we discovered after our primer event in the spring and our Plant-Stock event in the summer is that the bonding that happens in the chat room over the course of the weekend is really special. And then afterward, we send everybody—that wants to—to a free community group where we continue on with all the relationships and the bonds that were formed over the course of the virtual weekend   [01:16:10] Ashley James: That’s very cool. I know several very happily married couples who have met in chat rooms much like what you’re describing. Also good for singles who would like to meet other singles who are looking to get healthy together. I always believe in divine intervention, just like how your dad met your mom. That feels a lot like there is some divine guidance going on and how I met my husband. It took a lot of divine intervention to bring us together.   [01:16:46] Rip Esselstyn: It’s funny you say that because there were people in the chat room during Plan-Stock that were like I can’t date anybody anymore that’s a meat-eater. I just can’t do it. I have to find somebody that shares the passion and the values that I have around plants. And then there are people that are divorced that are looking for somebody as well. Luckily, I am happily married and we have a Plant-Strong family. The kids are all on board, everybody’s on board with it. It’s really nice when you can have a united front with your partner, your kids, and your family. But I can tell you if I was starting over again—just like I don’t think I could ever marry a smoker—I don’t think I could ever, ever marry a meat-eater. Just the smell of the meat in the kitchen, cheese in the refrigerator, chicken breast, fish—I just find it all to be, frankly, just so revolting now.   [01:18:01] Ashley James: What’s really interesting about that—so again, my husband who ate beef breakfast, lunch, and dinner, maybe he had pork for breakfast. But that’s all he ate when I met him, and I tried to get him to eat something else other than meat. That was just meat, meat, meat every single day, and we’ve been married for 12 years. He just woke up one morning and said never again, never ever, ever again. Within a matter of weeks, he began to become disgusted by the smell of meat, by the sight of meat. He is actually completely turned off by it, and what a 180 degree just transformation. But I noticed it in myself too, and I never ever thought. I saw it in him, I never thought it would happen in me. But I also noticed that the more you stay away from it, the more it actually feels unnatural to consume any animal or animal products, and I was very pro-eating animals before this. But it was my health journey that led me, and this podcast and interviewing because I want to interview everyone on all these different points. I want to bring in all the information that I can and to help people to heal because I suffered from many diseases including diabetes and reversed it with nutrition. Just through my own learning and adapting this way, I noticed that my desires, my cravings changed now. I have a Pavlovian response to kale. I just start salivating when I think about plants. It’s really interesting how our bodies will adapt and change. I think for people who are still primarily meat-eaters, just try a meatless Monday, try just a few meals a week, or just try a seven-day challenge like the one that Rip wrote about in his book and just notice how great you feel. Let that motivate you to use food to heal your body. Now, I’m very excited about your upcoming event on October 23 and 24—Plant-Strong Primer: Kitchen Rescue. It’s going to be delicious, I just know that. By then, you will have bought yourself an Instant Pot. You and hopefully all the listeners will get themselves an Instant Pot, and then we can all cook along with everyone in your live online event. The links to it are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show today, Rip. You are welcome back anytime you want to come and share more stories of success, more information about your future events and books. We would love to have you back on the show.   [01:20:58] Rip Esselstyn: Oh, thank you so much. In closing, let me say one thing because I mentioned it earlier on and we didn’t ever have the opportunity to circle back to it. That is the answer to your food products that have been at Whole Foods for eight years. What’s happened is they have turned the brand back over to me. It was a ten-year contract.   [01:21:23] Ashley James: I didn’t want to ask in case it was really sensitive.   [01:21:28] Rip Esselstyn: No, no, no. It’s really good because now, what we’re doing is we’re revamping the whole look and feel. We’re giving the brand a whole refresh. Instead of being called Engine 2, it’s going to be called Plant-Strong. We are going to have a little Engine 2 in the upper right-hand corner just to give a nod because that’s the whole origin story at a fire station—Engine 2. But the packaging is so beautiful, it’s so colorful, and it’s so wonderful. And we’re going to have a limited variety of products at retail outlets including Whole Foods starting in February 2021. We’re going to start with some veggie broth, then also some chilies, and some soups. And then online, we’ve started an e-commerce store where people can go right now today. We have the cereals and the granolas, and we have the pizza kits with the pizza crust and the sauce packs. And then we’re slowly, every couple of months, going to be adding more and more products to the e-commerce side of things. But in 2020, as we’re dealing with COVID-19, we’re just trying to figure out how to be smarter and more streamlined with our offerings and what makes sense. The D2C play, e-commerce, people are buying more and more food that way. This way, it allows us to get food to people—these premium products—at a better price point.   [01:23:08] Ashley James: Oh, great. Well, I love that. I just started buying all my groceries online because it just freed me up from so much time, and I used to love going grocery shopping. But with COVID, masks, hand sanitizers, and people looking at you worried like, oh, are you six feet away from me? I just don’t want to cause people to stress or live through that stress. I feel very, very blessed and fortunate to live in an area where I can have my groceries delivered, or I can order stuff online. I just ordered some whole food, plant-based cereal just last night. I normally don’t eat cereal, but I’m pregnant right now with our second child. My cravings, luckily, have been healthy ones.   [01:23:56] Rip Esselstyn: Good for you.   [01:23:58] Ashley James: Absolutely. Rip, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to attend your event coming up on October 23 and 24, Plant-Strong Primer: Kitchen Rescue. And of course, all the listeners are invited to attend as well. See you all in the chat, especially the singles who want to get healthy together. I just think that’d be so cool to hear some love stories.   [01:24:19] Rip Esselstyn: We’re going to do it. Just so you know, there’ll be several thousand people that will be partaking. This is going to be a big party. It will be a pre-holiday kitchen party where we’re going to get in, roll up our sleeves, and make potatoes, lasagnas, and pizzas together. It’s going to be a blast.   [01:24:41] Ashley James: Sounds great. Can’t wait. Thank you so much, Rip. Please, come back to the show at any time. We’d love to have you.   [01:24:46] Rip Esselstyn: Thank you so much, Ashley.     Get Connected with Rip Esselstyn! Website – Plant Strong Plant Strong Podcast Plant-Strong Foods Facebook – Plant Strong by Engine 2 Instagram – engine2diet Instagram – RipEsselstyn Twitter – Plant Strong by Engine 2   Books by Rip Esselstyn The Engine 2 Cookbook: More than 130 Lip-Smacking, Rib-Sticking, Body-Slimming Recipes to Live Plant-Strong  The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet: Eat Plants, Lose Weight, Save Your Health The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter’s 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds Plant-Strong: Discover the World’s Healthiest Diet–with 150 Engine 2 Recipes My Beef With Meat: The Healthiest Argument for Eating a Plant-Strong Diet — Plus 140 New Engine 2 Recipes

Visit TakeYourSupplements.com to get on Dr. Wallach's protocol & the supplements that Ashley and her family have been taking for the last ten years.   Mineral Deficiency: Root Cause of Diseases https://www.learntruehealth.com/mineral-deficiency-root-cause-of-diseases   Highlights: Root cause of mineral deficiency diseases Four categories of health Symptoms of osteoporosis of the skull Why going gluten-free is important   Have you heard about osteoporosis of the skull? In this episode, Dr. Joel Wallach is back on the show, and he talks about different symptoms of osteoporosis of the skull. He shares that osteoporosis of the skull is a nutrient deficiency and can be cured with proper nutrition. He also talks about the root cause of mineral deficiency diseases and how it caused hundreds of diseases that we now have today.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today, we have my hero, Dr. Joel Wallach. He’s a Naturopathic physician with so much experience. He’s in his 80s, and he’s the reason why I no longer suffer from all the illnesses that I had. I’ve been mentored by him for the last 10 years, and it’s such an honor to have him back on the show. Go listen to episode 435 to hear my first interview with him. In this episode, we continue our discussion, and then, in the end, he answers some questions for the listeners that posted questions in the Facebook group for him. We didn’t get to all the questions, so he’s agreed to come back on the show and he will continue to answer questions for us. As you’re listening to this episode, if you have questions for Dr. Wallach, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, and when I announce that I’m going to have him on the show again, please post your questions in that thread and I will get them answered for you. Now, as you’re listening to Dr. Wallach, if you’d like to get on his protocol, he designed a supplement company about 25 years ago. My family and I have actually been taking his supplements for the last 10 years, and I’ve been using them with my clients for the last 10 years having fantastic success. In this interview, I saw nine years and then I realized September was the 10th anniversary of me on his supplements, following his protocol, and reversing the illnesses and diseases I had using his information. As you’re listening, if you want to get on his protocol, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our experienced health coaches that are trained on all of Dr. Wallach’s protocols will help you. There’s also a health coach training program that completely trains you in all of Dr. Wallach’s protocols and we can hook you up. It’s very affordable, and it teaches you exactly how to help people—yourself, your friends, and your family. It’s a great adjunct to those who are already in the health field, but also, it’s great for people who just want to learn for themselves. I talk about IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which is a year-long health coach training program. That’s a major program to start a career as a health coach or if you are in the health field in some way to really add tools to your tool belt. If you go to takeyoursupplements.com and talk to them about learning specifically Dr. Wallach’s protocol, that training is much shorter, and it’s specifically designed to teach you everything about Dr. Wallach’s protocol. It’s a fantastic adjunct to IIN or to anyone who wants to learn more about holistic health and healing. I have been working with the health coaches at takeyoursupplements.com for years, and we’ve all been trained by Dr. Wallach and all of his information. What I love about his supplements, and the reason why he created these supplements is after all the research he did in discovering the root cause of 900 diseases—diseases that cross-species lines, and he’s published his work. For the last 35 years, he discovered the root cause of major diseases such as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, even down syndrome. He discovered they’re all different mineral deficiencies and element deficiencies in utero, and he’s published these findings. What he found was as he worked as a Naturopath with his clientele, they would get inconsistent results from different supplement companies because of the quality control (or lack thereof). So he was finally driven to produce his own, which have consistently, very high quality, and are third-party lab-tested. We can help you contact the company and get all the labs. They publish them. They’re very open about showing that Dr. Wallach’s supplements are very high quality, bio-available, easily absorbed by the body, and consistently get results, which is very exciting. They also have a 30-day money-back guarantee, which I think is really important because I spent thousands of dollars on supplements before I ever met Dr. Wallach, and felt that it was just a waste until I met him and got on his. Overnight, I started to notice fantastic changes. So if you’re wary about buying another supplement, know that his—when you go to takeyoursupplements.com and work with them—has a money-back guarantee. That is to show you that you can trust them. And if you like it for whatever reason, we want you to be satisfied, and we want to show you that you can feel comfortable and safe trying them and knowing that the company is all about helping you get your health back, which is why I’m so happy to be part of all of this. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this show with those you love. Strap yourselves in. This is going to be a great one. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:05:04] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 447. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have my hero, Dr. Joel Wallach. Dr. Wallach, because of you, I no longer suffer from type 2 diabetes, from chronic adrenal fatigue, which had me bedridden most days. I no longer suffer from the polycystic ovarian syndrome. I actually just got my blood work done with my Naturopath to confirm that I am the healthiest I’ve ever been. But the last nine years I’ve been on your protocol I’ve been able to reverse all these issues. I was told by an endocrinologist I would never ever conceive, that I was completely infertile. And because of your protocol, your guidance, and your advice, we conceived our child naturally. He is a healthy almost 5 ½-year-old boy. You have helped many of my family members, many of my friends, and my clients through your supplements and through your nutritional information. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. The difference you’ve made in millions of lives is so important. Your research has changed the world, but it needs to get mainstream. We have got to get your information out there, and that’s why I’m having you back here today so you can continue to share this information. Thank you so much for being here.   [00:06:37] Dr. Joel Wallach: Well, you’re very, very kind, Ashley. Thank you so much for the testimony and so forth. I get more women pregnant every year than any other man in history because I know the process. The human body has a phenomenal ability to heal itself, but it does need raw materials. You have to absorb and then you have to have the raw materials. You cannot get everything you need from your food. It’s like saying don’t waste your money on oil. Just put dirt from Texas in your car. There’s bound to be some oil in it. That was very, very stupid. Well, it’s very, very stupid to just say, well, I’m going to eat well and I’ll get everything I need. Nutritional minerals occur in veins like chocolate and chocolate ripple ice cream and veins like gold, silver, and coal. That’s why in some places on earth, people live long healthy lives. They say, well, boy they don’t even have doctors. They live 160-200, what’s going on? Well, that’s because they live in a place that has the nutrients there because of the glaciers, grinding up rocks, and all that kind of stuff. That’s why you see cultures, they’re famous and legendary for long lives. James Hilton wrote the book of course and the movie came out of it, Lost Horizon. He was a New York Times reporter. He was told to go to Hunza where people were claiming to be over 200 years of age and so forth. He went there, spent a year, and he said, hey, this is real. He wrote an article for the New York Times, and he made a book out of it, Lost Horizon. It became a movie, Lost Horizon and Shangri-La where people live forever and all that kind of stuff. I think the advantage I have, Ashley, is I’m a veterinarian as well as a physician. We don’t have health insurance for animals. We do have life insurance for expensive racehorses, but when it comes to health insurance, health insurance is the vitamins and minerals they add to their food. We’ve eliminated every disease that still plagues humans. I’m proud that I was able to—through lawsuits in federal courts—forced the baby formulas to put nutrients in there that doctors said were poisonous. The baby formula manufacturers like Enfamil and [inaudible 00:08:54] put it in there. In federal courts, I won because I did 1700 autopsies on kids under the age of 10 published in three languages. We got rid of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and crib death. I’m the guy that eliminated those three baby diseases. You don’t hear about them anymore because I’ve eliminated them by putting all these nutrients into the baby formulas and eliminated them because none of them were genetic. And certainly, the mother never laid on the babies to kill them.   [00:09:21] Ashley James: Even more so, prenatal nutrition, and even before we get pregnant, helping the mother become fully nutrified is incredibly important. Now, we talked about your experiences with curing Keshan disease. We didn’t get into talking about your work with the Amish though. Can you tell us the story about how you were invited—I believe it was—in Pennsylvania to go and help the Amish figure out what was going on with infertility and the diseases that were plaguing them?   [00:09:51] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. They had a lot of birth defects. Amish all over the country were plagued with birth defects. I had been working with the Amish. Started out in Kansas City, Missouri who was the parents of an Amish kid who became a decorated Navy Seal of all things. When he came back he said, look, we got to really spend some time with these Amish communities. They have so many birth defects. The doctors just tell them it’s genetic and there’s nothing to do about it. Well, it turns out that all these birth defects—and I’ll tell you a couple of specific stories—with the exception of getting the measles early in pregnancy and you damage the embryo that way. You’re too young probably, Ashley, to remember thalidomide, which was a pharmaceutical made to deal with morning sickness made in Australia and it was shipped over here. Ob-Gyns actually gave it to mothers early in pregnancy when they were having morning sickness. We had 10,000 babies born in America with no arms and legs because thalidomide interrupted that part of the embryonic development. With the exception of those kinds of things, 99% of all birth defects are caused by nutritional deficiency during the developmental stages of the embryo. There are no genetic diseases transmitted as birth defects. I’ll repeat that. There are no genetic diseases transmitted as birth defects. There’s no genetic disease transmitted like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and that kind of stuff. As a result, my thesis, which is from my 10-year study—20,000 autopsies. It’s kind of like a Ph.D. degree for a post-doctoral fellowship like a Ph.D. degree at Washington University in St. Louis. My thesis is in the Smithsonian Institute as a national treasure. We got a $25 million grant. Did the 20,000 autopsies. Did all the work, tracked everything down. Showed how all the birth defects could be prevented with prenatal nutrition, and how all these diseases that are said to be genetic in families were not genetic. The example I used was sickle cell anemia because every thesis of animals can have sickle cell anemia. Both white guys and black guys get sickle cell anemia, and it’s all caused by the same nutritional deficiency in the early stages of embryonic development when the bone marrow is being developed. This nutrient is missing in central Africa. That’s why so many people in Central Africa—like the Congo and places like that—they have sickle cell anemia. Of course, the medical doctors say, oh, it’s due to a genetic thing in these people in the Congo. No, they’re just missing that nutrient.   [00:12:29] Ashley James: The nutrient is missing from the soil so they’re not getting it when they eat their food?   [00:12:32] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s correct because plants cannot make this nutrient. I’ll give you a hint, it’s a mineral. The plants cannot make it. Here’s the beautiful part of it. So I’m seeing all these white kids with sickle cell anemia. I’m tracking their families, they don’t have any interactions with black families and there’s no intermarriages or anything like that. So it turns out, it’s the exact same deficiency in white guys as black guys. In white guys, they gave it a different name. In white guys, they call it thalassemia, and in black guys, they call it sickle cell anemia. It’s the same exact birth defect. I’ve done this. Actually, in my presentation, I show people that both the mother and father have either thalassemia or sickle cell anemia, they’ll have 10 normal kids as long as they’re getting all 90 essential nutrients for at least three months before they get pregnant. Nutritional deficiency.   [00:13:35] Ashley James: Because it happened in utero though, can you reverse sickle cell anemia or is it baked into the cake?   [00:13:41] Dr. Joel Wallach: It’s baked into the cake. However, I can take somebody who has maybe 25%-30% percent of their cells will be sickle cell anemia or thalassemia. I can give them a program and I might drop it down to 12%-15% because I’m really feeding the healthy cells in the bone marrow. They just make more healthy hemoglobin. But it is baked into the cake, all right. I can improve them, but you can’t cure them. I can take a mother and a father—both of whom have sickle cell anemia or both of whom have thalassemia—give them all 90 essential nutrients for three to six months prior to pregnancy and guess what, they can have 25 normal babies. This one, my thesis is in the Smithsonian Institute of Natural Treasure. There’s a great little story about arctic foxes at the Brookfield Zoo when I was working there, and it was part of this grant where I did my 20,000 autopsies. They had a big aquarium there so I had to spend a couple of years there dealing with all the tortoises, sea turtles, and things like that. I was covering all the species. Anyway, the keepers came to me and said, “Look, we’re going to bring you 10 baby arctic foxes, and the mother and father are wild-caught arctic foxes. We just had a litter of 10 babies all born with cleft palate. They have a bad gene, we want to get rid of them.” “No, no,” I said, “Oh my gosh. This is perfect. I’ve been looking for something like this and you guys are going to bring me the babies and bring me the foxes. What were you feeding them?” “Well, we gave them horse meat. Gave the two animal foxes horse meat because they’re carnivores. They’re meat-eaters.” “Well, did you give me any vitamins and minerals?” “No.” “Okay. Well, that’s why all the baby foxes were born with cleft palates. It’s a birth defect caused by cleft palates when they go from a flat disc into a tube, at that moment when their palate is forming, they’re missing these nutrients and it doesn’t close completely. Then they get cleft palate, cleft lip, and all kinds of stuff. So what I want you to do is start feeding the mother and father dog food, and then I want you to get infant formula, milk replacer like we’re going to give orphan baby puppies and start feeding those baby foxes.  When baby foxes get to be six months old, they’re going to go through puberty. Then I want you to take one female baby and put it with a father. I want you to put one male baby and put it with the mother, and all the other brothers and sisters you’re going to put together we’ll have five pairs of inbreeding. Actually, we’ll have seven pairs of inbreeding with the mother and father. You tell me when the baby foxes are born.” Well, it took six months for them to get to puberty, and then of course the baby foxes when they started eating solid food, we got them on dog food also. To make a long story short, we had 100 baby foxes born a year and a half later, and guess what? They’re all born perfectly normal, no cleft palates even though we were seriously inbreeding—brother and sister, mother and son, father and daughter. They’re all born perfectly normal because we gave them all the nutrients. This is written up in scientific journals. It’s in the book Rare Earths: Forbidden Cures. It’s in the book Epigenetic. And it’s in my presentation, which I give all the time in the section on pregnancies. Gosh, I have so many horrible pictures. They would do abortions of babies born with a terrible cycloptic eye—one eye in the middle of their forehead—or their brain was sticking out of their skull, and things like that. They would go ahead and do an abortion. They bring me those babies so I have lots of pictures of horrible birth defects all of which are preventable by proper diet—maximize absorption, no gluten, no fried foods, no processed meats, no oils, and then you throw in the 90 essential nutrients and there will never be another birth defect.   [00:17:41] Ashley James: The best place to get the 90 essential nutrients—myself and others who have been mentored by you, working with you, and working with your supplements for the last nine years—is takeyoursupplements.com. If you go to takeyoursupplements.com, you fill out your information, and you actually speak to one of us. We work with you and help you get on Dr. Wallach’s protocol. I want to talk about the four categories of health and healing in terms of nutrient deficiency, and how you easily help people to reverse diseases. But before we do, I just want to wrap up the Amish story. You went with Marvin Rob, and I’ve met Marvin Rob—an amazing, amazing man. I’ve learned so much from him too, and the two of you went to the Amish communities where there was a lot of infertility and birth defects. What happened?   [00:18:36] Dr. Joel Wallach: Well, basically, the Amish, of course, they grow a lot of grain—wheat, barley, rye, and oats. They eat so much of that bread, spaghetti, noodles, pancakes, waffles, pie crusts, cake, and so forth. Well, guess what. They have so much gluten their intestines are all dead. They lost the villi in their intestines, and they couldn’t absorb nutrients even if they had them in their food. Now nutritional minerals do not occur in a uniform blanket around the coast of the earth. They occur in veins like gold, silver, and coal. The only way you’re going to guarantee you’re going to get all 90 essential nutrients is to supplement. Well, even if you supplement, if your villi are all gone, you can’t efficiently absorb them, so they’re still having problems. We took some willing families that had some really serious problems. There was one family, I think it was Idaho. A 31-year-old young man and he was in a wheelchair for 31 years because he was born with severe muscular dystrophy, and they were told there was nothing to be done about it. Just giving care that dealt with the symptoms as opposed to there’s nothing you can do. To make a long story short, his name is Amos Wiki. This got to be 12, 15 years ago. We put Amos on the 90 essential nutrients. We gave him extra of the nutrients we’re missing when you have muscular dystrophy. Of course, they had already published a story about Jerry Lewis and so forth and everybody knew about that. Jerry Lewis, of course, we gave him 50 of these Amish kids who were born with muscular dystrophy. We had cured them. We gave him the charts. He took them to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and before he left the room they fired him. He said, “Well, Wallach’s curing all these people with muscular dystrophy.” They fired him and took him off the telethon route. This is in 2011. And in 2015, they had to stop the telethon because they couldn’t raise a penny without Jerry Lewis being on there. He’d already raised $2 billion on the telethon, but when they took him off the telethon, they couldn’t raise a penny. Anyway, here’s Amos Wiki. We put him on the program and we cured him. About a year later, Marvin and I are going from colony to colony in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Idaho, Utah, Texas, and so on running in all these Amish. They have annual meetings and all the farmers get together and say, okay, this year we’re all going to go grow sweet potatoes. This year we need extra, this, that, and the other. So they make all these plans, and they don’t have computers, telephones, cell phones, iPads, and things. They have to have these big meetings to communicate this stuff with each other. Otherwise, they’re writing letters and so forth, and they don’t like to do that. They rather just get together. I was going to speak to them because they were having this big gathering of 150 Amish families in Idaho, and Marvin took me there. This elder—white hair, typical looking Amish guy, probably in the 60s. Very, very accusing tone, “Before we start, Wallach, I want to know. You’ve been working with Amos Wiki for years. For three years you’ve worked with him and he’s still sitting in his wheelchair.” And Amos wiki was sleeping in his wheelchair. About 180 pounds, 31 years old. So I said to myself, what would Moses do here? What I did, I had to be a little bit of a showman, right? I stuck my right arm out 180 degrees away from Amos. I stuck my index finger out and I slowly, slowly turned through the face of the audience all around until I was pointing at Amos. I screamed his name. I said, “Amos, get up and dance.” And Amos got out of his wheelchair and he started doing a little jig. He runs up the middle aisle, runs around all the outside isles three times, and sits back down in the chair. Everybody, they couldn’t even breathe. It was quiet. They could not breathe. What had happened was Amos, in 90 days, we had cured him of his muscular dystrophy after 31 years of muscular dystrophy. But he had paid for that wheelchair himself. They don’t have health insurance so he paid for the wheelchair himself. He didn’t want to give it away, sell it, or just throw in the barn. So he took it with him wherever he went, and wherever he went he would just sit in his own wheelchair. He didn’t need it anymore. But the elder Amish guy thought Amos was still in the wheelchair because he still had muscular dystrophy. But no, we cured him in three months.   [00:23:45] Ashley James: I love it.   [00:23:47] Dr. Joel Wallach: We deal a lot with every kind of autoimmune disease you can think of. Things like lupus, which Amish used to get a lot of. They have the butterfly rash on their face, and it’s kind of like fibromyalgia with a butterfly rash in your face they call it lupus, an autoimmune disease. It’s really just a manifestation of gluten. They can’t absorb nutrients. One nutritional deficiency causes eczema, dermatitis, psoriasis, and rosacea when you have a deficiency of that nutrient. Also, you get ulcerative colitis, your villi go away, you get diverticulitis, Crohn’s disease, or irritable bowel syndrome. Basically, these diseases are all gone in the Amish community now. They used to eat so much wheat, barley, rye, and oats because that’s what they would grow to feed their livestock and also to sell in the markets. Now they know they need to live like Asians and they eat rice. They can’t have fried rice, but they could eat wild rice, white rice, yellow rice, and red rice. They could eat sweet potatoes. They can eat their dairy. They can have all the vegetables they want. They can have buckwheat, which is not wheat. They can have millet. They can have corn and so forth. All the diseases they used to get, they don’t get anymore because we got them off of gluten, got them on the 90 essential nutrients, 60 minerals, 16 vitamins, 12 aminos, and 3 fatty acids. And 2/3 of the 90 essential nutrients are our minerals. Plants do not make minerals. They can make vitamins, they can make amino acids, they can make fatty acids, but they can’t make minerals. Plants only need three elements from the soil, and farmers, Ashley, get paid by tonnage. They don’t get paid by the nutritional value of the food, they get paid by tonnage. When you look at all commercial fertilizers, they only have three minerals in it. They don’t have 60. They only have three. When they get everything ready to harvest, they harvest it, they sell it, it goes to the market, and we get three minerals in our food.   [00:25:58] Ashley James: Can you imagine what our health would be like as a globe if farmers got paid for the nutritional quality of their crop and if doctors got paid for results?   [00:26:10] Dr. Joel Wallach: Well, yeah. That’d be a totally different story.   [00:26:14] Ashley James: Yeah, exactly. There’d be no disease, and everyone would be listening to you.   [00:26:17] Dr. Joel Wallach: I can tell you when it all happens, 3:00 PM in the afternoon, Monday, September 4, 1882 on Pearl Street in New York City in the bluff overlooking the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, Thomas Edison pulled the switch on the first commercial electric generating plant and lit up part of New York City. Within 10 years, 100 new diseases occurred that had never happened before in America. All mineral deficiency diseases and doctors are telling people, oh these are genetic because before 3:00 PM in the afternoon, Monday, September 4, 1882, nobody had electricity. Everybody had wood stoves. They were putting their wood ashes into their gardens, and wood ashes are more than just carbon. Wood ashes are the minerals that are left when you burn the carbon in the wood, the corn stalks, or whatever it is you’re burning, coal. People put their wood ashes in their garden as fertilizer. If you were in a place where there were 15 minerals in the soil, there were 15 minerals that would ashes. If you’re in a place where they had 25 minerals in the soil, there were 25 minerals in the wood ashes. People did much better when they were putting their wood ashes in their gardens. I’m going to give you one more bit of story here and I’ll turn back to you.  That is most people don’t know this, Ashley, but slaves lived longer than plantation owners. There were more 100-year-old slaves than there were 100-year-old white people. Most chief slaves who were actually running the plantation operations outlive three generations of white plantation owners who die in their 40s and 50s. These slaves are 110, 112 still running the show. That’s because the plantation owners want to be like kings and dukes. They just ate the meat—steaks, roasts, and loins, that kind of stuff. They made the slaves eat the chicken feet, pig’s feet, the livers, the brains, the heart, and the lungs, which had all the trace minerals in it plus the sulfur, the calcium, and the magnesium. They would put the bones from what they would eat onto the stove at night and water and just simmer it all night and make bone broth soup.   [00:28:55] Ashley James: And get more minerals.   [00:28:57] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. The white people didn’t drink that or eat that. That was all the slaves. That’s why there was uncle Thomas. They couldn’t call him Sir Tom or Sir Remus. They call him Uncle Remus because they were giving him some kind of heroic name for living so long and running the plantations. Being an Uncle Tom was a good thing. Being an Uncle Remus was a good thing. Being an Aunt Jemima was a good thing because they were living to be 100 eating the things that the plantation owners thought were not even fit to feed a dog, only slaves could eat them.   [00:29:43] Ashley James: And they were getting more nutrition because of it. That’s fascinating.   [00:29:47] Dr. Joel Wallach: Isn’t that crazy?   [00:29:48] Ashley James: Yeah. I love how you look through history—different cultures, the rate of disease, and how you can link it all back that the people who have the lowest rate of disease and the highest rate of longevity are the people who are getting all their minerals, getting more minerals, and getting more nutrition. That’s very fascinating. I just love it.  Now, it’s been complicated for people to understand how to reverse disease, but you, in the last few years—in working with so many wonderful experts—have devised something to make it really simple. So that the average person or even health coaches who want to jump in and use your protocol, not only for themselves, but also for their clients or for their friends and family, they could understand how to figure out what nutrients their client, their selves, or their friends or families are missing. Can you discuss the four categories of health, and dive into how we can utilize them to help reverse disease?   [00:31:00] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, well you have to appreciate that all tissue has stem cells. No matter what tissue in the body, every tissue in the body has stem cells. The purpose of the stem cells is to make new cells when the old ones die because none of your body cells live forever so they have a lifespan. They might only live six weeks, six months, two years, or whatever it is. Then the stem cells will replace them with a new cell. Also, if you have an injury like a trauma, an injury where you get a bruise, a cut, a burn, or something like that, your stem cells will repair those injured cells and make new ones when the old ones die. They all require the 90 essential nutrients. This is why people who live in areas that have lots of minerals in the soil and eat food grown there, they actually have much longer lives. They tend to be disease-free, are very strong, and can resist the plague and all that kind of stuff which everybody else gets. People say well where are the longest-lived people on earth? The longest-lived people on earth come from Hunza, which is where the [inaudible 00:32:20] Glacier is which is in China. There’s a place called Pakistan and China, the [inaudible 00:32:30] glacier in Hunza is in between them.  These are the longest-lived people on earth. And again, the Hunzas didn’t know what they were doing. They just drank the water that came out from underneath the glaciers. They irrigated with the water that came out from underneath the glaciers. The glacial water had the minerals in it because the glaciers were grinding up all the rocks. It just so happens all the rocks there have 78 minerals. Also, this is where we get our plant minerals from these types of deposits. There’s half a dozen on earth, and we get our minerals from these types of deposits which come from the ocean. It’s not like rock. These are not rocks. These are plants. I’ll tell you a little bit about that in a second. And then also, we can get these things from the pink Himalayan salt. In the Himalayan mountains, when the oceans dried up, all the salt and minerals that were in the oceans there piled up down there and became the pink Himalayan salt. They have 84 minerals in them. Now, Ashley, before I answer your question, I’m going to tackle it backward a little bit so when I answer the question it’ll make sense.   [00:33:53] Ashley James: Okay.   [00:33:54] Dr. Joel Wallach: You know the carbon dioxide is going up in the air, and all the environmentalists are convinced that it’s due to fossil fuels for gasoline, oil, and all kinds of stuff for cars and things.   [00:34:09] Ashley James: Cow farts.   [00:34:12] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, things like burning coal, oil, and gasoline and all that kind of stuff. That’s where the carbon dioxide is coming from. They want everybody to drive Tesla cars and have all these hydroelectric plants and everything. Well, going back to the 1920s, they began to put in hydroelectric dams. Today, to make a long story short, we have a million hydroelectric dams. We have two million dams for our irrigation and water conservation. We have 400 million farm ponds that intercept the flow from creeks that would go into tributaries to dump these silts, minerals, and volcanic ash into the big rivers, which would then go feed the ocean and feed the reefs. Millions not thousands, millions of these dams. Well, here’s what happened is they shut off the food supply to the algae that were eating the carbon monoxide. Algae make up more plant life than all the plants on dry land earth. Algae in the ocean have a bigger plant mass than that. Well, algae, the purpose of it is to eat the carbon dioxide in the air, throw out oxygen into the atmosphere, then take the carbon out of the carbon dioxide, and make carbon chains like amino acids, carbohydrates, sugars, fiber, and stuff like that for plants like kelp and that kind of stuff. Well, we dammed up the rivers with 1 million hydroelectric dams, 2 million water conservation dams, and 400 billion farm ponds. We cut off the food. Only man has the power to cut off the food supply to the ocean, cut off the food supply to the reefs. I gave a lecture last year, a little more than a year ago—August of 2019, to Tesla at their annual meeting, and 2/3 of my lecture I had maps of all the places where the reefs have died and showed where they had dammed up all the rivers. I have pictures of the maps and then where the rivers were dammed up. In Queensland in Australia where the Great Barrier Reef is they dammed up all the rivers that were feeding the volcanic ash into the ocean on the western side of the great barrier reef that killed the great barrier reef by making hydroelectric there.  We’re working on getting a grant. We’re going to rebuild Queensland, we’re going to rebuild the Great Barrier Reef. We’re going to leave them to have their electric dams. We’re just going to go around them, through them, or over them with augers, get the silt back to the algae that were feeding the Great Barrier Reefs. And in 90 days’ time, we will have rebuilt the Great Barrier Reef and prove to the environmentalists it was the dams that caused the problems. That’s why anybody dealing with electricity and they want to make more electricity, it’s actually safer to burn coal than it is to dam up the rivers. Just think of all the diseases we’ve gotten since we went away from wood ashes for fertilizing our plants and we’re using electricity now. We got 1000 new diseases that never existed before because of nutritional deficiency.   [00:38:04] Ashley James: To summarize what you said because it is such an important—that moment you said, that exact moment that Edison did that. The exact moment, just a pivotal change happened in our world because until then, we were cooking with fire, basically. We’re cooking with wood.   [00:38:26] Dr. Joel Wallach: Wood and coal.   [00:38:28] Ashley James: But if you look at old like a few hundred-year-old recipes for bread, for example, they’ll call for wood ash. They’ll call for the white ash to be added to the food. Or they used it as a thickening agent in stews. We used to eat minerals, and we used to put them in our garden. Minerals were part of our everyday supplementation. We didn’t know it. We didn’t know that it was, we just did it. It kept us healthy until we traded in our wood stove for the electric stove a few generations later plus everything we’ve done with commercial farming, we’re not getting the 60 essential minerals. I’ve heard you talk about the dams before but it really, really hit me today. What we saw happen with our bodies over the last hundred years in terms of mineral deficiency and the rates of diseases go up. Now we’re doing it to our oceans. Isn’t it 70% of the earth is covered in water, and we’ve starved the minerals. We’ve cut off the mineral supply because of all these dams with the food supply, the mineral supply to the algae. And the algae is the most important plant on our earth to help us breathe oxygen and create homeostasis.   [00:39:55] Dr. Joel Wallach: Something usable from carbon dioxide.   [00:39:57] Ashley James: Right. What we did to our bodies over the last hundred years is what we’re doing to the entire ocean right now. And it all comes back to minerals are the most important thing for our health. Of course, vitamins are, but I’ve heard you say you can accidentally get vitamins if you eat enough vegetables, but you can’t accidentally get enough minerals because of all the things that you’ve talked about.   [00:40:22] Dr. Joel Wallach: Plants don’t make minerals.   [00:40:23] Ashley James: Right. They have to be grown in minerally rich soil, which is very hard to secure especially because of the farming practices of the last hundred years and the fact that we’re not re-mineralizing our soil.   [00:40:35] Dr. Joel Wallach: After a few years, the minerals and salt are gone because the plants suck them out of the soil. Now, grandma, as you point out, used to eat wood ashes and she’d put them in the bread dough, she’d put him in the soup, and that kind of stuff. When she got crazy cravings when she was pregnant, she’d go out in the yard with a spoon and eat dirt, and she’d eat more wood ashes when she was pregnant. It’s called pica. Now, during the Second World War when they came up with baby formulas so mothers could work in the factory so they didn’t have to breastfeed their babies, babies developed what was called cribbing. They would chew on the rails and the cribs because they were minerally deficient. They were looking for minerals and say we put their hands on the crib rails and chew on the rails and they call it cribbing. When horses are minerally deficient, they chew on the top rail of a barn stall, they call it cribbing because the horse looks like they’re doing what the kids are doing in the crib. Now grandma didn’t know why, but she knew that the terrible craving she had would go away when she would eat wood ashes and put them in the food and that kind of stuff. Also, obesity was not a big problem in the world until electricity came along. I mean, if you wanted to see an obese person you had to go to the carnival or the circus, and they would have the fat lady who was 300 pounds. Other than seeing a fat lady in the circus or the carnival, you never see a fat person because they’re eating minerals because they’re putting the wood ashes into their food. When you have pica, you’re driven to want to eat even though you just had a 5000-calorie dinner. If you’re missing minerals, you are going to eat and eat and eat and eat six desserts and all that kind of stuff. That’s when the clever guys came along and said you know grandma’s out there eating dirt. We need to make pretzels, potato chips, corn puffs, and all these desserts and sell them in the stores. She’ll buy those desserts and eat those rather than eating dirt and ashes. That way we can make some money. We’re not making any money with her eating dirt and wood ashes because entrepreneurs noticed that grandma’s eating that stuff because she was craving them.   [00:42:45] Ashley James: Why is it that people will crave salty foods or sweet foods when their body really wants minerals?   [00:42:52] Dr. Joel Wallach: Because they don’t know. They’ve never been taught that craving is telling them to eat minerals. If you’ve ever been around cattle farms, bee farms, they put these red trace mineral salt blocks out in the pasture on the big corrals. The cattle will lick the salt, they’ll lick the salt, they’re getting the trace minerals at the same time because they need the salt. All vertebrates require sodium chloride for digestion to make stomach acid and all that kind of stuff. Now, here’s a funny piece to it. You go back to the years 3600 BC, there was a healer in Egypt who began to give people dried seaweed. He noticed that the ones that had goiter when he gave them dry seaweed their goiter would go away. Well, that went on until 1930. That’s a big long time. Almost 4000 years. About 1930, chemists were doing analyses of seaweed. It was getting rid of goiter in people, and he noticed that one of the biggest things in the seaweed that would cure goiter was iodine. It was in 1875. Then comes along 1920. There was a salt company in New York. They’re selling a lot of salt, but they read about this iodine, which was a big problem all around the world. They put iodine in salt and they called it iodized salt. We eliminated goiter in the world with iodized salt because everybody salted their food because they were deficient in salt, so they would eat salt with iodine. They got iodized salt. Well, just before the Second World War, all these doctors were getting trained in medical schools. Being told that salt is what creates high blood pressure. So they’re running around telling people to get rid of the salt out of your diet, it will lower your blood pressure, so take drugs. But they didn’t say be sure you’re taking a supplement that has iodine in it, so goiter came back with a vengeance. That’s why we have so much stuff going on with our thyroid glands now because even if they do have salt out there with iodine in it, people are told don’t use salt.   [00:45:25] Ashley James: Fascinating. And you pointed out that our body actually needs salt in order to make hydrochloric acid.   [00:45:33] Dr. Joel Wallach: For digestion.   [00:45:35] Ashley James: And if we don’t have enough hydrochloric acid, then we get heartburn, and then a doctor will put someone on antacids which just makes the problem worse. Then they can’t digest, so then they can’t absorb. so now they’re going to become more nutrient deficient quicker and then they can get on more drugs. It’s just a perfect path to make the pharmaceutical company money.   [00:45:58] Dr. Joel Wallach: You’re exactly right. That’s why we have our savory division, our spice division, we have the pink Himalayan salt. I use that on my breakfast food, my lunch, and my dinners. I use our pink Himalayan salt, and I take it with me when I go out on the road, and it has 84 minerals in there. That’s an addition to our sports drink, which has 78 minerals in it. Our plant-derived minerals have 78 minerals in it. We have in capsules, liquids, and powders. Oh my. There are so many diseases, they’re very simply gotten rid of. For instance, diabetes. You don’t need to go to a doctor to see if you have diabetes. You go to a pharmacy without a prescription. You get the test strips for your urine, you get the test scripture blood, and for about $1.50 for each test strip, in three minutes you’ll know if you’re diabetic or not. And you didn’t have to pay $100 for an office call. You didn’t have to pay $200 for a lab fee. It just cost you $3 or $2.50 test strips, and you know if you have diabetes or not. And then of course, if you have diabetes, we have what we call the Healthy Blood Sugar Pack. If you’ve had it for 30 years, in 30 days or less you’ll actually be an ex-diabetic. Of course, the scorecard for how well you’re doing, how well you’re managing your diabetes is the A1C. It’s supposed to be down around 5. I get people, their A1C has been 15-19 for 20, 30 years. We get them on our program, our Healthy Blood Sugar Pack, and get them off of gluten so they can absorb everything. In six weeks, their A1C is now 4 and they don’t have diabetes anymore. They go into their annual or quarterly physical and the doctor says, we’ve got to run your A1C again, it came out 4. That can’t be right because it’s been 19 for 25 years. So they rerun it and she said well I don’t know why but your A1C is 4. It’s a miracle. I’ve never seen that before. And then they just turn and walk out the door. I asked the patient. I said, “Well, did the doctor ask what you were doing?” He says, “No, he just says it’s a miracle and walked out the door.” That’s because he didn’t want to be responsible. He didn’t want to be knowing what you did so he’d have to give it to his other patients.   [00:48:14] Ashley James: Well, that happened to me. I used to have type 2 diabetes, and I got on your protocol for healthy blood sugar and it went away so fast it made my head spin. I was feeling so good. And the pica, I thought it was part of my blood sugar problem. I had constant gnawing hunger. I was hangry. Every 45 minutes I had to eat. And then within the same day, I started taking your plant-derived minerals, my hunger went away. I just burst into tears of joy. I was so excited. My blood sugar started balancing very quickly, my adrenal fatigue subsided very quickly. Within two years, we naturally conceived our child, and my polycystic ovarian syndrome had gone away. It was bam bam bam. Things were resolving. It was great. I got so excited I changed my career and became a complete advocate of your work, of nutrition, and of the fact that we can reverse disease. I’ve traveled with you. I’ve watched you, helped you, or set up lectures, and I’ve met hundreds of people that have worked with your protocols. I have personally seen people reverse adult-onset asthma, arthritis, MS, kidney failure, COPD, infertility. I’ve met people who were supposed to go in for surgeries to have knees replaced, kidneys removed, or heart surgery, and then through your protocols, they got so healthy they no longer needed to have those procedures. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes nutrition and diet and then it takes a few more months or it takes adding in some herbal support, but stick with it. I highly recommend listeners go to takeyoursupplements.com and get on Dr. Wallach’s protocol. There are these four categories that you came up with—soft tissue, hard tissue, blood sugar, and healthy nervous system. There are a bunch of different symptoms that someone could look at. There’s a checklist and they could look at and go, oh, my problem is this. An example being is if someone has cracked heels, that they have soft tissue—it’s the nutrients that support soft tissue, specifically like essential fatty acids. They have that deficiency, but they might need further support in terms of digestion if they don’t have a gallbladder in order to fully digest and absorb their EFAs. But could you talk a bit about how you’ve made this very simple so that people can get on the right protocol with all the essential nutrients their body is missing in order to correct their problem?   [00:51:12] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, well thank you. Again, my thesis for my post-doctoral fellowship represents 20,000 autopsies. I’ve done over 32,000 autopsies for my thesis in the Smithsonian Institute as a National Treasure. When I would get bodies—whether humans or animals—if they were vertebrate, they would have the same external signs of the internal deficiency disease. If it was diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, thyroid issues, kidney failure, congestive heart failure, if they had irritable bowel syndrome, or they had colitis, all these kinds of things. Of course, then they would have skin pumps, eczema, dermatitis, and psoriasis. I’m saying, well, what causes these things? I would go look up and sure enough, there has been a paper written about it 25 years earlier, 100 years earlier. That they would make the connection between a nutrient deficiency and that particular health issue. I began to write these things up and do handouts and meetings. Usually, after a while, I had enough of those handouts. I just put them together in a book. The first book of course was Let’s Play Herbal Doctor. It goes into 600 different diseases and tells you what signs to look at. For instance, my most recent book now 50 years later is It’s All In Your Head. It talks about the 25 different diseases you get when you have osteoporosis in the skull, and it’s another thing that doctors never talk about is osteoporosis of the skull. They talk about osteoporosis of your legs, your vertebrae, your pelvis, and your shoulders, but that’s it. They never talk about osteoporosis of the skull. Well, there are 12 pairs of cranial nerves. And when you have osteoporosis of the skull because your skull gets thicker and bigger when you have osteoporosis, it fills up those tunnels that those nerves go through and the spinal cord coming out of the back of the skull and squeezes them and you get all these diseases. I ask people questions when they come in and they tell me they’re losing their vision. The doctors can’t figure out why because they don’t have glaucoma, they don’t have pressure in their eye, they don’t have cataracts, they don’t have macular degeneration, but they’re slowly going blind. They have to change their eye prescription every couple of months because it’s getting worse and worse and worse no matter what the eye doctor does. I learned if I ask them, “Do you have ringing in your ears? Do you have tinnitus? It’s called tinnitus, that [ringing] tone.” “Oh, yeah. That’s terrible. I have that all the time.” “And do you ever have dizziness or balance problems?” “Oh, man. If I get up too fast the world will spin. I’ll fall down, so I have to get up very slowly and stand there for a moment before I take a step. I do have vertigo.” “Well, that’s because your skull is squeezing the auditory branch of the atrial nerve to get that tone, and you will gradually get deaf. The skull is also squeezing the vestibular branch of your atrial nerve. The tone is called tinnitus. The dizziness, vertigo or Meniere’s disease now it’s called Wallach’s vertigo because it’s not a genetic thing. It’s a simple nutritional deficiency.” But also, I think what was happening, the skull is squeezing the second cranial nerve which is the optic nerve, and slowly causing the optic nerve and the artery that goes into the back of the eye. Formed in the brain, goes to the skull to the back of the eye. They would slowly lose their vision, and didn’t have any classic eye problems. I learned, by rebuilding the skull, I could get their vision to come back. I actually won a wager. I don’t know if I told you that story.   [00:54:52] Ashley James: I don’t think so.   [00:54:54] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, this is a great story. It has to do with these sorts of things. I was in Salt Lake City giving a lecture and about 50 people in the audience. It’s got to be 25, 30 years ago. There are 30, 40 people in the audience. When I was done, the guy in the front row said, “Dr. Wallach, my mother is in her 70s, and she’s been legally blind for eight years. Is there anything you can do for her? She’s got this terrible macular degeneration that caused her blindness. She’s been legally blind 6, 8, 10 years.” “Okay, I can fix that.” This guy jumps up in the back of the room. He says, “Wallach, you’re a liar.” I said, “Who are you?” He says, “Well, I’m an eye surgeon, and I diagnose people who are legally blind because they have really severe advanced aggressive forms of macular degeneration, and they go blind. There’s nothing to do about you. You just got to accept blindness at that point.” I said, “Well, sir, let’s have a wager. Why don’t you bring me 12 of your patients that you have diagnosed? There’s no question about the diagnosis. You have diagnosed with macular degeneration. They’ve been legally blind 6, 8, 10 years.” He says, “You’re on.” The next day, he brings me 27 charts. He says, “Pick your 12.” I said, “Why pick 12? Let’s take all 27.” He says, “You’re on. Well, what’s the wager? I said, “Well if I win, if I can cure these people in 90 days, if I can do it, it’ll happen in 90 days. If I can cure these people in 90 days—they go from being legally blind to be able to read 20-20 in 90 days, now you have to pay for their supplements. You have to apologize in public for calling me a liar. You have to buy me one of the most expensive steaks in Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and you’re going to buy me the most expensive French red wine in America, a bottle of it.” He says, “You’re on.” I said, “I’ll take all 27.” He says, “Well, how are we going to get him the information.” I said, “Well, I’m going to write up a little protocol that’ll be per 100 pounds of body weight, and I’ll call and talk to each one and I’ll mail each one so you need to give me their addresses so I know this is really happening.” He says, “You’re on.” So we went at it. Gave them the 90 essential nutrients, the anti-inflammatories, the MSM, vitamin D3, and so on. We went at it. In 90 days, 25 of the 27 could read 20-20. It took two more weeks for the other two. So he paid off on all counts.   [00:57:37] Ashley James: I love it.   [00:57:41] Dr. Joel Wallach: This is why we came up with a book, It’s All In Your Head. We talk about these 25 different diseases you get. You lose your sense of smell, you lose your sense of taste. You’ve heard of Bell’s Palsy, that’s the squeezing of the seventh cranial nerve, the facial nerve when you have osteoporosis. And then there’s trigeminal neuralgia. You have pain in your face and you can’t make saliva and everything because the fifth cranial nerve is being squeezed. And then people, when they get older, their voice tends to change. That happens because their ninth cranial nerve≤ the glossopharyngeal which controls the vocal cords are being squeezed. Beginning to get the picture?   [00:58:41] Ashley James: Fascinating. It’s all osteoporosis of the skull.   [00:58:43] Dr. Joel Wallach: Of the skull, and that’s why we have the book now, It’s All In Your Head. We’re selling these by the hundreds every day now. It was on the best-selling list, number one bestseller in ebook for the ebook companies—Amazon, Apple, Kindle. It’s going viral this book.   [00:59:13] Ashley James: I love it, and now you have a new DVD that just came out. If we were to watch it, what would we learn?   [00:59:19] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, the new DVD, Is Your Doctor Killing You? It goes into these things that are supposed to be genetic, supposed to be autoimmune, and so forth. They’re really just nutritional deficiencies. This was a Zoom video. It started out as a Zoom video. The person who interviewed me—like you’re doing now—was an academic pharmacist. It’s one of those things where Pharmacist Keith Abell, he was really on me when I was saying I can cure this, I can cure this, I can cure this. I always give references to make him satisfied. While we’re doing the Zoom, he goes online—he’s a techie—and he gets that article and he puts the cover page with the abstract and the authors in the title on it right next to my face. When you look at this Zoom, you’re getting the reference right next to my face on this DVD, Is Your Doctor Killing You? Of course, he is. And then, of course, we have the two CDs set—two one-hour CDs, and it was a two-hour lecture. I was lecturing to a big church up in Baltimore, Maryland with Linda. It was such audience participation. There were 1000 people in that church. It was really great. Those are the two new tools, Is Your Doctor Killing You? It goes along with the book Rare Earths: Forbidden Cures, and of course, the new book is It’s All In Your Head.   [01:01:03] Ashley James: Thank you. Very good. Now, recently, it just launched a few months ago, and I’ve already had several of my listeners participate. There’s a health coach program—it’s all online and it’s very, very affordable. Anyone, you don’t have to have any previous knowledge about holistic health. It goes through and teaches them exactly what your protocols are and how to help yourself, your friends, your family, but also, it’s great for health coaches. It’s great for even naturopathic doctors or any kind of doctor could go through this protocol, go through this health course. They can learn exactly your protocols, and you have these four categories. It goes through the list of the different symptoms and then it relates back to the nutrient deficiencies. I love that you saw this, that you saw that when you did all of these autopsies and the millions of histopathologies and blood panels, you’re able to see that nutrient deficiency was the root cause of 900 diseases, and that each disease you could replicate. You could see either in animals. If you starved an animal of a nutrient, you could predict what disease they would get based on the nutrient they were not getting—same with humans. You could see certain symptoms—exterior symptoms. I use the examples of cracked heels because it’s so common, but that there are many symptoms that an MD would not consider relevant, and that these symptoms are actually red flags showing us that we have nutrient deficiency.   [01:03:01] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s correct.   [01:03:02] Ashley James: In terms of this course, the best way to go about joining it is to go to takeyoursupplements.com because once you communicate with us, then we set you on that path and help you to sign up and learn all of Dr. Wallach’s protocols. Done in a really easy to use way, which I’m very excited about because I have been studying your work. How I learned the protocols is you’ve been doing radio shows for many years answering questions.   [01:03:35] Dr. Joel Wallach: Thirty years.   [01:03:34] Ashley James: Right, I went back and I listened to all the recordings I could find. Every day, eight hours a day, I would put them on. In my first year and a half working with the supplements, I had it playing in my house and I would listen to every single archive I could get my hands on. I’d hear the problem and then I’d try to predict the different course of action that you’d help them take. What’s really cool is that listening to it—because I listened to several episodes in one day—a few months later, someone would call back. They would say, okay, I don’t have MS anymore but I’m calling for my sister. So many people would call back and tell you that they’ve had progress, or they’d come back and they’d say, okay, my migraines are gone but my hands are still shaking. You’d correct their protocol. All this information has been put together in a really easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to learn way. Do you have time to answer a few questions for the listeners?   [01:04:37] Dr. Joel Wallach: Absolutely. I have one thing I need to do first and that is to thank you so much for putting together that training. I just appreciate you, respect you, and look forward to working with you for the next couple hundred years.   [01:04:52] Ashley James: Well, that’s it. When my husband and I learned from you almost 10 years ago, and you said we have the genetic potential to live to be 120, my husband and I are like let’s do this. We’re going to do this. Let’s do this. Let’s live to be 120. We’re right there with you. I’m very, very excited about that.   [01:05:10] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, thank you so much.   [01:05:13] Ashley James: Absolutely, you’re very welcome. Mike Park is one of our listeners whose son has an SCI. He got a fever and all of a sudden his legs stopped working. They think it was a viral infection of his nervous system, and he has neuropathy. He would like to know, is there a protocol that you know that can help stimulate the neurogenesis nerve growth factor and help with neuropathy in people with SCI?   [01:05:47] Dr. Joel Wallach: He’s got low back stuff, is that what it is?   [01:05:53] Ashley James: He’s like a five-year-old child who no longer has use of his legs because of this, I believe, a viral infection that happened to his spinal cord.   [01:06:04] Dr. Joel Wallach: It may just be osteoporosis of the skull because newborn babies can have osteoporosis in the skull. When you read this book, it’ll make you weep and cry. He’s five years old. I bet his skull is squeezing his spinal cord is what’s going on here.   [01:06:19] Ashley James: Fascinating.   [01:06:22] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. It makes you take a deep breath, doesn’t it?   [01:06:24] Ashley James: Really does.   [01:06:27] Dr. Joel Wallach: Do we have any idea how much this little kid weighs?   [01:06:31] Ashley James: Probably about 40 pounds.   [01:08:36] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, so let’s get him off all the bad foods. Everybody in the family’s got to get rid of fried food, processed meats, oils, glutens, wheat, barley, rye, oats, and sugar. He’s got to live like an Asian. Live on rice, sweet potatoes, and millets. You can make bread, pancakes, waffles, and all kinds of stuff out of rice, sweet potatoes, or white potatoes. You can have all that, okay. And the vegetables and the fish. I like the smoked Alaska salmon. I have that almost every morning for breakfast. That’s a good thing, plus my three poached eggs, soft yolks, and so on. I do have rice. I have three ice cream scoops full of rice, and then I have all my pills, my liquids, and so forth. Let’s say this kid weighs 40, 50 pounds. Let’s get him one Healthy Brain and Heart Pack that’ll last him two months because it’ll be a half a dose of everything every day, so he’ll get a quarter of a dose of everything at breakfast and dinner. I also want him to have the MSM. I want him to take three MSM a day, one with each meal. That bottle of MSM’s going to last two months. I also want them to get vitamin D3. I want them to take three of those twice a day, so it’ll be two bottles of vitamin D3. I want him to have the Glucogel. He can have liquid Glucogel. It’d be an ounce twice a day, put it into his shake. Or if he wants the capsules, he could take five capsules twice a day. Of course, he needs to be using our pink Himalayan salt. When they go out and eat, he can take what we call the mineral caps. One capsule of mineral caps has the same amount of minerals in it as one ounce of the liquid minerals. And then I want them to have six eggs a day. You can put them in a shake, you can have them soft boiled, soft poached, soft scrambled with butter, or you can whip them up with a blender and put them in one of her protein shakes. Because this kid, he had an infection they said that caused his problem.   [01:08:36] Ashley James: Yes. He is about five years old and the infection happened. I believe it was about a year ago, so he’s now in a wheelchair.   [01:08:43] Dr. Joel Wallach: So it happened when he was already four years old. Let’s see what happens in 90 days by doing all this. He’s got to make sure there’s no gluten in his life. No wheat, barley, rye, and oats. No cheat day. No one cheat meal a month—no gluten. Everybody, all the other brothers and sisters, mom and dad. Everybody’s got to get rid of gluten. You need to ask him did he have any skin problems as well—eczema, dermatitis, psoriasis, rosacea? Does he ever complain about ringing in his ears or tinnitus?   [01:09:19] Ashley James: So if he complains of ringing in his ears that would be one of the symptoms of the osteoporosis of the skull.   [01:09:25] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s correct.   [01:09:26] Ashley James: And then the skin problem, is that gluten-related?   [01:09:30] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, the gluten causes damage to the villi in the intestines, so you cannot absorb nutrients. And the nutrient is missing when you get eczema, dermatitis, psoriasis, rosacea. You get things like irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, diverticulitis. All those types of diseases are caused by a deficiency of the same nutrient that causes eczema, dermatitis, psoriasis, and rosacea. Same nutrient deficiency causes all that. And then when you have damaged your intestines—I want to get into it if we have time. I want to get into a little bit of the COVID-19. But this kid has a great possibility of recovering 100%.   [01:10:25] Ashley James: I’m very excited about that.   [01:10:28] Dr. Joel Wallach: You’ll know within six months.   [01:10:32] Ashley James: Excellent. We’ll definitely follow up. Mike has been an active listener and a member of our Learn True Health Facebook group, and he’s been sharing his son’s journey. I’m excited to help Mike get on that protocol. For everyone who’s listening, please go to takeyoursupplements.com to get on these protocols that Dr. Wallach is talking about. The next question is can we fix lazy eye or weak eye muscles? Is there a way to support eye health and reverse lazy eye?   [01:11:03] Dr. Joel Wallach: And how old is this person?   [01:11:05] Ashley James: You know what, I don’t know. They submitted it in the group, and looking at her picture, she looks to be in her 30s.   [01:11:17] Dr. Joel Wallach: Well, the fourth cranial nerves and the sixth cranial nerves are the ones that control the eyes and muscles. If you have osteoporosis of the skull, you get a lazy eye because it’s squeezing those nerves.   [01:11:28] Ashley James: I’m really starting to grasp how prevalent these problems are. The osteoporosis of the skulls is producing so many problems because it’s a nutrient deficiency.    [01:11:44] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, well it is a mineral deficiency. It is nutrient deficiency. I mean, how many doctors have told their patients, look, you have osteoporosis of the skull that’s why you have Bell’s palsy. No, they just say we’re going to give you steroids. They’ll get some benefit for a while, but it’ll come right back because they haven’t dealt with a basic problem.   [01:12:01] Ashley James: So then the problem isn’t a weak eye muscle, it’s that the nerve is being impinged and it’s sending a weak signal?   [01:12:09] Dr. Joel Wallach: Either sending a weak signal or an overactive signal.   [01:12:14] Ashley James: Very interesting.   [01:12:15] Dr. Joel Wallach: Either one.   [01:12:18] Ashley James: So your approach for her would be to follow a protocol that supports healthy bones and joints?   [01:12:26] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. You don’t know how much this lady weighs or anything?   [01:12:31] Ashley James: I do not.   [01:12:32] Dr. Joel Wallach: Let’s say for 100 pounds of body weight, one Healthy Brain and Heart pack. Five Glucogel capsules twice a day. MSM, three of those tablets twice a day. Just in case, I would also throw in the Ultimate Daily Classic tablets for circulation in the brain, three of those twice a day.   [01:12:56] Ashley James: Excellent. Thank you. Lauren wants to know about raising estrogen and testosterone in herself naturally. Her doctor says her estrogen and her testosterone is low. What can we do to balance and increase healthy hormone levels?   [01:13:15] Dr. Joel Wallach: How old is she? What does she weigh?   [01:13:17] Ashley James: I do not know what she weighs, but she looks to be in her late 20s.   [01:13:24] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, so young person. Well, again, she got to get rid of gluten. Got to get rid of all the fried foods, processed meats, oils, glutens, wheat, barley, rye, and oats, and absolutely no sugar. And then per 100 pounds of body weight, give her one healthy brain and heart pack for a month, three eggs with soft yolks twice a day—hard-boiled eggs won’t count because 95% of estrogen is cholesterol, 95% of testosterone is cholesterol. Avoiding cholesterol and taking statin drugs will make these things happen in people. I’m avoiding cholesterol because my family all had issues with their heart, well your doctor needs to be put in jail. Anyway, then they also need the D-Stress capsule, take those twice a day. Ultimate Niacin Plus, one of those twice a day. Anything going on with the brain and spinal cord needs to have the Ultimate Daily Classic tablets. Now, there’s one other thing that has to be done for the testosterone and the estrogen. We have a product called XeraTest, which is the food for the Sertoli cells and testicles that make the testosterone. They need the cholesterol and all the 90 nutrients to be able to work, don’t waste your money on the XeraTest if you’re not giving them the 90 cents of nutrients and the eggs, the cheese, and so on. And then the same thing is true for the female part for the estrogen and progesterone. They need XeraFem. Let’s see here, I can personally testify. I’m 81 years old, and I look like I’m 50, I sound like I’m 50. And sexually, I act like I’m 25.   [01:15:29] Ashley James: That’s a very important point to make. Many men, in their 30s and 40s, are experiencing erectile dysfunction, and it’s a nutrient deficiency.   [01:15:37] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s correct. Especially cholesterol. Remember, testosterone is 95%, by weight, cholesterol. So they got to give up the statin drugs. What they need to do is wrap up the statin drugs and give them to their doctor with love.   [01:15:56] Ashley James: Here, you take these if they’re so good for you.   [01:15:59] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. I was going to give them to somebody else because I’m going in another direction here, but I thought, who do I really think a lot? I’ll give them to you, doc. Please take them.   [01:16:11] Ashley James: So funny. I love it. I love that we could take someone who is struggling with hormones and show them through food and through supplements they can easily balance it. That’s exactly what happened to me. Leslie says she has scleroderma, right heart failure, and pulmonary hypertension. She’s been vegetarian for several years eating not junk food but very healthy food. She’s 117 pounds and 5’7”, and she says her autoimmune disease is progressing. She would love to support her body in no longer having these problems.   [01:16:50] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, we can do that. Get rid of all the bad food. No fried food, no processed meats, no oils, no glutens—wheat, barley, rye, and oats, no sugar, and everybody in the household—dog, cat, bird, fish, spouse, renter, roommate, mom, dad, brother, and kids. Everybody’s going to be drop-dead gluten-free because what do vegetarians eat a lot of?   [01:17:13] Ashley James: Gluten, a lot of it.   [01:17:16] Dr. Joel Wallach: Grain. There you go. That’s why she has all these diseases that doctors are telling her are autoimmune because even if she was supplementing, she can’t absorb it because her villi are gone out of her intestines. I’m going to tell you a story here. I don’t think I told you this yet. There’s a guy by the name of Herman Cain. Did I tell you that story?   [01:17:42] Ashley James: Oh, gosh. The name sounds so familiar. Go ahead and tell the listeners.   [01:17:45] Dr. Joel Wallach: Well, Herman Cain, CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. On the last day of June of 2020, he was diagnosed with COVID-19. He’s a billionaire, 74 years old, and he had respiratory symptoms. They put them in a hospital, they’re giving him oxygen, and they’re giving him IVs of antiviral drugs. On the 29th of July, 29 days after they put him in the hospital, he died. He’s a billionaire. CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. He has all the free pizza he can get. Gluten alert, gluten alert, gluten alert—the crust. He also had five pre-existing conditions because of the gluten, he couldn’t absorb nutrients. I don’t know if he was supplementing or not because they didn’t say in the newspaper releases. But when they did the autopsy three days later after he died, they said he didn’t have a respiratory infection, which is what they were treating him for but he did have respiratory distress clinically but he didn’t have respiratory pneumonia from the virus or anything. Well, that’s because the capillaries in his lungs were filled with clusters of a weird plot of red blood cells that didn’t have platelets in them. Well, he didn’t have any platelets because his bone marrow is dead because he couldn’t get nutrition because his intestines are dead because he’s been eating gluten—pizza pie crust for 35 years.   [01:19:37] Ashley James: Just fascinating.   [01:19:40] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. If they’d have gotten him gluten-free, gotten him on the 90. If he still wanted pizza, he could have pizza, but it had to have cauliflower gluten-free crust.   [01:19:55] Ashley James: But people say, oh I tried going gluten-free I didn’t notice anything. It’s not something you feel a difference like a peanut allergy. You’re removing something that’s doing damage to the microvilli of the small intestines, you eliminate it completely, and then your intestines then grow back and become strong, especially if you’re supplementing.   [01:20:19] Dr. Joel Wallach: And you have to have the 90.   [01:20:22] Ashley James: Right. And then, like you said, if you’ve been eating gluten, then over time, your bone marrow can’t produce platelets in a healthy way. Your immune system can’t function in a healthy way, and we end up getting autoimmune conditions and inflammatory conditions, but the root of it is a nutrient deficiency and eating foods that are doing damage to the body and the ability for the body to absorb nutrition.   [01:20:47] Dr. Joel Wallach: Here we go, Ashley, when you have these types of diseases, things like cortisone and prednisone can give you some temporary relief. I just love my doctor. Man I had skin problems all my life and he gave me prednisone and cortisone and the itching went away overnight. Within two weeks’ time, the skin problem was gone. Three months later they die.   [01:21:15] Ashley James: Of course, it would temporarily go away. They’re treating symptoms, not getting to the root cause.   [01:21:20] Dr. Joel Wallach: Exactly.   [01:21:21] Ashley James: Right. Dr. Wallach, thank you so much. We’re going to have you back on the show for sure because more questions have poured in from the listeners. I’d love to have you back on and to continue to share this information. You are a godsend. The work you do is absolutely amazing. There’s so much confusion in the nutrient world. What I love about your message is it’s science-based and you are backed by so many years of results. I’ve met thousands of people, myself personally, who have gotten results with you, and you’ve helped millions of people. We just have to get this information out there that we can prevent disease, we can reverse disease, we can prevent birth defects, and we can help ourselves. But also help the planet through proper mineralization and through making sure we’re avoiding the bad foods and ingesting the 90 essential nutrients. Please, listeners, go to takeyoursupplements.com to get on Dr. Wallach’s protocol, to learn more about how you can actually become certified as a health coach learning everything about Dr. Wallach’s protocols. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you’d like to say, Dr. Wallach, to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:22:33] Dr. Joel Wallach: Well, I just want to thank you so much, Ashley. You’re an angel of God. I’m just so proud of you and your husband, all the things you guys do. I’m just blessed that you would ask me to participate with you. We will do great things together, and it’ll be one of those things where right now people are also looking for things to do because of the COVID and they’re being laid off. We’re looking for help. I’m glad you’re working to get these people going. I’m willing to participate and help you do what you’re doing. Of course, we have all the textbooks, CDs and DVDs, and everything like that. It’ll be one of those things where everybody’s going to get the same answer to the same question. They don’t have to be scared and say, oh my God. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that disease. Well, look it up in Let’s Play Herbal Doctor, Rare Earths: Forbidden Cures, or Epigenetics. Look it up in those books and you’ll find the answers of what it is and then how to deal with it. It’s one of those things where you cannot fail. We’ve been doing this for 50 years. We’ve been doing this for 50 years. We have literally millions and millions and millions of people all over the world, and that’s why we have to travel so much and do worldwide Zooms and so forth. I can’t thank you enough for all the people you’re helping, Ashley. God bless you and your husband. Thank you.   [01:23:55] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Joel Wallach. Check out takeyoursupplements.com, talk to us for free. Let us help you get on his protocol, and also join the Learn True Health Facebook group because you can ask Dr. Wallach your questions when I have him back on the show next. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. There are so many amazing episodes on so many fantastic topics. You can go to learntruehealth.com, use the search function on my website. Most of my episodes now have been transcribed, so you can even read through the transcripts. You can listen to the episodes, you can read through the interviews, and you can search through the content to find what you want to learn about. And also, if you have a friend or family member with an illness, an injury, or disease, or a health question, you can use the search function both in the Facebook group and on my website learntruehealth.com to find information to share with those you care about. I can’t talk highly enough about takeyoursupplements.com, so please, go there if you haven’t already. Try it for 30 days. Just try especially the liquid minerals. Give them a try, or just get on the 90 essential nutrients for a month. It’s fantastic. I’ve even had clients stop drinking coffee and no longer even need coffee because they got so much natural energy because the body—when it’s lacking energy and it says get a coffee, an energy drink, or eat more sugar, it’s really desperate for nutrition. When you start to fill up those nutrient tanks with your vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals, it’s amazing how much energy you will get from that. Just give it a try. It’s pretty fantastic. It has really changed my life and all my clients rave about it. I know you will too. Takeyoursupplements.com. And hey, if you want to hear from those listeners who have been working with takeyoursupplements.com, come join the Facebook group and ask or use the search function. There have been a ton of listeners who have shared that they’ve had a great experience working with takeyoursupplements.com and Dr. Wallach’s supplements. Awesome. Thank you so much. Stay tuned. We have some really exciting episodes coming up in the coming weeks. I can’t wait for you to hear them. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Dr. Joel Wallach! The Wallach Revolution The Wallach Files Wellness Publications Youngevity Facebook Twitter Instagram

Kathleentrotter.com Learn True Health Home Kitchen Membership Course: Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coach   How To Make Fitness Your Lifelong Habit  https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-make-fitness-your-lifelong-habit   Highlights: Using data to set up systems Know what you’re putting in your body Guilt versus shame Polyvagal theory Motion is non-negotiable Four different fitness personalities   Is there something in your life that you need to improve? Do you want to be the best version of you? In this episode, Kathleen Trotter teaches us different ways to become a better version of ourselves. She talks about how journaling can help, listing out past data, and creating systems to help us become a better version of ourselves no matter what our goal is. Intro: Hello, true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today, we have Kathleen Trotter on the show. I’m very excited for you to learn from her. She is giving away a spot in one of her upcoming courses, and it’s very exciting. So as you’re listening today and you think, I would love to learn from Kathleen, you could actually enter to win a free spot in her upcoming class. It’s an online, interactive group coaching class. Please go to our Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group. There you will see a pin to the top. In the next few weeks, you’ll see a post to be able to be one of the winners. I ask that you share some unique insight that you really love learning today in the comments. I’ll have my 5 ½-year-old son pick at random a lucky listener from one of the comments. It would just be a wonderful opportunity. I just love it when guests give some of their work to us. Gift their books or gift a spot in their courses. I think that’s quite wonderful. Now, as you’re listening to Kathleen today and you think, I would love to do the kind of work she’s doing. I’d love to do the kind of work Ashley James is doing. I’d love to be able to help people as a health coach. Help them gain more joy in their life, joy in their body, and joy with their food—consider becoming a holistic health coach. Consider becoming an integrative health coach. You can get a free module by going to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach and sign up for the free module to see if health coaching is right for you. Take the free module and you’ll know if it’s something that you’d love to do either for yourself or to improve the health of yourself, your friends, and your family. To add new tools to your tool belt, or to even start a new career. What I love about IIN is that in the first half of the course, you are taught how to be a fantastic health coach. And then in the second half, in addition to learning how to be a fantastic health coach, you actually begin to already work with clients. So you’re still in the program, still able to be mentored while you’re working with clients, and they teach you how to build a successful coaching business. So if you’ve never even started a business before, and you don’t know if you’re confident enough to have those tools, know that their course teaches you how to do it. And it’s about coming from the heart and wanting to help people and getting such satisfaction from helping people. So visit learntruehealth.com/coach or learntruehealth.com/coaching—either one—and you will get the fee module and check it out. If you have more questions, you can email me, ashley@learntruehealth.com, or just google IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and ask some questions. Most of the time, those who answer the phones there are health coaches themselves that have been through the program and are really great in answering questions and giving you all the right information you need. The course was designed for very busy people, especially busy moms. You know that no matter how busy you are, you’re able to finish their online program to become an integrative health coach. As you talk to IIN know that you’re given fantastic savings by being a Learn True Health listener. That’s something I was really honored that they were able to offer my listeners. Make sure you mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health podcast for fantastic savings. Once in a while, they have great specials as well. It’s good to plug in if you’re interested in becoming a health coach. It’s good to communicate with them and get all your questions answered.  And If you’re not interested in becoming a health coach but you are interested in gaining more tools for health, of course, Kathleen Trotter, our wonderful guest today, is going to teach you many things. You should absolutely follow her. She has some great information. But also, I recommend joining my membership, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen.  I go into the kitchen with my dear friend Naomi, and we show you how to cook healing foods and beverages that are wonderful for the whole family. You don’t have to be completely vegan to eat this food, although we teach you how to eat more plants, and you can incorporate that into your life. You’re going to get more fiber, you’re going to get more vitamins, you’re going to get more nutrients into your life by joining Learn True Health Home Kitchen and following our delicious, wholesome, and healing recipes. So check that out. You can just go to learntruehealth.com and on the top, on the menu, you’ll see join the home kitchen. Check that out. Also, there’s a discount for listeners. Use the coupon code LTH. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. I look forward to seeing you in the Facebook group. Come join us here. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.   [00:05:36] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 446. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Kathleen Trotter on the show. Her website is kathleentrotter.com, and of course, links to everything that Kathleen does is going to be on the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Kathleen has a master’s in exercise science, and she’s a life and nutrition coach, which is really exciting because you encompass behavior, change, and looking at the person’s whole life when it comes to helping them do the best exercise routines for them. Now you also have interesting specialties in fascial work. I mean, I just love it. I look down on your bio, and I love all the different training that you’ve been through. You’ve been doing this for over 20 years, you’ve written two books.   [00:06:34] Kathleen Trotter: I love it, really, and it changed my life—health and wellness—so I want it to change other people’s. I have this thing about the health discourse, and it’s too much framed on making people feel about themselves. It’s about how you should be somebody else, and it’s like no, you should be yourself. Thrive in your lane, but just be the strongest, most energetic, and healthiest version of you that you can be. And I think that’s why I try to look and learn as much as possible because the body is super cool. But it’s really complex and there are so many variables that go into who we are and why we change, right? It’s not enough to just know the information. I mean, most of us know it. It’s like drink more water, exercise more. It’s all these shoulds—well do this, do that. And too often, we should all over ourselves without actually being well, what do I want to do? What would make me happy? What’s realistic? It might not be realistic to run every day for you because of injuries or time. The benefits of the best workout or best nutrition program are moot if you can’t actually make yourself do it. It’s about thriving in your own lane and figuring out what’s right for you. But in order to do that, you kind of have to know yourself enough to know do I like having a shake in the morning, or would I rather have eggs? Or is it too crazy in the morning to have eggs at all and should I be having little egg cups that I make on a Sunday? I mean, that sounds like a silly example, but that in itself can be the difference between making a sustainable change about your healthy breakfast or not. If you say, well, every morning I’m going to have eggs and then every morning you wake up and you’re like oh man. I got five kids to get to school and they need breakfast and they hate eggs. Well, it’s just not going to happen. You got to do you, know you, and just consistency and realistic expectations.   [00:08:22] Ashley James: Before we hit record, we were talking about how the motivation to make healthy changes or the motivation to create a new fitness program is short-lived. We oftentimes will come from a place of emotion, right? Feeling guilty, feeling like we should do this, then all of a sudden feeling inspired. We could maybe watch a TV show about health and all of a sudden feel inspired. I remember so many times watching the Biggest Loser or the finale of the Biggest Loser and seeing these really buff chicks. I’m like, okay, I’m getting to the gym tomorrow. When you look at the statistics of gym memberships, there’s a huge spike in January, and then by March they’re cut in half and the attendance goes down and down and down and down, and then it goes back up right after the holidays. We see that there are difficulties in forming healthy habits as a society around fitness, but also the idea of what is fitness? Is it heavily sweating in the gym on a treadmill, and is that really right for everyone? You understand how the body works and what’s best for unique people, right? We all need different things, and so that’s one of the things you specialize in is teaching people how they can create a fitness routine that brings them joy, that makes them want to want to get up and do it every day, but also would be the healthiest thing for them. I can’t tell you how many times I injured myself pushing myself in the gym because it wasn’t really the right training for my body.   [00:10:08] Kathleen Trotter: Absolutely. Well, let me go back to where you started because there are so many amazing concepts that you just threw out, which are awesome, but let’s unpack it a bit. Motivation has to be thought of as akin to an emotion, which means emotions come and go. You get angry, you get sad. The half-life of an emotion is a couple of seconds and then it’s gone. It’s very fast. So what you want to do is if you are in that motivated state, you watch the Biggest Loser or it’s January 1, that’s great. Use that, but use it to create systems for the future you that is going to be sad, that is going to be frustrated, and that is going to be angry. So then, when you have those moments of low motivation, you don’t fall off your horse. I guess it’s a matter of going back to realistic expectations. You have to know that you are human. You’re not perfect, none of us are perfect. You’re not a robot. Thank God. We don’t want robots. We want human beings, and human beings are messy, we’re emotional, and that’s one of our best qualities, but it also means that it’s easy for us to fall off our horse. Okay, a couple of weeks down the road we’ve got the gym membership after January 1, and then we get angry at our spouse or our kids or our boss and we’re just like screw it. I’m not going to go to the gym. And then you end up going home, you binge on some food, you feel kind of crappy, and then that starts this negative downward spiral. So you have to, on January 1, instead of just thinking oh my goodness, I feel amazing right now. And then assuming you’re always going to feel amazing, you have to say, oh I feel amazing right now. That’s great. Let’s harness that feeling of amazing motivation, and let’s use it to create some systems. I know for the last 10 years in a row, by the third week of January, I’m no longer going to the gym. Okay, great. That’s amazing data. Now, how do I use that data from past years to help future me? I think that’s one really key thing is just using your past history of what you like, what you don’t like, what works, what doesn’t, and then you create some systems. If you know that in the past you’ve always been really successful when you’ve had a gym buddy, then maybe have one. And if you can’t go right now with somebody to a gym because of COVID, then maybe you have an accountability buddy that you do over email, or maybe you go for walk and talks with your buddy in your ear. If you know that you really love Pilates, then find an online Pilates class. If you know you hate yoga, so then maybe don’t do yoga. Use what you know about yourself when you’re successful to set up a plan, but you have to set up the system. Why don’t I give you an example? I love fudge bars, and I use this example all the time because I think it’s really, really common. You’re in the grocery store, and I’ll be standing next to the frozen food aisle. I’ll just be thinking, I can buy the bars. You know Kathleen, you’re a personal trainer. You’re going to get home. You’ll be fine. You’re dedicated, you have willpower. You just won’t eat them. The problem is after years of doing this, what I know is the future me at 11:00 PM at night when I’m really tired, I’ve worked a full day, I can’t resist those fudge bars. So what I have done is a system where I don’t allow them to come into my home because I just love them too much, but I buy them and I always leave a box at my mom’s. If I want one, I can walk over. We can have a visit, I can enjoy one bar but I don’t binge on six bars at a time and then feel frustrated with myself. The systems are what you set up in the future for the future you. If you know you need to work out in the morning because that’s what works for your schedule but you hate working out in the morning, then maybe you have to set out your workout clothes the night before so they’re there. I actually sleep in my workout clothes often if I know that I have to work out really early. This morning, I had to do my workout about 5:000 AM in the morning, so I slept in my workout clothes because it’s one less thing between me and my workout. You take out as much friction as possible, you take it away. You make those healthy habits as convenient as possible. You make your unhealthy habits as inconvenient as possible. Put your alarm clock across the room so you have to get out of bed and turn it off versus just hitting the snooze button. Take all the crap out of your house because if it’s in your house, you or somebody you love will eventually eat it. One of the things that work is understanding this idea of present bias. The brain has many cognitive distortions that normally trick us a little bit. They trick us unconsciously. It’s not that we think, oh, I’m going to trick myself. It’s that we don’t understand until we become mindful of it that the brain feels that however we feel at this moment is how we’re always going to feel. Meaning, January 1 you think, I feel really motivated, without having to consciously think, oh well therefore I will always feel motivated. That’s what your brain thinks, but you have to say to the brain well, no, I’m not going to always feel motivated. What are the systems? But it also goes the other way that when you wake up in the morning, it’s 5:00 AM, and you’re tired, your brain thinks oh my God, I’m always going to be tired. Because you’re tired at that moment. Okay, well I always snooze my alarm too many times in the morning, so my system is to set the alarm across the room. And then, I also have to have the self-talk ready to say okay self, you feel tired at this moment but future you will feel better. That’s something I get my clients to work with all the time. It’s just this taking a pause and realizing that the moment that you’re in is not going to last. Emotions, as we talked about earlier, they dissipate. You feel something else. That’s the key to the emotion and the emotional wave. How you surf that emotional wave is so important because we all have moments of low motivation. There are lots of times I don’t want to work out. There are lots of times I want to eat tons and tons of chocolate, but I don’t have chocolate in my house. I have systems set up that nudge me towards the healthier choices, and I’ve learned a lot. This has been 20 years that I’ve been in the fitness field. I use every experience as data to help my future self. It’s a slow process, right? It’s not just like a pass-fail thing. You don’t automatically become healthy and then it’s easy. It’s always a struggle, and I wasn’t born fit either. I think that’s also really key is I know that for the first half of my life I lived, I felt really ashamed of my body I had a lot of body shame. I did anything to get out of gym class. I never moved. I was overweight. I had to learn these systems. It never came naturally to me. Everybody listening, if you’re thinking, oh my God, Kathleen sounds like she’s got this all figured out. Believe you me, it has taken a long time, and I still struggle. I struggle, struggle, struggle, but it gets a little bit easier every single day as you learn more skills and as you learn to just say future me is going to be happier if I work out. I never regret a workout, and the future me is going to be happier if I have some water and I just take a moment to take a pause and think. What’s going to serve me at this moment? I don’t know. Do you have a trick? Do you have a system? Do you have a favorite system?   [00:17:00] Ashley James: I love what you just said about I never regret a workout. I love that.   [00:17:06] Kathleen Trotter: That’s so true.   [00:17:07] Ashley James: I do the future you feel better. Actually, what I do is when I’m lying in bed, just waking up, I imagine myself an hour later. An hour later I’m going to feel so good. I imagine myself already awake. I have a very comfortable bed. My mattress is the best mattress in the world. I actually interviewed the founder of the company that created this mattress. It has space-age technology. It’s like NASA technology in it, and it makes it so there’s no pressure points—absolutely no pressure points. It doesn’t matter how much you weigh, it doesn’t matter what shape you are in. It actually is used to heal stage four bedsores—this technology—because it takes 100% of the pressure off and evenly distributes your body, so no matter what position you’re in, your spine is perfectly aligned. When I wake up, I’m floating on the cloud.   [00:18:02] Kathleen Trotter: You want to stay in bed. You’re like, I don’t want to move at all.   [00:18:03] Ashley James: If you’ve ever had a mattress where you wake up in the morning and you’re sore because you want to get out of that bed because it’s like, oh I’ve been lying in bed too long. I’m sore. That does not happen with my bed. You could stay in this bed for 24 hours. You’re not going to be sore from staying in this bed. When I wake up, every fiber of my being wants to continue to enjoy the comfort of this bed. I’m still a little tired. I’m groggy. I’m just waking up. But you know what, since I’ve done so many things for my health over the years, I have more and more and more energy in the morning, which really helps to get up. So going to bed early, not eating late at night. Even doing a bit of intermittent fasting where I push supper back to 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM and then no snacking afterward. So you go to bed on an empty stomach. Drink enough water, so drink like 120 ounces of water a day, but finish that 120 ounces by about 6:00 PM so that you have enough time to pee before bed. But go to bed at 10:00 PM because the circadian rhythm gets totally thrown off and we have a huge cortisol spike. Therefore insulin is then affected. Then we have a blood sugar imbalance if we stay up past 10:00 PM. It doesn’t matter what time zone you’re in. Something magical about 10:00 PM has a cortisol spike if we continue to stay up past 10:00 PM. So when I go to bed before 10:00 PM—falling asleep around 10:00 PM—I wake up in the morning with way more energy, way more vitality, no inflammation, and it’s easier to get out of bed. But there’s a little voice in my head that goes oh, this feels so good. Let’s just stay here. Or oh, I’m tired. Maybe I could fall back asleep, hit the snooze button. I have to imagine myself after I’ve gotten up, gone to the bathroom and put clothing on. That future me an hour from now is ready, pumped, and doing the day already. I’m like, yeah, I want to be my future self. Let’s get out of bed.   [00:20:09] Kathleen Trotter: I think you said a number of things that are really important, but I want to highlight the biggest thing is that you have got a lot of data about yourself. I think that with health, the problem is that we listen to people like you and me, and then you think oh my God, they have it all figured out. But we have it figured out because we’ve done a lot of trial and error. And this is really important. If anybody’s listening, if you get one thing from this, it’s that you don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to get great. So all the things you just said like you know you need to be in bed by 10:00 PM. You know intermittent fasting works for you. You know how much waterworks at what time. Well, that’s all great, but that comes from years of figuring it out and what works for you, and everyone’s going to be slightly different. So for me, I definitely do windows of intermittent fasting as well, but I also work out very early in the morning. So 5:00 PM would be too early a cut off for me because then for me, personally, I won’t feel strong in my workout the next morning. So I think the trick with people listening is there’s no right or wrong. I mean, there are definitely principles that are important, but we can really get in our own way when we think that things have to be perfect. When we’re listening to a podcast and we’re like, okay, I got to be done eating by 5:00 PM. I got to be asleep by 10:00 PM. I have to do this much. You have to figure out what works for you, but you can’t figure out what works for you until you actually try stuff. Be okay with your messiness. Again, I go back to we’re human, but more than that, think of life as like this science experiment. Everything you do is data. So if you do a workout that you hate, that’s great. Now you know you don’t like that workout. If you end up staying up and eating a little bit too much food and then you feel kind of gross and you can’t sleep, great. Don’t do that again. That doesn’t work. If you decide to work out every single morning and then listen to your kids get you up and you can’t work out in the morning and you have to do it at lunchtime, great. That’s data. The trick is to have this really fine line of having compassion for your compassion for yourself but also holding yourself accountable. So it’s not like oh, I ate at 11:00 PM at night. Oh, this made me feel crappy. Oh, well, I’ll do it again because Kathleen told me to love myself. No, I ate at 11:00 PM. Oh wow, I can’t sleep. Okay, so interesting. Kathleen told me to love myself. If I love myself, I really need a good night’s sleep. So how do I figure out how to eat a little bit earlier? It’s this really tricky thing of you act, then you analyze the action, and then you implement that action. But you have to act in order to analyze. Don’t get caught up on all the things we’re talking about and then just basically be like oh, screw it. I’ll never be as good as them, or I’ll never get it all figured out. I’m just going to stay in bed. To create an evening routine takes some work. I just started intermittent fasting. I do it more just like I call it the close the kitchen window after a certain time. I never eat after 8:00 PM. Normally, I don’t eat after about 6:30 PM, 7:00 PM. But the thing about it is I didn’t do that until a couple of years ago, and I didn’t realize how great it made me feel until I started doing it. So if I’d done this podcast three years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to say like yeah I completely agree. That feels amazing. But if I had tried it and I hadn’t liked it, guess what, I then wouldn’t do it. So you try something. You try a Zumba class. If it doesn’t work, hey, it’s not for you. Try going out for a jog. You don’t like it, you had a bad route, or bad running shoes—it’s data. And then you have to decide what stays and what you ditch.  James Clear has this really lovely quote that you have to standardize before you can optimize, and that’s really key because we all get into optimization before we get the basics down. Just start drinking some water. It might not be “enough.” It might not be as much as I would drink or Ashley James would drink, but you know what, if it’s more than what you did yesterday, it’s trending positively. And then you can figure out maybe you need a little bit more or a little bit less. Yes, maybe over five servings of vegetables would be great. But if you’re eating zero right now, start with one. Start, standardize, and figure out what works for you. Know that each of the choices that you make can change tomorrow. First of all, as you learn, not only can they change, but they should change as you get older, as your goals change, as you evolve. If I was still making the same choices as I did when I was 20, there’d be a problem. Every decade, things will change, the season that you’re in will change. COVID changed everything. Having kids will change everything. Any time there’s a life change there’s going to be a transition. So you can’t be like Ashley James does this, Kathleen Trotter does that, or I did this last year. I did this five years ago so I have to stay with it. No, it’s about being curious, but also holding yourself accountable because you really care and you respect yourself, your life, and that data. Knowing that each thing that you choose is a vote for the future you that you want to be. Again, I’m quoting James Clear. I absolutely love him. I don’t know if you’ve read the book Atomic Habits, but if you haven’t, if anybody’s listening, such an awesome book. He talks about all this stuff like how do you make habits small enough that they make it different. Small enough that you can do them, but big enough that they make a difference. That they compound, and that you’re creating the future you that you want. Because often, at the moment, things seem like not a big deal. Oh, it’s okay. I can have that hamburger, or I can skip a workout. But imagine if five years from now you skip everyday workouts, or you have hamburgers every single day and fries. That future you is not going to be the healthiest you that you want, but it goes the other way too. You often think, oh well, what does it matter if I have a salad or not? But it’s like, well yeah, but if you have a salad every single day for the next five years, that will matter. The compound interest of everything really does make a difference. I encourage everybody to just listen to what we say and think oh interesting. This is all information that could work for me and maybe won’t work for me. I could try it. It could be part of my science experiment that is my health. Most of the time, there’s really good principles that underlie all the actual information. What’s that Aristotle quote? It’s the mark of an educated man for the person who can entertain an idea without believing it or without taking it for certainty or something. You look it up. It’s a great quote, but basically, what it says is to listen to everything and decide what works for you. Try to figure out the underlying principles behind it. Weight Watchers, for example, you count your points. You might say, well, I’m not somebody who wants to count points. I’d rather count calories, or I’d rather count macros or whatever. All of that is good, but it’s all just an example of doing the same thing, which is becoming aware of what you put in your mouth. So the principle of basically every single way of eating is to know what you’re putting in your body, and then how you do it will depend on what works for you. If you’re somebody who’s really in love with having a community, then maybe you’re like oh, Weight Watchers is for me because that’s what I want. But if you’re somebody who’s not, maybe you do food delivery service, or maybe you’re more into vegan, vegetarianism, or whatever it is. But either way, no matter what you do, whatever food system you do, you have to be aware of what you put in your body. I’m a big believer in starting to just really see the principles behind actions and using everything as data for the recipe of success that will work for you.   [00:27:13] Ashley James: Yes. There’s a lot that I really like about Weight Watchers because they’re not telling you what to eat. You could be vegan, you could be whole food plant-based. You could do keto very well on Weight Watchers, but there are many healthy ways of eating that you could do. I love that there’s a system. I love that they really focus on more fiber. We are not getting enough fiber as a society. On average, North Americans eat 15 grams of fiber. I don’t know about those in Mexico, but I know Canadians, the United States, and other countries that eat very similar sorts of American diets. You get about 15 grams of fiber a day, which is horrible. We want to aim towards closer to 50 grams of fiber. You have to be incredibly intentional to get to 50 grams of fiber. I love this advice—grab a variety of vegetables so you’re always doing different ones.   [00:28:07] Kathleen Trotter: Absolutely. Most colors.   [00:28:08] Ashley James: And as you’re prepping them, so you’re chopping them up, take a handful, put them aside, and eat whatever you’re chopping up. You’re going to eat a few handfuls of raw while you’re cooking, and then steam every day two pounds of vegetables and snack on them. Have them with your meals, have them as a snack while you’re cooking other stuff. Have it on the go. Do it al dente so it’s not like soggy vegetables, and then you can make all kinds of great healthy sauces you can make. I love spicy things so I can put spicy sauces on it. But there are all kinds. You can drizzle different balsamic, which can taste absolutely amazing, or mustard, or whatever. If you can get two pounds of a variety of vegetables—both raw and cooked—into you, it doesn’t have to be a ton of raw, but just munch on some raw while you’re prepping it. Steaming is the easiest thing in the world. Boil water, throw it in the steamer. I have a bamboo steamer you get at the Asian market.   [00:29:05] Kathleen Trotter: Come to your house. You could cook for me.   [00:29:07] Ashley James: Yeah, I love those things. They stack, and I put it on top of a wok or a big pot that it fits on top of. Set a timer. I’ve forgotten that it was cooking something on the stove. Come back half an hour later. I’m like oh my gosh.   [00:29:21] Kathleen Trotter: Oh my gosh. I’ve done that so many times.   [00:29:22] Ashley James: So set a timer on the stove, or use the Instant Pot. You can steam stuff in the Instant Pot super quick as well. But basically, if you can steam, and always choose a variety. You want a nutrient profile that’s a variety, but also you don’t get bored.   [00:29:38] Kathleen Trotter: Each food has a different nutritional profile.   [00:29:41] Ashley James: Yeah, so today’s broccoli and cauliflower. Tomorrow’s a bunch of different colored green beans. The next day is different red peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini. But basically, it takes less than 10 minutes to do it in the kitchen and just carry it with you throughout the day and snack on it. Then maybe bring some hummus with you, some baba ghanoush, or some kind of dip. There are ways to make it really quick and you’re getting way more new nutrition into you. You’re getting nutrient-dense but lower-calorie food by eating two pounds of vegetables. Two pounds of non-starchy vegetables is about 200 calories, and it’s so much fiber that it really makes a difference. Fiber helps the body to eliminate hormones we no longer need in the body, toxins. It helps to balance blood sugar levels, helps with weight loss. I mean, the list goes on and on. It feeds the microbiome.   [00:30:42] Kathleen Trotter: I think that’s a great tip, and I think that the word you used really early on, you said intentional. I remember once being at a talk with Rachel Hollis, and she said, the trick to health is being intentional AF, intentional as fork, right? And I think that’s really, really important. I love that system, and I think that would be, for me, an example of what I would say to a client is a system.  Have a time where you’re prepping food. Prep a bunch of different things. Cut up vegetables, steam some vegetables, and have things ready and prepped because I think that’s a great system. Especially if you know at 3:00 PM you’re always feeling a little bit peckish for sugar. Then it’s like, oh, well but I have these vegetables already prepared. So it’s not like I “had to have this snack” or “it was just right there.” I think intentional is a keyword about your health because a lot of us get swept up by life, and we don’t design our habits. They sort of happen by default, and we often will say, well, I had to do this. My clients would say this all the time. I was out and about and I got really hungry, so I had to have this chocolate bar. If they were taking your advice, they would be carrying some cut up vegetables with them, or they would have an apple and a couple of almonds. They would have a snack, right? So that goes with being intentional, and intentional is connected to having those systems ready. But it’s also connected to knowing yourself because if you know 3:00 PM is the time that you always have a sugary snack, then instead of just being like, oh well, I always have that sugary snack. Boy, I’m a bad person. And then feeling shame, guilt, and frustration. Then be like, oh, interesting. I always have a 3:00 PM sugary snack. What can I do about it? Maybe you’re not having enough vegetables, healthy fats, and protein at lunch. So that’s maybe why you’re craving sugar. Maybe you’re frustrated always at your boss. Maybe you need to go for a walk. Maybe you need to have those vegetables ready and prepped. But if you use that as data, then you can create a system that works for you because you’re being intentional and mindful about your health. I have to use every opportunity as I can to bring in Brené Brown because I love her. I think what she would say at this moment is it’s really important to understand the difference between guilt and shame. We’ll just go with this 3:00 PM snack. If you always have the sugary 3:00 PM snack, then if you go into a shame spiral about it, it’s more often going to lead to further negative habits for your health like skipping a workout, having more sugar at dinner. So shame is connected to you as a person. I have a 3:00 PM sugary snack every day, so I’m a bad person. Versus guilt is connected to the behavior. I have a 3:00 PM snack every day. That’s not a behavior I want to replicate. How can I learn from that? You see the difference between a behavior and thinking it’s you as a human. When you connect behaviors to shame and feelings of lack of worth and that that you’re never going to be good enough, then it just makes your nervous system and your emotional brain want to continue with those negative habits, right? Because we often do those emotionally soothing habits. We’re trying to self-soothe, we’re emotionally distant, or whatever we’re doing is normally because we’re very anxious or we’re stressed. But the problem is then you have that sugary snack and that causes more of that feeling or emotion that made you want to have that sugary snack in the first place. It’s this terrible self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a negative spiral. So again, I go back to using it as data and understanding the guilt versus shame and being like, okay, so I don’t love that behavior. How do I change it? I circle back to that self-talk and the systems that we were talking about earlier because it’s about having self-talk that serves you because you respect yourself. Let’s say your kid came home and they got a bad math grade. You wouldn’t say to this child, you’re a loser. You might as well just quit math. That would be a shame-inducing response because that’s them of them as a person. You would say to them, oh, interesting. You’ve got a bad math grade. Are you stressed right now? Do you need a tutor? How can I support you better? Are you being bullied at school? Are you not getting enough sleep? When you talk to yourself about your health, about your exercise, about your sugary snacks, about what time you’re finishing eating, if you’re having enough fiber. All of those things, you have to talk to yourself like you would talk to your kid who brought home a bad math grade. This is data to be analyzed and then think about the idea of cutting up the vegetables. That’s a great system because you want to make healthy choices as convenient as possible. And then you want to make unhealthy choices as inconvenient as possible. Don’t have the crap in the house that you could snack on. So then you’re like, oh, well there’s nothing really to eat other than these vegetables and this lean protein. Okay, well, I’m going to go for it. I love that.   [00:35:46] Ashley James: But also, I think it’s very easy this day and age to order out. Oh, I don’t feel like cooking. There’s nothing in. Even go as far as to prep food and have meals already cooked in the fridge for sure.   [00:36:00] Kathleen Trotter: Or prep different ingredients. Have a bunch of quinoa, have a bunch of chicken breasts, have a bunch of veggies cut up, so then you can whip up—I call them hot-cold salads with greens on the bottom and then a bunch of hot stuff on the top. Or a quinoa bowl or whatever it is, but you want to make the healthy choices as fast as unhealthy choices or faster, and yummy too, right? You want to make it realistic and something that you find yummy.  I did a BT segment this morning, and we were talking about sort of similar ideas and I was using my mom as an example. I love my mom. She’s amazing, but she hates chocolate. I love chocolate as I said earlier. I was saying, if she was going to make a shake in the morning—because we were talking about shakes being healthy things you could pre-assemble the night before or have things ready and just sort of grab and go.  If I said to her that she had to have a shake with chocolate protein powder, avocado, and almond butter, she would be like that’s disgusting. I’m not going to do it. If I said to her she had to go for a run, she would be like I hate running. I’m not going to do it. Whereas she loves yoga, she loves walking the dog, and she loves vanilla things. If somebody said to me, well, your exercise routine is going to be yoga and vanilla protein shakes. I’d be like, oh gross. I’m not going to do it. So part of it is like knowing what you love and what you will actually do. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be what you love but at least what you don’t despise so that you can do it on a consistent basis. It has to be convenient. What you do once in a while doesn’t matter. It’s what you do most of the time that’s much more important. So figure out what you do consistently.   [00:37:33] Ashley James: Yes, that’s a great point to bring up. In my intake form for my clients, I have a question. What percentage of food do you eat out, or what percentage of food is not home-cooked? What percentage of food is home-cooked, are not home-cooked? Either way. At first, my clients will say, oh 80% of my food is home-cooked or whatever. It’s a high number, and then about a week in they’ll say, you know what, I’ve spent the last week thinking about that question. I realized that it’s closer to 30% of my food is home-cooked. It’s so easy to forget. If you’re not keeping track of the last week, the last month, or the last year, it’s so easy to forget. It’s so easy to eat out, so many food delivery services. It’s just so easy to eat this food. And the thing is, even if you think you ordered something somewhat healthy—some kind of delivery food—restaurants choose the lowest quality ingredients because it saves them money.   [00:38:36] Kathleen Trotter: And big portions too.   [00:38:38] Ashley James: You’re hard-pressed to find a locally-sourced, fresh, organic, no fried food, no oil. You’re hard-pressed to find this super healthy food if it’s takeout. One thing that I get my clients to do is we do these fun routines of stuff that they like so that they’re eating more and more and more food that’s home prepped. You instantly feel better when you’ve cut it out because there’s hidden sugar, there’s excess hidden salt, and there’s a ton of hidden oils that are really bad. They’re horrible. They’re polyunsaturated fatty acids that are absolutely horrible for us, and they disrupt our body’s ability to balance omegas healthfully. There are other kinds there. Just think of what they’re cooking. These restaurants use non-stick, so there are toxins. There are all kinds of toxins in that food. Yeah, it tastes good because it’s excitatory. It’s salt, sugar, and oil, and it’s not the kind of thing that you would have in your food if you cooked at home. It’s just looking at what percentage are you eating out every day as a habit and figuring out how to get most of your food cooked at home where you know exactly what’s going into your body.   [00:40:03] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah. I think all of your points are fantastic, but I think what I was laughing at is you said people say, well, only a little bit do I eat out. And then eventually, they think, oh no, actually it’s more. I think that’s across the board with so many habits. I often joke with my clients that we all underestimate our unhealthy habits and overestimate our healthy habits. I’ll say, how much junk food do you eat, or what do you like to eat? Oh, I like chips. Oh, how often do you have chips? Oh, not very often. It’s a treat, they’ll tell me. I’m like, okay, great. Why don’t you just start to become mindful of how often you have that treat. What’s funny is what most of us learn to appreciate is that what we think are treats are actually much more norms. I’m all for having a treat once in a while. I think that savoring something that you love is really important. I call it my love it rule. You want to make sure that you have moderate amounts of things that you love, but you don’t mindlessly eat a bunch of crap that’s not good for you. But I think the problem is people end up thinking what they’re doing is a once in a while love it rule treat, and really it’s daily. It’s not a treat. It’s actually just a normal thing. Again, it goes back to that understanding the principles of healthy eating. Basically, the key principle is just awareness. I love the quote, with awareness brings choice. You can’t choose healthier habits or to change anything if you don’t know what you’re doing at this moment. Keeping a food journal is great for a couple of weeks just to see what are the things that are actually treats versus what are the things I’m doing on a daily basis that aren’t serving me. And then you can decide. Because as I said, I love these fudge bars. They’re terrible for me. They’re full of absolute crap. But twice a year, in the summer, if I want to go and sit with my mom outside on the porch and have one, I’m fine with that. But I’m not fine with having like six of them a week because they’re both bad for my body. And then when you overeat, they’re also then bad for your soul, your emotional being, or whatever. If you’re going to have something that’s not good for your body, at least you want to savor it and have it only a couple of times a year. It should be something that you absolutely love. That’s something I really talk about with my clients. It’s just this choice value of taking a moment, pausing, and just deciding is this worth it? What nutrition is this getting for me? What is this doing for my body? To circle back to what we started with, how is my future self going to feel if I have this? Because often, at the moment, we want things. But often, the things that we want at the moment are not the things that serve us long term. So much of health is not letting our momentary desires and impulses dictate our behaviors. I think that, unfortunately, a lot of us have learned that skill with other things. We want to skip work, but we still go. You might get really angry with somebody, but you don’t punch them in the face. We’ve learned, okay, well my desire is to not go to work, but I have to go anyway. My desire is to get violent right now, but I’m not going to do that. But for some reason, a lot of us with our health, we haven’t figured out how to not let our impulses and desires dictate our behaviors as much. Some of us have and listen, that’s hard. But I think that’s where the awareness comes in because you can say, oh interesting. Every time I get mad at somebody I want to eat a cookie. Is the cookie worth it? Is it going to make me happy? If I’m angry at that person, should I just have a conversation with the person that I’m angry with? Maybe they shouldn’t be my friend, or maybe we need to set better boundaries. I like to tell my clients, all emotions are data, but they’re not directives. You can feel something. You can use it as data, but that doesn’t mean you have to do the thing that you want to do or act the way that you have always acted. Maybe when you’re sad, as opposed to binging on food that you’re going to feel really crappy about later, you have a bath, you phone a friend, or you meditate. But still honoring the emotion that you’re in and then going from there. I think it all comes back to awareness, being able to figure out what are my norms versus what are my treats, and knowing yourself. I think that what you just said about not ordering in and cooking, part of why it’s so important to cook is that it actually takes a lot more intentionality and a lot more of awareness. It’s really easy in your not aware self to comb the internet and be like okay, well, Uber is going to deliver me this, this, and this. It’s in a haze of emotion. Whereas if you have to cook it at home, you have had to think about what am I going to buy? You have to plan your week. Am I going to cook this salad, or am I going to cook chicken?  There’s a lot more thought that goes into what am I bringing into my house? Is it a good quality olive oil? Is it an avocado oil? What vegetables? Where did I buy it? Is it from a local farm? It’s slightly harder to be super emotional about it if you’re planning in advance all of your food.   [00:45:13] Ashley James: Right. Well, you can’t do some instant gratification too if you’re planning it out.   [00:45:17] Kathleen Trotter: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. You’re taking away some of that desire. I mean, if you bring crap into the house, you can still at 11:00 PM at night binge on it. That’s where we go back to making as much tension between you and those habits as possible. I just don’t bring crap into the house that I don’t want to eat.   [00:45:40] Ashley James: Right. For me, this started a long time ago. I don’t bring alcohol into the house, and I don’t bring sugar into the house. I really love chocolate, but I find—and this is something I want to bring up—that my taste buds and my cravings have significantly changed in the last 10 years along my health journey.  Ten years ago, I would have identified as a night owl, a chocoholic. You could not keep me away from chocolate. Now, I really can take it or leave it, but I have a brand. It’s called Lily, and I get the vegan dark chocolate sweetened with stevia two bars a month, and I don’t even eat the whole bar. Before, 10 years ago, whatever bar I’d get I’d have to finish. Now, I can have a few pieces, be like, that was yummy, and then I’m done. I’m satisfied. I just noticed that my taste buds, even in the last three years since I’ve been whole food plant-based, eating more and more whole ingredients. A variety of fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, and gluten-free greens. I just noticed that my taste buds have changed.   [00:46:54] Kathleen Trotter: Absolutely. You trended differently. You’re just slowly changing into it. I know for sure.   [00:47:01] Ashley James: Recently, I ate something that I used to love 10 years ago. I’m like, this doesn’t even taste good anymore. I don’t know. I used to get all excited about it. Now, I’m like, you know what, I can get really excited about a huge salad with 20 different vegetables. I start salivating. If you say the word kale, I have a Pavlovian response.   [00:47:27] Kathleen Trotter: Like brussels sprouts, roasted, oh my God.   [00:47:30] Ashley James: Right, roasted brussels sprouts are amazing. Any kind of hummus, any kind of hummus and carrots, or anything crunchy. These foods are fantastic and delicious. The past me from 10 years ago is like what are you doing? This is disgusting. And the me now is I love this. I think even if you don’t love-love vegetables now, just try them on and find the ones you do love, and your taste buds will change. There’s evidence to show that your microbiome is what causes us to have cravings because the microbiome hijacks it. It actually makes like neurochemicals that hijack our brain. So when we have an overgrowth of candida, for example, an overgrowth of bacteria that is more negative, that’s more harmful to the body, it will tell us to crave things that are really harmful. And if we choose to eat healthier foods for a long period of time, we end up culturing a microbiome that then tells us we love those foods.   [00:48:37] Kathleen Trotter: I have to tell you a funny story. I grew up, as I said earlier, really unhealthy and really unfit. Do you guys have East Side Mario’s in the states?   [00:48:45] Ashley James: No, they don’t.   [00:48:46] Kathleen Trotter: Okay, it doesn’t matter. But it’s like a pasta place. I grew up, as I said, I was overweight. I was unhealthy. I never exercised, and I used to love East Side Mario’s.   [00:48:55] Ashley James: Me too.   [00:48:56] Kathleen Trotter: Not only did I love East Side Mario’s, but I loved the three-cheese cappelletti. It was pasta with cheese on the inside and then covered in cheese. It was disgusting. Anyway, around 17 I started to get healthier. My life changed. That’s a whole story that we can get into if you want, but around 23, 24, I hadn’t had East Side Mario’s for like six years. I was running a half marathon. I was running with my friend, and I’ll never forget. We went through a hard time in the race, and I was like, oh my God. I’m going to die. She said, if you just get through this, you can have any meal you want. I was like, okay. We’re going to go to East Side Mario’s. She was like, fine, whatever. So that got me through the race, this idea of I’m going to East Side Mario’s. It’s going to be amazing. So we get to East Side Mario’s, and I ordered my food. I’m so excited. The food came and it was so gross. Not only did it taste bad. I literally did not like them. This is just exactly what you’re saying in the taste buds. Not only did I not enjoy eating it, because I hadn’t had pasta or cheese. None of that crap was I eating, but it made me so physically ill. It was so gross. That was when I was about 24. I’m now almost 38, and I haven’t had East Side Mario’s since. But it’s exactly to your point. Our taste buds change, and that’s why it’s really important to be curious about different things because we will, hopefully, evolve. I don’t want to be the same person in 10 years that I am now like. That’s the whole point of living. I know 10 years ago I wouldn’t have told you that I love sauerkraut, but oh boy do I love sauerkraut now. It’s so good.   [00:50:30] Ashley James: Oh yes. Fermented food.   [00:50:32] Kathleen Trotter: But you have to be curious. Yeah, so good, and so good for your gut and all this stuff. At the age of 15, I would have told you that what I liked was Orange Crush, East Side Mario’s, and as much chocolate and sugary penny candy as you could. We’d go to 7-Eleven and you’d get these big feet and all that kind of stuff. Now, if you try to make me do that, just thinking about that stuff makes me vomit. Do you know what I mean?   [00:50:59] Ashley James: Yes.   [00:51:00] Kathleen Trotter: Okay. One more example of this, and this is just to give everybody hope if they’re listening they’re like, what, are you guys crazy? I’m not going to like East Side Mario’s? I, again, love chocolate, but I used to eat a lot more of it. Now, it’s really only a couple times a year, and it’s very good quality chocolate. Well, except for the fudge bars. They’re not good quality, but anyway. That’s beside the point. When I did my first Ironman—I think I was 25—and my partner James, he was like what do you want when you’re done with Ironman. I was like, well, for 10 years, I haven’t had a Blizzard. I used to love Dairy Queen. We’re in Lake Placid and there’s no Dairy Queen. I just say to him you have to make me a homemade Blizzard. He goes to the grocery store and he buys all these ingredients. I finished Ironman and he makes me this thing. It had brownie bits and all these different stuff. I had one bite, and I was like, I want to vomit. Not only did this make me feel sick because I just did an Ironman, but it was terrible quality ice cream, terrible quality chocolate, and it didn’t taste good. I didn’t want it. But again, if you told my 15-year-old self that one day I would turn down a homemade Blizzard, I would literally tell you that you were crazy. I would do anything. I used to lie to get out of gym class. I would say I was sick because I didn’t want to change in front of anybody. I would walk home to school and I would time my walks so that I could stop, get fish and chips, and eat it while I was walking. And then I had mouthwash in my bag that I would wash my mouth out so my mom wouldn’t know that I was eating this type of food. I would go to the grocery store. I would buy a bag of M&M’s. I’d eat the entire bag of M&M’s, and then I’d go back to the grocery store. I was so full of shame that I would lie to the teller and say that I dropped the bag of M&M’s on the floor and therefore I needed to buy another one. These are the types of games I played. I would go to Subway and I want a 12-inch sub. So I would buy a 12-inch sub and I would tell the person I was buying it for me and my friend that we were going to split it, but I just wanted the entire 12-inch sub. I lied, I would say, three times a day at least about my food to my mom, to my dad, to everybody. It was just my taste buds, my self-esteem, and my self-worth. Everything changed, but it changed gradually. It’s not that I woke up one day and is all of a sudden this Kathleen that’s 37. The first time I went to the gym, I walked for 10 minutes. I got off the treadmill, and I thought I was going to vomit. You know when you’ve never been on a treadmill and you’re on that belt, and then you get off and the room is all spinny? That’s what happened to me after 10 minutes. I was like I can’t do this anymore. But then I just kept going, and I went back. The next time I went was 15 minutes, and then 20 minutes. You got to embrace the little wins especially when you’re first starting. Those little wins, that’s what accumulates and eventually makes those big changes.   [00:53:50] Ashley James: I like that you said trending positive. I think that’s going to be my new motto.   [00:53:55] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, it’s great. It’s not a linear journey. Also, that’s another thing that’s really important to understand is it’s a hill and you want a trend, but you’re going to have paradigm shifts. But within each paradigm, you’re going to go up and down. It’s not that every single day is better than the day that was before, but I can definitely tell you that in my 30s, I have healthier habits than in my 20s, and in my 20s I had healthier habits than in my teens.  On a whole, my demons have kind of softened, and on a whole, my habits are much healthier. On a whole, if I fall off my horse, the fall is much less severe. I get back on much faster, and I learn. I love the idea of everyone’s going to fall off the horse, but it’s how quickly do you course correct and how much do you learn from that experience? My falling off the horse now might just be snoozing my alarm five times and missing half of my workout. But 10 years ago, what might have happened is if I’d snoozed my alarm five times, I might have been like, oh well, who cares. I’ll just skip the entire workout. Now I’m like, no. Even if I can only do 20 minutes, 20 minutes is better than nothing. The slips are different. I learn better, and I’m better at not berating myself and being so unbelievably mean to myself about the slips. It’s much more of a growth process. I love the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. I don’t know if you know that book, but it’s all about growth mindset, and it’s so unbelievably important with everything. But particularly, I think about our health because I think we expect perfection and then I think perfection is not possible. And then when we can’t be perfect, most of us just quit. I think it’s so much, much, much, more important to have a growth mindset and to just trend in the right direction.  Know that you’re human and know you’re going to make mistakes. But can you make mistakes at a different level? Can you make mistakes on your jog versus on your walk? Or can you make mistakes on your workout versus making mistakes sitting and not doing anything? As you said, trend in the right direction and know there’s always going to be a struggle. What’s that phrase? It’s like a new level, new devil. Every level you get to, every paradigm shift about your health, there’s always going to be a devil that you’re fighting, but it’s just going to be a different devil.   [00:56:09] Ashley James: That’s really interesting. I don’t know if it’s the Kabbalah, but there’s a belief in the archetypes that the devil archetype is us standing behind ourselves with a pitchfork poking ourselves in the back. So it’s actually like a duplicate of you standing behind you testing your resolve.  Let’s say you’re a smoker and you’re like, today’s the day I’m going to quit. Five minutes from now you see people smoking outside, and there’s that little devil which is actually you. Little voice in your head poking you with the pitchfork in the back going, are you sure? Are you sure? How about this? Here, I’m going to give you people smoking in front of you. Are you sure? Now I’m going to give you a stressful situation because that was your go-to to handle it? Are you sure? Are you sure? I’m not saying that the devil does or doesn’t exist. What I’m saying is that the archetype of any time we put out to the universe, we say this is my new norm now. This is my new goal. This is my new me. There’s an archetype of the devil testing our resolve. We just have to know that’s like, okay, I will not back down. Yes, I’m going to be tested and I’m going to prove to myself, I’m going to prove to that devil hitting me with the pitchfork, yes, I do have resolve. This is the new norm I’m working towards. I wanted to touch on the guilt versus shame again because I think it’s really important. You talked about doing these little habits. Let’s say the person goes for a 10-minute walk and the shame might be there. Guilt is regretting actions or inactions.   [00:58:00] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, so guilt is the behavior. You can feel like, oh, I wish I’d done 20 minutes versus 10. I wish I didn’t go faster. It’s on the behavior. But as soon as you put it to, well, I’m the type of person who’s lazy, or I’m a failure. That’s what’s problematic. It’s one thing to acknowledge behaviors. I’m huge into growth and being—as I said, that balance between compassion and striving. I definitely believe in goals and striving. But you want to make sure that you have compassion, and compassion and shame do not go hand in hand.   [00:58:36] Ashley James: Yes. So shame, which is really interesting. I’ve had this woman on the show a few times. She’s an expert in magnesium. She’s led this group of women through a course. A big group of women through a course on healing their bodies and especially healing adrenal fatigue. What she noticed is every single woman except for about six of them got 100% results. She was like, what’s going on? She said, okay. She took the six women or this handful of women that didn’t. It was like maybe 100 women that did this and maybe six of them didn’t get results. It was a big number of people that got results. So she sat with them and said, we’re going to work through. We’re going to figure out why is it that so many of the women in this group got such great results, but you guys didn’t. She saw it over and over again because she teaches this course often. She finally figured it out that when women have shame present as an almost daily thing, it stops them. No matter how much nutritional supplements, exercise, sleep, and rest, all those things, none of the positive things would allow their adrenals to heal because the shame was keeping them in that fight-or-flight mode. Keeping them and stopping their healing.  I think it’s just really, really important to identify if we do have shame, if we do have that self-talk that’s saying, I’m stupid, I’m fat, I’m ugly, or no one’s going to love me. That negative self-talk is shame. To identify that and to then know that we have to work on that. Is there anything that you can give us to help identify? First, like you said, becoming aware is the first step. Do you have any advice or guidance for healing shame?   [01:00:32] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah. There are a couple of things. So I think often our biggest villain in our health is the voice in our own heads, and we have this evil roommate so often. If it was another human being who lived with us, who talked to us like that, we would say get the freaking out of here. You are not welcome. You can’t be my roommate. But yet it’s okay for us to talk to ourselves like that? I think part of it is just really recognizing that if you had a child that you talked to like that, if you had a parent that you talked to like that, they wouldn’t be your friend. Why do you think that you can talk to yourself like that, right? So I often really just encourage myself that health is really a re-parenting process. It’s learning how to talk to yourself in the way that you would talk to your child or in the way that you would talk to your aging parent. In a way that shows that you love and respect yourself, but again, that awareness piece is really key. Maybe you have to keep a journal about your internal thoughts. Write down some of the loops that you have in your head and work on those. Maybe every night you just take five minutes and just say, okay, what are three things that I did really well today—three positive thought loops, three actions, and how do I reproduce those? What was the emotional space that I was in when I had that thought? Or I went for a walk, what helped me do that? And then what are three things that I would like to eliminate from my thought process, and how can I do that? Step back and just take a little bit more of an objective view of it. Okay, well if this was my child who was having this action like staying up until 11:00 PM at night and not being able to go to bed. Okay, how would I help her have a better evening routine? That can be really helpful. I call that the reproduce versus eliminate journal. It’s again using it all as growth. And even just taking a moment like just having an alarm that goes off once an hour and just take 10 seconds and just think, okay, what was the most recent self-talk that I used on myself? Was it useful? Because often these things are so unconscious we’re not even aware that we are using them. Sometimes just free flow journaling is really useful, again, because we’re not even aware of how we’re talking to ourselves or how we feel. So just getting it out there and then you can look at it and be like, okay, interesting. Is this my critic? Is this like a parent? When you read this is it like, oh interesting. That’s how my dad used to talk to me when I was five. Well, that wasn’t helpful then. It’s not helpful now. I think some type of objective view, however, you’re going to get that whether that is through morning pages journaling, reproduce versus eliminating, or whether that’s going to therapy, and just really, really trying to produce a relationship in your head with somebody like it’s a roommate or somebody that you care about. When those negative thoughts come up, the more you’re aware of the thought loops that you get into, the more you’re able to say, nope, I’m not going there. But the first step is to become aware of the thought loops. Honestly, most people when I start to train them, they will say things and they don’t even realize that they’re shaming themselves or shoulding themselves. I should have done this and I didn’t. They’d go for a walk and instead of being like I’m so proud of myself, I went for a walk. They’ll be like, oh, I only went for a walk. Well, that’s great. It’s better than doing nothing. So now use that walk as a jumping-off point for more positive health habits. Noting the little wins I think is really key. Noting the little wins of when you speak to yourself nicely as well as when you go for a walk, as well as when you have a glass of water. And also just realizing that none of us are perfect. In the example that you gave earlier when you said about the shame about when you did something stupid. I forget the examples that you gave. I think part of it is just recognizing that you are sometimes going to say stupid. I say stupid stuff. In this interview, I probably said some stupid stuff, and that’s okay because guess what, I’m human.  Within the realm of normal, you have to just allow yourself to be human. You’re not always going to speak to yourself perfectly because perfect doesn’t exist. You’re not always going to be the smartest. You’re not always going to have the best run. You’re not always going to be having the healthiest dinner. It’s about the trends, and it’s about when you make a decision and be like, okay, so am I proud of this decision? Am I not? Okay, well, let’s learn from it. You can’t be perfect all the time.  I remember listening to this podcast once. It was actually about parenting and the interviewer was saying, well, I just tell my kids just always do your best. The woman who was being interviewed, her name is Kristin Neff, and she writes a lot about self-compassion. She said I just want to hold you there. She said, I actually think that it’s not about teaching your kids to always do your best because that’s just going to put them in the hospital. They can’t always do their best. It’s about teaching your kids when it’s important to do their best and when it’s important to just go to bed, or when it’s important to just read a book and chill. It sounds like a weird connection to the question about shame and guilt, but I actually think it’s really important. You can’t always do your best because then you will get adrenal fatigue. That’s what causes it. It’s like oh my God. If I’m not perfect I’m going to die. Oh my God. But that’s a thought loop that so many of us women get into. Listen, you can do anything but not everything. You have to choose what are the things, what are the battles that are worth battling, what are the hills that are worth dying on, what are the things you’re going to do your best on, and what are the things that you’re just going to say you know what that’s not that important to me. Goodbye. I’m setting my boundary. I’m going to say no to this because a no to that is a yes to something that I do care about. I think a lot of getting rid of shame is just getting rid of this idea that you have to be perfect and you have to do it all. You can’t do it all. You can’t be perfect, and nobody is perfect. They might pretend to be perfect on social media, but let me tell you, nobody’s perfect because we’re all human. We’re messy humans, and that’s what’s great about being human. We’re just this hot mess.   [01:06:43] Ashley James: I totally celebrate being a hot mess. I’m like, no one has it all together.   [01:06:49] Kathleen Trotter: No, and they would be freaking boring if they did. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t grow and learn. What’s a great example? About a month ago, I did my first Skype media segment for CTV, and I’d never done a Skype one before. I’ve done lots of podcasts, but never a video. Honestly, it wasn’t that great. It wasn’t terrible, but 10 years ago, oh my God, would I have berated myself. Kathleen, you were frenetic. I was a little bit too far away from the camera, so I was yelling. I would have just been so mean to myself. And instead, what I said to myself was you know what, I did do the best I could, but anytime you do anything new, you are never going to be great at it because that’s the nature of doing new things. They’re hard, and now, what can you learn from this? I watched it a number of times. I learned. I realized I needed to be sitting in a chair so I could be closer to Skype and I could get a better camera angle and all this stuff. And then I did the next one a week later and it was 10 million times better. But it wouldn’t have been better if I had berated myself about that first segment and be like oh, Kathleen, you’re a loser. You’re never going to be really good. The second segment would have probably been twice as bad because I would have been so nervous, I would have been shaking in my boots. I would have felt like a loser. And instead, the second one was way better because I learned and I grew. I think the net is just the first time you do anything—and this is circling back to you don’t have to be great to start but you do have to start to get great, standardizing before you can optimize. People listening, Brené Brown has a podcast Unlocking Us, and her first episode ever was on FFTs, Forking First Times. The point of the podcast is that any time you’ve never done anything, you’re going to be bad at it. It’s going to be messy and just embrace it. That’s the only way you get better. If you’ve never gone for a run, the first time you go for a run it’s going to suck. Embrace the suck. If you’ve never cooked a dish, it’s probably going to not be that great. Who cares? Try it. Learn. I’m trying to think of workouts. The first time I went to a CrossFit gym, oh my God, I was scared. I was like, I’ve never been here, but it was kind of fun and everyone was nice to me. I sucked at a bunch of things, but it didn’t matter. The first time I went for a run I was terrible. The first race I ever did was terrible. But now I’m way better, and I’m a better runner. CrossFit’s not really my jam, but I go every once in a while, and when I go, I’m way better than the first time. I don’t know. Persevere, learn, grow, and be kind to yourself. But that doesn’t mean let yourself off the hook. I think people take this advice and they think, oh, well, Kathleen says being nice to myself. That means eating 17 cookies, watching 14 hours of Netflix, and never working out because I love myself. No, if you love yourself, you respect yourself enough to go for a walk, drink some water, and get some sleep. It’s a really fine balance of striving but with compassion.   [01:09:41] Ashley James: What I got from what you just said is when we stay in shame we’re stuck and we can’t grow.   [01:09:50] Kathleen Trotter: Oh, I love that. Oh my God. I need to quote that’s. Okay, I’m going to quote you. When you stay in shame you’re stuck and you can’t grow. Yes because shame keeps you in—I don’t know if you know the polyvagal theory, but it’s a nervous system theory basically. They would say that when you stay in shame you don’t get to go in the ventral vagal system, so you’re not in that creative place where you can be their best self. That you’re stuck in your sympathetic nervous system. Your nervous system is basically teaching your body to stay stuck because it’s that paralyzed, it’s messing with your hormones, and it doesn’t put you in the mental space where you can grow.   [01:10:32] Ashley James: Once you’re in sympathetic nervous system response, you lose access to your frontal cortex. We actually shunt blood away from the logic centers of our brain so we can’t think critically, like you said, create creatively. We can’t do three-dimensional problem solving, and also, it harms our digestion because we shunt blood away from our core.   [01:10:58] Kathleen Trotter: Absolutely. It’s a whole bunch of bad stuff.   [01:10:59] Ashley James: Right. Identifying when there’s a shame. So here’s the thing, I’ve had clients who I’ll say okay. Every week I’ll give them homework to decrease stress. I want to get them out of fight-or-flight mode, or I want to get them out of that sympathetic mode. They won’t do the homework. They’ll eat what I tell them to eat. They’ll do all these health habits, but when it comes to like, okay, I want you to do 15 minutes of watching a comedy that makes you laugh.   [01:11:27] Kathleen Trotter: I love that homework.   [01:11:30] Ashley James: Go find a comedian on YouTube. I love the stuff out of Canada. Just for Laughs is the best. I want you laughing like you’re almost going to pee yourself for 15 minutes a day on your lunch break or whatever. I want you to walk out of the office building and walking around the block out in nature trying to find a park. Those kinds of things. Those are the hardest, so any de-stressor any habit. I’ve told several clients, okay, when you get home the first thing I want you to do is put on amazing music and have a dance party with your kids. What are fun activities that are going to like take you out of stress mode and bring back the feel-good hormones? I want you to hug your husband. Oxytocin. Hug your husband for three minutes straight. Just get into cuddle mode. And the funny thing is, these have been the hardest habits to get people to do. I’m like what’s going on? It’s easier to get someone to eat kale than it is to hug their husband or laugh. What’s going on? You’d think it’d be easy, but then the feedback I’d get is that well, I don’t know why I have to do this. I don’t feel stress. I don’t feel stressed out. I’m like okay, great. Stress is not an emotion. I think that shame, for some people, people are so disconnected that they don’t actually know they’re in shame. That they don’t feel it. How we can identify it is the self-talk. If you’re beating yourself up, if your self-talk is abusive, and your self-talk is akin to I’m not good enough. No one loves me. I’m stupid. That was so dumb of me, wtf. If your self-talk is abrasive and tearing you down like an abusive spouse basically, like an abusive partner, you are in shame.   [01:13:20] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah. It’s interesting, you were talking about the sympathetic nervous system. I think that’s very interesting. But if you look at what the polyvagal theory would say, and I’m not saying this is right or wrong. I just think it’s interesting to noodle on. They said there are three ways that you can be. You can be ventral vagal, so that’s in that creative mode where you make the best choices. You feel very content. Then there’s that sympathetic, which you were talking about. And then they would also say there’s what’s called dorsal vagal, which is almost like comatose, unable to make decisions. I think what they would say is it’s important to understand or start to note the self-talk, but they would also say it’s really important to start noting your somatic experiences. When you are in that dorsal vagal space, and I’m just learning about polyvagal. If anybody’s interested in this, don’t take my word. Go research it yourself. I’m using it for myself. I’ve been in therapy for 20 years. I’ve done a lot of talk therapy, and I’m just starting to look into more of the somatic therapy of starting to understand how different states feel in my tissues. And the idea of that dorsal vagal system is that you actually feel almost like paralyzed. You can’t get that ignition energy to start doing anything. You feel sort of a lack, and you almost feel like a disconnect or disassociation from what you’re doing and your life. Again, all of your suggestions would still be very helpful no matter which of those two systems you’re in, but that’s just another route to get to this idea if you’re feeling shame, if you’re feeling blocked, or if you’re feeling stuck. Start to feel how your body feels. Are you feeling almost away from your body, disconnected? Like that ostrich with the head in the sand. Because that could be showing you that you’re almost so in shame, you’re so in a fear mode that you’ve actually like left your body almost, and that makes it even harder to do any of those things. Because sometimes, when you’re in this sympathetic state—that stressful state—you actually have a lot of energy because you’re like nervous energy. That could be the time where you actually do things. You go for a walk, you go for a run. It’s not necessarily good for your adrenals, because you feel sort of more like I have to do something. Oh my God, if I don’t do something… It’s like that anxious state versus that dorsal vagal, which is almost like comatose. I need to go to bed state. Anyway, I just find that really interesting. There’s a Derek Sivers quote. It’s like, if knowledge was enough, we’d all have six-pack abs and be billionaires. The truth is that everybody listening just needs to get on board with the knowledge of what to do with everything in life but particularly to do with your health. That knowledge is not enough. We know to drink more water, eat less processed foods, and go to bed earlier. But if that was enough, we’d all be healthy and health wouldn’t be this million-dollar, billion-dollar industry.  It’s a billion-dollar industry because it’s really freaking hard to do what we know how to do because our emotions get in the way. Our nervous system gets in the way. Our history with our self-talk gets in the way. Our history of how our parents talk to us gets in the way. How we were bullied in school. If you were bullied over your body, or if you were laughed at playing sports, of course, you don’t want to go out and go for a run. You might not consciously be thinking like, oh my God. I’m going to get bullied, but your nervous system has these memories of like people are not nice to me when I go. I have a shame feeling when I go exercise. Part of exercising is retraining your nervous system. The reason why I hated it for so many years was I was overweight. People teased me. I would try to do things, I’d try to do sports, and I sucked at them. And then I got so embarrassed, and talk about shame— so filled with shame that I then didn’t want to do any of those things. I’ve been exercising for 20 years, but mostly I’ve been doing a lot of independent stuff like biking and running. It’s only been in the last five years that I’ve had enough confidence to go play basketball with my partner James. We play tennis, we play basketball, but for years he played all these different sports. I would go watch him, but I didn’t want to play team sports because even though I was fit and even though I loved exercising, I had such a nervous system memory of the shame that went along with not being able to hit the baseball very well and people teasing me. That I was like, hell no. I’m not doing that. Like what we talked about with food, gradually my palate has changed to do with exercise, and I’m slowly learning to enjoy more team sports. But that goes along with letting go of the shame and realizing if I suck at a sport, who cares. It doesn’t matter. I’m not being paid. I’m not a professional basketball player. I don’t need to be good at it. I just need to be getting some exercise, moving around, and getting slightly better each time. That shame response, it’s not useful, it’s not helpful, it doesn’t make me happy, it doesn’t make me the best version of myself, it keeps me stuck, it keeps me basically on the sidelines, and I don’t want to be on the sidelines. I want to be strong. I want to be empowered. I want to be energized. But it takes a lot of retraining growth mindset for the nervous system, right? A growth mindset for my brain to know that even if somebody does laugh at me, I don’t care. Somebody can go and laugh all they want. The doctors use the quote, those that mind don’t matter and those that matter won’t mind. So, people who love you, they’re not going to mind if you suck at basketball. People who care that you suck at basketball, they don’t matter. They can go jump on a river. But in order to think that way, you have to let go of shame. If you’re filled with shame, you care what everybody thinks. As soon as you let go of shame you can be like, oh right, you don’t think I’m a very good tennis player? Guess what, I don’t care what you think. You are not part of my core five. I care what my partner James thinks. I care what my mom thinks. I care what my dad thinks. My best friend Emily, I care what she thinks. But if you’re not part of the people that I respect, and you don’t like what I’m doing, how I play a sport, or what I’m eating, I don’t care. But that comes with letting go of shame.   [01:19:39] Ashley James: I love it. There was this really interesting quote that changed my husband’s life. It’s none of your business what other people think of you.   [01:19:52] Kathleen Trotter: I love, love, love that quote, and it’s just so true.   [01:19:56] Ashley James: it’s none of your business what other people think of you. My husband almost fell off his chair. This was about 12 years ago, we were listening to this really cool dude. He would just spew Buddhisms and very Zen sayings. We’ve been into listening to alternative media. We shut off our cable TV 12 years ago, and we just streamed stuff on the internet—all kinds of amazing podcasts and stuff. This is a guy we followed like 12 years ago. But my husband really struggled his whole life by worrying about what other people thought. He wouldn’t hold my hand in public. It was just weird stuff. I’m like what’s going on? He’s like I don’t know. I just can’t. I don’t know what I can do.   [01:20:39] Kathleen Trotter: It’s very common.   [01:20:40] Ashley James: We talked a lot about it. Ever since I met him, he’s always been super into personal growth, growing spiritually, and growing as a person. He loves really doing deep dives, he’s a man that wants to talk about his feelings. But he wants to grow. We’re like, okay, what’s going on. He’s like I’m stuck in this area. What’s going on? And then when he heard that, it gave him so much freedom because he really got that he was so worried about what everyone else thought, but it’s none of his business. Just like you walk down the street, let’s say you see someone running funny and you judge them. You’re like haha, that person looks silly. It’s none of their business that you’re thinking that about them.   [01:21:19] Kathleen Trotter: No, it’s all on me. It’s my problem.   [01:21:23] Ashley James: That’s your thoughts. I see someone running down the street, and I have really great thoughts for them. I’m like, good for them, really good. You know what, whatever your thoughts are, they’re your private thoughts. Other people’s private thoughts are none of your business.   [01:21:40] Kathleen Trotter: It says much more about them than it says anything about you. I agree, but I would make a caveat on that though. I do love that quote, and I’ve heard that quote, but I actually do think you need a little asterisk beside it. Because it’s none of your business what other people think, but here’s the thing. I think that it is your business what your core five think. It is my business what my partner James thinks about me.   [01:22:07] Ashley James: Oh, sure.   [01:22:08] Kathleen Trotter: Now that doesn’t mean I have to agree with what he thinks about me. The thing about quotes and the thing about social media, we like these really broad generalizations. There is so much nuance in it. It’s just like the idea of like well, you shouldn’t care about… That book the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. The whole premise of that book is we as human beings are programmed to care, we’re programmed to problem solve. But the idea is that if you’re going to care and you’re going to problem solve, you have to decide what problems are worth your time. That’s I think the same thing about that quote. We as human beings are programmed. We’re meaning-making genes. We’re tribal. We’re bred for connection. We’re wired for connection as Brené Brown would say. I think you have to appreciate that you are going to care what people think, and the trick is that you should care. You can’t be in a good relationship with somebody if you don’t care what they think about you. But the trick is you need to care about what people think that you respect. I decide on five or ten people in my life, and those are the people that I’m like, I wonder what James will think about this. And again, it’s not that I necessarily think that what he thinks I’m going to be like oh, well he says I shouldn’t wear red. Well, I’m not going to wear red. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is if he says something, because I respect him, I’m going to at least entertain the thought. And then I can say, well, no, you’re wrong. But it’s a very important thing. I think it’s really easy to be, oh well, no one else’s opinion of me matters. I don’t think we live in a vacuum. I don’t actually think that that’s true. I don’t think the key is to care about nothing. I don’t know. I just think it’s trickier, and I think that life is a little bit more complicated than any of that. But then it’s about being intentional. Who am I going to care what they think about me? Who am I going to interact with? And who gets my attention?   [01:24:10] Ashley James: So it’s coming back to shame. One of my teachers, Tad James, of no relation. He’s a master trainer of neurolinguistic programming, and he says if you lived on an on a planet where there’s no one else, that you were the only person in the world ever, you would never experience shame. Shame exists because we live in a society with other people and because it’s our judgments of ourselves in relationship to other people. That quote, it’s none of your business what other people think of you, is directly about shameful thoughts and decisions that you’ve made about yourself. That’s what I mean. If you’re so worried about strangers observing you while you’re exercising, it’s none of your business what they’re thinking. You do you. Go do your exercise. But if you catch yourself worrying what about other people think and that’s part of your shame spiral, then that’s stuff to work on.   [01:25:10] Kathleen Trotter: Oh, absolutely. And I’m not disagreeing with any of that. I completely agree with that. My point only was I just think these things are a little bit nuanced, and I think that part of the intentionality of all this is deciding who do you care what they think about you, and who do you care about? When I’m thinking about life and how to make my decisions in my day and what’s important, what do I say no to, and what do I say yes to? It matters the idea of you do you. Okay. Well, again, that’s great, and I love that quote. But I think that yes, I do me, but I live in a world where I really care about James. I care about my mom. I also have to take those. I don’t have to do anything, but I decide that taking those people’s feelings and emotions into account is really important. I’m never going to do me at the expense of that, or at least I’m going to have a conversation with James.  Again, I just think it’s all about awareness and intention. Nothing that I’m saying is discrediting. I think you’re completely right. Shame is an internalization of the criticism we’ve had as kids from our peers, from our parents. All of that stuff is correct. I just think part of getting to be an adult is taking an inventory of what you care about? What do you want to say yes to? What do you want to say no to? Who do you care about? Who do you care what they think about you? What conversations do you want to have? What do you want to say hell yes to? What do you want to say hell no to? If it’s really important that you get to bed by 10:00 PM, for example going back to you, okay, that means saying no to a bunch of things. That’s great. But every yes is a no. But in order to know what to say yes to, you have to know what to say no to.   [01:26:58] Ashley James: It sounds like really healthy boundaries and figuring it out. And then, like you said, not the expense of others. You use the example of doing team sports or doing exercise and other people are seeing you. You sound like you have very healthy relationships with your partner, with your mom, and your best friend, for example.   [01:27:19] Kathleen Trotter: It took years of therapy.   [01:27:23] Ashley James: Other people don’t have that yet, and they would never exercise in front of their partner, in front of their mom, or have their mom come to see them do team sports because they still have things to work through. That’s where I say, okay, figure out how you can get physically fit in an environment that fills you with joy and not shame or fear. Maybe it’s putting on a Zumba. Amazon Prime, free Zumba classes. There are so many great on Amazon Prime. Just as an example, so many great free fitness classes. Put it on the TV, do it in your bedroom, or do it in the living room when no one’s around. But when you go out to do any kind of fitness and you notice that there are shameful judgments that you’re having about yourself, is it because you’re around people—those are toxic friends or toxic relationships? Is it because of the people you’re around, or is it because it’s you and you’re just worried about what everyone thinks of you? It’s stuff to work through. Like you said, awareness is the first step.   [01:28:36] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah. I just lost my train of thought. Look at me being messily human. My first book was called Finding Your Fit, and I think this is an excellent segue to that. It’s about meeting yourself where you are. Maybe, right now, you need to be what I would call a home bunny. That’s you’re working out at home, and then maybe in 10, 20 years, then maybe you go to Zumba class. If right now you can’t work out in front of other people, that’s fine. Exercise has to be non-negotiable, but the way you move your body is completely your fit.   [01:29:13] Ashley James: And where you move your body.   [01:29:15] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah. Where, how, what you do. I’m going to use my mom because she is an amazing woman, and she’s the one who helped me figure out this concept. Basically, in a nutshell, unhealthy child, unhealthy teenager. I hated my body, was super full of shame. My mom said to me, “Listen, I know you hate gym class. I know you hate team sports, but we have to find a way that you can move.” We lived in a small town, and my mom said, “You’ve always felt better around grown-ups versus peers, so why don’t we go to the YMCA because the Y, the demographic is over 40, under 5. No one in the teen years will be there.” I was like, “Okay, cool.” And she said, “Listen, Kathleen. All you have to do is walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes. You can totally do that.” So she made the win so small that I could do it, and I think that’s the key because then I went once. It wasn’t like you have to go do an hour aerobics class. And in fact, before I even went to the gym, we did Jane Fonda workouts at home in our kitchen. The trick was I started with stuff at home. We did Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. And then Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda then turned with me going to the Y walking for 10 minutes, and that slowly spiraled—upward spiral. Then I was doing more walking, then weights, then I started taking aerobics classes, and then I started teaching aerobics classes. That’s what made me decide to go to school for kinesiology. But what my mom did for me was she said meet yourself where you are and figure out your fit. You thrive in your own lane. Don’t compare yourself. It doesn’t matter what works for your best friend, your father, your mother, or your favorite celebrity. You figure out what you can do, and what you can do can change in six months, in a year. Again, we go back to the idea that you have to standardize before you can optimize. Just standardize that you move your body every day, and then you can optimize with whatever you want. My mom was really the one. I wrote the book 15 years after that experience, but she was the one who said to me, “You just have to make the motion a non-negotiable, and you figure out what works for you.” In the book, I talk about the four fitness different personalities. You have the gym bunny, you have the home bunny, you have the competitive bunny, and then you have the busy multitasker. You don’t have to be just one of those. You could decide that normally, you are the gym bunny, but when you get really busy at work, you become the competitive multitasker, which is the person who takes a conference call while they walk right. Or they exercise while they’re watching their kids play soccer on the sideline—they’re doing lunges and squats. The idea is that you can mix and match the different personalities depending on the season you are in your life. Maybe in 10 years, you go from doing Zumba at home to doing Zumba at a gym. But no matter what season you’re in and whatever you’re feeling, you always know that some type of motion is non-negotiable.   [01:32:07] Ashley James: I love it. Can you give more examples? I love the example of doing lunges on the sidelines while watching your kids do soccer. Can you give more examples of how we can incorporate movement into our life instead of being sedentary?   [01:32:21] Kathleen Trotter: Oh, yeah. A lot of it is you have to set an alarm to make sure you don’t just what I call tunnel into work. Sometimes I sit down and it’s like eight hours later. I’m like, what just happened? Conference calls as you walk is a great idea. Gamify your fitness. Have a challenge with your family for getting a number of steps per day. Setting an alarm goes off in between Zoom meetings and doing three minutes of a dance class in your living room. If you’re commuting to and from work, walking to and from work, taking your bike. In Toronto, the city bikes are a really big thing now that people don’t really want to take the subway because of COVID. People are doing the city bike rental where you can get a bike at one end and then get a different bike after work. If your kids are going out for a bike ride, you can jog beside them. You could skip outside in the backyard as they’re playing. You can do planks and lunges and stuff as they’re indoors. They’re playing, you can get them involved in a push-up challenge or plank challenge. You could, instead of sitting in your car and doing iPhone stuff while they’re doing their sport, you could go for a jog and then meet them when they’re done practice. You can say, instead of watching television tonight, we’re all going to go to the park and we’re going to play some soccer together as a family. Making sure you get out of your car a couple of blocks away from wherever you’re going to walk there. It’s just peppering exercise into your daily life is that idea of the multitasker.  I’m a really big believer in what I call the plug and play solution. What that is is a list you create in advance of things that you can do in 5 minutes, things you can do in 10 minutes, things you can do in 15 minutes. If you “found time,” you can just look at the list and then know what to do. Because part of the problem is we often will find 5 minutes or 10 minutes in our day. And by the time you realize you have 10 minutes and you think, should I do this, or should I do that? The 10 minutes is gone, and you’ve wasted your opportunity to do some motion. But if you have a list and you just like look at the list, you’re like oh, okay. Well, I know in 10 minutes I can do a set of lunges and jumping jacks or 10 minutes of—I love Yoga by Adriene. It’s free. You know those things in advance, and then you just sort of like blah blah blah just do it. You don’t have to waste cognitive energy thinking I should do this or I should do that. That’s a great plug-and-play solution. That’s like “fitness snacking” with the idea that it all adds up, right? I really want people to ditch this idea of perfection because perfection is tied to shame, and it’s just not helpful. If you think, well, if I can’t do an hour-long workout, then it’s not even worth it, or if I can’t do 10 kilometers… You just end up doing nothing. Whereas if you “snack” on 10 minutes of exercise here and 10 minutes of exercise there, by the end of the day you’ve done an hour, and that’s great.   [01:35:04] Ashley James: I love it. Snack on exercise.   [01:35:08] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, snack on exercise.   [01:35:09] Ashley James: Because sometimes it’s daunting to think about an hour-long workout, 45-minute workout, 90-minute workout. Totally daunting. I get into the dorsal vagal. It’s just too big, can’t do it. Where you’re like, oh, I could snack.   [01:35:23] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, I can snack. It’s doable. And so much of health feels so overwhelming. Listen, life is freaking hard. Life’s hard at the best of times, but it’s particularly hard right now with the pandemic and everything. So much of health is just learning how to struggle well. You have to appreciate that the struggle is not a bug in the system. It’s part of the system. It is there.   [01:35:45] Ashley James: That’s beautiful.   [01:35:46] Kathleen Trotter: It is there. It’s part of the operating system, so you got to just be like okay, I’m going to struggle. I expect it, and how do I struggle well? How do I ride the wave of this? How do I surf really well—surf the wave of this struggle, just do the best I can, and learn from the experience. But you got to go in with realistic expectations. You don’t just find the perfect miracle workout or diet, lose a bunch of weight, then it’s easy peasy, and you never have anything go wrong. It doesn’t work that way.  There’s no perfect day to work out. No perfect week to start the program. You just got to do it. You seize the moment because the moment is the only time you have any direct control over. And if you take advantage of the moment and then the next moment and the next moment, five years from now you’ll be like damn, I feel fit. I feel strong. I’m no longer loving East Side Mario’s. It takes time. It really, really does. It takes finding your version of fit to know your version of fit will change and really being okay, thriving in your own lane. I’ll tell you one more story about my mom. I love my mom. She came with me once when I was teaching a spin class, and she got off the bike. She’s a super supportive woman. I’m sure you can feel that from the podcast. She got off the bike, she looked at me, and she’s like white as a sheet. She goes, “Kathleen, I love you more than anything but if you ever try to make me do a spin class again I will disown you.” I just laugh at that because I have a peloton and I die for Cody classes on the Peloton. Literally, if I’m in bed and I don’t want to get out of bed, I just say, Kathleen, you can do a Peloton. You can do a Cody, and that is motivational for me. If I said to my mom you could do a Cody class, she’d be like, well, that’s terrible. I don’t want to do a Cody class. My point only being is if I said to her the only way that she could be fit is if she did Cody Peloton classes every day, she’d be like well I’d rather be fat and never be fit. That does not interest me. But if she said to me, well, every day, you have to garden and walk the dogs, which is what she does, I’d be like well that doesn’t really interest me. You have to find what works for you. My dad’s another example. He plays hockey four days a week. He loves hockey. If you told me, well, Kathleen, to be fit you have to play hockey four days a week. I’d be like, oh no. But that’s his bliss. The great thing about it is because he loves hockey so much, that inspires him to do the stretching and the strength workout that he needs without falling over and without rolling over an ankle in his skate. It’s similar for me. I love running. I don’t love stretching and strength stuff as much, but I make myself do it because I know that that’s the way that I can do the thing that I love. Part of fitness is finding what you love, and then it’s also using what you love as self-talk to make yourself do the things that you might not necessarily love but that’s really important.   [01:38:26] Ashley James: Fantastic. That’s so great. For those that don’t know what a Peloton is, I know it’s a really cool bike that has a screen on it so you’re like watching these spin classes from home, right?   [01:38:39] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, pretty much. The reason why I love it is because it has so much. Classes go live. There’s a bunch of classes every day and then they get archived. Speaking earlier, we’re talking about finding the ignition energy to get going. I’ve always found an hour long spin feels really daunting, but what’s great about the Peloton is you can filter things. So you can filter by the instructor you like, the type of music you like. I like pop music or country music. There are two or three people I like, but I really like Cody, but you can also filter by time. You can say 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour, and I often find that in order to get myself on the bike, I actually just start with the 20-minute class, and then as soon as I’m done the 20-minute, I’m warmed up and then I’ll do a half an hour. So then it ends up being 50 minutes or I’ll do 45 minutes. It’s easier for me to put together a couple of smaller classes. The thing that I like the most about the Peloton is that first of all, you don’t have to leave your house to go do a class somewhere else. If a class you’re doing 45 minutes of spin, you’re actually doing 45 minutes of spin. But mostly, what I really like is that you can trick yourself into exercising. I often end up doing a full hour, but I start with just saying, you know what Kathleen, 20 minutes is better than nothing. Just get your ass on that bike do the 20 minutes. And then I enjoy myself. I’m smiling and laughing and I just keep going. This morning, I started with a 30-minute class, and then I finished the 30 and I was like I’ll do 10 more minutes. I ended up doing 40 minutes. The lesson for everybody out there if they’re like, well, I don’t have a Peloton. Why is that useful? What I would just say is it’s all about the mind games. It’s about self-talk. If you can’t bring yourself to do an hour-long workout, you just say to yourself, Kathleen would say do 10 minutes. Because once you’ve done 10 minutes, most likely you’ll just keep going. It’s easier to find the ignition energy to do 10 minutes, but if you do stop after 10 minutes, at least you’ve done 10 minutes. And 10 minutes a day is 70 minutes over the week. It’s better than nothing. But honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever done 10 minutes and just stopped at 10 minutes. By the time you’ve done 10 minutes, you’re like, oh well. I’ve already started. I might as well do at least 15. And then you do 15, you’re like, I might as well do at least 20. It’s all about mind games.   [01:40:49] Ashley James: That’s what I do with hikes. There are wonderful trails near our house. I’m like, okay, I’m just going to make it down to where the trail forks. By the time the trail forks, I’m like I’m doing the long trail. The thing is you’re lost in the woods and then you have to come all the way back. The last hike I did was like two hours long, and it’s up and down and through the woods. It’s beautiful. I am always surprised when two hours goes because I’m like it feels like 15 minutes. I mean, my body definitely got a great workout, but it’s fun so time really flies. The getting going it’s like, okay, I’m just going to make it down to that one point where the trail forks and then I’ll totally turn around. And then by the time I’m there I’m like, okay, blood flowing. I can keep going.   [01:41:36] Kathleen Trotter: Exactly. I think with the people who are listening, if they get anything from this story, it’s just like blah blah blah go work out. Just start. The hardest part is starting, and you just have to realize that your future self is going to be happier. Remember what we talked about before, the present bias, and knowing that just because you feel crappy at this moment doesn’t mean that you’re going to always feel crappy. Your future self is going to be so happy that you moved.   [01:42:00] Ashley James: Do you have any techniques for getting us out of that dorsal vagal mode where we are stuck, disassociated, unable to start? What ways can we break through and switch so we’re no longer in that dorsal vagal?   [01:42:15] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah. I think part of it is this idea of changing your state requires a physiological change. Even just some deep breathing, some meditation, or just talking to yourself nicely or phoning a friend that helps you bring into that ventral vagal state. Those are all things that can be really, really helpful. Journaling, any of those things would be great. Even just going for a 10-minute walk, which can feel very hard to do when you’re feeling very unmotivated. But just really being kind to yourself and just saying I will be happier if I even do two minutes. Even playing music and not dancing around but just having that energy out there in the universe. It really is that sort of first 30 seconds of anything that you can do. I think the key is just understanding that that dorsal vagal is a nervous system response based on feeling unsafe, insecure, unhappy, and it could be based on childhood unsafe, insecure, unhappy. If I go play baseball, my first instinct would be to go dorsal vagal because of being bullied as a kid, so I have to realize that I’m dorsal vagal. I feel it in my system and then I just say to myself, okay Kathleen, it’s okay. You’re okay. That’s a triggered state. At this moment, you’re actually okay. I think the most important thing is to take a pause and say is this real in this moment? Because it could be that you are unsafe. If you’re in an unsafe relationship or if somebody is bullying you, sometimes retreating is actually a really good coping mechanism. First, say, is this serving me? And if it is serving you, then it’s telling you something about the environment that you’re in, and then you can use that as data. Maybe you’re with friends that are really, really evil and then they should no longer be your friends because they’re putting you in that. But most of the time for us, the idea is that it’s actually not serving us. It is somehow triggered by childhood. Maybe your boss triggered a sense of shame in the way that your mother or father used to talk to you or the shame in the way that a teacher used to talk to you. Part of it is just sort of saying to yourself, I’m an adult, and I was treated purely as a child, but I’m not a child anymore. I have the resources in my current me to deal with this. Once you figure out that it’s not a current lack of safety, then you can proceed with the meditation, with the breathing, the walking, or phoning a friend. You just have to make yourself feel safe basically when they’re in that space and realize that a lot of procrastination is a feeling of shame or lack of safety. Because you’re worried, well, if I exercise and I don’t exercise perfectly, I’m going to be shamed. If you just say to me, it’s okay to not be perfect. I’m a human mess. I’m a messy mess, and that is okay. Talk nicely to yourself, basically. As long as you are actually safe. If you’re in an unsafe environment, get rid of that. Then you have to use that differently, but once you’ve figured out that you’re safe, then you just have to be kind to yourself.   [01:45:36] Ashley James: Yeah, and a lot of procrastination is focusing on what you don’t want to have happened instead of focusing on what you do want to have happened. When we’re visualizing all the things that could go wrong when we’re exercising—people laughing at us or whatever. Just these thoughts come into our heads. Oh, it’s going to be so difficult. I’m going to get an injury. I’m going to have a leg cramp. We just are imagining all these bad things are happening. We’re putting ourselves in a state of stress, and then that triggers our procrastination because we’re feeling unsafe. But if we focus on and visualize the successful completion of that workout and how great it was, just like you said, your future self, imagine yourself after the workout. You’re like, okay, I want to get there. Let’s go.   [01:46:17] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, but also say to yourself, those bad things, they might happen. But guess what, that’s okay too because I’m an adult and I can handle it. Part of it is that we procrastinate because let’s say you tried a sport when you were a kid and then you were bullied, then you felt like a failure, and then you stopped. But you were a child. You didn’t have the resources you have now. Part of it is also saying to yourself like, probably I will succeed. The data shows I’m very successful. I’m very perseverant. I’m probably going to get through this workout. But guess what, if I don’t, I will be able to deal with it because I’m an adult. Life isn’t perfect. There will be times that I go out, my run sucks. It’s terrible. There are probably times where I’m going to go out and somebody might snicker at me when I throw the basket and I’m bad. But guess what, I can handle it because I’m almost 40. My 10-year-old self couldn’t handle it, but I can handle it. That’s also part of it.   [01:47:10] Ashley James: Yeah. I love Tim Ferriss’s method for dealing with this.   [01:47:16] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, the fear setting.   [01:47:18] Ashley James: The fear, right? At first, when I was listening to him, oh this isn’t good. And then I was like whoa, this is really good. You write down everything you’re afraid will happen, but then you write down what’ll actually realistically happen? Because our mind is making up these big monsters, and they’re probably not going to happen. The entire gym is not going to turn and laugh at us, right? Or if we fall off of equipment, it’s not like everyone’s going to turn and laugh. A lot of people will actually be concerned and come up and help us.   [01:47:41] Kathleen Trotter: Yes, are you okay?   [01:47:43] Ashley James: Are you okay, and genuinely want to help. But he has us write down. Everything you’re worried about will happen and then what’ll actually happen? Realistically, what would happen? And then how would you handle it? When you do that you realize that it’s just a paper tiger that you’ve been worried about. That you, as an adult, have resources and you would be able to handle real situations as they arose. So instead of obsessing and fixating on all the perceived threats that you’ve made up, fixate on the solutions and how you would best handle those situations and then you feel a bit of confidence. But we’re starting out. We’re newbies. Like you said, 10 minutes on the treadmill. We’re complete newbies. I love, for example, I think it’s Hulu. I have all these different Hulu, Netflix, those kinds of things. But I think Hulu has this subscription where you can subscribe to exercise videos. My favorite is the kickboxing ones, and they have a total beginner—like beginner-beginner-beginner 10-minute kickboxing, and you don’t even have to use weights. They have that option. They usually have three different levels, three different people standing there.  It’s like, okay, follow this guy if you’re the beginner-beginner-beginner. This is your first-ever time exercising, or if you have mobility issues. After 10 minutes, I feel amazing and then I go and do another one, and I pick another one, another one, but I love that you can find beginner-beginner-beginner stuff. I can’t believe how just punching and kicking in the air while listening to some music is so soothing and so confidence building.   [01:49:24] Kathleen Trotter: It’s very empowering. I actually did boxing when I was in high school, and it was the best feeling. That’s what I love about health and wellness—when it can be empowering and energizing versus discouraging and oppressive. It can just make you feel like I can do anything. I’m powerful. The data shows that I’m strong, and then you take that data from your exercise and you go off your daily life. You’re like I can do this and it becomes a model. When your exercise becomes a model for how you just interface with the world, right? It’s like, oh yeah, this is scary. My bike ride today was hard, but guess what, I did it anyway. Work today is going to be hard, but guess what, I’m going to do it anyway. I felt a little bit of niggly shame, but guess what, I persevered and now I showed my shame to take this backseat that I don’t need it anymore. I really love this idea of exercise just being a model for how you can live your life and build your relationships intentionally, purposefully, and with mindfulness and attention.   [01:50:26] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love that you talked about how to find things that you love, find things that are fun. Of course, try new things.   [01:50:32] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, you never know what you’re going to love.   [01:50:35] Ashley James: You never know what you’re going to like, but try new things. Exercise does not have to look like sweating in the gym. It doesn’t have to look like what Hollywood shows us or what Jillian Michaels does. It doesn’t have to look like any TV show. It can be cleaning your house like vacuuming. Dude, you can work up a sweat. You can work up a sweat cleaning your house. Your mom does gardening. Dude, I do squats when I garden, and the next day I feel it. You can really get a workout doing anything. It’s about moving the body in a way that brings you joy. Then one thing I wanted to say is about your fudge bars. Something that’s really, really, really helped me the last 10 years on my health journey is figuring out the healthiest versions of something. I’m sure you’ve done this where you’re like what could I eat that’s like a fudge bar but more like an avocado and a sweet potato? What can you eat?   [01:51:27] Kathleen Trotter: I agree with that, and I think for most people and most times and 97% of my things in my life I have replaced with healthier versions. But guess what, I don’t want to replace my fudge bars with something healthy. I think that is okay too. Again it goes back to sometimes—   [01:51:42] Ashley James: Not being perfect.   [01:51:43] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, it’s not perfect. And it’s living the life I want to live. I don’t want to be on my deathbed and be like I loved these fudge bars and yet I didn’t ever have them. I don’t want to have them every day, but I buy one box a summer, and so over a four-month period, my mom has a beautiful backyard. We sit. That’s fine with me. There are tons of things I’m happy to do a healthier replacement, but if that’s my one sin, I’m okay with that. Part of being an adult is just deciding what you’re okay with and not living by anybody else’s rules, right? That’s what I’ve decided so I’m cool with that. But I do think you’re right in a lot of other things. I make lots and lots of wonderful frozen things that are avocado and fruit. I put them into bars. I do lots of other things as well to complement the fudge bars, but we got to live the life that we’re going to be happy with on our deathbed as well, right?   [01:52:42] Ashley James: You know what, looking at my life, I’m not going to regret the junk food I didn’t eat. Me 10 years ago wouldn’t have agreed with that. If I died right now, I’d regret all the living I didn’t get to live. I want to live the healthiest. I would regret letting my shame hold me back from new experiences.   [01:53:08] Kathleen Trotter: Yes. A beautiful, beautiful way to put it. Yes, I agree.   [01:53:13] Ashley James: Thank you so much. This has been such a wonderful conversation.   [01:53:16] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah, you’re amazing.   [01:53:17] Ashley James: Thank you, you too. I’m going to make sure the links to everything that Kathleen Trotter does are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com including the links to her two books. Your website, kathleentrotter.com. Pretty easy to remember. And of course, we could follow you on social media. Can people work with you around the world? You’re located in Toronto, you have a studio in Toronto, but can people telecommute with you? Can they work with you over Skype around the world? How does that work?   [01:53:44] Kathleen Trotter: I don’t have any open spots for one-on-one spots. I have clients who’ve been with me for basically 20 years, and they have my one-on-one spots. But I do group coaching. It’s a five-week group coaching course. It’s called Kick Your Ass with Compassion, and you can find out about that on my website. That is group coaching. It’s usually between 8 and 12 people for five weeks. We do once a week on Zoom, and there’s a lecture group coaching, and then you get unlimited emailing with me over the five-week period about your goal. Everybody has different goals. Some people quitting smoking, some people are trying to eat more vegetables, and some people are trying to do more exercise. The course is really about how you set goals and the principles of goal setting and having a growth mindset. A lot of the stuff we talked about today, but we break it down. I give you resources. We use my two books as textbooks. That would be the way that people from all over the world work with me. You can find information about that on my website.   [01:54:45] Ashley James: Awesome, very cool. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything you’d like to say or homework you’d like to give to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:54:51] Kathleen Trotter: The piece of homework I would give that ties everything we’ve done together is try some type of journaling, and it doesn’t have to be the way that you think. Journaling about your time spent, for example. If you are trying to find time to exercise and you’re like, I don’t have enough time. I bet if you journaled how much time you spent on TV or social media you’d be surprised at the frittering away of time that you do. Either journaling your time, journaling your food, journaling your exercise, or journaling your mood. One of the things my therapist got me to do many, many years ago is do a journal of pre- and post-exercise what my mood was on a scale of 1-10. That data just showed me that I was always in a better mood post-exercise. You could also journal your emotions connected to food. I call it the X versus O journal. You put three circles on the page, and if you eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, eat unprocessed foods, then you just put an X through the circle. You don’t have to write anything. But if you eat, overeat, eat when you’re not hungry, or eat a lot of sugar processed foods, then you would write down what you ate. But you then write down the emotions that were connected to why you ate those things with the idea of trying to learn to connect emotions to your food. If you look on my website or you google Kathleen Trotter journaling, I have done lots of articles on different types of journals. But they all just come back to building your awareness of the type of choices you make, why you make those choices, and how they’re connected to your emotions. You could journal sleep, you could journal anything. I think homework would just be work on knowing yourself.   [01:56:28] Ashley James: Yes, I love it. Michael Weinberger, I’ve had him on the show several times. He is bipolar—very severe. He’s got himself under control now, but he’s been suicidal many times and has been out of control many times. Been in manic mode many times, and he’s been in therapy his whole life. He’s a motivational personal growth speaker now because he shares his experience about mental health, spreading awareness, and how we can become healthier with wherever we are, whatever state we are in our mental health. He created an app actually based on all the habits that he used to go from wanting to kill himself to leading a healthy life. It’s like a journaling app. It’s very quick. You wake up first thing in the morning and it asks you on a scale of 1-10, where are you at? Happy, sad—where are you at basically, 1-10. He might say three. Three is like I don’t want to get out of bed. I’m depressed. I don’t want to get out of bed. And then it has you journal in the app three things you’re grateful for.   [01:57:39] Kathleen Trotter: I love that. This is great.   [01:57:40] Ashley James: And it’s very quick. What does that take, a minute? And then after that, it immediately asks the same question, on a scale of 1-10, how are you doing? He doesn’t see individual people’s information. It’s all private. He can’t go see what you said, but he collects the data. Statistically, everyone feels better after one minute of focusing on gratitude. Many of the people that have this app have mental health issues they’re working through. Just imagine, regardless of where you are in your mental health, whether you consider yourself incredibly mentally healthy or you’re working on some challenges, one minute of focusing on what you’re grateful for makes us so that some people go from not wanting to get out of bed—that’s how depressed they are—to being able to get out of bed.   [01:58:26] Kathleen Trotter: That’s fantastic.   [01:58:27] Ashley James: And that’s one minute of journaling. So I love your idea of journaling because not only does it give you awareness, but sometimes if your focus can be on positive things like things you’re grateful for, that can make a big difference.   [01:58:40] Kathleen Trotter: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to end and just have gratitude that we can move our body and eat healthy food. It is a hugely positive thing that we are able to do for ourselves, and I think often we think about health as something that we have to do, something that’s forced upon us. I love closing on this idea of gratitude. It’s something that we get to do. It’s a privilege.   [01:59:02] Ashley James: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Kathleen. It was a pleasure having you on the show today.   [01:59:06] Kathleen Trotter: My pleasure.   [01:59:07] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Kathleen Trotter. Please join the Learn True Health Facebook group so you can enter to win a spot in Kathleen’s upcoming live and interactive group health coach program. It’s very exciting. Please visit learntruehealth.com/coach to get a free module from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition if you’re considering becoming a health coach. And join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and check it out. Use the coupon code LTH and learn how to make delicious, nutritious, and healing recipes. We also have some wonderful recipes for Thanksgiving and the holidays as well. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Kathleen Trotter! Website Kick Your Ass With Compassion (Online Course) Learn To Spot ‘Unhealthy Healthy Foods’ Facebook Instagram YouTube Twitter Books by Kathleen Trotter Finding Your Fit Your Fittest Future Self

BOOK: Invisible Rainbow https://amzn.to/300Sn23 Cellular Phone Task Force, www.cellphonetaskforce.org International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space, www.5gSpaceAppeal.org Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coach   The Invisible Rainbow https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-invisible-rainbow Highlights: What is electrical pollution Illnesses caused by exposure to electrical pollution Ways to lessen exposure to electrical pollution   5G is here, and while many people are excited about this technology, Arthur Firstenberg describes it as the most urgent threat on earth today. In this episode, he explains why 5G is bad for us. He also enumerates different sources of electrical pollution and how we can lessen exposure to electrical pollution. [00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 445. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have the author of The Invisible Rainbow, Arthur Firstenberg. Arthur, one of my best friends was freaking out when she read your book. Her husband read your book, and he just was blown away. And then I started getting requests from a few listeners saying that your book has been mind-blowing, and it’s the most important book people have read in the last 10 years or more. It really caught my attention, and I thought I have to have this man on the show. We have to let more people know about your work. So I recently got your book, and I cannot put it down. I’m holding it right now. I could probably use it as an exercise device because of how thick it is. Based on the picture on Amazon, I was expecting a little paperback I could finish on the weekend, and it’s almost 400 pages. And then there’s what seems like about 75 to 100 pages of references. I mean, you really did your homework.   [00:01:23] Arthur Firstenberg: There’s actually 150 pages of footnotes and bibliography.   [00:01:30] Ashley James: Yes, I was guessing. I’m holding it. I showed my husband. I’m like, “Do you see the scientific references?” I’m quite impressed. But reading your book, it’s very, very interesting. The first thing that came to mind is that I would love to see your book become a documentary or some kind of movie because of how—   [00:01:50] Arthur Firstenberg: Somebody called me yesterday that wants to do exactly that.   [00:01:55] Ashley James: Yes, please do. I mean, as long as you have control of how it goes, but it is phenomenally well-written. Well-researched. If everyone knew what you lay out so well in this book it would change the world. I want to dive into understanding—for those who’ve never heard of you or your work—I want to dive into it a bit. But first, I’d like to know a bit about you. What happened in your life that made you want to write this book?   [00:02:31] Arthur Firstenberg: I went to medical school, and midway through school—at the end of my second year—I had some dental work and a whole lot of dental x-rays in the course of a summer. The last series of x-rays did something to my head, and I felt something give way in the back of my skull. I felt an electric current travel from head to toes and out into the floor. The next morning, when I went around in the hospital, I could feel electric currents emanating from every piece of electrical equipment in the hospital. My life has not been the same since then. I found out that I couldn’t finish school, essentially. I attempted to stick it out and get my MD. One day, on the inpatient pediatrics, I collapsed with all the symptoms of a heart attack. I had a year to go for my MD, and I left school. Before I had done that, I did a trade with my plastic surgery professor because being in the operating room was no longer possible. Every time I assisted a surgery I would have crippling pains in my hips so that I couldn’t walk for three days. He excused me from the OR in exchange for writing a research paper on a topic of my choice. I chose the effects of radiant energy on living organisms.   [00:04:33] Ashley James: Wow.   [00:04:33] Arthur Firstenberg: This was in December of 1981. In doing research for the chapter, I went to the medical school’s library—this was the  University of California Irvine—and lo and behold, there were many shelves full of books on the effects of electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic fields on biology and on health. We were not being taught this in medical school, and this seemed very strange to me. So I started doing research. That’s been my life, partially, since 1981, and full time since 1996 is researching being an advocate, being a support person, and being an activist. Trying to educate the world to this biological and environmental factor that nobody’s aware of.   [00:05:43] Ashley James: Did your professors believe you when you explained that being near electronics gave you excruciating pain?   [00:05:52] Arthur Firstenberg: I never asked him that question that way.   [00:06:00] Ashley James: Do you feel like they treated you as if they believed you? If they believed you, wouldn’t they have wanted to help?   [00:06:12] Arthur Firstenberg: I didn’t get any feedback because I submitted the paper in December, and I collapsed at the end of February. So it was only a couple of months before I quit school, and I never got any feedback from him.   [00:06:26] Ashley James: Do you still experience pain when you’re near electronics?   [00:06:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Not to the degree that I did then, but yes. A lot of people do. In fact, I would venture to say that most everybody does, but they’re not educated as to what the cause is. So a lot of people are on various pain medications. It causes sleep disorders, and the people are on sleeping medications. It causes anxiety, so people are on anxiety medications and antidepressants. They keep their cell phone in their hip pocket, and that causes excruciating pain, but they don’t connect the cause. So they end up going to the doctor, and the doctor tells them their hips are worn out. Let’s give you a hip replacement, and the nerves are cut, so it doesn’t hurt anymore. This is not confined to a few people. This is affecting the entire population of the globe.   [00:07:36] Ashley James: My husband and I both noticed—he has an iPhone, I have an android—our hands hurt when we hold our cell phones. That we can feel something. There’s something there. I mean, if you weren’t really paying attention, you could ignore it, but we’re very in tune with our bodies, and we can feel it. His hurts his hand more than mine does, I noticed.   [00:08:00] Arthur Firstenberg: Right. And that is the sign that you should stop using it because you can get cancer of your hand.   [00:08:10] Ashley James: Jeez. I was going to say, what damage is being done by being exposed to—and there are so many different forms of electricity like you say in your book. The cell phone is like the microwave, right? But we have electricity going throughout our house, our laptops, the Wi-Fi, the cell signals, and the radio waves.   The Dangers of 5G and How To Reduce Exposure to Electrical Pollution [00:08:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Okay, so now you’re talking about two different types of electrical pollution. The electricity going through your wires creates an electric field. That electric field is not intentional. That’s not part of the product, and it can be shielded with proper engineering. You can twist the wires. You can put it in a conduit. You can eliminate the electric fields to a great extent. They’re not necessary. The difference with wireless technology is that radiation is the product. That cell phone and Wi-Fi will not work unless you’re getting irradiated, so it’s a different idea. It’s actually the first form of pollutant in history that is intentionally being spread over every square inch of the planet. In other words, pesticides are designed to kill pests. They escape into the general environment, but that’s not deliberate. With wireless technology, the pollutant is the product, and that’s a big difference.   [00:09:57] Ashley James: You know what scares me is hearing that Elon Musk is launching satellites so that he can bathe every square mile in the entire earth with 5G waves, basically. There’ll be no escaping this electric pollution, as you put it.   [00:10:19] Arthur Firstenberg: That scares me more than anything else that’s going on right now on the planet. I am scared of climate change, pesticides, deforestation, and everything else that’s destroying our beautiful earth. But he’s putting thousands, in fact, he plans to put tens of thousands of satellites in low orbit around the earth. And I am less concerned about the direct radiation reaching the earth from a few hundred miles up than I am how they’re going to alter the electromagnetic environment of the earth itself in which we evolved and which we are dependent on for life and health. In other words, atmospheric physicists study what they call the global electrical circuit, and people are not aware of our electrical environment. We’re not taught this in school. Electricity is thought of as something useful that can accomplish things for us. That can turn on our lights, power motors, and so forth. But we actually live in an electric field—a natural electric field of 130 volts per meter on average in fair weather. And it’s a complex electric field.  In thunderstorms, the direction of the field reverses, and lightning actually completes the circuit. So you actually have a complete circuit traveling horizontally through the ionosphere, then vertically down to the earth in fair weather, beneath our feet horizontally through the earth, and then back up to the sky during thunderstorms. This circulates all the time, and it goes through the bodies of every living thing. It actually goes through our bodies, circulates through our acupuncture meridians. Doctors of oriental medicine study a little piece of this science, but basically, it’s little specializations and nobody’s looking at the whole picture. If you put 12,000 or more or 42,0000 or 100,000 satellites, there are a lot of players in this game. Space-X is the first entrant, but there are others waiting in the wings and starting to launch satellites. If you put tens of thousands of satellites up there, each one emitting thousands of different frequencies because you’re serving thousands of different users from each satellite, you’re going to pollute this circuit that travels through our bodies, keeps us healthy, and gives us life. This is what I’m frightened of, and this is imminent. This is much more imminent and life-threatening than any of these other environmental threats.   [00:13:50] Ashley James: I love studying astronomy. Why is it that earth has a perfect environment than any other planet in our solar system for life? And we have this beautiful electromagnetic field that you just described that allows us to have life. That allows the earth to prevent solar radiation from fully hitting us. It’s a shield. It protects us, but it also is what we’ve evolved from. Something you brought up in the book that we evolved from wherever we came from. Whether you believe we came from Adam and Eve, or whether you believe we came from single cells in a swamp, we have been here—for as long as we’ve been here—living with this natural electricity that is moving, that we are part of.   [00:14:51] Arthur Firstenberg: And in the 18th century, when people were beginning to study electricity in depth and when they were beginning to find ways of storing it and using it, it was initially used in medicine before it was used for any other technologies as kind of a panacea for a lot of illnesses. Isaac Newton also believed that electricity was the life force. That this is what gave us life. And my conclusion after studying this field for the last 40 years is that probably that’s right.  Electricity is either closely related to or identical with the life force, with this substance that travels, that acupuncturists work on, and travels through our acupuncture meridians. It’s modulated in complex ways. There’s what a lot of people have heard of, the Schumann resonances, which are the resonant frequencies of the biosphere—8, 14, 20, 26, and 32 hertz. That’s part of what circulates to our bodies. But it’s all controlled by the ionosphere. The ionosphere is a source of high voltage. It’s the earth’s source of high voltage. It’s charged to an average of 300,000 volts, and this is what powers and regulates the electricity that circulates in the biosphere and goes through every living thing.   [00:16:33] Ashley James: So what are the dangers of our modern electricity, of our modern devices? I love that in your book, you show very clearly that at each point in our history when we had a new introduction to the widespread use of electricity, that there was an uptick in disease. Could you go over some of that?   [00:17:05] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah. The first major use of electricity was for telegraphy. Millions of miles of telegraph wires were strung all around the earth, and there was a new disease described during the 1860s called neurasthenia. And nobody knew where it came from. Its sufferers were tired all the time and couldn’t sleep. Had aches and pains all over their bodies. A lot of things that people who call themselves electrically sensitive complain about today. I don’t use that term by the way—electrical sensitivity—because it gives the wrong impression that people who realize what’s making them sick are not normal. We’re just like everybody else. We just have figured it out. This is what’s making us sick. Like every other toxin in the environment, there’s a range of vulnerability in the population. If you poison the population with anything—with arsenic, not everybody will get sick at the same time. But if you expose people to high enough levels of electromagnetic fields, as we are doing today, eventually, everybody gets sick. Everybody gets affected. But in the 1860s, there was this epidemic, actually pandemic, of what they called neurasthenia. And for 40 years, it was in the literature. Nobody could figure it out, and along came Sigmund Freud in about 1895. He said this is a psychological disorder, and he called it anxiety neurosis, and that has stuck. So today, we have this thing called anxiety disorder, and 1/6 or 1/5 of the population is being diagnosed with it. And everybody’s being put on anti-anxiety meds, but still, the cause is not being realized. Telegraph operators suffered from it to a large degree. In the coming decades, in the 19th century, telephone operators suffered from it to a large degree. And then in 1889, when AC current essentially spread all over the world, and it spread extraordinarily rapidly. Basically, 1889 was in the space of a year the earth became wrapped in electric wires with alternating currents in them. And that was the year when the first modern influenza epidemic broke out all over the world.  Following that, the Spanish influenza of 1918—according to my research—was triggered by the United States’ entry into World War I with the latest in radio technology. The most powerful radio stations in the world. The first radio stations in the world that broadcast voices that could be heard over most of the earth. These were extraordinarily low frequency, enormously powerful radio stations that were turned on in September of 1918. The one in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And that month was when Spanish influenza became deadly all over the world. I traced the epidemics of influenza throughout the 20th century. 1957, the advent of radar for civil defense especially by the United States 1968. The Hong Kong flu coincided with the launch of the first fleet of military satellites into space.  That’s a brief summary. The advent of the wireless revolution in 1996 in this country a couple of years earlier in Europe and some of the rest of the world, the illness that was caused by that was also caused influenza, but it was not simultaneous all over the world because antennas and cell towers were not coordinated quite as well throughout the world as some of these earlier technologies. For example, where I was living in New York City, the first digital cell towers were turned on citywide commercially on November 14, 1996. A so-called influenza epidemic locally to New York City began essentially on that date and lasted officially until the following May. As a previously injured person living in New York City, I escaped one week later. It felt like I barely survived, I barely escaped with my life. That’s when I started the Cellular Phone Task Force and put an ad in the New York City newspaper saying if you have been sick since November 15, 1996 with the following symptoms, please contact us. And we heard from people all over the city who thought they were having a heart attack, a stroke, or a nervous breakdown on approximately that date. And that was the foundation for my nonprofit, which I have been running ever since then, since 24 years ago. And I got mortality rates. I downloaded mortality rates from the CDC’s website.   [00:24:07] Ashley James: Really?   [00:24:09] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah. I called up the doctor—what was his name in Israel? His name escapes me. Anyway, he directed me to the CDC’s website and said there’s where you can find mortality statistics. Indeed, there was a spike in mortality in New York City that lasted two to three months. I think it was three to four months in New York City. It was particularly devastating. I did this later. There was an increase in mortality between 10% and 25% lasting on average two to three months in every city that deployed what we now call 2G technology that began on the date in that city when the first 2G system went commercial. And I documented this for dozens of cities.   [00:25:11] Ashley James: Going back in the late 1800s when they had the major influenza outbreak after the modern world basically had electricity, had the wires everywhere, and the homes had access to electricity for the first time ever. Had there ever been a documented case of influenza to that extent, or was this the largest we’d ever seen?   [00:25:45] Arthur Firstenberg: Sure. Influenza is an ancient disease. It’s been known forever, but it was never an annual disease. When the worldwide influenza hit in 1889, a lot of doctors had never seen a case of it before. The previous influenza epidemic in the United Kingdom, I believe, had happened in 1854 or 1856.   [00:26:20] Ashley James: That skipped like 20 years?   [00:26:24] Arthur Firstenberg: Forty, forty-five years.   [00:26:25] Ashley James: Oh, huge difference.   [00:26:26] Arthur Firstenberg: Forty, forty-five years previously. And the last influenza epidemic in the United States had been in the 1870s, more than 20 years previously. Suddenly, in 1889, there was influenza throughout the world, and it returned every single year worldwide after that. In 1890, there was in the winter—every year.   [00:26:54] Ashley James: Every year until now.   [00:26:56] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah. It was never an annual disease before. It was never a seasonal disease before. It had something to do with solar radiation. There has been any number of studies correlating historical influenza epidemics with sunspots. So it seemed to come with the maximum solar activity until modern times.   [00:27:22] Ashley James: It would disrupt our electromagnetic field or disrupt our cells in a negative way, and that would leave us susceptible or weakened?   [00:27:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Something like that. And I also explored the Maunder Minimum in the 16th and 17th centuries when there were no sunspots for a period of 75 years, something like that. And during that time, there were no influenza pandemics. That’s consistent with influenza being—as I propose—an electrical disease, and not a viral disease, although it is associated with a virus.   [00:28:10] Ashley James: Well, the viruses live dormant in our body and are opportunistic, many of them, right? Chickenpox becomes shingles when someone’s immune system is compromised, and warts—herpes outbreaks. I mean, that’s one thing that could be hypothesized is that we have the influenza virus dormant in our body, and then when we are in a weakened state, it comes out as opposed to being caught by people.   [00:28:37] Arthur Firstenberg: That is what a number of influenza specialists have proposed in the past.   [00:28:43] Ashley James: And that’s radical.   [00:28:45] Arthur Firstenberg: Exactly what they proposed.   [00:28:46] Ashley James: I mean, what a radical concept because the pharmaceutical companies would not want us to believe this because they want us to take a flu shot every year. And now they’re saying we should take two flu shots because of COVID. I just thought it was really funny. I saw this video yesterday that Dr. Oz was saying that those who get flu shots have, I think he said, 36% more chance of developing COVID and they cut him off. I don’t know if it was CNN, but it was some interview and they cut him off.   [00:29:16] Arthur Firstenberg: That is actually based on a peer-reviewed published study that says that. Back in 1918 actually, doctors attempted to prove the infectious nature of influenza. These were doctors in Boston, and they published their research in public health reports in The New England Journal of Medicine and prestigious publications. They failed. This was during the height of Spanish influenza. They tried to infect 100 healthy individuals with secretions from sick influenza patients by having sick influenza patients cough several times into their faces, by injecting blood from sick influenza patients into healthy people. Not one of the 100 healthy people got sick, and they ended up saying we don’t know how influenza is spread. There were veterinarians because horses got influenza. They caught the epidemic about a month before people did. They tried to transfer influenza via secretions from horses into healthy horses, and the healthy horses didn’t get sick. So there was a resounding failure to infect healthy people with sick people by influenza.   [00:30:46] Ashley James: I don’t want to call it a conspiracy theory, but there’s been a chatter that areas in the world where COVID has taken off are the same areas where they’ve been introducing 5G or testing 5G technology. Have you heard of this? Is there any basis for it? It sounds like it’d be up your alley.   [00:31:11] Arthur Firstenberg: I have investigated it personally. There is a basis for it. My hypothesis is that the COVID-19 virus causes hypoxia by preventing oxygen from binding to hemoglobin. That the radiation from 5G causes hypoxia by interfering with electron transport in your mitochondria. So the COVID-19 virus starves your blood vessels of oxygen. The 5G starves your cells of oxygen. And when you put the two together, they are deadly. At first, I didn’t believe this, but when I investigated it, 5G officially got turned on in Wuhan, China two weeks before the first known cases of COVID-19 broke out there. 5G officially was turned on in New York City about two weeks before a very bad COVID-19 epidemic broke out in New York City. 5G was on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship. There seems to be a pattern here. Here where I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico—at least when I checked a week or two ago—there had been zero COVID-19 deaths in Santa Fe county to date. We don’t have 5G. Albuquerque does. They’ve got a bunch of COVID-19 deaths. As to why COVID-19 is rampant on the Navajo reservation could be due to other forms of pollution. It could be due to the fact that Native Americans have high rates of diabetes. There’s a lot of factors here. It’s not black and white simple, but there is a correlation with 5G. I did a search last week because I was curious. The Gaza Strip has one of the highest densities of population in the world. I wanted to know if they have a problem with the coronavirus, and it turns out to date, out of 1.8 million people, they’ve had 10 deaths from COVID-19. Essentially, they don’t have the disease there even though they are more crowded than any place in the world.  So there seems to be a correlation, and as I said, I have a hypothesis as to why there is a virus. It is deadly. My opinion is that there was—for the first few months—a pretty bad pandemic, and that has more or less passed. People adjust to it, people have immune systems, and the world is pretending that nobody has an immune system. We have to continue locking down the world, wearing masks, and social distancing. From my research, it doesn’t make sense that the places that have the highest number of deaths and the highest rate of illnesses are the places that have the most radiation.   [00:35:14] Ashley James: Why is it that ever since we have electricity and radio waves—we have all this electric pollution. Why is it that influenza comes back every year in the winter? Is it because we’re indoors more? Because I think people are indoors and are exposed to this all the time, so why winter when a few hundred years ago, it was like once every 40 years?   [00:35:42] Arthur Firstenberg: We don’t know. It has something to do with either the amount of solar radiation, which goes down in the winter, or the amount of artificial electromagnetic fields, which goes way up in the winter because we’re indoors. But that’s just speculation. I certainly don’t know all the answers.   [00:36:04] Ashley James: Like you said, there are other factors. Perhaps vitamin D levels, which are already dangerously low. Many people don’t have their vitamin D tested. To a naturopathic physician, if you’re below 60, it’s unhealthy. You want your vitamin D levels to be between 60 and 100. I’ve had a doctor come on the show—very experienced doctors—say that he has never seen toxic vitamin D levels and he prescribes incredibly high amounts of vitamin D, and he’s never seen someone above 100. But he does see chronically low vitamin D, and chronically low vitamin D leads to and there’s a correlation to cancer and to lowered immune health—lowered immune function. And of course, the more we spend time indoors, the less vitamin D we have and the more exposure to electric pollution, right?   [00:36:57] Arthur Firstenberg: It could well be.   [00:37:00] Ashley James: Right. Very fascinating. What other illnesses are commonly seen with exposure to electric pollution? You yourself had it when you had that x-ray. Can you give us some more examples?   [00:37:20] Arthur Firstenberg: Well, the chronic diseases that we are all living within the 21st century, and I show this in my book. Not only I explained the mechanism, but I showed historically when it began the trend, I graphed it out, and I published all the data—cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. These three diseases were rare or virtually non-existent before electrification, which means before telegraphy began in the 1840s, was well underway by the 1860s. And there’s a good reason for it because electromagnetic fields interfere with the movement of electrons. So this means that it interferes with electron transport in your mitochondria. In the mitochondria of every cell of every living organism. Electron transport is the last stage of metabolizing your food and utilizing the oxygen that you breathe. So when you metabolize your food, you’re producing electrons, which get transferred to the oxygen you breathe. It generates ATP, and this is how we live. If you interfere with electron transport, you are not efficiently metabolizing sugars, fats, and proteins. You don’t efficiently metabolize sugars at the rate at which you should be able to. Sugars back up into your bloodstream and excreted by your kidneys and you have diabetes. You don’t efficiently metabolize, fats they back into your bloodstream, get deposited in your coronary arteries, and you get heart disease. Cancer thrives in anaerobic environments. That’s actually how it’s diagnosed. So you’re effectively starving your cells of oxygen forcing them into anaerobic metabolism and cancer cells love it. So these three diseases, in my opinion, are predominantly caused by the escalation of what in some parts of the world is called the electrosmog. It hasn’t caught on in this country, but electromagnetic pollution.   [00:40:01] Ashley James: The rates of those diseases back in 1870, for example, before the widespread use of electricity in our homes. What were the rates of those diseases then?   [00:40:18] Arthur Firstenberg: Cancer, before it started to rise, was the 25th most common cause of death. About as many people died of accidental drowning as died of cancer. Diabetes was almost non-existent. The first book in English that was ever written about diabetes in the 1780s, the doctor who wrote it had only ever seen two cases of diabetes in his life. Heart disease was a disease of old people and infants—people with heart defects. People in the prime of their life between infancy and old age never got heart disease. This started to change in the 1840s and 1850s with all those three diseases.   [00:41:21] Ashley James: But that was before electricity was in the homes though. Was there electric smog or electric pollution being developed back then?   [00:41:31] Arthur Firstenberg: It was not in the homes but there were telegraph wires in most populated places.   [00:41:40] Ashley James: That’s right.   [00:41:41] Arthur Firstenberg: And not only most populated places, but running around alongside railroad tracks and elsewhere in rural environments.   [00:41:48] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s absolutely fascinating that you go through in your book all of the electric pollution that we’ve experienced in the last few hundred years, and then the rates of these diseases going through the roof.   [00:42:01] Arthur Firstenberg: And back in those days, the return current for telegraphy did not go through a wire. The return was through the earth itself, and that meant that there were ground currents from—well, nowadays it’s the power grid. But then those days, it was the telegraph grid. All of the return currents went through the earth, and so people were exposed to it just by walking around.   [00:42:32] Ashley James: I have a friend who has fibromyalgia, and there was a thunderstorm. It was so violent that when I woke up in the middle of the night, I could see the lightning—the light of the lightning. There’s so much lightning that I could walk down the hallway in my house and I could see everything. After that, I think it was August 1996 in Muskoka, Canada. And after that day, she was in the hospital for six months unable to walk in excruciating pain.  That just stuck in the back of my mind that she had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Back then, it was really hard to get diagnosed with it, and doctors really don’t know what to do about it. But that anytime there were electrical storms, she was put out for days or weeks. And this one was so bad she was in excruciating pain for six months. That’s a natural phenomenon, right? So imagine what is happening to our bodies when we’re around this electric pollution.  I love to point out in the show that we really don’t focus enough on the fact that our body is energy. When you go to a hospital, if you’re having weird symptoms, they’ll put electrodes on you and they’ll read the energy coming from your heart, coming from your brain. They’re reading the energy our body is putting out there in order to diagnose. That every part of our body is using electricity in some way. So when we’re exposed to this electric smog, of course, it would have an effect on us. Why do we think that we’re immune? Why do we think we’re immune to microwaves, Wi-Fi, and 5G? Why do we think we’re immune? Is it all through marketing? I mean, why is it that we think we’re totally immune and then we get sick and we take meds. Why are so many people blind to the fact that our body is energy, and our body is disrupted by the artificial energy we have surrounded ourselves by?   [00:44:54] Arthur Firstenberg: I do discuss this in my book. We have been in denial since the year 1800 as a culture. That was the year that the electric battery was invented. There started to be uses invented for electricity stored in batteries, and then in the 1840s telegraphy was used with essentially electric generating technology which had been invented in the meantime. The fact that it can make our lives easier and take over the work, the animals—industrial society has grown up completely dependent on electricity since about the year 1800. It has to do not so much with marketing, It’s a societal addiction. It has to do with our self-concept of who we are as human beings. It’s like if you took away electricity from us, who would we be? How would we live? People don’t want to think about it. There was a medical controversy in the year 1800 as to even the existence of what in the 18th century, the 1700s had been called animal electricity. As I said, people believed that electricity was a life force. Along came Alessandro Volta with the electric battery, and he demonstrated that you could generate electricity without the use of animals. He said there’s no such thing as animal electricity. There were a big controversy and a debate between Volta and Galvani in the 1790s as to the source of electricity, and Volta’s pronouncement that electricity had nothing to do with biology was widely believed and became the standard teaching in medicine and in society and people forgot. But they didn’t totally forget because electricity was still used very widely for electrotherapy to cure a lot of different diseases basically until the end of the 19th century when it started to be used for lights and power. Once it started to be used for lights and power, electrotherapy died out. People couldn’t continue to think that it was the life force if it could do all these wonderful things and be so powerful.   [00:48:21] Ashley James: I love the chapter where you gave the history of how they used electricity and medicine. That’s what made me really want this to be a movie, like a documentary or something. It’s so fascinating. That electricity can be harmful, but you also documented the thousands and thousands of cases where they saw healings from it. Many people who were deaf gained their hearing after using a specific electrode in and around their ear that physicians used, or back then, they called them electricians I think you said in the book.   [00:48:58] Arthur Firstenberg: They were called electricians, yes, in the 18th century.   [00:49:02] Ashley James: Quite fascinating.   [00:49:04] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah, it cured quite a number of documented cases of deafness. It cured some cases of blindness. It was reputed to make the lame walk but at really low power levels and brief exposures. They would expose somebody’s ear to a few pulses of electricity for a few minutes and that was it. When they tried to use higher powers of electricity, it didn’t work. It just injured them.   [00:49:41] Ashley James: There are medical devices that I’ve used and that show great results. Ionic foot detox spas that use a platinum energy system, it’s called, that uses almost a rife frequency. The BEMER, which is a mat out of Europe and used as a medical device in the hospitals there, is documented to increase blood flow right at the capillary and also make red blood cells function in a better way, not stick together, and it stimulates mitochondria to function even better. So there are lots of devices out there that use very, very, very low frequencies—gentle, and they see that it stimulates health and healing.   [00:50:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Gentle and brief, it has to be.   [00:50:35] Ashley James: Right. Gentle and brief.   [00:50:36] Arthur Firstenberg: Not chronic, not for long periods of time. And in today’s world, when we’re all immersed in a sea of electromagnetic radiation, I tell people to exercise extreme caution before using any of these devices because it has some therapeutic effects, but you don’t know what else it’s doing to you.   [00:50:58] Ashley James: Exactly. And wouldn’t it be even healthier to take a break? I mean, I daydream now about going to a cabin in the mountains or somewhere far away from all of this and living like a pioneer by candlelight and just having a break, having a detox from electric pollution.   [00:51:20] Arthur Firstenberg: But you can’t do that anymore because it’s everywhere. It’s coming down from satellites. It’s going through the earth. It’s being broadcast from very powerful radar stations. For example, the entire Amazon Rainforest is being blasted by 28 super powerful radar stations so they can track anybody that moves through the forest. It’s unbelievable what’s going on on the planet.   [00:51:56] Ashley James: This episode wasn’t designed to be doom and gloom. I do want to wake people up, but we also want to give people tools. You do talk in your book about what we can do to protect ourselves given that there’s nowhere to run. Electric pollution is everywhere. I mean, I have friends that live out in the Okanagan Valley in a very remote area of Washington, and there’s no cell service. There are almost no radio waves, and they live off the grid, so they have solar. They heat the house with firewood. You can lessen. You can decrease the amount of electric pollution. I mean, you have to really go out of your way. You can’t live in a city.   [00:52:42] Arthur Firstenberg: The most important thing that people have to do is get rid of their cell phones. That is the single most powerful source of radiation that everybody’s exposed to nowadays.   [00:52:52] Ashley James: Fascinating.   [00:52:54] Arthur Firstenberg: You’re getting more radiation from your phone than from all the cell towers and from the satellites, and people do not realize this because you’re holding it in your hand, holding it next to your head. The exposure level goes up exponentially with the proximity to the body.   [00:53:15] Ashley James: You had outlined that when 2G went live back in—I believe you said 1996.   [00:53:23] Arthur Firstenberg: Six and seven.   [00:53:24] Ashley James: 1996, 1997, which was right around that time my friend got sick for six months in the hospital after the electric storm. That’d be interesting to see when 2G went live in that part of Canada. So when it went live, you could document, you could pinpoint in the different cities the death rate going up and strange influenza outbreaks only in these specific cities during that time. Well, since then, we’ve had 3G and 4G. Have you been able to repeat this? Have you been able to see that once 3G and 4G went live that you could again see a spike in deaths and a spike in illnesses?   [00:54:04] Arthur Firstenberg: I have not tracked it in as much detail as I tracked it from zero radiation to 2G. That was very dramatic. Locally, I collected anecdotal reports here in Santa Fe when AT&T upgraded all its towers from 3G to 4G, there were lots of reports of illnesses around Santa Fe. I don’t have statistics to back that up. Those are only anecdotal reports, but it’s very consistent.   [00:54:42] Ashley James: It would be interesting to go back and look at because, of course, the biggest leap would be from zero to something. But then 2G to 3G to 4G, I mean, those just ramp up incredibly more powerful and more pervasive.   [00:54:59] Arthur Firstenberg: There are also so many more providers. There’s AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Each one does a different thing at a different time, and it’s just a kind of a gradual increase. Then you added Wi-Fi in about 2001. Yeah, it’s a gradual increase. 5G is no longer gradual. 5G is very dramatically different.   [00:55:29] Ashley James: Why is 5G so different than 4G?   [00:55:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Because it uses millimeter waves instead of centimeter waves—a very short wave, high frequency. It uses phased array technology, which is focused pencil-like beams where the cell tower tracks your user device and vice versa, or the satellite tracks you in a narrowly focused beam. And the power levels are very much greater. They’re 10 to 100 times greater than with 4G, 3G.   [00:56:08] Ashley James: If 5G comes in my area, I’m going to get rid of my cell phone. I mean, that is just it. What you just described was the final straw. I have a friend who doesn’t have a cell phone, and she’s a dear friend. I’m kind of just perplexed at how she survives in life, but she does. She gets around, and she has a home line, has a landline, and a computer and does just fine. I know it would definitely be an interesting experience.   [00:56:36] Arthur Firstenberg: There are a few of us that still live like that.   [00:56:41] Ashley James: It would definitely be an interesting experience, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my health to that extent. Either that or I’ll have to move to an area where 5G doesn’t exist anymore.   [00:56:52] Arthur Firstenberg: Well, I want people to wake up to the fact that they should not sacrifice their planet.   [00:56:57] Ashley James: I know.   [00:56:58] Arthur Firstenberg: For the convenience.   [00:57:01] Ashley James: I think there’s so much more to discuss about 5G, and I’ve had a few people come on the show and talk about it a little bit. It is so fascinating, and if there’s more for you to share, I’d love to do that. I also want to talk about Wi-Fi because we haven’t touched on it. Dr. Klinghardt, who I’ve had on the show, is an MD from Germany who is actually local to me, but people come from all around the world to see him at the Sophia Health Institute. He regularly helps children who are on the spectrum no longer be on the spectrum. Now, were they ever truly autistic in the first place? That’s debatable. He says the first thing he does when the parents come, from all around the world, with their autistic child or autistic-like symptoms I should say—non-verbal, beating their head against the wall, looking like they’re in incredible agony, these children. He says to remove them from Wi-Fi. Zero Wi-Fi in the house. Have them be nowhere near Wi-Fi. In his clinic, there are no cell phones allowed. There’s no Wi-Fi allowed. Every computer is hardwired. And he says that heavy metals, which have accumulated in the brain, the Wi-Fi vibrates those heavy metals at 60 hertz, and it’s heating up the brain and causing the autism-like symptoms. And then he does a natural detox, a natural chelation of heavy metals. And these children become verbal, stop hitting their head, are able to communicate, are able to look their parents in the eye and say they love them, and give them hugs. It is miraculous what we see come out of his clinic, but he says the first thing is to stop with the Wi-Fi. It is basically cooking their brain.   [00:58:53] Arthur Firstenberg: I agree with him. People have to stop with the Wi-Fi, and schools have to stop with the Wi-Fi. Children have to start living in a non-irradiated environment. They’re growing up much more unhealthy than previous generations of children. Why? Because they go to school with Wi-Fi and they grew up with cell phones. If we want to have a healthy future and a healthy planet to live on, that’s the direction in which we have to go.   [00:59:27] Ashley James: Do you see any correlation between the use of cell phones, Wi-Fi, or electric pollution, and mental health issues? You did mention that anxiety, which was never previously documented, was widespread after we used the telegraph. We’re now seeing that the second leading cause of death in the ages between 10 and 24 is suicide or the second leading cause of death of suicide, and that is new. As of the last few years, suicide has now jumped up to the second leading cause of death in our youth right now, and all these children have cell phones in their hands and are constantly exposed to Wi-Fi. Now, of course, social media bullying is all a factor. Do you see that there is a direct correlation between the amount of electric pollution that our youth is exposed to and mental health issues?   [01:00:23] Arthur Firstenberg: I would say it’s a big factor. It’s not the only factor, but it’s a big factor.   [01:00:29] Ashley James: So, what can we do to protect ourselves? Okay, so we get rid of our cell phone, that’s one thing. If someone can’t because of work, they completely limit their exposure at all costs to the cell phone. What else can we do in our home?   [01:00:48] Arthur Firstenberg: Well, I’m on a campaign to save this planet, not just to have people individually be healthier because it’s becoming impossible. If you own a cell phone, if you’re dependent on your cell phone, which means you expect it to work wherever you go, then you are dependent on the wireless infrastructure. Your cell phone cannot work wherever you go unless the entire infrastructure of the planet is there. All the cell towers have to be there. People more and more, even when they go on an ocean cruise, they want their cell phone to work so all the satellites have to be there.  The demand has to stop. It’s an insatiable demand for connectivity that is driving a lot of this. Yes, there’s a desire to make money, but at the base, it’s an insatiable demand for connectivity. We’ve gotten so used to—as alive human beings—having the right to connect to anyone, anywhere, anytime, wherever we happen to be. That’s killing our planet. It’s got to stop.   [01:01:59] Ashley James: So my friend Sean, who loved your book has some questions, and I think these are fantastic for everyone. He says that it’s a logistical question that in your book, you talk about aluminum or copper mesh to block EMF. How would you do that? Line your roof, cover your walls? How can we live in a city with, for example, 5G? Or how can we live in a city with electric pollution and best protect ourselves within the walls of our house?   [01:02:30] Arthur Firstenberg: I live in the Southwest where a lot of the houses are made of adobe, which is mud, it’s earth. Earth blocks the radiation, and that’s partly how I survive in Santa Fe. If you do not live in that kind of a house, there’s a big problem with smart meters.   [01:02:55] Ashley James: Yes.   [01:02:56] Arthur Firstenberg: That is increasingly everywhere, and they put a meter that emits radiation on the outside of your wall, and there’s basically nothing you can do about it. But a lot of places have an opt-out. If you opt-out and your neighbors got it, you can line your wall. You can actually paint that wall with paint that contains metallic fibers that are usually silver fibers that you can buy from places like Less EMF and paint the wall. It’ll block radiation from that side of the house. If your neighbor’s Wi-Fi is bothering you, again you can block that. You can even do it cheaply. You can put a sheet of aluminum foil over your wall and it’ll do the same thing. The thicker the sheet or the more layers, the better the blockage. The problem comes if the shielding material, if it’s metallic, becomes too large then it starts acting like an antenna. And it actually draws in and amplifies electromagnetic radiation from your environment. Then it depends on the size of it and what its resonant frequency is. But basically, I tell people that they do not want to live in a house with a metal roof because a metal roof is a huge antenna. Unless you want to live in a Faraday cage in complete metal structure. Not terribly healthy. A lot of people sleep on their sleeping canopies, which shield them from everything in their environment, and it’s not terribly healthy, but it does block the radiation. The reason it’s not terribly healthy is it distorts your own body’s electromagnetic field, it reflects it back at you, it blocks (to some degree) some of the earth’s natural frequencies, which you depend on for health but unblock all of them. It’s not a terribly healthy thing to do. But sometimes it’s a tradeoff. If you want to survive, sometimes you’ve got to do it.   [01:05:22] Ashley James: How effective is it to turn the circuits off in the house, or at least to your bedroom when you sleep?   [01:05:29] Arthur Firstenberg: Somewhat effective. The problem is when you turn off the circuit breaker, it only disconnects the hotwires and not the neutral wire. The neutral wire is at the same potential as the earth, supposedly, and it’s the return current to the power plant. So when you turn off the circuit breaker, it disconnects the hotwire, leaves the neutral wire connected, and when there’s dirty electricity in the power grid it still gets into your house. So it’s somewhat effective and not completely effective. What I’ve done in my house is I’ve installed a three-pole switch on the outside of my house, which allows me to disconnect all three wires at the same time.   [01:06:16] Ashley James: Oh, yes. I had a Ph.D. electrician—a really interesting guy. His whole life work is about helping people to get clean electricity and minimize electricity in the house. People will call him up with weird symptoms. He comes into their house, he tests, and he either sees that their entire neighborhood is dirty electricity from the transformer, or they’re sometimes an entire town has dirty electricity and the whole town is experiencing weird symptoms.   [01:06:53] Arthur Firstenberg: I’ll tell you a secret. Every wire in the world now has dirty electricity because there are computers connected to them. There are billions of computers connected to the power grid.   [01:07:08] Ashley James: Fascinating.   [01:07:09] Arthur Firstenberg: And that did to use to be the case 30 years ago   [01:07:13] Ashley James: Yes. This man, Sal La Duca, when I interviewed him, he talked about how after he helped people stop having dirty electricity, all of a sudden everyone in the house could sleep. The insomnia the whole house had, even the baby had it. The father who is an MD didn’t believe any of this. Everyone had insomnia. All of a sudden, the insomnia went away overnight. And I’ve said this many times. I live in a rural area 45 minutes outside of Seattle, and when we have storms in the winter, our power will go out—sometimes for two weeks because of the wind storms. And it’s the best sleep I ever have when the power is out because there’s no Wi-Fi, no electricity.   [01:08:04] Arthur Firstenberg: It used to be that when I would tell people when you go home tonight, turn off your cell phone, take the battery out of it—which mostly is not possible, but it used to be. Either that or put it in a metal pot is just as good. Unplug your computer, unplug your modem, unplug your television, and see how you feel in the morning.   [01:08:34] Ashley James: And leave the electricity on in the house?   [01:08:37] Arthur Firstenberg: Yes. Turn off your cell phone and all the wireless. Unplug your TV, computer, and modem, and they suddenly can sleep and feel better in the morning. It used to be. Nowadays, when everybody’s got a smart meter on their house, it might not make so much difference.   [01:09:00] Ashley James: When I was pregnant with my first pregnancy, I had a blanket that had lead in it. It was quite heavy. It was a lead blanket. And I would wear it over my belly when I was at the computer. I experimented with my cell phone to see that my cell phone lost all signals when it was in this blanket. There are videos of people using these meters to show that the blanket really does block. I’m just wondering, should we be wearing these blankets when we’re sitting at work or wearing clothing that has this lead or some kind of copper or aluminum mesh?   [01:09:38] Arthur Firstenberg: Copper is the best shield.   [01:09:39] Ashley James: Copper is the best shield, okay. We should be wearing synthetic clothing?   [01:09:43] Arthur Firstenberg: Copper and silver are the best. Well, there are companies that sell clothing like that. To some extent they work. To some extent it depends. They don’t surround you completely. They’re not complete barriers. If you’re wearing a shielding hat, for example, and radiation bounces off the floor ad up into your hear onto the hat, it can get amplified from the inside. It’s a two-edged sword shielding.   [01:10:18] Ashley James: Oh my God. I never thought of that. You’re right. Oh my gosh. For those who have to use computers to work—I mean, now, think about the education of these children.   [01:10:32] Arthur Firstenberg: If you have to use a computer, turn off the Wi-Fi. Use it wired only.   [01:10:38] Ashley James: Hardwire your computer. That’s what we do at our house. We hardwire everything.   [01:10:42] Arthur Firstenberg: Hardwire everything. Hardwire your computer. Hardwire your phones—simple answer.   [01:10:46] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s right. You can get an adapter to plug into your phone to hardwire it. And then keep it on airplane mode if you need to.   [01:10:55] Arthur Firstenberg: I do not recommend using the cell phone even that way because it still got the resonant circuit in it.   [01:11:00] Ashley James: Okay. So get a landline.   [01:11:04] Arthur Firstenberg: Get a landline. Use it only hardwired, not cordless, and use a wired computer.   [01:11:10] Ashley James: Got it.   [01:11:11] Arthur Firstenberg: And disable the Wi-Fi on your computer. Disable the Wi-Fi in your modem or your router.   [01:11:18] Ashley James: What about earthing or grounding as a way of helping the body with exposure to electric pollution? Have you looked into earthing and grounding as a form of mitigation?   [01:11:35] Arthur Firstenberg: It’s very popular. It used to be very effective. Nowadays, when the earth is polluted with dirty electricity, most places on the earth, when you plug yourself into the earth, you actually can draw up the dirty electricity into your body. So it no longer is as effective as it used to be.   [01:11:56] Ashley James: What do you do on a daily basis to clean yourself of electric pollution or mitigate electric pollution?   [01:12:08] Arthur Firstenberg: I feel well in my house in Santa Fe. Mostly, there’s nothing that I have to do. If I am overcharged, I fill up a bathtub full of water and put some sea salt in it, and that will draw out the electricity from your body, or a handful of clay.   [01:12:30] Ashley James: I love it. As we wrap up our interview, I’d love to talk about how we can help your movement. I think we’re all on board. We all want a healthier planet. You have laid out very well that there is a definite problem that we have, and we are rapidly getting worse and worse. I mean, I don’t want to be doomsday about it, but if we just run with this technology, we’re just going to get to the point where we kill ourselves and the planet. There needs to be checks and balances. We need to slow down and really take the precaution seriously. What can we do to prevent 5G, for example? What can we do to tell these companies that we don’t want this electric pollution anymore?   [01:13:26] Arthur Firstenberg: I think the single most powerful thing that anybody can do is get rid of their cell phone. Stop being part of the demand for it. That’s the single most important thing to do. They can also monitor my websites, which are cell phonetaskforce.org. I send out newsletters, and there are posted on the website—a number of languages. And my other website is 5gspaceappeal.org. That’s the international appeal to stop 5G on earth and in space. It’s got about 300,000 signatures to date. And they can make donations on either of those websites to support my work and to support legal action that we’re taking. We have a case before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals right now to declare laws that facilitate 5G unconstitutional.   [01:14:42] Ashley James: Yes. Arthur, that’s wonderful. I’m going to make sure the links to everything that Arthur Firstenberg does is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. And the link to your book, which I want everyone to read. It’s a fascinating book. I really can’t put it down. I’m very excited to finish it. I’m in the middle of it.  [01:15:08] Arthur Firstenberg: Our third website, which is not so popular yet, is echoearth.org, and it stands for End Cellphones Here on Earth.   [01:15:20] Ashley James: Okay, echoearth.org. I’m going to make sure that that and all the other links are on the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehalth.com, and a link to your book, The Invisible Rainbow, which is fantastic. I think everyone should read it. Arthur, is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:15:39] Arthur Firstenberg: We live in dangerous times. Our earth is under threat from many directions. Electromagnetic radiation is just one of them. We have the burning of fossil fuels, which has got to stop. We have deforestation. We have pesticides. We have a lot of threats, and to me, the single most urgent one—and the one that I have become an expert in—is the electromagnetic radiation. It’s more urgent because it’s escalating faster than the other, and society is in total denial that it even exists. This is what I’m working on.   [01:16:34] Ashley James: Arthur, thank you so much for your work. I really appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing this information. I can’t wait to see The Invisible Rainbow as a documentary. It’s going to be such a great movie. Please, feel free to come back to the show anytime you have more to share. We’d love to have you back.   [01:16:51] Arthur Firstenberg: Thank you, Ashley.     Get Connected With Arthur Firstenberg! Website Echo Earth.Org International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space Website   Book by Arthur Firstenberg The Invisible Rainbow   Recommended Reading by Arthur Firstenberg The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker  

Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coach http://jennyfenig.com   How To Co-Create With The Cosmos And Re-Align Self With Nature https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-co-create-with-the-cosmos-and-re-align-self-with-nature   Highlights: Lunar cycle in a nutshell Yoga’s purpose is to achieve mastery over the mind Ayurveda body types: vata, pitta, kapha Eliminate toxic elements Importance of breathing   How does the moon affect our lives? In this episode, Jenny Fenig explains the lunar cycle and how we can incorporate it into our lives. Jenny shares how we can manage our time better daily. She also explains the importance of breathing, grounding, and listening to the body.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have entrepreneur, coach, and homeschooling mom, Jenny Fenig. What I love about her message is she is a very successful, busy entrepreneur, busy mom, busy homeschooling mom, and also a fantastic coach. She figured out how to pack in all these activities while working from home, while taking care of her kids in homeschooling. She figured out how to do it, and she loves teaching others how to make this transition. I thought it’d be great to get some wonderful guidance from her. As you’re listening to Jenny, if you think to yourself, I would love to be a coach. I would love to help others mentally, emotionally, and physically become healthier, become more fulfilled in their lives, and be able to gain more joy. I’d love to work with clients to help them achieve their life and health goals; then I highly recommend checking out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I took IIN’s program. It’s a year-long health coach training program. It’s 100% done online. They also have an accelerated 6-month program for those that want to be full-time students. The year-long program is designed for busy people, and you can fit it in about 20 minutes a day. I’d like to do it in the evenings or sometimes I’d listen and do the coursework while I was driving, exercising, folding laundry, or cooking dinner, but I was able to get it in with my busy schedule. It’s absolutely fantastic. IIN’s program is life-changing. About half the students that do it do it for personal growth, which is pretty phenomenal. You could do it for your own personal growth, but of course, I did it because I also wanted to help my clients. I want to gain new tools to help them as a health coach, and they even train you on how to start your own business and become a successful health coach, which is really exciting. So not only do they teach you how to help your clients with mental, emotional, and physical health; gaining life goals; and increasing joy and fulfillment in every aspect of their lives. You’re also taught how to find clients that would resonate with your coaching style, and that clients you would just feel incredibly fulfilled and happy to work with. It’s a wonderful program.  I partnered up with IIN and they give a huge discount to the listeners of the Learn True Health podcast. So you can just google IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and when you give them a call, most of their staff have actually gone through the program and become integrative health coaches. What you can do is you can talk to them. They’ll help you work out your goals in terms of becoming a health coach and joining their program and then when you mention my name, Ashley James with the Learn True Health podcast, you will be given a huge discount. A few times a year, they do have some great specials as well, so always be on the lookout for that. If you’d like to try their program for free, there’s a module that they give you for free. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach. Sign up, put your name and email, and then you’ll be given a module for free. You can just put your toe in the water, try it out, and see if it’s something that resonates with you. See if it’s something that’s right for you. It was absolutely incredible when I did it. I highly recommend it. There have been over 100 of the listeners that I know of that have reached out to me that have told me that they’ve been through the program. A lot of them, because they heard about it through me through the podcast, so I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me and share that they’ve absolutely loved their experience with IIN. It’s a wonderful stepping stone because you can go and specialize in other things. You can specialize in gut health or mental health. There are just so many ways so that you can specialize as a health coach, which is really exciting. You become a health coach, but there are so many tools that they teach you around life coaching because health encompasses every aspect of our life. IIN is not about counting calories or teaching you how many grams of protein are in something. That’s not what IIN is about. It’s about giving you the real tools to help make huge differences in people’s lives, in working with clients to help them become more fulfilled in every aspect of their life. Check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach. Get your free module. And when you call IIN, make sure you mention my name Ashley James and Learn True Health podcast so you can get access to the great special that they give all the listeners. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Please come join our Facebook group. It’s a wonderfully supportive community for holistic-minded people. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook. Thank you for sharing these episodes with those you care about so we can help everyone to Learn True Health.   [00:05:26] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 444. I’m so excited for today’s guest. We have Jenny Fenig. Her website is jennyfenig.com. All the links that Jenny has are going to be the show notes with today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Jenny’s going to teach us today how to co-create with the cosmos and align ourselves with the energy of nature to help us achieve what we want to achieve in life. Also, there’s a bit of—from what I understand—tapping into your human potential, tapping into your life purpose. It’s going to be a really fun and light-hearted episode. I’m looking forward to it. Welcome to the show.   [00:06:15] Jenny Fenig: Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here, Ashley.   [00:06:18] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. What led you down the path to becoming an expert at co-creating with the cosmos?   [00:06:26] Jenny Fenig: Well, that’s a good question. I think the larger conversation is looking at how I’ve experienced so much loss in my life and so much death. We’re just going to go there. I mean life is death is life is death is life. We go through so many deaths in a lifetime. Death of an identity, a particular career path, a place that you used to live that isn’t working for you anymore, or what have you. For me, when I was 16 years old, I experienced the death of a significant person in my life. That person was my sister Julie—still is my sister Julie. Energy is energy. I absolutely have a strong connection with her still to this day. It’s been over 25 years since she died. But that experience of wow, life is so mysterious and it’s not “fair.” It’s not what you thought it was going to be, yet it all is lining up for your biggest opportunities to grow, to learn, to be who you came here to be, and do what you came here to do. With that death of my sister when she was 12 and I was 16—she died of cancer—I just skyrocketed into this experience of grief, loss, and what just happened? This isn’t supposed to happen. This goes against the natural order. And then six months later, my best friend’s brother died. That was just another example of what? These things aren’t supposed to be happening. At that point, we were seniors in high school. You’ve been looking forward to this moment your whole life. I grew up in the south in Georgia and Florida. At that point, I was living in Florida. This friend and I had just gotten onto homecoming court, which is this dream that we had. It felt like such a big deal. My sister had died earlier that year and then her brother dies that fall, and it was just this bizarre experience of this feeling that I hadn’t ever felt before ever, and then no one can prepare you for it. It allowed me to go really deep into my own process, my own faith, and my own questioning of all of it, really all of it. My sister was quite connected to God, and that was not anything that I really knew much about, to be honest with you. That was her thing. It was my dad’s thing, but it just was something I witnessed from afar like what’s that all about? I don’t really understand what you all are talking about. And then once my sister died and I had this huge pain and then my best friend’s brother died, you go deeper into this hole. That’s what it felt like just sitting with this and trying to understand something that can’t really be understood in a logical rational way. As I journey forward going on to college and just doing my best to keep showing up—keep showing up for the work, keep showing up for my talent, keep showing up for my ambition—I kept being led to the places I was supposed to be, the people I was supposed to meet, the experiences I was supposed to have so that I could do what I’m here to do. What was fascinating was early on in my sophomore year—that best friend whose brother had died our senior year of high school—that best friend died.  I basically had three deaths in three years from the time I was 16 to 19. I wouldn’t wish that on people. It’s very, very challenging as you can imagine, but it cracked me wide open and it allowed me to really come to this place of I am still here because my work is not done. I am going to really feel the energy of these people who meant so much to me. I know that they’re guiding me on because this work that I’m here to do, you’re here to do, and we’re all here to do, it requires all of us. It requires all of us to be awake. It requires all of us to be courageous. It requires all of us to approach each day like it is a gift because it is, and to go after the things that you’re most meant to do. Once I moved on into my career, I moved to New York City after I graduated from the University of Florida. I found my way into the career of public relations. I thought I had struck gold. This was a thing I was here to do. I’m working at this major agency, on these big clients, and eventually traveling globally on these big projects. Although it was exciting and I felt like I was at a good place and working on interesting projects and with interesting people, I had this feeling inside, which was really me connecting with that small still voice within to come face to face with the truth. The truth was this isn’t what I was supposed to be doing. It was such a tough pill to swallow because it looked good on paper. It looked really good on paper. You try to ignore it. You try to just push it away, push it down, and question yourself. I thought there was something wrong with me. I wondered why I couldn’t be satisfied or I couldn’t be happy when other people might think this was fine or awesome. But that small still voice within just kept nudging me along, nudging me along to say, Jenny, this isn’t it. You got to keep going. You got to keep looking. And most importantly, you’ve got to take care of yourself.  That environment that I was in, I graduated from college in 1999. You can go back to that point in time. The internet was very new, so there were no social media. That wasn’t taking our time, but when you worked on these big projects, I had to be at work a lot and I worked a lot. I was under a tremendous amount of pressure and stress. It’s not something that I found to be healthy, sustainable, or desirable. A big breakthrough for me was that I realized I had to start taking better care of myself. I really needed to learn how to mother myself, nurture myself, take a pause, take time, and not feel like I was racing all the time. You asked the question of how did I really find this work. I found the work by diving headfirst into the work that I felt I was here for and was talented at but then realizing that it didn’t quite hit the mark.  The way that I had to like deconstruct it and figure out what was a better path for me was to choose health, to choose vitality, and to choose to trust that small still voice within, which has continuously guided me on. It guided me to eventually quit that job, move into a different job, which is a thing I didn’t even know was a thing until I found it. I moved out of public relations and into conference producing, which again it just kind of fell in my lap when I was in sheer desperation to get me out of here, I can’t do this anymore.  That opened me up to interesting thinkers, thinking like an entrepreneur, acting like an entrepreneur, putting on these big events, solving problems in the market, and just understanding that I really can do anything that I want to do. I just have to decide what that is. I believe that’s true for your listeners as well. We are in a choice. We can come into this place of I have these distinct skills. I have these gifts. I have these talents. When we can really blend everything up and understand what problems we solve in the market and then communicate with an audience that is excited for us to help them solve that problem, then amazing things happen. A big pathway for me—I know your show is really a lot about health, vitality, and all the different ways—was I dove headfirst into yoga those first few years in New York. Once I could afford to belong to a gym, I started taking yoga classes. I took my first one in college. I thought it was the weirdest thing ever, and I wasn’t ready for it. But then once I was ready for it, in those New York City days, I realized it was a source of comfort and a source of peace. It made my body feel so good. I allowed myself to just feel that and to come to this place of oh my goodness. When you’re in a yoga class, you’re not competing at all. I thought so much of my life I had been competing. That was the game, you competed. When you’re in yoga, it’s not about competition. It’s really about being present with yourself, what’s going on that particular day, and honoring that. By following that path to yoga, eventually, I got this download to train to become a yoga teacher. I didn’t know where that was going to take me, but I trusted it. Again, that small still voice within, I trusted it. I said, okay, let’s see. Let’s see what happens when I commit myself to 200 hours of training on anatomy, on yoga philosophy, on the different asanas on meditation on just that whole realm. Once I did that, the next level of my career opened up, and I discovered the field of coaching. That has just taken me on this incredible path, this incredible journey. I realized that serving women was my passion.  As I got deeper into my study and work with women, I remembered how connected we are to the moon and the way our bodies are designed. They’re so intelligently designed. The way the lunar cycle is designed, the way nature is designed, there’s such intelligence and such wisdom in that. When we can tap into that wisdom, we come into that place of alignment. That is something I practice. That is something I teach. And that is something I want to remind everyone of. It’s very much been taken away. We live in such a society with technology and go, go, go, you’re falling behind, and all of it. Nature’s never behind, you know what I’m saying? It’s not behind. When I look outside, my trees aren’t like oh my gosh, I don’t have enough leaves yet. Or this tree is bigger than me and I must be less than. Nature is just so sure of who it is, and it’s always right on time. I find there’s such wisdom in that. It’s something I love talking about.   [00:18:27] Ashley James: Can you take us back to the moment when you realize that there was an energy of the moon to tap into? And explain how you figured it out and how it helped you.   [00:18:41] Jenny Fenig: Well, it’s interesting because my mom, growing up, would often say to me, look up at the moon. Since the time I was in college, I have lived away from where she was living and then beyond. She often would plant that seed with me and sometimes I thought she was a little wacky for going all right. But that has stuck with me. What’s so fascinating, no matter where you are located on this planet, every single one of us is looking at the same moon. It’s not different in the Philippines, in the United States, in Canada, in Spain, and in Antarctica. It’s the same moon. It’s the exact same moon. I just think that’s so cool. We live on such a giant planet, we’re all looking up at that same ball of light. When it really became clearer for me was when I just started reading various books about women, history, energy, and our creative process. Women are natural creators or creatrixes. A creatrix is the female term of a creator. We just naturally do it. We naturally create. Some of us are called for motherhood where we create a child inside, or we adopt a child. However that comes to be, or somehow a child comes into our life. I think I got deeper into it when I became a mother. My oldest child is 11 years old now, my youngest is 6. I also have a 9-year-old. When I became pregnant for that first time, which was so interesting because for a lot of years I didn’t want to become pregnant. That wasn’t something I was ready for. And then once I became ready for that and wanting that, I saw my body in a whole new way. As women cycle, a lot of us have had a menstrual cycle. We know what that is. Menstrual cycles are the same as the lunar cycle. It’s around 29 and ½ days. Think about that. Those are the things I wish I would have been taught in school. When I was growing up, it was very much like when you’re on your period, that’s dirty. That’s dirty. It’s something you want to hide. Maybe you were made fun of, especially if the boys knew you’re on your period somehow in school because you took your purse to the bathroom. It was something that almost felt shameful. There wasn’t a real big rite of passage around it when I was growing up. I will tell you, when my daughter moves into that phase of her life, I will do it differently with her. I will give her something that I didn’t have that I’ve had to learn for myself. When you really tune into the fact that we cycle, our body cycles the same as the moon, that’s something to take note of. With the moon—what I’ve come to learn through practice, study, and just applying this in my own personal life, in my business, and helping my clients do this—is that if you really want to understand how to work with the energy of the moon. When you are menstruating, there is energy. You might have read the book The Red Tent. I read that many, many years ago. It’s a fantastic book. It’s really that energy of being still, resting, renewing, and not go go go. You’re just receiving it. Your body is doing the work, your body’s cleansing, and that’s the energy of the new moon. That’s the energy of that new moon. If you were to start tracking the lunar cycle—and most calendars have this represented on the calendar. If you have a wall calendar, if you have a printed calendar. I still use those. I mean, I have a business. We have a lot of digital things going on, but I have a printed calendar that I keep on my desk and often in my purse. I’m not going as many places these days as I once did pre-COVID, but I’ve got my printed calendar, and I’ve got my calendar in my kitchen that I keep up on the wall. The moon phases are represented there. Take note of those. Some people have no idea where the moon is right now in terms of the phase of the cycle, and I suggest that you start paying attention—if you haven’t already—and just tracking your own energy around what’s going on in the moon. Sometimes, as women, our bodies might be in that same phase. If you’re still in your bleeding years, you might bleed at the same time as the new moon. If so, the energy is really synced up. If not, there’s still a lot that you can glean from the moon. And you really want to understand what’s happening out there so you can better take care of yourself. That’s the whole thing. Isn’t that what true health is all about is you know how to take care of yourself, and you know how to have others help take care of you if you have other people in your life—really helping to nourish you and support you? So that new moon is all about rest, renewal, and ultra-vision. And then about a week later, we move into the first quarter moon. That’s when you look up in the sky, and just last night it was the first quarter moon. I looked up and it was just like magic. It was so captivating, and it looks like a half-moon where that right side is glowing. And you don’t see the light on the left side. It’s just that right side of the moon. That is the energy of growth, action, and commitment. What you can do at the new moon, as well as resting and renewing, is that you get the vision for what you want to focus on in this upcoming cycle. With moons, there are 13 moons in a year. There are 12 months in a year, but there are 13 moons in a year. You have an opportunity 13 times in a year to really set your intention, and it doesn’t always happen at the first of the month. That’s not how it works. It happens when it happens based on that lunar cycle, and the lunar cycle is set. You could go look ahead a few years and you’ll go see the lunar cycle like when the new moon of 2025 will be. Scientists have this down. It’s really extraordinary what can be tracked and looked at as you move forward. What I like to do at each new moon is set my intention. What is my intention? What do I want my energy and my focus to go to for this lunar cycle so that as I take my steps forward? As I put my energy out there, my actions out there, and my words out there, I can see the seeds that I’m planting blossom.  I’m setting my intention. I’m establishing some goals to support that intention at the new moon, so when I get to that first-quarter moon I’m really quickening my steps. I’m like okay, let’s go. Have I sent out that email? Have I talked to that person? Have I gone to get that thing? Have I planted my seeds, and if not, what seeds do I really want to be planting now or in the next few days? Because then, about a week later, we’re going to get to that full moon. And that’s when you look up in the sky. Everybody knows what a full moon looks like. There tends to be a pretty powerful energy at the full moon. There’s just such powerful sensations that are happening right there, and we’re all feeling it. We’re all feeling it. There’s a lot of data to support that hospitals and emergency rooms in particular have a lot more action around the full moon. There’s just this heightened intensity that’s going on. And when we can understand that, we don’t have to be blindsided by it and going like why do I feel all this? You understand. You understand it intuitively, and you can really make space for it.  What I know at full moon is that’s when I’m in my fullest power. That’s when I’m going for it. As women, that’s when we would be ovulating. That’s when we could conceive a child. You think about that, and there are only a few days in a woman’s cycle that that could happen okay. When you then understand your own energy at that point, the energy of the full moon at that point, you can harness some things.  In my business, I might have some big activity going on at the full moon where I am putting something out there. I have hosted lots of retreats all around the world and tied that into the full moon. Where I will look ahead and go, all right, I’m going to have this event in November. I’d like to bring the women together around the full moon. When’s that full moon going to be? Okay, it’s this point. Let me check with my retreat center and see if they have space available at that time. You see, that’s how you can really line it up. Some people might decide that they’re going to have some special thing there, they’re going to put this thing out there, they’re going to whatever. You just know. That is maybe you want to go camping, like there’s just something that you want to do around the full moon. And I do a lot of this with my kids, especially my daughter. She’s super into it. We really talk about the moon together. If I take my dog for a walk around the property at night, I’m always looking for the moon. What’s interesting is you don’t know where she’s going to be. The moon is a feminine energy, p.s. So you don’t know where the moon is going to be. I can’t always look up over this particular tree and see her. It’s not how she works. She’s very mysterious, and I love that. I just love that energy. I love that idea that she’s always there, I just don’t know where she is all the time. I know what’s up. I know if she’s at this phase or that phase, but I can’t always find her in the sky. It’s just an interesting thing to play with, and it also helps you deepen into your faith. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Get it? And that we have to trust. We have to trust. And we have to trust planting these seeds. I’ll give you an example and I’ll tell you about the last phase of the moon. A few months back, as we were really in the throes of COVID here in Massachusetts. I know that you have listeners all over. Everyone is being impacted in different places, and it’s just horrible. It’s this horrible thing. A few months back, we really weren’t leaving our house. Except I was able to go to the garden store and be outside, and I eventually got these seeds—these sunflower seeds. Now I have never planted seeds. I just recently have gotten into gardening. A few years back, I kind of just all right. Let me try this, let me try that. But I’d always buy plants that were already formed. They were in the pots, and I could transfer them into my land into the earth. Well, I decided to just see what happens when I would plant seeds, and sunflower seeds in particular, which is really interesting because that was my favorite flower in high school. I campaigned for it to become our senior class flower, and it did, which is very exciting because we had had the rose for 20 years straight. My whole thing was okay, rose is a great flower, but can we just have a different flower? Let’s be creative. So we got the sunflower.  I decided to get these seeds, and I put them on the earth. I remember thinking to myself is this going to work? These things are really small. Is this really going to work? I’m going to follow the directions. I’m going to space them the number of inches they’re supposed to be spaced apart. I’ll water them. Okay. But I had that doubt in my head like really, could something as big as sunflowers grow out of these little things? Oh my gosh, Ashley, if you could look outside my window right now, these things are so huge. These stalks are taller than me, and I’ve been checking on them. There’s one in particular that I can see the yellow starting to peek through. I’m like oh my goodness, I think this week the flowers are going to come out. Because at this point, it’s been the giant stalks. Then I still know, within the stalks, the flowers in there. It’s just not ready. It’s not ripe yet. It’s not time yet, but can I still believe? Can I still believe? For everyone, can you still believe? Even if you can’t see it, you have to believe it to see it. Some people have it backward like I’ll see it when I believe it, or I believe it when I see it. Okay, I’ll believe it when I see it. No, you will see it when you believe it. That’s really how I feel what the moon allows us to do. She’s so consistent. As I’ve used her energy and really worked with her energy and co-created it, I’ve been able to come into deeper communion with my own body, with my own wellness, with my own groundedness and connection to the earth, and to my place on this earth. Then I’ve helped my people really tap into this wisdom as well.  So the last phase of the cycle is called the last quarter moon, and that is when you look up and you see the light on the left side. So you don’t see the light on the right side, and that’s how you can always know. When you look up, if it’s on the right side, the moon is waxing. It’s getting bigger in the sky. And if the light is on the left side, it’s called waning. The energy is waning and it’s getting smaller. Eventually going back to that new moon and then starting the cycle again. So with the last quarter moon, that is the energy of letting go. Letting go to rise higher. That is when you have seen what has started growing. What has become real? You’ve put in the effort, you’ve put in actions, you set that intention back at the new moon, you set those goals, and you work towards them. And some of them were meant to happen the way that you hoped they would or the way that you semi-envisioned that they would. Others you realize you know what, that wasn’t aligned, maybe not yet, maybe I need to simply be more patient, or maybe I need to let that go because this other thing is freaking growing and it looks really exciting. I want to align my energy with that. I know that I can’t do all the things all the time, so I’m going to double down on that, and I’m going to let go of these other things that can’t come with me into the next cycle. That is the lunar cycle in a nutshell. I’m actually looking up at this gorgeous lunar calendar. In addition to the ones that I mentioned that come printed in a lot of these calendars you might buy, I had my designer on my team—we collaborated on this really cool one sheet and it just says Lunar Calendar 2020. What was so interesting is that I had her put all the names of the months at the top of the paper, so going across horizontally, and then the numbers go down vertically.  January there’s 1 to 31, February 1 to 29, and they’re just these long rows of numbers going down the page. And then she would go in and plot out each phase of the cycle and go across the page. What is the full moon in January, February, December? And it looks like—if you ever had or ever saw those really cool beads that you could hang in a doorway, they’re kind of like circa the 1970s, but they’re cool. You could hang these beads in a doorway and then open the beads and move into another room. They kind of look like those beads. They’re so pretty when you look at it. To me, it’s just exquisite art the way that nature was designed. And the more that we understand that, the more that we understand ourselves.   [00:34:57] Ashley James: Beautiful. It’s amazing how there’s so much in nature that really affects us, and we often just don’t think about it. I mean the moon is powerful. If you think about it, the moon is strong enough to change the tides and pull the water, the ocean in one direction and then in another and create the tide. We’re made of water. Why wouldn’t the moon have some kind of pull if it can pull the water in the ocean? Why wouldn’t it have some kind of effect on us? I mean, it’s not a huge effect, but it can be felt, and we can see it. You can see it when we go to the ocean, and we see the tide come in and out. What other instances in nature do you keep your awareness of and tap into?   [00:35:51] Jenny Fenig: Well, I look at where I am each season. Really honoring seasonal shifts and planning around that. I didn’t realize how important honestly nature was to me until I did. I grew up in the south, as I mentioned. When I lived in Florida, I lived near the beach, and that was really nice having that ocean near me—speaking of tides and oceans. And then once I lived in New York, you’re in a concrete jungle. We had Central Park. We had some trees there, but typically you had a tree carved out in a little plot on the sidewalk and cement. I did have the Hudson River, thank goodness. I lived on West End Avenue, which was overlooking the Hudson River. Oh, that brought me such a sense of calm. But once I moved to the country 10 years ago. I left New York City. I now live in the country, Western Massachusetts. I felt like I could exhale. It was something I really needed but didn’t know that I needed it. New York was so wonderful for my career. I met my husband there. I had my first child there. I got pregnant with my second child when we lived there, but it didn’t provide me with enough nature. Now I have it. I look around these windows and the office that I’m speaking to you from and all I see are trees. That’s it. I see the trees. I live in a forest. I consider the trees my friends, which may sound funny but it’s true, and I take such cues from these trees. We have nature here, and we have four seasons here. Not every place has four seasons, but we have that here. I’ve learned to really be seasonal in my approach. My energy in the summer is different than my energy in the fall is different than my energy in winter is different than my energy in spring. And I encourage you all to really tap into that for yourselves as well. How are you in summer versus winter? And what changes do you need to make or modifications do you need to make so that your body stays in a natural state? I enjoy being warm. Cold is hard for me so winter here is hard. It’s really, really challenging. And I learned to layer. I learned that clothing really matters. Wool matters. I wear lots of layers of wool pretty much since it gets cold until it’s not cold anymore, I have a layer of wool on my skin. And that makes a massive, massive difference. What I’m eating during wintertime, in particular, are warm foods because my body is cold. And my body gets anxious when I’m cold. There’s something that I studied, which is pretty cool. It’s an ancient science and an ancient practice really. I went to India a few years ago, and I went through my yoga teacher training back in 2007. When I did that and I was reading all these books around yoga philosophy and really understanding the mind. The purpose of yoga is to achieve mastery over the mind. It’s not to contort yourself into these shapes, although the shapes help you achieve the mastery of the mind. So when I went through all that, I just had this pact I made with myself that I would go to India. I didn’t know when I would go to India or how that trip would come into being. It was like a seed. I planted the seed, and about 10 years later, the wish came true. The opportunity presented itself, and I walked through the door and I said I’m going to go on that trip. I had the opportunity to study something called Ayurveda. There are ayurvedic doctors. This is a form of medicine, and it’s a very natural form of medicine with the usage of herbs, being intelligent about what you eat, and understanding your body constitution. In Ayurveda, there are three body types: vata, pitta, and kapha. You can just dig into this if anyone’s interested. You can look around and see what you find here. There are these assessments you can take. You can answer questions and get a better read on what your constitution is. We all are a mix of all three, but you’ll have one that’s dominant and one that’s a clear secondary.  For me, I’m vata pitta. Vata is very airy. We are predisposed to being cold. My husband’s pitta so he’s predisposed to being hot. So you can imagine that we battle over the thermostat. He wants it to be on the colder side and I’m making it warmer. If you know that your body is predisposed to certain things, then you need to be prepared.  If my body gets too cold and I’m not prepared through the foods that I’m eating, through being mindful of me waking up first thing, I shouldn’t drink an ice-cold glass of water ever first thing. It’s going to throw me out of alignment. I’m going to just head into a place I don’t need to be, which is anxiety which is just too cold. I start just getting too amped up, and I’m not grounded. I’m kind of floating, and not in a way that’s super peaceful blissful. I’m just too out there. And I need to come back to this place of groundedness. So for me, understanding this, me going to India, studying with an ayurvedic teacher, working with ayurvedic doctors there, and staying at this really amazing Ayurveda retreat center in a town called Gokarna, which is just out of this world. I’ll never forget it. It was one of those incredible experiences. I understand now what I need to do. So when I wake up, my go-to ritual is I fill my kettle with water, turn on the stove, and then I pour myself two cups. One, warm water. It’s hot water when it goes into the cup. I wait so it cools off a little bit and I put lemon in there. And then I have my second cup and I fill that with my favorite jasmine green tea. And then of course with my lemon. One of my clients makes this really cool chai concoction. She’s just this herbalist and she gives me these batches of what she makes. So I stir a little bit of that in there and it just is this magical blend, and it gets me going on the right foot. My body starts really waking up. I’m moving. Things are really good, and I feel connected. I feel grounded because I haven’t gone to that ice-cold thing. You all can study that. You can really look at how your body is designed. Our body wants to feel good. We want to feel healthy, but things are set up right now that you forget all that. And if you’re on your computer all day, your cortisol levels get jacked up. You’re looking at this screen, your eyes are getting fatigued, and you’re out of touch with nature because you’re just looking at these machines.  I’m grateful for all my technology, but I’m not living my life in technology because that’s not where I want to live my life. I want to live my life out there, and then I come to tech to connect with people. Like connecting with you today, Ashley, knowing this podcast is going to go out and serve people. I will connect on social media with my people, but I’m doing that from a place of wellness. I’m doing that from a place of understanding how I need to take care of myself every day with the moves I need to make with what I’m drinking, what I’m eating, and then how I move through nature. You all can really look around and check on your own energy levels that each season you might decide that in the wintertime, in particular, you want to bring more fire into your life to warm you up. Maybe in the fall, you’re looking around—where I live, the leaves change colors. You might tap in at that point, what kind of transformation are you undergoing at that point? What are you shedding? What leaves are dropping for you?  And can you come into that place of faith knowing that winter is coming, but you’re strong enough to handle winter? Not just handle it, but really enjoy it. What do you need to do to prepare for each season? And then can you take a page from the playbook of trees, if you will, and say yeah, I know. And then my leaves are going to grow again. And then they’ll be green again. And then eventually they’ll fall again. The leaves will drop or they’ll change colors. I just think it’s so interesting. The whole thing is so interesting. This pandemic has given me an opportunity, as I mentioned, I never thought I’d be a gardener ever. You have no idea. Before this interview, Ashley, I went to my local hardware store and made the first-ever purchase. Do you want to know what I bought?   [00:45:08] Ashley James: What’d you buy?   [00:45:09] Jenny Fenig: A chainsaw.   [00:45:13] Ashley James: Electric or gas?   [00:45:17] Jenny Fenig: I went with the gas. I have an electric lawnmower, weed whacker, leaf blower, but they explained to me that I really need the gas to do the work that needs to be done. I think it looks like we’re going to be cutting our own firewood. I never thought ever. But as I was building out this one particular place of my land with this garden, the tools that I had weren’t adequate enough to get through this particular—it’s like this vine thing. We have these vines on the property that kind of wrap around trees and hurt the trees. There’s this one spot, this has to go and my tools aren’t enough. They’re not adequate. Sure, I could go hire someone to do it, but it’s really cool. You come into your power, I do anyway. When I say I can do that. I can do that. I felt a sense of pride. There are all guys helping me in that section of the store, but I’m like yep, first-ever chainsaw purchase. They were so excited for me, and I’m so excited for myself to come in and say we can do that. We can do that. When the temperature, when the weather is nice to be able to do this, I feel like such a responsibility to the land, and something I want to teach my kids how to take care of that. How to take care of things. How to really work with this land.  Even before the pandemic, we were homeschooling, and we’ll continue on that path. This is something I want us all to learn together, how do we do this? Once you know how to do a lot of these things, I know for me, I feel proud. I feel like, hey, I could get some help with this, and there’s nothing wrong with getting help. But gosh, what a wonderful feeling to know the things that you can do.   [00:47:05] Ashley James: Brilliant. Now one of your claims to fame is your ability to homeschool, manage your business, manage your household, and just be so busy juggling everything. Many people are overwhelmed right now. It’s a new experience for them homeschooling in the light of the COVID lockdown. Many parents have chosen not to send their kids back to school because of the restrictions and requirements. But instead of choosing to homeschool, many people work from home now like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. They’re keeping a lot of their staff at home. So it’s a new dynamic for many Americans, Canadians, and people around the world.  A new dynamic where many families are working from home and homeschooling at the same time. And they’re not used to juggling all these things, or they’re planning on it because it’s still the summertime. They’re planning on it. And even for those who are going back to school, many districts are only doing two days a week. So for public school, they’re still going to be home for three school days. And if parents are home with them, potentially working from home, then it’s just a whole new dynamic. Can you walk us through and teach us how we can be more effective at getting all this done? I think you talk about how you can get more done by doing less. What are some ways that you can really prepare the listeners who are stepping into a whole new routine, a whole new reality?   [00:49:04] Jenny Fenig: Yeah. I really like talking about this. Thank you. Well what we talked about obviously understanding the moon in particular and just what’s happening out in nature, that’s tremendously helpful. That just becomes your way of living. The more that you practice that, the more you’ll understand. You’ll understand, and it makes your life so much simpler. It really, really does. All right. So there’s that. The other things that I practice are what I call time chunking and task batching. So you become so intelligent and efficient with your moves and your time. I’ve always been pretty strong with time. It was interesting. Even in those first New York City jobs I had, I was like 22. My managers must have seen my ability to do this because myself and this other colleague of mine, she was also about 22, 23, I’d say. We were tapped to lead a time management training for the entire organization. I looked back at that, we were young, but we had something going on.  I think some of that is probably connected to the deaths that I experienced at such a young age because I knew right away—time is not guaranteed. It’s not. It’s not. Every day is an absolute gift, so don’t squander it. Don’t squander it. This is going to require you to be super disciplined to have very strong boundaries to know how to say no, not now, or let’s look to do that in a different way. You really want to understand, if someone’s asking you to do something, what that looks like. Because I think too many people just give their time away, and it’s often because they’re afraid of being perceived as mean or rude if they say no, ask for things to be a bit different, can we do it next week, or whatever. I think some people really like that word busy. I actually don’t consider myself busy. I don’t use that word. I don’t believe that is something that we have to subscribe to. I think being busy makes a lot of people sick, really.   [00:51:18] Ashley James: Well, absolutely. If we’re just talking about the stress response, the idea of busy is creating the autonomic nervous system fight or flight. Being in the sympathetic nervous system response of fight or flight, which turns off the healing mode in the body. If the story you tell yourself is I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy, then you’re triggering fight or flight. And that is a very unhealthy state to be in chronically.   [00:51:47] Jenny Fenig: Chronically, absolutely. I think it’s so interesting, especially for people who are trying to figure out if they’re in a reinvention right now. Which I know many people are that COVID has given people the opportunity to go is this what I really want? When my regular life is stripped away, all the things that I typically did, is my work—is this good? Is this what I want? Is this framework for this working? What’s interesting is you can look back at your life and go wait, I’ve always been fascinated by this particular thing. What was that through line? What’s the through-line? So for me, I was always stressed growing up. I remember feeling this immense pressure. In college, I took a stress management class. A whole semester, I took a stress management class because I wanted to understand. I mean, no one had taught me that in high school. There was no class that was like okay kids, let’s help you all be less stressed. It was like be stressed. Join the club, everyone’s stressed. No. So I took a class in college. I wanted to understand what stress really is and how to work with it. It’s the number one cause of death. I mean, it really is. It leads to so many issues. We don’t have to subscribe to it. It’s not just something that is a given because we’re human. We can reclaim being versus doing, and then when we do things, that those can be intelligent actions. What you can look at is how you can organize your day, your week, again, working with the lunar cycle if you’re going to play with that, so that you’re getting the maximum results from your efforts. And that you don’t do it maybe in the way that you used to do it. So I had to really retrain myself when I left my last corporate job. Once I set out on my own and became an entrepreneur without even knowing that that was what I was going to do when I quit that last job, I applied for other jobs and nothing was exciting. I was like I don’t want to do any of these things. Oh no.  And then I just discovered coaching and just kept okay, I’m going to stay on this path. And then before I knew it, I had a business, and here we are all these years later. I had to train myself to do it differently. It was not required. There was no rule that said I had to sit at a desk Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM or beyond. There was no rule that said that, but at first, I thought I would be in trouble. I mean it sounds silly to say it, but I really was like who’s going to come? Who’s going to knock on my door to see that I’m not here. That I’m at a yoga class at 11:00 AM on a Wednesday.  You know what was so interesting, there were other people at the yoga class at 11:00 AM on a Wednesday. And I’m going, oh my gosh. It’s not just me. Well, okay. What do they do for work? And I just saw that I wanted to have a different kind of existence where I could know my natural creation times or my mind was really sharp when my body had a lot of energy. And I could provide a tremendous amount of value in terms of writing, speaking, working with clients, and strategizing. It didn’t need to be all day because my body really isn’t designed for that. My mind isn’t designed for that, and I have a family. I have three kids. I can’t do all the things I need to do with that old framework, with that old dynamic. Listen, I know a lot of people are still in that space where that’s the rule, that’s the protocol. You are responsible for being on the computer or being at this physical location from this time to this time. I would simply challenge you or encourage you to be willing to shake things up a bit and look at how you can look at productivity and see. Okay, if I were to batch all my meetings on one particular day, batch my writing on my mornings on these days, or my client work on these days.  Now, this might be really provocative to some people and make you nervous to even consider doing this or having a conversation with someone who might be more senior to you that you need to get this through, but there’s plenty of organizations that have done this with extraordinary results. There are places especially abroad, I’ve seen studies where they just decided that people would work Monday through Thursday, not Monday through Friday. And productivity went up through the roof. Efficiency went through the roof because you weren’t just wasting your time going, well, I can’t leave before this time. So I might as well just shoot the breeze, you know what I’m saying? This is about reclaiming our time and reclaiming that energy. This is how I homeschool. I’m very fortunate my husband and I both work from home. We have relatively flexible schedules. I get to decide when my client calls are, when these group calls are, when I’m going to do a podcast interview, and then when I’m focused on the children, and when I might be working with my daughter on something. My boys are at an age where we’ve been working with tutors in the last few years. Pre-COVID we’d have tutors coming into the home. Right now, we’re going to have a pause on that and we’re going to do online classes and tutors.  We’ll just schedule things in a way that everyone gets what they need, but even within their schooling, it’s not 9:00 AM to blah blah they’re in classes back to back to back. I don’t believe in that. We need space. We need space to creatively come up with ideas to go outside and work in the garden. To go on a hike, bring your art supplies, and create something that you see. To be bored. The best ideas come through boredom. We try so hard to avoid boredom like it’s this horrible thing. That we’re a bad parent if our kids are bored. That’s really going to come up with a great idea. We don’t need to over-schedule them to the point where they don’t even know how to think. As you all are considering how you’re going to move forward, keep that all into account. Again, it goes against the systems that we thought were unbreakable, but they’ve all broken.   [00:58:18] Ashley James: No kidding.   [00:58:20] Jenny Fenig: They’ve all broken. And I say that with love but with all certainty because I know for many people, you’re still in this state of it’s hard and you might be grieving. I’ve been homeschooling for a few years now so I’m not freaked out. I’m sad that we are where we are. It’s horrible, it makes me mad, and all the things. I think we should feel our feelings. I feel for educators, I feel for schools, and I feel for administrators. I mean this is not fun, and there’s no playbook really.  The last time we had a global pandemic was more than 100 years ago, and the world looked very different at that point. So here we are, luckily we have more technology that can support us. But I would suggest—especially for those of you who are looking into homeschooling, how distance learning is going to look, or what you want to do—to be really mindful of what system you want to be a part of. Because whatever system you’re choosing, you’re choosing for your child as well. They are experiencing the energy of that system. I’m very grateful for homeschooling because we get to design our own system, really. We have the blessing of our local school district. We submit end of year reports. We submit a plan at the beginning of the school year to say here’s where we’re going, and we have very supportive public school principals and superintendents who have our back every year because they know that we have our heart in the right place with what we’re doing, with what’s best for our kids, and the way that we see it. And they’re learning the things that they need to learn. I actually just did a workshop on this a few days ago called charting your path as a homeschooler. I just want to make sure everyone knows too, distance learning is not homeschooling. It’s not. It’s not, okay. You are still in that system. If you like distance learning and it’s working well, then do it. But that’s not homeschooling. Homeschooling is when you unenroll your child from that school and you really set out on a different path. You have a lot more flexibility, a lot more freedom. Your kids aren’t going to be absent if you decide to go on a trip. And they’re not going to be logging in at a certain time. It’s a whole different deal. I’m very grateful for it. It’s not for everybody, but it’s for more people than people might think. I could talk about it all day.  I feel like where we are now as a society is one where, again, you have an opportunity to choose the system that you’re going to be operating in. And make sure that you can be healthy within the system. For me, Ashley, in that corporate existence—and this again was in the late ‘90s almost all the way through the 2000s. I quit that last corporate job in November 2007. I realized that system was making me sick, and I remember being so afraid to leave because well, I get health care. My husband and I got health insurance through my job because, at that point, he was freelance in his work.  We got health insurance through my job, but I remember that small still voice within was saying, but Jenny, you’re getting sick so you can keep your health insurance. And it was just this whole thing of this is backward. This is so twisted. So I had to get that courage up to quit my job. I went on COBRA for 18 months as long as we could, then we found private insurance. We were so blessed and grateful. My husband ended up getting a full-time position, and so we do have health insurance through his company now. The way his company is designed, he’s not getting sick by working there. I’m not getting sick doing the work I’m doing. My work keeps me healthy because my work keeps me honest.   [01:02:17] Ashley James: Beautiful. Do you have any other lessons, homework, or techniques that you’d like to teach those who are stepping into this new world?   [01:02:34] Jenny Fenig: Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. I’ve loved having this conversation. It’s been really special. As much as you can, remember that you’re breathing. This is another thing that we take for granted and we forget. Breathing, it’s the first thing we do when we’re born. We take that breath, and ah, rejoice. And then the last thing we’re going to do as we exit the body is we will take that final breath. So it’s a profound process—breathing.  For many people, and I know for me too before I discovered conscious breathing. In the yogic realm, it’s called pranayama. Prana is that life force energy. All right, so prana. We have this life force energy moving through our body, moving through our veins, our blood. It just keeps everything just beautifully connected. Oh my goodness. We often move through life—if you’re unconscious of it—and you’re in that whole busy trap, you’re just eating fast food on the go, you’re constantly out of touch with nature and really with your truth, and you’ve said yes to lots of things that you’re like, ugh, I don’t even want to do this but I have to do it. You’re in the shoulds and the obligatory stuff. That we’ve come out of connection with our own breath, and then you’re often breathing shallow. So it’s just from that upper lung capacity. You’re just breathing to the heart and up, but the lungs and the body can hold so much more. If you were to take some time and really sit with yourself, and we could do it right now. We could just breathe very deeply together, and you can count your breaths. You can count just the beats of the breath. We could play right now and simply come into this breathing exercise where we are mindfully inhaling, and just breathing as full as you can on the inhale. And then going as high up as you can in the body. Then as you exhale, slow methodical trusting that exhale. And then as you inhale the next time, feel that you’re pulling the inhale up from the core of the earth just bringing it all the way up the body, all the way up to the body, and can you come to the top of your head, the crown of your head. And as you exhale down from the crown of your head, putting that breath back into the earth. You’re recycling the breath over and over again, remembering that the earth gives us so much. I mean so much. It gives us food, it gives us sustenance, it gives us air to breathe, oxygen. So bring yourself into that place of just conscious breathing, especially if you find yourself getting stressed or anxious. Can you come to that place of breathwork, and it’s breathwork like there’s actual work involved in the breath, instead of that just unconscious, I don’t even know. I’m shallow breathing. You’ll find yourself feeling a lot of pressure and a lot of tension, which let’s be real, even the most experienced those of us are with breathing, with exercise, or mindfulness techniques—coronavirus COVID will test us all. This is the work. This is really the thing that we’re meant to see how deep our practices are, and where we still have work to do, blind spots, or where we might be falling in certain holes. Practice isn’t something that we’re here to become perfect at. It’s something that we just show up for every day. So whether it’s you when you go for your run, you get on your yoga mat, you just sit outside and look at nature, or you do this deep breathwork. They’re all the other things that you do. You play tennis, you’re into baseball, or you’re into all the wonderful things that we can do with our bodies. It’s knowing that we can come into this place of that quiet, and you can access that small still voice within, and just breathe. That’s it.  If it’s newer to you, there are apps you can get into. There’s that Insight Timer app. I use that for years. I have that on my phone. I’m a Peloton owner and user. I have the Peloton app on my phone. And often, if I’m preparing for—let’s say I’m going to lead a training for clients, I’m going to give a presentation, I will turn on meditation, even though I know how to meditate. I lead meditations, but it’s really nice for someone to tell me what to do. I like to be told what to do sometimes and to be guided through an experience.  So I’ll just open up the app, whatever app you want. There are so many that are available to you these days, and you can just pick one. If you have three minutes, it’ll be 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 30 minutes and beyond, and you can tune in and receive. Just tune in and receive. Allow yourself to be in that moment. Don’t worry about what just happened or what you’ve got next. Just come into that place of, I’m taking five minutes. I am not going to feel guilty for taking these five minutes, and I’m going to breathe. That’s it.  And if it’s a guided meditation, you’ll listen to the words that are being spoken. You’ll listen to maybe the music or the sounds of nature that might be on that meditation track, and you’ll go where you go. You’ll go where you go. And you might find that you’ll get the answer to something that you’ve been struggling with. Some kind of feeling will come over your body. You’ll get what I call an intuitive hit, and you’ll realize, oh my goodness. That’s it. I’m going to go call that person later, I’m going to go sign up for that thing, or I’m going to go make that decision. It comes to you in those moments of stillness, and then your job is to then respond. To do something with it. That’s something that I know that you all will get so much from just that conscious breath and that coming back to that thing that is so special. Talk to anybody who is having trouble breathing, or has some kind of illness where their breathing is affected. They will tell you how they wish it could be different. So when we have this gift, use it. Really use it. And take note of how it allows you to show up differently for the important people in your life. I think this is an opportunity for all of us to really honor the relationships that we have. We are living in a very hard time. There are lots of challenges now, and I know that many people are experiencing hard things at home, in their work, or with people in their lives. Maybe you can’t see the important people in your life right now, which is heartbreaking. Totally, totally heartbreaking. But can you come into this place of stillness so that as you show up for the relationships, you can show up from a place of groundedness, kindness, and compassion? Even though you might see some craziness happening on social media. Anytime you go there it’s loaded. You’re like, okay. Am I ready for this? So we’ve got to come back. We have to do our own work. And then if you have kids, can you teach them how to do this stuff? Can you model it? But the way you teach is to do it. It’s to be it. Can you show it to your partner? Can you embody this with the important people in your life? It’s such a simple tool, but so few people actually use it. And if you were to use it, it would change your life.   [01:11:06] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights. Another website of yours is magicmakerscoach.com, and you have a Magic Maker’s Coach Certification. What’s that all about?   [01:11:27] Jenny Fenig: Yeah. I’m really passionate about serving women, coaches, therapists, wellness professionals, fitness professionals, and those who might have come from that corporate background like I am. Women who know that they’re here to guide their people to their greatest potential. They do that through transformative coaching and really working with a lot of the concepts that we talked about today. It’s listening skills, it’s understanding energy, it’s understanding how to work with the lunar cycle, understanding how to help your clients move through energetic blocks, and just old patterns that aren’t healthy or sustainable. Really look for old stories that they’ve outgrown and aren’t serving them and aren’t serving this beautiful life that they’ve been blessed with. Once I became a coach all those years ago and then set out on my path to create this business and help people, I then realized there was a huge gap in the market for a coach certification that blended up how to honor the craft of coaching in this particular style of coaching. Which is very much about working with your intuition, your body, and energy, and then how to have a great business doing this? How to have an online business doing this? And that’s what our coach certification is dedicated to.  I feel so grateful that especially in these days, often women were in careers that were really important and valuable, but often they might get to a point where they have to choose. If they decided to become mothers or have families, that it became a real sense of tension and stress because that old system meant okay well you’re in this office, then your kids are over here, and then you’re dealing with who’s with them after school. If you really want to go far in your career, it can come at odds with the desire you might have to spend time with your family. Or you might be in a career that is so valuable, but for some silly reason, it’s not valuable from a financial compensation perspective. So that has also held women back. We’re in a new era now. Online has very much put us on different terrain. Women have an opportunity to earn really well, and to do incredible things with these gifts and talents that they might have used again in that corporate space. What was so interesting, Ashley, I didn’t even know what coaching was really. I had sports coaches growing up, but once I discovered it after my yoga teacher training, it was like a huge light bulb went on. I said I’ve been doing this my whole life. I didn’t know this was a job. This is the part that I liked most about all my jobs. The other things I had to do I didn’t enjoy, but I just thought that’s how it was. So once I discovered that coaching was this wonderful way to use these gifts and talents that I have, and so many women are naturally blessed with this. And then once they really are given the tools, the guidance, the training, and the community to really honor the craft and come forward with confidence as they work with their clients, and then understand how to create an incredible business. Mostly have it online, if that’s their desire. That’s the way I do it in my business. They don’t have to choose between motherhood and a lucrative career. It can be something that they can really integrate, and it can evolve with them. It can evolve with their family. It can evolve with the seasons as we talked about. That’s why we’ve created Magic Makers Coach Certification. I’m really proud of the work that we do. And if this calls out to anyone tuning in, I’d love for you to check it out and submit an application if you feel called.   [01:15:29] Ashley James: Wonderful. In closing, I’d like you to give us some homework. I know you told us before to breathe, pay attention to the lunar cycles. What kind of homework can you give us? Perhaps homework that would help people to better tap into their life purpose, tap into why they’re here and feel purposeful. Some people are feeling a little untethered right now. So what kind of homework can help to empower us?   [01:16:02] Jenny Fenig: Yeah, oh my goodness. That’s such a great question. Really to come into that place of purpose. If possible, and it should be because we’re in summer. It’s warm, in most places. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, I know you’re in a different season, but play with me on this. Go walk outside barefoot.   [01:16:26] Ashley James: Yes.   [01:16:30] Jenny Fenig: So simple, but goodness, it gets you back into that place of, oh, this is how my feet feel on grass, on the sand, or even on concrete. Just the warmth from the sun that’s being pulled up. Or maybe if you can, go jump in some water. Get in a pool. Go to a lake. Go to an ocean. As much as you can connect and with nature—the natural elements: fire, water, air, and earth—the more you are going to feel good in your body. And it feels good to feel good. You are allowed to feel good. That right there could be this monumental breakthrough for some of you. Oh, I’m allowed to feel good more often than not, right? What would happen if you felt good more than you do right now? What would happen? I also encourage you to get honest with yourself about what you’re putting in your body—when it comes to your thoughts, when it comes to what you’re looking at. Your digital diet. Do you need to unfollow some people on social media? Do you need to scroll less? Do you need to be more intentional about the information that you’re taking in? Again, not to go into a bubble. I believe in being informed. And I think now, more than ever, we need to keep our eyes open about what’s happening in the world, but be really mindful of what you’re subjecting yourself to. Just know maybe reading things is better than watching videos for you because you’re way too impacted by some of the scenes. I have subscriptions to certain publications that keep me informed. Also, look at what your body is telling you about what is good for you and what’s not. Is there something that you are consuming right now that really is toxic for you? A few years ago, I received a strong message from that small still voice within, that it was time for me to let go of alcohol and not drink anymore. If you would have known me as a teenager, Ashley, or during my collegiate career, you would have not believed that I would one day not drink because that was just so part of my identity. That’s what I thought you did to have a good time.  My body made it very clear as I had been those years of practicing yoga, having my children, and I wanted a natural birth with them. I did that with two out of the three. My middle child was breech, and so I had a c-section with him. So I’ve had all these different experiences with my body. I’ve come to appreciate her in ways that I never did before. I look back and I know I was horrible to her for many years with how I treated her, what I said to her, and what I put inside of her. I don’t do that anymore. I’m not perfect, but each day, I commit to being more in tune with what she needs in terms of fuel sources. So we need this fuel to go all the places we’re meant to go in this life, help the people we’re meant to help, and be there for our family. Be here as long as we can in vitality with our people. In my case, I realized that alcohol just didn’t have a role for me anymore. It couldn’t be a character in my movie any longer. I was ready to move into a new chapter, so I let it go. For other people, they can have it. But there are others who can’t eat gluten, they can’t have sugar, or they can’t have whatever. The certain people in your life, they’re just holding you back. This requires a lot of discipline, a tremendous amount of honesty, and some grief of oh my goodness, this thing that I’ve known for so long—or this person I’ve known for so long—we just can’t do this thing anymore.  I encourage you to have those honest conversations with yourself and just get curious about what might be on the other side. Just be curious. Sometimes you can make a decision, and it might be well let me just try this for a month or a lunar cycle. We play with that, or a season, and just see. Run experiments. Run more experiments. Be curious. When you find, you know what, my life is better. My body feels better without this or with this, then run with that until it doesn’t make sense anymore. And then you’ll redesign something from there.   [01:21:24] Ashley James: Alcohol, it’s an interesting thing. We go to alcohol, sugar. There are over-the-counter things like sugar and dairy. The very stereotypical woman sitting with a pint of ice cream crying or something like that. When COVID first came about—and I saw this in our grocery stores—were completely sold out of baking goods, materials for baking. All the baker’s yeast was gone. All the flour and the sugar. People just sat at home, baked, and ate their feelings. I get it. I only stock healthy food in the house, but I definitely caught myself eating my feelings in the first few months of this crazy year. Alcohol is something that I cut out of my life really young. I was a bartender when I was 19 because, in Canada, the drinking age could be 18 or 19, depending on what province. As a bartender, I was great as a bartender. I’m such an extrovert. I love people, and I love talking to people. It was fun. I didn’t think I’m serving people poison. At 19, I’m having fun. After a season of babysitting drunk people, it just turned me off so much. I just stopped drinking. I just didn’t like it. I don’t like feeling out of control. It didn’t give me any pleasure, but I watched my parents growing up. My mom would come home and take the vodka out of the freezer and have a shot just to calm her nerves. And then a few hours later, my dad would come home and they’d split a bottle of wine. They’d sit together at the dinner table, and they’d drink their wine. Sometimes, on special occasions, they’d put a little wine in a glass and fill it with water. They thought it was fun, they’re sharing it with me. It became their way of de-stressing, just grounding or unwinding from the day. In looking at physiology, we know that the moment you drink even one serving of alcohol, your body goes into a state of stress for 24 hours. You can actually measure your heart rate variability, which is the most accurate indicator of stress. And that your heart rate variability becomes very poor for 24 hours after drinking even just one serving of alcohol.  If it’s doing that to us, then it is affecting the depth of sleep, the depth of being able to regenerate your body through sleep. And then the next day, psychologically, it changes the brain chemistry so we’re more narcissistic. We’re less able to be empathetic. We actually have a harder time with emotional quotient or emotional intelligence being able to delay gratification. So we become people who need more instant gratification. This is all from one glass of wine.   [01:24:42] Jenny Fenig: One glass, yeah.   [01:24:43] Ashley James: Because now we are less likely to delay gratification, we would tend to then have another one. And we would tend to have another the next night, and the next night. It becomes a habit, and then we live a story. The story is I need this to unwind, or I deserve this to just have a break. This is going to make me feel good. Well, I can say that about sugar. I can say that about ice cream, right? We can say that about a lot of things that are over the counter, right? This is going to make me feel good.  Now you can say that about street drugs too, but most people who are listening are not currently choosing street drugs to relax at the end of a stressful day. But most people who are even very health-conscious do find that they have their—I don’t want to call them vices, but they have—self-medication. We have to look at it, not from a point of guilt and shame because that then just perpetuates the vicious cycle, but to break out of the vicious cycle and go, what? So what are my deeper needs? If I’m trying to fulfill a need with alcohol, with sugar, with flour, or with dairy, if there’s something that is ultimately not healthy for me, but I’m using it to kind of band-aid a need, what’s that deeper need and how can I serve it in a healthier way? How can I get to the root cause?  I used to work with a woman who was into personal growth and development and yet she couldn’t quit smoking until she finally realized why she couldn’t quit smoking. When she ever did quit smoking for periods of time, she would never take a break. She would work at her desk. She owned her own business, and she’d work out her desk from morning until night, never once getting up to stretch. Just never eating. Just really never taking care of herself. And then she would go downhill very quickly. But smoking, she caught herself and realized that it made her get off her desk, go to the balcony, take between 5 and 15 minutes and just relax, and breathe. Even though it’s breathing in a cigarette it’s still breathing   [01:27:05] Jenny Fenig: Breathing in nicotine, yeah.   [01:27:07] Ashley James: And then she would maybe grab a drink and grab a bite. And then she’d go back to the desk, and she was just as effective at her work because there comes a point when you push yourself so hard that you don’t have efficiency, as you talked about. But she used cigarettes as a way of mandating breaks. In order to successfully quit—and she did eventually—she implemented mandatory breaks without cigarettes. So she’d go outside and just breathe air without the cigarettes. She’d go for a walk, or she’d just do something else to stand up, stretch, walk around, get a glass of water, and take mandatory breaks. And then the deeper need that was being met by the cigarettes as a Band-Aid was no longer there. I just think that if we can choose to, like you said, do a lunar cycle with no alcohol in the house, with no alcohol in your life. And instead, ask yourself what’s this deeper need? If what you really need is something to relax and de-stress, knowing that alcohol temporarily makes you kind of feel out of it and disconnected, we think it’s relaxing us, but it’s actually stressing our body more for 24 hours. And if we can get outside, like you said, and do grounding or earthing—and I have some great—I was about to say great documentaries.  I do have a great documentary actually on that linked in the Learn True Health Facebook group under announcements. There’s an amazing documentary that we have uploaded into our Facebook group that we got permission to upload. But I have a few episodes on earthing and grounding. The importance of it, and that there are 26 studies that prove that by getting out in nature and putting your feet on the ground, or using a grounding mat if you live in a condo and you have no access to grass. By releasing those excess electrons, it decreases stress in the body, and it decreases inflammation in the body. Even people with MS and other autoimmune disorders that are triggered by inflammation see great success. I love your very powerful and doable advice of breathing, of tuning into yourself, and of walking as much as you can out in nature—barefoot so that you can earth and ground. And then try cutting out alcohol, or try taking what’s in your diet that that little voice that you talked about, that wise but quiet voice inside you that knows that it really is time to stop drinking the coffee and switch to green tea. Switch to nut-based milk instead of cow milk because it’s affecting your immune system. Or give up the alcohol for some kombucha. Or some herbal tea.   [01:30:06] Jenny Fenig: Oh my gosh, I love kombucha.   [01:30:07] Ashley James: Right, so good. It’s so good   [01:30:09] Jenny Fenig: Oh, yeah. I have one on my desk right now. Jalapeño-kiwi-cucumber blend.   [01:30:14] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [01:30:14] Jenny Fenig: I just recently discovered that one. It’s that Health-Ade kombucha brand and they have a jalapeño-kiwi-cucumber. Those of you who might experiment with no alcohol or you love kombucha, I highly recommend that variety.   [01:30:27] Ashley James: Yeah, switch to kombucha.   [01:30:30] Jenny Fenig: That jalapeño has that little kick. You still want the kick in your life, that’s the thing. You thought alcohol gave you the kick, but you can get kicks in other ways.   [01:30:37] Ashley James: Absolutely. I go to the farmer’s market and there’s a local company. They fill up my big glass bottle with it. They have the most delicious strawberry one. They also have a pineapple one, and a ginger one. I love it. My husband’s addicted to the cayenne.   [01:30:56] Jenny Fenig: Cayenne pepper? Cayenne cleanse?   [01:30:58] Ashley James: Yeah. I think it’s the cayenne and ginger or something. There are so many out there. There are just fun things to swap out. But at the root of it, I want us to just ask ourselves, is this serving me? Is this really serving me on a deeper level? Or is this masking something? Is this really fulfilling a need? Or is this just masking some symptoms? If you had a headache and you just take Advil, you’re not really serving yourself in the long run because that headache is your body trying to say something.   [01:31:35] Jenny Fenig: Exactly.   [01:31:36] Ashley James: I think your life is going to express in different ways to show you that there’s some deep healing you can do, but you have to stop masking things. I don’t think we can truly do deep healing if we’re drinking alcohol every day.   [01:31:50] Jenny Fenig: Totally. That’s the thing is we’ve been fed a narrative that we aren’t strong enough to feel things. So the way through that is through drugs, through some kind of numbing technique, or some kind of numbing substance. Alcohol numbs you. I experimented with plenty of drugs growing up. I numbed out from feeling things, from feeling stuff that felt very, very hard to feel.  The same thing when I went through childbirth, and I did so much study. I actually want to feel it. It’s okay, every woman can decide what’s right for her, but I wanted to feel the contractions. I wanted to feel the birth happening. I trusted my body. I didn’t need to numb out on that. You reclaim your power when you know that you can feel things. There are people who can help you feel things. I’ve worked with plenty of healers, therapists, and all the things. But gosh, there is liberation on the other side of feeling that stuff and knowing that it won’t kill you. It’s just going to make you stronger. You’re going to be reminded about who you are, and it will prepare you for all the other journeys you’re going to take in your life.   [01:33:12] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It has been such a pleasure to have this conversation with you, Jenny. I look forward to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We’re all seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but I look forward to implementing everything that we learned here today and possibly having you back on the show to see how things are progressing and have you come to share more with us.   [01:33:41] Jenny Fenig: That would be lovely. Thank you so much. It’s been a really, really powerful conversation. I send so much love and courage to everyone. We’re really creating the future today. We’re living it, and we’re living in a really fascinating time. I know it’s hard, but I also keep reminding myself when I say it to others, what a fascinating time to be alive. We could have chosen different times, you know what I mean? And we’re here now. Okay. Let’s show up, and let’s just do our best. Let’s keep choosing health. Let’s keep choosing the healthy path as best we can.   [01:34:24] Ashley James: An ancient Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times.” And that can be taken many ways. I love that. Let’s just keep choosing health and keep choosing the healthy path no matter what. Thank you so much, Jenny. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show.   [01:34:40] Jenny Fenig: Thank you.   [01:34:42] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Jenny Fenig. Please check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition by going to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learnturehealth.com/coach, sign up for a free module, and see if it’s right for you. See if taking the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s health coach training program is the path that you want to take either for your own personal growth to help yourself, your family, or your friends, or adding tools to your tool belt, or having a career. This is the career that you can do from home. Now is the time to invest in our own education and experience. Now is the time to dive into personal growth. I don’t want to say we could turn these lemons into lemonade, but sugar-free lemonade. We can take the hand we’ve been dealt right now, and we can turn it around and figure out how we can gain the most benefit. If you have to be at home right now, then find ways of enriching your life, enriching your experiences. Things like doing online school. It’s a fantastic way to spend your time to grow and to learn. If your kids are doing school from home, why not you as well? So check out IIN. And you know what, I’ve heard a lot of parents have shared the IIN course with their whole family. My husband watched some of the videos and some of the training modules with me and really enjoyed it. I know that older kids often love learning from it as well. It’s something that you can share with your children and maybe make it part of your homeschooling. So go to iin.com, check it out, and give them a call. Make sure you mention Ashley James and Learn True Health podcast for the listener discount. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.     Get Connected With Jenny Fenig! Website Facebook  Instagram   Book by Jenny Fenig Get Gutsy: A Sacred, Fearless Guide for Finding Your Soul’s Calling and Living Your Dream Recommended Reading by Jenny Fenig Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook: How to Prepare and Combine Whole Foods to Prevent and Treat Osteoporosis Naturally: https://amzn.to/2EFVR2r Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com Dr. Laura Kelly's website: https://medicinethroughfood.com   Treat Osteoporosis and Osteopenia Naturally https://www.learntruehealth.com/treat-osteoporosis-and-osteopenia-naturally   Highlights: Benefits of eating mushrooms Isolates versus complex herb cocktail as medicine Importance of self-care What contributes to bone loss and fractures Nutrition is foundational medicine Medicine is part of life   What is self-care? How do you practice self-care? Dr. Laura Kelly shares what self-care is, and it may be different for everybody. She explains that self-care includes everything about us from the food we eat down to our thoughts. We need to listen and know our bodies really well so we can practice self-care daily. She also shares how her patients, including her mom, were able to heal their bone diseases through her protocol. Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m so excited for you to learn from Dr. Laura Kelly today. She wrote a book using food, nutrition, and herbs to support the body in growing healthy, strong, flexible bones at any age. You can be a grandma. You can be in your 90s. You could be a 100-year-old marathon runner. You could be a 20-year-old. Whatever age you are, now is the time to start growing a healthy skeletal system. And what’s so cool is she’s even seen some of her patients and some of her readers reverse other diseases as well. Even her mom reversed calcification in the arteries of her heart after following this protocol because by following this protocol, you’re supporting the body’s ability to lay down healthy mineralization and create flexible bones so that they don’t fracture, so that they’re stronger, and that also supports the body in balancing minerals even in the soft tissue as well. So it’s very exciting. We also get into talking so much about the contrast between natural medicine and drug-based medicine, and just new ways of looking at it, which I think are really exciting especially because I know, I know you’re going to be sharing this episode with someone you care about. For all the new listeners that this is their first episode, welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited to have you here. Dr. Laura Kelly is going to be giving away a copy of her book to a lucky listener, so please come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s free. It’s a wonderful community, very supportive. If you’re into holistic health and you want to be part of a community that’s all into holistic health, you’ve come to the right place. Join the Learn True Health Facebook group.  Now, as we talk about different minerals, supplements, herbs, and foods, one thing that I have to let you know about is my favorite magnesium soak. Magnesium is the most important mineral for the body. Now there are over 60 minerals. The body needs at least 60 essential minerals to fully function, but there are elements and there are so many nutrients in the soil that the body needs that plants then digest, and that’s when we eat the plants, we get them. Sometimes we need to take them as a supplement, but the most important is magnesium, and magnesium is used so quickly and so readily by the body, we’re chronically deficient in it. And this is why I love this particular magnesium soak. I’ve had the founder of this company on the show several times. Her name is Kristen Bowen. So you can go to my website learntruehealth.com, and type in Kristen Bowen, and listen to the past episodes. At her worst, she was I believe 97 pounds, having 30 seizures a day, and in a wheelchair unable to communicate. And that was at her lowest. She was able to, with the help of her family, get her life back, and her health back. She found that the thing that made the biggest difference for her recovery was soaking in magnesium. It’s a special concentration from nature. It’s from the Zechstein Sea. It also has other co-factors in it. And when we soak in it, we absorb an average of 20 grams of magnesium. You can’t get that much if you take oral because oral magnesium reacts very poorly with the digestive system, and it’s just not economical for us to get IV magnesium—going to a doctor and getting IV magnesium. So it’s very economical to be able to soak in magnesium at home. It’s safe for children, it’s safe for pregnancy, it’s safe for everyone. So please check out the links in today’s episode. Also, for Dr. Kelly’s book, for Dr. Kelly’s website, and for the magnesium soak that I recommend, you can get it from the website livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH for the listener discount. That’s livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Grab the big jug. It says undiluted magnesium soak. You buy that big jug, and then use the coupon code at checkout LTH, as in Learn True Health, LTH for the listener discount. And check out those episodes that I did with Kristen Bowen. It’s quite fascinating. I’m so excited for you to learn from Dr. Laura Kelly, and she’s promised to come back on the show because she has invented software that helps us to decipher and understand our genetic expressions. How cool is that? So she’s going to come back on the show and continue this wonderful discussion about how we can uncover what our body needs, our unique needs to support our optimal health. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you care about. All those friends and family that want to have strong healthy bones. I even know some marathon runners that I’ll be sharing this episode with because they suffer from chronic fractures. So this is not just an episode for those who are senior citizens. This is an episode for everyone. Everyone deserves to have strong flexible bones at any age, and if it takes just doing a few tweaks to your lifestyle, to your diet, to your supplement routine to make such a huge health difference, why not. You’re worth it. It’s such a worthwhile investment. I highly recommend getting Dr. Kelly’s book after listening to this episode. I already bought a few copies for my friends and family. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.   [00:05:59] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 443. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. Laura Kelly on the show. What a fascinating book. You have published The Healthy Bones, how we can, through food, nourish our skeletal system so we can reverse and prevent osteopenia, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis. Fantastic. I’m so excited to have you on the show today. Welcome.   [00:06:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: Thank you, Ashley. It’s good to be here.   [00:06:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. This is such an important topic, especially when we look at demographics and we see that our wonderful baby boomer parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—that generation has moved into that era where their MDs are pushing them to be on drugs like Boniva or Fosamax, right? I don’t even know if those are still available. Drugs like that have caused so much harm to people in the past. I see it. I see people, especially seniors, being pushed to have drug after drug after drug. The body doesn’t have a drug deficiency. The body has a mineral deficiency.   [00:07:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: Right. That’s a good way to put it.   [00:07:28] Ashley James: Right, right.   [00:07:29] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. I mean it’s certainly a deficiency issue, for sure.   [00:07:33] Ashley James: Right. It just makes sense, but unfortunately for the MD, the only tool they have is drugs. They were never taught in medical school about nutrition, and of course, you were. Before we dive into how we can use food to heal our body and prevent and reverse disease, I’d love for you to tell us what happened in your life that made you want to become a doctor of oriental medicine, and made you want to practice medicine the way that you do?   [00:08:06] Dr. Laura Kelly: I always wanted to study medicine from when I was a little kid. It runs in my family. My uncle was head of neurosurgery, at George Washington University for 20 years. My other uncle is a physicist, my brother is a surgeon. So there’s a lot of medicine and a lot of medical thought in my family. And when it came time to get serious about life and start thinking about what I actually wanted to do as an adult, which happened quite late for me, which was around age 35, I started on the medical path. I started going back to school pre-med at UCLA, that sort of thing and intended on going to medical school. And then, as I approached that, it started to become apparent that path was not satisfying what I was looking for.   [00:09:06] Ashley James: What happened? So were you a teenager? Were you in pre-med?   [00:09:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: No, no, no. This was when I was older. This was when I was 35.   [00:09:15] Ashley James: Really? So what happened though? What happened that made you see that drug-based medicine wasn’t fulfilling?   [00:09:24] Dr. Laura Kelly: It wasn’t anything external, and it wasn’t an issue with me. It wasn’t a health issue with me or anything like that. It was really an internal drive. I had always felt close to nature, and that seemed to me to be the source of all things in this regard. That there were patterns here that were easy, natural, and harmonious. And it didn’t make sense to me in the larger picture to step very far away from that if I was talking about healing and working with a body, which came out of nature. So there was a very strong internal instinctual drive towards that, which I’d never heard about alternative medicine very much before. It wasn’t something that happened in my family, but it just was there, that drive, and I sort of re-examined the medical path. I thought there must be another way into medicine. So I started looking around and I found that Chinese medicine was very rigorous, and there were thousands, literally thousands of years of documentation, and thousands and thousands of years of case reports. There was enough science available in medicine for me to feel satisfied because I have a strong drive for knowledge. This medicine just appealed to me. It fit with the natural paradigm in an incredibly beautiful way. I mean Chinese medicine, again, the current literature that we still use today started 5000 years ago. There’s a book 5000 years ago that we still read.   [00:11:14] Ashley James: Wow.   [00:11:16] Dr. Laura Kelly: That came out of philosophy. It didn’t come out of let’s make a drug. It came out of natural philosophy. Natural philosophy evolved into medicine, and then it became medicine officially 5000 years ago. That kind of progression made a lot of sense to me intellectually.   [00:11:41] Ashley James: What is the philosophy? How is the philosophy of oriental medicine, as a doctor, differ from seeing an MD and their philosophy that governs how they practice medicine?   [00:11:57] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well the philosophy of the Taoist-based, which is sort of a philosophy of oneness with nature, essentially if you can boil it down to something. And the fact that we are part of nature and we are completely not extricable from that process. The things that make the amino acids and the things that makeup and the structures around us, we are made of the same things. We’re all made of the same things. So that harmony is inherent in Chinese medicine, and I think is inherent in all-natural medicines and all traditional natural medicines that are originating out of cultures that are connected to cultural traditions. Which is very different from the current western medical paradigm, which it’s an analysis. That’s an analysis-based, and that comes around from something like having a microscope and trying to see smaller and smaller pieces, and smaller and smaller parts and isolate understanding. That’s very different. It’s just a different way of looking at the world, and it’s a different way of looking at medicine and the body. They’re both, obviously, entirely valid. They’re just different.   [00:13:23] Ashley James: What’s been described to me is that we need to know when to which doctor, not witch doctors. We need to know when to go to the MD. When to go to the emergency room, essentially. When to go to your Naturopath. When to go to your doctor of oriental medicine. When you go to your chiropractor, right? There are several different forms of medicine and they’re all valid. And if we look at the history of modern medicine in the last 115 years or so, what then became the AMA, the AMA, for so many years, has done huge slander campaigns against all other forms of medicine. And they actually coined it as alternative medicine. And that is almost like it’s Orwellian in a sense that if they can label everything else, everything that isn’t drug-based medicine alternative medicine, then what they’ve done is they made it sound less than. A Naturopath that I’ve worked with said that if you said a German shepherd was the only actual dog, and every other dog was an alternative dog—the German shepherd is the one dog everyone should have, but a greyhound is an alternative dog, a little Weiner dog is an alternative dog, and the Australian shepherd is an alternative dog. That is absolutely silly, right? It’s completely silly. There is no such thing as alternative medicine. That term was used to discredit valid forms of medicine. As a doctor of oriental medicine, you’re saying that it’s quite science-based for the last 5000 years. Now there is an appeal to novelty. I was recently sharing a study with someone. In the ‘70s, they were able to reverse gestational diabetes. It was an amazing study, but it was done in the ‘70s. This woman then said, “That’s not valid, it was done in the ‘70s.” I’m thinking, did our genes all of a sudden change? Are we no longer the same humans as the ‘70s? Why isn’t a study that was done 50 years ago valid? I think that’s really funny. Perhaps there are some listeners who think that oriental medicine, yes, it may have been practiced for 5000 years, but at some point, we practiced bloodletting. We realized that’s not a valid form of medicine, but at the time it was science. What could you share with us that proves that oriental medicine is quite valid now? What kinds of recent studies are showing how it can very much help us?   [00:16:30] Dr. Laura Kelly: I mean there are two parts to that answer, and the first part is like you said, our bodies are still the same as they were. Until we have different bodies, then the things that worked 5000 years ago will still work, and the things that work in the ‘70s will still work. What’s happening now, for example, let’s take malaria. So malaria, obviously, one of the problems is that the bugs get used to the drugs. The World Health Organization is in charge of defining what malaria drugs are being used.  It was not that long ago, maybe it was 10 years ago, that it was realized that there’s a traditional Chinese medical formula for malaria. I think it’s probably 8 or 12—I’m sorry, I don’t remember exactly. But you learn it, and what you learn is that you can take this prophylactically. You can take this before you are exposed, and you can take it as a treatment, and it works. Malaria is not a big deal if you know how to treat it with this. That’s what you learn in school, that’s what the books say, and that’s what everything says.  So in 2005, maybe, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the date. There was a Chinese medical researcher who brought forward the isolate from one of the main herbs in this formula and said we can cure malaria with this and won the Nobel prize. She won the Nobel prize in medicine for this isolate from a Chinese medical herb that had been used for thousands of years, and the WHO adopted this herb and said, yes, this is absolutely correct. This herb works. So what they did is they created a drug cocktail for malaria with this as the key component because the other drugs that they had been using against malaria were starting to fall off. They weren’t working anymore. So they added this constituent, which is an isolate, and it worked for a number of years. It is, as far as, I know starting to fall off now. The bugs are starting to become accustomed to this isolate as well. So they’re going to have to keep looking and look for more things. There are two issues with this. One of them is that this was a malaria formula that we all know that is useful, functional, and does what it says it’s going to do, so much so that the WHO said this is a drug. The problem comes when you pull isolates, and this goes back to the concept of different medicines. If you pull an isolate out of a complex formula, if you have 8 herbs or 12 herbs, you’re going to have hundreds and hundreds of active ingredients, and they’re all going to be working against each other and with each other. And that combination, that’s a massive numerical combination of effect, which is not possible to replicate.  So if you pull out one isolate from the thousands and thousands or millions of reactions that are occurring within your system with all of those herbs, you’re exposing the effect to exactly what happened, which is the bugs—because it’s an isolate—can now overcome this single substance. Where it was when it was part of a much larger combination, it was harder for the body of the bug to overcome. There’s a danger a little bit when you’re moving between medicines that way if you don’t understand the complexity of the synergy of the effect of the medicinal herbs that you’re working with. You use an isolate because that’s the medicine you work in, the medical paradigm is isolationist. That is a little bit off the subject.   [00:20:34] Ashley James: No, that’s brilliant. That’s right on point. Do the Chinese herbs that they’ve used for thousands of years for malaria still work today? Or has malaria adapted?   [00:20:49] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. It still works in combination, as far as I know. The bug hasn’t completely overcome this isolate, but it’s starting to. I think it’s in Cambodia that it started to become non-effective or less effective.   [00:21:06] Ashley James: The isolate was turned into a drug, but I mean the original cocktail of Chinese herbs? The original, not the isolate, but the original cocktail of herbs, are they still used, and are they still valid?   [00:21:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. Until I hear otherwise, they are still valid, and that’s because of the complexity that you encounter when you combine 8 or 10 herbs with, let’s just say, 40 active constituents that are going to all playoff against each other. You’re creating a complex, complex response in the system. So, yeah.   [00:21:45] Ashley James: I interviewed a doctor who’s been an MD for 40 years, although he studied in a part of Germany that very interesting—while he was becoming a surgeon, while all these doctors become surgeons, they’re also taught acupuncture and homeopathy at the same time at the university level. He came to the United States 40 years ago thinking that all doctors knew homeopathy and acupuncture.   [00:22:09] Dr. Laura Kelly: Oh, that’s wonderful.   [00:22:10] Ashley James: And then he was like, what’s going on here? Why are we giving drugs to people? His name is Dr. Klinghardt, and he has an amazing, amazing ability to help children who are on the spectrum no longer be on the spectrum, also people who have Lyme disease, and just these very strange and hard to get over illnesses. He says his favorite thing to do is to find—someone that needs a drug, let’s say, and then—the herbal alternative that works better than the drug.  So he doesn’t ever use drugs unless he absolutely, absolutely, absolutely needs to. But he says that herbs always work better than the drug that would be prescribed to that symptom because most drugs are an isolate, like you said, of an herb. Like a compound of an herb, but they throw away all the other medicinal benefits from the herb when they just isolate one component. And this is the problem because drugs are for-profit—I know I’m singing to the choir—they end up looking to make a profit and protect patents instead of looking out for the greater good of humanity, in which case we would still be using and promoting the herbal complex that has worked to prevent and cure malaria.   [00:23:45] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. I think that there are quite a lot of people—to defend some of them—who are well-meaning. There was a symposium yesterday, and the discussion was about certain vaccine development. The concept around vaccine development is to find something that can help the world, right? To cure whatever disease is going to be, but the paradigm with which that is in is the paradigm of what’s the disease, and what’s the treatment. And the human body and the environment in which that disease is occurring is left out of that equation. There’s a whole other side of medicine, which is the side of medicine that I chose to practice, which is primarily concerned with the human body, the environment of that human body, and the environment into which the disease comes. It’s like two different approaches to the same median, which is the human body interacting with the world. The human body interacting with the disease. And they have one angle, which is the disease treatment, and we have one angle, which is the environment of the body itself. Bringing them together is what everybody really needs, right? When the problem that you’re speaking about before about the AMA trashing all of us is really unfortunate to me. It’s not classy, you know what I mean? It’s just not classy. When you start mixing dogma and medicine, I think you have a recipe for a real problem.   [00:25:32] Ashley James: That’s why I believe that people should know more about each kind of doctor, each kind of medicine. Instead of having a dogma about it, they can go to the right practitioner. You wouldn’t take your car to see a plumber. Don’t take your body to always the same kind of doctor because you’re just going to get their one philosophy of medicine. So just know which one to go to when, and I’ve had several episodes about this. So let’s learn more about you, how you practice medicine, and as a doctor of oriental medicine. Especially because you’re so excited about the science behind it, the philosophy that we are part of nature, and let’s use nature to bolster the environment of our body so our body can really do the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting off disease, right? Let’s bolster our own amazing God-given ability. If you’re a spiritual person, you believe in God, and you start studying how the immune system works, it is amazing. When I started studying and really getting into it, we are so complex. Our immune system is so brilliant. Our body functions are so beautiful, so harmonious. There are thousands of things all going on together in harmony. There’s nothing like it. There’s absolutely nothing like it. And even if you look some at simpler organisms, they’re still incredibly complex and beautiful, and there’s this balance. Homeostasis is amazing. If you’re someone that doesn’t believe in God, look into the science and just see how complex, beautiful, and intelligent it is. We have to really appreciate that our body has an innate intelligence to come back into balance, and it’s our job to help it. You as a doctor look to facilitate bringing the body back into balance so the body’s intelligence can do all the work, right?   [00:27:44] Dr. Laura Kelly: That’s beautifully said. Absolutely. That’s exactly what I do because there isn’t any reason to try and throw it off. I mean certainly, there are circumstances, like Dr. Klinghardt, if you’ve gotten to the end, you’ve tried everything, and if the problem is just too entrenched or it’s a genetic problem, then you may not have success. But even then, you can somewhat. The last resort, of course, is to really hit it hard with the heavy hammer of a western pharmaceutical. Up until that point, there’s incredible knowledge within the body that if you give it the right pieces, it knows what to do with them. That’s for sure.   [00:28:31] Ashley James: Your book is about supporting the skeletal system. What led you to want to publish this book?   [00:28:40] Dr. Laura Kelly: My mother. She had a progressive bone loss for about 18 years, and she finally hit the point where her doctor said to her, if you don’t take this reclass shot, then I can’t treat you any further because you will break your hip, and then you might die. My mother called me, and I was in school at that time. She said, “What am I supposed to do?” And I said, “Well, you know what, there are a number of herbs that I know fix fractures. Let me look into this. I’ll get back to you in a couple of months.” So I took a fracture map of the world, I looked at high and low fracture rates in the elderly over time, pulled apart the diets of the people with the high and low fractures, and figured out what was missing and what needed to happen. I called her back in two months and I said, “Here’s a list of the reasons why I believe this is happening. So pick three of them and start there.” So she did that, and then we did another DEXA scan early. You’re supposed to do them every two years. We did it in 15 months, and for the first time in 18 years, she had no bone loss. So her doctor said, “Well, that’s a complete fluke. You still have to take medicine.” And my mother said, “Well, you know what, let’s just wait just a minute.” So in the meantime, she had a scan and her cardiologist called me and she said, “What did you do? Because the plaque is clearing out of her carotid arteries.” So I said, “It’s all nutritionally-based. What I’m doing is activating the mechanisms that she already has in her body that weren’t activated to guide the calcium where it needs to go. And I guess, as a byproduct of that, it happens to be clearing the calcified plaque out of her arteries.” So she said, “Well, you need to write a book for doctors. You need to write a book for doctors because you’re sort of sciencey. You bridge the gap.” So I started that, and then I realized that this wasn’t for doctors. That this was medicine that people can do themselves. Of course, MDs, medically trained doctors, do need to understand these principles and practices because they can help their patients. But it felt more important to me, at the time, and it probably still is more important to me to write it for my mother and for other mothers because there isn’t a reason to fear this diagnosis in 99% of cases or 99.9%, and you can actually take care of it yourself. So it made much more sense to write the book, again, for mothers. So I called my mother and I said, “Hey, listen.” And by this time, she had had a second DEXA scan, again, not in four years, but still within another year maybe, and she still had no bone loss. So we realized that this wasn’t a fluke. Her doctor said, “Okay, well maybe it’s not a fluke.” So I called my mother and I said, “You know what, let’s write this together because this is for you. Let’s do it.” So we did that. We called a publisher and said, “Do you want to publish this?” And Chelsea Green, a wonderful publisher, said yes. So we sat down and wrote it.   [00:32:14] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I love it. I’m so excited.   [00:32:20] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. It was a wonderful process.   [00:32:21] Ashley James: Okay. So what I want to know is why was she reluctant to get the shots? Most people are super wanting to do whatever their doctor says. I know a lot of people who just go in. They go in because they’re sick and the doctor says, while you’re here, let’s give you a flu shot. Well, they’re sick. Well, their well their immune system is compromised. Oh, it’s time for these other vaccines. Oh, we need to give you the… So anyway, most people go in and get whatever shot, whatever medication, blindly follow without question whatever their doctor says. You said it was a reclass shot? What was it about that had your mother go wait a second, I want to think about this. Why was she not super eager to do exactly what her doctor said without question?   [00:33:20] Dr. Laura Kelly: Because I had started going to alternative medicine school. I think I was in year six at that point out of seven, or maybe I was actually in year seven. I’m sorry, I was in year seven. I had already been speaking to her and taking care of her from this more natural perspective for six years. So over that six-year period, gone from not really knowing or having any interest to buy now at year seven, she was sort of saying okay, well wait a minute, this is actually serious. This is actually real. This is actually right. When that came up, then she could turn to me instead of her doctor.   [00:34:13] Ashley James: You had been in school for oriental medicine for a while, so you had a few years to have her see some results. What kind of results was she getting to open her eyes to natural medicine? Did you help her through any other health problems before this?   [00:34:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: No. She was fairly healthy. She was very healthy really, to begin with. She has a natural instinct as well, which I think had never been allowed to live. Do you know what I mean? I think that was a latent belief or a latent tendency in her to connect with nature and all that sort of thing. But she grew up in the ‘50s, and life was a little different then. She didn’t participate in the ‘60s revolution, so she was outside of any of that mind-expanding situation that occurred. That was latent in her, and I think that when I took the step, it allowed her to let that out a little bit, and let her think about exploring other things other than the things that she’d been told. So I think it was a gradual process, but again, it was inherent in her already.   [00:35:41] Ashley James: I love it. We have to foster that quiet voice inside of us that is the first voice, that little voice that comes in first, and then we usually override it. It’s like the voice that says bring an umbrella when it’s sunny outside. That’s the voice, right? Or bring a sweater when it’s hot outside. That little voice, that first voice. So when a doctor says, You have to take this medicine, and that little voice says, no, I don’t think so. Something feels wrong here. We just need to listen. Just take a step back.   [00:36:18] Dr. Laura Kelly: That’s really wonderful. That’s a wonderful thing to say. But that’s not taught, Ashley. We don’t learn to do that in our culture. We don’t learn to sit with ourselves quietly and listen. It’s something that definitely happens. I mean meditation, these moving meditations, tai chi, and things like this. For example, part of the tradition of medicine that I learned, all of this is part of medicine. All of this is part of caring for the body. You don’t come with an instruction manual. You don’t come with all of the things that you need in order to take care of yourself, but you come with, in that tradition, medical practices. Medical practices that you carry with you throughout your life in order to keep yourself healthy, in order to treat yourself, in order to listen to your body. And you learn how to do that within that culture. We don’t learn that here. It’s not part of our cultural upbringing. It’s not part of our cultural heritage. Everything should function great, and then when it stops functioning great we go, oh, what am I supposed to do now? Okay, here’s somebody that knows what I’m supposed to do. I’m going to listen to them. Part of the holistic medical road is you learn to care for yourself from the beginning, and you learn to help the people that you live with. You learn to care for the people who are around you, and this is part of the medical structure. So this is an inherently different way of approaching life. It’s saying part of my life is self-care. That’s a very powerful thing to learn when you’re young, right? I didn’t learn that until I was well into my 30s. But I can imagine what it would have felt like to learn that from when I was very young.   [00:38:24] Ashley James: Yes. Can you imagine if we raised an entire generation to practice self-care?   [00:38:30] Dr. Laura Kelly: I can’t, I cannot, but it would be wonderful.   [00:38:34] Ashley James: Okay, one thing I’m deeply saddened by but I want to shed light on is that the rate of suicide for ages 10 to 26 has gone up so much. I believe it’s the second cause of death in that generation right now. That it is so high. There’s a huge disconnect, and with holistic medicine, we know that emotional, mental, and physical health because MDs mostly focus on the physical. They see a symptom they attack it with a drug, or they manage, they suppress symptoms. They manage things with drugs. There are enlightened MDs out there. I know sometimes I sound like I’m bashing them. I want us to just broaden our perspective and really see the whole forest. Just get a 30,000-foot view. We have been taught that there’s a physical body and it’s separate. It’s separate from mental, emotional health, and that in our culture, when you have the mental and emotional issues, there’s something wrong with you. We’re either normal or abnormal. That’s a philosophy that says we’re broken. And that is just such an incomplete version of what it is. The experience of what it is to be human.   [00:40:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s inhuman.   [00:40:04] Ashley James: Right. It’s inhuman to think that when someone has mental and emotional unhealth, that we’re broken. When in fact, it is part of being human. That we have an emotional body. We have mental health things to work out, and it’s not you’re normal or abnormal, you’re human, right?  What we’re seeing is suicide rates going up is a symptom of a problem that our medical system is broken, which we already knew that. But also, our philosophy—as parents, as aunts and uncles, and as cousins—of how we’re raising this generation is incomplete. And what we need to do is come back to what you’re saying. Maybe this is your next book. Just like you looked at cultures that have the lowest rate of osteoporosis and the lowest rate of fractures, and then you looked at what was different in their diet versus the ones with the highest. What about cultures that have the lowest rate of suicide and what they’re doing differently? What philosophy are they doing differently?  I really feel that self-care taught at an early age also increases self-worth, and if we can practice things like becoming quiet, doing breathing—I mean meditation kind of is a trigger word for some people because it seems too daunting. But simply going into oneself and just turn off the cell phone. Turn off the outside stimulus, and go into oneself—journal, breathe, get out in nature, do some self-reflection, share your thoughts and feelings with someone who’s supportive, and disconnect from negative energy, negative social media, that kind of thing, and practice self-care. There would also be a component of self-love and self-respect.  We really need to look at what’s going on because if we have a generation that has huge mental and emotional health issues, they’re not practicing self-care, self-love. And these are the things that also, as you say, are done in cultures that have less disease.   [00:42:35] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. I mean it is a philosophical issue back to that. There isn’t a cultural philosophy that I can pinpoint in America that’s effective in that sort of way. I didn’t grow up with one. So it’s hard, at any point, to say okay, now we have to find a philosophy because that’s not how it works. And that’s why everybody gets sort of tripped up with this concept. Can I meditate? Like you said, it’s really daunting because there is no philosophical base for the concept.  It doesn’t matter if you’re meditating. It doesn’t matter if you call it that. It doesn’t matter if you do it right. None of that matters. What matters is that you are listening to yourself, and you’re saying I am making space for you. I am making time for you. That’s it. That’s all that actually matters about it. Because when you start to recognize that you just want to make space for yourself, whatever that means for you, then you are respecting yourself. Then you’re respecting your body, and you’re respecting your mind. The response that you get from that will be enormous. To me, it’s about separating it from the concepts because we don’t have a philosophy in which to place the concepts. So let’s just get rid of them and say well, what am I actually doing? What I’m actually doing is respecting and loving myself, and that’s all I have to do. And if you start there, then you will grow your own philosophy out of that seed. That’s how I help people in a mental and philosophical way. It’s really just about do I love myself enough to sit and say, I’m going to give myself some space and time. If you find that you don’t, then you have to do some examination. Find ways into being good with sitting with yourself and giving yourself respect. But this takes us back to the mental-physical conjunction. The lack of separation of these things. We’ll pull it back down to reality. When you start to examine things like nutrition and brain function, the mechanisms in the brain, every single neurotransmitter turning into another neurotransmitter, every single function of the neurotransmitters, and the neurotransmitters themselves, all require different nutrients. The neurotransmitters need amino acids to be built. The translation of GABA to glutamate needs vitamin B6 and magnesium. If you don’t have these things, your brain isn’t going to work very well, and of course, you’re going to not feel good in a mental space. These are fundamental pieces. These are key important pieces. And then the other part of that is, for example, with B6, if you’re looking, if you’re speaking with autistic kids or people with ADHD and focus problems, again, vitamin B6 is one of the key factors for transforming glutamate into GABA. And that’s the inhibition of the stimulation. So if you don’t have enough magnesium, which a majority of Americans apparently don’t according to all sources including the US government, but also a lot of issues can come around the B vitamins in terms of the transformation of the B vitamins within your body. Because the form that you eat a vitamin in is not the form your body uses it in. It has to go through transformational steps, and every single one of those transformational steps is regulated by a gene. All genes have the ability to be mutated or have polymorphisms. So quite a lot of times, what you find is that even though this child is eating B vitamins, the pathway of transformation for some of the B vitamins isn’t working. So the form that he needs the B6 in order to transform the excitatory neurotransmitter into the inhibitory neurotransmitter his body doesn’t make. So he could eat B6 forever, and he still would not be able to efficiently make that transformation. So the glutamate will stay high, the inhibition of the GABA won’t happen, and he’s excited.  But when you understand this process that the body has to go through these genetic transformations to make these things actually available, and that every single step is an opportunity for it to go wrong. When you start to understand those pathways you can say okay, now I need to give him the pre-transformed version of B6 because his body’s not doing it. And then the neurotransmitters start to function properly in that mechanism.   [00:48:20] Ashley James: Can that be derived from food? Or would that need to be a methylated B vitamin supplement?   [00:48:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: It would need to be a methylated supplement. So these are the pieces that are really key to understanding anything that you want. The entire system is built from nutrients, right? There’s no way around that. All nutrients and everything that comes into your body is information, essentially. How is that body set up to receive that information, and can it use the information? Does it understand the language? Or does it need help understanding that language information? That’s the base in my having looked at this and worked with lots and lots of patients, and thought about all different types of disease and all different types of mental states and things like this. The bottom of the foundation of all this just simply is understanding. All of the nutrients are necessary—minerals, vitamins, everything is necessary. There’s nothing that’s not supposed to be there. It all has to be there. How does this particular person’s body respond and use that information—those nutrients? Let’s optimize that function as much as possible so that they can get the most out of everything that they’re taking because everybody’s taking supplements, and everybody’s trying to figure out what the right diet is. But without knowing this information, there is no optimization possible. Sometimes, it’s not possible to get happier, better brain function if you’re not transforming your B vitamins. So these are things that just have to be known, and to me, this is fundamental medicine. From my perspective, the real foundational medicine of this body is nutrition because it’s the only way that it functions. As scientists, as doctors, we have to say, okay, this is the fundamental medicine. Let’s dig into it. Let’s pull it apart and figure out everything we need to understand how to make this work for us. And that wasn’t done by western medicine. Luckily now, it’s being done by a lot of people. And there’s a lot of nutritional medicine and research going on, are really coming to understand how these things function and why they’re so important. Let me step back all the way to the very bottom of our bodies, which is our DNA. Not even speaking about it from the place of what it does, but speaking about the fact that what it is. DNA is made of something, and it’s made of nucleic acids. Nucleic acids, guess where we get them? We eat them, right? We have a pathway within us which is called a de novo synthesis pathway which can recycle what we have, but human breast milk is full of nucleic acid because that baby needs a huge supply of nucleic acids to build DNA because that baby is just pumping out cells rapidly. Coming back again, the nucleic acids, we get them from what we eat, but we also need to structure them into DNA. Our body does that in the liver, but it does not do that without folate, without the vitamins, and without the nutrients. These are co-factors that our body uses to build our DNA. To take those nucleic acids, put them together, and make the strands. Without the co-factors of B vitamins, for example, it won’t happen. We won’t build DNA. So when you’re looking at a system, for example, the immune system which is a rapid turnover—you’re going to get a turnover of cells every day, three to six days you’re going to get a full turnover of cells. The digestive tract, six days turnover of cells. These are rapidly turning over systems. Your body is constantly having to replenish cells, building cells all the time in these two systems. So these two systems need a lot of nucleic acids because you’re building a lot of DNA because there’s DNA in every cell. You can pull nutrition back to this extremely base level and really see that this is really important because your immune system will not function if you don’t have enough nutritional co-factors, If you don’t have enough nucleic acids, which you get from mushrooms, for example.   [00:53:21] Ashley James: Ohh.   [00:53:22] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, nice link, right?   [00:53:26] Ashley James: I love mushrooms so much.   [00:53:28] Dr. Laura Kelly: Mushrooms are amazing, and they’re the only real substantial source of nucleic acids in the plant kingdom.   [00:53:35] Ashley James: Wow, really?   [00:53:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. This is why they have been used traditionally for thousands and thousands of years as a longevity food.   [00:53:42] Ashley James: Any mushroom? Or are there certain kinds of mushrooms that have more co-factors than others?   [00:53:48] Dr. Laura Kelly: They have different factors meaning there are multiple levels of function with mushrooms. So you have the source of nucleic acids within the mushrooms, which are the building blocks for the DNA, but then you also have specific factors within each of the different types of mushrooms that trigger different immune system cell type growth. So some of the immune some of the mushrooms will trigger early phase immune response like natural killer cells and macrophages, and some of the mushrooms will trigger later stage cells—T cells, B cells, and things like this. There are multiple layers to the mushrooms in terms of the immune system and longevity.   [00:54:31] Ashley James: What kind of mushrooms do you eat on a regular basis?   [00:54:34] Dr. Laura Kelly: I eat chaga. I fluctuate depending on whatever is around. But reishi daily staple, chaga tea once a month, lion’s mane sometimes, and sort of geared towards brain health neuroplasticity, things like that.   [00:55:00] Ashley James: So those are supplements you can drink as teas or take as extracts. What about eating? Are there certain types of mushrooms that are better than others?   [00:55:13] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’m not a massive expert on mushrooms, even though I’d like to be. I think that shiitakes are particularly good. They seem to be very complex. That’s what I would suggest.   [00:55:29] Ashley James: I’ve had Dr. Joel Fuhrman on the show, and he says that everyone should eat a half a cup of mushrooms a day for some of the same reasons you’re expressing. In addition, at least a half a cup of onion, and you can mix them together. You can eat it raw or cooked. For this one particular nutrient he was talking about, and there are so many nutrients in the mushrooms. I always thought they were just water. I didn’t think that there was anything nutritionally beneficial in them, but they’re actually completely superfoods.  Obviously buy all mushrooms should be organic because you don’t want to buy pesticide-filled mushrooms. But he said the white button cap ones, the ones that are usually void of flavor, shiitake is so flavorful. So these are very mild in flavor, and they’re the least expensive ones. He said that it actually has this one nutrient. I forget what nutrient it was, but one nutrient he was talking about that helps the immune system that they were quite high in it. You could save money and buy—it’s usually $4 a pound organic—and get these little white button cap ones. I love cooking with mushrooms. Aren’t the building blocks as well for vitamin D? It’s like D1 or something is in mushrooms.   [00:57:00] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, that’s right. Maitake mushrooms are the only ones that actually have inherently vitamin D in them. Well, they have a significant amount of vitamin D compared to the rest of the mushrooms, but if you flip them up and put them in the sun gills up until they’re a little bit dry, they absorb vitamin D just like your skin does from the sun and they’ll store that.   [00:57:31] Ashley James: Yes. Then you eat it and then it’s like a vitamin D supplement.   [00:57:35] Dr. Laura Kelly: Exactly. It’s just way cheaper and more delicious.   [00:57:38] Ashley James: Oh, it’s so cool. That’s so neat. So besides mushrooms though, you’re saying that’s really the best source for the raw building blocks for nucleic acid. Would we have to then eat animals at that point if someone, for whatever reason, had adversity to mushrooms? Or is there anything else in the plant kingdom that we could eat?   [00:57:57] Dr. Laura Kelly: As far as I know, that’s the richest source is mushrooms. Other than that, you’re looking at organ meats, basically.   [00:58:08] Ashley James: Got it. Wow. I mean, that’s amazing. Let’s say someone eats the standard American diet but doesn’t eat mushrooms, doesn’t eat organ meats, they might be really low in nucleic acid.   [00:58:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well, this is a question. I mean, we do have a de novo synthesis pathway, which is we can recycle these pieces and make what we need to make, but again, when you’re dealing with a system with a high turnover like the immune system, the reproductive system, or the gastrointestinal system, you may not actually. This hasn’t really been researched, actually, which I find pretty interesting. It’s been researched more in Japan than it has here, by far. But there was one study that looked at if you’re an elite athlete and you’re pushing your body quite hard, one of the things that suffer post-exercise is immunity. So your immune system, the regulation goes down. So there was research where they decided that they would supplement these elite athletes with nucleic acids post-exercise and see, and it stopped the immune fall-off.   [00:59:27] Ashley James: How did they supplement? With the actual supplement, or they ate mushrooms?   [00:59:31] Dr. Laura Kelly: No, nucleic acids. I don’t know if it was a synthesized nucleic acid. I’m not sure where they got them, but there was a nucleic acid supplement. It provokes an interesting idea, which is if you’re immune-compromised, you can generally say that if you’re suffering from a chronic condition, you can guess that you’re having low natural killer cell function, which is the first phase of the immune response. So it begs the question, what happens with people who are having faltering immune responses if we supplement them with nucleic acids? So they’re actually able to produce more DNA and more cells. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it’s an interesting question from a supplementation standpoint, for sure.   [01:00:22] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, absolutely. So we’re looking at the body with a different philosophy. You mentioned that the body can recycle. So let’s say someone’s not eating foods that are rich in nucleic acid. The body’s recycling old cells as they die and reusing the nucleic acid. What co-factors are needed in order to do this recycling?   [01:00:55] Dr. Laura Kelly: You know what, Ashley, I don’t know because I have really just started digging into this in the past week because I’m writing a book on the immune system and longevity.   [01:01:05] Ashley James: Fantastic. Well, there’s my question for you. When you have completed that book, come back to the show and I want to know the answer.   [01:01:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: Definitely.   [01:01:14] Ashley James: Looking at each function of the body, for example, in recycling the body’s own glutathione, so glutathione is very expensive for the body to make. I believe the liver produces it. It’s our master antioxidant, so it’s obviously incredibly important, but it’s very expensive for the body to make. However, when selenium is present, which is a micronutrient—it’s like a mineral—then the body can recycle it. So that’s one of the co-factors the body needs to recycle glutathione. If we make sure we supplement with selenium, you don’t need to overdo it. 200 micrograms a day or between 200 and 600, depending on your weight, is great. But that’s supporting the liver in recycling glutathione, which helps us to fight off cancer and other diseases. If we knew the factors needed in recycling other things in the body like nucleic acid, then we can make sure that we have them.   [01:02:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Exactly. That’s my goal is to put together the list. Maybe someone has done this already. If anybody knows, definitely let us know, but I haven’t found any sort of supplementation in terms of exactly what you’re speaking of—providing nucleic acid bases, but also providing some co-factors along with that to really help the body produce the cells that it needs to produce. I think it’s a really interesting project.   [01:02:48] Ashley James: As you research, had you come across the effects of fasting, especially after 30 hours of fasting when the body’s ability to break down pathological tissue skyrockets?   [01:03:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, yes, yes, yes.   [01:03:06] Ashley James: Is that part of your system, or do you recommend that for people looking to speed up their healing?   [01:03:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. Well, it depends. It depends on how weak you are. It depends on if you’re diabetic. If you’re diabetic, it’s not a good idea. That’s going to be a mess. You need to do that with serious supervision. But in general, yeah. The upregulation of all sorts of longevity factors on top of all of that, there isn’t really another way to kick the body into that sort of behavior, except by fasting. And again, looking back at—I’m sure many of your other guests have taken this road and spoke about this—how we evolved, it’s again like looking back to nature. You look back to how we evolved and you say, how did this organism function? What does that mean for us in the environment we’re in, where food is completely plentiful? We can get whatever we want even if it doesn’t grow around here. All of these things are all questions to ask because there is a perfect harmony that comes out of evolution. The farther we get from those and the small choices that we make that distance us from that perfect harmony eventually are going to have an effect. Coming back to look at how we evolved, which is if we went out and we killed this animal or whatever we ate for a while, and then we didn’t eat meat for three months or whatever. Giving the body the natural patterns, looking at those natural patterns, and saying how we evolved is with those patterns. So that’s probably going to be what our body is going to respond to.   [01:04:51] Ashley James: Right, right. In the west, we’re so afraid of even missing a meal let alone fasting, but there’s so much evidence to show that it’s incredibly healthy. And yes, I have done interviews about it, and there’s lots of science now proving that you can do fasting in a very healthy and restorative way. I want to talk more about your book. Before I do, I want to bring up one more thing. I have a friend. It’s a friend’s mother, and she has had her gallbladder removed. She has basically had every part of your body you can have removed and still survive. This is exactly what she said to me, “I’ve had everything removed that you can without dying.” Gallbladder, she’s had her parathyroid removed, she’s had her appendix removed, so you go down the list. She’s 60 years old, relatively healthy, and all of a sudden, a few weeks ago, began having huge dizziness, can’t walk, her legs won’t work, and people have to just support her weight. She was so dizzy she was vomiting. It took several hospitals to finally diagnose her with—first they said it was peripheral vertigo, which is not accurate. Then they said, okay, it’s central vertigo. And then a neurologist, after doing a lot of blood work said, she has virtually no copper in her system. So she’s being supplemented with 2mg of copper a day for a year, which I think is incredible.   [01:06:27] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s high.   [01:06:29] Ashley James: Yeah, very high. But given that, the neurologist is not recommending any co-factors—not calcium, not magnesium, nothing. No co-factors at all. This woman has not had parathyroid for years, so her body has not regulated any of the minerals correctly. I’m kind of just taken aback. And she’s never done a bone density scan. I’m thinking, what’s going on…? Because you mentioned about the brain and how there are certain nutrients like if B6 is missing, you can actually—and I’ve heard of people having dementia, being put in nursing homes, and then a Naturopath is called by a family member. They get them on a B supplement and all of a sudden the lights come back on. They didn’t have dementia. They had a B-vitamin deficiency. If you have a B6 deficiency, the brain is not going to function. But if you’re incredibly deficient in trace elements and minerals like copper, for example, or major ones like magnesium or calcium, the nervous system doesn’t function correctly. I’d love for you to share. For some people who let’s say they don’t have a thyroid or parathyroid. Their body really cannot regulate healthfully on its own, what steps do you recommend? Do you recommend that they definitely read your book and do this diet? What steps do you recommend, especially for this woman, my friend’s mother?   [01:07:56] Dr. Laura Kelly: Again, my book isn’t a diet. I’m not really a proponent of that because everybody has different needs, everybody has different things that they want to do, and the ways that they want to eat. So I’m not prescribing a diet, just to clarify.   [01:08:13] Ashley James: Love it.   [01:08:15] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’m saying here are the mechanisms in terms of how your bones work and your body works around those bones, and here are the things you need in order to activate those mechanisms. I’m not dictating how you need to get them. So if you want to get your calcium from dairy, you can. If you want to get your calcium from leafy greens, you can. It doesn’t matter to me. Within that context, she’s not going to be regulating calcium. She’s not going to be regulating the bone density aspect. Then there’s a mechanism called osteocalcin. This mechanism is really key to regulating all of that and making sure that the calcium is going the right place. So understanding how to activate those mechanisms nutritionally sound really important to me for this person, and making sure that all of the factors are in place to make sure that those mechanisms are functioning without the oversight is really the situation that she wants to be in. If I were her doctor, I would run for her a nutrition evaluation first, and that’s going to look at basically all nutrients and say where are we with all of those things. I may also run genetics for those nutritional pathways because it’s really important for her, especially this person with lack of regulation over this issue, to understand where we may be running into trouble. For example, this all started with me because my vitamin D levels were chronically low. I didn’t understand why for so long, and I took the standard dose of vitamin D, and I never erased them. I finally said this is ridiculous. So I ran my genetics, and I have terrible vitamin G receptor genetics. There are four different transformations that are going to make, three of mine are in the toilet. So I tripled my dose of vitamin D, and I finally got where I needed to be. I would never have done that, and I spent years vitamin D deficient taking vitamin D. Especially for somebody who doesn’t have a lot of leeway, coming to understand if there are any things in the way from her body and saying, okay, let’s understand all of that, and then just make sure she has the proper doses of all of those nutrients, then you don’t need to overdose on any of the other ones. You don’t need to overdose on things because the body itself, like you were saying before, is so efficient that if you give it the right amounts of things, you’re not going to need to over supplement on anything and throw off because you’re going to throw something else off if you over supplement with copper.   [01:11:07] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [01:11:10] Dr. Laura Kelly: So you want to avoid doing that, of course, because you shouldn’t. You don’t need to, but what you do need to do is exactly like you said. You have to provide all of the co-factors that the copper needs to function, which is exactly the same situation that I encountered with my mother when her doctor had initially said, here take these calcium pills—1200 milligrams of calcium a day. Well, if you look at the research, 1200 milligrams of calcium a day doesn’t fix osteoporosis, and it also ups your chances of cardiovascular problems quite significantly.   [01:11:47] Ashley James: Especially because there are no other co-factors. Magnesium is needed to help place calcium correctly, and there are other nutrients as well, right? So if you’re only taking one, and they have to be in a great ratio, then you’re right. It’s not going to be placed correctly in the body. But just overdoing copper—and you’re much more of an expert than I am, but I know for example—throws vitamin C off, and it throws selenium off. Those three things have to be in the right ratios together. Because some people will overdose vitamin C, and that’s good in certain circumstances. But if you overdose vitamin C, it leeches copper from the body. Copper deficiency leads to aneurysms because it’s needed in the production. It’s a co-factor in elastin, and it’s also needed for making pigment. So people who lose the ability to make pigment or have gray hair have a copper deficiency. Everything has to be done together in balance, but I love that you talk about this genetic component of epigenetics—looking at how the genes are expressing. I have the MTHFR SNP mutation—however, it’s said—and so I have to take a methylated B-vitamins in order to support my liver to do both phases of detox. I haven’t even gone deeper into the genetics like looking at how my body—the four different genes that help the body make the D-vitamin, that’s incredibly interesting. So you do telemedicine. You see patients locally in LA, but you also work with people around the world. Can you order these tests and can you decipher them, these gene tests?   [01:13:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. I have actually. I’m in the process, and I’m almost finished building a piece of software that does this because it’s so important. If you want to stay healthy for as long as possible, you have to understand this. If you want to fix your type 2 diabetes, you have to do this. If you want to fix your heart disease, 90% of people who have these problems can reverse them. I don’t want to be too bold about it, but it can prevent, reverse, or mitigate the problems here.   [01:14:20] Ashley James: Absolutely. Even type 1 diabetics, they can increase their health so much that they require less insulin. I’ve known several type 1 diabetics who after focusing on health. They were able to cut down their insulin by over 70% because they increased insulin sensitivity, their body became more efficient. So even people who have issues where we’re not saying you’re curing it, but you can make it more efficient.   [01:14:52] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes, definitely. All of these things. Again, we know that we need to eat a good diet. We have good instincts, usually, about our own bodies and what we should and should not be eating. Over time we come to know that, but let’s get to it for real. Let’s just look at it and say, okay, your vitamin D function is terrible. You need to triple a dose. Okay, your B-vitamin functions are fantastic. Just sit in the sun for 10 minutes. We can do that. We can do that now. What I’m building here is a piece of software that’s going to allow me or you, I’m building it for you, I’m building it for everyone. Again, it’s like the book for mothers. I’m building this piece of software for you, for people to be able to say okay, I have these tests, or if I don’t have them, I can order them here. They’re going to go through this engine, and I’m going to actually know exactly what I need to be taking, or exactly what I need to be eating because here’s a shopping list. I can walk into my grocery store and I can say oh, this is actually the food I need.   [01:15:59] Ashley James: And the herbs.   [01:16:01] Dr. Laura Kelly: The herbs, all of it. Because herbs are concentrated nutrients. That’s what herbs are and that’s why they work.   [01:16:09] Ashley James: I love it. Let’s dive into your research in your book. You studied the cultures, the countries that have the highest rates of osteoporosis, osteopenia, and fractures, and you also study the lowest. Let’s talk about the bad first. What are the commonalities that the cultures that have the worst bone density? What are some commonalities that you feel contribute to bone loss and fractures?   [01:16:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: The two areas of the world are the US and Scandinavia. It’s pretty clear, and they’re significantly higher than they should be than everywhere else. It’s pretty clear in Scandinavia that it’s the vitamin D winter. I think that there’s really not much else to say there. It’s just simply the lack of vitamin D. There was a lot of research done around vitamin A, the balance of vitamin A and vitamin D, and how really important that is for bone health. Just not having enough sunlight is a deficiency.   [01:17:24] Ashley James: Right. I’ve heard some plant-based doctors have come on the show and have shared. I haven’t seen the studies so it would be interesting, but they’ve cited that countries—so certain cultures like Africa and Asia—that consume no cow dairy or very limited consumption have the highest bone density. And cultures that consume the most cow dairy have the worst bone density.   [01:17:56] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, that may be true, but I think there’s a difference that needs to be made also between pasteurized and unpasteurized. I mean they’re basically different foods. I think most of us grew up eating pasteurized dairy, and that’s not going to do much for you. Genetics plays a part in this, of course. You have some African tribes. All they eat is meat and blood and their cholesterol is 120. Do you know what I mean? There are genetic components to this environment. They grew up doing this. This is how their body evolved. This was their evolution, and so it works.   [01:18:40] Ashley James: They have great vitamin D levels.   [01:18:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: And they have great vitamin D levels.   [01:18:46] Ashley James: Okay. So vitamin D, you’re saying, is the biggest thing.   [01:18:51] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well it was. It is in Scandinavia. The point actually that I really should make is it’s just deficiency. It’s really a deficiency issue. That’s clear in the US. I remember, when I first started thinking and studying medicine, I was like it’s not possible. How is it possible that we’re deficient in the US? We’re the land of opulence. We can’t be deficient, but it’s very clear that the majority of us are nutritionally deficient, which is bizarre but true.   [01:19:23] Ashley James: Well the food is void of nutrients.   [01:19:27] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. There is that, and the dietary practices aren’t ideal in terms of keeping the system regulated and healthy. But that isn’t something that you know. It’s not something that you learn from your doctor, and your doctor never tells you that that’s something that’s important. It wasn’t something that was thought about for a long time.   [01:19:52] Ashley James: One of my mentors is Dr. Joel Wallach. I’ve had him on the show. He, interesting background, became a Naturopathic physician, but first, he did pathology, was a research scientist, was a veterinarian, and also had a degree in soil agriculture. He studied soil. He actually discovered what was the cause of Keshawn disease in China, and also certain groups of—what are they called in the United States in Pennsylvania?   [01:20:31] Dr. Laura Kelly: Amish.   [01:20:32] Ashley James: Amish, that’s right. The Amish were having high rates of the same sort of disease-like state, and he came in. Because they only eat what they grow, he studied their soil and determined the soil was completely void of certain nutrients like selenium. It was causing miscarriages and causing an alarmingly high rate of muscular dystrophy in this particular area of Pennsylvania because they’re eating the food they grow, and their soil is devoid of selenium. And selenium is needed in utero to prevent certain birth defects like muscular dystrophy, which he discovered. We usually don’t eat all of our food from the same soil. You look at your grapes, they’re from Chile. You look at your pears and they’re from Thailand. We’re eating food from around the world, especially if we’re not conscious of eating more locally for fresher foods. But just because Brazil nuts, are grown in any soil, that doesn’t mean they’re chock full of selenium because I’ve often brought this up, like oh, we need selenium. And then someone says, oh, I eat six brazil nuts a day. Brazil nuts can grow hydroponically. Anything can grow in almost minerally void water basically as long as it has NPK and some form of even artificial sunlight. So the fact that you’re eating broccoli, we should absolutely eat plants. But it doesn’t mean there’s enough calcium in that food or enough iron in that spinach. How do you go about combating this? Let’s say someone actually does eat healthily. They’re eating half their plate is full of vegetables, a variety of colors, and they’re all they’re always eating organic. How do you ensure that they’re getting all of their co-factors? Do you do blood testing? Do you look at their symptoms? Do you do the genetics? How do you go about it?   [01:22:31] Dr. Laura Kelly: All of it. This is a long-term prospect because you’re not coming to see me because I will fix your toe if it hurts. I mean, don’t get me wrong—or your knee or whatever. I can do that. But generally speaking, when people are coming to me, they’re coming to me because they’re saying, okay, maybe I have a bone density issue. Or maybe I have another chronic condition, but I’m interested in—I’m getting older maybe and I want to now be healthy for the rest of my life. What I do is I look at all of that stuff, and I say let’s build the foundation up. So let’s get the information and then we have it. But let’s also say that we know that we’re not running every trace mineral that your body needs for all that cell communication. We’re not running all of that. We know that we need all of it. We know that it’s devoid in the diet, so let’s choose some really base supplements that we’re going to take regularly. And then on top of that, we’ll figure out what your deficiencies are. If you’re missing vitamin C, we’ll supplement with that. But there is some really base supplementation that we need, just because of where we live, or just because of the world is the way it is. And that is amino acids and trace minerals. We need these things so much. If we eat only muscle meat, which we eat in the west and we don’t eat the connective tissue, we’re missing part of the amino acid profile completely. These are things that I find let’s just do it. Let’s just get these supplements going, and then you have the basis of everything you need. The nucleic acids, you need these things in order to do anything. Let’s blanket supplement these base things—at least for a while—and then figure out what your additional deficiencies are on top of it. That’s how I work. But the trace mineral supplementation, I don’t know if there’s anything more important than that.   [01:24:41] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [01:24:43] Dr. Laura Kelly: Like you’re saying, they’re the co-factors required for all cell communication, the things that are happening inside of the cell, the communication of the DNA, the RNA, and the building of the proteins themselves. All of these things require all of these co-factors. So let’s just put them all in there and say let’s give it all it needs and then work on the problems once it’s got all the fuel.   [01:25:07] Ashley James: Absolutely. Nine years ago—it’s actually coming up on 10 years, I can’t believe that. Next month it’ll be 10 years. I was incredibly sick. I had a lot of health issues and chronic adrenal fatigue was one of them. I got on Dr. Wallach’s protocol. The first thing I did was get on his liquid trace minerals. Within the same day that I took them, my constant gnawing hunger went away. I had out of control blood sugar, and I was type 2 diabetic as well, but the constant gnawing hunger that I was constantly yo-yoing. Every 45 minutes I was hungry. Nothing could satiate it. Within my first shot, I took an ounce of it, within minutes the hunger went away. It was really interesting. Within five days of being on it, I woke up early in the morning full of energy, and it was like a light bulb went on in my body. That was really what had me go, oh my gosh, I have to tell my friends about this. And then I did, and I have a friend who reversed her lifelong skin problem. I have another friend that immediately stopped five months of kidney stones—stopped them—and he hasn’t had them since. My friend hasn’t had her skin problem since. That’s what led me down this path of wanting to study with Naturopaths, become a health coach, and start the podcast. So trace minerals are what started it for me. Now, not all trace minerals are created equal. There’s buyer beware out there. I can say that takeyoursupplements.com is where I recommend getting them from. I’m sure you have your own line that you recommend when people work with you as well. I just want to put out there, I don’t recommend going to Amazon, just typing in trace minerals, and getting whatever. There’s so much buyer beware out there, but get it from a reputable source. Either get it from Dr. Kelly or get it from takeyoursupplements.com, I would say. But I think everyone should be on a trace mineral supplement. It makes such a huge difference. I totally agree with you.   [01:27:17] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, definitely. This is another coming back to the theme, which we’ve been in a while is the natural patterns that are there. We have ratios and balances of trace minerals. We don’t have an equal amount of all of them, right? We have different ratios, and it’s the same ratio that’s in the ocean. And it’s the same ratio that’s in shilajit or Himalayan salt. The patterns of mineral balance are replicated throughout the natural world. So finding sources that replicate that natural balance is what you want to find because then you’ll be taking things in the right balance for your natural body.   [01:28:10] Ashley James: So you had mentioned that you came up with a list of all the things that the cultures around the world with the lowest rate of osteoporosis, the highest bone density, and the lowest rate of fracture. That they have in common that helps the body to properly lay down calcium in the right places, not in the wrong places, and you told your mom to pick three. What were the three things that she picked?   [01:28:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: Let me just differentiate for a minute between bone density and fracture because they actually aren’t the same metric. This is relevant because of what I found. The Japanese, on the traditional diet, had very low rates of fracture compared to everybody else. But, if you scan their bones, they’re necessarily not dense, but they’re quite small, can be thin, and could even fall into osteopenia or osteoporosis, but they don’t fracture. This was a moment of saying, well wait a minute. So there are two separate metrics here and one of them is the density, which is what we read. But the other metric is actually flexibility because if you look at the way the bone is structured, you have the collagen that gets laid down. It doesn’t get laid down in a regular regulated fashion. It’s not regimented like a line a line a line a line a line of collagen. It’s laid down in a completely random fashion, and it creates a matrix, but a really random matrix. And the reason it does this is because you can imagine that if the collagen were laid down in straight lines, the bone would be very strong from one direction and completely not strong from another direction. So the randomness of the laying down of the collagen strands is completely random so that it can absorb a hit from any angle. This concept of flexibility is something that we don’t look at in the west in terms of diagnosis or understanding bone health. We look at density, and as you know from the drugs, you can densify your bones. But then, you can also suffer what’s called a bisphosphonate fracture, which is the result of taking the bone densifying drugs, and then the bones just randomly fracture standing on the subway, for example. That was the first one that went to the CDC. I think some woman was standing on the subway, and her femur just shattered. It was because the bone density drugs will support your system in laying down bone, but if it’s already been laying down subpar bone or bad quality bone, all it’s going to do is assist your body in laying down low-quality bone. You may get a denser reading, but the quality of the bone isn’t good, and so you end up with a fracture. So just looking at bone density is a mistake, and trying to figure out a way to read something like flexibility would be a better approach, in my opinion. Because if I had to choose between a dense bone and a flexible bone, I would take a small flexible bone any day because it’s going to withstand a lot.   [01:31:34] Ashley James: And not fracture   [01:31:35] Dr. Laura Kelly: And not fracture because it’ll be able to take a hit. Considering that concept, I was looking at the Japanese diet and looking at what in their diet is allowing them to not have particularly dense bones but to have flexible bones because that’s why they’re not fracturing. And that turns out to be K2. That’s in the traditional diet and has always been in the traditional diet. Of course, the presence of magnesium is required for activation as well. So it’s the nutrient co-factors. It’s always coming down to those. It’s always going to come down to those. So it’s making sure that all those nutrient co-factors are there in the right place, at the right time to make sure that the system and the mechanisms work. That was the top choice of my mother. She’s like okay, well this makes a lot of sense to me. So she started supplementing with K2. We looked at the research out of Japan. They’re researching it at very high doses, multiple, multiple, multiple thousands of times what our body would normally use. And there didn’t seem to be any downside. So we just took a hard-hitting approach for about three months, and I just said, “Okay, mom we’re going to hit your body so that your body knows what we’re doing.” I don’t have any scientific basis for this but I feel like the body wants, like we were talking about before, to be well. It wants its mechanisms to work. It wants to be in homeostasis. I also think that it listens to us, right? Again, it’s the information we’re putting in. What information are we putting in with our minds? What information are we putting in with what we eat? So I said, “Mom, we’re going to hit it hard so your body knows what we’re doing, and it has no uncertain terms that we are building your bone and we are making sure that the calcium is going in the right place.” So we spent three months of what I would call therapeutic doses of exactly what we talked about—K2, trace minerals, amino acids. These are her choices, and I agree with them completely. We said let’s start there, we started there, then ran her tests, figured out what else she was missing, and filled it in. She’s changed her diet completely. It took about two years for her to really shift her diet into what she actually needed to be eating.   [01:34:02] Ashley James: Which is?   [01:34:04] Dr. Laura Kelly: For her, again, it’s personal. For her, she ended up needing a lot of calcium from plants because she needed a lot of calcium. She wasn’t actually eating the calcium in her regular diet.   [01:34:20] Ashley James: Isn’t there also vitamin K in leafy greens?   [01:34:23] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yup, there is. And that can turn into K2 sometimes, it depends. K2 is one of the things I absolutely recommend supplementing with if you have bone density issues.   [01:34:35] Ashley James: What form of K2?   [01:34:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: Ideally, of course, from natto, but it’s a pretty hard thing to put into your diet because it’s pretty stinky and tastes pretty bad.   [01:34:48] Ashley James: Explain what that is for those who don’t know.   [01:34:50] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s a fermented soybean in a particular fashion.   [01:34:53] Ashley James: Yum. Sounds delicious.   [01:34:57] Dr. Laura Kelly: It’s sort of like when you—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Asia but if you bury shrimp in the ground for six months and then you pull it up and make a paste out of it, it’s got a similar kind of flavor to that kind of shrimp paste. It’s very rich, let’s say.   [01:35:12] Ashley James: So fermented natto?   [01:35:17] Dr. Laura Kelly: Natto.   [01:35:18] Ashley James: Natto, thank you. Where would one source that, or can you make it yourself?   [01:35:25] Dr. Laura Kelly: You can make it. It’s a process of fermenting beans, and it’s stinky. It’s a hard thing to do. You can do it. You can find it occasionally in some co-ops. I’ve seen it. And you can also buy powder. That’s another way to go is just to buy the powder. It’s not as stinky, and it actually tastes sort of caramel. So it’s kind of good.   [01:35:50] Ashley James: How did your mom source it? How did she eat it?   [01:35:55] Dr. Laura Kelly: She actually started with natto and then was like, “I don’t know if I can do this for too long.” So we went to supplements. We went to the bacterial fermented supplements. They worked. Everything worked well for her.   [01:36:12] Ashley James: I’ve heard natto’s kind of a miracle food. If someone wanted to eat natto, so it’s a paste, how much would they want to take? How would they cook with it? Do they turn it into tea or soup?   [01:36:26] Dr. Laura Kelly: No, maybe it comes in a paste, but the traditional format is like a fermented bean porridge kind of breakfast thing.   [01:36:36] Ashley James: Oh, okay.   [01:36:37] Dr. Laura Kelly: So you just ferment the beans. It creates this really mucousy, mucilaginous-like gel around it.   [01:36:45] Ashley James: That’s what I want for breakfast.   [01:36:47] Dr. Laura Kelly: Very appetizing. But some people get used to it, and then they love it. It’s one of those things where when you break through the barrier you’re like how could I live without it?   [01:36:56] Ashley James: Can you cook it, or does heating it deteriorate the vitamin K?   [01:37:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: I think heating it too high will kill the bacteria.   [01:37:06] Ashley James: Okay. So I could probably look up recipes. I’m thinking make congee with it, but just add it at the end so it’s not too hot.   [01:37:16] Dr. Laura Kelly: Maybe. The Japanese tend to eat it, I believe, in just a very traditional way, this is how we eat it.   [01:37:24] Ashley James: Just like a cold soup?   [01:37:26] Dr. Laura Kelly: Like a breakfast-ish.   [01:37:27] Ashley James: Like a porridge?   [01:37:28] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, that kind of thing.   [01:37:29] Ashley James: Okay.   [01:37:32] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’m sorry. I don’t know about any other recipes. I think it’s so specific a flavor that it’s hard to—   [01:37:38] Ashley James: It’s kind of like just get it down.   [01:37:40] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah.   [01:37:40] Ashley James: It’s so funny. My mom worked with these people from Asia who owned this company for many years. Worked with them, and had a great relationship. We had a cottage. I’m from Canada, and in Canada, especially Ontario, many people have a cottage. It’s like a second home but like out in nature. We kept inviting them to come stay with us for the weekend and they wouldn’t, and my mom said it was because they were afraid of eating the food we ate. The idea of, first of all, not eating rice at every meal was weird. But we were going to serve them eggs and toast and they’re like, no, thanks. We’d rather stay home. At an early age, that opened me up to this idea that there are certain people in the world that find our food repulsive.   [01:38:34] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah, absolutely.   [01:38:35] Ashley James: Especially if our body needs nutrition, let’s look for those cultures that eat food to prevent disease, and let’s try to open up our repertoire, our palette to include what they do medicinally, and just see what happens. I think especially, if we could get our kids to eat it, they might be able to grow up eating it. I’m going to see if I can find it at our co-op or have our co-op order it, and I’m going to try it for myself. I have never had it.   [01:39:12] Dr. Laura Kelly: Can you shoot yourself on video doing that so we can all watch?   [01:39:15] Ashley James: I will absolutely do that in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. I will go live, and I will eat natto for the first time. When I was a kid I’d eat anything, like anything. There was nothing I wouldn’t eat and my dad loved that. So he’d take me out to really weird Asian restaurants and feed me the really weird stuff. I’m just never a picky eater. That wasn’t my problem. Anyway, this will be fun. I will love eating natto. Okay. So vitamin K2 is incredibly important. Getting it from leafy greens, especially since you’re also going to get some co-factors like calcium is very important. What other things are just generally great ideas to incorporate into our diet?   [01:40:08] Dr. Laura Kelly: Generally great ideas, again, it just depends. This is the process of looking at what you have in your body, what you don’t have, and looking at your genetics and saying what’s actually functioning here? It really is the case that in terms of nutrition, everybody’s different. What do you process? I don’t know. What do you not process? I don’t know. Again, the standard dose of a nutrient is not correct either because I need 10,000 units a day of vitamin D, and you may need none because you’re in the sun for 10 minutes. There are general recommendations, which are all good, like eat most plants. Everybody needs to eat a lot of plants. Keeping things as whole source as possible. The basic things that we all know for the reasons of the complexity that I was speaking about earlier and the dynamics of the formula—the herbal formula for malaria. That same concept applies to food, and the complexity of the natural sources means that we’re going to get the enzymes that we need in order to digest the things that are there. So staying close to whole sources is always a good idea. But, again, finding out what you need is actually not a bad idea.   [01:41:43] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. What about water? Obviously, dehydration affects everything in a negative way, but what about the quality of water like avoiding sodium fluoride, which I’ve heard the body gets confused with this kind of fluoride in the water and it ends up harming the bone system but also the skull system. Also, it does things to the pituitary gland and to the thyroid. So what about chemicals in tap water?   [01:42:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yes. This is the problem with the world that we have created. It’s dangerous. We’ve created a dangerous world. It’s a problem. Filtering the water is probably not good enough. These are the difficulties of it. I think that there are some small water filter producers who make filters that actually do a good enough job for you to filter the tap water. So investigating those and figuring out what’s actually going to work if you’re going to drink tap water. Finding clean sources, testing your water is something I tell people to do just so you know what you’re dealing with. All of this is so important, and this is coming back to the information that we’re giving the system and saying what’s the information I’m putting in? With the food production, who knows what information we’re putting in when we’re eating processed food. I don’t know what that information is. The body doesn’t even know what that information is, and what’s in the water? Every single substance that’s in that water is going to say something to your body. What’s it saying? So these things, even though they seem inconsequential, it’s really important to understand and to know what are you putting in. Looking at your water, looking at your food sources, testing yourself, giving yourself that strong solid foundation because even if you are putting in questionable information, if you’ve got all those trace minerals present, your immune system is going to work well and you’re going to be able to defend yourself against the dangerous water that you’ve just drank. This is the complex web of self-care that we all find ourselves in, given the fact that the system itself doesn’t take care of this stuff for us. That’s why we’re here speaking about it, and that’s why it’s so wonderful that you’re bringing all of this to the forefront.   [01:44:31] Ashley James: Love it. Thank you so much for coming and sharing this information. I totally agree with you. We need to look at the world we’ve created and looked at the chemicals. For example, the pesticides and the chemicals that we’re spraying on our “conventionally grown food.” I think that’s hilarious because to our grandparents, to our great-grandparents, or to our great-great-grandparents, conventionally grown food was organic. We now consider organic. Although there are over 2000 chemicals that have been approved under the certification of organic. So even then it’s questionable. But get organic, get local as much as possible. Work with biodynamic farms as close to farms as you can. Luckily, I live in a state where I can actually go to a farm and actually get my food from the farm. So if you can do that, if you can figure out how to do that, do it. If you can source some food boxes that are coming directly from farms, that’s great. Organic as much as possible. These chemicals, a lot of them are chelators. So they bind to heavy metals, they bind to even minerals and wash them away from the soil. If we consume them like glyphosate, they will release heavy metals into our kidneys and brain. What we think is safe when we go to eat an apple or go to eat some corn. What we think is safe or even healthy food. A conventionally grown apple, they’ve had it tested as up to 50 different chemicals. These are man-made chemicals the body doesn’t know what to do with. The liver gets clogged up. These chemicals are endocrine disruptors. They harm the harmony in the body. You’re teaching us how to bring the body back into harmony, back into balance, and support the body’s ability to be strong and heal itself. One of those things is removing what is in our way as much as possible.   [01:46:42] Dr. Laura Kelly: The insults. This is coming back to—you just mentioned the liver. This is just to be clear, your liver gets clogged up because it’s trying to detoxify all of these things. That’s implying that everybody’s liver naturally functions perfectly anyway, which just simply isn’t even the case. I’ve never seen a genetic run where every CYP enzyme, every CYP genetic is perfect. There are polymorphisms all over the place in liver function. So you have CYP pathways in the liver that detoxify all different sorts of substances. There isn’t one pathway for all substances. There are different pathways for different substances, and each of those pathways has different genetics. Every time you’re dealing with genetics, which is everywhere, you have the opportunity for things to be not perfect, right? You have a polymorphism, which is sort of a mutation but not quite a mutation. In genetics, you call it a polymorphism in the smaller subset like this. So you have the opportunity for polymorphisms, which interfere with liver detoxification pathways, and everybody has those. I’ve never seen one without. Not only are you taking in the 50 chemicals that are in the water that went in to grow the organic apple. Because even if it’s organic, if they water it with water that’s filled with garbage, how much of the apple is water? Most of it. You’re going to eat that apple and you already have impaired liver detoxification because most of us do anyway. Each liver detoxification pathway itself has separate combinations of nutrient co-factors that are required including amino acids for phase detoxification. If you’re missing any of those, so you have an insult that you’ve taken into your body, you’re missing some nutrients either because you don’t need it or because of your genetic component, then your liver detoxification is impaired with polymorphisms in your genes for detoxification so it’s impaired. So you’ve got three places already. You’ve just eaten an organic apple, but you have three places where you could potentially run into huge amounts of trouble. It’s crazy. That’s crazy. That’s the truth of this pattern and this system is that it’s that complicated. And that’s in a healthy person. That’s somebody who’s me or you who’s walking around feeling good, feeling great, and having a wonderful life. That’s me. I don’t have great liver detoxification. I can eat that apple with those 50 insults and be causing myself a problem down the line. Not to fear monger, certainly not, but just to say that all of this is important. And when you’re thinking about medicine on a fundamental level, medicine for the human body, these are things that are really important to think about, and all of them are important. It’s not like just a little bit of it’s important. All of it is important.   [01:49:50] Ashley James: And if it’s too overwhelming to think about, find a practitioner like Dr. Kelly who does telemedicine. Or find a health coach like myself. Find someone to work with because sometimes we just get to a point where we just need to hand our bodies over to someone. And that’s often where we go to an MD, then we’re given drugs. Drugs are great for certain things, not great for others. It shouldn’t be a tool we use 100% of the time. We’ve already discussed that, right? One of the Naturopaths that I mentored with who is the dean of Bastyr Naturopathic College, and she’s practiced for over 30 years. She’s delivered over 1000 babies. She’s has a wonderful, wonderful practice working with women. She says sometimes she has a doctor-patient relationship where the patient is handing themselves over to her, and they’re saying, just take my blood, do labs on me, and just tell me what to do. They don’t want to think. It’s too overwhelming. They just want to be told what to do, and they’ll go home and do it. And then there are other times where she doesn’t have a doctor-patient relationship. She has a teacher-mentor kind of relationship with a client, and she’ll call them her client. They’re someone who wants to come in, and often, like our listeners, they want to be educated. They want to think for themselves. They want to be given options. They want to have a teacher teach them. A doctor can be a teacher because the root word is doceri, which means teacher. So they want a teacher relationship, a mentor, and a coach, not someone just taking their blood and telling them what to do. They want to actually think for themselves. So some people are just at the point where they’re so overwhelmed and they’re so sick, just please, do my labs and tell me what to do. You can provide that. And then for those who want to learn more, get the book and you can also have that relationship with them. It’s really important that we understand that distinction. That we could ask our doctor—be it Naturopath, osteopath, chiropractor, or a doctor of oriental medicine—to be our teachers, give us options, show us studies, and let us think for ourselves. If we are at the point in our life where we want to be educated, we want to navigate this world, think deeper, and spend time on this, but if we don’t have the energy to, we can hand our body over. We just have to make sure we hand our body over to the person who’s going to guide us to the outcome of optimal health.   [01:52:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: Right, absolutely. I think that’s the reason why me and all of your other guests write books. It’s like we want people to embrace, and it’s going back to what I was saying in the beginning. There’s a concept of okay, medicine is for when I’m sick. Or there’s a concept that I learned, which is medicine is part of life. Taking care of yourself, self-care is part of life. When you look at it that way and when it becomes part of your life that way, it gets very rich, of course, and you explore a lot of things conceptually. You also really learn to care for yourself this way. Writing books for people and sharing this information is really just saying, here, step into this beautifully rich world of self-care. Here, let us help you. Let us guide you with this. That’s why I write books because I want people to be able to, even if you are in a crisis point, you’re going to come out of that crisis point. When you come out of that crisis point, you can’t go back to the way you were that got you to the crisis point. So you have to then step into this world of where self-care becomes fun, ritual, or whatever it is that works for you. So providing information for people in this way. Again, to make medicine is a hard word to use to make medicine part of your life. It sounds a little cold, but I think you understand what I mean. It’s like taking care of yourself on a daily basis with the food, with the air, with the water, with the thoughts, and with the process of thinking. All of these things, on a daily basis, thinking about them as self-care, from a perspective of self-care, enables you to live a healthy and holistic life because your body isn’t under the stresses of the disintegration of the different parts and the different pieces. Okay, wait a minute, I have to do this, here, this, and this, and this. The mechanization that comes in the thinking. Again, providing this sort of breadth of movement of medicine self-care to the world is something that I really want to do and would like to keep doing. This is a driver for me. I think, again, for many of your guests and many of the doctors working in this space.   [01:55:19] Ashley James: What if we put a new filter on, and every choice became is this medicine for me? Hugging this person—I’m hugging my friend. I’m seeing my friend. I’m going to give him a hug. Is that medicine for me? Or staying up really late watching Netflix, is that really medicine for me? Is that medicinal?   [01:55:38] Dr. Laura Kelly: It can be. It can be.   [01:55:39] Ashley James: There are times when it can be, but I like to use that as an example because I stay up till 2:00 AM in the morning watching Netflix and then having to get up early the next day. You’re starving yourself of time. But having an evening where you’re watching something that makes you laugh is medicine, versus excessively watching television and staying sedentary is not medicine.   [01:56:02] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah.   [01:56:03] Ashley James: Looking at all the activities in your life, is this medicine? Is it spiritual medicine? Is it energetic medicine? Is it emotional-mental medicine? Is it physical medicine? And is there a better choice? Okay, watching TV for 10 hours. Okay, this isn’t medicinal for me, but what would be? Going for a walk in nature.   [01:56:28] Dr. Laura Kelly: Well wait, wait. I will differ with you a little bit about that. I would say that it’s really, again, about asking yourself and looking inward for the answer to that question. Because it may be that you just graduated from college, you just wrote a book, and whatever the situation is—that was mine. Watching TV for 10 hours straight is exactly what you need. You’re the only one that knows that. You’re the one that knows inside if this is right or if this is wrong. I don’t think that you can say one thing or another is right or wrong. It all has to do with context, but the most important thing is it has to do with how you feel about it? If you feel like you’re watching tv or 10 hours and it’s not right, then it’s not right.   [01:57:18] Ashley James: Well, if you feel like stiff, achy, upset, and irritable, and the media you were watching was something that ends up making you physically angry or tense, it wasn’t medicinal. But if you’re watching something that makes you happy, you’re laughing, and you’re resting, or maybe you take a break and read a book, but you want to just chill on the couch for the day and that’s what you need, and you feel good. I think we have to check-in. Like you said, check in with that voice inside you, and check-in with your body. Every behavior, every choice could be medicinal.   [01:57:56] Dr. Laura Kelly: Exactly.   [01:57:58] Ashley James: And that’s a wonderful thing to focus on. In your book, do you also talk about exercise? There’s a lot of confusion around exercise and healthy bones. Should it be weight-bearing? Should it be cardio? Should it be stretching? Do you talk about what kind of what are the best exercises for healthy flexible bones?   [01:58:21] Dr. Laura Kelly: Yeah. I don’t go deeply into exercise, but there are a couple of things I can mention. One of them is in the presence of an estrogenic compound—either a phytoestrogen or an endogenous estrogen—the bone has more of a response to exercise. So this would be a situation where if you do supplement with hormones, you’re going to be well placed to exercise. And if you don’t, you may want to consider phytoestrogen as well. If you don’t eat a lot of plants, then that’s going to increase the efficiency or the efficacy of the exercise that you do. But there is a certain amount of piezoelectric force that has to happen on the bone for it to trigger the brain to build bone. The osteogenic force is a particular force. Weight-bearing exercise, yes. Anything that’s going to put that type of pressure on the bone because what happens in the system is that the bone tells the brain, hey, we have pressure on us. We need to be strong. That’s what happens. When you’re putting pressure on the bone, if you’re jumping, if you’re dancing, running, or anything that’s putting pressure tells the brain we need to be strong. And if you just sit around, it tells the brain we don’t need to be strong. So it’s really that communication happens, and it’s really that simple. So putting that pressure on is something that you have to do for your whole life, for everybody, regardless of what issues you have. We all need to keep our system moving, and we all need our brains to think that we want to use our bodies because if the brain thinks we’re not using our bodies, it’s going to stop building them. So we all need to move and take care of ourselves in that regard. But specifically for bone, you want a force that’s going to put pressure on the bone. If you’ve crossed the point into more severe osteoporosis, then you may run into trouble because that kind of pressure and force you actually can’t do because you may fracture. That point you have to pull back, do the supplementation, and do the nutrition base in order to build up some bone strength before you start that kind of forceful exercise. And then there’s also a company called OsteoStrong, which produces machines that create the amount of force needed to put pressure on the bones without you having to actually create the force yourself. And theoretically, this seems to work. I haven’t seen enough of their science to fully say this is amazing, but theoretically, it’s correct. There is a certain amount of pressure that needs to happen on the bone to trigger osteogenesis, and these machines appear to do that.   [02:01:29] Ashley James: Very cool. That’s exciting. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. All the links that Dr. Kelly does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Medicinethroughfood.com is your website. We’re going to also have the link to your book, which is The Healthy Bones. I have already bought your book for myself and also for my mother-in-law. I’m sure I’ll think of a few other people I need to buy your book for. You’re giving away your book to a lucky listener. Listeners can go to the Learn True Health Facebook group, and this discussion will continue there. We’ll create a post, and then we’ll pick a lucky listener that will win a copy of your book, which is exciting. I’ve invited Dr. Kelly to come to join the Facebook group so we can continue the discussion there, which is great. We have over 4000 listeners in the group. We have a ton of listeners, so I’m always surprised. It’s funny because I’ll get emails or Facebook messages from listeners saying, “I’ve been a listener for over a year and I just joined the Facebook group.” I’m like, “What are you waiting for guys? Come on. Join the Facebook group. It’s a great community. It’s free. Come join us. We’re all here to support each other. So come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. And then also, Dr. Kelly, you have a Facebook group for readers of your book as well. Tell us about it.   [02:02:55] Dr. Laura Kelly: That’s right. My mother is the moderator, and she’s very, very good at keeping the group really dynamic and really motivated. It’s an amazing group of people. Everybody is probably like yours. Everybody just supports each other. They share their successes. They share recipes. They share trials, the difficulties that they’re having in there. It’s a really beautiful group of people, and they’re really there to help each other densify their bones and not be sick.   [02:03:25] Ashley James: And have flexible bones.   [02:03:27] Dr. Laura Kelly: And have flexible, exactly.   [02:03:28] Ashley James: Stronger bones. I love it. And then as a side effect, the body just gets healthier. The cardiologist who had such amazing insight to tell you to write a book. The cardiologist noticed that the calcification was leaving your mom. How is your mom’s heart health now having focused on bone health?   [02:03:49] Dr. Laura Kelly: It continues to be fantastic in terms of that sort of thing. There are no problems.   [02:03:58] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. That’s so great.   [02:04:01] Dr. Laura Kelly: I think unchecked, there may have been.   [02:04:05] Ashley James: Yes, we have to make sure that we take the blinders off and really not leave these very important things unchecked in our life. Do you have any stories of success you’d like to share?   [02:04:18] Dr. Laura Kelly: In terms of bones?   [02:04:21] Ashley James: Yeah, and well in terms of your book. In terms of patients or clients, you’ve worked with. In terms of the Facebook group. Just off the top of your head, do you have any stories of success that people have had because of the work you do?   [02:04:33] Dr. Laura Kelly: Sure, sure. You can go on that Facebook page and see people reporting, oh my God. I got my DEXA scan. I can’t believe it. I’ve gone from osteoporosis to osteopenia. It happens quite regularly, actually, which is amazing and wonderful. I’m crying every time it happens. But in terms of my own patient population, I had someone come to me who was 59 and her doctor had said, “Look, you can’t exercise anymore. I know you love tennis. You can’t play it anymore because you’re going to break your bones.” She said, “I’m terrible. This is killing me. I’m so unhappy about this.” And I said, “Okay, well let’s see what we can do.” She’s very small. She’s very thin boned and so there wasn’t a lot of room. We started working together, and I said, “This is going to be a long process. Don’t expect instant results. Maybe in a year and a half, maybe in two years. Maybe faster, but it’s going to be a while.” And she was very active in her own care. She was a mix between, what you said, a client, and a patient. She wanted to know what to do absolutely right away, but then she also wanted to understand. So we worked together for almost two years, and we completely reversed her osteoporosis. She went from 3.6 to 2.4. I think it took about a year and eight months, something like that, and then she’s just been improving from there. Her doctor was like, oh, okay. Because this was in a situation where at first, she went to her internist and she said, “Well, I’m working with this person.” He was like, “Yeah, whatever. That’s not going to work.” It was the same thing as always. But the book was out, and she took him the book, and then she got her scores finally. He was like, hmm. That was the answer, hmm. It wasn’t, no. It was, hmm, okay. He now has the book, and he’s actually shared the book with other people. It’s an educational process. In that regards an educational process. That’s the standard success that I’ve had. I’ve had a lot of patients now who’ve reversed bone density issues. She actually had a really bad accident on a Segway where she smashed her leg into one of these metal posts going at 50 miles an hour. She didn’t break anything. She said there is no way that this would have been like this without the work that we had done. That’s what her doctor said. Her doctor said, “Well the fact that you didn’t break your anything in that accident is a miracle of the work that you put in.”   [02:07:31] Ashley James: I love it. Beautiful. I love it. That’s so great. Now, what about osteoarthritis or bone spurs? Have you had success reversing or improving upon either of those?   [02:07:53] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’ve had success improving upon osteoarthritis. I haven’t actually worked with bone spurs, so I don’t know.   [02:08:01] Ashley James: This will be interesting though. I hope some people with bone spurs come out of the woodwork to do your program. I’ve had great success using Dr. Wallach’s protocol with bone spurs because if you can increase the nutrients you’re talking about, especially magnesium, the body dissolves bone spurs and puts them in the right place. That’s something really interesting. Hopefully, some people will come forward and share their experiences working with your protocol in laying down bone healthfully. Can you share any results you remember in terms of reversing osteoarthritis?   [02:08:42] Dr. Laura Kelly: I wouldn’t say reversing osteoarthritis. I would say improving function and improving the sensation of difficulty or pain. This actually has more to do with using herbs. There’s the foundation of bone health, but when you’re talking about osteoarthritis, you’re talking about wear and tear. You’re talking about joints. You’re talking about joint fluid. You’re talking about cartilage, connective tissue, and all these sorts of things. Other than bone, you have all of these other pieces that you also have to work with. You want to lay the foundation, of course, the nutrient foundation for bone health and for connective tissue health. What I do with that is I also use herbs at this point—external herb poultices. At about 1200, there were Shaolin monks. The Shaolin monks were famous monks in China. They were martial arts. They developed martial arts, basically. They took it to a new level. So the Shaolin monks were martial artists of the highest caliber, and because they did this martial arts work all of the time, they injured themselves all the time. What they developed was trauma medicine for martial arts injury, which is the same as any sort of trauma medicine. You break your leg, you have bruises. The formulas that were written at the time were written with titles such as the formula for hitting the back of the neck with a metal shovel. This kind of thing. It’s pretty hilarious. You have these very interesting names on these formulas, but they were very specific to different types of traumatic injuries. What I do is I take that trauma medicine and apply it to things like osteoarthritis. You have the basic bone foundation like the protocols in my book, but you also have to work with the trauma of the system and the body at that point. One thing that’s amazing about herbs, which is not available in western medicine and I’ve done this with many people, is that when they have surgery, what you’re doing is you’ve damaged your tissue when you have surgery. There has to be a repair process. And western medicine really has nothing to offer that process. They tell you to sit still on the couch and take pain medication, right? But what we can do with herbs—because herbs have such wonderful complex properties—is we can actually start the tissue regeneration process. What we’re talking about at that point is actually stem cell regeneration. We’re talking about providing the right information triggers to the system to actually start turning on and having a stem cell response. That’s one thing that’s possible through nutrients and herbs in a very targeted fashion. So you can do that externally, and this is where the trauma medicine is, which is you use the herbs and a combination externally on the site of osteoarthritis. What happens is the immune system factors come, whatever non-functioning cells, tissue, or damaged tissue is there gets cleared out. And then some low-level tissue regeneration starts to happen in that area. What happens from that is sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you’ll have actually enough tissue regeneration to actually eliminate any trace of the problem. There still is osteoarthritis, technically, but you don’t have the same experience any more of it. That’s a really beautiful use of herbs and where they can fill in where western medicine can’t.   [02:12:46] Ashley James: So cool. I love it. Again, go to the right doctor. You would never get this kind of medicine from seeing a chiropractor or an MD. You got to go to the right doctor for the right problem. Have an arsenal. Have a team.   [02:13:08] Dr. Laura Kelly: Absolutely have a team of doctors.   [02:13:10] Ashley James: Okay, great. You have an OB. I’d rather go to an OB than just a regular MD for gynecological exams. We’re used to that as women. If you have a skin problem, you go to a skin doctor. Or you have a foot thing, you go to a foot doctor. Why not also have Dr. Kelly in your corner? Why not have a doctor of oriental medicine, but on top of that, have a health coach, have a naturopath, have a chiropractor, and the list goes on and on. Then you can bring your body to them and they can offer different pieces of the puzzle to bring you back in balance. What if what you needed was that 5000-year-old herbal formula, right? That was your thing. You’re not going to get that from the other doctors. What if that was your thing, and your body does the best with that versus the other form? Never shall we use the word alternative again. There is an alternative to none. These are all valid forms of medicine. Why not have all of these in our team of doctors. Thank you Dr. Laura Kelly for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. I would love to have you back on the show. Please come join our Facebook group. Let’s also join Dr. Kelly’s Facebook group as well, and let’s all get her book. And of course, one of you lucky listeners is going to be gifted her book. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. The Healthy Bones. I know it’s on Amazon, and we could also go to your website medicinethroughfood.com. Dr. Kelly, is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?     [02:14:59] Dr. Laura Kelly: Oh, gosh. It’s probably lots of things.   [02:15:03] Ashley James: Do tell.   [02:15:05] Dr. Laura Kelly: You’ve had amazing people on your program. As you say, have a team. It’s like we’re all doing little pieces of this, and we’re all pulling apart different pieces of this. Everybody has gone into different corners and pulled apart different things. I just want to say to people who would read the book, the book itself is about meeting people where they are. It’s not about going into the biggest detail about every single piece of how to perfect the food, right? We need to sprout the beans or high pressure cook the beans. These things are there in the book, but there isn’t a huge amount of explanation in detail in all of that that has been done by others because what I have tried to do with this book is to take people, who like my mother, who doesn’t really have that much knowledge about how to take care of yourself and are coming out of the western medical paradigm. In fact, are still in the western medical paradigm where maybe nutrition may be important but I don’t really know. You can’t step from western medicine all the way into a natural medicine with a snap of the fingers. We’re not built that way as humans. We need information. We need to process it. We need to investigate it. We need to make a decision about it. Most people don’t do it like that. When I wrote the book, I was writing it to meet people where they are and say here’s a really broad spectrum of information on taking care of yourself. Here’s a way for you to start to understand that you can take care of yourself, and that you don’t have to be afraid of your diagnosis whatever it is. That you can take care of yourself and improve yourself with or without assistance from a practitioner. Hopefully, with a team, but even if it’s just you alone, you have enough ability, and your body has enough innate wisdom so that you can actually care for yourself. That was the point of the book, and I wanted to make that clear because again, there’s such a wealth of information from all of the people who you’ve spoken with. Again, this is another piece of that puzzle of creating this sort of genre of self-care. I just wanted to contextualize the book for you a little bit like that.   [02:17:47] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you. Excellent. Please come back to the show.   [02:17:51] Dr. Laura Kelly: I’d love to. I’d love to. It’s wonderful to talk to you.   [02:17:54] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. We’ll see each other in each other’s Facebook groups along with all the listeners.   [02:17:59] Dr. Laura Kelly: Okay, great.   [02:18:01] Ashley James: Thank you so much.   [02:18:03] Dr. Laura Kelly: Thank you. Have a great day.   Get Connected with Dr. Laura Kelly! Dr. Laura Kelly Website Medicine Through Food Website Twitter Healthy Bones Group Books by Dr. Laura Kelly The Healthy Bones Nutrition Plan and Cookbook        

Use coupon code LTH at ChemicalFreeBody.com for your listener discount! Use listener coupon code LTH at viome.com for the gut and mitochondrial testing and food & supplement recommendations. IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com   The Power of Living Foods https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-power-of-living-foods   Highlights: Core four secrets What cellular dehydration is Where chemicals come from How to eliminate chemicals from the body   Tim James is a farm boy who used to hunt and eat meat, but he is now on a raw vegan diet.  In this episode, Tim shares what made him go on a raw vegan diet, and what benefits he experienced after switching to a raw vegan diet. He also shares where we can find some of the chemicals that are getting inside our body and how to eliminate them. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I took a little bit of a break. Sorry for not getting an episode out in the last week. My husband and I just celebrated our 12th year anniversary. And so a friend let us come up to her cabin in the middle of the woods five hours away from Seattle in the Okanagan Valley, 45 minutes away from the nearest town or grocery store. We were completely isolated, there was no cell service, and it was beautiful and pristine. Our son caught bugs the entire time and played in nature. We swam, we walked in the forest, and we just sat in the sun, put our feet on the ground, took long slow deep breaths, and soaked in all the nature. I definitely encourage you to get out in nature as much as you can, as often as you can. Even if you live in the city, find some clean, pesticide-free grass, and just go lie down in it. Feel the earth rotating around this crazy universe. That ability to ground yourself is so healing. Now this episode, this interview that you’re listening to today is phenomenal. I love this man’s story, and this is going to be a great episode to share with your husband, your brother, or I just think the men that are at the point where they’re sick of being sick—this is going to be a great interview to listen to. The man that you’re about to hear was the American cowboy. Growing up in a ranch country eating nothing but beef, and he had a lot of health problems that men sweep under the rug. He just got sick of being sick, and he was able to—through his journey and his story he’s going to share, it’s a wonderful story—discover how to heal his body. And he teaches how you can do the same. How you can nourish your body in a way that everything comes back into balance. Now as you’re listening to Tim James share his story, he also shares his website chemicalfreebody.com. And he has invented a few supplements that are whole food supplements. I am very picky when it comes to supplements, but his green powder that you just turn into a drink is so delicious, and really, my body buzzes when I drink it. After this interview, I went and I bought some, and I am loving it. I put it in my smoothie every day. Sometimes I just put it in a glass of water and drink it. What I notice is it almost like could replace a coffee or tea. It gives me energy, but not jitters. It’s safe for children, it has a ton of raw food extracts from different superfoods, and it actually tastes good. If you’re looking to detox, you’re looking to become more alkaline—and oh also, I tested my alkaline levels and this green juice, this powder that he sells that is extracted from raw organic superfoods—it is so delicious and it also balances pH. I did the test before and after drinking it, and I saw my pH come back into alkalinity, and I thought that was very cool. My husband is doing a fast right now, and he is drinking this stuff every day, because fasting, you definitely stir up toxins. If you’ve been listening for any length of time, you know that I’m really into supporting the body and removing heavy metals, detoxing and supporting all the organs of the body in detoxing, and becoming as healthy as possible. If you want to give this a try, which I highly recommend you do, and basically it’s great to get for your husband if you’re helping the men in your life who are just coming into wanting to become healthier but maybe they don’t have the time or wherewithal to make a special salad and make a special vegetable smoothie and you just want to give them something really fast, that’s what Tim James created. He’s very particular, very picky about the ingredients that he puts into his stuff so that the quality is there. He formulated them for his own health—for him and for his family—so I like that he’s never going to compromise on the ingredients. It’s chemicalfreebody.com, and then use the coupon code LTH for 5% off. His margins are so slim when it comes to supplements as it is so he gave us a discount, and I thought that was really nice of him. So chemicalfreebody.com, LTH for the coupon code. Be sure to use that, which will give you just a little bit of a discount. That helps to cover shipping. He recommends doing the Total Energy and Detox bundle. I grabbed just the green drink to start and I love it, and I’m going to definitely dive in and try his other supplements, his bundle next, the Total Energy and Detox bundle. And he also highly recommends doing his protocol while you do any form of fasting, cleansing, or detoxing because it really helps so that you don’t have any flu-like symptoms, detox symptoms, or any downtime when you’re fasting or detoxing. Enjoy today’s interview. Make sure you go to chemicalfreebody.com, check out his videos, and do the coupon code LTH. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode with those you love. Let’s help all the people we love—the men and the women in our lives to learn true health.   [00:06:24] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 442. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Tim James on. He’s the founder of chemicalfreebody.com. Tim James of no relation. We just coincidentally have the same last name. I’m really excited for the mission that you’re on. In my own quest for health, I found that by cutting out chemicals and pesticides, my health drastically improved, and so I love what you’re doing. Also, when I’m exposed to certain chemicals I notice I really, really feel it. It’s pretty amazing how so many people are walking around with sluggish livers, full of chemicals, and not knowing that there’s a better way. There’s a way that you can just hugely improve your overall health and well-being. The well-being of our children, the well-being at any age by eliminating chemicals and toxins as much as we can from our food, our water, and our air. Tim, welcome to the show.   [00:07:41] Tim James: Ashley, thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here and share.   [00:07:44] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now you have an amazing story, so let’s dive right in. What happened in your life? How young were you when you first started having health problems? And what happened that led you to discover that chemicals were the cause of your problems?   [00:08:03] Tim James: Well, I can take it back a little further just so people understand my background. I grew up in Eastern Oregon on a cattle and hay farm. We had Hereford cattle. Between me and my neighbors, we had horses, chickens, and ducks. It was just all their—goats and everything. I grew up hunting and fishing a lot, so meat was a huge part of my lifestyle. Played baseball at a high level, and at age 37, that’s when the wheels were really falling off for me. I had gained 38 pounds even though I still, in my mind, I thought I was an athlete, even though I had hardly any energy to get up. I’d only do it to walk the dogs. I was a financial advisor at the time getting up early, long days, lots of traveling, and high stress. And then I had skin issues on my elbows like eczema, and it would bleed and crack. I had to start wearing black shirts because the white ones would you know. I’d bleed on people’s couches on Super Bowl parties and stuff like that. It was embarrassing. And it didn’t look good. I had this big belly, my elbows were bleeding, my knee finally got eczema too—it was cracking and bleeding. And then I had acid indigestion really bad. I was on Tums and Rolaids all the time. The doctor wanted me to go into Prilosec, I didn’t want to do that, and then finally it got really bad. I started bleeding rectally and I didn’t tell anybody about this for almost two years. I never did tell a doctor, nobody. I’m just like, hopefully, that goes away. How stupid is that, right? It was just that guy mentality like ah, it’s fine. It’ll get better. Not even a pause. Not even a pause. Just oh, I hope that goes away. Back to work because it really wasn’t a problem. I wasn’t stopped completely. I just kept going. I’m raising the kids and I got a mortgage payment, so I’m moving. Finally, it was on vacation. We were in northern Peru right below Tumbes, which is in Ecuador, and I had to get life-flighted to get an emergency surgery in Lima, and that’s when that mask went over my face. That’s when I knew my life was out of control, but I still didn’t know what the hell to do. I didn’t know what I was doing with my health, even though I thought I was healthy. I was eating trying to do five meals a day and eating more protein. Give me a chicken teriyaki bowl and give me extra chicken. And I thought drinking my milk for my bones, the meat for my protein, and all that stuff, but I was a mess. A friend of mine got diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which is a supposedly rare supposedly incurable blood cancer. He’s like dude, I can’t die. I have to live. Because our sons played together so he’s like I’m going to go to this place in Florida called the Hippocrates Health Institute. Have you heard of those people at all?   [00:10:44] Ashley James: I have not.   [00:10:45] Tim James: Okay. So they’re one of the oldest alternative health institutes in the world. And he says I want you to go with me and support me. I’m going to try to heal naturally. Well, I’m thinking this isn’t going to work. I’m going to support you. I’m like yeah, dude. I’m all in, but in the back of my mind, he’s dead. My grandma died of brain cancer, my aunt died of skin cancer. We just actually lost a guy in my baseball team that we played in the adult men’s world series in Phoenix on the super nice spring training fields. Clay died of cancer. He had stomach cancer, and he went through chemo, surgery, and all that stuff. He died 80 pounds under his weight. We had already been through that. Clay didn’t have any insurance, but he left three little boys behind at ages 6 to 17. It was terrible. It was a whole bunch of these really strong tough men on this baseball team were all at his funeral just crying their faces off. Do you know what I’ll never forget? He came for his last baseball game. He was too proud to run out to the center-field because he couldn’t run. He’s just like, “I don’t have the energy to run back and forth to my position. I’m sure as hell not going to walk. Can I pitch? Because I can just kind of jog out to the mound.” And I’m thinking pitching’s going to take way more energy dude, whatever. He’s pitching, and around the fourth or fifth inning he comes in on the bench and he’s sitting there on my left and my buddy Jason’s on his left. Me and Jason were looking at Clay and he’s sitting there spitting up blood. Jason’s like, “Man, what the hell are you doing out here?” He’s like, “Look, dude. I love baseball. And if I’m going to go out, I’m going to go out doing what I love.” I was like, “Okay, man.” What do you say to that? Just okay, whatever you want to do. I watched a guy my age. Now I’m starting to freak out because I’m bleeding rectally, I have all these problems. I’m looking at this guy. He’s healthier than all of us, and he’s dying of cancer. And then my buddy Charles, at age 43, gets it, and I’m freaking out, but I still don’t know what’s going on. Anyway, long story short, we fly to Hippocrates on January 1, 2011.   [00:12:40] Ashley James: This is you and Clay?   [00:12:42] Tim James: No, Clay passed away.   [00:12:43] Ashley James: Okay, so Clay passed away. When he was spitting up blood at the baseball diamond, did you have any light bulbs going off in your head? Like wow, I was bleeding rectally for years.   [00:12:56] Tim James: No, it was fear. I was just in fear mode, but I didn’t know what to do. I just still didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t until Charles said, “Hey, we got to go to this institute.” Now we’re on the plane flight there because he’s got this blood cancer, and he’s like, “Oh, Tim by the way, when we get there there’s no meat, no dairy, no salt, no sugar, and nothing’s cooked.” And I’m like, “What?” I’m literally freaked out. You have to understand, hunting and fishing were my life. Every year, I worked so hard so I could get another extra week off to hunt and fish. All my thousands of dollars of hunting and fishing equipment. Our motto was if it flies, it dies. If it’s brown, it’s down—just to give you an idea. I’m redneck, okay. Eastern Oregon farm boy. It was fun, we had a lot of fun doing that stuff, so I’m freaked out. And if it wasn’t for Charles and him having cancer, there’s no way I would have set foot into that place. We made fun of vegetarians, and this place was like plant-based vegans. Not even eggs or dairy, which didn’t make sense because I’m like how are you going to have strong bones? Anyway, I’m freaked out but I’m like, “Look, Tim, put your stuff aside. They probably got salads. Charles has got cancer, just focus on him.” I went there with a notepad, and I’m running around trying to disprove this place, talking to all these people, and trying to gather information from my friend because I really want him to heal but I didn’t think it was possible. Well, it was amazing what happened. They put us on purified water. They put us on these green juices. All sprouted nuts, seeds, grains, beans, broccoli sprouts, sunflower sprouts, pea sprouts, and all this stuff. Sprouts in the juice even. And what you do is you go through what’s called a healing crisis. Now the first takes about three, four, five days for most people. It’s like doing surgery without a knife, and all this stuff starts coming out of you. They teach you. The very first class is on internal awareness, and they teach you from the time you eat something or drink something—from it enters your mouth until it exits—what goes on. And they just break it down, they make it simple. I’m like, oh my God. Where’s this information? That first class, they’re trying to teach you about getting colon hydrotherapy or colonic. Have you ever heard of those?   [00:14:56] Ashley James: Mm-hmm.   [00:14:57] Tim James: And then I’m elbowing Charles going, “Hey man, you got me to come here to help you, but there’s no way I’m doing that deal.” For those of you listening that aren’t aware of that, you just sit on a tube rectally and water basically goes in and out, and they clean you out gently with water. That’s a colonic or colon hydrotherapy session. He said that most people are carrying around about 6-12 pounds of impacted fecal material and mucoid plaques lining the small and large intestine, and you want to get that stuff out. Now the record at the institute—some lady did a colon hydrotherapy session and she had she dropped 29 pounds of impacted fecal material. And I’m like what? I was the first person to sign up on that thing. I’m like I got to clean that stuff out because I got this blood deal going on, right? They weigh me, I do the deal for an hour, I come back, and I’m 10 pounds lighter. Just like Dr. Scott said, he goes, “Tim, you got 10 pounds of crap in a 5-pound bag, and we got to clean it up.” This is even before nutrition. What you brought up even earlier was about the chemicals and the toxins, well the pathway of elimination of the digestive tract is the first place to get cleaned up because it’s the epicenter. It’s the driving engine of your life. It’s where all the nutrients flow and everything, so they taught us all that. I did that thing, I started feeling better. Day one, my acid indigestion was gone. The blood had stopped that week.   [00:16:14] Ashley James: When you say the blood you mean rectal bleeding, not the blood coming from your knees or your elbows?   [00:16:20] Tim James: No, that was still there. That was still going on. We do this. I had headaches, I had night sweats, I wasn’t feeling good, I was irritable during that first four days, and this is what they call healing crisis or doing surgery without a knife. Your body is basically changing from an acid-based organism because of the environment it was in. Everything I was eating was acid. I didn’t know meat was acid. I didn’t know coffee was acid. I didn’t think about it. I was drinking two big coffees a day. Dairy is acid, ice cream is acid, pasta is acid, and most cooked foods are acid. I was pouring acid into my body. I’d love picking apples and stuff like that and nature and vegetables, I love that stuff, but it was out of ratio, basically. They put me on all this alkaline diet. What happens is you change the internal terrain of the body, and that’s when the harmful organisms leave. They pack their bags because harmful organisms like viruses, bacteria, mold, yeast, fungus, parasites, and cancer, they love low oxygen, highly acidic environments. And that’s the environment that I had created for them. Those little buggers were growing, proliferating, eating my food, drinking my drinks, urinating, and defecating in me and I had a build-up of them. We washed out and cleaned out my digestive tract. I started flooding my body, my cells, my blood, and my lymphatic system with all this purified water and green juices, and the body started removing all this stuff. Thank God it only lasted four or five days, and then I woke up the next day and I felt like I was 19 again. I looked at Charles, I said, “Dude, you’re going to live. I’ve interviewed all these people around here. There’s a whole bunch of people that have already healed themselves of cancer. They’re back now, they’re bringing their friend with cancer, and they’re helping people.” I’m like, “Dude, this is the fountain of youth that we found. This is what everybody’s looking for. I feel great. Dude, how do you feel?” He’s like, “I feel awesome.” I said, “Awesome, dude. I’m going to go back. I’m going to do this whole plant-based thing with you except I’m going to keep bacon. I’ll do that.” Because I figured I couldn’t make it work without—   [00:18:16] Ashley James: So you’re going to eat a whole food plant-based diet plus bacon?   [00:18:19] Tim James: With bacon, with bacon. I was going to keep it. It was hard to give up. I read this book called The China Study by Dr. T. Colin Campbell on the plane flight back, and that changed my mind because they dissected the hearts of 300 young soldiers in their early 20s that came back from the Korean War and they found like 76.3% of them had severe onset of heart disease already in the early 20s from the standard American diet. I’m like oh my God, I have heart disease. Not only do my elbows are bleeding, I’m bleeding rectally, but I have heart disease. Nobody eats more meat than me, and it’s the animal fat that’s causing the problem. That healing crisis really woke me up to like how bad it was, and I didn’t have it as bad as some people. Some people had rashes breaking out all over their arms, their faces, over their bodies as the body was pushing and expelling out toxins, chemicals, pollutants, and harmful organisms. We saw parasites crawling out of people’s pores. One lady had a parasite crawling out of her eye.   [00:19:16] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:19:17] Tim James: Many people, when you’re doing enemas and wheatgrass implants rectally, which that’s what they do at that place, parasites will come out in your stools, not just the big long ones, but your stool can be covered with white fuzzy stuff. All these little white ones will come out, and then there are also microscopic ones that you can’t see that you have parasites in your blood and stuff. Again, it was a pretty awesome thing to get all that stuff out, and everybody on graduation day says the same thing. I feel 20 years younger. I feel 30 years younger. I’m off my medications. My elbows were hurting for 20, I can move my elbow. I can move my knee. On and on these people were just raving about how they were feeling. So we went back home, we got serious. We implemented the lifestyle, and in two and a half years my friend Charles heals himself with this so-called incurable cancer, and he’s alive today. He got to see his son graduate high school, graduate college. He picked up the guitar, started a band. He’s living his life. He went from cancer and bankruptcy to thriving business and living his highest excitement. I just went crazy with it, and finally walked away from the financial services industry to tell more people about it.   [00:20:19] Ashley James: I love it. My husband, because he was just like you, used to say, “I eat vegans daily,” because he would eat the cow—cow’s a vegan. But he—for many years—would only eat beef every day or bacon. Bacon and beef and nothing else. And then one day he woke up two or three years ago—it’s been a few years. He woke up and he just said to me, “I’m never eating meat again. He just woke up and he became whole food plant-based overnight. Just something clicked in him. Probably after one of my interviews with Robyn Openshaw, and he heard about the frequency of meat and how it lowers the frequency in the body until we’re practically dead. Something in him just went, that’s it, I’m never eating meat again. And within days of eating just whole food plant-based, you got to get, I never was able to get vegetables into him, and all of a sudden he’s eating only vegetables. About five days in he turns to me and he says, “If you told me that this food would taste this good I would have given up meat years ago. This tastes better. This tastes amazing.” He’s always impressed with how great vegetables can taste in comparison to meat, but our brain is hijacked by fatty foods. A great book to read is The Pleasure Trap by Dr. Goldhamer and Dr. Lisle. I’ve had Dr. Goldhamer on the show, and he explains it. That’s episode 230, so listeners can go back and check that out.  Part of our survival mechanism is to seek out foods that are highly pleasurable in that they’re salty, sugary, and fatty because those help us gain weight and survive famines. Well now, we don’t want to gain weight to survive a famine because those foods are highly readily available. Whereas they were very hard to find and it took a lot of energy expenditure in order to secure those foods 200 years ago. But now, you don’t even have to expend any energy. You could just type in Amazon and they can deliver all those highly fatty foods to you. Looking now, we see that 70% of Americans are obese or pre-diabetic. We’re heading very quickly in the wrong direction. Now you have mentioned The China Study. One thing that Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn talks about in Forks Over Knives—I’ve had him on the show, also a really great interview. But Caldwell Esselstyn talks about how during the Nazi occupation, one of the Norwegian countries—it was between 1939 and 1945, the Germans who were occupying the Norwegian countries. They took over all of the food supply, and they took over all of the meat. Only the Norwegians could eat potatoes, grains, and vegetables and they were not given any meat to eat.  You’d think that heart attacks would have increased because of the stress levels of being occupied in a Nazi-occupied country, but in fact, they completely plummeted. In that population, they saw that the mortality rates for heart disease just completely fell to almost zero. And then when they were liberated and they got to eat meat again the heart attack rates went up. That to me shocked me because I always thought that stress—and stress obviously is a toxin to the body for many reasons. You’d think that stress would have somehow made the heart attacks worse, but no, just cutting out meat significantly decreased heart attacks. That really, really surprised me. Also, of course, increasing their vegetable intake and their fiber intake would then also play a role in their health. You going to this center, coming back, what happened the first day? So the plane lands, you get home, you’ve read The China Study. You’ve interviewed a bunch of people who are on a raw whole foods diet. Your rectal bleeding has stopped. You feel like you’re 19 again. What was the first day like at home? How did you wrap your brain around making these changes now that you’re back in your old routine?   [00:25:00] Tim James: I already knew the changes were going to have to take place before I left because on Thursday before I left on Saturday, I was like oh, I don’t have a juicer at home. I don’t have all these things. I went to the store at Hippocrates Health Institute and I said, “What do I need to get this lifestyle at my house?” She’s like, “Do you have a juicer?” I’m like, “No.” I said, “Which one?” “That one.” “Okay, I’ll take it. What else do I need?” “Are you growing sprouts?” I’m like, “No, but I grew up on a farm. We had a garden. I can grow anything. I’ll figure it out.” She’s like, “Well, you need wheatgrass, sunflower, and pea sprouts to start.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take some of those.” I just ordered a bunch of stuff. I ordered like $1100 worth of stuff. I called my wife up and I was like, “Hey, there’s a package on the way so look out for it because it’s got some stuff in there. She’s like, “How much did you spend?” I was like, “I don’t know what to say. No, I spent like $1100.” And she’s like, “What are you spending $1100 for?” I was like, “Look, I’m changing my life. Charles is going to heal cancer. We’re going to do this. I got to go.” I ordered that stuff. I got my seeds out, I started soaking my seeds. I went to the store, I started buying lots of produce—celery and cucumbers for juicing. To be honest, I didn’t know what the hell to eat for a while. I basically created these things that are now—we’re putting a recipe book together. I actually became a raw living food chef, believe it or not. From redneck cowboy type person farmer—my buddy was a cowboy. I really wasn’t, but I have a cowboy hat—a real one. I created these little tacos. I would take a lettuce leaf, I would take hummus, and I would just put some cumin and coriander in it to get kind of that Mexican flavor. A little bit of chili powder and then mix that up. I started sprouting lentils, mung beans, and fenugreek—red, green, and French lentils. They only take two and a half days and they’re ready to eat. You can do it on your countertop in a glass jar. It’s easy. I would throw those in the hummus and mix it up, and then plop that on the lettuce, cut some sprouts, throw them on top of that or vegetables or maybe some avocado. Squeeze some lemon or lime on it, put some lots of paprika on it so it looked like meat, and then I’d eat it. I pretty much ate that for almost eight, nine months because I didn’t know what else to do, then I found another restaurant that made these living food wraps in town. Once a week I’d go over and buy those on my way to the rotary club and eat half and eat the other half for dinner. I mixed it up a little bit. About nine months into it I’m like I need some recipes. But I was committed because I told Charles, “Look, dude, I’m going to do this with you. I will follow this protocol. I even started growing the sprouts for him too. I was growing it for me and him, and he’d come over and pick him up or I’d drop him off at his house because he was really busy. He’s reeling from a bankruptcy type thing with his businesses and trying to keep the lights on, so I did that for him trying to keep his stress down and just deliver these beautiful trays of sprouts to him.  That’s how we started doing it, and then one of my buddies actually came over and he’s like, “Wow, what are all these plants you got grown over here?” And I said, “Oh they’re sprouts.” He’s like, “What’s that for?” I’m like, “Well, it’s part of this protocol, and sprouts are living foods. They’re like 30-50 times more nutritious than freshly picked vegetables out of your garden if you ate them on the spot.” He’s like, “Wow, that sounds pretty cool. Hey, will you grow that for me?” And I’m like, “No way, man. This takes a lot of work. Just grow it yourself, I’ll show you to do it.” He’s like, “Nah, but if you grow up for me I’ll do it.” So he talks me into it, the next day he brings a friend over. I give the same spiel, and he wants me to grow for him. Before too long, between him and Eric, they keep sending people over, and I keep randomly getting home from work and I got to give these talks. Then finally, I told my wife it interrupted a date night. We’re getting ready to do something. This lady showed up with cancer, and I’m just like, “Sorry, I have to help her.” So I do the spiel and doing all this stuff, and before too long, we started teaching classes regularly. Living food juicing classes on Tuesday nights. Those filled up quickly. Then it was Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And then I started speaking at schools, grocery stores, and hospitals.  I’d go to an apartment complex and speak at the little places that they have there where people can meet and gather. I just get the message out. I did this for five years, and I was still a financial advisor. I wasn’t getting paid, I was actually paying people to come over and have dinner with me. I figured out I spent about $1100 a month on food extra to feed people in these classes. Think about it, I was feeding a lot of people. We’d have anywhere from 1-13 people. Probably on average about 6-8 people per class were coming. We’re talking over 4000 people in 5 ½ years coming to my house.  I got a lot of experience sharing this message with people. I was just so passionate about it because in a little over two years, again, my buddy healed himself with cancer. I have the first-person experience on this, right in front of my face. So he isn’t bs-ing me. It’s right there. I healed myself. Within 60 days all the weight was gone. I could feel my ribs again. The eczema was gone. I had another skin issue on my shoulder that disappeared. And eight months later, the big huge patch of eczema was completely cleaned up on my knee too. I completely healed myself, and I’ve stayed that way. Now I’ve been able to maintain it for 10 years, and I just keep getting healthier every year, and I’m 47 today. Nobody believes me. I’ll be in conversations, and “Oh, where are your kids?” “Oh yeah, Mike, I have a sophomore at the University of Oregon and a junior at Tualatin High School.” And they’re like, “What? Wait a minute, how old are you?” I’m like those people that worked at the institute now because the people that worked there that were on that lifestyle, they looked 10, 15, 20 years younger than people their age, and it blew me away.  I made a decision back then because they said that in seven years you can replicate completely new you. If we took every cell out of your body, put it in a catalog, categorized it, and come back in seven years—completely new you, new cells. He goes, “You have a choice.” I thought about them. I’m like, well I can either keep doing what I’m doing and probably have heart disease and cancer, who knows what’s going to happen with me. Or I could change, do what these people are doing, and build a new Tim. And seven years later there was a new Tim. I keep rebuilding new Tim all the time and finding ways to be healthier, younger, fitter, and make it simpler and easier for people so they can cut through all the minutiae online because there are so many people saying all these things that work and stuff like that, but in reality, they do a little bit but they really don’t. It’s confusing. The problem is, the standard American diet, Ashley, is so bad that if you make any changes you’re going to see some improvement. But I’m looking for optimal performance. What really works. The cool thing is most of these things are really simple, and it really boils down to what you said earlier, which is getting the toxins out. Our main job over here is not—even though I’m considered a nutritionist now, and I don’t have a degree in it, but I’ve had tons of nutritious and dietitians come to my classes. I actually had one crying and she’d been a nutritionist for 30 years. I said, “What’s going on?” She’s like, “Everything that you said tonight resonated with me so well. It just makes common sense. Everything I’ve been telling my clients is mostly wrong. How am I going to face them?” I said, “Well, just tell them the truth and just say you’ve discovered something new and you’re going to do that. You want to help them, right?” “Yeah.” I said, “Well, go help them. Look at me, I was a mess for 37 years. I got some new information, I’m flipping the coin, and I’m going down that path 100%” So she started going down that path.   [00:32:25] Ashley James: It’s so true. We have to sometimes eat a little bit of humble pie, put our ego aside. When we find new information, we just have to open your mind so much your brain could fall out and be ready to receive new information that could help you change your life and let go of the egoic belief system that you were raised with around food. People believe that they have to eat bacon, eggs, or dairy because we’ve been taught since a very young age that those are healthy things. One thing that really surprises me is cereal, for example. I go to health food stores. We have local health foods, local co-ops here in and around Seattle, and I go to Whole Foods. Whenever I’m in a different city I go to a health food store, but all cereal—it’s very, very hard to find a cereal that doesn’t have sugar in it. Just a whole-grain cereal, it’s very difficult to find. There are a few, but most cereals—and I’m so surprised because when I was a kid, there were more cereals that didn’t have sugar. Rice Krispies didn’t have sugar in it. There were so many cereals that you could find that didn’t have. Of course, there were sugary cereals back in the ‘80s, but I’m just noticing that even in health food stores, the second ingredient, or sometimes the first ingredient is sugar. And that blows my mind. Now, of course, I don’t buy cereal. I’m just using that as an example of how food has changed in the last 30, 40 years. Since we were children, I think a lot of people are eating like—even on an unconscious level—how they were raised to eat. How their grandparents told them what was healthy or their parents told them what was healthy. We developed belief systems. My mom was afraid of carbohydrates. She would get very angry at me—I was a child. I remember at a restaurant I ordered the fish and the rice with the side of vegetables. I thought that was a healthy choice to make, and my mom started literally yelling at me. Everyone in the restaurant was looking because she was so angry that I ordered rice because, in her mind, rice was very unhealthy for you. Any carbohydrate was very unhealthy for you.  I had these unconscious beliefs about food and my food choices that led me down a very unhealthy path. And then I had to re-examine why do I think this is good food or bad food? Or why do I believe I can’t live without cheese or I can’t live without eggs or dairy or I can’t live without meat? Why do I believe that? You really need to wipe the slate clean of my own belief system, and look at what is the most healing thing I can do for my body? What’s my body going to resonate with.  So trying out the whole food plant-based diet I was shocked. I remember my first meal without meat because I had never in my entire life had a meal without meat. I’d had lots of meals with just meat and no vegetables, but I’d never had a non-meat meal because it wasn’t a meal in my mind. You had to have meat in a meal. And I remember my first meal, and at the end of it, I was shocked because I thought I was going to feel weak. I was going to feel tired. I was going to feel still hungry. I really assumed that it was the meat that filled me up and gave me energy, and it was the opposite. The more I went whole food plant-based and incorporated more complex carbohydrates from potatoes, for example, and sprouts—I love sprouting too. But the more I incorporated vegetables—both raw and cooked—I noticed I had more and more energy. If we examine our own belief system and we are able to try on things that we said to ourselves I’d never do that, if we talked to you at 18, you would have been like no freaking way I’m going to eat that stuff that you’re eating now. We have to be willing to make these changes and then notice what happens in our bodies. Now you mentioned you spent $1100, and to a lot of people, that would be enough of a barrier to not even listen any further. I couldn’t do that. I can’t afford that. I guess this isn’t for me. And I want to tell people that you don’t have to spend $1100 to get a juicer and get all this stuff going. I know you did Tim, you did and you probably bought like the best of the best. I’ve actually twice bought juicers that were worth hundreds of dollars for $12 at a local thrift store. You can go to your thrift stores, you can go to Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, or even the Buy Nothing—there’s buy nothing local groups on Facebook—and seek out a juicer. It doesn’t have to be the best of the best but just get started. You could probably find someone who has an extra. I own five juicers. You could probably find someone who has an extra juicer that would be willing to lend it to you or sell it to you at a really cheap price. Don’t let money be a barrier to your health. Same with sprouting. Sprouting is so incredibly affordable. I buy my lentils organic, of course, but in bulk, and then I just actually use a colander. I soak them for 24 hours, and then I put them in a colander, and I put them in a dark warm place. And then twice a day—in the morning and at night—I rinse them off and I shake them up. For me, I like eating them at about day four day five because I like them when they’re grown more and they’re a little less crunchy. But that’s just my personal preference. There are many ways, and I’ve only done lentil sprouts. I’d be really excited to try like the pea sprouts, the mung bean sprouts, and the other sprouts that you mentioned. That sounds delicious. Your whole thing is living foods as much as possible, we can do it on a budget for those who have a budget they need to adhere to.   [00:38:34] Tim James: Yeah, can I talk about that?   [00:38:35] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I want you to.   [00:38:37] Tim James: You can save money and save your life at the same time eating this way, so it doesn’t have to be expensive. Yeah, I bought a $600 juicer. I got after it, and I did it. I made the juice twice a day, and it can become expensive. I was teaching people what I learned. I went to this place, juicing twice a day, doing this, eating that, and it worked, so I brought it home, and I recreated it. Most people can’t do it in their busy schedules. First off, you can’t go cold turkey because you’re going to go through that healing crisis, and you can’t. You’re trying to raise kids, soccer practice, school, taking care of aging parents, and all the things we got going on today. People are busy, they don’t have time for a healing crisis. That’s why you have to go away to an institute like that. People would come to my classes, I would teach them the whole thing. We had a lot of people get juicers, but the problem was only 1 out of 10 would stick with it. Within 30-60, 90 days, most of them would have the juicers underneath the cupboard and they weren’t using anymore. I was like, “Why? You saw what happened to me. You knew me.” I know thousands of people in Portland because I was in business for years, and I’m like, “You know Charles. He healed himself with cancer. Why aren’t you doing this?” “Tim, it takes too much time. It’s too much money. My husband won’t help me with it. My wife won’t help me with it. They’re not on board. I’m getting made fun,” or whatever, blah, blah, blah. It’s too much work, and I’m like man. I’m like, what could I do to help these people? I went out and interviewed 100 people that came to a class, bought the juicer, got excited, and then stopped. They wanted something simple, and they wanted a plan. It just has to be easy. I went back to the drawing board, and right now I’d like to share my core four secrets that we teach everyone. This is the foundation for transforming your health, losing weight. getting the energy, boosting your immune system, and whatever you need to do. Is that okay if I share those?   [00:40:19] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [00:40:20] Tim James: Okay. So core’s four secrets. Core secret number one is drinking half your body weight in liquid ounces of purified water daily. And if you live in the city, then the water needs to be purified and restructured so you can actually absorb it because the high-pressure pipes in city water make the molecules stick together, and they will not go through the intestinal lining very well and you just pee it out. That’s very important. That’s it right there. And just on a side note, you can at least go to the grocery store in gallon glass jars and get single purified water for 25 to 44 cents a gallon. There’s no reason you can’t at least get some 90% purified water in your life. Okay? Less than 5% of people are doing this. If you’re 200 pounds, that’s 100 ounces of water a day. If you’re 100 pounds, that’s 50 ounces of water a day just to maintain health. Now if you’re drinking caffeine-free teas or drinking a green juice with no sugar in it, we’re not talking apple juice, orange juice, that kind of stuff—that doesn’t count. Coffee doesn’t. Just flax seed water. Green juices with vegetable juices and purified water itself, hibiscus tea—all these counts towards your water intake. That one right there, less than 5% of the population is doing this, and we are literally sitting in a situation called cellular dehydration. This is like a national catastrophe right now that nobody knows about or even talking about. And if 95% of us are dehydrated, when your body needs water, do you know where the first place it goes to get it? It’s the colon. It’s the colon. This is why people have—this is what we learned—6-12 pounds of impacted fecal material in that colon because your colon has been dried up over the years because you don’t drink enough water. And if your cells need water, your brain needs water, or your bones—your bones are 22% water. Whatever your body needs for a process or an organ system needs water and it doesn’t have what it needs, it goes to the colon. So the colon then can’t evacuate waste properly. It doesn’t work properly. Do you see the problem? It’s just day in and day out, it adds up and it builds up, then you get backed up, and then you get messed up. That’s what ends up happening. So simply by changing your water intake, you can allow your colon to start working, waste to start removing better, your lymphatic system works on movement, water, and oxygen, you can start getting the garbage out through the lymphatic system better, you’ll have more intelligence, your IQ will go up if you drink more water—literally. The difference between not having enough water in your body could be the difference between finding your keys, searching around for your keys, or hunting for your keys for 10-15 minutes in the house trying to find them. That’s the difference the water plays.  I had one lady, she implemented this at my class, eight months later I was teaching a class at a yoga studio and I saw her. I was like that lady looks familiar but I couldn’t recognize her for some reason, and then I said, “Hey, you look familiar.” She’s like, “Well, yeah. I attended one of your classes eight months ago.” And I was like, “Oh, wow. I don’t know, I thought I noticed you but you look different for some reason.” She’s like, “I hope you noticed, I’ve lost 50 pounds.” I was like, “Whoa, wow. That’s awesome.” Now everybody’s tuning in, listening, and taking notes. I was like, “What did you do to lose the 50 pounds?” She goes, “You gave me so much information that night, Tim. I just stuck with one thing—water. That’s what I heard, so I did that. So every morning now I drink water. I do half of my body weight. I dropped 50 pounds.” I’m like, “Well, that’s great. What are you doing back this time?” She goes, “I’m here to find out what’s next.” I’m like, “Okay, here it is.” Here’s core secret number two, chew your food until liquefied. This is so important. We have two ducts in our upper mouth and four in our lower mouth that secrete the enzymes, amylase, and lipase. These break down our starches and our fats. And if you don’t chew your food really well, they’re not going to get digested, and instead of digestion and a simulation of nutrients, which is what we want, you’re going to get fermentation and gut rot. You’re going to destroy those intestinal villi, those little hair-like structures lining the intestinal tract, and you’re going to end up with a leaky gut like me. 90% of people have leaky gut at some level, which is these little tears and holes in your intestinal tract where undigested food particles and microbes get into the bloodstream. And they start wreaking havoc, causing inflammation, causing headaches, weight gain, cancer, and all these other problems. Hashimoto’s, arthritis, everything. Chewing your food is of the utmost importance. It’s the first domino in digestion, and if you don’t chew your food well, the first domino doesn’t fall and you’re going to end up with a lifetime of gut rot, gas, bloating, and problems. This one’s big, and less than 4% of the population, that I benchmarked, is chewing their food well. And for those of you suffering from depression, by chewing your food really well and hitting those meridian points on your teeth—this is right from Dr. Gabriel Cousens, Medical Doctor, MD—you can increase your serotonin up to 500%, which is your happy juice just by chewing and stimulating those meridian points in your teeth. So it’s a huge deal. Core secret number three is avoiding liquids with meals. People are like what? This is a tough one especially when you go to a restaurant—if you can nowadays—and they’re trying to get some water, would you like some wine, you want some tea, you want a beer, or you want some coffee. They’re always trying to upsell you that stuff. Even when I tell them half the time I don’t want water they still bring it to me. Now that you’ve worked really hard to chew your food well and get it really small so it’s easy to digest and you’ve pre-loaded it with all those enzymes if you drink purified restructured healthy water, apple juice, wine, or beer you’re going to dilute those digestive enzymes and you’re going to go from a simulation of nutrients and digestion right back to fermentation and gut rot. You’re going to go right back to where you were—problems, your gut will be jacked up. Less than 2% of the population is avoiding their liquids with meals. We give a rule of thumb. For beginners, stop 30 minutes before you eat and wait an hour after you eat to start drinking liquids again. For those of you with stage four disease, wanting to win an Olympic gold medal, or just be your fit top best stop drinking liquids an hour before and wait two hours after you eat and then start drinking a lot of liquids again. That’s core secret number three. And the last one is core secret number four. This one is doing some breath exercises before you eat, just for a minute. Maybe a minute or two. And it’s as simple as this—taking a big breath in through the nose, pause at the top, and then release out to the mouth. And while you’re going through this process you can think about how grateful you are to have that breath, to have your life, to have this food in front of you that’s going to nourish your body. What ends up happening, Ashley, is most people—I mean, would you agree that we live in a stressed-out environment, a world?   [00:46:49] Ashley James: Right.   [00:46:51] Tim James: So even if you don’t think you’re stressed, you are. Your body doesn’t know the difference. If you are in stress mode, which most of us are, and we’re talking lots of stress—work stress, family stress, financial stress, COVID stress, and EMF stress. There are lots of stresses on us, right? Your body will—as a defense mechanism—go into fight-or-flight mode. The blood actually leaves the organ systems because digestion is not important now. You got to fight something to live or you got to run to live. So all the blood and all the energy goes out to your extremities. Cortisol gets jacked up, adrenals, and all these things. So by simply doing this breathwork for a minute to two, you bring the blood from the extremities back into the organ system so you can actually digest your food properly. Less than 1% of the population is doing that. Now these core four secrets, besides getting some glass jars and packing the water from the purifying place, how much does that cost anybody? Nothing. It’s free, right? There they are. I have so many people when they order our products they hear me on a podcast or whatever radio show, they’re like, “Tim, I’m already feeling better before I even got your products.” Because they started implementing these things. They’re just common sense. I’ve used this for 10 years. I’ve shared it with thousands of people. It works for everybody, every single person. I tell people until you’ve done it yourself, how do you know? You have to have a first-person experience. Don’t believe what I say. You got to go home and try it. Because people are like, well I don’t want to change my food. I’m going to exercise. I’m going to go get something. No, you don’t even have your foundation in place first. This is the foundation. This is the sub-basement to build upon, and then after that, then we really get deep with our products, to the detoxing, to the nutrition, to the bacteria, and all the other stuff.   [00:48:37] Ashley James: Awesome. So cool. I love it. I love that you point out that anyone can start this, and you can start it slow. You can start one habit at a time. I think chewing the food more is something that is going to take a bit of conscious effort, especially if you’re used to drinking a lot of water. I’ve seen a lot of people do this where they just take maybe two bites and then drink some water to help get it down. The food hasn’t really been chewed.   [00:49:15] Tim James: I have a solution for this if I could share.   [00:49:17] Ashley James: Yeah.   [00:49:17] Tim James: I do private coaching, one-on-one. In the beginning, I didn’t charge anything because I didn’t value myself. Now I have people pay me thousands of dollars a month to coach them if they wanted to work with me. I have other coaches, it’s not that expensive, but the first thing I do on our initial call, we do this onboarding calls. I have them pull out their phone, and I have them program these things into their life with recurring appointments. Now think about it, if I say plot, plot, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is, many people listening today know what I’m talking about. We’re talking about Alka-Seltzer. Why is that? It’s because television programming actually calls it that. They’re telling you, hey, we’re going to program you. That’s what they call a television program. My dad was like, “What program are we going to watch tonight?” We’re getting programmed with commercials—the habitual repetitive motion. You say something long enough, and often enough, people believe it is true or they’ll remember it because what you’re doing is just simple. It’s programming the subconscious mind.  What I have my clients do is they wake up in the morning and it says drink water. They pick the time and they had a recurring appointment. And it’s like [buzzing] and it says drink water. Then maybe 30 minutes later it’ll say green juice, Gut Detox, Toxin Detox. Those are our products, and we have them programmed as a reminder. Then at lunchtime, it says chew food. You can put chew food, avoid liquids, breath, probiotics, and enzymes, and we have that as a recurring appointment. In the afternoon—green juice, and then at dinner—chew food, avoid liquids, breath, enzymes, and recurring. So I have them set up that structure. And then every day, their phone [buzzing], they look down, they see it, they see it, they see it, they see it, they see it. They’re smart. They’re now programming it. They’re using their phone to program themselves, and in three to four months you’re going to have a hard time forgetting those four things. And everybody improves. That’s the easiest, cheapest way I’ve found to do it because everybody carries their phone around.   [00:51:12] Ashley James: Very cool. What kind of juicer? Could it just be any juicer, or do you like the masticating juicer over the centrifugal juicer? Is it better just to get any juicer and just start doing it, or do you have a preference?   [00:51:28] Tim James: Well it really depends on what you want to do. If you’re just going to do celery juice, then you could get a cheaper centrifugal one. It’s really fast, but the ones that are the most nutritious—I’m putting sprouts and wheatgrass through mine. I can do wheatgrass juice. I can turn right around and make a nice sprout juice. I do cucumber, celery, sunflower, pea sprouts, and I’ll put some ginger in there, turmeric, or some lemons and limes. Maybe some vegetables from time to time like leafy greens or whatever. What you want is a slow auger juicer that’s going to turn under 72, 75 RPMs, very slow so it’s not going to create all that oxidation like a wind tunnel that’s going to oxidize and devalue the nutrients quickly. That’s very important. It’s just a really slow auger juicer. The one we recommend now is an Omega. Omega’s got a bunch of them. You can pick them, but I can’t remember the exact model number now because I used to be super into the juicers. I still use my old Omega 8006. It just works, but there are newer ones that actually work a little bit better and they don’t get gummed up as much. They’re awesome, but you can get one of those for $350 bucks and you’re dialed. Or like you say, go to OfferUp. People are selling stuff like crazy now. Or they started juicing, they got all excited about it, and they gave up on it. Hey, take my juicer for $1000 and you can get a $300, $400 juicer for $100.   [00:52:55] Ashley James: Yeah, right. I’ve got them for even cheaper, but yeah. I have an Omega that I got back in 2008 for $30 or something.   [00:53:04] Tim James: That’s a deal.   [00:53:05] Ashley James: I know, I know. There are people who just want to get it out of the house or whatever. There are so many juicers out there. You want one you can find one at your budget, but the Omega’s fantastic. I love Omega. I’ve had such great success with it.   [00:53:23] Tim James: Yeah, they’re really good. I literally healed myself with juicing. I juiced twice a day for five years because I was like I’m healing Charles, I’m committed. I gave my word that I would do this with him, so that’s another thing is to get a buddy and stuff. The first product that we actually developed—this could be a good segue—is our Green 85 Juice formula. It’s basically as close to a fresh-pressed juice as you can get. This is where I met people where they’re at. It’s simple, it’s easy. They just take a scoop, mix in water, shake it up, and they drink. It takes literally under a minute and they’re done. And they’re flooding their body with all this nutrition. If you still want to juice, do it. I totally do it. I made a fresh juice this morning and I put a scoop of Green 85 in it. Because I want more rights. That’s what I do, but we have stuff like that available to people. For those of you that don’t want to buy a juicer, I recommend that you do at some point, but you can get this in yourself once or twice a day easily. There’s no juicing, there’s no cleanup, there’s no mess. The grocery bills are way cheaper. When people are drinking these greens twice a day, your grocery bill drops about $100 a month. If you’re drinking it once a day it drops about $50 because as the cells get hydrated from all this new water you’re going to be drinking, hopefully, and you drink these greens and get the nutrients in there, the cells are going to send signals saying, hey, I’m not hungry. You just can’t eat as much. It’s impossible. Your body just whips right back up into shape, and your grocery bill drops. It’s pretty cool. You can do this on a budget. You just have to be strategic about it.   [00:54:51] Ashley James: Very cool. Why is it called Green 85? Is it 85?   [00:54:56] Tim James: Yeah. We called it Green 85 Juice formula, not because I’m a marketer or anything, it’s just because it replaces the 85% of the nutrition that’s farmed out of the soil. Most people aren’t aware of this that even if you’re eating organic vegetables or organic meat, the soil is 85% deficient on average, so it’s just not there. If it’s not in the soil, it’s not going to be in the plant or in the animal that ate the plant. Literally, almost all of us are actually walking around on 15% fuel or 15% octane. What I teach people to do is how to get up to 100% octane. We figured it out with our products now to make it easy for people so they can do it. Our whole program, it’s a clinic in a box. Literally completely from the inside out—gut health, blood health. It takes less than five minutes a day, so it meets people where they’re at with their time constraints. That’s why we called it Green 85 is because it replaces the 85% that’s been farmed out of our soils today.   [00:55:55] Ashley James: How do you guarantee that your stuff has all of the minerals and the vitamins in it that we need? If the nutrients aren’t in the soil, how do you get it in your sprout formula?   [00:56:06] Tim James: It’s all about sourcing. Sourcing the individual ingredients from farms and farmers that understand how to keep their soil healthy. Either they are doing permaculture, maybe they re-mineralize with rock dust, or even better, they’re re-mineralizing with ionic ocean minerals. They get a concentrate out of the ocean. There’s a company called oceansolution.com. I’ll just give them a plug because this stuff’s awesome. You can get a gallon, and you should. You should get a gallon of this stuff. It’s like $55 or something. And you can put a little quarter of a teaspoon or a half a teaspoon in with your sprouts when you soak them and deliver tremendous amounts more minerals because the plants will soak that stuff up. You can do your lawn with it. You can do your garden. We did my brother’s garden. We sprayed one spray with ionic ocean minerals and the size of his garden doubled. And they were like what is going on. I’m like yeah, your soil’s deficient, right? And the other thing that you can tell is how you feel. When you start drinking this stuff on a daily basis, it’s going to radically change your physiology from the inside out. I’ve personally made three runs at it. I wanted to do 40 days and 40 nights on just Green 85. The first time I tried it I made it 11 days, then I made it 26 days, and then last year I finally made it 40 days. And all I had was Green 85, 3-5 times a day. I had hibiscus tea, which is just water and hibiscus leaves, and I did some Irish sea moss in the morning and night. I actually did do a chai tea latte, but no sugar. That’s what I lived on for 40 days was Green 85.   [00:57:50] Ashley James: So you were doing a fast?   [00:57:52] Tim James: Yeah. And the time before when I did it 26 days, it was only Green 85 and I never felt better. I don’t want to blow people out of the water here too and think you have to do that stuff. Because I remember when I was at the institute and this guy was on a 10-day fast, I’m like 10 days you didn’t eat? How is that even possible? See I wasn’t even ready for that. It takes time to build up the mental strength, understanding, and how the body works. And then you have to be willing to go through a little pain to feel amazing because usually, the first two, three days of a fast it’s like you’re not feeling so good. You’re freaking getting cravings, and then all of a sudden you’re just not hungry at all and it just goes away. Your body kicks into ketosis and starts burning up all the fat and the dead cells in your body. It just starts cleaning you up. We were nomadic people for almost the entirety of the time we walked this planet. So we’d walk for two or three days, and then we’d eat some food. Then we’d walk for two or three days, we wouldn’t eat, and then we would allow our digestive tract a time to rest and clean itself up, and our blood to clean itself up. We’re just literally eating ourselves to death. Like you said with the cereals and stuff, I mean, I don’t want to get started on that, but it’s terrible. They’re putting genetically modified wheat, as an example, so it’s grown in a lab, raised in soils that are deficient, sprayed with chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, fungicides, larvicides, and herbicides. They grind it up in its dormant state, which if I gave you some hard red winter wheat and had your spring wheat and had you chew it you’d crack a tooth. You can’t digest that. It would come out just how it looks when it went in your mouth, but they ground it in that dormant state into a powder. They add sugar, water, and yeast. They cook it at high temperatures, devalue it more, and then they spray synthetic vitamins on it. They call it enriched vitamins, and then they give it to kids. This is supposed to be healthy food. And then it’s even worse. Now they’re putting super sugars like high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup that are 50% by weight glyphosate. This is not me saying it, this is right out of MIT. It’s bad. 50% by weight high fructose corn syrup is glyphosate, it’s Roundup—so ketchup and stuff. This stuff started freaking me out, but that’s not good enough. They want more addiction so they hired these engineers types, they pay them big salaries, and they created these opiate derivatives that they put in cereals, and it’s not even on the box, to further addict us and our children to eat cereals. So the cereal thing really ticks me off. The only one that I would purchase is Ezekiel Brand Natural. That’s actually sprouted grains, that’s it. They have sprouted grains ground up and you just put it in some seed milk and then off you go. Flaxseed milk or something like that so you’ve got proper food combining, and then then you’ve got cereal you could actually eat and it’s not going to destroy your health.   [01:00:31] Ashley James: Right. Some of us have allergies to gluten or can’t eat barley, wheat, rye, or oats so cereal is not even on the table. But you know what, I’ve gotten used to eating big beautiful salads for breakfast. Actually, what I do is I take my sprouts. I told you day five is my favorite. I take a big bowl of my lentil sprouts, I drizzle balsamic vinegar on it, then I take a little bit of either coconut aminos or soy aminos—the Bragg’s aminos—and then I just mix it up. And I eat a big bowl of lentil sprouts for breakfast. I was surprised because then it was all of a sudden 2:00 PM and I’m like wow, I’m just starting to get hungry. A big bowl of lentil sprouts gave me energy throughout the whole morning, and well into the afternoon. It was really cool. Sometimes, on days like that, I just have that for breakfast and then I just make a really big beautiful dinner, and that’s it. We can get away from this idea of having to eat what we ate as children, right? Or what we are marketed to our entire lives. I love that you brought up that. We have to remember to not become relaxed and give into—because sometimes people say, oh, just in moderation. I don’t want to get too strict. I’m going to be in moderation, and once in a while, we’re going to eat the standard American diet. We’ll just buy this Cheerios or whatever once in a while, but we have to remember that the glyphosate—the Roundup—is so concentrated. When they make high fructose corn syrup, it’s so concentrated. I’ve had two really great interviews with Dr. Stephanie Cena, who’s the PhD, top research scientist from MIT who is an activist trying desperately to let us know. And she doesn’t get paid to do any of it. She’s trying to let us know that glyphosate is such a harmful chemical. It binds to heavy metals and releases them into our brain and into our kidneys causing major problems with developmental issues for children, but also can cause kidney disease and actually damage to the brain.   [01:02:56] Tim James: It’s in over 70% of the rainwater today, just to give people an idea of how much it’s out there. It’s bad. That Stephanie gal, she’s smart. I’ve seen some of her work. She was also talking about the laminate floors directly linked to autism in children—another contributing cause. Some really good work that she’s done. She’s done some really cool stuff.   [01:03:18] Ashley James: Yes. In cleaning up our diet, water, and food, we also have to consider the environmental factors that are in our home because the air quality in our home can have 10 times more pollution than outside, than being in a busy street in downtown whatever town you’re in. And yet, we think that it’s fresh air inside, but it’s not because everything is off-gassing. We have to remember to open the windows.   [01:03:51] Tim James: Maybe we are related because you sound like me. I feel like I’m listening to myself. The paint’s off-gassing, the glues are off-guessing, and we’re bringing this stuff in. It’s really cool to be chatting with you today.   [01:04:04] Ashley James: You might have heard of the Sternagles, have you heard of them?   [01:04:07] Tim James: Mm-mm.   [01:04:07] Ashley James: I’ll connect you guys. The Sternagles are a family. I’ve had them on the show. Their son, at a year old, and actually his pediatrician was our pediatrician. They now live in Utah, but we found out that we actually lived really close to each other. At one year old, their son was diagnosed with cancer, and so the last five years he’s been fighting cancer and it came back. They got it to go away and then it came back again. So they really have been fighting it for five years, maybe six years now. He now has a clean bill of health—spoiler alert—but they tell a great story of how they’ve had to fight cancer twice. The first time they used natural medicine and in conjunction with some allopathic medicine. And the second time it came back, they got the oncologist’s blessing—because they’re very persuasive—to just allow them to do 100% natural medicine and watch, wait, and see. And they’re able to 100% help their child to not have any cancer any tumors. He had tumors in his nervous system and in the spine—very painful. In their journey, like you, they’ve really gotten clear that the toxins in their house and in their environment needed to be thrown away. They moved to Utah, took the rest of their life savings, bought some land in a beautiful area, and they built from scratch a completely non-toxic home He teaches people. He shares all this information, teaches people how to do it, but his whole thing is what kind of light bulbs are you going to use? What kind of carpeting? What kind of paint? What kind of caulking? What kind of tile? Just every single square inch of their house is the lowest toxic, and it’s just amazing the things we take for granted that we don’t realize are affecting and are contributing to potential cancer, contributing to potential disease, or slowing the development of our children. Like you said, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, seeing there’s even a link from laminate floors and the off-gassing to potentially creating autism-like symptoms in children. You mentioned the Irish moss. Why did you take it? And how do you take it?   [01:06:40] Tim James: I take it because it’s got like 92 minerals in it. It’s chocked full of minerals. It can be used as a thickener. You can make a pudding with it, you can make a key lime pie with it, or you can just eat it plain or you could squeeze some lime or lemon juice, a little bit of salt, and then consume it in the beginning. It’s just a wonderful thing. It’s great for the gastrointestinal tract, for your skin, your brain health, and your gut health—everything. What I do is I try to get the purple stuff, it’s harder to find, especially now with everybody home, everybody’s buying all this stuff up. It’s either white or purple. I try to get the wildcrafted purple stuff, and it can be more expensive like $35 to $45 a pound. But then I take a half a pound of it, I soak it in water for 10-12 hours, then I rinse it off, and I pick out any little sea stuff or rocks that are leftover. It’s pre-washed, but there’s still stuff left, and then I put it in a blender with a little bit of water and blend it to a kind of a paste. Add more water, and I just keep doing that until I got about a half a gallon. From that half a pound I’ll turn into about a half a gallon of this gel, and then I put in the fridge and it gels up. Every morning and night I take a big huge scoop of it. That stuff’s awesome. It really is.   [01:07:53] Ashley James: Does it taste good?   [01:07:54] Tim James: I wouldn’t say that at the beginning because especially when it comes out of the blender it’s kind of warm. It really needs to chill. I mean I can eat it warm now but I’m still like ugh. It’s still what it is. It’s like a sea vegetable. It’s not like dulse flakes. Dulse I think is really good. We put that in our green 85 formula because it’s got a lot of iodine in it, and that’s one of the big reasons so many people have thyroid issues today is because there’s a lack of iodine. It’s one of the four halogens. You’ve got iodine, bromide, chloride, and fluoride. What I was taught was that the thyroid thinks that those other ones like chlorine, fluorine, and bromide are iodine, especially if it’s not getting enough of it. So it grabs it. It’s like oh, iodine, but it’s not. And then it doesn’t communicate properly. It doesn’t talk and give clear direction. Especially for women listening with breast cancer, we’ve been taught to give them tons and tons of iodine. We like it through a root system of a plant so that it’s converted from rock form to a carbon-based form. It works better, and this sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, and sweep that out and then get the thyroid chock full of a normal plant-based vitamin or iodine that’s been through the root symptom of a plant. That really helps out with breast cancer. There’s a lot of studies on that kind of stuff too.   [01:09:12] Ashley James: I love  01:09:12] iodine, which has been derived from sea vegetables. I like yours better because I love a whole food source of nutrients because then you’re always going to get it in the right ratios. So you’re getting iodine in the right ratios with other trace elements, and I love that you brought up that something that people are getting in their body every day—the bromine, the fluoride, or the chlorine. They’re getting it in their tap water, they’re getting it when they go in their hot tub, or when they go swimming in a swimming pool. We’re absorbing these chemicals that confuse.   [01:09:47] Tim James: From their toothpaste or their bread.   [01:09:51] Ashley James: Oh, right. Processed foods would have bromide in it. Processed foods are made with tap water so they’re going to have that. You know what’s really interesting, it made me so sad, but frozen vegetables, which I thought was a good alternative if you can’t get to the grocery store often. Frozen vegetables are processed by being washed in highly chlorinated water.   [01:10:17] Tim James: Yeah, genius.   [01:10:19] Ashley James: Because they’re supposed to make them disinfected or whatever. It’s great because it’s fresh, right? They’re picking it from the farm and immediately flash-freezing it, but before they immediately fast freeze it, they wash it several times with highly chlorinated water. Then that chlorine is getting into your system or those chemicals are getting into your system from your tap water, from swimming, from your bread, from taking showers. I live on a well so I feel really blessed, and I haven’t used fluoridated toothpaste in 12 years because I woke up back then discovered why fluoride is so bad. Not in its naturally occurring state in the ground because we can eat fluoride when it comes out of the ground. It’s one of those trace elements the body needs, but not in the chemical form sodium fluoride. It confuses the thyroid, and the thyroid is absorbing these instead of the iodine. And then the thyroid can’t make the hormones, so then we go to an MD and the MD gives us what? Gives us a prescription when the thyroid isn’t working because we’re giving the body chemicals.   [01:11:25] Tim James: Yeah, so you get more chemicals. This is really important because this really helped me. All the listeners have to do is type in the umbilical cord and the word chemical. Just type that in—umbilical cord and chemical. You can go back to 2005 and you can see the studies showing that they actually take the umbilical cord blood from these brand new babies and young mothers, and they tested for like 400 chemicals. They found 71% of what they were looking for. For about 250 toxic chemicals, 180 cause cancer in humans, 212 cause developmental and brain disorders, and on down the list it goes. The scientists and doctors refer to this as a body burden. How come this is not being blasted on mainstream media? You’ll see it in 2005, 2010, 2013, 2012, the different studies that come out. Environmental working group, different places, and nobody’s talking about that. That’s when I realized, I’m like, oh my God. If the youngest of young—the young babies and the young mothers, the healthiest of everybody—is already being born into this world with a body burden, we’re all polluted. Everybody’s polluted. I realized that. I’ve been on a mission, that’s what we call our company chemical-free body because you can look at the studies. And if that doesn’t hit you upside the head like a frying pan and you realize that you’re polluted, even though you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not the case because we’re all breathing the same air, drinking the water, eating these foods, and we’re exposed to all these personal care products that you don’t think. Like you were saying, everything’s off-gassing. You got people spraying chemtrails, automobile exhausts, rubber compounds coming off of tires. Where does that go? Well, the tires started out with a lot of treads and then you got to get new tires every year or two, why? Where’d the rubber go? It goes into the environment microscopic. You breathe it in, it attaches to your mucous membrane in the back of your throat, and down into your gut, it goes. That’s where the problems are. That’s why we have really focused on teaching people how to become a mechanic for their own self, be doctoring themselves. You’re a mechanic. If the car is not running right you got to check body light or check engine light. Here’s the example, car’s not running right check engine light comes on. Do you just keep driving that car? No, nobody does that because they know if they keep driving it and they don’t take it into the mechanic, the repair bill could get huge. Or the car could explode, or break down and they’re stranded at the side of the road they can’t get where they want to go anymore. When check engine lights come on people take them in and get them fixed. It makes sense. It’s common sense, but as our own bodies—the most important vehicle that you’re ever going to own, it’s the only one you got—has a check body light like you’ve gained weight, you have low energy, you have headaches, you have heart disease —   [01:14:02] Ashley James: You’re bleeding rectally.   [01:14:04] Tim James: Yeah, yeah you’re bleeding rectally, you have cancer, all these things. You have eczema on your elbows, you’re on medications, your body is just flashing the lights like hey, hey, stop, stop, take me in, take me in. Tune me up. This is where self-care comes into place, and you have to start loving yourself and realizing the only person that’s going to take care of your body is you. Not me, Ashley, some doctor, your aunt, your uncle, your grandma, your brother, your sister, your husband, or your wife. It has to be you. Look at animals. They take care of themselves. The cat wakes up, it stretches, does its yoga poses, and it licks its fur—it takes care of itself. We don’t do that. We don’t expect everybody else to do it. We take really good care of the outside. We wake up, we shower, we brush our hair. We got our face—put our makeup on, we got our earrings, and everything’s looking good. The coat’s looking good, the skirt’s looking right, but what do we do to the inside of ourselves? You can’t see it so it’s not paid attention to. What we do is we teach people to take care of the inside. If the car’s not running right you flush the transmission fluid, you flush the engine, new spark plugs, new fuel filter, new air filter, and new water filter. Then you put in the good fuel and then you maintenance that sucker, and that’s what we’re teaching people to do with their bodies. You clean out the digestive tract. We have a product called Gut Detox, it’s a thousand ancient-year-old formula from India. It works beautifully for that. You want to purify the blood, we have a product called Toxin Detox. It was originally two formulas for the military that will purify the blood of heavy metals, radiation, and toxic chemicals like glyphosate as an example. And then where are you going to get the fuel? Well, you need to flood the body with those green nutrition twice a day. We have a product for that, and then you got to recolonize that bacteria—probiotic spores. We do the spore base rather than regular probiotics because they die in the stomach acid, and for those of you eating yogurt and thinking that’s a health food, it’s a dessert. Probiotics are bacteria, okay. When you heat them, which by law you have to do that to all that yogurt, it’s pasteurized. It’s 190 degrees, they’re dead. So yes, you’re getting probiotics, but you’re getting the corpse of a probiotic. It’s dead. There’s no benefit. You’re just having breakfast, or you’re having dessert for breakfast with yogurt, that kind of stuff. All these things come into play, and it’s really about internal health. When you clean out the gut. you clean the blood, and you start flooding the body with nutrition, flood the body with these bacteria and eating fermented foods like sauerkrauts, kimchis, and these types of things, and more bacteria, getting outside, getting your hands on the dirt, more bacteria. Petting dogs and let the dog kiss you, more bacteria, the healthier you’re going to be. That’s how it works.   [01:16:39] Ashley James: I love it. There are plant-based fermented yogurts you can find that are raw.   [01:16:48] Tim James: CocoYo is one.   [01:16:49] Ashley James: Yeah, CocoYo. So what I do, I learned this from my friend Naomi. Naomi and I created a whole food plant-based course, videos. We basically just made videos in her kitchen because she’s amazing at whole food plant-based. I was doing it before her then she started because she had a heart disease diagnosis, and then she started spreading it. Her whole family started doing it, her parents started doing it, and then they all saw these great benefits. She’s really creative in the kitchen at getting people with very picky appetites to like the food. So she figured out, she soaks raw cashews, and then takes cashews, puts in the Vitamix, blends it, and then mixes in a few spoonfuls of the CocoYo and a very little water and then ferments it for about 24 to 48 hours on the counter. It makes the most delicious, and it works best when we use CocoYo because of the live culture. We can really tell the difference, but it makes the most delicious like cream cheese, sour cream, and you don’t need a ton of it because it’s—   [01:18:03] Tim James: Strong.   [01:18:04] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s strong. It’s very. It’s strong. It’s very dense nutritionally, very calorically dense, but her kids will fight over it. She had to take it and put it in individual little containers with their name on it because they would literally fight over it, which is really cool. She’s made other great delicious recipes where the kids will fight over it, and not leave any for the dad when he gets home from work. And that always surprises her because she made a vegetable dish the other day with mushrooms, and her kids hate mushrooms, but the way she made it was so delicious they ate it all up and they didn’t leave any for the dad. So she had to make a second dinner. It’s just so cool when she never would have thought that her kids would get excited over a whole food plant-based diet. There are just ways of making it really delicious. When I used to cook years ago, I would start with, okay, well, we’re going to have a roast for dinner. We’re going to have the salmon for dinner. We’re going to have the pork chops, or we’re going to have the chicken. You would start with what’s the meat, and then what complements the meat. Well, I guess I’ll make some couscous, or I guess I’ll make some broccoli. You bring in the side dishes, right? Now, my focus is on what can I eat to heal my gut? What can I eat to maintain my energy and my vitality? What can I eat to get nutrients in my body? And that becomes the compass or the foundation of that meal, and then what can I eat that’s raw today? What can I eat that has all those delicious raw enzymes that my body needs? And then I build the meal upon that. If you bring your focus to what you want to heal in your body, and what you want to support your whole family, what can I eat to support my immune system? What can I eat to help my liver detoxify? And then you build the meals upon the premise of healing the body. So your kitchen becomes your pharmacy instead of what can I eat that’s just delicious? Because these foods are delicious. They can absolutely be delicious, but we have to make our focus be what can I do to support the 37.2 trillion cells in my body, so in seven years, I’m a totally new person but I’m actually going to be younger cellularly. I’m going to be younger in seven years. What can I do to make me younger? Now, as women, we spend thousands of dollars in our lifetime on face creams to make our skin appear as young as possible, but we’ve got to actually work on the nutrition on the inside. And when we do that, then our skin will develop younger-looking cells. So instead of focusing on what I can schlop on my face, we should be focusing on what nutrients we give our body that will make healthy cells, and then we actually look younger and younger? It’s so true.   [01:20:51] Tim James: Yeah. It’s usually coming more from our women clients, but in six months on our protocols, people look five years younger. You’ll know once you start getting about three to four unsolicited comments like maybe your hairdresser will be like wow, your skin’s looking good. Or your roots are coming in thicker, what are you doing? Somebody will just say, wow, you look younger. And in the beginning, it feels weird because I started getting this from people. Especially from a guy, redneck, supposed to eat meat, drink whiskey, and shoot guns or something. Now it’s like, hey, Tim. You have really beautiful skin. I mean that made me feel my skin crawl in the beginning when people started telling me this stuff because I didn’t even know how to take it because nobody ever talked to me like that before. Now, I’m like, my skin is beautiful. Thank you so much. I love it. I love getting the comments. And I like freaking people out. I can’t wait till I turn 50. I can’t wait till I turn 60 because I like people going what? I want to be that guy that’s like 110, sprinting down the beach, playing tag football with my great, great, grandkids, and they think I’m like their old dad or a healthy grandparent, you know what I mean? Because I know that’s possible now because I’ve met people that are doing this. Dr. Gabriel Cousens, he lives a living food diet. You should have him on, he’s awesome. He goes deep into diabetes and stuff, wasn’t trying to do that, but he’s got books written on it. The dude’s like 80 something, he can do like 30 pull-ups. He did a rain dance for the Indians. He was telling all the Indians you got to stop eating the buffalo, you got to start eating plants, and they thought he was crazy. Nobody had done this rain dance in a decade, 4 decades, or 10 decades. It’s been a long time because it’s two days no sleep doing this dance. Well, he did it. He did it in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and then afterward, all the chiefs were like well maybe we should start eating plants because somebody’s been able to do that dance for 40 years or whatever it was. The results speak for themselves. People see other people. If you want people around you to change, you have to make those changes for yourself. There’s no question about it. That’s how you do it.   [01:23:07] Ashley James: Awesome. I love it. In the last few years since you’ve been working with people and helping them to adopt a more whole food plant-based, even more raw foods lifestyle to support their overall health, what diseases have you seen people reverse? What medications have you seen people get off of because they became so healthy?   [01:23:27] Tim James: Everything. I’ve seen everything.   [01:23:30] Ashley James: Can you give us some stories or some examples?   [01:23:33] Tim James: Yeah. One of the first ones was this guy that had multiple sclerosis. His name was Bob, and this guy had come to me. Actually, I met this other guy in the grocery store at Whole Foods. He had a whole bunch of stuff. And I’m like, “Wow you must be juicing.” He’s like, “Well, actually, I got horses, and we feed all these carrots to the horses.” I was like, “I just started juicing so I thought you were because when I first started juicing, I was doing carrots and that kind of stuff.” He’s like, “No, it’s for horses.” Anyway, he came over, went to one of my dinner classes. He was an attorney, really nice, just a gentleman. The guy was a sweetheart, and we became friends. Then he was part of this men’s bible group. This guy Bob had MS. He’s like, “God, Tim, will this help Bob?” And I’m like, “Yeah, actually what I heard was that people with MS, they actually really need this. Besides the lifestyle and the juicing, they need a blue-green algae.” It comes from Klamath Lake down in Oregon here. It really bolsters and strengthens the fatty tissue of the brain. What I was told is that MS is a virus that’s attacking the fatty tissue of the brain, so we want to bolster and strengthen that up. It’s one of the protocols they use at the Hippocrates Health Institute for people with MS. Well, this guy couldn’t even walk. He had a caregiver, and I don’t know how long it was—a few months or whatever he was on the protocols. All of a sudden, he was driving up to his house, and the guy was walking across the street and getting his newspaper. He pulled up. He’s like, “Bob. Look at you.” And he’s like, “What?” He’s like, “You’re getting the newspaper, man. You’re walking.” He’s like, “Well, yeah. I guess I am.” And then a few months later, all of a sudden, I get this knock on the door and it’s Bob and his caregiver. He’s walking. I never met the guy before. It was just somebody through osmosis. He’s like, “I just want to come by and say thank you because the stuff that you’ve been sharing with my buddy has helped me. I’ve been able to get out of the house. I can walk now. I’m getting around to do things. I feel a lot better.” And believe me, he wasn’t fully on the whole program at all, but the changes he made had made a significant impact on him. It wasn’t just the blue-green algae, the [inaudible 01:25:29], it was the brain on version. That’s very important for those of you that are writing that down who might have somebody with MS. But it’s like a super-duper omega is what it is. You’re looking for those omegas. It’s the sub-basement of where all omega comes from. We recommend people do that for a two to three year period, and then after that, you can do it periodically. Human beings aren’t supposed to eat algae all the time, but for healing, it can be a good thing.   [01:25:52] Ashley James: Absolutely. I totally agree with you. I’ve had several interviews with Catharine Arnston, who’s the creator of energybits.com. She gives us a great discount. Listeners can use the LTH coupon at energybits.com. But she shares her story, and she sources blue-green algae. It’s chlorella and also spirulina. She has it tested, has the water that it’s grown in tested—it’s all purified.   [01:26:21] Tim James: Yeah, it’s important.   [01:26:22] Ashley James: Yeah, it’s very important. There are zero heavy metals. There are other companies out there. You can buy it cheaper, but the problem with buying it cheaper is it’s full of lead, heavy metals, and pollution. There are only a handful of companies out there that will test it. She actually has it tested twice. She has tested where it’s grown and also has the final product tested for purity to make sure there are no heavy metals and there’s no pollution in it. I’m really impressed with the quality of hers, and hers actually don’t taste fishy like other companies do. Hers tastes like it’s fresh.   [01:26:57] Tim James: Clean.   [01:26:58] Ashley James: Yeah, it tastes clean. My son loves them. He’s five but he’s been eating them his whole life. He calls them green crackers, and he loves that it turns his tongue different colors depending on which one he’s eating. He loves that game. So if you want to get kids into it, it’s like look at my tongue, you can make your tongue green. You can make your tongue like this bluish color, and then they freak out and they want to do it too. That’s a great way to get kids to eat it, but it also helps to chelate the heavy metals from the body. That’s part of the protocol that a doctor here, I’ve had him on the show, Dr. Klinghart. He’s just outside of Seattle, and he has a clinic where he basically reverses autism. He gets kids that are non-verbal, rocking themselves, hitting their head, or banging them themselves against a wall. He gets them from the point where they’re completely shut in their own nervous system and unable to communicate or connect with people, to where they’re able to go to college. Where they’re totally no longer on a spectrum. I think it’s because they don’t actually have autism. I think most of the children that are diagnosed with autism, it’s autism-like symptoms, and that it’s the chemical toxicity. What he does, Dr. Klinghart has a whole protocol where he cleans the child’s body out of all of the heavy metals and nutrifies the body—like you’ve been talking about. And has them remove the chemicals in their life—like you’re talking about. They just come back online. He has them do green juicing—just like you’re talking about. He has them do chlorella, spirulina, and do saunas—depending on their age.   [01:28:44] Tim James: Is he having them do chlorine dioxide?   [01:28:46] Ashley James: I don’t know, but I will find out. He has a whole protocol. A lot of it is food-based as well. He puts herbs in their green smoothies that also are natural chelators. It’s easy to put just these herbs. You can grow yourself in your own garden into your into your green smoothies every day. But that’s when I first learned that he specifically uses it with children very effectively. That he gives them the algae, and he will only recommend one of the few brands out there that are so clean like Catharine Arnston’s brands. But we’ve had had her on the show a few times because she went into all the studies and talks about the nutritional profile of chlorella and spirulina, and it’s fascinating. You can get your vitamin K.    [01:29:42] Tim James: It’s amazing. It’s amazing. Our top four ingredients—spirulina and chlorella are in there. We test them like crazy. It’s very important that people understand the ingredients. You can’t even believe labels anymore today. You have to know the people behind it, that’s the only way. The only reason I have the supplement brand now is because of frustration. As a health coach, I would do all this research. I’m like okay, I got to clean their gut—this product. Okay, we need to purify their blood—this one. We need a green juice—this one. And then we need digestive enzymes—that one. We need probiotics—that one. And then six months later, I’m looking, I’m like what? Xanthan gum? That wasn’t in there before. And I’m comparing the bottles and I call them up, I go, “What’s this?” It’s mutated corn syrup fermented in bacteria. I’m like, “What? I’m not putting that in my body.” And then I started reading the labels and I started looking up every little ingredient—dicalcium phosphate, the wrong type of silica that would cause hardening the arteries, gallstones, and kidney stones. After research, research, research, I’d finally get something. I tell everybody about it. My coaching clients are using it, and then they’d switch the ingredients. I mean after this happened three or four times, Ashley, I finally said this is enough. I found Dr. Scott Treadway, who’s one of the top formulators in the world, and he actually studied in India under two lineages of thousands of years of apprenticeship at herbology. Then he studied Chinese herbology, and then Western herbology. So he’s got this trifecta of knowledge. He did practice clinical work with patients, seeing his own patients for 10 years besides when he was getting trained in India, and then now he’s one of the top supplement formulators in the world. When we met, I was looking for somebody. I went through 30 labs until I met him. And I’m like, “Do you know what Kirlian photography is?” And he’s like, “Oh, yes. We have two of those machines.” I’m like, “Really?” For those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s a machine that can actually measure the energy or the frequency from whatever you’re pointing it at like a night scope. What’s cool is we can process—anytime you process anything you’re devaluing the nutrients. What we do in ours on our wheatgrass juice extract, spirulina, oat grass juice, wheat sprout, broccoli sprout, meringue leaf, or anything that’s in our products, they’re air dried or sun driesun-dried10 degrees to keep those enzymes or that life force active. It’s actually a charge. Not only are you getting the vitamins, the minerals, and the trace minerals, but you’re literally getting a frequency charge from the product itself. It’s literally charging the cells instant contact. And we’ve had those people that are intuitives or Reikis people that are really into energy healing. They’ll come to booths that we have at events and they’ll take one sip of our greens and they’ll go, “What is this stuff?” They just flip out. And then, “I’ll take six cans.” And then the people working there are like, “What’s going on?” They see that they’re in tune and they know. So that’s what we tell people on our greens. Don’t blend it because 90 seconds in a blender you’re going to kill 85% to 92% of the nutrition of whatever you put in there. Make your smoothie if you’re going to do that, add the greens in later, stir it in, spoon it, and then shake it up, and drink it that way to not kill that life force. That’s very important. And then please read your labels. On my products, you’ll see in red on all of them no magnesium stearate, no silicon dioxide, no dicalcium phosphate, and I can’t tell you how many people have called in and are like, “Dude that stuff’s in all my stuff.” So if you’re buying supplements, you have about a 95% chance that you’re consuming a toxic chemical even though it’s purported to be health food. Keep in mind, 85% of the supplements on the market today are synthetic versions sold by pharmaceutical companies. So 85% of the entire supplement market is big pharma.   [01:33:25] Ashley James: Right. I’ve been working with Dr. Joel Wallach for the last nine years, and he had the same problem. He is a Naturopathic physician, but back 20-30 years ago, he was working with patients. He had clinics actually from Washington all the way down to California. We’d drive down I-5, go to a different clinic, meet with people, and work up and down the western seaboard. He was getting great results because of all of his research that went into understanding that we’re minerally deficient, and so he was using another company. And all of a sudden people stopped getting results. He looked into it. He analyzed the supplements and found out the company that he was working with decided to dilute their product to make a bigger profit, and he was so upset. He obviously stopped telling his patients to use those, but he just didn’t know what to do because he couldn’t find the quality that he wanted to get the trace minerals and all the 90 essential nutrients for his patients. And then his family begged him to start their own company. He said, “I want to be helping people. I don’t want to be building a company or running a supplement company.” So his family begged him. “Okay, logistically, we’ll run the company. You keep working with people.” That’s over 22 years they’ve been doing that, but that’s the same story is companies will keep changing their supplements. And also, with Kristen Bowen who has the magnesium soak that I love, she was getting amazing results with it and then the company overnight—her, and she actually had 200 people. She just kept telling people about it, telling people about it, and over 200 people that she became friends with were all using this magnesium soak. It’s concentrated or undiluted magnesium from the Zechstein Sea, and she reversed major health issues with it. And then out of nowhere, someone says, “It’s not working anymore.” And then she grabs an old bottle and a new bottle, takes it to a lab, and sure enough, the company started diluting it hugely to increase their profits.   [01:35:33] Tim James: This happens all the time. People that are listening, it’s not easy to step into the supplement business. I could see because I only did small batches for my coaching students. Now that things are expanding and the supplement thing is growing, it’s very difficult to compete because my raw material costs are through the roof. I build this stuff for my body and my coaching clients. I build this stuff for me. I want it to freaking be the best, the top of the pyramid. That’s what I want, and every time we build it, I go to the formulator. I’m like, “Look, I want to be the best.” Well, if I was to sell my greens at regular retail value, it’d be like $117 to $127 a jar. Most people can’t afford that. I can’t really compete on the marketing because I don’t have this huge marketing budget because I’m not making an extra $60 a can or $50 a can on people on top of what I sell it for. It’s just numbers at that point. If I ever sell my company, probably don’t buy the products anymore. But we’re not going to do that. I’m going to put it in the bylaws. We’re family-owned, and it’ll be probably employee-owned. We’ll probably turn it over to the employees and they’ll be bylaws soon. The formulas have to stay the way they are, they will never change, and that kind of stuff so that after I’m dead and gone, it’ll still perpetuate. Because I have a lot of people, they have to have my stuff. Once they get on it, they’re progressing, they do not want to get off of it, so they get on auto-ship and they stay consistent with them.   [01:37:00] Ashley James: It has been such a pleasure having you on the show, Tim. I know you’ve got to go. Thank you so much. Do you have any final words that you’d like to say to our listeners to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:37:09] Tim James: Yeah, I do. I always like to end these talks with a challenge, and I would like you to challenge yourself to start putting yourself first—100% loving self. You have got to be first. I see this with men, and I see it with so many women, especially young mothers, mothers in general. They do everything for everybody. I mean taking care of the kids, washing the clothes, making the food, cleaning the house, trying to have a romantic life with the husband, and taking care of people. They put themselves last, they put their health last, and then eventually, a wheel falls off. Then they find themselves in the hospital with a nervous breakdown, they’re on anxiety medications, depression medications. They’re not happy and they’re not feeling good. Well, the reality is you have to put yourself first if you truly love your children. You have to because they’re watching you, and monkey see, monkey do. Literally, do you want your children to follow your footsteps and be worn out, worn down, sick, tired, overweight, and all these problems that people have today? No. My people ask me, “What’s more important, you or your kids?” I’m like, “I’m more important.” And people think that I’m a jerk by saying that. I say, “Let me finish. If somebody shoots our way, I’m going to jump in front of my kids and take the bullet. Obviously, I love them unconditionally, but I put myself first because I want my children to put themselves first. And I’m going to lead by example.” And I can tell you in my own life, it works. You lead by example, and what you’re doing by leading by example is giving other people permission, not that they will do it, but you give them permission and inspiration to do it for themselves. That’s all you can do. You can’t get people to do anything. I mean, you’ve probably experienced this. It’s hard. It’s like pushing a rope or trying to herd cats. Look at your husband. When he finally made the decision is when he changed, not when you wanted him to, when he wanted to. And the best way to do it, change yourself, that’s how you change your world.   [01:39:15] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure having you on. You should definitely come back. I’d love to have you on and continue sharing and teaching. I love your mission and the work that you’re doing to help people to live happier, more vital lives. It’s wonderful. Thanks, Tim.   [01:39:35] Tim James: Thank you so much. Yeah, I’d love to come back. We could go deep on whatever you want. Also, on my website, my podcast is there too where people can find me on the Health Hero Show. That’s my podcast, and I go deep on some stuff like proper food combining and things like that.   [01:39:53] Ashley James: Absolutely. And the links to everything that Tim James does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you so much, Tim. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Tim James. Wasn’t his story amazing? I love it. I feel like all men should hear it, I mean women too, not excluding anyone, but men need to hear his journey. Because I think a lot of us, we can stop and go what symptoms have I been sweeping under the rug? What symptoms have I been writing off? I have friends who take Advil every day because they have aches and pains. They just keep going, and like Tim said, if you’re sick, you have all these symptoms but it doesn’t stop you, it doesn’t stop you from doing your daily tasks, then it’s really easy to keep ignoring or keep self-medicating. That down the road is going to lead to bigger problems. My mom died when she was 55. I was 21 years old, my mom died when she was 55, and she was the epitome of health. She was the healthiest person we knew. She exercised seven days a week. She ate incredibly clean. She took supplements, and she didn’t manage her stress levels. She ignored certain symptoms, and she died of cancer. My dad died of heart disease. These are diseases that when you listen to enough episodes, you gather that there are many diseases we’re dying of that are lifestyle diseases, that are caused by our choices. I can’t get in a time machine and bring my parents back, but I can show you this information. Maybe we can share this information with your family members, with your friends, with your loved ones. Maybe we can save some of the loved ones in our life. Maybe you can help someone in your life to stop ignoring some of the health symptoms they have and do some simple changes to their diet or their lifestyle to help their body correct itself. We can extend the quality of our life. We can put years on our life by changing our diet, by changing certain health habits. This is what we explore in this podcast, so keep listening. If you’re a new listener, subscribe. Please give us a five-star rating review. That helps our show get to more people. And then please, go back and listen to past episodes. The most current episodes are on iTunes, but we’re also on Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and Google Podcast is an app now. We’re on all those, and you can also go to learntruehealth.com. All the episodes are on learntruehealth.com. The most recent episodes, the most recent 100 or so, have been transcribed. You can even just read the transcripts. And you can use the search function on the website to find episodes about specific illnesses or correcting certain things, certain topics. Please check out Tim James’ website chemicalfreebody.com and use the coupon code LTH. I invite you to try his green drink. I absolutely love it, and I’m very picky. It is organic. He sources the highest quality ingredients, and it is gluten-free. I had to make sure that myself. So chemicalfreebody.com, coupon code LTH. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, it’s free. A great resource, great community there. Go to learntruehealth.com and check out all the resources there. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me on Facebook, or you can reach out to me through email ashley@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. If you have any suggestions for future topics, or if you are grasping at straws with your own health, I’m also a certified health coach, and I’ve been working with people for nine years. I’d love to help you as well. You can go to learntruehealth.com, and on the menu, there’s a section for working with me. You can also go to learntruehealth.com/chat and fill out the form for a free consultation to see if we’d be great working together. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener, and I can’t wait to meet you either on Facebook, through a phone call, or an email. I’d love for you to reach out. Just know that you’re not alone. We’re all in this together. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Tim James! Website Podcast Facebook Instagram Twitter   Recommended Readings by Tim James Supplements Exposed – Dr. Brian Clement   Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com

Use listener coupon code LTH at viome.com for the gut and mitochondrial testing and food & supplement recommendations. IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com   Viome: At-Home Gut Microbiome and Mitochondrial Testing https://www.learntruehealth.com/viome-at-home-gut-microbiome-and-mitochondrial-testing   Highlights: Bad oral hygiene causes inflammation in the gut and the body The byproduct of the gut microbiome is important What diet ages people the quickest No such thing as a universal healthy diet   Every single person is unique, not only physically, but even internally. Because each person is unique, shouldn’t we have a diet specific to what our body needs? In this episode, Naveen Jain tells us the at-home tests that Viome has created that help in optimizing our health. He talks about the importance of feeding the microbiome what it needs and that every gene in our body is important, so all genes expressed in the body need to be tested to fine-tune what diet our body needs specifically. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today is one of those days that’s going to change your life. I’m so sure of it. This episode is mind-blowing. Cutting-edge, state-of-the-art at-home tests—you don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to go to the doctor’s office. You don’t have to go to a lab somewhere to have blood drawn. An at-home test that can take a few drops of your blood easily with a finger prick, can take stool, and even saliva and do a huge immense amount of genome work on the microbiome and of the mitochondria of your body, which are also bacteria, and understand exactly what you need to eat to bring everything back into balance and to make your gut bacteria work for you instead of against you. We can heal a leaky gut. We can heal all kinds of autoimmune issues that are triggered by and at its root caused by dysbiosis. This is very exciting. If you listen to episode 440, the one right before this, I had a gastroenterologist who has been working for 14 years helping people heal the gut with food. This episode complements that one because now we’re taking something to a whole new level where now you get to determine exactly what foods specifically for you right now, specifically for the very complex and individual microbiome matrix that is so specific to you. No two people in the world have the same makeup of gut bacteria, and so of course, not one exact diet fits all. Why is it that some people can eat bananas and some people can’t? It’s because of our gut, and it all starts there. We could even heal food allergies by following this method. So I’m so excited for you to listen to today’s episode. I want to let you know that I always ask founders and owners of companies to offer discounts to the listener. So Naveen has offered a discount for listeners. If you choose to do his at-home test, you’re going to use the coupon code LTH when you go to his website Viome and you use the coupon code LTH. I want to let you know that his website has a discount right now. He does have things on sale, but he does have things at a discounted rate, and you’ll get an even further discount by using the coupon code LTH. But there will come a time when those discounts on the website go away, you’ll still get a discount by using coupon code LTH. Go to viome.com, use coupon code LTH, and get a further discount. Enjoy today’s interview. It’s a doozy for sure, and I can’t wait to have him back on the show. My husband and I have ordered the kit, and we are going to be doing it. So the next time I have him on the show I will be sharing our experience with it, and I’m very, very excited. I’ve already told some friends about this and every single one of them said how can I get my hands on this kit. This sounds amazing. I have a feeling that everyone’s going to enjoy today’s interview and make you think about your bacteria in your body in a new way. Thank you so much for sharing this episode. Thank you so much for supporting the Learn True Health podcast. Come join our Facebook group if you get a kit from Viome and use the coupon code LTH there. If you end up going to viome.com and doing the kit, please come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and share your results as I will share mine as well. I’d love to hear from you guys and hear what you think. Excellent. Let’s figure out what we can do to feed our mitochondria and feed our microbiome to achieve absolute, amazing health together. It’s so exciting. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:04:09] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 441. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Naveen Jain on the show. Viome is your website, is your business—viome.com. I’m very excited about this. You are offering a discount to listeners. The LTH coupon code they can use. You give testing that allows us to get precise food and supplement recommendations based on our gut microbiome and mitochondrial health, and this is fascinating. So many of my listeners have asked me what food allergy tests they should get. And every week, my listeners are asking about different probiotics and how they can heal the gut. Many of my guests have said that if you want to heal any disease, you have to start by healing the gut microbiome. It is that important. And of course, now we know more and more that if you don’t have mitochondrial health you have a disease. Your company is helping people to get right to the root and solve this health crisis we have of chronic disease. I’m excited today because you said you wanted to talk about how we can, as a society, move in the direction so that chronic disease becomes optional. Welcome to the show.   [00:05:43] Naveen Jain: Thanks, Ashley. It is just amazing that we are living in this world of COVID, and it is hard to even mention that as a humanity, we really have done a great job of infectious disease. These pandemics, like COVID, happen once every 100 years. But at the end of the day, the world has this epidemic of chronic diseases. Think about it, we know or every one of us knows at least a dozen people who are suffering from obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, or autoimmune disease. You can give names like heart diseases, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, but these are just the symptoms. These are just symptoms of chronic inflammation. So one of the things that I realized is that chronic diseases are really caused by chronic inflammation. In terms of chronic inflammation, the root cause of almost all of the chronic inflammation, especially the systemic chronic inflammation, tends to be the gut microbiome. We somehow feel that we have discovered some new signs and new biology about human beings, and we are so much smarter. But if you go back 2500 years ago and Hippocrates say the same thing, “All diseases begin in the gut. Let food be thy medicine. Let thy medicine be the food.” It’s not that we have become any wiser or any smarter, except that now we have a scientific way of actually looking inside the body and finding out what is going on. So if I were to describe Viome in a simple way, we digitize the human body. We look at every single gene that’s expressed in the human body. We look at the human gene expression, mitochondrial gene expression, the gut microbial gene expression, and the oral microbial gene expression. As you mentioned, these things all work together. Unfortunately, it’s not like these things are just siloed. What happens in your gut doesn’t stay in the gut. It changes our body. What happens in our mouth when we chew our food changes what happens in the gut that changes what happens in the body. All these things are interconnected. As we go along here, we’re going to talk a lot more about this latest research and the latest science of what we’re learning.   [00:08:10] Ashley James: I’m going to just come out and say the big elephant in the room. Let’s just clear the elephant in the room right now. A lot of my listeners are really interested in doing the different gene tests, but they’re afraid of—myself included. My naturopathic physician was suggesting I do one of these gene tests, but I don’t want to give my genetic code over to a company that’s going to sell it to a pharmaceutical company. Does Viome promise to not sell our RNA or DNA sequences or the information of our body to other corporations? Do you keep our information protected and safe?   [00:08:54] Naveen Jain: First of all, the short answer is yes. I’m going to give you a slightly longer answer as well.   [00:08:58] Ashley James: I’d love a longer answer.   [00:09:00] Naveen Jain: So the longer answer is, remember, your DNA or your genes never change. That means you’re born with your DNA, you’re born with the genes, your genes never change. Anytime someone who is telling you they can give you some recommendations based on your genes is simply fooling you, here is why. Now imagine, if I made the recommendations to you based on your genes and a year later you gained 200 pounds, has your genes changed? No. Your recommendation better change because you’re not going in the right direction. Now let’s assume you also developed depression, now you have autoimmune diseases, now you have diabetes, you have every chronic disease known, and now your genes still haven’t changed. So how can you possibly tell me that somehow the solution lies in the genes? What really the diseases develop when your gene expression that means your expression of genes is constantly changing, your genes don’t change. So if you’re not looking at gene expression you will never be able to know what is causing a disease, and that’s literally how cancers are formed or everything. It is the microbial gene expression signaling the human genes expressions and they’re literally working in coordination that causes almost every single chronic disease. If you’re not born with a disease you’re not going to get a disease unless you actually trigger it, and these triggers happen with the choices that we make every day. The interesting thing about gene expression is genes are like your thoughts. You can have good thoughts or you can have bad thoughts, and as long as you don’t express any bad thoughts there is no crime that happens. In the same way—you can have good genes or bad genes. If your bad genes are not being expressed, then you are in good shape. It is really about the expression of genes. You may or may not know, Viome is the only company in the world that actually measures the gene expression because no one has figured out how to sequence RNA because they all look at DNA, which is genes rather than RNA, which is really where the gene expression comes from. As we go along we’ll tell you a lot more about that. I just want to make one more point. Assume hypothetically that I looked at your gut and I got the gene expression of it. God forbid, let’s assume somehow somewhere our data got stolen. Let’s just assume because anybody who tells you that they have a complete foolish safeguard. We are HIPAA compliant, we have every single security put in place. But let’s assume, God forbid, it does get stolen, then what now? The question you have to ask yourself is since your gene expression is always changing, someone can beat the out of you and you still have a different gene expression so they won’t be able to match it back to you. That means since it’s a dynamic environment we know what is happening right now. And six months later or a year later, it’s going to be completely different. That’s why it is less critical to worry about gene expression than about genes. I hope that makes sense.   [00:12:07] Ashley James: You said some very interesting things in there. Your microbiome gene expression triggers your body’s gene expression. We know the microbiome is incredibly important, but the microbiome is reaching out and sending signals to our body, and our body’s gene expression will change based on our microbiome’s health.   [00:12:29] Naveen Jain: Of course. Think about that, right? I mean 70% of our immune system is along our gut lining. How does our immune system get trained? So it’s literally the signals that microbial—what I would call micro poop, which the technical term is metabolites. The microbiome metabolites. That means the molecules that are produced by the microbiome based on the food they eat they produce certain molecules, and I call them micro poop because they’re literally the poop of these microbiomes. Sometimes these poops are really, really good. They produce short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate. So the butyrate is a microbiome metabolite or microbiome tool. That literally triggers our immune system to calm down, so it’s anti-inflammatory. There are things like that microbiome produce a molecule called LPS, lipopolysaccharide, that literally creates then tells the immune system to start creating more pro-inflammatory compounds because it says, hey look, the bad stuff is here. Start creating the pro-inflammatory stuff so we can kill that stuff right. It’s constantly interacting with the immune system. Just know that our immune system does not have eyes and ears. Our epithelial cells don’t have eyes and ears. It is simply acting on the biochemicals or the chemicals that are being produced by the microbiome. And based on what is being produced, our body changes. For example, most people probably know that 90% of our serotonin is produced in the gut, not in our brain. And serotonin is, as most people know, is the molecule that actually makes you feel good. Serotonin makes you feel good, right? The interesting thing is 90% of it is produced in the gut, and it’s produced by the human epithelial cells. But how do the human cells actually know when to produce it? That is triggered by the gut microbiome. So the microbiome triggers the chemical that actually causes the epithelial cells to produce serotonin. They literally are always interacting with each other and you will find that that’s why without microbiomes, your genes are necessary for you to be born, but you couldn’t live if you didn’t have the microbiome in your body. In fact, the majority of if you look at all the genes that are expressed in our body, 99% of them are expressed by the microbes, which are foreign to our human body. If you look at the human genes, Ashley, less than 22,000 genes that are expressed in the human genes are protein coding genes. When you start to look at the microbes, 39 trillion microbes in our gut, and a trillion in our mouth and all over our body. They are expressing somewhere between 2 million to 20 million genes. And that means at any point of time, we have probably less than 1% of the genes that are expressed in the body are our own, and the rest are all coming from somewhere else. We are literally a container for all these organisms. That’s really—we are beautiful containers for these organisms. I might even argue that these organisms may have actually created us for their own benefit, right? If you are interested I’ll give you my creation story of how I think humans may have been created.   [00:15:55] Ashley James: We definitely have to hear that, especially when you look at it that way. When you look at it from a standpoint like we’re the planter box that the garden lives in. When you realize that that’s six pounds of gut biome sitting in our digestive system is trillions of cells and does 99% of the gene expression of our entire body. And it does things like convert our thyroid. 25% of our T3 is converted there. Our serotonin is made there. Our short-chain fatty acids are made there. So much of our nutrients are digested there. We know that when someone has an unhealthy or a sick microbiome that their entire body becomes sick. There’s a direct relationship. Yes, it’s not us in that we didn’t grow. It’s not like the cells of my eye that I grew or the cells of my finger that I grew, but it is ours to take care of or to neglect. Just like having a pet, we have to take care of the microbiome. We can’t just eat whatever we want. If we eat whatever we want we’re going to get the common diseases. I often say in the show if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. If you don’t want to be a statistic like the number one killer is heart disease. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. One in three people has pre-diabetes or diabetes and are obese. All these diseases are on the rise, even though we spend, as a nation—I’m talking about the United States, but most industrialized nations are similar to us in that we spend the most out of every nation “health care” and yet we come in dead last in things like infant mortality and other chronic illnesses. Your mission is to help build a society where chronic illness is an option. Where someone could choose to not be chronically sick. I love that you also mentioned if you’re not born with a disease, if you didn’t develop a disease in utero, and you weren’t born with a disease, then any disease that comes after birth is optional. Very interesting. I want to talk about those points. Let’s start though by going back to what you said about your creation story because it’s interesting. I’ve had an expert on the mitochondria on the show and he said—and this just blew my mind—that the mitochondria of our cells are a different DNA than the rest of our body. So at one point, we merged with mitochondria and made an agreement that they would be part of us. We really do have foreign living organisms in a beautiful relationship with us. So tell us about your creation story.   [00:19:02] Naveen Jain: I think as you started that, think about it. Microorganisms have been on planet earth for three and a half billion years. The humans are, give or take, a couple of hundred thousand years old. How do you think the human came to be? And this is my tongue-in-cheek story and then I’m going to tell you the scientific basis of all how it actually happens. But this tongue-in-cheek story, once you hear it you can never unhear it. Now imagine this world. Close your eyes and imagine this world. All these microorganisms are living in Africa and then one day they all got together and said we are sick and tired of living in a small space. We want to take over the world, and they all looked at each other. One of the microbes says I have an idea. What is your idea? What if we can create something bipedal and trillions of us could live right inside it? Now, all we have to do is keep this person. We can make it crave any food we want and they’re going to run all over the world, find the food for us. All we have to do is keep this thing healthy. Now we can make it crave anything we want and it’s going to go everywhere, it’s going to poop, everywhere, it’s going to spread us around, and we’re going to just take over the world. They actually created humans and they named it humans. Right after they created humans, they started to wonder, oh my God. What have we just done? As you can possibly imagine, we are so worried about artificial intelligence and we keep wondering what if someday the AI becomes smarter than us, what will happen to us humans? So microbes had exactly the same thought. They all reassemble and say, master, master, what have we done? We created this monster called humans. What if someday it became smarter than us? What will happen to all of us? Master says not to worry for a second. We took care of all those problems. Master, what have you done? Master says, well the first thing we did is right inside their cell we put one of our brothers right inside their cell, and can you believe that they call that mitochondria. It provides all the energy for their cell and we keep in direct communication with us all the time. We are bacterial brothers, we talk to them all the time. At any point in time the humans don’t take good care of us, we tell our mitochondrial brother to shut the energy down and they’re all dead. Master, that is brilliant. However, you’re forgetting something. What son? They are starting to develop this thing called the brain, what are we going to do about that? Master says, that’s the first thing we thought about what do you think we did? We put a direct connection to their brain and can you believe they call that a vagus nerve? They thought they’re going to name it after Las Vegas thinking what happens in the gut is going to stay in the gut. They’re so wrong. What happens in the gut goes everywhere. Now, through that vagus nerve, we control their mood, we control their behavior, we control their thinking, and we control their craving. And guess what, if they want to feel good they better take good care of us because we’re not going to let them produce most of the serotonin. 90% of that we’re going to produce it ourselves. So ladies and gentlemen, we are the ones that actually are the puppets, and our puppet masters are these trillions of organisms that are constantly pulling the strings and telling us what to eat, what to do, how to think, and what happens to us. It’s a tongue-in-cheek story, Ashley, but I can tell you some of the research that came out. Just two weeks ago there was a research that showed that our social behavior, whether we are extrovert or introvert, actually is driven by our microbiome.   [00:22:55] Ashley James: Wow.   [00:22:56] Naveen Jain: Our mood is driven by our microbiome. Our cravings for the food are driven by microbiome so much so they did an experiment on different types of sweeteners, and it turns out that the microbiome releases the signal directly to the brain that releases the dopamine that is specifically designed for the sugar molecule. They want to test the theory is it just a sweetness versus actual preference for the sugar. So they did the artificial sweetener, and the microbiome hated that. They wanted their sugar. So they thought maybe it is because of the amount of calories the sugar has. So they actually created this molecule that had identical to sugar except that it cannot be digested. That means it won’t produce any calories. Guess what, they still have the same preference for the sugar molecule. That means they literally want their sugar, and that’s what happens. When we eat sweet stuff we crave sweet stuff, right? But now interestingly, these organisms that make you crave for that stuff if somehow you can use two weeks of willpower not to eat sugar, guess what happens. You actually don’t even feel like eating anymore because we kill the organisms that are making you crave that stuff. And that’s literally what happens. You and I look at some people and say oh my God, how can you just eat this salad and some people say I love it. I enjoy it. For our microbes it’s like, I don’t want that stuff right. I want my bread. I want my pasta. I want my pizza. Another very interesting thing we noticed, Ashley, was our blood sugar, diabetes, or glycemic response is completely dependent on what is happening in our gut. We actually did a large study that showed that we are able to predict the glucose response for a specific food based on what is going on inside your gut. That means two people can eat the same slice of bread and one person will get six times the glycemic response and the other person get none. Intuitively, we know some people who can eat bread all day and never get fat, and some people like me can smell bread and get fat, right? We all know that happens. That thing is all are driven by our gut. The other interesting thing that we talked about—cancer and heart disease, I’m going to tell you something very interesting we found. In the last 30 days, there were two research papers published—one in cell and one in nature. And they looked at about 20 different types of cancer. What they realized was every single cancer tumor had microbiome inside the tumor, and that microbiome was very specific to each cancer, not only providing the energy to the cancer cells, but also protecting it from the immune system. Remember, the microbes can tune the immune system down, so they were releasing the anti-inflammatory signal to let the cancer actually continue to grow so the immune system doesn’t kill it. Isn’t that amazing that now we are able to simply look at—there is a company that’s looking at it, just looking at the microbiome in the cell and the blood plasma and predict that not only you have cancer but what type of cancer just by simply looking at microbiome. In fact, we applied for FDA now that by looking at the microbiome in our saliva we can predict stage 1 or stage 0, the pre-cancerous cells in your mouth oral cancer with 94% accuracy just by looking at the saliva microbiome. And it is really amazing how oral microbiome is communicating directly with the gut microbiome, is in constant communication. So essentially, are in fact our body. The other thing that’s really very fascinating to me is almost all of the metabolic diseases and you look at some of the neural diseases like depression, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, many of them are obviously directly tied now to the gut microbiome. In fact, they were able to do a fecal transplant and were able to actually transfer the depressed person’s poop into a person that was not depressed, and actually the same phenotype goes across. There was another very interesting research that recently came out. There was a person who had Alzheimer’s, and it turns out the person ended up getting a C. Diff infection. And for the C. Diff infection, they gave you tons of antibiotics, and then they do the fecal transplant. This person, after they got a C. Diff infection, they got a fecal transplant and six months later, this person’s memory came back. So Alzheimer was reversed simply with changing the microbiome. Think for a second. Now what we are learning is just like when our gut microbiome is behaving improperly or what I would say dysbiosis, we get this leaky gut. And these microbes are constantly now going past the epithelial barrier into our blood, and our immune system is constantly inflamed trying to deal with that. The same thing happens when we have leaky gum. Remember, when you have blood, the gums which are inflamed. And now when you brush you’re bleeding because that inflammation now the microbiome from the mouth is now starting to go into the blood causing the same systemic low-grade chronic inflammation. What they found was, at least in a couple of papers, oral microbiome could be a predictor for Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and autism just like the gut. What’s really happening is that when you get the inflammation in your gum, in one of the studies they showed was not only the pathogens move from the mouth to the gut, even the immune cells—the Th17 cells—they actually fluorescence those cells. They saw them move from the mouth all the way to the gut. That means our immune system cells are moving as well when we have inflammation in the mouth. When we don’t have good oral hygiene, not only you are actually causing inflammation in the body, you’re also causing the inflammation in the gut, which also furthers the inflammation in the body.   [00:29:16] Ashley James: There are two things, one is to screen. So you can use the microbiome to screen for cancer, you can use the microbiome if there’s dysbiosis in the mouth, for example, which could be a precursor, like you said, to dementia and other problems. We can screen the microbiome and see what kind of diseases could have been created in the body because of this. So screening or early detection, especially with cancer, is key, but it’s not prevention. Prevention is the best key, it’s the root cause because if we could do a course correction or prevent it from becoming a dysbiosis in the first place, that would be the best thing. So here we have people. Most of our listeners are really excited about getting even healthier. Some have major health issues, and some are fairly healthy but they want to get to the next level. Let’s just assume that all of us, on some level, may not have the perfect microbiome. We all have some form of dysbiosis or Homer Simpson gut. I once heard someone refer to the standard American microbiome as the Homer Simpson of microbiomes because there are so few. It’s like a dumbed-down microbiome, and that makes us crave really bad food for us. We could grow a new microbiome that would make us crave healthy foods instead of bad foods, that would give us our serotonin so we’re happier, that would prevent diseases, that would heal up the gut so we didn’t have leaky gut, and it just cascades into better and better health. Does your testing help us do both screening things but also then teach us what we can do to regrow a healthier microbiome?   [00:31:18] Naveen Jain: The first thing is, I will tell you, we’re not a diagnostic test. We don’t tell you have cancer or you have this particular disease because that will be an FDA-approved diagnostic test. What we do instead is to look at what is going on inside your body. We will look at that blood, stool, and saliva, and based on that we can tell you what your cellular health looks like. That means cellular health consists of many things. In terms of what your oxidative stress looks like, how do your cells behave under stress, what is your cellular senescence looks like, how is your immune system activation, what is causing the immune system to be active. We will give you things like your gut health, your cellular health, your mitochondrial health, your immune system health, your stress response health, and your biological age because in some sense, what is your true inside age rather than what your chronological age is. And under each one of those scores, we give you the sub-scores that if your gut health is this, what is causing you gut health to be this poor? Is it because your LPS is too high? Is it because your butyrate is too low? Or is it your sulfide production is too high? Ammonia production is too high. After looking at all of that we say here are the foods that you should avoid, and for each thing, we tell you why for you specifically. For example, the first time when we launched the thing I did a test. I honestly thought, Ashley, I was eating the healthiest one could. I’m a vegan, to begin with. I’m eating spinach, broccoli, cabbage, and brussels sprout. I wasn’t thinking I am going to be the person they’re going to put a picture of me and say this is what the healthy person looks like. It turns out, my gut was so bad it told me not to eat broccoli and says your sulfide production in your gut is very high and the broccoli contains a very high amount of sulfate. You should lay off the broccoli because the sulfide is causing a lot of inflammation in your gut. My second thing was not to eat spinach because it sees your oxalate pathway for your gut microbiome, which is very poor that means you eat spinach that is very high in oxalic acid, it is not going to be digested properly. All the protein that lentils and legumes I was eating says it’s producing a lot of protein fermentation and producing ammonia that was causing issues because I was eating so much of this. That means they were not being digested, instead were going to the colon where they were being fermented and microbes were releasing ammonia. It told me to take a digestive enzyme along with my food to be able to digest that protein so it does not get fermented in the gut.  Literally, for every food it says here’s what’s going on, here are the food you should avoid, and why. Here are my superfoods and for each one it tells you why. And then it says here are the supplements that you need to keep your body currently correct. Because a lot of the things that your body is not currently producing that your body needs, so in the short term you should take these supplements until we can get your microbes to start producing that. Take butyrate so you can at least heal your gut lining while we get the short-chain fatty acids to get going. Literally, that is what the test does. What is interesting is come now three years later, having followed this, my biological age now, I am in my 40s even though my chronological age is at 61. I’m in my 40s as a biological age just because I’m able to heal my gut and get my immune system health, mitochondrial health, and my cellular health to be this good.   [00:35:19] Ashley James: You’re in your 60s?   [00:35:20] Naveen Jain: Yeah, 61.   [00:35:22] Ashley James: You really do look like your early 40s.   [00:35:26] Naveen Jain: Yeah, so there you have it. My biological age is still I’m 40.   [00:35:29] Ashley James: I mean some of us would just do your test because we’re vain and we want to look 20 years younger.   [00:35:36] Naveen Jain: Ashley, I’m going to tell you something very interesting here. Now we looked at biological age and something really fascinating data that now that we’ve analyzed over a quarter-million people now. It’s a lot of people we have analyzed, and here is the thing that really surprised us. The number one offender of your biological age, that means what makes you really, really old is—now I’m going to say it and I’m going to probably get a lot of hate mail for that—the keto diet. The ketogenic diet makes people really thin and lose weight in the short term, but technically it completely their body.   [00:36:17] Ashley James: I can believe it. I had several keto doctors on and it sounded really interesting. My husband and I ended up doing the ketogenic diet with a naturopathic physician where we came in weekly. We did it for three months and we were very strict on it. I’ve done it about three times in my life, but this was a very strong stint of being in constant ketosis for three months with this naturopath. At the end of it, I had developed such bad liver problems that my liver was distended. You could see my liver was sticking out of my gut. It was very inflamed and painful. I went for an ultrasound and they said it wasn’t cirrhosis, it wasn’t fatty liver, it was just inflamed liver. My liver was so bad. All of my liver enzymes were through the roof. Basically, my liver was very damaged. But what was worse was my husband developed incredibly high blood pressure like worrying about an aneurysm kind of blood pressure. Very scary high blood pressure in those three months. We went for further testing and he found out that he had such bad kidney damage from the ketogenic diet that it took him over a year of eating a whole food plant-based diet and supplementing to heal his kidneys. He had been put on several medications in the interim. We’re working with a really great naturopath here. It’s a naturopathic physician who’s a cardiologist. He specializes in heart and getting people so healthy they no longer need high blood pressure medication. Working with him, it took my husband over a year to heal his kidneys and get his blood pressure back down from that event and get off of all the medications. It wasn’t worth it. What I do love—   [00:38:08] Naveen Jain: My point is you and I are both going to probably get canceled.   [00:38:13] Ashley James: I’m sorry.   [00:38:14] Naveen Jain: We are both going to be canceled. In a cancel culture, people are going to just think we are the two nut people trying to bad mouth keto diet because there are so many fans of the keto diet.   [00:38:24] Ashley James: You know what, my experience with my listeners is they’re very open to learning about and hearing it. I hope they’re not going to just cancel out what we said because they love the keto diet, and I get it. I get it. I was a raving fan of the ketogenic diet. I looked in all the research, followed the doctors, and I really, really loved it until my husband and I had those experiences. Then I turned around went wait a second, I was really ignoring all of the signs that it was deteriorating my health and it’s a very acidic diet. It’s very bad for the gut. It’s a way to manipulate the survival mechanism in the body, but is that really health? Is that really going to be long-term health? I have a few friends that are really heavily into keto, and they have been for a few years. I’m afraid for them in the long term. So you’re seeing though that when they analyze cellular age that it is the one diet that ages people the quickest?   [00:39:32] Naveen Jain: Yeah. Remember, the aging is fundamentally the aggregation of all the damage that we are doing to our body, right? To some extent, the keto diet was one of those biggest offenders followed by the paleo diet, by the way. It’s really all these fad diets that we fall into maybe the short term may work for some people, not for others, but they really damage our bodies. To me, it is all about the right balance. You have to eat a balanced food. You can’t say carbs are bad. Carbs are not bad. Carbs are needed for your body. The point really is there is no such thing as a universal healthy diet. A diet that’s good for one person may not be good for another person. Or even the foods that are good for you today may not be good for you six months from now because remember, when you change your food habits your gut microbial ecosystem completely changes, and then you have to readjust. It’s a constant tuning of your body. Just like you have to tune your car once a year, you got to tune your body every couple of times a year to keep this body into a perfectly working machine. If you want a great working machine you got to keep it tuned. And that’s what the gut microbes do is adjusting your diet so you can keep tuning your gut microbiome to stay in homeostasis. Another thing, Ashley, I found the concept of this good microbiome and bad microbiome. I think that is being just one of those misnomers just like good genes and bad genes. These microbes actually all work together as one big ecosystem. Think of your gut microbes as a rainforest. That means every step you take in the rainforest can be completely different from each other, yet everything can be lush and green. That means no two people have the same gut microbiome. Both can be extremely healthy. In a sense, it is not about what organisms are there in each person’s gut. That is the second part that when you talk about health, and this has been a big, big misnomer in the field of microbiome. That’s the reason why science has never advanced. Our focus has always been in genes—microbiome genes, and the human genes—the DNA. What that meant was the focus on microbiome was to tell me who is there. I want to know the names of every organism that is there. Somehow thinking that will allow us to find out why people are sick. The biggest breakthrough for us at Viome was we say that can’t possibly be the problem because I’m being naïve. I thought the microorganisms are probably like human beings. That means there are two people who could have completely different microorganisms producing exactly the same thing that may be causing a disease. Or the same organisms could be producing completely different things in two people’s gut based on the environment and the ecosystem it finds itself in, right? Because remember, you and I both know—like human beings—depending on which company we are in, our behavior changes, what we do completely changes. Me at work—an entrepreneur, me at home—a dishwasher. What changed? Not me. The environment, right? And it’s very interesting that you look at Akkermansia, which generally most people consider to be good bacteria. Akkermansia can be very good when it is actually taking the fiber and producing butyrate or short-chain fatty acid for us. And Akkermansia can be extremely pathogenic and is known to cause many of the diseases including cancer when it actually turns into virulent and pathogenic. It is not about the organism itself, it is the environment. When you find an organism under attack—so let’s assume there are a lot of other pathogens or something that actually the organisms find to be inhospitable. The organisms start to release inflammatory compounds and antibiotics to kill other organisms so it can protect itself. Now the same organism that was producing short-term fatty acid is now producing toxins trying to kill everything else, in turn harming the body that it’s inside. The point I’m trying to make is this fundamental change that we did at Viome was we focused on what these organisms are producing. That means what biochemicals are being produced rather than who they are because our body can’t see the bacteroidetes. My body cannot see the fusobacteria. My body cannot see Akkermansia muciniphila. It only can see the chemical signals that are being produced, and it doesn’t care why. It only cares about what is being produced. Our job now is to look at this ecosystem and say what biochemicals are being produced? How do we change the input? Like a computer, if food is the information, when you give it a new set of information, now the process comes up with a totally different output. So when input changes, your output changes.  But in this case, it is a self-modifying operating system in a sense that when you change your food, the organisms that can thrive on that food start to grow, and other organisms that can’t digest those foods start to wane. And now your ecosystem changes, that means now you have to start changing your diet again so that you can start to create a balance. Otherwise, when you keep eating the same food, the certain organisms that are really, really good at metabolizing that food they become in so much quantity then they start to behave poorly and they start to form the biofilm and they start to misbehave. It’s literally about getting the right balance between all of these different organisms to actually produce more and more nutrients for us.   [00:45:52] Ashley James: I love it.   [00:45:53] Naveen Jain: Makes sense?   [00:45:54] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. So the trillions of cells in our gut doesn’t matter what they are. There’s a variety. It’s like a rainforest. It’s more about what they’re producing. Don’t think of it like it’s a bad microbiome or good microbiome, it’s what’s being produced. What if someone has candida, for example? What if someone, in the past, we’ve called that a bad microbiome. The candida—the concern though is the byproducts it’s producing are toxic for the body, right?   [00:46:24] Naveen Jain: The interesting thing is, again, every organism—for example, one of the worst offenders is C. Diff, right? I mean everybody knows about C. Diff. Obviously, once you get a C. Diff infection then literally there’s not much you can do. You take as much antibiotics as you can and your only survival for people I’ve seen is FMT after that—fecal transplant. It’s very interesting almost every one of us has C. Diff. It is when it becomes out of control that means other organisms, which are good organisms, don’t keep it in balance, then it goes out of proportion. Remember, we need some of these—what I would say—pathogenic people to constantly keep our immune system primed. Immune system is very interesting. When it is very, very low activity that means not prime and suddenly you get an infection, your immune system is really not ready for it. The immune system can’t be too inflamed—it’s really bad, or it’d be too low where it’s actually not ready for attack. The best way to do that is to have your immune system ready, but not be at high, high inflammation. That means at high activation where it’s dealing with so much inflammation. And that means a little bit of these pathogenic activities actually keep your immune system primed for you to be actually capable of dealing with when there is a pathogen out there. In fact, when you look at our immune system health, when you have low immune system activation it is bad, and when you have high immune system activation is bad. And if you want to protect yourself from flu, cold, or for example COVID, the best thing you really need to do is to be right in the middle when it is in the best adult prime hood to go take on the enemy.   [00:48:11] Ashley James: Fascinating. Here we have a vast microbiome, and we want to support the body in having a diverse microbiome. Because what you’ve described as being optimal for the immune system. With your test, it’s testing for the byproducts of the microbiome. Then we can see what’s out of balance because it’s not so much, like you said, about what bacteria you have, which ones. The body doesn’t see that, but the body is affected by their poop and is affected by their byproducts. And some of their byproducts can be incredibly healing for the body, so we want to continue to feed those and give them the nutrients for them to thrive like the short-chain fatty acids are—   [00:49:08] Naveen Jain: Are good.   [00:49:10] Ashley James: Sorry.   [00:49:10] Naveen Jain: They’re very good. The SCFAs they’re very good, but they need fiber.   [00:49:15] Ashley James: Right, and they need fiber. You want to be eating the potatoes, for example, instead of the white bread. You want to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables, but the problem is then we have these other microbiome that might be over-producing something that is harmful. So your test will say okay, this substance is too high in your gut so you want to limit these foods. Does your test also tell us what we should eat more of or continue to eat to support and grow a more diverse and healthy microbiome?   [00:49:51] Naveen Jain: Yeah. We give you a superfoods. Here are your top 20 or 25 foods you should eat as much as you can. Here are your foods of another 500 foods that you should enjoy as much as you can, here are the foods you should minimize, and here are the foods you should avoid. You lift all those four categories. And the one thing we are doing next, Ashley, which we have not announced yet but I’m going to tell you since you asked. We always found that getting these supplements, which are an augmentation to the food, how do we only give people what they need rather than giving as much as you can get? What we found is any time you give your body something it doesn’t need, it actually has to work hard to get rid of it and that means it only causes damage to your body. We thought what if you can actually create supplements made to order for each individual, one capsule at a time. That means if I looked at your body and say here are the 60 things you need, here are the herbs you need, the food extracts, minerals, vitamins, enzymes, amino acids, prebiotics, and probiotics. If you only need 22 milligrams of lycopene, there is no way to find it. What if we create these things for each individual made to order? We’re going to be launching that next month. We’re launching that in August, basically making make to order after we do the test and say you need 22 milligrams of lycopene, 11 milligrams of elderberry, 2 milligrams of chicory root, and we need these 60 ingredients. We’ll literally take those exactly in that dosage for you and put them in these eight capsules in a sachet, make them for you only that time. And then when we do the retest, you can see all your health markers, what they were after you took all the changes, what they changed to, and then we reformulate again as we do the new results. Literally, constantly reformulating and giving you a new recommendation as your body is changing and adapting. Imagine every four months, you get a completely new set of food recommendations, a new set of supplements that you need, and they’re all sent to you every single month and made just for you.   [00:52:18] Ashley James: Fascinating. So you recommend that someone would take this test every four months because they want to continue to adjust their diet? Obviously, diet is key, but then they can also have supplements made to order for their specific gut health and their body health.   [00:52:35] Naveen Jain: We also take all your superfoods that you need and we actually extract their stuff and put them in these supplements. For example, we know you may need fisetin that is in strawberries. But the problem is, first of all, you have to eat five pounds of strawberries to get enough fisetin. And the second problem is it also contains a lot of histamine producing products in the strawberry. In fact, we will see strawberry is avoid for you but the strawberry extract actually could be in the supplement. People say wait a second, how can the strawberry extract may be in my supplement when you’re asking me to avoid strawberry? And the answer is we literally just took out the fisetin from the strawberry, we gave them as a supplement, and we took out all the other histamine producing stuff that is going to cause you problems. It is quite possible the food maybe avoid, but the underlying ingredients can actually be in the supplement that you need. That makes sense to you?   [00:53:35] Ashley James: Absolutely. When you went back and you took the test and it told you should take a digestive enzyme because you’ve been fermenting your food instead of digesting it. You should avoid these foods but eat more of these foods. Even though you eat a whole food plant-based diet, you eat a very, very healthy wholesome diet, you made these slight changes, which don’t seem bad. Cut out this vegetable, include this vegetable, and take an enzyme. That’s almost no effort at all to do. What health changes did you see in your body take place after doing that?   [00:54:10] Naveen Jain: Another interesting thing that you’ll find fascinating. My wife had completely different. Everything that was my superfood was her avoid, and my avoid for her superfood. And it became a challenge. We’ve all been told to eat together in the same dinner. It became a challenge for us to start following those diets. We ended up really making two things—one that was good for her, and one that was good for me. We started adjusting smoothies because for even right now, coconut water is her avoid and coconut water is my superfood. Guess what we do. We make the smoothie and I put the coconut water after. What I’m trying to say is she is healthy, she works out every day. She tells me, “Why do I need to do anything? I am just so healthy already.” When she did that test and followed the diet—the husbands are always or your spouse is probably the dumbest person you ever know because they think what do they know? They’re not a doctor. How can their company be telling me do this. He’s not a doctor, what does he know? I said, “Look, why don’t you do the test and follow it for three months and you’ll find out for yourself.” She does the test and she says, “You know it’s amazing. I used to always feel tired in the afternoon. I just needed a 15 minutes nap, and I just thought it is something that is needed. Now, I just don’t feel tired all day. I just never take a nap.” It’s like wow. She tells me quietly, “You know all my baby fat is gone.” I didn’t know how to respond to it. All I could say was, “What baby fat? I never saw it.”   [00:55:52] Ashley James: Good husband.   [00:55:58] Naveen Jain: The point I’m trying to make is for me, I don’t need more energy, but God, after I change my diet I feel so good. I jump out of the bed at 4:00 AM in the morning jumping with joy, wanting to do things, and I can work 17, 18 hour days and I work 7 days a week and never feel tired.   [00:56:18] Ashley James: I love it. Both of you—even though you were healthy to begin with—saw total improvements in your health in a few months just by making sure your diet was going to be optimal for what your gut biome produces. It’s so cool to think about how we can just cut out one food, include another, and all of a sudden our microbiome is producing better chemicals for our body. And then our whole body responds on every level. Energy, weight loss, mental clarity, and even hormone function.   [00:57:01] Naveen Jain: Everything.   [00:57:02] Ashley James: You have two tests. At viome.com you offer the Gut Intelligence service. I’m really surprised by your prices, to be honest, because I paid over $200—it was close to $300—to have my food allergy testing done. And I thought your services would be like $1000. The Gut Intelligence service is cheaper than what it cost for me to get my food allergy testing done. I’m thinking that if I followed your system in terms of the food recommendations, I’d have far better outcomes than following the IgG food intolerance test. You’ve got this Gut Intelligence service, and then you have another one, which is the Health Intelligence service that includes the Gut Intelligence service. Can you tell us about each one and why we should choose one or the other, or should we all just choose the Health Intelligence service because it includes so much more?   [00:58:11] Naveen Jain: Yeah. Obviously, one thing is the price. Look, if you can’t afford the Health Intelligence service, then you use the Gut Intelligence service. And again, the Health Intelligence service looks at your body, which is human gene expression, mitochondrial gene expression. That means we’re now looking at your cellular health, we’re looking at your immune system health, we’re looking at your mitochondrial health, we’re looking at your stress response, and we’re looking at your biological age. All that stuff also goes into our recommendations. If you’re not doing that test, then you still get very, very good recommendations, but only based on what’s happening in your gut microbiome. Gut Intelligence test only looks at the gut microbiome. Health Intelligence looks at the gut microbiome and all the stuff that’s happening in the human body from the blood test. It is essentially an at-home test. When you order, it comes in—by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the test or not—a beautiful kit. It’s literally like a Louis Vuitton silver metallic box. But the interesting thing is because we didn’t want people to feel it’s some type of a product that looks like a medical product because we want to make it very easy for people to use. The way it is done is so easy at home. Even for blood, you don’t have to go somewhere to draw the blood. It is literally you finger prick it, four drops of blood. There is a small pipette, you put the pipette next to it, it draws a full drop of blood, you put in the test tube, prepaid envelope, a touch of stool—prepaid envelope, and you’re done. Literally done. Ten days, two weeks later, in the app, it tells you everything that we saw, so all the insights into your body. And it tells you here are your superfoods, here are your foods to avoid. For everyone it tells you why, so here are your superfoods and why, here are your foods to avoid and why, here are your foods to enjoy, here are your foods to minimize.  And the supplements that you can made to order for yourself, or you can just go buy them from Amazon. But in that case, you’re getting a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t need and paying 10 times more for the stuff that you don’t need. That means you could be spending $500, $600 a month getting these supplements, and most of the stuff you don’t need versus we just only put the stuff that you need and give it to you on a monthly price, which is substantially cheaper than what you would buy.   [01:00:36] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [01:00:38] Naveen Jain: Another interesting part that you mentioned was the food sensitivity test. I just want to say it because I think most people don’t realize. The food sensitivity is actually about IgG, which is the immune system antibodies for this food. Why would a food ever create a goal into the blood for your immune system to create antibodies? Think for a second.   [01:01:02] Ashley James: Because you have a leaky gut. You got a leaky gut and the food is getting in there. You eat some carrot, a tiny piece of carrot gets in. For me it’s bananas. I’m just so depressed about this. I loved bananas, and now my body just wretches and has such a negative reaction to bananas out of nowhere, but it’s leaky gut. So I ate some banana, I had a leaky gut, the little particles of banana got into the bloodstream, my immune system attacked it because it’s a foreign body—it’s not supposed to be in the immune system. Anything injected into the bloodstream that the body didn’t create as a foreign body that the immune system is going to mount a response against, and it’s not supposed to be there. If I were to eat a banana, my immune system would mount a huge response and my gut totally hates it.   [01:01:56] Naveen Jain: But here’s a very interesting thing. There are two points to make. One was if you have a leaky gut, you’re going to get the antibodies for almost every food that you eat a lot of because a little bit of it’s always going to end up in the blood. Literally, the IgG tells you that you have a leaky gut because if you are allergic to all these foods, all that means is you have a leaky gut. Not that you really are sensitive to those foods, it is what they show. If you fix the leaky gut because these antibodies go away in six months or nine months, then you would be able to eat the food. More often than not, most of the IgGs goes away. In a sense, if you can now fix the leaky gut and you can tighten the epithelial barrier, then many of those IgG just disappear. So my point I’m trying to make is that the food sensitivity test is the wrong, wrong word. You’re not sensitive to those foods, you simply have a leaky gut. The point is, food should never be in the blood to begin with and there should not be an antibody. You’re not sensitive to those foods. You made them sensitive by eating the foods when you had a leaky gut. That’s all happened.   [01:03:09] Ashley James: Following the advice after doing your test would allow us to seal up the gut and heal it so we no longer have a leaky gut?   [01:03:19] Naveen Jain: That is correct. One of the scores that we give you is actually the intestinal barrier health. That means how tightly your intestinal barrier is actually regulated. You want to keep it nice and tight, and we give you all the foods and supplements to make sure that the only reason it gets permeable or leaky is because of the inflammation. As you can see, inflammation stretches the thing and that causes it to get the junctions to get loose. The best thing you can do is to reduce the stuff that causes inflammation, increase the stuff that is anti-inflammatory, and get more foods that are going to give the nutrients that your body needs. Remember, there is no such thing that more of the good thing is better. That is another thing that most people actually make mistakes on. For example, somehow you probably heard that you take NAD, and NAD is really good for longevity. It increases your mitochondrial biogenesis, it’s going to make you younger, and you’re going to live longer. And it turns out, there was the research that came out, I think, two months ago that shows that actually the NAD precursor, NMN, and NMNH, when you have high inflammation or high cellular senescence, it causes the cytokine storm and causes the inflammation to get even worse. The point is when you have higher mitochondrial biogenesis, you are actually now creating more free radicals. And if your free radicals were already being over-stressed because they were not getting cleaned up, now you even have high amount of free radicals that are going to cause more inflammation in your body, and higher cellular stress.   [01:05:10] Ashley James: So it just cascades? It’s like a domino effect. People are often just eating whatever they want. You go to a restaurant, you go to a friend’s house, or your spouse cooks, you cook. You cook something that your kids like to eat. We just throw anything into our mouth, just whatever. Just order Thai food. Let’s just eat that. There’s a ton of ingredients in there that might be triggering to your microbiome. Okay, now we’re going to order pizza tonight. Okay, now we’re going to go to McDonald’s drive-thru, or we’re going to go to Starbucks. It’s interesting, though, I got to tell you. My husband switched from Starbucks to a different kind of coffee at one point in his life and he noticed a huge health change. He looked into it and he saw that there’s stuff in Starbucks. There are ingredients they put in their coffee and that will disrupt your health. And if someone were to just switch to a cleaner organic coffee, many people have noticed emotional health changes, as well as physical changes. Let’s say you wanted to have a pizza, there’s a difference between something you make at home, from scratch, with your own ingredients and you know exactly what’s on it versus the delivery pizza. If we make pizza, we have a cauliflower crust. I make my own sauce on it. We don’t have any cheese, we put some vegetables on it, and we can make something really healthy. But when we do, which a lot of people are doing right now, ordering out at restaurants, we’re throwing just random stuff out of our microbiome to handle. Actually, one of my clients recently said my poop is fine. My poop is fine. I’m good, my poop is fine. I thought that was just the weirdest response. I don’t need to change my diet, my poop is fine. I get enough fiber. I’m fine, I poop. It’s okay. And I just thought that’s so interesting that someone thinks they have a healthy gut just because they poop.   [01:07:08] Naveen Jain: A couple of interesting points you brought up, Ashley. Same thing on supplements. Oh, I heard my friend tell me that the elderberry is really, really good for me not to catch COVID. And I should be taking vitamin C, vitamin D, and I should take this. They have no idea what that thing is doing to your body. You just hear it, you read about it in some magazine you say, oh, I need the green coffee extract because it will help me lose weight. Really? My point is all these things, you get every single magazine—here are the 10 supplements you should buy, here are the 10 ingredients that are a superfood, and you’re always looking for what is it that you need. You keep popping more and more and in the morning you take 20 pills just to make sure you got everything that everybody has mentioned to you and end up harming yourself rather than actually helping yourself. That is really the trick is to know what exactly your body needs and how much, rather than just thinking somebody recommended so I’m going to take it. I think it’s not just the food but also, as you mentioned, how you prepare it and where you buy it. Let’s assume tomatoes are good for you. If not, you can now buy some tomatoes which obviously have all kinds of pesticides in them. You may still want to get good organic tomatoes. How you cook the food, the tomatoes are more beneficial when they are cooked rather than when they are raw. We eat pizza just like you do. We sometimes make a whole wheat at home pizza, no cheese on it, and we put so many different colors of vegetables on it. We make our own tomato sauce, and then we actually now cook the tomato sauce with basils and stuff and herbs and oregano. We literally make our own pizza that I think is pretty healthy. It’s not the pizza is bad, it is the ingredients on the pizza and everything else you put on top of that and the crust itself that may be the one that’s causing problems.   [01:09:07] Ashley James: Exactly. Now I’d love to know a little bit more about your company and Viome. Tell us about the history of your of Viome as a company. Because I know that you have a mission and that you see a future where biome is helping the world to make chronic disease an option. They get this testing and then they go okay, I can choose this path and go down this road of disease, or I can choose this path and go down this road of health. We’re not forcing it upon anyone, but it is giving people information and giving them the ability to make better-educated choices about everything they put into their mouth because they’ll know. They’ll have the science to know what is the optimal thing that they could eat and put in their mouth or drink at every moment of the day to maximize their longevity and their health. Viome I know has this mission. You’re seeing where you’re going in the future. First, tell me about your past. How did Viome get started? How long have you guys been doing this? What kind of doctors and scientists are behind it?   [01:10:29] Naveen Jain: The technology for Viome came from Los Alamos National Lab, which had designed this for the biodefense work. And this is the only technology that’s available to be able to actually measure the gene expression. Preserve your RNA, measure your gene expression, and find out what molecules from the gene expression are being produced. And then we use the AI to be able to see if this is what’s happening in the body. Here are the bioactive compounds in this food. How your gut, which is really a chemical factory, is going to turn a food chemical into what will be the output. It’s a complex chemical factory, but once you know what are the bioactive compound in a food, then you can see what they’re going to translate them into, what is the poop of the chemical factory that’s going to come out, and is that going to be good for you or bad for you? We started this company four years ago. And anytime I start a company, Ashley, I ask myself three questions. One is why this, why now, and why me? The first question is, God forbid, I am actually successful in doing what I’m about to be doing, is it going to be able to help a billion people live a better life. And if the answer to that is no, then I’m thinking why would I dedicate 10 years of my life to doing something that does not move the needle. And the reason for that is whether you do something small or you do something big, it takes every ounce of energy and it takes every effort to do something. Why not do something that is meaningful and that’s going to literally improve the lives of as many people as you can? And the second part of that thing is are you truly obsessed about solving this problem? I didn’t use the word passion because a lot of people talk about I’m passionate about this. Me, in my world, passion is for losers. Passion is for hobbies. Passion is I am passionate about meteorites. That’s a passion. That’s not an obsession. Obsession is I go to sleep thinking about how do I solve the problem of chronic diseases? I jump out of the bed at 4:00 AM thinking about how do I go solve this problem? And part of this obsession comes from having lost my own dad to pancreatic cancer and watching him go through the system that could have easily, not only prevented cancer, could have also cured cancer, but they would not go beyond what is the current practice. I showed them all the research how pancreatic cancer is caused by the gut microbiome going through the bile depth into the pancreas. Showed in the research how the researcher, in fact, injected the antibiotics directly into the pancreas, killed the microbiome, and the immune system killed cancer. Showed them research. I said all I want you to do is just put antibiotics in his pancreas and I would take the responsibility. My dad will sign the thing, I’m going to sign the thing, and you are not responsible. They say we will not do it because that’s not what’s allowed. No, I could not do anything. Nothing I could do and watch him die. And I told my dad, I said, “Dad, look. I can’t save your life but I’m going to dedicate my life to making sure no one else has to suffer. No one has to suffer from cancer. No one has to suffer from diabetes, obesity, heart disease, or watch someone lose memory from Alzheimer’s or have Parkinson’s. I just don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”  So that’s my obsession. Part of it is you have to believe that what has changed in the last five years that allows you to do this now than 10 years ago. The reason is if something could have been done 20 years ago and if nobody’s doing it, you have to assume you’re not the smartest guy in the world. Somebody would have solved this problem. So there has to be what has changed? To digitize the human body, the cost of sequencing has to come down. When we started, the cost of sequencing would have been several thousand dollars. We said look, it is an exponential curve. I know in the next couple of years it is going to come down. We were able to use robotics and break it down, and we said let’s go do that. The second part of it was: are computers going to be powerful enough to be able to analyze these petabytes of data that’s going to come out of, which is the cost of competing going to kill us? And the answer was you can fire up a thousand cores on Amazon Web Service and you’ll survive, and the cost of processing is coming down to zero. AI has to be powerful enough to analyze this massive data because every single person—you’re now looking at you know tens of thousands of these gene expressions and you have to analyze for every single thing. That’s massive AI. Is it powerful enough? The answer was yes, it is happening now. The last part is the most, I would say, interesting part for me, entrepreneurial perspective, called why me? Why me is what is it that I believe that other people are not thinking about? What question that I am asking that is different from what everyone else is asking? And that’s why they are solving the wrong problem, they are working on a different problem, or they are not going to be solving the problem—their question is completely wrong. And let me give you a couple of examples of that, what I mean by asking the right question. My other company is Moon Express. We are trying to make humanity a multi-planetary society. Can we settle down on the moon? And then essentially take that humanity into Mars, Pluto, and beyond. And the reason for that is all eight billion of us are living on a single spacecraft. And God forbid, if we get hit by a large asteroid, humanity is going to get completely wiped out. It’s not the planet won’t survive. The planet will do just fine. Remember 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the planet? All the dinosaurs completely got wiped out, and dinosaurs were much larger than us. The planet actually did just fine. The planet did so fine that it created humans. Now we may get wiped out and it may create superhumans for all we know. But the point is if you can hear any dinosaur rolling in their grave what would they be saying? If they had one good entrepreneurial dinosaur they’ll be roaming on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. So I thought, what if we can do that? Now, what do you think the first question people ask when we say hey, we can live on the moon. They say how are you going to grow the food on the Moon? And my thinking was wait a second, that’s the wrong question. Instead of asking how to grow the food on the Moon, what if we ask a different question. Why do we eat food? Because if you ask the question of how to grow the food, the only solution is to grow the food. But if you ask a slightly different question, which is why do we eat food? Now there are many solutions. You eat food for energy, and you eat for nutrition. What if you can get energy from radiation? What if you get energy from photosynthesis? What kind of nutrition do you need? Hydrogen, oxygen. What if you can get that from water? But the point is, just by changing the question, now you have a plethora of possibilities rather than just growing the food. The same thing happened in the space of Viome. Look, all the research is clearly showing the gut microbiome is key to chronic diseases. There are tens of companies doing microbiome as service. Why is the problem not getting solved? And it turns out that everyone was asking the same question. I want to know what organisms are in our gut. And I say what if the question is different, which is what they are producing? And if we can solve that problem, then we will be able to solve the chronic diseases. And that’s the reason I started Viome. By the way, we hired the head of IBM Watson who worked on the AI, and he runs our AI. We hired the best genetic expression people out of human longevity, Craig Venter’s team. Craig Venter, as you know, is the guy who sequenced the human genome. And then the guy who developed the technology for Los Alamos, Dr. Momo Vuyisich. We actually hired him to go develop this technology for us. So we got the best and the brightest from around the world to solve the problem that we wanted to solve. Another interesting point, Ashley, is if you set out to solve a problem like how to make chronic diseases optional, you get the best and the brightest because they want this to be their legacy. Smartest people want to work on the toughest problems, right? And that’s why it’s easier to solve an audacious problem than to solve a smaller problem. So that’s really the history. In four years, as we have come along, we have helped hundreds of thousands of people. If you just literally look at the emails I get every month about the number of people telling me that you saved my life, you saved my wife. I thought I was going to die and now I can walk. It’s just an unbelievable amount of comfort you get that your hard work is not being wasted. You’re doing something that actually improves people’s lives. Really, my goal is to provide actionable information to people that they can act on rather than simply do things and give you information that is not actionable. My DNA test, I’m six times more likely to get Alzheimer’s, enjoy. What am I going to do with that?   [01:20:13] Ashley James: That’s true. You go get those DNA tests and they just say here’s what you could have. Angelina Jolie has her breasts removed because she has the BRCA gene. Well, the BRCA gene doesn’t mean you’re going to have breast cancer. And in fact, when the BRCA gene expresses in a healthy way it prevents breast cancer. She was worried about the BRCA gene expressing in an unhealthy way that would create breast cancer, and then what, she continues eating McDonald’s, continues eating whatever she wants and disrupts a bad microbiome. Cancer can show up anywhere. It doesn’t have to show up in the breast. She could get a different kind of cancer. What is she going to do, remove everything? Cut out all her organs? This just infuriates me that women are being told, and I’ve had clients where the women were told to have full hysterectomies and their ovaries removed because their sister had ovarian cancer, or their sister had some form of cancer that was triggered by hormones. Because it’s in their family and their genes, all the women in their family should have their ovaries removed. This is ridiculous. This isn’t preventive medicine. To remove organs to prevent cancers is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous.   [01:21:42] Naveen Jain: And more than, these genes would not have actually evolved through the selection if they were always bad for you. Think about that. They would have been wiped out from the human population if they were bad for you, right? The same thing by the way for Alzheimer’s is called APOE6. APOE6, it turns out in the Amazonian forest they have 8 or 10 copies of them and they never developed Alzheimer’s. In fact, it turns out it is supposed to protect you against all types of bacterial infection because they have so much mosquito-borne diseases it protects them from all those diseases that’s why they have these many copies of things. Elephants have eight times more the same APOE6 gene and elephants never get Alzheimer’s, right?   [01:22:27] Ashley James: And an elephant never forgets.   [01:22:30] Naveen Jain: And never forgets. There you have it. My point is, these GWAS studies are so bogus. In fact, it turns out, when you look at these GWAS, which is Genomic-Wide Association Study, they did 20 studies on depression. They basically will take 200 people who are depressed and say oh, look at what we found in common. The 20 separate research were published all differently. One guy decided that he’s going to do a matter research of look at all these 20 research and see what is in common. And he concluded there is not a single gene that is actually in common between these 20 research that causes depression. It is nothing but measuring the noise because any time you can find a pattern in the noise when you have these millions of these genes, you’re going to find something out there that’s common between these 200 people and you publish a paper. It doesn’t mean that it’s actually causing the disease.   [01:23:26] Ashley James: Like they all ate apples.   [01:23:28] Naveen Jain: Yeah.   [01:23:29] Ashley James: Right. It must be apples because they all ate an apple on a Tuesday. It’s not about the gene is what you’re saying. It’s about the genus expression, and that’s epigenetics. Because we epigenetically can turn gene expression on and off depending on the nutrients that are available. So people can express in a way that develops a disease. And you give the body new nutrients, different nutrients, and the body then expresses in a healthy way that suppresses that disease. So it all comes back to the food. But you take it one step deeper and go back to the microbiome, so it all comes back to what we’re feeding the microbiome because the microbiome is feeding us these chemicals. And we have to optimize the chemicals the microbiome is feeding us in order to optimize our own health. I’m very excited.   [01:24:29] Naveen Jain: Agreed. That’s literally what it does. And I really hope that your audience gets to go try this because I’ll tell you that it will change their life. It will fundamentally. Small changes will have a massive impact on their own, and they can feel it. Not only will it improve their health from the inside out. They will be able to feel it. They will feel younger, they will look better, they’ll have more energy, the mental fog, and all the stuff. And hopefully, prevent all these chronic diseases from happening. Every single person who joins also essentially helps everyone else before them and after them so that we can together understand what is causing these diseases and prevent it from future generations. Even if we don’t do it for ourselves, let’s do it for our children and grandchildren.   [01:25:21] Ashley James: Absolutely. As we’ve been sitting here I’m thinking, well, I’m definitely going to do the Health Intelligence service, which you give listeners a discount. So please listeners, you can go to viome.com and use the coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. Use the coupon code LTH for your discount. I’m going to get the Health Intelligence service, but I’m also going to get it for my husband because like you said and I just know this, he and I react differently to different foods. I’ll feed him at dinner and all of a sudden his gut looks like he’s nine months pregnant. Because he’s fermenting. Whereas I eat that dinner and my gut’s great. I’m like oh, that felt wonderful. But for him, it made him bloated. And then there’s another meal I’ll make and I get bloated and he doesn’t. We definitely have two different microbiomes going on that we need to help. But what about my son? My son’s five years old and we have a lot of listeners with children. Can children do this as well?   [01:26:20] Naveen Jain: Yes. Yes, they can but the parents have to consent to it.   [01:26:26] Ashley James: Of course. Well, yeah because we’d be the one pricking the finger for the blood and collecting the stool sample. That’s right. So walk us through. Is it saliva, stool sample, and a little prick of blood that we can all do it in the comfort of our own home?   [01:26:42] Naveen Jain: Yeah. Currently, the Health Intelligence only has blood and stool. We are launching the next product, which is going to be the whole body intelligence that will also include saliva. But that’s currently not available. So only products available are Gut Intelligence and Health Intelligence.   [01:26:58] Ashley James: Got it. So very soon you’ll have the one that has all three. We’ve talked a lot about Gut Intelligence. I’m interested about the microbiome. Your Health Intelligence service, what kind of information does it give us to help us to optimize mitochondrial health? I’m really interested in supporting mitochondrial health. You talked about how the gut talks to our mitochondria. Is it that by correcting the gut and supporting the gut health and supporting the microbiome we’re supporting mitochondria? Or are there further steps to take to support mitochondria?   [01:27:36] Naveen Jain: Well, first of all, as you pointed out earlier, Ashley, mitochondria is an organelle inside our own cell. It has its own genes. It replicates itself just like any other bacteria. So inside ourselves, these bacterial cells are constantly replicating. It has its own 12 genes. We look at its own gene expression to see how much energy it is producing? How much is it replicating, which is called mitochondrial biogenesis? When the cells divide you need the mitochondria, you need all the energy. So if you don’t have enough mitochondrial biogenesis happening, you’re going to start feeling tired. You don’t have enough energy. Cells are going to die. So we look at all of the mitochondrial biogenesis. Then remember, if you go back to high school biology, the mitochondria is the one that completes the Krebs cycle, that ATP cycle. You take glucose and it actually gets converted into ATP. If anything inside that, to complete that cycle there are a whole bunch of coenzymes that they need. So for example, if you are missing some coenzyme like CoQ10, then you may actually not be able to produce energy. And then we will actually give you the foods that are high in CoQ10 or the supplement that contains CoQ10. It’s literally by looking at your mitochondrial gene expression, we are able to recommend the foods that are good for you, recommend the food that you should avoid, and also include them in the right set of supplements. If there are certain things that you’re not producing but you need, we give them to you as an augmentation or supplement with that. And we do the same thing with, by the way, cellular side. So by looking at your blood, we’re looking at your cellular senescence. These are the cells that neither died but they’re still alive producing toxins. And the cellular senescence causes aging. So we have to also worry about making sure how do we go out and making sure these cells don’t become these zombie cells. So we look at your cellular stress. We look at, as I said, stress response. We look at your immune system’s health. Because if your immune system is highly inflamed, not only at that point. Essentially your body is going to constantly be in inflamed mode causing a whole bunch of diseases and getting your organs to start failing. But also, you’re not prepared to be able to deal with the infection. Whether it is cold, flu, or COVID. To be able to get your immune system right in the place, that’s the reason I recommend people do the Health Intelligence Test because they get the most comprehensive insight into their body, and the recommendations are now based on more information rather than just the gut information.   [01:30:16] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you. I’m really excited about your pricing. Just thinking about the last time I got blood work at my annual visit with my naturopath. Even after having insurance, insurance pays for only so much because you’ve got deductibles. I actually paid more. I paid more out of pocket than having your test. So it cost me more to get all these other tests, whereas they didn’t actually tell me. The blood tests I get that I pay a ton for, even with insurance at the doctor’s office, don’t tell me what to do. I mean, the doctor is supposed to tell you what to do, but most doctors don’t. Most doctors go okay, well I guess we got to get you on statins now. You’re going to get on metformin soon. Because MDs will use blood tests to determine if you need to get on drugs. That’s not health. We’ve got two different philosophies of thinking. The mainstream philosophy of medicine is wait till you get sick and then get on a drug, which will probably make you sicker but whatever. We’ll suppress symptoms in the body. You’ll do that until you die and maybe get on more drugs as you age. And then there’s the other way to think, which is I want to get so healthy I don’t need to be on medication. I want to get so healthy that I optimize myself and I look 40 when I’m 60. I want a blood test that I pay hundreds of dollars for at the doctor’s office to actually tell me what to do. Okay, here’s the information. Here’s where you are. Now here’s what you should do to get better. That’s been my frustration. Even though yes, I get to sit down with the Naturopath and they look over. Here’s your A1C hemoglobin. Okay, you’re getting better. Here are your triglycerides. Oh, they’re a little up. The Naturopath would be like—because I eat brown rice they’re like—eat less brown rice. What do you mean eat less brown rice? Is that really what’s causing high triglycerides? And we go through all these different things on the blood test, and at the end of the day, I was left confused because it was sort of muddled. Keep taking your supplements, maybe a little less brown rice, and see you in a year when you pay another $500 for all your work up. That just drives me up the wall when I’m not given a really clear intelligent scientific path to take. Here enters your third option. The third option is your testing. Now you’re not saying don’t go to a doctor, don’t go to a Naturopath. You can absolutely continue that route but taking the Health Intelligence service that you offer in the comfort of your own home. And now you’re given very, very specific instructions on what you can put in your mouth to optimize your health, and then you do it in another four months or so and then you see that you’re getting better. You see that you’re progressing. If someone were to do that for a year they’re going to get much better results that if they just waited to get sick, go to the MD, and get on drugs. Or saw a holistic practitioner who just took a bunch of blood and then said well, we’ll keep monitoring this but maybe eat a little bit less rice. They have no idea because they didn’t test for what your microbiome needs and what your mitochondria needs. So I’m very excited for what you’re doing. I’m really, really excited to take the test myself, my husband, and my son. I know that some listeners are going to absolutely want to take the Health Intelligence service test and join me in trying this and seeing how they can optimize their entire body, every cell in their body, to be fully nutrified because they’re eating to feed the gut. To make the gut biome make exactly what we need. This is just so cool. I love it. It’s finally the right time, like you said. It’s the right time because now the costs can be driven down so low because of AI and because the way machines can be used, robots can be used in labs. Now gene sequencing isn’t thousands of dollars. When I started the podcast four years ago it was thousands of dollars to take tests similar to this, and now it is a few hundred dollars, so this is very exciting.  I definitely want to have you back on the show after I take the test and after my husband and I do this. We can follow up, and I’m sure we can talk more about it because like you said, your company is releasing this next test shortly. There’ll be more information to talk about, but I’d love you to come back and have you continue to share what Viome is doing in the future as you unfold more and more exciting services in your effort to make chronic disease optional. This is very exciting. I definitely want to have you back on the show. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:35:25] Naveen Jain: I would say, first of all, Ashley, thank you very much for hosting me. And all I can say is keep dreaming and dream so big that people think you’re crazy.  And never ever be afraid of what you want to do because imagination is the only thing that stops us from achieving what we want. Let’s just keep moving humanity forward. Let’s just keep doing the things individually what we can to contribute back to humanity. I look forward to coming back and talking more.   [01:35:53] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much. Listeners can go to viome.com and use the coupon code LTH. Join me in doing the Health Intelligence test, and let’s feed our gut what the body needs. It’s so exciting. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Naveen Jain from viome.com. You can go to viome.com and use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health, coupon code LTH for your listener discount. And please, join the Learn True Health Facebook group and come tell us about your experience. And I’d also love for you to join the Facebook group and share what you thought about this episode, other episodes, come ask questions. It’s a free community of wonderful holistic-minded people who want to achieve true health. I look forward to hearing everyone’s results using the Viome experience. The Viome feedback from their tests and their app, and I can’t wait to do it myself. I’ll let you guys know how it goes in a few weeks after I get my results back and start eating specifically for my mitochondria and my microbiome. And I can’t wait to hear back from you guys and hear how it’s helping you as well. Excellent. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. And I hope wherever you are, you get to go out in nature, put your feet in the grass, have sunlight on your face, take a few deep breaths, and think of things that you are grateful for. Help ground yourself, come into yourself and feel love and gratitude for all the trillions of cells in your body and all the wonderful energy that’s flowing through you. God bless.   Get Connected With Naveen Jain! Website Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube    

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com https://theplantfedgut.com   Gastroenterologist Prescribes Food Not Drugs For Healing The Gut  https://www.learntruehealth.com/gastroenterologist-prescribes-food-not-drugs-for-healing-the-gut   Highlights: The biggest issue is the absence of fiber in the American diet Fiber is the preferred food of our gut microbiome Most powerful driver of gut health was the diversity of plants within your diet Human health starts in the gut Raw and cooked vegetables feed different microbiomes Prebiotic and probiotic   How important is fiber to our health? In this episode, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz explains the importance of eating a variety of plant-based foods to support our gut microbiome’s overall health. He also shares how to increase our gut microbiome’s biodiversity, the difference between prebiotic and probiotic, and the effects of these two in our gut. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m loving the series that we’ve been doing on gut health and healing the body by healing our gut. If you haven’t already listened to the last episode, we did episode 439 as I think it plays really well into today’s episode with a gastroenterologist who focuses on—instead of using drugs and surgery—using food to heal the gut. I know these two episodes play really well together. And then after this episode, so 441, is going to be an amazing episode about healing the gut as well and tests that we can order to fully understand the foods that we want to eat or avoid to properly feed the microbiome. Why is it that your husband can eat one food but if you eat that same food you’d get bloated? Or why is it that some people can eat a certain way and be fine but other people are not even though those are both healthy foods? Well, that is going to be uncovered in episode 441. We’re continuing our series on gut healing. Something I found with the Learn True Health podcast is guests tend to book themselves all clumped together and it ends up being the same subject. I reach out to many different holistic health professionals. I give them a link and they sign up to get on my schedule, and they choose the date that works best for them. So many times it turns out that within one week, I’ll have several interviews that are all about the same thing, that are all about heart health, or all about gut health, and I didn’t coordinate it. They don’t know each other, and they don’t know that they’re doing it. But so many times, I’ve sat down and looked at my calendar and realized that I’ll have several interviews in the row about the same topic. Not covering the exact same information, but complementing each other. This is where I really feel that God and divine intervention are taking place on so many levels in our life, and I can see it when these episodes come together in such a wonderful way. I believe the latest episodes that have been published and are going to be published really complement each other. And I invite you to look at your life and see where wonderful divine intervention is taking place, possibly the information you’re hearing today. I’ve heard from several listeners, they’ll contact me through email or through Facebook and they’ll say, you know, I was just praying or I was just thinking about wanting this information and boom, I turned on your podcast and they were talking about exactly what I wanted to hear. That is so cool. I just love that. I love how what we focus on and what we want to have show up in our life we can create it. Neurologically speaking, it’s the reticular activating system, which is a part of the brain that will seek out what we choose to focus on. If you’re someone who has anxiety or would love to learn more about how the brain works, and how we can optimize our life for success, eliminate procrastination, and eliminate anxiety, I invite you to take my course. So I’m a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming, and I spent 14 months putting this course together. It is a wonderfully fun course where you learn all these techniques—the behavioral change techniques for personal growth and development. Go to learntruehealth.com and in the menu click on the Free Your Anxiety course and take it. It’s phenomenal, I love it, and I do give a money-back guarantee if you take it and it’s not your cup of tea. Although so many listeners have said it’s been completely life-changing. So I invite you to check that out. I also invite you to check out the course that I put together with my dear friend Naomi where we have filmed ourselves cooking in the kitchen delicious recipes, and we also include information on how to heal the body with teas, herbs, and different foods—both cooked and raw—and why those fibers or those nutrients in those foods are so healing for the body. So if you love listening to the podcast, you’re going to love the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership. Check it out, try it for a month, it’s less than $10 to just try it for a whole month and get all the delicious recipes out of it. And if you continue to enjoy it continue being a member. You’ll be supporting the Learn True Health podcast. This is what I do full time, and so you’d be supporting me to continue putting out these episodes, but also helping you and supporting you and your family to learn delicious recipes that are designed to heal the body and nutrify the body. So you can go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen for more information about that. Like I said, also check out the Free Your Anxiety course. It is very powerful. And please, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’d love to see you there. We have a wonderful community of people that are totally into holistic health and healing, love to answer questions, support each other, share insights, and share inspiration. Whatever you’re dealing with, whatever you’re looking to heal or to optimize, we’re a whole community that wants to get behind you and get to behind each other and support each other in our success. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. Continue to share the episodes that you know will make a big difference. We’re going to turn this ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to learn true health. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:05:50] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 440. I’m so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show a doctor that specializes in healing the gut. And isn’t that the first place we need to start when it comes to building our health? I’m really excited to have you on the show. Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, welcome to the show.   [00:06:20] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Ashley, thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s an honor to be here. I’m excited to talk about it.   [00:06:24] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m thrilled that you focus on healing the gut when so many doctors just throw drug after drug after drug at people. I know in my 20s I was so sick. I had chronic infections, and every time I went to the MD, I got another antibiotic. And I’m sure that did not help. Years of being on antibiotics did not help my health. One of the first things I had to do was heal my gut and what a difference it makes. When you heal the gut first, so much comes into balance. So I’m really excited to hear your story though. What happened in your life that made you want to become an MD? Which normally, MDs don’t typically go the route of holistic medicine, right? That’s not a typical MD move. So what happened in your life that made you want to become an MD? But then what happened that made you want to help people heal their body and heal their gut with food?   [00:07:22] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah. Well, I think that when we have individual experiences, similar to what you described in your own life, those things motivate you and drive you to think outside of the box. Particularly when you have to go outside the box to find your solution, to begin with. So for me, how I became a doctor really starts from a really simple thing, which is the desire to do something where I would help people. I started down that path. I mean, basically made the decision when I was in high school—16 years old. This is what I want to do with my life, and that was the motivation. Truly, if it was about money, you should go on banking, not medicine. So I started down that path and I didn’t really get there until I was 34 years old. But during that process, it feels like I woke up one day and I was 30 and I felt like I was 60. I look in the mirror and I weigh 50 pounds more than I did in high school, which is for me a tough pill to swallow because I was a three-sport athlete, so I think of myself as an athlete. And there I am, looking in the mirror and I have this gut. I have high blood pressure, tons of anxiety, low self-esteem, and tremendous fatigue to the point that I’m basically caffeinated 24 hours a day like drinking coffee at 9:00 PM at night. Something had to change. I trained at these great American institutions. I went to Georgetown for med school. I was the chief medical resident at Northwestern, one of the top internal medicine residencies in the entire country. And I went to the University of North Carolina for my GI training. And within my field in gastroenterology, many people consider UNC to be—if not the best—clearly one of the top two or three. I trained at these great institutions, but here’s this problem that I have. I weigh 50 pounds more than I used to. I have high blood pressure, high anxiety, and I don’t know how to fix my own issue. At that point in my life, I was incredibly good at dealing with the care of an acutely ill person who is crashing in the hospital. That’s what I have been built for, that’s what I spent so much time training on, which is the person who might die unless you do something, then you do that thing, and you bring them back. That’s what I was good at, but I was not good at conventional healthcare, taking care of the routine person, giving them dietary advice, and preventing illness as opposed to waiting for the illness to arrive. I wasn’t good at that because the system didn’t prepare me for that. So I needed a solution. I needed a solution in my own life. So being a typical type A medical doctor type, I decided to try to work my way out of it with exercise, and I started showing up at the gym six days a week—30 to 45 minutes of heavyweights, and then jump on the treadmill for a 5K to 10K during the winter. Or if it was the summertime, go to the community pool and swim 100 laps. Did that six days a week. I could build strength. I could build muscle. I could build endurance. I couldn’t lose the gut. When things changed for me was when I met the person who actually is now my wife. Because we went on a date and I have to tell you, at this point in my life—I’m in my early 30s and I’d never been around anyone who was vegetarian let alone vegan. I honestly didn’t even really know what the difference was. I see this person that I’m on a date with who’s eating completely plant-based, and she’s eating without restriction, cleaning the plate, loving her food, and completely satisfied. Meanwhile, I have a post-meal hangover, and I’m struggling just to keep up after because I want to go home and put on some sweatpants. This relationship opened my eyes and made me think. Maybe it’s the diet that I was raised on. Maybe the food that I have consumed since childhood is what is actually affecting my body in a negative way and holding me back. So I started to make changes in my nutrition. It wasn’t a radical change. It wasn’t going all the way to one extreme. It was just making simple substitutions. Instead of going out for fast food, I would go home and I’d make a big like 30-something ounce smoothie. Or instead of drinking a two-liter of soda, which I actually did back then, I would drink water. And making those simple substitutions, next thing I know the fat is just melting off my body. The blood pressure issue goes away. The anxiety lifts, my self-esteem surges, and I start feeling young, vibrant, and alive again. It was so powerful that I said, why have I not heard anything about this? I trained in these great places. How come I was never taught anything about this? I turned to the medical literature thinking there must not be anything out there. This must be a space where we just don’t have the studies yet. I was really shocked when I found there were literally thousands of high-quality studies that already were in existence, and I just hadn’t been taught about them. This motivated me to start devouring nutritional information, and I was studying in my free time. I was doing it at night. I was staying up to do it. And then I was bringing what I found into my medical practice, using it to take care of my patients with digestive issues, and seeing radical transformations in their life on par with the way that it changed in mine. And that was so provocative that—I mean, I have to tell you. I never in a million years thought that I would be on this podcast with you, talking about my New York Times bestselling book, or having an Instagram account with 150,000 followers. I never thought of any of those things because it wasn’t the plan. I’m the guy who creates plans. I think they’re going to happen, and all of a sudden here I am—and this was like 2016—and I just felt like I had to share this story of what was happening in my clinic. I didn’t really like social media at all. I still don’t, but I felt compelled to share. So I started posting stuff and not really thinking anyone would be interested. One thing led to another and in 2018 I did a podcast interview that went viral. 300,000 people have listened to this podcast now. When that happened, the energy was so profound surrounding these ideas that I was putting out there. There was so much energy that I was like I have to compile this into something so that people can get the whole story in a structured, organized fashion. And there’s really no better way to do that than to write a book. That’s when I decided, in August of 2018, that’s what I wanted to do. I spent basically the next year and a half doing it. Investing everything that I had, all my effort, waking up early—5:00 AM in the morning writing. I was at Starbucks here in Charleston, South Carolina from 5:00 AM until 7:30 PM. They know me really well at Starbucks. I know the deals. I know that you can get a free refill if you want it, and basically wrote this book. And then it came out in the middle of a pandemic. I just had to adapt to that. But the bottom line is that here it is, it’s arrived, and two months after release 35,000 people have bought a copy of this book.   [00:16:14] Ashley James: Nice.   [00:16:15] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah, and I’m getting messages. If you just go back to that 16-year-old kid who sat there and said I want to help people. That has been what’s motivated and driven me this whole time. People, they may or may not know this, a book itself does not pay the bills. I paid the bills with my medical practice. I’m a full-time gastroenterologist, but to get messages from people from around the world who have read the book and are healing their digestive issues—healing their autoimmune, their hormonal, their metabolic, or their mood issues, restoring function to their body. To get those messages on a daily basis is incredible, it’s a dream come true for a doctor.   [00:17:11] Ashley James: You have a clinic as a gastroenterologist. What does that look like? Are you doing colonoscopies? What does it look like to go to you if someone has gut issues?   [00:17:24] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So I spend about half my time doing procedures. So during that time that I’m doing procedures, I do colonoscopies and upper endoscopies. For example, an upper endoscopy, it is typically a five to ten-minute procedure, and it allows me to look in the esophagus, the stomach, and the small intestine; allows me to, for example, take biopsies for celiac disease, which these days, unfortunately, our blood tests for celiac disease—I don’t know how much people realize this, but the blood tests are completely inaccurate or completely inadequate in terms of testing for celiac disease. So the endoscopy is the gold standard that allows me to firmly know whether or not a person has that. I also spend my time doing colonoscopies. A big portion of that is colon cancer screening. But then the other half of my time, this is part of what I love about my field. One of the things that I love is I get to use my mind, to be very personal with my patients, and have relationships. But I also get to use my hands, and that’s kind of fun. So half of my time is spent in the clinic talking to people, hearing their health history, breaking down what the problems are, creating complex plans of how to attack them, and finding solutions.   [00:18:48] Ashley James: I have an interesting guest. Have you heard of Chef AJ?   [00:18:53] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I love Chef AJ. She’s a dear friend.   [00:18:55] Ashley James: Okay, great. So she tells her story in one of our past interviews. She’s been on the show twice. I think it was the first interview I had her on. And she shares that although was vegan for ethical reasons, was a junktarian, ate lots of junk food. She went for a colonoscopy cancer screening and her doctor found pre-cancerous polyps—bloody polyps through her whole colon and her colon looked just totally destroyed. She’s so afraid of surgery that she decided not to get surgery to have them removed, but she ended up going to a center and doing a deep cleanse, doing a raw food vegan. Whole food but the foods are alive. She did that, and then she came back six months later and had her colonoscopy. Her doctor got very angry at her. Have you heard her story when she tells it?   [00:19:52] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I don’t think I’ve heard this one.   [00:19:55] Ashley James: Okay. So her doctor gets really angry at her. I imagine the doctor was the same kind of profession as you are. So he’s sitting there, he’s doing the colonoscopy, he just starts getting angry, and he goes, “Who did your surgery? And she said, “What are you talking about? You’re my doctor. I have insurance with you. I wouldn’t go to a different doctor. I’m terrified of surgery. If I were to get surgery it would be with you.” And he’s sitting there, the camera, staring at her colon and going, “Someone did surgery on you. I knew where every single polyp was and all the pre-cancerous polyps and none of them are here. They’re all gone. Your intestine, your colon looks like vascular and healthy like a newborn baby. It used to look just disgusting and purple.” Whatever color it looked like before. He was visibly upset at her because he did not believe that she healed her body with food. But there was another doctor who was maybe a resident or something from India. She whispered to Chef AJ. She goes, “I believe you.” Because this doctor had seen coming from India where it’s more acceptable to heal the body with food. It was interesting. I’ve heard many stories, and I’ve had my own personal experiences where MDs just do not believe you can heal the body with food. That it’s part of the training. So what happened in medical school? Did you have teachers say to you like no, you can’t heal the body with food? Do they actually try to tell you guys that? Or why is it that most MDs don’t believe you can heal the body with food. I love that you have broken away. It’s kind of like you came out of the Matrix and you’re able to think for yourself and go no, we can heal the body with food. Drugs are a tool but they’re not the only solution. Since we’re putting something in our mouth that our body is using to build healthy cells, shouldn’t we look first to food? Did any part of your education try to tell you that we can’t heal with food?   [00:22:04] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I think that there’s a pervasive culture of allopathic Western medicine that stands in the way of accepting these types of ideas, and that’s unfortunate. It’s something that is hindering the quality of care and also the quality of the relationship with the individual patient. Because at the end of the day, if you try to tell a reasonable, rational person that the food that you eat makes no difference, any reasonable or rational person would say that’s BS. That’s BS. How can you possibly say that the food that you eat makes no difference? It’s very obvious that the food that you eat does make a difference. So if it does make a difference, how much of a difference does it make? The modern science shows us that if you look across all of humanity on our planet, and you were to quantify health and disease, you would discover that just 20% of actual disease is driven by genetics. I mean, look, there are individual diseases, don’t get me wrong, like down syndrome. If you have the gene, you have the disease. But if you look across all humanity, just 20% of disease is driven by genetics, which means that 80% is driven by our environment, driven by diet and lifestyle. The 80,000 pounds of food that we are going to eat during our lifetime, that will always be far more powerful than a couple of milligrams of medication. And you can’t prevent disease effectively with medication. There’s very little evidence to support that that works. You can’t overcome a bad diet with medication. You can’t make someone back to net neutral. The best that you can do is cover it up. That’s the best you can do is just cover up the problem with the medication, and that’s not really addressing the root of the issue. If our problem exists because of our diet and lifestyle, then to ignore our diet and lifestyle in the treatment plan is to never actually address the root of the issue. So from my perspective, we need to go there. We have to go there. Now I can’t say that there was ever any conversation where people said, that there was formal teaching, that no, diet is worthless, or diet is not important. That was never said. It’s more so that if you withhold the education on diet and nutrition, if you never actually provide that information to people, and all you do is ask them to study and learn the side effects of all these bazillion drugs and the indications, and you know how to do this surgery, if that’s all that you teach them, then it’s unrealistic to expect them to just automatically transition. As intelligent as medical doctors are, they’re not trained and taught how to have a conversation about conventional nutrition. That’s the problem.   [00:25:36] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. In college, when I took anatomy, my teacher was actually a retired neurosurgeon. When it came to studying the joints, he said once someone has—because we also studied pathology with him—arthritis, when your client has arthritis, they cannot regrow it. Once you have damaged your cartilage you cannot regrow cartilage, no supplements work, and he got kind of angry. Supplements don’t work and diet doesn’t work. Nothing works. When someone has arthritis that’s it. They’re done. You can’t regrow cartilage. Obviously, he must be smarter than me. He was a neurosurgeon. He knows what he’s talking about. And I just thought it was really interesting. Years later, I met a naturopathic physician who regularly helps his patients and clients reverse arthritis. I know a friend of mine, her mom, in six weeks on a whole food plant-based diet, all of her arthritis symptoms went away. It’s amazing what the body can heal, and it’s also amazing that we’re taught by people we put on a pedestal—people that we put in authority—were told that we can’t heal. Now as a patient is on your table, you’re doing a colonoscopy, and you see they have polyps. Let’s use Chef AJ’s example. Their colon is bleeding a little bit. It definitely does not look vascular and healthy. Maybe it looks just discolored and they’ve got some polyps that you identify as possible pre-cancerous polyps. What’s your next step with them versus other doctors? What do you do with them to help them to heal their body?     [00:27:16] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Well, I think that from my perspective, the solution is in having a conversation about diet and nutrition. That’s where the opportunity lies. And a big part of the issue, from my perspective, is the absence of fiber in the American diet. If you look at the consumption of fiber in the United States, we may be the culture with the least consumption of fiber in human history. We certainly are probably about as close as we could get to the worst. The average American is consuming 15 grams of fiber per day. Now to put them into perspective—15 grams—the minimum recommendation on a daily basis for women is 25, for men is 38. Actually, it’s really embarrassing when we do these fiber studies because the way that we’ll set them up is we’ll say let’s compare high fiber consumers to low fiber consumers. And what you’ll see when the study is done in the United States is you’ll see the high fiber consumers are getting 22 or 23 grams of fiber per day. And most people don’t know enough about fiber including the doctors to register the point that even the high fiber consumers in these studies are not even getting the minimum recommended amount on a daily basis. It’s embarrassing. 97% of Americans are not getting enough. When I say fiber, by the way, I’m talking about fiber from real food. Fiber comes from plants. Plants have a monopoly on fiber. And the way that you should get your fiber is by eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes. The reason that I want to motivate fiber consumption is that I know the vast majority of Americans are wildly devoid of fiber in their diet. And also, because I know that there is a direct connection between fiber and the prevention of colon cancer. So let’s unpack that a little bit. When we eat fiber, we’ve been taught that fiber goes in the mouth and just goes through, sweeps through the colon—some people describe it the way it sweeps through, and it just comes out the other end as a torpedo. All right. That’s like sort of the traditional teaching on fiber. We always think of grandma stirring the orange drink so that she can have herself a bowel movement. We need to update our definition. We need to understand the actual way that fiber works in the body, which is that there are many different types of fiber. They’re not all the same. We have oversimplified fiber by just counting grams or just calling it soluble or insoluble fiber. And the reason why we’ve simplified it so much is because fiber is incredibly biochemically complex. If you were to look at fiber molecules—I was a chemistry major in college—I look at them just like what the heck is that? Because of that complexity, we try to keep it as simple as we can and we look at it as soluble and insoluble fiber. Well, insoluble fiber does what we traditionally think of fiber. It just goes in the mouth and it comes out the other end. But soluble fiber is a totally different story. Soluble fiber passes through the small intestine—untouched—and it arrives into the colon. When it gets there, your gut microbes, which reside predominantly in your colon, they get into an absolute feeding frenzy. They go crazy because fiber is their preferred food. You’re feeding your gut. And when you feed them, they consume it, these microprobes become stronger, and they become energized. Because of that, they are more capable of upholding your human physiology. These microbes are so central to the way that our body works. We need them in tip-top shape to help us out if we want to be healthy. When we feed them fiber, that’s what we get. We get healthy microbes that are strong, energized, and ready to help us, and they help us immediately on the spot. Because what they do is they take that soluble fiber, they consume it, and they transform it into short-chain fatty acids. Short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, acetate, and propionate. These short-chain fatty acids, we can unpack them. We can talk more about them throughout the entire show. I am obsessed with them. They are an entire chapter in my book. I honestly think this is the biggest secret in all of the nutrition that no one is talking about, and we should all be talking about it. We can get distracted by all these other red herrings. We should be talking about why we need more short-chain fatty acids in our life. And when we talk about colon cancer itself, in the study of colon cancer, we discover that short-chain fatty acids have been shown to directly impair the development of colon cancer. So it creates this mechanistic pathway, which is that fiber comes into the colon, connects with the gut microbes. When you put these two ingredients together—prebiotic fiber and these probiotic microbes, you combine them, and they basically will create for you these post biotic short-chain fatty acids that will directly impair the development of colon cancer. It’s no surprise that colon cancer is the number two cause of cancer death in America because we’re completely fiber devoid. If you compare African Americans to native Africans, native Africans consume a very high fiber, low-fat diet. African Americans, typically, traditionally, consume a very high-fat low fiber diet. Before I even tell you the number to frame this, if you said there were two times the risk of developing colon cancer, in the cancer world, that would be a lot. If you said three times, you go whoa, that’s crazy. If you said five, you go this is completely bonkers. All right, the number is 65. African Americans have 65 times the colon cancer that native Africans have. It’s absurd. That’s ridiculous. And it’s because we’re not taking care of our diet, we’re not taking care of our microbiome, and we’re not feeding our microbiome what it needs to give us these protective molecules, these short-chain fatty acids. And when you zoom out and you apply this mechanism, it’s more than just this connection from an epidemiology perspective between African Americans and native Africans. You can find studies from around the world, different cultures showing us that high fiber consumers—when I say high fiber I mean actually high fiber meaning definitely more than 38 grams of fiber per day. High fibers consumers have virtually no colon cancer, and there was a major, major, major review done that came out in January 2019 by Andrew Reynolds, and I wrote about this in my book, where it was basically a mega meta-analysis. So a meta-analysis is where they compile studies. We have a hierarchy of evidence, and the hierarchy of evidence says that the highest quality evidence comes from a meta-analysis where you compile studies to answer questions. And in this mega meta-analysis where he did multiple meta-analyses, Andrew Reynolds and his science team found numerous benefits to fiber for longevity, for heart disease, and for cancer, in particular—no surprise—colon cancer.   [00:35:57] Ashley James: That is something to wrap our brains around, isn’t it? I’m fascinated by the microbiome. It’s about six pounds of bacteria that live in our gut that help us. It actually makes nutrients for us. It helps us digest our food and make nutrients for us. And we live in such a sterile world, especially now, everyone’s using hand sanitizers. We’re constantly thinking about how to sterilize our food and food is just dead. The average household is eating packaged food, and the food is just dead. It’s void of life. It’s void of healthy bacteria. You’re saying we need to adopt a diet that works with our microbiome to get the nutrients the body needs. And that’s great. The fiber, it just doesn’t go in one end and out the other. It’s doing so much more for us. I loved learning that fiber helps bind to the toxins that the liver has excreted through the gallbladder and helps to remove the estrogen that the body is getting rid of. It helps to remove all of the chemicals, the pesticides, and everything that the liver is trying to excrete. And it also binds the cholesterol in the gallbladder. The bile juice, it’s binding to all that and bringing it out. And that people who are constipated or eat low fiber, the colon can reabsorb it. And we see that in studies where people do fasting. I had a guy on the show where he did different things with fasting. They took blood and they found that the body would reabsorb certain pesticides because they were testing for chemicals and pesticides. But with fiber, when there was something to bind to it, the body wouldn’t reabsorb it. So it becomes very exciting. Are you saying everyone should go and start drinking Metamucil? Is any fiber good? Or are certain fibers better than others? I’ve heard that there’s a kind of fiber from potatoes, for example, or there’s non-resistant starch. There are all these different kinds of fibers, which one should we eat?   [00:38:27] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I have so much I want to say. I’m so excited to talk about all this.   [00:38:33] Ashley James: You have the floor.   [00:38:36] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I’m a nerd, I’m a nerd. I love everything that you just said. I want to get into it more. All right. So to answer your question and try to not get distracted by so many tangents that I would love to talk about, let’s talk about fiber and optimizing fiber, okay? It starts with exploring the relationship between fiber and these microbes, which is an incredibly important relationship for the health of our gut microbiome. Fiber is their preferred food. But let’s talk a little bit about what that means. Let’s define the gut a little bit first. Your gut is made up of 39 trillion microbes. That’s a ridiculous number. How can we put that into a number that makes sense? Okay, try this. We live in the milky way, that’s our solar system. Take our solar system with every single star that exists in the sky—every single one—and you have 100 solar systems worth of stars living inside of you right now that are microbes. Mostly bacteria, but they also include yeast, archaea, sometimes parasites, and I’m not counting viruses in this number 39 trillion, but there are viruses too. They all live there in harmony and balance. This is an ecosystem. Your gut, microbiome this community of microorganisms that by the way are as alive as you and I are, they are. There’s an ecosystem in the same way that the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon Rainforest are also ecosystems. And if you’re a biologist, there is a simple rule that applies to every single ecosystem and is a measure of the health within that ecosystem, which is biodiversity. When you have a more biodiverse Amazon Rainforest, a more biodiverse Great Barrier Reef, you have an ecosystem that is resilient. It is strong. It is prepared for any challenge or perturbation that you throw at it. Let’s go to the Amazon for a moment. I don’t like snakes. They terrify me, I used to have nightmares when I was a kid like snakes being in my bed. I don’t love mosquitoes, they annoy me. I don’t like these creatures, but here’s the issue. If you remove all snakes and all mosquitoes from the Amazon Rainforest, you’re going to create a biological hole that the other animals are not designed to fill. And there will be a ripple effect that will have negative consequences on the health of the entire Amazon Rainforest because of that. So biodiversity is key. We need all these players. We need as much diversity as possible, and that applies to our microbiome too. We need a diversity of species, as many different species as possible. So how do we get there? Okay. Let’s understand how they live because they’re alive, which means they need food. They got to eat and their preferred food is fiber, but not just generically fiber. There are at least millions maybe even billions of types of different fibers that exist in nature. Every single plant has its own unique types of fiber. And these microbes, they’re just like us. They’re picky eaters. All right. Chef AJ is vegan, I’m vegan too, but we don’t eat the same food. She’s got her preferences, and I have mine. Guess what, these microbes are just like that. They have their preferences. They don’t all eat the same. They don’t just generically eat fiber. So when you eat a particular food, let’s use the black bean as an example. You consume black beans, you send these black beans down to your microbiome, and there are specific populations of bacteria that are going to thrive because you just fed them. They will grow, they will be more strongly represented within your microbiome, and they will reward you with whatever it is that they do best, which may include the production of short-chain fatty acids. They will go to work helping you. But the opposite of that is also true. If you say I am going bean-free, no more black beans. Okay, well this population of microbes that are waiting to be fed black beans, they’re not being fed. And just like us, when you don’t feed them, they starve. They grow weaker. And at some point, they grow weak to the point that they’re incapable of holding up and doing the job that your body needs them to do. And potentially it can get to the point where they go extinct. Just like the loss of mosquitoes and snakes within the ecosystem, when you have bacteria within the ecosystem that are not able to do their job, you create a loss of balance where that ecosystem, that gut is not able to keep up with the rigors of supporting human health anymore. And that’s what dysbiosis is. Dysbiosis is a damaged gut that’s out of balance. Some people call this leaky gut, and we’re basically talking about the same thing. So we want to maintain that biodiversity. And the way that we do that is by recognizing each unique species of bacteria has its own way of eating, and they like fiber. But not all fiber is the same. Every single plant has its own unique types of fiber. So when we eat as many different varieties of plants as possible, we are delivering as many different types of fiber as possible to our microbiome, and therefore supporting the dietary preferences of the broadest diversity of microbes possible. This is a core idea in my book, this is my central philosophy for human health and diet, and this is the most important thing that I’m going to say in the entire episode, okay. Not that I want people to turn off after I’ve said this, I got more to say. But if there’s only one thing that you take away from our episode today, let it be this. And this is more than just Dr. B’s idea. This is actually scientifically validated in the largest study to date to make a connection between diet and lifestyle and the health of our microbiome, which is called the American Gut Project. In the American Gut Project, they found that there was a clear-cut number one predictor of a healthy gut. The most powerful driver of gut health was the diversity of plants within your diet. So it’s a change of philosophy where this is not about grams of fiber, and this is certainly not about consuming mono fibers like Metamucil. This is about getting as many different types of fiber into your diet as possible so that you can support the biodiversity of your microbiome. And as a result, just like the Amazon Rainforest, just like the Great Barrier Reef, you create a lush, biodiverse, stable, and strong microbiome that is prepared to uphold the pillars of human health, which are digestion of your food which basically is access to nutrients. What’s more important than that? And these microbes, beyond that, are also connected to our immune system, our hormonal balance, our metabolism, and even our mood and the way that our brain functions. Human health starts in the gut. And the most important part of human health isn’t even human, it’s these microbes, and we need to feed them. We need to feed them, and we’re just not feeding them in the United States. We’re starving them. Then we’re surprised when we have an epidemic autoimmune disease.   [00:47:11] Ashley James: That came out of nowhere. When you and I were kids, autoimmune disease was not as pervasive as it is today. It’s definitely on the rise. Would you agree with that? Would you say that the illnesses that we’re seeing now are in no way the same numbers as when even when you were in medical school? That we’re seeing an increase in these illnesses. I mean, the question is, is it that they’re getting better at screening? Of course because technology advances, right? However, there weren’t this many autoimmune issues 20, 30 years ago, was there?   [00:47:55] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yes, there definitely was not. People can argue the statistics in whatever direction. And if they have an agenda, they’ll figure out their way to argue the statistics to feed their agenda. But if you take a step back and you just look objectively, think about something like ulcerative colitis, which presents with profound profuse diarrhea that’s bloody, and it occurs around the clock. You wake up in the middle of the night because you got to go number two. That to me is not something that you would miss for years on end. That’s not detection bias. It either exists or it doesn’t exist. In Brazil, it’s quite fascinating to do epidemiology case study looking at third world countries as they modernize into first world countries. Brazil westernized really ramping up from the late 80s through the 90s and into the 2000s. They really started to ramp up and westernize. And during that period of time, they saw an 11%-15% increase in ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease on literally a yearly basis. Think about that growth. That’s absurd. And these doctors that were down there, they had never seen this before. We were very used to treating this in the United States because our epidemic was already fully here, but down there, they had never been seeing this. So they had to start basically flying up to the United States and attending our meetings and hearing how we treat these patients because they had no experience.   [00:49:50] Ashley James: Because the diet changed so quickly because the country became more Americanized and their diet changed to more of an American diet?   [00:49:58] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: They just changed to more of an American diet. This is starting to unfold in China too. Not that we have reliable statistics coming out of China, but they’re starting to westernize and follow the same patterns. Ashley, I know you would agree with me that it’s more than just diet.   [00:50:17] Ashley James: Yeah.   [00:50:18] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Diet is the number one driver, okay. Let’s take a step back and think of our life in the context of how radically things have changed in 100 years. Think about your relative, whoever that might be, your great grandparent or your grandparent, whoever that may be. A hundred years ago, for them, there was no processed food. They knew the farmer more than likely. Everything was locally sourced and in season. There was very little use of pesticides—at least the modern pesticides had not been invented yet. The animal products that they consumed—if they did consume it, most of them did—at least those animal products were not hyped up or pumped up with antibiotics and hormones. Lifestyle-wise, think of the percentage of people who walked to school back then compared to the percentage that walks to school today. Radically different. Think about how they entertained themselves. We do Twitter at 10:30 PM at night and expose ourselves to the blue lights, which by the way disrupt our circadian rhythm and suppress our melatonin. So that even if we do sleep, we’re not getting good sleep. We are watching television. We’re sitting on couches. We’re sitting in offices and working on computers all day. That’s not the way that they lived back then. They were very active. They didn’t have access to vehicles for transportation as readily as we do these days. Here we are, and there’s just been this radical lifestyle and diet transformation that has occurred in the last 100 years where now, the average American, their diet is 60% processed foods that didn’t exist 100 years ago. And 30% of the American diet is animal products that are hyped up on hormones and antibiotics. And literally just 10% of the American diet as fruits, vegetables, whole-grain seeds, and nuts. And perhaps the saddest part of it all is that when I say 10% actually most of that is french fries. We have made huge, huge changes in a very short period of time. It’s putting an evolutionary strain on these microbes, and none of the changes that we’ve made have been advantageous to our microbiome. All of them have inflicted harm. And now, here we are.   [00:53:05] Ashley James: About 15 years ago, I read a really funny book. So if anyone’s looking just to kick back with a funny but true story, The Sex Lives of Cannibals. Have you ever read that book?   [00:53:16] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: No, but I love the title.   [00:53:19] Ashley James: Yeah. I bought it because of the title. I was like, what is this? But it’s a true story. So a man travels with his wife—I think it was actually his fiancé at the time—and they go to the South Pacific. There are island chains in the South Pacific like Vanuatu and Christmas Island. He talks about how hot it is, obviously, down there. I think she works for Red Cross or something and he’s a journalist, and so he thought this will be fun. I’ll bring my typewriter or whatever. I don’t know if he brought a laptop because it was spotty whether they would ever have access to electricity. They get down there and the first island they land on after—I think they came from New Zealand—they land on a bigger island and it is definitely Americanized. He couldn’t believe how many fast food joints from America he saw because he thought he’d be exposed to a different culture, and yet it just felt like he was in Hawaii with all the American food. And he also noticed the people kind of looked like they were from Hawaii or looked like they’re from the United States. And then they ended up going on a smaller island where there was all the people who lived there ate the way they’ve eaten for hundreds of years. And they all gardened, fished, and lived off the land. And they were all very healthy and they didn’t have any access to McDonald’s. He just noticed the two. He just noticed it was interesting. He didn’t go deep into it, but that planted that idea in my mind of I wonder what it looks like. It’s probably been long enough since he wrote that. I think he wrote it 20 years ago. I bet we could go and collect the information—because they’re all Polynesians. They’re all genetically similar, but we could go look at this one island that’s 50 miles away from this island and see okay, well this island people have been eating for the last 20 years McDonald’s and more of an American. They have constant access to electricity so they can watch TV. They have more influence to eat the way we’re eating in the standard American diet. And they have more access to oil, more access to meat, the potato chips, and whatever. And then we go 50 miles away, these people are still eating—and they’re not vegan by any means—coconuts, fish, and whatever vegetables they can grow. They have very little imported. And we look at how they’ve been doing the last 20 years. I think that would be really interesting. Just from the microbiome standpoint, the people who stuck to the diet that their ancestors have been eating—a whole food diet—versus a diet that’s been disrupted, the microbiome has been disrupted by lowering fiber and consuming oil, which also affects the microbiome. And then eating food that’s dead, that’s microwaved, that doesn’t have any bacteria. Because they’ve disrupted their microbiome, how’s their health as a people changed I think that would be a really interesting study, and I’m sure people are doing it like you said. Looking at those from Africa versus those born and raised in America but have their ancestors are from Africa and seeing the differences. And I’ve heard of people from Japan. Japan used to have an incredibly low rate of heart disease and now they don’t. Okinawa used to be a blue zone and now it’s not. The people have changed their diet enough that people are no longer living in their hundreds on a regular basis super healthy.  I would like to address the urgency that we need to turn this ship around on a personal level. Okinawa, in one generation, is no longer a healthy population. We can’t wait any longer. Things are going downhill. We need to take individual responsibility and turn this around right now.   [00:57:49] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. Let me talk a little bit about what you just laid out with the South Pacific, which by the way, I love that idea and I find it to be fascinating. I think the South Pacific is very interesting too, by the way. But there’s actually a guy, his name is Justin Sonnenberg, who’s a microbiome researcher. World-class, one of the leading microbiome researchers. Wrote a great book by the way. It’s called The Good Gut. And he endorsed my book Fiber Fueled. He was fully in support of everything that I wrote in my book. Sonnenberg has done these studies on a population of people called the Hadza. And they live in Tanzania in Africa. They are tribal and they are pre-agrarian meaning that they are hunters and gatherers. He has basically taken a look at their life, the way they eat, and then he also has done microbiome analyses on them. First of all, let’s talk about their diet. Again, they don’t have crops. There’s no farm and they’re not part of organized society. They’re not going into the supermarket. They don’t have dollars and cents. They’re, as described, foraging for their food, and then to a degree, hunting. And they’re not vegan. They’re eating an omnivore diet. But if you look at what they eat, they eat more than 100 grams of fiber per day. More than 100 grams of fiber per day. I said before the diversity of plants feeds a diverse gut microbiome. If you look at the diversity in their diet, they eat 600 varieties of plants on a yearly basis. A lot of this seasonal. So berries come to the season, they start eating berries again. And then something else comes in the season, they eat that. 100 grams of fiber per day, 600 varieties of plants. Ashley, let me ask you a question. All seriousness. Give me just ballpark, rough estimate, off the top of your head, how many different plants do you think you eat on a yearly basis?   [01:00:11] Ashley James: Oh, geez. I just went grocery shopping at Costco this morning. We have a great Costco with organic broccoli, cauliflower, corn, spinach, mixed greens—so there’s maybe three different kinds of greens in there. We eat potatoes, brown rice, brussels sprouts. I think I just rotate about 20 different vegetables. I probably eat 20 different vegetables a year, maybe 30, but on a regular basis probably 20.   [01:00:51] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Okay. Does the number 30 include whole grains, seeds, nuts, legumes, fruit?   [01:01:00] Ashley James: I would say vegetables. Probably 30 different kinds of vegetables a year. I get a variety of potatoes. I like different potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes, different squash, and gourds. Maybe 50 or 60 different. I really do try to get a variety, but maybe between 50 and 60 if you include fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, legumes, and beans.   [01:01:25] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yup. Okay. I don’t have an exact number. I don’t track my—   [01:01:30] Ashley James: I’m going to write it down. I’m going to start thinking about that.   [01:01:35] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Okay. We can talk a little more about what number people should have in mind on a weekly basis, but just to continue the conversation with regard to the Hadza, if I had to estimate for myself, I would probably guess I’m 60 or 70. For most Americans, certainly less than 50. And the Hadza over here are having 600 on a yearly basis—600 different plants. So that would lead us to believe, if my theory from the prior conversation is correct, they should have a more diverse microbiome. And guess what, they do. It’s radically more diverse. In fact, they have 30% more diversity than the average Brit, and they have 40% more diversity than the average American. We are born with a 40% deficit in terms of biodiversity—the measure of a healthy microbiome. We are born with 40% less biodiversity than you find in this population of native tribal people. That shows you how much things have changed on a radical basis. And there’s actually a doctor who’s associated with the American Gut Project who has created this. I mean it’s kind of interesting to think about, but it’s also terrifying. He’s created a doomsday microbe bank. Basically, what he’s done is he said, “I’m worried that we’re killing too many species too fast. I’m worried that we’re eroding our microbiome so fast that we’re just going to be disease-stricken.” The sad thing is these Hadza, the tribe is falling apart because just like in Okinawa, the younger generation doesn’t want to carry on the tradition. They want a cell phone. They want a job. They want money. They want to watch television. I mean, they’re not living in someplace where they don’t even know that real society exists. They know it’s out there. They’re choosing to continue what they have. So the tribe is eroding. The concern that they have is that we may lose these microbes forever. So they’ve created this doomsday microbe bank where one day, if we need to open up the bank, multiply these microbes, and bring them back, we have the ability to do that if we need to. Going back to the urgency of this, there are a few things that I want to talk about with regard to this. and part of it is individual health, which is that if you wake up one day and you have Crohn’s disease, you can’t just walk that back. You have it. I personally believe, and I take care of these people for a living, there’s no such thing as a cure. Once you have Crohn’s disease, there’s remission. That’s the best that you can do. And you may be able to put yourself into a deep remission and keep yourself there effectively having the appearance of a cure, but there is no cure. You’re always vulnerable to the recurrence of Crohn’s disease. You don’t want to wake up one day and have this. Even in health, it becomes imperative that we nurture the health of our microbiome. The second thing, Sonnenberg who is the doctor from Stanford who is studying the Hadza, he’s done some other studies that I think are super fascinating. If you think about the transfer of microbes from mother to child, that’s where we get started in life. If we pass through the birth canal instead of the cesarean section, the birth canal is our first exposure to the outside world, and it’s designed to basically inoculate us with these microbes. So there’s an inheritance that occurs as a result of mom passing down microbes to the child. And there’s a question, could we alter the inheritance of microbes in a way that’s detrimental to future generations? We all care about our kids. Many of us care more about our kids than we do about ourselves. Sonnenberg, you can’t recreate this study in humans because a generation of humans takes 25 years. But you can do this study in mice very quickly using human microbes—the same microbes that we have. So Sonnenberg did mouse studies looking at generational differences in the microbiota and the biodiversity. Again, biodiversity is key to the health of the ecosystem. And what he found is that if you withdraw fiber from these mice, there is a generational loss of species that compounds. So for example, if grandma has 1000 species but she’s not eating fiber, then by the time she has mom, she’s down to 700 species. So mom starts with 700, and by the time mom has you, she’s down to 400 so you start at 400, and you start at a 60% deficit relative to grandma. And that deficit may be enough to make you far more fragile to developing the disease than grandma was.    [01:07:22] Ashley James: Wow.   [01:07:23] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: So the concern is there’s this generational inheritance of the microbiome that could have negative consequences that perhaps some of the issues that we’re seeing in 2020 or in our generation are the results of the initiation of a low fiber diet that started with our parents and even our grandparents’ generation. And what’s interesting is, a ray of hope here, let me just say—   [01:07:53] Ashley James: We’re all doomed. The end.   [01:07:55] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah, as scary as that sounds. I mean, look the framing of the question was why do we need to do it today? We have to have at least a little doom and gloom in there. But the ray of hope here is that if you reintroduce fiber, you can get the species back, all right. You just have to do it early enough, so do it today. Why wait? Do the fiber today and support your gut microbiome and support the gut microbiome for future generations to come. And then the last thing that I wanted to say is this. This is the third thing. I can’t help but say that we need to think about the impact that we’re having in our environment. I usually don’t like to go there because I feel like as a medical doctor it’s not my place, but increasingly, I’m starting to feel like we can no longer deny the connection between our environment and human health. And if that connection is there, then it’s my job as a medical doctor to make people aware of that connection. Consider human population growth, we have 7 billion people on the planet right now. We will have 10 billion people in 2050. So in 30 years, we will go from 7 to 10 billion people. Guess how many people there were in the year 1800. One, there was only one billion people on this planet in 1800. We’re about to have 10 times that number in 250 years. Humans are resource consuming on a very heavy basis. We consume resources like crazy. The planet is reaching a point of saturation in terms of our consumption. And we need a food supply for 10 billion people. And how are we going to actually accomplish that? And they actually got together a bunch of scientists recently. They wanted to try to understand what is going to be the best way for us to preserve our environment, preserve the resources, and not flog this planet to the point that we destroy ourselves. It was called the EAT-Lancet Report, and one of the big issues that people need to realize is that 80% of the agricultural land, which we are currently sort of stretched and maxed out, 80% of that land produces just 18% of the calories that we consume. So we have a very inefficient system. And what I’m referring to, by the way just to be totally clear in case it’s not, is animal agriculture. There’s a huge loss of efficiency when we build a diet around animal products. And that loss of efficiency has to do with the fact that if you have 10 calories when you start, and you feed those 10 calories to the cow, the cow is going to burn a certain percentage of those calories. The cow is going to use a certain percentage of those calories to build joints, bones, eyeballs, and stuff that you’re not going to eat. The cow is going to fart and poop out a certain percentage of those calories. And then a small fraction of it is what actually goes into creating the food product, which is the meat. So there’s a huge loss of efficiency there where when you could have just had a human consume 10 calories. You could just feed that to the human. Why give it to the cow and run it through that system with that huge loss of efficiency? And this is how you end up in a scenario where 80% of our agricultural land produces just 18% of our calories. So when we see the Amazon Rainforests burning, let’s not be naïve. That is a rain forest. It doesn’t burn like California. This is not a forest fire. These are man-made fires for forest clearing to create more land because you need more land if you want to expand that business. The land is already fully consumed. The only way to do more is to get more land. And so how are we going to do that with 3 billion more people? A 50% jump. How are we going to do that?   [01:12:22] Ashley James: Yeah, we’re going to lose all the rain forests. And this is what they think happened to Africa. I saw a really interesting—I don’t know if it was a TED Talk—but Africa and the Sahara desert didn’t use to be a desert. We just think it’s always been a desert. It actually wasn’t. They cut down all the beautiful huge giant trees to make wood ships—500 years ago, 600 years ago. And because of that, the moisture that the forests used to create helped to make the clouds and make rain on the inland of Africa. And with all the forest cut down for all the ships they built it, it completely changed the dynamic of that continent. That’s what they’re thinking is going to happen to South America. That they’re cutting down enough rain forest that it will forever change the ecosystem of an entire continent again. We have to learn from our history. We have to learn. I love that you’re addressing this. A good documentary to watch would be Cowspiracy. I think it’s still on Netflix. It’s a good documentary because they do cover—in more detail. I’m a very visual person so with graphics they show what you’re addressing. But someone might say eating animals is healthy for me. It’s a necessary step. Isn’t it healthy for me to eat this? I should have dairy because that’s how you build strong bones. I should have eggs, that’s a good source of vitamins and vitamin D. I should eat animals because that’s where I get my protein and my energy from. This is what we’ve been told since we were children. It’s like a necessary evil. Cows are beautiful and I don’t want to hurt the environment, but then if I didn’t eat cows, it would be harmful to my body to not eat it, so I have to keep eating it. This is the mindset that many people still have because it’s what we’ve been told our whole life through all of the marketing. So maybe you can address that because people are afraid to give up meat and eat more fiber because they think it would be harmful to their body. That they wouldn’t have energy, they wouldn’t have protein, they wouldn’t have those vitamins that they’re getting from dairy, eggs, and meat.   [01:15:02] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah, let’s start with the marketing campaign. Marketing is incredibly powerful. Most food industries and also supplement industries have discovered that you’re far better trying to attack people’s emotions through marketing campaigns than you are actually conducting clinical research. Clinical research is expensive and it may not support the perspective that you want. It may in fact show the opposite, right? Why invest your money into that when you can invest your money into marketing campaigns that are designed to prey on people’s insecurities or their emotions and build fear? Got milk, the entire campaign, which most people understand comes from our government. Maybe you don’t. That was a government-run campaign. “Got Milk” was subsidized by the US government. “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” That was a US government subsidized campaign. Now, what is the government doing getting involved in what food we choose to eat? Well, that’s the issue. There is lobbying that exists that is tremendously powerful. There’s a reason why organic fruits and vegetables are expensive. The reason is that they’re not subsidized at all. If you have allowed animal products to be their true cost, the true cost would make them prohibitively expensive, and we wouldn’t have problems with people who are of lower socioeconomic status who, as part of being lower socioeconomic status the vast majority of time that also means lower educational level. And they don’t have the ability to see the big picture, which is that going to McDonald’s and getting the $3.99 Happy Meal that your kid is jumping for joy, they’re kissing you, they’re thanking you, and it’s an easy dinner, that’s actually hurting us. We have made it readily accessible. We’ve made it cheap. We’ve gotten rid of all the barriers to people consuming these unhealthy foods. And so you make the choice simple for people who fail to really have a complete understanding of what the big picture is and how that’s going to hurt them in the long run. When it comes to consuming these foods, here’s the thing that I’ll say. First of all, if you read my book, I really truly believe in meeting people where they are. And so I’m not in the business of saying this is all or nothing. This is not black and white. I’m in the business of saying the path to optimal human health is with plants. All of the healthiest cultures in human history are predominantly plant-based. The blue zones—all five—90%+ plant-based. It’s the tie that binds them together. They are all predominantly plant-based. So the evidence is clear. Science repeatedly shows us that when we substitute and we use plant products instead of animal products we live longer with less disease. It’s consistent. I mean, how many studies do we need to say the same thing? I feel like we’re in the era 50 years ago where the tobacco industry was pushing back maybe 60 years ago. Seriously. Do you know how many studies they had to do to convince people that smoking actually caused lung cancer?   [01:18:55] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [01:18:56] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: There is no randomized controlled trial to prove that smoking causes cancer. It doesn’t exist. Do we all agree that smoking causes lung cancer? It is so obvious. But they had to do a bazillion studies to convince people this is the truth, and the problem is that you had a big tobacco industry that was extremely rich, was buying lobbying power, and was basically mobilizing their resources to create confusion and tried to make this less clear. And now the exact same thing is repeating itself when it comes to our food. You have big industries that are tremendously powerful that have bought influence. And they’re also intentionally running and conducting studies or doing marketing campaigns to create confusion so that ultimately, the status quo reigns supreme. Here we are, and the average American eats 220 pounds of meat per year. That is simply not sustainable. And the problem is that we get upset when we see the amazon rainforest getting cut, getting burned, and we go do something about it. And we turn to our government. They’re not going to do anything about it. First of all, they can’t. Second of all, there are not motivated to because the lobbyists are convincing them to do otherwise. But I want everyone to keep in mind, at the end of the day, we have the ultimate power, not them. The government can do whatever it wants to do, but we are the consumer. And every single dollar that we spend is a vote for an industry. And when we choose to spend our money on purchasing 220 pounds of animal products, guess who we’re making rich? That industry. Instead, if we cut it back—literally consider this. Consider this picture, Ashley. American diet right now—10% plants, 60% processed, 30% animal products.   [01:21:04] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [01:21:04] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Okay. What if we did this? What if we went to drop the processed food and replaced it with plants? Now we’re 70% plants, 30% animal products. Gosh, that’s pretty good. But hold up. 220 pounds of meat, that’s absurd. Do we really need that much? So what if we cut that down by 65%? What if we took a third of that? We’re still eating more than a pound of meat per week. Right now, the average American eats more than their own body weight in meat per year. It’s gross. And what if we cut that down to where we are consuming one-third of that—70 pounds, 75 pounds. You can still have your meat, and now you have moved into a blue zones diet where you are 90% plant-based, 10% animal products. But the truth is this, and this is what happened to me. My favorite foods, if it was my birthday, I was going to have a rib eye and a glass of red wine. That was my food. All right. The interesting thing about it is as I started to change my nutrition and the weight was melting off my body and my anxiety was lifting and my blood pressure was dropping and my confidence was soaring, as I was doing that I wanted more and more and more. I wanted to keep feeling better and better and better. So there’s no reason to stop. You just keep ramping up your nutrition and doing better and better and better emphasizing progress, not trying to be perfect, and you keep moving in this direction. I’m just going to tell you, if you get to 90% plant-based, first of all, that’s a healthy diet. Second of all, you’re going to want more. Why would you stop? Keep going. For the people who live in fear of I don’t think I can do it, I don’t think I can be 100%, you don’t need to go and be 100% starting today. You need to take an honest look in the mirror of what you’re currently doing and say where can we do a little bit better? I just want to start this week. Give me one meal that’s plant-based. Start with that and let’s go from there.   [01:23:23] Ashley James: I love it. So there are two things to consider in terms of the microbiome of the gut. You’re a gut doctor, you’re a gut specialist so it’s best to talk to you. There’s the prebiotic and the probiotic. The probiotic is the alive bacteria that are digesting our food, making nutrients, making the short-chain fatty acids, and helping prevent disease in our body. The prebiotic is the fiber that we’re eating that feeds. I’ll use this as an example because I had a guest use it as an example. The six-pound gut biome is like having a chihuahua. But I wanted a panda, she wanted a kangaroo. Anyway, it’s a six-pound animal. People take care of their dogs and their cats more than they take care of themselves. I’m a pet owner, I will go out and buy the best food and the best everything. I know a woman who spends hundreds of dollars a month on handcrafted organic treats for her mastiff. We really take care of our animals. Imagine your gut biome is your pet. It’s your pet. You take it for walks. Go take it for a walk. Put it on a leash, take it for a walk because when you go for a walk, you’re taking your pet by microbiome for a walk. But the food you feed it is the food that’s either going to allow it to thrive or it’s going to kill it, right? And the prebiotic, the fiber you eat is feeding it. Now my question to you is about raw food versus cooked food versus a package supplement like taking a Metamucil as a fiber. We want to increase the biodiversity of the gut biome, and how we do that is by eating a variety. But if I eat cooked broccoli versus raw organic—I’m always organic because of the pesticides. Does raw broccoli have an advantage overcooked broccoli in terms of feeding the microbiome and also introducing new healthy bacteria?   [01:25:41] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Okay. There’s a lot that I want to tackle, but let’s start here. First of all, raw versus cooked. All plants contain fiber. Each plant has its own unique types of fiber, and that fiber is specific to the way that the plant is being served. So there is another well-regarded microbiome researcher named Peter Turnbaugh who did a study. This is fairly new. This is less than a year old. The study is fascinating where he basically looked at the effect on the microbiome of cooking the food, so raw versus cooked. And here’s what he found. The key is there was a difference. You wouldn’t describe necessarily that one is superior to the other. Instead, what he described is when you cook your, food you’re creating different types of fiber that feed different microbes. We want to feed all the microbes. So the key is rather than choosing one versus the other, we should have both. So if you are cooking your food one of the things I talk about in my book is the health hack, which is that if you are cooking your food, you should have a nibble of the raw food before it’s cooked. If you’re going to braise your greens, braise your kale, just make sure you chop up a couple of pieces of that kale and nibble on it while you’re cooking, while you’re braising those greens.   [01:27:33] Ashley James: Yeah.   [01:27:34] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: All right, that’s one of the things. Yeah, kind of cool. There are a couple of other topics that you brought up. You’re bringing up so many great points that you just get me really excited to talk. Let’s talk about organic versus non-organic in the context of living food. Now, when I say living food, to the average person they’re going to hear fermented. And that’s true, fermented foods have microbes. But guess what, all life—most people have not thought of this—has a microbiome. All life either has a microbiome or you are a part of the microbiome. Those are the two choices. If you’re alive, you’re one of those two things.   [01:28:19] Ashley James: Oh wait, are we the microbiome of the earth?   [01:28:21] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I think we kind of are. I hate to say this, actually, I kind of think we’re a virus because we’ve grown exponentially and we’re destructive. All right. Think about that growth—1 billion in 1800, 2 billion in 1900, 7 billion today, and 10 billion in 2050. That’s exponential. That’s the same thing that you see with viruses. All right. But all life has a microbiome, right? Take an apple, for example. They’ve actually studied this. They’ve discovered that an apple has about 100 million microbes as a part of the apple. The tremendous diversity of species. Actually more diversity on an apple than you will find inside the human body. A couple of paradoxical or interesting things. Out of curiosity, Ashley, because I’m guessing you’re going to give the answer that anyone would including me. Where do you think the microbes are on the apple?   [01:29:28] Ashley James: On the skin.   [01:29:29] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Exactly. That’s what I would say too, and it’s not a bad answer. Anyone would say that. But actually, most of them are in the core.   [01:29:36] Ashley James: In the core? The thing we throw out and don’t eat?   [01:29:39] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: The part that we throw out. That’s where most of the microbes are.   [01:29:42] Ashley James: So we should be juicing them, right? Or blending them? How would you?   [01:29:48] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Or just eat the core.   [01:29:48] Ashley James: Eat the core.   [01:29:50] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah, why not? What’s stopping you other than tradition?   [01:29:56] Ashley James: I guess there’s a minor amount of arsenic in the seeds.   [01:30:01] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yeah. You could throw out the seeds. You don’t have to eat the seeds if you don’t want to. But what’s interesting is this microbiome that this plant has serves a purpose to the plant in the same way. There are parallel tracts that exist where these microbes are there to support plant life in the same way that these microbes support us. They’re the architects of life on this planet—these microbes. We rely on our microbes to support us as we grow from newborns all the way to grown adults. And the same thing happens with these plants. From flower to fruit, the microbiome of the individual plant is evolving and it’s helping to facilitate the growth of the plant. So this apple has a hundred million microbes in a tremendous diversity of species, and they’ve looked at organic versus conventionally raised. What’s cool is the organic—to me yet another reason to motivate to consume organic—apple had more diversity. Okay. So more biodiversity on the apple, that’s a good thing. That’s a measure of health. And also, the organic apple had a stronger representation of species that are known to be probiotic. Because the word probiotic does not just mean bacteria. To be considered probiotic you have to actually demonstrate a health benefit in humans. Eating that apple goes back to this idea—eat an apple a day keep the doctor away. We’re now learning there’s a lot of truth to that, and this is part of the reason why—these microbes.   [01:31:50] Ashley James: Fascinating. I’m so excited. I’m going to start eating apple cores now with my apple.   [01:31:55] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: And then the other thing that I wanted to say really quick is the debate about prebiotics and probiotics. I’m moving a little bit into the supplement space. So before I move into it let me just say above all else that diet always comes first. All right. Diet and lifestyle come first. You can’t supplement your way from a C- gut to an A+. That’s impossible. You can’t keep a junk diet and have an A+ gut. That’s impossible. If you want a good gut you have to take care of your diet. It’s the only way. All right. But that being said, there is a place for this prebiotics and probiotics. So let’s talk about this. All right, probiotics. So everyone’s heard of probiotics—living bacteria that as I just said, they have a health benefit in humans. So we always think you got to take this capsule that has this probiotic, but that’s again a construct of marketing convincing us that the path to gut health is through a supplement. That’s what they’ve taught us. That’s not true.   [01:33:02] Ashley James: Well, they’ve taught us to go to the doctor, get a pill, and you’ll be fine, right? I believe medications have their place, but we’re overusing them 90% of the time. I believe that supplements absolutely have their place, but the problem is people have the mentality, like you said, you cannot up out supplement a bad diet. Just like you can’t out-drug a bad diet. A bad diet is a bad diet. I know everyone listening probably eats way healthier than the average person and genuinely wants to eat even healthier than that. So if we could incorporate a good diet and then find a supplement just to kick-start us or get us an edge, I’m sure we’re all interested. So we understand the advice you’re about to give is has to go in conjunction with a really good gut health diet.   [01:33:57] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yes. A supplement is meant to be the word. It’s a supplement, right? It’s done in addition to a healthy diet. And there’s definitely a place. Going back to your point, I just want to double down on what you said, which is we should not live in a world of absolutes. Meaning we should not choose to live in a world where we are fully reliant on pills and procedures for our health. That doesn’t work. And we also shouldn’t live in a world where we believe that diet alone is a silver bullet. That’s not true. The optimal approach for human health is to optimize diet and lifestyle, to fully support and potentially even extend your health with the use of supplements that are targeted, and frankly, not excessive. I don’t believe in taking 20 different supplements because you just don’t know what the interactions are. But supplementation—where appropriate—to optimize our health, and then engaging with the health care system—where appropriate—to protect ourselves. Anyway, we’ve been sold to this idea that probiotics are the source of gut health. The problem is you, for example, Ashley, have a completely unique gut microbiome. There’s literally no one on the planet with the same microbiome as you including your mom. It’s like a fingerprint. When I give you a probiotic I am prescribing a generic formula. And what I’m doing is I’m really crossing my fingers and hoping that when this generic formula mixes with your completely unique gut microbiome, that we get good chemistry. And you just don’t know. There are some people who benefit—no question. There’s also a lot of people who spend a lot of money and they get nothing. So we have to understand this limitation of our current approach, but the second part is we should understand that these probiotics already live inside of us. We don’t need to introduce it from the outside with the hope that we’re introducing something that our body is missing. Instead, we just need to acknowledge that the microbes that live inside of us, we could use them and just make them stronger. Make them more powerfully represented. And that’s where prebiotic comes into play, which is that Ashley, once again you have a completely unique gut microbiome. And although I don’t know the nooks and the crannies and the details of what’s there and what’s not, what I do know is if I feed your microbes with a prebiotic, I’m going to be selecting for specific healthy bacteria. I’m going to be selecting for the probiotics. And we’re going to enrich them, we’re going to make them more powerful, more well represented, we’re also going to be feeding them. Fiber is requisite for feeding these microbes, and then they’re going to have the ability to transform that into short-chain fatty acids. Just to step back for a moment and reconsider our big picture. If we had probiotics but we did not have fiber, there really wouldn’t be much of a point. If we had fiber but we were sterile creatures, which we’re not, there really wouldn’t be much of a point to fiber. But when fiber, specifically prebiotic fiber, connects with these bacteria, specifically probiotic bacteria, magic takes place. And what we get are postbiotic short-chain fatty acids. And the entire point of this relationship is not one or the other. The entire point is what happens when you connect the two. And that’s why I’m a bigger believer in prebiotics than probiotics.   [01:37:54] Ashley James: Because you already have a gut biome. I’ve heard someone reference the Americans have the micro Simpson of gut biomes because it’s so not diverse. We need to have something more complex and intelligent, or we have to incorporate and support our microbiome to have many more species, so be much more diverse. And we can do that, over time, by eating a variety of plants that are organic because we take on the microbiome, like you said, you eat the core of the apple with the apple. Your gut is taking on those bacteria that become part of your healthy and diverse gut biome. But the most important thing is to feed it. Feed it first. So we have to feed it before you just take a probiotic. I heard this study once that they had people take a probiotic, like acidophilus. We all heard of acidophilus. They examined their stool a month after they had stopped taking it and they found that the acidophilus was no longer there. They thought for sure taking the probiotic, taking acidophilus, or whatever probiotic would have then continued to live in the gut right. It doesn’t probably because they didn’t change their diet to incorporate enough fiber to feed it to continue its development. So you’re saying the most important thing is to start by feeding the gut the healthy fiber, variety of fibers—both cooked and raw—so that the gut can get fed, so that microbiomes can get fed. I know you’ve got to go, and I definitely want to have you back on the show because I have this whole list of topics and questions I want to explore. How to reverse chronic constipation? How to reverse diarrhea? What about people who have IBS or have a really irritated bowel and they can’t tolerate it. Every time they try to eat fiber they can’t tolerate it. These are topics I want to go deep with you. So I’d love to have you back on the show to explore that. You keep mentioning hormone balance as well, that’s something I’d like to go deeper and have you explain why is it that healing the gut, fiber, and the microbiome affects our sex hormones and our stress hormones. Why does it affect all of the hormones in our body? Interesting that I’ve heard that 25% of our T3, our thyroid hormone, is converted in the gut. What without a healthy gut we have significantly low T3 levels. So low in fact that then someone’s put on medicine. And isn’t that a shame that there are so many doctors out there that prescribe a synthetic T3 drug without even addressing gut health? Because the root cause could be in that person’s gut, and likely statistically is, given how little fiber the average person eats. There are so many more things to explore, and I definitely want listeners to know about your website. Theplantfedgut.com. The links to everything that Dr. Will does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learn True Health. I definitely am going to encourage listeners to buy your book as well, and the link to your book will be there. And people can also go to your website The Plant Fed Gut. And it says right there, want the ultimate plant fed super snack, put in your name and email. And they get a little booklet from you. That’s really cool. And of course, they can follow you as well on Instagram. I saw some of your Instagram posts that I really, really appreciated them. One, in particular, was about racial equality, and you address that we cannot have racial equality until we have medical equality. And if we really look statistically, our medical system is so skewed, especially in the United States. Other countries it is less, but in the United States it’s so skewed and it is not a fair system. We need to change. We need to make sure that our medical freedoms are protected for everyone, and that medicine is available to everyone. I don’t want to get into politics, I love that you addressed that while we’re all really conscious of it’s in our daily consciousness to be addressing and looking at and trying to change racial equality, we should know and we should also address that medical equality needs to be addressed in order to fully help everyone of all races. Thank you so much for everything that you’re doing. I love your message. You’re speaking out. You’re kind of a black sheep. I’m so excited that you’re here talking to our community of listeners, we’re all the black sheep. Let’s just say we are all on the same page as you. At times, if you ever feel like you’re the odd one out because you’re the MD that doesn’t want to give people drugs first but wants to really, really help people on a root level, heal their body, and do it in a way that is radical. It’s radical to tell someone to eat plants and not meat. It’s totally radical. You’re going to get more and more and more results the more we go down this path. I just interviewed an MD who’s been a plant-based doctor for 39 years. I love that you and your career and you’re seeing how you can help people and then you can even go do a colonoscopy and see that these diets actually work and they help heal the body from the inside out. Knowing all the science of exploring the microbiome, it’s so fascinating. Please come back on the show. I’d love to have you back. I’d love to continue to learn from you.   [01:44:04] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I appreciate it, Ashley. I definitely would love to come back. I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like a black sheep. I mean, seriously. I guess for me maybe it just seems so obvious.   [01:44:21] Ashley James: Right?   [01:44:21] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: It just seems so obvious so we need to talk about it. And I’m not afraid to share how I feel about these kinds of things because it’s really important for people. If this is the way to heal people, then we need to put it out there. And that’s been something that has been a part of me and everything I’ve done and it’s brought me to where I am today. I just wanted to add real quick a couple of things, I hope you don’t mind.   [01:44:45] Ashley James: Please do.   [01:44:46] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: At theplantfedgut.com, we have a COVID-19 guide. We have a guide to clinical research. I really think that one of the big issues—this is why I wrote this guide—is people are confused by the conflicting information that they receive. On a consumer-level, we have to have protections in a place where we become smart enough to sniff out fraud, to sniff out something that’s fake, to sniff out an agenda, and to see the truth. Because the truth exists but there’s a lot of noise. Because the truth brings us to health. Truth is the compass that guides us to health, but the only way to find that is to get rid of the noise. You can’t believe every single word that every person puts out there. We have to start discriminating because we have excessive access to information these days. And then the other thing I wanted to add is probably by the time this episode airs I have a course that I’m starting in late August that I’m super excited about. Basically, what this is is an opportunity to connect deeper with me and my ideology to go beyond the book. When I see problems I go, okay, how are we going to fix this? One of the problems is I only get 30 minutes with my patient, and I wish I could have a day to just completely educate and give them everything. And that’s where this course comes in. It’s a structured way for me to give you over seven weeks all of the information that I think is necessary to actually understand gut health and to understand how to navigate our health care system to make yourself well. What’s cool is I’ve been working on this course for about a year, and I’m just releasing it for the first time. But I’ve beta tested it twice in private with small groups and had amazing results. I’ve had people who have suffered from issues for more than 10 years who have healed because the course empowered them with the right information to know how to talk to their doctor, what questions to ask, and then we found solutions. I’m super excited about it because it’s just another way for me to connect with more people and provide the information and education necessary to help people to heal so that they’re not overly reliant on a system that’s not giving it to them. Let me step in and intervene and give you what you need.   [01:47:33] Ashley James: I love it, I love it. And so many symptoms people don’t realize are related to gut issues like the thyroid we had mentioned, but also serotonin levels. So depression and anxiety often the root is in the gut because there’s a direct relationship between serotonin production, gut health, and the nerves that connect the brain to the gut. Skin issues—so psoriasis, eczema, dermatitis, and the list goes on and on. You had mentioned hormones, but our brain fog, our energy, our weight gain—there are so many health issues that you don’t realize start in the gut. By making sure we have the healthiest gut possible, we may actually be resolving mental, emotional health issues and strengthening our mental and emotional health, strengthening the health of our immune system. 70% of our immune system surrounds our gut and is directly affected by our gut and by the food we eat. I’m sure you have this information on your website, especially because you have a guide to COVID and maintaining optimal health through this. Listeners can go to theplantfedgut.com. They can fill out their information to get your super snack guide for gut health. And then once your course is available, you just email them? Is that the best way for them to be notified on your—   [01:49:06] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: That’s right, theplantfedgut.com   [01:49:07] Ashley James: What’s the name of your course? Have you named it yet?   [01:49:11] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: Yup. It’s the Plant Fed Gut Online Course.   [01:49:13] Ashley James: Okay, great. Easy enough to remember. Awesome. We’ll have all that information in the show notes of today’s podcast. Thank you so much. Please come back to the show. I’d love to have you back.   [01:49:23] Dr. Will Bulsiewicz: I would definitely will. Looking forward to it. Thanks, Ashley.   [01:49:25] Ashley James: Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz. It was amazing. I did not know that fiber in the gut creates short-chain fatty acids that are so important for overall health. And there are so many fascinating things to learn about how we could support the microbiome through our diet. Coming up next in the next episode, we’re going to dive even deeper and learn more about how we can support the microbiome of the body with the food that we eat. And how we can actually use tests—special lab tests that you can do in your own home that will tell you all about what foods to eat and what foods not to eat to best support your microbiome in producing special chemicals that heal the body and boost the immune system. It is so fascinating. Now, as you listen to the episodes of all these amazing people and you think to yourself you would love to learn more about holistic health, you’d love to learn more about how you can heal your body and also help others. If you’re interested in augmenting your own health or changing your career becoming a health coach, I highly recommend checking out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I went through their program, I absolutely loved it. Many people go through the program just for personal growth alone, and I had such an amazing time with the personal growth that I got out of it that I would have just done it for that alone. But on top of that, you also learn a whole career. So you can do it just for yourself and your own personal growth, you can do it to help your friends and family, or you could do it to shift careers. Or maybe you already work with people and you want to have another tool in your tool belt, IIN sets you up to be successful as a health coach, they train you how to do it. They guide you, they hold your hand, it’s an amazing program, it’s very nourishing, it’s all about holistic health on, not only a physical level, but also a mental, emotional, spiritual, and energetic level. It’s a fantastic program. Why don’t you just try a section of their course for free? Go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach and they’ll give you a free module for you to try out and see if you like it. See if that’s something that you’d be interested in. And if you’re interested in it, call IIN. Just google IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and talk to them. Make sure you mention Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because they give a huge discount to our listeners. I’ve been just raving about them for years because I had a wonderful experience with them, and so many of our listeners have gone through the program as well. They’ve given all of our listeners a really fantastic discount. You can go ahead and check out a free module by going to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can just give them a call. Just google IIN and call the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Everyone you talk to on the phone has gone through their program, so they can actually sit down with you almost like a coaching session. And they can help you plan out your goals. They genuinely want to help you. There’s not like a sales pitch when you get on the phone with them. It’s not like a high-pressure sales pitch. They really lovingly and genuinely want to support everyone to make the right choice for them. And if IIN is the right choice, then they want to help you with that. So go ahead, check it out, give them a call, and see how you like it. I highly recommend it and encourage you to check it out if you’re looking to do some online learning, especially these days when we can be home more, learning more, absorbing more great information to better ourselves. What a perfect time to do that. To take this time to go into our cocoon and transform ourselves. We can choose to be a victim or we can choose to be a cause in our world, and I choose to be a cause in my world-transforming myself. When the times get tough, I’m going to transform myself. I’m going to choose to learn and grow and be even better when times are hard. And I know you want to as well. Have a fantastic rest of your day. I’m looking forward for you to listen to the next episode. It’s going to be fantastic, I can’t wait. Please share this episode with those you love and continue sharing so we could help as many people as possible to learn true health.   Get Connected with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz! Website – The Plant Fed Facebook Instagram Book by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz Fiber Fueled  

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com Dr. Klaper's sites: https://www.doctorklaper.com plantbasedtelehealth.com   Dr. Michael Klaper’s Powerful Healing Strategy https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-klapers-powerful-healing-strategy   Highlights: The food is square one Humans are herbivores Type 2 diabetes is a disease of fat toxicity High protein diets are toxic to the kidneys Indications that humans are herbivores   We have heard that a whole food plant-based diet is the best diet because it can prevent and reverse diseases. But there are also different indications and proofs why we should be herbivores as shared by Dr. Michael Klaper in this episode. He explains why food is square one and why type 2 diabetes is a fat toxicity disease and not carbohydrate problems. He also gives tips on how to ease into a whole food plant-based diet.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m very excited for you to hear today’s interview. It’s with a doctor who’s been practicing medicine for 39 years. And instead of walking in the room with a prescription pad ready to dole out drug after drug, he looks to help his patients reverse major diseases and extend the longevity and quality of their life with food. It’s going to be a lot of fun today so strap in your seat belt and get ready to go. I want to let you know, as you’re listening, if you’re interested in learning more about using food as medicine and healing your body with nutrition, please go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and sign up. I created a very affordable course that teaches you how to cook delicious food for your whole family that also heals your body. And it’s totally in alignment with what this doctor is teaching today. Just give it a try. Just try it for a month and just see how you feel. Especially if you’re quarantined at home right now, what’s a few weeks of just trying nutritious foods, trying different dishes in the effort to support your overall health? That’s learnturehealth.com/homekitchen. When you sign up you’d also be supporting the Learn True Health podcast to continue doing what we do, so you’d be supporting yourself and you’d be supporting the podcast you love. Awesome. Learnturehealth.com/homekitchen and use the coupon code LTH. If you’d like to sign up for an annual, it gives you a big discount. That’s coupon code LTH at learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. Please share this episode with those in your life who have any kind of heart disease or are afraid that they might develop it—high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and any kind of circulatory problems. Please share this episode with them as they will want to know this information. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:02:17] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 439. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. Michael Klaper on the show. His website, or one of his websites, is plantbasedtelehealth.com. It’s going to be really interesting. The other website you have is doctorklaper.com. And of course, links to everything that Dr. Klaper does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learn True Health. You’re quoted as saying, “It’s the food. It’s always the food.” And you love to show people how they can reverse disease, prevent disease, and heal their body with the nutrition in their food. So I’m very excited that you’re here today because you’re going to break down the science of how we can use food as our medicine. Welcome to the show.   [00:03:12] Dr. Michael Klaper: Well, thank you very much, Ashley. Good to be with you and your listeners.   [00:03:15] Ashley James: Absolutely. Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of how we can heal our body with food, I really want to hear more about your story. What happened in your life in your youth that led you to want to become a doctor? You kind of broke away. I mean, whenever I see an MD teaching people how to heal their body without drugs, I feel like they might be a little bit of a black sheep. You broke away from the stereotypical norm and you are an advocate for helping people heal their own body. So what happened in your life that made you become a doctor and then had you break away like a renegade to teach people how to heal without drugs?   [00:03:56] Dr. Michael Klaper: Oh my. Got a minute?   [00:03:59] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [00:04:00] Dr. Michael Klaper: Here’s my life story. I did much of my growing up on my uncle’s dairy farm in Northern Wisconsin. The natural world entered my life very early, and I’ve been milking cows since I was eight, driving tractors, and I saw a lot of things on the farm. I saw life, death cruelty, and the reality of putting meat on the table. But like the rest of society, I just closed my mind and my heart to that reality. It was registered, no doubt. But I was the kid on the farm who always wanted things to be okay. I patched up the injured animals and just as fascinated by biology in general. It was natural that I grew up and went to medical school. I graduated in the early 1970s. For the first nine years, I practiced blood and guts emergency room medicine, outpatient clinic, emergency rooms, operating rooms, and I did anesthesia. That’s what I thought I was going to do. Just acute care medicine, just patch people up when they got sick or hurt. A couple of things happened in 1981. I was a resident in anesthesiology. I thought I was going to be an anesthesiologist, and I was up in Vancouver. I was on the cardiovascular anesthesia service. Day after day, I’m putting people to sleep and I’m watching surgeons open their chest and open their coronary arteries and their heart. From their arteries, the surgeons pull this yellow greasy guck out of the inner linings called atherosclerosis. And I knew very well what that stuff was. There were already studies in the medical literature explaining it, and actually, some showing that you can melt this stuff away with a plant-based diet. I had an academic interest in it, but a personal one, my dad was already showing signs of clogged arteries. He already had a blue leg, diabetes, and chest pain. I knew that I had the genes, and if I didn’t change my diet, I was going to be laying on that operating table with that striker saw going up my sternum. I didn’t want that. I saw those folks when they woke up. I was getting some really strong messages to stop eating animal fat because that’s what that stuff was. It’s the fat of the animals largely these folks are eating. When I changed my diet to a plant-based diet, my body responded dramatically. Within 12 weeks, a 20-pound spare tire of fat melted off my waist. My high blood pressure went to normal. My high cholesterol went to normal. I felt great waking up in a nice lean light body. And I realized at that point, three-quarters of the way through my anesthesia residency, that I didn’t want to be an anesthesiologist and spend my time putting people to sleep. I’d rather go back to general practice and help them wake up. So I did, much to my parents’ dismay, and I moved to Florida. Started doing nutrition-based medicine. My patients who were able to follow my counseling—I found people in the area who would do plant-based cooking lessons. Those patients who are able to change their diet in this way to a whole food plant-based diet, they noted the same wonderful changes. They lost weight. Their high blood pressure came down, their cholesterol came down, they felt really good, and I became the happiest doctor I know. My patients get healthy right in front of my eyes. It’s the most exciting transformation in medicine to watch someone waddle into your office obese, diabetic, hypertensive, clogged up, and inflamed. And week after week, meal after meal, month after month of these healthy plant-based foods, it’s just remarkable what you see. The obesity melts away, the arteries relax and open up, the high blood pressure comes down, the joints stop hurting, the asthmatic lungs stop wheezing so much, the migraine headaches get better, the colitic bowel settles down, and they turn into normal healthy people. How exciting that is to celebrate with them these health victories. I’ve been a nutrition and lifestyle medicine doc ever since. And as important as the lifestyle is, you got to get enough sleep, you need to walk every day. Yes, yes, yes. But until you change the food stream washing through your cells meal after meal after meal, the other modifications are not going to make a great difference. It’s the food. It’s the food. There’s the food. It’s square one. You’ve got to do the other things, but the food is square one.  There’s just remarkable magic, if you will, pharmacological effects of plant-based diets that we can talk about. It’s become an art form for me to look at all the different ways that plants change the body, how they promote healing. And now we’re giving master classes in plant-based nutritional healing. That’s been my evolution. My body’s the same weight as it was back in 1981 when I graduated. It was the same weight when I graduated high school. I don’t need medications. I feel great, I just turned 73 yesterday, and I plan on doing this for as long as I can. As I said, I’m the happiest doctor I know and I want to share with the medical students before pharmaco sclerosis sets in their brains. I’ve been going to the medical schools to tell them it’s what your patients are eating before you order another $1000 scan, another $500 set of blood tests.  Ask them what they ate yesterday. If it’s full of pepperoni pizzas and buffalo wings, that’s why they’re sitting in front of you, doctor. Send them to the plant-based dietitian. Let them do the counseling. You see them back in a month and they ought to be doing better. Trying to put a new model of how medicine should be practiced in these young doctors’ heads. That’s my mission of late, and it’s a challenge, but I’m enjoying it.   [00:10:13] Ashley James: I love it. We have a listener who was going to be—I don’t know what the term is—fired but discharged from the military. He’s a career man in the military. It’s his life, he loves it, and he works down in DC. His cholesterol was so high that he was going to be medically discharged from the military from active service. I don’t know the details other than he came listening to the show, came to us. I think he heard my interview with Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. He’s a steak and potatoes kind of guy—gets on the whole food plant-based, no salt, sugar, oil protocol for one month and his cholesterol numbers came down in one month so fast that he’s been able to keep his job and keep his career. That was so cool to see that in one month, it could change that fast. You’re 73. You look very young for 73. You’ve been eating a whole food plant-based diet for 39 years?   [00:11:28] Dr. Michael Klaper: Correct, that’s exactly right. The more I found out about how meat is produced, especially today’s industrial factory farming and what I saw happen on the farm, I chopped the heads off chickens. I did all of that, and now I realize the violence involved. I just don’t want anything to do with that. And learning what it’s doing to the earth, to the animals, and to the people who consume it, that’s certainly gotten me into a plant-based diet, and there’s no looking back. There’s no sneaking a cheeseburger now and then.   [00:12:04] Ashley James: But you know what, there are unhealthy vegetarians. There are unhealthy vegans. Just cutting meat out doesn’t mean someone can be healthy. I’d love for you to explain the finer nuances of what going just going meatless alone could still have someone develop diabetes or develop a heart attack. But what are the finer nuances of a whole food plant-based diet versus vegetarianism that would have people heal, prevent, and reverse disease?   [00:12:35] Dr. Michael Klaper: Thank you. That’s such a key question, of course. And the answer is in that phrase. It rolls off our tongues, people like you and me—whole food plant-based diet. It sounds like one word here. But wait a minute, whole foods, stop right there. We’re talking about whole foods like they grew out of the ground that you could recognize in the garden. Oh, there’s a tomato over there. There’s a carrot growing over there. There are green beans hanging on the fence there—whole foods. That’s really what we’re designed to eat. We have the same digestive system that our gorilla and bonobo cousins have, and they’re up in the trees eating leaves and fruit because we have this digestive system meant to digest a high-fiber, plant-based food. We are not carnivorous apes. We are plant-eating, simian-like creatures. We have fingers on our hands, not claws. We got long intestines for digesting fiber. We’ve got enzymes in our saliva for digesting starch, not protein. We’re clearly plant-eating creatures. And as long as we stay on that diet, it’s a whole food plant-based food stream, then our body knows what to do with it. The microbiome hums along there, the arteries stay open, the blood stays free-flowing, and we live our long healthy natural lives. I’ve never had a gorilla in the office saying doc, I can’t keep my hands off the cheeseburgers. The animals know what to eat. And our simian cousins do fine with their whole plant foods. When we stray from that, and there are two ways that the [inaudible 00:14:23] vegetarian straight one is broadening their definition. I’m vegetarian so I can eat eggs and dairy. Well, you put cow’s milk with baby calf growth fluid and it’s filled with the hormones, fats, allergenic proteins, and growth factors. You flood your system with that—with the milk, the cheese, and the ice cream. That’s going to not do great things for your system. It’s going to spawn bacteria that cause problems. It’s going to change your blood chemistry. It’s going to change your hormone levels. It’s going to set you up for everything from diabetes to autoimmune diseases.  And eggs that people have—they’re full of cholesterol, saturated fat, and choline that turns the bacteria turn into trimethylamine that drives cholesterol into the artery walls. We’re not egg and dairy eating creatures either. You don’t see the gorillas going around raiding birds’ nests and eating the eggs. That isn’t our affair. When we stick to the whole grains, whole potatoes, legumes, and the whole wonderful world of plant-based foods, lots of steamed grainy yellow vegetables, colorful salads, hearty soups, stews, casseroles, and stir-fries. When we keep our belly filled with that, we eat all these colorful sweet fruits for dessert, our body hums right along. Our arteries stay open, and the inflammation in our body subsides, and the blood is free-flowing. The artery is good. There’s a reason that long-term vegans are lean. They will not become obese. We can talk about why. The calorie density just isn’t there. It’s mostly fiber and water that we’re eating. It doesn’t stick to you. If you go back for the fourth bowl of vegetables, who cares, they’re just fiber and water. It’s like high-quality gasoline in a sports car. Runs great, but you start putting the eggs, the dairy, and then the processed food—even the vegan process food. But if they’re made of flour, oil, sugars, flavorings, glutens, dough conditioners, yellow number three dye, and all the adulterants that get put into the various chips, [inaudible 00:16:51], the bips, the burgers, and all of that. Well then, It’s like you’re mixing diesel fuel, kerosene with your racing gasoline. The engine starts running rough, the gas line plug gets clogged up your arteries, and diseases happen. Then we put names on them. You have high blood pressure, you have type 2 diabetes, but really, they’re just putting the wrong fuel and the engine clogs up, our insulin receptors clog up our arteries. Similar to your man in the service there who jumped on Dr. Esselstyn’s program there, he gets on that whole food plant-based food stream and the arteries clear out, the cholesterol comes down. They say, oh, how wonderful, how wonderful. But really, it’s predictable. That’s what should happen. That’s what must happen. You put the right fuel in and the numbers take care of themselves. I joke that clinical reporter, that people get better on plant-based diets was published in that prestigious medical journal called duh. Yeah, that’s the point. We do get better because it’s the food we ought to be running on. Long answer, but it’s just a matter of obeying natural law. Your house cat is a carnivore. The majority of food that goes down a mountain lion’s gullet or your house cat is the flesh of animals. They are carnivores. We are not. We are herbivorous creatures. The majority of what goes down our gut should be whole plant foods. Now, you can quibble around the edges with a little bit of meat once a month or no, you probably wouldn’t. I’m sure the gorilla eats the occasional beetle little worm on the underside of the leaf there, but by and large, as long as we stick to those whole plant foods, our body knows what to do with it. It functions beautifully and these diseases should not occur. Type 2 diabetes should never occur in a homo sapiens body. Obesity should never really occur. These autoimmune diseases shouldn’t occur. These are all dietary diseases. And the hopeful news is they get better when you put the right fuel and then most of them go away.   [00:19:12] Ashley James: In working with your patients for the last 39 years, you have helped people reverse so many different diseases. If a woman comes to you with an autoimmune disease like maybe MS or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, what do you do? Do you put her on prescription drugs? Or do you start her on a whole food plant-based diet and see how fast and how far you can go with that before you put her on drugs? Or do you not use drugs at all?   [00:19:45] Dr. Michael Klaper: Very perceptive question. The answer is kind of yes to all of the above. I’m a complete pragmatist. I’ll do what works, and I want to save that woman’s tissues whether it’s in her joints, her kidneys, or her nervous system. I want to quell the inflammation and get to the root of the disease as efficiently as possible. In the past, if someone’s in the middle of a big arthritis flare or whatever, I have no qualms about her short course of tapering down prednisone or other types of anti-inflammatories. The beauty of changing to a whole food plant-based diet, but we’re not anywhere near answering your very complex question there, is it bathes the tissues with antioxidants and it has a real anti-inflammatory effect. When you say autoimmune diseases, the most common ones we see are the autoimmune inflammatory arthritis. The woman who wakes up and her joints are sore and severely fatigued, maybe she’s got a faint skin rash, and goes to the rheumatologist. Negative for rheumatoid arthritis, but it’s seronegative rheumatoid arthritis. Here’s a woman that has most likely a so-called leaky gut phenomenon. She’s injured her gut wall and food proteins and bacterial cell walls are leaking out into the bloodstream and flowing through her joints and causing this inflammation. Here’s a person that if you pull out the offending molecules, and that includes even starting with water fast for 5 days, 7 days, or 10 days to just put the fire out. It’s remarkable how dramatic these inflammatory states respond to a water fast—we can talk about that—but even without the water fast, if she just can’t or doesn’t want to do that. Just drinking vegetable broth for a day or two and then going on a very low antigenic plant-based diet—blended squash, sweet potatoes, quinoa. So just slowly add these in—steamed green vegetables and probably some omega-3 algae-derived DHA and a fairly hefty dose—300-600 milligrams a day. We often get a dramatic improvement in the inflammation throughout the body. And then you want to keep her on that so it doesn’t flare. You can’t go back to the fried chicken and the grilled fish that she was eating before. Occasionally, it’s indicated to do a leaky gut repair if they’ve got all sorts of hives and skin rashes after they eat particular foods. They’re showing signs of leaky gut. There’s a protocol of various supplements—quercetin, glutamine, and probiotics for a couple of months to help the gut wall heal. That’s the most common type of autoimmune conditions that we commonly see. Now over on the other end of the spectrum of autoimmune diseases are the real tough gunslinger diagnoses that make most doctors want to run the other way when they see it on the chart there are multiple sclerosis and Hashimoto’s. These are very complex diseases. These are more than just inflammation from a leaky gut. If you see Hashimoto’s thyroid under a microscope, it is swarming with lymphocytes. There’s an inflammatory fire burning in that gland, and it’s hard to put out. Eventually, it burns out after a couple of years. I have not found the magic pill or herb. I wish I could tell them to eat two cloves of garlic and wear rutabaga around their neck and their thyroid will heal. But most of us docs here, we would love to turn off that raging inflammatory fire in the thyroid gland. You support them with thyroid hormone, and we nibble around the edges with various herbs, anti-inflammatory oils, and things. But I’ve not found the magic key for Hashimoto’s and similar to multiple sclerosis. Certainly, there are legendary recoveries for multiple sclerosis. Dr. Saray Stancic, an infectious disease specialist, pretty much cured herself of multiple sclerosis. A number of people have done these dramatic turnarounds, but I’ve got a couple of other MS patients who they’ve been plant-based for years and the disease is still progressing. It’s clear when you have a lot to learn about those particular conditions. But still, even if the disease is progressing, there’s no way I can see when you bite into a chicken leg or a chicken breast, what are you really eating? At the risk of being graphic here, you’re biting into that chicken’s muscle, artery, tendon, and nerve and now you’re chewing up the nerve tissue—the myelin and neural proteins of another animal. Especially if you’ve got a leaky gut, some of that myelin from the cow, the chicken, the pig, the lamb, or whatever you’re eating is going to get in your system. If you’ve got antibodies against myelin or you’ve got some type of neurologic activity going on, the last thing I would think you would want is the myelin of another animal flowing through your immune system, in your bloodstream. Just to help put out the autoimmune inflammatory fire, stop running animal tissue through your body just seems to be a square one logical thing to do. And then again, lots of dark leafy greens and the omega-3 containing nuts and seeds. If you’re also seeing a neurologist, you can use some of their high-tech medicines. I’m fine with that it’s I won’t stand on principle if it will let them keep walking and keep seeing the MS patients then I’m happy to work with the conventional docs. The patient still should be eating a really healthy plant-based diet no matter what other therapies that they’re on.   [00:26:56] Ashley James: Very good, Dr. Terry Wahls, I’ve had her on the show and she’s doing studies now using diet to reverse MS. Very promising work, and she’s working with Dr. Kahn doing studies on the plant-based diet reversing MS. I love that you’re pragmatic and you’re willing to continue to learn, grow, and implement what you can to help your patients to heal. It’s just those more complex cases where it’s like how far can food take us, right? I’m a health coach so my client comes to me. I don’t want to throw the kitchen sink at them. I used to do that early on. I’ve been doing this for nine years, and I used to do that early on. I just want to throw everything at them at once and overwhelm them. That doesn’t help them with long-term success, but in the beginning, let’s just get them on the path to eating and bringing in nutrition into their body. Like you said, bathing all those cells in their body with the right nutrition and see how far you can get just with that. It’s amazing how many symptoms. I have them write down all their symptoms and grade them at the beginning. A full of symptom inventory checklist. Then a month later, I have them go back and do it again, and every month have them do it. What’s amazing is they see how many of their symptoms resolve just by the fact that they’ve changed their nutrition to nutrient-dense foods so that now their body is being bathed, like you said, in these antioxidants, in these phytonutrients, and all the vitamins and the minerals they can possibly take in, and so much reverses. And then after that, maybe there’s still some lingering things that they can work out with. Like you said, herb supplements, or maybe they need to work with a functional doctor and see how that can be supported. You’re eating a standard American diet, you take your symptoms, and you go to a typical MD, you’re going to walk out with a bag full of prescriptions. Which one of my previous guests—who I just had on the show—he’s basically the mayor of Brooklyn. Very interesting story. He walked out of his doctor’s office with a prescription pad full of drugs and basically came home with a bag full of drugs with multiple problems. Diabetes, he’s losing his eyesight, losing his feeling in his hands and feet, and has an ulcer. The doctor, the MD was like get ready to be on this entire bag of drugs—like 15 medications—for the rest of your life—and probably more.  He went home and he had a little pamphlet they gave him that said, how to live with diabetes. And something about that saying didn’t sit with him. It was almost like divine intervention. He went home and googled how to cure diabetes, and that’s when he discovered the whole food plant-based diet. He got on that, and it’s been a few years. He’s totally off all those meds, he’s reversed all those conditions—the conditions that his MD said you will have for the rest of your life and you will be on these meds for the rest of your life. Does that upset you? You’ve been a doctor for so long. You’re kind of a pioneer. You’re way ahead of your time helping people reverse disease with food. Doesn’t it upset you when you see so many people being told they’ll always have type 2 diabetes? They’ll always have these problems. They have to be on these meds for the rest of their life when you know they can heal their body. I mean, doesn’t that just get to you?   [00:30:41] Dr. Michael Klaper: It drives me around the bin. It leaves me somewhere between anger and despair, but the determination to correct this. It’s just outrageous to let these young students go through four years of medical school and never once ask about what their patients are eating. We practice medicine like what our patients are eating has no effect on these diseases. It’s some genetic mismatch, or your liver is making too much LDL. Let’s pound down those enzymes and drop that LDL level. No, doctor. It’s from what they’re eating meal after meal. I practiced medicine for 45 years before anybody put the words disease reversal into the same sentence for me. When the light went on, I said these are reversible diseases. Why didn’t somebody tell me this? Why aren’t we telling these young medical students these are reversible diseases. All of us who practice a diet and lifestyle kind of medicine, we have files full of patients who used to have type 2 diabetes, who used to have high blood pressure, who used to be obese, who used to have an autoimmune disease. These diseases go away. How can we withhold that information from the students and from our patients? It’s unethical to do that, and it really has to change. The public needs to demand that. The students have to demand it, which is what I’m advocating. We’ve formed a non-profit initiative called Moving Medicine Forward, and I’ve been going to the medical schools telling this to the students. You’re dealing with reversible diseases from what your patients are eating. Ask them what they’re eating, get them on a plant-based diet, and you will see most of these diseases go away right before your very eyes. Do you want to heal these patients or don’t you? I let that question hang in the air. Why are you going into medicine? Do you want to heal these people or don’t you? Either way, if you just call in your obese diabetic patient and you clock your time over their A1C level. You’ve got to raise your metformin level, we’ve got to raise your glyburide level. Okay, you come back in two months. Let’s see what your numbers look like. If that’s the kind of medicine you’re going to practice, you’re sure not helping your patients. You’re just going to watch them get fatter and sicker until you get that call from the wife, John had a big heart attack. He’s in the ER. They’re not sure if he’s going to make it. That’s what you’re going to witness, and you’re going to leave medicine. You’re not going to do this for 25, 30 years. It’s discouraging. It’s bleak medicine, especially when the way to heal these patients is right in front of you. It’s on their dinner plate. Probably you need to change your diet too, doctor, because there’s nothing sadder than a doctor who walks in the exam room with a big obese potbelly and a pocket full of statins and beta-blockers for his own high blood pressure and his own hyperlipidemia. That’s no example to set for a patient. They want to see a healthy healer walk through that door. It’s all accessible just for ordering the bean chili instead of the beef chili. That’s the huge sacrifice we’re asking people to make. I mean the cuisine is delicious. You can eat all you want. And you could do it Italian, East Indian, Mexican, or Chinese. This is not a diet of deprivation, but somebody needs to speak the truth to these students. But with the meat industry, big pharma, big egg, and all that, there’s a lot of distortion of the truth that’s getting into these young docs heads. So a few of us are trying to reach them directly. And if people are interested, again, go to my website doctorklaper.com. It’s all spelled out, doctorklaper.com, and click on Moving Medicine Forward. You’ll see the work we’re doing. But absolutely, it causes me great consternation that in this day and age, we’re still withholding that information from the students and the patients. It’s unconscionable and it can’t stand. The patients know it. It’s getting easier though. When I go to the medical schools—years ago before COVID, now we’re all online—now, in every second, third, fourth-year med school class, there’s always 20, 30, 40 students who’ve seen films like Forks Over Knives. They’ve seen What the Health, and they’ve seen Cowspiracy. The light’s on, and the kids know something’s up with nutrition here. They’re worried about the environment. They know the importance of all of us adopting a plant-based diet. So the message is getting easier to deliver to the students, but the faculty is still pretty resistant. But they will yield. Let the truth be told or the heavens fall. We’ll keep pecking away at that wall and eventually the wall of ignorance and resistance it’ll come down.   [00:35:38] Ashley James: Very cool. I’d like to talk about carbohydrates. I was type 2 diabetic. I reversed it with food and supplementation of nutrients. I no longer have type 2 diabetes, but I was left afraid of carbohydrates. It really started when I was a child. My mother, who was thin and fit, was incredibly afraid of carbohydrates. She was very afraid of becoming fat, of becoming obese, and she would wake up really early in the morning to go to a 90-minute exercise class. She would do that every day and eat lean chicken and vegetables and never ever, ever touch potatoes or rice or any kind of grain. She was just so afraid of carbohydrates. When I had type 2 diabetes, I was again afraid of carbohydrates. I would do things like Atkins wishing that the promise of Atkins would be bestowed upon me. That this promise of being incredibly healthy. Oh, all you have to do is eat lots of fat and protein and very very few carbohydrates and you too could be diabetes free and full of health and vitality. Well, I don’t know anyone who has achieved long-term health and vitality by eating such an acid-forming diet, but I felt very sick doing Atkins. But every time I did it, I thought it was me. That I was failing somehow, or my body was broken somehow because I kept reading these books and kept seeing all the information out there that that was the way to go. Even my doctors would say you have to eat 50 grams or less of carbohydrates. Well, in coming into the whole food plant-based diet, it seemed radical this idea that you would eat almost entirely your diet is carbohydrates. Of course, there’s healthy fats and protein as well within a whole food, but the majority of it is a complex whole food carbohydrate—brown rice, quinoa, potatoes, and vegetables. They all contain carbohydrates and starches, and I was afraid of it. I chose to dive in because I like doing experimentation, and in eating this way, what shocked me was my blood sugar went even lower. I actually burst into tears. I had a meal, an hour later I took my blood sugar—it was 87. I burst into tears. I eat 200 grams of carbohydrates on average every day, but they’re whole food sources. So I’m eating potatoes every day, brown rice every day, and what I noticed is I wake up earlier, I have more energy, and my body wants to go to sleep at night. I just noticed that my body shifted, and it has more energy throughout the day, but I also wake up earlier. Then my body’s more ready for bed at night, which was really just an interesting shift in just increasing carbohydrates in the form of whole food carbohydrates.  I know some people who are still afraid, even with all this information, they’re still afraid of eating potatoes. They’re still afraid of eating brown rice because carbohydrates have received a very bad rap. I would love for you to get into more details. You wouldn’t be taking these potatoes and putting butter on them or putting olive oil on them. You wouldn’t put even some veganaise or whatever. You wouldn’t take processed oil and include it in the foods. Why is it that someone can eat more carbohydrates and their blood sugar becomes more stable if they eliminate processed fats? Why is it that we’re seeing that processed fats have a larger role in disrupting blood sugar and insulin regulation than eating a whole food carbohydrate would?   [00:39:40] Dr. Michael Klaper: That’s a key question. Congratulations on your bravery for persevering with a really natural diet, and you got rewarded—as you would and should. Because we are carbohydrate burning creatures. Ask any gorilla, ask any gazelle, ask any buffalo. We are meant to burn carbohydrates. The mitochondria in our cells burn glucose preferentially, not fats. We are sugar-burning organisms, and that’s what the grazing animals are eating. That’s what the gorillas are eating—the leaves, the fruits, and the roots. And that’s what our ancient paleolithic ancestors ate, not mammoth meat. We spent all day foraging, digging up these starchy roots and tubers. Most of the calories that came in the paleolithic camp were gathered by the women who spent all day foraging for the starchy roots, tubers, berries, leaves, and fruits, but these are carbohydrate-heavy whole plant foods. Nature makes their plants out of carbohydrates. We’ve got this beautiful digestive system that burns them cleanly, and that’s the point. Glucose, which is what sugars and starches are, it’s a clean-burning fuel. Once it goes into mitochondria, the energy is extracted from the glucose molecule. And what’s the waste product? The carbon dioxide that you breathe off in your lungs and water that you pee out in the urine. It leaves the body cleanly, elegantly, and delivers a lot of good energy. The problem is fats. When people are grossly diabetic—and type 2 diabetes is the most common type because people have clogged their insulin receptors up with fats, we’ll get to that in a minute. Once they’re all insulin resistant and their insulin receptors are clogged up with fats, then they eat some rice, potatoes, or some fruit—and because their insulin sectors don’t work because of the fat—their blood sugar spikes way up. And people say, aha, see those bad old carbohydrates. They’re evil foods for you and they make you fat. No, they don’t. Carbohydrates cannot, with one exception, turn into fats. They can’t. When you think about it, the body is not going to take a ring of glucose, blow it apart of the mitochondria, grab the two, three-carbon fragments, and start stringing them together and make it a long-chain fatty acid with a bunch of enzymatic steps to turn that sugar into fat. Not going to happen. Your body’s not going to do that. What’s it really going to do? If you, at dinner time, eat a couple of potatoes and a heap of rice, you take in a carbohydrate load at 6:00 PM in the evening, what’s going to happen? Blood sugar is going to go up, that’s true, and insulin is going to be secreted by the pancreas. That’s going to move the glucose into your muscles and your liver where it’s going to be stored in a form called glycogen. That’s the energy we use in our muscles to walk around, breathe, et cetera. But once the glycogen stores are full in the muscle, what happens to that extra energy? You burn it off as heat. Your body temperature will go up a quarter of a degree, and you’ll stick your foot out from under the covers at night or throw the covers off, and you’ll radiate that heat off to space. It will not turn into fat. What will happen is as you rightly imply—now if you pour olive oil on your baked potato or on your pasta—you eat fat and sugar at the same time, the body will preferentially burn the sugar and will store that fat for later. That sugar and fat combo does stick to you, but the real damage is done is that is the fat. And again, people are keeping fat in their blood all day of bacon and eggs for breakfast, cheeseburger for lunch, and fried chicken for dinner, or pizza with cheese then the olive oil. All these fats, they’re keeping their blood fatty all day, day after day, week after week, month after month. It never really clears out of the bloodstream. And as a result, the fat starts oozing into the liver and into the muscle cells and they start clogging up the fat molecules, clog up the insulin receptor mechanisms. And then insulin that needs to move sugar from your bloodstream into your muscle doesn’t work, so the sugar piles up in the bloodstream and goes up. It’s not a good thing to walk around with high sugars. It hurts your arteries, it hurts a lot of things. But the primary problem is not the carbohydrates, it’s the fats. We need a little bit of fat, but get it out of a handful of almonds, walnuts, some olives on your salad, or some avocado in your dressing. Get it out of whole foods. We need some fats. You don’t want to eat grossly fatty foods as far as the things made with egg yolks, vegetable oils, certainly the meats, the dairy, the cheeses, and all that stuff. That’s where it comes from. Type 2 diabetes is a disease of fat toxicity, it’s not a disease of carbohydrate problems. Your mother—God bless her—your mother didn’t know, my mother didn’t know, who knew? But she was given bad information by the doctors at the time who are chasing these blood sugar numbers. Oh, it’s the sugar, it’s the sugar. No, it’s not, doctor. It was fat all along. You changed that. You got rid of most of the fat when you went on a whole food plant-based diet. Your insulin receptors cleared out, and suddenly you’re able to metabolize that very slowly released glucose that comes from whole rice, whole potatoes. They’re released very moderately into the bloodstream and don’t cause a big spike in sugars, as you noted there. Again, it’s just going back to natural law. We are carbohydrate burning creatures here, and it’s the fat that seduces us. The folks on the keto diets who have these low blood sugars, they’re all insulin resistant, but because they run the other way when they think about eating any carbohydrates. They never eat any so no, their blood sugar doesn’t go up. And they say, see, it cures diabetes. No, ma’am. No, sir. Your diabetes is not cured. You are insulin resistant as hell as you would find out if you ate some carbohydrates how high it goes, but this is not a state of health. The steak in ketosis week after week after week. There’s stress on the body. I think these folks are setting themselves up for some bad diseases, but that’s another story. But anyway, ask any gorilla. We should subsist on whole plant foods, and if we do, the gorillas don’t go diabetic, and there’s no reason we should either. Again, thank heavens it’s one of those eminently reversible diseases. If you’ve got any pancreas function left at all, you should be able to handle the glucose from whole plant foods quite well, and diabetes is one of those reversible diseases.   [00:47:02] Ashley James: Triglycerides is something that we have come to know as being a better indicator of heart disease than cholesterol. I’ve been told by my doctor that high triglycerides are caused by eating sugar. Can you explain how we could eat a whole food plant-based diet where we’re eating a ton of carbohydrates but at the same time lower our triglycerides?   [00:47:29] Dr. Michael Klaper: We’ll get to that at the end. Yes, when I said with one exception, sugars don’t turn into a fast. The one exception is if you really flood your liver, especially with fructose, which is not a friendly sugar. Muscles cannot burn fructose. There is only one organ that burns fructose and that’s your liver. If you’re eating way too much fructose, fruit juices, various high fructose corn syrup, confectioners, and things like that, the body will take some of those fructose molecules, rearrange them, and turn them into your triglycerides. But let’s talk about some science here, if you don’t mind.   [00:48:15] Ashley James: I’d love that, please.   [00:48:17] Dr. Michael Klaper: The real issue here when you say triglycerides is a better indicator than cholesterol, realize that all of those statements are derived from a population of Joe meat and potatoes Americans who are eating meat and dairy every day. In those folks, triglycerides and LDL cholesterol they’re markers. They’re indicators. These are the folks you’re going to get in trouble because of what they’re eating. It’s not so much the absolute number of your triglyceride or your LDL is. Atherosclerotic plaques do not form on your artery walls because your LDL is too high. These are inflammatory lesions. These arteries are being injured meal after meal of fried chicken muscle, vegetable oils, frying french fries, high fructose corn syrup, phosphoric acid from cola drinks, the artificial colorings and flavorings, the detergents, and the polysorbate 80 that keeps the candy bar soft. These detergents injure the inner artery walls, the endothelial lining. Meal after meal, day after day of exposure to this chemical these all rips up the endothelial linings. When you grill a steak or a burger, you are oxidizing cholesterol in the muscle of the animal. When you eat that oxidized cholesterol and it goes over those ripped up endothelial linings, that’s how it’s able to get into the wall of the artery and set off the inflammatory reaction that winds up with a plaque being formed that can rupture and kill you. But this is an active biological process. It’s not just about how high is your triglycerides, how high is your LDL. There is an inflammatory fire burning in the walls of the arteries kindled and kept blazing by the person’s daily diet. If you are on a whole food plant-based diet, if the only thing you’re running through those arteries are rice, greens, beans, papayas, fruits, and vegetables—just filled with antioxidants without the fried animal muscle, the Neu5Gc, the endotoxin, the aldehydes, and all the things that are inherent in a meat-based diet. You pull those out and you bathe those artery walls with antioxidants, phytonutrients, resveratrol, and all these things meal after meal, the arteries heal. And these plaques melt away as Dr. Esselstyn demonstrates, but cardiologists have become these fear-filled technicians ricocheting off these numbers. What’s your LDL particle size? What’s your ratio? What’s your LDL number? Doctor, you’re a healer of arteries. Think about what is injuring those arteries. It’s artery abused by the owner of the arteries, doctor. Talk to the owner of those arteries about how they’re treating them. If you never change the oil in your sports car and you’re screeching the tires, eventually you’re going to wind up with a rickety engine and bald tires. That’s what this person’s doing to their artery walls. Talk to them, doctor. Get real. Don’t just raise their statin dosage. There’s an active biological process going on here that will turn that process into a healing one with a change in the fuel mixture flowing through those arteries and those arteries will heal, doctor. When you say triglycerides are higher, they’re just indicators for who’s beating up on their arteries. Now I’ve got vegans with cholesterols at 210, and cholesterol is not an evil molecule. Your liver makes it, so your adrenal glands can make cortisol out of it. And your genitals can make your estrogen, your testosterone out of it that’s why the liver makes it. If you don’t have enough iodine in your diet, and you have low-grade hypothyroidism, that will raise your cholesterol. There are reasons why a vegan may have slightly higher cholesterol. But if their inflammatory markers are stone-cold negative, they’re not injuring their arteries meal after meal, I don’t care that their cholesterol is 208. They’re never going to develop a plaque. As I said, when the arteries are inflamed, there are all sorts of inflammatory markers you can measure—high-sensitivity CRP, myeloperoxidase, oxidized cholesterol. There’s a whole panel now that you can measure. If those are stone-cold negative, you get an ultrasound of their carotid arteries and they’re smooth and clean, I don’t care that their cholesterol is 210. I can put that person on statins. They do not have the disease of atherosclerosis.  There is a medical term, I would say, doctors, please, make the distinction between benign hypercholesterolemia where your liver just happens to put out a little extra LDL in your bloodstream versus the disease—the active biological inflammatory process of atherosclerosis burning in the walls of the arteries. They are not the same thing. You can have benign mild hypercholesterolemia without the artery disease. It depends on how the owner of the arteries treats those arteries. Thanks for letting me get that out, but I want to free people. It’s what I call the tyranny of the numbers. We’re so scared. Oh my god, my LDL is 184. How many statins do I need? Get off that merry-go-round. Treat your arteries like the gorillas treat theirs. I don’t have any gorillas on statins or any bonobos. There really shouldn’t be any humans needing them either, ask Dr. Esselstyn. He occasionally uses it acutely to drive down their cholesterol for a few months. If you got a patient on death’s door or were all clogged up, yeah I don’t have any problem with six months of statin. There’s an emergency measure. But it’s the food, it’s the food, it’s the food going to heal that person, not the statins. People need to be aware. I’m giving that masterclass this Sunday evening if people want to hear that in my masterclass. Go to my website and sign up for a master class on healing arteries and hearts.   [00:54:49] Ashley James: Very good. You mentioned that it’s more about what is doing damage to the artery and what is damaging and inflaming the artery. There are all these blood tests and they’re showing either triglycerides and cholesterol. Cholesterol is a catchphrase for a bunch of different sized molecules. It’s like what’s damaging that artery for that person? Is it high blood sugar? High blood sugar damages the artery, all the oxidative stress. What you’re saying is really the best thing to look at are the inflammatory markers.   [00:55:25] Dr. Michael Klaper: Yes.   [00:55:26] Ashley James: Can you break down and teach us what are the safe numbers? You said there’s a whole panel, but for those who don’t know about the inflammatory markers, what is the best way to measure artery damage, basically?   [00:55:42] Dr. Michael Klaper: I’ll be glad to answer that question. Pulling back the focus a little bit though, a wise doctor once said, anybody who’s been eating the standard American diet for more than 30, 40, 50 years, you have artery disease. It doesn’t matter what your markers are. I used to order a lot of these, I don’t order so many anymore. Because the truth of it is no matter what the numbers are, the treatment is the same. Get on a whole food plant-based diet, run those greens and beans through your blood vessels, and no matter what the numbers are, they’re going to take care of themselves. Ultimately, no one needs to really focus on these numbers. The idea is that what they’re telling you is there is an inflammatory fire burning in the walls of your arteries or not. And if there is, put it out with a whole food plant-based diet. If people are really serious about pursuing this, go to the website of either Boston Heart Laboratories—I have no connection with either of these labs—or Cleveland HeartLab. They have these lovely diagrams and the lovely panels of all the inflammatory markers there. So Boston Heart or Cleveland HeartLab will show you. But basically, there’s a progression. As the artery starts to get inflamed—first of all, measure the oxidized cholesterol. That’s the really atherogenic particle. See if that is elevated. And the different labs, the other different range of normal. But check for oxidized cholesterol. Then as inflammation starts happening, you start getting prostaglandin E2 two building up. Isoprostane two is one of the early markers of inflammation. And then, as it progresses, as plaque starts developing, you get a protein release called C-reactive protein. And the test for that is hs-CRP—high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. You want that less than one.  As plaque develops and the white blood cells invade the plaque and start softening it and getting ready to rupture, which would set off a clot, then the enzymes that the white cells use to soften the plaque material, the monocytes release phospholipase A2, PLA2s. And the white blood cells release an enzyme called myeloperoxidase or MPO. That’s the panel. If I’ve got a patient eating a standard western diet and his isoprostane is up, he’s full of oxidized cholesterol, he’s already putting out CRP, and his myeloperoxidase and fossil lipids are up, he not only has a plaque, but they’re probably getting ready to rupture. This man needs to jump on Dr. Esselstyn’s green heavy diet. Boot in, full tilt. If I have a vegan—10-year, 20-year vegan—who’s eating rice, beans, and greens, but his cholesterol is 222 but his oxidized cholesterol is near zip, and his CRP is less than one. Again, his myeloperoxidase and his fossil lipid, they’re all negative. I send him over to the ultrasound store there and they check his carotids and they are slick and clean with nice laminar flow. This man does not have the disease atherosclerosis. I don’t care if their cholesterol is 220. He’s not cooking up plaques here. He’s a very low risk. This man does not need a statin. Those are markers. The individual numbers vary with the different labs, but if they’re grossly high or negative, those are the two boundaries that you’re looking at.   [00:59:49] Ashley James: Very cool. Thank you for clarifying that. When you had said that fructose can increase triglycerides if someone were to eat a raw vegan diet that’s more of a fruitarian, would that be enough to increase triglycerides? Or you’re saying more like concentrated highly processed foods like high fructose corn syrup and drinking Coca-Cola, that kind of thing? It’s basically the standard American diet, which is full of processed sugar and processed fructose versus eating whole fruit.   [01:00:25] Dr. Michael Klaper: Correct. When you bite an apple, what’s really in your mouth? What do you find? It’s mostly water, fiber, and a little fructose. There are other sugars involved. There’s not that much fructose, but it comes in with B vitamins and minerals to help with the metabolism of the fructose. Really, how many apples can you eat? You’re not going to be getting that much fructose from whole fruits. Now once you throw six mangoes, a pound of grapes, four bananas, and pineapple into a blender and make a fruit smoothie, you are full of fructose. Chug-a-lug it down in 90 seconds, that’s a heck of a fructose load. You do that—and some of my fruitarian folks do—that’s a good way to get to jack up your triglycerides and give you a surge on your weight and possibly a fatty liver. But again, there’s no one other animal that does that. I tell folks if you’re going to do a smoothie, it should be a green smoothie. Just packed solid with baby kale and baby broccoli or whatever with some almond milk in there, some ground flax seeds, and maybe some frozen mangoes for sweetness, but mostly greens.  If you’re making up a smoothie like that, or any kind of smoothie, don’t chug-a-lug it down all at once. Take a mouthful, put the glass down, chew up the mouthful, mix it with your saliva, swallow it, wait 10 minutes, wait 15 minutes, let it get down into your stomach out into your duodenum, let it absorb, and start getting into your bloodstream there before you take the next swallow there. But take an hour, take two hours to drink a smoothie. Don’t chug-a-lug those things down all at once. There’s nothing physiologic about dumping 32 ounces of fructose and potassium into your system all at once. That’s my thought on fruit. How many mangoes are you going to eat? Three? That’s really not going to cause a huge fructose injury to your body, I don’t think.   [01:02:32] Ashley James: Especially because, like you said, the sugar, the fructose is bound to the fiber, the body has to break down the fiber, and the fiber helps feed the healthy gut biome. It slows everything down. I was fascinated when I learned that the body takes nine hours to utilize all of the carbohydrates, the fuel, the energy from a sweet potato or a yam. So you eat a yam, it’s nine hours of constant fuel slowly being dripped into your system because your body has to break it down, has to break it away from the fiber versus if you were to process it. Let’s say we process that yam into a flour—removed it from the fiber or broke it down, processed it, and made some kind of pasta out of it. Oh, it sounds like a really cool gluten-free paleo pasta. It sounds like a fun treat, but that would shoot up blood sugar much quicker because we process the fiber or removed the fiber. So when you eat whole food, it reacts much differently in the body than any kind of processed food, especially if a processed food that’s had oil added to it, which is what you explained. It’s interesting looking at this way of eating because we have to continue to remember, it’s no oil. Really coming back to you, if you want to get fat, you have to get it from whole food. So many people keep saying, but what about olive oil? It’s so healthy. And what about coconut oil? It’s so healthy. There are studies that show that these foods are healthy.  I keep coming back to then eat the whole food. They’re actually removing it out of all the other nutrients and throwing those nutrients away—throwing the fiber away, throwing the minerals away. Eat the whole coconut. Drink the coconut milk and eat its flesh. That way, that coconut oil is going to be inside that, but you’re also going to get it with all the other nutrients. Same with an olive. Find some low sodium olives. It’s not that I’m against sodium. If you want to eat 12 olives, you’re definitely going to want to look for a low sodium olive because they are packed full of sodium and get the nutrients from that. You mentioned some really great documentaries. One that I actually went into the movie theater to see is the Game Changers. That one was different from the others because they were following the lives of elite athletes—gold medal winners in the Olympics. There’s a man in his 70s who is able to perform athletic feats that 20-year-old athletes couldn’t do. There were fighters in mixed martial arts battles, and there was the world’s strongest man. He kept referring to gorillas as well and looking at a 1500 pound or a 2000 pound bull. Looking at these giant bulls rippling with muscle or a giant gorilla rippling with muscle. He would refer to them and say, “What does the bull eat? What does the gorilla eat? They don’t eat a giant 30-ounce steak to get their muscle. They’re eating 100% plants. That’s just where they get their protein from.” This man, who’s the world’s strongest man, gained after he went whole food plant-based. Actually was able to gain 30 more pounds of muscle. That really shocked me. There are people who have different health goals listening to this. Some want to gain weight, some maybe are a little thin—on the thinner side—would like to gain some muscle, like to gain some more definition, or just be in a healthier place. Many people want to lose weight. 70% of Americans and many other countries around the world— because we follow what America does in terms of the diet—the hyper-palatable foods.  Many people want to lose weight, so 70% of adults are considered overweight and also have pre-diabetes, a diabetic, or on their way to becoming diabetic. They have different health goals. How can someone who wants to lose weight, someone who wants to gain weight or gain muscle, and someone who just wants to maintain their weight but be healthy or maybe reverse a disease, how can they all achieve the same goal with the same way of eating?   [01:07:08] Dr. Michael Klaper: Beautiful question. There are two separate issues, though they do meet in the middle so to speak. As far as the weight loss goes, yes, we are overweight, obese nation. I’ve been a physician for 49 years since the early 70s. I’ve seen this tsunami of obesity sweep through the American public. It’s been eye-watering to see this. Despite the movement for fat acceptance, obesity is a state of inflammation. There are no healthy obese people. They are inflamed, they have hormone imbalances, and they die earlier from clogged arteries, cancers, and strokes. Obesity is not something to be accepted. Now, the way through it is not to pack your intestines full of meat every day, and it’s not to starve yourself of calories. The beauty, as we implied much earlier, of a whole food plant-based diet is mostly fiber and water. If you start your meals with a big salad, a hearty bowl of vegetable soup, and some steamed green-yellow veggies, already your stomach is pretty full with just a couple of hundred calories. And then have your rice and potatoes towards the end of the meal there, but a meal like that is going to take the weight off you. You can’t hold an obese body on that kind of dietary fair. The calorie density is just not there. So the answer is just to adopt the whole food, and here’s again that whole food. It’s got to be whole plant foods. It can’t be energy bars, cookies, granola cereals, and energy drinks. These hyper-concentrated, hyper-palatable foods—even if they’re vegan—are not going to help you get a lean body. But as long as it grew out of the garden, and you can call it by name—that’s a cucumber, that’s a cabbage—then keep your belly full of that and your weight will take care of itself. Within 3, 6, 12, or 18 months, you’re going to have a much leaner healthier body. That kind of takes care of itself. Now, as far as muscle mass goes, it’s not a matter of just trucking down huge bolts of protein and expect your muscles to ripple. One, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t eat brains and expect to get smarter. It’s not a matter of just eating a cow’s muscle or a bull’s muscle and expect to have muscles like a bull. It doesn’t work like that. But before I just blow past that, it’s not healthy to do that. High protein diets are toxic to the kidneys. When you eat these high protein meals—and that includes the veggie protein powders that these bodybuilders bolt down—you slam the glomeruli with 100 grams of amino acids and it hurts them. I’ve seen chronic kidney disease in long-term vegans who are eating way, way too much protein. Get your protein out of beans, peas, chickpeas, and lentils in their whole form and you can easily make it to that magic 70, 80 grams of protein. Nobody really needs that. Most people function just fine on 40 or 50 grams of protein. Even that’s plenty. But if the bodybuilders eat one gram of protein for every pound of bodyweight, you ought to be eating 70, 80 grams. Okay, so you have an extra hummus sandwich and a scoop of lentil stew or have a nut butter sandwich. You better eat the more calorie and protein-dense foods, but that’s not going to put muscle on you.  What puts muscle on you is then getting up off your duff and going to the gym or going into the room where your weights are and spend 40 minutes using those muscles. That’s why that bull’s got that rippling muscular body because he’s carrying around 2000 pounds of bone and muscle in every place he goes. The gorillas, they’re constantly doing these feats of strength as they lift their bodies up and they brachiate through the forest. These animals develop these muscles because they’re using them all day. They’re muscular athletic creatures. That’s what builds muscle. Whether you want to get into the whole rippling bodybuilder thing, but just have enough. You want to get to your 80s and 90s with enough muscle in your body so you can get out of a chair unassisted. That’s the most important thing. If you fall so you can get up off the ground. That’s the most important athletic act you will ever do. When they go to the old folks home on the senior citizens’ home and they see who can get out of a chair unassisted, they’re the ones who are still there the next year. The folks who can’t get out of a chair unassisted often don’t survive very long. No one needs all these rippling muscles. I don’t think it’s a terribly physiological healthy thing to do to really just way overdevelop your muscles. But if that’s what you choose to do, yes, you can do it on plant-based foods. But again, it comes from those sweat in the gym. It’s not a matter of how much protein you can bolt down.   [01:12:51] Ashley James: Thank you for the clarification. You’re mentioning gorillas several times. I guess two schools of thought. One is that we’re evolved from gorillas or we’re distant cousins of gorillas. And then there would be the more biblical Adam and Eve story. Of course, we’re not here to say that anyone’s religious beliefs aren’t incorrect. But for those who have a religious belief about where we came from, why is it that we want to look at gorillas as a good example for our health?   [01:13:34] Dr. Michael Klaper: I don’t want to step on anybody’s religious beliefs. Yes, I’m assuming that if you believe in evolution at all—all the way up from the fish to the lizards to the whole evolutionary tree there—we homo sapiens creature, we’ve come up through the simian line, through the ape line. We didn’t come up through the antelope line or through the ungulates. We came up through the simian ancestors. You did not evolve from your cousin. We did not evolve from the gorilla, but way way way way back, we probably had a common ancestor, probably a lemur or something that was 10 million, 20 million years ago. But we clearly came down the simian branch of evolution. So we look at the great apes and the monkeys that are on this planet. They’re all essentially plant-eating creatures. Yes, the baboons can get into flesh-eating et cetera, but even the majority of what they eat is still fruits and herbage. It is just because I’m just being true to just our evolutionary heritage there. None of those animals go out. You don’t see a bunch of gorillas banding together into a group of 20 of them and hunting down a gazelle and tearing its flesh.   [01:15:10] Ashley James: They could.   [01:15:12] Dr. Michael Klaper: They could but they don’t. They’re not built that way. Their nature is not in their digestive system. And could they really bite through that hide? It’s not simian-like to do that. We are not carnivorous apes. Because they’re so close to us in our anatomy, et cetera, it’s not that big of a logical leap there to say they’re of the same prototype.   [01:15:44] Ashley James: For those who don’t prescribe to that belief system, what kind of science can you bring? What kind of examples can you bring to show that eating the way an ape would eat benefits humankind?   [01:15:59] Dr. Michael Klaper: Well, certainly, our body gives us lots of indications. Plants have no cholesterol so it keeps our arteries clean and it feeds our microbiome a plant-based diet, breeds the beneficial prevotella organisms that crunch cancer growth and inflammation. I mean, on every level, our body hums along, but when we start eating flesh, and especially in any quantity, our arteries become inflamed and clogged up. We spawn Bacteroidetes and other microbes in our gut that produce carcinogens and uncouple our bile salts and set it up for colon cancer. There are just so many red lights that start flashing when we drift into an animal-based fuel. That alone should ask us to just obey the nature of who we are. We’ve got our canine teeth shorter than our central incisors. If we jumped on the back of a cow, you couldn’t bite through its hide let alone its muscle, but these short little canines work great for biting into starchy roots, tubers, and apples. That is really what our dentition is made. We’ve got these made flat grinding molded teeth and a rotary jaw joint that lets us chew in a rotary motion to chew up leaves, grains, and seeds, et cetera. Again, we’ve got fingers on our hands, not claws.  In fact, I would invite people, if you really want a beautiful discourse on this, go to YouTube and search for the wonderful presentation by Dr. Milton Mills, MD. Is man an herbivore or an omnivore? And he gives a brilliant discourse removing all doubt we are herbivorous creatures. And to stray from that is to transgress national natural law and we wind up summoning all those diseases that reverse on a plant-based diet. I don’t know what more proof people need.   [01:18:18] Ashley James: The best thing we can do is learn from our history, learn from our past so that we don’t repeat it. Many of us don’t know what the diet of our ancestors was like and also don’t know the statistics of disease. Could you let us know what our great grandparents—what was their quality of food? What was on their plate versus the diseases they had? Statistically, we’re most likely to die of heart disease. If we look at it, the biggest killer in the United States and in many countries around the world is heart disease. This is why it’s so important. If you eat a diet that keeps your heart and arteries clean, you’re likely to also stave off other diseases. That’s what we see, we learn from the whole food plant-based diet. This is not a new fad. You’ve been doing this for almost 40 years. This is certainly not new, but it is new to us in that we were raised under the marketing and under the hypnosis of the mainstream media pushing us, marketing to us to eat eggs, bacon, butter, and dairy—makes a body good. Let’s get cracking. We were all marketed to eat a certain way, and of course, our tax dollars are funding subsidies, which artificially lower the cost of meat because we subsidize the corn and the feed for the animals. They’ve altered the food supply in the last 100 years so much and now we see disease skyrocketing. What did it look like 100 years ago or 200 years ago in terms of the statistics of disease versus today? And what was on their plates versus today?   [01:20:13] Dr. Michael Klaper: Oh my. We’ll get to 100 years ago, let me take back 100,000 years. As far as what our ancient ancestors ate—people say, well, how do you really know? One thing we know is that when we look at their encampments, these people—just like us—they had bowel movements. The feces became fossilized, and there are fossilized fecal droppings, called coprolites, all over those ancient encampments. When you look at the mass of the bowel movements of the fecal that they passed, you see the massive amounts of fiber these people were eating. They have been eating about 100 grams of fiber a day to produce these large stools. Again, that’s plant material. Whether they had a mammoth in the freezer and ate the occasional animal flesh, again, the majority of what those folks ate was a whole food plant-based diet. That said, coming into more modern times here, the picture’s kind of skewed in medical history because 100 years ago, certainly 150, 200 years ago, people were dying of infectious diseases. They were dying of tuberculosis, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, and all these diseases of crowded cities and poor sanitation. That really carried away about half the public there. There were still heart attacks, but I think Eric described the first one I think in 1910. Again, it seemed to be a 20th-century disease, they certainly had gout, they certainly had diabetes, and they certainly had the diseases of affluence—the diseases of kings and queens. Now people ate like that back then got those same diseases. But the regular folks who couldn’t afford meat every day, they didn’t die so much of the artery disease. But again, they were the poor folks who wound up in crowded cities and dying of typhoid and tuberculosis. No matter when in history we tune in, the diet was certainly playing a major role. But the main thrust of your question, you are right. After World War II, I was born 1947, from that era on, the western diet changed. We got rich in this country, we got high techie, and we got money-driven. The food folks learned that you put fat, salt, and sugar on people’s tongues, man, you can sell them anything. They developed it into an art form. Their science of it. We’re left with the sorry legacy of that juggernaut that got spawned with that lethal mix of marketing, the money, and the disregard for public health. I don’t care what it does. As long as they’re buying my product, as long as my stockholders are making money, that’s all I care about. Look at our children. Look at the cost of that philosophy and the costs have been way, way too high. I don’t care if they’ve made a lot of money. They’re going to wind up giving it back with all the hospitals, the medical plans, and the insurance. The old saying, pay your grocer now or your doctor later. The one or the other. You’ve got to pay for your health. It’s better to pay the grocer for healthy food rather than paying your doctor to bail you out of the problems that bad food has created.   [01:24:16] Ashley James: In all your years of working with people and helping them to heal their body with food, is there one story that stands out? Someone who you were so surprised that they were able to reverse that. You didn’t expect them to reverse that problem with a whole food plant-based diet.   [01:24:39] Dr. Michael Klaper: Oh my, yeah. A number of them. I had a man in his 40s come in. He had low-grade cancer, but he had some numbers that were of concern regarding his blood tests, his arteries, et cetera. He had read Dr. Esselstyn’s book and he said, “I know I have to do this.” And I really encouraged him to do that. He was living with his mother and father and both of them said we’re fine, but as an act of solidarity to support you, our son, we’re going to eat the same way you are. Not only did Andre do beautifully with his cholesterol levels and his cancer never came back, but his father lived—totally unbeknownst to me.  He had diabetes, high blood pressure, was taking four medications and was on insulin. I would see the son every month or so and about six months into it, he brought his father with him. His father walked in and gave me the biggest cry. He had tears coming down his face. He said, “You don’t know me,” but he brought in the pills that he was on. He had a paper bag full of pills. He says, “I don’t take a single pill. Every morning I work out on my exercise, I bike like you recommended for my son, and I’ve never felt so good.” You never know who hears, you never know who sees, you never know who gets inspired. We became quite good friends. We see them a couple of times a year. I’ve got a really fine thing with the father now who wasn’t even my official patient. I had another patient. He was the head of physiotherapy at Truckee hospital in the California mountains. He had angina so bad and he was clogged up. He used to be a football player. He couldn’t walk across the courtyard of our clinic without taking two nitroglycerin. He was in such a bad artery shape. He did a water fast and got on a really lean clean diet, and every morning, I would meet him for our morning and afternoon walk. When we started he could barely make it at half a block, but day after day, healthy meal after a healthy meal, I watched him. I watched the weight come off him, I watched his walking ability increased, and I watched his confidence increase. His face changed as he lost weight. He became a different man right in front of my eyes. And by the time he left our clinic in Northern California, he was walking five miles around Santa Rosa. Yes, it makes you go to bed at night saying yes, that’s why I went into medicine to help people get into that state. Wonderful good stories. Everybody’s got a bucket full of those who practice this kind of medicine.   [01:27:58] Ashley James: I love it. I call my kitchen my pharmacy and you walk into your kitchen, when you walk through the threshold of your kitchen, just know, say to yourself, I’m walking into my pharmacy. Use farm like farmacy. You’re walking into your farmacy. You open that fridge, and when it is full of a beautiful variety of colorful vegetables, leafy greens, it is so beautiful. There’s just something magical about it. I love cooking, and I love making delicious food. Some people are really intimidated by it. There are so many recipes out there. I had Chef AJ on the show a few times. She has at least 100 videos on YouTube teaching different recipes. Then I got together with a really good friend of mine who got on the whole food plant-based diet as well and has seen amazing results. But not only that, her parents, her mother-in-law, her entire family, and they all have had results. She converts people. It’s pretty amazing. She’s a living example. She’s in her 40s, she was diagnosed with heart issues, or she was told she has heart issues. She noticed that she was having some pain and she thought it was a different health problem, but the pain in her chest was the beginning of angina.  And then she got on a whole food plant-based diet, and within just a matter of—I think it was less than two weeks, it was really really soon—her walking partner, she goes around the block with a working walking partner very often. The walking partner said you’re walking faster, and she didn’t really believe her. She has three boys around the ages between 9 and 13 or 8 and 13, and they were usually always in front of her. Come on, mom. Come on, let’s go. Keep up. They’re walking somewhere together and all her boys were behind her. Mom, slow down. She turned around and she started crying. She’s like oh my gosh, I am walking faster. I don’t have angina, and then just things progressed from there. The weight came off. I think she said she’s at the same size as she was back in college. Just so many things are getting better. It’s like watching a snowball melt. It’s like watching your body slowly transform, but not only that, her mother, her arthritis within six weeks went away—completely went away. Both her parents are doing great on a whole food plant-based diet. We’re just seeing so many wonderful changes that are taking place. She and I got together, she’s an amazing cook, and we started filming ourselves cooking in the kitchen. We made that available through our website as a course. Everything that we can do and I could think of to help people to just try it, just try it. I was so afraid to try it. I had never had a meal without meat. I really went into this kicking and screaming. My husband, I think it was about three years ago, he woke up one day and he was a meat guy. He barely ate anything other than meat. It was just coffee and then meat, that’s all he ate and eggs. He woke up one morning a few years ago and he said to me, “I am never eating meat again.” Just something inside him snapped and he said, “I’m never having anything from an animal again.” If I had told him that 12 years ago when I met him he would have laughed at me out of the house. He totally transformed into seeing all this health information. Me, I went kicking and screaming because I was so afraid. I was so afraid of what might happen, but I tried it and I was fascinated with the results. At every turn, my body rewarded me with better and better health. I’m still on my health journey, so is my husband, and we’re just seeing the changes take place as we continue down this road. For those who are just starting out, potentially they’re interested, but again they might be like me where they’ve never had a meal without meat. They don’t even know what life would look like in that way. Maybe they have a spouse that wouldn’t support them in this way. Can you give us some resources or some tips, or maybe just walk us through what they can do to transition or try this out?    [01:32:26] Dr. Michael Klaper: Absolutely. If they have a pencil and paper or they can remember this. Go to a website with these initials pcrm.org—Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. They have a 21-day plant-based kickstart program there that will walk you through. They’ll find your favorite food. You start with mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, just things that you’re already eating, and just get a couple of plant-based breakfasts together, a couple of plant-based lunches and dinners. They ease you into it. That’s a really useful website, pcrm.org. But also go to a website called Forks Over Knives and see the film at the website of that same name, but they’ve got beautiful transition plans and recipes. Another one is called Engine 2, which is Dr. Esselstyn’s son Rip’s website. Those four will certainly get you started. You’ll find no oil and salad dressings there, and you can find everything you need at those four websites, but there’s no end of wonderful cookbooks. Cathy Fisher’s Straight Up Food is wonderful. Katie Mae’s plant-based gym is wonderful. There are lots of resources on the web, but start with pcrm.org and Forks Over Knives and they’ll walk you through the transition deliciously.   [01:34:02] Ashley James: Very cool. Do you personally have any tips? Imagine we’re sitting in your office, we’re new patients of yours. What are the things you would tell us to help us get started?   [01:34:13] Dr. Michael Klaper: Again, take your time. There’s no emergency here. Don’t get uncomfortable, but don’t linger in bad food land there either. As the PCRM folks, let’s start with the food you already eat. Let’s see if we can healthify them. What do you have for breakfast? How about oatmeal with some fruit on it and little almond milk there, are you okay with that? Sure. Or just a bowl of fruit, wonderful. Just drink water if you’re not hungry until you get hungry. That’s all fine. And lunches and dinners, I want a salad with every—Dr. Fuhrman says the salad is the main dish, and he’s right. You want that fresh, live, colorful salad every day, and a hearty bowl of vegetable soup.  Just start with that. Have a salad and soup as part of lunches and dinners. And realize starches are your friends. The whole grains, rice, quinoa, millet, and buckwheat are wonderful things to put in soups and to put on your plate there and cover with vegetables. Learn to love legumes, beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, and anything in a pod. Lentil stews and bean burritos without the cheese—should visit your plate frequently. And there’s a world of colorful fruits for dessert. Instead of ice cream, have berries with some almond milk on it. My wife and I enjoy that. Have a couple of mangoes. Have some grapes and cherries for dessert. It doesn’t take much. These are all delicious foods. Learn to do batch cooking. Make up a big pot of soup and eat part of it and put the rest in freezer containers and put it in the freezer for those days you don’t feel like. You can just pull them out and heat them up, and you only have to cook like twice or three times a week. You just coast the rest of the days on the soups, the stews, and the casseroles that you made up in those big batches. There’s an art to it, and the more you do, the easier it gets after you’ve made these dishes two, three times. You can do it in your sleep. They’re not that complicated.  Have fun with the seasonings. As I said, you can make it Italian style, East Indian, Mexican, or Asian. Have fun with the different cuisines so you don’t get bored. Enjoy, eat all you want, and you’ll wind up lean and healthy.   [01:36:47] Ashley James: I love it. It sounds great. That is such a perfect way to ease into it, but like you said, don’t dwindle but definitely ease into it. That is such a simple plan that someone can get started right away. Your website, you offer some great services. You do telemedicine, people can work with you, and you also have these classes. Tell us a bit more. When someone goes to your website, of course, all the links to your websites are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. When someone goes to plantbasedtelehealth.com or doctorklaper.com, what kind of classes should they sign up for?   [01:37:31] Dr. Michael Klaper: Sure. Plant Based Telehealth, this is our official medical services company. I work with two other plant-based doctors, Dr. Laurie Marbas and Dr. Chris Miller, and we do plant-based nutrition consultations. We do 30-minute consultations about any disease you’ve got there, so if you want a plant-based doc who won’t cluck their tongues when you tell them that you’re vegan, go to plantbasedtelehealth.com and make an appointment. It’s very reasonably priced, but that is for straight medical counseling. But if you want to learn about the plant-based diet, the scientific side, the ethical side, the environmental side, and you want to see videos, et cetera, go to my website, doctorklaper.com. You’ll find free videos there. You’ll find recipes, you’ll find articles, you’ll find Q&As there. It’s just a treasure trove of plant-based information. You can sign up for our masterclasses and plant-based nutrition. We do them every two weeks for 12 classes, but once the course is finished, people can download the recordings. It’s never too late to sign up if you’d like. Again, that’s all at doctorklaper.com.   [01:38:56] Ashley James: Awesome. Tell us what you ate in the last 24 hours.   [01:39:01] Dr. Michael Klaper: Oh, wow. Well the last 24 hours, we always have a big salad going in the fridge. My wife makes these dynamite salad dressings in the blender, and we always have a big Crock-Pot full of super stew on the counter. We’ve got an Instant Pot. We just made some Gordo beans soup. I could live on soup, salads, and greens. So yesterday, for lunch, I had soup and a salad. Dinner time my wife had made a tofu lasagna and we splurged on cooked foods about once a week. That was our decadent treat for the week. She put up overnight oats before we went to bed. She started soaking oats for the morning, and so this morning the overnight oats were ready. I put in half a quart of blueberries. I love blueberries. I loaded up with that and my wife makes cashew milk in the blender. I put some ground flaxseed and hemp seed on the cereal. And lunch, I haven’t had lunch yet here, but I think she’s making a buddha bowl. I think she’s cooking up some quinoa and she’ll put some greens and some tahini dressing on it. I’m a big fan of her buddha bowls. It’s cherry season here. She brought back some dynamite organic cherries, and we’ve been feasting on the cherries in between meals.   [01:40:43] Ashley James: That sounds delicious. Dr. Michael Klaper, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much for bringing your 39 years of experience helping people to reverse disease and prevent disease with a whole food plant-based diet. Do you have any final words you’d like to say? Words of encouragement or some challenges that you’d like to give us, some homework you’d like to give us to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:41:10] Dr. Michael Klaper: Absolutely. No matter where you look, the lights are flashing, the bells are clanging that major changes are needed here on planet earth. By far, the one thing we can do as we are hurtling towards environmental catastrophe is each of us to evolve our diet to a whole food plant-based diet. It’s beyond nicety, it’s beyond your cholesterol level. Large-scale industrial animal agriculture is destroying this planet. It’s destroying the forest, the waters, and the soils and it’s what’s putting greenhouse gases into the air as we cut down the forest.  We are being told, humans, if you want to survive on an individual level, you want to live a healthy life with clean arteries, adopt a whole food plant-based diet. But if you want a livable planet that we can pass on to our children without hanging our heads in shame, as species, we need to adopt a whole food plant-based diet. If we do, we’ll need so much less land to grow our food that the forest will come back. As the trees grow, they’ll take carbon dioxide out of the air. The waters will run purely again. The soils will stabilize. The earth will heal. But the age of animal eating is over. We’ve used it up. We’ve used fishing up. The bell is clanging, the red lights are flashing. We’ve run out of time here. What can we do? What can we do? We can adopt a whole food plant-based diet as individuals and as species. I urge people, don’t put it off. It’s the most life-affirming thing that you can do. On some level, if we hold on to our old meat-eating ways, the future looks very bleak. Plant-based diet offer a future of health, stability, and healing. I urge people to take it seriously. Get on the plant-based train, and it’ll take you good places, I promise.   [01:43:22] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. One final thing. I just remembered you said that when we don’t eat processed fats—so no oil—and we don’t eat the animal fats, so now we’re just getting whole food plant-based fats from a whole food source like avocado, some nuts, or some olives. Occasionally, not in excess quantity. We’re primarily getting starches that the body will take the excess starch or the excess carbohydrate and burn it off as heat.  Sometime after I gave birth—my son’s five—I noticed that I’m not cold anymore, and I attributed that to something changed in my body because I gave birth. Because I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was always freezing. I’m from Canada so I just thought it was the cold weather because it would be -40 in the wintertime, but I was always cold. I had to wear heated socks. You put them in the microwave, you heat them up. I even had an electric blanket in my house. I found an electric blanket that plugs in the car and I would wear that around me. I was just always cold all the time.  After adopting a whole food plant-based diet, and it didn’t click until you said it because I thought it had something to do with maybe my hormones after giving birth, but it was after I went whole food plant-based. I am hot all the time in the last few winters. I’ve walked around barefoot in the winter even outside. I am so hot I don’t ever have the blankets on me. My husband is amazed. I can’t believe it. Something about my circulation, something about the heat, but I know so many women are complaining that they’re cold all the time. Their hands are cold, their feet are cold. I’m telling you I’m hot, but I’m not uncomfortably hot. But I run hot now. That’s so funny you mentioned that. Any excess carbohydrates I’m eating the body’s just burning it off as heat, and I run hot, which is really cool. I mean it’s really hot, but it’s so much better than the alternative. It was so uncomfortable being cold all the time, which almost is like saying I had a carbohydrate deficiency. My body was unable to produce enough heat, and now it is having a healthier circulation and producing enough heat. I thought that was really interesting.  Thank you so much for everything you brought today, and I’d love to have you back on. Anytime you want to come and share more information, we’d love to have you.   [01:45:44] Dr. Michael Klaper: Thank you very much. You’ve done a great service in bringing this information—and hopefully inspiration—to your listeners. It’s a great service that hopefully will help everyone heal including the planet, so it’s been a delight and an honor. Those are great questions. You’re an excellent interviewer, by the way, and I really enjoyed being on your show. Thank you very much. All the best to you and your listeners.   [01:46:08] Ashley James: Thank you. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You can go to learntruehealth.com and check out all of the wonderful resources there. We transcribe all of our interviews, so you can scan through and read interviews. We have some really great free goodies on the site as well. If you have a friend, family member, or yourself suffer from anxiety, I have a wonderful course where you learn tools on how to eliminate anxiety. How to turn off the anxiety response in the body, how to decrease stress, and increase health mentally, emotionally, and physically. So go to learntruehealth.com, search through the menu. You’ll see there are many resources on the site available to you there. Thank you so much for being a listener, and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Let’s help turn this little ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to learn true health.   Get Connected With Dr. Michael Klaper! Doctor Klaper MD Plant-Based Health Facebook Twitter Instagram Books by Dr. Michael Klaper